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The Moth Radio Hour: Sailing On An Alien Sea
00:57:16
In this hour we explore stories relating to STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering and MATH): we travel from the laboratories of the Antarctic to the icy seas of Saturn’s moon Titan - we learn that predisposition does not mean predestined and sometimes A is larger than C.
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Jay Allison
The rest of your Life.
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James McClintock
From PRX this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show and this time we are bringing you a special collection of STEM stories. That is, stories all about science and technology, engineering and math. But if you're a humanist, don't despair. There won't be a quiz. And these are stories. After all, they're about people. Our first story comes from biologist James McClintock, who began his college education as an English major. By the way, he studies the ways organisms use chemistry to survive. He told this story at the 2016 World Science Festival in New York City. The theme of the night was Making waves. Here's James McClintock live at the mall.
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Well, I faced two major challenges on my first trip to Antarctica when I was a young scientist. I was off to McMurdo Station, located 2,000 miles south of New Zealand. The first challenge was as a chemical ecologist who studies how chemicals structure the seafloor, how organisms use chemistry to defend one another, defend themselves from getting eaten or communicate. I knew that I was among the giants of Antarctic marine biology. At the station, there were people like Paul Dayton, who had described the seafloor and how it was structured. There was Art de Vries, who had discovered the antifreeze that allowed 250 species of Antarctic fish to evolve and survive in this sub freezing water. I was among giants, so somehow I had to forge my path among such people. The second challenge that I faced is I had to get into seawater that was minus 1.8 degrees below 8ft of sea ice. I will never forget my first dive. I was up in the dive locker getting into my dry suit. It's a very bulky, heavy suit. I was thinking, claustrophobia. I'm going down a four foot diameter hole of ice and then I'll be locked under eight feet of ice. We drove down to the dive hut and I sat on the edge of the hole, of the hole cut in the floor of the hut and I dangled my feet into the icy water. And I finally got up the courage to slip in and to hit the valve on my suit that let the air out and I slowly descended. But you know what? When I came out under that sea ice, any sense of claustrophobia vanished. I could see 1,000ft under the water. It was the clearest water you could dive in in the world. I could look up and see a translucent blue ceiling of light above me. And on the seafloor as just a collage of sponges and corals, starfish and sea urchins. As far as you could see, this was one of the richest marine ecosystems on our planet. What a great place to do chemical ecology. These organisms had to be competing for space. They had to be protecting themselves using chemistry. And I learned lots of things about chemical ecology over the coming weeks. I'll never forget one story. I was out on the sea ice and I was sort of innocently peering down through one of the dive holes into the water, and I noticed a little shrimp swimming along. And on its back was a little orange backpack. A bright orange backpack. How odd. So I happened to have a little net and I dipped the shrimp out of the water and put it in a bucket, took it up to the marine lab, and there John Jansen, a colleague and a fish biologist, and I teased the little orange backpack off of that shrimp. The little orange backpack opened its wings and began to fly. It was a sea butterfly, a beautiful little snail that over evolutionary time has lost its shell and evolved wings. And sometimes when we're diving in Antarctica, we'll see hundreds flapping around in the water near us. We call them sea angels. But we got very interested in this relationship. So John and I set about sampling all around McMurdo Sound with nets. And we caught hundreds and hundreds of these little shrimp. And we found that over half of them were carrying a sea butterfly. Why would they go to all that trouble? So we brought them in the laboratory and we removed sea butterflies from the backs of shrimp and we offered them to fish and the fish would eat them every single time. But if you left that little sea butterfly on the back of that shrimp and you offered it to a fish, it would take it in the mouth and then every time spit right out, that little shrimp would happily swim away with its little sea butterfly. And we had, to the best of our knowledge, the first example of one species of animal abducting another species and carrying it around for its own chemical defense. We went sea butterfly collecting one day and we went out to the ice edge to do it. It was about 10 miles north of the station, so we flew by helicopter. It was a beautiful day. The helicopter landed near the ice edge and the rotors came to a stop and there was a group of emperor penguins off to the side that took an interest in us and sort of came over and seemingly greeted us. And we went over to the sea ice edge and unpacked all of our dive gear and thought about getting into it and ready to dive. And suddenly a ten foot long, thousand pound leopard seal came zooming up out of the water and threw her chest up against the ice and grinned at us with a mouthful of sharp teeth and yellowish eyes and the head like a reptile. We knew leopard seals were dangerous. We'd never seen one, but clearly they were dangerous. If you're in the water and a leopard seal was to come for you, it's over. Well, I'll tell you, that leopard seal disappeared almost as quickly as she made her appearance. She slipped back in the water and away she went. Well, doing science in Antarctica, time is precious. We needed those samples. So we decided after conferring that we would carry our dive gear along the edge of the ice. And if we got to a new location and still hadn't seen the leopard seal, we're going to go ahead and dive. And that's what we did. We got to this new location. My dive buddy, his name was Ron Britton, I'll never forget Ron. He was a little ahead of me in the dive preparation, end of things. So he was already suited up. He was sitting on the edge of the ice with a rope between his legs going to the sea floor, a down line. He was reaching for his mask. The last thing you do before you go in. And all of a sudden that leopard seal came right up between Ron's legs and looked him right in the eye. And somehow I had the wherewithal to grab a camera and take a picture. If you look at that picture, you can see the downline, you can See, you see the leopard seal, but you do not see Ron. Ron is doing a two and a half back gainer with 150 pounds of scuba gear on. So you know what that leopard seal was probably doing? It probably was under the sea ice the whole time we were walking along the edge, just as if a penguin was walking along the ice edge. And when the penguin goes in the water, the leopard seal attacks. We don't think the leopard seal would have attacked Ron because he didn't wait for Ron to go in the water. But being scientists, we did not test that hypothesis. We let the leopard seal have the ocean that day. Well, I went back to my university. I had a year before my next field season, and I wrote up that paper about the little shrimp, the little butterfly, and I thought, you know, this is so unique. So I sent it to the journal Nature. Now, Nature is at the pinnacle of scientific journals. This is the journal that the structure of DNA was published in by Watson and Crick. So you can imagine how thrilled I was as a young scientist to get that paper accepted in Nature. And I came back to McMurdo station the next year with a little more confidence than the first year. A few weeks after getting there, there was a knock on the door of my research lab. And there, standing there, was a group of the senior scientists at the station, including people like Art de Vries. And somebody pulled out a copy of that Nature issue that had my paper in it, and it had been signed, autographed by all the scientists and they had written congratulatory notes. I hope, looking back, I've lived up to the expectation of those scientists. I think I've had a fairly productive research career in Antarctica after all these years. It's a spectacular place. Those of you who've been there know this. Unparalleled in its beauty, it's a natural laboratory for looking at the first effects of climate warming and ocean acidification, where carbon dioxide is absorbed into the seas. And it's also an amazing place because of its resources, its marine resources. In our Chemical Ecology program over the years, we've had a drug discovery component and we have found a compound in Antarctic tunicate that's active against melanoma skin cancer. We have found a compound in an Antarctic alga that's active against the H1N1 flu virus. And last month we found a compound in an Antarctic sponge that's very active against the MRSA resistant bacteria. So 35 years of going to Antarctica and every time I go, I know I'll find another secret. Thank you.
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James McClintock is the endowed University professor of Polar and Marine Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He's an expert on invertebrate nutrition, reproduction and Antarctic marine chemical ecology, climate change and ocean acidification. He's the author of two popular books, Lost Antarctica and A Naturalist Goes Fishing. The US Board on Geographic Names named a terrain feature after James to honor his contributions to Antarctic science. It's called McClintock Point. James wrote us people are always finding it interesting that I have a point of land named for me in the Ross Sea, Antarctica. I like to say it means I will never be pointless. He also wrote climate change continues to increasingly dominate not only my research, but especially my public outreach. Since the US Pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, I have had more invitations and opportunities than ever to lecture across the country on climate change. If you'd like to see photos from James Expeditions and a video of Harrison Ford narrating a passage from James book Lost in Antarctica, visit themoth.org Coming up in a moment, more stories from this special STEM Hour. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by prx.
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James McClintock
This is the Moth Radio Hour from prx. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this show on today's episode, all things science, technology, engineering and math. Our next story comes from science writer Lona Frank. She shared it at the World Science Festival in 2013, where the theme of the night was what lies beneath.
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Lona Frank
I don't remember a time in my life when I wasn't aware of mental illness. And I mean acutely aware. Even when I was a little kid, some of my earliest memories are of being together with hardcore mental patients. And this is because when I was little, my mother was a psychiatric nurse in Aarhus, Denmark, which is the country's second largest city. And there was a big mental hospital there. And she was in the geriatric ward. So she was taking care of patients who had been ill from for decades. And they were pretty much all of them hardcore paranoid schizophrenics. And I was very fascinated with these people because they were certainly strange in many ways. And we would talk at the dinner, conversation at home would be about, so how was my Mother's Day? And yeah, it had been fine. This patient had three thrown a knife at somebody and had to be restrained, but otherwise it was all good. And I was like, I would sit there with big eyes and why are they like this? Why are they like this? Well, because they have a different view of reality. In fact, you know, they often hear voices that will tell them to do these things. And I remember that really intrigued me to the point where I would sometimes get in the bathroom and turn off the light and lock the door and just sit there and really try to hear voices. I mean, could I just hear something? I never succeeded. But soon after, I realized that mental illness was not just something that other people had. It was not something that just people in hospitals had. In fact, it was rampant in my own family. I remember the first time I went to see an aunt of mine at the very same hospital in a different ward. And she was in there to have a course of electroshock treatments. So she would be in there for severe depression. And we would go see her and she would sit there normally a very talkative lady that was suddenly completely silent and just looked very odd and gray. And I thought, well, you know, schizophrenia, apparently people hear voices and depression must be a disease that makes very talkative people shut up. It's odd. Well, it was a little more serious than that. I soon found out because the story of my grandmother, my mother's mother, turned out that she had been severely depressed in the 50s. She was hospitalized for a year. She didn't get out of bed. In the end they wanted to give her a lobotomy. And she was only saved by a family doctor saying, don't do this, don't do this. And it turned out when I talked a little bit more to my mother about this, well, her father, so my mother's grandfather had in fact, shot himself over severe depression, gone out into the barn and just shot himself. And it turned out this mental illness in the family wasn't just something of the past. I think I was about in my teens when my father had a lot of uncles and aunts. Suddenly one of these uncles went out into the woods where he lived and hung himself because of depression. And an aunt, actually, she lived in the country. She went out one day very depressed and drowned herself in the great big tank where they keep the pig. And that really, to me, that brought home that, you know, depression is not just any old disease. It's a really, really devastating, miserable, awful thing. And it got even closer to home when a few years later, my father was suddenly diagnosed with bipolar disease and also very prone to depressions now and then. Now all this would be what a psychiatrist would call a very interesting family history. I must admit that growing up, I always had that feeling, feeling of, I wonder if this curse is also going to hit me. I mean, can I even avoid this at all? And, well, not surprisingly, I did develop depression from my early 30s. I've sort of battled manageable depressions, bouts of depressions that can be treated with antiquity and so on. But I've always had that strange feeling of, what if it gets worse? I mean, this time the drugs work, but what if they don't next time? Will I end up having electroshock treatments? Will I end up in some ward somewhere? Will I end up killing myself, for Christ's sake? And then a few years ago, as everybody knows, consumer genomics, personal genomics, suddenly became a reality. Now we can all go out and get genetic information about ourselves and about our disease risks. And I thought, and at this point, I'm, you know, I'm a science writer, I have a background in neuroscience, a PhD. And so I thought, well, this seems to be a great topic for a book, and why not make it a really personal book? Use myself as the guinea pig, because I have some questions about the heritability of depression. And so I start out doing this book, doing the research, and I take various consumer genomic tests. You probably all know, 23andMe out in Silicon Valley. I get that one sort of starts it all off and it's all somatic disease. It's you know, it's your risk for gout, it's your risk for diabetes and all that stuff. They don't do genes for mental illness, and there aren't very many. But in fact, it turns out that there is a handful of genes that seem to be somehow connected with depression, anxiety, even behavioral problems and a lower stress threshold. So I get really interested in that, and I find out that there is actually a project, research project going on at the University of Copenhagen where they're looking at this handful of genes and the connection between those and your personality and mental illness, disease, depression, and anxiety. So I call them up and say, well, I have a suggestion. I would like to volunteer to be in your study if you would let me get the results, my own personal results, and let me use them in the book. And they say, fine, come in. First of all, I come in, they draw blood for genetic studies, and I get a personality test. So the five factor model, which you probably also heard of, that we have sort of five dimensions in our personality that we score somewhere between very low and very high extroversion, for example, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. So I get in to see a psychologist who has analyzed my personality test, and he looks at me sort of weird and says, so you're lona. Yeah. I just have to say first that I was analyzing your results yesterday, and I was really not looking forward to seeing you. Okay. So he puts out the results, and it seems that neuroticism is fairly high. Okay, I can sort of live with that. But agreeableness is like rock bottom. And he says, I've just never seen that in a woman before. Never. Well, and. Well, low agreeableness and high neuroticism kind of correspond very well to a predisposition for depression. So already that doesn't point in the right direction. Doesn't sound good. But the next thing is, I go in and see the PI, the professor who has my genetic results, and she takes them out and she explains, you know, there are these five genes, and they basically all have, you know, two variants. You can have a robust variant, and you can have what we call a risk variant or a vulnerable variant that, you know, predisposes you to depression, anxiety, stress, so on. And of course, you have all your genes. You get one version from your mother, one from your father. And so. Okay, I say, well, let's get the results. And she starts with number one. Well, this gene. Let's see. Oh, you have two copies of the risk Variant. Okay. And the next one, oh, you have two copies of the risk variant. And the third one, the same. The fourth one, the same. The fifth one, one the same. And I'm sitting there getting really depressed, sort of, you know, like I feel like a loser in the genetic lottery. Like I'm this lousy specimen. And I walk out of there sort of with a cloud hanging over me. Like, you know, I can see myself, you know, going into an asylum somewhere, never coming out, you know, or, you know, hanging myself, whatever it is. I feel kind of doomed, you know, like this, oh, this is going to happen. I am going to be one of those family casualties. So I start getting into, I have to write this book and I start working on it and I sort of get into the research about these genes and what they mean. And the more I read, the more I get this whole thing sort of turned around in my mind and I end up saying to myself, well, wait a minute, you get this information, you get this knowledge that you have this probably fairly strong, you know, predisposition, biological predisposition to this disease that you've seen and you've seen the results of it, but what does that mean? It doesn't mean that you're determined that, you know, your future is definitely deep depression. Because now you have this knowledge and what you can start, you can start thinking differently. And with what I know about neuroscience, I also know, well, the brain is a very, very place plastic organ. It is not determined. You change it all the time by what you do with yourself. And you change your brain by thinking. And the way you think affect your brain chemistry and the cells in there and everything that happens. And so I come to the result really that. Wait a minute. Knowing, just knowing that there is this much biology to the bad moods and the depression in itself creates a sort of distance. So when I come to that moment when I'm sort of sliding down towards that gray puddle that is depression, I can kind of stop myself by saying, this is your biology talking. It's just brain stuff happening. It doesn't mean that you should look at the world this way. So think differently. And I have to say, it actually works. It is the best non chemical antidepressant I've tried. And sometimes thinking, what would have happened if those family members of mine had lived in a time where we could get deep knowledge about our own biology and how we function? I mean, would it have, would they have been less miserable? Would it have saved their lives? Because I really, really deeply feel for myself that the more I have insight into my own biology and its intricate, fascinating mechanisms. The more I can control my moods, the more I can shape my life and I can actually be a better version of myself. Thank you.
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James McClintock
Lona Frank is an award winning journalist and Author with a PhD in neurobiology and a background in research. In her native Denmark, she presents a weekly one hour podcast on science and culture. Her books include Mind Field, My Beautiful Genome and the most recent, the Pleasure Shock. Lona is working on a documentary based on this book which chronicles the controversial history of deep brain stimulation she wrote. To us, beginning to think about depression as my biology speaking was like finding a new life tool. It is not some miracle cure, but a very handy way of steering clear of the worst psychological potholes in everyday life. And it only gets more efficient with practice. You can find a link to her documentary Genetic Me at our website, themoth.org up next in this STEM hour, a story from Daya Lakshmi Narayanan. She told it at a Grand Slam in San Francisco where we partner with public radio stations ca, KALW and kqed. Here's Daya.
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Daya Lakshmi Narayanan
I'm doing what I love, which is composing Excel spreadsheets because I'm a nerd and I'm an undergrad studying engineering and I meet guys by saying things like, hey, my digits are seven prime numbers, homie. Yeah, but no one called me. My mom did send me an email though and it read something like, we're not worried. Everything will turn out okay. No need to come home. So I panic and book a flight immediately home. I arrive home and and I see that my dad, the breadwinner, has been laid off from his job. And not only that, he becomes one of the 6 million Americans denied health insurance because of a previously existing condition. He's diabetic and this is pre Obamacare. He's totally checked out, sitting on the La Z boy with the remote control watching the same Matlock episode he's seen three times before. My mom decides it's up to her to go back to school, to get a job to support the family and my dad's Matlock addiction. So I'm there and I'm supposed to help her. So she has to take a basic math exam to get into this program. She's 45 years old and she wants to study computer science. She's failed math in high school and never took it in college. And that's not to say that she's dumb. 30% of Americans would rather clean their bathroom than do a math problem. And let me just say My bathroom is disgusting. So that's where I come in. I'm supposed to help my mom, the nerd from MIT who knows about math. So I get a sample exam, and I'm looking through it, and it's easy, but things start going downhill quickly. We get to the transitive property. If A is equal to B and B is equal to C, then A is equal to C. Easy, right? She doesn't get it. I'm like, okay, let's try it again. If A is equal to B and B is equal to C, then A is equal to C. And my mom says to me, which just means you just said the same thing, except slower and louder. And I was like, okay, maybe I need to say this in her language. So I tried in Tamil, but see, the thing is, there's like five characters associated with A, and I don't really know how to do math in Tamil, even though they know how to do math in every language. So I'm just like, e un bi un equal un la bi un si uncle una e un siyu equal la. And she goes, adeda e po so na y ponjo tamer solisone. Which means you just said the same thing. With some useless Tamil words thrown in for my benefit. I'm like, yes, I did do that. Because this is basic math. It's simple. You should have learned this in high school. And now you're asking me to do this. You're asking me to help you. I need a little bit of help from you. Okay? I saw the panic and shame in her eyes, and she just looked at me and she said, I'm not like you. I'm not smart like you. When your mom says something like that to you, you feel like an asshole. I was behaving the way nerds behave. We're impatient, we're angry, and when someone doesn't get what we got, we take it out on them. My mom lost her dad when she was 9. Her mom left, so she was raised on hand me downs and low expectations. When she decided to get married instead of continuing schooling, they were like, great. One less expense. And she had carried this with her through the decades. So I was like, mom, let's just take a break. You are smart. Just tell me about how you learned English. You learned English when you came to the United States, right? How did you do that? She goes, I Love Lucy, the Jeffersons, Smurfs. Smurfs, okay. And then I'm like, okay, that's awesome. So what is your favorite show now? She's like, well, the one he's like, what's the deal with Kramer? Why does he eat my food? Like Jerry Seinfeld never, ever said that in a single episode. But okay, Jerry Seinfeld. Okay, got it. Now, if Jerry Seinfeld tells Elaine a secret, A is equal to B, and if Elaine tells that same secret to Kramer, B is equal to C, then Jerry's telling that same secret to Kramer. A is equal to C. Got it. So what's the deal with my mom? She took that test, she passed. She got into grad school, and now she's a software engineer. My dad's diabetes is under control. He has health insurance, but unfortunately, he still watches Matlock. And me, I'm still a nerd, Kind of. So if my mom was 45 years old when she went back to school and I was in college, and now I'm X years old, and that was y years ago. How old is my mom now? However old she says she is, because there are some solutions that don't have to be rational. Thank you so much.
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James McClintock
Daya Lakshmi Narayanan is the host of one of our San Francisco mall story slams. She was the grand prize winner of Comedy Central Asia's ultimate comedy challenge. Prior to entertainment, Daya says she was a proud nerd, attending MIT and working in the tech and financial sectors. For photos of Daya and her mother, visit our website themoth. In a moment, the final story in our special STEM hour, the Moth Radio hour, is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by prx. This is the Moth Radio hour from prx. I'm Jay Allison. For our final story this hour, we go back to the World Science Festival, this time in 2015. The theme that night was it's all Relative. Here is Ellen Stofang live at the mall.
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Jay Allison
When I was four years old, I went to my first rocket launch. My father actually is a rocket scientist and he worked for NASA. He was studying the sloshing of fuels in rocket tanks that was making rockets at that time tumble. This was a really long time ago, 1965. And so I'm all excited. We live in Cleveland, so I'm getting to go from bleak, cold Cleveland to sunny Cape Canaveral, Florida, for my first launch. And so we're all excited and we're watching and waiting for the rocket to go, and it starts to rise slowly away from the gantry, and then it explodes in this amazing explosion. I don't really remember what happened next, but my mother said that my sister and I became quite hysterical because apparently I Had this vision of my father standing next to that rocket with this big red button launch. Then the rocket would go. Of course, he was quite a ways away in a blockhouse, and he was absolutely fine and no one was hurt. But I think that rocket exploding probably had something to do with the fact that I never wanted to become an astronaut. You know, instead I was that kid that always picked up rocks and shells, totally fascinated with the world around me. Then when I was about 11 or 12 years old, my mother was taking a geology course. She was getting her master's degree in education, and she took me along on the field trip. And I was following the professor, and we were walking down this stream bed with these rock walls. And I just was amazed that here, this guy could read these layers of rock, like pages in a book, and know about Earth's history, not just over thousands of years, but millions of years. And I pestered him with all these questions, you know, what are these rocks? How did they form? Where did these layers come from? And he was very patient, and he answered all my questions. And I thought, a job where you get paid for going around picking up rocks, this is a job for me. And then a couple years later, my father was involved in another rocket launch down in Florida. We were there again, but this time it was the Viking missions that were going to Mars. And I got to go to talks by people like Carl Sagan talking about why we were going to Mars, why we were exploring this red planet where life just possibly at some point in the past, had evolved. And I thought, okay, geology plus planets. NASA. This is for me. So I became a planetary geologist. I study volcanoes across the solar system, trying to study volcanoes on these other planets and say, how did their surfaces form? How do they change over time? And how can we bring that information back to help us understand this planet better? I like to use the analogy of saying it's. It's like if you were a doctor and you only had one patient, you might start to understand why that person got sick. But you'd never understand the progression of disease unless you had lots of patients. So for a planetary geologist, we study processes like wind and water and volcanoes that change the surfaces of planets. And we compare planets to really understand how they work. Now, I've worked on a bunch of different NASA missions to Venus to Mars to Saturn to Earth. Now, of course, I haven't actually gone any of those places. I studied data that's returned by our robotic spacecraft. So I get to be an armchair explorer again, avoiding those rockets. The favorite Mission that I've worked on is the Cassini mission to Saturn. I'm on the radar team, and I study Saturn's moon, Titan. Titan is this amazing moon because it's the only moon in the solar system that actually has a substantial atmosphere. But Saturn and titan are over 90 million miles from the Earth. So it's extremely cold out in the outer solar system. So the rock on Titan is actually water ice, but it's so cold, it behaves like rock. So really cool place to study. In the summer of 2006, we were going to get our first pass across the north pole of Titan. So the radar team was really excited about this. Now, most of the radar team was out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, but I was actually at the beach in North Carolina on vacation. But being a good radar team member, I had my computer and I downloaded the images, which is always really exciting when these first images come back and you get to say, wow, I'm the first person, one of the first people to ever look, look at this section of another planet. So we're excited, and we're quite anxious to see the new images. And I'm on the telephone, and we're looking at these images, and we appear to see what look like lakes on the surface. Now, before Cassini had gotten to Saturn, people had predicted there might be liquids on the surface. But Cassini had been at Saturn for about three years, and we hadn't seen any good evidence yet. So the radar team is really arguing, could we be scientifically sure that what we were seeing were liquids? Was there any other explanation? We had to get it right. And we're a pretty lively, argumentative bunch. So there's a lot of discussion going on. And I keep trying to get a word in edgewise on the phone, but people aren't listening. So I get frustrated. And so I type up this set of arguments of why I think there's good evidence that these are actually liquid. Well, because of that email, I actually ended up being the lead author on the discovery paper for these lakes, which was really fun. But more than anything else, it's just amazing that Titan has these lakes. And you hear me saying lakes. Those lakes are not filled with water. They're filled with liquid methane and ethane. So basically gasoline, because at the cold, cold temperatures of Titan, that's what's a liquid. And so it's amazing that here you have this moon so far out into the solar system, but it's the only place where you have open expanses of liquid. It's the only place we could go to study how a sea interacts with an atmosphere. How do wind and waves really operate? And some of these seas are big. They're about the size of the Caspian Sea or the Black Sea. So a couple years later, some of the Cassini radar team and I decided to put together a proposal to send a boat to one of these seas on Titan. It's to a NASA mission class called the Discovery Class. That's a competition. You put in a proposal, the mission has to cost less than $425 million, which for. Okay, I know that's actually cheap. I hate to tell you that's cheap for a NASA mission. Oh, come on. I mean, there's movies that cost more than that to make. So we have this proposal. You have to have low cost risk, low technical risk, but you have to have the most scientifically compelling proposal. Now, this was a big deal because at the time, some people had done a study and said, oh, the outer solar system is too hard. There's no way you can do anything meaningful for under a billion dollars. So we were this audacious team saying that we could do something cool for $425 million. So we work hard. We work for four years on this. And so you're really working on this, on this proposal, saying, what are we going to do with this boat? It's really more like a floating probe. It's going to measure the depth of the sea, what the sea's made of, the wind, the waves. But to me, I'm a sailor, so it was this terribly romantic proposition. I'm designing a boat to sail on an alien sea. And I used to love to put on our view graphs this quote from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge. We were the first to ever burst into that silent sea. How cool to explore an alien sea. But, you know, for four years, again, we're working on this proposal. You know, what can we afford? What's the technology? You know, you want the Cadillac of missions, but maybe you can only afford the VW of missions or even the motorbike of missions. So you work really hard, you send the proposal off and you wait. There were 28 proposals that went in and they down selected to three. And we were one of the three. And I was over the moon. I never win anything. Like, I never win at Raffles. Enter a raffle with me. I never win at Raffles. I never win. And so the idea that our proposal had made it to the stage was really exciting. We had eight months of funding. You work really hard to put together a larger proposal that really defends that you're able to do this. So, you know, late nights, lots of work. I've got three children, and this. This mission became my fourth child. You just pour your heart and your soul into it. And I had an amazing team. And again, you're working really hard, and then you send the proposal off, and then you have this all day review where people are just asking you question after question. And then we lost. We lost to a mission that's going to Mars. It's launching in two years. It's a seismometer mission. Cool science, great mission. But it wasn't my beloved Titan boat. So I cried. I was crushed. I had to pull myself together to call the team and say, you guys did a great job. You know, I'm sorry that we lost. You have to smile calmly and talk coherently at a debrief where they tell you all the things that you didn't do quite right. Because the real disappointment was, I will never be captain of that Titan boat. It turns out Titan's axis is inclined like the Earth's axis is inclined. And, you know, it goes dark at the poles during northern hemisphere winter or southern hemisphere winter because of that inclination. Well, Titan and Saturn's axis are inclined also. So Titan's poles go dark during its winter. But its problem, my problem is its winter is about eight years long. So from the mid-2020s to the mid-20s, 2000 and-30s, it's dark at the pole of Titan. So my mission can't be proposed again until the mid-2030s, and I'll be too old to be captain of that Titan boat. So it made the experience even that much more depressing. So I'm maybe feeling just a little bit sorry for myself. And a couple months later, I get a phone call and somebody says, do you want to interview to be chief scientist of NASA? And I say, you must have the wrong number. But I interview, I get the job, and, you know, now I get to be part of a much larger voyage. We're working on something we call the journey to Mars. Can we send humans to Mars by the mid-2030s? And it's got all these challenges because getting to Mars is hard. But for me, I really want to see this happen. I look back to that Viking mission that I saw launch to Mars, and at that point, even with my fear of rockets, I thought maybe I someday could be a geologist on Mars. Well, it's not going to be me. It's going to be somebody else, maybe one of our children here. And that person is actually going to be able to do science on Mars. They're going to be able to study Mars and understand it. So this is an amazing journey that I'm now part of. So when I think of my Titan boat, you know, it's kind of a similar process. You're trying to say we only have so much money, we've got what's the technology, how can we get this done, all those same challenges and, you know, along that path to Mars, there's going to be failures, there's going to be disappointments. But I like to look back to that first rocket that I saw fail on that launch pad. That rocket actually went on to launch the Mercury and Gemini astronauts and more scientific spacecraft than I could tell you. Because, you know, at NASA, just like with many of us in our lives, you know, sometimes we fail, but when we fail, we learn, we try again and we never stop exploring. Thank you.
- [50:58]
James McClintock
Dr. Ellen Stofan is the former chief scientist of NASA. She's an honorary professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London, a senior scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, and co chair of the World Economic Forum Future of Space Technologies Council. Her research focuses on the geology of Venus, Mars, Saturn's moon, Titan and Earth. Ellen says she continues to hope she'll see the first humans arrive at Mars in the early 2000-30s, and she looks forward to the discovery of life beyond Earth. That's it for this episode, full of science and wonder. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from the Moth. Meg Bowles directed the stories in this show. The rest of the Moss directorial staff includes Kathryn Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin, Janess and Jennifer Hickson. Production support from Timothy Lou Lee and Anna Martin. Special thanks to everyone at the World Science Festival, especially Tracy Day, Brian Greene and Kate Roth. Most stories are True is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from Ludovico Einaudi, Duke Levine and Bill Frizzell. You can find links to all the music we use at our website. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This episode is part of PRX's Stories in Science project supported by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation to enhance public understanding of science, technology and economic performance. More@sloan.org this hour was also produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio hour is presented by the public radio exchange. Prx.org for more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themauth.org sa.