Chuck. Yeah. Dr. Funky Spoon back in the house. One of our favorites always and David Grinspoon. In this episode we found out exactly where that we found life. We found it. Did we? I mean, did we record the same episode together? I mean, we didn't find it out in the universe. It's here. But we still found it. Join us again with one of the world's leading astrobiologists on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk. You're a place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here. You're a personal astrophysicist. Chuck Nice with me too. Chuck, how you doing? What's happening? Neil? All right. You were comedian also acting? Yes. I'm stealing money. That's all. I'm just stealing money. Neil, we don't even know. You make people laugh and they just hand you their money. It's just giving me money and I'm like, you don't even know. I'm just acting like a comedian. I'll take that Chuck.
Chuck, we got Cosmic Queries. This is a fan favorite. Cosmic Queries. Yeah. And oh my gosh. One of our favorite guests. Yes. To help us out here. Excited to have him back. We got Dr. Funky Spoon. Dr. Funky Spoon. David's Grinch Spoon, longtime friend and colleague. We kind of came up together through graduate school, but we were sort of different sides of the fence. I was sort of galaxies and cosmology. He was like planets and asteroids. Oh man. That's like the jets and the sharks right there.
Just to put it in context, we had telescopes that would reach out to the galaxies. We had telescopes that would see the planets, but then they started going to the planets. It's still astronomy. If you can go there, you see. This was part of the divide. You go there and bring back samples and stuff. You're just a lab technician as far. You had to observe first. You had to look through something and see it first. David Grinch Spoon, welcome back to Start Talk, dude.
Oh, thanks a lot. It's really great to see you guys. It's a pleasure, as always. And yeah, that divide between planetary and astrophysics. It's kind of funny. I mean, it is interesting how it evolved historically. And at times, it was kind of intense. When I was in grad school, in planetary science, the astronomy department across the street, the professors were like, oh, don't go over there. But now, that was before exoplanets. Now we need each other more than we ever knew.
Yeah, there's been a meeting of the melting of the mines and hearts and souls. Also, our preeminent journal, the astrophysical journal, the ordering, I don't know if it's still, is this why I haven't paid attention? The ordering of the articles in every released issue was in descending order of distance from Earth. So it's start out cosmic microwave background, large scale structure of the universe, galactic, and you keep doing it. And way at the bottom is observations of Saturn.
It was like clearly the prioritization of the universe is large in those pages. That's all. So David, I noticed you have a title that you didn't have last time. At first, you're an astrobiologist. We get that. But you're also senior scientist for astrobiology strategy at NASA. What is that? Yeah, so that's my new job. Since the last time I really had a good conversation with you guys, I started a new role. I've always worked with NASA and been supported by NASA for my research
and the missions that I've involved in my whole career. But just about a year ago, this week, I started a new job at NASA. I am now a G-man. I worked for the government. Oh, look at that. Yeah. And now see, you'll never tip me alive. Copper. That's right. I am now working at your nation's space agency, helping to run the astrobiology program.
And it's just like it says, I'm doing astrobiology strategy. So really trying to understand and figure out how we can expand astrobiology in new ways and plot the future. It's a really interesting role for me. It's fascinating. It's very different. I mean, I feel like my career up to this point was preparing me for this in a lot of ways. But it's fundamentally very different from any other job I've had. And it's been a year, but I feel like I'm still learning the ropes.
But do you not have power over missions, do you? We do that in our Decadal surveys. So do you help shape it after the priorities are set? Yeah. So I don't. Yeah. Absolutely. Like you say, the Decadal surveys, which are, you know, the big community input exercises to set the priorities for the, you know, on a Decadal time scale. So the public understands it's why you never see astrophoke publicly arguing about how money should be spent. We do that among ourselves like private.
Well, yeah, like any good marriage. So that sets like the major priorities, which we take as our foundational document, you know, those are in a way our marching orders. But within that, there's a lot of decisions to be made about how we prioritize different research areas and directions and, you know, what we put, what we emphasize and how we communicate about what we're doing, the Decadal kind of defines the shape that we're acting within. But then within that,
there's a lot of a lot of decisions to be made. And, you know, again, it's all about working with the community. We represent the astrobiology community. And so it's not like, oh, what ideas do I have today about what NASA should do? I'm just going to go do it. You know, of course, I hopefully am interrupting my own creativity and my own ideas. But it only works if we're really working a lot with that community and kind of moving. If you speak too far, somebody who couldn't go to DC
and kick your ass. Exactly. Exactly. You know, I'm a public servant. But, you know, it's interesting. It's a different kind of creativity. Before this, I was doing my own research. Now I'm putting a lot of time into facilitating other people's research and figuring out how to creatively get groups of people working together in new ways and helping, you know, create connections between people that are that think they're doing separate things, but trying to get them to see how working together,
the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. So it's a real new kind of, I feel like I'm tapping into a new sort of creativity for me. So we kind of need that and even expect it. But are you following some mission statement that's been established for your strategic plan? Yeah. So as you mentioned, there's the Decadal Survey, which is, you know, and there's a planetary science and astrobiology Decadal Survey, which is different from the astrophysics Decadal Survey,
although they play well together. And then beyond that, there's actually something called the Astrobiology Strategy, which is a 10-year document, which is much more detail about the research priorities and so forth. And part of what I'm doing now, a big part, is we're working on a new astrobiology strategy. So we're actually starting to canvas the community of astrobiology researchers and say, hey, what should our priorities be for the next decade? No, I saw that right now. Find life.
That's, you know, that's the big goal, but then, you know, but give us some detail. How do you want us to do that? We're trying to fill in the steps there. Here's the funny thing that you guys are always looking for life. Have you ever thought about creating it? Like maybe where the progenitors? Like, you know, when you look at like Prometheus, it's all about like, ah, you know, these aliens came, they left, you know, some microorganisms in
our water and that made us. Or you mean Prometheus, the movie? The movie, not actual people to aliens, just good to catch people up with your your sci-fi fluency. That's my sci-fi, yes. So, so my, is it ever us? Maybe we are the aliens that create and see the life elsewhere.
It's funny. You should ask because there are people working on, well, obviously there's there are people working on sort of origin of life experiments, not necessarily that they're literally trying to create organisms, organisms, but they're trying to recreate the chemical steps to help us understand how life started. And that's, you know, that's Astrobiology supports a lot of that kind of experimentation. There are people actually trying to work on synthetic life. Like,
could we create some kind of a life form? And that, you know, it's a really interesting idea. We've that's certainly something how that's a avenue towards learning a lot about life if we could do that. Just to be clear, when someone says this is made of synthetic leather, it means it's not leather. It just kind of looks and smells like leather. If you're going to say synthetic life, you're not making it out of some ingredients that life is not made of. You're actually making life.
Correct. So, so that that word synthetic can be can mean a few different things, but there are people. I think it's the wrong thing in person in terms of a person's first hearing of that. Yeah. Maybe you want to say artificial or, you know, laboratory created. And that's not, that's not a major effort of Astrobiology now, but it's certainly something that some people
are thinking about. And it is very related to this question of, you know, alien life. And and some people have predicted, you know, sort of provocatively, but maybe they're right, that the first alien life that we will discover or come to know will be something made in a laboratory. You know, and then you can say, well, is that really alien? It comes from Earth, but it's pretty alien. Yes. The impossible meat alien. Yeah, exactly. What do they call the turkey made out of?
Tofarky. Yes. How far are you? I'm Kai from Bangladesh and I support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil Digress Tyson. David, we had a guest recently who was a roboticist describing a collaboration with NASA about a the search for life in the subsurface of Encelonus. We know Encelonus has these striking plumes that we can see sort of in those side views when it's properly lit by the sun. You see these
sort of geysers coming out. So he's working with folks at NASA to make a worm, a robotic worm that will go down that hole and then look around for life with because it's frozen on the top and then you have sort of liquid water we presume below. So do you know about that and do they need your permission or do they need your blessing or do they need a fishing license?
Yeah, we put we certainly put some resources into these experimental and speculative engineering projects that could someday lead to a new way, a new kind of mission to search for life in a place like Encelonus. Not just a lander and the usual, right? That's not a current mission that's in our plan. We're definitely going to do this, but part of our strategy is to support
people with innovative concepts that could lead to future missions. And certainly Encelonus is one of the places that's very high on our list of places that we would like to visit and characterize for habitability and perhaps search for life. For the reasons that you mentioned, Neil, it seems like a place not only is there liquid water in the interior, but the hints we have about that ocean based on what we've seen in that plume suggests that the chemistry of that
interior ocean may be really conducive to life. It may have the right mix of chemicals to have sources of energy and the biogenic elements, you know, the right elements to make life. So we have some hints that not only is there an ocean on Encelonus, but it might have the good stuff. So it's definitely high on our list of places that we intend to explore. You know what I never asked you guys, and this for both of you, a very icy crust frozen over,
right? And then underneath a liquid ocean. So what is making it so warm underneath that we can have a liquid ocean, but clearly it's like not in some Goldilocks zone because the outside is a frozen crust. Yeah, well, you know, it's a big surprise of planetary exploration that so many of these moons of the outer solar system have these warm active interiors. We didn't expect that,
maybe we should have if we were smarter, you know, because the physics works out. But we thought they'd, but before we sent spacecraft to Jupiter and Saturn, we thought they'd just be the straighter dead ice balls. But it turns out that being near these giant planets, the way the moons interact with each other, flexes their interiors basically by tides. The interiors are getting squished. And that makes certainly a place like Europa keeps the interior warm and keeps, you know,
pumping heat from basically the gravitational influence of those giant planets. There's also any place with a rocky core, and all these moons have rocky cores have some sources of just natural heat from radioactivity in the rock. So it's some combination of natural radioactivity and the tidal history of these moons that have like warmed their interiors. So I remember in solidists, I'm not entirely moon fluent, but in solidists, if memory serves orbit Saturn, correct? That is
correct. Okay. Last I checked. Yeah. He was like, I'm just giving you that one, Neil, I don't have to say. Sorry, I thought you were just pausing for dramatic effect. When Neil the Grass Tyson says, and some of this orbit Saturn, correct? I'm going to think that that's rhetorical and just shut up. So I was going with that. Jupiter has no shortage of moons. It's got tidally heated moons. It's got moons with ice on it. Everybody's favorite Europa. Jupiter is only half the distance out there
compared with Saturn. So why would Saturn moons have any priority at all relative to Jupiter's moons? Cassini at Saturn, which was the orbiter that really brought those moons to us, turned up some really surprising things. Probably the biggest surprise that was that in solidists is so weird. And it's weird in enticing ways that it seems some people think it's the best candidate for finding extant life. Some people think it's even a better candidate than Europa. Now I don't want
to get into that fight. We're going to Europa with the clip remission, which is great because Europa is a very promising place to look. But what's amazing about in solidists is as you mentioned, it has these geysers. So it's literally like shooting its guts out into space. And there is stuff from that ocean landing on the surface. Some people think we can go to an solidist and just scoop up snow from the surface and look for organisms in the snow. It never has to go down into the liquids, right?
It's the ocean is so accessible because it's literally squirting out into space. So what's this I heard? You know some of the chemistry like hydrogen cyanide? Is that right? Is it an HCN or something? Yeah, yeah. Which sounds like, oh that's poison. But actually, it's a very, and you're thinking about an origin of life and what primitive life may need. It's a very juicy chemical because whenever you've got nitrogen bound up in a carbon molecule,
that's the basis of so much. That's the basis of amino acids and all this stuff. So hydrogen cyanide is actually a very promising sign if you're looking for a life somewhere. But just to be clear, it will kill you if you ingested it out. I'm talking about this formation of life just to be clear. Yes, yes. No, don't try this at home. But it gets and it gets away. There you go, Chuck. So it's hydrogen cyanide. I think that's the gas and gas chambers or some variant on that.
But you're saying if hydrogen HCN, the C and the N together, is what really that's what's fertile for organic chemistry. That's that's enticing. That's because we know, you know, one thing we've learned is that there's carbon molecules everywhere in the many places in the universe, which is encouraging for astrobiology. It's not hard to, you know, the universe likes to make carbon molecules, which is great. But you need certain things beyond that. Carbon bonded with nitrogen
is very key to all the biochemistry we know. So when you see that in a natural environment, you go, hey, that's encouraging. All right, so this is what's attracting people. All right, we're interested. This is a cosmic queries. That's right. And Chuck has collected them. So David, you may remember in our cosmic queries, we tell people you're going to be on. They're reminded of your expertise and they come in with their questions that are inspired by the curiosity that
your work drives. So let's see what you got, Chuck. Okay, we got it. Let's start off with Brad Lester. Brad Lester says hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Grinspoon and Mr. Nice didn't get the memo on the Lord part. Did you? They're Brad. Okay. Chuck, these are paying customers. That's right. That's right. Nice for them. By the way, thank you all for supporting us on Patreon. We certainly appreciate you and we appreciate you just even more than we appreciate your money. Just letting
you know that. Okay. And just to be clear, they call you Mr. Nice, they must, they must be new members because they don't know the history. That's true. That's being called so be nice to the new folks. I will be nice. That's right, because he's no too. So we got to super nice. So I've heard scientists speak about how unlikely it is for intelligent life to evolve into a humanoid form on other planets that being said, as any study been devoted to the likelihood of other exoplanets
that might contain trees or other plants or structures comparable to trees. If tree-like flora existing elsewhere in the universe is reasonably likely and if we assume sentient life could also evolve on these planets, it is it is it reasonable to conclude that some organisms would evolve to have limbs, hands, fingers or similar appendages to allow them to spread
to the tree-heavy environment. Maybe I'm mistaken, but isn't that the reason why primates evolved in the first place and thus, like humans contain two arms and two legs and fingers and it's to grab things. So, you know, damn, damn. See, that's not where I thought he was going with that. I thought he was doing it. I thought can we have sentient trees like they had in order to rings? That's such a good question. You should get this guy to be your next guest on this show.
No, I mean, it's like what he's asking about is I, I, it's something that we call convergent evolution. Like, you know, on the one hand, we know evolution is full of accident and contingency and, you know, like Stephen J. Gould used to say if you ran the tape again, you wouldn't get the same biosphere because there's so much randomness. Why would you expect anything
to be the same since evolution is so random? But, but the opposite of that is that there are certain things you can see on earth that evolve similarly in different environments multiple times because they make sense. They solve a problem and evolution is all about solving problems, right? And so, we do expect on other planets probably photosynthesis evolves like the ability to use sunlight because what is there all over the universe? There's stars in any environment with, you know,
that's a great source of energy. So, if you have photosynthesis, you're going to have some organism that spreads out and has something like leaves. So, it can capture that and then you're just going to have something like branches because that's sort of a natural, you know, so you can make these arguments. Yeah, there would be things that are like trees and similarly, you can say, well, there's not going to be a humanoid because that would be unlikely. Why would you expect aliens to
look just like us? But then you go through some of our characteristics. Like, a head makes sense to have one central processing system for the brain and two eyes make sense to have, you know, stereo vision. And yeah, like your questioner astutely said, something to grasp and swing from tree branches. So, you know, I would not expect humanoids like we're going to mistake them and say, oh, wow, are they from Earth? I think nothing's going to be that similar. But some characteristics
in common, there's rationale for that. And one of the fascinating things, if we ever, when we ever get to meet complex aliens, that's how we'll answer this question, you know, not by speculating, but by like finding out what they're like. And I say- And by the way, you don't have to actually, I mean, you can, you don't have to necessarily evolve hands and instead of limbs, you could just evolve tentacles. Right, right, right.
But, but David, when I think of convergence, I wouldn't be so specific as you've been. I would just say there's convergent, a convergent evolution that enable organisms to sense things at a distance for us at site. And there's other versions of site, right? So insects can see, but they don't have a retina eyeball situation, but they can see for sure, right? And then locomotion, you don't have
to talk about legs or arms, but can you move? Trees can't move, okay? Not at least, I mean, there wasn't a Wizard of Oz, I think, Chase Dorothy down the street, but I think- And they threw through their apples. Through their apples, that. So, yeah. So you have locomotion and in that need and that valuation of that talent, you have snakes
with no arms and no legs at all, yet they move along just fine. So when I think just come to it from the world of physics, I'm not, I don't have the urge to be so specific about what it is, so much as what it accomplishes. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, that's a fascinating question. You're right, it's all about the needs being met, because that's what evolution does. Right. And there are some cases on Earth, though, of very specific things like, like,
eyes evolve more than once. Yes. And you can say that's all on the same planet with the same condition. So who knows? I mean, I think we can speculate, but this is what I love about astrobiology and explorations, that that's how we'll find the answers is what we're going out there and seeing. Mm-hmm. I check. Give me some more. This is Tom Lendelius from Sweden. He says, greetings from Sweden, or did he say greetings from Sweden? Okay. Yes, Chuck, thank you for
everything. And right after that, he says, are Easty Bean or Biscuit or Easty Bean or Biscuit Board? That's what he said right after that. Anyway, he says, we already know that Neil's favorite alien movie is The Blah. But what is your favorite alien movie, Dr. Funky Spoon? And what do you think the first encounter actually bigger than microbes might look like when we encounter aliens? Let me just clarify. That's my favorite, it's not my favorite alien movie, it's my favorite alien.
Right. Just to be clear, because it has no bones, no skin, no mouth, eyes, teeth, hair, fingers, it's, I think it's the most creative alien ever put on the screen, because it looks nothing like any other like form on earth. And if you want to come visit from another planet, and you look more like humans than either humans or you look like anything else on earth, you're not being creative in Hollywood. Right. So, yeah. So I want to know too, David, what's your
favorite? Yeah. So, I mean, I have to give you two answers if that's okay, because in terms of favorite, I'm all school with a favorite movie. To me, it all goes back to 2001. And, and part of that is because as Neil says, you know, if you show the aliens, they're going to look cheesy, no matter what. And in 2001, they did the brilliant thing of implying them without really showing them
in this pretty mind-blowing way. By the way, I told, and you might have some other insight here, that Carl Sagan at the time, though young, advise the producers of that film to not show the aliens and leave it to your imagination. And that fact was preserved in his novel contact when the screen version, at least, you don't see the aliens at all. Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. I think, you know, rumor has it, or the story is that that Sagan and Kubrick didn't really get
along that well. And Carl didn't have that much input into that film. But his one substance of piece of advice that was followed was, don't show the aliens, because in some earlier drafts, they were going to try to. But it's always a brilliant storytelling ploy is to leave things to the imagination. When you think about jaws, you don't see the shark until how long into the movie. Right. Right. Yeah. And again, you're right, Neil, that's what they did in contact to brilliant
effect. The one depiction that's coming to mind of an alien organism in a movie that I think is pretty good is in arrival. You know, where they have the. Oh, the septipoids. Is that true? I just saw a few days ago. Awesome. Awesome. I like that. An odd number is good too. But, but you know, and they're kind of floating there in behind this frosted glass in their own atmosphere, and you can sort of see them. But to me, there's nothing about them that seems like fake or
or implausible. I'm like, yeah, that looks like an alien. So I give them high, I give them high points. I mark. Yeah, but you miss the ray guns and stuff like that, you know. Yeah. Well, so you said you had two movies. So the arrival, by the way, there's another movie, the arrival with Charlie Sheen in it playing an astrophysicist. Yes. So you're talking about the more recent one where they have the the ash yet the physicist and the linguist to decode Amy Adams.
Amy Adams. Yes. Yes. Yes. So that's the more recent one from a few years ago. So what's the other film you're the Charlie scene one, by the way, is underrated. Let me just say that Charlie scene one is pretty cool because it's about climate change. Oh, okay. I go back and check it out. Yeah. All right. Go ahead. No, the other one I already mentioned 2001. I said that's my circle. I'm a national one where that's, you know, I like the aliens because you don't see them.
Nice. This is Ivan or Ivan DeSouza who says, hello, doctors and lord greetings from Abu Dhabi United Arab Emirates. Long time fan and recent Patreon member. Well, thank you. My question is about Jupiter's moon Europa. I can't help but wonder what life may possibly find in that vast ocean that insulates its icy surface. Yes. I am ruling out in possibility because I really want to be there. What do you think we will find? And in what form please do visit the side of the world,
this side of the world would love to take y'all around. Okay. There you go. Very cool. I'm open standing invitations. If that existed more frequently in the world, imagine how much more at peace we would be because there's an invitation awaiting you, right? Not a wall preventing you. It's just a very, very kind forward thinking gesture. We're going to put a door in the wall. There's a door. Yeah. No, I love that. And I love the fact that these kinds of questions make it so obvious that
we're all we're all on the same side when we're thinking of what's out there, you know. So that's great. What's your best, what's the best thinking about Europa? Because that's, that gets everybody's imagination for sure. Europa was in 2010, the sequel to 2001. And Europa's shown up in several storytelling efforts. There's another one called the Europa Report, which is a film, it's a lower budget sci-fi film. I know about that because I'm in it.
Oh, get out. Interesting. I have a little bit short. Camio, and it was simple because they just clipped something from what I was on CNN. And the clip was, I can't wait to go ice fishing on Europa. Cut a hole in the ice, put it camera lens down there and see if anything swims up and licks it. I think that that was my entire quote. Licks the camera. Can you imagine a giant Europa tone? I'm like, well, well, well. Europa is one of those places that's just been in our imagination
for a long time. And actually, so I have a Camio too. In the, in episode six of the original cosmos with Carl Sagan, Travelers Tales, they show the scene in a JPL when Voyager 2 showed the first close-ups of Europa that had ever been seen by a spacecraft. Somehow, Carl convinced the,
you know, them to let a camera crew in the room while this was happening. And I'm actually an undergraduate intern in a skinny kid with a giant half row holding a clipboard in the very back of that scene on screen for like three frames. You're mom have a booster of that, you know, with a circle and an arrow. Of course, of course. Yeah, but so Europa, you know, and that was 1979, some of 1979, and that was the first, you know, Europa came to our attention as like a really weird world.
But that's clear. Cosmos was released in 1980. So it was filmed that moment to place in 1979. Yeah, and that, you know, we saw with Voyager a moon with no visible craters on the surface. So that tells you it's young. There's not, hasn't been sitting there getting hit. And these weird lines turn out, you know, process, which turn out to be cracks in a thin ice shell with an ocean of liquid water. And the more we've learned about that, it seems the ocean probably has probably
the right kinds of chemicals to support some kind of metabolism. And, you know, it's more and more encouraging to imagine some life form there. And what's really cool is that we're going back there. We have to interrupt you again, Chuck. He said a thin coat of ice, but let's get him to quantify that by thin, I mean, maybe, maybe, maybe between 10 and 100 kilometers. This is not, you know, dangerous ice to go ice skating on. You would, you would not fall through.
I have to be clear, I'm just trying to truth in advertising here. Sin ice out of David's mouth. This is a, this is an object, a world about the size of our moon. So if it's just got 10 kilometers of ice over a deep ocean, that's, it's might be, it's probably our solar systems, the largest ocean of liquid water, more water than on Earth. So it's, it's impressive in that way. As far as we know, life on Earth began in our oceans.
Absolutely. I mean, it must have begun in water and either oceans or a pond or, you know, we think maybe a hot spring at the bottom of the ocean, which actually that's really just think is probably your hot spring, you know, or like these, these vents, see for vents at the bottom of your own position. We think, fed by that tidal energy we were talking about earlier. So,
so we're sending a spacecraft back there. If all goes well, launching later this year, called Europa Clipper, which is going to orbit Jupiter and make lots of close passes of Europa to examine this question of habitability. And to look at things like, are there pockets of water in the ice shell itself, which would be one place you could have life if there are, because then you have chemicals coming in from the surface and chemicals coming up from the, from the ocean
below that are kind of mixing. So that's one place you could have in the ice shell. Yes, and NASA astrobiology strategist, why go back to Jupiter and just keep orbiting? Isn't it a high time we'd landed on Europa? What is the, what is the, the right? So there's a couple of things. We can only do what we can do. It's very difficult to, at one point we wanted to maybe orbit Europa rather than orbit Jupiter. Dude, we landed on Saturn's moon Titan. Come on now. Don't tell me you
can't land on Jupiter's moon Europa. But, but Huygens wasn't even, it was supposed to touch down and then die, right? And it last for 45 minutes on the surface. We don't want to do that on Europa. If eventually by the way we do want to send a lander to Europa, but with the budget that we had, it was decided that we, what we want to do first is characterize Europa much more carefully. For one thing, you want to know where to land, you want to know if it's safe and you
want to pick the right spot. You can't do that without surveying more than we've done. A hundred kilometers thick. You're not falling through. You're not falling through, but you don't want to land on the wrong spot and be like, oh, if only we had been over there, that's where the interesting stuff is. I see a lot of people don't know because, you know, the Apollo program was,
was so visible. There was an entire lunar, a, a, Ranger, was it the Ranger series that photographed the entire surface of the moon to enable people to study it and figure out where the best land sites would be. That was all the homework we did before the famous words were spoken. Yeah. And the other thing that's interesting is you might say, well, so why aren't we just
going to orbit Europa rather than orbit Jupiter and make lots of passes by Europa? Because and there, there have been Europa Orbiter studied, but the problem is, Jupiter's radiation field is so intense that if you're at the distance of, if you're at Europa's distance from Jupiter, that's pretty close in to Jupiter, you would get fried and I don't just mean you. I mean, our electronics don't survive very long with intense radiation. So what you do is you orbit
Jupiter. You spend time farther out when you're doing things like sending the images back to Earth and doing other things. And then you make these quick, close passes by Europa where you dash through
the radiation and then you retreat to safety. And if you do that enough time, you can build up these really detailed maps of all the different qualities we want to study of Europa, the images, the spectra, the gravity data, the radar data that's going to tell us of what's underneath the ice, the radio data is going to tell us if that is ocean assaulty by looking at the conductivity. But we do it quickly on these close passes and then you retreat. You sure you can.
Just wrap the vessel in one of those blankets that my dentist wears and just land. Well believe it or not, we're doing that with this thing even with what I said, the radiation hardened. The biggest danger is radiation. We have all these radiation hardened components and it's in a vault. It's in something that's literally called the vault, which is this radiation hardened container where all the electronics are. Even with that, you still get way too
much of a dose. So this reminds me of the monster movies from Japan in the 1950s and 60s. I think many of them, if not all of them, they got that way because of radiation. Of course, let's not soon forget that Japan is the only country to ever have nuclear weapons used against them. So the idea that radiation would create some next world order with these giant monsters. So that is cinematic evidence that Godzilla is in Europa.
There you go. Well, it's funny though because you know, so you think of radiation is just going to like destroy everything. So there's going to be no life on Europa. But of course, underneath the ice shell, the ocean is shielded from that radiation. And not only that, the radiation is interacting with the surface of the ice in ways that can actually make Europa more habitable.
Because when that radiation hits the, you know, the H2O ice, it knocks off hydrogens and leaves behind some oxygen and oxidized compounds in that ice, which then can make their way over time into the ocean. And so that could be a source of energy in the ocean that's coming indirectly from that radiation. So just like Godzilla, honor, those heroines may be fueled by radiation in some indirect way. Wow. Chuck, only a few more minutes here. Let's see if we can tighten up these answers.
This is Mack Lamkin who says question. If you, Neil Chuck, David, could have one definitive understanding of anything from life on another planet. What would you like to understand most? Look at that. I only get one. We only get one. Okay. I want to know how they encode information. I want to know how they create a global technological civilization that survives long term. It's the rise itself. That assumes they're intelligent. The question
didn't require that. Right, right. Right. Right. Right. I think between Neil and I, like, kind of covered the gamut in there. Well, no, you guys miss what I want to know. Do you have weapons? That's what I want to know. And are they better than guns? Because they're better than guns than you. We're not contacting you. This is Patrick. Waglinski. And Patrick Waglinski says, Hello, Dr. Grinspoon, Dr. Tyson Lorde, nice. This is Patrick from Salt Lake City, Utah.
What is your and your colleagues algorithm for characterizing something that's being alive? I'd imagine that if we found life far away from our planet that evolved in a vastly different environment, it could be hard to directly compare it to life on earth and therefore make it difficult to say whether indeed it's life or not. Yeah, David, what's the biologist current stand on the definition of life? The definition of life has evolved. Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
And, and you know, this could be a, this could be a long answer, but we're keeping it short. Because people still argue about this. And it's another one of these things that will be much more sophisticated about when we find other life. But, you know, in brief, something that reproduces itself and is evolving by something like Darwinian evolution. Okay. Except if you find a life form that is perfectly suited for its environment, it would never have to evolve. And they would never
discover evolution because they were just always the same. That doesn't sound like much fun, though, Neil. All right. Chuck, give me another quick. This is David Geiger. David Geiger says, greetings Dr. Tyson, Dr. Funky Spoon, Lord Nice, David Geiger here from Crescent, Iowa, has anyone updated the estimate of the number of active extraterrestrial civilizations postulated by the drink equation given the enormous amount of data that is available now.
I love it. Just a quick thing in a book I co-published a few years ago with two fellow professors with Kotodak Kors at Princeton. It's called Welcome to the Universe. We actually give the latest estimate there of the number of technologically capable civilizations in the galaxy. But that was as of maybe eight years ago. So David, what would you say is the latest number if you
give the galaxy several hundred billion stars? So would you give me? Yeah, I mean, my first answer to the question is people are updating it all the time because it requires a lot of assumptions of parameters that we don't know. We fundamentally don't know the answer to. And the drink equation is really meant as a medium for a discussion of how the different factors would influence the answer,
not as a way to calculate a definitive answer. And as we... So just to remind people of the drink equation, you start with a number of stars and you just hack away at it with fractions. What fraction of the stars are planets? What fraction of those stars with planets have life? What fraction of those that have life have intelligent life? What fraction of those have life that have intelligent life have technology, this sort of thing. And by the time you hack away with these
fractions, there's not much. But if you start with a big enough number, there should be a few left. Come on now. It's got to be at least one. So give me your number here. Well, we know there's one. Unless you consider, you know, you could debate whether it's an intelligent civilization. We were seeing the intelligent status. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. But, you know, there's so many. I hate to
just come up with a number. I'd love to just like talk about the possibilities. If you ask me to come up with my own personal number, not wearing my NASA hat, but just my Dr. Funke Spoon, David Grinspoon hat, I would say I would say a thousand civilizations in the galaxy. But... That was a huge error bar that ranges from zero to a million. So what fraction of those civilizations would you suggest might be considerably more advanced
than we are? Most of them. Okay. Okay. There it is. And how many of them would still be around? Because there's a possibility that many of them have come and gone. Yeah. No, that's an estimate for the current number. If you want to talk about all the ones that have ever been, then it's of course going to be a larger number. Although I tend to think... And this is again, we're trying to
keep our answer short. I tend to think that over a certain threshold of success that they last really, the longevity gets huge because you pass this sort of unstable immature phase that arguably we're at. And if you make it to the point where you've learned how to be sustainable, then you know enough to not get wiped out. So the longevity, you know, they stick around. If you get out of your teenage years... Yes. You got a damn good chance of making
your brain set in. If you make it to adulthood, you're probably going to be okay. Yeah. Well, we're not quite there yet, unfortunately. So you've got time for one last question. Oh. It means this end. Okay. Alrighty. This is Stary Eid Mama. It says, greetings, doctors, Grinspoon, Tyson, Lorde Nies. If mathematics is the universal language, what would it look like to be able to convey a message and communicate with another intelligent
life form? Can't wait to watch you live here in Columbus, Ohio. This fall, Dr. Tyson, I'm a grateful fan, Maria Gale. She already bought tickets, bro. That's amazing. Yeah. I come in through Columbus, Ohio. Yeah. I generally don't give my speaking schedule publicly. You got to go find it. Well, she did. You didn't. She did. She did. Give her free. Give her free. Give her free. Free the picture on pass. Exactly.
We can get you some pay. We can get you some Patreon passes. Maria Gale. All right. So go ahead, Dr. Funky Spoon. Yeah. Well, Stary Eid Mama, if mathematics is not a universal language, then I feel like we have a much, much harder task in trying to establish any understanding with other
creatures out there with whom all we share in common is the same universe of origin. So it seems to me, and this is an interesting philosophical question that mathematics kind of has to be a universal language because it seems sort of built into the universe, not something we've created, so much as something we've discovered. If that's correct, then presumably other intelligences could have should have discovered the same mathematics. And that creates a basis. Even you can think of
two-dimensional, we have these ways of making two-dimensional messages. Just send a circle, a perfect circle. Then you at least know this is that's another mind. Nothing made that randomly. And then once you've established, we're a mind, you're a mind, we're trying to communicate. Then you can start to get more sophisticated. So to me, mathematics is the thing that gives us hope of being able to establish that connection with some other. If circles are everywhere with large
planets and things, I would send a triangle. There are no natural triangles out there. Yeah. Well, no, right. A circle is ubiquitous, but something that is encoding a digital message that makes a circle. That's like, oh, God, oh, God. You know the first idea how to communicate with aliens? You know what that was? You surely know this, David. Was it like making giant triangles of fire in the Siberian forest or something? Exactly. No, so what you do is you create a right triangle
as big as you can on Earth. So it's got a right angle and then the other two angles. Okay. Now, do you remember your Pythagorean theorem, Chuck? I'm at 180 degrees. Well, those are the sum of the three and 45 and 90. A, B and C. These are the three same numbers. I remember how they were like. Right. Yes. There's A squared plus B squared equals B squared. See the hypotenuse. Okay. Okay. So now this is what's so brilliant. Okay. You make this triangle as big as you can.
And it's got to be, you got to be able to ignite it. I mean, not blow it up, but light it with fire. So you can see it at night on the, on the side of the Earth that's not lit. Right. So the aliens could then see it. So that's first you get a right triangle. Okay. Then you fill out the sides of the triangles with squares. Okay. So one side of a triangle is the side of a square. So you, so you create squares, three squares off the side of that side of the triangle.
Why would you do that? Because the area of one of the squares plus the area of the other squares equals the area of the third square. How do I know that? That's the Pythagorean theorem. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. What's the area of a square? Then the one dimension times the other dimension. So it links like trigonometry and geometry. And you get to, and aliens say, oh, there's intelligence down there.
Right. The aliens say there was intelligence down there. They're like, well, clearly they were smart enough to figure out our Galupian theorem. However, they were dumb enough to burn down their whole damn planet trying to show it to us. Now wouldn't it be cool if like the first time we get a direct imaging picture of an exoplanet with our super duper space telescope? That's what we see. That'd be amazing. The Galupians would be... Galupian theorem. That's a good one, Chuck. We got to keep that.
So David, we got to call it quits here. Remind us of the book that you wrote about Pluto a few years back. What's that title? Yeah. Yeah. Chasing new horizons with Alan Stern. Oh, both of you. Yeah. So we're together on that. Excellent. And the subtitle was... Oh, gosh. You want to remember the subtitle? It was... No. Chasing new horizons inside the epic first mission to Pluto. Okay. That's the only mission to Pluto. Just trying to number them before their number. No, far.
And we find you on... You also like your musician. Like Dr. Funky Spoon is your that's your moniker. You musical moniker. Yeah, you can find me on YouTube and, you know, the usual channels. And I think in our archives, we have you playing the guitar. That's right. We did... We did the astrobiology... Astrolysis. The Chuck and I wrote together. Yeah, that's in there. Oh, it's in our archives. Dig that one up. All good. All right, Chuck. Good to have you, man.
Always a pleasure. All right. Neil the Grass Tyson. Yet another installment of Cosmic Queries. This one with the one and only Dr. Funky Spoon will see you next time. As always, keep looking up.