September 5, 2025 • 48 mins
We’re taking this week off! But don’t worry, we’ll be back with new episodes starting September 10th. In the meantime, we’re sharing some of our favorite interviews from the year so far. This week, Oz talks with writer Nathaniel Rich about one of the biggest challenges of sending humans to Mars: isolation.
Nathaniel Rich is a novelist, essayist and writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. Rich sits down with Oz to talk about his essay, “Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?” The piece explores NASA's CHAPEA (“Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog”) mission, a simulation meant to test a major challenge of Mars missions – isolation.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Hi Os Voloscin here and Cara Price. We're taking the
week off.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Indeed, we'll be back with new episodes starting September tenth.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
In the meantime, instead of leaving this feed empty, we
wanted to share an episode from earlier this year. This week,
we're reairing my conversation with Nathaniel Rich from January twenty ninth.
He's a novelist, essayist, and writer at large for the
New York Times magazine. We discuss a NASA experiment where
civilians take a simulated trip to Mars and try to
(00:40):
handle the isolation. Hope you enjoy it and thanks for listening.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
NASA has a punch list of eight hundred problems that
must be solved before the first mission to Mars is launched.
Very few of them have to do with problems of
human psychology or really even of in survival, which is
the subject of this experiment that I wrote about, called SHAPEA.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
This particular experiment began with rather intriguing announcement on the
NASA website.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Yeah, it was a little bit like the Wonka Factory,
the Golden ticket that you know, four civilians would be
chosen to go to Mars Asterisk not really Mars, but
a habitat that was built on essentially a stage set
to look exactly like what they expect the first mission
to Mars to look like. And it generated enormous excitement
(01:35):
and people from all over the country rushed to apply.
They wanted the Golden ticket to live out. In most cases,
I think it's kind of childhood fantasy of space exploration
to see if they could withstand psychologically the challenges of
living away from the rest of the everyone else they've
ever known or met.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Welcome to tex Stuff the Story. I'm os Vloschen, and
each week we bring you an in depth interview with
one of the brightest and farthest seeing minds in and
about tech. Karen, I'm excited to bring you this interview
with Nathaniel Rich. When we ask people to come on
the show, it's always because one or other of us
(02:23):
has been fascinated by something they've said, something they've done,
or something they've written.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Well, Nathaniel kind of had me at Mars Asterisk.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Me too. You can't really understand tech today without understanding,
or at least investigating the dreams and the fantasies of
the tech Titans. Colonizing space is such an important touchstone
for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in particular, and also
mentioned by Trump for his inauguration as quote the pursuit
of our manifest destiny.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
He said, put stars and strip What do you say?
Put red, white, and blue? Are stars and stripes on
Mars Marsia.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
So when I came across this article in the New
York Times magazine under the headline can humans withstand the
psychological torture of Mars? I had to know more. In fact,
I remember reading it and just getting goosebumps, and so
I kind of wanted to talk to Nathaniel about how
realistic the dreams of getting to Mars are and what
some of the practical dare I say, technical steps required
(03:18):
to achieve the mark?
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Before you get too excited, Can you just tell me
who Nathaniel Rich is?
Speaker 4 (03:21):
Sorry.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Nathaniel is an author. He's written novels like The Mayor's Tongue,
Odds Against Tomorrow, and King Zeno, but also nonfiction books
primarily about the environment, such as Losing Earth, A Recent
History and Second Nature Scenes from a World Remade. One
critic actually said Rich is a gifted caricaturist and a
(03:42):
gifted apocalyptist. It's his talent for describing the apocalypse which
brought him in some ways to reporting on the Mars
June Alpha project, which asked to you about why did
you decide to write the piece?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
The NASA part of it was almost came secondarily. I
had become obsessed with this history of isolation research, and
particularly by this incredible story of a man named Michel
Sefrey who had launched a series of cave experiments to
(04:25):
test the endurance of people in isolation, in environments where
they're completely cut off from the world. And so he
had run a series of these experiments that culminated with
this experiment by the first female participant in the series,
who was this woman named Veronique Legwyn was in the
late eighties, and she went underground and ended up setting
(04:46):
the record at the time as one hundred and eleven
days underground. And she kept a journal and she wrote
about everything she was thinking about and feeling, and ultimately
what happened was she went a little bit insane, but
also had these moments of great and enlightenment. And it's
a tragic story though, because she came out finally, and
(05:06):
after being celebrated and becoming a kind of national celebrity
for a period of time, entered into this great depression
and ultimately killed herself within a year. And she had
said before her death something to the effect of, you know,
I never was more alive than I was down and
underground when I was all by myself. And that led
me into a whole obsession with these types of experiments.
(05:29):
And I wanted to see if anyone was doing these
things now, because they're on one level, they're completely unethical
because basically what you'd expect happens, which is most people
struggle and often lose their hold on reality. And I
found that no one was really doing these experiments for
that reason, except for NASA, who had continued under the
(05:52):
guise of this Martian project.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
So on the one had NASA putting out the cool applicants,
but on the other hand, they had to build mass
or at least a motion colony on Earth.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Yeah, they had to build or actually print using a
three D printer, a habitat, which is, by the way,
how they will do it. When we get to Mars.
You can't travel thirty three million miles with a house.
You know of towing a house behind you. Yeah, free.
(06:26):
So they can't quite do that, or they don't have
the technology to do that. It's not efficient. And so
what they will do is they will just lug a
three D printer up there and use Martian rock regolith
as ink for this three D printer.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
So they'll tone the sand into cement somehow.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Yeah, and they can do that.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
They do that on this planet too, And there are
you can find online some habitats that have been built,
some houses that have been built this way, not using
Martian rock obviously, but terrestrial rock. And they will construct
this house. It's a seventeen hundred square foot habitat and
they built it in a warehouse at the Johnson Space
(07:05):
Center in Houston, and it's their four little bedrooms and
a lounge and you know, a small indoor garden and
some computers and desks and like a little relaxation space.
And that seventeen hundred foot house habitat was where they
(07:27):
were going to send four people for more than a year.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
And this habitat resembles exactly what they intend to build
on Mars when they get there.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Yeah, I'm sure subject to change, and I suppose part
of this experiment was to determine whether this particular model
would work best.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
But yeah, this is the plan.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
And the kind of simulated colony in the Johnson Space
Center had quite a romantic.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Name, Yeah, Marsdoo and Alpha is the name of the habitat,
and the the mission is named Shapeah, which is I
guess NASA's idea of a sexy name.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
And so okay, So the call goes out for some
volunteers to go to Mons Dunolf. One of the people
who sees the advertisement is Nathan Jones. Who's Nathan.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Yeah, Nathan Jones is in many ways the most fascinating
figure for me in reporting the piece. He's an emergency
room physician from Springfield, Illinois, father of three boys, married
and Nathan was, like basically everyone I spoke to for
the story, was a kind of self professed NASA geek
(08:43):
or obsessive and had always dreamed of doing something special,
bigger with his life. He was obsessed with space travel
and when he saw this posting, he applied immediately and
then told his his wife, who was I think as
safe to say as it was a pault.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
The sequence that seems a little all speaking as American man.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yeah, I don't. I wouldn't have flied in my house.
But he was unique actually in that he was the
only one of the finalists who had children, and as
the father of two small children myself, I felt for
the family. And he was fully aware he was going
to miss out on a lot. You miss a year
(09:29):
with your children, you're missing a lot, and you come
back and the children look like different people. So there
was another dimension of an emotional challenge with him. But
he was determined to do it.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
And how did he prepare.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
He prepared very dutifully by him and his wife had
a whole series. I was fascinated by this, a whole
series of preparations that they did. He wrote little letters
to that he placed around the house in secret hiding
spots that the kids and his wife case he might
find over the course of the year. Sometimes little like
(10:04):
notes of encouragement, like he put a note in the
fuse box for like the first time the lights went
out and said, you know you can do this. I
trust you, just flipped this switch. And so they're all
these sort of sweet and for somewhat poignant point.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
It's almost like the script of a movie where somebody
knows they're going to die.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Yeah, and there's but the poignancy is somewhat compromised. I
found by the fact that it was all a contrived
scenario he was. That's there's a kind of beathos to
the fact that, well, he wasn't actually going to Mars.
It's not quite the Matthew mcconnie Interstellar where he's missing
his children for this this major mission. He's just going
(10:45):
to sit on a stage set for a year. But
that tension between the kind of absurdity of the whole
proposition and then the real emotion that attended every aspect
of this process, for me, that was really the heart
of the story.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
All you have to do is watch the video of
him about to go into the Mars Dunelfa. What did
you feel when you watch somebody you spend time with
his source in such distress?
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Yeah, that was striking. He had predicted it.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
But sure enough, when it came time to enter this habitat,
they had this dramatic ceremony. They were filmed right in
front of the main portal, which is basically just a door.
It wasn't like some major like you're entering a submarine
or something. But they were at a they get a
little press conference, and each one of them had to
give a talk, give a little statement, and he broke down.
(11:41):
He couldn't finish it because he was so overcome by
the thought of saying goodbye finally to his family for
this long period of time.
Speaker 5 (11:50):
But I believe that tomorrow will only be possible because
we step into Mars Dune Alpa today. And with that
in mind, I also want to take a moment to
sincerely think the great many people who've worked tirelessly in
so many countless hours to get us to this point. Also,
thank you to our families and friends for their sacrifices.
(12:12):
We see, we know those sacrifices. We couldn't be here
without your love and support. Sorry, Sorry to my wife
and kids.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
I love you, the moon. I'm sorry, bars and back.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
And it's very moving and upsetting and sort of sweet
and horrible in some ways as well. It's something that
he brought upon himself. But I think what's key to
understand is that everybody in the mission, from the administrators
to the participants, felt very certain that what they were
doing was a critical next step towards this wonderful dream.
(12:57):
Of Humanity's next chapter, they felt that there is no Mars,
there is no exploration of Mars unless you have the
shapea experiment.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
I'm not convinced that's true at all.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
I mean, I wrote about that, but they certainly were,
and so they did feel that they were sacrificing, making
a major personal sacrifice towards achieving a great goal for
all of humanity, which.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
May have kept them safe. And the woman you mentioned
at the beginning, the French woman who took her own life,
does she have that same sense of mission.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
That's a great point.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
There is some commonality, and that there was this idea
that they were on a kind of different frontier of
human psychology. But yes, it's not it was. I don't
think it was quite as ennobling. The stakes were quite
as high as you see with NASA and all the
trappings of NASA.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
And also she was totally alone, whereas Nathan had three companions.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Right right, And so there's some distinctions there, although I
will say that in the long history of experiments in
which people are together in isolation, they suffer also, I mean,
maybe it's not quite as extreme, but you know, in
conducting the research for the piece I spoke with a
bunch of psychiatrists and historians of science and historians of psychology,
(14:19):
and I learned that the definition of isolation is not
necessarily being alone. It's being removed from your normal life
and from the people close to you. So you can
be in isolation with other people, and in fact, many
of the same psychological effects are experienced whether or not
(14:41):
there are you're with other people, if you're cut off
from the people who are most important to you.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
When I think about the history of space movies is
obviously the famous Houston. We have a problem. Could Nathan
and co stay in touch with homebase and even with
their families while they were in Mars Dunolfa.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
They were very scrupulous about imitating the reality, the expected reality,
which is that there's this time lapse for any communication
from Mars because it's far away and you're dealing with
the limits of the speed of sound and technology, and
so there's something it depends on where it is in
the orbit, but essentially there's like a twenty nine minute lapse,
(15:22):
and so you can't have a conversation, any kind of
normal conversation, but they can send messages. But the other
problem is that every form of electronic communication from the
habitat has to go through the same channel, So that
includes any kind of data that the habitat is sending
(15:44):
back to Earth about I don't know, oxygen levels or
what's happening in the experiments, or any kind of computer connections.
And so that's sort of the best case scenario, and
that actually the lag can be much longer, and the
low larger the audio file or the text file, the
computer file, the longer it takes of sending a short
(16:05):
video even in low resolution, could take days, where sending
a one line text message maybe takes only half an
hour or so. So they could communicate, but only in
this clipped way with all of these ellipses essentially between communications.
So if there's an emergency, say back at home, they
(16:26):
couldn't just start having a conversation with them. Now, in reality,
since they were on a stage set, they could break
the experiment at any time if someone just like I
don't know, cut off their finger or something, but they
would try to they would do anything to avoid breaking
the experiment obviously, So yeah, they were reduced to these
sort of intermittent text messages essentially that would be relayed
(16:51):
at unpredictable intervals.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
How did you choose the headline field story?
Speaker 4 (16:56):
I don't choose the headlines from a not a lot.
I don't.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
I can consult on them, and I can say this
one's worse than the other one.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
But the headline the New York Times magazine went with
was can humans withstand the psychological torture?
Speaker 4 (17:11):
I mean, it's pretty good. I can't.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Yes, yes, And that's also what it's about, basically, can
we can people survive this? Because most of what NAS
has been asking over the course of its space program
is can we physically get people into space? Can we
physically put them on another planet? Very little thought has
been given into can human beings once they're there survive psychologically, emotionally.
(17:38):
And that's that's what this experiment is, at least ostensibly about.
And it's definitely what the story is that I wrote
us about.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
When we come back. More from Nathaniel rich on why
we're so obsessed with going to Mars and how historically
attitudes towards Mars have always revealed deeper cultural undercurrents. How
close is NASA to putting humans on Mos? They've been
predicting for many years that it's just around the corner.
(18:07):
They keep pushing back the window.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Even a few years ago, I think by twenty eighteen
they had predicted that it would be no later than
the end of the twenty twenties. I think now they're
looking more to the middle of the next decade. But
they are full speed ahead, and I think they're very
confident that they will get people to the planet in
(18:33):
a fairly short amount of time. The technical problems that
lay before them that we referenced are not seen as
intimidatingly difficult. They're just math problems to be worked out,
is the sense that I got from speaking with one
of these senior propulsion engineers. So there is, and there
has been for quite a while within NASA, quite a
(18:55):
lot of optimism that this is going to happen.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
It's going to happen pretty soon.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
And why why mos Well.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
That's the million dollars, that's the million dollar question. I mean,
there's a lot of different rationales. The main ones you
hear from NASA is it represents scientific progress. It's the
next step for human exploration of the universe, and certainly
human progress in this space exploration. There's also the rationale
that through the kind of innovation that's necessary to put
(19:25):
people on Mars or to reach any new milestone in
the space expeditions, that there will be some kind of
unpredictable benefits, technological benefits that can be applied for all
of humanity, so that maybe they'll invent new materials or
new types of devices that can then make our life
on Earth easier. And there are plenty of examples I
(19:46):
think of that in the past. And then there's a
kind of political rationale, which is to say that we
need to do it before someone else does.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
There's a national pride on the line.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
I mean, it's like in the sixties when I wanted
to put a man on the moon first. Is there
a parallel to the sixties in that respect, Yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Would say not only is there a parallel, but I
think NASA in its whole frame of thinking. If you
can speak of something the size of an agency, the
size of NASA as a personified in some way, but
I think the whole enterprise is really stuck in the sixties,
if not the fit nineteen fifties one it's created. So
it's very much it's you know, you see this sort
of vestigial, almost cold war mentality that I think informs
(20:29):
all almost every aspect of the whole enterprise.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
What does it say to you that in the sixties
it was the president JFK sort of outlining this national
mission to put a man on the moon, and now
in the twenty twenties it's l Musk and to a
certain extent Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Yeah, I think you can learn all you need to
know about a culture or a society by studying its
attitudes about Mars. You know, it's it's certainly now it's
dominated by a kind of There are a few different strands.
There's a kind of private enterprise strand, but that is
often including in the case of Musk, closely alloyed with
(21:10):
a libertarian fantasy of a lawless world in which people
can stake their claim a kind of wild West and
not have regulation and oversight. There are groups of Mars
enthusiasts out there that are very much explicitly libertarian ideologues
who hope to start a libertarian society on Mars.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
So that exists if you.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
Go back to the fifties and sixties, where at this
very different place in our culture, obviously in society, a
place of tremendous global cooperation relatively that gave birth to
the entire sort of modern space race, even though you
have a competition between the Cold War powers. But you
can even go back further and if you look at
the late nineteenth century when Chaparelli, a Milanaisy astronomer, observed
(21:59):
that there were canals on Mars, there was this great
fascination for decades about are people living on Mars? Are
Martians building canals? And it was very much an expression.
You can find very clear a correlation between the kind
of excitement of the industrial age, and there was a
period where people were competing with Mars to build more
(22:20):
canals as fast as possible, as also of course during
the same period of the digging of the sus canals.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
So this was you know, this is the New York Times.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
This is not just some like weird thing is this
is at the time generally accepted that we're in this
race against the Martians. So it's always been a kind
of repository Mars for the kind of subconscious of the
culture that observes it. And I think that's true today.
And I think as our society changes, probably our view
(22:48):
of Mars will change. In tandem with it.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
You've written that future Mars voyages will have to want
to travel to Mars more than almost anyone else in
the world. They'll have to embrace the knowledge that for
at least five hundred and seventy days, they will be
the most isolated human beings in the history of the universe.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Yes, they will have to, because that's what they're signing
up up for.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
What will that do to them?
Speaker 3 (23:13):
You know? I think a distinction has to be made
between the kind of person who wants to be an
astronaut and wants to go on a mission like this,
like the people I wrote about, like Nathan Jones. But
then once we start talking about a permanent settlement or colonies,
we're talking about a very different group of people. So
you have this sort of kind of zelot astronauts who
(23:35):
are perfectly fit, who are the most stable people you've
ever met, enormous reserves of self concentration and self reliance
and all the rest, and then the rest of us right,
and for colony to exist, it has to look very different.
And a major criticism that I encountered in researching the
piece from close watchers of the NASA program is that
(23:58):
Even if this experiment has some value to predict the
ability of say, astronauts to survive in this setting, it
will have no value for the rest of us, who
you know, all kinds of other considerations would have to
be made. And so we're certainly not at the stage
where we're asking can people have families up there? Can
(24:19):
people give birth? There's some major biological challenges there. What
happens if someone gets sick, what happens if someone misses home,
you know, enters a depression, and none of that. We're
nowhere near those kinds of questions yet, but I think
that's if they continue to hit these benchmarks, that's where
this is ultimately heading.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
So when you wrote the piece Nathan and co In
the mods Habitat, and since publication, they've of course come back.
Do you know what the experience was like for Nathan?
Speaker 4 (24:49):
No, they're not.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
They're basically sworn to secrecy. And this was the level
of secrecy that shrouded just about every aspect of the
experiment was somewhat astounding or surprise for me. It was
as it reporting the story at least talking to the
NASA people and to some extent the participants themselves, you'd
(25:14):
think I was investigating I don't know, Abu grab or
something like. The way that it was talked about extremely confidential. Now,
their justification was that they want to run the experiment
multiple times, and they don't want prospective applicants to know
anything about what they're going to do. They don't want
to because it would, I guess, diminish the value of
what they find if people already know, like, these are
(25:36):
the kinds of things we're going to do when we're there.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
This is what happened to people.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
It struck me as slightly ridiculous because, on the one hand,
very similar experiments have been conducted many times, including by NASA,
and those results are public, so the results.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
NASA haven't published any results of this.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Not that I'm aware of, no, and you know, they
release these very anodyne statements.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
It's a success. Everyone had a great time.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
And you put the story in the context of the
history of isolation research. But more specifically, it seems like
this particular simulation of life on Mars has happened multiple
times in the past and is also being replicated multiple
times right now all around the world. Can you kind
of describe the spread of this type of experiment being run.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Yeah, I guess it depends on how narrowly you want
to define the experiment. But NASA has been doing some version,
conducting some version of this experiment since before NASA was
even called NASA. I mean, they had some of the
early first astronauts did isolation experiments. They would put them
(26:41):
in little pods for long periods of time, sometimes in
fairly brutal configurations and sometimes completely in isolation, especially back
in the fifties when they thought that astronauts would have
to be propelled in tiny little vessels for months at
a time into outer space. But there was another similar
experiment called High Seas, which was the subject of a
(27:04):
really fascinating book by the writer Kate Green, who was
one of the original crew members they ran that experiment.
I don't know, I think a dozen times. That was
a similar idea in a habitat that was built on
Mona Loa Mountain in Hawaii, and it was four people
or sometimes six put into this environment for months at
(27:25):
a time, and Green writes very elegantly and movingly about
the experience and on the kind of madness of it
and what it did to her life.
Speaker 4 (27:35):
The book once upon a time I lived on Mars it's.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Called And then there was a crazy experiment called Mars
five hundred that was administered by a Russian agency called
which has a name that I love, called the Institute
of Biomedical Problems. So of course that's who did this
completely barbaric experiment where they locked six male crew members
together for five hundred and twenty days. Wow, that was
(28:01):
in twenty ten and eleven in a kind of fake
spacecraft on a fake Mars and that was pretty well
studied and people participants lost their hair and lost weight.
But then there's NASA, if they have something like a
dozen different versions of this going on at all times.
(28:21):
There are all different configurations, different amounts of time, different
number of participants.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
So did you lost? Do you say to NASA, why
do you need to keep doing that?
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Yes, that was one of my big questions, why do
we keep doing this? And don't we know what happens?
Even before the NASA history, there's this whole other history
of people doing similar isolation experiments, and their official answer was, yes,
we've done similar some experiments, but actually there's no substitution
for this is far closer to the expected reality and experimentally, scientifically,
(28:53):
all of the previous experiments are essentially useless, and this
is the only one that will matter. Now if you
believe that, you also have to then wonder well. And
this is what some of the people who study that's
pointed out to me. Yes, okay, this experiment, even if
it's its exact simulation, a perfect simulation of what the
(29:14):
first Mars expedition is going to be, you're only testing
a group of four people or eve an n of
four right, experimentally speaking, and so the statistical value of
this experiment is close to nil. You'd have to run
this experiment thousands of times for it to be statistically reliable,
(29:36):
and of course they're not going to do that. So
even if you grant them this sort of scientific argument
that this experiment is unlike all the other ones, even
though they all basically have the same results, it doesn't
actually have much scientific value unless they would do it all,
you know, fifty.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
Times or a thousand times.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
I'm not sure where the probability charts cut off, but
as it stands, they're probably going to do it one
or two more times, at which point they'll be ready
to hurl people.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Up to Mars. But from that point of view, was
this about understanding if humans can withstand isolation or was
this some we talked to the beginning about the technical
problems NASA has to solve or was this Were there
any technical problems they were looking to solve with this?
Speaker 3 (30:18):
That was probably the That was the point where I
was most I mean, there's something that's where I sort
of laughed in the reporting, although it's kind of horrible. So, yes,
the official line is where we want to test the
human side of this. We have all these divisions doing
the science and the technology, and this is the human
research side. And in fact, there is a human Research
(30:40):
division within NASA that was administering the experiment. However, they
were partnered with two other divisions, and the division that
oversaw the whole experiment was actually run by someone named
Rachel McCauley, who is a propulsion engineer. She's the one
who decides which rocket will do the job best. And
(31:04):
in order to make that determination, she needs to nail
down a bunch of variables. And one of the main
variables is how much weight needs to be carried by
the rocket ship. And so what that means is, of
course the weight of the people, but also how much
food do they have to take? And so when I
talked to her, she was like, very blithely kind of
(31:28):
dismissive of the whole human psychological aspect of the thing,
and instead she focused on how much food are they
going to eat? Like what's the weight? How much waste
are they going to produce? And once I have those figures,
then I will know exactly what kind of propulsion device
to use.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
And so then I went a little bit dubious.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Yeah, and so I was like, what, no, I mean,
I believed her because she was running the experiment.
Speaker 4 (31:54):
She's a solid propulsion systems engineer.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
And so then I went back to the sort of
human research people and they're like, oh, no, no, no, it's
all about human psychology. But in fact the person they
were reporting to, the person who was running the whole thing,
said that was not the case. And so actually, I
think if you follow the money, you start to wonder, well,
is this whole human aspects side of it part of
(32:18):
the marketing and it's frankly irrelevant to what NASA's real
concern is, which is, yeah, how many pounds of food
do we need to put on this thing?
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Geez.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Stay with us for more from Nathaniel rich on why
dreams of Mars and dreams of AI are inextricably linked
and why some techno optimists theorize that humans would evolve
into AI powered martians. There was a part of your
story that's really stuck out to me was that NASA's
(32:55):
chief research scientist Dennis Bushel said that as Colonis, he
most becomes more feasible, colonists themselves will evolve into mortians.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Did that surprise you.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
Yes, although a little bit.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
It was surprised me to see him write about that
so openly. This is Yes, This chief scientist at the
Langley Research Center, who had been I think he recently retired,
had been a NASA for sixty years, and he published
this sort of opus about the institutional view of deep
space exploration, and he said, what I think a lot
(33:34):
of scientists have predicted is that if people are able
to survive on Mars for any extended amount of time
with oxygen and all the rest, that ultimately their bodies
will change. That over time, because of the radiation exposure,
because of the reduced gravity, that there will be real
(33:57):
physiological changes to their bodies. There's no way out of that.
So essentially one of the kind of tricks for surviving
Mars is to live there long enough so that people
evolve into Martians and they look different and they probably
have elongated heads and maybe different diets and all the rest.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Of it evolved means, of course natural selection. Survivor are
the fittest on Moss exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
We're talking about a generational No, it's a generational shift.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Now.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Of course they have to solve things like inconvenient things
like procreation on Mars and all the rest of that.
But yes, that's the long term view, is that we
won't have to solve every problem perfectly because people will
just start to there'll be natural selection and they'll be
forced to evolve into these other Martian creatures. And that
seems to be NASA's view.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
There's another piece you wrote in The New York Times recently,
which was a review of Ray Causweill's book The Singularity
Is Nearer. Can you talk about who Ray Causweil is
that book and how viewing that book syncs up with
your writing on this experiment.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
Yeah, Kurzweil is a kind of god of Ai who's
called the godfather of AI, who is for many decades
has been predicting the rise of artificial intelligence and ultimately
the singularity. But yes, his idea is that there will
be nanobots powered by artificial intelligence that we will inject
(35:29):
into our bodies, and that they will swim through our
bloodstream into our brains and connect our neocortex to the cloud,
linking us up to the I guess the Internet are
really like the global repository of all human information civilization,
and so at that point when we're just kind of
wired into intelligence, electronic intelligence, that for him is a singularity,
(35:54):
and he thinks that's coming very soon, basically by the
end of the decade.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Well, but there's something to me which is very striking
in the sense that Ray caswild this Sea the godfather
of AI, on the one hand, and on the other hand,
Dennis Bushnell, the NASA Chief Scientist, I'm both saying in
one way or another that within our lifetimes, the technological
future will mean that we no longer conform to the
(36:22):
current definition of what it is to be human.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Yeah, although I think you'd be hard pressed to find
a definition that would admit that would be universally agreed
to on what it means to be human. True, now,
we already and that's part of Kurzwell's argument, is that
we already atsourced so much of our mind and identity
to technology that we rely on the Internet to remember
(36:48):
things for us, our digital record, a lot of our
powers are only possible through technology. And if we were
just put in the wilderness, most of us we'd be
able to survive a couple of weeks. But yes, both
of these visions of they're both kind of these technologically
optimistic views of the world. There's this kind of viscerally
(37:14):
disturbing aspect to them, which is that they require us
to reimagine physically what will look like, you know, but
even putting aside all the sort of mental psychological aspect
of it, that we're going to be morphed into these
other different kinds of creatures that are going to be
like physically in some ways unrecognizable. And Kurzwill has this
(37:35):
whole thing about how soon people be able to design
their own bodies the way you can design like a
virtual avatar, and that we can we'll have people have
wings and the tusks and whatever you want, you know, feathers,
and that part of it tends not to be spoken
aloud or advertised as much as the part about, you know,
(37:57):
improving our intelligence. But I think think what was striking
to me about Curzweil's book and what I wanted to
write about is let's not forget the part where he
the prerequisite for all of these future predictions is that
we're injecting microscopic robots into our brains and our bloodstream.
Let's not lose track of that part of it, so that, yes,
(38:19):
I think you're right to draw a kind of a
parallel with the Mars visions. They tend to collide in
the realm of artificial intelligence. It's not surprising that Elon Musk,
you know, is obsessed with both Mars and AI.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
You used the phrase earlier on a conversation about mourning,
and one of the pieces of Cozweil's book that you
draw out is him talking about basically making an AI
version of his father, who passed away in nineteen seventy
to be able to talk to him about music. And
one of the other things I noticed in the piece
about Mars was the crop garden in the Mars June
(38:55):
Alpha colony, which wouldn't be for eating, but rather for
the mental health of the participants. You know, it's I
guess it makes me think of that whole sort of
cliched thing about the fisherman who becomes a millionaire and
then returns to where he lived to fish. The craving
for the kind of things which are the touchstones of
(39:15):
what we think about as our human experience also is
present in these future fantasies.
Speaker 4 (39:22):
Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
That's another major point of convergence I think, is this
that once you peel back this techno optimistic fantasy of
how things are going to be, you find this deep
sense of longing for how things once were. You certainly
(39:44):
see it in Kurswell, where after hundreds of pages of
talking about all the wonders of this new technology, all
the conveniences, and how we can travel have beach holidays
without leaving our houses through virtual reality and all the
rest of it, his ultimate goal is to reanimate his
dead father, who was a composer not of some renown
(40:07):
and a conductor in New York. And he's already gone
so far as to program an AI version of his
father that trained on his father's letters and writings and
personal documents and his and his music. In the pages
of the book, he has a there's a transcript of
a conversation that that Curswell has with his dead father,
(40:29):
and that to him is that's his great hope, is
to bring back his dad. In the same way in Mars,
I was struck by the mournful quality of this whole enterprise,
and everyone I asked, every sort of expert I interviewed,
I asked, there's something, there's something just a little bit
(40:49):
upsetting about all of this, like what you know, and
they all kind of many people kind of agreed, but
they couldn't put their finger on it until I spoke
to this one historian of isolation experiments, Mattius at Cornell,
and he said, this thing that for me is the
heart of the story, and to some extent, it's the
heart of the Curzwell and even ai store, which is
the urge to try to recreate a perfect world, is
(41:12):
always going to be about rehearsing what we got wrong here.
He told me, we're not chasing Mars, We're mourning Earth.
That struck a chord with me because I feel like
that is the through line here, that there's this attempt
to chase something that we've lost, and you know, for Mattias,
(41:33):
he was talking about essentially a world ruined by climate
change and environmental degradation, and that the ultimate fulfillment of
the Mars fantasy, at least in our age, seems to
be to terraform the planet and create a kind of
idyllic second Earth that won't be marred by all the
(41:53):
mistakes that we've made here. And the Ai fantasy has
the same component. It's, you know, we'll all be young
and and free of sin in a way, and that
I think that's true, and I think that's I think
we lose something when we just assume that all of
these stories are about what the way they're advertised.
Speaker 4 (42:16):
It's like progress.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
I think it's also there's a kind of a morning
of something that we've lost that we're trying to get back,
and we don't quite know how to do it, and
so we're trying to build a fancy news sports car
to get us there, but we can't.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
The thing that I found the most interesting about this
piece that you did was this idea that, like, isolation
is not about being alone. Yes, isolation is about being
away from community, absolutely, and you can be with the
community of people in a place that isn't home and
be very isolated.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Well not enough thing. You know. One of the questions
I didn't ask Nathaniel, but which I kind of wish
that I had, was this interest in isolation research, Like
we are constantly bombarded with this idea of the loneliness epidemic,
and like, even though we're more connected, were more isolated
than ever. And I was wondering if there was a
kind of another text spread that I actually didn't pull on,
but perhaps should have done about you know, why this
(43:21):
cultural moment is so interested in isolation?
Speaker 2 (43:23):
That's right? And I think that, you know, I mean
I think about it all the time when I'm sitting
at home on the couch on my phone, feeling incredibly
connected to people and like how I could survive that way,
but also questioning like do I want to live that way? Right,
you know, and sort of how do I force myself
out of that?
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Now.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
That really has nothing to do with going to Mars Asterisk.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
But you are somebody who grew up as a lover
of science fiction. Your father was a science fiction author. Yes, so,
I mean some people like to be very dismissive of
muscum Bezos and their dreams of space. You know, I
think they are two characters who are probably can deal
with the bit of stick. But I don't think it's
(44:04):
wrong to dream and even plan about space exploration.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Well. I think part of it is a colonizer's instinct,
But I also think this idea of like what is
outside of our reach is always something that will fascinate
writers of science fiction, will always fascinate even you know,
the most practical technologists, because it's something that in a
certain way is a fantasy. Like even the idea of
(44:32):
like having to bring a three D printer to Mars
because we can't lug certain things there. I mean, these
are such far out concepts, you know.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
I find them exciting. I find them exciting, I think,
but I also did find it very tragic this idea
of like the compulsion to repeat these quite damaging experiments,
of sending people to simulate life on Mars and hurting
them in the process in their life on Earth.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Yeah. Of course, we just had Trump, on day one
of his second term, simultaneously make an executive order to
drop out of the Paris Climate Accords and declare that
we will launch astronauts into space. And I quote, plant
the stars and stripes on the planet Mars. So this
twinning of saying goodbye to Earth and embracing Mars actually
(45:19):
feels very salient and very right.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Now, Well, that's true, But what of this leaves me
the question about you? Is there anything that could be
done that I could offer to induce you to spend
three hundred and fifty days in as ssimulated Mars.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Now I went to space camp. You'll remember, or maybe remember,
but I do remember. Now I did go to space camp.
I am an intellectual explorer. I am not a physical explorer.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
You're not a psychon one either, No, I'm.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Definitely not a psychoap and I did. I found the
story of the woman was at LeGuin really really tragic.
And I do think that what's interesting is that in
moments of you know, innovation or exploration, we do test
people's psychological limits. Do we have to? I don't know,
(46:10):
you know, but I think that for me personally, I
am not compelled by living for that long outside of
the sort of my normal life. No are you?
Speaker 1 (46:24):
No, No, I'm not. But that sense that we talked
about of these experiments in some ways being a kind
of psychological mourning for what we're losing. You did make
me think about environmental degradation. And you know, there are
these I've seen these kind of techno fantasy illustrations of
what life on Mars might look like, and they're basically
(46:46):
these biospheres into which you have crammed, like the Swiss Alps,
the Grand Canyon, the Mediterranean Sea, like beautiful animal.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
I also just think we're still human beings right well
now for now, but you know, we project all of
our fantasies still in the world of the creature comforts
that we want. Do I want to ski on Mars?
I guess right, because I like skiing here.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
You know, it makes you remember just how wonderful, you know,
this earth of ours is. And what I loved about
this interview and took away from it is when you
play out the fantasy and when you actually ask, you know,
one of the chief research scientists at NASA, what this
looks like in the future. It's not just going to Mars.
It's evolving into a new species with different shape of head,
(47:32):
with a different reaction to radiation. And what that says
to me is this is not just you know, going
on a fun trip. This is essentially saying that there's
going to be a fundamental categorical shift in US as
a species in order to colonize Mars. And it's just
a very weird and I find disturbing thought.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
Again, not something I would do.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
That's a good place to leave it. That's if a
tech Stuff Today. Today's episode was produced by Sina Ozaki,
Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez, and Lizzie Jacobs. It was executive
produced by me Oswaaloshin, Kara Price, and Kate Osborne for
Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell by Heart Podcasts. The Engineer is
(48:15):
Beheit Fraser, Kyle Murdoch, Rodar Themsong Join us on Friday
for Textuff's The Week in Tech, when we'll explore the
origin story of our current obsession with step counting. Please rate, review,
and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at
gmail dot com. We want to hear us on your mind.
Hi Os Voloscin here and Cara Price. We're taking the
week off.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Indeed, we'll be back with new episodes starting September tenth.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
In the meantime, instead of leaving this feed empty, we
wanted to share an episode from earlier this year. This week,
we're reairing my conversation with Nathaniel Rich from January twenty ninth.
He's a novelist, essayist, and writer at large for the
New York Times magazine. We discuss a NASA experiment where
civilians take a simulated trip to Mars and try to
(00:40):
handle the isolation. Hope you enjoy it and thanks for listening.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
NASA has a punch list of eight hundred problems that
must be solved before the first mission to Mars is launched.
Very few of them have to do with problems of
human psychology or really even of in survival, which is
the subject of this experiment that I wrote about, called SHAPEA.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
This particular experiment began with rather intriguing announcement on the
NASA website.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Yeah, it was a little bit like the Wonka Factory,
the Golden ticket that you know, four civilians would be
chosen to go to Mars Asterisk not really Mars, but
a habitat that was built on essentially a stage set
to look exactly like what they expect the first mission
to Mars to look like. And it generated enormous excitement
(01:35):
and people from all over the country rushed to apply.
They wanted the Golden ticket to live out. In most cases,
I think it's kind of childhood fantasy of space exploration
to see if they could withstand psychologically the challenges of
living away from the rest of the everyone else they've
ever known or met.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Welcome to tex Stuff the Story. I'm os Vloschen, and
each week we bring you an in depth interview with
one of the brightest and farthest seeing minds in and
about tech. Karen, I'm excited to bring you this interview
with Nathaniel Rich. When we ask people to come on
the show, it's always because one or other of us
(02:23):
has been fascinated by something they've said, something they've done,
or something they've written.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Well, Nathaniel kind of had me at Mars Asterisk.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Me too. You can't really understand tech today without understanding,
or at least investigating the dreams and the fantasies of
the tech Titans. Colonizing space is such an important touchstone
for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in particular, and also
mentioned by Trump for his inauguration as quote the pursuit
of our manifest destiny.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
He said, put stars and strip What do you say?
Put red, white, and blue? Are stars and stripes on
Mars Marsia.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
So when I came across this article in the New
York Times magazine under the headline can humans withstand the
psychological torture of Mars? I had to know more. In fact,
I remember reading it and just getting goosebumps, and so
I kind of wanted to talk to Nathaniel about how
realistic the dreams of getting to Mars are and what
some of the practical dare I say, technical steps required
(03:18):
to achieve the mark?
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Before you get too excited, Can you just tell me
who Nathaniel Rich is?
Speaker 4 (03:21):
Sorry.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Nathaniel is an author. He's written novels like The Mayor's Tongue,
Odds Against Tomorrow, and King Zeno, but also nonfiction books
primarily about the environment, such as Losing Earth, A Recent
History and Second Nature Scenes from a World Remade. One
critic actually said Rich is a gifted caricaturist and a
(03:42):
gifted apocalyptist. It's his talent for describing the apocalypse which
brought him in some ways to reporting on the Mars
June Alpha project, which asked to you about why did
you decide to write the piece?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
The NASA part of it was almost came secondarily. I
had become obsessed with this history of isolation research, and
particularly by this incredible story of a man named Michel
Sefrey who had launched a series of cave experiments to
(04:25):
test the endurance of people in isolation, in environments where
they're completely cut off from the world. And so he
had run a series of these experiments that culminated with
this experiment by the first female participant in the series,
who was this woman named Veronique Legwyn was in the
late eighties, and she went underground and ended up setting
(04:46):
the record at the time as one hundred and eleven
days underground. And she kept a journal and she wrote
about everything she was thinking about and feeling, and ultimately
what happened was she went a little bit insane, but
also had these moments of great and enlightenment. And it's
a tragic story though, because she came out finally, and
(05:06):
after being celebrated and becoming a kind of national celebrity
for a period of time, entered into this great depression
and ultimately killed herself within a year. And she had
said before her death something to the effect of, you know,
I never was more alive than I was down and
underground when I was all by myself. And that led
me into a whole obsession with these types of experiments.
(05:29):
And I wanted to see if anyone was doing these
things now, because they're on one level, they're completely unethical
because basically what you'd expect happens, which is most people
struggle and often lose their hold on reality. And I
found that no one was really doing these experiments for
that reason, except for NASA, who had continued under the
(05:52):
guise of this Martian project.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
So on the one had NASA putting out the cool applicants,
but on the other hand, they had to build mass
or at least a motion colony on Earth.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Yeah, they had to build or actually print using a
three D printer, a habitat, which is, by the way,
how they will do it. When we get to Mars.
You can't travel thirty three million miles with a house.
You know of towing a house behind you. Yeah, free.
(06:26):
So they can't quite do that, or they don't have
the technology to do that. It's not efficient. And so
what they will do is they will just lug a
three D printer up there and use Martian rock regolith
as ink for this three D printer.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
So they'll tone the sand into cement somehow.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Yeah, and they can do that.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
They do that on this planet too, And there are
you can find online some habitats that have been built,
some houses that have been built this way, not using
Martian rock obviously, but terrestrial rock. And they will construct
this house. It's a seventeen hundred square foot habitat and
they built it in a warehouse at the Johnson Space
(07:05):
Center in Houston, and it's their four little bedrooms and
a lounge and you know, a small indoor garden and
some computers and desks and like a little relaxation space.
And that seventeen hundred foot house habitat was where they
(07:27):
were going to send four people for more than a year.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
And this habitat resembles exactly what they intend to build
on Mars when they get there.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Yeah, I'm sure subject to change, and I suppose part
of this experiment was to determine whether this particular model
would work best.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
But yeah, this is the plan.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
And the kind of simulated colony in the Johnson Space
Center had quite a romantic.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Name, Yeah, Marsdoo and Alpha is the name of the habitat,
and the the mission is named Shapeah, which is I
guess NASA's idea of a sexy name.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
And so okay, So the call goes out for some
volunteers to go to Mons Dunolf. One of the people
who sees the advertisement is Nathan Jones. Who's Nathan.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Yeah, Nathan Jones is in many ways the most fascinating
figure for me in reporting the piece. He's an emergency
room physician from Springfield, Illinois, father of three boys, married
and Nathan was, like basically everyone I spoke to for
the story, was a kind of self professed NASA geek
(08:43):
or obsessive and had always dreamed of doing something special,
bigger with his life. He was obsessed with space travel
and when he saw this posting, he applied immediately and
then told his his wife, who was I think as
safe to say as it was a pault.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
The sequence that seems a little all speaking as American man.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yeah, I don't. I wouldn't have flied in my house.
But he was unique actually in that he was the
only one of the finalists who had children, and as
the father of two small children myself, I felt for
the family. And he was fully aware he was going
to miss out on a lot. You miss a year
(09:29):
with your children, you're missing a lot, and you come
back and the children look like different people. So there
was another dimension of an emotional challenge with him. But
he was determined to do it.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
And how did he prepare.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
He prepared very dutifully by him and his wife had
a whole series. I was fascinated by this, a whole
series of preparations that they did. He wrote little letters
to that he placed around the house in secret hiding
spots that the kids and his wife case he might
find over the course of the year. Sometimes little like
(10:04):
notes of encouragement, like he put a note in the
fuse box for like the first time the lights went
out and said, you know you can do this. I
trust you, just flipped this switch. And so they're all
these sort of sweet and for somewhat poignant point.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
It's almost like the script of a movie where somebody
knows they're going to die.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Yeah, and there's but the poignancy is somewhat compromised. I
found by the fact that it was all a contrived
scenario he was. That's there's a kind of beathos to
the fact that, well, he wasn't actually going to Mars.
It's not quite the Matthew mcconnie Interstellar where he's missing
his children for this this major mission. He's just going
(10:45):
to sit on a stage set for a year. But
that tension between the kind of absurdity of the whole
proposition and then the real emotion that attended every aspect
of this process, for me, that was really the heart
of the story.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
All you have to do is watch the video of
him about to go into the Mars Dunelfa. What did
you feel when you watch somebody you spend time with
his source in such distress?
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Yeah, that was striking. He had predicted it.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
But sure enough, when it came time to enter this habitat,
they had this dramatic ceremony. They were filmed right in
front of the main portal, which is basically just a door.
It wasn't like some major like you're entering a submarine
or something. But they were at a they get a
little press conference, and each one of them had to
give a talk, give a little statement, and he broke down.
(11:41):
He couldn't finish it because he was so overcome by
the thought of saying goodbye finally to his family for
this long period of time.
Speaker 5 (11:50):
But I believe that tomorrow will only be possible because
we step into Mars Dune Alpa today. And with that
in mind, I also want to take a moment to
sincerely think the great many people who've worked tirelessly in
so many countless hours to get us to this point. Also,
thank you to our families and friends for their sacrifices.
(12:12):
We see, we know those sacrifices. We couldn't be here
without your love and support. Sorry, Sorry to my wife
and kids.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
I love you, the moon. I'm sorry, bars and back.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
And it's very moving and upsetting and sort of sweet
and horrible in some ways as well. It's something that
he brought upon himself. But I think what's key to
understand is that everybody in the mission, from the administrators
to the participants, felt very certain that what they were
doing was a critical next step towards this wonderful dream.
(12:57):
Of Humanity's next chapter, they felt that there is no Mars,
there is no exploration of Mars unless you have the
shapea experiment.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
I'm not convinced that's true at all.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
I mean, I wrote about that, but they certainly were,
and so they did feel that they were sacrificing, making
a major personal sacrifice towards achieving a great goal for
all of humanity, which.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
May have kept them safe. And the woman you mentioned
at the beginning, the French woman who took her own life,
does she have that same sense of mission.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
That's a great point.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
There is some commonality, and that there was this idea
that they were on a kind of different frontier of
human psychology. But yes, it's not it was. I don't
think it was quite as ennobling. The stakes were quite
as high as you see with NASA and all the
trappings of NASA.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
And also she was totally alone, whereas Nathan had three companions.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Right right, And so there's some distinctions there, although I
will say that in the long history of experiments in
which people are together in isolation, they suffer also, I mean,
maybe it's not quite as extreme, but you know, in
conducting the research for the piece I spoke with a
bunch of psychiatrists and historians of science and historians of psychology,
(14:19):
and I learned that the definition of isolation is not
necessarily being alone. It's being removed from your normal life
and from the people close to you. So you can
be in isolation with other people, and in fact, many
of the same psychological effects are experienced whether or not
(14:41):
there are you're with other people, if you're cut off
from the people who are most important to you.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
When I think about the history of space movies is
obviously the famous Houston. We have a problem. Could Nathan
and co stay in touch with homebase and even with
their families while they were in Mars Dunolfa.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
They were very scrupulous about imitating the reality, the expected reality,
which is that there's this time lapse for any communication
from Mars because it's far away and you're dealing with
the limits of the speed of sound and technology, and
so there's something it depends on where it is in
the orbit, but essentially there's like a twenty nine minute lapse,
(15:22):
and so you can't have a conversation, any kind of
normal conversation, but they can send messages. But the other
problem is that every form of electronic communication from the
habitat has to go through the same channel, So that
includes any kind of data that the habitat is sending
(15:44):
back to Earth about I don't know, oxygen levels or
what's happening in the experiments, or any kind of computer connections.
And so that's sort of the best case scenario, and
that actually the lag can be much longer, and the
low larger the audio file or the text file, the
computer file, the longer it takes of sending a short
(16:05):
video even in low resolution, could take days, where sending
a one line text message maybe takes only half an
hour or so. So they could communicate, but only in
this clipped way with all of these ellipses essentially between communications.
So if there's an emergency, say back at home, they
(16:26):
couldn't just start having a conversation with them. Now, in reality,
since they were on a stage set, they could break
the experiment at any time if someone just like I
don't know, cut off their finger or something, but they
would try to they would do anything to avoid breaking
the experiment obviously, So yeah, they were reduced to these
sort of intermittent text messages essentially that would be relayed
(16:51):
at unpredictable intervals.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
How did you choose the headline field story?
Speaker 4 (16:56):
I don't choose the headlines from a not a lot.
I don't.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
I can consult on them, and I can say this
one's worse than the other one.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
But the headline the New York Times magazine went with
was can humans withstand the psychological torture?
Speaker 4 (17:11):
I mean, it's pretty good. I can't.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Yes, yes, And that's also what it's about, basically, can
we can people survive this? Because most of what NAS
has been asking over the course of its space program
is can we physically get people into space? Can we
physically put them on another planet? Very little thought has
been given into can human beings once they're there survive psychologically, emotionally.
(17:38):
And that's that's what this experiment is, at least ostensibly about.
And it's definitely what the story is that I wrote
us about.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
When we come back. More from Nathaniel rich on why
we're so obsessed with going to Mars and how historically
attitudes towards Mars have always revealed deeper cultural undercurrents. How
close is NASA to putting humans on Mos? They've been
predicting for many years that it's just around the corner.
(18:07):
They keep pushing back the window.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Even a few years ago, I think by twenty eighteen
they had predicted that it would be no later than
the end of the twenty twenties. I think now they're
looking more to the middle of the next decade. But
they are full speed ahead, and I think they're very
confident that they will get people to the planet in
(18:33):
a fairly short amount of time. The technical problems that
lay before them that we referenced are not seen as
intimidatingly difficult. They're just math problems to be worked out,
is the sense that I got from speaking with one
of these senior propulsion engineers. So there is, and there
has been for quite a while within NASA, quite a
(18:55):
lot of optimism that this is going to happen.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
It's going to happen pretty soon.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
And why why mos Well.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
That's the million dollars, that's the million dollar question. I mean,
there's a lot of different rationales. The main ones you
hear from NASA is it represents scientific progress. It's the
next step for human exploration of the universe, and certainly
human progress in this space exploration. There's also the rationale
that through the kind of innovation that's necessary to put
(19:25):
people on Mars or to reach any new milestone in
the space expeditions, that there will be some kind of
unpredictable benefits, technological benefits that can be applied for all
of humanity, so that maybe they'll invent new materials or
new types of devices that can then make our life
on Earth easier. And there are plenty of examples I
(19:46):
think of that in the past. And then there's a
kind of political rationale, which is to say that we
need to do it before someone else does.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
There's a national pride on the line.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
I mean, it's like in the sixties when I wanted
to put a man on the moon first. Is there
a parallel to the sixties in that respect, Yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Would say not only is there a parallel, but I
think NASA in its whole frame of thinking. If you
can speak of something the size of an agency, the
size of NASA as a personified in some way, but
I think the whole enterprise is really stuck in the sixties,
if not the fit nineteen fifties one it's created. So
it's very much it's you know, you see this sort
of vestigial, almost cold war mentality that I think informs
(20:29):
all almost every aspect of the whole enterprise.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
What does it say to you that in the sixties
it was the president JFK sort of outlining this national
mission to put a man on the moon, and now
in the twenty twenties it's l Musk and to a
certain extent Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Yeah, I think you can learn all you need to
know about a culture or a society by studying its
attitudes about Mars. You know, it's it's certainly now it's
dominated by a kind of There are a few different strands.
There's a kind of private enterprise strand, but that is
often including in the case of Musk, closely alloyed with
(21:10):
a libertarian fantasy of a lawless world in which people
can stake their claim a kind of wild West and
not have regulation and oversight. There are groups of Mars
enthusiasts out there that are very much explicitly libertarian ideologues
who hope to start a libertarian society on Mars.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
So that exists if you.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
Go back to the fifties and sixties, where at this
very different place in our culture, obviously in society, a
place of tremendous global cooperation relatively that gave birth to
the entire sort of modern space race, even though you
have a competition between the Cold War powers. But you
can even go back further and if you look at
the late nineteenth century when Chaparelli, a Milanaisy astronomer, observed
(21:59):
that there were canals on Mars, there was this great
fascination for decades about are people living on Mars? Are
Martians building canals? And it was very much an expression.
You can find very clear a correlation between the kind
of excitement of the industrial age, and there was a
period where people were competing with Mars to build more
(22:20):
canals as fast as possible, as also of course during
the same period of the digging of the sus canals.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
So this was you know, this is the New York Times.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
This is not just some like weird thing is this
is at the time generally accepted that we're in this
race against the Martians. So it's always been a kind
of repository Mars for the kind of subconscious of the
culture that observes it. And I think that's true today.
And I think as our society changes, probably our view
(22:48):
of Mars will change. In tandem with it.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
You've written that future Mars voyages will have to want
to travel to Mars more than almost anyone else in
the world. They'll have to embrace the knowledge that for
at least five hundred and seventy days, they will be
the most isolated human beings in the history of the universe.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
Yes, they will have to, because that's what they're signing
up up for.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
What will that do to them?
Speaker 3 (23:13):
You know? I think a distinction has to be made
between the kind of person who wants to be an
astronaut and wants to go on a mission like this,
like the people I wrote about, like Nathan Jones. But
then once we start talking about a permanent settlement or colonies,
we're talking about a very different group of people. So
you have this sort of kind of zelot astronauts who
(23:35):
are perfectly fit, who are the most stable people you've
ever met, enormous reserves of self concentration and self reliance
and all the rest, and then the rest of us right,
and for colony to exist, it has to look very different.
And a major criticism that I encountered in researching the
piece from close watchers of the NASA program is that
(23:58):
Even if this experiment has some value to predict the
ability of say, astronauts to survive in this setting, it
will have no value for the rest of us, who
you know, all kinds of other considerations would have to
be made. And so we're certainly not at the stage
where we're asking can people have families up there? Can
(24:19):
people give birth? There's some major biological challenges there. What
happens if someone gets sick, what happens if someone misses home,
you know, enters a depression, and none of that. We're
nowhere near those kinds of questions yet, but I think
that's if they continue to hit these benchmarks, that's where
this is ultimately heading.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
So when you wrote the piece Nathan and co In
the mods Habitat, and since publication, they've of course come back.
Do you know what the experience was like for Nathan?
Speaker 4 (24:49):
No, they're not.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
They're basically sworn to secrecy. And this was the level
of secrecy that shrouded just about every aspect of the
experiment was somewhat astounding or surprise for me. It was
as it reporting the story at least talking to the
NASA people and to some extent the participants themselves, you'd
(25:14):
think I was investigating I don't know, Abu grab or
something like. The way that it was talked about extremely confidential. Now,
their justification was that they want to run the experiment
multiple times, and they don't want prospective applicants to know
anything about what they're going to do. They don't want
to because it would, I guess, diminish the value of
what they find if people already know, like, these are
(25:36):
the kinds of things we're going to do when we're there.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
This is what happened to people.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
It struck me as slightly ridiculous because, on the one hand,
very similar experiments have been conducted many times, including by NASA,
and those results are public, so the results.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
NASA haven't published any results of this.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Not that I'm aware of, no, and you know, they
release these very anodyne statements.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
It's a success. Everyone had a great time.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
And you put the story in the context of the
history of isolation research. But more specifically, it seems like
this particular simulation of life on Mars has happened multiple
times in the past and is also being replicated multiple
times right now all around the world. Can you kind
of describe the spread of this type of experiment being run.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Yeah, I guess it depends on how narrowly you want
to define the experiment. But NASA has been doing some version,
conducting some version of this experiment since before NASA was
even called NASA. I mean, they had some of the
early first astronauts did isolation experiments. They would put them
(26:41):
in little pods for long periods of time, sometimes in
fairly brutal configurations and sometimes completely in isolation, especially back
in the fifties when they thought that astronauts would have
to be propelled in tiny little vessels for months at
a time into outer space. But there was another similar
experiment called High Seas, which was the subject of a
(27:04):
really fascinating book by the writer Kate Green, who was
one of the original crew members they ran that experiment.
I don't know, I think a dozen times. That was
a similar idea in a habitat that was built on
Mona Loa Mountain in Hawaii, and it was four people
or sometimes six put into this environment for months at
(27:25):
a time, and Green writes very elegantly and movingly about
the experience and on the kind of madness of it
and what it did to her life.
Speaker 4 (27:35):
The book once upon a time I lived on Mars it's.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Called And then there was a crazy experiment called Mars
five hundred that was administered by a Russian agency called
which has a name that I love, called the Institute
of Biomedical Problems. So of course that's who did this
completely barbaric experiment where they locked six male crew members
together for five hundred and twenty days. Wow, that was
(28:01):
in twenty ten and eleven in a kind of fake
spacecraft on a fake Mars and that was pretty well
studied and people participants lost their hair and lost weight.
But then there's NASA, if they have something like a
dozen different versions of this going on at all times.
(28:21):
There are all different configurations, different amounts of time, different
number of participants.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
So did you lost? Do you say to NASA, why
do you need to keep doing that?
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Yes, that was one of my big questions, why do
we keep doing this? And don't we know what happens?
Even before the NASA history, there's this whole other history
of people doing similar isolation experiments, and their official answer was, yes,
we've done similar some experiments, but actually there's no substitution
for this is far closer to the expected reality and experimentally, scientifically,
(28:53):
all of the previous experiments are essentially useless, and this
is the only one that will matter. Now if you
believe that, you also have to then wonder well. And
this is what some of the people who study that's
pointed out to me. Yes, okay, this experiment, even if
it's its exact simulation, a perfect simulation of what the
(29:14):
first Mars expedition is going to be, you're only testing
a group of four people or eve an n of
four right, experimentally speaking, and so the statistical value of
this experiment is close to nil. You'd have to run
this experiment thousands of times for it to be statistically reliable,
(29:36):
and of course they're not going to do that. So
even if you grant them this sort of scientific argument
that this experiment is unlike all the other ones, even
though they all basically have the same results, it doesn't
actually have much scientific value unless they would do it all,
you know, fifty.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
Times or a thousand times.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
I'm not sure where the probability charts cut off, but
as it stands, they're probably going to do it one
or two more times, at which point they'll be ready
to hurl people.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Up to Mars. But from that point of view, was
this about understanding if humans can withstand isolation or was
this some we talked to the beginning about the technical
problems NASA has to solve or was this Were there
any technical problems they were looking to solve with this?
Speaker 3 (30:18):
That was probably the That was the point where I
was most I mean, there's something that's where I sort
of laughed in the reporting, although it's kind of horrible. So, yes,
the official line is where we want to test the
human side of this. We have all these divisions doing
the science and the technology, and this is the human
research side. And in fact, there is a human Research
(30:40):
division within NASA that was administering the experiment. However, they
were partnered with two other divisions, and the division that
oversaw the whole experiment was actually run by someone named
Rachel McCauley, who is a propulsion engineer. She's the one
who decides which rocket will do the job best. And
(31:04):
in order to make that determination, she needs to nail
down a bunch of variables. And one of the main
variables is how much weight needs to be carried by
the rocket ship. And so what that means is, of
course the weight of the people, but also how much
food do they have to take? And so when I
talked to her, she was like, very blithely kind of
(31:28):
dismissive of the whole human psychological aspect of the thing,
and instead she focused on how much food are they
going to eat? Like what's the weight? How much waste
are they going to produce? And once I have those figures,
then I will know exactly what kind of propulsion device
to use.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
And so then I went a little bit dubious.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Yeah, and so I was like, what, no, I mean,
I believed her because she was running the experiment.
Speaker 4 (31:54):
She's a solid propulsion systems engineer.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
And so then I went back to the sort of
human research people and they're like, oh, no, no, no, it's
all about human psychology. But in fact the person they
were reporting to, the person who was running the whole thing,
said that was not the case. And so actually, I
think if you follow the money, you start to wonder, well,
is this whole human aspects side of it part of
(32:18):
the marketing and it's frankly irrelevant to what NASA's real
concern is, which is, yeah, how many pounds of food
do we need to put on this thing?
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Geez.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Stay with us for more from Nathaniel rich on why
dreams of Mars and dreams of AI are inextricably linked
and why some techno optimists theorize that humans would evolve
into AI powered martians. There was a part of your
story that's really stuck out to me was that NASA's
(32:55):
chief research scientist Dennis Bushel said that as Colonis, he
most becomes more feasible, colonists themselves will evolve into mortians.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Did that surprise you.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
Yes, although a little bit.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
It was surprised me to see him write about that
so openly. This is Yes, This chief scientist at the
Langley Research Center, who had been I think he recently retired,
had been a NASA for sixty years, and he published
this sort of opus about the institutional view of deep
space exploration, and he said, what I think a lot
(33:34):
of scientists have predicted is that if people are able
to survive on Mars for any extended amount of time
with oxygen and all the rest, that ultimately their bodies
will change. That over time, because of the radiation exposure,
because of the reduced gravity, that there will be real
(33:57):
physiological changes to their bodies. There's no way out of that.
So essentially one of the kind of tricks for surviving
Mars is to live there long enough so that people
evolve into Martians and they look different and they probably
have elongated heads and maybe different diets and all the rest.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Of it evolved means, of course natural selection. Survivor are
the fittest on Moss exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
We're talking about a generational No, it's a generational shift.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Now.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Of course they have to solve things like inconvenient things
like procreation on Mars and all the rest of that.
But yes, that's the long term view, is that we
won't have to solve every problem perfectly because people will
just start to there'll be natural selection and they'll be
forced to evolve into these other Martian creatures. And that
seems to be NASA's view.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
There's another piece you wrote in The New York Times recently,
which was a review of Ray Causweill's book The Singularity
Is Nearer. Can you talk about who Ray Causweil is
that book and how viewing that book syncs up with
your writing on this experiment.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
Yeah, Kurzweil is a kind of god of Ai who's
called the godfather of AI, who is for many decades
has been predicting the rise of artificial intelligence and ultimately
the singularity. But yes, his idea is that there will
be nanobots powered by artificial intelligence that we will inject
(35:29):
into our bodies, and that they will swim through our
bloodstream into our brains and connect our neocortex to the cloud,
linking us up to the I guess the Internet are
really like the global repository of all human information civilization,
and so at that point when we're just kind of
wired into intelligence, electronic intelligence, that for him is a singularity,
(35:54):
and he thinks that's coming very soon, basically by the
end of the decade.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Well, but there's something to me which is very striking
in the sense that Ray caswild this Sea the godfather
of AI, on the one hand, and on the other hand,
Dennis Bushnell, the NASA Chief Scientist, I'm both saying in
one way or another that within our lifetimes, the technological
future will mean that we no longer conform to the
(36:22):
current definition of what it is to be human.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Yeah, although I think you'd be hard pressed to find
a definition that would admit that would be universally agreed
to on what it means to be human. True, now,
we already and that's part of Kurzwell's argument, is that
we already atsourced so much of our mind and identity
to technology that we rely on the Internet to remember
(36:48):
things for us, our digital record, a lot of our
powers are only possible through technology. And if we were
just put in the wilderness, most of us we'd be
able to survive a couple of weeks. But yes, both
of these visions of they're both kind of these technologically
optimistic views of the world. There's this kind of viscerally
(37:14):
disturbing aspect to them, which is that they require us
to reimagine physically what will look like, you know, but
even putting aside all the sort of mental psychological aspect
of it, that we're going to be morphed into these
other different kinds of creatures that are going to be
like physically in some ways unrecognizable. And Kurzwill has this
(37:35):
whole thing about how soon people be able to design
their own bodies the way you can design like a
virtual avatar, and that we can we'll have people have
wings and the tusks and whatever you want, you know, feathers,
and that part of it tends not to be spoken
aloud or advertised as much as the part about, you know,
(37:57):
improving our intelligence. But I think think what was striking
to me about Curzweil's book and what I wanted to
write about is let's not forget the part where he
the prerequisite for all of these future predictions is that
we're injecting microscopic robots into our brains and our bloodstream.
Let's not lose track of that part of it, so that, yes,
(38:19):
I think you're right to draw a kind of a
parallel with the Mars visions. They tend to collide in
the realm of artificial intelligence. It's not surprising that Elon Musk,
you know, is obsessed with both Mars and AI.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
You used the phrase earlier on a conversation about mourning,
and one of the pieces of Cozweil's book that you
draw out is him talking about basically making an AI
version of his father, who passed away in nineteen seventy
to be able to talk to him about music. And
one of the other things I noticed in the piece
about Mars was the crop garden in the Mars June
(38:55):
Alpha colony, which wouldn't be for eating, but rather for
the mental health of the participants. You know, it's I
guess it makes me think of that whole sort of
cliched thing about the fisherman who becomes a millionaire and
then returns to where he lived to fish. The craving
for the kind of things which are the touchstones of
(39:15):
what we think about as our human experience also is
present in these future fantasies.
Speaker 4 (39:22):
Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
That's another major point of convergence I think, is this
that once you peel back this techno optimistic fantasy of
how things are going to be, you find this deep
sense of longing for how things once were. You certainly
(39:44):
see it in Kurswell, where after hundreds of pages of
talking about all the wonders of this new technology, all
the conveniences, and how we can travel have beach holidays
without leaving our houses through virtual reality and all the
rest of it, his ultimate goal is to reanimate his
dead father, who was a composer not of some renown
(40:07):
and a conductor in New York. And he's already gone
so far as to program an AI version of his
father that trained on his father's letters and writings and
personal documents and his and his music. In the pages
of the book, he has a there's a transcript of
a conversation that that Curswell has with his dead father,
(40:29):
and that to him is that's his great hope, is
to bring back his dad. In the same way in Mars,
I was struck by the mournful quality of this whole enterprise,
and everyone I asked, every sort of expert I interviewed,
I asked, there's something, there's something just a little bit
(40:49):
upsetting about all of this, like what you know, and
they all kind of many people kind of agreed, but
they couldn't put their finger on it until I spoke
to this one historian of isolation experiments, Mattius at Cornell,
and he said, this thing that for me is the
heart of the story, and to some extent, it's the
heart of the Curzwell and even ai store, which is
the urge to try to recreate a perfect world, is
(41:12):
always going to be about rehearsing what we got wrong here.
He told me, we're not chasing Mars, We're mourning Earth.
That struck a chord with me because I feel like
that is the through line here, that there's this attempt
to chase something that we've lost, and you know, for Mattias,
(41:33):
he was talking about essentially a world ruined by climate
change and environmental degradation, and that the ultimate fulfillment of
the Mars fantasy, at least in our age, seems to
be to terraform the planet and create a kind of
idyllic second Earth that won't be marred by all the
(41:53):
mistakes that we've made here. And the Ai fantasy has
the same component. It's, you know, we'll all be young
and and free of sin in a way, and that
I think that's true, and I think that's I think
we lose something when we just assume that all of
these stories are about what the way they're advertised.
Speaker 4 (42:16):
It's like progress.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
I think it's also there's a kind of a morning
of something that we've lost that we're trying to get back,
and we don't quite know how to do it, and
so we're trying to build a fancy news sports car
to get us there, but we can't.
Speaker 2 (42:40):
The thing that I found the most interesting about this
piece that you did was this idea that, like, isolation
is not about being alone. Yes, isolation is about being
away from community, absolutely, and you can be with the
community of people in a place that isn't home and
be very isolated.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Well not enough thing. You know. One of the questions
I didn't ask Nathaniel, but which I kind of wish
that I had, was this interest in isolation research, Like
we are constantly bombarded with this idea of the loneliness epidemic,
and like, even though we're more connected, were more isolated
than ever. And I was wondering if there was a
kind of another text spread that I actually didn't pull on,
but perhaps should have done about you know, why this
(43:21):
cultural moment is so interested in isolation?
Speaker 2 (43:23):
That's right? And I think that, you know, I mean
I think about it all the time when I'm sitting
at home on the couch on my phone, feeling incredibly
connected to people and like how I could survive that way,
but also questioning like do I want to live that way? Right,
you know, and sort of how do I force myself
out of that?
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Now.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
That really has nothing to do with going to Mars Asterisk.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
But you are somebody who grew up as a lover
of science fiction. Your father was a science fiction author. Yes, so,
I mean some people like to be very dismissive of
muscum Bezos and their dreams of space. You know, I
think they are two characters who are probably can deal
with the bit of stick. But I don't think it's
(44:04):
wrong to dream and even plan about space exploration.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Well. I think part of it is a colonizer's instinct,
But I also think this idea of like what is
outside of our reach is always something that will fascinate
writers of science fiction, will always fascinate even you know,
the most practical technologists, because it's something that in a
certain way is a fantasy. Like even the idea of
(44:32):
like having to bring a three D printer to Mars
because we can't lug certain things there. I mean, these
are such far out concepts, you know.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
I find them exciting. I find them exciting, I think,
but I also did find it very tragic this idea
of like the compulsion to repeat these quite damaging experiments,
of sending people to simulate life on Mars and hurting
them in the process in their life on Earth.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Yeah. Of course, we just had Trump, on day one
of his second term, simultaneously make an executive order to
drop out of the Paris Climate Accords and declare that
we will launch astronauts into space. And I quote, plant
the stars and stripes on the planet Mars. So this
twinning of saying goodbye to Earth and embracing Mars actually
(45:19):
feels very salient and very right.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Now, Well, that's true, But what of this leaves me
the question about you? Is there anything that could be
done that I could offer to induce you to spend
three hundred and fifty days in as ssimulated Mars.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Now I went to space camp. You'll remember, or maybe remember,
but I do remember. Now I did go to space camp.
I am an intellectual explorer. I am not a physical explorer.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
You're not a psychon one either, No, I'm.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Definitely not a psychoap and I did. I found the
story of the woman was at LeGuin really really tragic.
And I do think that what's interesting is that in
moments of you know, innovation or exploration, we do test
people's psychological limits. Do we have to? I don't know,
(46:10):
you know, but I think that for me personally, I
am not compelled by living for that long outside of
the sort of my normal life. No are you?
Speaker 1 (46:24):
No, No, I'm not. But that sense that we talked
about of these experiments in some ways being a kind
of psychological mourning for what we're losing. You did make
me think about environmental degradation. And you know, there are
these I've seen these kind of techno fantasy illustrations of
what life on Mars might look like, and they're basically
(46:46):
these biospheres into which you have crammed, like the Swiss Alps,
the Grand Canyon, the Mediterranean Sea, like beautiful animal.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
I also just think we're still human beings right well
now for now, but you know, we project all of
our fantasies still in the world of the creature comforts
that we want. Do I want to ski on Mars?
I guess right, because I like skiing here.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
You know, it makes you remember just how wonderful, you know,
this earth of ours is. And what I loved about
this interview and took away from it is when you
play out the fantasy and when you actually ask, you know,
one of the chief research scientists at NASA, what this
looks like in the future. It's not just going to Mars.
It's evolving into a new species with different shape of head,
(47:32):
with a different reaction to radiation. And what that says
to me is this is not just you know, going
on a fun trip. This is essentially saying that there's
going to be a fundamental categorical shift in US as
a species in order to colonize Mars. And it's just
a very weird and I find disturbing thought.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
Again, not something I would do.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
That's a good place to leave it. That's if a
tech Stuff Today. Today's episode was produced by Sina Ozaki,
Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez, and Lizzie Jacobs. It was executive
produced by me Oswaaloshin, Kara Price, and Kate Osborne for
Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell by Heart Podcasts. The Engineer is
(48:15):
Beheit Fraser, Kyle Murdoch, Rodar Themsong Join us on Friday
for Textuff's The Week in Tech, when we'll explore the
origin story of our current obsession with step counting. Please rate, review,
and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at
gmail dot com. We want to hear us on your mind.
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