Explorers Festival, Saturday June 17 | National Geographic

From a distance, it always seems impossible. But impossible is a place we haven't been to yet. Impossible is what beckons us to go further, to explore. It calls us from the wild, lures us into the unknown, asks us to dig deeper, to look at things from new perspectives, and sometimes forces us to change the way we see. The impossible appears in the darkest hours, taunts us with answers in the most unlikely places, hides solutions where there once were none. It can drive us to the brink, but it's what beats in the heart of every explorer.

[Music]

We go into the impossible. The closer we are to making it possible. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Grosvenor Auditorium for our presentation of "Red Planet versus Blue Planet: Where Do We Explore Next?" Please welcome to the National Geographic Explorers Festival stage National Geographic Society Executive Vice President and Chief Program Officer, Brooke Brunette.

I'm happy to see all of you here. Good morning! Thanks for coming today. We are so thrilled to include all of you in something that we've kind of kept to ourselves for a couple of years, which is this great explorer symposium. We usually invite our explorers to town every year, and a huge number of them have come this time. What we want to do is try and open this up to our friends and neighbors in Washington and have something that's a fun public event.

So we have a couple of these, and we hope you'll stick around with us. Today’s event is going to be fantastic. Then tonight we have a celebration of exploration over at the Listener Auditorium. We had a big crowd, and then tomorrow, there'll be a further film festival here. But it's just one way of saying welcome in because we have some great people here.

So today we will be doing a fantastic program. We sort of had this idea because we've been thinking about what is exploration and why do we do it? Why do we humans do this? We were thinking about where the next frontiers would be for all of us. As you saw, we're thinking about furthering all the time. We thought, there are some people who want to go up to Mars and then there are these other people who we're talking to who always want to go down to the bottom of the ocean.

We sort of thought that this was a Red Planet, Blue Planet Smackdown that we would have here. So welcome to our smackdown! The correct answer at the end of the day may be both, but we thought we would invite some fantastic people. So you'll really see a great lineup today.

We have our explorers in residence, Bob Ballard and Sylvia Earle, who are both fantastic. We have the first Canadian commander of the ISS, Chris Hadfield, who we're so thrilled to have here. We have some of our emerging explorers, some fantastic authors, and interesting people. Later today, there'll be a special taping of the National Geographic show "Star Talk," which is hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, who will get the Hubbard medal from us later tonight and talking to James Cameron, who has a lot of opinions about our Red Planet, Blue Planet.

So there's going to be a great day today, and we're so glad you could join us. But first, let's look at a little setup video before I introduce your MC.

[Music]

We all have come from this microscopic egg, many many times smaller than a mustard seed. Each egg is hardwired into our DNA. Each iteration of life pushes us further. The question has always been and will always be, where do we go? Impossible has traversed continents and glaciers. We've climbed and dove around submersibles to the bottom of the ocean. We push further into the heavens, setting our sights on the fourth planet from the sun.

The second most habitable planet in the solar system, Mars, could hold proof that life exists beyond Earth. A mission to Mars will inspire a generation.

[Music]

But as we reach into the universe, it's easy to forget there's so much left to explore right in our own doorstep because we've only truly explored about a third of our planet's floor, carefully mapped. It holds answers about life that we may never know. Exploration has always been dangerous, and sending humans to another planet or even the ocean floor is extremely challenging and something we should be doing.

[Music]

So, why survival knowledge, the pursuit of the unknown? Exploration is who we are. So, Mars or the ocean, you choose, where do we go next?

[Music]

Well, that's exciting to all of us. We get thrilled about this. So, I'm going to introduce our Master of Ceremonies today, one of our favorite explorers. We have lots of favorites, but Kenny Broad has been a 2006 emerging explorer, and then in 2011, he and his partner became the Explorers of the Year, which was a fantastic honor, and he's really a great, great person. He'll be fun!

Anyway, he's an environmental anthropologist by trade, and he has done just about everything. He's one of those people who's done all sorts of things. He's done filmmaking and scientific expeditions almost everywhere. He's a licensed U.S. Coast Guard Captain and a commercial helicopter pilot. He has multiple dive ratings, so he's actually been in that blue hole almost to the bottom of it.

By day, he's a professor at the University of Miami, where he directs the Abess Center of Ecosystem Science and Policy, and he's also the co-director of the Center for Research on Environmental Decision Making at Columbia University. He collaborates with everyone, and he's one of the greats in pulling a lot of different people together to talk about really interesting problems.

So he's a perfect person to pull this together today. So I'm pleased to welcome Kenny Broad!

Good morning! Good morning! Good morning! You hear me all right? No glare? Everyone's caffeinated, all right? They gave me cards, so let me get this done. Oh my God! If found wandering, please return to National Geographic.

No, so let me do the housekeeping part of today. You can all join the conversation on social media by using the hashtag #NatGeoFest, and we are being live-streamed around the world. So I want to say hello to our live stream guests wherever you're looking at us from, and thank you for tuning in. Please send us your questions as you watch so we can incorporate them into our Q&A at the end of the session.

One more card is: the music we didn't get to hear back there, but you've been listening to live music from Taylor Jordan, and he's also known as The Greatest Hoax. He's a climate scientist but hey, and a classically trained pianist and a music producer. He usually plays at night and I'm not sure if I—they wrote—maybe he's a vampire, but throughout the day he'll be sharing his original creations with us.

So, all right, I got that. That was the hardest part of the day! Anyway, thank you all for coming out this morning.

Sure, Brunette described what a sort of crazy week it's been. I think almost 150 explorers descended on the National Geographic campus from all over the place. I mean, everyone says it feels different, but it actually smells different—it really does! I won't go into detail—it's not me—but it's like these inspiring, amazing conversations that range from gender equity, human rights, and how those relate directly to the sort of environmental and conservation issues that we care about, all the way through to the most esoteric discussions about what might go on in space and how that affects us, and even learning about the origins of life.

So it's an intense week, and it's still going on! It actually went on until one in the morning last night, with a party where there were people sleeping in the green room when I got here. But you're left feeling completely inadequate, but also very motivated as you move forward.

So it's wonderful! You can watch everything still online, so please take a look at it. We're going to sort of continue the existential thoughts and take them to new depths and heights with a series of conversations today with extremophiles, people who are on the sort of cutting-edge of thinking, and actually physically going to these most extreme environments.

And I think I've seen it before—they played a couple of videos beforehand, the startup to the show, and those gave some of what I would call rational reasons why we explore—-the pursuit of knowledge, thinking about the future, survival of our species, and perhaps even some genetic reasons why we're driven to explore.

A fellow National Geographic explorer, Tierney Thys, sent me a short clip. It's not as nicely produced as this, but they also, I think it gets across some of the emotion and some of the other, I think, more controversial aspects that are related to exploration. I’d like to play it; it’s short. And again, it’s not final. You know?

[Video plays]

Yeah, that—actually when she first sent it to me, besides it being hilarious, it reminded me of the very first expedition I was on. At least it had adult supervision. It was in the late 1980s with someone who ended up being my mentor, Wes Skiles, and it was a remote part of the Caribbean—it was hard to get there, all the kind of expedition stuff.

And I forget how, but somehow, I was the youngest one, and I got the good fortune of being the first one to get to dive in one of these offshore underwater caves called Blue holes. I did my dive—I came up a few hours later to the back of the boat. Wes is hanging over the top; a bunch of people are hanging over. And I just held up my exploration reel that was empty. I laid out all the line, explored this cave, full of hubris and, you know, chest-thumping, whatever. And he just looked at me with his southern drawl and he said, “Where’s the data?”

And I didn’t take pictures; I didn’t survey the cave; I didn’t take a sample. And it really kind of drove home the difference between I guess adventure and exploration. And increasingly, I think there's always been a blur in the lines between exploration and exploitation.

And you know, whether it's in deep sea as we go deeper to look for manganese nodules, whether it's already plans to do space mining for rare Earth metals, or whether it's just doing something to get as many YouTube hits as possible, because that has media and financial value, these are all sort of, there's a range of ethical moral questions related to exploration.

You know, in the colonial days, as well as in our post-colonial world right now, there's, there's probably one of those—certainly at the forefront—should we be going to these places when we’re not even taking care or able to handle resources here on the surface? So these are the sorts of issues I think we're going to start to talk about today with a great group of panelists.

So I’m going to introduce the moderator, who’ll then introduce the first panel of the day, which is called “Leaving Terra Firma.” And I have a card, because I don’t want to mess someone else up, but our moderator is Joel Achenbach. Many of you have probably heard of him. He’s been a long-time contributor, I think since 1988, to National Geographic. He’s been with The Washington Post since 1990. He’s got many books. Their topics range from alien life to the Deepwater Horizon spill. He’s got a blog that you can follow called Achenblog.

And I’m excited to wait till you see the panel he has. So please join me in welcoming Joel to the stage!

[Applause]

All right, thanks a lot! Thank you, Kenny! Thanks for being here. They made me turn off my phone, which was kind of a bummer because I wanted to call my mom and say, “Mom, you’re not going to believe who I’m hanging out with this morning.” Okay, so this panel includes like the guy who found the Titanic, right? Yeah!

I really wanted to tell my mom that. There’s an astronaut, you know, and I don’t know about you, but astronauts are sort of amazing, you know? I mean, so I’m supposed to be the serious moderator, but I’m kind of in awe. So let’s bring them on out here.

So here we go: Steve Petranic, okay, legendary editor—uh Bethany Ellman, come on out—Chris Hadfield, astronaut, and Bob Ballard!

Okay, so let me just say, I don’t know about you folks, but like this morning, coming out here, I was really worried about parking, you know? Like where will I park? And then I thought, you know, I bet you Bob Ballard's not worried about parking, you know? I mean he went to the Titanic, like, at the bottom of the ocean. He doesn’t worry about stuff like that.

So anyway, I didn't do a very full introduction of who each person is, but we'll work our way down here. Bob, let’s start with you. This whole panel is Red Planet versus Blue Planet. Have we explored fully the Blue Planet? I mean, are we all done? What else is there to see here?

We have better maps of Mars than of our planet. We have better maps of Mars than of our planet. There’s no, no kidding. You can see Mars. It’s pretty hard to see our planet because it’s covered with 72 percent of it with water. So it's a much greater challenge to map our planet. Although the cost of mapping Mars I think was three billion; you could map our planet for the same amount of money. We haven’t done it yet.

So you're talking about the deep sea—72 percent of the Earth—which is also 50 percent of the United States of America. We have the largest underwater holdings of any other nation on Earth, and we don’t have maps of half of the United States.

Okay, so lots of room to explore there, clearly. Um, let’s talk to Chris Hadfield. Canadian astronaut! I mean, yeah! So Chris, you have actually explored in space. We were talking on the phone a while back that you were spacewalking during an aurora. I mean, you've had these experiences that few other people have had.

Obviously, I think everyone would love just to hear some stories about that, sure! Can you put that also in the context of how this is important for us as a species?

Sure! Yeah, there’s a bunch of explorations. Oh, we’re all explorers fundamentally. That’s how we've discovered the world around ourselves from the time we learn to walk. But I’ve been lucky enough to fly in space three times, and I’ve gone around this blue planet about 2,600 times or so; and as you say, actually be outside on a spacewalk, going through the aurora as it was rippling past the ship in between my legs and all around me.

It’s intriguing—the contrast of Red Planet versus Blue. I think we’d win right now, actually, Red Planet versus Blue Planet. But I think it’s important that we encourage exploration. It’s where on the edge of the frontiers of things, that we discover the most.

And by challenging ourselves to go into an environment we’ve never been before, whether it’s down on the where the ocean is spreading in the Straits of Juan de Fuca, whether it’s looking like we just saw underneath the polar ice cap of Mars, where there are caves that may have been caused by meteor impacts—or the understanding of our own planet and therefore ourselves and our role in it only comes, I think, through exploration and through our ability to see it in any way that we can challenge ourselves.

So I think we need to continuously push ourselves to do those things. And often, the returns are just scientific; you get data, you get temperatures, you get ideas. But what National Geographic has done so well for so long is take those bits of data and those ideas and turn them into something human—something that inspires us to be even more curious.

To take something as technical as the aurora, which is just, you know, electromagnetic energy causing a change in energy state of the upper atmosphere, which then causes fluorescence and a color, and turn that into an intense human personal beautiful experience to see the rainbow of all those little sparkles of light flowing for a thousand miles past you—that contrast and that flow I think is both really important, but it’s also what drives us to the scientific understanding that follows afterward.

And so I think we need both, so we’re going to print that up what he just said and run it in the magazine! Okay, um, so Bethany Ellman is a professor at Caltech and works at JPL, and Bethany actually explores Mars. We were talking yesterday when you see the Opportunity Rover or Spirit or Curiosity—Bethany works on these projects; she drives these things!

Tell us a little bit about what that’s like to explore robotically another planet!

So my job is not so much the Rover driver but the Rover backseat driver as one of 400 and something members of the science team for the Curiosity Rover. For example, we take—we take turns—and there are a few of us who have the privilege of each day getting to be in charge of the decision of where does the Rover go, where does it drive to? What do we do, what rock do we shoot with our laser in order to make a measurement of its chemistry?

And it's a whole different style of exploration when you can’t just go up there and touch the rock; you can’t pick it up. You can only look at images. Now, I’m a geologist by training; sometimes this is intensely frustrating. You just want to look what is on the other side. But one of the things that you do with the Rover is where we use all of the tools and all of the ingenuity we have to extend our human presence to this other planet through the eyes of a robot that drives around with a field of view that’s about at the same height as our eyes.

And this is incredibly exciting. So each day we get the data downlink from Mars, and you never quite know what you’re gonna find. Every once in a while, Mars throws a surprise in there, and you just step back at the beginning of the day before the logistics of creating the plan for the next day set in and you're just like, "Wow! This is a planet that’s hundreds of millions of miles away from us, and here we are seeing this for the first time, seeing this rock related to water! What story does it hold?"

And going back to the theme of this session, you know, Red Planet versus Blue Planet. The reason that I explore Mars is the question of why did Mars, once a water-rich world, it had lakes, it had rivers, it had hydrothermal systems, it may have even had an ocean in the north. Why did it go from being a blue planet to a red planet? I think that’s a hugely profound question and I want to understand that which is why I explore with Rovers.

Real quick, before that, tell us that story about when Spirit was on that long trek and came across a rock that sort of jumped out at everyone.

You’re a planetary scientist, but you’re a geochemist.

Yeah, I’m a geologist studying rocks to learn about the planet. So Joel’s alluding to a story that we were chatting about yesterday. It was one of the very first missions that I had the privilege of working on. I was still a student at the time actually working on the Spirit Rover, which landed in Gusev Crater. It looks like Gusev Crater once held a lake.

It’s this, you know, giant more than 100 kilometer impact crater. There’s a channel that goes in it, but at the particular spot that we landed when, you know, the Rover opens up its camera and takes the first panoramic images, lava—nothing but lava! Lava occasionally broken apart by impact craters. Now we want to study why Mars went from being a blue planet to a red planet, so if we’re just in the middle of a lava field, this is not going to work.

The only thing on the horizon—and this turned out to be one of the saving graces of the landing site for Curiosity—is that there were some hills on the horizon a little more than a kilometer away. Now, this was a Rover that was designed to last for 90 days and travel no more than 500 meters or so. But we said, we gotta head for those hills!

And just one day after about three, four months of driving, data downlink came down and you know, the rock looked a little bit different. It wasn’t these dark solid massive angular rocks from the lavas. It was a soft-looking, very heavily eroded by the wind, these like different colored protuberances coming out that looked like minerals formed in liquid water. And sure enough, we deployed the chemical instruments, and yes, this was our first sign of that potential lake of that potential water on Mars!

It was just this amazing experience to see that this is something different. This is why we explored! This is what we need to go find out next. And that process is really a really exciting one. Fantastic!

So Steve Petranic, years ago worked at the Miami Herald, trapped at Magazine, later worked at The Washington Post Magazine—later I worked there too, so I'm kind of following him around. Steve wrote a book "How We’ll Live on Mars" and it’s not like how we might live on Mars or like how it's conceivably possible we'll live on Mars. It's like how we're going to do it! So tell us what your vision is of humans on Mars, when it's going to happen, and the scale of it.

Well, it’s not my vision, first of all, it’s the vision of other people, primarily, and I’m just kind of the reporter making people aware of this. But there’s this guy on the planet named Elon Musk with the mission statement of SpaceX that says "to go to Mars and build a sustainable human colony there." That’s their only mission.

This is a company that, when it started, I was the editor of Discover magazine back in the early 2000s, and I met Elon at a conference, and I was very taken by the fact that he was trying to start a private rocket company. They put him on the cover of Discover and Teddy was probably going to be successful. He had three failures in a row, and then the fourth failure was successful and now he can launch a payload into space that can resupply the International Space Station probably more reliably and better than any other outfit that is resupplying the space station.

The other one is Orbital ATK and he builds beautiful rockets that have extraordinary reliability and can take payloads into space for about a fourth the price that conventional payloads go into space. Now, you need your mic! It’s not working. Oh, sorry, can you start all over?

Yeah, we're going to Mars—the shorter version! Yeah, the guy who—well, he created an electric car that is the best car in the world according to Consumer Reports, 50 years ahead of when other major car companies said you could not have significant electric vehicles. He’s created a rocket company in less than 10 years that is extraordinarily successful. He says he’s going to put thousands of people on Mars, and frankly, I believe him if he doesn’t get hit by a truck.

I really think this is going to happen, and it’s going to take a lot of money, and it’s going to be really difficult, but I'm really kind of shocked and surprised that more people can't get their heads around the reality of this.

Okay, so in the Green Room you were saying 50,000 people on Mars by 2050, has it changed since this morning? That’s true; I think that's a conservative estimate to be perfectly frank. And that’s one of the really hard numbers for people to get their heads around.

I think people can't believe that we’re going to have humans on Mars landed on Mars within 10 years. I think there will be humans on Mars landed on Mars within 10 years if Musk can build this Mars colonizer rocket that can carry 80 to 100 people at a time. If the system that he has in mind in which you basically have a heavy launch vehicle or first stage that gets the spacecraft—which is actually the second stage of the rocket as well as the part of the rocket that you would live in—if you can get that refueled in orbit and then send it to Mars, he’s going to be able to build a lot of these rockets at a very low cost.

Now, okay, let's—this is a very provocative idea, and we write about it a lot in The Washington Post. I’d love to hear the other panelists weigh in on this. Is it doable technologically and financially? I mean is there a budget for that? Does it pencil out? But is it a good idea? I mean, is it something we actually would want to do?

Bob, go ahead!

Well, I mean exploration in any way is worth doing. But it then does boil down to costs. I’m 13th-generation American but the first to go to college and graduate. So I sort of like it. And graduate from University. I don’t need that task.

So the point is that I’m sort of thinking about Joe Average and putting funds in this thing and I know that NASA’s budget is 1,000 times larger than NOAA’s ocean exploration budget. So it’s really money. Yes, we should do every kind of exploration we can, but I’m really focused on my own planet, knowing how little of it has been explored, that 95 percent of the human race lives on less than 5 percent of planet Earth.

I would rather colonize Earth first. Chris, what do you think?

Historically, I think we've explored for three different reasons. One is ideological, and often that’s sort of not even the intent of exploration, but because we have some particular strong core belief, religious or whatever else, it leads to exploration of a place we've never been before. Or it is purely scientific, and that’s another reason for us to explore, and it drives historically in some of the current exploration going on.

Or the main reason that we've ever explored has been financial, of course, and that’s why the Portuguese invented all the things they invented to get us around Africa and then with the Spaniards across the Atlantic, and then Cabot across the North Atlantic and on the Northwest Passage, and it’s still driving it today to a large degree.

So I'm intrigued to think historically if we look at 10,000 years or whatever, or the 300,000 for our species maybe, of exploration of those three historic drivers and the balance between the three financial—which ends up almost always being the main discriminator. Where does Mars fit into that?

And I don't think it's religious-based. There's a lot of ideology in what I'd call an ideology that is pushing us towards Mars. I don't see that it's going to be financially viable, and what he's doing is not scientific. The scientific exploration of Mars doesn't involve settlement and colonization, and so I think, as an ideology and as a way to motivate people, it's a wonderful idea and it’s a long-term motivator because we need our young folks to do something that hasn’t been done before, but I don't think the timeline is realistic, and the technology has to move in order to support the idea.

And just to build off of only—only the United States has successfully landed a mission on Mars and carried out robotic exploration. A Russian lander landed, existed for a couple of seconds, sent back meaningless data as I found out from reading one of your historical articles, Joel, and then failed.

The European Space Agency has not yet been able to successfully land on Mars; this is hard. Elon Musk has not successfully landed on Mars. And the other thing we've not done is ever launch anything back off of the surface of Mars. So all of our Rovers that we send, they've gone on a one-way trip. They explore and then they remain.

I think if we were going to set out a colony, we might want some two-way traffic at least of some supplies and materials, especially if there's a financial side to this.

So I think that what SpaceX is doing, what Elon Musk is doing is tremendously important because the reusable rockets are catalyzing access to space at a cheaper cost. There’s a number of companies that are pursuing this, and that’s the most important catalyst, is getting that cost of access to orbit down.

And I think there’s also an interesting interplay with the government space agency of NASA. There’s a Space Act Agreement between NASA and SpaceX that NASA will provide the communications support and relay around Mars the tracking to SpaceX should they attempt to send a craft to Mars later in this decade.

So it’s this interesting public-private partnership, and certainly Elon Musk talking about this, setting these long-term goals is really catalyzing some technological action along the way of getting humans to Mars eventually.

So I think it’s important to understand there’s a difference between exploring for, as Chris said, for scientific reasons and settling somewhere. And you know, the question that comes up a lot, and Bethany and I were talking about this yesterday, is doing it robotically enough. So we’ve had these incredible missions, you know, Viking and Voyager, and right now, Cassini, which is going around Saturn and diving in between the rings of Saturn and the surface of Saturn in its last few months of life—I mean, there’s these robotic missions.

Uh, New Horizons, two years ago, which flew by Pluto, have been enormously successful, but they may not fully satisfy our desire to be there. I’m sure that anyone who works on the Mars program would say it would be nice to have a human being there to actually pick up that rock and look what’s underneath it or dig a hole.

I mean, like, I mean there’s a limit to what you can do and plus with, you know, with the Rovers, you run into like heavy sand, and then, you know, you get worried about getting stuck. You know, it’s just—it’s a difficult business.

And Bob, you've done exploration robotically and physically. I mean, talk about that a little bit. Do we need to physically be there or is it enough to have a proxy explorer?

Well, you know, imagine if they went to the Moon and looked out of a window and then flew home. We don’t get out down there. You know, you certainly at the depths that we work at, you know, 20,000, 30,000 feet, it would ruin your day.

So, right now, when—in during recess, if you go to nautiluslive.org, we just launched our vehicles; they're making a 9000 foot dive down to a hydrothermal vent, and they'll be down there for a couple of days. And that’s the point. I lived in elevators—I spent a tremendous amount of my time both as a naval officer and deep-diving submarines and as an oceanographer in deep-diving submersibles.

I spent 25 years going up and down and when I dove to 20,000 feet, it took me six and a half hours to get down, six and a half hours to get back. That doesn't leave a lot of time at the office, so I'm all about bottom time.

And since we’re a private organization, we have to pinch every penny. I judge my success by cost per mile traveled on the bottom, and so if the only way to do that is to use robotics—but really if you look at humans, we’ve evolved ourselves into a box. Just like the koala bear can eat eucalyptus trees, or panda bears eat bamboo shoots, we live, like I said, on a very small part of even planet Earth. But our spirit is indestructible and can move at the speed of light.

I basically have followed in Jim Cameron's motto of building avatars or a navii that carry my spirit; and if you remember in the movie, when they transferred Jake’s spirit from his body into a navi, and he woke up inside the navi and the first thing he did was run out the door, and they thought he’d freaked out and they went and got him. They said, “Why did you run?” and he said, “I wanted the wind in my face again,” and that’s because he was a war veteran; his body had failed him below his waist, and as soon as he woke up and he saw these legs, he didn’t care they were blue-green, and he thought they were sort of sexy actually in a tail and he took off and he wanted to win in his face again.

So I just had to ask you real quick, so you went in a submarine down to the Titanic.

Yeah, the second year we found it with robots—it went down a second and landed on the deck of the Titanic. So was that cool?

That was cool, but you know what was even cooler? Was when I had a little robot called Jason Jr. who flew off of the submarine and went down the grand staircase and went into a room and scared the crap out of me, because we were down about six decks down inside. Spiritually, we were up on the deck, but our robot went down, and we were a little disoriented. So we followed the ground and the wall of the grand staircase and we turned, and we would go down, and look, and go down, and look, and we looked, and a light came on!

Yeah! No, the light came on! And we were in the sub, and I banged the back of my head because it’s, you know, anything like that. And we said, “Well wait a minute, that’s not us, that’s the robot!” So we then went and was a chandelier reflecting light back at us!

Okay, that’s great, right?

So Chris, I gotta ask you along the same lines, so I understand that when you do a spacewalk, there’s a moment where you got to step out, and um, and I've been told that more than one astronaut has hesitated at that moment because it’s a long way down. I mean, like what’s that? Is it scary at all? What’s that like?

I mean, realize you have no fear! Okay, but—well, there’s a big difference between danger and fear, of course. They aren’t synonymous, although we tend to make them synonymous in the vernacular.

Um, normally you’re afraid because you’re not ready for something, so we try not to be fearful when we start a spacewalk because we spent so much time getting ready for it so that it feels familiar.

We feel like it’s not going to overwhelm us—it’s an incredibly complex process getting ready for that moment where you open the hatch. The words you choose are funny to step out; and down—out and down, those aren’t the right words—you are years of preparation and training underwater in virtual reality simulators, in theoretical simulators, you’ve launched, you’re in orbit, the days there you’ve gotten your body as ready as it can be, you put yourself inside this one-person suit, you’re locked into a tiny room.

We evacuate all the air out of this room, and it’s thousands and thousands of steps and years of preparation. Finally the moment is coming and you’ve got all the air out of the airlock, the sound has gone quiet and the only real sound you have is because the pressure is down to 4.3 PSI in your suit, and nothing around you is your own breathing, that’s all you really hear is the quietness of your own breath and then your loudness of your own beating heart, and you grab you grab—you can’t whistle inside the suit actually because the air is so thin, so it really modifies sound, and you grab the handle and turn it, and it pulls in the dogs around, and you grab this big manhole cover and push it up out of the way, push the thermal cover that’s on the outside, and then pull yourself out into the universe.

And that moment is one you've been dreaming of and thinking of and getting ready for technically, and it’s as if you were maybe in a toilet stall sometime and you finished. You open it and you stepped out and you’re in the top of Mount Everest. You, like, close the door again, and I go, “Okay, how can these two places be separated by one little bit of metal?”

And, and, I, okay that’s memorable, I tried to—that's—next time you’re in a toilet stall. I tried to describe the experience real-time because I knew it was a rare human experience, and I thought, they're going to record every word I say, so as I go outside I am going to try and clearly articulate what’s going through my mind and through my heart, and when I listen to the tape afterwards, it’s so funny, it is me going “Wow,” and that’s it!

Okay, well, it is overwhelming for multiple reasons. One, it’s the Earth is not down. The Earth is near, the Earth is a big—it’s like it’s like Mars over there—that one right there!

Yeah, well, yeah, it’s not below you, there’s no sense of it being below you, there’s no sense of falling to Earth, you can’t fall to Earth, and you don’t feel like you’re from Earth. Just like when you look at the Moon, you don’t feel like you’re on the Moon.

The Moon is something in the night sky that’s interesting to look at; you are separate from the Earth and you're much more part of the universe at that point. The three-dimensionality of the enormity of the universe that’s what’s around you, and you hold on tight when you go outside with one hand holding on so tight.

After a while you relax, but that initial transition phase I think is psychologically stupendous, in the best sense of that word, as an early look to the rest of everything else at a deeply personal level.

Wow!

Okay, um, so we’re going to go to questions here I think in a minute. There’s a clock here in front of me that’s trying to tell me something; I’m not really sure what it means, but I think we want to get questions real quick so we can do that.

So would you also like to reiterate, while we bring the mics around, if you would also like to reiterate the points that are persistent, something that we have a little time to finish, would really be appreciated.

We may have a bit of time to go over what is really left to do.

Please let us gather here today for knowledge to last.

Thank you. Thank you, my friends, for this opportunity.

[Applause]

Coming back, just like that!