Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to rationally speaking, I am your host, Masimo Appeal YouTube. And with me, as always, is Julia Gillard, my co-host. Before we get into today's topic, where for which we have a guest, very esteemed guest, I would like to make a special announcement, which is that New City Skeptic's is hosting, again, an annual event called the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism.

The date for it is April 17. Last time it was an awesome event with an all day sequence of speakers and panel discussions. It was very well attended. There were more than 400 people in New York for that event. And if you're interested in participating and signing up for the event, the website is any C, C CEO and dot org. All right, Julie, we got to this point. What are we gonna talk about today?

Well, we're honored to have a very special guest in studio with us. With us today is Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium is joining us to talk about the status of the space program today.

What are its goals currently and what practical benefits does the space program have for our society? And to the extent that it doesn't have practical benefits, what are the justifications for spending taxpayer money on it or on any other science without applied benefits? Neil, welcome.

Thank you. So what do you talk about? All that and more, in fact.

So really, as you know, this has been in the news for some time recently because of budget cuts to NASA and things of that sort. So what will be your take if you were to talk to President Obama today and say, you know, you really do need to fund this thing? And what would your best pitch?

Well, let me remind some listeners or alert them perhaps for the first time what it is we're talking about. The Obama administration in the new NASA budget made some fundamental changes to what's in the portfolio of NASA's ambitions. Some are good, some are neutral. Some have been heavily criticized. The one that has had hardly any resistance and was broadly praised was the urge to get NASA out of low earth orbit and privatize that entire enterprise. And so what that would mean is NASA, which was chartered to advance the space frontier.

Low Earth orbit, low earth orbit is a couple of hundred miles up. That's where the space station orbits space shuttles go, that sort of thing. We we know how to do that. We've been doing it for decades, in fact, the space shuttle goes there and it's boldly going where hundreds have gone before. It's not a frontier. So typically the way governments, the way our government has birthed new industries in the past is they make the initial investments before capital markets can value them.

Right. And that's where there's high risk patents get made and get allocated, patents get earned and get allocated and and early moneys get made. But only when the risks are managed and understood does the with a capital market then take interest.

The notion here is that there's enough business going on in low earth orbit. You're marketing, that is all of the all of the consumer products that thrive on GPS right now. This is all this is all commercial markets, the directive, other satellite communications. So get NASA out of that business. And you seem to be favorable to that idea. I think so.

I think so. It's not a frontier anymore. So give it away.

Well, one question that comes off to actually in relation to this particular sector of the low orbit business is, you know, what is it exactly that the space station has been doing up there? We know it's happening in orbit. Right.

But other than that, no. So it's an international collaboration. In fact, it's other than Antarctica, it's probably the next best example of international cooperation there ever was in the history of the world. Multiple, pretty high price. Yes, it is. It is Antarctica. If you didn't know, it's a it's a collaboration of multiple countries going down there doing science research. And no one is making land grabs. Nobody. It's just a corporate. Maybe it's because no one really wants to live there.

So that would be my guess. That helps in the collaboration.

No one wants to be king of nothing, you know. So no, but Antarctica is a beautiful place and it is unique in location for certain kinds of science that can be conducted in part because it's cold and there's so there's low moisture in the air. And if you're near the South Pole, it's actually very high elevation. So you're above a lot of the atmosphere that would otherwise interfere with your view of the night sky. So a lot of astrophysics goes on in the South Pole.

The point is that's a area of high international collaboration. So, too, is the International Space Station. It demonstrated that we can have major projects of international collaborators. It demonstrates that we can build things in space. There was a day when we thought if we're going to build a telescope or build some piece of hardware, we'd need a surface to do it on. And we realized that if you have a surface, that means there's gravity. That means you have to be structurally supportive of the weight of the system you're building.

And if you do it in orbit, everything's weightless. So it's it's a remarkable engineering achievement. Not only that different countries have modules. These are the segments of the International Space Station where they're conducting their own science. Japan has a as module, the European Union has modules. And so within them, they have their own space laboratories, their own peer reviewed research.

But what I'm hearing, therefore, is that would you make an exception for the space station in terms of what you just said a minute ago, it privatization as opposed to government funding funded research?

Oh, well, you wouldn't necessarily privatize the space station right now, but you'd certainly privatize access to it. You sell trips to the space station, right? Sure, why not? If someone is going to go up there and that's really where the privatization would first reveal itself in the in the new plan. But that and so no one's complaining about that. Where Obama got in a little bit of hot water was his cancellation of the NASA plan to return to the moon.

Yes, the moon is an interesting target.

First, it's nearby. Of course, we've already been there, but in part because we've already been there.

It means you can go there with higher confidence that you'll succeed. Whereas a round trip to Mars astronauts away from the protective blanket of Earth's magnetic field would be subject to radiation.

Tha tha tha tha tha radiation from the sun, solar flares, this sort of thing. These are these are high energy charged particles that can come in and basically einiger atoms.

And that would be bad if that if that's so, would you see therefore the the a possible moon station, for instance, as a stepping stone toward a Mars mission?

No, because if you're going to go to Mars, you don't want to go somewhere else first, generally because it takes energy to land. Once you get up enough speed, you don't want to stop until you get to where you're going. If you get up enough speed and go to the moon, then you have to slow down again. You need fuel to slow down. If the moon had an atmosphere, you could use the atmosphere to slow down, just as the space shuttle does.

That's why it needs tiles, these famous heat tiles that dissipate the heat of reentry. That's a good thing. If it didn't do that, the shuttle would burn up and. We have to stop or the shuttle simply wouldn't be able to stop, right, if there was no such way to to to dissipate the energy of motion. So with Mars, a trip to Mars could be hazardous to astronauts and. Do you bring all your resources with you if you're taking a road trip to California, are you do you attach a supertanker to you?

And that's the fuel you need to know. You bring a farm with you know, you rely on the fact that there's a quick mart at intermediate stops between where you are in California so you can refill and buy some food. Like a long term goal is that if we become spacefaring, that resources in space can be used for space. Not necessarily brought back to Earth, and so the moon is out of the picture, but Obama said, let's continue to do research on launch vehicles and rocket technologies to one day get us to Mars.

But that one day was not specified and that's what got people a little uncomfortable.

Did the moon is out of the picture surprise the scientific community, given the recent discoveries, for instance, about the possibility of water on the moon?

Most scientists there are some key vocal exceptions to this, but most scientists, myself included, if I were to pick the moon or Mars about what would be an interesting place to go to its Mars, Mars has all this evidence of running water today, bone dry, that methane is fusing its way out of the side of a cliff recently measured. It's got evidence of possible liquid water laying recent tracks within the soils.

So what drives us not just that, it's an interesting. Geology or Mars ology, because geo means Earth in this case, of course, it's not simply that it's interesting geology, but if there was once water there, every place on earth where there was liquid water, there's life. So we know deep down in our quest. To search these planetary surfaces, we're really looking for life. And can you talk about the advantage of putting a human on Mars as opposed to robotic exploration of no advantage?

There's no advantage. Well, sorry. Let me let me. That's the short answer. But let me give nuances. Yeah. We've got a few more minutes. We've got a few more minutes.

It cost anywhere between. 20 and 50 times more. In budget and cost, in outlay of cash to send a human to a destination than it does to send a robot. So if you're a scientist interested in scientific returns, even if you're a geologist, even if you're the rock jock from Mount Olympus and I say to you, I can send you with your rock hammer and maybe even give you a few machines to make measurements. I can do that once or I can fund 30 different rovers that you can choose where you want to put them any place on the Martian surface, and they'll carry these machines that I'd otherwise be giving to you.

What would you pick? Seems like a no brainer. It's a no brainer. Scientifically, it's a no brainer, right? That's the point is because of the price difference that any scientist interested in scientific results would not could not with a with a with a clear conscience vote to send a human there. So that leaves us with two options. Either you get the cost of flying humans, they're really low so that it's competitive with robots and you just send the person because you can do in a few moment.

But in a few minutes, what am I take a rover all day to do? All right. Because the brain, the human brain is more intuitive about what it's looking at than a robot is that you program and so program. It's a subset of what you are, but it's still not you because humans were programmed. That's itself an interesting philosophical conversation. So we can have a special that's whole show.

Can you program a computer to be more intuitive than you are if you're the programmer? And so I'll leave that one for you.

Philosopher love questions like that. We'll talk about that.

And scientists will just do it over beer and then the beer ends. We get back to work. But you guys just keep talking about it, right?

Speaking of over a beer or so before the show, we were talking about something that I think is very pertinent to this topic, which is how historically really, really large, very, very expensive projects got funded.

And you want to talk about that a little bit, because this is what we're talking about here. We're talking about a huge, historically very large project.

So I did a little homework 10 years ago, which ended up as a chapter in the Columbia history of the 20th century, a book published at the turn of the millennium. And my chapter was called Paths to Discovery. This was not your ordinary millennium book that just gives a history. The editors wanted its content to be more reflective, wanted experts in various fields to be reflective on what was known and what impact the developments had on what was known, rather than simply being an historical account.

So my chapter I titled Paths to Discovery and what I wanted to do there because I wanted to go to Mars, I wanted to send people to Mars. And so I wanted to know what would that cost? Is it a hundred billion dollars or is it half a trillion dollars? Whatever it is, it's going to be expensive.

Well, let me take my cue from history. What other expensive projects in either human capital or financial capital? Cost that much, I ask myself, and what did they do to get that funded? Maybe we can learn something from that.

So I was prepared to actually fill an entire book of all the ways cultures going back thousands of years have justified spending large portions of their state wealth.

But now we're not that imaginative, right? There are only two or three ways in which we. Yeah. So it turns out there wasn't a whole book. So there's like three three drivers. One of them is praise of royalty and deity. So that was like there's the pyramids right there. It's the expensive tombstones for the pharaohs, the building of the cathedrals in Europe, especially Italy. These are activities undertaken in part out of deep respect, in other parts, out of deep fear of the power of who it is you're doing this for.

So we could ask the pope to fund the principle. However, we live in a time where these are not common activities for states to undergo, State says, and just nation states to undertake. So that leaves these other two drivers that I found.

It's a one of them is the the promise of economic return. And that's where you get the Columbus voyages, you get the Magellan voyages, Lewis and Clark, major undertakings over society, and then there's, of course, war. I don't want to die driver. So I don't want to die and I don't want to die poor. And the war driver gets you the Great Wall of China, gets you the Manhattan Project to get you the Apollo program.

I was going to say, it seems to me that, in fact, a large part of the space program has been driven by that precisely from the 1950s through the 70s, at least. Exactly. If we all remember the words, if not, you were not alive. You certainly seen clips of President Kennedy saying we will return and put a man on the moon and return them safely to Earth before the decade is out. And these are powerful words that galvanize the ambitions of a nation, but this is a speech given to the joint session of Congress May twenty fifth, nineteen sixty one, just a few weeks after Yuri Gagarin had just come out of orbit over in the Soviet Union.

And so this speech was in reaction to the fact that we do not yet have a man rated to call man rated rocket safe enough to put a human on as opposed to a satellite that you might might be more prone to experiment with cheaper components. And so if you read the same speech a few paragraphs earlier, it says, if the events of recent weeks, Yuri Gagarin are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, we need to show the world the path of tyranny will fail compared to our path of freedom.

This is a it was a battle cry against communism because it was a political statement, period. And without that, he could have said, let's go to the moon. It's great. We're discovering that no one would have written the check at some point. Somebody's got to write the check. Right. So it occurs to me that China's space program is is developing. Right. And in the next decade or 10, 15 years, China may be poised to rival us as the superpower of the world.

So that could potentially spark another influx, an interest in funding space for this moment, right?

Sure. That's a good name for it. But a few of our commenters on Russian speaking pointed out that the kind of research that that might be justified with this kind of reason might not be the same kind of research that would be justified for a scientific for the best kind of scientific research.

This science has never been a driver of expense or project. We have depending on the wealth of the nation, you could spend money on science below a certain radar level without it really getting heavily debated. So, for example, the Hubble telescope over all its years comes to about 12 billion dollars is less than a billion per year. That's a threshold that can't fit comfortably below the radar of criticism for science project or for projects. It's not economics or war.

And you raise it up above 10 billion, 20, 30 billion. If there's not a weapon at the other end of that experiment or you don't see the face of God or you don't find oil wells, it's at risk of getting. Risk of failing as a funded projects and just that that's what happened with the supercollider, the superconducting supercollider in America, we were going to have the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. It was proposed in the conceived in the late 70s, funded in the early 80s.

Nineteen eighty nine comes out. And what happened in 1989, peace breaks out.

Peace breaks out well before then, I hate when that happens, when that happens. Inconvenient physicist basically won the Second World War with the Manhattan Project. So America had a fully funded particle physics program. Do you know that the bomb on Nagasaki was not a uranium bomb? It was the plutonium bomb that was the bomb that was tested in in Trinity Point of New Mexico. You know, there's that one bomb that they tested. They test. Why did they test that one?

Because it used plutonium. Nineteen forty five. Well, where do you get plutonium from? It had just been discovered in nineteen forty. That's a pretty quick turnaround, that's a quick turnaround when you when when you when you're at war, money flows like rivers. So what happens? Nineteen eighty nine. Peace breaks out within three years. The entire budget for the supercollider is canceled.

And remember what happens now. Europe says we'll take the mantle. So. All right. And they build the Large Hadron Collider at the the European Center for Nuclear Research. CERN is the French acronym for that. And now we're standing on our shores, looking across the pond saying, OK, guys, can we join? Can we help? And there was an interesting thing that an interesting little exchange that I remember from those hearings that you're talking about where one of the senators on that was evaluating essentially the expense for the for the collider, the continued expense, the continued expense, asked Steven Vineberg, one of the physicists who was testifying in Congress.

Well, you know, he said, Professor Vineberg, unfortunately, one of the problems is that, you know, it's hard for me to tell to justify this expense to my constituents because, you know, after all, nobody eats quarks. And of course, Vineberg and Tipitina is typical fashion, pretending to do a little calculation on his own, on his piece of paper in five minutes. And actually, Senator, by my calculations, you just a few billion works this morning for breakfast, which was a very good retort, except that I didn't think in health it helped exactly Feinberg's point.

So the basically the bottom line, therefore, is, however fine, we get only basic research project, large basic research projects, if they piggyback on on, as you said, the big three, that you have to have to piggyback on that or be below the funding threshold to to be scrutinized.

And somebody may ask reasonably, should it be otherwise? I mean, why not? Why is that not reasonable?

I'm just saying don't shoot the messenger.

I'm just saying I look for 5000 years, and unless we're going to believe that we're a fundamentally different kind of populated culture than has ever preceded us, I'm going to take my cue from the history of major funded projects and say that we're going to go to Mars.

It will likely only happen if we can find an economic driver for it or a military driver. So I joke about this partly seriously, and I say let's get China to leak a memo that says that they want to build military bases on Mars. If that's the case, we'd be on Mars in 12 months.

You've heard them here first.

The Russians making well. Do you think there's any case to be made for the fact that so many scientific discoveries that end up being incredibly useful practically were actually discovered accidentally in the course of just exploratory research or in the course of a completely unrelated research that they were lucky accident? Can we make that case for space exploration?

No, because that's an excellent question. No, because the time delay between a serendipitous scientific discovery on the frontier of our understanding of science and when that becomes a useful product that has been engineered, designed and marketed, is longer typically than the re-election cycles of those are allocating money. And so it does not survive. You can't get politicians to decide to invest this way because it's irrelevant to their the needs of their constituency. And that's why we need the monarchy or the pope to sponsor these kind of programs because they last longer.

And you're from Italy, right? Yeah, OK, you got to watch watch this guy.

But more generally, I think an interesting question that this whole discussion raises is actually I didn't finish.

Yeah, go ahead. Just complete the answer to your question about NASA. So I don't think we'll ever go to Mars unless we can find an economic reason for doing it or military reason. And until then, we just kind of driving around the block.

Right. So but you spend a significant amount of your time talking and writing for the general public. And so this this whole discussion does deal with how scientists communicate and in particular justify their work and therefore publicly funded work, because I know how to justify the hundred billion dollars.

I can do that. But it takes longer than what they call the elevator conversation right in the elevator for like 30 seconds with the congressman. It's your only chance you have to influence their their policies and voting go right. And my but mine takes maybe three minutes, but not 30 seconds.

But what about the janitors? You know, forget for a minute politicians. It is through the day, by the way, make decisions while they serve us. Why do I only get 30 seconds of their time? Exactly.

You could stop the elevator. You could stop.

But if you wanted to make the point to a general public and say, OK, here, here are good reasons to to fund know space exploration or basic scientific research in astrophysics other than it's just my curiosity. I want to be paid to do things that I like. What would you say?

No, we are funding basic research in astrophysics that is happening. What this conversation is about is the manned space program. That's where the expense comes in. That's where you're above those funding thresholds that then appeal to these these great drivers in the. History of culture, so we we got the Hubble telescope, we're going to have a laboratory on Mars in a few years. It's called the Mars Science Laboratory. We've got we're in orbit around Cassini right now around.

We have Cassini in orbit around Saturn right now, the name of one of the spacecraft observing Saturn and its moons and its ring system. We've got another spacecraft on its way to Pluto. We've got telescopes being designed and built that will observe more parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Science is getting done. I wish there was more of it, but it's getting done. That's not that's not the variable.

But as you pointed out before, not the collider we have now. We have the Europeans doing it right and the good. It was a good question. I suppose in some sense that the Texas senator brought up which which was, you know, how do I justify this to my constituents now?

I'm not going to claim that even if he said, oh, you'll get great products at the end of it, it wouldn't have happened. You think you would have said at the end of this, you have a weapon and you can protect the country? There's a famous reply. I don't remember who said it to whom, but it gets often repeated. And I think it plays well if you say it. But it's not. It's it's.

According to my analysis of the three drivers, it wouldn't work, so right. So the senator says to the scientist, what about this project will help in the defense of America? Right. There's the question that comes out and said, Senator, I don't know how it can help in the defense of America other than to ensure that America is a country worth defending. Yes.

And that, as you know, it's the great argument that he's not going to fly. It doesn't. It plays well. It makes a good headline. But right now, there's one other potential case I can think of for space travel that we haven't really talked about, which is you mentioned earlier, you alluded to if we become a space faring people, we might need these new moon and Mars and sort of quick Mars.

Do you think we could make the practical case that we need to to venture out into space because Earth will at some point be uninhabitable? Is that is that enough of a practical case to be made?

There are many who make that case. Stephen Hawking among them. Richard is another one, a professor at Princeton. I have a dissenting view. Whatever. It is we do. That messes up earth. If we have the power. To terraform Mars and make that another planet that we go live on, spreading our genetic code to become a multi planet species, if we have the power to do that, we have the power to fix Earth's. If we can terraform Mars and and ship a billion people there, it seems to me be a little easier to fix the rivers and the oceans.

And it seems to me, why not terraforming earth?

Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Terry, for finding a recipe that'll fix the earth problem. And so I don't think the space is necessarily the most obvious way you would spend money to fix Earth or to resolve the we messed up earth problem. Right.

That's a really good point. We're going to wrap up this section of Republicans began and I know how to get that whole universe here.

We'll bring you back when we return.

We'll move on to the rationally speaking picks where our guests, Neil deGrasse Tyson, will present his pick for the episode.

We are back at Rajani speaking with our guest, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who will be doing the pick of this episode.

Neil, what did you choose? A little cliche, but I'd have to say the film Avatar for the following reason. Every now and then a science fiction movie comes along and whether they get it right or wrong.

It's possible for that which is right and that which is wrong to both serve as teachable moments, give us an example and example. So we have these 10 foot tall, blue, three fingered aliens with like USB ponytails and live in a Keibler tree, not forget the breasts even though they're now mammals.

OK, we haven't forgotten them.

So we've got them. And yet it shows positively no imagination for what aliens from another star system would look like, because other creatures on our own planet don't have heads to eyes, nose, mouth, ears, shoulders, arms, legs. We so much on our own planet does not look like us and we have DNA in common with them, but Neil, we have to be able to fall in love with them.

Hence the name one of the other black worm, Red Lobster.

They got to be hot babes out there. Exactly.

Yeah. That's not buckthorn. It's called the box office. So I stand that and I accept it. But there are other things. For example, the unobtainium that was kind of cool noticed it was floating over the desk. If you remember the movie, everyone's seen a gazillion sort of three billion dollar film. Everybody's seen it. So. So what what were those floating mountains? You know, why were they floating around? I don't often I don't mind if you want to float them, but why was water falling off the side of them?

That was the rock float in the water that so maybe they're made of unobtainium.

But if they're made of unobtainium, why do you have to blow up a Keibler tree to get the oil beneath you?

Calaway one of the one of the one of the floating mountains. And if you had spaceships to get you from the sun to Alpha Centauri, you can surely haul one of these mountains back with you. I would think so. You need some consistency there. Plus it gets that far in the future.

Twenty one fifty seven. I remember the date plus or minus.

Then why are they still using like guns with bullets. Is there some more creative weaponry they have other than like Apocalypse Now. You know then then if there's this spirit that permeates the planet, that's kind of cool. Well, start off. If there's a biology that permeates the planet, that's cool.

Clearly, the Avatar aliens or the Pandora Orian's, they they coevolved with the plantlife, which is why they have the USB ponytail.

Exactly. That's cool. So if that's how you're going to do it, take me places with that. But then they put in the spirit thing where they're worshipping a tree and and then the bad things happening to the planet. So now the spirit is going to rise up and summon the defenses.

And I thought maybe all the trees would, you know, pull a Wizard of Oz on them and throw apples at the bad guys or something, because we told we're told the trees are all connected with a neuro connectivity and therefore they should react.

So they should they should come together. You would need spirits for that if they're connected chemically. But even if you had spirits, there's something to spirits and who comes to save the day? Some rhinoceroses and some some canine creatures. Well, Tarzan could have some in them. You don't need spirits to do so.

So I think it failed in what it could have done with the power of spirits and it failed with with what it could have done with the power of biology to fight this assault.

I think this is an interesting point in general. That is obviously we do know that when you go to a movie to see a movie, especially a science fiction movie or a fantasy movie, you have to, as they say, suspend disbelief. Right. But I think what you're getting at is one of the things that irritate me as well in similar circumstances, which is the suspension of disbelief. And then there is idiocy and inconsistency. Exactly. And there are different ones that are perfectly willing to suspend my disbelief, my blue people.

That's fine. I'm cool with that.

So if you had to had your pick, on the other hand, of a science fiction movie that satisfies you from that perspective, that was, you know, where people actually learn something, things were consistent and so on and so forth. What would you pick? Contact.

Contact? Yes, in part because they didn't even show you the aliens. Right. They knew enough to say something with no genetic overlap with anything on earth is not even something we can imagine. It's not. So we're not going to put an actor in a costume and have them slither or crawl onto the set. Let's just create at some make it some entity what I was fascinated by with contact, which was the study of human behavior in response to this knowledge that intelligence was found elsewhere in the galaxy.

And, you know, that's exactly how society is going to react to be wacko's there'll be. And that's kind of spooky. So it's a scary view of the future. It says that we look at the consequence of rampant science, illiteracy. They don't even know how to handle the possibility that there could be some more intelligent species out there.

So I thought that was just well done. It had good drama, good character development, and it was a very important scientific kind.

Of course, the the it was written by Carl Sagan, who was both a very good scientist and a good science popularizer, which means that he did have actually a good understanding of the psychology of pseudoscience and reactions to science and the relationship between science and religion, for instance, which was prominent in that movie.

And I was proud of the movie for not shying away from that, because that clearly would show up right. As we predict for the future what would unfold.

Unfortunately, that's all the time we have today for this episode of Rationality about the Universe. And you're done in thirty minutes. What? I don't know. What is that about?

The nutshell version of the in the nutshell University of Notre Dame University in a in a in a mustard seed. OK, thank you so much for joining us.

Now you can all check out our website at Rationally Speaking Big for more about this episode and future episodes and join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.