January 29, 2025 • 47 mins
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 (00:00):
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 human survival, which is
the subject of this experiment that I wrote about called SHAPEA.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
This particular experiment began with rather intriguing announcement on the
NASA website.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
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
(00:51):
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 2 (01:16):
Welcome to Tech Stuff the story. I'm Os Voloshin, and
each week we bring you an in depth interview with
one of the brightest and farthest seeing minds in.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
And about tech.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
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 has been fascinated
by something they've said, something they've done, or something they've written.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Well, Nathaniel kind of had me at Mars asterisk me too.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
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
his inauguration as quote the pursuit of our manifest destiny.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
He said, put stars and stripe. What did you say,
put red, white, and blue? Are stars and stripes on
Mars Mars?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah, 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 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
(02:33):
required to achieve the mark?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Before you get too excited, can you just tell me
who Nathaniel Rich is?
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Sorry?
Speaker 2 (02:38):
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
(02:58):
gifted apocalypse. It's his talent for describing the apocalypse which
brought him, in some ways to reporting on the Mars
June Alpha project, which I asked to about why did you
decide to write the piece?
Speaker 1 (03:19):
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
Sifrey who had launched a series of cave experiments to
(03:41):
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
(04:02):
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 euphoria and enlightenment. And
it's a tragic story though, because she came out finally
(04:22):
and 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
(04:45):
of experiments, 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 whole on reality
and I found that no one was really doing these
experiments for that reason except for NASA, who had continued
(05:07):
under the guise of this Martian project.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
So on the one had NASA putting out the cool applicants,
but on the other hand, they had to build Mars
or at least a motion colony on Earth.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
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 half behind you. Yeah, so
(05:42):
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 2 (05:57):
So they'll tone the sand into cement somehow.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, and they can do that. 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 Center in Houston, and
(06:24):
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
habitat was where they were going to send four people
(06:45):
for more than a year.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
And this habitat resembles exactly what they intend to build
on Moss when they get there.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yeah, I'm sure subject to change, and I suppose part
of this experiment was to determine whether this particular model
would work best. But yeah, this is the plan.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
And the kind of simulated colony in the Johnson Space
Center had quite a romantic name.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah, Mars Dune Alpha is the name of the habitat,
and the mission is named Shapeah, which is I guess
NASA's idea of a sexy name.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And so okay, So the call goes out for some
volunteers to go to Mars dun Alfa. One of the
people who sees the advertisement is Nathan Jones. Who's Nathan.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
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
(07:59):
or ass 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 wife, who was I think as safe
to say as it was a.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Pault the sequence that seems a little all speaking as
Americ man.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
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
(08:45):
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 2 (08:56):
And how did he prepare?
Speaker 1 (08:58):
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, Casey might find
over the course of the year. Sometimes little like notes
(09:21):
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 2 (09:35):
It's almost like the script of a movie where somebody
knows they're going to die.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yeah, and there's but the poignancy is somewhat compromised. I
found by the fact that it was all a contrived scenario.
He wasn't that that's that there's a kind of beathos
to the fact that, well, he wasn't actually going to Mars.
It's not quite the Matthew mcconnae Interstellar where he's missing
his children for this major mission. He's just going to
(10:01):
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 2 (10:17):
All you have to do is watch the video of
him about to go into the Man's dun alfa. What
did you feel when you watched somebody you spent time
with his source in such distress.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, that was striking. He had predicted it. 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 gave a little press
(10:51):
conference and each one of them had to give a talk,
give a little statement, and he broke down. 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 4 (11:06):
But I believe that tomorrow will only be possible because
we step into marsdo now but today, and with that
in mind, I also want to take a moment to
sincerely thank 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.
(11:28):
We see, we know those sacrifices. We couldn't be here
without your love and support. Sorry, Sorry to my wife
and kids.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
I love you, the moon. I'm sorry Mars and back.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
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
(12:13):
of humanity's next chapter. They felt that there is no Mars,
there is no exploration of Mars unless you have the
shapea experiment. I'm not convinced that's true at all. 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
(12:37):
of humanity.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Which 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 1 (12:47):
That's a great point. There is some commonality, and that
there was this idea that they were on a kind
of different frontier of human psychology. And but yes, it's
not it was. I don't think it was quite as ennobling,
or the stakes were quite as high as you see
with NASA and all the trappings of NASA.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
And also she was totally alone, whereas Nathan had three companions.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
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,
(13:35):
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
(13:57):
there are you're with other people. You're cut off from
the people who are most important to you.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
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 dun Alpha.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yeah, so that 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
(14:36):
twenty nine minute lapse, 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
(15:00):
is sending 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 larger the audio file or the text file,
the computer file, the longer it takes. So sending a
(15:21):
short 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,
(15:42):
they 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. So yeah, they were reduced to
these sort of intermittent text messages essentially that would be
(16:06):
relayed at unpredictable intervals.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
How did you choose the headline? Feel story?
Speaker 1 (16:12):
I don't choose the headlines. I'm not allow I don't.
I can consult on them, and I can say this
one's worse than the other one.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
But the headline the New York Times magazine went with
was can humans withstand the psychological torture?
Speaker 1 (16:27):
I mean, it's pretty good, I can't headline yes, yes,
And that's also what it's about, basically, can we can
people survive this? Because most of what NASA 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
(16:47):
into can human beings once they're there survive psychologically, emotionally,
And that's that's what this experiment is, at least ostensibly about,
and it's definitely what the story is that I wrote
about when.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
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 Mars. They've been predicting
(17:22):
for many years that it's just around the corner. They
keep pushing back the window.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
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 it's
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
(17:49):
in 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
(18:11):
lot of optimism that this is going to happen. It's
going to happen pretty soon.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
And why why mos Well.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
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
(18:41):
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
(19:02):
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. There's a
national pride on the line.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
I mean, is this like in the sixties when JFK
wanted to put a man on the moon first. Is
there a parallel to the sixties in that respect?
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Yeah, I would say not only is there a parallel,
but I think NASA and 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 is created.
So it's very much it's you know, you see this
sort of vestigial almost cold war mentality that I think
(19:45):
informs all almost every aspect of the whole enterprise.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
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 El Musk and to a
certain extent, Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
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 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
(20:26):
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. So
(20:48):
that exists if you 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,
(21:15):
observed 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
(21:36):
canals as fast as possible, as also, of course, during
the same period of the digging of the sus Canal.
So this was you know, this is the New York Times.
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
(21:57):
culture that observes it. And I think that's true today,
and I think as our society changes, probably our view
of Mars will change in tandem with it.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
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 1 (22:23):
Yes, they will have to, because that's what they're signing
up up for.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
What will that do to them?
Speaker 3 (22:29):
You know?
Speaker 1 (22:29):
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 zealot astronauts, who are
(22:52):
you 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
(23:14):
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
(23:35):
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, 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 2 (23:54):
So when you wrote the piece, Nathan and co in
the mod's habitat, and since oublication, they've of course come back.
Do you know what the experience was like for Nathan.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
No, they're basically sworn to secrecy. And this was the
level of secrecy that shrouded just about every aspect of
this experiment was somewhat astounding. Orse for me, it was
as it reporting the story, at least talking to the
(24:26):
NASA people and to some extent the participants themselves, you'd
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
(24:46):
to because it would, I guess, diminish the value of
what they find if people already know, like these are
the kinds of things they're going to do when we're there,
or this is what happened to people. 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.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
So the results. NASA haven't published any results of this.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Not that I'm aware of, no, and you know they
release these very anodyne statements.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
It's a success.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Everyone had a great time.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
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 been replicated multiple
times right now all around the world. Can you kind
of describe the spread of this type of experiment being run?
Speaker 1 (25:37):
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
(25:57):
in little pods for long periods of time 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
(26:20):
a 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
(26:41):
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. The book Once
upon a Time I Lived on Mars, it's called And
then there was a crazy experiment called Mars five hundred
that was inistered by the Russian agency called which has
(27:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
That was 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. They have something like
a dozen different versions of this going on at all times.
(27:37):
There are all different configurations, different amounts of time, different
number of participants.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
So if you lost, you say to NASA, why do
you need to keep doing that?
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Yes, that was one of my big questions. Why do
we keep doing this? And don't we know what happened?
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
(28:06):
experimentally scientifically, 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 that study
that's pointed out to me. Yes, okay, this experiment, even
if it's its exact simulation, a perfect simulation of what
(28:30):
the first Mars expedition is going to be, you're only
testing a group of four people eve an n of four, right,
it's 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,
(28:52):
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
a million, you know, fifty times or a thousand times.
I'm not sure where the probability charts cut off, but
(29:12):
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 up to Mars.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
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 1 (29:34):
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
(29:56):
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
(30:20):
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
(30:44):
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,
I will know exactly what kind of propulsion device to use.
And so then I went, you a little bit dubious, yeah,
(31:06):
And so I was like, what, no, I mean, I
believed her because she was running the experiment. She's a
solid propulsion systems engineer, 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
(31:27):
actually I think if you follow the money, you start
to wonder, well, is this whole human aspect side of
it part of 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 (31:43):
She's stay with us for more for Nathaniel Reach on
why dreams of Mars and dreams of AI are inextricably linked,
and why some techno optimists theorize that humans would evolve
into AI powers martians. There was a part of your
(32:06):
story that pretty stuck out to me was that NASA's
chief research scientist, Dennis Bushel said that as colonizing mass
becomes more feasible, colonists themselves will evolve into martians.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Did that surprise you?
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Yes, although a little bit. It was surprised me to
see him write about that so openly. 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
(32:49):
think a lot 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
(33:12):
will be real physiological changes to their bodies. That 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 2 (33:30):
Of it evolved means of course natural selection. Survived are
the fittest on Moss exactly.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
If we're talking about a generational no, it's a generational shift. Now,
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
(33:58):
seems to be NASA's view.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
There's another piece you wrote in The New York Times recently,
which was a review of Ray Causwell's book The Singularity
Is Nearer. Can you talk about who Ray Causwell is
that book and how viewing that book syncs up with
your writing on this experiment.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
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
(34:42):
powered by artificial intelligence that we will inject 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,
(35:06):
electronic intelligence, that for him is a singularity, and he
thinks that's coming very soon, basically by the end of
the decade.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Well, but there's something to me which is very striking
in the sense that Ray caswild this year the godfather
of AI, on the one hand, and on the other hand,
Dennis Bushnell, the NASA Chief Scientist, are both saying in
one way or another that within our lifetimes, the technological
future will mean that we no longer conform to the
(35:38):
current definition of what it is to be human.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yes, 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 are already and that's part of kurz Wells's argument,
is that we already outsourced so much of our mind
and identity to technology that we rely on the Internet
(36:03):
to remember 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
wouldn't 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
(36:29):
viscerally disturbing aspect to them, which is that they require
us to reimagine physically what will look like, you know,
even putting aside all the sort of mental psychological aspect
of it, that we're going to be morph into these
other different kinds of creatures that are going to be
like physically in some ways unrecognizable. And Kurzwill has this
(36:51):
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 well have people have
wings and 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,
(37:13):
improving our intelligence. But I think what was striking to
me about Kurzweil'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,
(37:35):
I think you're right to draw a kind of 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 2 (37:48):
You use the phrase earlier on a conversation about mourning,
and one of the pieces of Coswill's book that you
draw out is him talking about basically making an Ali
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 Dune
(38:11):
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
(38:31):
what we think about as our human experience also is
present in these future fantasies.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Absolutely. 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. Only
(39:00):
see it in Kurzwell, 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
(39:23):
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 music. In the pages of the book,
there's a transcript of a conversation that Kurswell has with
(39:44):
his dead father, 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 us, there's something,
there's something just a little bit upsetting about all of this,
(40:07):
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 Kurzwell and
even aistor, which is the urge to try to recreate
(40:27):
a perfect world, is 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.
(40:47):
And you know, for Mattias, 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
(41:09):
be marred by all the mistakes that we've made here.
And the Ai fantasy has the same component. It's you know,
we'll all be young and beautiful 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
(41:30):
the way they're advertised. It's like progress. 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 3 (41:56):
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 2 (42:15):
Well, not for nothing, 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, we're more isolated
than ever. And I was wondering if there was a
kind of another text s thread that I actually didn't
pull on that perhaps should have done about you know,
(42:36):
why this cultural moment is so interested in isolation.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
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 2 (42:56):
Now?
Speaker 3 (42:56):
That really has nothing to do with going to Mars Asterisk.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
But you are somebody who grew up as a lover
of science fiction. Your father was a science fiction aus. Yes, so,
I mean some people like to be very dismissive of
muscum Bezos and their dreams of space.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
You know.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
I think they are two characters who are probably can
deal with the bit of stick. But I don't think
it's wrong to dream and even plan about space exploration.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
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
(43:48):
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 2 (43:58):
I find them exciting. I find them exciting and 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 3 (44:12):
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. Wow. So
this twinning of saying goodbye to Earth and embracing Mars
(44:35):
actually feels very salient and very right. Now.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Well, that's true. But all 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 assimulated Mars.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
Now, I went to space camp.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
You'll remember, or maybe, but I do remember.
Speaker 3 (44:55):
Now I did go to space camp. I am intellectual
will explorer. I am not a physical explorer.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
You're not a psycho one either, No, I'm.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Definitely not a psychoope. And I did. I found the
story of the woman was at leguinea 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,
(45:26):
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 2 (45:40):
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
like what life on Mars might look like, and they're
(46:02):
basically these biospheres into which you have crammed, like the
Swiss Alps, the Grand Canyon, the Mediterranean Sea, like beautiful animal.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
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 2 (46:25):
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,
(46:48):
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 3 (47:08):
Again, not something I would do.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
That's a good place to leave it. That's it for
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 Norvel Bhart Podcasts. The Engineer is Biheit, Fraser,
(47:32):
Kyle Murdoch, rodear theme song Join us on Friday for
tex Stuff'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.
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 human survival, which is
the subject of this experiment that I wrote about called SHAPEA.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
This particular experiment began with rather intriguing announcement on the
NASA website.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
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
(00:51):
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 2 (01:16):
Welcome to Tech Stuff the story. I'm Os Voloshin, and
each week we bring you an in depth interview with
one of the brightest and farthest seeing minds in.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
And about tech.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
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 has been fascinated
by something they've said, something they've done, or something they've written.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Well, Nathaniel kind of had me at Mars asterisk me too.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
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
his inauguration as quote the pursuit of our manifest destiny.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
He said, put stars and stripe. What did you say,
put red, white, and blue? Are stars and stripes on
Mars Mars?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah, 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 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
(02:33):
required to achieve the mark?
Speaker 3 (02:35):
Before you get too excited, can you just tell me
who Nathaniel Rich is?
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Sorry?
Speaker 2 (02:38):
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
(02:58):
gifted apocalypse. It's his talent for describing the apocalypse which
brought him, in some ways to reporting on the Mars
June Alpha project, which I asked to about why did you
decide to write the piece?
Speaker 1 (03:19):
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
Sifrey who had launched a series of cave experiments to
(03:41):
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
(04:02):
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 euphoria and enlightenment. And
it's a tragic story though, because she came out finally
(04:22):
and 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
(04:45):
of experiments, 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 whole on reality
and I found that no one was really doing these
experiments for that reason except for NASA, who had continued
(05:07):
under the guise of this Martian project.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
So on the one had NASA putting out the cool applicants,
but on the other hand, they had to build Mars
or at least a motion colony on Earth.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
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 half behind you. Yeah, so
(05:42):
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 2 (05:57):
So they'll tone the sand into cement somehow.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yeah, and they can do that. 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 Center in Houston, and
(06:24):
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
habitat was where they were going to send four people
(06:45):
for more than a year.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
And this habitat resembles exactly what they intend to build
on Moss when they get there.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yeah, I'm sure subject to change, and I suppose part
of this experiment was to determine whether this particular model
would work best. But yeah, this is the plan.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
And the kind of simulated colony in the Johnson Space
Center had quite a romantic name.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah, Mars Dune Alpha is the name of the habitat,
and the mission is named Shapeah, which is I guess
NASA's idea of a sexy name.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And so okay, So the call goes out for some
volunteers to go to Mars dun Alfa. One of the
people who sees the advertisement is Nathan Jones. Who's Nathan.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
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
(07:59):
or ass 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 wife, who was I think as safe
to say as it was a.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Pault the sequence that seems a little all speaking as
Americ man.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
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
(08:45):
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 2 (08:56):
And how did he prepare?
Speaker 1 (08:58):
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, Casey might find
over the course of the year. Sometimes little like notes
(09:21):
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 2 (09:35):
It's almost like the script of a movie where somebody
knows they're going to die.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yeah, and there's but the poignancy is somewhat compromised. I
found by the fact that it was all a contrived scenario.
He wasn't that that's that there's a kind of beathos
to the fact that, well, he wasn't actually going to Mars.
It's not quite the Matthew mcconnae Interstellar where he's missing
his children for this major mission. He's just going to
(10:01):
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 2 (10:17):
All you have to do is watch the video of
him about to go into the Man's dun alfa. What
did you feel when you watched somebody you spent time
with his source in such distress.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, that was striking. He had predicted it. 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 gave a little press
(10:51):
conference and each one of them had to give a talk,
give a little statement, and he broke down. 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 4 (11:06):
But I believe that tomorrow will only be possible because
we step into marsdo now but today, and with that
in mind, I also want to take a moment to
sincerely thank 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.
(11:28):
We see, we know those sacrifices. We couldn't be here
without your love and support. Sorry, Sorry to my wife
and kids.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
I love you, the moon. I'm sorry Mars and back.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
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
(12:13):
of humanity's next chapter. They felt that there is no Mars,
there is no exploration of Mars unless you have the
shapea experiment. I'm not convinced that's true at all. 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
(12:37):
of humanity.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Which 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 1 (12:47):
That's a great point. There is some commonality, and that
there was this idea that they were on a kind
of different frontier of human psychology. And but yes, it's
not it was. I don't think it was quite as ennobling,
or the stakes were quite as high as you see
with NASA and all the trappings of NASA.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
And also she was totally alone, whereas Nathan had three companions.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
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,
(13:35):
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
(13:57):
there are you're with other people. You're cut off from
the people who are most important to you.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
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 dun Alpha.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yeah, so that 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
(14:36):
twenty nine minute lapse, 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
(15:00):
is sending 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 larger the audio file or the text file,
the computer file, the longer it takes. So sending a
(15:21):
short 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,
(15:42):
they 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. So yeah, they were reduced to
these sort of intermittent text messages essentially that would be
(16:06):
relayed at unpredictable intervals.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
How did you choose the headline? Feel story?
Speaker 1 (16:12):
I don't choose the headlines. I'm not allow I don't.
I can consult on them, and I can say this
one's worse than the other one.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
But the headline the New York Times magazine went with
was can humans withstand the psychological torture?
Speaker 1 (16:27):
I mean, it's pretty good, I can't headline yes, yes,
And that's also what it's about, basically, can we can
people survive this? Because most of what NASA 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
(16:47):
into can human beings once they're there survive psychologically, emotionally,
And that's that's what this experiment is, at least ostensibly about,
and it's definitely what the story is that I wrote
about when.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
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 Mars. They've been predicting
(17:22):
for many years that it's just around the corner. They
keep pushing back the window.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
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 it's
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
(17:49):
in 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
(18:11):
lot of optimism that this is going to happen. It's
going to happen pretty soon.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
And why why mos Well.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
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
(18:41):
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
(19:02):
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. There's a
national pride on the line.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
I mean, is this like in the sixties when JFK
wanted to put a man on the moon first. Is
there a parallel to the sixties in that respect?
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Yeah, I would say not only is there a parallel,
but I think NASA and 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 is created.
So it's very much it's you know, you see this
sort of vestigial almost cold war mentality that I think
(19:45):
informs all almost every aspect of the whole enterprise.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
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 El Musk and to a
certain extent, Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
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 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
(20:26):
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. So
(20:48):
that exists if you 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,
(21:15):
observed 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
(21:36):
canals as fast as possible, as also, of course, during
the same period of the digging of the sus Canal.
So this was you know, this is the New York Times.
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
(21:57):
culture that observes it. And I think that's true today,
and I think as our society changes, probably our view
of Mars will change in tandem with it.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
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 1 (22:23):
Yes, they will have to, because that's what they're signing
up up for.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
What will that do to them?
Speaker 3 (22:29):
You know?
Speaker 1 (22:29):
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 zealot astronauts, who are
(22:52):
you 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
(23:14):
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
(23:35):
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, 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 2 (23:54):
So when you wrote the piece, Nathan and co in
the mod's habitat, and since oublication, they've of course come back.
Do you know what the experience was like for Nathan.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
No, they're basically sworn to secrecy. And this was the
level of secrecy that shrouded just about every aspect of
this experiment was somewhat astounding. Orse for me, it was
as it reporting the story, at least talking to the
(24:26):
NASA people and to some extent the participants themselves, you'd
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
(24:46):
to because it would, I guess, diminish the value of
what they find if people already know, like these are
the kinds of things they're going to do when we're there,
or this is what happened to people. 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.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
So the results. NASA haven't published any results of this.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Not that I'm aware of, no, and you know they
release these very anodyne statements.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
It's a success.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Everyone had a great time.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
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 been replicated multiple
times right now all around the world. Can you kind
of describe the spread of this type of experiment being run?
Speaker 1 (25:37):
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
(25:57):
in little pods for long periods of time 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
(26:20):
a 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
(26:41):
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. The book Once
upon a Time I Lived on Mars, it's called And
then there was a crazy experiment called Mars five hundred
that was inistered by the Russian agency called which has
(27:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
That was 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. They have something like
a dozen different versions of this going on at all times.
(27:37):
There are all different configurations, different amounts of time, different
number of participants.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
So if you lost, you say to NASA, why do
you need to keep doing that?
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Yes, that was one of my big questions. Why do
we keep doing this? And don't we know what happened?
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
(28:06):
experimentally scientifically, 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 that study
that's pointed out to me. Yes, okay, this experiment, even
if it's its exact simulation, a perfect simulation of what
(28:30):
the first Mars expedition is going to be, you're only
testing a group of four people eve an n of four, right,
it's 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,
(28:52):
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
a million, you know, fifty times or a thousand times.
I'm not sure where the probability charts cut off, but
(29:12):
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 up to Mars.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
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 1 (29:34):
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
(29:56):
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
(30:20):
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
(30:44):
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,
I will know exactly what kind of propulsion device to use.
And so then I went, you a little bit dubious, yeah,
(31:06):
And so I was like, what, no, I mean, I
believed her because she was running the experiment. She's a
solid propulsion systems engineer, 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
(31:27):
actually I think if you follow the money, you start
to wonder, well, is this whole human aspect side of
it part of 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 (31:43):
She's stay with us for more for Nathaniel Reach on
why dreams of Mars and dreams of AI are inextricably linked,
and why some techno optimists theorize that humans would evolve
into AI powers martians. There was a part of your
(32:06):
story that pretty stuck out to me was that NASA's
chief research scientist, Dennis Bushel said that as colonizing mass
becomes more feasible, colonists themselves will evolve into martians.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Did that surprise you?
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Yes, although a little bit. It was surprised me to
see him write about that so openly. 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
(32:49):
think a lot 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
(33:12):
will be real physiological changes to their bodies. That 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 2 (33:30):
Of it evolved means of course natural selection. Survived are
the fittest on Moss exactly.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
If we're talking about a generational no, it's a generational shift. Now,
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
(33:58):
seems to be NASA's view.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
There's another piece you wrote in The New York Times recently,
which was a review of Ray Causwell's book The Singularity
Is Nearer. Can you talk about who Ray Causwell is
that book and how viewing that book syncs up with
your writing on this experiment.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
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
(34:42):
powered by artificial intelligence that we will inject 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,
(35:06):
electronic intelligence, that for him is a singularity, and he
thinks that's coming very soon, basically by the end of
the decade.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Well, but there's something to me which is very striking
in the sense that Ray caswild this year the godfather
of AI, on the one hand, and on the other hand,
Dennis Bushnell, the NASA Chief Scientist, are both saying in
one way or another that within our lifetimes, the technological
future will mean that we no longer conform to the
(35:38):
current definition of what it is to be human.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yes, 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 are already and that's part of kurz Wells's argument,
is that we already outsourced so much of our mind
and identity to technology that we rely on the Internet
(36:03):
to remember 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
wouldn't 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
(36:29):
viscerally disturbing aspect to them, which is that they require
us to reimagine physically what will look like, you know,
even putting aside all the sort of mental psychological aspect
of it, that we're going to be morph into these
other different kinds of creatures that are going to be
like physically in some ways unrecognizable. And Kurzwill has this
(36:51):
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 well have people have
wings and 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,
(37:13):
improving our intelligence. But I think what was striking to
me about Kurzweil'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,
(37:35):
I think you're right to draw a kind of 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 2 (37:48):
You use the phrase earlier on a conversation about mourning,
and one of the pieces of Coswill's book that you
draw out is him talking about basically making an Ali
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 Dune
(38:11):
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
(38:31):
what we think about as our human experience also is
present in these future fantasies.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Absolutely. 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. Only
(39:00):
see it in Kurzwell, 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
(39:23):
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 music. In the pages of the book,
there's a transcript of a conversation that Kurswell has with
(39:44):
his dead father, 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 us, there's something,
there's something just a little bit upsetting about all of this,
(40:07):
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 Kurzwell and
even aistor, which is the urge to try to recreate
(40:27):
a perfect world, is 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.
(40:47):
And you know, for Mattias, 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
(41:09):
be marred by all the mistakes that we've made here.
And the Ai fantasy has the same component. It's you know,
we'll all be young and beautiful 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
(41:30):
the way they're advertised. It's like progress. 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 3 (41:56):
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 2 (42:15):
Well, not for nothing, 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, we're more isolated
than ever. And I was wondering if there was a
kind of another text s thread that I actually didn't
pull on that perhaps should have done about you know,
(42:36):
why this cultural moment is so interested in isolation.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
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 2 (42:56):
Now?
Speaker 3 (42:56):
That really has nothing to do with going to Mars Asterisk.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
But you are somebody who grew up as a lover
of science fiction. Your father was a science fiction aus. Yes, so,
I mean some people like to be very dismissive of
muscum Bezos and their dreams of space.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
You know.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
I think they are two characters who are probably can
deal with the bit of stick. But I don't think
it's wrong to dream and even plan about space exploration.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
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
(43:48):
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 2 (43:58):
I find them exciting. I find them exciting and 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 3 (44:12):
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. Wow. So
this twinning of saying goodbye to Earth and embracing Mars
(44:35):
actually feels very salient and very right. Now.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Well, that's true. But all 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 assimulated Mars.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
Now, I went to space camp.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
You'll remember, or maybe, but I do remember.
Speaker 3 (44:55):
Now I did go to space camp. I am intellectual
will explorer. I am not a physical explorer.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
You're not a psycho one either, No, I'm.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Definitely not a psychoope. And I did. I found the
story of the woman was at leguinea 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,
(45:26):
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 2 (45:40):
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
like what life on Mars might look like, and they're
(46:02):
basically these biospheres into which you have crammed, like the
Swiss Alps, the Grand Canyon, the Mediterranean Sea, like beautiful animal.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
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 2 (46:25):
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,
(46:48):
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 3 (47:08):
Again, not something I would do.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
That's a good place to leave it. That's it for
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 Norvel Bhart Podcasts. The Engineer is Biheit, Fraser,
(47:32):
Kyle Murdoch, rodear theme song Join us on Friday for
tex Stuff'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.
TechStuff News
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Karah Preiss
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