Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - What Elon Musk Isn't Telling You About Colonizing Mars w/ Zach Weinersmith [Ep. 434]

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All .edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN! Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? The allure of a fresh start on a new planet has captivated humans for a very long time, and now, public figures like Elon Musk are trying to make it a reality. But should we? Is it even possible? And how would life on Mars even look like?  These are the questions Zach and Kelly Weinersmith tackled with a deep expertise and winning sense of humor in their new book, A City on Mars, which has become an instant bestseller.  Zach is a cartoonist and writer best known for his webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC). Outside of SMBC, he has worked on a sketch comedy series, a podcast, and multiple other webcomics. Kelly, on the other hand, is a biologist, writer, and podcaster. She is a faculty member in the Department of BioSciences at Rice University and an alumni collaborator with the Parasite Ecology Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Today, Zach is joining me on Into the Impossible to discuss whether and how to become multi-planetary. Tune in!  Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:22 Elon Musk’s obsession with Mars 00:04:38 Why Mars? 00:12:11 Why not just build bunkers underground? 00:18:03 Judging a book by its cover  00:19:37 Space psychology  00:29:16 The hard physics of colonizing space 00:36:22 The economics of space exploration  00:43:34 Audience questions  00:56:35 Elon Musk’s bizarre notions about space  01:01:17 Outro — Additional resources: 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! ➡️ Connect with Zach Weinersmith: 💻 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/zachweinersmith   ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZachWeiner/  ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can we build a base on Mars? Should we settle space? And have we really thought this through? These questions echo down the corridors of human ambition as we contemplate the next frontier, Mars. Just imagine a world free of climate change war and Twitter. Well, unless that old Elon joins us, the allure of a fresh start on a new planet,

rebooting humanity has captivated humanity for a very long time. And now, figures like trillionaire Elon Musk are trying to make this a reality. But should we? Is it even possible? And how would life look like on Mars? These are the questions Zach and Kelly Weenersmith tackled with a deep dive using their expertise and winning sense of humor in their latest book, A City on Mars, which became an instant bestseller.

Today, Zach is joining me in the studio to discuss whether and how to become multi-planetary. Let's go blast off to Mars. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. Welcome everybody to an exciting out-of-this-world episode of The Into the Impossible podcast with Zach Wiener-Smith, who's joining us all the way from his home in Virginia, but down to do a book tour and speak at the UCSD Colloquium today. So, Zach, thank you so much for joining us.

I'm excited to talk about space. We're talking about space. We're talking about your book. We're going to do a lot of things today. We're going to talk about Elon Musk, who makes not a small, insignificant appearance in this book. Talk about Antarctica. And we'll talk about Mars, of course.

So I actually have here a couple of different little chunks of goodness for you. So this, I don't know if you recognize what this is, but this is an actual piece of Mars. We're going to be talking about your wonderful new book, A City on Mars. And what is that all about? So I don't let that out of my sight. So let's put that back. I don't trust you graphic artists type of thing. Even more shifty-eyed than my graduate students.

No, just kidding. So, Zach, what brings you here today? You're talking about this wonderful book, A City on Mars. I love this book. I listen to it. In audio, I read it in hardcover, Kindle. I had it beamed to my Apple Vision Pro, which I'm now returning, unfortunately. But they do have a Mars rover as in one of the apps on that.

What is the fascination about Mars? Why would we want to build a city on Mars? Why would we want to build a city on Mars? Well, I would say a good look at all the other options would leave you with basically no choice. So that would be one good reason. I think there is a kind of romance about it that has to do with science fiction. But I think part of the deal is the way we like to say it is, you know, space is very big, notably. But the actual places you would maybe be able to make a go of settlement are small.

You know, the moon has problems. We get into the details. The moon has problems. Mercury is obviously a bad coal. Venus is obviously a bad call. Astridelt is an extraordinarily bad call. And then beyond that, you have giant gas planets where you just die if you get too close. And it gets worse from there.

So Mars is the only game in town, and it's not an easy game. And so there's a lot of different aspects of this book. It's not only a book about Mars. It's a book about Earth. It's a book about culture, civilization, getting along, and various experiments. Some of which have been done here in America, and some of which are being led by folks like Elon Musk, who I had the opportunity, as I was saying before we started recording. Actually, it was chatting live on Twitter, X space. I got to say ads.

I'll get banned. I was talking on X spaces with Elon. I'll put a little clip of that in later of me asking him if it's really true that he wants to die on Mars. So you want to build a city on Mars. That may be a prerequisite for dying on Mars. Let's just get into it. So what do you think about his notion? I had one of our many-time guests, Lord Martin Reese was on the podcast.

He said, when I asked him about Elon's plans, he said, Elon wants to die on Mars. And in his British accent, he said, I just hope it's not on impact. Yes, exactly. So tell me, is this a good idea? What is this obsession? of Mars? Well, so I think Musk's usual argument, and it was an argument Stephen Hawking made, is that the case for Mars is reducing existential risk for humanity.

And the basic argument is, you know, right now we have one planet, two planets is more than one planet. Let me check the math. Yeah, yeah, I can do that math. And so the theory is, you know, if an asteroid's going to hit Earth eventually that's going to be scary or maybe we'll have nuclear war or what? whatever it is, the idea is having a backup plan it would help us. And we're skeptical of that argument for reasons that are laid out through the book.

I can get into it now, but I don't want to jump the gun. Yeah, let's talk about the different aspects of city planning, right? So we're here in San Diego. We have the world's easiest place to make a living if you're a weatherman, world's hardest place to make a living if you're a sportscaster, never won a national championship in any major league sport. But it seems to me we need to have a few different things to support a, city, including good pre-planning, but it seems like getting there is one thing, you know,

surviving there is another thing, living there, thriving there, building a city. And the one thing that kind of made me, you know, taken aback when I remember I hear these plans, first of all, all those phases come with risks that are, you know, 100 to one odds against surviving, right? But I thought about like, let's say we're establishing a new city in Antarctica, where I've been twice, spent a month of my life there. There's actually a bottle of Antarctic ice that's no longer in the ice form right behind you, collected at the South Pole by one of my wonderful trips there on your tax dollars. But it seems like if we're going to start a city somewhere Antarctica and it makes an appearance in the book, nevertheless, if you want it to start

it somewhere not as challenging, Karen Island or something, you need water and you need all major cities, at least when they're first established near major bodies of freshwater. How the hell is it even possible to start ab initia? So this is a good thing to bring up. So, you you know, Mars has water, of course. And actually, the moon has a small amount of water, although it's often overstated. Right. There's a tendency among engineers and scientists interested in this stuff to treat the existence of water as like a video game thing.

Like, there's water or there's not water. But actually, of course, the water is quite hard to get access to its accessible in forms you would generally not accept on Earth. And so, like, it is always, you know, one of the complaints we get from people who disagree with us is that a lot of stuff we talk about is, if not a solid, problem, there is a known solution to the problem. But this gets risky because, you know, one of the findings that to me was very interesting was when you look at the biosphere experiment that was done in the 90s, one of the findings that you may not have read is that in order to just eat and have oxygen,

they were working, I think it's like 10 hours a day, six days a week. That was just to eat, right? So when you start adding these things like, well, we need a water source, but actually Martian water would be laden with perchlorates, you'd have to cleanse it out. Also, you know, either you're going to dig down deep on the equator or you're going to have to get it in the form of ice from the poles. So you can literally do it. But at a certain point, you're like double, triple, quadruple booking all your astronauts all day long. And we've talked with Jessica Mayer. I think I'm the only podcasters ever had an interview with a NASA astronaut on the ISS.

So she was actually on the ISS at the time. She's a proud graduate of UCSD. And she was talking at the time that she has to exercise four hours a day. Now that's in zero quote microgravity. but would it be different on Mars? So adding to the 10 hours, you have to put three hours of exercise in? Right. So, you know, the numbers we found, and it's possible they've changed since, was six days a week

you're doing like two, three hours of intense exercise on ISS. Why do you do that? Because if you don't, you lose bone and muscle mass very rapidly. But even with that, you lose bone mass. The numbers we had, there's a recent paper. We had slightly higher numbers. It's been a more recent paper that lowered the numbers a little bit. something like 1% bone density loss in the hip per month, right?

Extraordinarily fast. Now, as you said, that's in microgravity. We don't know what it would be like on the moon. So, you know, of course, we've been to the moon, but the total amount of time people walked on the moon was about 10 days, right? You put it all together about 10 days. Aldrin Armstrong moon walked for about two and a half hours. Yeah, yeah, right?

So we don't know. So, you know, the moon is about 1-6 earth gravity. Maybe that's enough. Or maybe that's enough if you, like, put weights on your body or something. Mars is about 40% earth gravity. Maybe that's even better. There was a very recent experiment by Jaxa, the Japanese Space Agency, putting rats in little wheels, and they seem, the partial gravity seemed to be okay. But we certainly don't have what you'd really want, which would be like 10 years longitudinal data or something. We're not even close. So that's a scary thing about any of these plans. Let's say you knew you could do it. You knew you could get to Mars and, you know, Elon's going to get, not Elon's going to get someone's going to get there. Why would you want to get there personally? Is there any reason beyond, I mean, I think it's, I'll just say what my opinion is. And then it's mostly your show.

So I want to make sure you talk more than I do. But it seems like, you know, we need this backup drive, you know, jump drive for the Earth, which I think is kind of ridiculous in a lot of ways, especially since as you point out of the book, if you want to start, you know, you know, just finding Planet 2 USB jump drive, better to spend that money cleaning up Earth. Yeah. And that actually makes me kind of pessimistic, as I said many times, about what will happen the day after we find life in space. Well, we know there's about 10 trillion, you know, microbes per cubic meter.

the Pacific Ocean a mile from here. So why would you want to, if God tells you you're getting there, is that why would you say yes, you're going to live there? Would I do it? Yeah. I'm a coward. No, so first of all, you know, the argument you made, which I know from experience causes a lot of space people to scream,

is the like a version of why spend so much money on Mars when we could do it on Earth. And I would like to slightly restate it. I think I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's like, if the issue is existential risk, then the question is what good does a dollar do for you? And I think it's hard to imagine anyone disagreeing with the idea that a dollar spent mitigating climate change right now is a much better call than trying to settle Mars. But, you know, it's not as if there's like, if we have control over the spending of every dollar.

So if you can, you know, it might not be a losing situation to just get both. But I would say, you know, to break it down with Mars, let's go through some arguments. So one argument is that Mars might have resources we need. And I would say that's basically just not on. You know, it's worth noting the solar system is made of the same stuff everywhere, right? So there's no dilatheum crystals, there's no atomatium, there's the same stuff here. You know, you'll now and then read a book where someone will say, well, but, you know, Earth has been mined a lot and Mars hasn't. So, well, it'll be easier to get whatever.

And it's like, okay, but you have to do six months inbound, you know, and forget it. It's even using like Elon Musk numbers, he hopes one day you'll be able to get a person to Mars for like 500 grand, which is considered wildly optimistic. So the idea that you could bring back tons of materials from Mars and make a profit is just, It's crazy. There's been similar claims about getting deuterium from Mars, but deuterium is plentiful on Earth. You can buy it online. It's not really not a big deal to get deuterium, you know.

There's similar claims about the moon with Helium 3. I think that's bogus too. I can go into detail, but it's in the book. And so the resource claim I think is not good. I'm not even really a buyer of the asteroid mining claim. It's really hard to believe. And then when you add in, you know, we said earlier the existential risk equation is 1 plus 1 equals 2, With anything you do in the process increases existential risk, the math is more complicated.

And of course, building a vast space infrastructure has to increase existential risks. Sagan was writing about this in the 90s. You know, you know, the odds of a... So people often say, well, we need this stuff because an asteroid's going to strike. Dinosaur-annihilating asteroids strike one every 50 million years, okay? It's not a risk we really need to be worrying about. We're overdue, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, right.

You know, right, we're overdue. Exactly, yeah. We'll just send the... I'll call you. We'll get some tough guys with regional American accents to go take care of it. But no, I, you know, so, well, the way I would like to say it is what scares you more, you know, 100 nations having the ability to push asteroids around or the odds of some dinosaur-style asteroid colliding with Earth, you know, what do you think increases your existential risk more?

Right. And with Mars, you know, Mars has more inertia. So it'll be, I guess it's less risky than, you know, driving series towards towards the earth a little bit but speaking of that I want to do want to point out that I do have a gift for you this is for your to take you're not you're not you're not get your hands on this Mars rock this cost more of them you know my first five cars put together so this is a chunk of an asteroid this is a chunk of an asteroid that impacted the earth about 15 to 20 000 years ago yeah in argentina so it's called the campus de ceilo meteorite fall and actually give these away to members who join up my mailing list bryan keating.com link below and if you have a dot edu email address which you may still have I don't know

then you guaranteed to win one of these otherwise it's a one in a hundred shot maybe but this is for you so talk about yeah this is kind of like the the first goal that people think about then nowadays a lot of talk about artificial intelligence obviously nuclear annihilation let's just say that those are you know probability greater than PTE greater than 5% let's say each one of that at what point do you then say that there aren't better places on earth under the earth, you know, I mean, the, what, what the awful war, you know, perpetuated by Hamas is showing is, you know, tunnels are effective for certain things, right? And, and shielding and excluding

awful human beings from being obliterated is one of them. But, you know, China's repeatedly building huge things. All these AI and, and kind of billionaire tech bros from Musk to Sam Altman, to Peter Thiel, a friend of mine, to other people are building escape bunkers underground throughout the, Canadian prepper, my good friend. Why not just build bunkers on Earth? Which one of these things can be mitigated by things that we can control right now, which can't. Going to Antarctica, another option, right?

I think that's a very good point. Yeah. So if you were to have a Mars settlement, one of the first things you would do is dig a hole in the ground or else find a hole in the ground, right? And for a bunch of reasons, right, temperature, radiation and other stuff, you would be living underground. And so you ask yourself, well, if I'm being very rational and the goal is to make sure there's a backup plan for humanity, what's harder?

and what's safer, right? Do you try to build a civilization on Mars where it's very hard to help them if they have a problem? Or do you like take an abandoned gold mine that goes a mile into the earth and seal it off? Because on Mars, that's where you're going to have to do, right? You're going to have to be sealed off. You're creating a bubble that only interacts with the environment to carefully take in soil and resources and cleanse them and get them to work. So why, you know, if there's a dinosaur-sized asteroid and it hits Earth and you're a mile below Earth with like whatever you're imagining a fission reactor and all this to grade your crops, then you're fine. So if the goal is just to have a backup reservoir for humans, you know, there are much easier options than going to Mars. I say it was some, you know, it is, you know, I'd rather be excited about Mars. But when you break down cases like that, it's just there's almost always a cheaper, easier approach.

Hey, y'all, Professor Brian Keating here. And before we blast back to Mars, I want to make sure you're subscribed to my YouTube channel and following the podcast and your favorite audio player platforms. Right now, only about 50% of you are and you're missing out on so much incredible content and mind-bending conversation. including past guests like Nobel Prize winner, scientist, astronauts, and even Elon Musk himself. So go ahead, subscribe now before we head back to Mars. Do it now. Famous quote by Nobel Prizeman. I think Daniel Kahneman said, you know, nobody wants to see a number. Nobody ever believes something because of a number or data. They want a story. And this book is full of amazing stories, one of which I never knew. So past guest and your friend Andy Weir,

who does give his delightful incommium somewhere on the, well, I'm on the front cover. He's on the front cover. We're excited about that. All right, yeah. He's a past, I can't say graduate because he did not graduate. Can you imagine the career he could have had if Andy were a graduate? But in there, of course, Mark, you know, takes poop on the, you know, he starts using his poop. And you make the point if we go to that, now here's a chunk of the moon.

That's a little 0.24 gram. I'm not giving these out, but you can look at it. So you go to the moon, you go to a tranquility base. You've come upon a pile of, you know, brown, brown dielectric material, as Pansias might say. Can you use it? Can you grow in some spuds? Oh, can you grow an astronaut poop? Well, can you is, it depends on what you mean by can you.

First of all, why would you want to? Is the first question people might have, which is the answer. There's actually a good answer, which is the moon is carbon poor. I mean, this is a mind-blowing fact. It's why this is not front and center with, like, build a farm on the moon plans, you know, for carbon-based life forms, you like to have some carbon. And so we have a joke about how there is one where actually, I guess there'd be six caches of carbon on the moon, which are the places where astronauts landed and put out their poop bags. And there might also be vomit bags.

They would have that too. I actually don't know the carbon ratio. Why bring it back? Right, right. Well, yeah, exactly. You've got to dump that mass. But the question is, can you? So I think legally you can, it would be frowned upon.

So NASA has, I think, this is in a book somewhere, at 2011 sort of best practices, anticipating people are going to send stuff to the moon and, like, would you please not. mess with these historical Apollo sites type of stuff. So I don't think there's any law, though. Like if you landed a rover and had like a foot and wanted to kick the poop bags across the moon, I don't think strictly speaking you'd be breaking any rules. You would just be shunned from conferences, maybe. So you have a lot of things that brings up, you know, the reason that you hear is, you know, discuss the book, written with your wife. We've got to mention your lovely wife. And we haven't done the judging books by the cover. But some of these involve, yeah, the actual, you know, biology and growing stuff, recipes, et cetera.

Yeah, it's a recipe. It is really incredible. Beat wine, I just love it. I have these beet chips that I can give you a snack of before we go to the faculty club, which is a version of something called a company tag. I made a tweet, post. Everyone should follow Zach there. Very easy.

Although they abbreviate your full name, unfortunately, to just Zach Wiener, but I'm sure you're used to that. You made it through middle school. Yeah, you made it through middle school. Yeah. It's peak pollination season, and my business is, This is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

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incredible art that you put out for Saturday morning breakfast cereal and other things that you've done. Your amazing wife is a psychologist, a PhD, faculty member in the Department of Bioscience, Rice University, alumni collaborator with the Parasite Ecology Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. So let's do that. Let's do the judging this book by its cover. So this is a fantastic book. We're not supposed to do it.

We always do it on The Into the Impossible Podcast. You can't avoid it. Title, subtitle, and this lovely color illustration. That took me two days that drawing. Okay, so take it away. Take the book. All right. Walk us through. Oh, okay. Well, the mind of the artist. First thing.

So, yeah, you got the cool Star Warsy font. I had nothing to do with that. And then can we settle space? Should we settle space? And have we really thought this through? We actually spent a lot of time trying to come up with that stuff ending, which is like the major activity of authors these days as an appropriate subtitle. But it was, you know, you're trying to capture that like it was one like a skeptical book and also just kind of a goofy tone. Yeah. So that's what we ended up doing. And that is, it is, you know, a good representation of the questions we get in. the Martian city is a complete lie.

You will not live. There will be no glass domes on Mars. I'm very sorry. Or if you did, it would be extraordinarily costly bad idea. And then the underground city is a little more realistic. Although you see we did a kind of like where's Waldoy version of it. It's like a little tiny town and there's some goofy stuff. Like there's a little church, I think, and like a general store.

And the beach at the lower right is just a lie. So, you know, given the cost much more likely you're living in like, you know, bunker, tiny rooms, like a submarine sort of deal, but that wouldn't have made a great cover. So we did settle. So the phenomenal book, it talks about the, not only the science of it. There's a lot of hard science in there, which I assume came from you and not the cultural stuff, which came to know, and the art that came from Kelly. No, but the hard science is kind of matched in some way in interest with the stories that you tell about some of the precursors or prototype types of settlements. The one that I'm most interested in you kind of exploring comes from where

this rock was collected from Antarctica. So that's from the coast of Antarctica. So I made the joke when I was there the first time I was probably the fattest person on Antarctica, you know, a whole continent because there's only 200 people there, you know, a thousand people in the summer, 200 people in the winter. You can get, you know, there's like five different types of life forms. I often use it as as a kind of a pessimistic view of life in the cosmos because people say, oh, there's so many stars, they have so many planets that there must be life summer. You're an idiot kidding. You call yourself an astrophysicist. I say, I've been to one seventh of the Earth's continents, you know, at least one of them.

There's zero life there besides upright bipedal primates like us, a couple of penguins on the coast only, and no polar bears and a bunch of these really terrifying giant seagulls on steroids called scoobirds. But that's it. There's even very few microbes. So to think that, oh, well, there should be one seventh the amount of life on an, it's total nonsense. But talk about these activities because it's not only the dangerous inhabitants, the penguins, the orcas or whatever. penguins very dangerous creatures. But it's also getting along with your fellow man. And if you're a Russian, I have some vodka over here from my Russian friend, Alexander Polnerov.

But tell me what, and Vladimir Potishvili makes an appearance in this book. He's a very good friend. Oh, is that right. Huge supporter of cosmic microwave background physics. Talk about Russians, talk about their experiences. What's it like to live in one of the most isolated, perhaps the most isolated place on Earth? Yeah, so it's actually the picture is complicated. I'd be curious to hear your perspective.

So we, one of the hardest chapters to write was about space psychology. And part of that is because it's hard to give a definitive answer on anything in psychology generally. And often in the context of something very specific like space psychology, Antarctic psychology, the data is like very diffuse. No, the experiments are controlled nicely. And what we were surprised by is that there are lots of stories of things going bad in the Antarctic. But actually the broad picture is you have about the same rate of psychiatric issues as you have back home. In fact, if anything, you have a lower rate, although some of that's almost certainly due to selection, right?

It's like the people who go are people like you who actually want to be there. And also like there's a psych exam for these programs before you go. Yeah, but you can cheat off your neighbor. Well, that's true. Yeah. And notably, people do cheat a lot on these things. But you know, you're at least not like getting random people, right? Same as a submarine.

Submarines is another place we look for like psych data. There are some studs and studettes down there. There's a man who we do around the world race, which is a marathon, which is like, like two feet around the pole. And the guy who won it, you know, came in second in the Boston marathon. Oh, wow. Carpenter. Did you do the 3,000 degree challenge or 300 degrees? No, that, you can only do that in the winter. My wife would not let me go there. And I don't know if I'd want to freeze my, you know what? The lesson I was told was do not fall during the 300 degree challenge. Unless you have kids already. That's right. Don't plan on having it. Then it's fine.

Yeah, don't worry about it. No, but, so it was a really interesting finding because, you know, you would sort of think, and you could probably think of polar exploration stories of people going mad in the Arctic. But the basic evidence is it doesn't really happen like that. And it's actually, it's fairly easy to select out. So like for space, one of the most powerful things you can do in selection is you only take people who are like over about 30. So, you know, they've had time in their life to manifest acute psychiatric issues. But, you know, what we say for settlement is that doesn't quite give you off the hook for psychiatric stuff. And the reason is is two things.

Well, maybe three things. So the first thing is, you know, on Earth we have psychiatric care for people who have problems, right? You might not have that on Mars unless you have a very big setup, right, so that there's a lot of cross-training and people, you know, have lots of different capacities. And also, what do you do if someone is dangerous to themselves and other people? Yeah. There is a protocol on the ISS for like basically drugging somebody until you can get them home. But you can get them home in like 24 hours. Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. On Mars, forget it. Yeah. And the South Pole, forget it too, half the year. That's right. Half the year. But even then, yeah, but on the South Pole, at least, you know, it'd be like a couple months. Yeah.

You know, and we heard stories, but we didn't put them. We couldn't corroborate them from more than one source about that happening like in the early days, like in the 50s. And the stories we read were that you could dope someone up, which is a lot less scary in Antarctica, though, because if they like punch a hole in the wall, they're just making themselves cold. Oh, it's happened to even more recently. Yeah. One of my friends was a station commander, boss, whatever. He's an astrophysist in E. He was a PhD.

But, you know, he had a gun and they have locked under handcuffs and everything. Right. You have to have it. And so it's like, the point is like, even if you have a better. a lower rate of psychiatric distress than on the mainland, you still have to deal with it. Which is really hard if you imagine like a hundred person settlement on Mars, right?

I mean, I honestly don't know what you do like short of killing the person if they're actually dangerous. So it's a problem that needs to be solved and sometimes gets overlooked as like a kind of like precious, why are you worrying about people's psychology will just send tough people.

But where it really hits the fan is when you imagine having kids, right? Because it was just the sine qua non of a settlement. If you want a settlement, not just like an outpost that's like cool, you have to be able to have children And so now you have a group that is not selected, right? And you're going to have, you know, you might have some kids who have issues that they can't function well in a Mars colony.

And then what do you do? So this is something where we're really, we hit on a lot about it. Like, it's an unsolved problem. And there are prima facie reasons to think you'd have a higher than normal rate of problem births. Just because you have the high level of radiation. You have the microgravity. Yeah, I mean, you can go on and on. And so, like, you're talking about an environment where you should expect lots of.

problems and expect to not have good solutions for them, which is kind of terrifying. And you worry about things like inbreeding. And so in this book, you, you guys talk a lot about, about sex. Yes, yes. There's a whole space sex section. How dare you. How dare you? Of course, everyone wants to know about it.

So I read a study once when I was in my Antarctic days of your, and that was, they commissioned a psychological study by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. And there's a patch right there. You can hold that up to the camera. That's a real patch from the. the gift shop down there, proves I went there. And they did a survey, what is the optimal ratio of men to women? And naively, I thought 50-50, but it turns out that's a bad idea. And you guys talk a little bit about psychology and those types of effects. So even before you get there, even before

you have sex, talk about like, how would you do that? And in today's, you know, ultra, let me say progressive culture. Shall I say that? How would you choose it if it's anything other than one-to-one? We worked on a chapter that was going to talk about like gender ratio questions. And we came to feel it's very hard to say something definitive. So there's some, you know, the thing about Mars is it's been this fantasy that's been deferred so long. Everybody has gamed out everything. So there's like, what is the optimal ratio? And there's like, for example, an argument that you should only send women because women consume lower rates of oxygen and food and things.

Right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this has been studied. It's something like 15% less. Of course, that's an average. It's probably a better argument for sending like small people who don't have legs or something would be the optimal group to send. you know, but you know, you can game this out, but, you know, my view is at least if you're talking about like an excursion, like 10 people, it's going to be political anyway, so you're

probably are going to send an equal ratio because human space fairing is at core at a political activity. It's not, it's not all about science. It's something we do for national prestige. If you're talking about a settlement, probably you want something like 50, 50, I guess, but I don't know. I mean, you know, the tricky thing with all this stuff, and we originally had a lot more to say about this when we had to cut the book down is kind of like, you You have to remember, it's not as if you get to be the overlord who makes all the choices, right? So it's like, we actually very early on had a whole chapter on how would you write a constitution for Mars, which I would love to publish as an essay at some point.

Yeah, you have all this outtakes. Oh, man, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so there's a great early on, um, I think it's called the survival of national constitutions by Elkins, Ginds, Gendezberg, and Melton, and they basically write about, like, a kind of mathematical model of, like, how do you get constitutions that live, and, and, and, you know, and that's considered, good because revolutions are really dangerous and scary. Right. And there are a lot of things that go on, but one of the really deep lessons you learn is that

constitutions, they are lists of rules and things, but they're also political documents. Like it's about buy-in from the relevant groups. So it doesn't really matter if there's an optimal scientific ratio of like gender or something. You have to convince the people who are going that you've made the right choice. So I'm skeptical of any kind of like, you occasionally as an example of a nerd version of this, you hear people be like, well, what won't send men, we'll send only women and gametes. You know. Right.

And you're like, maybe there are women who are cool. with that at least for one generation, you know, you could probably find them. But like, you know, humans don't want to be right. Some of my ex-girlfriends would. Yeah, we, yeah, you don't need to, this whole part is useless. So, uh, the study I had read, if I recall correctly from about 20 years ago before, you know, it's ultra progressive. Everything out of B 50-50 no matter what. The study that I read said the optimum ratio was actually, um, two men for every woman. Really? Because in that case, there were enough, um, so at least, you know, the one-third of men could make. match with the one-third of women.

And then the other ones wouldn't feel so bad if they didn't match up because, oh, well, there was only a 50% chance anyway. So I didn't feel bad. Anyway, I don't know if that's true. There's a memoir and I'm forgetting its name, but it was written about a woman who got integrated in the Anarch program in the 60s. And she was talking about it was really tough because it was like literally it was like one to 2000 or what, not 2000, but like the ratio was crazy.

And it was weird social dynamics involved in that term environment. And what, you know, another thing you talk about is, you know, the effects of things that you don't really think about. Again, there's this grand story, which is like, you know, the setting off in the spirit of adventure and we're humans, we're destined to conquer new horizons. But, you know, there's a very big difference when you go somewhere where there's absolutely zero life, zero human life, zero animal life, zero, anything, and bringing that all with you. I just find it an escape as fantasy.

But talk about some of the hard physics of it. Don't be afraid to nerd out. I got the smartest audience in the known universe. Sure. Or multiverse. Talk about like microgravity effects. of changing gravitational field, space radiation. Let's break it into three phases.

Getting there, challenges of that, surviving, landing, you know, the first settlement, sustaining it as a settlement, and then also just, you know, just the logistics of setting up. So getting, setting up, surviving. Sure, yeah, yeah.

So just getting there. So, you know, space is very big. The places you might go are not. So you're not called space. Yes, doesn't want you there. You know, by the way, you know what sucks about the word space? is you try to use Google Scholar and put like space

and you get the anthropology literature and it's like you know gendered spaces or something you're like no you have we had space it meant this other thing so you know you're not coming to mercury it's red hot you have to drop in toward the sun which is a tricky maneuver you're not going to Venus because it's like just literal hell there it's like acid clouds and a hundred times earth pressure and etc there are people who want to live in the Venusian atmosphere

but that's a whole different thing and then you got Mars which we'll come back to you got Earth's moon, great. And then beyond that, it's just no good. It's the asteroid belt. It's very sparse. You're not going to get any gravity. And then beyond that, you've got gas giants, ice giants, and the rest of the universe. So really, you're just talking about the moon and Mars as your good options. The moon's not great.

It's carbon poor. You will sometimes read a headline that says there's water on the moon, and it's literally true, but it's a very small amount of water that never replenishes. I wish this was more front and center. People talk like we're going to have a lunar gas station. There's not that much water, right? And so low carbon, low water, the only really good thing about the moon is it's position. It's close.

You can basically have a live conversation. It's about one second there and back for light. And it would be a very good place to try out lots of technology. But having a permanent inhabitation would require a lot of amelioration, right? So Mars, much better, has all the elements you want. Also has a CO2 atmosphere, very thin, but it's a CO2 atmosphere, which normally wouldn't be good except, hey, you have carbon and oxygen, right? And if you throw, if you get a hydrogen source, which you either bring with you or find on the moon, now you got water, you got oxygen, you can make methane for powering things and for your rockets. So Mars is looking pretty good.

And then the other option often talked about is big rotating space stations like O'Neill cylinders and stuff. And for reasons we got during the book, we're just very skeptical of those as having any real utility. So if you want to do this, probably you're going to Mars. Biggest problem with Mars other than it just being really bad, right? Right. So it's got radiation, poison, so let's talk about getting there. Using a home-in transfer, you know, lowest energy transfer, you're talking six months inbound and six months back, usual mission would be about two years on the surface. I think there is a trajectory where you can get back after a month on, but like most people don't talk about that because Jesus, why would you spend a year traveling just spend a month on Mars?

And the big point to make those, it's like with the moon, something goes wrong, you can in principle always get home because you're always the same distance from Earth. But there's a time when Mars is going past you around the sun. So unless we're talking about like having the Millennium Falcon or Fusion drives or whatever future stuff, you can't get back. And the shortest distance, it's a three minute signal time. So there's no live communication, no live help if you have a problem, and no just live chats with your mom. And at longest distance, it's 22 minutes. So getting there's tough. You know, if Starship comes through from Elon Musk, that'll help part of the problem, but there's still going to be a lot of stuff remaining.

Then once you get there, so I guess we want to talk about the medical problems you expect. Yeah. So the big caveat with all this is most of our medical data comes from the International Space Station, which you're in microgravity, which you will not be on the moon or Mars. No. But we know it rapidly degrades bones, rapidly degrades muscles. Maybe surprising rapidly degrades vision. We don't know why, by the way. The speculation is, you know, when you go to a place where there's no gravity, you get what's called a fluid shift.

So your body's used to pumping stuff up from your feet. All of a sudden, it shifts up. You get puffy face is what it's called. If you look at astronauts have just gone up that kind of look like babies because there's all this fluid up. in their faces and their legs get skinny. And that may be associated with this vision loss. There's equivocal evidence. There might be cognitive effects.

So it could be, for example, whatever's causing that vision loss. We think maybe it's like pressing on what's behind your eyes as it's doing it. But it's possible there are long-term cognitive effects. The thing worth knowing is almost no one's been up for more than a year. It's like a handful of people. The record consecutive time is 437 days. So we don't have a lot of really long-term data. Will Mars and the Moon be better?

probably that gravity is going to help a little. But there are other problems. So lunar soil is what's called regolith. If you put it under microscope, it looks like tiny little jagged knife-like things. It might give you stone grinder's disease. If you breathe it in too often, there's a little bit of evidence from Apollo that when you breathe it in, you get an allergy-like response. It's also bad for equipment.

There's other stuff on the moon, but I'll stick to the medical stuff. And so if you go to Mars, you have similar problems. You have higher gravity, which is nice. But the soil is also full of chloroids, which are a hormone disrupt. So if you try to imagine having kids on this surface, that's a little worrisome. And the other thing is because of that thin atmosphere, which is mostly a good thing, you do get worldwide dust storms. You also get local ones.

But now, then, you get a dust storm that blots out the sky for like two, three weeks of time, which is not great if you're running solar power. And, you know, I could go on, but those are the main problems once you get through. And then also, of course, the radiation. So moon doesn't have a magnetosphere. Mars is very weakly magnetic. So you're just exposed if you're on the surface, right? And we don't know much about the effect.

NASA has kind of guidelines for your increased cancer risk, but it's very speculative. Cancer, you know, the kind of radiation you get in space we don't have on Earth. You know, humans don't usually get huge doses of radiation. Some of the best data we have is like from animal studies or from like Chernobyl or atomic bomb droppings, which are obviously not controlled. Thank God. I don't even know what that would mean. So we don't have very good data.

But there's some world in which, you know, there's a severe increase in cancer risk, which again is extra scary if you're talking about raising children in these environments. And so then you said, survive there. So what you do is basically a response to all that stuff, right? And the best response is to go underground. You can do that by setting down and just piling dirt on top of yourself or maybe more desirable. Both these places have lava tubes, which are caves formed by flowing lava. They're desirable for variety of reasons.

But you can go down, possibly seal off a chamber. And now you're protected from radiation from big temperature swings. Maybe you're protected somewhat from that toxic soil. And then you try to recreate the earth in a little tiny pocket in this environment, probably with your power supplied by fission. Yeah. So that's the optimist perspective. Yes. So I want to, you know, kind of bring up this quote that you're known for.

And it comes up a lot in some of the interviews I've watched a years. You say reading about space settlement today. It's kind of like reading about what quantity of beer is safe to drink in a world where all the relevant books are written by breweries. But I want to push back with my love and respect. But I had Ashley Vance on the podcast recently and link somewhere up as a new book. As far as a new book about, you know, space pioneer and space as an economic, you know, gold rush times. And really not Elon doesn't play as big a role as it did, certainly in his first book, called Elon Musk. Yes.

But even in another depictions of, you know, space exploration and space settlement. So he's very sanguine about going to space, and he thinks, as does, you know, many other guests that I've had on, that there are economic reasons. So how do you balance the, you know, the Scylla and Carybdis of having, you know, very good reasons to go into space now for satellites, for prestige, for warfare, as the past guest Neil DeGrasse Tyson to talk about. But also that, you know, step two away from LEO or even geosynchronous orbit or even the moon is really kind of a pipe dream a lot of ways. How do you balance those two? I would say everything up to GO is big money. There's lots of good stuff to do. It's in data transmission, remote sensing, environmental assessment, that kind of stuff. Beyond that, there's basically no good reason. I mean, well, I'm sorry, let me take that back.

There's no good economic reason. Economic in the sense of an investor gives you money and you come back with more money, right? Now, there are perfectly good PR reasons for nations to do it. That's why we put a guy with a flag on the moon. There are, I think the military stuff I don't buy at all. I think there are absolutely military advantages to, again, lower orbit to geo, totally. This was talked about in the early 60s.

What if we put a missile base on the moon? You know, we'd have second strike capability. And it's like, it turns out it's submarine does that just fine, much more cheaply. Some people will say asteroid mining. We kind of go through this in the book. I think we're pretty skeptical. You know, I mean, you can always be like, well, in 10,000 years when we're a Cardishia of 83 civilization, you know, then we'll be. And fine, I'm happy to admit that.

But anything like remotely. Plug in our Dyson sphere. Yeah, absolutely. Sure. 100%. But right now, I mean, no, there's an absolute gold rush on for space, but that's mostly for data transmission. Because we have a very data-hungry world, and you have stuff like Starlink, which is an amazing product. I use it at home. We live in a rural area. It's been life-changing for a lot of people who live in rural areas. But putting it, you know, far than really, most the actions in low Earth orbit, you can go up to geo and get other things.

But beyond that, there's really no good reason. And I think what you have is a lot of people who are really excited about space coming up with reasons. And so one of the things I did for this book is we read. like dozens of books from the past predicting the big money in the future and the same arguments being made in the 1960s are being made now for some reason we have to go to the moon and I just don't think

I'd be happy to go through the different arguments but I just don't think they're very compelling. It really sounds like a solution in search of a question or answer I think that's right yeah. Yeah there's but of course you know going there tourism as Andy Weir points out and Artemis is probably the best reason

to go to the moon and build a smuggling bases and all sorts of fun stuff. You mentioned in the book, I can't resist, that you mentioned Arthur C. Clark, and this podcast is named after one of his most famous sayings into the impossible. The only way of discovering limits of the possible,

going beyond them, into the impossible. But he has this kind of wacky suggestion in the late 60s, right around the time of 2001 of Space Odyssey, which is the origin of the name podcast. Did you know that? The word podcast comes from 2001. It comes from the pod, right? So Pod Bay doors, open the pod bay door.

My other studio, I have a neon sign that says that. But yeah, so there's Vinnie Ticcarelli. I just lost the name. Was an engineer and a copywriter work for Apple in 2001, the year 2001. And he was bemused by this notion that you could have this life stain, you know, sustaining, you know, all source of all information at the time, a thousand songs in your pocket. So he called it the pod. Then we got podcast from the pod. So thanks to Arthur C. Clark.

So how dare you, you know, condens. Tell me what he said, because this is so hilarious. Oh, is this the sex thing, he said? Well, now it wasn't, and now it is. So do the sex thing. I can't remember if we put in the Arthur C. Quar, he said, he had one quote about, let me just say what it was, alien life. He said that in the promise of space that the evidence for the growth of vegetation is impressive.

Yes. But I want to hear sex. He, I can't, we made it. So, you know, we tried to find anything we could say about people talking about sex in the past in space. And as far as I could tell, as a historiographer of space sex, the goal, the goal. Olden age of talking about sex in space was about 1963 to about 1980. Now we don't do it so much, I think, because the fantasy has kind of died in a way. But, yeah, those people were very open about it back then.

I forget there's some Arthur C. Clarke quote from like the late 60s where he's like, people that are finally talking about space as an erotic place and it's about time. Something like that. It was a very late 60s, Arthur C. Clarkish. Yeah, I could see him with the. But yeah, okay, so you're talking about vegetation. So I think the book in question would have been from the early 60s. So the history of Mars is essentially, you people have all these theories,

Everybody knows the famous canals on Mars idea, going back to Chaparrelli. So there's all these ideas about life on Mars, and it was believed, I was surprised by this. As early as late as the early 60s, that there was some kind of vegetation, like, and there was lots of speculation about it. And I believe what they were looking at was like the expansion of the dust storms. The basic deal is that the Mariner program killed that. And once you come up, you're like, oh, it's just totally dead. And then the Viking probes went and they did, you know, explain.

experiments to look for life. There are few people who think it found life, but I think the smart money is that they found an interesting chemical reaction. Yeah, but it's almost like it's kind of sad to read the books written in the 50s and 60s because there is so much more hope because it's all new and it's all amazing and it's all happening faster than people expected. And there's this belief that, yeah, maybe like Carl Sagan thought maybe we'll land on Venus and it's hard to remember that we didn't know much about what these planets were like back then, you know? So anything could have been true. It just turns out the universe is quite desolate. It's as far as we can see. It doesn't want us there. It wants us to solve our problems down here.

I guess so, yeah. I know you're loving this Martian voyage with the incomparable Zach Wienersmith, but I want to have a special offer for you. That's to join my Monday Magic mailing list where you could win your own piece of space dust. This is part of the asteroid that may have generated the planet Mars. Long, long time ago. Out near the asteroid belt. I've got great news for you.

You could win it if you join my mailing list. It's where I share great content from a round. the world of STEM and clue you in on recent conversations and thoughts I'm having about our wonderful universe. Go to Brian Keating.com slash list and sign up. And by signing up, you're entering a competition to win one of these meteorites that I give away each month. But if you have a .edu email address, you are guaranteed to win one. So to win one for sure, if you have a .edu email address, go to Brian Keating.com slash edu. And you might win a real piece of the asteroid belt. Now back to the episode. So before we said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

How much did we save? Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. We get to criticisms of the book from a noted critic whose name I don't have written down but you presume. Oh, Peter Hague. The Hague trials. But before that, we're going to talk about some comments and questions for my readers, including what I was always, so I've read about 300 books on this podcast with authors and esteemed guests like yourself and your wife. And I found it, you know, authors love it when

you read their books. They don't like it when you tell the entire. of the book, like a short form, you know, brilliant summary or whatever, because then it discouraged people from buying it. But in this case, you have to buy it because the illustration. That's right. Even the audiobook, the audiobook is wonderful and it's read, you know, you guys make appearances, but really it doesn't do the book justice for the art. You got to get it in either Kindle. I wouldn't get in Kindle. It's a beautiful book. It's actually printed very beautifully. But I found that what authors really love is that if the host reads the book and half them, duh. I was on Joe Rogan Show. I sent him. I didn't hope even like crack the cover.

You didn't even know where they were. That's fine. Lex, Lex Fried, but the same. guy. Although I think Lex read one of my books. But anyway, the point being, how do you tell somebody or convey to somebody that you've read their book? And I found one way you can do that is read the acknowledgments because then it means, because you can get chapter one for free on the Kindle so you can just, you know, look that up. But actually the number one way to show your devotion to an author I have found to be when you've pointed out erotum, not eroticism, but errors in the book. Mistakes. So this comes from a man on Twitter named Mars Pioneer, who posted your book, A City on Mars, and my Facebook group,

Mars Pioneers Group. And a member commented, I like the underground city. Oh, I have to cover. I like the underground city. But why on the store on the left that's underground would you need awnings on its windows? And where would the wind come from to push the sailboats around? How dare you, Zach? So, okay.

That's true. That's a good, good question, Mars Pioneers. I love that name. Ben Schultz asked the following question. Your proposal, yours and Kelly's, proposal to wait and go big dismisses the knowledge we get from failure. SpaceX is going to blow up a lot of rockets

and learn how to launch enough mass to orbit. Understanding that one may die on Mars is a similar gamble humanity took when we left Africa. And you pointed out, all the astronauts were liars in the 60s. They would lie about having a heart attack yesterday. Because they were willing to die.

I mean, they would much rather die in a rocket that blew up then die in a golf cart, you know, in their 90s, right? So why, what do you say to Ben who says, let's fail first, fail off? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are two arguments there I would like to talk about. So one is the failure argument. The second one was the thing about humans leaving Africa,

which I think is an incorrect understanding of human history. I think that's just kind of a misunderstanding of what we're arguing. So like we're not in any way opposed to space exploration. If for whatever reason governments decide they want to send humans, like I don't know that's the best use of a science dollar, but whatever. I'm cool with science funding for weird stuff. Send them. And if they're adults who want to sign a waiver and probably die, good for them. I am libertarian enough to think of a compass-mentous adult, signs a waiver to go die for something awesome. Godspeed. But when you talk

about a settlement, right? We're talking about settlement, not exploration. The defining feature of a settlement is generations, is having children there who grow up to have their own children. And that makes the ethical question much more dicey, right? So, and we talked about this a bit. But Like just to hit home on this, right? There are all sorts of reasons to expect you would have a higher than normal rate of kids who have problems, say cognitive handicaps or stuff like that. Kids who could not easily contribute in this very dangerous environment. Forget about kids. Elon Musk has admitted, you know, he's got severe ADHD, Asperger's.

I'm not joking. I'm not laughing about it. But imagine being on the crew with him. I mean, all these tech bros that love being with, I love Elon. He's great. But what I want to spend a year of my life, just get there? No way. That is absolutely true.

Don't only think about the kids are going to have kind of. No, that'll be, that'll be, yeah, yeah, having to spend being a single apartment-sized spaceship with Elon Musk for six months would be a good, good test of your port-in-suition. Join the survey, you know, but so I mean more like, you have a kid who's born with cognitive disabilities, right? So on Earth, we have all sorts of stuff for kids like this. They're loved. They're taking care of it, especially like in a rich country like the U.S. We have facilities for them. We have people to take care of them.

We have the tax money. We have the local infrastructure for them. In space, you know, they might not, not only might, you have trouble taking care of these kids, but you're an environment that's extraordinarily hostile, where everything is demanding your time all the time. You don't have time for these kids. And what creeps me out is we found at least three quotations for people in space advocacy where they say some version of, well, we'll just let natural selection take its course. You know?

And you like, like, I don't know how to interpret that other than to say we're either going to like let these children die. So essentially we're going to have a much lower standard for human existence. Right? So we're going to do stuff that would be obviously unethical on Earth. So that's what I mean when I say wait and go big. It's true. Stop stuff like that because when it comes to space, settlement, not exploration, settlement, scale solves a lot of problems.

That's not the only one, but I think it's the most, like, horrifying one, the idea of having an environment where you're more likely to have children who need help and more likely to not be able to give it to them. So it's not just about like being the right brothers and getting hurt. You know, that's all fine. I'm talking about space settlement. Okay. So another question comes from philosopher Ken.

We should shelve all plans and discussions to settle Mars until we have secured our long-term survival and prosperity for everyone here on Earth. That would make a hugely important influential gesture that people like yourself, Brian, are in a position to make. Okay. So he says saying we should just devote resources. We should focus on Earth. Yeah. I mean, I would say I have actually an objection to that. So let me make everyone angry.

Screw humans. Yeah, fuck. I don't believe that out. Nerds to humans. Okay, so I think Mary Roach was the first person I saw make this argument explicitly, but she said something the effect of like, look, you know, when we defund a science project, like I think of the Superconducting Super Collider. When it got defunded, it's not as if all that money just routed into public science.

Now, maybe it routed into something else you like. No, it didn't. Okay, yeah. See, that's what I mean. So I'm kind of like, I'm very much a cynic about why we do human space fairing. I think it's basically political and we smash a little science onto it where we can. But I'm someone who's in favor of public funding of science. And so if we can get it, you know, I think it's a good case that if you replaced all human

space fairing with like money for NHS, it would be a much better move. But it's not like you just get to make that call. Right. So, you know. People say the same thing. I'm a wife on the Large Hadron Collider. If we can spend it all on cancer research. Yeah.

Well, we spent trillions of dollars in cancer. It's still not cure. Yeah. I'm all for curing cancer. Totally. If you can make, if you can wave a wand and make that call, maybe you'd do it, but you can't. So past guest on the show, Alison Motry, says launch brain organized into space. and seeing the effects because apparently there's also degeneration of neuronal function,

telomere destruction, so they're actually trying to grow these brain, you know, proto brains in space. And this is kind of related to it from dynamica.org. Is there any way we can live there without getting killed by the ultra-fine dust particles that will get into everything. So this is regolith. First of all, define regalith for the nerds out there. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a piece of regalph, by the way.

There you go. So that's a big piece. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Imagine you have a giant rock in space. And it's just there for billions of years. What happens to it? Well, it gets smacked by objects from space, large and small, also by radiation.

And what happens when that happens is the surface will fuse and then get broken. And then fuse again when something smashes get broken. And over great eons of time, that means you have tiny shards of rock and glass. Glass. It's called Regolith from the Greek for blanket of stone. And if you inhale it, it's probably bad for your health. Lung scarification. And there's some evidence that it's really bad for equipment.

and by the way, it's statically charged, so it clings, which creates subtle problems. So, for example, spacesuits are white to reflect light, even though obviously black would be way cooler. But when you get regolith on, you turn that plastery gray color of the moon, which actually creates heating problems because it insulates while holding in heat.

So it's not good. So there's all sorts of problems, but actually a lot of science engineering is oriented around solving this problem. So it's highly solvable. It doesn't mean it's easy. This is a thing we're big about. You don't want to just say it's solved

because it's solvable. But so, for example, you could have all facilities have like one or two ante rooms where you have to take off all the clothes you had on before. One proposal, which seemed pretty plausible to me is you just keep disposable full cover suits and you just whenever you go out and come back and you take them off. There are other proposals that like essentially you could dock a spacesuit on the side of your base and then you kind of wiggle and do it and then you go walking. Pod Bay. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. So there are solutions. They're not, you know,

I mean, it's still going to be a huge problem all the time, but it's not like you're going to definitely die. I really didn't like your solution to send toddlers out there first to collect all of dust as our kids do and get them all over their skin. Next to last penultimate question, Gibby Star Trek. I was actually going to use that for one of my kids' names. What do you think a viable economic society would be like on Marx? Could it be communist, but truly deep in Marx's ideas that only the craziest utopiest dream?

Wasn't that by ironic coming from the capitalist, liberal USA and private companies to create communism on Mars? That's a big question. So I may be the relevant authority on this question because, so we have a, actually had a chapter. So in an earlier version of this book, there was a lot more sociology on our editor was just like, you can't, you just can't spend 800 pages on this stuff. So we do have one about company towns, which is obviously not a communal way to organize life. It's kind of the opposite. And we have concerns about that. We had a larger chapter on communes in space,

communes as a model for society. And the reason we had, two reasons. One was because people do talk about it. Like, so the dominant fantasy, I would say for going, like the dominant escapeist fantasy tends to be kind of libertarian frontiery type of stuff, but there are people who want to leave capitalism behind, have a chance to start over, there are such people. Often they propose communal living. The other good thing about communes is they're actually quite well-studied, especially the Kibbutz movement, and Israel is very well-studied by economists. Almost all failed, though, economically failed. Yes, yeah. Well, I would say in the case of the Kibbitt seemed they drifted into capitalism would be a better way to say, yeah, yeah.

They're communist-comunistic, like Vietnam is communist- Yes, yeah, but I would actually say, well, let me get to that. So I actually wrote a paper, Kelly and I and I and Iberminsky and John Lair, Robin Abraminsky leading authority on Kibitim, John Lair, leading authority on the Hutterite communal movement, probably the most successful communal movements in human history. We'd wrote a paper about it, about space communes. You could look it up. It's called, I think it's called to each according to their space need or something like that.

And the answer is maybe, if you want details on how that might work, we have it. But, but yeah, so as you say, like in the commits movement, as is typical, they either failed or drifted into capitalism once sort of conditions normalized. But actually, you know, arguably that's what you'd want to do in space. You could start with something that's a little more regimented just to like not die. Yeah. I mean, the Massachusetts compound was intrinsically. Okay. Last kind of critical questions comes from Peter Haig, PhD.

So let's be careful here. Wintersmiths are fond of historical allegory, but miss a highly relevant one that goes against their narrative, the scramble for Africa. Africa. Warlike European powers, even without the threat of nuclear war hanging over them, didn't go to war with each other over it. When Europe finally did go to war with itself was because the Austria-Hungary, no African colonies threatened Serbia, no African colonies. In Russia, no African colonies intervene. The first player with colonies to get into the fray was Germany and a bizarre, bizarre reading of history to claim that they did so to defend Namibia. If he wants to argue that the scramble for Africa did not cause warfare, I don't know what to say.

Separate from whether we want to buy the idea that there was no warfare as a result of European powers going into Africa, including warfare against each other, as in, for example, the trends of all. It's worth noting that, and this was true in North America, it was true in Africa. There were lots of resources to dispossess from native populations in that period. And I'm not saying that was a good thing. It was an awful thing. Part of the classic case is the company states like the Dutch East India Company, the English East India Company, did lots of awful stuff. But even if you set that aside, like there's good reason to go to these places. Like the English East India Company was there because there were these rich civilizations to trade with that had lots of stuff.

That's right. If such a thing were on Mars, we would already be there, right? If there were aliens on Mars that had better stuff than us, we would have a huge space infrastructure to make that trade happen. Right. Right. There's no giant trade regime, no company state that tried to go to the Yukon, right? Oh, actually, it was the Yukon for gold. I mean, Aryanra does have resources, but you're forbidden to access them.

Yeah, and right, right. the end so that's a whole nother story but jail for that water bottle that's right oh my god well it's not a mineral well this rock yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not like those um 19th century europeans were going to the bottom of the sea to get stuff right because it would have been expensive and crazy they were going to places where they could dispossess property from people and take their resources but that stuff's not available right or they didn't go to you know uh like i said earlier they didn't go to indonesia or single Singapore to posit their germination, you know, their germinal record so that they could

reproduce in case World War I really was the war that ended up. So yeah, I agree with you. Yeah. Peter, you're welcome to talk back when I have Zach on or maybe I'll get Kelly on and she can she can go toe to toe with you. Thanks for the questions, everybody. Last question comes from yours truly. So I talked to Elon, as I said this week. It was my first time talking to him. Fascinating person. We had a seven, eight minute conversation. Very good to geek out with him. He has some, you know, bizarrely naive notions about space in general, including the fact that, you know, I was kind of criticizing him gently and respectfully because I want to recognize he has done good efforts for it. For optical astronomy, you know, they've made the space link spacecraft. They've made them

optically black. But for microwaves, which is what we study, not only are they not black, it's hard to make something absolute zero in space, right? But they also transmit in the exact bands that we are detecting this precious window to perhaps reveal the gravitational wave background from the inflationary origin of all the universe, right? So I told him about that and he's like, well, I actually think it would be better to put telescopes on the moon and in space. And it's like, well, we need a 10 meter telescope. Can you pass that over, Zach? That's the only, that's only five meter telescope. So we have a, this one, uh, free. I got it from one of my brilliant students. Made it up for me, uh, including the gold foil on the real gold. But Zach, uh, I asked him. I said,

you're a father of we believe he has he has puissant uncertainties in the number of kids i've heard 10 11 um he has uh the square root of the number of children are the number of his wives approximately i love that guy um and i said you know Elon with with respect you've talked about this as kind of a backup plan for civilization for our consciousness et cetera et cetera leaving that aside the practical implications do you are you being serious when you say you want to go to Mars i said Elon can you imagine you're going to look your child X, and he's like, X is on my shoulders right now.

So I was like, cool. I talked to, by the way, I talked to X, I talked to Elon, and I talked to his mother all in the same space. It's wonderful.

I'm going to put a clip of it here and put a link to it there because it was really a highlight in addition to this conversation, obviously. But when I talked to him, I said, Elon,

you're going to look your son in the eye, this precious treasure that you spend so much time with who is so valuable to you. And you're going to say goodbye to him. And he's like, not if I take him with me.

And I was like, okay, you're going to take your kid with you. That still leaves nine or ten. Other kids you're not going to take with you. We're going to take all those. You're going to take your mom with you. And, you know, speaking to somebody like Elon who's lost a child, it's the most painful thing could ever imagine.

And he kind of like it sounded like he choked up. I couldn't see him. But it sounded like he choked up a little bit. And his mother interviewed. Well, that's not going to happen for a long time. Do you think he's serious? Do you think he really expects it? Or is it part of this like he needs more of a narrative?

I mean, the guy's done the most amazing things for humanity. Love him or hate him. You can't argue that he's probably the most successful human being has ever lived. By one metric or another, he's also said to live inside of his mind is a storm that he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy. So I have great compassion for him too. But do you think even he's serious? Let's play armchair psychologist. Is he serious?

I mean, has he thought this through? Is he going to say goodbye to his kids, his wife, his mother, or his girlfriends? So the question that kind of comes up often, you know, with people who really don't like you, on my excuse, is he just a grifter? And I would say at least to that question, the answer is no. Because if you read his biography, like, you might believe he's a bastard, you know, you might believe he's like, he's, you might just like. Nazis, anti-Semitic.

He's anti-Semitic, whatever you want to believe about him. But like, you know, for me, like a clincher on this is after he made a whole bunch of money from PayPal, one of the first things he did was he went to like, this crazy story, he went to Russia to see if he could get some rockets because he had this plan, I believe it was to set up a little greenhouse on Mars, which like, whatever else you could say about it is not a money-making proposition. You know, it's just too expensive. Even if you got a lot of press, it would not make money. I think he's a true believer in that, in that sense. Now, he's also a showman, and I'm positive he exaggerates numbers. And I think if you, you know,

he'll say, like, well, we'll have this in two years. And it's become notorious that, you know, you have to multiply that by like an Elon Musk constant. Has he really thought through the details? I do kind of wish more people in this field who are more, say, engineering inclined would read some of the biological and sociological stuff. Because I do think there's a lot of stuff that's written about biology and sociology that is a little handwavy. And we really try to stick close to the facts. If you read our section on Company Towns, it's a very complicated picture.

It's a very rich picture. And it's a picture where you can really look at data. And there's just evidence of things that are really bad ideas. And I do think he's a true believer. There's no doubt in my mind. Whether he would take a bet with you on the timeline that I don't know. No, he don't know. Well, Zach, Wienersmith, half of the Wienersmith duo.

I want to thank you so much for spending so much your valuable time here, giving a colloquium in a few hours. He's got to get you there for that. But first we're going to the academic version of a company town, the faculty club. They get you. They charge you. They get the money from you and there's nowhere else to go. Zach Wiener-Smith, thank you so much. This has been a blast.

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