246: A Hard Wet Sponge

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Tickets go on sale to the general public June 30th at somethingworthknowing.com. So come build a better world with us on September 16th and experience something worth knowing you can get your ticket at Complexly.info slash something. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you to be surprised and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon and John, have you heard that all across America as we approach and get into summer that stadiums, stadiums are heating up way more than usual?

Oh, why is that? It's because there are no fans. It's stupid, but it's true. There are no fans.

The Premier League is back on TV and you know, I've been a fan of Liverpool Football Club for most of my life and I got to see Liverpool play for the first time in 97 days yesterday. It was a nil-nil draw and it was as dull as a football game can possibly be and yet I felt unadulterated joy the entire time. I realized that it was the first time I'd felt like complete mindless joy in 97 days. I'm very happy for you.

Was it weird with no screaming? Well, they pipe in fake crowd noise into the TV broadcast. It's just like, but not like whoa, or like a black track. It's not like perfectly timed, but sometimes they do attempt like when the referee makes a dubious decision.

Really? Yeah, they attempt to have like a boo. But it's always a little too late. Like I'm imagining that there's somebody playing a keyboard, each of which has a different crowd sound.

But the person's just like watching the game on like a four-second delay. So yeah, it's not quite working for me yet, but I'll tell you what, when Hank, I know that this podcast is not primarily about football, but I just want to tell you that if and when Liverpool win their first English Premier League title and their first title in 30 years, I had imagined that moment so many times and I'd imagine being at the Union Jack pub with all of the members of the Liverpool Indianapolis community and I'd imagined being at Anfield, watching it happen live and I'd imagined it in every conceivable place except for alone in my basement, which is where I'm going to actually be. And I'll have like a single champagne popper and it'll be like, hey, we did it. But let's do some questions, John.

Do you want to answer some questions? I do. I do for a little bit of background before we go into the questions from my listeners. I think it's important to note that Hank and I had to talk to each other on the phone for 25 minutes just to get ourselves into a headspace where we thought we could make this podcast and laugh and have a good time or what passes for a good time these days.

Hank, with our first question today, we're going to return to your book of beautifully Foolish and Never, which comes out July 7th with this question from Emma who writes, dear John and Hank, my birthday is coming up on July 7th, the same day as Hank's new book of beautifully Foolish and Never Comes Out. And I know I won't be able to celebrate as usual. I know Hank recently celebrated a socially distant birthday and I was wondering if you have any ideas on how I could celebrate my birthday from home. Of course, I will be reading Hank's book and watching Vlogbrothers Live on YouTube at 7PM Eastern Time with special guest John.

Birthdays and books, Emma. Well, we'll try to do a special shout out to you, Emma. Thank you for being there. Also, thank you for the plugs.

My socially distant birthday was really fantastic and I wasn't able to gather with all of my friends. So, Catherine collected messages from all of my friends and put them all in one place in an audio format. It's basically a podcast of my friends telling you why they like me, which I should listen to every day. And Emma, maybe you should nudge somebody in your life to ask them to do the same thing or in lieu of that, just do it yourself.

That's okay. It's still nice. I feel like, hey, my birthday's coming up. It's going to be a weird one.

Sending an audio message of why I'm good. Or, you know, constructive ways that I could improve. Maybe not as much of that. So, Alice has had a socially distant birthday party.

It was a little bit of a bummer, but Alice enjoyed it. She's much more adaptable than her dad. I think we're going to remember this as a weird time, Emma. And you're going to remember this as a weird and difficult birthday.

And that's okay. It's hopefully not going to be the last birthday you have. And hopefully, you'll be able to look back on this and be like, oh, thank God that ended. Yeah.

Hopefully, it will be something that you remember because it was different. And I think that that is often the case when things are as expected, they make a little bit less of an impression. But even if things are good, but in a different way, they can stick with us for longer. Yeah, it's interesting that you say that, because it occurs to me that I don't really remember many of my birthdays at all.

And the ones I do remember are the ones where something unusual happened. But in my case, it was usually terrible. Like my 39th birthday, for instance, I went go-karting, which was my first mistake. And then of course, my second mistake was that I got a displaced fracture of my ribs from a go-karting accident.

Yeah, I remember you go into this go-karting place and I was like, that looks cool. And then I looked at it and I was like, that looks like, no, that looks like really what I imagined is go-karting. It's two-way-way levels. Yeah.

It's hardcore go-karting. And I got into a fairly serious accident. But I thought I was okay. It just, I happened to go to the doctor two days later for something else.

And he noticed me get up on the examination table very gingerly. And then he touched it, and he was like, your rib is very broken. And you should go to the emergency department right now. It might be stabbing you in the liver, which it wasn't, thankfully.

Yeah. I was able to repurpose all of that in my novel turtles all the way down. Yeah. Yeah.

John, you seem to, it doesn't go great when you race. That's true. The other time that I raced a car, it caught on fire. And this is like the only times, right?

Like, imagine you as a racer. I do a very amount of go-kart writing, driving, driving. What do you call it? More brothers, and I don't even really know this.

Well, I mean, I do live in the racing capital of the United States. Yes, that's true. Yes. That was the time when your car caught on fire, but they had told you before your car caught on fire that if you crash, just wait and someone will help get you out of the car.

So your car caught on fire, but you and you were like, I will continue to follow instructions and just sit here. Yeah. Which, to be fair, they did come and get me. You know, like, instead of focusing on all the times that I was a bad race car driver, can we not focus on the time when I was a really good race car driver when I drove the pace lap for the Indianapolis Grand Prix and I didn't get into a car accident and then the very next week, the pace car driver, at the very next race, like slammed into the wall and they had to like stop the race for an hour.

Can we focus on that? Oh, God, that's so embarrassing. Tell me you did this. When you said you were doing that, I was like, John, what are you thinking?

This never goes well for you. I was so, I've never been as nervous as I was driving that pace car. It was not a pleasant experience, not least because one of the IndyCar drivers, the person who had the pole position, Simone Pajano, he was like riding up against my bumper and he kept like, then he would slow down and he would go back to tailgating me, but like, it's a totally different level of tailgating when you're talking about professional race car drivers, like tailgating me with them as being one inch behind the bumper. And I was taking it very personally as I do when I get tailgated and I was like, listen, Simone Pajano, they told me to drive 72 miles an hour and I am driving 72 miles an hour.

And if you think I'm going to speed up just because you're not happy with the tire pressure or whatever, you've got another think coming. I love it. I love it. You show him and he probably like has no idea he's even doing it.

Exactly. Like a solid, a solid like five times his comfortable distance. Totally. So I actually saw him like months later and I was like, boy, you were really like really, real close in my rear view mirror and I, I felt like it was a little extreme.

And he was like, Oh, no, I don't really remember that. But that's what he would say. He's a very nice guy actually. Well, what was the question?

Oh, yeah. I'm a driver pace car. Go race. This next question comes from Maggie who asks, Dear Hank and John, when expression my mom uses all the time is the phrase bone dry.

Yeah. Why do you think there's that dry in your home? I don't understand this mainly because aren't our bones in our bodies? Wouldn't they be like full of fluids?

Aren't they wet? Can you get back to me? Stair safe Maggie. I love it.

Could you get back to me? Could you get back to me? Yeah. Thanks.

We try to occasionally do that. And also, I love about this question is how terrible it makes me feel about my bones. Yeah, they are just all inside of me. Aren't they?

So wet. Well, here's the thing, Maggie. They're moist now, but a dryness is coming. Maybe depends on how like, I guess the idea is that if like the bone is out in the desert or the animal who died is out in the desert and then the bone eventually appears after being blasted by sand and torn out by vultures that eventually that bone will be very dry.

But it doesn't seem like the default state for a bone. Well, most bones aren't in the desert. Quote me on it. So let's stick it on a pillow.

Yeah. So the actual etymology of the phrase bone dry is pretty interesting, not least because it's really new. And you would think that it would be old because most most bone related things are old. We've had them a long time.

Yeah. But bone dry didn't appear in English until 1830. Oh, wow. And it is about the fact that if you leave a bone out in the sun, it will eventually become dry.

But like, if you leave anything out in the sun, it will eventually become dry. You know, you could say the same thing about like, yeah, a pond. Yeah. Pond dry, you know, how it is.

Or a sponge, you know, it's like, yeah, this is dry as a sponge. And it's like, well, bones are basically hard sponges. I want to go back in time to before I knew about that hard. Let's go on to another question.

This one from Gracie who writes here, John and Hank do all microwaves rotate in the same direction. Gracie. No, no, Gracie. In fact, my microwave rotates to the left half the time and to the right and the other half of the time.

And I don't know why. Oh, I do. Oh, great. When the so when the motor does its little thing, yeah, stops the the mechanism kind of like rests in the direction that it stopped in.

And so a nicer microwave wants to have it rest not in the same way every time because it rests against the mechanism in the same direction every time it wears faster in that direction. So basically, it switches directions only so that the motor will be able to have a longer lifespan. And also I think that it less than use a slightly less expensive motor because it means that it will be able to instead of like overcoming where it's already resting and pushing through that move in the direction that it's not resting in and that's actually less energy to move. So it's an engineering thing where they're able to make a cheaper, longer lasting microwave as long as they have it move in different directions every time.

That was actually fairly interesting. I always thought that it was a wind unwind. Yeah. Like, does it spring in there that if you keep going in the same direction and eventually be like, I can't, I can't, you know, yeah.

Well, that's that's disappointing, but I'm glad that I now know the facts. There you're settled. All right. We have another question.

This one comes from Taylor who writes, dear John and Hank, we're all donating lots of money to cancer research funds. And I'm only 23. But so far as I'm aware, these fundraisers have been a thing for a while. Why haven't we cured cancer?

Oh, just is that all? So Taylor, one of the things that we don't hear about that much, but is really important is that the overall mortality rate from cancer is declining really dramatically and has been declining dramatically throughout your lifespan. There are a bunch of reasons for this research and better treatment is one reason. Another reason is public health decisions.

We tend to like really undervalue the importance of public health in these conversations, but people choosing not to smoke cigarettes has been a big deal for lower cancer rates and higher cancer survival. The other important thing here, and we have a social video about this, if you want to watch it, but cancer is not one disease and like not even every lung cancer or breast cancer is the same as other lung or breast cancers. They're, and like the things that go wrong for cancer to happen are really varied. And some of them are fairly well studied and we have ways to combat them.

And some of them are still completely unknown. And part of the reason that they're unknown might be because they're more rare. So we haven't had them to do the research. Part of it might be it's just more complicated and we haven't figured it out yet.

And so like, and it tends to be that in order to get cancer, you don't have to, it's not like one thing went wrong. Usually, there's a couple of genetic things that you're predisposed to, a couple of genetic things that happened along the way. Maybe, and like those things might be in completely different parts of your body system. So it might be one thing happened in your immune system that went wrong, one thing happened over here in like your sort of like cell regulation systems, one thing that happened over here and like your actual like the tissue that was the sort of the start of the cancer.

So it can be a bunch of different things. And if we focus on one of those things, we can sort of carve out a whole section of cancer and improve mortality around that. But while cancers are spreading, they can, they sort of like find new mutations that might help them survive our treatments. So it's super complicated.

And the amount of work that we have done in terms of cancer research is really amazing. We have a long way to go. We also have a long way to go and increasing access to those treatments because they tend to be very expensive for the first 10 or 20 years after they're developed. And a lot of them, a lot of them are less old than that.

So you know, like having that, I think that limited access is also a huge deal and something that we should be looking hard at. Yeah. I mean, the first person to get access to methotrexate, which is a chemotherapy drug that's been around for like 60 or 70 years, the first person to get access to that in Sierra Leone's Kona district got access to it last year. Yeah.

So we have a long way to go, both in terms of the discoveries that we need to make, but also in terms of the actual health consideration, which is not about whether or not we figured something out, it's about whether or not we can distribute it widely and equitably. Yeah. And there are also cancers that are super treatable if you find them at the right time. And that's why screening is really important.

I'm getting my colonoscopy in two months. So if you are, if you are of the age, make sure that you're getting your all of your correct cancer screenings, because that is how we stick around for ourselves and our families. I had a great colonoscopy in February before all of this started. Yeah.

It was great. I look back on that time with a great deal of nostalgia. It's very hard for me, not like most of the time when my brain is doing nostalgia, I can say like, you know what, brain, the old days weren't that good. Like, oh, 1990, it was so wonderful.

I was 12 years old and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, except that like the chances of getting murdered in the United States were literally twice as high in 1990 than they are today. Like most of the time, I can tell myself a story that helped me to understand that my urge to sentimentalize the past is misplaced. Right.

But that colonoscopy in February of 2020 really was as good as it gets. This is a peak. There's a peak right at the top peak, peak John Green right there. That's not just peak John Green.

I want to be clear. That was the peak, like February 12th, 2020. Oh, no. It was the best moment of human history.

Okay. All right, John, this next question comes from Adam who asks Dear Hank and John, I'm considered an essential worker in my job doing maintenance for dorms and office buildings at my university. The offices have been empty for a couple of months due to COVID, but I've taken it upon myself to water all of the abandoned office plants during my lunch break. What I want to know is, are those plants mine now?

They only survived due to my labor and clearly have neglectful parents. So is it incorrect for me to appropriate? I actually want a real economist to answer this question for me. Like a plant is a living thing.

Yeah. And so, so there's the plant and I think that you might own the plant, but I worry that you don't own the pot yet. So, you might not own the dirt that the plant is growing in. You might only own the plant.

And I'm not even totally sure that you own the plant. I think it depends on the context in which the plant was abandoned because if you got like two days notice that the office will be closing on Friday and you didn't take home your office plants, that's on you. Like you can sign to those plants to almost certain death. If on the other hand you had like 30 seconds warning and they were like, everybody has to leave the office right now, then maybe that's still your plant and you're just very grateful to the person who's taken care of it in the meantime.

Right, right. And you've been thinking this whole time, oh my gosh, I can't believe that I can't save my plant. Or I miss Sam so much because I assume that people name their plants. But in any case, the plants are grateful that they are not dead.

So thank you for doing that work, whether they are your plants or not. Which reminds me that this podcast is brought to you by plants. So many of the different things on the planet. And they are genuinely essential.

It's weird that we don't have more corporate sponsors that are just things that we really need. Like this podcast is brought to you by iron. Yeah, it courses through your blood and allows you to survive. But that's not our second sponsor.

Of course, our second sponsor is microwaves that go in both directions, microwaves that go in both directions. They're slightly more efficient, maybe. And this podcast is also brought to you by Simone Padgino. He's a driver of a car.

And he's a former Indianapolis 500 winner, Hank. Okay. Yes, it's brought to you by him. He tailgates too much.

Well, I think he tailgates probably the right amount. He's a very good driver. By the way, Hank, you should Google Simon Padgino so that you can see the extent to which he looks exactly like Ali G's character in Talladega Nights. Oh, wow.

Really? They really got it. Yeah. I mean, they essentially stole both his likeness and his accent for that role.

But he is a lovely person. And also today's podcast is brought to you by Dry Bones. Dry Bones. Everybody's least favorite Mario Kart driver.

Never even tried. Never even tried to use dry bones. Hasn't happened a single time. My entire Mario Kart life.

Look, I've been playing Mario Kart for 32 years. I've played as Luigi the whole time. When I play as anyone other than Luigi, all it makes me feel is that I miss Luigi. Yeah.

I have the same experience with Donkey Kong. Oh, God. Donkey Kong is terrible, but we don't know. I know, but I learned how to play Mario Kart as Donkey Kong and I can't play as anybody else.

That's very funny. I only know how to play this game with terrible handling and very slow acceleration. Yeah, but I can knock into you with no problem. I will not change direction.

That's true. That's true. We also have a project across the message street from Pierre and Christina who write a message from our past selves. Today is the day.

You have to jump in the ocean today. It may be inconvenient and you may have worked. You may have commitment for the day this podcast airs. Oh, I hope it's not winter.

Well, we waited until after the solstice. We did it. Perfect. Pierre and Christina, it's not winter as long as you're in the Northern Hemisphere.

Yes. But I don't know that it's going to be super easy to jump in the ocean today, but I think you'll find a spot. I think past y'all may have failed to account for certain variables, but I think you can do it. I believe in you.

Yeah, you want to learn in that at least. This episode of your Hank and John is brought to you by Shopify. There are a lot of things that stand between I have an idea and this is an idea that actually exists in the world and people are buying things from me. And that is what Shopify makes easier.

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You can start your free trial at Shopify.com slash deerhank. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash deerhank with new subscription only while supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See you website for more details. It's from Quince.

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This next question comes from Meredith who asks deerhank and John. My Anthropocene Reviewed mug is probably my favorite mug right now but I've got more possible if not the issue with it. I drink a lot of tea so although it's technically a coffee mug it very rarely has coffee in it. What exactly makes a mug a coffee mug?

Is it weird that I drink tea from a mug with a review of coffee mugs on it? Cups and curiosities Meredith. So I'm very fond of the fact that the Anthropocene Reviewed has only released one piece of merch and it's a coffee mug that contains my review of coffee mugs that you can read nowhere except on the coffee mug. It makes me very happy.

It's my favorite thing that we've ever done but I failed to foresee of course Meredith's problem which many other people have emailed me about which is that it's weird to drink tea from a mug that announces itself very loudly as a coffee mug. I think it's okay Meredith. I think it's okay. I think it's what it sometimes it turns out that I was not doing a good job of imagining coffee mugs complexly and understanding that they have many different functions.

For example, my Anthropocene Reviewed Coffee Mug is sometimes an ice cream holder. Yeah, this is the thing. Like do I sometimes wipe things that aren't dishes with a dish towel? I do.

Do I sometimes use a stack of books as a tripod? I do. This is the human ingenuity and the reason why we call it a coffee mug in America is because we're coffee people. We don't have to be coffee people.

America is full of diverse takes and appreciations for different things and so we should be open to the fact that our coffee mugs are going to be used for various things and I sometimes drink water out of them. So there's that. Maybe I should make a tea mug that contains my review of tea. My hope is that tea is just as delicious as coffee is when drunk with the Anthropocene Reviewed mug mug.

Yes. You should have had it just to be a review of mug mugs. This next question comes from Tiki who writes Dear John and Hank, I have a baby sister who's at the stage of learning her ABCs so naturally the ABC song is played almost constantly in my house which is maybe wonder why does the order of the alphabet matter? Like I guess it makes it easier for children to memorize the alphabet but other than that the order of the letters has no significance to how we use the English language.

For example, the fact that C comes after B doesn't change the way that we speak or write. Yeah, that's definitely true. But there are all kinds of reasons why it is helpful to have an order to the alphabet. The first one, you have identified, which is that it's easier to remember the alphabet if we have an order to it.

The second is that you need to look things up in an order sometimes and alphabetically is a really good way to do that. These things are so useful that the alphabet has remained in alphabetical order for longer than any individual word has existed. Really? Yes.

Isn't that a wild notion? Yes. That is a little mind-blowing. I did a vleibreter's video about this at one point in the last 15 years.

Well, I forgot about it. That said, I would argue that while alphabetizing things is still really important and really useful, it is less important than it was certainly when I was a kid. Well, yeah. Now you have records and you can order them any way you want to.

You can do it alphabetically or by size or by color and just change the little thing in the database. But sometimes we still have physical objects that need to be ordered in a way. Yeah. So I think alphabetizing remains important.

I do think it's an interesting question how important alphabetizing will be in 100 years because it will be probably less significant than it is right now. And people might find it weird. I was thinking when I was reading this question in 200 years, are people going to have to learn the alphabet as adults so that they will be able to go back and read the dictionaries that we wrote? Well, I mean, can they are you asking if they'll be able to read or if they won't know what alphabet it would be?

No, of course they won't necessarily learn. They won't have the same need to learn the alphabet in the same order that we've learned it. Or at least that need won't be as acute in 100 years. I don't think.

But then again, I am terrible at predicting the future. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm like, or in green is still singing Humpty.

I think that we're still going to have that song in a silly part of the learning process. I think that alphabetical order is maybe the most concrete item of culture that will that will last through the millennia. No, that's an exaggeration. And you know it.

What else? The most concrete item of culture that will last for millennia. TikTok? I'm going to say Hamlet, but yeah, no, it might be TikTok.

I can't wait for the first like full cast TikTok version of Hamlet. I don't really know how to pull that off, but we'll figure it out. John, before we get to the important news from Mars and A.C. One of them, this question comes from Joseph, who asks Dear Hank and John, we have all heard time and time again that we should not waste water.

What does that mean exactly? I have a friend who says that that's not a real thing because of the water cycle. I'm sure it has basis and truth though. What is it?

And why should we not waste water? Joseph, first, Joseph, I love your instinct that somebody who is in a position of knowing about this stuff is probably right. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't ask the question and wonder why that is. And the answer, of course, is that it's true that we don't like eject water out of the atmosphere and remove it.

We don't remove water from the hydrological cycle by using it. That is true. It is also true that it requires a tremendous amount of energy to make water clean and to get water to the places where we want it to be. So what we're really trying to save is the energy that we use to create clean, safe water.

Right? Yes, that's a big piece of it. And in certain places that that amount of energy is much higher than other places. So if you live in a place that has a lot of water, that number is lower, that if you live in a place that does not, it's much higher.

There are also places where there is actually a limited amount of fresh water. And we are pumping it out of aquifers faster than the aquifers are replenishing. So these are like giant underground lakes, basically, and we're pumping water out of the lakes faster than the lakes are filling back up. So eventually that water will not be one of the ways that we can get water.

And there are other ways to try and get water if you're near the ocean, you can try and take the salt out of the water, but that's extremely energy intensive. You can move the water from where it is to places where it isn't. It also uses a tremendous amount of energy. So this question is different in different places, but in general, a lot of work and energy goes into moving a fairly finite resource, which is clean fresh water, which there's certainly lots of water in the world, but there isn't an infinite amount, and there's definitely not an infinite amount of fresh water.

And if you really do use more than we have access to or there's a long drought, and so the places where we get the water, either rivers or aquifers, start not being the places where we can turn to, then you have to solve that problem in really big and intense ways that involve rationing water, pulling back on some agriculture, actually having people leave the areas where they are, or moving the water from places where it is hundreds and hundreds of miles through pipelines in a way that is extremely energy intensive. It's a big, big question, but yes. Yeah, so in short, let's try to minimize our use of water, especially potable water. That's why I like to bring up all of the water I use to water my plants from the White River.

You can still have all the benefits of pesticides. Because they're in the river. It comes pre-round-upped. It's the great thing about the water in the White River.

It's already got all the fertilizer in it from the poop, the human feces that have been placed directly into the river system. What are we talking about? Right, the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. All right, take a start for the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

I'll start. AFC Wimbledon are building their new stadium that hopefully they will be able to move into for the start of the 2020-21 season. Now, of course, we don't know what the world is going to look like in August or for that matter of July, but they are currently building the stadium and there's going to be three temporary stands around three sides of the field and then one permanent stand and they've just released like what it's all going to look like. It's kind of a blue and yellow speckle along the three temporary stands and then it's going to be blue except in yellow is going to be written The Dawns on seats, which is very cool.

There's been a lot of conversations about how people feel about the speckling. I saw on Twitter one person wrote in reply to the speckling, Democracy doesn't work, which I thought was a little bit of an overreaction. I'm not ready to give up on the idea of fan ownership, which is simply because some people may not be happy with the speckling effect. I think the speckling effect is super cool and modern and that it looks great and I just cannot wait to be at the new Plow Lane watching AFC Wimbledon in real life.

I pray that day comes safely and comes soon. I also see that in this render, which looks very impressive. It looks like the most impressive football stadium I've ever seen. I think that may be more sort of angle that they've put it at than reality, but it looks like there's a bunch of boxes.

Yeah, there's some luxury boxes in the luxury boxes in the central, the permanent stand has like some just climate control. Right. I bet there'll be a variety of catering packages available. Exactly.

I let's hope. So we don't know what's going to happen, but I think it's wonderful that they're building the stadium and hopefully it will be complete soon and football will be ready to go with fans at some point. All right. Yes, please.

Well, this week in Mars News, we are now less than a month away from the launch of Perseverance. Really? Originally scheduled for July 17th, but there was a crane issue. So that happens.

I've been there. So got pushed back a few days to July 20th. Shouldn't be an issue. The full launch window is of course determined by how close Mars and Earth are to each other.

And this year that extends to August 11th. But if the launch ends up missing that window, we will have to wait 26 months for our next chance. So we got it. We got to get this done.

This is the one. This is the one. Fingers very crossed. It isn't the only mission aiming for this take off window.

So this happens to be 26 months. So frequently, there are several Mars missions that all launch at the same time. There's the hope Mars mission being led by the United Arab Emirates. And there's Tianwen one being led by China and the exo Mars mission, that's European Space Agency and Ross Cosmo's lead was scheduled for this year, but has been pushed back for those 26 months.

So to 2022, as part of the finishing touches on Perseverance, JPL added an aluminum plate in honor of the healthcare workers here on Earth who've been working to fight COVID-19 despite the slight launch delay on Earth and the rover is scheduled to land at Jasero Crater on February 18th, 2021. So just into the new year. So the two dates I have to worry about because you know, that's how I like to approach life. We got to get this thing off the ground by August 11th, and we got to get it on to Mars in February.

Yes. So the day we're looking at is July 20th for for launch right now. And if it's not launched by August, by August, you should start to non your fingernails a little bit. I'll just tell you exactly how to worry, not just how much to worry about how to manifest it.

I could not handle working on a project like that. I know I couldn't just talking about is freaking me out. So yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds really stressful.

But I am hopeful and I'm excited. It's a great moment every time when we have a launch like this. And it's an even greater moment when the rover lands safely on Mars. So here's the more that.

Yes. Oh, God. I always think there's no way I'm going to be able to watch that. And then I always end up watching it.

That's great. John, thank you for making a podcast with me. Thank you. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tuna Medici.

It's produced by Rosie on Hals Rowass and Sheridan Gibson. Julie Bloom is our community coordinator and the music hearing now and beginning the podcast by the Great Gunnarolla. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.