Exploration from the poles to the heavens

Daniel and Kelly talk about difficulties encountered during polar expeditions, and how we can avoid making these same mistakes when we begin exploring Mars. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Before the first crew leaves from Mars, it would be
good to know what to expect. Yes, you want to
know things like what kind of trajectory your spacecraft is
going to take, But you also want to know some
of the squishier stuff too, like what kind of social
problems might come up along the way.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
To help think through the problems you might encounter.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
It might be helpful to know what's happened in similar situations,
But what would a similar situation look like? Well, okay,
a trip to Mars will include separating crew members from
their family and friends for more than two years, living
in a cramped space with a small number of people
who you may or may not like, days filled with
tedious and boring tasks like fixing the toilet, and a

(00:47):
diet of shelf stable and maybe less than delicious foods,
in an environment where some small mistake could spell death
for the whole crew. Turns out, all of those criteria
are met by research expeditions launched to Earth's poles around
the year nineteen hundred.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Space will have fewer walruses.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
And hopefully less cannibalism, but at least initially, we'll probably
have similar levels of misery tediousness, stinkiness, and danger. So
today we're going to talk about two different polar research
expeditions and discuss how the problems experienced during these expeditions
can give us some insights into how we should prepare
for the first trip to Mars.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Hi, Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. I'm Daniel.
I'm a particle physicist and I don't like being uncomfortable,
but I do like camping.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I'm a parasitologist and I like gross stuff.
And there's just not enough gross stuff at the polls
for me to want to go.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
Well, are you a camping kind of person? Do you
like to be out there in nature, on the edge
of survival, making coffee over an open flame?

Speaker 1 (02:10):
I do, but I don't get to do it a
lot because I married an indoor husband.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Sounds like you need a second outdoor husband.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Is that an option? I don't know. I think Zach
would say.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
No, you have my permission, but I do know what
that counts for.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Oh, fantastic, or I'll let zech know.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
We went to a cabin once and he called that
camping and then he was like, I've had enough and
so that's it.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
So what about you?

Speaker 3 (02:31):
I don't have an outdoor husband. No, but thank you
for asking, but no. My question for you today is
what is the scariest or most dangerous outdoor camping expedition
experience you've had? Have you ever thought hmm, I'm not
sure I'm going to make it back from this one.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
No, I don't think I've ever done anything that dangerous.
And anytime that I have been scared, it's because I
was camping and they were like loud people nearby who
sounded like maybe they were getting violent, and so it
was scary because of the other humans, not because of
like wild animals or difficult temperature conditions.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Or something like that. I don't know that I've really
gone out on a limb while camping. What about you?

Speaker 3 (03:10):
I almost froze to death once in the Ozarks in
a freak snowstorm.

Speaker 4 (03:14):
WHOA.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
I was going to go on like a week long
backpacking trip with my wife Katrina, and we had this
wonderful guidebook to take us through the Ozarks, and it said,
you know, if people tell you it's going to snow
don't worry. It never snows in the Ozarks. And the
morning we started walking out, it started to snow and
we were like, hm, this is weird, but we just
kept going because we had never bailed on a backpacking
trip ever, right, And we were crossing streams which were frozen,

(03:39):
and the temperatures just kept dropping and dropping, and we
had to stop at like three in the afternoon and
try to set up camp and it was like ten
degrees and our fingers were freezing, and we made the
like terrible decision to cook dinner inside the tent because
it was so cold, and we didn't burn the tent down,
but we did like go to bed in the sleeping
bags at like five pm because the temperature was so low.

(04:02):
And we woke up at like three in the morning
having slept the full night, and it was still like
five degrees. Oh no, So we woke up in the
morning and hiked right back out of there, and we
were like, yeah, we're not doing this again, and we
spent the rest of that trip in a cabin. So
Zach would call it camping.

Speaker 4 (04:16):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Have you done any backpacking away from civilization since?

Speaker 5 (04:20):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yes, absolutely, we've since taken our kids backpacking and made
similar mistakes, this time being underprepared for mountains in the
summer in California. Turns out when you go really high up,
it can get pretty cold.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
Yeah, and I always get dizzy when I go really
high up.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
I think everybody's maybe picking up on me being a
giant wimp and having married a giant whimp. And you're
totally correct with that assessment. Yeah, whenever I go mountain
climbing with friends or something, we get a little high
up and I'm like, sorry, guys, I'm dizzy. You keep
going hung and eat my snack, got my protein bar, and.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
I hang out.

Speaker 6 (04:50):
Well.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
Fortunately, humanity has learned a lot about the Earth because
there are people who are not like me and not
thank you, and can survive crazy conditions to explore all
the amazing and beautiful corners of this earth.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
So the people who explore the poles are really amazing
to me, in part because it's like such a juxtaposition
with my wimpiness, you know. So when I read about
the expeditions to the Poles, like, I don't really like
being cold. Virginia has a little bit of cold in
the winter that seems really nice. I have friends who
go to Antarctica to like study sealed diving behavior, and

(05:22):
I don't want to be that cold, but they're incredible.
There are people who love this stuff and thrive on
it and don't die.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
And so is it hard for you to even like
read about this, like while you're wrapped up in a
blanket and sipping your warm tea, You're like, ooh, this
is too unpleasant? Or does it give you a thrill
to hear about other people suffering?

Speaker 2 (05:38):
I don't revel in their suffering.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
It makes me feel justified in my decision to stay
home with my warm blankets. You know, it's good that
some people go out and explore the world. And there'll
be some stories today about an expedition that collected some
data from the Arctic that's used now as like a
baseline for understanding climate change. I'm glad there are people
out there doing it. It just doesn't have to be me.
I'm good, what about you.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
I'm in awe of these folks, you know, the way
they risk their lives, the way they suffer, the way
they persevere. It's incredible. I don't think that I could
do it, but of course I'm not in that situation.
I don't really know, and lots of times when normal
people have had to do extraordinary things in order to survive.
But this feels different because it feels like they've chosen it.

Speaker 7 (06:20):
You know.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
They could have stayed home with their blanket and their
tea and had a more boring job. But I guess
there was something in them that made them feel like,
I want to do something nobody else has done, even
if I'm risking my fingers and my toes and my nose.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
Why do you think they do it? What do you
think their motivation is.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
I think they're outdoor husbands, you know, and that's just
some of us are outdoor husbands and some of us
are indoor husbands. I think it's just really who we are.
Everybody's different. And I want to explore the universe. I
had this deep drive to understand the way the universe works,
but I don't have a drive to physically explore the universe.
I want to explore the universe mentally while staying home
with my tea. And I think other people have that

(06:57):
deep desire to see new things physically themselves, to be
the first person to put their flag somewhere who were
excited about the idea of like living in Elon Musk's
colony on Mars. I think we're all just built a
little different.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
Yeah, No, I totally agree. I think we are all
just built a little different. I think these expeditions are
a combination of like looking for adventure, wanting to answer
scientific questions, and then also a little bit in some
cases of a drive for fame. So like famously, roll
Aminson was heading to try to get to the North
Pole first, and he had like the whole ship like

(07:31):
packed up, and they were on the way, and he
found out that actually someone had made it to the
North Pole first, and he wasn't going to get the
first claim. So he turned that ship around, lied to
his funders, and headed to the South Pole, which he
did get to first. And so I think in some
cases it's not like a desire to get a certain
amount of information or to see a certain place. It's
like a desire to like be number one. But I

(07:52):
don't think that's the motivation for everyone. That's maybe just
the motivation for some captains who have gone out there.

Speaker 3 (07:58):
Well, lying to your funders. Nate's with me. There's definitely
been times when I've gotten a grant to do X,
and then I'm like, that's not gonna work out. I
think want to do why instead? And I don't know
if that counts as lying to your funders, but you know,
sometimes science takes a swerve.

Speaker 2 (08:12):
I don't think you're alone there.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
I've heard a lot of people say that they pitch
grants for projects they've already done, yeah, so that they
know they'll have it done on time and then they
can use the money for the next thing.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
Anyway, maybe Elon Musk has already been to Mars and
he's pitching it, but he secretly already has the base there.
What do you think?

Speaker 2 (08:29):
No, I hope not.

Speaker 7 (08:31):
No.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
I don't think quick aside that I thought was super fun.
So I was reading Freak Joff Nansen, sorry about the pronunciation.
Part of his mission Aboard the fram was funded by
Ring This Beer, and in his diary, which he knew
was going to get turned into a book, he very
regularly talks about how delicious Ring This Beer is and
the day they ran out, he says, it's a day

(08:53):
of mourning when we ran out of Ring this Beer.
And I'm like, to what extent is this advertising versus
like actually being said about running out of ring this beer.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
So anyway, some things haven't.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
Shaped all right, But let's get back on topic. Yeah,
tell us why we're talking about polar expeditions today. If
our real goal is to understand what life would be
like on.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Mars, well, before you go to Mars, you'd like to
know what kind of problems you should prepare for, what
kind of things you're likely to experience. And there's just
not a lot of exploration missions that are as intense
as what amission to Mars will be like. But the
Polar expeditions come close, and they had a lot of
problems that I think NASA folks are now anticipating and

(09:34):
have like incorporated into their mission plans. But there's just
a lot of problems that get encountered that you're gonna
want to avoid. And there's a lot of common themes
when you're reading this stuff that make you think, like, oh,
all right, there's definitely some stuff beyond figuring out the
trajectory and like designing the rocket or the ship that
you need to be thinking about.

Speaker 3 (09:51):
So going to Mars is going to be uncomfortable. So
let's think about the most uncomfortable anybody's ever been. That's
basically the.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
Thought, you know, As I said, I hate being cold,
so yes, hungry and cold. I don't like either of
those things. That a lot of people died hungry and
cold at the polls.

Speaker 3 (10:06):
So let's hear all about it. But before we do,
I went out there and I asked folks if they
thought that we could learn something about what life would
be like on Mars without actually going there. So before
you hear these answers, think for yourself. What do you
think we can learn about life on Mars from uncomfortable
experiences on Earth. Here's what folks around U see Irvine

(10:28):
had to say.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
We'd probably learned some helpful tips and tricks.

Speaker 7 (10:32):
But I think just the scale of how much more
difficult it would be to get to Mars makes things
a lot harder.

Speaker 4 (10:38):
Even if it might be useful, it is only useful.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
The first team of evolutions.

Speaker 6 (10:44):
I think that's the best chance we have to prepare
for something is extreme as Mars.

Speaker 5 (10:49):
They're isolated for six months without any real way to resupply,
you know, or get them out. So I remember there
was like several instances where they got ill and then
they had to learn how to from training and from
remote how to take care of the illness.

Speaker 6 (11:09):
For example, the difficulty to getting into the South Pole
is similar to the difficulty of getting to Mars, at
least on a local level, right like gif to go
to Argentina first, then the weather has to be completely
perfect to get to the South Pole. Sometimes that takes
several months for to be good. And so I think
that would prepare the travelers going to Mars mentally, like
that uncertainty of all right, we have this time window.

(11:31):
If we miss it, we're going to have to wait
another amount of time, but you're still going to be
You're going to still have to be just as prepared
as you would have then before.

Speaker 5 (11:39):
It's probably a good way to train, right just like
send people some cold, remote place and say, okay, live
by yourself for a year and see how that goes.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
See if you like the misery?

Speaker 6 (11:49):
Yeah no, no, Once traveling to Mars is its own thing,
it's a lot easier to travel to the pole.

Speaker 4 (11:58):
For me, I don't have a very gietic I.

Speaker 7 (12:00):
Feel like it would be totally diffferent.

Speaker 4 (12:03):
I think it does because there's hospitable environments.

Speaker 2 (12:06):
You learn how to manage those, so it's a stepping stone.

Speaker 7 (12:09):
Oh, there's huge parallels. That's why Antarctic stations are treated
as a space analog, especially the one that the Australians run,
where they have ten people overwintering with no contact from
the outside world for eight months in the year, and
we see really interesting changes in immune system because you're
not exposed to new introductions of microbes through that time.

(12:33):
And there's social aspects as well, how you get people
to keep their dynamic moving in a good way when
they're so isolated.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
It was interesting to me the variability and answers where
some folks were like, yes, absolutely, there's stuff to learn,
and others were like, no, it's two different I could
see both sides, and I do think that there's like
a narrow window of Martian exploration where we can learn
something from polar expeditions, and we're going to try to
folks on that narrow window today.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
But what did you think of the responses?

Speaker 6 (13:03):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (13:03):
I thought they were great. That last one is from
my wife Katrina, and she touched on the social aspect,
which was really fascinating because I know that she studies
how folks microbes are similar when they lived together in
the Australian Antarctic Station, and in order to study that,
she had to have access to like how many times
the Australians, how do you say, transmit fluids among each other?

Speaker 7 (13:27):
Uh huh?

Speaker 3 (13:28):
And it turns out ten people overwintering and the Australian station,
there's a lot of fluid transmission.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
We read a lot of stories about what happens at
those stations, and that comports with what we had read.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
Yes, it's a very exciting place down there.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
Lots of different potential matchups and basically all of them happened.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
Not much else to do when you're down there, so
you know, yeah, exactly, So wait to pass the time.

Speaker 3 (13:51):
Maybe that's a preview for what life will be like
on Mars.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, could be. It is a universal way to spend time.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
So maybe outdoor husbands occasionally are indoor husbands in a
different way.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
And then they get bored and they need to do
indoor things, yes, exact with other indoor people. If you'd
like to weigh in for our next episode, feel free
to send us an email at questions at Danielankelly dot org.
We'll send you the question and you can send us
an audio file with your answer, and then you can
hear your voice on our podcast.

Speaker 3 (14:21):
And everybody can hear your thoughts on the question of
the day.

Speaker 1 (14:24):
M all right, so let's get started. So I picked
two expeditions for us to talk about today that I
felt like illuminated some pretty important social things.

Speaker 2 (14:33):
That you'd want to think about.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
I also specifically picked missions that most people hadn't heard
about already. So these aren't like the first person to
make it to the North Pole the first person to
make it to the South Pole, because if you know
about polar expeditions, those are the things you're most likely
to know about that are shackleton and so these are
research expeditions.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
Which you know.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Unfortunately, I'd like to think that people care more about research,
but they sometimes don't. So our first expedition is led
by Adolphus Greeley. Interestingly, he was in the Civil War
and he got shot in the jaw. Maybe interesting was
the wrong word for that, but he got knocked out,
he fell over, and then he got shot again, but
he survived, and he wore a beard for the rest

(15:16):
of his life. And he was on the correct side
of the Civil War. I'll say, but he went through
some intense stuff and then he got put in charge
of this expedition that left in eighteen eighty one.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
So already this guy's a survivor. He experiences terrible pain
and tragedy and just moves on.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yes, yep, he's intense. He's a survivor.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
And I'll note that the story today is from a
book called Labyrinth of Ice by Buddy Levy, and it's
a great book.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
I recommend it.

Speaker 3 (15:40):
Well, if I'm choosing somebody to head up my expedition
to the polls that I'm funding, I definitely want somebody
who's been through some suffering. So I want to see
that on the CV Experience Suffering.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
I want to see that too.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
But I think by the end of this story, maybe
we'll both agree that Greeley isn't your guy in particular.
He lives and that's great, But the rest of his crew.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
So what was the goal of this mission? You said,
as a research mission? What were they trying to learn?

Speaker 1 (16:04):
So one, they were setting up a research station, and
the goal was just to collect a bunch of environmental
data like temperature, barometric pressure or stuff like that. They
also were supposed to go look for the DeLong Expedition,
which was another expedition sent to the Arctic, but they
were DeLong gone, and oh, I'm so sorry. Maybe they

(16:25):
actually weren't all dead yet at that point, but really
didn't look too hard for them to be honest.

Speaker 4 (16:29):
Mmm.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
I feel like that's the set of for so many tragedies, like, hey,
we sent these people to this dangerous place, they didn't
come back, so now we're sending you to go figure
out what happened. Like I'm pretty sure I know what happened.
The ideas don't send more people there, but anyway, you know,
mission too get sent.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
The survivors of the Greeley Expedition did get saved by
a crew that went in to save them, so sometimes
it works. But yes, I think a lot of the
time you're just like throwing more dead bodies on the pile.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
Unfortunately.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
Maybe that's a little cold, but it's cold out there,
cold out there, So any puns I'm going to have
for today, it's going to be great.

Speaker 3 (17:03):
But you were saying also that the point of this
mission was just to get like barometric and environmental data,
like we didn't know yet how cold it was at
the polls and what the pressure was and what the
weather was like there. That was still new to us.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
It wasn't totally new. So most of the folks who
had gone to the polls were trying to reach farthest
north and so it was like a race to get
there and then to come back. And it wasn't like
systematic data collection. So his goal was to set up
a research station and collect data in the same place
over a long period of time, to get like some
really nice solid baseline, not just like collecting random data

(17:35):
points wherever you happen to be on a trip to
try to make it to a place quickly.

Speaker 3 (17:39):
All right, So how did this mission go? Was it
fun from the beginning or did tragedy strike on day one?

Speaker 2 (17:45):
It was pretty good initially.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
So, like they got there and they set up the
research station, they were collecting data pretty well. One of
the secret goals really had that he wasn't really supposed
to be going for was to try to get as
far north as anyone had ever gotten before, or just
to kind of like tie up that record. And they
did that, all right, I mean the record was eventually beat,
but like he was feeling pretty good about that. They

(18:07):
were getting their data. Things were going okay. But at
the end of year one they hit their first major snag.
There were a couple like social problems before then, but
at year one, the first resupply ship that was supposed
to bring them supplies to like get them through to
the next couple of years left too late in the season.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
What how does that happen? They just like woke up
late and didn't make.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
It or I mean, this was a government expedition, and
so I think they were like government hold ups and
I don't know one thing or another. And then temperature
is different between years, and they just thought they'd be okay,
but they weren't, and so by the time they got there,
they hit a wall of ice and they were like, oh, well,
we can't get there.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
I mean, if I send people to a very unpleasant
place and they're relying on my resupply, then I'm sending
that resupply like a little early, yeah, just to make sure.
So like this is kind of shocking.

Speaker 2 (18:56):
Yeah, no, it is shocking.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
And really's wife was mortified and very angry. So there
was a like letter writing campaign and the people in
charge were like, Okay, next year, we promise we'll send
it sooner.

Speaker 3 (19:08):
Next year, Like can they make it without this resupply ship?
Is this just like extra biscuits and coffee or is
it like essential supplies?

Speaker 1 (19:15):
So they did plan ahead knowing that it's possible that
the mission wasn't going to get through, and so they
had enough food to get them through a year if
the resupply mission didn't make it through. But they knew
that by year two, if they didn't get a resupply mission,
they were going to need to abandon the station and
like high tail it out for an area where they
were more likely to get rescued and maybe there'd be

(19:35):
some resupplies along the way where boats would have left. Like,
this is as close as we could get, So we
dumped the food here with like a flag. The plan
was like, if you don't get resplies for two years,
then you need to go out and try to get help.

Speaker 3 (19:48):
And were there any resources there? I mean, is it
just completely barren where they were or could they like
hunt polar bears?

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah, so they were hunting.

Speaker 1 (19:55):
They were hunting wolves and foxes, and on this mission
they didn't to eat their dogs, which is nice because
I don't think they wanted to do that, so they
were able to do some hunting, which was also nice
for like getting out and mental health and stuff like that.
So they were able to resupply themselves a little bit.
But the big problem came in year two where they

(20:17):
sent out two boats and for a variety of reasons,
like one hadn't been retrofitted soon enough, because you need
really strong boats because you're gonna have to sometimes like
crush through the ice to try to get forward if
you think the ice is thin enough, and so for
like a variety of fumbles, they kind of left laid again,
oh man, and one boat was like I'm going forward anyway,

(20:38):
and then that one got stuck in the ice and
sank to the bottom of the sea with a lot
of the food.

Speaker 4 (20:44):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
Grieley's wife must appended a really grumpy letter after that. Huh.

Speaker 1 (20:48):
She was not so happy about the way this was
all working out. It's so sad reading about it, you know,
Like they were standing on a hill looking hoping to
see the ship, because there was a period where it
looked like things were opening up and the ship could
have gotten through, but like the food never came.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
Why don't they resupply in the summer. This is crazy.
Why wait for the ice to be forming so you
have to race against the ice.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
They were trying to like leave in the summer, but
it's a long journey at a time where a boat
rides are slow, and they got out later than they
had planned on in both instances, and so even though
they should have left earlier, by the time they left,
it was too late and it just didn't work out.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
So is this resupply boat still like on the bottom
of the ocean or did somebody eventually find it and
pull it up.

Speaker 5 (21:26):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
So it was the Polaris, and it's not one of
the more famous ships to have gone to the Arctic,
and so I don't know if anyone's bothered to pull
it up, so it might still be there, I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (21:37):
It's amazing to me how hard it is to bring
up a shipwreck, which means that like the Earth is
covered in shipwrecks, many of which maybe nobody can get
to or nobody ever will, which contained like vast riches
and archaeological and sociological stuff that would be super revealing
about the time. It's fascinating how close it is and
yet how inaccessible some of this stuff is yeah, but.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
Like it totally makes sense to me.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Like when I wear a wet suit and I'm like
in the water and I go to stand up, if
the wetsuit is open a little bit and some water
gets in there, like it's much harder.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
Like water is really heavy when it gets inside stuff.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
It makes sense to me that it would be hard
to lift a boat out if it's stuck, and then
it's got all that water and the boat is heavy
on its own, And so I think you'd rather just
get the gold and leave the boat if.

Speaker 3 (22:22):
You can, or the coffee or whatever's down there.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
That's right, Yeah, definitely, you don't want to lose the
coffeeld though now it's maybe a little salty, little less good,
all right.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
So Greeley goes out there. They try to resupply him twice,
fail twice. What does he do. Does he decide he's
going to live off polar bears forever or does he
head home?

Speaker 1 (22:38):
So there's a disagreement in the crew. Some of the
crew think, like, look, we can make this polar bear
thing work. Let's just stay here for another year. But
Greeley is a rule follower in the army, and so
he's like, no, we said that if the resupply didn't
come in two years, we were gonna leave and like
meet everybody at this spot. And so he followed the rules,
and there were twenty five men that set out, and

(22:58):
they were able to get like a I think it's
called a cash where like some food got left for
them and they found some of it. But in the end,
out of the twenty five that set out, only seven
of them survived and the rest of them died from
starvation and exposure.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
So it was bad.

Speaker 3 (23:14):
I mean, I've messed up research projects before, but nobody
ever died because I was too late to file a
report or run some calculation or something.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
This is why I decided to not be an er surgeon,
because I thought, you know, like there's gonna be a
day where something goes wrong and someone dies and maybe
you could have done something about it. And I don't
know that I can handle that. Like major props to
the people who do. We obviously need those jobs, but
I was like, I don't think I want that on
my shoulders, and really had a lot of deaths on

(23:42):
his shoulders.

Speaker 3 (23:43):
I feel the same way you do. I couldn't handle
this sort of mental load of knowing that my decisions
caused somebody to die, even if there are also days
where like, I've saved somebody's life. That's one reason why
I ended up in particle physics, because I felt like
there's no chance anything I do is ever going to
impact humanity really in any way, not even like being
able to develop new weapons, you know, like my parents

(24:04):
were in the weapons program, and obviously there are big
moral consequences there because they're developing literal weapons of mass
destruction pointed at civilian populations. And so I decided to
be totally irrelevant. But then later when I grew up,
I thought, hm, it's kind of weird. Other friends I
have have actually useful skills that can help people and
save lives and whatever. I thought that might be nice,

(24:24):
but it does protect you against the days where oops,
I didn't get enough coffee and I actually cut off
the wrong thing.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah, I made a lot of the same calculations, and
I'm totally happy where I am. I'm totally happy being
mostly irrelevant but sometimes amusing.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
That's fine with me. I hope I make some people
chuckle sometimes and nobody.

Speaker 3 (24:42):
Die, that's right. Anyway, these aren't the lessons of Daniel
and Kelly's career choices. We're trying to learn from Greeley's expeditions.
So a lot of people died, very few made it back,
and largely because they weren't resupplied.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
Is that right, Yeah, So there's two lessons to get
from this, and the first lesson is all about resupply.
So just like a to Mars, there's like windows of
time where resupply ships can leave and things go wrong,
so you need to be self sufficient. So you know,
you could imagine with SpaceX if that window that opens
up once every two years to send a resupply mission,

(25:14):
you can imagine things going wrong and making it so
that resupply doesn't show up. For example, maybe China attacks
Taiwan and the special computer chips that are made in
Taiwan can no longer be purchased, and maybe that's a
problem for SpaceX. Or maybe SpaceX goes bankrupt and they're
the only ones with the technology to get a resupply
ship to Mars right now, or a musk decides to
invest all of his money in X and you're just

(25:36):
left there.

Speaker 3 (25:37):
But let's back up a second and think about why
you need a resupply. I mean, the polar analog is
interesting because those guys needed a resupply even though they
could hunt locally. Right now, clearly on Mars there are
not polar bears. We're not aware of any large mammals
you can eat. But technology is also improved. Is it
absolutely clear that a Martian mission will need to be resupplied?

(25:57):
Is it possible to just send a bunch of people
there and have them be self sufficient from the get go.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
Yeah, so that is a great question and maybe something
you should try to plan for, especially if your goal
is to have like a settlement, or you could just
pack two extra years worth of freeze dried foods and
plan ahead of time for them and not expire.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
Polar bear jerky. I bet that's pretty good.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
Sure, yeah, delicious. I mean, I think you'd need a
lot of space to do essentially subsistence farming for four
people and survive just on that. So that would be
a pretty massive undertaking. But you know, maybe you want
to try to pack enough to buy yourself time for
that next open window, or pack cyanide pills.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Got dark?

Speaker 3 (26:42):
I thought first you were going to go into the
like maybe you should bring spices that would help you
when you need to, you know, draw straws and decide
who's going to be dinner and who's going to be
at dinner.

Speaker 4 (26:51):
You know.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
I was reading this book by Eric Seahouse that was
all about like lessons you can learn from polar expeditions,
and I was really surprised at how little he talked
about behavioral things that you could learn. But he brought
up cannibalism like a bunch of times. And in this
book he kept being like, in this generation, they're all
a bunch of whims. And he had a whole section
where he talks about how like, okay, say you do

(27:13):
run out of food and you look across the table
and you're like, there's food.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah, who goes first?

Speaker 1 (27:17):
And he was like, well, the biggest one should go
first because they require the most calories and can provide
the most calories, which made me wonder if he's kind
of like a short guy, and he's like and there's
a bit of a bias there, but you know, the
math checks out. But then he went and he talked
about how you could like three D print the stuff
that you'd need to like.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Butcher a body, and I was.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
Like, I would not invite Eric's seathouse on my knision,
like he is not coming with me.

Speaker 3 (27:41):
Well, it seems like there are nuances there also, like
do you need to eat a whole person? Can't you
just be like, hey man, you don't need both of
those legs, or you know, let's cut a hunk out
of that buttock or something. Right, there are ways somebody
could survive and still provide you food.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
Sure, those would be some very difficult conversations.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
So did Greeley do any of that? Do you think
there's any cannibalism? I mean people died, right, and other
people were starving where they tempted to, like, you know,
cook up their mates and have them for a snack.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
So this is a pretty big controversy actually, and we're
going to return to it after.

Speaker 4 (28:10):
The break, all right.

Speaker 1 (28:27):
I know everybody's dying to know about cannibalism on the
Greeley expedition. So the answer is, we really don't know.
It sounds like really genuinely was not aware of it happening.
But all of the bodies of his crew were brought
back to the US and some doctors thought that there
were signs on some of the bones that could have
been indicative of flesh being cut away to be eaten,

(28:48):
and so there were some grumblings about possible cannibalism. But
it's thought that even if the evidence was pretty good,
the government tried to cover it up because they wanted
this to be an uplifting story about how it seven
people got saved, not a story about cannibalism in an
army expedition.

Speaker 3 (29:05):
So it's unclear an uplifting story about how we failed
to resupply twenty five people and most of them died.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
What's been that just slighting scale. I guess some of
them made it back. I think they were really clinging
to the silver lining, all.

Speaker 3 (29:20):
Right, So then, what wo do you say is the
lesson we learn from the polar chips about how to
resupply stuff on Mars, make it self sufficient, building lots
of buffer. What can we do other than thinking, wow,
you got to be brave to go on one of
these missions.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
You know it's going to be really hard to pack
enough resupply to get a crew through an extra two years,
and that would be extremely expensive to do. But I
think you really need to think through how do we
make sure the resupply gets there. Can we give them
enough extra supplies where it would be okay if we
missed one launch window? What would that look like? Could

(29:53):
we have like a backup plan where maybe the next
mission won't be crude, but we have like duplicate rock
gets that just send food that we can dump somewhere
on the Martian surface. You got a plan for things
going wrong, and it's going to be even more complicated
for a mission to Mars.

Speaker 3 (30:08):
Well, it sounds like we should pack some cyanide pills.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
You know, it might not be a bad idea.

Speaker 3 (30:14):
Put that on the indoor husband's to do list, all right?
So what other kinds of lessons can we learn from
polar expeditions other than just like, resupply is crucial and
it's really hard.

Speaker 1 (30:24):
So Greeley had a big problem on his expedition, which
is that he had at least three crew members who
were just not listening, not behaving, and he had no
ability to punish them.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
So his engineer, of which he.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
Brought one was an alcoholic, and when it was time
for them to leave the research station to try to
like go get help, he kept drinking the fuel alcohol
would and they needed that for their ships and to
cook their food, and at one point he's drunk it
he grounds the boat and Greeley is like, I'm gonna

(30:58):
shoot you, but then he realizes, like I can't because
I have one engineer and I need this guy, and
he didn't have a backup plan, so he like made
a note in a notebook like we're gonna talk about
this with the government when we get home, and like
the guy just kept doing it, he kept stealing the
fuel alcohol. He ended up being one of the first
to die, which kind of solved that problem sort of

(31:18):
in the harsh you know, math of the Arctic, but.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
It doesn't solve the we still need an engineer problem, right.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
No, that's true, but at that point a couple other
people had learned those skills, which is something they should
have done before they left. So like less than one
duplicate skills, you need to have like multiple people who
know how to do the same job because you never
know what's gonna happen. And so he had a similar
skill problem with the doctor, who around year two was like,
you know what, I don't want to do this anymore

(31:45):
and really was like, dude, we wouldn't have hired you
if you were going to quit halfway through, you have
to keep going. And he's like, I'm gonna arrest you
if you don't. And the guy's like, how can you
arrest me? We're in the middle of nowhere, and really
was like, no, I can't, and he like he didn't
provide any details.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
What was this guy's plan. He's like, I'm with you
on this mission, but I'm gonna stop being a doctor,
or I'm just like gonna walk home myself. Like the
guy's kind of stuck, isn't he.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
That is what I would have thought if I was
in that position. But I think he was just like
I just want to chill, I want less work. You
still have to take care of me. But also he
was involved in like some mutinous conversations. There was like
somebody else he wanted to take control because they thought
really wasn't doing a great job, and so the doctor
was offering to diagnose Greeley as being like mentally unstable

(32:32):
so that somebody else could take over. And really got
word that this sort of mutinous talk was happening, but
he didn't do anything because he didn't have a lot
of options. Oh man, And then the worst thing the
doctor did. In my mind, there was one guy who
was like really sick, he had gotten frostbite, and the
doctor was like, look, I know we're all on rations,
we're all starving to death, but this guy, if he's

(32:53):
gonna make it, he needs extra food. So can we
please give this guy extra food? And everybody's like, yes,
we want to save this guy, Let's give him some
extra food. And then Greeley saw the doctor eating the
extra food that was meant to be for.

Speaker 4 (33:05):
The other pagion. I know he's such a jerk.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
He doesn't make it either, but there's nothing that he
could do.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
And then the last guy, and this is why cru
selection is important, turned out that this guy had been
in jail for forging a check and then when he
got out in jail, he killed a man and then
he changed his name.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
And he made it on the Greeley expedition. So not
a great guy.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
And as they're all starting, I think needs a better
vetting system, like, you know, weed these people out before
you take them on the mission, right, well.

Speaker 1 (33:32):
And so NASA has like a very stringent system for
how they pick people who get to go to space,
and so what makes me nervous is that when we
start to open it up to like muscle, say, well,
anyone who can afford to go? Who are the people
who are trying to escape earth? Like, no doubt there's
a lot of like dreamers and researchers and big thinkers,
but maybe there's also people who are just like trying
to escape the law. So you're gonna have to be

(33:53):
careful with who goes. But this guy's stealing their food
while everyone's starving to death, and he at one point
gets caught because he snuck in ate some raw bacon,
and then everybody was like, where'd.

Speaker 4 (34:04):
The bacon go?

Speaker 1 (34:05):
And eating raw bacon had upset this guy's stomach, so
he threw it up and they were like, oh, there's
the bacon, and so then he couldn't like pretend he
hadn't stolen it.

Speaker 3 (34:14):
I wait, I have a gross question. Are they so
hungry that like vomited up raw bacon is still something
you might consider like cooking up.

Speaker 2 (34:21):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
They had eaten fungus cover dog treats. At one point,
when they'd shoot an animal, they would start like licking
the blood, like and they were eating moss.

Speaker 3 (34:36):
They'd like boiling their shoes to make tea and stuff. Right,
these folks are desperate, so at some point even vomited
up bacon might be quite a delicacy.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
They are eating the leather in their clothes by the end. Yeah,
So the book did not specifically talk about the fate
of the regurgitated bacon. It wouldn't surprise me if it
had been distanmed, because when you're dying elite like anything,
which I think is something we've talked about before, we
have themes.

Speaker 3 (34:58):
Imagine going to a restaurants seeing this stuff the menu,
like shoe tea or fungus covered dog treats or once
vomited bacon. It's amazing what people will eat though, when
they got.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
To survive, right, Yeah, yeah, the drive to live is
pretty incredible.

Speaker 3 (35:14):
But this is mostly a lesson about picking your crew
and what you can do when you're out there. I mean,
this guy's the captain of the ship. Doesn't he basically
have complete authority that can't he excute people if he
has to in order for the mission to succeed.

Speaker 1 (35:26):
So, yes, he has that power, but he was a
little concerned that if he exercised that power would reflect
poorly on the mission. So he held back for a
long time, but this guy who was stealing the food,
he was getting stronger while everybody was getting weaker because
they weren't eating, but this guy was eating more. So
eventually g really was like, all right, we're gonna have
to shoot this guy. And he couldn't do it because

(35:47):
he was too weak to get up. So he told
two other guys like, you've got to go shoot I
think the guy who's the last name was Henry, and
they did, and so eventually justice in a way was served.
What are the lessons here? So one, you need job redundancy,
because this got really in a hole a bunch of times.
There were a lot of times where he clearly should

(36:09):
have punished someone or locked them up, but he's like
he needed their skills.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
So you're saying we need like two engineers and two
doctors and two cooks or whatever.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
Or you at least need skill redundancy, where like maybe
your doctor also knows the main tasks of the engineer,
and the engineer knows a lot of what the navigator
needs to do, and so you know, I mean, I
feel like in an ideal world, you'd be able to
bring like a couple of all of these people, but
probably are just going to need to have redundancy and
skills within the crew.

Speaker 3 (36:39):
So everybody's got to be a doctor slash cook slash engineer.

Speaker 1 (36:42):
Which requires a lot of prior planning, and I think
NASA does do that kind of like cross training ahead
of time. But you know, it would be good if
Musk also had that kind of stuff on his mind. Also,
there was no jail cell, which kind of limited his
options for what he could do. But he also couldn't
afford to lock up members of the crew all out
of the time, Like if he locked up the engineer,

(37:03):
then he still can't use the engineer's skills.

Speaker 3 (37:05):
Wait, but help me imagine where they are. I mean,
they're on a polar expedition. Are they sleeping in tents?
And they built some sort of temporary structure. I realized
now I don't have like a mental image of where
these folks are living.

Speaker 1 (37:15):
So initially they were living in a research station where
they probably could have like walled off part of it
to make a jail cell.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
To research station is like a building. Somebody built a
building out there.

Speaker 2 (37:25):
Yep, yep.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
They brought building supplies and they put it together. And
it was a nice station. Actually, in a future expedition,
I think it was Perry who stopped by and credited
his survival with being able to like hang out in
this station that had been so well built that like
years later he could still go there to warm up.

Speaker 3 (37:40):
Indoors aren't nice places, yes, yeah, pro indoors, all right,
So they had indoors on this research station. That's great.

Speaker 2 (37:45):
Yeah, my indoor husband would love that.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
So if you could get him out there, that's right.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
But you know, then at some point they are living
in a tent and so a jail cell would have
been difficult, but a plan would have been helpful. He
should have been able to see that this was a
possibility that would come up that they wouldn't be able
to like put someone in a jail cell and have
a way to deal with it instead of making a
note that like, oh, I'm gonna tell the government that
you engage in mutiny when we get home.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
But for right now, we've got nothing.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
And so you know, on early naval expeditions, flogging is
something that they would do. It was like a quick
thing where you like really hurt someone enough that they
don't want to do the thing again. But then they
can go right back to work and you don't need
to like confine them in a certain area. And I'm
not saying that I am pro corporal punishment. I'm giving
the history of punishment options, but like, whatever they decide

(38:32):
to do, they needed to have a clearer plan and
really needed to feel like he was empowered to carry
through on those plans, and it just seemed like that
did not happen for this mission.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Well, it's interesting that people would act this way on
this mission because it feels like sort of counter to
their own interests. I mean, everybody's got to pull their
weight for this whole mission to succeed, and this mission
has to succeed for be able to survive, So it
feels like that would provide a lot of pressure for
people to toe the line and be part of the
team and stuff. That's amazing to me that even under
those conditions, some folks are like stealing the bacon and

(39:04):
deciding to not do their job anymore.

Speaker 1 (39:06):
There was a ton of variability actually, so you know,
there's the guy who's stealing the bacon, but there were
also members of the crew where like somebody was dying
because they were starving, and they'd take some of their
food and they would feed the other person, try to
like help them, and like there were literally stories about
them like cradling each other's heads and trying to like
spoon feed them because they were too weak to eat.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
So, like there was.

Speaker 1 (39:25):
A lot of compassion and a lot of examples of
people being willing to like risk their lives to help
other crew members. But then there's the guy who's stealing
the bacon. And so I think you've got to be
careful about who you send up there, and then you
need to have a system for making sure that the
people who don't behave the way you want them to,
there's some way to keep them from doing that again.

Speaker 3 (39:45):
So Greeley is one example, and he seems like a
little bit of a week leader, Like he had some
of these tools and he didn't use them, and maybe
that would have helped him keep his crew in line.
Is that a general thing in these polar trips and
in these crazy expeditions and on you know, long voyages,
that the CA is not really feeling like they have
these tools of their disposal because it'll ruin morale or whatever.

(40:05):
It's really unusual or this is a common theme.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
The next story we're going to talk about is another
case where a leader had a little bit of trouble
maintaining order for a different reason. So it's not like
this is the only story of a leader who has
sort of trouble with maintaining order, But there were some
who were definitely more successful. So earned Shackleton, for example,
when his boat, the Endurance, sunk first, he did a
really great job of managing the personalities. So there were

(40:29):
like three or so guys who are just like super
annoying and super negative, and Shackleton was like, you guys
are sleeping in my tent. And he just made sure
that like their negative attitude didn't like seep over into
the other crew members.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
And he was more willing to threaten people.

Speaker 1 (40:44):
So, for example, there's this story where there was a
stowaway on the Endurance and they discovered it after they
had left. It was too late to return the guy
who had stowed away, and so Shackleton said to him, Okay,
but if anything goes wrong, you're the first one we're
gonna eat. And I think threatening ca anibalism is probably
a pretty good way to keep people in line. And
he also was better about reminding people about the documents

(41:06):
they had signed ahead of time where they promised to
follow the rules, and he was just a bit more assertive.

Speaker 3 (41:10):
All right, So then what's the takeaway. You're planning a
mission to Mars. You're keeping Greeley's experience in mind. You
have your own experience as a parent flogging your children
when they get out of line, you know, or at
least holding that possibility over there.

Speaker 1 (41:22):
I've never hit my kids, but I think the point
is you need to have a plan that you are
willing to execute and that everybody knows could have been
ahead of time. And that might not solve all of
the problems, but at least then you've got some path
forward and some legitimacy.

Speaker 3 (41:37):
And you have some credibility that the negative outcomes are
going to keep people in love. Ye yeah, you hope,
you hope. So, yeah, that's a real challenge, you know,
being a leader of a mission like that, you know,
really being willing to follow through on those threats because
otherwise they're empty and then you have no power.

Speaker 1 (41:51):
Yeah, so you need to be careful about picking the crew,
but you also need to be careful about picking the
leader because you could argue that if Greely had been
a little bit more assertive and had a little clearer plan,
maybe some people could have lived longer, and maybe they
would have made it to the resupply ship. If Henry
hadn't been stealing food for so long, if the cook
hadn't been drinking the fuel alcohol that they needed, you know,
to keep warm and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
You need a leader who's willing to follow through on
this stuff.

Speaker 3 (42:14):
I mean, I know, as apparent, you don't make threats
you're not willing to follow through on because sometimes you
have to. And if you're like, finish your dinner and
nobody's going to go into that movie and you're like,
oh man, I kind of wanted to go to that movie.
You got to be willing to do it.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
You know, those moments suck.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
I hate those moments where I'm like, oh no, I
don't get to do what I want to do because
I'm punishing you. Or the moments where you know your
kid really wants to do something and you want to
let them do it, but you're like, yeah, you kept pushing.
I remember once my daughter like I told her, you
do that again. Blah blah Blah's gonna happen. And she
looked me in the eye and she said the thing again,
and I was like, I have conflicted feelings. On the

(42:48):
one hand, Wow, that took some hutzba. I'm proud of
you for like being tough. But on the other hand,
go to your room. You're not going to the campout
or whatever. Yeah, interesting watching them grow, right, stuff out.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
It's a wonderful challenge everyone. Yes, all right, So what
else do we learn from the polar expeditions. We talked
about resupply, we talked about punishment and management. What else
do we need to worry about on our Martian mission
that we can learn about from our polar experiences.

Speaker 1 (43:16):
Well, we're going to take a break and then we're
going to talk about how psychology can be a problem
on polar missions.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
All right, we're back.

Speaker 1 (43:38):
So the last example for today is the Moss and Expedition.
And this is a guy from Australia who went down
to Antarctica around nineteen eleven to collect a bunch of
scientific information about Antarctica. So this is another like, it's
not a race to the pole, it's just going out
there to try to collect data about this difficult environment
and he had a really hard time. Like he went

(43:59):
out with these other two guys. One of the guys
fell through a crack in the ice and they just
never saw him again because he fell down through the
ice so far with like a bunch of their resupply stuff,
and so now they like didn't have a lot of food,
and they were racing back as fast as they could,
and one of the guys just kind of died from
hunger and exposure. Mawson, who's, you know, the leader of
this expedition, He's trying to race back in time, but

(44:21):
he like falls down another one of those like cracks
in the ice, but he manages to pull himself up,
and when he gets back, he looks out and there's
the boat sailing away for the season.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
He had just missed it.

Speaker 3 (44:34):
Oh no, I know.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
Like so you'd think that he'd be the one who
would have a mental break, But it turns out they
the crew hadn't given up on him. So they left
some men behind to watch out to see if Mawson
and the rest of the guys on his expedition got
back there. And they had resupplied enough to get them
over the winter. And so they've got this chance right,
and the boat's gonna come back. And so Mawson's there

(44:56):
with some other guys, and one of the guys there
was a twenty nine year old names need Jeffries, and
he was the only guy there who knew how to
use the wireless telegraphy system, so he was the only
one who could communicate with the outside world. And Jeffries
started to have a mental break. He starts trying to
start fights with people. He's like, I could tell you're

(45:16):
trying to be a jerk. Let's go to the other
room and fight. And the other guy's like, I don't
know what you're talking about. Man, I'm reading a book
and he's just like trying to chill. And then at
one point Jeffries is challenging other people to duels and
so they have to lock up all of the weapons.
At one point, he's telling Mawson about a disease he
had of the type that we usually don't talk about
in polite conversation.

Speaker 3 (45:38):
Does it come from fluid transmission?

Speaker 2 (45:40):
It does come from fluid transmission. Yes, that's right to theme.

Speaker 3 (45:43):
Yes, be careful of those indoor husbands, some of them
are diseased.

Speaker 1 (45:46):
That's true. Yeah, probably some of the indoor wives too.
You just you know, you gotta watch out. So Mawson
goes to talk to the doctor and is like, okay,
so you know, Jeffries has that disease, and the doctor's like, no,
that's a hallucination. Nothing is wrong with him in that regard.
There was no dirty indoor wives causing any problems. And
then Jeffries also starts storing his urine because he thinks

(46:07):
there's some like medical reason he should be doing that.
He also stops bathing. He's letting his hygiene go, so
he smells bad. But perhaps most importantly, he's in control
of the communication system, and he starts telling the outside
world that actually everybody but him has lost their mind
and everybody's trying to kill him, and he won't let

(46:29):
anybody else communicate with the outside world. And so what
is the lesson here? So this guy, you know, when
he gets back to Australia, it turns out he needs
to end up an asylum. He spends the rest of
his life there. He probably had the onset of something
like schizophrenia, which happens often in your early thirties. This
guy was twenty nine years old, and so I think

(46:50):
the lesson here is one, if you take young people
with you, there are a fair number of diseases that
don't become apparent until you're like in your thirties, and
so there's some ants that you're going to be dealing
with these problems when you're in this harsh environment. But
more importantly, people break sometimes, Like even people who don't
have like underlying mental health issues will break under difficult conditions.

(47:14):
And so you need to have a system, which means
you need to, you know, maybe have some therapists with
you on the trip, or you need to try to
see if you can get some shelf stable medication that
you can send with you, Like, you need to have
a plan for what happens when things go wrong, because
even the humans that seem the most stable when you
hire them onto the crew, they're not necessarily going to

(47:35):
stay stable the whole time.

Speaker 3 (47:37):
But some people survive this experience without their minds cracking.
Is it thought that this guy was more susceptible to
it he already had these mental issues and this tough
experience brought it out, or was he like totally saying
and the experience itself just broke him.

Speaker 1 (47:50):
I don't think we have great information about what this
guy was like before the trip. It could be that
this experience broke him. Although he did volunteer to be
one of the people who stayed, he must have kind
of felt like he had a handle on the situation. So,
first of all, we read a bunch of astronaut memoirs,
and a bunch of astronauts lie about their mental health.
It totally makes sense because if they say I'm feeling anxious,

(48:11):
maybe they don't get to go on another trip to space, right,
so they have every incentive to say that they're fine.
And so there's plenty of stories. A lot of the
stories are medical, like there was a guy who thought
he was going to have a heart attack a couple
days before he was supposed to go up to space,
but he lied and went to a doctor covertly and
didn't tell anyone else about it because he didn't want
anyone to know. And then there's also people who passed

(48:32):
the tests maybe really were fine, and then break later.
So for example, Lisa Noak was a NASA astronaut. She
went up on the Shuttle, she started dating one of
the Shuttle astronauts. He left her for another woman and
she tried to kidnap the other woman, and it's not
clear what she planned on doing with her after that,
And so is this the one.

Speaker 3 (48:52):
Who drove cross country wearing astronaut underwear?

Speaker 1 (48:55):
So she would say that actually she hadn't worn it,
and that she had twins, and that those diapers were
from a prior trip she went on. Then she just
forgot to throw them out. But yes, I think that's
exactly what happens. She had rubber tubing, and she was
arguing like I was using the rubber tubing for exercise,
like it was a tension thing. And it seems pretty
clear that she was planning on trying to kidnap this woman,

(49:16):
and it's not clear what she was going to do
with her after that.

Speaker 3 (49:18):
I think the lesson is, don't date astronauts, or don't
date people who have the mental fortitude to go in
these missions, because there's clearly something weird about those folks,
you know. More power to them, and I'm glad that
we have them, and we've learned so much about the
polls and we potentially will learn a lot about Mars.
But I'm not sure those folks need to be in
the reproductive pool.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
You know, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (49:39):
I think there's a lot of people who would say
that astronauts are like the best of us. I don't
think there's a lot of people advocating for pulling them
out of the gene pool.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
You might be on your own there.

Speaker 3 (49:47):
It's interesting because if we build a colony, it's going
to be populated by those folks, and they're going to
be reproducing. And so if it takes a certain kind
of person to be willing to go on that mission,
then your colony is going to be filled with those
folks the same way that like colonies a few hundred
years ago required some fortitude and some risk taking. And
they're definitely not representative samples of other countries, right sure.

Speaker 1 (50:08):
But then also they'll have kids, and maybe their kids
will be more like a representative sample from the country
that they came from. And I think, no matter who
you send, you need to have a system in place
for what happens when someone has a mental health crisis,
because I just think that it's unavoidable no matter who
you pick, that at some point there's going to be
a problem with someone, and on the iss they have
a system, you're supposed to tie somebody up, put a

(50:30):
towel underneath their chin and duct tape their head to
something so that they can't move, and then I think
you're supposed to offer them like an oral something like
a tranquilizer to calm them down, and if they refuse,
you can also like inject it. And so essentially the
plan for the International Space Station is to just immobilize
someone until you can get them home, which will only
take a couple days. But it gets much more complicated

(50:51):
if you're stuck on Mars for two years and you're
worried that they're going to try to hurt themselves or
hurt somebody else. Usually it's hurt themselves, not hurt somebody else.
But like having a system in place, like are you
just going to trank someone for a year and a half.
That doesn't seem feasible or good for the person being
knocked out for that long.

Speaker 3 (51:08):
No, but it might solve some of your other problems,
like hey, this person turns out to be dinner right,
they go crazy, or they break the rules like oh,
maybe we don't need a resupply.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
You should be going to space. You are apparently comfortable
with any of the difficult decisions that need to be made.
I'm not sure i'd want to be on your crew,
but I think maybe.

Speaker 2 (51:24):
You should go.

Speaker 3 (51:26):
No, I'm comfortable having a podcast conversation about these difficult decisions,
but when rubber hits the road, or you know, ice
hits the tent, I think it'd be a lot harder
to do than it is to talk about.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
Yeah, fair enough.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
So those are the lessons for today. You know, when
you read about these stories, there is a lot of
really exciting, inspirational stuff that's going on, people really pushing
the limits and people who are just really excited about
getting answers, doing like whatever it takes to get those answers.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
But there's also a lot of difficult.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
Stuff along the way that if you plan for, hopefully
you can avoid or at least minimize the negative impacts of.
So let's hope that Elon Musk is doing sufficient planning
for his first trip to Mars, which is hoping will
happen in the next you know, decade or so.

Speaker 3 (52:06):
I think the takeaway from me is that we imagine
these expeditions to be voyages or scientific journeys, but these
are people, and these expeditions have people on them. And
so they have people problems, and people problems come with
people and you can't escape them, and so you've got
to be prepared for them. You know, people got to
go to the bathroom, and people are going to be
jealous and mad and go crazy. And you can't pretend

(52:29):
that just because you have noble goals that are universal
or deep unfundamental, that you're somehow just going to magically
avoid those issues. So yeah, you got to be prepared.
Bring your astronaut underwear and bring your astronaut tranquilizer amen.

Speaker 1 (52:42):
I think, especially with space, people tend to project utopias
and think that everything's going to be great up there.
But I think humans are going to bring all their
problems with us into the heavens and we need to plan,
all right.

Speaker 3 (52:51):
Thanks everyone for taking this voyage into our historical expeditions
and what we can learn from history about the problems
we'll face in the future when humans we hope one
day to start to colonize the Solar System.

Speaker 1 (53:11):
Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio.

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