text:
Science Throwdown: Sea vs. Space main content.
Science Throwdown: Sea vs. Space
by AMNH on
Into the deep or over the Moon—which is more important, intriguing, and inspiring? Explore the merits of sea vs. space across a range of judging categories with aquanauts Fabien Cousteau and Liz Bentley Magee, and astronauts Mike Massimino and Don Pettit. Hosted by comedian and journalist Faith Salie.
This event took place at the Museum on April 13, 2017.
Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes (1 hour 40 mins, 96 MB)
Science Throwdown: Sea Versus Space – Transcript Narrator: You're listening to public programs at the American Museum of Natural History. Into the deep, or over the moon? Which frontier is more important, intriguing, and inspiring? Judge the merits of exploring sea versus space across a range of categories with aquanauts Fabien Cousteau and Liz Bentley Magee, and astronauts Mike Massimino and Don Pettit. This tongue-in-cheek debate is hosted by comedian and journalist Faith Salie. This event took place at the museum on April 13, 2017. Moderator It's my great pleasure to welcome the host for tonight's program. Faith Salie is an Emmy-winning contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning and a panelist on the fabulous Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! She also hosts the PBS show Science Goes to the Movies. Recently, she chronicled her overachieving tendencies in her hilarious and brilliant book, Approval Junkie, which is out in paperback, and you should all get it if you haven't gotten it yet, because it's fantastic. She's a writer, comedian, and a fervent advocate for science. She does that most magical work of teaching us, touching our hearts, and making us laugh. In times of turmoil we follow the wisdom of the late, great George Michael; we gotta have faith. Faith Salie Thank you. All right. Welcome to the American Museum of Natural History. I can assure you that you're in for a very exciting evening, because on the conference call we had to prepare for this event there was a 15-minute debate about which is smellier: an astronaut after being in an astronaut suit for two weeks without bathing, or an aquanaut being in the same wetsuit for six days. And it got very heated, so you're really in for some drama tonight. We'll also be taking Twitter questions throughout the evening, so it's #sciencethrowdown, so get your thumbs warmed up and tweet questions at me, and I'll throw them at the teams. All right, so let me tell you how this tongue-in-cheek debate is going to work. We have five rounds of categories tonight. They are sound, smell—just kidding—vision, discovery, habitability, and technology. The category will have a corresponding media prompt before each. Team Sea and Team Space will each have five minutes—and we have a timer—to speak to the category while trying to persuade all of you, the audience, why their team should win. So now, without further ado, let's welcome out the teams to the stage. Representing Team Sea we have aquanaut, oceanographic explorer, environmental advocate, and founder of the Fabien Cousteau Ocean Learning Center, Fabien Cousteau. Fabien Cousteau Go ocean! Salie I don't know if you can see from the audience, but he actually has webbed fingers. It's really cool. Also on Team Sea, of the Three Seas Program and diving operations at the Marine Science Center, Liz Bentley Magee. That is Team Sea. Now, Team Space. Former NASA astronaut and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University, he's also, get this, the first person to tweet from space: Michael Massimino. And by his side, a veteran of three space flights, he operated the robotic arm for STS-126 and served as a flight engineer for Expedition 331 in 2012 where he lived aboard the International Space Station for more than six months, Don Pettit. All right. Team Sea, Team Space, I need you to come here, I need you to shake hands like the gentlemen and gentleladies you are. Michael Massimino A pleasure. Cousteau Nice to meet you. Salie All right, guys. Stay right here, because I gotta explain the rules to you, okay? I'm going to be keeping you to five minutes per category. The museum gave me a Taser. I don't want to have to use it. You're going to hear this sound—there you go—that sound when your round is up, okay? And if you're itching to get a jab in, just stay put, because you will have a chance to have a rebuttal at the end of each round. Donald Pettit Do we get a Taser, too? Salie To use on each other? All right. I may also interject with a few Twitter questions from the audience, all right? So to your corners, please. Cousteau Let's go. Salie I know you all agreed to this because we told you it would be a fun-loving debate, but I think I speak for everyone here: we want beef, we want trash talk, we came for the drama and also to learn how you go to the bathroom in space or underwater. Cousteau But do we want smell? That's what I was going to ask. Salie Yeah, yeah. Maybe. All right. So, panelists, are you ready to get this started? Liz Bentley Magee Ready. Pettit Ready. Cousteau Ready. Massimino Ready. Salie Audience, are you ready? All right. We will begin with Round 1, which is Sound. Cousteau The world's laziest grouper. Bentley Magee Very lazy. Salie All right. Cousteau So that was a small excerpt from, I think that was Mission 31, where we lived for 31 days under the water, and we had an extraordinary access to the outside world. By living underwater for 31 days, we were able to listen to the ocean world in a very different way not only from the inside, but from the outside. And there was a lot going on. Sound is extraordinarily important underwater from echolocation, communications, et cetera, et cetera. In this particular case, this was a goliath grouper that was booming—the sound that you heard was a very muted version of booming—which is so powerful that it creates a cavitation bubble that's hotter than the surface of the sun for a split second. As a matter of fact, we tried to film that at one point. Bentley Magee We did, yeah. Yeah. So the goliath grouper uses this sonic boom for various methods of communication and warning and also stunning its prey. Sound is used as a tool and a weapon by many, if not most of the organisms underwater. One of the coolest that we were able to capture on film with an edgertronic, high-speed camera was the mantis shrimp. The mantis shrimp uses its claws or its clubs, depending on the species, to create this soundwave and this cavitation bubble that can just kill its prey instantaneously. Cousteau Well, and I think we also, when we talk about sound underwater we also have to talk about not only the good things, but sound pollution. So there's a lot of jarred or jarring sounds. For example, on the surface of the underwater habitat you have snapping shrimp that would keep me up the first few nights, because all night long, you'd hear... and the machinery and everything else, and then, of course, all of the other artificial sounds that sometimes disrupt nature. Bentley Magee Yeah. And actually, speaking of snapping shrimp, I know you guys have The Dark Side of the Moon with Pink Floyd, but I don't know if anybody has heard about one of the newer species that was recently discovered: s. pinkfloydi. It's named this because it's got a massive, hot pink shrimp claw that it snaps, and it creates such a fast soundwave that it instantly after the snap kills its prey, and then it can just eat it at its leisure. So we now are taking back Pink Floyd from space. Cousteau It is an amazing thing, and I think sound, in some ways, is almost more important underwater than vision. Because if you go deeper beyond the light spectrum you start going into the Twilight Zone, the Midnight Zone, and so on and so forth, and the lack of vision is there, but the sound is a very important part of the ecosystem. And we still know so very little about our ocean world. We know less than 5% to date, so we have a lot left to explore out of that 3.4 billion cubic kilometers of volume. So I'm looking forward to it, for sure. Bentley Magee Yeah, absolutely. And we have a whole bunch of technology that we can potentially utilize from studying space. One cool fact, we have echolocation, which definitely utilizes sound with our marine mammals. Dolphins are able to detect a baby in a human mom. While our ultrasound technology is certainly advanced—my mom's in the audience, she's been doing ultrasounds for 40 years—we could potentially use this natural technology, learning from our marine mammal relatives, how to better advance medicine technologies the way they already have it naturally going for them. Cousteau Well, and they detect other things, too, that even some of our newest technologies still don't detect such as certain sicknesses such as cancer, et cetera, et cetera, which is really pretty interesting itself. So we can learn a lot about the oceans. You know, at the end of the day, when we were down below as aquanauts I think we were actually cherishing the lack of sound, or at least I was. I would go out on my walks and actually turn off the sound. I would ask our mission control to turn it off because there was so much chatter going on, and I wanted to hear what was going on in the coral reef itself. We really don't know that much about language yet underwater, and we're trying. You look at a mammal like an orca whale, which is arguably as intelligent was we are, has a matriarchal society, and has very complex language skills that are so specialized that each pod has its own language. And so, with that said, we still haven't been able to decipher what that language is or what those different languages are. So we're just scratching that surface, and for me, it brings about a lot of information about what and who we are and how we're communicating with [sentient being] friends. Bentley Magee Absolutely. Cousteau And I see I was five seconds... look at that, I'm good, right? Salie Yeah, you nailed it. I hope I don't offend anyone if I suggest that maybe orca whales are more intelligent than we are [if they have] a matriarchal society. Bentley Magee I agree. Cousteau Oh, I'll sign on to that for sure. Salie You don't have to take the time to answer this, but I do think this Twitter question needs to be spoken aloud. It's from @HaveANiceDave, and it says, "Hey, Team Ocean. Aren't you jealous of those sweet space jackets?" Bentley Magee They are nice. I like 'em. Cousteau Ah, yes. Well, I did suggest we come up in our wetsuits, but that might be a little uncomfortable: especially the Mission 31s, which are a little bit stinky. Bentley Magee Yeah. Salie And when it comes to songs, here's... Oh God. This is @HaveANiceDave again. I'm going to... All right. Last one from him. Yellow Submarine, or Major Tom? That's a good question. That's a solid question. Cousteau Interesting. Salie Team space, let's hear it from you. Massimino What was that? Anybody know? Pettit A gun fire. Salie Was that the end of Hamilton? Massimino No. Pettit Or that's sonic booms when a spacecraft comes back getting ready to land. Massimino That's a sonic boom that you heard. And so you could hear that on landing before you could see the spaceship coming overhead. Pettit That's right. About, oh, two or three minutes later, the shuttle comes in and lands. Massimino And so the shuttle goes from zero to 17,500 miles an hour, which is really fast. Pettit That's fast. Massimino It's fast, and it's gotta slow down, to get about 250 knots over the runway. So it does a deorbit burn, uses the atmosphere, the friction— Pettit Brakes. Brakes. Massimino Right. That's the breaks is the atmosphere. And it slows down, and so it's not like... You would think of a sonic boom as when you go through the sound barrier when you speed up, but in this case, it's actually when you're slowing down and you go through the sound barrier [crosstalk] slow down. Pettit Yeah. So you're going faster than sound, and when you slow down to less than faster than sound you hear this, boom, boom. Massimino And the reason that there's two booms? Pettit Well, it's debatable. You get two astronauts together you'll get three opinions, but... Massimino We're supposed to be debating them. Pettit Oh, I thought we're debating. Cousteau [Crosstalk] only two booms. Massimino Well, we could do that, too. Pettit Oh, okay. Well, there could be a shockwave from the nose and then a shockwave from the tail. Massimino That's what I thought it was. Pettit Well, but the time differential between those two shock waves, instead of going boom, boom, it'd be boom-boom. And so what I've heard is it's a shockwave from the nose and then a shockwave from the vacuum left behind the shuttle as it's going through the atmosphere, and it's the air coming back together kind of like thunder after lightening. Massimino Wow. Pettit So it's debatable. I don't know which one's right, but I've heard both— Massimino Who told you that? Cousteau Wait, and you guys are [astronauts], right? Pettit One of my astronaut friends. Massimino Oh, okay. One of your smart astronaut friends. Okay, so that's what the boom, boom was. A sonic boom as you're slowing back down so you can be about 250 knots over the runway up to being, we have these little patches on that says Mach 25. So that's how fast you were coming in on entry, Mach 25, and you go down to Mach 1, and that's how you get that boom, boom. Other sounds in space? Pettit Well, space is really the true silent world, and... Massimino Except when he and I are up there. Then it's very loud. Pettit Yeah. But in a vacuum, you know, in the vacuum of space you can't hear an astronaut scream. And there's only one science fiction movie that I know of that actually got the science right, and that was 2001: A Space Odyssey, because when they showed their space scenes, it was silent. But then, you look at all the other movies and a rocket goes by, you hear this... And you can't hear that in space. It's silent. Sound doesn't travel in space. Massimino Yeah. You can be on your spacewalk and banging on something with a hammer, and you don't hear anything. Pettit You don't hear anything. Massimino They'll hear you inside, though. Pettit Oh yeah. Massimino These guys, they're making a racket, and they don't know that they're making a racket when they're working outside the spaceship. Pettit But there's one thing that you could do if you're out on a spacewalk. Let's say you lose all your com. You can push your two helmets together, you kind of go like that and you can shout to each other, and you can hear on the other side because of the vibration through the contact on the helmet. Massimino Did you try that? Pettit Yeah. Massimino Really? You and Sox did that? Pettit Of [course] I'm not kidding, yeah. Massimino I mean Ken Bowersox. I never knew this. I would have tried that. Pettit Yeah, and it's the space equivalent of two kids stretching a tin can out with a string, you know? "Hello, can you hear me?" Massimino You guys planned to do that? How did you come up with this idea? You guys did this—like you said, let's put our helmets together? Pettit Well, we did it when mission control wasn't looking. Massimino You guys put your helmets together and talked. Pettit Yeah. Massimino That's pretty cool. I didn't know that story. I don't know if you're learning anything, but I'm learning a lot. Pettit But inside the spacecraft it's noisy, because you've got pumps— Massimino Right. It's actually very loud inside of a spaceship. Pettit —fans, ventilators. Massimino You can't even hear. You gotta shout, "Hey, what just..." You know, that kind of thing. You gotta shout across to each other. Pettit Well, it's improved. When I first went to space station, this was 2002, it was under construction. So it's like living in a house when you're still building it and there's a bucket where the kitchen sink is supposed to be and a table saw set up in the dining room, and that's what it was like my first trip to station. Massimino Just like Don's house at home: a table saw in the dining room. Pettit Yeah. But it was noisy. We wore earplugs for probably 14 hours a day, because it was that loud. But the engineers at NASA, they're really clever folks, and they came up with ways to muffle the fans and the ventilators and the pumps– Massimino It's tolerable. Pettit Yeah. Massimino But we only have a few seconds left. Just a couple of things I want to say. When you're spacewalking and you're not inside of the spaceship where your friends are talking, you're out there, and you can hear... You have your headphones on. You can hear the chatter. You can talk to your—and you have a microphone. But the only sounds you hear is this whir of the fan. Your fan pump— Pettit Separator. Massimino Thank you. Your fan pump water separator that is humming the... which is a good thing to hear, because you know your spacesuit is working. If you don't hear any of it, that goes out, then you know [we got] trouble, right? But you hear that. Pettit Whistle Massimino And what you can't do when you're out there is you can't whistle, because...? Pettit The pressure's too low in the space suit. It's four pounds per square inch instead of 14.7. Massimino So you can't whistle while you work. Salie Whoa. That was good timing. That was like a mic drop, Mike. You guys are car talk in outer space. That's all I have to say. Can you whistle underwater? Bentley Magee You cannot whistle underwater. Cousteau You cannot whistle underwater either, because of the exact opposite. The pressure's too high. Salie Here's a cool Twitter question for both of you. Do astronauts and aquanauts have to learn hand signals in case of communication failure, and is it official hand signals or is it in bet— Cousteau Accidental or intentional communication failure? Salie Oh, I guess accidental. But does each team decide, these are going to be our hand signals, or is it taught to you by some expert? Bentley Magee It's taught. Generally with scuba diving we have a myriad of different hand signals that we use to indicate different things like, let's go up. There's something wrong. I'm okay. Cousteau I usually advocate hand signals just because people chatter too much, and the silence is golden. There's way... you're saturated with all sorts of sounds underwater, and the last thing you want to do is hear someone chatter in your ear. So usually I take the batteries out of the coms. Salie What about you guys? Hand signals? Massimino I had to use them actually on a spacewalk. We have some things, like in our airplanes we used to fly formation, so we used to use hand signals all the time: how much fuel you have and who's going where and can you hear or can't talk or whatever. And I actually had a com out, a switch get out of config on one of my space walks, which is very unusual. Pettit Very hard to... Whose fault was it that [unintelligible] out of config? Massimino It's impossible. I don't know what gremlin got me, but something— Salie Wait, you had a com out? A communicator? Massimino A com, yeah. So I actually... What happened was is, and they're protected, the switches are protected with a switch guard, because you don't want to bump those, but somehow I think my frequency got bumped. One of those switches got bumped. Pettit Yeah. You switched to the alternate frequency. Massimino Right, yeah. But it got—I don't know what happened, but I was setting up our tether right at the beginning of the spacewalk, and I was right at the robot arm setting up the tether who Mike Good who was going to come out, and I'm looking, and I said, boy, it really got quiet. And I'm talking and they're not answering me, and I go, well, maybe they're busy inside, you know? They're not answering, I'm asking questions. I'm just thinking, oh, you know, I'm here here [on a] spacewalk. Pettit Maybe they're busy tweeting. Massimino They're busy—I don't know what they're doing. Maybe they're getting something to eat. Yeah, maybe later. And I look through the window, and I see my buddies looking at me, because I was only about 20 feet away from them, and I'm like, they can't her me. And I'm like, no talk; can't hear. And they're doing the same to me. And I look down at my switch config, and what do they teach you, Don? All the switches have gotta be pointed to you when you're outside. Pettit Yeah. That's right. Massimino So you don't even have to know what was what. I just looked, and I saw one askew, and I put it back in and we were okay. But I did use hand signals to tell them, can't hear; can't talk. Bentley Magee That reminds me of a really cool moment I had in Aquarius, one of my last days during— Salie Wait, was it a cooler moment? Bentley Magee It was probably cooler. I call it my Inception moment. So I was outside in my helmet communicating back inside to Grace, one of our aquanaut buddies, and she actually FaceTimed my husband on my cellphone from inside the habitat, and she had her headphones on talking to me, and I climbed up onto the viewport and looked into the habitat. My husband logged in and saw the live feed from my camera helmet, and she held the phone up through the viewport so I could talk to my husband while I was diving underwater. It was probably one of the coolest moments that I've had. Salie That is cool. Cousteau Was that when the sea turtle was swimming behind you, and you didn't see it? Bentley Magee Yes. Yeah, exactly. Cousteau See? See what social media does? Salie All right. Unless—that was some healthy time we took up there. Unless one of you has a very strong and fierce rebuttal... Do you? Cousteau I'm just afraid to go into space with these guys. Salie If you like silence, I don't think that's the place for you, yeah. Cousteau Everybody having too much fun. Salie Anyone got a rebuttal, or should we move on? All right. Let's go... The audience rebuttals don't count, sorry. All right. Round 2: Vision. Massimino Do we go first, now? Salie Team Space, take it away. Massimino All right. So vision: what you see. Pettit Yeah. With your eyes. Massimino With your eyes. You were saying about how far you can see. Pettit Yeah. In space, you could see, for the length scale, a half a continent. When a space station is over Central Australia, you could see both the East Coast and the West Coast at the same time, and that's at least equivalent to half a continent. So you could see things on a length scale that you can't see down here on Earth. You see geologic structure, you see folds in mountains, you could see fault zones, you could see rifts, you could see parts of Earth moving in a different direction. Like you could tell that Madagascar is trying to leave the presence of Africa. And it's just amazing what you could see on the length scale of half-a-continent. Massimino You know what? What I noticed was looking out and looking back what you could see, right? So we look through our atmosphere and the stars twinkle, you know? Right here at this fancy planetarium we got going, and you can look and see what the stars really look like, because they're perfect points of light when you get above the atmosphere. They don't twinkle. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star was written by a person who was on Earth, all right? Because they don't twinkle when you're in space. They're perfect points of light, and you can see the constellations, and very clearly. And you can see the gas clouds of the Milky Way. You can see the moon—to me, it looked like it was three dimensional, Don. Like on Earth, it kind of looks like it's two dimensional to me. But you can see the roundness of it and you can see the craters very clearly. But my most favorite thing was looking back at the Earth. Pettit At Earth, because that's where we're from. Massimino That's where we're from. That's where we're both from. We're both from planet Earth. Pettit Yeah, I think. Although my wife sometimes says that I may be from a different planet. Massimino Nah, we're both from Earth. So, but looking back at the planet is what's the most compelling thing. And what I note particularly during a spacewalk, you're looking through—which we both have reports [of this]— Pettit Oh yeah. Massimino —you're looking through the window, your view is a bit constrained by what you can see through the window, plus some of that light is filtered through the window. Pettit Yeah. Massimino When you get outside, it's just the thing visor that you look through, and you're really seeing unfiltered, now. And the brightness of the light was the bright... The sun to me was so bright. It was like a purity. It wasn't even like a light. It was like pure white. And then when you're going around at 17,500 miles an hour, it's about 90 minutes from one orbit, about half the time in sun, half in darkness. You get 16 sunrises, 16 sunsets in 24 hours, and the darkness is like complete blackness. When you're out there you need— Pettit It's black. Massimino Yeah. You need these helmet lights to see what you're doing. And then then the view of the planet, though, from the spacewalk for me, Don, when I was able to... And we were a little bit higher. At Hubble, where I— Pettit Yeah, you're higher. You can see— Massimino We're 100 miles high. We get that curve going, right? You see the planet in its entirety taking up your whole field of view, but you see it with that curve, and what went through my mind was, when I really had a chance just to look at it and just soak it in from the spacewalk without... not worrying about what the task was, I thought, you know, if you were in heaven, this is what you would see, you know? Pettit Wow. Massimino If you could be in heaven and look back, this is what you would see. Pettit And then mission control interrupts the moment. Massimino But I thought about that, I dwelled on that for a couple moments, and then I thought, no, no, it's more beautiful than that. This is what heaven must look like. And at that moment, I really felt like I was looking into a paradise. Pettit And that's Earth? Massimino Earth. And my perception of this place changed in that moment. I really believe we are living on a paradise and that we're very, very fortunate to be here. Pettit Wow. Massimino You know, there's always bad stuff going on, but the beauty of it, when you see it from that vantage point, the vision that you have from space looking back on our planet, I can't imagine anything more beautiful than our planet. Pettit Wow. Well, I had an epiphany to where Sox and I were outside— Massimino Sox is Ken Bowersox, his spacewalking buddy that [he got] the helmets together with. Pettit —and we were asked to stand by for the deployment of the radiators, and it got dark, and so we were asked to stand by till the sun came up. So we had 30 minutes of doing this outside on a spacewalk. So I went to the very front of station, and I clipped in with one of these special tethers we have, and I pointed myself in the direction of station. I was at the very front, a dark pass, and it was like that movie Titanic where the girl was on the bow like this. And so I was going through space, I was looking at Earth, and there was Aurora, there were meteors, there were cities there. I was going like this just... I couldn't see anything else. The station was all behind me. It was like nothing was out there except me doing this on the bow of a space version of Titanic. Massimino And you weren't king of the world. You were king of the universe. Pettit Yes. Salie That's very moving. A less spiritual question from Twitter: is it true you can see the Great Wall of China and the Grand Canyon from space? Pettit You could see the Grand Canyon. You can only see the Great Wall if you use binoculars or a telephoto lens. The contrast is too low to actually see the Great Wall of China, so... Bentley Magee How about the Great Barrier Reef? Pettit You can see the Great Barrier Reef. Bentley Magee I know. Salie Nice one, Liz. All right. Massimino It's beautiful. Pettit And it's beautiful. It is totally gorgeous. Salie All right. Team Sea, your environment is part of that paradise. Cousteau Well, being able to be immersed in this last frontier on the planet is like going into a fireworks display of color and movement and life, and it's just such an amazing, immersive experience. Both of us are looking at one thing, which is the planet, from two different directions. And, for me, I mean, our life support system is such an amazing place, and I love, obviously, both kinds of exploration. But our vision is much less of a distance and much more of an immersive visual experience, because we can almost—don't do it—but we could almost touch those animals and those plants and flora and fauna out there, and it's just something that I feel that we are so integral and connected with. And as a species, we're a very visual creature. Bentley Magee Yeah. And that's one thing I really got to take advantage of, we all did, while living underwater. At the Aquarius habitat, you have what's called the gift of time while being underwater. Cousteau Yeah, that's right. Bentley Magee And normally when you're a surface diver and you're diving from a boat underwater or from the shore you've got a mission. You've got 60 minutes complete that mission—kind of like you out there for 30 minutes or however long your missions are in space—and you wrap it up, and you get out of water safely. But when you're saturated underwater, you can wander around for up to nine hours a day just like you would on a hike somewhere on a mountain. You can lay down and you can stare at a square meter of sand and see all of the different organisms crawling around in that square meter that you wouldn't even notice when you were going underwater for just 60 minutes. Cousteau But what if you have to go? Bentley Magee That's true. Cousteau That's something that we won't talk about tonight. Bentley Magee Yeah. Cousteau And we had to do those trials in the beginning, remember, the training. Bentley Magee Yeah. Cousteau And the very disconcerting part of it was taking our masks off for the entire dive and trying to find our way around basically blind to get back to the habitat. Because, as with space in the habitat, that's your safe spot. And the ocean as well, being saturated, that gift of time comes with a price, and that's the price of not being able to go to the surface. Bentley Magee Right. Yeah, you're stuck below 35 feet. You don't ever go above 35 feet for the entire dive. And some of the coolest moments that we had outside were actually staring at those tiny square meters, like that mantis shrimp that we captured. We literally hung out kind of upside-down with our helmets on the bottom of the sand trying to capture this mantis shrimp, and we were like luring gobies towards the mantis shrimp— Cousteau That was evil. Bentley Magee Yeah. We sacrificed a few gobies, these tiny little fish, to capture the footage. But it was actually really cool. Cousteau It was all in the name of science. Bentley Magee Yeah. And then we also had the night dive with the lightening. That was pretty cool. Cousteau So that was something that was pretty amazing. I think some of our aquanaut friends were looking back at the surface wondering what was going on with friends and family, and, who was it? Was it you that saw the lightning storm from underwater? Bentley Magee Yeah. It was amazing. We were doing a night dive, and so we had all of our lights and our auxiliary lights, our backup lights just in case our flashlights went out in the middle of the dive. But at some moments, we didn't even need them because there was actually thunder and lightning above us, 60 feet above us that we really couldn't tell until there was a lightning strike that dissipated throughout the water and lit the entire reef up just like it was daytime. It was so amazing to see that. Cousteau What about when we turned the lights off inside and looked outside? Bentley Magee Yes. That was pretty amazing. Cousteau There's this cacophony of action. I remember that goliath grouper looking down biting on the barracuda. I'd never seen that in my life. Bentley Magee It was like the food chain right there from the viewport every single night while we had these zooplankton coming and then bigger fish eating the zooplankton and then bigger... And then finally with this goliath grouper striking a barracuda. It was amazing. Cousteau What about our team that was going outside at night? So very limited vision, and they had their flashlights, and one of them got knocked in the side of the head by a sea turtle. Bentley Magee Yeah. And there's also the bioluminescence while you're out there, too. If you do turn your flashlight off temporarily you can wave your hand around, and the tiny plankton that you can't even see with your eyes lights up, a chemical reaction, as your hand's going through the water. And then you can kick your fins as well and see it just kind of glowing. It's amazing to know life is all throughout the water at all times. Cousteau There's a whole different spectrum under there. If you put special goggles on [you can] the phosphorescence on the coral reef. It's pretty awesome. Bentley Magee Yeah. Salie Fabien, a quick Twitter question for you. Cousteau Yeah. Salie What is the most astonishing or beautiful thing you've ever seen underwater? Cousteau Well, those might be two different things, right? The most astonishing is human beings underwater, for better or for worse. The most beautiful thing? Jeez, I'm going to say the next dive, but that's such a generic answer. I would say the battle of an octopus and a mantis shrimp. First of all, the octopus is my favorite invertebrate, and the mantis shrimp is this armored predator that has a punch more powerful than a .22 caliber bullet. So you have this soft intelligence trying to get at this massive, well-armored tank, and this struggle that... there's certainly not a clear winner on either one. Salie Well, what happened? Cousteau Ah. So I was watching and watching and patient and back and forth, and the rainbow-colored multilayered eyes of the mantis shrimp going back and forth and backing up and punching at this soft creature and not really getting anywhere, and he finally scooted in his hole, and the octopus, being this super flexible, tactile creature comes slithering into the hole after it. And I'm sitting there waiting and watching and waiting and watching... waiting and watching and waiting and watching. And, dammit, I had to go back. I never saw the end, sorry. Salie All right. Well, I think we're all rooting for soft intelligence. All right. Rebuttal? Team Space, do you have any rebuttal for Team Sea? Any questions? Any beefs? Massimino I never saw a shrimp fight, but we eat shrimp in space. Pettit Yeah, we eat shrimp. Yeah. They're good. Massimino It's one of my favorite things. Pettit Yeah. Cousteau Did you look at the seafood watch guide? Is that sustainable? Pettit Yeah. Shrimp cocktail. Bentley Magee What about your space ice cream that we all think is pretty awesome? Cousteau Yeah. We even had some underwater. Bentley Magee I just learned tonight that it's not awesome in space. Pettit Yeah. Space ice cream is terrible. Massimino It's terrible. The reason you can buy it in a gift shop is because astronauts will not eat that stuff. We'll go into space and we'll be cramped— Salie All right. This is what's called a digression. Cousteau We have some for you. Massimino No, we're not going to eat that. You can put us in a cramped location, you can— Pettit —make us hot, humid, sweat— Massimino —make us hot and really cold, whatever, but we're not going to space if you make us eat that stuff. We have much better food. We have chocolate fudge cake and— Pettit Brownies. Massimino Brownies. Yeah. We have really good dessert. Cousteau Oh, so you guys sent your leftovers to us, because we all had all freeze-dried food the whole time. Salie All right. Team Sea, any rebuttals to Team Space's expression of their vision? Cousteau I think it's, you know, you're looking at the same thing, which is our planet, from two different perspectives; from two different angles. So, I don't know. Bentley Magee It sounds cool. Cousteau It sounds pretty cool either way. Bentley Magee I think it's cooler underneath the water, though. Massimino No, I think what you saw is really cool, but the view of our planet is just breathtaking, and we are very, very lucky to be here, and I think that it's... When you have a moment like that, for me, it was like I was so grateful that I had the opportunity to see this. Pettit Yeah. Well, how far can you see underwater? Maybe 400 feet, 500 feet? Salie How far can you see underwater? Pettit And that's like half a planet from... Cousteau It depends on the [climate], yeah. It depends if you have sonar. Let's remember that when we're going in outer space, we're always seeking water. Bentley Magee It's true. Pettit Oh, that is true. Massimino Not saltwater, though. Bentley Magee It's true. [Crosstalk] Salie Fabien and Liz, this is from a nine-year-old in the audience. Have you ever seen a siphono... Bentley Magee Siphonophore, yes. Cousteau Siphonophore, yeah. Bentley Magee Yes. A very cool invertebrate. Salie How big? Why is this notable? Why is a siphonophore... Bentley Magee It's just a really cool invert that kind of free floats in the water, and it's pelagic. It's a colonizing—like multiple cells are all connected. It's pretty cool. Salie Okay. So, yes. So that's for nine-year-old Avery in the audience. Yes, they're indeed cool. Cousteau Maybe Avery will get a chance to see a siphonophore soon. Bentley Magee Yeah. Salie There seems to be a danger of getting eaten underwater but not in space. That's an interesting thought. Cousteau That is an interesting thought. Pettit But we eat the underwater creatures in space. Cousteau Maybe that's why we're eating everything out of the ocean; so that they can't eat us. Salie How many colors can a mantis shrimp see? Bentley Magee How many colors? Sixteen, and we can see three. So the mantis shrimp is amazing. Salie It seems like a... It's misleading. When you hear shrimp, you're like, oh. Bentley Magee A mantis shrimp is scary. It can break your thumb, it can break an aquarium glass— Cousteau You do not want to put your hand in front of a mantis shrimp. Bentley Magee No. Cousteau And it's not a shri... well, it is a crustacean, but it almost looks more like a— Bentley Magee Alien? Cousteau —weird-looking alien lobster. Bentley Magee Or I guess the alien looks like the mantis shrimp. Salie Okay. We're here for Round 3, which is Discovery, for Team Sea. Bentley Magee This is a really cool picture that was recently taken of a sea turtle that is glowing. It's bioflorescing underwater, and I think this is just a good representation of what we can really learn underwater on a daily basis. Every time we have a deep-sea mission we come back with at least around 15 new species that we're discovering versus... How many species have you found in space? And so I think that really demons— Speaker [We're trying to find a real cool one.] Bentley Magee Oh, okay. It's really demonstrating the importance of discovery under water, and really, the potential of under water. Cousteau Well, there's discovering on all sorts of levels. There's the discovery of new species, the discovery of the reasons why we're getting [into] things like climate change and so on and so forth. There's also the discovery of new medicines. For example, in deep-water sponges, I was just in Curacao on a sub dive where we were going with a biotech company and taking deep-water sponges and extracting the chemical composition to fight malaria—which they found a composition that will fight malaria—as well as certain types of cancer. Look at the new discovery for arctic fish where they took the antifreeze out of the blood, and now they're using that composition as well. I mean, there's so much that we have yet to discover. And of course, the discovery of the physiology of the human being living in extreme environments—obviously both sea and space—and what our limitations are and where we need to start relying more and more on technology to get us further. Bentley Magee And I feel like this is another time to bring up the accessibility of discovery in the sea versus discovery in space and how many people have been able to go up in space and, oh, I took like 15 people diving yesterday in my science diving class. It was 40 degrees in Boston, but it was still a really cool dive, and everybody came out discovering something new that they were really fascinated about on the dive. Cousteau And before you can become an astronaut, you first have to become a diver. Bentley Magee It's true. You have to be, generally. Cousteau Well, no, you have to train—because of the extreme environment, it does demonstrate some of the things that you would feasibly encounter in outer space, so it makes perfect sense to start there, and it is an immersive environment. Again, to some people, it may be an alien world and scary and all that. To some of us who are addicted to it, it feels like home. Bentley Magee Yeah. Cousteau Not necessarily always in a 600 square-foot space with six people for 31 days, but it is a pretty neat place for sure. Bentley Magee And we were down there for one month, and we collected about two years' worth of data. And so the Aquarius habitat where Fabien and I lived is the world's only underwater laboratory. Cousteau Correct. Bentley Magee It's amazing that we have one—one space underwater where we can actually do science, collect data, and learn about the environment while being out in the water for nine hours a day. And so I just—I think the possibilities are really endless for discovery. Cousteau It allows us also to—and I know we're going into that next, at the end—but it allows us also to experiment with parameters, technologies, et cetera, et cetera. So discovering new ways to look at things. Look at David Gruber, for example, Dr. David Gruber, who's been looking at phosphorescence and that being a new spectrum for the behavior of animals underwater. Bentley Magee Yeah. It's a whole language, a secret language that we can't see with our eye looking at these organisms underwater without special goggles or filters or cameras. It's just amazing. Cousteau I've discovered a lot of things myself, like I really hate freeze-dried food. Salie What is the coolest organism you've discovered? Cousteau Do you want to answer that one first? Bentley Magee Well, I was really excited about my Pink Floyd reference there, but the mantis shrimp is my favorite. I mean, it's just amazing to know that this animal's capable of so many different things right at its claw-tips. That is my favorite. And the 16 different spectrums of light as well. Cousteau I mean, I know when people ask that question they expect us to talk about the megafauna, the large animals, but sometimes some of the smallest creatures are probably the most fascinating. Look at some of the smallest deep-water creatures have been the inspiration for movies like aliens and such. I mean, there's so much out there, and like I said earlier, there's so little that we've explored. It's a fascinating place. I don't know how else to describe it. Salie Here's another Twitter question. Does sea exploration and discovery put sea creatures at risk? Bentley Magee I don't think so. I think the more we know about it, the more we can protect it. Cousteau Well, there's... And it depends what you mean by sea exploration. If you're talking about exploitation, it's one thing. If you're talking about exploration for discovery's sake to bring back information it can be done in a way that's very minimally impactful. We do have to be careful of our footprint, for sure. Bentley Magee Yeah. Salie All right. Let us go to discovery, Team Space. Massimino Okay. NASA had a press conference today that they've discovered the elements of life—not necessarily life, of course—but water and hydrogen on Enceladus, which is a moon on Saturn, and that was discovered by the Cassini spacecraft. And Hubble, which I got to work—[those were,] my fights with Hubble—Hubble, using an instrument that we repaired but almost broke, but luckily we didn't break it, but it was in the news today... Pettit Well, this is an instrument that you put in, right? Massimino Well, actually, it was put in by another crew, but my crew went up there to repair it. We had to replace a power supply. Pettit And what happens if you would have gooned that up, then? Massimino We wouldn't know anything about these planets. So luckily, it worked. Now, this was not a Hubble discovery, but today what Hubble—it was announced that Hubble found—was that plumes were coming off of Europa, and under the surface, plumes of water, hydrogen... Pettit So that means it's more like an ocean? Massimino Right. Pettit So we're doing ocean exploring. Massimino We're doing ocean exploring and seeing that stuff. We're looking at oceans—not just our ocean, but [crosstalk]. Pettit What do you think? Do you think we'll get some alien shrimp that's going to punch a hole in our helmet? Massimino I don't know, but why take the chance? [Crosstalk] Pettit —with NASA we'll have a double helmet. Massimino That's right, we'll be very careful. And we know who to call if we get in trouble. We'll call our friends over there. But I think this is very exciting, the picture we had before of the possibility of life in other places, and it's not just—we're discovering not just gigantic planets but earth-sized planets that could possibly sustain life, and I think if we're able to find somewhere else where life exists, I think that would be an extraordinary find. Pettit That'd be a discovery— Massimino Yeah, a great discovery. And this is coming in just the last couple years, and really in the last year especially, where we're seeing these great discoveries with the technology we have at our fingertips now that the astronomers know how to use, they're able to make these great discoveries. But that stuff is done without astronauts. We fixed Hubble, but these other probes, that stuff's far away, right? And so we do discovery more hands-on like on the space station like you did. Pettit Yeah. Because you can make discoveries that enrich your mind and tickle your imagination, and you could do those anywhere, and then you could make discoveries that affect the lives of people living on Earth that don't get a chance to go into the frontiers. And that's one of the things we're working on in space station right now. We're making headway on bone decalcification, and we're—which can help people on Earth that have trouble with their bones. And then we're finding out that astronaut retinas are starting to degrade. About 70% of everybody that lives on station has some kind of measurable degrade in your retina— Massimino That happen to you? Pettit Yeah. Massimino Quick, who am I? Can you see? How many fingers? Pettit Two. Massimino Oh, you're in good shape. Pettit Okay. But, you see, the amazing discovery is it's only men and typically only in one eye, and if it's in one eye, it's always the right eye. So, what is going on, here? Massimino Whoa. That's freaky. Pettit Mother Nature is telling us something about we go into space. And, you see, we are creatures of Planet Earth, and we have grown up under Earth's gravity, and now, for the first time, we can go off and study... We can change an experiment. We could do experiments on ourselves and lifeforms where we tweak the gravity knob. It's a variable now, and you can raise things under an environment where the gravitational forces are effectively removed. And then, who would have thought that your bones decalcify? Who would have thought that your retinas [do things]? And bacteria, we're finding that some of the pathologic bacteria like salmonella express different genomes in a weightless environment. We don't know why, but it's just... that's what it does. And they can actually be more pathologic. So what's going on here? We don't know. We're still in the process of making these discoveries. The answers aren't in the back of the book. We have to figure these things out for ourselves, and that's why frontiers are so fascinating. Massimino Yeah. And if you think about it, a lot of the questions... We've answered a lot of questions. We still have a lot more to go, but we understand a lot about how things work, you know? How plate tectonics work and weather, and so we understand a lot more. But there are some bigger questions we don't know. Are we alone? Are we the only ones here? Where did we come from? Where do we go afterwards? And I think those big questions that we still haven't answered, those are the ones that I think we need to leave the planet to answer. Salie Ready? Nice. This is a question from [Ram-Ram] on Twitter. What's the strangest thing you've seen through Hubble? Massimino I haven't looked through the telescope. We leave that to the astronomers. I only fix it. I don't look through it. I was a minor in astronomy. A lot of people ask me astronomy questions, you know? Like my neighbors, after I went to Hubble, I came back, and they were like, "Hey, you know, Mars is on the right side of Venus today, and this is over here," and I'm like, "I don't know." And they go, "You went to Hubble, didn't you?" And I said, "Yeah, but I only fix it. I don't look through it." But what's the strangest thing I've seen in space, maybe? Salie Sure. Massimino I think just seeing things in a different way. Like seeing a sunrise in space or a sunset in space. Especially on a spacewalk, as you're going from darkness into light, let's say, and it's a huge temperature swing—we talked about this earlier—it's a couple hundred degrees going from minus 200 in the darkness and then you're going into the sunlight was a couple hundred degrees above zero, and you don't feel all that temperature swing, but you certainly... you feel the warmth you feel the cold. And you look back at the planet, and you see this line between night and day. It's—we call it The Terminator, right? And it's very distinct. And you can look down from up there and look down at the Earth and see who's in the dark and who's in the sunlight, and then you see this line moving. And you realize what's happening is is that our planet is rotating. And you look, and you can see the sun is like a big start out there in space, and you look back, and you see our planet moving as you're going around it, and it's... You know, you learned about that as a child. I learned about this kind of stuff coming here as a kid in the planetarium, and now I'm getting to see this play out. So it's stuff, you know what it is, it's just extraordinary. Pettit One of the coolest things I saw, I've seen it twice now, a total solar eclipse from orbit. And you look down with this vantage point, and you can see the umbra, you can see the penumbra, you can see all the stuff the astronomers figured out 200 years ago, never got to see, but were able to use math and geometry and observations to figure all of this stuff out without having ever seen it from that vantage, and that was just so cool. Salie Team Sea, any rebuttal? Bentley Magee I mean, I think we have to bring up the hydrothermal vents. When we're talking about NASA's awesome press conference that they had today—I did my homework—and we wouldn't have even known to look for these plumes on other planets and moons without understanding first what's happening on our own planet all the way down there in these hydrothermal vents. And for the longest time, we thought we need the sun to survive. You need the sun to photosynthesize, and then we eat the plants that photosynthesize, and life goes on. We discovered something like 40 years ago, 50 years ago these hydrothermal vents where the sun can never reach, will never reach, but there's these ecosystems down there. Life is thriving down there, and we really—you said it before—we've discovered 5% of the ocean down below. And so, having discovered just this one thing, these hydrothermal vents, we were then able to apply that to space, and sorry, we wouldn't have even thought to look for this and have... We wouldn't even have had the press conference that you used earlier in your debate without first discovering our hydrothermal vents. Pettit I think that was timed [just for us]. Cousteau And some of the other discoveries, I mean on human physiology, for example, being able to go into space, were discovered from being underwater. For example, hypobaric medicine, that's something that's used on a regular basis in hospitals to treat all sorts of illnesses. Bentley Magee Wound care, yeah. Cousteau Wound care. We're living, quite literally, in a hypobaric chamber down underwater. Bentley Magee Underwater, yeah. Cousteau It's just all these kinds of things. Why do we lose our sense of taste under pressure? Bentley Magee I know, that was terrible. Cousteau Why are we feeling a little funny and having these strange jokes that the topsiders don't understand? Bentley Magee Nitrogen narcosis. Cousteau I mean, all these things are amazing discoveries that seem to be in our everyday lives. I remember my grandfather, when he first built the first underwater habitats, they were smoking underwater at three atmospheres. They were drinking wine. Bentley Magee Lots of red wine, right? Yeah. Cousteau I mean, they're French, right? Bentley Magee We didn't have any for our mission. Cousteau No, no. No. None that anyone knows of. No, it was against the regulations. But it was pretty amazing to see them doing all these things that know we know not to do, and at the same time, seeing their hair grow faster and their wounds heal faster and all that. I mean, all those discoveries were the first fin steps in ocean exploration that then transpired into space exploration. Salie There are some very important questions that have come up on Twitter three times. Does everyone agree that Cousteaulooks like Rob Lowe? This has come up three times? Cousteau Seriously? Salie Perhaps equally as pressing, lots of questions about Pluto. They want to know if you guys deem Pluto a planet. Yes or no? Massimino Yeah, I think so. Salie You think so? Don? Pettit Yeah, I grew up with Pluto being a planet, and so it's a planet. Now, I understand there is somebody here in this museum that is central to knocking it off a planet. [Crosstalk] Cousteau I've [got] to side with these guys on this, because I just don't want to have to relearn the planets. Salie Do you feel the difference between hot and cold underwater like you do in space? Cousteau Oh, very much so. We were lucky enough to be in a place that had fairly warm water, but even after an hour or two, and with good suits, you still get cold. You burn... So this is something that was pretty—and I don't think it really is part of the agenda—but I realized that I could eat three times as much food and burn four times as many calories. I lost 10 pounds in that month, 12 pounds. Bentley Magee Well, I didn't. But I've never eaten more Peanut M&Ms in my life, and it was awesome. Salie On that note, I think in your book, Mike, you mentioned that you are the only astronaut to go to space and actually gain weight. Massimino Yeah. Me and one other guy. Salie Well done, sir. So that ice cream's not so bad, mike. Massimino No, that's because I didn't eat the ice cream. I would have lost some weight if that was the only thing we had to eat. Salie All right. There have been lots of Twitter questions that essentially distilled to, what is the most awkward physiological experience you've had either underwater or in space, and I think now we have landed to the round where we can get there. This is Round 4. Well, it's a two-parter. So Round 4 is Habitability, Part 1. We've got a lot of questions for you guys. Team Space? Video Presentation And, of course, the answer to the big question everybody asks: how do you go to the loo in space? It really is quite simple. Here's the tube you pee in, take the cap off, turn on the fan, and the airflow keeps everything going down the pipe, and also, for number two, the airflow does the same thing. Simple as that. Bentley Magee Gross. Salie Take it away, guys. Pettit That takes me right back into space. Massimino The key to the bathroom is suction, and that's what Tim was showing. Pettit Yeah, okay. Okay. Cousteau What do the female astronauts do? Massimino That was Tim Peake, our British friend. But, Don, that's a pretty complicated system that we got going there— Pettit It is. Massimino —and it's important, because water, we need water, right? And we don't have oceans in space, right? So we need the water. And on the space shuttle which we got to fly on, we had fuel cells that mixed liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, and the byproduct of that was water. We had so much water on the space shuttle that we had to dump it. We couldn't even use all of it. But on the space station for power— Pettit It's different. Massimino —you use solar rays. So tell these nice people what you use for water on the space station. Pettit We recover the water from our urine. Some people think that we drink urine. We don't. We recover the water from the urine. Massimino Right. We won't eat that ice cream but will drink pee. Pettit Yeah. And we have a suite of machines— Cousteau Is that where Tang came from? Pettit —a suite of machines starting with the toilet, and you saw that, and that goes into a machine. It's a distillation machine. So we have a still on space station. And out from that comes—not a single malt—but water, and then—but it's not quite pure, then we have all kinds of filters [and things], and then it ends up in the galley, and then you go there and you make yourself a bag of coffee. And I like to call—well, the NASA engineers call this whole suite of machines a regenerative life support system, and I like to call this the coffee machine. Because it has the unique ability to take yesterday's coffee and turn it into today's coffee. And in space, we do—every time you get up in the morning, we do exactly the same thing that everybody does down here. You float out of bed and you float into the loo—as Tim Peake said—then you need to get yourself a bag of coffee. And you float over to the galley and you get your bag of coffee, and meanwhile, all this machinery is going chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chug, and you know where that water came from. And it's good stuff. Massimino But it tastes fine, though. You don't even have to worry. It tastes fine. Pettit Yeah. It's really pure water. And we need to learn to do this when we go away from Earth, because we don't have oceans of water once we leave the planet. Massimino Right. Or even in certain areas of the planet where we can't get good water all the time. Being able to recycle water is an important thing, so this is something that helps out here on Earth as well. I always felt like, looking at that scene in the photo, I always felt like the difference between the Russian and the U.S. programs could be described by the toilet. On the shuttle we had a really fancy toilet, right? Pettit We did. Massimino You had to turn it on and it compacted stuff and it was finicky and– Pettit Freeze-dried. It was a freeze-dried— Massimino It freeze dried your, yeah, number two, and it could only be serviced on the ground, and you had to be really careful with it so you didn't mess it up, because it was very finicky. The Russian toilet is basically a— Pettit —a bucket. Massimino A bucket. A can, right? Pettit Yeah. And we have to service our own toilet. Massimino Yeah. You go in there with the big gloves and do what you need to do. It's a bucket with a liner with a plastic bag, you do what you need to do, you tie it off, put it at the bottom, and put another one on there. Pettit Yeah, that's right. Massimino And then when you're done you put a top on that lid, and then you put it in a dumpster, and it burns up on reentry. Pettit Yeah. We give it a de-orbital cremation. It comes in like a flaming... Well, it comes in flaming. Massimino And actually, that's a better way to go. This fancy thing we have, was, oh, oh, it was very finicky. Pettit Yeah. We do this over the Pacific Ocean, and so in essence, we are feeding the fish. Cousteau So living in New York City and feeling a little spittle on your head, that's not you guys, right? Pettit No, it's not. Salie I just want to congratulate you two on doing an entire five minutes on urine. Massimino We could have went longer, believe it or not. Salie All right. Team Sea, take it away, my friends. Cousteau So, wow. I mean, that— Bentley Magee Wait. First we just have to address the elephant in the room, that Team Space spent five minutes talking about going to the bathroom in space and didn't mention the diapers that you wear quite frequently. Massimino We're wearing them now. Bentley Magee I think we can also fill up five minutes with bathroom— Cousteau This was habitability, right? Salie Yes. Habitability. What's it like to live underwater? Cousteau Well, there are a lot of similarities. Since... I can't not go to the bathroom topic, okay? Bentley Magee Yeah, it's true. Everybody's curious anyways. Cousteau I certainly don't want to wear diapers. We don't have to wear diapers, thankfully, although the underwater habitat is not a closed-loop system. We have two choices. Well, we have one official choice, which is the—they had inside, which looks a little bit like yours, and then— Bentley Magee Emergencies only. Cousteau Emergencies only, because, as this is a very small environment and you're sharing it with five other people, unless you want to share the sounds and smells with everybody else in the room there is another option, which is the gazebo. And I know that you all will not be able to see this, but I have a picture on my phone of Liz right after she went to the plan B, and that's the gazebo where you have water up to your waist. And you go into the gazebo and you're able to feed the fish, so to speak. Very organic. We eat all organic food, so that's the closed-loop system out there. So we do have that luxury in terms of being able to not be so discomforted. But on this one particular occasion, I think this may have been your first walkabout— Bentley Magee Yeah. I was fatally wounded by a spotted chub, and it bit me on a very sensitive area as I was trying to put my swimsuit back on so bad that they actually changed the rules, and now if you're a female going to the bathroom outside you have to wear a two-piece swimsuit so as not to expose too much skin to the spotted chubs surrounding the habitat. And that actually kind of brings up another point where any injuries that you have, anything that happens, we always have a Navy doctor, actually, on hand to come down to the habitat and check you out. I was okay not having him check me out for that wound. Cousteau We didn't have to cancel the mission? Bentley Magee No, I was okay. Band-Aids are fine. But really, it's an adventure. You're not a true aquanaut until you have gone to the bathroom as an aquanaut. Cousteau I think that's officially in the title. Bentley Magee It is. Cousteau You have to go to the bathroom under the water. Bentley Magee And I've heard of NASA astronauts doing their NEEMO missions taking three days to become an official aquanaut because they're so scared to go to the gazebo. Massimino Sounds dangerous. Bentley Magee Yeah. Massimino Not like a rocket launch. Cousteau There are alien creatures out there, and they are hungry. That was only one aspect. Now we got rid of the bathroom part, being able to breathe multiple atmospheres you sound a little bit funny, you feel a little bit funny because you're a little bit narked, you've got a little excess nitrogen in your system— Bentley Magee All that nitrogen, mm-hmm. Cousteau It's a whole different living experience, but just like my grandfather had proposed back in the 50s and 60s and why building underwater habitats was the big thing—and I would imagine would still be useful today—is that people imagine that the next frontier to live in was at the continental shelf which is from the waterline out to about 200 feet or whatever into these underwater villages. And that's where the experiment started. So it is feasible. It is different. It is definitely—you have to change your mindset and your parameters. Oh, and by the way, if you run out of food, there's still some swimming out there. That will be recycling. Bentley Magee And actually, we got pizza brought to us. I'm not sure if you guys ever got a pizza delivery in space, but we got pizza delivered to us under water, and that was pretty amazing. That was one of the highlights for us, I think. Salie All right. I think several people would like to know what is reentry like from your respective missions. How does your body feel coming back to Earth? You guys want to start? Cousteau Wow. In one word, the most... depressing. Bentley Magee It was sad. Cousteau It was the saddest moment of my diving career. Salie Physiologically? Your body— Cousteau No, not physiologically; psychologically. Bentley Magee Yeah. Cousteau I wanted to stay down there. I really got addicted to being underwater, and that's not the same for every aquanaut. Everyone's psychological profile is very different. Bentley Magee I shed a tear. I was sad, too. Cousteau It was a really sad moment. The physical aspect of things is we close out the hatch, the door, we slowly bring up the pressure inside the habitat to surface level. During that time we're on and off oxygen for 24 hours or so, and then when it's time to go, we bring the pressure back down really quickly, don our dive gear, and bounce dive to the surface, and then for 72 hours we're under a doctor's watch before we can pack up and go home. Salie How do you guys feel when you get back from a mission? Your bodies and I guess your minds. Massimino You know, in some ways, a relief that, for me, happy to be back, that you made it through and good to see your family again, but sad that it's over, of course. I think probably the same feeling there. As far as physiologically, my missions were relatively short compared to Don's longer ones. I was there for 12 days and 14 days, so getting your vestibular system back in order, it's been floating, so you're a little off balance-wise. But Don, you're up there for so long, it was a— Salie Six months was the longest [you were up there]? Massimino That's a whole different story. Pettit Yeah. A couple of six-month missions, and it happens every time. One of the first things I do when I come back to Earth, I end up puking my guts out. And that's just my personal physiological response to being greeted by Mother Earth after you've been gone for a while. Massimino You're feeling okay now, though, aren't you? Pettit Oh yeah, yeah. Massimino Okay. Salie All right. Team Space, do you have a rebuttal to Team Sea? Pettit Yeah. I was wondering, if women now heave to wear a two-piece swimsuit, what do men have to do? And I'm thinking it could be maybe dangerous to men if they're in... Cousteau Well, you know, you guys have been to Aquarius, because that's where some of the NEEMO missions are for training, and men don't have that option. So we've devised—or actually, the people before us, thankfully, devised a thing called a bubble curtain. So you turn on the air, and it creates this sphere of bubbles around so that the fish don't see that you're in there. The only unfortunate thing with that is they've gotten used to it and they bolt through that bubble curtain, and then they're stuck inside as you're trying to go. Bentley Magee Yes, yeah. That is scary. Cousteau And you know how fish like worms, so... Salie Team Sea, any rebuttals to Team Space? Cousteau Well, I have a question. I mean, you're truly a closed-loop system up there. Eventually, if we're envisioning longer missions colonizing places like Mars and all that, what do you do... Because eventually there's waste. So you're trying to filter out the water and other debris, but what about the filters? What about all those things that are essentially consumables? Pettit Well, you always have some level of consumables, but like the solid waste, I think one of the ultimate purposes for the solid waste would be to grow potatoes. Cousteau I've seen that movie. Salie All right, everybody, that's a— Massimino You gotta look at it as a resource, I guess, if you can. [Crosstalk] Salie —that's a Matt Damon, Martian reference, right? Bentley Magee Yeah. Salie Yeah. There were questions about sleeping. How well do you guys sleep? Do you sleep okay? Bentley Magee I've never slept better in my life. Cousteau I've never slept better either. It was partially probably—I mean, there is a circadian rhythm that's disrupted by the lack of light, but there's... The fact that we're diving eight, nine, 10, 12 hours a day— Bentley Magee Yes. You're exhausted. Cousteau —you're exhausted, so that helped. Salie What about you guys? No-gravity sleeping? Pettit Slept like a baby, man. And you wake up in the morning feeling like you're 20 years old again. Massimino You know, I wasn't up there for that long, but even I noticed a change. For me, it took a little while to get used to, a couple nights, but then after the first couple nights... Your body's going through a lot of changes those first couple hours, those first couple days. Your spine elongates, you have a fluid shift going on, so you feel a little bit... You know, you're getting used to a new—you're excited, too. It's a little hard to sleep maybe the first couple nights, but then after that, you sleep great. Bentley Magee I thought one of the cooler things underwater was you would wake up from the flashes of light from the tarpon scales reflecting off of the habitat lights that you couldn't see from the viewport. They would be swimming by and flash into your eyes, and that's what would wake you up; a fish scale. It was so cool. Cousteau Yeah, up on the ceiling, yeah. That was pretty neat. Bentley Magee Yeah. It was pretty amazing. Salie All right. This is Round 4: Habitability, Part 2. We're going to start with Team Space. Pettit On my last mission, I wanted to have the equivalent of a potted plant in the corner. Not having a plant habitat with all the fancy stuff and fans and light and nutrients and all that, I wanted to figure out, how could I just have a plant in the corner and I water it a couple times a week and just have it grow? Because we're living in this machinery environment with all kinds of machinery noises, it smells, and I wanted a little bit of green that wasn't mold. Massimino Because that, you had plenty of, apparently. Pettit Yeah. We have some moldy spots on the wall. But anyway, so I took some seeds with me. They were zucchini seeds. Massimino Did you sneak these onboard the spaceship? Pettit No I did not. They were part of my personal kit, and they went through all the NASA reviews. I think they thought they were pumpkin seeds. They probably thought I was going to eat them or something. Massimino Okay. So you grew a zucchini. Pettit Yeah. I grew a zucchini— Massimino On your own in space? Pettit Yeah, without... Just kind of a potted plant in the corner. Massimino And there was no dirt you had for this thing. Pettit No dirt. No dirt. Massimino So you used aeroponics, which is— Pettit Yeah. I used aeroponics, but I needed nutrients. Massimino And for nutrients, what did you use? Pettit I made a compost pile. Massimino Okay, I think that's enough of that. What do you mean you made a compost... How did you do that? Pettit Well there's leftover food. You don't eat all your vegetables, right? Did you eat all your green beans? So what do you do with the extra green beans? Massimino Sure I did. Pettit You put them in a bag, and you put anything else that looks like it's biodegradable in a bag, and then you kind of seal that bag up, and when nobody else is around you open that bag up and you take a syringe and you suck the juice out, and that's called a compost tea, for all you plant people, and then you can inject the compost tea in and you can grow your plants. Massimino So this zucchini, I've seen this, but you should describe—this is... You grew this thing in space. Pettit Yeah. Massimino So a zucchini grows pretty straight on Earth. Pettit Oh, that was sunflower. That's right, I did sunflowers, too. Massimino You said sunflowers as well. So what's the difference between growing something in gravity and growing it in zero gravity? Pettit Well, the sunflower grew to be a meter-and-a-half long, and I think this is the longest or the tallest or the longest plant that's been grown in space. And normally, a sunflower—a meter-and-a-half-long sunflower would have a stock like that and it'd be straight as an arrow. And this sunflower had a stock that was maybe, oh, less than a quarter of an inch in diameter and it was all circuitous and everything, and this sunflower was lazy. It was not making anything it needed for structure, because it didn't have gravity to have to deal with it, and it made a lot of leaves and it bloomed and it made seeds and all of that, but it didn't put energy into making the stock. Massimino So it just kind of spun around? Pettit Yeah. It's kind of like people. When you don't have to go out and do your gym time, you just sit around on the couch and watch TV. Massimino Yeah. And the zucchini, what did this thing look like? Pettit The zucchini looked like a normal zucchini, and I thought about writing a blog about the details on how you raise these plants without any facilities, and I thought, well, me and three other people would be interested in reading that. So I did a blog where I personified Zucchini, and it's called Diary of a Space Zucchini. And Space Zucchini became a seventh crewmember and told the mission through his viewpoint. Salie I think we all need to know if you ate Space Zucchini. Pettit That'd be cannibalism. Salie Right. Team Sea: Habitability, Part 2. Cousteau Living underwater, say you strip everything from a habitat that's been prepackaged, premade, you can live off the land, so to speak, because your resources are right there at your front doorstep. You can literally have mariculture, aquaculture, hydroponics, et cetera, et cetera so that you can become a farmer underwater and build your nutrition resources. Growing kelp or just harvesting kelp from right there, you can become either a hunter/gatherer or a farmer underwater very, very easily. Bentley Magee Mm-hmm. And also, using the power of the sea for energy, it's a renewable energy at our fingertips that we are finally utilizing and understanding. But if we're talking about having an environment where humans are immersing themselves and staying underwater, we have things like using the heat of the ocean, using the waves of the ocean, and using the tides and things like that for our power. Cousteau Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's OTEC, there's ocean thermal energy that you can use to great efficiency for baseline power. There's of course wave energy and that sort of thing, so you can absolutely, doing it the right way with modern technology, you can power that whole station underwater and feed yourself as well as using de-cell type of technology to create water. So you have all the basic resources necessary to live underwater. Then, of course, you have to keep in check all the things that are much more difficult, like pressure and sicknesses and things like that. Bentley Magee Yeah. And I feel like this is where we start to kind of see these two extreme environments merging closer with our increased technologies where having a system where we're using our waste to our advantage, having a closed-circuit system might be something that would be handy for some of our underwater habitats in the future. Cousteau Well, and, you know, you're in two extreme environment platforms, so obviously any mistake—either in space or in deep ocean—is potentially fatal. Bentley Magee It could be, yeah. Cousteau Certainly very potentially injurious. And when you're isolated like this, that's a problem. Now, the luxury of being still on the planet is that you have some accessibility to help from the surface, if need-be. Albeit, the deeper you go, the harder that accessibility is. Bentley Magee The higher the risk, yeah. And I feel like this type of technology is becoming more and more important as we're learning more and more about global climate change and the direction that our planet is changing. Like, heck, the tides are going to rise. Coastal communities are going to be potentially getting the waters coming closer and closer to them. And so, understanding how we might be able to live with, on, and under the water is really to our benefit. Cousteau Will Atlantis be real? Bentley Magee I hope so. I'd move there. I would. Cousteau I think it does allow us in the near term to think about ocean habitations, because we do have the ability at this point to make that happen today. Bentley Magee Yeah. Cousteau Plunk down the economic baseline and you can build it, and it becomes an amazing system for research, for exploration of being able to colonize places like Mars and such, because now all of the sudden you can have a test program that has a failsafe—hopefully—to be able to explore Mars and beyond; Europa, and so on and so forth. Bentley Magee And just from our experience underwater, I think it is something that I think people would be interested in exploring. I know living underwater for several weeks, I would be interested in going back down there for longer stretches of time, and I could picture that being something worthwhile for most people. Cousteau And it's a two-way ticket. Bentley Magee That's true. Cousteau You do get to go back to your families afterwards. I'm a big—don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of space exploration and I would love to go and explore those oceans on the other planets—but I'd like to eventually come back home to my family. And right now, it seems the distances are probably the biggest challenge in terms of these two very similar yet very different worlds. I don't know, I'm ready. Anyone have a checkbook? Bentley Magee Do you have a rebuttal? Do you have a rebuttal to that? Massimino Oh, I was [just going to say], we appreciate a coming-home, too. Yeah, we want to come home, and I think it's the... I'm sorry. Salie That's okay. Go ahead. Massimino But I think, you know, you're right. It's just the distances are so long. But yeah, the one-way ticket to Mars I don't think is a bargain. When we flew to space, Don and I, as government employees we get travel orders, you know? And it said, like Don, you came here... Don still works for the government, I don't, but you got travel orders to come here, right? Pettit Yeah. Massimino And it said probably from Huston, Texas to New York City and return, right? Pettit Correct. Massimino So when we go into space, we also get travel orders. And my travel order said from Kennedy Space Center, Florida to low-Earth orbit and return. That "and return" was pretty important, right? So you want to come home. It also gave us our expenses, and it said lodging provided, meals provided, but they couldn't give us... Like what's our incidental charge? Like $3.50 for incidentals. They couldn't zero that out, so we made $3.50 a day in space or something like that. But yeah, I think the one-way trip to Mars is not a good idea. I think you what to come back. Cousteau Do they charge you for phone calls? Massimino No. You may get a call now. Get ready. If you have a Huston area code show up on your phone, answer it, because it might be the space station. I'm telling you. Bentley Magee Really. But that does bring a good point up about budget. I mean, we're dealing with a much smaller budget than NASA is— Cousteau About 100 times less in the United States, yeah. Bentley Magee Yeah, and we're kinda doing quite a bit with our little budget, and I think maybe if we had your budget we could be doing quite a bit more. Cousteau Oh, we would lend all these new technologies and all this knowledge out to our space brethren. Massimino Talk to your congresspeople. We just go to work. We don't know... Sorry about your budget. Bentley Magee I think that's a really big deal. So sea exploration is funded 100 times less than space exploration. Cousteau In the United States, yeah. And the budgets have just been cut again. Salie Wow. So what should people do about that? Talk to their congresspeople? What else? Bentley Magee Sure. Cousteau Yeah, absolutely. Massimino I think that's a problem. I think, no kidding, it should, you know. I think the space program—I don't think you should get it from us. Bentley Magee I agree. I agree. Cousteau I think you guys have been cut, too. Massimino I think you guys should be funded more, I think the space station should be funded more, I think all the sciences... We're in the American Museum of Natural History for God's sakes, right? All this great stuff that we see here needs more money, and I don't think it should come from you and I don't think... I think we all benefit from it. And there's so much—we're having a debate, here—but there's so much synergy between what we do. Bentley Magee Absolutely. Cousteau There's a lot of reciprocal knowledge. Massimino We learn so much. We train underwater so much. I spent a lot of time... For the 34 hours I've spent spacewalking, I've spent 700 hours underwater training to do it in a suit, so... Salie There was a Twitter question: vacuum versus pressure. Which is more deadly. Cousteau Jeez, that sounds equally deadly. I mean... Massimino That's pretty bad. A vacuum, if you're exposed, you're dead immediately. Bentley Magee Yeah. Vacuum at least is quick. The pressure is a slow death. Massimino That sounds more painful. Yeah, that sounds more painful. Cousteau Well, it depends on the pressure, right? If all of the sudden you get eight tons of PSI on you, that's pretty instant. If you're at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, you're not going to feel it. But if you're 10, 12 atmospheres and you don't have an option to come up, that could be a problem. With space, I don't know. Is it instant if you have a slow leak, or is it... Pettit Yeah. You lose consciousness in maybe 15 seconds. Cousteau Okay. So you got those 15 seconds to go, "Oh no." Bentley Magee Yeah. And no one would hear you. Last words. Massimino Yeah. We're not really sure exactly what would happen though, are we? Pettit No. Massimino We don't really want to find out, either. Pettit That's an experiment they haven't done yet. Massimino Yeah, we don't want to do that experiment– Pettit I'll sign you up, Mass, you can be— Massimino No, no. You don't have to do that. Pettit I'll be your backup. Massimino No. Cousteau I think both are equally—in extreme environments, both are equally deadly. Bentley Magee Right. Salie And where is Space Zucchini now? Pettit Oh, I brought Space Zucchini home, and Space Zucchini grew in my garden at home. Massimino He's got space vegetables in the backyard. That's what he's saying right [there]. Pettit I also did space broccoli, and broccoli is perennial, and Space Broccoli is still growing. It's been like five years now, and Space Broccoli is like that high just sitting in my garden, and I throw a little fertilizer on it every so often. Massimino Do you find this amazing? I can't believe this. He's got these— Pettit It's true. It's true. Massimino Isn't that incredible? Salie It is amazing. Pettit I got space broccoli. Massimino He's got space food growing in the backyard, you know? Unbelievable. Salie I don't know what I'm going to do with this. All right. This is the final round, you guys. Round 5: Technology, we're going to begin with Team Sea. Bentley Magee The Exosuit. Cousteau Yeah. That is pretty awesome. That's the latest and greatest in deep-water exploration. The Exosuit is the latest suit built by Phil Nuytten, an engineer over in Canada, who had the dream of becoming untethered as a human being from submersible. So essentially, this is your spacesuit underwater, and you can fly free in any direction as a diver in this suit. It's, in many ways, is actually very similar to a spacesuit, maybe a little bit more armored, and it allows a diver quite literally to go down a thousand-plus feet without any decompression problems. This is a one-atmosphere suit, essentially. And what's cool about that is you can manipulate your body just like you would in a scuba suit or in a skin or a dive suit. You can manipulate your fingers, you can actually handle things in a way that's not a claw or a scoop. You're actually able to also retract your arms into the suit itself—send out a tweet or whatever you want, actually, hopefully you're collecting data—onto the computer and the screen, and then you can go back out and continue your work. And it gives you an autonomy of several hours. You probably—oh, and in this case, unfortunately, we have to wear diapers as well. There's no other Plan B for that part of life. But it allows you to go for several hours at some of the deeper parts of the ocean, and it's just an amazing piece of kit. Now, granted, this is also something that just came out. Again, this is a funding type of issue, but it is an amazing piece of kit that we're looking forward to using. This, like I said, came out last year. Bentley Magee You're going to get trained on it soon, right? Cousteau I'm going to get trained on it in a month. Obviously this is not the only kind of technology to push further, longer, and deeper. There are deep-water submersibles, ROVs, AUVs—which are autonomous vehicles and remotely operated vehicles—that are giving us the accessibility and the constant accessibility, which is one of the bigger problems, is how do you have a longer range for a longer amount of time to be able to explore the ocean world? Bentley Magee Yeah. And I think something really cool about the Exosuit is, oh wow, we've had submersibles for a long period of time, and why do we need to have this new technology that looks a lot like a spacesuit? It's because there's really no way to replace the human in all of this exploration, in all of this technology development. And having the diver be able to detach from that clunky, underwater vehicle and actually be able to get there and pick up whatever that really cool technology is and bring it back with them, or actually just feel it and see it and be there, there's nothing that replaces that human experience. And the same goes for space. It's necessary and absolutely important, and developing these technologies that bring us there and bring us to the forefront of exploration is something that needs our attention, because we're discovering things underwater and in space that are going to be vital for our survival as the environment's changing and as all of these things on the globe are getting more extreme. Cousteau Well, yeah. As you take a human being underwater to deeper and depths, so higher and higher pressures, of course you can compensate somewhat for that with different gas mixers: heliox, et cetera, et cetera. Eventually, we'll get to liquid breathing and so on, which will definitely extend the human body's range underwater. But right now, that's not a protected technology, so it's still a one-way trip. Until that time, we have submarines. But submarines are a vehicle that segregates you from that environment. ROVs and AUVs are great, but they can only do so much as a vehicle that doesn't have a human being directly attached to it. So from the remoteness, that's also an issue in terms of being able to explore, because you're just not there. And being able to use something like an Exosuit, which is beyond scuba, beyond rebreather, it does allow you to get that range and still be close to the action, be right then and there, touch things, gather things, film things, et cetera, in a way that you just can't do with the other vehicles. Salie What was on the bottom of the Exosuit? Is it like suction cups? Because people are wondering. Bentley Magee Yeah. Cousteau Right. So the bottom are antiskid bottoms which either have a suction-type of cup for smooth surfaces or it has clamp-ons for the muddier, rougher surfaces that a cup wouldn't sit on. You can also even put fins on the bottom if you wanted to swim, but you have a jetpack on your back. So why even bother? I mean, you could just fly off. Salie All right. Team Space; technology. Pettit Going in the ocean, going into space, these are places where human beings were not intrinsically meant to go, and you have to take technology with you in order just to stay alive and in order to get there in the first place. And you have to know how to deal with that technology, you have to understand how it works, you have to know how to fix that technology. And when I talk to students who mostly want to come and take my job when I'm ready to sit in a rocking chair, they want to know, how can I become an astronaut, what do I need to do, and you have to understand technology, because that keeps you alive. And it takes math and science and engineering. You gotta understand that stuff, or you can't live in a place like this and stay alive, at least right now. So the technology is really important. It keeps you alive. You gotta understand it. Massimino And getting a chance for me to work on Hubble, which is a great scientific instrument, and a lot of people here at the planetarium have done research with it and made some great discoveries, and what Don has worked on on the space station, I think what's cool about the space station is that it was an international effort in that we were able to cooperate with all these different countries to put this thing together. Because all that mishmash of stuff right on the other side of this is attached to the Russian segment— Pettit That's right. And there's a European segment, the Japanese segment, the Canada arm. I mean, it's... Space, even as big as NASA's budget is, it's not big enough to build something like that on your own. So we have to have international cooperation to build it, and once you get it built and you're up there as a crewmember, you're not there as, I'm Joe NASA and I'm Jack [So] or a Canadian astronaut. You're up there, you're one big family. If there's any issues, the issues are all on the ground between the mission controls. But once you are there in that piece of technology we're all part of the same team, and we're all working to keep that machine either flying or floating or... I don't know, what—the machine does something, but... Massimino It's going pretty fast. Pettit It goes in circles. Massimino Yeah. It's going in circles pretty fast. But yeah, and I think you look at our countries don't always... Countries don't always get along at the top, right? But when you have a common goal—which I think is a great thing of course with your stuff as well—and any science or engineering that anyone might be interested in is that when you have that common goal, it doesn't matter the differences of where you come from. You all have that—you have that shared goal of what you want to accomplish, and I think that that's... That's what I think maybe, as much as the research is great and the discoveries are great, I think just that cooperative effort to get it done, to get that technology to work together, we all—that team effort, that global effort is just amazing. Pettit Yeah. Just the technology brings all these countries together. Massimino Right. That's really bridging our gap to where we can live off the planet even further. Going back to the moon or going to Mars or going somewhere, if we ever stand a chance of actually sending people to these far-off places, it's going to be from the technology we've developed here. Pettit That's right. We're getting the bugs out when we're still close to Earth. And most of all those beautiful cables and snarls of technology and all this stuff that keeps you alive, most of that is stamped serial number 001, because it's the first version of that. This coffee machine I was talking about, that's serial number 001. And when you have that kind of technology it's always breaking down and we're always fixing it. We're always having to figure out how to jerry rig spare parts together from things that weren't meant to go in it. It doesn't get any better than that when you're dealing with technology on the forefront. You're trying to figure out how to make it work, and the lessons you learn from that are what's going to be able to take us away from planet Earth. Because if you go to Mars, because of the orbital dynamics and our current state of propulsion, when you decide to go to Mars you're going to be gone for two years: about a year to get there, a couple months there, maybe a year, a year to come back. And if the toilet breaks when you've left Earth, you're going to have to go to Mars and come back again. If the toilet breaks, that will have just killed the crew. Salie Wow. That is... whoa. Massimino What a way to end that one. Salie Thank you. Do you have any rebuttal, Team Sea? Cousteau I was getting into it, and all of the sudden I said, okay, I don't want to go anymore. So yeah, no, so technology, obviously it could be really sexy, it could be really messy. The Exosuit is a really slick, awesome piece of kit that's been worked on for a decade. We've got robots that go and fix underwater pipelines, things like that. And, with regard to that, in extreme environments, be it space or underwater, you're more and more reliant on the technology, and you're more and more reliant on being self-sufficient to make sure that that technology still works. If you remember, our chiller—which is an air conditioner in the underwater habitat—went out. And quite literally, it went from fairly cool to extraordinarily uncomfortable— Bentley Magee Like a swamp, yeah. Cousteau —to the point where we almost had to scrub the mission and go back to the surface. And that's just one piece of kit that thankfully we were able to fix during the mission that allowed us to continue. And that's something that was one of the most simple pieces of technology that had been tried for 20-some-odd years. So imagine going and doing long-term travel or deep-water research for a long term, you need to be able to have that technology to work for you without fail. This is not a Gulf oil spill or an Exxon Valdez where you can try and clean things up. I mean, this is human lives one way or another that, if it breaks, that could be the difference between life and death for sure. Salie Team Space? Massimino I was just going to mention that a lot of what you talk about with the underwater submersibles and robotics and the whole life support that's been developed for undersea has really helped space exploration, you know? There's a company called Oceaneering which did a lot of fieldwork under the water, right? But I guess it's more industrial work than science and so on—but I'm sure there's some of that there, too—but they have an engineering, they have Oceaneering space systems which was started by a diver who later became an astronaut named Mike Gernhardt, and they now are helping with spacesuits and tools and robotics. And what I think is cool is that the technology that was developed under the sea has helped with technology to get us to space. And you said something earlier, Liz, about how you took a bunch of kids scuba diving, right? Bentley Magee Yeah. Massimino And you were able to do that fairly—I mean, you gotta put them in the... you know, it's not like they're going to the park. They're going underwater, right? But still, you're able to do that. And I was like, yeah, wouldn't it be great if we all could go on a space trip tomorrow, you know? And I think because of what's been developed undersea and moved over to the space program that we've learned from, and the technology that's been developed by NASA and these other governments on space station and with all of our rocketry, I think we're getting closer to that point. These commercial companies—I've got some students here from Columbia, and the students that are so excited about the space program, it's not just working for the government; it's going to work for one of these commercial companies and privatization. And I think through the development of technology between all these fields, I really am very hopeful that we're really close to where space travel is going to be open to a lot more people. It may be slow, but it's going to start opening and opening. And so these wonderful things that we've described, whether it's growing a zucchini or seeing the planet or whatever it might be in space, that hopefully everyone will have a chance to do that. Maybe with the same effort, hopefully, to do what you did with those kids the other day, that would be great if everyone had a chance to do that. And it's through the technology development and the research and all that, and it takes a while, it's not easy, but hopefully we're close to that happening. Salie This debate has turned very generous and respectful. Cousteau I was about to say, obviously for space exploration, it's much better to test everything out here in all possible conditions before you send people out to deep space and risk lives far, far away. What was it? In a galaxy far, far away? Bentley Magee If you want to give us some of your budget, we'll take some of your budget to practice [unintelligible]. Massimino We'll go for budget together. No stealing. Pettit Yeah. And I would like to say that frontiers are place that are rich in discovery, and it really doesn't matter where they are. They could be under the ocean, they could be in space, under the stage of a microscope. And the important thing is for us to find a frontier that sings to our heart and start working on that frontier with a passion and see what discoveries you can make. Salie There was a question, what is the most old-school thing—I guess making technology—that you still use in space or sea. Pettit A pencil. Bentley Magee Same here, actually. Salie What is that? Same here? Bentley Magee Yeah. A pencil. Cousteau Yeah. Same here. Pencil. That must shock this generation. Salie Someone wanted to know if you get a hole in a spacesuit or an aquanaut suit or Exosuit, is that it? Are you done? Is that like... Cousteau It's a major problem. Depending on the hole, it can be it right away. Otherwise, you can try and keep it patched somehow, although if you're deep enough, that's not going to change much. Bentley Magee Right. Massimino We have—it depends on the size of the hole, but it could be game over, but you generally look for... you'd be able to feed the leak. If you're outside, I mean if you're in your spacesuit while you're space walking, we have a secondary oxygen pack that's under a higher pressure, yeah, Don? Pettit Right. Massimino And so that'll help feed—if that leak is going to happen, it'll feed it such that it'll keep enough pressure... It will regulate to a lower pressure to keep you alive. And the rule of thumb is 30 minutes. Pettit Yeah. You can have a hole about the size of a pencil poke in your suit and you could—30 minutes. Massimino Thirty minutes is what we train at. No matter where you are, you gotta be able to get in. Cousteau So if you get hit by a little asteroid or something, or a little— Massimino A micrometeorite impact, yeah. Cousteau —dust speck or something like that, so you're trying to keep pressure in, and we're trying to keep pressure out. Massimino Correct. Right. Cousteau If it's enough pressure outside of the Exosuit or submarine or whatever, it can literally quite literally—the pressure of the water coming in can quite literally cut through you like butter. So it's kind of different kinds of gruesome deaths, so... Salie Okay. On that sober note, this is the end of the evening, everybody. Fabien? Cousteau Well, I just wanted to redirect and reiterate in short what they were saying, which is space exploration, ocean exploration, or personal exploration in your everyday lives, it boils down to this: for the betterment of our species and the knowledge of our species, et cetera, which is something my grandfather said, which is, for whatever reason, if one gets a chance to lead an extraordinary life, one has no right to keep it to themselves. And that communication of extraordinary people exploring space and ocean and bringing those stories, that data, that information, that adventure to those who may not get a chance to do it will hopefully drive our species into the future and into a better future. Salie Thank you. Thank you. When I looked at the Exosuit I had to wonder, what do you think your grandfather would say? Cousteau Looking at the Exosuit? Salie Yeah. Cousteau "But of course!" Salie All right. I know that everyone here is so inspired by and grateful for all of your efforts in what you do, so thank you so much. Thank you to Liz and Fabien and Mike and Don. Thank you all for coming. Good night. Narrator: Thanks for listening to Public Programs at the American Museum of Natural History. To listen to our archive of podcasts, visit amnh.org/podcasts.