WEBVTT

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We're back with another Geek Out episode. Richard Campbell, a developer and podcaster who also

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dives deep into science and tech topics, is back for our second Geek Out episode.

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Last time we geeked out about the real science and progress around a moon base.

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This time it's why is there life on Earth? Where could it be or have been in the solar system and

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beyond? In case you didn't catch the first Geek Out, episode 253, this one is more of a general

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science and tech episode. I love digging into the deep internals of all the tools of the Python space,

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but given all that's going on in the world, I thought it'd be fun to take a step back and just

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enjoy some fun geekery and give you all something to sit back and let your mind dream.

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This is Talk Python To Me, episode 276, recorded July 14th, 2020.

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Welcome to Talk Python To Me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the ecosystem,

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and the personalities. This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Follow me on Twitter where I'm at

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mkennedy. Keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpython.fm and follow the show on

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Twitter via at talkpython. This episode is brought to you by Brilliant.org and us. Here's an unexpected

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question for you. Are you a C# or .NET developer getting into Python? Do you work at a company that

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used to be a Microsoft shop but is now finding their way over to the Python space? We built a Python course

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tailor-made for you and your team. It's called Python for the .NET developer. This 10-hour course takes all

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the features of C# and .NET that you think you couldn't live without. Unity framework, Lambda expressions,

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ASP.NET, and so on. And it teaches you the Python equivalent for each and every one of those. This is

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definitely the fastest and clearest path from C# to Python. Learn more at talkpython.fm/.NET.

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That's talkpython.fm/D-O-T-N-E-T.

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Richard, welcome back to Talk Python To Me.

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Hey, man. It's great to be back. I'm flattered. You know, I generally don't have a guest back within

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a year unless something really special happens. So, was it only February the last time I was on?

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Yeah, it wasn't that. Let's see. Yeah, February.

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So, it's only 100 years ago, right?

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Well, February was extremely long ago and it wasn't that long ago. Like, on wall time,

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it was five months. Yeah, but no.

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But in societal time.

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The world, everything has changed. Everything has changed.

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Yeah, everything has changed.

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Yeah, it's astonishing. This is the longest stretch I've been home in 10 years.

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Yeah.

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Maybe longer, yeah. And certainly my wife would be the first one to tell you that.

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Adjusting to having you permanently here instead of having you out somewhere.

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By the way, beat down that honey-do list. Like, it's nailed. But she's run out of things to keep me

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doing, so.

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Yeah, our house is looking pretty taken care of as well. Like, what else are you going to do,

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you know?

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Everybody's yard's amazing. It's really something. I'm super fortunate. I live in a great neighborhood

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where most of my neighbors, at least one day a week, we all go out on our driveways and

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sip a glass of wine near sunset and chat a bit.

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Yeah, those types of things really are making a big difference for folks. Like,

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do that as well. Meet up with people. You know, sit outside and have a beer or something that's good.

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Something to connect with a broader community. It's funny how valuable that is. You don't think

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about it until it's a problem, until it's a challenge.

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Yeah, well, and you know, being developers, I suspect that we feel less disconnected than others.

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Yeah, I think you're right. I also, you know, I work a lot in the IT space, and I realize IT people

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not only were just busy because there was so much to do, but that, you know, most of your work is

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crisis to crisis anyway. So, this was just another crisis to process. In some ways,

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I don't think they've actually dealt with the reality of the disruption of society because

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their job is calling them and they're useful and important at this particular time. But

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yeah, technology's kind of saved our bacon on this pandemic, I think. Not that we're anywhere near

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done.

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No, we're definitely not done. Definitely not in the US for sure, but yeah, I think we're pretty

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fortunate on the timing. But yeah, so five months ago, not that long ago, but again, quite a different

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time. So, let's maybe start our whole story here by just summarizing what this geek out idea is.

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Yeah.

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Previously, you were on talking about the moon base.

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Right.

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This was the moon base geek out where we just dove into this concept of a moon base and how people are

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going to get there, what it might be like, and so on. So, we're going to touch on something sort of

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similar, but not the same for sure this time around. But you've done many, many of these. How

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many did you say? Like 86 or something?

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Yeah, I think we're right at 80 right now. And I have kind of stopped making them at the moment

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because I'm pouring most of my research energy into the book, into the history of .NET. And it's just,

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you know, it's way more consuming than I realized. Like, I've been doing more interviews just this

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week as I'm getting through the body of the work and really getting a narrative of some of the

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things I'm seeing the holes. And then, good news, knowing enough people that I say I know who to

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fill this hole with. So, I'm going and knocking down more interviews. So, yeah, I've worked on that

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bloody book for two years. And I hope I can get it done this year, but it's just been a lot.

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That's a big, definitely a big project. And I know last time you were on, we talked about it.

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Yeah, it was killing me then. It still is. Well, and the other thing is I've promised myself that

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when the book is finally out of my head and out in the world, I will stand the geek outs up as their

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own show. That people love the topic. I love the material.

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Yeah, I think they deserve to be. I mean, that's 100 hours or so of really interesting,

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deep research and just stuff that most people are not talking about. Definitely not at that level.

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I think you're right. And if I have any particular talent, besides being just a good researcher,

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is that I do adore the complexity of things. I find a lot of science communication is oversimplified

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for my taste anyway. And so, getting into the more complex elements and then being able to service

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them in a way that's still palatable, that you actually enjoy, hey, this is why this is hard.

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You know, what we don't actually understand about these things.

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Well, it's a careful balance you got to cover. I mean, I've read a lot of science for non-scientists

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books, like Fermat's Theorem and other stuff that's been covered, the stuff of the Large Hadron Collider.

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And, you know, some of those books, they're just dry.

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Some of them are like not realistic. They don't actually, you don't really feel like you've learned

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science on the other side, but there's a few clear ones that are like, do both. And they entertain and

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they inform. And it's amazing.

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Yeah. When you get it right, it's really something. I also think that intersecting science is too,

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you know, especially when you talk about a subject as tricky as life in the solar system. It's not

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just about astrobiology or aerospace engineering. It's also a lot of other aspects of biology and

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physics that come into play that it's the composite of that knowledge that really gives you a sense of

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what's possible in the solar system, much less beyond.

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Yeah. And so, you do these two podcasts. You do .NET Rocks and you do Runners Radio.

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Yes.

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And in the .NET Rocks genre, every now and then, when you're not deep in a book, book authoring,

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you will go and do research into one of these areas and you've been calling those geek outs.

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Yeah. And really what it is, is I'm always doing the research anyway. Like my idea of a perfect Sunday

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morning is tearing through a couple of scientific papers in the topic areas that I care about,

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which are pretty broad based. And so, I was always making notes anyway. It was Carl's idea to

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start the geek outs, which goes all the way back to 2011. And really what a geek out means is me

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taking a cut of my understanding of a topic at the time and making it into an hour long conversation.

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Yeah.

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That's in the essence of what it is. So, when it comes to life of other planets,

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I did do a geek out this in 2018. And so, when we talked about doing a show on it, I went and

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looked at those notes and I looked at the new stuff that I've been gathering in that area. It's like,

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so much has happened in the past two years. Like, it's just astonishing how much the understanding of

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the way planets operate and the way life can exist in just a couple of years that it just,

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for a two-year-old show, felt stale.

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That's crazy.

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It was at the time when the Cassini, Cassini had already just been de-orbited and de-orbited the

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fall before I did that show in 2017. And they're still writing papers off Cassini data. They figure

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there's 10 to 20 years of more writing off of what they gathered from that spacecraft. And so,

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just those publications alone sort of changed the way we think about where life could exist in the

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solar system.

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I think maybe just, you know, understanding what is required for life is a good starting point as well,

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right? Because for so long we thought, okay, we need liquid water, we need sunshine,

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the Goldilocks zone you hear talked about a lot. But as we'll see going through it,

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that's not necessarily the case. One thing I was thinking is, are you surprised that we've not

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recreated life in a laboratory setting?

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Well, there's an argument as to whether we have or not, because we're getting cleverer about our

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ability to combine things. I ended up in prep for this conversation, rereading a couple of Carl

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Sagan's papers. And Sagan was very, I mean, he also created the, you know, searcher, extra,

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life, right? SETI, as well as a whole bunch of other things. But he worked really hard on what

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would you do to detect life? And what, you know, what would that even look like? And broaden our

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understanding of it. So, you know, one of the things that came out of an awful lot of that research was

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that the ingredients for life are pretty much everywhere. So now it's really about cooking technique.

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You know, how do you assemble them? What is the perfect mixture? And so the whole idea of the

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Goldilocks zone is, this is the point at which a planetary-sized body orbiting a star can have

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liquid water on the surface, which was firmly, you know, at the time believed in a necessary

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requirement for life. And so as we've started imaging planets around other stars, and there are

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different kinds of stars, like brown dwarves, like very dim stars, that Goldilocks zone is

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tremendously closer to the star. But that has other side effects, like almost certainly when you have

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close orbiting bodies like that, the body will end up being tidally locked. So you can imagine the

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effect that you'd have on the Earth if it was orbiting a star, but one side of the planet faced the star

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all the time. That is, one side is always lit and one side is always dark. Well, that's going to cause

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some troubles, right? You know, there's some impacts.

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Yeah, you think about just the tilt that causes winter and summer, it's super minor.

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Well, and yet, I think incredibly important. It's when you start looking at the different bodies in

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the solar system, you see that it's only those small variation differences that may be crucial.

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I would go a step further, and this is like even more recent reading, is that are the continents

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essential to life. Not that they're land masses, but that they force warm water to circulate away from

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the equator and up towards the pole. So what we've known as the North Atlantic conveyor is a pump system,

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essentially, that exists in the ocean where water is warmed in the Gulf of Mexico and then is drawn

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up the eastern seaboard of the United States all the way to the Arctic, where the ice there drives that

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water down, cools it, and that creates this pump. And the side effect of that is the North Atlantic

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is substantially warmer than it ought to be. And so it provides more rain and more heat to the northern

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latitudes into Europe, which makes them far more habitable.

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Yeah. Yeah. Europe is super far north, much more than my conception of it relative to other places.

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Sure.

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I think that's partly why, right?

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And in fact, we have evidence now that in the around 15, 1600s, the conveyor broke down to some

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degree, and they called it the Little Ice Age, that in northern Europe, where people were already

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living, winter got dramatically worse. The canals of Amsterdam froze. So it makes a big difference.

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It is part of the dynamics of what makes a habitable world. Where can life evolve and advance?

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There's a lot of different ingredients in that.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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Absolutely. Well, let's start our exploration of this whole idea with what I think of as the two

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classic thought problems or thought experiments here. And that would be Fermi's paradox and Drake's equation.

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Right. And so Enrico Fermi and father of the atomic bomb, you know, after becoming in the destroyer of worlds,

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and then, and to his credit, then staying in the process to stop humanity from using them successfully,

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I might add, so far, then came up with that whole, you know, his paradox was given that astronomy is

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showing us just how many stars there are and how many galaxies there are, the inevitability that even

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if a tiny fraction of the planets that exist can carry life, where are they? Because there should be lots

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of them. Yeah.

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You know, it's just, it didn't make no sense. And it was Frank Drake that went deeper into that as part of

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the gap, the original SETI gathering, where he started building this probabilistic formula known as Drake's

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equation that sort of went down to how many stars have we got? What's the rate of new stars being made?

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How likely are they to have planets? Are they in the conditions to support life, which is a big factor of this?

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And then does life actually evolve? What's the likelihood of that? Does it actually advance intelligence?

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And then can it communicate in a way we can detect? And then how long that lasts as a society before it either...

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Right. Before society breaks down and the preppers will break and whatever, right?

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This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by Brilliant.org. Brilliant has digestible courses

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click the link in the show notes.

00:14:59.780 --> 00:15:07.540
Or perhaps evolve away. You know, there's a group of thought that says that the actual purpose of a

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universe is like every other composite creature to make more of itself. And so one of the possibilities

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is that in the end, a successful universe is one that creates conditions where advanced biological life

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can form, become intelligent, develop technology that ultimately leads to being able to make their own

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universes. You know, which one of the ways you could answer Drake's equation is say the reason we haven't

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heard from any of other life forms is that the window between you developing technology and being

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able to make your universe is a few thousand years and then you're gone. You've moved on. Why would you

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hang out in this universe? You can make your own.

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Right. You made your wormhole and you've got the actual perfect place you've designed and all that.

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I mean, you could look at it the same way as when you climb out of the cave or you climb out of the

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ocean. Like it's just the next logical evolution of an intelligence is to go make universes.

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Yeah. And the math of Drake's equation, you know, you think about the math when you do as,

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you know, astrophysics and astronomy, relativity, all that stuff is insanely complicated.

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I mean, we know so much more now. In 1961, when he writes that equation, we did not have a good

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count of stars and star formation. We certainly do now, right? We know that roughly three solar

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masses worth of stars are formed in our galaxy alone every year. So it might be one big star. It

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might be a bunch of little ones, but like it's a constant thing. We know that virtually every star

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we've ever looked at that we're able to see reasonably with our exoplanet systems has planets. Planets are

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super common. Like everything. That's recent news, right? Yeah. That's in the past years. Within 10

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years or so, this is a certainty, not a speculation. Right. Because we're counting them. We're finding

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them. We're getting better at finding them. We're even getting better at finding ones in the Goldilocks

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zone and likely rocky, roughly 1G worlds for, you know, when our first sensors were being used to find

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exoplanets, we could only find hot Jupyters, stuff that's Jupyter-sized or bigger orbiting very close to a

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star because our senses weren't that good, right? We weren't able to measure the wobbling stars well

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enough to sense something small so we can sense something big. So one of the arguments was,

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yeah, there's lots of planets, but they're not good ones. But now as the sensors have gotten better,

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we are being able to say that rocky worlds seem to be pretty common too. So every hardening number,

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every maturing estimate that we've got around Drake's equation points to more, not less,

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until you get into this life part. What does it really take to support life? And there's where our solar system

00:17:44.840 --> 00:17:50.840
suddenly is a great example because we have other planets, some of which, you know, especially when you look at

00:17:50.840 --> 00:17:57.480
something like Venus, it ought to be life-sustaining. What's going on there? And again, in the past few years,

00:17:57.480 --> 00:17:59.660
our knowledge of that has expanded dramatically.

00:17:59.660 --> 00:18:05.800
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So Drake's equation is this interesting, basically seven or however many

00:18:05.800 --> 00:18:10.020
factors, ways to speculate because the math is just independent probability times independent

00:18:10.020 --> 00:18:10.600
probability.

00:18:10.600 --> 00:18:10.980
Right.

00:18:11.040 --> 00:18:17.220
Out pops another number. And so let's try to put some concreteness around the speculation,

00:18:17.220 --> 00:18:21.580
I guess. Let's just look at here. Like we know there's life on earth. You and I were talking,

00:18:21.580 --> 00:18:23.260
we're pretty sure we're not in a simulation.

00:18:23.260 --> 00:18:30.900
We're not sure about that at all, but close enough. You know, probability says that we're almost certainly

00:18:30.900 --> 00:18:31.480
a simulation.

00:18:31.480 --> 00:18:37.920
Yeah. Yeah. So let's just, you know, it's a little bit like you started off, right? Like we think that it

00:18:37.920 --> 00:18:44.160
was the sun and the liquid water on the surface and all of that, that turned out to be most important.

00:18:44.160 --> 00:18:46.660
But then people started going into the ocean.

00:18:46.660 --> 00:18:47.140
Yeah.

00:18:47.140 --> 00:18:51.420
And finding volcanic vents and that kind of broke, broke some stuff.

00:18:51.420 --> 00:18:56.180
The Woods Holes finds in the Galapagos is where they first found, they speculate. Again,

00:18:56.220 --> 00:19:02.300
you always have amazing people who can come up with an idea that, hey, look like there's volcanoes

00:19:02.300 --> 00:19:08.560
and there are above ground volcanoes have vents. Why wouldn't underground volcanoes have vents?

00:19:08.560 --> 00:19:12.840
In fact, why wouldn't there be vents everywhere? And so then they build a theorem around that and

00:19:12.840 --> 00:19:17.760
say, well, we should be looking for warm spots in the deep water. And so then they build a sensor

00:19:17.760 --> 00:19:22.160
array and drag it behind a ship, which they did in the Galapagos, which is, Galapagos is very much

00:19:22.160 --> 00:19:25.900
like Hawaii in the sense that it's literally just a chain of islands made from volcanoes.

00:19:25.900 --> 00:19:32.160
And they found evidence of potential vents. It leads in the late seventies to the Alvin

00:19:32.160 --> 00:19:37.620
submarine going down and they find clams in the bottom of the ocean. Like what the heck is going

00:19:37.620 --> 00:19:44.840
on here? And they follow this trail of clams to a black smoker, to a hydrothermal vent spewing

00:19:44.840 --> 00:19:52.780
iron sulfites into the water and the water 700 degrees Fahrenheit, like screaming hot. And it's

00:19:52.780 --> 00:20:00.000
surrounded by life. Some of it is, is like surface life, like clams that have found a new ecological

00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:07.220
niche living in the dark, surviving off of the plankton that grows around that vent. Some of it is

00:20:07.220 --> 00:20:13.440
unique to the area, the tube worms and other strange critters. It's just like here, which should have been

00:20:13.440 --> 00:20:19.160
nothing, should have been a desert at the bottom of the ocean. There is this wellspring of life in the

00:20:19.160 --> 00:20:25.940
absolute pitch black, but there are, is chemical and thermal energy available. And so that, you know,

00:20:25.940 --> 00:20:32.100
that sort of changed the math. It just said, Hey, as long as I have energy in the form of chemistry and

00:20:32.100 --> 00:20:39.840
air and heat and still water, water may be the undeniable one, the intractable one. You know,

00:20:39.840 --> 00:20:45.360
that science fiction used to speculate around the idea of silicon life. I just read a great paper where it

00:20:45.360 --> 00:20:52.340
said, Hmm, you know, so we like silicon as potential life because it's just one tier down on the

00:20:52.340 --> 00:20:57.580
periodic table below carbon. We know we have carbon based life. We are carbon based life. And so if you

00:20:57.580 --> 00:21:04.320
stay in the 14th column, you go down one, you get silicon. And it is also a tentatory atom in the sense

00:21:04.320 --> 00:21:09.740
it'll make four bonds just like carbon will, but it doesn't make them anywhere near as well as carbon does.

00:21:09.960 --> 00:21:16.860
And so it probably doesn't work and it would need, and they get into this idea of carbon combined with

00:21:16.860 --> 00:21:21.520
water. And you really need to throw some nitrogen and they call it chon, right? Carbon, hydrogen,

00:21:21.520 --> 00:21:26.480
oxygen, nitrogen. You get those basic elements together. That's all of organic chemistry more or

00:21:26.480 --> 00:21:26.800
less.

00:21:26.800 --> 00:21:28.080
Yeah. More or less.

00:21:28.440 --> 00:21:33.180
And so the water, which might not be optional. The good news is every bit of astronomy we've done

00:21:33.180 --> 00:21:39.700
shows water is everywhere. Water is just, it's not even, it's not even, and in fact,

00:21:39.700 --> 00:21:44.260
your amount of available water tells an awful lot about how your planet's doing one way or the other.

00:21:44.260 --> 00:21:49.580
So water's pretty common. Carbon, pretty common. Like we're doing all right in those respects.

00:21:49.580 --> 00:21:52.120
We could probably find life anywhere those things exist.

00:21:52.120 --> 00:22:00.520
Right. And we found water in the craters on the moon. We found evidence at least of water

00:22:00.520 --> 00:22:02.500
in Mars. There's...

00:22:02.500 --> 00:22:06.320
Yeah. We're pretty sure there's actually a lot of water on Mars now. We're just being a little

00:22:06.320 --> 00:22:11.620
careful going too near it because there's almost certainly life in it. And we don't want to

00:22:11.620 --> 00:22:12.580
accidentally destroy it.

00:22:12.580 --> 00:22:19.340
Yeah. That'll be amazing. You've got Venus, which has evidence of something flowing a lot on it.

00:22:19.340 --> 00:22:21.120
You look at the shape of the ground.

00:22:21.120 --> 00:22:26.660
Yeah. The Venus Express mission, which is still in orbit today, but it did a lot of the detailed

00:22:26.660 --> 00:22:31.940
map, modern mapping of Venus. So it definitely shows ocean bases and things like that. It also shows

00:22:31.940 --> 00:22:40.120
over a hundred large scale active volcanoes scattered around the planet. So, you know, and by large,

00:22:40.120 --> 00:22:48.600
I mean like big Hawaiian Island large, right? Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, but a hundred of them.

00:22:48.600 --> 00:22:52.520
Like, okay. So there's a reason why there's a lot of sulfuric acid in the atmosphere of Venus.

00:22:52.520 --> 00:22:52.900
Right.

00:22:52.900 --> 00:22:57.040
But one of the things that they really dug into from there is they said, well, look,

00:22:57.040 --> 00:23:00.960
seeing that the ingredients are so common, but clearly Venus isn't like that anymore, right?

00:23:00.960 --> 00:23:06.620
Like surface of Venus is 90 times atmospheric pressure. It's 900 degrees Fahrenheit there.

00:23:06.620 --> 00:23:13.560
Lead will melt on the spot. The toughest Soviet lander ever made, Venera 11, lasted two hours on the

00:23:13.560 --> 00:23:18.380
surface before it broke down. Like it's not fun down there, but it doesn't look like it was

00:23:18.380 --> 00:23:25.280
always like that. That a billion years ago or so, Venus was a water world, that it had oceans,

00:23:25.280 --> 00:23:33.140
but something went wrong. And the went wrong seems to be the magnetic field. The magnetic field of

00:23:33.140 --> 00:23:39.220
Venus was not strong enough to repel solar wind. And in the end, solar wind's nothing magical. It's

00:23:39.220 --> 00:23:49.120
the by-product of fusion of the sun spews a constant stream of highly charged protons from the star all

00:23:49.120 --> 00:23:54.940
the time. And it hits everything all the time. And because it's highly charged, it's magnetically

00:23:54.940 --> 00:23:59.800
sensitive. So our very strong magnetic field on the earth pushes those protons away. It actually,

00:23:59.800 --> 00:24:04.800
and if they're low enough energy, it'll capture them in the Van Allen belts. But the main part is that it

00:24:04.800 --> 00:24:10.920
doesn't get to the atmosphere. Because when a high energy hydrogen atom shows up like that, it finds

00:24:10.920 --> 00:24:16.620
itself another hydrogen atom. They like to be in pairs. And so it'll rip a hydrogen atom out of the

00:24:16.620 --> 00:24:21.720
atmosphere in a big old hurry. The typical place it's going to get it from is a water molecule. So it'll

00:24:21.720 --> 00:24:26.980
yank a hydrogen on. One of those high energy solar particles is going to grab a hydrogen atom off of a

00:24:26.980 --> 00:24:33.300
water molecule and head off into space. And then you'll end up with a hydroxyl radical, an OH,

00:24:33.300 --> 00:24:37.060
which is then going to try and combine with something else. Or maybe that other hydrogen will get ripped

00:24:37.060 --> 00:24:42.620
off as well. And then you have elemental oxygen. And elemental oxygen does not like being elemental.

00:24:42.620 --> 00:24:44.740
It finds a home.

00:24:44.740 --> 00:24:45.040
Yeah.

00:24:45.180 --> 00:24:51.720
And so it grabs whatever it can find. And in the case of Venus, it grabbed carbon atoms and turned

00:24:51.720 --> 00:24:57.720
Venus. Venus gradually lost more and more of its hydrogen. And all of that oxygen found home in

00:24:57.720 --> 00:25:03.200
carbon. And you had a ton of carbon dioxide until you get the atmosphere of Venus that you have now.

00:25:03.200 --> 00:25:05.380
Which is incredibly dense, as you said.

00:25:05.380 --> 00:25:05.720
Yeah.

00:25:05.720 --> 00:25:10.780
90 times, even though the size of Venus, the gravity of Venus is about the same.

00:25:10.780 --> 00:25:12.780
It's not like Jupyter or something, say.

00:25:12.920 --> 00:25:13.100
No.

00:25:13.100 --> 00:25:16.300
But yeah, it's just turned into this hot, dry place.

00:25:16.300 --> 00:25:21.260
Yeah. But gravity is not the thing that protects an atmosphere, it appears. It's the magnetic field

00:25:21.260 --> 00:25:25.260
that makes the difference. And pretty much the same thing has happened at Mars. It's just that Mars

00:25:25.260 --> 00:25:31.520
is further away. And it's smaller. Right? It's only half the size of Earth. Right? We always think of

00:25:31.520 --> 00:25:39.540
Mars as close to Earth. Venus is way more related to Earth than Mars is. But Mars, too, was once a wet

00:25:39.540 --> 00:25:46.580
world. Our detailed maps from the Mars Odyssey and other mapping satellites has shown us where oceans

00:25:46.580 --> 00:25:52.940
ran. And in fact, still seeing occasional bursts of water come up, bubble up onto the surface and roll

00:25:52.940 --> 00:25:58.100
down hillsides and then disappear again because of sublimation because the atmospheric pressure is so low.

00:25:58.100 --> 00:26:04.680
But same thing happened. The hydrogen got stripped away. The oxygen found a home. It made a carbon dioxide

00:26:04.680 --> 00:26:08.860
atmosphere. Granted, it's a very weak one. It's also why the planet's red because it bombed with all of

00:26:08.860 --> 00:26:14.900
the iron it could find and turned the planet red. But in both cases, it's the weak magnetic field that

00:26:14.900 --> 00:26:18.040
has been the big difference maker for that planet.

00:26:18.040 --> 00:26:24.680
People mostly think of Mars as where, as like the old Earth or whatever. Right? Long ago, it might have

00:26:24.680 --> 00:26:28.140
been like that because Venus is so different with its temperature. But...

00:26:28.140 --> 00:26:32.740
Yeah. But they're both of the same result. If you make a heavy-duty dense carbon dioxide

00:26:32.740 --> 00:26:37.100
atmosphere, you get a runaway greenhouse effect. If you don't have enough mass to hold on to your

00:26:37.100 --> 00:26:41.380
atmosphere well when the atmosphere is dripping, you get a dry desert like Mars.

00:26:41.380 --> 00:26:41.720
Yeah.

00:26:41.720 --> 00:26:49.120
But they were both likely wet worlds and quite possibly had life on them. Whether or not any of

00:26:49.120 --> 00:26:55.660
that it survived now seems unlikely. But NASA's been admitting that they want to be really,

00:26:55.660 --> 00:27:03.060
really careful around any native life on Mars. And their protocols for putting stuff down on the

00:27:03.060 --> 00:27:08.160
surface of Mars to detect life are strict enough that they generally don't want to build spacecraft

00:27:08.160 --> 00:27:12.760
that way because they need to sterilize the spacecraft so thoroughly that it's actually hard to make a

00:27:12.760 --> 00:27:20.480
in order to really sterilize, to kill bacteria that will survive the journey in space to Mars and re-entry,

00:27:20.480 --> 00:27:26.540
you have to bake the spacecraft at incredibly high temperatures. And most spacecraft don't survive

00:27:26.540 --> 00:27:31.120
the baking process. So, so far with the missions they've been sending to Mars, they stay away from

00:27:31.120 --> 00:27:36.220
areas that are likely to have life so that they don't have to follow those steeper protocols.

00:27:36.220 --> 00:27:40.280
Right. And how certain are you that a little tiny bit didn't get through, right?

00:27:40.280 --> 00:27:40.760
Yeah.

00:27:40.760 --> 00:27:41.680
It's microbiology.

00:27:41.680 --> 00:27:47.800
Constant concern. Well, and a great example of this is the Israeli Mars lander had

00:27:47.800 --> 00:27:53.580
tardigrades on it. The lander was supposed to do an experiment with tardigrades, which are often

00:27:53.580 --> 00:27:59.660
called water bears. There's these little microscopic critters that are insanely tolerant to harsh

00:27:59.660 --> 00:28:04.980
conditions, insanely tolerant to being dried out and being wet and brought back to life again,

00:28:04.980 --> 00:28:09.800
to hard radiation conditions and so forth. So tardigrades are great, interesting things to experiment

00:28:09.800 --> 00:28:14.460
with. Well, the bear sheet lander didn't make it to the moon. It hit the moon just with a little bit

00:28:14.460 --> 00:28:19.980
too much of vigor. Yeah. You can, you can see a lunar carnesis orbiter picture of where it landed. It's a

00:28:19.980 --> 00:28:25.440
big old splat, but there's also a conversation that says, the tardigrades probably survived. We have

00:28:25.440 --> 00:28:28.140
contaminated the moon with water bears.

00:28:28.760 --> 00:28:33.880
In that little tiny spot. In that spot. Yeah. Now I don't think they're going to rise up and

00:28:33.880 --> 00:28:40.340
repent, you know, and attack us someday, but it speaks to the reality that when you get down to

00:28:40.340 --> 00:28:46.200
microscopic life, they were incredibly resilient and our risk of contamination is really significant.

00:28:46.200 --> 00:28:50.180
And this gets into this really interesting ethical discussion around.

00:28:50.180 --> 00:28:55.080
How do you look for life? If it's almost like quantum mechanics, right? The process of looking destroys it.

00:28:55.080 --> 00:28:58.120
It's like, if you observe it, you may change it. Yeah.

00:28:58.120 --> 00:29:01.580
You better, you got like one shot to check is life here.

00:29:01.580 --> 00:29:06.280
Yeah. And how you check it. And then you want to study it over time, right? And so the more we've

00:29:06.280 --> 00:29:12.520
learned about Mars, the more we've come to appreciate that there's very likely briny liquid water

00:29:12.520 --> 00:29:17.340
under the surface. You know, one thing we have not done much of in all of our explorations of Venus

00:29:17.340 --> 00:29:23.860
and Mars and the moon and so forth is really dug into the ground at all. And so you don't know what's

00:29:23.860 --> 00:29:29.160
going on a few feet down, you know, the earth itself, depending on where you dig transforms

00:29:29.160 --> 00:29:36.580
amazingly as you dig down, you know, the first meter is one thing. The next 10 meters, something

00:29:36.580 --> 00:29:40.600
else, a hundred is something else. Again, the first kilometer again, and so forth on down.

00:29:40.600 --> 00:29:47.100
We just don't know for sure. But as the models have gotten more coherent and reliable, it looks

00:29:47.100 --> 00:29:53.580
like there's briny liquid, you know, salty water subsurface of Mars, and it almost certainly

00:29:53.580 --> 00:29:59.000
has bacterial scale life in it. And because the question is, is it worth constructing a mission

00:29:59.000 --> 00:30:05.740
to do that, to actually test for that safely, which is very challenging to do, to teach you

00:30:05.740 --> 00:30:10.460
exactly what other than to assert for sure there's bacterial life on Mars?

00:30:10.460 --> 00:30:14.200
Right. And that would be interesting, but you know, how significant is it?

00:30:14.200 --> 00:30:14.560
Very true.

00:30:14.560 --> 00:30:21.620
It would be much more interesting to find creatures that move around in some way, right? And so that

00:30:21.620 --> 00:30:26.880
brings us back to, well, if it's actually the magnetic field that matters, other places around

00:30:26.880 --> 00:30:28.420
you have magnetic fields as well, right?

00:30:28.560 --> 00:30:37.220
Well, and part of what led us to that understanding were the Galileo and Cassini missions out to Jupyter

00:30:37.220 --> 00:30:44.180
and to Saturn respectively. Because there you've got an epic magnetic field. It's just not your,

00:30:44.180 --> 00:30:50.760
the moon's field. It's this gas giant's field. And there's no solar radiation getting in that. In fact,

00:30:50.760 --> 00:30:56.340
you get more radiation off of the host planet than you do from the sun once you get it to that scale.

00:30:56.340 --> 00:30:57.900
Saturn has crazy radiation, right?

00:30:57.900 --> 00:31:02.900
Yeah. And so does Jupyter. And pretty much for the same reason is you compress gas to that point.

00:31:02.900 --> 00:31:07.040
Like they talk about metallic hydrogen and things being down there. You create these electromagnetic

00:31:07.040 --> 00:31:13.360
fields from the friction of everything moving around that they're incredibly destructive. It

00:31:13.360 --> 00:31:19.980
certainly will kill any human that gets anywhere near it. But making electronics that tolerate that,

00:31:19.980 --> 00:31:25.060
you wonder why these space missions are so expensive. It's really tough to make hardware that can

00:31:25.060 --> 00:31:30.900
tolerate the radiation exposure that they get. And they don't orbit in neat, tidy orbits the way you

00:31:30.900 --> 00:31:36.380
think about it from science fiction. And both Galileo and Cassini did orbits where they got a long way

00:31:36.380 --> 00:31:41.740
away from the gas giant on a regular basis to decrease their radiation load as well. It helped them also

00:31:41.740 --> 00:31:46.500
do maneuvers. When you're at that far apogee, when you're further away, it takes very little fuel to tweak

00:31:46.500 --> 00:31:52.300
your orbit and be able to make a close pass on a different moon. But it also means that you have

00:31:52.300 --> 00:31:56.780
shorter bursts of time at higher speed in those strong radiation belts.

00:31:56.780 --> 00:31:59.580
Right. You went by them really quick, take your measurement and get out.

00:31:59.580 --> 00:32:05.560
But speaking of detecting life, the Galileo mission, which flew back in 89 out of a space shuttle back

00:32:05.560 --> 00:32:10.000
when A, space shuttles operated. And B, they were still launching satellites, which they stopped doing

00:32:10.000 --> 00:32:15.520
because it finally clued into someone after that how dangerous it was to put a rocket engine inside of a

00:32:15.520 --> 00:32:22.140
space shuttle full of fuel when you're going up. But what was cool about, many things were cool about

00:32:22.140 --> 00:32:26.800
the Galileo mission. Its mission to Jupyter was great. But part of the way that it got to Jupyter is it

00:32:26.800 --> 00:32:33.640
actually did a slingshot maneuver off of Venus and then another one off of the Earth on its way out,

00:32:33.640 --> 00:32:39.060
which took it about six years. But it was Sagan. Remember him? Carl Sagan.

00:32:39.580 --> 00:32:47.680
Who said, hey, can we craft an experiment for Galileo to detect life on Earth?

00:32:47.680 --> 00:32:54.700
Like given this limited sense of sensors that we're going to send to Jupyter to go look at the moons

00:32:54.700 --> 00:32:59.600
and go to Europa and all those cool things, what would we do to actually detect life on Earth?

00:32:59.680 --> 00:33:06.220
And so he was primarily using spectrographs. So he's imaging the atmosphere to read it and say,

00:33:06.220 --> 00:33:13.280
what are the unique signatures in Earth's atmosphere that are life indicators? One of the points he made

00:33:13.280 --> 00:33:20.600
in this paper from 93 was that there's atomic oxygen in the atmosphere. Because oxygen doesn't like being

00:33:20.600 --> 00:33:26.120
on its own, it always is going to find something to combine with. The only way you would measure atomic

00:33:26.120 --> 00:33:33.720
oxygen in the atmosphere is something is producing it constantly. And his argument was that is almost

00:33:33.720 --> 00:33:40.060
inevitably life. Like he really can't think of another model that is constantly producing

00:33:40.060 --> 00:33:46.360
oxygen. In our case, it's plants, right? Plant life rose first in the form of algaes on the Earth. And

00:33:46.360 --> 00:33:52.140
it's what pumped oxygen into our atmosphere that created all these possibilities, right? Our ambient

00:33:52.140 --> 00:33:59.600
atmosphere was mostly nitrogen before that. It wasn't until plant life really got going that we started

00:33:59.600 --> 00:34:06.180
having ambient oxygen. But he also indicated that methane was an interesting indicator as well in

00:34:06.180 --> 00:34:12.840
combination with oxygen. Methane is super simple. It's a carbon and four hydrogen atoms. It is created in

00:34:12.840 --> 00:34:20.040
space all the time, right? Cosmic gases form into methane regularly. And if you've got lots of methane,

00:34:20.040 --> 00:34:25.340
methane is probably created that way. But methane does not exist in amongst atomic oxygen very easily.

00:34:25.340 --> 00:34:30.360
So where it does exist, it means there's some kind of what they call metagenesis going on,

00:34:30.360 --> 00:34:36.380
or something, some process is making methane, and it's probably life. And so, you know,

00:34:36.380 --> 00:34:42.500
the most famous methane producer on the planet for most people are cows, right? Because they ferment

00:34:42.500 --> 00:34:48.720
their cud, their grass, and a byproduct of that is methane, which they mostly burp out, not the other

00:34:48.720 --> 00:34:54.780
way. But it is an interesting indicator that mixture of atomic oxygen and methane is probably a really good

00:34:54.780 --> 00:34:59.520
measure of life. And the delicious part of this, and it's one of the reasons I bring it up in this story,

00:34:59.520 --> 00:35:07.260
is so he writes that in 93, makes that postulation, and years later would find that exact mixture

00:35:07.260 --> 00:35:10.520
elsewhere. And we'll talk about that when we get there.

00:35:10.520 --> 00:35:11.840
Yeah, for sure.

00:35:11.840 --> 00:35:14.880
And essentially, you know, the Galileo mission was focused on Europa,

00:35:14.880 --> 00:35:17.640
which is an icy moon in orbit around Jupyter.

00:35:17.640 --> 00:35:22.120
Yeah, and we have all these moons around Jupyter, right? And Saturn, I don't remember which,

00:35:22.120 --> 00:35:23.620
but it's like 20 to 80.

00:35:23.620 --> 00:35:27.520
Yeah, I think you're over 80 for Saturn alone now. Because when you start sending spacecraft

00:35:27.520 --> 00:35:31.540
close enough to actually orbit, you know, the Voyager missions were just flybys.

00:35:31.620 --> 00:35:36.620
They whizzed by Jupyter and Saturn. They saw a few things. But when you, you know, Galileo

00:35:36.620 --> 00:35:41.740
orbited around Jupyter for years, and so found a lot of moons, as opposed to, you know, the

00:35:41.740 --> 00:35:46.620
ones that Galileo, Galilei saw from a primitive telescope. He saw the first four.

00:35:46.620 --> 00:35:49.300
Yeah. But isn't it supposed to be cold out there?

00:35:49.300 --> 00:35:53.100
It is very cold. There's no two ways about it. And that was the expectation, right? Is that

00:35:53.100 --> 00:35:58.620
we're going to go see ice balls. And then when they actually imaged Europa, they found there

00:35:58.620 --> 00:36:02.700
were cracks in the ice. I mean, that makes no sense, right? Like, why would there be cracks

00:36:02.700 --> 00:36:08.620
in the ice? And not only that, but wherever there was cracks, there was red. Sort of a muddy

00:36:08.620 --> 00:36:09.800
red brown.

00:36:09.800 --> 00:36:16.660
Well, here comes Sagan again. They eventually, they were trying to figure out what it was,

00:36:16.660 --> 00:36:21.080
and they had this theory that it was a chemical compound. And so they started making it on Earth.

00:36:21.620 --> 00:36:28.820
So take your common cosmic gases, the stuff that naturally forms, like methane and ethane,

00:36:28.820 --> 00:36:33.340
ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, those kinds of compounds, all relatively simple compounds,

00:36:33.340 --> 00:36:38.820
carbon with a bit of hydrogen, nitrogen with a bit of hydrogen, that sort of thing. And then expose

00:36:38.820 --> 00:36:45.780
it to ultraviolet light and a few cosmic rays. And it changes. It changes into a weird reddish

00:36:45.780 --> 00:36:52.140
substance that is actually really tough to measure. For a long time, they called it star tar, which is

00:36:52.140 --> 00:36:52.580
a good name.

00:36:52.580 --> 00:36:53.560
Okay, yeah.

00:36:53.560 --> 00:36:59.880
But ultimately settled on tholine, which is derived from the Greek word for muddy, because it is kind

00:36:59.880 --> 00:37:06.880
of a sticky, muddy substance. And so the theory goes that you have these common compounds, and then

00:37:06.880 --> 00:37:12.660
they come to the surface and get irradiated. And then that irradiation turns it into these sort of

00:37:12.660 --> 00:37:18.820
primitive compounds. And we've, since Europa was really the first time we saw tholines in substantial

00:37:18.820 --> 00:37:24.860
amounts all along the cracks in Europa's ice. And we've seen them elsewhere since then.

00:37:24.860 --> 00:37:31.980
So the model for what made Europa interesting then was this combination of a very strong magnetic field

00:37:31.980 --> 00:37:38.120
from Jupyter, also very strong tidal flexing, so that the gravitational pull of Jupyter is so strong,

00:37:38.200 --> 00:37:44.640
it flexes Europa regularly, which keeps the core of Europa warm. And so the estimates now is that there's

00:37:44.640 --> 00:37:51.140
a hundred kilometer deep liquid ocean underneath the ice of Europa.

00:37:51.140 --> 00:37:58.640
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00:38:37.180 --> 00:38:41.660
And that flexing has got to be causing some volcanic-like behaviors.

00:38:41.660 --> 00:38:47.820
Yeah. They call cryovolcanoes, right? That you get these bursts of warm water, above freezing water,

00:38:47.820 --> 00:38:54.860
that bubbles onto the surface, carrying these simple compounds, your methanes and ethanes and ammonia

00:38:54.860 --> 00:39:00.380
and so forth, onto the surface, where it gets irradiated by the sun and turns into tholans.

00:39:00.460 --> 00:39:04.780
Yeah. And I would point out that Arthur C. Clarke, who to this day I am still convinced is actually

00:39:04.780 --> 00:39:10.380
a time traveler and didn't die, but rather went home, who predicted geostationary satellites 20

00:39:10.380 --> 00:39:15.980
years before anybody could fly them, also wrote in the book 2010, his sequel to 2001 A Space Odyssey,

00:39:15.980 --> 00:39:22.220
that the star people said, "All these worlds are yours, save Europa, attempt no landing there."

00:39:22.220 --> 00:39:26.380
And the first time we get a good look at Europa, it looks like there's something there.

00:39:26.380 --> 00:39:33.980
Yeah. That's insane. That was such a great imaginative story. And wow, I didn't realize that part.

00:39:33.980 --> 00:39:38.220
Oh, I remember when the paper, when the stuff came, the reports came out, I looked at it,

00:39:38.220 --> 00:39:46.140
and it was like, "How? How did he know? How did he? He keeps being right. It's crazy."

00:39:46.140 --> 00:39:52.940
Yeah. That is totally crazy. Totally crazy. Yeah. I would love to see us go, go there even with that

00:39:52.940 --> 00:39:58.300
warning, maybe. I don't know. I mean, the problem is once you go there, the clock is ticking for at

00:39:58.300 --> 00:40:00.380
least very small microbiology.

00:40:00.380 --> 00:40:06.540
Well, there are mission proposals like this thing called Jupyter Express where they want to put a

00:40:06.540 --> 00:40:13.740
lander down on the ice close to one of those cracks. They want to melt their way through the ice and drop

00:40:13.740 --> 00:40:15.180
a submarine down. Yeah.

00:40:15.180 --> 00:40:17.980
And motor around in that ocean. Get a nuclear space heater or something.

00:40:17.980 --> 00:40:21.180
You guess what you're going to need, right? A radiothermal generator, which is generally what they

00:40:21.180 --> 00:40:26.620
use out there anyway, because there's not enough sunlight to really make solar work. And most of those

00:40:26.620 --> 00:40:34.220
RTGs generate four to one heat to electricity. So your typical RTG, like the one that's on the

00:40:34.220 --> 00:40:41.980
Curiosity rover on Mars, is generating a hundred watts of electricity and 400 watts of thermal, of heat.

00:40:41.980 --> 00:40:47.100
So you could get a big one and put it down on that ice, and it's not only making electricity,

00:40:47.100 --> 00:40:50.540
so it's still able to communicate to the surface, but it's also generating enough heat that instead

00:40:50.540 --> 00:40:54.540
of you trying to dissipate it, you're actually pumping it into the ice to melt your way through it.

00:40:54.540 --> 00:40:59.100
Yeah. And now you get into the question, like, knowing what we know now, that there's

00:40:59.100 --> 00:41:04.060
almost certainly liquid water down there, and it's caused by these tidal effects,

00:41:04.060 --> 00:41:09.180
which means there's cracks in that core. If it's warm enough, maybe there's hydrothermal vents down

00:41:09.180 --> 00:41:14.780
there. And knowing what we find in our hydrothermal vents, what would we find in their hydrothermal vents?

00:41:14.780 --> 00:41:21.260
Yeah. It's exciting. It's absolutely exciting. And another place that's in this kind of realm is

00:41:21.260 --> 00:41:27.100
Saturn and its moons. Mm-hmm. So, you know, the Galileo mission was the late 80s, early 90s.

00:41:27.100 --> 00:41:31.740
Cassini was one of the last of what they called the great observatories. They built these huge

00:41:31.740 --> 00:41:36.620
spacecraft. They don't build them this big anymore. Cassini was a tank, arguably one of the largest

00:41:36.620 --> 00:41:43.340
explorer spacecraft ever built. It was literally the size and weight of a large school bus, of a full-size

00:41:43.340 --> 00:41:48.460
bus. And I did, you know, almost six metric tons. Wow. That's like four cars, three cars.

00:41:48.460 --> 00:41:55.900
Yeah. A huge machine. And left in the late 90s, got to Saturn in 2004, operated for 13 years. It was

00:41:55.900 --> 00:42:00.220
originally planned for a three-year mission, but they kept extending it. And in fact, they intentionally

00:42:00.220 --> 00:42:07.100
de-orbited it. Because what they found in the moon system of Saturn was so profound that they weren't

00:42:07.100 --> 00:42:12.220
willing to take a chance that Cassini might accidentally crash into one of the moons when

00:42:12.220 --> 00:42:16.460
they lost control of it, when it ran out of fuel. And so instead, they intentionally de-orbited it

00:42:16.460 --> 00:42:22.060
into Saturn's atmosphere. And it sent data right up until it lost control. It hit enough of the

00:42:22.060 --> 00:42:27.180
atmosphere that it started to spin. But the story of Saturn's, the exploration, I mean, of course,

00:42:27.180 --> 00:42:31.900
the big one was to see Titan. And Titan is the largest moon in the solar system. In fact,

00:42:31.900 --> 00:42:37.340
Titan is larger than Mercury. You know, it'd be a planet, except that it happens to be orbiting a gas

00:42:37.340 --> 00:42:42.940
giant. And the Voyager missions had imaged it well enough that they knew it was completely clouded

00:42:42.940 --> 00:42:48.540
over, incredibly dense atmosphere on it. And so they had a lander on the Cassini mission called the

00:42:48.540 --> 00:42:56.140
Huygens probe to land on the surface of Titan. And what it found, there's a great video they composed of

00:42:56.140 --> 00:43:02.940
all of the photographs of that, the Huygens probe as it descended by parachute down to the surface.

00:43:02.940 --> 00:43:08.860
It looks like a wet world. The problem is it is extraordinarily cold. It's that negative 290

00:43:08.860 --> 00:43:14.620
degrees Fahrenheit on the surface. So like, bring a jacket, right? It's cold. And so the atmosphere is

00:43:14.620 --> 00:43:20.060
almost entirely nitrogen with traces of ethane and methane. And in fact, there's ethane and methane

00:43:20.060 --> 00:43:28.780
clouds that rain onto the surface and cause erosion. And there are lakes, bodies of liquid on the surface

00:43:28.780 --> 00:43:34.460
of Titan. It's just, they happen to be liquid methane. Oxygen, it's cold enough that oxygen is frozen solid

00:43:34.460 --> 00:43:40.940
there. So you would be able to mine oxygen if you get there. And the atmosphere, the pressure on the surface

00:43:40.940 --> 00:43:43.900
there is about 10 times sea level pressure, 10 bar.

00:43:43.900 --> 00:43:45.100
Is the atmosphere thicker?

00:43:45.100 --> 00:43:49.500
It's very thick. And again, it's a decent size. It's not a huge thing, but it's big enough.

00:43:49.500 --> 00:43:53.740
But you see your gravity is low enough and your atmosphere is thick enough that if you could

00:43:53.740 --> 00:43:59.820
get a warm enough coat and a respirator so you could breathe, you could probably strap a couple of wings

00:43:59.820 --> 00:44:05.420
onto your arms and fly. Just flap. It'd be enough. You've got enough atmosphere to push against and a low

00:44:05.420 --> 00:44:07.740
enough gravity, you could probably fly around tight.

00:44:07.740 --> 00:44:12.700
Wow. That would be insane. It'd be kind of like swimming, but in the whole sky.

00:44:12.700 --> 00:44:18.620
The problem is that at that level of cold, everything is brittle and hard. It'd be very

00:44:18.620 --> 00:44:24.060
challenging to function there. But it is, if you were picking candidates for places that humans could

00:44:24.060 --> 00:44:29.500
live, that's one of them. We just have to solve certain challenge, you know, non-trivial problems.

00:44:30.220 --> 00:44:37.100
But the atmosphere is thick. Is there life there? It's awfully cold. The water, there is

00:44:37.100 --> 00:44:42.940
absolutely water ice, but it will be like rock. So, intensely hard.

00:44:42.940 --> 00:44:45.340
Yeah. So, maybe, maybe not. Who knows?

00:44:45.340 --> 00:44:51.420
But that was the, you know, their plan for Cassini was obviously to drop the Huygens probe on Titan,

00:44:51.420 --> 00:44:55.420
because this amazing moon. But they were generally going to image all the moons. They wanted to find

00:44:55.420 --> 00:44:59.180
some Europe and so forth. And it was the Settilus that stole the show.

00:44:59.180 --> 00:45:04.620
Yeah. Absolutely. Settilus is the sixth largest moon of Saturn. So, it wasn't high on the rank.

00:45:04.620 --> 00:45:08.860
They expected it. Well, the only thing that was interesting about Settilus going in with Cassini

00:45:08.860 --> 00:45:15.020
was it had the highest albedo of any moon. So, it was incredibly white, very reflective. So,

00:45:15.020 --> 00:45:19.020
it was expected that it was incredibly white because it was an ice ball. It was just covered in ice.

00:45:19.020 --> 00:45:24.140
And so, it reflected a lot of light. And so, after a few orbits in from the initial mission,

00:45:24.140 --> 00:45:27.580
one of those orbits was going to get close enough to Settilus that almost as an afterthought,

00:45:27.580 --> 00:45:31.340
was like, "Ah, we should snap a couple of pictures of Settilus." Like, they weren't planning on doing

00:45:31.340 --> 00:45:35.500
anything substantial with Settilus. And then one of those pictures, when they got it back,

00:45:35.500 --> 00:45:42.140
there was a cryo geyser erupting on the southern half of Settilus. And it was visible in the photograph.

00:45:42.140 --> 00:45:48.700
Right. It was, they were somehow between the sun and then a Settilus and then the spaceship,

00:45:48.700 --> 00:45:53.180
right? So, they caught it in the light. They caught it in the light. They could see the cryo. And again,

00:45:53.180 --> 00:45:57.820
totally unexpected. And to NASA's credit, they rewrote the mission at that point.

00:45:57.820 --> 00:46:04.860
They just redid it. Okay. That's now an important body. Let's figure out how we do more passes on it.

00:46:05.420 --> 00:46:12.380
It's active now. We need to see this thing now. And so, while they still mapped a tremendous number

00:46:12.380 --> 00:46:19.100
of moons for Saturn, and it's over 80 now, and they got pictures of all the other bodies and some great,

00:46:19.100 --> 00:46:24.220
and learned more about the rings, figured out that there's a cloud formation on the north and south

00:46:24.220 --> 00:46:29.580
poles, that it's hexagonal. Like, they learned astonishing things about Saturn.

00:46:29.580 --> 00:46:34.780
Yeah. But they really studied the heck out of Settilus to the point where they decided,

00:46:34.780 --> 00:46:39.420
as they were getting towards the most extended parts of Cassini's mission, they were going to take

00:46:39.420 --> 00:46:46.460
a chance. And they made a pass, past the south pole of Cassini, of Settilus, within 12 kilometers.

00:46:46.460 --> 00:46:50.540
And ended up flying through a geyser pole. Wow.

00:46:50.540 --> 00:46:55.740
And to the point where the spacecraft almost lost control and spun out. They genuinely,

00:46:55.740 --> 00:47:01.660
that thing got splattered with that cryo geyser. They took an incredible chance with this machine.

00:47:01.660 --> 00:47:07.500
They hit like a hose type of thing at 20,000 miles an hour or something, right? I mean, that's crazy.

00:47:07.500 --> 00:47:11.500
You know when you're bombing down the highway, and the guy in front of you washes his windshields,

00:47:11.500 --> 00:47:18.940
and it lands on yours? That. In a billion-dollar, six-metric-ton spacecraft,

00:47:18.940 --> 00:47:24.380
120 million kilometers away from a pit stop. But the byproduct is that they caught some of that

00:47:24.380 --> 00:47:27.020
material. And they measured it. And you know what they found? What?

00:47:27.020 --> 00:47:28.300
Atomic hydrogen and methane.

00:47:28.300 --> 00:47:30.300
Oh. How interesting.

00:47:30.300 --> 00:47:37.260
It's the same stuff that we'd measured with the Galileo spacecraft. Like, in the right ratios,

00:47:37.260 --> 00:47:42.460
where it's like, something biological could have made this. And that is just a, you know,

00:47:42.460 --> 00:47:48.300
from what they thought was an icy ball that wasn't interesting to, we have measured unstable compounds

00:47:48.300 --> 00:47:55.180
in the effluent of this moon that indicate something down there is producing it.

00:47:55.180 --> 00:47:56.220
And lots of water, right?

00:47:56.220 --> 00:48:00.380
Well, there's a lot, yeah, certainly plenty of water and briny water, salty water, and a bunch

00:48:00.380 --> 00:48:05.820
of other hydroxyls, other light compounds, again, unstable compounds. But that experiment that Sagan

00:48:05.820 --> 00:48:12.780
had done 20 years before with the Galileo spacecraft, and that piece of research to sort of map neatly onto

00:48:12.780 --> 00:48:17.180
the data set they got back from Cassini's fly-through of the Enceladilus cryo-volcano,

00:48:17.180 --> 00:48:22.460
or cryo-geyser. And it just, you sort of hit, you sit back and you see and go, "What have we found?

00:48:22.460 --> 00:48:25.420
Look, what do we know now?" And of course, there's Tholans all over Enceladilus.

00:48:25.420 --> 00:48:29.820
And of course, there's a lot of other things that are going to be found in the world.

00:48:29.820 --> 00:48:31.980
And of course, there's a lot of other things that are going to be found in the world.

00:48:31.980 --> 00:48:34.220
And of course, there's a lot of other things that are going to be found in the world.

00:48:34.220 --> 00:48:36.220
And of course, there's a lot of other things that are going to be found in the world.

00:48:36.220 --> 00:48:37.820
And of course, there's a lot of other things that are going to be found in the world.

00:48:37.820 --> 00:48:39.820
And of course, there's a lot of other things that are going to be found in the world.

00:48:39.820 --> 00:48:43.820
And of course, there's a lot of other things that are going to be found in the world.

00:48:43.820 --> 00:48:47.980
And then Europa to do it to Enceladilus. It's a little bit further out because you're going out

00:48:47.980 --> 00:48:53.180
to Saturn. It's a smaller ball. And it's certainly active, right? So, I mean, one of the challenges

00:48:53.180 --> 00:48:58.540
you have here is like, we can see all of the evidence of potential life on Mars, but it's traces

00:48:58.540 --> 00:49:06.860
from the past. There may still be some hanging on in a subsurface sea, but this is way more active.

00:49:06.860 --> 00:49:12.060
It's just a long way away. Right. And what you would find in Mars is probably just biological,

00:49:12.060 --> 00:49:16.540
as you already said, right? Whereas this, I mean, there could be something like a whale down there.

00:49:16.540 --> 00:49:22.220
Who knows? I would hope for like a barnacle, dude, right? An idea of a filter feeder that means an

00:49:22.220 --> 00:49:27.340
ecosystem exists where there's microscopic life that eats other really small life that ultimately

00:49:27.340 --> 00:49:33.020
gets to a filter. Like that would be astonishing. The most, you know, the higher probability is a slime

00:49:33.020 --> 00:49:41.100
mold, but you know, okay, life. And yeah, but what's interesting is seeing that this theme happens over and

00:49:41.100 --> 00:49:45.900
over again, that when you have a combination of strong magnetic field that protects the atmosphere

00:49:45.900 --> 00:49:53.980
from solar stripping, and you have some heat in the form of tidal forces or core heating,

00:49:53.980 --> 00:50:00.380
and you have liquid water also generated by those things, you have these elements come together again

00:50:00.380 --> 00:50:06.140
that show the precursors to life, or to at least, or the evidence of relatively simple life.

00:50:06.140 --> 00:50:10.700
Yeah. Well, really quickly, I know you guys had Ron Connery, Rob Connery on your show.

00:50:10.700 --> 00:50:11.020
Yeah.

00:50:11.020 --> 00:50:16.780
And he had written an interesting book called The Curious Moon, which is like a learn Postgres,

00:50:16.780 --> 00:50:17.420
the database.

00:50:17.420 --> 00:50:24.780
Yes. But his sample data was NASA's and satellites data. And what's lovely about that is not only is it

00:50:24.780 --> 00:50:30.860
super real and so forth, and it's a fun book. And I actually helped him edit it. I was one of the early

00:50:30.860 --> 00:50:36.460
readers on it as well. And we argued vociferously about it. But it is really a good teaching tool.

00:50:36.460 --> 00:50:41.180
But NASA publishes absolutely everything they gather. It's part of their basic policies.

00:50:41.180 --> 00:50:44.860
And so including that data is the fact that they actually changed the data structure halfway through

00:50:44.860 --> 00:50:48.940
the research when they went to the second phase of, and they're like, I don't like this data

00:50:48.940 --> 00:50:50.940
format. We're going to ship this data format. So you have all those problems.

00:50:50.940 --> 00:50:52.140
Yeah.

00:50:52.140 --> 00:50:56.060
And Rob is a friend, and I think his book is brilliant, and we all should own it. If you

00:50:56.060 --> 00:51:00.220
want anyone who wants to learn Postgres, there's no nicer way. And you'll work,

00:51:00.220 --> 00:51:05.500
and the story he tells is a fictionalized story based on real data is delightful, like just a

00:51:05.500 --> 00:51:06.860
really a fun thing.

00:51:06.860 --> 00:51:08.700
But that's cool. I definitely want to check it out.

00:51:08.700 --> 00:51:10.380
Yeah, I totally encouraged you.

00:51:10.380 --> 00:51:14.860
So what we've covered so far was on my radar. These are things that I at least knew about.

00:51:14.860 --> 00:51:21.180
I knew about the geyser. You know, you look at Venus, and it obviously has what looks like,

00:51:21.180 --> 00:51:26.620
Grand Canyon type of structures in it and whatnot. But it turns out if you look farther,

00:51:26.620 --> 00:51:29.660
there's still interesting stuff out there that was not on my radar.

00:51:29.660 --> 00:51:33.020
Well, and I'll skip over the other two gas giants, Neptune and Uranus,

00:51:33.020 --> 00:51:38.060
for no other reason than we just don't have good data. We've never had a Cassini class mission out

00:51:38.060 --> 00:51:43.100
there. There's a big pitch right now to send a major mission to Neptune. It would still take a

00:51:43.100 --> 00:51:48.460
decade plus to get there. But we happen to be recording this almost right on the five-year

00:51:48.460 --> 00:51:54.780
anniversary of New Horizons getting to Pluto. And, you know, New Horizons is a very unusual mission.

00:51:54.780 --> 00:51:59.100
Pluto is a weird orbit. It was only discovered in 1930. It does not

00:51:59.820 --> 00:52:06.300
orbit on the ecliptical plane of all the other planets. It's tilted. It also crosses into Neptune's

00:52:06.300 --> 00:52:10.460
orbit and then passes back out. And in fact, when they were proposing the New Horizons mission,

00:52:10.460 --> 00:52:14.220
what they're saying was like, "Listen, we're at a point right now where we can get a couple of good

00:52:14.220 --> 00:52:20.540
gravity slingshots and get something there in a reasonable length of time, right, in 10 years or so.

00:52:20.540 --> 00:52:23.820
And if we don't do it now, we won't be able to for like 50 years."

00:52:23.820 --> 00:52:23.820
Wow.

00:52:23.820 --> 00:52:27.340
Wow. And so they got the budget. And it's a relative, it was a quite a small spacecraft.

00:52:27.340 --> 00:52:31.340
It's about the size of a piano. And I mean, like a baby grand piano. And it's actually triangular

00:52:31.340 --> 00:52:38.460
shaped. And it was actually the fastest moving vehicle we ever made. It did a direct ascent to

00:52:38.460 --> 00:52:42.860
Earth escape. Like generally, you put something in orbit around the Earth before you fire another

00:52:42.860 --> 00:52:47.420
engine and fly it and fly it off to Mars or Jupyter or anything like that. They did not do that with New

00:52:47.420 --> 00:52:53.980
Horizons. It was an Atlas V. It was overpowered. And it just shot as fast as it could to do a slingshot

00:52:53.980 --> 00:53:00.060
off of Jupyter to get to Pluto. And it got there in 2015. I mean, Pluto at that point was a dwarf,

00:53:00.060 --> 00:53:05.420
considered a dwarf planet. And it was supposed to be an ice ball. It's out in the middle of nowhere.

00:53:05.420 --> 00:53:13.100
And the first photos that came back from New Horizons, there was a heart-shaped patch of red,

00:53:13.740 --> 00:53:17.900
huge on the side of Pluto. It's all Tholans.

00:53:17.900 --> 00:53:21.180
Oh, wow. It's this muddy stuff that you talked about.

00:53:21.180 --> 00:53:26.780
Yeah. It's all, it doesn't cover the whole thing. I mean, it's very cold on Pluto. Make no mistake,

00:53:26.780 --> 00:53:34.460
right? It's a very chilly place. Water ice is like rock. There are glaciers of methane and nitrogen. It

00:53:34.460 --> 00:53:40.540
may even snow nitrogen there at times because it does have this oscillation in its orbit that it gets

00:53:40.540 --> 00:53:44.620
closer to the sun when it's inside the orbit of Neptune and then gets colder as it was further away.

00:53:44.620 --> 00:53:51.260
But you wouldn't, it had more texture and structure, young structures on it, you know,

00:53:51.260 --> 00:53:58.540
maybe less than 100 million years old that indicated activity, a trans-Neptunian object,

00:53:58.540 --> 00:54:04.540
like something so far, far away. And so again, it just sort of shook us up to this idea that

00:54:04.540 --> 00:54:10.060
the ingredients for life tend to exist anywhere enough of it can gather to coalesce into a

00:54:10.060 --> 00:54:14.700
structure. The, after it made the flyby of Pluto, because it was moving off as fast, it was only in

00:54:14.700 --> 00:54:19.340
close to Pluto for a few days, they were able to do some tweaks and maneuvering to make a flyby of one

00:54:19.340 --> 00:54:24.220
other trans-Neptunian object, which they've subsequently named Ultima Thule, which is actually two

00:54:24.220 --> 00:54:30.620
rocks sort of sticking together, but it looks like it's entirely covered in Tholans.

00:54:31.500 --> 00:54:31.980
Oh wow.

00:54:31.980 --> 00:54:32.940
The whole thing is red.

00:54:32.940 --> 00:54:35.180
Oh wow. How cool.

00:54:35.180 --> 00:54:41.020
Yeah. So, you know, the byproduct of this is just this repeated sort of indication that

00:54:41.020 --> 00:54:45.980
these things keep happening. The chemistry is always there, which brings up the interesting

00:54:45.980 --> 00:54:50.060
question, which is why are there no Tholans on earth? You'd think, other than the Tholans we've

00:54:50.060 --> 00:54:55.900
made ourselves, and the main reason is elemental oxygen. As soon as you introduce elemental oxygen,

00:54:55.900 --> 00:54:58.700
it is going to rip apart all those Tholin compounds.

00:54:58.700 --> 00:55:00.540
All right. It just wants to react straight away, huh?

00:55:00.540 --> 00:55:06.460
Oxygen is greedy, right? Oxygen always finds a way to grab, you know, it'll, you mix oxygen in with

00:55:06.460 --> 00:55:13.340
ammonia and you get nitro monoxide and water, right? You know, oxygen always gets in there.

00:55:13.340 --> 00:55:19.500
So I think what we see in these Tholans are these early stages of life. And then as it advances,

00:55:19.500 --> 00:55:26.540
they get destroyed to become resources as active oxygen is introduced to the system.

00:55:26.540 --> 00:55:32.140
Right. Wow. So there's a lot of possibilities, a lot of places where this could be. A lot of it is

00:55:32.140 --> 00:55:38.780
not obvious. It's underground or it's something, but especially those moons that sound really,

00:55:38.780 --> 00:55:39.740
really interesting to me.

00:55:39.740 --> 00:55:44.220
Yeah. And definitely a lot of energy around, can we make a mission, another mission to Enceladus

00:55:44.220 --> 00:55:46.460
Enceladus and land on Enceladus? Yeah.

00:55:46.460 --> 00:55:49.580
Maybe not actually bore through the ice the first try. The chances, you know,

00:55:49.580 --> 00:55:54.060
I know they're doing experiments now in places like Antarctica to see, can we actually melt through the

00:55:54.060 --> 00:55:58.460
ice kilometers? Because we don't have good enough measurements right now. Maybe we start with an

00:55:58.460 --> 00:56:03.820
orbiter. The problem is the flight times are a decade. Like you pretty much commit to a lifetime.

00:56:03.820 --> 00:56:07.900
So it takes you five to 10 years to build a mission, 10 years to get there and 10 years to operate

00:56:07.900 --> 00:56:09.900
it. That's a career.

00:56:09.900 --> 00:56:13.820
Yeah. That's just insane that the timescales needs to work on. And I think we'll probably be

00:56:13.820 --> 00:56:19.100
coming back to that for a second here. But I think one of the things that's happening recently,

00:56:19.100 --> 00:56:26.460
that's pretty interesting is what do we do if we want to have people go to other places?

00:56:26.460 --> 00:56:26.860
Yeah.

00:56:26.860 --> 00:56:31.420
So what we talked about so far is, you know, is there life around, you know, black smokers or

00:56:31.420 --> 00:56:37.740
some other potential thing, or was there previously life on Venus? But there's some really wild ideas,

00:56:37.740 --> 00:56:44.460
like maybe we could live on Venus, even though it's 90 times atmospheric pressure and it's 900 degrees

00:56:44.460 --> 00:56:45.500
and whatnot.

00:56:45.500 --> 00:56:54.060
So there's a spot on Venus that is almost one G and it's one atmosphere of pressure and it's 50

00:56:54.060 --> 00:56:59.100
kilometers off the surface. So it's above the, for the most part, above the sulfuric acid clouds,

00:56:59.100 --> 00:57:02.460
which is good. Although we can make sulfuric acid repellent materials.

00:57:02.940 --> 00:57:08.060
It has a ton of solar power, about 40% more than earth. And it's atmosphere is so dense that you

00:57:08.060 --> 00:57:13.340
could put a balloon filled with nitrox with breathable air in there big enough that you could

00:57:13.340 --> 00:57:18.140
build a town in it. And it would simply sit on the, it would float on the atmosphere at that altitude.

00:57:18.140 --> 00:57:23.580
So cover the top of it in solar panels. It's just that one atmosphere of pressure. If you get a hole

00:57:23.580 --> 00:57:28.940
in it, it's not like the air rushes out. In fact, you probably make your sphere just slightly higher

00:57:28.940 --> 00:57:32.540
pressure. So you, you tend to not to have the carbon dioxide come in, but you had the atmosphere

00:57:32.540 --> 00:57:37.100
come up, but you could easily stitch it back up again. There was a concept mission developed called

00:57:37.100 --> 00:57:44.220
HAVIC or the high altitude Venus operational concept using essentially blimps and rockets to go and explore

00:57:44.220 --> 00:57:49.340
at that altitude around Venus. But one of the most interesting realizations was that the atmosphere

00:57:49.340 --> 00:57:54.940
composition at that level has lots of carbon and oxygen, and even some hydrogen still, there's still some

00:57:54.940 --> 00:58:00.780
water vapor at that level, lots of nitrogen, sulfur that, and it's all in gaseous form.

00:58:00.780 --> 00:58:05.180
So if you want to live off the land, if you want to do in-situ resource utilization,

00:58:05.180 --> 00:58:10.060
you just need a gas pump. You just pump the gases from the atmosphere in.

00:58:10.060 --> 00:58:15.260
And then you typically, what you do is you chill it because each one of those compounds turns to a

00:58:15.260 --> 00:58:21.180
liquid at different temperatures. So you literally are doing cryo-fractionation and you separate out each

00:58:21.180 --> 00:58:25.580
of the fluids into the respective elements and then you use them in chemistry. You want to make

00:58:25.580 --> 00:58:32.300
breathable air? No problem, right? You need to make some carbon structures? Yeah, we got those. No

00:58:32.300 --> 00:58:37.740
problem. Like all of the compounds you need to take care of a lot of your consumables, they're there.

00:58:37.740 --> 00:58:43.580
It's just that you're building a cloud city, which is weird. Like that's straight science fiction stuff

00:58:43.580 --> 00:58:47.020
until you understand how dense... That is straight out of science fiction. Yeah.

00:58:47.020 --> 00:58:54.060
Except the atmosphere is so dense, you don't have a buoyancy component. Your breathable air is buoyant.

00:58:54.060 --> 00:58:59.420
And it's the only place where you'd be able to go outside without a pressure suit. Now you'd still be

00:58:59.420 --> 00:59:04.060
wearing something because there's droplets of sulfuric acid, but it turns out Teflon repels sulfuric

00:59:04.060 --> 00:59:12.540
has it just fine. So imagine wearing a body suit, Teflon coated, helmet on, you've got a respirator,

00:59:12.540 --> 00:59:17.260
but you're not under a pressure. You're not inside a balloon like you are in a space suit.

00:59:17.260 --> 00:59:23.020
So you can move very freely. It's going to be very bright. You have enough radiation protection

00:59:23.020 --> 00:59:28.460
because there's enough magnetic field and there's enough atmosphere to protect you there. So it's

00:59:28.460 --> 00:59:34.220
unique outside of the earth. One G, one bar of pressure, sufficient radiation protection,

00:59:34.220 --> 00:59:36.140
ton of solar power. And some resources.

00:59:36.140 --> 00:59:39.660
Yeah. And eventually you could build out the infrastructure to have enough resources to at

00:59:39.660 --> 00:59:41.980
least keep yourself in water and air. Yeah.

00:59:41.980 --> 00:59:43.820
It's more compelling than it ought to be.

00:59:43.820 --> 00:59:49.180
That is such an insane idea, but it sounds actually better than living on the moon or living on Mars.

00:59:49.180 --> 00:59:53.740
Well, because the moon's always going to be almost, I mean, not quite a camping trip,

00:59:53.740 --> 00:59:56.620
but definitely an outpost. It's always going to need supplies.

00:59:56.620 --> 01:00:03.500
Yeah. But you know, and Elon's keen to get to Mars because everybody can relate to Mars. You can see

01:00:03.500 --> 01:00:09.820
its surface. It sort of has an environment to it. We've made movies about it, but the radiation

01:00:09.820 --> 01:00:16.940
protection on Mars is simply not adequate. So, you know, all of those cartoony, science fiction-y,

01:00:16.940 --> 01:00:22.620
we're going to build a city on Mars is not likely. We'll more likely build underground. There has been

01:00:22.620 --> 01:00:27.980
enough volcanic activity over the millennia on Mars that there are significant lava tubes. So,

01:00:27.980 --> 01:00:33.980
the pre-formed tunnels that you can put a pressurized habitat into. You are always going to have to wear a

01:00:33.980 --> 01:00:40.300
pressure suit. The atmosphere is simply not strong enough. It's less than 1%. So, you're going to have

01:00:40.300 --> 01:00:45.580
all of the spacesuit problems, which are not trivial. When you get into that low-pressure environment,

01:00:45.580 --> 01:00:51.740
you have huge electrostatic problems. You have the perchlorates, which are an iodine compound that

01:00:51.740 --> 01:00:57.580
we find in very desert-y areas on the earth as well. The Atacama Desert in Peru has perchlorates,

01:00:57.580 --> 01:01:02.460
but perchlorates are everywhere on Mars. And they're quite bad for humans. They're quite a nasty contaminant.

01:01:02.460 --> 01:01:06.060
They have to be chemically processed out, which is not energy cheap.

01:01:06.060 --> 01:01:08.620
Right. Energy is expensive out there. You're far from the sun.

01:01:08.620 --> 01:01:13.340
Yeah. Solar panels are not great there. We make them work on golf cart-sized machines. But as soon as you get

01:01:13.340 --> 01:01:17.580
any bigger than that, the Curiosity rover is about the size of a mini, and it just couldn't be solar

01:01:17.580 --> 01:01:24.300
powered. The solar panels would be too large. So, it has an RTG, a radiothermol generator on it. If

01:01:24.300 --> 01:01:28.300
we're actually going to put humans on Mars, we're going to need nuclear power of some form. And there's

01:01:28.300 --> 01:01:33.980
a bunch of interesting technologies around that that'll make it feasible. But the amount of solar

01:01:33.980 --> 01:01:38.620
required, the dust problems and the electrostatic problems, it's just not efficient. It's even hard to

01:01:38.620 --> 01:01:43.100
make solar work on the moon for the same reason. And you get a lot more solar power on the moon than you

01:01:43.100 --> 01:01:50.860
do on Mars. But you're still talking less than a kilowatt per square meter on the moon. And you're

01:01:50.860 --> 01:01:58.620
talking half that on Mars and maintenance. It's just not enough power. So, you know, although you

01:01:58.620 --> 01:02:03.660
get double at Venus, so you have more options there. And you don't have the atmospheric problems.

01:02:03.660 --> 01:02:07.100
You're still going to need to do some maintenance because they're going to have to resist sulfuric acid

01:02:07.100 --> 01:02:11.740
and things like that. But it certainly has more possibility. Heat will be a challenge.

01:02:11.740 --> 01:02:14.860
But none of these planets is going to be...

01:02:14.860 --> 01:02:18.220
If you build a starship, would you go? Would you take a trip?

01:02:18.220 --> 01:02:23.580
Oh, yeah. But I'd want to come back. I'll take a ride for sure. You know, I don't have the money for

01:02:23.580 --> 01:02:29.980
the current generation of space explorers. But, you know, the side effect of when starship works,

01:02:29.980 --> 01:02:33.740
it's not going to be the trip to Mars. It's going to be interesting. It's going to be orbital hotels.

01:02:33.740 --> 01:02:34.060
Yeah.

01:02:34.060 --> 01:02:38.940
Because they suddenly get way more feasible. Now it's like, I could buy a house or spend a week or

01:02:38.940 --> 01:02:45.900
two in orbit. And that's... I'd be tempted, you know. Got a house. Raised my kids. I'm happy to

01:02:45.900 --> 01:02:47.260
spend their inheritance at this point.

01:02:47.260 --> 01:02:50.700
It would be like a really different cruise.

01:02:50.700 --> 01:02:55.500
Yeah. Really extraordinary cruise. I mean, very, very expensive. But, you know,

01:02:55.500 --> 01:03:01.260
this may well be coming in our lifetime. Especially, I mean, a star... Starship is going to take longer

01:03:01.260 --> 01:03:07.020
than Elon plans, but then everything Elon plans take longer than Elon plans. But his design seems

01:03:07.020 --> 01:03:13.020
essentially sound. And if he has a 100% reusable spacecraft so that we're only paying for fuel,

01:03:13.020 --> 01:03:20.060
now we're talking pennies a kilo into orbit instead of hundreds of... I mean, he's gotten...

01:03:20.060 --> 01:03:26.300
Even Falcon 9 is below $2,000 a kilo to orbit, which is astonishing. Like, it's a revelation. It is

01:03:26.300 --> 01:03:29.020
literally an order of magnitude improvement. Yeah.

01:03:29.020 --> 01:03:34.620
But starship would be three more orders of magnitude. Like, now 20 cents a kilo, like that.

01:03:34.620 --> 01:03:35.660
That is insane.

01:03:35.660 --> 01:03:39.180
You're in the ballpark. Yeah. Well, I mean, if anyone's going to do it,

01:03:39.180 --> 01:03:43.980
that guy's going to do it. He's got some... Well, don't count Bezos out. The only reason,

01:03:43.980 --> 01:03:50.380
you know, Elon is a showman for a reason. He needs money. Now, he's mostly showing off to his

01:03:50.380 --> 01:03:56.860
billionaire friends, right? It's Sergey and Larry that are funding him a lot of the time. But Jeff

01:03:56.860 --> 01:04:01.180
doesn't need the money, which is why he sort of keeps it to himself. Yeah.

01:04:01.180 --> 01:04:05.900
I think we may get surprised by him that New Glenn is further along than we realize.

01:04:05.900 --> 01:04:10.540
And that is one heck of a rocket design. And it'll obviously be different than what's known

01:04:10.540 --> 01:04:15.980
because he keeps himself close to the chest. But his mission is not to put humans on Mars.

01:04:15.980 --> 01:04:21.660
He's much more in the O'Neill cylinder category. He'd like to build habit, learn how to mine asteroids,

01:04:21.660 --> 01:04:28.780
build structures in space, and build 1G habitats. Gravity wells are dumb. Like, why would you go back

01:04:28.780 --> 01:04:34.300
down into a gravity well and make it expensive to get flying around when I can hollow out an

01:04:34.300 --> 01:04:42.140
asteroid, put some artificial light in the center of it, spin it up so that you have 1G, and fill it

01:04:42.140 --> 01:04:47.580
full of people and wildlife and resources. And anytime you want to go back into space, you take

01:04:47.580 --> 01:04:53.260
an elevator to the center where there's no gravity again and out to a non-rotating rim where you can

01:04:53.260 --> 01:04:58.700
hop in a spacecraft and take off. Now, that's a tremendous amount of technology. That's probably

01:04:58.700 --> 01:05:03.820
decades worth of work. But it starts with being able to get into orbit cheaply.

01:05:03.820 --> 01:05:07.980
Yeah, absolutely it does. How interesting. All right, let's wrap this up. We're getting short on time.

01:05:07.980 --> 01:05:08.540
Sure.

01:05:08.540 --> 01:05:14.540
Bring it back to the beginning. So, we talked about Drake's equation, which puts a bunch of

01:05:14.540 --> 01:05:21.420
probabilities together. Almost any non-zero number you put in there, knowing how many stars are in a

01:05:21.420 --> 01:05:27.820
galaxy and how many galaxies there are, shoots out a tremendous number of potential habitable places

01:05:27.820 --> 01:05:31.820
with life forms. And yet, there's Fermi's paradox.

01:05:31.820 --> 01:05:33.020
Yeah. Where are they?

01:05:33.020 --> 01:05:37.740
Where are they? I mean, we're finding all these exoplanets. What do you think? What is your gut feeling

01:05:37.740 --> 01:05:46.460
here? I think that the ingredients for life are super common, but the conditions are more challenging.

01:05:46.460 --> 01:05:52.940
How do we get a planet with a strong magnetic field? So, it has an oversized moon. These days,

01:05:52.940 --> 01:05:59.260
we talk more and more about the chemistry of the moon's lower core, that it's not just the nickel iron

01:05:59.260 --> 01:06:05.820
that's compressed in the center. But also, there are tendrils of spirals of sulfur coming out of them that

01:06:05.820 --> 01:06:12.300
help amplify that magnetic field. So, it may be that there's only particular windows of time in the

01:06:12.300 --> 01:06:17.740
evolution of a planet where it actually makes a magnetic field strong enough to really defend its

01:06:17.740 --> 01:06:23.500
atmosphere. And hopefully, it has enough atmosphere to defend at that point. But then, also, it's cooled down

01:06:23.500 --> 01:06:30.860
enough that the floating pieces of land that create land masses don't float so freely that they're just

01:06:30.860 --> 01:06:37.100
one big land mass so that you have a homogeneous life on it, but rather start to stick to each other and

01:06:37.100 --> 01:06:41.660
break apart and become and create plate tectonics that then distribute.

01:06:41.660 --> 01:06:46.220
Create these currents that level out the atmospheric and weather patterns and all that, right?

01:06:46.220 --> 01:06:52.380
But also, create conditions for rapid evolution. What happens when you fragment the land mass up is

01:06:52.380 --> 01:07:00.700
you create micro environments for evolution. You know, we wouldn't have kangaroos and all of those

01:07:00.700 --> 01:07:07.820
weird monotremes if not for the isolation that is Australia. And so, how do you create conditions

01:07:07.820 --> 01:07:13.020
where different things can evolve and then encounter themselves later? And I think continental

01:07:13.020 --> 01:07:17.340
drift is an important part of it. So, you need a planet that is hot enough and energetic enough

01:07:17.340 --> 01:07:22.940
that it's making a strong and athletic field, but cool enough that its plate tectonics exist and are

01:07:22.940 --> 01:07:29.180
fracturing land to create that petri dish of evolution. Like, now you're starting to get into tougher numbers.

01:07:29.180 --> 01:07:31.180
Yeah, it's getting smaller.

01:07:31.180 --> 01:07:36.220
And then throw into that little indicator I threw at the beginning, which is when you finally evolve

01:07:36.220 --> 01:07:41.180
a tool building life that starts developing technology and they go up that hockey stick

01:07:41.820 --> 01:07:47.020
of technological advancement. How long before they wink out of existence as far as we're concerned,

01:07:47.020 --> 01:07:50.540
either by destroying themselves or by evolving beyond this universe?

01:07:50.540 --> 01:07:55.900
Yeah. And the other thing that comes back for me all the time is you talked about,

01:07:55.900 --> 01:08:03.340
let's just go visit, what was it, Pluto? If we do it at the right time, it'll only take 10 years of flight

01:08:03.340 --> 01:08:06.540
time. If we do it the wrong time, it'll take 50 years of flight time.

01:08:06.540 --> 01:08:07.260
Or never.

01:08:07.260 --> 01:08:08.780
And that's just within the solar space.

01:08:08.780 --> 01:08:09.100
Yeah.

01:08:09.100 --> 01:08:16.140
Space is so big that I think it breaks our conception. Like, oh yeah, there's a billion of them over there,

01:08:16.140 --> 01:08:20.940
but they happen to be so far away that it's inconceivably far. There's no,

01:08:20.940 --> 01:08:25.420
the thought of going there doesn't make sense. Like generations won't, you know,

01:08:25.420 --> 01:08:27.100
how many generations do you need to get there?

01:08:27.100 --> 01:08:31.660
But let me throw you a wrench into those numbers for you. We use chemical rockets right now,

01:08:31.660 --> 01:08:37.180
where they, which burn very brightly, very briefly. There are better rocket engines.

01:08:37.180 --> 01:08:41.900
And not that I know that we have the answer to this, but we have a few good ideas about better engines,

01:08:41.900 --> 01:08:48.300
nuclear engines being one example of it. But imagine at the right period, right? This is certain

01:08:48.300 --> 01:08:52.540
moments where it makes sense to fly between the earth and Mars. So I picked the right moment to fly

01:08:52.540 --> 01:08:55.980
between the earth and Mars. But I have a very special spacecraft. I have a spacecraft that can

01:08:55.980 --> 01:09:03.180
accelerate at exactly one G. Okay. So it's like normal earth gravity. The engine runs continuously.

01:09:03.180 --> 01:09:08.460
So I'm going to burn continuously at one G of acceleration towards Mars. So we get about halfway.

01:09:08.460 --> 01:09:13.980
Then I'm going to turn around and I'm going to burn at one G to decelerate so that we arrive at Mars.

01:09:13.980 --> 01:09:18.540
How long did it take me to go from the earth to Mars at one G of continuous acceleration, deceleration?

01:09:18.540 --> 01:09:22.140
One G. Yeah. How long does it take now? 18 months?

01:09:22.140 --> 01:09:26.780
Yeah. Four to six months, depending on a bunch of factors. I don't need you to do the math,

01:09:26.780 --> 01:09:28.620
friend. I'll just tell you. I think I'm going to say one month.

01:09:28.620 --> 01:09:30.460
It's three days. Oh, okay.

01:09:30.460 --> 01:09:37.180
So this is the, and so you can imagine if we could sand two Gs, it'll be a day and a half. Given we can

01:09:37.180 --> 01:09:42.860
put smart people in space and create incentives to actually fly between bodies on a routine basis,

01:09:42.860 --> 01:09:47.580
we can make better engines. We can make the solar system far more approachable.

01:09:47.580 --> 01:09:54.700
We have not needed to. Every engine we've ever flown in space, we built on earth. And first,

01:09:54.700 --> 01:10:01.180
it had to survive being put into orbit and then operated. When we start building vehicles in space

01:10:01.180 --> 01:10:07.420
for space, they will be very different and they will have new capabilities. We will learn to do things

01:10:07.420 --> 01:10:11.340
with the different resources we have available to you. We built spacecraft out of aluminum because we

01:10:11.340 --> 01:10:16.220
have to lift them into orbit. It makes no sense to do that once you're in space.

01:10:16.220 --> 01:10:18.300
It's just metal that melts really easily.

01:10:18.300 --> 01:10:23.660
Yeah. It has a whole ton of problems and it's not that common. You know what would be easier to find?

01:10:23.660 --> 01:10:31.180
Nickel iron. They make asteroids out of this stuff. You know, maybe a true spacecraft built in space will

01:10:31.180 --> 01:10:38.140
be made from a nickel iron hull. It'll be heavier, but it won't matter. You know, we are not there yet.

01:10:38.140 --> 01:10:43.500
We're starting to get the ingredients to start thinking in terms of more powerful engines and

01:10:43.500 --> 01:10:50.700
vehicles built for interplanetary flight. We can do much better. We just haven't needed to yet. We will,

01:10:51.260 --> 01:10:57.900
we're not there yet. Well, I think we probably will. You're right. I mean, 400 years ago, we used wind and

01:10:57.900 --> 01:11:05.580
sails on the water. Yeah. And still we coveted rare, rare kinds of woods like iron wood from the Indies,

01:11:05.580 --> 01:11:11.740
you know, for mass. Like they, you know, one of the claims to fame for the Americans was their American

01:11:11.740 --> 01:11:17.020
Oak made incredible hulls that we came up with a technique that they built the constitution with old

01:11:17.020 --> 01:11:23.180
iron sides. Well, there's no iron on the old iron sides. It's wood. Like there is abilities as you

01:11:23.180 --> 01:11:29.180
start functioning that space to get better at it. We just never done it because we have not had people

01:11:29.180 --> 01:11:33.740
building in space yet. The moment we do things will happen.

01:11:33.740 --> 01:11:38.780
Yeah. Well, that sounds very exciting. It's been really fun to explore this whole idea of,

01:11:38.780 --> 01:11:43.980
you know, life in the universe. Where is it? Where could it be? And beyond. So yeah,

01:11:43.980 --> 01:11:46.780
Richard, thanks for coming back on the show. Well, my pleasure, friend. I will do this with

01:11:46.780 --> 01:11:51.260
you anytime you like. It's a, it's an excuse for me to sit down and update all that research,

01:11:51.260 --> 01:11:55.260
right? To say, okay, all the notes I've taken over the past couple of years, since the last time we sort

01:11:55.260 --> 01:11:59.660
of dug into this, what have we learned? And I'm always in, I come out of it always excited. Like,

01:11:59.660 --> 01:12:03.580
I can't believe how much we've learned in this short amount of time. If you just stop and take

01:12:03.580 --> 01:12:08.460
in everything that's going on, it's such an exciting time. It is. The civilization is at,

01:12:08.460 --> 01:12:14.460
is doing amazing things right now. We have non-trivial challenges and we could have spoken

01:12:14.460 --> 01:12:19.660
for an hour on coronavirus. I don't let anybody want to listen to it, but we could have, because

01:12:19.660 --> 01:12:26.300
again, we are doing remarkable things there as well. Some less remarkable also, but it's never

01:12:26.300 --> 01:12:31.100
been a bad finder time to be alive. It doesn't feel like it's at times, but truly we're at the

01:12:31.100 --> 01:12:34.860
height of our civilization right now. I agree. I think the, there's some rough times,

01:12:34.860 --> 01:12:38.300
times, but I think there are bumps in the road. Well, and so much more to do. Like if you thought

01:12:38.300 --> 01:12:42.940
we've, you know, okay, we've done everything. We're good. No, there's more to do.

01:12:42.940 --> 01:12:46.300
Not even close. All right. Well, thanks so much for being on the show. It's great to chat with you as

01:12:46.300 --> 01:12:46.380
always.

01:12:46.380 --> 01:12:47.740
You bet, brother. Thank you.

01:12:47.740 --> 01:12:48.300
Bye.

01:12:48.300 --> 01:12:48.700
Bye.

01:12:48.700 --> 01:12:55.260
This has been another episode of Talk Python To Me. Our guest on this episode was Richard Campbell,

01:12:55.260 --> 01:12:59.740
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01:13:47.100 --> 01:13:51.820
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01:13:51.820 --> 01:13:57.900
Now get out there and write some Python code.

01:14:09.900 --> 01:14:15.420
I'll see you next time.