WEBVTT - Part Two: When Women Were Computers: A Tale of Space and Math 0:00:00.520 --> 0:00:02.719 Hello, and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff. 0:00:02.720 --> 0:00:05.080 I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy. At each week, I'm going 0:00:05.120 --> 0:00:08.920 to tell you about more cool people, including our guest 0:00:09.080 --> 0:00:13.480 Bridget God, who is a sort of viable cool person. Bridget, 0:00:13.520 --> 0:00:15.880 if you had to elevator pitch yourself, what would that 0:00:15.880 --> 0:00:19.400 pitch sound like? Oh, it would sound like I am 0:00:19.640 --> 0:00:24.759 a internet weirdo who loves to hang out and made 0:00:24.760 --> 0:00:30.600 cool podcasts. That's bad and it works. I'll leave it 0:00:30.640 --> 0:00:34.000 at that. Okay. Cool. We also Sophie Liechterman on the call, 0:00:34.040 --> 0:00:38.720 who produces this and literally every other podcast. I think, Sophie, 0:00:38.880 --> 0:00:45.279 what's your elevator pitch for yourself as a person producer podcasts, puppies, plants, 0:00:46.680 --> 0:00:50.000 You're welcome cool. There are a lot of plants, and 0:00:50.640 --> 0:00:55.720 so if he's zoom background. So, in the first half 0:00:55.720 --> 0:00:57.400 of this two parter, we talked about the women who 0:00:57.400 --> 0:01:01.520 were computers who studied space, or people into space. Today 0:01:01.520 --> 0:01:03.960 we're going to talk about space and the people who 0:01:04.319 --> 0:01:07.840 got into space. But first we're gonna talk about the 0:01:07.840 --> 0:01:09.880 gay man who broke the Nazis codes and shortened World 0:01:09.920 --> 0:01:13.640 War two by years, saving fourteen million lives and kind 0:01:13.640 --> 0:01:16.120 of invented the modern computer, which is to say, we're 0:01:16.120 --> 0:01:19.840 going to talk about motherfucking Alan Turing, and I say 0:01:20.200 --> 0:01:23.400 kind of invented modern computing, because there isn't actually a 0:01:23.440 --> 0:01:26.880 specific start date for computers. It really depends on how 0:01:26.920 --> 0:01:30.400 you're defining computer. At Leasta says, I've always understood I 0:01:30.400 --> 0:01:32.480 think you know more about computers than me, so I'm 0:01:32.480 --> 0:01:41.760 like making sure that I'm yeah, yeah, I definitely don't. Okay, 0:01:43.760 --> 0:01:46.959 good to know. So Alan Turing had the misfortune of 0:01:47.000 --> 0:01:49.480 being born in n in London. I don't know if 0:01:49.480 --> 0:01:52.120 the year was misfortunate, but being English and gay worked 0:01:52.120 --> 0:01:55.160 out really badly for him in the end. And not 0:01:55.200 --> 0:01:58.240 that many places were better. But just as a white 0:01:58.280 --> 0:02:00.880 American of Irish descentive legally acquired to make fun of 0:02:00.880 --> 0:02:03.720 England every chance I can, because I can pretend like 0:02:03.760 --> 0:02:07.760 it's punching up even though it clearly isn't. So there's 0:02:07.800 --> 0:02:10.560 my job at England that turned into a jab at myself. 0:02:12.080 --> 0:02:15.240 Alan Turner was a rich British smart kid, so he 0:02:15.280 --> 0:02:17.120 wound up in boarding school, where he fell in love 0:02:17.160 --> 0:02:20.080 with a fellow student named Christopher, who died of sucking 0:02:20.120 --> 0:02:24.440 tuberculosis bovine tuberculosis. I swear to God everyone in every 0:02:24.440 --> 0:02:27.200 episode that I record that if they're not killed violently 0:02:27.200 --> 0:02:32.240 by a government, they're killed by tuberculosis. Christopher drank infected 0:02:32.280 --> 0:02:36.200 milk and died Turing. I wasn't really excited about that. 0:02:36.280 --> 0:02:38.760 He turned his grief towards his studies. He went on 0:02:38.800 --> 0:02:40.639 to study at Cambridge, and while he was there he 0:02:40.680 --> 0:02:42.640 did a bunch of wild math ship that is completely 0:02:42.639 --> 0:02:45.480 beyond me, and he wrote out a sort of basic 0:02:45.520 --> 0:02:48.720 idea of a computer, sort of conceptual but not capable 0:02:48.760 --> 0:02:51.320 of being made. Idea of a computer called the Turing Machine. 0:02:52.200 --> 0:02:54.160 And I know what you're thinking, because it's what I 0:02:54.240 --> 0:02:56.480 was thinking when I was researching this. He did not 0:02:56.680 --> 0:02:59.880 name it the Turing Machine. He's not that kind of asshole. 0:03:00.600 --> 0:03:04.120 He named it the a machine for automatic machine, and 0:03:04.200 --> 0:03:07.640 his doctoral advisor called it the Turing Machine. It also 0:03:07.680 --> 0:03:10.760 doesn't exist. It's a hypothetical thing. It's a proof of concept, 0:03:11.240 --> 0:03:14.200 but it's basic principles wound up the central concept of 0:03:14.240 --> 0:03:17.959 modern computers, which is cool. I mean, I know computers 0:03:17.960 --> 0:03:20.680 have done a lot of bad things, but I kind 0:03:20.720 --> 0:03:24.760 of like them. I'm kind of addicted to them. I 0:03:24.840 --> 0:03:27.520 like them to like, where would we be without our Like, 0:03:27.600 --> 0:03:31.200 how would we stay up until four am researching nonsense? 0:03:31.960 --> 0:03:34.320 Not for the computer. I know, we have to find 0:03:34.320 --> 0:03:38.080 a library. It's much less fun to be at the 0:03:38.120 --> 0:03:41.040 library at four am when you should be asleep researching 0:03:41.160 --> 0:03:44.720 like a list of animals that got college degrees or 0:03:44.760 --> 0:03:49.200 whatever random thing you're looking up on Wikipedia. Asleep. Wait, 0:03:49.240 --> 0:03:52.360 which animals got college degrees? Oh, there's a really interesting 0:03:52.520 --> 0:03:56.880 Wikipedia page about animals that have earned college degrees. But 0:03:56.880 --> 0:03:59.840 they're all honorary I mean, come on, but still there's 0:04:00.520 --> 0:04:09.200 giving us more googling. Thank you my legacy. Yeah, as 0:04:09.240 --> 0:04:13.400 an aspiring honorary degree getter, U, I really see myself 0:04:13.400 --> 0:04:16.479 in these animals, so I'm excited to see them. But 0:04:16.600 --> 0:04:19.200 Alling Turing was not an honorary degree getter. He was 0:04:19.240 --> 0:04:21.600 a regular degree getter. He might have gotten honorary ones too, 0:04:21.680 --> 0:04:25.080 I don't know. So after school he also went to 0:04:25.160 --> 0:04:27.120 Princeton too, I think, just to show off to go 0:04:27.200 --> 0:04:30.000 to both Cambridge and Princeton. He got a job working 0:04:30.040 --> 0:04:32.719 for the government and the Code and Cipher School, and 0:04:32.760 --> 0:04:34.960 then a nineteen thirty nine The Nazis are like doing 0:04:35.000 --> 0:04:37.760 their Nazi thing. I swear to God, it's impossible to 0:04:37.800 --> 0:04:40.080 do a history podcast that doesn't tie in the Nazis 0:04:40.120 --> 0:04:43.200 at some point, probably one of those animals in that 0:04:43.279 --> 0:04:49.040 list sucking Nazi um so. And then he starts working 0:04:49.080 --> 0:04:52.599 at as working at a super secret, top secret, extra 0:04:52.680 --> 0:04:56.640 secret Bletchley Park in order to decipher Nazi codes, which 0:04:56.720 --> 0:05:00.520 he succeeded at not single handedly. I think this guy's 0:05:00.520 --> 0:05:03.000 hella cool, but we keep hitting the same point. But 0:05:03.040 --> 0:05:05.440 it's teams of people who make history. But he still 0:05:05.480 --> 0:05:09.000 did a fucking lot of it, and probably it certainly 0:05:09.040 --> 0:05:10.680 would have not happened in the same way without him, 0:05:10.760 --> 0:05:12.920 might not have happened at all. The work that they 0:05:12.960 --> 0:05:16.080 did did not single handedly crushed Hitler, but basically having 0:05:16.120 --> 0:05:21.120 access to all of their coded information. One historian calculated 0:05:21.160 --> 0:05:24.000 that it shortened the war by two to four years 0:05:24.040 --> 0:05:28.640 and saved fourteen million lives, which I mean that ain't bad. 0:05:29.040 --> 0:05:31.960 We always talked about like, oh, this person killed X 0:05:32.080 --> 0:05:34.960 million number of people, right, but we don't I haven't 0:05:34.960 --> 0:05:37.200 seen the Wikipedia list of the people who have saved 0:05:37.200 --> 0:05:40.279 the most people. Yeah, And it really goes back to 0:05:40.320 --> 0:05:44.360 sort of like I like, it's kind of sucked up 0:05:44.360 --> 0:05:48.360 that we talk about, like like numbers of people killed 0:05:48.360 --> 0:05:51.080 when we're talking about war. But like, even the conception 0:05:51.160 --> 0:05:54.880 of this action saved x amount of people's lives, we 0:05:54.920 --> 0:05:57.560 don't really even have like an understanding of that, Like 0:05:57.600 --> 0:06:01.200 we don't that's that's not how we describe things. Yeah, totally, 0:06:01.320 --> 0:06:05.159 and and even like, like I'm pretty pretty antimilitaristic in 0:06:05.160 --> 0:06:07.159 my attitude and most of the time, but I don't 0:06:07.200 --> 0:06:10.000 necessarily apply that to World War two, where stopping the 0:06:10.080 --> 0:06:12.159 Nazi seems like a really important thing to do, even 0:06:12.160 --> 0:06:13.960 if all of the people trying to do it, all 0:06:13.960 --> 0:06:16.160 the government's trying to do it were bad, like the 0:06:16.240 --> 0:06:19.200 USSR in the US, right, But it's interesting to think that, like, oh, 0:06:19.240 --> 0:06:22.320 this person who contributed to the war saved millions of lives. 0:06:23.200 --> 0:06:24.880 I don't know, because most of the time that's not 0:06:24.920 --> 0:06:28.520 the way that you savellions of lives. So the Nazis 0:06:28.520 --> 0:06:31.720 are sending messages using these machines called Enigma machines, which 0:06:31.800 --> 0:06:33.919 would be a name that would be absolutely trite if 0:06:33.960 --> 0:06:37.400 I wrote it in fiction. And they are these typewriters 0:06:37.440 --> 0:06:40.320 that translate between cipher text and plain text. You type 0:06:40.320 --> 0:06:41.839 in your message, it comes out of code, or you 0:06:41.839 --> 0:06:44.120 type in a code. It comes out of message and 0:06:44.160 --> 0:06:47.680 it's based on a key which can change every day, 0:06:47.720 --> 0:06:49.640 and by the time the war starts, the Nazis are 0:06:49.720 --> 0:06:52.640 changing it every day. It was actually Polish mathematicians who 0:06:52.640 --> 0:06:55.680 first broke Enigma, and right before World War Two they 0:06:55.720 --> 0:06:58.760 passed that information along to the Allies. So poland sort 0:06:58.800 --> 0:07:01.839 I guess the last laugh about that whole being crushed 0:07:01.839 --> 0:07:03.840 by the Nazis thing, or at least they got to 0:07:03.839 --> 0:07:08.400 participate in the reverse crushing. But then after the war 0:07:08.440 --> 0:07:11.000 breaks out, the Nazis change how Enigma works and it 0:07:11.120 --> 0:07:13.960 needed new breaking. The stuff gets really into the weeds. 0:07:14.000 --> 0:07:17.960 People really like codes. Turing, in, another codebreaker, develops a 0:07:18.040 --> 0:07:21.040 purpose built code breaking machine that they called the bomb 0:07:21.160 --> 0:07:24.320 or the Bombay or something, and it's bomb with an 0:07:24.320 --> 0:07:26.680 E at the end, but not like bomb e like Wally, 0:07:26.880 --> 0:07:29.560 which would be a better choice I think they could 0:07:29.600 --> 0:07:32.240 have made. During the war, he broke Nazi codes and 0:07:32.240 --> 0:07:34.400 did other ship like he developed a voice scrambler to 0:07:34.920 --> 0:07:37.680 encrypt voice calls, which is like something that I even 0:07:37.880 --> 0:07:40.160 I conceptually struggle to imagine how I would do a 0:07:40.240 --> 0:07:43.720 hundred years later. You know, I'm not a cryptographer, that 0:07:44.000 --> 0:07:45.600 this is really coming across to anyone who was a 0:07:45.640 --> 0:07:48.360 cryptographer is listening. And then after the war, he fucking 0:07:48.400 --> 0:07:51.280 invents the modern computer. Sort of same as everyone who 0:07:51.320 --> 0:07:53.760 invents the modern computer, lots of people do it, but 0:07:53.840 --> 0:07:57.640 he puts forward the idea that computers can store their programs, 0:07:57.640 --> 0:08:02.760 and this is a really major step up. And he 0:08:02.840 --> 0:08:07.400 also stayed gay. Imagine that at one pot in one 0:08:07.400 --> 0:08:10.120 he actually proposed to a coworker, a woman, and she 0:08:10.160 --> 0:08:12.920 said yes, and then he was like, oh, but I'm gay, 0:08:13.440 --> 0:08:15.960 and she was like, that's that's fine, Okay, we can 0:08:16.000 --> 0:08:18.760 still get married. Not a deal breaker, I know. And 0:08:18.760 --> 0:08:21.240 then Turing was like, you know, actually I probably shouldn't 0:08:21.280 --> 0:08:23.240 marry it. I feel like that would be like dishonest 0:08:23.280 --> 0:08:25.320 or something. But yeah, I appreciate that it wasn't a 0:08:25.360 --> 0:08:28.960 deal breaker. For in nineteen fifty two, he's thirty nine 0:08:29.000 --> 0:08:32.120 years old, he starts dating a younger man. He accidentally 0:08:32.120 --> 0:08:34.800 snitches himself out to the cops about being gay. His 0:08:34.840 --> 0:08:37.160 house had been burgled, and he made a classic mistake 0:08:37.200 --> 0:08:39.000 that rich white people make where he thought that the 0:08:39.040 --> 0:08:43.440 cops would um help him. Don't talk to cops exactly, 0:08:43.920 --> 0:08:46.240 And if he had listened to our sponsor, don't talk 0:08:46.280 --> 0:08:48.440 to cops. His life would have been very different and 0:08:48.440 --> 0:08:52.080 probably substantially longer. So he outs himself as gay while 0:08:52.080 --> 0:08:55.360 he's explaining like why his partner like why there's another 0:08:55.360 --> 0:08:57.319 man in the house or whatever, like his his partner 0:08:57.559 --> 0:09:00.559 was like unemployed and probably knew the burglar and I 0:09:00.600 --> 0:09:02.640 don't know, it's all this complicated it. So he and 0:09:02.640 --> 0:09:06.479 his boyfriend get arrested because they're gay and that's not right. Apparently, 0:09:07.120 --> 0:09:09.720 he pleads guilty. First, he kind of leads like no contests, 0:09:09.720 --> 0:09:11.959 as lawyers like, plead guilty. So he pleads guilty, and 0:09:12.000 --> 0:09:14.120 he's given two choices. You can either go to fucking 0:09:14.120 --> 0:09:18.880 prison for darren sleep with another consenting adult, or you 0:09:18.880 --> 0:09:22.200 can let us chemically castrate you where the government. He 0:09:22.480 --> 0:09:27.480 picks chemical castration. Basically, they these are just these are 0:09:27.520 --> 0:09:30.720 hormones that feminize his body. They reduces libido, they make 0:09:30.800 --> 0:09:33.719 him impotent, and they cause breast tissue to form. So 0:09:34.200 --> 0:09:37.079 the punishment for being gay was being forced to transition. 0:09:37.760 --> 0:09:42.360 Oh my god, like the govern like the government. I mean, 0:09:42.640 --> 0:09:47.600 it almost seems silly in when we know that our 0:09:47.960 --> 0:09:51.040 governments are trying to make it like like criminalized trans 0:09:51.200 --> 0:09:54.760 youth and like keep them from gender reform, gender reforming care. 0:09:54.800 --> 0:09:57.160 But like, it is wild to me that we're still 0:09:57.240 --> 0:10:01.640 having this conference. That's it seems so like backward and horrible. 0:10:01.679 --> 0:10:04.120 But then I had to be like, oh wait, it's 0:10:04.120 --> 0:10:06.560 not really like the government really getting involved in like 0:10:06.720 --> 0:10:09.920 people's expression of their gender and sexuality. I wish it 0:10:09.960 --> 0:10:11.880 were a thing of the past and that like what 0:10:11.960 --> 0:10:14.120 a relic of of a of a different time, but 0:10:14.200 --> 0:10:18.760 like not really unfortunately. Yeah, yeah, I I even I 0:10:18.840 --> 0:10:20.760 like try to write a thing out in the script 0:10:20.800 --> 0:10:22.720 about this. At all I wrote out was what the fuck? 0:10:22.880 --> 0:10:25.440 Because like what I just keep looking at it, and 0:10:25.440 --> 0:10:29.280 I'm like, this is what they're not letting us do 0:10:29.440 --> 0:10:31.880 on purpose now, but when the government wants to do 0:10:31.960 --> 0:10:36.640 it to game like oh fucking no mine. Fuck. Yeah. 0:10:36.840 --> 0:10:39.160 His boyfriend gets I think the same deal. He does 0:10:39.200 --> 0:10:40.679 some kind of deal that gets them out of prison, 0:10:40.679 --> 0:10:43.360 and I don't believe it was like cooperation or anything. 0:10:43.360 --> 0:10:46.600 I think it was probably the same chemical castration. And 0:10:46.920 --> 0:10:50.160 of course now he's a terrible monster, so he can't 0:10:50.240 --> 0:10:54.400 keep his security clearance at the government who he entirely saved, 0:10:55.000 --> 0:10:57.760 and he loses his job. You can't have your fucking 0:10:57.800 --> 0:11:02.120 fourteen million lives saying fucking here, like sucking dudes off. 0:11:02.160 --> 0:11:05.800 That'd be bad, you know. Um, And the US doesn't 0:11:05.840 --> 0:11:08.720 let him enter because he's like so bad and untouchable again, 0:11:08.760 --> 0:11:11.600 like the fucking hero of World War two. You can't 0:11:11.600 --> 0:11:13.959 have someone as dangerous as that around in the US. 0:11:14.200 --> 0:11:18.319 So two years later, on June seven fifty four, Turing 0:11:18.440 --> 0:11:22.800 kills himself with cyanide. And it's possible that this was 0:11:22.840 --> 0:11:27.000 an accident. I frankly don't believe it. Apparently he loved 0:11:27.040 --> 0:11:29.200 Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was one of his 0:11:29.240 --> 0:11:32.960 favorite films, and one biographer said that he particularly liked 0:11:32.960 --> 0:11:36.240 the scene where the you know, wicked witch or whatever 0:11:36.559 --> 0:11:39.679 dips the apple into poison, and a half eaten apple 0:11:39.760 --> 0:11:42.000 was found next to his corpse and they didn't bother 0:11:42.120 --> 0:11:44.680 to check it for cyanide before they like hucked it 0:11:44.679 --> 0:11:48.160 out or whatever. So there was also this whole electroplating 0:11:48.200 --> 0:11:50.720 set up in his tiny room for gold plating spoons, 0:11:50.760 --> 0:11:53.160 and so there's like this accidental death theory that he 0:11:53.440 --> 0:11:56.319 accidentally killed himself with cyanide that he was using to 0:11:56.640 --> 0:12:00.440 electroplates spoons, which I don't know. I I buy the 0:12:00.440 --> 0:12:03.040 theory that he put that there for plausible deniability. He 0:12:03.120 --> 0:12:06.040 put that there to be like, I feel like a 0:12:06.080 --> 0:12:08.280 lot of the time, when people choose to end their 0:12:08.280 --> 0:12:10.320 own lives, they come up with ways to do it 0:12:10.360 --> 0:12:12.800 in ways that kind of give everyone around them a 0:12:12.800 --> 0:12:14.600 way to be like, well, we don't know for sure, 0:12:15.200 --> 0:12:18.000 even though we all kind of know, you know, I 0:12:18.040 --> 0:12:20.160 don't know. This just gets into the what the fuck 0:12:20.240 --> 0:12:22.560 He's another gay man driven to suicide by society they 0:12:22.559 --> 0:12:24.720 want to accept him. I don't know. And so like 0:12:24.760 --> 0:12:27.720 we're recording this episode and the listeners listening to this 0:12:27.760 --> 0:12:31.040 episode with technology that this man fucking developed, um and 0:12:31.040 --> 0:12:34.840 then the UK government killed him. As far as I'm concerned, yeah, 0:12:34.880 --> 0:12:37.240 I mean it's at what you just said really like 0:12:37.400 --> 0:12:40.520 puts it in perspective that we're people are listening to 0:12:40.920 --> 0:12:43.839 this episode on technology that we wouldn't have without him, 0:12:43.920 --> 0:12:47.040 and yet rather than being treated like the innovator and 0:12:47.160 --> 0:12:51.920 hero that he was, he was driven to death by suicide. 0:12:52.000 --> 0:12:54.120 And I think it, like, I don't know, maybe I'm 0:12:54.120 --> 0:12:55.760 just in a weird place where I can't help but 0:12:55.800 --> 0:12:58.760 see these parallels of today of like who out there 0:12:58.800 --> 0:13:00.360 are we going to be like, Oh, if only we 0:13:00.480 --> 0:13:04.280 had you know, celebrated them and affirmed them while they 0:13:04.320 --> 0:13:07.240 were here, Like it's just like a generation. It's it's 0:13:07.320 --> 0:13:09.640 so so wasteful, Like what a wasteful way to treat 0:13:09.679 --> 0:13:13.079 someone who had so much to give to the world. Yeah, No, totally, 0:13:13.120 --> 0:13:15.080 and it it just keeps up coming up again and 0:13:15.080 --> 0:13:19.800 again that people people work for these institutions like governments 0:13:19.960 --> 0:13:23.600 in order to improve the world and take humanity further 0:13:23.720 --> 0:13:28.000 and advance human knowledge and then get basically murdered by 0:13:28.000 --> 0:13:31.480 them or you know, thrown away. Not my favorite thing 0:13:31.600 --> 0:13:38.560 that's happened. So let's talk about the space race. So 0:13:38.640 --> 0:13:41.160 World War two is over and it's cold wartime, and 0:13:41.200 --> 0:13:43.040 which brings it with it, the space race. And I'm 0:13:43.040 --> 0:13:44.760 going to cut mostly over to the USSR for a 0:13:44.800 --> 0:13:47.760 while because I'm not trying to be like yeah us 0:13:47.840 --> 0:13:50.600 with this podcast. I've probably hit this theme enough. But 0:13:50.960 --> 0:13:52.560 I don't like the U S or the U S SR. 0:13:52.880 --> 0:13:56.520 It's a cold war between two evil powers. But they 0:13:56.520 --> 0:13:59.559 still did all this really interesting ship the individual scientists 0:14:00.160 --> 0:14:03.680 and the USSR, for my money, won the space race. 0:14:04.000 --> 0:14:06.040 We got to the Moon first, which which everyone pretends 0:14:06.120 --> 0:14:09.040 like the biggest prize. But the USSR had the first satellite, 0:14:09.080 --> 0:14:11.920 the first mammal, the first human, the first woman, the 0:14:11.960 --> 0:14:15.000 first and the first black men into space. Oh what 0:14:15.040 --> 0:14:18.000 was the first mammal? Do you know? Oh? Crap, I 0:14:18.040 --> 0:14:23.760 looked it up. Oh no, I don't, no, no no. 0:14:23.880 --> 0:14:26.200 I I had this whole section written about the animals 0:14:26.240 --> 0:14:28.080 they sent to space, and then I got too sad 0:14:28.280 --> 0:14:30.840 and I decided not to include them because most of 0:14:30.840 --> 0:14:32.760 the animals that got sent up into space were just 0:14:32.800 --> 0:14:36.000 like sent into space and then abandoned, or some of 0:14:36.000 --> 0:14:37.880 them were sent up into space and then came back 0:14:37.960 --> 0:14:42.720 and then we're you know, treated badly upon their return. Um. No, 0:14:42.840 --> 0:14:44.440 So I got really sad about the animal parts, so 0:14:44.480 --> 0:14:45.920 then I cut it out. And now I don't remember 0:14:45.960 --> 0:14:48.440 what the first animal was, but fruit flies were the 0:14:48.480 --> 0:14:53.120 first like living creature. Okay, interesting, Yeah, I I'm sad 0:14:53.160 --> 0:14:56.440 that that they didn't treat these animals well when they returned, 0:14:56.840 --> 0:14:59.520 or if they returned. My god, I know some of 0:14:59.520 --> 0:15:02.440 them ended like heroes or whatever. And like, you know, 0:15:02.960 --> 0:15:05.560 some of the dogs, I think in particular, I like, 0:15:05.840 --> 0:15:09.360 I looked it up. It was a dogo oh I 0:15:09.560 --> 0:15:15.280 dog go. So the space race. The USSR starts it 0:15:15.320 --> 0:15:18.560 by launching a satellite, right, and guess what inspired them 0:15:18.600 --> 0:15:21.560 to launch a satellite. The obvious answers here would be 0:15:21.560 --> 0:15:23.520 either like domination of the planet to a hive mind 0:15:23.560 --> 0:15:25.720 of communism if you're reading in propaganda on one end 0:15:25.760 --> 0:15:28.320 of the spectrum, or the further into human knowledge from 0:15:28.320 --> 0:15:30.760 a detached atheistic point of view. After all, the uss 0:15:30.800 --> 0:15:34.920 are we're full of atheists, right? Wrong? I mean, the 0:15:34.960 --> 0:15:37.120 USSR was full of atheists, but not just full of 0:15:37.160 --> 0:15:40.280 atheists and a lot of their rocket scientists. So the 0:15:40.320 --> 0:15:42.560 philosophical underpinnions of the U S s R is entry 0:15:42.600 --> 0:15:45.080 into the space race, the thing that started the chain 0:15:45.080 --> 0:15:47.160 of events that got a human on the moon. Where 0:15:47.200 --> 0:15:50.680 the cosmists? Have you ever heard of the Cosmists? I haven't. 0:15:51.120 --> 0:15:56.680 So they're this weird, ideologically diverse philosophical and scientific movement 0:15:57.000 --> 0:16:00.280 that is kind of cult like and it marries spirituality 0:16:00.280 --> 0:16:04.400 and science. And they were aspiring necromancers who wanted to 0:16:04.480 --> 0:16:11.120 raise the dead, not necromancy. Necromancy if you think the 0:16:11.200 --> 0:16:15.400 fucking leftists arguing on Twitter are bad right now. In 0:16:15.440 --> 0:16:18.440 the nineteen twenties, there were anarchists arguing that death was 0:16:18.520 --> 0:16:25.720 quote logically absurd, ethically impermissible, and esthetically ugly. Oh my gosh, 0:16:25.720 --> 0:16:28.360 I just I don't know. I somehow I didn't need 0:16:28.480 --> 0:16:39.160 necromancy versation, roll left turn exactly so. And this is 0:16:39.200 --> 0:16:41.800 the This is the group that includes basically all of 0:16:41.840 --> 0:16:44.800 the early rocket scientists in the USSR and the people 0:16:44.840 --> 0:16:49.240 designing practical spacecraft. Their ideological founder was a guy named 0:16:49.360 --> 0:16:53.560 Nikolai Fyodorov who died penniless three of pneumonia in a 0:16:53.600 --> 0:16:56.280 rented room full of strangers. And he came at the 0:16:56.280 --> 0:16:58.280 whole thing from a Christian lens. He was an orthodox 0:16:58.400 --> 0:17:01.800 Christian and the reason he died so poor is that, 0:17:01.800 --> 0:17:04.040 in proper Christian form he gave away everything he owned. 0:17:04.320 --> 0:17:06.040 I think he was also, I think it was I 0:17:06.080 --> 0:17:08.080 think it was him. It was also very conservative and 0:17:08.119 --> 0:17:10.760 like like these are. This is not like a communist hero. 0:17:11.720 --> 0:17:14.600 But he gets called the Socrates of Moscow and he 0:17:14.640 --> 0:17:17.879 would hold intellectual salons and he was He befriended Tolstoy 0:17:18.000 --> 0:17:21.359 until they got into arguments about politics, Tolstoy being far left, 0:17:22.080 --> 0:17:24.359 and Tolstoy also shows up in every episode. I do, 0:17:24.440 --> 0:17:27.280 and I don't understand why. Um, I don't even have 0:17:27.320 --> 0:17:30.000 any particular love for Tolstoy, but he's everywhere. If I 0:17:30.000 --> 0:17:33.359 talk about Russia, Tolstoy is there there. He is pops 0:17:33.440 --> 0:17:36.160 up his most important project, oh and his whole thing. 0:17:36.280 --> 0:17:38.359 So the three things that the cosmis are trying to 0:17:38.400 --> 0:17:41.680 do is that they're trying to colonized space. They're trying 0:17:41.720 --> 0:17:47.600 to resurrect the dead and live forever just like you do. Yeah, 0:17:47.640 --> 0:17:50.720 they're on some like Peter Teel ship like I know, 0:17:51.520 --> 0:17:54.360 I know, I mean, these are the like, these are 0:17:54.520 --> 0:17:59.520 the forefathers of the futurist movement. Um, it really doesn't 0:17:59.560 --> 0:18:02.679 surprise that tols Soys bring brought up when death is 0:18:02.800 --> 0:18:07.680 being described as aesthetically ugly like that fills very brand. Yeah, 0:18:07.680 --> 0:18:11.040 fair enough. So. So this guy's most important protege was 0:18:11.119 --> 0:18:15.080 Constantine Sholkovski, who lived in a cabin in the woods 0:18:15.119 --> 0:18:18.240 by choice and wrote books with riveting titles like Explorations 0:18:18.240 --> 0:18:21.320 of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices, and he 0:18:21.400 --> 0:18:23.920 was talked about guiding ships of rocket thrusters. He talked 0:18:23.960 --> 0:18:26.679 about using airlocks on space stations, and he spent his 0:18:26.720 --> 0:18:30.000 time developing ideas of closed loop ecosystems that would keep 0:18:30.000 --> 0:18:33.680 everyone fed on space stations, which basically means he he 0:18:33.720 --> 0:18:36.400 came up with the basic foundations of where we're currently 0:18:36.440 --> 0:18:39.080 at a hundred years later in terms of our space travel. 0:18:39.840 --> 0:18:42.200 A lot of these early cosmists are right wings rists 0:18:42.200 --> 0:18:43.800 and ship but a lot of them weren't. A lot 0:18:43.840 --> 0:18:46.800 of them were leftists. During the Russian Revolution and the 0:18:46.840 --> 0:18:49.560 resulting Civil War, some chunk of the cosmists became the 0:18:49.600 --> 0:18:52.760 bio cosmists, and they're an anarchist faction and they're fighting 0:18:52.800 --> 0:18:57.320 for colonized space, resurrect the dead live forever. Lennin famously 0:18:57.400 --> 0:19:00.480 not excited about anarchists in general, including ones he started 0:19:00.480 --> 0:19:02.919 off as his allies. He actually lets them hang out 0:19:02.960 --> 0:19:06.680 longer than all the other anarchists, not because they're weird necromancers, 0:19:06.680 --> 0:19:09.760 but because they kind of shut up and backed the Bolsheviks, 0:19:10.359 --> 0:19:12.960 and they were mostly a poetry movement. They were so 0:19:13.040 --> 0:19:16.960 confusing the whole fucking cosmist thing, and people are really 0:19:17.000 --> 0:19:19.119 into the cosmis. I've never even heard of them until 0:19:19.960 --> 0:19:22.480 I first read about them in an introduction to a 0:19:22.600 --> 0:19:25.400 Russian novel that I was reading. Most of the rocket 0:19:25.440 --> 0:19:29.879 scientists in USS are our cosmists. So after the Revolution. 0:19:30.280 --> 0:19:31.920 Things were looking really good for the uss are to 0:19:31.920 --> 0:19:35.679 get into space right until who comes onto this stage 0:19:35.680 --> 0:19:43.000 but Stalin. Stalin comes on and sucks everything up. Motherfucket 0:19:43.040 --> 0:19:46.080 Stalin shows up. He sucks everything up. He disappears all 0:19:46.080 --> 0:19:48.359 of the major players into the whole thing because he 0:19:48.440 --> 0:19:51.320 does not like how religious the whole thing is, and 0:19:51.440 --> 0:19:53.800 he doesn't like the some portions of it are too anarchistic. 0:19:54.240 --> 0:19:59.359 Space communism aborted by Stalin. He also shuts down research 0:19:59.359 --> 0:20:01.879 into computer because he saw them as an evil Western 0:20:01.960 --> 0:20:06.440 capitalist plot undermine workers rights, even though the first computer 0:20:06.640 --> 0:20:09.119 able to solve differential equations in the world was a 0:20:09.160 --> 0:20:11.520 Soviet invention in nineteen thirty six. It was called the 0:20:11.560 --> 0:20:15.560 Water Integrator, and it stores numbers by different quantities of water, 0:20:16.320 --> 0:20:19.680 which fucking rules. Yeah, I've never even heard of this. 0:20:19.920 --> 0:20:24.080 I had neither. I really want to see one. So anyway, 0:20:24.080 --> 0:20:26.760 in nineteen fifty three, Stalin did the single best thing 0:20:26.840 --> 0:20:30.320 he ever did for the world. He fucking died. Not 0:20:30.359 --> 0:20:34.520 a big Stalin fan here. Nineteen fifty seven, Russian scientists 0:20:34.960 --> 0:20:38.199 get Sputnik one into orbit, the first artificial satellite in 0:20:38.280 --> 0:20:40.920 Earth orbit by anyone in the world. It's only after 0:20:40.960 --> 0:20:43.000 a month of design and construction. Basically, they hit the 0:20:43.040 --> 0:20:46.080 ground running as soon as they get out of Stalin jail. 0:20:46.680 --> 0:20:49.040 Sputnik one hangs out doing its thing for three weeks 0:20:49.119 --> 0:20:50.760 until it's batteries run out, and then a couple of 0:20:50.800 --> 0:20:53.280 months later it burns up on re entry. And this 0:20:53.640 --> 0:20:55.280 not the fact that it burns out on re entry, 0:20:55.320 --> 0:20:57.800 but the fact that they launched it freaks the US 0:20:57.880 --> 0:21:01.760 out entirely and triggers this base race which the U. 0:21:01.840 --> 0:21:03.280 S s R continues to beat the ship out of 0:21:03.320 --> 0:21:06.920 the US in. On April twelve one, the first human 0:21:06.960 --> 0:21:10.320 gets into space, Uriga Garin, who's a Russian cosmonaut because 0:21:10.320 --> 0:21:13.080 they called there's cosmonauts in the US called There's astronauts. 0:21:13.720 --> 0:21:16.880 Yuri goes up on Volstock one, and the main designer 0:21:16.920 --> 0:21:19.439 for both of these things, Buttnick and vol Stock was 0:21:19.680 --> 0:21:23.879 Sergey Pevlovich or oliv. I really am good at Russian. 0:21:23.960 --> 0:21:28.119 That's my second. I'm not good at Russian. He's a cosmist. 0:21:28.480 --> 0:21:31.320 Sergey is, or at least he's heavily influenced by the cosmos. 0:21:31.359 --> 0:21:33.640 He writes books about the cosmis and shipped to interact 0:21:33.640 --> 0:21:35.840 with their theories. I think he's a cosmist. He spent 0:21:35.920 --> 0:21:38.400 six years in prison thanks to Stalin and his fucked 0:21:38.440 --> 0:21:41.600