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Jan. 15, 2013 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:17
Edition 102 - Dr Nick Lister

This time we talk with a rising-star Astronomer – Dr Nick Lister – based at Fleetwood in theNorthwest of England. He's recently been part of the "Stargazing Live" project on British television.2013′s started with news stories about an asteroid cruising close to earth and more evidence ofearth-like planets – we talk about these things and more space topics on this show.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for coming back to the show.
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Thank you so much.
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Top guy doing top work.
Now, this time round, we're in the middle of a bit of a, I'm trying to find a word for it, frisson, I suppose you could call it, here in the UK.
Everybody's very excited by a live TV show that's been on called Stargazing Live.
And they've been to different places in the country, poked cameras into the sky and telescopes, and they've seen whatever they could see, some nights better than others.
But it's been a fascinating week and a great idea.
And I'm going to talk to one of the people who were involved in this over this last week or so.
He's a bit of a rising star in the field of astronomy.
His name is Dr. Nick Lister.
And I find the way that he communicates very, very compelling.
I heard him on the radio a few days ago, and I thought, my God, you're good.
Got to get you on the unexplained.
So I tracked him down on the internet, picked up the phone, and he answered, and he said, yes, of course, I'll come on your show.
And that was three days ago.
So he's about to join us now.
Dr. Nick Lister is his name.
And we're going to talk about everything to do with astronomy.
There have been so many stories in the news this last week or so about astronomy, including the asteroid Apophis that is going to be passing close to Earth again, is in the process of doing that, and may one of these days hit us, they fear.
And the possibility, again in the news, of more habitable planets, potentially, in the solar system and beyond.
We'll talk about that.
And also the latest from the Mars rover, or rather the Mars Curiosity rover that's up there now, sending back those amazing pictures.
You almost look around that landscape and you keep expecting, don't you, to see either somebody standing there or an apartment block.
And the feeling that I get whenever I look at those pictures is I wonder what it would be like to be able to stand on the surface of Mars.
And I have a feeling that one of these days somebody will.
Even though it will take a very long time to get there and you may never be able to come back, I think one of these days, not in my lifetime, not in yours, it may happen.
But we'll see.
I'll get whoever's doing the unexplained then to report on it.
If the show is still around at that point.
Okay, let's cross to the northwest of England near Blackpool on the northwest coast and talk now to astronomer Dr. Nick Lister here on The Unexplained.
Nick, thank you very much for coming on.
Hello, good morning to you.
Now, Nick, thank you for doing this with me.
When I phoned you up, you didn't know who the heck I was or what I was all about.
And you've done a lot of important stuff, so I'm really pleased that you're able to join us here on The Unexplained.
It's an absolute privilege.
What impressed me most about you, though, and I have to say this, is your sheer infectious enthusiasm for the subject.
Right.
That's something I've always had, Howard.
I mean, it's very kind of you to say that.
It's something that I'll always have.
It'll never go away, I think.
It's the idea for me, at the end of the day, I mean, I love the subject a bit, but the idea for me is to pass it on, Howard, at the end of the day, because I see how people become infected by it.
I mean, the amount of people I've met and say the last 20 years, and I can give you a stat now, which I'm not exaggerating about in any way, shape, or form, but the people of all ages that I've found that have sort of dipped their toe into astronomy and become infused by astronomy, I would actually say that 10 out of 10, not 9 out of 10, but 10 out of 10 people who dip their toe in become infected by it, become hooked by it, become infused by the subject.
Now, why do you think that is in this day and age?
I can answer that for my case because I grew up with, you know, Thunderbirds and all those TV shows that sparked my enthusiasm for it and the work of Jerry Anderson, who made all of those shows who died, sadly, very recently.
That's what sparked my enthusiasm and probably a lot of my generation.
But what do you think it is at the moment that is gripping people's attention?
That's a very good question you just asked because the things you just mentioned, they're all at the end of the day space-related.
You know, even a so-called puppet show, and I don't mean that in a demeaning way, a so-called puppet show about space, et cetera, et cetera, is grabbing people's attention.
And the thing is about it, Howard, that the science itself is full of the most amazing wow factors.
It really is.
And so many of these ideas concern with scale and distance.
And one thing, if you don't mind me saying, is that I always say the biggest wow factor of the whole lot has to be this regarding astronomy.
That if you go out on a clear evening and you look up at the beautiful night sky, you are actually looking back in time.
And this is not science fiction, this is science fact.
You're seeing objects as they were many years ago in the past, which we can go on and talk about this a bit later if you wish, to explain why that is.
But the point is, it is a fact.
If you look up at the night sky, you are looking back in time.
Now, what greater wow fact do you need than that, to be honest, to be inspired by the subject?
And isn't it funny that I think a lot of people have been thinking about these ideas of scale and enormity lately?
More people, I think, than ever.
I sometimes just lie there in the evenings, if it's a clear night here and you can look up into the sky and I live near a park and you see the moon there.
And I've thought to myself, as man probably throughout time, has thought to his or herself, how amazing, A, that we can see this, and B, how far exactly does that go?
And then you Start to get into the thought of eternity and something that goes on forever.
And however, we try.
And I interviewed the great British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore about this, and he'd spoken to Einstein about it.
And Einstein said, We cannot, we don't.
Basically, Einstein said that we are not equipped as human beings with the tools to even be able to comprehend it to start to.
I think that's brilliant.
That's absolutely spot on what you've just said.
Because a phrase I often use to people, that so-called infiniteness of the universe, something that just goes on and on and on and on.
And my explanation often to them is that people can't accept that.
And the reason we can't accept it is because, look, at the end of the day, anything that we've experienced in our everyday life here on Earth, everything that we experience does have an edge, does have an ending.
A room does, a box does.
It has edges.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that everything in existence has to have an edge.
And is it possible for something just to go on and on and on?
Our brains can't cope with it.
And that's reflecting what you just said, that Patrick has said about Einstein.
Just very quickly as well, to pick up on something you said then about the night sky and the moon.
It is beautiful, Howard.
And the other thing is that you mentioned the moon.
I often say to people that, I mean, one of the questions I get so often is things like, what sort of telescope do I need?
What should I get to use to look at the night sky?
And there's lots of great kit out there, but I often say to people, look, the best tools available to us are our own eyes.
And something like the full moon is just a beautiful spectacle in the night sky.
And of course, nowadays, it's so overlooked.
And if you can go outside on a clear evening and say there's a nice full moon up there in the sky, I say to people, look, don't just give it a cursory glance.
Actually, stand still and stare at the full moon just with your eyes.
Stare at it for five minutes, and you'll start to see details on the surface of that moon that you don't see just with a cursory glance.
So I'm just reflecting on both the points you brought up there.
The night sky itself is beautiful and often overlooked.
And yes, this great infiniteness, I know that's not a very good word, it is a good word for space, and it's hard for us to comprehend indeed.
The technology that we have available to us these days is far better than it used to be.
They used to tell me when I was a kid, you can start with a pair of binoculars, which I guess you still can.
But these days, you can walk into a high street store in the UK or the US and buy something that I presume is of a magnitude and power far more able than anything that we had, say, when I was a kid, you know, 30 odd years ago.
Yeah, once again, you're hitting the nail right on the head there, Howard, actually, because when I was a kid, and I got into astronomy, you know, very young, and I wanted a telescope, you know, by the time I was 10 years old, this kind of thing.
And at that time in England, there were very few telescopes around.
And therefore, those that were around cost an absolute arm and a leg.
Whereas nowadays, of course, because of competition, because of mass production techniques, there must be at least a dozen manufacturers in England alone who are very good.
And because, of course, of competition, their kit is very good and very well priced.
So yes, there's some amazing stuff available now.
So much so as the years have gone on that, first of all, as you've correctly said, yes, you can start with a nice pair of binoculars.
But above that, nowadays, people can get themselves kitted out with a really nice telescope that will show them the rings of Saturn and things like this, beautiful details on the moon, for say £200.
And going slightly beyond that, I know it's a bit of a leap in money, but what I would say is if you've got something like £1,500 nowadays, not only can you get a really nice telescope, but you can also get a little sort of almost a little observatory to put it in and get yourself a laptop and the software to go with it and produce staggeringly amazing images from space.
Which brings me to the point, then, Nick, that if people have this kind of technology available to them, do you think we're going to get to the stage where ordinary Joes, if they're living in Chicago or Crawley in Sussex in the UK or wherever they're living, ordinary people might start to make discoveries, perhaps things that the scientists miss?
Absolutely, definitely.
Without any shadow of a doubt, we're almost going full circle there because some of the original discoveries made, say, 100 or 150 years ago, they were, to begin with, made by certainly non-professional astronomers, people who had an interest and have had an interest during the 20th century because, as I mentioned previously, all the major instruments were professional.
So it was a very professional-driven science.
But now we have gone full circle because in modern times, as you've just said, the equipment is now available for amateurs to do wonderful things, and they do.
And also, I think professionals are now realizing this to the extent that some jobs, for want of a better description, that astronomers need doing, in some ways they can tender out now to the massive worldwide amateur astronomy fraternity.
And indeed, that's happened, hasn't it, with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence or SETI?
They've got this SETI at home program that I think is still running that people around the world can take part in.
Absolutely spot on.
Yeah, to be honest with you, I think that was the original one of these so-called jobs that amateurs can do.
I think the SETI was the original one and still ongoing, as you know.
I think that was a classic case as well of the amateurs almost taking over from the professionals when the professionals had their funding removed, etc.
So the amateurs have taken over.
Another lovely one that amateurs tend to do is because we know that there are millions of millions of galaxies out there making up the universe, and they're all kind of different types.
And for many good reasons, astronomers need a good classification of the galaxies, the ratios of the different types.
And of course, again, offering such a huge job out to the amateur people in the world is a good way of getting that job done because they can all use their telescopes to classify the galaxies.
But the people who've got the money, the people who've got the expertise, are obviously the big governments.
And we're thinking mostly of the United States and ourselves and other big developed countries.
Do you believe, on the basis of the stuff that you've seen and maybe stuff that people have told you, maybe at conferences or whatever, that there is information about space that we aren't being told yet?
Now, that's an excellent question.
And the reason, I know it's a very exciting thing to talk about.
I know, almost a nitty-gritty thing to talk about.
And it's nice that you brought that up because I think a lot of people have heard, first of all, that there are threats from space, you know, things that can threaten the Earth, and indeed that can threaten our whole solar system.
That's the Earth and our star, the Sun, and the planets that everybody's heard of, like Mars and Jupiter, etc.
I mean, first of all, I know people have heard of the idea that asteroids, big chunks of rock basically, have hit the Earth in the past and created devastation.
The last one that hit is quite famous because it's certainly the straw that broke the camel's back regarding the lives of the dinosaurs.
It was responsible certainly for the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Is that the one that hit in Russia?
Pardon?
The one that hit in Russia.
Yes, well, the one that hit in Russia, that was that last century.
That was quite recent, yeah.
So that wouldn't have been that one, okay.
That was the Tunguska explosion.
That's okay, Howard.
That was the Tunguska explosion, I believe.
That's a fascinating account.
What that could have been, Howard, we think it could have even been something like a comet kind of exploding in the upper atmosphere as it enters the Earth's atmosphere.
And like an atomic bomb that kind of explodes above the ground, one of the effects is to flatten everything underneath it.
So they call that in military terms the airburst, don't they?
They do indeed, sir, yes.
So of course you've got all the flattening of the forest underneath the Tunguska explosion.
That could have been a comet entering.
I mean, that's a minor thing compared to the event that killed off the dinosaurs.
I think that actually hit in the Gulf of Mexico, I seem to remember.
It created what's called the Chicxalub crater.
We now know that events like that, Howard, have happened at least, well, I would say definitely three times, probably five times in the Earth's long history, if not many times more.
Each time these events are very damaging for life.
And as time has gone on, we can also say things like, look, first of all, in the very, very, very far future, say 5,000 million years' time, our own star, the Sun, will kill us off, basically, at the end of the day, because it will swell up to such an immensely huge size that it will swallow up the entire orbit of the Earth.
So the Earth has gone as a planet.
And in very recent times, we're starting to realize there are other objects out in space, which if they do certain things, they can be very dangerous for the whole solar system.
All right, well, let's talk.
I'm fascinated by the Sun, because a lot of exploration has been done of the Sun recently, because we now have the technology to do that, the optics and what have you.
But I want to talk about asteroids, because in this last week or so, there's been another very good story about an asteroid that is apparently coming close to Earth and will come even closer to Earth in the future.
This is a poppet.
It's an asteroid that's 300 meters, it's about 900 feet wide.
That may not sound like a whole lot, but if that hits at some velocity, then that is going to wipe out an awful lot of stuff down here.
And they're saying, I'm just reading a quote here on one of the news websites from a few days ago, and they're quoting some professor, a guy from Queen's University in Belfast in the UK, saying, if this happened, Earth would be hit with 100 times the energy of the biggest nuclear bomb.
Yes.
Which is a terrifying prospect and one that I think is something that most people would probably prefer to ignore because it is so frightening.
So this is where you were mentioning the idea before about maybe information being kept from us.
Is that where you were suggesting that?
Yes, yes.
And I was delighted that you were on that in a second.
Yes, completely.
Yeah.
I mean, when you mentioned the size of that chunk of rock, as you said, initially it may not sound like much, but if you actually think through, if you pick up a rock, if you're out walking one day and you pick up a rock that's say just six inches across, you know that that piece of rock weighs a reasonable amount actually.
And you certainly know that if you get to a rock the size of a human being, there's no way you'd lift it.
So when you're getting to something that's say 900 feet across, that is a lot of tonnage.
And as you correctly said, velocity-wise, these things, once they actually came into contact, for want of a better description, with the Earth, they're going to be traveling at something upwards of 150,000 miles an hour.
So scientists say, look, in a way to calculate the kind of, if you like, the energy that this thing's going to hit us, basically they times the speed that it hits us by the mass that it is, the weight that it is.
Now, that's a big number.
So yeah, that's how we work out the kind of energy.
That's how this chap in Ireland, was it Ireland you said, has calculated the energy equivalent to all these massive nuclear blasts.
And we live in what scientists call, have called, a cosmic shooting gallery.
These things are coming past us and near us all of the time.
Statistically, one of these days, something is going to hit.
Without a doubt, because, as we said, geologists, scientists, astronomers, geologists, when they look at the fossil record, they can see not just one event, but several events in the Earth's long history as a planet where, if you like, fossils have almost suddenly just run out, stopped, life has stopped, and it has had to start and build up again.
And these we often establish with these events, these catastrophic events associated with impacts from rocks, from space, asteroids, comets, etc.
So it has happened several times.
And when you look at the timings between the events, some statisticians, some astronomers, some scientists will say, look, actually, it appears that there's one overdue.
So I don't want to actually have people listening to this and everybody not be able to sleep at night.
But the point is, therefore, as we've been leading towards in this conversation, we have to think of ways, Howard, in the future of trying to look after the Earth, to protect the Earth, to try and stop these impacts.
Well, we do.
And, you know, even if we can't deploy Bruce Willis with a nuclear bomb up there, we have to think.
We have to think about what we can do.
But people do worry about these things.
And going back to the point that possibly some information is kept from us or not put out in the public domain as clearly as it could be.
I remember doing a story on Capitol Radio in London about 10 or 12 years ago at about 8 o'clock in the morning.
And one of these stories about an asteroid that might possibly one day hit Earth.
And after I'd done the story, and I must admit I did it as the media tended to do in those days and probably still does.
And I'm a little guilty for this, but I did it at the end of the news.
And I turned it almost into a funny story, although it is a scientific story and quite serious.
I turned it into a kind of funny at the end of the news.
And I got this phone call from a young mother who said, I have a five-year-old son.
We were in the car going To school, and he's terrified now.
And you did that.
I felt terribly guilty about that.
I shouldn't be laughing, should I, sorry?
But the fact of the matter is that when you talk about these things, some people get scared.
They do.
When I talk about it, and especially if I talk about it, as you just mentioned there, to younger children, say from primary schools, the approach I use, I have to use carefully because, first of all, as you know, again, as a media person, these stories, although they may be frightening, they are fascinating.
And if I mention these stories and put up some whacking great artists' impressions up on the screen of a massive chunk of rock hitting the earth, there's instantly a gasp from the audience of young kiddies.
But after that, Howard, there's a thousand questions an hour about it.
They want to know.
And at the same time, of course, I have to try and present it in such a way that A, they are fascinated and they learn.
But also, I do have to say, look, you know, this might not happen for another two, three hundred million years.
So please don't go home and have nightmares.
So yes, you do have to balance it.
You're right.
But we do have to be responsible.
We have to try and let kids know about this.
Why?
Because their generation might just be, if this apophys is going to come anywhere near us in 2036, they would be the generation that would have to deal with it.
Absolutely.
They are the ones that are going to inherit the Earth, as it were.
You're absolutely spot on, yeah.
So we have to think of ways.
I mean, there are developed ways.
One thing I once read about was, ironically enough, you know, good old Ronnie Reagan, he was in the 80s, wasn't he?
And when he was talking about his Star Wars development program for putting effectively, was it sort of lasers up in space to shoot down Russian missiles?
Well, that was the idea.
And, of course, he got into a lot of trouble over it because it was going to cost such a lot of money.
And ironically enough, of course, one of the ideas of trying to, there's no way we could really stop these chunks of rock.
They're too heavy, but maybe there's an opportunity to just try and deflect them.
You know, if you imagine if you're a dart player and you're throwing for the triple 20 or the bullseye, you've not got much margin of error.
And if you throw your dart, in other words, if that chunk of rock is coming towards the Earth in a certain direction, if you just deflect your dart by a slight amount, you're going to miss the bullseye.
And so the idea is, if you've got a huge asteroidal chunk of rock or a cometary body coming towards the Earth, is there a way that we can just try and nudge it so it goes off course and misses the bullseye that is the Earth?
And as you say, the laws of physics mean that if you catch it a long, long way out and nudge it by a tiny amount, the further out you catch it, the less effort you have to put into moving it.
Absolutely 100%.
You've done your research there, sir, very, very well.
And I'm reading also, I did a little bit of internet searching here, and among the many, many stories on these themes, NASA made news only very recently because they are indeed working on this, on ways of being able to deflect these objects.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah, I mean, we track them for a start.
Any objects that we are now aware of, which could potentially become dangerous or already potentially dangerous to us, NASA and other bodies around the Earth, they track these, we call them PHOs, potentially harmful or hazardous objects.
So yes, they are on the case.
Of course, it's going to cost a lot of money, but I'm pretty sure that scientists around the world now, Howard, are convincing governments to spend money because, you know, to try and look after the Earth at the end of the day.
Well, we had an MP here.
He's not an MP anymore called Lembert Opic.
Oh, I've heard of Lembert, yes.
Well, he made headlines for a whole variety of reasons, but one of the reasons that he made headlines was that he has been, and I've interviewed him on this a few times, a consistent campaigner about preparation for collisions by objects passing this planet.
And he stood up in Parliament, and I think some of the MPs there, the members of Parliament, were laughing a little bit behind their hands at him.
But it is a very serious thing and something we have to be prepared for.
Absolutely.
It's serious enough that the MPs certainly shouldn't have been laughing behind their hands.
That shows a slight ignorance and an arrogance in some ways as well, because he's right to do this.
As we've previously discussed, the point is, this might not happen for another 100 million years.
But let's face it, at the end of the day, it might happen.
This is where we've got to be careful and not scare anybody, but it might happen in the next 30.
So people like Lemby are on the case, and thank goodness they are.
That's what I would say.
And what about the so-called, I don't know if you've heard of this thing, the so-called Planet X?
The one that is supposed to be out there might one of these days hit us.
And I think some of the 2012 people, the alarmist people who were saying that we were doomed on the 21st of December 2012, which of course did not happen.
And now they're saying, well, maybe that will happen at another date fairly soon or not, as the case may be.
What about the theory that there is a planet that isn't being talked about out there?
Well, the thing is, I mean, I don't really sort of go with that theory.
I don't mean to sort of not be juicy enough on your program in a million years.
I don't particularly go with that theory.
I think from my astronomical perspective, as far as I'm concerned, planet X, initially for several decades, there was an idea that there was a planet out beyond Neptune and out beyond Pluto, which a lot of people know is not now classified as a major planet.
But there was an idea that there was a planet X. X was a Roman numeral for 10, of course.
And if you go out as far as Pluto, that was the ninth body.
So there would be a tenth body beyond that.
I think that's initially where the idea of the planet X came from.
And the idea was that there was supposed to be, presumably, another quite heavy, quite large planet out beyond what we now call the dwarf planet Pluto.
In the last 20 years, what I would suggest is, and this is the reason Pluto is no longer a major planet, what we now know is that out where Pluto resides, towards the sort of old-fashioned edge of our solar system, there are many, many, many Pluto-like, small planets, planetoids, if you like, minor planets.
And so Pluto is a member of a very large family of small, minor planets out there towards the outer edge, so-called outer edge of our solar system.
So for that reason, because all of those objects have been found, I think in some respects the search for planet X out beyond that has now been diminished.
We now know, however, that there are basically many hundreds of thousands Of small Pluto-like objects out beyond the eighth planet Neptune.
And those go on and on and on and on and on for a long, long distance, actually.
They go through an area called the Kuiper Belt that Pluto is a member of.
They go into a huge area a long, long, long way away called the Oort cloud.
It's a region in space that we actually think comets come from.
Having said that, we can't completely poo-poo this idea because there actually could be, yes, there could be some larger planets out there at a great distance in space.
From an astronomical perspective, it's pretty unlikely, though, having said that.
Nearer to home, what about the moon?
I'm of the generation where there was lunar exploration.
I can remember being a boy and seeing the last Apollo mission and thinking, well, I guess as a schoolboy, you think, well, we're going to go back, of course, and we'll go back with something bigger and better.
And we never did.
And we were told, of course, that's for financial reasons, which I can completely understand because these things were money-spending projects.
And who can afford that kind of thing on a consistent basis?
Well, certainly not at the moment.
However.
There is talk of going back to the moon now.
And I think it was the previous president, Bush, who was the first to talk about that.
Why do you think there is renewed interest in the moon when we can now see further out?
That's a very good question.
You mentioned President Bush there, and it always surprised me that he didn't, when he was trying to get the funding, didn't present to his people a particularly impressive idea that I'm going to relate to you now.
I like yourself, I remember the I actually used to come home myself from primary school to look at the final few couple Apollo missions.
Well, you did.
I mean, you did because you had to.
They captivated the nation, didn't they?
They captivated the world.
They certainly did.
They were awesome.
Yeah, I used to love it so much and seeing that footage.
And you can still listen to that footage now.
And for me personally, just listening to the sound transcripts, the communications between the moon surface and the Earth, it gives me goosebumps, to be quite honest with you.
I think it's completely awesome.
And we've had nothing like that since.
I mean, whether it was Patrick Moore in this country, Walter Cronkite in America saying, man on the moon.
There just hasn't been anything like that.
What a ring to it.
I mean, you mentioned the financial situation.
Of course, as well, at the end of the day, I think we all now know that the point was it was a propaganda, wasn't it?
It was a way of the Americans actually beating the Russians in one way, because the Russians kept being first, you know, to put someone in space, Yuri Gagarin, and then to put someone in orbit and all this business.
And the Americans said, look, how can we finally gazump them?
Or let's put someone on the moon.
So it was a bit of a propaganda stunt to begin with as well, wasn't it?
But I think there is one or two good reasons, and a quite spectacular reason, if you don't mind me explaining on your program, is this.
If we look at the Earth, and I mentioned the fossil record before, as we go back down through our rocks that we have available to us on Earth, we can see, of course, as life, how life has progressed throughout the history of the Earth, right back to primitive forms of life.
And I think most scientists would always say, look, we've got the evolution of life on Earth pinned down pretty accurately.
But at the same time, most scientists would say, what we don't know is how life started, what seeded it, how it began on Earth.
And one of the reasons for that, Howard, is because we don't have any fossils of the very beginnings of life on Earth.
And the reason for that is because we can't get our hands on any rocks old enough to show fossils from the beginnings of life on Earth.
Now, the point is this.
The early solar system was always getting knocked about.
We've already been talking about impacts from space.
And the very early stages of the solar system, it was a very active time, a very violent time.
And everything was getting smacked into all over the place.
So let's imagine life starts on Earth.
And let's imagine the first forms of life are created and die and form fossils that we currently can't get our hands on here on Earth.
But let's then imagine that those original fossils in those original rocks are subject to being hit by an asteroid from space.
Those rocks can get punched out into space from the impact.
Maybe some of those rocks can land eventually on a very young surface of the moon.
Now the moon doesn't have any weathering.
So any rocks that did that will still be there today.
And the point that I'm trying to make after this story is there could be rocks on the surface of the moon that have fossilized evidence of the beginning of life on Earth.
So the moon has more to tell us.
I'd never thought of this.
The moon has a story to tell us that isn't only about itself.
Exactly right.
I mean, I think that's an incredible thing.
When we had, I know in particular Apollo 17, the last mission had Mr. Schmidt on board, who was a geologist, and he went and tapped a few proper rocks out, that kind of thing.
But even he at the time probably wouldn't have realized that he could have been stepping over rock which could have had fossilized evidence of the first life on Earth.
Now, apart from the fact that we have better techniques for analyzing these things than Schmidt would have had in his day, for this to be talked about and for this to be considered as a serious reason for going back there, the powers that be must have some reason.
There must be something that they know or suspect.
Yeah, that's a good point.
That is a very good point.
Yeah, that is a very, I mean, I don't know.
I can't.
Again, are you thinking of an idea of something being covered up there?
Well, not necessarily, but I don't think the governments of the likes of the United States would consider committing billions of dollars to something unless they felt there was a real good, serious reason for it.
Of course, the other reason the moon might be of interest is minerals, isn't it?
Yeah, mineral wealth is a very good reason, a very good scientific reason, because, of course, one of the things that on Earth is that we, as time has gone and our technology has changed through the decades, we start to use different materials more so.
We start to use different metals more so, especially with the computer revolution, etc.
And metals every day, so-called everyday metals like copper are actually quite rare on Earth.
And of course, we use copper in electrical industry, and the electrical industry in the world, of course, is massive.
And so, yeah, things like copper, metals like titanium, which are, of course, used in surgery and things like this, they are actually quite rare metals on Earth, but reasonably abundant, certainly in certain areas on the lunar surface or within the lunar crust, definitely.
So, for a very practical reason, we need to be exploring beyond this planet because we're running out of resources.
And out there is a whole, you know, it's a whole supermarket of potential wealth.
There is indeed, sir, yes.
I mean, the other thing is that the so-called asteroids that we've talked about already on the program, there are something like, I think it's something like 300,000 asteroids, these chunks of rock between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
And a lot of them are mineral-rich, again, metal-or-rich, things like titanium, copper, etc.
Even things like silver, no doubt, as well.
So, yeah, mining them is something that should be an idea for the future.
I think as well on the exploration thing, Howard, I think we've got to appreciate the idea that in literally just the same way that people, famous people in history, like Chris Bonington, etc., and Tenzing and Hillary, etc.
Chris Bonington, famous mountaineer, Sherpa Tenzing and Edmund Hillary, the guy who climbed Everest and the person who helped him do it.
Wonderful.
You know, these people, I think we all have it in us to a degree to explore.
I think it's innate.
It's human nature.
And like you can't disinvent, unfortunately, some people would say, you can't disinvent the knowledge of nuclear weapons in the same way you can't disinvent the passion that human beings have to explore.
And as we explore and explore and explore our own Earth, it's a natural progression.
It literally is a natural progression to go into space.
It's just a bit further.
At the end of the day, it's just a bit further.
You know, if you go on an expedition on Earth, the further you go from your home, the more expensive it's going to be.
And in the same way, if you go out into space, the big difference, literally, is cost.
But I don't think you can knock that out of human beings as a race.
And why should we?
Why should we knock it out?
Because it is, as we've mentioned a couple of times already, it's linked.
It is really very, very much linked to the promotion and the fact that the humans can carry on and live.
What's the word I'm looking for?
The human race can survive and prosper.
Well, sustainability?
Sustainability, of course.
That's a fascinating point.
And the other thing that connects to what you just were just saying is that when you run out of things to explore on this planet, and they keep telling us, of course, we've got to go down the oceans because we don't know much about them.
But on the physical surface above the oceans, we know most things about this planet now.
Yeah.
That desire to explore means that we're going to look outside this planet.
That's the next place to go.
Definitely, without any shadow of a doubt, we have to do that.
Again, you've just hit on a great related subject there.
You mentioned us going down into the depth now, but there are certainly some parts of the deep seabeds.
You know, the quote is often we know more about the surface of the moon than those seabeds.
Related to that, though, there's this great thing to do with life again, because we found in the last, again, it must be just the last couple of decades, we find life, things like bacterial life, living in the most inhospitable situations you can possibly imagine on Earth.
If you think of down on these very deep seabeds, where it's very cold, there's no light, the pressures are immense, and yet we now find life there where we would never have thought it possible before.
Life finds a way.
Things like bacteria are very hardy forms of life, they really are.
Now, if life forms can exist in those extremely hospitable situations on Earth, why therefore can they not possibly, I'm not saying they do, but why can they not possibly exist even on places like Mars?
There's really great evidence now over the last 30 years that's been gathered to say, look, we now know that a long time ago, Mars was a very wet planet.
There were river systems, Amazonian-scale river systems, perhaps, even an ocean on Mars.
It was a very wet planet.
So if liquid water was there in a great degree, who's to say life didn't kick off on Mars?
And even though it's much colder on Mars now, and the water we would therefore say presumably is all locked up as water ice, as solid water, who's to say that things like bacteria couldn't be clinging on to life?
If they can do it on Earth in pretty inhospitable situations, environments, why can't they cling on to life on places like Mars?
And there's a great deal of speculation, Nick, now, isn't there?
A huge amount of speculation that because of the presence of water, frozen water there, that there may well have been at some point, perhaps there isn't now, life.
But even if we discover that there was life on Mars, then that changes our perception of absolutely everything, doesn't it?
And I get this feeling, and many people do get this feeling, that we're on the brink of being told that.
I agree with everything you've just said, to be honest.
In the same way that we've talked about introducing ideas to the general public in a very careful way, i.e.
if there was an asteroid coming towards the Earth, I think in the same way, if life was discovered, even if it's bacterial, so-called primitive life on another planet, it is still life as we know it, that plastic phrase.
And I always wanted to add Jim onto the end of that phrase, life as we know it, Jim.
Even if that was discovered, then of course, yes, governments, they need to almost find a way to give that information out.
I don't think that's one of those things that you could put on the end of the news, is it?
Oh, and by the way, in a jokey way, we found life on Mars.
I think it has to be delivered in the right way.
But it just seems to me that we're on the nursery slopes.
Just when I listen to the ways that some of these things are couched, some of the stuff that comes out of NASA when these pictures from Mars are released, I get the feeling as I watch this stuff, just as an observer, not as a journalist, I get the feeling that we're being prepared.
That is a great way to put it, yeah.
Because maybe, you know, a lot of those NASA scientists, as they find out more and more from the Curiosity Space probe that's there now, that hopefully will be there for a long time.
As they're finding out more and more and more now, they're in the real hot seat in a way.
They are in the position to be looking at all the facts and figures that are coming out and thinking, I think this is going somewhere.
And so, yes, you're right.
Perhaps they are preparing for something for us.
I think it would be amazing.
I wouldn't be surprised, as you just hit on this about five minutes ago, if in the next 30 or 50 years, that kind of evidence for life is found.
It would be an incredible thing.
It would be wonderful.
I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm not saying it's going to be there.
I'm saying I would be overwhelmed at the finding, but what I wouldn't be is surprised.
It wouldn't be a shock to me.
And those high-definition images from Curiosity are truly, truly amazing.
They are.
I've often looked at them here, and I've thought the detail, certainly the amount of detail that's being released to us, maybe they've got higher res pictures than we're getting to see.
But the ones that we do get to see, it's amazing to think that that thing is parked there.
We made it.
There is light there.
There are rocks all around it.
And what focused my mind, certainly looking at some of these pictures over the Christmas holiday, which I did, I thought this planet, they've actually said, scientists have said that if life ceased on this planet, if there was some cataclysmic event, you would think that traces of us would be left around in perpetuity.
Forever, there would be some trace that we've been here.
But in fact, in very quick succession, things begin to degrade and break down.
And the buildings and structures, and certainly us, traces that we were here, you're talking about maybe thousands, tens of thousands of years.
After that period, there would be pretty little left.
And so if there had been life a million years ago on Mars, or you pick a number, there wouldn't necessarily be buildings and structures and artifacts there.
What there would be is just rubble and bits of what look like rock.
What you're saying is that it would be hard to detect any evidence of previous life.
And looking at those pictures, all right, the mind has this propensity to try and make order out of chaos, but sometimes you see shapes and you think, is that this probably sounds crazy to you, but you think, could that have been a piece of something?
Oh, absolutely.
I appreciate exactly what you're saying.
Wasn't it not even just Bernard Lovell, very famous person, who, when he was first sketching Mars through his, what was then quite a reasonably primitive telescope compared to today's standards?
And he was looking at the dark patches on Mars.
And the more he stared, a lot of the stories about him are almost now suggesting that, as you've just suggested, the more he stared, he kind of, not necessarily consciously, but he kind of made shapes, put shapes into his sketches that were very linear, very straight-lined.
And was this evidence of things like canal systems on the surface of Mars, man-made systems?
And that's a very famous story.
So yes, your own, almost your own subconscious can come to the fore and you can bring things into shape which maybe or maybe not are actually there.
Yeah, I agree with you, certainly.
And again, you're saying because we're getting these great high-res images now, they are superb.
And I often find them surreal because what you're looking at is a long, long way away.
And to see things in such incredible detail is truly, truly awesome.
You can almost imagine yourself suitably equipped walking around on the surface of the planet Mars.
Well, I keep expecting to see Sigourney Weaver drive up in a rover.
That's tremendous.
That's awesome.
Well, as long as it's not quite as awkward to understand as Prometheus or something like that, I'd go with it.
I'd go with it.
I'd always go with it.
Absolutely super.
But there is this tremendous focus on Mars at the moment.
And there is just this feeling that a lot of us have that we are about to discover something.
And maybe this is going to be the year when we will at least be prepared for that announcement that there has been something up there.
All right, there may not be anything there now, but there may well have been before.
And that will start to beg all sorts of questions, like, for example, the one that has been very seriously been asked by some people.
Could that be the place that we came from?
That has been asked indeed.
I used a phrase, I think, about 10 minutes or so about the idea of seeding life on Earth, how it actually started, yes.
Because I mentioned to you, the early solar system was full of impacts, things smashing into each other, and therefore rubble, for want of a better description, being ejected out into space and that rubble landing on other parts of the solar system.
So there is a way there, isn't there, that material, even life-developing material like protein molecules, etc., can be spread out across not just our solar system, but our whole galaxy.
So even if you don't buy the idea that we were seeded by aliens in spaceships, we could have been seeded by accident.
This is very true.
I think personally, from my perspective, that we have been seeded by accident.
I personally think maybe life-forming chemistry has come our way, loaded up on a comet that smacked into the Earth or in some similar manner.
I personally think that's the way it happened on Earth.
You mentioned Mars and a lovely theory.
It's not so much a theory anymore.
We're pretty sure that this happened.
Because we were talking about the moon earlier on, we now accept the idea that the moon formed because when the Earth was settling down, for want of a better phrase, as a young planet, it was hit by something about half its size.
This object then, it was like a glancing blow.
So this object that hit us about half our size then skipped off into space, either never to be seen again, or perhaps to settle down as the planet Mars.
The rubble that was created from that glancing blow basically then settles down and forms the moon.
So the point there I'm trying to make is that there are some people who say was that object that initially hit us, it would have been about half the size of the Earth.
Mars is about half the size of the Earth.
Could that have been Mars?
And therefore, if that happened, there has been a touch between Mars and Earth.
There's been an impact.
And is that not a great way to transfer material, as you've just been suggesting?
Certainly sounds like it.
I want to talk about the sun.
We mentioned the sun earlier.
A lot of people talking in recent years, mainly because we just understand more about it now, about increasing instability on the Sun.
More solar flares, X-class giant flares, which have tremendous impact here on Earth, electromagnetically and in other ways.
Do you believe from what you've seen that the Sun is becoming less stable?
I think what I believe, Howard, is that the Sun is not as understood as we once thought.
And when I say that, what I mean is this.
I think the stability question is a good question.
I don't know.
I don't know which way I would go on that, to be honest with you.
When I say the understanding part of the Sun, a great example to give you here is since records, that great phrase, since records began, I'd say for about three centuries now, people, scientists, astronomers, they've been making certain records of the Sun.
One of them in particular is to watch the activity of the Sun.
The Sun's activity does go up and down in several reasonably regular cycles.
In one particular very regular cycle, the Sun's activity goes up and down every 11 years.
And that's associated with the amount of sunspots that everybody will have heard of, the amount of sunspots on the surface of the Sun.
Now, that cycle has been followed very accurately, recorded by many, many people for about three centuries, to be honest.
And that 11-year cycle, to be honest with you, has hardly ever missed a beat.
It's been very accurate.
Every 11 years, the activity of the Sun goes up, reaches a peak, falls to a minimum, then goes back up, beaches a peak, etc.
Now, it's now about, was it about, say, what are we on?
Now say seven years ago, I think, something like that.
The Sun was due to have a minimum activity time, which it duly did.
And there were very few sunspots on the surface of the Sun.
And therefore, about a year or so later, the Sun's activity is supposed to pick up, as it always has done for the last 300 years.
But it didn't.
The Sun had a particularly long minimum activity time.
And there was no sunspots for quite a long, I think something like two and a half years.
That was a big anomaly.
And yes, the activity of the Sun at the moment is very key.
A lot of astronomers are studying it because there is something going on.
There seems to be something going on.
Whether it's something that's understandable or not, I don't know.
The big flares you mentioned, things like coronal mass ejections, yes, indeed, these are effectively the sun burping out a great deal of energy into space, which do affect us here on Earth.
They knock out all our radio stations and even our electricity grids in places like Canada.
They've done it a few years ago.
So yet, the Sun is something we need to study carefully without any shadow of a doubt.
The whole theory of how the stars live is an ongoing theory.
I mean, astronomers think they've got it pinned down pretty well, but there's always going to be a surprise in store, for sure.
And the thought that there is something out there, it's almost like the same wonderment that we have about infinity, but the thought that this thing can burn forever.
Nothing.
In our experience of life, if you light a match, it burns down and at the end it turns black and burns your finger if you're not very careful.
You've got to drop it.
But it lasts a few seconds.
The idea that the sun can burn infinitesimally is just something that is impossible for most of us to get our heads around.
Well, I mean, for us, the thing is, howard, the universe is an infinite thing.
The universe will presumably go on and on and on for a very, very, very long time.
I don't mean to correct you.
Please forgive me.
But our star, the sun, the stars themselves, they don't burn for an infinite amount of time.
They burn for a very long time, yes, which in itself is a bizarre fact.
Because if you look at the rate that our star, the sun, is so-called burning its fuel through nuclear fusion, several million tons a second is often quoted, and yet our star, the sun, has been doing that for 5,000 million years and will continue to burn its fuel in its core for another 5,000 million years before it starts to run out.
That is a staggering fact.
It's not an infinite amount of time for a star, but it is still a very, very long time.
Our star, the sun, we believe a star like the sun will have what we call a main sequence life, a prime of life stage of about 10,000 million years, which is a very long time.
It's not infinite, but it is a staggering amount of time.
And when it all comes to an end, we're not going to be here.
In fact, we'll have probably more than many, many millions of times denuded the resources of the Earth.
So the human race probably won't be around anyway.
But just in case there are people still around here, what would happen as the sun begins to wind down?
Will it explode?
Will it just simply go dark?
What happens then?
That's a good question.
Some stars out there in space do explode.
People will have heard of supernovas exploding stars.
Our star, the sun, won't do that.
It will do something really equally dramatic in a way.
In about 5,000 million years, when it starts to run out of its main fuel, our star, the sun will make adjustments.
And physically, one of the results of those adjustments will be that it will bloat.
It will expand.
It won't explode, but it will expand many, many, many times its current size.
Now, astronomers theorize a couple of estimates to the size.
One is that our star, the Sun, will bloat to such a huge extent, it will redden as it does so to become what's called a red giant.
It will bloat to such a huge extent that its outer surface, the outer surface of the sphere of the Sun, will reach out into space so far, it will almost touch the orbit of the Earth.
What that will mean, the question you've asked, what will it mean to us?
Well, for us here on Earth, if we were still here, the Sun would fill our sky, which would be a spectacular sight.
It would be incredible.
So, in fact, it's not going to freeze and go cold, as I thought.
At the end, we're going to fry.
Well, at the end, we would fry, yes.
The other estimate is that the sun would get a bit bigger than that and actually swallow up the earth.
So, we would be inside the sphere of the star.
So, the earth literally would melt at the end of the day.
Yes, we would fry.
If for some bizarre reason we could survive that, we couldn't.
But let's move on to the bit you mentioned about freezing.
If for some reason, maybe we were, let's imagine we were living on Mars at the time when the sun went into a red giant.
Perhaps We could survive that.
So, after the red giant stage, what then happens is the Sun basically then gives up the ghost and the Sun will cease to exist.
All the outer layers of the Red Giant will basically kind of dissipate off reasonably gently into space.
And what will be left behind will be the old star's engine, the core, the pips of the apple, if you like.
And that's what we term a white dwarf, which a lot of people will have heard of.
Now, the white dwarf is very small.
Initially, it's ferociously hot when it's exposed to space, but it's very small, and it's a long way away, and we would be very cold here in the solar system then.
So, if we could somehow survive the red giant stage of our sun, then yes, we would then go into the big freeze for sure.
But that's a very, very, very long way down the track.
No need to worry about that just yet.
We think I don't know whether this is your field, but it's something that's always fascinated me, and a lot of people have been talking about it over the last 10 years or so.
The possibility, because it's happened before on this planet, of a polar magnetic shift, a flip, where north becomes south and south becomes north.
That apparently can happen.
Certainly scientists are telling us.
When that happens and has happened in the past, it can happen very, very quickly.
And we're not even talking about a period of years.
We're talking about a period of days.
Exactly right.
The magnetic shifts have happened many, many, many, many times over the Earth's history.
Again, geologists can see evidence of that in the rocks, bizarrely enough.
The way all the magnetic minerals, you know, minerals that are made of iron, etc., the way they kind of align their crystals in the rocks on Earth, show us that many, many times over the Earth's long history, the polarity, the magnetic north and south poles on the Earth, have flipped, have reversed.
What I would admit to you, Howard, is I don't know what effect that would have on us as a modern society.
I mean, obviously, you're talking straight away about a navigation effect, which would presumably be easily rectified.
We'd easily get our way around that.
Well, where North becomes South, South becomes North, that's easy.
But the thing that you couldn't correct for is the fact that, as far as I understand it, tell me if I'm wrong, nothing electronic would work, would it?
Oh, now that's a very good question.
You are out of my field there.
I mean, what a revelation that would be, because, you know, if you're talking about nothing electronic, aren't we just running on the electronic world?
Our whole culture and society basically is running on that now, isn't it?
There's a lot of recent films and books, aren't there, about this so-called EMP bombs, electromagnetic pulse bombs, which don't blow up anything, but basically knock out every single electrical, electronic device on the earth or across the entire United States in one go.
And what chaos and catastrophe that would create in our modern society today.
And even if we leave out the electronics, if you think about the effect on us as people, we can be affected by changes in air pressure.
I know that, you know, a lot of people suffer from sinus difficulties.
I have, and where the air pressure goes up and down, it changes.
But we also are magnetic creatures.
We're affected by magnetism.
So imagine if the poles flipped.
What would happen to us both through that process and afterwards?
That's a very good question.
That is an excellent question.
I think maybe that's something we should direct to the biologist, even, who says that it's a very good question.
Right, here's one for you then, and it's from the Daily Mail newspaper, which is very good on space stories.
Today, they've just published this this morning.
I've got it here.
And it says, enough planets exist in the Milky Way to ensure that there is at least one for each of the hundred million stars in the galaxy, according to NASA.
Analysis of data, the paper says, from the Kepler Space Telescope, shows 17 billion planets in the galaxy are Earth-like in size.
And the paper says the findings are making scientists increasingly confident of finding a rocky planet the same size as Earth with a similar orbit and situated in the habitable zone of a solar system.
In other words, here comes another story on the day that we're recording this in a British newspaper that says that we're getting closer to finding another planet just like this one.
Exactly right.
Isn't that awesome?
Isn't that fantastic?
As these techniques have developed using, nowadays using the Kepler spacecraft, what the Kepler spacecraft does, it peers out into the depths of space.
It looks at all those suns, those stars out there in our galaxy of 300,000 million suns.
And all of those suns, those stars, they are so far out there in space.
All stars are very large, but they are so far out there in space that we see them as a speck of light.
And what astronomers try and do, therefore, in order to detect any planets that are circling, orbiting around those specks of light, what we try and do is if a planet is circling around its parent star in such a way that it will periodically blot out a tiny amount of that star's light as the planet passes in between us and the star, it's that little dip in light that astronomers are trying to catch.
There's no way really they can see the planet because if we see the star, the parent star, as a speck of light, and planets are a tiny fraction of the size of the parent star, how in on earth are we actually going to directly observe them?
It's very difficult to do that.
But what we can observe is any little dip in light caused as the planet passes in between us and its parent star.
Now, over the years, as this technique has progressed, it started here on Earth, that technique.
But over the years, as this technique has progressed, now with this wonderful satellite out in space, this space bro out in space doing this experiment very accurately for us.
So as the techniques have progressed and become more accurate, we are now starting not only to identify these planets out there circling around other stars in space, but we're starting to recognize how big they are, the distance between them and their parent star, and hence, as you've correctly said, the temperature that that planet is.
Are we finding planets that are in the so-called Goldilocks zone?
Not too hot, not too cold for liquid water to exist and therefore life as we know it, gym, I would have to say.
And one of the things I asked Sir Patrick Moore, and there's a little clip of him on my website, www.theunexplained.tv, I did a little tribute to him featuring a clip from an interview that I did.
But one of the things I asked him, of course, had to be the prospects of life elsewhere.
And he said, statistically, there just has to be.
Not necessarily on Mars.
He didn't believe that.
But somewhere out there, there just has to be.
Statistically, it's a no-brainer.
Absolutely, definitely.
I agree totally.
I think personally as well, what we're just saying here now has changed over the last 15 years.
I would almost suggest that, say, you know, 15, 20 years ago, a lot of scientists might have said, well, there is life here on Earth, but not so sure for various reasons that there's much out there.
We changed our minds on this issue.
We can sort of analyze the chemistry, what's going on chemically out in space.
We use techniques called spectroscopy, etc.
And what astronomers are now finding as, well, real revelations these are.
We're seeing evidence that suggests that carbon-based chemistry, the sort of chemistry that we are based on, carbon-rich chemistry, is prevalent out there in space.
And yes, therefore, the idea is that the universe could be teeming with life.
And I'm personally sure that it is teeming with life.
Of what form is another issue entirely.
Well, probably not as we know it.
I would suggest exactly what you just said, to be honest with you.
It's life, Nick, but not as we know it.
Exactly right, sir.
Hey, listen, I've loved this conversation.
I'd love you to come on here again.
Thank you for making time for me.
Nick Lister, if people want to know more about you, is there a place on the net where they can find details?
That's very kind of you to say that.
The website is astronomyforall.
That is all one word.
AstronomyForall.co.uk.
That's www.astronomyforall.co.uk.
Thank you, Jim.
What a fascinating conversation.
And the great thing about you, which is what I said at the beginning, is your incredible enthusiasm for the subject.
And, you know, I hope you always have that because I think you're going to do a lot of people a lot of good.
Nick Lister, thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you very much.
What a great guy.
Dr. Nick Lister.
And he is an astronomer.
If you want to know more about him, I'll post some details of him on my website, www.theunexplained.tv.
That's the place to go.
If you'd like to leave me feedback, there's a link there for emails.
Or if you'd like to leave a donation to the show, thank you to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot for getting the show out to you, as he does, and for devising the website.
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune as ever.
And most of all, thank you to you for keeping the faith with the unexplained.
I'll see you again soon.
My name's Howard Hughes.
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