 Dingo, we're back. It's the one o'clock rock on a given Monday every Monday research in Manoa And with us we have our old friends Jeff Taylor and Linda Martel of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology In so West that's the school of Ocean Earth science and technology We'll be giving you a short examination at the end of the show about various acronyms like that Welcome to the show you guys. Thank you. Bye great to see you here great to have you back And the title they settled on which I agree with and endorse wholeheartedly is the value of space research to earthlings from space to earth Okay, and this all begins with the notion of Why do we care? I love to ask that question. Why do we care about what you guys are doing in and the research You're doing about space Nothing record reflect a long You go ahead. I think It really helps us understand our place in the universe, you know We're part of something much bigger and we can in our daily lives get all wrapped up in for example a recent experience Getting to the parking structure in downtown Honolulu When you don't come down here that often and And wrapped up in all these little things and getting the kids to school and so on but in fact, you know, we are part of a Beautiful island chain on a beautiful blue planet in a dynamic solar system That's one of many and just to understand that and it supports life. That's the thing about it. Whatever it does It yes, not every place No, I'm also many so there are other places that will support could support life But many solar systems do not have planets in the right place We're lucky. We're to see this. This is almost of a one-time only type of deal. They call it the Goldilocks, you know Position just far enough away from the Sun to be good not too far away not too hot not too cool Yeah, you believe in an extra terrestrial beings up there. You believe in Well, I didn't think I was gonna get that question. Oh, and no, I don't really think It's too remarkable You know mankind humankind is too remarkable life mammalian life life is a wonderful thing But it isn't everywhere and we don't we don't really have evidence that it exists anywhere else We do not yet have evidence that there's any microorganisms anywhere else. It's likely there is Microorganisms, but this whole evolutionary change to lead to to intelligent beings. That's a long shot. This is yeah Yeah, yeah Well, I want to go one step further than you know You went about a beautiful island chain in a beautiful blue planet in a You know a dynamic solar system all of which supports life as it's great to get away From a world that is becoming increasingly fragmented So, you know, we had a show about the the headlines unpleasant headlines in Europe and in this country too and the world today We are fragmented all kinds of headaches going on Frustrations like the news is not good news. But if you look to the heavens, you have a moment of respite That's why people have found deities up there, right? Deities are always up there because you can get away from all the trouble on on the surface Yeah, in a sense of them looking back on us. Yeah, it also gives us a different perspective on the earth You know the picture of the whole earth That's like our picture number one is It's just magnificent and you know and back in the 70s late 60s 70s I think the environmental movement was given a big boost by this picture this national kind of picture here This is a newer one newer version of it taken by the lunar reconnaissance observer Yeah, but it is looking back to see this this amazing place in space and And and all by itself, you know in the further way you get from it you realize that we are on our own And it would be nice if all those intelligent beings down there acted somewhat more intelligently You don't see those country lines. Yeah, there's no country lines on that You see oceans you have to take care of in the land. I mean the ice cap seems smaller though Yeah, I wish more people would think about the earth this way as a whole Yeah, and this photograph with this kind of photograph the NASA style of photograph really should be an inspiration to us all And that should make us think those thoughts. Yeah, and the whole I like the whole idea of Of the planet is the integrated system. And yeah, we study the other planets that way Mars and Venus are so Because they have atmospheres a really complex interaction the atmosphere and the ground the rocks and his volcanism and so on And the moon and mercury are a little calmer in that respect But they still have big complex interacting histories and the earth It's it one of the things that may have led to us is the fact that it is so dynamic That there are recycling of the atmosphere recycling of ocean sediments There's new ocean basins forming all along that's why the hawaiian island so you get stresses and the stresses ultimately result in Differences and mutations if you like Of of the life. So look what we have. Yeah. Yeah So, you know, how much progress have we made scientifically technologically since say 19? What was it 1969? When we had the first walk on the moon, how much progress have we made? Do we know a lot more? How much more do we know now? Oh, we we know a tremendous amount more Including even like things about the ozone layer and our climate We we do But you know, we then we never knew that we Really truly completely are sure that we know now where the moon came from but it's been up there It's big in the sky. It's the brightest and biggest thing in the sky and And you wonder about that. How did they get there? What's it like? Was it does it have did it have oceans? The answer is no And what ever have oceans what is it like and I I think we learned things from little events to big events And in fact, we even have an example of in that slide Oh, there it is see that arrow Uh-huh Apollo 17 landing site. They're at the lower middle bottom And there's letters on it that's sm is south messif and nm is north messif And the sh is the sculptured hills. Those are geologic units around this site That the we hope that the astronauts would be able to sample. They are deposits from big impact events The the two big basins are way bigger than texas in their size And at least two of them contributed materials to this site And we went there to try to understand not only the smooth plains that this valley is filled with But also the the mountains how old are they? Are they really from those big basins when the basins form? And and one of the most interesting things at this landing site are big boulders like in number three Linda just wrote an article in our web magazine about these boulders and They made tracks as they rolled down the hill. Oh, how interesting the crew can know where they came from In fact, these are this is two of the boulders, but they came down as one piece it appears or so this This image was taken by astronaut cernan of astronaut schmitt on this last Apollo mission to the moon so these are the last two humans on the moon and the boulders had fallen down from a big slope And it let them Sample those rocks But look at the size of the boulders in relation to to the astronaut who's who's standing there by the by the rover Is that common the boulders like that? I mean you can find them all over on the rims of craters and Downhill slopes like this. Yeah, especially on fresh craters. Oh, it was the Abundant boulders now look at that So you see that streak that's kind of going up to the top of the picture those that's the track of the original boulder That was rolling down that It's been there 20 million years that boulder track That's not moving very quickly Not now it did come down quickly I mean and just I mean that's the track that track is 20 million years old Yeah, so it was a single event of a boulder rolling downhill But if you were down in the valley you would not have heard it Yeah, why What why did it stop? Oh, I think in fact it the slope changes and it gets a little um More horizontal and it just came to a stop it broke up this big boulder broke up But then just you know landed What kind of event? Sorry go ahead. Oh, no, it's just was a It was just a boulder falling down cliff 20 million years ago Why why did it roll in the first place? What event what kind of event might have started it off? You know, you don't know On the earth landslides would develop but you have a lot of range and that ran you on the moon Earthquakes can cause it case of the moon a little meteorite impact can cause it And other times, you know the this Uh, it gets very cold at night and very hot in a day in equatorial zones there and maybe This stresses enough over millions of years to crack it and There's enough gravity on the moon to have this thing rolled down Okay, so this this opens The question again. Why do I care? Why do I care about this boulder? Well, how's this boulder affecting my life my community my earth? You know anything that I do Why do I care about this boulder? Well, um First I'll make it back to you about that check No, no, uh first just to continue the boulder a bit more and then we'll then I'll talk about it. It's a um Schmidt was Astronaut Schmidt was strut in the bowl a one of the these boulder tracks If we can see that picture again of him this that last picture, I would just want to read you while they were on the surface Um astronaut Schmidt who you see in the picture says um a little earlier before this time Hey, this boulder's got its own little track right up the hill across the contour and He says to the other astronaut. I'm gonna I'm standing in the boulder track How does that make you feel and the other astronaut says oh that makes me feel like I'm coming over to do some sampling Then he says think how it would have been if you were standing there before that boulder came by And schmidt says I'd rather not think about it and that's what they're talking about while they're out there Because that picture is actually two boulders one in front of the other, but they're huge They're huge, but they're not round So, you know, you wonder how they could roll because they would have had to roll right roll tumble something Next time we have a landslide on oahu and we will Rush out to where it covers the road And you'll see most of the rocks are busted up and they they end up angular Even though they may be from a weathered hillside that's kind of roundish, but the stuff underneath is still fairly angular and on the moon even more angular because there's no No water processes It's kind of soft kind of earthquake event something driven down and what's cool This happened. We do know this from dating certain kind of isotopic dating of the samples including from the boulder tracks and it happened like 20 million years ago and that's So schmidt was studying an event big boulder rose downhill 20 million years ago the boulder itself has The formed about 3.9 billion years billion years ago In a big event that made a base on the moon that is way bigger than texas like 900 miles to a thousand miles across depending on the where you put the rim and this is big and There is evidence from lunar samples that we had all 50 of these size basins actually is 40 something Form in a short time period that could be only a few hundred million years If the moon here's the importance of it if the moon is like that The earth was bombarded too in its early history And what did that do to could have delayed the onset of life? Could it have actually made little niches of Where life could have developed because it added hate to the system Those are the things we don't know. Well, of course and couldn't it happened again Could it be bombarded in the same way again? Not by a whole bunch of them like that because I think we know where things are and they're not on the orbits that would do that Unless there's some other kind of odd big event a single event like this chichalube crater in Mexico that that killed dinosaurs Yeah, I'd heard about that Yeah, it's uh We could uh, that's a is a manageable event We could probably defect an asteroid if we would actually really work on doing that One more question before we leave the the moon and the boulders is uh, so the so it's a smaller Object as moon is smaller not as much gravity because it's not as much mass So the bowler doesn't weigh as much On the moon. So how does that affect things? Does that make it roll faster or slower? Um, does that plant it firmly where it is or does it make it unstable for further events? Because of the light gravity the stability is In this case, it probably doesn't matter because it ends up kind of on the flat grounds, but But the The falling down it would roll slower just like if you drop something that falls slower. Yeah Yeah And then it it's and it but on the other hand it might have taken longer to get us started If that same boulder was in the same kind of hill on the earth it probably would have rolled sooner And I don't I don't know but you know, it's Interesting thing is the the landing site has a big landslide too. What's interesting is Is here's a process that happens on earth, but what's the difference on the moon? It has no atmosphere smaller gravity and Or is the process the same or is Does this happen on the earth in some cases? But a lot of times it really helped by water flowing with it You know all these things it makes you look at the whole process of boulders falling downhill Yeah, I have this image of that astronaut, you know at the time when the boulder was actually coming And he sees it coming down to him. It's moving a little slower than it would move on earth And it's lighter than it would be on earth. They puts his hand up Like Superman and stops it right there just like we're going to stop this show for one minute while we take a break Hi, I'm chris leatham with think tech kawaii and I'd like to ask you to come watch my show the economy in you Each wednesday at 3 p.m Aloha, this is maria mera and i'm here to invite you to my bilingual show Viva hawaii on think tech hawaii every other monday at 3 p.m We're here to inform motivate and entertain you join us Hi, I'm Ethan allen host of likeable science on think tech hawaii I hope you'll join me each friday afternoon as we explore the amazing world of science We bring on interesting guests scientists from all walks of life from all walks of science To talk about the work they do why they do it I'm chris leatham with think tech hawaii I'm chris leatham with think tech hawaii I'm chris leatham with think tech hawaii In all walks of science to talk about the work they do why they do it and more why it's interesting to you What the science really means to your life? Its impacts on you how it's shaping the world around you and why you should care about it I do hope you join me every friday at 2 p.m for likable science We're back. That was a relief, eh Okay Jeff taylor and lid感謝 ob the hawaii afford to secure physics and plus etology at solast And we're talking about the value of space research to mere earthlings. Okay, really interesting provocative stuff. So you know, I like history, the study of history. We have plenty of history on these shows. Because it is like time travel. As you put yourself, it's the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. How would life be if I was back there, what, four or five hundred years ago? Well, how would life be if I was back there two hundred million years ago? So you got time travel big time when you study this kind of planetology. Yeah, it's what attracted me to it. Is the idea you could find out about events that happened in case of planetary science billions of years ago. And it's just so exciting. And then you can hold in your hands rocks. The lunar samples we have, the typical youngest rock is about three billion years old. Well, that's really old. Pretty old, actually. And you know that from carbon dating? No, from radioactive dating, yeah. Radioactive, can you take a minute and describe how that works? Well, there are a few radioactive elements that just decay at a constant rate and defined by a half life, but they decay at a constant rate and they make a product and you can measure both the product and the radioactive element and through a decay equation figure out how long that process was going on. There are complexities to it, which is why we hire very nerdy technical people to do that work. Find people, find interesting people, find nerdy. It happened here in Hawaii. Oh, yes. Yes. Have the equipment and all that. Yeah, yeah. So that's why you love to get your hands on space rocks. Space rocks. Because that will tell you so much. Yeah. And in the case of the moon, even dating it, there are the whole outer part of the moon, the highlands of the moon we call them, the white areas when you look at it. Those are composed of dominantly one mineral called feldspar. It's a particular type of it. Geologists do like to name things. We'll try to avoid some of them. The feldspar makes up about 45% probably of Hawaiian basalts. It's a common mineral. But to concentrate so much of it, an idea came from the very first samples examined from the Apollo 11 mission from little white rocks in what was a dark pile of rock of basalt pebbles. And it's one way of doing it is to have a magma and the pelagic glaze, sinks or floats, and in the case of the moon, floated to the top and made a crust of this stuff that's like 30, 40 kilometers deep, all composed of mostly of this mineral. And it was a shock. And then subsequent missions showed that this crust actually does have all this feldspar in it. And even though there was some skepticism at first, but then the idea really took hold and it's called the magma ocean hypothesis. And for the first time, we thought, as depicted here, see the molten moon on the left and then is partially crystallized where dense minerals sank and form the layer is not actually green because it's so hot. But the mineral you take from it when it cools is green. And then finally the feldspar crystallizes and makes a crust. And this said that that planet formed really hot. And maybe the Earth did. And up until that time, everyone had the Earth, geologists, had the Earth forming cold, heating up and had very elaborate theories as to how long it took, when the core formed and so on. And this said, maybe everything starts hot. And ever since then, everything has started hot for planets. And that goes to this whole question of why do we care? Because if you're talking about running a kind of parallel analysis on what's happening in space and finding out how things work, how geology works, because that's all there is out there, geology and physics, I suppose. And then you take those lessons and maybe you can find parallels on the Earth. But how frequently do you find parallels on the Earth that you can actually use for something? Oh, we do a lot of comparative planetology. It even has a name, so it must be... CP. Yeah. With the moon and Mars and Venus and Mercury and solid planets. And even little asteroids. Asteroids melted and almost completely melted when they formed four and a half billion years ago. And you try to put it all together into a story of the Earth through time. And you know, we don't have much of a direct record of the Earth four and a half billion years ago because it was so geologically active you lose much of this record. But the other planets have that record and we do see some evidence of the early history of Mars. It was very hot, very geologically active, the moon was... Venus is kind of too geologically active to see that. But there's nothing like being there, isn't it? I mean, you need to actually like these astronauts, you have to go there and look and touch and apply sensors and testing equipment that, you know, sort of a scientific analysis by people who may come up with some new thing they want to learn while they're there. Yeah. Yeah. So the question I put to you is, don't you think that it's... This is like going down the bottom of the ocean. At one point we had all these ways where human beings could go down the bottom of the ocean. Now we focus more on technology to go down to the ocean, bottom of the ocean. Isn't the likely result, because of the time difference, you know, that need to travel for long periods of time, isn't it going to result in automated research on these foreign planets somewhere? I think there's a combination. Yeah, a combination. I think so, too. There are some things you might just as well send if they're a simple task, especially early, like if you want to build a base on the moon, the earliest things you want to do are really their stone age thing, right? You build habitats from the local material, this can be done robotically. Once you have more complex things there and you want to design it so people can live there and work there and figure out how to use space materials to do even grander voyages like to Mars, that's one way of doing it. The other way is to find out if you're going to go, if you really want to go to long missions like to Mars and beyond, you have to understand the space environment and the effect on people, which is why the space station is so useful. And I think underappreciated, it's a gigantic structure up in space, and the volume of it is bigger than, I think, a 767 interior altogether, a county, all those little modules that go off, and there have been done, and a lot of really interesting experiments have been done. You know, I mean, from time to time, it goes back into the literature of the 20th century anyway, when people first realize the possibilities of going there and being there and the notion of creating habitats on the moon or elsewhere and in space stations where you'd stay for an indefinite, and it wouldn't only be scientists, it would be ordinary people, it would be the big getaway, right? This has got to be a repeating theme in our literature, the big getaway. When it's out of Superman, where the planet Krypton blows up, remember? So he comes to Earth because there's nothing left of Krypton. What about that here? I mean, we are abusing this planet at a rapid rate. One day it may just implode and it won't be a place where we can live. We who were born here may have to go, I mean, is there any real possibility that we could survive on a planet where we didn't evolve? Can we survive on the moon? Wouldn't that be too expensive? Not if you, first, not if you have to, and the price is proportional to the demand, but it's also not if you use the materials that are there. One of the problems, the Apollo program, is fabulously successful. And since then we've tried to follow that model where you bring everything with you. Well, we didn't do that exploring anywhere else, you know, the Hawaiians that arrived here with 1,300 years worth of food on their canoes, it was, you get there and you use what's there. Now, the moon is a tad on the barren side, and so is Mars, but nevertheless there's materials there, you can build greenhouses, and you can grow stuff in lunar dirt. They did that with Apollo dirt as part of the protocol to make sure there were not earthling killing germs in the materials, so I think you can do it. Well, what do you see? We only have a minute left and I wanted to get you guys to take on what do you see as ultimately the best case analysis, you know, are coming out of, emerging out of our space research, space exploration, that is for us, for the planet, for humanity. What is the best result we can achieve? What do you think about as scientists who look into this? I think about the different medicines and things that they're probably being able to create in that microgravity environment in the space station, and also energy production, trying to use maybe the moon as a place to send solar energy back to the Earth. Oh, interesting, yeah. There are interesting possibilities for energy for the Earth from the moon, and they haven't been explored in enough, we haven't done a demonstration project and that's what we really need to do, it sounds so grandiose, but you know, we are still burning fossil fuels like mad, and the amount is increasing, China's building 20-odd pine, a new coal-fired plant, one per week, and so it's going to get worse, so we have to do, we have to be able to do something to first save our planet, give energy that's clean, and there are a couple of possible ways of doing that. The other thing is space, by traveling in space, it's a whole different environment, and my friend Don Pettit, I just spent fourth of July weekend on the big island, he was on vacation, he's an astronaut, been up in the space station for almost a year and two different trips, and he pointed out that the experiments, the greatest experiment is astronauts themselves, with bone density loss, there are high problems that develop, and how many of these things really help us understand the way the human body works, and I think we can make progress by studying humans in space. Don pointed out to me that when you do experiments with earth animals, life in any form, no matter what you do, you decrease the amount of water, increase sunlight, you always have gravity the same, but the space station has, that factor has changed by a factor of a million, and what does it do to us, and what does it tell us about how the body works? Yeah, we could learn, we are learning. Yes, we actually are learning. Thank you, Jeff Taylor, Linda Martell, thanks for coming down from HIGP at So, where's that UH Manoa? We're only beginning this discussion.