Speaker 1: Hey, Kelly, where do you think your kids are going
Speaker 1: to live when they grow up?
Speaker 2: Well, right now, my oldest is saying she's going to
Speaker 2: stay in the house and have fourteen cats and ten kids,
Speaker 2: And I guess I'm hoping that she's not in my
Speaker 2: house but when that happens. But I also don't want
Speaker 2: her too far because I'd love to see her and
Speaker 2: her many creatures as much as possible.
Speaker 1: Well, what would be too far? Are we talking like
Speaker 1: South America or Antarctica.
Speaker 2: I'd make those trips, although I wouldn't be super excited
Speaker 2: about Antarctica, but I suspect I'm going to be a
Speaker 2: pretty determined grandparent.
Speaker 1: What if they have grandbabies, like in near Earth orbit
Speaker 1: on this space.
Speaker 2: Station, I'd be a bit disappointed for her poor decisions,
Speaker 2: because I'm not sure that that's safe yet. But if
Speaker 2: that's what I have to do to see the grandkids,
Speaker 2: and my love is unconditional, I'm in all right.
Speaker 1: And what if they move to MI and have little
Speaker 1: Martian babies?
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, I don't know. Maybe we should set
Speaker 2: up a video link.
Speaker 1: Well, it's good to know the limits of your love.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, there's Alpha Centauri is a good limit. But
Speaker 2: you know what's worrying me is we're having this conversation,
Speaker 2: and now I have to make sure that my kids
Speaker 2: in the future and my grandkids don't listen to this
Speaker 2: conversation because they're going to get ideas and they'll move
Speaker 2: out deep into the solar system.
Speaker 1: Right now, they know exactly how far they have to
Speaker 1: move to.
Speaker 2: Avoid grandparent visits. Yep, good luck kids.
Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor
Speaker 1: at UC Irvine, and I hope my kids move far away.
Speaker 2: I'm Kelly Weener Smith. I'm a parasitologist and adjunct Debt
Speaker 2: Race University. And you know, I'd like my kids to
Speaker 2: be close, but maybe not in the house.
Speaker 1: I have lots of friends here whose kids graduate from
Speaker 1: high school, go to college, and then move back home
Speaker 1: in this neighborhood. They call that failure to launch.
Speaker 2: That's a big thing. Now, Yeah, my kids can stay
Speaker 2: with me as long as they need to.
Speaker 1: Mm. I just feel like moving outside the influence of
Speaker 1: your parents is part of growing up and becoming an
Speaker 1: adult in the world.
Speaker 2: You know, I did love it. I had so much
Speaker 2: fun when I moved out.
Speaker 1: Well, welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,
Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio. My usual friend and co host,
Speaker 1: Jorge can't be here today, but I'm very happy to
Speaker 1: be joined by our regular guest host, Kelly Wingersmith. Kelly,
Speaker 1: thanks very much for joining us.
Speaker 2: It's a pleasure to be here as always. And you know,
Speaker 2: today we're talking about maybe the best thing you've ever
Speaker 2: talked about on the podcast, and so I'm particularly excited
Speaker 2: about today's conversation.
Speaker 1: That's right. Today we're not just talking about explaining the universe.
Speaker 1: We're talking about exploring the universe, actually settling the universe,
Speaker 1: sending humanity out to the rest of the cosmos to
Speaker 1: infect it with our disease. And as a special bonus,
Speaker 1: we have not one Wienersmith today, we actually have two
Speaker 1: Zach wingers made welcome to the podcast as well.
Speaker 3: Hey, Hello, I need some intro music.
Speaker 1: What is your intro music? Is it sort of like
Speaker 1: the Darth Vader theme song?
Speaker 3: Is more of a more of a wrestling thing, I
Speaker 3: would I would like what did the Macho Man have?
Speaker 1: Well, regular listeners the podcast know Kelly, of course, and
Speaker 1: some of you may also know Zach her less famous husband,
Speaker 1: well known for a Saturday morning breakfast cereal.
Speaker 3: Whatever made man.
Speaker 1: And there's a reason we have Zach and Kelly on
Speaker 1: the podcast together today, not just for marital therapy, but
Speaker 1: because these two folks have written a fantastic and fascinating
Speaker 1: book all about settling space and exploring the.
Speaker 2: Cosmos, and it's finally almost of it.
Speaker 1: How long have you guys been working on this book?
Speaker 2: We did four years of research on the book, and
Speaker 2: then it took a year between submitting the book and
Speaker 2: it going to Prince. So we've been thinking about this
Speaker 2: for like a decade between the two of us, and
Speaker 2: we are ready to crush everyone's dream.
Speaker 1: If you feel about this book the way I feel
Speaker 1: about every paper I write that takes longer than a year,
Speaker 1: then by the time it's ready to go out in
Speaker 1: the world, I hate the thing and I never want
Speaker 1: to see it again.
Speaker 2: I was happy to get it off of my desk
Speaker 2: when the time came, but I'm still pretty excited about it,
Speaker 2: and that year in between sort of helped me get
Speaker 2: excited about it again. What about you, Zach, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: think you know.
Speaker 3: So the amount of time between submitting a manuscript, you're
Speaker 3: basically not allowed to touch and the time you get
Speaker 3: to actually put the book out of the universe is
Speaker 3: quite substantial. So the other thing is, you know, the
Speaker 3: way publishing works now is you don't want to say
Speaker 3: too much because you might get to say it in
Speaker 3: some prominent place. So you kind of have you're sort
Speaker 3: of like, you know, and gagged until the book comes out.
Speaker 3: So it's getting to where it's exciting to talk about
Speaker 3: this stuff again.
Speaker 1: Awesome. So I hope we're catching you right in the
Speaker 1: upswing where you're excited about these topics again, because I'm
Speaker 1: very excited about it and I can't wait to talk
Speaker 1: to you both about it. And so today on the podcast,
Speaker 1: we'll be tackling the question can we settle space? Should
Speaker 1: we settle space? Have we really thought this through? I
Speaker 1: love the subtitles for your book. It really sets up
Speaker 1: the whole conversation, the skepticism, the nerdy analysis of whether
Speaker 1: this is something realistic. I really love the way you
Speaker 1: guys tackle this.
Speaker 2: I feel like by reading the last question we propose,
Speaker 2: you pretty much know where we're going to fall on
Speaker 2: the whole topic. But you know, we try to we're
Speaker 2: still people who are excited about space settlement at the
Speaker 2: end of the day.
Speaker 1: And space settlement is something that's definitely in the zeitgeisten
Speaker 1: has been for decades. Right, We've been hearing about the
Speaker 1: possibilities of moving humans out into space. Elon Musk is
Speaker 1: famous accelerating our ability to get into orbit, and so
Speaker 1: this is something people have been thinking about. And so,
Speaker 1: as usual on the podcast, before we dig into the topic,
Speaker 1: I pulled our listeners to hear what they thought about
Speaker 1: the possibilities of colonizing space, the Moon and Mars in
Speaker 1: this case, actually walked around campus here at UC Irvine
Speaker 1: where classes have recently started, and asked folks if they
Speaker 1: thought it's important that we colonize space and whether we
Speaker 1: will have the technology. So, before you hear these answers,
Speaker 1: think to yourself for a minute, do you think we
Speaker 1: should colonize space? Are we ready to do so? Here's
Speaker 1: what people had to say, Sure, why not? Do you
Speaker 1: think we're capable of doing it anytime in the near future? No? No,
Speaker 1: how long do you think before we're ready?
Speaker 4: The Moon? Probably under the years, I would say that
Speaker 4: estate I don't know.
Speaker 1: Finding the future, do you think humanity should colonize space?
Speaker 1: The Moon? In Mars. No, because we kind of ruined
Speaker 1: our planet already. Are you worried we're going to ruin
Speaker 1: some more?
Speaker 4: We will deserve too.
Speaker 1: Do you think humanity should colonize space the moon in
Speaker 1: Marsh Yeah? Definitely, Yeah, definitely Yeah. Cool. Why is that?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Because like you know, like you never know like what's
Speaker 4: going to happen in the future, you.
Speaker 1: Know, do you think we're ready? Do we have the technology?
Speaker 4: Maybe NASA does, but we never know like what's going
Speaker 4: to happen. Maybe they're like hiding something or at least
Speaker 4: that's what I think. I think we should colonize like
Speaker 4: those kind of financial What is NASA hiding?
Speaker 1: Do you think?
Speaker 3: I have no clue?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm just undergrad student here, but probably like some
Speaker 4: like super technology, you know, just came out that aliens
Speaker 4: does exist.
Speaker 1: The question is, do you think humanity should colonize space
Speaker 1: the moon in Mars?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I think so. I think it's a good idea. So
Speaker 5: if we're capable of doing it, I think it's not.
Speaker 5: It's not a bad idea.
Speaker 1: So do you think we are capable?
Speaker 5: I think we will be very very likely because I mean,
Speaker 5: we sure have the technology to go there.
Speaker 1: It's just yeah.
Speaker 5: So I guess if you asked me, in probably in
Speaker 5: one hundred years, there will be people living in March Mars,
Speaker 5: That's my guess.
Speaker 1: Do you think it's important that humanity colonizes space, the Moon, Mars,
Speaker 1: et cetera.
Speaker 3: Eventually, yes, but not in the immediate future.
Speaker 1: And do you think we'll have the capability the technology
Speaker 1: to do it anytime soon?
Speaker 3: Eventually?
Speaker 1: Eventually? What does eventually mean?
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Erudious all right, Zach Kelly, what do you guys think
Speaker 1: about those answers?
Speaker 2: Well, I'll note that I didn't share them with Zach
Speaker 2: ahead of time, so he's unprepared. But I'm going to
Speaker 2: go ahead and say that's his fault. So one of
Speaker 2: the respondents said no, because we've ruined our planet already,
Speaker 2: so we don't deserve it. And I got to say,
Speaker 2: what as an ecologist, when I started telling people like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm writing a book about space settlement, many of them
Speaker 2: immediately assumed that I was writing a book about how
Speaker 2: we don't deserve it because we've destroyed our own planet,
Speaker 2: And I almost felt guilty because that was not at
Speaker 2: all my angle. I'm excited, and I think we should
Speaker 2: you know. I hope we do it at some point,
Speaker 2: but I hope we're just careful about it.
Speaker 3: Zach.
Speaker 2: When you talk to people, what is the response that
Speaker 2: you usually get from people when you tell them that
Speaker 2: you're reading a book about space settlements?
Speaker 3: So I think, you know, the ecologist's example is good
Speaker 3: because what we've found is what we should do in
Speaker 3: space is almost like a roar shock test for your
Speaker 3: view of the universe, you know what I mean. There
Speaker 3: are these different strains. So there are people who are
Speaker 3: very kind of techy libertarian, read a lot of hindline
Speaker 3: Elon musk is is in this vein who think it's
Speaker 3: not just that it would be cool to do it,
Speaker 3: would be kind of like a thwarting of human ambition
Speaker 3: to not do it. But then you also have feel
Speaker 3: who are Yeah, I have this perspective that we have
Speaker 3: kind of befouled the Earth and we're a sort of
Speaker 3: you know, gross skurf on the surface of the planet
Speaker 3: and ought not to extend ourselves to other planets. And
Speaker 3: I think it's almost like you know how people say
Speaker 3: science fiction is never about the future, it's always about
Speaker 3: the present. I think what you think should be done
Speaker 3: in space settlement kind of works the same way. What
Speaker 3: you're often doing is really making rendering a sort of
Speaker 3: judgment on how we're doing right this second. You know.
Speaker 3: The deal is, of course space is actually a real
Speaker 3: place that interfaces with actual reality, and so you know,
Speaker 3: our book is hopefully it's an attempt to part from
Speaker 3: it just being a sort of philosophical thing and talk
Speaker 3: about what it would actually be like. But yeah, can
Speaker 3: you say about the ecology thing my biggest rebuttal to that,
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, people tend to assume that we're going
Speaker 3: to be like, yes, Elon mess is an idiot and
Speaker 3: he's defiled Earth and will defile Mars, and I just
Speaker 3: want to say, like that just fails to reckon with
Speaker 3: how thoroughly terrible Mars is, Like unless you are one
Speaker 3: of these people, and there are such people more than
Speaker 3: I would have thought, who think like Mars as an
Speaker 3: entity has agency like a person would. Unless you believe
Speaker 3: something like that, it's bizarre because there's no part of
Speaker 3: Earth that's even close to as bad as anywhere on Mars.
Speaker 3: You couldn't make it as bad without like slamming the
Speaker 3: Moon into Earth or something. So the idea of in
Speaker 3: an ecological sense, messing up Mars is sort of absurd,
Speaker 3: and the moon even more so. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, one thing I think is really fascinating is hearing
Speaker 1: about how your opinions have changed. I mean, if this
Speaker 1: is like a war shark test for who you are
Speaker 1: and what you think about where we are today, then
Speaker 1: it's really interesting that you guys went from like vaguely
Speaker 1: optimistic about space settlement to being you know, space cranks.
Speaker 1: Essentially tell us a little bit about your journey, like
Speaker 1: what book did you start out wanting to write? Did
Speaker 1: you intend to write when you started this project? Oh,
Speaker 1: so many years ago?
Speaker 2: So we wrote soonish together and that was a book
Speaker 2: about emerging technologies, and two of the technologies in the
Speaker 2: book were cheap access to space and asteroid mining. And
Speaker 2: after writing both of those chapters, we thought like, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe space settlements aren't that far away. So
Speaker 2: if you can launch mass to space cheaply, then you
Speaker 2: can send habitats with all the tech that you need
Speaker 2: to keep humans alive in space. And if asteroid mining
Speaker 2: is a thing, then pretty soon we're going to be
Speaker 2: able to use resources from space to build our habitats.
Speaker 2: And that's going to make things even cheaper, And so
Speaker 2: we thought that this is something that could happen in
Speaker 2: our lifetimes, and especially given all of the like pop
Speaker 2: size stuff you read about space settlement and all rhetoric
Speaker 2: from space advocates, we thought like, this is something that
Speaker 2: we are one hundred percent prepared to do. We just
Speaker 2: need to be able to afford to do it. So
Speaker 2: we were going to write like the guide to what
Speaker 2: the next couple of years are going to be like, like,
Speaker 2: you know, how do you put together the first crew?
Speaker 2: Should it be half male half female? How should you
Speaker 2: know if you have an international crew, kind of sociological
Speaker 2: stuff might they come up against? And what kind of
Speaker 2: governance should you have for the first settlement on the moon.
Speaker 1: And you were excited to see these things happen, right
Speaker 1: You were like, ooh, let's figure this out. This would
Speaker 1: be fantastic if it happened.
Speaker 2: I guess I shouldn't speak for both of us, but
Speaker 2: I was. I think it's beautiful. The idea of like,
Speaker 2: you know, waking up on the Moon and seeing Earth,
Speaker 2: you know, from the glass dome that you were sleeping
Speaker 2: in or whatever, that all sounded amazing, and so I
Speaker 2: was super excited, but every chapter that we started working
Speaker 2: on we were like, oh, man, we don't know anywhere
Speaker 2: near enough about this. So in the medicine chapter, we
Speaker 2: were like, we really don't know how bodies are going
Speaker 2: to respond to space. And then in the closed loop
Speaker 2: ecology chapter, where you know, can you recycle the carbon
Speaker 2: dioxide that you breathe out in the water, and how
Speaker 2: do you get like a habitat that recycles stuff so
Speaker 2: that you don't need more stuff flown in from Earth,
Speaker 2: And we really don't know how to do that very well.
Speaker 2: And then we got into the international law and we
Speaker 2: were like, oh, my gosh, there's so much that isn't
Speaker 2: figured out here, and it could create tons of conflict
Speaker 2: if we start trying to settle now. And I could
Speaker 2: just go on and on and on. Every chapter that
Speaker 2: we thought, oh, we've probably figured this out, it turned
Speaker 2: out that there's a lot of work to do, and
Speaker 2: so we ended up, yeah, writing the book that we
Speaker 2: wrote instead.
Speaker 1: So you discovered that a lot of these things hadn't
Speaker 1: really been explored thoroughly, or viewed with a skeptical lens,
Speaker 1: or analyzed in detail. Essentially, it was all hidden under
Speaker 1: a bunch of pro space fluff. Is that the sense
Speaker 1: you got once you start digging into things?
Speaker 2: Yeah, all of that, All of that is true.
Speaker 1: So why is that, Zach? Why do you think nobody
Speaker 1: has written this sort of like skeptical are we really
Speaker 1: ready kind of book before? Why is it all sort
Speaker 1: of pro space gloss over the details?
Speaker 3: That's a good question, you know, I should say, first
Speaker 3: of all, as we got close to press a couple
Speaker 3: similar books not quite the same story coming out, I
Speaker 3: do think there's a kind of growing analytical approach to
Speaker 3: this problem. I will say, you know, it's hard to
Speaker 3: know other people's motivations. I think the generous assumption is
Speaker 3: that people don't tend to write pop technology books about
Speaker 3: a thing you're not going to get generally speaking, right,
Speaker 3: I was talking to a distinguished popular science author and
Speaker 3: I said, you know, I was talking to him about it,
Speaker 3: and you know, basically explained this whole thing that where
Speaker 3: we're basically going to say it's going to be, it's
Speaker 3: way harder than you expected, The timelines are much longer
Speaker 3: than you expected, and there are even arguments for not
Speaker 3: doing it outside of like extraordinary technological developments. He was like,
Speaker 3: you can't do that you can't have a book for nerds.
Speaker 3: That's like, sorry, nerds, you don't get the thing. And
Speaker 3: so you know, the upshot of that is, if you
Speaker 3: look as we did at the sort of corpus of
Speaker 3: future casting books about space written going back to the
Speaker 3: nineteen twenties, they tend to be about what problem space
Speaker 3: is going to solve? Right. They're not critical in that
Speaker 3: sense of saying, wait, maybe this problem is not worth
Speaker 3: solving in a sort of boring economic sense, the kind
Speaker 3: of analysis you would do if you were trying to
Speaker 3: say drill and oil well, right, And so when you
Speaker 3: don't have that voice in the room, there tend to
Speaker 3: be major things that just get skipped. So like, for us,
Speaker 3: a huge turning point which will sound like almost nothing
Speaker 3: when you first hear it, but then you start thinking
Speaker 3: about it, which is the surface of the Moon is
Speaker 3: carbon poor, like extremely carbon poor. There's almost no carbon, right,
Speaker 3: And so you have a nerd audience they know what
Speaker 3: that means that you literally cannot have life. You have
Speaker 3: to import carbon. Right. It's not like you need to
Speaker 3: like sprinkle a little phosphorus or something, right, you have
Speaker 3: to sprinkle the whole farm, Which is crazy when you
Speaker 3: think that these you know, like if you look at
Speaker 3: Saturn fives, like the biggest rocket ever built, it was
Speaker 3: able to put this eeny weeny little thing on the moon. Right,
Speaker 3: It's the idea that we're to scale up to where
Speaker 3: we're delivering mountains and mountains just to be able to
Speaker 3: grow apples or whatever is kind of crazy and so
Speaker 3: like whatever, it could be solved, quote unquote, But why
Speaker 3: isn't this the first thing in all these books about
Speaker 3: space settlement, right? Why aren't questions like this number one?
Speaker 3: Like these massive problems? And another huge one is radiation,
Speaker 3: which there's a book called The Case for Space, or
Speaker 3: is the Case from Mars. It's a huge book in
Speaker 3: this sector by Robert Zubrin. It has a section on radiation.
Speaker 3: It goes immediately as I recall into this idea of
Speaker 3: hormesis hermeisis meaning when you get some of something, it
Speaker 3: might actually be good, some of a little bad something
Speaker 3: might be good in some circumstances, which is like a
Speaker 3: bizarre response to the unknown results of massive doses of
Speaker 3: non earth like radiation. But I think this is what
Speaker 3: you would expect if most of the books are written
Speaker 3: by advocates. They just don't want to linger on those problems.
Speaker 1: You have this line in your book, which I thought
Speaker 1: was a great singer. You say, quote much of the
Speaker 1: discourse around why we should go to space and how
Speaker 1: society will work when we get there remains mired in
Speaker 1: un informed opinion and unrealistic fantasy. Ouch are you suggesting
Speaker 1: that we should have like a boring economist in every
Speaker 1: conversation to keep us like firmly rooted on the ground.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean there would be worse things. And I also,
Speaker 2: just to be clear, we are generally very nice to
Speaker 2: the space settlement community. We disagree, but we love them
Speaker 2: very much. These people are our friends, and we're sorry
Speaker 2: that we're wet blankets. But yes, the rhetoric could use
Speaker 2: a bit of Well.
Speaker 1: We're going to dig into all of your analysis of
Speaker 1: what it's like to live in space and where we
Speaker 1: could go, and what the real problems are in international
Speaker 1: law and cannibalism and sex in space, on all these
Speaker 1: really fun topics that you guys analyze. But before we do,
Speaker 1: I just have one more question, which is, what do
Speaker 1: you think the response is going to be from the
Speaker 1: pro space settlement community when you call them uninformed and
Speaker 1: unrealistic fantasizers about the future.
Speaker 2: Ah okay, So I'll say that Daniel Dowdney came before us.
Speaker 2: He wrote a book called Dark Skies, which is very
Speaker 2: anti space settlement, and he has been called anti human.
Speaker 2: And I watched a panel that was set up where
Speaker 2: he was like invited to sort of like watch, but
Speaker 2: they didn't ask him to suggest any names for people
Speaker 2: to go on the panel, so it was just people
Speaker 2: tearing apart his ideas for like two hours, and which
Speaker 2: I thought there were plenty of good counter arguments that
Speaker 2: weren't presented. But anyway, I am not super sure that
Speaker 2: the community is going to be real kind to us.
Speaker 2: But there's also plenty of people in that community who
Speaker 2: are open to discussion, and so I'm optimistic that we'll
Speaker 2: have lots of productive discussions with lots of people, but
Speaker 2: no doubt there will be a subset of people who
Speaker 2: are going to have really hate our guts.
Speaker 1: Well, I hope you guys don't have to go into
Speaker 1: hiding after this book. I think it's a good idea
Speaker 1: to explore this constructively, and that in your book you
Speaker 1: were balanced and fair and didn't just throw wet blankets
Speaker 1: on these ideas suggested like actual ways forward and raise
Speaker 1: the issues that we need to confront if we're going
Speaker 1: to make this happen. So I think it's a very
Speaker 1: positive and forward thinking book. But let's dig into the
Speaker 1: details in a minute after we take this short break. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back and we're talking about the future of humanity
Speaker 1: settling space. Should we can? We will we have the tech?
Speaker 1: When will we have the tech? Is it possible to
Speaker 1: live in space? With Zach and Kelly Windersmith, because they
Speaker 1: just wrote a book about it, called A City on Mars,
Speaker 1: which is out now from all excellent booksellers and also
Speaker 1: less reputable booksellers.
Speaker 2: Sorry, you can get it anywhere.
Speaker 1: All right, So let's talk about what it's like to
Speaker 1: live in space, because so far, almost every human who's
Speaker 1: ever existed has lived in a very narrow slice of
Speaker 1: the universe, very close to the surface of the Earth.
Speaker 1: So tell us about what we know about living in space.
Speaker 1: What is it like in terms of the environment for
Speaker 1: human survival? And let's start with radiation. What are we
Speaker 1: facing if you're going to live for an extended period
Speaker 1: not in the atmospheric bubble of Earth.
Speaker 2: Well, so this was one of the first eye opening
Speaker 2: research topics for me. So we started with space medicine,
Speaker 2: and I assumed, you know, okay, so the Soviets sent
Speaker 2: up a bunch of solutes, and then the Soviet Union
Speaker 2: slash rust Russia sent up Mirror, and then ISS has
Speaker 2: been up there for like twenty years, and China has
Speaker 2: now fielded three space stations in low Worth orbit, and so,
Speaker 2: you know, I assumed that we would have a bunch
Speaker 2: of data on how radiation impacts the human body, and
Speaker 2: we'd have good answers to questions like does space radiation
Speaker 2: cause cancer? And I should note that radiation in space,
Speaker 2: as your listeners no doubt already know, is different than
Speaker 2: the kind of radiation we tend to encounter on Earth,
Speaker 2: and so we understand it even less well. But something
Speaker 2: I should have realized but didn't occur to me until
Speaker 2: I was reading these textbooks on space medicine, is that
Speaker 2: all of our space stations have been orbiting the Earth
Speaker 2: under the protection of Earth's magnetosphere, and so most of
Speaker 2: space radiation is not reaching them. Maybe they have slightly
Speaker 2: elevated levels, but a person living on the International Space
Speaker 2: Station isn't necessarily giving us the data that we need
Speaker 2: to understand how a person living on the Moon or
Speaker 2: Mars is going to hold up under space radiation.
Speaker 1: So where does space radiation come from? I mean, they
Speaker 1: don't have like nuclear power plants melting down in the
Speaker 1: middle of space. Where is this coming from?
Speaker 2: It's coming from the Sun, and it's coming from well,
Speaker 2: I really feel like this is a question.
Speaker 1: For you then, right, So you're right, the Sun generates
Speaker 1: a huge amount of radiation, you know, protons and electrons,
Speaker 1: very high speed, the solar wind. People think about space
Speaker 1: as empty, but it's really filled with high speed particles.
Speaker 1: And as you say, the Earth is protecting us from that.
Speaker 1: It's atmosphere and its magnetic field shields us from a
Speaker 1: lot of that space radiation. So if you think about
Speaker 1: radiation like Fukushima style, is not a whole lot of that,
Speaker 1: but there's a huge amount of just solar wind, and
Speaker 1: we feel that already down here on Earth. You know,
Speaker 1: we get radiation from space that penetrates through the atmosphere
Speaker 1: and as you go higher and higher, you're more exposed
Speaker 1: to that radiation. So you know, one question I have
Speaker 1: for you is like, is it possible to learn more
Speaker 1: about this not just from astronauts on the space station,
Speaker 1: but from like flight attendants who spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time at higher altitude and are more exposed to that
Speaker 1: radiation from space.
Speaker 2: Well, so they're more exposed to that kind of radiation,
Speaker 2: but they are they also more exposed to like the
Speaker 2: galactic cosmic radiation like iron ions and stuff. Are those
Speaker 2: also hitting the planes in space?
Speaker 1: That's actually a really fascinating research question. We don't actually
Speaker 1: know what component of the radiation the cosmic rays that
Speaker 1: hit the Earth are, like iron nuclei versus just protons.
Speaker 1: None of that actually makes it down to the surface.
Speaker 1: They'll just slam into the atmosphere and then turn into
Speaker 1: muons and other particles. So there's definitely no iron nuclei
Speaker 1: like passing through the bodies of stewardesses and airplane passengers fortunately,
Speaker 1: And so I guess your argument is that out there
Speaker 1: in space, on the surface of Mars or on the Moon,
Speaker 1: you have like no protection, so you're like really feeling
Speaker 1: the brunt of raw space radiation itself.
Speaker 2: And you're never escaping it. And also your habitat can
Speaker 2: create different kinds of radiation, so when the radiation hits
Speaker 2: your habitat, something called spallation happens where the particles break
Speaker 2: into different kinds of particles that are also radioactive. And
Speaker 2: so what kind of habitat you're living in, the shape
Speaker 2: of the habitat, all this stuff is going to matter.
Speaker 2: But with stewardesses for examples, you know, let's say they
Speaker 2: are getting exposed to some of that radiation. You know,
Speaker 2: they're exposed to it for parts of their lives, so
Speaker 2: you know, they're working lives start at like what eighteen,
Speaker 2: but maybe even older, and they're only up there part
Speaker 2: of the time. And so we're talking about people who
Speaker 2: are going to be like born on a planet and
Speaker 2: exposed to radiation from the moment they're conceived, or you know,
Speaker 2: from maybe even the game meats in their parents were
Speaker 2: receiving radiation, and so that kind of accumulated dose over
Speaker 2: an entire lifespan, maybe it's not going to be a problem.
Speaker 2: Maybe we can design habitats that total keep the radiation out,
Speaker 2: or maybe like we read this one review paper from
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen that basically said, look, we don't even know
Speaker 2: if space radiation causes cancer, but it's probably best that
Speaker 2: we assume it could. And so like that's where we
Speaker 2: are right now, Like it probably causes cancer, but we
Speaker 2: don't even know. But I will note that most proposals
Speaker 2: for habitats on the Moon are Mars or even rotating
Speaker 2: space stations involve covering the habitat with meters of regalists.
Speaker 2: So that's the like dirt, dusty dirt that you find
Speaker 2: on the Moon and Mars. And the idea is that
Speaker 2: if you're under a couple meters of that, it's going
Speaker 2: to block the radiation before it gets to your habitat.
Speaker 2: So that glass dome that I wanted to wake up
Speaker 2: underneath and look at the Earth, you know, on my vacation,
Speaker 2: that's not going to happen. I would be baked with radiation.
Speaker 2: So yeah, there's a lot we don't know. And the
Speaker 2: answer might be either it's fine or it's fine with
Speaker 2: a little bit of engineering, but we don't have the
Speaker 2: kind of data that we need right now to really
Speaker 2: understand that. And there are so Brookhaven Laboratory now has
Speaker 2: a new device that can make galactic cosmic radiation or
Speaker 2: can mimic it, and so we're starting to be able
Speaker 2: to get some better data on rodents. But even then
Speaker 2: it's not like they're being exposed for their entire life
Speaker 2: to the entire range of radiation that they're going to
Speaker 2: get in space. So there's still a lot we have
Speaker 2: left to learn.
Speaker 1: So you're saying that the kind of habitats we're imagining
Speaker 1: long term life on Mars or the Moon or in
Speaker 1: a space station could end up like a horror movie
Speaker 1: where everybody gets like horrible cancer and your faces melt
Speaker 1: and all this kind of stuff that we just don't
Speaker 1: know the answer to whether it's even possible for humans
Speaker 1: to live in that scenario.
Speaker 2: So I think face melting is probably off the table,
Speaker 2: but maybe not. But well, I don't think that we
Speaker 2: have to, you know, start with babies and see what happens.
Speaker 2: Like I think we could go to the Moon and
Speaker 2: set up a research station, and the Moon is only
Speaker 2: a couple days away, so people could stay for a
Speaker 2: couple months, and if there was any indicator that they
Speaker 2: were having a problem, we could send them home, and
Speaker 2: then we could send a different habitat type and try again,
Speaker 2: and we could have rodent colonies out there. But it's
Speaker 2: going to be a slope process to make sure, you know, like, Okay,
Speaker 2: this amount of radiation is safe, and then that amount
Speaker 2: of radiation is safe, and it'll be a long time
Speaker 2: before you can convince me that it would be safe
Speaker 2: to conceive and have babies in space without too much
Speaker 2: extra risk. But somebody who read our book told us
Speaker 2: we were being whips about that.
Speaker 1: So and you're like, well, why don't you send your
Speaker 1: grandkids to the moon.
Speaker 2: Then they said they would because we did say that.
Speaker 2: We did say that, and they were like, I totally would,
Speaker 2: I'd do it. And I was like, wow, I'm glad
Speaker 2: I'm not you're a child.
Speaker 1: This is a great example for me. When reading your book,
Speaker 1: I was very surprised that we just don't know so
Speaker 1: much about what life will be like in space. Even
Speaker 1: things that seemed like they might not be a big
Speaker 1: deal could turn out to be a big deal because
Speaker 1: we just don't know because we have such a littlemited experience.
Speaker 1: I was really enjoying the section on micro gravity, for example, like,
Speaker 1: what's it like to live in very little gravity your
Speaker 1: whole life? I suppose we just don't know the answer
Speaker 1: to that as well.
Speaker 3: Basically, Yeah, So one thing a lot of people maybe
Speaker 3: don't know is that the record consecutive spaceflight was I
Speaker 3: think four hundred and thirty seven days, and down from
Speaker 3: that there's something like a dozen people who've been up
Speaker 3: for a year, and it's down from that. And I
Speaker 3: don't have it offhand, but I think if you looked
Speaker 3: it up, the majority of astronauts ever have been for
Speaker 3: like on a matter of weeks, like they went on
Speaker 3: on the shuttle or something. Right, So the amount of
Speaker 3: longitudinal data, like we literally could not have it. No
Speaker 3: one's gone up for a year and a half consecutively.
Speaker 3: If you look at people who've gone up, like the
Speaker 3: highest total is somewhere in the eight hundreds of days.
Speaker 3: So even then you're talking about a really short amount
Speaker 3: of time to get like good longitudinal data. Like Kelly said,
Speaker 3: we're not talking about face melting for radiation, right, We're
Speaker 3: talking about like long term effects. But we do know
Speaker 3: that to come back to microgravity in particular, there are
Speaker 3: reliable bad effects of microgravity. So when you go to space,
Speaker 3: one thing we ended up not talking too much about,
Speaker 3: even though it has a rich history, is a lot
Speaker 3: of people get motion sickness. It's something it's called space
Speaker 3: motion sickness, and they spend the first few days throwing up.
Speaker 3: But We didn't talk about it too much because it's
Speaker 3: not really a settlement problem. You do adjust to it.
Speaker 3: The problems that show up when you stay longer are
Speaker 3: things like rapid loss and bone density in some parts
Speaker 3: of your body you lose I think the number we
Speaker 3: had was one and a half percent bone density per month,
Speaker 3: like an insanely fast rate of bone loss. And that's,
Speaker 3: by the way, while astronauts are doing a huge amount
Speaker 3: of exercise every day, right, very time consuming exercise every
Speaker 3: single day, and there are other more subtle things obviously
Speaker 3: you know coming with that is that you have a
Speaker 3: lot of loss of muscle strength. Jerry Linninger was an astronaut.
Speaker 3: He was on Mirror for about four months, and it
Speaker 3: was a huge point of pride for him as a
Speaker 3: kind of like muscly, slightly meat headed astronaut that he
Speaker 3: was able to walk just barely when he got out
Speaker 3: of the space station. But there are other things that happened,
Speaker 3: so they're like Lininger described, when he got home to
Speaker 3: his hotel room, he kind of freaked out a little
Speaker 3: because in space, if you feel pressure on your back,
Speaker 3: it means you're going to fling forward because it's it's
Speaker 3: very Newtonian up there, right, So when he got down
Speaker 3: in bed, he felt like he was going to go flying.
Speaker 3: So he said he could only sleep once he had
Speaker 3: kind of wrapped himself up in a blanket.
Speaker 1: You you need to be swaddled like a baby.
Speaker 3: I think it was more like tied down, but I
Speaker 3: actually don't know. I don't remember what you do with
Speaker 3: the blanket in particular. And then there are these more
Speaker 3: subtle effects. Right, People often get dizzy, right because your
Speaker 3: body on Earth is used to pumping blood against gravity
Speaker 3: all day long, and in space there's no orientation. So
Speaker 3: when you suddenly return to full Earth gravity, your body
Speaker 3: is just not prepared to do this. I mean, it's
Speaker 3: kind of amazing to me that your body does eventually
Speaker 3: work it out. You don't just like die. And there
Speaker 3: are other subtle things. Reliably, people lose vision, so they
Speaker 3: actually for especially for older astronauts, you have to be said,
Speaker 3: with these glasses that are adjusted, because it's anticipated your
Speaker 3: vision will get worse, and it's not perfectly understood why.
Speaker 3: But one possibility is that microgravity you experience this fluid shift.
Speaker 3: Fluid shifts up in your body, especially the beginning. You
Speaker 3: notably have what's called puffy face and chicken legs, as
Speaker 3: one person described it, which is like kind of funny
Speaker 3: but also kind of bad, maybe because it's possible what's
Speaker 3: happening is it's causing nerve damage or reshaping of the
Speaker 3: nerves that connect your eyes or something, which is like
Speaker 3: bad enough, but it's also a little creepy because you worry.
Speaker 3: There's like, you know, there's apparently equivocal evidence on cognitive
Speaker 3: effects of space. We don't know if that's because of microgravity,
Speaker 3: your radiation, or just who knows what. So, yeah, there's
Speaker 3: a lot of stuff you wouldn't anticipate. In the particular
Speaker 3: context of babies, it gets like extra freaky. I'm willing
Speaker 3: to buy that a baby in ingestation is at least
Speaker 3: in kind of a neutral buoyancy tank. But you know,
Speaker 3: you try to imagine like a six month old trying
Speaker 3: to have normal bone development and microgravity that would be
Speaker 3: enormously scary. It's possible on the Moon, which is about
Speaker 3: one six ers gravity, it wouldn't be so bad. But like,
Speaker 3: to add more more data to this, we have I
Speaker 3: think something like a grand total of ten days on
Speaker 3: the Moon between all of the missions. You know, and
Speaker 3: so like we really don't know, and that was of
Speaker 3: course all full grown, like particularly fit men, and so
Speaker 3: there are other things. But yeah, micro gravity is a
Speaker 3: big open question and would take a long time to
Speaker 3: get better data on it.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to push back on your denial of
Speaker 1: my face melting concern, because you're talking about like lower
Speaker 1: bone density, weakened muscles, puppy eyes. To me, that sounds
Speaker 1: like you know, that could lead to real face melting.
Speaker 3: We could term the sweet of negative effects face melting.
Speaker 3: What will call the whites and face melting.
Speaker 1: Okay, there you go. But my real question is that
Speaker 1: it seems like it might be hard to go to space,
Speaker 1: have your body adapt to it, and then come back
Speaker 1: to Earth. But what if you just do a in
Speaker 1: a one way trip. Isn't it possible that kids who
Speaker 1: grow up in space are totally adapted and can live
Speaker 1: totally healthy lives in space with low bone density and
Speaker 1: super long chicken legs or whatever. Is this about going
Speaker 1: to space and coming back or is this about just
Speaker 1: surviving in space?
Speaker 2: I think it's about both. So you know, Mars has
Speaker 2: forty percent of Earth's gravity. Maybe that will be enough
Speaker 2: for normal development, Maybe not. So it's the same as radiation.
Speaker 2: Maybe it'll be fine, maybe not. But you know, especially initially,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of stuff we're going to be figuring
Speaker 2: out about Mars, like, you know, how can we live
Speaker 2: up there sustainably? Can we create an economy, how do
Speaker 2: we you know, create a society that has some freedom
Speaker 2: and likes being up there. And you know, it's a
Speaker 2: very delicate habitat. So if you have people who are
Speaker 2: you know, angry or become terrorists, they could very easily
Speaker 2: kill almost everybody. And so for a variety of different reasons,
Speaker 2: you would like to be able to have the option
Speaker 2: to bring people home, especially initially when this whole experiment
Speaker 2: is starting. So if it turns out you have you know,
Speaker 2: one hundred babies in the first generation at the settlement
Speaker 2: and they decide, you know what, this isn't economically feasible.
Speaker 2: We just can't make any money out here. We can't
Speaker 2: pay to get the supplies shipped in that we need
Speaker 2: from Earth because it's super expensive. What do you do
Speaker 2: with those babies who are now stuck out there? And
Speaker 2: so you know, yes, maybe a couple generations from now,
Speaker 2: when we're like safely settled on Mars and it's sustainable,
Speaker 2: and we know that, you know, we're going to be
Speaker 2: able to stay out there permanently. Maybe it's not such
Speaker 2: a big deal if they can't come back to the
Speaker 2: cradle of humanity. But I can still imagine that being depressing.
Speaker 2: I think Earth will always be I mean, Earth is beautiful.
Speaker 2: I'd want to be able to visit.
Speaker 1: And it might be that babies who are raised on
Speaker 1: Mars have their faces melted. But maybe on Mars that's
Speaker 1: seen as really attractive. But then they can't really adjust
Speaker 1: back to life on Earth because you know, we're not
Speaker 1: that into it. But speaking of that kind of topic,
Speaker 1: self sustaining colonies, is it possible? Do we know if
Speaker 1: it's even possible for humans to reproduce in space, Like
Speaker 1: you know, the mechanics and the chemistry of it doesn't
Speaker 1: all work in microgravity under high radiation. Do we know
Speaker 1: anything about that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the basic deal is we know almost nothing.
Speaker 3: So one thing it's really important to understand about the
Speaker 3: history of space science is that space stations are not fielded.
Speaker 3: Because you know, the NSF sat down one day and said,
Speaker 3: we're going to do a systematic program on space medicine.
Speaker 3: They're fielded for geopolitical reasons, and then science gets done
Speaker 3: in them, right. And so one result of that is
Speaker 3: that you really don't have a lot of systematic data
Speaker 3: on hardly anything. I think you can you can absolutely
Speaker 3: trust objective readings on things like bone density that seems
Speaker 3: like hard to mess up or fake. But when it
Speaker 3: comes to reproduction, you know, if someone had said, you know,
Speaker 3: when the first space station went up in nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 3: suppose the Soviet Union had said, one of our major
Speaker 3: goals is human reproduction in space. We're going to really
Speaker 3: oriented around. You can imagine a world where they started
Speaker 3: with I don't know, lizards or something and just sort
Speaker 3: of worked their way up to more human like creatures
Speaker 3: and not just having babies, but having generations in space,
Speaker 3: and so that by now we would have this big
Speaker 3: corpus of data on reliable effects on going to space
Speaker 3: and microgravity on every stage of development. Right. And by
Speaker 3: the way, you know, we usually often when this comes up,
Speaker 3: to the extent it comes up at all, we talked
Speaker 3: just about can you have a baby, But of course,
Speaker 3: in order to have a sustaining settlement, that baby has
Speaker 3: to be able to grow up to have babies, and
Speaker 3: so that means they have to get through every stage
Speaker 3: of development successfully as do their gam metes. Right, So
Speaker 3: you know, we don't have that data. What we do
Speaker 3: have is a pile of different experiments from you know,
Speaker 3: different agencies, done on different stations for different amounts of time,
Speaker 3: on different creatures, and it's very hard to look at
Speaker 3: all this and resolve a picture other than a big shrug.
Speaker 3: I will say there have been cases where bad stuff happened,
Speaker 3: but it's literally a situation where you're talking like, we
Speaker 3: have data from a rat and it didn't go well
Speaker 3: for that rat, and it's sort of like, what can
Speaker 3: you extrapolate from this meaningfully? So I would say, you know,
Speaker 3: you're kind of in the position of saying, well, at
Speaker 3: least a priori, there seem to be a lot of
Speaker 3: reasons to be really really scared, a lot of reasons
Speaker 3: to say I wouldn't want anyone having a baby in space.
Speaker 3: So you know, we talked about bone loss stuff. We
Speaker 3: don't know what that does to developing kids, babies, let
Speaker 3: alone like teenagers. The atmosphere in space is really not
Speaker 3: like Earth's because it's actually very hard, at least on
Speaker 3: the iss to reproduce an Earth like atmosphere. So it's
Speaker 3: very high in carbon for example, very high in carbonoxity,
Speaker 3: much higher than anywhere on Earth. And there are probably
Speaker 3: also like subtle outgassings from different pieces of equipment. We
Speaker 3: tolerate higher levels of this stuff because people aren't there
Speaker 3: that long, but we don't know what the effect is,
Speaker 3: you know, to just depend on what kind of artificial
Speaker 3: atmosphere you're able to create. You know another thing you
Speaker 3: mentioned a second ago that you know, maybe in Mars
Speaker 3: gravity people will be taller, and that's like a sci
Speaker 3: fi thing, but actually we don't. You know, the bodies
Speaker 3: are weird, right, They're made of all these tiny nanim
Speaker 3: machines that have evolved over four billion years. It's possible
Speaker 3: the response will be something totally unexpected to being in
Speaker 3: that micro gravity environment, or nothing at all, and we
Speaker 3: just don't know.
Speaker 1: Face melting, for example.
Speaker 3: I'm up to giving it a sixty percent chance.
Speaker 1: All right, Zach, But this is a very highbrow answer.
Speaker 1: I was asking a much more lowbrow question, which is
Speaker 1: essentially like, do we have any data? Has anybody done it?
Speaker 1: In space?
Speaker 3: Nobody has. Well, there's a family dispute about this, I
Speaker 3: should say, let me sketch the parameters of the dispute,
Speaker 3: and then Kelly can say something wrong. So the thing
Speaker 3: we absolutely agree on is nobody knows. It's not like
Speaker 3: there is someone with you know, pictures you can look
Speaker 3: upon the Internet. And then the question is like probabilities,
Speaker 3: and I would rate the probability as quite low, and
Speaker 3: I'm happy to explain that. But let me just say
Speaker 3: it's quite low, whereas Kelly thinks the odds or at
Speaker 3: least I don't know where we are. I'm at like
Speaker 3: one to five percent that it's happened.
Speaker 2: I don't know what percent I'm at, but I don't
Speaker 2: know a coward's answer. See, okay, fifty to sixty percent.
Speaker 1: Wow, who are we talking about here?
Speaker 2: There has been I'm a husband and wife pair. So
Speaker 2: they got married on the sly, didn't tell NASA, and
Speaker 2: then they went up on the shuttle. Zach argues that
Speaker 2: they're in a like tiny area, like you know, they've
Speaker 2: got about as much space as you would in a bus,
Speaker 2: and there's like six other people on the crew. It's
Speaker 2: not like there's a lot of options for them to
Speaker 2: sneak off and not be seen and not be caught
Speaker 2: by the cameras and blah blah blah. But I gotta say, man,
Speaker 2: if I was on a crew and there was a
Speaker 2: married couple, I would be like, I just want you
Speaker 2: to know that I'm going to be on the upper
Speaker 2: deck for about You would make it so I would
Speaker 2: make it so awkward. But they keep.
Speaker 3: Coming up to them and being like, I'm just gonna
Speaker 3: tell you that door closes. I'm not saying anything.
Speaker 2: Anyway, And you know there have been opportunities, but you know,
Speaker 2: I think Zach would would argue, and you know, of
Speaker 2: course you don't have to be married to have sex.
Speaker 2: Zach would argue that there's a lot like it's cramp spaces,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of people there, there's a lot of
Speaker 2: surveillance equipment. It would be hard to get any privacy.
Speaker 2: And also, these people are super concerned about their careers
Speaker 2: and if they get caught doing something like that in space,
Speaker 2: they're not going to get sent up again. And so
Speaker 2: these like highly career oriented people might not be willing
Speaker 2: to risk their jobs. But you know, I'd say, I
Speaker 2: went to grad school to study animal behavior, and it
Speaker 2: would blow my mind to find out that no one
Speaker 2: has taken advantage of, you know, being able to have
Speaker 2: sex in space.
Speaker 1: Well, it seemed to me like an important science frontier.
Speaker 1: I mean, somebody's got to figure this out for the
Speaker 1: future of humanity, right, I mean, if we are going
Speaker 1: to ever live in space, then that's going to be
Speaker 1: a necessary part of activity out there in space. All right,
Speaker 1: So I want to dig more into these questions about
Speaker 1: what life would actually be like in space, what it's
Speaker 1: like to go to the bathroom where we might actually live,
Speaker 1: is it legal? And can you eat people in space?
Speaker 1: But first we have to take another quick break. Okay.
Speaker 1: So we are back and we're talking about the nitty
Speaker 1: gritty of living in space. A lot of people think
Speaker 1: of space as a fantasya land where everything can come true,
Speaker 1: where life in space solves all the problems of life
Speaker 1: on Earth. But Zach and Kelly are here to tell
Speaker 1: us that it's messy and gouey, and that your face
Speaker 1: might or might not melt. Nobody knows.
Speaker 2: Okay, sure, so tell us.
Speaker 1: More about what life might be like in space. You
Speaker 1: guys really dug into the details. I was amazed you
Speaker 1: had such a careful analysis of like toilets tell us
Speaker 1: about what it's like to use the toilet in space.
Speaker 2: So when you read biographies or you hear interviews with astronauts,
Speaker 2: the question that they tell you that they get asked
Speaker 2: the most is what is it like using the restroom
Speaker 2: in space? So it is apparently a very deeply human
Speaker 2: thing to want to know what it is like to
Speaker 2: use the restroom in microgravity. And one thing we can
Speaker 2: tell you across all of the different vehicles that we
Speaker 2: studied is that it has never been pleasant. So like
Speaker 2: on the Apollo and the Gemini missions, they literally, you know,
Speaker 2: for number two, they had a bag that they would
Speaker 2: attach to their heiin knees and it had a little
Speaker 2: like adhesive rim so it would stick a little bit better.
Speaker 2: And then it had a little thing where you a
Speaker 2: little finger cut they called it, so you could stick
Speaker 2: your finger in there, because without gravity, nothing falls on
Speaker 2: its own, so you'd have to nudge it in the
Speaker 2: right direction. Yeah, so gross. And then they'd have to
Speaker 2: put antibacterial tablets in there and sort of squish them
Speaker 2: around to make sure that like, you know, the bag
Speaker 2: the feces was being held in wouldn't explode in a
Speaker 2: horrible scent, would like go everywhere. In fact, Frank Borman
Speaker 2: was so uncomfortable with the procedure, which also had to
Speaker 2: happen in a super tiny space with the guy who
Speaker 2: you were in space with, like literally almost right next
Speaker 2: to you, that he tried to make it for a
Speaker 2: full fourteen days without going number two, and I think
Speaker 2: he made it today eight and then he said a
Speaker 2: gym level, I gotta go, man, And so anyway, it
Speaker 2: was pretty gross. So now instead of fingercuts and baggies
Speaker 2: with adhesives, we have vacuum systems and you usually have
Speaker 2: one for urine and one for feces, but even then
Speaker 2: you lose stuff. So like again, every vehicle that we
Speaker 2: read about, there were stories about escapees sort of floating
Speaker 2: off into the habitat on the shuttle. This happened so
Speaker 2: frequently they became called brown trout floating around. And you know,
Speaker 2: these systems break regularly and need to be fixed and
Speaker 2: are pretty disgusting. I think Patty Whitson had a story
Speaker 2: about needing to put a glove on and sort of
Speaker 2: push the waist down to make you know, room to
Speaker 2: get it all in the bag. So it's disgusting and
Speaker 2: we haven't figured it all out yet. So on the
Speaker 2: one of the recent SpaceX missions there was problem with
Speaker 2: the toilet as well. This is one of the ones
Speaker 2: where it was a bunch of tourists going around inspiration
Speaker 2: for something like that. It was reported that there were
Speaker 2: toilet problems. This is just a hard thing to deal with,
Speaker 2: but it should get easier when you have some gravity
Speaker 2: to sort of nudge the brown trout downstream. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's probably going to remain sort of a messy process
Speaker 2: wherever we are in space.
Speaker 1: But is this like a frontier issue where the first
Speaker 1: generation has sort of a harder life than you know,
Speaker 1: the wealthy folks back at home, and then eventually things
Speaker 1: build up and life on Mars is a comfortable, pleasant
Speaker 1: bathroom experience or is this something that's always going to
Speaker 1: be a feature of living out of the well of
Speaker 1: the Earth.
Speaker 2: I think the first generation is going to have to
Speaker 2: spend quite a bit of time interacting intimately with human
Speaker 2: waste of all forms, because we're going to need to
Speaker 2: learn to recycle that. So Zach mentioned already that there's
Speaker 2: very little carbon on the Moon, So the carbon that
Speaker 2: your body releases, you're probably going to want to find
Speaker 2: some way to recycle that back into your garden and
Speaker 2: maybe eventually will sort of perfect this process. And you know,
Speaker 2: nowadays waste gets treated and most of us don't have
Speaker 2: to see or experience it like at all. But I
Speaker 2: think initially you're probably going to be pretty intimate with
Speaker 2: your wasste until we figure out nice or systems for
Speaker 2: handling this stuff. Was there anything you wanted to add
Speaker 2: to that, Zach.
Speaker 3: I would just say to directly answer the question, like
Speaker 3: the wacky like poop stories are all from micro gravity.
Speaker 3: I think plausibly on Mars, your waist knows to go
Speaker 3: in the right direction. That's all you need, you know,
Speaker 3: like like so it'll go a little more slowly. But
Speaker 3: I would actually bet you'd be fine with like one
Speaker 3: percent gravity. You really just need you need your poop
Speaker 3: to know which way to go. And the vacuum is
Speaker 3: just an imperfect way to do that because you have
Speaker 3: to have like a part of the machine that is,
Speaker 3: you know, providing that vacuum which you don't want the
Speaker 3: poop to go into. Uh So, like for solid waste,
Speaker 3: you have to have a net. And so you can
Speaker 3: imagine like what complexity that adds to like waste management.
Speaker 3: You have to like bag it and and stew it
Speaker 3: and so. But probably I would guess on a plausible
Speaker 3: Mars setup, where you've got some kind of gardening and
Speaker 3: waste management set up, probably it's not as big a deal.
Speaker 3: The bigger problem will just be that, like you know,
Speaker 3: on Earth, of your toilet breaks down, you can just
Speaker 3: go outside, whereas on Mars it better work.
Speaker 2: I think that's less of an option in the city.
Speaker 2: But in the country where we live.
Speaker 3: I've seen some stuff in San Francisco, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Urban decay. Well, let's get a little bit more concrete
Speaker 1: about what we're talking about. You know, are we talking
Speaker 1: about living in space stations or the moon. Let's walk
Speaker 1: through the sort of the pros and cons of each scenario.
Speaker 1: Should we aim to be building our own habitats that
Speaker 1: float in space, like in space stations huge rotating rings?
Speaker 1: Are those plausible?
Speaker 3: So, just to give a little context, the idea of
Speaker 3: giant rotating space stations has been kicked around in detail
Speaker 3: at least since the nineteen twenties, but it really became
Speaker 3: a big thing in the seventies. So have you've ever
Speaker 3: seen these images of a city around the rim of
Speaker 3: a giant wheel that like like the most awesome space
Speaker 3: station images, there could be those ten to descend from
Speaker 3: the nineteen seventies. And the reason they were arguably plausible,
Speaker 3: we say, is that if you look at the seventies
Speaker 3: in particular, the price of going to space has fallen
Speaker 3: drastically by some measures, fallen by something like ninety nine
Speaker 3: percent since the late fifties, from like roughly nineteen fifty
Speaker 3: seven to nineteen seventy two. So if you plot that
Speaker 3: as continuing, it's going to get a lot cheaper. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: there are these huge concerns about environmental damage. So there
Speaker 3: are books like The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth,
Speaker 3: which are predicting I think the population Bomb, like the
Speaker 3: by the eighties, hundreds of millions of people will be
Speaker 3: dying of famine. Obviously we know now they failed to
Speaker 3: anticipate a bunch of things, But put that in your
Speaker 3: head as you think about this. And then third, that
Speaker 3: there are no serious renewables on the horizon, right, I mean,
Speaker 3: there's hydro power, but not enough to offset things, and
Speaker 3: that nuclear is starting to look like a political problem.
Speaker 3: And so there's this idea that gets floated, most notably
Speaker 3: by Gerard K. O'Neill that, well, what if we just
Speaker 3: went to space, we will kind of solve everything. You
Speaker 3: get access to limitless solar power all the time at
Speaker 3: high intensity. You could do all your farming up there.
Speaker 3: You can completely control the ecosystem. We can beam excess
Speaker 3: power down to the energy needing Earth. And so it's
Speaker 3: a sort of third way if you don't like these
Speaker 3: sort of environmental doomers, but you're also seriously worried about
Speaker 3: this stuff. Space is the way out with the ad bonus,
Speaker 3: since again it's the like early seventies that you can
Speaker 3: kind of check out of society and try out new governments,
Speaker 3: you know, so it also appeals to sort of counterculture impulse.
Speaker 3: The problem is it's basically just a bad idea. Like so,
Speaker 3: a big problem about building these things is you have
Speaker 3: to get an extraordinary amount of mass, probably millions of tons,
Speaker 3: into a point in space somewhere, just to have a
Speaker 3: relatively small number of people. And so you say, well,
Speaker 3: where's that coming from, the usual answer, I think O'Neil's
Speaker 3: answer was the moon. Other people have proposed asteroids. So
Speaker 3: let's take the moon the way that you do this,
Speaker 3: and there are a number of proposals that say this
Speaker 3: is you build a mass driver on the Moon and
Speaker 3: for your less you know, dorky audience. It's basically a
Speaker 3: train if you want to visualize it, like a maglev
Speaker 3: train that points up and eventually the track just goes away,
Speaker 3: and so you can fling stuff of it just using energy.
Speaker 3: You can fling into space because the Moon is low
Speaker 3: gravity and has no atmosphere, and then your space station
Speaker 3: construction site catches this stuff into kind of giant catchers
Speaker 3: mitt and takes just sort of like pure mass, just
Speaker 3: stuff from the surface of the Moon and converts it
Speaker 3: to suburbs around a giant space wheel. And so that
Speaker 3: the idea that this is going to be easier than
Speaker 3: just staying on the Moon or even going to Mars
Speaker 3: is just kind of crazy.
Speaker 1: It does seem crazy to take the Moon apart and
Speaker 1: then reassemble something which is just basically doing the job
Speaker 1: the Moon is already doing.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, So to say why smart people believe this,
Speaker 3: I do think, you know, part of it's that beguiling
Speaker 3: promise of the limitless energy. There's also, like, you know,
Speaker 3: suppose it is the case that you can't have babies
Speaker 3: on Mars, like that forty percent gravity just won't do
Speaker 3: it. It causes some weird metabolic thing. Who knows, well, then
Speaker 3: you need full gravity, and then if you really need
Speaker 3: to get off Earth, you have no option in the
Speaker 3: Solar system, so you have to build these space wheels.
Speaker 3: There are other purported benefits like that you could manufacture,
Speaker 3: so for people who don't remember high school physics, as
Speaker 3: you walk up the axis, like if you walk a
Speaker 3: stairwell from the outermost floor of your spinning wheel to
Speaker 3: the middle, gravity falls off linearly, so you can select
Speaker 3: between zero and full Earth gravity or even extra Earth gravity.
Speaker 3: So there's these ideas that it would be like a
Speaker 3: manufacturing thing, but like the idea that would be economic
Speaker 3: plausible just seems sort of any to us. And so
Speaker 3: it's like an extra hard version of a thing we
Speaker 3: already can't do. So it just seems unlikely.
Speaker 1: So then what about colonies on the moon? The Moon
Speaker 1: has access to a lot of sunlight and there's lots
Speaker 1: of raw materials there. What's the issue with living on
Speaker 1: the moon. Where on the moon is a good place
Speaker 1: to build your space home?
Speaker 2: So the moon has very small patches that are probably
Speaker 2: what countries are going to fight over when we start
Speaker 2: heading out to the moon. So on the poles you
Speaker 2: get areas where you have these craters, and inside of
Speaker 2: the crater there's water that's frozen, and it stays frozen
Speaker 2: because it never gets exposed to sunlight. If it did
Speaker 2: get exposed to sunlight, it would you know, vaporize and
Speaker 2: end up in the vacuum of space, never to be
Speaker 2: recovered by us again. But it's frozen, so it stays there.
Speaker 2: And additionally, those rims, if you put solar panels on them,
Speaker 2: you could get sunlight almost all the time, Whereas if
Speaker 2: you're at the equator, you get two earth weeks of
Speaker 2: daylight and then you get two earth weeks of nighttime,
Speaker 2: and you would need an incredible number of battery packs
Speaker 2: to be able to store enough solar power to get
Speaker 2: you through that. But if you're at these areas where
Speaker 2: you can put your solar panels up and almost always
Speaker 2: get sunlight, then a lot of your energy needs have
Speaker 2: been reduced. And so these are probably the spots where
Speaker 2: you'd want to be, where you can get water and
Speaker 2: where you can get some sunlight. But I'll note that
Speaker 2: that water still has some like chemicals and stuff you
Speaker 2: can't drink in there, and it's going to be very
Speaker 2: hard to extract because at the temperatures you find in
Speaker 2: these craters, water is more like a rock than anything else.
Speaker 2: So it's going to be difficult to get your hands on.
Speaker 2: You're gonna have to clean it up, and then you're
Speaker 2: gonna have to recycle it very efficiently because there's not
Speaker 2: a lot in there. So what was the lake that
Speaker 2: we looked up, Zach Sartus Lake.
Speaker 3: Sardis Lake, I think, was it Alabama or Minister.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's this human made lake called Sartus Lake
Speaker 2: that has the same amount of water as what we
Speaker 2: predict is on all of the Moon. And so you
Speaker 2: can imagine pretty quickly if you don't use that carefully,
Speaker 2: running out of it, and so you're going to need
Speaker 2: to recycle it. And this is why we think proposals
Speaker 2: for setting the Moon up as a gas station are,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of robbing the future. So if you
Speaker 2: take the water and you split it and you use
Speaker 2: the oxygen and the hydrogen for rocket fuel, you can't
Speaker 2: bathe with it or drink it anymore. It gets lost
Speaker 2: in the vacuum of space, and there's not that much
Speaker 2: there to begin with. So anyway, those are the places
Speaker 2: on the Moon that you'd probably go to. There's not
Speaker 2: a lot of them, but the moon remains awful, you know,
Speaker 2: even at the poles. The temperatures aren't ideal. But perhaps
Speaker 2: even more importantly, there's regolith everywhere. And the regolith is
Speaker 2: like this thick layer of super jagged dust and glass
Speaker 2: that clings to everything. It's electrically charged. It clings and
Speaker 2: if you breathe it, we think it's possible that it
Speaker 2: could scar your lungs over time and create something similar
Speaker 2: to stone grinder's disease on Earth. So you're gonna have
Speaker 2: to go to great lengths to make sure it doesn't
Speaker 2: get in your habitat, which again is going to be
Speaker 2: really hard because it clings to everything.
Speaker 1: And that sounds like lung melting, which sounds pretty bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So your face is gonna melt and your
Speaker 2: lungs are gonna melt.
Speaker 1: So most of the Moon is totally inhospitable, and a
Speaker 1: tiny fraction of it is somewhat less inhospitable.
Speaker 2: There's also the caves and the tubes on the Moon,
Speaker 2: which I'm gonna let Zach tell you about because he
Speaker 2: really geeks out about these.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, sure, so, like you know, again at the
Speaker 3: intersection of still a bad idea, but it's super awesome.
Speaker 3: The Moon has lava tubes. It's not really very seismically
Speaker 3: active anymore, but it was in the past, and so
Speaker 3: people of Earth may know that. If you go to Hawaii,
Speaker 3: you can see lava tubes, these huge underground caves that
Speaker 3: are like sort of cylindrical, and we talk about the
Speaker 3: process by which these are made, but very loosely speaking,
Speaker 3: you can imagine lava pushes through forms this sort of
Speaker 3: vein shape and then goes on its way and leaves
Speaker 3: behind this giant cave. Now you can imagine if that
Speaker 3: process occurs somewhere where there's only one six as much gravity,
Speaker 3: you get a much bigger cave. And there are some
Speaker 3: estimates that you could have lava tubes on the Moon
Speaker 3: that are hundreds of times larger than anything on Earth. Right, So,
Speaker 3: if you're going to pick a sort of dream mission
Speaker 3: for pure awesomeness, sending a little speedlunker bot to one
Speaker 3: of these caves to just look is probably about as
Speaker 3: cool as you can get. And it just happens to
Speaker 3: be on our closest neighbor in space, and these are
Speaker 3: desirable potentially for a space settlement because one of the
Speaker 3: deep problems of space settlement is essentially you have to
Speaker 3: create a little bubble that is protected from everything around you.
Speaker 3: If there's a pre existing tube, you're not completely predicted.
Speaker 3: But one of the ideas is you could go in
Speaker 3: there with some kind of spray on ceilant, right or inflatable,
Speaker 3: and just press it against those walls. And the cool
Speaker 3: thing about that is you've created a really big bubble.
Speaker 3: You might be talking about like literally thousands tens. I
Speaker 3: didn't have to look at the numbers, but many words
Speaker 3: of magnitude more than like a habitat that is built,
Speaker 3: and once you seal it, you can just build in there, right,
Speaker 3: you can just build a house. It doesn't have to
Speaker 3: be designed for space other than in case of danger.
Speaker 3: So those are potentially extraordinarily valuable. Yeah.
Speaker 2: It also saves you from needing to deal with the
Speaker 2: regolith because you're inside of a lava tube where that
Speaker 2: has all been sort of like turned into a crust
Speaker 2: by the lava, and it saves you from temperature swings.
Speaker 2: It's just there's lots of reasons why it would be great,
Speaker 2: but we're not good at moonwalking. Moon's plunking is another level.
Speaker 1: All of the views from underground are not quite as
Speaker 1: spectacular as you were suggesting earlier. Kelly.
Speaker 2: Well, but you're gonna be covered by dirt anyway, right,
Speaker 2: and so you know you might as well let the
Speaker 2: tube protect you from radiation as opposed to needing to
Speaker 2: pile regolith bags on top of your habitat.
Speaker 1: And then what about Mars? In your book, you say
Speaker 1: the only way you would believe that Mars would be
Speaker 1: a good idea would be quote if you had no idea,
Speaker 1: how thoroughly, incredibly, impossibly horrible Mars is. Why is Mars
Speaker 1: it such a horrible place to live?
Speaker 3: I should say Mars is? We do argue that it's
Speaker 3: the least bad option. While being the least bad option,
Speaker 3: it is a bad option. And so just to kind
Speaker 3: of go down the line quickly, can I just say
Speaker 3: the good stuff about Mars and then ruin it? So
Speaker 3: the biggest virtue of Mars is that you know, the moon,
Speaker 3: like we said, is pouring carbon, and Mars basically has
Speaker 3: all the stuff you'd need. You know, if you've imagined
Speaker 3: advanced civilization that can just perfectly move around elements however
Speaker 3: they like because they have infinite energy and science and whatever.
Speaker 3: The moon has all the stuff, right, and in addition,
Speaker 3: it has an atmosphere. It's not much of an atmosphere,
Speaker 3: it's about half a percent to a percent of Earth,
Speaker 3: is very low pressure. But that atmosphere is made of
Speaker 3: carbon dioxide. Right, So there's your carbon and oxygen. Humans
Speaker 3: just can't get enough of it. We love it, so
Speaker 3: that's pretty huge. The downsides are one, it's really far away, right,
Speaker 3: A typical proposal is six months inbound. The only way
Speaker 3: to really fix that is to have something more exotic,
Speaker 3: like a fission or fusion reactor. And even if you
Speaker 3: had that, you might still take the slow trip to concern,
Speaker 3: you know, to just you know, bring more stuff. But anyway,
Speaker 3: so it's far away, which which means at the longest length,
Speaker 3: it takes something like twenty minutes to send a signal
Speaker 3: each way, so forget live communication. I think the closest
Speaker 3: it's something like three minutes, So it's still pretty bad.
Speaker 3: So no live conversations with your loved ones ever. Again. Also,
Speaker 3: you know, the surface is still really nasty and unlike
Speaker 3: the Moon. It also has perchlorates, which are a hormone
Speaker 3: disrupting chemical, So you know, circling back to questions about reproduction,
Speaker 3: that would be interesting to find out what happens to
Speaker 3: like a teenager swimming in hormone disruptors. So that's bad.
Speaker 3: So one good thing is you have almost Earth like days.
Speaker 3: I think it's like twenty four point seven hours, so
Speaker 3: you do get sunlight. It's substantially dimmer than the sunlight
Speaker 3: of Earth. But the bigger problem from an energy standpoint
Speaker 3: is Mars has giant dust storms. Sometimes these dust storms
Speaker 3: are so big. There's a story that one of the
Speaker 3: Mariner probes is going toward Mars and suddenly Mars looks
Speaker 3: like a flat surface and it turns out what had
Speaker 3: happened is there was a worldwide dust storm. So you
Speaker 3: try to imagine what that's like on the surface. Is
Speaker 3: just like the sky is like biblical, right, like no
Speaker 3: more sky for you, So forget your solar panels. You
Speaker 3: better have really good batteries or a nuclear reactor or
Speaker 3: something more exotic. And so you know, those are some
Speaker 3: of the problems. There's also the stuff we've discussed before,
Speaker 3: like microgravity and extra radiation, but you know, it is
Speaker 3: the best game in town. Everywhere is not just worse,
Speaker 3: but like wildly worse. So it is extraordinarily dangerous and bad,
Speaker 3: and there's not an obvious economic payoff, but everywhere else
Speaker 3: is worse.
Speaker 2: And Mars has a lot of water, and so that yeah,
Speaker 2: that's also good.
Speaker 3: Oh I'm sorry, yes, yes, yeah, yeah. So crucially, you know,
Speaker 3: the Moon has very little water. This is important to
Speaker 3: us because you read articles sometimes that are like, what
Speaker 3: are we gonna do with all the moonwater? Like it's
Speaker 3: like a resource in a video game, you just have
Speaker 3: all you want. But Mars actually does have plenty of water,
Speaker 3: the poles of tons of water ice, and actually in
Speaker 3: most places on Mars it looks like if you dig
Speaker 3: down far enough there there's water in some form. So
Speaker 3: like when you put that all together, it's not just
Speaker 3: that you can drink and breathe. Like if you have carbon,
Speaker 3: hydrogen and oxygen, at least in principle, you can make
Speaker 3: a lot of the stuff humans need, including rocket propellant
Speaker 3: and like fuel cells and things. So you really have
Speaker 3: everything you need except like a reason to be there
Speaker 3: is the tricky part. At the cost, it's going to
Speaker 3: be well.
Speaker 1: I also want to dig into the legal side of
Speaker 1: thea that saying that quote ivides we and eat them.
Speaker 1: What laws govern activities in space are on Mars.
Speaker 2: So since nineteen sixty seven, space has been governed by
Speaker 2: a United Nations treaty that goes by the shorter name
Speaker 2: the Outer Space Treaty. And it says a lot of stuff,
Speaker 2: and it says a lot of things vaguely, but for
Speaker 2: the purpose of space settlement, the most important points are
Speaker 2: no nation is allowed to appropriate any territory in space.
Speaker 2: But it also specifies that people come from somewhere and
Speaker 2: they are the responsibility of some nations. So you can't
Speaker 2: just say, like, okay, the US can't claim the south pole.
Speaker 3: Of the Moon.
Speaker 2: And some people will argue that like okay, but Elon
Speaker 2: Musk could because he's not a nation, he's just some guy.
Speaker 2: But according to the Outer Space Treaty, he belongs to
Speaker 2: the US. The US is responsible for what he does
Speaker 2: up there, and so it's on the US if Elon
Speaker 2: Musk goes up there and says, I am creating Muscow
Speaker 2: and this is my new place to live, and so
Speaker 2: you're not allowed to appropriate the land. But here's where
Speaker 2: there's quite a bit of ambiguity. It's apparently unclear what
Speaker 2: you can do with the resources that are up there.
Speaker 2: So can Jeff Bezos go to those craters of eternal
Speaker 2: darkness where you can find water and extract the water
Speaker 2: and sell it to other people for rocket fuel? And
Speaker 2: the answer to that is it's not really provided in
Speaker 2: the Outer Space Treaty. And so countries are sort of
Speaker 2: coming up with their interpretation of what the Outer Space
Speaker 2: Treaty means. And in the US, Obama passed an act
Speaker 2: that essentially said, the United States, if our citizens go
Speaker 2: up there and extract resources and sell them, our interpretation
Speaker 2: of the Outer Space Treaty is that that's okay. And
Speaker 2: then Donald Trump released an executive order essentially saying the
Speaker 2: same thing. So this is maybe the only thing that
Speaker 2: Obama and Trump can agree on. And then the Artemis
Speaker 2: Accords came out while we were writing the book. And
Speaker 2: the Artemis Accords is sort of a NASA document that
Speaker 2: a bunch of other countries have signed onto. I think
Speaker 2: it's at around twenty now, and a bunch of other
Speaker 2: countries have signed onto it, and it essentially says it
Speaker 2: is our interpretation that it is okay to extract resources
Speaker 2: and sell them. And in fact, NASA supported a company
Speaker 2: that went up there and scooped a tiny bit of
Speaker 2: regolith and then sold it to NASA for a token
Speaker 2: fee of I think a dollar, And it was just
Speaker 2: meant to set the precedent that a resource can be
Speaker 2: collected by a company on the Moon and then sold,
Speaker 2: and that the United States is okay with that. But
Speaker 2: that is supposed to be a global commons. That was
Speaker 2: point to the Moon is a global commons. All of
Speaker 2: space is a global commons, and so other countries I
Speaker 2: think would argue that as a global commons, if you
Speaker 2: extract a resource, everybody should benefit from it. But that's
Speaker 2: not actually specified by the Outer Space Treaty, so there's
Speaker 2: a big fight over inter But we like to note
Speaker 2: that the Moon and space in general is not like
Speaker 2: a completely weird legal structure that is unlike anything you
Speaker 2: see anywhere else. This is essentially what humanity has decided
Speaker 2: to do when we end up with vast swaths of
Speaker 2: land that technology suddenly opens up for us. So, for example,
Speaker 2: Antarctica is managed by the Antarctic Treaty System, where a
Speaker 2: bunch of countries come together, they agree, it's a global commons,
Speaker 2: they decide what can be done with the resources, and
Speaker 2: at the moment they've decided, you cannot extract any resources,
Speaker 2: and in fact you cannot even look for them because
Speaker 2: we don't want to start any trouble. And then the
Speaker 2: deep seabed is managed by close the United Nations Convention
Speaker 2: on the Law of the Sea. So we have a
Speaker 2: couple of different global commons, a couple different ways of
Speaker 2: managing them. But you know, it's unclear how things are
Speaker 2: going to shape up in space.
Speaker 1: So does that mean it is or is not legal
Speaker 1: to eat your neighbor in space?
Speaker 3: I can speak to that question. Yes, I should say
Speaker 3: this is it's a short part of the book, but
Speaker 3: we do something like an answer. So the short version
Speaker 3: is it depends on what law you consider yourself to
Speaker 3: be under, which probably has to do with what country
Speaker 3: you're from or where you launched from, right, and it
Speaker 3: actually varies by country. We're more familiar with the American
Speaker 3: and British law, which in the US. This is beyond
Speaker 3: what we have in the book. So I'm digging a
Speaker 3: little deep for this, but I believe there's something called
Speaker 3: the Holmes test. Which is this list of conditions which
Speaker 3: basically says, look, if you want to like engage in
Speaker 3: survival homicide, meaning kill some people so other people can live,
Speaker 3: there has to be a set of conditions met. And
Speaker 3: there are things like, you know, there has to be
Speaker 3: no other option, and you have to have a random draw.
Speaker 3: You can't like prefer the crew to the passengers. So
Speaker 3: there's a set of criteria that have to be met
Speaker 3: for it to be considered okay or at least potentially okay,
Speaker 3: to engage in survival homicide. So, you know, there's not
Speaker 3: a lot written about death and space generally it's never happened. Well,
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, it's never happened other than just people suddenly
Speaker 3: die during a situation where they can't be saved, right,
Speaker 3: So there's never been a situation where like a guide
Speaker 3: dies in the spaceship in and sort of crowded around
Speaker 3: like geez, what do we do? And so there's not
Speaker 3: a lot written on this. But we found a paper
Speaker 3: from nineteen seventy eight by a guy named Robert Fritis,
Speaker 3: who I think ended up being a nanotechnology guy, but
Speaker 3: in seventy eight he was interested in this question and
Speaker 3: it said you know, there's this movie and novel called
Speaker 3: Maroon where there's three guys in space and there's something
Speaker 3: goes wrong. There's not enough oxygen to save all of them.
Speaker 3: The rescue ship will like get there in five hours.
Speaker 3: They have four hours of oxygen. So if you're being
Speaker 3: if we were ants, one of the ants would be like,
Speaker 3: I'm going to go die. Problem solved. But we're not ants,
Speaker 3: and so it's like a really nauseating question. And so
Speaker 3: he actually kind of went through the literature of how
Speaker 3: we think about this question legally, and the basic deal
Speaker 3: is it's going to depend on where you're from. So
Speaker 3: if you're in the ISS, the kind of funny thing
Speaker 3: is the modules are kind of like quasi sovereign territory, right,
Speaker 3: so the Japanese module is sort of like a piece
Speaker 3: of Japan. So you know, we say you should sort
Speaker 3: of call a lawyer. You should be like, what country
Speaker 3: you know if I went to Japan or Russia? Would
Speaker 3: I get a better deal if I have to eat somebody?
Speaker 3: But yes, that's the law. In terms of like the
Speaker 3: physical part, we found one guy who's willing to talk
Speaker 3: about it, who was like weirdly detailed about how to
Speaker 3: butcher a human and three D print a plastic knife
Speaker 3: in space. His name is Eric's Seathhouse, and we advise
Speaker 3: against bringing him on your crew. And that's my main
Speaker 3: advice about eating your friends in space. To summarize. The
Speaker 3: Outer Space Treaty obviously doesn't deal with cannibalism in space,
Speaker 3: so you will probably be dealt with as a national
Speaker 3: of some country. Preferably to keep it simple, don't eat
Speaker 3: someone from some other country because it's going to be
Speaker 3: an international incident.
Speaker 1: That's going to complicate your life. So it sounds like
Speaker 1: you guys have done a really deep dive into the
Speaker 1: details of what it would be like, the logistics, the
Speaker 1: legal side, where we would actually live. In the end,
Speaker 1: how did you feel about it? I mean, you started
Speaker 1: out optimistic and then you were a little disappointed in
Speaker 1: how much people had explored this. On balance, in the end,
Speaker 1: do you feel like this is something humanity should do?
Speaker 1: But maybe deeper into the future that we're not ready yet,
Speaker 1: but it's still something we should plan for, or maybe
Speaker 1: we need to dig even deeper before we have an
Speaker 1: answer even to that question.
Speaker 2: So I think maybe Zach and I should both give
Speaker 2: our answers in case we differ a little bit. I'd
Speaker 2: say that I still think it's a beautiful idea. I
Speaker 2: would love to see it happen at some point, but
Speaker 2: I think we need to not push for it to
Speaker 2: happen in our lifetimes. I will be personally very happy
Speaker 2: if in my lifetime there is a research base on
Speaker 2: the Moon where we get a better handle on creating
Speaker 2: closed loop ecosystems, figuring out safety measures for adults and
Speaker 2: the babies that we'd like to have one day. I
Speaker 2: think there's a lot of work on geopolitics and international
Speaker 2: law that I would like to see happen before we
Speaker 2: end up with the scramble for territory. You know, in
Speaker 2: the book, we talk about how the way the deep
Speaker 2: seabed is managed could be a great way to manage
Speaker 2: resources in space as well. So I'd love to see
Speaker 2: some more work on stuff like that. So I'd like
Speaker 2: to see it happen, but I'd like to see us
Speaker 2: slow down and figure out, like step by step, what
Speaker 2: needs to happen to do it safely, and then you know,
Speaker 2: start to see that kind of stuff funding. I would
Speaker 2: love it if Musk had not bought Twitter and Head
Speaker 2: instead invested in closed loop ecosystems or research stations on
Speaker 2: the moon or something. What about you, Zach, Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I would say my view is that it's something
Speaker 3: that we will eventually do entirely because it's awesome. I
Speaker 3: think the economic arguments are quite weak. We discussed this
Speaker 3: a little in the book. There's a lot of sort
Speaker 3: of what you might call sociological arguments, like if we
Speaker 3: don't do this, we're going to stagnate. There are arguments
Speaker 3: that we're going to save the environment. There's no way
Speaker 3: it's going to happen fast enough. There are all these
Speaker 3: different arguments for why we ought to do it, and
Speaker 3: we think they're basically no good. And I would also
Speaker 3: add that there's an argument Daniel Duden is big on
Speaker 3: this as there's an argument that we should just never
Speaker 3: do it, because you know, people tend to say we
Speaker 3: should colonize space to decrease existential risk, but actually they're,
Speaker 3: you know, plausibly by getting that huge infrastructure above a gravity, well,
Speaker 3: you're creating higher existential risk. So maybe it's never going
Speaker 3: to be a good idea until like, you know, does
Speaker 3: physics allowed tractor beams or something. You know, So there's
Speaker 3: an argument there. I think you can imagine a world
Speaker 3: it's some distant date where you know, we are such
Speaker 3: an advanced, wealthy species that you could just go to
Speaker 3: Mars to set up there, because it would be a
Speaker 3: cool thing to do. Like you're going to send you
Speaker 3: one hundred AI robots ahead of you. They're going to
Speaker 3: set up a cabin and space launch is totally safe,
Speaker 3: and Earth is so peaceful and harmonious that the idea
Speaker 3: of like starting warfare between planets is unimaginable. And that world,
Speaker 3: it's a great idea, It's wonderful. It's sort of like
Speaker 3: in Star Trek they're just exploring around because exploring is
Speaker 3: a cool thing to do, and all the old problems
Speaker 3: have been solved. But I guess the big change for
Speaker 3: me is I just I just don't buy any of
Speaker 3: the arguments that there's a non esthetic reason to do Mars.
Speaker 3: There just doesn't seem to be unless you're talking about
Speaker 3: like a Kardish of you know, eighteen civilization that's got
Speaker 3: to maximize every single photon in the universe. There's just
Speaker 3: no good reason to do it. So to me, that
Speaker 3: puts it on the scale of centuries. It requires a
Speaker 3: better humanity and a much richer humanity.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you guys very much for writing this book.
Speaker 1: I know you described as something of a wet blanket,
Speaker 1: but I actually think it's necessary to think about these
Speaker 1: things carefully, to lay the groundwork to figure out what
Speaker 1: the problems are actually going to be. That, if anything,
Speaker 1: your book could makes it more likely that we do
Speaker 1: figure this stuff out because people think about it carefully.
Speaker 1: So from all the space nerds, thank you. You see
Speaker 1: this book positively, and I encourage everybody out there to
Speaker 1: get it. It's called a City on Mars? Can we
Speaker 1: settle space? Should be settle Space? And how we really
Speaker 1: thought this through. It's really exquisitely, deeply detailed and well researched.
Speaker 1: These guys definitely know what they're talking about. And in addition,
Speaker 1: it's really fun. I mean, obviously these two are very
Speaker 1: funny people, and so you'll read it, you'll learn a lot,
Speaker 1: you'll laugh a lot. I totally encourage you, and thank
Speaker 1: you very much Zach and Kelly for joining us today
Speaker 1: to talk about sex and space, poop in space, and
Speaker 1: face melting.
Speaker 3: Thanks so much, Daniel, I can do a whole episode
Speaker 3: on face melting.
Speaker 1: Collaboration, all right, Thanks again everyone for listening and tune
Speaker 1: in next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
Speaker 1: and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.
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