Instant Genius - When we’ll actually move to Mars

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

If you’re anything like Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, the idea of a mass human migration to space is exciting but, well, a little flawed. As they say in their new book, A City on Mars (shortlisted for this year's Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize): “An Earth with climate change and nuclear war and, like, zombies and werewolves is still a way better place than Mars.” In this episode, we speak to Kelly about why we’re not likely to see billionaires rocketing off to Mars-based bunkers, what we might eat when we live in space, and how close we really are to moving to Mars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com. to learn more. This is Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Noah Leach, special projects editor at BBC Science Focus. Life on Mars.

Sounds great, right? Space sunsets, cutting-edge terraforming, and a world with no war. Well, probably not. That's what Kelly and Zach Wienersmith have concluded in their new book, A City on Mars, written after years of research into space settlements. In this episode, we speak. speak to Kelly about why space probably won't save us from a calamity on Earth, including overpopulation and even a dinosaur-style asteroid impact.

As they say in the book, an Earth with climate change and nuclear war and zombies and werewolves is still a way better place than Mars. Listen on to find out why and what we still need to figure out before we can go extraterrestrial. So Kelly, I want to start by asking you one of the main questions that you ask in the book. When it comes to settling space, have we really thought this through? You know, certainly some folks would argue that they definitely have, but I think as a society, we absolutely have not. No.

So I think that one of the reviews of your book actually talked about all the hype and naivety around space exploration and specifically settlement of places like the moon and Mars. And you tackle this hype, let's call it, with humor, you're skeptical and in your own words, pessimistic. Why do you not think it's a good idea right now? There's so much that we don't know yet. You know, in particular, settlements require that people can have babies, for example, in a place like Mars. And we don't have anywhere near enough science to know that that's going to be safe for the mothers or for the babies that are born.

And it just feels like it would be unethical to start this soon. There's just a lot of questions we still need to answer. Let's dive straight into space babies because I've got this down and something I really want to talk to you about. The amount of research that's been done on reproduction in space is really minimal, and it's been really sporadic and not systematic. So, you know, we'll send rats up for the first part of their trimester and then send them back to Earth. And then we'll send them up for labor and then bring them back or something. Like, we haven't even had rodent colonies go through a couple generations in space.

And partly that's because the space agencies aren't super excited about funding research related to reproduction and sex in space. is just not a very pressing question. So we know very little about how this works in orbit around Earth on somewhere like the International Space Station. And when you move out to a place like Mars, where you have 40% of Earth's gravity and you're completely exposed to space radiation, everything gets even harder.

And so I'm just not convinced we can do this safely yet. Yeah, we actually spoke to a space gynecologist, which is an amazing job title, about a year ago. So how close are we? Would you hazard to put a date on it? I mean, when we spoke to her, She wasn't very optimistic about the timescales. What do we know about this? If tomorrow, the United States decided, okay, space settlements are a really important geopolitical goal.

We're in a new space race with China. Then maybe all the money would come flooding in and we'd have research stations on the moon and we'd understand this stuff in the time spans of biology are, like, they can be kind of long. So you'd have to at least go through, you know, many rodent generations. And then maybe you'd want monkey generation. So I still think it would be years to get good. data, but it all depends on how we can fund this stuff and how fast that money comes in. So we've done a lot of research on the International Space Station. So it's in orbit around Earth. It's in free fall. So that's essentially no gravity. And it's been within the protection of the magnetosphere. So the magnetosphere surrounds the Earth and it shuttles space radiation to the poles. And so most of

that radiation hasn't hit our astronauts. So we don't understand what that's going to do to human bodies. Like there was this quote that we found when we were doing our research that said, we don't even really know space radiation causes cancer, but it's reasonable to assume that it can. Like, that's where we are on that stuff. And so, you know, maybe radiation is going to mess with our gametes and we're going to have a lot of problems that way. Maybe, as I've mentioned, Mars has 40% of Earth's gravity. Maybe that's going to be a showstopper, but maybe 40% is enough. We just, we really haven't done enough research to know the answer to that question. And then you've also got difficult questions like, you know, we leave.

lose a lot of women post-labor to hemorrhaging. And the way that we treat that on earth is we give women oxytocin, which causes contractions and it sort of clamps off the blood vessels and the bleeding stops. And so, you know, can we get oxytocin to Mars and can we keep it shelf-stable? There's all of these questions about taking care of the mom and their babies that I just don't feel like we've thought through and have a good plan for yet. So we're lacking some of the fundamental details in everyday life. But let's just go back to the foundations for a moment. Some of these plans, some seem to have good intentions, but what are some of the reasons that people want to build these space settlements? And do you think these reasons hold weight? I think the best

reason is this idea that Mars would be sort of a plan B for our species. So the idea is that if something catastrophic happens to Earth, we get hit by a giant extinction level asteroid, that having humans somewhere else in the solar system will sort of keep our species persisting. And like history, not withstanding, I like our species. And so I think that's a good goal. But I think one of the problems with that goal is, you know, so Musk talks about how in 30 years we're going to have a million people in a self-sustaining settlement. And self-sustaining implies that that settlement could survive, even if Earth were destroyed. And I'm just not at all convinced that in 30 years, Mars is going to have the infrastructure to create all of the complicated technological equipment that you're going to need

to keep people alive in habitats on Mars. And so that's the argument that I think is the most compelling. There's a lot of other arguments that I think are less compelling. So, for example, some folks will argue that we're not going to have to go to war anymore on Earth because war is about resources and land. And space has essentially infinite quantities of those things. And so we won't have war on Earth anymore. We talked to some war theorists, and there's just no evidence that that's going to pan out.

because, you know, for example, wars aren't often about, like, acres. War is about very particular pieces of land that we have, like, emotional connections to. So, you know, if you contacted Vladimir Putin and said, give up the parts of Ukraine that you all have annexed and we'll give you a comparable size of that land in Antarctica, I can't imagine Putin would be like, okay, yeah, no, we're good. Well, you can call off this war. Things are more complicated. So what are the most viable current options for space settlements?

Are there any? I think Mars is probably the best place for us to settle space. It has the most of the stuff that humans need. So for example, it has a lot of water that's fairly accessible. It has a lot of the minerals and nutrients that we would need to be able to grow plants. The temperature swings aren't too wild. But a problem is that Mars is pretty far away. So you can only leave every two years when Mars is in the right position where it will be close enough to Earth. And it takes six months to get there. And then you have to stay there for like. a year and a half and then six months to get back. So if something goes wrong on Mars, you're kind of on your own, which means that the moon becomes a very valuable place to learn how to do stuff before you go to Mars. So, you know, you'd like to test out your equipment in the difficult environment of the moon for two years and confirm, like, okay, this stuff's not going to break, we have enough of it, and then head over to Mars. Musk proposes that we sort of skip that step and go right to Mars. I think that would be very dangerous. I think there's a lot of stuff that we should trial out beforehand,

But Mars is probably the best spot. And then there's another group of folks who would argue that rotating space settlements are the ideal place for humans to settle space. So these are, you can imagine like a bicycle tire spinning in space. And that generates something like Earth gravity. And, you know, we talked a little bit about how 40% gravity on Mars might not be enough for reproduction. But if it turns out you need Earth like gravity, maybe these rotating space stations are going to be where we have to live. but technologically they're far more complicated to create and they're going to be very expensive. And there are tons of plans involving the moon currently. There's a lot of talk about moon bases in particular. So more areas of scientific research, presumably, than settlements. But do you consider that to be a step towards settlements? And do you think that the timelines of 2035 for the China one on the South Pole, for example, do you think that's viable? Oh, that's a great question. I think research on the moon is absolutely critical for moving forward for space settlements. And NASA wants to be out on the moon with humans again, including the first woman by, I think 2026 is their goal. But their goal, as far as I know, is to like get there and do some research, but NASA is not planning on starting a research station or they're not explicitly planning for that, whereas China is. And I think that's going to have some pretty interesting geopolitical implications. So China is heading to the South Pole. That's where NASA wants. And

wants to be as well. So the moon, when you look out at it at night, it all looks like kind of the same. And so it's, you know, maybe you look at it and you don't immediately tell that there are some places that are better than others, but the poles are way better than the equator, for example. So on the poles, you have these areas where there have been impacts on the moon and they've created rims. And if you're up on the top of these rims, you can get sunlight something like 90% of the time. Whereas at the equator, you have two weeks, like the equivalent of two weeks on Earth, of light, and then a nighttime that lasts the equivalent of two weeks, which makes solar panels not really a viable option because you'd need just incredibly massive battery packs that you'd have

to hope would work in this difficult environment. So being in an area where you get more light is very valuable. Additionally, inside of those craters, those are the best chances of getting water in the form of ice on the moon. And so you've got, you know, water, which we need for life. And maybe you could also use it as rocket propellant. If you split it into hydrogen and oxygen, they can react explosively and can be a great rocket propellant. So it does seem like there's going to be a race for these very concentrated resources in a very particular place. And so it'll be interesting to see how that pans out where interesting could mean bad. There are also plans, earth-based plans, aren't there? I mean, they're all earth-based plans, but they're earth-based simulations. So I'm thinking specifically

of Mars June Alpha, which is the isolation experiment that's happened over the last year. So could you tell us a bit more about that and how that feeds into all of this? So Mars June Alpha, they took something like four crew members and they closed them into a habitat that was meant to mimic something like an early Mars habitat. And there's some things that you can learn about that, but I think the psychological value is limited in some ways. Because if you had a habitat on the surface of Mars and it got hit by debris from space, it would depressure. and everyone would die. You miss that psychological component where like things are going well, but we could die at any moment. And so, which I think is probably going to be important for how things

will play out on Mars. Additionally, there have been some simulations where they've tried to close things, which is to say they try to recycle their waste. They, you know, turn the urine back into drinking water, for example. They use plants to extract carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. And these complicated systems are what we're going to need if we're trying to live on the surface of Mars for a long time. But they require hours of maintenance every day. And when they start to break down, you know, the quality of life goes down too. So Biosphere 2 in the 90s, famously the levels of oxygen started to go down as carbon dioxide went up. Everybody had horrible headaches because they weren't managing the system well. And I think you lose some of that realism that's going to be absolutely critical to understanding what life will be like in space in some of these analog. So I've got to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of some of those. I'd love to see us do more of those experiments in closed environments. Would you do it? No, because I'm not convinced the scientific payoff would be enough.

And also, like, it's very stressful to leave, you know, family for a year. And I have two young kids. But also, I wouldn't go to Mars. So maybe that's informative. Yeah, yeah. But so reproduction, we haven't thought about. What are the other key details that you think are missing in just day-to-day life? Those closed-loop systems that I referenced a second ago are going to be

critical. And they're a really important part of life on the International Space Station, for example. Like, if you read the biographies from the astronauts, they're very regularly complaining about what a pain in the rear end it is to just maintain the bathroom and just make sure that that's not breaking. And the carbon dioxide levels on the International Space Station are higher than they are on Earth because it's just kind of difficult and expensive to maintain low carbon dioxide high oxygen levels. And so they'll complain about headaches from time to time. And we just, we don't really. have the complicated equations that we're going to need to understand, you know, how many wheat plants do you need to scrub the carbon dioxide for, you know, four people out of the atmosphere.

China has a facility called Lunar Palace where they're working on these closed systems. And a couple years ago, they had a system where they had three men in it. And the carbon dioxide levels were like fluctuating up and down wildly. And they replaced two big men with two smaller women. And the carbon dioxide level balanced out. So that's where we are right now. Like you need to swap out smaller people to make sure that you're not overwhelming the ability of the plants. And of course, if that happened on Mars, that would be the end. You'd be a goner. There's just a lot of work that we still need to do and stuff like that. There's some power research that we need to do. So solar panels will be great. But I think we're really going to need portable nuclear reactors to provide enough power because it takes a lot of power to live in an environment that is trying to kill you quite like space tries to kill humans. And right now we have some research on those. reactors, but they haven't been, you know, tested in space yet, which is another great case for going to the moon to test some of this stuff out. What about food? I mean, we see what people eat on the

International Space Station, but are we think food's quite important to a lot of people? Are we getting gourmet food in any way, or are we talking dried sachets forever? We're going to start with dried sachets, almost certainly. Lots of freeze-dried food. I think they're called intermediate moisture foods, Eminem's fall under, yeah, right, sounds delicious. But when we start trying to grow food on Mars, that's going to be pretty complicated. So the Martian surface is covered in this stuff called Regolith, which is like our dirt, but far more jagged. And so it's like you put it under the microscope and it's kind of like these tiny little knives. And unlike our dirt, it doesn't have microbes. It also doesn't have a lot of the other stuff that plants need to survive. So we're going to

need to bring that with us and make sure we recycle it carefully. But what it does have is perchlorates, which are endocrine disrupting hormones that mess with your thyroid hormones. For For adults, that means it's messing with your metabolism. For developing fetuses, it would be messing with nervous system development. And when I talk to space settlement advocates, they're like, well, it's not a big deal because it's water soluble. So you just, like, rinse it off. But, like, my husband and I bought a farm and we grow food that we feed to our kids. And someone was like, oh, yeah, like the soil's toxic, but just like rinse it really good first and you'll be fine.

Like, no, I'm going to live somewhere else. So we're going to need to take those toxins out. Additionally, I think there's toxic levels of aluminum in there that's going to need to be taken out. And for all of these reasons, a lot of folks who are excited about space settlements propose that we're going to need is that hydroponics or aquaponics. It's whichever one requires taking water that you put nutrients in and the plants grow directly in the water without the need for anything like soil. So that might be how we're getting our plants. Where we're going to get our protein, aside from things like legumes, is going to be complicated because we're probably not going to be able to bring with us goats and chickens and pigs and cows, at least initially. They're not a very, a very way of producing calories for humans. So when you feed animals plants, you get less calorie in the meat that's produced in the animals than the calories that you fed into it because there's just some inefficiencies and conversion there that are unavoidable. Additionally, those plants are going to take up space. They're going to sort of complicate things. And so most of the proposals that I've

seen involve getting protein from things like mealworms, which are way easier to grow and they can eat the parts of the plants that aren't edible to humans. And so you throw the, inedible stuff to the mealworms, they turn that into protein, and then you eat the mealworms. And that doesn't sound super appealing to me as a westerner who didn't grow up eating insects, but there's other cultures that are more comfortable with that. Or there's some technologies for cell-based meats where you're essentially growing like fish flesh or cow meat in a vat where you have the cells and you provide them with nutrients. And that way you don't have to deal with the animal, you just get the protein.

So the test for whether or not you're ready to go to Mars is just sitting there and downing some mealworms essentially. You know, so there was a study, like to return to the Lunar Palace, there was a study where they did a meal plan where the snacks involved like, you know, seasoned meal worms. And it was rated very favorably by the folks in the simulation. And it could be because they're kind of hoping that like a lot of times folks who are in these sort of trial runs for space, they're hoping that they'll get to be astronauts or tykinaughts in the Chinese case. And so maybe they were like, delicious, but they didn't really love it. In pretty much everything we've talked about so far, plants have come up. And obviously, they are integral to human life. So no news there.

But what about our lack of ecology and green spaces? Are people thinking about those from more of a kind of nature perspective beyond eating and breathing and survival? One of the main concerns is that we're destroying nature here. So do we plan to replicate it elsewhere? Oh, that's a great question. I think for mental health, it would be ideal if we could create, you know, huge enclosed spaces where we have something like forests that you can walk through. That stuff is going to be difficult. So, for example, when I think about space habitats, I imagine big glass like geodesic domes. And that's going to be a non-starter on Mars because that space radiation is going to get right through that glass and bake the inhabitants living inside. So most of the proposals I've seen involve taking that nasty regulath we were just talking about and bury you. meters of it on top of the habitat, which means now you can't use that sunlight for your plants, so you need to have grow lights, which are energetically expensive. So now you need to, you know, bring more nuclear reactors. This stuff gets complicated. A lot of proposals that I've seen involve

having VR or AR augmented reality fill in for the lack of nature. So you just like put on your goggles and pretend you're in a forest, which is maybe not quite as satisfying, I think. So I'm an ecologist by training. So I would rather be in the woods personally. I mean, I do think the goal eventually is to be able to recreate stuff like that, but we are very far away from being able to do that. And I think initially the first couple generations are going to be living in tiny enclosed habitats and you don't want a lot of big open air spaces because if those depressurize, everybody dies. So it's probably going to be a lot of like airlock connected small spaces. So I think initially we're going to have to do without, which I think could be difficult psychologically

or would be for me at least. Yeah. And we'll tie into all of those other difficulties as well. So as an ecologist, do you think that these upcoming missions hoping to find life or seeking to find life on Mars in any kind of cellular form at basic level will change the plans for these settlements and the direction this all goes in? That is a great question. So as an ecologist, if we did go to Mars and find something, you know, that looked like bacteria that was living, that would be incredible to me, you know. So there's some hypotheses that maybe something hit Mars and that knocked life that had started on Mars over to Earth. Earth. And so maybe Earth is actually just like Martian life in a better environment. I mean, that would be amazing to find out. Or if there were two completely separate origins of life on these two different planets, I mean, that would completely change the way we think about life in the entire

universe. If it's that easy that even on a difficult environment like Mars, there's more of it. I'm a little concerned that if we discovered that, that wouldn't necessarily slow us down. I think a lot of people don't have a lot of respect for bacteria, which makes sense. You know, I wipe my counters off with disinfectant wipes in the morning and don't think about the bacteria that I'm killing. I don't think we have a lot of respect for it, but I do feel like the scientific value would be huge. We're looking for it, and it's possible that we'll find it in places like lava tubes and caves that are sort of protected from the radiation, and Mars used to have flowing water, which could be conditions that would be amenable to life. So we might find it. If we do, I hope that will

slow us down a bit and make us think about what it would mean to have humans and all of our microbes in space with us. But at the moment, we don't know if it's out there. From your research into these grand plans to settle space, just sticking on the environment topic for this one last question, did you find that these plans were in any way linked or at the very least matched by plans to save Earth so that this isn't needed? So Jeff Bezos, who is best known for his work with Amazon, but also started a company called Blue Origin, which is a space company. He argues that we need to go to space to save the Earth. And so, you know, if we take a bunch of people off of Earth, then we can relieve some of the

population pressure. And if you move them into habitats and space, that's good for the Earth. He also argues that we could move heavy industry into space. And we could, I think he says, zone Earth as residential and light industry. I don't find that argument very convincing. So on Earth, we put on something like 200,000. people every day. So even just to tread water, you would need to move 200,000 people from Earth to space into habitats that we don't even know how to make yet. So I just don't think any of these

solutions are going to come fast enough to help us with problems like climate change that are barreling down on us right now. Additionally, when you start to think about the details of industry and space, it's like super complicated and it would be nice to try, but I just don't see it working out in the near term. There does seem to be this conflict between folks thinking that there's a off between money that goes into space and money that goes into environmental problems. And I think it's worth noting that NASA, I think it doesn't have a giant budget. It's something like 1% of the U.S. budget. And I think if you ask a lot of people, they would guess that it's something like 20. It's not. And a lot of that money isn't going towards settlements. It's going towards

exploring other places in our solar system. And sometimes when we explore other places in our solar system, we understand the Earth better. So like by studying Venus, we can understand ozone depletion and climate change, and that can help us understand problems we're encountering on Earth. Additionally, a lot of the money that goes into space goes into satellites, and those satellites give us information that we need to understand weather patterns and deal with climate change and make our climate change models. And I think if you were to take money away from space, that money isn't necessarily going to go towards climate change mitigation strategies. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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Many people are looking forward to or even relying for their own peace of mind on the idea of being able to exit the planet and continue human life off Earth. So do you think that they will be perhaps disappointed by your verdict and your research? I know that they are disappointed because they've reached out to tell me that. I also think that, you know, if you imagine leaving Earth for somewhere better, space does not have that somewhere better. Even an Earth that was like ravaged by nuclear war had been hit by an asteroid. There's probably still places on the planet that you could go outside and you wouldn't die immediately. You know, Mars has 1% of Earth's atmosphere.

You can't go outside and like feel wind on your skin or take a breath of fresh air. You would die. You're going to be living like underground in isolated cramped habitats. It's not going to be as nice as it is here. I think if you really want to settle Mars, then you need to have a long plan of keeping Earth alive and like in a good space where we can continue to advance technologically so that we can support Mars.

And so, you know, I think you need to care about both of these things, you know, at the same time. You've got to keep Earth in a good place. We've got to solve some geopolitical problems. And then you can have a sustainable settlement on Mars. I mean, in general, I can understand being very emotionally attached to this idea. If you really believe that, like, settling space is going to reduce war, it's going to save the Earth, it's going to increase democracy, it's going to make everybody nicer to each other. There's all these arguments, like so many different utopias exist in space according to space settlement advocates. I can imagine being really mad at someone who's, you know, sharing a negative view of all of this stuff.

But I think at the end of the day, we have to be realistic. And we can still move forward with this goal in a realistic way. So it may not be the most glamorous of topics, but law and politics are obviously fundamental to space societies. And you mentioned it there. So what would that involve? Would the politics of living on another planet, how would that work? And how would those tie in with our own politics and laws here on Earth? So I think this is a problem we might be dealing with in the near term. So as you mentioned, China wants to put a space station on the lunar pole. And that's also where the US wants to go. And right now, there's no rules about who gets. to use what? So the biggest rule that we have is 1967, the United Nations passed the outer space treaty, which says that no one's allowed to claim sovereignty. So when China lands on the South Pole, they can't say, okay, this is ours now. But there's also no rule to make them leave. So they could stay there in perpetuity. And you can imagine there being conflict if there's a couple like really

good places that everybody wants to get to. And the first person who gets there can have something like quasi-sovereignty because they just never leave. There's also a lack of clarity about what you're allowed to do with the resources in space. So the United States' interpretation is that you can extract and sell resources from space and that that's different than claiming sovereignty. So you could, for example, extract the water from those craters on the moon and sell it to other people who want to use it as rocket propellant. And the United States would say that that's consistent with the outer space treaty.

And a number of different countries have sort of signed on to that interpretation. NASA put out the Artemis Accords, which essentially, you know, said this is our interpretation and something like 20 or 30 other nations have signed on. China and Russia have not signed on. Partly, they can't. So because of the Wolf Amendment, China's not allowed to sign on to like NASA projects. There was some concern about NASA, you know, and if NASA worked with China, China might steal some of our technology or there's some concerns about human rights abuses and not wanting to essentially like feel like you're giving them the stamp of approval by working with the Chinese government. And so there does seem to be the situation that we're heading towards where going back

to the moon is a sign of prestige for both China and the United States, but there's not really a clear system for who gets to do what and who gets to go where. And that could create some geopolitical problems going forward. There's reasons to be optimistic. We have figured out how to solve problems like this in Antarctica and in the deep seabed. So those are also places where technology has recently opened them up, and we've figured out ways to peacefully use them, prioritizing science, but also resource extraction for the deep sea. We're working on rules for that right now. So this could go down peacefully, but I would like to see more clarity in international law to figure out who's allowed to do what before things heat up too much. Big question, but who

owns Mars? Nobody is supposed to own Mars. So Elon Musk said in his Starlink terms of service that if people do end up on Mars, they will not be beholden to the laws of Earth. That straightforwardly breaks international law. So according to that 1967 Outer Space Treaty, people who go to space are the responsibility of some country. It can be the country that they're from or it can be the country that launched that person into space. And so probably in both of those cases, Musk would be the United States's responsibility.

So if he goes out there and starts breaking international law, it would be our job to say, okay, we're not approving any more resupply missions until you all start following international law again. So that would be the main sanction and effect would be resources from Earth. Because it's quite hard to police, presumably, from another planet. Yeah, no, very hard. And so I do think Mars is going to be so reliant on Earth resources for a really long time that I do feel like that would be a pretty good way to curtail negative behavior. But you know, you could also say, okay, Musk, we're going to like seize your Earth-based resources and like there are sanctiony ways to sort of deal with stuff like this.

But yeah, you're not going to send the police up there probably. You're too far away. What do you think about the fact that a lot of these missions and plans are being led by millionaires, sorry, billionaires even, and companies rather than countries? Yeah, so that was not anticipated when the Outer Space Treaty came out. When I was talking to space lawyers and was complaining that there's so much sort of ambiguity and it's only something like 2,000 words long, it would have been nice if it were more clear.

They were arguing that actually, no, that's a benefit. They didn't know what the future held. So this ambiguity in what's allowed and what's not sort of allows for interpretation to change over time. There are still ways to control his behavior, but it is surprising that the biggest space powers are like NASA, the Chinese government, the European Space Agency, and Elon Musk.

Like, I think that was maybe unanticipated. So let's end on a higher and a loano. in style. I wanted to know what you think is the best idea that you've heard of for a space settlement. The best idea that I've heard for a space settlement, nothing is immediately coming to mind. So there was a book of proposals for the first thousand people in space. And some of them had really interesting ideas. And like I like that they're starting to think about closed loop ecosystems and how do you govern these societies. A lot of them were proposing that communal living will be really important. My husband and I actually collaborated with some scholars who study communal living, and we wrote a paper about lessons from communal living.

And so I'm excited about various proposals that are actually trying to dig into how do we make this less miserable. But I can't think of a proposal in particular where I was like, I would live there. Nothing where you were like, that's actually a really good idea. Right. Yeah, no, nothing like that. Nothing. Nothing at all. Okay.

And, okay, on the opposite end of the spectrum, what's the absolute worst and most ridiculous thing you've heard of. Venus, living in the atmosphere of Venus. And so I have a friend who's really excited about this idea. He's got this group called Humans to Venus. And they are working on proposals for living in the Venusian atmosphere. So the Venusian atmosphere, it's like thick. So it protects you from some of space radiation. Venus is this big massive planet. So if you're in the atmosphere, you're getting pulled down by essentially the equivalent of Earth gravity. So if you need that for like reproduction, that's there. But it does require you to float above a planet where, If you were to fall into it, you would be crushed and boiled.

And that's if you survive, you know, passing through the sulfuric acid clouds on the way down. So it's like not exactly where I'd want to live. But if you talk to him, he has this really, like, convincing argument about how, well, Mars doesn't have Earth gravity. And so maybe Venus is going to be better. And then maybe Teflon, it seems like Teflon is going to be resistant to sulfuric acid. And so we could maybe do this. And at the end, I think all I'm convinced by. is that all of this stuff is crazy.

Like, if you can convince me that maybe there's some merit to living in the Venusian atmosphere, maybe this is all kind of a bad idea. But I still love the idea of humans waking up on another planet and, like, you know, seeing the sunrise on the surface of another planet. I'm still excited about that. But wow, it's all really complicated and we need to be realistic about that. That was Kelly Weena Smith, co-author of the new book, A City on Mars, which won a Hugo earlier this year,

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