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Speaker 3: Hey Daniel, am I remembering correctly that your kids are
Speaker 3: almost in college.
Speaker 1: That's right. They're in high school, so college is just
Speaker 1: around the corner.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, it goes so fast. Do they want
Speaker 3: to stay close to home or are they needing a
Speaker 3: little distance from their parents?
Speaker 1: Well, the oldest wants to be far enough away that
Speaker 1: we can't pop into surprising, So.
Speaker 3: How far is that? Are we talking like a long
Speaker 3: car drive one stayed over a whole country?
Speaker 1: This is the loophole my wife is relying on because
Speaker 1: she's willing to travel a long way to just pop.
Speaker 6: In on somebody.
Speaker 3: Ah right, So maybe they need to consider like universities
Speaker 3: in Australia.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if Elon Musk is going to build a
Speaker 1: university on Mars, they might be able to attend.
Speaker 3: You know, he's got enough kids to fill the first
Speaker 3: class of students by himself.
Speaker 1: And if Elon is your dad, nowhere in the soul's
Speaker 1: just them is.
Speaker 6: Far enough away.
Speaker 2: Hi.
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at
Speaker 1: UC Irvine, and I was definitely ready to leave home
Speaker 1: when it was time to go to college.
Speaker 3: I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I'm adjunct at Rice University, and
Speaker 3: I also was ready to go. When I started college,
Speaker 3: California was not far enough from Ohio, but I stuck
Speaker 3: with that.
Speaker 1: And Welcome to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe,
Speaker 1: in which we take your mind to new locations to
Speaker 1: explore new ideas and think about living in other places,
Speaker 1: where we download the entire workings of the universe into
Speaker 1: your little brain. My friend and co host Jorge isn't
Speaker 1: here today, but I'm very glad to be joined by Kelly. Hi, Kelly,
Speaker 1: thanks again for joining us.
Speaker 3: Hey, thanks for having me. And you know, I think
Speaker 3: that maybe we should change the introduction to my friend
Speaker 3: and co host. Torge isn't available today, but my friend
Speaker 3: and co host Kelly is. I want to be upgraded
Speaker 3: to friend and co host status.
Speaker 1: You're definitely a friend and a co host, an a
Speaker 1: fellow scientist, and a colleague, absolutely all those things.
Speaker 3: Oh what a great day for me in.
Speaker 1: All the prizes. And you're also a great person to
Speaker 1: be talking to about today's topic about casting not just
Speaker 1: our minds, but maybe our bodies and our lives and
Speaker 1: our families out of the little envelope of the Earth
Speaker 1: and into the Solar system and maybe even the rest
Speaker 1: of the universe, and.
Speaker 3: Not just the places that you usually think of. We're
Speaker 3: talking about settling places that I think of as maybe
Speaker 3: some of the worst places in space. But there are
Speaker 3: people who disagree with me. So the question today is
Speaker 3: could humans live on Venus?
Speaker 1: That's right. You might be wondering why anybody ever lives
Speaker 1: anywhere other than the best place on Earth, otherwise known
Speaker 1: as southern California. But for some reason, humans do live
Speaker 1: in the northern reaches of Norway and the hottest deserts
Speaker 1: on Earth, and so humans do seem to have this
Speaker 1: appetite for living in crazy places, maybe even on Venus.
Speaker 1: So we went out there to ask our audience if
Speaker 1: they thought it was possible for humans to live on Venus.
Speaker 1: If you would like to participate in this audience answer
Speaker 1: segment for future episodes, please don't be shy. Write to
Speaker 1: me two questions at Danielandjorge dot com and I'll put
Speaker 1: you on the list. So think about it for a
Speaker 1: minute before you hear these answers. Do you think humans
Speaker 1: could live on Venus? Here's what people had to say.
Speaker 7: It might be possible for us to live on Venus,
Speaker 7: but obviously we've need protection from the extreme pressure, temperature, radiation,
Speaker 7: and poisonous gases.
Speaker 8: I guess in the ice caps in the northern region,
Speaker 8: but we'd be vaporized before we got there, correct, So
Speaker 8: yes and no.
Speaker 3: Well, just today I heard that Venus is a sister
Speaker 3: planet to planet Earth.
Speaker 6: So for that reason, I'll say, PEPs.
Speaker 9: Humans could live on Venus if we could construct a
Speaker 9: strong enough structure. Oh look, never say never, that's my motto.
Speaker 10: Okay, So obviously humans could not live on the surface
Speaker 10: of Venus. We don't know any life that could manage
Speaker 10: that pressure and temperature. But there's definitely a habitable zone
Speaker 10: up in the atmosphere kind of best bin like cloud
Speaker 10: city style, where we kind of have like balloon or
Speaker 10: other floating habitats, and there's possibility there. Is it worth pursuing.
Speaker 10: I think everything's worth pursuing. Spend more money on science.
Speaker 11: There's no way you can live on Venus and be
Speaker 11: a human unless you have some insanely.
Speaker 6: Good air conditioning system because it's several hundred degrees there.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not for three reasons crushing air pressure, extreme air toxicity,
Speaker 1: and extreme heat. Humans could live pretty high up in Venus,
Speaker 1: kind of like the Jetson's maybe a balloon city or something
Speaker 1: like that on service no further out No, but somewhere
Speaker 1: in the mail the clouds. So what do you think
Speaker 1: of these answers, Kelly?
Speaker 3: I think that the listeners who said never say never,
Speaker 3: which was an interesting, you know, repetition in the answers,
Speaker 3: are really going to like the guests that we have
Speaker 3: on the show today.
Speaker 1: I think there's a wonderful optimism there, you know, the
Speaker 1: sense that problems that seemed impossible ten years ago or
Speaker 1: fifty years ago might be solvable now. And the humans
Speaker 1: are just so ingenious and always coming up with new solutions,
Speaker 1: which means that places that used to be impossible to
Speaker 1: imagine living might eventually one day be like cozy and comfortable.
Speaker 3: Maybe. Who knows. Humans like to dream big, and on
Speaker 3: today's show, we've got a pretty big dreamer.
Speaker 1: I mean, why do you think humans like to dream big? Kelly?
Speaker 1: You wrote a whole book on this where you were
Speaker 1: not exactly you know, in favor of space colonization in
Speaker 1: the near term. Why do you think it captures the imagination?
Speaker 1: What are the motivations for everybody casting their ideas and
Speaker 1: maybe even their families and their descendants out past the
Speaker 1: comforts of Earth.
Speaker 3: To be honest, I've been asked this question a lot,
Speaker 3: and I don't think I will ever have a perfect answer.
Speaker 3: But I think it's because we all think different things
Speaker 3: are awesome, you know, Like like I have a vodka
Speaker 3: bottle filled with tapeworms from a road killed porcupine on
Speaker 3: my desk and I think that's awesome and I like
Speaker 3: looking at it sometimes. And there are some people who
Speaker 3: think it would be awesome to move to space, and
Speaker 3: like I could totally get both of those things. I
Speaker 3: don't know. I think humans we find our little niches
Speaker 3: that we think are awesome and we want to go,
Speaker 3: and space is particularly inspirational. Like, you know, I think
Speaker 3: most of us, you and I talk on the show
Speaker 3: all the time about looking up at the stars and
Speaker 3: all the big thoughts that makes us have and how
Speaker 3: small it makes us feel. And yeah, I don't think
Speaker 3: I have a really good answer, but I think just
Speaker 3: you know, it's kind of awesome, and that's a good
Speaker 3: enough reason to do a lot of things, as long
Speaker 3: as it doesn't have at anyone else.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it would be awesome if all the
Speaker 1: tapeworms on Earth were evicted and sent to space. Daniels,
Speaker 1: fans are too awesome.
Speaker 3: No, No, I am so glad. You don't have any
Speaker 3: power over these things, Daniel. They have to say here
Speaker 3: where people like me can study them.
Speaker 1: All Right, Well, we have a fun expert to talk
Speaker 1: to today who knows a lot about what it might
Speaker 1: be like to live outside of the Earth's comfort zone,
Speaker 1: out in space and maybe even in the atmosphere of Venus.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So our guest today is Guillermo Sunline. I've had
Speaker 3: the pleasure of meeting Germo in person. We've chatted virtually
Speaker 3: a couple times. He's a really fun guy to talk to.
Speaker 3: He's got big ideas. He was an officer in the
Speaker 3: US Marine Corps. He got an AB in economics from
Speaker 3: UC Berkeley and a jd from the UC College of
Speaker 3: Law in San Francisco. He's an explorer, an entrepreneur, and
Speaker 3: a philanthropist. And today we're going to talk to him
Speaker 3: about a space venture studio he's working on called Humans
Speaker 3: to Venus, where their goal is to get a thousand
Speaker 3: people living in the Venusian atmosphere by twenty fifty and
Speaker 3: there's a lot of challenges with that goal, but Ghermo's
Speaker 3: the right person to be working on it, so let's
Speaker 3: talk to him about why he thinks this is a
Speaker 3: good plan for humanity.
Speaker 1: I'm skeptical, but fascinated. Let's do it same.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the show, Gimo. We're excited to have you here.
Speaker 6: Hey, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, me too. So you and I have met irl
Speaker 3: once and it was a lot of fun. So I'm
Speaker 3: excited to be chatting with you again about all of
Speaker 3: your awesome Venus stuff. You're the only person I've ever
Speaker 3: talked to who made me think that maybe Venus isn't
Speaker 3: quite best bad. But we'll get there. Okay. So we're
Speaker 3: talking about settling space, and so first let's talk about
Speaker 3: why space is so hard to settle. So humans are
Speaker 3: like super well adapted to life on Earth. What are
Speaker 3: some challenges that space poses to the human body?
Speaker 6: Yeah, geez, where to start with that?
Speaker 11: I mean, you know this from writing your book, right,
Speaker 11: I Mean, first of all, we're adapted to our gravity
Speaker 11: here on Earth, which I'm sure we'll come back to
Speaker 11: in a minute here talking about Venus.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 11: Then we've got the protection of our atmosphere, so we've
Speaker 11: got both the breathable air that we take for granted
Speaker 11: as we take our breaths every day, plus keeping us
Speaker 11: nice and cozy and warm from the cold of space
Speaker 11: and at the same time keeping us from getting fried
Speaker 11: by the sun, which is basically this big star that
Speaker 11: we're just living very close to. So yeah, geez, where
Speaker 11: to start. I mean, on top of all that, obviously
Speaker 11: we have to eat and drink water, which is easy
Speaker 11: to get relatively.
Speaker 6: Speaking, here on Earth, and it gets harder as you
Speaker 6: leave Earth.
Speaker 11: So one of the things that I always say is
Speaker 11: I think people that work in space or work at
Speaker 11: trying to get humans into space are probably some of
Speaker 11: the biggest environmentalists and conservationists because they have a appreciation
Speaker 11: for how important Earth is for the human body and
Speaker 11: how well, as you said, how well adapted we are
Speaker 11: to Earth, and how ill adapted we are to basically
Speaker 11: living anywhere else. So it is our precious, our precious homeworld.
Speaker 11: We got to take care of it.
Speaker 3: I was surprised at how many people in the space
Speaker 3: community are environmentalists who are really interested in sustainability, because
Speaker 3: I think that when I, as an ecologist, talk to
Speaker 3: my friends, a lot of them would be like, oh,
Speaker 3: but the space people, they don't care about Earth. They
Speaker 3: just want to dump it and leave it behind and
Speaker 3: go leave somewhere else. But that has not at all
Speaker 3: been my experience with the community since interacting with you all.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I think I think that's one of the frustrating things,
Speaker 11: you know, as you're dealing with the media or the
Speaker 11: general public, or even friends and family, right they're like,
Speaker 11: you know, why are you trying to leave Earth?
Speaker 6: We have so many problems here on Earth.
Speaker 11: It's like, yeah, I know, but you know, it's also
Speaker 11: the best way to draw attention to those problems on
Speaker 11: Earth and help find solutions for them. So for some
Speaker 11: people it's the best way, you know, for people like
Speaker 11: me and maybe you, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think it's really interesting that you comment that humans
Speaker 1: are well adapted to Earth but ill adapted anywhere else,
Speaker 1: because one of the things I think about for human
Speaker 1: adaptation is how amazing it is that we've been able
Speaker 1: to live in so many different environments, Like what else
Speaker 1: other than you know, bacteria can adapt to like really
Speaker 1: cold and really warm and really wet and really dry.
Speaker 1: And we've built cities basically everywhere on the Earth except
Speaker 1: maybe Antarctica. Is that just because we're considering a pretty
Speaker 1: narrow range of habitats compared to like the extraordinary radiation
Speaker 1: and dryness and wetness and insanity of space.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that's exactly as you were saying that, That's exactly
Speaker 11: what I was going to say. You know, it is
Speaker 11: such a narrow band relatively speaking. You know, the temperature
Speaker 11: is a big one, right you mentioned you know, the
Speaker 11: hottest place on Earth and the coldest place on Earth
Speaker 11: range wise, is nothing compared let's say to the dark
Speaker 11: side or light side of the Moon, or you know,
Speaker 11: day or night on Mars. And so it is a
Speaker 11: very narrow range. And again kind of focusing on the
Speaker 11: core advantage of Venus, all of that is still within
Speaker 11: one G of gravity.
Speaker 6: So even if you think.
Speaker 11: About even astronauts in low Earth orbit, they're still experiencing
Speaker 11: one g of gravity. The reason they float is because
Speaker 11: they're constantly falling off Earth in response to the one
Speaker 11: G of gravity.
Speaker 6: But even that, we're still within one G of gravity.
Speaker 11: Or even if you think about pressure, atmospheric pressure. As
Speaker 11: you know, I've done work underwater, taking humans underwater in
Speaker 11: subs and going from the surface of the Earth let's
Speaker 11: say at sea level, where you have one atmosphere of
Speaker 11: atmospheric pressure and go into space, to the vacuum of space,
Speaker 11: it's a change of only one atmosphere. Going underwater, it's
Speaker 11: a change of one atmosphere every thirty three feet roughly
Speaker 11: ten meters going down, because you've got the way to
Speaker 11: the atmosphere on top of you, plus you have.
Speaker 6: The weight of the water on top of you.
Speaker 11: But we don't live underwater, and right now, we don't
Speaker 11: live in the vacuum of space, and so even atmospheric
Speaker 11: pressure wise, we're really only in a very narrow range
Speaker 11: from sea level to maybe you know, some high altitude
Speaker 11: and that's about it.
Speaker 1: So basically Earth is like the southern California of the
Speaker 1: Solar system. You know. We say we have seasiness, but
Speaker 1: really it's not winter.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, it's always sixty eight in sunny you know.
Speaker 1: So then why should we ever leave? It seems great here?
Speaker 6: Well, you know, it's funny, I just had that.
Speaker 11: I've had that discussion several times, and I just had
Speaker 11: it last week with a couple of students that I'm mentoring,
Speaker 11: you know, about why should we leave? And the short answer,
Speaker 11: I think is we should never leave, right, I mean,
Speaker 11: if you think about it from a survival standpoint, survival
Speaker 11: instinct standpoint, if you're somewhere comfortable and it's not dangerous
Speaker 11: to you, and it's got water and air and food,
Speaker 11: and you know, why would you ever leave? And the
Speaker 11: thing is, I kind of look at this like in
Speaker 11: nature when you look at an ant colony or a
Speaker 11: bee hive. Right, Once the queens have a good location
Speaker 11: for their hive, for their colony, they don't move the colony,
Speaker 11: they don't move the hive, but they know that at
Speaker 11: some point those circumstances may change and they may need.
Speaker 6: To move the colony and the hive.
Speaker 11: And so in both cases they always have a small
Speaker 11: subset of the colony or hive that is always going
Speaker 11: out and looking at other places. You know, they're kind of,
Speaker 11: you know, to use human terms, they're out exploring, you know,
Speaker 11: they send scouts out in different places, and they end
Speaker 11: up losing a lot of ants and a lot of
Speaker 11: bees in the process, but some of them make it
Speaker 11: back and they convey information to the queens, and at
Speaker 11: some point the queens make a decision that it's time
Speaker 11: to move the colony or move the hive, and now
Speaker 11: they've got some information they and they actually do move
Speaker 11: them for the survival of the colony or hive. I think,
Speaker 11: to a certain extent, I think that's kind of what's
Speaker 11: driving a little bit of let's say Elon Musk looking
Speaker 11: at Mars as a potential second home for humanity. Is
Speaker 11: that at some point we may decide we need to
Speaker 11: move humanity somewhere, or at least a portion of humanity,
Speaker 11: and by the time that day comes, it's going to
Speaker 11: be too late to think about it, like we have
Speaker 11: to have already, you know, taken some steps in that direction.
Speaker 11: I think that's I think that's at the core of
Speaker 11: what's driving someone like Elon to look at taking humanity
Speaker 11: off planet.
Speaker 6: But I agree with you.
Speaker 11: I mean, until something like that happens, like rationally, why
Speaker 11: would you ever leave Earth?
Speaker 3: Well, so that's why Elon wants to settle space. Why
Speaker 3: do you want to settle space?
Speaker 6: This is where it gets a little bit philosophical.
Speaker 11: But going back to the ant and be analogy, I
Speaker 11: think genetically, psychologically, I don't know, there's a small subset
Speaker 11: of Homo sapiens that are wired the same way those
Speaker 11: scouts are in the in the beehive or in the colony,
Speaker 11: and I think I'm just wired that way. It's I
Speaker 11: think that's also why within the explorer community, forget space
Speaker 11: for a second, right, just the general explorer community, Like
Speaker 11: if you go to the Explorers Club and talk to
Speaker 11: anybody there, any of the members there, about the stuff
Speaker 11: that they're working on, and they go some of the
Speaker 11: places Daniel was just talking about, you know, the deserts,
Speaker 11: the poles, you know, high altitudes. Probably the most common
Speaker 11: question that an explorer gets asked is why, right, why
Speaker 11: are you doing this?
Speaker 6: It just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 11: It seems it's counterintuitive, it goes against your survival instinct
Speaker 11: to take a risk climbing that mountain or doing whatever.
Speaker 11: And every explorer since you get asked that question so
Speaker 11: often you come up with an answer that you give,
Speaker 11: but it never feels like a complete answer.
Speaker 6: It never feels like a fulfilling answer.
Speaker 11: And I think if you talk to explorers, I think
Speaker 11: at the core it's because they.
Speaker 6: Don't know really why they're doing it.
Speaker 11: And I think the reason they don't know why they're
Speaker 11: doing it is because they're just wired that way. You know,
Speaker 11: they're just being themselves that's one question that it's never
Speaker 11: ask each other. You never hear an explorer. I remember
Speaker 11: at the Explorers Club ask another member, Hey, why are
Speaker 11: you doing that? Like they already know that the answer
Speaker 11: is I don't know. It's because I'm being myself, you know,
Speaker 11: and that's what I do.
Speaker 1: It's like asking those ants what you're doing and they're
Speaker 1: just like, we're just anting.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, or at least the Scouts, Yeah, they're just
Speaker 11: doing what they think is right.
Speaker 3: I like it, and I feel like, you know, the
Speaker 3: parasitologists that I work with, no one, no one is like,
Speaker 3: why are you elbowed deep in fish cuts for a worm?
Speaker 3: Because we love the worms. It's very different. But anyway, okay,
Speaker 3: so where are we going to settle? So that in
Speaker 3: my book, the two most commonplaces I hear about people
Speaker 3: wanting to settle are rotating space stations, where they argue
Speaker 3: that you can control so many different aspects of your
Speaker 3: environment it's really great, and mores. So I'd love to
Speaker 3: hear your takes on the pros and cons of those
Speaker 3: two locations so that we can then set up the
Speaker 3: even better option of venus.
Speaker 11: I'd love to see some sort of free floating, rotating
Speaker 11: structure somewhere kind of Oelian kind of future. I think
Speaker 11: the big advantage to that one, obviously that everyone pushes
Speaker 11: for it is you've got the artificial gravity, right. The
Speaker 11: whole reason it's rotating is so that we we have
Speaker 11: this artificial wungi of gravity, which I think is a
Speaker 11: big advantage obviously because I'm looking at Venus. But for
Speaker 11: me as an explorer, what I like about that option
Speaker 11: is that you can take that rotating ship and just
Speaker 11: point it out on the exit on the off ramp
Speaker 11: off the Solar System and just go. You know, it's
Speaker 11: a one way trip, just go kind of like you know,
Speaker 11: Star Trek, to boldly go where no one's gone before.
Speaker 11: And I would love that if we had that built,
Speaker 11: I'd sign up for that right now. But obviously the
Speaker 11: con to that is just the cost is just enormous, right,
Speaker 11: I Mean, the biggest engineering structure we've built as humanity
Speaker 11: is the International Space Station, and that costs a huge
Speaker 11: amount of money. It took a lot of time, and
Speaker 11: it's not nearly you know, the size that a big
Speaker 11: rotating kind of free floating station would have to be,
Speaker 11: or free floating community would have to be.
Speaker 6: So that's the obvious con on that one.
Speaker 1: Are you imagining something that's self sustaining. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you're going to point this thing out of the Solar System,
Speaker 1: it needs to not rely on Earth's infrastructure, right, Are
Speaker 1: you talking about something at that scale where it's like
Speaker 1: making its own food, et cetera.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, so yeah, So that's a great point, you know,
Speaker 11: because then you've got the structure that's kind of a
Speaker 11: free floating, rotating, rotating structure. But then you've got the
Speaker 11: question of geography, like where are you going to put it?
Speaker 11: And if you put that in orbit around Earth, that's fine.
Speaker 11: If you've got it still within the Solar system, you know,
Speaker 11: you can kind of still be dependent on Earth for
Speaker 11: imports and potentially exports. But if you do what I
Speaker 11: just suggested, which is just pointed out and just go yeah,
Speaker 11: then you've got to make sure that that thing's fully
Speaker 11: self sustaining.
Speaker 6: And if you think.
Speaker 11: About it, you know that's going to require a lot
Speaker 11: of infrastructure and a lot of people, you know, to
Speaker 11: really get to the point where that society is as
Speaker 11: specialized as it needs to be to put everything together.
Speaker 3: And the letter recycling and redundancies. Yeah, it would be tough,
Speaker 3: but awesome.
Speaker 6: Yeah, my favorite.
Speaker 11: I'll tell you my mind got blown about a year ago.
Speaker 11: I'd heard this before, but there's a YouTube video out
Speaker 11: that I watched over and over again. Now I can
Speaker 11: never remember which economist it was that that did this.
Speaker 11: Maybe as I tell you this, you'll know which one
Speaker 11: it is. It's from like the seventies where he holds
Speaker 11: up a pencil and he talks about thinking about what
Speaker 11: it would take to build a pencil from scratch.
Speaker 6: And if you think about it, it.
Speaker 11: Takes like millions of people to build that number two pencil. Right,
Speaker 11: if you just think about just the wood for the pencil, right,
Speaker 11: requires a whole timber company, and you got to go
Speaker 11: cut down the tree. Okay, but to do that you
Speaker 11: need saws, So somebody's got to make the saws.
Speaker 6: And for the saws going to need metal.
Speaker 11: So someone's going to need the metal for the blades
Speaker 11: for the saws, and someone's.
Speaker 6: Going to have to build all that.
Speaker 11: And if you think about that, the saws get made
Speaker 11: at a factory. Well, someone's got to build the factory,
Speaker 11: and you got to power the factory. And now all
Speaker 11: of a sudden you realize if you go through every
Speaker 11: single nuance of that supply chain for that number two pencil,
Speaker 11: it's millions of people that you need to get even
Speaker 11: just to that number two pencil. You know, sometimes I'll
Speaker 11: hold up I think, actually, Kelly, I may have even
Speaker 11: done this when we last saw each other in Slovakia.
Speaker 11: I held up a beer bottle and with someone I
Speaker 11: was talking with, and I just pointed to the label.
Speaker 11: Forget the bottle, forget the beer, just the label, the
Speaker 11: printed label that goes on the beer bottle. You know,
Speaker 11: if you think you know the paper that goes in that,
Speaker 11: the adhesive that goes in that, the paint that goes
Speaker 11: on that, the design, putting the label, and just getting
Speaker 11: that label ready, and then you think it takes millions
Speaker 11: of people just to even make that label. And in
Speaker 11: the world here on Earth, I guess we just take
Speaker 11: that for granted because we've got eight billion people, right
Speaker 11: and they're spread out everywhere, and we have so many
Speaker 11: people that we can specialize in these various areas. But
Speaker 11: when you think about trying to replicate that beer bottle
Speaker 11: label in space, or as Daniel was saying, you know,
Speaker 11: in a free floating station, that's going out toward outside
Speaker 11: the Solar System.
Speaker 6: You're not going to have millions of people to create
Speaker 6: all that.
Speaker 11: So that's where things get interesting is when you know,
Speaker 11: we start going off planet, but we try making that
Speaker 11: community as self sustaining as possible. And I think that's
Speaker 11: also a big premise of Kelly of your book, right,
Speaker 11: that we haven't thought through a lot of those things yet.
Speaker 11: We're so focused on, you know, the technology and the
Speaker 11: science of getting humans off this planet, but there's a
Speaker 11: lot of other stuff that we need to consider when
Speaker 11: we talk about doing that at scale.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and those millions of people on Earth can just
Speaker 3: go outside and take a big breath of fresh air,
Speaker 3: and so you you know, those million people in space,
Speaker 3: you also need to provide them the air they breathe.
Speaker 3: Everything down to that, it gets complicated, it is, Yeah.
Speaker 6: It gets complicated in a hurry.
Speaker 11: So, Daniel to one thing you were saying before, you know,
Speaker 11: a couple of years ago, I was talking with some friends.
Speaker 11: We were talking about just kind of even trying to
Speaker 11: replicate a community like that, like an off world community
Speaker 11: like that, just trying to replicate that here on Earth. Right,
Speaker 11: if you just started, let's say you wanted to set
Speaker 11: up a thousand people here on earth to live somewhere
Speaker 11: remote and be as self sufficient as possible. We realized,
Speaker 11: at least through the thought exercise, that the first people
Speaker 11: you had to start with was the medical community, right,
Speaker 11: because you've got to make sure that these people don't die, right,
Speaker 11: and that can stay healthy and then can reproduce and
Speaker 11: have kids and grow them into adulthood and all that.
Speaker 11: So you have to start with a medical community. And
Speaker 11: all of a sudden we realized, man, this gets complicated
Speaker 11: in a hurry, because let's say you start with a hospital, right,
Speaker 11: but that hospital's got to be unlike any hospital you've
Speaker 11: ever seen on earth, because first of all, it has
Speaker 11: to have every specialty. You got to have dentists, you
Speaker 11: got to have oncologists, you got to have obstetricians like cardio.
Speaker 11: You got to have everybody all in one hospital. Number one.
Speaker 11: Number two, it's got to be a teaching hospital because
Speaker 11: you don't have medical schools that you can rely on,
Speaker 11: so you're going to have to teach the next generation
Speaker 11: of medical professionals that come up. Then it's also going
Speaker 11: to have to be its own pharmaceutical company because you're
Speaker 11: not going to be able to.
Speaker 6: Just order.
Speaker 11: Drugs from a drug company to have them delivered there
Speaker 11: if you really want to be truly self sustaining, right,
Speaker 11: So you're going to have to develop your own drugs there,
Speaker 11: and you got to be a medical devices company because
Speaker 11: if you're a dentist or an orthodonist in your drill breaks,
Speaker 11: you can't just order another drill.
Speaker 6: You got to make one.
Speaker 11: Now, all of that can be helped with modern robotics
Speaker 11: and AI and all sorts of stuff, but it still
Speaker 11: means that you need all that functionality all in that
Speaker 11: one hospital. And if you think about that, that all
Speaker 11: of a sudden you're getting i don't know, like three
Speaker 11: hundred people, four hundred people, five hundred people at a minimum.
Speaker 11: And now all those people have families, right, and all
Speaker 11: those families have to live somewhere. Everyone's got to live somewhere,
Speaker 11: so you need you know, houses and food and sewage
Speaker 11: and water and security and all that stuff. It's hard
Speaker 11: to make a fully self sustaining society with only a
Speaker 11: thousand people. So it's just crazy even just doing the
Speaker 11: thought exercise, even if the numbers are all off, you know,
Speaker 11: and everything I just said, the premise still stands that
Speaker 11: it gets complicated very quickly.
Speaker 1: All Right, you convinced me, I'm never leaving southern California.
Speaker 1: I'm here to stay.
Speaker 11: Let me share an anecdote, and I don't think he'll
Speaker 11: mind my my sharing this. So a few years ago,
Speaker 11: there's a group that was contemplating what it would take
Speaker 11: to set up a permanent presence on the Moon.
Speaker 6: So this was like eight years ago, nine years ago,
Speaker 6: and at the time.
Speaker 11: This was the I think the third organization in about
Speaker 11: a year that did these like workshops where they would
Speaker 11: bring people together and just have them talk about, you know,
Speaker 11: what would it take to set up a.
Speaker 6: You know, a permanent presence on the moon.
Speaker 11: And so this organization got twelve of us together in Chanuga,
Speaker 11: Tennessee for a weekend and it was pretty good. They
Speaker 11: brought people together that kind of understood space but came
Speaker 11: from different backgrounds. So you had, you know, a scientist,
Speaker 11: an engineer, an entrepreneur, a marketer, a lawyer, like you.
Speaker 6: Had different people. And the facilitators.
Speaker 11: The first thing they did on the morning of the
Speaker 11: first day of this weekend workshop is they went around
Speaker 11: and they had everyone answer the same question, which is
Speaker 11: what would have to be set up on the moon
Speaker 11: for you to go visit there? Right, not even to
Speaker 11: go live there, just to go visit there. And there
Speaker 11: were different answers depending on you know. Someone said, you know,
Speaker 11: I'm willing to go when they have the first music
Speaker 11: festival there, because then that means that they've got enough
Speaker 11: infrastructure that people could go and it's safe enough and
Speaker 11: all that. One person said, you know, I'll go when
Speaker 11: they have the first hotel there.
Speaker 6: You know, there were twelve people in the room, the
Speaker 6: two ends of the spectrum.
Speaker 11: On one end was me, I said, I'll be the
Speaker 11: first one there, like you send me. I don't care,
Speaker 11: there's got to be nothing. That's fine. I'll go and
Speaker 11: I'll help set everything up for you guys, you know,
Speaker 11: to follow. The other end of the spectrum. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 11: was Andy Aldrin, right, so his dad was Buzz Aldrin,
Speaker 11: the second man to walk on the Moon. And Andy
Speaker 11: surprised all of us because he said exactly what Daniel
Speaker 11: just said.
Speaker 6: He says, I'm never going.
Speaker 11: It doesn't matter what you've got set up there, I'm
Speaker 11: never going. And he said, I like my air, I
Speaker 11: like my food, I like my water, I like my gravity,
Speaker 11: I like my radiation protection. I'm staying right here. And
Speaker 11: first of all, it took us all by surprise that someway.
Speaker 11: I don't know why. In our minds we just figured, well,
Speaker 11: the son of the second Man walk on the Moon.
Speaker 11: Of course he's going to want to go. Prices us
Speaker 11: that he said no, And so we asked him, like,
Speaker 11: why do you have that, you know, this feeling, this opinion,
Speaker 11: and he said, precisely, because I grew up around astronauts.
Speaker 11: I grew up with people who risk their lives leaving
Speaker 11: this planet. I know how dangerous it is up there.
Speaker 11: I know how rough it is, I know how you know,
Speaker 11: as we were talking earlier, how well suited we are
Speaker 11: for Earth, and like, why would I want to take
Speaker 11: that risk?
Speaker 6: I'm perfectly happy being here. Now that was a few
Speaker 6: years ago.
Speaker 11: I don't know if his mind's changed, but the fact
Speaker 11: remained that, you know, the people that.
Speaker 6: I think are most aware of the risks of.
Speaker 11: Leaving this planet sometimes are the ones that, like, you
Speaker 11: know what, I'm perfectly happy staying right here.
Speaker 3: On that note, let's all take a break to think
Speaker 3: about what it would take to convince us to go
Speaker 3: to the moon. And we'll be right back.
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Speaker 3: So we're back and we are talking about settling space.
Speaker 3: So girmo, let's quickly talk about Mars and why Mars
Speaker 3: is less good in your mind than Venus, and then
Speaker 3: we're let's move on to talking about Venus.
Speaker 11: First of all, I'm not entirely convinced that Mars is
Speaker 11: less good because it depends on different parameters and why
Speaker 11: you're going to where you're going. But each possible destination
Speaker 11: in space has its drawbacks, right, It's got its pros
Speaker 11: and cons, just like being here on Earth, right, which
Speaker 11: is on the side I was trying to figure out
Speaker 11: where to live next. And every city on Earth that
Speaker 11: I thought about living had its pros and cons and
Speaker 11: I couldn't make up my mind.
Speaker 6: So it's a similar thing, I.
Speaker 11: Think, you know, the biggest advantage to Mars, obviously, is
Speaker 11: just humans are used to walking on hard surfaces.
Speaker 6: And you know, so landing on the Moon.
Speaker 11: And landing on Mars makes sense, which is the drawback
Speaker 11: by the way, to the free floating stations we were
Speaker 11: talking about earlier. That's almost like being on a cruise
Speaker 11: ship stuck out in the middle of the ocean, as
Speaker 11: opposed to actually be ending up somewhere where you can,
Speaker 11: you know, walk on ground. The biggest disadvantage I see
Speaker 11: to Mars is the lack of gravity.
Speaker 6: It's the same as the Moon.
Speaker 11: The difference is that the Moon is so close to Earth.
Speaker 11: It's only three days away. You can go there and
Speaker 11: come back. It's kind of a weekend trip almost going
Speaker 11: back and forth. I don't want to minimize the risk
Speaker 11: of going to the Moon and back, but you know, geographically,
Speaker 11: on a Solar System level, it's basically our backyard, whereas
Speaker 11: Mars is a lot further away, and if you've got
Speaker 11: problems out there, and with the lack of gravity or
Speaker 11: anything else, it's tough to get any help. And we
Speaker 11: already know from our own history of human spaceflight, even
Speaker 11: with limited short duration hops to the Moon and lowerth orbit,
Speaker 11: that we don't react that well to lack of gravity.
Speaker 11: Our bodies are, as we keep talking about, our bodies
Speaker 11: are well suited for one G of gravity here on Earth.
Speaker 11: And so to go to Mars, where it's so far away,
Speaker 11: it takes so long to get there, you're kind of
Speaker 11: committed to being in zero gravity the whole way there
Speaker 11: and the whole way back, and then when you get
Speaker 11: there it's only thirty eight percent diverts gravity. You know,
Speaker 11: we're just not sure how the human body is going
Speaker 11: to react to that. It could be that it's fine,
Speaker 11: but it could be that it's not. And if you're
Speaker 11: looking at being there from a Homo sapien expansion into
Speaker 11: the cosmos perspective, being there multiple generations, and that's where
Speaker 11: the problems come up, where we're not sure if humans
Speaker 11: can reproduce in less than one G have gravity. And
Speaker 11: I know Kelly's heard me say this before, right, you know,
Speaker 11: we're not sure if we can conceive. We're not sure
Speaker 11: if we can carry a fetus to term. We're not
Speaker 11: sure if we can deliver a baby without defects, and
Speaker 11: most importantly, we're not sure if that Martian born Homo
Speaker 11: sapien baby can grow into adulthood and reproduce themselves. So
Speaker 11: it's entirely possible that we could be going to Mars
Speaker 11: and then kind of die out within one generation because
Speaker 11: we can't reproduce. I think that's the biggest challenge. I'm
Speaker 11: hoping that I'm wrong, you know, I'm hoping that we
Speaker 11: get there and everything works out or we can figure
Speaker 11: out ways around it. But as of right now, given
Speaker 11: what we know, that is probably the biggest risk of
Speaker 11: going to Mars from a specie standpoint, at least from
Speaker 11: a long term, permanent, multi generational standpoint. Now, the pro
Speaker 11: of Mars, I think is from my standpoint because I'm
Speaker 11: one of these explorer ants explorer bees is you know,
Speaker 11: we're on the third rock from the Sun here and
Speaker 11: Mars is the fourth rock from the Sun, so it
Speaker 11: feels like we're on our way out of the Solar System.
Speaker 11: You know, it's closer to the asteroid belt that we
Speaker 11: can get to some of the asteroids and the asteroid belt.
Speaker 11: We can get through that and get to the moons
Speaker 11: of Jupiter and move on beyond. It seems like we're
Speaker 11: heading in the right direction, either in actuality or psychologically,
Speaker 11: it feels.
Speaker 6: Like we're going out in that direction.
Speaker 11: I think that's the biggest advantage that Mars has.
Speaker 3: So I think most people wouldn't listen to the list
Speaker 3: of cons that you said and then think, well, we
Speaker 3: should go to Venus instead. Like so, when we were
Speaker 3: doing the research for our book, Venus was always compared
Speaker 3: unfavorably to Hell, and I remember reading about the you know,
Speaker 3: Russian Venia trobes they like landed and immediately was squished
Speaker 3: and then melted. So we listen, in our book, we
Speaker 3: put Venus is one of the less good options. Yeah,
Speaker 3: why were we wrong?
Speaker 6: Well, so I've told you this before.
Speaker 11: I think even the first time we met is until
Speaker 11: four years ago, I agreed with you, and I think
Speaker 11: every time we have to when we talk about Venus,
Speaker 11: we've got to get past the everything you just said.
Speaker 6: If we land on the surface of Venus, we're going.
Speaker 11: To get crushed or we're going to get fried, or both,
Speaker 11: because the pressure and the temperature at the surface is
Speaker 11: just horrendous for Homo sapiens. Or we have to combat
Speaker 11: the other end of the sci fi spectrum, which is
Speaker 11: terraforming Venus, right, can we can we change it so
Speaker 11: that we take their big atmosphere and make it more
Speaker 11: amenable to us, which, of course we don't even know
Speaker 11: if it's possible, and even if it's possible, it would
Speaker 11: take centuries.
Speaker 6: So like it's total sci fi.
Speaker 11: So I think which changed for me four years ago
Speaker 11: is I was reading a white paper about those Soviet
Speaker 11: era of ven aera emissions that you were talking about.
Speaker 11: And for people who are listening who don't know, and
Speaker 11: I didn't know this until four years ago, the former
Speaker 11: Soviet Union has more experience learning more about Venus than
Speaker 11: anybody else because they've sent I don't know, a dozen
Speaker 11: or so probes in orbit and through the atmosphere and
Speaker 11: to the surface of Venus. So four years ago, I
Speaker 11: was reading this white paper about some of the data
Speaker 11: collected from these missions, and there's a chart in particular
Speaker 11: that stood out which showed that, yeah, on the surface
Speaker 11: of Venus, the pressure is horrendous and the temperature is horrendous,
Speaker 11: but about fifty kilometers off the surface in the Venutian atmosphere,
Speaker 11: there's like a ten kilometer wide swath of the atmosphere
Speaker 11: where it's basically one atmosphere of pressure, which is about
Speaker 11: what is sea level here on Earth, and where temperatures
Speaker 11: range from twenty five to fifty degrees centigrade, which is
Speaker 11: definitely hot.
Speaker 6: But it's not fatal.
Speaker 11: It's not gonna it's not gonna burn, you know, melt
Speaker 11: your suit or anything.
Speaker 1: I want to see that on the advertising for Venetian homes.
Speaker 1: Not fatal, yeah, yeah, hey yeah.
Speaker 11: But you know what, as we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 11: that's a claim that you can't make on Mars or
Speaker 11: the moon, right, you know, you can't make them not
Speaker 11: fatal on pressure, on gravity or on are on temperature.
Speaker 11: So so that's one reason where all of a sudden
Speaker 11: I looked at it and go wait a second, and
Speaker 11: by the way, let's back back up. The whole reason
Speaker 11: I was looking at that white paper to begin with
Speaker 11: was because of the gravity that we were talking about earlier, right,
Speaker 11: the problems with making a Martian community multi generational and
Speaker 11: not knowing if we can reproduce. I started thinking, well,
Speaker 11: it'd be nice if we found somewhere in the Solar
Speaker 11: System then had one g of gravity that was not
Speaker 11: one of these, you know, human constructed spinning, rotating structures.
Speaker 11: And since gravity is related to size and mass of
Speaker 11: the object, obviously Venus would be the best choice because
Speaker 11: it's ninety eight percent the size of Earth and it
Speaker 11: has ninety eight percent of our gravity.
Speaker 1: But we are talking about a human constructed something, right,
Speaker 1: because as you say, the surface is way too deep.
Speaker 1: The nice region is not on the surface, there's no
Speaker 1: surface to walk around. Fifty kilometers fifty kilometers also, like
Speaker 1: that is very, very high. I'm terrified of heights. You
Speaker 1: talking about living fifty kilometers above the surface on some
Speaker 1: human constructed platform. I'm really going to be having to
Speaker 1: trust those engineers.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, well so, so you're right now backtracking one
Speaker 11: step though, I'm talking about human constructed and rotating just
Speaker 11: so we can get artificial gravity. I see, right, right,
Speaker 11: You know, at least on Venus, whatever the human constructed
Speaker 11: structure is, you don't have to spin it around and
Speaker 11: rotate it, and that it doesn't break apart because you've.
Speaker 6: Got one g of gravity, right, And I want to come.
Speaker 11: Back to the rest of what you just said, because
Speaker 11: I think that's very important. But let me just keep
Speaker 11: kind of going through the thought process originally from four
Speaker 11: years ago, because when I looked at it, I thought, well,
Speaker 11: this is perfect. Then we've got one g of gravity
Speaker 11: and fifty kilometers off the surface, we're going to have
Speaker 11: decent temperature, decent pressure. I dug further into the white paper,
Speaker 11: and the data that they collected seemed to suggest that
Speaker 11: the Venusian atmosphere is still so thick that even at
Speaker 11: fifty kilometers, as you said, that's very high up, but
Speaker 11: their atmosphere is so thick there, like there's people living there.
Speaker 11: I don't know why I just said that, but you know,
Speaker 11: Venus's atmosphere is still so thick that what's left above
Speaker 11: you at fifty kilometers is still thick enough to provide
Speaker 11: adequate protection from the Sun's radiation, even though Venus is
Speaker 11: closer to the Sun and it does not have a magnetic.
Speaker 6: Field the way we do.
Speaker 11: So I thought, wow, this would be like a perfect place,
Speaker 11: you know, as close as it gets off Earth. Digging
Speaker 11: a little further, it turns out Venus is also closer
Speaker 11: to Earth than Mars is and has a more similar
Speaker 11: orbit than Mars. If you've looked at Mars or thought
Speaker 11: about Mars, you've seen or even talk listening to elon talk,
Speaker 11: you know that there's a launch window every twenty six
Speaker 11: months where we can launch anything toward Mars. And that's
Speaker 11: in large part because we have a fairly circular orbit
Speaker 11: around the Sun, and Mars has a fairly more elliptical
Speaker 11: orbit around the Sun, whereas Venus is a lot more
Speaker 11: circular kind of like ours, so it kind of makes
Speaker 11: it easier to get to and from Venus.
Speaker 3: Is there a regular launch window though, that's an and
Speaker 3: if so, what is the timeframe there?
Speaker 11: Yeah, so I think the transit time is a lot shorter,
Speaker 11: but it's also more regular, like it's always three to
Speaker 11: four months, whereas Venus can be anywhere from.
Speaker 6: Six to nine months.
Speaker 11: And in some cases, if you hit it on the
Speaker 11: wrong time, you may as well not even try because
Speaker 11: you know you never going to catch it coming around.
Speaker 11: But also importantly, you're using less fuel to catch it.
Speaker 11: You need less Delta V We promise not to get
Speaker 11: too technical, but so anyway, I started looking at all that,
Speaker 11: but the problem is, as I've said before, you know
Speaker 11: I'm not technical, I'm not an engineer, I'm not a scientist,
Speaker 11: so I was looking at this, going okay, this, I
Speaker 11: can't be the first person to have seen this, right,
Speaker 11: So of course the first thing I did is a
Speaker 11: Google search, and it turns out NASA had actually looked
Speaker 11: at this already.
Speaker 6: A few years ago. They created a thing called HAVOC.
Speaker 11: NASA loves their acronyms, right, so HAVOC High Altitude Venus
Speaker 11: Operational Concept, and they had come up with this concept
Speaker 11: of having basically floating research stations in the Venusian atmosphere.
Speaker 11: And I thought, okay, well, if NASA's looked at it,
Speaker 11: then I'm not completely nuts. There's got to be other
Speaker 11: people that have looked at it, and kept doing more
Speaker 11: Google search and poking around, and it turns out a
Speaker 11: lot of people around the world have looked at this,
Speaker 11: including the Russians, and so it just kind of became
Speaker 11: interesting seeing, okay, there's all these experts everywhere that have
Speaker 11: actually looked at this. And I thought the same thing, Kelly,
Speaker 11: did you know when you and Zach were researching your book,
Speaker 11: It's like, well, then how come we don't know about this?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 6: Why is it such a hidden gem kind of thing?
Speaker 11: And I think it's because all these people are kind
Speaker 11: of working in isolation around the world, and because the
Speaker 11: world is so focused on Moon, Mars and beyond, and because,
Speaker 11: as you were saying, you know, the conventional wisdom on
Speaker 11: Venus is that it's hell. Everyone's afraid of poking their
Speaker 11: head up and being labeled some sort of lunatic on it.
Speaker 11: And so I started, before I poked my head up
Speaker 11: and started being labeled a lunatic, I started trying to
Speaker 11: have private conversations with people that had talked about this
Speaker 11: or discussed this, or put out videos or blogs or whatever.
Speaker 11: And the more I talk to people, the more it
Speaker 11: seemed to make sense.
Speaker 3: So you said floating in the Venusian atmosphere. So floating
Speaker 3: to me implies like no work needs to be done,
Speaker 3: but like propellant will constantly need to be used to
Speaker 3: keep this thing up so it doesn't, you know, fall down,
Speaker 3: so everyone does.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, no, So that's great.
Speaker 11: So actually that's a good seguey to come back to
Speaker 11: what Daniel said earlier about living on this man made structure,
Speaker 11: you know, floating somewhere and trusting it and being afraid
Speaker 11: of heights and all that. So the interesting thing in
Speaker 11: Venus's atmosphere, which is primarily carbon dioxide, and it's very,
Speaker 11: very dense. It is so dense that if you take
Speaker 11: our normal breathable air and put that in a balloon,
Speaker 11: it will actually float in Venus's atmosphere, which means that
Speaker 11: if you're looking to build something that's livable, you could
Speaker 11: essentially take something. And this is an engineer did this.
Speaker 11: I didn't do the calculation. So if it's wrong, someone
Speaker 11: else can work around it. If you take let's say,
Speaker 11: a football stadium that's domed, and you fill it with
Speaker 11: normal breathable air, it will create enough lifting force in
Speaker 11: Venus's atmosphere to keep.
Speaker 6: The whole football stadium afloat.
Speaker 3: Does that check out? Particle physicists, Daniel.
Speaker 1: That's a whole lot of particles to calculate all at once.
Speaker 1: But doesn't that depend a little bit on the extra mass,
Speaker 1: like you know, how heavy is the football stadium, et cetera.
Speaker 1: But you know it might. I mean, you can float
Speaker 1: like huge battleships that are basically bubbles of air in
Speaker 1: the water. That's effectively what we're talking about, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, something like that.
Speaker 3: So cool.
Speaker 11: Again, not being an engineer and not being a scientist,
Speaker 11: I tend to live my life trusting engineers and scientists,
Speaker 11: and instead of questioning them, maybe I should question them more.
Speaker 11: But for something like that, it seems to me like
Speaker 11: that's an engineering problem, Like you put enough engineers on
Speaker 11: that they'll figure out how to make this thing float.
Speaker 6: So two thanks Kelly to your point.
Speaker 1: And after the first few disasters crashes, they'll really figure
Speaker 1: it out. So you don't want to be in the
Speaker 1: first wave, but eventually, well.
Speaker 11: And hopefully you know, the first few waves are going
Speaker 11: to be autonomous and there won't be anyone on them
Speaker 11: until they figure it out.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 11: But you know, Kelly, to your point, despite the fact
Speaker 11: that this thing may kind of float, like you said,
Speaker 11: with like little or no effort, there is going to
Speaker 11: still have to be you know, maintaining that that equilibrium
Speaker 11: and keep it floating. And then there's probably going to
Speaker 11: need to be some sort of system to keep it
Speaker 11: kind of station keeping, you know, make sure it doesn't
Speaker 11: dip too far down or too far up, because if
Speaker 11: it goes down, it's going to be subject to the
Speaker 11: additional pressure and temperature. Too far up, it's it's going
Speaker 11: to be cold and all that stuff. So there's going
Speaker 11: to have to be some adjustment there. But Daniel, going
Speaker 11: back to your earlier point about having the sphere of
Speaker 11: heights and all that stuff, I think it's because when
Speaker 11: you think about it, you're kind of thinking of like
Speaker 11: a small like research station kind of thing.
Speaker 6: But imagine an.
Speaker 11: Entire building or a football stadium, right, or a mall right,
Speaker 11: you could kind of, or or a cruise ship right
Speaker 11: where you're always on this big structure and it's floating.
Speaker 11: And I think it's also I guess related to that
Speaker 11: is one thing that we don't have a lot of
Speaker 11: from a science standpoint. We don't have a lot of
Speaker 11: photographs or video of the Revenusian atmosphere, so we're not
Speaker 11: even sure what the view will look like from up there.
Speaker 6: It's very dense atmosphere.
Speaker 11: There are a lot of clouds there, and so it
Speaker 11: may just be kind of like when you're in an
Speaker 11: airplane and you're flying through clouds, or you're flying right
Speaker 11: above clouds, you may not even get a sense.
Speaker 6: For how high up you are anyway.
Speaker 1: And if I fall off this platform, right, I'm not
Speaker 1: just going to be on my own. I'm going to
Speaker 1: be in some sort of breathable suit. Anyway, say I'm
Speaker 1: like working on the outside of it, I fall off.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering because the pressure, will I actually fall off
Speaker 1: or will I just float next to it? Is it
Speaker 1: more like being underwater where if you like lose your grip,
Speaker 1: you're floating next to it, as opposed to like actually
Speaker 1: plummeting towards.
Speaker 6: You know, that's a great question.
Speaker 11: I don't think I've ever been asked that question in
Speaker 11: the last four years.
Speaker 6: You know, I have no idea. So since I'm not
Speaker 6: an engineer scientist, I'm going to.
Speaker 11: Have to ask somebody, you know, to help out with that,
Speaker 11: because a part of me says, well, you've got gravity
Speaker 11: pulling you down, right, so it is like being one
Speaker 11: ge of gravity. It is going to pull you down.
Speaker 11: But I guess to your point, is the atmosphere so dense.
Speaker 6: That it wouldn't be able to pull you down? Would
Speaker 6: you float?
Speaker 12: Like?
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 1: I don't know the same physics should apply to a
Speaker 1: person in an air bubble as they do to a
Speaker 1: football stadium in an air bubble.
Speaker 6: Right, So ooh, that's a great question.
Speaker 3: Ooh, let's all take a break and see if we
Speaker 3: can figure out the answer, and we'll come back in
Speaker 3: a second to chat more about venus.
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Speaker 3: So I think that living in Venus would also have
Speaker 3: some really interesting material science problems that would need to
Speaker 3: get solved. In particular, I'm thinking about the fact that
Speaker 3: there are lots of clouds made of sulfuric acid that
Speaker 3: you'd be floating on top of in the Venutian atmosphere.
Speaker 3: What do we know about how well habitats can survive
Speaker 3: stuff like that.
Speaker 11: Yeah, so that's great because there are two things that
Speaker 11: I was kind of excited about because there are two
Speaker 11: huge cons to Venus, right you asked me earlier, the
Speaker 11: cons to Mars.
Speaker 6: They're two huge cons to Venus.
Speaker 11: One is that the atmosphere is primarily CO two, so
Speaker 11: we can't breathe it. And the other one is what
Speaker 11: you just mentioned, is the clouds are made of sulfuric acid.
Speaker 11: So when I read that, I'm like, oh, well, now
Speaker 11: what do we do? But I kind of researched a
Speaker 11: little bit more. So the first thing we'd have to
Speaker 11: do on the first one is we'd have to be
Speaker 11: able to convert the CO two into breathable air. And
Speaker 11: the thing with that is, if you're a scuba diver,
Speaker 11: you know that scuba divers have been using rebreathers for
Speaker 11: a long time now, and so there is a method
Speaker 11: of converting CO two into breathable air.
Speaker 6: And by the way, a few weeks ago, I.
Speaker 11: Was in Boston at a conference and after one of
Speaker 11: the sessions, we were at one of the receptions and
Speaker 11: I happened to be talking with a guy, and before
Speaker 11: he even knew what I was working on with the
Speaker 11: whole Venus thing, I asked him what he was working on.
Speaker 11: It turns out he was an atmospheric scientist, and I'm like, oh, wait,
Speaker 11: I've got three questions for you. So question number one,
Speaker 11: is it possible to turn CO two into breathable air
Speaker 11: just from an atmosphere chemistry standpoint? And he said, yes,
Speaker 11: it depends on what scale, but yeah, it can be done,
Speaker 11: and it depends on how much money it's going to
Speaker 11: take to do it, or resources it's going to take
Speaker 11: to do it.
Speaker 6: But yes, from a chemical standpoint, it can be done.
Speaker 3: I think that's the subodia reaction. Didn't Moxie just do
Speaker 3: that on Mars? I think they had a box on
Speaker 3: Mars that was converting the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere anyway,
Speaker 3: So sorry, yeah, that's a problem we've made some progress on.
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 11: Well, that's my point with this is that you know,
Speaker 11: these are not like we don't need to like invent
Speaker 11: the warp drive or something, you know to make this happen.
Speaker 11: You know, because number two is can we extract water
Speaker 11: from sulfuric acid clouds and CO to atmosphere? And he said, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 11: that's a no brainer. I said, okay. And then the
Speaker 11: third one is what your question was, right, do we
Speaker 11: have materials that can withstand sulfuric acid? And he said yes,
Speaker 11: and the two most common ones are glass and the
Speaker 11: big long scientific name that I don't know, but the
Speaker 11: common name is teflon. Right, so we've got teflon that's
Speaker 11: resistant to sulphuric acid and.
Speaker 6: Glass.
Speaker 11: So I asked them, well, given you know, CO two
Speaker 11: and sulfuric acid.
Speaker 6: Can you make teflon out of it?
Speaker 11: It's like, well, you'd need fluorine or something like that,
Speaker 11: you'd add it in, but you could, you could create it.
Speaker 6: So so the bottom.
Speaker 11: Line is it sounds like even the biggest obstacles to
Speaker 11: setting up shop in the Venutian atmosphere are from an
Speaker 11: engineering perspective and from a scientific perspective, we can probably
Speaker 11: overcome even today if we really wanted to do it.
Speaker 11: It's not like, like I said, it's not like we've
Speaker 11: got to invent warp drive or artificial gravity or anything
Speaker 11: else like that.
Speaker 3: So to try to bottom line it, so I think
Speaker 3: what you're arguing is that so rotating space stations awesome
Speaker 3: but super complicated, and Venus is less complicated because you
Speaker 3: don't have to spin and Mars has a lot of benefits.
Speaker 3: But if not living in one G is a game stopper,
Speaker 3: then Venus is a better option.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, in some ways you could think about it.
Speaker 11: You know, in the US, NASA has been following this Moon,
Speaker 11: Mars and Beyond strategy for a couple of decades, and
Speaker 11: the rationale behind that is, you know, kind of like
Speaker 11: the crawl walk run approach. Right, we start in Leo.
Speaker 11: That's crawling. We're getting used to kind of operating in space.
Speaker 11: Then we go to the Moon, which is our planetary backyard,
Speaker 11: to build up some of the competencies and that develop
Speaker 11: some of the technologies, and then we're going to actually
Speaker 11: go out to Mars.
Speaker 6: So it's kind of like this crawl walk run kind
Speaker 6: of thing.
Speaker 11: But if you think about it, in many ways, Venus
Speaker 11: may actually be a better next stepping stone because at
Speaker 11: least we don't have to worry about all these weird
Speaker 11: orbital mechanics. We don't have to worry about gravity. We
Speaker 11: don't have to worry about you know, what's the hardest part.
Speaker 11: You ask anybody on Mars missions, what's the hardest part
Speaker 11: about a Mars mission? And it's the hard landing on
Speaker 11: the surface, you know, surviving that hard landing. I don't
Speaker 11: know what the success rate is on on the Mars missions,
Speaker 11: but you know most of them failed just during the landing,
Speaker 11: and you know, we don't have to worry about that
Speaker 11: on Venus. We got to make sure that, you know,
Speaker 11: we don't fall through the fifty kilometer mark and implode
Speaker 11: on the way down to the surface, But it's a
Speaker 11: lot of challenges that we're going to have going to
Speaker 11: Mars that we're not going to have going to Venus,
Speaker 11: And so there's there's an argument to be made that
Speaker 11: maybe Venus is even a good training ground for going
Speaker 11: to Mars or beyond.
Speaker 3: Would it be fair to say that that it's not
Speaker 3: necessarily that we don't have the same problems, but they're
Speaker 3: just a little easier because like Venus will still have
Speaker 3: some orbital mechanics to worry about, and getting just the
Speaker 3: right spot in the Venusian atmosphere is tough, but maybe
Speaker 3: not as tough as landing on Mars. But space is
Speaker 3: never easy. Problems never go away.
Speaker 11: Yeah, Yeah, that's that's why I never say that it's
Speaker 11: easy or even that it's better, because it's just different, right,
Speaker 11: Because you're right, we've got similar problems, but they may
Speaker 11: be easier to solve, But we also have some problems
Speaker 11: on Venus that you don't have on Mars, like dealing
Speaker 11: with the CO two atmosphere and dealing with the sulphuric
Speaker 11: acid clouds and dealing with you know, we haven't even
Speaker 11: talked about the mechanics of this, but you know, in
Speaker 11: both cases, you're probably orbiting the planet and then you're
Speaker 11: going down to where the human community is. On Mars
Speaker 11: you're going from orbit down and landing on the surface,
Speaker 11: and then in Venus you're going down to the atmosphere.
Speaker 11: In both cases you also have to be able to
Speaker 11: come back. So from Mars you're launching from the surface
Speaker 11: back to the orbit before coming back to Earth or whatever.
Speaker 11: And that's something we know how to do, because that's
Speaker 11: how we've got there.
Speaker 6: To begin with.
Speaker 11: Right, we launched off the surface of Earth into orbit
Speaker 11: and then beyond. But launching from an atmospheric platform back
Speaker 11: to orbit is something we really haven't done. We've tested,
Speaker 11: but we don't have a lot of experience doing that,
Speaker 11: and certainly not humans. Right we haven't launched humans from
Speaker 11: a hot air balloon or from a stratospheric balloon into orbit.
Speaker 11: So those are challenges that we haven't faced yet and
Speaker 11: that we won't face on Mars or the Moon. But
Speaker 11: on the flip side, a lot of those things are
Speaker 11: like I said, or challenges that like I said, I
Speaker 11: keep kind of tritely saying we don't have to invent
Speaker 11: warp drive or something like that to do that. It's
Speaker 11: something that we could even start testing. That's the other
Speaker 11: nice thing, by the way, with Venus is so much
Speaker 11: of the technologies and the operational capabilities we're going to
Speaker 11: need to develop or about operating in an atmosphere, and
Speaker 11: so we can actually test some.
Speaker 6: Of those here on Earth.
Speaker 11: Right, we could test high altitude balloons and trying to
Speaker 11: launch rockets into orbit from there, and people have tried
Speaker 11: that and have tested it. But we could develop those capabilities.
Speaker 11: We could develop some of these larger floating structures and try.
Speaker 11: The other thing we haven't tried is point to point
Speaker 11: transportation within the atmosphere. Right, if we had two balloons
Speaker 11: with stations, can we get from one to the other,
Speaker 11: you know, floating over there in some sort of transportation system.
Speaker 11: So it's things that we could test here on Earth
Speaker 11: we actually go to Venus. It's tougher to test stuff
Speaker 11: for Mars because we can't simulate the gravity and everything else.
Speaker 3: We're coming up on the end of our hour and
Speaker 3: my plan for wrapping things up was to ask if
Speaker 3: you would personally go to Venus given the chance. But
Speaker 3: I feel like we've had enough comparisons to the Scout
Speaker 3: bees that the answer must be yes, So what is
Speaker 3: the answer.
Speaker 11: I think the advantage to living in Venus because of
Speaker 11: the one G of gravity is it'll be relatively straightforward
Speaker 11: to go back and forth between Venus and Earth, especially
Speaker 11: for anyone born on Venus. Right, any homo sapien born
Speaker 11: on Venus is going to be used to one g
Speaker 11: of gravity there, and so they can easily come back
Speaker 11: and visit here on Earth and go back. Any homo
Speaker 11: sapien born on Mars is going to be used to
Speaker 11: thirty eight percent of Earth's gravity, so coming to visit
Speaker 11: here on Earth, to them, it will feel like they're
Speaker 11: constantly pulling a two and a half g turn in
Speaker 11: an airplane, and that's going to be uncomfortable. At a minimum,
Speaker 11: it's going to be uncomfortable, you know. At worst, it's
Speaker 11: just going to cause all sorts of health problems. So
Speaker 11: I don't think very many Martian Homo sapiens, assuming we
Speaker 11: can you conceive and be born there and all that,
Speaker 11: I don't think very many of them are ever going
Speaker 11: to be able to come back to Earth, whereas Venusians
Speaker 11: will kind of be more of a society that will
Speaker 11: have closer ties with Earth and go back and forth. Now,
Speaker 11: I'm kind of talking more sci fi futuristic, you know,
Speaker 11: one hundred years from now.
Speaker 6: But I think that's for that reason.
Speaker 11: I think I'd rather live on a floating platform in
Speaker 11: Venus than on some surface of Mars Station, which, by
Speaker 11: the way, is probably going to be underground anyway, So
Speaker 11: it's going to be just as claustrophobic is staying stranded
Speaker 11: on a little floating station in the middle of the
Speaker 11: Venusian atmosphere.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Daniel's afraid of heights and I'm claustrophobic, So I
Speaker 3: suspect that Daniel and I are going to be staying
Speaker 3: on Earth and Garmo. You can visit Us from Venus
Speaker 3: because it'll.
Speaker 6: Be sounds good. I'll send you pictures.
Speaker 3: Okay, was there any more questions you wanted to ask? Daniel?
Speaker 1: You know, I think a lot about where I moved
Speaker 1: because it influences not just where my kids live, but
Speaker 1: where they're from. You know, I moved to southern California,
Speaker 1: and now I have to hear my kids say like,
Speaker 1: I'm from Orange County, which is always a bit of
Speaker 1: a shock to the system. So how do you feel
Speaker 1: about moving to Venus and then having your kids be
Speaker 1: like I'm Venusian.
Speaker 6: I think it would be cool.
Speaker 11: You know, I was just thinking about this because I
Speaker 11: was watching For All Mankind and you know, not to
Speaker 11: spoil it for people who haven't watched it yet, but
Speaker 11: it's just interesting the evolution of off world communities when
Speaker 11: they're on the Moon or on Mars and versus Venus,
Speaker 11: which by the way, is not part of the For
Speaker 11: All Mankind.
Speaker 6: And I think that kind of will evolve over time.
Speaker 11: And I think to a certain extent, Kelly and Zach
Speaker 11: kind of talked about this, and they're both too, But
Speaker 11: if you just kind of look at the history of
Speaker 11: human expansion from one piece of land mass on Earth
Speaker 11: to another piece of land mass on Earth.
Speaker 6: You know, initially, first of all, the demographics of whoever's
Speaker 6: in this new community change over time.
Speaker 11: You know, the first ones are the explorers, and then
Speaker 11: you've got settlers, and then you've got natives who were
Speaker 11: born there, and a lot of them will always come
Speaker 11: back because they're originally from wherever they were from. And
Speaker 11: eventually you get to a point where you've got people
Speaker 11: that were born and raised in this new community that have.
Speaker 6: Never been back to their ancestors. You know, their parents'
Speaker 6: homeland or their grandparents' homeland, and.
Speaker 11: So they start developing their own identity, and eventually they'll
Speaker 11: kind of become more independent because they'll have their own language,
Speaker 11: their own culture, their own belief system and all that.
Speaker 11: I think that's going to be more true on Mars
Speaker 11: than on Venus. I think over time, I think the
Speaker 11: Moon will never have that identity because it's just so
Speaker 11: easy to go back and forth. I think it's always
Speaker 11: going to be tied to Earth's identity. I think Venus
Speaker 11: will have its own identity and people will say, hey,
Speaker 11: I'm Venusian, I'm from Venus, but it'll still be fairly
Speaker 11: closely tied to Earth because it's relatively easy to go
Speaker 11: back and forth. Although over time a lot of Venusians
Speaker 11: will never come to Earth, just like a lot of
Speaker 11: Earthlings will never go to Venus. But Mars is really
Speaker 11: going to be where there's going to be I think
Speaker 11: an independence movement because of just the physical problems of
Speaker 11: Martian Homo sapiens coming back to Earth and vice versa.
Speaker 11: So I think, yeah, I'd be perfectly okay with descendants
Speaker 11: saying that they're from Venus.
Speaker 6: In fact, I think it'd be pretty cool.
Speaker 1: It does sound pretty cool. Well, thanks very much for
Speaker 1: answering all of our questions. Really appreciate your time.
Speaker 11: Yeah, sure, it's great. It's always great talking with Kelly
Speaker 11: and Daniel. It's great meeting you, all.
Speaker 1: Right, it's super fun to talk to Guillermo. So what
Speaker 1: do you think in the end, Kelly, what are the
Speaker 1: chances that they're going to get a thousand people to
Speaker 1: live floating in the atmosphere Venus by twenty to fifty.
Speaker 3: I think I think that conversations like this make me
Speaker 3: realize just how harsh space is, you know, that Venus,
Speaker 3: that by listening to someone like Gyermo at the end,
Speaker 3: you could be like, well maybe Venus isn't quite as
Speaker 3: inhospitable as I thought. To me, that just says that
Speaker 3: everything out there is just absolute rubbish. It's just really
Speaker 3: bad living out in space. But you know it does
Speaker 3: I don't know. I don't think we're going to be
Speaker 3: living having space settlements anywhere in space by twenty fifty.
Speaker 3: And I think if you ask Germo, he'd say that
Speaker 3: they're shooting for twenty fifty, but you know, he wouldn't
Speaker 3: hang his hat on that date. That's my not answer
Speaker 3: answer to your question is what do you.
Speaker 1: Think My answer to my question is that the question
Speaker 1: is totally bogus because it's impossible to predict this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. Humanity and human civilization and technology changes so quickly,
Speaker 1: and the changes happen faster every year that you know,
Speaker 1: the technology required could be invented, that what is impossible
Speaker 1: today could be totally possible in five years. Somebody could
Speaker 1: invent some new kind of material which makes these things
Speaker 1: really easy or simple. And so it's impossible to predict.
Speaker 1: And I like their strategy of like, let's aim for it,
Speaker 1: let's push for it, because that's exactly the kind of
Speaker 1: work you have to do to make it possible. You
Speaker 1: have to push forward on all these boundaries and do
Speaker 1: basic research and trying to crack problems. And you know,
Speaker 1: even if they don't figure this out, this kind of
Speaker 1: work could lead to new ideas that helps solve other problems.
Speaker 1: And so I'm in favor of, like, let's do all
Speaker 1: of it, you know, all the science and all the engineering.
Speaker 3: Sure, I'm with you, and I can tell you that
Speaker 3: it's a lot of fun drinking with Girmo.
Speaker 1: Well, thanks very much for bringing him on the show,
Speaker 1: and thanks again to Geirmo for answering all of our
Speaker 1: questions well meaning and naive as they were. Thanks very
Speaker 1: much Kelly for joining us today, and thanks everybody for
Speaker 1: taking this mental trip to Venus with us.
Speaker 3: Thanks Brend and co host Daniel.
Speaker 1: Thanks Brand and co host Kelly. Thanks to all the listeners.
Speaker 1: All right, tune in next time for more science and curiosity.
Speaker 1: Come find us on social media where we answer questions
Speaker 1: and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Instant, and now TikTok.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain
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Speaker 1: find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and
Speaker 1: drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases.
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Speaker 1: manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and
Speaker 1: elect your cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's last
Speaker 1: sustainability to learn more.
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Speaker 5: Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC subject to credit approval
Speaker 5: offer subject to change.
Speaker 6: Terms apply.
Speaker 3: I'm a clean lady, a single mom with three kids
Speaker 3: and an IQ north of one sixty, So helping the
Speaker 3: cops solve a murders literally the easiest part of my day.
Speaker 16: ABC Tuesday, the series premiere of fall's most anticipated new drama,
Speaker 16: High Potential.
Speaker 6: That big brain of hers is going to help us
Speaker 6: close out a lot of cases.
Speaker 16: Haylen Open is the new base of investigation.
Speaker 1: You're a single mom pretending interview. I am not pretending.
Speaker 3: I'm just out here super copping.
Speaker 16: High Potential series premiere Tuesday, ten ninth Central on ABC
Speaker 16: and stream on Hulu