April 22, 2014 • 51 mins
Sure today Mars would kill you with its thin, toxic atmosphere and cold desert temperature swings of 100 degrees, but early on it and Earth were practically twins. Find out how the two planets diverged and if there might be life on the Red Planet.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clarkner's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there. We
all have um I boogers because this is an early morning, unusual,
(00:21):
early morning edition of Stuff you Should Know. Welcome to
the morning edition. We should just talk like this. We
got on NPR. We got taken to task in its
nine email from a morning talk show TV show host.
Did you see it? Uh about the inquisition? Yeah, He's like,
way to release the inquisition on Ash Wednesdays, kind of
(00:41):
slapping the face. Five respond I said, actually, it came
out on fat Tuesday and by sheer coincidence. He's like,
thanks for the reply, and I responded to him too.
I was like, man, I wish I was that clever
who said I had no idea. It's like our our
medical marijuana episode being our four utter complete coincidence. Guaranteed everybody.
(01:02):
I think over the course of six hundred plus shows,
you're gonna have some weird coincidences like that. You know, Yes,
I certainly didn't know it was Ash Wednesday. I didn't
either until I went to the mall yesterday evening and
a third of the people are were walking around with
charcoal crosses on their forehead. Nice. It's like, I had
no idea Atlanta had this many Catholics, good going, They're
(01:23):
everywhere there are Well, I mean that didn't use to
because you know, I grew u Baptist here and I
didn't know many Catholics growing up. But well, Atlanta became
a transplant towns instead, exactly. And I'll tell you about
another transplant chuck. Possibly life here on Earth from Mars.
Oh yeah, is this your intro? Have you got breaking news? No?
(01:44):
That was it. Oh do you remember we did an
episode on UM the Origin of life on Earth? Remember? Uh?
Oh yeah, yeah. And one of the possibilities that it
was from Mars. And one of the um pieces of
evidence of this possibility was the Alan Hills Rock from Antarctica,
(02:06):
a Martian meteorite that was discovered in that was studied
and studied and they thought in basically Bill Clinton said,
we found evidence of life on Mars. And then they
studied it again and they were like, maybe not. And
now they're studying it again they're saying, yeah, it's possible.
It's very possible that this four point one billion year
(02:28):
old rock is showing evidence of fossilized nano bacteria. And
this is all still Bill Clinton saying this. It is
underwear at home the authority. He's talking to the TV again.
Nice uh, but yeah, we're gonna do how Mars works.
Tom Hanks, this one's for you, big space guy. Oh yeah, sure, Okay,
(02:52):
I didn't know if I was missing something there, like
he did some movie that didn't know about. No, if
I said Gary CINESI, this one's for you, there would
be a mission to Mars reference. I did not see that.
Mind bogglingly odd and pretty bad. Yeah, I heard, That's
why I didn't see it. That and Red Planet didn't
see either. One of those Red Planet I don't know about. Yeah,
but that kind of brings us to a point that
(03:14):
we've long been fascinated with the Red Planet, going back
to you know, War the Worlds and early science fiction
and Martians, and Mars has just always captivated us because
you know, sometimes you can see it with a telescope
and it's not like what's on the other side of
Venus Venus. Yeah, we don't know much about Venus mystery.
(03:34):
There are no Venusians that we're afraid will come down
here and attack us. I think it's Venusians Venetians, which
is different from Venetians, which are people from Venice, which,
strangely enough, UM kind of coincides with the guy named
Giovanni shia Parelli. He might not have been from Venice,
but that man was definitely from Italy. Do you think,
(03:56):
yeah he was? Can you say his name for everybody? Chuck?
Who Givanni? Really? That was good? Man? Have you been
practicing at all? No? I just don't even want of pasta.
That's good stuff, man. So Um Shipprelli in eighteen seventy
seven decided to draw a map of Mars, and his
(04:17):
conception of Mars, what became the popular conception, if it
wasn't already UM, was that Mars was a UM, a
lush planet with civilizations, and he named the regions of
Mars accordingly, like Elysium, which which UM culture believed that
(04:37):
that was Heaven. I don't know, I can't remember, man,
I haven't heard that. We you know, we've discussed it before, Elysium.
I haven't retained that. UM. Another part was called Utopia Arcadia,
basically all these different names for paradise reflected the idea
that Mars was a very similar to Earth, most likely
(04:58):
inhabited by intelligent beings and um. As proof, uh Sia
Parelli drew canals that he noticed on the on Mars,
which suggested that this advanced civilization had dug canals to
um route water from the polar ice caps, which are
visible here on Earth, to the central locations where their
(05:22):
civilizations were get water to the Martians. Yeah, and this
established like what Earthlings thought of Mars for a hundred
years almost. Yeah. About forty years after that, a US
astronomer named Percival Lowell Um wrote a book also about Mars,
where he actually talked about civilizations and h The problem
was he he wasn't really based on anything. It might
(05:45):
as well have been science fiction, right, and yet they
named the Lowell Observatory after him. He was an astronomer,
so it's not like he was He wasn't just making
stuff up, but he didn't have like hard evidence. He
made a lot of stuff up. Okay, he well, he
interpreted it without any evidence. Yeah, and then wrote a book,
and that became the impetus for Mars based science fiction. Yeah.
(06:07):
It really captured folks. And that's when, like I talked about,
were the world's and uh Edgar Rice Burrows the Princess
of Mars, and it's just always been just out there
staring down at it. Yeah, speaking of war the world's.
It even says it in this article. It did not
cause the national panic in night. That's a myth. Did
you know that? Um? I don't know. I'm not sure
(06:29):
I knew the full stories. Supposedly when h when um
uh who directed Citizen King? When Orson Wells carried out
this radio? Yeah, yeah, it's scared everyone, right, it caused
a panic, people for wild in the streets, committing suicide,
like doing all sorts of stuff. No, it isn't true. Um.
Apparently the newspapers got wind of this rumor and played
(06:53):
it up. And um, the reason they played it up
was to prove that radio couldn't be trusted as a
source of news because it was a big competitor to
newspapers at the time. Have you done Don't Be Dumb
on that? No? Maybe I will? Can I plug that?
Go ahead? Josh? As a web series called Don't Be Dumb?
That is very funny and uh strange and you learned stuff.
(07:17):
It's like the perfect one to three punch. Weird funny
and you walk away with some knowledge. Thanks man, And
everyone likes it that watches it, So we just need
more people to watch it. Give me the weird sausage fingers.
Steve McQueen clap. That's that is weird? Oh the director?
Oh yeah, he was clapping weird, wouldn't he at the oscar?
(07:38):
Apparently he and um, the screenwriter who won an oscar
for that movie for Twelve Years of Slave do not
like each other over the writing credit. Oh yeah, the
writer walked right past him, and Steve McQueen didn't even
turn to look at him as he was walking up
to get his oscar. I did kind of notice that. Yeah, well,
if you read delisted, he rooted it out and found
(07:58):
out that it was over a writing question credit. Is
that why he was clapping weirdly? He was showing his
this thing with sausage weird. Al right, So, um, this
weird early fascination with Mars, Like I said, we didn't
have a lot of information other than just sort of
looking at it from earth. Um, And it wasn't until
the sixties and seventies that we started in many countries
(08:20):
started exploring Mars, but we started sending UM orbiters to
take a closer peak, and then eventually orbiters led to
landers and rovers and it's been like kind of a
prime directive of NASA for a while. Yeah, one of them,
and and it was UM. When they scrapped the Space
Shuttle UM program. I remember NASA was saying like, don't
(08:43):
worry everybody, We're gonna go to Mars. We're gonna focus
on Mars. That's why we're not doing the Shuttle anymore. UM.
And apparently they are. There was just as recently as
yesterday NASA testified about its budget and UM and they
were saying, well, we've got a really great thing plan.
We're gonna get this asteroid. We're gonna maneuver it with
(09:04):
a robot into lunar orbit so we can go visit
it later. And the Senators at this hearing basically said boring,
like yeah, they're like, what's this backup Mars mission listed?
And they're like, oh, well, we're talking about doing a
man fly by a venus and Mars. The senators are like, Mars, Mars, Mars.
So it looks like NASA is gonna be forced to
(09:25):
go to Mars, whether they like it or not. So
it's still captivating. If it's captivating. The dumb dums in Congress, well,
they even said, like the asteroid mission, that's not gonna
spur the public, the public imagination, like going past sending
a person past Mars, that's what you want to do, NASA.
And NASA's like, all right, but it's gonna we could
(09:47):
probably mind the asteroid And the senators I went Mars, Mars, Mars,
and they all went to a bar afterward. Yeah again, Jim,
you want to go to Mars. And he was like,
all right, I guess so. Um, all right, so where
should we start here? Um, well, let's start with the
origin of Mars. It seems pretty appropriate. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating.
(10:08):
I love how scientists piece together ancient history of the cosmos,
you know, without having ever sent a geologist there. It's
all I mean, even before the rovers, it was basically
all just based on photographs and and and surmising from those.
Now we've got the Curiosity rover, the third rover up there.
(10:28):
It's still up there, right, yeah, yeah, or it didn't
come home, does it? No, it will, It's yeah, um,
and they were thinking, I think it was a two
year mission, but it could go longer than that. I
think it's already gone a little longer than that, because
I think it went isn't really already. I think it
went up in late two thousand eleven, So I think
it's been there a little over two years. Well, good
going curiosity. I might be wrong. Um. All right, So
(10:51):
there's basically five things that they surmise happened to four Mars,
which will will list and then get into in more detail. Um.
It initially formed from clumping together of little tiny objects
until it made a big round planet as an accretion disk. Yeah,
like just like Earth, just like Earth. Uh. Then there
(11:13):
was a lot of meteor bombardment all over the Solar System,
and Mars was of course affected just like Earth, just
like Earth. In the Moon, the mantle was very hot
and pushed through the crust, lifting up portions of it,
just like And then there were a couple of uh
they don't know how many, but at least a couple
of periods of lots of volcanoes going on it, just
(11:36):
like lava flows. And then finally the planet cooled down
and the atmosphere thned out to leave this with Mars,
unlike Earth, right, Uh, and it Mars formation was virtually
identical of the process that formed Earth. It's about half
the size, but there in the beginning, as far as
makeup and the processes that they were undergoing, they were
(11:58):
virtually identical. Yeah, and being half the size is pretty
key to uh, why it's not like Earth more um
one of the reasons. So I guess we should get
into some more detail about this, huh. I think the
accretion that you talked about, the small objects about it
took about a hundred thousand years, and as the gravitational
field got stronger, it kept pulling in more of this
(12:20):
stuff and it would crash into the planet and uh
and get hot basically and just sort of meld together.
It was like, oh, Mars, And that was interesting. I
looked at why planets around and the reason why it's
because the gravitational field and the spin. Uh, it's sucking
everything into the dense core. Yeah, well it's the core.
(12:43):
The gravitational field behaves like it's coming from the center,
and everything else thinks it's coming from the center. So
the only way to get everything is close to the center.
As possible is to make a sphere like obviously, if
you had a square, that would be a corner that's
not as close as other parts. It would be a
creepy planet like a cube. Yeah, but I wondered, you know,
(13:05):
or why doesn't it look like an asteroid. Let's say,
but asteroids don't have the kind of gravitational force to
draw everything in like that to form that sphere. It's
called isotactic adjustment. Yeah. I just thought, wait a minute,
all these things are perfectly round. We're not perfectly around.
I want more pyramids. Shake planets would be kind of cool. Um,
(13:25):
all right, so that was the acretion. And now you
have gas being released from cooling after the core and
mantle and crust have formed in this hot ball. Right,
and as the as the gases are being released in
the hot ball, um, they are forming this atmosphere. They're
(13:45):
supporting an atmosphere there floating out and um kind of
hanging around. Yeah yeah, yeah, and um, so you've got
an atmosphere in place. You have a molten core, you
have a after mantle, and then a crusts that formed. Yeah,
and um, as that that softer mantle and the molten
(14:08):
core press up you have volcanic activity, yeah, which releases
even more heat and gas, which makes the atmosphere even thicker.
And at this point they think that there is a
period of um water presence on Mars where it was raining.
So then after you've got a primitive atmosphere. And then
(14:29):
as it says in the article by Craig, he's a
great writer for us, Yeah, PhD, that's right. Uh he
said March March couldn't catch a break, which was pretty accurate,
and it was pounded by meteors in the Solar system,
forming craters and basins and all sorts of interesting land forms.
(14:49):
And you know, the same thing happened here, but we
had like water and things like that too, cause erosion
and fill it, fill it in. On the Moon there
isn't anything like that, so you still see those craters.
And but the same thing happened on Mars. Yeah, and
actually there was water on Mars um that bombardment in
the that caused the magma to come up out of
(15:11):
the core of of Mars, creating volcanic activity and shifts
in the mantle and the crust um all released hot
gas into the Martian atmosphere, which thickened it and increased
its temperature, which led to rain, yes, rain, flooding, erosion.
So there was like a period at least for a
(15:34):
little while of um the presence of water on Mars.
There still is, dude, the presence of unfrozen flowing water.
Uh yeah, there's not flowing water right as of September
of last year, they found water in the dirt. Yeah,
it's pretty exciting to pint for cubic foot. Yeah, but
but it's a spoiler. Sorry, actually it can't be a spoiler.
(15:58):
That happened in the bast right, Yeah, but if if
you haven't heard of it anyeh, all right, uh so
then Craig likens to Mars at this point is a
soft boiled egg and as the eggshell is cooling, uh,
the the yoke is gonna start busting through the mantle.
And that's like on Earth is what is going to
(16:19):
form things like volcanoes. And again those volcanoes and that
activity led to that atmosphere in the periods of rain
and flooding and erosion. Olympus Mons, Yeah, that's a good
pixie songs. That a pixie song for a dream of
the Olympus. Mons. Nice. Yeah, I don't think I need
that one. What's that on? Uh okay? Uh? Olympus Mons
(16:43):
is the largest volcano there and it's like it makes
Mountain Evers look like a mole hill. As a matter
of fact, it's the largest point in the known Solar system,
the highest point. Yeah, yeah, the tallest. Um. Remember our
myth busting episode where we showed that Mount Everest wasn't
the tallest mountain. It's mounta loa Um on Earth. Mounta
(17:06):
looa is um something like I think it's six miles
from the ocean floor. Uh, yes, there rises sick nice
chuck and um. It's a hundred and forty miles wide
at its base. That's a big mountain on Earth. On Mars,
which is again half the size of Earth in diameter,
(17:27):
Olympus Mons is sixteen miles tall. And that's not from
an ocean floor either. Yeah, you know, because there is
no ocean on Marks exactly. But if you want to
see something cool, type in Mars, what would Mars look
like with ocean and people have done like um simulations
of it. It looks really neat, like vacation worthy, like
(17:50):
you would want to go there to vacam He's like
a sunny beach with it looks like Earth but with
weird continents. Um. And then it's three seventy miles across
Olympus mons is. That's large. It's big. And they have
like pictures if you google it, Uh, compare it to
Everest and it just dwarfs it. That's right. And you
can see pictures of it too, you know, they snapped
(18:13):
photos of it. It's pretty impressive. It's large volcano which
eventually went dormant. All the volcanoes on Mars went dormant
somewhere possibly about three billion years ago. And um, as
the volcanoes went dormant, the the the heat was released. Basically, Yeah,
(18:35):
Mars had no more heat to give from its core um,
which meant the atmosphere wasn't being fed any longer, so
it thin, which led to a drop in temperatures. Yeah.
And how we mentioned earlier, how the fact that it
was smaller than Earth is one reason why it's not
more like Earth. That's the reason it cooled so fast,
like Earth wouldn't have cooled nearly as fast, no, huh.
And um, it also kept a magnetic field going thanks
(18:59):
to its molten core. Mars did not any longer, so
you got a thin atmosphere, cold temperatures. Um the atmosphere
that was there started freezing and falling two Mars and
was stored as ice. Any water that was already on
the planet's surface turned into perma frost, and um Mars
became it underwent what's called the Great desiccation event, where
(19:22):
it became a barren, deserted, desert planet. Yeah. Before that,
these were this kind of happened in cycles for a while,
like the volcanic action, and then the gas is being
released in like major flooding from water, until like you said,
eventually it's the cold, not hot, but cold, dusty place
that we love today. Yeah. And what's um interesting is
(19:45):
that Earth and Mars were so similar as they formed
and about at the same time, about three billion years ago,
Mars underwent the Great Desiccation event and Earth underwent the
Great Oxygenation event, which gave rise to all life here
on Earth, the appearance of algae, which created a breathable
atmosphere almost at about the same time, So they totally
(20:07):
diverged in two different paths that around the same time.
I wonder if the main reason was because of its size. Yeah,
the cooling another Earth. Yes, it's interesting. Had it been
the exact same size, who knows, maybe we'd be like
going there and back right now, right on vacation. Like,
(20:28):
how was a good one for Colin Farrell? Did you
see the remake? No? Although I heard the Robo Cup
remake was like surprisingly good, I haven't expecting that. I
haven't seen it either. Yeah, that's what I'll definitely wait
for TV for that one. You know, Uh, you really
don't care about seeing that one, not even DVD like TV. Well,
(20:50):
I don't watch dvs. Okay, I'm streaming like the rest
of the modern world, not even a laser disk. Uh.
Should we talk about what it's like there? Yeah, on
the surface, yes, the surface of mars Um. Scientists have
divided it into three major parts, the southern highlands, the
(21:12):
northern plains, and the polar regions, which we already said
you can actually see from Earth polar ice caps. Yeah,
just like her. But the ice caps are made of
carbon dioxide, so it's dry ice ice caps, and then
underneath there's water ice. So the southern highlands are vast.
I love our morning shows. It's always a little more
(21:32):
like laid back. I feel like yeah, like I'm sleepy. Yeah,
you're not riddle with anxieties yet. No, that comes on
about noon. Yeah, I haven't had enough coffee yet. So
you've got your Southern Highlands, and like I said, they
are extensive and vast and uh, it is elevated. It's
not the highest part of Mars and heavily cratered and
again the highest part of the solar system, right, because
(21:55):
that's where Olympus Mons is, that's right in the southern region,
the Southern Highlands. Uh. And they scientists think it's ancient
um these highlands because of the craters, because the cratering
happened close to four billion years ago and that was
just meteors kind of just pounding the solar system all
over the place. So the Southern Highlands are high and
(22:16):
then there's a very um pronounced drop of several kilometers
down to the um northern plains, which are low lying regions.
There are a lot like the season the moon um.
But they do feature raised areas plateaus a couple of them. Yeah,
the cinder cones. Yeah, well, the cinder cones are on
(22:38):
the plateaus. I think basically the mantle bulged up through
the crust is thinner in the northern region, and the
mantle just pushed up and formed like continent sized plateaus
um that are called crustal upwarps. That's a great word. Yeah,
I kept thinking I was reading it wrong. Nope, crystal upwarps. Uh.
And the these crystal upwarps, there's two of them. One
(23:00):
is smaller, it's Elysium remembered Paradise, that's right, and the
other one is called Tarsus arcs uh. In the Northern
Hemisphere is divided into eastern and western hemispheres. Tharsis is
in the west and Elysium is in the east. Yes,
celestial names are so cool, it really are. You know,
what do we have on Earth? New Jersey not thar No,
(23:26):
start a campaign to rename New Jersey Tharsis um and
then like the main city could be Tharci City, which
sounds super futuristic, and in fact it's Newark. Every citizen
has issued is sparkly silver jumps. Oh uh, so you've
called out Olympus. Mons is the highest point that is
(23:48):
where in the It's in the Stars region, which this
article is confusing because it mentions the Sarsest reason region
in the southern um the hemisphere and in the northern hemisphere. Uh.
And I looked all over the place to find definitively
where it is. And I think the discrepancy comes from
the fact that it's equatorial. Okay, it's pretty close to
(24:10):
the equator Olympus Mons definitely is. So maybe it's both right,
But it's about at that point, um that the uh,
the highlands drop off into the northern plains. That's right.
And Uh, in Tharcis you have some pretty impressive canyons um,
a system called the Vallis Marineris, and it makes the
(24:34):
Grand Canyon look like a tiny little hole in the ground.
It is three hundred and seventy miles wide and twenty
six thousand, four hundred feet deep. Not to slay the
Grand Canyon, but if you've ever been there, imagine something
dwarfing that even, right. And again, Mars is half the
size of Earth, right, and it doesn't even just dwarf
the Grand Canyon. It's bigger than the Mariana Trench, which
(24:56):
is eighty miles long, so it's a good foul and
miles longer than the Marianna Trench. And the Mariana Trench
is forty three miles wide. The Vallis Marineris is seventy
miles wide. Yeah, that's nuts. Yeah, so it's a big
old trench, Like you can't even comprehend that kind of
size when you're standing there. No, I imagine when you're
(25:17):
in it. You can't see the edges or anything like that.
So you're just of course you can't be in it
because you know, people can't go to Mars. But you know,
I know what you mean, we will eventually. You think
Elon Musk predicts he will retire and die and be
buried on Mars. That's what he's he said. It's not
a certainty, but it's a possibility. But that's his goal. Yeah. Wow,
(25:38):
Well he's got the dough to make it happen, I guess,
and the vision, Like you say the same thing, but
you've just got the vision, you don't have the billions
of dollars. And it's not even my vision. I'm just
reporting what Elon Musk said. You know, oh, I thought
you wanted to do that as well. Now go to Mars.
You want to get shot out of a cannon? I
would I abandoned that a long time ago. Yeah, Um,
(25:59):
what's the new plan cremated, yeah, distributed with Umi. Okay,
that's nice. She's really calmed you down. She's like, first,
first things first, this canniball thing, right, it's gotta go.
Um the polar regions you can see from Earth, like
we said, and it is surrounded by a bunch of dunes,
(26:20):
and they are like, I think you said it was
frozen carbon dioxide. Right, So it's not like the ice
we have here on Earth. No, it's well, we have
it here on Earth, dry ice. Well yeah, but just
it's not our polar ice cap, right, and like Earth,
depending on the season, the ice caps are gonna change
shape in the summertime. The CEO two from the northern caps,
(26:41):
uh melt away and and there's water ice below that,
so not dry ice as they call it in Spanish
agua ice. And that's why apparently we sent the phoenix there. Uh.
They were like, send that thing up there and dig
down into the frozen dirt and let's see what it's
made up of. Right, And they found water. They found uh,
(27:05):
two pints. Phoenix didn't find it. Phoenix found like found
uh that the Martian soil is filled with perchlorate, which
is a big problem for Mars missions. Yeah, that's like
very bad for human beings. It's extremely toxic. Gets a
thyroid toxin has a very quick effect um as a
(27:26):
developmental effect on infants and um photuses, So reproducing on
Mars would be a big problem. And even in adults,
it has a big effect on your thyroid, which affects
your hormone production function UM. And it's everywhere. It's in
the light Martian dust and Mars has tons of dust
storms that enveloped the whole planet, which we'll talk about
(27:48):
for like weeks at a time. Yeah, and there there's
per chlorice in those dust storms, so it would get everywhere.
So they just found out like a couple of months
ago that this is everywhere and it's going to be
a huge challenge to Mars missions in the future. But
they're saying, now that we know about it, we can
design around it. Yeah, it just seems so uninhabitable, Like,
(28:11):
I don't know if our lifetime we're gonna see it
a manned mission. Maybe we'll definitely see a fly by. Yeah, yeah,
a man fly by. Yeah, Okay, you and Elon Musk,
we will That's not even just me. Elon Musk in
the Senate. Okay, yeah, Mars Mark, they're all so excited,
(28:34):
So Chucker's up next. We're gonna talk about the interior
of Mars, because it's what's on the inside that counts.
But we're gonna do that after these messages. Okay, so
we're back and we're talking about Mars's interior, And to
talk about mars interior is really boring unless you compared
to Earth, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh,
(28:55):
this is cool. So let's compare to Earth. The Earth's
core is um has a radius of about from the
center to the surface, and is made up of iron
in two parts, the solid core and the liquid outer core,
and the interplay between those two creates Earth's magnetic field,
(29:16):
which allows for the northern lights. Oh yeah, encompasses. What else? Ah,
that's about it. Okay, Mars's core radius is only about
nine um and between nine miles, and it is probably
made up also of iron, but throwing some sulfur, maybe
(29:39):
a little oxygen, and they believe. Uh, I don't I
didn't get this. He said it may be made up
maybe maybe malten but it's unlikely, so they still don't know.
I guess and they think that. The reason they don't
think that it's molten though, is because Mars has a
very weak magnetic field. Um, but maybe not always. Yeah,
(30:02):
it probably had a strong magnetic field and the and
before the great desiccation event um, but now it doesn't have.
When they think that if it is molten, it's not,
there's not a lot to it. Okay, Yeah, that makes sense.
Around the Earth, score is softer mantle like toothpaste, and
it's way less dense than it is iron and magnesium silicate,
(30:25):
about eight hundred miles thick. And that's when you see
a volcano and lava flowing from a volcano, that's where
that's coming from. Well, it comes from the magma through
there the liquid all right, wasn't it I think? So
we did a podcast on volcanos. Remember that was a
good one, the volcano one. I was worried about it,
(30:46):
and Chuck, the mantle pushing up through the through the
surface accounts for those crustal uplifts, up up warps, up warps.
Yeah that's right. Um. And here on Earth we have
things like volcanoes, active volcanoes and earthquakes, and they're largely
(31:07):
due to if not exclusively due to um the fact
that we have continental plates like the crust of Earth,
which Mars also has a crust, but Earth's crust is
broken up into these plates that drift and move around
slowly and rub up against one another. Um. And that's
where the fault lines exist. And along those fault lines
(31:27):
you have volcanoes and earthquakes. Mars, that's not the case
as a crust, but it's not broken into place. It's solid. Yeah.
I thought that was pretty interesting, and that's why there's
no active volcanoes right now for one reason. Yeah. Um.
And we while we're talking about Mars, well we probably
(31:47):
should have mentioned it on the surface, but it's a
neat little tidbit if you ask me, do you know
why Mars is rust colored? Uh? No, because it's coated
in rusty. Yeah, it's exodised iron in the soil, which
makes it rusted. It's a rusty old planet, a rusty, dusty, cold, windy,
(32:10):
uninhabitable perhaps planet. And again, the reason why it's probably
uninhabitable is it lacks an atmosphere, or it practically lacks
an atmosphere. There is a very thin one still. Yeah,
I guess we can compare that to Earth. To um,
March's atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. On Earth, it's less
(32:32):
than one percent, Like you could just stop right there. Toxic,
a lot less nitrogen two point seven percent compared to Earth.
Not much oxygen at all, only point one three that's
a big factor's toxic again and um about one as
(32:53):
much water vapor is on Earth. Yeah, you need that
too inhospitable, which is why they there are proposals to
seed Mars to terraform it. Yeah, basically going and like
artificially stimulate an atmosphere to form so that in ten
thousand and fifty hundred thousand years it could conceivably be habitable. Yeah,
(33:18):
and we we did a show on that too. It
is all coming together. It's a long term plan, but sure,
which means we'll never do it. Elon muskwill maybe his grandchildren.
Uh So. The atmospheric pressure in Mars is interesting too.
It's super low and super cold, and that's why there
is no water liquid flowing, because it's either going to
(33:39):
freeze or evaporate. They can't just exist as water these days. Nope.
But like we said, possibly probably did at one point.
So you've got a thin atmosphere, which means a lot
of um solar radiation is not blocked, is not reflected um,
which means that you have very wild swings in daily
(34:02):
average temperature on Mars. Because Mars does have a day,
it does rotate, and actually it rotates it about the
same rate as Earth. The Mars salt which is short
for solar day, it's just about forty three minutes longer
than um Earth's day. Yeah, but because it's further out
(34:23):
away from the Sun, it's orbit around the Sun takes longer.
So it's year is about twice as long as a
year on Earth six hundred and eighty six point nine
eight Earth days, which means the seasons lasts longer, which
makes them more extreme as we'll see. Yeah, and you
talked about the temperature fluctuation. It's almost a hundred degrees
fahrenheit on a daily basis. The difference in temperature that's enormous. Again,
(34:50):
not very friendly for us humans. Now, well, we'll figure
it out. You have to pack a big suitcase, you know,
you have to pack your your thong as well as
your Arctic explore You could just wear a thong under
your Earth coast there, it's the key to Mars. Where
layers pack big where layers. But like you said, there
(35:14):
are seasons in the spring and early summer, the sun
heats up the atmosphere and the dust lifts up and
and makes it even hotter once that dust is in
the atmosphere, and it basically is what causes those big
dust storms we're talking about. Yeah, the dust. The dust
particles get suspended and invite more heat, which suspends more
(35:37):
particles than um. It creates wind there winds. Yeah, well,
just like here on Earth, it creates convection cells, which
creates wind. And as those wind speeds whip up, because
the atmosphere is thinner, you have to have higher speeds
because the wind has less to push against air to
(35:57):
push against, so it takes higher speed winds. But once
they do hit something like a hundred and twenty miles
an hour, the entire planet can become enveloped in a
dust storm that can last months. That's crazy. And again
it's not just dust. It's dust with one of the
more toxic compounds known to humanity in every bit of it. Yeah,
(36:20):
and it's not gonna blow off a Mars robe or
these things. You know, way like in the tons, yes,
one ton, one ton. And actually what's strange is the
dust storms, it says are beneficial because they will blow
the any um Martian dirt caked on the solar panels. Yeah,
that makes sense too, or maybe it might reveal something
(36:40):
yeah that wasn't there before, like a pyramid. That'd be
pretty cool, Chuck. I want to talk about water on Mars,
but first let's um do a message break and we're back.
So I guess let's get to the water part um.
That was NASA's direct to follow the water for many
(37:02):
years and still is really because they think they're in holds.
The key to the big question is there possibilities of
having life on Mars? Is there life? Was their life
on Mars? And we're not talking about Martians unfortunately, we're
talking about maybe bacteria, which could be Martians. I mean,
if it lives on Mars, it's Martian. I guess it's
(37:24):
a good point. Everybody just basically needs to lower the
bar for their expectations of what a Martian is. Yeah, right,
you know what I mean. Instead of little green men,
it's bacteria and um. When this article was written, it
was pre curiosity, but it's just a couple of months ago,
curiosity confirmed, uh that there is water present in the soil,
(37:47):
and they think it's everywhere. Yeah, it's basically the soil
has a very big leaching property, yeah, where it absorbs
water from the atmosphere and locks it in there, so
that if if we went up there, we could extract
um about like I said, two pints of water from
every cubic foot of soil that's mine. It's pretty It
(38:08):
is pretty cool. Again, though, we have that per chlorate problem.
It's everywhere. It would get in the water, and one
of the ways that it transfers to humans and becomes
toxic is through drinking water, so we'd have to deal
with that. But ironically, the thing about par chlorate being there,
it's also used in solid rocket fuel here on Earth.
So we would need it to get to Mars, but
(38:29):
once we got to Mars, we wouldn't want to have it. Interesting,
that is very ironic. Thanks. So you're talking, Chuck about
how water could consuerably lead to life on Mars. We
it's vital to life. It's one of the um vital
parts of life. I can't remember the term for him.
Not a building block, one of the essential some things
(38:51):
for life component. Yes, yeah, I think that is it
essential component for life. We worked that out together. This
has been a condition and no, no, Now they found
water on Mars and confirmed that it is there, and
they knew all along that there was water ice on Mars. Um.
It makes that Martian rock from four billion years ago
(39:14):
seem all the more likely that it is displaying evidence
of fossilized microbes. Yeah. And they used to think that
there was methane UH in the atmosphere or trace amounts,
but I think that has been debunked now with upon
further research. Yeah. Yeah, because again when this article was written,
it sounds like they thought it was still like they
still head detective methane and they didn't know whether it
(39:36):
was from of biological or chemical origin. Yeah. More recent
studies UM as of October two thousand twelve, UM, they
analyzed the atmosphere UH for methane six times and basically
found no more than one point three parts per billion.
Yeah that's not good for evidence of life. Yeah, and
(39:57):
that's about one six as much as they had previously estimated.
And they thought, well, maybe it went somewhere, you know,
and and they NASA said, now it wouldn't um. It
would have been super exciting, but it's methane doesn't distribute
and leave like that that quickly, like it would still
be around. So unfortunately, no methane. Speaking of methane um
(40:20):
as evidence of like remember our termite episode, somebody wrote
in to say, did you know termites or like a
huge contributor of methane to on Earth. They're the second
largest contributor of methane after five stock. Yeah. Wow, even
beating out humans. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah, because we shoot
a lot of ducks, we humans, some of us termites,
(40:43):
flatulent insects. Uh so. Bacteria um Martian soil has been
known to be like formally chemically active, but maybe not biologically,
but it is possible, maybe because they have a good
example in Greenland. UM they found bacteria that was dormant
for a hundred and twenty thousand years frozen in the ice,
(41:06):
and when they unfroze it, it started multiplying again in
the beginning of the apocalypse. Yeah, that's kind of creepy. Yeah,
but like it's not stopping. Possibly in the polarized keps
on Mars maybe that's going on too. Yeah, we just
don't know. Yet Yeah, they think that. Um it is
very possible that you could take some of them, the
extreme A file bacteria, ones that live like in um
(41:28):
volcanic events undersea and things like that, and transplant them
too Mars and some of them would survive, especially mineral
thriving um bacteria ones that like eat minerals. You could
put them on Mars and they would they would do okay.
Possibly well spaceships like if we could possibly bring our
(41:49):
own bacteria there by accident as well, you know, just
from like I think the International Space Station had E.
Colid in it. Yeah, and possibly Lee Jonella. There's disease
on the I S I YEA or the I S S.
That sounds like a like a movie waiting to happen. Sure,
I guess we sort of did that with Outland. Was there?
(42:12):
Was it a disease a disease? It was just a
cop chasing a bad guy again. I wonder if it
holds up. I doubt it. Yeah, if it held up,
it'd be alien like. It would still be in the rotation.
But Outline doesn't play on cable very often that it
really doesn't. That is pretty good evidence too. I remember
(42:33):
the Outland Mad magazine. Um I didn't have that one. Yeah,
that was a good one. Um So, Chuck. You remember
we were talking about way back how the UM Viking
and UM Mariner and Mars orbiters provided this evidence that
Mars was just a dead, barren planet and really undermine
(42:55):
the idea that there was possibly life there and that
it was lush. Well, it all so provided some conspiracy
theorists pretty solid evidence that there was or is some
sort of civilization on Mars, because yeah, Viking one in
nineteen seventies six produced a photo that looked a whole
(43:16):
lot like a Feronic type face, like the face on Mark.
Pretty clearly a face if you look at it. Uh,
it was two miles from head to toe, from tip
to to bottom. So it wasn't like Jesus on a
piece of toast. No, I mean, it looked like it
looked like a artificially constructed monument, a face of a monument.
(43:39):
Maybe when that had toppled, it was now just poking
out from the Martian soul soil. Um So they looked,
uh closer in, but there's a lot of cloud cover,
so they got kind of a garbled look. And they
looked again more recently maybe two thousand eight or two
thousand eleven, And it's very clearly just a mesa. That's disappointing.
(44:01):
It is, especially like when you look at that original yea, yeah,
when you look at the Viking one photo. Yeah, it
looks like a top old statue head. Yeah it does.
It actually factored into that terrible movie um Mission to Mars, Wow,
which I saw with hippie rob By the way. Really yea,
(44:21):
was that is the last time you saw him? It
was among that he just walked into the woods after that.
Wasn't that? That was Brian to Palmer, wasn't it. I
think it might have been so disappointing. I mean it
had an all circust Gary Sinise, don Cheetle. I think
Bill Paxton maybe I don't think it's Pullman, but I
(44:43):
might be confusing Bill Paxton from Apolar thirteen. Anyway, it
didn't pan out very well. But do you got anything else? Yeah? Um,
I don't know why this article doesn't mention if Mars
has two moons, phobos and demos. Yeah, they didn't get
into that at all. No, um and uh, Mars popped
up and pops up and pop culture a lot. There's
(45:06):
um the Mars Volta the band. Yeah. Uh. David Bowie
had a song called Life on Mars, one of the
great songs. The Misfits had the greatest Mars song, Teenagers
from Mars. That's a great song. Yeah. Oh, what's his name?
Jared Leto right thirty seconds to Mars. Yeah, they're going
(45:27):
on tour right after his Oscar Win. I had never
heard any of his music until the other day. I
was like, what are they like? And Emily tried to
describe it. Then she just played a song. Yeah, it's
not my bag, mine anything, but good for him. Oh yeah,
I think they're like huge internationally. Yeah, he's got gout.
Did you know that? I did not know that he
needs to lay off the path? No, I think he um.
(45:48):
I think it was had to do with his weight
gain and loss for the John Lennon um the Mark
David Chapman movie. He did, Oh really, Yeah, he got
all fat to play Mark David Chapman and like got
all skinny again. I think got gout because of it,
and then got even skinnier to play Rayon in Dallas
Biberus Club. Dude, have you seen it? Yes? How thin
(46:09):
can two people get? They were pretty thin, like the
two of them together make me. And there's gotta be
like that. There's gotta be a safe way to lose
and regain weight. Yeah, but I'll bet there's not very
many safe ways to gain wait to make yourself look pudgy, no,
I mean, and then to lose it again. I'll bet
(46:30):
when it's been done, Like from DeNiro to fat mac
On always sunny. I think they say they just eat
like lots of garbage and just pile it on. Yeah,
that's not I'll beat at all now. But you know
that's one of my pet peeves. When you take a
fit person in like the game thirty pounds for a
movie and it it's like, you don't look like a
fatter person and you look like a fit person who
(46:52):
like has a distended belly. You know, it takes years
to get this look. You know you gotta work at it,
sculpt this. Yeah, um, okay, you got anything else? I
got nothing else. I think this is better than the sun.
Oh yeah. As far as our our celestial episodes go
far less physics that we had to deal with. We
(47:14):
haven't done the moon straight up? Have we? I think
we have? Have we? Jerry? Have we done the moon.
I think we did because we talked about its origin,
whether it was calved, whether it was a separate decreation.
I'm pretty sure we've done the moon. All right, we'll
look it up. It is getting bad. We need we
need to get a list together. Yeah, we do, so
we quit boring everyone with this. Yeah, you'd think we'd
(47:37):
edited out, but we just don't. Well, if you want
to learn more about Mars, you can type that word
into the search bar how stuff works dot com. And uh,
since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Uh, Josh,
I'm gonna call this um your theory on eating what
(47:58):
you crave? Did you see this email? No? Um, just
listen to the Salt podcast. Dudes, and Josh posture that
you could get along just fine eating only what you crave.
I'm not sure how serious he was, though fairly serious,
fairly okay, I'll agree that if it depends on whether
I'm right, I'll agree that a hundred and fifty years
ago this may have been pretty viable. These days, it's
a different story. There's a lot of evidence that points
(48:21):
to food manufacturers actually designing junk foods that make you
crave more of them. Mainly sugar and fat heavy foods.
There's one great book in particular called Good Calories, Bad
Calories by Gary Tobbs, basically tells the story of how
a lot of what the f d A and U
s d A recommends as wrong and how it got
that way. For instance, the guy who conducted the Seven
(48:41):
Countries study, which is what caused the government to say
fat will kill you, simply throughout data that contradicted the
result he was looking for. Throwing the fact that corn
is subsidized and super cheap, we have the recipe for
an obese, misinformed population that's addicted to sugar. Has been
fed terribly wrong information and about health for a long time. Yeah,
(49:02):
I've learned recently, like you're supposed to have fats, and
there are good fats and there are bad fats, but
like low fat is a not a good way to go,
and it has been kind of foisted on us, foisted
you like the venue. That word, and that is from
Steve Baum, the bomber in what he calls good Old
(49:22):
New Jersey or as we calls Parsis. Is he from
Tharsus City, that is steep Bomb. I don't know if
he's from Tharsus City or not, but he's from somewhere
in There is a really good article about um, how
(49:44):
food scientists engineer foods to make us crave them is
on the New York Times. It was a couple of
years ago by a guy named Michael Moss. Yeah, and
in your defense, I don't think you were. I think
you meant it more along the lines of craving real
foods and not in a surely I'm craving ben and
Jerry's or pretzels, right. No. I meant like, like craving
(50:05):
a steak or something like that, not ignoring that and
going with, you know, ahead of lettuce Um. I can't
find the name of that article, but it's a Michael
Moss article and it's from the New York Times, and dude,
it is good. It's one of those really extensive long
form ones that like should be long form because there's
just so much great information in it opening. So look
(50:29):
it up, everybody. It will open your eyes. Uh. If
you want to get in touch with Chucking Me, you
can tweet to us at s y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff
you should know. You can send us an email to
stuff podcasts at Discovery dot com. Check out our YouTube channel,
Josh and Chuck. It's pretty fun, and also be sure
(50:49):
to hang out on our website Stuff you Should Know
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stuff Works dot com. M hm hm
Welcome to you Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clarkner's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there. We
all have um I boogers because this is an early morning, unusual,
(00:21):
early morning edition of Stuff you Should Know. Welcome to
the morning edition. We should just talk like this. We
got on NPR. We got taken to task in its
nine email from a morning talk show TV show host.
Did you see it? Uh about the inquisition? Yeah, He's like,
way to release the inquisition on Ash Wednesdays, kind of
(00:41):
slapping the face. Five respond I said, actually, it came
out on fat Tuesday and by sheer coincidence. He's like,
thanks for the reply, and I responded to him too.
I was like, man, I wish I was that clever
who said I had no idea. It's like our our
medical marijuana episode being our four utter complete coincidence. Guaranteed everybody.
(01:02):
I think over the course of six hundred plus shows,
you're gonna have some weird coincidences like that. You know, Yes,
I certainly didn't know it was Ash Wednesday. I didn't
either until I went to the mall yesterday evening and
a third of the people are were walking around with
charcoal crosses on their forehead. Nice. It's like, I had
no idea Atlanta had this many Catholics, good going, They're
(01:23):
everywhere there are Well, I mean that didn't use to
because you know, I grew u Baptist here and I
didn't know many Catholics growing up. But well, Atlanta became
a transplant towns instead, exactly. And I'll tell you about
another transplant chuck. Possibly life here on Earth from Mars.
Oh yeah, is this your intro? Have you got breaking news? No?
(01:44):
That was it. Oh do you remember we did an
episode on UM the Origin of life on Earth? Remember? Uh?
Oh yeah, yeah. And one of the possibilities that it
was from Mars. And one of the um pieces of
evidence of this possibility was the Alan Hills Rock from Antarctica,
(02:06):
a Martian meteorite that was discovered in that was studied
and studied and they thought in basically Bill Clinton said,
we found evidence of life on Mars. And then they
studied it again and they were like, maybe not. And
now they're studying it again they're saying, yeah, it's possible.
It's very possible that this four point one billion year
(02:28):
old rock is showing evidence of fossilized nano bacteria. And
this is all still Bill Clinton saying this. It is
underwear at home the authority. He's talking to the TV again.
Nice uh, but yeah, we're gonna do how Mars works.
Tom Hanks, this one's for you, big space guy. Oh yeah, sure, Okay,
(02:52):
I didn't know if I was missing something there, like
he did some movie that didn't know about. No, if
I said Gary CINESI, this one's for you, there would
be a mission to Mars reference. I did not see that.
Mind bogglingly odd and pretty bad. Yeah, I heard, That's
why I didn't see it. That and Red Planet didn't
see either. One of those Red Planet I don't know about. Yeah,
but that kind of brings us to a point that
(03:14):
we've long been fascinated with the Red Planet, going back
to you know, War the Worlds and early science fiction
and Martians, and Mars has just always captivated us because
you know, sometimes you can see it with a telescope
and it's not like what's on the other side of
Venus Venus. Yeah, we don't know much about Venus mystery.
(03:34):
There are no Venusians that we're afraid will come down
here and attack us. I think it's Venusians Venetians, which
is different from Venetians, which are people from Venice, which,
strangely enough, UM kind of coincides with the guy named
Giovanni shia Parelli. He might not have been from Venice,
but that man was definitely from Italy. Do you think,
(03:56):
yeah he was? Can you say his name for everybody? Chuck?
Who Givanni? Really? That was good? Man? Have you been
practicing at all? No? I just don't even want of pasta.
That's good stuff, man. So Um Shipprelli in eighteen seventy
seven decided to draw a map of Mars, and his
(04:17):
conception of Mars, what became the popular conception, if it
wasn't already UM, was that Mars was a UM, a
lush planet with civilizations, and he named the regions of
Mars accordingly, like Elysium, which which UM culture believed that
(04:37):
that was Heaven. I don't know, I can't remember, man,
I haven't heard that. We you know, we've discussed it before, Elysium.
I haven't retained that. UM. Another part was called Utopia Arcadia,
basically all these different names for paradise reflected the idea
that Mars was a very similar to Earth, most likely
(04:58):
inhabited by intelligent beings and um. As proof, uh Sia
Parelli drew canals that he noticed on the on Mars,
which suggested that this advanced civilization had dug canals to
um route water from the polar ice caps, which are
visible here on Earth, to the central locations where their
(05:22):
civilizations were get water to the Martians. Yeah, and this
established like what Earthlings thought of Mars for a hundred
years almost. Yeah. About forty years after that, a US
astronomer named Percival Lowell Um wrote a book also about Mars,
where he actually talked about civilizations and h The problem
was he he wasn't really based on anything. It might
(05:45):
as well have been science fiction, right, and yet they
named the Lowell Observatory after him. He was an astronomer,
so it's not like he was He wasn't just making
stuff up, but he didn't have like hard evidence. He
made a lot of stuff up. Okay, he well, he
interpreted it without any evidence. Yeah, and then wrote a book,
and that became the impetus for Mars based science fiction. Yeah.
(06:07):
It really captured folks. And that's when, like I talked about,
were the world's and uh Edgar Rice Burrows the Princess
of Mars, and it's just always been just out there
staring down at it. Yeah, speaking of war the world's.
It even says it in this article. It did not
cause the national panic in night. That's a myth. Did
you know that? Um? I don't know. I'm not sure
(06:29):
I knew the full stories. Supposedly when h when um
uh who directed Citizen King? When Orson Wells carried out
this radio? Yeah, yeah, it's scared everyone, right, it caused
a panic, people for wild in the streets, committing suicide,
like doing all sorts of stuff. No, it isn't true. Um.
Apparently the newspapers got wind of this rumor and played
(06:53):
it up. And um, the reason they played it up
was to prove that radio couldn't be trusted as a
source of news because it was a big competitor to
newspapers at the time. Have you done Don't Be Dumb
on that? No? Maybe I will? Can I plug that?
Go ahead? Josh? As a web series called Don't Be Dumb?
That is very funny and uh strange and you learned stuff.
(07:17):
It's like the perfect one to three punch. Weird funny
and you walk away with some knowledge. Thanks man, And
everyone likes it that watches it, So we just need
more people to watch it. Give me the weird sausage fingers.
Steve McQueen clap. That's that is weird? Oh the director?
Oh yeah, he was clapping weird, wouldn't he at the oscar?
(07:38):
Apparently he and um, the screenwriter who won an oscar
for that movie for Twelve Years of Slave do not
like each other over the writing credit. Oh yeah, the
writer walked right past him, and Steve McQueen didn't even
turn to look at him as he was walking up
to get his oscar. I did kind of notice that. Yeah, well,
if you read delisted, he rooted it out and found
(07:58):
out that it was over a writing question credit. Is
that why he was clapping weirdly? He was showing his
this thing with sausage weird. Al right, So, um, this
weird early fascination with Mars, Like I said, we didn't
have a lot of information other than just sort of
looking at it from earth. Um, And it wasn't until
the sixties and seventies that we started in many countries
(08:20):
started exploring Mars, but we started sending UM orbiters to
take a closer peak, and then eventually orbiters led to
landers and rovers and it's been like kind of a
prime directive of NASA for a while. Yeah, one of them,
and and it was UM. When they scrapped the Space
Shuttle UM program. I remember NASA was saying like, don't
(08:43):
worry everybody, We're gonna go to Mars. We're gonna focus
on Mars. That's why we're not doing the Shuttle anymore. UM.
And apparently they are. There was just as recently as
yesterday NASA testified about its budget and UM and they
were saying, well, we've got a really great thing plan.
We're gonna get this asteroid. We're gonna maneuver it with
(09:04):
a robot into lunar orbit so we can go visit
it later. And the Senators at this hearing basically said boring,
like yeah, they're like, what's this backup Mars mission listed?
And they're like, oh, well, we're talking about doing a
man fly by a venus and Mars. The senators are like, Mars, Mars, Mars.
So it looks like NASA is gonna be forced to
(09:25):
go to Mars, whether they like it or not. So
it's still captivating. If it's captivating. The dumb dums in Congress, well,
they even said, like the asteroid mission, that's not gonna
spur the public, the public imagination, like going past sending
a person past Mars, that's what you want to do, NASA.
And NASA's like, all right, but it's gonna we could
(09:47):
probably mind the asteroid And the senators I went Mars, Mars, Mars,
and they all went to a bar afterward. Yeah again, Jim,
you want to go to Mars. And he was like,
all right, I guess so. Um, all right, so where
should we start here? Um, well, let's start with the
origin of Mars. It seems pretty appropriate. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating.
(10:08):
I love how scientists piece together ancient history of the cosmos,
you know, without having ever sent a geologist there. It's
all I mean, even before the rovers, it was basically
all just based on photographs and and and surmising from those.
Now we've got the Curiosity rover, the third rover up there.
(10:28):
It's still up there, right, yeah, yeah, or it didn't
come home, does it? No, it will, It's yeah, um,
and they were thinking, I think it was a two
year mission, but it could go longer than that. I
think it's already gone a little longer than that, because
I think it went isn't really already. I think it
went up in late two thousand eleven, So I think
it's been there a little over two years. Well, good
going curiosity. I might be wrong. Um. All right, So
(10:51):
there's basically five things that they surmise happened to four Mars,
which will will list and then get into in more detail. Um.
It initially formed from clumping together of little tiny objects
until it made a big round planet as an accretion disk. Yeah,
like just like Earth, just like Earth. Uh. Then there
(11:13):
was a lot of meteor bombardment all over the Solar System,
and Mars was of course affected just like Earth, just
like Earth. In the Moon, the mantle was very hot
and pushed through the crust, lifting up portions of it,
just like And then there were a couple of uh
they don't know how many, but at least a couple
of periods of lots of volcanoes going on it, just
(11:36):
like lava flows. And then finally the planet cooled down
and the atmosphere thned out to leave this with Mars,
unlike Earth, right, Uh, and it Mars formation was virtually
identical of the process that formed Earth. It's about half
the size, but there in the beginning, as far as
makeup and the processes that they were undergoing, they were
(11:58):
virtually identical. Yeah, and being half the size is pretty
key to uh, why it's not like Earth more um
one of the reasons. So I guess we should get
into some more detail about this, huh. I think the
accretion that you talked about, the small objects about it
took about a hundred thousand years, and as the gravitational
field got stronger, it kept pulling in more of this
(12:20):
stuff and it would crash into the planet and uh
and get hot basically and just sort of meld together.
It was like, oh, Mars, And that was interesting. I
looked at why planets around and the reason why it's
because the gravitational field and the spin. Uh, it's sucking
everything into the dense core. Yeah, well it's the core.
(12:43):
The gravitational field behaves like it's coming from the center,
and everything else thinks it's coming from the center. So
the only way to get everything is close to the center.
As possible is to make a sphere like obviously, if
you had a square, that would be a corner that's
not as close as other parts. It would be a
creepy planet like a cube. Yeah, but I wondered, you know,
(13:05):
or why doesn't it look like an asteroid. Let's say,
but asteroids don't have the kind of gravitational force to
draw everything in like that to form that sphere. It's
called isotactic adjustment. Yeah. I just thought, wait a minute,
all these things are perfectly round. We're not perfectly around.
I want more pyramids. Shake planets would be kind of cool. Um,
(13:25):
all right, so that was the acretion. And now you
have gas being released from cooling after the core and
mantle and crust have formed in this hot ball. Right,
and as the as the gases are being released in
the hot ball, um, they are forming this atmosphere. They're
(13:45):
supporting an atmosphere there floating out and um kind of
hanging around. Yeah yeah, yeah, and um, so you've got
an atmosphere in place. You have a molten core, you
have a after mantle, and then a crusts that formed. Yeah,
and um, as that that softer mantle and the molten
(14:08):
core press up you have volcanic activity, yeah, which releases
even more heat and gas, which makes the atmosphere even thicker.
And at this point they think that there is a
period of um water presence on Mars where it was raining.
So then after you've got a primitive atmosphere. And then
(14:29):
as it says in the article by Craig, he's a
great writer for us, Yeah, PhD, that's right. Uh he
said March March couldn't catch a break, which was pretty accurate,
and it was pounded by meteors in the Solar system,
forming craters and basins and all sorts of interesting land forms.
(14:49):
And you know, the same thing happened here, but we
had like water and things like that too, cause erosion
and fill it, fill it in. On the Moon there
isn't anything like that, so you still see those craters.
And but the same thing happened on Mars. Yeah, and
actually there was water on Mars um that bombardment in
the that caused the magma to come up out of
(15:11):
the core of of Mars, creating volcanic activity and shifts
in the mantle and the crust um all released hot
gas into the Martian atmosphere, which thickened it and increased
its temperature, which led to rain, yes, rain, flooding, erosion.
So there was like a period at least for a
(15:34):
little while of um the presence of water on Mars.
There still is, dude, the presence of unfrozen flowing water.
Uh yeah, there's not flowing water right as of September
of last year, they found water in the dirt. Yeah,
it's pretty exciting to pint for cubic foot. Yeah, but
but it's a spoiler. Sorry, actually it can't be a spoiler.
(15:58):
That happened in the bast right, Yeah, but if if
you haven't heard of it anyeh, all right, uh so
then Craig likens to Mars at this point is a
soft boiled egg and as the eggshell is cooling, uh,
the the yoke is gonna start busting through the mantle.
And that's like on Earth is what is going to
(16:19):
form things like volcanoes. And again those volcanoes and that
activity led to that atmosphere in the periods of rain
and flooding and erosion. Olympus Mons, Yeah, that's a good
pixie songs. That a pixie song for a dream of
the Olympus. Mons. Nice. Yeah, I don't think I need
that one. What's that on? Uh okay? Uh? Olympus Mons
(16:43):
is the largest volcano there and it's like it makes
Mountain Evers look like a mole hill. As a matter
of fact, it's the largest point in the known Solar system,
the highest point. Yeah, yeah, the tallest. Um. Remember our
myth busting episode where we showed that Mount Everest wasn't
the tallest mountain. It's mounta loa Um on Earth. Mounta
(17:06):
looa is um something like I think it's six miles
from the ocean floor. Uh, yes, there rises sick nice
chuck and um. It's a hundred and forty miles wide
at its base. That's a big mountain on Earth. On Mars,
which is again half the size of Earth in diameter,
(17:27):
Olympus Mons is sixteen miles tall. And that's not from
an ocean floor either. Yeah, you know, because there is
no ocean on Marks exactly. But if you want to
see something cool, type in Mars, what would Mars look
like with ocean and people have done like um simulations
of it. It looks really neat, like vacation worthy, like
(17:50):
you would want to go there to vacam He's like
a sunny beach with it looks like Earth but with
weird continents. Um. And then it's three seventy miles across
Olympus mons is. That's large. It's big. And they have
like pictures if you google it, Uh, compare it to
Everest and it just dwarfs it. That's right. And you
can see pictures of it too, you know, they snapped
(18:13):
photos of it. It's pretty impressive. It's large volcano which
eventually went dormant. All the volcanoes on Mars went dormant
somewhere possibly about three billion years ago. And um, as
the volcanoes went dormant, the the the heat was released. Basically, Yeah,
(18:35):
Mars had no more heat to give from its core um,
which meant the atmosphere wasn't being fed any longer, so
it thin, which led to a drop in temperatures. Yeah.
And how we mentioned earlier, how the fact that it
was smaller than Earth is one reason why it's not
more like Earth. That's the reason it cooled so fast,
like Earth wouldn't have cooled nearly as fast, no, huh.
And um, it also kept a magnetic field going thanks
(18:59):
to its molten core. Mars did not any longer, so
you got a thin atmosphere, cold temperatures. Um the atmosphere
that was there started freezing and falling two Mars and
was stored as ice. Any water that was already on
the planet's surface turned into perma frost, and um Mars
became it underwent what's called the Great desiccation event, where
(19:22):
it became a barren, deserted, desert planet. Yeah. Before that,
these were this kind of happened in cycles for a while,
like the volcanic action, and then the gas is being
released in like major flooding from water, until like you said,
eventually it's the cold, not hot, but cold, dusty place
that we love today. Yeah. And what's um interesting is
(19:45):
that Earth and Mars were so similar as they formed
and about at the same time, about three billion years ago,
Mars underwent the Great Desiccation event and Earth underwent the
Great Oxygenation event, which gave rise to all life here
on Earth, the appearance of algae, which created a breathable
atmosphere almost at about the same time, So they totally
(20:07):
diverged in two different paths that around the same time.
I wonder if the main reason was because of its size. Yeah,
the cooling another Earth. Yes, it's interesting. Had it been
the exact same size, who knows, maybe we'd be like
going there and back right now, right on vacation. Like,
(20:28):
how was a good one for Colin Farrell? Did you
see the remake? No? Although I heard the Robo Cup
remake was like surprisingly good, I haven't expecting that. I
haven't seen it either. Yeah, that's what I'll definitely wait
for TV for that one. You know, Uh, you really
don't care about seeing that one, not even DVD like TV. Well,
(20:50):
I don't watch dvs. Okay, I'm streaming like the rest
of the modern world, not even a laser disk. Uh.
Should we talk about what it's like there? Yeah, on
the surface, yes, the surface of mars Um. Scientists have
divided it into three major parts, the southern highlands, the
(21:12):
northern plains, and the polar regions, which we already said
you can actually see from Earth polar ice caps. Yeah,
just like her. But the ice caps are made of
carbon dioxide, so it's dry ice ice caps, and then
underneath there's water ice. So the southern highlands are vast.
I love our morning shows. It's always a little more
(21:32):
like laid back. I feel like yeah, like I'm sleepy. Yeah,
you're not riddle with anxieties yet. No, that comes on
about noon. Yeah, I haven't had enough coffee yet. So
you've got your Southern Highlands, and like I said, they
are extensive and vast and uh, it is elevated. It's
not the highest part of Mars and heavily cratered and
again the highest part of the solar system, right, because
(21:55):
that's where Olympus Mons is, that's right in the southern region,
the Southern Highlands. Uh. And they scientists think it's ancient
um these highlands because of the craters, because the cratering
happened close to four billion years ago and that was
just meteors kind of just pounding the solar system all
over the place. So the Southern Highlands are high and
(22:16):
then there's a very um pronounced drop of several kilometers
down to the um northern plains, which are low lying regions.
There are a lot like the season the moon um.
But they do feature raised areas plateaus a couple of them. Yeah,
the cinder cones. Yeah, well, the cinder cones are on
(22:38):
the plateaus. I think basically the mantle bulged up through
the crust is thinner in the northern region, and the
mantle just pushed up and formed like continent sized plateaus
um that are called crustal upwarps. That's a great word. Yeah,
I kept thinking I was reading it wrong. Nope, crystal upwarps. Uh.
And the these crystal upwarps, there's two of them. One
(23:00):
is smaller, it's Elysium remembered Paradise, that's right, and the
other one is called Tarsus arcs uh. In the Northern
Hemisphere is divided into eastern and western hemispheres. Tharsis is
in the west and Elysium is in the east. Yes,
celestial names are so cool, it really are. You know,
what do we have on Earth? New Jersey not thar No,
(23:26):
start a campaign to rename New Jersey Tharsis um and
then like the main city could be Tharci City, which
sounds super futuristic, and in fact it's Newark. Every citizen
has issued is sparkly silver jumps. Oh uh, so you've
called out Olympus. Mons is the highest point that is
(23:48):
where in the It's in the Stars region, which this
article is confusing because it mentions the Sarsest reason region
in the southern um the hemisphere and in the northern hemisphere. Uh.
And I looked all over the place to find definitively
where it is. And I think the discrepancy comes from
the fact that it's equatorial. Okay, it's pretty close to
(24:10):
the equator Olympus Mons definitely is. So maybe it's both right,
But it's about at that point, um that the uh,
the highlands drop off into the northern plains. That's right.
And Uh, in Tharcis you have some pretty impressive canyons um,
a system called the Vallis Marineris, and it makes the
(24:34):
Grand Canyon look like a tiny little hole in the ground.
It is three hundred and seventy miles wide and twenty
six thousand, four hundred feet deep. Not to slay the
Grand Canyon, but if you've ever been there, imagine something
dwarfing that even, right. And again, Mars is half the
size of Earth, right, and it doesn't even just dwarf
the Grand Canyon. It's bigger than the Mariana Trench, which
(24:56):
is eighty miles long, so it's a good foul and
miles longer than the Marianna Trench. And the Mariana Trench
is forty three miles wide. The Vallis Marineris is seventy
miles wide. Yeah, that's nuts. Yeah, so it's a big
old trench, Like you can't even comprehend that kind of
size when you're standing there. No, I imagine when you're
(25:17):
in it. You can't see the edges or anything like that.
So you're just of course you can't be in it
because you know, people can't go to Mars. But you know,
I know what you mean, we will eventually. You think
Elon Musk predicts he will retire and die and be
buried on Mars. That's what he's he said. It's not
a certainty, but it's a possibility. But that's his goal. Yeah. Wow,
(25:38):
Well he's got the dough to make it happen, I guess,
and the vision, Like you say the same thing, but
you've just got the vision, you don't have the billions
of dollars. And it's not even my vision. I'm just
reporting what Elon Musk said. You know, oh, I thought
you wanted to do that as well. Now go to Mars.
You want to get shot out of a cannon? I
would I abandoned that a long time ago. Yeah, Um,
(25:59):
what's the new plan cremated, yeah, distributed with Umi. Okay,
that's nice. She's really calmed you down. She's like, first,
first things first, this canniball thing, right, it's gotta go.
Um the polar regions you can see from Earth, like
we said, and it is surrounded by a bunch of dunes,
(26:20):
and they are like, I think you said it was
frozen carbon dioxide. Right, So it's not like the ice
we have here on Earth. No, it's well, we have
it here on Earth, dry ice. Well yeah, but just
it's not our polar ice cap, right, and like Earth,
depending on the season, the ice caps are gonna change
shape in the summertime. The CEO two from the northern caps,
(26:41):
uh melt away and and there's water ice below that,
so not dry ice as they call it in Spanish
agua ice. And that's why apparently we sent the phoenix there. Uh.
They were like, send that thing up there and dig
down into the frozen dirt and let's see what it's
made up of. Right, And they found water. They found uh,
(27:05):
two pints. Phoenix didn't find it. Phoenix found like found
uh that the Martian soil is filled with perchlorate, which
is a big problem for Mars missions. Yeah, that's like
very bad for human beings. It's extremely toxic. Gets a
thyroid toxin has a very quick effect um as a
(27:26):
developmental effect on infants and um photuses, So reproducing on
Mars would be a big problem. And even in adults,
it has a big effect on your thyroid, which affects
your hormone production function UM. And it's everywhere. It's in
the light Martian dust and Mars has tons of dust
storms that enveloped the whole planet, which we'll talk about
(27:48):
for like weeks at a time. Yeah, and there there's
per chlorice in those dust storms, so it would get everywhere.
So they just found out like a couple of months
ago that this is everywhere and it's going to be
a huge challenge to Mars missions in the future. But
they're saying, now that we know about it, we can
design around it. Yeah, it just seems so uninhabitable, Like,
(28:11):
I don't know if our lifetime we're gonna see it
a manned mission. Maybe we'll definitely see a fly by. Yeah, yeah,
a man fly by. Yeah, Okay, you and Elon Musk,
we will That's not even just me. Elon Musk in
the Senate. Okay, yeah, Mars Mark, they're all so excited,
(28:34):
So Chucker's up next. We're gonna talk about the interior
of Mars, because it's what's on the inside that counts.
But we're gonna do that after these messages. Okay, so
we're back and we're talking about Mars's interior, And to
talk about mars interior is really boring unless you compared
to Earth, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh,
(28:55):
this is cool. So let's compare to Earth. The Earth's
core is um has a radius of about from the
center to the surface, and is made up of iron
in two parts, the solid core and the liquid outer core,
and the interplay between those two creates Earth's magnetic field,
(29:16):
which allows for the northern lights. Oh yeah, encompasses. What else? Ah,
that's about it. Okay, Mars's core radius is only about
nine um and between nine miles, and it is probably
made up also of iron, but throwing some sulfur, maybe
(29:39):
a little oxygen, and they believe. Uh, I don't I
didn't get this. He said it may be made up
maybe maybe malten but it's unlikely, so they still don't know.
I guess and they think that. The reason they don't
think that it's molten though, is because Mars has a
very weak magnetic field. Um, but maybe not always. Yeah,
(30:02):
it probably had a strong magnetic field and the and
before the great desiccation event um, but now it doesn't have.
When they think that if it is molten, it's not,
there's not a lot to it. Okay, Yeah, that makes sense.
Around the Earth, score is softer mantle like toothpaste, and
it's way less dense than it is iron and magnesium silicate,
(30:25):
about eight hundred miles thick. And that's when you see
a volcano and lava flowing from a volcano, that's where
that's coming from. Well, it comes from the magma through
there the liquid all right, wasn't it I think? So
we did a podcast on volcanos. Remember that was a
good one, the volcano one. I was worried about it,
(30:46):
and Chuck, the mantle pushing up through the through the
surface accounts for those crustal uplifts, up up warps, up warps.
Yeah that's right. Um. And here on Earth we have
things like volcanoes, active volcanoes and earthquakes, and they're largely
(31:07):
due to if not exclusively due to um the fact
that we have continental plates like the crust of Earth,
which Mars also has a crust, but Earth's crust is
broken up into these plates that drift and move around
slowly and rub up against one another. Um. And that's
where the fault lines exist. And along those fault lines
(31:27):
you have volcanoes and earthquakes. Mars, that's not the case
as a crust, but it's not broken into place. It's solid. Yeah.
I thought that was pretty interesting, and that's why there's
no active volcanoes right now for one reason. Yeah. Um.
And we while we're talking about Mars, well we probably
(31:47):
should have mentioned it on the surface, but it's a
neat little tidbit if you ask me, do you know
why Mars is rust colored? Uh? No, because it's coated
in rusty. Yeah, it's exodised iron in the soil, which
makes it rusted. It's a rusty old planet, a rusty, dusty, cold, windy,
(32:10):
uninhabitable perhaps planet. And again, the reason why it's probably
uninhabitable is it lacks an atmosphere, or it practically lacks
an atmosphere. There is a very thin one still. Yeah,
I guess we can compare that to Earth. To um,
March's atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. On Earth, it's less
(32:32):
than one percent, Like you could just stop right there. Toxic,
a lot less nitrogen two point seven percent compared to Earth.
Not much oxygen at all, only point one three that's
a big factor's toxic again and um about one as
(32:53):
much water vapor is on Earth. Yeah, you need that
too inhospitable, which is why they there are proposals to
seed Mars to terraform it. Yeah, basically going and like
artificially stimulate an atmosphere to form so that in ten
thousand and fifty hundred thousand years it could conceivably be habitable. Yeah,
(33:18):
and we we did a show on that too. It
is all coming together. It's a long term plan, but sure,
which means we'll never do it. Elon muskwill maybe his grandchildren.
Uh So. The atmospheric pressure in Mars is interesting too.
It's super low and super cold, and that's why there
is no water liquid flowing, because it's either going to
(33:39):
freeze or evaporate. They can't just exist as water these days. Nope.
But like we said, possibly probably did at one point.
So you've got a thin atmosphere, which means a lot
of um solar radiation is not blocked, is not reflected um,
which means that you have very wild swings in daily
(34:02):
average temperature on Mars. Because Mars does have a day,
it does rotate, and actually it rotates it about the
same rate as Earth. The Mars salt which is short
for solar day, it's just about forty three minutes longer
than um Earth's day. Yeah, but because it's further out
(34:23):
away from the Sun, it's orbit around the Sun takes longer.
So it's year is about twice as long as a
year on Earth six hundred and eighty six point nine
eight Earth days, which means the seasons lasts longer, which
makes them more extreme as we'll see. Yeah, and you
talked about the temperature fluctuation. It's almost a hundred degrees
fahrenheit on a daily basis. The difference in temperature that's enormous. Again,
(34:50):
not very friendly for us humans. Now, well, we'll figure
it out. You have to pack a big suitcase, you know,
you have to pack your your thong as well as
your Arctic explore You could just wear a thong under
your Earth coast there, it's the key to Mars. Where
layers pack big where layers. But like you said, there
(35:14):
are seasons in the spring and early summer, the sun
heats up the atmosphere and the dust lifts up and
and makes it even hotter once that dust is in
the atmosphere, and it basically is what causes those big
dust storms we're talking about. Yeah, the dust. The dust
particles get suspended and invite more heat, which suspends more
(35:37):
particles than um. It creates wind there winds. Yeah, well,
just like here on Earth, it creates convection cells, which
creates wind. And as those wind speeds whip up, because
the atmosphere is thinner, you have to have higher speeds
because the wind has less to push against air to
(35:57):
push against, so it takes higher speed winds. But once
they do hit something like a hundred and twenty miles
an hour, the entire planet can become enveloped in a
dust storm that can last months. That's crazy. And again
it's not just dust. It's dust with one of the
more toxic compounds known to humanity in every bit of it. Yeah,
(36:20):
and it's not gonna blow off a Mars robe or
these things. You know, way like in the tons, yes,
one ton, one ton. And actually what's strange is the
dust storms, it says are beneficial because they will blow
the any um Martian dirt caked on the solar panels. Yeah,
that makes sense too, or maybe it might reveal something
(36:40):
yeah that wasn't there before, like a pyramid. That'd be
pretty cool, Chuck. I want to talk about water on Mars,
but first let's um do a message break and we're back.
So I guess let's get to the water part um.
That was NASA's direct to follow the water for many
(37:02):
years and still is really because they think they're in holds.
The key to the big question is there possibilities of
having life on Mars? Is there life? Was their life
on Mars? And we're not talking about Martians unfortunately, we're
talking about maybe bacteria, which could be Martians. I mean,
if it lives on Mars, it's Martian. I guess it's
(37:24):
a good point. Everybody just basically needs to lower the
bar for their expectations of what a Martian is. Yeah, right,
you know what I mean. Instead of little green men,
it's bacteria and um. When this article was written, it
was pre curiosity, but it's just a couple of months ago,
curiosity confirmed, uh that there is water present in the soil,
(37:47):
and they think it's everywhere. Yeah, it's basically the soil
has a very big leaching property, yeah, where it absorbs
water from the atmosphere and locks it in there, so
that if if we went up there, we could extract
um about like I said, two pints of water from
every cubic foot of soil that's mine. It's pretty It
(38:08):
is pretty cool. Again, though, we have that per chlorate problem.
It's everywhere. It would get in the water, and one
of the ways that it transfers to humans and becomes
toxic is through drinking water, so we'd have to deal
with that. But ironically, the thing about par chlorate being there,
it's also used in solid rocket fuel here on Earth.
So we would need it to get to Mars, but
(38:29):
once we got to Mars, we wouldn't want to have it. Interesting,
that is very ironic. Thanks. So you're talking, Chuck about
how water could consuerably lead to life on Mars. We
it's vital to life. It's one of the um vital
parts of life. I can't remember the term for him.
Not a building block, one of the essential some things
(38:51):
for life component. Yes, yeah, I think that is it
essential component for life. We worked that out together. This
has been a condition and no, no, Now they found
water on Mars and confirmed that it is there, and
they knew all along that there was water ice on Mars. Um.
It makes that Martian rock from four billion years ago
(39:14):
seem all the more likely that it is displaying evidence
of fossilized microbes. Yeah. And they used to think that
there was methane UH in the atmosphere or trace amounts,
but I think that has been debunked now with upon
further research. Yeah. Yeah, because again when this article was written,
it sounds like they thought it was still like they
still head detective methane and they didn't know whether it
(39:36):
was from of biological or chemical origin. Yeah. More recent
studies UM as of October two thousand twelve, UM, they
analyzed the atmosphere UH for methane six times and basically
found no more than one point three parts per billion.
Yeah that's not good for evidence of life. Yeah, and
(39:57):
that's about one six as much as they had previously estimated.
And they thought, well, maybe it went somewhere, you know,
and and they NASA said, now it wouldn't um. It
would have been super exciting, but it's methane doesn't distribute
and leave like that that quickly, like it would still
be around. So unfortunately, no methane. Speaking of methane um
(40:20):
as evidence of like remember our termite episode, somebody wrote
in to say, did you know termites or like a
huge contributor of methane to on Earth. They're the second
largest contributor of methane after five stock. Yeah. Wow, even
beating out humans. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah, because we shoot
a lot of ducks, we humans, some of us termites,
(40:43):
flatulent insects. Uh so. Bacteria um Martian soil has been
known to be like formally chemically active, but maybe not biologically,
but it is possible, maybe because they have a good
example in Greenland. UM they found bacteria that was dormant
for a hundred and twenty thousand years frozen in the ice,
(41:06):
and when they unfroze it, it started multiplying again in
the beginning of the apocalypse. Yeah, that's kind of creepy. Yeah,
but like it's not stopping. Possibly in the polarized keps
on Mars maybe that's going on too. Yeah, we just
don't know. Yet Yeah, they think that. Um it is
very possible that you could take some of them, the
extreme A file bacteria, ones that live like in um
(41:28):
volcanic events undersea and things like that, and transplant them
too Mars and some of them would survive, especially mineral
thriving um bacteria ones that like eat minerals. You could
put them on Mars and they would they would do okay.
Possibly well spaceships like if we could possibly bring our
(41:49):
own bacteria there by accident as well, you know, just
from like I think the International Space Station had E.
Colid in it. Yeah, and possibly Lee Jonella. There's disease
on the I S I YEA or the I S S.
That sounds like a like a movie waiting to happen. Sure,
I guess we sort of did that with Outland. Was there?
(42:12):
Was it a disease a disease? It was just a
cop chasing a bad guy again. I wonder if it
holds up. I doubt it. Yeah, if it held up,
it'd be alien like. It would still be in the rotation.
But Outline doesn't play on cable very often that it
really doesn't. That is pretty good evidence too. I remember
(42:33):
the Outland Mad magazine. Um I didn't have that one. Yeah,
that was a good one. Um So, Chuck. You remember
we were talking about way back how the UM Viking
and UM Mariner and Mars orbiters provided this evidence that
Mars was just a dead, barren planet and really undermine
(42:55):
the idea that there was possibly life there and that
it was lush. Well, it all so provided some conspiracy
theorists pretty solid evidence that there was or is some
sort of civilization on Mars, because yeah, Viking one in
nineteen seventies six produced a photo that looked a whole
(43:16):
lot like a Feronic type face, like the face on Mark.
Pretty clearly a face if you look at it. Uh,
it was two miles from head to toe, from tip
to to bottom. So it wasn't like Jesus on a
piece of toast. No, I mean, it looked like it
looked like a artificially constructed monument, a face of a monument.
(43:39):
Maybe when that had toppled, it was now just poking
out from the Martian soul soil. Um So they looked,
uh closer in, but there's a lot of cloud cover,
so they got kind of a garbled look. And they
looked again more recently maybe two thousand eight or two
thousand eleven, And it's very clearly just a mesa. That's disappointing.
(44:01):
It is, especially like when you look at that original yea, yeah,
when you look at the Viking one photo. Yeah, it
looks like a top old statue head. Yeah it does.
It actually factored into that terrible movie um Mission to Mars, Wow,
which I saw with hippie rob By the way. Really yea,
(44:21):
was that is the last time you saw him? It
was among that he just walked into the woods after that.
Wasn't that? That was Brian to Palmer, wasn't it. I
think it might have been so disappointing. I mean it
had an all circust Gary Sinise, don Cheetle. I think
Bill Paxton maybe I don't think it's Pullman, but I
(44:43):
might be confusing Bill Paxton from Apolar thirteen. Anyway, it
didn't pan out very well. But do you got anything else? Yeah? Um,
I don't know why this article doesn't mention if Mars
has two moons, phobos and demos. Yeah, they didn't get
into that at all. No, um and uh, Mars popped
up and pops up and pop culture a lot. There's
(45:06):
um the Mars Volta the band. Yeah. Uh. David Bowie
had a song called Life on Mars, one of the
great songs. The Misfits had the greatest Mars song, Teenagers
from Mars. That's a great song. Yeah. Oh, what's his name?
Jared Leto right thirty seconds to Mars. Yeah, they're going
(45:27):
on tour right after his Oscar Win. I had never
heard any of his music until the other day. I
was like, what are they like? And Emily tried to
describe it. Then she just played a song. Yeah, it's
not my bag, mine anything, but good for him. Oh yeah,
I think they're like huge internationally. Yeah, he's got gout.
Did you know that? I did not know that he
needs to lay off the path? No, I think he um.
(45:48):
I think it was had to do with his weight
gain and loss for the John Lennon um the Mark
David Chapman movie. He did, Oh really, Yeah, he got
all fat to play Mark David Chapman and like got
all skinny again. I think got gout because of it,
and then got even skinnier to play Rayon in Dallas
Biberus Club. Dude, have you seen it? Yes? How thin
(46:09):
can two people get? They were pretty thin, like the
two of them together make me. And there's gotta be
like that. There's gotta be a safe way to lose
and regain weight. Yeah, but I'll bet there's not very
many safe ways to gain wait to make yourself look pudgy, no,
I mean, and then to lose it again. I'll bet
(46:30):
when it's been done, Like from DeNiro to fat mac
On always sunny. I think they say they just eat
like lots of garbage and just pile it on. Yeah,
that's not I'll beat at all now. But you know
that's one of my pet peeves. When you take a
fit person in like the game thirty pounds for a
movie and it it's like, you don't look like a
fatter person and you look like a fit person who
(46:52):
like has a distended belly. You know, it takes years
to get this look. You know you gotta work at it,
sculpt this. Yeah, um, okay, you got anything else? I
got nothing else. I think this is better than the sun.
Oh yeah. As far as our our celestial episodes go
far less physics that we had to deal with. We
(47:14):
haven't done the moon straight up? Have we? I think
we have? Have we? Jerry? Have we done the moon.
I think we did because we talked about its origin,
whether it was calved, whether it was a separate decreation.
I'm pretty sure we've done the moon. All right, we'll
look it up. It is getting bad. We need we
need to get a list together. Yeah, we do, so
we quit boring everyone with this. Yeah, you'd think we'd
(47:37):
edited out, but we just don't. Well, if you want
to learn more about Mars, you can type that word
into the search bar how stuff works dot com. And uh,
since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Uh, Josh,
I'm gonna call this um your theory on eating what
(47:58):
you crave? Did you see this email? No? Um, just
listen to the Salt podcast. Dudes, and Josh posture that
you could get along just fine eating only what you crave.
I'm not sure how serious he was, though fairly serious,
fairly okay, I'll agree that if it depends on whether
I'm right, I'll agree that a hundred and fifty years
ago this may have been pretty viable. These days, it's
a different story. There's a lot of evidence that points
(48:21):
to food manufacturers actually designing junk foods that make you
crave more of them. Mainly sugar and fat heavy foods.
There's one great book in particular called Good Calories, Bad
Calories by Gary Tobbs, basically tells the story of how
a lot of what the f d A and U
s d A recommends as wrong and how it got
that way. For instance, the guy who conducted the Seven
(48:41):
Countries study, which is what caused the government to say
fat will kill you, simply throughout data that contradicted the
result he was looking for. Throwing the fact that corn
is subsidized and super cheap, we have the recipe for
an obese, misinformed population that's addicted to sugar. Has been
fed terribly wrong information and about health for a long time. Yeah,
(49:02):
I've learned recently, like you're supposed to have fats, and
there are good fats and there are bad fats, but
like low fat is a not a good way to go,
and it has been kind of foisted on us, foisted
you like the venue. That word, and that is from
Steve Baum, the bomber in what he calls good Old
(49:22):
New Jersey or as we calls Parsis. Is he from
Tharsus City, that is steep Bomb. I don't know if
he's from Tharsus City or not, but he's from somewhere
in There is a really good article about um, how
(49:44):
food scientists engineer foods to make us crave them is
on the New York Times. It was a couple of
years ago by a guy named Michael Moss. Yeah, and
in your defense, I don't think you were. I think
you meant it more along the lines of craving real
foods and not in a surely I'm craving ben and
Jerry's or pretzels, right. No. I meant like, like craving
(50:05):
a steak or something like that, not ignoring that and
going with, you know, ahead of lettuce Um. I can't
find the name of that article, but it's a Michael
Moss article and it's from the New York Times, and dude,
it is good. It's one of those really extensive long
form ones that like should be long form because there's
just so much great information in it opening. So look
(50:29):
it up, everybody. It will open your eyes. Uh. If
you want to get in touch with Chucking Me, you
can tweet to us at s y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff
you should know. You can send us an email to
stuff podcasts at Discovery dot com. Check out our YouTube channel,
Josh and Chuck. It's pretty fun, and also be sure
(50:49):
to hang out on our website Stuff you Should Know
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stuff Works dot com. M hm hm
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Josh Clark
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