Charlie: Good morning, I'm Charlie.

Jimmy: Good morning, I'm Jimmy.

C: And today on the show, we are gonna teach you how you can colonize Mars 'cause clearly we're the people to listen to on that topic.

J: We're very wise. It's Cereal Time!

(Intro)

J: Good morning, lovely people. It is Monday, hope you had a great weekend. This is really difficult, I've got to get a mouth hole. If you want to get in touch with us on the show then you can do. Why not like us on Facebook? It's facebook.com/cerealtimeshow or we're also on Instagram, did you know that Charlie?

C: I did know that.

J: Yeah. Also CerealTimeShow, so search for CerealTimeShow there and give us a follow.

C: I wonder if I should explain this. Last week we came up with our own games. I won, my game involved toilet rolls, so therefore we have a toilet roll mummy Jimmy.

J: I've just seen what I look like. It's horrible, so I'm going to take this off.

C: You're really, really terrifying.

J: Hi, guys. Before we get into the show though, it's time to do Fan Frame.

C: Today's Fan Frame is Virginia who wrote us the same e-mail twice, once in English and once in Spanish, just in case her English wasn't good enough, so thank you very much for that, Virginia.

J: Virginia, thank you so much. That's so sweet.

C: Also included in this week's Fan Frame is the corner of this man, who we don't know who he is, but congratulations, to your chin.

J: He's got lucky there. People strive for years to get into Fan Frame, and he's just done it without even realizing it, so congratulations. Thank you for that, Virginia. If you want to get in to Fan Frame next week, then send us a picture of your face. Send us a picture of you showing how much of a fan you are of the show and you could end up in that golden frame of delights.

C: Ooh, very exciting.

J: Today, though, and this week, rather, we're going to talk about Mars because, I don't know if you saw, last week there was some pretty exciting Mars related news.

C: Big Mars news. Yeah, we thought we'd jump right on that bandwagon.

J: Oh yeah.

C: Good old water on Mars time. It has been found, flowing liquid water on Mars on some lovely hills. So that's a big deal.

J: Is it a big deal? I don't know how to feel about this 'cause I saw people posting about this on Twitter and Facebook "Exciting Mars news". So immediately I thought martians. Finally they've found aliens, brilliant. That's something to get excited about. But then when I found out it was just a bit of water, well why is that? I thought there was already water on Mars.

C: People's expectations are too high. They had found water, in the form of ice, on Mars, I believe, but not flowing water, Jimmy.

J: Yeah, same thing, isn't it? I feel like they're really clutching at straws.

C: You know why this is important? Because one of the major building blocks of life is water. This does mean that we are one step closer to the possibility of there being actual life on Mars.

J: One step closer to a possibility isn't gonna... That's not making me excited. That's not getting me going.

C: Well, I'm sorry, that's just the truth. You should be excited by the truth.

J: And what kind of life is it going to be. Oh, we found a microbe. Ooh! Come on, you can't talk to a microbe and microbes aren't gonna invade the planet, is it?

C: You're telling me that if life was found on another planet, you wouldn't be a bit like "Oh, that's pretty cool, actually"?

J: Yeah, for like a minute.

C: I'll take it.

J: No, I would. Of course I would. We're going to chat to Hank later on in the show. Hank Green, boss of Cereal Time, big old fan of Mars, isn't he? He's a bit of a Mars fanboy, so we're going to chat to him later on in the show.

C: Get the real details on this story.

J: But today, for now rather, we thought, well, we thought we'd talk about how you can colonize Mars because if there's water there now, surely that means that living there as a human would be, maybe a little bit easier.

C: Slightly more of a possibility.

J: I'm going to take this off. I'm going to get rid of this guys.

C: I couldn't do that last week with my wild west woman costume, could I?

J: No, because you loved it so much, you refused to take it off.

C: Alright. First thing that you would have to do if you wanted to colonize Mars is get a lot of money. This is a pretty easy thing. You just need approximately, like, estimates are anywhere between twenty million dollars to four hundred billion dollars, required to colonize Mars.

J: Oh wow.

C: Which is, quite a lot of money.

J: I think that Bill Gates, who is one of the richest men in the world has about, doesn't he have about a hundred billion, a hundred and fifty billion, something like that.

C: It might be enough, if he invested it all into just going to Mars. Then he could manage it.

J: Yeah. Four hundred billion is a lot.

C: Instead he puts it all into charity.

J: (Scoffs) Bill! Get over it, mate. There's Mars to go and visit.

C: So you could either become really rich or you have to convince the government to give you money to go to Mars. I feel like NASA has been trying this quite a lot, seeing if they can manage. A good reason to go to Mars is, well, it's the same reason we went to the Moon, 'cause it's there, 'cause it's a challenge, 'cause it would bring people together. It's a big important thing to do that would unites, unite the peoples of the world to go to another planet.

J: We should speak to the government. We should have a chat with them. Guys, send Cereal Time to Mars. We'll just do a week. We'll just do a Mars special from Mars.

C: Maybe if we were just annoying enough people would want to send us to Mars. Just to get us off the planet.

J: Ooh, we'll do a Kickstarter. How long to raise four hundred billion on a Kickstarter? So another way that you could get to Mars, colonize Mars is to become an astronaut. The requirements for this are a bachelors degree in engineering, biological science, physical science, or mathematics.

C: Easy.

J: I don't have any of those, but I'm sure I could try.

C: In a week.

J: Yeah, I'm sure.

C: Simple.

J: You need at least one thousand hours pilot and command time in a jet aircraft. So you have to be able to fly planes and you have to have done it for a thousand hours, which is ages.

C: It's ages.

J: That's so long.

C: You have to do it all in one go, as well.

J: And you also need twenty out of one hundred or better uncorrected eyesight. I don't even know what that means or it has to be correctable to twenty-twenty vision. So you need good eyes, you need good blood pressure, and you need to be between sixty two and seventy five inches. How tall are you in inches?

C: I'm not entirely sure. What I love about that is the idea that someone would be like sixty one inches and really want to be an astronaut.

J: Yeah, they've got everything else.

C: They go up to NASA, right, and they'd have one of those things you have, like, on theme park rides that just says you're not tall enough to be an astronaut. Wouldn't that be heartbreaking.

J: They're like "Sorry. I know you've done your two thousand hours in a jet aircraft but it's not gonna happen."

C: Oh God. One other thing you'd need, definitely, if you wanted to colonize Mars, as well as having lots of money and being an astronaut, is you've got to get a team together. You've got to get a group of people together who would be willing to leave their families. I don't know if you'd be willing to do that, Jimmy.

J: I dunno, I'm not that attached to them. No, no way, absolutely not. I would never go to Mars.

C: No. 

J: No, it's dangerous, you're going to have to leave everyone behind, no Cereal Time. That's a disaster.

C: I think you actually could get the internet on Mars.

J: Yeah?

C: I don't know if that would be impossible.

J: Really? Really strong Wi-Fi.

C: It'd be, you know, NASA level Wi-Fi, but you'd still get Cereal Time.

J: Okay, well, maybe. That's making it slightly more appealing, but still. Can I bring the Gnome of Lies with me?

C: I don't know.

J: You know it, Gnome-y. One other thing you'd need to colonize Mars is travel. You'd need to get there, basically.

C: You do need to get there.

J: You need to get there. If you want to start a colony on Mars, you have to be on Mars. Which means getting a space craft, obviously to get you from one place to another, and then a booster vehicle to get you out of Earth.

C: Yeah. So two space crafts, basically.

J: Why do you need two?

C: Well, you've got to... Like you just said...

J: I read it, but I didn't understand what I was saying.

C: You know how you need, like, you know a space... You know how when something leaves Earth, huge rockets, goes off into space, breaks up into two pieces, the booster thing, that's to get you off Earth and then the space ship kind of goes between.

J: Oh, okay. See I would count that as one thing, personally, but fine, fair enough. I didn't write it, obviously.

C: And then once you get to Mars, as an astronaut, with your team and all of your money, what you've got to do now is actually start a colony. So for this, you need a pressurized place to live as Mars's atmosphere has a pressure below the Armstrong limit, which is the minimum pressure.

J: So you'd just get crushed, basically, I imagine.

C: I don't know if it's crushed or you'd expand.

J: Oh, expanding. Josh is saying expand.

C: You need more pressure, I believe. Oxygen supplies, very important as well. The atmosphere on Mars, there is an atmosphere but it's 0.4 percent oxygen.

J: That's not enough oxygen.

C: No, not at all.

J: You need loads more than that.

C: And then simple step: You've got to figure out how to become self-sufficient. How do you produce air, water, food and power. Doesn't really seem like the happiest place to be.

J: Got water though now. Which is one of those things.

C: Yeah, you got flowing water that flows over, what, the course of, like, a Mars year, a Martian year. Just sort of up a hill and back down again. Might not be enough to sustain you.

J: You're going to have to take some bottled. Take some bottles of water. Take some San Pellegrino probably.

C: I knew he was going there.

J: Took the words out of your mouth. I'm so predictable. And finally, on my card, it says "Most importantly have fun." People will most likely need to do recreational activities like gardening, exercise, maybe even repopulating/artificially inseminating. Perhaps having a good old game of swingball. Yeah, 'cause that's what you want to do on Mars, where you're gonna expand and potentially explode. Play swingball.

C: Tell you what, swingball would be easier. You know, less gravity.

J: That's true.

C: I might actually like that game if I could play it properly.

J: It would be really, really simple. Yeah, I'd do a bit of swingball on Mars. I would take, I think, Battleships with me. I think that would be a fun game to play on Mars. Just be like "Oh we're on Mars playing Battleships. Isn't it weird". But I think we should get some real facts from somebody who knows a lot about Mars now.

C: Yes.

J: Charlie, you chatted to Hank didn't you.

C: I did chat to Hank, resident Martian Cereal Time Expert, Hank Green. Had a little chat with him to find out some real information on this topic.

C: Hi, and welcome back to Cereal Time, where it's just me, but it's not just me 'cause Hank Green is here. Hello, Hank.

Hank: Oh my gosh! Thanks for having me on Cereal Time!

C: You're very welcome. It's Hank Green, boss of Cereal Time, who wanted to fire us, but not really. How did you feel about that, by the way?

H: Well I'm glad nobody got fired. Also I want to say that I feel like a complete poser because I'm eating a sandwich for breakfast.

C: What? That's not how we do it here, bro.

H: I know, it's Sandwich Time!

C: So I want to ask you, Hank. We have found, well, not we, but NASA-

H: Yeah, you and me

C: -found flowing water... We found flowing water on Mars! And I just kind of want you to geek out about it because Jimmy didn't really want to get into it. He didn't think it was very impressive.

H: Well, it's the human, it's us. It really is "we", it's not, you know. Like I think that all achievements of one are the achievements of all, especially when they're an achievement of an agency that is very much owned by me, at least, if not you. Sorry about that. Your space agency isn't quite up to snuff.

C: I didn't really even know that we had one, to be honest, but just don't worry about it then. What is it, then? Do we got water, flowing water, on Mars. I don't really know much beyond that.

H: Well, the big question is "Where did it come from?" And it could come from two different places. One, these perchlorate salts love water a lot so they could be actually sucking humidity out of the air and then turning that humidity into a liquid because once it sucks it out of the air, it becomes really stable as a liquid. But that's probably not it because there's not very much humidity on Mars. So what it probably is, is it's actually flowing out of some kind of subsurface water feature that is potentially liquid all the time, and it's just only during the sort of summer or spring months when that liquid can, like, persist on the surface for any amount of time.

C: So is this confirmation? We've got oceans of liquid underneath Mars? Right here on Cereal Time.

H: I wouldn't call it confirmation, but for Cereal Time viewers, let's just pretend that we can break that story. It is, I mean it is very likely and it was sort of likely before this announcement was even made, which is pretty cool. Of course, at the same time, this is not the best water for life because it's full of corrosive salts, which would kill you if you drank them and would also kill most organisms if they were inside of them, but not all. And there are actually some organisms that eat perchlorate because it is an unstable molecule that has a lot of energy inside of it. So they'll actually consume it and release oxygen and chlorine and that's the stuff that feeds their metabolism.

C: So when the whole world is like "We found water, flowing water on Mars, therefore we are one step closer to life, is that an actual thing or is that like a eh, sort of, kind of, maybe, but not really.

H: No, it's an actual thing and there's other hydrology on Mars that is also potentially a better place to look for life, which would be, like, water that has come, like, come out of, like, fresh water that's come out of glaciers. There's lots of ice on Mars. There's tons of ice on Mars. There's, like, you know... When people say, like, "There's water on Mars" it's like, yeah, we've known there's water on Mars since the seventies. There's lots of water on Mars, it's the fact that it's in a liquid state.

C: Well, thank you very much, Hank, for geeking out about Mars, water on Mars, right here, 'cause that made me very happy.

H: It's extremely exciti... And I am excited because I feel like a proper news correspondent doing, like, science news on an important show.

C: We both got to do some pretending about how important we actually are in relation to size today. Great. Thanks, Hank. See ya.

H: Yay, thank you.

J: That was a Monday, did you like it? Give us one of these. Did you really like it? Then press on the subscribe button because we are here every single week day. Also leave us a comment. Who would win in a fight between Mars, this guy here, and Pluto. Is Pluto even a real planet? That is the question.

C: Who knows. No it's not. It's definitely not.

J: Controversial.

C: Okay, we have our Twitter Thought of the Day here - it's definitely not - from Space Devil who says "You don't need to wear pants" You don't need to wear pants (parnts).

J: So posh.

C: "You don't need to wear pants to be a vlogger."

J: That's completely true. I'm nude from the waist down. Always am.

C: Really, I feel like I would be much better at this show if I didn't have to look at that, every single weekday morning, but whatever. Have a great day and we'll see you tomorrow.

J: See you tomorrow.