Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy. At each week, I'm going
Speaker 1: to tell you about more cool people, including our guest
Speaker 1: Bridget God, who is a sort of viable cool person. Bridget,
Speaker 1: if you had to elevator pitch yourself, what would that
Speaker 1: pitch sound like? Oh, it would sound like I am
Speaker 1: a internet weirdo who loves to hang out and made
Speaker 1: cool podcasts. That's bad and it works. I'll leave it
Speaker 1: at that. Okay. Cool. We also Sophie Liechterman on the call,
Speaker 1: who produces this and literally every other podcast. I think, Sophie,
Speaker 1: what's your elevator pitch for yourself as a person producer podcasts, puppies, plants,
Speaker 1: You're welcome cool. There are a lot of plants, and
Speaker 1: so if he's zoom background. So, in the first half
Speaker 1: of this two parter, we talked about the women who
Speaker 1: were computers who studied space, or people into space. Today
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about space and the people who
Speaker 1: got into space. But first we're gonna talk about the
Speaker 1: gay man who broke the Nazis codes and shortened World
Speaker 1: War two by years, saving fourteen million lives and kind
Speaker 1: of invented the modern computer, which is to say, we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about motherfucking Alan Turing, and I say
Speaker 1: kind of invented modern computing, because there isn't actually a
Speaker 1: specific start date for computers. It really depends on how
Speaker 1: you're defining computer. At Leasta says, I've always understood I
Speaker 1: think you know more about computers than me, so I'm
Speaker 1: like making sure that I'm yeah, yeah, I definitely don't. Okay,
Speaker 1: good to know. So Alan Turing had the misfortune of
Speaker 1: being born in n in London. I don't know if
Speaker 1: the year was misfortunate, but being English and gay worked
Speaker 1: out really badly for him in the end. And not
Speaker 1: that many places were better. But just as a white
Speaker 1: American of Irish descentive legally acquired to make fun of
Speaker 1: England every chance I can, because I can pretend like
Speaker 1: it's punching up even though it clearly isn't. So there's
Speaker 1: my job at England that turned into a jab at myself.
Speaker 1: Alan Turner was a rich British smart kid, so he
Speaker 1: wound up in boarding school, where he fell in love
Speaker 1: with a fellow student named Christopher, who died of sucking
Speaker 1: tuberculosis bovine tuberculosis. I swear to God everyone in every
Speaker 1: episode that I record that if they're not killed violently
Speaker 1: by a government, they're killed by tuberculosis. Christopher drank infected
Speaker 1: milk and died Turing. I wasn't really excited about that.
Speaker 1: He turned his grief towards his studies. He went on
Speaker 1: to study at Cambridge, and while he was there he
Speaker 1: did a bunch of wild math ship that is completely
Speaker 1: beyond me, and he wrote out a sort of basic
Speaker 1: idea of a computer, sort of conceptual but not capable
Speaker 1: of being made. Idea of a computer called the Turing Machine.
Speaker 1: And I know what you're thinking, because it's what I
Speaker 1: was thinking when I was researching this. He did not
Speaker 1: name it the Turing Machine. He's not that kind of asshole.
Speaker 1: He named it the a machine for automatic machine, and
Speaker 1: his doctoral advisor called it the Turing Machine. It also
Speaker 1: doesn't exist. It's a hypothetical thing. It's a proof of concept,
Speaker 1: but it's basic principles wound up the central concept of
Speaker 1: modern computers, which is cool. I mean, I know computers
Speaker 1: have done a lot of bad things, but I kind
Speaker 1: of like them. I'm kind of addicted to them. I
Speaker 1: like them to like, where would we be without our Like,
Speaker 1: how would we stay up until four am researching nonsense?
Speaker 1: Not for the computer. I know, we have to find
Speaker 1: a library. It's much less fun to be at the
Speaker 1: library at four am when you should be asleep researching
Speaker 1: like a list of animals that got college degrees or
Speaker 1: whatever random thing you're looking up on Wikipedia. Asleep. Wait,
Speaker 1: which animals got college degrees? Oh, there's a really interesting
Speaker 1: Wikipedia page about animals that have earned college degrees. But
Speaker 1: they're all honorary I mean, come on, but still there's
Speaker 1: giving us more googling. Thank you my legacy. Yeah, as
Speaker 1: an aspiring honorary degree getter, U, I really see myself
Speaker 1: in these animals, so I'm excited to see them. But
Speaker 1: Alling Turing was not an honorary degree getter. He was
Speaker 1: a regular degree getter. He might have gotten honorary ones too,
Speaker 1: I don't know. So after school he also went to
Speaker 1: Princeton too, I think, just to show off to go
Speaker 1: to both Cambridge and Princeton. He got a job working
Speaker 1: for the government and the Code and Cipher School, and
Speaker 1: then a nineteen thirty nine The Nazis are like doing
Speaker 1: their Nazi thing. I swear to God, it's impossible to
Speaker 1: do a history podcast that doesn't tie in the Nazis
Speaker 1: at some point, probably one of those animals in that
Speaker 1: list sucking Nazi um so. And then he starts working
Speaker 1: at as working at a super secret, top secret, extra
Speaker 1: secret Bletchley Park in order to decipher Nazi codes, which
Speaker 1: he succeeded at not single handedly. I think this guy's
Speaker 1: hella cool, but we keep hitting the same point. But
Speaker 1: it's teams of people who make history. But he still
Speaker 1: did a fucking lot of it, and probably it certainly
Speaker 1: would have not happened in the same way without him,
Speaker 1: might not have happened at all. The work that they
Speaker 1: did did not single handedly crushed Hitler, but basically having
Speaker 1: access to all of their coded information. One historian calculated
Speaker 1: that it shortened the war by two to four years
Speaker 1: and saved fourteen million lives, which I mean that ain't bad.
Speaker 1: We always talked about like, oh, this person killed X
Speaker 1: million number of people, right, but we don't I haven't
Speaker 1: seen the Wikipedia list of the people who have saved
Speaker 1: the most people. Yeah, And it really goes back to
Speaker 1: sort of like I like, it's kind of sucked up
Speaker 1: that we talk about, like like numbers of people killed
Speaker 1: when we're talking about war. But like, even the conception
Speaker 1: of this action saved x amount of people's lives, we
Speaker 1: don't really even have like an understanding of that, Like
Speaker 1: we don't that's that's not how we describe things. Yeah, totally,
Speaker 1: and and even like, like I'm pretty pretty antimilitaristic in
Speaker 1: my attitude and most of the time, but I don't
Speaker 1: necessarily apply that to World War two, where stopping the
Speaker 1: Nazi seems like a really important thing to do, even
Speaker 1: if all of the people trying to do it, all
Speaker 1: the government's trying to do it were bad, like the
Speaker 1: USSR in the US, right, But it's interesting to think that, like, oh,
Speaker 1: this person who contributed to the war saved millions of lives.
Speaker 1: I don't know, because most of the time that's not
Speaker 1: the way that you savellions of lives. So the Nazis
Speaker 1: are sending messages using these machines called Enigma machines, which
Speaker 1: would be a name that would be absolutely trite if
Speaker 1: I wrote it in fiction. And they are these typewriters
Speaker 1: that translate between cipher text and plain text. You type
Speaker 1: in your message, it comes out of code, or you
Speaker 1: type in a code. It comes out of message and
Speaker 1: it's based on a key which can change every day,
Speaker 1: and by the time the war starts, the Nazis are
Speaker 1: changing it every day. It was actually Polish mathematicians who
Speaker 1: first broke Enigma, and right before World War Two they
Speaker 1: passed that information along to the Allies. So poland sort
Speaker 1: I guess the last laugh about that whole being crushed
Speaker 1: by the Nazis thing, or at least they got to
Speaker 1: participate in the reverse crushing. But then after the war
Speaker 1: breaks out, the Nazis change how Enigma works and it
Speaker 1: needed new breaking. The stuff gets really into the weeds.
Speaker 1: People really like codes. Turing, in, another codebreaker, develops a
Speaker 1: purpose built code breaking machine that they called the bomb
Speaker 1: or the Bombay or something, and it's bomb with an
Speaker 1: E at the end, but not like bomb e like Wally,
Speaker 1: which would be a better choice I think they could
Speaker 1: have made. During the war, he broke Nazi codes and
Speaker 1: did other ship like he developed a voice scrambler to
Speaker 1: encrypt voice calls, which is like something that I even
Speaker 1: I conceptually struggle to imagine how I would do a
Speaker 1: hundred years later. You know, I'm not a cryptographer, that
Speaker 1: this is really coming across to anyone who was a
Speaker 1: cryptographer is listening. And then after the war, he fucking
Speaker 1: invents the modern computer. Sort of same as everyone who
Speaker 1: invents the modern computer, lots of people do it, but
Speaker 1: he puts forward the idea that computers can store their programs,
Speaker 1: and this is a really major step up. And he
Speaker 1: also stayed gay. Imagine that at one pot in one
Speaker 1: he actually proposed to a coworker, a woman, and she
Speaker 1: said yes, and then he was like, oh, but I'm gay,
Speaker 1: and she was like, that's that's fine, Okay, we can
Speaker 1: still get married. Not a deal breaker, I know. And
Speaker 1: then Turing was like, you know, actually I probably shouldn't
Speaker 1: marry it. I feel like that would be like dishonest
Speaker 1: or something. But yeah, I appreciate that it wasn't a
Speaker 1: deal breaker. For in nineteen fifty two, he's thirty nine
Speaker 1: years old, he starts dating a younger man. He accidentally
Speaker 1: snitches himself out to the cops about being gay. His
Speaker 1: house had been burgled, and he made a classic mistake
Speaker 1: that rich white people make where he thought that the
Speaker 1: cops would um help him. Don't talk to cops exactly,
Speaker 1: And if he had listened to our sponsor, don't talk
Speaker 1: to cops. His life would have been very different and
Speaker 1: probably substantially longer. So he outs himself as gay while
Speaker 1: he's explaining like why his partner like why there's another
Speaker 1: man in the house or whatever, like his his partner
Speaker 1: was like unemployed and probably knew the burglar and I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's all this complicated it. So he and
Speaker 1: his boyfriend get arrested because they're gay and that's not right. Apparently,
Speaker 1: he pleads guilty. First, he kind of leads like no contests,
Speaker 1: as lawyers like, plead guilty. So he pleads guilty, and
Speaker 1: he's given two choices. You can either go to fucking
Speaker 1: prison for darren sleep with another consenting adult, or you
Speaker 1: can let us chemically castrate you where the government. He
Speaker 1: picks chemical castration. Basically, they these are just these are
Speaker 1: hormones that feminize his body. They reduces libido, they make
Speaker 1: him impotent, and they cause breast tissue to form. So
Speaker 1: the punishment for being gay was being forced to transition.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, like the govern like the government. I mean,
Speaker 1: it almost seems silly in when we know that our
Speaker 1: governments are trying to make it like like criminalized trans
Speaker 1: youth and like keep them from gender reform, gender reforming care.
Speaker 1: But like, it is wild to me that we're still
Speaker 1: having this conference. That's it seems so like backward and horrible.
Speaker 1: But then I had to be like, oh wait, it's
Speaker 1: not really like the government really getting involved in like
Speaker 1: people's expression of their gender and sexuality. I wish it
Speaker 1: were a thing of the past and that like what
Speaker 1: a relic of of a of a different time, but
Speaker 1: like not really unfortunately. Yeah, yeah, I I even I
Speaker 1: like try to write a thing out in the script
Speaker 1: about this. At all I wrote out was what the fuck?
Speaker 1: Because like what I just keep looking at it, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, this is what they're not letting us do
Speaker 1: on purpose now, but when the government wants to do
Speaker 1: it to game like oh fucking no mine. Fuck. Yeah.
Speaker 1: His boyfriend gets I think the same deal. He does
Speaker 1: some kind of deal that gets them out of prison,
Speaker 1: and I don't believe it was like cooperation or anything.
Speaker 1: I think it was probably the same chemical castration. And
Speaker 1: of course now he's a terrible monster, so he can't
Speaker 1: keep his security clearance at the government who he entirely saved,
Speaker 1: and he loses his job. You can't have your fucking
Speaker 1: fourteen million lives saying fucking here, like sucking dudes off.
Speaker 1: That'd be bad, you know. Um, And the US doesn't
Speaker 1: let him enter because he's like so bad and untouchable again,
Speaker 1: like the fucking hero of World War two. You can't
Speaker 1: have someone as dangerous as that around in the US.
Speaker 1: So two years later, on June seven fifty four, Turing
Speaker 1: kills himself with cyanide. And it's possible that this was
Speaker 1: an accident. I frankly don't believe it. Apparently he loved
Speaker 1: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was one of his
Speaker 1: favorite films, and one biographer said that he particularly liked
Speaker 1: the scene where the you know, wicked witch or whatever
Speaker 1: dips the apple into poison, and a half eaten apple
Speaker 1: was found next to his corpse and they didn't bother
Speaker 1: to check it for cyanide before they like hucked it
Speaker 1: out or whatever. So there was also this whole electroplating
Speaker 1: set up in his tiny room for gold plating spoons,
Speaker 1: and so there's like this accidental death theory that he
Speaker 1: accidentally killed himself with cyanide that he was using to
Speaker 1: electroplates spoons, which I don't know. I I buy the
Speaker 1: theory that he put that there for plausible deniability. He
Speaker 1: put that there to be like, I feel like a
Speaker 1: lot of the time, when people choose to end their
Speaker 1: own lives, they come up with ways to do it
Speaker 1: in ways that kind of give everyone around them a
Speaker 1: way to be like, well, we don't know for sure,
Speaker 1: even though we all kind of know, you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know. This just gets into the what the fuck
Speaker 1: He's another gay man driven to suicide by society they
Speaker 1: want to accept him. I don't know. And so like
Speaker 1: we're recording this episode and the listeners listening to this
Speaker 1: episode with technology that this man fucking developed, um and
Speaker 1: then the UK government killed him. As far as I'm concerned, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's at what you just said really like
Speaker 1: puts it in perspective that we're people are listening to
Speaker 1: this episode on technology that we wouldn't have without him,
Speaker 1: and yet rather than being treated like the innovator and
Speaker 1: hero that he was, he was driven to death by suicide.
Speaker 1: And I think it, like, I don't know, maybe I'm
Speaker 1: just in a weird place where I can't help but
Speaker 1: see these parallels of today of like who out there
Speaker 1: are we going to be like, Oh, if only we
Speaker 1: had you know, celebrated them and affirmed them while they
Speaker 1: were here, Like it's just like a generation. It's it's
Speaker 1: so so wasteful, Like what a wasteful way to treat
Speaker 1: someone who had so much to give to the world. Yeah, No, totally,
Speaker 1: and it it just keeps up coming up again and
Speaker 1: again that people people work for these institutions like governments
Speaker 1: in order to improve the world and take humanity further
Speaker 1: and advance human knowledge and then get basically murdered by
Speaker 1: them or you know, thrown away. Not my favorite thing
Speaker 1: that's happened. So let's talk about the space race. So
Speaker 1: World War two is over and it's cold wartime, and
Speaker 1: which brings it with it, the space race. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to cut mostly over to the USSR for a
Speaker 1: while because I'm not trying to be like yeah us
Speaker 1: with this podcast. I've probably hit this theme enough. But
Speaker 1: I don't like the U S or the U S SR.
Speaker 1: It's a cold war between two evil powers. But they
Speaker 1: still did all this really interesting ship the individual scientists
Speaker 1: and the USSR, for my money, won the space race.
Speaker 1: We got to the Moon first, which which everyone pretends
Speaker 1: like the biggest prize. But the USSR had the first satellite,
Speaker 1: the first mammal, the first human, the first woman, the
Speaker 1: first and the first black men into space. Oh what
Speaker 1: was the first mammal? Do you know? Oh? Crap, I
Speaker 1: looked it up. Oh no, I don't, no, no no.
Speaker 1: I I had this whole section written about the animals
Speaker 1: they sent to space, and then I got too sad
Speaker 1: and I decided not to include them because most of
Speaker 1: the animals that got sent up into space were just
Speaker 1: like sent into space and then abandoned, or some of
Speaker 1: them were sent up into space and then came back
Speaker 1: and then we're you know, treated badly upon their return. Um. No,
Speaker 1: So I got really sad about the animal parts, so
Speaker 1: then I cut it out. And now I don't remember
Speaker 1: what the first animal was, but fruit flies were the
Speaker 1: first like living creature. Okay, interesting, Yeah, I I'm sad
Speaker 1: that that they didn't treat these animals well when they returned,
Speaker 1: or if they returned. My god, I know some of
Speaker 1: them ended like heroes or whatever. And like, you know,
Speaker 1: some of the dogs, I think in particular, I like,
Speaker 1: I looked it up. It was a dogo oh I
Speaker 1: dog go. So the space race. The USSR starts it
Speaker 1: by launching a satellite, right, and guess what inspired them
Speaker 1: to launch a satellite. The obvious answers here would be
Speaker 1: either like domination of the planet to a hive mind
Speaker 1: of communism if you're reading in propaganda on one end
Speaker 1: of the spectrum, or the further into human knowledge from
Speaker 1: a detached atheistic point of view. After all, the uss
Speaker 1: are we're full of atheists, right? Wrong? I mean, the
Speaker 1: USSR was full of atheists, but not just full of
Speaker 1: atheists and a lot of their rocket scientists. So the
Speaker 1: philosophical underpinnions of the U S s R is entry
Speaker 1: into the space race, the thing that started the chain
Speaker 1: of events that got a human on the moon. Where
Speaker 1: the cosmists? Have you ever heard of the Cosmists? I haven't.
Speaker 1: So they're this weird, ideologically diverse philosophical and scientific movement
Speaker 1: that is kind of cult like and it marries spirituality
Speaker 1: and science. And they were aspiring necromancers who wanted to
Speaker 1: raise the dead, not necromancy. Necromancy if you think the
Speaker 1: fucking leftists arguing on Twitter are bad right now. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, there were anarchists arguing that death was
Speaker 1: quote logically absurd, ethically impermissible, and esthetically ugly. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I just I don't know. I somehow I didn't need
Speaker 1: necromancy versation, roll left turn exactly so. And this is
Speaker 1: the This is the group that includes basically all of
Speaker 1: the early rocket scientists in the USSR and the people
Speaker 1: designing practical spacecraft. Their ideological founder was a guy named
Speaker 1: Nikolai Fyodorov who died penniless three of pneumonia in a
Speaker 1: rented room full of strangers. And he came at the
Speaker 1: whole thing from a Christian lens. He was an orthodox
Speaker 1: Christian and the reason he died so poor is that,
Speaker 1: in proper Christian form he gave away everything he owned.
Speaker 1: I think he was also, I think it was I
Speaker 1: think it was him. It was also very conservative and
Speaker 1: like like these are. This is not like a communist hero.
Speaker 1: But he gets called the Socrates of Moscow and he
Speaker 1: would hold intellectual salons and he was He befriended Tolstoy
Speaker 1: until they got into arguments about politics, Tolstoy being far left,
Speaker 1: and Tolstoy also shows up in every episode. I do,
Speaker 1: and I don't understand why. Um, I don't even have
Speaker 1: any particular love for Tolstoy, but he's everywhere. If I
Speaker 1: talk about Russia, Tolstoy is there there. He is pops
Speaker 1: up his most important project, oh and his whole thing.
Speaker 1: So the three things that the cosmis are trying to
Speaker 1: do is that they're trying to colonized space. They're trying
Speaker 1: to resurrect the dead and live forever just like you do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're on some like Peter Teel ship like I know,
Speaker 1: I know, I mean, these are the like, these are
Speaker 1: the forefathers of the futurist movement. Um, it really doesn't
Speaker 1: surprise that tols Soys bring brought up when death is
Speaker 1: being described as aesthetically ugly like that fills very brand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fair enough. So. So this guy's most important protege was
Speaker 1: Constantine Sholkovski, who lived in a cabin in the woods
Speaker 1: by choice and wrote books with riveting titles like Explorations
Speaker 1: of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices, and he
Speaker 1: was talked about guiding ships of rocket thrusters. He talked
Speaker 1: about using airlocks on space stations, and he spent his
Speaker 1: time developing ideas of closed loop ecosystems that would keep
Speaker 1: everyone fed on space stations, which basically means he he
Speaker 1: came up with the basic foundations of where we're currently
Speaker 1: at a hundred years later in terms of our space travel.
Speaker 1: A lot of these early cosmists are right wings rists
Speaker 1: and ship but a lot of them weren't. A lot
Speaker 1: of them were leftists. During the Russian Revolution and the
Speaker 1: resulting Civil War, some chunk of the cosmists became the
Speaker 1: bio cosmists, and they're an anarchist faction and they're fighting
Speaker 1: for colonized space, resurrect the dead live forever. Lennin famously
Speaker 1: not excited about anarchists in general, including ones he started
Speaker 1: off as his allies. He actually lets them hang out
Speaker 1: longer than all the other anarchists, not because they're weird necromancers,
Speaker 1: but because they kind of shut up and backed the Bolsheviks,
Speaker 1: and they were mostly a poetry movement. They were so
Speaker 1: confusing the whole fucking cosmist thing, and people are really
Speaker 1: into the cosmis. I've never even heard of them until
Speaker 1: I first read about them in an introduction to a
Speaker 1: Russian novel that I was reading. Most of the rocket
Speaker 1: scientists in USS are our cosmists. So after the Revolution.
Speaker 1: Things were looking really good for the uss are to
Speaker 1: get into space right until who comes onto this stage
Speaker 1: but Stalin. Stalin comes on and sucks everything up. Motherfucket
Speaker 1: Stalin shows up. He sucks everything up. He disappears all
Speaker 1: of the major players into the whole thing because he
Speaker 1: does not like how religious the whole thing is, and
Speaker 1: he doesn't like the some portions of it are too anarchistic.
Speaker 1: Space communism aborted by Stalin. He also shuts down research
Speaker 1: into computer because he saw them as an evil Western
Speaker 1: capitalist plot undermine workers rights, even though the first computer
Speaker 1: able to solve differential equations in the world was a
Speaker 1: Soviet invention in nineteen thirty six. It was called the
Speaker 1: Water Integrator, and it stores numbers by different quantities of water,
Speaker 1: which fucking rules. Yeah, I've never even heard of this.
Speaker 1: I had neither. I really want to see one. So anyway,
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty three, Stalin did the single best thing
Speaker 1: he ever did for the world. He fucking died. Not
Speaker 1: a big Stalin fan here. Nineteen fifty seven, Russian scientists
Speaker 1: get Sputnik one into orbit, the first artificial satellite in
Speaker 1: Earth orbit by anyone in the world. It's only after
Speaker 1: a month of design and construction. Basically, they hit the
Speaker 1: ground running as soon as they get out of Stalin jail.
Speaker 1: Sputnik one hangs out doing its thing for three weeks
Speaker 1: until it's batteries run out, and then a couple of
Speaker 1: months later it burns up on re entry. And this
Speaker 1: not the fact that it burns out on re entry,
Speaker 1: but the fact that they launched it freaks the US
Speaker 1: out entirely and triggers this base race which the U.
Speaker 1: S s R continues to beat the ship out of
Speaker 1: the US in. On April twelve one, the first human
Speaker 1: gets into space, Uriga Garin, who's a Russian cosmonaut because
Speaker 1: they called there's cosmonauts in the US called There's astronauts.
Speaker 1: Yuri goes up on Volstock one, and the main designer
Speaker 1: for both of these things, Buttnick and vol Stock was
Speaker 1: Sergey Pevlovich or oliv. I really am good at Russian.
Speaker 1: That's my second. I'm not good at Russian. He's a cosmist.
Speaker 1: Sergey is, or at least he's heavily influenced by the cosmos.
Speaker 1: He writes books about the cosmis and shipped to interact
Speaker 1: with their theories. I think he's a cosmist. He spent
Speaker 1: six years in prison thanks to Stalin and his fucked
Speaker 1: up paranoia before he gets out and wins the space race.
Speaker 1: And this is he sends the first dog, the first man,
Speaker 1: the first woman, and the first spacewalker into space. His
Speaker 1: rockets photographed the dark side of the moon. He never
Speaker 1: loses anyone on any flight during his direction. And unsurprisingly,
Speaker 1: actually this is gonna shock you. He didn't trust his
Speaker 1: government very much. He had lost all of his teeth
Speaker 1: while he was in prison for some of his teeth
Speaker 1: because of scurvy, so he doesn't trust his government very much.
Speaker 1: Apparently his favorite expression was this is a really catchy expression.
Speaker 1: We are all going to be shots and there will
Speaker 1: be no obituary. It's just like catchphrase. You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I get it, but grim well, death is
Speaker 1: aesthetically ugly. If you didn't know, yeah, totally, but you
Speaker 1: know it isn't aesthetically ugly. Is a good comb, a solid,
Speaker 1: reliable comb. You can get a lot done with it. Then,
Speaker 1: not any particular brand, just that a really good comb.
Speaker 1: As well as all of the sponsors of today's show
Speaker 1: besides Combs, here's some ads and we are bad and
Speaker 1: we're talking about how we're all going to be shot
Speaker 1: and there will be no obituary if we live in Sofia, Russia.
Speaker 1: And I think, I think that this attitude of him
Speaker 1: really underlines this thing again to keep hitting my same
Speaker 1: themes over and over again, and that these scientists are
Speaker 1: scientists first and foremost, and they interact with bureaucracy as
Speaker 1: best as they can to facilitate the science. And this
Speaker 1: is a lot of bad effects. But I don't know,
Speaker 1: I it makes sense to me. I can kind of
Speaker 1: understand this guy being like, well, I guess I'm really
Speaker 1: interested in sending ship to space, so I'm going to
Speaker 1: work with even the people who just let me out
Speaker 1: of jail. I don't know, Yeah, it makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: And it's like, like, if you're interested in space, there
Speaker 1: really is only one game in town. It's not like
Speaker 1: you can start your own little like indie space startup.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, I mean I wish, but then you have
Speaker 1: to be elon Musk and do other evil ship on
Speaker 1: a completely different other evil access. So so one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that the Soviets are ahead of the US,
Speaker 1: I mean, one day they start first, right, and they've
Speaker 1: been planning for it for years because they practically religiously
Speaker 1: obsessed with it the Cosmos. At least that's part of
Speaker 1: their three part program, and the other is kind of ironically.
Speaker 1: They had an advantage in that they hadn't gotten as
Speaker 1: a head in technology. They weren't miniaturizing their technology. We
Speaker 1: were using we the US was using transistors, and the
Speaker 1: USSR was still using vacuum tubes. So they just made
Speaker 1: everything like fucking giant and brutal. On Soviet NASA's Mercury
Speaker 1: spacecraft was like a tiny floating coffin. The Soviet voss
Speaker 1: stock was a cannonball filled with padding, and NASA went
Speaker 1: for careful water landings. The USSR was like, I'll just
Speaker 1: get the funk out of a parachute before it hits
Speaker 1: the ground, all right, um, get the funk out of
Speaker 1: their good luck goes O't go, what are you an idiot?
Speaker 1: Then get the ground like that's all. They gave him
Speaker 1: a good life? Yeah, and actually it actually they gave
Speaker 1: Although they were the first to start sending engineers instead
Speaker 1: of just pilots up into space. At the very first
Speaker 1: people they were sending up, they were like, you don't
Speaker 1: have any control over this thing. You just you're just there.
Speaker 1: You're just there. You have some basic stuff, whereas the
Speaker 1: U S Space program, the astronauts had a lot more control,
Speaker 1: a lot more the ability to understand what was happening
Speaker 1: and fixed problems. But yeah, so this sets them up
Speaker 1: for quick victories, but it makes a complex operation like
Speaker 1: landing on the Moon much harder, and so they they
Speaker 1: do later keep trying and failing too. They managed to
Speaker 1: hit the moon a lot, but they don't manage to
Speaker 1: soft land on the Moon very well. So, but the
Speaker 1: Soviets get women into space first. The US was poised
Speaker 1: to get women into space first. The U S had
Speaker 1: private screenings for potential women astronauts starting in nine It
Speaker 1: was financed by a wealthy woman aviator, and in the
Speaker 1: end they picked thirteen women who passed all the same
Speaker 1: tests as male astronauts. Decades later, they were dubbed the
Speaker 1: Mercury thirteen, which wasn't their name at the time, as
Speaker 1: a reference to the Mercury Seven, which is the seven
Speaker 1: man astronauts that were picked. An aviator named Jerry Cobb
Speaker 1: was lead among these women, and she had already set
Speaker 1: in her twenties, she had set three aviation records, like
Speaker 1: not just for like a woman aviator, but for any aviator.
Speaker 1: But then in nineteen sixty two there was a House
Speaker 1: committee hearing on gender discrimination in the space race. Jerry
Speaker 1: Cobb and others testified basically it was discrimination to not
Speaker 1: let them go up into space just because they were women.
Speaker 1: They passed all the same tests as the male astronauts.
Speaker 1: That seems pretty cut and dry, right, do you think
Speaker 1: they're gonna win? I don't know. Well, guess who testifies
Speaker 1: against them. But the first two American men to go
Speaker 1: up in orbit, including John Glenn, who was painted as
Speaker 1: this trust women anti racist in the fucking movie Hidden Figures.
Speaker 1: Are you fucking kidding? I Am not kidding. Okay, wait,
Speaker 1: how the hell do we let people like this be
Speaker 1: like rebranded as like heroic and like anti racist feminist?
Speaker 1: Like what they they only read the fucking headline. They
Speaker 1: don't read the whole story. Yeah yeah, his quote to
Speaker 1: the committee. I think this gets back to the where
Speaker 1: social order is organized. Really, it is just a fact
Speaker 1: the men go off and fight wars and fly the
Speaker 1: airplanes and come back and help design and build and
Speaker 1: test them. The fact that women are not in this
Speaker 1: field is a fact of our social order, which what
Speaker 1: is true but only in a bad way. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: like to say that and be like and like what
Speaker 1: the unset thing is like that that that and we
Speaker 1: need to uphold that norm Yeah, totally he did. Apparently
Speaker 1: he had it like he had his like maybe I
Speaker 1: shouldn't be this way moment when um, oh, I don't
Speaker 1: remember her name, but a woman died in the Challenger
Speaker 1: explosion and oh he eulogized her and did not say like, well,
Speaker 1: it shouldn't have been there in the first place, and
Speaker 1: I rite, you know, um, I think he like twenty
Speaker 1: years later or whatever kind of like came around. But
Speaker 1: but first he argued. Part of their defense about why
Speaker 1: women shouldn't get to fly in space is that in
Speaker 1: order to be an astronaut you had to be a
Speaker 1: test pilot in the Air Force, and women weren't allowed
Speaker 1: to be test pilots. So so sorry, sorry, ladies, get
Speaker 1: out of space because it's it's not us, it's this
Speaker 1: other institution that's preventing you. Post other rule. We would
Speaker 1: we would change it if it were up to us,
Speaker 1: but it's just the social owner, am I right? Um? God? Anyway,
Speaker 1: this delays women from going to space for decades, so
Speaker 1: that the Soviets are always looking for propagandic coup over
Speaker 1: the US, and they really like to prove how more
Speaker 1: progressive they are, so they send the first woman into space,
Speaker 1: Valentina Tereshkova on June. Most of the Soviets involved in
Speaker 1: the space race that I found, we're just scientists who
Speaker 1: happened to do their work in the USSR. Not Valentina.
Speaker 1: She's a patriot in a communist well, she's actually still alive,
Speaker 1: and she's still a patriot. She's not technically a communist anymore.
Speaker 1: She's born in seven and shortly thereafter her father was killed.
Speaker 1: And that dumb thing where the Soviets tried to invade
Speaker 1: Finland because and this thing that will sound familiar to nobody,
Speaker 1: the Winter War where the Soviets invaded Finland was because
Speaker 1: they decided that the Finnish border was too close to
Speaker 1: one of their cities, so it was a threat, and
Speaker 1: so they had to move the border, so they invaded Finland. Anyway,
Speaker 1: her dad died doing that, and I'm not sorry. Valentina
Speaker 1: finished the school, she joins the Communist party. She gets
Speaker 1: to work at a textile factory, and then she becomes
Speaker 1: a competitive parachutist, which is objectively cool. I didn't even
Speaker 1: imagine competitive parachuting, and I think of parachuting is a
Speaker 1: thing you do when you turn forty and you're trying
Speaker 1: to find meaning in life, or your George w Bush
Speaker 1: doing it on your birthday. Right. No, Apparently Sophie is
Speaker 1: wagging her finger correct to say yes um. And it
Speaker 1: was this activity that got her noticed, and soon enough
Speaker 1: she ends up a cosmonaut. She's the first woman in space,
Speaker 1: and to this day she's the only woman who's been
Speaker 1: to space on a solo trip. And there was this
Speaker 1: tradition among cosmonauts on the way to the launch pad
Speaker 1: where they needed to take one last piss before they
Speaker 1: got into the shuttle, so they would pee on the
Speaker 1: tire of the bus that takes them out. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's the most boy thing in the world, right It's
Speaker 1: I say this as someone who loves to camp and
Speaker 1: like it takes a lot of pleasure and peeing outside gross.
Speaker 1: Valentina did not break this tradition, and she too peed
Speaker 1: on the which is kind of like, I kind of
Speaker 1: like that energy, though, I kind of like the all
Speaker 1: right bucket. She goes up to space. She orbits forty
Speaker 1: eight times in a single flight, really just trying to
Speaker 1: flex on the US. She logs more flight time in
Speaker 1: that than all American astronauts prior to that combined. She
Speaker 1: takes photos of the atmosphere that are used to analyze
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, and then the way that she was particularly
Speaker 1: nauseous during her her flight was like used to study
Speaker 1: the effects of space on on the human And since
Speaker 1: her flight capsule was basically a cannonball, it comes down
Speaker 1: crashing into the Earth. She injects four kilometers above the
Speaker 1: ground and parachutes down, which is the skill that got
Speaker 1: her the job, because they're like, look, all you gotta
Speaker 1: do is get shot into space and parachute at the end. Right.
Speaker 1: That's like and she's like an expert competitive parachuter. So
Speaker 1: she's gotten like the job, she's got down, Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean I think she also like trained and shipped
Speaker 1: to be a cosmonaut, but like, but this is why
Speaker 1: she got picked. And then she fights strong winds on
Speaker 1: her descent, she bruises but not breaks her nose on
Speaker 1: the landing, and then she has some dinner with local villagers,
Speaker 1: and then she goes home a hero, and she wanted
Speaker 1: to keep going to space, but she was too valuable
Speaker 1: as a propaganda hero, and against her wishes, she was
Speaker 1: put in charge of the Committee for Soviet Women in
Speaker 1: because of the the USSR was a dictatorship and she didn't
Speaker 1: get to choose what she did. She dives into feminist
Speaker 1: socialist politics. She stays a communist for a while after
Speaker 1: the collapse of the USSR, and now she's a politician
Speaker 1: with the United Russia Party, which is basically the let
Speaker 1: Putin do whatever he wants party. She tried to remove
Speaker 1: term limits for Putin, um she sort of succeeded. Putin
Speaker 1: now has a two term limit, but they reset them,
Speaker 1: so Putin has two more terms or whatever, like a
Speaker 1: decade left. She's not my hero, That's what I'm trying
Speaker 1: to say. Yeah, I mean, it's like a classic story
Speaker 1: of like jumping out of planes and pissing on wheels
Speaker 1: is cool, but then it's like, oh, yeah, you did
Speaker 1: all this other stuff for like a fucked up fascist state.
Speaker 1: A good job, I guess. One time, she meets Jerry Cobb,
Speaker 1: the American woman who should have preceded her and been
Speaker 1: the first woman into space, and she actually said, well,
Speaker 1: I idolized you before she became a cosmonaut, and she said, quote,
Speaker 1: we always figured you would be the first. What happened?
Speaker 1: And then to the media she said, they the American
Speaker 1: leaders shout at every turn about their democracy and at
Speaker 1: the same time they announced they will not let a
Speaker 1: woman into space. This is open inequality. So she knows
Speaker 1: what the funk is happening. She knows her role both
Speaker 1: as a propagandist, but she's also telling the truth. You know,
Speaker 1: they're both hypocrites, both not the people but the governments. Incidentally,
Speaker 1: Jerry Cobb, who should have been the first woman in
Speaker 1: space and should have gotten to go to space with
Speaker 1: the US, she gets sucked over out of it more
Speaker 1: than once because later that asshole John Glenn, he gets
Speaker 1: sent to spaces seventy seven year old, and he claims
Speaker 1: that he wants to do it so they could test
Speaker 1: the effects of space on aging. So they need to
Speaker 1: send an old person. But it's like really openly, just
Speaker 1: like a political favor, and he wants to go to
Speaker 1: space again. So Jerry Cobb is like, oh, yeah, you
Speaker 1: probably need to test that on a woman too. Me
Speaker 1: I never got to go to fucking space. NASA's like, sorry, babe,
Speaker 1: she never got to go to space. That's so fucked up.
Speaker 1: I know this is really making me hate John Glenn.
Speaker 1: I feel is bad, but I don't, you know. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm sure there's more to the story than the these
Speaker 1: sides of him, but I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm glad to hear that he maybe renounced these vibes
Speaker 1: at some point in his life. Oh my god, this
Speaker 1: is reminding me so much. Did you ever hear that
Speaker 1: anecdote that Sally Ride when she went to space, they
Speaker 1: gave her she was gonna be there for a week,
Speaker 1: and they gave her like a hundred tampons, and they
Speaker 1: were like this be enough, like the greatest scientific minds,
Speaker 1: and also will this be enough? I love that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it. The whole thing is like all the
Speaker 1: different ways that like these these institutions and individuals coalesced
Speaker 1: to make it be like a women don't belong in space,
Speaker 1: Like did you go up to space? We have no
Speaker 1: idea how to keep how to make you feel supported,
Speaker 1: like you had no business up there in the first place.
Speaker 1: It is wild, totally and then the like more recently
Speaker 1: when they're like planning the Mars mission and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: we should send for women so that they don't have
Speaker 1: sex and therefore there's no like weird feelings. Yeah, women
Speaker 1: never have sex with each other. No, definitely, not not
Speaker 1: in zero G either. Yeah. I didn't know Sally Ride
Speaker 1: about the tampon thing. I'd heard that. I think I
Speaker 1: think it was don't quote me on that, but I
Speaker 1: think it was. It definitely was a hundred tampons, So
Speaker 1: that is actually correct. Yeah, there's like songs about it.
Speaker 1: It's it's ridiculous. I've seen a song on I've seen
Speaker 1: this song like one h tampon, yes, and will that
Speaker 1: be enough? Yeah, these are the people who yeah, I
Speaker 1: can play Oh my gosh. Cool. Yeah. So Sally Ride
Speaker 1: actually is next to my script because she doesn't get
Speaker 1: to go to spacete. She's the third woman in space.
Speaker 1: And I didn't know this until recently, and I think
Speaker 1: no one most people didn't. It came out more recently
Speaker 1: she's the first confirmed gay person in space. After she died,
Speaker 1: her obituary casually mentioned her partner of twenty seven years.
Speaker 1: I did not know she was gay. No, she apparently,
Speaker 1: according to her sister, who's more publicly out, she hadn't
Speaker 1: hit in her relationship, but she hadn't made it public either,
Speaker 1: and just basically been like, that's not what And also
Speaker 1: I think there was a lot of like, what you
Speaker 1: funk up your career if you told anyone right now
Speaker 1: you know? Yeah. So, but if if those four women
Speaker 1: go to Mars, none of them will be gay. Ye,
Speaker 1: No lesbian sex happening in space, don't worry. Definitely not.
Speaker 1: So this brings us the first black person in space.
Speaker 1: And the first thing I did was Google first Black
Speaker 1: person in space because I was not totally sure, and
Speaker 1: I got the wrong answer at the top of the
Speaker 1: Google screen, because if you type into google first Black
Speaker 1: person in space, you get little automatic answer at the
Speaker 1: top that says Gan S. Blueford, who went to space
Speaker 1: on the third Challenger mission. And this guy is a
Speaker 1: mean he's a talented guy. He's still alive. He has
Speaker 1: medals after medals from the Air Force, and he's written
Speaker 1: a ton of papers about fluid dynamics and ship like that.
Speaker 1: But he wasn't the first black person in space. He
Speaker 1: was the first Black American in space. And it comes
Speaker 1: up time and time again, right that you look something
Speaker 1: up and it's like the first person to do this thing,
Speaker 1: and it usually means the first Western person or the
Speaker 1: first white person, or the first in this case like
Speaker 1: you know, non Soviet block person or whatever. But the
Speaker 1: first black person in space was also the first Latin
Speaker 1: American person in space and the first Cuban in space.
Speaker 1: And he wasn't an astronaut. He was a cosmonaut. Cuban cosmonaut.
Speaker 1: Arnaldo to Myo Mendez went to space in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: for a week as part of the USSRS inter Cosmos program,
Speaker 1: which was a program by which the USSRS allies were
Speaker 1: given access to space for research and honestly just for
Speaker 1: cloud like every country wants to get to have gone
Speaker 1: to space, right, And they even let non allied Western
Speaker 1: power was used Intracosmos sometimes, which was like an extra
Speaker 1: flex over the US because the US is like waist
Speaker 1: injier about who they'll send to space. And Arnaldo Tamio
Speaker 1: Mendez was born January two in the Guantanamo Province of Cuba.
Speaker 1: He never knew his father. His mother was dirt poor
Speaker 1: and died of tuberculosis when Ronaldo was eight months old.
Speaker 1: He was raised the age of nine by his grandmother,
Speaker 1: who also took in the children of another one of
Speaker 1: her dead children. This is not a very nice time
Speaker 1: to be poor in Cuba. Before communism, it was pretty
Speaker 1: fucking bad. Eventually, when he was nine, his uncle, who
Speaker 1: was a mechanic, took him in and as a young kid,
Speaker 1: Arnaldo started taking every job he could, as a shoe shine,
Speaker 1: a vegetable peddler, a milk delivery boy. By the time
Speaker 1: he used thirteen, he found himself an apprentice carpenter, but
Speaker 1: he didn't drop out of school. In the background of
Speaker 1: all this, when Arnaldo was ten or so, the US
Speaker 1: installed a dictator in Cuba named Batista. Fidel Castro and
Speaker 1: se Guvara and a ton of other people had this
Speaker 1: whole revolution thing. It took like five years nifty nine
Speaker 1: they win. Batista did the classic dictator thing where he
Speaker 1: steals hundreds of millions of dollars and then fus off
Speaker 1: out of the country, in this case to Portugal, and Arnaldo, seventeen,
Speaker 1: was one of the thousands who stormed through the streets
Speaker 1: and joy to see their military dictatorship overthrown. He joins
Speaker 1: the military, becomes an aviation technician, and soon he adds
Speaker 1: off to the Soviet Union learning how to fix and
Speaker 1: fly fighter jets, and then he flies twenty reconnaissance missions
Speaker 1: during the Cuban Missile Crisis of nineteen sixty two. The
Speaker 1: Cuban Missile crisis was when, oh, crap, Cuba has nukes now,
Speaker 1: which happened when the USSR gave their buds some nukes,
Speaker 1: which they did because the US had stationed nukes pointing
Speaker 1: at the USSR in Italy and Turkey, and the US
Speaker 1: has also just tried to invade Cuba and failed in
Speaker 1: the Bay of Pigs invasion. So the U S is like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: Cuba suddenly has nukes. I mean, there's a reason that
Speaker 1: Cuba suddenly had nukes. The crisis ends when the US
Speaker 1: agrees not to invade Cuba anymore and to withdraw its
Speaker 1: nukes from Turkey, and the USSR agrees to withdraw its
Speaker 1: nukes from Cuba. So anyway, Arnaldo flew a bunch in
Speaker 1: the Cuban Air Force during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and
Speaker 1: as well as he started teaching Cuban aviators in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, he spent two years fighting in Vietnam, which was,
Speaker 1: you know, on the opposite side of the conflict as
Speaker 1: the US, which is interesting because he was on the
Speaker 1: opposite side of the same war flying missions as the US,
Speaker 1: as first black astronaut. And I've I've read mixed reports
Speaker 1: about exactly what Cuba got up to in Vietnam. They
Speaker 1: weren't like a major presence in the war, but if
Speaker 1: nothing else, they provided limited air support for the North Vietnamese.
Speaker 1: The USSR wanted to send some foreign cosmonauts up into space,
Speaker 1: started looking for a Cuban came down to Arnaldo, who
Speaker 1: was black, and Jose R. Mondo Lopez Falcon, who wasn't black,
Speaker 1: and it's possible after winning it down to two people,
Speaker 1: Castro picked Arnaldo basically as a fuck you to the
Speaker 1: US to point out to make fun of the US
Speaker 1: for its awful race relations. Right, but Cuba was also
Speaker 1: full of anti black racism at that time. More than
Speaker 1: half of its population was black. Harold Germaine Star, writing
Speaker 1: in the Washington Post in made the case that Moscow
Speaker 1: and Havana rolled out the red carpet for Lanks and
Speaker 1: Hues and Sada Shakur, but non exceptional black people are
Speaker 1: regularly discriminated against, jail disproportionate and non black residents and
Speaker 1: just generally mistreated. Yeah, I mean the anti black it's
Speaker 1: so interesting and I love how you've put this. The
Speaker 1: anti blackness in Cuba is a documented thing, but yet
Speaker 1: they do like welcome I guess quote exceptional black folks.
Speaker 1: And it's so interesting to me that Cuba would be
Speaker 1: trying to sort of get one over on the US
Speaker 1: by being like, oh, look how we treat our black folks.
Speaker 1: We spend send them to space, while while like totally
Speaker 1: ignoring the reality that is anti blackness in their own country.
Speaker 1: It is like so interesting and so layered and so
Speaker 1: complex and nuance, and then like it's I guess I'm
Speaker 1: happy to hear you talk about it in this way
Speaker 1: because so many people talking about it really don't have
Speaker 1: the range to like really parse the like the seven
Speaker 1: layer castle role that is anti blackness globally. I guess
Speaker 1: I'll say, yeah, yeah, No. I spent a while trying
Speaker 1: to be like, oh my god, and I just kept going,
Speaker 1: you're right, that's it's so many layers as it goes
Speaker 1: down and down, and with anti blackness all the way down,
Speaker 1: it's really fucking pressing. It's anti blackness the whole way
Speaker 1: to help. So let's talk about the USSR santi black
Speaker 1: racism for a second. In the nineteen sixties, the USSR
Speaker 1: had its own black rights demonstrations because African students, especially
Speaker 1: from Ghana, had been moving to the country for studies.
Speaker 1: And then an African man named Edmund A sorrow Atto
Speaker 1: was found dead in nineteen sixty three and students say
Speaker 1: that he was killed for sleeping with a white woman,
Speaker 1: and they had a demonstration about it that may or
Speaker 1: may not have been a riot. One sign read another Alabama,
Speaker 1: which was, you know, a clear reference to the widespread
Speaker 1: anti black racism and US basically saying it should have
Speaker 1: been better here. And the Soviet government, surprise, surprise, claimed
Speaker 1: it was all a propaganda stunts set up by the
Speaker 1: Western powers, and we're like, oh, the guy just froze
Speaker 1: to death or whatever, you know. And there's only a
Speaker 1: hun fifty seven people at this protest, which makes it
Speaker 1: seem sort of like not a big deal. But it's
Speaker 1: the first demonstration of on Red Square since the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1: Because uss are not really big on allowing freedom political
Speaker 1: speech and assembly, and people fucking did it anyway, Um,
Speaker 1: because they're fucking mad for whatever reason, they pick Arnaldo,
Speaker 1: and he's a perfectly good, you know, cosmonaut choice. He's
Speaker 1: a he's a great pilot, he's a perfect choice to
Speaker 1: represent Cuba. On September eighteenth, nineteen eighty, Arnaldo becomes the
Speaker 1: first black person in space, something that the US didn't
Speaker 1: succeed at until he spent He spends more than a
Speaker 1: week on the Soviet Space station conducting agricultural experiments designed
Speaker 1: by Cuban scientists so that Cuba can advance some of
Speaker 1: its its science. But he wasn't treated as the first
Speaker 1: black person in space right away. He definitely was the
Speaker 1: first black person in space, but no one was making
Speaker 1: a big deal out of his blackness. He was the
Speaker 1: first Cuban in space and the first Latin American in space,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't until the US sent up their black
Speaker 1: Vietnam vet Gian Blueford that attention was really drawn to
Speaker 1: the fact that Cuba did at first. Because everything is
Speaker 1: a bunch of bullshit propaganda wars that use marginalized people
Speaker 1: as ammunition. Yeah, I mean, it's so much like the
Speaker 1: episode that we just did about that, you know, hidden
Speaker 1: figures and marginalized people in computing. It's like it is,
Speaker 1: I can't imagine what it must have been like to
Speaker 1: be Like, on the one hand, I am happy that
Speaker 1: I get to to, you know, break this barrier and
Speaker 1: do this milestone. But on the other hand, they're kind
Speaker 1: of using me because they're trying to make a political
Speaker 1: point or like use me at like you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Like, I can only imagine what that must
Speaker 1: have been like to actually know all of these things
Speaker 1: and feel all of these things, but still be somebody
Speaker 1: who was like breaking barriers and making history in these ways. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: I would definitely still be like, no fucking send me
Speaker 1: to space and in his shoes, you know. Not if
Speaker 1: given the chance, would you go to some I think
Speaker 1: I would. I would have to because I refuse to
Speaker 1: let fear control my life. But oh my god, does
Speaker 1: that sound anxious? I would What I would need to
Speaker 1: do not in addition to like astronauto cosmonaut training, I
Speaker 1: would need to like really figure out a regiment of
Speaker 1: anti anxiety drugs. Yeah, I'm sure it gets. I'm sure
Speaker 1: it gets like anxiety provoking up there like tight spaces.
Speaker 1: It's like probably weird, like like probably weird sounds. I
Speaker 1: would go on a heartbeat, no question in my mind,
Speaker 1: I would totally go cool. Sophie, would you go No,
Speaker 1: we have the full range of choices. You're not even curious,
Speaker 1: what's what's going on up there? Nope, You're like, I
Speaker 1: don't it doesn't concern me. I'm gonna mind my business
Speaker 1: down here on Earth's going to stay down here with
Speaker 1: my hundred tam bonds and all the day. They probably like,
Speaker 1: send me up and they'd be like trans woman woman, Okay,
Speaker 1: hundred bonds. No, no, no, you two hundred two hundred.
Speaker 1: I don't even know as I'm like on drugs, but
Speaker 1: no one else you can eat on drugs. Potatoes absolutely
Speaker 1: sponsored today's podcast. Uh, here's some advertising that supports are
Speaker 1: complicity in capitalism and we are back and we're all
Speaker 1: jealous of Soaphy, who's dinner arrived while we were just potatoes.
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry. Well, there's other wholesome foods, I'm sure so.
Speaker 1: At the top of this episode, the first part of
Speaker 1: this episode that you heard on Monday today is Wednesday,
Speaker 1: because obviously you're listening to this to day came out.
Speaker 1: It could be any day. I don't know what day
Speaker 1: it is when you're listening to this. I promised you
Speaker 1: a bisexual rocket scientist. And so for the last story
Speaker 1: that I'm going to talk about today, I'm going to
Speaker 1: tell you about Jack Parsons and the suicide squad. Jack Parsons,
Speaker 1: who was actually his birth name is Marvel, but he
Speaker 1: didn't like his dad very much, so he didn't He
Speaker 1: didn't keep his dad's name Marvel, although Marvel Parsons would
Speaker 1: have also been a really good name. Jack Parsons, I
Speaker 1: like it. He's one of the people who founded JPL,
Speaker 1: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that later became part of NASA,
Speaker 1: the place that started the trend of hiring women as
Speaker 1: computers in aerospace field. And he designed a ton of
Speaker 1: rocket engines. He made advancements in solid and liquid fuel.
Speaker 1: That Nazi guy who led the space race, Verna von Braun.
Speaker 1: One time he got called the father of rocket science,
Speaker 1: and he was like, no, no, no, that's Jack Parsons.
Speaker 1: And I can't tell you that Jack Parsons was a
Speaker 1: good person, but I can tell you that he is
Speaker 1: fucking interesting. Jack Parsons was this rich white kid from
Speaker 1: Pasadena born in nineteen fourteen. He'd read a on of
Speaker 1: science fiction and he thought rockets were cool. He got
Speaker 1: picked on in school for being a rich, effeminate kid,
Speaker 1: and he spent his afternoons with his like one friend
Speaker 1: and they would go blow shut up in the go
Speaker 1: out in the woods and blow shut up, sucking homemade
Speaker 1: gun patterns. Probably not woods. I assume it's like desert
Speaker 1: or something. I don't know, the West coast. He reads
Speaker 1: a ton of occult of ship Pasadena, Pasadena, Florida. Where
Speaker 1: is it west? Is it Pasadena, California? Wait, where's Pasadena?
Speaker 1: Because there's Pasadena, California. Or is it Pasadena somewhere else?
Speaker 1: Because Pasadena, California. We don't upwoods there. Yeah, Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: I was right, Okay, So it's not the woods. He's
Speaker 1: blowing it up in going outside, blowing shut up whatever.
Speaker 1: Pasadena looks like. I don't know where Pasadena is. Clearly
Speaker 1: a most well traveled person. You can trust me, Okay.
Speaker 1: So his interests in classic go bisexual boy mo he uh.
Speaker 1: He blows stuff up with homemade gunpowder. He figuring out
Speaker 1: how to make his own gunpowder, and then he reads
Speaker 1: a cult of stuff and he tries to summon the
Speaker 1: devil in his bedroom, but he chickens out and he
Speaker 1: doesn't finish the ritual. He goes to college, he starts
Speaker 1: working on rocket ship in the weekends. He starts corresponding
Speaker 1: with rocket scientists all over the world, including von Brown
Speaker 1: and the Russian cosmists. Like before the warship came up,
Speaker 1: all of the U. S scientists, German scientists, Russian scientists,
Speaker 1: they're all buds and comparing notes when he's in college.
Speaker 1: His crew in school got called the suicide Squad because
Speaker 1: they're reckless with their bomb experiments, and a bunch of
Speaker 1: the major players in rocket science in the US and
Speaker 1: China are involved in the suicide Squad. Wait, I haven't
Speaker 1: really possibly silly question, Please give me if this is
Speaker 1: the stupidest question, is that where the name from? Like
Speaker 1: the comic book slash movie the Suicide Squad? Is that
Speaker 1: where the name comes from? I don't know. I was
Speaker 1: thinking about that because this is the second thing like
Speaker 1: a suicide squad I've run across in UM In the
Speaker 1: I did an episode on gay resistance to Fascism, and
Speaker 1: I found out that gay Nazis were put into a suice.
Speaker 1: It wasn't. I don't know if it's called a suicide squad,
Speaker 1: but they were put into a suicide squad where they
Speaker 1: were like, instead of going to jail, they got put
Speaker 1: in with all of like the worst Nazis off to
Speaker 1: go do like but it was like an S S
Speaker 1: squad um And so I was like reading that, and
Speaker 1: I was like, WHOA, is this where suicide squad got
Speaker 1: their things from? Like gay fucking Nazis? And now I'm
Speaker 1: reading this and I'm like, maybe this is where suicide
Speaker 1: squad got its name from. I don't know. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: just like a thing that people called idiots who kept
Speaker 1: trying to blow themselves up. Maybe it shows up all
Speaker 1: throughout history. This is interesting. No, I get really excited
Speaker 1: about these weird threads that I don't I haven't figured
Speaker 1: out how to untangle yet. So he drops out of
Speaker 1: school because he doesn't have enough money to go to school.
Speaker 1: I think maybe because his dad had sucked off. I'm
Speaker 1: not entirely sure why this financial situation changed so much.
Speaker 1: But he never gets a degree, and he turns down
Speaker 1: honorary degrees later, which is even more of a flex
Speaker 1: in a way. Although I will also say the fact
Speaker 1: that it's like the white kid turning down all these
Speaker 1: degrees as compared to like the black women who are like, like,
Speaker 1: there's a whole thing that I didn't really get into
Speaker 1: about HBUs historically black universities and like how much work
Speaker 1: they did to help uh black folks get ahead, and like,
Speaker 1: so I'm not trying to like whenever I'm like on
Speaker 1: this maverick named Marvel who dropped out of Oh my God,
Speaker 1: the fact his name was Marvel and suicide Squad Marvel
Speaker 1: or d C. I think it's Marvel, but don't quote
Speaker 1: me on that. Um anyway, that was a d h
Speaker 1: D spin off from what I was trying to talk about.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean I think you're right. Like, I
Speaker 1: love that you've added that that, Like, it's it's really
Speaker 1: easy to be a white kid from Pasadena who turned
Speaker 1: down an honorary degree. Meanwhile, all of these black women
Speaker 1: who were like working their ass off from any recognition
Speaker 1: and getting none of it probably would have like been
Speaker 1: really honored by a degree considering the role that like
Speaker 1: HBCUs played and things were that black folks were able
Speaker 1: to get educated. You know, it makes so much sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I also want everyone to know that we are safe.
Speaker 1: Suicide Squad is d C comics. Okay, too weird, too
Speaker 1: weird everyone, all right, So he drops out of college.
Speaker 1: He's still blowing ship up. He actually, you know, he
Speaker 1: starts forming these rocket scientist companies and ship, and then
Speaker 1: he starts hanging out with the communists and gets really
Speaker 1: into Marxism. But he won't join the Communist Party because
Speaker 1: he's too anti authoritarian, which makes me like him. But
Speaker 1: then he discovers something that he likes even more than
Speaker 1: like radical leftist anti authoritarian politics, occultism in the in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, he becomes a Thelamite, which is this
Speaker 1: religion started by Alistair Crowley that's all into magic and ship.
Speaker 1: And he starts talking to how magic is just quantum
Speaker 1: mechanics because he's brillianto science and all this this other
Speaker 1: ship and so yeah, he's advancing the field of rocket
Speaker 1: scientists by leaps and bounds while smoking weed with his
Speaker 1: friends and chanting to him to pan during rocket tests.
Speaker 1: This is like, I'm having trouble like wrapping my brain
Speaker 1: around this the occult Like it's just yeah, this is
Speaker 1: like in my and when I was like in high
Speaker 1: school listening to Pink Floyd. This is like what my
Speaker 1: mom would be like, Oh, you better watch out or
Speaker 1: you're gonna end up trying to go into space and
Speaker 1: being into the occult. Watch out totally. He talks throughout
Speaker 1: his life. He's he sort of like has a reputation
Speaker 1: as a womanizer that was actually part of a polyamorous culture.
Speaker 1: I'll get into a little bit, but he also talks
Speaker 1: about his latent homosexuality and in his his FBI file,
Speaker 1: which we'll get to, he's called bisexual. He liked to
Speaker 1: answer the door with a snake around his neck. His
Speaker 1: mailbox was a mannequin holding a bucket that said residents
Speaker 1: across the bucket. UM. I kind of like, I know,
Speaker 1: I kind of like this guy. When the US enters
Speaker 1: World War Two, he and his leftist rocket scientist friends,
Speaker 1: they're like, we we need to help out with the
Speaker 1: war effort, and it was a moral duty from from
Speaker 1: their point of view. They had to stop the Nazis.
Speaker 1: So him and all his friends start very intentionally working
Speaker 1: on developing a lot of the rocketry that people used
Speaker 1: to fight the Nazis. He also leaves his wife Helen
Speaker 1: for her seventeen year old sister Sarah. But then Helen
Speaker 1: falls in love with Jack's best friend, and then the
Speaker 1: couples move in together into a communis messy, very messy,
Speaker 1: but they stay friends and the house is called the
Speaker 1: parsonage because it's I think it's because it's his fucking
Speaker 1: money paid for it do because it's like and then Sarah, oh,
Speaker 1: Sarah gard leaves them for fucking l Ron Hubbard. Are
Speaker 1: you oh my fucking god. Honestly, of course of course
Speaker 1: she does. Of course she's like, what else could she do? Like, okay,
Speaker 1: so anyway, so in a similar way, we're okay, we can,
Speaker 1: we can, we can. He's really in all this occultis
Speaker 1: ship too, before he starts his own religion to fucking
Speaker 1: milk everyone out of their money. Um, and yeah, the
Speaker 1: weird fucking group of people. Okay, I'm gonna need a
Speaker 1: nap after this. So okay. So in a similar way
Speaker 1: that Stalin had gotten all paranoid and imprisoned and oppressed
Speaker 1: all of their best scientists, and the UK fucked over
Speaker 1: Alan turing Well. The House of on American Activities has
Speaker 1: some words to say for Jack Parsons, who has advanced
Speaker 1: like like his ideas of rocket fuel are what gets
Speaker 1: us to the moon. Like, he absolutely does a fucking
Speaker 1: ton of important stuff right, And then the House of
Speaker 1: an American Activities is like, now you're fucking communist, and
Speaker 1: he's like, actually, I'm not a communist. I I'm anti
Speaker 1: authoritarian and I'm Athelamite, and so I believe in the
Speaker 1: power of the individual. And they're like, we don't care,
Speaker 1: you're fucking communist. They revoke his security clearance. He's not
Speaker 1: able to get any work in the field, because how
Speaker 1: are you going to be a missile designer if you
Speaker 1: can't work for the government, And his life starts is
Speaker 1: just falling apart. In NIF two, he moves to Mexico
Speaker 1: and he sets up an explosives factory, which I guess
Speaker 1: is a thing one can choose to do when one's
Speaker 1: life is falling apart. And then one day he's making
Speaker 1: some bombs for a film set, a Mexican film, and
Speaker 1: his trailer blows up and it kills him. And lots
Speaker 1: of people have lots of ideas about exactly what happened here,
Speaker 1: but it was probably an accident or suicide. He'd probably
Speaker 1: been high on morphine at the time. He died, but
Speaker 1: then other people are like, no, it was these people.
Speaker 1: His story is so much more complex than I'm getting
Speaker 1: across because I only half understand it because it's so
Speaker 1: twisted and convoluted. But there's so many people who would
Speaker 1: have tried to kill him. So I don't know what
Speaker 1: happened to this guy, and everyone likes to argue about
Speaker 1: it because he's like, Okay, he probably dropped this container
Speaker 1: of this chemical, and then people like, no, he was
Speaker 1: very careful, and other people like, are you freaking kid?
Speaker 1: And he wasn't careful if you met this guy. But
Speaker 1: on the other hand, he'd been doing that since he
Speaker 1: was a little kid, So I don't know. Jack fucking Parsons,
Speaker 1: Then okay, don't with people, but one more thing, which
Speaker 1: actually involves a person, So I guess I lied when
Speaker 1: I said no more people. So for all the cold
Speaker 1: attached atheism that scientists supposedly known for, there's always this
Speaker 1: religious component, and I hadn't even realized that's so I
Speaker 1: started doing this research. You've got a Unitarian astronomer, You've
Speaker 1: got the cosmist who want to resurrect the dead. Katherine
Speaker 1: Johnson was a Presbyterian who sang in the choir is
Speaker 1: a member of her church for fifty years. Alan Turing
Speaker 1: he believed in fortune telling. A fortune teller told him
Speaker 1: when he was a little kid that he was going
Speaker 1: to be a genius. And supposedly the last time he
Speaker 1: had his fortune read, he came out really shook, and
Speaker 1: he didn't tell anyone what happened. Um never told anyone
Speaker 1: what he heard. And then of course there's Jack fucking Parsons,
Speaker 1: who Yeah, he's Jack fucking Parsons. He's singing to him
Speaker 1: to pan during rocket tests. But I want to talk
Speaker 1: about one more religion that's obsessed with space, Earth Seed,
Speaker 1: which is the fictional religion made up by maybe the
Speaker 1: most prescient science fiction author whoever lived, Octavia Butler. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: this is your speaking of my language. I'm a big
Speaker 1: Butler fan. Let's do this. She's so freaking amazing. I'm
Speaker 1: this I'm not unfortunately good God, I actually probably need
Speaker 1: to do an episode on Butler's You absolutely should. I
Speaker 1: would definitely listen to that. Okay. So she wrote a
Speaker 1: book called The Parable the Sewer, which I think is
Speaker 1: the most Prussian science fiction book that's ever been written,
Speaker 1: at least in terms of our current disaster that we're
Speaker 1: all living through. And this is the book where the
Speaker 1: fictitious religion of earth Seed comes from. She describes a
Speaker 1: slow apocalypse that includes a right wing fanatic of a
Speaker 1: president who runs under the slogan make America Great Again.
Speaker 1: Sound familiar, and so the protagonists they make their way
Speaker 1: up to northern California. They set up a little apocalypse
Speaker 1: survival homestead, and they develop a religion based on basically
Speaker 1: two things. One God has changed, that we all have
Speaker 1: to learn to embrace and shape change and let change
Speaker 1: shape us. And too, basically that the stars are our destiny,
Speaker 1: that theoretically something like space exploration ought to be something
Speaker 1: that brings humanity together instead of dividing us. And I
Speaker 1: don't know, And I think that that's important to think
Speaker 1: about one because I fucking like it a lot, but
Speaker 1: too because the old way of doing space is dying
Speaker 1: right now, right like nations are no longer the primary
Speaker 1: drivers of space research. You have capitalism instead, which is
Speaker 1: maybe the only thing more dangerous than these nations states.
Speaker 1: And I propose that we're sort of crossroads. Either space
Speaker 1: gets explored and claimed by sucking corporations that I claim
Speaker 1: I would say it will not be named, but we
Speaker 1: clearly named them earlier. Or we get our ship together
Speaker 1: and do it like Butler told us, and do it
Speaker 1: for humanity. That like, you just blew my mind. I yeah,
Speaker 1: you just move my mind. I hadn't thought about it
Speaker 1: that way. First of all, I have to say, I'm
Speaker 1: so glad that you're referencing Butler, because in this moment,
Speaker 1: everybody is like, oh, hand its tale, handmade sale. No,
Speaker 1: it is sucking Butler, like, like that's the that's the
Speaker 1: text we should be at least the text that I
Speaker 1: think we should be like looking too. But honestly, the
Speaker 1: way that you put that is almost kind of hopeful
Speaker 1: that we have this. We're at at a crossroads where
Speaker 1: we can decide if you want the next generation of
Speaker 1: space exploration to belong to people like Elon Musk or
Speaker 1: something different, like is it is it? Like? Who is
Speaker 1: it for? What's who's going to define it? I think
Speaker 1: I think it's almost sort of hopeful the way that
Speaker 1: you put that. Thanks. I yeah, I I you know,
Speaker 1: it's like I I try for optimism sort of strategically
Speaker 1: because it's the only chance we have is to to
Speaker 1: act like we can win, you know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and that in that book Parallel Sower and
Speaker 1: thats sequel parable of the talents. It's the most hopeful
Speaker 1: apocalypse I've ever like apocalyptic book I've ever read, and
Speaker 1: that's one of the reason I love it so much.
Speaker 1: That's my episode on space and the exploration of it
Speaker 1: and rockets and computers. Do you have any any final
Speaker 1: final reflections or yeah? My final reflection is just that like,
Speaker 1: I can't I'm so surprised to find myself in this
Speaker 1: optimistic space where you know, it's kind of up to us, like, like,
Speaker 1: what's it gonna be? What are we going to decide
Speaker 1: we want? And you know, are we gonna treat We've
Speaker 1: kind of got a number on the on the world
Speaker 1: on on Earth. Are we going to let people who
Speaker 1: we know can't be trusted do the same thing to
Speaker 1: space or aren't we you know, it's just it's kind
Speaker 1: of up to us. I don't know, it is it's
Speaker 1: a hopeful apocalypse. I guess, as you said, than where
Speaker 1: did you have any plugbolspre us? Yeah, I love conversations
Speaker 1: about technology and all things nerdy, and so please come
Speaker 1: check out my podcast there are no girls on the Internet.
Speaker 1: You can find me on Instagram at Bridget Marie DC
Speaker 1: are on Twitter at Bridget Marine Amazing and we'll be
Speaker 1: back next week, right, Margaret, Yay Soil the Heat, Death
Speaker 1: of the Universe. Where can people follow you? Margaret Well,
Speaker 1: if you want to see pictures of my dog or
Speaker 1: of a turtle that I saw today that was eating
Speaker 1: a mushroom, Yes, you can follow me on Instagram at
Speaker 1: Margaret kill Joy. And if you want to hear me
Speaker 1: complain about discourse while at participating in discourse, you can
Speaker 1: follow me on Twitter at Magpie killed Joy. I do
Speaker 1: I really do? And uh Paul Bridget Margaret back next week, everyone,
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did? Cool Stuff is a production of
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