Off-Nominal - 209 - Mars Life Pushers (with Chris Temby and Jan Špaček)

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Chris Temby and Jan Špaček join Jake and Anthony to talk about the Agnostic Life Finding Association and the search for life on Mars.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 209 - Mars Life Pushers (with Chris Temby and Jan Špaček) - YouTubeALFA MarsAgnostic Life Finding Association, Inc. (@alfamarsinc) / XALFA Mars - YouTubeFollow 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, everybody. Welcome to FNOMINL. There's no life in the NASA budget, but there is maybe life on NASA. Wow. That's what we're going to talk about today. How about that?

Hey, guys. We just came off a very dismal pre-show with our listeners, our Discord supporters, where we were talking about the state of chaos, as usual, our favorite topic right now. And so I'm actually like super jazz to step into this conversation with you, which is a lot more hopeful and interesting than talk about the same thing over and over again.

So welcome. We got Chris Temi with us and Jan Spachek, hopefully I said that right, from Alpha. So we're going to talk about microbes and bugs and little green men on Mars, hopefully. We'll see. Now you sound like the U.S. Congress that we were talking about, Jake. I came prepared.

So this is a check beer. and I actually brought two different beers. That is such a move. Someone I met in Germany did that to me when I was 17 years old, and I still think about it. And I have an English one, Guinness. And that's on purpose. This is for educational purposes.

Oh, shoot. That didn't sound. It wasn't a great sound. So I love them in the car, so they are kind of a mix. He's doing a mixie. No, it's a separate because I need two beers. Okay. All right.

Give me a second. Yeah, we're getting right into the science real quick. Yeah, we are getting into educational video science. This is excellent. Yeah. Listen, this is the quickest the content we've ever been on the show. This is great. I love this.

Very, very fast, yeah. Do we have any predictions on where this? I assume, Chris, you've seen this before. You're acting unimpressed by this situation. It's happening. So is this dark beer or a light beer? Just based on the phone. Just based on the foam.

No cheating. So, right? You can't tell like you are. What about what is this crazy guy doing, right? Can you tell? Can you tell him? No. So this is related to the Venus project we are doing, right?

So when you see Venus, it looks pale yellow, right? But what we are observing is actually the clouds. So what V.S. Astrobiologists are interested in is actually was the color of the liquid, not the reflected light, which is coming from the clouds. So we are sending the first private interoperter mission. I will talk shortly about this Venus mission

and then they'll go to Mars because it's related. So it's a morning star mission. And we are shooting laser into the clouds and trying to figure out if there's some organics. And our most recent paper is actually discussing exactly this effect, that when you are observing just the foam or just the clouds, the effects of scattering are totally changing the optical properties of the liquids. And we are interested in what's the color, opacity of the clouds, liquid.

And what we actually modeled is that the clouds above Venus must be much, much darker than this Guinness beer. It would be, based on our models, it will be as absorbing as star. So if you collected clouds of Venus, they would be as light absorbing as star. So that's super exciting. And hopefully next year, we've that rocket lab mission, we'll find it. And so why, how is that related to what we are going to discuss? That's supposed to be the first private internal planetary mission.

So cheers to that. that was the best excuse to have two beers in the show you didn't need i have another one you didn't need a whole thing i would have been fine with you having two beers but i'm yeah usually we have to like come up with some kind of excuse like oh i had a hard week or something and this is straight science jake listen you got to pour yourself again and refresh you from the check beer yeah how many did you bring chris let's see so i actually i do have two next to me but i'll start with one so we got the support local business. This is a first mag brewing company, which is from Gainesville, Florida. And Vega is the

beer. It's obviously named after the star. And it says it's an award-winning beer as bright as its namesake. Vega is perfect for stargazing and daydreaming. So maybe we'll do some of that today. And shameless plug, I'll put it in the alpha mug here. Let's see. Boom. Alpha. It says, is there life on Mars? Let's find out. Obviously, Yon and I are wearing some merch. Yeah, you're logoed up. It's like a NASCAR event over here.

Yeah. I feel so under-merchandise right now. Jake has this epic NASA hat that he got from like some vendor in Mexico City on that's super knockoff. I just got nothing. So. Yeah. My big gay starship turned on. It's very faded.

Oh, yeah. Man, that plays different in 2025 than. Sure does. I kind of like more. I was really hoping I could get my hands on some of your me, Jake. But yeah, I don't know. Maybe one day. Maybe not yet.

Maybe I would you guys give that a year. Yeah, yeah. They're getting better though. I just racked a mango habanero. Oh, it's really good. I'm going to let it just sit for a little longer, but it's ready to drink already. And I'm just like, I have to convince myself every week not to just open it and start drinking it. What does rack mean?

I forget where that's in the process. process. It's like the last step before bottling, so he could age it together in one vessel instead of separately. All right. Well, you're not drinking that, though. What do you got over there? Not today. No, I got something super weird today. Oh, yeah. You said, you'd send me about this. I had to send Anthony messages. I'm like, I have something strange. So, I mean, I don't know what it is. That's what's really funny about it. So this is what it looks like. Okay. So Perlinegra. So black pearl, right? It says by by Jegs,

and it says it's... Viscop you can read that. It says alcoholic beverage with herbs flavored. I don't know what herb flavored means.

What kind of liquid it is? Yeah, what herbs. And the topic says there's no caffeine, no taurine. Just in case you were worried about that, it's not in here. That this can specifically says,

energy drink. Okay. It's not an energy drink. It's a downer. It sounds like it's a downer. Is it like, oh. Okay. I don't know what it looks like here. Well, all right. All right. It's beer colored, is. I think this is red bull without.

There's no phone at all. Damn. Is that even beer? No, this, it's not beer. This is Red Bull without the stuff. It's like green. This is Red Bull without the stuff. Yeah, Red Bulls got torrent and caffeine, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, before they mix that in. Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's what this is.

And they just swapped out the energy stuff for alcohol. I guess, yeah. This is, what's the, what is that when you spike a Red Bull with Jagger? It's like a Jagger bomb, whatever. Is that what you called? Yeah. It's like that without the, just built in. And it can.

This is really strange. Anyway, I have that today. Man. I've just got a victory, Prima pills. Philadelphia all the time. Victory for the birds. It's NFL kickoff today, Jake. Do you know about football?

I do not know. You don't know about football. Half the screen knows about football. Half the screen is not about football. So we'll move on quickly with a simple Go birds. And that's it. Go birds.

Mars. We got to go to Mars. We did the Venus thing. I have like 8,000 questions about the Venus thing. We'll circle back. on that because we got to this is Venus is not in in the domain this alpha Mars that we're talking about so let's let's get into it Jake where are we starting with this thing man dust off your Mars chops here for us yeah yeah I well I mean maybe you guys just start off with what what the heck

is alpha like what this is an organization of some kind and so it's probably good to maybe lay the groundwork and who you are and what you're up to Chris do you want to introduce us yeah I'll do a quick pitch and then Jan can talk a little more but yeah so alpha is the agnostic Life Finding Association. We're a 501C3 nonprofit research and development organization based in Alachua, Florida. We are supporting the development of astrobiological instrumentation, as well as sort of developing mission concepts to seek life at Mars is our focus because, I mean, there's a handful of reasons, but we think there should be a search for life on Mars before we go and search for life and Europa and Enceladus and so on.

Primarily because of the timeline involved with human exploration, right? There's planetary protection concerns and also questions about scientific integrity, right? If there's possible extant microbial life on Mars and we go contaminate the region there, right? There might be some loss of science there, but also some concerns related to the safety, possibly of the astronauts and also bringing that material back to Mars. So it seems like a pretty important precursor objective would be to search for extant life. And only a couple of years ago when we got started, there wasn't really much conversation about how important this really is.

And there was a lot of conversation about how cool starship and a Mars colony would be. And so we're trying to sort of re-center that discussion with NASA and beyond NASA to sort of, you know, make note of how important it is to really actually do a thorough astrobiological search on Mars, you know, sooner rather than later. And it's not like it's, you know, some far-fetched idea. You're the Reds from Kim Stanley Robinson's, right? You're the reds, not the greens. Is that, weren't this the thing?

Does anyone remember those books? Because they kind of suck, to be honest. I couldn't get through them. I couldn't get through them. It made me the, maybe like, I lost fans because of that. Yeah. Yeah, but his show is like, the two takes of like 2001 is kind of a terrible plot of a movie and the Mars trilogy, it's kind of sucks. Like those are the hills will die on. Yeah.

So, John, is there more you want to add to that? Back to what Chris was just saying. Like even throughout the literature that NASA puts out, it's that they are claiming that we will likely not know whether there is life on Mars, like extra life still. active life on Mars before we send humans there, and the human presence will enhance the search for life on Mars. But actually, human astronauts on Mars, it's not compatible with search for life, because imagine you are astronaut, and you find life on Mars, which is great. You know, you're excited.

You've made the biggest discovery ever. But now the mission changed from your regular space like Moonwalk into no return, planetary protection, you cannot return back until you prove that those Martians are safe to Earth biosphere, right? Because if a normal sample return, maybe you heard about the break of the chain where they make sure that nothing that touched Mars can touch Earth, atmosphere, or anything. So they have these containment. That's why the sample return was so expensive and now cancelled because the trouble with the containment, which is dictated by outer space treaty.

You cannot bring samples from Mars to Earth if you consider, until you prove they are safe because of the planetary protection. Of course you cannot sterilize humans. It's quite unlikely that you will manage to contain Martians if they are coming back with the crew mission. So if you are, so imagine the situation. you are an astronaut you find Martians and then am i going to report the results and spend

the rest of my life about a year or two on Mars or will i just not report the results and have a chance to return back to earth because that's that's that's the situation we have right now and nobody talks about it because i think they didn't even for this through uh second the problem cannot be or doesn't have to be only on this level. Imagine that the astronauts will report to NASA that they found alive. Now NASA has to decide should we publish this result or should we... So if they publish the result, then they will have to observe the astronaut as they die, trying to prove that the Martians are safe to return to Earth,

which I don't think it's possible to show within a couple of years. So we are not ready to send humans to search for life on Mars. We need to screen Mars for external life before we send humans there. That's our motto, what we are promoting. That's the motivation. That's interesting. I'm just laughing at this idea of like the most important scientific discovery of human history. And there's like, no, I don't want to fill out the paperwork for this.

That's too much work. It's not like, no, no, it's not because it's too much work. If you fill the paperwork, then you are doomed to stay on Mars because you cannot return. I think you're putting way too much faith in the United States' willingness to adhere to that treaty. Yeah, no chance. No, the reason why simple return was requested $11 billion was because of the Autospace Treaty. So apparently NASA actually tries to end up. here to it. Of course it can go out of the window if you have enough political pressure,

but I don't think it should. If you actually think through it, we don't know when was the last time Earth was infected by Martian organisms successfully. There's the exchange of material between Mars and Earth, but we don't know when was the last viable transport of the microorganisms. So it's like with invasive species, you'll never know what you are think. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good story, but also, like, think about it. Yeah, I'm going to think about that for sure. The paperwork. It's funny because theoretically, the person that's doing this is like, they're not going to, I don't know, I guess, back in the day, right, Apollo missions, I think we lost Chris. Hopefully his

back. We're going to leave his block empty, like the Brady Bunch. Is he just frozen for you guys, or is it empty? Oh, he's back. Don't worry. He's empty to me. He's coming back in. Apollo era, right? Like, the astronauts famously were not scientists until the very end and had to go through a lot of scientific training once it was evident that they were going to have to do things on the lunar surface. But the astronaut core of today is so different than the 60s that I've, bet the person, this is more of like a for all mankind plot line, I feel like, but theoretically the person that's, the mission specialist that's jobs it would be to run the test to find the life. Like, I bet if you pulled that batch of people, they would be like, I'm

fine being the person that finds this if I died doing it. They would like totally be a martyr for being the person that found the first life off earth. So it's like, I, number one, I don't think that storyline would go that way, but I also bet the people involved would probably be all right with it in a bizarre sense. Yeah, I can imagine people like me and Chris staying on Mars, you know, are enjoying our rest breaths of oxygen as it runs out, knowing that we found life on Mars. Writing your own history book, yeah. But can you imagine that NASA live streams our demise?

I don't think that would be very. Yeah. No, I mean, I'm not, I'm not going to lose a lot of things. sleep over that, I'll be honest. I don't think they're, I think you could almost invoke the outers-based treaty, the other part of the treaty that's like, or at least the Artemis Accord, it's like, if there's someone in distress, you have to go rescue them. It's like maritime rules, you know, when you get a distress call. So I think it would be pretty easy to make a, make the legal argument to go go back and get someone. But I think the point, though, obviously it's like the,

the urgency is an interesting question, right? Because like, that is all we hear about in terms of like the debate about planetary protection, right? It's just like, you know, human, human travel to Mars is literally incompatible with planetary protection guidelines as written today. Like you just, you cannot, you cannot step on the foot of Mars in a way that is lawful today if you look at the regulations. And so there is like, obviously the rules have to change in some way. And so talking about that in a sense of like this window, I think is interesting because it, it does add the urgency and it does add like, you know, it, it gives everyone the idea of like, hey, things are going to change and we have this, this, we have an opportunity that will never, ever come by again.

So we should take advantage of it. I do, I've come a long way on this topic, though, like personally. I think that at some point, though, we do have to kind of figure out all the, all the negative ramifications of that, right? So you think about things like, okay, so we're going to bring Earth microbes and we're going to pollute Mars. That's like one problem, right? We're going to bring microbes back and pollute Earth.

That's another problem. We got to be able to identify Martian life on the surface and like you can say, oh, this is Martian life and this is Earth life and we can tell them apart. That's like something we will eventually have to do. And so I'm curious about to hear what you guys think about like, does it have to be an all or nothing thing or like, you know, can we just kind of bumble into it and make a few mistakes and then get it right later and what's the consequence of doing it that way, right? Yeah, I will start with the urgency part, right?

So average astrobiology mission, not just to Mars, but in general, it takes about 20 years from the idea to execution. We now don't have 20 years. If it was just NASA going to Mars, it would have maybe like 50 years or indefinite time, right? But it's not just NASA now. So, yeah, we need to update the rules, how you approach this while we still have time and actually recognize that there is urgency about this topic. And yeah, you have big part for recontamination. And I don't know what you meant by stumbling into it, like stumbling into finding life on Mars.

Well, like, no, more like so, okay, so do we have to, you know, one suggestion is like, we suspend all human, you know, travel to Mars and we send all life missions and we like, you know, we search everywhere, we figure it out. We find the life or we don't find the life. And if we do, we characterize it, we identify it. We determine if it's safe. And then once we figured all that out, then it's like, okay, now we can start sending people there. That's like, that's like the safe linear path, you know, the waterfall way to do that, right?

Whereas the stumbling into it, be like, well, what if we just sent people there and they're going to contaminate it and we're going to get contamination back and we'll like figure out what that means and deal with it. And, you know, maybe some people will get sick or maybe we'll, we'll make some microbes sick over there or whatever. And then we got to like look at it. And then we'll find out what the differences are. And then we'll learn how to contain it and separate it and keep it safe.

And, you know, it'll be a little messy, but you don't have to like do one than the other, right? And so I'm kind of curious about what the take is on the two different ways to do that, right? You are presenting false dichotomy. We are advocating for the third option. So it's so. I think it's unrealistic to actually stop us. Once we have the technology to survive on Mars and go send humans to Mars, we are going. And if it's not we as United States or ISA and NASA, it's going to be somebody who has money to buy Starship lending system to send humans there.

So I think Emirates, which already showed interest in sending missions to Venus, Mars, sorry, will. well, might be the first, you know, it's a big leap forward. So we are the okay thing. We need to do the search before. And with regards to for the first option, send the humans only after we have done complete screening on Mars, I think that's unreasonable because of the reasons I just said. And then stumbling, like going blind to Mars without even trying.

I think that's a very stupid option. Like before we send humans to Mars, we will for sure do some preliminary missions when you are prospecting the future landing sites where you are. So during this, I would push onto the NASA to include search for life as a necessary step before we send humans there. But of course, not delaying. because if we don't find anything in the life searching mission, it doesn't mean that Mars is sterile, but it shouldn't be also like deal breaker. We need to search until we find something.

It's always hard to prove negative, right? We haven't found any black swans, so should we keep searching? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's good. I appreciate that. It's a smart way to think about it. Something that I'll add to this comment as well is that, I mean, the, you know, with the funding landscape and obviously the timelines involved for an astrobiological mission from concept to flight is so long.

What we're trying to do is sort of envision what the architecture would be to enable humans to Mars and sort of try to align ourselves with that type of architecture. For example, the plans to send starship and land, you know, millions of people on Mars someday is supposed to include some large-scale NC2 resource utilization, subsurface mining, propellant manufacturing, who knows water consumables and stuff like that. So ideally, right, if we could use that large subsurface sample as an astrobiological sample as well, then we'll have pretty much an unprecedentedly large sample size to do science with. And so the instrument concept that Jan came up with, and I've been working with him to try to help develop, and what the agnostic life-finding association is mainly supporting is this Alf instrument behind Jan, you'll see the Alf character.

I have Alf here behind me as well. But yeah, so it's basically an instrument concept that's supposed to act as an add-on to future water mining operations on Mars. And so someone else will do the mining and the extracting of the subsurface water. And we want to use a small sample of that sample to basically do electrodiallysis, some interesting science and extract. what we call polyelectrolite genetic informational biopolymers. So in you and I, that's DNA and RNA. I've said it thousands and thousands of times, so it comes out. That came out way too easy.

Stroked out for a second. What did you say? So polyelectric genetic informational biopolymers. Let me see if this button works. Someone shared the screen. Yeah, I shared a screen. That's the... I'm trying to find.

Let's see if it works. So when I'm I don't. Let me say something. It's going to be just you for a second and then I'm going to change it. Hold on. Let me second. We never, we usually don't have two guests and then we usually don't do screen share. So I'm riffing on a thing. Hold on. Let me

Yeah, we're struggling into it messy. We're going to try. Hold on, hold on. Assign it to, it's a guest four, which is a weird. And then there we go. Okay. Now it's you in it. Here we go. Now it's just, There we go. Boom. Okay, so now you are looking on the lab or bench top instrument, which does exactly what Chris says.

It takes water sample, which is like Mars simulant, or the water which is going to be mined on Mars to refuel starships and prepare for the future restaurants, getting water for drinking and making oxygen. So we take that water and we run it through through instruments similar to this, of course, we'll get it more advanced, miniaturized, what can be miniaturized, make it more compact, and of course, Mars already. But this thing extracts DNA and other genetic polymers from the stream of water,

and we can run basically the whole feed to, which is to basically resupply those emissions, or those refueling. So we will just take the polyelectroids. And the reason why we are doing this, all life, as we know it, or even alien life, needs to have some genetic polymer which transmits genetic information between generations. So if we define life as a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution, it needs to have molecule which carries information between generations. and without going into too much detail,

the molecule we are looking for is polyelectrolide. In DNA, we have negative phosphates. In some alien molecules, it can be some amines with positive charge, but we are looking for long-charged molecules, which we extract from the stream of water, which we treat the ultrasound before to release the polyelectrolites from the cells or compartments, which Martians might have.

have. So we are making these instruments to be compatible with the missions, just as Chris described. So we are ready when when somebody goes mining water on Mars, we say, hey, just include this instrument. It will just heat up the water for you and look for life in the meantime. So if there's any life anywhere on Mars, I have a probe here, we're all sharing the screen. This is Mars. As you know, Mars is changing obliquity during overtime. Every 100,000 years, it goes to like 60 degrees. Or that's like on a million year scale. Normally it bubbles between 20 degrees and like 35, 40 degrees.

Sometimes it goes to 60. And when it has very high obliquity, the sun is shining straight to the poles, evaporating the water and carbon dioxide from the poles. So it's snowing on the jet just below equator, so that's how you accumulate ice in the mid regions. And now we know that in the mid-latitudes, we have those huge glaciers overburdened with less than one meter of record.

So that's the prime target for the future landing sites where you just make a pipe, the road well, which is you pump hot water down, pump the melted ice and water back, and you recycle it, making larger land, larger hole. And this ice, as I said, was actually deposited during precipitation, and it's geologically quite young. It's just millions of years. And from Earth, if you search ice on Earth, which is a couple million years old, you find bacteria which fallen in there through wind deposition, air deposition.

So it will be buried in there. if it was anywhere on Mars and if you sample large enough sample, we will find it in those layers of ice. So that's our, that's the mission we want to do before we send humans to Mars. That's cool. It makes me ask a question though, because I, so I'm curious to know how you approach this idea of like knowing how to look for life because that's sort of like been a theme for Mars exploration for a long time, right? They did Viking, which was like, let's go find life. And then it like had a whole bunch of inconclusive results.

And the instruments weren't right. And they didn't know what they were looking for. And it's still controversial today about like what happened with the Viking life finding stuff, right? And so, you know, NASA strategy was like, we got to figure out what the hell we're doing first. And let's just go and learn about this environment and whatever. And they're still doing that.

Right. So that's great. But what you're describing is like, oh, no, all you have to do is, look for these chains of whatever, this information is being passed on that's life. Just go do some fracking. Go do some fracking and we're good. So I guess part of the question is like,

why didn't NASA think of that? I say one sentence and that'll Chris talk because I've been talking for a while now. Yeah, the problem with, we always wanted to look for DNA. It was always like top tier thing to search for, but you expect very low concentrations of DNA. So it would require actually have some concentration methods, which we provide.

So thanks to these large resupply missions where you are dealing with tons of ice instead of mil liters, this mission is enabled. And I let Chris to talk about Viking mess and why we haven't searched for life after. The easy topic. The easy topic, Chris. Explain hiking to us. Re-contextualized 45 years of NASA drama, please. Oh gosh. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll only touch on a couple of things. I'll only touch on a couple of things related to Viking and then talk about why this hasn't been done before. But yeah, I mean, the the oxidation results that came from the labeled release experiment are like the most commonly cited results to say that there would have been a biological interpretation. And yeah, I mean, honestly, I think we should just refly a, a chiral labeled release experiment to like test the

an antimer specific substrate addition to see if there's some biological interpretation to that. I'm trying to put together an instrument concept to do something like that. But yeah, I don't know. You said I basically didn't know what they were doing and they

asked the wrong questions. But the reason we think that are if we have a little he's getting, he's turning Indoor Robot. This is the big NASA stifling this description

of the Viking experiment. Who went wrong? Okay? This is directly from NASA HQ has vaporized his connection. You guys can't hear me? Oh, I'm back now. You're back now, yeah. Yeah, just don't, you know, just watch it next time. All right. Okay.

I'll shut up about Viking. You said a big J and C's Stephanie there. I'll shut up about Viking yeah a famous last words so good so so the thing is the thing is that no mission since Viking was looking for extant life on Mars in a way that would have chance to succeed if you actually took all the instruments we sent since Viking to Mars and put them in dry regions in Atakama Desert where we know that there is very sparse life but still surviving life it would not find it

because the levels of organic material in those dry soils is so low that they would just miss it because the sensitivity of the detection instruments is too low. And so what that tells us, we need extremely sensitive instruments, and we need some sample handling, pre-concentration of the samples. We lost Chris again. He's back. Yeah, that's the thing. And unfortunately, yeah, the reasons why NASA is not looking for life on Mars,

It's, of course, speculations mostly, but my speculation is that search for life on Mars, it's quite costly. And if you have a bunch of scientists fighting over, it should we send one mission to Mars for $1 billion or build a couple more telescopes which can feed more astrobiologists and you would let democracy to rule, then they will overrule you and call you life pushers. Yeah, Mars life pushers. That's how some of the psychologists call us. My connection is recovered a little bit, I think. Let me see if I can put in my two cents here. So the reason that we think that our life-finding architecture, if you will, with this agnostic lifefinder,

this Alf, you know, pre-concentration technology to look for these, like I said, polyelectrolite informational biopolymers. The reason we think it's the best is because if we're looking for life on Mars, it's going to be a super low resource, what we call oligotrophic environment, right? So you're going to get maybe a handful of cells at max, maybe like 100 cells per millimeter type of population density

when you're analyzing some ice sample. And so the first problem is that you need extreme sensitivity, right? And you also need to be able to sample enough of the subsurface to actually get a decent chance of actually assessing this biosphere. And so there's been, I mean, the deepest that anybody has ever drilled on Mars is what, like three centimeters or something with perseverance, right? I mean, and even then they went to a place where they weren't actually looking to try to access any ice, right? So the biggest step, obviously, and the biggest technology gap that still exists, probably other than putting nanopore on Mars, would be to be able to drill deep enough to actually access the subsurface. But once you can access the subsurface and do that.

you do. So once you can access the subsurface and can do the metagenomics on Mars, you should find something. But yeah, you need the preconcentration because even with nanopore, which is nanopore sequencing, that's the state of the art, what we use when we actually go search for life on the like Mars analog regions on Earth, you still need simple handling, precondrations and purify the DNA from the large volume. That's what we want to do.

Since Chris is not here, I'm going to be pedantic. The deepest we got was with the inside mission. I was going to say, he was a mole eraser in history there. Geez. Yeah. Didn't work that good, but it did get somewhat deep. Technically, technically not a drill, so you're still right. That's true.

We hammered. We hammered into the service. How deep did it go? I cut you off before the good part. 40 centimeters? I have no idea. What do you got, Jake? You remember this.

That sounds about right. That sounds about right. 40-ish. It was supposed to go, like, the deep, but I've heard that there was some issues before they managed to, I don't know how deep. It wasn't a level one requirement, though. So it was fine. Yeah, Chris, we're talking about how you erased the Mars Insight, although on a technicality,

you're still right because it wasn't a drill. It was a hammer. Fair enough. And also it failed. Yeah. Take that. And now they're really going to go for you, Chris. This show is for closers.

between this and the Viking thing, man. They're like, we're coming down. Just throwing every mission under the bush. Yeah. Yeah. He guys, do you think that Chris is like a rage quitting every time he forgets of what he wants to say? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know what's happening.

So I'll just sit here and look pretty. Yeah, I know. I think it's big nasty coming after you. I think they're in, they got a line in on your internet connection or something. I mean, this show is not making friends there. We got Jake, who's all up on the Johnson Space Center. conspiracy theory. We've now got Chris talking shit about the Viking results.

Are you still running for a NASA administrator? I am. It looks like I might be getting bumped out of that position. There's a new someone has gotten reassigned as the associate administrator, so I think I might be on this time around. What's great to be next one? Nobody is our theory. Our theory is there will not be one for this administration.

I might be. I might still be. I just have to switch maybe, you know, I'm assuming that the Democrats are going to win next time. So I'm going to start. Can you be like shadow national administrator? Yeah, shadow government, yeah. I think we might be.

We might be. I don't know. We'll see. A cabal if you will. The fortunes of Johnson Space Center and those still defending the Viking results. We'll see how they fare in the recent years or the coming years. Just keep hiring all the scientists that NASA is firing and it'll be good.

Assemble. Yeah. What was the rogue NASA or whatever? There was that like the whole rogue Twitter account thing the first time around? Maybe that's all the people that left. All right, I have a collection of questions. Number one. Well, first, I do like the way that you guys are phrasing this in that you're like,

I mean, Jake's dichotomy that we talked about already, right? Of like, do we hold everything up until we do this or do we just go for it? And you're saying, no, you kind of are embracing that everyone's just going for it and we're just trying to send this box along and have them use it. I would call it doing due diligence before we go. So, but what if you guys make hardware that's really good? And what if the first

thing that is available to send it on is a human mission on Starship? Would you still send it along? Like, or is it once there you guys are folding and you're gone and then you're doing different things? You are making things up. Starship is not going to set humans first. No, I'm just, listen,

we're game theory in this. I'm trying to figure out if if it fails and there's people that, if people are the first opportunity, say you guys don't Say Big NASA that's stifling the Viking results also wants to nix your potential to fly things to Mars, but the first starship that has humans on is like, we got some extra space, we'll take the box.

Would you still send it, or would you say, our mission has failed, we're bailing? No, of course. Like, this can be used throughout the... Every time you're mining on Mars, this can be included. Because from the big picture perspective, the water you mine on Mars, you need to heat it up for further industrial use.

And instrument we have, it's net purpose. Well, aside from searching for life, it's basically flow through heater, right? It's just heating the water by pushing electricity through the water. And it's moving out ions with the polyelectroides. But from the big picture, it's just like 500 watt heater, which they will either, they will have

heat the water either way on Mars. So, you know, so you're selling water heaters that also find life. I mean, I might buy one from my house, dude. Like that sounds kind of helpful for me, you know. So something else that I'll add also, if my connection stays there, is that, yeah, we've sort of built in this fail safe, if you will, into the instrument design as well, in the sense that if we are able to deploy ALF only after there is human presence and possible, well, likely forward contamination, The reason that we're calling it Alf as in the agnostic Lifefinder is that we're looking for life agnostic to the biosphere that it originates from.

So we're actually designing Alf to be able to concentrate, isolate and concentrate polyelectrolites from large volumes of water. That's why we can search also for the forward contamination. So not just for the Martians, but we will be mapping what bacteria we are bringing with us and putting into the subsurface. And because we will be sequencing the DNA, we isolate, we know exactly where the contamination is coming from. So if we find life, which is very similar to life we have at Cape Caneval, that suggests that it's not Martians. You find some hideous mosquitoes there, you know, that it probably came from Florida. Gators, based on where Chris is sitting. It's gators. Yeah.

Yeah. Is this a manatee? What is this? I don't think you would notice. To lose a manatee probably. You would notice monities on a board of starship. The smell at least would get you. Yeah. Yeah. That explains too. I was going to ask about the agnostic part. Like if you were, are you agnostic about whether there is or is not life or is this a statement that you're not doing this for religious purposes, which is another aspect to this whole life finding situation?

that will really rock some things. We are agnostic of everything. We are agnostic about where the life comes from. Like it can be DNA or it can be different, polyelectrolize genetic molecule. We are agnostic to ecology. So regardless where are the oasis, where life now survives in that subsurface ice,

we will have the samples blown in and like trace amounts. So if life on Earth was limited only to tropical region, we would still find life in Greenland glaciers deposited from the air like bacteria, which is uplifted, is deposited during snow, storms in the glaciers. And so that's why we are agnostic towards ecology. So that's biology, ecology. And what else? we are agnostic to budget size if we can parasite on those missions. So as long as we can get this to field-ready instrument, which we projected would cost about $600,000, we are good to go. The reason why we haven't got funding for this is because in our last proposal for NASA's innovative advanced concepts, we selected a wrong font size.

wrong font in the grand proposal. So I was worried about the paperwork, Jake. Listen, this is from experience, dude, you know? So last two pages of our proposal were reducted. So that was one strike, second strike was, or second strike was that there's no mining architecture plan on Mars, water mining architecture. But NASA is also funding the origin,

or it used to be honeybee robotics to make those mining rigs to extract mine water on Mars. And third reason, what was the first reason? Yeah, that the search for life is not a crucial step on a pathway to send humans to Mars. It was the first, third argument by the reviewers. So which all three are. What you're going to do is you got to amend the proposal to say,

we're going to go find life on Mars before China does. That will get you all the money you could ever hope for in your life. a good water heater so you can take a nice shower. Very industrial argument as well. Yeah. Keeping NASA as a beacon of science being the primacy or how they call it, the geopolitical reasons of finding life on Mars before NASA brings samples back in 2031. That would be also nice.

Getting some points in the Mars race. new space race. Yeah, yeah. That feels like the the Mars sample return version of like the Soviets going to orbit first. Like, well, you brought the samples back first, but we found like, we did find a

microbe. So like, you know, it's pretty good. Like, that was a pretty good one. That's your goalpost move right there. Yeah, we found it. You brought it back first, but we did find in the first. If China's bringing subsurface ice, they might as well be the first to

in life of Mars. In 2031, they will bring it back. So that's our timeline. We want to beat that. So then, all right, give me the concept on how you take your message forward in the world in which we are in, where China has a stated sample return goal. Are you putting in the ground game over with the Chinese Communist Party, or is this going to be a rough time? So, first of all, I would not help Chinese Communist Party to get the sempluses. Second, I like the competition, obviously. I think it's without competition between superpowers. Like, there was big stagnation in space.

So I think it's good to have some competition to advance. Hopefully this will stay on a level of, like, mild trade war. not go beyond that and competition and science because then it's detrimental to everything on life as we know it on earth yeah um i forgot i was going with this christ finish my thought yeah fair enough since you did it for me so many times now we're the chinese commies party censoring your internet as well chris so we're really sticking it all on uh on the game's no finish beer i'm actually not used to drinking anymore he's a drinking and you crushed you on a podcast.

He did freeze, man. Anytime we throw to Chris, they know. They know what he's going to get into. He's pretty pretty, man. It's crazy, man. It's crazy. I don't know. Okay, so not helping Chinese.

And then, yeah, I think, as you pointed out, the United States usually proceeded with a space program after being a little accumulated by Soviet Union. So maybe we need Chinese space station, or we already have Chinese space station on moon to like get NASA in a higher gear to make them realize that we are losing on this front. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I go back and forth and I don't like the I don't like the idea of like the the, the, the, toxic like winning mentality to like do anything accomplish anything in space like I I don't like the the geopolitical like space race a way you do anything do you have

do have example where we you know get something down with our competition so the competition's fine the competition's fine but it but if it's just like I don't know my I always go back to the space race be like okay there was competition and we got Saturn five and we got Apollo and we got a moon landing and that was great and then it just like went away and we after after 1972 all it was was 50 years of of being saddled with the

maintenance fees on the Kennedy Space Center and you know in the in the long Jesus now he's got Florida come for us too I know in the long view of history sometimes I wonder well that that means so many enemies on this episode

my point being is that it's not it's not it's a flash in the pan kind of win not a sustainable win, right? And that's why I don't love it. But isn't that Yon's point, though, is that it was once the competition was done, that we got stuck with the maintenance. And if in the for all mankind universe, if the competition kept going,

that you would have gotten, right? Like, we would have never let off the gas. I think that was his point. I think it's hard to balance it, right? Like, on one hand, you have competition promoting science. On the other hand, you have a bigger chance of dying of nuclear holocaust. So, yeah. Closing goes.

shake that up. Well, I actually think it's more, it's more the fact that there's just, Jake's thing is always, like, the why we should go to Mars is very muddled and everyone has a different answer and there's no real consensus around that. And the geopolitical competition just adds a whole bunch of more whys for people to get into it. And so that increases the intensity that it's funded or the emphasis that's placed upon it so that, you know, yesterday they go up in the Senate and they're talking about the return to the boon and there's just a lot more emphasis on it because China's done some tests recently and yeah so it just I think that's I don't really think it's yeah I think it's just more focus and more spotlight on the thing it's not the essence of like the US and

Soviet Union could have been competing on anything they just both happen to pick space because that's where we were at in that that moment in history but like it's been LLMs for the last year you know yeah I think nerds and dust the drama nerds like I don't need a competition, but to get general population excited, you need the competition. Like to explain why we should care about bacteria on Mars to general public, it's quite hard. But if you say, hey, China's going to find it before we do, oh, we should be first. Let's find out. I love it.

It's like the just asking questions of space. Is their life on Mars? I'm just asking questions. Yeah. Well, I'll argue with myself for in the last couple of minutes and say that like, if there is a flash in the pan geopolitical funding surge for completely all the wrong reasons, and in that brief narrow window, you find life on Mars, we've done okay. We'll take it. Because that can't be taken away, right? That's not like a human spaceflight program that like it can go away after.

like we don't have Apollo anymore. So like I as a generation later don't get to, I don't get to enjoy that, right? So it's in the past. But once you find life on Mars, it will have been found for it. Yeah, but finding life, we lost Jake.

Now they're coming for his Starlink connection. He's been censored. So finding life is just the first step. We need to actually study it. So once we find it, we need to go deeper. Just knowing yes, no, it would actually make it like if you say

we found light on Mars like it just opens the questions like what does it do how active it is how concentrated it is yeah yeah and that didn't work on the moon

right once we got to the moon it didn't open up a bunch of questions about how do we live there now now now it's getting closer to economically feasible operational moon so we'll see

and then see. Like if you have really cheap access to space, then moon actually will be very interesting if you can put some industries there. Yeah. Yeah. So if the listeners want to learn more about, you know, this thing and if they want to, I don't know, support you or figure out how to be involved, tell us about where I can find

in the internet and all that kind of stuff. Chris, I'll let you talk while you can. All right. Let's hope the connection stays again. But yeah, check out the website, www.alpha, mars.org, A-L-F-A-M-A-R-S. We have a shop on there, our merch is there if you'd like to support us. I probably have my email somewhere on there.

If you want to reach out, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to find Jan and I somewhere on the internet. I'm on LinkedIn as well. But, yeah, we're looking for people. you know, help support us. And that means financially, but also ideologically, right? I mean, there's a large conversation here that we're happy to have with you guys here on this platform, but, you know, around the world and the alpha community is growing day by day. And astrobiologists are continuing to say, well, why haven't we searched for life on Mars since

1976? And so, yeah, I mean, this is sort of a platform and a group of people that we're looking to continue to expand and just, you know, like I said, continue to have this interesting conversation about is there life on Mars, how do we find it, and let's go do it if we can. Yeah, I started Alpha Mars when I realized that NASA is not looking for life on Mars and that is not going to look for life on Mars in time. So although we now didn't get funding to advance the instrument you just saw to like the field ready instrument, we continue development with our internal funding.

And we got some people reaching to us that they want to fund us on larger scale. So we, of course, look for more and more funding because, you know, the scientist plate. That's how we are to get it to Mars. I estimate it's going to be a couple millions to get this instrument, field ready. Oh, Mars ready. To get it to field ready will be about half a million dollars. So that's what we own funding.

And then people like you helping us with outreach. telling people that we are not looking for life on Mars and we should look for life on Mars for many different reasons. And if you're an astrobiologist who's listening and you either like our ideas or you don't like our ideas, we'd be very happy to have a conversation and either bring you into the fold or understand. Yeah, exactly. Come argue for you and let's go talk about the best ways to find life. And if you're Jared Isaacman and you're listening, just hit him up, you know? That seems like a good target who may or may not listen to the show.

I don't know. Yeah, let's start the shit with us. Come find us, Jared. We would love to make a deal. Is there any like milestones coming up for like development or anything that we can like look forward to? I think next big milestone is to take the instruments we have and make it feel ready. At first it's going to be ugly. you know, with a bed housing, but the main point is to taking it off-grid and, you know,

and then operating it outdoors in some nice location, and finding out what we need to get to a next iteration to make it work like in very streamlined instrument. So then you just chuck it in some stream and let it operate, send us the data back. So I hope that by the next year, end of next year, we should have, instrument. It depends on funding. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, right.

It depends on funding because now I'm running between my office, writing grant proposals, writing articles and running those instruments. So experiments. But yeah, ideally, I mean, we're supported by NASA's NIAC program, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, and so that was through Phase 1, we're eligible to, get phase two support as well. So hopefully in 2026, I guess, is, when that solicitation would be.

And so that that would be maybe something that listeners can keep an eye out for the phase two selections for next year in NIAC program. Of course, if we get funding before that, we can complete this faster. True. You won't say no to money is what you're saying.

Yeah, money is the thing, you know, always in science. You cannot do research with people. Yeah. That's the plate, man. That's the plate. Well, this is awesome, guys. Thanks so much for sharing all this with you. It sounds awesome. I hope that Jared calls you, and I hope that you get some,

I hope you get some success in your thing. I would love to see some dial electric multi-generational polymer phosphate, whatever the thing was. I would love to see some someday. One of those. Maybe with one of those. it worked for you. Jake. Yeah,

thanks for us. That's great. Next week, we're continuing the geopolitical conversation, I think, right,

Jake? We're going in on the, the old Russia and China geopolitics of space. Yeah, we've got great,

Greg Gillinger on, Gillinger. Yeah, this is a soft or hard Ginger. Is it? Jillinger, Gillinger, Gillinger,

or Gillinger. Jllinger. What's your bet? The last one. What? Jlinger? Maybe it's like a, Maybe it's like a stealth Spanish name and it's like Gying.

I don't think it's that. I think it's Gil, like Gills, Gillinger. I think it's that. That would be my guess also. Gillinger. All right. We're going to go ahead. Well, we're going to talk about what was going to happen if China beats us to find

life on Mars. And that's all we'll get into. Yeah. It's a hot topic. So, yeah. I'm so glad that we like took a break from all the bullshit we've been talking about for weeks, Jake. this is a very much needed diversion from all that.

Hey, well, we're here whenever you want to continue the conversation. So, sounds good. Thanks for platform. That's good. A lot of my stuff to fly for here. Cracking in this second beer. Jake's not too hopped up on that Red Bull thing. How's that going for you?

I mean, it's very sweet. So, you know, it's like a lot. You're going to make it? Yeah, I'll make it. It'll be all right. All right. All right, y'all. Goodbye.

Goodbye. Hi, everybody. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.