All Episodes
Previous Next
April 4, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:08
Edition 247 - Astrobiology and Mars...

At 71... Australian Professor Malcolm Walter has had a life in Astrobiology - he's now aworld leader in the field...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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 online.
Thank you very much for bearing with me recently and for the fact that the shows have not been appearing on precisely the dates that you might have expected.
Just simply that life is very busy.
I've done some filling in on some radio shows out of London, the music and talk shows that I've been doing in Berkshire, and my regular news stuff.
And as I've bored you with before, none of this pays brilliantly, but it keeps me eating, which is the main thing, and allows me to do this podcast, which I've now been doing for nearly 10 years.
We're heading for our 10th anniversary, I think at the end of next month.
I'll check the exact date.
Where did those 10 years go?
Thank you very much for supporting me on the new radio show on Talk Radio.
If you want to read about them, they're at talkradio.co.uk.
But your first port of call for me about this show is through my website, theunexplained.tv, which is maintained and owned and created and curated by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
So if you have questions about the radio show or things you want to say about it, until I get myself up and running with another email address there, please contact me through the website.
It's just easier.
Now look, the radio show has been a learning experience, as you might have heard.
With anything new like this, in a new place, new radio station, and it's not just the show that's new there, it's the whole station.
You've got to feel your way bit by bit.
And the idea of the show, of course, is a bit different from what we're doing here.
Here we do extended conversations with people.
We don't have to get to commercial breaks.
We don't have to get things on time for the news.
And, you know, that's good.
But of course, the downside is I can't put you on air here.
So, this is where you come in.
Wherever in the world you are, if you can possibly call the show if you have something to add to the things we'll be talking about, I'd love you to do it.
You can get all the numbers and details from the website of Talk Radio, and we'll see how that goes.
But the most important thing that I want you to know is that this show that I've been doing for 10 years, whatever happens on the radio or anywhere, is going to continue and it's going to develop.
There are things in the pipeline now that are completely outside everything else I do that will see this show developing.
But this show is going to stay here and the website and the title of the show belong to me.
So this is my project.
And the great thing is that on the podcast here, I can do whatever I think is right.
And if it isn't right, you'll tell me.
You know, it's a great relationship.
It's very, very simple.
So thank you for supporting me both on the radio show and on this.
And thank you for your emails.
I'm not going to do shout-outs on this edition.
I haven't had time to collate them all, but I am reading them as they come in.
And thank you for the response to the radio show, for the continuing guest suggestions and your feedback about me and the way that I do things.
You can email me if you'd like to at theunexplained.tv.
That's the website.
Follow the link.
And if you'd like to send a donation to the show, if you can, that would be marvelous.
If you have donated to the show recently, thank you very, very much from the bottom of my heart, because all of this allows me to keep going.
As I've said before, people in radio, they don't get rich, most of them, some of them do.
And the rest of us scrape along.
But we're doing the thing that we love.
So no regrets anywhere there.
And I just love what I'm doing, you know, very grateful.
One of the downsides of the extra work that I've been doing lately, though, is that the tinnitus problem I've got, this ringing in the ears that I've had for years that I've shared with you before, and you've shared your thoughts about it with me, that's a bit worse.
And that's a worry.
You know, all I can do is pray hard that it's under control.
But, you know, you need to know about that.
And thank you for the suggestions that you made, one or two of which I am following up on at the moment.
I guess it goes with a life on air, really.
You know, sometimes radio stations in the past had sound going on around you that was too loud.
And I had to do things like party in the park in Hyde Park, where we had, as part of the presentation, I had to go on stage in front of speakers that put out 100,000 watts of power.
And then my ears would ring for a whole day afterwards.
God knows what that was doing.
So I guess it goes with the territory.
But that's it.
Great guest on this edition.
Now, a lot of you have been asking me over the years to get real scientists on talking about real science.
Well, that's what we've got this time.
The man we're going to be talking with is one of the world's foremost astrobiologists.
His name is Professor Malcolm Walter, and he's based in Sydney, Australia, and has very kindly, with a big time difference, 11 hours between London and Sydney, agreed to come on digitally on this edition of The Unexplained.
He's been in the media quite a bit recently about his ongoing research and long-term interest in Mars and the astrobiology of Mars.
So I'm going to talk with him about a whole range of topics on this edition of The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for being in touch.
Please stay in touch.
Let's get to Sydney, Australia now and Professor Malcolm Walter.
Malcolm Walter, thank you very much indeed for coming on here.
Can you tell me a little bit about your job and how you came to it, astrobiology and how you came to be where you are now?
That's a long story.
We have time.
It's a story of about 60 years.
I'm a geologist and I became a geologist because one of my grandfathers, my maternal grandfather, was a prospector and he told very romantic stories about big ore deposits he almost found and almost developed and so on to show me little jars of gold and things like that.
But over the years, I've learned to enjoy working with people from other disciplines like microbiology in particular and also astronomy.
So gradually I have evolved into what I'm called a professor of astrobiology now.
And so it's very challenging and interesting to try to do interdisciplinary Science.
There is so much we can talk about.
I want to center a lot on Mars, and the reason that we're talking is because I saw an article from, I think, a couple of years ago in the Daily Mail, maybe a year ago, here in the UK, big newspaper, that quoted you and the research that you've been doing about the Martian surface and the huge amounts we seem to be learning almost by the day about it.
So that's the principal reason.
But I'm curious and fascinated by this whole process of what makes somebody who's a geologist.
And look, I studied a bit of geology at school.
I didn't take it to university level, but I took it to a level beneath that.
So I know the fascination of looking back and seeing how things evolved and how they are formed.
But I'm just curious at the process of how you take an interest and professionally get involved in the geology of Earth, and then you start to want to look beyond us.
I can presume and guess, but I may well be wrong, that maybe some of your inspiration was to do with the Apollo missions?
Oh, yes.
Well, you know, I was born in 1924.
So when the first Apollo mission happened in 1969, I was already a university student and I remember sitting up with some of my friends, drinking too much beer and watching the first landing on the moon.
So that was important.
But beyond that, what really happened to turn me into an astrobiologist was that, I think it was 1987 or something like that, I was invited to speak at a NASA meeting on the search for life on Mars and to give my ideas about the search for life on Mars.
And that happened because in the intervening years, I'd done a lot of work on early life on Earth, which happens to be well preserved in Australia and what we call the Pilbara in Western Australia.
And so it was entirely, well, it was fortuitous, really.
Nothing planned.
It just happened.
And my ideas were well received at that meeting.
And I got hooked.
I got hooked on thinking about Mars.
That was an early stage to do that, because everybody's attention then was still on the moon.
Attention had moved beyond the moon at that stage.
And it'd been, well, there's been a focus on Mars for a long time, really, but I wasn't aware of it until that time because people have been interested in the possibility of life on Mars for centuries, in fact.
But it was new to me.
And as I said, I had never thought about it before 1987.
So it really shifted my attention there.
I ended up writing a book about the central life on Mars, and I've been involved one way or another for many years since 87.
But if you think about how embryonic, if that's the right word, our notions of Mars, our thoughts about Mars were back then, we didn't know much at all, did we?
It was all about speculation.
It was almost like, you know, you see in newspapers artists' impressions.
Yes, it was.
And I've followed it ever since.
In the late 1970s, I spent a couple of years at Yale University in Connecticut.
And I worked in Yollison National Park on the hot springs.
Really, it's a really beautiful area.
And I had a chance to collaborate with microbiologists who were looking at the bacteria that live in those hot springs.
And I worked on the minerals that were precipitating from the water.
And that really started me thinking about life at high temperatures and life in extreme environments and what microbiologists now called extremophiles, organisms that live in really weird and extreme environments.
And Yellowstone, you know, I listen to the radio from Yellowstone, so what I've learned about Yellowstone, I've heard on the radio there, is a very, very in-the-raw environment, isn't it?
It's almost primeval.
It is almost primeval.
And the hot springs harbor a wide variety of organisms, microbes, that can live in very extreme environments, from acid to alkaline, from low temperatures to extremely high temperatures.
And that just opened my eyes to the range of life forms that we have on Earth.
And maybe also, from the sounds of what you say, the possibility that if those life forms that you discovered in Yellowstone can be tough and enduring enough to survive hot conditions like that, or maybe if it goes cold at night, very cold conditions or being buried way beneath the Earth, then maybe it will be possible for organisms to exist in other parts of the solar system.
Yeah, that was the understanding that eventually came to me.
I didn't look at it from that point of view to start with, but over time, and as I mentioned, after the NASA meeting that I was invited to in 87, I began to see that context.
And it's been really interesting to me because I think it's very likely that there is life elsewhere and it's most likely to be microbial life.
And it's probably the sort of thing that we see in Yellowstone now.
Right.
And talk to me about that life.
You know, how does it function?
And how does it reproduce?
What does it do?
How advanced, advanced is not even a word you can use, really, but how primitive is it?
Well, if you look at the whole spectrum of the evolution of life on Earth, then you can use the word primitive, but in fact, it's very complex.
These are bacteria and another large group of organisms called archaea, which are a bit like bacteria, but different genetically and chemically.
It's in fact quite complex, and most of the biochemistry we have now in life on Earth, including ourselves, was actually invented by those microbes way back then.
When I say way back, I'm talking about more than two and a half billion years ago.
Wow.
And those are the building blocks of life, I guess.
Well, they are.
We don't know how life started.
That's one of the great mysteries that scientists are fascinated by.
We can speculate about it and we can have really interesting hypotheses about it, but they're not well constrained.
So we don't know really how life started.
So there you are doing those investigations, which, as we said, really fired your interest.
How did you start to make the connection between what's going on there and what's going on up on Mars?
Because the images that we had of Mars were nothing like the resolution and detail that we have today.
No, but when I was asked to talk at that meeting in 1987, I was asked to come up with a strategy to look for life on Mars.
And frankly, I didn't have a clue.
But I thought about my experience in Yellowstone, and I thought about hot springs and the microbes there.
And if you think about hot spring, even the very big ones in Yellowstone, they're like targets.
There's water coming up in the middle and it spreads out and it's sort of a more or less circular thing, quite like a target.
And it's complex chemistry and there's plenty of water, there's plenty of nutrients and there are lots of microbes.
And so it just seemed to me that that was a reasonable place to start, to focus on something like a hot spring system, where we know on Earth that there is complex microbial life and we know how to look for it and we know what it looks like.
And we know not only the microbiology and the chemistry, we know the minerals and we know how to look for those things.
So it just followed automatically for me.
That was a good way to go.
And I still think so.
Amazing when you think of how primitive it all was.
I mean, our researches about mass, because we didn't know much.
I can't even recall now in 1987, back end of the 80s, what we had flying past there.
But it wasn't going very close, was it?
No, but it's useful to remember that now there have been about, I think it's about 50 missions to Mars.
The former Soviet Union had some, and of course NASA, and now the Japanese Space Agency and the Chinese as well.
So over the decades, since 97, we've learned a huge amount.
And there are people who say now that we know more about the topography of Mars than we do know about that of the Earth, because there are no oceans on Mars anymore.
There might have been once, probably were.
But a lot of our topography is obscured by the oceans.
So it's been quite a remarkable evolution of thinking over the last 30 or 40 years.
Very basic question from me this, but I think people will be thinking this.
People generally listening to this podcast are very questing minds.
And I guess they would want to know what I would want to know.
Why are we so interested in Mars when there are many other planets we could have been exploring?
What is the attraction?
Well, one of the key things we've learned over the previous decades is that early in this history, Mars was not identical perhaps, but very similar to the early Earth.
And now I'm talking about times more than three billion years ago.
And we know the geology of Mars pretty well these days, and we know the geology of the early Earth pretty well.
And so that there is that similarity, and we know from work in South Africa and in Western Australia that there was abundant microbial life on Earth in those early times.
So what has happened is that we just say that, well, the two planets were very similar early on, more than three billion years ago.
One had life.
Why wouldn't the other?
Which is the core question of everything.
Of course, as you will know, and I don't know how far you think this is in the realms of science fiction and how close to science fact it might be, but there are many people who have been suggesting, especially more recently, that there may have been a civilization on Mars, very similar to ours or something on Mars, way, way before we were here.
Yes, most of those people come from Southern California.
I think I know what you're implying.
But to my listeners in Southern California, please take that in good part.
There are a lot of people who speculate in a new age-y kind of way about that.
All right, being solid and factual and scientific about it, you see synergies between here and there.
And that's what makes it interesting because, you know, whatever, whether you come from Southern California, whether you come from South London or Sydney, The very thought that there might be now or might have been something else is a complete fascinator, isn't it?
Well, it is.
And my apologies for some points.
I'm sure they understood exactly how you meant it.
Yeah, well, it's a big question.
I mean, the question is: are we alone in the universe?
And where do we start to try to answer that question?
There are a number of ways to go.
And one of the ways that many of your listeners would know is listen for potential radio signals or other sorts of electromagnetic signals from intelligent civilizations elsewhere.
But that's quite, as the people who do it have told me, you know, even they realize that that is quite hit and miss.
One day you've got to get lucky.
Yeah, you do have to get lucky.
And people have been trying for 40 or 50 years and with no luck so far.
But, you know, if you push me, I'd say there probably are intelligent civilizations elsewhere, but we have no evidence.
So as a scientist, I try to avoid those sorts of prognostications, but it's quite possible.
I think it's highly likely that it's life elsewhere.
And do you think there's a possibility that that life, or at least the conditions in which it lives, the terrain in which it lives, can send us a little postcard through space, that bits of what is on Mars can be sort of picked up by passing comets or whatever and sprayed here on their tails?
I mean, I'm not exactly sure of the mechanism for that.
But what I'm saying is that is it possible for pieces of their terrain and whatever's on it to arrive eventually here?
Yes, and there are people who speculate about where life started.
Now we're talking about our own solar system.
So we're only talking about the planets in our solar system at the moment.
And we know that we have meteorites on Earth that have come from Mars.
We know that from the chemistry and the mineralogy that they've come from Mars.
And we know that they've got here and they haven't been too heated or whatever, that they could have brought life on Mars.
So in recent years, it's become acceptable for scientists to talk about the possibility that life first started on Mars and came here, or it started here and went there.
Either is possible.
Okay.
Which brings us to the state of research, you know, back end of the 80s.
And as we get into the 90s, suddenly this great cranking machine that we have now, it all starts to get into high gear.
Everything's moving faster and faster.
You're getting more and more data.
Back here on Earth, what are you doing then?
Well, the issue is, if we think that there is microbial life somewhere else, or there was microbial life somewhere else, such as on Mars, the search strategy comes down to this.
How do we think we can find a microbe on another planet?
I think that puts it in context, let alone a fossil microbe, which would be poorly preserved like the ones we have on Earth.
So there's our challenge.
Find a microscopic object on another planet.
That is enormously difficult.
But it's also exciting because it answers the criticisms of people who say, look, we've looked at it now.
We've got wonderful photographs.
It's just a whole heap of red dust and rocks scattered about the place.
You can't see anything there, and there probably isn't anything there.
That is by far not the truth and not the whole story, because there might be something there, but it could be at a level so tiny, so infinitesimally small, that as yet we haven't got there.
Yes.
And the scientists who are actively involved in that search, including my colleagues at NASA and the European Space Agency and elsewhere, have that in mind.
And they know it's a hard quest.
But the encouraging thing is it's a hard quest on Earth as well to find the earliest stages of life, just microbial life.
But we've done it.
We know how to do it.
So that's what keeps most of my colleagues going.
In that we've learned how to find evidence of microscopic life, even back to, well, the oldest examples are 3.49 billion years old.
We've learned how to do that and we can apply that knowledge to Mars.
And when did we start doing that?
And how did we start doing that?
Applying it to Mars.
We started to do that back in the 70s, really.
People were thinking this way then.
But what's happened subsequently is that there's been a lot more work on early life on Earth since then.
And we've learned a lot about how to do it well on Earth.
So that's what's changed.
And, you know, it gives us reasonable hope.
We could do the same on Mars.
How fascinating and how exciting.
So fast forward to where we're at now, or within the last, say, 10 years or so.
These days we've got curiosity and we're scanning Mars in a way that we haven't before.
And we're also scanning what's around Mars.
What are the things that make you excited?
What are the things that enthuse you at the moment about what we are discovering?
Well, one of the things we've learned, which was very surprising, is that there is liquid water on Mars.
The first impression of what Mars was like, the impression we had 50 years ago, was that it was a frozen planet.
And there could be no liquid water because it was too cold and the atmospheric pressure was too low.
So, well, really, over just the last decade, we've learned that that's not quite right.
And we've seen very clear evidence from particularly NASA missions that there is still liquid water flowing occasionally on the surface of Mars.
And we know that because we can see little gullies that come and go with the seasons.
So even if you don't see ebbs and flows and tides, you can see the marks that those things leave.
Not tides, but streams.
Yes, we can see that evidence.
And that's really quite new.
And why that's significant is that we only have one example of life, and that's life on Earth.
The only example that scientists can project from.
And all life on Earth requires liquid water at some stage in its life cycle.
So there's a mantra in NASA, for example, that says, follow the water.
It's searching for life, follow the water.
And now we've found the water.
Right, but the atmosphere that that water is in is very different from here.
Yes, it has almost no oxygen.
It has a lot of carbon dioxide.
We're heading the same way, I must say.
It seems to have some methane, which is interesting that CH4.
Well, that is interesting, isn't it?
Because from what I thought, and again, I'm not a science expert.
I was not very good at science at school.
I'm an arts guy.
But I thought methane could only appear if it is expelled by something.
Yeah, methane can, well, yeah, that's more or less true.
But there are two ways it can be expelled.
One is from volcanic environments where it has nothing to do with love.
And the other is from...
Well, yes.
Or something.
Yes.
Cows and rice paddies and so on, but it's done by microbes in the cows and in the rice paddies and so on.
So it can be a biological, as we scientists say, or it can come from microbes.
And at the moment, we think we know that there's methane in the Mars atmosphere, but we don't have the definitive evidence that says where that methane came from.
But I think we will.
We'll have that evidence within five years probably because there are measures designed to check that possibility.
But the fact that it's there says as plain as anything, and this is new and exciting, isn't it, for all of us, that microbial interactions and the microbial process is going on up there.
It certainly suggests that.
Doesn't prove it yet, but it suggests that.
Well, you could say it gives us the courage to keep looking.
So what do we do next about that?
How do we proceed?
Well, in the case of the methane, the methane that's produced by microbes has a distinctive isotopic composition.
Carbon has three isotopes, and microbes differentiate or select one isotope over another.
So you can look for that signal in the methane in the atmosphere of Mars.
And that's what's going to happen probably, well, not probably, but definitely in a couple of years.
So that's one approach to it.
But, you know, scientists are always skeptical.
And even if we find that isotopic signature in the methane, some people will say that, well, you could do that, or it could have happened by some chemical means that had nothing to do with life.
So it's just one iteration in the search for life.
Do we get to a point, do you think, and maybe we do and maybe it's coming soon, where there is a limit to what, however sophisticated they might be, little devices crawling around and scooping up bits of earth and hacking off bits of rock.
Do we get to a limit where they can't do any more and you simply do have to get people there?
Well, I think so.
That is my opinion, that in the end, you have to have boots on the ground because if you have well-trained astronauts and scientists on the ground, they can make intuitive decisions.
And people will say that computer programs are developing the same way, but I think that we're pretty clever things.
We're pretty clever organisms, aren't we, as people?
And it's perfectly feasible to get people on Mars.
It's just a matter of time, in my opinion.
And I think we could get to a solution of the problem as to whether there's life there much more quickly if we did that.
Of course, a big commitment for a person to actually do that.
But there are many people, as we know, willing to sign up and be there.
As a place to live, as a terrain, and that's one of your specialisms, what would that be like for people?
What would we have to do in order to make that terrain and that geology work for us as human beings if we were there?
What would we have to do?
How would we have to adapt it?
Well, that's a fraught subject.
But when I think about it, I think about the people who've explored Antarctica, for example, and who overwinter in Antarctica are in controlled environments.
So if you apply that to Mars, we'd need to be In a controlled environment where we modified the atmosphere and we could grow our own food in greenhouses in that controlled environment and so on.
But why it's particularly fraught from my point of view is that there are people who say that we're making such a mess of the environment on Earth, we need somewhere else to go if Earth becomes uninhabitable.
Well, it's strange that you should say that because about five years ago, I interviewed, I don't know if you've ever met him through your connections with NASA, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who of course walked on the moon.
And one of the things that he was saying is that we do need to have our eyes on the skies because the way we're treating this planet, it's going to not serve us for a whole lot longer.
We have to fix what we're doing on Earth and not think about going to somewhere else and doing the same things there.
Or indeed taking our practices, the way that we've done things down here, which has not been perfect by any means, exporting that to another planet, taking, we have a, I guess, and it's a very big question.
And it's interesting that you thought of this, that we have a responsibility, don't we?
We have a huge responsibility to look after our own planet.
And, you know, that brings us to climate change, of course.
And I think, you know, it's very clear now that that's a real issue.
No serious scientist disputes it anymore.
And so.
And you've only got to look at the fact that I know you've had some real weird and wacky weather in your own city in Sydney.
But here in the UK, I can't remember when we had a good old-fashioned winter like we had when I was a kid, the last decade or so, and especially the last five years.
We've had the strange, I mean, I hate the cold anyway.
I don't like the British weather by any, I get away from it whenever I can.
But, you know, we've had very strange winters, full of storms, even in the last week or so, terrible storms.
So yes, Malcolm, you know, no disagreement from me, and I'm not a scientist, that something has happened, whether it's a natural cycle or whether it's what we've done to this planet, which I suspect it might be, it's worrying.
Well, it's not a natural cycle, and certainly the climate has changed enormously and past millennia for all sorts of reasons.
But what's different now is the rapidity with which the Earth is warming.
That's new.
And what do you think?
I know we're here to talk mainly about Mars, but just for a minute to speculate, what do you think the end game of that might be?
How serious will this get?
I'll get very serious.
The Earth has warmed to about one degree centigrade already.
And what will happen if we don't do anything is that climate regions will move.
That means that places that are productive now in terms of agriculture will shift and that will cause huge disruption to economies.
And the other thing that will happen, of course, is that the sea level will rise.
And even if it only rises about a metre, and it's already risen a centimetre or so, then think about those cities like London or New York or Sydney that are on the coast and right at sea level, that would cause enormous damage.
And you've only got to think, and it's been in the news this last week or so, just before we get off this particular topic, a couple of hours flying time north of you up towards Brisbane, and I've been lucky enough to be out there, there's the reef and the people who live in low-lying places like the little islands, like Hayman Island and Hamilton Island.
It's a real huge worry for them.
Yes, of course it is.
And also the Pacific Island countries, too, which is even more worrying for them, of course, because they've got nowhere to go.
And most of those countries, those land masses are at sea level anyway.
Right.
So the message is that we mustn't see Mars as a lifeboat.
Yes, we can research it.
Yes, we can understand it.
And there are many reasons why we might want to.
But we must not see it as somewhere that we can escape to.
No.
And I think it's really bad thinking to suggest that it might be a lifeboat.
You know, it just focuses our mind back on what to do back here on Earth.
Right.
Okay.
Well, that's a conversation to be having at another time, but a really relevant one.
And I'm glad that you raised it.
So, human beings on Mars.
Now, there was a movie very recently that I watched in the last month or so called The Martian.
And it was all about, I don't know if you've seen it, Malcolm, but the premise of it is there was a colony on Mars of humans exploring it.
They had a base very much like what we see at Antarctica.
And one of them gets left behind.
And he has limited resources, but has to fend for himself until they can figure out a way to rescue him.
And he cultivates plants.
He builds a greenhouse and it works.
Now, I thought to myself, that's fantastic.
Why aren't we going to do that?
I suppose the question for you is, could we, or was that just fiction?
No, it was a good movie.
I did see it.
And yes, we could do it because we've been, well, I haven't, but other people have been experimenting with growing food in a Martian-like environment, and it can be done.
Right.
Well, talk to me about that.
So you've tried to replicate, as far as you know, the environment, the atmosphere and the soil or whatever you want to call it, and you've actually been able to grow things?
Not me.
But that sort of work has been done by particularly NASA For many years and probably elsewhere as well.
And yeah, what do you need?
You need liquid water.
You need nutrients like phosphorus and so on, which all rocky planets have anyway.
It's just in the chemistry of the rocks.
You need a source of energy.
Well, sunlight.
There's sunlight on Mars, weaker than here, but it's still there.
And you can get energy from chemical reactions as well.
So it's perfectly feasible.
And, well, I think it'll happen.
And what we get, I presume if it's just a soup of chemicals and seeds, what we get is exactly the same as what we get here on Earth.
There wouldn't be any, just because you'd be doing that a long way away, it's still a process and the process is the same wherever you are, whether you're in Sydney or Sidonia.
Yeah, exactly.
So we could be making mun bean sprouts on Mars just the same as we'd make mung bean sprouts here.
You're working with NASA and the ESA, the European Space Agency, ESA.
What are they doing about all of this now?
I don't expect you to breach any confidences, but what sort of plans are they making?
Well, the immediate plans are all for robotic missions still, like we've been seeing for the last few decades.
But they're ramping up in intensity.
The Curiosity landing was a great encouragement to those of us who think about those things.
It was an absolutely amazing achievement for an 800 kilogram object to land on the surface.
It was like landing a Volkswagen Beetle on the surface of Mars.
So that's where the space agencies are going at the moment.
But for a long time now, the agencies have been working on plans for human missions to Mars.
And that thinking is very well advanced.
And I don't really see any where that won't happen.
I think it will happen, but it's going to be extremely expensive.
That's the major problem.
So I think it'll probably take an international mission to land astronauts on Mars, but I don't see any reason why that won't happen.
Of course, as a man who cares about the environment, which you clearly do, I suppose the last thing we need to be doing is making too much of an impact up there.
And I guess also another thing we need to think very carefully about is whether we really ought to do things like rape the place for its resources effectively.
Because there are people out there saying, you know, oh, you can do mining on the moon and maybe we can get minerals out of Mars and ship them back here by freighter.
I guess because of the Martian ecology, we need to be thinking very carefully about whether we want to do that and how we would do that.
Yeah, well, as a geologist who's observed a lot of mining and thought about it, I think that's nonsense, really.
I'm not commenting on your comment, but the notion of what's called off-earth mining, I think is bizarre.
And why would we do it?
We'd have plenty of resources of those sorts, mineral resources, that is, on Earth.
And just think about where the iron ore prices have gone in the last year, that they've gone, that they've reduced by 100% almost.
Why would you want to buy iron somewhere else in the solar system?
It just doesn't make sense to me.
So the basic question, I know we hinted at this early on in our conversation.
What would we be doing it for then?
Why would we be there?
We would be there to better understand the early history of the solar system.
A good reason for going to Mars through that is that here on Earth we have what's called plate tectonics and that is the movement of North America into Europe and that sort of thing.
Australia is drifting north into Asia at six centimeters a year and that causes all the mountains and so on.
That has not happened on Mars.
What happened on Earth is that those processes destroyed almost totally the first billion years of geological history.
So we don't really understand how the Earth evolved in those early times.
But those early times are recorded on Mars.
So that's one reason.
So it's a missing link.
We will find, we might find the missing link.
Yes, there's that.
But the more powerful reason is to search for life elsewhere.
And I think it's a philosophical issue.
You're either interested in knowing there's life elsewhere or we're not.
But I think most people are interested in knowing whether we're alone in the universe.
And my take on that is that if we find life or even fossil life on Mars, and if we can confirm that it had a separate origin from life on Earth, and there are ways to address that problem, then we will have answered a fundamental philosophical question.
If there is such life and it had a separate origin from life on Earth, then we can, I think, make a reasonable prediction that the universe will be pregnant with life.
There'll be life all over the universe.
Wow.
So it means so much on so many levels.
Yes, that's a very big issue.
It has philosophical consequences.
It has religious consequences.
And it's probably the biggest scientific question of all, I think.
And, Malcolm, what happens if, I mean, we know what mankind is like for questing and trying to improve things.
What happens, as might happen, if the first human explorers up there in their first few decades or hundred years up there discover something superb?
Maybe there's some great way to grow stuff that involves what we find there, microbes that we find there, or something that we find there.
Then there's a great big ethical, I guess, and moral question.
Dare we bring that back here?
That's a huge issue, isn't it?
Now, if you just regard these things as chemicals and things that exist, not a problem.
But maybe there might be difficulties that we don't fully understand.
In other words, it's almost like hybridization and that kind of thing here.
Would we want to cross-fertilize Earth with what we've learned on Mars?
Badly put question, but I think you know where I'm going.
I know what you mean.
And it's a serious issue.
And so what we would do, for example, and the space agencies have thought about this for decades, what we would do would be not to bring it back in the first instance, but say take it to the moon and do some experiments with it on the moon where it couldn't do any harm or take it to the equivalent of the International Space Station and do experiments there, but not bring it back to the surface of the Earth.
I think everyone agrees.
Every scientist who's involved in this sort of thing agrees that it's a serious issue, but there are ways to deal with it.
Big question, not about Mars, but you mentioned the moon.
We have come perhaps over more recent years, and we haven't been going there and doing all that much with it because we've been more interested in Mars.
A lot of people have come to regard the moon as a grey, dead lump of nothing in particular.
Is that a fair view for us to have?
Or should we be more interested in the moon perhaps than we have been?
Big lump of nothing in particular.
Well, it's a big lump of rock, that's for sure.
But the moon is interesting to geologists from a number of points of view.
And one is, a critical one is it gives us a clock to use in dating events on other planets in the solar system.
And the reason for that is that, you know, you know from looking at the moon that there are lots of meteorite craters on the moon, some huge, hundreds of kilometers across, and some quite small.
And there are people who say that the moon has acted as some kind of shield for us.
In other words, those things that might have been headed this way were deflected or stopped by the moon.
Yes, there are people who say that.
But I don't, yeah, well, we've been impacted by lots of objects as well.
But my point about timing is that because of the Apollo missions and also the Soviet missions at the same time, we have samples from the moon and rock samples, and those rocks have been dated.
And so we have flawed, but a useful time scale for the impacting of meteorites on the moon.
And the same sort of impacting would have happened on all the planets in the solar system as the planets were forming.
So in recent decades, the moon has played a critical role in our saying, when I tell you that something happened on Mars more than 3 billion years ago, where do I get that 3 billion year number from?
Well, it comes from comparison with the moon.
So from a scientific point of view, that's critical.
It's a very crude clock, but it's a clock nonetheless.
And beyond that, well, what can you say about going to the moon?
But I think a lot of astronomers would like to have a telescope on the far side of the moon away from the interference of the Earth's atmosphere so they can see further back into the origin of the universe.
So it's a handy sort of lab as well.
And from what you said, in order to be able to study Mars and learn about the way things grow there, if anything does grow there, and do other research, we also have to have the moon as a midway point, as a base station.
So we have to be putting people there too.
Yes.
Well, that's a controversial issue.
And there are a lot of scientists who say in order to get to Mars, we should go to the moon again first and use the moon as a launch station.
And there are many others who say that's not necessary.
We can go straight to Mars.
So my personal opinion is that it would be very handy to go back to the moon and try out the sorts of launch strategies and survival strategies that we would like to apply to Mars.
As somebody who was first a geologist, but interested in all of these things, what have you made over the years of these claims of things like the face on Mars, people who make sense out of things that they see on Mars?
I mean, it happens every day.
There's somebody who claims to have seen, I think, a crucifix on Mars recently, or hieroglyphics have been reported.
When you see these things, and they do get into mainstream newspapers, even in recent weeks, what do you think?
I'll try not to be too rude.
It's wishful thinking.
It used to be, I guess I could say, an arguable interpretation 50 years ago, when we had no good images of the surface of Mars.
And then we could talk about pyramids on Mars and faces on Mars and canals on Mars.
I mean, the idea of canals on Mars goes back for more than 100 years, as you know.
But, you know, unfortunately for all those witchful thinkers, the better images we got on the surface of Mars, the less possibility of any of those things being correct as emerged.
There are no faces on Mars.
There are no canals on Mars.
There are no pyramids on Mars.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing that relates to any advanced civilization.
And the images we have of Mars now are so good from the high-resolution cameras on some of the satellites, for example, that we can see things down to only a meter or so in size.
So none of those things reflect reality.
You work with NASA, Malcolm.
Do they release all the pictures that they get?
And here's another conspiracy theory.
There are people who say that they either degrade the images, some of them that they get, or they don't give us everything that they've got.
Yeah.
Look, I don't actually work with NASA.
I've been a contractor to NASA on and off over the years.
But my response to that is that scientists are very bad at keeping secrets.
We love discovering things.
And if any group of people was going to leak things to the press, such as yourself, it would be people like me.
We can't keep our mouths shut.
So the idea that NASA is degrading images or hiding things is completely fascinating.
I mean, you know that there are people, I spoke to one on radio only a few days ago, who believe even now that we never went to the moon, for example, and believe that we're lied to about an awful lot of this.
But, you know, as you've just said, scientists are people who are questing and want to discover all the time.
And if you're questing and you want to discover all the time, if you know something, of course, you're going to want to say it.
Yes, and that idea that we never went to the moon, I know it's out there.
I've actually met one of the astronauts who trod on the moon.
Who did you meet?
I've just tried to remember his name.
He was on the last mission to moon.
He was the only scientist to the moon.
He was the only science I'm just rabbitting on because his name has escaped me for the moment.
That's funny.
All of those names, of course, are burned into our souls, aren't they?
From Apollo 11 and before, you know, Gene Cernan and Edgar Mitchell and all of those people.
This was Apollo 17.
He went on to become a senator in Nevada and probably tomorrow I'll remember his name.
But the story is interesting in itself.
Yeah, that's right.
So that's just silly.
But what was his, if you can summarise it and if you think it's fair to do so, what was his take on all of this?
Well, he was the only scientist to be sent to the moon on the Apollo missions.
And so I didn't talk to him about this notion that no astronauts went to the moon because that would have been very insulting.
Earlier on you mentioned Hayman Island and the Grab Air Reef.
He was actually at a meeting on Hayman Island that I was at and that's where I spoke to him.
Fantastic place to hold conferences.
But just to speak to something, to actually meet somebody who's done that is a remarkable thing.
I spoke to Edgar Mitchell, but never actually met him face to face.
It must impress you a great deal.
Well, it does.
And I know three or four astronauts, including Andy Thomas, who's an Australian and American astronaut, and I've known him for many years.
I just marvel at what they've done.
I couldn't do it, and I don't want to do it.
But we have enormous ability to do extraordinary things.
And for example, when people tell me that there are lots of problems about going to Mars or whatever, I say, well, we've become a bunch of wimps because remember Captain Cook, he went on one or two year journeys and he survived.
Not all of them did, but that used to be the norm two centuries ago.
And there are even people who are saying that perhaps the ancient Egyptians were great explorers in a way that we don't fully understand yet.
So we need to get our spirits back.
Yeah, and the ancient Chinese as well.
Yeah, we can do it and we will do it.
And there are these people like the current astronauts who are doing it.
And so that sort of exploration will continue.
Because of the level that you've worked at, which is pretty high, have you ever encountered the moonrock, the bits of moon rock that were brought back here?
And if you have, what are they like?
Yes, I have.
It's interesting that here in Australia at the Australian National University in Canberra, we have the man who did the first analysis of a moon rock.
He was based in Houston at the time.
His name is Ross Tyler.
He's a very elderly man now, but he's still with us.
And also some years ago for the centenary of the Federation of Australia in 2001, I put on an exhibition in one of our major museums about space exploration and I had a moon rock.
And I got that moon rock from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and brought it back to Australia.
It was only small, about half the size of a matchbox.
I have this vision of something like what we, my grandmother had these things.
I think my mother did too.
The thing, you know, the pumice stone.
I always think every bathroom had a pumice stone.
I always think moonrock is like that.
No, it doesn't have those bubbles in it.
I mean, pumice is like because of all the gas bubbles that are in it.
But I seem to remember from geology, one of the terms that they always used to like was friable.
It breaks up easily, does it?
Yeah, it does.
But moonrock is like basil.
So imagine yourself in Hawaii, for example, where the volcanoes are active and there's molten lava flowing down the mountains.
I've seen it from a plane flying above it, as you probably have.
Oh, there you go.
So that's what Moonrock is like.
And is it, How does it feel that there is something from somewhere else?
Yeah.
Is it underwhelming, I think, is what I'm getting at.
Yeah.
I'm supposed to be a rational scientist, remember.
I'm not supposed to be moved by emotion, but I've never achieved that objectivity.
I am moved by emotion.
And yeah, it's very special to hold something like that, as it's very special to find fossils three and a half billion years old in Western Australia and so on.
That's very powerful motivation to want to keep doing these sorts of things.
The Life on Mars announcement, which you and I are both convinced will one day come in some form, whatever that life might be.
How close do you think we are to that?
Well, when I first got involved in this business in the 1980s, astronauts landing on Mars were only 20 years away.
And here we are, more than 20 years later.
And it's still said to be 20 years in the future.
So I've become a bit of a cynic.
I don't like being a cynic.
But because of all the, well, the expense mainly, apart from the technical problems, because of the expense, we're probably at least 20 years away from it.
But maybe not much more.
And when you look back at the body of your work back to those early days in the 70s and 80s and up to now, all of the things that you will subsequently do, how would you like to be remembered if you were sort of looking back, and we all sort of muse on these things, don't we, sometimes, maybe in restaurants.
You think, what have I achieved?
How would you like to be recalled?
Look, I'd like to think I'm a fairly modest person, so I don't normally talk about that.
But I've done a lot of work on early life on Earth, and I've revealed quite a lot of the early history of life on Earth, and I've given a lot of thought to looking for life on Mars, and I've published all that.
I've published several books.
Have you got anything in the pipeline?
No.
And, well, that's not quite true.
You're speaking to somebody who's 71 years old.
Nothing these days.
Mick Jagger was on stage in Havana, Cuba, just two weeks ago in the East 70.
Yeah, sorry.
One of the things I've really liked to do in my academic lifetime, which is just the second half of my career, is encourage young people.
So I think probably more than anything else, I'd like to be thought of as somebody who's encouraged young scientists and they'll go on to do much better things than I've ever done.
That's a very good way of looking at things and an incredible modesty.
Just one last question.
And thank you very much for, you know, it's evening time where you are.
It's morning time here.
So for talking across this distance and time zones.
What is it like to work with NASA at that kind of level with those kind of people?
What is it like and what are they like?
It's extraordinarily exciting.
It's just amazing.
And I know quite a lot of NASA scientists.
I know a few European Space Agency scientists as well and some Japanese ones.
But it's enormously stimulating.
There are absolutely brilliant people and not only scientists, but the engineers.
I go back to what I said before about the Curiosity landing on Mars.
Just think of that.
Something the size of a Volkswagen Beetle landing safely on another planet.
It's mind-boggling.
I have good friends in NASA who've been, well, one in particular, who was the chief scientist for the Curiosity mission.
He's a Caltech now.
John Grossi is his name.
He is just an extraordinary scientist and it's a privilege to be associated with such people and work with them.
I count myself as being very lucky.
Well, it sounds to me like you've had a wonderful life and much more of it to come, Malcolm.
Thank you very much.
If people, my listeners, want to know more about the institution that you work for and the work that you do, is there a website or a place they can go?
Google the Australian Centre for Astrobiology.
And what are you working on next, Malcolm?
You know, when you get up tomorrow morning and you go to work, what's the first thing that you do?
Apart from working with students who I'm still supervising, I'm interested in the origin of life and I'm interested in the geological constraints on the timing of that event.
And I think there's a lot of misunderstanding.
So I'm trying to clarify the evidence as to when life arose.
Well, good luck, and thank you for the work that you're doing with the next generation, Malcolm.
And I don't think 71 is any age at all these days.
And I wish you many more years of questing and being excited by it, which you obviously still are.
Malcolm, thank you very much indeed.
Thank you, Howard.
The highly interesting professor, Malcolm Walter, in Sydney, details of him, as he said, will be posted on my website, theunexplained.tv.
And by the way, the Apollo astronaut whose name that neither of us could remember, a man from Apollo 17, was Harrison Schmidt.
Remember him?
And all of those names, of course, are burned into history one way or another.
Thank you very much for being part of this.
Please stay in touch.
Keep your donations coming.
Keep the emails coming.
And if you can, keep the faith with all the stuff that I'm doing.
And if you can join me on the radio show Sunday night, UK time, 10 p.m., fantastic.
We'll see how that goes.
Until next, we meet here on the Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London, and please stay safe.
Please stay calm, and please stay in touch.
Thank you.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection