Reflecting on Earth from Space

I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Fasses. Ten. Nine. Eight, seven. Today we are pitting facts against Frontiers. Four, three, two, one. as we tackle the moon. And lift off the crew of Artemis 2 now bound for the moon. Humanity's next great voyage begins. This week, four astronauts flew around the moon, going further into space than humans ever have before. The NASA mission is called Artemis 2, and they're scheduled to splash down back on Earth tomorrow. And all over the world, people have been stunned by this journey. Oh my goodness! It's not just what you see and you hear as the rocket nips off. You can actually feel the force of it through your body. It's absolutely amazing what's going on right now and all I can say is wow. She is the first woman to ever see the entirety of our planet. The world is following every moment of this mission. And that includes how the astronauts are getting by with a temperamental loo. Houston, we have a toilet burning! They're seeing shadows and when you see shadows you get to see terrain and relief and you get to see the scale of the mountains. You can hear the excitement in their voice when they're talking about these craters. It's absolutely phenomenal. The astronauts themselves are in awe of everything they're saying. Well, last night we did have our first view of the moon far side and It was just absolutely spectacular. You can see Copernicus, Rainier Gamma, it's just everything and absolutely unbelievable. This is incredible. Happy Moonjoy. And while these astronauts didn't land on the moon. In just two years. NASA hopes. On the moon. For the first time in over fifty years. And when that happens, when we actually see people walking on the moon again. That is sure to send our moon joy into warp drive. And Hel Abud Madrid, who studies space exploration now. Remembers that moment back in nineteen sixty nine and how amazing it was. He was eight years old living in Chihuahua, Mexico, and his dad woke him up to see it. And I just remember very clearly uh my my dad shaking me, Kim, come on. You gotta watch this. What do you remember from seeing on the screen? It was a small black and white TV. And it was this grainy picture. And I start watching And I see the humans stepping out. All Fap for Man. Yeah, please for the My dad keeps saying, this is a momentous occasion. Oh, we were talking about it the day after everybody uh was talking about it and and uh My uncle, my aunts were like, did you watch this? It was incredible. I mean we we made it to the moon, how far we had gone. And there in the corner was grandma saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah, but Don't we have enough problems here to be worrying about the moon? Why are we doing this? And that really stuck with me. to be a moon killjoy here. But more than fifty years on. still got a really good question here. Why are we doing this? Really? After all, back in nineteen sixty nine, what felt like this big day for humankind. Was also this huge political pissing contest between the US and the Soviet Union. Around the time the US won. They slashed NASA's budget. And for decades no one's been that serious about going back to the moon. That was until Just several years ago, really. Just as the US and China are getting particularly sassy with each other. Here we go again. The race to the moon is back on! With some new players as well. China's lunar rover touched down last night on the far side of the moon. India is set to head to the moon. Israel South Korea Japan In the last uh You know, five years or so, this has really exploded in terms of interest. There are 73 space agencies and probably 20 more are being planned because every country is realizing maybe there's something in it for us. In a recent NASA report. They said that a big reason to go to the moon would be to keep the US in the leaders' position. So they can Bon winning. And this week President Trump posted We are winning in space, on Earth, and everywhere in between. Economically, militarily, and now beyond the stars. Nobody comes close. End quote. So Is this just about winning? Today on the show we're returning to an episode that we ran a few years ago to ask. Why are we really going back to the moon? And when you listen to politicians and bigwigs in this space talk about Why we are doing this. Two big things come up a lot. And that's what we're gonna rove through today. One is this idea of a luder gold rush. Some say that there are trillions of dollars of resources up there in the moon waiting to be mined. And the first country to grab them will be one step closer to Global domination. Second thing is going to Mars. People are arguing that going to the moon is crucial to getting to our ultimate destination. The red planet. For real. When it comes to the moon, there's a lot of Why are we doing this? The science. Science versus the moon is coming up. Just after that. This episode is brought to you by Stelfers. Here comes three-time juggling champion Natalia Rogers. She's juggling law school. Her TA job. Oh, narrowly catches the laundry. What's that fourth ball? Parents unexpectedly showed up at dinner time? Is that too much for Natalia? Not with Stulfers Chicken Alfredo and its mouth watering mix of Asiago, Romano, and Parmesan. When you're juggling four things at once and the clock strikes dinner, think Stalfers. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate see. According to Indeed Data, sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.comslash Podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. Today we're asking. Why are we going back to the moon? Really? One reason is this idea of a lunar gold rush. that the moon is a treasure trove of valuable stuff just waiting for us to dig it all up. And the first country to get their hooks in? wins. We know that the moon does have untapped resources in it. When the Apollo astronauts brought back moon rocks, scientists discovered that, yes, they contained rare earth elements. Which are super important to our lives today. part of our renewable energy industry. They aren't your phones. The phone that you have in your hand right now has rare earth. They are in your cars. So it's part of our society right now. That's Angel Abud Madrid again. He's now the director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Minds. Ankel told us that one of these rare earth elements is called terbium. If you haven't heard of it, it's a shiny soft metal. And it's used to make the colour green on your phone. And there's a bunch of elements like this. Some of them really hard to pronounce. Uh Lanthanum and Utreum and like neodemium. Proceum. Rare so also used in stuff like solar panels and electric cars. The problem is that on earth, mining these elements is pretty nasty. It can pollute soil and waterways. Plus, the vast majority of rare earths that we use come from China. And so the idea is that if the US or other countries could get their mitts on the stuff on the moon. and then mine it without polluting the earth, that would be win win. So people thought. Well, these are important elements and we found them on the moon. Would it be worth going after them? And to you, i is it worth going after them? Uh Not at this point. Not from the information that we have. So even though these things are called rare earth elements, there's actually a lot of them here on Earth. And not just in China. That's just currently where most of the mining is happening. All over the globe we're finding these elements. Even though they're called rare earth elements, they're actually not that rare. They're not actually that rare, believe it or not. Curiously, there isn't even that much of this stuff on the moon. We know from satellite data that there's a bit of a hotspot of rare earths, which happens to be on the right eye of the man in the moon. Even there. The elements aren't just sitting there like a big nugget of gold. They're diluted, mixed up with the moon dirt. And would be hard to mine. Let me give you an analogy. It's like uh If you want to get rare earth on Earth is like putting a bucket in Seattle or New Orleans and collecting Rain water from there. as compare as On the moon, it will be us having a a bucket on Death Valley. Oh probably one of the driest place on earth. You're looking for droplets. Wow. Uh at this point. It is. It's sounding like we should probably work out ways to mine rare earth safely here on Earth and Even get better at recycling the stuff on our phones before we resort to all the hassle and expense of going to the moon for these elements. There is another idea that's been making the rounds on the web and in science fiction. And it's that the real treasure on the moon. is this thing called helium three. One Apollo astronaut has called it quote. The best reason to return to the moon in the 21st century. End quote. Helium 3 is a version of helium that people say could be used as fuel for clean nuclear energy. That means no harmful radioactive waste. We'd still get All this great power. So you don't need much to generate a lot of energy. If you were to helium, uh about 220 pounds. So that's the weight of So 220 pounds of helium, you bring it all together, you generate energy, it will be enough to light up a city like Dallas for a full year. That's the amount of energy. that you have from just two hundred and twenty pounds of helium. Wow. And that would have no waste, not like the nuclear reactors we have now. No radioactive waste. The beauty of helium three is that what is the waste is just helium. The same thing that you put on balloons. Yeah, everyone at these nuclear reactors could just be like Hello Make it clean energy. Yeah. Everybody working there will have that that type of voice, yeah. This all sounds great. Say. It's really, really great. He's the cat. While it's true that the moon has way more of this special helium than we have here on Earth. If today you went all the way to the moon and grabbed some helium three, then brought it back You couldn't use it to power a city right now. And that's because the kind of nuclear reactor that we would use for this stuff. It doesn't exist. Right now, the way that we make nuclear power is by ripping atoms apart and using the energy for power. Clear fission. But for helium three, we'd need to do something called nuclear fusion. This is the opposite. Instead of splitting the atom, you bring two of those atoms together, you fuse them. And that way you generate energy. So to get this helium three working, we're gonna need to crack nuclear fusion. And we have not cracked that yet. That's exactly right. Scientists and engineers have been working on controlling fusion for years and decades. It's been really hard. It's really hard to get that initial reaction going, that fusing of the elements. I feel like because fusion sounds like fission, you're like, well, you just need to change the I for you. This is easy. But it's actually like completely different technology. That's a whole that's quite a change of a letter. It's it takes a lot of work. And sure, it's possible that some countries are interested in this because they want to stake their claim on helium three, like just in case it's useful someday and we can crack nuclear fusion. But I asked Angel. So if someone said to you g you know say someone big Big in the White House, who has like a ch a massive checkbook and was like, I wanna go to the moon for this helium three. What would you tell? That we can use that money for something else at the moment. Right. So for now, stripping the moon for parts to use back on earth. It's not making a lot of sense, and it is kind of feeling like going back to the moon is more for international bragging rights. What about this idea that popping back up to the moon could help us get to Mars? Perhaps the moon could be some kind of launching pad that could catapult us into the rest of the solar system. And this idea seems to be what got President Trump On board with the moon several years ago. They said no sir, it's a launching pad for Mars, so we'll be doing uh the moon. But we'll really be doing Mars. So, do we really need to do the moon to do Mars? That answer. After the break. Plus, we'll find out why going to the moon might help us reveal secrets about the universe. Like why you, me, and everything we know. exists at all. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zetbound Ter Zepitide may be able to help. Zetbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity, or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. ZetBound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. Zepbound contains terzepatide and should not be used with other terzepitide containing products or any GLP1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zep Bound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. 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But when you're ready to go, there's Expedia, the one place you go to go places. Flights, hotels, vacation homes, cars, you can save when you bundle, or book as you go and still save. So what are you waiting for? Expedia, the one place you go to go places. Members only savings vary. Refreshing Wild Cherry Cola. Meets smooth cream. The tree you deserve. Pepsi Wild Cherry and Cream. Treat yourself. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus. Let's go! Get ready for a new case. We're gonna crack this case and prove we're vicarious partners level five! New friends. You are Gail Destinate. And your last name? The Snake. Dream Team. New habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly working at. Zotopia 2. Now available on Disney Plus rated PG. Welcome back. So it's looking like the so-called lunar gold rush is more like a lunar gold bust. So What's the point of going to the moon? Well some people say that we've gotta go back to the moon. So that we can get to Mars. And to find out if that's true, we called up Nicole Zellner. She's a professor of physics at Albion College in Michigan. And Nicole is very excited about getting us to the red planet. Well, humans have explored for All of humanity and Mars is intriguing, um, as just the next step in in human exploration. Technically speaking, you don't have to go to the moon to go to Mars. We can fly direct. In fact, that's what Elon Musk is planning to do with SpaceX. But Nicole says that doesn't mean the moon is useless here. NASA released this big report about their plans for the moon, and it actually does have to do with Mars. but not to use it as a launch pad. Their idea is to use it as a training ground for Mars. Which Nicole says makes a lot of sense. You're not gonna climb Mount Everest on a whim, right? You're gonna climb somewhere in the cat skills first, and then you're gonna you're gonna work your way up um into higher and higher elevations. You're you're gonna train for that Mount Everest. And you can think about Mars being the Mount Everest for now. Because Mars is so much further away than the Moon. It takes just a few days to get to the Moon, but at least six months to get to Mars. If you forget your wrench there. There's no Amazon Prime. Producer Meryl Horn talked to Nicole about it. You're not just gonna go there without any practice. That Like a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for disaster. Yeah. I was gonna say it's a fool's errand. I mean it's it's you just don't go somewhere without practicing it first. I mean, that's common sense. Already on Artemis 2, they've learned a bunch of things. The toilet broke and they had to pee in bags at one point. and running. Mission specialist Christina Cook helped fix it. I'm the space plumber. I'm proud of to call myself the space plumber. They've also been a bit chilly on board, and astronaut Victor Glover, the pilot on Artemis 2, said at one point that he'd hoped they'd pack different sleeping bags. It is quite cold and uh yeah, we're wishing we had the uh the the uh lower temperature sleeping bags with us. You don't wanna be shivering all the way to Mars. And NASA's longer-term plan on the moon is actually pretty fun when you look at the details. Like I mentioned, in two years they're planning to put people on the moon. And then in the longer term, NASA is talking about building a lunar base and learning how to deal with the tough condition that come with being on a whole new space rock. is moon dust. It's like tiny bits of corrosive glass that were a huge pain in the ass for the Apollo astronauts. Nicole told us some of the things they said about it. I was almost blinded. Junk immediately got into my eyes. The dust really bothered my eyes and throat. I was tasting it and eating it. So when you're in an environment where you can't even go outside without putting a space suit on, and then you come back inside, you've got dust everywhere. Yeah, you gotta figure out how to how to deal with that. And another thing that they'll be dealing with is drinking water. our moonstronauts will get their water from a spacecraft orbiting the moon, kinda like the International Space Station. But it's hoped that these pioneers will ultimately find good water sources on the moon that they could drink and then start to fend for themselves. And eventually, the vision is that if we do find enough water on the moon, maybe we'd use it not just for drinking water, but for something else. As fuel. to power rocket ships that would venture out into the solar system. And this isn't totally bonkers. You know, water, even on the moon, is just hydrogen and oxygen. And the fuel that we usually use for rockets now. It's hydrogen. And we can split apart those water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. And then that hydrogen can be used as a rocket fuel. Oh, do we have All the science for that, yes? We do. Yeah. We we know how to do this. Plus, having a gas station on the moon would be an added bonus. 'cause it would be easier for rockets to take off from around there. 'Cause they could sidestep Earth's strong gravity. So it makes sense that you'd want to figure out the nuts and bolts of living on the moon before you live on Mars. But maybe you're not sold on any of this. Maybe going to Mars just feels like part of the same pissing contest. And it's starting to feel like what we really need is a giant toilet roll on the moon. Well guess what? We found one. And turns out, it's one of the best reasons we've heard. to go back to the moon. One of its biggest cheerleaders is Greg Hallanin, a professor of astronomy at Caltech. And he wants to put a telescope on the moon, on the far side, to be specific. That's the side that's always facing away from us. And Greg and his team are so abbed about this. That they actually named their telescope Far Side. And it's an acronym. Uh it it stands for Are you looking it up? Did I know to Fire And 100% I am guilty. I I have not memorized the horribly forced acronym we have used to name the array Fireside. It is called the Fireside Array For radio science investigations of the dark ages and exoplanets. Wait, what what is it again? It's the um Far Side Array. for radio science investigations of the dark ages and exoplanets. And remember the first word of the acronym is the acronym. So How bad an acronym is that? As bad as the acronym is. It's gonna look great. Greg sent me a picture. Here we go. Can you see that okay? Ooh, it looks real pretty. It does, it does. So what we're looking at, look, to tell you the truth, is it looks like a real space age toilet roll a little? It does. It's got that hole at the bottom. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it does. It does. It's very fan it's very fancy toilet roll. It's gold it's gold plated. I don't think it'd feel very good, but it it it would be very expensive. The plan is that this role will deploy a giant telescope that will cover an area that's ten kilometers across. That's over six miles. In my opinion, if we're gonna go to the moon This is why we should go. Okay, so this awkwardly named toilet roll telescope won't feel good for wiping your bum. This telescope is gonna do something even better. It's gonna help us understand why your bum exists at all. To understand how. Let's travel all the way back in time, to a period before basically anything existed. It's cold. Dark ages. It's this huge gap in time right after the big bang. Scientists agree that some 14 billion years ago, the entire universe was inside this teeny, tiny, incredibly hot bubble, which went. Exploded. Universe was born. From here, hot plasma was thrown up everywhere. And when that settles All we have left are these dark clouds everywhere. At that point the entire universe was a sea of hydrogen and some helium and basically nothing else. Just a sea of neutral stuff. A nun. Something changes. Out of this sea of stuff. Stars formed, and then galaxies, and then yada yada yada, dinosaurs, big max, podcasts, everything we know. And the big mystery is... What changed in this weird dark soup that caused stars and everything we know to be born? Because without that, we'd still be in darkness. We don't know how it happened. And the reason that this is such a big mystery is that our traditional tools for peering back in time. Telescopes that measure light. But they can't help us here. Like even if we build a giant one. But you could build a space telescope the size of the planet Earth. It wouldn't be good enough because There was no light. No light, no optical light that we could see with our eyes. Hence the term the dark ages. The only things that existed back in the dark ages. Was this soup of hydrogen and some helium and a couple of other small, you know, yeah, elements. And since there was a bunch of hydrogen float around in the dark ages. Is the K. We need to be able to measure hydrogen to know what happened. Greg's telescope is designed to do just this. Because it turns out That that soup of hydrogen from billions of years ago. It made radio waves. That we can still find today. Greg reckons if we could hear it, it would sound something like this. On one, two, three. a quiet hiss from the universe could be what we need to reveal the secrets of our cosmic dawn. By analyzing the radio waves, Greg reckons that we could get a sort of timeline. Of what happened. We can play a movie. That tells us how the universe evolved. All the way through. to uh um when we can actually see galaxies and stars. And Greg needs to put this telescope on the moon. It wouldn't work if we put it on earth because we have this rather annoying atmosphere. The signal can't get through the atmosphere. You just kept it's like looking through a brick wall, literally. You know, it's that's how that's how how much the signal is blocked by the atmosphere. So you just can't see it. And that's why we hop over the brick wall and go to the moon. Greg hopes that his super fancy telescope will also help us solve another big mystery of the universe. Are we alone? Because it's souped up equipment can study planets outside of our solar system called exoplanets. In particular, it'll be looking for exoplanets that have magnetic fields, also called Nitospheres, which we think are important for life. For example, uh has a magnetosphere. Radio telescopes can pick it up. In fact, when Earth's magnetic field is converted into sound This is what it sounds like. I Meryl talked to Greg about his big plans. Let's say, you know, this is all set up, you turn on the switch and you start getting this data, and then like you find an exoplanet with a magnetosphere. How big a moment would that be? That's my my ultimate dream. We are designing and building the space telescopes. The can Ash detect. signatures of life of other planets. You know, that would be such a profound moment, you know, discovering life outside our solar system. I assumed that like The politicians all around the world that this is just kind of a pissing contest about who can get to the moon faster and who can put the coolest thing on the moon, and then the scientists just get to kind of go, Okay, honey. But while while you're having a pissing contest, I'm gonna do some cool s on the side. I mean the Apollo the Apollo missions very fundamentally was the mother of all pissing contests, right? Right. Um It's possible for national prestige projects to be fundamentally good. in their application. I think the lunar landing is an example of that. The moon landing it I think really like Achieve so much. transformed our position and our view of ourselves in the cosmos. Um there there were signs done for the moon that was fundamental. So we once again even though it was in its origin Like you said, a pissing contest. In its eventuality, I think it was a fundamentally beneficial thing for all humanity. I think the same applies to what happens on the moon in the future. Greg and everyone we spoke to about this. These literal moon shots. Always seemed to pay us back in spades. The technology that we developed in the first moon race eventually led to things like smaller computers, GPS. Even memory foam. Funnily enough. always forgets about. So even though In some ways going back to the moon is still a political pissing contest. At least we get some cool science. Well that is maybe Isn't a science reason for going to the moon. Seeing all of these Stunning images of Eight is on the moon. And this big lonely blue marble that we call home that are coming back from this mission. It's making a lot of folks have Big feelings about earth. And how fragile and small we are. Which is some feelings that You don't get from most pissing contests. There's so much beauty and so much life and so much potential. And What are we doing with it? For me, realizing that this is our address in the universe, that this is the place that we inhabit, it's freeing. I can really see Earth as one thing. Maybe the distance we are from you. makes you think what we're doing is special, but we're the same distance from you, and I'm trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special. In all of this emptiness, this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together. Science masses. Hi, this is Meryl again. Just a quick update. Since we originally ran this episode, there's been a newfound interest in helium 3, and it's not just about nuclear fusion. This stuff is being used for things like quantum computing and medical equipment. And some companies have even gotten contracts from the US government to start harvesting helium three from the moon in the next several years. Okay, back to Wendy and the credits.