OLD-TIMEY NEWS ALERT SOUNDS AND SPACEY SOUNDS

LULU: [in an old newscaster voice] We interrupt your regular Terrestrials programming to bring you breaking news in the world of space… and poetry. That’s right breaking space-poetry news: because NASA has just launched a spaceship from Planet Earth! that will travel all the way to one of Jupiter's moons – a moon called Europa. And that spaceship is carrying fuel and radio transmitters and telescopes and thermal cameras and...a poem. That's right. A poem that is on its way out into the stars.

LULU: Yes, I’m really serious about all this. So… WHY? Why send a poem into space? And why send it to that moon in particular? Because Jupiter has, like dozens of them. Well, that is what we are talking about today. And to help we are joined by NASA scientist, Dr. Cynthia Phillips, who has spent months, years – how, how long Dr. Phillips, working on this mission?

CYNTHIA: It's been years. It's been, you know, maybe I don't want to say how many years, but it's been a lot of years.

LULU: Wait, tell us how many years! how many years

CYNTHIA: Well, so we, we first started planning this mission almost 25 years ago 

LULU: Woah.

CYNTHIA: When we were visiting the Jupiter system with a previous spacecraft called the Galileo and the pictures and observations that Galileo took of Europa were so cool that we were like, We have to go back. We have to go back with a mission that just studies Europa. 

LULU: Wow. And we are also joined by the one person on Earth selected to write the poem worthy of being engraved on this spaceship, 25 years in the making:  U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. Hi!

ADA: Hello! It's so wonderful to be with you today. 

LULU: Um, that doesn't sound like a stressful assignment at all.

ADA: Oh, no! [sarcastically] No stress. Very easy to try to write a poem that will be engraved on a spacecraft that hopes to speak for all of humanity. 

CYNTHIA: No pressure.

LULU: Ada, Cynthia I am so excited to have you here today…AND now is the part where i make u sing the theme song with me

ADA: Haha 

LULU and ALAN: [singing] Terrestrials, terrestrials, we are not the worst, we are the –

ADA: Best-rials. 

LULU: Yes you got it! I am your host lulu miller, joined as always by my songbud, 

Alan: [singing] Woo hoo hoo 

LULU: Alan!

ALAN: [sings] REACHING FOR EUROPA WITH A POEM! HELLO! 

LULU: Now, usually the way Terrestrials works is that I narrate a story about something strange that happened right here on earth. And at the end, I get out of the way and let kids ask questions to the expert involved in the story. And the thing is… that part, when I move away from the microphone, turns out to be pretty much everyone’s favorite part. And so, for news as momentous as this launch, and with guests as esteemed as a NASA scientist and the US Poet Laureate, I thought I’d turn over the mic to the people who ask the best questions: YOU. Our listeners. Over the last few months we collected questions from kids all over the country, and beyond, questions about what is going on with this mission, why it matters to science, and why poetry is part of it. So, you’re gonna hear mostly from them, from you, from yourselves… Cynthia, Ada, you guys ready?

ADA: I am absolutely ready. 

CYNTHIA: This is going to be great 

EVAN: Hi my name is Evan, and I’m 9 years old. So the spaceship is going to one of Jupiter's moons. How many moons does Jupiter have? 

CYNTHIA: Uh, you know, that's one of those hard questions, right? so, cause we're always discovering more. I think the latest number I saw was like 95 moons, but I could be wrong. They could have found another one last week I haven't heard about yet. So, there's a lot, a lot of moons.

LULU: Ok, so, almost 100 moons. Are they ever like, I'm just picturing suddenly like someone playing pool. Do those moons ever collide with each other?

CYNTHIA: Yeah, no, no, that's a good question. And yeah, collisions are possible. [collision sounds] Most of those collisions would have happened sort of early on in the solar system, back when everything was kind of new and things were crashing into each other. [more collision sounds] Nowadays, things have kind of settled down.  

LULU: So a bunch of kids wondered… of all those moons.

AMRITA: Why Europa? 

Cynthia: Yeah, so, the Jupiter system, so it has these moons that are really, really cool looking moons, and one of them, Io, that's close to Jupiter, it has volcanoes that are erupting like all the time. [VOLCANO SOUND]

LULU: With like lava and?

CYNTHIA: Mm hmm. There's like lava flows. There's plumes. There's like these sulfur deposits on the surface. We sometimes call it the pizza moon because it, seriously, it looks like a pizza. There's like red and orange and yellow and then like these little dark circle things that are actually, they’re lava flows but they kind of look like anchovies

LULU: What! 

CYNTHIA:  Or like olives 

LULU: Wow. love that, ok

CYNTHIA: So yeah, so, Io is totally this pizza moon. But then Europa, it's the next one out and its surface is covered with ice. 

SFX CRACKLE 

CYNTHIA: And then some of our models started showing us that actually under all that ice, there could be water. 

WATER/SHINY SOUNDS

CYNTHIA: We think that Europa has more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. 

LULU: Really?

CYNTHIA: So a huge ocean. So yeah It's a crazy place. When we think about water out in our solar system, like way out far away from the sun, this huge ocean.

WAVES AND WATER SOUNDS

LULU: [in a state of wonder and amazement] Gosh, an ocean in space.

CYNTHIA: Yeah 

WAVES AND WATER SOUNDS CONTINUE

LULU: Turns out the tagline to NASA’s mission to Europa is: “Exploring Jupiter’s Ocean World”

CYNTHIA: The reason why we've been working on this Europa mission for 25 years is that as soon as we found that ocean, we were like, “There could be life in that ocean.”

LULU: Wow. 

LENOX: Hi I’m Lenox. I’m 9 years old. I heard that the space craft is named “The Clipper”. Do you know why it’s named that?

CYNTHIA: Uh, yeah. So back in the 1800s, there were these giant sailing ships, and one of them was called the clipper ship. And it was a ship that had like these big sails on it, and it was very fast. And so they kind of like the imagery of this sailing ship.

LULU:  It's like a sailboat in space. looking at maybe oceans in space. That’s neat.

CYNTHIA: Yup.

LULU: Nautical-themed. It's fitting. 

CYNTHIA: Yes.

WAVES AND WATER SPRAY SOUND

AARNAV: My name is Aarnav Rudraraju. I’m 10 years old. My question is:  How big is the spacecraft?  

CYNTHIA: The whole spacecraft is going to be as big as a basketball court, 

LULU: Oh!

CYNTHIA: So it's going to be gigantic.  This is actually one of the biggest spacecraft that we've ever built and launched.

LULU: Wow. And just to be clear there aren’t any humans on it. It's purely machine? 

CYNTHIA: Yeah

GRAYSON: Hi my name is Grayson. I’m seven years old. My question is: what if the spacecraft blows up? 

CYNTHIA: Mmm. That's one of the scariest things about launch. Once it launches, once it's safe in space, then the chances of it blowing up are pretty small. BUT yeah, that's one of the, it's one of the scariest parts of working on a mission like this. You could spend 25 years working on something and it doesn't work. You know, something happens, something blows up.. 

LULU: What on earth would you do if it did?

CYNTHIA: I'd cry. Seriously. Like, I, you know, I'd cry. Because this is, you know, the spacecraft's like a friend. 

EVA: Hi I’m Eva I’m 9 years old.: Have you touched the spacecraft?

CYNTHIA: I have not touched it, but they don't let me touch things, right? You have to be really, really special to actually get to touch it. 

LULU: Ha ha

CYNTHIA: But, I have breathed the same air as it. 

LULU: So, you’ve been in the same room with it, or?

CYNTHIA: I've been in the same room. Yeah. So we were building it in this giant clean room. And so everyone who goes in there and all the stuff it has to be cleaned and then cleaned and then cleaned again. So we make sure we don't bring any dirt or dust or microbes or particles with us. And so I actually got to go in the clean room and, you know, they had an engineer who was making sure I didn't get too close to the spacecraft, but I got to go pretty close. And I was, seriously, I was sitting there. I was so excited.

LULU: Did you blow it a little kiss or like enclose any secret meditation or prayer on it for good luck?

CYNTHIA: I didn't, but I definitely said hi to it. Like I definitely, I sent it some mental kind of like, “good luck, you're awesome,” kind of wishes to it. 

LULU: Alright, switching gears to the poem engraved on the surface of that very spacecraft. A lot of kids asked a version of this question, but I am gonna toss it to Jude, aged 5, who, when he heard NASA was sending a poem into space asked simply:

JUDE: What for? 

CYNTHIA: That's a really good question. So NASA has a tradition of putting little messages on its spacecraft. And one of the most famous was one that went on the Voyager spacecraft. So these were two spacecraft that were launched in the 1970s. They're actually still going…And, we think in, you know, like thousands of years, they might make it to a different star system. 

LULU: Wow.  

CYNTHIA: And so when the spacecraft were being designed, um, scientists realized that maybe if there's an alien civilization out there, these spacecraft might be the first signs of Earth that they ever find. Um, and so they wanted to put a message on it. And they put it in the form of what's called The Golden Record.

NEEDLE DROP, VINYL STATIC. SAXOPHONE IN.

LULU: So like an actual physical record like the kind you’d put on an old fashioned record player to play music?

CYNTHIA: Yeah! But instead of just putting music, they put sounds from Earth. So they put people talking

LULU: in 55 different languages

VOYAGER SOUNDS: Hola y saludos a todos…

CYNTHIA: and they put sounds of nature 

LULU: Birds, chimpanzees, whale song 

VOYAGER AUDIO crying baby

LULU: A mother soothing her baby

VOYAGER AUDIO mother saying oh come on now

LULU: Songs from India, Senegal, Peru....

VOYAGER AUDIO singing

LULU The sound of a train..... Of thunder.....  Of a kiss!

VOYAGER AUDIO ENDS kiss sound 

CYNTHIA: And they basically put all sorts of things that represent the earth and humanity as a species.

LULU: How beautiful.

CYNTHIA: Yeah. And there's even like a little map on the record, that maybe an alien civilization could use to figure out where this thing came from.

LULU: Huh. Was there a record player in those spacecrafts shooting out way into space? 

CYNTHIA: No, but there's instructions on how to build one, right? 

LULU: Oh! That’s amazing!

CYNTHIA: And so the assumption was, you know, if these aliens are smart enough to be able to, you know, like, find our spacecraft and understand our message, then they can understand the instructions for how to like, how to build this record player to play it.

LULU: Are they in, like, English or is it Ikea where you get the stick figures or...?

CYNTHIA: You know, that's a good question. I think it's more, like diagrams. So yeah, I think it's like Ikea style. 

LULU: Um wow okay but so going back to Jude’s question of “why send a poem into space”, your answer is basically that it’s supposed to be a message from earth on the off chance an alien actually encounters it? 

CYNTHIA: yeah and whether or not anyone actually ever finds these things, it's a way of symbolically bringing humanity along for a ride. I think it's a really important process to go through thinking about, you know, what would we want to say? What traces of Earth would we want to bring with us? What is, what is the best of ourselves that we could take with us beyond this planet into space?

LULU: Woah. What a question!

CYNTHIA: Yes

LULU: So turning now to the one person on earth that NASA hoped could answer that question in verse form–

ADA: Ugh

LULU: U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón.

ADA: We definitely need to get Taylor Swift to write this instead 

LULU:Hahaha. We’ve got some questions for you.

ASHWIN: Hello. My name is Ashwin. I’m 10 years old. and my question is: How did you feel when NASA asked you to write the poem? 

ADA: Yeah, wonderful. We all hopped on Zoom. And the team at NASA explained the importance of Europa, the importance of the mission. And as they talked, I thought, Oh, I absolutely am so interested in doing this. And I immediately said, yes, yes, yes, yes. I want to do it. Thank you so much for asking me. Wow. What an honor. 

LULU: No pause. You didn’t sleep on it? In the room?

ADA: No pause. No pause. And then as soon as we got off the call, I thought. Oh, no, how am I going to write this poem? 

LULU AND ADA: Hahaha

ADA: And I thought, how difficult this is going to be. And so I went from this enthusiastic, wholehearted, yes, with my whole body to being basically terrified.

MENGSU: Hi everyone! I am Mengsu. I’m a teacher. My question is, was there any mandates to write the poem?

ADA: Yeah, no, they gave me some parameters. You know it needs to be, um, something that is able to be read by someone who is in fourth grade, and it needed to include water. And it needs to be, I think it was under 200 words. 

LULU: Hm

ADA: And that's, that's where the real sort of fear and anxiety set in.

LULU: Because how do you actually represent something so big in so few words?

ADA: Yeah exactly..

LULU: Now before we move on to how Ada tried to move through that fear, we just got SO MANY questions from kids about WHAT THE HAIKU a POET LAUREATE is, that we’re gonna to play a brief [dooo doo doo!] lightning round we are calling  

Lulu and Alan SINGING: WHAT- aerate is a poet LAUREATE?

ADA: Laughs

LULU: Number one:

LEO: Hi Im Leo. My question is: Wait, so are you, like, the best poet in the world?

ADA: Um no, Leo, I am not the best poet in the world. But I was chosen by Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, to be the 24th poet laureate. And what that means is that I am asked to expand the audience for poetry. 

LULU: Number two:

ANIRUDH: Where do you work as the Poet Laureate? And who do you work for? 

ADA: I work for the Library. The Library of Congress, the largest library in the world.

LULU: Hmm

ADA: And it has so many different types of  books, but also it has things like. The contents of President Lincoln's pockets 

LULU: What?

ADA: On the day that he was shot. 

LULU: Gasp!

ADA: Yes. 

LULU: What's in what there?

ADA: Well, he has a few different spectacles, and one pair of spectacles that he had clearly mended with a piece of thread because they were falling apart. 

LULU: Wow. Number three:

REMMY: Hi my name is Remmy, and I’m 10 years old. What do you usually do as a poet laureate?

ADA: I spend a lot of time on the road and I give readings all over the United States. I speak to a lot of high schools and different schools and  different libraries. In fact, I only have four more states to go to.. And then I will have gone to every single state in the United States. 

LULU: What are the four left? 

ADA: Oh, well, I have North Dakota and South Dakota, Maine and Alaska

LULU: Wow, neat. And that concludes 

LULU/ALAN: [singing] what-aureate is the poet laureate.

LULU: So, back now to your questions about the mission at hand, the mission to Jupiter's moon, the mission to this faraway space ocean…

ROBILIANA: Hi, my name is Robiliana Santos Soriego, and I’m 16 years old. If there is marine life in the ocean, in the moon, what flavor would it be?

Cynthia: Whoa

ROBILIANA: Like, if we ate it would it taste different than the food we have in our oceans?

CYNTHIA: laughs You know, that's a, that's, that's not a question I thought about before.That's a really good question. Um, so, so yeah, if there's life on Europa, Very likely, it's a completely separate, independent origin of life that's totally different from Earth. And so it's possible that, you know, we don't even know if that life will be based on DNA, on the same amino acids that ours are based on. And so, if we find life on Europa, there's no guarantee that it even would be edible for humans, BUT you know, maybe we'll have discovered, like, a new flavor of the tastiest fish ever…

LULU: And any guesses from little things, you know about anything about its chemical composition? Like, I don't know what it might like, would it taste a little more nitrogeny?

CYNTHIA: Yeah, like, if you're making a frozen drink out of Europa, what it would taste like, you know. You're making a slushie, right? And so you take some of Europa's ice, and then you'd have to, it'd have to be a little bit salty. It could have like sulfur 

CRASH

LULU: Raining down from nearby Io’s volcanoes

CYNTHIA: and be kind of stinky.

LULU: Would it maybe be fizzy? [ZZP SFX] Like if there's carbon dioxide up there?

CYNTHIA: Yeah! You know, probably the chances are it's much more likely to be gross than it is to be delicious, but you never know…

ALAN: [sings] It’s an icy salty fizzy slushee. Maybe sour maybe stinky. Probably won’t want to drinky (slurp slurp ahhh)

LULU: Alright, well, the spacecraft that just might be able to get better answers to that question has just begun its long journey to Europa... and when we come back, we are gonna hear the poem  that Ada finally wrote and hear questions from you about what it mean. Stick with us.

[BREAK]

LULU: Terrestrials is back. I am Lulu: and right now, as I say this, a spacecraft is soaring through space towards one of Jupiter's moons...called Europa, a moon that likely has an ocean on it. BTW if you would like to watch video of the launch of the spacecraft and read updates on the Clipper, can do that by heading on over to NASA plus. That’s plus dot nasa dot gov.

LULU: When we left off, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón had been asked to write a poem that would be engraved on the outside of the spaceship to represent a message from all of humanity! No bigs. But she was stuck. Like real stuck. 

ADA: Terrified. 

LULU: So we resume with the tale of what she did to move through that… which we learned about thanks to questions from kids all over the world 

ELIZABETH: My name is Elizabeth and I’m 10 years old. What steps did you take to write the poem? 

ADA: Well, I had about three months to write the poem. And I was going to Hawaiʻi, to a town, I'm not kidding, named Haʻikū, 

LULU: ha!

ADA: and I was staying in the house of a former U.S. Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin, And so my husband and I went there. It's inside an incredible palm forest. All of these beautiful, different varieties of palm trees. And so I got to watch all of the different species of birds and all the geckos inside and outside the house. And I had this real space to think and sit with the idea of what I wanted to offer. And so I began writing the poem 

SCRIBBLE SOUNDS AND MUSIC

ADA: I was trying to imagine the audience being sort of out in space, right? Whether there were other beings out there, whether the audience was the stars themselves

LONELY SPACEY MUSIC

ADA: And I kept imagining a loneliness. 

LONELY SPACEY MUSIC + SCRIBBLES

ADA: And so, I would read a draft to my husband, and he would say, “Hmm, you know, I think you need to stop writing a NASA poem.”

LULU: What do you think your husband heard when he said that?

ADA: I think he was hearing maybe more of a scientific approach, more stiff and formal type of writing. Maybe more of, um, following the assignment. Thinking of it as, um, presenting facts about Europa. Poets have one really beautiful way of procrastinating. And let me tell you about it. 

LULU: Ok.

ADA: What we love to do is research. 

LULU: Laughing 

ADA: And it means that instead of writing the poem, I think, you know what, I'm going to go Google everything about this moon of Jupiter. And it's a wonderful distraction, and it's a great way of learning. But it often doesn't actually help you make the poem. but it is our way of, um, just not writing.

LULU: Laughing

ADA: So, I think that that's part of what I was doing was thinking, “Oh, I'm going to teach people about Europa.” And that’s what he was hearing. And so what I needed to shift was, “Oh no, I need to speak to Europa and have this be a reaching out”.

LULU: Was there anything that like–a bird or a tree or a moment–that led you down the right path, the rabbit hole that would turn into the more us poem? I dunno. There might not be. But, do you have anything in your head?

ADA: Yeah! I was in Hawaiʻi, and I was staring at this palm frond and the palms really move. They sort of glow and move. They have a bounciness to them in the wind. And there was a little gecko that was stuck on the underside, that was completely upside down. And he was hanging on this palm frond. And I thought, “How amazing! That little dude is just, you know, bouncing in the wind back and forth.” And I thought of the line: we too are made of wonders. 

LULU: “We too.” Meaning, like, Europa and Earth are both made of wonders? 

ADA: Yeah. That's where the poem shifted. Then I realized that really the audience was us here on this beautiful planet. And it includes everyone on earth. And it also includes plants and animals. So it needed to be from all of us to all of us and the, “I”, “me”, “Ada” had to be taken out of it. And that's where the poem really reached a momentum, where I could follow it through.

MAADHAV: Hi. My name is Maadhav Sharma. I’m 11 years old. What did you struggle with to come up with in this poem? 

ADA: Oh, that's a great question. Um, I think that what I struggled with the most was how to use a we. Um, to be honest, I am someone that's always been a little suspicious of a we, um, you know, as a Latina, as, um, a woman, there are times where I even think of “we the people” and I think, am I included in that “we”? I want to know if I'm included in that “we”. 

LULU: And that, of course, is from our constitution

ADA: Exactly. And so I think that as a poet, I often don't use we, And so, um, I think the most difficult thing I had to do was actually surrender to the “we”. And remember that, uh, that the “we” had to represent everybody and to try to include trees and animals and plants. And so I had to really release that idea of the “I” and make room for my most communal voice.  And that was where the poem took hold. 

LULU: Really took hold. That poem is now engraved into the spacecraft, and Ada's words are literally touching the cold of space, collecting stardust as they blast towards Jupiter’s moon. She did it. She found a way to write a message from ALL of us here in this water world to Jupiter’s waterworld… in under 200 word. Um alright, well, would you be up for, for reading it?

ADA: I would be honored.

ADA READS: In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa

Arching under the night sky inky

with black expansiveness, we point

to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,

we read the sky as if it is an unerring book

of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:

the whale song, the songbird singing

its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

We are creatures of constant awe,

curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,

at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us,

not the cold distance of space, but

the offering of water, each drop of rain,

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.

O second moon, we, too, are made

of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great

and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,

of a need to call out through the dark.

CYNTHIA: My first reaction was just “Wow.” 

LULU: NASA scientist, Cynthia Phillips again.

CYNTHIA: And I think my second reaction was also, “Wow.” 

ADA: We got to visit the jet propulsion lab. And we got to see the Europa Clipper being built in the clean room. and I went into a sound booth and recorded the poem and I think I did it maybe three or four times. And when I came out, I hadn't realized that the sound was being pumped into the next room over. 

CYNTHIA: Oh my goodness, if I thought reading it myself was amazing, listening to her read it, oh. It makes me tear up, honestly. 

ADA: When I came out, everyone was crying and clapping. 

LULU: Oh!

LULU: Alright now, uh, back to our kid questions:

OWEN: Hello my name is Owen, and I’m 10 years old. My question is why do the words in the poem not rhyme?

ADA: Let me tell you, I love a good rhyme! There are a few moments. If you read closely, there are some rhymes.

LULU: Mmm!

ADA: Let's see if I can read one for you, ok. “We are creatures of constant awe/ curious at beauty/ at leaf and blossom/ at grief and pleasure…”

LULU: Aw! Yeah. Wait, where is it?

ADA: Leaf and grief.

LULU: Oh yeah!

ADA: Um. If you see “each drop of rain/ each rivulet/ each pulse/ each vein.”

LULU: Ah, rain and vein!

ADA: So, actually, there are rhymes throughout the poem, my friend. Ha ha ha

AMY: My name is Amy. My age is 13. The line that I liked was “We too are made of wonders, Of great and ordinary loves”. What does “ordinary loves” mean?

ADA:  Oh, I love that you asked that question. You know, I was thinking about how poets and artists and all of us, we like drama. We like big loves. We like really epic stories. We like everything to be at a ten! And I wanted to praise the little loves. Maybe it's the love between two friends and they're just friends and they can say, I love you. Maybe it's like, just like you and your mom and you can say, Oh, I love my mom. The moment where you can say, I love that coffee cart guy, ha who gives me the good donut, I love that, that bird in the tree, I love that everyday when I get on the bus that particular bus driver always says howdy instead of good morning.

LULU: And that line again, in the poem, you're talking about the similarities with Europa and the water up there, and also the ordinary loves up there. What kind of ordinary loves do you imagine might be on Europa?

ADA: Yeah. I mean, I'm so curious because it could just be, you know, the way certain elements love each other so that they bond, you know?

LULU: Haha yeah! 

ADA: It’s just the different kinds of attachments that happen every day.

MUSIC ENDS

SAMANAA: Hi, I'm Samanaa. I'm 13 years old. My question is, the things we've sent up so far mostly focuses on the good parts of being human, but what about the bad parts, like war and climate change?

ADA: Yeah, I think that's a great question. I don’t want to not recognize how hard we can be on one another and the destruction we’re so deeply capable of. And that’s there in the poem. That's one of the reasons that I wanted to put in, “grief and pleasure.” You know, that there's sun and shadow, but then it's followed by the line, “it is not darkness that unites us”. The selfishness, the lean towards war, the things that keep us separate. I don't think that those things define us.. 

LULU: Okay speaking of sending up our… uh, less..  Good parts of us,  I have a question, myself, for NASA Scientist Cynthia, that is going to really switch gears here. Uh, my colleague Latif Nasser told me there might be some… poop… up on the moon, on Earth’s moon. Because when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first astronauts who landed on the moon, when they were up there they were up there for a while and they had to go, and they just left it in a baggie that’s probably still there. Is that true?

CYNTHIA: That is actually true. 

LULU: Gasp!

CYNTHIA: So we've sent 12 astronauts to the moon. Um, and you know, when you got to go, you got to go, even if you're an astronaut, even if you're on the moon. So there literally are bags of trash on the moon that had astronaut poop in them. And, you know, it's kind of a gross thing to think about, but science, there are scientists who like thinking about really gross things. And so they've actually thought about, well, you know, that poop has now been there for like 50 years sitting on the surface. Could any of it …And, you know, you think about your poop. Like, why is it so gross? It's because it's filled with bacteria. Like, could any of it have survived there for 50 years? We have no idea. But isn't that kind of an interesting question? I mean, it's a gross question, but it's kind of an interesting

LULU: And like you could find out, right? If we went back and opened the bag, and like are there little bugs in there?

CYNTHIA: Yes. So literally, NASA, people have actually thought about designing a mission to go back and bring back an Apollo astronaut trash bag from the moon, bring it back to Earth and study it. And look at those poop samples and see, is there any, are there any microbes that managed to somehow survive on the surface of the moon for 50 years?

LULU: Wow. So, and like –

CYNTHIA: it's a gross question, but it's not a crazy question.

LULU: No, it's profoundly interesting scientifically,

CYNTHIA: Yeah, yeah, it is. It is.

LULU: And I guess instead of calling that the famous Apollo mission, which is Greek for sun, you could call it, I'm just looking this up, Kaka! The Kaka Mission, which I think we all know what that is Greek for.

CYNTHIA: Hahaha I love it

LULU: Gosh, that makes me think differently, like, tonight when I look up at the moon. Just picture what else is up there.

CYNTHIA: There is poop on the moon. 

LULU: Hahahaha thanks.Thanks for going with me there. Alright! Last few kid questions before we let you both go. This one’s for Ada.

ELI: Hi My name is Eli. And I’m 14 years old. Do you feel like a part of you is going to space?

ADA: I do. I do feel like a part of me is going to space. 

MUSIC ENTERS

ADA: Because I made the poem and the line breaks and the stanza breaks, that you have. my own breath in it. The way that I read it, the way that I, ya know, made the poem. And, so, in some ways it is my little, little human breath is going 

SOUND DESIGN BREATHING

CAITLIN: My name is Caitlin and I'm 14 years old. I want to know why people would think that people in Europa would speak English if there's people on our planet that don't even understand English.

CYNTHIA: That’s a great question. We've transited messages into space using radio waves. And those messages have been encoded using math. Because we think that math is probably a much more universal language than say like English or Spanish or something. 

LULU: Hmm

CYNTHIA:  Um, but yeah. So the message that we're sending with Europa Clipper, it was written in English, but we thought about the whole other language thing. And so we basically, we took the word for water in just over this huge variety of languages as spoken by a native speaker, and then we encoded those into these waveforms,

WORDS:Aqua, ur, miri

CYNTHIA: The languages were chosen by a team of professional linguists to, to represent languages from, you know, every different language family. 

WORDS: miso, amasi, nero, vater, vesi…

CYNTHIA: In the center of the design, is the encoding for the american sign language word for water. 

Droplet sound

LULU: That sign by the way is made by holding up your three middle fingers like a W, and then bouncing them on your chin a couple times

CYNTHIA: Yeah

LULU: I love that 

ASHANTI: Hi, my name is Ashanti. 13 years old.  How can feel the astronauts, when they go to space, how they feel a long time with they no have family or friends with them? 

CYNTHIA: Hmm. Yeah, that's a really good question. So yes, I think that being in space is an intensely lonely experience. What I've heard from astronauts who are up on the International Space Station, um, the favorite thing that they like to do whenever they have time when they're not working or sleeping is they like to look out the window down at the earth. 

LULU: Hmm

CYNTHIA: So, yeah, I think that they miss their friends and their family and their homes. I think it's hard. I think it's a really exciting and fun thing to be an astronaut. But it's also a hard job.

LULU: And you think that looking out the window is a kind of longing?

CYNTHIA: Yeah. Yeah.

LULU: It’s a kind of evidence of loneliness?

CYNTHIA: To say, yep, the earth is still there, you know. I will get to go home. 

ETHAN: Hi, my name is Ethan. And I’m 12 years old. Do you think there are any similarities between writing poetry and space exploration?

CYNTHIA: I think there really are. When you write a poem, you're trying to, in a few words, capture something that's bigger than the poem itself. And you think of a spacecraft? It's something that's crafted. It's something that's, that's engineered, that's, that's created, right?

LULU: Craft, right.

CYNTHIA: And you know, poetry, right? You're crafting a poem. It's kind of the same hands on sort of almost artisan nature in both cases, right? So you're crafting it, but then you send it out into the world. You send it out into space, and you see what comes back. I can imagine what, say, the new pictures of Europa are going to look like, but I have no idea. It might find things that we never dreamed of when we built the spacecraft, just like a poem or a song can take on meaning and resonance beyond kind of what was originally intended. 

ADA: And that's what's sort of fun about poetry, is that it begins in curiosity and then it ends in more curiosity. And exploration is the same way. We begin with a question. We get a little bit of an answer, and that means Oh! That leads us to another question. 

LULU: I love that, it’s like all of that intense crafting of a spacecraft or a poem that comes from the human mind, gets you far beyond the human mind.

ADA: Yeag. All of the arts and science in that way exist in questions, in wonder, in interrogation. They really make a beautiful pairing.

LULU. Well, that is the best place to leave it. Ada, Cynthia, Congratulations on the launch. I will be crossing my fingers as your words and work continue out into… the unknown. Thanks so much for talking to us

ADA: Thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure to talk with you all.

CYNTHIA: Thank you for such great questions. This was really fun.

LULU: Ummm a few exciting tidbits before we go. First of all, Ada’s poem is now available as a gorgeous childrens book. It’s called In Praise of Mystery. It’s also available in Spanish: Elogio al Misterio. The illustrations are by Peter Sís. They are celestial and beautiful. Get a copy. Wrap up in the poem and all its imagery.

Big shout out to Latif Nasser and his TV show Connected. Which you can watch on Netflix. That’s where he talks about the poop stuff. He has a whole episode about poop. Not just on the moon, but also in other places. Go check that out. He is just as wonderful on TV as he is on the radio. And finally, if you'd like to keep tabs on the Clipper as it heads out to Jupitar’s moon, see photos, read updates and so much more, just check out the links right there in our show notes.

Terrestrials was created by me, Lulu miller with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Ana González, Mira Burt-Wintonick and me. With help from Tanya Chawla, Alan Goffinski, Sarah Sandbach, Valentina Powers, and Joe Plourde. Fact checking by Natalie Middleton. 

HUGE SPECIAL THANKS TO THE TEACHERS and schools we worked with, including:
Simone Larson, Sarah Gates, Kaleb Wagoner, StreetLab, CMSP 327 in the Bronx - go sharks!
And also to WNYC’s awesome Community Partnerships editor, George Bodarky,
and to Gretchen McCartney, Michael Taeckens, Vaughan Ashlie Fielder, and BIGGEST THANKS TO ALL THE BADGERS. Kids with badgering questions from all over the country - literally hundreds of you- with great questions, we couldn’t get to all of them, but we appreciate ALL OF YOU.

Support for Terrestrials is provided by the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Kalliopeia Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. THANK YOU!

Catch you in a couple spins of this watery old planet of ours. Blowin’ a kiss to the Clipper. SMOOCH SOUND!