Speaker 1: Here we Go Again Again. Hey, I'm cal Penn. Welcome
Speaker 1: to my new show, Here we Go Again.
Speaker 2: Here We Go.
Speaker 1: So you may know me as an actor from Harold
Speaker 1: and Kumar House or Designated Survivor. I'm also a former
Speaker 1: White House staffer, a NASCAR enthusiast, an eager karaoke participant,
Speaker 1: and I guess, as of like five seconds ago, a
Speaker 1: podcast host.
Speaker 2: How am I doing so far?
Speaker 1: I'm hosting this podcast because there's one particular question that
Speaker 1: I find myself asking a lot these days. Why does
Speaker 1: the same shit keep happening? War, labor strikes, getting ghosted
Speaker 1: by a hookup. No one wants to be stuck in
Speaker 1: a vicious cycle of patterns repeating. So every week we're
Speaker 1: going to take a topic from the present, see how
Speaker 1: it played out in the past, and try to figure
Speaker 1: out what it means for our future. Each episode, I'll
Speaker 1: chat with an expert who can help me answer a
Speaker 1: different burning question, like why is my plane always delayed?
Speaker 1: Are we headed towards another economic crash? Is this rash
Speaker 1: what I think it is? Oh? Wait, ignore that last one.
Speaker 1: We're asking all the right questions to all the right
Speaker 1: people to make you feel at least like nine percent
Speaker 1: better about well everything except maybe the rashow. So now
Speaker 1: that I got my little introduction out of the way,
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure how I wanted to kick off the
Speaker 1: first episode, but then I kept looking down at my tattoos.
Speaker 1: Some people have tattoos of bald eagles, A lot of
Speaker 1: people have tattoos of x's. Most of my tattoos have
Speaker 1: something to do with astronomy. That's what you see if
Speaker 1: you look at my sleeve, and of that, I'd say
Speaker 1: at least half has to do with the NASA Voyager
Speaker 1: Golden Record. If you don't know what the Golden Record is,
Speaker 1: it's a piece of this spacecraft called the Voyager, launched
Speaker 1: in the late nineteen seventies, and the idea there was
Speaker 1: that if it's ever found by an intelligent civilization, and
Speaker 1: if they can ever decode this record, they would see
Speaker 1: only the best of human civilization, biology, science, music, arts, DNA.
Speaker 1: To me, space has always been about exploring the unknown,
Speaker 1: about possibility, and as the guy with the Voyager tattoo,
Speaker 1: I clearly care a lot about the new space race
Speaker 1: that's happening right now. From the Cold War to today,
Speaker 1: space has really been about flexing power the United States
Speaker 1: versus the Soviet Union, for example back in the day,
Speaker 1: or more recently, the United States versus China. But now
Speaker 1: there's also a new player, private corporations enter the billionaires.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk is willing to spend fifteen and a half
Speaker 1: billion dollars to be the first to colonize Mars. Jeff
Speaker 1: Bezos is funding Blue Origin to keep up. And in
Speaker 1: the middle of all of this is still NASA with
Speaker 1: a shrinking budget. So here's my question, why do we
Speaker 1: keep turning space into a race? And what does that
Speaker 1: say about the future of space exploration and about humanity?
Speaker 1: This is here we Go again, a show where we
Speaker 1: take today's trends and headlines and then ask why does
Speaker 1: history keep repeating itself. I'm cal Penn to explore the past, present,
Speaker 1: and future of the space race. I knew only one
Speaker 1: guy would do. He's super sciency, a spokesperson, an adventurer,
Speaker 1: a teacher, and the only adult man I trust to
Speaker 1: wear a bow tie. Unlike me, He's got a star
Speaker 1: on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the singular William Sandford
Speaker 1: n I, better known as my friend Bill Nye, the
Speaker 1: science Guy. Welcome Bill it's so good to be here.
Speaker 1: Thanks for doing this. Man. I think that most of
Speaker 1: us have a very rudimentary understanding of space, and I
Speaker 1: will I will preface this by saying, I think I've
Speaker 1: shown you my astronomy tattoos, most of which are based
Speaker 1: on the Voyager Golden Record, well pulse ar map and
Speaker 1: things like that, but that is still you know, for
Speaker 1: an actor, that's still a rudimentary like, well.
Speaker 2: You're a citizen of Earth, cal thank you.
Speaker 1: I like to put it that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's what we're going for here.
Speaker 1: So, like, what is the history of the original space race?
Speaker 1: In like a minute, And I'm not asking for the
Speaker 1: version of like if you and Neil deGrasse Tyson were
Speaker 1: in a room together, which I've seen and it's brilliant,
Speaker 1: but like, what's the second grade version of that?
Speaker 2: The second grade version is the Soviet Union was created
Speaker 2: with this idea that they would be that its system
Speaker 2: would be better than the West. And along with that,
Speaker 2: we're going to prove that we're better than the West.
Speaker 2: We're going to go into space, the ultimate high ground.
Speaker 2: So they built sputneck spacecraft and I was a little
Speaker 2: little kid nineteen fifty seven and the grown ups are
Speaker 2: all very very concerned about this. And so then the
Speaker 2: US answered the threat or the historic achievement of Sputnik
Speaker 2: by creating NASA, the National Annasa Space Administration, a civilian
Speaker 2: space agency that was involved in flying around in space,
Speaker 2: which you might think was more of a military thing,
Speaker 2: but this became and everybody talks about this turning point
Speaker 2: with John Kennedy, whatever else you might think about him,
Speaker 2: presented this challenge of putting somebody on the moon before
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy, so that became a way to fight the
Speaker 2: Cold War, was put somebody on the moon, and the
Speaker 2: US did, and not too long in historic terms, after that,
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union went out of business, so that was
Speaker 2: good for us.
Speaker 1: During Spotnik, the old folks were kind of freaking out.
Speaker 1: And I'm curious at that point was there an understanding
Speaker 1: or a keen interest in the exploration part of this
Speaker 1: or was there a fear about the militarization part.
Speaker 2: So there was both. So the guys at NASA, and
Speaker 2: they were mostly men, were arguing that we needed to
Speaker 2: understand the cosmos. We needed to understand what cosmic rays are,
Speaker 2: We need to understand the processes that create sunlight and stars,
Speaker 2: and we need to know more about what I like
Speaker 2: to call our place in space. But the reason it
Speaker 2: was done was the Cold War. But with that these
Speaker 2: extraordinary discoveries were made, and a couple of remarkable things.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty eight, Bill Anders, this astronaut, took a
Speaker 2: picture of the Earth that came to be called Earth Rise,
Speaker 2: with the moon and the foreground, and this is where
Speaker 2: you see the Earth against the icy blackness of space.
Speaker 2: When the aperture of the camera was set to capture
Speaker 2: the planet Earth, the stars behind Earth were not bright
Speaker 2: enough to show up. So it's stark. There's the Earth,
Speaker 2: this planet. And then the thing that struck my grandparents
Speaker 2: was the clouds. You see Earth from space, and you
Speaker 2: see all these clouds. When you think of Earth before that,
Speaker 2: you'd think of it as a classroom globe, no clouds,
Speaker 2: and just political boundaries. And the ocean is perfectly uniform
Speaker 2: color all around the world, and so on. And so
Speaker 2: this changed history, and it was not in my opinion,
Speaker 2: and it keep in mind everybody, my opinion is correct.
Speaker 2: And so a few years later the Soviet Union was
Speaker 2: doing these extraordinary things, and I sent these missions to
Speaker 2: Mars they sent missions to Venus all these things, and
Speaker 2: along that line, the US was going to keep up,
Speaker 2: and the US did, and this led to this extraordinary
Speaker 2: event events of the launching of the Voyager spacecraft. And
Speaker 2: these were are two spacecraft that did this so called
Speaker 2: Grand tour of the Solar System because of the alignment
Speaker 2: or the orientation or the places and spaces of the planets.
Speaker 2: And the old hilarious joke is the same arrangement of
Speaker 2: planets happened during the Atoms administration in eighteen twenty, but
Speaker 2: they didn't do anything about it. They didn't send any
Speaker 2: spacecraft in eighteen twenty. What were the thinking and so anyway,
Speaker 2: I claim this changed the course of history, and this
Speaker 2: led to the Golden Record, which is on your tattoo.
Speaker 1: Can you tell us more about the Golden Record? Like
Speaker 1: I obviously like to think I'm an expert enough that
Speaker 1: I tattooed on my body. But my real understanding is
Speaker 1: that what it's a group of people, which I think
Speaker 1: involved Carl Sagan they made this recording of positive Earth
Speaker 1: stuff that we sent up on the Voyager missions. Is
Speaker 1: that essentially it?
Speaker 2: Yes, So everybody, let's just talk some more about me.
Speaker 2: I happened to be in class with Carl Sagan, famous astronomer.
Speaker 2: I happened to be in class. I was a senior
Speaker 2: in mechanical engineering school. I took astronomy one oh two
Speaker 2: for kicks, just I took a freshman level course because
Speaker 2: this guy had become so famous, this Carl Sagan, who's
Speaker 2: on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. This is before
Speaker 2: Jimmy Fallon, before Jay Leno. Yeah, and Carl Sagan said,
Speaker 2: we're to put this record, this phonograph record. And for
Speaker 2: the young people listening, I know you're all into vinyl again,
Speaker 2: right on, way to go, turn it up loud, Okay,
Speaker 2: while you're doing all that. The idea was to send
Speaker 2: a phonograph record to Phonograph Records into deep space, and
Speaker 2: so then you're gonna put sounds on the phonograph record,
Speaker 2: sounds of this extraordinary world Earth. And Carl Sagan said,
Speaker 2: don't worry, young people were going to put a rock
Speaker 2: and roll song on the record, and he said it's
Speaker 2: going to be rollover Beethoven by Chuck Berry. And I
Speaker 2: certainly voiced a concern. But this next part may be
Speaker 2: a so called constructed memory. I claim I stood up.
Speaker 2: This is a part of the semester. You know, there
Speaker 2: are people who are so confident in college that they
Speaker 2: don't go to class. They just take the tests and
Speaker 2: the final, and they write the paper and they just
Speaker 2: read the tech don't go to class. I was not
Speaker 2: among those people because I felt that Sagan was so entertaining,
Speaker 2: he was such an amazing speaker. So I claim I
Speaker 2: stood up and I said, Professor Sagan, it's not roll
Speaker 2: over Beethoven. The song you want is Johnny be Good
Speaker 2: by Chuck Berry. And so I was not the only
Speaker 2: guy expressing this sentiment, but I was particularly vocal because
Speaker 2: I'm a particular fan of Chuck Berry, and so Chuck
Speaker 2: Berry's on the record. I take full credit.
Speaker 1: You're saying that you helped decide what was on the
Speaker 1: Golden Record. How did I not know this?
Speaker 2: It's all me, everybody, and it's just you guys. Understand
Speaker 2: the dumb luctivity of my life that I happened to
Speaker 2: be in this class. First of all, that I got
Speaker 2: into this extraordinary university, Cornell, that I got into there
Speaker 2: was I'm sure some mistake in the admissions department, but
Speaker 2: I happened to be there at this moment in history
Speaker 2: of space exploration that changed my life. And so I'm
Speaker 2: very thankful, and I tell everybody those two spacecraft are
Speaker 2: still flying because they're powered by plutonium. It is extraordinary.
Speaker 2: And this is what Carl Sagan used talk about all
Speaker 2: the time. Humans in so many ways are not worthy
Speaker 2: of respect, like we're just mean spirited, crummy creatures. But
Speaker 2: in other ways we can do these extraordinary things and
Speaker 2: understand our place in space and try to know where
Speaker 2: we came from, and to ponder whether or not we're
Speaker 2: alone in the cosmos. These are just extraordinary questions. And
Speaker 2: along with that, for Carl Sagan and Andrew and his wife
Speaker 2: then and the people that he worked with, they just
Speaker 2: wanted everybody to appreciate the beauty that humans appreciate. And
Speaker 2: that's what's on the record, the way.
Speaker 1: That you're described. I mean everyone from the astronaut who
Speaker 1: took that photograph of Earth from the moon to the
Speaker 1: fact that you put Chuck Berry on the Golden Record.
Speaker 1: All of the sixties and seventies and eighties, the reputation
Speaker 1: that NASA had was almost this glamorous and certainly now
Speaker 1: looking back, very fucking cool. Cool group of people who seem,
Speaker 1: especially in retrospect given the world we live in now,
Speaker 1: very hopeful, very aspirational, and I think we think a
Speaker 1: lot about that, but also think about the competition that
Speaker 1: has come to dominate space that then kind of ignores
Speaker 1: the cooperation. What I'm getting at here is at what
Speaker 1: point did the International Space Station come into this conversation?
Speaker 1: Can you talk a little bit about how it started
Speaker 1: and then which countries cooperated with it? Did it come
Speaker 1: out of this same idea of hey, we can do
Speaker 1: amazing things together. Let's put music and send out there.
Speaker 2: Well, another thing along this line, talking about Carl Sagan
Speaker 2: again this mythic astronomer, I say mythic. He's a real person,
Speaker 2: but he's so influential, Like for example, you mentioned earlier
Speaker 2: before we started, you mentioned Neil deGrasse Tyson. As you know,
Speaker 2: Steve Martin said, personal friend of mine and me. We
Speaker 2: probably would not be doing what we're doing without the
Speaker 2: creation of NASA and without Carl Sagan and his influence.
Speaker 2: So along this line, Carl Sagan started the planetary sieting
Speaker 2: because he and his colleagues felt that public interest in
Speaker 2: space was very high, but government support of it was
Speaker 2: not especially high that would never happen again. That's the
Speaker 2: same thing's going on now. And they were very concerned
Speaker 2: about nuclear war, and they wanted very much to engage
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union, and so there was this hand shaken space.
Speaker 2: Now I'm doing this for memory. I should look this up.
Speaker 2: I should have it at my brain for tips LEONEV
Speaker 2: and Allen. That's not quite right.
Speaker 1: I got it. It's a Leonov and Stafford astronaut Thomas
Speaker 1: Stafford and Russian cosmonaut Aleck Say Leonov.
Speaker 2: Right, they shook hands in space, an astronaut and a cosmonaut,
Speaker 2: and this was going to be okay, cold war over
Speaker 2: shirk hands in space, Let's go. And that led to
Speaker 2: the International Space Station. And for those of you who remember,
Speaker 2: for many years the only way to get up and
Speaker 2: down to the International Space Station was on a Russian
Speaker 2: rocket because the Russian rockets were just big, heavy and reliable,
Speaker 2: and they so are. But the Space Shuttle was created
Speaker 2: to get people up and down to the space station.
Speaker 2: The user words shuttle like you're going to go, you know,
Speaker 2: on a bus every day. But it turned out to
Speaker 2: be fantastically expensive. But that dream or that vision of
Speaker 2: using space exploration, to establish international relations, to prevent an
Speaker 2: international conflict.
Speaker 1: Is still with us.
Speaker 2: You talk to any US astronaut, he or she speaks Russian,
Speaker 2: you talk to any cosmonaut, he or she speaks English
Speaker 2: because they train together. They still cooperate. With all the
Speaker 2: other stuff that's going on, sabotaging underwater natural gas lines,
Speaker 2: conflict in Ukraine, all the other sort of Cold war
Speaker 2: knock on stuff that's going on, there's still international cooperation
Speaker 2: in space. It's remarkable.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to here we go again with me Calpen,
Speaker 1: your host and our guest, the wonderful Bill n I. Okay, Bill, so,
Speaker 1: I love how you ended that last segment with the
Speaker 1: reality that that no matter what conflicts are happening in
Speaker 1: the world, we're still cooperating in the space station. But okay,
Speaker 1: what about the space racing Now, I'm curious what's the
Speaker 1: same in what's changed? And especially that original space race
Speaker 1: Did it truly ever end? Does it continue in a
Speaker 1: version of its original form? Today?
Speaker 2: It doesn't continue in the original form in that it's
Speaker 2: not the US versus the Soviets or Russians anymore. Now
Speaker 2: people are just as far as space racing, people are
Speaker 2: just beginning to acknowledge the importance of China, and the
Speaker 2: Chinese National Space Agency is doing extraordinary things, and they're
Speaker 2: doing them for the same reason everybody else did. First
Speaker 2: of all, it's national pride. You get Taykonts up there
Speaker 2: in their own space station doing their own cool experiments.
Speaker 2: They want to go to the south pole of the
Speaker 2: Moon because there is nominally an engineering reason to go there.
Speaker 2: That is to say, people suspect strongly there's enough ice
Speaker 2: in the regolith. That's a fabulous word, that the rocky
Speaker 2: surface of the Moon that you could use solar panels
Speaker 2: to make electricity, turn the water into hydrogen and oxygen gas,
Speaker 2: and then liquid hydrogen and oxygen recombine them and have
Speaker 2: a rocket from the Moon run by rocket fuel made
Speaker 2: of moon stuff. So I know it was okay, it's
Speaker 2: a lot. But the other reason to go to the
Speaker 2: Moon is national pride and plant the flag and so on.
Speaker 2: But then that's this international space race that's just getting
Speaker 2: acknowledged here in the US circles since that Congressman Wolf
Speaker 2: retired that you don't have the same but he just
Speaker 2: was bringing up all the time.
Speaker 1: So Congressman Wolf, for those who don't know was the
Speaker 1: author of the Wolf Amendment, which prevented and prevents still
Speaker 1: the US from cooperating with China in space exploration.
Speaker 2: But then the other space race is these billionaires rather
Speaker 2: who are going at it with their own companies. And
Speaker 2: so they're doing it for a couple of reasons. First
Speaker 2: of all, their own pride and space intrigues. Everybody, everybody,
Speaker 2: I think, goes through a period of wanting to be
Speaker 2: an astronaut and fly in space. And we all embrace
Speaker 2: science fiction where you go to other worlds and do
Speaker 2: these extraordinary things and compare the other world to our
Speaker 2: world and wonder if we're alone in the universe. That's
Speaker 2: all in there, and then there's real money to be made.
Speaker 2: A lot of people I speak with are not aware
Speaker 2: of the extraordinary amount of money that's spent in space. Wait,
Speaker 2: all the money that's spent in space is really spent
Speaker 2: on Earth. Wait a second. Yeah. So the SpaceX, for example,
Speaker 2: is huge business with the Air Force, Space Force, NASA
Speaker 2: along with its own starlink thing. Man. They launch rockets
Speaker 2: a couple three times a week, these very reliable Falcon
Speaker 2: nine rockets, and they do it for business to dominate
Speaker 2: global communications in lower author and the technology has got
Speaker 2: to the point where you can do that. You know,
Speaker 2: it's like a cell phone signal. You know, when you
Speaker 2: drive around the cell phone, you can go from one
Speaker 2: cell to another and the system hands it from one
Speaker 2: hands your phone call from one cell to another cell seamlessly.
Speaker 2: Now these you know, these spacecraft are going in the
Speaker 2: English units. It's over seventeen thousand miles an hour and
Speaker 2: they're handing the communications signal from one to another. It's
Speaker 2: really amazing.
Speaker 1: The number of satellites that allow us to do what
Speaker 1: we do was kind of put into scope. I did
Speaker 1: a USO tour to the Space Force space in Greenland
Speaker 1: at Tuley a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2: What time of year were you know.
Speaker 1: I mean it didn't matter, it was greatly.
Speaker 2: You'd have to kill me, it was.
Speaker 1: It was so well, it was winter because it was cold,
Speaker 1: and it was dark. It was dark the whole time
Speaker 1: we were there. And I mean two things that I
Speaker 1: walked away with the thing on my list. You're never
Speaker 1: allowed to have your own schedule when you go on
Speaker 1: these USO tours, nor should you. I guess you're giving
Speaker 1: your time. But I really wanted to see the Greenland Telescope,
Speaker 1: which is part of the event Horizon Telescope, and so
Speaker 1: I like DMD the folks who were working on it directly.
Speaker 1: I found out who they were, followed them on Instagram.
Speaker 1: They were gracious and excited that I was coming, and so, as.
Speaker 2: Carl Sagan said all the time, when you're in love,
Speaker 2: you want to tell the world. They wanted to show
Speaker 2: you their equipment, right, it was very cool.
Speaker 1: They wanted to show me the equipment, and they were
Speaker 1: from all over the world. I mean, these these these
Speaker 1: incredible scientists. But the second thing that I saw, I
Speaker 1: did you know, worked in government years ago. No longer
Speaker 1: have a clearance, so I couldn't see everything. But it
Speaker 1: seemed like one of the big purposes of Space Force,
Speaker 1: especially at that base, was to track satellites all over
Speaker 1: the world and make sure that they don't crash into.
Speaker 2: Each other, a huge problem.
Speaker 1: And I was like, this is crazy there. And of course,
Speaker 1: I mean when you think about it, exactly what you said,
Speaker 1: the fact that you can you know, you can listen
Speaker 1: to everything no matter where you're in the world. I mean,
Speaker 1: how do we think on my phone telling me which
Speaker 1: subway line to take and knowing where I am and
Speaker 1: whether I'm changing trains like all of that is because
Speaker 1: of all of this. You've also spent some time at
Speaker 1: a Space Force space Colorado, right last year?
Speaker 2: Yeah, went to Butler.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so is that the same. Are these big concerns.
Speaker 1: That is why space Force exists.
Speaker 2: It is the concerness of concerns, and so you hear
Speaker 2: it express different nouns. But Kissler, a guy named Kissler,
Speaker 2: did this analysis the Kissler effect, the Kissler syndrome, the
Speaker 2: Kissler catastrophe, where he pointed out, when you start running
Speaker 2: the spacecraft into each other, you'll create orbital debris on
Speaker 2: a global scale that you cannot clean up. This is
Speaker 2: trying to catch a bullet with a bullet, as the
Speaker 2: saying goes, and you just can't. I mean, it almost
Speaker 2: certainly cannot. And every year at science fairs people come
Speaker 2: up with the giant nets and but it's just a
Speaker 2: huge concern. And so were you around when people's Republic
Speaker 2: of China Army shot down one of their own satellites.
Speaker 1: This was literally my next question for you. I was
Speaker 1: around for it, and I remember it being shocking, at
Speaker 1: least in some of the astronomy blogs. That I read.
Speaker 1: And then so just this danger of can it pierce
Speaker 1: the space station? Will it affect other satellites? What was
Speaker 1: that about?
Speaker 2: Well, they were showing off, is my understanding. Now we
Speaker 2: could do this, We could shoot down satellites. We could
Speaker 2: shoot down your satellite. So you better have a treaty
Speaker 2: with us. You better not presume we're not a spacefaring
Speaker 2: nation with extraordinary technical capability. Okay. So in response to that,
Speaker 2: you may remember the US shot down its own satellite,
Speaker 2: this U CARS, which was an acronym upper atmospheric something
Speaker 2: something research system just take over like the word even
Speaker 2: the word NASA is a word now it's not an
Speaker 2: acronym for many people, National aeron otion, space and industriction.
Speaker 1: So the Chinese shot down a satellite kind of as
Speaker 1: a display of power, or what happened.
Speaker 2: Next along this line, then the US shot down its
Speaker 2: own satellite to show this is how you do it.
Speaker 2: You don't make a mess. You shoot it down, you know, carefully.
Speaker 2: And I just remember this that it was shot down
Speaker 2: from a missile on a ship at sea, a US
Speaker 2: ship at sea, and they couldn't shoot it down sort
Speaker 2: of same day because the ocean was too rough. They didn't.
Speaker 2: They didn't want the initial trajectory of the missile to
Speaker 2: be messed up by the motion of the ship. And
Speaker 2: I just remember thinking, Okay, the Cold War will be
Speaker 2: once the Hot War starts, so it'll be really good
Speaker 2: as long as the ocean has come. Like, this is
Speaker 2: serious business. When you start weaponizing outer space, things can
Speaker 2: potentially go really wrong.
Speaker 1: I mean, so then militarization is still it sounds like
Speaker 1: a major aim. You're basically describing war games in space
Speaker 1: right now.
Speaker 2: Well, sort, but what is your what's the name of
Speaker 2: the podcast?
Speaker 1: Here we go again.
Speaker 2: Yes, So there was an anti Ballistic Missile treaty right
Speaker 2: long about nineteen sixty eight, because people realize this is
Speaker 2: not winnable. Man, if we start throwing weapons this expression
Speaker 2: so are called mutually assured destruction MAD. You can't do this.
Speaker 2: If everybody's in on it, then we can take a meeting.
Speaker 2: If you pretend that it's a winnable situation, then you're
Speaker 2: just going to keep escalating. And this was something that
Speaker 2: Carl Sagan and the guys in the nineteen seventies and
Speaker 2: eighties talked about all the time. Okay, let's have a treaty.
Speaker 2: Ge wis Man. And then if we start blowing up
Speaker 2: or knocking apart satellites in space. I worked at a
Speaker 2: company that was involved in the KKV, the Kinetic killed vehicle.
Speaker 2: You just run a satellite into another satellite and have
Speaker 2: it shatter. Yeah, it's not winnable. Let's have a treaty.
Speaker 2: And yet it's come all the way back around. People
Speaker 2: are talking about warfare and space weapon putting weapons in
Speaker 2: space the ultimate high ground, and man, it would be
Speaker 2: much better if everybody got along. It's just it is
Speaker 2: not a winnable thing. And this thing in Ukraine is
Speaker 2: what I like to call the extended dance mix of
Speaker 2: World War Two. It's the same bunch of people fighting
Speaker 2: over the same land, and it's a land war in Europe,
Speaker 2: just like we had in my parents' day, and everybody
Speaker 2: got together and resolved that. But right now it's not
Speaker 2: clear that everybody's getting together to resolve it this time, so.
Speaker 1: Things are repeating themselves. The one is it fair to
Speaker 1: say the one big difference is the role of billionaires
Speaker 1: in the private space sector that didn't exist in the eighties.
Speaker 2: Yes, you're right, But with that said, you know it's
Speaker 2: a government investment in weapons that you know, the Space
Speaker 2: Force goes back and forth all the time about which
Speaker 2: rocket company to use and who to sign contracts with
Speaker 2: and all that stuff. But that aside Calah. The reason
Speaker 2: we love space exploration is it brings out the best
Speaker 2: in us. Yes, we solve problems that have never been
Speaker 2: solved before. But on the way, people realized the extraordinary
Speaker 2: nature of planet Earth, that we live on this extraordinary
Speaker 2: world that is but one world in this literally unimaginable
Speaker 2: vastness of creation. Nobody can really imagine how big the
Speaker 2: universe is, how big, how many galaxies there are, and
Speaker 2: how many planets there must be. And this leads us
Speaker 2: to the two deep questions, where did we come from?
Speaker 2: And are we alone in the universe? And I say
Speaker 2: all the time, if you meet somebody who says they've
Speaker 2: never wondered, that they are lying to your face.
Speaker 1: You know, obviously all of us have thought about the
Speaker 1: philosophical part the exploration, the part about whether you know
Speaker 1: how it is possible that we're here, and the idea
Speaker 1: that you can't wrap your head around the infinite nature
Speaker 1: of all of these galaxies.
Speaker 2: So there's three things that keep me in this game.
Speaker 2: First of all I want to explore. I claim that
Speaker 2: our ancestors who did not have the drive to explore
Speaker 2: are not our ancestors, but guys. If you had a
Speaker 2: tribe where the men and women did not want to
Speaker 2: go over the hill to see what's on the other side,
Speaker 2: they got out competed by the people who did want
Speaker 2: to go over the hill and see what's on the
Speaker 2: other side, the other valley, the other resources, and what
Speaker 2: have you. So I claim that's deep within us. Then
Speaker 2: the other thing is I want to find evidence of
Speaker 2: life on another world. I want that to happen while
Speaker 2: I'm alive. So the places to look are Mars, and
Speaker 2: this is I'm talking about evidence of life. So it'd
Speaker 2: probably be the equivalent of fossil bacteria locked in the
Speaker 2: mud rocks of an ancient river basin. On Mars, strangers
Speaker 2: still though near the equator of Mars. Maybe there's some
Speaker 2: really salty slush under the sand, and there are Martian microbes,
Speaker 2: Mars crobes still doing their thing, like alive things that
Speaker 2: we could find with spacecraft. I mean, it's extraordinary. Then
Speaker 2: the other place right now is Europa, the moon of Jupiter.
Speaker 2: There's twice as much ocean water as Earth has. If
Speaker 2: you have ocean water for four and a half billion years,
Speaker 2: is there something alive on Europos It's amazing a question.
Speaker 2: Then the other thing, the third thing is do not
Speaker 2: want to get hit with an asteroid. It's a real thing.
Speaker 2: It's not just science fiction. In twenty twenty nine, nobody's
Speaker 2: talking about it much yet, but oh we will be
Speaker 2: a office a name for an Egyptian god of chaos
Speaker 2: and anxiety. It's going to come not closer to the Moon,
Speaker 2: it's going to come closer than the geosynchronous satellites on Friday,
Speaker 2: the thirteenth of April twenty twenty nine. People are going
Speaker 2: to be talking about it. And so we want it
Speaker 2: planetary society. We want it to be a dress rehearsal
Speaker 2: for international cooperation on deflecting an asteroid or so called
Speaker 2: mitigating the effects of an asteroid. If you knew exactly
Speaker 2: or pretty much where it was going to land, you
Speaker 2: could get everybody out of the way. But if it's
Speaker 2: going to land in Paris, like that would be bad.
Speaker 2: Like you get everybody out of the way, but you
Speaker 2: still crushed a major international city.
Speaker 1: How far out would we know where it's going to
Speaker 1: land if it is going to land.
Speaker 2: Oh, this is the dark art, my friends. No, so
Speaker 2: thirty years would be really good. And right now I
Speaker 2: don't know how serious these people are, but right now
Speaker 2: there's an effort to cut NASA's funding overall by twenty
Speaker 2: five percent, half or more of the science budget so
Speaker 2: called Science Mission Directorate SMD within NASA. So that is
Speaker 2: not in anybody's best interest. That is shortsighted and not
Speaker 2: being able to find asteroids using the NEO Survey or
Speaker 2: neuarth Object Survey Mission and other ground based telescope coordinated systems,
Speaker 2: is you don't want to stop doing that?
Speaker 1: Well, that was sort of the big question I had
Speaker 1: for you, obviously as a Planetary Society member, and you
Speaker 1: should all join the advocacy that is around funding for
Speaker 1: NASA and funding for STEM and all things astronomy and
Speaker 1: exploration related. They were always impressive to me, even as
Speaker 1: a kid. I went to space camp when I was
Speaker 1: in like sixth grade, and I was that nerd, right,
Speaker 1: and you get this sense of like, oh, there are
Speaker 1: all of these different you know, when NASA was set up,
Speaker 1: it was purposely set up in different places around the
Speaker 1: country so that funding would be sustained.
Speaker 2: Right, it was done on purpose. Yeah, in NASA center
Speaker 2: spread all over the country. It is inherently inefficient. But
Speaker 2: that's not a bad thing in this case.
Speaker 1: For folks who don't know. That's because Congress ideally sets
Speaker 1: and decides and eliminates funding according to what they think
Speaker 1: their priority should be. And so distributing NASA facilities around
Speaker 1: the country sures that there are going to be jobs
Speaker 1: in particular communities. And there are four votes to fund
Speaker 1: this stuff, right.
Speaker 2: And there's almost not a single county in the United
Speaker 2: States that does not have a connection to NASA. Oh well, yeah,
Speaker 2: the one that doesn't have too many is Nebraska, but
Speaker 2: it has a few, and a big advocate for NASA's
Speaker 2: Don Bacon from Nebraska. He's a good guy.
Speaker 1: You just mentioned that people want to cut the NASA budget,
Speaker 1: cut the funding budget a what percentage of the larger
Speaker 1: federal budget? Is it? By the way, big pet peeve
Speaker 1: of mine? So I can't even imagine how big of
Speaker 1: a pet peeve this is of yours, This idea that like,
Speaker 1: why are we wasting money on space when we have
Speaker 1: all these challenges on Earth? Can you walk us through
Speaker 1: the reality of what that.
Speaker 2: Is that's ancient. That's an ancient concern. First of all,
Speaker 2: you can't stop exporing space. We rely on space for all,
Speaker 2: for this phone call or this podcast. We could not
Speaker 2: do without space assets. The weather you rely on, and
Speaker 2: military situational awareness is all about space. We hived off
Speaker 2: part of the Air Force into the Space Force because
Speaker 2: the space concerns became so significant, and so you can't
Speaker 2: not explore space. And then the other thing is everybody
Speaker 2: wants to know what's going on on Mars. And then
Speaker 2: this perception that every kid, everybody in the world has
Speaker 2: now that Earth is this planet that is like Mars,
Speaker 2: that's like Venus, that's like Saturn, only different and special
Speaker 2: and remarkable, and how did we all get here? And
Speaker 2: we've got to be stewards of it and all that
Speaker 2: that is a result of space exploration. And if we
Speaker 2: were to find evidence of life on another world or
Speaker 2: stranger still, something alive on another world, it would change
Speaker 2: the course of history. Everybody everywhere would feel different, diferently
Speaker 2: about being a living thing. Everybody would just feel differently
Speaker 2: about being alive. Not saying we'd all start driving on
Speaker 2: the left in or something, but it would change history,
Speaker 2: and we do it for an extraordinary small fraction of
Speaker 2: the federal budget. You know, it's it's barely zero point
Speaker 2: eight percent of the federal budget, and then the planetary
Speaker 2: division within NASA is nine percent of that.
Speaker 1: Well, that's min a skill.
Speaker 2: It's just very very small fraction of the of our
Speaker 2: intellect and treasure. And you ask people on the street
Speaker 2: how much how big is the NASA budget, They'll say
Speaker 2: ten percent.
Speaker 1: They're off by effect iated.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, because it is such an important part of
Speaker 2: what I like to call and Casey Dryer art policy
Speaker 2: guy who likes to call the American story, is such
Speaker 2: an important part of the American story. And everybody understand
Speaker 2: South Africa has a space program, Vietnam has a space
Speaker 2: for Mexico is a space for Australia has a space program.
Speaker 2: Because everybody realizes the value of exploring space to your
Speaker 2: overall national treasure.
Speaker 1: So that's us now, a sky full of satellites, hearts
Speaker 1: full of hope, and a space program in desperate need
Speaker 1: of more funding. What's next is our future mutually assured
Speaker 1: destruction or mutually assured cooperation. We'll be back to the
Speaker 1: future of the space race. Sorry too After this when
Speaker 1: we're talking about exploring Mars, whether it's to find hopefully
Speaker 1: life there or elsewhere, is that something that NASA ideally
Speaker 1: is investing in or is it some of these private companies.
Speaker 1: Cause I feel like there's so much conversation now about
Speaker 1: rare mens and resources we can harvest from these places.
Speaker 1: Are they the same conversation or the different conversation.
Speaker 2: Well, if you're asking me, and I got the impression
Speaker 2: you were, I was, I like to remind people there's
Speaker 2: a lot of platinum on Earth. When you say let's
Speaker 2: get an asteroid made of essentially stainless steel and bring
Speaker 2: it back somewhere near Earth where we could access it,
Speaker 2: that is just it's just a very very difficult and
Speaker 2: expensive proposition. More power to you, guys, But I'm not
Speaker 2: writ in a check. It's just a very very difficult problem.
Speaker 2: And what we advocate for and what I strongly believe
Speaker 2: in based on my life experience, is NASA does things
Speaker 2: that nobody else can do. There is no business case
Speaker 2: for looking for life on Mars unless you know how
Speaker 2: to say, oh, it's going to be great to sell
Speaker 2: theater tickets. Well maybe, but this expiation is done for
Speaker 2: exporation's sake to know more about outer space than to
Speaker 2: know more about ourselves. The more you travel, the more
Speaker 2: you know about your home. This is the old saying
Speaker 2: what's absolutely true about space exploration. Also, you know, people
Speaker 2: thought Mars had canals on it and there were Martians
Speaker 2: running around doing Martian stuff. It turns out it's not
Speaker 2: the case. People thought the Venusians were these great looking
Speaker 2: people living in a tropical paradise. It turns out to
Speaker 2: be a deadly hellish place, a hellscape on Venus. And
Speaker 2: that's where I like to argue that climate change on
Speaker 2: Earth was discovered on Venus when, especially James Hansen, doctor
Speaker 2: Jim Hanson at Goddard Institute for Space Studies, he was
Speaker 2: looking at Venus and realize what's going on in Venus
Speaker 2: was happening on Earth. And then all this research came
Speaker 2: together and the greenhouse effect, especially due to carbonoxide, was
Speaker 2: international news based on that research. So you know, when
Speaker 2: we talk about space exploration, it was space exploration that
Speaker 2: led to the discovery. In the modern era of climate change,
Speaker 2: people exploring other planets realize that we're changing the climate
Speaker 2: of this planet. And it does, I admit it does.
Speaker 2: Seem incredible. It does not seem possible that the humans
Speaker 2: presence on Earth could change the climate of a whole planet.
Speaker 2: But we have. And the example from Earth history we
Speaker 2: like to give you is cyano blue green algae, cyanobacteria,
Speaker 2: where these organisms stumbled on a way to take carbon
Speaker 2: dioxide out of the air, metabolize it and make oxygen,
Speaker 2: and it changed the course of planetary history. None of
Speaker 2: us would be here without the species or its set
Speaker 2: of species, and so this bacteria change the whole planet.
Speaker 2: So yes, when you have eight going on nine billion
Speaker 2: humans breathing and burning the atmosphere, you can change the
Speaker 2: climate of a whole planet. But the other side, as
Speaker 2: people who used to work in the White House would say,
Speaker 2: is just spiritually committed to the idea that climate change
Speaker 2: is not happening, that humans are not causing it. Just
Speaker 2: committed to the idea that it is our manifest destiny
Speaker 2: to dig up old swamps and burn them. I'm talking
Speaker 2: about fossil fuels, do.
Speaker 1: The I don't mean to be referring to them as
Speaker 1: billionaires as a pejorative, but the a lot of these
Speaker 1: big aerospace and space exploration, space tourism companies are run
Speaker 1: by individual billionaires. Is their involvement in Mars, in space
Speaker 1: exploration and space tourism, in private space flights, like can
Speaker 1: that interrupt things like climate research in certain places or
Speaker 1: can they work hand in hand? Is it ultimately a
Speaker 1: good thing that there's that much new stuff that we're asking?
Speaker 2: Is it a zero sum game?
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Basically I don't think so. Okay, they're all winners. I
Speaker 2: mean just that while the fraction of the US budget
Speaker 2: goes to space explorations quite small, the fraction of the
Speaker 2: billionaire's budget might be pretty large, but it's still a
Speaker 2: small relatively compared to the challenge of climate change is
Speaker 2: a relatively small investment everybody and space assets are going
Speaker 2: to be involved in addressing climate change. You know, there's
Speaker 2: Methane SAT, the satellite that's looking at methane from Earth orbit.
Speaker 1: Ye.
Speaker 2: Right now, there's PACE, this plankton satellite that can tell
Speaker 2: by the light reflected off the ocean what species of
Speaker 2: plankton are living in the ocean, and how they're getting
Speaker 2: moved around by ocean currents, and how ocean chemistry is
Speaker 2: being changed by the interaction of these species that plankton
Speaker 2: with the salinity in the water and the warmth of
Speaker 2: the water, and as they're all being studied from outer space,
Speaker 2: from outer space people, we're learning these extraordinary things. So
Speaker 2: climate change is a big issue with me, But I
Speaker 2: work professionally in space exploration because I've always had this
Speaker 2: wonderful passion for knowing our place in space.
Speaker 1: Is the solution to invest in escaping Earth. Did you
Speaker 1: hear all these people having that conversation? Is that okay?
Speaker 2: The answer for me is absolutely not. Or put another way,
Speaker 2: are you high like okay? The example to ask yourself is,
Speaker 2: do you know anybody that goes to live, not goes
Speaker 2: to explore, goes to live in Antarctica? No, it's too
Speaker 2: cold and there's not enough to eat for a large
Speaker 2: popular and nobody's going there to build schools and libraries
Speaker 2: and stuff. People go there to learn more about Earth's
Speaker 2: climate systems and ice and species that wander around there.
Speaker 2: But you're not going to go there to live. And
Speaker 2: if you want to run this experiment, go there to live,
Speaker 2: and you have to bring your own air because on
Speaker 2: Mars there's nothing to breathe. You will notice that immediately. Man,
Speaker 2: if you go to Mars and open the cabin door,
Speaker 2: you'll suffocate in a few seconds, and that would be undesirable.
Speaker 2: And this whole idea of being a two planet species
Speaker 2: for the sake of being a two point on a species.
Speaker 2: I am not on board with building an exploration base,
Speaker 2: a science base on Mars where people come and go. Okay,
Speaker 2: perhaps it is an extraordinarily difficult problem. And it's not
Speaker 2: only difficult technically and scientifically, it's very difficult financially, Like,
Speaker 2: how are you going to make money doing this? Is
Speaker 2: a pretty.
Speaker 1: It's a tough nut to crack. So basically you're saying no,
Speaker 1: this guy said.
Speaker 2: He wants to go die on Mars, but not on impact. Okay,
Speaker 2: I just don't think he's really thought through how difficult
Speaker 2: it is to be on Mars. There's no place like home,
Speaker 2: there's no place like Earth. Space exploration has shown us
Speaker 2: there is no place like Earth. We have to be
Speaker 2: stewards of this world. We are all crewmates on.
Speaker 1: Spaceship Earth, and it's worth saving.
Speaker 2: Well if if you want to stay alive, and a
Speaker 2: lot of people do. There's a few people I wouldn't mind,
Speaker 2: am I right? And so you probably have a few
Speaker 2: people in your world, So I might be one of
Speaker 2: them and all that, but Earth is extraordinary. There's no
Speaker 2: other place to live. Let's go.
Speaker 1: Thanks Bill, Thank you guys. Here we go again as
Speaker 1: a production of iHeart Podcasts and SNAFU Media in association
Speaker 1: with Kelly and Kelly. Our executive producers are me Kelpen
Speaker 1: Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Alyssa Martino, Andy Kim, Pat Kelly,
Speaker 1: Chris Kelly, and Dylan Fagan. Caitlin Fontana is our producer
Speaker 1: and writer. Dave Shumka is our producer and editor. Additional
Speaker 1: writing from Megan tan Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino.
Speaker 1: Tory Smith is our associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly,
Speaker 1: logo by Matt Gosson. Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline
Speaker 1: Johnson and Megan Halson. Special thanks to Glenn, Isaac Dunham,
Speaker 1: Adam Horne, Lane Klein and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but
Speaker 1: especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Etoor. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: See you next week.