Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Chuck, we're going back to Venus. Haven't been there in like 50 years.
You know what? I haven't been at all and don't ever want to go.
Coming up, what's on the docket for NASA and the search for life in the solar system with the one and only Dr. Funky Spoon on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
Chapter 2: What are the key objectives of NASA's return to Venus?
StarTalk begins right now. This is Star Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And right to my right, Chuck Nice. What's up, Neil? All right. Yeah, man. So, one of my favorite subjects today is going to be astrobiology. Ooh. But not only that, we're going to take some extra twists on it because we're bringing in the one, the only, drumroll please. Brrrr. Dr. Funky Spoon!
Dr. Funky Spoon! Oh, David Grinspoon. David Grinspoon, welcome back to StarTalk. This is your, like, 20th time on StarTalk?
Something like that. Hey, yeah, it's great to see you guys, as always. Great to be here.
Yeah, yeah. Let me get your resume updated here. A professor at Georgetown University. You're based in Washington, D.C. area. You're on the board of the Scientific Society for Astrobiology. That's a new one for me. Advisory Board of the SETI Institute. They can't do much better than you on that one. And on the science team of NASA's upcoming Da Vinci Mission to Venus.
Now you wrote a book on Venus, but was it the book on Venus?
Well, I like to think it was.
That was a few years back. What was the title of that book?
Venus Revealed.
Yeah. Okay. Sounds very sexy.
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Chapter 3: How has our understanding of Venus evolved over the years?
Yeah, yeah, well, I think it's Justifying Space, and then the subtitle is, you know, A History of Space Futures. Okay. But it's a fun lens to look at the history and the present of space exploration, because it's not quite just asking, what happened? It's what were people thinking? What was the motivating vision? What future did they think they were creating?
So, you know, you can go all the way back to H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and those kinds of images and then up to, you know, Wernher von Braun and, you know, Robert Goddard and, you know, sort of start of rocketry and Apollo and, you know, all these, like,
inspiring visionaries like Carl Sagan, you know, what kind of future were they helping people imagine was going to come to pass through space exploration. And then you can take it right up to the present. And Carl Sagan, who you knew very well. Yeah, big influence. Right, right.
So when you were a kid, wait, we buried the lead. How did you know Carl Sagan?
Oh man, I grew up with, he and my dad were best friends, actually. Sagan and my dad, they were both Harvard professors. Oh my God, get out. And before Sagan went to Cornell, because he was denied tenure at Harvard. Take that, Harvard.
You effed up, Harvard. Everybody's been saying that ever since.
Yeah, so he was kind of in the household when I was six years old. He was Uncle Carl and kind of just around as I was growing up, which was pretty interesting in a lot of levels. For one thing, he wasn't famous when I first met him, when we first knew him. And so seeing that whole phenomenon happen to somebody that you knew well was pretty interesting to me.
That could have been interpreted another way. He wasn't famous until he knew me.
No, I was not implying a causal relationship there.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do scientists face in studying Venus's atmosphere?
Star Trek would be on. And because it was not like on regular TV, it came on every day. And then I found my- Those are called reruns. Yes. Okay. And so I watched it every single day. And I was like, oh, wow. I guess I reached the end because they're coming on over again. Oh, you saw reruns. Okay. Because it was only- It was repeating. Yeah.
I mean, I don't know how many episodes there were because there weren't a lot. Three seasons. Three seasons. Three seasons? Is that all? That's all. Well, they- It was canceled after three seasons. Right, so in a year, you could see everything. In less than a year, you could see every single episode.
And in retrospect, canceling Star Trek is like not giving tenure to Carl Sagan. Yeah, exactly. You did what? You did what?
Yeah. Anyway, so here, let me not bore you with the details. What it did for me was they would say things like plasma conduit, light speed, phaser. So vocabulary descended upon you. The vocabulary, I was like, what the, I honestly didn't, I didn't want, I wanted to understand what they were saying. I didn't, I wanted to be like a crew member on the, I didn't want to just sit there and watch.
I wanted to understand. Mm-hmm. So I started looking all this crap up. And honestly, that's when I first got like excited about science and about space travel and the whole deal, all from this stupid TV show.
So Chuck, then can you explain to me like how dilithium crystals work?
But I can't explain to you, but I can tell you this. They'll never hold up. What?
They'll never hold up.
The dilithium crystals will dissolve. So, yeah, the dilithium crystals was a great, like, I also love the fact that they put all that kind of little stuff in there, which is absolute nonsense. But they somehow married it to some form of science to make it work. This is the creativity on the frontier.
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Chapter 5: What insights do we have about potential life in the clouds of Venus?
Unobtainium is there. I'm sure vibranium is on there. Vibranium is definitely there.
It's a very cool list. Oh, I got to look that up. How did you guys feel about the portrayal of aliens? In Star Trek? The astrobiology of this, yeah.
there's obviously a range and Star Trek, I mean, in a lot of ways, Star Trek holds up really well. It was very sophisticated, high quality entertainment for some of the reasons, you know, Chuck just mentioned. And, and it's amazing how much it's still referred to even, you know, amongst professional astrobiologists, we like get into conversations.
Well, could you have something like a class M planet, you know, and, and, but, you know, then obviously they're devices, which are just devices, which have no correlation to any science.
And I have to interject, interject there, they classified planets better than we ever did even today. They classified them by whether they could sustain life, by whether they were rocky, gaseous. To us, a gaseous, a rocky, or one that sustains life, they're all just planets. So if you just say I discovered a planet, you have to play 20 questions to know what kind of planet was discovered. Right.
So this was my sympathy for the Pluto folk out there because to remove it from the ranks of planets when what should have happened is that we should have nuanced the word planet with many more adjectives, descriptive adjectives. Right. Gas planet, rocky planet, dwarf planet. You just go down the list.
Right. You know, we're still in the infancy of our understanding of planets. And, you know, they're from the 23rd century, so it makes sense they would know more. But, you know, I mean, at the time of Star Trek, of course, we hadn't even discovered any exoplanets. And so we had no real diversity to work with. Now we at least are starting to understand planets.
It would be another 30 years before we would discover our first exoplanet. Wow.
So we're starting to understand the diversity of planets, but we're still pretty naive.
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Chapter 6: How does the search for extraterrestrial life influence space exploration?
But, you know, as far as aliens, the problem with Star Trek aliens is they're, you know, generally humans with prostheses. Right. And that makes sense for the economics of producing a TV show, but they don't, generally look like what we would picture aliens to look like.
Of course, we have no idea what aliens look like, but we imagine probably they don't look just like humans because of the randomness of evolution.
This is Ken the Nerd Neck Zabera from Michigan, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk Radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
So I have a book behind me, which is called Visions of Spaceflight, which is a modern book, but goes back 40, 50, even 60 years to show how people were dreaming this up. Is any of that infused in your class? Just where we got it all wrong?
Yeah. No, a lot of that is in there. And, you know, there's so much fun material to work with. There's like, you know, those famous Collier's articles, Collier's magazine that Von Braun did with Walt Disney and Chesley Bonestell. You know, there's so much.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of recent findings from asteroid Bennu?
Remind us who all these people are. So we're going to Von Braun. Give us a three sentence bio.
I just mixed two different things up. So Wernher von Braun, of course, was the former Nazi rocket scientist who invented basically the V2 in World War II and then came over with a bunch of other German scientists and was very instrumental in designing the Saturn V and getting us to the moon, the Apollo program.
Well, he said to you, he's just, they came over. No, we grabbed them.
Yeah. I didn't know how much we should go into Operation Paperclip.
Yes, that's what that was. Yes, because we didn't want them going to the Russians afterwards.
Right.
The Russians and Americans divided Germany.
Right.
Right, right. Okay. So we bring them. I'm intrigued that we bring them and put them in Huntsville, Alabama, which is like. Makes sense.
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Chapter 8: How do cultural perceptions shape our understanding of space?
Stop. Alabama is the place, if you gotta relocate some Nazis, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't do a bad thing by putting them in Alabama. Don't put them in Detroit. You damn sure better not put them in Chicago. What is this?
So many Schwarzers!
The space program would have never happened. So anyhow, so he goes to Alabama, and that's Huntsville, Alabama, where he births our presence in space. Because you didn't say this, but I have to add, the V2 rocket was the first rocket to leave our atmosphere. And everybody knew that if there was any future in space, it's going to be through the technologies that enabled that rocket.
Okay, so you got more on Von Braun?
Well, he was also, you know, a proselytizer for space and a major popularizer. And so he got together with Walt Disney, and they did these kind of propaganda films, but all about the great future of man in space. Of course, it was man in space. Mm-hmm.
then it wasn't humans and then they also did this series of articles with um chester lee bonestell who was almost like the original space artist or the guy that you know did the first very scientifically accurate and careful space art and they and he and von braun uh teamed up for the series of articles in collier's magazine i guess in the late 40s or early 50s early 50s yeah
In the 50s, thank you. They're really fun to look at because it's all, you know, our future in space. And, you know, very imaginative and very evocative. And I think it really did help, you know, along with other efforts to kind of prepare the populace for thinking about space as this aperture to this wonderful future.
And you know where the first of those meetings were? No. At the Hayden Planetarium.
Get out.
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