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Speaker 1: Hey, Kelly, where do you think your kids are going

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Speaker 1: to live when they grow up?

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Speaker 2: Well, right now, my oldest is saying she's going to

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Speaker 2: stay in the house and have fourteen cats and ten kids,

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Speaker 2: And I guess I'm hoping that she's not in my

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Speaker 2: house but when that happens. But I also don't want

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Speaker 2: her too far because I'd love to see her and

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Speaker 2: her many creatures as much as possible.

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Speaker 1: Well, what would be too far? Are we talking like

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Speaker 1: South America or Antarctica.

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Speaker 2: I'd make those trips, although I wouldn't be super excited

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Speaker 2: about Antarctica, but I suspect I'm going to be a

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Speaker 2: pretty determined grandparent.

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Speaker 1: What if they have grandbabies, like in near Earth orbit

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Speaker 1: on this space.

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Speaker 2: Station, I'd be a bit disappointed for her poor decisions,

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Speaker 2: because I'm not sure that that's safe yet. But if

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Speaker 2: that's what I have to do to see the grandkids,

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Speaker 2: and my love is unconditional, I'm in all right.

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Speaker 1: And what if they move to MI and have little

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Speaker 1: Martian babies?

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Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, I don't know. Maybe we should set

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Speaker 2: up a video link.

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Speaker 1: Well, it's good to know the limits of your love.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, No, there's Alpha Centauri is a good limit. But

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Speaker 2: you know what's worrying me is we're having this conversation,

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Speaker 2: and now I have to make sure that my kids

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Speaker 2: in the future and my grandkids don't listen to this

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Speaker 2: conversation because they're going to get ideas and they'll move

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Speaker 2: out deep into the solar system.

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Speaker 1: Right now, they know exactly how far they have to

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Speaker 1: move to.

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Speaker 2: Avoid grandparent visits. Yep, good luck kids.

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Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor

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Speaker 1: at UC Irvine, and I hope my kids move far away.

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Speaker 2: I'm Kelly Weener Smith. I'm a parasitologist and adjunct Debt

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Speaker 2: Race University. And you know, I'd like my kids to

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Speaker 2: be close, but maybe not in the house.

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Speaker 1: I have lots of friends here whose kids graduate from

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Speaker 1: high school, go to college, and then move back home

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Speaker 1: in this neighborhood. They call that failure to launch.

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Speaker 2: That's a big thing. Now, Yeah, my kids can stay

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Speaker 2: with me as long as they need to.

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Speaker 1: Mm. I just feel like moving outside the influence of

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Speaker 1: your parents is part of growing up and becoming an

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Speaker 1: adult in the world.

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Speaker 2: You know, I did love it. I had so much

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Speaker 2: fun when I moved out.

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Speaker 1: Well, welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,

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Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio. My usual friend and co host,

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Speaker 1: Jorge can't be here today, but I'm very happy to

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Speaker 1: be joined by our regular guest host, Kelly Wingersmith. Kelly,

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Speaker 1: thanks very much for joining us.

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Speaker 2: It's a pleasure to be here as always. And you know,

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Speaker 2: today we're talking about maybe the best thing you've ever

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Speaker 2: talked about on the podcast, and so I'm particularly excited

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Speaker 2: about today's conversation.

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Speaker 1: That's right. Today we're not just talking about explaining the universe.

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Speaker 1: We're talking about exploring the universe, actually settling the universe,

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Speaker 1: sending humanity out to the rest of the cosmos to

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Speaker 1: infect it with our disease. And as a special bonus,

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Speaker 1: we have not one Wienersmith today, we actually have two

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Speaker 1: Zach wingers made welcome to the podcast as well.

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Speaker 3: Hey, Hello, I need some intro music.

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Speaker 1: What is your intro music? Is it sort of like

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Speaker 1: the Darth Vader theme song?

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Speaker 3: Is more of a more of a wrestling thing, I

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Speaker 3: would I would like what did the Macho Man have?

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Speaker 1: Well, regular listeners the podcast know Kelly, of course, and

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Speaker 1: some of you may also know Zach her less famous husband,

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Speaker 1: well known for a Saturday morning breakfast cereal.

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Speaker 3: Whatever made man.

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Speaker 1: And there's a reason we have Zach and Kelly on

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Speaker 1: the podcast together today, not just for marital therapy, but

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Speaker 1: because these two folks have written a fantastic and fascinating

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Speaker 1: book all about settling space and exploring the.

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Speaker 2: Cosmos, and it's finally almost of it.

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Speaker 1: How long have you guys been working on this book?

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Speaker 2: We did four years of research on the book, and

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Speaker 2: then it took a year between submitting the book and

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Speaker 2: it going to Prince. So we've been thinking about this

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Speaker 2: for like a decade between the two of us, and

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Speaker 2: we are ready to crush everyone's dream.

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Speaker 1: If you feel about this book the way I feel

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Speaker 1: about every paper I write that takes longer than a year,

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Speaker 1: then by the time it's ready to go out in

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Speaker 1: the world, I hate the thing and I never want

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Speaker 1: to see it again.

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Speaker 2: I was happy to get it off of my desk

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Speaker 2: when the time came, but I'm still pretty excited about it,

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Speaker 2: and that year in between sort of helped me get

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Speaker 2: excited about it again. What about you, Zach, Yeah, I

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Speaker 2: think you know.

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Speaker 3: So the amount of time between submitting a manuscript, you're

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Speaker 3: basically not allowed to touch and the time you get

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Speaker 3: to actually put the book out of the universe is

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Speaker 3: quite substantial. So the other thing is, you know, the

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Speaker 3: way publishing works now is you don't want to say

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Speaker 3: too much because you might get to say it in

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Speaker 3: some prominent place. So you kind of have you're sort

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Speaker 3: of like, you know, and gagged until the book comes out.

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Speaker 3: So it's getting to where it's exciting to talk about

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Speaker 3: this stuff again.

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Speaker 1: Awesome. So I hope we're catching you right in the

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Speaker 1: upswing where you're excited about these topics again, because I'm

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Speaker 1: very excited about it and I can't wait to talk

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Speaker 1: to you both about it. And so today on the podcast,

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Speaker 1: we'll be tackling the question can we settle space? Should

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Speaker 1: we settle space? Have we really thought this through? I

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Speaker 1: love the subtitles for your book. It really sets up

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Speaker 1: the whole conversation, the skepticism, the nerdy analysis of whether

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Speaker 1: this is something realistic. I really love the way you

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Speaker 1: guys tackle this.

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Speaker 2: I feel like by reading the last question we propose,

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Speaker 2: you pretty much know where we're going to fall on

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Speaker 2: the whole topic. But you know, we try to we're

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Speaker 2: still people who are excited about space settlement at the

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Speaker 2: end of the day.

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Speaker 1: And space settlement is something that's definitely in the zeitgeisten

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Speaker 1: has been for decades. Right, We've been hearing about the

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Speaker 1: possibilities of moving humans out into space. Elon Musk is

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Speaker 1: famous accelerating our ability to get into orbit, and so

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Speaker 1: this is something people have been thinking about. And so,

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Speaker 1: as usual on the podcast, before we dig into the topic,

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Speaker 1: I pulled our listeners to hear what they thought about

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Speaker 1: the possibilities of colonizing space, the Moon and Mars in

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Speaker 1: this case, actually walked around campus here at UC Irvine

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Speaker 1: where classes have recently started, and asked folks if they

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Speaker 1: thought it's important that we colonize space and whether we

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Speaker 1: will have the technology. So, before you hear these answers,

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Speaker 1: think to yourself for a minute, do you think we

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Speaker 1: should colonize space? Are we ready to do so? Here's

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Speaker 1: what people had to say, Sure, why not? Do you

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Speaker 1: think we're capable of doing it anytime in the near future? No? No,

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Speaker 1: how long do you think before we're ready?

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Speaker 4: The Moon? Probably under the years, I would say that

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Speaker 4: estate I don't know.

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Speaker 1: Finding the future, do you think humanity should colonize space?

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Speaker 1: The Moon? In Mars. No, because we kind of ruined

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Speaker 1: our planet already. Are you worried we're going to ruin

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Speaker 1: some more?

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Speaker 4: We will deserve too.

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Speaker 1: Do you think humanity should colonize space the moon in

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Speaker 1: Marsh Yeah? Definitely, Yeah, definitely Yeah. Cool. Why is that?

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Speaker 3: Yeah?

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Speaker 4: Because like you know, like you never know like what's

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Speaker 4: going to happen in the future, you.

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Speaker 1: Know, do you think we're ready? Do we have the technology?

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Speaker 4: Maybe NASA does, but we never know like what's going

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Speaker 4: to happen. Maybe they're like hiding something or at least

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Speaker 4: that's what I think. I think we should colonize like

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Speaker 4: those kind of financial What is NASA hiding?

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Speaker 1: Do you think?

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Speaker 3: I have no clue?

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Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm just undergrad student here, but probably like some

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Speaker 4: like super technology, you know, just came out that aliens

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Speaker 4: does exist.

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Speaker 1: The question is, do you think humanity should colonize space

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Speaker 1: the moon in Mars?

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Speaker 3: Yeah?

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Speaker 5: I think so. I think it's a good idea. So

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Speaker 5: if we're capable of doing it, I think it's not.

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Speaker 5: It's not a bad idea.

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Speaker 1: So do you think we are capable?

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Speaker 5: I think we will be very very likely because I mean,

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Speaker 5: we sure have the technology to go there.

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Speaker 1: It's just yeah.

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Speaker 5: So I guess if you asked me, in probably in

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Speaker 5: one hundred years, there will be people living in March Mars,

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Speaker 5: That's my guess.

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Speaker 1: Do you think it's important that humanity colonizes space, the Moon, Mars,

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Speaker 1: et cetera.

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Speaker 3: Eventually, yes, but not in the immediate future.

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Speaker 1: And do you think we'll have the capability the technology

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Speaker 1: to do it anytime soon?

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Speaker 3: Eventually?

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Speaker 1: Eventually? What does eventually mean?

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Speaker 3: I don't know.

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Speaker 1: Erudious all right, Zach Kelly, what do you guys think

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Speaker 1: about those answers?

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Speaker 2: Well, I'll note that I didn't share them with Zach

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Speaker 2: ahead of time, so he's unprepared. But I'm going to

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Speaker 2: go ahead and say that's his fault. So one of

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Speaker 2: the respondents said no, because we've ruined our planet already,

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Speaker 2: so we don't deserve it. And I got to say,

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Speaker 2: what as an ecologist, when I started telling people like, oh,

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Speaker 2: I'm writing a book about space settlement, many of them

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Speaker 2: immediately assumed that I was writing a book about how

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Speaker 2: we don't deserve it because we've destroyed our own planet,

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Speaker 2: And I almost felt guilty because that was not at

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Speaker 2: all my angle. I'm excited, and I think we should

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Speaker 2: you know. I hope we do it at some point,

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Speaker 2: but I hope we're just careful about it.

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Speaker 3: Zach.

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Speaker 2: When you talk to people, what is the response that

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Speaker 2: you usually get from people when you tell them that

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Speaker 2: you're reading a book about space settlements?

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Speaker 3: So I think, you know, the ecologist's example is good

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Speaker 3: because what we've found is what we should do in

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Speaker 3: space is almost like a roar shock test for your

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Speaker 3: view of the universe, you know what I mean. There

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Speaker 3: are these different strains. So there are people who are

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Speaker 3: very kind of techy libertarian, read a lot of hindline

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Speaker 3: Elon musk is is in this vein who think it's

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Speaker 3: not just that it would be cool to do it,

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Speaker 3: would be kind of like a thwarting of human ambition

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Speaker 3: to not do it. But then you also have feel

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Speaker 3: who are Yeah, I have this perspective that we have

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Speaker 3: kind of befouled the Earth and we're a sort of

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Speaker 3: you know, gross skurf on the surface of the planet

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Speaker 3: and ought not to extend ourselves to other planets. And

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Speaker 3: I think it's almost like you know how people say

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Speaker 3: science fiction is never about the future, it's always about

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Speaker 3: the present. I think what you think should be done

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Speaker 3: in space settlement kind of works the same way. What

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Speaker 3: you're often doing is really making rendering a sort of

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Speaker 3: judgment on how we're doing right this second. You know.

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Speaker 3: The deal is, of course space is actually a real

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Speaker 3: place that interfaces with actual reality, and so you know,

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Speaker 3: our book is hopefully it's an attempt to part from

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Speaker 3: it just being a sort of philosophical thing and talk

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Speaker 3: about what it would actually be like. But yeah, can

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Speaker 3: you say about the ecology thing my biggest rebuttal to that,

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Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, people tend to assume that we're going

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Speaker 3: to be like, yes, Elon mess is an idiot and

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Speaker 3: he's defiled Earth and will defile Mars, and I just

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Speaker 3: want to say, like that just fails to reckon with

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Speaker 3: how thoroughly terrible Mars is, Like unless you are one

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Speaker 3: of these people, and there are such people more than

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Speaker 3: I would have thought, who think like Mars as an

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Speaker 3: entity has agency like a person would. Unless you believe

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Speaker 3: something like that, it's bizarre because there's no part of

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Speaker 3: Earth that's even close to as bad as anywhere on Mars.

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Speaker 3: You couldn't make it as bad without like slamming the

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Speaker 3: Moon into Earth or something. So the idea of in

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Speaker 3: an ecological sense, messing up Mars is sort of absurd,

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Speaker 3: and the moon even more so. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Well, one thing I think is really fascinating is hearing

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Speaker 1: about how your opinions have changed. I mean, if this

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Speaker 1: is like a war shark test for who you are

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Speaker 1: and what you think about where we are today, then

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Speaker 1: it's really interesting that you guys went from like vaguely

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Speaker 1: optimistic about space settlement to being you know, space cranks.

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Speaker 1: Essentially tell us a little bit about your journey, like

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Speaker 1: what book did you start out wanting to write? Did

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Speaker 1: you intend to write when you started this project? Oh,

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Speaker 1: so many years ago?

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Speaker 2: So we wrote soonish together and that was a book

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Speaker 2: about emerging technologies, and two of the technologies in the

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Speaker 2: book were cheap access to space and asteroid mining. And

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Speaker 2: after writing both of those chapters, we thought like, oh,

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Speaker 2: you know, maybe space settlements aren't that far away. So

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Speaker 2: if you can launch mass to space cheaply, then you

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Speaker 2: can send habitats with all the tech that you need

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Speaker 2: to keep humans alive in space. And if asteroid mining

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Speaker 2: is a thing, then pretty soon we're going to be

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Speaker 2: able to use resources from space to build our habitats.

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Speaker 2: And that's going to make things even cheaper, And so

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Speaker 2: we thought that this is something that could happen in

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Speaker 2: our lifetimes, and especially given all of the like pop

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Speaker 2: size stuff you read about space settlement and all rhetoric

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Speaker 2: from space advocates, we thought like, this is something that

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Speaker 2: we are one hundred percent prepared to do. We just

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Speaker 2: need to be able to afford to do it. So

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Speaker 2: we were going to write like the guide to what

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Speaker 2: the next couple of years are going to be like, like,

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Speaker 2: you know, how do you put together the first crew?

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Speaker 2: Should it be half male half female? How should you

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Speaker 2: know if you have an international crew, kind of sociological

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Speaker 2: stuff might they come up against? And what kind of

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Speaker 2: governance should you have for the first settlement on the moon.

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Speaker 1: And you were excited to see these things happen, right

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Speaker 1: You were like, ooh, let's figure this out. This would

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Speaker 1: be fantastic if it happened.

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Speaker 2: I guess I shouldn't speak for both of us, but

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Speaker 2: I was. I think it's beautiful. The idea of like,

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Speaker 2: you know, waking up on the Moon and seeing Earth,

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Speaker 2: you know, from the glass dome that you were sleeping

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Speaker 2: in or whatever, that all sounded amazing, and so I

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Speaker 2: was super excited, but every chapter that we started working

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Speaker 2: on we were like, oh, man, we don't know anywhere

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Speaker 2: near enough about this. So in the medicine chapter, we

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Speaker 2: were like, we really don't know how bodies are going

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Speaker 2: to respond to space. And then in the closed loop

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Speaker 2: ecology chapter, where you know, can you recycle the carbon

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Speaker 2: dioxide that you breathe out in the water, and how

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Speaker 2: do you get like a habitat that recycles stuff so

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Speaker 2: that you don't need more stuff flown in from Earth,

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Speaker 2: And we really don't know how to do that very well.

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Speaker 2: And then we got into the international law and we

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Speaker 2: were like, oh, my gosh, there's so much that isn't

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Speaker 2: figured out here, and it could create tons of conflict

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Speaker 2: if we start trying to settle now. And I could

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Speaker 2: just go on and on and on. Every chapter that

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Speaker 2: we thought, oh, we've probably figured this out, it turned

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Speaker 2: out that there's a lot of work to do, and

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Speaker 2: so we ended up, yeah, writing the book that we

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Speaker 2: wrote instead.

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Speaker 1: So you discovered that a lot of these things hadn't

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Speaker 1: really been explored thoroughly, or viewed with a skeptical lens,

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Speaker 1: or analyzed in detail. Essentially, it was all hidden under

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Speaker 1: a bunch of pro space fluff. Is that the sense

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Speaker 1: you got once you start digging into things?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, all of that, All of that is true.

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Speaker 1: So why is that, Zach? Why do you think nobody

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Speaker 1: has written this sort of like skeptical are we really

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Speaker 1: ready kind of book before? Why is it all sort

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Speaker 1: of pro space gloss over the details?

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Speaker 3: That's a good question, you know, I should say, first

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Speaker 3: of all, as we got close to press a couple

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Speaker 3: similar books not quite the same story coming out, I

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Speaker 3: do think there's a kind of growing analytical approach to

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Speaker 3: this problem. I will say, you know, it's hard to

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Speaker 3: know other people's motivations. I think the generous assumption is

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Speaker 3: that people don't tend to write pop technology books about

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Speaker 3: a thing you're not going to get generally speaking, right,

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Speaker 3: I was talking to a distinguished popular science author and

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Speaker 3: I said, you know, I was talking to him about it,

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Speaker 3: and you know, basically explained this whole thing that where

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Speaker 3: we're basically going to say it's going to be, it's

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Speaker 3: way harder than you expected, The timelines are much longer

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Speaker 3: than you expected, and there are even arguments for not

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Speaker 3: doing it outside of like extraordinary technological developments. He was like,

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Speaker 3: you can't do that you can't have a book for nerds.

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Speaker 3: That's like, sorry, nerds, you don't get the thing. And

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Speaker 3: so you know, the upshot of that is, if you

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Speaker 3: look as we did at the sort of corpus of

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Speaker 3: future casting books about space written going back to the

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Speaker 3: nineteen twenties, they tend to be about what problem space

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Speaker 3: is going to solve? Right. They're not critical in that

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Speaker 3: sense of saying, wait, maybe this problem is not worth

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Speaker 3: solving in a sort of boring economic sense, the kind

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Speaker 3: of analysis you would do if you were trying to

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Speaker 3: say drill and oil well, right, And so when you

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Speaker 3: don't have that voice in the room, there tend to

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Speaker 3: be major things that just get skipped. So like, for us,

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Speaker 3: a huge turning point which will sound like almost nothing

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Speaker 3: when you first hear it, but then you start thinking

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Speaker 3: about it, which is the surface of the Moon is

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Speaker 3: carbon poor, like extremely carbon poor. There's almost no carbon, right,

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Speaker 3: And so you have a nerd audience they know what

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Speaker 3: that means that you literally cannot have life. You have

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Speaker 3: to import carbon. Right. It's not like you need to

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Speaker 3: like sprinkle a little phosphorus or something, right, you have

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Speaker 3: to sprinkle the whole farm, Which is crazy when you

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Speaker 3: think that these you know, like if you look at

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Speaker 3: Saturn fives, like the biggest rocket ever built, it was

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Speaker 3: able to put this eeny weeny little thing on the moon. Right,

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Speaker 3: It's the idea that we're to scale up to where

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Speaker 3: we're delivering mountains and mountains just to be able to

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Speaker 3: grow apples or whatever is kind of crazy and so

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Speaker 3: like whatever, it could be solved, quote unquote, But why

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Speaker 3: isn't this the first thing in all these books about

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Speaker 3: space settlement, right? Why aren't questions like this number one?

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Speaker 3: Like these massive problems? And another huge one is radiation,

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Speaker 3: which there's a book called The Case for Space, or

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Speaker 3: is the Case from Mars. It's a huge book in

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Speaker 3: this sector by Robert Zubrin. It has a section on radiation.

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Speaker 3: It goes immediately as I recall into this idea of

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Speaker 3: hormesis hermeisis meaning when you get some of something, it

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Speaker 3: might actually be good, some of a little bad something

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Speaker 3: might be good in some circumstances, which is like a

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Speaker 3: bizarre response to the unknown results of massive doses of

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Speaker 3: non earth like radiation. But I think this is what

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Speaker 3: you would expect if most of the books are written

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Speaker 3: by advocates. They just don't want to linger on those problems.

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Speaker 1: You have this line in your book, which I thought

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Speaker 1: was a great singer. You say, quote much of the

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Speaker 1: discourse around why we should go to space and how

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Speaker 1: society will work when we get there remains mired in

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Speaker 1: un informed opinion and unrealistic fantasy. Ouch are you suggesting

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Speaker 1: that we should have like a boring economist in every

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Speaker 1: conversation to keep us like firmly rooted on the ground.

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Speaker 2: Yes, I mean there would be worse things. And I also,

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Speaker 2: just to be clear, we are generally very nice to

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Speaker 2: the space settlement community. We disagree, but we love them

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Speaker 2: very much. These people are our friends, and we're sorry

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Speaker 2: that we're wet blankets. But yes, the rhetoric could use

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Speaker 2: a bit of Well.

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Speaker 1: We're going to dig into all of your analysis of

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Speaker 1: what it's like to live in space and where we

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Speaker 1: could go, and what the real problems are in international

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Speaker 1: law and cannibalism and sex in space, on all these

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Speaker 1: really fun topics that you guys analyze. But before we do,

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Speaker 1: I just have one more question, which is, what do

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Speaker 1: you think the response is going to be from the

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Speaker 1: pro space settlement community when you call them uninformed and

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Speaker 1: unrealistic fantasizers about the future.

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Speaker 2: Ah okay, So I'll say that Daniel Dowdney came before us.

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Speaker 2: He wrote a book called Dark Skies, which is very

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Speaker 2: anti space settlement, and he has been called anti human.

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Speaker 2: And I watched a panel that was set up where

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Speaker 2: he was like invited to sort of like watch, but

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Speaker 2: they didn't ask him to suggest any names for people

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Speaker 2: to go on the panel, so it was just people

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Speaker 2: tearing apart his ideas for like two hours, and which

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Speaker 2: I thought there were plenty of good counter arguments that

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Speaker 2: weren't presented. But anyway, I am not super sure that

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Speaker 2: the community is going to be real kind to us.

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Speaker 2: But there's also plenty of people in that community who

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Speaker 2: are open to discussion, and so I'm optimistic that we'll

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Speaker 2: have lots of productive discussions with lots of people, but

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Speaker 2: no doubt there will be a subset of people who

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Speaker 2: are going to have really hate our guts.

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Speaker 1: Well, I hope you guys don't have to go into

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Speaker 1: hiding after this book. I think it's a good idea

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Speaker 1: to explore this constructively, and that in your book you

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Speaker 1: were balanced and fair and didn't just throw wet blankets

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Speaker 1: on these ideas suggested like actual ways forward and raise

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Speaker 1: the issues that we need to confront if we're going

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Speaker 1: to make this happen. So I think it's a very

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Speaker 1: positive and forward thinking book. But let's dig into the

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Speaker 1: details in a minute after we take this short break. Okay,

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Speaker 1: we're back and we're talking about the future of humanity

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Speaker 1: settling space. Should we can? We will we have the tech?

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Speaker 1: When will we have the tech? Is it possible to

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Speaker 1: live in space? With Zach and Kelly Windersmith, because they

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Speaker 1: just wrote a book about it, called A City on Mars,

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Speaker 1: which is out now from all excellent booksellers and also

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Speaker 1: less reputable booksellers.

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Speaker 2: Sorry, you can get it anywhere.

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Speaker 1: All right, So let's talk about what it's like to

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Speaker 1: live in space, because so far, almost every human who's

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Speaker 1: ever existed has lived in a very narrow slice of

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Speaker 1: the universe, very close to the surface of the Earth.

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Speaker 1: So tell us about what we know about living in space.

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Speaker 1: What is it like in terms of the environment for

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Speaker 1: human survival? And let's start with radiation. What are we

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Speaker 1: facing if you're going to live for an extended period

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Speaker 1: not in the atmospheric bubble of Earth.

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Speaker 2: Well, so this was one of the first eye opening

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Speaker 2: research topics for me. So we started with space medicine,

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Speaker 2: and I assumed, you know, okay, so the Soviets sent

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Speaker 2: up a bunch of solutes, and then the Soviet Union

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Speaker 2: slash rust Russia sent up Mirror, and then ISS has

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Speaker 2: been up there for like twenty years, and China has

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Speaker 2: now fielded three space stations in low Worth orbit, and so,

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Speaker 2: you know, I assumed that we would have a bunch

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Speaker 2: of data on how radiation impacts the human body, and

440
00:20:42,480 --> 00:20:46,000
Speaker 2: we'd have good answers to questions like does space radiation

441
00:20:46,400 --> 00:20:49,520
Speaker 2: cause cancer? And I should note that radiation in space,

442
00:20:49,600 --> 00:20:52,080
Speaker 2: as your listeners no doubt already know, is different than

443
00:20:52,119 --> 00:20:54,399
Speaker 2: the kind of radiation we tend to encounter on Earth,

444
00:20:54,440 --> 00:20:58,080
Speaker 2: and so we understand it even less well. But something

445
00:20:58,119 --> 00:21:00,399
Speaker 2: I should have realized but didn't occur to me until

446
00:21:00,440 --> 00:21:03,240
Speaker 2: I was reading these textbooks on space medicine, is that

447
00:21:03,400 --> 00:21:06,560
Speaker 2: all of our space stations have been orbiting the Earth

448
00:21:07,000 --> 00:21:11,119
Speaker 2: under the protection of Earth's magnetosphere, and so most of

449
00:21:11,200 --> 00:21:14,639
Speaker 2: space radiation is not reaching them. Maybe they have slightly

450
00:21:14,680 --> 00:21:17,720
Speaker 2: elevated levels, but a person living on the International Space

451
00:21:17,760 --> 00:21:21,200
Speaker 2: Station isn't necessarily giving us the data that we need

452
00:21:21,240 --> 00:21:23,720
Speaker 2: to understand how a person living on the Moon or

453
00:21:23,800 --> 00:21:26,080
Speaker 2: Mars is going to hold up under space radiation.

454
00:21:26,320 --> 00:21:28,479
Speaker 1: So where does space radiation come from? I mean, they

455
00:21:28,480 --> 00:21:31,320
Speaker 1: don't have like nuclear power plants melting down in the

456
00:21:31,400 --> 00:21:33,120
Speaker 1: middle of space. Where is this coming from?

457
00:21:33,240 --> 00:21:35,479
Speaker 2: It's coming from the Sun, and it's coming from well,

458
00:21:35,520 --> 00:21:36,920
Speaker 2: I really feel like this is a question.

459
00:21:36,680 --> 00:21:41,160
Speaker 1: For you then, right, So you're right, the Sun generates

460
00:21:41,200 --> 00:21:43,760
Speaker 1: a huge amount of radiation, you know, protons and electrons,

461
00:21:43,840 --> 00:21:46,760
Speaker 1: very high speed, the solar wind. People think about space

462
00:21:46,800 --> 00:21:50,040
Speaker 1: as empty, but it's really filled with high speed particles.

463
00:21:50,359 --> 00:21:52,399
Speaker 1: And as you say, the Earth is protecting us from that.

464
00:21:52,440 --> 00:21:55,879
Speaker 1: It's atmosphere and its magnetic field shields us from a

465
00:21:55,920 --> 00:21:57,840
Speaker 1: lot of that space radiation. So if you think about

466
00:21:57,920 --> 00:22:00,680
Speaker 1: radiation like Fukushima style, is not a whole lot of that,

467
00:22:01,119 --> 00:22:03,720
Speaker 1: but there's a huge amount of just solar wind, and

468
00:22:03,760 --> 00:22:05,959
Speaker 1: we feel that already down here on Earth. You know,

469
00:22:06,000 --> 00:22:09,600
Speaker 1: we get radiation from space that penetrates through the atmosphere

470
00:22:09,840 --> 00:22:12,040
Speaker 1: and as you go higher and higher, you're more exposed

471
00:22:12,080 --> 00:22:13,800
Speaker 1: to that radiation. So you know, one question I have

472
00:22:13,880 --> 00:22:15,600
Speaker 1: for you is like, is it possible to learn more

473
00:22:15,600 --> 00:22:18,160
Speaker 1: about this not just from astronauts on the space station,

474
00:22:18,280 --> 00:22:20,520
Speaker 1: but from like flight attendants who spend a lot of

475
00:22:20,560 --> 00:22:23,399
Speaker 1: time at higher altitude and are more exposed to that

476
00:22:23,520 --> 00:22:24,560
Speaker 1: radiation from space.

477
00:22:24,920 --> 00:22:27,520
Speaker 2: Well, so they're more exposed to that kind of radiation,

478
00:22:27,600 --> 00:22:29,879
Speaker 2: but they are they also more exposed to like the

479
00:22:29,920 --> 00:22:33,560
Speaker 2: galactic cosmic radiation like iron ions and stuff. Are those

480
00:22:33,600 --> 00:22:35,440
Speaker 2: also hitting the planes in space?

481
00:22:35,760 --> 00:22:38,200
Speaker 1: That's actually a really fascinating research question. We don't actually

482
00:22:38,240 --> 00:22:41,119
Speaker 1: know what component of the radiation the cosmic rays that

483
00:22:41,200 --> 00:22:44,480
Speaker 1: hit the Earth are, like iron nuclei versus just protons.

484
00:22:44,760 --> 00:22:47,200
Speaker 1: None of that actually makes it down to the surface.

485
00:22:47,240 --> 00:22:49,800
Speaker 1: They'll just slam into the atmosphere and then turn into

486
00:22:49,880 --> 00:22:53,199
Speaker 1: muons and other particles. So there's definitely no iron nuclei

487
00:22:53,400 --> 00:22:57,600
Speaker 1: like passing through the bodies of stewardesses and airplane passengers fortunately,

488
00:22:58,200 --> 00:23:00,640
Speaker 1: And so I guess your argument is that out there

489
00:23:00,640 --> 00:23:02,760
Speaker 1: in space, on the surface of Mars or on the Moon,

490
00:23:02,800 --> 00:23:05,800
Speaker 1: you have like no protection, so you're like really feeling

491
00:23:05,840 --> 00:23:08,640
Speaker 1: the brunt of raw space radiation itself.

492
00:23:08,440 --> 00:23:11,920
Speaker 2: And you're never escaping it. And also your habitat can

493
00:23:11,960 --> 00:23:14,520
Speaker 2: create different kinds of radiation, so when the radiation hits

494
00:23:14,560 --> 00:23:18,120
Speaker 2: your habitat, something called spallation happens where the particles break

495
00:23:18,160 --> 00:23:21,320
Speaker 2: into different kinds of particles that are also radioactive. And

496
00:23:21,359 --> 00:23:23,560
Speaker 2: so what kind of habitat you're living in, the shape

497
00:23:23,560 --> 00:23:25,359
Speaker 2: of the habitat, all this stuff is going to matter.

498
00:23:25,640 --> 00:23:28,119
Speaker 2: But with stewardesses for examples, you know, let's say they

499
00:23:28,119 --> 00:23:30,320
Speaker 2: are getting exposed to some of that radiation. You know,

500
00:23:30,320 --> 00:23:33,399
Speaker 2: they're exposed to it for parts of their lives, so

501
00:23:33,440 --> 00:23:35,680
Speaker 2: you know, they're working lives start at like what eighteen,

502
00:23:35,800 --> 00:23:38,280
Speaker 2: but maybe even older, and they're only up there part

503
00:23:38,280 --> 00:23:41,600
Speaker 2: of the time. And so we're talking about people who

504
00:23:41,600 --> 00:23:45,359
Speaker 2: are going to be like born on a planet and

505
00:23:45,440 --> 00:23:48,119
Speaker 2: exposed to radiation from the moment they're conceived, or you know,

506
00:23:48,200 --> 00:23:50,680
Speaker 2: from maybe even the game meats in their parents were

507
00:23:50,720 --> 00:23:54,720
Speaker 2: receiving radiation, and so that kind of accumulated dose over

508
00:23:54,760 --> 00:23:57,760
Speaker 2: an entire lifespan, maybe it's not going to be a problem.

509
00:23:57,800 --> 00:24:01,160
Speaker 2: Maybe we can design habitats that total keep the radiation out,

510
00:24:01,280 --> 00:24:03,280
Speaker 2: or maybe like we read this one review paper from

511
00:24:03,320 --> 00:24:06,960
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen that basically said, look, we don't even know

512
00:24:06,960 --> 00:24:10,480
Speaker 2: if space radiation causes cancer, but it's probably best that

513
00:24:10,520 --> 00:24:13,000
Speaker 2: we assume it could. And so like that's where we

514
00:24:13,080 --> 00:24:15,679
Speaker 2: are right now, Like it probably causes cancer, but we

515
00:24:15,720 --> 00:24:18,320
Speaker 2: don't even know. But I will note that most proposals

516
00:24:18,359 --> 00:24:21,320
Speaker 2: for habitats on the Moon are Mars or even rotating

517
00:24:21,359 --> 00:24:26,040
Speaker 2: space stations involve covering the habitat with meters of regalists.

518
00:24:26,080 --> 00:24:28,600
Speaker 2: So that's the like dirt, dusty dirt that you find

519
00:24:28,600 --> 00:24:31,000
Speaker 2: on the Moon and Mars. And the idea is that

520
00:24:31,040 --> 00:24:33,040
Speaker 2: if you're under a couple meters of that, it's going

521
00:24:33,080 --> 00:24:35,600
Speaker 2: to block the radiation before it gets to your habitat.

522
00:24:35,920 --> 00:24:38,239
Speaker 2: So that glass dome that I wanted to wake up

523
00:24:38,320 --> 00:24:41,440
Speaker 2: underneath and look at the Earth, you know, on my vacation,

524
00:24:41,960 --> 00:24:44,160
Speaker 2: that's not going to happen. I would be baked with radiation.

525
00:24:44,440 --> 00:24:46,080
Speaker 2: So yeah, there's a lot we don't know. And the

526
00:24:46,119 --> 00:24:48,760
Speaker 2: answer might be either it's fine or it's fine with

527
00:24:48,800 --> 00:24:51,200
Speaker 2: a little bit of engineering, but we don't have the

528
00:24:51,280 --> 00:24:53,120
Speaker 2: kind of data that we need right now to really

529
00:24:53,200 --> 00:24:57,000
Speaker 2: understand that. And there are so Brookhaven Laboratory now has

530
00:24:57,040 --> 00:25:01,320
Speaker 2: a new device that can make galactic cosmic radiation or

531
00:25:01,359 --> 00:25:04,000
Speaker 2: can mimic it, and so we're starting to be able

532
00:25:04,000 --> 00:25:06,800
Speaker 2: to get some better data on rodents. But even then

533
00:25:06,840 --> 00:25:09,280
Speaker 2: it's not like they're being exposed for their entire life

534
00:25:09,359 --> 00:25:12,040
Speaker 2: to the entire range of radiation that they're going to

535
00:25:12,080 --> 00:25:14,240
Speaker 2: get in space. So there's still a lot we have

536
00:25:14,359 --> 00:25:14,920
Speaker 2: left to learn.

537
00:25:15,320 --> 00:25:17,560
Speaker 1: So you're saying that the kind of habitats we're imagining

538
00:25:17,920 --> 00:25:20,240
Speaker 1: long term life on Mars or the Moon or in

539
00:25:20,280 --> 00:25:22,920
Speaker 1: a space station could end up like a horror movie

540
00:25:22,920 --> 00:25:25,920
Speaker 1: where everybody gets like horrible cancer and your faces melt

541
00:25:25,920 --> 00:25:27,520
Speaker 1: and all this kind of stuff that we just don't

542
00:25:27,560 --> 00:25:30,639
Speaker 1: know the answer to whether it's even possible for humans

543
00:25:30,680 --> 00:25:31,680
Speaker 1: to live in that scenario.

544
00:25:31,920 --> 00:25:34,800
Speaker 2: So I think face melting is probably off the table,

545
00:25:35,160 --> 00:25:38,080
Speaker 2: but maybe not. But well, I don't think that we

546
00:25:38,280 --> 00:25:41,880
Speaker 2: have to, you know, start with babies and see what happens.

547
00:25:42,119 --> 00:25:44,240
Speaker 2: Like I think we could go to the Moon and

548
00:25:44,280 --> 00:25:46,360
Speaker 2: set up a research station, and the Moon is only

549
00:25:46,359 --> 00:25:49,480
Speaker 2: a couple days away, so people could stay for a

550
00:25:49,520 --> 00:25:51,800
Speaker 2: couple months, and if there was any indicator that they

551
00:25:51,800 --> 00:25:53,560
Speaker 2: were having a problem, we could send them home, and

552
00:25:53,560 --> 00:25:56,359
Speaker 2: then we could send a different habitat type and try again,

553
00:25:56,720 --> 00:25:58,960
Speaker 2: and we could have rodent colonies out there. But it's

554
00:25:59,000 --> 00:26:02,000
Speaker 2: going to be a slope process to make sure, you know, like, Okay,

555
00:26:02,040 --> 00:26:04,159
Speaker 2: this amount of radiation is safe, and then that amount

556
00:26:04,160 --> 00:26:06,520
Speaker 2: of radiation is safe, and it'll be a long time

557
00:26:06,520 --> 00:26:08,880
Speaker 2: before you can convince me that it would be safe

558
00:26:08,920 --> 00:26:12,800
Speaker 2: to conceive and have babies in space without too much

559
00:26:12,840 --> 00:26:15,280
Speaker 2: extra risk. But somebody who read our book told us

560
00:26:15,320 --> 00:26:17,000
Speaker 2: we were being whips about that.

561
00:26:17,200 --> 00:26:20,480
Speaker 1: So and you're like, well, why don't you send your

562
00:26:20,520 --> 00:26:21,520
Speaker 1: grandkids to the moon.

563
00:26:21,600 --> 00:26:25,160
Speaker 2: Then they said they would because we did say that.

564
00:26:25,320 --> 00:26:27,440
Speaker 2: We did say that, and they were like, I totally would,

565
00:26:27,560 --> 00:26:30,000
Speaker 2: I'd do it. And I was like, wow, I'm glad

566
00:26:30,080 --> 00:26:31,520
Speaker 2: I'm not you're a child.

567
00:26:31,800 --> 00:26:33,720
Speaker 1: This is a great example for me. When reading your book,

568
00:26:33,760 --> 00:26:35,760
Speaker 1: I was very surprised that we just don't know so

569
00:26:35,880 --> 00:26:38,560
Speaker 1: much about what life will be like in space. Even

570
00:26:38,600 --> 00:26:40,200
Speaker 1: things that seemed like they might not be a big

571
00:26:40,240 --> 00:26:42,480
Speaker 1: deal could turn out to be a big deal because

572
00:26:42,480 --> 00:26:45,440
Speaker 1: we just don't know because we have such a littlemited experience.

573
00:26:45,520 --> 00:26:48,520
Speaker 1: I was really enjoying the section on micro gravity, for example, like,

574
00:26:48,560 --> 00:26:52,360
Speaker 1: what's it like to live in very little gravity your

575
00:26:52,400 --> 00:26:54,800
Speaker 1: whole life? I suppose we just don't know the answer

576
00:26:54,800 --> 00:26:55,440
Speaker 1: to that as well.

577
00:26:55,560 --> 00:26:59,240
Speaker 3: Basically, Yeah, So one thing a lot of people maybe

578
00:26:59,240 --> 00:27:03,199
Speaker 3: don't know is that the record consecutive spaceflight was I

579
00:27:03,200 --> 00:27:06,440
Speaker 3: think four hundred and thirty seven days, and down from

580
00:27:06,480 --> 00:27:09,479
Speaker 3: that there's something like a dozen people who've been up

581
00:27:09,520 --> 00:27:12,119
Speaker 3: for a year, and it's down from that. And I

582
00:27:12,119 --> 00:27:13,480
Speaker 3: don't have it offhand, but I think if you looked

583
00:27:13,520 --> 00:27:15,560
Speaker 3: it up, the majority of astronauts ever have been for

584
00:27:15,640 --> 00:27:17,520
Speaker 3: like on a matter of weeks, like they went on

585
00:27:17,520 --> 00:27:20,240
Speaker 3: on the shuttle or something. Right, So the amount of

586
00:27:20,280 --> 00:27:23,040
Speaker 3: longitudinal data, like we literally could not have it. No

587
00:27:23,080 --> 00:27:25,120
Speaker 3: one's gone up for a year and a half consecutively.

588
00:27:25,240 --> 00:27:26,879
Speaker 3: If you look at people who've gone up, like the

589
00:27:26,960 --> 00:27:29,280
Speaker 3: highest total is somewhere in the eight hundreds of days.

590
00:27:29,320 --> 00:27:31,560
Speaker 3: So even then you're talking about a really short amount

591
00:27:31,560 --> 00:27:34,920
Speaker 3: of time to get like good longitudinal data. Like Kelly said,

592
00:27:34,920 --> 00:27:36,960
Speaker 3: we're not talking about face melting for radiation, right, We're

593
00:27:36,960 --> 00:27:40,199
Speaker 3: talking about like long term effects. But we do know

594
00:27:40,600 --> 00:27:43,959
Speaker 3: that to come back to microgravity in particular, there are

595
00:27:44,000 --> 00:27:47,600
Speaker 3: reliable bad effects of microgravity. So when you go to space,

596
00:27:47,880 --> 00:27:49,800
Speaker 3: one thing we ended up not talking too much about,

597
00:27:49,840 --> 00:27:51,639
Speaker 3: even though it has a rich history, is a lot

598
00:27:51,680 --> 00:27:53,680
Speaker 3: of people get motion sickness. It's something it's called space

599
00:27:53,720 --> 00:27:56,240
Speaker 3: motion sickness, and they spend the first few days throwing up.

600
00:27:56,320 --> 00:27:57,719
Speaker 3: But We didn't talk about it too much because it's

601
00:27:57,760 --> 00:27:59,760
Speaker 3: not really a settlement problem. You do adjust to it.

602
00:28:00,119 --> 00:28:02,440
Speaker 3: The problems that show up when you stay longer are

603
00:28:02,440 --> 00:28:06,240
Speaker 3: things like rapid loss and bone density in some parts

604
00:28:06,240 --> 00:28:08,000
Speaker 3: of your body you lose I think the number we

605
00:28:08,040 --> 00:28:11,280
Speaker 3: had was one and a half percent bone density per month,

606
00:28:11,840 --> 00:28:14,320
Speaker 3: like an insanely fast rate of bone loss. And that's,

607
00:28:14,320 --> 00:28:16,879
Speaker 3: by the way, while astronauts are doing a huge amount

608
00:28:17,040 --> 00:28:20,359
Speaker 3: of exercise every day, right, very time consuming exercise every

609
00:28:20,400 --> 00:28:23,080
Speaker 3: single day, and there are other more subtle things obviously

610
00:28:23,119 --> 00:28:24,639
Speaker 3: you know coming with that is that you have a

611
00:28:24,640 --> 00:28:27,520
Speaker 3: lot of loss of muscle strength. Jerry Linninger was an astronaut.

612
00:28:27,560 --> 00:28:29,000
Speaker 3: He was on Mirror for about four months, and it

613
00:28:29,040 --> 00:28:30,679
Speaker 3: was a huge point of pride for him as a

614
00:28:30,760 --> 00:28:33,919
Speaker 3: kind of like muscly, slightly meat headed astronaut that he

615
00:28:33,960 --> 00:28:36,560
Speaker 3: was able to walk just barely when he got out

616
00:28:36,560 --> 00:28:39,320
Speaker 3: of the space station. But there are other things that happened,

617
00:28:39,320 --> 00:28:42,840
Speaker 3: so they're like Lininger described, when he got home to

618
00:28:42,920 --> 00:28:45,280
Speaker 3: his hotel room, he kind of freaked out a little

619
00:28:45,320 --> 00:28:47,640
Speaker 3: because in space, if you feel pressure on your back,

620
00:28:47,640 --> 00:28:49,640
Speaker 3: it means you're going to fling forward because it's it's

621
00:28:49,720 --> 00:28:51,760
Speaker 3: very Newtonian up there, right, So when he got down

622
00:28:51,760 --> 00:28:53,440
Speaker 3: in bed, he felt like he was going to go flying.

623
00:28:53,480 --> 00:28:55,440
Speaker 3: So he said he could only sleep once he had

624
00:28:55,520 --> 00:28:57,000
Speaker 3: kind of wrapped himself up in a blanket.

625
00:28:57,080 --> 00:28:58,800
Speaker 1: You you need to be swaddled like a baby.

626
00:28:59,360 --> 00:29:01,240
Speaker 3: I think it was more like tied down, but I

627
00:29:01,280 --> 00:29:02,680
Speaker 3: actually don't know. I don't remember what you do with

628
00:29:02,720 --> 00:29:04,719
Speaker 3: the blanket in particular. And then there are these more

629
00:29:04,760 --> 00:29:07,680
Speaker 3: subtle effects. Right, People often get dizzy, right because your

630
00:29:07,680 --> 00:29:10,640
Speaker 3: body on Earth is used to pumping blood against gravity

631
00:29:10,680 --> 00:29:13,520
Speaker 3: all day long, and in space there's no orientation. So

632
00:29:13,560 --> 00:29:16,400
Speaker 3: when you suddenly return to full Earth gravity, your body

633
00:29:16,440 --> 00:29:18,040
Speaker 3: is just not prepared to do this. I mean, it's

634
00:29:18,120 --> 00:29:19,880
Speaker 3: kind of amazing to me that your body does eventually

635
00:29:19,920 --> 00:29:22,840
Speaker 3: work it out. You don't just like die. And there

636
00:29:22,880 --> 00:29:26,920
Speaker 3: are other subtle things. Reliably, people lose vision, so they

637
00:29:26,960 --> 00:29:29,480
Speaker 3: actually for especially for older astronauts, you have to be said,

638
00:29:29,560 --> 00:29:32,120
Speaker 3: with these glasses that are adjusted, because it's anticipated your

639
00:29:32,160 --> 00:29:35,400
Speaker 3: vision will get worse, and it's not perfectly understood why.

640
00:29:35,440 --> 00:29:38,560
Speaker 3: But one possibility is that microgravity you experience this fluid shift.

641
00:29:38,600 --> 00:29:41,200
Speaker 3: Fluid shifts up in your body, especially the beginning. You

642
00:29:41,240 --> 00:29:43,920
Speaker 3: notably have what's called puffy face and chicken legs, as

643
00:29:43,920 --> 00:29:46,320
Speaker 3: one person described it, which is like kind of funny

644
00:29:46,320 --> 00:29:48,280
Speaker 3: but also kind of bad, maybe because it's possible what's

645
00:29:48,280 --> 00:29:51,200
Speaker 3: happening is it's causing nerve damage or reshaping of the

646
00:29:51,240 --> 00:29:53,480
Speaker 3: nerves that connect your eyes or something, which is like

647
00:29:53,560 --> 00:29:55,560
Speaker 3: bad enough, but it's also a little creepy because you worry.

648
00:29:55,560 --> 00:29:59,080
Speaker 3: There's like, you know, there's apparently equivocal evidence on cognitive

649
00:29:59,080 --> 00:30:01,600
Speaker 3: effects of space. We don't know if that's because of microgravity,

650
00:30:01,640 --> 00:30:04,200
Speaker 3: your radiation, or just who knows what. So, yeah, there's

651
00:30:04,240 --> 00:30:06,600
Speaker 3: a lot of stuff you wouldn't anticipate. In the particular

652
00:30:06,640 --> 00:30:09,360
Speaker 3: context of babies, it gets like extra freaky. I'm willing

653
00:30:09,400 --> 00:30:12,080
Speaker 3: to buy that a baby in ingestation is at least

654
00:30:12,080 --> 00:30:14,200
Speaker 3: in kind of a neutral buoyancy tank. But you know,

655
00:30:14,560 --> 00:30:16,400
Speaker 3: you try to imagine like a six month old trying

656
00:30:16,400 --> 00:30:18,920
Speaker 3: to have normal bone development and microgravity that would be

657
00:30:19,000 --> 00:30:21,680
Speaker 3: enormously scary. It's possible on the Moon, which is about

658
00:30:21,680 --> 00:30:25,040
Speaker 3: one six ers gravity, it wouldn't be so bad. But like,

659
00:30:25,760 --> 00:30:28,200
Speaker 3: to add more more data to this, we have I

660
00:30:28,200 --> 00:30:30,040
Speaker 3: think something like a grand total of ten days on

661
00:30:30,080 --> 00:30:32,640
Speaker 3: the Moon between all of the missions. You know, and

662
00:30:32,720 --> 00:30:35,280
Speaker 3: so like we really don't know, and that was of

663
00:30:35,360 --> 00:30:41,280
Speaker 3: course all full grown, like particularly fit men, and so

664
00:30:41,320 --> 00:30:43,840
Speaker 3: there are other things. But yeah, micro gravity is a

665
00:30:43,880 --> 00:30:46,000
Speaker 3: big open question and would take a long time to

666
00:30:46,000 --> 00:30:46,880
Speaker 3: get better data on it.

667
00:30:46,960 --> 00:30:49,000
Speaker 1: Well, I want to push back on your denial of

668
00:30:49,040 --> 00:30:52,840
Speaker 1: my face melting concern, because you're talking about like lower

669
00:30:52,880 --> 00:30:56,720
Speaker 1: bone density, weakened muscles, puppy eyes. To me, that sounds

670
00:30:56,760 --> 00:30:58,479
Speaker 1: like you know, that could lead to real face melting.

671
00:30:58,680 --> 00:31:01,640
Speaker 3: We could term the sweet of negative effects face melting.

672
00:31:01,640 --> 00:31:03,240
Speaker 3: What will call the whites and face melting.

673
00:31:03,640 --> 00:31:06,600
Speaker 1: Okay, there you go. But my real question is that

674
00:31:06,720 --> 00:31:08,880
Speaker 1: it seems like it might be hard to go to space,

675
00:31:08,960 --> 00:31:11,560
Speaker 1: have your body adapt to it, and then come back

676
00:31:11,600 --> 00:31:13,120
Speaker 1: to Earth. But what if you just do a in

677
00:31:13,160 --> 00:31:15,720
Speaker 1: a one way trip. Isn't it possible that kids who

678
00:31:15,800 --> 00:31:18,280
Speaker 1: grow up in space are totally adapted and can live

679
00:31:18,400 --> 00:31:20,760
Speaker 1: totally healthy lives in space with low bone density and

680
00:31:20,800 --> 00:31:23,520
Speaker 1: super long chicken legs or whatever. Is this about going

681
00:31:23,520 --> 00:31:25,240
Speaker 1: to space and coming back or is this about just

682
00:31:25,240 --> 00:31:26,400
Speaker 1: surviving in space?

683
00:31:26,840 --> 00:31:29,040
Speaker 2: I think it's about both. So you know, Mars has

684
00:31:29,120 --> 00:31:31,840
Speaker 2: forty percent of Earth's gravity. Maybe that will be enough

685
00:31:31,960 --> 00:31:35,240
Speaker 2: for normal development, Maybe not. So it's the same as radiation.

686
00:31:35,320 --> 00:31:38,680
Speaker 2: Maybe it'll be fine, maybe not. But you know, especially initially,

687
00:31:38,720 --> 00:31:40,479
Speaker 2: there's a lot of stuff we're going to be figuring

688
00:31:40,560 --> 00:31:43,200
Speaker 2: out about Mars, like, you know, how can we live

689
00:31:43,280 --> 00:31:45,880
Speaker 2: up there sustainably? Can we create an economy, how do

690
00:31:45,960 --> 00:31:49,120
Speaker 2: we you know, create a society that has some freedom

691
00:31:49,440 --> 00:31:51,560
Speaker 2: and likes being up there. And you know, it's a

692
00:31:51,640 --> 00:31:54,400
Speaker 2: very delicate habitat. So if you have people who are

693
00:31:55,320 --> 00:31:58,000
Speaker 2: you know, angry or become terrorists, they could very easily

694
00:31:58,080 --> 00:32:01,760
Speaker 2: kill almost everybody. And so for a variety of different reasons,

695
00:32:02,320 --> 00:32:04,320
Speaker 2: you would like to be able to have the option

696
00:32:04,440 --> 00:32:07,760
Speaker 2: to bring people home, especially initially when this whole experiment

697
00:32:07,840 --> 00:32:10,440
Speaker 2: is starting. So if it turns out you have you know,

698
00:32:10,680 --> 00:32:14,160
Speaker 2: one hundred babies in the first generation at the settlement

699
00:32:14,520 --> 00:32:17,160
Speaker 2: and they decide, you know what, this isn't economically feasible.

700
00:32:17,200 --> 00:32:19,320
Speaker 2: We just can't make any money out here. We can't

701
00:32:19,320 --> 00:32:21,080
Speaker 2: pay to get the supplies shipped in that we need

702
00:32:21,120 --> 00:32:24,080
Speaker 2: from Earth because it's super expensive. What do you do

703
00:32:24,160 --> 00:32:26,920
Speaker 2: with those babies who are now stuck out there? And

704
00:32:27,000 --> 00:32:30,200
Speaker 2: so you know, yes, maybe a couple generations from now,

705
00:32:30,200 --> 00:32:33,200
Speaker 2: when we're like safely settled on Mars and it's sustainable,

706
00:32:33,480 --> 00:32:35,280
Speaker 2: and we know that, you know, we're going to be

707
00:32:35,280 --> 00:32:37,840
Speaker 2: able to stay out there permanently. Maybe it's not such

708
00:32:37,880 --> 00:32:39,560
Speaker 2: a big deal if they can't come back to the

709
00:32:39,600 --> 00:32:43,720
Speaker 2: cradle of humanity. But I can still imagine that being depressing.

710
00:32:43,920 --> 00:32:47,000
Speaker 2: I think Earth will always be I mean, Earth is beautiful.

711
00:32:47,080 --> 00:32:48,200
Speaker 2: I'd want to be able to visit.

712
00:32:49,840 --> 00:32:51,800
Speaker 1: And it might be that babies who are raised on

713
00:32:51,840 --> 00:32:54,360
Speaker 1: Mars have their faces melted. But maybe on Mars that's

714
00:32:54,400 --> 00:32:57,000
Speaker 1: seen as really attractive. But then they can't really adjust

715
00:32:57,080 --> 00:32:59,080
Speaker 1: back to life on Earth because you know, we're not

716
00:32:59,160 --> 00:33:01,320
Speaker 1: that into it. But speaking of that kind of topic,

717
00:33:01,560 --> 00:33:04,520
Speaker 1: self sustaining colonies, is it possible? Do we know if

718
00:33:04,560 --> 00:33:07,840
Speaker 1: it's even possible for humans to reproduce in space, Like

719
00:33:08,240 --> 00:33:10,560
Speaker 1: you know, the mechanics and the chemistry of it doesn't

720
00:33:10,560 --> 00:33:13,760
Speaker 1: all work in microgravity under high radiation. Do we know

721
00:33:13,840 --> 00:33:14,560
Speaker 1: anything about that?

722
00:33:14,880 --> 00:33:17,080
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the basic deal is we know almost nothing.

723
00:33:17,400 --> 00:33:20,480
Speaker 3: So one thing it's really important to understand about the

724
00:33:20,520 --> 00:33:24,600
Speaker 3: history of space science is that space stations are not fielded.

725
00:33:24,800 --> 00:33:27,680
Speaker 3: Because you know, the NSF sat down one day and said,

726
00:33:27,680 --> 00:33:30,400
Speaker 3: we're going to do a systematic program on space medicine.

727
00:33:30,480 --> 00:33:34,280
Speaker 3: They're fielded for geopolitical reasons, and then science gets done

728
00:33:34,280 --> 00:33:38,600
Speaker 3: in them, right. And so one result of that is

729
00:33:38,640 --> 00:33:40,960
Speaker 3: that you really don't have a lot of systematic data

730
00:33:41,000 --> 00:33:43,880
Speaker 3: on hardly anything. I think you can you can absolutely

731
00:33:43,920 --> 00:33:47,240
Speaker 3: trust objective readings on things like bone density that seems

732
00:33:47,280 --> 00:33:49,040
Speaker 3: like hard to mess up or fake. But when it

733
00:33:49,080 --> 00:33:52,440
Speaker 3: comes to reproduction, you know, if someone had said, you know,

734
00:33:52,440 --> 00:33:54,560
Speaker 3: when the first space station went up in nineteen seventy one,

735
00:33:54,600 --> 00:33:56,880
Speaker 3: suppose the Soviet Union had said, one of our major

736
00:33:56,920 --> 00:33:59,400
Speaker 3: goals is human reproduction in space. We're going to really

737
00:33:59,400 --> 00:34:03,640
Speaker 3: oriented around. You can imagine a world where they started

738
00:34:03,760 --> 00:34:08,040
Speaker 3: with I don't know, lizards or something and just sort

739
00:34:08,080 --> 00:34:11,279
Speaker 3: of worked their way up to more human like creatures

740
00:34:11,560 --> 00:34:14,960
Speaker 3: and not just having babies, but having generations in space,

741
00:34:15,480 --> 00:34:18,359
Speaker 3: and so that by now we would have this big

742
00:34:18,400 --> 00:34:22,560
Speaker 3: corpus of data on reliable effects on going to space

743
00:34:22,600 --> 00:34:26,200
Speaker 3: and microgravity on every stage of development. Right. And by

744
00:34:26,200 --> 00:34:28,560
Speaker 3: the way, you know, we usually often when this comes up,

745
00:34:28,600 --> 00:34:30,240
Speaker 3: to the extent it comes up at all, we talked

746
00:34:30,239 --> 00:34:31,879
Speaker 3: just about can you have a baby, But of course,

747
00:34:31,920 --> 00:34:34,799
Speaker 3: in order to have a sustaining settlement, that baby has

748
00:34:34,800 --> 00:34:36,359
Speaker 3: to be able to grow up to have babies, and

749
00:34:36,400 --> 00:34:38,520
Speaker 3: so that means they have to get through every stage

750
00:34:38,520 --> 00:34:41,839
Speaker 3: of development successfully as do their gam metes. Right, So

751
00:34:42,360 --> 00:34:44,359
Speaker 3: you know, we don't have that data. What we do

752
00:34:44,440 --> 00:34:47,040
Speaker 3: have is a pile of different experiments from you know,

753
00:34:47,080 --> 00:34:50,640
Speaker 3: different agencies, done on different stations for different amounts of time,

754
00:34:50,760 --> 00:34:53,359
Speaker 3: on different creatures, and it's very hard to look at

755
00:34:53,360 --> 00:34:56,040
Speaker 3: all this and resolve a picture other than a big shrug.

756
00:34:56,600 --> 00:34:59,960
Speaker 3: I will say there have been cases where bad stuff happened,

757
00:35:00,040 --> 00:35:02,080
Speaker 3: but it's literally a situation where you're talking like, we

758
00:35:02,120 --> 00:35:04,719
Speaker 3: have data from a rat and it didn't go well

759
00:35:04,719 --> 00:35:06,680
Speaker 3: for that rat, and it's sort of like, what can

760
00:35:06,719 --> 00:35:10,279
Speaker 3: you extrapolate from this meaningfully? So I would say, you know,

761
00:35:10,280 --> 00:35:11,719
Speaker 3: you're kind of in the position of saying, well, at

762
00:35:11,800 --> 00:35:13,640
Speaker 3: least a priori, there seem to be a lot of

763
00:35:13,680 --> 00:35:16,200
Speaker 3: reasons to be really really scared, a lot of reasons

764
00:35:16,200 --> 00:35:19,240
Speaker 3: to say I wouldn't want anyone having a baby in space.

765
00:35:19,719 --> 00:35:22,160
Speaker 3: So you know, we talked about bone loss stuff. We

766
00:35:22,200 --> 00:35:24,560
Speaker 3: don't know what that does to developing kids, babies, let

767
00:35:24,600 --> 00:35:28,440
Speaker 3: alone like teenagers. The atmosphere in space is really not

768
00:35:28,640 --> 00:35:30,920
Speaker 3: like Earth's because it's actually very hard, at least on

769
00:35:30,960 --> 00:35:33,640
Speaker 3: the iss to reproduce an Earth like atmosphere. So it's

770
00:35:33,719 --> 00:35:35,840
Speaker 3: very high in carbon for example, very high in carbonoxity,

771
00:35:35,920 --> 00:35:37,760
Speaker 3: much higher than anywhere on Earth. And there are probably

772
00:35:37,800 --> 00:35:40,880
Speaker 3: also like subtle outgassings from different pieces of equipment. We

773
00:35:41,000 --> 00:35:44,000
Speaker 3: tolerate higher levels of this stuff because people aren't there

774
00:35:44,040 --> 00:35:45,960
Speaker 3: that long, but we don't know what the effect is,

775
00:35:46,000 --> 00:35:47,720
Speaker 3: you know, to just depend on what kind of artificial

776
00:35:47,760 --> 00:35:50,080
Speaker 3: atmosphere you're able to create. You know another thing you

777
00:35:50,080 --> 00:35:52,520
Speaker 3: mentioned a second ago that you know, maybe in Mars

778
00:35:52,560 --> 00:35:55,239
Speaker 3: gravity people will be taller, and that's like a sci

779
00:35:55,239 --> 00:35:57,680
Speaker 3: fi thing, but actually we don't. You know, the bodies

780
00:35:57,680 --> 00:35:59,719
Speaker 3: are weird, right, They're made of all these tiny nanim

781
00:35:59,719 --> 00:36:03,360
Speaker 3: machines that have evolved over four billion years. It's possible

782
00:36:03,360 --> 00:36:06,040
Speaker 3: the response will be something totally unexpected to being in

783
00:36:06,040 --> 00:36:08,040
Speaker 3: that micro gravity environment, or nothing at all, and we

784
00:36:08,640 --> 00:36:09,239
Speaker 3: just don't know.

785
00:36:09,320 --> 00:36:10,520
Speaker 1: Face melting, for example.

786
00:36:10,680 --> 00:36:13,440
Speaker 3: I'm up to giving it a sixty percent chance.

787
00:36:13,280 --> 00:36:15,280
Speaker 1: All right, Zach, But this is a very highbrow answer.

788
00:36:15,440 --> 00:36:17,640
Speaker 1: I was asking a much more lowbrow question, which is

789
00:36:17,719 --> 00:36:20,799
Speaker 1: essentially like, do we have any data? Has anybody done it?

790
00:36:20,920 --> 00:36:21,480
Speaker 1: In space?

791
00:36:21,760 --> 00:36:24,239
Speaker 3: Nobody has. Well, there's a family dispute about this, I

792
00:36:24,239 --> 00:36:27,160
Speaker 3: should say, let me sketch the parameters of the dispute,

793
00:36:27,160 --> 00:36:30,560
Speaker 3: and then Kelly can say something wrong. So the thing

794
00:36:30,760 --> 00:36:33,200
Speaker 3: we absolutely agree on is nobody knows. It's not like

795
00:36:33,280 --> 00:36:35,920
Speaker 3: there is someone with you know, pictures you can look

796
00:36:35,960 --> 00:36:38,759
Speaker 3: upon the Internet. And then the question is like probabilities,

797
00:36:38,800 --> 00:36:41,160
Speaker 3: and I would rate the probability as quite low, and

798
00:36:41,200 --> 00:36:43,239
Speaker 3: I'm happy to explain that. But let me just say

799
00:36:43,280 --> 00:36:45,560
Speaker 3: it's quite low, whereas Kelly thinks the odds or at

800
00:36:45,640 --> 00:36:47,480
Speaker 3: least I don't know where we are. I'm at like

801
00:36:47,480 --> 00:36:49,160
Speaker 3: one to five percent that it's happened.

802
00:36:50,520 --> 00:36:53,520
Speaker 2: I don't know what percent I'm at, but I don't

803
00:36:53,520 --> 00:36:56,480
Speaker 2: know a coward's answer. See, okay, fifty to sixty percent.

804
00:36:57,440 --> 00:36:59,439
Speaker 1: Wow, who are we talking about here?

805
00:36:59,480 --> 00:37:01,400
Speaker 2: There has been I'm a husband and wife pair. So

806
00:37:01,400 --> 00:37:04,840
Speaker 2: they got married on the sly, didn't tell NASA, and

807
00:37:04,880 --> 00:37:09,600
Speaker 2: then they went up on the shuttle. Zach argues that

808
00:37:09,920 --> 00:37:11,799
Speaker 2: they're in a like tiny area, like you know, they've

809
00:37:11,800 --> 00:37:13,600
Speaker 2: got about as much space as you would in a bus,

810
00:37:13,640 --> 00:37:15,799
Speaker 2: and there's like six other people on the crew. It's

811
00:37:15,800 --> 00:37:17,120
Speaker 2: not like there's a lot of options for them to

812
00:37:17,160 --> 00:37:19,160
Speaker 2: sneak off and not be seen and not be caught

813
00:37:19,239 --> 00:37:23,520
Speaker 2: by the cameras and blah blah blah. But I gotta say, man,

814
00:37:23,600 --> 00:37:25,120
Speaker 2: if I was on a crew and there was a

815
00:37:25,160 --> 00:37:27,400
Speaker 2: married couple, I would be like, I just want you

816
00:37:27,440 --> 00:37:28,640
Speaker 2: to know that I'm going to be on the upper

817
00:37:28,680 --> 00:37:33,320
Speaker 2: deck for about You would make it so I would

818
00:37:33,320 --> 00:37:35,640
Speaker 2: make it so awkward. But they keep.

819
00:37:35,440 --> 00:37:37,360
Speaker 3: Coming up to them and being like, I'm just gonna

820
00:37:37,360 --> 00:37:41,120
Speaker 3: tell you that door closes. I'm not saying anything.

821
00:37:42,200 --> 00:37:47,040
Speaker 2: Anyway, And you know there have been opportunities, but you know,

822
00:37:47,120 --> 00:37:50,040
Speaker 2: I think Zach would would argue, and you know, of

823
00:37:50,080 --> 00:37:51,440
Speaker 2: course you don't have to be married to have sex.

824
00:37:51,520 --> 00:37:54,040
Speaker 2: Zach would argue that there's a lot like it's cramp spaces,

825
00:37:54,080 --> 00:37:55,799
Speaker 2: there's a lot of people there, there's a lot of

826
00:37:56,200 --> 00:37:59,960
Speaker 2: surveillance equipment. It would be hard to get any privacy.

827
00:38:00,080 --> 00:38:03,640
Speaker 2: And also, these people are super concerned about their careers

828
00:38:03,680 --> 00:38:06,000
Speaker 2: and if they get caught doing something like that in space,

829
00:38:06,239 --> 00:38:07,960
Speaker 2: they're not going to get sent up again. And so

830
00:38:08,120 --> 00:38:12,400
Speaker 2: these like highly career oriented people might not be willing

831
00:38:12,480 --> 00:38:15,360
Speaker 2: to risk their jobs. But you know, I'd say, I

832
00:38:15,360 --> 00:38:18,480
Speaker 2: went to grad school to study animal behavior, and it

833
00:38:18,600 --> 00:38:21,919
Speaker 2: would blow my mind to find out that no one

834
00:38:21,960 --> 00:38:25,319
Speaker 2: has taken advantage of, you know, being able to have

835
00:38:25,360 --> 00:38:26,120
Speaker 2: sex in space.

836
00:38:26,480 --> 00:38:28,800
Speaker 1: Well, it seemed to me like an important science frontier.

837
00:38:28,960 --> 00:38:31,200
Speaker 1: I mean, somebody's got to figure this out for the

838
00:38:31,239 --> 00:38:33,319
Speaker 1: future of humanity, right, I mean, if we are going

839
00:38:33,360 --> 00:38:36,000
Speaker 1: to ever live in space, then that's going to be

840
00:38:36,040 --> 00:38:40,040
Speaker 1: a necessary part of activity out there in space. All right,

841
00:38:40,080 --> 00:38:41,960
Speaker 1: So I want to dig more into these questions about

842
00:38:42,000 --> 00:38:44,600
Speaker 1: what life would actually be like in space, what it's

843
00:38:44,640 --> 00:38:47,040
Speaker 1: like to go to the bathroom where we might actually live,

844
00:38:47,200 --> 00:38:50,360
Speaker 1: is it legal? And can you eat people in space?

845
00:38:50,800 --> 00:39:05,800
Speaker 1: But first we have to take another quick break. Okay.

846
00:39:05,840 --> 00:39:08,160
Speaker 1: So we are back and we're talking about the nitty

847
00:39:08,239 --> 00:39:11,479
Speaker 1: gritty of living in space. A lot of people think

848
00:39:11,560 --> 00:39:14,360
Speaker 1: of space as a fantasya land where everything can come true,

849
00:39:14,600 --> 00:39:17,440
Speaker 1: where life in space solves all the problems of life

850
00:39:17,480 --> 00:39:19,839
Speaker 1: on Earth. But Zach and Kelly are here to tell

851
00:39:19,920 --> 00:39:22,200
Speaker 1: us that it's messy and gouey, and that your face

852
00:39:22,360 --> 00:39:24,600
Speaker 1: might or might not melt. Nobody knows.

853
00:39:25,360 --> 00:39:28,319
Speaker 2: Okay, sure, so tell us.

854
00:39:28,239 --> 00:39:30,319
Speaker 1: More about what life might be like in space. You

855
00:39:30,320 --> 00:39:32,960
Speaker 1: guys really dug into the details. I was amazed you

856
00:39:33,000 --> 00:39:35,799
Speaker 1: had such a careful analysis of like toilets tell us

857
00:39:35,840 --> 00:39:38,600
Speaker 1: about what it's like to use the toilet in space.

858
00:39:39,000 --> 00:39:42,080
Speaker 2: So when you read biographies or you hear interviews with astronauts,

859
00:39:42,160 --> 00:39:44,320
Speaker 2: the question that they tell you that they get asked

860
00:39:44,400 --> 00:39:47,440
Speaker 2: the most is what is it like using the restroom

861
00:39:47,440 --> 00:39:50,520
Speaker 2: in space? So it is apparently a very deeply human

862
00:39:50,640 --> 00:39:53,040
Speaker 2: thing to want to know what it is like to

863
00:39:53,160 --> 00:39:55,879
Speaker 2: use the restroom in microgravity. And one thing we can

864
00:39:55,920 --> 00:39:59,120
Speaker 2: tell you across all of the different vehicles that we

865
00:39:59,160 --> 00:40:02,960
Speaker 2: studied is that it has never been pleasant. So like

866
00:40:03,000 --> 00:40:06,719
Speaker 2: on the Apollo and the Gemini missions, they literally, you know,

867
00:40:06,760 --> 00:40:09,480
Speaker 2: for number two, they had a bag that they would

868
00:40:09,560 --> 00:40:11,920
Speaker 2: attach to their heiin knees and it had a little

869
00:40:11,960 --> 00:40:15,040
Speaker 2: like adhesive rim so it would stick a little bit better.

870
00:40:15,320 --> 00:40:17,000
Speaker 2: And then it had a little thing where you a

871
00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:19,040
Speaker 2: little finger cut they called it, so you could stick

872
00:40:19,040 --> 00:40:21,799
Speaker 2: your finger in there, because without gravity, nothing falls on

873
00:40:21,880 --> 00:40:23,680
Speaker 2: its own, so you'd have to nudge it in the

874
00:40:23,760 --> 00:40:26,719
Speaker 2: right direction. Yeah, so gross. And then they'd have to

875
00:40:26,719 --> 00:40:30,160
Speaker 2: put antibacterial tablets in there and sort of squish them

876
00:40:30,160 --> 00:40:32,920
Speaker 2: around to make sure that like, you know, the bag

877
00:40:32,960 --> 00:40:35,200
Speaker 2: the feces was being held in wouldn't explode in a

878
00:40:35,239 --> 00:40:38,920
Speaker 2: horrible scent, would like go everywhere. In fact, Frank Borman

879
00:40:39,719 --> 00:40:43,520
Speaker 2: was so uncomfortable with the procedure, which also had to

880
00:40:43,520 --> 00:40:46,120
Speaker 2: happen in a super tiny space with the guy who

881
00:40:46,160 --> 00:40:49,120
Speaker 2: you were in space with, like literally almost right next

882
00:40:49,120 --> 00:40:51,160
Speaker 2: to you, that he tried to make it for a

883
00:40:51,200 --> 00:40:56,160
Speaker 2: full fourteen days without going number two, and I think

884
00:40:56,280 --> 00:41:00,040
Speaker 2: he made it today eight and then he said a

885
00:41:00,160 --> 00:41:03,200
Speaker 2: gym level, I gotta go, man, And so anyway, it

886
00:41:03,239 --> 00:41:06,400
Speaker 2: was pretty gross. So now instead of fingercuts and baggies

887
00:41:06,440 --> 00:41:10,120
Speaker 2: with adhesives, we have vacuum systems and you usually have

888
00:41:10,200 --> 00:41:12,960
Speaker 2: one for urine and one for feces, but even then

889
00:41:13,040 --> 00:41:15,719
Speaker 2: you lose stuff. So like again, every vehicle that we

890
00:41:15,760 --> 00:41:19,320
Speaker 2: read about, there were stories about escapees sort of floating

891
00:41:19,360 --> 00:41:22,239
Speaker 2: off into the habitat on the shuttle. This happened so

892
00:41:22,320 --> 00:41:27,200
Speaker 2: frequently they became called brown trout floating around. And you know,

893
00:41:27,360 --> 00:41:30,960
Speaker 2: these systems break regularly and need to be fixed and

894
00:41:31,000 --> 00:41:34,360
Speaker 2: are pretty disgusting. I think Patty Whitson had a story

895
00:41:34,360 --> 00:41:36,319
Speaker 2: about needing to put a glove on and sort of

896
00:41:36,600 --> 00:41:39,080
Speaker 2: push the waist down to make you know, room to

897
00:41:39,080 --> 00:41:41,360
Speaker 2: get it all in the bag. So it's disgusting and

898
00:41:41,400 --> 00:41:44,319
Speaker 2: we haven't figured it all out yet. So on the

899
00:41:44,440 --> 00:41:48,480
Speaker 2: one of the recent SpaceX missions there was problem with

900
00:41:48,520 --> 00:41:50,880
Speaker 2: the toilet as well. This is one of the ones

901
00:41:50,920 --> 00:41:53,160
Speaker 2: where it was a bunch of tourists going around inspiration

902
00:41:53,280 --> 00:41:55,759
Speaker 2: for something like that. It was reported that there were

903
00:41:55,760 --> 00:41:58,440
Speaker 2: toilet problems. This is just a hard thing to deal with,

904
00:41:58,520 --> 00:42:00,800
Speaker 2: but it should get easier when you have some gravity

905
00:42:00,840 --> 00:42:04,399
Speaker 2: to sort of nudge the brown trout downstream. But yeah,

906
00:42:04,440 --> 00:42:07,800
Speaker 2: it's probably going to remain sort of a messy process

907
00:42:07,840 --> 00:42:08,960
Speaker 2: wherever we are in space.

908
00:42:09,120 --> 00:42:11,480
Speaker 1: But is this like a frontier issue where the first

909
00:42:11,520 --> 00:42:14,239
Speaker 1: generation has sort of a harder life than you know,

910
00:42:14,360 --> 00:42:17,080
Speaker 1: the wealthy folks back at home, and then eventually things

911
00:42:17,080 --> 00:42:19,880
Speaker 1: build up and life on Mars is a comfortable, pleasant

912
00:42:19,920 --> 00:42:22,719
Speaker 1: bathroom experience or is this something that's always going to

913
00:42:22,719 --> 00:42:24,560
Speaker 1: be a feature of living out of the well of

914
00:42:24,600 --> 00:42:24,959
Speaker 1: the Earth.

915
00:42:25,239 --> 00:42:27,160
Speaker 2: I think the first generation is going to have to

916
00:42:27,200 --> 00:42:31,000
Speaker 2: spend quite a bit of time interacting intimately with human

917
00:42:31,040 --> 00:42:33,440
Speaker 2: waste of all forms, because we're going to need to

918
00:42:33,520 --> 00:42:36,640
Speaker 2: learn to recycle that. So Zach mentioned already that there's

919
00:42:37,000 --> 00:42:39,920
Speaker 2: very little carbon on the Moon, So the carbon that

920
00:42:39,960 --> 00:42:43,400
Speaker 2: your body releases, you're probably going to want to find

921
00:42:43,400 --> 00:42:46,120
Speaker 2: some way to recycle that back into your garden and

922
00:42:46,239 --> 00:42:49,440
Speaker 2: maybe eventually will sort of perfect this process. And you know,

923
00:42:49,920 --> 00:42:52,719
Speaker 2: nowadays waste gets treated and most of us don't have

924
00:42:52,800 --> 00:42:55,520
Speaker 2: to see or experience it like at all. But I

925
00:42:55,520 --> 00:42:58,160
Speaker 2: think initially you're probably going to be pretty intimate with

926
00:42:58,200 --> 00:43:00,640
Speaker 2: your wasste until we figure out nice or systems for

927
00:43:00,680 --> 00:43:02,680
Speaker 2: handling this stuff. Was there anything you wanted to add

928
00:43:02,719 --> 00:43:03,360
Speaker 2: to that, Zach.

929
00:43:03,239 --> 00:43:05,560
Speaker 3: I would just say to directly answer the question, like

930
00:43:05,680 --> 00:43:08,920
Speaker 3: the wacky like poop stories are all from micro gravity.

931
00:43:09,239 --> 00:43:11,759
Speaker 3: I think plausibly on Mars, your waist knows to go

932
00:43:11,800 --> 00:43:14,040
Speaker 3: in the right direction. That's all you need, you know,

933
00:43:14,120 --> 00:43:16,160
Speaker 3: like like so it'll go a little more slowly. But

934
00:43:16,280 --> 00:43:18,480
Speaker 3: I would actually bet you'd be fine with like one

935
00:43:18,480 --> 00:43:21,719
Speaker 3: percent gravity. You really just need you need your poop

936
00:43:21,760 --> 00:43:23,840
Speaker 3: to know which way to go. And the vacuum is

937
00:43:23,880 --> 00:43:26,080
Speaker 3: just an imperfect way to do that because you have

938
00:43:26,160 --> 00:43:27,880
Speaker 3: to have like a part of the machine that is,

939
00:43:28,160 --> 00:43:30,880
Speaker 3: you know, providing that vacuum which you don't want the

940
00:43:30,880 --> 00:43:34,160
Speaker 3: poop to go into. Uh So, like for solid waste,

941
00:43:34,160 --> 00:43:35,719
Speaker 3: you have to have a net. And so you can

942
00:43:35,760 --> 00:43:38,560
Speaker 3: imagine like what complexity that adds to like waste management.

943
00:43:38,600 --> 00:43:41,279
Speaker 3: You have to like bag it and and stew it

944
00:43:41,360 --> 00:43:44,680
Speaker 3: and so. But probably I would guess on a plausible

945
00:43:44,719 --> 00:43:47,279
Speaker 3: Mars setup, where you've got some kind of gardening and

946
00:43:47,320 --> 00:43:49,799
Speaker 3: waste management set up, probably it's not as big a deal.

947
00:43:49,800 --> 00:43:52,080
Speaker 3: The bigger problem will just be that, like you know,

948
00:43:52,120 --> 00:43:54,000
Speaker 3: on Earth, of your toilet breaks down, you can just

949
00:43:54,040 --> 00:43:58,200
Speaker 3: go outside, whereas on Mars it better work.

950
00:43:58,600 --> 00:44:00,560
Speaker 2: I think that's less of an option in the city.

951
00:44:00,680 --> 00:44:02,360
Speaker 2: But in the country where we live.

952
00:44:02,400 --> 00:44:05,080
Speaker 3: I've seen some stuff in San Francisco, I don't know.

953
00:44:07,440 --> 00:44:10,200
Speaker 1: Urban decay. Well, let's get a little bit more concrete

954
00:44:10,320 --> 00:44:12,839
Speaker 1: about what we're talking about. You know, are we talking

955
00:44:12,880 --> 00:44:15,480
Speaker 1: about living in space stations or the moon. Let's walk

956
00:44:15,520 --> 00:44:17,640
Speaker 1: through the sort of the pros and cons of each scenario.

957
00:44:18,160 --> 00:44:21,640
Speaker 1: Should we aim to be building our own habitats that

958
00:44:21,680 --> 00:44:25,000
Speaker 1: float in space, like in space stations huge rotating rings?

959
00:44:25,000 --> 00:44:26,000
Speaker 1: Are those plausible?

960
00:44:26,239 --> 00:44:28,480
Speaker 3: So, just to give a little context, the idea of

961
00:44:28,680 --> 00:44:31,560
Speaker 3: giant rotating space stations has been kicked around in detail

962
00:44:31,600 --> 00:44:34,439
Speaker 3: at least since the nineteen twenties, but it really became

963
00:44:34,440 --> 00:44:36,200
Speaker 3: a big thing in the seventies. So have you've ever

964
00:44:36,239 --> 00:44:38,920
Speaker 3: seen these images of a city around the rim of

965
00:44:38,960 --> 00:44:42,000
Speaker 3: a giant wheel that like like the most awesome space

966
00:44:42,040 --> 00:44:45,880
Speaker 3: station images, there could be those ten to descend from

967
00:44:45,920 --> 00:44:50,640
Speaker 3: the nineteen seventies. And the reason they were arguably plausible,

968
00:44:50,680 --> 00:44:53,520
Speaker 3: we say, is that if you look at the seventies

969
00:44:53,520 --> 00:44:56,480
Speaker 3: in particular, the price of going to space has fallen

970
00:44:56,560 --> 00:44:59,200
Speaker 3: drastically by some measures, fallen by something like ninety nine

971
00:44:59,200 --> 00:45:02,560
Speaker 3: percent since the late fifties, from like roughly nineteen fifty

972
00:45:02,560 --> 00:45:04,920
Speaker 3: seven to nineteen seventy two. So if you plot that

973
00:45:04,960 --> 00:45:07,320
Speaker 3: as continuing, it's going to get a lot cheaper. Meanwhile,

974
00:45:07,440 --> 00:45:11,480
Speaker 3: there are these huge concerns about environmental damage. So there

975
00:45:11,480 --> 00:45:14,160
Speaker 3: are books like The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth,

976
00:45:14,160 --> 00:45:16,759
Speaker 3: which are predicting I think the population Bomb, like the

977
00:45:16,800 --> 00:45:18,719
Speaker 3: by the eighties, hundreds of millions of people will be

978
00:45:18,800 --> 00:45:21,200
Speaker 3: dying of famine. Obviously we know now they failed to

979
00:45:21,200 --> 00:45:22,839
Speaker 3: anticipate a bunch of things, But put that in your

980
00:45:22,880 --> 00:45:24,920
Speaker 3: head as you think about this. And then third, that

981
00:45:24,960 --> 00:45:27,600
Speaker 3: there are no serious renewables on the horizon, right, I mean,

982
00:45:27,600 --> 00:45:31,239
Speaker 3: there's hydro power, but not enough to offset things, and

983
00:45:31,360 --> 00:45:34,280
Speaker 3: that nuclear is starting to look like a political problem.

984
00:45:34,560 --> 00:45:36,880
Speaker 3: And so there's this idea that gets floated, most notably

985
00:45:37,080 --> 00:45:39,080
Speaker 3: by Gerard K. O'Neill that, well, what if we just

986
00:45:39,120 --> 00:45:40,920
Speaker 3: went to space, we will kind of solve everything. You

987
00:45:40,960 --> 00:45:43,400
Speaker 3: get access to limitless solar power all the time at

988
00:45:43,440 --> 00:45:45,839
Speaker 3: high intensity. You could do all your farming up there.

989
00:45:45,880 --> 00:45:49,000
Speaker 3: You can completely control the ecosystem. We can beam excess

990
00:45:49,040 --> 00:45:52,000
Speaker 3: power down to the energy needing Earth. And so it's

991
00:45:52,000 --> 00:45:54,279
Speaker 3: a sort of third way if you don't like these

992
00:45:54,280 --> 00:45:57,560
Speaker 3: sort of environmental doomers, but you're also seriously worried about

993
00:45:57,560 --> 00:46:00,560
Speaker 3: this stuff. Space is the way out with the ad bonus,

994
00:46:00,600 --> 00:46:03,120
Speaker 3: since again it's the like early seventies that you can

995
00:46:03,160 --> 00:46:05,480
Speaker 3: kind of check out of society and try out new governments,

996
00:46:05,520 --> 00:46:08,160
Speaker 3: you know, so it also appeals to sort of counterculture impulse.

997
00:46:08,200 --> 00:46:13,279
Speaker 3: The problem is it's basically just a bad idea. Like so,

998
00:46:13,320 --> 00:46:15,000
Speaker 3: a big problem about building these things is you have

999
00:46:15,080 --> 00:46:18,040
Speaker 3: to get an extraordinary amount of mass, probably millions of tons,

1000
00:46:18,400 --> 00:46:20,759
Speaker 3: into a point in space somewhere, just to have a

1001
00:46:20,760 --> 00:46:23,080
Speaker 3: relatively small number of people. And so you say, well,

1002
00:46:23,080 --> 00:46:25,960
Speaker 3: where's that coming from, the usual answer, I think O'Neil's

1003
00:46:25,960 --> 00:46:28,480
Speaker 3: answer was the moon. Other people have proposed asteroids. So

1004
00:46:28,560 --> 00:46:30,400
Speaker 3: let's take the moon the way that you do this,

1005
00:46:30,480 --> 00:46:32,200
Speaker 3: and there are a number of proposals that say this

1006
00:46:32,280 --> 00:46:34,759
Speaker 3: is you build a mass driver on the Moon and

1007
00:46:34,800 --> 00:46:38,640
Speaker 3: for your less you know, dorky audience. It's basically a

1008
00:46:38,680 --> 00:46:40,600
Speaker 3: train if you want to visualize it, like a maglev

1009
00:46:40,640 --> 00:46:42,960
Speaker 3: train that points up and eventually the track just goes away,

1010
00:46:43,239 --> 00:46:45,760
Speaker 3: and so you can fling stuff of it just using energy.

1011
00:46:45,800 --> 00:46:47,600
Speaker 3: You can fling into space because the Moon is low

1012
00:46:47,640 --> 00:46:50,520
Speaker 3: gravity and has no atmosphere, and then your space station

1013
00:46:50,640 --> 00:46:54,000
Speaker 3: construction site catches this stuff into kind of giant catchers

1014
00:46:54,040 --> 00:46:57,600
Speaker 3: mitt and takes just sort of like pure mass, just

1015
00:46:57,600 --> 00:46:59,319
Speaker 3: stuff from the surface of the Moon and converts it

1016
00:46:59,360 --> 00:47:02,319
Speaker 3: to suburbs around a giant space wheel. And so that

1017
00:47:02,400 --> 00:47:04,480
Speaker 3: the idea that this is going to be easier than

1018
00:47:04,600 --> 00:47:07,640
Speaker 3: just staying on the Moon or even going to Mars

1019
00:47:07,800 --> 00:47:08,720
Speaker 3: is just kind of crazy.

1020
00:47:08,960 --> 00:47:11,040
Speaker 1: It does seem crazy to take the Moon apart and

1021
00:47:11,080 --> 00:47:14,160
Speaker 1: then reassemble something which is just basically doing the job

1022
00:47:14,200 --> 00:47:15,320
Speaker 1: the Moon is already doing.

1023
00:47:15,760 --> 00:47:18,640
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, So to say why smart people believe this,

1024
00:47:19,160 --> 00:47:21,480
Speaker 3: I do think, you know, part of it's that beguiling

1025
00:47:21,560 --> 00:47:24,480
Speaker 3: promise of the limitless energy. There's also, like, you know,

1026
00:47:24,800 --> 00:47:26,760
Speaker 3: suppose it is the case that you can't have babies

1027
00:47:26,800 --> 00:47:28,600
Speaker 3: on Mars, like that forty percent gravity just won't do

1028
00:47:28,640 --> 00:47:31,480
Speaker 3: it. It causes some weird metabolic thing. Who knows, well, then

1029
00:47:31,520 --> 00:47:33,200
Speaker 3: you need full gravity, and then if you really need

1030
00:47:33,239 --> 00:47:35,440
Speaker 3: to get off Earth, you have no option in the

1031
00:47:35,440 --> 00:47:38,160
Speaker 3: Solar system, so you have to build these space wheels.

1032
00:47:38,280 --> 00:47:40,960
Speaker 3: There are other purported benefits like that you could manufacture,

1033
00:47:41,000 --> 00:47:43,600
Speaker 3: so for people who don't remember high school physics, as

1034
00:47:43,640 --> 00:47:45,480
Speaker 3: you walk up the axis, like if you walk a

1035
00:47:45,520 --> 00:47:48,719
Speaker 3: stairwell from the outermost floor of your spinning wheel to

1036
00:47:48,719 --> 00:47:52,080
Speaker 3: the middle, gravity falls off linearly, so you can select

1037
00:47:52,160 --> 00:47:55,640
Speaker 3: between zero and full Earth gravity or even extra Earth gravity.

1038
00:47:55,800 --> 00:47:57,360
Speaker 3: So there's these ideas that it would be like a

1039
00:47:57,400 --> 00:48:00,000
Speaker 3: manufacturing thing, but like the idea that would be economic

1040
00:48:00,200 --> 00:48:02,759
Speaker 3: plausible just seems sort of any to us. And so

1041
00:48:02,960 --> 00:48:04,759
Speaker 3: it's like an extra hard version of a thing we

1042
00:48:04,800 --> 00:48:07,400
Speaker 3: already can't do. So it just seems unlikely.

1043
00:48:07,680 --> 00:48:10,440
Speaker 1: So then what about colonies on the moon? The Moon

1044
00:48:10,520 --> 00:48:12,799
Speaker 1: has access to a lot of sunlight and there's lots

1045
00:48:12,800 --> 00:48:15,560
Speaker 1: of raw materials there. What's the issue with living on

1046
00:48:15,600 --> 00:48:17,680
Speaker 1: the moon. Where on the moon is a good place

1047
00:48:17,920 --> 00:48:19,399
Speaker 1: to build your space home?

1048
00:48:19,760 --> 00:48:24,360
Speaker 2: So the moon has very small patches that are probably

1049
00:48:24,400 --> 00:48:26,920
Speaker 2: what countries are going to fight over when we start

1050
00:48:26,920 --> 00:48:29,640
Speaker 2: heading out to the moon. So on the poles you

1051
00:48:29,680 --> 00:48:32,600
Speaker 2: get areas where you have these craters, and inside of

1052
00:48:32,600 --> 00:48:36,640
Speaker 2: the crater there's water that's frozen, and it stays frozen

1053
00:48:37,040 --> 00:48:39,839
Speaker 2: because it never gets exposed to sunlight. If it did

1054
00:48:39,840 --> 00:48:42,640
Speaker 2: get exposed to sunlight, it would you know, vaporize and

1055
00:48:42,880 --> 00:48:44,520
Speaker 2: end up in the vacuum of space, never to be

1056
00:48:44,560 --> 00:48:48,160
Speaker 2: recovered by us again. But it's frozen, so it stays there.

1057
00:48:48,200 --> 00:48:51,960
Speaker 2: And additionally, those rims, if you put solar panels on them,

1058
00:48:52,280 --> 00:48:56,160
Speaker 2: you could get sunlight almost all the time, Whereas if

1059
00:48:56,200 --> 00:48:59,400
Speaker 2: you're at the equator, you get two earth weeks of

1060
00:48:59,480 --> 00:49:03,160
Speaker 2: daylight and then you get two earth weeks of nighttime,

1061
00:49:03,800 --> 00:49:07,960
Speaker 2: and you would need an incredible number of battery packs

1062
00:49:08,560 --> 00:49:10,919
Speaker 2: to be able to store enough solar power to get

1063
00:49:10,960 --> 00:49:14,319
Speaker 2: you through that. But if you're at these areas where

1064
00:49:14,320 --> 00:49:16,520
Speaker 2: you can put your solar panels up and almost always

1065
00:49:16,520 --> 00:49:19,080
Speaker 2: get sunlight, then a lot of your energy needs have

1066
00:49:19,239 --> 00:49:23,000
Speaker 2: been reduced. And so these are probably the spots where

1067
00:49:23,000 --> 00:49:24,920
Speaker 2: you'd want to be, where you can get water and

1068
00:49:25,000 --> 00:49:27,239
Speaker 2: where you can get some sunlight. But I'll note that

1069
00:49:27,239 --> 00:49:30,319
Speaker 2: that water still has some like chemicals and stuff you

1070
00:49:30,320 --> 00:49:31,960
Speaker 2: can't drink in there, and it's going to be very

1071
00:49:31,960 --> 00:49:34,920
Speaker 2: hard to extract because at the temperatures you find in

1072
00:49:34,960 --> 00:49:38,480
Speaker 2: these craters, water is more like a rock than anything else.

1073
00:49:38,920 --> 00:49:41,040
Speaker 2: So it's going to be difficult to get your hands on.

1074
00:49:41,080 --> 00:49:42,520
Speaker 2: You're gonna have to clean it up, and then you're

1075
00:49:42,520 --> 00:49:45,840
Speaker 2: gonna have to recycle it very efficiently because there's not

1076
00:49:46,520 --> 00:49:49,480
Speaker 2: a lot in there. So what was the lake that

1077
00:49:49,520 --> 00:49:51,280
Speaker 2: we looked up, Zach Sartus Lake.

1078
00:49:51,440 --> 00:49:55,560
Speaker 3: Sardis Lake, I think, was it Alabama or Minister.

1079
00:49:56,239 --> 00:49:59,399
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's this human made lake called Sartus Lake

1080
00:49:59,680 --> 00:50:02,600
Speaker 2: that has the same amount of water as what we

1081
00:50:02,760 --> 00:50:07,000
Speaker 2: predict is on all of the Moon. And so you

1082
00:50:07,080 --> 00:50:10,160
Speaker 2: can imagine pretty quickly if you don't use that carefully,

1083
00:50:10,280 --> 00:50:12,080
Speaker 2: running out of it, and so you're going to need

1084
00:50:12,120 --> 00:50:14,719
Speaker 2: to recycle it. And this is why we think proposals

1085
00:50:14,719 --> 00:50:17,680
Speaker 2: for setting the Moon up as a gas station are,

1086
00:50:18,080 --> 00:50:20,000
Speaker 2: you know, sort of robbing the future. So if you

1087
00:50:20,080 --> 00:50:22,919
Speaker 2: take the water and you split it and you use

1088
00:50:23,000 --> 00:50:26,000
Speaker 2: the oxygen and the hydrogen for rocket fuel, you can't

1089
00:50:26,040 --> 00:50:28,200
Speaker 2: bathe with it or drink it anymore. It gets lost

1090
00:50:28,200 --> 00:50:30,399
Speaker 2: in the vacuum of space, and there's not that much

1091
00:50:30,440 --> 00:50:32,440
Speaker 2: there to begin with. So anyway, those are the places

1092
00:50:32,440 --> 00:50:34,560
Speaker 2: on the Moon that you'd probably go to. There's not

1093
00:50:34,719 --> 00:50:37,640
Speaker 2: a lot of them, but the moon remains awful, you know,

1094
00:50:37,960 --> 00:50:41,440
Speaker 2: even at the poles. The temperatures aren't ideal. But perhaps

1095
00:50:41,520 --> 00:50:44,880
Speaker 2: even more importantly, there's regolith everywhere. And the regolith is

1096
00:50:45,040 --> 00:50:50,040
Speaker 2: like this thick layer of super jagged dust and glass

1097
00:50:50,560 --> 00:50:54,600
Speaker 2: that clings to everything. It's electrically charged. It clings and

1098
00:50:54,680 --> 00:50:56,880
Speaker 2: if you breathe it, we think it's possible that it

1099
00:50:56,920 --> 00:50:59,560
Speaker 2: could scar your lungs over time and create something similar

1100
00:50:59,600 --> 00:51:01,920
Speaker 2: to stone grinder's disease on Earth. So you're gonna have

1101
00:51:01,960 --> 00:51:03,960
Speaker 2: to go to great lengths to make sure it doesn't

1102
00:51:03,960 --> 00:51:06,319
Speaker 2: get in your habitat, which again is going to be

1103
00:51:06,400 --> 00:51:08,840
Speaker 2: really hard because it clings to everything.

1104
00:51:08,560 --> 00:51:11,040
Speaker 1: And that sounds like lung melting, which sounds pretty bad.

1105
00:51:11,280 --> 00:51:13,080
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So your face is gonna melt and your

1106
00:51:13,120 --> 00:51:14,120
Speaker 2: lungs are gonna melt.

1107
00:51:16,560 --> 00:51:19,160
Speaker 1: So most of the Moon is totally inhospitable, and a

1108
00:51:19,239 --> 00:51:22,160
Speaker 1: tiny fraction of it is somewhat less inhospitable.

1109
00:51:22,600 --> 00:51:25,480
Speaker 2: There's also the caves and the tubes on the Moon,

1110
00:51:25,520 --> 00:51:27,359
Speaker 2: which I'm gonna let Zach tell you about because he

1111
00:51:27,440 --> 00:51:28,680
Speaker 2: really geeks out about these.

1112
00:51:29,040 --> 00:51:32,040
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, sure, so, like you know, again at the

1113
00:51:32,080 --> 00:51:34,360
Speaker 3: intersection of still a bad idea, but it's super awesome.

1114
00:51:34,600 --> 00:51:38,080
Speaker 3: The Moon has lava tubes. It's not really very seismically

1115
00:51:38,080 --> 00:51:40,840
Speaker 3: active anymore, but it was in the past, and so

1116
00:51:42,400 --> 00:51:45,400
Speaker 3: people of Earth may know that. If you go to Hawaii,

1117
00:51:45,440 --> 00:51:48,920
Speaker 3: you can see lava tubes, these huge underground caves that

1118
00:51:48,960 --> 00:51:53,200
Speaker 3: are like sort of cylindrical, and we talk about the

1119
00:51:53,239 --> 00:51:55,800
Speaker 3: process by which these are made, but very loosely speaking,

1120
00:51:55,800 --> 00:51:58,520
Speaker 3: you can imagine lava pushes through forms this sort of

1121
00:51:58,600 --> 00:52:00,520
Speaker 3: vein shape and then goes on its way and leaves

1122
00:52:00,520 --> 00:52:03,719
Speaker 3: behind this giant cave. Now you can imagine if that

1123
00:52:03,760 --> 00:52:06,920
Speaker 3: process occurs somewhere where there's only one six as much gravity,

1124
00:52:07,320 --> 00:52:09,040
Speaker 3: you get a much bigger cave. And there are some

1125
00:52:09,239 --> 00:52:11,640
Speaker 3: estimates that you could have lava tubes on the Moon

1126
00:52:12,080 --> 00:52:15,160
Speaker 3: that are hundreds of times larger than anything on Earth. Right, So,

1127
00:52:15,160 --> 00:52:17,000
Speaker 3: if you're going to pick a sort of dream mission

1128
00:52:17,239 --> 00:52:22,319
Speaker 3: for pure awesomeness, sending a little speedlunker bot to one

1129
00:52:22,360 --> 00:52:24,839
Speaker 3: of these caves to just look is probably about as

1130
00:52:24,840 --> 00:52:26,360
Speaker 3: cool as you can get. And it just happens to

1131
00:52:26,400 --> 00:52:28,640
Speaker 3: be on our closest neighbor in space, and these are

1132
00:52:28,680 --> 00:52:31,440
Speaker 3: desirable potentially for a space settlement because one of the

1133
00:52:31,960 --> 00:52:34,080
Speaker 3: deep problems of space settlement is essentially you have to

1134
00:52:34,120 --> 00:52:37,720
Speaker 3: create a little bubble that is protected from everything around you.

1135
00:52:37,760 --> 00:52:40,600
Speaker 3: If there's a pre existing tube, you're not completely predicted.

1136
00:52:40,640 --> 00:52:42,160
Speaker 3: But one of the ideas is you could go in

1137
00:52:42,200 --> 00:52:45,359
Speaker 3: there with some kind of spray on ceilant, right or inflatable,

1138
00:52:45,760 --> 00:52:48,399
Speaker 3: and just press it against those walls. And the cool

1139
00:52:48,440 --> 00:52:50,880
Speaker 3: thing about that is you've created a really big bubble.

1140
00:52:50,920 --> 00:52:54,120
Speaker 3: You might be talking about like literally thousands tens. I

1141
00:52:54,160 --> 00:52:55,880
Speaker 3: didn't have to look at the numbers, but many words

1142
00:52:55,880 --> 00:52:58,760
Speaker 3: of magnitude more than like a habitat that is built,

1143
00:52:59,400 --> 00:53:02,200
Speaker 3: and once you seal it, you can just build in there, right,

1144
00:53:02,239 --> 00:53:03,840
Speaker 3: you can just build a house. It doesn't have to

1145
00:53:03,840 --> 00:53:06,600
Speaker 3: be designed for space other than in case of danger.

1146
00:53:07,040 --> 00:53:09,840
Speaker 3: So those are potentially extraordinarily valuable. Yeah.

1147
00:53:09,960 --> 00:53:11,680
Speaker 2: It also saves you from needing to deal with the

1148
00:53:11,719 --> 00:53:14,719
Speaker 2: regolith because you're inside of a lava tube where that

1149
00:53:14,760 --> 00:53:17,280
Speaker 2: has all been sort of like turned into a crust

1150
00:53:17,320 --> 00:53:20,160
Speaker 2: by the lava, and it saves you from temperature swings.

1151
00:53:20,320 --> 00:53:22,279
Speaker 2: It's just there's lots of reasons why it would be great,

1152
00:53:22,280 --> 00:53:25,840
Speaker 2: but we're not good at moonwalking. Moon's plunking is another level.

1153
00:53:25,960 --> 00:53:28,040
Speaker 1: All of the views from underground are not quite as

1154
00:53:28,040 --> 00:53:30,320
Speaker 1: spectacular as you were suggesting earlier. Kelly.

1155
00:53:30,480 --> 00:53:33,319
Speaker 2: Well, but you're gonna be covered by dirt anyway, right,

1156
00:53:33,400 --> 00:53:35,840
Speaker 2: and so you know you might as well let the

1157
00:53:35,920 --> 00:53:38,440
Speaker 2: tube protect you from radiation as opposed to needing to

1158
00:53:38,520 --> 00:53:41,160
Speaker 2: pile regolith bags on top of your habitat.

1159
00:53:41,520 --> 00:53:44,000
Speaker 1: And then what about Mars? In your book, you say

1160
00:53:44,080 --> 00:53:46,120
Speaker 1: the only way you would believe that Mars would be

1161
00:53:46,160 --> 00:53:48,880
Speaker 1: a good idea would be quote if you had no idea,

1162
00:53:49,040 --> 00:53:54,240
Speaker 1: how thoroughly, incredibly, impossibly horrible Mars is. Why is Mars

1163
00:53:54,320 --> 00:53:55,560
Speaker 1: it such a horrible place to live?

1164
00:53:55,680 --> 00:53:57,680
Speaker 3: I should say Mars is? We do argue that it's

1165
00:53:57,719 --> 00:54:01,320
Speaker 3: the least bad option. While being the least bad option,

1166
00:54:01,400 --> 00:54:04,040
Speaker 3: it is a bad option. And so just to kind

1167
00:54:04,040 --> 00:54:05,879
Speaker 3: of go down the line quickly, can I just say

1168
00:54:05,880 --> 00:54:08,200
Speaker 3: the good stuff about Mars and then ruin it? So

1169
00:54:08,640 --> 00:54:11,399
Speaker 3: the biggest virtue of Mars is that you know, the moon,

1170
00:54:11,480 --> 00:54:14,879
Speaker 3: like we said, is pouring carbon, and Mars basically has

1171
00:54:14,920 --> 00:54:16,880
Speaker 3: all the stuff you'd need. You know, if you've imagined

1172
00:54:16,920 --> 00:54:20,040
Speaker 3: advanced civilization that can just perfectly move around elements however

1173
00:54:20,080 --> 00:54:22,760
Speaker 3: they like because they have infinite energy and science and whatever.

1174
00:54:23,000 --> 00:54:25,920
Speaker 3: The moon has all the stuff, right, and in addition,

1175
00:54:26,040 --> 00:54:28,240
Speaker 3: it has an atmosphere. It's not much of an atmosphere,

1176
00:54:28,280 --> 00:54:30,759
Speaker 3: it's about half a percent to a percent of Earth,

1177
00:54:30,840 --> 00:54:32,759
Speaker 3: is very low pressure. But that atmosphere is made of

1178
00:54:32,760 --> 00:54:37,160
Speaker 3: carbon dioxide. Right, So there's your carbon and oxygen. Humans

1179
00:54:37,200 --> 00:54:39,080
Speaker 3: just can't get enough of it. We love it, so

1180
00:54:39,800 --> 00:54:45,040
Speaker 3: that's pretty huge. The downsides are one, it's really far away, right,

1181
00:54:45,160 --> 00:54:48,879
Speaker 3: A typical proposal is six months inbound. The only way

1182
00:54:48,880 --> 00:54:51,480
Speaker 3: to really fix that is to have something more exotic,

1183
00:54:51,560 --> 00:54:54,000
Speaker 3: like a fission or fusion reactor. And even if you

1184
00:54:54,080 --> 00:54:56,280
Speaker 3: had that, you might still take the slow trip to concern,

1185
00:54:56,400 --> 00:54:58,560
Speaker 3: you know, to just you know, bring more stuff. But anyway,

1186
00:54:58,600 --> 00:55:01,399
Speaker 3: so it's far away, which which means at the longest length,

1187
00:55:01,440 --> 00:55:03,400
Speaker 3: it takes something like twenty minutes to send a signal

1188
00:55:03,440 --> 00:55:06,960
Speaker 3: each way, so forget live communication. I think the closest

1189
00:55:06,960 --> 00:55:08,799
Speaker 3: it's something like three minutes, So it's still pretty bad.

1190
00:55:09,080 --> 00:55:12,040
Speaker 3: So no live conversations with your loved ones ever. Again. Also,

1191
00:55:12,239 --> 00:55:14,720
Speaker 3: you know, the surface is still really nasty and unlike

1192
00:55:14,760 --> 00:55:17,320
Speaker 3: the Moon. It also has perchlorates, which are a hormone

1193
00:55:17,320 --> 00:55:21,320
Speaker 3: disrupting chemical, So you know, circling back to questions about reproduction,

1194
00:55:21,360 --> 00:55:23,960
Speaker 3: that would be interesting to find out what happens to

1195
00:55:24,080 --> 00:55:27,080
Speaker 3: like a teenager swimming in hormone disruptors. So that's bad.

1196
00:55:27,200 --> 00:55:30,520
Speaker 3: So one good thing is you have almost Earth like days.

1197
00:55:30,800 --> 00:55:33,120
Speaker 3: I think it's like twenty four point seven hours, so

1198
00:55:33,200 --> 00:55:36,880
Speaker 3: you do get sunlight. It's substantially dimmer than the sunlight

1199
00:55:36,920 --> 00:55:39,680
Speaker 3: of Earth. But the bigger problem from an energy standpoint

1200
00:55:39,840 --> 00:55:42,960
Speaker 3: is Mars has giant dust storms. Sometimes these dust storms

1201
00:55:43,000 --> 00:55:44,759
Speaker 3: are so big. There's a story that one of the

1202
00:55:44,760 --> 00:55:49,280
Speaker 3: Mariner probes is going toward Mars and suddenly Mars looks

1203
00:55:49,320 --> 00:55:51,480
Speaker 3: like a flat surface and it turns out what had

1204
00:55:51,520 --> 00:55:54,200
Speaker 3: happened is there was a worldwide dust storm. So you

1205
00:55:54,239 --> 00:55:56,080
Speaker 3: try to imagine what that's like on the surface. Is

1206
00:55:56,160 --> 00:55:59,040
Speaker 3: just like the sky is like biblical, right, like no

1207
00:55:59,120 --> 00:56:01,920
Speaker 3: more sky for you, So forget your solar panels. You

1208
00:56:02,160 --> 00:56:05,319
Speaker 3: better have really good batteries or a nuclear reactor or

1209
00:56:05,360 --> 00:56:09,759
Speaker 3: something more exotic. And so you know, those are some

1210
00:56:09,840 --> 00:56:11,839
Speaker 3: of the problems. There's also the stuff we've discussed before,

1211
00:56:11,880 --> 00:56:14,920
Speaker 3: like microgravity and extra radiation, but you know, it is

1212
00:56:14,960 --> 00:56:17,160
Speaker 3: the best game in town. Everywhere is not just worse,

1213
00:56:17,200 --> 00:56:20,960
Speaker 3: but like wildly worse. So it is extraordinarily dangerous and bad,

1214
00:56:21,080 --> 00:56:24,640
Speaker 3: and there's not an obvious economic payoff, but everywhere else

1215
00:56:24,760 --> 00:56:25,160
Speaker 3: is worse.

1216
00:56:25,760 --> 00:56:28,719
Speaker 2: And Mars has a lot of water, and so that yeah,

1217
00:56:28,760 --> 00:56:29,359
Speaker 2: that's also good.

1218
00:56:29,440 --> 00:56:32,560
Speaker 3: Oh I'm sorry, yes, yes, yeah, yeah. So crucially, you know,

1219
00:56:32,640 --> 00:56:35,200
Speaker 3: the Moon has very little water. This is important to

1220
00:56:35,280 --> 00:56:37,200
Speaker 3: us because you read articles sometimes that are like, what

1221
00:56:37,239 --> 00:56:39,080
Speaker 3: are we gonna do with all the moonwater? Like it's

1222
00:56:39,120 --> 00:56:40,680
Speaker 3: like a resource in a video game, you just have

1223
00:56:40,719 --> 00:56:43,279
Speaker 3: all you want. But Mars actually does have plenty of water,

1224
00:56:43,320 --> 00:56:46,239
Speaker 3: the poles of tons of water ice, and actually in

1225
00:56:46,239 --> 00:56:48,200
Speaker 3: most places on Mars it looks like if you dig

1226
00:56:48,239 --> 00:56:50,719
Speaker 3: down far enough there there's water in some form. So

1227
00:56:50,800 --> 00:56:52,960
Speaker 3: like when you put that all together, it's not just

1228
00:56:53,000 --> 00:56:55,160
Speaker 3: that you can drink and breathe. Like if you have carbon,

1229
00:56:55,239 --> 00:56:59,200
Speaker 3: hydrogen and oxygen, at least in principle, you can make

1230
00:56:59,280 --> 00:57:02,080
Speaker 3: a lot of the stuff humans need, including rocket propellant

1231
00:57:02,480 --> 00:57:05,080
Speaker 3: and like fuel cells and things. So you really have

1232
00:57:05,239 --> 00:57:08,799
Speaker 3: everything you need except like a reason to be there

1233
00:57:08,880 --> 00:57:10,560
Speaker 3: is the tricky part. At the cost, it's going to

1234
00:57:10,600 --> 00:57:11,080
Speaker 3: be well.

1235
00:57:11,080 --> 00:57:13,440
Speaker 1: I also want to dig into the legal side of

1236
00:57:13,480 --> 00:57:16,680
Speaker 1: thea that saying that quote ivides we and eat them.

1237
00:57:17,240 --> 00:57:20,440
Speaker 1: What laws govern activities in space are on Mars.

1238
00:57:21,120 --> 00:57:25,040
Speaker 2: So since nineteen sixty seven, space has been governed by

1239
00:57:25,040 --> 00:57:27,560
Speaker 2: a United Nations treaty that goes by the shorter name

1240
00:57:27,640 --> 00:57:31,680
Speaker 2: the Outer Space Treaty. And it says a lot of stuff,

1241
00:57:31,720 --> 00:57:33,360
Speaker 2: and it says a lot of things vaguely, but for

1242
00:57:33,400 --> 00:57:36,760
Speaker 2: the purpose of space settlement, the most important points are

1243
00:57:37,080 --> 00:57:40,760
Speaker 2: no nation is allowed to appropriate any territory in space.

1244
00:57:41,040 --> 00:57:44,000
Speaker 2: But it also specifies that people come from somewhere and

1245
00:57:44,000 --> 00:57:46,760
Speaker 2: they are the responsibility of some nations. So you can't

1246
00:57:46,800 --> 00:57:50,320
Speaker 2: just say, like, okay, the US can't claim the south pole.

1247
00:57:50,120 --> 00:57:50,560
Speaker 3: Of the Moon.

1248
00:57:50,720 --> 00:57:53,200
Speaker 2: And some people will argue that like okay, but Elon

1249
00:57:53,360 --> 00:57:55,880
Speaker 2: Musk could because he's not a nation, he's just some guy.

1250
00:57:56,280 --> 00:57:59,120
Speaker 2: But according to the Outer Space Treaty, he belongs to

1251
00:57:59,160 --> 00:58:01,560
Speaker 2: the US. The US is responsible for what he does

1252
00:58:01,640 --> 00:58:04,800
Speaker 2: up there, and so it's on the US if Elon

1253
00:58:04,920 --> 00:58:07,960
Speaker 2: Musk goes up there and says, I am creating Muscow

1254
00:58:08,440 --> 00:58:11,360
Speaker 2: and this is my new place to live, and so

1255
00:58:11,480 --> 00:58:14,880
Speaker 2: you're not allowed to appropriate the land. But here's where

1256
00:58:14,920 --> 00:58:18,360
Speaker 2: there's quite a bit of ambiguity. It's apparently unclear what

1257
00:58:18,440 --> 00:58:20,680
Speaker 2: you can do with the resources that are up there.

1258
00:58:20,760 --> 00:58:24,680
Speaker 2: So can Jeff Bezos go to those craters of eternal

1259
00:58:24,760 --> 00:58:27,600
Speaker 2: darkness where you can find water and extract the water

1260
00:58:28,120 --> 00:58:32,000
Speaker 2: and sell it to other people for rocket fuel? And

1261
00:58:32,120 --> 00:58:35,600
Speaker 2: the answer to that is it's not really provided in

1262
00:58:35,640 --> 00:58:37,560
Speaker 2: the Outer Space Treaty. And so countries are sort of

1263
00:58:37,600 --> 00:58:40,840
Speaker 2: coming up with their interpretation of what the Outer Space

1264
00:58:40,880 --> 00:58:45,000
Speaker 2: Treaty means. And in the US, Obama passed an act

1265
00:58:45,080 --> 00:58:48,480
Speaker 2: that essentially said, the United States, if our citizens go

1266
00:58:48,600 --> 00:58:52,160
Speaker 2: up there and extract resources and sell them, our interpretation

1267
00:58:52,280 --> 00:58:55,440
Speaker 2: of the Outer Space Treaty is that that's okay. And

1268
00:58:55,480 --> 00:58:59,480
Speaker 2: then Donald Trump released an executive order essentially saying the

1269
00:58:59,520 --> 00:59:02,560
Speaker 2: same thing. So this is maybe the only thing that

1270
00:59:02,600 --> 00:59:06,400
Speaker 2: Obama and Trump can agree on. And then the Artemis

1271
00:59:06,480 --> 00:59:08,720
Speaker 2: Accords came out while we were writing the book. And

1272
00:59:08,760 --> 00:59:12,240
Speaker 2: the Artemis Accords is sort of a NASA document that

1273
00:59:12,280 --> 00:59:14,560
Speaker 2: a bunch of other countries have signed onto. I think

1274
00:59:14,560 --> 00:59:17,080
Speaker 2: it's at around twenty now, and a bunch of other

1275
00:59:17,120 --> 00:59:19,840
Speaker 2: countries have signed onto it, and it essentially says it

1276
00:59:19,920 --> 00:59:23,480
Speaker 2: is our interpretation that it is okay to extract resources

1277
00:59:23,520 --> 00:59:26,720
Speaker 2: and sell them. And in fact, NASA supported a company

1278
00:59:26,720 --> 00:59:28,960
Speaker 2: that went up there and scooped a tiny bit of

1279
00:59:29,000 --> 00:59:31,720
Speaker 2: regolith and then sold it to NASA for a token

1280
00:59:31,800 --> 00:59:33,440
Speaker 2: fee of I think a dollar, And it was just

1281
00:59:33,520 --> 00:59:36,120
Speaker 2: meant to set the precedent that a resource can be

1282
00:59:36,160 --> 00:59:38,440
Speaker 2: collected by a company on the Moon and then sold,

1283
00:59:38,520 --> 00:59:40,520
Speaker 2: and that the United States is okay with that. But

1284
00:59:40,600 --> 00:59:42,720
Speaker 2: that is supposed to be a global commons. That was

1285
00:59:42,760 --> 00:59:45,800
Speaker 2: point to the Moon is a global commons. All of

1286
00:59:45,840 --> 00:59:48,960
Speaker 2: space is a global commons, and so other countries I

1287
00:59:48,960 --> 00:59:51,840
Speaker 2: think would argue that as a global commons, if you

1288
00:59:51,920 --> 00:59:56,040
Speaker 2: extract a resource, everybody should benefit from it. But that's

1289
00:59:56,080 --> 00:59:58,800
Speaker 2: not actually specified by the Outer Space Treaty, so there's

1290
00:59:59,000 --> 01:00:02,200
Speaker 2: a big fight over inter But we like to note

1291
01:00:02,280 --> 01:00:05,960
Speaker 2: that the Moon and space in general is not like

1292
01:00:06,440 --> 01:00:10,760
Speaker 2: a completely weird legal structure that is unlike anything you

1293
01:00:10,840 --> 01:00:15,200
Speaker 2: see anywhere else. This is essentially what humanity has decided

1294
01:00:15,280 --> 01:00:19,000
Speaker 2: to do when we end up with vast swaths of

1295
01:00:19,120 --> 01:00:22,280
Speaker 2: land that technology suddenly opens up for us. So, for example,

1296
01:00:22,320 --> 01:00:26,480
Speaker 2: Antarctica is managed by the Antarctic Treaty System, where a

1297
01:00:26,480 --> 01:00:29,480
Speaker 2: bunch of countries come together, they agree, it's a global commons,

1298
01:00:29,800 --> 01:00:31,880
Speaker 2: they decide what can be done with the resources, and

1299
01:00:31,920 --> 01:00:35,240
Speaker 2: at the moment they've decided, you cannot extract any resources,

1300
01:00:35,280 --> 01:00:38,120
Speaker 2: and in fact you cannot even look for them because

1301
01:00:38,120 --> 01:00:39,960
Speaker 2: we don't want to start any trouble. And then the

1302
01:00:39,960 --> 01:00:44,800
Speaker 2: deep seabed is managed by close the United Nations Convention

1303
01:00:44,880 --> 01:00:46,560
Speaker 2: on the Law of the Sea. So we have a

1304
01:00:46,560 --> 01:00:48,640
Speaker 2: couple of different global commons, a couple different ways of

1305
01:00:48,640 --> 01:00:51,040
Speaker 2: managing them. But you know, it's unclear how things are

1306
01:00:51,040 --> 01:00:52,080
Speaker 2: going to shape up in space.

1307
01:00:52,400 --> 01:00:54,600
Speaker 1: So does that mean it is or is not legal

1308
01:00:54,920 --> 01:00:56,440
Speaker 1: to eat your neighbor in space?

1309
01:00:56,720 --> 01:00:59,480
Speaker 3: I can speak to that question. Yes, I should say

1310
01:00:59,480 --> 01:01:01,200
Speaker 3: this is it's a short part of the book, but

1311
01:01:01,280 --> 01:01:04,520
Speaker 3: we do something like an answer. So the short version

1312
01:01:04,560 --> 01:01:07,160
Speaker 3: is it depends on what law you consider yourself to

1313
01:01:07,160 --> 01:01:09,120
Speaker 3: be under, which probably has to do with what country

1314
01:01:09,160 --> 01:01:12,320
Speaker 3: you're from or where you launched from, right, and it

1315
01:01:12,360 --> 01:01:15,440
Speaker 3: actually varies by country. We're more familiar with the American

1316
01:01:15,440 --> 01:01:18,520
Speaker 3: and British law, which in the US. This is beyond

1317
01:01:18,560 --> 01:01:20,320
Speaker 3: what we have in the book. So I'm digging a

1318
01:01:20,320 --> 01:01:21,800
Speaker 3: little deep for this, but I believe there's something called

1319
01:01:21,840 --> 01:01:24,480
Speaker 3: the Holmes test. Which is this list of conditions which

1320
01:01:24,520 --> 01:01:26,640
Speaker 3: basically says, look, if you want to like engage in

1321
01:01:26,640 --> 01:01:29,880
Speaker 3: survival homicide, meaning kill some people so other people can live,

1322
01:01:29,920 --> 01:01:31,640
Speaker 3: there has to be a set of conditions met. And

1323
01:01:31,680 --> 01:01:33,640
Speaker 3: there are things like, you know, there has to be

1324
01:01:33,680 --> 01:01:36,400
Speaker 3: no other option, and you have to have a random draw.

1325
01:01:36,560 --> 01:01:39,560
Speaker 3: You can't like prefer the crew to the passengers. So

1326
01:01:39,600 --> 01:01:41,560
Speaker 3: there's a set of criteria that have to be met

1327
01:01:41,600 --> 01:01:44,800
Speaker 3: for it to be considered okay or at least potentially okay,

1328
01:01:45,360 --> 01:01:48,280
Speaker 3: to engage in survival homicide. So, you know, there's not

1329
01:01:48,360 --> 01:01:51,600
Speaker 3: a lot written about death and space generally it's never happened. Well,

1330
01:01:51,640 --> 01:01:54,600
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, it's never happened other than just people suddenly

1331
01:01:54,640 --> 01:01:56,800
Speaker 3: die during a situation where they can't be saved, right,

1332
01:01:56,800 --> 01:01:58,880
Speaker 3: So there's never been a situation where like a guide

1333
01:01:58,880 --> 01:02:00,920
Speaker 3: dies in the spaceship in and sort of crowded around

1334
01:02:00,960 --> 01:02:02,720
Speaker 3: like geez, what do we do? And so there's not

1335
01:02:02,720 --> 01:02:04,480
Speaker 3: a lot written on this. But we found a paper

1336
01:02:04,560 --> 01:02:07,400
Speaker 3: from nineteen seventy eight by a guy named Robert Fritis,

1337
01:02:07,400 --> 01:02:09,880
Speaker 3: who I think ended up being a nanotechnology guy, but

1338
01:02:09,880 --> 01:02:11,920
Speaker 3: in seventy eight he was interested in this question and

1339
01:02:11,960 --> 01:02:14,200
Speaker 3: it said you know, there's this movie and novel called

1340
01:02:14,240 --> 01:02:16,920
Speaker 3: Maroon where there's three guys in space and there's something

1341
01:02:16,960 --> 01:02:19,040
Speaker 3: goes wrong. There's not enough oxygen to save all of them.

1342
01:02:19,120 --> 01:02:21,240
Speaker 3: The rescue ship will like get there in five hours.

1343
01:02:21,720 --> 01:02:23,640
Speaker 3: They have four hours of oxygen. So if you're being

1344
01:02:23,800 --> 01:02:26,280
Speaker 3: if we were ants, one of the ants would be like,

1345
01:02:26,360 --> 01:02:29,000
Speaker 3: I'm going to go die. Problem solved. But we're not ants,

1346
01:02:29,000 --> 01:02:31,680
Speaker 3: and so it's like a really nauseating question. And so

1347
01:02:31,720 --> 01:02:33,520
Speaker 3: he actually kind of went through the literature of how

1348
01:02:33,560 --> 01:02:36,720
Speaker 3: we think about this question legally, and the basic deal

1349
01:02:36,800 --> 01:02:39,680
Speaker 3: is it's going to depend on where you're from. So

1350
01:02:39,680 --> 01:02:41,440
Speaker 3: if you're in the ISS, the kind of funny thing

1351
01:02:41,520 --> 01:02:44,920
Speaker 3: is the modules are kind of like quasi sovereign territory, right,

1352
01:02:45,000 --> 01:02:46,760
Speaker 3: so the Japanese module is sort of like a piece

1353
01:02:46,800 --> 01:02:49,520
Speaker 3: of Japan. So you know, we say you should sort

1354
01:02:49,560 --> 01:02:51,560
Speaker 3: of call a lawyer. You should be like, what country

1355
01:02:51,960 --> 01:02:54,000
Speaker 3: you know if I went to Japan or Russia? Would

1356
01:02:54,040 --> 01:02:56,200
Speaker 3: I get a better deal if I have to eat somebody?

1357
01:02:56,480 --> 01:02:59,360
Speaker 3: But yes, that's the law. In terms of like the

1358
01:02:59,400 --> 01:03:01,919
Speaker 3: physical part, we found one guy who's willing to talk

1359
01:03:01,920 --> 01:03:04,160
Speaker 3: about it, who was like weirdly detailed about how to

1360
01:03:04,280 --> 01:03:07,280
Speaker 3: butcher a human and three D print a plastic knife

1361
01:03:07,480 --> 01:03:09,880
Speaker 3: in space. His name is Eric's Seathhouse, and we advise

1362
01:03:09,920 --> 01:03:15,720
Speaker 3: against bringing him on your crew. And that's my main

1363
01:03:15,760 --> 01:03:18,480
Speaker 3: advice about eating your friends in space. To summarize. The

1364
01:03:18,520 --> 01:03:21,520
Speaker 3: Outer Space Treaty obviously doesn't deal with cannibalism in space,

1365
01:03:21,800 --> 01:03:24,160
Speaker 3: so you will probably be dealt with as a national

1366
01:03:24,160 --> 01:03:27,000
Speaker 3: of some country. Preferably to keep it simple, don't eat

1367
01:03:27,040 --> 01:03:28,840
Speaker 3: someone from some other country because it's going to be

1368
01:03:28,840 --> 01:03:30,280
Speaker 3: an international incident.

1369
01:03:31,480 --> 01:03:33,440
Speaker 1: That's going to complicate your life. So it sounds like

1370
01:03:33,480 --> 01:03:36,200
Speaker 1: you guys have done a really deep dive into the

1371
01:03:36,280 --> 01:03:38,680
Speaker 1: details of what it would be like, the logistics, the

1372
01:03:38,760 --> 01:03:41,920
Speaker 1: legal side, where we would actually live. In the end,

1373
01:03:42,080 --> 01:03:43,680
Speaker 1: how did you feel about it? I mean, you started

1374
01:03:43,680 --> 01:03:46,480
Speaker 1: out optimistic and then you were a little disappointed in

1375
01:03:46,680 --> 01:03:50,200
Speaker 1: how much people had explored this. On balance, in the end,

1376
01:03:50,280 --> 01:03:52,840
Speaker 1: do you feel like this is something humanity should do?

1377
01:03:53,000 --> 01:03:55,760
Speaker 1: But maybe deeper into the future that we're not ready yet,

1378
01:03:56,040 --> 01:03:58,720
Speaker 1: but it's still something we should plan for, or maybe

1379
01:03:58,720 --> 01:04:00,560
Speaker 1: we need to dig even deeper before we have an

1380
01:04:00,560 --> 01:04:01,760
Speaker 1: answer even to that question.

1381
01:04:02,080 --> 01:04:03,760
Speaker 2: So I think maybe Zach and I should both give

1382
01:04:03,800 --> 01:04:06,680
Speaker 2: our answers in case we differ a little bit. I'd

1383
01:04:06,680 --> 01:04:09,720
Speaker 2: say that I still think it's a beautiful idea. I

1384
01:04:09,720 --> 01:04:12,360
Speaker 2: would love to see it happen at some point, but

1385
01:04:12,400 --> 01:04:14,760
Speaker 2: I think we need to not push for it to

1386
01:04:14,760 --> 01:04:17,680
Speaker 2: happen in our lifetimes. I will be personally very happy

1387
01:04:17,720 --> 01:04:20,920
Speaker 2: if in my lifetime there is a research base on

1388
01:04:20,960 --> 01:04:23,080
Speaker 2: the Moon where we get a better handle on creating

1389
01:04:23,160 --> 01:04:27,840
Speaker 2: closed loop ecosystems, figuring out safety measures for adults and

1390
01:04:28,000 --> 01:04:30,160
Speaker 2: the babies that we'd like to have one day. I

1391
01:04:30,200 --> 01:04:33,760
Speaker 2: think there's a lot of work on geopolitics and international

1392
01:04:33,840 --> 01:04:35,680
Speaker 2: law that I would like to see happen before we

1393
01:04:35,760 --> 01:04:38,120
Speaker 2: end up with the scramble for territory. You know, in

1394
01:04:38,160 --> 01:04:40,000
Speaker 2: the book, we talk about how the way the deep

1395
01:04:40,080 --> 01:04:43,240
Speaker 2: seabed is managed could be a great way to manage

1396
01:04:43,280 --> 01:04:46,000
Speaker 2: resources in space as well. So I'd love to see

1397
01:04:46,000 --> 01:04:49,000
Speaker 2: some more work on stuff like that. So I'd like

1398
01:04:49,040 --> 01:04:50,720
Speaker 2: to see it happen, but I'd like to see us

1399
01:04:50,720 --> 01:04:53,880
Speaker 2: slow down and figure out, like step by step, what

1400
01:04:54,040 --> 01:04:56,480
Speaker 2: needs to happen to do it safely, and then you know,

1401
01:04:56,720 --> 01:04:58,480
Speaker 2: start to see that kind of stuff funding. I would

1402
01:04:58,520 --> 01:05:01,480
Speaker 2: love it if Musk had not bought Twitter and Head

1403
01:05:01,520 --> 01:05:05,440
Speaker 2: instead invested in closed loop ecosystems or research stations on

1404
01:05:05,480 --> 01:05:07,960
Speaker 2: the moon or something. What about you, Zach, Yeah.

1405
01:05:07,760 --> 01:05:11,800
Speaker 3: So I would say my view is that it's something

1406
01:05:12,080 --> 01:05:17,320
Speaker 3: that we will eventually do entirely because it's awesome. I

1407
01:05:17,400 --> 01:05:20,840
Speaker 3: think the economic arguments are quite weak. We discussed this

1408
01:05:20,840 --> 01:05:21,960
Speaker 3: a little in the book. There's a lot of sort

1409
01:05:21,960 --> 01:05:23,920
Speaker 3: of what you might call sociological arguments, like if we

1410
01:05:23,920 --> 01:05:26,480
Speaker 3: don't do this, we're going to stagnate. There are arguments

1411
01:05:26,520 --> 01:05:28,240
Speaker 3: that we're going to save the environment. There's no way

1412
01:05:28,280 --> 01:05:30,200
Speaker 3: it's going to happen fast enough. There are all these

1413
01:05:30,240 --> 01:05:32,000
Speaker 3: different arguments for why we ought to do it, and

1414
01:05:32,040 --> 01:05:34,080
Speaker 3: we think they're basically no good. And I would also

1415
01:05:34,120 --> 01:05:36,080
Speaker 3: add that there's an argument Daniel Duden is big on

1416
01:05:36,120 --> 01:05:37,680
Speaker 3: this as there's an argument that we should just never

1417
01:05:37,720 --> 01:05:39,680
Speaker 3: do it, because you know, people tend to say we

1418
01:05:39,720 --> 01:05:43,920
Speaker 3: should colonize space to decrease existential risk, but actually they're,

1419
01:05:43,960 --> 01:05:48,320
Speaker 3: you know, plausibly by getting that huge infrastructure above a gravity, well,

1420
01:05:49,120 --> 01:05:52,000
Speaker 3: you're creating higher existential risk. So maybe it's never going

1421
01:05:52,080 --> 01:05:53,640
Speaker 3: to be a good idea until like, you know, does

1422
01:05:53,640 --> 01:05:56,600
Speaker 3: physics allowed tractor beams or something. You know, So there's

1423
01:05:56,640 --> 01:05:59,320
Speaker 3: an argument there. I think you can imagine a world

1424
01:06:00,000 --> 01:06:04,160
Speaker 3: it's some distant date where you know, we are such

1425
01:06:04,200 --> 01:06:08,080
Speaker 3: an advanced, wealthy species that you could just go to

1426
01:06:08,240 --> 01:06:10,080
Speaker 3: Mars to set up there, because it would be a

1427
01:06:10,120 --> 01:06:11,800
Speaker 3: cool thing to do. Like you're going to send you

1428
01:06:11,840 --> 01:06:14,160
Speaker 3: one hundred AI robots ahead of you. They're going to

1429
01:06:14,200 --> 01:06:16,840
Speaker 3: set up a cabin and space launch is totally safe,

1430
01:06:16,880 --> 01:06:19,560
Speaker 3: and Earth is so peaceful and harmonious that the idea

1431
01:06:19,560 --> 01:06:24,000
Speaker 3: of like starting warfare between planets is unimaginable. And that world,

1432
01:06:24,000 --> 01:06:26,280
Speaker 3: it's a great idea, It's wonderful. It's sort of like

1433
01:06:26,320 --> 01:06:28,840
Speaker 3: in Star Trek they're just exploring around because exploring is

1434
01:06:28,840 --> 01:06:30,640
Speaker 3: a cool thing to do, and all the old problems

1435
01:06:30,680 --> 01:06:33,080
Speaker 3: have been solved. But I guess the big change for

1436
01:06:33,120 --> 01:06:34,760
Speaker 3: me is I just I just don't buy any of

1437
01:06:34,760 --> 01:06:38,760
Speaker 3: the arguments that there's a non esthetic reason to do Mars.

1438
01:06:38,800 --> 01:06:41,560
Speaker 3: There just doesn't seem to be unless you're talking about

1439
01:06:41,600 --> 01:06:44,520
Speaker 3: like a Kardish of you know, eighteen civilization that's got

1440
01:06:44,520 --> 01:06:47,680
Speaker 3: to maximize every single photon in the universe. There's just

1441
01:06:47,720 --> 01:06:49,360
Speaker 3: no good reason to do it. So to me, that

1442
01:06:49,360 --> 01:06:51,560
Speaker 3: puts it on the scale of centuries. It requires a

1443
01:06:51,560 --> 01:06:53,800
Speaker 3: better humanity and a much richer humanity.

1444
01:06:53,920 --> 01:06:56,040
Speaker 1: Well, thank you guys very much for writing this book.

1445
01:06:56,320 --> 01:06:58,720
Speaker 1: I know you described as something of a wet blanket,

1446
01:06:58,720 --> 01:07:01,240
Speaker 1: but I actually think it's necessary to think about these

1447
01:07:01,280 --> 01:07:04,720
Speaker 1: things carefully, to lay the groundwork to figure out what

1448
01:07:04,760 --> 01:07:07,200
Speaker 1: the problems are actually going to be. That, if anything,

1449
01:07:07,280 --> 01:07:09,040
Speaker 1: your book could makes it more likely that we do

1450
01:07:09,120 --> 01:07:11,800
Speaker 1: figure this stuff out because people think about it carefully.

1451
01:07:12,040 --> 01:07:15,040
Speaker 1: So from all the space nerds, thank you. You see

1452
01:07:15,080 --> 01:07:20,000
Speaker 1: this book positively, and I encourage everybody out there to

1453
01:07:20,000 --> 01:07:22,440
Speaker 1: get it. It's called a City on Mars? Can we

1454
01:07:22,480 --> 01:07:24,919
Speaker 1: settle space? Should be settle Space? And how we really

1455
01:07:24,920 --> 01:07:30,480
Speaker 1: thought this through. It's really exquisitely, deeply detailed and well researched.

1456
01:07:30,680 --> 01:07:32,920
Speaker 1: These guys definitely know what they're talking about. And in addition,

1457
01:07:33,120 --> 01:07:35,680
Speaker 1: it's really fun. I mean, obviously these two are very

1458
01:07:35,680 --> 01:07:38,080
Speaker 1: funny people, and so you'll read it, you'll learn a lot,

1459
01:07:38,160 --> 01:07:40,960
Speaker 1: you'll laugh a lot. I totally encourage you, and thank

1460
01:07:40,960 --> 01:07:43,040
Speaker 1: you very much Zach and Kelly for joining us today

1461
01:07:43,040 --> 01:07:45,880
Speaker 1: to talk about sex and space, poop in space, and

1462
01:07:46,000 --> 01:07:46,680
Speaker 1: face melting.

1463
01:07:46,880 --> 01:07:48,800
Speaker 3: Thanks so much, Daniel, I can do a whole episode

1464
01:07:48,840 --> 01:07:49,880
Speaker 3: on face melting.

1465
01:07:52,000 --> 01:07:56,600
Speaker 1: Collaboration, all right, Thanks again everyone for listening and tune

1466
01:07:56,600 --> 01:08:07,040
Speaker 1: in next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel

1467
01:08:07,080 --> 01:08:10,520
Speaker 1: and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.

1468
01:08:10,760 --> 01:08:15,960
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

1469
01:08:16,080 --> 01:08:18,439
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.