Speaker 1: Elon Musk recently announced that SpaceX is shifting its focus
Speaker 1: away from a self sustaining city on Mars and will
Speaker 1: instead build a self growing city on the Moon. Musk
Speaker 1: explains that building on the Moon makes sense because you
Speaker 1: can launch a rocket to leave for the Moon every
Speaker 1: ten days and it only takes two days to get there.
Speaker 1: But for Mars, because you have to wait for the
Speaker 1: planets to align nicely, you can only leave for a
Speaker 1: trip every twenty six months and it takes six months
Speaker 1: to get there. So he argues, you can go to
Speaker 1: the Moon more often and more quickly, so it makes
Speaker 1: more sense to start there, But orbital mechanics hasn't like
Speaker 1: recently changed. These facts that Musk is stating have been
Speaker 1: true for the history of SpaceX, and of course for
Speaker 1: much longer than that, so why the change in heart
Speaker 1: and fickle human hearts? Aside, how feasible are these plants,
Speaker 1: we'll chat about how difficult it will be to create
Speaker 1: a self growing or a self sustaining city on the
Speaker 1: Moon or Mars, and we'll chat about Musk's plans to
Speaker 1: build AI satellites on the Moon and launch them into
Speaker 1: deep space using a mass driver. Welcome to Daniel and
Speaker 1: Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 2: Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I want
Speaker 2: humanity doccupy the stars, but I want to stay here
Speaker 2: on Earth.
Speaker 1: Hello. I'm Kelly Wainer Smith. I study parasites and space,
Speaker 1: and I'm also cool with humanity occupying the stars as
Speaker 1: long as we do it like ethically and carefully. But
Speaker 1: I am also staying down here on Earth with the
Speaker 1: goats and the moths and my kids and my husband.
Speaker 2: All Right, Well, if neither of us are going to
Speaker 2: Mars or the Moon or the Belt, then my question
Speaker 2: for you today, Kelly, is what is the most dangerous
Speaker 2: or uncomfortable place you'd be willing to visit.
Speaker 1: I'd be willing to visit.
Speaker 2: I mean, you're not taking a ride to the moon.
Speaker 2: Would you take a trip to the bottom of the
Speaker 2: ocean or to Antarctica?
Speaker 1: I would maybe go to Antarctica. It would be it's
Speaker 1: kind of like beautiful there. I could maybe be convinced.
Speaker 1: I would like to visit a desert. The desert has
Speaker 1: a sort of beauty all its own, especially if I
Speaker 1: could ride a camel. That'd be fun.
Speaker 2: Visit the desert. There is the desert such an exotic
Speaker 2: place for you. I mean I live in the desert.
Speaker 1: Oh well, I mean I like a real desert.
Speaker 2: Oh you're looking down your nose at the southwest. Huh.
Speaker 1: I mean you turn a tap and you've got water,
Speaker 1: And so I mean like a desert where like everywhere
Speaker 1: you look their sand dunes, like in the middle of
Speaker 1: the desert.
Speaker 2: You know you heard it here first, folks, Death Valley
Speaker 2: doesn't qualify as a desert. According to Kelly Winersmith.
Speaker 1: All right, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Well what about you?
Speaker 1: What's your answer?
Speaker 2: Having just experienced international business class for the first time,
Speaker 2: I think the answer is nowhere. Like, I really just
Speaker 2: don't want to go anywhere uncomfortable. It's just not fun. Yeah. No,
Speaker 2: I'm going to be a total whimp about it.
Speaker 1: I feel like I have to stay alive for my kids.
Speaker 1: Otherwise my answer could be a bit more exotic. But uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I got to stay alive from my kids right now.
Speaker 2: Like, I even have plausible scientific reasons to go to Antarctica,
Speaker 2: and I know a guy who goes quite often. I
Speaker 2: could probably go if I wanted to, But yeah, just
Speaker 2: no interest in going to Antarctica. It seems miserable.
Speaker 1: I have friends who go to Antarctica and they're like,
Speaker 1: you have no desire to go, And I'm like, oh, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no. I have friends who jumped in the water
Speaker 1: in Antarctica. Scott and Joe, you two are nuts. Nuts.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: Wow. Well, speaking of nuts, today, we're talking about to
Speaker 2: settle the Moon. And if you didn't already pick up
Speaker 2: on it, And if this is your first episode of
Speaker 2: this podcast and you have no idea how Kelly feels
Speaker 2: about settling space, then you might have gotten a hint
Speaker 2: about where this is going.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's right. We are talking today about Elon Musk's
Speaker 1: about face. He has for a long time been talking
Speaker 1: about settling Mars. You can see him wearing his Occupy
Speaker 1: Mars shirts all the time. He's well known for saying
Speaker 1: that he wants to have a self sustaining settlement on
Speaker 1: Mars with a million people in the next twenty to
Speaker 1: thirty years.
Speaker 2: What's his most outrageous prediction for when he's going to
Speaker 2: start sending people to Mars? That like didn't come true?
Speaker 1: I mean, I think not that long ago he was
Speaker 1: predicting that he was going to try to get like
Speaker 1: some people heading Mars word in like I think I
Speaker 1: think we're in a launch window in twenty twenty six,
Speaker 1: so you know, like sometime in the next couple of years,
Speaker 1: Starship would be bringing people Mars word. But I don't
Speaker 1: pay too much attention, you know, Like Musk is well
Speaker 1: known for saying that SpaceX turns impossible into late.
Speaker 2: That's catchy, that's good.
Speaker 1: I like that is good. And SpaceX has done absolutely
Speaker 1: amazing things. Like Zach and I were very frustrated when
Speaker 1: we were writing Soonest, which was a book about emerging technologies,
Speaker 1: and we had this chapter about lowering the cost of
Speaker 1: sending masks to space and SpaceX just kept doing one
Speaker 1: absolutely amazing thing after another, and we kept having to
Speaker 1: update that chapter because we were like, holy cow, they're
Speaker 1: like revolutionizing space launch. As we're writing this chapter.
Speaker 2: They're catching rockets with chopsticks.
Speaker 1: You no, No, it is absolutely amazing. And so I
Speaker 1: every once in a while I'll talk to someone who
Speaker 1: will be like, oh, Musk and SpaceX haven't done anything amazing.
Speaker 1: There have been reusable rockets before, and to me, this
Speaker 1: like borders on conspiracy theory. Ye, Like, yeah, clearly this
Speaker 1: has been revolutionary. You can argue about whether or not
Speaker 1: you're excited about their being more satellite in space, for example,
Speaker 1: But anyway, I think it's been very impressive.
Speaker 2: No, it's important to be clear eyed and to be
Speaker 2: fair about it, and you give credit where credit is due.
Speaker 2: Otherwise you have no credibility. You're just out there to
Speaker 2: bash on a rich nerd. Yeah, but do you have
Speaker 2: any insight into why Mars was the target? I mean,
Speaker 2: Mars has always been further and harder. Why did he
Speaker 2: focus on Mars?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So my sense is that Musk has always been
Speaker 1: into science fiction and he's always been sort of excited
Speaker 1: about big space goals. After he got his money from
Speaker 1: what's now called PayPal, he was excited about Mars. Even then.
Speaker 1: He wanted to send something like a little like greenhouse
Speaker 1: to Mars and then take a video of like a
Speaker 1: plant growing on the Martian surface, and he thought that
Speaker 1: would be really inspirational for people to see a plant
Speaker 1: growing on Mars and like, yes, absolutely, yeah, And so
Speaker 1: my guess is that why he's excited about Mars is
Speaker 1: because Mars actually is one of the best play in
Speaker 1: the Solar System to have a self sustaining settlement for
Speaker 1: humans if you were gonna do it anywhere.
Speaker 2: We hold on that's like it is one of the
Speaker 2: best in the sense that there's only one good one,
Speaker 2: and Mars is like, you know, a distance second. It's
Speaker 2: like saying eating garbage is some of the best food
Speaker 2: you can eat. It was like, yeah, but there there's
Speaker 2: a better option just right here.
Speaker 1: Well, yes, we're so everything else in space sucks so
Speaker 1: much worse than Mars. I mean, like, so Earth is
Speaker 1: perfect and then Mars is then like least bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, next, right, and we think garbage is better than
Speaker 2: eating sewage, and and that's basically the argument. All right,
Speaker 2: So tell us about their recent news about Musk pivoting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there's there's been this recent surprising pivot where
Speaker 1: where now Musk is saying that they're going to have
Speaker 1: a self growing or self sustaining depends on what you know,
Speaker 1: whether you're talking about a tweet or a speech he
Speaker 1: gave recently. And the tweet he said self growing, but
Speaker 1: in a speech I listened to, he's and self sustaining
Speaker 1: city on the Moon in you know, maybe even less
Speaker 1: than ten years. And when you ask him why, he
Speaker 1: says that it's because you can get to the Moon faster.
Speaker 1: So the Moon you can leave every ten days a
Speaker 1: window opens, whereas you can only leave to get to
Speaker 1: Mars once every something like twenty six months, because you
Speaker 1: have to wait until Mars and Earth are like aligned
Speaker 1: in a nice way where you can like make that
Speaker 1: journey the shortest.
Speaker 2: And that's because the Earth and Mars don't orbit the
Speaker 2: Sun in a coordinated way, so sometimes they're like on
Speaker 2: opposite sides of the Sun. It makes no sense to
Speaker 2: try to get to Mars. And sometimes they're lined up
Speaker 2: like one car passing the other one or on a race.
Speaker 1: Truck exactly right. And the Moon is nice enough to
Speaker 1: always be about the same distance away from us at
Speaker 1: all times.
Speaker 2: The Sun never comes between the Earth and the Moon.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 1: I know, it's very convenient. It's very convenient.
Speaker 2: That would be very cool to see though, But yeah, celestially,
Speaker 2: that just never, that's right.
Speaker 1: That's right. And when that window does open up and
Speaker 1: you leave for the Moon, it takes you like about
Speaker 1: two days maybe a little more to get there, whereas
Speaker 1: if you leave for Mars, it takes you between six
Speaker 1: to nine months to get there. Yeah, And so you
Speaker 1: can leave for the Moon a lot more often, and
Speaker 1: you get there a lot quicker.
Speaker 2: But clarify for us the distinction you made between self
Speaker 2: sustaining and self growing. It's one of them like a plant,
Speaker 2: and the other one's what's a distinction?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been trying to figure that out as well.
Speaker 1: So self sustaining is the word that he tends to
Speaker 1: use for Mars, and what he means by that is,
Speaker 1: if something catastrophic happens to Earth, Mars would be fine
Speaker 1: on its own. Makes sense, and I, you know, so
Speaker 1: I wrote this book called A City on Mars where
Speaker 1: I sort of critique his timeline for how long it
Speaker 1: would take to get to self sustaining. I don't think
Speaker 1: you could do that in twenty to thirty years. But
Speaker 1: he first started using this word self growing on the Moon,
Speaker 1: And when we start talking about the Moon in a
Speaker 1: little bit later in the show, I want to dig
Speaker 1: into why I think he may have used self growing
Speaker 1: initially instead of self sustaining, because the Moon lacks a
Speaker 1: lot of things that I think that you would need
Speaker 1: to have a self sustaining society, because it turns out
Speaker 1: the Moon is a really bad place to live and
Speaker 1: it's lacking stuff like carbon. It's got some carbon, but
Speaker 1: not a lot, and we're carbon based like organisms, and
Speaker 1: so like even just the basic building blocks that you
Speaker 1: need to make humans, we're gonna have to bring with
Speaker 1: us to the Moon. And so I'm guessing that's why
Speaker 1: he used self growing initially. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe
Speaker 1: you could grow businesses there, but self sustaining would take
Speaker 1: a lot of work. What's interesting to me is that
Speaker 1: Musk is saying, like, oh, we can get to the
Speaker 1: moon faster, and that's why we got to start there.
Speaker 1: But this has always been true.
Speaker 2: It's not like the moon was recently moved to get
Speaker 2: easier to.
Speaker 1: Get to right right, And I don't think that Musk
Speaker 1: like woke up ten days ago. We're recording this in
Speaker 1: like mid Febuerbruary, and he, you know, he said this
Speaker 1: in like early ish February. I don't think that Musk
Speaker 1: woke up like ten days ago and was like, oh,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, the moon is closer, and like I
Speaker 1: don't and so like why the shift? And so there's
Speaker 1: loads of people who are speculating on the cause of
Speaker 1: the shift. I don't think we should speculate a ton
Speaker 1: I don't want to spend a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: breath on guessing. But many people have noted that Blue
Speaker 1: Origin is finally starting to catch up to SpaceX after
Speaker 1: being behind for a long time. Blue Origin is now
Speaker 1: starting to talk about doing more activity on the Moon
Speaker 1: and having like a lunar lander. And this is at
Speaker 1: a time when there's rumors that SpaceX is going to
Speaker 1: want to start doing their initial public offering, so becoming
Speaker 1: a public company. And so maybe Musk is looking for
Speaker 1: some way to do something impactful in the near term,
Speaker 1: and maybe the Moon is looking like something that that
Speaker 1: he can do something exciting sooner than he can do
Speaker 1: something exciting related to Mars. I don't know, what do
Speaker 1: you think.
Speaker 2: I think the probably unfair and least charitable interpretation is
Speaker 2: that after the movie The Martian, he knew everybody was
Speaker 2: excited about Mars, and so he rode that wave and
Speaker 2: now everybody's thinking about the Moon, and he's got a
Speaker 2: public offering coming up, and he's got to pump that stock.
Speaker 2: And that's probably unfair, but that's like the least charitable interpretation.
Speaker 2: But as you said, we can't get into his head,
Speaker 2: so instead, let's just think about the science first tell
Speaker 2: us how feasible was the plan to go to Mars anyway?
Speaker 1: Not super feasible or you know, so maybe he would
Speaker 1: have been able to get starship there. So I'm not
Speaker 1: going to dig too much into the rocket plan. But
Speaker 1: what really got me frustrated was this plan that we're
Speaker 1: going to have a self sustaining settlement in twenty to
Speaker 1: thirty years, which implied that you were going to have
Speaker 1: a million human bodies on Mars way before we knew
Speaker 1: if that was safe or not.
Speaker 2: Why do you need a million for self sustaining Why
Speaker 2: is that a requirement?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so a million is the number that Musk came
Speaker 1: up with, not me. Oh, I guess you thought that
Speaker 1: a million was the number that you would need to
Speaker 1: have enough people to do all of the jobs that
Speaker 1: would be necessary to have a self sustaining like economy,
Speaker 1: and enough people to have enough genetic diversity. I would
Speaker 1: note that when we were doing research, we felt like
Speaker 1: a million was an underestimate for all of the different
Speaker 1: kinds of jobs you would need if you were going
Speaker 1: to have the kind of economy that would also be
Speaker 1: making things like computer chips, which you would need to
Speaker 1: keep a complicated habitat that runs on technology on an
Speaker 1: alien planet running This is a.
Speaker 2: Really fascinating thing to think about, because the number of
Speaker 2: people involved in like your daily life is huge. You know,
Speaker 2: the number of people who like make pencils and like
Speaker 2: make toilet paper and transport all that stuff. Like, the
Speaker 2: number of people who touch your life is enormous. But
Speaker 2: we've sort of build our society that way. We've assumed
Speaker 2: that everybody's here and then we can transport stuff. If
Speaker 2: you intentionally built a society that had like fewer choices
Speaker 2: of pencils and only one kind of toilet paper because
Speaker 2: you wanted to simplify it, you're saying even then you
Speaker 2: couldn't winnow it down to less than about a million people.
Speaker 1: Maybe, but like I guess you'd have you could say,
Speaker 1: you know, we want fewer medical specialists and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: But you know, on Earth you can make some winnowing
Speaker 1: because you can like walk outside and take a deep
Speaker 1: breath and you don't have someone who needs to manufacture
Speaker 1: the air, for example. But there are some you know,
Speaker 1: additional things that you absolutely have to have in an
Speaker 1: environment where technology is required to keep you from dying,
Speaker 1: where like you need a spacesuit in order to walk outside,
Speaker 1: because otherwise the nitrogen is going to boil out of
Speaker 1: your blood and kill you.
Speaker 2: So you need, for example, somebody who can fix a spacesuit,
Speaker 2: and somebody to manufacture their pair patches for the space
Speaker 2: suits and all that stuff. All right, somebody, let's start
Speaker 2: with the pros, right, what are the advantages of going
Speaker 2: to Mars. Let's steal man this case?
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, okay, So you wanted to know why it
Speaker 1: is Musk excited about Mars, and it's because Mars actually
Speaker 1: has a lot of pros if you exclude the Earth.
Speaker 1: So Mars has plenty of water. It's got lots of
Speaker 1: water at the poles. It even has a lot of
Speaker 1: water at the equator if you're willing to dig down
Speaker 1: a little bit.
Speaker 2: And this is cool science.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: We didn't know that Mars had water on it until
Speaker 2: pretty recently. That's exciting.
Speaker 1: I mean, we thought Mars had loads of water and
Speaker 1: that there were canals shuttling the water around for a while.
Speaker 1: But but yes, once we dispelled ourselves of that illusion, Yes,
Speaker 1: we did recently learn that Mars had plenty of water.
Speaker 1: Mars has some atmosphere, and it has a lot of
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide, and that you know, kind of sounds like
Speaker 1: a bummer as an organism that doesn't love breathing carbon dioxide.
Speaker 1: But plants like to breathe carbon dioxide. That's good news
Speaker 1: for our plants.
Speaker 2: And I like to eat plants.
Speaker 1: And I like to eat plants too, and you can,
Speaker 1: you know, break it up. And there's oxygen in there,
Speaker 1: which is a gas that we do like to breathe.
Speaker 1: There's also lots of there's lots of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon,
Speaker 1: and nitrogen on Mars. Those are all good things that
Speaker 1: we can use for you know, for us and for
Speaker 1: our plants. The climate is okay relative to other places
Speaker 1: in space. So the equator at summertime is about twenty
Speaker 1: one degrees celsius, which is about room temperature. Okay, so
Speaker 1: you know that's okay, we can work with it.
Speaker 2: Still not sunbathing though.
Speaker 1: No, no, you're not sunbathing. And you know that one
Speaker 1: percent of Earth's atmosphere that we talked about, like that's
Speaker 1: still thin enough that you can't step outside without a spacesuit.
Speaker 1: As we talked about, you you would die. And it's
Speaker 1: got a day that's kind of earth like. So about
Speaker 1: twenty four point seven hours, So that's kind of nice.
Speaker 2: And it's got a red sky with blue sunsets. That's
Speaker 2: pretty cool.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, so it's got some some pros.
Speaker 2: All right, we're doing our best here to make the
Speaker 2: positive case.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right, but it also has some cons.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we've already talked about the fact that it's really
Speaker 1: far away. It also has only forty percent of Earth's gravity,
Speaker 1: and we don't know how big of a problem that's
Speaker 1: going to be for human muscles and bones. There's some
Speaker 1: reason to worry that that might not be enough for,
Speaker 1: you know, to keep for example, moms muscles and bones
Speaker 1: strong enough to get her through labor, and that might
Speaker 1: not be enough for a fetus to develop normally. We
Speaker 1: just really don't have enough data to answer questions like that.
Speaker 2: And what about childhood, right like, what happens to a
Speaker 2: child who grows up in low gravity? Did their bones
Speaker 2: develop weirdly? Do they get cancer? Does something else happen?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Right, And we've talked about this in past episodes,
Speaker 1: so I'm not going to be labor it too much.
Speaker 1: Folks can go back through our archive to find those episodes.
Speaker 1: But you know, in my mind, we need to do
Speaker 1: a lot of additional research before we send a million
Speaker 1: people to Mars to figure out the answers to those questions, which,
Speaker 1: to be honest, is one of the reasons why I'm
Speaker 1: sort of excited about this pivot to the moon. We
Speaker 1: could use it as an opportunity to get those data
Speaker 1: before we start sending people to Mars to do repert
Speaker 1: and stuff. We you know, we could like slow down
Speaker 1: and make this transition a little bit more ethically in.
Speaker 2: What scenario is raising children in low gravity to see
Speaker 2: what happens ethical? Like, how do you figure that out?
Speaker 1: So? Okay, So if you slowed down and you decided,
Speaker 1: in addition to the AI satellites that Musk wants to
Speaker 1: be making, which we're going to talk about a little
Speaker 1: bit later, you also tacked on a biological research station.
Speaker 1: You could start with a colony of rodents, and you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you give those rodents a decade, and if the
Speaker 1: rodents all seem super healthy, maybe then you could let
Speaker 1: people bring their dogs, and maybe you could let some
Speaker 1: of those dogs have puppies, and if they seemed fine,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe you could very carefully monitor some pregnancies
Speaker 1: of humans, and if anything looked bad at any point,
Speaker 1: you could send those people back to Earth immediately. But
Speaker 1: if the pregnancy seemed to be developing normally, you could,
Speaker 1: you know, let it progress and very carefully watch how
Speaker 1: things were going on the Moon, and you could, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of scale up that way.
Speaker 2: But even in that scenario, you are experimenting on fetuses,
Speaker 2: or on babies or on children. But I guess that's
Speaker 2: just standard protocol. Right. We do that also here on
Speaker 2: Earth when we're testing out new medications or new.
Speaker 1: Treatments, right, yeah, right, And I agree, But I do
Speaker 1: feel like there's a gradient of risk. And if you've
Speaker 1: done a lot of experiments on animals, you can at
Speaker 1: some point say we have reduced, yeah, the risk to
Speaker 1: a point that we feel comfortable with. But I agree,
Speaker 1: you are still taking a risk at some point.
Speaker 2: Okay, So reproduction is tricky. What else is hard? On Mars?
Speaker 1: Growing food is hard? So the surface of Mars is
Speaker 1: covered in a jagged dust called regolith, and that jagged
Speaker 1: dust also has a chemical called perchlorates, and those perchlorates
Speaker 1: mess with your thyroid and the hormones produced by your thyroid,
Speaker 1: and it messes up nervous system development in fetuses and
Speaker 1: things like metabolism in adults. And if you try to
Speaker 1: grow food like plants in that dirt, the prochlorates get
Speaker 1: sucked into the plants, and so we're gonna have to
Speaker 1: be very careful about that. And we we in general,
Speaker 1: need to learn more about how we would grow food
Speaker 1: in space, and how we would grow food in a
Speaker 1: way that would also like generate oxygen and create sort
Speaker 1: of like loops that would recycle our waste while growing food,
Speaker 1: and closed loop ecosystems is what it's called, and we
Speaker 1: need more research there.
Speaker 2: All right, So jagged poisoned dust in everything bad and.
Speaker 1: Dust storms that kick it up and cover the whole
Speaker 1: planet in it for weeks sometimes at a time, which
Speaker 1: is going to make solar panels a difficult way to
Speaker 1: power your settlements.
Speaker 2: I saw that in the Martian.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you did see that in the Martian, which means
Speaker 1: we probably want to figure out portable nuclear reactors before
Speaker 1: we get out there, which folks are working on, but
Speaker 1: it's not quite ready yet.
Speaker 2: Although some of the rovers on Mars are nuclear powered,
Speaker 2: yes they are. So we have done nuclear power on Mars,
Speaker 2: which is amazing as a species.
Speaker 1: Like wow, Yes, so they're not nuclear reactors. They're like
Speaker 1: thermo couples or something. So they've got like a little
Speaker 1: piece of nuclear decaying material which provides warmth and a
Speaker 1: little bit of energy. I think they often also have
Speaker 1: some solar panels coupled to the system. But this is
Speaker 1: not like a nuclear reactor that you can like turn
Speaker 1: up to get more energy and down to get less energy.
Speaker 1: It's not the kind of thing that could power an
Speaker 1: entire habitat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's more like a nuclear battery than a nuclear
Speaker 2: power plant.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: We have a whole episode on nuclear space ships and
Speaker 2: nuclear power in space. Check that out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that is like a subsample of the many
Speaker 1: challenges we need to overcome to have a self sustaining
Speaker 1: settlement on Mars. Let's not be labor the point too much.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of work that still needs to be done.
Speaker 1: I don't think we could do it in twenty to
Speaker 1: thirty years. But let's take a break, and when we
Speaker 1: get back, let's talk about the feasibility of Musk's new
Speaker 1: Moon plan, his new lunar ambitions. All right, we're back,
Speaker 1: and we are talking about Musk's lunar ambitions. Musk is
Speaker 1: now heading to the Moon instead of Mars, or at
Speaker 1: least he's going to the Moon first. He still plans
Speaker 1: on going to Mars. I noted in the last segment
Speaker 1: that I'm actually kind of excited because going to the
Speaker 1: Moon first gives us some time to learn some good
Speaker 1: skills and practice with some technology before we go to Mars,
Speaker 1: which is a much more like dangerous, far away place.
Speaker 1: Whether or not will make the most of this opportunity
Speaker 1: remains to be seen, because it seems like Musk does
Speaker 1: sort of want to rush through things. But we could
Speaker 1: learn from this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the big arguments in your book essentially
Speaker 2: is that we're not ready to go to Mars and
Speaker 2: we need to fill in a lot more staff to
Speaker 2: get there, and experiments on the Moon and in near
Speaker 2: Earth are part of those steps. So in that sense, hey,
Speaker 2: maybe you must read your book and he's listening to
Speaker 2: your advice.
Speaker 1: H I doubt it, highly doubt it, but you know,
Speaker 1: if so, that'd be great. Yeah, So the Moon does
Speaker 1: have some pros, and this is what Musk is pointing out.
Speaker 1: He's pointing out that you know, the moon is celestially speaking,
Speaker 1: pretty close. It's three hundred and eighty five thousand kilometers
Speaker 1: away and pretty much always the same distance away. That's
Speaker 1: pretty nice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's always available right.
Speaker 1: Year round, yep. And so you can get resupply ships
Speaker 1: there quickly. You can get medical advice almost in live time,
Speaker 1: whereas Mars is so far away that there's a three
Speaker 1: to twenty two minute communication delay depending on how far
Speaker 1: away Mars is from Earth at the time. And that
Speaker 1: also means that you can like control robots from Earth
Speaker 1: in like pretty much lifetime. That's pretty great.
Speaker 2: In fact, I think about the service of the Moon's
Speaker 2: sort of the same way I think about Antarctica, because
Speaker 2: like you can get to Antarctica, but you can't get
Speaker 2: there like this afternoon. Yeah, you know, there's like a
Speaker 2: few planes and a few boats, like it takes a
Speaker 2: couple of days. And if you're in Antarctica and you
Speaker 2: need to get home like asap, you can't like be
Speaker 2: home for emergency surgery that evening, right. It's a lot
Speaker 2: of planning, and so in the same way, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you can get there, it's just not easy.
Speaker 1: With the Apollo thirteen crew, like things went wrong and
Speaker 1: they were able to like get help and turn around
Speaker 1: and get back in time, and everyone survived. And then
Speaker 1: in Antarctica, there was like a woman who figured out
Speaker 1: that she had breast cancer. She was a doctor and
Speaker 1: she was able to like do a biopsy. She realized
Speaker 1: she had breast cancer, and she ended up getting like
Speaker 1: saved by a rescue mission that was able to come
Speaker 1: like towards the end of the season.
Speaker 2: Right, do you know this story, Yeah, this is amazing.
Speaker 2: This is Jerry Nielsen, and she like did a biopsy
Speaker 2: on herself in Antarctica and like started treating herself with chemotherapy.
Speaker 2: She was then evacuated, but like they couldn't get her
Speaker 2: out very easily because like you can reach Antarctica much
Speaker 2: more easily during some parts of the year than others.
Speaker 2: And so they sent a plane several weeks ahead of
Speaker 2: schedule in this crazy weather to bring her back and
Speaker 2: they were able to evacuate her back to the US
Speaker 2: for surgery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, like it's difficult, but you have some options,
Speaker 1: whereas it like for Mars, you're just one hundred percent
Speaker 1: out of luck. Yeah, although there was that one Russian
Speaker 1: surgeon who did his own appendectomy in Antarctica. Because he
Speaker 1: couldn't get out on time like that is pretty hardcore.
Speaker 1: I would just be dead anyway, all right. So the
Speaker 1: Moon also has some cool stuff like silicon, aluminum, magnesium, iron, titanium,
Speaker 1: things that might be helpful for building stuff like solar panels.
Speaker 2: It's also helium three on the moon, isn't there.
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Correct, You don't sound excited about that. Why not, Kelly?
Speaker 2: Everybody talks about helium three a fusion fuel.
Speaker 1: That, yes, and maybe one day helium three will be
Speaker 1: a helpful fusion fuel on the Moon. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's worth digging through tons of regolith on the Moon
Speaker 1: to collect helium three for nuclear reactors that we aren't quite.
Speaker 2: Using yet or don't know how to build.
Speaker 1: Or don't know how to build. But some people disagree.
Speaker 2: With me, and quick primer there. Helium three is a
Speaker 2: fuel for fusion. Fusion is not a technology we've made
Speaker 2: to work here on the surface of the Earth with
Speaker 2: all of our infrastructure. We might one day get it
Speaker 2: to work, and we might one day be able to
Speaker 2: do it on the Moon. But helium three based fusion,
Speaker 2: although it has some advantages, is also harder to get
Speaker 2: to work. So we're talking about an extra hard version
Speaker 2: of fusion that we haven't made work here on Earth yet.
Speaker 1: Even when we're doing the easy version.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The Moon also has lava tubes, and lava tubes are
Speaker 1: kind of cool because when you're underground, that protects you
Speaker 1: from space radiation. It also protects you from impacts from like,
Speaker 1: you know, space debris that might fall onto the surface
Speaker 1: of the Moon and could maybe puncture your habitat, and
Speaker 1: temperature swings are a little bit less extreme in lava tubes.
Speaker 1: And speaking of those temperature extremes, let's go ahead and
Speaker 1: jump to the con because the Moon has a lot
Speaker 1: of them.
Speaker 2: I love how you put lava tubes as a positive,
Speaker 2: like lava tubes, Like, who wants to live in a
Speaker 2: lava tube? That doesn't sound like cozy or appealing or
Speaker 2: attractive to me at all. So like the fact that
Speaker 2: you have to put it in the pro category just
Speaker 2: tells you, like there's not a whole lot of pros
Speaker 2: in that category.
Speaker 1: No. No, I mean I think it would be cool
Speaker 1: to go in a lunar lava tube to like explore once,
Speaker 1: but I wouldn't want to live there.
Speaker 2: No, I mean, I don't even like going in caves.
Speaker 1: I'm claustrophobic. I went in a cave once and I
Speaker 1: was like, I need to get out of here.
Speaker 2: And then once you read the story by the guy
Speaker 2: who like crawled into the cave of the wrong direction
Speaker 2: and got stuck upside down.
Speaker 1: Oh no, stuff, Yeah, you don't want to see. Moving on,
Speaker 1: Moving on. So the temperature at the lunar equator swings
Speaker 1: from negative one hundred and thirty degrees celsius to positive
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty degrees celsius.
Speaker 2: Wait, by the fundamental theorem of calculus, that means at
Speaker 2: some moment it must be room temperature.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, there is a moment where you'll be like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's comfortable before you either freeze to death or like
Speaker 1: overheat to death.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 1: Yes, so sorry, it could kill you in either direction,
Speaker 1: which is lovely. The daytimes last the equivalent of two
Speaker 1: weeks here on Earth, and the night times also last
Speaker 1: the equivalent of two weeks.
Speaker 2: Why is that two weeks? Is that because the moon
Speaker 2: is tidly locked to the Earth.
Speaker 1: Probably, how about you explain that physicist friend of mine.
Speaker 2: So the reason a day lasts for two weeks on
Speaker 2: the moon is that the moon takes four weeks to
Speaker 2: orbit the Earth, and it's timely locked to the Earth.
Speaker 2: And so what that means is that essentially takes four
Speaker 2: weeks for the Moon to spin relative to the Sun.
Speaker 2: And so that's why day lasts for two weeks because
Speaker 2: relative to the Sun, the moon spins once every four
Speaker 2: weeks because it's connected to the Earth, and it takes
Speaker 2: four weeks to orbit the Earth.
Speaker 1: Excellent. That's a long time though to be at negative
Speaker 1: one hundred and thirty degrees celsius, yes, or at a
Speaker 1: positive one hundred and twenty degrees celsius. It's a long
Speaker 1: time to be at either of those temperatures. Sounds real bad.
Speaker 1: Another thing that sounds real bad is that if you
Speaker 1: are trying to create a self sustaining settlement, then you
Speaker 1: are going to need carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus. And
Speaker 1: the surface of the Moon is low on all of
Speaker 1: those things.
Speaker 2: Why do you need nitrogen and phosphorus. I don't like
Speaker 2: buy those at the store every day.
Speaker 1: Well, that's because Earth has plenty of those things, and
Speaker 1: plants suck those things up and you get those from plants.
Speaker 1: And if you want to grow plants, which you probably do,
Speaker 1: because we like eating those things. You're going to need
Speaker 1: to bring tons of that stuff with you to create
Speaker 1: your self sustaining settlement. And right now, probably the most
Speaker 1: concentrated source of carbon on the Moon are the ninety
Speaker 1: six bags of feces, vomit, and urine that were left
Speaker 1: behind by the Apollo astronauts on the surface of the Moon.
Speaker 1: But those belong to NASA.
Speaker 2: Oh, the misfertilizer.
Speaker 1: No, you are not supposed to grow tomatoes in Neil
Speaker 1: Armstrong's Long Lost Bowel movements.
Speaker 2: Wait, so we need fertilizer to grow any food on
Speaker 2: the Moon, which means we need to bring all that
Speaker 2: fertilizer with us.
Speaker 1: Yes, or you could import it. You could import it.
Speaker 1: You could you know, you could put it on a rocket,
Speaker 1: or you could find it somewhere else in space and
Speaker 1: bring it from there to the Moon. But the Moon,
Speaker 1: the Moon ain't got it. Like you know, there's there's
Speaker 1: some ammonia in the water at the poles, which we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about. Ammonia has nitrogen, and so you
Speaker 1: can get some nitrogen, but it's not going to be
Speaker 1: enough to create a self sustaining settlement. It's not going
Speaker 1: to be enough to make up for the fact that
Speaker 1: you're going to need to grow a whole lot of
Speaker 1: plants to support people.
Speaker 2: So in the spirit a steel manning Musk's plan, has
Speaker 2: he elaborated or even hinted on how he's going to
Speaker 2: solve any of these problems.
Speaker 1: No, not as far as I've seen. But let's go
Speaker 1: ahead and dig into a few more of the things
Speaker 1: that are going to make living on the Moon difficult,
Speaker 1: and then we'll get into some of the plan that
Speaker 1: he has elaborated on so far. All right, First of all,
Speaker 1: I want to note that those temperature swings are going
Speaker 1: to be bad for equipment as well as people, so
Speaker 1: building factories on the Moon is going to be difficult.
Speaker 1: Another thing that's going to make building on the Moon
Speaker 1: difficult is going to be that regolith. So, just like
Speaker 1: on Mars, the Moon has jagged regolith, but on the
Speaker 1: Moon it also tends to cling. So the solar wind
Speaker 1: makes it electrostatic, and it also makes it sort of
Speaker 1: levitate a little bit, and it sticks to stuff, and
Speaker 1: one the stuff it sticks to gets a little bit darker,
Speaker 1: so it tends to absorb heat and make things overheat
Speaker 1: a little bit. We think that one of the Soviet
Speaker 1: rovers lunicod overheated because it got some regolith on top
Speaker 1: of its solar panels, and then everything overheated and it's
Speaker 1: super abrasive, and so the astronauts would complain that if
Speaker 1: they got it on, like they had these little watches
Speaker 1: that also had their like instructions for stuff they were
Speaker 1: supposed to do for the day, and if they wiped
Speaker 1: the regolith off of it, it scratched it so they
Speaker 1: could no longer read what was written on their watches,
Speaker 1: and so that's also going to be bad for equipment,
Speaker 1: also bad for humans. There's concern that if you breathe
Speaker 1: it in, it's going to scratch your lungs and cause
Speaker 1: stone grinder's disease, which essentially means you get scars in
Speaker 1: your lungs until you can't breathe anymore. Bad. Bad. The
Speaker 1: Moon has pretty much no atmosphere. We call it an exosphere.
Speaker 1: It's like essentially a negligible atmosphere. Although physicists would be like,
Speaker 1: it still exists.
Speaker 2: Bah, physicists, Well, there is a distinction there. An atmosphere
Speaker 2: is dense enough that the particles interact, they bounce off
Speaker 2: each other, et cetera exosphere the particles are there, but
Speaker 2: there's such low density that they basically never interact with
Speaker 2: each other.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, there you go. So they're there, but
Speaker 1: they're sort of negligible from the perspective of human health.
Speaker 1: You're you can't breathe out there.
Speaker 2: For sure, and there's no protection from cosmic rays.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, yes, right, yeah, so you are getting hit by
Speaker 1: all the radiation space has to offer. The Moon has
Speaker 1: one sixth of Earth's gravity, so your bones and your
Speaker 1: muscles are probably degrading, which over time could be a
Speaker 1: big problem. But again we don't really understand that very well.
Speaker 1: And the Moon has water but not yeay, but not much,
Speaker 1: not much, and that water is very concentrated. So like, yes,
Speaker 1: there is technically some water all over the surface tied
Speaker 1: up in that regolith, that dirt that's all over the surface,
Speaker 1: But technically concrete also has some water in it, and
Speaker 1: concrete is wetter than regolith.
Speaker 2: Concrete doesn't seem very wet to me.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right, So you're probably not gonna want
Speaker 1: to be extracting water from the regolith. But at the poles,
Speaker 1: you have these areas where there are craters and on
Speaker 1: the rims of the craters you could set up solar panels,
Speaker 1: and that's great because you might remember that at the
Speaker 1: equator you've got this two week stretch of darkness in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night, so that's probably not a
Speaker 1: great place for solar panels. But if you are at
Speaker 1: the poles, over eighty percent of the time, you get
Speaker 1: sunlight at the poles, especially if you're up on these rims,
Speaker 1: so that's good for solar panels. And then inside of
Speaker 1: the craters you get these areas that are permanently dark,
Speaker 1: and there's water inside of those permanently dark craters. That
Speaker 1: water has some stuff in it like methane, hydrogen sulfide,
Speaker 1: and ammonia. Well you don't want to drink those, but
Speaker 1: there's some carbon in there and some nitrogen in there,
Speaker 1: so those are things that you could extract and use.
Speaker 1: There's not going to be enough to sustain like a
Speaker 1: million person settlements with the carbon and the nitrogen in there,
Speaker 1: but you know you could you could still use some
Speaker 1: of it. But once you extract it, then now you've
Speaker 1: got water to drink or you could break it up,
Speaker 1: and you've got some oxygen to breathe at that point.
Speaker 1: But there's not a lot of water in there, So, like,
Speaker 1: have you ever heard of Sardis Lake in Mississippi?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: No, Yeah, no one has because this is like a
Speaker 1: tiny lake that's not worth knowing about. All.
Speaker 2: What if we have listeners who live next to Sardist
Speaker 2: Lake and now you're insulting them.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, I'm sorry to people who enjoy Sardis Lake.
Speaker 1: I hear there's bass there, and I like bass a lot,
Speaker 1: But this is a human made lake that most people
Speaker 1: haven't heard of because it's nowhere near as big as,
Speaker 1: for example, the Great Lakes. Yeah, and the amount of
Speaker 1: water that's estimated to be in all of the craters
Speaker 1: is ten percent of the water that's estimated to be
Speaker 1: in this lake that most of us haven't heard of.
Speaker 2: So it's the point.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yes, so it's not a lot of water.
Speaker 2: So you're saying if you took all the water on
Speaker 2: the Moon and put it somewhere in Michigan, it would
Speaker 2: be smaller than a lake nobody's ever heard of except
Speaker 2: for the wonderful people who live next to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's Mississippi, but I may have I used the
Speaker 1: wrong abbreviation in our outline Mississippi. But anyway, yes, that's
Speaker 1: that's the point I was trying to make, right.
Speaker 2: Okay, So there's not a whole lot of water on
Speaker 2: the moon.
Speaker 1: Not a whole lot of water on the Moon. And
Speaker 1: these craters of eternal darkness, which is what we call
Speaker 1: these craters that have the water, they make up zero
Speaker 1: point one percent of the lunar surface, so very small percent.
Speaker 1: And those peaks, those rims where you can put your
Speaker 1: solar panel. We call these the peaks of eternal light,
Speaker 1: which is over selling it a little bit because they've
Speaker 1: got light like eighty percent of the time. But they
Speaker 1: are one one hundred billionth of the lunar surface, so
Speaker 1: about two tennis courts. And these are the best places
Speaker 1: on the moon because you've got, you know, water in
Speaker 1: the best places for solar panels. And the reason you
Speaker 1: want to know that is because this is probably where
Speaker 1: Musk is going to want to go. And I was
Speaker 1: watching a Chinese news channel and what they were talking
Speaker 1: about was, hey, this is where we want to go.
Speaker 1: Do we have to worry about Musk going there now too?
Speaker 1: And this is also where NASA wants to go. And
Speaker 1: so now you have this very small surface area that
Speaker 1: is where everybody wants to go. And you know, this
Speaker 1: program that I was watching was saying, like was part
Speaker 1: of this new space race, and so you know, now
Speaker 1: we've got this new space race and everybody trying to
Speaker 1: go to the same places on the Moon, and that
Speaker 1: is a little bit concerning to me in particular.
Speaker 2: All right, so there are a few places where you
Speaker 2: can get silli power eighty percent of the time. How
Speaker 2: does that reconcile with your physicist explanation for why the
Speaker 2: moon is in darkness for two weeks of time?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, great question. So if you are at
Speaker 1: the equator, you get two weeks of night and then
Speaker 1: two weeks of daytime. But at the poles, the Moon
Speaker 1: has a different tilt than you get with the Earth,
Speaker 1: and so the sun sort of glances off of it
Speaker 1: in a slightly different way. And you know, and on
Speaker 1: Earth you get like different day lengths. At the poles,
Speaker 1: then you get at the equator, and these rims also
Speaker 1: lift you up off the surface a little bit, and
Speaker 1: so you've got solar panels up on poles, up on
Speaker 1: top of the rims, and in that way you can
Speaker 1: catch the sunlight as it glances off of the poles
Speaker 1: about eighty percent of the time.
Speaker 2: All right, So solar power is tricky. There's only a
Speaker 2: few places you really want to do it. Fusion is
Speaker 2: maybe impractical even here on Earth. What about good old
Speaker 2: nuclear power. We know how to do that, We've been
Speaker 2: doing it for decades. Can't we build small modular reactors
Speaker 2: and send them to the moon.
Speaker 1: Yeah? Sure, those portable nuclear reactors would be helpful on
Speaker 1: the moon as well. We don't quite have those ready
Speaker 1: to go to the moon yet, to power like factories
Speaker 1: like Musk is talking about, but people are working on
Speaker 1: stuff like that, and that would be helpful. And so
Speaker 1: I guess the question is, do we imagine that we
Speaker 1: could have a lunar city that would be self sustaining
Speaker 1: in ten years? I think ten years? Is it really optimistic? Because, like,
Speaker 1: I mean, when you are talking about temperature changes that
Speaker 1: are like two hundred and fifty degrees celsius, I mean
Speaker 1: the amount at which metal like expands and contracts at
Speaker 1: those temperature swings, and like, you know how difficult it
Speaker 1: is to get lubricants that don't like boil off at
Speaker 1: that high temperature or like freeze at that low temperature.
Speaker 1: There's just a lot of engineering challenges when you're working
Speaker 1: at those sorts of temperature swings. I think we're not
Speaker 1: going to overcome all of those challenges in ten years,
Speaker 1: but you know, we could start building something in ten
Speaker 1: years and that would be kind of fun.
Speaker 2: All right, It does seem like this is a hard problem,
Speaker 2: but remember SpaceX has done amazing things. What do you
Speaker 2: think is the best way to attack each of these problems?
Speaker 2: Like what is our best case scenario? Like for nuclear power,
Speaker 2: we said small modulu reactors that might be possible. What
Speaker 2: about the other challenges, what's the best case scenario for
Speaker 2: each one?
Speaker 1: All right? Well, so first I'll note that like Starship
Speaker 1: was built so that you can move a lot of
Speaker 1: mass fairly cheap, right, and so they could get things
Speaker 1: like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus stuff that they need to the Moon.
Speaker 1: It would be expensive, but they are maybe in a
Speaker 1: good position to move a lot of mass to the
Speaker 1: Moon to make it more habitable.
Speaker 2: I mean must talks about like daily launches or multiple
Speaker 2: launches a day, like really getting a pipeline up to
Speaker 2: the moon.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, okay, and if that happens, you could get
Speaker 1: some mass there. Again, I do think that would still
Speaker 1: be expensive, but let's assume that that can happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so all right, you could build factories in lava tubes
Speaker 1: and that would protect you from the radiation, which you
Speaker 1: and I recently had a whole episode about how radiation
Speaker 1: is not just dangerous for human bodies but also bad
Speaker 1: for our equipment. So you're definitely going to need to
Speaker 1: protect yourself from radiation.
Speaker 2: And does lava tubes also solve the temperature problem if
Speaker 2: you're not on the surface, Is it more reasonable?
Speaker 1: Yes, it is more reasonable. Yes, that results in milder
Speaker 1: temperature swings if you're undergrad And it solves a lot
Speaker 1: of the regolith problem because as the lava went through
Speaker 1: it fused the regolith and so now you don't have
Speaker 1: a lot of dust that's going to be getting into
Speaker 1: your equipment and stuff like that. You still have the
Speaker 1: problem of needing to figure out how you like lower
Speaker 1: everything into the lava tube. You know, like we're not
Speaker 1: super experienced with moving around on the surface of the
Speaker 1: Moon and now we're like lunar splunking, But like that's
Speaker 1: kind of a cool problem to solve, and so working
Speaker 1: in the lava tubes could be you know cool, and
Speaker 1: like if you could even like fuse the inside of
Speaker 1: a lava tube and put an airlock in there, like
Speaker 1: maybe you could create an environment where you could walk
Speaker 1: around without spacesuits. If you could, you know, create a
Speaker 1: pressurized environment inside of part of a lava tube.
Speaker 2: Maybe yeah, all right, Well, I don't want to go
Speaker 2: into a cave here on Earth. So caves on the
Speaker 2: Moon don't sound very cozy, but they do sound better
Speaker 2: than the surface, I'll admit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are braver people out there than you and
Speaker 1: me think. So, yeah, that's right, that's right, low bar.
Speaker 2: But exactly, well, what about the water problem? I mean,
Speaker 2: the Solar System is filled with water. There's huge chunks
Speaker 2: of ice just out there. Certainly we don't need to
Speaker 2: launch water from the surface of the Earth climbing up
Speaker 2: the gravity, well do we.
Speaker 1: Nope, that's true. And a lot of the asteroid mining
Speaker 1: community has been excited about collecting water from asteroids and
Speaker 1: figuring out how to extract it from asteroids and then
Speaker 1: you know, selling it maybe to the International Space Station,
Speaker 1: or maybe they could sell it to the Lunar SpaceX facility,
Speaker 1: and so water could come from other locations in space
Speaker 1: rather than pulling it out of our gravity.
Speaker 2: Well, that seems pretty cool. I mean people buy like
Speaker 2: Fiji water because it seems like exotic, now like asteroid water. Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'd paid ten bucks for a bottle of asteroid water.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, I mean that that could be a possibility.
Speaker 2: But again that's not something we're going to figure out
Speaker 2: in the next few years.
Speaker 1: Agreed, that's right. So yeah, I mean you could have
Speaker 1: a portable nuclear reactor that powers your factory inside of
Speaker 1: a lava tube. I can technically see solutions to all
Speaker 1: of these problems. Not in the next ten years, but yes,
Speaker 1: I could see a path forward again, not inn tenues.
Speaker 2: All right, well, on that positive note, let's take a
Speaker 2: break and come back and talk about Musk's other dreams
Speaker 2: for AI satellites.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, Daniel. I want to start with
Speaker 1: a question to you, what is an AI satellite? Why
Speaker 1: do you want an AI satellite?
Speaker 2: I think when he says AI satellite, he's thinking about
Speaker 2: all the data centers we're building the power AI because
Speaker 2: AI essentially is deep neural networks, and neural networks are
Speaker 2: basically lineary algebra, which rely on matrix multiplication, which means
Speaker 2: the multiplying a bunch of numbers by another bunch of numbers,
Speaker 2: and that's much faster if you do them in parallel
Speaker 2: rather than doing them one at a time. And there
Speaker 2: are special chips GPUs, which were invented for calculating very
Speaker 2: quickly how to draw blood on your screen for your
Speaker 2: video games, and along the way invented hardware technology to
Speaker 2: very quickly do matrix multiplication because you also need that
Speaker 2: for graphics on your video game. And then AI companies realized, oh,
Speaker 2: that's also the same technology we need to do with
Speaker 2: the linear algebra inside of our neural networks. So now
Speaker 2: GPUs are basically AI chips. Even though they were invented
Speaker 2: for video games, they found this other use. And I
Speaker 2: think now the market is just swamped by people using
Speaker 2: them for AI. So they shouldn't be called GPUs anymore.
Speaker 2: They should be called like aipus or something I don't know.
Speaker 2: And so I think when he says AI satellite, he's
Speaker 2: thinking data centers in space in order to power AI.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, so yeah, so Musk has an AI
Speaker 1: company called Xai, which was recently acquired by SpaceX.
Speaker 2: I love that when Musk buys his own company with
Speaker 2: his own company.
Speaker 1: It feels like a scam, Yes, it feels weird, but anyway,
Speaker 1: he owns the world, so he gets to do what
Speaker 1: he wants, and so he's done that. These data centers,
Speaker 1: as I understand it, and you probably know more, are
Speaker 1: getting like huge, Like hasn't didn't Microsoft buy three Mile
Speaker 1: Islands so they could use that nuclear power plant to
Speaker 1: run their data center.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. The thing that limits AI right now seems to
Speaker 2: be the available GPUs. Like the more GPUs you throw
Speaker 2: these things, the more powerful they get. There's this scaling
Speaker 2: behavior where it just seems like going bigger means smarter,
Speaker 2: So everybody's trying to go bigger than everybody else. And
Speaker 2: there's a huge market now for these GPUs and for
Speaker 2: memory also in these chips, which is why like computers
Speaker 2: are getting expensive and memory is very expensive, and GPUs
Speaker 2: are hard to find because there's like one company in
Speaker 2: the world, in VideA that knows how to make the
Speaker 2: cutting edge GPUs.
Speaker 1: Must be a good time to work it in video, Yes.
Speaker 2: It must be a good time to own in video stock.
Speaker 1: Yeah right right, Okay, So why why space, Like why
Speaker 1: move that all to space, because that's got to be
Speaker 1: really expensive to do. Why not just keep doing that here?
Speaker 2: Yes, so we build these things in massive data centers
Speaker 2: here on the Earth. And they take a lot of
Speaker 2: water to cool these computers, because computers use electricity and
Speaker 2: when you do calculations, they heat up and so you
Speaker 2: got to cool them. So we use a lot of
Speaker 2: water to cool them. They draw a lot of power,
Speaker 2: and they take a lot of space. There's environmental impact.
Speaker 2: Real estate is expensive, and so recently muscles been talking
Speaker 2: a lot about data centers in space. And people have
Speaker 2: been talking about this for years, but mostly it was
Speaker 2: scoffed at, and now people are taking it work seriously,
Speaker 2: and so, you know, let me try to steal man
Speaker 2: the arguments for data centers in space. Why do people
Speaker 2: want to do that at all? Well, Number one, there's
Speaker 2: power up there, right. If you have solar panels, then
Speaker 2: those solar panels see the sun much more often, Like
Speaker 2: there's no clouds in space, right. If you are far
Speaker 2: enough from the Earth's surface, then you can always be
Speaker 2: in sunshine, So solar panels can power you. There's more
Speaker 2: power in space. So there's that. The other issue is
Speaker 2: environmental impact. Some people argue, like why should we cover
Speaker 2: the surface of the Earth, and data centers, we should
Speaker 2: just put those out in space. Also because there's like
Speaker 2: infinite real estate out there, right, you don't need to
Speaker 2: take up land as somebody was going to use to
Speaker 2: build houses to just fill space with data centers. Space
Speaker 2: is really big and there's plenty of room up there,
Speaker 2: and so you know, in terms of like scalability, and
Speaker 2: that's definitely an advantage. You can flip some of the
Speaker 2: cons and try to make them pros. Like one of
Speaker 2: the cons is it's hard to get up there. So
Speaker 2: anybody who's ever like run a computing system knows you
Speaker 2: got to reboot the stuff, you got to repair the stuff.
Speaker 2: You got to get in there sometimes physically to fix things.
Speaker 2: And that's harder to do out in space. Remember when
Speaker 2: we fix the Hubble, we had to like launch the
Speaker 2: Shuttle with astronauts to do a space walk to fix
Speaker 2: the hubble. It was a huge pain. So now you're
Speaker 2: talking about like maintaining a data center in space. But
Speaker 2: these guys flip it and they say, ooh, that makes
Speaker 2: it less susceptible to terrorists for example. Right, So it's
Speaker 2: like data sovereignty. You're out there in space you own
Speaker 2: these computers where there the law is fuzzy, as you've
Speaker 2: often said, Kelly, and so like, if my data is
Speaker 2: out in space, then I don't have to worry about
Speaker 2: like the US Administration trying to subpoena it, right because
Speaker 2: it's not in their jurisdiction. Maybe my lawyers say, what
Speaker 2: do you think about that argument? The face you're making
Speaker 2: tells me you're not persuaded.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think you're still supposed to register your
Speaker 1: satellite when you launch something. It is the responsibility, I
Speaker 1: believe of somebody, because if your satellite smashes into something,
Speaker 1: they need to know who would get sued. And so
Speaker 1: I think someone is still responsible for it. And there
Speaker 1: is a nation that would be responsible for paying the
Speaker 1: bill if you don't pay the bill, and so I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure that you're not in a legal gray area
Speaker 1: if you're out there. I'm not sure that holds up.
Speaker 2: I think the strongest argument is that eventually we're going
Speaker 2: to have space industry and we want to build stuff
Speaker 2: for space, and if you do that, it makes sense
Speaker 2: to build it in space. The idea is, if you
Speaker 2: need this stuff for space, then why build it on
Speaker 2: the surface of the Earth and then launch it. So
Speaker 2: if you need, for example, data centers on the Moon,
Speaker 2: build them in space, have them in space, don't build
Speaker 2: them on the Earth and try to operate them from
Speaker 2: the Moon or then launch them. And so if you
Speaker 2: have some sort of self sustaining space economy, then I
Speaker 2: do think there are arguments for building data centers out
Speaker 2: in space using materials you already have out in space,
Speaker 2: assuming you have people living out there in space who
Speaker 2: can maintain them and support them and all this kind
Speaker 2: of stuff. But it's a bit of a bootstrapping issue.
Speaker 1: And I think part of that argument is because Earth's
Speaker 1: gravity well is so hard to get out of that
Speaker 1: if you were making the satellites, for example, on the Moon,
Speaker 1: it would be much easier to get them out into
Speaker 1: orbit exactly relative to Earth.
Speaker 2: Even if they bring launch costs down right, Building huge
Speaker 2: data centers in space would be very expensive, but it
Speaker 2: is possible to build them in space for use in
Speaker 2: space eventually.
Speaker 1: Okay, So it sounds like Musk's plan is to build
Speaker 1: AI satellites on the Moon and then use what he's
Speaker 1: calling a mass driver to shoot them out into space yep,
Speaker 1: which is interesting because he's a big hindline fan and
Speaker 1: this sounds very moon is a harsh mistress, like where
Speaker 1: they used a mass driver to shoot rocks using an
Speaker 1: AI towards the Earth. But anyway, maybe I'm maybe I'm
Speaker 1: projecting too much, but anyway, so well, mass.
Speaker 2: Drivers are cool because on the surface of the Moon
Speaker 2: gravity is much less, and so you don't need like
Speaker 2: chemical rocket technology to escape the Moon's gravity. You just
Speaker 2: need like a big gun. And so a mass driver
Speaker 2: is just like you know, electromagnetic rail or you know
Speaker 2: even a or even like a centrifuge, you know that
Speaker 2: spins up and then throws things into space. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Now that you've done a pretty good job of emphasizing
Speaker 1: all the positives, let's go ahead and give it the
Speaker 1: Kelly treatment and talk about some of the some of
Speaker 1: the negatives of doing this on the Moon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there are challenges to data centers in space.
Speaker 2: Number one is cooling. There's a lot of misunderstanding about
Speaker 2: how this works. People think of space as cold, and
Speaker 2: so ooh, isn't cooling just free out in space? The
Speaker 2: problem is space is an insulator, right, It's a vacuum.
Speaker 2: The thing you have in your thermis, for example, that
Speaker 2: keeps your coffee hot or your beverage is cold, is
Speaker 2: a vacuum gap between the beverage and the rest of
Speaker 2: the planet because it's hard for heat to go across
Speaker 2: a vacuum, and that means if you have something hot
Speaker 2: out in space, there's no air to blow across it
Speaker 2: to get heated up to carry that heat away. You
Speaker 2: can cool down in space, but there's only one way
Speaker 2: to do it, which is to radiate that heat away.
Speaker 2: So remember, everything that's out there that has a temperature glows,
Speaker 2: and that means that it's cooling. It's giving off energy.
Speaker 2: That also happens down here on Earth. You have like
Speaker 2: a hot piece of metal, it's red hot, it's glowing,
Speaker 2: it's giving off that energy. It's gonna cool down. But
Speaker 2: here on Earth we have two ways to do it,
Speaker 2: convection and radiation. Out in space, you only have radiation,
Speaker 2: so you need to build big radiators out in space,
Speaker 2: or bring a bunch of water to run across your chips.
Speaker 2: But you already are are short on water. So cooling
Speaker 2: is going to be extra hard in space, not extra easy.
Speaker 1: That's number one.
Speaker 2: That's number one. Then there's a question of the radiation.
Speaker 2: Our data centers here on Earth run under the protection
Speaker 2: of our magnetic shield. Right, the magnetic field of the
Speaker 2: Earth deflects a lot of cosmic rays and the atmosphere
Speaker 2: which protects us from cosmic rays. Even still, data centers,
Speaker 2: as we talked about on a recent episode, have to
Speaker 2: correct for bitflips from cosmic rays. I had dinner the
Speaker 2: other night with a guy who runs the data centers
Speaker 2: for Nvidia, and they have all this cool technology to
Speaker 2: correct for bitflips, which is frustrating to me because when
Speaker 2: they delete those bitflips, they're deleting physics information that could
Speaker 2: teach us about the universe. But anyway, I know, but
Speaker 2: somebody's got to generate that image of puppies playing poker
Speaker 2: or whatever. Anyway, this is harder out in space because
Speaker 2: you have no protection, and radiation is bad for computers,
Speaker 2: and what you're doing is running computers in space, and
Speaker 2: so you need extra hardcore chips, which we have not developed,
Speaker 2: or you need shielding, which means again more mass. So
Speaker 2: this is harder to do in space than it is
Speaker 2: here on Earth. It's a more important, more challenging problem.
Speaker 2: And then of course the biggest one is maintenance. Right,
Speaker 2: something always breaks. You built something at scale, it needs
Speaker 2: a whole team of people to keep it running. Nothing,
Speaker 2: even like the Golden gate Bridge, just stands there and works, right.
Speaker 2: It needs constant maintenance. Everything does, which means you need
Speaker 2: a team of people up there all the time, or
Speaker 2: launching up there all the time. And it's much further away.
Speaker 2: Imagine you were in charge of maintaining a computer on
Speaker 2: a table in Antarctica. It would be really hard to
Speaker 2: do if you could never go there and fix it,
Speaker 2: or if it was hard to get there. And so
Speaker 2: this thing is going to be down all the time,
Speaker 2: and they're going to be people trying to fix it
Speaker 2: all the time. And maybe we could get better at
Speaker 2: building computers that didn't need so much maintenance, but we're
Speaker 2: definitely not there yet.
Speaker 1: What about maintaining those giant solar panels.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly right. Solar panels also are set instead of
Speaker 2: two radiation, So those things are going to get destroyed.
Speaker 2: They need to get replaced, or they need to be
Speaker 2: more robust. Another disadvantage is it's further away, and so
Speaker 2: maybe if you don't care about latency, then it's not
Speaker 2: a big deal. But if you want like fast turnaround
Speaker 2: times to your calculation. You want to press the button
Speaker 2: and get the answer instantly. Then you don't want to
Speaker 2: put your data center far away because that adds latency
Speaker 2: to your calculation.
Speaker 1: I don't want to wait for my puppy playing poker.
Speaker 2: And in terms of environmental issues, if you're building the
Speaker 2: stuff here on Earth and then launching it, like launching
Speaker 2: things into space, is not great for the environment.
Speaker 1: So I don't actually know what Musk's plan is. Do
Speaker 1: you think that his plan is to build these things
Speaker 1: on the moon or would that be just like way
Speaker 1: too complicated to do.
Speaker 2: No. I think his plan is to build things on
Speaker 2: the moon. That makes a lot more sense, but it
Speaker 2: assumes that we have the capacity to do this on
Speaker 2: the moon. But yeah, it's a lot cheaper if you
Speaker 2: build these things essentially in space, use in space. Building
Speaker 2: them on the surface and then launching them makes very
Speaker 2: little sense to me. But even still, you have to
Speaker 2: face the issues of maintenance, of radiation, of cooling. These
Speaker 2: are all solvable problems, but it makes it expensive and laborious,
Speaker 2: and I don't think they have been solved yet. But
Speaker 2: you know, SpaceX it's an amazing company and they catch
Speaker 2: rockets with chopsticks, so let's not put anything past them.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we will have to keep an eye
Speaker 1: on this as the years in the decades pass and
Speaker 1: see what they do. And you know, in the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you're interested in more information on what it's like
Speaker 1: to live and work in space, a City on Mars
Speaker 1: is a pretty great book to check out to learn
Speaker 1: more about.
Speaker 2: That, as is Becoming Martian by our friend Scott.
Speaker 1: Solomon, which came out today, which is February seventeenth. You
Speaker 1: won't be hearing this on February seventeenth, but you should
Speaker 1: definitely check out Becoming Martian, and you should check out
Speaker 1: the prior to episodes on which Scott Solomon was a guest.
Speaker 2: And so, while we think there are challenges to building
Speaker 2: a self sustaining colony on the Moon, it's not impossible
Speaker 2: and it is worse of pushing, but we should be
Speaker 2: realistic about when it's going to happen, yes.
Speaker 1: And we should try to do it ethically. And I
Speaker 1: will try not to be too much of a wet
Speaker 1: blanket at this point. So we'll end the show. Now,
Speaker 1: have a nice day. Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary Universe is
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