>> host: today i'm talking with william burrows about his enjoyable book suborder. i guess i would characterize it as the story of how astronomers planetary scientist space engineers might some day save the world and how would you

characterize your book? >> guest: i think you did it very well. i would characterize it by saying my point is that we don't have to be the hapless helpless victims of nature. my friends at nasa and elsewhere in the space community like to say if the dinosaurs had a space program they would still be here. we have the wherewithal to save ourselves and the book though it's an important part of the book is that explains that and comes out with a plan and they plan was not invented by me. it is universally accepted within the community. >> host: it's my impression it leaves you are advocating spending quite a lot more on this problem and on planetary defense. is that right? >> guest: yes, the cold war is over. peace allies has broken out and what i like to tell people who say it will cost an astronomical amount of money to do this i say

what is your collective life as a civilization were? the dinosaurs got blown away. it can happen again. the chances are it's not going to happen very soon but doomsday is always a possibility. what i'm saying is protect yourself. that is a very good use of money. >> host: yeah so what are you advocating that people should do. say you had a few billion dollars or you were king of the world what do you think is the right thing to do? >> guest: i would set up a permanent planetary defense system and begin within the community this is the knowledge that having three parts. part one is you have to have the sensors on the planet, infrared sensors on the planet and off the planet to spot in a so-called potential impact or that is coming this way and it looks like it's going to hit.

part two is you have got to be able with 20 or more years notice, you have got to be able to send a spacecraft out that will nudge it off course long before it gets here and given the distance nudge it off just a tiny amount will do it. it will pass far wide of the planet. the third part of the strategy is last-ditch and that is being able to stop it violently probably with a nuke if everything else fails and it looks like it's going to be an impact. >> host: so there have been a lot of efforts to find these things. congress passed a bill. they put up some money. there are these programs you talk about, notably the linear program and the catalina observatory and things like

that. i suppose there's another one that will come on line in a few years that's an ls sp or telescope. aren't those going to do the deal in terms of finding the asteroids or do we need to build more? >> guest: well they should pretty well do it but also as i mentioned in the book there is some mall which is an infrared telescope. we are planning in 2017 putting in a venus like orbit from where it will watch the neighborhood as they collect and pick up anything again that looks threatening. you can't have too many eyes in the community it is an agreement on that. everything you mentioned is in play and sentinel should be in play to matter. >> host: so, since, sentinel is funded and it will be up there in 2017 as far as we know?

>> guest: that is the plan. it's being funded by a company in colorado ball aerospace and technologies corp. corp. and the b6 12 foundation which is former astronaut rusty schweikert and ed lu started with some other people. they're actually going to build it and then it will be put into space. as i said i think in 2017. that's the plan. so it's the private sector. >> host: so the money we don't have and that we do need to protect the planet than this for the spacecraft that would go out and actually meet the beast, right? >> guest: exactly. >> host: and there is no plan to build those right now. is that correct? >> guest: well it's being thought about but is the concrete? no. it's all theory.

>> and what order of magnitude amount with those costs do you think? >> as far as i know that has not been determined but it's obviously multiple billions but again what is your life worth? >> host: yeah. so what chance do people listening to this have a getting killed by an asteroid or whatever else would come along and how would that compare to whatever else might come along? >> guest: a good question. the question -- the chances of being knocked off by an asteroid are very slim. there's an inverse lot here and that is earth gets pelted all the time as you know by everything from pebbles to boulders to larger rocks and so on. we are constantly being hit by any of the so-called near earth objects. the chances of the big one coming along which would be a

planet killer are very remote. they think the next time will be in about 100 years and by that time we should be prepared to do something about it. as i say it is the smaller ones that will ruin your day. they can take out large tracks of area and it has happened judging by the number of impact craters on this planet if this happened well over 130 times. >> host: of course it could be happening in the next minute and we wouldn't know necessarily. >> guest: that's right. >> host: so i read in the book that getting killed by an asteroid is a little bit less probable than dying in an airplane crash. is that a fair statement? >> guest: that is absolutely right. as i say it's the inverse law. the chances are very remote but

if it happens it can be devastating. >> host: so i would guess one result of this program so far finding all these asteroids is a lot of asteroids with these of monitoring programs that we actually now know of a lot of asteroids that are not going to hit us and we haven't found any that will so probably will not that probability down some, right? we know we are a little safer than we knew before. is that a fair statement? >> guest: i think we are a lot safer and there's another element to this and that is the little prince who loved the asteroid he lived on had a point. asteroids are not all bad. asteroids have got some potentially very useful qualities. one is a lot of them are loaded with precious metals that can be mined. another is very big ones can be

lived on and that's a preparation for a lunar colony which is in the book. lunar colony beings is something i believe strongly in. the point is asteroids getting close turning into meteoroids can do terrible damage. it happened last year in russia, that blew up in a town and sent more than 1400 people to the hospital who were injured. so there are pluses and minuses. >> host: fortunately he didn't kill anybody. it says a lot of flying broken glass in people being thrown around. >> guest: they were lucky that it blew up where blew up because had it exploded over the city at a lower altitude it could have been horrendous death and destruction. >> host: i remember reading that in some way while asteroids are only on the history of the

earth may have sterilized the planet over and over several times that maybe actually they were sort of like our planetary lifeboat that a big asteroid will throw things out into space and some of these rocks may be infected by the early bacteria that were on the planet and then were sterilized but some of the bacteria can remain alive in space, capable of getting going again in reproducing and those rocks, a lot of may end up back on earth. it would have to actually open up a vacuum cavity in the atmosphere to get those rocks to fly out so they are the destroyers and the creators perhaps that you said something also about people's ideas about asteroids and comets bringing in organic materials from outside.

>> guest: that's a theory. comments in fact did bring life to this planet which has not been disproven. >> host: it's not a theory that people talk about that yes. so how wide do you think the audiences for this? just a candid question, what fraction of the populace thinks or knows the difference between an asteroid versus a comment versus a major planet or whatever? do you have any feel for that? >> guest: my guess is that it's a very small percentage of the population. when i taught journalism at nyu i sam barry students sam barry students how one day to interview the proverbial man on the street about what he or she thinks about the space program

and they came back and once said professor burrows the lady i talked to said she's more interested in educating the children. a man said actually -- barges in and paying the mortgage and another interested in putting -- putting food on the table. in answer small percentage. people worried about keeping a roof on and i don't mean the roof that protects us against any ohs but i mean literally a ref on the house and that's where it is. >> host: it seems to me at least in the recent past congress has been motivated about this question so that's important but are you thinking of how to get the word out about this threat and how we need to more -- spend more money than we are now? >> guest: i was privileged to be picked as the only nonscientist of a 14 member

panel by their national research council which of course is the national academy of sciences to be on a near earth object survey and mitigation panel a few years back and took testimony in washington, tucson and santa fe from scientists. that is how i got interested in this because they said that it's a serious problem. again doomsday around the corner that i got interested in participating in that. i was very privileged to win the bid for it. it's her real problem as you well know. >> host: so do you think -- did you think you would write a book like this? >> guest: it was an act of faith. >> host: so, sitting here being somewhat depressive i can imagine all sorts of things that might wipe out the human race

like people think now 71,000 years ago we were brought about by a giant volcano in indonesia and other volcanoes wiped out almost all life a quarter billion years ago. i can imagine some really bad virus or something like that so is the asteroid threat really the worst thing we have got to steel ourselves for or is that one of the top one's? have you thought about that? >> guest: asteroids, the minas thing about asteroids as you know is big ones can do a lot of damage. the good news is they can be stopped. as the late gene shoemaker a geologist and de facto planetary scientist says he pointed out can be stopped.

hurricanes and typhoons, earthquakes can't so that's the difference. the bad news is of course if you are a dinosaur watch out. the good news is they can in fact be deflected or stopped and that's part of again the book. i should also say to get back to your question also advocating a permanent colony on the moon and mars. buzz aldrin co-authored a book called ron debut with -- which the heroin is an intergalactic space command and she says he justifies an intergalactic multi-general nation by saying no place on this planet is safe forever. the universe is telling us do that or wait around and die and

that's the point. >> host: that's right. if you are on the mend and a giant volcano on earth is going to get you, it might get the people you work with anna anna might lead you in a bad situation but hopefully you have figured out how to get along. so yes you have a chapter on how to survive all of this stuff except for the aliens. if there's an alien invasion they may know about the man but anyway. >> guest: i would say one of the major points of the book is that planetary defense has got to by definition be international and i am advocating that we have a planetary defense agency. nasa has a planetary defense department but the point is its international and that's good. if we all work together the

bottom line is on some level we are no longer americans in brits and russians and chinese and japanese. we are earthlings. >> host: the virus or the volcano or the asteroid is going to know the difference. let me get a little bit technical about some things here. one thing i was a little bit surprised that, people talk about the terrain out. that sort of a good way to play out the threats and the probabilities of something but i don't know, is that not used so much anymore and should we all be getting a reading on the terrain no scale of asteroid threats? >> guest: as far as i note the arena was not talked about much anymore. for reasons i don't know that the community does not get into

the torino scale. but a lot of them have been measured. >> host: yeah. one thing i was wondering, reading about all these asteroids you have done is wonderful job of finding hundreds of thousands of new asteroids and many of them are near earth, and one thing i was wondering, it's really much easier to find them around the plane of the solar system where most things are a bit. have people actually been searching the whole sky including above and below the earth's orbit around the sun and as thoroughly or are we missing parts of this guy a? >> guest: not thoroughly.

you being an astronomer of course you know about this cloud of rocks and things that surrounds the entire solar system. a lot of these things are in their and we can pretty well monitor the main asteroid belt which is between mars and jupiter. there are untold hundreds of thousands or millions of rocks of all sizes in the main build. we can see them coming or we can see a lot of them coming because of telescopes because we are quits to do that. the ones that drop out of the cloud which is above us we don't see coming. that is a whole separate category and that is truly dangerous. there are many that, but again if you can't see it you can't defend against it and that's a potential problem. >> host: okay. actually what i was thinking of is the fact that rocks that have

almost hit us might actually be the ones that tend to drop out of above or below the plane and come at us again. you know if there's a near miss these things are going to tend to get from away from earth's orbital plane that they will come back and hit earth's orbit. plutonian mechanics they will return to the scene of the crime and if we are there, then it's bad news for us. those are the ones that are frequently going to be coming out of the north are coming out of the south without maybe much warning. i was wondering if those have been covered by some of the survey's? >> guest: not many and again you are absolutely right. they will come out of nowhere with virtually no warning and

it's a real problem. >> host: that's the one that worries me because it almost seems like you know, well it's a lot better to say you have discovered 100,000 asteroids than to say you have discovered 10,000 but hey i have covered the whole sky so it was my impression that things like that are not covered yet. first you have to look where you are going to find things but eventually you are looking under the lamppost for the keys that you have lost somewhere else in the parking lot so yeah that was one thing i was worried about and it sounds like it should be a little bit worried about that. we are may be missing some of those lines that are going to surprise us someday. >> guest: as you know being an astronomer as far as i know

everybody believes that. it's absolutely true. the other thing is going to say was in terms of a near miss by a main build asteroid it will come around again. in that regard earth's gravity is dead because an earth causer will swing layout and because of earth's gravity it will come back and cross our path again. the deal is as you know is that all things being equal every time it comes by it comes like closer. earth's gravity will tend to do that. >> host: i understand. it's going to come back to earth's orbit but how does it know that earth is there? >> guest: i don't know. [laughter] but the chances are it will keep getting closer and that's the problem. >> i don't understand that one. we will let that one go.

so what about all these mitigation techniques? what about three stages depending on how big a thing as and how close it is to hitting earth? wanting to tell us a little more about those plans were those proposals. >> guest: that's the standard plan and again it depends totally on seeing this thing at least two decades and hopefully more before it gets here. once it has been spotted and tracked and it has been determined that it's a potential impact or then you want to try to nudge it off course at a very long distance event long distance event that is a work again, blow it up. i should say in that regard as you know if you have read the book that i have coined a term called the bruce willis defense

and that comes from the movie armageddon in which i think eight days out he lands on the comment and nukes it and save the world. if you were to nuke a comment or an asteroid, a meteor eight days out each one of those chunks could take out jersey city or chicago or nairobi. the bruce willis defense doesn't work. again you have got to stop the decades ahead of time. >> host: we are going to take a break here and we will come back with some more things to discuss about the asteroid threat.

>> host: we were talking before the break about a spacecraft, the space-based mode of attacking the asteroid or changing the asteroid, not just looking for an asteroid. so deflecting it softly, deflecting it with a big whack or something. deflecting it inevitably and then just nuking it. the first thing i think would be very intriguing to people, what's that all about? how are you going to deflect it softly? is sort of like you are going to make good use of the butterfly in a sense. >> guest: the big story here

is that yes, thanks to astronomy you can spot the danger. the other side of that coin is there is nothing in hand that will actually stop one of them. we don't have it. as a former news man the blue room says it's a very good story. we can spot them but we can't stop them. yes you are supposed to be able to deflect it. that's the plan far out. do we have a rocket that can do that? no. and if we had a rocket that could do that and it didn't didn't work and it came in close and look like it was going to impact could be blow it away? do we have a mechanism for doing that? no. we certainly have the nukes but how do you get that nuke to go out there and meet this thing several years out to blow about? the technology is not there.

so the big deal there is yes we can spot them but we cannot stop them and if we see one headed this way tomorrow we had better get our act together very very quickly to try to get the technology. >> host: what is the proposal for how we would deflect something just a little bit if we saw it way ahead of time? if we had 20 years or something like that? >> guest: we would send a rocket up far ahead of time to to meet it and to nudge it off course and again getting in closer you would use nukes. i should say in this regard that as i mentioned in the book, there is the so-called star wars technology. i'm very proud to say that i was among the first people in this country to combat against that stuff. president reagan made his speech in march of 1983 based on what

he was told about stopping russian missiles but this defensive system and as they were saying at the time they were supposed to be stabilizing it. appoint a made clear in foreign affairs in 1984 within a few months of the speech is that it was not going to be stabilized. it would be destabilizing because if you have the only defensive system that works they are going to try to knock off your enemies head. the point is that technology which was very very dangerous in the cold war is not going to be dangerous in terms of planetary defense. the asteroid's do not have ballistic missiles that can use to destroy us. so the point is the stuff that technology. nuclear pumped x-ray lasers and all sorts of things to try and

stop them. that technology would be very useful. >> guest: . >> host: like a nuclear-powered laser could be beamed onto the asteroid and that would heat up stuff with material blown out by heat -- being heated up and causes the thing to rocket away and into a different orbit, right? is that what you are talking about? >> guest: that's right, that's right. >> host: you were talking in the book about not even happening to touch the asteroid with a spacecraft or with anything from the spacecraft but just using the gravity of the spacecraft gravitational tractor. that is something that's practical if you have a couple of decades leadtime. >> they are calling it a gravity tractor and again the b6 12

rusty schweikert and ed lu and other people and the southwest research institute who is an aerospace guide, they have talked about this for years and it's exactly right. you can deflect it by touching it or not by touching it because it's so far out. again at those distances if you move it a couple of yards where it is 20 years out it will be supplanted by many, many, many miles of distance is -. >> host: the earth is only 4000 miles in radius so you don't have to move it much more than that and you accumulate that over decades you don't have to move it too much while you were there for that to discontinue. >> guest: that's right.

>> host: there are a lot of exotic ideas like painting the asteroid white or black so that the sunlight will push it more or less than the grey asteroid that's there. do any of those make sense? >> guest: no. why sidle up to this thing and painted colors when with the same amount of effort you can nudge it off course. unless of course you are an art major, you might like that but seriously, no. that's not necessary. just nudge it off course and again if worse comes to worse blow it away but painting in colors is senseless. >> host: those sorts of things do affect asteroids but that's over thousands and millions of years so do the math.

it's not quick enough. >> guest: that's right. >> host: do we know enough about asteroids to be exploding things on them? you have a picture in the book of the asteroid and it is i guess what eugene shoemaker said it looks like a rubble pile. it looks like a bunch of rocks lying on top of each other and you know what if we all we managed to do was sort of blow a hole in it or blow it into pieces that are still pretty much on the same trajectory? do we know enough about asteroids? the good thing about the gravity tractor is that we'll work on anything because gravity works the same on everything. we have known that but when it comes to a expecting an asteroid

to react a certain way what do we know about this? >> guest: depends on the asteroid and as yo you come up a lot of different compositions. some of them are almost entirely ironed and almost pure metal. others are like rocks. the popular image of the rock. i should say all of them carry small craters from impacts with other objects which gets back to june shue -- jeanne schumacher's hail of bullets which he called the universe in terms of what's going on out there but the point is come in all shapes and sizes and they vary enormously. as you say it buries according to which one you are talking about in the answer is we don't know enough. that's why that mission if you years ago worked and the

japanese did the same thing but to get as much information as possible about our neighbors. >> host: said that means if we see one coming it is the first thing we have to do is send a mission to it to find out what it's like before we send a mission to move that? >> guest: that depends on how close it is. if it's 11:00, no. then you save earth anyway you can but if it's very far away yes that would be the smart thing to do. find out what it is and in addition to everything else the science builds up. you learn things about them and that's what's important. again it's a matter of how close it is. >> host: right. so hit how big and how close to something up to be when the only thing left is to get? >> guest: that's a good

question too and it not only on its size but on what it's made out of. my suspicion is that within five or six years, that's close enough, you have to allow for the fact that the first time it may not work. the safety margin is as much time as possible so what they are saying in the community is five, six to seven years to go out there and again blow it up. earlier, nudge it off course but if you are going to blow it up blow it up for her had enough time and don't turn a cannonball into a rim shot. shrapnel. >> host: let me ask a little bit about the history of this idea. now humans have kind of figured out that there are rocks falling out of space. at the end of the 1700's or something in that order, i mean

i remember this famous quote that apparently thomas jefferson never said he would rather believe that a gamecube professor could lie been rocks could fall out of space but apparently he never actually said that. but when did he first encountered the idea that iraq could fall out of space and actually kill somebody or kill a bunch of people or anything like that? how long has this notion been around? >> guest: well basically since the 18th century and two the 19th and astronomers began spotting these things and again, you do a little bit of homework and you see the sky is full of them and they are flying around in all versions. it's a couple hundred years before that it was all miraculous. things were falling out of the sky when the cavemen were around but they put it down to god. there was nothing they could do

about it like the phases of the moon. >> guest: the astronomers were talking about dangerous meteorites from the beginning and when did the science fiction writers get into this? >> guest: 1610 he puts together the first and transit on the moon and every telescope that has been trained on the moon including his sees craters. it's rough and jagged and it's obviously been hit by things. that goes back to 1610. so since then i mean we have built on that. i should also say i wrote a book called exploring space which is about the solar system exploration program and the spacecraft which i've mentioned in the book called voyager, pioneer, mariner.

a sensational four planet grand tour in the 1970s and into the 80s. the four planets being jupiter saturn uranus and neptune. every neptune. everyone of them and senate passed had craters. again nobody talked about it at the meetings because the science was so wonderful. i was at those meetings. the science was so wonderful that that's what they wanted to talk about, the jpl. not about the damage that the pictures were there. they are our craters every solid object. >> host: it's an amazing thing. such universal process. obviously if you have a very thick atmosphere that keeps craters from being formed and there are some places that are just volcano world but that's a

minority. most places are pelted by these objects all the time. all of these objects all the time and in fact it's an amazing tool because things get hit at a certain rate and once we have figured out what that rate was by measuring the ages of the feature on the moon by the apollo program you could extend that to all the other objects that were being pelted. so this is sort of like how do you look at the surface of a planet and tell how old it is? without going down and picking up a sample and dating the rocks. you can just look at it and it's a wonderful tool. so yeah you have your volcano world's. you have got your impact worlds and the moon has gone back and

forth. they thought it was volcano's for a while and then baldwin started convincing people that it was the impact world and he talked about shoemaker really convincing everybody. >> guest: 's the crater called yucatán which they also thought was a volcano at one point. >> host: but that reminds me that you know we are more of a volcano world. most of the surface of our planet gets resurfaced. it's like the ocean bottoms. they have been resurfaced 50 times since the beginning of the planet and the impacts have eroded away on the consonants and we have got a lot of volcanoes. they are dangerous. i mean the theory is at least

the whole human race almost died because of volcanoes and now we are entering the 21st century and who knows what we are going to cook up in the way of dangerous things that could kill us all. i'm going to return back to this issue that you raise, the survival imperative. is that the name of the chapter? along with protecting ourselves from the asteroids we have got to protect ourselves from everything else so one thing you are advocating is let's spread the risk. let's get some people out of here so whyo you tell me more about that? >> guest: as i said spread out or die. there is safety and spreading out and that is why we should have a lunar colony. it's not for a denture although it would certainly be an interesting thing to do. spread out or die. that is why we need to do that.

in terms of volcanoes again getting back to shoemaker the good thing about the asteroids is they can be defended against. we can't defend against volcanoes as he pointed out or earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes. there is no defense against them so i'm an optimist in that regard. if you have the will you can defend the planet against asteroids. you can't defend it against exploding volcanoes. you just can't do it so in a way we are sitting on a paradigm. >> host: have you thought about you know they put neil and buzz on the moon moon and of a volcano had gone off while they were there they would have been real bad shape. they may have been able to make it back to the pacific ocean but maybe there would have been an aircraft carrier to pick them up

or something like that. so you know, can you talk about saving the earth from asteroids and keeping enough people live on the moon and by the way this is something that i'm willing to entertain because this is what i wrote about but i'm wondering what do you think? >> guest: in terms of a colony on the moon? >> host: yeah. >> guest: it's a no-brainer. spread out or die. again what it cost a huge amount of money? yes. but what is your life worth? >> host: do you have any scale or proposal in mind or something like that? you just have to keep some people live there that can come back to earth? >> guest: arthur c. clarke wrote about this in his book called the asteroids and space his third book which is i think a bible in his community grade he mentions a lunar colony and a

mars colony and he has the mars colony under a colossal plexiglass dome. if you look in it you can see automobiles and vegetation in all sorts of things. that dome would also have to keep our radiation which on mars is terrible but again what choice do you have? one really bad hit and the earth is gone and we just evaporate. will the universe care? no but i care. i have grandchildren. >> guest: it's not just the volcanoes and the asteroids. i can think of any number of things getting out of hand. it's lucky that we made it through the cold war. >> guest: look at the stuff we are pouring into the oceans and air pollution and global warming and climate change. absolutely.

we have met the enemy and it is us. >> host: what i think about this is you would have to have a lot of people to maintain a society such that when the threat is gone and the earth has settled back down and to something like normal you get a bunch back to earth so that they could start the place going again in terms of civilization. you would have to have a lot of people on the moon and people talk about the numbers but it's in the many thousands, many hundreds of thousands when you think about that. how are we going to build housing for 100,000 people on the moon? that sounds very expensive but the thing that is so cool is our moon and mars they have discovered recently there are basically cap earns just underneath the surface and that is where you would have to go.

you think every million years or something some horrible impact occurs on earth. well, there are any number of things on the moon that would kill you every day but the way to get away from them is just to go underground a little bit. you can seal up the vacuum and you don't have to worry about radiation from the sun and the galaxy. you don't have to worry about the temperature going up and down by 500 degrees fahrenheit. all these things don't make it below the surface and just below the surface buries these giant spaces and if you do the math, if you ask how many people could you put in those spaces, and keep them alive and the heat and all that, it's in the millions so actually it's so crazy an

idea. you don't have to build the a city of 100,000 out in a vacuum. we have already got the superstructure sitting below the men, so you have to get the people there and you have to give them the tools to sort of make things themselves and they will take care of. people are pretty good at making livable conditions especially if they are increasing in numbers and want their children to live someplace decent and things like that. the fascinating thing is the same kinds of caverns are on mars. this may be not such a crazy idea. it would certainly be very very expensive but it's not as expensive as when you first think about how much it might

cost. >> guest: that's right. there's another element too that should be mentioned and that is what some friends and mine and i call archives. the record of our collective civilization also would be preserved. we don't want to have it if there is a calamity on earth, we don't want to happen to the planet what happened when all the record of civilization was lost in a fire. so we need an archive over civilization that is constantly updated. again to make sure that if the worst happens and we are on the moon and on mars we have not lost their record of civilization. >> host: we are to have this library in the arctic vault. i can't pronounce it.

where we are keeping you know all the important prop grains and things like that and the amazth is that at the polls of them and there are these places that are almost absolute zero and they just sit there for a billion years. it's like if you wanted to store something for somebody a billion years from now you could actually do that. that is unfathomable. everything on earth changes in a million years. so that was a little bit tangent but let's get back to your book. i'm going to give you an opportunity to sort of sum up what you think are the important points we have covered here and convince people that use they should buy your book. >> guest: recovered the important points but to

reiterate again planetary defense is what is important here. again because we have access to space we have the wherewithal to protect ourselves one way or another. either on the planet or elsewhere about access to space has given us that and we have to use it. >> host: or else? >> guest: or else, yes. >> host: all right, well thank you bill burroughs. i got the opportunity to read your book and i got the opportunity to talk to her nose grey. >> guest: thanks. you have asked one of the questions. it is appreciated. it's been really fun.

>> that was "after words" booktv signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journals public policymakers legislators and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10:00 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9:00 p.m. on sunday and 12:00 a.m. on monday. you can also watch "after words" on line. go to booktv.org and click on on "after words" in the on "after words" in the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. >> guest: walter isaacson you have a new book coming out this fall. what's it about? >> guest: we have talked about innovation and the word has almost become devoid of meaning. he gets overused. i want to look at how real people invented the computer and the internet and how innovation really happens in the usual way. it was something that came out of working with steve jobs and before that bill gates to say