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Jan. 17, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
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Edition 511 - David Whitehouse
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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.
Hey, thank you very much for all of your emails, communications.
If you've been to my website, theunexplained.tv, and you've followed the link, and you've sent me an email recently, very, very grateful for your communications, and it's nice to know that in the middle of all of this, we are keeping each other going.
Now, I think you're going to be hearing this show in the second week of January.
I'm recording it at the back end of the first week of January, but we are well and truly rolling into 2021, and what an extraordinary year this is already turning out to be.
I'm not even going to try and speculate.
I've never been much of a psychic anyway, what's going to happen next.
But let's hope that the developments that we will be seeing in the future will be good ones, hey, because I think we need a few of those.
And hopefully, within not too long, we're going to be able to emerge from whatever we are locked or locked down within and smile again, look at the sunshine, go places like we used to, and live what we used to regard as a normal life.
I am certainly looking forward very much to that.
And I'm keeping myself going day by day.
I try not to think more than like a couple of days ahead, because at the moment I don't think you can.
But when I allow myself, just perhaps before going to sleep at night, to think about the future, then of course, I don't know whether you do this.
I do things like planning, where would I want to go for my first holiday?
Will I ever get to make that trip to Australia that I want to make?
I want to see, I'd like to see the Melbourne area and the Great Barrier Reef, and I'd like to see Western Australia, Perth again, and I'd like to see Los Angeles and San Diego again.
You know, it would be nice before I turn my toes up to do these things when we can travel.
All of the plans that we all had have been somewhat derailed, but with a bit of luck at some point, looking ahead to things that we might do may become reality soon enough.
I'm hoping so.
Thank you very much to Adam from Creative Hotspot for getting the shows out to you.
And as usual, thank you to Haley for booking the online show.
Thank you for your emails.
Keep them coming.
Theunexplained.tv is my website.
Go to the link and you can send me an email from there.
And when you do, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
The guest on this edition of the show is an old friend of mine, old friend of this show, David Whitehouse, former BBC Space and Science Editor, now prolific author about scientific and space matters.
And the subject for conversation in the next hour is going to be Space 2021.
Sounds like a movie title.
This is going to be a massive year for exploration of and developments around space.
So sit back, have a drink of whatever you like, and enjoy David Whitehouse in this conversation about what we can look forward to in what I think is going to be an amazing year in space.
Thank you very much for being part of The Unexplained.
Thank you for reaching out to me when you do.
Right now in the north of Hampshire, David Whitehouse, former space and science editor for the BBC, well-known author, doing extremely well with a number of books, including The Story of Apollo and Space 2069 and more coming soon.
David, thank you very much for coming on.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to you and thank you for asking me.
I'm sorry, I misnamed that Apollo book, David.
It's not the story of Apollo, is it?
It's called Apollo 11, The Inside Story.
And it is.
It is.
Thank you.
And are the two books still doing well?
I gather they are.
It's always nice when the publisher, the same publisher, comes to you after the Apollo book, says we want another one.
And after Space 2069, they did the same thing.
So as we should talk later, I'm currently writing the next one.
So I can't complain.
And for you, is this move into being authorial, is that something that you see as your future direction?
Well, if a publisher comes along to you and you're a writer and says, we want a book, you're a very hard-nosed writer if you actually say, no, I don't want to write it.
Because I know so many writers, brilliant writers, who are looking around for a publisher to publish their work.
So I'm fortunate in that respect.
But, you know, I spent so many years broadcasting and writing articles for newspapers and magazines that it's nice to really get into the art, if you like, of writing books.
I mean, I wrote my first book 20 years ago about the moon.
And I followed it up with a similar book about the sun.
And what I realize now is that, and I think we realize this in many walks of life, is that I'm only just now getting the hang of how to put a book together.
And every time I write one, I learn so many new things.
And I knew what I was doing wrong in the past as well.
So it's a very interesting way of life.
It is.
And I like the way that you lead people through stories.
You don't do it in the obvious way because that's boring.
You do it a little more artfully.
I always remember Alastair Cook, not the cricketer, but the famous broadcaster, and his letter from America.
He would start over here.
And then he would take you on a journey through all sorts of ideas and concepts and thoughts, apparently straight off the top of his head, but they weren't really.
And then he would bring you magically, when you were wondering where you were going next, at the end of it, back to the point where you began.
And you would then realize the point of it all.
I look at your books as being a little like that.
You take us on a journey.
You're very kind to say that.
And I'm delighted that you've taken that away because for me, writing a book is, there are two aspects to writing a book about science.
First of all, is getting the science right.
Now, anybody can do that.
It's a question of picking up the phone, sending emails, talking to people, reading background.
You know, you can get the science right or you can get interesting views on science or you can find the story.
But the other view, and in fact, the other aspect of writing a book, which I enjoy more these days, is the physical factor putting together the narrative.
Where do you start?
What stories do you use?
Where do you end the chapter?
How do you bring things in?
Do you play around with the timeline?
Because I think that a lot of books I read, the information is just slapped onto the page.
And I thought, no, people don't have to read your book.
Nobody's going to force them.
You know, if people don't want to buy a book, they think they'll change their mind.
so you've got to actually introduce them to the book and entertain them.
And as you say, take them somewhere so that they're enjoying it.
Because there's nothing worse than having to read a book.
Well, I don't actually.
There's nothing worse than having to read a book you don't enjoy.
That's true.
I have to say I have a very short span of attention these days, you know, brought up on electronic media.
So if somebody is not engaging me, I just get bored with it.
I get sent so many books, and a lot of them, I just think, oh, God.
Exactly.
I've got the philosophy.
If a book doesn't grab you by page 30, toss it aside.
Life's too short.
Oh, that's what I do.
It doesn't even make page 30, I have to say.
All right.
Now, we're going to do this conversation because we have three segments here on talk radio in the night time.
I thought what we do is start with some stuff that is current, in other words, that has been in the news the last week or so, then move to the milestones and mile markers in the year of 2021, because there are plenty of them.
This is going to be a hell of a year in space in every way.
And then in the last segment, just before midnight, just before one o'clock rather, we'll talk about your current work or your new work.
How does that sound to you?
Sounds good to me.
Nothing like a bit of planning, is there?
Can't believe it.
All right.
News on Friday.
SpaceX, in the news every day, Falcon 9 rocket thundered into space, I'm quoting here, from Cape Canaveral deployed a Turkish communications satellite.
This was last night, Thursday night, as we record this.
We're recording this on Friday.
The first of more than 40 Falcon rocket missions scheduled this year from launch pads in Florida and California.
This thing looked like it went like clockwork.
Yeah, it seems to.
I mean, SpaceX have got the Falcon launches off to a T now.
40 of them in one year.
I mean, heaven's sake, this is remarkable.
Of course, you have failures from time to time.
You have malfunctions.
But SpaceX is gaining a tremendous track record.
Even though I think up till now, most of its customers have been the US government.
Now it's spreading its wings to launch for other people.
And from nowhere 20 years ago, it's now become almost the default launcher for so many satellites.
You've got to be impressed with the Falcon 9 and SpaceX.
I mean, the bread and butter satellite stuff is good news for them.
If you can get that off pat, then you can do all sorts of other things.
It will help to fund other things that you do, like going to Mars.
And Elon Musk is saying that we will be on Mars, or he will be on Mars, not him specifically, but there will be people on Mars potentially by the middle of this decade, perhaps.
I've always thought, and you've always thought that is a little ambitious.
A little ambitious.
Yes, that's a good way of putting it.
I didn't think he's got any chance of getting people to Mars in five years or even 15 years, because it is a journey that's frequently underestimated by many.
Because, well, he's got a rocket and he's got rocket motors and they are impressive.
But you need a heck of a lot more than that.
And you need a heck of a lot more testing of the rocket motors he's doing.
You need a trained crew.
You need living quarters.
You need life support systems.
You need radiation protection.
You need the computers to run all these things.
You need all these things which are not in development at SpaceX, which nobody has for a journey to Mars.
So if rockets are impressive, but the stuff you have to put around the rocket to take people on a 250-day voyage to Mars and back and keep them alive, he just doesn't have.
Nobody's got it and nobody's going to have it for more than a decade.
So I'm in two minds about Ilumbas.
As you said, you've got to be impressed with SpaceX and his rockets and their flying.
But perhaps it's what things that the richest people in the world do is that we sometimes indulge them when they come out with these fantasies.
But there's a never-ending stream.
Sorry.
You're right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sure.
You're right.
A never-ending stream.
I mean, for example, today, another story that I saw as soon as I logged on this morning was reports that astronauts on Mars could use methane as a fuel.
You know, so all of these things are subsidiary to the task of getting there.
But as you say, the task of actually getting there and being there is the primary issue, the primary difficulty.
And that's the thing that hasn't been mastered.
You're quite right.
That is it in a nutshell, because we understand Mars.
We've had rovers on the surface.
Rovers are going to land on the surface later this year.
We know what the temperature's like.
We know the pressure.
We know the wind.
We know the atmosphere.
We know what the soil is like.
We know about Mars.
We know about the surface of Mars.
So once you get there, there are all sorts of things we can do.
We do not know about the journey.
The journey is the frontier when it comes to going to Mars.
Look at what the astronauts had to put up with when they were in space for just a year and protected on the space station and protected by the Earth shielding Van Allen radiation belts.
They came back in a terrible state.
That has to be overcome.
We need to understand how humans can survive that long, how they can function that long, what they need.
Do they need artificial gravity?
Do they need a spacecraft that rotates to give them some feeling of gravity?
What drugs do they need?
What are the changes to their DNA?
There are all sorts of problems associated with people who are the weakest link on the journey to Mars that we just do not know at the moment.
So if he's thinking about sending a crew, however big, however small, to Mars in five years' time, then it would not look good for the crew.
In fact, nobody would do it, to be honest.
Let's face it, nobody would go because it would just be too outrageous.
But the technology continues to evolve and the ingenuity behind that technology never fails to amaze.
Another story that appeared very recently, within the last few days, is a plan.
I don't know whether you've seen this, I'm sure you have.
Again, this is a SpaceX one, to catch the first stage booster rockets from launches, to actually catch them for reuse, perhaps within hours.
I mean, this is the kind of thing that is going to make space very much an everyday occurrence.
Well, of course, they do catch the first stage from the Falcon, which is very impressive.
And it's now become routine.
I mean, if you'd have gone to NASA 20 years ago and said, or the other major companies who run the Atlas and the Delta and such like that rockets, and said, we want to catch your first stage, they'd said, whoa, whoa, too complicated.
We can't do it.
And yet SpaceX has shown that it can be the norm.
They do it beautifully and they do it so efficiently.
And with their current Starship rocket, that huge silver thing they've been testing, they're going to put on the bottom of that a super heavy first stage, which is going to give it the boost to get that into orbit when it might go this year.
And they're going to try and capture that as well.
This is tremendous.
This has changed the economics and the way of launching things into space.
And SpaceX and Elon Musk have made everybody else look slow.
So they have done some wonderful things.
They have changed the game.
It certainly seems so.
This idea of catching the booster with a special arm and then having it ready to launch again, it's claimed in as soon as an hour.
That just sounds, I mean, that's straight out of Thunderbirds, isn't it?
An hour would be amazing.
It would remain to see how far they can turn that into reality.
But I suppose, in a sense, it doesn't really matter how long it takes, because as long as you get the thing back and you can launch it again, because so it's an hour, so it's a week, so it's a month.
If you've got a regular routine of schedule of rockets going up, then as long as a reusable rocket is available next time you want it, job done.
So yes, I mean, this is wonderful.
And I think we are going to see this decade, the slow change from sending things up into orbit with reusable to actually being able to go much further into space using higher power, more powerful reusable rockets and, you know, make going into low Earth orbit cheaper than it was.
Perhaps we can now do the same for actually traversing to the moon and perhaps going further.
One story at a complete tangent from this.
You might have heard a clang there.
It was the sound of a name that's about to drop.
Professor Arvi Loeb from Harvard.
Yes.
Very famous astrophysicist, very famous man in this work, always remarkable to interview.
I spoke with him last week.
And we talked about his idea.
He's not afraid of thinking out of the box, of actually sending proactive missions to look for extraterrestrials.
Whether we do those proactive missions from down here, whether we send craft up there to look for extraterrestrials rather than try to find happenstance, communications or evidence of them.
Do you think that idea is a runner?
It could be.
I mean, Harvey's got a book coming out later this month called Extraterrestrial.
And I'm looking forward to reading that.
That's going to be a fine read after he started really moving in this direction with Amuamua a few years ago, which is that strange object that passed through our solar system and that some people thought could be artificial.
But he's quite right.
There is a broad...
You know, it started off with radios, looking for radio signals.
Frank Drake and Project Osma, when he looked for two nearby stars.
And actually he found something until it was realized it was a military secret spy satellite.
Oh Lord.
Yes.
Until it was radio.
Then it was lasers because the argument was that you can fire a laser at a nearby star.
And if you were at the other end of that, the laser would be incredibly bright.
And it's a much more effective way of transmitting information.
And then people talked about looking for technostructures, so-called Dyson spheres in space, things which had been altered by aliens, which we could see were unnatural and might give us some evidence.
And now, more than in the past, there's the idea that, the great idea that Fermi had, where is everybody?
Because you can do some calculations and you can see that even if you can't travel faster than light, and you probably won't be able to, you could actually send reproducing spacecraft very slowly between the stars.
And when they got to a star or a planet, they then made another one of themselves and that set off.
And you can colonize the whole galaxy in a million years.
So Fermi said, where is everybody?
It's been well over a million years, you know, since humanity has been around.
Where are the alien craft?
And people have said, well, RV has taken the view that, well, they could be sitting out there, lonely, waiting in the asteroid belt, perhaps.
And we should perhaps try and go and have a look.
It's a good idea.
It's a good idea.
I'm sure that some of these Russian billionaires would come up with some money for it.
So you do get the impression that the search for intelligent or other forms of life in space is broadening out this decade.
And that's very exciting.
And just finally, while we tie up this little segment, and we've got to get to commercials in a minute or two, but there was a headline that I saw this morning.
I have to say, it's one of many headlines that I didn't entirely understand, but I loved the headline.
Okay, and I know that you'll be able to put some flesh on this.
The Stingray Nebula is fading fast, and we've observed it.
Are you aware of this?
And what is it?
And what exactly is it doing?
I've only heard vaguely in the past about the Stingray Nebula.
I think it's a nebula of gas and dust, a bright gas and dust nebula, though I could stand to be collected.
And these nebulae do fade.
They can fade because they're powered by stars.
But if it is fading consistently over the whole of its size, then that would be strange because things in general in space cannot vary on a time scale less than the light travel time across it because it's got a built-in delay.
One side of it could start to fade, but the other side, you know, it's too big to actually all fade out at the same time.
So if that's the case, then that would be strange indeed.
But I think the general rule is if things change in space and you observe things changing, you know, you'd get an awful lot of information from that.
Ah, well, I think we need to look into this one a little further, David, because it sounds fascinating.
Almost like the big banks.
This one is too big to fade.
Sorry for the joke, David, which is not a very good one, we have to say, but it is early in the morning.
David Whitehouse, former BBC Space and Science Editor and author these days.
David, as you hinted at the top of this, 2021 is going to be one heck of a year in space, perhaps a year like no other.
It's going to be tremendous.
I mean, there's so many things happening.
There's landing on Mars, orbiting Mars.
There's space probe, space probes being launched to asteroids.
There's several space observatories being launched.
There are lots of small rockets from small companies being launched.
You have the big James Webb Space Telescope being launched in October.
I mean, we've waited a decade for that.
And, you know, by the time it gets into space, that'll be amazing, you know, because we've had it in our minds for so long.
But its potential is extraordinary to explore the universe.
And of course, we've got this thing which everybody's talking about at the moment, or a lot of space people are talking about in Washington.
And that's what will happen to Artemis, the Trump-led plan to go back to the moon, put people on the moon, it's often said the first woman and the next man, in 2024.
How's that going to pan out now that Trump is gone?
Biden, but nobody knows Biden's approach to it, and that we're just about to get a temporary head of NASA who may stay in the post for many months until Biden appoints his own person.
So there's going to be a total change, isn't there?
Because Jim Brightenstein stepped down from the headship of NASA.
So now we have somebody new in Pro Tem, plus a new president, and every new president takes a different view of space.
So are we saying that there's some uncertainty about Artemis?
Well, there is, because it's always been seesaw between the Republicans and the Democrats about space.
And you'd have to make an observation that actually the Republicans generally tend to do better on space than the Democrats.
But that's not a hard and fast rule.
I mean, there are several things about Artemis.
I mean, there are lots of different points of view.
First of all, the money is not coming as was envisaged.
Well, that's not a surprise.
Congress voted, I think, $23 billion to NASA for the coming year.
Now, the way Congress give the money to NASA, they don't just give the $23 billion to NASA and say, do with it what you will.
They actually go through it line by line and say, you will spend this on that and that on this.
And they've only given $850 million to human landing systems on the moon, which considering you're three and a bit years away from putting a person on the moon, doesn't to me seem a great deal.
They could do with more.
So that's been chopped back.
And that's the general rule for these things.
They do get, when you plan to go back to the moon, it gets chopped back.
And the following year, it gets chopped back.
And then suddenly you realize you can't do it because you haven't got the money and the time scale is too long.
But there is a hope here.
It has been suggested to Biden and his transition team that what America needs is something big.
It needs the great big Kennedy-esque challenge of going back to the moon.
And that this would be something that would unite the nation, would bring them pride, would bring them a place in the world which they're slowly losing.
And that point it might be a good idea for Biden to back Artemis.
But we don't know.
We have yet to find out.
There are people with very long faces in Washington at the moment, but there are also people saying, yes, it can still be done.
Because if you think back to when I was a little boy and you were a little boy, and the landing on the moon happened for the first time, you can remember the television coverage of people standing with their noses into television sets in shop windows in Times Square in New York, people watching at home in London, people in Tokyo.
It united people.
And in a divided world, and I think the political aspect of this, you quite rightly flag up, David, in a divided and embittered, in some cases, world, one thing that would bring people together would be a great achievement in space.
And also, international politics.
China is expected to launch the first stage of a space station this year.
They're going to land on Mars with a rover this year.
They're developing new boosters to take heavier things into space.
They've already had great success, you know, being the first country since 1976 to bring rocks back from the moon.
So America needs a response to the Chinese space program.
And this is the thing that Obama did not realize when he changed the course of the American space program by turning away from the moon.
There is more to this than money.
And if China is going to be such a superpower in the future and such a threat or a challenge to America on many levels, then America putting its big foot down on the moon in a way that before China does, you know, is an international aspect that can't be ignored.
Right.
And in the early days, in 1969, it was the United States versus Russia.
These days, you have to read the United States versus China.
So it's the same dynamic, just for a different generation.
That's right.
I'm afraid Russia is a declining space power now.
I see no great role for it or no great achievements coming up in the next decade.
Because we realize that Russia has an economy the size of Texas and Texas couldn't have a space program because it's not big enough.
So Russia is living off its past and will probably be less capable in 10 years' time.
But China is a entirely different case.
You're quite right.
In 10, 20 years' time, it'll be not only publicity-wise, the soul of the world of China versus America, but military as well.
Because space is becoming more militarized and there are more aspects of warfighting and military confrontation that will come from space in the future.
And both sides know it.
There was an idea.
I mean, this is very much oblique to what we're talking about here, but there was an idea that I saw publicized.
It's not the first time it's been publicized.
But over the Christmas holiday, there was once again coverage of an idea of being able to send power, solar power, derived in space, back down to Earth.
Now, this isn't Star Wars, it's not fighting in space, but it's a different use of space.
I don't know whether you're aware of that and whether we might see some progress in this.
This has been around for decades, the idea of solar power satellites, that you collect sunlight, huge panels, huge solar panels in space.
You collect sunlight and you beam the energy by microwaves back down to a receiving station on the Earth and then you distribute the power.
And the receiving station could be anywhere.
It could be the middle of Siberia.
And you'll be able to get power that way.
The problem with that is that it's too expensive at the moment.
To build large solar arrays, keep them in orbit, operate them, maintain them, is beyond us at the moment.
In the past, you used to see nice animations and films of astronauts welding panels together, moving around.
You can't do it like that.
You couldn't have armies of astronauts in space doing that.
You'd have to now do it robotically and automatically.
And that's a possibility.
But I wouldn't put that as being on the horizon the next 10 or 15 years.
Right.
It was just an interesting thing to read about.
It's a fascinating thing that every...
Can we run with it?
And often the situation has changed.
And what was a no-goer 20 or 30 years ago is possible due to new technology.
And I think that could well happen for space-power telescopes, space-power satellites.
But if we, just, I mean, just before we move off this, the thing that has always concerned me about this idea, because, you know, I'm a bear with minimal brain, is the idea that if you're sending power back to Earth, then you've got to beam it back.
And what is to stop it blowing my head off if I get in the way?
You're dead right.
That is one of the concerns, because if you're going to beam it back with microwaves, then clearly you can't dilute these microwaves too much, because you'd need too big a receiver on the ground to collect them and to store the energy.
And it's not a well-used, not a well-understood technology anyway.
So you actually actually have a quite strong beam, which is directed towards a small radio telescope, which sucks them up and turns them into energy.
And you're quite right.
What if that beam wanders?
What if somebody for nefarious reasons puts that beam over London or Moscow?
What health effects would it have?
And there are some scenarios where it could be rather nasty.
So a lot of things have to be worked out because, you know, a few people have said that if you're building a space power system, you're also building a weapon.
And we have to bear that in mind because these things, like nuclear power, nuclear power can be used for good, it can be used for evil.
And the same with this kind of thing.
I want to get back to space per se and the Mars Perseverance mission.
Now, this is slated for April.
It is a landing, which includes a helicopter drone.
Oh, yes, we're looking forward to this.
Oh, yes.
In fact, it's in fact the year of Mars because February 9th, the United Arab Emirates probe called Hope goes into orbit.
And then shortly after that, the Chinese Tan Wen-1 arrives at Mars mid-February.
And they're going to put something down on the ground in Utopia Planitia, which is quite northern latitude, but it's where one of the Viking probes landed in the 70s.
But they're not going to land that probe straight away.
They're going to wait several months.
But that's going to be such a leap forward for China to put a rover on Mars.
And of course, Perseverance, with its helicopter, and it's moving around, putting Martian soil samples into test tubes so that they can be brought back to Earth by a future mission.
Perseverance is going to be a fantastic mission.
It's going to be, I'm really looking forward to it.
But of course, there is the seven minutes of terror, Howard, which people describe as being the entry into the Martian atmosphere and the landing on this.
And we've been, well, mostly, it's been okay for the past 10 years.
The European Space Agency came acropper with one of their probes.
But mostly, you know, fingers crossed, it worked.
And you think, well, it's got to work this time because it would be so tragic if Perseverance didn't get to land on Mars.
But you're right.
This is a mission that's going to dominate the Earth.
And I'm really looking forward to seeing this.
How can a helicopter drone fly in the Martian atmosphere?
Martian atmosphere is very thin.
But the gravity is a third of that of the Earth.
So you've got to do the fairly straightforward equations of how much lift you can get from a surface that's rotated, from a helicopter blade, how big it has to be, how much it has to rotate to produce a force which overcomes Martian gravity.
And you can do it.
It turns out that you actually can do it.
So that's going to be fascinating to see this thing move out because as you know, when Mars rovers go across the planet and we can see their new horizons every day, you're always thinking, what's over the next ridge?
What's beyond there?
What's the best route to take?
This shortish-lived experiment with the Mars helicopter is going to be absolutely fantastic to see something fly over the surface of Mars.
I remember years and years ago, I went to a briefing where some guy was telling me that the best way to explore Mars would be with a cruise missile.
He converted a cruise missile and he flew it across the surface of Mars and it made measurements as it traveled a great distance and it mapped the surface and he got it all worked out.
It's an American military guy.
He got it all worked out and it was a very impressive mission.
But of course, for various reasons, it never went ahead.
But I think that in the future, when this Perseverance helicopter has worked, and when we start sending more probes to Mars in the 2030s, it may well be we have advanced small cruise missile type rockets which fire off from a landing site in various directions and produce wonderful local maps.
I can just see this sort of Kenny Everett type American military character, you know, with stars up and down his arms saying, we're going to send a missile and we're going to fire it across the surface of Mars and those Martian critters better get out the way.
Well, I mean, the surface terrain hugging and mapping of the cruise missile was revolutionary.
And to use that similar technology on the planets would be tremendous.
Well, I mean, the stuff that we are doing is just amazing.
Now, look, kind of back down to Earth, but also back up into space again.
We haven't heard very much in 2020, now we're in 2021, of Richard Branson, 70 years of age this year, but he plans to take a trip to the edge of space in that suborbital space plane that one day he hopes will carry fee-paying passengers.
Is that going to happen, do you think?
It's going to happen sometime.
But I mean, you look back in history and we were hoping this was going to happen 20 years ago.
And I think Richard Branson has said that they didn't realize quite how hard this was.
Because you'd think, you know, you take a rocket, a rocket motor, you take it up to 50,000 or 60,000 feet or whatever it is on a mother airplane, and then you fire it straight up and it comes down.
And with Bert Rutan's design of a wing, which he calls feather technology, actually slowing it down and keeping it under control doesn't seem to be a problem.
The wings of the Branson Virgin Galactic capsule are tremendous.
But they've spent a long time doing tests and having various setbacks and overcoming them.
And we all hope that this year, or whatever year we face, will be the time.
And I suppose it's got to be this year sometime.
I mean, they had a problem with their test last time, but they learned a lot from that when the rocket didn't fire.
They aborted and came back down.
And that was great information to learn.
It went smoothly, it went smoothly.
But you're right, it's different when you put fare-paying passengers up there.
And hopefully, this will be done later this year for the first time.
Now, whether they can ramp that up to get a decent flight rate to start really putting people on these suborbital hops remains to be seen because, I mean, there are people who have bought tickets or put money down on tickets who are 250 or I think 300 in line for a voyage.
And who knows when they're going to see themselves being able to board this craft and go into space.
So it's a bit of a cruncher, but you can certainly see with Virgin Galactic the benefits and the results of all the research and the testing they have done.
It's a very impressive outfit.
And, well, Richard Branson is going to have to do, you know, the thing in the first commercial flight.
Well, everybody's going to be able to do it.
He's going to have to be there.
He's going to have to be there.
He is the man who had his lunch on top of a balloon.
He's done all of these remarkable things.
This one he's got to do.
So let's watch this year for that.
Finally, when we look at 2021 and its prospects, we haven't got to forget, and this is all about these days, either governments or people with a ton of money, Jeff Bezos owns Amazon, owns the Washington Post.
He's got a company called Blue Origin.
And from what I'm reading, and I'm quoting here, 2021 could be, quotes, a breakout year for the company, which he founded 20 years ago.
What do you think?
Could be.
Could very well be.
I mean, it's about, one could say it's about time that Jeff Bezos' investment started to pay off because he's got this, as you say, Blue Origin, which has got a very impressive, and you can look online and see the very impressive tests of this technology to take people up into space and bring them down again in a different way, slightly different way from the technique that Virgin Galactic will use it.
And you look at the tests where this has been done not with a crew, and it's very impressive.
So I quite like the technology.
It's clear that they're being cautious, but they've got some tremendous technology behind this stuff.
And it may well be by the end of the year that Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are both operating low trips into space, suborbital hops.
And that would give us a backdrop, a constant behind us, of regular human spaceflight.
And that would change the whole atmosphere of everything.
Because at the moment, you have people going to the space station every few months.
If lots of people were going up every week on two systems, well, that would just make it so much more routine and part of people's lives.
And we would learn so much from that.
You're right.
That would have knockoff effects.
Yes.
No, absolutely.
So this is going to be a year where, hopefully, if the money continues to flow, where the effects of COVID to force us back to the Stone Age are countered by tremendous scientific and developments in space.
Let's hope so.
So David, we've talked about the prospects for 2021, and unless I've missed anything in those prospects and the various names who will be making news probably during this year.
What about you, though?
Because you've written two books.
You've got a bit of a taste for it now and you're working on a third.
What will that be about?
Well, I've written eight books, you know, two with the current publishers, ICOM books, which are wonderful.
They're wonderful people to work with.
But you're quite right.
I'm sort of getting more into the swing of it and at the moment producing one a year.
And, you know, these type of things, they come about randomly, but, you know, eventually there's a plan involved.
And I wrote Apollo 11 in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of Apollo because I saw a different way of writing the book, using astronauts, administrators, politicians, words in a certain way to tell the story.
It was a different way to tell the story.
And people liked it, and I'm delighted they did.
And then I wrote a sequel to that, not just the 50th anniversary of Apollo, but the 100th anniversary of Apollo, Looking Forward and Looking Back, Space 2069.
And the publisher said, well, what are you going to do next?
And actually, I felt I'd had enough of planets and rockets for a while.
And I wanted to write about stars and galaxies.
The thing is, though, that everybody, there's so many people write about stars and galaxies.
What's your USP?
What are you going to do?
And so I tried to think of a theme which had lots of branches to it, a big question.
And the question was, can life survive in the universe?
Can intelligent life survive as the universe evolves?
Because our current ideas about how the universe evolves means that all the stars are going to go out and it's going to get very cold, very bland, and things are going to die out.
But I thought that if you were an intelligent civilization and you managed to grow up and be a million or a billion years old, surely you'd want to continue.
And if you were that clever, how could you find a way to survive?
So it's really a sort of story of how life began, our search for intelligence at the moment, and how that if we are to survive long-term into the future, humans are going to need to find aliens,
and we're going to actually rely on each other, perhaps as a community, because the universe that is around us at the moment, a bright universe of stars and galaxies and planets, is a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of the lifetime of the universe.
For most of the universe, for an infinity in front of us, that brief shining period when it seems life was easy to start, is going to be over in the distant, infinite past.
And most of the universe is going to be, it's going to be very different.
It's going to be dark and very different and featureless.
And the question was, how do you get over it?
How does life survive if it wants to live forever?
And of course, once you start asking an interesting question like that, you then start branching out and think, well, how would we find life in the universe?
How would it find us?
How would it develop and live long term?
Well, first it would live next to stars.
Then it would have to live next to black holes to get the energy.
But what happens when the black holes go?
So it's sort of, as most books do, it started off with a few suggestions and a few ideas.
And then you basically go away and you work on it and you say, is there a story here?
All right, from what you said there, though, it makes it sound like, and I've never heard you say anything like this before, that the need to find life beyond here, the need to find other civilizations, is not just a bit of fun.
It's not just a bit of scientific experimentation.
It is actually a necessity now.
You're quite right.
That is the central theme of the book, I think, that if humanity is to survive and have something and actually go into the future, the significantly far future, you know, we may be destroyed in a million years' time by an accident or by ourselves.
But if we want to be one of those civilizations that lasts hundreds of millions or billions of years in the cosmos or much longer than that, my idea was that we have to find aliens.
There was a great quote by Lauren Isley, who was an American biologist, who was a wonderful writer.
Go and find some, I'd advise you, listen to this, find some Lauren Isley books.
They're brilliant.
And he said, you will not understand yourself.
Humans will not understand ourselves until we take regard to those who look at us with a non-human eye.
We won't understand ourselves.
We won't understand the universe unless we have somebody else to talk to about it.
But you're saying that we have to plaintively ask the aliens when we find them.
And assuming that they have different or superior technology, we're going to have to ask them for a favor.
And the favor that we'll be asking them is, you know, our source of power is dying out.
Everything's changing around here.
Have you got any ideas for how we might survive?
That's one part of it, yes, because from statistics, you can argue quite straightforwardly that if we find a civilization in space and there are interesting targets quite close to the Earth, quite close to the solar system we could look, then they are likely to be the ancient ones.
They're likely to be much older than us, far more technologically advanced and they would no doubt have some sort of solution to our problems.
But I wonder if they have any solution or thoughts on the great sort of ideas of understanding the universe and lasting for a long time.
Perhaps this is a problem we should share and develop.
Because these aliens, they would think differently from us.
They would perhaps have several things in common with us, mathematics, processes of evolution, but they may have an entirely different way of thinking.
Like for instance, as you know, we grew up on this planet from ape-like creatures.
We understand swinging through trees.
We understand throwing things.
We understand jumping from trees.
So we have programmed into our brains an understanding of our local environment and the fact that it's predictable through science.
And we have these great thoughts about the universe and where it came from and how it develops.
But it may well be that we will forever have a middle understanding or a poor understanding of the universe compared to other creatures out there in space.
Our very physical brains might limit us in seeing a grander picture, in seeing the answers to bigger questions than we can see.
And it may well be that other aliens out there in space have a much greater understanding, a much deeper understanding.
And that's why I made the point that if we're to have a long-term future in space and protect ourselves from local catastrophes that could wipe us out, we have to find other people.
We have to find aliens.
And it may well be that we will become aliens in the future.
What do you mean we may be assimilated?
Well, we may be assimilated.
We may be joint evolution.
Humans may evolve into something else.
Humans may evolve in...
Biological evolution uses forces of survival.
Whereas once an intelligence can design the next generation of itself, and you introduce this intelligent design into evolution, then the changing and the development of a species stops being linear and becomes exponential.
So it could be that this has happened many times in the past, and that the default form of life in the universe is so advanced, we are not yet members of that club.
We could not see it.
It struck me that these are big questions that would be interesting to sort of try and address.
If, you know, there's a line in Star Trek, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, which came back to me when I was writing.
And it was about these people who were abnormally intelligent.
And they weren't treated, humans were abnormally, and they weren't treated very well.
They were treated as eccentrics.
And one of them said, the problem with this universe is the dark matter.
How do we get rid of it?
And I thought, that's an amazing question.
If you can ask questions about how you can interfere with the universe and change it, that is a sort of way of thinking which had not occurred to me before.
I thought the universe was, you know, those are the laws, that's the way it is, full stop.
But one thing I sort of realized right throughout this book is that where is the limit of intelligence?
Where is the limit of capability?
When the universe is empty of stars, when all the stars are dead, when all the black holes have evaporated, and the universe is cold and empty with very little energy, could life and intelligence and civilization still hang on and do something?
And what would they do?
And that struck to me as being a mind-boggling question.
It's a fundamental question, I think, which oddly enough brings us back to Professor Arvi Loeb, because he was saying to me not 10 days ago, a week ago, that we need to be thinking out of the box.
And that's what he's doing at the moment.
And that's exactly what you just said.
And I think, and let's leave this conversation on a deeply philosophical point, which is unusual for me, David, as you know.
We need to do that now.
Otherwise, in so many ways at the moment, we are doomed.
Unless we start to change our thinking processes, not only in exploring space, also science, but in a million other ways, we need to come up with some new thinking because the way that we've been doing things, maybe as we go into the future, will not serve us that well.
You know, one of the quotes, you know, the nice thing about writing a book is that one of the things I do is I collect quotes as I'm going along and I write them down on a subpiece of paper.
And occasionally they find a quote at the frontispiece of the book.
And one of them was from Richard Feynman and it said, science needs a new way of thinking.
And I thought, hmm, isn't that interesting?
Coming from Richard Feynman.
And I thought, you know, that's fascinating.
I'm looking forward to the book, David.
Keep up the good work.
Thank you.
And let's hope we both survive to ask these questions.
I'm certainly aiming to.
David, thank you very much indeed.
If people want to check out you and your work, I know that you have a website.
Would you like to promote it here?
Well, it's a bit of a ramshackle website at the moment, but it's called davidwhitehouse.com.
And you can get in touch with me with there.
And if you've got any great ideas, I'll be willing to listen because, you know, it's nice to hear other people's ideas.
And we are a connected world now.
And if there's any aliens, you know, I know you've got contacts.
You've got contacts in all sorts of fields, Howard, and you talk to interesting people about various things.
But if there are anybody, any aliens out there that want to come along and help me, then please do.
DavidWhitehouse.com.
David, thank you very much.
It's been always a pleasure to speak with you.
Thank you, David.
David Whitehouse, more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, stay in touch.
And as a great man once said, good night and good luck.
Take care.
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