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And welcome back to George Nori with you doctor Jim Bell. With this gym at its closest ebb, when Mars is at its closest point, how long would it take to launch an astronaut crew to get to Mars just to get there.
Just to get there, generally three to six months, well, just to get there. Yeah, and then and that's using current rocket technology that could get low to be a smaller number in the future this technology improves, But then you have to wait for the planets to line up again.
So you either plant the flag and turn on a run home real fast and take another three or six months to get back, or if you're actually going to spend some quality time there, do some exploration, start a settlement, or if you have to try to recreate your own fuel to get back, living off the land and converting the atmosphere or ice and surface into rocket fuel, you got to wait, you know, another Earth year or year and a half sometimes more for the planets to line
up again for that next three to six month trip back to the Earth.
Would they have a lander similar to what we had on the Moon.
That they could. There's more gravity on Mars. It's three eighths instead of one sixth, and so it has to be it can't be that fragile. It has to be a little beef here. It also has to be able to survive dust storms. Dust Storms are not an issue on the Moon without an atmosphere, and so it's a little bit of a harsher environment. Sand and dust gets blown around all over the place on Mars. So you know, there's different concepts and ideas for what those landers might
look like. Many different companies and NASA are you know, putting forward ideas for that, but no final decisions have.
Been made in your opinion, Jim, do we go back to the Moon or go back to Mars? Or go to Mars first?
Well, right on the edge of going back to the Moon, I mean, you know, the Artemis two mission is supposed to launch this fall, followed by Artemis three, which is the first crew back to the Moon. Artemist two will be like you remember Apollo eight, looping around the Moon testing out the systems, getting into the lunar environment and coming back home don't land. And Artemis three intended to be the first landing on the Moon and then a series of missions afterwards to follow on. So that's just
a few years away. If things can stay on schedule, you know, budgets don't get slashed like we were talking about earlier. So we'll have to see. And I do believe that going to the Moon it will be great practice for going farther on into the Solar System permanently as a human speedies. I think we have it. We have it in our destiny to explore and to be a species that lives on other worlds. Partly because we're driven to do that. We've always been driven as explorers
as a species all across the globe. Partly because we know that we can rewrite the textbooks for our kids and teachers and understand the worlds around us and how the Earth fits into the planets around us, and where do we come from? Where are we going those kinds of things. And also it's because of national pride and American leadership, you know, we do those things. These are things that we can do together as a nation by pulling our resources, both our money resources and our neurons,
our brains to do difficult things like that. I think we're on the edge of going back to the Moon. Let's do that.
I'm all for space exploration, but are we wasting our time going back to the Moon.
I don't think so. I think we have a lot to learn. Like I said, it's been fifty years since we've been out there, and you know that the technology is totally different now, and where you know we're we're in a race, like you said, we're in a race for technological leadership on our planet and on other planets. So I don't think it's a waste. I think it's also it still is inspirational to people, to kids and their teachers, just like it was to us when we
were growing up. And it is a way that our nation can continue to lead the world and show people what America can do. So I don't think it's a waste at all. I think we have a lot to learn by going back, and we're going to use those lessons that we learn out there close home at the Moon, not too far away. In case something goes wrong, we can hop into a lifeboat and come back. That's not going to be the case when we go to Mars or past Androids or other planets in the Outer Solar System.
There won't be any lifeboats like that. So we've got to get good at to get good at living off the land and using this new technology in ways that can keep us keep us going.
One of the arguments a gem of space exploration has always been to leave planet Earth in case we have to to start a new civilization elsewhere. But is that really practical?
Well, I mean sure, it's technically it's true. Right, Technically, technically, if there are people living off of our planet and something catastrophic happens on our planet, like a unnuclear war, like an asteroid impact, like a major plague, you know that that wipes everybody. You know, there's all any number of things you've seen the science ficture movies to any number of things that could happen that could potentially wipe
out our species. There have been enormous mass extinctions as bees in the past, at least five major extinctions that wiped out ninety percent or more of all species on the planet. Probably large impacts, maybe volcanic explosions, that kind of thing. So yeah, technically it's an insurance policy. But
I don't think that's why we should do it. I think that's a byproduct of being explorers and going out there and pushing our bodies and our technology to the limit in order to learn new things, to discover things, to inspire our kids, to inspire our fellow citizens, and have our country lead the world in space.
Well, doctor Jim Bell, author of the Art of the Cosmos, Jim, where do you stand on the possibility of intelligent life out there in the universe somewhere?
Oh, my gosh, it's got to be one hundred percent. I mean it's got to be, right. I mean, you just look at the numbers. We've talked about this in the past, right, the numbers haven't changed. There's still there's still astronomical right, that's the word for it, right, that hundreds of billions of stars in our own galaxy, hundreds
of billions of galaxies. Now we know astronomers have been discovering over the past few decades that most stars, these sun like stars, have planets, mostly more than one, maybe up to ten. So you know, now we think there may be ten million Earth like planets in our galaxy alone,
maybe more. That's a wild guess. And so I think it's there there personally, and I can't, of course, I can't prove it right, But I believe that the numbers support hypothesis that there is other intelligent life out there. I think the big problem, George is Albert Einstein and his stupid speed of light. That's the big problem. The problem is we won't be able to communicate with each
other because we're so far away from each other. It doesn't seem to be any evidence evidence of intelligen of life and our own solar system besides ourselves here on planet Earth, and we don't have any evidence in the dozens hundreds of nearby stars that have been searched so far with radio telescopes and other means for intelligent life. Doesn't mean they're not there, we just don't have any
evidence for. But likely if there are other intelligent civilizations or beings out there, they're just very widely separated because space is so vast, and it's a little sad. Maybe it's a little sad to me that maybe we're so far apart from each other that we just can't communicate it ever know for certain that we're all out there together.
The second man to walk on the moon, Buzz alder And, is still with us. He's ninety five years old. God Love him there aren't many left.
No, that's true. I think there's only there's a handful of three or four maybe, yeah, yeah, But Buzzes and buzz is still very active and promoting missions to cycle between the Moon and Mars, get people out there. Another moonwalker, Jack Schmidt, Harrison Schmidt, who was a US senator as well. He's still very active working with some of these companies sending missions to the Moon, like the Intuitive Machines company that sent a mission up just yesterday which is on
its way. So yeah, they're they're they're getting their dwindling though, the Apollo moonwalkers and the Apollo generations dwindling, and so it's exciting to work with so many young people, so many early career people now who are just as turned on about space, space exploration and space leadership for America as as as we were when we were young.
When are we going to get those astronauts back then got stuck going to the International Space Station?
Yeah, yeah, you know, I don't know exactly why. I think there is a plan to get them back fairly soon. But you know, I don't know those two astronauts, but I know enough astronauts to know that probably that's really where they want to be, right They train and train and train to go into space. They want to be up there, and they're doing useful work while they're up there.
So I didn't I don't personally not feel bad for them, but at some point their mission does need to come to an end and they do need to come back home.
Not under any pressure to get back, but I think they.
Want to come home, probably probably.
Let's now with the Art of the Cosmos.
The part of the Cosmos was as my most recent book, and it was a lot of fun putting this together. I've taken a whole bunch of photography from robotic missions and human missions, astronauts in Earth orbits or on the Moon, and I've looked at these pictures as pieces of art.
Some of them, like the spectacular swirling clouds of Jupiter which are on the cover of the book, almost like a Van Goh painting, you know, just these natural patterns of such beauty, And some of the landscapes on Mars or the Moon that have this just absolute stark, stark bleakness to them, and yet a familiarity to us, like, you know, I may have gone on a hike in that place at one point, you know, and in the desert southwest or whatever, you know, and there's a there's
a great intersection between science and art, between space exploration and art. And photography is a visual art after all, and once in a while, those of us who who do space photography, very rarely we get to think like real photographers frame a picture, think about depth of field, think about contrasts and focus, you know, those kinds of things, and and we do get to create photographic art space and sometimes we don't think about it. It just happens naturally.
You know, beautiful pictures of the Earth rising from the moon, or you know the nebula and deep space, the so called pillars of creation that are just so incredibly visually spectacular. And so I tried to collect a few hundred of those with some stories behind them in that book, The Art of the Cosmos.
If you were asked to permanently go to Mars, would you go.
Permanently? You know? Maybe if I had just been diagnosed with a terminal disease or something, and you know, I know I don't have much time to go, I sure, probably why not? But I want to go. I'd love to go. George but I want to come back. I really want to come back.
How long do you think I'll stay there?
You know, I'd go for one of those trips that to three to six months to get there, spend a year, a year and a half three to six months to get back. I would do something like that. You know, when people get there, it does look it looks familiar and inviting and even warm with those reddish colors right
the red planet. But it is the harshest environment that humans will ever have been in its you know, it makes Antarctica look like a tropical wonderland, you know, and you have to bring your own oxygen, you have to bring water, you have to bring food, bring fertilizer, you need to bring your rocket fuel to get back. You know, it looks inviting, but it's going to make, you know, the settlement of the Wild West look easy in comparison,
So it's going to be hard. It's going to be hard for people who go there, especially people who do want to settle there. There will be tragedy, there will be loss of life, just as in any hard exploration endeavors. But I would love to visit because I've been studying and learning about trying to figure that place out through the eyes of robots for my entire career. I'd love to see those some of those places with my own
eyes and try to answer some of those questions. Probably we're getting it all wrong, who knows, But I do want to come back because Earth is my favorite planet. I've lived here most of my life. Most of my friends are from here.
Do you ever see the day that there'll be a baby born on Mars?
Yes, I do, and the Moon as well, although I wonder and I don't. I'm not a medical doctor, so I don't know the details, but I know people are thinking about childbirth in space and how important is gravity and earth gravity and the shielding from radiation that we get here on planet Earth from the ozone layer and our magnetic field. You know, these are all important things that enable life and conception and gestation on our planet
in the way that it happens. And so I don't know if the medical world right now knows if people can have children in space. I would love to find out, and you follow the research, but at some point I imagine the experiments are going to happen and we will find out.
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