Speaker 1: Hi Os Voloscin here and Cara Price. We're taking the
Speaker 1: week off.
Speaker 2: Indeed, we'll be back with new episodes starting September tenth.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, instead of leaving this feed empty, we
Speaker 1: wanted to share an episode from earlier this year. This week,
Speaker 1: we're reairing my conversation with Nathaniel Rich from January twenty ninth.
Speaker 1: He's a novelist, essayist, and writer at large for the
Speaker 1: New York Times magazine. We discuss a NASA experiment where
Speaker 1: civilians take a simulated trip to Mars and try to
Speaker 1: handle the isolation. Hope you enjoy it and thanks for listening.
Speaker 3: NASA has a punch list of eight hundred problems that
Speaker 3: must be solved before the first mission to Mars is launched.
Speaker 3: Very few of them have to do with problems of
Speaker 3: human psychology or really even of in survival, which is
Speaker 3: the subject of this experiment that I wrote about, called SHAPEA.
Speaker 1: This particular experiment began with rather intriguing announcement on the
Speaker 1: NASA website.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was a little bit like the Wonka Factory,
Speaker 3: the Golden ticket that you know, four civilians would be
Speaker 3: chosen to go to Mars Asterisk not really Mars, but
Speaker 3: a habitat that was built on essentially a stage set
Speaker 3: to look exactly like what they expect the first mission
Speaker 3: to Mars to look like. And it generated enormous excitement
Speaker 3: and people from all over the country rushed to apply.
Speaker 3: They wanted the Golden ticket to live out. In most cases,
Speaker 3: I think it's kind of childhood fantasy of space exploration
Speaker 3: to see if they could withstand psychologically the challenges of
Speaker 3: living away from the rest of the everyone else they've
Speaker 3: ever known or met.
Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff the Story. I'm os Vloschen, and
Speaker 1: each week we bring you an in depth interview with
Speaker 1: one of the brightest and farthest seeing minds in and
Speaker 1: about tech. Karen, I'm excited to bring you this interview
Speaker 1: with Nathaniel Rich. When we ask people to come on
Speaker 1: the show, it's always because one or other of us
Speaker 1: has been fascinated by something they've said, something they've done,
Speaker 1: or something they've written.
Speaker 2: Well, Nathaniel kind of had me at Mars Asterisk.
Speaker 1: Me too. You can't really understand tech today without understanding,
Speaker 1: or at least investigating the dreams and the fantasies of
Speaker 1: the tech Titans. Colonizing space is such an important touchstone
Speaker 1: for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in particular, and also
Speaker 1: mentioned by Trump for his inauguration as quote the pursuit
Speaker 1: of our manifest destiny.
Speaker 2: He said, put stars and strip What do you say?
Speaker 2: Put red, white, and blue? Are stars and stripes on
Speaker 2: Mars Marsia.
Speaker 1: So when I came across this article in the New
Speaker 1: York Times magazine under the headline can humans withstand the
Speaker 1: psychological torture of Mars? I had to know more. In fact,
Speaker 1: I remember reading it and just getting goosebumps, and so
Speaker 1: I kind of wanted to talk to Nathaniel about how
Speaker 1: realistic the dreams of getting to Mars are and what
Speaker 1: some of the practical dare I say, technical steps required
Speaker 1: to achieve the mark?
Speaker 2: Before you get too excited, Can you just tell me
Speaker 2: who Nathaniel Rich is?
Speaker 4: Sorry.
Speaker 1: Nathaniel is an author. He's written novels like The Mayor's Tongue,
Speaker 1: Odds Against Tomorrow, and King Zeno, but also nonfiction books
Speaker 1: primarily about the environment, such as Losing Earth, A Recent
Speaker 1: History and Second Nature Scenes from a World Remade. One
Speaker 1: critic actually said Rich is a gifted caricaturist and a
Speaker 1: gifted apocalyptist. It's his talent for describing the apocalypse which
Speaker 1: brought him in some ways to reporting on the Mars
Speaker 1: June Alpha project, which asked to you about why did
Speaker 1: you decide to write the piece?
Speaker 3: The NASA part of it was almost came secondarily. I
Speaker 3: had become obsessed with this history of isolation research, and
Speaker 3: particularly by this incredible story of a man named Michel
Speaker 3: Sefrey who had launched a series of cave experiments to
Speaker 3: test the endurance of people in isolation, in environments where
Speaker 3: they're completely cut off from the world. And so he
Speaker 3: had run a series of these experiments that culminated with
Speaker 3: this experiment by the first female participant in the series,
Speaker 3: who was this woman named Veronique Legwyn was in the
Speaker 3: late eighties, and she went underground and ended up setting
Speaker 3: the record at the time as one hundred and eleven
Speaker 3: days underground. And she kept a journal and she wrote
Speaker 3: about everything she was thinking about and feeling, and ultimately
Speaker 3: what happened was she went a little bit insane, but
Speaker 3: also had these moments of great and enlightenment. And it's
Speaker 3: a tragic story though, because she came out finally, and
Speaker 3: after being celebrated and becoming a kind of national celebrity
Speaker 3: for a period of time, entered into this great depression
Speaker 3: and ultimately killed herself within a year. And she had
Speaker 3: said before her death something to the effect of, you know,
Speaker 3: I never was more alive than I was down and
Speaker 3: underground when I was all by myself. And that led
Speaker 3: me into a whole obsession with these types of experiments.
Speaker 3: And I wanted to see if anyone was doing these
Speaker 3: things now, because they're on one level, they're completely unethical
Speaker 3: because basically what you'd expect happens, which is most people
Speaker 3: struggle and often lose their hold on reality. And I
Speaker 3: found that no one was really doing these experiments for
Speaker 3: that reason, except for NASA, who had continued under the
Speaker 3: guise of this Martian project.
Speaker 1: So on the one had NASA putting out the cool applicants,
Speaker 1: but on the other hand, they had to build mass
Speaker 1: or at least a motion colony on Earth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they had to build or actually print using a
Speaker 3: three D printer, a habitat, which is, by the way,
Speaker 3: how they will do it. When we get to Mars.
Speaker 3: You can't travel thirty three million miles with a house.
Speaker 3: You know of towing a house behind you. Yeah, free.
Speaker 3: So they can't quite do that, or they don't have
Speaker 3: the technology to do that. It's not efficient. And so
Speaker 3: what they will do is they will just lug a
Speaker 3: three D printer up there and use Martian rock regolith
Speaker 3: as ink for this three D printer.
Speaker 1: So they'll tone the sand into cement somehow.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and they can do that.
Speaker 3: They do that on this planet too, And there are
Speaker 3: you can find online some habitats that have been built,
Speaker 3: some houses that have been built this way, not using
Speaker 3: Martian rock obviously, but terrestrial rock. And they will construct
Speaker 3: this house. It's a seventeen hundred square foot habitat and
Speaker 3: they built it in a warehouse at the Johnson Space
Speaker 3: Center in Houston, and it's their four little bedrooms and
Speaker 3: a lounge and you know, a small indoor garden and
Speaker 3: some computers and desks and like a little relaxation space.
Speaker 3: And that seventeen hundred foot house habitat was where they
Speaker 3: were going to send four people for more than a year.
Speaker 1: And this habitat resembles exactly what they intend to build
Speaker 1: on Mars when they get there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sure subject to change, and I suppose part
Speaker 3: of this experiment was to determine whether this particular model
Speaker 3: would work best.
Speaker 4: But yeah, this is the plan.
Speaker 1: And the kind of simulated colony in the Johnson Space
Speaker 1: Center had quite a romantic.
Speaker 3: Name, Yeah, Marsdoo and Alpha is the name of the habitat,
Speaker 3: and the the mission is named Shapeah, which is I
Speaker 3: guess NASA's idea of a sexy name.
Speaker 1: And so okay, So the call goes out for some
Speaker 1: volunteers to go to Mons Dunolf. One of the people
Speaker 1: who sees the advertisement is Nathan Jones. Who's Nathan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Nathan Jones is in many ways the most fascinating
Speaker 3: figure for me in reporting the piece. He's an emergency
Speaker 3: room physician from Springfield, Illinois, father of three boys, married
Speaker 3: and Nathan was, like basically everyone I spoke to for
Speaker 3: the story, was a kind of self professed NASA geek
Speaker 3: or obsessive and had always dreamed of doing something special,
Speaker 3: bigger with his life. He was obsessed with space travel
Speaker 3: and when he saw this posting, he applied immediately and
Speaker 3: then told his his wife, who was I think as
Speaker 3: safe to say as it was a pault.
Speaker 1: The sequence that seems a little all speaking as American man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't. I wouldn't have flied in my house.
Speaker 3: But he was unique actually in that he was the
Speaker 3: only one of the finalists who had children, and as
Speaker 3: the father of two small children myself, I felt for
Speaker 3: the family. And he was fully aware he was going
Speaker 3: to miss out on a lot. You miss a year
Speaker 3: with your children, you're missing a lot, and you come
Speaker 3: back and the children look like different people. So there
Speaker 3: was another dimension of an emotional challenge with him. But
Speaker 3: he was determined to do it.
Speaker 1: And how did he prepare.
Speaker 3: He prepared very dutifully by him and his wife had
Speaker 3: a whole series. I was fascinated by this, a whole
Speaker 3: series of preparations that they did. He wrote little letters
Speaker 3: to that he placed around the house in secret hiding
Speaker 3: spots that the kids and his wife case he might
Speaker 3: find over the course of the year. Sometimes little like
Speaker 3: notes of encouragement, like he put a note in the
Speaker 3: fuse box for like the first time the lights went
Speaker 3: out and said, you know you can do this. I
Speaker 3: trust you, just flipped this switch. And so they're all
Speaker 3: these sort of sweet and for somewhat poignant point.
Speaker 1: It's almost like the script of a movie where somebody
Speaker 1: knows they're going to die.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's but the poignancy is somewhat compromised. I
Speaker 3: found by the fact that it was all a contrived
Speaker 3: scenario he was. That's there's a kind of beathos to
Speaker 3: the fact that, well, he wasn't actually going to Mars.
Speaker 3: It's not quite the Matthew mcconnie Interstellar where he's missing
Speaker 3: his children for this this major mission. He's just going
Speaker 3: to sit on a stage set for a year. But
Speaker 3: that tension between the kind of absurdity of the whole
Speaker 3: proposition and then the real emotion that attended every aspect
Speaker 3: of this process, for me, that was really the heart
Speaker 3: of the story.
Speaker 1: All you have to do is watch the video of
Speaker 1: him about to go into the Mars Dunelfa. What did
Speaker 1: you feel when you watch somebody you spend time with
Speaker 1: his source in such distress?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was striking. He had predicted it.
Speaker 3: But sure enough, when it came time to enter this habitat,
Speaker 3: they had this dramatic ceremony. They were filmed right in
Speaker 3: front of the main portal, which is basically just a door.
Speaker 3: It wasn't like some major like you're entering a submarine
Speaker 3: or something. But they were at a they get a
Speaker 3: little press conference, and each one of them had to
Speaker 3: give a talk, give a little statement, and he broke down.
Speaker 3: He couldn't finish it because he was so overcome by
Speaker 3: the thought of saying goodbye finally to his family for
Speaker 3: this long period of time.
Speaker 5: But I believe that tomorrow will only be possible because
Speaker 5: we step into Mars Dune Alpa today. And with that
Speaker 5: in mind, I also want to take a moment to
Speaker 5: sincerely think the great many people who've worked tirelessly in
Speaker 5: so many countless hours to get us to this point. Also,
Speaker 5: thank you to our families and friends for their sacrifices.
Speaker 5: We see, we know those sacrifices. We couldn't be here
Speaker 5: without your love and support. Sorry, Sorry to my wife
Speaker 5: and kids.
Speaker 1: I love you, the moon. I'm sorry, bars and back.
Speaker 3: And it's very moving and upsetting and sort of sweet
Speaker 3: and horrible in some ways as well. It's something that
Speaker 3: he brought upon himself. But I think what's key to
Speaker 3: understand is that everybody in the mission, from the administrators
Speaker 3: to the participants, felt very certain that what they were
Speaker 3: doing was a critical next step towards this wonderful dream.
Speaker 3: Of Humanity's next chapter, they felt that there is no Mars,
Speaker 3: there is no exploration of Mars unless you have the
Speaker 3: shapea experiment.
Speaker 4: I'm not convinced that's true at all.
Speaker 3: I mean, I wrote about that, but they certainly were,
Speaker 3: and so they did feel that they were sacrificing, making
Speaker 3: a major personal sacrifice towards achieving a great goal for
Speaker 3: all of humanity, which.
Speaker 1: May have kept them safe. And the woman you mentioned
Speaker 1: at the beginning, the French woman who took her own life,
Speaker 1: does she have that same sense of mission.
Speaker 4: That's a great point.
Speaker 3: There is some commonality, and that there was this idea
Speaker 3: that they were on a kind of different frontier of
Speaker 3: human psychology. But yes, it's not it was. I don't
Speaker 3: think it was quite as ennobling. The stakes were quite
Speaker 3: as high as you see with NASA and all the
Speaker 3: trappings of NASA.
Speaker 1: And also she was totally alone, whereas Nathan had three companions.
Speaker 3: Right right, And so there's some distinctions there, although I
Speaker 3: will say that in the long history of experiments in
Speaker 3: which people are together in isolation, they suffer also, I mean,
Speaker 3: maybe it's not quite as extreme, but you know, in
Speaker 3: conducting the research for the piece I spoke with a
Speaker 3: bunch of psychiatrists and historians of science and historians of psychology,
Speaker 3: and I learned that the definition of isolation is not
Speaker 3: necessarily being alone. It's being removed from your normal life
Speaker 3: and from the people close to you. So you can
Speaker 3: be in isolation with other people, and in fact, many
Speaker 3: of the same psychological effects are experienced whether or not
Speaker 3: there are you're with other people, if you're cut off
Speaker 3: from the people who are most important to you.
Speaker 1: When I think about the history of space movies is
Speaker 1: obviously the famous Houston. We have a problem. Could Nathan
Speaker 1: and co stay in touch with homebase and even with
Speaker 1: their families while they were in Mars Dunolfa.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: They were very scrupulous about imitating the reality, the expected reality,
Speaker 3: which is that there's this time lapse for any communication
Speaker 3: from Mars because it's far away and you're dealing with
Speaker 3: the limits of the speed of sound and technology, and
Speaker 3: so there's something it depends on where it is in
Speaker 3: the orbit, but essentially there's like a twenty nine minute lapse,
Speaker 3: and so you can't have a conversation, any kind of
Speaker 3: normal conversation, but they can send messages. But the other
Speaker 3: problem is that every form of electronic communication from the
Speaker 3: habitat has to go through the same channel, So that
Speaker 3: includes any kind of data that the habitat is sending
Speaker 3: back to Earth about I don't know, oxygen levels or
Speaker 3: what's happening in the experiments, or any kind of computer connections.
Speaker 3: And so that's sort of the best case scenario, and
Speaker 3: that actually the lag can be much longer, and the
Speaker 3: low larger the audio file or the text file, the
Speaker 3: computer file, the longer it takes of sending a short
Speaker 3: video even in low resolution, could take days, where sending
Speaker 3: a one line text message maybe takes only half an
Speaker 3: hour or so. So they could communicate, but only in
Speaker 3: this clipped way with all of these ellipses essentially between communications.
Speaker 3: So if there's an emergency, say back at home, they
Speaker 3: couldn't just start having a conversation with them. Now, in reality,
Speaker 3: since they were on a stage set, they could break
Speaker 3: the experiment at any time if someone just like I
Speaker 3: don't know, cut off their finger or something, but they
Speaker 3: would try to they would do anything to avoid breaking
Speaker 3: the experiment obviously, So yeah, they were reduced to these
Speaker 3: sort of intermittent text messages essentially that would be relayed
Speaker 3: at unpredictable intervals.
Speaker 1: How did you choose the headline field story?
Speaker 4: I don't choose the headlines from a not a lot.
Speaker 4: I don't.
Speaker 3: I can consult on them, and I can say this
Speaker 3: one's worse than the other one.
Speaker 1: But the headline the New York Times magazine went with
Speaker 1: was can humans withstand the psychological torture?
Speaker 4: I mean, it's pretty good. I can't.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, And that's also what it's about, basically, can
Speaker 3: we can people survive this? Because most of what NAS
Speaker 3: has been asking over the course of its space program
Speaker 3: is can we physically get people into space? Can we
Speaker 3: physically put them on another planet? Very little thought has
Speaker 3: been given into can human beings once they're there survive psychologically, emotionally.
Speaker 3: And that's that's what this experiment is, at least ostensibly about.
Speaker 3: And it's definitely what the story is that I wrote
Speaker 3: us about.
Speaker 1: When we come back. More from Nathaniel rich on why
Speaker 1: we're so obsessed with going to Mars and how historically
Speaker 1: attitudes towards Mars have always revealed deeper cultural undercurrents. How
Speaker 1: close is NASA to putting humans on Mos? They've been
Speaker 1: predicting for many years that it's just around the corner.
Speaker 1: They keep pushing back the window.
Speaker 3: Even a few years ago, I think by twenty eighteen
Speaker 3: they had predicted that it would be no later than
Speaker 3: the end of the twenty twenties. I think now they're
Speaker 3: looking more to the middle of the next decade. But
Speaker 3: they are full speed ahead, and I think they're very
Speaker 3: confident that they will get people to the planet in
Speaker 3: a fairly short amount of time. The technical problems that
Speaker 3: lay before them that we referenced are not seen as
Speaker 3: intimidatingly difficult. They're just math problems to be worked out,
Speaker 3: is the sense that I got from speaking with one
Speaker 3: of these senior propulsion engineers. So there is, and there
Speaker 3: has been for quite a while within NASA, quite a
Speaker 3: lot of optimism that this is going to happen.
Speaker 4: It's going to happen pretty soon.
Speaker 1: And why why mos Well.
Speaker 3: That's the million dollars, that's the million dollar question. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of different rationales. The main ones you
Speaker 3: hear from NASA is it represents scientific progress. It's the
Speaker 3: next step for human exploration of the universe, and certainly
Speaker 3: human progress in this space exploration. There's also the rationale
Speaker 3: that through the kind of innovation that's necessary to put
Speaker 3: people on Mars or to reach any new milestone in
Speaker 3: the space expeditions, that there will be some kind of
Speaker 3: unpredictable benefits, technological benefits that can be applied for all
Speaker 3: of humanity, so that maybe they'll invent new materials or
Speaker 3: new types of devices that can then make our life
Speaker 3: on Earth easier. And there are plenty of examples I
Speaker 3: think of that in the past. And then there's a
Speaker 3: kind of political rationale, which is to say that we
Speaker 3: need to do it before someone else does.
Speaker 4: There's a national pride on the line.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like in the sixties when I wanted
Speaker 1: to put a man on the moon first. Is there
Speaker 1: a parallel to the sixties in that respect, Yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Would say not only is there a parallel, but I
Speaker 3: think NASA in its whole frame of thinking. If you
Speaker 3: can speak of something the size of an agency, the
Speaker 3: size of NASA as a personified in some way, but
Speaker 3: I think the whole enterprise is really stuck in the sixties,
Speaker 3: if not the fit nineteen fifties one it's created. So
Speaker 3: it's very much it's you know, you see this sort
Speaker 3: of vestigial, almost cold war mentality that I think informs
Speaker 3: all almost every aspect of the whole enterprise.
Speaker 1: What does it say to you that in the sixties
Speaker 1: it was the president JFK sort of outlining this national
Speaker 1: mission to put a man on the moon, and now
Speaker 1: in the twenty twenties it's l Musk and to a
Speaker 1: certain extent Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you can learn all you need to
Speaker 3: know about a culture or a society by studying its
Speaker 3: attitudes about Mars. You know, it's it's certainly now it's
Speaker 3: dominated by a kind of There are a few different strands.
Speaker 3: There's a kind of private enterprise strand, but that is
Speaker 3: often including in the case of Musk, closely alloyed with
Speaker 3: a libertarian fantasy of a lawless world in which people
Speaker 3: can stake their claim a kind of wild West and
Speaker 3: not have regulation and oversight. There are groups of Mars
Speaker 3: enthusiasts out there that are very much explicitly libertarian ideologues
Speaker 3: who hope to start a libertarian society on Mars.
Speaker 4: So that exists if you.
Speaker 3: Go back to the fifties and sixties, where at this
Speaker 3: very different place in our culture, obviously in society, a
Speaker 3: place of tremendous global cooperation relatively that gave birth to
Speaker 3: the entire sort of modern space race, even though you
Speaker 3: have a competition between the Cold War powers. But you
Speaker 3: can even go back further and if you look at
Speaker 3: the late nineteenth century when Chaparelli, a Milanaisy astronomer, observed
Speaker 3: that there were canals on Mars, there was this great
Speaker 3: fascination for decades about are people living on Mars? Are
Speaker 3: Martians building canals? And it was very much an expression.
Speaker 3: You can find very clear a correlation between the kind
Speaker 3: of excitement of the industrial age, and there was a
Speaker 3: period where people were competing with Mars to build more
Speaker 3: canals as fast as possible, as also of course during
Speaker 3: the same period of the digging of the sus canals.
Speaker 4: So this was you know, this is the New York Times.
Speaker 3: This is not just some like weird thing is this
Speaker 3: is at the time generally accepted that we're in this
Speaker 3: race against the Martians. So it's always been a kind
Speaker 3: of repository Mars for the kind of subconscious of the
Speaker 3: culture that observes it. And I think that's true today.
Speaker 3: And I think as our society changes, probably our view
Speaker 3: of Mars will change. In tandem with it.
Speaker 1: You've written that future Mars voyages will have to want
Speaker 1: to travel to Mars more than almost anyone else in
Speaker 1: the world. They'll have to embrace the knowledge that for
Speaker 1: at least five hundred and seventy days, they will be
Speaker 1: the most isolated human beings in the history of the universe.
Speaker 3: Yes, they will have to, because that's what they're signing
Speaker 3: up up for.
Speaker 1: What will that do to them?
Speaker 3: You know? I think a distinction has to be made
Speaker 3: between the kind of person who wants to be an
Speaker 3: astronaut and wants to go on a mission like this,
Speaker 3: like the people I wrote about, like Nathan Jones. But
Speaker 3: then once we start talking about a permanent settlement or colonies,
Speaker 3: we're talking about a very different group of people. So
Speaker 3: you have this sort of kind of zelot astronauts who
Speaker 3: are perfectly fit, who are the most stable people you've
Speaker 3: ever met, enormous reserves of self concentration and self reliance
Speaker 3: and all the rest, and then the rest of us right,
Speaker 3: and for colony to exist, it has to look very different.
Speaker 3: And a major criticism that I encountered in researching the
Speaker 3: piece from close watchers of the NASA program is that
Speaker 3: Even if this experiment has some value to predict the
Speaker 3: ability of say, astronauts to survive in this setting, it
Speaker 3: will have no value for the rest of us, who
Speaker 3: you know, all kinds of other considerations would have to
Speaker 3: be made. And so we're certainly not at the stage
Speaker 3: where we're asking can people have families up there? Can
Speaker 3: people give birth? There's some major biological challenges there. What
Speaker 3: happens if someone gets sick, what happens if someone misses home,
Speaker 3: you know, enters a depression, and none of that. We're
Speaker 3: nowhere near those kinds of questions yet, but I think
Speaker 3: that's if they continue to hit these benchmarks, that's where
Speaker 3: this is ultimately heading.
Speaker 1: So when you wrote the piece Nathan and co In
Speaker 1: the mods Habitat, and since publication, they've of course come back.
Speaker 1: Do you know what the experience was like for Nathan?
Speaker 4: No, they're not.
Speaker 3: They're basically sworn to secrecy. And this was the level
Speaker 3: of secrecy that shrouded just about every aspect of the
Speaker 3: experiment was somewhat astounding or surprise for me. It was
Speaker 3: as it reporting the story at least talking to the
Speaker 3: NASA people and to some extent the participants themselves, you'd
Speaker 3: think I was investigating I don't know, Abu grab or
Speaker 3: something like. The way that it was talked about extremely confidential. Now,
Speaker 3: their justification was that they want to run the experiment
Speaker 3: multiple times, and they don't want prospective applicants to know
Speaker 3: anything about what they're going to do. They don't want
Speaker 3: to because it would, I guess, diminish the value of
Speaker 3: what they find if people already know, like, these are
Speaker 3: the kinds of things we're going to do when we're there.
Speaker 4: This is what happened to people.
Speaker 3: It struck me as slightly ridiculous because, on the one hand,
Speaker 3: very similar experiments have been conducted many times, including by NASA,
Speaker 3: and those results are public, so the results.
Speaker 1: NASA haven't published any results of this.
Speaker 3: Not that I'm aware of, no, and you know, they
Speaker 3: release these very anodyne statements.
Speaker 4: It's a success. Everyone had a great time.
Speaker 1: And you put the story in the context of the
Speaker 1: history of isolation research. But more specifically, it seems like
Speaker 1: this particular simulation of life on Mars has happened multiple
Speaker 1: times in the past and is also being replicated multiple
Speaker 1: times right now all around the world. Can you kind
Speaker 1: of describe the spread of this type of experiment being run.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess it depends on how narrowly you want
Speaker 3: to define the experiment. But NASA has been doing some version,
Speaker 3: conducting some version of this experiment since before NASA was
Speaker 3: even called NASA. I mean, they had some of the
Speaker 3: early first astronauts did isolation experiments. They would put them
Speaker 3: in little pods for long periods of time, sometimes in
Speaker 3: fairly brutal configurations and sometimes completely in isolation, especially back
Speaker 3: in the fifties when they thought that astronauts would have
Speaker 3: to be propelled in tiny little vessels for months at
Speaker 3: a time into outer space. But there was another similar
Speaker 3: experiment called High Seas, which was the subject of a
Speaker 3: really fascinating book by the writer Kate Green, who was
Speaker 3: one of the original crew members they ran that experiment.
Speaker 3: I don't know, I think a dozen times. That was
Speaker 3: a similar idea in a habitat that was built on
Speaker 3: Mona Loa Mountain in Hawaii, and it was four people
Speaker 3: or sometimes six put into this environment for months at
Speaker 3: a time, and Green writes very elegantly and movingly about
Speaker 3: the experience and on the kind of madness of it
Speaker 3: and what it did to her life.
Speaker 4: The book once upon a time I lived on Mars it's.
Speaker 3: Called And then there was a crazy experiment called Mars
Speaker 3: five hundred that was administered by a Russian agency called
Speaker 3: which has a name that I love, called the Institute
Speaker 3: of Biomedical Problems. So of course that's who did this
Speaker 3: completely barbaric experiment where they locked six male crew members
Speaker 3: together for five hundred and twenty days. Wow, that was
Speaker 3: in twenty ten and eleven in a kind of fake
Speaker 3: spacecraft on a fake Mars and that was pretty well
Speaker 3: studied and people participants lost their hair and lost weight.
Speaker 3: But then there's NASA, if they have something like a
Speaker 3: dozen different versions of this going on at all times.
Speaker 3: There are all different configurations, different amounts of time, different
Speaker 3: number of participants.
Speaker 1: So did you lost? Do you say to NASA, why
Speaker 1: do you need to keep doing that?
Speaker 3: Yes, that was one of my big questions, why do
Speaker 3: we keep doing this? And don't we know what happens?
Speaker 3: Even before the NASA history, there's this whole other history
Speaker 3: of people doing similar isolation experiments, and their official answer was, yes,
Speaker 3: we've done similar some experiments, but actually there's no substitution
Speaker 3: for this is far closer to the expected reality and experimentally, scientifically,
Speaker 3: all of the previous experiments are essentially useless, and this
Speaker 3: is the only one that will matter. Now if you
Speaker 3: believe that, you also have to then wonder well. And
Speaker 3: this is what some of the people who study that's
Speaker 3: pointed out to me. Yes, okay, this experiment, even if
Speaker 3: it's its exact simulation, a perfect simulation of what the
Speaker 3: first Mars expedition is going to be, you're only testing
Speaker 3: a group of four people or eve an n of
Speaker 3: four right, experimentally speaking, and so the statistical value of
Speaker 3: this experiment is close to nil. You'd have to run
Speaker 3: this experiment thousands of times for it to be statistically reliable,
Speaker 3: and of course they're not going to do that. So
Speaker 3: even if you grant them this sort of scientific argument
Speaker 3: that this experiment is unlike all the other ones, even
Speaker 3: though they all basically have the same results, it doesn't
Speaker 3: actually have much scientific value unless they would do it all,
Speaker 3: you know, fifty.
Speaker 4: Times or a thousand times.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure where the probability charts cut off, but
Speaker 3: as it stands, they're probably going to do it one
Speaker 3: or two more times, at which point they'll be ready
Speaker 3: to hurl people.
Speaker 1: Up to Mars. But from that point of view, was
Speaker 1: this about understanding if humans can withstand isolation or was
Speaker 1: this some we talked to the beginning about the technical
Speaker 1: problems NASA has to solve or was this Were there
Speaker 1: any technical problems they were looking to solve with this?
Speaker 3: That was probably the That was the point where I
Speaker 3: was most I mean, there's something that's where I sort
Speaker 3: of laughed in the reporting, although it's kind of horrible. So, yes,
Speaker 3: the official line is where we want to test the
Speaker 3: human side of this. We have all these divisions doing
Speaker 3: the science and the technology, and this is the human
Speaker 3: research side. And in fact, there is a human Research
Speaker 3: division within NASA that was administering the experiment. However, they
Speaker 3: were partnered with two other divisions, and the division that
Speaker 3: oversaw the whole experiment was actually run by someone named
Speaker 3: Rachel McCauley, who is a propulsion engineer. She's the one
Speaker 3: who decides which rocket will do the job best. And
Speaker 3: in order to make that determination, she needs to nail
Speaker 3: down a bunch of variables. And one of the main
Speaker 3: variables is how much weight needs to be carried by
Speaker 3: the rocket ship. And so what that means is, of
Speaker 3: course the weight of the people, but also how much
Speaker 3: food do they have to take? And so when I
Speaker 3: talked to her, she was like, very blithely kind of
Speaker 3: dismissive of the whole human psychological aspect of the thing,
Speaker 3: and instead she focused on how much food are they
Speaker 3: going to eat? Like what's the weight? How much waste
Speaker 3: are they going to produce? And once I have those figures,
Speaker 3: then I will know exactly what kind of propulsion device
Speaker 3: to use.
Speaker 1: And so then I went a little bit dubious.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so I was like, what, no, I mean,
Speaker 3: I believed her because she was running the experiment.
Speaker 4: She's a solid propulsion systems engineer.
Speaker 3: And so then I went back to the sort of
Speaker 3: human research people and they're like, oh, no, no, no, it's
Speaker 3: all about human psychology. But in fact the person they
Speaker 3: were reporting to, the person who was running the whole thing,
Speaker 3: said that was not the case. And so actually, I
Speaker 3: think if you follow the money, you start to wonder, well,
Speaker 3: is this whole human aspects side of it part of
Speaker 3: the marketing and it's frankly irrelevant to what NASA's real
Speaker 3: concern is, which is, yeah, how many pounds of food
Speaker 3: do we need to put on this thing?
Speaker 2: Geez.
Speaker 1: Stay with us for more from Nathaniel rich on why
Speaker 1: dreams of Mars and dreams of AI are inextricably linked
Speaker 1: and why some techno optimists theorize that humans would evolve
Speaker 1: into AI powered martians. There was a part of your
Speaker 1: story that's really stuck out to me was that NASA's
Speaker 1: chief research scientist Dennis Bushel said that as Colonis, he
Speaker 1: most becomes more feasible, colonists themselves will evolve into mortians.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 1: Did that surprise you.
Speaker 4: Yes, although a little bit.
Speaker 3: It was surprised me to see him write about that
Speaker 3: so openly. This is Yes, This chief scientist at the
Speaker 3: Langley Research Center, who had been I think he recently retired,
Speaker 3: had been a NASA for sixty years, and he published
Speaker 3: this sort of opus about the institutional view of deep
Speaker 3: space exploration, and he said, what I think a lot
Speaker 3: of scientists have predicted is that if people are able
Speaker 3: to survive on Mars for any extended amount of time
Speaker 3: with oxygen and all the rest, that ultimately their bodies
Speaker 3: will change. That over time, because of the radiation exposure,
Speaker 3: because of the reduced gravity, that there will be real
Speaker 3: physiological changes to their bodies. There's no way out of that.
Speaker 3: So essentially one of the kind of tricks for surviving
Speaker 3: Mars is to live there long enough so that people
Speaker 3: evolve into Martians and they look different and they probably
Speaker 3: have elongated heads and maybe different diets and all the rest.
Speaker 1: Of it evolved means, of course natural selection. Survivor are
Speaker 1: the fittest on Moss exactly.
Speaker 3: We're talking about a generational No, it's a generational shift.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: Of course they have to solve things like inconvenient things
Speaker 3: like procreation on Mars and all the rest of that.
Speaker 3: But yes, that's the long term view, is that we
Speaker 3: won't have to solve every problem perfectly because people will
Speaker 3: just start to there'll be natural selection and they'll be
Speaker 3: forced to evolve into these other Martian creatures. And that
Speaker 3: seems to be NASA's view.
Speaker 1: There's another piece you wrote in The New York Times recently,
Speaker 1: which was a review of Ray Causweill's book The Singularity
Speaker 1: Is Nearer. Can you talk about who Ray Causweil is
Speaker 1: that book and how viewing that book syncs up with
Speaker 1: your writing on this experiment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Kurzweil is a kind of god of Ai who's
Speaker 3: called the godfather of AI, who is for many decades
Speaker 3: has been predicting the rise of artificial intelligence and ultimately
Speaker 3: the singularity. But yes, his idea is that there will
Speaker 3: be nanobots powered by artificial intelligence that we will inject
Speaker 3: into our bodies, and that they will swim through our
Speaker 3: bloodstream into our brains and connect our neocortex to the cloud,
Speaker 3: linking us up to the I guess the Internet are
Speaker 3: really like the global repository of all human information civilization,
Speaker 3: and so at that point when we're just kind of
Speaker 3: wired into intelligence, electronic intelligence, that for him is a singularity,
Speaker 3: and he thinks that's coming very soon, basically by the
Speaker 3: end of the decade.
Speaker 1: Well, but there's something to me which is very striking
Speaker 1: in the sense that Ray caswild this Sea the godfather
Speaker 1: of AI, on the one hand, and on the other hand,
Speaker 1: Dennis Bushnell, the NASA Chief Scientist, I'm both saying in
Speaker 1: one way or another that within our lifetimes, the technological
Speaker 1: future will mean that we no longer conform to the
Speaker 1: current definition of what it is to be human.
Speaker 3: Yeah, although I think you'd be hard pressed to find
Speaker 3: a definition that would admit that would be universally agreed
Speaker 3: to on what it means to be human. True, now,
Speaker 3: we already and that's part of Kurzwell's argument, is that
Speaker 3: we already atsourced so much of our mind and identity
Speaker 3: to technology that we rely on the Internet to remember
Speaker 3: things for us, our digital record, a lot of our
Speaker 3: powers are only possible through technology. And if we were
Speaker 3: just put in the wilderness, most of us we'd be
Speaker 3: able to survive a couple of weeks. But yes, both
Speaker 3: of these visions of they're both kind of these technologically
Speaker 3: optimistic views of the world. There's this kind of viscerally
Speaker 3: disturbing aspect to them, which is that they require us
Speaker 3: to reimagine physically what will look like, you know, but
Speaker 3: even putting aside all the sort of mental psychological aspect
Speaker 3: of it, that we're going to be morphed into these
Speaker 3: other different kinds of creatures that are going to be
Speaker 3: like physically in some ways unrecognizable. And Kurzwill has this
Speaker 3: whole thing about how soon people be able to design
Speaker 3: their own bodies the way you can design like a
Speaker 3: virtual avatar, and that we can we'll have people have
Speaker 3: wings and the tusks and whatever you want, you know, feathers,
Speaker 3: and that part of it tends not to be spoken
Speaker 3: aloud or advertised as much as the part about, you know,
Speaker 3: improving our intelligence. But I think think what was striking
Speaker 3: to me about Curzweil's book and what I wanted to
Speaker 3: write about is let's not forget the part where he
Speaker 3: the prerequisite for all of these future predictions is that
Speaker 3: we're injecting microscopic robots into our brains and our bloodstream.
Speaker 3: Let's not lose track of that part of it, so that, yes,
Speaker 3: I think you're right to draw a kind of a
Speaker 3: parallel with the Mars visions. They tend to collide in
Speaker 3: the realm of artificial intelligence. It's not surprising that Elon Musk,
Speaker 3: you know, is obsessed with both Mars and AI.
Speaker 1: You used the phrase earlier on a conversation about mourning,
Speaker 1: and one of the pieces of Cozweil's book that you
Speaker 1: draw out is him talking about basically making an AI
Speaker 1: version of his father, who passed away in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: to be able to talk to him about music. And
Speaker 1: one of the other things I noticed in the piece
Speaker 1: about Mars was the crop garden in the Mars June
Speaker 1: Alpha colony, which wouldn't be for eating, but rather for
Speaker 1: the mental health of the participants. You know, it's I
Speaker 1: guess it makes me think of that whole sort of
Speaker 1: cliched thing about the fisherman who becomes a millionaire and
Speaker 1: then returns to where he lived to fish. The craving
Speaker 1: for the kind of things which are the touchstones of
Speaker 1: what we think about as our human experience also is
Speaker 1: present in these future fantasies.
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: That's another major point of convergence I think, is this
Speaker 3: that once you peel back this techno optimistic fantasy of
Speaker 3: how things are going to be, you find this deep
Speaker 3: sense of longing for how things once were. You certainly
Speaker 3: see it in Kurswell, where after hundreds of pages of
Speaker 3: talking about all the wonders of this new technology, all
Speaker 3: the conveniences, and how we can travel have beach holidays
Speaker 3: without leaving our houses through virtual reality and all the
Speaker 3: rest of it, his ultimate goal is to reanimate his
Speaker 3: dead father, who was a composer not of some renown
Speaker 3: and a conductor in New York. And he's already gone
Speaker 3: so far as to program an AI version of his
Speaker 3: father that trained on his father's letters and writings and
Speaker 3: personal documents and his and his music. In the pages
Speaker 3: of the book, he has a there's a transcript of
Speaker 3: a conversation that that Curswell has with his dead father,
Speaker 3: and that to him is that's his great hope, is
Speaker 3: to bring back his dad. In the same way in Mars,
Speaker 3: I was struck by the mournful quality of this whole enterprise,
Speaker 3: and everyone I asked, every sort of expert I interviewed,
Speaker 3: I asked, there's something, there's something just a little bit
Speaker 3: upsetting about all of this, like what you know, and
Speaker 3: they all kind of many people kind of agreed, but
Speaker 3: they couldn't put their finger on it until I spoke
Speaker 3: to this one historian of isolation experiments, Mattius at Cornell,
Speaker 3: and he said, this thing that for me is the
Speaker 3: heart of the story, and to some extent, it's the
Speaker 3: heart of the Curzwell and even ai store, which is
Speaker 3: the urge to try to recreate a perfect world, is
Speaker 3: always going to be about rehearsing what we got wrong here.
Speaker 3: He told me, we're not chasing Mars, We're mourning Earth.
Speaker 3: That struck a chord with me because I feel like
Speaker 3: that is the through line here, that there's this attempt
Speaker 3: to chase something that we've lost, and you know, for Mattias,
Speaker 3: he was talking about essentially a world ruined by climate
Speaker 3: change and environmental degradation, and that the ultimate fulfillment of
Speaker 3: the Mars fantasy, at least in our age, seems to
Speaker 3: be to terraform the planet and create a kind of
Speaker 3: idyllic second Earth that won't be marred by all the
Speaker 3: mistakes that we've made here. And the Ai fantasy has
Speaker 3: the same component. It's, you know, we'll all be young
Speaker 3: and and free of sin in a way, and that
Speaker 3: I think that's true, and I think that's I think
Speaker 3: we lose something when we just assume that all of
Speaker 3: these stories are about what the way they're advertised.
Speaker 4: It's like progress.
Speaker 3: I think it's also there's a kind of a morning
Speaker 3: of something that we've lost that we're trying to get back,
Speaker 3: and we don't quite know how to do it, and
Speaker 3: so we're trying to build a fancy news sports car
Speaker 3: to get us there, but we can't.
Speaker 2: The thing that I found the most interesting about this
Speaker 2: piece that you did was this idea that, like, isolation
Speaker 2: is not about being alone. Yes, isolation is about being
Speaker 2: away from community, absolutely, and you can be with the
Speaker 2: community of people in a place that isn't home and
Speaker 2: be very isolated.
Speaker 1: Well not enough thing. You know. One of the questions
Speaker 1: I didn't ask Nathaniel, but which I kind of wish
Speaker 1: that I had, was this interest in isolation research, Like
Speaker 1: we are constantly bombarded with this idea of the loneliness epidemic,
Speaker 1: and like, even though we're more connected, were more isolated
Speaker 1: than ever. And I was wondering if there was a
Speaker 1: kind of another text spread that I actually didn't pull on,
Speaker 1: but perhaps should have done about you know, why this
Speaker 1: cultural moment is so interested in isolation?
Speaker 2: That's right? And I think that, you know, I mean
Speaker 2: I think about it all the time when I'm sitting
Speaker 2: at home on the couch on my phone, feeling incredibly
Speaker 2: connected to people and like how I could survive that way,
Speaker 2: but also questioning like do I want to live that way? Right,
Speaker 2: you know, and sort of how do I force myself
Speaker 2: out of that?
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: That really has nothing to do with going to Mars Asterisk.
Speaker 1: But you are somebody who grew up as a lover
Speaker 1: of science fiction. Your father was a science fiction author. Yes, so,
Speaker 1: I mean some people like to be very dismissive of
Speaker 1: muscum Bezos and their dreams of space. You know, I
Speaker 1: think they are two characters who are probably can deal
Speaker 1: with the bit of stick. But I don't think it's
Speaker 1: wrong to dream and even plan about space exploration.
Speaker 2: Well. I think part of it is a colonizer's instinct,
Speaker 2: But I also think this idea of like what is
Speaker 2: outside of our reach is always something that will fascinate
Speaker 2: writers of science fiction, will always fascinate even you know,
Speaker 2: the most practical technologists, because it's something that in a
Speaker 2: certain way is a fantasy. Like even the idea of
Speaker 2: like having to bring a three D printer to Mars
Speaker 2: because we can't lug certain things there. I mean, these
Speaker 2: are such far out concepts, you know.
Speaker 1: I find them exciting. I find them exciting, I think,
Speaker 1: but I also did find it very tragic this idea
Speaker 1: of like the compulsion to repeat these quite damaging experiments,
Speaker 1: of sending people to simulate life on Mars and hurting
Speaker 1: them in the process in their life on Earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Of course, we just had Trump, on day one
Speaker 2: of his second term, simultaneously make an executive order to
Speaker 2: drop out of the Paris Climate Accords and declare that
Speaker 2: we will launch astronauts into space. And I quote, plant
Speaker 2: the stars and stripes on the planet Mars. So this
Speaker 2: twinning of saying goodbye to Earth and embracing Mars actually
Speaker 2: feels very salient and very right.
Speaker 1: Now, Well, that's true, But what of this leaves me
Speaker 1: the question about you? Is there anything that could be
Speaker 1: done that I could offer to induce you to spend
Speaker 1: three hundred and fifty days in as ssimulated Mars.
Speaker 2: Now I went to space camp. You'll remember, or maybe remember,
Speaker 2: but I do remember. Now I did go to space camp.
Speaker 2: I am an intellectual explorer. I am not a physical explorer.
Speaker 1: You're not a psychon one either, No, I'm.
Speaker 2: Definitely not a psychoap and I did. I found the
Speaker 2: story of the woman was at LeGuin really really tragic.
Speaker 2: And I do think that what's interesting is that in
Speaker 2: moments of you know, innovation or exploration, we do test
Speaker 2: people's psychological limits. Do we have to? I don't know,
Speaker 2: you know, but I think that for me personally, I
Speaker 2: am not compelled by living for that long outside of
Speaker 2: the sort of my normal life. No are you?
Speaker 1: No, No, I'm not. But that sense that we talked
Speaker 1: about of these experiments in some ways being a kind
Speaker 1: of psychological mourning for what we're losing. You did make
Speaker 1: me think about environmental degradation. And you know, there are
Speaker 1: these I've seen these kind of techno fantasy illustrations of
Speaker 1: what life on Mars might look like, and they're basically
Speaker 1: these biospheres into which you have crammed, like the Swiss Alps,
Speaker 1: the Grand Canyon, the Mediterranean Sea, like beautiful animal.
Speaker 2: I also just think we're still human beings right well
Speaker 2: now for now, but you know, we project all of
Speaker 2: our fantasies still in the world of the creature comforts
Speaker 2: that we want. Do I want to ski on Mars?
Speaker 2: I guess right, because I like skiing here.
Speaker 1: You know, it makes you remember just how wonderful, you know,
Speaker 1: this earth of ours is. And what I loved about
Speaker 1: this interview and took away from it is when you
Speaker 1: play out the fantasy and when you actually ask, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the chief research scientists at NASA, what this
Speaker 1: looks like in the future. It's not just going to Mars.
Speaker 1: It's evolving into a new species with different shape of head,
Speaker 1: with a different reaction to radiation. And what that says
Speaker 1: to me is this is not just you know, going
Speaker 1: on a fun trip. This is essentially saying that there's
Speaker 1: going to be a fundamental categorical shift in US as
Speaker 1: a species in order to colonize Mars. And it's just
Speaker 1: a very weird and I find disturbing thought.
Speaker 2: Again, not something I would do.
Speaker 1: That's a good place to leave it. That's if a
Speaker 1: tech Stuff Today. Today's episode was produced by Sina Ozaki,
Speaker 1: Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez, and Lizzie Jacobs. It was executive
Speaker 1: produced by me Oswaaloshin, Kara Price, and Kate Osborne for
Speaker 1: Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell by Heart Podcasts. The Engineer is
Speaker 1: Beheit Fraser, Kyle Murdoch, Rodar Themsong Join us on Friday
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