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Speaker 1: Hi Os Voloscin here and Cara Price. We're taking the

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Speaker 1: week off.

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Speaker 2: Indeed, we'll be back with new episodes starting September tenth.

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Speaker 1: In the meantime, instead of leaving this feed empty, we

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Speaker 1: wanted to share an episode from earlier this year. This week,

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Speaker 1: we're reairing my conversation with Nathaniel Rich from January twenty ninth.

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Speaker 1: He's a novelist, essayist, and writer at large for the

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Speaker 1: New York Times magazine. We discuss a NASA experiment where

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Speaker 1: civilians take a simulated trip to Mars and try to

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Speaker 1: handle the isolation. Hope you enjoy it and thanks for listening.

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Speaker 3: NASA has a punch list of eight hundred problems that

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Speaker 3: must be solved before the first mission to Mars is launched.

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Speaker 3: Very few of them have to do with problems of

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Speaker 3: human psychology or really even of in survival, which is

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Speaker 3: the subject of this experiment that I wrote about, called SHAPEA.

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Speaker 1: This particular experiment began with rather intriguing announcement on the

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Speaker 1: NASA website.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it was a little bit like the Wonka Factory,

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Speaker 3: the Golden ticket that you know, four civilians would be

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Speaker 3: chosen to go to Mars Asterisk not really Mars, but

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Speaker 3: a habitat that was built on essentially a stage set

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Speaker 3: to look exactly like what they expect the first mission

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Speaker 3: to Mars to look like. And it generated enormous excitement

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Speaker 3: and people from all over the country rushed to apply.

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Speaker 3: They wanted the Golden ticket to live out. In most cases,

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Speaker 3: I think it's kind of childhood fantasy of space exploration

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Speaker 3: to see if they could withstand psychologically the challenges of

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Speaker 3: living away from the rest of the everyone else they've

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Speaker 3: ever known or met.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff the Story. I'm os Vloschen, and

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Speaker 1: each week we bring you an in depth interview with

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Speaker 1: one of the brightest and farthest seeing minds in and

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Speaker 1: about tech. Karen, I'm excited to bring you this interview

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Speaker 1: with Nathaniel Rich. When we ask people to come on

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Speaker 1: the show, it's always because one or other of us

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Speaker 1: has been fascinated by something they've said, something they've done,

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Speaker 1: or something they've written.

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Speaker 2: Well, Nathaniel kind of had me at Mars Asterisk.

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Speaker 1: Me too. You can't really understand tech today without understanding,

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Speaker 1: or at least investigating the dreams and the fantasies of

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Speaker 1: the tech Titans. Colonizing space is such an important touchstone

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Speaker 1: for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in particular, and also

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Speaker 1: mentioned by Trump for his inauguration as quote the pursuit

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Speaker 1: of our manifest destiny.

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Speaker 2: He said, put stars and strip What do you say?

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Speaker 2: Put red, white, and blue? Are stars and stripes on

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Speaker 2: Mars Marsia.

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Speaker 1: So when I came across this article in the New

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Speaker 1: York Times magazine under the headline can humans withstand the

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Speaker 1: psychological torture of Mars? I had to know more. In fact,

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Speaker 1: I remember reading it and just getting goosebumps, and so

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Speaker 1: I kind of wanted to talk to Nathaniel about how

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Speaker 1: realistic the dreams of getting to Mars are and what

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Speaker 1: some of the practical dare I say, technical steps required

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Speaker 1: to achieve the mark?

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Speaker 2: Before you get too excited, Can you just tell me

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Speaker 2: who Nathaniel Rich is?

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Speaker 4: Sorry.

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Speaker 1: Nathaniel is an author. He's written novels like The Mayor's Tongue,

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Speaker 1: Odds Against Tomorrow, and King Zeno, but also nonfiction books

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Speaker 1: primarily about the environment, such as Losing Earth, A Recent

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Speaker 1: History and Second Nature Scenes from a World Remade. One

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Speaker 1: critic actually said Rich is a gifted caricaturist and a

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Speaker 1: gifted apocalyptist. It's his talent for describing the apocalypse which

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Speaker 1: brought him in some ways to reporting on the Mars

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Speaker 1: June Alpha project, which asked to you about why did

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Speaker 1: you decide to write the piece?

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Speaker 3: The NASA part of it was almost came secondarily. I

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Speaker 3: had become obsessed with this history of isolation research, and

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Speaker 3: particularly by this incredible story of a man named Michel

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Speaker 3: Sefrey who had launched a series of cave experiments to

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Speaker 3: test the endurance of people in isolation, in environments where

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Speaker 3: they're completely cut off from the world. And so he

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Speaker 3: had run a series of these experiments that culminated with

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Speaker 3: this experiment by the first female participant in the series,

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Speaker 3: who was this woman named Veronique Legwyn was in the

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Speaker 3: late eighties, and she went underground and ended up setting

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Speaker 3: the record at the time as one hundred and eleven

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Speaker 3: days underground. And she kept a journal and she wrote

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Speaker 3: about everything she was thinking about and feeling, and ultimately

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Speaker 3: what happened was she went a little bit insane, but

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Speaker 3: also had these moments of great and enlightenment. And it's

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Speaker 3: a tragic story though, because she came out finally, and

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Speaker 3: after being celebrated and becoming a kind of national celebrity

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Speaker 3: for a period of time, entered into this great depression

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Speaker 3: and ultimately killed herself within a year. And she had

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Speaker 3: said before her death something to the effect of, you know,

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Speaker 3: I never was more alive than I was down and

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Speaker 3: underground when I was all by myself. And that led

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Speaker 3: me into a whole obsession with these types of experiments.

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Speaker 3: And I wanted to see if anyone was doing these

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Speaker 3: things now, because they're on one level, they're completely unethical

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Speaker 3: because basically what you'd expect happens, which is most people

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Speaker 3: struggle and often lose their hold on reality. And I

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Speaker 3: found that no one was really doing these experiments for

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Speaker 3: that reason, except for NASA, who had continued under the

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Speaker 3: guise of this Martian project.

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Speaker 1: So on the one had NASA putting out the cool applicants,

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Speaker 1: but on the other hand, they had to build mass

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Speaker 1: or at least a motion colony on Earth.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, they had to build or actually print using a

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Speaker 3: three D printer, a habitat, which is, by the way,

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Speaker 3: how they will do it. When we get to Mars.

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Speaker 3: You can't travel thirty three million miles with a house.

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Speaker 3: You know of towing a house behind you. Yeah, free.

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Speaker 3: So they can't quite do that, or they don't have

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Speaker 3: the technology to do that. It's not efficient. And so

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Speaker 3: what they will do is they will just lug a

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Speaker 3: three D printer up there and use Martian rock regolith

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Speaker 3: as ink for this three D printer.

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Speaker 1: So they'll tone the sand into cement somehow.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, and they can do that.

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Speaker 3: They do that on this planet too, And there are

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Speaker 3: you can find online some habitats that have been built,

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Speaker 3: some houses that have been built this way, not using

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Speaker 3: Martian rock obviously, but terrestrial rock. And they will construct

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Speaker 3: this house. It's a seventeen hundred square foot habitat and

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Speaker 3: they built it in a warehouse at the Johnson Space

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Speaker 3: Center in Houston, and it's their four little bedrooms and

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Speaker 3: a lounge and you know, a small indoor garden and

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Speaker 3: some computers and desks and like a little relaxation space.

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Speaker 3: And that seventeen hundred foot house habitat was where they

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Speaker 3: were going to send four people for more than a year.

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Speaker 1: And this habitat resembles exactly what they intend to build

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Speaker 1: on Mars when they get there.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sure subject to change, and I suppose part

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Speaker 3: of this experiment was to determine whether this particular model

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Speaker 3: would work best.

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Speaker 4: But yeah, this is the plan.

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Speaker 1: And the kind of simulated colony in the Johnson Space

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Speaker 1: Center had quite a romantic.

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Speaker 3: Name, Yeah, Marsdoo and Alpha is the name of the habitat,

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Speaker 3: and the the mission is named Shapeah, which is I

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Speaker 3: guess NASA's idea of a sexy name.

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Speaker 1: And so okay, So the call goes out for some

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Speaker 1: volunteers to go to Mons Dunolf. One of the people

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Speaker 1: who sees the advertisement is Nathan Jones. Who's Nathan.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, Nathan Jones is in many ways the most fascinating

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Speaker 3: figure for me in reporting the piece. He's an emergency

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Speaker 3: room physician from Springfield, Illinois, father of three boys, married

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Speaker 3: and Nathan was, like basically everyone I spoke to for

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Speaker 3: the story, was a kind of self professed NASA geek

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Speaker 3: or obsessive and had always dreamed of doing something special,

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Speaker 3: bigger with his life. He was obsessed with space travel

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Speaker 3: and when he saw this posting, he applied immediately and

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Speaker 3: then told his his wife, who was I think as

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Speaker 3: safe to say as it was a pault.

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Speaker 1: The sequence that seems a little all speaking as American man.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't. I wouldn't have flied in my house.

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Speaker 3: But he was unique actually in that he was the

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Speaker 3: only one of the finalists who had children, and as

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Speaker 3: the father of two small children myself, I felt for

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Speaker 3: the family. And he was fully aware he was going

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Speaker 3: to miss out on a lot. You miss a year

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Speaker 3: with your children, you're missing a lot, and you come

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Speaker 3: back and the children look like different people. So there

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Speaker 3: was another dimension of an emotional challenge with him. But

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Speaker 3: he was determined to do it.

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Speaker 1: And how did he prepare.

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Speaker 3: He prepared very dutifully by him and his wife had

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Speaker 3: a whole series. I was fascinated by this, a whole

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Speaker 3: series of preparations that they did. He wrote little letters

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Speaker 3: to that he placed around the house in secret hiding

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Speaker 3: spots that the kids and his wife case he might

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Speaker 3: find over the course of the year. Sometimes little like

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Speaker 3: notes of encouragement, like he put a note in the

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Speaker 3: fuse box for like the first time the lights went

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Speaker 3: out and said, you know you can do this. I

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Speaker 3: trust you, just flipped this switch. And so they're all

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Speaker 3: these sort of sweet and for somewhat poignant point.

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Speaker 1: It's almost like the script of a movie where somebody

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Speaker 1: knows they're going to die.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's but the poignancy is somewhat compromised. I

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Speaker 3: found by the fact that it was all a contrived

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Speaker 3: scenario he was. That's there's a kind of beathos to

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Speaker 3: the fact that, well, he wasn't actually going to Mars.

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Speaker 3: It's not quite the Matthew mcconnie Interstellar where he's missing

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Speaker 3: his children for this this major mission. He's just going

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Speaker 3: to sit on a stage set for a year. But

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Speaker 3: that tension between the kind of absurdity of the whole

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Speaker 3: proposition and then the real emotion that attended every aspect

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Speaker 3: of this process, for me, that was really the heart

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Speaker 3: of the story.

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Speaker 1: All you have to do is watch the video of

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Speaker 1: him about to go into the Mars Dunelfa. What did

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Speaker 1: you feel when you watch somebody you spend time with

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Speaker 1: his source in such distress?

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Speaker 4: Yeah, that was striking. He had predicted it.

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Speaker 3: But sure enough, when it came time to enter this habitat,

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Speaker 3: they had this dramatic ceremony. They were filmed right in

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Speaker 3: front of the main portal, which is basically just a door.

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Speaker 3: It wasn't like some major like you're entering a submarine

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Speaker 3: or something. But they were at a they get a

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Speaker 3: little press conference, and each one of them had to

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Speaker 3: give a talk, give a little statement, and he broke down.

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Speaker 3: He couldn't finish it because he was so overcome by

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Speaker 3: the thought of saying goodbye finally to his family for

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Speaker 3: this long period of time.

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Speaker 5: But I believe that tomorrow will only be possible because

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Speaker 5: we step into Mars Dune Alpa today. And with that

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Speaker 5: in mind, I also want to take a moment to

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Speaker 5: sincerely think the great many people who've worked tirelessly in

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Speaker 5: so many countless hours to get us to this point. Also,

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Speaker 5: thank you to our families and friends for their sacrifices.

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Speaker 5: We see, we know those sacrifices. We couldn't be here

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Speaker 5: without your love and support. Sorry, Sorry to my wife

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Speaker 5: and kids.

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Speaker 1: I love you, the moon. I'm sorry, bars and back.

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Speaker 3: And it's very moving and upsetting and sort of sweet

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Speaker 3: and horrible in some ways as well. It's something that

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Speaker 3: he brought upon himself. But I think what's key to

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Speaker 3: understand is that everybody in the mission, from the administrators

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Speaker 3: to the participants, felt very certain that what they were

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Speaker 3: doing was a critical next step towards this wonderful dream.

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Speaker 3: Of Humanity's next chapter, they felt that there is no Mars,

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Speaker 3: there is no exploration of Mars unless you have the

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Speaker 3: shapea experiment.

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Speaker 4: I'm not convinced that's true at all.

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Speaker 3: I mean, I wrote about that, but they certainly were,

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Speaker 3: and so they did feel that they were sacrificing, making

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Speaker 3: a major personal sacrifice towards achieving a great goal for

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Speaker 3: all of humanity, which.

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Speaker 1: May have kept them safe. And the woman you mentioned

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Speaker 1: at the beginning, the French woman who took her own life,

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Speaker 1: does she have that same sense of mission.

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Speaker 4: That's a great point.

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Speaker 3: There is some commonality, and that there was this idea

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Speaker 3: that they were on a kind of different frontier of

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Speaker 3: human psychology. But yes, it's not it was. I don't

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Speaker 3: think it was quite as ennobling. The stakes were quite

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Speaker 3: as high as you see with NASA and all the

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Speaker 3: trappings of NASA.

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Speaker 1: And also she was totally alone, whereas Nathan had three companions.

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Speaker 3: Right right, And so there's some distinctions there, although I

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Speaker 3: will say that in the long history of experiments in

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Speaker 3: which people are together in isolation, they suffer also, I mean,

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Speaker 3: maybe it's not quite as extreme, but you know, in

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Speaker 3: conducting the research for the piece I spoke with a

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Speaker 3: bunch of psychiatrists and historians of science and historians of psychology,

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Speaker 3: and I learned that the definition of isolation is not

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Speaker 3: necessarily being alone. It's being removed from your normal life

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Speaker 3: and from the people close to you. So you can

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Speaker 3: be in isolation with other people, and in fact, many

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Speaker 3: of the same psychological effects are experienced whether or not

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Speaker 3: there are you're with other people, if you're cut off

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Speaker 3: from the people who are most important to you.

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Speaker 1: When I think about the history of space movies is

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Speaker 1: obviously the famous Houston. We have a problem. Could Nathan

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Speaker 1: and co stay in touch with homebase and even with

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Speaker 1: their families while they were in Mars Dunolfa.

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Speaker 4: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: They were very scrupulous about imitating the reality, the expected reality,

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Speaker 3: which is that there's this time lapse for any communication

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Speaker 3: from Mars because it's far away and you're dealing with

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Speaker 3: the limits of the speed of sound and technology, and

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Speaker 3: so there's something it depends on where it is in

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Speaker 3: the orbit, but essentially there's like a twenty nine minute lapse,

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Speaker 3: and so you can't have a conversation, any kind of

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Speaker 3: normal conversation, but they can send messages. But the other

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Speaker 3: problem is that every form of electronic communication from the

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Speaker 3: habitat has to go through the same channel, So that

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Speaker 3: includes any kind of data that the habitat is sending

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Speaker 3: back to Earth about I don't know, oxygen levels or

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Speaker 3: what's happening in the experiments, or any kind of computer connections.

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Speaker 3: And so that's sort of the best case scenario, and

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Speaker 3: that actually the lag can be much longer, and the

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Speaker 3: low larger the audio file or the text file, the

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Speaker 3: computer file, the longer it takes of sending a short

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Speaker 3: video even in low resolution, could take days, where sending

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Speaker 3: a one line text message maybe takes only half an

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Speaker 3: hour or so. So they could communicate, but only in

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Speaker 3: this clipped way with all of these ellipses essentially between communications.

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Speaker 3: So if there's an emergency, say back at home, they

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Speaker 3: couldn't just start having a conversation with them. Now, in reality,

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Speaker 3: since they were on a stage set, they could break

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Speaker 3: the experiment at any time if someone just like I

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Speaker 3: don't know, cut off their finger or something, but they

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Speaker 3: would try to they would do anything to avoid breaking

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Speaker 3: the experiment obviously, So yeah, they were reduced to these

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Speaker 3: sort of intermittent text messages essentially that would be relayed

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Speaker 3: at unpredictable intervals.

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Speaker 1: How did you choose the headline field story?

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Speaker 4: I don't choose the headlines from a not a lot.

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Speaker 4: I don't.

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Speaker 3: I can consult on them, and I can say this

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Speaker 3: one's worse than the other one.

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Speaker 1: But the headline the New York Times magazine went with

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Speaker 1: was can humans withstand the psychological torture?

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Speaker 4: I mean, it's pretty good. I can't.

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Speaker 3: Yes, yes, And that's also what it's about, basically, can

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Speaker 3: we can people survive this? Because most of what NAS

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Speaker 3: has been asking over the course of its space program

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Speaker 3: is can we physically get people into space? Can we

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Speaker 3: physically put them on another planet? Very little thought has

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Speaker 3: been given into can human beings once they're there survive psychologically, emotionally.

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Speaker 3: And that's that's what this experiment is, at least ostensibly about.

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Speaker 3: And it's definitely what the story is that I wrote

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Speaker 3: us about.

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Speaker 1: When we come back. More from Nathaniel rich on why

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Speaker 1: we're so obsessed with going to Mars and how historically

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Speaker 1: attitudes towards Mars have always revealed deeper cultural undercurrents. How

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Speaker 1: close is NASA to putting humans on Mos? They've been

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Speaker 1: predicting for many years that it's just around the corner.

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Speaker 1: They keep pushing back the window.

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Speaker 3: Even a few years ago, I think by twenty eighteen

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Speaker 3: they had predicted that it would be no later than

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Speaker 3: the end of the twenty twenties. I think now they're

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Speaker 3: looking more to the middle of the next decade. But

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Speaker 3: they are full speed ahead, and I think they're very

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Speaker 3: confident that they will get people to the planet in

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Speaker 3: a fairly short amount of time. The technical problems that

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Speaker 3: lay before them that we referenced are not seen as

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Speaker 3: intimidatingly difficult. They're just math problems to be worked out,

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Speaker 3: is the sense that I got from speaking with one

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Speaker 3: of these senior propulsion engineers. So there is, and there

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Speaker 3: has been for quite a while within NASA, quite a

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Speaker 3: lot of optimism that this is going to happen.

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Speaker 4: It's going to happen pretty soon.

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Speaker 1: And why why mos Well.

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Speaker 3: That's the million dollars, that's the million dollar question. I mean,

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Speaker 3: there's a lot of different rationales. The main ones you

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Speaker 3: hear from NASA is it represents scientific progress. It's the

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Speaker 3: next step for human exploration of the universe, and certainly

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Speaker 3: human progress in this space exploration. There's also the rationale

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Speaker 3: that through the kind of innovation that's necessary to put

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Speaker 3: people on Mars or to reach any new milestone in

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Speaker 3: the space expeditions, that there will be some kind of

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Speaker 3: unpredictable benefits, technological benefits that can be applied for all

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Speaker 3: of humanity, so that maybe they'll invent new materials or

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Speaker 3: new types of devices that can then make our life

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Speaker 3: on Earth easier. And there are plenty of examples I

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Speaker 3: think of that in the past. And then there's a

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Speaker 3: kind of political rationale, which is to say that we

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Speaker 3: need to do it before someone else does.

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Speaker 4: There's a national pride on the line.

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Speaker 1: I mean, it's like in the sixties when I wanted

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Speaker 1: to put a man on the moon first. Is there

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Speaker 1: a parallel to the sixties in that respect, Yeah, I.

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Speaker 3: Would say not only is there a parallel, but I

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Speaker 3: think NASA in its whole frame of thinking. If you

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Speaker 3: can speak of something the size of an agency, the

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Speaker 3: size of NASA as a personified in some way, but

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Speaker 3: I think the whole enterprise is really stuck in the sixties,

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Speaker 3: if not the fit nineteen fifties one it's created. So

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Speaker 3: it's very much it's you know, you see this sort

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Speaker 3: of vestigial, almost cold war mentality that I think informs

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Speaker 3: all almost every aspect of the whole enterprise.

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Speaker 1: What does it say to you that in the sixties

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Speaker 1: it was the president JFK sort of outlining this national

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Speaker 1: mission to put a man on the moon, and now

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Speaker 1: in the twenty twenties it's l Musk and to a

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Speaker 1: certain extent Jeff Bezos.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you can learn all you need to

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Speaker 3: know about a culture or a society by studying its

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Speaker 3: attitudes about Mars. You know, it's it's certainly now it's

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Speaker 3: dominated by a kind of There are a few different strands.

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Speaker 3: There's a kind of private enterprise strand, but that is

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Speaker 3: often including in the case of Musk, closely alloyed with

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Speaker 3: a libertarian fantasy of a lawless world in which people

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Speaker 3: can stake their claim a kind of wild West and

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Speaker 3: not have regulation and oversight. There are groups of Mars

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Speaker 3: enthusiasts out there that are very much explicitly libertarian ideologues

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Speaker 3: who hope to start a libertarian society on Mars.

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Speaker 4: So that exists if you.

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Speaker 3: Go back to the fifties and sixties, where at this

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Speaker 3: very different place in our culture, obviously in society, a

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Speaker 3: place of tremendous global cooperation relatively that gave birth to

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Speaker 3: the entire sort of modern space race, even though you

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Speaker 3: have a competition between the Cold War powers. But you

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Speaker 3: can even go back further and if you look at

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Speaker 3: the late nineteenth century when Chaparelli, a Milanaisy astronomer, observed

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Speaker 3: that there were canals on Mars, there was this great

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Speaker 3: fascination for decades about are people living on Mars? Are

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Speaker 3: Martians building canals? And it was very much an expression.

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Speaker 3: You can find very clear a correlation between the kind

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Speaker 3: of excitement of the industrial age, and there was a

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Speaker 3: period where people were competing with Mars to build more

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Speaker 3: canals as fast as possible, as also of course during

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Speaker 3: the same period of the digging of the sus canals.

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Speaker 4: So this was you know, this is the New York Times.

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Speaker 3: This is not just some like weird thing is this

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Speaker 3: is at the time generally accepted that we're in this

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Speaker 3: race against the Martians. So it's always been a kind

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Speaker 3: of repository Mars for the kind of subconscious of the

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Speaker 3: culture that observes it. And I think that's true today.

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Speaker 3: And I think as our society changes, probably our view

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Speaker 3: of Mars will change. In tandem with it.

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Speaker 1: You've written that future Mars voyages will have to want

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Speaker 1: to travel to Mars more than almost anyone else in

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Speaker 1: the world. They'll have to embrace the knowledge that for

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Speaker 1: at least five hundred and seventy days, they will be

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Speaker 1: the most isolated human beings in the history of the universe.

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Speaker 3: Yes, they will have to, because that's what they're signing

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Speaker 3: up up for.

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Speaker 1: What will that do to them?

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Speaker 3: You know? I think a distinction has to be made

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Speaker 3: between the kind of person who wants to be an

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Speaker 3: astronaut and wants to go on a mission like this,

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Speaker 3: like the people I wrote about, like Nathan Jones. But

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Speaker 3: then once we start talking about a permanent settlement or colonies,

401
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Speaker 3: we're talking about a very different group of people. So

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Speaker 3: you have this sort of kind of zelot astronauts who

403
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Speaker 3: are perfectly fit, who are the most stable people you've

404
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Speaker 3: ever met, enormous reserves of self concentration and self reliance

405
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Speaker 3: and all the rest, and then the rest of us right,

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Speaker 3: and for colony to exist, it has to look very different.

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Speaker 3: And a major criticism that I encountered in researching the

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Speaker 3: piece from close watchers of the NASA program is that

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Speaker 3: Even if this experiment has some value to predict the

410
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Speaker 3: ability of say, astronauts to survive in this setting, it

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Speaker 3: will have no value for the rest of us, who

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Speaker 3: you know, all kinds of other considerations would have to

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Speaker 3: be made. And so we're certainly not at the stage

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Speaker 3: where we're asking can people have families up there? Can

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Speaker 3: people give birth? There's some major biological challenges there. What

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Speaker 3: happens if someone gets sick, what happens if someone misses home,

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Speaker 3: you know, enters a depression, and none of that. We're

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Speaker 3: nowhere near those kinds of questions yet, but I think

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Speaker 3: that's if they continue to hit these benchmarks, that's where

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Speaker 3: this is ultimately heading.

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Speaker 1: So when you wrote the piece Nathan and co In

422
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Speaker 1: the mods Habitat, and since publication, they've of course come back.

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Speaker 1: Do you know what the experience was like for Nathan?

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Speaker 4: No, they're not.

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Speaker 3: They're basically sworn to secrecy. And this was the level

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Speaker 3: of secrecy that shrouded just about every aspect of the

427
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Speaker 3: experiment was somewhat astounding or surprise for me. It was

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Speaker 3: as it reporting the story at least talking to the

429
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Speaker 3: NASA people and to some extent the participants themselves, you'd

430
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Speaker 3: think I was investigating I don't know, Abu grab or

431
00:25:17,480 --> 00:25:20,600
Speaker 3: something like. The way that it was talked about extremely confidential. Now,

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Speaker 3: their justification was that they want to run the experiment

433
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Speaker 3: multiple times, and they don't want prospective applicants to know

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Speaker 3: anything about what they're going to do. They don't want

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Speaker 3: to because it would, I guess, diminish the value of

436
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Speaker 3: what they find if people already know, like, these are

437
00:25:36,840 --> 00:25:38,360
Speaker 3: the kinds of things we're going to do when we're there.

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Speaker 4: This is what happened to people.

439
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Speaker 3: It struck me as slightly ridiculous because, on the one hand,

440
00:25:44,280 --> 00:25:48,159
Speaker 3: very similar experiments have been conducted many times, including by NASA,

441
00:25:48,240 --> 00:25:51,000
Speaker 3: and those results are public, so the results.

442
00:25:51,040 --> 00:25:52,720
Speaker 1: NASA haven't published any results of this.

443
00:25:53,160 --> 00:25:55,680
Speaker 3: Not that I'm aware of, no, and you know, they

444
00:25:55,720 --> 00:25:57,119
Speaker 3: release these very anodyne statements.

445
00:25:57,160 --> 00:25:59,120
Speaker 4: It's a success. Everyone had a great time.

446
00:25:59,280 --> 00:26:01,439
Speaker 1: And you put the story in the context of the

447
00:26:01,480 --> 00:26:05,840
Speaker 1: history of isolation research. But more specifically, it seems like

448
00:26:05,920 --> 00:26:10,320
Speaker 1: this particular simulation of life on Mars has happened multiple

449
00:26:10,359 --> 00:26:13,760
Speaker 1: times in the past and is also being replicated multiple

450
00:26:13,760 --> 00:26:15,719
Speaker 1: times right now all around the world. Can you kind

451
00:26:15,760 --> 00:26:20,000
Speaker 1: of describe the spread of this type of experiment being run.

452
00:26:21,080 --> 00:26:24,520
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess it depends on how narrowly you want

453
00:26:24,560 --> 00:26:28,840
Speaker 3: to define the experiment. But NASA has been doing some version,

454
00:26:29,200 --> 00:26:33,080
Speaker 3: conducting some version of this experiment since before NASA was

455
00:26:33,119 --> 00:26:35,119
Speaker 3: even called NASA. I mean, they had some of the

456
00:26:35,160 --> 00:26:41,280
Speaker 3: early first astronauts did isolation experiments. They would put them

457
00:26:41,280 --> 00:26:45,399
Speaker 3: in little pods for long periods of time, sometimes in

458
00:26:45,440 --> 00:26:50,520
Speaker 3: fairly brutal configurations and sometimes completely in isolation, especially back

459
00:26:50,600 --> 00:26:53,399
Speaker 3: in the fifties when they thought that astronauts would have

460
00:26:53,520 --> 00:26:56,879
Speaker 3: to be propelled in tiny little vessels for months at

461
00:26:56,880 --> 00:27:00,960
Speaker 3: a time into outer space. But there was another similar

462
00:27:01,000 --> 00:27:04,879
Speaker 3: experiment called High Seas, which was the subject of a

463
00:27:04,920 --> 00:27:07,920
Speaker 3: really fascinating book by the writer Kate Green, who was

464
00:27:07,960 --> 00:27:10,440
Speaker 3: one of the original crew members they ran that experiment.

465
00:27:11,040 --> 00:27:13,439
Speaker 3: I don't know, I think a dozen times. That was

466
00:27:13,480 --> 00:27:16,480
Speaker 3: a similar idea in a habitat that was built on

467
00:27:16,720 --> 00:27:22,040
Speaker 3: Mona Loa Mountain in Hawaii, and it was four people

468
00:27:22,600 --> 00:27:25,639
Speaker 3: or sometimes six put into this environment for months at

469
00:27:25,640 --> 00:27:30,240
Speaker 3: a time, and Green writes very elegantly and movingly about

470
00:27:30,320 --> 00:27:32,919
Speaker 3: the experience and on the kind of madness of it

471
00:27:32,960 --> 00:27:35,200
Speaker 3: and what it did to her life.

472
00:27:35,840 --> 00:27:38,280
Speaker 4: The book once upon a time I lived on Mars it's.

473
00:27:38,119 --> 00:27:42,280
Speaker 3: Called And then there was a crazy experiment called Mars

474
00:27:42,320 --> 00:27:47,240
Speaker 3: five hundred that was administered by a Russian agency called

475
00:27:47,280 --> 00:27:50,520
Speaker 3: which has a name that I love, called the Institute

476
00:27:50,520 --> 00:27:53,960
Speaker 3: of Biomedical Problems. So of course that's who did this

477
00:27:55,160 --> 00:27:58,080
Speaker 3: completely barbaric experiment where they locked six male crew members

478
00:27:58,119 --> 00:28:01,199
Speaker 3: together for five hundred and twenty days. Wow, that was

479
00:28:01,240 --> 00:28:04,800
Speaker 3: in twenty ten and eleven in a kind of fake

480
00:28:05,040 --> 00:28:10,520
Speaker 3: spacecraft on a fake Mars and that was pretty well

481
00:28:10,560 --> 00:28:14,080
Speaker 3: studied and people participants lost their hair and lost weight.

482
00:28:14,800 --> 00:28:17,679
Speaker 3: But then there's NASA, if they have something like a

483
00:28:17,720 --> 00:28:21,800
Speaker 3: dozen different versions of this going on at all times.

484
00:28:21,840 --> 00:28:24,480
Speaker 3: There are all different configurations, different amounts of time, different

485
00:28:24,520 --> 00:28:25,600
Speaker 3: number of participants.

486
00:28:25,600 --> 00:28:27,920
Speaker 1: So did you lost? Do you say to NASA, why

487
00:28:27,920 --> 00:28:28,800
Speaker 1: do you need to keep doing that?

488
00:28:28,880 --> 00:28:30,960
Speaker 3: Yes, that was one of my big questions, why do

489
00:28:31,040 --> 00:28:34,280
Speaker 3: we keep doing this? And don't we know what happens?

490
00:28:34,400 --> 00:28:37,119
Speaker 3: Even before the NASA history, there's this whole other history

491
00:28:37,119 --> 00:28:43,000
Speaker 3: of people doing similar isolation experiments, and their official answer was, yes,

492
00:28:43,040 --> 00:28:47,040
Speaker 3: we've done similar some experiments, but actually there's no substitution

493
00:28:47,320 --> 00:28:52,520
Speaker 3: for this is far closer to the expected reality and experimentally, scientifically,

494
00:28:53,040 --> 00:28:56,240
Speaker 3: all of the previous experiments are essentially useless, and this

495
00:28:56,400 --> 00:29:00,080
Speaker 3: is the only one that will matter. Now if you

496
00:29:00,120 --> 00:29:05,120
Speaker 3: believe that, you also have to then wonder well. And

497
00:29:05,160 --> 00:29:06,960
Speaker 3: this is what some of the people who study that's

498
00:29:07,000 --> 00:29:10,440
Speaker 3: pointed out to me. Yes, okay, this experiment, even if

499
00:29:10,440 --> 00:29:14,720
Speaker 3: it's its exact simulation, a perfect simulation of what the

500
00:29:14,800 --> 00:29:17,960
Speaker 3: first Mars expedition is going to be, you're only testing

501
00:29:18,720 --> 00:29:21,080
Speaker 3: a group of four people or eve an n of

502
00:29:21,200 --> 00:29:26,920
Speaker 3: four right, experimentally speaking, and so the statistical value of

503
00:29:26,960 --> 00:29:29,920
Speaker 3: this experiment is close to nil. You'd have to run

504
00:29:30,000 --> 00:29:35,880
Speaker 3: this experiment thousands of times for it to be statistically reliable,

505
00:29:36,000 --> 00:29:37,560
Speaker 3: and of course they're not going to do that. So

506
00:29:37,680 --> 00:29:41,360
Speaker 3: even if you grant them this sort of scientific argument

507
00:29:41,400 --> 00:29:44,320
Speaker 3: that this experiment is unlike all the other ones, even

508
00:29:44,360 --> 00:29:46,680
Speaker 3: though they all basically have the same results, it doesn't

509
00:29:46,720 --> 00:29:49,560
Speaker 3: actually have much scientific value unless they would do it all,

510
00:29:49,760 --> 00:29:51,240
Speaker 3: you know, fifty.

511
00:29:50,880 --> 00:29:52,800
Speaker 4: Times or a thousand times.

512
00:29:52,840 --> 00:29:55,800
Speaker 3: I'm not sure where the probability charts cut off, but

513
00:29:56,760 --> 00:29:58,960
Speaker 3: as it stands, they're probably going to do it one

514
00:29:59,040 --> 00:30:02,000
Speaker 3: or two more times, at which point they'll be ready

515
00:30:02,040 --> 00:30:03,200
Speaker 3: to hurl people.

516
00:30:03,000 --> 00:30:06,000
Speaker 1: Up to Mars. But from that point of view, was

517
00:30:06,040 --> 00:30:10,640
Speaker 1: this about understanding if humans can withstand isolation or was

518
00:30:10,640 --> 00:30:13,640
Speaker 1: this some we talked to the beginning about the technical

519
00:30:13,640 --> 00:30:15,959
Speaker 1: problems NASA has to solve or was this Were there

520
00:30:16,000 --> 00:30:18,440
Speaker 1: any technical problems they were looking to solve with this?

521
00:30:18,680 --> 00:30:22,240
Speaker 3: That was probably the That was the point where I

522
00:30:22,520 --> 00:30:26,040
Speaker 3: was most I mean, there's something that's where I sort

523
00:30:26,040 --> 00:30:29,040
Speaker 3: of laughed in the reporting, although it's kind of horrible. So, yes,

524
00:30:29,080 --> 00:30:30,600
Speaker 3: the official line is where we want to test the

525
00:30:30,640 --> 00:30:33,440
Speaker 3: human side of this. We have all these divisions doing

526
00:30:34,280 --> 00:30:38,000
Speaker 3: the science and the technology, and this is the human

527
00:30:38,040 --> 00:30:40,080
Speaker 3: research side. And in fact, there is a human Research

528
00:30:40,160 --> 00:30:45,840
Speaker 3: division within NASA that was administering the experiment. However, they

529
00:30:45,840 --> 00:30:50,200
Speaker 3: were partnered with two other divisions, and the division that

530
00:30:50,280 --> 00:30:55,320
Speaker 3: oversaw the whole experiment was actually run by someone named

531
00:30:55,400 --> 00:30:59,760
Speaker 3: Rachel McCauley, who is a propulsion engineer. She's the one

532
00:30:59,800 --> 00:31:04,040
Speaker 3: who decides which rocket will do the job best. And

533
00:31:04,080 --> 00:31:08,120
Speaker 3: in order to make that determination, she needs to nail

534
00:31:08,120 --> 00:31:10,000
Speaker 3: down a bunch of variables. And one of the main

535
00:31:10,080 --> 00:31:14,640
Speaker 3: variables is how much weight needs to be carried by

536
00:31:14,720 --> 00:31:16,840
Speaker 3: the rocket ship. And so what that means is, of

537
00:31:16,920 --> 00:31:19,360
Speaker 3: course the weight of the people, but also how much

538
00:31:19,360 --> 00:31:23,080
Speaker 3: food do they have to take? And so when I

539
00:31:23,120 --> 00:31:28,280
Speaker 3: talked to her, she was like, very blithely kind of

540
00:31:28,320 --> 00:31:32,920
Speaker 3: dismissive of the whole human psychological aspect of the thing,

541
00:31:33,000 --> 00:31:36,800
Speaker 3: and instead she focused on how much food are they

542
00:31:36,800 --> 00:31:40,040
Speaker 3: going to eat? Like what's the weight? How much waste

543
00:31:40,040 --> 00:31:43,840
Speaker 3: are they going to produce? And once I have those figures,

544
00:31:43,920 --> 00:31:47,200
Speaker 3: then I will know exactly what kind of propulsion device

545
00:31:47,240 --> 00:31:47,640
Speaker 3: to use.

546
00:31:48,080 --> 00:31:49,680
Speaker 1: And so then I went a little bit dubious.

547
00:31:49,920 --> 00:31:51,440
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so I was like, what, no, I mean,

548
00:31:51,480 --> 00:31:53,480
Speaker 3: I believed her because she was running the experiment.

549
00:31:54,480 --> 00:31:56,680
Speaker 4: She's a solid propulsion systems engineer.

550
00:31:57,000 --> 00:32:00,040
Speaker 3: And so then I went back to the sort of

551
00:32:00,120 --> 00:32:02,560
Speaker 3: human research people and they're like, oh, no, no, no, it's

552
00:32:02,560 --> 00:32:05,960
Speaker 3: all about human psychology. But in fact the person they

553
00:32:06,000 --> 00:32:08,200
Speaker 3: were reporting to, the person who was running the whole thing,

554
00:32:09,040 --> 00:32:11,840
Speaker 3: said that was not the case. And so actually, I

555
00:32:11,920 --> 00:32:14,760
Speaker 3: think if you follow the money, you start to wonder, well,

556
00:32:14,840 --> 00:32:18,080
Speaker 3: is this whole human aspects side of it part of

557
00:32:18,120 --> 00:32:22,800
Speaker 3: the marketing and it's frankly irrelevant to what NASA's real

558
00:32:22,880 --> 00:32:25,560
Speaker 3: concern is, which is, yeah, how many pounds of food

559
00:32:25,600 --> 00:32:26,600
Speaker 3: do we need to put on this thing?

560
00:32:27,120 --> 00:32:27,400
Speaker 2: Geez.

561
00:32:31,480 --> 00:32:34,440
Speaker 1: Stay with us for more from Nathaniel rich on why

562
00:32:34,520 --> 00:32:38,600
Speaker 1: dreams of Mars and dreams of AI are inextricably linked

563
00:32:39,120 --> 00:32:43,120
Speaker 1: and why some techno optimists theorize that humans would evolve

564
00:32:43,160 --> 00:32:50,280
Speaker 1: into AI powered martians. There was a part of your

565
00:32:50,400 --> 00:32:55,120
Speaker 1: story that's really stuck out to me was that NASA's

566
00:32:55,200 --> 00:33:00,240
Speaker 1: chief research scientist Dennis Bushel said that as Colonis, he

567
00:33:00,280 --> 00:33:04,960
Speaker 1: most becomes more feasible, colonists themselves will evolve into mortians.

568
00:33:05,600 --> 00:33:06,080
Speaker 4: Yes.

569
00:33:06,880 --> 00:33:08,120
Speaker 1: Did that surprise you.

570
00:33:10,280 --> 00:33:12,440
Speaker 4: Yes, although a little bit.

571
00:33:12,640 --> 00:33:14,800
Speaker 3: It was surprised me to see him write about that

572
00:33:15,080 --> 00:33:19,440
Speaker 3: so openly. This is Yes, This chief scientist at the

573
00:33:19,480 --> 00:33:23,800
Speaker 3: Langley Research Center, who had been I think he recently retired,

574
00:33:23,800 --> 00:33:26,880
Speaker 3: had been a NASA for sixty years, and he published

575
00:33:26,880 --> 00:33:30,880
Speaker 3: this sort of opus about the institutional view of deep

576
00:33:31,000 --> 00:33:34,240
Speaker 3: space exploration, and he said, what I think a lot

577
00:33:34,280 --> 00:33:38,080
Speaker 3: of scientists have predicted is that if people are able

578
00:33:38,120 --> 00:33:42,640
Speaker 3: to survive on Mars for any extended amount of time

579
00:33:44,480 --> 00:33:48,840
Speaker 3: with oxygen and all the rest, that ultimately their bodies

580
00:33:48,920 --> 00:33:53,240
Speaker 3: will change. That over time, because of the radiation exposure,

581
00:33:53,880 --> 00:33:56,880
Speaker 3: because of the reduced gravity, that there will be real

582
00:33:57,360 --> 00:34:01,080
Speaker 3: physiological changes to their bodies. There's no way out of that.

583
00:34:01,440 --> 00:34:03,840
Speaker 3: So essentially one of the kind of tricks for surviving

584
00:34:03,880 --> 00:34:07,120
Speaker 3: Mars is to live there long enough so that people

585
00:34:07,160 --> 00:34:10,880
Speaker 3: evolve into Martians and they look different and they probably

586
00:34:10,880 --> 00:34:14,560
Speaker 3: have elongated heads and maybe different diets and all the rest.

587
00:34:14,400 --> 00:34:17,759
Speaker 1: Of it evolved means, of course natural selection. Survivor are

588
00:34:17,800 --> 00:34:20,200
Speaker 1: the fittest on Moss exactly.

589
00:34:20,600 --> 00:34:24,840
Speaker 3: We're talking about a generational No, it's a generational shift.

590
00:34:24,880 --> 00:34:25,000
Speaker 2: Now.

591
00:34:25,040 --> 00:34:27,759
Speaker 3: Of course they have to solve things like inconvenient things

592
00:34:27,800 --> 00:34:29,960
Speaker 3: like procreation on Mars and all the rest of that.

593
00:34:30,080 --> 00:34:32,880
Speaker 3: But yes, that's the long term view, is that we

594
00:34:32,960 --> 00:34:35,520
Speaker 3: won't have to solve every problem perfectly because people will

595
00:34:35,560 --> 00:34:38,360
Speaker 3: just start to there'll be natural selection and they'll be

596
00:34:38,400 --> 00:34:41,920
Speaker 3: forced to evolve into these other Martian creatures. And that

597
00:34:42,360 --> 00:34:44,640
Speaker 3: seems to be NASA's view.

598
00:34:47,320 --> 00:34:49,560
Speaker 1: There's another piece you wrote in The New York Times recently,

599
00:34:49,640 --> 00:34:53,720
Speaker 1: which was a review of Ray Causweill's book The Singularity

600
00:34:53,920 --> 00:34:57,239
Speaker 1: Is Nearer. Can you talk about who Ray Causweil is

601
00:34:58,040 --> 00:35:02,759
Speaker 1: that book and how viewing that book syncs up with

602
00:35:02,840 --> 00:35:04,400
Speaker 1: your writing on this experiment.

603
00:35:05,160 --> 00:35:07,880
Speaker 3: Yeah, Kurzweil is a kind of god of Ai who's

604
00:35:08,120 --> 00:35:12,560
Speaker 3: called the godfather of AI, who is for many decades

605
00:35:12,560 --> 00:35:17,680
Speaker 3: has been predicting the rise of artificial intelligence and ultimately

606
00:35:19,040 --> 00:35:23,719
Speaker 3: the singularity. But yes, his idea is that there will

607
00:35:23,760 --> 00:35:29,400
Speaker 3: be nanobots powered by artificial intelligence that we will inject

608
00:35:29,400 --> 00:35:32,880
Speaker 3: into our bodies, and that they will swim through our

609
00:35:32,880 --> 00:35:36,640
Speaker 3: bloodstream into our brains and connect our neocortex to the cloud,

610
00:35:37,280 --> 00:35:39,759
Speaker 3: linking us up to the I guess the Internet are

611
00:35:39,800 --> 00:35:45,000
Speaker 3: really like the global repository of all human information civilization,

612
00:35:45,400 --> 00:35:47,480
Speaker 3: and so at that point when we're just kind of

613
00:35:47,560 --> 00:35:54,480
Speaker 3: wired into intelligence, electronic intelligence, that for him is a singularity,

614
00:35:54,920 --> 00:35:58,400
Speaker 3: and he thinks that's coming very soon, basically by the

615
00:35:58,480 --> 00:35:59,320
Speaker 3: end of the decade.

616
00:35:59,560 --> 00:36:02,320
Speaker 1: Well, but there's something to me which is very striking

617
00:36:02,320 --> 00:36:05,560
Speaker 1: in the sense that Ray caswild this Sea the godfather

618
00:36:05,600 --> 00:36:08,640
Speaker 1: of AI, on the one hand, and on the other hand,

619
00:36:08,960 --> 00:36:13,759
Speaker 1: Dennis Bushnell, the NASA Chief Scientist, I'm both saying in

620
00:36:13,800 --> 00:36:18,000
Speaker 1: one way or another that within our lifetimes, the technological

621
00:36:18,080 --> 00:36:22,560
Speaker 1: future will mean that we no longer conform to the

622
00:36:22,600 --> 00:36:24,880
Speaker 1: current definition of what it is to be human.

623
00:36:25,760 --> 00:36:28,240
Speaker 3: Yeah, although I think you'd be hard pressed to find

624
00:36:28,400 --> 00:36:32,560
Speaker 3: a definition that would admit that would be universally agreed

625
00:36:32,600 --> 00:36:35,240
Speaker 3: to on what it means to be human. True, now,

626
00:36:35,360 --> 00:36:39,120
Speaker 3: we already and that's part of Kurzwell's argument, is that

627
00:36:39,160 --> 00:36:43,319
Speaker 3: we already atsourced so much of our mind and identity

628
00:36:43,400 --> 00:36:48,000
Speaker 3: to technology that we rely on the Internet to remember

629
00:36:48,040 --> 00:36:51,560
Speaker 3: things for us, our digital record, a lot of our

630
00:36:52,400 --> 00:36:57,759
Speaker 3: powers are only possible through technology. And if we were

631
00:36:57,800 --> 00:37:00,400
Speaker 3: just put in the wilderness, most of us we'd be

632
00:37:00,440 --> 00:37:04,000
Speaker 3: able to survive a couple of weeks. But yes, both

633
00:37:04,040 --> 00:37:07,840
Speaker 3: of these visions of they're both kind of these technologically

634
00:37:07,840 --> 00:37:13,960
Speaker 3: optimistic views of the world. There's this kind of viscerally

635
00:37:14,760 --> 00:37:19,680
Speaker 3: disturbing aspect to them, which is that they require us

636
00:37:19,760 --> 00:37:23,319
Speaker 3: to reimagine physically what will look like, you know, but

637
00:37:23,400 --> 00:37:26,520
Speaker 3: even putting aside all the sort of mental psychological aspect

638
00:37:26,560 --> 00:37:28,839
Speaker 3: of it, that we're going to be morphed into these

639
00:37:28,880 --> 00:37:31,759
Speaker 3: other different kinds of creatures that are going to be

640
00:37:31,760 --> 00:37:35,000
Speaker 3: like physically in some ways unrecognizable. And Kurzwill has this

641
00:37:35,040 --> 00:37:37,880
Speaker 3: whole thing about how soon people be able to design

642
00:37:37,920 --> 00:37:40,120
Speaker 3: their own bodies the way you can design like a

643
00:37:40,200 --> 00:37:43,239
Speaker 3: virtual avatar, and that we can we'll have people have

644
00:37:43,280 --> 00:37:48,920
Speaker 3: wings and the tusks and whatever you want, you know, feathers,

645
00:37:49,040 --> 00:37:53,600
Speaker 3: and that part of it tends not to be spoken

646
00:37:53,680 --> 00:37:57,160
Speaker 3: aloud or advertised as much as the part about, you know,

647
00:37:57,360 --> 00:38:01,160
Speaker 3: improving our intelligence. But I think think what was striking

648
00:38:01,160 --> 00:38:03,239
Speaker 3: to me about Curzweil's book and what I wanted to

649
00:38:03,239 --> 00:38:06,200
Speaker 3: write about is let's not forget the part where he

650
00:38:07,160 --> 00:38:09,799
Speaker 3: the prerequisite for all of these future predictions is that

651
00:38:09,840 --> 00:38:14,400
Speaker 3: we're injecting microscopic robots into our brains and our bloodstream.

652
00:38:14,719 --> 00:38:19,319
Speaker 3: Let's not lose track of that part of it, so that, yes,

653
00:38:19,400 --> 00:38:21,120
Speaker 3: I think you're right to draw a kind of a

654
00:38:21,160 --> 00:38:25,279
Speaker 3: parallel with the Mars visions. They tend to collide in

655
00:38:25,320 --> 00:38:28,480
Speaker 3: the realm of artificial intelligence. It's not surprising that Elon Musk,

656
00:38:28,560 --> 00:38:31,440
Speaker 3: you know, is obsessed with both Mars and AI.

657
00:38:32,440 --> 00:38:35,760
Speaker 1: You used the phrase earlier on a conversation about mourning,

658
00:38:36,000 --> 00:38:38,120
Speaker 1: and one of the pieces of Cozweil's book that you

659
00:38:38,239 --> 00:38:41,760
Speaker 1: draw out is him talking about basically making an AI

660
00:38:41,920 --> 00:38:44,880
Speaker 1: version of his father, who passed away in nineteen seventy

661
00:38:45,000 --> 00:38:48,000
Speaker 1: to be able to talk to him about music. And

662
00:38:48,040 --> 00:38:50,680
Speaker 1: one of the other things I noticed in the piece

663
00:38:50,880 --> 00:38:55,040
Speaker 1: about Mars was the crop garden in the Mars June

664
00:38:55,080 --> 00:38:58,719
Speaker 1: Alpha colony, which wouldn't be for eating, but rather for

665
00:38:58,800 --> 00:39:02,880
Speaker 1: the mental health of the participants. You know, it's I

666
00:39:02,880 --> 00:39:04,799
Speaker 1: guess it makes me think of that whole sort of

667
00:39:05,000 --> 00:39:07,759
Speaker 1: cliched thing about the fisherman who becomes a millionaire and

668
00:39:07,760 --> 00:39:10,800
Speaker 1: then returns to where he lived to fish. The craving

669
00:39:10,960 --> 00:39:15,239
Speaker 1: for the kind of things which are the touchstones of

670
00:39:15,480 --> 00:39:19,200
Speaker 1: what we think about as our human experience also is

671
00:39:19,280 --> 00:39:21,759
Speaker 1: present in these future fantasies.

672
00:39:22,840 --> 00:39:23,480
Speaker 4: Absolutely.

673
00:39:23,920 --> 00:39:27,439
Speaker 3: That's another major point of convergence I think, is this

674
00:39:28,400 --> 00:39:34,760
Speaker 3: that once you peel back this techno optimistic fantasy of

675
00:39:34,960 --> 00:39:39,240
Speaker 3: how things are going to be, you find this deep

676
00:39:39,520 --> 00:39:44,240
Speaker 3: sense of longing for how things once were. You certainly

677
00:39:44,239 --> 00:39:47,640
Speaker 3: see it in Kurswell, where after hundreds of pages of

678
00:39:47,719 --> 00:39:51,839
Speaker 3: talking about all the wonders of this new technology, all

679
00:39:51,880 --> 00:39:55,240
Speaker 3: the conveniences, and how we can travel have beach holidays

680
00:39:55,239 --> 00:39:57,759
Speaker 3: without leaving our houses through virtual reality and all the

681
00:39:57,840 --> 00:40:03,600
Speaker 3: rest of it, his ultimate goal is to reanimate his

682
00:40:04,040 --> 00:40:07,480
Speaker 3: dead father, who was a composer not of some renown

683
00:40:07,560 --> 00:40:11,600
Speaker 3: and a conductor in New York. And he's already gone

684
00:40:11,600 --> 00:40:15,040
Speaker 3: so far as to program an AI version of his

685
00:40:15,080 --> 00:40:18,799
Speaker 3: father that trained on his father's letters and writings and

686
00:40:18,840 --> 00:40:22,840
Speaker 3: personal documents and his and his music. In the pages

687
00:40:22,840 --> 00:40:24,960
Speaker 3: of the book, he has a there's a transcript of

688
00:40:24,960 --> 00:40:28,880
Speaker 3: a conversation that that Curswell has with his dead father,

689
00:40:29,400 --> 00:40:31,920
Speaker 3: and that to him is that's his great hope, is

690
00:40:31,920 --> 00:40:36,080
Speaker 3: to bring back his dad. In the same way in Mars,

691
00:40:36,640 --> 00:40:41,640
Speaker 3: I was struck by the mournful quality of this whole enterprise,

692
00:40:42,239 --> 00:40:46,080
Speaker 3: and everyone I asked, every sort of expert I interviewed,

693
00:40:46,120 --> 00:40:48,640
Speaker 3: I asked, there's something, there's something just a little bit

694
00:40:49,560 --> 00:40:52,000
Speaker 3: upsetting about all of this, like what you know, and

695
00:40:52,000 --> 00:40:54,040
Speaker 3: they all kind of many people kind of agreed, but

696
00:40:54,080 --> 00:40:56,080
Speaker 3: they couldn't put their finger on it until I spoke

697
00:40:56,160 --> 00:41:02,200
Speaker 3: to this one historian of isolation experiments, Mattius at Cornell,

698
00:41:02,440 --> 00:41:05,279
Speaker 3: and he said, this thing that for me is the

699
00:41:05,280 --> 00:41:07,000
Speaker 3: heart of the story, and to some extent, it's the

700
00:41:07,000 --> 00:41:09,239
Speaker 3: heart of the Curzwell and even ai store, which is

701
00:41:09,239 --> 00:41:12,920
Speaker 3: the urge to try to recreate a perfect world, is

702
00:41:12,920 --> 00:41:16,560
Speaker 3: always going to be about rehearsing what we got wrong here.

703
00:41:17,040 --> 00:41:20,520
Speaker 3: He told me, we're not chasing Mars, We're mourning Earth.

704
00:41:21,440 --> 00:41:24,239
Speaker 3: That struck a chord with me because I feel like

705
00:41:24,360 --> 00:41:29,000
Speaker 3: that is the through line here, that there's this attempt

706
00:41:29,040 --> 00:41:33,160
Speaker 3: to chase something that we've lost, and you know, for Mattias,

707
00:41:33,160 --> 00:41:37,840
Speaker 3: he was talking about essentially a world ruined by climate

708
00:41:37,920 --> 00:41:42,560
Speaker 3: change and environmental degradation, and that the ultimate fulfillment of

709
00:41:42,600 --> 00:41:46,040
Speaker 3: the Mars fantasy, at least in our age, seems to

710
00:41:46,080 --> 00:41:50,400
Speaker 3: be to terraform the planet and create a kind of

711
00:41:50,440 --> 00:41:53,920
Speaker 3: idyllic second Earth that won't be marred by all the

712
00:41:53,960 --> 00:41:57,960
Speaker 3: mistakes that we've made here. And the Ai fantasy has

713
00:41:57,960 --> 00:41:59,719
Speaker 3: the same component. It's, you know, we'll all be young

714
00:41:59,719 --> 00:42:05,160
Speaker 3: and and free of sin in a way, and that

715
00:42:06,000 --> 00:42:09,839
Speaker 3: I think that's true, and I think that's I think

716
00:42:09,880 --> 00:42:12,440
Speaker 3: we lose something when we just assume that all of

717
00:42:12,440 --> 00:42:16,000
Speaker 3: these stories are about what the way they're advertised.

718
00:42:16,000 --> 00:42:17,000
Speaker 4: It's like progress.

719
00:42:17,040 --> 00:42:20,240
Speaker 3: I think it's also there's a kind of a morning

720
00:42:20,280 --> 00:42:22,319
Speaker 3: of something that we've lost that we're trying to get back,

721
00:42:22,360 --> 00:42:25,160
Speaker 3: and we don't quite know how to do it, and

722
00:42:25,239 --> 00:42:28,879
Speaker 3: so we're trying to build a fancy news sports car

723
00:42:29,080 --> 00:42:31,040
Speaker 3: to get us there, but we can't.

724
00:42:40,600 --> 00:42:42,400
Speaker 2: The thing that I found the most interesting about this

725
00:42:42,520 --> 00:42:45,320
Speaker 2: piece that you did was this idea that, like, isolation

726
00:42:46,080 --> 00:42:49,600
Speaker 2: is not about being alone. Yes, isolation is about being

727
00:42:49,600 --> 00:42:54,400
Speaker 2: away from community, absolutely, and you can be with the

728
00:42:54,400 --> 00:42:57,799
Speaker 2: community of people in a place that isn't home and

729
00:42:57,880 --> 00:42:59,080
Speaker 2: be very isolated.

730
00:42:59,400 --> 00:43:01,319
Speaker 1: Well not enough thing. You know. One of the questions

731
00:43:01,360 --> 00:43:03,319
Speaker 1: I didn't ask Nathaniel, but which I kind of wish

732
00:43:03,400 --> 00:43:07,600
Speaker 1: that I had, was this interest in isolation research, Like

733
00:43:08,280 --> 00:43:11,759
Speaker 1: we are constantly bombarded with this idea of the loneliness epidemic,

734
00:43:11,840 --> 00:43:14,120
Speaker 1: and like, even though we're more connected, were more isolated

735
00:43:14,160 --> 00:43:16,120
Speaker 1: than ever. And I was wondering if there was a

736
00:43:16,200 --> 00:43:18,239
Speaker 1: kind of another text spread that I actually didn't pull on,

737
00:43:18,280 --> 00:43:21,000
Speaker 1: but perhaps should have done about you know, why this

738
00:43:21,080 --> 00:43:23,000
Speaker 1: cultural moment is so interested in isolation?

739
00:43:23,320 --> 00:43:26,319
Speaker 2: That's right? And I think that, you know, I mean

740
00:43:26,360 --> 00:43:27,799
Speaker 2: I think about it all the time when I'm sitting

741
00:43:27,840 --> 00:43:30,560
Speaker 2: at home on the couch on my phone, feeling incredibly

742
00:43:30,560 --> 00:43:33,960
Speaker 2: connected to people and like how I could survive that way,

743
00:43:34,360 --> 00:43:37,319
Speaker 2: but also questioning like do I want to live that way? Right,

744
00:43:37,360 --> 00:43:39,240
Speaker 2: you know, and sort of how do I force myself

745
00:43:39,239 --> 00:43:39,600
Speaker 2: out of that?

746
00:43:40,000 --> 00:43:40,160
Speaker 1: Now.

747
00:43:40,160 --> 00:43:43,000
Speaker 2: That really has nothing to do with going to Mars Asterisk.

748
00:43:43,719 --> 00:43:46,239
Speaker 1: But you are somebody who grew up as a lover

749
00:43:46,320 --> 00:43:50,160
Speaker 1: of science fiction. Your father was a science fiction author. Yes, so,

750
00:43:50,880 --> 00:43:53,040
Speaker 1: I mean some people like to be very dismissive of

751
00:43:53,360 --> 00:43:56,200
Speaker 1: muscum Bezos and their dreams of space. You know, I

752
00:43:56,880 --> 00:44:01,480
Speaker 1: think they are two characters who are probably can deal

753
00:44:01,560 --> 00:44:04,520
Speaker 1: with the bit of stick. But I don't think it's

754
00:44:04,600 --> 00:44:09,160
Speaker 1: wrong to dream and even plan about space exploration.

755
00:44:10,200 --> 00:44:13,000
Speaker 2: Well. I think part of it is a colonizer's instinct,

756
00:44:13,960 --> 00:44:17,279
Speaker 2: But I also think this idea of like what is

757
00:44:17,320 --> 00:44:22,000
Speaker 2: outside of our reach is always something that will fascinate

758
00:44:22,080 --> 00:44:25,879
Speaker 2: writers of science fiction, will always fascinate even you know,

759
00:44:26,520 --> 00:44:29,920
Speaker 2: the most practical technologists, because it's something that in a

760
00:44:29,960 --> 00:44:32,880
Speaker 2: certain way is a fantasy. Like even the idea of

761
00:44:32,880 --> 00:44:36,440
Speaker 2: like having to bring a three D printer to Mars

762
00:44:36,480 --> 00:44:39,399
Speaker 2: because we can't lug certain things there. I mean, these

763
00:44:39,440 --> 00:44:42,279
Speaker 2: are such far out concepts, you know.

764
00:44:42,320 --> 00:44:44,520
Speaker 1: I find them exciting. I find them exciting, I think,

765
00:44:44,760 --> 00:44:47,040
Speaker 1: but I also did find it very tragic this idea

766
00:44:47,080 --> 00:44:50,879
Speaker 1: of like the compulsion to repeat these quite damaging experiments,

767
00:44:50,920 --> 00:44:54,600
Speaker 1: of sending people to simulate life on Mars and hurting

768
00:44:54,680 --> 00:44:56,160
Speaker 1: them in the process in their life on Earth.

769
00:44:56,239 --> 00:44:58,600
Speaker 2: Yeah. Of course, we just had Trump, on day one

770
00:44:58,800 --> 00:45:02,719
Speaker 2: of his second term, simultaneously make an executive order to

771
00:45:02,840 --> 00:45:06,840
Speaker 2: drop out of the Paris Climate Accords and declare that

772
00:45:06,880 --> 00:45:10,680
Speaker 2: we will launch astronauts into space. And I quote, plant

773
00:45:10,760 --> 00:45:15,560
Speaker 2: the stars and stripes on the planet Mars. So this

774
00:45:16,160 --> 00:45:19,399
Speaker 2: twinning of saying goodbye to Earth and embracing Mars actually

775
00:45:19,440 --> 00:45:21,359
Speaker 2: feels very salient and very right.

776
00:45:21,400 --> 00:45:24,279
Speaker 1: Now, Well, that's true, But what of this leaves me

777
00:45:24,400 --> 00:45:29,600
Speaker 1: the question about you? Is there anything that could be

778
00:45:29,680 --> 00:45:31,800
Speaker 1: done that I could offer to induce you to spend

779
00:45:32,000 --> 00:45:34,120
Speaker 1: three hundred and fifty days in as ssimulated Mars.

780
00:45:34,239 --> 00:45:38,320
Speaker 2: Now I went to space camp. You'll remember, or maybe remember,

781
00:45:38,719 --> 00:45:40,560
Speaker 2: but I do remember. Now I did go to space camp.

782
00:45:41,040 --> 00:45:48,480
Speaker 2: I am an intellectual explorer. I am not a physical explorer.

783
00:45:48,600 --> 00:45:50,719
Speaker 1: You're not a psychon one either, No, I'm.

784
00:45:50,520 --> 00:45:53,360
Speaker 2: Definitely not a psychoap and I did. I found the

785
00:45:53,400 --> 00:45:58,320
Speaker 2: story of the woman was at LeGuin really really tragic.

786
00:45:58,960 --> 00:46:02,759
Speaker 2: And I do think that what's interesting is that in

787
00:46:03,080 --> 00:46:07,240
Speaker 2: moments of you know, innovation or exploration, we do test

788
00:46:07,320 --> 00:46:10,680
Speaker 2: people's psychological limits. Do we have to? I don't know,

789
00:46:10,920 --> 00:46:14,400
Speaker 2: you know, but I think that for me personally, I

790
00:46:14,480 --> 00:46:20,120
Speaker 2: am not compelled by living for that long outside of

791
00:46:20,360 --> 00:46:24,080
Speaker 2: the sort of my normal life. No are you?

792
00:46:24,120 --> 00:46:28,319
Speaker 1: No, No, I'm not. But that sense that we talked

793
00:46:28,360 --> 00:46:32,080
Speaker 1: about of these experiments in some ways being a kind

794
00:46:32,080 --> 00:46:35,799
Speaker 1: of psychological mourning for what we're losing. You did make

795
00:46:35,840 --> 00:46:39,520
Speaker 1: me think about environmental degradation. And you know, there are

796
00:46:39,520 --> 00:46:43,560
Speaker 1: these I've seen these kind of techno fantasy illustrations of

797
00:46:43,719 --> 00:46:46,440
Speaker 1: what life on Mars might look like, and they're basically

798
00:46:46,480 --> 00:46:51,040
Speaker 1: these biospheres into which you have crammed, like the Swiss Alps,

799
00:46:51,080 --> 00:46:54,600
Speaker 1: the Grand Canyon, the Mediterranean Sea, like beautiful animal.

800
00:46:54,480 --> 00:46:58,440
Speaker 2: I also just think we're still human beings right well

801
00:46:58,880 --> 00:47:02,120
Speaker 2: now for now, but you know, we project all of

802
00:47:02,120 --> 00:47:04,440
Speaker 2: our fantasies still in the world of the creature comforts

803
00:47:04,440 --> 00:47:06,840
Speaker 2: that we want. Do I want to ski on Mars?

804
00:47:06,840 --> 00:47:09,279
Speaker 2: I guess right, because I like skiing here.

805
00:47:09,480 --> 00:47:13,080
Speaker 1: You know, it makes you remember just how wonderful, you know,

806
00:47:13,160 --> 00:47:16,479
Speaker 1: this earth of ours is. And what I loved about

807
00:47:16,480 --> 00:47:18,920
Speaker 1: this interview and took away from it is when you

808
00:47:18,960 --> 00:47:22,160
Speaker 1: play out the fantasy and when you actually ask, you know,

809
00:47:22,239 --> 00:47:25,359
Speaker 1: one of the chief research scientists at NASA, what this

810
00:47:25,400 --> 00:47:28,200
Speaker 1: looks like in the future. It's not just going to Mars.

811
00:47:28,320 --> 00:47:31,960
Speaker 1: It's evolving into a new species with different shape of head,

812
00:47:32,239 --> 00:47:35,360
Speaker 1: with a different reaction to radiation. And what that says

813
00:47:35,360 --> 00:47:38,479
Speaker 1: to me is this is not just you know, going

814
00:47:38,520 --> 00:47:41,439
Speaker 1: on a fun trip. This is essentially saying that there's

815
00:47:41,440 --> 00:47:45,279
Speaker 1: going to be a fundamental categorical shift in US as

816
00:47:45,280 --> 00:47:49,160
Speaker 1: a species in order to colonize Mars. And it's just

817
00:47:49,200 --> 00:47:52,080
Speaker 1: a very weird and I find disturbing thought.

818
00:47:52,960 --> 00:47:54,239
Speaker 2: Again, not something I would do.

819
00:47:54,760 --> 00:47:56,400
Speaker 1: That's a good place to leave it. That's if a

820
00:47:56,480 --> 00:48:03,560
Speaker 1: tech Stuff Today. Today's episode was produced by Sina Ozaki,

821
00:48:03,719 --> 00:48:07,880
Speaker 1: Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez, and Lizzie Jacobs. It was executive

822
00:48:07,920 --> 00:48:11,520
Speaker 1: produced by me Oswaaloshin, Kara Price, and Kate Osborne for

823
00:48:11,560 --> 00:48:15,640
Speaker 1: Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell by Heart Podcasts. The Engineer is

824
00:48:15,680 --> 00:48:19,560
Speaker 1: Beheit Fraser, Kyle Murdoch, Rodar Themsong Join us on Friday

825
00:48:19,560 --> 00:48:22,239
Speaker 1: for Textuff's The Week in Tech, when we'll explore the

826
00:48:22,280 --> 00:48:27,280
Speaker 1: origin story of our current obsession with step counting. Please rate, review,

827
00:48:27,360 --> 00:48:29,920
Speaker 1: and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at

828
00:48:29,960 --> 00:48:32,160
Speaker 1: gmail dot com. We want to hear us on your mind.