 I should warn you, we have the ignominious distinction of being the last panel before lunch. But my warning to you is that even though we're the only thing standing between you and those styrofoam boxes out there, nobody leaves here until Neil says so. I'm going to introduce my two panelists here who I'm very pleased to say have phonetically anagrammed names. Ellen Stofen and Neil Stephenson. Ellen is chief scientist at NASA. Can anybody beat that in this room? Serving as principal advisor to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on the agency science programs and science related strategic planning and investment. She has researched the geology of Venus, Mars, Saturn's moon Titan, and Earth, just to keep it local. And was a principal investigator on the Titan mayor explorer proposed mission to send a floating lander to a sea on Titan. Neil Stephenson, who you've already met, Neil is the New York Times bestselling author of many books, including the three volume historical epic The Baroque Cycle and Snow Crash, which was named one of Time magazine's top 100 all time English, best English language novels. Now you have to tell me, did you read all the ones ahead of you just to see what you did wrong? Maybe you can move up next time. Because we have to push the book, he is also the author of Atmosphere Incognita, a story in the Hieroglyphs collection. The title of this panel is Lost in Space, How Should We Approach Our Future Frontier? Let me begin by asking this question, how should we approach our future frontier? I'll start. Space is really expensive and hard to get to, and it's a dangerous place to be, so you have to have some reason for wanting to go there. The space program I grew up was based on a kind of heroic quest that was set by President Kennedy, which was the prototype of what we talk about when we refer to a hieroglyph in the sense of this book, meaning a thing that could be explained in one sentence, put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, that everyone could understand and that sounded really cool and that people were willing to get behind. Since then, we haven't really had that. Once we got to the moon, there was kind of a sense of what do we do now, and for various reasons we didn't go where I had always been told we were going to go, which was to giant orbiting space colonies and eventually to Mars. And so there's a whole generation of bitterly disappointed people from the 60s who never got their trip to Mars. So the first thing that I think we have to do is decide why we're doing it. We've got fantastic programs going on with robot space probes that are doing unbelievable stuff, sending people into space. We don't seem to have a super compelling narrative behind that anymore. And so I kind of feel like the first step is deciding why we want to be there and what the goal is. Well, I guess obviously I'm going to respectfully disagree that we don't have a goal. Scientifically, obviously as you say, robotically, we're pushing back the frontier. We're rewriting textbooks every day from the Kepler Space Telescope that in the last several years has discovered several thousand candidate planets around other stars. If that's not science fiction, I don't know what it is, but now it's science fact. And we're going to follow on with the JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope, to actually start looking at the atmospheres of those planets around other stars, which is just unbelievably cool. If you take it to the next level and say, okay, how are we doing that in our own solar system? We're searching for life on Mars, hopefully sometime soon on Europa. And this is where I think we do have a clear goal for the human exploration program. And that is the president has stated he wants to see a human in the vicinity of Mars by the early 2030s. Why? Well, scientifically, I actually think it's going to take geologists like me, astrobiologists, down on the surface of Mars cracking open rocks, throwing half of them over your shoulder and finding the right rock that's going to really demonstrate to us that life evolved on Mars. And so I think at NASA we feel like we have a clear goal, and the new part is we're trying to do it in a new way. So I'll stop there. Well, no, don't. Feel free to duke it out, because it's important here. I mean, the premise for those of you who haven't read all the paraphernalia, the premise of this whole conference is that Neil was mouthing off about the fact that science fiction writers have been falling down on the job. It goes crow-less and nothing awful about that. Oh, all right. Well, then, okay. You was issuing a complaint to me. Well, let's discuss that. And the fact that, I mean, look at science fiction from when we were young, consider, for example, Planet of the Apes, which was about, you know, ultimately about, well, it's a big Twilight Zone episode, which ends with, oh, it was Earth, after all. And it's all about atomic holocaust and the future civilization, whereas they do it now 50 years later almost, and it's about viruses and animal testing. So, you know, it's substantially the same story, but science fiction is much more interested in internal things and not about sending 40-story buildings into space. Discuss. The vision of the Planet of the Apes Zero was that of the sort of the one that I was raised on, which is this Collier's Magazine spreads by Chesley Bonestell in which there was a certain progression of vehicles and things we were going to build that was going to start with great, big, huge rockets called the NOVA boosters that were going to help us build sort of donut-shaped orbiting space colonies. And eventually we'd build vehicles big enough to take a substantial human presence to Mars. Mars has always been the obvious next place that we're expected to go. And the, you know, one vision of why to go there is to do science. And in a lot of ways, that's kind of the most logical reason to go to Mars for all the reasons that you mentioned. The vision that we hear from, say, Elon Musk is, I just want to go there. You know, just, I want to die on Mars just, I think it's somehow the inherent kind of destiny of the human race to expand to other worlds. And that's all the justification that I really need. Well, I think it's a great point. And I actually think science fiction does such a great job of inspiring. You know, I didn't say this, but, you know, you can't invent something that somebody didn't imagine first. And we actually, our chief technologist, David Miller, has a little circular robot thing up on the space station called Spheres. And he actually invented it with his students at MIT after watching Star Wars and that little circular ball thing that Luke Skywalker trained with. We have one of those now up on the aisle. Well, they don't do training with it. But again, that powerful role that I think imagination plays is something that's a critical role. And actually, I just read about a month or so ago a new book called The Martian where a guy gets accidentally left behind on Mars by an expedition. It's a fun book. So, you know, I think science fiction is still out there. And I love this idea of let's not just have dystopian, you know, as much as I love those stories as much as anyone, that imagining new ways of propulsion, that imagining new ways of exploring, new ways of doing spacecraft is something that, you know, some of those ideas are going to become the reality. They're going to make an engineer sit down and say, oh, maybe I could actually do that. Somebody in this room must know what that floating ball was called because I'm looking around and it's proud and I'm seeing a lot of nerds. It's the closest I've come to Comic-Con. What is it? It's just called a remote? That's not a good enough name. Oh, we have a better name for it. What do you call it? Spears. My theory was that it was actually a pinata and that had he hit it, all his candy would have fallen out. How does it move? Does it have, like, compressed rockets? I'm hoping Tom knows. I'm actually not sure. There's a lot of NASA people in the audience, but I don't know if anybody can help me out, compress the O2 there. O2, okay. Don't use it too much or you'll just fix it. Let's talk about something, a seed you also planted, Neil, this morning about having sort of a centralized system or method for developing, generating, and making ideas happen. In the entertainment business and all of you folks online, don't tell anybody this, but there's sort of this protocol. I will tell young writers if you want to work and show business, you have to know who to go to go in and pitch an idea. But imagine you're trying to pitch an idea to General Motors for a new car. It's very, very hard, right? I've got an idea for the future. I've got an idea for the next version of rocket ships or robots or whatever. How do we make that happen? How do we develop that infrastructure? It's tough because with other types of inventions, particularly in the realm of software, you can make a pitch that will appeal to greed, frankly, to the desire of the investor to make a bunch of money. And so there's a well-trodden path that entrepreneurs can use to get funding based on that. In the case of inventing a new propulsion system for space travel, it's a much harder pitch to make because it's difficult to explain to a business person how they're going to get their money back. It almost obliges, unless there's something I'm not aware of, it almost obliges somebody who's trying to innovate in that area to seek grants, to do things through university labs or government labs of various kinds. We actually have a program at NASA called NIAC. It's the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. And if you guys are ever short on ideas for stories, I'd go look at some of the things we fund. We have spider web type platforms to get really large aperture telescopes, submarines on Titan, advanced propulsion systems. So we do actually, obviously, we're spending most of our NASA resources trying to make sure the space station's operating, launching the 17 satellites we have studying the Earth. But we do put some money into what are things we want to do 25 years from now? What do we want to do 30 years from now? Let's put a little money into speculation, into innovation. Tom talked earlier about the challenges and prizes in citizen science. And that's an area we're really expanding in to say, you know, we don't have all the good ideas. Let's reach out as broadly as we can and get help. Sorry, that begs the question, which I'm asked constantly. I'm sure you are too, Neil. So where do you get your ideas? I think the stock answer is Schenectady. I agree. That's not a good enough answer, though. Well, you mean ideas for fiction? Are we talking about fiction now? I'm more interested in our answer. I thought you were looking at me. You know, I think the thing is, you know, earlier we were talking about the globalization of science. You know, first of all, I think if we're like working on a global exploration roadmap of how are we going to get humans to Mars? You know, we work with our global partners on how to do that. So first of all, we don't just look within the United States. We don't just look within the government. We just don't say, okay, all the good ideas are held within NASA or the federal government. We reach out and form partnerships with universities, with academia, and again, increasingly with people through citizen science, through, you know, going out and saying, what ideas can we actually get huge public involvement in? And I think we're actually changing the way we do things, which is another great example of that, is commercial crew and commercial cargo, saying, you know, if we're going to get to Mars in the future, the space program of the future is going to be much more a public-private than the entirely public-funded effort that we saw going to the moon. Where do you get your ideas now? And how do you, well, so, I mean, again, this comes back to your inspiration for this whole thing. So how do we, as science fiction writers, develop things that will, because here you have the chief scientist at NASA saying, we're interested. We're interested in hearing it. Where do we get the ideas? I spent a while trying to come up with new ideas for Space Launch, for how to get things off the ground and into low-Earth orbit. And that was out of a conviction that what we've been doing all along, conventional chemical rockets, are probably not the technology we would pick if we started from scratch and decided what was going to work best. And what I found out pretty quickly was that so many brilliant people have been thinking about that exact problem for so long that it's almost a waste of time. Unless you have, you're privy to some new physics or some new material science to try to invent any novel kind of Space Launch technology because you always end up learning that somebody came up with exactly that idea and 20 other cool ideas like 50 years ago and investigated it and wrote it all down. So there's an amazing zoo of different ideas. I found things like somebody had the idea to drill a two-mile-long slanted hole, a tunnel in the Antarctic ice cap and use it as a giant gun. And I mean, that's just one example of many ideas that people have come up with. So I think innovating in that part of it, which is only a small part of what a space business and a space ecosystem has to look like, is less a problem of coming up with new ideas and more a problem of how do you push those ideas forward in a kind of aerospace ecosystem where we're pretty much locked in on the chemical rocket approach that has been the basis for all space travel until today. Are we seeing advances in alternative means of propulsion? We are. In fact, right now NASA is putting a lot of effort into SEP, which is solar electric propulsion, ion propulsion. We've done some spacecraft to different targets with it, but it's actually, we're developing a much larger ion engine to do an asteroid mission because we think that's the most useful technology that we have at this point in time, say, to move cargo back and forth to Mars because if you're going to have humans on Mars, you're going to have to take a lot of stuff for them. And so ion propulsion is sort of the next step. We certainly have looked over the years as many people have at nuclear thermal propulsion, but that sort of next big step is something that still, as Neil says, it's a huge challenge. Everybody has said, you know, we've got to move beyond chemical propulsion, but it's really hard. Physics is tough. I thought so in college and I think so now. So where do you want to go in space? I mean, it sounds like Mars just isn't that big a deal anymore. I don't think I said that. I mean, the problem with space is you've got to have gravity or your body falls apart and you've got to get away from cosmic radiation. So it's actually a pretty rough environment and so the two ways to do that are you can go to a large planet and dig in, which is kind of what you would be doing in the case of Mars, or you can use in-situ resources like asteroids to build things that rotate to give you simulated gravity and then construct shielding around your living quarters so you don't get just baked by cosmic radiation. So those are kind of the two options and in a lot of ways the building a habitat is sort of more logical because there's plenty of stuff up there. There's plenty of material in Earth-like orbits that could be gone up and grabbed and you can build whatever environment you please in that case. But it lacks the certain kind of romantic element of being able to go to another planet and go places where people haven't gone before and perhaps be confronted with surprises. There's not going to be a lot of surprises on a rotating space habitat. Are we looking at colonization in our lifetime or our grandchildren's lifetime? Our aim right now is to get humans to Mars and as Elon Musk says, to get them safely home again if they so choose. So our focus is really that how do you get humans safely there? How can we make sure with the space radiation and other issues that we can get them there safely and get them home again? And we can do it by the 2030s. I mean, we're really on a path and I think we can achieve it. I think where this community is really helpful is, you know, is this something that you think engages the public? I mean, how many of you would want to go to Mars? Takers? As long as you can come back. You know, and at times, sometimes when I'm talking to people in the general public, because I think science fiction has done such a good job, because CGI has done such a good job, I actually find some confusion in the public about whether we've actually been to Mars or not, which is horribly disappointing, you know, from my point of view. And so I think that this community serves a great role because you guys are probably more maybe enthusiastic about getting humans to Mars than your average person on the street in talking about it, in talking about why it's exciting, why it's exciting to explore, to move beyond this planet, to move out into the solar system and someday beyond. When you say we haven't been to Mars, I mean, we haven't been to the moon, but we've been to the moon. So there's that distinction as well. One of the early problems we had on Futurama was not only, you know, we could just magically terraform and assume there were aliens and all kinds of other life forms in space, but the chief difficulty we had, because we were so compulsive, was the speed of light is a real hard thing to defy and how we could get anywhere even in the galaxy within a reasonable period of time. So we just made this rule that in 2045, the speed of light had been changed. So which we can do, can you? So far we don't think so. We have found no good evidence that you can exceed the speed of light. So that is a limiting factor. And that is the frustration, you know, as again, it's within our grasp, within our lifetimes, I think, to ultimately, we need really large aperture telescopes, but this idea of being able to start imaging planets around other stars is one that I think is so exciting, one I think we're going to see. And the first thing we're going to want to do is go there, but they're obviously really far away. What do you want to see happen? The... Lunch? Yeah, yeah, no, no. Blood sugar. Panel to end. No, no, the... I'm still stuck on the kind of... the more Elon Musk style of heroic space epic. You know, just go to space because it's what we ought to do and just because it would be cool. It's kind of a... almost an adolescent kind of impulse, but I think that's the... those are the arguments that sound most compelling to me. And usually what happens then is then there's some backfilling. So say, well, because if there was a horrible plague on Earth and everyone died, then we would have another planet, you know. So there's always sort of some rationalizations that are backfilled in for the sort of go big mentality about space exploration. But why isn't Manifest Destiny enough? I'm saying it is for me. Yeah, but... Well, I think for a lot of people it's just not. I mean, a lot of people say, well, why don't you invest that money in something else? Why don't you invest that money here on Earth? And that's why I think Manifest Destiny or however you want to say it's our nature to explore. We push boundaries as a species by nature is part of the justification. There is scientific justification. And of course then there's the justification. My favorite Onion article ever was one where they said NASA has been launching billions of dollars into space and they show these rocket ships going off loaded with dollars trailing behind them. We spend all this money here on Earth. These are great STEM jobs. We invest in the best sectors of the economy that help grow this country, help grow economies across the world. So there is that economic piece that we don't always talk about but is there. This is a great investment for innovation that I think is also important. The great concern is when NASA isn't launching that money, what are you doing when you're not launching money into space? We're innovating, we're exploring, we're discovering. We have six people above us right now on the International Space Station doing amazing research. They're watching us now. A minute ago on my phone I pulled up the live stream feed. How cool is that that on your cell phone you can sit there and watch what the astronauts are seeing from space down here on Earth. We're achieving amazing things and the problem is sometimes I think the public is just kind of, you know, they see it every day and it's routine. You know, to me it's never routine. You get to look at the surface of another planet for the first time. You watch a launch. I watched the SpaceX launch a couple weeks ago sending new cargo up to the ISS. You know, we do, not we at NASA, we as a country, we as a civilization do amazing, cool things and it's really fun to be part of it. We can start taking questions or we can just answer all of Ms. Singh's questions now if we have time for that. I hate to be a party pooper. I know you've said you don't want us to be negative, but when the space shuttle program was being initiated they were saying, I believe, $100 a pound to put stuff into low Earth orbit. By the time it was done I heard figures that said it was a half billion dollars launch. Isn't that the real killer for space exploration as low Earth orbit, the thing that you wrote about? And how do you think that's going to work out with initiatives like Mr. Musk's? It's certainly a big, it's a big hurdle obviously and that's why the interest in considering other ways of doing it, there's a lot that could be said and has been said about the politics of the space shuttle and how it came to be in the form that it ended up in and how that may have driven its cost upwards in a way its original planners didn't anticipate. So one of the basic issues we're never going to get away with in launch cost reduction is that it's all entwined with politics and with money in a way that's very hard to separate out. If I can jump to one of Ms. Singh's questions. I think the issue of how we work with other countries in the world is really critical and last week I had the great fortune to be able to go up to New York City and put forward a bunch of initiatives for the big UN climate summit. One of those was NASA was releasing really high resolution topographic elevation data over most of the continent of Africa and that data are critical but we're not just throwing it over the transom and saying here world, good luck with this elevation data. We actually have a group called Surveyor that we do with USAID where we go into countries this year it's going to be East Africa, South Africa and we take those data sets and we say elevation data that can help you in your local region help to make better decisions when your sea level is rising when you're going to get storm surges in areas how are you going to use this data to make decisions that are going to affect people's lives affect their economies and so in the government we're trying to make especially climate data much more widely available around the world but not just saying to a country here's the data but here's how to use it here's how you can use it those hard decisions that are going to have to be made in the back I'm kind of wondering about space tourism or it's kind of the functional equivalent in space of eco-tourism it seemed to me many stories in the book talked about wealthy people willing to drink in the first space bar or to go on an eco-tourist venture that foreshadowed Habs in space or on the moon I'm wondering whether or not space tourism has an opportunity to kind of both finance and bootstrap renewed space program and I'm wondering if we can use that to send people like Chris Hadfield to sing David Bowie from the space station or any of the other things because it seems to me you pull a country together I was brought to tears personally listening to him sing David Bowie and this is flying down below me so I guess that's my question where is space tourism on the horizon you know I've watched that video 12 times and I'm a crier and I cried all so I thought it was beautiful you know we're entering into a new ramen now it's a really exciting time to be there with the sort of partnering with the commercial sector with going to commercial cargo for the ISS going to commercial crew and you know part of it with commercial crew you know we had three companies that were buying for this two were selected this has been talked about earlier we're going to a new realm you know by the 2020s are there going to be commercial outposts in low earth orbit will NASA just be a customer instead of the primary customer along with the other space agencies of the world and I think what's going to happen over the next 10 years is going to be fascinating as we move to despite the cost of getting material off the earth even just to low earth orbit the commercial sector wants to play small companies big companies innovators it's a changing world and I think it's really exciting and again that's where you guys come in because it's not clear to me where it's all going I don't think it's clear to anybody at this point but it's clear that that we're going towards commercial low earth orbit what it's going to look like say by 2025 2030 I think it's really an open question two words Disney moon once they put Park up there people will go I mean who went to Orlando before yes actually you had a question sir she hasn't I agree that it's an exciting time for the commercial elements to work as part of you know in DC we call that part of the national defense industrial base there's a growing number of people in organizations that are part of that but Neil made a point earlier this morning as well that commercial interests are not identical to public interests unfortunately there's also then this sort of resource constraint for innovation at the shortage I think it's really interesting to think about whether the shortage is on clever ideas or whether it's about the infrastructure to actually launch literally or figuratively those new ideas how do we think about how the small profit driven or large profit driven commercial side should intersect with the government requirements or public needs whether that's of space exploration of other kinds of technological innovation in a way that as Dan Kaufman this morning talked about pushes that public sector interest but benefits from the commercial side government has a few challenges in terms of procurement and other moving fast in a way that it didn't in the 1960s and so how do we balance all those different constraints and opportunities well just quick answer on that Neil talk about it we struggle with that every day at NASA because you say how do you get the commercial sector involved how do you energize them about the potential of low earth orbit we have a group called CASIS that's affiliated with NASA that runs the national laboratory up on the international space station that's looking for ways to commercialize research they have now sent their second group of commercial research experiments up to the station including just last week with the 3D printer and some other experiments that they sent up so we're moving into that realm but I think we're doing it kind of step by step and trying to figure out it's a complex question are we up and down mass limited yes are we resource limited resources are what they are and you do what you can and you try to innovate as you go along there's massive interaction with government that starts to happen as soon as you a private company starts to do anything related to space if you're trying to build a rocket you're dealing with all kinds of regulatory issues around the fact that you've got this big piece of fire breathing stuff that's going to go over a lot of other people's property and so there's certain standards you have to obey around that and what those standards are going to lead to is that you're probably going to end up launching from an existing government launch facility there's also sort of arms control regulations that kick in if you're building anything that can be defined as part of as part of a weapon then it limits who's allowed to get access who you can talk to about your project and so a lot of these people have to deal with kind of complicated problems around restricting access to information to U.S. nationals or people who are on an approved list so there's massive interaction that happens in a way space is like maybe not a great example of an area where we can do free innovation simply because of these existing factors that it's always going to be a sort of co-production of government and private industry Tell the anecdote I think it's your anecdote about the best thing communism I once knew a grizzled NASA engineer from the Apollo days who said that the Apollo moon landings were communism's greatest achievement just in the sense that the whole reason to go there was to get there before the communists did and it took on elements of a kind of status propaganda project while we were doing it there needs to be market propaganda as well I mean is there inspiration like that out there today? Well again I think if you look at what it would take in the absence of a cold war to motivate a country to do something ambitious like sending humans to another planet, another moon you need a motivation and I think we've talked about the motivation to do it from a human perspective but I think to say practically how can we do it is to go back to this public-private partnership you know the US did it on its own for going to the moon we won't do it on our own to go to Mars it's going to be an international effort and I think it's not just going to be government it's going to be public-private partnerships and I think that's exciting because that's where we're going to get innovation we're going to get new ideas we're going to get great ideas yes sir put a man on the moon but can we get a microphone to that corner of the room first of all thank you so much this has been a fantastic panel our next task is how you as an author and you as a scientist try to enlist younger people into this process of thinking about science and thinking about space exploration it seems like today in literature there has been a migration towards the mystical you have vampires and wizards and werewolves and so how do we poach some of those zombies exactly so how do we poach some of these people back for science well I'll give a quick answer which is also a self-serving answer which is that I have a big near-earth space opera hard science fiction novel coming out in May called Seven Eves which is it's almost exactly me addressing your question which is why is it that in the sort of fantasy and science fiction world the needle has swung way over toward fantasy in the last decade or two so this is an experiment to see if I can swing it back the other way a little bit I think there's a couple things first of all the president has an initiative on STEM education how do we get better science teachers how do we make sure we're teaching kids science in a way a hands-on experience that's fun and exciting I try to get out in the classrooms just about once a month because to me it's fun to go out and talk to fifth graders or junior high school or high school kids and try to get them enthusiastic you figure if you make one convert I've done my job but the other thing where I think we have a lot of work to do frankly is again a question that was asked earlier in underrepresented groups I'm frequently one of the few women in a room when the topic is science and engineering and that's frustrating because we're not going to solve big problems like how to deal with climate change how to get a lot of mass through that thin atmosphere and down onto the surface of Mars unless we have all of our population participating and so I think it's a huge challenge still that we're working on and there's probably an anti-intellectualism that's permeating and anti-science that's permeating our discourse beyond just this subject in on the planet currently well let's talk about your inspirations what did you read what did you watch why did you become a scientist I have a particularly weird, my father worked for NASA I'm actually a NASA brat I went to my first launch when I was four I went to the Viking this dates me terribly I went to the Viking launches and met Carl Sagan and all the people who put Viking on Mars and so to me NASA was something I grew up with but it was that inspiration of seeing people go to the moon on the other hand I was reading dune in a corner you know I was hugely inspired by science fiction and so to me it was that combination of reality we have people on the moon and also reading about science fiction it's the fact in the fiction and you need both I think how about you just sitting on the rug in front of the big black and white TV watching the mercury in Gemini missions you know I mean that was it and who are you who are you fictional you know the usual suspects from that era but for whatever reason the one that sticks with me is Heinlein so I read all that stuff but he had a knack for creating little moments little conversations or little interactions between people that have stuck with me and I have very clearly lodged in my head all these years later there's one in particular that just burns me up I get mad whenever I I got angry when I read it as a kid and my blood pressure still goes up whenever I remember this you want to know what it was? Yes we do it's the one where the I'm afraid we're out of time it's the one where the high school group goes through a teleportation tube to another planet for their like summer vacation their weekend away and then it breaks down and so they get stuck there they get marooned on this other planet for a while and it's years before the earth people can get back to them and so finally the rescue party comes and there's a TV crew and so this guy is going to be the spokesman for these people who've survived on this planet and just before he goes on the air the reporter walks up to him and touches his face and he doesn't quite know what's going on but he does the interview and then later on he realizes that they put war pain on him because the story they wanted to tell on the TV interview was that these people had reverted to savagery and so they just like just you know put war pain on him before he could react and did the interview on that basis just makes me so mad so Heinlein had a genius for creating moments like that is all I'm saying as a writer that sold the technological content of the story better than than the other guys time for one final question and it will be mine which is the better future which is the future you expect Star Trek Star Wars oh good heavens no you must choose I have to say Star Trek you know again that probably dates me the original series you know again to me since you know I'm too chicken to ever actually go explore myself so I get to explore the surface of a titan every time Cassini sends back new data I get to explore Mars every time we get new images from curiosity so the idea of having this group out just exploring to me is perfection well Trek is science fiction and wars is fantasy and I see wars as the camel's nose under the tent that created the swing I was talking about earlier and so it's almost for me a self answering yes the correct answer is Star Trek Star Trek is the future Star Wars is a long time ago in a galaxy far far away what relevance does that have to us today thank you all you may now dine