David Brin is back and he's brought Empathetic Space Exploring robots with him this week on planetary radio.

Welcome, I'm a Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the Human Adventure

across our solar system and beyond. He's one of my favorite science fiction

writers, but Dr. Brin is also a scientist and a futurist.

It's in that last role that we'll talk with him today about our future in space and down here

on Earth, returning now and then to the role artificial

intelligence will increasingly play in both of these arenas. There's nothing

artificial about Bruce Betts. He'll drop by with the latest look at the

night sky and yet another space trivia contest. We begin once again with the

Planetary Society's senior editor Emily Lockwala. Happy to have you back once again, Emily,

with yet another report from last week's LPSC,

the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference,

much, much more for people to take a look at at planetary.org from a lot of those

guest bloggers that you recruited, as well as their notes, which is pretty interesting.

But I want to talk specifically about your March 29 post

fungi in the lab hot springs frozen cold and exploding lakes it begins with well do we need to worry about all those lovely, supposedly pristine samples

that are stored in that lab at the Johnson Space Center?

Well, yes and no, Matt, the lab at JSC Johnson Space Center, which handles every bit of extraterrestrial

material we have.

There are actually a number of different labs. There are different labs dedicated to each kind of material. There's seven labs, one each for meteorite samples collected in Antarctica, one for the tiny itty bitty samples collected from Hayabusa and Genesis, each

lab has a different standard of cleanliness.

As they're getting ready to get samples back from Hayabusa 2 as well as Osiris Rex from these near-Earth

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