Part Two: When Women Were Computers: A Tale of Space and Math

In part two of this week's episode, Margaret continues her conversation with Bridget Todd about the space race, Russian cosmists, gay scientists, and the women who got humanity to the moon.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff.
I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy. At each week, I'm going
to tell you about more cool people, including our guest
Bridget God, who is a sort of viable cool person. Bridget,
if you had to elevator pitch yourself, what would that
pitch sound like? Oh, it would sound like I am
a internet weirdo who loves to hang out and made

(00:24):
cool podcasts. That's bad and it works. I'll leave it
at that. Okay. Cool. We also Sophie Liechterman on the call,
who produces this and literally every other podcast. I think, Sophie,
what's your elevator pitch for yourself as a person producer podcasts, puppies, plants,

(00:46):
You're welcome cool. There are a lot of plants, and
so if he's zoom background. So, in the first half
of this two parter, we talked about the women who
were computers who studied space, or people into space. Today
we're going to talk about space and the people who
got into space. But first we're gonna talk about the

(01:07):
gay man who broke the Nazis codes and shortened World
War two by years, saving fourteen million lives and kind
of invented the modern computer, which is to say, we're
going to talk about motherfucking Alan Turing, and I say
kind of invented modern computing, because there isn't actually a
specific start date for computers. It really depends on how
you're defining computer. At Leasta says, I've always understood I

(01:30):
think you know more about computers than me, so I'm
like making sure that I'm yeah, yeah, I definitely don't. Okay,
good to know. So Alan Turing had the misfortune of
being born in n in London. I don't know if
the year was misfortunate, but being English and gay worked

(01:52):
out really badly for him in the end. And not
that many places were better. But just as a white
American of Irish descentive legally acquired to make fun of
England every chance I can, because I can pretend like
it's punching up even though it clearly isn't. So there's
my job at England that turned into a jab at myself.
Alan Turner was a rich British smart kid, so he

(02:15):
wound up in boarding school, where he fell in love
with a fellow student named Christopher, who died of sucking
tuberculosis bovine tuberculosis. I swear to God everyone in every
episode that I record that if they're not killed violently
by a government, they're killed by tuberculosis. Christopher drank infected
milk and died Turing. I wasn't really excited about that.

(02:36):
He turned his grief towards his studies. He went on
to study at Cambridge, and while he was there he
did a bunch of wild math ship that is completely
beyond me, and he wrote out a sort of basic
idea of a computer, sort of conceptual but not capable
of being made. Idea of a computer called the Turing Machine.
And I know what you're thinking, because it's what I
was thinking when I was researching this. He did not

(02:56):
name it the Turing Machine. He's not that kind of asshole.
He named it the a machine for automatic machine, and
his doctoral advisor called it the Turing Machine. It also
doesn't exist. It's a hypothetical thing. It's a proof of concept,
but it's basic principles wound up the central concept of
modern computers, which is cool. I mean, I know computers

(03:17):
have done a lot of bad things, but I kind
of like them. I'm kind of addicted to them. I
like them to like, where would we be without our Like,
how would we stay up until four am researching nonsense?
Not for the computer. I know, we have to find
a library. It's much less fun to be at the

(03:38):
library at four am when you should be asleep researching
like a list of animals that got college degrees or
whatever random thing you're looking up on Wikipedia. Asleep. Wait,
which animals got college degrees? Oh, there's a really interesting
Wikipedia page about animals that have earned college degrees. But
they're all honorary I mean, come on, but still there's

(04:00):
giving us more googling. Thank you my legacy. Yeah, as
an aspiring honorary degree getter, U, I really see myself
in these animals, so I'm excited to see them. But
Alling Turing was not an honorary degree getter. He was
a regular degree getter. He might have gotten honorary ones too,

(04:21):
I don't know. So after school he also went to
Princeton too, I think, just to show off to go
to both Cambridge and Princeton. He got a job working
for the government and the Code and Cipher School, and
then a nineteen thirty nine The Nazis are like doing
their Nazi thing. I swear to God, it's impossible to
do a history podcast that doesn't tie in the Nazis
at some point, probably one of those animals in that

(04:43):
list sucking Nazi um so. And then he starts working
at as working at a super secret, top secret, extra
secret Bletchley Park in order to decipher Nazi codes, which
he succeeded at not single handedly. I think this guy's
hella cool, but we keep hitting the same point. But
it's teams of people who make history. But he still

(05:05):
did a fucking lot of it, and probably it certainly
would have not happened in the same way without him,
might not have happened at all. The work that they
did did not single handedly crushed Hitler, but basically having
access to all of their coded information. One historian calculated
that it shortened the war by two to four years
and saved fourteen million lives, which I mean that ain't bad.

(05:29):
We always talked about like, oh, this person killed X
million number of people, right, but we don't I haven't
seen the Wikipedia list of the people who have saved
the most people. Yeah, And it really goes back to
sort of like I like, it's kind of sucked up
that we talk about, like like numbers of people killed
when we're talking about war. But like, even the conception

(05:51):
of this action saved x amount of people's lives, we
don't really even have like an understanding of that, Like
we don't that's that's not how we describe things. Yeah, totally,
and and even like, like I'm pretty pretty antimilitaristic in
my attitude and most of the time, but I don't
necessarily apply that to World War two, where stopping the
Nazi seems like a really important thing to do, even

(06:12):
if all of the people trying to do it, all
the government's trying to do it were bad, like the
USSR in the US, right, But it's interesting to think that, like, oh,
this person who contributed to the war saved millions of lives.
I don't know, because most of the time that's not
the way that you savellions of lives. So the Nazis
are sending messages using these machines called Enigma machines, which
would be a name that would be absolutely trite if

(06:33):
I wrote it in fiction. And they are these typewriters
that translate between cipher text and plain text. You type
in your message, it comes out of code, or you
type in a code. It comes out of message and
it's based on a key which can change every day,
and by the time the war starts, the Nazis are
changing it every day. It was actually Polish mathematicians who
first broke Enigma, and right before World War Two they

(06:55):
passed that information along to the Allies. So poland sort
I guess the last laugh about that whole being crushed
by the Nazis thing, or at least they got to
participate in the reverse crushing. But then after the war
breaks out, the Nazis change how Enigma works and it
needed new breaking. The stuff gets really into the weeds.
People really like codes. Turing, in, another codebreaker, develops a

(07:18):
purpose built code breaking machine that they called the bomb
or the Bombay or something, and it's bomb with an
E at the end, but not like bomb e like Wally,
which would be a better choice I think they could
have made. During the war, he broke Nazi codes and
did other ship like he developed a voice scrambler to
encrypt voice calls, which is like something that I even
I conceptually struggle to imagine how I would do a

(07:40):
hundred years later. You know, I'm not a cryptographer, that
this is really coming across to anyone who was a
cryptographer is listening. And then after the war, he fucking
invents the modern computer. Sort of same as everyone who
invents the modern computer, lots of people do it, but
he puts forward the idea that computers can store their programs,
and this is a really major step up. And he

(08:02):
also stayed gay. Imagine that at one pot in one
he actually proposed to a coworker, a woman, and she
said yes, and then he was like, oh, but I'm gay,
and she was like, that's that's fine, Okay, we can
still get married. Not a deal breaker, I know. And
then Turing was like, you know, actually I probably shouldn't
marry it. I feel like that would be like dishonest

(08:23):
or something. But yeah, I appreciate that it wasn't a
deal breaker. For in nineteen fifty two, he's thirty nine
years old, he starts dating a younger man. He accidentally
snitches himself out to the cops about being gay. His
house had been burgled, and he made a classic mistake
that rich white people make where he thought that the
cops would um help him. Don't talk to cops exactly,

(08:43):
And if he had listened to our sponsor, don't talk
to cops. His life would have been very different and
probably substantially longer. So he outs himself as gay while
he's explaining like why his partner like why there's another
man in the house or whatever, like his his partner
was like unemployed and probably knew the burglar and I
don't know, it's all this complicated it. So he and
his boyfriend get arrested because they're gay and that's not right. Apparently,

(09:07):
he pleads guilty. First, he kind of leads like no contests,
as lawyers like, plead guilty. So he pleads guilty, and
he's given two choices. You can either go to fucking
prison for darren sleep with another consenting adult, or you
can let us chemically castrate you where the government. He
picks chemical castration. Basically, they these are just these are

(09:27):
hormones that feminize his body. They reduces libido, they make
him impotent, and they cause breast tissue to form. So
the punishment for being gay was being forced to transition.
Oh my god, like the govern like the government. I mean,
it almost seems silly in when we know that our

(09:47):
governments are trying to make it like like criminalized trans
youth and like keep them from gender reform, gender reforming care.
But like, it is wild to me that we're still
having this conference. That's it seems so like backward and horrible.
But then I had to be like, oh wait, it's
not really like the government really getting involved in like
people's expression of their gender and sexuality. I wish it

(10:09):
were a thing of the past and that like what
a relic of of a of a different time, but
like not really unfortunately. Yeah, yeah, I I even I
like try to write a thing out in the script
about this. At all I wrote out was what the fuck?
Because like what I just keep looking at it, and
I'm like, this is what they're not letting us do
on purpose now, but when the government wants to do

(10:31):
it to game like oh fucking no mine. Fuck. Yeah.
His boyfriend gets I think the same deal. He does
some kind of deal that gets them out of prison,
and I don't believe it was like cooperation or anything.
I think it was probably the same chemical castration. And
of course now he's a terrible monster, so he can't
keep his security clearance at the government who he entirely saved,

(10:55):
and he loses his job. You can't have your fucking
fourteen million lives saying fucking here, like sucking dudes off.
That'd be bad, you know. Um, And the US doesn't
let him enter because he's like so bad and untouchable again,
like the fucking hero of World War two. You can't
have someone as dangerous as that around in the US.
So two years later, on June seven fifty four, Turing

(11:18):
kills himself with cyanide. And it's possible that this was
an accident. I frankly don't believe it. Apparently he loved
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was one of his
favorite films, and one biographer said that he particularly liked
the scene where the you know, wicked witch or whatever
dips the apple into poison, and a half eaten apple

(11:39):
was found next to his corpse and they didn't bother
to check it for cyanide before they like hucked it
out or whatever. So there was also this whole electroplating
set up in his tiny room for gold plating spoons,
and so there's like this accidental death theory that he
accidentally killed himself with cyanide that he was using to
electroplates spoons, which I don't know. I I buy the

(12:00):
theory that he put that there for plausible deniability. He
put that there to be like, I feel like a
lot of the time, when people choose to end their
own lives, they come up with ways to do it
in ways that kind of give everyone around them a
way to be like, well, we don't know for sure,
even though we all kind of know, you know, I
don't know. This just gets into the what the fuck
He's another gay man driven to suicide by society they

(12:22):
want to accept him. I don't know. And so like
we're recording this episode and the listeners listening to this
episode with technology that this man fucking developed, um and
then the UK government killed him. As far as I'm concerned, yeah,
I mean it's at what you just said really like
puts it in perspective that we're people are listening to
this episode on technology that we wouldn't have without him,

(12:43):
and yet rather than being treated like the innovator and
hero that he was, he was driven to death by suicide.
And I think it, like, I don't know, maybe I'm
just in a weird place where I can't help but
see these parallels of today of like who out there
are we going to be like, Oh, if only we
had you know, celebrated them and affirmed them while they

(13:04):
were here, Like it's just like a generation. It's it's
so so wasteful, Like what a wasteful way to treat
someone who had so much to give to the world. Yeah, No, totally,
and it it just keeps up coming up again and
again that people people work for these institutions like governments
in order to improve the world and take humanity further
and advance human knowledge and then get basically murdered by

(13:28):
them or you know, thrown away. Not my favorite thing
that's happened. So let's talk about the space race. So
World War two is over and it's cold wartime, and
which brings it with it, the space race. And I'm
going to cut mostly over to the USSR for a
while because I'm not trying to be like yeah us
with this podcast. I've probably hit this theme enough. But

(13:50):
I don't like the U S or the U S SR.
It's a cold war between two evil powers. But they
still did all this really interesting ship the individual scientists
and the USSR, for my money, won the space race.
We got to the Moon first, which which everyone pretends
like the biggest prize. But the USSR had the first satellite,
the first mammal, the first human, the first woman, the

(14:11):
first and the first black men into space. Oh what
was the first mammal? Do you know? Oh? Crap, I
looked it up. Oh no, I don't, no, no no.
I I had this whole section written about the animals
they sent to space, and then I got too sad
and I decided not to include them because most of
the animals that got sent up into space were just

(14:32):
like sent into space and then abandoned, or some of
them were sent up into space and then came back
and then we're you know, treated badly upon their return. Um. No,
So I got really sad about the animal parts, so
then I cut it out. And now I don't remember
what the first animal was, but fruit flies were the
first like living creature. Okay, interesting, Yeah, I I'm sad

(14:53):
that that they didn't treat these animals well when they returned,
or if they returned. My god, I know some of
them ended like heroes or whatever. And like, you know,
some of the dogs, I think in particular, I like,
I looked it up. It was a dogo oh I
dog go. So the space race. The USSR starts it

(15:15):
by launching a satellite, right, and guess what inspired them
to launch a satellite. The obvious answers here would be
either like domination of the planet to a hive mind
of communism if you're reading in propaganda on one end
of the spectrum, or the further into human knowledge from
a detached atheistic point of view. After all, the uss
are we're full of atheists, right? Wrong? I mean, the
USSR was full of atheists, but not just full of

(15:37):
atheists and a lot of their rocket scientists. So the
philosophical underpinnions of the U S s R is entry
into the space race, the thing that started the chain
of events that got a human on the moon. Where
the cosmists? Have you ever heard of the Cosmists? I haven't.
So they're this weird, ideologically diverse philosophical and scientific movement
that is kind of cult like and it marries spirituality

(16:00):
and science. And they were aspiring necromancers who wanted to
raise the dead, not necromancy. Necromancy if you think the
fucking leftists arguing on Twitter are bad right now. In
the nineteen twenties, there were anarchists arguing that death was
quote logically absurd, ethically impermissible, and esthetically ugly. Oh my gosh,

(16:25):
I just I don't know. I somehow I didn't need
necromancy versation, roll left turn exactly so. And this is
the This is the group that includes basically all of
the early rocket scientists in the USSR and the people
designing practical spacecraft. Their ideological founder was a guy named

(16:49):
Nikolai Fyodorov who died penniless three of pneumonia in a
rented room full of strangers. And he came at the
whole thing from a Christian lens. He was an orthodox
Christian and the reason he died so poor is that,
in proper Christian form he gave away everything he owned.
I think he was also, I think it was I
think it was him. It was also very conservative and
like like these are. This is not like a communist hero.

(17:11):
But he gets called the Socrates of Moscow and he
would hold intellectual salons and he was He befriended Tolstoy
until they got into arguments about politics, Tolstoy being far left,
and Tolstoy also shows up in every episode. I do,
and I don't understand why. Um, I don't even have
any particular love for Tolstoy, but he's everywhere. If I
talk about Russia, Tolstoy is there there. He is pops

(17:33):
up his most important project, oh and his whole thing.
So the three things that the cosmis are trying to
do is that they're trying to colonized space. They're trying
to resurrect the dead and live forever just like you do. Yeah,
they're on some like Peter Teel ship like I know,
I know, I mean, these are the like, these are

(17:54):
the forefathers of the futurist movement. Um, it really doesn't
surprise that tols Soys bring brought up when death is
being described as aesthetically ugly like that fills very brand. Yeah,
fair enough. So. So this guy's most important protege was
Constantine Sholkovski, who lived in a cabin in the woods

(18:15):
by choice and wrote books with riveting titles like Explorations
of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices, and he
was talked about guiding ships of rocket thrusters. He talked
about using airlocks on space stations, and he spent his
time developing ideas of closed loop ecosystems that would keep
everyone fed on space stations, which basically means he he
came up with the basic foundations of where we're currently

(18:36):
at a hundred years later in terms of our space travel.
A lot of these early cosmists are right wings rists
and ship but a lot of them weren't. A lot
of them were leftists. During the Russian Revolution and the
resulting Civil War, some chunk of the cosmists became the
bio cosmists, and they're an anarchist faction and they're fighting
for colonized space, resurrect the dead live forever. Lennin famously

(18:57):
not excited about anarchists in general, including ones he started
off as his allies. He actually lets them hang out
longer than all the other anarchists, not because they're weird necromancers,
but because they kind of shut up and backed the Bolsheviks,
and they were mostly a poetry movement. They were so
confusing the whole fucking cosmist thing, and people are really
into the cosmis. I've never even heard of them until

(19:19):
I first read about them in an introduction to a
Russian novel that I was reading. Most of the rocket
scientists in USS are our cosmists. So after the Revolution.
Things were looking really good for the uss are to
get into space right until who comes onto this stage
but Stalin. Stalin comes on and sucks everything up. Motherfucket

(19:43):
Stalin shows up. He sucks everything up. He disappears all
of the major players into the whole thing because he
does not like how religious the whole thing is, and
he doesn't like the some portions of it are too anarchistic.
Space communism aborted by Stalin. He also shuts down research
into computer because he saw them as an evil Western
capitalist plot undermine workers rights, even though the first computer

(20:06):
able to solve differential equations in the world was a
Soviet invention in nineteen thirty six. It was called the
Water Integrator, and it stores numbers by different quantities of water,
which fucking rules. Yeah, I've never even heard of this.
I had neither. I really want to see one. So anyway,
in nineteen fifty three, Stalin did the single best thing

(20:26):
he ever did for the world. He fucking died. Not
a big Stalin fan here. Nineteen fifty seven, Russian scientists
get Sputnik one into orbit, the first artificial satellite in
Earth orbit by anyone in the world. It's only after
a month of design and construction. Basically, they hit the
ground running as soon as they get out of Stalin jail.
Sputnik one hangs out doing its thing for three weeks

(20:49):
until it's batteries run out, and then a couple of
months later it burns up on re entry. And this
not the fact that it burns out on re entry,
but the fact that they launched it freaks the US
out entirely and triggers this base race which the U.
S s R continues to beat the ship out of
the US in. On April twelve one, the first human
gets into space, Uriga Garin, who's a Russian cosmonaut because

(21:10):
they called there's cosmonauts in the US called There's astronauts.
Yuri goes up on Volstock one, and the main designer
for both of these things, Buttnick and vol Stock was
Sergey Pevlovich or oliv. I really am good at Russian.
That's my second. I'm not good at Russian. He's a cosmist.
Sergey is, or at least he's heavily influenced by the cosmos.

(21:31):
He writes books about the cosmis and shipped to interact
with their theories. I think he's a cosmist. He spent
six years in prison thanks to Stalin and his fucked
up paranoia before he gets out and wins the space race.
And this is he sends the first dog, the first man,
the first woman, and the first spacewalker into space. His
rockets photographed the dark side of the moon. He never
loses anyone on any flight during his direction. And unsurprisingly,

(21:55):
actually this is gonna shock you. He didn't trust his
government very much. He had lost all of his teeth
while he was in prison for some of his teeth
because of scurvy, so he doesn't trust his government very much.
Apparently his favorite expression was this is a really catchy expression.
We are all going to be shots and there will
be no obituary. It's just like catchphrase. You know, yeah,

(22:19):
I mean I get it, but grim well, death is
aesthetically ugly. If you didn't know, yeah, totally, but you
know it isn't aesthetically ugly. Is a good comb, a solid,
reliable comb. You can get a lot done with it. Then,
not any particular brand, just that a really good comb.

(22:40):
As well as all of the sponsors of today's show
besides Combs, here's some ads and we are bad and
we're talking about how we're all going to be shot
and there will be no obituary if we live in Sofia, Russia.

(23:00):
And I think, I think that this attitude of him
really underlines this thing again to keep hitting my same
themes over and over again, and that these scientists are
scientists first and foremost, and they interact with bureaucracy as
best as they can to facilitate the science. And this
is a lot of bad effects. But I don't know,
I it makes sense to me. I can kind of

(23:22):
understand this guy being like, well, I guess I'm really
interested in sending ship to space, so I'm going to
work with even the people who just let me out
of jail. I don't know, Yeah, it makes sense to me.
And it's like, like, if you're interested in space, there
really is only one game in town. It's not like
you can start your own little like indie space startup.

(23:44):
Yeah exactly, I mean I wish, but then you have
to be elon Musk and do other evil ship on
a completely different other evil access. So so one of
the reasons that the Soviets are ahead of the US,
I mean, one day they start first, right, and they've
been planning for it for years because they practically religiously
obsessed with it the Cosmos. At least that's part of

(24:05):
their three part program, and the other is kind of ironically.
They had an advantage in that they hadn't gotten as
a head in technology. They weren't miniaturizing their technology. We
were using we the US was using transistors, and the
USSR was still using vacuum tubes. So they just made
everything like fucking giant and brutal. On Soviet NASA's Mercury

(24:25):
spacecraft was like a tiny floating coffin. The Soviet voss
stock was a cannonball filled with padding, and NASA went
for careful water landings. The USSR was like, I'll just
get the funk out of a parachute before it hits
the ground, all right, um, get the funk out of
their good luck goes O't go, what are you an idiot?

(24:46):
Then get the ground like that's all. They gave him
a good life? Yeah, and actually it actually they gave
Although they were the first to start sending engineers instead
of just pilots up into space. At the very first
people they were sending up, they were like, you don't
have any control over this thing. You just you're just there.

(25:09):
You're just there. You have some basic stuff, whereas the
U S Space program, the astronauts had a lot more control,
a lot more the ability to understand what was happening
and fixed problems. But yeah, so this sets them up
for quick victories, but it makes a complex operation like
landing on the Moon much harder, and so they they
do later keep trying and failing too. They managed to

(25:30):
hit the moon a lot, but they don't manage to
soft land on the Moon very well. So, but the
Soviets get women into space first. The US was poised
to get women into space first. The U S had
private screenings for potential women astronauts starting in nine It
was financed by a wealthy woman aviator, and in the
end they picked thirteen women who passed all the same

(25:52):
tests as male astronauts. Decades later, they were dubbed the
Mercury thirteen, which wasn't their name at the time, as
a reference to the Mercury Seven, which is the seven
man astronauts that were picked. An aviator named Jerry Cobb
was lead among these women, and she had already set
in her twenties, she had set three aviation records, like
not just for like a woman aviator, but for any aviator.

(26:14):
But then in nineteen sixty two there was a House
committee hearing on gender discrimination in the space race. Jerry
Cobb and others testified basically it was discrimination to not
let them go up into space just because they were women.
They passed all the same tests as the male astronauts.
That seems pretty cut and dry, right, do you think
they're gonna win? I don't know. Well, guess who testifies

(26:35):
against them. But the first two American men to go
up in orbit, including John Glenn, who was painted as
this trust women anti racist in the fucking movie Hidden Figures.
Are you fucking kidding? I Am not kidding. Okay, wait,
how the hell do we let people like this be
like rebranded as like heroic and like anti racist feminist?

(26:59):
Like what they they only read the fucking headline. They
don't read the whole story. Yeah yeah, his quote to
the committee. I think this gets back to the where
social order is organized. Really, it is just a fact
the men go off and fight wars and fly the
airplanes and come back and help design and build and
test them. The fact that women are not in this

(27:20):
field is a fact of our social order, which what
is true but only in a bad way. Yeah, and
like to say that and be like and like what
the unset thing is like that that that and we
need to uphold that norm Yeah, totally he did. Apparently

(27:41):
he had it like he had his like maybe I
shouldn't be this way moment when um, oh, I don't
remember her name, but a woman died in the Challenger
explosion and oh he eulogized her and did not say like, well,
it shouldn't have been there in the first place, and
I rite, you know, um, I think he like twenty
years later or whatever kind of like came around. But

(28:05):
but first he argued. Part of their defense about why
women shouldn't get to fly in space is that in
order to be an astronaut you had to be a
test pilot in the Air Force, and women weren't allowed
to be test pilots. So so sorry, sorry, ladies, get
out of space because it's it's not us, it's this

(28:25):
other institution that's preventing you. Post other rule. We would
we would change it if it were up to us,
but it's just the social owner, am I right? Um? God? Anyway,
this delays women from going to space for decades, so
that the Soviets are always looking for propagandic coup over

(28:49):
the US, and they really like to prove how more
progressive they are, so they send the first woman into space,
Valentina Tereshkova on June. Most of the Soviets involved in
the space race that I found, we're just scientists who
happened to do their work in the USSR. Not Valentina.
She's a patriot in a communist well, she's actually still alive,
and she's still a patriot. She's not technically a communist anymore.

(29:11):
She's born in seven and shortly thereafter her father was killed.
And that dumb thing where the Soviets tried to invade
Finland because and this thing that will sound familiar to nobody,
the Winter War where the Soviets invaded Finland was because
they decided that the Finnish border was too close to
one of their cities, so it was a threat, and
so they had to move the border, so they invaded Finland. Anyway,

(29:34):
her dad died doing that, and I'm not sorry. Valentina
finished the school, she joins the Communist party. She gets
to work at a textile factory, and then she becomes
a competitive parachutist, which is objectively cool. I didn't even
imagine competitive parachuting, and I think of parachuting is a
thing you do when you turn forty and you're trying
to find meaning in life, or your George w Bush

(29:54):
doing it on your birthday. Right. No, Apparently Sophie is
wagging her finger correct to say yes um. And it
was this activity that got her noticed, and soon enough
she ends up a cosmonaut. She's the first woman in space,
and to this day she's the only woman who's been
to space on a solo trip. And there was this
tradition among cosmonauts on the way to the launch pad

(30:16):
where they needed to take one last piss before they
got into the shuttle, so they would pee on the
tire of the bus that takes them out. I mean,
it's the most boy thing in the world, right It's
I say this as someone who loves to camp and
like it takes a lot of pleasure and peeing outside gross.
Valentina did not break this tradition, and she too peed

(30:38):
on the which is kind of like, I kind of
like that energy, though, I kind of like the all
right bucket. She goes up to space. She orbits forty
eight times in a single flight, really just trying to
flex on the US. She logs more flight time in
that than all American astronauts prior to that combined. She
takes photos of the atmosphere that are used to analyze

(30:58):
the atmosphere, and then the way that she was particularly
nauseous during her her flight was like used to study
the effects of space on on the human And since
her flight capsule was basically a cannonball, it comes down
crashing into the Earth. She injects four kilometers above the
ground and parachutes down, which is the skill that got
her the job, because they're like, look, all you gotta

(31:19):
do is get shot into space and parachute at the end. Right.
That's like and she's like an expert competitive parachuter. So
she's gotten like the job, she's got down, Yeah exactly.
I mean I think she also like trained and shipped
to be a cosmonaut, but like, but this is why
she got picked. And then she fights strong winds on
her descent, she bruises but not breaks her nose on

(31:39):
the landing, and then she has some dinner with local villagers,
and then she goes home a hero, and she wanted
to keep going to space, but she was too valuable
as a propaganda hero, and against her wishes, she was
put in charge of the Committee for Soviet Women in
because of the the USSR was a dictatorship and she didn't
get to choose what she did. She dives into feminist
socialist politics. She stays a communist for a while after

(32:01):
the collapse of the USSR, and now she's a politician
with the United Russia Party, which is basically the let
Putin do whatever he wants party. She tried to remove
term limits for Putin, um she sort of succeeded. Putin
now has a two term limit, but they reset them,
so Putin has two more terms or whatever, like a

(32:23):
decade left. She's not my hero, That's what I'm trying
to say. Yeah, I mean, it's like a classic story
of like jumping out of planes and pissing on wheels
is cool, but then it's like, oh, yeah, you did
all this other stuff for like a fucked up fascist state.
A good job, I guess. One time, she meets Jerry Cobb,
the American woman who should have preceded her and been

(32:45):
the first woman into space, and she actually said, well,
I idolized you before she became a cosmonaut, and she said, quote,
we always figured you would be the first. What happened?
And then to the media she said, they the American
leaders shout at every turn about their democracy and at
the same time they announced they will not let a
woman into space. This is open inequality. So she knows

(33:06):
what the funk is happening. She knows her role both
as a propagandist, but she's also telling the truth. You know,
they're both hypocrites, both not the people but the governments. Incidentally,
Jerry Cobb, who should have been the first woman in
space and should have gotten to go to space with
the US, she gets sucked over out of it more
than once because later that asshole John Glenn, he gets

(33:27):
sent to spaces seventy seven year old, and he claims
that he wants to do it so they could test
the effects of space on aging. So they need to
send an old person. But it's like really openly, just
like a political favor, and he wants to go to
space again. So Jerry Cobb is like, oh, yeah, you
probably need to test that on a woman too. Me
I never got to go to fucking space. NASA's like, sorry, babe,

(33:50):
she never got to go to space. That's so fucked up.
I know this is really making me hate John Glenn.
I feel is bad, but I don't, you know. I'm like,
I'm sure there's more to the story than the these
sides of him, but I don't know. I don't know.
I'm glad to hear that he maybe renounced these vibes

(34:13):
at some point in his life. Oh my god, this
is reminding me so much. Did you ever hear that
anecdote that Sally Ride when she went to space, they
gave her she was gonna be there for a week,
and they gave her like a hundred tampons, and they
were like this be enough, like the greatest scientific minds,
and also will this be enough? I love that, Yeah,

(34:38):
I think it. The whole thing is like all the
different ways that like these these institutions and individuals coalesced
to make it be like a women don't belong in space,
Like did you go up to space? We have no
idea how to keep how to make you feel supported,
like you had no business up there in the first place.
It is wild, totally and then the like more recently
when they're like planning the Mars mission and they're like, well,

(35:00):
we should send for women so that they don't have
sex and therefore there's no like weird feelings. Yeah, women
never have sex with each other. No, definitely, not not
in zero G either. Yeah. I didn't know Sally Ride
about the tampon thing. I'd heard that. I think I
think it was don't quote me on that, but I

(35:21):
think it was. It definitely was a hundred tampons, So
that is actually correct. Yeah, there's like songs about it.
It's it's ridiculous. I've seen a song on I've seen
this song like one h tampon, yes, and will that
be enough? Yeah, these are the people who yeah, I

(35:43):
can play Oh my gosh. Cool. Yeah. So Sally Ride
actually is next to my script because she doesn't get
to go to spacete. She's the third woman in space.
And I didn't know this until recently, and I think
no one most people didn't. It came out more recently
she's the first confirmed gay person in space. After she died,

(36:04):
her obituary casually mentioned her partner of twenty seven years.
I did not know she was gay. No, she apparently,
according to her sister, who's more publicly out, she hadn't
hit in her relationship, but she hadn't made it public either,
and just basically been like, that's not what And also
I think there was a lot of like, what you
funk up your career if you told anyone right now

(36:24):
you know? Yeah. So, but if if those four women
go to Mars, none of them will be gay. Ye,
No lesbian sex happening in space, don't worry. Definitely not.
So this brings us the first black person in space.
And the first thing I did was Google first Black
person in space because I was not totally sure, and

(36:47):
I got the wrong answer at the top of the
Google screen, because if you type into google first Black
person in space, you get little automatic answer at the
top that says Gan S. Blueford, who went to space
on the third Challenger mission. And this guy is a
mean he's a talented guy. He's still alive. He has
medals after medals from the Air Force, and he's written

(37:09):
a ton of papers about fluid dynamics and ship like that.
But he wasn't the first black person in space. He
was the first Black American in space. And it comes
up time and time again, right that you look something
up and it's like the first person to do this thing,
and it usually means the first Western person or the
first white person, or the first in this case like
you know, non Soviet block person or whatever. But the

(37:33):
first black person in space was also the first Latin
American person in space and the first Cuban in space.
And he wasn't an astronaut. He was a cosmonaut. Cuban cosmonaut.
Arnaldo to Myo Mendez went to space in nineteen eighty
for a week as part of the USSRS inter Cosmos program,
which was a program by which the USSRS allies were
given access to space for research and honestly just for

(37:54):
cloud like every country wants to get to have gone
to space, right, And they even let non allied Western
power was used Intracosmos sometimes, which was like an extra
flex over the US because the US is like waist
injier about who they'll send to space. And Arnaldo Tamio
Mendez was born January two in the Guantanamo Province of Cuba.

(38:14):
He never knew his father. His mother was dirt poor
and died of tuberculosis when Ronaldo was eight months old.
He was raised the age of nine by his grandmother,
who also took in the children of another one of
her dead children. This is not a very nice time
to be poor in Cuba. Before communism, it was pretty
fucking bad. Eventually, when he was nine, his uncle, who

(38:35):
was a mechanic, took him in and as a young kid,
Arnaldo started taking every job he could, as a shoe shine,
a vegetable peddler, a milk delivery boy. By the time
he used thirteen, he found himself an apprentice carpenter, but
he didn't drop out of school. In the background of
all this, when Arnaldo was ten or so, the US
installed a dictator in Cuba named Batista. Fidel Castro and
se Guvara and a ton of other people had this

(38:56):
whole revolution thing. It took like five years nifty nine
they win. Batista did the classic dictator thing where he
steals hundreds of millions of dollars and then fus off
out of the country, in this case to Portugal, and Arnaldo, seventeen,
was one of the thousands who stormed through the streets
and joy to see their military dictatorship overthrown. He joins
the military, becomes an aviation technician, and soon he adds

(39:18):
off to the Soviet Union learning how to fix and
fly fighter jets, and then he flies twenty reconnaissance missions
during the Cuban Missile Crisis of nineteen sixty two. The
Cuban Missile crisis was when, oh, crap, Cuba has nukes now,
which happened when the USSR gave their buds some nukes,
which they did because the US had stationed nukes pointing
at the USSR in Italy and Turkey, and the US

(39:41):
has also just tried to invade Cuba and failed in
the Bay of Pigs invasion. So the U S is like, oh, no,
Cuba suddenly has nukes. I mean, there's a reason that
Cuba suddenly had nukes. The crisis ends when the US
agrees not to invade Cuba anymore and to withdraw its
nukes from Turkey, and the USSR agrees to withdraw its
nukes from Cuba. So anyway, Arnaldo flew a bunch in

(40:02):
the Cuban Air Force during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and
as well as he started teaching Cuban aviators in nineteen
sixty seven, he spent two years fighting in Vietnam, which was,
you know, on the opposite side of the conflict as
the US, which is interesting because he was on the
opposite side of the same war flying missions as the US,
as first black astronaut. And I've I've read mixed reports
about exactly what Cuba got up to in Vietnam. They

(40:24):
weren't like a major presence in the war, but if
nothing else, they provided limited air support for the North Vietnamese.
The USSR wanted to send some foreign cosmonauts up into space,
started looking for a Cuban came down to Arnaldo, who
was black, and Jose R. Mondo Lopez Falcon, who wasn't black,
and it's possible after winning it down to two people,
Castro picked Arnaldo basically as a fuck you to the

(40:45):
US to point out to make fun of the US
for its awful race relations. Right, but Cuba was also
full of anti black racism at that time. More than
half of its population was black. Harold Germaine Star, writing
in the Washington Post in made the case that Moscow
and Havana rolled out the red carpet for Lanks and
Hues and Sada Shakur, but non exceptional black people are

(41:06):
regularly discriminated against, jail disproportionate and non black residents and
just generally mistreated. Yeah, I mean the anti black it's
so interesting and I love how you've put this. The
anti blackness in Cuba is a documented thing, but yet
they do like welcome I guess quote exceptional black folks.
And it's so interesting to me that Cuba would be

(41:28):
trying to sort of get one over on the US
by being like, oh, look how we treat our black folks.
We spend send them to space, while while like totally
ignoring the reality that is anti blackness in their own country.
It is like so interesting and so layered and so
complex and nuance, and then like it's I guess I'm
happy to hear you talk about it in this way

(41:49):
because so many people talking about it really don't have
the range to like really parse the like the seven
layer castle role that is anti blackness globally. I guess
I'll say, yeah, yeah, No. I spent a while trying
to be like, oh my god, and I just kept going,
you're right, that's it's so many layers as it goes
down and down, and with anti blackness all the way down,

(42:10):
it's really fucking pressing. It's anti blackness the whole way
to help. So let's talk about the USSR santi black
racism for a second. In the nineteen sixties, the USSR
had its own black rights demonstrations because African students, especially
from Ghana, had been moving to the country for studies.
And then an African man named Edmund A sorrow Atto

(42:33):
was found dead in nineteen sixty three and students say
that he was killed for sleeping with a white woman,
and they had a demonstration about it that may or
may not have been a riot. One sign read another Alabama,
which was, you know, a clear reference to the widespread
anti black racism and US basically saying it should have
been better here. And the Soviet government, surprise, surprise, claimed

(42:53):
it was all a propaganda stunts set up by the
Western powers, and we're like, oh, the guy just froze
to death or whatever, you know. And there's only a
hun fifty seven people at this protest, which makes it
seem sort of like not a big deal. But it's
the first demonstration of on Red Square since the nineteen twenties.
Because uss are not really big on allowing freedom political
speech and assembly, and people fucking did it anyway, Um,

(43:15):
because they're fucking mad for whatever reason, they pick Arnaldo,
and he's a perfectly good, you know, cosmonaut choice. He's
a he's a great pilot, he's a perfect choice to
represent Cuba. On September eighteenth, nineteen eighty, Arnaldo becomes the
first black person in space, something that the US didn't
succeed at until he spent He spends more than a

(43:37):
week on the Soviet Space station conducting agricultural experiments designed
by Cuban scientists so that Cuba can advance some of
its its science. But he wasn't treated as the first
black person in space right away. He definitely was the
first black person in space, but no one was making
a big deal out of his blackness. He was the
first Cuban in space and the first Latin American in space,

(43:58):
and it wasn't until the US sent up their black
Vietnam vet Gian Blueford that attention was really drawn to
the fact that Cuba did at first. Because everything is
a bunch of bullshit propaganda wars that use marginalized people
as ammunition. Yeah, I mean, it's so much like the
episode that we just did about that, you know, hidden
figures and marginalized people in computing. It's like it is,

(44:23):
I can't imagine what it must have been like to
be Like, on the one hand, I am happy that
I get to to, you know, break this barrier and
do this milestone. But on the other hand, they're kind
of using me because they're trying to make a political
point or like use me at like you know what
I mean. Like, I can only imagine what that must
have been like to actually know all of these things

(44:45):
and feel all of these things, but still be somebody
who was like breaking barriers and making history in these ways. Yeah, totally.
I would definitely still be like, no fucking send me
to space and in his shoes, you know. Not if
given the chance, would you go to some I think
I would. I would have to because I refuse to
let fear control my life. But oh my god, does

(45:07):
that sound anxious? I would What I would need to
do not in addition to like astronauto cosmonaut training, I
would need to like really figure out a regiment of
anti anxiety drugs. Yeah, I'm sure it gets. I'm sure
it gets like anxiety provoking up there like tight spaces.
It's like probably weird, like like probably weird sounds. I

(45:30):
would go on a heartbeat, no question in my mind,
I would totally go cool. Sophie, would you go No,
we have the full range of choices. You're not even curious,
what's what's going on up there? Nope, You're like, I
don't it doesn't concern me. I'm gonna mind my business
down here on Earth's going to stay down here with
my hundred tam bonds and all the day. They probably like,

(45:56):
send me up and they'd be like trans woman woman, Okay,
hundred bonds. No, no, no, you two hundred two hundred.
I don't even know as I'm like on drugs, but
no one else you can eat on drugs. Potatoes absolutely

(46:18):
sponsored today's podcast. Uh, here's some advertising that supports are
complicity in capitalism and we are back and we're all
jealous of Soaphy, who's dinner arrived while we were just potatoes.

(46:43):
I'm so sorry. Well, there's other wholesome foods, I'm sure so.
At the top of this episode, the first part of
this episode that you heard on Monday today is Wednesday,
because obviously you're listening to this to day came out.
It could be any day. I don't know what day
it is when you're listening to this. I promised you
a bisexual rocket scientist. And so for the last story

(47:03):
that I'm going to talk about today, I'm going to
tell you about Jack Parsons and the suicide squad. Jack Parsons,
who was actually his birth name is Marvel, but he
didn't like his dad very much, so he didn't He
didn't keep his dad's name Marvel, although Marvel Parsons would
have also been a really good name. Jack Parsons, I
like it. He's one of the people who founded JPL,

(47:26):
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that later became part of NASA,
the place that started the trend of hiring women as
computers in aerospace field. And he designed a ton of
rocket engines. He made advancements in solid and liquid fuel.
That Nazi guy who led the space race, Verna von Braun.
One time he got called the father of rocket science,
and he was like, no, no, no, that's Jack Parsons.

(47:48):
And I can't tell you that Jack Parsons was a
good person, but I can tell you that he is
fucking interesting. Jack Parsons was this rich white kid from
Pasadena born in nineteen fourteen. He'd read a on of
science fiction and he thought rockets were cool. He got
picked on in school for being a rich, effeminate kid,
and he spent his afternoons with his like one friend
and they would go blow shut up in the go

(48:09):
out in the woods and blow shut up, sucking homemade
gun patterns. Probably not woods. I assume it's like desert
or something. I don't know, the West coast. He reads
a ton of occult of ship Pasadena, Pasadena, Florida. Where
is it west? Is it Pasadena, California? Wait, where's Pasadena?

(48:30):
Because there's Pasadena, California. Or is it Pasadena somewhere else?
Because Pasadena, California. We don't upwoods there. Yeah, Okay, Okay,
I was right, Okay, So it's not the woods. He's
blowing it up in going outside, blowing shut up whatever.
Pasadena looks like. I don't know where Pasadena is. Clearly
a most well traveled person. You can trust me, Okay.

(48:54):
So his interests in classic go bisexual boy mo he uh.
He blows stuff up with homemade gunpowder. He figuring out
how to make his own gunpowder, and then he reads
a cult of stuff and he tries to summon the
devil in his bedroom, but he chickens out and he
doesn't finish the ritual. He goes to college, he starts

(49:15):
working on rocket ship in the weekends. He starts corresponding
with rocket scientists all over the world, including von Brown
and the Russian cosmists. Like before the warship came up,
all of the U. S scientists, German scientists, Russian scientists,
they're all buds and comparing notes when he's in college.
His crew in school got called the suicide Squad because
they're reckless with their bomb experiments, and a bunch of

(49:36):
the major players in rocket science in the US and
China are involved in the suicide Squad. Wait, I haven't
really possibly silly question, Please give me if this is
the stupidest question, is that where the name from? Like
the comic book slash movie the Suicide Squad? Is that
where the name comes from? I don't know. I was
thinking about that because this is the second thing like

(49:56):
a suicide squad I've run across in UM In the
I did an episode on gay resistance to Fascism, and
I found out that gay Nazis were put into a suice.
It wasn't. I don't know if it's called a suicide squad,
but they were put into a suicide squad where they
were like, instead of going to jail, they got put
in with all of like the worst Nazis off to

(50:16):
go do like but it was like an S S
squad um And so I was like reading that, and
I was like, WHOA, is this where suicide squad got
their things from? Like gay fucking Nazis? And now I'm
reading this and I'm like, maybe this is where suicide
squad got its name from. I don't know. Maybe it's
just like a thing that people called idiots who kept
trying to blow themselves up. Maybe it shows up all
throughout history. This is interesting. No, I get really excited

(50:40):
about these weird threads that I don't I haven't figured
out how to untangle yet. So he drops out of
school because he doesn't have enough money to go to school.
I think maybe because his dad had sucked off. I'm
not entirely sure why this financial situation changed so much.
But he never gets a degree, and he turns down
honorary degrees later, which is even more of a flex
in a way. Although I will also say the fact

(51:01):
that it's like the white kid turning down all these
degrees as compared to like the black women who are like, like,
there's a whole thing that I didn't really get into
about HBUs historically black universities and like how much work
they did to help uh black folks get ahead, and like,
so I'm not trying to like whenever I'm like on
this maverick named Marvel who dropped out of Oh my God,

(51:24):
the fact his name was Marvel and suicide Squad Marvel
or d C. I think it's Marvel, but don't quote
me on that. Um anyway, that was a d h
D spin off from what I was trying to talk about.
But yeah, I mean I think you're right. Like, I
love that you've added that that, Like, it's it's really
easy to be a white kid from Pasadena who turned

(51:46):
down an honorary degree. Meanwhile, all of these black women
who were like working their ass off from any recognition
and getting none of it probably would have like been
really honored by a degree considering the role that like
HBCUs played and things were that black folks were able
to get educated. You know, it makes so much sense. Yeah,
I also want everyone to know that we are safe.

(52:06):
Suicide Squad is d C comics. Okay, too weird, too
weird everyone, all right, So he drops out of college.
He's still blowing ship up. He actually, you know, he
starts forming these rocket scientist companies and ship, and then
he starts hanging out with the communists and gets really
into Marxism. But he won't join the Communist Party because

(52:27):
he's too anti authoritarian, which makes me like him. But
then he discovers something that he likes even more than
like radical leftist anti authoritarian politics, occultism in the in
the nineteen thirties, he becomes a Thelamite, which is this
religion started by Alistair Crowley that's all into magic and ship.
And he starts talking to how magic is just quantum

(52:48):
mechanics because he's brillianto science and all this this other
ship and so yeah, he's advancing the field of rocket
scientists by leaps and bounds while smoking weed with his
friends and chanting to him to pan during rocket tests.
This is like, I'm having trouble like wrapping my brain
around this the occult Like it's just yeah, this is

(53:10):
like in my and when I was like in high
school listening to Pink Floyd. This is like what my
mom would be like, Oh, you better watch out or
you're gonna end up trying to go into space and
being into the occult. Watch out totally. He talks throughout
his life. He's he sort of like has a reputation
as a womanizer that was actually part of a polyamorous culture.
I'll get into a little bit, but he also talks

(53:32):
about his latent homosexuality and in his his FBI file,
which we'll get to, he's called bisexual. He liked to
answer the door with a snake around his neck. His
mailbox was a mannequin holding a bucket that said residents
across the bucket. UM. I kind of like, I know,
I kind of like this guy. When the US enters

(53:53):
World War Two, he and his leftist rocket scientist friends,
they're like, we we need to help out with the
war effort, and it was a moral duty from from
their point of view. They had to stop the Nazis.
So him and all his friends start very intentionally working
on developing a lot of the rocketry that people used
to fight the Nazis. He also leaves his wife Helen
for her seventeen year old sister Sarah. But then Helen

(54:17):
falls in love with Jack's best friend, and then the
couples move in together into a communis messy, very messy,
but they stay friends and the house is called the
parsonage because it's I think it's because it's his fucking
money paid for it do because it's like and then Sarah, oh,

(54:40):
Sarah gard leaves them for fucking l Ron Hubbard. Are
you oh my fucking god. Honestly, of course of course
she does. Of course she's like, what else could she do? Like, okay,
so anyway, so in a similar way, we're okay, we can,

(55:04):
we can, we can. He's really in all this occultis
ship too, before he starts his own religion to fucking
milk everyone out of their money. Um, and yeah, the
weird fucking group of people. Okay, I'm gonna need a
nap after this. So okay. So in a similar way
that Stalin had gotten all paranoid and imprisoned and oppressed

(55:27):
all of their best scientists, and the UK fucked over
Alan turing Well. The House of on American Activities has
some words to say for Jack Parsons, who has advanced
like like his ideas of rocket fuel are what gets
us to the moon. Like, he absolutely does a fucking
ton of important stuff right, And then the House of

(55:47):
an American Activities is like, now you're fucking communist, and
he's like, actually, I'm not a communist. I I'm anti
authoritarian and I'm Athelamite, and so I believe in the
power of the individual. And they're like, we don't care,
you're fucking communist. They revoke his security clearance. He's not
able to get any work in the field, because how
are you going to be a missile designer if you
can't work for the government, And his life starts is

(56:10):
just falling apart. In NIF two, he moves to Mexico
and he sets up an explosives factory, which I guess
is a thing one can choose to do when one's
life is falling apart. And then one day he's making
some bombs for a film set, a Mexican film, and
his trailer blows up and it kills him. And lots
of people have lots of ideas about exactly what happened here,

(56:31):
but it was probably an accident or suicide. He'd probably
been high on morphine at the time. He died, but
then other people are like, no, it was these people.
His story is so much more complex than I'm getting
across because I only half understand it because it's so
twisted and convoluted. But there's so many people who would
have tried to kill him. So I don't know what

(56:52):
happened to this guy, and everyone likes to argue about
it because he's like, Okay, he probably dropped this container
of this chemical, and then people like, no, he was
very careful, and other people like, are you freaking kid?
And he wasn't careful if you met this guy. But
on the other hand, he'd been doing that since he
was a little kid, So I don't know. Jack fucking Parsons,
Then okay, don't with people, but one more thing, which
actually involves a person, So I guess I lied when

(57:13):
I said no more people. So for all the cold
attached atheism that scientists supposedly known for, there's always this
religious component, and I hadn't even realized that's so I
started doing this research. You've got a Unitarian astronomer, You've
got the cosmist who want to resurrect the dead. Katherine
Johnson was a Presbyterian who sang in the choir is
a member of her church for fifty years. Alan Turing
he believed in fortune telling. A fortune teller told him

(57:35):
when he was a little kid that he was going
to be a genius. And supposedly the last time he
had his fortune read, he came out really shook, and
he didn't tell anyone what happened. Um never told anyone
what he heard. And then of course there's Jack fucking Parsons,
who Yeah, he's Jack fucking Parsons. He's singing to him
to pan during rocket tests. But I want to talk

(57:56):
about one more religion that's obsessed with space, Earth Seed,
which is the fictional religion made up by maybe the
most prescient science fiction author whoever lived, Octavia Butler. Yes, yes,
this is your speaking of my language. I'm a big
Butler fan. Let's do this. She's so freaking amazing. I'm
this I'm not unfortunately good God, I actually probably need

(58:18):
to do an episode on Butler's You absolutely should. I
would definitely listen to that. Okay. So she wrote a
book called The Parable the Sewer, which I think is
the most Prussian science fiction book that's ever been written,
at least in terms of our current disaster that we're
all living through. And this is the book where the
fictitious religion of earth Seed comes from. She describes a
slow apocalypse that includes a right wing fanatic of a

(58:39):
president who runs under the slogan make America Great Again.
Sound familiar, and so the protagonists they make their way
up to northern California. They set up a little apocalypse
survival homestead, and they develop a religion based on basically
two things. One God has changed, that we all have
to learn to embrace and shape change and let change

(58:59):
shape us. And too, basically that the stars are our destiny,
that theoretically something like space exploration ought to be something
that brings humanity together instead of dividing us. And I
don't know, And I think that that's important to think
about one because I fucking like it a lot, but
too because the old way of doing space is dying

(59:21):
right now, right like nations are no longer the primary
drivers of space research. You have capitalism instead, which is
maybe the only thing more dangerous than these nations states.
And I propose that we're sort of crossroads. Either space
gets explored and claimed by sucking corporations that I claim
I would say it will not be named, but we
clearly named them earlier. Or we get our ship together

(59:42):
and do it like Butler told us, and do it
for humanity. That like, you just blew my mind. I yeah,
you just move my mind. I hadn't thought about it
that way. First of all, I have to say, I'm
so glad that you're referencing Butler, because in this moment,
everybody is like, oh, hand its tale, handmade sale. No,
it is sucking Butler, like, like that's the that's the

(01:00:05):
text we should be at least the text that I
think we should be like looking too. But honestly, the
way that you put that is almost kind of hopeful
that we have this. We're at at a crossroads where
we can decide if you want the next generation of
space exploration to belong to people like Elon Musk or
something different, like is it is it? Like? Who is

(01:00:25):
it for? What's who's going to define it? I think
I think it's almost sort of hopeful the way that
you put that. Thanks. I yeah, I I you know,
it's like I I try for optimism sort of strategically
because it's the only chance we have is to to
act like we can win, you know, I don't know.
And yeah, and that in that book Parallel Sower and
thats sequel parable of the talents. It's the most hopeful

(01:00:46):
apocalypse I've ever like apocalyptic book I've ever read, and
that's one of the reason I love it so much.
That's my episode on space and the exploration of it
and rockets and computers. Do you have any any final
final reflections or yeah? My final reflection is just that like,
I can't I'm so surprised to find myself in this

(01:01:08):
optimistic space where you know, it's kind of up to us, like, like,
what's it gonna be? What are we going to decide
we want? And you know, are we gonna treat We've
kind of got a number on the on the world
on on Earth. Are we going to let people who
we know can't be trusted do the same thing to
space or aren't we you know, it's just it's kind

(01:01:29):
of up to us. I don't know, it is it's
a hopeful apocalypse. I guess, as you said, than where
did you have any plugbolspre us? Yeah, I love conversations
about technology and all things nerdy, and so please come
check out my podcast there are no girls on the Internet.
You can find me on Instagram at Bridget Marie DC
are on Twitter at Bridget Marine Amazing and we'll be

(01:01:52):
back next week, right, Margaret, Yay Soil the Heat, Death
of the Universe. Where can people follow you? Margaret Well,
if you want to see pictures of my dog or
of a turtle that I saw today that was eating
a mushroom, Yes, you can follow me on Instagram at
Margaret kill Joy. And if you want to hear me

(01:02:12):
complain about discourse while at participating in discourse, you can
follow me on Twitter at Magpie killed Joy. I do
I really do? And uh Paul Bridget Margaret back next week, everyone,
Cool People Who Did? Cool Stuff is a production of

(01:02:33):
cool Zone Media, but more podcasts and cool Zone Media.
Visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.