--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- [Discussion of data breaches]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, you've heard of data breaches, but what would make the worst data breach of all time? How about losing 145 million social security numbers?
--:-- [Discussion of the Equifax breach]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is the subject of the podcast Breach, its second season, the Equifax story. This time it's personal.
--:-- [Discussion of NASA and space exploration]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now, let's talk about space. NASA used today's budget announcement from the president to talk about its vision for the country in space. Well, good afternoon and welcome to the Kennedy Space Center.
--:-- [Discussion of NASA's vision for space exploration]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the dawn of a new era in the exploration of the moon and Mars. And who are we kidding? For the past few years, it's felt like all the exciting space news has been coming from companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
--:-- [Discussion of NASA's plans for Mars exploration]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, it felt like NASA got back in the game. First, they talked about something called the Gateway, which will permanently orbit the moon.
--:-- [Discussion of Dr. Ellen Stofan's work]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Dr. Ellen Stofan is the director of the National Air and Space Museum, and she used to be NASA's chief scientist.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: But actually, there's this really strong scientific thread that NASA's been pursuing, something called follow the water. What was the history of water on Mars?
--:-- [Discussion of the search for life on Mars]
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Now, why water? Water is critical to life. Life here on Earth evolved in the oceans. It stayed in the oceans for over a billion years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, you really want that water to just not have been present on the surface for years, but millions of years.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: And that's what we've been doing with all these spacecraft is gathering all the data, like detectives gathering lots of bits of evidence to put together a story in this search for life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because of all those Mars missions, we know that water was persistent for very long periods of time on Mars, hundreds of millions of years.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: So that makes us really optimistic that life evolved on the planet. But the problem was, then Mars got cold, the water evaporated, the surface became radiated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if life persisted, it probably went deep underground, or it went extinct.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: So we're talking about something that's not going to be easy to find.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so ultimately, from a scientific point of view, we've been following the water. Now we understand that story fairly well. Now we're really looking for signs of ancient life.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: And as we do that more and more, we're going to need really smart, really flexible, really creative things on the surface to really break open a lot of rocks and find those ancient fossils.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I would argue that creative, flexible thing is a person.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: And so really it is to me ultimately about getting a human mission to Mars hopefully in the next 10 to 20 years to really nail down this case of did life evolve beyond earth and if so which we suspect it did it makes scientific sense how different is that life from life on earth and what can we learn about life on earth by being able to compare it to life that evolved somewhere else.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What kind of life are we talking about? You know, this isn't going to be very exciting to the general public, but we're talking about microorganisms.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Think pond scum, you know, algae, single cell, you know, very, very uncomplicated life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We know that life evolved very, very rapidly after conditions stabilized on this planet. But it stayed very simple for over a billion years.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: And Mars just didn't have that much time. So we think we're looking for, you know, think single cell algae is the type of life we're looking for.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I know most people say, oh, that's not very exciting. We want something that you know is a little green person or whatever.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: But again we want to ask what kind of cell structure does it have? Does that life that evolved elsewhere have DNA? Does it have RNA?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And how can we use that information to understand life better on Earth, to understand viruses better on Earth, to understand bacteria better on Earth? That's going to help humanity.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: So I think there's real benefits to this search that go beyond just, oh, this is cool science.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You got me thinking about like the timeline of life on Mars. Are you saying it could have started well before the timeline of life on Earth?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: You know, it could have. These wet kind of Earth-like early Mars conditions were at around the same time that life evolved here on Earth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is a theory out there that there could have been material actually exchanged between the two planets.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: So you could have had life only evolve one place and been transferred.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I know it sounds like a crazy theory. Scientifically, it is possible. It can't be ruled out.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: So, for example, if we found ancient life on Mars that looked exactly like ancient life on Earth, same type of DNA, same type of RNA, we would be suspicious there had been material transfer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If it looks different, then we'll be convinced this is a second origination of life.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: There may be only very narrow pathways that life as we know it can go down.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But scientists are also really struggling, and this is the fun that scientists get to have, is really struggling with what would life as we don't know it, what would that look like?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Would it use different amino acids than our DNA uses? DNA carries information. Are there other molecules that could do that that we haven't even thought of yet?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's what we're looking for. So many possibilities. Really cool.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Including that we are, in fact, the Martians.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do you prepare for infinite discovery for the unknown?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: You know, the scientific community has obviously really been struggling with that because we know how to look for life as it is on Earth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But how do you look for life when it might be so different from what we have here on Earth that you might miss it?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: And when are we going to get people down on Mars? You said maybe in 20 years?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right now, the goal would be to get humans to Mars sometime in the 2030s.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Wow. Probably the late 2030s is the goal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Getting to Mars is hard. You need a really big rocket to be able to give people that launch into space.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: You're out in a high radiation environment for long term, so we're still working on how best to protect our astronauts in that environment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have work to do on the entry, descent, and landing technology at Mars.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Mars has a very thin atmosphere. So getting huge, heavy humans and all their equipment down onto the surface is something that technologically we're still working on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That seems kind of slow and kind of frustrating, but at the Air and Space Museum, we've been celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo program.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing. not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: And when you think that President Kennedy gave the country a goal of getting humans onto the surface of the moon within a decade, we accomplished it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, at that point, NASA went up to 4% of the federal budget, not 0.4, but 4%, big difference.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: But we started from, boy, scratch. I mean, when he gave that challenge to NASA, NASA had only been around for two years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Johnson Space Center didn't exist. Kennedy Space Center didn't exist.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Huge infrastructure project, huge science, technology challenges had to be overcome. And we did it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I do hear people sometimes saying, oh, I don't know if we can make it to Mars in 15 or 20 years.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: You're like, we could go in five if we really tried. and spent the money, and that's not a light thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is that a good investment, or is it better to do it in 10, 15, 20 years and spend the money at a more moderate pace, which fits in with the U.S. federal budget?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: That's the path that we're on and the path I think we should be on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's not a question of can we. It's when will we and how will we.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: When it comes to Mars, NASA has a pretty fleshed-out vision, even a mission.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what about everything else out there? I'm looking at you, Saturn.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: NASA's plan's way, way beyond Mars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's next on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so at the top of the show, I told you about this worst data breach ever. Equifax, what makes Equifax the worst data breach ever?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Well, let me tell you. When Equifax got hacked, this door opened, and it was left wide open for 76 days.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And beyond that door inside this room was something like 145 million social security numbers hanging out with a bunch of unpatched bugs and passwords stored in plain text just sitting there for the taking.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: This is the subject of the podcast Breach, its second season, the Equifax story. This time it's personal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it really, you know, it is personal. Equifax is about you, your data, your social security number, your credit, your future.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: It's about your privacy and it all straight up got got so you might want to listen to a podcast about it subscribe to Breach that's B-R-E-A-C-H in your podcast app right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ellen, I wonder how NASA thinks about using public money on these space missions.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: I think you look at, is the science of the highest priority? And so to determine that, NASA actually turns that over to the National Academy of Sciences.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they actually bring together the scientific community so that everybody knows NASA's doing what the scientific of a community thinks is the absolutely most important thing.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: I think NASA does really make a huge effort to show that when you invest dollars in NASA, you're actually investing in the U.S. economy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: NASA technologies provide a huge amount of benefit to society.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: I was just reading something the other day that was talking about material that was in the Apollo spacesuits that's now in people's roofs all around the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So certainly when people were developing the Apollo spacesuits, no one said, oh, that'd be cool material for roofing 50 years from now.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: So NASA satellites are helping farmers around the world do a better job of farming.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: NASA data are helping us to understand the water cycle and whether countries are having droughts and how we might cope with our changing climate.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: So there's tons of data every day being gathered that has a huge impact on people's everyday life here on Earth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And NASA is actually about 0.4 percent of the U.S. federal budget.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: So less than half a penny of every dollar goes to NASA.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I would argue what we get in return is huge.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: We're understanding the universe. We're understanding our solar system. We're understanding our planet and the challenges it's facing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, we've got humans in orbit around us on the International Space Station.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: All that for less than half a penny. I think that's a pretty good investment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does the introduction of someone like Elon Musk and SpaceX factor into how NASA operates or how these missions operate?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Well, you know, he has generated a ton of excitement, which I think is great.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Five, four, three, two, one. There's no question it's had a positive effect on people believing what's possible.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: And people moving forward, I will say he's a great partner of NASA's.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's a NASA contractor, right?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: He launches cargo up to the International Space Station.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's contracted to start launching crew up to the space station.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: I think, though, his great contribution has really been trying to drive down the cost.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, right now, one of the biggest challenges with space is the cost of getting material, whether it's a spacecraft or a human, off the surface of the Earth into space.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: If we can bring that cost down like you see Musk trying to do with his reusable stages, you see Bezos doing at Blue Origin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If we can bring that cost down, all of a sudden it opens access to space up.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: The cost comes down. Much more is possible whether it's going to Mars or whether it's you want to go to the moon no matter what you want to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there something that he can do that NASA can't in sending a convertible up into space and taking funny photos?
--:-- Dr. Elon Musk: There's always been this gravity of a NASA mission, of an Apollo mission, of a Mars mission, of an International Space Station mission.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then you got this guy just like he seems like he's throwing things up there just for viral photos or for the fun of it.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Yeah. And, you know, I have to admit, my kids gave me a coffee mug for Christmas that had a picture of the Tesla in space.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm not I'm not immune to this.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: But, you know, NASA is using taxpayer dollars, which is your money and my money and everybody's money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So NASA doesn't have money and in my mind shouldn't have money to do funny things.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Gags. Let's call them gags.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. I'll call them gags.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: You did see some people cringe about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I didn't. I thought it was fun and charming and lighthearted and I love all that.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Did I wish there'd been maybe some student experiments attached to it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, of course.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: But, you know, it's his company. He can do what he wants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: NASA does what's right to do with taxpayer money.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: That being said, NASA does have some wild ideas, right? Things that might sound like pure science fiction to people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You came up with one of them, right?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Are you comfortable talking about Titan?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, though hopefully I won't cry.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Oh, gosh. Okay. So Titan is this amazingly cool moon of Saturn.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: First of all, you know, you're over 100 million miles away from the Earth out at Saturn, and yet you've got a moon of Saturn where it has an atmosphere.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: It's the only moon in the solar system that has a substantial atmosphere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it actually rains. It has a complete cycle where it rains, it forms lakes and rivers, evaporates back into the atmosphere, rains again.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: So just like our water cycle here on Earth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But because you so far out from the sun and it very very very very very cold that the scientific way of describing it the fluid isn water It actually liquid methane and liquid ethane.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: So basically liquid gasoline is what a fluid But it again it behaving just like water does
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Titan is the only body in the solar system besides Earth with open bodies of liquid So it got rivers that flow down into seas It got river deltas you know that go down into rivers It got valleys that have been carved by liquid methane and liquid ethane
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: It's this place that in some ways is so bizarrely Earth-like and yet different.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Temperatures are different, materials are different, but the processes are the same.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: And that gets the scientists really excited.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Could there be life in Titan's seas?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: What if you just need a fluid? What if it doesn't have to be water?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So going to Titan and exploring those seas would help us get a little further on this question of how Earth-like does it actually have to be for you to get life?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: A number of years ago, I proposed to land a boat, a floating spacecraft in one of these seas on Titan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I worked on it for like five years.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: We made it through an initial round of NASA selection.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in the end, we lost actually to the mission InSight that just landed on Mars a couple months ago.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: So it was personally crushing, you know, because I worked on this project for five years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it was so romantic, this idea of sailing a boat on an alien sea.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: You know, how can you beat that, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And someday the mission will happen, but Titan's axis is tilted, so it gets dark at the North Pole where the seas are until the mid-2030s.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: We really can't do that mission and probably until the late 2030s, and I'll be way too old.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, it's really disappointing, but someday it'll happen.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Sailing a boat on an alien sea is, you know, so romantic sounding.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are there other interplanetary ideas we can tease? 50-year plans, 100-year plans?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: You know, one of my favorite NASA websites, it's called the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, so N-I-A-C or NIAC.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's where NASA actually accepts proposals from people to investigate that are for things just like that, submarines to go to Titan's seas, little spacecraft that could spin almost a structure that could hold a giant telescope in space that would be able to image planets around other stars.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Cool. So it's all these like cool things that you can say, should they really be spending money on things that might not happen for 50 years?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the idea is if you don't start pushing the technology now, they will never happen.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: And so how can you kind of push really advanced innovative ideas forward?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It goes back to this. You know, are we alone? Can we find that Earth 2.0, that little blue marble around another star?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Can we show that there's life on planets beyond our solar system?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can we use data that we get about not just our solar system but other solar systems that we're discovering every day with our telescopes to help us understand things like climate change, how our planet is changing, how typical is our solar system?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: These are all things that we're just on the beginnings of getting the data to understand.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I wonder, you know, if you ask like any average person, what's the purpose of NASA?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: I imagine they'd say, you know, to explore space, to go up there and look around.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then the why sometimes feels like more of a philosophical or existential question.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Does NASA have a stock answer to the why?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They have a mission statement, which has forgotten exactly what it is.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: But it's something like to expand knowledge of our solar system, our planet, and our universe for the benefit of humanity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And to me, it's also partially an inspiration role.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: What are we capable of? You know, we're literally – this is the better side of our natures where we're looking upward and outward and answering these fundamental questions of why.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, and how can we gather the data to answer these really fundamental questions?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: And then how can we gather data to make life better on this planet, whether it's understanding our climate, understanding asteroids that might come a little too close to us?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, how can we help this planet move forward in the future by understanding it better?
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: Having seen what we've accomplished over my lifetime, it's just stunning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then you step further back and you think that we made it from the sands of Kitty Hawk to the Sea of Tranquility in basically a single person's lifetime.
--:-- Dr. Ellen Stofan: When you think of the fact that Charles Lindbergh was there watching Apollo 11 launch, you know, that's amazing what humanity has done, what this country did in such a relatively short time period.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And to me, it makes me extremely optimistic over what the next 50 to 100 years are going to bring.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Dr. Ellen Stofan was once NASA's chief scientist and is now the John and Adrian Mars director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram from this is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks for listening to the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In case you're looking for another one to listen to, you might want to check out the second season of Breach.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's all about the biggest most disastrous data hack of all time the Equifax hack 145 million social security numbers were just hanging out there in the ether breach like beach with an R after the B season 2 is out now the Equifax story this time it's personal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Find it on your podcast app the one you're using to listen to maybe this show right now.
