Last week, scientists, engineers and visionaries met at the annual Humans to Mars summit, outlining current challenges and technological breakthroughs in developing a plan for how to live on the red planet. WeMartian’s podcast host Jake Robins attended the virtual summit and joins us to talk about his takeaways from the conference — like conversations about diversity and inclusion in deep space exploration and the expanded role robots will play in getting us to Mars.

Then, is an supernova to blame for one of Earth’s earliest extinction events? We’ll chat with our panel of expert scientists from UCF this week to talk about a new paper that argues a star’s death could have had some collateral damage here on Earth.