Welcome to Star Talk.

Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now.

Welcome, welcome, welcome ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, kids of all ages to Star Talk

Radio. Bill and I are sitting in for Neil deGrasse Tyson and I'm here today with none other

than Chuck Nice. Hey, Bill. And we are going to have cosmic queries.

Yes, we are. Questions from the cosmos submitted by you to Chuck and Chuck, you not only have

the questions you have what they want to look like. That's right. I do what they want

to look like because these are their avatars from Facebook and Twitter and what have

you. And we have questions from all over the internet wherever we find a home. And before

you go any, I just want to point out that we are excited to have GE is a partner for this

inaugural video, cosmic queries, head over to their YouTube page to check out videos of how

they are bringing imagination to life. I'm talking about www.youtube.com slash GE. Yes.

We have a query. Yes, we do. Let's jump right into this and go to Justin Conner's who's

coming to us via Facebook and Justin says this. Since Mars core cooled off much faster than

Earth because of its higher surface area, wouldn't it have had a much earlier start than that

of Earth? That is to say, how much sooner could Mars have been habitable than Earth? Also,

what kind of period of time could Mars have had to develop and sustain life and could you

compare that to Earth? First of all, this is a fabulous question. It is a great question.

And let me say he worded it as best as he could, but it's not just that Mars has more surface

area, it has more surface area relative to its mass. It's a smaller thing. It has about

as much surface area as the land of the Earth, the dry land of the Earth. Okay. And so the

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