Off-Nominal - 164 - Middle Finger to Entropy (with Casey Dreier)

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society, to share the Good News about Human Spaceflight.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 164 - Middle Finger to Entropy (with Casey Dreier) - YouTubeThe Crusade to Reclaim Hubble - jakerobins.comSpace Policy Edition: Is Human Spaceflight a… | The Planetary SocietyEscaping Earth: Human Spaceflight as Religion (Roger D. Launius, Smithsonian Institution)Space Policy Edition: Real and Acceptable… | The Planetary SocietyFollow CaseyCasey Dreier | The Planetary SocietyThe Planetary SocietyFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, Jake. Hi. What's up, buddy? Happy Thursday. You all right? I'm excited. This is the first show in a long time where I don't feel like I'm dying slowly from the inside out.

So things are looking out. Oh, sickness-wise. It's like, what topics have we hit lately that were so bad? No, no. It's a pretty heavy existential shit to hit us with right off the bat. No, no, no, just being sick. Some sort of, I don't know. I could say I never got tested, but probably COVID.

at some point and I just got and I was traveling and stuff it was bad so I feel better this week finally which is very exciting for me so I feel better because one of our faves Casey dryers here with the most epic shirt that's ever been on this show 100% look at that shirt I have to say I've gotten more comments I'm not a style guy I don't know if that shocks anyone but I've gotten more comments in everyday life from wearing this shirt than any other piece of clothing. And it's always from, it's generally always from dudes who probably remember watching space shuttle launches as a kid. But it's a great way to target market. Like, who would, yeah? I'm square in the middle. I have identified it. This is actually, I think it's

front, it's a vintage shirt. This is like one of those great. My dad got it for me for like a Christmas present off of eBay. I think it's from the 80s. It's quite comfortable too. Big fan of it. is that a NASA meatball pin or no that's part of the shirt because I see another one on your right shirt. That's part of the shirts. Follow the meatball logo and the last or not. That's so good.

Actually, I have my society pin, but it barely shows up. So I'll just plug that right off the bat. There it is. It's funny what shirts will like do that because I've had similar experience. I had one, I think I still have it somewhere where it's got a pocket on the shirt

and inside the pocket is like an embroidered rocket launching out of the pocket. And so like if you like lower the pocket down, you can see more of the rocket and the exhaust and stuff down. And people were like, that shirt is really cool. I just I wanted to tell you how awesome that shirt is. I'm like, it's not really that. It's not really that interesting. Like it's just a.

I don't know. You should leave it. It's like, yeah, that's awesome. That's why I'm wearing it. Look at this rocket go. Boom. So. Can't believe I've never seen that shirt.

How does you not wear that to a conference? I think. I think, wait, who are you talking to me or am? This shirt's bad. Talk to him. You. Yeah. I've won it on the show, I think.

I think I've worn it on the show. Yeah. I haven't worn it in a while, though. So maybe I don't have it. Break that out. Yeah. All right. Well, what did you got?

You got something nice that you're drinking there now that you feel better? I'm just working through a bottle of Jameson still. So, yeah. There's nothing real special about it, but there you go. There it is. Yeah. Casey, you're early. You're early.

What's your post lunch drink? I'm early. So I'm, I'm drinking just some strong coffee. I'm still technically on the clock, so I probably shouldn't. But I did break out a special cup just for you guys. If anyone recognizes this, our MSR, our sample return. Coffee cup.

This is why we're over budget, folks. We had coffee cups printed for the mission. Yeah, it was an $11 billion cup of coffee. It's a huge amount. I'm just happy to agree today and not by 2040. Yeah, the coffee. He was brood on Mars, so... You would think this is a coffee as well,

but I filled up way too much of this with a gin and tonic, like an alarming amount, because I wanted to pre-mix it before I came up to my office today. So, perfect for a discussion about religion. That's really how I want to kick it off. So, what are we doing here? How do we get here? First of all, I want to say something.

We have a calendar for this show in our notes that Jake and I share. And that's what we send people to link. and we say, oh, here's where you should go. If you want to see what date, you want to come on or whatever. And one day I opened it and just Casey's name was on there with like spaceflight religiosity or something. And I was like, I don't remember having this discussion. And Jake tells me that, yeah, this just happened by on demand, I think.

Yeah, yeah. I was like, I need to come. So it starts, I mean, it started with this episode of space policy edition that Casey put out. So maybe Casey, you tell us about. that first because it was, I mean, it just stand alone as its own topic. It was just a really fun episode. And I think you should, you should plug it because that's a great, great podcast anyway. Yeah. So it's my monthly show, Space Policy Edition, part of Planetary Radio. And it's actually a topic I'd wanted to talk about for a while. Roger Launius, who was the NASA Chief

historian, he was at the Smithsonian Institute for a long time. Just one of the great academics and writers about space policy and history had written this paper. about 10 years ago called escaping Earth human spaceflight as religion that has just cozied up into a nook in my brain ever since.

And it's just, it just lives there kind of, you know, so to speak, rent-free. And it's just such an interesting prism sometimes to look at a larger sense of how we as a culture and particularly adherence of human spaceflight or people who are really into human spaceflight,

like I assume most of us are. engage with the topic. And it's somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it's meant to kind of provoke, it's a lens of looking at it. And so his paper outlines kind of these initial ways in that kind of, the way that we talk about human spaceflight,

our devotion to it, particularly adherence of it, devotion to it, kind of has similarities to religion, right? We have these like holy texts, right? Are these like the 1950s collier's articles? We have your apostles in terms of people like von Brown or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. You have the sacrifices of astronauts. You have kind of a priestly cast of engineers and scientists who speak a certain language.

And all of this is mediating access to something greater. And ultimately, I think the core of the idea is that a lot of human spaceflight, particularly for long-term settlement or colonization of other planets, is functionally a salvation theology. Human species will be saved if we do this thing and come with me to this new land and settle. I mean, that's Joseph Smith. That's Mormonism almost, right?

I mean, that's a religious kind of concept to begin with. Now, obviously, we don't sit and pray to Von Braun. We shouldn't need no matter what, but we don't pray to rockets. You know, we don't pray to, there's no like structured theology, but it hits a part of our brain that I think shares aspects of our attractiveness to a large religious superstructure that I think helps explain, and his argument in this paper is that helps explain in a sense a relative overinvestment and resources to human spaceflight relative to where you would maybe just looking at it from a purely Vulcan-like dispassionate comparison to space

science or technology. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was so it was your brain and it wheeled into mine as soon as they listened to the show. Like this is one of those podcasts where like I didn't multitask. I just like it started playing. I was like, wait a man. I just had like sit down and just kind of go like this. And I was like yeah, yeah. You know, just like shouting at myself. Like this is exactly. Yes. This is this is, you know, verbalizing. This is yeah, preach, baby. This is verbalizing what what I had been like trying to figure out in my brain. Because I've always had like, like personally I've always had a weird kind of tension with that sort of thinking because like I I think of myself as someone who is not like those,

it's not pushing those parts of my brain like you talked about. When I think about spaceflight, it is not really doing that for me. It never really has. Sometimes I play the part, but like really it's just, it's just never really like time for me that way, you know? So, yeah, it was interesting to listen to. That's for sure. Why did it, why is it only human spaceflight that, that he hit on?

you know, back in the day when he was writing this, um, because I certainly, there's a couple angles. There's the, I mean, Jake's article about, about Hubble.

I feel like there was a little bit of this about, opportunity probably when it was like, is that the one? Which one was like most recently stuck? Yeah, like, opportunity. But also there's the whole like,

per, uh, our guest today, there's like a Saganism realm of this, right? Like we are all star stuff. That kind of sected. Like when Arrocebo went down, it was like,

our great church. collapsed in on itself and it was like a national day of morning right so I feel it I feel it I feel it with but I definitely I feel it stronger probably because I'm less generally attracted to the other areas like I'm I'm more into space like strategy and like architectures than I am about like black holes and stuff but that's not to say that I don't feel personally the draw to the spiritual side of the Saganism so what was it that he scoped it tightly to human spaceflight and not like space nerds I guess is my question yeah i mean i think you're right i mean there's an aspect of i mean this is the theme anyone who's been listening to space policy

edition over the last year there's actually been kind of a secret theme of going on of really struggling through these fundamental reasons and trying to explore kind of this philosophical basis of why we do this and why it resonates with us and this is a part of that and it kind of fits within the framing of the, you know, so-called real and acceptable reasons of spaceflight. Another way I'd put that would be right-brained

and left-brain reasons for spaceflight. And all of space, I think to your point, has spiritual aspects of it. Or I would almost characterize it as it's so strange and big and immense and weird that we only have comparative language to the spiritual experience by which to explain it. So we reach into that well to draw out some sort of evocative metaphor or relationship to help other people understand some inner feeling that's innately hard to express.

And when you talk about kind of the Saganism, he absolutely leaned into the spiritual side of it. And I think he recognized that that is, and ultimately where I'm going in kind of with my exploration of this idea, is that I think it's the most effective means to communicate and engage people is by reaching past the practical into the, let's call it spiritual, but or just maybe the right, the right brain aspect, the emotive feeling. And ultimately, I think a lot of that is just the feeling of you considering yourself before infinity. and the universe is very big, it's functionally infinite. That feeling is essentially what facing, you know, if you read some of these early theological works, you know, Moses before a burning bush is like he disappeared, you know, something very immense and powerful is expressing himself.

And that relationship, that's the aspect of the sublime, which has an aspect of existential terror in it to a degree. But at the same time, finding comfort in it is related to, I think, confronting and exploring space to begin with robotically or with humans. Launius' contention is, and I think I agree with them, that human spaceflight is particularly resonant with the structures of religion in that it has these salvation aspects of it, that it's people doing it.

You know, you go for scientific, you can send a robot to Mars, but that's not going to save humanity. Right. Do you say, I'm going to go save? humanity by settling over that next mountain and create a new colony in a utopia, basically. It's a utopian theology that saves, you know, this, and again, salvation is the essence of so many types of religion, whether it's of the soul or in this case of the species. And that's a very powerful motivator. And I could actually argue tying it into some of the

thoughts that Jake brought up through his nice article kind of riffing on this idea, that it's kind of the secret sauce to a lot of commercial space success. because it's functionally used as join my movement. Work 80 hours, 100 hours a week for 40 hours of pay, but you're going to save humanity. You're going on this great mission. You're gathering religious adherence. Well, so I guess that's the thing, right?

It's there's a pretty smooth cleavage point there between the organized religion aspect where you're building a movement and the like fundamental existentialism of, because like, I've always, The thing I always thought is that, growing up Catholic, I thought Christianity missed the boat on the fact that let there be light accurately described the Big Bang and they didn't seize on the commonality there. Like, explain the functional difference between your explanation of the Big Bang and the line,

Let There Be Light. Sounds the same to me. Hits me the same way. I don't know what happened before either one. And nobody does. Well, I guess you could say that let there be light implies causality and time prior to the Big Bang where the Big Bang by death. definition establishes the concept of causality.

Neither of which makes sense. I'm going to be real with you. The Big Bang sounds like some bullshit that we haven't figured out yet. That's how I feel about. That doesn't make any sense. There's another book that I just read. I actually had on the policy edition a couple months ago was Brian Autumn, the current historian, chief historian of NASA,

was talking about NASA in the South. And I didn't really talk about it in the interview, but in that book, it was a bunch of essays about how aspects of Southern culture have engaged. with the space program over in the United States, of course, over its history, one of which was a preacher specifically tying in together this kind of space techno-futurism into Christian teaching in Florida and the space coast and set up a church, a big mega-church in the space coast, specifically tying this all together in a way that you were talking about. Clearly, you didn't really catch on in the broad sense,

but aspects of Christianity have flirted with that. Yeah. Anyway, the point is that there's a, this is more, about the movement building side than the like Saganism. Well, I think another way to look at it would be of the individuals who are active in space now and creating private companies or investing their own money into space. It's all human spaceflight. I was thinking about this the other day when I was watching Jared Isaacman's press briefing for the Polaris Dawn mission, which is going to happen next week.

And it's really exciting. It's really neat stuff that they're doing. but there's no one doing in, you know, he won't say, but he's clearly spent hundreds of millions of dollars on these missions, right? Yeah. No one is doing the same thing to do a science mission. And that, I think that's kind of the difference of it, right? That the, even though it explores and expands and adds to knowledge and can actually go places where humans can't, there's something about the, whether it's solipsistic or just human experience aspect of it,

that makes it distinct and particularly maybe more potent. So I think it's maybe just on a gradient, but the human spaceflight aspect, because it kind of makes no sense in some ways, right? I mean, you go back to these early debates in the Eisenhower administration and the chief science advisors like, why are we sending people in the space? Like, we got robots. We can do that.

There's no reason to do that. It's the same arguments people have made over the years. And there is no real, in a sense, the only real, I think, arguable reason becomes the salvation one. It's like ultimately you need to have humans not on earth over time. And then suddenly you find your one's self making a salvation theology, theologically similar argument by we need to have offside back of a humanity.

But it doesn't really make sense because it's harder, more expensive, more dangerous. Sure you can do things faster, but you pay a lot more for the same stuff. So it goes back to why do we do it in the first place and there has to be something else there that Lanius would argue is this kind of pseudo-religious motivation. Yeah, yeah. In doing like the Mars podcast, I've encountered a fair amount of people. Like Mars is sort of a lightning rod for some of these kind of ideas, right?

It's, it's the nearest, it's the nearest place we could escape to to be saved, you know? It's like, and so it gets tangled up in a lot of that. You know? Yeah, it's weird. the grid that will look pretty cute. You wonder at the district. There's a little of commonality there. Yeah.

But so I mean like I, I've had that lots of times where like someone will approach me like, oh, I saw you have a Mars podcast. You are obviously like Mars. Let's have a conversation about what system of government would be best when we, when we land there with the settlers and stuff. And I was like, yeah, dude, I'm not the, I'm not the guy. That's like the fastest way to like make me not interested in a conversation is to talk about that, you know? Like, I'm not the person for that. And I've always, I've always had that

kind of tension with, like, the people that I'm trying to associate with. And it's been, so that's where like this podcast was like, oh, that's what it is. Okay, like this, this helps me, like, it puts like a, like a label on it or just like some way for me to like identify where they're coming from. And it was, it was a, it was very eye opening for me in that sense. So that's why I'm glad you did it. But, um, but yeah. So then I started riffing on it, right? That's I don't know if you're going to say something or yeah I was just thinking about like I my only thing with the salvation aspect of this before we talk about Hubble and and missions that we should save through our salvation is that I feel like I have an atheistic take on it

which is more equivalent to me realizing that like we are life which it's one goal is like expand into regions where you do not currently live and multiply and it's the same thing we did like from the oceans onto land. There was no real good reason to do that. The oceans were fine. And but it was like, well, there's more space over there. So we should expand up there. So I, I find myself more in that atheistic version of like, we should go other places because that's what we've always done for four billion years as life on this planet. And every piece of life is doing it, go to the bottom of the ocean. There's crazy shit that lives down there. You know my takes on Jake that like there's going to be wild stuff that lives in those waters. Like, everywhere you go

on Earth, there's crazy life. It looks weird. It does weird stuff. It acts different. That's just kind of the fundamental force of life. And I'm like, well, we're the ones with spaceships. So I guess we're the ones that do that too. So I feel similar. But I do feel like I have a more atheistic version of this take than the pure movement building. I would challenge that your take there is probably more utilitarian than you think, right?

Because, like, we didn't just, like, crawl into land because we were bored. There was food and stuff up there, you know? Food and stuff and not crazy big sharks and, like, fifth foot great whites and stuff that lived in it. I think that's ultimately how, like, you know, if we're going to get into it, like, that's ultimately how human space exploration is going to go. It's like, we're going to go to these places because we're going to do something or find something that makes our lives better, right? And that's what we do.

But I think, interestingly, that isn't the case for human spaceflight, right? Like, there's nothing that has been useful or makes our lives any easier in those destinations. It's just a huge pain in the ass to get there to stay there. Our bodies just rot away, basically, or melt away when we're there. We don't have the killer app yet. Absolutely. That's exactly. And again, I love humans.

I just will just make it clear. I love human spaceflight. And I think the point of this piece is not to assert anyone who likes human spaceflight is kind of actually practicing a sacred religion. It was a, it's almost like an analytical tool, meta-analysis tool to kind of understand motivations for people who may not even be aware that they're, doing it. And that's so, you know, and it's, I think it's, that's why I think it's always been really interesting and lodged in my head for when I've seen, like, the development in the last 10 years of kind of the personality cult around Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos kind of also preaching a similar type of earth-centric salvation, right, of moving all heavy

industry and making Earth a new Eden basis, you know, you can put all these into pseudo-religious terms really easily. And as you said, they're all building these movements or trying to, and it's an effective way to, again, get a lot of work out of people and to motivate people. And I think that tells us something about how our brains work and what humans are searching for and need. And maybe there's no accident that this is all happening in a rapidly secularizing, at least Western world in the United States here for sure and certainly also in Europe and other nations, where church attendance has dropped, a lot of people are declaring that they're not any particular religion and we're almost seeking, we have a variety of, on a grade of like unhealthy,

destructive to benign opportunities and culture on the internet that can kind of fill those things of meaning and purpose. And this is where understanding how messages resonate, and this is what I'm kind of interested in. Why do these messages resonate and how do they resonate? And ultimately, at the end of the day, I think this is where if you're looking for more people to be interested in this, I don't think we should shy away from it, not necessarily like expressly saying this is a religion and you should come change religions and come join us. But an understanding that a lot of people want to feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves and something with meaning, which I think it does. I think there is real meaning to it. And even though human spaceflight is really hard and kind of insane to do it.

The fact that we can do it and do it anyway is kind of the ultimate fuck you to the universe of like here's what humans can do. I don't care if we're going to waste away in cosmic radiation. We're going to do it anyway. That's an incredible middle finger to entropy, at least for a little while, which is all we can ask for, I suppose. So I think there's something really interesting about looking at it that way. And again, I think it kind of reveals when you see like various, let's just use Reddit as an example of various passionate individuals or subreddits or whatnot

of various attitudes and things. I think that helps explain some of the passion. is that it's not, even if people may think that they're taking a rationalistic approach, and there's aspects of it, but there's something very fundamental motivating them. And you become broken down into various sects who war with each other and have purity and get kicked out of this true believer's aspect of it. And you were talking about Mars there, right? I mean, you have Zubrin is basically one of the biggest cult, religious leaders of the Mars movement,

if you want to put it into that language, right? Like, follow me to this glory. glorious future in Mars. I think he would be fine with that. He's like, let's just go ridiculous with this metaphor and say he's John the Baptist, right? And then Elon Musk is this kind of like Christ-like figure taking us and taking all the sacrifices to bring us to this new salvation. There's going to be so good AI images based on this show. I'm thrilled with what's coming our way. Again, this is why it's such a great paper because it's very evocative. And again, I think we just always, I mean, it's not literal religion, but there are aspects of it. And I think this is,

it's, it's resonating with people in a pseudo religious way, whether they are aware of it or not. So why did this, why did this hit for Hubble for you, Jake? Yeah. So I was riffing on this in a way that was, it's funny, this thing is not really about Hubble per se, but I was ripping on this in a way that is looking at the commercialization of space, which I think is like, some sort of new sub-movement, right? So, Launius's paper was really about human space flight. And in the, you know, they talk about this sort of like, what is it, revered leaders and maligned villains or whatever that, you know, there's. And in Lonnius's example, it was like, the astronauts are these heroes, these like, you know, we put them on a pedestal.

They're these people that go out into the great unknown and take all these risks for our betterment, right? And the enemies, like the antagonists in this kind of analogy was like, Congress not funding them, which I thought was really kind of a funny way to think about it. It was like anyone who would like shut down the program or cancel funding and all these kind of things. And I think there's a different, like the paradigm is kind of flipped now where we have this like commercialization movement where people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Peter Beck and all these like, you know, great entrepreneurial leaders who are doing all these amazing things in space in a different way. That is like now the new movement and the enemies now.

are like NASA and in the case of Hubble literally astronauts who were the heroes in the other one, you know, speaking out about how maybe doing that the commercial way was too risky or wrong or whatever, right? So all these kind of like themes were surfacing from this Hubble story that I, that drew an analogy for me. And I thought it was kind of interesting to see how the roles had changed and there's something different happening. So I don't know, maybe the commercial district now or the district commercial. Commercial movement, you know, in space is like, In cities, haven't you? It was.

This has become almost like the Protestant movement in Catholicism. Right? Like, you know, it's like a subsect now that is like branching away and rejecting the old ideas in a new way for this. And but yeah, like a lot of the rhetoric that I was seeing around this Hubble idea, you know, should, should Jared Isaacman be allowed to go and fix it or not? Like all, to me, there was like no facts in any of the conversations.

It was just like, no, I believe in commercial space and they're the ones that can save Hubble. Hubble is now this holy relic. The pictures are the holy texts, you know, like, you know, the picture of the horseshoe nebulas. Like this is the sacred text of telescopes, you know, like that's, that's like it'll forever be in the museum of spaceflight science, right? And so I was seeing all these things. I had to write about it. So, yeah, it was an idea that just kind of like snuck into my brain and I had to get it out. I think there is something.

I mean, I really enjoyed that article, by the way, and that was fun to read. And I was happy to see these ideas kind of filter forward because, again, it's a very useful tool for trying to understand things that we're seeing. And I think there is, in a sense, I guess we'll just start just playing all this fast in those metaphors. Elon Musk as Luther, I suppose, and nailing his pieces of individualism up to the door and anti-bureaucratic, you know, whatever. So now NASA, I don't know, whatever you want to call me. You can give me a license, cunk. Yeah, I don't need to do. And his whole thing is, like, people were burdened down with unnecessary rules and systems.

The priestly cast who had supposed to be cared for us has led us down, and I'm going to give you direct access to the future you were promised. And there is something, I think, also to the idea of commercial space, at least at a very visible level, is tied. to individuals, which is a huge departure from the history of, we've had individuals in some of the astronauts, but the process of space has been a function of bureaucracies, right? And it's because of the necessity that it took entire governments to marshal the resources and capabilities necessary to access space, which has only recently changed. And so everything that we've internalized as a culture globally about going into space has come from a process. It's a previous era where it was all these kind of faceless bureaucracies putting up and then representing

the nations in a sense that that put them there that enabled them, where now we're moving to this role of individuals merging with their movements and the aspects of connecting to an individual's attitudes, belief systems, political statements, the whole gamut fuse with the movement itself, which is actually a much more traditional way. I think humans have interacted with movements, particularly with religion, obviously, right? That the individuals are very important into it as charismatic leaders and so forth.

And there's obviously, there's some risks with that too, because then you get too tied into the belief of one person. And I think you also risk a large cultural buy-in to something that was designed to be palatable and serving everybody. Now having aspects of the movement that serve the few. And it's not some anti-capitalist attitude.

It's just a function of it's an individual having an idiosyncratic approach to doing something very visible and then merging that all into public consciousness. And so I think we're starting to see some of those tensions flare up as a consequence. And this is going to sense the classic tension of like, if maybe if the Jerich Isaacman or some individual had put up Hubble, they would be willing themselves to take the risk to have it repaired. But it wasn't them. it was a national endeavor and a national asset,

and it has a different set of, in a sense, needs and expectations. And also it owes a certain amount of, if you can guarantee 10 more years versus add a 20% chance of failure or whatever, I know, it wasn't that high, but to it, then you start playing a very different game as a national asset versus an individual asset. Yeah. And have a different. The values there are different, right, from those, from the two sides there.

It's a domain mismatch, right? And we're, we're starting to see more and more, I think that, people like Jared Isaacman, which again, I'm very excited about Polaris-on, because it's his mission, he's paying for it, he chose the crew, they're all there in their own volition, they're taking risks that NASA wouldn't let their astronauts do, because their failure is not a national failure. It's an individual failure. NASA has the whole, NASA messes up and the Congress is breathing down their neck. You get think pieces saying, oh, is America losing, falling behind capability we can't do X, Y, or Z.

We stop dreaming. Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. And so you have certain, and this is, I think, a healthy development in some ways that we have more opportunities for risk taking. This kind of brings us back to Michael Griffin's real and acceptable reasons of spaceflight, where a lot of his real reasons are things like monument building, adventureism, legacy building. Those are all domains of the individual, right? Those are, I want to leave a legacy. I want to take, like, you. the great age of exploration in the 19th century. And earlier, those are explorations of individuals. I mean, maybe you got some money from the crown, but the crown's reputation isn't resting on Columbus or Magellan or whoever

getting to be successful. They're risking themselves. Edmund Hillary is risking himself and people didn't have to, you didn't have the full weight of the responsibility of a nation behind them. And we hadn't had that in space until very recently. and we're starting to see that return and it can be the juxtaposition can just feel a little weird sometimes

and then when you have intermixed with public assets that starts to make things complicated and I think then you get some interesting religious warfare happening at least on the threads on Reddit or elsewhere discords Yeah yeah

The discord ones we know very well Yeah Never our discord No it's good So yeah, no, it was fascinating. So I've, yeah, I was the response to that article. It was okay. I think that some of the people, you know, many of the people in my, my orbit are in that religion, right?

And so there was a lot of people that probably read it and kind of went like, huh, okay, like, so what are you saying, right? And I purposely didn't say anything about, like, I don't, you know, I'm just asking questions. right? But yeah, no, it was like, I think some people kind of just read it and went, I don't know how I feel about this and maybe didn't engage too much. So it was, it was pretty quiet, I would say, in terms of other responses I get. But I mean, nothing bad. Obviously, people are reasonable. But yeah, it was interesting. On the internet, I don't know. That's a true statement. Our community is pretty good. I mean, I'm pretty happy. Yeah, we have gone to great lengths to curate an audience that aren't a bunch of jacking. asses. So I'm really happy. Shout out. Al the anomalies. Yeah. Shout out to the anomalies who are reasonable. Yeah.

So. We are benefited with the fact that are the vast majority of our audience, just people that work in the industry and use their real names when they log into our shit. So it's like a bunch of people and their potential future coworkers or bosses. So I think it keeps it a little bit more reasonable. so yeah you know you get the chat you deserve i think is the uh real internet idiom so i'll just say you know planetary society online community very nice people are very nice in support it's it is a legitimate uh axiom that you get the chat you deserve

one one aspect of this there's two things i was thinking all along one is um case you mentioned that like some of this is people being a base level like built into us need for this kind of structure and wanting to go on these missions as as humans I've kind of equate that to sports being a great outlet for our base level tribalism like everybody needs to fill their tribalism bucket a little bit so I can root against the Dallas Cowboys because of the Dallas cowboys and that's all the explanation that is needed and and that scratches my lizard brain tribalism bucket and like I feel like this is similar that we want to have a little these structures but try to do it in areas that that limit impacts in the world that are negative.

The other aspect that I thought when I saw your article go up, Jake, was going to be more of the reverence of the object themselves as an aspect of this that like the, not to say it wasn't sad when the Cassini mission was over, but there was like this very drawn out, extended, I can't believe this spaceship is disappearing kind of thing, where I'm like, that was metal as hell. That thing just crashed into Saturn and now it's forever part of the planet. And the mission's done, you know, it's fine. Or like people being worried that Voyager's going offline now. I'm like, all right, well, you know, okay, what do you expect out of this thing? There's got to be like a case study in sort of like planetary science because we don't have

humans doing planetary science out there on the planets. It's like the anthropomorphization of space robots. curiosity playing, happy birthday to itself. Like one of the most sad things ever read in my life. I'm like, why are we doing that?

You know? Good Night Opie, that whole documentary is trafficking in that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, at the anthropomorphization. Anthroposization. Yeah, that's it.

And the, I think that's clearly a stand-in for the need and why, I mean, that's done consciously a lot. I mean, we did, I did a party.

here in my hometown for the end of Cassini. We did a wake for Cassini. And we had like a big portrait of Cassini with flowers around it and, you know, a big toast. And we treated it like we were losing a member of the family to some degree, right? It's kind of an Irish way. But it's a way because it's again, it's a shortcut to an emotive response that we have to help connect, you know, to the ultimate ideal of what we're doing. Right. I mean, the robotic aspect of sense they're just these extended appendages of humans.

They just are in one, you know, they're a human exploration mission just not directly in that sense. But ultimately, it's humans processing and understanding and feeling everything. And I think, again, there's that the reason why we resonate so strongly is we don't need to shy away from it. And again, I think we actually see a big opportunity. And the fact that there are these communities that have built us. around this show, around the planetary society, obviously, and around others that shows that people actually want to need some sort of community space to resonate and kind of jive off each other's good vibes of these events happening, right? And that says something, too, that this is

really a deeper thing than just a purely left-brain analytical endeavor, that this is hitting something really profound and maybe, again, lacking in our lives. So you said about sports, that's a great example of it. I mean, they've done, I believe they've done like a sociology experiments where they just give people like blue and red chits. And then they actually, immediately people just fill up into like semi-intagonistic groups against each other. You ever read the comic Perry Bible Fellowship, which is one of my old favorite comics. There's a comic where like people wearing like pro-scud and anti-scud shirt or scub. And then they start fighting and then they cuts to scub as just some like goo in a can, right?

And they're just like, it's just like people. Too real. It plays in some of these like basic aspects of it. And I think obviously space kind of plays in that too, right, of competition and global leadership. And I think maybe what it is, I think all of modernity is finding healthy ways to channel some of these basic instincts and space again or even channel some of the more positive aspects of it too of exploration and not being afraid to talk about it.

Yeah. And I almost wonder if by being more open, and this is, again, why has, why was Sagan so successful? Because you ever read any of Sagan's biographies? It's kind of fascinating. You should, there's two of them. One is official and one's unofficial. But both of them when he was going into college, he majored in physics, obviously. But he also basically just gave himself a second major in humanities in English.

And he had like in the Smithsonian now in his like personal notes that you can see his self-appointed reading list as a kid in college, like a 20-year-old, and he's reading like the great works of like Greek philosophers and Dante and all these humanists. And I think what that did is it trained him at a very fundamental level to understand the needs of the human psyche, or at least what the human psyche resonates with. And that's what that's something that's actually, you can still find value in books written thousands of years ago because our psyches are fundamentally, at least biologically, the same. And so people have been thinking about this for a long time. And it gave him, I think,

a structure and an access and an understanding of how to communicate the modern aspects of space into a package that people feel at a very profound level. And then people, you know, other great communicators basically trade at various levels of that effectiveness. But there's something to understanding that. And if we want to reach people, you don't reach them in a sense. And this is ultimately where it goes, I think so powerful about Mike Griffin's real and acceptable reasons of space flight. And I use this one at our day of action in Washington, D.C., right? At the planetary society, we have over 100 people will come to Washington, D.C. of our members and advocate for planetary science.

These, for the most part, aren't planetary scientists. They're not professionals in the field. They're regular people who fly themselves out to D.C. And take a day off of work to go to Washington. You know, it's just this incredible commitment they give us. And I said at the beginning of the training, is like none of you are here because you think of this is an important STEM development workforce issue, right? Which is one of the practical benefits of going on. They're there because

they feel something. They feel like this is important. They feel like they want to be a part of this discovery process. They want to see and reveal new things. And that, again, that right-brained aspect of it, that emotive feeling, which is by definition hard to express in words because that's our left brain. That's all of our verbal center. That is the powerful motivator. And learning how to responsibly, and I think engage that, ultimately helps. Responsibly. You can see how easily abused it is. And I don't know.

But it's a very powerful tool. And I think, again, Sagan understood that at a very deep level and trained himself from a very young age to understand that and make it used to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. You mentioned that, like, you know, the STEM development.

Because I think I read at some point, this is, you know, a study that, you know, a study that that never ever gets any light a day, but like the impact of like Apollo on on STEM stuff where it's like, you can like map out like, okay, so like Apollo happened and then everyone watched it. And then like the amount, you know, five years after the moon landing, the amount of like physics degrees is like skyrocketed. Like people just like went into like sciences and then, you know, STEM fields and that kind of thing. And then you go track that back, you know, 10, 15 years later. And like, what are those people doing with the peaks of their careers? And it's like all these like new inventions pop up and stuff. Like you can really like watch this thing happen.

And I don't know. So as someone who is like, like I said, I'm not an atheist, but just like not part of this, this brain touching part that we've been talking about here. I'm always like, why aren't we shouting that from the rooftops? Like look at how much like you want to be really callous way to look at look at how much economic, like how much GDP we got out of Apollo, you know, 15, 20 years later. And nobody talks about that. No one, no one cares.

I talk about it. Come on, guys. I love talking about that. Well, and we had a NASA economic impact report from Artemis just a couple of years ago making the same case. And I think when it's just what domain in which you're talking about it. And so this is the other aspect of this type of argument, which I think is really fascinating. And this again goes back to Mike Griffin's real and acceptable. The acceptable reasons are acceptable within this policy sphere. And he kind of frames that as a negative. because they're missing something really important about being human. But at the same time, the more that I've thought about it, you kind of need a policy sphere that is detached from the individual cultural values of a person. You need it to be ecumenical in a broad sense or dispassionate, because you have to have some kind of, if you're in a representative democracy, where you can't just take for granted that everybody feels the same thing you do, even if I feel space is really strong.

There are people who are just, I'll call them. Chopin, I think, said, like, small soul men should never play one of his pieces, right, because they'll just mess it up. And I remember once I was, the society has a little piece of a Martian asteroid that we allow people to touch. And so we used to do outreach events way back in the beginning

when I was working there. And we would go out places like, hey, you want to touch Mars. And people like, wow, touch Mars. Yeah, he does touch a real piece of Mars. Come, when you get to touch Mars? And one time I was a, this older guy was walking by and it was like, it was kind of slow. So I was like, hey, you want to touch a piece of Mars?

And he like stops and he looks at me and he goes, no. And then he just walked. Like the most like disdainful. And it was like, I don't think he's going to be a member, you know? I don't think we're signing up him. It's not in the, uh, the member chats for sure. Yeah, but it's a reminder too that when we talk about this right brain thing,

some people just aren't going to believe. that not going to feel it. And that's okay. And that's in a sense, and literally they don't feel it, so you can't convince them otherwise. And I say that story to illustrate, this is why the policy sphere tends to be

dispassionate and quantitative and talk about things that are measurable as direct benefits, because otherwise you're relying on people to feel the way you do. And maybe that can work in relatively modest-sized places or cultural places or things that aren't very diverse, but particularly in the United States, large democracy, very diverse set of people and cultures and values expressed here. And so there's in a sense a reason

why we have this bifurcation of real and acceptable reasons. And this is why I kind of said earlier, the real reasons, again, using Mike Griffin's parlance, tends to be the domain of the individual, that kind of legacy, adventure, emotive, big picture feeling, where the acceptable reason tends to be the domain of the group, right? Group benefit, direct argumentation, quantitative, like things that we can all literally agree on because we can look at the same set of numbers and see the same arithmetic happen with them. So, STEM benefit, economic benefit, kind of structural values, things that fall out of in a sense the so-called real reasons of why we do things, but we don't lead with them. So I think there's been a lot of interesting, again, there's a lot of subtlety here, but I think

this all kind of plays together and that we can lean into these more emotive aspects and really give people feeling of meaning and importance and excitement that are otherwise somewhat denied to us or or abused by weird QAnon stuff or whatever out there or while at the same time we can really lean into quantifying the broad structural benefits that everyone can at least admit are good even if it's not themselves solely responsible for the investment. And then finding that balance between them. So it's almost like inverting how you start with the argument, right? You start with the real reasons and then you can work towards these practical things.

And I think the interesting thing is, maybe I'll point this out to you guys. I don't know, I'm sure you've had people come up to you and say, well, why should we go into space at all? Right? Sure. Like we get that all the time. And how do you, how do you guys answer that when someone kind of challenges you on that? I mean, most of the time when I am faced with that, when they're not asking, you know,

why should we go into space? They're asking like, why should we go to space when we could be doing this other thing, right? And so that's the right way to frame that question. Yeah. And I usually like, I try to dig into that, right? It was like, okay, well, you know, what is it that you think that we should be doing and why? And then what is it you think that we're actually doing in space, right?

And then usually you can find that kind of commonality. It's like, well, we got people that are, you know, they need help on Earth. And it's like, well, here's all the ways that this helps you, right? And it's like, that's our actual, you know, you can draw those kind of parallels when you need to, right? But, you know, I go to my atheistic take that I told you earlier on this space religion front and then I change the subject and talk about the Eagles or something.

I climb to high account. That's pretty much like, yeah, yeah, because it is there. Yeah. I give it a shot for five minutes. And then I'm like, I don't know, do you want another beer? Like, we should just talk about word with it. anything else. Ego crawling its way onto land.

None of us would be here, damn it. Yeah, I will definitely go down that rabbit hole for sure. But I think it's interesting thinking about maybe what they're really asking in those moments. And I wonder, so that's the thing. We both kind of, I mean, Jake, like, that's, I tend to also default to a response of, oh, here's how it's actually practical. And you start giving these acceptable reasons.

And I wonder if it's actually better to try to sell them on a more emotive reason first. Right? That's say it. Yeah, that's come to my world and try to get them to think about the primordial soup and then see how that goes. Yeah, it's some kind of broader, like it fits at some, I think, again, and I'm still, I always feel like I'm, I'm not the smartest guy. So I'm like circling around the drain of the core idea, all of this. And I'm more and more convinced that there's something essential in the act of pursuing space exploration that is essential to a. of vibrant and healthy modern society.

And it has something to do with pursuing things that are innately hard, pursuing things that are here to for unknowable or weren't knowable, and struggling with and validating the ideas that we've developed in one place against the larger cosmos. Right. And then through that struggle, we're constantly having to reassess our understandings of our natural world in which we live to understand.

it better. And there's something innately beneficial to understanding the world in which we live better in a broad, broad sense, both culturally and practically. And that's hard to get across briefly, right? And so it's, but it's something I struggle with. But I think what it is at a broader level of communication, I think there is something about this leading with this big picture, right-brained aspect. And then providing these aspects back. There's almost like a, like Cold War space race thing analogy you can kind of make in that you know by doing these hard things and exploring space you know pushing human you know determination and technology to the absolute limits you are like running a stress test on how well your society is set up right because if you

have created a world where there are people who can get that education and the money can be raised and the resources are there like that is a way to say what we're doing. doing here in our system of society and government, all that kind of stuff is working or not, right? And that's what the Cold War was about. It was like, is capitalism better than communism? Let's see who gets to the moon first to find out, right? That was like really what the whole thing was all about. And so like maybe there's a little bit of that or it's just like, this is this is always your litmus test. It's like people that are going to space are doing it right. And that's a very roundabout way to say that we're doing it right and we're the best. But you know, I love that.

Love that from the 80s. It's a thigh, right? Stress test is a good word for on your team, right? You are, thankfully. We picked the meeting team, right? Couldn't attach shit to the space station without you. Yeah, exactly. Or the gateway, eventually.

Or the gateway. I don't know, Casey. I've been on cancel gateway crew. That's the whole thing. My current salvation is canceling gateway is the only way out of the situation we're in. That's my space religion at the moment. I don't know. What do you do with all the international agreements then? Everybody wants to go to the surface already, baby.

Everybody wants surface access and their game for it. Russia was the only one that was committed to the gateway that doesn't actually going to go to the surface with us. So shed the dead weight, go to the surface, everybody would be happy. That's my current safety. So all you got to do is solve ready, quick access to the surface and then, because orbiting the moon is much harder than doing that, apparently. Well, the other aspect here is that the later gateway,

gets the closer and tired is to the actual lunar landing. All you got to do is just land on the surface every six months with no problems and then everyone can go. Yeah. I don't know if we can't build the lunar space station effectively, maybe that that pathway might pose more problems than we think. Yeah, I mean, I think Gateway, to me, is the source of the international partnership support. And it's like the backup to everything. It doesn't make sense from a programmatic point, but it's not meant to. That made sense to me when we were only thinking about it. I love that we're doing this last five minutes when Jake wanted to complain about an Excel sheet as well. There's a whole Excel branch that we have to get to.

We're going along today, folks. That made sense in the era when we were extending the ISS agreement out and we had Russia on board and all the others were not yet committed. But since that time, Russia has been doing Russia and they are no longer interested in our gateway nor the surface with us. and all the people that were interested with the exception of Canada with their arm is ready to roll down to the surface with us. Hey, we're ready to go to the surface. Well, Japan and East have major contributions to Gateway.

United Arab Emirates has the major contribution to Gateway. All of the international deals are with Gateway and then they're all kind of jockeying for the first landing and getting a landing eventually. But it's the, and I think it changes maybe it's the fact that the Gateway is going to be like smaller than... No, none of them are interested in the first landing.

gateway because they're like, we're going to be in orbit. We'll never go down to the surface. They all want to go to the surface. That's all they all want. I love being institutionalist means I always get stuck arguing for a shitty program design from a policy domain argument. I made them as,

I don't know, it was just fun. I debated Zubran once about Mars plans and I was in the same position taking the boring institutionalist attitude versus the burn it all down, do it Mars direct. Like, sure. And that, but that's my whole point is that this is never made in a policy. The policy is part of the programmatic design and it has to be.

And so far, it's been the most successful policy program. You know, the return of the fact that we're this far since Apollo says something about the system that has, as it's been proposed. And I think that means that there's something to ready access at a variety of technological levels, right? that you have, because it's also about providing work for the relevant countries aerospace space. And one of the big problems of the Mars initiative under Obama is such that it was, is that it was not perceived as being accessible for countries who didn't already have highly advanced space programs, and which is really only one or two. So Gateway gives an opportunity for aerospace industries of countries who know how to build,

pressurized habs or to start working on them like UAE in a much more accessible environment than landing on the moon and lunar surface operations, which is, I think, a step up in complexity. So you have with Artemis, the whole structure, you have Artemis Accords at your very bottom, raise your hand if you like the moon, join the club, and then you have these kind of like stepstones of participation based on monetary technological capabilities that your nation is willing to do. Gateway gives a middle step and then surface operations is the ultimate step. But not every country can afford or technologically contribute in a useful way to that operation yet.

So we have Gateway. I don't buy it. That's my response. Well, I interpreted the Bible differently. Yeah, Casey, pick out a different day because I want to give one full hour on that discussion. Preferably, what are you doing on November 7th, I think, would be the thing I throw out to you. We were just talking about that before the show. Real quick, we have two minutes left, which is a perfect amount of time for me to open this Excel sheet and have Jake complain about this live on the air because he told me that he really wants this to be a segment of the show, Casey.

So I'm turning the show over to Jake and this Excel sheet. What is your gripe and what is your question for Casey? By the way, you are now our official OIG of NASA for the off-nominal show. This is Casey Driver's. So what do we got you? So you guys at the Planetary Society, probably just you, Casey, I'll be honest. I'm sure this is 90% your work here. I've put together this great planetary budget data set, which is like,

how much has every mission cost it in every dimension you can imagine? Which I love. It's like it's actually kind of maybe embarrassing how often this spreadsheet, just open on my desktop. It's like a permanent spot on my desktop that I just need to look at here and there. But I'm digging into it this morning, to answer a question. And there's this number in there that I'm mad about, which is this LCC life cycle cost. This is insight that we have up here on the screen here, and it's $813 million. And this number

doesn't make sense to me because the mission was delayed. And I think it's including that delay. And so now I wanted to ask you what this number is because I don't think it means what I think it means. Well, it depends when, that's actually one of the problems I've thought about when I do a version two is which life cycle, which version of the life cycle cost number do you want? So it is updated. It's not the original life cycle cost. It's the final life cycle cost at launch. There you go.

Okay. That's why it doesn't make sense. I'm like, there's no way this was approved already blowing through the cost cap. Yeah. The other interesting, I mean, that's kind of interesting. You look at then missions like Psyche, which the cost, a strict cost cap discovery mission of $500 million cost $900 million, cost $900 million before.

for its delay, not to mention Veritas and Da Vinci, which are estimated to cost between 1.2 and 1.5 billion. If you look very closely at the description of the strict cost cap on discovery, it only covers phases B through D, which is the development, so not operations, not and not early formulation. It also does not cover launch. And it also does not include, It also is fixed at FY15 assumption of what $500 million was, which is now 10 years ago and substantially higher. And then it also does not cover any what's called GFE, is government-funded equipment, which is bonus stuff.

So like Psyche had a GFE of the Laser Coms demonstrator, which was like $80 million and caused one of the delays on the project. But that's free to the mission, so it wasn't counted in the against the, So there's a variety of ways to get around that cost cap that are not very helpful. This is the number I'm exploring right now because we didn't get to it, but, you know, Viper was canceled for being over budget. And I've had a, I've had a grumpy take lately about, I think NASA should cancel more missions. But so maybe we'll talk more about that.

But I need to go through the data first before I can. Yeah. You want them to strike the fear of God into project managers? Just a little bit, just a little bit more than they are now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's definitely been an assumption, I think, that, like, you're not going to cancel us at phase D. There's a suspicious amount of new five years.

I mean, they're barely over budget. Give me a fucking break. Like, they're barely over budget. They're like, I did the, you saw my article. I did the numbers. You're talking about an extra 40 million above what they were planning to spend next year and then 30 million above that. It's like 70 million.

Out of a half a billion dollar mission, give me a break. Come on. That's like. Listen, it sounds like you are right. We spend more to run the stennis. rocket test facility every year than it costs to finish that mission, which is, again, built and being finalized tested right now. I'm going to assign you homework, Casey, which is go to the show we did last week with John Connoffay,

and I'll send you a timestamp where I get into my conspiracy theory about Viper, our JSC-based conspiracy theory on what is going on here, and it being swiped off of a Griffin and applied to other landers out there. Oh, I see what you're here. Jake's got to look into some data. You have to look into my conspiracy theory. To be fair, it may have helped if Astrobotic had landed something with their

first generation mission. Yeah. I mean, I wish if only they could have made a couple decisions on what they want to do with that vehicle. Oh, yeah. We're really getting into the conspiracy rabbit hole here. Yeah. Well, that's not conspiracy. They had to sink that. I mean, it was

to, look, look, to be honest, it was an insane decision to put Viper on a second-gen commercial lander when it was three years from launching and attempting the first-gen land. To me, Viper is a patchwork of insane decisions. And so... Yeah, it is. It's one of those, I call it an era of exuberance at the beginning of Artemis program when they thought, Mike Pence, they had Mike Pence on their side, and Trump thought they were going to Mars. And so everyone was getting the money they needed and everyone was happy. And easy to say yes to things back then. And now we've got to like, other people now, not the people who see us,

to everything. Other people now are left to implement all those decisions. And it turns out to not to be very difficult at the moment. Yep. So, yeah. What are we? I don't think we could easily talk about that for two more shows. Yeah.

We're going to do an eight hour podcast one day on all of these things. So that'll be great. We should do like a fundraising show and just do how long can Casey talk about space policy? I mean, tempt us. tempt us with a better idea than that. A podcast with bathroom breaks. That's what we need. Right.

Or astronaut diapers. Oh, God. No, thanks. Well, your McAnless ones, the free-floating ones. Yeah. Hey, they all wear diapers at one. That's a question I have. You think he just took a poop while he was out there, all by himself?

Not the first question that popped into my mind, but I suppose something could have happened. Yeah. On that note, what would you like to plug for people that should check? out what you're working on. I'm doing to plug for P. No, not. Well, if you love hard-hitting discussions like this, obviously,

the space policy edition of planetary radio, planetary.org slash radio. My organization, the Planetary Society, independent, non-profit, funded by members, keeps us going, keeps us able to do what we do in space and really advocate

for planetary science and exploration. So those are my two plugs. And Jake's article, I thought, which is a great article. Thanks, thanks. Yeah. Sometimes they're okay. I'm still learning how to be a writer. So it's, it's been a fun journey for me. But yeah, next week on the show. So apparently, we don't really, we're not really experts on this even less so than we are experts on other things that we aren't experts on. But there's apparently like a supernova like about to happen. And we're going to, we're going to talk to somebody about it and figure out what's going on. So we have someone from the Lowell Observatory coming on to dig into that. Notably, it will be a pre-recorded episode just

because of some scheduling stuff that's going on. So it'll be a little different. But it's going to air in the exact same time slot for everybody. So stay tuned. Yeah. And hopefully between the time we record that and when we post it, the supernova doesn't happen. I'm hoping that it's like slightly after that or happens right now so we can talk about it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's like two good ways for that to go and one very non-optimal. We're being smart. There's only like a couple day to lay in there. Tiny, tiny tape. Yeah. It'd really have to thread the needle to screw us up, I think. Although the other other way this could go is like supernova happens tonight. My child is born tonight. The whole shows off, you know, and you're doing you're soloing that.

You know what, already happened though, right? If it's deep in space, information is just propagating towards us. All right, shut it down. Shut it down. It's just closing us off. You're the best, Casey. We appreciate hanging out and delving into that with us.

So thanks, man. Always a pleasure.