Can we settle space? Should we? Have we really thought this through?

Daniel talks to Kelly and Zach Weinersmith about whether humanity is ready to move into the stars.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Kelly, where do you think your kids are going
to live when they grow up?

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Well, right now, my oldest is saying she's going to
stay in the house and have fourteen cats and ten kids,
And I guess I'm hoping that she's not in my
house but when that happens. But I also don't want
her too far because I'd love to see her and
her many creatures as much as possible.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Well, what would be too far? Are we talking like
South America or Antarctica.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
I'd make those trips, although I wouldn't be super excited
about Antarctica, but I suspect I'm going to be a
pretty determined grandparent.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
What if they have grandbabies, like in near Earth orbit
on this space.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Station, I'd be a bit disappointed for her poor decisions,
because I'm not sure that that's safe yet. But if
that's what I have to do to see the grandkids,
and my love is unconditional, I'm in all right.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
And what if they move to MI and have little
Martian babies?

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Oh my gosh, I don't know. Maybe we should set
up a video link.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Well, it's good to know the limits of your love.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Yeah, No, there's Alpha Centauri is a good limit. But
you know what's worrying me is we're having this conversation,
and now I have to make sure that my kids
in the future and my grandkids don't listen to this
conversation because they're going to get ideas and they'll move
out deep into the solar system.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Right now, they know exactly how far they have to
move to.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Avoid grandparent visits. Yep, good luck kids.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor
at UC Irvine, and I hope my kids move far away.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
I'm Kelly Weener Smith. I'm a parasitologist and adjunct Debt
Race University. And you know, I'd like my kids to
be close, but maybe not in the house.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
I have lots of friends here whose kids graduate from
high school, go to college, and then move back home
in this neighborhood. They call that failure to launch.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
That's a big thing. Now, Yeah, my kids can stay
with me as long as they need to.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Mm. I just feel like moving outside the influence of
your parents is part of growing up and becoming an
adult in the world.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
You know, I did love it. I had so much
fun when I moved out.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
Well, welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,
a production of iHeartRadio. My usual friend and co host,
Jorge can't be here today, but I'm very happy to
be joined by our regular guest host, Kelly Wingersmith. Kelly,
thanks very much for joining us.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
It's a pleasure to be here as always. And you know,
today we're talking about maybe the best thing you've ever
talked about on the podcast, and so I'm particularly excited
about today's conversation.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
That's right. Today we're not just talking about explaining the universe.
We're talking about exploring the universe, actually settling the universe,
sending humanity out to the rest of the cosmos to
infect it with our disease. And as a special bonus,
we have not one Wienersmith today, we actually have two
Zach wingers made welcome to the podcast as well.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
Hey, Hello, I need some intro music.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
What is your intro music? Is it sort of like
the Darth Vader theme song?

Speaker 3 (03:26):
Is more of a more of a wrestling thing, I
would I would like what did the Macho Man have?

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Well, regular listeners the podcast know Kelly, of course, and
some of you may also know Zach her less famous husband,
well known for a Saturday morning breakfast cereal.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
Whatever made man.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
And there's a reason we have Zach and Kelly on
the podcast together today, not just for marital therapy, but
because these two folks have written a fantastic and fascinating
book all about settling space and exploring the.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Cosmos, and it's finally almost of it.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
How long have you guys been working on this book?

Speaker 2 (04:03):
We did four years of research on the book, and
then it took a year between submitting the book and
it going to Prince. So we've been thinking about this
for like a decade between the two of us, and
we are ready to crush everyone's dream.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
If you feel about this book the way I feel
about every paper I write that takes longer than a year,
then by the time it's ready to go out in
the world, I hate the thing and I never want
to see it again.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
I was happy to get it off of my desk
when the time came, but I'm still pretty excited about it,
and that year in between sort of helped me get
excited about it again. What about you, Zach, Yeah, I
think you know.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
So the amount of time between submitting a manuscript, you're
basically not allowed to touch and the time you get
to actually put the book out of the universe is
quite substantial. So the other thing is, you know, the
way publishing works now is you don't want to say
too much because you might get to say it in
some prominent place. So you kind of have you're sort
of like, you know, and gagged until the book comes out.

(05:02):
So it's getting to where it's exciting to talk about
this stuff again.

Speaker 1 (05:05):
Awesome. So I hope we're catching you right in the
upswing where you're excited about these topics again, because I'm
very excited about it and I can't wait to talk
to you both about it. And so today on the podcast,
we'll be tackling the question can we settle space? Should
we settle space? Have we really thought this through? I

(05:27):
love the subtitles for your book. It really sets up
the whole conversation, the skepticism, the nerdy analysis of whether
this is something realistic. I really love the way you
guys tackle this.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
I feel like by reading the last question we propose,
you pretty much know where we're going to fall on
the whole topic. But you know, we try to we're
still people who are excited about space settlement at the
end of the day.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
And space settlement is something that's definitely in the zeitgeisten
has been for decades. Right, We've been hearing about the
possibilities of moving humans out into space. Elon Musk is
famous accelerating our ability to get into orbit, and so
this is something people have been thinking about. And so,
as usual on the podcast, before we dig into the topic,
I pulled our listeners to hear what they thought about

(06:11):
the possibilities of colonizing space, the Moon and Mars in
this case, actually walked around campus here at UC Irvine
where classes have recently started, and asked folks if they
thought it's important that we colonize space and whether we
will have the technology. So, before you hear these answers,
think to yourself for a minute, do you think we
should colonize space? Are we ready to do so? Here's

(06:34):
what people had to say, Sure, why not? Do you
think we're capable of doing it anytime in the near future? No? No,
how long do you think before we're ready?

Speaker 4 (06:42):
The Moon? Probably under the years, I would say that
estate I don't know.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
Finding the future, do you think humanity should colonize space?
The Moon? In Mars. No, because we kind of ruined
our planet already. Are you worried we're going to ruin
some more?

Speaker 4 (06:58):
We will deserve too.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
Do you think humanity should colonize space the moon in
Marsh Yeah? Definitely, Yeah, definitely Yeah. Cool. Why is that?

Speaker 3 (07:07):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (07:07):
Because like you know, like you never know like what's
going to happen in the future, you.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
Know, do you think we're ready? Do we have the technology?

Speaker 4 (07:15):
Maybe NASA does, but we never know like what's going
to happen. Maybe they're like hiding something or at least
that's what I think. I think we should colonize like
those kind of financial What is NASA hiding?

Speaker 1 (07:27):
Do you think?

Speaker 3 (07:29):
I have no clue?

Speaker 4 (07:30):
Yeah, I'm just undergrad student here, but probably like some
like super technology, you know, just came out that aliens
does exist.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
The question is, do you think humanity should colonize space
the moon in Mars?

Speaker 3 (07:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (07:43):
I think so. I think it's a good idea. So
if we're capable of doing it, I think it's not.
It's not a bad idea.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
So do you think we are capable?

Speaker 5 (07:50):
I think we will be very very likely because I mean,
we sure have the technology to go there.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
It's just yeah.

Speaker 5 (07:57):
So I guess if you asked me, in probably in
one hundred years, there will be people living in March Mars,
That's my guess.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
Do you think it's important that humanity colonizes space, the Moon, Mars,
et cetera.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
Eventually, yes, but not in the immediate future.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
And do you think we'll have the capability the technology
to do it anytime soon?

Speaker 3 (08:17):
Eventually?

Speaker 1 (08:17):
Eventually? What does eventually mean?

Speaker 3 (08:20):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (08:21):
Erudious all right, Zach Kelly, what do you guys think
about those answers?

Speaker 2 (08:24):
Well, I'll note that I didn't share them with Zach
ahead of time, so he's unprepared. But I'm going to
go ahead and say that's his fault. So one of
the respondents said no, because we've ruined our planet already,
so we don't deserve it. And I got to say,
what as an ecologist, when I started telling people like, oh,
I'm writing a book about space settlement, many of them
immediately assumed that I was writing a book about how

(08:45):
we don't deserve it because we've destroyed our own planet,
And I almost felt guilty because that was not at
all my angle. I'm excited, and I think we should
you know. I hope we do it at some point,
but I hope we're just careful about it.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
Zach.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
When you talk to people, what is the response that
you usually get from people when you tell them that
you're reading a book about space settlements?

Speaker 3 (09:04):
So I think, you know, the ecologist's example is good
because what we've found is what we should do in
space is almost like a roar shock test for your
view of the universe, you know what I mean. There
are these different strains. So there are people who are
very kind of techy libertarian, read a lot of hindline
Elon musk is is in this vein who think it's

(09:25):
not just that it would be cool to do it,
would be kind of like a thwarting of human ambition
to not do it. But then you also have feel
who are Yeah, I have this perspective that we have
kind of befouled the Earth and we're a sort of
you know, gross skurf on the surface of the planet
and ought not to extend ourselves to other planets. And
I think it's almost like you know how people say
science fiction is never about the future, it's always about

(09:47):
the present. I think what you think should be done
in space settlement kind of works the same way. What
you're often doing is really making rendering a sort of
judgment on how we're doing right this second. You know.
The deal is, of course space is actually a real
place that interfaces with actual reality, and so you know,
our book is hopefully it's an attempt to part from

(10:08):
it just being a sort of philosophical thing and talk
about what it would actually be like. But yeah, can
you say about the ecology thing my biggest rebuttal to that,
I mean, yeah, people tend to assume that we're going
to be like, yes, Elon mess is an idiot and
he's defiled Earth and will defile Mars, and I just
want to say, like that just fails to reckon with
how thoroughly terrible Mars is, Like unless you are one

(10:29):
of these people, and there are such people more than
I would have thought, who think like Mars as an
entity has agency like a person would. Unless you believe
something like that, it's bizarre because there's no part of
Earth that's even close to as bad as anywhere on Mars.
You couldn't make it as bad without like slamming the
Moon into Earth or something. So the idea of in
an ecological sense, messing up Mars is sort of absurd,

(10:52):
and the moon even more so. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
Well, one thing I think is really fascinating is hearing
about how your opinions have changed. I mean, if this
is like a war shark test for who you are
and what you think about where we are today, then
it's really interesting that you guys went from like vaguely
optimistic about space settlement to being you know, space cranks.
Essentially tell us a little bit about your journey, like
what book did you start out wanting to write? Did

(11:15):
you intend to write when you started this project? Oh,
so many years ago?

Speaker 2 (11:18):
So we wrote soonish together and that was a book
about emerging technologies, and two of the technologies in the
book were cheap access to space and asteroid mining. And
after writing both of those chapters, we thought like, oh,
you know, maybe space settlements aren't that far away. So
if you can launch mass to space cheaply, then you
can send habitats with all the tech that you need

(11:40):
to keep humans alive in space. And if asteroid mining
is a thing, then pretty soon we're going to be
able to use resources from space to build our habitats.
And that's going to make things even cheaper, And so
we thought that this is something that could happen in
our lifetimes, and especially given all of the like pop
size stuff you read about space settlement and all rhetoric

(12:00):
from space advocates, we thought like, this is something that
we are one hundred percent prepared to do. We just
need to be able to afford to do it. So
we were going to write like the guide to what
the next couple of years are going to be like, like,
you know, how do you put together the first crew?
Should it be half male half female? How should you
know if you have an international crew, kind of sociological
stuff might they come up against? And what kind of

(12:23):
governance should you have for the first settlement on the moon.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
And you were excited to see these things happen, right
You were like, ooh, let's figure this out. This would
be fantastic if it happened.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
I guess I shouldn't speak for both of us, but
I was. I think it's beautiful. The idea of like,
you know, waking up on the Moon and seeing Earth,
you know, from the glass dome that you were sleeping
in or whatever, that all sounded amazing, and so I
was super excited, but every chapter that we started working
on we were like, oh, man, we don't know anywhere

(12:54):
near enough about this. So in the medicine chapter, we
were like, we really don't know how bodies are going
to respond to space. And then in the closed loop
ecology chapter, where you know, can you recycle the carbon
dioxide that you breathe out in the water, and how
do you get like a habitat that recycles stuff so
that you don't need more stuff flown in from Earth,
And we really don't know how to do that very well.

(13:15):
And then we got into the international law and we
were like, oh, my gosh, there's so much that isn't
figured out here, and it could create tons of conflict
if we start trying to settle now. And I could
just go on and on and on. Every chapter that
we thought, oh, we've probably figured this out, it turned
out that there's a lot of work to do, and
so we ended up, yeah, writing the book that we

(13:36):
wrote instead.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
So you discovered that a lot of these things hadn't
really been explored thoroughly, or viewed with a skeptical lens,
or analyzed in detail. Essentially, it was all hidden under
a bunch of pro space fluff. Is that the sense
you got once you start digging into things?

Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yeah, all of that, All of that is true.

Speaker 1 (13:56):
So why is that, Zach? Why do you think nobody
has written this sort of like skeptical are we really
ready kind of book before? Why is it all sort
of pro space gloss over the details?

Speaker 3 (14:07):
That's a good question, you know, I should say, first
of all, as we got close to press a couple
similar books not quite the same story coming out, I
do think there's a kind of growing analytical approach to
this problem. I will say, you know, it's hard to
know other people's motivations. I think the generous assumption is
that people don't tend to write pop technology books about
a thing you're not going to get generally speaking, right,

(14:29):
I was talking to a distinguished popular science author and
I said, you know, I was talking to him about it,
and you know, basically explained this whole thing that where
we're basically going to say it's going to be, it's
way harder than you expected, The timelines are much longer
than you expected, and there are even arguments for not
doing it outside of like extraordinary technological developments. He was like,
you can't do that you can't have a book for nerds.

(14:52):
That's like, sorry, nerds, you don't get the thing. And
so you know, the upshot of that is, if you
look as we did at the sort of corpus of
future casting books about space written going back to the
nineteen twenties, they tend to be about what problem space
is going to solve? Right. They're not critical in that
sense of saying, wait, maybe this problem is not worth

(15:12):
solving in a sort of boring economic sense, the kind
of analysis you would do if you were trying to
say drill and oil well, right, And so when you
don't have that voice in the room, there tend to
be major things that just get skipped. So like, for us,
a huge turning point which will sound like almost nothing
when you first hear it, but then you start thinking
about it, which is the surface of the Moon is

(15:33):
carbon poor, like extremely carbon poor. There's almost no carbon, right,
And so you have a nerd audience they know what
that means that you literally cannot have life. You have
to import carbon. Right. It's not like you need to
like sprinkle a little phosphorus or something, right, you have
to sprinkle the whole farm, Which is crazy when you
think that these you know, like if you look at
Saturn fives, like the biggest rocket ever built, it was

(15:56):
able to put this eeny weeny little thing on the moon. Right,
It's the idea that we're to scale up to where
we're delivering mountains and mountains just to be able to
grow apples or whatever is kind of crazy and so
like whatever, it could be solved, quote unquote, But why
isn't this the first thing in all these books about
space settlement, right? Why aren't questions like this number one?

(16:17):
Like these massive problems? And another huge one is radiation,
which there's a book called The Case for Space, or
is the Case from Mars. It's a huge book in
this sector by Robert Zubrin. It has a section on radiation.
It goes immediately as I recall into this idea of
hormesis hermeisis meaning when you get some of something, it
might actually be good, some of a little bad something

(16:37):
might be good in some circumstances, which is like a
bizarre response to the unknown results of massive doses of
non earth like radiation. But I think this is what
you would expect if most of the books are written
by advocates. They just don't want to linger on those problems.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
You have this line in your book, which I thought
was a great singer. You say, quote much of the
discourse around why we should go to space and how
society will work when we get there remains mired in
un informed opinion and unrealistic fantasy. Ouch are you suggesting
that we should have like a boring economist in every
conversation to keep us like firmly rooted on the ground.

Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yes, I mean there would be worse things. And I also,
just to be clear, we are generally very nice to
the space settlement community. We disagree, but we love them
very much. These people are our friends, and we're sorry
that we're wet blankets. But yes, the rhetoric could use
a bit of Well.

Speaker 1 (17:28):
We're going to dig into all of your analysis of
what it's like to live in space and where we
could go, and what the real problems are in international
law and cannibalism and sex in space, on all these
really fun topics that you guys analyze. But before we do,
I just have one more question, which is, what do
you think the response is going to be from the
pro space settlement community when you call them uninformed and

(17:50):
unrealistic fantasizers about the future.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
Ah okay, So I'll say that Daniel Dowdney came before us.
He wrote a book called Dark Skies, which is very
anti space settlement, and he has been called anti human.
And I watched a panel that was set up where
he was like invited to sort of like watch, but
they didn't ask him to suggest any names for people

(18:15):
to go on the panel, so it was just people
tearing apart his ideas for like two hours, and which
I thought there were plenty of good counter arguments that
weren't presented. But anyway, I am not super sure that
the community is going to be real kind to us.
But there's also plenty of people in that community who

(18:36):
are open to discussion, and so I'm optimistic that we'll
have lots of productive discussions with lots of people, but
no doubt there will be a subset of people who
are going to have really hate our guts.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
Well, I hope you guys don't have to go into
hiding after this book. I think it's a good idea
to explore this constructively, and that in your book you
were balanced and fair and didn't just throw wet blankets
on these ideas suggested like actual ways forward and raise
the issues that we need to confront if we're going
to make this happen. So I think it's a very
positive and forward thinking book. But let's dig into the

(19:08):
details in a minute after we take this short break. Okay,
we're back and we're talking about the future of humanity
settling space. Should we can? We will we have the tech?

(19:31):
When will we have the tech? Is it possible to
live in space? With Zach and Kelly Windersmith, because they
just wrote a book about it, called A City on Mars,
which is out now from all excellent booksellers and also
less reputable booksellers.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
Sorry, you can get it anywhere.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
All right, So let's talk about what it's like to
live in space, because so far, almost every human who's
ever existed has lived in a very narrow slice of
the universe, very close to the surface of the Earth.
So tell us about what we know about living in space.
What is it like in terms of the environment for
human survival? And let's start with radiation. What are we

(20:09):
facing if you're going to live for an extended period
not in the atmospheric bubble of Earth.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
Well, so this was one of the first eye opening
research topics for me. So we started with space medicine,
and I assumed, you know, okay, so the Soviets sent
up a bunch of solutes, and then the Soviet Union
slash rust Russia sent up Mirror, and then ISS has
been up there for like twenty years, and China has
now fielded three space stations in low Worth orbit, and so,

(20:37):
you know, I assumed that we would have a bunch
of data on how radiation impacts the human body, and
we'd have good answers to questions like does space radiation
cause cancer? And I should note that radiation in space,
as your listeners no doubt already know, is different than
the kind of radiation we tend to encounter on Earth,
and so we understand it even less well. But something

(20:58):
I should have realized but didn't occur to me until
I was reading these textbooks on space medicine, is that
all of our space stations have been orbiting the Earth
under the protection of Earth's magnetosphere, and so most of
space radiation is not reaching them. Maybe they have slightly
elevated levels, but a person living on the International Space
Station isn't necessarily giving us the data that we need

(21:21):
to understand how a person living on the Moon or
Mars is going to hold up under space radiation.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
So where does space radiation come from? I mean, they
don't have like nuclear power plants melting down in the
middle of space. Where is this coming from?

Speaker 2 (21:33):
It's coming from the Sun, and it's coming from well,
I really feel like this is a question.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
For you then, right, So you're right, the Sun generates
a huge amount of radiation, you know, protons and electrons,
very high speed, the solar wind. People think about space
as empty, but it's really filled with high speed particles.
And as you say, the Earth is protecting us from that.
It's atmosphere and its magnetic field shields us from a
lot of that space radiation. So if you think about

(21:57):
radiation like Fukushima style, is not a whole lot of that,
but there's a huge amount of just solar wind, and
we feel that already down here on Earth. You know,
we get radiation from space that penetrates through the atmosphere
and as you go higher and higher, you're more exposed
to that radiation. So you know, one question I have
for you is like, is it possible to learn more
about this not just from astronauts on the space station,

(22:18):
but from like flight attendants who spend a lot of
time at higher altitude and are more exposed to that
radiation from space.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
Well, so they're more exposed to that kind of radiation,
but they are they also more exposed to like the
galactic cosmic radiation like iron ions and stuff. Are those
also hitting the planes in space?

Speaker 1 (22:35):
That's actually a really fascinating research question. We don't actually
know what component of the radiation the cosmic rays that
hit the Earth are, like iron nuclei versus just protons.
None of that actually makes it down to the surface.
They'll just slam into the atmosphere and then turn into
muons and other particles. So there's definitely no iron nuclei
like passing through the bodies of stewardesses and airplane passengers fortunately,

(22:58):
And so I guess your argument is that out there
in space, on the surface of Mars or on the Moon,
you have like no protection, so you're like really feeling
the brunt of raw space radiation itself.

Speaker 2 (23:08):
And you're never escaping it. And also your habitat can
create different kinds of radiation, so when the radiation hits
your habitat, something called spallation happens where the particles break
into different kinds of particles that are also radioactive. And
so what kind of habitat you're living in, the shape
of the habitat, all this stuff is going to matter.
But with stewardesses for examples, you know, let's say they
are getting exposed to some of that radiation. You know,

(23:30):
they're exposed to it for parts of their lives, so
you know, they're working lives start at like what eighteen,
but maybe even older, and they're only up there part
of the time. And so we're talking about people who
are going to be like born on a planet and
exposed to radiation from the moment they're conceived, or you know,
from maybe even the game meats in their parents were

(23:50):
receiving radiation, and so that kind of accumulated dose over
an entire lifespan, maybe it's not going to be a problem.
Maybe we can design habitats that total keep the radiation out,
or maybe like we read this one review paper from
twenty eighteen that basically said, look, we don't even know
if space radiation causes cancer, but it's probably best that
we assume it could. And so like that's where we

(24:13):
are right now, Like it probably causes cancer, but we
don't even know. But I will note that most proposals
for habitats on the Moon are Mars or even rotating
space stations involve covering the habitat with meters of regalists.
So that's the like dirt, dusty dirt that you find
on the Moon and Mars. And the idea is that
if you're under a couple meters of that, it's going
to block the radiation before it gets to your habitat.

(24:35):
So that glass dome that I wanted to wake up
underneath and look at the Earth, you know, on my vacation,
that's not going to happen. I would be baked with radiation.
So yeah, there's a lot we don't know. And the
answer might be either it's fine or it's fine with
a little bit of engineering, but we don't have the
kind of data that we need right now to really
understand that. And there are so Brookhaven Laboratory now has

(24:57):
a new device that can make galactic cosmic radiation or
can mimic it, and so we're starting to be able
to get some better data on rodents. But even then
it's not like they're being exposed for their entire life
to the entire range of radiation that they're going to
get in space. So there's still a lot we have
left to learn.

Speaker 1 (25:15):
So you're saying that the kind of habitats we're imagining
long term life on Mars or the Moon or in
a space station could end up like a horror movie
where everybody gets like horrible cancer and your faces melt
and all this kind of stuff that we just don't
know the answer to whether it's even possible for humans
to live in that scenario.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
So I think face melting is probably off the table,
but maybe not. But well, I don't think that we
have to, you know, start with babies and see what happens.
Like I think we could go to the Moon and
set up a research station, and the Moon is only
a couple days away, so people could stay for a
couple months, and if there was any indicator that they
were having a problem, we could send them home, and

(25:53):
then we could send a different habitat type and try again,
and we could have rodent colonies out there. But it's
going to be a slope process to make sure, you know, like, Okay,
this amount of radiation is safe, and then that amount
of radiation is safe, and it'll be a long time
before you can convince me that it would be safe
to conceive and have babies in space without too much
extra risk. But somebody who read our book told us

(26:15):
we were being whips about that.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
So and you're like, well, why don't you send your
grandkids to the moon.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
Then they said they would because we did say that.
We did say that, and they were like, I totally would,
I'd do it. And I was like, wow, I'm glad
I'm not you're a child.

Speaker 1 (26:31):
This is a great example for me. When reading your book,
I was very surprised that we just don't know so
much about what life will be like in space. Even
things that seemed like they might not be a big
deal could turn out to be a big deal because
we just don't know because we have such a littlemited experience.
I was really enjoying the section on micro gravity, for example, like,
what's it like to live in very little gravity your

(26:52):
whole life? I suppose we just don't know the answer
to that as well.

Speaker 3 (26:55):
Basically, Yeah, So one thing a lot of people maybe
don't know is that the record consecutive spaceflight was I
think four hundred and thirty seven days, and down from
that there's something like a dozen people who've been up
for a year, and it's down from that. And I
don't have it offhand, but I think if you looked
it up, the majority of astronauts ever have been for

(27:15):
like on a matter of weeks, like they went on
on the shuttle or something. Right, So the amount of
longitudinal data, like we literally could not have it. No
one's gone up for a year and a half consecutively.
If you look at people who've gone up, like the
highest total is somewhere in the eight hundreds of days.
So even then you're talking about a really short amount
of time to get like good longitudinal data. Like Kelly said,
we're not talking about face melting for radiation, right, We're

(27:36):
talking about like long term effects. But we do know
that to come back to microgravity in particular, there are
reliable bad effects of microgravity. So when you go to space,
one thing we ended up not talking too much about,
even though it has a rich history, is a lot
of people get motion sickness. It's something it's called space
motion sickness, and they spend the first few days throwing up.
But We didn't talk about it too much because it's

(27:57):
not really a settlement problem. You do adjust to it.
The problems that show up when you stay longer are
things like rapid loss and bone density in some parts
of your body you lose I think the number we
had was one and a half percent bone density per month,
like an insanely fast rate of bone loss. And that's,
by the way, while astronauts are doing a huge amount
of exercise every day, right, very time consuming exercise every

(28:20):
single day, and there are other more subtle things obviously
you know coming with that is that you have a
lot of loss of muscle strength. Jerry Linninger was an astronaut.
He was on Mirror for about four months, and it
was a huge point of pride for him as a
kind of like muscly, slightly meat headed astronaut that he
was able to walk just barely when he got out
of the space station. But there are other things that happened,
so they're like Lininger described, when he got home to

(28:42):
his hotel room, he kind of freaked out a little
because in space, if you feel pressure on your back,
it means you're going to fling forward because it's it's
very Newtonian up there, right, So when he got down
in bed, he felt like he was going to go flying.
So he said he could only sleep once he had
kind of wrapped himself up in a blanket.

Speaker 1 (28:57):
You you need to be swaddled like a baby.

Speaker 3 (28:59):
I think it was more like tied down, but I
actually don't know. I don't remember what you do with
the blanket in particular. And then there are these more
subtle effects. Right, People often get dizzy, right because your
body on Earth is used to pumping blood against gravity
all day long, and in space there's no orientation. So
when you suddenly return to full Earth gravity, your body
is just not prepared to do this. I mean, it's
kind of amazing to me that your body does eventually

(29:19):
work it out. You don't just like die. And there
are other subtle things. Reliably, people lose vision, so they
actually for especially for older astronauts, you have to be said,
with these glasses that are adjusted, because it's anticipated your
vision will get worse, and it's not perfectly understood why.
But one possibility is that microgravity you experience this fluid shift.
Fluid shifts up in your body, especially the beginning. You

(29:41):
notably have what's called puffy face and chicken legs, as
one person described it, which is like kind of funny
but also kind of bad, maybe because it's possible what's
happening is it's causing nerve damage or reshaping of the
nerves that connect your eyes or something, which is like
bad enough, but it's also a little creepy because you worry.
There's like, you know, there's apparently equivocal evidence on cognitive
effects of space. We don't know if that's because of microgravity,

(30:01):
your radiation, or just who knows what. So, yeah, there's
a lot of stuff you wouldn't anticipate. In the particular
context of babies, it gets like extra freaky. I'm willing
to buy that a baby in ingestation is at least
in kind of a neutral buoyancy tank. But you know,
you try to imagine like a six month old trying
to have normal bone development and microgravity that would be
enormously scary. It's possible on the Moon, which is about

(30:21):
one six ers gravity, it wouldn't be so bad. But like,
to add more more data to this, we have I
think something like a grand total of ten days on
the Moon between all of the missions. You know, and
so like we really don't know, and that was of
course all full grown, like particularly fit men, and so
there are other things. But yeah, micro gravity is a

(30:43):
big open question and would take a long time to
get better data on it.

Speaker 1 (30:46):
Well, I want to push back on your denial of
my face melting concern, because you're talking about like lower
bone density, weakened muscles, puppy eyes. To me, that sounds
like you know, that could lead to real face melting.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
We could term the sweet of negative effects face melting.
What will call the whites and face melting.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
Okay, there you go. But my real question is that
it seems like it might be hard to go to space,
have your body adapt to it, and then come back
to Earth. But what if you just do a in
a one way trip. Isn't it possible that kids who
grow up in space are totally adapted and can live
totally healthy lives in space with low bone density and
super long chicken legs or whatever. Is this about going
to space and coming back or is this about just

(31:25):
surviving in space?

Speaker 2 (31:26):
I think it's about both. So you know, Mars has
forty percent of Earth's gravity. Maybe that will be enough
for normal development, Maybe not. So it's the same as radiation.
Maybe it'll be fine, maybe not. But you know, especially initially,
there's a lot of stuff we're going to be figuring
out about Mars, like, you know, how can we live
up there sustainably? Can we create an economy, how do
we you know, create a society that has some freedom

(31:49):
and likes being up there. And you know, it's a
very delicate habitat. So if you have people who are
you know, angry or become terrorists, they could very easily
kill almost everybody. And so for a variety of different reasons,
you would like to be able to have the option
to bring people home, especially initially when this whole experiment
is starting. So if it turns out you have you know,

(32:10):
one hundred babies in the first generation at the settlement
and they decide, you know what, this isn't economically feasible.
We just can't make any money out here. We can't
pay to get the supplies shipped in that we need
from Earth because it's super expensive. What do you do
with those babies who are now stuck out there? And
so you know, yes, maybe a couple generations from now,
when we're like safely settled on Mars and it's sustainable,

(32:33):
and we know that, you know, we're going to be
able to stay out there permanently. Maybe it's not such
a big deal if they can't come back to the
cradle of humanity. But I can still imagine that being depressing.
I think Earth will always be I mean, Earth is beautiful.
I'd want to be able to visit.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
And it might be that babies who are raised on
Mars have their faces melted. But maybe on Mars that's
seen as really attractive. But then they can't really adjust
back to life on Earth because you know, we're not
that into it. But speaking of that kind of topic,
self sustaining colonies, is it possible? Do we know if
it's even possible for humans to reproduce in space, Like
you know, the mechanics and the chemistry of it doesn't

(33:10):
all work in microgravity under high radiation. Do we know
anything about that?

Speaker 3 (33:14):
Yeah, So the basic deal is we know almost nothing.
So one thing it's really important to understand about the
history of space science is that space stations are not fielded.
Because you know, the NSF sat down one day and said,
we're going to do a systematic program on space medicine.
They're fielded for geopolitical reasons, and then science gets done
in them, right. And so one result of that is

(33:38):
that you really don't have a lot of systematic data
on hardly anything. I think you can you can absolutely
trust objective readings on things like bone density that seems
like hard to mess up or fake. But when it
comes to reproduction, you know, if someone had said, you know,
when the first space station went up in nineteen seventy one,
suppose the Soviet Union had said, one of our major
goals is human reproduction in space. We're going to really

(33:59):
oriented around. You can imagine a world where they started
with I don't know, lizards or something and just sort
of worked their way up to more human like creatures
and not just having babies, but having generations in space,
and so that by now we would have this big
corpus of data on reliable effects on going to space

(34:22):
and microgravity on every stage of development. Right. And by
the way, you know, we usually often when this comes up,
to the extent it comes up at all, we talked
just about can you have a baby, But of course,
in order to have a sustaining settlement, that baby has
to be able to grow up to have babies, and
so that means they have to get through every stage
of development successfully as do their gam metes. Right, So
you know, we don't have that data. What we do

(34:44):
have is a pile of different experiments from you know,
different agencies, done on different stations for different amounts of time,
on different creatures, and it's very hard to look at
all this and resolve a picture other than a big shrug.
I will say there have been cases where bad stuff happened,
but it's literally a situation where you're talking like, we
have data from a rat and it didn't go well

(35:04):
for that rat, and it's sort of like, what can
you extrapolate from this meaningfully? So I would say, you know,
you're kind of in the position of saying, well, at
least a priori, there seem to be a lot of
reasons to be really really scared, a lot of reasons
to say I wouldn't want anyone having a baby in space.
So you know, we talked about bone loss stuff. We
don't know what that does to developing kids, babies, let
alone like teenagers. The atmosphere in space is really not

(35:28):
like Earth's because it's actually very hard, at least on
the iss to reproduce an Earth like atmosphere. So it's
very high in carbon for example, very high in carbonoxity,
much higher than anywhere on Earth. And there are probably
also like subtle outgassings from different pieces of equipment. We
tolerate higher levels of this stuff because people aren't there
that long, but we don't know what the effect is,
you know, to just depend on what kind of artificial
atmosphere you're able to create. You know another thing you

(35:50):
mentioned a second ago that you know, maybe in Mars
gravity people will be taller, and that's like a sci
fi thing, but actually we don't. You know, the bodies
are weird, right, They're made of all these tiny nanim
machines that have evolved over four billion years. It's possible
the response will be something totally unexpected to being in
that micro gravity environment, or nothing at all, and we
just don't know.

Speaker 1 (36:09):
Face melting, for example.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
I'm up to giving it a sixty percent chance.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
All right, Zach, But this is a very highbrow answer.
I was asking a much more lowbrow question, which is
essentially like, do we have any data? Has anybody done it?
In space?

Speaker 3 (36:21):
Nobody has. Well, there's a family dispute about this, I
should say, let me sketch the parameters of the dispute,
and then Kelly can say something wrong. So the thing
we absolutely agree on is nobody knows. It's not like
there is someone with you know, pictures you can look
upon the Internet. And then the question is like probabilities,
and I would rate the probability as quite low, and
I'm happy to explain that. But let me just say

(36:43):
it's quite low, whereas Kelly thinks the odds or at
least I don't know where we are. I'm at like
one to five percent that it's happened.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
I don't know what percent I'm at, but I don't
know a coward's answer. See, okay, fifty to sixty percent.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
Wow, who are we talking about here?

Speaker 2 (36:59):
There has been I'm a husband and wife pair. So
they got married on the sly, didn't tell NASA, and
then they went up on the shuttle. Zach argues that
they're in a like tiny area, like you know, they've
got about as much space as you would in a bus,
and there's like six other people on the crew. It's
not like there's a lot of options for them to
sneak off and not be seen and not be caught
by the cameras and blah blah blah. But I gotta say, man,

(37:23):
if I was on a crew and there was a
married couple, I would be like, I just want you
to know that I'm going to be on the upper
deck for about You would make it so I would
make it so awkward. But they keep.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
Coming up to them and being like, I'm just gonna
tell you that door closes. I'm not saying anything.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Anyway, And you know there have been opportunities, but you know,
I think Zach would would argue, and you know, of
course you don't have to be married to have sex.
Zach would argue that there's a lot like it's cramp spaces,
there's a lot of people there, there's a lot of
surveillance equipment. It would be hard to get any privacy.
And also, these people are super concerned about their careers

(38:03):
and if they get caught doing something like that in space,
they're not going to get sent up again. And so
these like highly career oriented people might not be willing
to risk their jobs. But you know, I'd say, I
went to grad school to study animal behavior, and it
would blow my mind to find out that no one
has taken advantage of, you know, being able to have

(38:25):
sex in space.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
Well, it seemed to me like an important science frontier.
I mean, somebody's got to figure this out for the
future of humanity, right, I mean, if we are going
to ever live in space, then that's going to be
a necessary part of activity out there in space. All right,
So I want to dig more into these questions about
what life would actually be like in space, what it's
like to go to the bathroom where we might actually live,

(38:47):
is it legal? And can you eat people in space?
But first we have to take another quick break. Okay.
So we are back and we're talking about the nitty

(39:08):
gritty of living in space. A lot of people think
of space as a fantasya land where everything can come true,
where life in space solves all the problems of life
on Earth. But Zach and Kelly are here to tell
us that it's messy and gouey, and that your face
might or might not melt. Nobody knows.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Okay, sure, so tell us.

Speaker 1 (39:28):
More about what life might be like in space. You
guys really dug into the details. I was amazed you
had such a careful analysis of like toilets tell us
about what it's like to use the toilet in space.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
So when you read biographies or you hear interviews with astronauts,
the question that they tell you that they get asked
the most is what is it like using the restroom
in space? So it is apparently a very deeply human
thing to want to know what it is like to
use the restroom in microgravity. And one thing we can
tell you across all of the different vehicles that we

(39:59):
studied is that it has never been pleasant. So like
on the Apollo and the Gemini missions, they literally, you know,
for number two, they had a bag that they would
attach to their heiin knees and it had a little
like adhesive rim so it would stick a little bit better.
And then it had a little thing where you a
little finger cut they called it, so you could stick
your finger in there, because without gravity, nothing falls on

(40:21):
its own, so you'd have to nudge it in the
right direction. Yeah, so gross. And then they'd have to
put antibacterial tablets in there and sort of squish them
around to make sure that like, you know, the bag
the feces was being held in wouldn't explode in a
horrible scent, would like go everywhere. In fact, Frank Borman
was so uncomfortable with the procedure, which also had to

(40:43):
happen in a super tiny space with the guy who
you were in space with, like literally almost right next
to you, that he tried to make it for a
full fourteen days without going number two, and I think
he made it today eight and then he said a
gym level, I gotta go, man, And so anyway, it
was pretty gross. So now instead of fingercuts and baggies

(41:06):
with adhesives, we have vacuum systems and you usually have
one for urine and one for feces, but even then
you lose stuff. So like again, every vehicle that we
read about, there were stories about escapees sort of floating
off into the habitat on the shuttle. This happened so
frequently they became called brown trout floating around. And you know,

(41:27):
these systems break regularly and need to be fixed and
are pretty disgusting. I think Patty Whitson had a story
about needing to put a glove on and sort of
push the waist down to make you know, room to
get it all in the bag. So it's disgusting and
we haven't figured it all out yet. So on the
one of the recent SpaceX missions there was problem with

(41:48):
the toilet as well. This is one of the ones
where it was a bunch of tourists going around inspiration
for something like that. It was reported that there were
toilet problems. This is just a hard thing to deal with,
but it should get easier when you have some gravity
to sort of nudge the brown trout downstream. But yeah,
it's probably going to remain sort of a messy process
wherever we are in space.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
But is this like a frontier issue where the first
generation has sort of a harder life than you know,
the wealthy folks back at home, and then eventually things
build up and life on Mars is a comfortable, pleasant
bathroom experience or is this something that's always going to
be a feature of living out of the well of
the Earth.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
I think the first generation is going to have to
spend quite a bit of time interacting intimately with human
waste of all forms, because we're going to need to
learn to recycle that. So Zach mentioned already that there's
very little carbon on the Moon, So the carbon that
your body releases, you're probably going to want to find
some way to recycle that back into your garden and

(42:46):
maybe eventually will sort of perfect this process. And you know,
nowadays waste gets treated and most of us don't have
to see or experience it like at all. But I
think initially you're probably going to be pretty intimate with
your wasste until we figure out nice or systems for
handling this stuff. Was there anything you wanted to add
to that, Zach.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
I would just say to directly answer the question, like
the wacky like poop stories are all from micro gravity.
I think plausibly on Mars, your waist knows to go
in the right direction. That's all you need, you know,
like like so it'll go a little more slowly. But
I would actually bet you'd be fine with like one
percent gravity. You really just need you need your poop
to know which way to go. And the vacuum is

(43:23):
just an imperfect way to do that because you have
to have like a part of the machine that is,
you know, providing that vacuum which you don't want the
poop to go into. Uh So, like for solid waste,
you have to have a net. And so you can
imagine like what complexity that adds to like waste management.
You have to like bag it and and stew it
and so. But probably I would guess on a plausible

(43:44):
Mars setup, where you've got some kind of gardening and
waste management set up, probably it's not as big a deal.
The bigger problem will just be that, like you know,
on Earth, of your toilet breaks down, you can just
go outside, whereas on Mars it better work.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
I think that's less of an option in the city.
But in the country where we live.

Speaker 3 (44:02):
I've seen some stuff in San Francisco, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
Urban decay. Well, let's get a little bit more concrete
about what we're talking about. You know, are we talking
about living in space stations or the moon. Let's walk
through the sort of the pros and cons of each scenario.
Should we aim to be building our own habitats that
float in space, like in space stations huge rotating rings?
Are those plausible?

Speaker 3 (44:26):
So, just to give a little context, the idea of
giant rotating space stations has been kicked around in detail
at least since the nineteen twenties, but it really became
a big thing in the seventies. So have you've ever
seen these images of a city around the rim of
a giant wheel that like like the most awesome space
station images, there could be those ten to descend from
the nineteen seventies. And the reason they were arguably plausible,

(44:50):
we say, is that if you look at the seventies
in particular, the price of going to space has fallen
drastically by some measures, fallen by something like ninety nine
percent since the late fifties, from like roughly nineteen fifty
seven to nineteen seventy two. So if you plot that
as continuing, it's going to get a lot cheaper. Meanwhile,
there are these huge concerns about environmental damage. So there

(45:11):
are books like The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth,
which are predicting I think the population Bomb, like the
by the eighties, hundreds of millions of people will be
dying of famine. Obviously we know now they failed to
anticipate a bunch of things, But put that in your
head as you think about this. And then third, that
there are no serious renewables on the horizon, right, I mean,
there's hydro power, but not enough to offset things, and
that nuclear is starting to look like a political problem.

(45:34):
And so there's this idea that gets floated, most notably
by Gerard K. O'Neill that, well, what if we just
went to space, we will kind of solve everything. You
get access to limitless solar power all the time at
high intensity. You could do all your farming up there.
You can completely control the ecosystem. We can beam excess
power down to the energy needing Earth. And so it's
a sort of third way if you don't like these
sort of environmental doomers, but you're also seriously worried about

(45:57):
this stuff. Space is the way out with the ad bonus,
since again it's the like early seventies that you can
kind of check out of society and try out new governments,
you know, so it also appeals to sort of counterculture impulse.
The problem is it's basically just a bad idea. Like so,
a big problem about building these things is you have
to get an extraordinary amount of mass, probably millions of tons,

(46:18):
into a point in space somewhere, just to have a
relatively small number of people. And so you say, well,
where's that coming from, the usual answer, I think O'Neil's
answer was the moon. Other people have proposed asteroids. So
let's take the moon the way that you do this,
and there are a number of proposals that say this
is you build a mass driver on the Moon and
for your less you know, dorky audience. It's basically a

(46:38):
train if you want to visualize it, like a maglev
train that points up and eventually the track just goes away,
and so you can fling stuff of it just using energy.
You can fling into space because the Moon is low
gravity and has no atmosphere, and then your space station
construction site catches this stuff into kind of giant catchers
mitt and takes just sort of like pure mass, just
stuff from the surface of the Moon and converts it

(46:59):
to suburbs around a giant space wheel. And so that
the idea that this is going to be easier than
just staying on the Moon or even going to Mars
is just kind of crazy.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
It does seem crazy to take the Moon apart and
then reassemble something which is just basically doing the job
the Moon is already doing.

Speaker 3 (47:15):
Yeah. Yeah, So to say why smart people believe this,
I do think, you know, part of it's that beguiling
promise of the limitless energy. There's also, like, you know,
suppose it is the case that you can't have babies
on Mars, like that forty percent gravity just won't do
it. It causes some weird metabolic thing. Who knows, well, then
you need full gravity, and then if you really need
to get off Earth, you have no option in the
Solar system, so you have to build these space wheels.

(47:38):
There are other purported benefits like that you could manufacture,
so for people who don't remember high school physics, as
you walk up the axis, like if you walk a
stairwell from the outermost floor of your spinning wheel to
the middle, gravity falls off linearly, so you can select
between zero and full Earth gravity or even extra Earth gravity.
So there's these ideas that it would be like a
manufacturing thing, but like the idea that would be economic

(48:00):
plausible just seems sort of any to us. And so
it's like an extra hard version of a thing we
already can't do. So it just seems unlikely.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
So then what about colonies on the moon? The Moon
has access to a lot of sunlight and there's lots
of raw materials there. What's the issue with living on
the moon. Where on the moon is a good place
to build your space home?

Speaker 2 (48:19):
So the moon has very small patches that are probably
what countries are going to fight over when we start
heading out to the moon. So on the poles you
get areas where you have these craters, and inside of
the crater there's water that's frozen, and it stays frozen
because it never gets exposed to sunlight. If it did

(48:39):
get exposed to sunlight, it would you know, vaporize and
end up in the vacuum of space, never to be
recovered by us again. But it's frozen, so it stays there.
And additionally, those rims, if you put solar panels on them,
you could get sunlight almost all the time, Whereas if
you're at the equator, you get two earth weeks of
daylight and then you get two earth weeks of nighttime,

(49:03):
and you would need an incredible number of battery packs
to be able to store enough solar power to get
you through that. But if you're at these areas where
you can put your solar panels up and almost always
get sunlight, then a lot of your energy needs have
been reduced. And so these are probably the spots where
you'd want to be, where you can get water and

(49:25):
where you can get some sunlight. But I'll note that
that water still has some like chemicals and stuff you
can't drink in there, and it's going to be very
hard to extract because at the temperatures you find in
these craters, water is more like a rock than anything else.
So it's going to be difficult to get your hands on.
You're gonna have to clean it up, and then you're
gonna have to recycle it very efficiently because there's not

(49:46):
a lot in there. So what was the lake that
we looked up, Zach Sartus Lake.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
Sardis Lake, I think, was it Alabama or Minister.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
Yeah, so there's this human made lake called Sartus Lake
that has the same amount of water as what we
predict is on all of the Moon. And so you
can imagine pretty quickly if you don't use that carefully,
running out of it, and so you're going to need
to recycle it. And this is why we think proposals
for setting the Moon up as a gas station are,

(50:18):
you know, sort of robbing the future. So if you
take the water and you split it and you use
the oxygen and the hydrogen for rocket fuel, you can't
bathe with it or drink it anymore. It gets lost
in the vacuum of space, and there's not that much
there to begin with. So anyway, those are the places
on the Moon that you'd probably go to. There's not
a lot of them, but the moon remains awful, you know,
even at the poles. The temperatures aren't ideal. But perhaps

(50:41):
even more importantly, there's regolith everywhere. And the regolith is
like this thick layer of super jagged dust and glass
that clings to everything. It's electrically charged. It clings and
if you breathe it, we think it's possible that it
could scar your lungs over time and create something similar
to stone grinder's disease on Earth. So you're gonna have

(51:01):
to go to great lengths to make sure it doesn't
get in your habitat, which again is going to be
really hard because it clings to everything.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
And that sounds like lung melting, which sounds pretty bad.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
Yeah. Yeah, So your face is gonna melt and your
lungs are gonna melt.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
So most of the Moon is totally inhospitable, and a
tiny fraction of it is somewhat less inhospitable.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
There's also the caves and the tubes on the Moon,
which I'm gonna let Zach tell you about because he
really geeks out about these.

Speaker 3 (51:29):
Oh yeah, sure, so, like you know, again at the
intersection of still a bad idea, but it's super awesome.
The Moon has lava tubes. It's not really very seismically
active anymore, but it was in the past, and so
people of Earth may know that. If you go to Hawaii,
you can see lava tubes, these huge underground caves that
are like sort of cylindrical, and we talk about the

(51:53):
process by which these are made, but very loosely speaking,
you can imagine lava pushes through forms this sort of
vein shape and then goes on its way and leaves
behind this giant cave. Now you can imagine if that
process occurs somewhere where there's only one six as much gravity,
you get a much bigger cave. And there are some
estimates that you could have lava tubes on the Moon
that are hundreds of times larger than anything on Earth. Right, So,

(52:15):
if you're going to pick a sort of dream mission
for pure awesomeness, sending a little speedlunker bot to one
of these caves to just look is probably about as
cool as you can get. And it just happens to
be on our closest neighbor in space, and these are
desirable potentially for a space settlement because one of the
deep problems of space settlement is essentially you have to
create a little bubble that is protected from everything around you.

(52:37):
If there's a pre existing tube, you're not completely predicted.
But one of the ideas is you could go in
there with some kind of spray on ceilant, right or inflatable,
and just press it against those walls. And the cool
thing about that is you've created a really big bubble.
You might be talking about like literally thousands tens. I
didn't have to look at the numbers, but many words
of magnitude more than like a habitat that is built,

(52:59):
and once you seal it, you can just build in there, right,
you can just build a house. It doesn't have to
be designed for space other than in case of danger.
So those are potentially extraordinarily valuable. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
It also saves you from needing to deal with the
regolith because you're inside of a lava tube where that
has all been sort of like turned into a crust
by the lava, and it saves you from temperature swings.
It's just there's lots of reasons why it would be great,
but we're not good at moonwalking. Moon's plunking is another level.

Speaker 1 (53:25):
All of the views from underground are not quite as
spectacular as you were suggesting earlier. Kelly.

Speaker 2 (53:30):
Well, but you're gonna be covered by dirt anyway, right,
and so you know you might as well let the
tube protect you from radiation as opposed to needing to
pile regolith bags on top of your habitat.

Speaker 1 (53:41):
And then what about Mars? In your book, you say
the only way you would believe that Mars would be
a good idea would be quote if you had no idea,
how thoroughly, incredibly, impossibly horrible Mars is. Why is Mars
it such a horrible place to live?

Speaker 3 (53:55):
I should say Mars is? We do argue that it's
the least bad option. While being the least bad option,
it is a bad option. And so just to kind
of go down the line quickly, can I just say
the good stuff about Mars and then ruin it? So
the biggest virtue of Mars is that you know, the moon,
like we said, is pouring carbon, and Mars basically has
all the stuff you'd need. You know, if you've imagined

(54:16):
advanced civilization that can just perfectly move around elements however
they like because they have infinite energy and science and whatever.
The moon has all the stuff, right, and in addition,
it has an atmosphere. It's not much of an atmosphere,
it's about half a percent to a percent of Earth,
is very low pressure. But that atmosphere is made of
carbon dioxide. Right, So there's your carbon and oxygen. Humans

(54:37):
just can't get enough of it. We love it, so
that's pretty huge. The downsides are one, it's really far away, right,
A typical proposal is six months inbound. The only way
to really fix that is to have something more exotic,
like a fission or fusion reactor. And even if you
had that, you might still take the slow trip to concern,
you know, to just you know, bring more stuff. But anyway,

(54:58):
so it's far away, which which means at the longest length,
it takes something like twenty minutes to send a signal
each way, so forget live communication. I think the closest
it's something like three minutes, So it's still pretty bad.
So no live conversations with your loved ones ever. Again. Also,
you know, the surface is still really nasty and unlike
the Moon. It also has perchlorates, which are a hormone
disrupting chemical, So you know, circling back to questions about reproduction,

(55:21):
that would be interesting to find out what happens to
like a teenager swimming in hormone disruptors. So that's bad.
So one good thing is you have almost Earth like days.
I think it's like twenty four point seven hours, so
you do get sunlight. It's substantially dimmer than the sunlight
of Earth. But the bigger problem from an energy standpoint
is Mars has giant dust storms. Sometimes these dust storms

(55:43):
are so big. There's a story that one of the
Mariner probes is going toward Mars and suddenly Mars looks
like a flat surface and it turns out what had
happened is there was a worldwide dust storm. So you
try to imagine what that's like on the surface. Is
just like the sky is like biblical, right, like no
more sky for you, So forget your solar panels. You
better have really good batteries or a nuclear reactor or

(56:05):
something more exotic. And so you know, those are some
of the problems. There's also the stuff we've discussed before,
like microgravity and extra radiation, but you know, it is
the best game in town. Everywhere is not just worse,
but like wildly worse. So it is extraordinarily dangerous and bad,
and there's not an obvious economic payoff, but everywhere else
is worse.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
And Mars has a lot of water, and so that yeah,
that's also good.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
Oh I'm sorry, yes, yes, yeah, yeah. So crucially, you know,
the Moon has very little water. This is important to
us because you read articles sometimes that are like, what
are we gonna do with all the moonwater? Like it's
like a resource in a video game, you just have
all you want. But Mars actually does have plenty of water,
the poles of tons of water ice, and actually in
most places on Mars it looks like if you dig
down far enough there there's water in some form. So

(56:50):
like when you put that all together, it's not just
that you can drink and breathe. Like if you have carbon,
hydrogen and oxygen, at least in principle, you can make
a lot of the stuff humans need, including rocket propellant
and like fuel cells and things. So you really have
everything you need except like a reason to be there
is the tricky part. At the cost, it's going to
be well.

Speaker 1 (57:11):
I also want to dig into the legal side of
thea that saying that quote ivides we and eat them.
What laws govern activities in space are on Mars.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
So since nineteen sixty seven, space has been governed by
a United Nations treaty that goes by the shorter name
the Outer Space Treaty. And it says a lot of stuff,
and it says a lot of things vaguely, but for
the purpose of space settlement, the most important points are
no nation is allowed to appropriate any territory in space.
But it also specifies that people come from somewhere and

(57:44):
they are the responsibility of some nations. So you can't
just say, like, okay, the US can't claim the south pole.

Speaker 3 (57:50):
Of the Moon.

Speaker 2 (57:50):
And some people will argue that like okay, but Elon
Musk could because he's not a nation, he's just some guy.
But according to the Outer Space Treaty, he belongs to
the US. The US is responsible for what he does
up there, and so it's on the US if Elon
Musk goes up there and says, I am creating Muscow
and this is my new place to live, and so

(58:11):
you're not allowed to appropriate the land. But here's where
there's quite a bit of ambiguity. It's apparently unclear what
you can do with the resources that are up there.
So can Jeff Bezos go to those craters of eternal
darkness where you can find water and extract the water
and sell it to other people for rocket fuel? And

(58:32):
the answer to that is it's not really provided in
the Outer Space Treaty. And so countries are sort of
coming up with their interpretation of what the Outer Space
Treaty means. And in the US, Obama passed an act
that essentially said, the United States, if our citizens go
up there and extract resources and sell them, our interpretation

(58:52):
of the Outer Space Treaty is that that's okay. And
then Donald Trump released an executive order essentially saying the
same thing. So this is maybe the only thing that
Obama and Trump can agree on. And then the Artemis
Accords came out while we were writing the book. And
the Artemis Accords is sort of a NASA document that
a bunch of other countries have signed onto. I think

(59:14):
it's at around twenty now, and a bunch of other
countries have signed onto it, and it essentially says it
is our interpretation that it is okay to extract resources
and sell them. And in fact, NASA supported a company
that went up there and scooped a tiny bit of
regolith and then sold it to NASA for a token
fee of I think a dollar, And it was just
meant to set the precedent that a resource can be

(59:36):
collected by a company on the Moon and then sold,
and that the United States is okay with that. But
that is supposed to be a global commons. That was
point to the Moon is a global commons. All of
space is a global commons, and so other countries I
think would argue that as a global commons, if you
extract a resource, everybody should benefit from it. But that's
not actually specified by the Outer Space Treaty, so there's

(59:59):
a big fight over inter But we like to note
that the Moon and space in general is not like
a completely weird legal structure that is unlike anything you
see anywhere else. This is essentially what humanity has decided
to do when we end up with vast swaths of

(01:00:19):
land that technology suddenly opens up for us. So, for example,
Antarctica is managed by the Antarctic Treaty System, where a
bunch of countries come together, they agree, it's a global commons,
they decide what can be done with the resources, and
at the moment they've decided, you cannot extract any resources,
and in fact you cannot even look for them because
we don't want to start any trouble. And then the

(01:00:39):
deep seabed is managed by close the United Nations Convention
on the Law of the Sea. So we have a
couple of different global commons, a couple different ways of
managing them. But you know, it's unclear how things are
going to shape up in space.

Speaker 1 (01:00:52):
So does that mean it is or is not legal
to eat your neighbor in space?

Speaker 3 (01:00:56):
I can speak to that question. Yes, I should say
this is it's a short part of the book, but
we do something like an answer. So the short version
is it depends on what law you consider yourself to
be under, which probably has to do with what country
you're from or where you launched from, right, and it
actually varies by country. We're more familiar with the American
and British law, which in the US. This is beyond

(01:01:18):
what we have in the book. So I'm digging a
little deep for this, but I believe there's something called
the Holmes test. Which is this list of conditions which
basically says, look, if you want to like engage in
survival homicide, meaning kill some people so other people can live,
there has to be a set of conditions met. And
there are things like, you know, there has to be
no other option, and you have to have a random draw.
You can't like prefer the crew to the passengers. So

(01:01:39):
there's a set of criteria that have to be met
for it to be considered okay or at least potentially okay,
to engage in survival homicide. So, you know, there's not
a lot written about death and space generally it's never happened. Well,
I'm sorry, it's never happened other than just people suddenly
die during a situation where they can't be saved, right,
So there's never been a situation where like a guide
dies in the spaceship in and sort of crowded around

(01:02:00):
like geez, what do we do? And so there's not
a lot written on this. But we found a paper
from nineteen seventy eight by a guy named Robert Fritis,
who I think ended up being a nanotechnology guy, but
in seventy eight he was interested in this question and
it said you know, there's this movie and novel called
Maroon where there's three guys in space and there's something
goes wrong. There's not enough oxygen to save all of them.
The rescue ship will like get there in five hours.

(01:02:21):
They have four hours of oxygen. So if you're being
if we were ants, one of the ants would be like,
I'm going to go die. Problem solved. But we're not ants,
and so it's like a really nauseating question. And so
he actually kind of went through the literature of how
we think about this question legally, and the basic deal
is it's going to depend on where you're from. So
if you're in the ISS, the kind of funny thing
is the modules are kind of like quasi sovereign territory, right,

(01:02:45):
so the Japanese module is sort of like a piece
of Japan. So you know, we say you should sort
of call a lawyer. You should be like, what country
you know if I went to Japan or Russia? Would
I get a better deal if I have to eat somebody?
But yes, that's the law. In terms of like the
physical part, we found one guy who's willing to talk
about it, who was like weirdly detailed about how to
butcher a human and three D print a plastic knife

(01:03:07):
in space. His name is Eric's Seathhouse, and we advise
against bringing him on your crew. And that's my main
advice about eating your friends in space. To summarize. The
Outer Space Treaty obviously doesn't deal with cannibalism in space,
so you will probably be dealt with as a national
of some country. Preferably to keep it simple, don't eat
someone from some other country because it's going to be

(01:03:28):
an international incident.

Speaker 1 (01:03:31):
That's going to complicate your life. So it sounds like
you guys have done a really deep dive into the
details of what it would be like, the logistics, the
legal side, where we would actually live. In the end,
how did you feel about it? I mean, you started
out optimistic and then you were a little disappointed in
how much people had explored this. On balance, in the end,
do you feel like this is something humanity should do?

(01:03:53):
But maybe deeper into the future that we're not ready yet,
but it's still something we should plan for, or maybe
we need to dig even deeper before we have an
answer even to that question.

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
So I think maybe Zach and I should both give
our answers in case we differ a little bit. I'd
say that I still think it's a beautiful idea. I
would love to see it happen at some point, but
I think we need to not push for it to
happen in our lifetimes. I will be personally very happy
if in my lifetime there is a research base on
the Moon where we get a better handle on creating

(01:04:23):
closed loop ecosystems, figuring out safety measures for adults and
the babies that we'd like to have one day. I
think there's a lot of work on geopolitics and international
law that I would like to see happen before we
end up with the scramble for territory. You know, in
the book, we talk about how the way the deep
seabed is managed could be a great way to manage

(01:04:43):
resources in space as well. So I'd love to see
some more work on stuff like that. So I'd like
to see it happen, but I'd like to see us
slow down and figure out, like step by step, what
needs to happen to do it safely, and then you know,
start to see that kind of stuff funding. I would
love it if Musk had not bought Twitter and Head
instead invested in closed loop ecosystems or research stations on

(01:05:05):
the moon or something. What about you, Zach, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:07):
So I would say my view is that it's something
that we will eventually do entirely because it's awesome. I
think the economic arguments are quite weak. We discussed this
a little in the book. There's a lot of sort
of what you might call sociological arguments, like if we
don't do this, we're going to stagnate. There are arguments
that we're going to save the environment. There's no way

(01:05:28):
it's going to happen fast enough. There are all these
different arguments for why we ought to do it, and
we think they're basically no good. And I would also
add that there's an argument Daniel Duden is big on
this as there's an argument that we should just never
do it, because you know, people tend to say we
should colonize space to decrease existential risk, but actually they're,
you know, plausibly by getting that huge infrastructure above a gravity, well,

(01:05:49):
you're creating higher existential risk. So maybe it's never going
to be a good idea until like, you know, does
physics allowed tractor beams or something. You know, So there's
an argument there. I think you can imagine a world
it's some distant date where you know, we are such
an advanced, wealthy species that you could just go to
Mars to set up there, because it would be a

(01:06:10):
cool thing to do. Like you're going to send you
one hundred AI robots ahead of you. They're going to
set up a cabin and space launch is totally safe,
and Earth is so peaceful and harmonious that the idea
of like starting warfare between planets is unimaginable. And that world,
it's a great idea, It's wonderful. It's sort of like
in Star Trek they're just exploring around because exploring is
a cool thing to do, and all the old problems

(01:06:30):
have been solved. But I guess the big change for
me is I just I just don't buy any of
the arguments that there's a non esthetic reason to do Mars.
There just doesn't seem to be unless you're talking about
like a Kardish of you know, eighteen civilization that's got
to maximize every single photon in the universe. There's just
no good reason to do it. So to me, that
puts it on the scale of centuries. It requires a

(01:06:51):
better humanity and a much richer humanity.

Speaker 1 (01:06:53):
Well, thank you guys very much for writing this book.
I know you described as something of a wet blanket,
but I actually think it's necessary to think about these
things carefully, to lay the groundwork to figure out what
the problems are actually going to be. That, if anything,
your book could makes it more likely that we do
figure this stuff out because people think about it carefully.
So from all the space nerds, thank you. You see

(01:07:15):
this book positively, and I encourage everybody out there to
get it. It's called a City on Mars? Can we
settle space? Should be settle Space? And how we really
thought this through. It's really exquisitely, deeply detailed and well researched.
These guys definitely know what they're talking about. And in addition,
it's really fun. I mean, obviously these two are very

(01:07:35):
funny people, and so you'll read it, you'll learn a lot,
you'll laugh a lot. I totally encourage you, and thank
you very much Zach and Kelly for joining us today
to talk about sex and space, poop in space, and
face melting.

Speaker 3 (01:07:46):
Thanks so much, Daniel, I can do a whole episode
on face melting.

Speaker 1 (01:07:52):
Collaboration, all right, Thanks again everyone for listening and tune
in next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(01:08:16):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.