Your Health as a Mars Colonist

Sure, you need to get your butt to Mars, but what are the long-term health ramifications of life on the Red Planet? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore reduced gravity, radiation, toxic dust and a microbiotic desert.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how stuff
weren't dot com? Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. So Robert, Yes,
I wanna put you in a strange scenario. I want
you to imagine yourself an astronaut in a near future dystopia,

(00:28):
in fact, a truly dystopian scenario. From my perspective, to
do this is an exer side I try to employ
you know every day. Okay, Now, you might be going
to a kind of Orwellian place, like the totalitarian Hell
don't go there. Or you might be going to like
the oldest Huxley place where we're all just medicated and
placated and have an empty, soulless bliss. Not there. I

(00:51):
want you to put yourself in the actuarial capitalist bureaucracy
of the private insurance market. Okay, okay, so we land
in a place that's maybe a little more comfortable, but
a little more mundane. So specifically, what you're trying to
do is purchase a suite of insurance policies that will
protect you and your family if you suffer death, disability,

(01:15):
or a serious medical condition in your line of work.
So during a brief interview, there's a policy agent who
has to ask you if you questions to determine whether
they can sell you a policy and what your rate
is going to be, so you get the standard ones.
Are you a smoker, heavy drinker, ivy drug user? Wait?
What this is the future? Right? Yes? Okay? Uh duelist

(01:38):
and or gun slinger? Um, this is the future? Yeah, um,
I'll say sometimes how about drag race junkie night of
the Sacred art of the motor joust? Um? Do you
work with high voltage nitroglycerin or flying guillotines? Not currently?
And does your church congregation practice snake handling? Not bio snakes?

(02:04):
So we're good, right, you only get those uh those
safe synthetic snakes. Yeah, yeah, I mean so we get
you know, the spirit of the practice is still true.
It's not the Middle Ages. Come on the future. Okay.
So we're all the way through the interview except for
one final question. Are you now or have you ever
been on the waiting list for a space colonization project?

(02:26):
And there you got me? Yeah, I got you. Sorry,
that's the kicker, because Robert, I know that you are
in fact, currently an in astronaut training to become one
of the members of the first wave of semi permanent
Mars colonists. Uh. And depending on circumstances, you might be
spending the next six to twelve years and maybe the
rest of your natural life in a habitat on the

(02:49):
surface of a red, red waste land. And unfortunately you're
well aware of this, and well aware of the fact
that if you answer yes to this question, your monthly
payments are going to be so high as to defeat
the entire purpose of the insurance policy, right, because this
is a risky venture. This is this is even beyond
drag racing and motor jousting and what have you. This

(03:10):
is uh, this is this is a risky lifestyle to
take on. How true that is? Now, you could do
what Neil Armstrong and the rest of the crew of
Apollo eleven did. Did Did you ever hear about this story? Now?
The whole insurance policies for astronaut is is an area
I've I've not explored well. When the crew of the
Apollo eleven mission, who were going to be the first
people to land on the Moon, realized that life insurance

(03:32):
policies would be prohibitively expensive for them. They came up
with an interesting idea to to make a policy of
their own. So, during the month when they were in
quarantine before launch, and this is true, they signed hundreds
of autographed covers they were called which were these envelopes
postmarked with historically significant dates on them? Uh, And they were.

(03:53):
They were autographing these covers, and then they would deliver
them all to their families. This way, they knew that
if they didn't survive of the mission, the sale of
autographed memorabilia would at least be enough to keep their
families afloat. So since I'm probably not going to get
this insurance policy because of my my my aspirations to
to become a Mars colonist, I can at least set

(04:15):
up the possibility that my family can make money off
the fact that I am Slash was the first man
to die on Mars. Yeah, okay, I could see that. Yeah,
I mean that the motion pictures that would be made
about me, the rights to your life. Who's gonna play
you dying on Mars? I I hope everybody. They would
be like a Bob Dylan kind of thing, where different

(04:36):
actors and actress would would play me at different stages
of my demise. Kate Blanchets you gasping on the red Rock.
I think that's perfect. That would be pretty cool. But anyway,
put yourself back in the scenario. So the insurance agent
that that question might actually cause you to have some
second thoughts about your plans to go to Mars because

(05:00):
of what your body is going to be up against.
Now you know a few things, but you might not
realize the entire spate of potential challenges to your health
and well being while living on Mars, well while bound
for Mars, and once you get there, especially since you
couldn't wait out the years of preparation it was going
to take to be part of the joint NASA Jackson Yes,

(05:21):
a mission, and instead you have signed up with a
kind of sketchy sounding nonprofit based Mars colonization outfit because
they promised lift off within eighteen months and you're in
a hurry. Though from what you've seen so far, they
might be cutting some corners. Uh. Yeah, I was very
skeptical of the the wooden spaceship approach that they were

(05:41):
they were looking to employ. Did you ever read that?
What was that there? Was a proposition that that the
movie Alien three was originally going to be about a
wooden planet. Oh yeah, I go, yeah, wooden space station
man by monks. That idea. Pretty wish they'd made that. Anyway,
back to the story, So this is a good jumping
off point to talk about the real thrust of today's episode,

(06:02):
which is the question, what are all of the health
challenges that our bodies might face over the course of
a long term Mars colonization effort, both traveling to Mars
and living there for years at a time or maybe
for a whole lifetime, And are there anyways we know
of to overcome these challenges? Yeah, it's a it's a
big question one that uh that NASA and other space

(06:25):
exploration authorities continue to look into, because that's kind of
the next big phase, right, that's the dream that's our
generation's moon, the idea of actually making it to the
red planet, of leaving this world that we've evolved to
thrive on and to thrive within a very slim portion
of the atmosphere and also only in certain regions of

(06:47):
the planet, to leave this world, travel through the unforgiving
void of space to a rather lifeless world and somehow
make a go of it. Yeah, well, we certainly don't
want to discourage Mars exploration with this podcast, but I
think it's just helpful while encouraging the exploratory and scientific

(07:08):
spirit to also realize what a truly horrible place Mars is.
So I think we should start with some of the
more obvious and more often talked about issues such as
radiation and reduced gravity micro gravity or zero gravity as
the case may be, and and then move on to
some of the more obscure concerns. So, the biggest health concern,

(07:31):
quite obviously for Mars travelers is going to be radiation exposure. Indeed,
we live in a kind of privileged a situation here
on Earth because we're we're largely shielded from some of
the the harsher radiation that can reach us in the
form of cosmic radiation and in a lot of the
solar radiation. Yeah, that's certainly true, And we actually would
have to deal with radiation in two different scenarios that

(07:54):
both apply to the Mars colonists. So there's gonna be
the radiation on the way to Mars and the radiation
once you get there. Because it's a sad fact that
Mars is not shielded the way Earth is, so both
cosmic and solar radiation immediately become a problem once you
leave the neighborhood of Earth. Even on Earth's surface, we're

(08:15):
actually exposed to a steady ambient level of radiation from
the Sun and from the larger universe. That would be
solar radiation and cosmic radiation, respectively. But Earth's atmosphere and
magneto sphere, so that's the magnetic field generated by the
dynamo effect when the Earth's liquid metal outer core rotates
around the intercore, an effect that most planets, uh that

(08:38):
we know do not feature. Yeah. Uh, that protects us
from the danger. So most of the incoming radiation gets
deflected or absorbed and we don't really have to worry
about it. Even astronauts on the International Space Station, which
is on average two nine miles above the surface of Earth,
even though they're exposed to more radiation than we get

(08:58):
on the surface, there's still shielded by Earth's magnetosphere, which
extends thousands of miles out into space. Yeah. When you
take that into account, I mean it's it's hostile and unforgiving.
As as the orbital environment is, it makes it seem like,
you know, like a five year old camping in his
parents backyard compared to actually venturing beyond the magnetosphere into

(09:20):
this unprotected regional space. Well, it's the equivalent of like
wading into three feet of water as opposed to swimming
across the ocean. But yeah, so once you're traveling in
outer space on the way to Mars, you no longer
have these protective barriers. And even once you get to Mars,
as we said, things aren't gonna be much better because
Mars does not have a strong magnetosphere like Earth, and

(09:42):
its atmosphere is absolutely puny. It's puny and thin. It's
about one percent the thickness of Earth's atmosphere. So you're
just not going to get much protection from radiation on Mars.
And there are ways to get around this. So people
have been coming up with all kinds of habitat and
space ship designs that would try to shield astronauts from
the various types of radiation they would encounter. So some

(10:04):
ideas are how to how to make shielding around a
spaceship that would absorb cosmic rays and try to prevent
secondary radiation from shooting off and irradiating you. One interesting
idea of read about is surrounding the crew capsule with
organic materials and water, so all of the food and
human waste and water and things like that would go,

(10:27):
would sort of form a weird moist BioShield around you.
Oh wow, so in in a sense, you would be
sailing to Mars in a protective bubble of your own sewage. Yes, exactly. Yeah,
it's sewage to the future. It will save your life, hopefully,
But we need to do more research to determine exactly

(10:48):
what the risks are and if we can create a
system like this that's economically feasible and we'll keep astronauts safe.
Because another problem is, sure, you can build a radiation shield.
I mean, we've build stuff like that all the time.
We have nuclear power plants, people who work with radiation,
and they can do that with relative protection. But it's
expensive to ship stuff into space, and the more bulk

(11:10):
you're adding to your ship to shield yourself, the more
trouble you're making this mission. Yeah, and it's in a
continuing theme that we'll we'll keep coming back to here
is is so much of this work is still ongoing.
We're still trying to find the answers, still trying to
figure out the best methods and dealing with a limited
ability to experiment on them. UH in real life. Totally true,

(11:32):
And unfortunately, it's not even just the standard radiation risks
that we're going to be dealing with during the trip
to Mars. So a standard trip to Mars might take
somewhere around six months. This is an estimate you see
thrown out a lot, and during those six months, and
once you get get to Mars, it's not just the

(11:52):
increased risk of cancer and other standard dangers associated with radiation.
Astronauts bound for Mars might face even weird or and
more disturbing dangers, for example, brain damage. So there is
some evidence that the kinds of cosmic rays that will
be cutting through your body on a regular basis while

(12:12):
you're on the way to Mars can produce brain damage,
leading to symptoms somewhat analogous to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's UH,
and I've read a few articles about this. So medical
doctors have noted that some patients who receive radiation to
the head in the course of treating brain cancer display
side effects like increased confusion and other cognitive impairments, and

(12:37):
cosmic rays might do pretty much the same thing to us.
So in recent experiments, researchers have subjected mice to simulated
cosmic rays, and six weeks after acute exposure to this radiation,
the mice exhibited decreased cognitive performance as well as physiological
changes to brain tissue. And I just want to read this,

(12:59):
uh quote from the abstract of the study. It was
reductions in dendritic complexity and spine density along the medial
prefrontal cortical neurons known to mediate neurotransmissions specifically interrogated by
our behavioral tasks. So so your ability to behave with
intelligence could be impaired by the time you arrive at Mars.

(13:24):
Showing up at Mars brain damage is not a good idea. Yeah, yeah, right,
when a lot of the really heavy work is about
to begin. Yeah. And so a couple of notes, these
are mice brains, not human brains, and we know there's
some difference there. Also, we we should be able to
protect against this, like I was saying earlier, if we
prepare and invest enough, if we do the research, figure

(13:45):
out what the vulnerabilities are, and build the right kind
of shielding. But again it's an economics problem. Can we
invest enough resources to make sure people are safe from
these effects? If you're going on the nonprofit cutting corners
get you there fast missions, that might not be the case. Yeah,
I don't know if the balsa wood shielding is going

(14:05):
to work and the outfit that I've been I've been
reading the brochure about. But of course it's not just
the radiation that will threaten our bodies on the trip
to Mars. What about the effects of micro gravity. Yeah,
this is a big one. And again I'm sure this
is one that that everyone is familiar with on some level. Uh,
you know, it often shows well, I was about to
say it often shows up in science fiction, but more

(14:27):
more often it's ignored in science fiction than the whole
issue of of of gravity and the lack of gravity
and space flight. Generally, you just throtle in some sort
of magical artificial gravity scenario and you don't worry about it.
I always respect the science fiction universes that have some
kind of rotating device on the ship to generate the
force of gravity. Yeah, where it's not just the millennium

(14:49):
falcon and you can walk around wherever. Yeah, because the
bottom line, of course, is that we evolved on a
world with a certain amount of gravitational pull and we're
completely adapted to it. Yeah, everything about our form and
gravity dictates the form of our muscle groups. Uh. And
gravity alone forces a certain level of exercise on you

(15:10):
at all times. So even if you're just you know,
standing in your apartment otherwise doing nothing, your body is
still working with gravity. And on a microscopic level, our
skeleton constantly alters its structure to bear the gravitational forces
of our planet. Even our organs work with it. With
with Earth gravity, I mean our heart beats against gravity

(15:31):
when it pushes blood um up to our brains. So
I mean we are we are just steeped in it.
We often take it for granted. I mean we we
almost always take it for granted. But we are creatures
that have evolved to live with our gravity, with Earth gravity. Yeah,
you don't think about it, but your body is constantly
having to compensate for gravity. I mean, the gravity wants

(15:53):
to pull you towards the floor. The gravity wants to
pull all your blood into your feet. So, like you said,
your circulatory says them, Like you mentioned has to pump
more blood pressure into the top of your body just
to make sure you get an even circulation, all because
of gravity. Indeed, so when we when we send astronauts
into space, when they go into orbit, um, they experience

(16:15):
a certain amount of muscle and skeleptle system deterioration. It's
called getting soft. Yeah, and literally that's that's what happens.
The muscles, especially the underutilized leg muscles, become flabby, lose
tone and mass, Muscular atrophy occurs. Bone becomes weaker because
of the loss of the minerals calcium, potassium, and sodium

(16:37):
um and the bone degeneration can reduce bone in the
lower limbs by so it's essentially a form of osteoporosis
known as space flight osteopenia. Yeah, and astronauts have to
do tons of exercise just to prevent this from being
worse than it is. Yeah, they're a number that there's
a lot of exercise. Um. Also, astronauts will generally take

(17:01):
various vitamins and even some pharmaceuticals. Particularly will take calcium
and vitamin d H. NASA often you know, tends to
have their their astronauts take clay to help to supposedly
help with calcium retention and then also uh, and it's
thought that osteoporosis drugs can be helpful in mitigating this
as well. Um, it's interesting the calcium is especially a problem.

(17:22):
The calcium loss in the bones of our body is
calcium is stored in the skeleton, and when we lose
it in low gravity, it enters the bloodstream, where an
excess of calcium can cause a host of unpleasantries. You know,
that could be as mild as just you know, diarrhea.
But you don't need another reason to have diarrhea in space. Yeah, well,
I mean you don't need you don't need a reason

(17:43):
to have any condition in space. That plays on another
problem that's not a medical condition in itself, but just
the fact that if you're headed towards Mars, or on Mars,
you are so far away from the nearest medical facility. Yeah,
you've got to have it all in the back, right,
you're ready to go. Yeah, what if you get a
kidney stone on Mars? You know? And the other thing

(18:06):
about the the exercise, because it easy to imagine, all right,
we'd have our our our drug hampers is completely filled
up and our our vitamins and our um and our
osto process medications. But then and we'll just be hitting
the treadmill the whole time. But you know, we've been
working with this problem for decades and and uh and
and experts still aren't really convinced, you know, what the

(18:27):
best method of exercises and if exercise really helps to
mitigate this, because you're again you're talking about constant ambient
gravitational pressure on the body and that's not something you
can you can really replicate with our current systems of
you know, treadmills or even some of these, uh, like
these force suits that the the Russians experimented within the past,

(18:48):
where they would be like this, we're just the act
of moving your arm would have a certain amount of
of of exercises. Yeah, the resistance suits, those are interesting, Yeah,
they're Um is a space musical by the name of
the American Astronaut, and there's a character that shows up
named body Suit, and he's this, uh, he's been living

(19:08):
in deep space for a long time and has has
one of these resistant suits on to keep his body strong. Meanwhile,
his father is just this stringy creature that's completely lost
all of his bone mass and as this enormous swollen head.
It's a yeah, um, it's it's a common exploration in
sci fi. I guess some of the heavier sci fi,

(19:31):
like Dan Simon's Hyperion books, there's a there's like a
race of humans that live in wayless environments and very
very tall and elongated, creepy. Well. I mean, actually, if
you've ever seen live footage of astronauts on the International
Space Station, you might have noticed that they look a
little weird, like, yeah, what, what exactly is wrong with

(19:54):
their bodies? That's an effect of weightlessness, where where body
fluids are read distributed up from the legs and into
the chest, shoulders, and heads. So if their face looks
puffy and they look they've got the kind of bodybuilder shoulders,
that's because of the microgravity environment. Yeah, there's so many
things we don't even necessarily think about. One that always

(20:16):
amazes me is how your bladder fills up in a
weightless environment. Yeah, because we've evolved to live in gravity.
So as our bladder fills up, that water is subject
to gravity, and as it starts getting a little bit,
a little bit towards the tipping point, we realize Hey,
I need to go to the bathroom. I should go
and relieve this. But if you're in a weightless environment,

(20:38):
it's not filling from the bottom up, it's just kind
of filling all around. So afternots don't often really realize
they have to go urinate until they've reached like maximum capacity,
like like almost you know, dangerous levels of full bladder.
Oh man, Yeah, so it's kind of so it kind
of transforms, you know, an ad adventurous adult in to

(21:00):
a toddler who suddenly realizes I've got to go to
the bathroom and there's nothing I can do to stop it.
All right, But that's all just in space flight, when
you're in this effectively zero G environment, the micro gravity
environment floating around, when you're on the International Space Station
for a number of months, you can eventually come back
to Earth and retrain. Your body might never be exactly

(21:20):
the same as it was before you went up to
the I S S, but you can you can regain
a lot of lost capacity. One question I have is
to what extent is that going to be true once
astronauts get out of the ship after six months in
weightlessness and then walk around on Mars, Because Mars is
not Earth right less gravity there, So you be you're,

(21:42):
you're you would certainly leave behind this, uh, this weightless
environment of space travel, but you're not. You're certainly not
going back to Earth levels of gravity. You're going back
to something far lighter. Yeah, and so what is the
effect of living in sixty less gravity for years at
a time or the rest of your life. I don't

(22:04):
think anybody knows the answer to that question yet. Yeah,
it's just not something we've we've dealt with thus far.
And and and this is again an area where are
our research into ways to mitigate uh space flight osteopenia
has to improve. Is we have to figure out better
ways to tackle it with improved exercise system improve pharmaceuticals

(22:25):
and vitamin regiments. So it's it's hard to say. Yeah.
And then there are a whole host of other effects
we observe in astronauts and witless environments that are not
even related to the decay of muscle and bone density.
One example would be vision. We ever read about astronaut
vision impairment? Yeah, this is the thing. So on Earth,

(22:46):
like we were saying, our circulatory system has adapted to
give us even blood circulation despite the effects of gravity
yanking our blood towards the ground. So without the gravity,
your body overcompensates for gravity that isn't there and puts
way too much blood into your head, so you can
essentially read out without without the aid of the jet fighter. Well,

(23:08):
the it's actually the continuous effects of this increased blood
pressure in the head that caused the biggest problem. One
common symptom is far sightedness. Another thing is this thing
called cotton wool spots in your field of vision, and
that's caused by damage to the nerve fibers in the
back of the eye. So now we've got a few things.
When you get out of the ship, so you've just

(23:30):
arrived at Mars, you might have decreased bone and muscle density,
possibly brain damage if you didn't take you know, your
proper radiation shielding, and impaired vision. That's not a way
to build a colony. So I I don't know if

(23:50):
the impaired vision effects would carry over onto Mars either
or to what extent the Mars gravity would help solve
the problem. Again, we don't know about the long term
effects of living on reduced gravity. All Right, we're gonna
take a quick break and when we come back, we
will consider the Martian dusty. Alright, we're back, as we've

(24:19):
been discussing. Yeah, we've arrived at Mars and we've we've
just been ravaged by a micro gravity radiation and now
we're actually on the surface and here comes the Martian dust. Right,
So we've dealt with the main threats to health and
well being that people bring up, the micro gravity and
the radiation. But it turns out there are a bunch

(24:39):
of other ones, and and the Martian dust is a
particularly interesting one to me. In December of nineteen seventy two,
the astronauts Harrison Schmidt and Eugene turn On of Apollo
seventeen landed on the Moon and they were carrying out
some surface missions and once upon returning from the Taurus
Littro Valley, which is close to the Sea of Serenity

(25:01):
on the Moon, the two astronauts re entered the lunar
module and Harrison Schmidt reported respiratory distress from inhaling particles
of moon dust that they had tracked into the capsule
with them. Uh and to make it sound cute, he
called it lunar dust hay fever. That does sound cute,

(25:22):
but the actual situation isn't so cute. And while working
on the surface of the Moon, the Apollo astronauts have
have noticed a consistently annoying and troubling thing about the Moon.
It's covered in this sticky, abrasive dust that true fact,
smells like gunpowder, they all report, and it gets all
over everything. Astronauts found that it's these sharp edged, abrasive

(25:47):
dust grains, almost almost like a tiny shards of glass,
and they would embed themselves and surfaces, and it was
just impossible to prevent astronauts from bringing it with them
when they returned from outside. And this is proven a
tough problem for anybody imagining a return trip to the
Moon or a Moon colony, because if the trip involves
any extra vehicular activity, moon colonists are going to have

(26:10):
this dust problem. Yeah, I've read about some of this,
but before it's it's it's interesting. You just see those
images of the Moon and you you kind of default
to imagining it is being covered with you know, just
sand or maybe maybe like a fine flower, uh consistency,
but it's it's it's rough stuff and it gets over everything.

(26:31):
Another aspect is that again it's dark. It's like, uh,
and it's it's dark gray kind of material, and you're
on the Moon and it's say, it coats your instruments,
it coats your equipment, maybe it coats your space suit,
and it's gonna cause whatever it's coding to start heat up,
to heat up in the sun because this is the
dust itself will absorbed the solar radiation. So suddenly it's

(26:54):
like you're wearing a black coat on a sunny day
and you're just getting hotter and hotter because of the
dust on Yeah, and you don't want to sweat like
a pig on the moon, So you could essentially wind
up cooked via lunar dust. Scary thought, but that's the Moon.
Mars might have a similar problem, but basically even more horrible.

(27:17):
So one problem is fine grains of silicate materials. So
here on Earth, human miners often suffer from a disease
called silicosis. If you're working in like a mine or
a quarry, or if you work in tunneling, drilling, sand blasting,
glass works, any of these things, your work environment can
produce extremely fine grain particles of silicon dioxide or silica

(27:42):
dust in the air and silica is a totally common mineral.
It's not one of those things to get upset about.
As a material itself, sand is mostly sica. If ingested
in reasonable quantities orally, it's non toxic. But if you
breathe in extremely fine particles silica dust, they can become
embedded in your lungs and your body can't remove them,

(28:06):
so depending on the level and length of exposure, this
can lead to irritation, swelling, and difficulty breathing, and eventually
to progressive massive fibrosis, which means your lungs are pretty
much destroyed, and long term exposure to crystalline silica is
also considered a cancer risk. This is this is a
bad recipe for long health. Martian soil contains fine grained

(28:30):
silicate particles that are largely different from the particles of
quartz silica that we'd risk breathing on Earth, though they
might produce similar or even worse effects. So years ago,
researchers at Stony Brook University in New York pulverized samples
of the most common basaltic minerals you'd find in the
Martian soil feldspar, pyroxene, and olivine to see what would

(28:53):
happen when this faux Martian dust reacted with moisture the
way it would with the moisture in your lungs if
you breathe in And the results were kind of gross.
A mixture of five million liters of water with a
couple hundred milligrams of the synthetic Mars dust reacted to
create hydrogen peroxide, So fizzy fizzy party times hydroxyl and

(29:16):
a negatively charged oxygen ion called superoxide. Not not really
things you want in your lungs. In addition to this,
scientists believe Martian soil contains perchlorates, which have detrimental effects
on the thyroid and hormone production in the human body.
So not only is it likely to cause irritation and

(29:37):
lung diseases if inhaled chronically over time, it can also
poison you and he gets worse. On Mars, there are
dust storms of titanic proportions. You don't really have to
worry about dust storms on the moon. On Mars, you do.
The dust storms there can become so bad they can
become planet wide dust storms engulfing the entire surface. So

(29:59):
welcome to planet poison storm. Don't breathe in. As far
as I'm aware, there is no known solution to this
problem yet except maybe just never going outside. I guess
if you seal yourself off in an airtight container and
you know you're never going in or out, then you
could probably be okay. But then what are you doing right?
As right? So I read in the past, I think,

(30:22):
in the context of Moon exploration, about NASA researchers looking
into designs for things like handheld vacuums and airlocks. And
I don't know where that research is today, but it
seems like even that would have trouble completely solving the
dust problem, because you only, what, are you just going
to bring an entire ship of vacuums that steadily break
down from all the particles that are surging through the system. Yeah,

(30:46):
and then there's the question of how the dust would
actually affect the equipment in your habitat. So is the
dust going to be clogging air filters, is it going
to be getting into instruments that you need to perform
your scientific work? And so, by and large, the dust
is going to be a huge problem, and it's something
we really need to think about if we're actually going

(31:08):
to be sending people to Mars. And that's assuming that
the dust doesn't suddenly turn into a giant hand like
the Stephen King short story Beach World. Right, yeah, because
then it's a whole set of set of problems in
addition to just breathing it in or or wait a minute,
what does the dust do in mission to Mars? Oh?
You know, I don't think I ever saw mission to Mars. Well,

(31:28):
you're one of the lucky ones, all right, Well, the
next thing to think about, you know, on the surface
seems a little less intensive. Uh, you know, it's not.
It's not as as crazy as dust that's gradually killing you,
or or the loss of phone mass, or even the
harmful effects of radiation. But it is very real, and

(31:51):
you can think of it as just an additional thing
you would have to deal with on Mars. And that
is how life on Mars would affect your circadian rhythm. Um.
And I have to admit I never really thought about
this myself, But a Mars day called a soul is
thirty nine minutes and thirty five seconds longer than an
Earth day. Oh that that's just close enough that it

(32:15):
seems maybe even worse than if it were way different. Well,
you know it, Yeah, and on the surface, it doesn't
maybe it maybe it doesn't sound like much. You might
even think, oh, it's a good thing. I can watch
one extra episode of of my favorite hour long show
Fans Commercials. Right, it's forty minutes. I can get it in, right,
maybe forty minutes of extra sleep. But we actually have

(32:37):
some experience dealing with the problems of an extra forty
odd minutes in the day. Uh As, every time NASA
lands are over on Mars operations teams have to adapt
to the Martians schedule. There's a there's a great article
that deals with this that appeared in Scientific American by
Katie It's an article by Katie Worth titled step into

(32:58):
the Twilight Zone? Can Earthlings adjust to a longer day
on Mars? And she describes how those extra forty minutes,
you know, they weren't bad at first, but you have
the you have this crew and they're dealing with with
with the Martian day, they're dealing with the Earth day,
and they're dealing with both across multiple time zones. So
the forty minutes just begins to add up over time.

(33:19):
It just ends up causing high levels of exhaustion, so
they end up trying limiting shifts to four days in
a row no more. But even this uh causes the
martian minutes to catch up with you after time. Um. Yeah,
because you have to imagine it. It's not just that
you would get an extra long day one day and
then you get to sleep and reset every day. This

(33:43):
accumulation of the extra forty minutes is adding on to
the accumulation of the day before. Now it's like continuous
jet lag. Now we're in for some good news because
one of the things is once you actually get to Mars,
you're at least going to have, you know, cycles of
day and night to tie in with your circadian rhythm.

(34:03):
So it's thought that you would probably adjust pretty well
to this extra forty minutes once you're on the planet. Now,
of course, one of the problems is that you've, of
course you've been traveling through space completely cut off from
cycles of night and day unless there's some sort of
artificial stimulation of your circadian rhythm and uh, and you're
still going to have to on some level deal with

(34:26):
time back come um. And this is where you get
into questions about, all right, what what's going to be
the degree of communication with the home world. Uh. I'm guessing,
especially in an early low budget visit to Mars, is
gonna be pretty minimal. You're not gonna have any direct
skype conversations with your family back home. Now, you're just
gonna be broadcasting your reality television show. Yeah, and with

(34:51):
with some tape delay, right. But um, but the people
back home, the people looking after you and uh and
and seeing how operations are going, they're going to be
the one suffering from that extra forty minutes is they
have to simultaneously live into different time zones at once. Um.
And this this plays into another area that I've thought
about before too, like how do we end up keeping

(35:11):
track of time in general when we start looking towards
an an interplanetary future where you have different lengths of
days on different worlds, um, And then you have to
deal with the distance between those worlds, the time delay
and communication. In some cases, you might even have to
deal with noticeable time dilation exactly. Yeah, if you're talking

(35:32):
about like near light speed travel between different I mean,
the idea of time starts to lose its sense of
universality when you're talking about an interplanetary species. Yeah, it's
a great example of taking a very terrestrial concept and
then trying to make sense of it when we leave
the planet and I and you know, there we've we've

(35:52):
touched on religion in that sense, and you know, now
we're talking about time and the human body there. And
I can't even imagine how many different additions to that
there are that we're not even thinking about, all the
little things that add up to make interplanetary life all
the stranger totally. I I was trying to think about
it in the car on the way to work this morning, like,

(36:14):
how do you synchronize Mars time with Earth time? This
is only forty minutes difference each day, but what do
you do? Does does Mars just have thirty nine points
something extra minutes that go up on the clock and
then it resets to zero or I'm sure nobody would
actually try to do this, But for a minute, my
brain went to the place of would you just make

(36:34):
your minutes a little bit longer and have twenty four
hour days? Or yeah, it's very complicated and uh, and
again we have some experience with this in the way
that that NASA workers looking after any kind of operations
on Mars have to add that forty extra minutes into
their day. Well, I've got another way that we are
completely and totally adapted to Earth, and I think we

(36:57):
haven't fully considered the rampant cations of removing our culture
to a non Earth location, and that is microbiota. Ah,
and this this is uh, this is what I had
never thought of either. But even though on the past,
on the show, we've done a number of episodes dealing
with microbota and and how essentially we're just this population

(37:21):
of different bacteria, uh, in different microbiotic organisms that all
kind of work together as one spaceship. Oh totally. So. Yeah,
imagine you're a colonist on Mars. Where are you going
to get your food? I imagine you're gonna be growing it, right, yeah,
or or you know, getting it from the cube distancer. Yeah.
I mean, so, if you're an astronaut in the I

(37:42):
S S. You can live on vacuum packed shrimp cocktail
for a couple of months and that's not gonna kill you.
On Mars, you can't take all your food with you
and you go. You're gonna have to somehow grow crops
for yourself. Once you're at your semi permanent colony on Mars.
So maybe you could survive on hydroponics like rooting plants
in nutrient field water, or maybe even aeroponics like free

(38:04):
growing roots in the air fed by a nutrient rich
mist or spray. Makes sense, but there's a crucial question there.
We might not be taking into consideration what happens when
you drive a hundred and forty million mile wedge between
earthlings and earth soil, because Mars is a microbiotic desert.

(38:24):
And this is a digression, but I had to report
that Microsoft word wanted to change microbiotic desert to macrobiotic dessert.
That's how that's how appalled Microsoft is that the idea
of life on Lars right. So I read a really
interesting article about this in Slate from called our Guts

(38:47):
May Hate Mars, and the author, Michael Chorrost, makes the
interesting point that the soil we live on isn't just
an inert mass of stuff for plants to sit in.
It's an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem of its own, like
a rainforest or a coral reef, and it is teeming
with life, including bacteria, insects, worms, protozoa, and this ecosystem

(39:10):
is something that humans have never really tried to live
without for years at a time. So a few considerations.
One of them is the bacteria found in earth soil
is probably important for maintaining your microbiotic profile, because, as
we were alluding to a minute ago, your body isn't
just your body. You are a symbiant. You have legions

(39:32):
of benign microorganisms that live inside you, for example, in
your digestive system. And without healthy gut flora, humans can
suffer serious consequences Like what happens to you if you
don't have healthy gut flora. A lot of bad things
gonna happen. I mean, at the very least diarrhea in space, yeah,
which is a bad thing to happen in space. Yeah.

(39:54):
And you know, this reminds me too of some past
episodes we've done on the show dealing with the problems
of creating all these artificial environments that we live in now,
just talking about our our office spaces, where you have
an entirely different microbiotic profile that emerges because it is
separated from the soil, separated from the natural microbiotic environment

(40:15):
in which we live. And that's just here on Earth.
That's your workplace. Yeah, and so in this article, Chorist
points out that scientists say organisms that live in the
earth soil also provide countless quote ecosystem services that go
unnoticed but which are really important for keeping the rest
of life on Earth running smoothly. And these services include
things like the breakdown of dead organic matter, water filtration,

(40:39):
carbon dioxide cycling, and he cites Justin L. Sonnenberg, a
microbiologist and immunologists from the Stanford School of Medicine, who
also says a couple of really interesting things. One of
them is that the soil bacteria on Earth might make
your food better. So when you grow crops in the

(40:59):
t eaming micro jungle of Earth's soil, the plants have
to face off against enemies. They have to face off
against predators parasites of the ecosystem, and this causes the
plants to you know, be like Rocky when in the
training montage. It makes the plant strong, and in getting strong,
they have to synthesize compounds like antioxidants that make the

(41:19):
plants more nutritious for us when we eat them. So
without having to fight off the microbiotic onslaught the plants,
we eat wouldn't do all the same beneficial things for
our bodies that they do here on Earth. And this
is just one example of the many ways the complexities
of earth soil contribute to our well being. The point
is we don't know all of the ways that earth

(41:42):
soil contributes to our well being and to what extent
we might be able to survive without it, and we
might face health and well being problems that are much
bigger than we could have expected. So we get to
Mars and we're flabby and fightless due to our our
bone and muscle loss, and then we're growing some sort
of hydropod pumpkin to eat that's equally flapping and fightless

(42:03):
because it doesn't have to deal with the with the
with the natural uh predators and microbiota that it has
to that it has evolved to combat. Yeah, how many
ways Mars would make us soft? Well. So there's one
potential solution, right, What if we just shipped a bunch
of soil with us two Mars. So you just pack

(42:23):
up dirt from Earth and you take it and you
protected along the way because you don't want irradiated soil either,
and then you grow your crops in that would would
that work. Probably not, and there are a couple of reasons.
One of the things is that we've alluded to already
is cost. It's unbelievably expensive to put mass into orbit,

(42:44):
even more expensive to send it all the way out
of Earth's gravity well as we would need to do
to get it to Mars. The old figure that was
commonly cited was that it cost ten tho dollars per
pound to put stuff into low Earth orbit. With all
the private space launch technology that's currently emerging or will
emerge soon, that number is going to change. Who knows
what it is today or what it will be, but

(43:05):
I think it's safe to say it's still going to
be very, very expensive. And if you're on this corner
cutting Mars mission, they're not going to pony up for
the Earth soil. But there's a second point that's made
by Dr Sonnenberg in this article, and that point is
that it might not matter because in a closed environment
separated from the rest of Earth. Sonnenberg says that the

(43:27):
biodiversity of a soil sample will tend to decrease over
time until you no longer have the balanced microbiotic jungle
that you're looking for in this soil, so you end
up with just this dead soil. Essentially, the soil dies
like you you will. Yeah, this is interesting. It brings
mind to two things. First of all, even though it

(43:49):
would ultimately die, if we just needed to get soil
into orbit, we could take the Great Escape route, right
or the no I guess it was. I guess it
was the Great Escape And maybe it was Shoshank Redemption
as well, where they you have the problem of right,
if you're digging a hole to escape from a prison,
you have to do something with the dirt, so you
just you you you sneak it out a little bit

(44:10):
at a time, right, So maybe we just start putting
like a pocket full of dirt into on on board
each astronaut as they go up every space launch. Yeah,
well that's a great idea. Every time an astronaut goes
to the I S S, they just take some fistfuls
of soil. Yeah. Of course, again, it doesn't really do
much good if it's dead. But the other thing that
kept entering my mind is we consider the possibility of

(44:32):
organisms bringing their soil with them when they travel to
a new land in order to to thrive and to live. Is,
of course Dracula, because when Dracula left his home in
Transylvania to begin life in uh in London, he brought
with him a bunch of that that soil from his
native land, right. Yeah, And you actually see this in
ancient religious concepts, to like the idea that the God

(44:56):
I worship is the god of my lands, and if
I want to work ship my God in a foreign land,
I might want to take some soil from where I
came from with me, so I'm still technically on the
lands of my god when I worship him. Well, there
you go. There's some Internet that's probably some great food
for thought when it comes to any asked ancient astronauts scenarios, right,

(45:17):
because clearly this idea was handed down to us by
quote unquote gods who from another planet and had to
bring their own soil because they were aware of the
problems here of venturing to a new world caught off
from your your Earth. They were the reason the Colossus
of Rhodes was anatomically correct. Uh So, So ultimately, what

(45:38):
will life be like separate from from Earth dirt? We
just don't know, And the prospects are intriguingly scary. And
I think this is something that needs to be researched
very well before somebody makes that leap and says, Okay,
I'm a Martian now. But there's another risk that you
might run when you take the leap to say I'm

(46:00):
a Martian now, which is that you're not going to
have a lot of room on Mars, and you might
not necessarily have a lot to do on Mars, and
you're not going to be able to leave if you
want to write, and you might be confined in this
small space with several other people who you don't get

(46:22):
to get away from if you don't like them. And
and that's where space madness centers EQUI right, what we
we would be remiss if we did not talk about
space madness. So what is the deal with psychological health
on Mars. Well, you know, we've already touched a little
bit on how radiation could play into it. But but yeah,
just when we're dealing with the possibilities of dealing with

(46:45):
a confined space, not much variety in your environment. Um,
certainly on the trip there, but even once you get there,
you know you're you're you're stuck in this little shell.
Perhaps and then occasionally you get to engage in this
very stressful john out into the dust ravage landscape. But
but yeah, you're opening yourself up to the psychological effects

(47:06):
of of of isolation and seclusion. Uh, social isolation as
well as just you know, a lack of variety in
your environment. They've been you know, countless studies that have
looked at at how um isolation affects the human mind.
Now when we don't, you know, it comes back to
what we've evolved to live. And we've evolved to live

(47:26):
in this rather vibrant world of fixed and movable objects,
of interacting people and things. And when you leave that,
your brain kind of starts gnawing on it, creating the
the varied stimuli that you have come to it, your
brain has come to expect. Yeah, so we're here on Earth,
we're the mice on the mouse playground. On Mars, you

(47:49):
might be the mouse in the tiny cage with nothing
but a heroine button to push right and uh, and
you better hope that the heroine button works. And of course, yeah,
the whole time you're dealing with people, which, of course,
just in any given environment, can be stressful. And then
on top of that, you were traveling through space. You're
going to a disco. You're dealing with all the stress

(48:10):
of that, which is only going to exasperate into these
other conditions. Yeah, you're possibly having a lung conditions, serious
lung conditions. You might be suffering from cancer, you might
be suffering brain damage, you might be suffering weakness and
bone density loss, you might be suffering from digestive distress
from lack of proper microbiome. And then you've got to

(48:32):
deal with all these jerks and a tin ft by
tin foot space. Yeah, it's not surely not tin foot
by tin foot. I just threw that out there. However
big the space would be. Let's hope it's bigger than that. Yeah,
it's uh. You know, it's an area that that NASA
has been looking into for a while, but it's also
an area that we haven't had an extensive amount of
research on because for the most part, space flights are

(48:54):
pretty busy, even when you're dealing with these longer johns
up to the I s s, because you have a
lot a lot of that time is taken up by
you know, just getting acclimatized to the orbital environment, forcing
down your food making yourself sleep, braving the indignities of
orbital toilet use, and then of course conducting lots of experiments,

(49:14):
repairs and all the exercise you have to do. Yeah,
hitting that that coldbart treadmill up there. Um, there's plenty
to do. So we're not we're not as yet dealing
with the long term, uh, solitude issues, of the very
long term isolation issues, and people don't spend you know,
six to twelve years of Yeah, but of course NASA

(49:36):
has been looking into it, and they've studied how work, entertainment,
and food can conquer the effects of solitude. The agency
even invested one point seventy four million in a virtual
space station, a computer program designed to council astronauts about
the emotional problems, about their emotional problems and insecurities. So
we're essentially talking about the birth of robots psychologists here, um,

(49:59):
which which I I believe the movie Moon explored. We
had to Kevin Spacey voiced psychologist robot the regularly checks
in with our main character to uh, to see how
he's coping with this isolation. Yeah, it was fun. It
had a number of cool science topics, the Helium three
isolation and a few others. I don't want to spoil,

(50:19):
but uh, there's also a two thousand eight study that
was conducted at the NHC Healthcare in Maryland Heights of Missouri,
and they found that the robotic dog Abbo or abbo
ibo ibo a I b o that's the one. Yeah
he uh he that that particular robot he she whatever
was just as effective at decreasing human loneliness as a living,

(50:42):
breathing dog. That's kind of weirdly depressing but comforting because
we probably don't want to send a dog on one
of these journeys. God knows it's it's gonna be difficult
enough to send a human. But if you have a
robot psychologist, a robot friend all wrapped up into one,
maybe it's a robot dogs I cologist that can help

(51:02):
mitigate the problems. Um. Yeah, I guess if he took
a real dog to Mars, you'd have a big problem
with like taking it out to do its business. Yeah,
I mean in the dust. I've been watching a lot
of shows recently that have a robotic humanoids in it. Um,
the excellent Humans show that's been airing on and you
can tell me about that. I've got to check it out.

(51:23):
It's pretty good. Um. It makes me think, like what
you need to do is you need a robot family
to send this uh the space uh explorer with right.
You can't send him with his actual hit him or
her with her actual family. You know. Another way you
could go is if you want to go down the
total recall route, the Quato route, and then you could

(51:43):
have a friendly companion in your body with you, like
Quato's Uh, well you have Big Marshall Bell and then
he has Quato in his stomach. Yeah, okay, well well
you know, and maybe the the the form that could
take is that essentially the I on your ship or
in your suit, like that is your buddy. Like your

(52:04):
suit is your buddy. You talk to your suit, and
your suit is analyzing your your your your your levels
and your your your current state of physical fitness, and
then also quizzing you about your mental health. So it's
like David Hasselhoff in his car. What's the car called, um,
smart car? Smart cars? No, I don't think it's not
how kit kits the tea, Yeah, because you need somebody

(52:29):
to talk to, so talk to the computer anyway. It's
you know, it's not a perfect, perfect answer. Well, but
but it's the one we've been looking at. Tying back
into our echo Boorgs podcast. I think we would need
better chat pots before this would make any sense. Otherwise
you're just gonna be up there and infuriated that it
won't stop bringing up fruit trees. Yeah. I mean it
comes back to the reminding you of the fruits you

(52:51):
can't get. Yeah. I mean it comes back to the
idea that there there's certain things that we've evolved as
part of our lot to deal with as part of
our lives, and would be dealing with long term um
extraction from that environment, and so what can we do
to mitigate the effects of removal from that environment? Uh,

(53:13):
and or the recreation of that environment on another planet
and during the voyage to that planet. Yeah, So is
your solution to try to simulate Earth on Mars or
to try to recognize that your Mars habitat isn't Earth
and deal with the problems as they arise. I know

(53:34):
that's a tough one. I mean, maybe you try and
find some sort of space between I'm reminded of one
of the elements from Philip K. Dicks The Streets the
Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrick. Um, they're they're they want
to read it just based on that title. Oh yeah,
I mean it's a wonderful book. It's one of his
trippier books and and really one of his best in

(53:56):
my opinion. But you have these individuals in space and
they take this drug called can D which allows them
to share the experiences of these perky pat layouts that
they play around, which is essentially kind of like Barbie
play uh houses with little dolls. Um. But it also
reminds me a lot of the computer game The Sims.

(54:18):
You know, You're really end up. I haven't played it
in you know, over a decade, but I remember when
it came out and I'm playing it, remember how invested
I felt in these uh these little you know, non
existing characters and they're little, very you know, one dimensional lives.
But but it reminded me even then a lot of
of perky pat and and of course the in this scenario,

(54:40):
there's a there's a pharmaceutical, uh means of of increasing
your involvement with perkey Pats. So I don't know, maybe
it's a situation of giving the the astronaut or robotic
family that looks after him and analyzes his, uh his
mental state and then also secretly, you know, pumping ecstasy
and in the whole trip. Maybe that's the the answer.

(55:02):
That's what I'm suggesting. We're gonna have to be way
less prude issue about our methods to keep the astronauts
truly happy. Yeah, you kind of end up having to
perhaps take that that lab rat mentality. Right, This is
maybe less a person in more an experiment. This is
more about the living cargo, and how do we keep
the cargo uh in in shape for the duration? Yeah,

(55:26):
that is an interesting question. How how mercenary do you
want to be about keeping the astronauts on your Mars
colony happy? Like if you found that you could just
give them a drug that would make them, you know,
sort of placated, and then the oldest Huxley sense to
go back to that, you know, if you could, if

(55:46):
you could make a brave new world on Mars, and
and that was a pretty reliable way to keep the
astronauts from going crazy, would you do it? Yeah? I mean,
and it also just drives home that we don't belong there,
right in a very very basic sense, like this is
not our world. And it's it's not how it's completely

(56:07):
inhospitable to the human form. We want to go there.
We want to go there to two so we can say, hey,
we have been to Mars, and then in our grander
visions of the thing, we want to recreate Earth life there.
But is that is that just kind of a ridiculous
notion that we eventually have to get past. Yeah? I

(56:29):
don't know. Is it wishful thinking? I don't want to
take away from this episode to be let's not go
to Mars, right, I mean, because I don't feel that way.
I'm in a lot of ways I support a very
aggressive program of space exploration and colonization. But I think
we're just highlighting how difficult this project is if we

(56:49):
want to do it right, all of the things we
have to learn and all the things we don't we're
not even aware that we don't know about the dangers
of space and Mars and and and colonization of other
bodies in the Solar System. Indeed, the destination is hostile,
the trip is dangerous and lonely, and those are realities
we have to face if we are actually going to

(57:10):
send humans to Mars. Yeah, but if you're one of
those people out there who's working on these problems. Right now,
I salute you and I and I say more people
should support your efforts. Indeed, yeah, I'm still one behind
putting up you know, human on Mars. Uh you know,
just one though, just just one. Yeah, I don't think
we should go crazy, just just one. Really, it should

(57:33):
just be Val Kilmer, just Valkolmer. Or who's going to
be in the upcoming film about the I think it's
Matt Damon. There's a film. Yeah, I heard about that.
I haven't read that book, but I hear good things interesting.
So we'll have to we'll have to revisit this topic
when that film comes out. I guess okay, So that
you have it, your life as a Mars colonists, all

(57:54):
important stuff to think about before you sign on the
dotted line. Right. Hey, if you want to check more
episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you want to
check out our vast archive of videos. We want to
check out our blog posts, links out to our social
media accounts. Head on over to stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That's the mothership and that's where you
will find everything. And if you want to let us
know about an interesting solution you've read about or thought

(58:17):
of to any of these concerns we brought up today,
or a threat that your health might encounter on Mars
that we didn't even think to include. You can email
us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com