 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things in matter-to-tech and Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Cynthia Sinclair. In our show this time, we'll take a look at the future of space tourism, according to professor and author Jim Bell of the University of Arizona. He gave a talk recently at the University of Hawaii. It was funny, witty, and scientific, and well attended by the UH astronomy and geophysics and planetary community. Jim Bell is a planetary scientist, educator, author, public speaker for both public and academic audiences and president of the Planetary Society. He took his master's in PhD at UH Manoa. He is now a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, an adjunct professor in the Department of Astronomy at Cornell, and a distinguished visiting scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is heavily involved in NASA's Solar System Exploration missions like those of the Mars rovers, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. Jim runs an active research program involving many students and topics. Current areas of research in his group include surface mineralogy and the weathering history of Mars, surface composition and the mineralogy of the moon, and geologic processes on the surfaces of terrestrial planets, moons, and asteroids. In 2011 he received a Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Public Communication from the American Astronomical Society. He is an avid writer for space-related magazines and blogs, and often appears in media interviews on space-related topics. His talks cover a wide variety of space-related topics, ranging from exploring Mars with rovers, viewing the Solar System in 3D, and the future of space exploration and other public talks related to topics such as the search for life in the universe, the role of science in exploration in society, and building bridges between engineers and scientists. He gave a great talk at UH Minoa. He talked about taking some vacation time at Phobos, skiing Northern Mars, rafting on Saturn's largest moon, or booking a stay in a luxury hotel and spa floating above Jupiter's great red spot, and a ton of other exotic holidays and fun tourist activities. Was he completely serious? Hoping you choose where to go and what to do is covered in Jim's book, The Ultimate Interplanetary Travel Guide, a futuristic journey through the cosmos. Jim believes travel to space will become as routine as air travel is now, given how far we've come with technology in the past hundred years. From planes to spacecraft, space tourism could conceivably happen in fifty or a hundred years from now. Jim said, right now we can put a really good list together of where people are going to want to go. He also said, we already know where the cool hotspots are going to be, where the adventure travel is going to be, where people are going to want to go to skydive to walk around or to fly, and where the interplanetary parks are going to be. All the planetary science in his book, facts, sizes, distances, compounds, and chemical compositions are based on or extrapolated from what we already know. These potential travel destinations are more science fact than science fiction. Even with reasonably assumed advanced propulsion technologies, we are still likely to measure travel times to solar system destinations in weeks at best, and more likely in months or years. He said, I thought it was important to make it. Maybe just to inspire people that this could really happen. Even when it does happen, space is big. The solar system is big. The idea of a travel guide has been on my mind for many, many years, he said. His book looks and reads like a lonely planet travel guide. Here's how long it takes to get there. What there is to do, see, and explore. What accommodations and dining will be like. Wow. Talk about a rich but also scientific imagination. Every place I wrote about I want to go to, but I want to come back, he said. I don't want to be a settler. I want to be a tourist. I'm not even sure I'd go to one of those long outer solar system trips where it could be your last trip. Earth is my favorite planet. I spend most of my life here. Most of my friends are from Earth. I love the place, he said. Jim's talk was really interesting, creative, and more than a little whimsical. Everyone enjoyed it, especially the scientists. It's my pleasure to introduce our speaker this evening. And one of the greatest pleasures, I think, as a faculty member is to see how our former graduate students have succeeded when they leave, that's what the alumni weekend is all about, for example. I think students are academic kids. Like our natural kids, we hope they do well and avoid all the errors that we have made. I'm really pleased to say that Jim Bell, tonight's speaker, has done this to a phenomenal degree. So it's indeed my great pleasure to introduce our speaker tonight. Welcome, Jim, to Hawaii. It's been a long time since we saw you here last. Thank you, Pete. It's great to be back among friends and some familiar buildings surrounded by new buildings that have popped up somehow. Take you on an interesting and maybe speculative journey this evening through the solar system and through the lens of space tourism. I'll share with you some thoughts about why I'm foolishly optimistic on the future of space tourism and maybe even make some predictions about some of the places that will go. Kind of a central hypothesis that guides my thinking in all of this is that NASA and other space agencies have been around for 60 years and we've been exploring the solar system robotically. And I claim that we know right now where the interplanetary national parks are going to be in our solar system. We know where the superlatives are, the deepest canyon, the tallest mountains, the tallest cliffs, et cetera. And you saw some of them in the film. And so just like on our own planet where we've made it a point to try to conserve, protect, and enjoy the superlative places on our own planet, our solar system is out there with similar kinds of superlative places. And another hypothesis is that tourism is a great business model that should work in deep space just like it works on the earth. Tourism is a very simple business model. People are interested in going somewhere, you provide the infrastructure, the transportation, the accommodations, the dining, the entertainment, and people will come and companies make money off of that. So those are two of the kind of high level assumptions. And then I fold in just my own optimism. And then one more thing. We're going to take a little trip into the future right now. And I don't know whether this is 50 years from now, 100 years from now, 200 years from now. I guessed 200 in the book, but it could be sooner. It could be more. And I'm going to assume that we don't need any kind of magic to get to a place like what I'm going to describe. We don't need warp drives or transporters or lightsabers or anything science fiction. I think that a reasonable extrapolation of technology, engineering achievements, scientific advances can get us to a place like this. It delved me then. You've decided, finally, you want to take that off-planet trip. And so you're going to have to do some preparation just like if you were going to do some preparation for an adventure tourism kind of activity here on the earth. And there's lots of attractions, of course, you can run into. And so I sprinkled throughout the talks great little icons for places to eat and good photography. And here's a historical monument, et cetera, et cetera. But also there's going to be some unique warnings you have to be aware of. Maybe there's acid rain. Maybe there's crazy day and night cycles. Maybe there's giant dust storms. Maybe there's extreme temperatures both on the cold and the hot side. Maybe there's extreme gravities, extreme pressures. Maybe it'll take you a super long time to get some of these places. There's radioactivity there. The terrain's rough. There are other hazards you cannot anticipate. You're probably going to have to have some training. And probably you're going to use specialized equipment. And it sounds like, wow, that's going to forget it, right? But if you want to climb Mount Everest, sure, you can do that. What do you need? You need special equipment. You need training, some guides to help you figure out how to get there. You want to dive a deep wreck in the Caribbean? Sure, you can do that. You're going to need special equipment, some training, some guides. Where would you start, right? You want to take a deep space vacation? Why not take a weekend on the moon, right? Maybe because it's our closest celestial neighbor, it's probably easy to predict. It's going to be an extremely popular, common tourist destination. In the future, you can do things like visit historic landing sites, which are going to need to be protected in some way. Of course, there's ice at the poles. That ice is a resource that's going to be mined in some way. In the future, it's easy to make that kind of a prediction. You can go hiking in low gravity, some spectacular peaks. You can go play in low gravity, low-g theme parks, low-g sports. Go to places where the sun never sets along the rims of some of the polar craters. And of course, there'll be unique lunar cuisine that's involved in this. Are these farsight Brussels sprouts? I can tell. And it's relatively close to home. I say weekending on the moon. That implies that there's going to be some significant advancement in propulsion technology compared to the three days it takes to get there now. I don't know what that technology is. I don't even know if I'm probably out of my league even guessing that you could get to the moon in some number of hours, less than a day. But it doesn't seem like a completely unreasonable thing to speculate on for 50, 100 years or more into the future. All right, so you've been to the moon. I really want to get out of your moon system. Let's do something that I've always wanted to check off my interplanetary passport. Let's go to Venus. Why not? Kind of a crazy place. Surface temperature hotter than your oven. But a thick atmosphere with different interesting layers and temperatures and pressures. Maybe easy to imagine a series of floating hotels in the atmosphere of Venus. You saw some examples in other places in the film. Maybe easy to imagine that you could get down to the surface. It is an engineering problem that needs to be solved, right? High temperature, high pressure. Oh, and we have to pass through sulfuric acid clouds to get there. And what's waiting for you down on the surface? Another large collection of robotic spacecraft from early in the history of Venus exploration and just some pretty spectacular geology there as well, especially for volcanologists. Volcanologists should love Venus, right? It's all kinds of great volcanic features on the surface. Maybe you want to keep getting in a little closer to the sun. You want to zip around on Mercury, the fastest moving planet and intermediate in size between the Earth and the moon. And my kind of fun speculation is that because it's the fastest moving planet in the solar system, if you want to set the solar system to land speed record in inertial coordinate systems, you have to go to Mercury. And so one can imagine a sort of a speedway culture. Every one of these destinations is going to have to have a colony or a base of some kind. That's the center of the infrastructure, at least one. The moon will have more than one. Places like Mars will probably have more than one. And things to do. So not just things to photograph, places to hike, things to do, entertainment and sports, as I mentioned earlier. Mercury has this weird, unique resonance between its orbit and its spin. And so there are places, certain longitudes you can go. You can imagine a hostel or a hotel set up there where you watch the sunrise and then the sun sets. And then the sun rises again over the course of a couple of days. And maybe you want to get some sun. This may not resonate so much with Hawaiians, but maybe you literally want to get some sun. Can we imagine tourist visits, adventure tours, really close to our nearby star? The sun, of course, is a pretty violent environment, in terms of temperature, radiation, but also pretty spectacular environment to view. You can get lucky and see a total solar eclipse if you're in the right place at the right time on the Earth. Or you can go to the right place in space and have a total solar eclipse all the time. Now you want to maybe head out in the other direction and start to build your experience base, fill out your passport. Hey, what do you want to do this summer, honey? Well, I don't know. How about if we take the kids to Mars? All right, let's do that. What are we going to do there? Well, there's lots of things to do there. Mars, I predict, in the future will be probably the second most popular deep space tourist destination beyond the moon. I can imagine multiple settlements and colonies there. Some could start, if you believe, Elon Musk as soon as a decade or two from now. We know the geology of that planet in great detail. We know places where there is ice on the surface, water ice and dry ice on the surface or in the shallow subsurface. And some of those places extend down, not just at the poles, but down into the mid-latitudes, where you also have enough sunlight at those mid-latitudes to run solar panels. Just like on the moon, there's historic landing sites, Viking landing sites, the rover landing sites, the first human landing on Mars, and just like on the moon and other exotic destinations on the Earth, there will be unique food, unique music, unique culture, unique entertainment, and sports opportunities as well. Mars has these two moons, these two potato-shaped looking moons, Phobos and Deimos that orbit around the planet. Phobos is very, very close to Mars. It actually orbits Mars faster than Mars spins on its axis. So it rises in the west and sets in the east around Mars. And Deimos orbits almost the same time, a little bit longer than a Mars day, so it stays over the same parts of the planet for long duration. The main asteroid belt, populated with millions of bodies larger than a kilometer in size, and most of the mass tied up in a relatively small number of them. I mentioned Ceres, also Vesta, the asteroid psyche, just great examples of places that have been explored in the early 21st century. So Jupiter, the great red spot, of course, it's been an attraction since the 17th century. And you saw a really nice spot in the film imagining a ship with an enormous bay window that you can just float in front of the great red spot of Jupiter. If you love the northern lights or southern lights on the earth, if you're an Aurora viewer, an Aurora hunter, the best Aurora in the solar system around Jupiter. They're these beautiful streams of light and electricity, which are much larger than the entire earth individually. So you can go impact hunting. I'll describe that in a second. And just like on Venus, it's easy to imagine these floating hotels at different levels of the atmosphere. You sign up for that tour. The pilot takes you on a tour of the individual comets or asteroids that are going to smash into Jupiter. You follow along. Maybe you do a little surface excursion, do some sampling, whatever. And then you back off to a safe distance and watch the most spectacular fireworks show you'll probably will ever see in your entire life. You've seen Jupiter and all it has to offer, so you want to go on. Let's go on to Saturn. Now we're talking even longer travel times to get out there. But maybe you've decided this is going to be your retirement tour, right? You're just going to retire by visiting the places in the outer solar system. The rings of Saturn and the atmosphere of Saturn itself. Other great targets that you saw highlighted a little bit in the film. Saturn's largest room. Titan's seashore recreation area. The Department of the Exterior and Saturn, the moons of Saturn. Titan's super interesting because of the Cassini mission, which was an orbiter. That was an orbiting Saturn for a decade. Maybe you've got a lot of time. You really don't care if you come back to the Earth. You've seen it all except for the far outer solar system. You're in a snap tune. Maybe you don't care if it's a one-way trip. And your tour company will take care of that for you too. Sure. Now these are the vast outer reaches of the solar system. 20, 30, 40 times distance from the Earth to the Sun. Long travel times, years to get out there. And some really interesting things to see when you get out there. A whole series of very cool icy moons around the planet Uranus. A big moon around Neptune called Triton that also has geysers of its own. Pretty spectacular clouds and the atmospheres of both Uranus and Neptune. And really interesting collection of ices and glaciers that have only recently been discovered on Pluto. So the skiing industry in Pluto is really going to pick up. All right, so I've taken you on this fanciful imagined speculative tour of some of the highlights of our solar system from a tourist destination. Places that we know about now. And maybe I've convinced you that we know a lot of the greatest hits places that we will ultimately visit. But I want to bring you back to my favorite planet. My favorite planet is the Earth. Want to know more about Jim Bell and his research books, writings and talks on space tourism? Check out Jimbell.SESE.ASU.EDU or you can look at his YouTube channel or you can read his book. And now let's check out our ThinkTech schedule of events going forward. ThinkTech broadcasts its talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. And some people listen to them all night long and on the weekends. If you missed a show or if you want to replay or share any of our shows, they're all archived on demand on thinktecawaii.com and YouTube. For our audio stream, go to thinktecawaii.com slash audio. And we post all our shows as podcasts on iTunes. Visit thinktecawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links. For better yet, sign up on our email list and get our daily email advisories. ThinkTech is a high-tech green screen studio at Pioneer Plaza. 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For lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech, visit thinktecawaii.com, be a guest or a host, a producer or an intern, and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks so much for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification, and global awareness in Hawaii and throughout the solar system. And of course, the ongoing search for innovation wherever we can find it. You can watch this show throughout the week. And tune in next Sunday evening for our next important ThinkTech episode. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Cynthia Sinclair. Aloha everyone.