A/V Geeks Lunch 2-17-2022

do so so so so do so so you do hello hi everybody i'm skip alzheimer welcome to the ev geeks lunchtime streaming show where we watch old 16 millimeter films uh that last film was a home movie um that a fellow collector got and i'm not sure if you got it on ebay or if you got it at an estate sale um but we don't know uh the story behind the family we feel like it's in new england but and we think it's in the 30s but we don't really know a whole lot beyond that uh and that's one of the reasons that we try to tell people now if they have home movies you know try to invest in keeping them in the family so that we have context and show them periodically so you can start sharing the stories and documenting your family and where things were and who people were and when it was and all that stuff so that's my little soapbox uh and every year we do a home movie day where we celebrate home movies and uh we'll definitely do it again this year uh i just i'm not sure when i'm not sure if we're gonna do it locally kind of depend depends on covid but anyways um i'm not in my archive today i'm in charlotte north carolina where a lot of my family lives and uh kind of visit uh people for their birthdays my father's birthday and my stepbrother's birthday and see some other folks um on the way here uh we were driving down i-90 i'm sorry i-85 and we noticed a lot of emergency vehicles driving past us and all the traffic came to a standstill and it's because less than a mile from us a plane crashed into a tractor-trailer truck and we saw the smoke and we saw uh evidence of the debris and so we feel pretty lucky that we missed that whole event i feel bad for the pilot uh who passed away um and thankfully there was no other people that were hurt because that that highway was packed with cars um because it was like right at rush hour so um anyways lucky to be here and happy to show you films uh we're gonna take a little bit of a space ilk direction uh today um i like to dig into some of the nasa stuff that i have and some other stuff that i have so this is a film 19 minutes to earth enjoy it was not just another day on the planet mars a spacecraft had successfully landed and was monitoring this unique planet the information was transmitted and it took 19 minutes to reach earth [Music] [Applause] [Music] even from the beginning of the viking mission to mars we began to assemble more than just pictures of the martian surface as information was received we began to piece things together and to understand a place a planet other than our own as the planet was orbited we began to understand mars through a series of incredible photographs photographs that when assembled told of the planet's history we found remarkable evidences of running water here are just a few of what appear to be dried out river bids although other evidence states that liquid water could not flow on mars today we can see that at one time in the past liquid water must have flowed on the martian surface when did this take place and was there life on mars when these channels were filled with water we now know where part of the martian water is today and that is in the permanent pole and that as volcanoes erupt lava on the surface the evidence is clearly seen that martian volcanoes have erupted in the past and from this mission we know that at least one quake has taken place recently on mars so mars is alive and we now have a general idea of the thickness of its crust [Music] [Music] further evidence of volcanic activity in the past is seen from the surface where a variety of volcanic rocks are pitted with gas pockets and sharp or angular in appearance [Music] [Applause] [Music] these rocks face the day-to-day environment of mars and obviously many have been reduced in part to the martian dust let's examine the martian environment as told to us through the viking mission to begin the temperature the temperatures appear to vary the same day-to-day starting as an approximate low average temperature of 190 degrees kelvin just before the martian dawn the temperatures rose to an average upper temperature of 240 degrees kelvin this temperature range appeared day in and day out relatively the same almost to the point of monotony next the atmosphere [Music] the extremely thin upper martian atmosphere consists of some familiar gases the most abundant is carbon dioxide a gas that we breathe out [Music] there is carbon monoxide dangerous to life as we know it argon oxygen in small amounts atomic oxygen nitric oxide and a small but significant amount of nitrogen additional argon and nitrogen data reveals that mars once had a much denser atmosphere which could have supported running water [Music] an analysis of the martian soil shows an iron-rich clay with an unusually high amount of sulfur the elements that make up this clay are familiar iron [Music] silicon [Music] magnesium [Music] aluminum [Music] calcium and sulfur [Music] in terms of abundance silicon and iron are in the largest amounts silicon is also one of the most abundant elements of the earth's crust [Music] magnesium aluminum calcium and sulfur exist in significant amounts the soil samples appear to be very similar in composition at the two different sites on mars but nowhere were organic carbon compounds found in the soil the absence of organic carbon compounds affects the interpretation of the three biology experiments conducted on the surface of mars one experiment used a sample of martian soil moistened with a liquid that included foods that earth microorganisms thrive on a sample of the martian atmosphere was pumped into the chamber and if there were microorganisms in the soil the gases given off would later be detected possibly indicating the presence of life let's take a look at the results of this experiment if there is life the gases should vary over the days shown data does not exclude the possibility of life but neither does it strongly support it the second biology experiment involved another sample of martian soil also moistened with the liquid containing nutrients but this time the nutrients were tagged with radioactive carbon 14. if the organisms were in the soil sample they would have taken in the nutrients and passed off radioactive carbon with their gases the gases when analyzed would have indicated the presence of life let's take a look at the results of this experiment the soil samples behaved remarkably similar at both landing sites on mars here is a graph of the results at one landing site and here is the graph of the same experiment at the other landing site the similarity is remarkable showing a reliable experiment and the immediate change from radioactive carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide strongly suggests the presence of life although there are non-biologic explanations still let's compare this experiment conducted on antarctic soil to that on martian soil [Music] by itself you can see this experiment could favor the presence of life but remember the first experiment nope organic carbon compounds and finally our third experiment in the third and final biology experiment a sample of the soil was placed in a chamber where it received a small amount of moisture and an atmosphere of carbon dioxide gas tagged with radioactive carbon 14. simulated martian sunlight was introduced and if plant-like organisms were present in the soil they would capture the carbon-14 [Music] later the original carbon-14 gas was flushed out of the container and the chamber was heated to over 1 000 degrees fahrenheit if there was carbon 14 in the soil sample it would have been detected when released in the heating process this would indicate plant-like organisms existing on mars let's examine the results and see if life was indicated by this experiment first the data itself [Music] let's take a look at this information as shown on a graph from this information and supporting evidences we cannot conclusively say that life is or is not present in the martian soil with certainty if life does exist on mars it most likely is in relatively few numbers [Music] one final discovery in the martian mission dealt with its moons an extremely close flyby of phobos has given us information that could lead to invaluable data concerning the origin and evolution of the entire solar system are the martian moons captured asteroids and are they slowly being pulled apart by the martian gravity while this mission has answered many questions it has raised still others ambiguity ambiguity we can add that to our list with the protean and reptiles ambiguity um yeah so that was about the mars viking mission i have another film uh that kind of talks about that what i've noticed with uh and digitizing nasa stuff is uh when they would do a mission they would build an entire educational campaign around it uh to talk about the aspects of you know chemistry uh geology um telecommunications all these things would kind of come out of this and this when the shuttle missions would happen you would have a shuttle mission that would have a series of experiments then you would have all this video stuff that would accompany it that would be about educational aspects of it um aimed at children high school kids college and and others um you know they would really i mean milk it for whatever they could because they spent a lot of money on it and this was also public relations for what they were doing so this next film i'm not sure if this this might have been made i feel like this was made when viking landed but there's a lot of great animation in this also um man the soundtrack on that last film was awesome it was so good uh and i have to look up that name to see if that person the person who did the sound was actually um a known musician or what the deal was but that was glorious and hopefully this next film which is probably made around the same time hopefully it also has an awesome soundtrack so this is mars a new laboratory for space i'm sorry for science enjoy [Music] research scientists create products which enrich the quality of our lives products to increase our food supply dyes and pigments which surround us with color pharmaceuticals to improve our health products which reaffirm the value of science to mankind as part of its continuing program in support of science education siba geige is pleased to present this issue of the science screen report [Music] the science screen report developments in science engineering and medicine that help solve the problems of modern life [Music] since antiquity people have speculated about mars was it a world of colossal canals advanced civilizations mysterious aliens prolonged telescopic studies gathered few facts mars was half the size of earth at a 24-hour day displayed seasonal feature changes but otherwise remained a near total mystery [Music] it was only with the viking mission to mars that scientists began to actively probe this strange world today mars has become a planetary laboratory for studying soil chemistry geology biology weather climate and other processes much resembling yet very different from those on earth in 1975 two viking spacecraft each carrying a lander robot went into orbit around mars to study and probe the still mysterious world once in orbit the vikings were used for a detailed examination of possible landing zones the final choice a flat expanse with few impact craters july 20th 1976 lander 1 separates and begins its descent the robot about the size of a large motorcycle controls its own flight entering the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere its instruments continuously analyze and telemeter to earth data on the martian environment this film material of the first successful mars landing was provided by the national aeronautics and space agency [Music] seconds after landing the viking camera returns the first surface picture the robot's foot pad set firmly on another world the second picture a long panorama of the landing site rocks and volcanic material to one side sand and dune fields on the other [Music] the first color picture fine dust red or yellow brown covers the surface the sky is a lighter tint due to suspended dust particles soon after the second landing is accomplished on a vast plane again littered with rubble typical of meteor impacts and volcanic eruptions [Music] as the landers begin their programs of experiments the orbiters continue mapping surface topography weather variations and other data [Music] for several years now the robots of the viking mission have continued to gather data from the martian environment this planetary survey is scheduled to continue through 1990 providing a 15-year study of the planet mars [Music] meanwhile the tens of thousands of photographs and other data transmitted have been used to profile the forces and processes that shape the planet keys to better understanding their counterparts on earth the record of meteor impacts has been used to reconstruct mars geological history the older the formation the more meteors have struck it here a small fresh crater overlies a larger older one on the left a crater rim has eroded away and near a fresh crater is a cluster of crater rims buried by some later event mars apparently was formed about four and a half billion years ago in the swirling gas and dust nebula that also gave rise to the sun and earth [Music] in this process heat was released as one result the heavier material settled to the center and the lighter substances rose to form a planetary crust as elsewhere in the solar system meteor bombardments then excavated craters and immense basins much of mars surface like the moons is still cratered but elsewhere volcanic action commenced raising mountains lava flows built shield volcanoes the greatest olympus mons is 27 kilometers high and 600 across wide enough to cover the hawaiian islands crustal expansion led to faulting and rifting one rift valley is 5 000 kilometers long perhaps the start of continental drift on mars mars surface was also shaped by water experts believe that during the first billion years of mars history the atmosphere may have been warm and dense enough for rains to fall and rivers to flow channels formed by those primordial rainstorms were evident in several viking photographs [Music] in addition molten rock intruding into crustal ice may have formed slurries mixtures of water dust and rock that moved across the surface such slurry movements could explain the large channel systems extending hundreds of kilometers with their teardrop shaped islands features with no counterparts on our earth [Music] on mars low atmospheric pressures and temperatures do not allow liquid water to exist the northern polar cap is thought to be made up of water ice mixed with dust in addition water vapor measurements indicate a vast reserve of subsurface permafrost [Music] nearer the martian equator thin clouds of condensed water vapor swirl around volcanoes or drift high in the sky [Music] while in canyons and valleys a morning ice haze is recorded by the cameras in orbit [Music] on earth the ocean's heat and moisture together with heat and wind variations over land produce our complex weather patterns [Music] on mars because there are no water masses or cloud formations there is little variation in the weather [Music] only in early summer does solar heating produce violent dust storms driven by hurricane force winds they may blanket the entire planet streaks associated with craters are due to winds light streaks to dust deposits dark ones uncovered solid surface [Music] the spiral formations at the poles exemplify martian chemical physical and geological variations the dark bands are scarps or cliffs of bare ground within the polar cap [Music] each scarp holds terraces eroded from surface rock this is a model of such an area about 75 kilometers across it is thought that scarps and terraces were formed at the same time but by different geological processes [Music] because of the planet's orbit and axial tilt polar regions are alternately warm then cold for hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of years during cold periods mixtures of dust and ice were deposited in near horizontal layers a period of warmer climate followed and erosion processes set in cutting deep valleys new ice dust mixture layers were laid down and more erosion followed this cutting off of one set of terraces by the next is evidence for millennia-long climatic cycles the first climatic process discovered beyond planet earth questions about life on mars have not been resolved at the time life first developed on earth several billion years ago the two planets were very similar suggesting martian life as depicted here might resemble earth life on earth life interacts with the environment most living organisms take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide while photosynthetic plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen [Music] seeking evidence of such life the viking lander robots carried out tests to detect these processes first results seem to be positive but later analysis suggested these were due to chemical not biological activity any biological process depends on organic compounds so next tests were made on earth to learn if organic compounds could form under martian conditions an artificial mars environment was created finely ground simulated mars surface material plus traces of water a low pressure carbon monoxide mars atmosphere tagged with radioactive tracers and martian sunlight from a xenon arc lamp as the result of the experiment traces of organic compounds appear to have been synthesized [Music] but vikings instruments failed to detect organic compounds this fact decreases the chances that life exists on mars yet since only three tests were made at only two sites experts still cannot rule out life on that planet [Music] meanwhile research is underway to further investigate viking soil chemistry results and their relationship to possible life on mars extraterrestrial life is only one of the questions facing today's space scientists they also probe the origin and evolution of the solar system of our own planet and of our own species the search for new knowledge is the goal of planetary exploration and the voyages of our spacecraft across the solar system are beginning to provide some of the answers we see [Music] science screen report has been produced by siba geige corporation with headquarters in artsley new york as part of its continuing program in support of science education [Music] so that wasn't a nasa produced film that was uh screen signs digest which was made by allegro productions and allegro productions would make these films and then seek local or regional advertisers to uh sponsor them so the siba guy is one such example but i've also seen other companies depending on where film comes from there was one from a power company in virginia uh i've seen ones for other technology companies so it's kind of interesting and they all have that the same kind of uh layout and that you have an ad before and you have an ad after and then these are distributed to schools um and uh the music with this uh was was not great i would say somebody called it in the comments it was a little froggy uh i would say that at moments it sounded like goblin uh that awesome italian um prog rock band that did a lot of uh italian horror movies um but the first one was so funky and so electronic it was awesome okay so uh we're gonna one last film this is longer and we're gonna go back in time even more uh like 12 13 years to 1967 and this is a documentary um that was shown on abc and this i think they had a copy of this distributed through mcgraw-hill um and that's probably how i ended up with it um this is called we are not alone enjoy [Music] the fixed stars in our firmament have through the ages given man a feeling of security we have always wanted to believe that we have our feet firmly planted on a solid earth with a protective heaven above but science has continually whittled away at this idea for some time we have known that our earth in reality is only a changing ball of rock and soil water and air held together by a tenuous gravity spinning and whirling in space around our sun and even as a planet we are not very special being only one of nine in orbit around the mother sun our sun itself a star and only a small middle-aged one as stars go is a kind of lost child on the outskirts of its galaxy which we can see in the sky as the milky way it is only one of hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy which is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies all of which are in constant motion if we are not unchanging in space neither are we eternal in time our son 5 billion years old will in another 5 billion years or so burn itself out and in doing so expand and absorb all its planets as countless other stars have done before our sun's only real distinction that we know of thus far is that it has people whirling around it the question is might this have happened elsewhere in the universe or are we alone it was recently discovered that stars and gases in space emit natural radio waves which can be picked up and amplified by radio telescopes the jodrell bank radio telescope in england the green bank radio telescope in west virginia and this one at arecibo in puerto rico can be called man's largest ears the bowl of the telescope a thousand feet across made of half-inch wire mesh acts as a reflector able to focus even extremely weak radio signals from space in searching for life on other worlds the theory is that intelligent civilizations in the universe would use natural radio frequencies as a means of communicating with one another by listening to signals from interstellar space intelligent codes could be distinguished from the patterns of natural radio waves radio astronomer of cornell university and director of the arecibo ionospheric observatory dr frank drake conducted project asthma the first search for intelligent life in space by radio telescope some years ago it was suggested by professors morrison and caconi at cornell that there might be other civilizations in space attempting to send us messages we use very sensitive and ingenious detecting devices to search for intelligent signals amongst the static which comes to us from the interstellar space in 1960 we made a short search for such signals with existing telescopes such as the 85-foot telescope at green bank using the 21 centimeter line frequency and we looked at there was time in fact to look at only two stars the ones we picked of course were the two nearest stars which are like the sun the stars toss seedy in the constellation of cetus the whale and epsilon arrhythmia in the constellation of aridness we found no evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence signals but now we must realize that this was an extremely limited search and the fact that we found nothing should not discourage us or cause us to think that any future search is going to fail one can estimate that a search which has a good chance of succeeding will take perhaps 30 years but if one is going to make a realistic search this is what is required and anything less than this is really not worth the effort because the chance of success is so small surely the results of the detection of extraterrestrial signals are going to be one of the most exciting things that ever happened while some scientists in the discipline of astronomy press the search for intelligent life in the distant stellar regions beyond our solar system with the big ears and eyes of the radio and optical telescopes some perhaps more down-to-earth investigators feel they would be making an historic discovery by a less ambitious find these men are called exobiologists they are looking for microbiologic forms of life lesser than intelligent man and perhaps higher than the lowly virus something between the organic molecule and the bacteria that might have evolved outside the earth the most likely candidates for such a search are the planets mars and venus earth's nearest neighbors in the solar system the mariner spacecraft has been our principal vehicle for unmanned planetary exploration the planetary program is carried out by the jet propulsion laboratory operated by the california institute of technology for the national aeronautics and space administration dr william h pickering is the director mars and venus of course are the two closest planets to the earth uh in some ways we know more about mars than we do about venus because um venus is always covered with clouds we do not believe we have ever seen down to the surface of venus that is with a telescope from the earth whereas in the case of mars um we we usually see the surface of mars mars on the other hand is a planet which astronomers for many years have compared with the earth the size is a little smaller than the earth it happens that today on mars is almost exactly the same length as a day on the earth the year is about twice as long as a year on the earth the seasons change in the same manner that they do on the earth in other words the spin axis of mars is tilted about the same way that the axis of the earth is tilted all of this has led astronomers to to compare mars with the earth in many ways and of course the one comparison which one must always make is what about life is mars a suitable planet for life as we know it it is feasible from what we know about life on earth that life could exist on mars dr richard s young chief of the exobiology division of nasa's ames research center life on earth probably arose as the result of a very natural sequence of events we think we know what the primitive atmosphere of the earth was like before there was any life on the earth we think we know what types of energies were available on the primitive earth before there was any life on earth biological evolution took over and the atmosphere was changed rather drastically until we have the sort of atmosphere we have on the earth today and we have the tremendous diversity of life that we have today a subsequent result over the next say three billion years of biological evolution in fact then just about any primitive planet during its early history should have undergone a similar sequence of events they were formed obeying the same laws of physics and chemistry they should have had the same type of primitive atmosphere and probably underwent chemical evolution in much the same way the earth did now what we need is proof of that if we can find life on one planet say mars then it is um very probable that elsewhere within our own galaxy there must certainly be planets comparable to earth with life forms comparable to earth the optical telescope has been the principal tool of astronomers for studying the stars and the planets from the days of galileo centuries ago the 200-inch mirror in the palomar observatory telescope in california can be called man's largest eye it can bring into view the farthest observable objects in the universe called quasars points of light believed to be billions of light years away and moving away from us at incredible speeds another kind of telescope is the 26-inch refractor or direct view telescope like this one at the united states naval observatory in washington dc to find planets comparable to earth revolving around stars comparable to our sun dr kai strand scientific director of the observatory and his former colleague dr peter vandecamp of swarthmore college used a telescope of this type they wanted to verify the argument that planets are abundant in the universe in 1963 vandecamp announced the discovery of a planet orbiting a neighboring star the first planet ever to be detected beyond our solar system although it has never been directly seen depends what you mean by scene harvard astronomer carl sagan explains how the existence of this planet was deduced the second nearest star system after uh the sun is called barnard's star named after an american astronomer ee barnard and the motion of this star of course the sky is not a more or less uniform line on the background stars as you might expect but instead oscillates and the wiggly path is due to the presence of a dark companion we don't see the dark companion but we can quite reliably deduce its presence from the wiggles and the motion of this storm let's suppose this is jupiter and this is the sun and the two of them are moving of course of course through space together however jupiter is also going around the sun and when jupiter is on this side of the sun its gravitational attraction pulls the sun a little bit that way when it's on the other side of the sun it pulls the sun a little bit that way and so as the sun goes through space it has in addition to its ordinary motion that way it has let's say an up and down wiggle due to the motion of the invisible jupiter okay and so the wiggle tells you the presence of jupiter not only that it tells you uh its mass and it tells you how far away it is if you were riding the nose cone of a rocket to the moon this is what you would see as you approach the lunar surface for a landing these pictures were made by television cameras in ranger nine the unmanned american picture taking expedition to the moon in march of 1965. since then thousands of spectacular close-up pictures of the moon surface have been returned by surveyor 1 which soft landed on the moon in june of 1966. pictures from the probe of lunar orbiter in august of 1966 showed our planet as seen from the vicinity of the moon this representation of the lunar landscape shows us what a man might see from the moon a bright sun in a sky black as night due to the lack of light diffusion by an atmosphere and the earth visible in the lunar night hanging in its black sky like an oversized moon itself surveyor one and lunar orbiter returned much valuable information and they have also shown us what we have known the moon to be a body without atmosphere without water without life not unlike the moon in some aspects is earth's neighbor in the solar system the planet mars when in july of 1965 the mariner 4 spacecraft completed a successful mars flyby after a journey of eight months and 325 million miles passing within 6500 miles of the planet 21 pictures of the martian surface were returned to earth including one of the most remarkable scientific photographs of this age mariner's 11th picture of mars many scientists felt that this picture settled once and for all the century-long controversy over martian canals in 1877 the italian astronomer giovanni scaparelli claimed to have seen canals which he thought could be evidence for intelligent life on mars as late as 1908 the american astronomer percival lowell confirmed the sightings the spacecraft mariner was too far away in its flyby to be able to show decisively what exists on the martian surface but most scientists agree that if life does exist there it will not be intelligent but of a very low order of course the early astronomers saw canals and they saw a lot of other things that dr richard young of ames research center we no longer think canals are are really exist on mars we think they're primarily optical illusions uh and they aren't something that the martians constructed to transport water from the pole to the equator and keep the deserts wet and all that sort of thing mars has although it's a harsh environment by biological standards mars has an atmosphere it has a very rare atmosphere it's a smaller planet has a lower gravitational field and its atmosphere is probably oh something like 1 100th or perhaps even closer to 1 1000th of the total pressure on the surface of the earth it also contains water life can't exist without water but the fact that mars has water is terribly significant now unfortunately from a biological point of view the amount of water in the atmosphere of mars is very slight it's about 1 1000th of the amount that one would detect in the earth's atmosphere with a similar observation there are other features of mars that we're reasonably familiar with astronomers have been observing it for something approaching 100 years now and they've known that there are light areas and they're dark areas the dark areas are assumed to be or at least by the early astronomers were assumed to be uh vegetation the light areas were assumed to be desert there are also pole caps on mars which have been shown to be water however although they're pretty extensive the total amount of water in these pole caps is very slight it's probably nothing more than a layer of frost however these pole caps do recede seasonally in the spring pole cap recedes at the same time the pole cap is receding or disappearing the dark areas are getting darker implying at least to the early astronomers that well water is becoming available now from the pole caps and the vegetation in the dark areas is is literally inhaling the water and is flourishing during the spring we really simply don't know enough about the intimate detail of the surface of mars to critically analyze any of these visual phenomena all we can do is speculate about them and so far the the best of our speculations has failed to demonstrate that life on mars must be ruled out in fact the best of what we know still leaves well within the range of possibility the idea that life may well exist on mars and would be well worth the uh the search if you will i feel that in the search for extraterrestrial life the three approaches one firstly the one that you named to go to mars and see whether there's life there the other one which frank drake has for some time tried out listening to radio communication from outer space the third one is the one that we are working on here retracing the path by which life appeared chemist at ames research center is searching for answers to extraterrestrial life by studying the chemical evolution of life on earth from the information we have today we know that the earth is four and a half billion years old let me put that down as one of our starting point 4.7 billion years is the exact given life as we know it or the first evidence of life in the fossil record is about three billion now biology or the darwinian theory takes over from here see you find the life evolving into a whole variety of organisms we know that uh mammals are around 160 million and then so on we come to the evolution of man finally what went on before this from the time the earth was formed or even further back from the time the solar system was formed this can be described as chemical evolution we know that the solar system is about 5 billion and then if you go backwards in time you come to the origin of the universe which is greater than 10 billion some put it at 13 some at 20 but we know definitely it's more than 10 billion years now we have some starting points to go on we know that 90 percent of the universe is hydrogen right so the hydrogen then by series of reactions during the birth of a star gave rise to the other elements of the periodic table carbon nitrogen oxygen and so on in other words you would have thermonuclear reactions taking place within a stone so the idea of chemical evolution then is the gradual evolution of hydrogen the initial matter of the universe to give the elements of the periodic table to give the constituents of the earlier atmosphere say methane ammonia and water simple chemistry tells us that the carbon will be in the form of methane the nitrogen will be in the form of ammonia and the oxygen will be in the form of water so the early atmosphere of a planet would have been made up of methane ammonia and water from here on we visualize what happened the only atmosphere being acted upon by lightning also wanted light from the sun or heat producing organic molecules till the early oceans became something like a primordial soup so from a primitive atmosphere we are hoping to go to the stage when the two molecules that are important to living things the nucleic acid and the protein were formed first molecules capable of replication so it's a stepwise process it appears to be a beautiful plan going all the way from the hydrogen atom till the time you get to the intelligent human being so there is it is a coherent story it is something which appears most logical uh it is it is rational so the discovery of life on mars with to the to people starting the origin of life will be the greatest thing as a matter of fact in my mind the search for extraterrestrial life is only part of the question of the study of the origin of life this is the scientifically broader question origin of life in the universe and going to mars is the unique opportunity that we have perhaps the one only opportunity that we have of showing this because there's life on mars and especially if we can show that its origin is different from the origin of life on earth or it is independent then we'll have a very heartening answer to this question of uniqueness in life new york times science editor walter sullivan author of the book on which this program is based raised this question with nobel prize winning chemist dr harold yuri dr yuri a lot of the discussion on the origin of life boils down to the question of whether there are other there are other worlds other solar systems you believe there are it is my belief that if you have conditions such as we have on the earth life will spontaneously appear i don't know how long it takes maybe a million years maybe a billion years but sometime life as we know it will appear every indication is that the properties of the elements in the most distant stars that we look at are the same as those that we of those that we have on earth the physical universe is the same everywhere that is our conclusion the laws are the same as far as we go as we understand them and this of course means that the chemistry of carbon nitrogen oxygen hydrogen the four abundant elements in living things the chemical properties of these elements will be the same wherever we are in the universe and therefore we expect that they will have the capacity to evolve into what we would call living organisms no matter where we go now we don't expect that they will be the same sometime in 1973 a spacecraft will take off from earth its name will be voyager the voyager a new kind of space vehicle will begin a trek to the planet mars the first of a series of missions that will eventually carry sophisticated life detection devices to the martian surface the success of a voyager mission would be a scientific breakthrough in our unmanned planetary program it will be our first attempt to soft land an instrument package on another planet looking beyond voyager to 1977 1979 and the 1980s space engineers are already at the hard practical model stage of designing devices that are still emerging from the minds of scientific dreamers one such device designed for a mars life search is the automated biological laboratory called an abl one concept of it has been developed by the aeronautronic division of the filco corporation it would operate remotely and automatically on mars so says space research engineer william hostetler but basically there there are several processes that to be performed first of course you have to obtain physical samples of the of the surface of mars physical samples of the soil because that's uh where the organisms will congregate if there are living organisms i might comment incidentally that we are concerned more with the uh lower forms of life the the molecular forms of life rather than uh elephants and horses and so forth we are prepared to take pictures of these things if they happen to be there the abl is divided really into three basic integrated subsystems one of these is a sampling subsystem that is used to obtain the surface samples from the soil samples from the surface of mars at the very bottom of the abl and directly underneath there is a system that uses a brush and vacuum system to obtain samples of the martian surface directly under the abl also there is a core drill system that drills into the surface about 10 feet to obtain subsurface samples in case the water availability or other conditions make it more likely as a place for martian biological life a second system picks up samples around the abl with a sampler as you see here which is located on a linkage that attaches it to the main body and will pick up samples from a generally in around the abl location a third system is used for getting samples from a considerably further distance and in particular selected areas that the visual survey system has pointed out as being particularly desirable because possibly they are warmer than the surrounding spots or they have a different appearance that might appear to be vegetation or something of that nature so a sampling line is deployed uh ballistically fired out like a small rocket carrying this line to some distance up to possibly a thousand feet from the abl location and a sampler then similar to the one that works in the vicinity of the abl is carried up on an elevator latched onto a trolley on this line and deployed out to the desired spot to obtain the surface sample returning and delivering it to the operating parts of the abl these samples are then processed and brought into the interior of the abl for chemical processing prior to reading out the experiment the chemical processing equipment is located generally in the central area of the abl in the form of 13 chemical processors located circumferentially around the central core certain supplies water certain gases are stored in tanks around the center of the abl other chemical reagents are stored in ampules which hold individual quantities in this area that surrounds the processors these ampoules are are put into cartridges like this so that they feed to the outer end and can be picked up by the processing by the transport device which internally then moves them to the proper location to conduct the chemical analysis after the analysis is completed the samples are then transferred to the instruments to read out the experiment results the data from these are then processed internally and transmitted through the high gain system back to earth if the scientific and engineering problems that must be solved to accomplish this feat are not overwhelming the political obstacles may indeed be insurmountable congress will soon have to make the most important decision on space policy since president kennedy first won approval to commit us to the space age mr walter sullivan what a wonderful planet is our world and how far it may be to anything else like it we have reasonably believed there are other planets blessed with our advantages a kindly stable parent star a well-placed orbit a suitable atmosphere dry continents for advanced life forms great seas within which their primitive ancestors evolved but the fragile green hue of life appears only here and there on our planet has seen from space its hold is tenuous if inbred passions overcome reason we can now render the planet uninhabitable is that the fate of all technological societies it is up to us on this wonderful world of ours to prove that it is not so [Music] um so uh i love looking back and watching films about our future in space um it gives us a really good sense of where our heads were oops turn that off had alarm set to let me know when this film had ended in case i was doing the dishes or something um anyways uh it gives you a really good sense of where we were technology wise philosophically uh and you know it and so i have a lot of footage like this a lot of stuff that i digitized either for nasa or for nc state which has a nasa collection or for my own collection stuff and uh so it's it's it's fascinating to take a look back to the future um and they talked about the philco radio robots and of course phil co made this amazing uh film that we would like to watch looking back to the future um i did it i would show it as part of a show called yesterday yesterday's tomorrow today uh anyways the film is called year 1999 a.d and it was made in 1967 68 by ford vilco to show our future uh you can see it on i have it on youtube uh and it's fascinating uh because it gives a sense of what we think the future should be like or could be like and one of the things i noticed is there's no keyboards it's all very strange interfaces uh and also a central computer um and also a very lonely existence in a giant house um and homeschooling so it's interesting to see what they got right and what they got wrong um file sharing too anyways uh thanks for tuning in today uh tomorrow uh i'm not sure if i'm gonna be live or not um as i will be celebrating with my father for his birthday um but there will be some great stuff i i remembered something that i had digitized a long time ago that i think would be really great to show so uh join us tomorrow friday uh thanks everybody for tuning in uh if you like what you saw please hit the thumbs up the like the subscribe tell your friends about what we do or you can buy some coffee too at uh ko dash fi.com av geeks um we drink coffee on the road it's uh it's kind of a habit uh anyways everybody have a great rest of your thursday and we will talk to you soon everybody take care bye you