journalist elizabeth rosenthal looks at the business side of healthcare. at 10 pm eastern, the board amato discusses the relationship between time, physics, spirituality and our physical lives. and at 1130, we wrap up our primetime lineup with an interview with stanford professor corey fields on african americans and the republican party. >> at all happens tonight on these bantus book tv. >>. >> now we want to introduce you to chris mb, professor, what you do here at the university? >> on the associate dean and a professor of astronomy. >> how long have you been here? >> 30 years. >> what does that entail being what you are. >> now i'm an administrator, i like to keep a little piece, i do teach online classes, these massive online open classes, i had over

100,000 like the lighthearted teaching online i, i do budgets and i try and improve outreach for the college and various things. science literacy is a big concern of mine. for science students and for the general public and every student we teach. >> when did you get interested in astronomy. >> a little late, as far as either those little kids that had a telescope and traded it for bigger ones but i grew up in new york. i grew up in big cities with no stars so i got them through physics. physics is a gateway drug for astronomy, you do physics and you realize i can apply physics to the universe, that's cool so you look outwards and learn how to do it. >> what's the connection between the university of arizona and astronomy? >> we're a big astronomy departments, we're on our way to making the world biggest telescope, hitting the mirrors in the football

stadium under the span of the football stadium, it's a big business, we have i think astronomy and optics and related industries are worth about a quarter of $1 billion a year so there's their own economy so it's important to a lot of people, we have space missions, base telescopes with a lot of research that serve a buzzing place for astronomy. >> professor, before we get your butt beyond their future , can you go back to the football field and spending years, what was that about? >> what it was about was the telescope seem to have reached the limit so the power mark 200, that was around since the second world war, five meters and it wasn't exceeded for decades, the russians exceeded it formally with the six meter in the 70s, that's going to brett. >> and so there was a optic thing because big mirrors are expensive and heavy and hard to move around and hard to keep accurately shaped so roger angel one of my colleagues recently retired, invented this way of making mirrors large, thin and very accurate and the way you do it, the trick, the secret sauce is you the glass walks

in an oven and you spin the other fast enough that the mirror liquid takes the shape of a parabola and let it cool and take it out and you've got a mirror that's really large, bigger than any marinade in the us for half a century. and life. and therefore not to these too expensive. >> what's the connection to the football field. >> the connection is at the time that was the only place where there was a big enough stage to do this, you need a lot of vertical space and a lot of horizontal space and you just have to avoid game days. >> so you're spinning mirrors on the football field. >> it underneath, under the angle of this and the triangular space under the stand and the university, it was available space. >> why did the banner help the biggest telescope to see. >> as long as you're just greedy, you think five meters would be big enough, 10 meters should be big enough, we're trying for 22 mirrors

now. it's because more gathering, more life, the less you see further away and were trying to look back to the big bang, it is close to that as possible and you need bigger glass and also bigger mirrors makes impregnable sharper images so to see details, you also want a bigger mirror so everything's driving you in the direction of bigger glass, bigger mirrors. >> where are these is a goal telescope. >> the biggest ones we have are on telescopes on mountain tops around tucson and the president of arizona is still a good place but the biggest ones are now in chile so we have two 6 and a half meter telescopes in chile and these 22 and a half meter buildings in chile. that's the dark best place to observe in the world, essentially. >> professor, you write in your book beyond their future in space, that how our dna tells the story of the profound human urge to explore, what does that mean? >> i guess i need that while there are animals,

whales, birds that migrate , very large instances and travel planet in search of food or meeting, where the only creatures in the history of the planet that have traveled out of curiosity. because when you inscribed out of africa and migrated across the planet, in some cases, there is starting to be quick, a few thousand years ago from the bering strait where we could walk across all the way down to patagonia. it is a few hundred generations and they didn't have to. they were very food sources. so it was curiosity, i believe we spread across the planet out of the urge , desire to explore. and we've explored pretty much the whole planet and there's even been a gene identified or a variant of a single gene that the explorer gene which correlates with risk-taking behavior, with adhd, with things that might associate with internet explorer. so it fits into us and when you've explore the earth, you've got to go up and out.

>> from 1969 we landed on the moon area is that like looking at a horseless carriage today or is that still pretty intense?>> it's an amazing achievement in hindsight. there's been tension between the fact that in gallup and other polls, 7 to 10 percent of americans don't think we did it, they think it was a hoax and even setting that aside, so many americans were not alive when that happened. so it's a dim cultural memory. more receiving from you but on the other side hand it's the most stunning technical achievement humans have ever achieved. hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers, 1000 different companies, an enormous amount of money at the time doing with computers that were so primitive, 100 times more powerful then your cell phone computer to get to the moon. it's an extraordinary achievement and yet it so long ago. >> how does nasa fit in now with all the different

aspects of potential space exploration? >> nasa is still critical because it is the government space agency. they had a hard time, their budget forward during apollo and entrenched as the vietnam war was starting up and we couldn't afford to spend that much on nasa but equally discouraging for space acolytes, nasa's budget has gone down as a fraction of the federal budget for a factor of two for the past 20 years so nasa has to do with more with less and things are expensive, the technologies are challenging so nasa is a very important space player but now there are all these new players, there's all these three dozen private space companies and a few of them are funded by well-heeled billionaires and have other investors and i think in the aggregate of these private space enterprises, they clearly rival nasa's budget and will eventually of course far exceeded. >> are they cooperating with each other or are they on their own? >> it's an interesting situation.

with nasa, i think there's frustration with nasa that things are moving so slowly. this space shuttle was an obsolete technology by the time it was retired, the space station is not loved universally and some of the private space companies just wanted to do their own thing. elon musk was to reinvent rockets from the ground up and things he can do better so there is definitely lot rivalry recently, there's cooperation two. all these private space companies , they don't really have a good business model yet so orbital sciences and space x and several others have multibillion-dollar contracts with nasa to ship freight and eventually astronauts up into orbit. and that money is important to them and it's important to nasa because nasa can put an american in space and haven't been able to for six years which is a little embarrassing so that there's rivalry and there's cooperation, also america's trying to be more noble, they're trying to encourage sort of entrepreneurial

aspects at the level of space x but student groups and smallstartups to do miniaturization, to microsatellites up , that the booming area and so nasa is trying to learn, trying to roll with the time and be more entrepreneurial and there's a lot of partnership. >> you mentioned university of arizona has its own space program. >> yes, we been targeted now by nasa twice to do everything except the launch itself for our space program, first it was the phoenix lander that went to the martian polar region and most currently arts osiris rest which is going to grab a little bit of an asteroid and bring it back in seven or eight years, it takes a while. >> beyond our future in space you write about the importance of asteroids, what is that? >> asteroids if you want to get a glitter in your eye, they're a valuable commodity, there's 500 meter asteroids, as half a kilometer that happens to be coming near the earth so that you could

capture it by altering its orbit. and as fallen $2 trillion worth of precious metals, current market prices and about the same amount of rare herbs which are valuable in making the industry and so on so these are huge mineral resources that are out there and available. there's this little practical problem of how you tether them into a safe orbit that threatening the earth and then our risk back to that mother load at an economic level about destroying the market because you got so much of it. but that's not discouraging people, there are people who think, maybe five years but 10 years, 15 years from now there will be viable asteroid mining. >> is it time to retire the space shuttle? >> absolutely, the spatial never quite lived up to its promise, it was supposed tobe a space truck , i think it never went up more than once a month and its history. obviously the tiles were a problem and two orbiters out of five were lost astronomically, it was all on board.

and you're just doing that each time it happens so yes, it was long overdue to retire. >> is it important that this international space patient continued orbit? >> i think so but not maybe for the pure scientific reason because the truth is, scientists have not flocked to it, companies have not blocked to gravity research on drugs so it's not been a magnet for the economic and research activity people hope. but what has been is a demonstration that we can live and work in space, are 17 countries in the states station including our superpower rivals russia and china so it's kind of an emblem of cooperation and living in space. just learning how to do it. until you do it like that, all the practical stuff, a lot of the electrical and funding is not very glamorous. so it's important in that regard, it's expensive, $120 billion and counting at this point.

>> in other words w bush called for a return to the moon when he was president, is that important? >> it evan flow, the idea of the moon. certainly from a visionary, it seems disappointing. to just had our sites on the nearest body, half a century after we been back. but the moon is a very good, as the space station is a good place to live and learn how to work in space. just half a days drive vertically up so not too far. the moon is a very good place to learn how to live in a dome and a self-sufficient colony. because you can use the lunar soil which is extremely sterile, you can get a liter of oil out of a water, sorry, out of a ton of soil and you can turn the water into rocket fuel, oxygen to read. you can use it for plants, that you go there, not to drink so it's learning to live beyond the earth, the moon is the best place to do it and it's also a place that sort of serve as a staging post for the rest of the solar system.

>> chris, in your book beyond our future in space, where would you like to see us go? >> the outer solar system takes longer and is more ambitious but some of the moons of jupiter are so interesting. we have a europa clipper doing this waterworld around jupiter, good one or be the next place where we could see life beyond the earth and in some of the other moons and other solar systems , they are fascinating places where they're supposed to be biology. >> it's just a multi-year, it's a more expensive proposition to go out there. >>. >> let's go to the obvious, is there life in your view beyond earth? >> yes, since jan earth and includes a few hundred billion stars in our own galaxy and billions of galaxies in the universe, specifically i can't say for sure but i'm almost certain so the work on xo plant is

really including this traffic system that's just in the news in the last few weeks is pretty much telling us that there are tens of billions of earthlike planets inhabitable situations just in our own galaxy. >> the odds that they are all their all, the odd that given billions of years before the earth even formed, then nothing has happened with biology when it did happen here, i think are very low so yes, i believe there's like out there. >> what that pipedream that you have it comes to space exploration? >> for myself, that i get to go. it's beyond my means and i'm not going to be an astronaut so i would like the experience of orbit. i've talked to enough astronauts to be jealous of the experience. my pipedream for the whole activity is that we figure out a way to get beyond the solar system to the stars. unknown systems that are tens of thousands of times bigger than jupiter or saturn so will need some sort of cryonic technology or away to go into suspended animation.

we will need newkinds of fuel and proposing to g's . we just need to do rnd and heading to the stars would be an extraordinary thing. >> is anyone doing that r and d?>> nasa as i mentioned has resuscitated some of their more visionary ideas, the breakthrough star shot which is half years nano robots for the nearest star system and that's a sign that things are taking off. nasa is hosting conferences on interstellar drives and propulsion systems which they had hosted decades ago and then stop doing. now they're doing it again. the medical research on how humans could be taken into a white space is continuing for other reasons like life extension and medical reasons so yes, i think the balls are only moving forward. >> what is it about you that 100,000 students take your courses online? >> to be honest, 100,000 is a

lot but is not outrageous because you're tapping the whole world, these are in the 170 different countries. my course is about the cutting edge of astronomy so i tried to rather than marching through the subject the way a textbook would or i would with students at the university, i give them the good stuff. i talk about xo planets and how we make huge mirrors and big telescopes. how we measure black holes, the cutting edge of cosmology so i give them the research cutting-edge topics without the math so it's painless. and we have a lot of good online discussions, and a lot of fun teaching online. >> your book be on is a great title, not title, is that purposeful? >> yes, i've written textbooks and a lot of indigestible technical articles. i enjoy writing a popular book because to be able to explain it to a general audience as a challenge and it makes you know your subject better so when i write about cosmology which i've done a few times, those are an exotic abstract concepts and challenges you to know your subject well, to explain it to anyone and so i

like the challenge of a popular science book and also there's science is important now and getting the facts out there is important now more than ever though i'm sort of extra motivated to communicate to the public. >> we've been talking here on book tv with chris in b, his book is beyond our future in space. professor of astronomy here at the university of arizona. >> thank you. >> book tv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you. to us, twitter.com/book tv or post comments on our facebook page, facebook.com/book tv . >>