Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseThe SF Universe of Mary Robinette Kowal's "The Calculating Stars"
Daniel and Jorge discuss the book "The Calculating Stars" and interview the author. Mary Robinette Kowal's science fiction debut, 2019 Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Award for best novel, The Calculating Stars, explores the premise behind her award-winning "Lady Astronaut of Mars."
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Hi.
I'm David Ego from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, better we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey or Hey, I have an idea for a new science institute.
H nice, I guess you're going to call it the White Sun Institute.
No, no, no, I'm going to call it the End of the World Research Institute.
What you want to study new ways to kill everyone?
No, there's plenty of people doing that already. I want to study the ways science can help in a disaster.
Oh it's pretty cool. But wait, what if science is what causes the disaster?
Oh, we'll have a department for that also.
Oh yeah, who's going to lead that department?
Professor Bruce willis, of course.
The professor of saving the world.
We have him on standby.
Whereas Bruce willis when you need him.
He's at the End of the World Research institution in the coronavirus.
Like all celebrities seem to do.
No No cut Cut.
I am Horeham, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics.
I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a particle physicist and I'm not actively working towards the end.
Actively, But you're hoping inadvertently or what's your what's your motivation here?
I'm not hoping for the end of the world. I'm not trying to facilitate the end the world. I'm not trying to speed the end times. I just want to get it out there.
Abivalent about the end of the world.
I'm just saying, if it comes, it wasn't because I made it happen.
I see.
I'm not saying I won't be at fault.
But should have put more funding into science.
That's right, Maybe particle physics would have saved the world.
Well.
Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe Say production of iHeartRadio.
In which we take you away from the concerns and worries of the every day and travel out into the universe and think about all the crazy, amazing, beautiful, terrifying, extreme, and gorgeous things out there.
Yeah, because you know, we are living in pretty interesting times, and we figured why better way to get us all through this than to think about the larger universe, the fast cosmes out there that make us seem like insignificant little things.
That's right. And usually on this podcast we pick a topic in science. It's at the sort of the forefront in the brains of scientists. Things people are wondering about the problem, they're trying to crack a question that scientists are currently asking, and we share it with you because, in our opinion, the universe belongs to all of us, and wondering about the universe is a common human experience.
That's right. We are all in this together, and we're also all made of the same stuff. Right.
That's right. Me, you, lava and hamsters were basically all the same things.
And space bananas. Don't forget the bananas.
I'm not including space bananas in that category. Now, that's in a separate, different category like dark matter.
We don't know.
I've never had one, so I can't decide. Maybe I love space bananas. Maybe space bananas will bring me into the fold of the Church of the Bananas.
Maybe they turn into dark matter, just like real bananas.
Real bananas do turn into a form of dark matter.
That's true, but no, we like to talk about the universe, all the things in it, and also all of the ideas that are out there about science and how science can impact society, and how it can help society, and how might it even affect if something happens to humanity.
That's right, and we like to think optimistically on this podcast. We'd like to think that science is one of humanity's greatest inventions. It's pulled us out of lots of scrapes, it's provided quality of life, it's brought you this podcast, and so we hope that in some crazy end of the world scenario, scientists will pull together and bring us all through.
And it's even cooler when this great invention of humanity meets another great invention of humanity, which is the arts and writing and creative and differs.
That's right, and that's why on this podcast we've been doing a series of episodes about the physics of science fiction universes. I've been reading science fiction and talking to authors about how they constructed their universe, how much physics they put into it, how it reflects on our universe, and how it reflects on the human experience.
Yes, so you can look back through our archive and find a couple of great book reviews and author interviews that we've done with several pretty well known and award winning recent science fiction novels. And so today on the program, we are doing another of these series where we talk about a book that recently won the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, right, which are like the I guess, the Oscars and Emmy of Science Fiction Writing Writing.
Yeah, it's more like the Golden Globes and the Oscars. It's pretty impressive to even be nominated for one of these, to win one of these, to win both of them in the same year is really a monument.
Which one is hosted by Ricky Gervais.
If you can believe it. The hosts are even nerdier for these awards.
Oh what do they do? They dress up? Is there like a ceremony with taxes and stuff?
I think they cosplay. I'm not sure.
Oh nice, I.
Know I've been. I've never been one of these, and I don't think they're broadcast on TV.
Somebody writes a book about that.
But a lot of these books are wonderful. But we're not choosing these books because they want awards. We just for the books we've chosen that are wonderful. We'd like to mention that, hey, these authors have some deserved acclaim. And for today's episode, I thought it would be fun to talk about a dystopian science fiction novel, one in which science comes to the rescue and saves humanity.
Yeah, because Daniel, you are a big fan of science fiction, and we are living in interesting times, and how did you piecese two things together? And is it really fiction at this point?
It's fascinating. I started reading this book, and I made plans to read this book, which is all about how science might rescue humanity in the face of a huge catastrophe, well before this pandemic started, and now it's sort of increasingly relevant. And you'll hear but I had a pretty fascinating conversation with the author about how the current pandemic impacts her thinking about science and technology and it's interfacing with government and people and how people feel about this stuff. It's an important topic.
Let's dive into it. So to be on the program, we'll be asking the question can science save humanity from a Crisis, the science fiction universe of Mary robin at Cole and her book The Calculating Stars. So this is a pretty recent book, right. It came out in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen.
Yeah, it came out around then. And it's in a series of books about the Lady Astronauts, and it's all about women becoming astronauts and being on the forefront of exploration and it's fascinating. It's a novel she wrote. It's a prequel to a short story she wrote called The Lady Astronaut many years ago, which was also wonderful, and she liked this universe she created so much, and now she's written a series of books as a prequel to that short story. So there's The Calculating Stars, then there's The Faded Sky, and she has a new book coming out next year in this trilogy.
Wow. And she has a pretty interesting history for a science fiction author. She used to be a puppeteer for Jim Henson.
Yeah yeah, and now she's like officially on the Sesame Street Hall of Fame. So she is really an artist, you know, comes from a creative background. She's not one of these science fiction authors that was once a scientist and then transitioned into writing. She's always been on the creative, sort of the non Mathew, you know, artistic inspired side of things. But I asked her about that. You'll hear her answer. She feels like being a puppeteer and being a science fiction author sort of draw from the same inspiration.
Really, I guess you're using your imagination and coming up with the voices and characters. Is that kind of what she meant.
Yeah, all sciences really just make believe. That's right.
You guys just sit in meetings, moving your hands, going and blah blah blah, blah blah blah.
Yeah, and this is a really fascinating book. It's different from a lot of the other stuff that I read, which tends to be like far future science fiction, space opera, crazy technology, alternative universe physics. This one is placed in our universe, and it's sort of alternative history science fiction. It's like going back in time to do science fiction. So it's pretty fascinating, and she takes a very different approach to writing and to incorporating the science into the story than almost anything else I've read.
Yeah, you told me that it's very realistic about the science sort of like the Martian, you know, where they really sort of don't invent or do anything magical. They just try to work with what we have right now.
Yeah, one thing about being a scientist is that you never really know what's going on. You have limited information, and from that you're trying to figure out what's going on, what should I do? How do I gather the next piece of information? And you rarely see that in science fiction. In science fiction, it's usually something happens and then all of a sudden, the scientists have some like awesome heads of display with graphics and visuals that shows you exactly what's going on. And she really got the process part of this, the experience of not knowing and how do you figure it out and those little trickles of discovery, you know, coming in to change your opinion about what might be happening. She really nailed it. And that's so impressive, especially for somebody who hasn't actually done it. I mean, she doesn't have a science background.
Interesting, and you're telling that it has sort of an interesting theme or undercurrent about how governments and societies and scientists can work together, or how they react to a natural disaster, or like a global crisis.
Yeah, absolutely, it's I think people will find it very relevant for today. It touches on themes of like when the scientists say there's a huge disaster coming, how do they get the government to listen. Like if you look out your window and you don't see the world on fire, but the scienceists are telling you it's going to be on fire in a week, we better act. Now, how do you get the government to believe you?
Oh?
Boy. So there's a lot of really interesting stuff in there that people might have thought, oh, this is really relevant, or its analogy to like climate change, but now it's much more an analogy to what we're facing today.
Well, but the scenario is a little bit different, right, So it's not a pandemic, it's not a virus or anything like that. It's sort of a little bit more sciencey and spacey. So step us through this book, Daniel. First of all, before we get to the interview, Now, what's the basic idea of the book and when is it set.
So it's set on Earth in our universe in around the nineteen fifties, so you know, modern technology doesn't exist. We don't have tiny computers and all that stuff.
But it was our world when we were in the fifties. It's not like an alternate nineteen fifties where they had hoverboards. It's like the same nineteen fifties.
It's the same nineteen fifties. But then it diverges, you know, it's an alternative history starting from our nineteen fifties.
We still beat the Nazis, right, we still.
Beat the Nazis. Yes, But sometime in the nineteen fifties, an enormous meteorite hits the Earth and basically wipes out DC in a flash.
What of all places on Earth, DC gets hit.
I'm not sure if you mean that it's like, hey, nice choice meteorite, or like.
Oh no, I guess I mean nice choice. Science switching author, what's the one place it can hit that would cause the maximum amount of kids?
And the story takes place from the point of view of a young woman who's gifted mathematically and she's a pilot. And one of the things I like about the book is that when you start out, you don't know what's happened. Is just she's out with her friends and she sees this huge thing in the sky. She doesn't know, are we being attacked by the Russians or has a meteorite hit, and she's piecing it together bit by bit exactly the way that she would and you know, she doesn't know if her parents have survived. And this, this experience of not knowing what's going on and piecing it together is really really well done.
Because this was pre Twitter.
How did anybody learn get any information?
You have to go to the new stand and.
You know, of course there's immediate impact, which is DC is gone, our government is decimated, all that stuff you have to react to.
But like, how much time did people have to react to this?
No time at all. There was no warning, We had no idea what was happening. It was just all of a sudden boom.
All right, well we'll talk about the plausibility of the scenario. But then that's not all. It gets worse.
Yeah, it seems immediately to just be a big disaster, like, okay, DC is gone, we have a lot of rebuilding to do. But this scientist she figures out pretty quickly that there's longer term consequences to this, that what it's going to happen is that it's going to create a big greenhouse effect. It's going to heat up the entire Earth and it's going to make the Earth uninhabitable in a few years.
Kind of like what happened to the dinosaurs. Like, you know, it wasn't the impact that killed the dinosaurs, but like the dust cloud kind of.
Yeah, the longer term effects there, we'll talk about the details of the science. But when you have a big impact like that, you can either throw up a bunch of dust and ash and create like an impact winter, right because you're blocking out the sun and the Earth goes into an ice age. Or you can create a greenhouse effect, which can be a runaway effect, so you can basically turn the Earth into an oven. And either way it's not ovid.
Either way, medias are not good.
I wouldn't recommend ordering a meteor for delivery, even.
If it's a no contact delivery.
Even then, and as a reaction, Earth has to scramble and they have to develop space technology and basically start to colonize Mars because they realize Earth is no longer going to be a place we can live.
In the fifties, man, in the fifties, we didn't get to the moon until nineteen sixty nine, right, that's right. Wow, So this was like way accelerating.
Yeah, and that was in response to what felt like a disaster at the time, right, which is like the Russians are beating us in the space race, and so a lot of this is about how human vanity makes its priorities. You know. It makes the point that if we had to do this, could we how would we do this, if we just you know, gun to our head against the wall, had to do this or die? Could we put this together? Could we pull it out?
What's this before like the Cold War really kicked in, or because you know, we just won the war and putting myself in the time, so we just won the Second World War, but this is before kind of the Cold War started kind of.
Being about Yeah, And one angle in her book is the humanity sort of pulls together and these national boundaries start to be less important because it's a human problem and we're all going to solve it. And scientists from the around the world are all working together, and it's sort of inspiring in that way. And I really hope that in the event of a huge disaster that scientists do pull together and work on this. And frankly, I've seen in the news that people are working together in labs right now around the world sharing information about this virus and trying to make a vaccine. And so it's it's it's a little weird to read about it in the book. When I was first reading, I thought, this is a little idealistic. But you know, now I kind of see it happening in reality, not on the same scale. Of course, science does respond in this human way, in this personal way to pull together.
When you first read it, you thought it was a little kind of sickly sweet, maybe like unrealistic that people would actually pull together. But now in such a times, I wonder you're looking for signs of the opposite, you know.
Yeah, I mean I wouldn't have criticized it. I just thought, like, you know, that's on the positive edge of the potential outcomes, you know, And I admired that sort of idealism. And I actually asked her about this in the interview you'll hear her reaction. But that's sort of the angle of it, all right.
Cool, Well, let's get into the science of it, of the size of a meteor hitting the Earth, and then let's get into the interview with science fiction author Mary Robinette Cole. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about Mary robinetts Cole's sciencewitcher novel The Calculating Stars, which is about a meteor hitting the Earth in the nineteen fifties and it just so happens to hit the White House. Does it hit the White House directly, kind of like in Independence Day, Like there's a shot at the White House and then the meter hits right on it. Or is it in the suburbs?
No, it actually hits in the water in the bay near the coast, and which is much more devastating. And she thought really carefully about the science. I was really impressed, especially for somebody without a science background. She really thought about what would happen if it hit on land, or if it's in the deep water, or if it hit in the shallow water, and you get different outcomes, And actually the most devastating is a shallow water impact. I think that's why she put the media there.
Why because it creates an explosion and a tsunami at the same time.
Yes, and it throws a lot of water into the atmosphere.
Oh, and I'm guessing that's part of the plot.
That is part of the plot, my friend.
All right, well, let's talk about a meteor hitting. And we've talked about meteors hitting and how there's a group at NASA that whose only job it is to look out for meteors hitting the Earth. But this was back in the nineteen fifties, right, because back then we didn't have the We weren't looking out for meteors where.
We were not And this is a really fascinating topic, especially to place historically, because you're right, in the fifties, we weren't looking at all, and we totally could have been blindsided by meteor like we might have noticed it, you know, as it approached a few days in advance, because we had telescopes and people were looking, but you basically have to get lucky and spotted. Nobody was on purpose looking.
For this, I see. People were too busy doing the hula hoops and going around in roller skates and going to the diner and then suddenly to be lucked for you to look up and see a media coming at you.
Yeah, And we didn't have those sort of telescopes we have now, and the budget for science and all that stuff. You know, America had just emerged from World War Two and it's about to enter this era of investing in science and universities and academics. So we just didn't have the technology, and even later decades later, we still hadn't really done it. It wasn't until Shoemaker Levy in the nineties, which is a comet that hit Jupiter with fantastic fireballs the size of the Earth, that people woke up and thought, hold on a second, there could be something out there that's going to hit us. We better look more carefully.
Really, that was the first time in the eighties that people started taking this seriously.
It was in the nineties, and so really only in the last twenty or thirty years, as NASA made a serious, dedicated effort to map the Solar System for anything that might hit us.
Ooh interesting, huh. I didn't know it was that recent.
Yeah, And that is actually a moment that I got drawn into science. I was working on a science project that summer where we had a super fast, high resolution camera and we saw this comt come into the Solar System and break into pieces and then slam into Jupiter one by one. And so we hooked up this awesome camera to a telescope and I watched those things hit Jupiter in real time. It took these high resolution, high speed videos of the impacts. It was pretty exhilarating. Yeah.
Really wow, And so you said, I'm going into particle physics.
At the time, I actually wanted to be an astronomer. But it turns out that you don't get climactic collisions like this very often, which is, you know, a good thing and a bad thing depending on your angle you.
Like, I mean ten to the twenty three collisions per second. This is not enough one every hundred years anymore.
So there's a few angles on this one. Is It's totally true that in the fifties we could have been blindsided by a big meteorite totally plausible. Today. However, we have mapped out most of the stuff in the Solar System, so we know where most of the big rocks are. In fact, we're pretty sure we know where all of the big rocks are. Of all the planet killers or the extinction event rocks, pretty sure we've seen those. We know where they are. We've seen them for long enough to map out their trajectory and predict where they're going to be in the next couple of one hundred years.
Mmm.
So we have a little bit of an a lead time. But in the book, how big was this meteor?
Was it?
Like a how big relative to Manhattan? That seems to be the standard scale?
She avoids telling us in the book, And I tried to ask her about this in the interview, and she said that she very purposely didn't put the numbers in why is it such?
A why is it? As well?
I think she didn't feel confident about her calculations. Remember, she's not a science person, and she didn't want to put details in there she wasn't one hundred percent sure of so she left herself some fuzz room. Interesting But then as an extra wrinkle, she made her character super curious about the size of the meteor that had hit, but never the answer. They don't know what they don't know. I'm curious, you're curious. The character was curious. The author didn't tell anybody.
And alert you'll never know the answer because there is no answer, all right. So then it hits the Earth and it obliterates DC. So I guess all of our politicians and representatives are gone.
Yeah, but I want to say one more thing about the chances of this happening, which is you should feel comfortable that NASA and the people around the world have tracked most of the asteroids which could potentially hit the planet, and they're not going to hit us in the next couple of hundred years, So relax. That's fine, But.
Like you have more serious things to worry about, like toilet paper.
But there is a big question mark because one of the most dangerous things that could hit the Earth is not actually an asteroid. It's a comet like the one that hit Jupiter. And comets move much faster and they're harder to predict because they can have like hundreds or thousands of years long orbits around the Sun, meaning there could be one out there really far away. We haven't seen, and it could be headed on a collision course towards Earth and we wouldn't get a lot of lead time before it actually hit us. Wow.
I think we talked about this in a previous episode. But do you think maybe there's a young grat sudent in Jupiter with a telescope going, Oh, man, I hope that meteor hits there.
I've been waiting for this.
All right, So the meter hits and it obliterates Washington, DC. We had all of our politicians I guess they were all in town at the same time.
Yeah, all except for one. So like the you know, one cabinet member ends up being president oh designated survivor, Yes, exactly.
Interesting and then so and then it creates a huge I guess hole where DC used to be or near where DC used to be. But you're saying that the real plot twist is what happens after the meteor hits.
Yeah, because it lands in the water, it shoots up a huge amount of water into the atmosphere, which becomes vapor and stays up there as gas and vapor and basically creates a new blanket around the Earth. And so then what you get is a big greenhouse.
Like clouds, like basically clouds.
Basically a lot of very high altitude clouds.
Oh, high altitude clouds. Mm hmmm, Like they turn into ice crystals, I.
Guess, yeah, And so they stay up in the atmosphere and this water vapor actually acts like a big blanket around the Earth, and so it's transparent to a lot of the Sun's energy going in but not going out, and so the Earth sort of gradually heats up.
Because of the infrared rays can't get out. That's not the idea. They can get in.
But now that you know transmission, when you enter the atmosphere and you shift to lower free you're absorbed and shift to a different frequency. But the point is that it creates a greenhouse effect, and then the Earth is heating up. And they figure this out in the book pretty quickly, like things are going to cool off quickly and then they're going to start heating up, and then the oceans will.
Boil, which would make more of these clouds.
Yeah, And as it gets hotter, exactly, you get more water vapor released, and you get more of these clouds, and you know, as a fascinating aside, there's a really interesting theory that this is exactly what happened to Venus. That Venus used to be a lot like Earth. It used to with water oceans on the surface at you know, basically the same temperature as Earth. It must have even looked like Earth from space, but it might have been hit by a huge meteor which created this runaway greenhouse effect. Now it's hot and totally uninhabitable.
Well, and how much time did they have in the book before the ocean's boiled.
Not a whole lot of time.
You know.
It's not the kind of thing that's going to happen tomorrow or next week or next year. It's going to sort of gradually increase. So in five years it'll be too hot to live comfortably, ten years and be very very difficult to grow anything. And then as the years go on, the oceans will heat up and heat up. And so I think, you know, they have order ten years, decades kinds of things, but not a lot of time to build a huge space infrastructure.
Interesting, and so then what they have to do then is figure out how to get off of Earth and colonize like the Moon and Mars. What's their plan.
That's precise of the plan is start building space infrastructure, build rockets, you know, get astronauts up there, start practicing on the Moon. But eventually the goal is to build colonies on Mars.
And what would they eat? Yeah, that's my compute.
Yeah, it's really tricky and you know, if you go to Mars we talked about this on the podcast once you have two basic options. One is like build a lot of bubbles that you can live inside, or try to terraform the whole planet. But terraforming is very very hard.
Wow. And so what did they do.
Well in this first book? There don't get there yet, so it's a you know sort of series.
Yeah, oh, it's just a teaser. So the first book is just about how they set up the problem and how what they start doing.
Yeah, and the development of the space industry and astronaut training. And there's a fascinating side story there about how in these times of crisis, the opportunities for like large social change and so the main character, who's a woman, pushes herself forward to become an astronaut. So she sort of breaks this barrier and it's the first lady astronaut. Interesting, and so most of the rest of the book is about how they developed this technology and how they slowly build towards taking people into space. And then you know, the rest of the trilogy, which I haven't yet had a chance to read, explores in more detail actually colonizing the Moon and Mars.
Wo oh man, it's kind of sad. That's what it takes. That's what it would have taken in the fifties for women to become astronauts. Yeah, meteor hitting the water just the right spot.
Yeah, And it's really well written from that point of view. Also, there's a lot of these issues of that sort of resonate with similar themes and like Hidden Figures. You know, people having the skills, wanting to contribute to an important problem, but being left on the sidelines because of their gender, or because of their race, or because of their background. And so from that point of view, it's also sort of inspiring in this novel that they overcome that and that humanity in the end lets our best step forward, regardless of their background and how they look, and contribute to this problem that we're all facing.
Interesting, so it said the Hollywood pitch would be Hidden Figures meets Armageddon or Deep Impact, depending on you know, which flavor of asteroid media.
Yeah, I think they work nicely together. I think before Hidden Figures came out, people didn't really even understand that the concept of a computer in the fifties was a person somebody who was doing computations that were necessary to solve these hard problems. Before we had minturization of technology that we had these computers you could use on board. So I think that actually helps people understand sort of the context and the tone the cultural situation that this book takes place.
Wow, sounds pretty cool, pretty fascinating, pretty appropo to our times today. And so, Daniel, you got a chance to talk to Mary Robinette Cole about her book and what she was thinking when she wrote it, and about some of the signs in it, right, and about puppets and about puppets. All right, And so here is Daniel's interview with Mary Robinette Cole, the author of the science fiction novel The Calculating Stars.
First, thanks very much for joining us today on the podcast. Would you mind introducing yourself for our listeners.
My name is Mary Robinette Cole. I write science fiction and fantasy. I'm also an audiobook narrator and a professional puppeteer.
Well, it's not that often that you made a science fiction author who's also a puppeteer. How did those two careers intersect.
They're both all about theater of the possible. Anything is possible when you step into puppetry or science fiction, so they're both also, I think, places that tend to naturally explore what if an imagination?
Well, that's wonderful. I'd like our listeners to get a chance to get to know you a little bit, to hear how you think about science fiction and the universe. So let me ask you a couple sort of and science fiction questions just to get acquainted. And the first is a classic question. I'm sure you've heard about science fiction philosophy, which is about teleporters. Are you in the camp that believes that when you step into a Star Trek style teleporter, that it actually moves you from one location to another, or in the camp to think that it disassembles you, in effect killing you and recreating a clone of you somewhere else.
Existentially, I think that it moves you from one point to another mechanically. I think it disassembles you and reassembles a clone.
At the other end, I see. And so would you be willing, given that understanding, to step into a Star Trek style teleporter knowing you'd be disassembled?
Absolutely?
I mean it is a faster version of what we do with on a regular basis, with our actual bodies. These cells that are in my body right now are not the cells that were in it seven years ago. For the most part. You know, we're constantly replenishing our selves and changing things. It's a ship of theseus. Question, right, at what point does it stop being me? And the answer is doesn't except to some philosophers who like to argue about things. So it's the same thing. It's just a sped up process. That said, you know, possibility for copying errors again, a thing that can happen with a natural body, not on the sped up timeline.
All right, So then while we're talking about science fiction technology, what bit of technology that you see in science fiction would you like to see become reality?
I mean a teleporter. Yeah. One of the things I will say that is becoming incredibly apparent to me with the you know, shelter in place, sparkling, isolation, distance, socializing of life, and a pandemic, is how much time I actually do spend in transit. That's a lot of time I'm getting back, so and people that I would like to be able to visit and see, and resource allocation suddenly becomes much easier if you don't have to if you aren't dealing with perishability to the same degree. So teleportation and time travel, those are the two that I would very much.
Like to have.
All right, it sounds like it would solve some logistical problems for you.
Ah yeah, yeah, a lot wonderful.
Personally, I'd like to write a book in the future and then travel back in time to deliver to me here today, like instant book writing.
Yeah yeah.
So then let's talk about your book, The Calculating Stars. First of all, congratulations on the success and on all of the awards. Very well deserved.
Thank you very much. That was an exciting time.
I really enjoyed reading it, and something that really resonated with me in the book were the sort of scientific moments of jel Like there's a scene in the book where they first see these pictures from the moon and you can feel the scientists like at the edge of their seat, like I want to see it in the photograph. What does that look like, and you know as a scientist, you know, I've had a few of those moments in my career when you're opening the data from the experiment, when you're asking the universe a question and it has to respond like you've cornered it and forced it to reveal something. So congrats on writing that so effectively. But I have to ask, how did you do that? I mean, your background is not as a scientist, unless I've misunderstood.
No, it's very definitely not.
How did you capture that so well? Did you spend a bunch of time with NASA folks.
The sense of wonder is a universal thing, you know that, and it's the object of the wonder shifts. But having that sense of wonder, having that sense of discovery and joy from that, that's something that I think that everybody can experience and probably has experienced at some point in their life. So for me, it's easy to do this with seeing the moon because I am not a scientist, but I'm a huge space nerd. I remember my mom talked me into a college level astronomy class when I was in middle school, mostly so that I could go and do the astronomy labs and use the telescopes, because you know, it was fantastic. It is a it's been a lifelong interest. The thing that I like about writing science fiction is that it gives me a socially acceptable way to indulge my natural curiosity, so I'm able to ask people. And then the other thing that I would say is that, in addition to bringing my own curiosity and joy and interest in this, I read a lot of autobiographies and memoirs and nonfiction where there are interviews or discussions with people who are scientists and seeing the specific things that triggered their point of joy, the things that they are excited about. Like I just got to talk to someone who's a geologist specializing in Mars, and I asked her, you know, would you go to Mars? And she's like, the opportunity to be able to actually touch the things that I've spent my entire career studying, And you could hear her just over the phone. Her entire expression just lit up at that possibility. And as a writer, I get to create those moments basically by extrapolating from my own experience and mapping it on to the points that someone else notices and loves well.
I think you really nailed it. I was impressed.
Thanks.
And there's something else to me that was very unusual to find in science fiction, but I liked in my experience, science, real science is about wondering, and it's about curiosity, of course, but the process of it is not always so exciting every day. It's not like I'm discovering a new particle before lunch and revealing us secret to the universe, you know, with my coffee. It's a slow, painstaking process there. And the thing that I really respect about the depiction in your book is that you describe that process like they're trying to figure out what happened and they don't know anything. They're clueless, and it takes a while to figure it out and oh my gosh, this asteroid might be an extinction event. You know, the realizations come slowly, they're not always at once. You capture that cluelessness, the frustration, the difficulty. So tell me why did you decide to make this science process so integral to the story. You know, it really drives the plot in a way I haven't seen in other science fiction.
I think that for me. The reason of there's two reasons. One is that I find it inherently interesting. We do see a lot of stories of the lone savior. But when you anyone who is interested in space at all knows that, you know, the astronauts are out there all of the credit and the glory, but they are supported by this enormous, enormous body of people who are all experts in their field, doing top level work as a group, and at the they're at the end of this long, long, long problem solving thing. But again, I come like, I'm from a theater background, and it's very similar in a lot of ways that when you go to see a show, when you go to see a movie, there's the movie star, there's the lead on stage who gets all of the glory, but they're supported by all of these other people and hours and hours and hours of work of human labor leading up to that, the rehearsals and all of these things. We tend to not celebrate and valorize all of that effort, which which is that's where all of the conflict is. Like by the time you get to the final product, everything's been solved, you know, and an actual space walk when you're watching it, you know, should be boring because there should be nothing that goes wrong like that, that's what you're aiming for. My understanding from the people who've done it is that it's not actually boring so much as very very focused, but it is digging into the how do we do these things and the iterations that I find interesting. I've also always been interested in process, Like I would if you offer me the opportunity to see to go to watch a rehearsal of a show or watch the finished show, I'm going to pick the rehearsal every time.
Well, I think you got the behind the scenes stuff pretty accurate. I mean, I see a lot of science fiction movies where the scientists get like one piece of data and then dot dot dot they have some amazing idea, complete with fancy graphics five seconds later and it's just all figured out. And to me, that's like where most of the science is. It's in that dot dot dot part, and it's slow and it's painful, but that's what makes it science is the gradual. Really.
Now, having said that, I having complimented me on that and said that, I will also say that the other thing that I do in this is I very specifically treat mathematics like a magic system. I establish what it is that Elma, my main character, can do with math. I show you a couple of hints of her doing the math. There is not a single point in that book where there is a complete equation, and there is not a single point where she goes from start to finish on solving a math thing. Because math is not my happy place. And basically I figured out that once I explain to people that Elma can do math in her head and she's very good at it, that they would just believe me that she could do that level of mathematics in her head. And then I didn't have to do it. I just had to know that it was possible to be done mathematically. And it turns out that you can represent almost anything mathematically.
Well, it seems like you did some of the math behind the statements in the book to make sure they were plausible. So I totally about it.
I did not, I know it seems like it. I did not do any of the math in the book. I cribbed it from Werner von Brown's Mars a Technical Tale, which is he describes as a novel and it is certainly fiction, but it also has these tables of appendices in the back. He wrote it in nineteen forty seven to try to convince people use fiction to convince people to go to Mars. So I cribbed his I think there's more appendixes than there is actual novel, so I cribbed from that. And then I also had a science consultant, Stephen Grenade, who did most of the rest of the math. And then I had a bunch of other people. But most of the actual math in there comes from those two sources. And I'm just like we played mad lips basically, I would say, and then Elma did bracket math bracket, Well, I think that we need to examine the bracket. Fancy mass phrase bracket.
Oh that's wonderful, and right hand.
Them, playmate. It's so much easier.
Oh, I wish I could do signs that way. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite, But the people in the dairy industry are us. Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times. The same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit us dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
We think of Franklin as the doddling dude flying a kite in a rain, but those experiments are the most important scientific discoveries of the time.
I'm Evan Ratliffe.
Last season we tackled the ingenuity of elon musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from history.
His media empire makes him the most successful self made business person in America. I mean, he was never early to bed, an early to rise type person. He's enormously famous. Women shout wearing their hair and what was called the coiffor a la Franklin.
And who's more relevant now than ever.
Only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin, but he's too old and once Washington been doing.
Listen to on Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey everyone, Jake's story Elli hear from John Boy Media. I want to tell you about my podcast, Waken Jake. It's your go to spot for anything and everything sports baseball, football, basketball, hockey, golf, college, whatever's hot in the street, we're talking about it on Waken Jake. So if you're a diehard fan or looking for the latest buzz, we've got you covered. No matter your favorite sport, we're breaking it down with the passion that'll make you feel like you're in the stands with us. Plus we've got a bunch of guests Foolish Bailey, Jolly Olive, Chris Rose and more, mock drafts, rankings, whatever you want. It's the sports world. And come on and join our friends in the Waken Jake family. You will not regret it. So new episodes Monday and Wednesday. You can watch along on the Wake and Jake YouTube channel, or listen Awaken Jake on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
So, in my reading of the book, the story essentially revolves around how humanity responds to a mega crisis, how that creates opportunities to upend the social order. Is that a fair description? So then let me ask you what gave you the idea to use this concept like a meteorite hitting the earth. Did you start from that particular science concept and then think about what would happen? Or did you have this story you wanted to tell and we're looking for the sort of mad live science moment that would allow you to tell that story.
It's a mix. This particular novel was a little odd from my usual process in that I had written two stories in this universe. One of them is The Astronaut of Mars, which is set about forty years along the timeline from where Calculating Stars is forty years down the line. So Calculating Stars is a prequel to this, and the backstory for that, and in this other short story that I have called We Interrupt this broadcast, is that a meteor had hit DC and that caused everyone to get off the planet very fast. So I had this initial thing, but I also had this future of international cooperation, which meant that when I went back to build out the novel that I knew that I was building towards a hopeful future. The reason that I wanted it to be a meteor strike in the Lady Astronaut of Mars versus a nuclear bomb or anything like that, any of the other catastrophic things, was that I wanted something that was absolutely that could not be blamed on a single person. You know, it couldn't be blamed on another country. That it was, you know, it was an act of God, because I think that we reacted differently to those than we do to something that you know, we're a foreign government. If it had been someone doing something catastrophic, there would have been you know, reprisals and all of those other potential things that would have distracted people. But we do react to natural disasters or even like Notre Dame when when that caught on fire, there was you know, global mourning for something that didn't affect the majority of people who were witnessing it. The wildfires in Australia. The way we react to that is very different than than the way we react to other things that our equal number of lives lost, sorry more lives lost in Syria, but we react. We react differently to conflict than we do to disaster. So I wanted something in.
The sense that the science community sort of pulling together and treating it like a humanity wide problem.
Yeah, yeah, I mean just looking at the way people are different communities are reacting to the pandemic that we're in right now. So one of the things that I do with the kind of fiction that I write, I often I look at historical examples and patterns from that, and there are patterns, one of which is that in the initial moment of the shock, the moment right after everyone does pull together, there's like a natcha instinct for most people, and they've actually done studies on this, but the instinct for most people is to help, and then the urge to continue helping depends on who is setting the tone at the top, and you see different patterns for how that plays out. Looking at history. One of the things that I think is really lovely looking at the way Italy is handling it, and they're being hiten incredibly hard. But one of the things that they're doing is, you know, they're leaning out the windows and singing together. And then I believe it's six pm, all of the church bells toll and everyone leans out the window and collapse and applauds the medical professionals who are working because they want them to know how appreciative and supportive they are. And that's lovely, lovely. The United States, I understand that our sales of guns and AMMO are up, and we are hoarding toilet paper.
Let's talk for a minute about the problem that they're solving in your novel. A meteorite strikes the Earth and there's a giant impact. So how do you rate the chances that humanity is actually going to face this kind of scenario?
I mean, you're asking me to tell you numbers.
Well, I mean, is this something that you think is a reasonable thing for us to worry about?
Yeah?
Yeah, I mean we do, and at the same time we don't because when it hits us, we won't see it coming. But there's there where a lot of Earth has had been hit before we will be hit again. It's just it's a matter of time, you know. We think things hit Earth every day of different sizes. It's just a matter of time before something hits us. That's a problem.
And about the impact itself, Like in your book, you had the impactor strike essentially in the water. You create this enormous tsunami and it throws up a lot of stuff into the atmosphere, which stimulates climate change. How important was it to you to like get the sort of physics right of that part. I mean, did you speak to science consultants about the details of how it's going to affect the hurricane season and impact the greenhouse effect?
Yeah, so I talked to greenhouse effect. I talked to a couple of different people about that. But Purdue University also has an impact simulator where you can say this is where my thing has hit this is where I'm standing, and it will tell you when the shockwave will hit. When you'll you can say you know what the angle of impact, the content and size of the meteorite. So it was important to me to get it right in principle. I am also extraordinarily careful to never tell you how big that meteor was, or the angle of entry, or the speed with which it was going, because there are so many variables in how this plays out. We know that a water impact behaves differently than a land impact. The worst case scenario is a shallow water impact, because then you get, which is what I've done, dropped it into the bay. My original plan was to drop it on DC. And then I talked to an astronomer who Lucian Walkowitz. She's an astronomer at Adler Planetarium, and we sat down with coffee and she told me about the greenhouse effect that can happen, the runaway greenhouse effect that can happen with a water strike and a shallow water strike, and.
Then lat she shared with you her nightmare scenario.
Her night mar scenario. Yeah, all of the the novels where they save the Earth by driving the meteor into the ocean. Some of those, sure, okay, that's going to be better. Some of those, Actually it's just a lingering. It just delays the problem. But basically what happens is when a meteor comes through the atmosphere, even before it hits the ground, it's tearing a hole through the atmosphere because of the speed that it's traveling. When it hits the ground, when it becomes a meteorite, it ejects all of the material it hits through that hole into the upper atmosphere. Some of it all goes past that, but depending on size, so it ejects it into the upper atmosphere. Now, normally what happens when water leaves the earth is that it precipitates back out, but when it gets ejected into the upper atmosphere, it does not precipitate out. You'll have some that will, but a lot of it, and again it depends on the scale of the meteorite that you carefully do not define, but a lot of it hangs out and functions as greenhouse gas, and you can get a runaway greenhouse effect where the earth heats up, which causes water to evaporate, which becomes more of a greenhouse gas, which you know this cycle, there's some speculation.
Yeah, we become Venus basic.
There is speculation that Venus was earthlike until it was struck by a meteorite.
Yeah. I love that image of like two earth like planets essentially for billions of years side by side and then Venus destroyed fairly recently on cosmological.
Yeah, exactly so. And there are other things that can cause a runaway greenhouse effect, which is one of the like there there are scenarios, there's modeling out there, like it's a it's not an immediate common case scenario, but there is a scenario in which we don't get you know, we have taken no ameliorating efforts to deal with the greenhouse effect, and we do wind up with a runaway greenhouse. Like it is possible actually to trigger that a runaway greenhouse effect, which is terrifying. But again that's that's an outlier scenario, but it's a possible one.
Right.
Well, I'm a big fan of the science of these impacts. I love that. And I was really curious, like, how big is this thing that hit the earth in your novel, what's the angle of entry? And I noticed that your character was also very curious which just stimulated my curiosity even more so. Frankly, it's a little bit of torture that you didn't.
Tell us well, so I can. I can tell you if you go to Marry Robin Atcole dot com, there's a Lady Astronaut a FAQ and on that you can open up the Purdue Impact Generator and I tell you the parameters that I used to figure out when the shockwave would hit Elma and Nathaniel, so you can take a look at that. I have never run those through a climatologist to see whether or not it would cause the runaway greenhouse effect because mostly because when I was writing it, I didn't have anyone available to do that. I tried to find a couple of different people who could do that math for me. Strangely, it's work, and it's difficult to find someone. It's very specialized, very very specialized, and it takes a computer doing a lot of calculations. So which is why I decided not to include that information in the novel, because I couldn't stand behind it. What I try to do with the novels is anything that I put in there, I try to have as accurate as possible anything my character interacts with directly, I try to have accurate. If they don't, then I'm willing to handwave past it, and if it's not a plot point. So I know that a meteorite hit that was large enough to cause these effects, and I figured out a meteorite that was big enough to cause parts some of them, but I did not go all the way into figuring out to linking the two different effects. It's like I need the runaway greenhouse effect and I need them to be able to escape, and I need Washington, d c. To have disappeared. So I have those two things. I don't know if they actually play together. We handwa have passed that while Alma mutters all of those equations instead of saying the entire thing out loud, it's magic.
Well, I'm impressed by how this society responds to the catastrophe in your novel, and also the efforts to colonize Mars. And I think it's especially fascinating that you said it sort of, you know, fifty sixty seventy years ago, which makes their efforts to get to Mars so much more difficult, but not for this novel. You must have thought about like how Mars colonization would happen now. How different do you think it would be to colonize Mars now as opposed to the setting of your novel.
Oh, we have so many pieces of technology that they don't have. So because of when I have it's set, they don't have miniaturization of computers. As soon as you have that, everything changes like a lot, a lot. So the fact and without miniaturization of computers you don't get three D printing that you don't get in situ resource developed through three D printing. We have that now, So the things that we can do, our ability to do self guided craft are much greater than they had in the fifties. So like what I think that colonization now or I should say human exploration and settlement or human habitation I'm trying not to use the word colonization actually, but human habitation of Mars. I think that what we'll do is we'll send out you know, of the plans that I've seen, the one that seems to make the most sense is to send out ships, uncrewed ships before to set up an advanced base and then get feed on the ground. The thing about having humans on the ground is that we can respond more quickly to be more responsive. A good example of this is the insight lander that has been dealing the past year with a stuck probe, and the reason that it's taking so long to resolve that is because they have to get all of the information from Mars. Do tests here on Earth, transmit the information from that test program it, transmit that to Mars, get the information back, go do other tests here on Earth before they make another decision. And if you have someone on the ground, they can go, oh yeah, let me see, I can jiggle that without without breaking anything because you've got an immediate feedback loop of judgment. But with that delay, don't you don't get that immediate feedback loop, and you don't have anyone who can improvise. Humans can improvise. We can. You know, we are a multipurpose tool.
It's super amazing that we live in this moment of history where one hundred years ago, if we'd been hit by meteor, we basically have no chance of getting off the planet right But now or in ten years or fifty years or one hundred years, we're pretty well equipped. Now, you set your novel right at that point where humanity has like a chance. Maybe it's not totally hopeless, but it's still really difficult. Yeah, it's a fascinating moment, sort of historically and technologically.
Yeah, it's fun. Well, and it's interesting to me that, you know, how early we had been thinking about going to the Moon in the March and Mars. It's it's something that I think of I think most people think of it in the modern era as something that kind of spontaneously arose with Sputnik and the V two rocket, which horrendous destruction in World War Two originated because of a rocketry club. Like the technology from that is descended from a rocketry club in Germany, and they were trying to get off the planet, you know, they just wanted to get into space for funzies.
Well, thank you very much for talking to us. Do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about any upcoming project?
Sure?
So the next thing you can pre order it it'll be delivered magically to your home so you never have to leave. Is The Relentless Moon, which is the third volume in the Lady Astronaut Universe. You can read it as a standalone, but basically we're on the Moon and people who are pushing back. It takes for people who have read Calculating Stars and Faded Sky. It takes place concurrently with Faded Sky, So it's what's happening on Earth while the rest of the team is, well, there's a team on the way to Mars. So it's about the pushback. It's about the terrorists who who decide that they're going to take matters in their own hands and stop things. And I had planned on this being a surprise thing in the novel, but I have a polio outbreak on the moon, so quarantine on the Moon. There's a lot of stuff that's hitting home, Like there's some research that I've done that's making me super uncomfortable.
Wow, all right, that's a little bit unexpectedly on the news. Yeah, yeah, all right, thanks very much for answering our nitpicky science questions and for talking to us about the universe that you created in your novel.
Thank you so much.
All Right, that was pretty interesting, Daniel. She seems like a very optimistic person, which is great, which is I think maybe what we need these days.
Yeah, for somebody who's thinking about the end of the world, it's nice that she's idealistic about how people will come together in a crisis, and how science might actually save humanity.
Yeah, and you guys talked even about how about today, about this pandemic and how science is playing a role in it.
Yeah. She had some pretty insightful and interesting thoughts about how people feel about dystopian fiction in these times, and also about how this current pandemic is affecting people, and how a lot of people are living in very difficult situations before this pandemic, and so it sort of makes us all think about the human experience and how people are living today. But I was also really impressed with how detailed she got about the science. You know, she not only did a great job of modeling the science moments and the process of doing science, she actually ran simulations about what would happen if you hit this kind of media or that kind of media, and where should you land it, And that was pretty impressive. She thought really carefully about the science.
Why are you so impressed, Daniel? You don't think people out there can do these kinds of things.
No, I'm just happy when science fiction authors take the science seriously and want to make it real, And in this book she really accomplishes that and it's important, especially for her book, because the science the process of the science is so important. And she mentioned in the interview an impact simulator she used on Perdue University's website where you can say, what if this impact hit in this location, how much energy would be deposited and how long would it take to get to me. So if you're interested, you can go look up that simulator and run a bunch of end of the world scenarios yourself.
We all need a little distraction these days, yes, we do, all right. Well, it sounds like she has a pretty positive view about humanity coming together, which is great. And hopefully I meet will not strike us now at this moment in time in DC, right now.
That's right. Let's hope everybody out there stay safe and healthy. But it's fun to think about other universes where humans are facing more difficult problems and solving them.
Yeah, and to get us to think about all the difficulties that other people are here and having in our universe. So stay safe, but I also help out your neighbor and look out for each other.
That's right. And if you're enjoying this series about the science fiction universes created by these authors, let us know and send us a message about the books you'd like us to talk about.
We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time.
Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's last sustainability To learn more.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists stand and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, better we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Parents looking for a screen free, fun and engaging way to teach your kids the Bible.
As a mom, I was looking for the same thing, so I created Kids' Bible Stories podcast.
Thousands of families are raving about it, and kids actually request to listen.
With captivating sound effects, voices, and an apply section at the end to spark meaningful conversations, it's a hit with both kids and parents.
Listen to Kids' Bible Story's podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
