Quirks and Quarks' Bob McDonald taking LitFest to the stars with new book

Quirks and Quarks host Bob McDonald is at LitFest at two events Thursday. supplied / jpg

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Bringing his new book An Earthling’s Guide to Outer Space to LitFest Thursday, one of Canada’s most approachable science journalists is hoping to give something back.

“When I was a kid, seven or eight,” says Bob McDonald, now 68, “my mother gave me a Golden Library of Knowledge called Planets. I knew nothing about them. But flipping through those pages over and over I was inspired and fell into it. And the space race was happening and I thought, ‘One day I’m going to be out there having holidays on the moon.’

“It didn’t quite turn out that way,” he laughs, “but if I can maybe inspire some kids to get there.”

Bob McDonald’s An Earthling’s Guide to Outer Space stands on the shoulders of the Golden Library of Knowledge’s Planets. jpg

McDonald has hosted CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks since 1992, third in an impressive lineup including David Suzuki and Jay Ingram.

Over the years, full of curiosity, he’s watched numerous launches and landings from NASA command centres, been weightless multiple times near the edge of the atmosphere. He’s an Officer of the Order of Canada, even has an asteroid named after him, which are described with wonder in his book of questions and answers about space local and extraordinarily distant as we currently understand it.

For his two Thursday events, McDonald will be appearing free at Glass Bookshop in City Centre mall at noon and as a feature author at 6 p.m. at Amiskwaciy Theatre in Royal Alberta Museum, $12 at litfestalberta.org.

On his radio show his straightforward questions are an inspiration, and I hope he forgives me when mine got a little esoteric.

Q: I like your optimism in this book, you’ve got such a casual way of pushing the fact someone reading the book might be the person who invents the fusion drive or steps on Mars and so forth. Can you talk about having hope?

A: Hope’s what I’m hoping for, I’m pitching it at the tweens. We need hope — there’s a lot of bad news out there about the environment. But we wouldn’t even know about a lot of it if it wasn’t for space technology. We look out and see all these amazing worlds out there — but they’ll all kill you! We live in the Garden of Eden. It really turns you into an environmentalist when you see how rare the Earth is.

Q: Do you think there might be some as-yet-undiscovered technological solution to climate change disasters? I’m not sure we’re going to fix things on the pre-catastrophe side of the timeline.

A: I have faith in human ingenuity and I have a lot of faith we can engineer our way around a lot of the problems. The solutions are out there. A lot of damage has already been done, and part of our adaptation for the future is getting used to living on a warmer planet. It’s going to be a different world. But one of the reasons humans have survived for so long is we are adaptable. We’ve got to control our numbers and our consumption, but there are things we can do. We tend to wait until crises, then we’ll do something about it. Back in the ’60s it was a space race issue, the evil Russian were going to build a better rocket than us. Thrown 400,000 people and $20 billion at it and look what we did!

Q: And then 50 years later there are basically two official languages in space, English and Russian, as friends.

A: (Laughs.) That’s right. And we can’t go to the moon. But as far as climate change goes, there’s a sailor’s saying: the best tool to keep a sinking boat afloat is a scared man with a bucket. If you get depressed you don’t do anything. There’s a term called eco-weary — people get tired of it. I’d rather talk about possibilities any time, we know what the problems are.

Q: There’s a lot of humour in the book — you’re fully willing to make a dad joke like ‘meteowrong.’

A: Yeah, why not? Kids like to laugh. They’re naturally funny. We kind of drill it out of them in school, we tell them to sit down and shut up and do the work. But they love to laugh.

Q: Adults should read your book, too. I forgot Earth had a ring, and definitely didn’t know Saturn’s is slowly snowing down onto the “surface.”

A: It’s not a profound book, but it’s kind of me giving back. I designed it to be the kinds of things kids would ask, why are planets round, that sort of thing. And the experiments are something kids and parents can do together.

Q: You talk about Flat Earthers — what do you think it is that’s having people reject science? Is there some psychological science you can talk about here?

A: It’s an interesting phenomenon, because when I was a kid, science was magic — it was doing all kinds of amazing stuff. And now there’s a mistrust of science, and sometimes I think it’s just down to inconvenience, telling us what we don’t want to know. Like, ‘the climate is changing and you’re responsible for it.’ Or ‘there’s this food that’s bad for you,’ or ‘smoking is bad for you.’ So people will accept some science, take a pill for a headache — the warnings on the sides of some bottle even include death — but we’ll pop the pill. But then somebody modifies a gene in corn with no evidence it harms you and people call it Frankenfood. Science has been abused in many ways, including finding out ways to kill each other — but in its pure form it’s all about trying to understand how the universe works.

Q: Outside all the love of science, are you a science fiction fan?

A: I loved Tom Corbett, Space Cadet as a kid. But also Arthur C. Clarke — he was a realist. He did a story called Islands in the Sky, where a kid wins a trip up to the space station, the big wheel we eventually see in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He just took me there, made me think, ‘I’m going to be up there one day.’ And of course Asimov, with all his robot stuff. You just can’t beat the classics.

Q: What would you say to my four-year-old niece who’s obsessed with space if she wants to be an astronaut?

A: Get outside on a clear night, lie on your back and look up. Think about the sky as three-dimensional. Look at the stars, how some are bright and some are dim, some are close, some far away. Think of it as a space that just goes on and on. If you get away from the lights and can see the Milky Way arching across the sky, that’s our home city, even farther away — all the stars are in the foreground, the Milky Way in the background. It’s a huge Frisbee spinning through space and we’re in it. This thing takes 250 million years to turn once. The last time we were on this side, the dinosaurs were just emerging! So get outside and look up. Think of the sky as our ultimate environment. The universe if hostile, it’s a deadly place, you’ll die out there. And here we are, under this little bubble of air, breathing freely. It’s the only planet we know of where you can do that. But we’re heading out there anyway.








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