Bill Nye Takeover

26:31Science, because it's measuring real things in the physical world, you have some external set of conditions and realities that constrain what you do. Give me an example, you're talking about measuring temperature. Well, you have a bunch of scientists, a bunch of contrarian scientists in a room together. No, you don't.

26:52and that would just be how do you resolve I think looking for life on Europa is more important than looking for the history of geologic evolution of the cosmos you know in dark matter or dark energy well they can get together in a room and they can say what are the biggest questions because as a field they generally know what that is these are the biggest unknowns that we've learned in the last 10 years and because those unknowns exist beyond the opinions of somebody right because again and science is measuring some objective reality, you will eventually find some version of consensus to say these are actually the biggest and most important questions, right?

27:26So what happened with Mars sample return? Well, I think it is set as the priority, and I think it has been a long-term priority because, again, it has all these benefits. I think the problem with Mars sample return is that there's so many various justifications for it that there isn't a single one that you can just say. So do I have to get in charge, Chuck? Is that what it is? That's pretty much what the answer is. We're going to find out if life started on Mars. Mars was hit with an impactor. This fell to Earth, and you and I are descendants from Martians. That's what we're going to go find out.

27:55Right. Do you guarantee this as the outcome? I guarantee that we will evaluate that. We can evaluate that hypothesis before we send people and contaminate it. Yeah. With that said, there's these proposed cuts. Cut, cut, cut. Meanwhile, people at the China National Space Administration are going, Chuck, I've disturbed you. I'm sorry. Take it, Chuck. Take it. That was a fabulous reaction. No, I'm just— For those of you listening only, Chuck grabbed his face. Yeah. And that would, you know, this very troubling image. Back to you. I'll put it in the words of a very wise leader who said, we invent all of this, and then we don't have it.

28:37It's not here. China. China's killing us. They're killing us. So, I mean, you know. Who were you talking about? So the China National Space Administration is doing all these missions that are almost one for one. They actually have a Mars sample return mission going in 2028. Well, I mean, so again. So, hold on. I did an offhanded remark. Expand on that, please, if you would. Well, I think so. Maybe just to step back and say, even if you don't buy the China competition or don't want to have that kind of geopolitical thing, it is the framing of the administration right now. And even beyond that, a new space race with China.

29:16There's just a hearing in Congress framing it literally that way. So it doesn't make sense that in order to win a space race, they cut our science budget at NASA in half. But why isn't the argument that getting to the moon is what matters? Well, the moon, yeah. The universe is a lot bigger than the moon and Mars, right? There's a lot more to the universe. If you say you want to retain leadership over China or any other country, you can't just decide other parts in space don't count. going to Mars sample return that doesn't count, Jupiter doesn't count anything further out, that doesn't count only the moon counts that sounds like a two year old making things up on the fly so that you can I resonate very strongly with irrational claims very strongly held how often have you said to your two year old you have three kids how often did you say your claims are irrational young man I can't count them I can't count how many times I've said that.

30:13So with this in mind, China's space administration is planning to do this. And we'll talk about stuff besides Mars, everybody. But just this one thing, they're going to do this similar mission. Okay, so how about this? The person, these same people that we spoke of hypothetically in the beginning of the conversation. And they say, so what? They beat us. Big deal. So what? We lose our hegemony in space. Big deal. What's it mean? Yeah. That's actually, frankly, a really good question. Because I don't, I mean, I tend not to really go in on the pure competition aspect of it. I think there's a symbolic aspect of what do we choose to do as a nation that is peaceful and cooperative and ambitious.

30:56And space science is all of those things. By definition, requires us to work together in groups of people because it's so complicated. It requires us to work with our allies, you know, very closely. And it says it's wildly ambitious and optimistic. It's like, we're going to go, what's on that red dot in the sky over there? Well, let's roll up our sleeves and go figure it out. So along this line, you say it's cooperative. Right now, so during the Apollo era, as I like to point out, when I was young, during the Apollo era, it was a government effort. Everybody who worked, NASA was considered the best job in the world for a few years.

31:31But now we have these commercial companies competing with each other, not working together. Address that, man of wonk. Well, commercial can do a lot of great things. They can make it cheaper to launch things into space. They can make satellites that bounce our internet signals back to us. They can make things that look at Earth. They do things that go up and point back down. That's what commercial does. Because that's where the market is. Because there's money there. There's money there, right? Why is there money there? People like to hear themselves talk. Are we not the most insular creatures?

32:04We are self-absorbed. So everything is just, again, I go back to this TikTok, and sorry for people like TikTok, but I'm a little man now. And it's just swiping and social media is like the lunchroom in the high school cafeteria, right? And it's all this, who's saying this and who said that? Oh, this person has a beef with this person, blah, blah, blah, blah. It is the most kind of internal and closed kind of self-obsessed driver of human interest. Space is literally the opposite. It literally pulls us out and away from ourselves a little bit. and have a bigger perspective. No, no, it's cool, man.

32:40So people will pay for, again, practical things. I need to have a communication satellite that can beam this amount of data to the Indian subcontinent for this expansion of broadcast market that I have. I want to learn about trends in agricultural development in various places. But go beyond that, there's no market to say, how does Jupiter work? what is the nature of dark matter is there life on Mars and I can say we've had a lot of private space companies and individuals they've been happy to send themselves into space or small tourism in various ways and they built rockets and they built a lot of things but there's no one of them not a single one of them has ever built a science mission with that money not a single one of those companies has ever decided to just go and figure something out because it's not their fault.

33:33That's just the wrong incentives. Well, they have investors and they need a return. That's exactly right. So along this line, Casey, you have talked about guys who built telescopes in the early, early days. Built telescopes. Space exploration before we had rockets. Just a little digression there, if you would. So in the United States, we didn't have public funding of science, basically, until after World War II. Because science or technology turned out to be so valuable in winning a war. Yeah, I mean, it turns out, oh, there's actually like a fundamental, the nuclear bomb or any number of things.

34:08And rockets themselves, right? Dual-use technology. But before that, it just wasn't seen as a responsibility of public investment to do, it was private sector responsibility to do scientific research. And that works up to a point, but when you start doing really complex things, like going into space, it's hard for any one person to do that. So before we had rockets, you can say space exploration was basically looking through big telescopes. and there was a... Which was amazing. Yeah, I mean, that was revolutionary. I mean, the technology enabled bigger and bigger lenses and mirrors and, you know, there was kind of this prestige race among the equivalents of billionaires at the time, you know, these like Yerkes and Keck and some of these other people whose names now grace these telescope, ground-based telescopes, Lowell.

34:50And they used their money to build these big space, you know, telescopes on the ground to put their name on them. And what they would do generally, they'd cut the ribbon, they'd say I'm such a great person and I've built this thing for the benefit of humanity and they take off and they never fund anyone to actually look through it. And that's the difference. So you can get sometimes an individual to build a thing because I think our brains like to focus on a physical thing but the ongoing activity of something is really hard for a person to take a lot of attention to. Which is why we built this into the public sphere.

35:21We have funding, it's not just enough to build a mission to Mars, you have to pay scientists to figure out and look at the data. Without any data, none of those missions mean anything. The telescope without making sketches of what you see or taking pictures of what you see. It's like the equivalent of a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it.

35:59Now, along this line, you referenced Jupiter. You might have said, I think you said Europa for a minute. So there's different opinions in the science community about which place to explore with how much money, right? Yeah, I mean, until basically all this money was cut by the White House, right? So I think that's really pushed a lot. Those are internal, you know, it's like, we have a certain amount of steady funding, let's kind of figure out where to put our efforts. And you say that was a good process or good enough. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the best, you know, it's an ongoing process, but it's an open and deliberative process.

36:31There's always going to be disagreements. But the point is that you have these external factors of just the big questions. What big questions are we trying to answer? Where did we come from? Functionally, that's what they are. Are we alone in the universe? They're all related to that. How did these things form? Why is the solar system the way it is? How did life arise? What is the nature of dark matter, dark energy? These are all frontier science things. And that's what you bring up in terms of China's space ambitions. Their scientific program is ramping up to answer the same questions. They're like people in many ways.

37:00Well, I mean, they're driven by the same, you know, and there's all these aspects of national pride. And are you going to be the nation that discovers the future or not? Yeah. But they also, you have to remember, well, we all have to remember that their government invests in these technologies that don't. Well, so did we, us, U.S. But that's what I'm saying. So Bill Nye, people, years ago on this show, predicted the future that we are living in now, where he said that it was going to be imperative that we develop battery technology. And I never forgot that. Wow, I love you, man. Yeah, I never forgot that.

37:38And now the Chinese, they dominate battery technology because where we did not invest, they did. Yeah, Casey, what about that?

37:51batteries are very useful on spacecraft but seriously China has mission for mission there's a very strong one to one correlation between what China is developing and what we have proposed to cancel in the United States so it's like a needless seeding of this kind of competition to other nations, not just China the US would become second to not just China but Europe and Japan and other places But the thing is, we're not talking about human spaceflight. This is all the space science stuff. Everything. And let me ask you both then. So if we're ceding these areas to other nations, does that mean that the scientists and the brilliant minds that go along with those projects go to those nations?

38:34Yeah, absolutely. And the partnerships between nations. So all of the things that the White House has proposed to cancel, more than a dozen are with our closest allies nominally, right? And so we're - European space. European Space Agency, these missions, these joint missions that we've made commitments to, we're just abrogating those commitments. And we're saying, sorry folks, we are no longer going to fulfill our commitments. So there is no one within the administration pushing back against the way you described it, it sounds extraordinarily short-sighted. It is extraordinarily short-sighted.

39:03So yeah, strangely enough, Congress itself has actually been doing the right thing on this. Tell us about Congress. Which is not a phrase I say often, but they've actually been doing... Whatever they've been doing. They, both House and Senate, which are both Republican-run, same party as the president, have put forward their own kind of funding bills for NASA next year as part of this whole ongoing annual process. So can you wonk it for us? Sure. There's something called the president's budget request. President's budget request, the PBR, if you will. So then what happens? So the budget, the president requests, here's what I want to spend next year for NASA.

39:32That sets the baseline of argument. and then the House will put out what's called an appropriations bill and say, well, here's how we would appropriate money in response to your request. Then the Senate would do the same. They vote on theirs. They reconcile. They kind of iron out the differences between the two. They have a meeting in some smoke-filled room. Yeah, the proverbial kind of agreement. Diet Coke-filled room. And then you ideally pass it by the Congress and then the president would have to sign it into law. So that's like the ideal process. This is your spherical cow of legislation.

40:05So do you get the spherical cow? I don't know the spherical cow. It's hilarious. Casey, physics major, tell us about the cow. Let's see if I can do this joke. What is it? A farmer comes up and goes to a university and says, my cow isn't producing enough milk. How can I get my cow to produce more milk? So he goes to the biology professor, and the biology professor goes through this long process of understanding that, you know, he explains to him, you know, you give these types of foods and things, and we understand these kind of process works, and he does that. and that'll help your cow get more milk.

40:33So the farmer goes, okay, okay, that's a lot. And then he goes to, what's the other one? An astrophysicist. I'll just do it in two instead of three. And he goes to a physicist and says, my cow's not producing enough milk, what do I do? So the physicist thinks for a while. Let's go a year. He goes away for a year. And he draws up a bunch of stuff, comes back. Okay, and the physicist goes, all right, I figured it out. Here's how we get your cow to produce more milk. He said, step one, assume a spherical cow. First, we assume a cow is a sphere. It's so funny. Which is hilarious. For any physics major, yes.

41:05So the reason planets are round, you guys, is because of gravity. And the reason asteroids are not quite round, they don't quite have enough gravity. So with all this in mind, Casey, so the president's budget request this year was extraordinarily low. Destructive, yeah. Destructive. Draconian, unstrategic, wasteful. Wow, tell us how you really feel. These are the polite terms. So along this line, as an observer, is it a bargaining technique just to go into the meeting saying we're going to give you half what you asked for so that they would reach three quarters of what you asked for when they split the difference?

41:42No, because this predates this whole process. The person who runs the budget office in the White House called a shot three years ago. He published a report saying he wanted himself to cut NASA science by 50%. This is deeper. You're talking about the Votster, Russ. Russ Vod, yeah, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, who we don't have to go into this level of detail, but that's what the Space Policy Edition is for. But the point is that... But the StarTalk listeners are interested in how we got here. There's a deeper level of animosity clearly being expressed towards federal investment in science that I think is profoundly short-sighted and ignores the wild benefits that have come from, again, this very brief...

42:22In one person's lifetime, The United States went from not funding science barely at all to winning most Nobel Prizes in science. That all started again in the late 1940s. It was 1950 when the National Science Foundation was created. It all came from a report by this guy, Vannevar Bush, the president of MIT, to Franklin Roosevelt, saying we won World War II because of science. He called science the endless frontier. And through science, public health, national interest, national defense, industry, everything, but we need to do this fundamental stuff that markets and private individuals cannot do.

42:56Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution. Congress is to promote the progress of science and useful arts since 1787. Wow. Casey, you made it on... I'm on other arts, isn't it? Well, useful arts to me is... What are the non-useful arts? ...is making stuff. Bridges. What did they do? Church steeples, plows. Engineering and architecture. So now, Casey, you threw out a word, which I dig. Okay. Can you describe why these cuts are you view as unstrategic? Well, again, so you're destroying the fundamental research base of the entire country, right? And this goes all the way down to whether students can be trained to become scientists and good thinkers or engineers.

43:39It breaks, again, all these alliances with our allies. It pushes them to work with other countries who are more reliable. So we're actually pushing allies away. We're becoming more insular. We're destroying our own ability to do this research. And through this broader attack, I'd say, on universities and academia, we are undermining this kind of powerful engine of insight discovery and economic growth that we've created. So specifically, I wanted to ask you about sending humans back to the moon. So in that sense, too, by, well, and also, and so there's a pivot to sending humans to Mars. If your strategy is to send people to the moon, this is unstrategic.

44:17It also, again, tried to disrupt a ton of the other political investment and the political consensus behind going to the moon. So that's the other thing. Nothing happens. Space at NASA is inherently a product of politics. We are in a democratic, nominally still democratic society. And we have the ability and the right of every representative to have some kind of valid reason to support. You need a coalition of people to support you. Why are we going to go back to the moon? It can't just be one person. It should not be one person, right? And it cannot just be one person. And so you need to have something that builds a coalition of people who agree with you.

44:54And you have all sorts of reasons. People have all their reasons for wanting something, and you have to accept that. That's just a product of our system. And so our current effort to the moon, it's not the most efficient. It's not the cheapest. It's not the fastest. But it is politically stable. And that's your zero-ist law. Describe what he means, because it's been going on for decades. It's survived. It's the first effort to return humans to the moon that has survived a presidential transition. So where did it start? It started under the first Trump administration. The first administration had really good space policy.

45:26He was all about it with Space Force and the whole deal. Yes, Space Force got a lot of it, which is arguably actually not the worst policy, but then creating Artemis, Project Artemis. And the Biden administration carried that on, unchanged. What else did Biden and Trump agree on? And so the fact that... Nothing. As your listeners know, the motions of the planets do not follow convenient political cycles. They don't go on two and four year cycles of politics. You need to have someone to pass this baton off on. Because you can't do it in four years. You can't do it in two or four years. You need to build some consensus of someone to carry on that progress.

46:07If you want to send people back to the moon and then go to Mars, which is also in this proposal despite cutting NASA's budget so much, while destroying such a popular part of the agency and this broader, not even making an effort to build a coalition around it, it will fail. And so it is an anti-strategy. Who will carry this forward? Because why would they bother to do it? There's no groundwork established that anyone else agrees with this. And so by destroying the coalition we do have and then not making one for this new idea, you end up wasting money in the immediate term, destroying this huge thing that we have built support for, and then undermining their own goal in the long term.

46:47Which is why it's an anti-strategy. Specifically, certain listeners, viewers, may remember the Ares program and the Constellation program. So I went to Cape Canaveral. They built a giant gantry tower, steel, welded things, rivets, spray paint. A giant thing to hold up a giant rocket. and the rocket was going to be all solid motor, a solid rocket motor with no liquid fuel. And then people realized the thing was going to be a wobbly mess. Is that accurate? Yes, it was the last gasp of George W. Bush's Return to the Moon program was this. Hang on a second. Is the current Artemis program not derived from Return to the Moon?

47:33One piece of it is. the Orion capsule, which is going to launch with astronauts in it next year. But the space launch system, the big rocket, no, that's not derived from that. That's all different stuff. All right, so let's talk about the space launch system. Sure. So the other organizations, everybody, this has to do with cosmology and exploring space. SpaceX, Blue Origin, European Ariane rocket. Rocket Lab, Firefly, all these new rockets, yeah. are working, largely, by and large. Space Launch System... It's fun. Go ahead. It's fun. I mean, it's the big government moon rocket. So this is why Congress mandated, this is the first rocket to be mandated, written into law.

48:19It's illegal for the U.S. not to make this rocket. 2010 or something? Yeah, 2010, it was written into law that NASA had to make this rocket using existing shuttle components. It's a way to basically, when they retired the shuttle, they wanted to keep their workers in their states working on space stuff, so they build this rocket out of the same shuttle. And this is part of what you say, the inefficiency of NASA, but is inefficiency necessarily bad? It is. It's depending what you're optimizing for. Do you optimize for political stability? Then yes, you like inefficiency because then you spread your money around the country.

48:52You build that coalition. There's 10 NASA centers for a reason. There's 10 NASA centers, big contractors and contractors. Utah is really invested in the space launch system because they build the solid rocket boosters there. That's just like where they happened to create that company. That's where that company happened to be established. And people don't like that. I understand the frustration. And then they say, oh, well, we should have SpaceX, which does things a lot cheaper, which they do. And a lot faster, which they do. But because there's an irony when because they're so much more efficient, they have a much smaller footprint around the country.

49:23So their invested political coalition is a lot smaller. So they're actually at cross purposes. efficiency and political stability in terms of, you know, kind of, does my district benefit from this moon program? And so these are the types of inputs that I think are really fascinating. Why do we have this rocket that costs roughly$4 billion per launch, right? $4 billion per launch? $4 billion to launch the full stack with the Orion. Expensive, it launches once a year, which is crazy low at most, right? You know, SpaceX has over 100 launches this year. Yeah. And it's only September. Well, then you have Starship, right?

49:59Which is the whole space, which is like everything will be made obsolete by Starship, which it might be. But the reason why it persists, and so the Trump administration tried to cancel this rocket this year. But you know what happened is that Ted Cruz, no critic, no real critic of Trump, completely wrote into a separate bill, nope, you're actually going to fund this, you're going to spend a billion dollars on this every year. But see, that sounds like it's more like a jobs program than advancement. It is, but I like to say, space is the only industry that is a shame that it makes jobs. Like, great, I love jobs.

50:29That's true, because defense is nothing but a jobs program, too. There's a lot of jobs. And nobody cares. No, no, defense, they make stuff to defend. Well, this is true, but I'm saying there's a lot of defense when you look at almost, when you look at$800 billion, there's a lot of waste there. Almost a trillion now. Almost a trillion now. There's a lot of waste there, is what I'm saying. There might be. This is my contrarian self, right? And this is, I'm frustrated by it, too, and this is like, I don't necessarily defend this way of doing things, But it's the incentive structure selects for these types of programs, right?

51:00Based on this distributed representative democratic system we have. And if that's the tax, in a sense, of getting a moon program to survive for the first time, the fact that we will be launching astronauts around the moon next year, fine. So let me just make a public service announcement, if I might. because what you're saying right now seems to be that if you can incentivize your representative to fund NASA, NASA will be funded. And believe it or not, when you reach out to the people that you vote for and tell them, hey, man, you better do this, they actually do take note because quite as it's kept, we're the boss.

51:43Okay, I know nobody wants to actually believe that. They work for us. They work for us. So if you reach out to them, and I'm talking about our Star Trek audience, and say, I do not want to see NASA decimated. I want to see as much money as possible that can go to NASA. And to take the science. And to studying the Earth. I want money there. Believe me. So along that line. It means something. Yeah, well, so I'll just plug planetary.org. So, I mean, one of the things we do is try to, this is a non-partisan grassroots effort that we try to do. For the most part, you know what? Congress has agreed with us on all the things I've just said.

52:18Congress has largely agreed with. And it really speaks to the, this is not something to completely despair over, right? And because it's generally still, with exceptions of things like science, unfortunately, but generally still non-partisan. It's political, but non-partisan. Political, but not partisan. Yeah. And so if you just participate in that process, and we've done this for years, and we've had a very good response. How would a visitor to planetary.org participate in the process, Casey? Funny you mention that, Bill. And what was that website again? Planetary.org. Well, we have a link. Save NASA Science is our big campaign to do this.

52:56And it's been a huge—we've had hundreds of thousands of people respond. And we've had dozens of other organizations, thousands of scientists. To your point, Chuck, we send—our members and people who visit the website send emails. They write paper letters. and they... They go to Washington, D.C. with us. Over 200 people will be joining us in Washington, D.C. to talk about NASA science. So 200 people who take the time, they take a day or two off from a job, often fly on a plane to Washington, sometimes drive, take a train, and that we organize it so that they can visit their congressional representative, their senator, and make just the case that you're describing.

53:34Excellent. So check us out, you guys. It is also very rewarding. I think everybody who participates gets a lot out of it. You really walk the halls of Congress. You really meet with your representative. You meet their staffers, some of whom are old enough to drive. And you go in New York. That's a reference. People operate motor vehicles. Many of you don't. And so it is really a cool thing that with Casey's leadership, with our other guy in D.C., Jack Corrali, we have been able to build this very well-organized effort. And furthermore, when members go to congressional offices, Casey, you have created what you call tools to help people take it.

54:22Well, we want to empower people. Empower. Yeah, I mean, well, you want to walk in and just say, you can go in and say, I want this. And that's totally legitimate. You're not an expert. I want this. But if you can make the case saying, you walk in and say, oh, here's actually NASA's real economic impact in your district. Here's NASA's science impact specifically. So you have written software. We have pre-generated, we've done all the analysis for people, all this stuff to show that there's an impact here, right? So if I'm from a congressional district, I go to planetary.org and I find... You can go to dashboards.planetary.org and you can find or save our NASA science at planetary.org and you can find your state and district and you can find out how it impacts your locale because that immediately establishes relevance.

55:03Something happens here because of this. And if we don't do it, it goes away. How many congressional districts are there? Well, 435 congressional districts and 50 states. And 50 states. So that's 100 senators. Yep. So you can go in either with the ideas or the numbers in your head, or you can print out the numbers and you can present them to your representative and senator and say, this is the effect in our district. We want to fund NASA science. We want to explore planets. and China National Space Administration will kick our empennage if we don't do something. So we give you, yeah, I mean, it's whatever works best for you and what's best for your representative and what resonates.

55:45And the point is that there's a lot of ways to argue for this and that it's also in so doing, it's anti-cynicism. It's like a good antidote to cynicism, frankly. Like most people come out of this and this is, because you don't run into these partisan walls, you are there really just trying to express your passion. And that's, at the end of the day, what we all have, and what's so unique about this, is that this isn't just, as Bill, you said, we're independent, I don't get any bonuses if we go to Europa or Jupiter, unfortunately. We don't have anything to gain but seeing the incredible pictures or sharing in the knowledge that we find.

56:17And that enrichment, that is an access, I think, to the sublime, that we do not get from pretty much anything else in a secular world today. And that's why I say it's the antidote to scrolling on TikTok or whatever endlessly, is that there's something bigger and grander and just waiting, literally sitting on the surface of Mars waiting to be known. Surface of Mars is one example. Europa. Just whatever, right? And we have the ability to do it. We're all for all that. So you're not just there talking about a specific thing. You're saying, in doing this action, we ourselves become better. What a great thing to argue for.

56:48Let me just add this, you guys. Planetary Society was founded by the famous Carl Sagan, the guy who gave Neil a copy of his book, gave him a ride to the bus station, but Neil chose not to take his course. I can't, you'll have to take that up with him. Carl Sagan, Lou Friedman, who was an orbital mechanics guy at Jet Propulsion Lab at the time, and Bruce Murray. And Bruce Murray was the head of the Jet Propulsion Lab during these famous, famous missions. Viking landing on the surface of Mars and Voyager, the famous Voyager spacecraft that did the grand tour of the solar system, the golden record, which is still flying out beyond the heliopause into the cosmos.

57:30He was the head guy during all that. And he famously was asked, why are you building these spacecraft? What are you going to find? We don't know what we're going to find. That's what we're building them. And to that point, all four of my grandparents were born in the 19th century. They were born in the 1800s. I'm of a certain age. All four of them. They did not know there were neutrons. They did not know there was relativity. They did not know that one day we would have mobile phones that depend on both special relativity, the speed of the spacecraft, and general relativity, the Earth's gravity affecting the speed of clocks.

58:10They did not know any of that. And all of that is derived from space exploration and in the case of relativity and largely from just the telescopes, just the beginning before rockets. They didn't know about Pluto. They didn't know there was a Pluto. And there still isn't a Pluto. There's a Pluto. Pluto and the Sedna. So anyway, you guys, I'm starting my own movement. So to take it back to Casey's point, with all this talk, all this concern about NASA budget and funding international competition, what could a person do about it, Casey? Well, again, planetary.org, there's links right on the homepage for our Save NASA Science campaign.

58:49It'll catch you up on the news. It'll give you ways to write your member of Congress. You can call them if you want. It catches you up on talking points. and then whenever you want, you can join us. We go to Congress every year. Sometimes twice a year. Sometimes twice a year. And so you can sign up. I have a space advocate newsletter and then also subscribe to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio to keep going into all the depths and nuance and reasons for why we do these things. And then the more you know, the better you're going to be. I just saw a star go across the room. How appropriate for where we're here.

59:19So really, you guys, a lot of times on StarTalk, we talk about cosmology and astrophysics and so on. the discoveries that have been made about anthropomorphic star ripping the guts out of the star cluster or the planetary nebula or something. But this is the practical information about what it takes to support NASA science so that we can make these discoveries and work to answering the two deep questions. Where did we come from and are we alone? The search for life. Keep looking up. Thanks for listening.

59:55Thank you.