This Is Why We Play: Stories about motivation

In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers give us behind the scenes glimpses into why they do what they do.

Part 1: While constantly staring at Mercury’s craters for NASA's MESSENGER mission, a picture of the Galapagos Islands captures Paul Byrne’s attention.

Paul Byrne received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in geology from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC on NASA's MESSENGER mission, the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury. He later joined the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, and then moved to North Carolina State University as an assistant and then associate professor. He became Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis in 2021. His research focuses on comparative planetology—comparing and contrasting the surfaces and interiors of planetary bodies, including Earth, to understand planetary phenomena generally. His research projects span the Solar System from Mercury to Pluto and, increasingly, to the study of extrasolar planets. He uses remotely sensed data, numerical and physical models, and fieldwork on Earth to understand why planets look the way they do.

Part 2: While serving in the navy to get his engineering degree, David Estrada is struck by the level of poverty he witnesses on the tiny island of East Timor.

David Estrada is originally from Nampa, Idaho. From 1998 to 2004 he served in the United States Navy as an Electronics Warfare Technician/ Cryptologic Technician – Technical. David achieved the rank of Petty Officer First Class in 2003 before receiving an honorable discharge and returning to Idaho to pursue his undergraduate education at Boise State University (BSU) where he was a Ronald E. McNair scholar. After completing his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from BSU in May of 2007, he began graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the direction of Professor Eric Pop. David received his Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from UIUC in 2009, and his Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering at UIUC in 2013. David then joined Prof. Rashid Bashir’s Laboratory of Integrated Bio Medical Micro/Nanotechnology Applications as a Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher before moving to the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Boise State University. David is the recipient of the NSF and NDSEG Graduate Fellowships. His work has been recognized with several awards, including the Gregory Stillman, John Bardeen, and SHPE Innovator of the Year awards. His research interests are in the areas of emergent semiconductor nanomaterials and bionanotechnology.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

I'm going to bring you back to 2011, which I don't know about you, but that feels like 50 years ago at this point. So, like you heard, like Ken described, I was a newly minted postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institute of Science in Washington DC. Now, at the time, I had finished my undergrad and my PhD, I was a newly minted doctor. In hindsight, an idiot, but, at the time, feeling like I was well equipped to do this kind of space stuff. And I was extremely lucky to work on NASA's MESSENGER mission. It was the first mission ever to orbit Mercury.

Now, the reason that's a big deal is because Mercury is really hard to get to. In fact, although we'd only gone to Mercury one time before back in the ‘70s, that spacecraft only saw half of the planet, which meant that until the MESSENGER spacecraft, which was launched in 2004 and took seven years to get to Mercury, and I'll talk about why in a moment, we didn't know what half the planet looked like.

One of my jobs as a newly minted, young postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie was to, every day, look at the images that were coming down from the spacecraft from all the way at Mercury. And what was incredible about that experience was that every day we were seeing parts of the solar system that no human had ever seen before. We were seeing landscapes that we didn't know to expect and that was a humbling experience.

But there was also kind of a sense of routine to it. So, after a few months of looking at these images, I've got to tell you, Mercury is a really interesting place. But after a while, it starts to kind of look the same. There are craters and then there are bigger craters, and sometimes there are really big craters. Then there's a lot of other stuff in between, which actually turns out it's really small craters if you look in, so it's pretty cratered.

Paul Byrne shares his story at the St. Louis Public Media Commons in September 2023. Photo by Michael Thomas.

Now, it's a good world. It doesn't get the kind of love that, say, Mars does because most people actually haven't even seen Mercury. It usually only goes a few degrees over the horizon, so unless you're in a field, it's really hard to see Mercury, which is kind of the reason why we didn't explore it all that much.

So we were looking through these images and I was paging through pages of these archival images that the spacecraft had taken, and one jumped out at me. It was a picture of the Galapagos Islands.

Now, you may wonder, how does the spacecraft going to Mercury have a picture of the Galapagos? Like, that's some pretty bad navigational error.

It turns out that it actually takes a long time to get to Mercury for a good reason. The analogy I like to use is this. Imagine you're on the top of a skyscraper and you're looking down at the street and you see your best friend. You want to say something to them. You have two options for getting to your friend. One is very fast, but you won't really be in much of a position to have a conversation with them. And the other is slower, but it's safer.

Well, it turns out that if you go straight to Mercury from Earth, you can get there in a few months, but you're going to make a little crater. Or maybe you'll fly right past Mercury into the Sun. So the way you get to Mercury with a small spacecraft, the MESSENGER spacecraft was the size of a large office desk. It was tiny. The way you get there with a small spacecraft is you do all these gravitational flybys. You slowly spiral into the deepest part of the solar system and, doing so, by flying past other worlds you get slow enough until, eventually, when you reach Mercury, you're able to get into orbit.

And so the MESSENGER mission launched in 2004 flew a year later back to Earth for a gravitational assist. Then it went on and did two flybys of Venus, and then it did three flybys of Mercury. On the fourth approach to Mercury, it was finally going slow enough that its little engine was enough to slow it down, and just enough to make orbit. And I can relate to the idea of hoping you have a job if the mission works.

It actually made orbit in St. Patrick's Day, 2011 and I stayed up watching the NASA livestream going, "I don't know if I need to pack my bags or not, because this thing could make a crater, or it could go into orbit."

You know what? The engineers in that spacecraft, they missed their perfect orbit by like two kilometers. Now, you know how far away Mercury is. That's pretty good.

Anyway, I'm looking through these images and I see this picture of the Galapagos. It's a beautiful image. There's the islands and they were in the middle of the Pacific and the sun is shining this glint and it just stopped me in my tracks, this amazing image.

I was like, “This is something that I don't see every day.”

At that moment, I realized the reason it was so arresting to me was because— it just hit me. Remember, I'm looking at craters all the time and there's a lot of craters on Mercury. Suddenly, I see this picture and I realize modern humans have been around for 100,000, 150,000 years. We've been looking through telescopes for about 400 years and we've been sending robotic spacecraft out into the solar system for about 50 years. So, for the tiniest segment of our species history, have we been in the position where we can see photos from the surfaces of other worlds.

And it just struck me that this part in our species history is essentially unparalleled. Even up until a few decades ago, astronomers had the exclusive domain of planetary science, because you needed telescopes to see these worlds. And it was in the '60s when we began to send stuff out into space and see these images.

So, looking at this image, I was like, “This is insane. Two or three generations ago, there was no capacity for building a rocket in the first place. And, now, we're photographing the surfaces of other worlds.”

The other thing, too, is that if you think of it like I do, the hope is that in a few generations' time, maybe it won't be so unusual to see the surfaces of other worlds because humans will have spread out into the solar system, tentatively at first, but eventually, hopefully, in large numbers, which means this is this very narrow window in time when we're beginning to take these first steps out into the solar system.

I was like, “That's really cool.” And then I went back to look at craters.

For months, we were doing some cool stuff. We saw these weird lava channels on Mercury, I got to name stuff past the International Astronomical Union. I didn't tell them that the inspiration for the naming was Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it was, but we got to do some really cool stuff.

But that picture of the Galapagos kind of stuck with me. I kept coming back to it. I didn't really understand why and it was about a year later when I realized why it had had such an effect on me. It wasn't just that I was like, "Oh, I get to go and look at these cool images and boast to my friends.” I tell all my friends about my work. They don't care about them, but I tell them. But the reason this image really stuck with me is because in the years up to that point and the years since, both in my own career and in the work we do as a species, sending spacecraft out into the outer solar system, there's not a single place we've been to, not a single world we've surveyed that looks remotely like our own.

And what I realized about that picture of the Galapagos was that there is, for the foreseeable future, no prospect that we will photograph a world that has liquid water oceans and sunlight glinting on it and an island where Darwin found observations that helped him craft his idea of evolution. That image tells us just how rare and special and vulnerable this world is, because we now know there's nothing like it anywhere nearby.

I believe that there are worlds like Earth orbiting other stars, but we don't know about them yet. And we are a very long way from having the technology to be able to photograph them and look for their islands glinting in their suns.

And it really just brought home to me the idea, the thing I learned later was called the overview effect. This idea was originally developed or came to prominence during the Apollo missions where astronauts would fly from Earth and, for the first time in human history, look out through a single window and see the entire planet floating in the dark.

And these astronauts would come back and they would talk about this overview effect. This changed the shift of perspective where suddenly you realize all the stuff that we squabble about on the ground doesn't really seem all that important. It's really hard to see borders from space.

Now, I have not been into space yet, but with this image I think I have my own little insight into this idea, this overview effect. It has helped me realize since, and I use this in a lot of my public outreach talks and even in my lectures, I help people understand these pictures aren't just about telling us about the details of a given world or all the processes that might shape planets generally and what they have in common. More than anything, it's giving us a perspective we cannot possibly have otherwise, to get a sense of just how vulnerable our world is.

And at a time when we are arguably facing the greatest challenge of our species so far, anthropogenic climate change, it really, really helps to get that perspective of that little blue world out there in the dark, sunlight glinting on its oceans, the only place like it we know. And that perspective might just help all of us take a little more care and collaborate a little bit more here on Earth as we look to see what's out there.

Thank you very much.

Part 2

I'm the youngest of six children. I was born to Mexican immigrants. My father, he never completed high school. My mother did not complete high school.

In my father's case, about the age of seven, second grade, he had to drop out of elementary school so that he could be the sole provider for his family. He had eight siblings and he's in a single‑mother household trying to support the family. It's a very difficult task, as you can imagine, for somebody in second grade. And he lost two of his brothers to starvation, a fact that he didn't share with me until I was an adult just several years ago. Imagine the guilt that he must have felt his whole life.

David Estrada shares his story at Boise State University in November 2023 at a show sponsored by Boise State. Photo by Joseph Rodman.

My mother was slightly better off, but she, too, was raised in a single‑mother household. She made it through elementary school, in junior high and in high school. She had to drop out because, at that time in that school, you had to pay for your chemistry lab fees and they couldn't afford it. So, she also did not complete her high school education.

This motivated my parents to move to the United States to seek greater opportunities for their children. They brought my two older sisters with them and immigrated to ____ [00:01:31] and worked in the orchards there around 1970s.

So, you can imagine now that not having completed high school, either of them, education was very much valued in our family. I felt this growing up with my siblings. I can remember the times I would work with my mother as a young child and doing homework at the kitchen table, and I didn't realize at the time my dad couldn't help me, but she really enjoyed it. She really enjoyed the math and science and really encouraged me to study hard and complete my education along with my siblings.

Fast forward a couple of years, time goes on and my siblings, we all grow up. We start to graduate from high school one by one. My siblings start to move out of the house and start their careers and start their families.

And so I became the last of my family to graduate from Napa High School in 1995. This marks a major milestone for my parents, because they had seen all six children complete the high school education that they did not have the opportunity to do. But in my case, I still had that value of education and wanted to continue my education into college , so this motivated me to seek resources to continue down that path.

Of course, the military is one of those that can provide college fund, GI Bill, and opportunities for education, so I enlisted in the US Navy as the electronics warfare technician. This allowed me to sign up for six years. My first two years, I'd be getting an advanced electronics training. It's equivalent to an Associate's Degree in Electronics Technology. The rest of my time was spent overseas in Yokosuka, Japan, serving on board the Arleigh Burke‑class destroyer, the USS Curtis Wilbur.

Now, many experienced stand out for my time in the Navy. I remember my first mission that I was serving on, I had to meet my ship out of Bahrain to do sanctions enforcement on Iraq. This was when Saddam was still in charge over there. So, that was long nights getting just thrown into the mission as a newly minted E‑4.

I remember 9 /11, and I think many of you might also remember when those towers fell and military was called to action. I went upstairs and packed my seat bag, because I knew that call was coming and we had to go to the ship.

I remember simple things, too. Day‑to‑day operations and underway replenishments were kind of my favorite underway activity, but also like a blessing in disguise. You got to be outside on the focsle, feeling the sea spray in your face and the fresh air. But we worked at least 13 hours a day on watch and another six hours on top of that.

Underway replenishment basically meant no sleep for 24 hours for me, but, still, I got to be outside and you could smell that diesel getting pumped from the big oiler. You could see the crates coming over full of food and steaks that had been rejected by Kansas State Prison.

But the one experience that stands out the most to me, and I think it's the most transformative on my career, was a visit to the tiny island of East Timor. This was around 2000, shortly after they had just suffered a civil war. The Curtis Wilbur had been charged with going to support a humanitarian mission there under the United Nations.

So, we went there and anchored out. I was selected to be part of the landing party that would go and help rebuild a couple elementary schools, in part because of the advanced electronics training that I had received.

So, we went to shore on the RIB boat and I remember getting off the RIB boat and getting on. It's hot. It's humid. You step onto the pier and there's the US Marine Corps and the United Nations soldiers with their baby blue berets ready to escort us to go do the work at the elementary school.

We go through town on the way to the school. There's just these ditches next to the road, and what's that smell? Well, it turns out the sewage system in the city after their civil war. It's basically an open network of ditches that just ran alongside the city streets. You can see the flies going from the ditch to the meat hanging in the open‑air market. It's like, wow, this is a breeding ground for cholera, dysentery, hepatitis, you name it, right? This is disgusting. It's the first time I'd seen this level of poverty in these kinds of conditions.

We continue on and we go to the elementary school. We're coming and the elementary school has a large concrete wall around it. We're walking by and there's the bullet holes, also in the outer school house walls, serving as a sickening reminder of the political violence that has surrounded these kids' lives just months before we had arrived.

So, we come around the corner and there's the schoolchildren. They were happy and they were eager to see us, knowing that we were there to help rebuild their educational environment while in the background there's sewage overflowing from the latrine. There's no fresh water in the school. There's not a place to get a— there's no cafeteria. You're not going to get your chicken nuggets and fries. There's no place for a hot meal, but they were excited. They were excited for that opportunity to pursue their education

And so when I was in East Timor, I saw despair. I saw this poverty, but I also saw hope. It's the first time in my life that I realized that for many people around the globe, they are willing to take great personal risk for the opportunity to pursue their education. Some people even become combat engineers to pursue a civil engineering education.

This also reminded me, just seeing this level of poverty, about my own ancestors and my parents and how they grew up in lesser conditions and had to give up their opportunities to pursue an education. So, this motivated me, actually it factored into my decision to separate from the Navy, because I was no longer content with just serving my country and using my technical skills in service to my nation. I wanted to do something more and use my skills to help solve problems which have no regard for political, socioeconomic or cultural boundaries.

So, I came back after 2004. I received my honorable discharge and came back home to Idaho to pursue my undergraduate education here at Boise State and Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

During that time we were pursuing the education, I had gotten married in Japan with my wife and our son was born shortly after here in Boise, Idaho. I started to get involved in research to the McNair Scholars Program and got the bug to pursue an advanced degree and a career in research. That led to pursuing a PhD at University of Illinois, Urbana‑Champaign, also in electrical engineering with a degree emphasis in semiconductor device physics.

So, I was the first of my family to get a college degree in 2004. My wife and I were the first in our families to get advanced degrees as well. She has her Master's, I have my PhD. We came back here in 2013 both as faculty at Boise State University.

I remember being very excited at that time. When I got in my office, there's “David Estrada, PhD” on my door, my lab is across the hall and I'm in the new Environmental Research Building, which my brother helped build, by the way. By then, he’d established himself as one of the best masons‑laborers in the region. And those of you who don't know, these are the guys that mix the concrete and the mortar, pack the bricks, pack the block, build the scaffold, drive the forklifts. And so I got to have my lab in a building that my brother built.

It was empty. It was clean. Somebody must have cleaned it before we showed up. And walk in, it's just ready. It's ready for new instruments. It's ready for students who are eager to learn and work on impactful problems.

That was 10 years ago. Now, my team is the Advanced Nanomaterials and Manufacturing Lab. We occupy, I think, about eight labs here in Boise, and two labs here in Idaho Falls. Also, we're here in the new Micron Center for Materials Research, also another building that my brother helped build.

But we have a mission in our lab, and that's to develop manufacturing and material solutions for grand challenges which have no regard for political, socioeconomic or cultural boundaries. We want to tackle those big problems.

This next part of the story I have to take a little care, because you're not supposed to have favorite projects as a faculty member. Kind of you can't have your favorite child. Some of my students are in the audience.

So, one project that I'm particularly excited to work on, I love them all, but this one was very exciting because it's a new area of research for me and I believe it has a lot of impact. Faculty members still like to learn alongside their students. And so I got into water research.

You might be thinking, “Water?” At least one person appreciates the importance of and the difficulty in the technical aspects of water. I'm sure there's others here, but it's kind of an easy problem to motivate, but I also hear it can be kind of difficult to motivate. You might think about your own day this morning. Raise your hand if you brushed your teeth this morning. Oh, boy, who's not raising their hand? Take a quick look.

So, you get up. You can go to your faucet. You turn it on. There's fresh water, brush your teeth, wash your face. Then you go downstairs. Next thing you do is put water on the teapot, stir the coffee in and you just make yourself a nice cup of coffee or tea with the fresh water. Maybe you did the dishes after breakfast, right? You want to rinse them off, put them in that magic box that's on a timer and just fresh water comes later and cleans it.

And maybe you left a couple gallons of water for your pets in the dish bowl and you head out the door. That's not the case for a lot of people around the world.

I didn't understand this until I got an email, I probably still don't understand the full scope, but I got an email from a woman in Pakistan, Naqsh Mansoor. She had emailed me probably about five, six years ago and wanted to come to Boise and Boise State to work on using nanomaterials to do water remediation and help treat water and remove contaminants from water. She was on a Fulbright Fellowship.

So, being the on the tenure track and needing free students, I was like, “Great, I'm gonna learn water. Come on. We're gonna publish some papers and I'm gonna get tenure.”

But it was also an important problem to work on. You see, in Naqsh’s hometown, water doesn't come out that easy out of the faucet in the city water system. The trucks have to deliver the water. The trucks deliver the water to a big tank on the on the roof and you don't get more. If you use all that, you got to wait till the next truck shows up, so you have to be very conservative in using that water.

And this is a luxury. This is a luxury for people who can afford to pay the truck to fill that water tank.

I have another student who just started with our group about a year ago. I was talking to him on a trip to go get a couple of Starbucks and found out that Felix used to walk five miles a day to bring a couple gallons of fresh water home to his family. Felix is from Nigeria.

So, I think water is one of these big problems that transcend these political, socioeconomic, cultural boundaries and it's a big problem around the world.

I'm happy to say we're making progress in developing technologies to work in this area. Last year, Naqsh and I published a paper together where we used a new class of materials known as MXenes to remove ammonia from simulated agricultural waste streams.

MXenes are about three to five atoms thick, about the diameter of your DNA, and the flakes were 500 nanometers lateral dimensions, so about 100 times smaller than the diameter of your hair. And these materials, we put them in a capacitive deionization cell, you put a voltage on them and you can pull ions out of water. And they are operating at 10 times greater energy efficiency and 100 times more ion absorption capacity than state‑of‑the‑art activated carbon and CDI, so that material that's in your Brita water filter.

Felix has an interesting problem. He's part of a new National Science Foundation program, $6 million program we have with Louisiana Tech and some other schools in the Southeast to develop inks to print cheap water quality sensors. And so working with Felix is fun and trying to teach him all about graphene, this wonder material that's one carbon atom thick. He's trying to develop an ink that can print these sensors using an inkjet printer, something that you might have in your home office, so we can do distributed‑water quality monitoring.

You imagine just in one of these remote villages or in a remote area, just being able to put a sheet of paper in, print your water quality sensor, see what contaminants are there and then maybe combine it with Naqsh’s work to remove those contaminants, it's quite exciting. I never imagined that I would be in this position to do this kind of work with my students.

It just reminds me of taking that RIB boat back and leaving the shores of East Timor and going back to the Curtis Wilbur, the beautiful haze gray ship, I'm saying it sarcastically, climb up the ladder and get on the fantail where the helicopters land. I remember at that time thinking, as I'm watching the sunset. If you've never seen the Indonesian sunsets, they're amazing. Pretty much every color in the sky. And thinking to myself I want to go back and do something more and to work on impactful problems.

And that's part of being a faculty member, is offering, having the opportunity to provide other students the chance to pursue their education. But, more than that, just the journey I've taken and my own education and the opportunities that have come from that, I always think that education is a great equalizer. If you have the opportunity, it can help level the playing field, and more so for the next generation to come.

So, the opportunities that my son has in his education, there's no question he's going to graduate high school or even go to college. He doesn't ask, “Should I go to college?” It's like, “Which college will I go to?” But that's his story and that's something for him to tell. But I could tell you this. It's off to an amazing start.

Thank you.