NASA Sends Nudes | Mike Massimino On Adventures in Space - podcast episode cover

NASA Sends Nudes | Mike Massimino On Adventures in Space

Jan 22, 202417 min
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Episode description

Here's a collection of the best stories from out of this world, like why NASA leaves space junk on Mars and sends nudes to aliens. And Former NASA Astronaut Mike Massimino shares his challenging journey to becoming a NASA astronaut and the lessons that led to his book “Moonshot: A NASA Astronaut’s Guide to Achieving the Impossible” and his thoughts on the existence of intelligent life in the galaxy.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

You're listening to Comedy Central.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 3

For decades, humans have been trying to not only find other planets for us to destroy, but also intelligent life for us to colonize.

Speaker 1

And we've tried everything. You know.

Speaker 3

We sent out deep space probes, we sent out radio waves in the fifties, we sent like a bunch of dogs and monkeys for some reason. But now, after decades of no luck, NASA has decided to take things up a notch.

Speaker 4

NASA scientists planned to send pictures of naked humans into space, hoping to catch the attention of aliens. Nudes will come with an invitation to respond. Pictures aren't graphic, just a drawing of a naked man and a woman next to a picture of DNA. NASA revealed this as part of a project called Beacon in the Galaxy to send a message to any alien civilizations.

Speaker 3

Okay, first things first, they've got to hire more women over at NASA, because only dudes would think the best way to introduce yourself is with unsolicited nudes.

Speaker 1

Hey, aliens, you up there? What are we doing?

Speaker 3

Those aliens are going to be really upset that they turned on their air drop for everyone in the galaxy. But also, but also, but also, if you are going to send nudes, why would you send these nudes? Let me tell you something that if I was an alien, no way in hell I'm coming to this planet. Like if someone sent me these nudes and they said, hey, I'd be like, I am so far from up. I'm in a coma.

Speaker 1

I will never be up again. I mean, look at this thing, because think you're sex thing with an atari. What is that? Huh? The woman doesn't even have a nose. Look at that shit. Think about when we say either this planet has.

Speaker 3

Zero technology, because this is how they draw themselves. Oh, this is how they actually look. Either way, I'm not coming. I'm not coming. That's a terrible thing to say.

Speaker 1

Like maybe if I was like a thirteen year old alien, I could make that work. Yeah, you know what I mean.

Speaker 3

But how are these the news that we're sending to aliens. If we want aliens to get interested, don't send them an etcher sketch drawing, send them coupons for only fans.

Speaker 1

Come on, man, get them in the game.

Speaker 3

And you know, honestly, even if the aliens are interested, I think we've got to be careful. This is sending the wrong idea about us into the galaxy. Just imagine for a second the very first thing we send to aliens is naked photos.

Speaker 1

What are we only trying.

Speaker 3

To make contact with the horniest aliens in the universe? Yeah, no, wonder every time they abduct someone, they probe their butts.

Speaker 1

We're sending out the wrong vibe. You understand how scary this is. You know what's gonna happen here, right?

Speaker 3

The aliens are gonna get here and they're just gonna expect to smash immediately.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and then they're gonna be disappointed. Yeah.

Speaker 3

Imagine if someone you've never even met before texted you nudes and then you go there and they're like, cool, now that you hear, I wanted to introduce you to Joe Biden. That is the worst catfishing ever. They'll blow up our planets just for that. Don't come your horny horny and be like, take us to your laid up we're here to smash.

Speaker 1

Now we're in trouble.

Speaker 5

Yeah.

Speaker 3

The only way that would work out is if the aliens come and Trump is President's Yeah, no, no no, because if there's one thing I'll tell you about Trump, he'd.

Speaker 1

Shit out of those aliens.

Speaker 3

It'd be like, I don't know what they have down there, but I'm grabbing it.

Speaker 1

I'm grabbing it. Cave your aliens.

Speaker 6

We should actually hope, we actually should hope that this only reaches the whole horny aliens, because you realize how.

Speaker 1

Offensive this is gonna be.

Speaker 3

If it just ends up in front of a normal alien, they are going to be so pissed off.

Speaker 7

Sheila, those are pergits left pornography on the load. Yes, I'm sure it's not my pornographe you know I wouldn't be yanking my floor flax to a drawing of two hells monkeys.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I mean one doesn't even have a.

Speaker 7

Know, Sheilah. Come on, you know what I'm into, and it's not desk crap. Plus, I don't need pornography.

Speaker 1

I only need you. You know, I love your baby. I love you, Sheilah.

Speaker 3

For decades now, humans have been obsessed with trying to get to Mars.

Speaker 1

Why, well, we just want to see what it's like.

Speaker 3

You know, it's not like there's anything wrong with Earth. We just want to see what's going on out there, you know. Yeah, it's the same way your dad is currently looking for apartments the.

Speaker 1

Marriage is fine. He just he just needs a place to hang. You know. The important thing is that it's not your fault. It's not your fault anyway.

Speaker 3

The point is humans are desperate to find out everything we can about Mars.

Speaker 1

You know, did it used to have water? Can it support life? Can it be gentrified?

Speaker 3

And now, thanks to NASA, we've discovered something amazing on the Red planets.

Speaker 1

NASA says it's ingenuity.

Speaker 2

Mars helicopter recently discovered and surveyed the debrief from the agency's Perseverance Rover mission on Mars one year ago. NASA photos show both the parachute that helped the rover land on Mars, as well as the cone shaped backshell that protected it during its fiery descent toward the Martian surface

on February eighteenth, twenty twenty one. NASA says being able to look at some of the components that enabled the rover to get safely to the Martian surface could provide valuable insights for future missions.

Speaker 1

That's it. Where are you kidding me?

Speaker 3

That's NASA's big discovery on Mars is some garbage that they left there. Why are you announcing? What do you I expect the shit from a five year old. Look, the greatest space agency in the world. Look, mommy, I found your poop in the toilet.

Speaker 1

That's your poop. Is well.

Speaker 3

How is NASA prouder that we left trash on March?

Speaker 1

Think about that?

Speaker 3

Huh?

Speaker 1

If anything, we should be embarrassed.

Speaker 3

The first thing we do on another planet is lita. I mean, I guess it's good to set expectations early, but still, guys, can you imagine what the Martians think of us right now?

Speaker 7

Shayla Shyla, the two legged freaks came back again and left war trash.

Speaker 1

I swear to Glorp if they move here, we're going to vanish.

Speaker 4

Yeah.

Speaker 7

I don't care if it's further from your sister. At least it doesn't have these shaved monkeys showing up and leaving the shit on our lawn.

Speaker 3

I would love some teeth, Thank you, honey. Blasting off just got a whole new meaning. Listen to this.

Speaker 8

NASA scientists are researching the behavior of sperm in space. They sent samples aboord the Falcon nine rocket last week. Scientists want to know whether humans would be able to reproduce in micro gravity.

Speaker 3

Wow, NASA is experimenting with space sperm. That's one small step for man, one giant load of mankind.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 3

I think we finally got to the bottom of what those ink blotches were in arrival.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Those aliens were literally coming in peace. That's all they were doing. They were communicating with us.

Speaker 3

And now NASA says that this is the first sperm in space, right, And I bet every dude astronaut is like, yeah, yeah, first, yeah, come on it.

Speaker 1

Men have been in space for almost sixty years now.

Speaker 3

There's no ways in hell this is the first space sperm.

Speaker 1

You put a dude in a hotel room.

Speaker 3

Within five minutes, he's jacked off twice.

Speaker 1

You know, these guys are in the space station as soon as they got there.

Speaker 3

Just like, oh, honestly, I think NASA needs to slow its role because I don't know if you realize this. Just consider how all of this looks if you're an alien. First, humans send up telescopes to creepily watch them from afar, right, and then we sent up mixtapes, and then we sen up nudes, and now we're sending sperm. Like at this point, it just feels like we're sexually harassing.

Speaker 1

Aliens that was.

Speaker 3

It feels like I wouldn't be surprised if out first contact was the aliens coming down and just saying like, hey, take a hint, We're not interested.

Speaker 1

Hashtag me too, hashtag gloves are Welcome back to the Daily Show.

Speaker 5

My guest tonight is a former NASA astronaut and New York Times bestselling author who's here to talk about his latest book, Moonshot, a NASA Astronaut's guide to Achieving the Impossible. Please welcome, Mike Massomino.

Speaker 1

Man uh okay, I am.

Speaker 5

I am a huge space nerd okay, So most of my tattoos are space related. From Voyager one on. I knew when I was backstage that I needed to come up with very smart, engaging questions for you. You've been to space twice, and so I.

Speaker 1

Wrote a bunch of them down. But I just got to ask your help. Coolness to go to space.

Speaker 9

And it's pretty cool, yes, so cool.

Speaker 1

I would say.

Speaker 9

The coolest part though, of it was getting a chance of space walking. It was pretty cool inside the spaceship you're doing some work and looking at the window. Floating arounds kind of cool. But you go outside in a space suit. Now the whole world opens up to you. You can see the planet and how beautiful it is. And when I first saw the planet from a spacewalk, you can kind of see it. It's an entiret to see the curvature of it. And I thought to myself,

it's so beautiful. It's more beautiful than human eyes can withstand. I shouldn't be looking at this, and I actually turned my head, don't look at it. And then I said, you idiot, of course you're supposed to look at it.

Speaker 1

What a you're going to get?

Speaker 9

So I looked again, and I just got overcome with emotion. I started to tear up a little bit cal and then I got petrified because if you introduce water into your spacesuit, it could cause a problem and there would be an investigation. And I have to admit that I would cry, and there's no crying in space. Your friends will make fun of you. But the third time I looked, the thought that went through my mind was this is

a view from heaven. This is a heavenly view. And then it was replaced by another thought, which was, this is what heaven must look like. I think we're living in an absolute paradise. You can also see the thinness of the atmosphere. You turn about global warming, that atmosphere, that thin line. If you think of the Earth as an onion, that top thin layer of the onion is the size relationship of our atmosphere to the rest of our planet. That's the only thing that's keeping us alive.

You look the other direction, you see the earth here, and you look out here, and you see the darkness. Kind of cool, you see start, we checked out the neighborhood. Man, We've got nowhere to go. We've got to make this planet work.

Speaker 5

When you're I mean, when you're up there, Look, you give me chills when you were talking about that. When you look at the world, I think most of us, you know, we feel like things are kind of shitty right now.

Speaker 1

You know there are a lot of problems.

Speaker 5

Yeah, Do you have hope when you're up there and you look at things, it sounds like you only fallst on the beauty.

Speaker 9

Yeah, absolutely, because I think you see the Earth the way it's supposed to be seen. From that vantage point, you just see its beautiful creation. And I have the sense, I really do believe we're living in a paradise.

Speaker 4

Now.

Speaker 9

People will mess it up right. We do lots of bad things to each other, and there's a lot of bad stuff going on, but I think there is that possibility for happiness and love and beauty, and we should try to remember that every day. Every day, I try to remember that view and apply it here on Earth. You know, whether I'm on the New York City subway or I'm looking at the ocean, you know, wherever it is, there's beauty everywhere.

Speaker 1

You.

Speaker 5

I was reading this, You got rejected from the NASA space program three times. Did you have a plan that at a certain point you were going to give up? Or how did you persevere?

Speaker 9

No, I'd still be trying now, I think. I don't think I was first. So NASA puts out a call for astronaut applications every couple of years. They still do that for those who are interested. The first time I applied, I got a letter back that said no. Right, I applied again, and I got another letter back a few years after that first time that said no with an exclamation point. But I kept try. A third time I

got an interview. So the interview is not just an interview, but it's also a bunch of medical exams, and I was medically disqualified because of my eyesight. I couldn't pass the medical exam, the eye exam, and it was pretty disheartening because once you're disqualified, they said they won't even read my application again, and they didn't accept any medical procedures.

But I found out about vision training, so little kids, when their eyes are still developing, if they have eye issues, they can go through training and improve their eye muscles in their vision. And I made an appointment with him, an optometrist, and she sees me sitting in a chair and she goes, I've never worked with an adult, And I said, doctor hopping, I can be sore mature. You won't know the difference.

Speaker 1

Please.

Speaker 9

I begged her to help me, and she did, and I was able to pick up a couple of lines just so I could try again. At least I could submit again, and I got another interview, and then I got picked on the fourth try, so I'd still be.

Speaker 1

Going at it.

Speaker 5

When when I was in seventh grade, yeah, I went to Space Camp. I was the Shuttle commander at Space Camp. I wanted to be an astronaut and they told me there the whole vision thing.

Speaker 9

At the time.

Speaker 5

At the time, I wore contact lenses, so I was like, oh, I guess I can't be an astronaut. And then later I was like, oh, also, I'm bad at science and math, so like that's probably yeah.

Speaker 9

The other party, I should never let things stop you from at least try and there you go.

Speaker 1

See that, you know, there you go.

Speaker 5

You you recently, I think commended Congress for investigating UFOs or at least sort of all that. Whenever I see these stories on TV, I feel like everybody just thinks of like aliens coming down here, right, yeah, And no one ever talks about the difference between life that seems to exist Drake equation and all of that out there versus intelligent life and the possibility that intelligent life could.

Speaker 1

Have visited us.

Speaker 5

Can you walk us through what each of those things are and why there's so much hyperund it?

Speaker 9

I think, well, the congressional thing, what NASA has been doing is looking into UAPs. There used to be UFOs, I kind of like UFO, yeah, right, but now the UAP unidentified aerial phenomenon. And so they put together a pretty good committee on that, very reputable people, and they came up with the finding that about ninety five percent of the sightings can be explained, but there's still that five percent we don't know what it is. That doesn't

mean it's et coming to visit, you know. It's probably a weather phenomenon, or maybe some other aircraft they don't recognize, or a drone or something. So I think it's good to trying to find out what that five percent of whatever they don't know is yet that's flying around here. The intelligent life versus the signs of life. The intelligent life is like et own up. There's no real evidence of that happening yet, and we don't really have the ability to go that far to find anybody. So they

got to come find us. We need, you know, they need whoever it is, they've got to come and find us. I think that day will probably happen sometime. It hasn't happened yet. But the search for life, even within our own solar system, which I find very intriguing. We thought that, like, for example, the way out at the end of our solar system, some of the moons that are out there around Jupiter, we thought they were just frozen blocks of ice.

And what we find is that they're warmer than we expected and there's probably oceans underneath that ice, and we think that life began and the oceans here on our planet, So who knows what could be going on. There probably not any real life that we would think, or intelligent life, but even just those building blocks being that close to us, I think gives us hope that there's probably somebody else

out there. There are billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each, most of which have multiple planets orbiting around those stars. I think I can't imagine we're the only ones here in the universe, but we still haven't found each other yet.

Speaker 1

That's stars setting. I mean, I hope we do in our lifetime.

Speaker 9

I'd be very excited when that happens. That's gonna be big news.

Speaker 1

I wanted to ask you, huge news. I mean I was secretly just hoping.

Speaker 5

You you roll in here, like, all right, let me tell you something.

Speaker 1

No, I don't have it in the program I can tell you.

Speaker 9

Yeah, No, I wish I could. No, I have nothing like that. Oh that's fine, Well, big news. I think it's hard to cover that one up. You know, it's we're going to find out when we know. I agree, Mike mass everybody explore.

Speaker 3

More shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching the Daily Show wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 1

Watch The Daily Show week nights at eleven.

Speaker 5

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Speaker 1

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