Tech Won't Save Us - What Elon Musk Won’t Tell You About Settling Mars w/ Zach Weinersmith

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Zach Weinersmith to discuss why building space colonies will be much more difficult than the space billionaires want us to believe. Zach Weinersmith co-wrote A City On Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? with Kelly Weinersmith. He also makes the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:An excerpt of A City on Mars was published by Space.com.Support the show

And so the idea that we're going to have a million people on Mars in 20, 30 years, as Elon Musk says, is either just bogus, which I think it probably is, or just like an ethical calamity in waiting. And notably, none of the people making these claims are spending the kind of vast money you would need to get like a kind of handbook on orbital obstetrics, probably because there is no return on investment. So, you know, yikes. Thanks. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Zach Wienersmith. Zach, along with Kelly Wienersmith, are the co-authors of A City on Mars, Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

Questions that we ask relatively often on this show. Zach is also a cartoonist who makes the Saturday Morning Breakfast cereal comic, so you can certainly find a link to that in the show notes if you want to check it out. When I saw the title for Kelly and Zach's book, I immediately said, okay, this sounds like exactly the type of conversation that I want to have on the show. Because we hear so much from these tech billionaires that one of the things we absolutely must do is settle space and especially settle space in the near future. And this book sounded like, and of course, after reading it now, it certainly does tell

us, hold on a second. It gets into the scientific, but also the legal and kind of sociological, like personal questions that come along with actually trying to move our society that has evolved to live here on earth onto the moon or another planet like Mars. And what they find, of course, no surprise is that this would be much more difficult than the Elon Musks of the world are really leading us to believe. And there are a lot of reasons why we should kind of think twice or put the brakes on this sort of conversation, because the reality is that if we do ever actually settle space, it's going to be something that

is not going to happen for a very long time and is going to require a lot more work to actually figure out what these sorts of societies are going to look like and the best way to actually carry this out again if it's possible at all and if it's something that we should try to do at all but it is certainly not something that is going to solve or address any of the near-term issues that we actually face in our society today, as some of these people would have us believe. So the book is like a really fun read. If you ever did want to know some of the answers to these questions yourself, we certainly couldn't get into all of it in an hour-long interview. But this book is just packed

with so many fascinating stories and details. And of course, it's presented in a way that is so approachable to like a general average reader. It's not this like kind of dense academic tome. It's actually a lot of fun and I would highly recommend it. So I think with that said, let's get into the interview. If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice

and feel free to share it with any friends or colleagues who you think would find this interesting. And if you like the show and want to support the work that goes into making it every single week so I can keep having these fantastic conversations with people like Zach digging into these really important questions, you can join supporters like Joe from London,

Andrew in Toronto, Alex from Vienna, and Robin from Vancouver by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus where you can support the show, you can get some stickers, you can get access to a bunch of premium conversations, and you can find all that on patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus. So thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Zach, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm excited to be here. I'm really excited to chat with you. You and Kelly have this new book called A City on Mars that really digs into

the nitty gritty of what it would actually take if we wanted to set up life in the solar system, you know, on the moon, on Mars, on space stations, what would really go into that. And I feel like even though it's approached in a really kind of light way, it gets to these details in a really concrete way that we often don't hear discussed when we get into these discussions. So I want to dig into all this with you. But before we start, I do have to ask, there's a lot of mention of Canada in this book. I'm obviously a Canadian and even specifically a random mention of cornerbroke Newfoundland. Now I'm from Newfoundland. Where's all the Canada stuff coming from? Is there a specific reason? I hadn't thought about it. I'm suddenly wondering if I have an implicit bias or something that I

need to reckon with. I'm just thinking offhand, there's a joke about how under international law, you could technically pack a moon base full of soldiers. And I believe we use Canada as the country perpetrating that probably because Canada is generally perceived as well-governed and probably wouldn't do that. So maybe that was the the reason I didn't put too much thought in it. Cornerbrook comes up. Had you heard of Cornerbrook? Like we were familiar with this book? I've been there.

Yeah, I've really. Yeah. So it comes up in the specific context of company towns because it's a sort of like well-studied company town. There's a book that dedicates a significant portion to it as an example of how like company towns are actually more clusterfucky than you might imagine from the sort of stereotype. And so Cornerbrook being an example of like a company town that was set up and actually went bankrupt repeatedly for decades before making a profit. Maybe I shouldn't get into the weeds, but actually Canada comes up a lot in the

study of company towns because you have a sparse country with lots of resources. So actually, someone was telling me once that like, everyone makes fun of Canadians for Tim Hortons, but he was like, look, Canadians are really brand loyal because like this giant continent was shaped by like company towns setting up cities around the country. I don't know if that's true, but actually, so, you know, when you're researching company towns in North America, Americans tend to think Appalachia. But actually, of course, there's a rich tradition in Canada, which is it seemed to be qualitatively quite different. That's fascinating. Yeah, I felt like I felt like Cornerbrook in particular when it came up, it just came up in a way where it was like, you know, company towns in Cornerbrook, like, obviously, you should all know about the history of Cornerbrook, right? And I was like, what? This is me, maybe, but like, the general reader?

No, no, it's not. You want to talk about company towns, I could go in a whole thing. But yeah. Yeah, no, I just found it funny. Especially being a Canadian, and particularly someone from Newfoundland, reading your book and just having all these references come up. So yeah. That must have felt really weird. Yeah, like 80% into the space settlement book. Let's talk about Newfoundland. So anyway, you know, getting back to the book more generally. So why did you and Kelly set out to write this book in particular? And how did it evolve, you know, from the idea that you initially had to what you ended up writing? We had written a book called Soonish, which is a kind of more typical book. It's a sort of like, here's some cool technology stuff, and we'll kind of explain it to you. And what we came across is

that there, and this is true, there's just been a genuine revolution in the pricing of getting mass to space. And that is largely down to SpaceX. There are now a couple other competitors. Well, SpaceX via a government program to sort of accelerate. That's the whole story. But basically, the sine qua non of this is this company called SpaceX that, for a variety of reasons, drastically drops the cost. So big picture, if you go back to Sputnik in 1957, it's extremely expensive to put in space. Let's say it's something like $1 to $10 million per kilogram. That drops, depending on your estimate, 19% to 99% by 1970 or so, the end of the Apollo program. And the view at that time, especially if you read books from the early 70s, is like, this is just going to keep going. It's going to be a vast

expansion. But we now have the data. And it's a little hard to compare because you get apples to oranges stuff. But loosely speaking, the price actually went up from the early 70s, plateaued at a high level. The shuttle in particular, the space shuttle was extraordinarily expensive. And that was the way things were. You'll read books from like the 90s. It's very cynical. It's like, oh, my God, we all these dreams.

Blame is kind of cast everywhere. But a pretty good place to point the finger is just that space is really hard. And there was not a lot of downward cost pressure. I won't get into the weeds, but basically SpaceX comes along, they successfully dropped the price by, depending on your estimate, three quarters to four fifths. And that's where we are now, which is a big reason you're seeing this huge uptick in all sorts of space stuff. And the kind of fantasies that exist in the early 70s are coming back. And we were sort of excited because it is really cool tech and And it really did change things.

So the number of satellites we have up now is getting close to the number of satellites that were ever launched prior to the modern era. So it's really changed. So we're like, oh, space cell, man, it's coming back. But we talked to them. They weren't focusing that much on the kind of human factors, economics and psychology, biology. We were like, let's write that book about how we're going to do all this stuff. And the big change that we went through, and this is like two years into our research, it was way deep.

We'd accumulated so many things where we were like, well, this seems much harder than advertised in a lot of the books by advocates or like random articles you might read, but like in reputable publications. It also seems like a lot of like obviously undesirable stuff is being treated as sort of marginal. You know, to give a concrete example, the just sort of general existential risk of having like vast million ton objects orbiting close to what's called Earth's gravity. Well, meaning if they fall, bad stuff happens. And then, you know, an absolute dearth of talk about the existence of international law that is broadly agreed upon by many nations when it comes to creating states in space. And so by that time, we were just kind of like, oh, my God, there's this whole big picture

that is, I would say, broadly negative about near-term settlement that is not being reckoned with. That's a little less true, I should say. Now, there's a couple of books that came out around when ours came about. So there are a couple other books on this. So I think there's starting to be a movement, which is maybe in response to the drop in cost and the greater access. But that's where we fit in. I feel like the book kind of arrives at this perfect time, as you say, because there is all this interest in space. You know, there is all this discussion about, are we going to go to the moon? Are we going to go to Mars? Like, what is this kind of future endeavor that we are going to take off? And it has really, you know, kind of infected the

narrative coming from NASA as well, and kind of the some of the programs that they are putting out there. But as you say, there is a lot of discussion about kind of the possibility and what we might be able to achieve and why we should do this. But not so much is in the public discourse about the reasons that we should maybe be a bit more, not even skeptical, but even just realistic about what we can achieve here. And I feel like the book does a really good job of saying, here's all the things that you should know that you don't hear very often. But also, we're going to present it to you in this way where it's not just this really bland, dry text, but is really fun to engage with and learn about and stuff like that. So it's perfect for like average people who want to know more about all this stuff. Yes, for me, a good pop side book is a lot of depth that's like presented well on something

you've never heard of or never thought about. And that's what we were going for. Yeah, it's fantastic. And why is it that so many of the things that we hear about space settlement come so much from the enthusiasts, often libertarian ones? And how does that kind of shape the way

that we think about building a base on the moon or a libertarian ones? And how does that kind of shape the way that we think about building a base on the moon or a city on Mars? Like, how does it distort the public conversation about those things? Yeah, so it often comes from libertarians. It's not without exception. There have even been a few people who propose like we have a whole paper that's not in the book about space communes, because there is a much smaller leftist thread of like, we'll leave capitalism behind, which I think is wrong for opposite reasons. But like, I think the reason the discourse is probably bad is essentially that most of it is by advocates and advocates. Just, you know, I'm all for advocacy.

The problem is, like, on a lot of issues, you have advocates on both sides. But usually in the context and like I said, there's changing, but usually in the context of space. You know, one of the things we did was read basically as many books as we could find from the past, trying to predict the future of space settlement. I don't know that there are hardly any, I can think of like a small number of very recent books that take a broadly negative view, but mostly they're very pro. And it's kind of, it's not too surprising actually, even when I was showing this manuscript to other pop-sci authors and I was like, yeah, we're kind of going to come in with a negative view of whether this is a good idea. They were like, you can't do that. You can't write a book for nerds about how you don't get the thing. Writing a book sucks, right? You've written books. I mean, it's like, wonderful to have done and to imagine doing, but there's a part in the middle where it's just absolute misery. And so like, you probably wouldn't power through that generally, if you didn't really believe in the thing, or think there was something really interesting. So I think that's a lot of what's going on. So just as an example, you know, the kind of seminal book on Mars missions is by Robert Zubrin called The Case for Mars.

I would broadly construe him as something like not exactly libertarian, but sort of right-leaning and very sort of pro-America frontier type of stuff. Libertarian conservative, maybe you'd say. It's a 400-page book on this topic of space settlement basically completely leaves out international law that would like bar a lot of the stuff he's saying we should do but also leaves out stuff like so like radiation is a big open question like what it does and he actually has a section on what's called hormesis which is not definitely wrong but it's like the idea that exposure to some of something might actually be good for you and like that's let's say insufficient but that insufficient, but that's what I mean. So like a really good example, like we were talking a little beforehand, the moon where people talk about setting up a like gas station, this is a Jeff

Bezos thing. The idea is, well, the moon has some water and that's true. Water can be cracked into hydrogen and oxygen. Those are typical rocket propellants. So we can have a moon gas station. The problem is there's not that much water. Like, end of story. There's just not that much. We compared it to it. We found a small man-made lake. I think in like, I forget, it was like Mississippi or Alabama. Just one that happened to have about the right area.

It was quite small, but it's also very hard to get. But even saying that aside, if you could get it all, it's just not that much, right? And it doesn't ever renew. It's like, well, not on the scale of human lifespans. This stuff is really salient and it gets left out. I could guess as to why, but I think just when you're motivated on one side, you tend to emphasize some things and de-emphasize others. Yeah. It also doesn't sound good for these billionaires who are trying to build these space companies to say, actually, all these visions that we're giving you to justify what we're doing are going to be way harder to achieve than, you know, you've been led to believe, right?

I get like companies have to have vision statements. But if your vision statement is we'll have a permanent way station on the moon, it's just not true. You cannot do it with the water supplies that are available. I guess before we dig into the deeper kind of issues there, I think the final question I have about this is, you know, we have all these big visions that are out there now that have really gained steam that, you know, people have been hearing, I would say more and more often over the past decade, especially as you say, as SpaceX has become bigger, and as Blue Origin has been competing with it, and as that has kicked off kind of further investment in the private space industry

in particular. But why is NASA increasingly embracing these visions? You know, as you see, it's kind of Artemis missions and going to the moon and talking about that being a stepping stone to Mars and stuff. Like, why has the public space agency embraced these visions that, as you say, have a lot of kind of fundamental issues with them? Yeah, well, you know, it's always dangerous to try to guess the motivation. Sometimes with some billionaires, they tell you and then you can go off that. I mean, let me lay some things on the table and not say for sure I know why, because it's a good question. But let's say so for one thing, you know, these agencies are essentially political. Right, right. So I think the right view of NASA, it was created as a political act. And it is essentially to gain,

you know, all space agencies, especially for human spacefaring. It's a hundred percent about prestige. It's a political behavior. I always feel bad saying that Apollo was a political action more than it was a scientific action. But so like these agencies need to get funded and they need to have an identity. And so I think in the robotics and that's highly justifiable as good science people are interested in the, like put a dude on the moon or like now it's going to be one man, one woman on the moon. There's not really a good justification for that. But the public, we know this from history, is super interested and really responds strongly to it. So I think that's probably part of it. One thing that really irks me, and this comes out of like Department of Defense people around the world, comes out of agency heads,

comes out of politicians, is this like almost sort of salivating for cold war part two with like China or whoever. And so you'll hear people say things like, well, we have to have a Western government on the moon because of the Chinese get their first X, Y, Z. And I'm over here just like, there's nothing worth doing in the sense of like an investor gives you money and you come back with more money and give it back to them. Right. There's nothing in the sort of traditional economic sense worth doing on the moon. It's not going to make us richer. It's not going to like end poverty or any of these other outlandish claims. It's purely down to politics. So, again, without wanting to sort of second guess people's motivations, I do think they're obvious sort of like funding reasons and like PR prestige reasons why people are motivated to do this stuff. Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. And it's a really good way to understand it. And maybe we'll come back to a bit to that history, because that was a really interesting part of the book as well. But let's get to some of these bigger visions and kind of what is wrong with them. So, you know, if we hear Elon Musk talk about it, the idea is always, we're going to go to Mars,

we're going to like set up a city there, you know, we're probably going to do it by the end of the decade, if you know, we really believe his kind of more outlandish claims. His timeline keeps moving. But I know that's one of the timelines that he's put out there, at least to kind of start this settlement project. I imagine part of that is about going to the moon on the way to Mars, though, he talks way more about Mars than than going to the moon on the way to Mars, though he talks way more about Mars than going to the moon. I know that the moon is more part of like the NASA mission that is talking about going there and that SpaceX is involved with and things like that as well. So if we're just thinking more broadly, if we were going to set up a settlement on the moon or on Mars, thinking about the environmental conditions, I guess first, like what is the real roadblock there? The first thing to say before I

even launch in is everywhere else is worse. So as bad as what I'm about to describe sounds, everywhere else is substantially worse in space that you might go. Okay. So just a super quick rundown. If you go to the moon, one, you've got one-sixth Earth gravity, which we think, we actually don't have a lot of data on this, we think probably rapidly, fairly rapidly degrades bones, muscles, and then other more subtle stuff. Not a big deal. Not a big deal. Well, I mean, to be honest, it's possible it isn't a big deal.

It is a big deal on the International Space Station where you're in zero gravity. It's possible one sixth gravity, which you have on the moon, is enough to like, at least stretch out the damage. So just for reference, on the ISS, you lose something like 1% of hip bone density per month, right? It's a zany, like Harry Potter spell rate of bone loss. But, you know, it could be fine on the moon, it could be not. But like we've been to the moon, it's true.

We've been there for like weeks, right? So Aldrin and Armstrong walked on the moon for about three hours. We calculated about 1% of their time was trying to get the flag to stand up, you know? So like we just don't have a lot of medical data on that kind of thing. So you're also exposed to radiation, right? So even when you're in the International Space Station, you're under the magnetosphere, you're under the magnet, sorry, the Van Allen belts. Down here, we have more protection because we have the atmosphere, but at least up there,

you have some. On the moon, you have none, right? The moon is only very weakly magnetic and no atmosphere. And by the way, no atmosphere is also bad because, you know, you die really fast. It's basically the same as if you've ever been diving, which I have not. But if you surface too soon, nitrogen comes out of your blood and you get enormous pain and maybe die. Space is, of course, much worse because the pressure difference between inside and outside

is like infinity. So for reasons I could go into, that's actually really non-trivial because it means there's a lot of management of like breathing gases and stuff. The dust on the lunar surface, you know, you see pictures and it looks like a black and white photo of Arizona. It's actually much worse than that. So the moon is this rock that's a product of stuff slamming in it for eons. There's no wind, there's no water, there's no life, no nothing. The result of that is if you put it under a microscope, it looks like knives. It's little jagged bits of stone and glass. Seems to be bad for equipment. By the way, it's also statically charged because you're just exposed to radiation.

So astronauts described it as like clinging to your suit, which is a problem in all sorts of ways. To just give one example you might not think of, those suits are white to reflect sunlight. If you fall into this dust, which inevitably they did because they're carrying on these giant suits in this unfamiliar gravity regime, you get covered with this plastery color, so you absorb more heat while also being a little bit insulated by the dust, right? So it's just like, oh, this is a major problem. We think maybe if you breathe too much of it, it would cause silicosis, which is when you lose the ability to breathe easily because your lungs are so scarified over time, also known as stone grinder's disease. Lunar days are 14 Earth days long, extreme heat. Lunar nights are 14 Earth days long, extreme cold, and your solar panels are not going to work. That's enough about the moon. Really quick, the Mars is broadly

similar. It has more gravity. It's 40% of gravity, roughly. It has an atmosphere quite thin. You still die immediately if you go outside, but it has a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, which is nice because your plants can consume it. It's not true on the moon, which is very poor in carbon, which is a really non-trivial problem for any farming operations because carbon has to be made in stars. You can't just make it from scratch. But the downside of that atmosphere is that you get worldwide dust storms. So even though you might be tempted to just have solar panels because Mars has Earth-like days, the sun gets blotted out worldwide for weeks at a time. By the way, that soil that gets kicked up has a high concentration of perchlorates, which is a hormone disrupting chemical, which if we talk about reproduction,

you know, think about trying to have kids in an environment where there are hormone disruptor storms. And then last thing I would say is also there's distance. So the moon is, you know, relatively close. You can almost have a live conversation. It's about two and a half seconds, signal gets there and back. So it's like a little bit of lag, but not bad, which is good for a variety of reasons, psychological equipment, help in an emergency. Mars, the closest rendezvous, you're about three minutes each way. So there is no live call to mom. 22 minutes at longest distance. Equally important, if you're on Mars, the launch window to Earth only opens up every two years, right, for orbital mechanics reasons. You can only go home every two years, right, for orbital mechanics reasons.

You know, you can only go home every two years unless we have, like, super futuristic technology. And it's six months there, six months back again, unless we have super futuristic technology. So it's a much bigger long-term venture, much more dangerous. And then the last thing then is Mars is also exposed to radiation. Another problem with solar panels on Mars, there's an inverse square law for how much light you get. So, you know, if you double the distance, you get a quarter of the light. Mars gets about 40% the light of Earth. I believe it's a little better because of the thin atmosphere. If you are doing solar panels with like a battery system, they're going to have to be tremendous, double any solar setup you would have on Earth at least. And as perhaps you know,

I'm all in on solar. I think it's great. It's the future. It also has a huge land footprint, which means a huge maintenance operation on this hostile world. So that's your best places. Yeah. It sounds, it sounds very appealing. You know, my main takeaway was that I could record a podcast with somebody on the moon, but not on Mars. So, you know, that's right. And it would still be a little annoying, but doable, but doable. But I knew going into reading the book that there were a lot of challenges that went into going to the moon and going to Mars. Obviously, I knew that you couldn't breathe on these planets, you know, without kind of

manufactured oxygen and tanks and, you know, special settlements and stuff like that. But the thing that really got me that I didn't know as much was the stuff about the soil or the dirt or whatever on Mars just being like jagged kind of glass and stone that's also electrically charged and the soil on Mars being toxic, basically. I was like, oh, these are things that I hadn't heard before that you don't hear Elon Musk telling you all about, you know, when he's talking about our great future in space. And what drives me crazy, and we've gotten this critique. So a lot of people, this is what I think goes on is for a lot of engineers, my brother's an engineer,

some of my best friends are engineers. But there is this kind of mindset that says, if there is a solution to the problem, then it's no longer a problem. But like, we actually had people who were mad at us for even mentioning perchlorate, which strongly is bizarre, because they were like, well, you just run, you have to cleanse them, it's fine, you can use water. And it's true. If you put them in a moist environment, you can you can cook off the perchlorates. But they also do seep into plants. So our joke was like, you know, we live on a little farm. And if we have been about to buy it, and they were like, Oh, by the way, the soil is 1% hormone disruptors, but you just run a little water through it. And you're good. It's like, it's like a bizarre standard. And what I didn't want to getors, but it's okay. You just run a little water through it and you're good.

It's like, it's like a bizarre standard. And one day, I don't know if we want to get into, but like, you know, all that stuff I described, people will say there is a solution. That's true. And I'm not saying it's impossible. Like humans could one day do this. It's just that when you start, like people will sort of double book their astronauts or triple or quadruple, they'll be like, well, they have to run the farm and the fission reactor, and they have to clean the solar panels and they have to do all this stuff that no human could possibly do. And then of course, when you add in, I don't know if we'll get to like the lack of an economic return, it gets pretty dicey. Yeah. You know, I think before we get to the economic piece of it, you also mentioned like the human side of this, right?

You mentioned like reproduction and the issues that might cause there, but you know, just in general, like our body has evolved to live on this planet and in this gravity and in these kind of biological conditions, what would it mean for us then to go to somewhere like the moon or like Mars and then try to live there? Do we know what that would mean for human biology? Do we have a good grasp of that? Broadly speaking, I would say no, we don't. I should note too, you're absolutely right. I think it's a great way to think about it to say evolution designed us for this one place and the rest of the universe we know of is not like this one place. I would add though, about something like 60, 70% of the surface of this planet,

you die pretty quickly if you're just transported to it, you know? So you're adapted for part of this planet. So the data we have comes from, for about 50 years, we've had space station. That's obviously the best data on human physiology in space because the other trips are really short. So I already talked about like the loss of bone density, loss of muscle mass, seem to lose vision. So the main thing I want to say though, is like, take all that stuff and imagine trying to have children under those conditions, right? So this is where we really don't have data. We absolutely don't have enough about whether you can even like survive for a long time on the

moon or Mars, because you can imagine if you are losing, let's say it's a lower rate, like maybe 0.2% bone density per month, you're still in real trouble eventually. But try to imagine having children. We have nothing on this. Your listeners might think, well, NASA is a systematic program for human spacefaring. It is not. Space stations are political activity embodied in metal and plastic. You would think if I want to know about humans, can we have babies in space that I could look up

like the textbook or like the sequence of experiments we've done. The experiments done on space stations don't work that way. They're grab baggy. People like ask for time and sometimes they get it. And so if you look at like all the reproductive data, it's like, well, one time we sent quail eggs. One time we sent geckos. One time we sent lizards. A couple times we sent rats. We find a variety of results. There have been cases where there was stillbirth. There's some ominous hormone results, like low testosterone in males, low oxytocin in females, which is especially worrying if they're trying to give birth. Is it the microgravity?

Is it the radiation? Is it just the enormous stress of being a rat that suddenly can float and doesn't know why? What you really would want, if you wanted to know if humans could reproduce in this environment, is a longitudinal study where you would start with something like gerbils or whatever and have them do generations. Because the other big question here, right? So often when this comes up, it's like, can you have a baby in space? But if you want a settlement, and the sine qua non of a settlement is permanence, right? Is families that have kids who have kids who have kids, then you would want to do that with like a rodent first. And then you would want to do it ethically, or at least

borderline ethically, you know, I think you can even debate the animal part of this, you would want to kind of scale up taxonomy towards primates, and then ultimately to humans, we don't have anything like this. And by the way, often the experiments we do have show scary stuff like cell deformation, stillbirth, as I said, the hormone stuff. And just to kind of, you have this sort of prima facie if you expose people to all this radiation, all these weird conditions, like on the moon or Mars, because of all the stuff they described, they're probably living underground in tight quarters. All this stuff put together suggests it would not be shocking if you had a higher than normal rate of kids born who have difficulties.

And where this gets really scary is on Earth when you have kids with special needs. Some of us might complain about the quality of services they get, but there are services. There are places for those kids. And frankly, you're just in an environment where people have regular lives, where they're not trying to survive every day. So they can take care of these kids as well as possible. On the moon or Mars, it's going to be very difficult. And you find, we found three different quotes of space advocates saying some version of, well, we'll have to like let natural selection do its thing, which is like obviously ethically horrific, I think to anybody. And I would say notably ethically horrific in any posture, like it doesn't require you to have a sort of stance toward like economics or politics or anything to think mass experimentations on babies is a no-no. But I would say, you know, those are just the people, those quotes we found are the people saying it out loud. If you have a

thousand people on Mars trying to make a go of it without this science saying that it's okay under some conditions, then it is just obviously ethically a catastrophe. And so the idea that we're going to have a million people on Mars in 20 years, as Elon Musk says, is either just bogus, which I think it probably is, or just like an ethical calamity in waiting. And notably, none of the people making these claims are spending the kind of vast money you would need to get like a kind of handbook on orbital obstetrics, probably because there is no return on investment. So you know, yikes. Yeah, yikes is right, especially when you start talking about like space eugenics and stuff like that. Yeah. It gets really kind of dicey really quick. And like you say about Musk, like I often feel a lot of these grand visions are more like

PR for his company than something he really thinks he's going to achieve, but I'm sure there's a mix. I mean, it's weird, right? Cause we have this question, like, is Elon Musk, is he just a grifter? Is he just saying stuff to, like, take money? But, like, if you read his biography, I think that the smart money is that he's at least, to a great extent, a true believer. Which is, like, whether that's good or bad, you know, if the true belief is if we just go to the Mars frontier, everything will work out fine. That's much scarier than just grifting. I think probably it's like you say, there's a kind of spectrum from a sort of pure grift to a pure belief. And he's somewhere in between, you know, showmanship level. But it's

hard to know what's in people's true beliefs, of course, even when it's your own beliefs. Yeah, you know, taking the belief and really deceiving on the timeline. Absolutely, yes. Before we get into the economic piece of it, there's another proposal out there as well, right? You mentioned Jeff Bezos and how he wants to use kind of the moon as this gas station for, you know, not so much the settlement of Mars, but more the creation of these large kind of floating habitats in space where we'll live and we'll move industrial production and we'll do all our farming and Earth will become like this big natural park that we go visit every now and then.

So it can be kind of our little Eden can just exist and, you know, we're not kind of destroying it and whatnot. What is the issue, you know, with the idea of building all these big space colonies? Is this the solution to the problem of colonizing Mars or the moon? Yeah, so Bezos is in a very long tradition. So people have been proposing giant orbital space stations since like the late 1920s. But like the big fleshing out comes in the early 70s. The main guy is Gerard K. O'Neill. I think there's a documentary about him now. And it's hard to attract physics students anymore because people want to be more politically engaged at this time for kind of obvious reasons. And so he comes up with this idea where we'll have a course on could you put a big space station and put people there? And the set of problems this solves, especially for an idealistic college student in the 60s, is, well, it's simultaneously a fix for the environment because we'll offload stuff from the biosphere while generating solar energy. And you'll get a chance to try out new governments, like the back to the land movement that was going on then like they

will try out communes will try this and that. So there are detailed proposals, the main book on it is the high frontier. And the short version is and I could go off on a whole detailed thing on this, but basically, like, a big problem is you have to have mass, right? So typically, you want to situate these in a Lagrange point without going into detail, that's basically a point where stuff sits in space relative to some other things. So like relative to Earth, which is nice. It just sits there and it can face the sun all the time. So you get the solar power.

Problem is you need to build the damn thing. So usual proposal, this was O'Neill's proposal, although you'd have to fix the carbon problem, is you launch mass from the moon. So if you want to visualize this, imagine a mass driver, which is a sort of maglev train that kind of goes up and then the track just ends and so you would sort of like load up sealed like containers of just moon rock and you would fling it and there'd be a sort of giant space catcher's mitt which by some means or another descending from the massive amount of energy you supposedly could have you convert it into like suburbs so people have seen these pictures of dinner partiers in the 70s, and there's a toroidal Tuscan village. O'Neill knew that was BS at the time. Even if you could do this, it would be so expensive, you'd be living in submarine barracks. But set that aside,

that's the grand vision. We even say, acknowledge in the 70s, early 70s, it makes a kind of sense because renewables are not really there yet other than hydro. O'Neill himself says in the early 80s, it makes a kind of sense because renewables are not really there yet other than hydro. O'Neill himself says in the early 80s, he thinks solar is never going to work. And there are really big concerns. There's Paul Ehrlich stuff, limits to growth stuff. There's a view that resources are going to run out soon and there'll be unavoidable mass famines, like hundreds of millions of deaths in the third world sometime in the 80s. And I don't want to poo-poo environmentalism or any of this stuff. But the particular claims being made at that time were much more catastrophic than turned out to be true. So these people see it as a sort of third way. We don't have to de-growth. We can still have this lifestyle. We just have to boost people

off planet. So one is that they're hard to build because of that mass problem. Another thing, though, you can calculate how many people do you have to boost to tread water. Right now, it's about 200,000 people a day would have to go just to keep population stable, right? 200,000 people a day, 80 million people a year, right? So like more than Germany a year has to go up. Right now, there are, I think, under 20 people in space. That's pretty high on a historical scale. And so, you know, the idea that this is one, going to happen anytime soon, but two, going to solve climate change, because right now, rocket launch is quite pollutive, is just crazy. Jeff Bezos says we'll move heavy industry. We checked one heavy industry. I think it was

concrete. I always mix up concrete and cement. But anyway, produce a lot of CO2 doing this. And the amount of tonnage per year on Earth is like in the billions, which weighs much more than those 200,000 people we already can't boost. It's just not serious. Even if you could do it, it would be like just, if you want to talk about lowering the risk of environmental calamity, spend some money on putting some solar panels in New Mexico. Don't do this zany stuff. It's almost certainly not going to pay off. If you started doing it immediately, it would make the environment worse. So no. Damn, I was really hoping this one would work. Yeah, they are awesome. They're the coolest visuals in the history of space. They look really nice. Yeah. It's interesting

because in the book you kind of point out like, if you know, we were really concerned about what is going to happen for the future of humanity and where we should be living, like even an earth that is climate ravaged, where a bunch of nuclear bombs have been dropped, like it's way harder to live than the conditions that we have right now is still so much more livable and a good place to be than anywhere else in the solar system or like the universe that we know of. Yes. And it's not even close, right? Go to the bottom of the ocean, go to the worst part of Antarctica, you can still get water, you can still breathe.

At least in the ocean, there's still life you can eat. It's just not even close. If we talk about the economic angle of it, right, because this is really core, especially when you start to talk about Bezos and like moving heavy industry into space, but so much of kind of the discourse that has arisen around this growth of the private space industry is that, yes, you know, you have the Blue Origins and the SpaceX is doing the rocket launches, and they're bringing the satellites up and stuff like that. But this is the first step to building a space economy where we're going to be mining all these asteroids that have trillions of dollars in value associated with them. And that is going to make us unbelievably prosperous. Is this economic argument one that actually makes any sense?

We don't think so. So I would say the money zone, if you want to make money doing space stuff, everywhere out to geosynchronous orbit, that's about 24,000 miles high, is good money, right? So you can do remote sensing, navigation. We access our phones all day long for stuff that talks to space. You can do data acquisition, data transmission, military stuff is obviously quite valuable to have space technology. Beyond geosynchronous though, there's nothing's nothing that exciting right you don't need to get further out you don't get a better view on earth actually the trend now is for low earth orbit stuff like a couple hundred miles high so the more zany stuff which is usually moon mining moon mining just

seems to be objectively crazy like you just people someone in your audience is being like what about the valuable helium-3 we talked about it very briefly we originally had like a whole long thing and our editor was just like no you can't have like two percent of your book be about helium isotopes that are not relevant but we have a whole rant about why it's a bad idea but if you want details there's a paper we put in the footnote which goes into detail basically actually there's a canadian reactor that can make helium-3 as a byproduct a f fission reactor. It's called a can-do reactor, this really good acronym game. And I think that's like Canadian deuterium, something, I don't remember. Anyway, so, you know, other than that, there's really nothing worth getting. There's a quote, I can't remember if we used this, but from Michel Van Pelt, who's

a guy, he's a European space agent. He said, if there were bars of gold on the surface of the moon, it would not be worth it to go get them. And if you want to sort of visualize why, like imagine Apollo program, you walk up to the rocket, it's the size of a skyscraper, most of it's propellant. You dispose of the rocket when you go up. By the time it gets at last to the moon, it's a little tiny like dinghy, a little tiny bell. And they, I think a grand total of half a ton was taken back from the moon, right? So you try to imagine the extraordinary cost of this program, hundreds of billions of modern dollars, the idea that you're going to make money getting stuff from the moon. I mean, of course, you can drop the cost. You probably

would. But it's still not even close, especially versus just digging a big hole on Earth. The other big claim is asteroid mining. And basically, the deal is people somehow have this idea that there are platinum asteroids floating around or gold asteroids. There aren't. There are asteroids that are relatively high in some relatively high value metals. But the ones that are worth getting at least anytime soon, which come kind of closest to Earth. We found one estimate that said they were on the order of 10. So you imagine creating all this specialized equipment to go get the stuff. It's pretty questionable.

Throw in the risk of what are the rules on if if you want to kick a million tons of iron or nickel toward the home planet? Seems like there should be a little concern about that. Beyond that, there's not a lot of economic cases I don't think I've seen. But the basic deal is it probably always is going to be a better idea to do it on Earth. The case is probably just not there. You always got these bad answers for us. Nothing is possible. Well, let me just say, so we have been accused of saying it's impossible. I would never want to be saying it's impossible because there's a whole history of people saying things are impossible, but it's much more boring than that. It's about the marginal dollar, right? So it's like,

if you have 10 bucks to spend and your goal is lower existential risk, anytime soon, it's obviously not go to space, right? If your goal is return investment, like look at the bones of all the companies that were asteroid mining startups. It's not like someone did like had a zany energy startup and got there, but oh, then the price dropped and the thing they were selling. It's like they haven't even got off the paper stage before they went bankrupt. I'm a kind of optimistic person. I'm like a bit of a tech nerd. I'm excited about many other things, but this one is just kind of in the silly zone. Yeah, I think the question about asteroid mining

is really fascinating, right? And whether the economic piece of it makes sense. And I think what you say about the low Earth orbit and the things closer to Earth actually being something that these companies can make money doing makes sense when you see exactly what SpaceX is doing, right? Where it's firing up all these satellites, where it's controlling so many satellites with its Starlink system, like that is where the money is. And that is where it is making its money. It's not going to try to really colonize the planet and where it is going further than that, it's doing it with NASA money in order to do it, right? But there's another really big piece of this book, which is really important in which you really don't hear Elon Musk talk about or any of these advocates really. And that is the question of space law and international law and how this

all applies to what is going on in space. You talk about some of the different treaties that exist out there and that do govern space or could potentially govern space into the future. And, you know, you can go back to the earlier days to the Cold War, and they have the Outer Space Treaty, which started to set a framework here in order to make sure that one, you know, these great powers weren't going to be warring over space, but also to give some degree of confidence, I guess, to other countries around the world that these parties weren't just going to control it. And there were efforts after that to do a follow up, which didn't work out, which would have made space more of a commons. And that is being

challenged today by new regulations that are not happening on the international stage, but are coming from the United States and from other countries allied with it that seek to promote this idea of a private space economy and the private ownership of resources or control of resources in space. So this is like a really broad way of saying, you know, how should we understand the way that space law is actually going to impact what is going on here? And what barriers does it throw up to these grand visions that these billionaires and these space advocates promote to us, I guess? Yeah, I mean, so how it will play out, I don't know. I can tell you what we try to do is say, first of all, there is international law. That's important because it's often left out.

International law does bind the behavior of nations. It's not infinite. And obviously there are power dynamics. But on the other hand, like, you know, when you have a treaty, if you think it's all about power, then the treaty is a statement of what the powerful nations think the rules should be. So it does matter. It also, like, international law kind of tells you what would be a provocation or not.

So one example I'd like to give you, we obviously have this whole war between Russia and Ukraine. Russia could start dropping nuclear weapons. Obviously, they are constrained in some way. There is some limit. And I think part of that is down to international law, which it would just be considered such a massive violation of norms and treaties. The response would be complete isolation, even from nominal allies. So there is international law. It matters. As you say, the big document for space is the Outer Space Treaty. When it comes to space settlement in particular, most relevant is Article 2, which says no sovereignty in space.

Basically, no space countries. Like the U.S. can't, as Newt Gingrich proposed, claim the moon should be a U.S. state. And likewise, you can't start a new state on the moon. People will argue about this, but very few legal scholars will say you can. I always thought Canada was the 51st state, but now I'm learning it's actually going to be the moon. It's one of my favorite tidbits is Newt Gingrich just being like, we need it.

It'll be like the old west, you know, only it's the moon. We just need to get enough people. And so, but out of the outer space tree, the answer is basically no, which is important because, you know, a lot of people who are advocates for going to space want to start nations. You know, Robert Zubrin is this, Elon Musk hasn't said it particularly, but it's kind of looming in a lot of proposals. Part of that is this idea that Earth sucks in some way or other. It's

insufficiently libertarian, as you said, is a common one. Also, there's a more, I don't know, you'd say centrist version of that, which is, well, most people feel at least Earth has some problems. A lot of people think it's too bureaucratic or we're getting a monoculture. If we could escape from that and start new stuff on Mars, that'd be awesome. The basic deal is legally you can't. And when I say legally, this is important. So when people hear illegal, they think like domestic law. But in international law, which is law by the usual scholar's definition, there's not

like an enforcement agency. There's no police who like show up and put you in country jail, right? There's sort of like cultural responses by the countries who agree to these things. But so, you know, if say tomorrow you found out Russia had secretly put a base on like one of the lunar poles and said, this is ours, that would under an international law be a like drastic provocation. Even if you agree with me that there's no sort of good reason to do this, like that it would be a broadly stupid move, like in terms of resources, it would still be a massive provocation. I don't know what would happen, but it would be a big deal. So that's the sense in which I mean, it constrains behavior. And the question is like, is this going to stick around?

Because a lot of people think it'll go away. And sometimes it's because they want it to go away. Sometimes I think it's kind of a cynical view of the international order that it's all BS anyway. I think one thing we're really big about is that you have to understand space law, which does make space broadly a sort of commons, depending on your definition, is not some sort of one-off, right? So in the 20th century, three times humanity had to decide how to deal with a whole lot of territory that opened up due to technology. That's in Antarctica, that's in the bottom of the sea. And that's the rest of the solar system, right? But worth noting, Antarctica and the seabed, that's 60% of the surface of this planet,

was formerly kind of, you know, you'd sound crazy if you were like, I'm going to claim this, you know. Although Antarctica did have claims, right? And in all three cases, by different means, but broadly speaking, all three were regulated as commons. That is what humanity decided to do in the second half of the 20th century. We're not going to fight about these things because we don't want a repeat of the bad old days where we fought over territory, but also because there's probably nothing worth getting in these places. So we really don't want

to fight over it. Let's just do science and leave it alone. So like in Antarctica, there's a chunk of Antarctica, non-trivial one that's claimed by three countries, Chile, Argentina, and the UK. And it's just cool. Nobody, you know, they don't relinquish their claims. They don't make new claims. They just promise not to be jerks about it. And that has held since 1961, I think. This is how we regulate things. Where it gets weird is you can't have sovereignty, but you can probably claim infinite resources, which leads to all sorts of perverse outcomes, right? So like you can't claim the moon as sovereign territory. You could write Elon Musk in big letters on it with a laser beam. There's no explicit prohibition against that. There'd be some environmental contamination questions, but no prohibition. Please don't give him any ideas.

Yes, I'm sorry. Yes. he might do worse things than that. Maybe that's a good trade. Yeah, so the longstanding U.S. view, which is starting to become the international norm, is that you can access resources ad libitum as much as you want. That includes that scarce water resource. And so as you said, we tried, we meaning like the international community, tried to regulate all this in a way that would have been broadly like the seabed is regulated now, which is like there's an international agency which kind of bureaucratizes and slows down the process of territorial claims. And that became the Moon Agreement,

which is technically in force because the nation signed it, but none of the space powers, none of the big powers signed it. So it's kind of a dud. Into the breach comes the Artemis Accords put up by the US in line with a bill passed under Obama and an EA and an executive order signed by Trump, basically saying who, you know, Americans could do what we want. And 20 nations have signed on this. And they're not like little strong arm nations. It's like Germany, the UK is real, I think in Australia, like serious countries have signed this. I think Canada is on there again. Canada. All right. We got Canada. All right, so there will be moon Canadians. Yeah, and so basically it's scary because you can start under this agreement

to make quasi-turf-like claims. You can designate what are called safety zones. They're explicitly not sovereignty claims, but they're kind of like, this is our don't land here. You're going to mess up our stuff. We can't guarantee your safety if you're in our safety zone.

These have unspecified radius. So the way we say it is, whereas in the 60s, you had to kind of fight to do a stunt on anywhere on the moon. You could get into a sort of turf battle. The best spots on the moon are actually quite limited. They're on the orders of hundreds of acres probably. And so to me, that's scary. I think it's all pointless, right? The science would be awesome. But like, where are you getting to these quasi-turf-like claims that escalate international tensions down here? And on that point, like, if, you know, as we've been talking about this idea of settling the moon, you know, let's not even talk about Mars for now, seems so distance and remote

and difficult to do and having very little economic case. Why is there such a push when you see the US government and these other 20 countries passing these laws or signing these accords that are aimed at making it so private companies can access resources on this far off body that is not even on our own planet? Whereas, as you say, what happens in Antarctica can just stand and has stood for 60 years. And there's no attempt to disrupt that I know of what what is going on down there and kind of the regulatory framework and international law framework that's been set up there. Why is there so much focus on space when it seems like something that is far less accessible, whereas something

that's so much closer, and is regulated as a commons can just stand and there's no attempt to overthrow that people who disagree with me would probably point out it's not a bad point on its own which is well they would say like well the space you know we could just go do stuff there's a lot of regulations down here and maybe there should be so you know you can't make the moon worse it's already horribly inhospitable so let's just go to resources there but as i said it's just like it's not worth it like it's just not even close you probably have to do some environmental damage. Then there's a question about like, you know, do we want to actually tear up huge chunks of the moon, which is this kind of destructible record of what's happened to Earth over time? Why there's a push for it is really

hard to say. I would point out two things. So one, there really has been a drop in the cost. It will probably be the case that before long, it's cheaper to do stuff on the moon. So I think that gives people the idea that it'd be worth doing. I just think a kind of cold calculation of the numbers doesn't bear it out. One thing I would point to, though, it is really hard to overstate the salience of space activity as a prestige activity for companies and people. There's a wonderful book by Alex McDonald. I think he's still the chief economist at NASA called The Long Space Age.

I highly recommend it. His theory is even if you go back to observatories, doing stuff in space is mostly costly signaling, either by individuals or countries. It's basically a way to display prestige. One of my favorite stories from the history is famously, both Khrushchev and Eisenhower don't realize satellites are going to be a big deal. They think they'll be a big deal for data, but they don't think the public is going to care.

It's like a science project among many. And Sputnik goes up. The story from, I think, Khrushchev's memoir is that he sort of says, good job, everybody, and says, good night, wakes up, and the whole world is on fire. You know, just every headline of every newspaper everywhere is Sputnik. And Eisenhower's also caught off guard. He thought all the space stuff was kind of crazy, especially the Moon race stuff he thought was completely

bonkers. I think there's a good argument he was right. But like the world went wild and you can see there's polling from this time where there's a big shift towards thinking the Soviet system is better. It's not like overwhelming, but it's like, it's something like a double digit swing in a lot of Europe. Now I should say there's a big point to be made here, which is this is, of course, during the period of high decolonization from 1945 to 1975. So trying to get alignment is maybe a bigger deal than it is now, although it's still a big deal. And so if people are talking a lot about the importance of this stuff, it is to an extent, like the way I like to say it, let's just say tomorrow you found out China not only had a base at the bottom of the Arctic Circle, but was saying, this is China. We're claiming a two-mile radius at the bottom

of the sea. You'd probably be like, well, that's weird, but I don't really care. Whereas for whatever historical reasons, it's in the public consciousness space. If China did the exact same thing on the poles of the moon, I think there'd be a massive response because it would broadly be considered that China was way ahead of us on everything. That's what happened with the Soviet Union. I think the basic deal is they weren't, but this stuff is so deep in people's heads. And maybe that's just biological. The moon just seems different. So if you found out China had a city on the bottom of the ocean, you'd be like, cool. If you found out they had a city on the moon, you'd be like, wow, China is going to win the next century period. And so i do think there is a kind of i don't know where it comes from i can speculate

but i really don't know there's just a kind of salience that is unique to space kind of the result of stories that we've been collectively telling ourselves for a very long time basically i think that's a good guess i honestly wish there was like a sort of detailed treatment of why we feel this way and i don't know what the answer is. No, that's interesting, though. There have been a ton of interesting facts that you've given us through this conversation. And we could go on and on and talk about even more. But you know, after looking at all this, kind of what is your assessment of what space settlement would actually look like? Is this a realistic thing? And if it was something that we wanted to do, what would be the best way to do it? Is it what Elon Musk wants to do to try to get

us there as soon as possible and just start throwing people onto Mars and hopefully building up a city? Or would our approach look much different if we really wanted to do this in a responsible way? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a couple of things there. So the first bit was a kind of, is this feasible? I think it's kind of like, you could sort of turn earth into a kind of garrison planet where all resources are devoted to getting people on. You can imagine a sci-fi story where there's like some giant object

that's going to hit earth and we're toast. And you're like, we have to do this period, right? I think it's literally doable. You'd have to obviously deal with like the reproduction stuff we didn't even get into like handling an ecology which is a whole nother question but like you know i would actually say that to me that's one of the few situations where you could justify moving a lot of humans quickly without a lot of this data if the alternative was worse that seems unlikely the objects that are quite rare but so you i think it is literally feasible

i don't want to say it's not it's just it would require an extraordinary amount of money and be ethically dicey outside of particular circumstances. I do want to add, too, there is a non-trivial thread of argument that we just shouldn't do it, that it actually just increases existential risk without benefit. And Daniel Doodney is the kind of guy for that. Not very popular in the space settlement community. He's an international relations guy who's also kind of like a space geek. He wrote it's like he wrote a book called Dark Skies, which analyzes a lot of this in extraordinary depth. It's a kind of like a scholarly book. It's not a sit on the beach and

read book. But if you want the kind of just say no version of this, he's the guy. If we wanted to do it, what we argue for something we call wait and go big. The idea the wait part is scientific. Basically, we need the reproductive science. We need ecological science, which is a whole other thing. I think the rockets and that kind of technology stuff that will probably take care of itself because it's economically remunerative, at least a lot of it is, with the kind of like, can we have babies? Can we run a sustainable ecosystem in space?

That you need to just shell out for, and it's going to take a long time to get the data. That's the weight part. Go big is something we thought about at the end of a lot of this stuff. A lot of stuff we didn't get into benefits from scale. So probably ecosystems benefit from scale because you have more redundancy and less risk of calamity. Human psychology, which we didn't get into, probably benefits from scale because you just have more resources for people, more opportunities for getting help. Likewise, if you are in a situation where a lot of people have special needs or other stuff or need, you know, special treatment, again, scale means division of labor.

One thing we didn't really get into is we talked about company towns, economics. If you want to have better working conditions, a classic important thing is labor mobility. That is to say, do workers have a choice? That's a really hard thing to get in space, which is like, you know, the most isolated you can be and also where you have to have enough oxygen to like move to somebody else's place. So again, scale probably improves labor mobility, which would be a good way to make conditions better for workers. Yeah, I remember Elon Musk talking about space indentured servants. So yes, yes, I don't think he said indentured servants. Yeah, not the term. But yeah,

it'll be great. They'll just owe the company their existence and a million dollars in debt, and nothing bad will happen. Yeah, yeah. So just, you know, again, like, so like having just a lot of skill, in other words, instead of kind of trying to bootstrap, if you could quickly get to like a million people, if you had all this other stuff solved, you're probably better off for a variety of reasons. The one last caveat I'll offer, and then I'll give my slightly optimistic conclusion. We talk a little about war in space,

mostly to dispel some myths, because I really don't know what war will be like in the distant future, and we don't like to speculate too much. But it is worth noting that there's categories of weapons that we don't often use on Earth. And part of why we have these interdictions is because of risk to everyone else. So part of why we have these interdictions is because of risk to everyone else.

So part of why these nuclear test ban treaties came along is there was a big experiment in the 50s that showed up strontium-90 in baby teeth. Strontium-90, a nasty radioactive isotope, also shows up cesium-137 as a water-soluble nasty isotope. When you just blow up nuclear weapons, either for war or not. You put this stuff in the atmosphere and you harm all of us, right? You kill some of us due to premature cancer death. Likewise with biological or chemical weapons, there's similar problems with blowback or escape. So we don't like to use these. They do occasionally get used, but generally they're prohibited. There's a debate about why, but one reason is thought to be the

risk to everyone. Well, if you throw one of these from Mars to Earth, or vice versa, you're safe. Now, they might shoot it back at you, but at least you've taken this issue off the table. So usually when we talk about going to Mars or wherever, it's as a reduction of human existential risk, because one plus one equals two, you have two options. But we say the math is more complicated. And I think it's kind of trivial that it is a bit more complicated. But actually, even in the long term, with a lot of development, we might have higher existential risk. So with that said, if we really had to do this, if I was running the agency for getting this done and had the budget, where I would spend would be three places. One would be that reproductive science. We kind of went through that. Eventually, you'd want to get maybe on the moon to see how partial gravity works in this map. Two would be closed-loop ecologies, which we

didn't get into. But basically, the idea is you need a sealed bubble where you can have an ecosystem that doesn't destroy itself and provides enough food and oxygen and clean water. That's a big problem. Biggest one ever was three acres, had eight people in it. We need to scale up to a million people. That would, if it's linear, require a greenhouse the size of two Singapore's. That would be part two. Ideally, those two things merge on the moon somewhere. You have a sustaining ecosystem on the moon where people can have children. Then maybe you can do Mars. That would obviously take many decades. Last thing, I want to shout this at everyone who's 18. There's this whole thing called international law. It sounds boring, but it's the only area

in human life where you can scribble ideas on a piece of paper and they just change the hinge of history. Part of why sea law is what it is, is because people were writing in the 17th century about what they thought it should be. So it's an area where you could really make a difference by doing scholarship and showing up at conferences and talking to people about what the ideal space law should be. We think it should be like a sort of slow bureaucratic space law. Other people want a kind of dynamic, more capitalist version. This is a fight we're going to have during the next hundred years and it will shape much of the future. So like all of these

three things, space babies, closest to ecology, international law space are just objectively awesome, separate from what the best ideas are. Like, like they're just really cool stuff to study. And that's what we should be looking at if we want to settle space and not cause harm to ourselves. I love that. And I think that gives us a really good insight into, you know, what we should actually be thinking about if we do want to one day realize this, you know, when I was reading the book, my real takeaway was, this is theoretically something that's possible. There's a lot of roadblocks to achieving it. But if it is something that we want to set ourselves up for in the future, there are

steps that we can start to take. There is science that we can start to do to make sure that we are kind of heading in that direction and learning if this is something that is really feasible, right? That these issues of reproduction and things like that are not going to be hard lines that we just cannot overcome and that that research needs to be done in order for us to get there. But I feel like the important thing was simply that this is not something that's going to happen in the next decade or two, as a lot of these tech billionaires and advocates seem to want us to believe.

It's not going to be something that is going to save us from climate change or protect us from the existential risk of something going wrong on this planet. Ultimately, the bigger question, the bigger priority is to make sure that Earth is a good planet, to make sure that we are stewarding it well. First of all, because it's going to take way more time if we ever hope to settle the moon or Mars in any real capacity beyond like maybe a science outpost at some point. But further than that, because we should want to have our house in order here before we try to go anywhere else and set up a kind of human colony civilization or whatever we want to call it there. I think that's it. I appreciate that it took a while to say it because like we really try to have a nuanced, like it's complicated, right? Space is a real actual place.

It lives outside fantasies. The way I've come to think of it, and I don't know if Kelly would agree with me on this, but let me just state my view, which is essentially like space settlement done right is an activity for a very advanced and very harmonious future civilization, right? It's for Star Trek. It is not an economic proposition, most likely. It's an aesthetic proposition. And that's sufficient as long as we've taken care of the existential aspects. But to get to be that Star Trek civilization, you have to survive the next 100, 200, 300 centuries while still, like, developing.

And so that's where the kind of husbanding our resources on Earth property comes in. Because people tend to say, well, why are we spending on space when we could be spending down here? And I think often that's a false trade-off. Because if we reduce funding for NASA, it's not obvious to me that it would all get piled into solar panels or something. It's a more complicated story than that. Might be just tax cuts. But to me, the main, yeah, quite plausibly. And so to me, it's really all about, we need to make sure we don't destroy ourselves down here. That means reducing existential risk. And space is not going to do that

and might do the opposite if we don't do it the right way. Yeah, no, I think that's a really important way to understand it. And it also says, don't stop being excited about space, don't not being interested in space, but be realistic about the settlement piece of it. Let's do our science, let's learn about it, because that's the real interesting thing. But let's not kind of follow Elon Musk and his big dreams and get obsessed with, you know, his vision of the future, because we can still do really cool things without, you know, joining the cult of musk

oh 100 i mean i think we did talk was there are these like lava tubes on the moon that are maybe hundreds of times bigger than the ones on earth we've never been inside there's no economic value in this there's maybe cool space space value but i just want to see you know i i don't want any i know i'm like broadly like negative or whatever like, I'm not in any way against space exploration. I think it's I mean, you can debate whether it's the best use of funding for science, but like, whatever, we have the funding, and it's awesome. And so like, that's all good. Where it gets dicey is when you talk about permanent populations having babies and trying to declare nation state. Yeah, then these really go off the rails. But Zach, it's been really great to speak with you. I would highly recommend the book for anyone interested in learning more about this because

it's fun to read, but it's also super informative. Thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Thanks very much. This is a lot of fun. Zach Wienersmith is the co author of a city on Mars and the cartoonist behind the Saturday morning breakfast cereal comic tech won't save us is made in partnership with the nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.