Space

You're listening to Radio Lab. From New York Public Radio. Public Radio WNYC. And NPR.

Some people go to therapy. Some to church. Others come here. To the northwest corner of a parking lot on Fire Island, where most nights, you'll find a handful of people.

Looking up. I come down here quite often. It's a great place to stargaze. You've got the sound of the ocean in the background, with the crashing waves.

It's a really nice relaxation of it. The night I visited this guy, Ron, was about one of twenty enthusiasts. Huddle over astral maps, staring through telescopes of all sizes. This is quite a telescope.

Some so big. You need a ladder. While other big cluster of stars. Yes, it certainly is.

Do you get attached to certain stars? Oh, yeah. You know, the first one you ever found and stuff like that. Do you remember your first?

Well, yeah, I'll be right. I was one of them. I really like. Ron's going to show it to you.

I didn't catch your name, actually. John. John. What it is is that to the naked eye, I'll be right.

I'll be right. I just look at a really faint single star. But when you look at it through a telescope, you're not looking there. Yeah, yeah.

Oh my god, they're so bright. Through the telescope, Alberio looked like a headlight, bright and flat and close, very immediate. But that was nothing compared to what happened next. It only walks up, points her finger at the star.

Wait, is that the one up here? And touches it. That one right here. That one right here.

It touches the star. That's really cool. That was one of the coolest things. Describe what you just did, please.

I turned on my green laser and I pointed at the star. It was one of the coolest things I have ever, ever, ever seen. Her name was Linda. She had a pen that was a laser.

And then I turned on a focused, bright green beam of light sprung from her hand to the star. Like a long green finger. She literally touched the star for a moment. Amazing.

I forgot the ground underneath my feet. And that star, Alberio, was 50 million light years away. It seemed right there. Look up, besides, you know, nebulas and stars and star clusters.

But what do you sort of look for exactly? Well, you really see sort of like where you are in the universe or at least in our own galaxy. It makes like a very interesting perspective for yourself, you know, and like what life is like here and what life must be like in other worlds and whether or not there's other planets out there with people or different life forms that we came to comprehend. This is Radio Lab.

I'm a chat at home run. Today on our program, we're going to project our minds out there. It's a great beyond it. I'm going to ask some basic questions here to help as always.

Hi, it's Robert Kowich. And in this hour, we discover how big, oh sorry, and in this hour, we find ourselves in space. We discover how immense, how huge space is. And then we ask ourselves, no, where does that leave us?

We are a spec on a spec on a spec on a spec. And as astrophysist Neil de Graz Tyson will remind us later in the program, it is difficult for little spec like us to find walking, talking, intelligence spec somewhere else in the universe, but say what you will be our trying. Speaking of which, let's begin by rewinding the clock back to 1977. Okay.

This is a big year for the space program because in August of that year, NASA launched a spacecraft carrying a gold record. You remember this, right? The record carried a message from us, to them, our story. Now it was Carl Sagan.

Because it was all it is, or ever was, or ever will be. Who led the team that made the record and that team included, actually was headed by Annie Droyin. I visited Annie at her home in Ithaca, New York, and we sat in the backyard near a waterfall. In the same spot, she says where Carl himself would sit and become so absorbed in what he was reading that he would not notice a deer standing right next to him.

My name is Annie Droyin, and I was honored to be the creative director of the Voyager interstellar message project, which began in early 1977. But how did this come about? I think about the project now, and it's so exciting to think about. I mean, it's such a romantic idea.

Did you know that at the time? Absolutely. We felt, first of all, that this was a kind of sacred trust, that here we were, have a very flawed human being with huge holes in our knowledge of all of these subjects, building a cultural Noah's Ark. It was a chance to tell something of what life on earth was like, two beings of perhaps a thousand million years from now.

Because the Voyager engineers were saying, this record will have a shelf life of a billion years. But that didn't raise goosebumps. Then you'd have to be made of wood. It was also the season that Carl Sagan and I fell so madly in love with each other.

But here we were taking on this mythic challenge and knowing that before it was done, two spacecraft would lift off from the planet earth, moving at an average speed of 35,000 miles an hour for the next thousand million years. And on it would be a kiss, a mother's first words to her newborn baby. Oh, come on now. Good girl.

Mozart. Ah, Beethoven. Greetings in the 59 most populous human languages. Oh, what's wrong with you?

What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? It's the first, as well as one non-human language, the readings of the humpback whales.

And it was a secret undertaking because it was saying, we want to be citizens of the cosmos. We want you to know about us. Tell me about the moment you fell in love with Carl Sagan. You said it was during the Voyager compilation.

Yes, it was. It was on June 1st, 1977. I had been looking for some time for that piece of Chinese music that we could put on the Voyager record and not feel like idiots were having done so. And done.

I was very excited because I'd finally found a ethnomusicologist, composer at Columbia University who told me without a moment's hesitation that this piece, Lowing Streams, which represented to me as one of the oldest pieces of Chinese music, 2,500 years old, was the piece we should put on the record. So I called Carl who was traveling. He was in Tucson, Arizona, giving a talk. And we had been alone many times during making the record and his friends for three years.

And neither of us had ever said anything to the other way, both of the popular people. We had these wonderful, storing conversations. We had both been completely just professional about everything and his friends. And he wasn't there, left a message.

Our later phone rings, pick up the phone. And I hear this wonderful voice and he said, I get back to my hotel room and I find this message. And it says, Annie called and I say to myself, why didn't you leave me this message 10 years ago? And my heart completely skipped a beat.

I can still remember it so perfectly. And I said, for keeps? And he said, do you mean get married? And I said yes.

And we never cast. We never even had any kind of personal discussion before. We both hung up the phone and I just screamed out loud. I remember it so well because it was this great Eureka moment.

It was just like scientific discovery. And then the phone rang and I was thinking, oh shit. And the phone rang and it was Carl and he said, I just want to make sure that really happened. We were getting married, right?

And I said, yeah, we're getting married. He said, OK, just wanted to make sure. And Spacecraft lifted off on August 20th and August 22nd. We told everyone involved and we were together from that moment until his death in 1996 in December.

Wow, that was romantic. It was romantic. And part of my feeling about Voyager, obviously, and part of what I was feeling in me, recording of my brain waves, my heart, my eyes, everything, in that meditation on the record. I had asked Carl whether or not it would be possible to compress the impulses in one's brain and nervous system into sound and then put that sound on the record and then think that perhaps the extraterrestrials of the future would be able to reconstitute that data into thought.

And he looked at me in a beautiful May Day in New York City and said, well, you know, thousand million years is a long time. Why don't you go do it? Because who knows? Who knows what's possible in a thousand million years?

And so my brain waves and REM, every little sound that my body was making, was recorded at Bellevue Hospital in New York. This was two days after Carl and I declared our love for each other. And so what I often think is that maybe a hundred million years from now, somebody flags that record down. And I always wonder because part of what I was thinking in this meditation was about the wonder of love and of being involved and to know it's on those two spacecraft.

Even now, whenever I'm down, you know, I'm thinking, it's still, they move. Thirty-five thousand miles an hour, leaving our solar system for the great wide open sea of interstellar space. Billions of years from now, the sun will have reduced this planet to a charred, ashy ball. But that record with Androids, brain waves and heartbeat on it will still be out there, somewhere intact.

In some remote region of the Milky Way, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished on a distant planet. Two hearts on a wing. Very nice. Lovely, right?

So there are six plus billion earthlings right now. And what the best thing I think about Earth is that we're so various. Right. So you can get six plus billion versions of being an earthling.

Yeah, like if you were Annie Joanne in Carl Sagan, what would you or recipe of us be? So we asked a bunch of people. Who? Comedian, Margaret Cho, you know, Neil Gaiman, this graphic novelist, Michael Cunningham, and author, very famous chef, Alice Waters.

They all sort of, you know, told us what they would send. I'll play you one. I'm not going to play all of them. It would take too long.

You can hear all of them on our website, actually, RadioLab.org. But here is one guy we asked. He's a composer. This is Philip Glass speaking.

The reason I've chosen Bach is that he had the ability to do two things at once. One was to deal concretely with the language and music. Almost you could say grammar of music. At the same time, while he was doing that, let's say, with one part of his brain, he was able to create music that we empathize with.

He takes you by the hand as it were and walks you into states of being that you didn't even know existed. Bach goes out in the spaceship. Well, anybody can hear that? We'll print a decision.

But I would also recommend strongly that we bring music in from other world traditions, whether it's from Africa or whether it's a throat singing that you might hear in Siberia or in the Arctic or a wonderful flute line that you might hear in South India. I was in India in 1967 and I was in a small village in the Himalayas called Kalim, on the board of Bhutanatabad. In a friend of mine, a rug dealer, had been in his shop numerous times to look at his rights. Rennell, Mr.

Glass, can't let me show you a picture. And he had gotten a hold of a film club of Gandhi. It was a march he took in the 30s called the, it was known as the Salt March. The English had put a tax on the use of salt.

Thousands and thousands of people joined him and they walked into the sea and they took their garments, put them into the water and harvested the salt. There is an indefinable, mysterious power that pertains everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. I saw the picture of this tiny little man.

Really, surrounded by thousands and thousands of people leading this march. And it was so moving. I think what you'd have to do is get that piece of flesh. It articulates in this very simple act how societies change.

How people that appear to be powerless and insignificant can bring about huge changes. Jad here, Robert and I will continue in a moment. No, no, no, no. You are listening to Radio Lab.

It's from New York Public Radio. B-U-N-Y-C. NPR. Wait, what's that?

Keep listening. Okay. I am Candace Kratty calling from St. Paul, Minnesota.

Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloane.org. This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Steve Kerr, one of the best coaches in the NBA, and certainly one of the most outspoken.

Calling the president a buffoon, I kind of regret that, even though I felt it in my heart, because I'm representing a large group of people, not only for our organization, but our fans too. Steve Kerr joins us next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour for the WNYC. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Radio Lab.

I'm Jada Bumran. And I'm Robert Kroll, and this is how we're talking about space, sending stuff into space, little messages and bottles or capsules, as it were, so that the extraterrestrials of the future might one day find it. If there are, really? Well, yes.

Yes. But surely there are. I mean, someday, Android and Space capsules are bound to run into someone and they'll know about us. Well, just a second year.

I know that the Anne story was beautiful and that you're in some kind of romantic haze, but if you would just get a little more cold-hearted here about solid facts, you might feel differently about this whole thing. What do you mean? What do you think is the likelihood of Anne's message of love ever being read by an intelligent alien somewhere in the world? Yeah, I see where you're going with this.

What do you have to ask that question? It's just a gesture. It's like a romantic thing. No, no, this isn't a attempt, I think, to be fair to her at a real conversation.

She wants someone to hear about this, but the chances are so remote when you consider the vastness of space. Suppose, for example, you wanted to visit just, I don't make it easy, the very next star to us, okay? Actually, it's too lucky. To meet a civilization, I think it'd be so hard to come out and find one of the very first stop.

Let's go four stars out, two stars out, two stars, zeta, tu-kane. I see you. I look kind, I look kind. If we increase the speed of the Voyager capsule, Anne Drian's message from 35,000 miles an hour, that's how fair she was going, right?

Yeah, that's right. Increase that speed to say a million miles an hour. How long do you think would it take for you to get to zeta, tu-kane? Three hundred years.

Thirty thousand years. Seriously? Whoa. This jedi boomerad is a 1200 generation trip.

You know where the aboom rods were? 1200 generations ago? Where? They were living in a cave, beating on a drum.

That's what they were doing. So imagine a space trip in which you have to go forward 1200 generations. That's a long trip. You're such a downer.

Well, you think that's tough? Listen to this. There's a whole another problem we're going to have to deal with. Not the problem of distance.

In this case, there's a problem of time. We have one of those, too. Every civilization has an arc. You can think of it in threes.

Step one. Step two. That's welcome. Step Jackson and his Chesterfield.

Bound along. How do you do with the body? And step three. What the hell is that?

Well, a million years ago, we were practically apes. We hardly begun to have conversation. Now we have technology. We have radio and TV and the universe can hear us.

How long would it be do you think? Well, we're either for global warming or for some kind of war. We're the way the news has been recently. Days.

Weeks. In any case. I'm going to guess like 100 million years or 10 million years. But that's still a flash of time in a universe.

Now, suppose instead of one civilization, let's have two civilizations. Another one out there. If they arrive on Earth ready to talk and we're then there's no way to have the conversation. Or on the other hand, if they arrive on Earth after there's nobody to talk to.

And in a 14 billion year universe with each civilization lasting in only 10 million years, the chances of two civilizations lining up in perfect synchrony so they can have a conversation. It's almost mathematically impossible. Yeah, fine fine. But you have to keep something in mind though, right?

Well, as a rule, people who make the argument you're making right now, pessimists as it were, as a rule, those people are usually proven wrong. That's always how it goes. And we play something. Well, in the history of human navigation, lots of things have seemed too lonely and too far away until someone did them.

This is the guy who produced the Voyager record. His name is Tim Ferriss. I mean, settling Polynesia in canoes navigating by the stars and the currents alone and hitting a tiny island after crossing hundreds or even thousands of miles of open ocean. That's a pretty lonely scary thing to do and yet thousands of Polynesians did it.

So I don't know what our future interstellar space flight will be, but it is important to keep in mind that the record of people who said that this or that journey of exploration is impossible or ill-advised historically those sorts of predictions have not fared very well. Yes, you just hold your horses. That's right. I mean, look, Tim is talking about the Pacific Ocean, which is big, but I'm talking about the fucking universe.

Mine is a much, much bigger space and therefore a much, much bigger problem. And when I want to ask questions about space, I usually go to this guy. Right now I realize why I'm talking about here. I hear you through that speaker, but not through my headphones.

Who is this? This is Brian Green, professor of mathematics and of physics at Columbia University. Are we on? Okay.

So, Jan, I said to Brian, if we've got a spacecraft crawling through this vast, vast, empty universe, how long a trip is it for just to start from wherever it is now to the end of the universe? And by the way, where is the end of the universe? That's a very natural question. You know, in most environments, you can walk for a while, but then you hit the end, you hit the end of the city, the end of the country.

But when it comes to the universe, we believe that there's probably no edge. There is no end. Now, how do you picture that? One possibility is that maybe the universe goes on forever.

Space may just carry on. You just keep on going and you'll just never run out of space. The other possibility is that you walk off into space for a while and you keep on walking and after a while, you realize that you've actually circled back to your starting point. Sort of like on the surface of the Earth, you don't find an edge.

You can't fall off the Earth's surface because when you walk, ultimately you'll come back to your starting point. That idea may apply to the fabric of space, to the entire cosmos. Although the Earth analogy is a little insufficient cause when I'm walking in Central Park. I am on the edge of the Earth cause when I look down, I see Earth.

But when I look up, I see none Earth. I see guests around the Earth. So I'm at the edge. Well, as if I were on a balloon, I'm on the surface of the balloon looking out at non-balloonedness.

Yeah, that's where the analogy fails. If you're on the surface of the Earth, you can jump off. You can jump up. So it feels like you're on an edge.

But in the universe, there is no notion of jumping off because there is nothing beyond the space that we inhabit. It is all there is and there is nothing outside of it. And now to make things even harder for our little capsule traveling through space. We now know that space, that the universe and the space that it is, is expanding, constantly expanding.

So imagine our little craft all alone in nothingness and every minute there's more nothingness and more nothingness. Has this always been happening? We think it's been happening since the very beginning. So if the Big Bang was the origin of the universe and this expansion has been going on for 13.7 billion years.

So there's more space all the time. Yes. Does that mean that it takes a longer time to go from one part of the universe to another? Absolutely.

So when you say something like the universe is expanding, what that seems to mean to you is that the empty spaces in the universe are getting bigger? Yes. So the intuitive but wrong picture would be that you picture the universe expanding into a pre-existing space, a pre-existing realm that the universe is now filling. Like a balloon.

Like a balloon, filling say the room in which you're blowing it up. But that imagery is wrong in the following way. It's not that the universe is expanding into a pre-existing space. It's that as the universe expands, it creates more space.

It creates the new space that then inhabits. Does that mean that there's no middle of the universe? Yes. The old idea was that there is a central point in the universe and the old idea was that we were at that central point in the universe.

But in the current way and more modern way of thinking about the universe, there is no center. The universe is actually expanding. But it's not expanding from a certain point in space. All of space is stretching uniformly.

Brian Green is professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. This leaves us in a sort of strange position. Yeah, lonely position. In the sense that we have this little capsule riding somewhere in a space which keeps changing we don't know where it is or where we are relative to other things and whatever we know is changing all the time.

It used to be so different. I forgot. Hello. Neil deGrasse Tyson who runs the Hayden Planetarium in New York City because once upon a time we knew where we were, at least we thought we knew where we were, and we were the stars.

Well, before Copernicus, the idea of our place in the universe was largely accepted to be the center. It looked that way for sure. You stand here on earth and look up and the sun rises and sets and the moon rises and the stars rise and set and the planets rise and set. Copernicus came around.

He put the sun in the middle of the known universe, allowing the planets to then grow. He goes around the sun, relegating earth to the status of a planet, being one of these objects that goes around the sun. That was a very dangerous idea at the time apparently. Yes, because that idea conflicted with all prevailing interpretation of scripture.

It had deep societal ramifications. And Copernicus knew this. He knew it so well that he said, I'm going to make sure I'm dead before this hits the bestseller list. So he didn't want to publish it during his own lifetime.

This book was basically published on his deathbed. Copernicus is 1600s? Oh, 15. Oh, yeah, 1543 I think was the pub date.

So now what happens? So now we're no longer, humankind is no longer at the center of things. Now what? Well, we're no longer at the center of the then known universe.

The then known universe was the objects of the solar system, the planets. But you look up at the night sky beyond the planets, what you see, stars. There's stars in every direction. In fact, if you count how many stars are to your left, how many are to your right, how many are above and below, it's about the same in every direction you look.

Hey, maybe even if earth is not the center of the solar system, the solar system is in the center of the rest of the universe. Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket. OK, now we can dig out of this hole that Copernicus put us in. Yeah, let's go ahead and do that.

So that group is king. No, yeah, our little family of planets, we're in the center. And so that prevailed for a while because it's a comforting concept, not only for the public but for the scientists as well. It wasn't until the 1920s where Harlow Shapley, then head of Harvard College Observatory, noticed globular clusters.

Those were more in one direction of the sky than the other. And he deduced that these things ought to know where the center of the gravity is, rather than these measly handful of stars that are sitting in front of us around on the sky. I mean, these big fat concentration of stars. Big fat, 100,000 star beehive concentrations of stars.

Star clusters. They ought to know where the center of the galaxy is, even if these single stars don't. And so he deduced that the center of the galaxy was off in the direction of Sagittarius on the sky. OK, so now people fighting that, people fighting that, but then all hell breaks loose because 1920s come in, Edwin Hubble grabs the business end of the biggest telescope of the day and determines that these fuzzy things among the stars are not the same distance as the stars themselves.

They're vastly farther away. In fact, you know, they kind of look like what this collection of stars might look like from afar. In fact, maybe they are other Milky ways. Maybe they are other galaxies.

Maybe we're not the whole story. Oh boy. Oh, wow, the sky keeps getting bigger and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. Oh, this was terrible for the ego.

I can tell you, I'm disappointed in myself. Oh, man. And so now, OK, maybe we're in the center of the that universe. Yeah, let's hope for that.

This way, we see about the same number of galaxies this way as that way as that way as that way. Kind of looks like we're at the center and they're all receding from us. So hey, we're at the center then, but now we're smarter than this now. We're not going to fall for that.

We fall for that one nine times already. We're not going to fall for this again. You mean somebody's sitting there in the corner thinking every time we make ourselves the star of the show we're wrong. We're wrong.

So we're not going to make that mistake again. And so you then apply Einstein's general theory of relativity. And it says, if you live in an expanding universe in this fabric of space and time, no matter where you are, it will look like you're at the center. Which means what?

There is no center? Yes. So that's how we could look like we're at the center of the actual universe, even though we're not because everybody sees the same signature of the expansion. Now there's an even stronger argument for than the numerics.

Let's look at the ingredients of the human body. You learn from biology class, we're mostly water. But what is water mostly? Hydrogen.

Hydrogen, oxygen, oxygen, oxygen. Look at the cosmos. The number one ingredient in the cosmos is hydrogen. Next in the universe, oxygen.

Next on earth, and in life, oxygen. Next in the universe, carbon. Next in life, carbon. Next in the universe, nitrogen.

Next on life, nitrogen. One for one. You go down the list. We are not simply in this universe, the universe is in us.

So we're not the center of the universe, we are on the side. Then our gang is not the center of everything, but it's just out on a wing. And then a galaxy that we're a part of is one of many. And the fact that we are alive is maybe not unique.

I got something where can we go. Oh, we can go lower. You ready? Yeah.

You want to go lower? Yeah. Okay. We may not even be the principal stuff of the universe.

That's how insignificant we are. Okay? We have learned the universe has this stuff that is gravity but doesn't otherwise interact with matter as we know it. It doesn't shine, it doesn't reflect, it doesn't block, it's dark.

It's called dark matter. So how much of the universe is the stuff that we can either see or that is blocked but we can just kind of detect. Four percent. What is not going to happen?

You asked how low it can be built. 96% of the universe is missing. 96% of the universe is not us. It's something else.

Is it you're working bias that if I came to you with a new discovery in which we were less important or a discovery which proposed that we were more important that you would guess that my scientific discovery that will be less important is more likely to be right? No doubt about it. That's correct. Now you call it a bias, but I don't.

I call that track record. Okay. Track record. We have among our exhibits here a timeline of the universe that begins with the Big Bang and you walk the equivalent length of 100 yards and time goes by with every step you take 70 million years depending on how long your legs are.

70 million years per step. Per step. And you do that for 100 yards and you get near the bottom, it's a gently sloping ramp. You get to the bottom of the ramp and then you're reminded that 65 million years ago the dinosaurs were roaming the earth ready to become extinct.

And then you take one more step on this ramp and you reach modern day. Well, at the end of that ramp we have mounted a single strand of human hair. The left side of that hair, cavemen were drawing cave paintings. The right side of that hair is this conversation right now.

So we are a speck on a speck on a speck on a speck. And the speck that you just heard talking to is over six feet tall by the way is Neil de Graze Tyson astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. The thing with that right there though is why I think a lot of people don't like science. Because anytime that anyone normal wants to say that we are important, there's some scientists in the corner who's yelling, bah!

About to get this back. Science is a preference. But I don't know. I think artists Shakespeare for example, who says what a piece of work is man, how noble and reasonable.

It seems like it's art's job to say that we are special, significant, glorious and it's science's job to say no or not. Right. Well maybe art is where we should go next. Stay with us.

I'm Jada Bumran. And I'm Robert Kollisch. Radio Lab will continue in a moment. You're listening to Radio Lab.

Radio Lab. From New York Public Radio. Public Radio. WNYC.

And NPR. Hi, my name is Britt Van and I live in Manhattan. My name is Erica Stister and I live in Brooklyn. I live in Best Friends since fifth grade.

Radio Lab is supported and part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alkripi Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.slow.org. This is Radio Lab, I'm Jada Bumran. And I'm Robert Krollisch.

And this hour on Radio Lab we're looking at space, more specifically, our place in it, our place in the cosmos. It's big. We're liberal. But since, as you mentioned before, the break sometimes artists have their own particular ways of tilting things back in our favor.

Let me introduce you to someone. Introduce yourself. He's an artist. I'm Dario Robletto.

Dario Robletto. I had artists live in San Antonio, Texas. I ran into Dario actually in New York at the Whitney Museum. He was 27 and this was his first solo show.

Ever show here in New York for solo show at the Whitney? Sculpture, mostly. That's his main thing. But on a side wall he was displaying some photographs.

Tell me what we're looking at which I had to show me. It's a series of seven digital photographs framed on the wall. Side by side, seven photos. All showing the same thing.

And tomato seeds. Seeds that are at different stages of blossoming. Think back to kindergarten. That's what these remind you of.

The day your teacher came in and said, okay class, we're going to grow some seeds. These pictures are of that day. More specifically, the day the seeds actually grew. Because each photo in there are seven shows one seed, tiny little seed poking its head out of a massive cup.

So what I did was these are custom made porcelain cups. If you can imagine the size of a star from cup. Dario made the cups, put some dirt in a seed inside and then crammed the top full of cotton. Cotton, which is also another school room element.

Final step. When the seeds grew. They grew. Each one is at a slightly different stage of development.

But basically it's that moment when the leaves are pushing, you know, waking up from a long sleep. Which that one kind of looks like yawning and your arms go up in the air. Also, I should point out that there's text printed right on the cups just as if a kid had written their name or something. And loopy cursive.

Can you read me with the name of the people on that? Yeah, so we have MJ Smith, F.R. Scobee, S.C. McCalliff, J.A.

Resonate Commission. Maybe you recognize those names. Maybe not. But here's the backstory.

Dario tells it's 1984. Everyone's excited about space. And NASA. NASA built this probe.

The NEF stands for the long duration environmental facility. This was a probe that was basically meant to store things for long periods of time. So it had all these compartments. 52 compartments, I believe.

And NASA, for the first time, opened it to the public. It was brilliant PR. They said, okay America, we've got this probe with all these compartments. What would you like to send into space?

They kind of said you send in a proposal for what you'd like to put on board. And we'll consider it. People have all stripes sent in ideas and farms. Paint samples.

Pondwall. All the way to a group of school kids got together and said, hey can we put some seeds on board? So NASA's, I think, seeing the great potential in what these children proposed further the experiments of it and put aboard a lot of seeds for the sole purpose that when they returned, they would be redistributed to the classrooms as a cool space seed artifact. April 6, 1984.

The probe filled the seeds and all kinds of things. Goes aboard the space shuttle. It goes aboard on the space shuttle Challenger. Successfully.

Probe is deployed from the Challenger. And it was scheduled to be picked up on the next shuttle mission by the Challenger. Well, the day on that pickup mission was the day the Challenger exploded. Coming up on the 32nd point in our countdown, he might have heard the second one.

We've had a goal for auto-equent. Start three, two, one. The 25th space shuttle mission and it is clear the tower. Procedures are in effect, though.

In a flash, seven people were gone. And America changed its mind about space. And the whole space program got put on hiatus for, I think, almost two years. And meanwhile, that little probe, the Challenger had been on its way to get, which was only supposed to be up there for about nine months.

Well, it stayed up there. This is a case where something literally got lost in space. Because this is floating out there. This probe, designed for nine months, ends up sitting in orbit for almost seven years.

January 19th, 1990, the probe was finally brought back after seven years. By another space shuttle mission. This time, without fanfare. Because all the kids that would have wanted those seeds were grown up.

They didn't know or care anymore. And the only people that did were collectors, NASA geeks. And I was able to obtain some of those seeds that went aboard that day. Through an online auction.

Luckily, they were vacuum sealed the whole time. But they were incredibly moody little seeds. They did not want to cooperate. He planted the seeds in the cotton filled cups.

And the seeds did break through the cotton, like spaceships bursting through clouds. And right as they did, he snapped photos. But then, days later, and suddenly, they all died. Oh, none of these seeds are alive anymore.

No, and I wanted them to. And like I said, they just, something just wasn't right anymore. I had originally, you know, wanted to take them to full bloom. It just wasn't meant to be.

But getting it here was quite a miracle. So I'll take this stage. If you willfully invest in the illusion of a photograph, as Dario does. This stage means that the seeds and everything they represent, the lives of the crew, the hope of a class of school kids, is frozen.

Alive again forever. Forever. And forever more. Then again, this is just an art project.

Sometimes reality doesn't cooperate. Because here's the sad coda to the story. It turns out the shuttle that picked up the probe in 1990 and brought it back was the Columbia. And just before Dario was preparing to show his pictures.

Just by coincidence, I had the photographs laid out in front of me going over some framing issues when the tragedy was first reported that morning. We were breaking in with the sad news this morning. The space shuttle Columbia has been seen apparently breaking up in the skies over Texas as it returned to Earth. Shortly after 9 a.m.

Eastern time this morning, searching rescue teams and reporting. To know suddenly the only two shuttles that these seeds ever had anything to do with were the two that we lost. It really hit me hard. Dario, blood as an artist, lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Nobody promised that space travel would be safe or pleasant or easy or even rewarding. All that was promised was that it would be an adventure. And sometimes we were in the mood. And sometimes we weren't.

Well, and Droyen Carl Sagan's widow, who began the show, she remembers what it was like the very beginning. President Kennedy, 1962, makes a speech which if you read about it in Herodotus, that some Persian king decreed that we would walk on the moon. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon.

It was the stuff of... of... doing. We choose to go to the moon and this decay and do the other things.

Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. Now, of course it was in reality part of the...

worst part of the Cold War and the madness of the nuclear arms race. But it brought out the very best in a whole bunch of people. And I remember feeling first walking on the moon when Americans first walked on the moon. And I was enraged at my government's conduct in the world, horrified by it.

But I had to admit that it made me really proud. And then as soon as NASA became involved with Space Shuttle, we lost the grand purpose. And it was very much to me as a mother of two children remembering when they were young, when they were toddlers, and they were first learning to walk. They would run away from me and encounter some frightening reality 10, 12 feet away, and then turn around and come running back to be around my ankles.

And that's what the last 25 years of the space program has been like. It kind of retreat to our mother's skirts. Yeah, according to Annie Droyin, somewhere around the Space Shuttle, we lost our nerve. Yeah, although there is now a new generation of people who would be space explorers and who say, in a loudest possible way, we don't want to be sissies in space anymore.

Of course, we've thought about the government always as the person taking us there. Take this guy. But I put forward here, the government is not going to get us there. The government is unable to take the risks required to open up this precious frontier.

The shuttle is costing a billion dollars a launch. That's a pathetic number. That's unreasonable. That was Peter Diamandis.

Remember him? Guy who offered the X Prize? The X Prize. The X Prize.

Global contest to build the first commercially manned spaceship. That's Space Prize? He was at a conference in Oxford in England called Ted Global. It was an audience filled with entrepreneurs and technologists and he said to them, you know why I created this prize?

You know what's really going to get people interested in space, exploring space, taking risks in space again? As we go forward. And here, his instinct is kind of different from any drones. What's going to bring people back to space he says?

Is wealth. Money. In fact, the greatest wealth. If you think about these other asteroids.

Well, asteroids. Think how much you could make if you could own an asteroid. There's a class of a nickel iron which in platinum group metal markets alone are worth something like $20 trillion. You can grab one of these rocks.

My plan is actually buy puts on the precious metal market and then actually claim that I'm going to get one. That will fund the actual mission to go and get one. What are puts? That's what you do to finance grab one of those rocks as he puts it.

But the key here remember is that you've got to create a business. And to do that you need a business plan. Some reason to invest and build and do. And for that he has actually kind of a cool phrase.

We need what I call an exothermic economic reaction in space. Which in ordinary English means there's got to be some way to get entrepreneurs to spend money. Their own money on some kind of space stuff. And how exactly?

Well, his first notion was he would sell tickets to rich billionaires. He sold a seat on the Russian space shuttle. The Soyuz. On the Soyuz.

For $20 million. $20 million. What? That is expensive.

But people are going to pay that. Not any people I know. I guess you're not going to get a whole lot of people at prizes. So then he came up with a bigger boulder broader plan.

Which was a prize. A prize. Because remember when Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. No, I don't remember.

I wasn't born yet. Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic to win a prize. That's really why you crossed? Seriously?

Yeah. For a cash prize. Peter thought, why don't I create a prize of my own. And he came up with the number 10 million bucks.

That would be the prize. Why 10 million? Because it was just big enough to be really attractive to young scientific teams all over the world. 10 million dollars.

And just small enough to be boring to conservative clunky companies like Lockheed and Boeing. You wouldn't ever think of anything interesting anyway. He's trying to split the difference. Yeah.

But you know, Peter doesn't have that kind of money. He's not a government. So where do you get a 10 million dollar? Probably the most difficult thing that I had to do was raise the capital for this.

I went to 100, 200 CEOs. No one believed it was done. Everyone said it was NASA. People are going to die.

How can you possibly put this forward? And what I ended up doing was going out to the insurance industry and buying a whole one insurance policy. You know how rare it is to hit a whole one on a golf course? Well, the insurance industry will make you a betting proposition.

If you go to the insurance company and say, I bet that I can go up and down space twice in the same two week period and they go, no, you can't. I'll give you a million dollars in premiums if you give me a 10 million dollar insurance policy. He made the offer. The insurance company said, well, this isn't going to happen, right?

The insurance company went to Boeing and Lockheed and said, are you going to compete? No, you've been competing. No, no one's going to win this thing. So they took a bet that no one would win by January of 2005 and I took a bet that someone would win.

Amazingly. Today, pilot Mike Melville made aviation history just two months before the deadline. The privately funded rocket plane, spaceship won. Fluid to the edge of space in a privately funded vehicle.

And the best thing is they paid off and checked in balance. Plus, he got tons of publicity. He incentivized young scientists all over the world. He did it with other people's money.

But then just as he was finishing the presentation, there was this guy in the room who got up and said, I almost wasn't going to ask this because I didn't want to end on a negative note. So you know Peter D. Mandy's. Maybe you're not that brilliant.

Maybe all you are is lucky. By encouraging innovation so effectively, you are encouraging risk-taking. And it is inevitable that sooner or later they will be deaths. Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely. And you're also... That's a little too enthusiastic. You've also made a very coherent explanation of why, frankly, in PR terms, investing in prices is very, very good value because you get the vast amounts of publicity.