David Grinspoon

I don't remember anything in those those sort of Disney films he did or the Collier's magazine, that kind of stuff about extraterrestrial life.

It was more just like humans are going to go to space and there'll be new places to live and new resources and new places to explore in there.

And he talked about the national security implications.

Of course, America has to dominate this space because we can put nuclear weapons up there and make sure that the world is peaceful and American.

It was kind of infused like that.

Nice.

Yeah.

So, of course, there is speculation about alien life going back and, you know, some of the other future literature of the past, but not not in this sort of Apollo propaganda stuff that we're talking about.

Yeah, it's pretty recent, really.

It wasn't until people started to wonder in the 50s because they saw this excess microwave radiation they couldn't explain, and they thought, well, could that be from a super hot surface?

Basically, with the advent of radio astronomy after World War II, that made that possible.

But it wasn't until the first...

mission to Venus, which was Mariner 2 in 1961, that it was demonstrated that Venus was hot and definitely unearth-like.

So throughout the whole time of really the 20th century up until the space age, there was a lot of speculation that Venus was probably pretty earth-like.

A lot of scientists thought that and could have life.

And it's completely covered with clouds.

And so they deduced that correctly.

They said, oh, it's covered with clouds.

And well, what are clouds made out of?

Water.