The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Fantasy of Space Colonization: The Spaceship We're Already On with Tom Murphy & DJ White | RR 24

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

On the heels of Artemis II, our cultural obsession with space colonization continues, even as we face increasing global resource constraints and planetary health declines. Techno-optimists, including some of the wealthiest among us, dream of a future where we mine, travel to, and colonize other planets – all in the hopes of bypassing the problems we now face on Earth. But from the perspective of physics and ecology, how feasible is space colonization – and are these interplanetary ambitions blinding us to the miracle of the planetary spaceship we already inhabit? In this episode, Nate welcomes back astrophysicist Tom Murphy and eco-interventionist DJ White, two longtime friends with deep roots in both space science and ecological reality, to examine the surging cultural fascination with space mining and off-world colonization. Drawing on decades of experience with NASA missions, lunar laser ranging, and biophysical research, Tom and DJ outline the economic impossibility of asteroid mining, the physiological brutality of long-duration spaceflight, and the absurdity underlying dreams of Mars colonization. Both guests also argue that space colonization has, at its core, become a convenient story that lets humanity off the hook for the damage being done here at home.  What if the real tragedy isn't that we can't reach the stars – it's that we've stopped paying attention to the planetary home we're already on? If the most brilliant minds drawn to space exploration redirected that energy toward the living systems collapsing around us right now, what might become possible? And what if we could recognize that the complexity, beauty, and intelligence we hope to discover elsewhere in the cosmos is, improbably and urgently, still here? (Conversation recorded on February 24th, 2026)   About Tom Murphy: Tom Murphy is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Physics and the Department Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California San Diego. He retired in 2023 and moved to Washington State to focus more on the predicament of modernity and its ecological incompatibilities.  He is the author of Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, creator of the Metastatic Modernity video series, and continues to explore long-term human success through his Do the Math blog.   About DJ White:  DJ White is a co-founder of Greenpeace International and founder of EarthTrust. He has played a leading role in protecting dolphins, whales, sea turtles, and countless other marine animals, including successfully stopping a national dolphin drive kill and breaking the deadlock in capping the Kuwait oil fires. Additionally, he helped end the world's largest and most destructive global fishery – pelagic driftnetting – and created the lab which first demonstrated self-awareness in the universe outside the great apes.   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

We are all space travelers now. We're on a great spaceship, which through luck is perfectly tuned to humans. During the course of this interview, we'll probably travel a million miles, farther certainly than any of the moon missions that are coming up. We've got radiation shielding. We've got air. There is no single square inch of Earth on top of the ocean, on the crust of the seabed, on Antarctica.

That is not a million times better to colonize. in any other planet in the solar system. All the real profound stuff is here. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future.

By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I'm rejoined by two friends of mine who have both been on the show multiple times, Tom Murphy and DJ White, for a biophysically grounded discussion about the increasingly popular and fantastical ambitions to mine and colonize outer space. Tom Murphy is a professor emeritus of the Department of Physics and the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego. He retired in 2023 and moved to Washington State.

to focus more on the predicament of modernity and its ecological incompatibilities. Tom is the author of Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, creator of the Metastatic Modernity video series, and continues to explore long-term human success through his Do the Math blog. DJ White is a co-founder of Greenpeace International and founder of Earth Trust. He has played a leading role in protecting dolphins, sails, sea turtles, and countless other marine animals, including successfully stopping a national dolphin drive kill and breaking the deadlock and capping the Kuwaiti oil fires.

Additionally, he helped end the world's largest and most destructive global fishery, pelagic drift netting, and created the lab which first demonstrated self-awareness in the universe outside of the great apes. In this episode, we take a deep dive into the biology, chemistry, physics, and he underpinning why human colonization of space is not as close as many would like to believe, and why even dreams of interstellar robot mining are a biophysical non-starter. Tom D.J. and I also explore the underlying philosophies and cultural imagination that has led to an obsession with space for many of the wealthiest among us.

But the biggest takeaway from this episode is not about the impossibility of these space fantasies. but realigning with the reality that we are already on an earthen spaceship flying through the galaxy, and that we might consider appreciating and taking care of our existing ship while we still have it. With that, please welcome Tom Murphy and DJ White. Welcome back to the great simplification, DJ White and Tom Murphy. I just looked at my old emails, and I've known both of you for about 20 years, is pretty crazy. So you've both been on the show multiple times, and you are both deeply embedded in researching

what I increasingly refer to as our more than human predicament, as well as being close friends of mine. And today I've asked you to come back on the podcast to discuss the resurgence of ambitions for space mining and space colonization amongst the leading techno-optimist technologists of our age. And I've got a ton of questions for you both. But before we dive in, I was hoping you could each give a little of your own background on your academic and professional experience in these fields and how you initially got interested in space, SpaceX exploration and those topics. Tom, maybe we start with you.

Okay, well, thanks for having me on. Well, I think the obvious statement is that I spent 20 years as an astrophysics professor, so that gets me, you know, one step closer to space. But more than that, my main project used the reflectors that were placed on the lunar surface by Apollo astronauts. So I built the apparatus that really reaches out and touches those reflectors. And so it was very personal in that sense. The project, in fact, was named Apollo, the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser Ranging Operation.

Our logo was a Saturn 5 rocket. Our computer, the mission control, if you will, was called Houston. Another controller, the instrument control computer had two Cs in it. So I had Cocoa as its name because of Cocoa Beach where the astronauts trained. We even had a custom piece of electronics that controlled the real-time state of the machine called the Apollo command module, just like the little capsule that the Apollo astronauts sat in. I had two decades of continuous funding from NASA that accumulated to something like $3 million, plus a comparable amount from National Science Foundation,

and reviewed over 100 NASA proposals, many of them for space missions, some of them for Mars missions. So I kind of got a sense of the state of the art and what's practical and what's not. I was the principal investigator for a mission concept study to put a spacecraft on Phobos to test general relativity in the solar system. And, you know, was at the jet propulsion laboratory in the room where they all set around with navigation and computation and communication and thermal and all those sort of desks to sort of do a shakedown of the mission. But even before all that, I mean, I was seven years old when Star Wars came out. And it rocked my world, you know, you can imagine. I had all the action figures and the toys, became a fan of Star Trek. Lots of fiction like Hitchhackers Guide to the Galaxy, which I read over a few years and am actually reading it now because it's just so fun.

The 2001 Space Odyssey, The Right Stuff was a favorite movie of mine for many years. And I grew up not far from Huntsville, Alabama. I was in Tennessee, and so visits to the space museum were a real highlight. I mean, this is kind of like my mecca. And I even got a chance to work on a space shuttle project when I was between undergrad and grad school. And then even as a 28-year-old, maybe adult by that point, in graduate school near the end of my PhD, I started really considering seriously the idea of being an astronaut. I thought that would be a lot of fun.

I even got a pilot's license. We had a local hero John Grunsfeld who came out of my same department and was an astronaut. Still is. And so, yeah, I've been in the space business or adjacent to it, never in space. I've never built anything that went to space, but I've been really close to space hardware, space missions. and NASA for many years. DJ, what about you? Yeah, well, what an act to follow, right?

Tom is the real deal. He's a rocket scientist, and he's a guy that loves this stuff. I, too, am a guy who loves space. And I think it's important we lead off with that because we're going to be talking reality here. I'm here as a, you know, more of a sci-fi, you know, initially a sci-fi and space geek

That's, you know, from early ages, like, I mean, like six or seven. We're talking classic sci-fi, you know, here for me because I'm old. But it was always very important to me. And, you know, of course, the moon missions and all of the, you know, for everything, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, it was nuts. And, well, I've got a piece of Skylab here on my desk that was given to me by one of my brothers. because he and I drove from Indiana down to see the last Saturn 5 lift-off in person. And that was not that easy thing to do for working-class guys who were doing factory work and odd jobs for a buck or two an hour to mount a trip like that.

It was heavily symbolic for us of the cool things about the future. And anyway, getting beyond that, it's, well, I think we were established in the past. I'm kind of an autistic guy, you know, it's okay to say that these days. I was very interested from an early age, not really having an internal verbal monologue in the nature of intelligence in the universe, the nature of what is the place of mankind in the universe. and all these people around me that believe things that made no sense. How did that work? My quest to learn more about space and my quest to learn about the nature of consciousness in the universe

were the same thing. They weren't like two different diverging paths. And by college, I had encountered John Lilly's speculations on dolphins, which had bigger brains, bigger cerebral cortices of the other. we do, but nobody really knew, you know, what they were doing with those. Basically, I, I ended up pushing my life in what felt to me like both space and intelligence in the universe directions, skipping forward, I got myself into a situation where I was able to maintain a long-term friendship with the dolphin, a non-human, abstracting intelligence, and figure out, to my

criteria that, holy shit, these are people in every, they're not like dogs or people. This critter is smarter than I am in some ways and is a person. You know, there are other peoples on earth who are, you know, even intellectual. They're just non-technological. But realizing that also meant I immediately became aware that our species was perpetrating multiple holocaust. to be basically wiping them all out. And that placed a heavy ethical onus on me, and I switched from what had been a geophysics career

and initially working in the oil industry to try and to save them. And I have been pretty successful, but maybe not ultimately successful. But I also tried to bring space people to it. In other words, I served on a, on a three-member board of a granting foundation that granted for projects of space exploration

and ways of having that also affect Earth. In other words, the idea of, yeah, let's do the dirty stuff off-land at some place that let's save our sacred home planet from destruction. But there were a number of astronauts that got involved in some of my projects. For instance, Tom mentioned 2001 Space. I'd see, Arthur C. Clark, I guess Sir Arthur C. Clark, who wrote that, became a friend.

And one of the projects I was doing, which is to interface dolphin lines. I created dolphin lab for dolphin cognition research. One of my projects to do that was to interface computers with dolphins and try to work out hybrid language. Arthur Clark wrote a fiction book called Fountains of Paradise about space elevators, which was a cool enough book. proceeds from that largely funded what I was doing to hook actual alien minds up with computers. So, you know, there's real clear demarcation to write good sci-fi. You need to understand the dividing line between fiction and reality, you know, fantasy and reality. So the guy that wrote a space odyssey was, he was our international advisory board chair.

And because there's reality and there's wonderful things in reality and they're very exciting. And, you know, and there's fantasy. Fantasy is fun. You know, Cinderella had a, you know, had a pumpkin that turned into a coach. That's fun. But increasingly, it seems a lot of people have magical stories in place of where they ought to have basic understanding of the limits in the universe. So that's probably run on long enough. Excellent. Don, I've known you for a long time. I've never actually heard that particular story. And I've heard a lot of them. Thank you. So with that

background and your bona fides, at least a little bit out in the open, let's move into a topic, which I think a lot of people are quite conflated about or just buy into the memes and the stories, because in recent years, there's been lots of popular stories about space mining and claiming that once we tap into the metal and mineral stores in asteroids and space, like zinc and iron and copper and cobalt, it's going to solve any scarcity issues on Earth. And, you know, I saw a presentation by Jeff Bezos a few years ago, and the first third of it was like, oh my gosh, like he totally understands overshoot and the things that we discuss,

you know, energy limits and such. And then the last two thirds were, well, in my opinion, delusional. But as both of you know, these plans for colonizing space and all the things along the way from part fabrication to actually launching a ship have material costs. So to the best of your understanding, what would be the energy and material requirements in order to fully construct and maintain an off-world mining operation as one example? And are those resources currently available to us, humans? I haven't really dug into the space mining fantasy in particular very extensively. I've looked a little bit at it in terms of, you know, what would the worth of an asteroid B in terms of its trace amounts of platinum and so forth. I mean, these are not

giant chunks of pure gold or anything. There are precious materials in them, and I've looked at the economics of briefly into, you know, how much is an asteroid worth. But, you know, it's a ridiculous kind of number in the sense that you can ask the same thing about gold just suspended in the ocean. And it's a ridiculous. a curiously high number in market value. But, you know, I'll also get flumixed over the idea that, yeah, it's extremely hard. It's the hardest kind of material acquisition you can imagine. It's not waiting on some new, say, rocket propulsion technology to do it.

The reason it fails economically by all these startups is because it's just too hard, too expensive. It's not it's not on the real axis as I've heard many physicists describe it. It's got a large imaginary component. But, you know, I also got hung up on the idea that should you bring, so nickel is one of the elements that you do find in some abundance in an asteroid and a certain type of asteroid. Most of the asteroid mass is just sort of rocky. And we got plenty of rocky stuff here. So it's it's the special class, the M-class asteroids that are, uh, that make the eyes light up and turn to dollar signs in, you know, some of these folks. But, uh, and the don't look up movie was a really great example of that, um, that meme. But, you know, once you brought that much nickel,

if you even could, uh, into proximity, uh, to the earth, uh, so that it could be useful, uh, it's suddenly almost worthless economically because, you know, he flooded the market. So, but, you know, the idea that there's this thing called the rocket equation, which talks about how much fuel you need to move a certain piece of material, a certain, you know, give it a delta V, a change in velocity. And, you know, it turns out it's not accidental that a Saturn 5 rocket is 90% fuel. And the cargo, the payload, is this tiny little thing at the top, right? And so in order to deliver an asteroid, you'd have to have like several asteroids worth of fuel. You know, where is that going to come from? So there are a lot of just preposterous elements to this that just don't stand up to any scrutiny.

So it's kind of the space equivalent of corn or cellulosic ethanol from an energy perspective. Yeah, yeah, it really is. But, you know, It kind of touches on another aspect, which is that for every hour that a human has spent in space, one of my colleagues really looked into this, a life cycle analysis of the costs, for every hour that a human has spent in space, the environmental impact on Earth is roughly 2,000 times a single hour spent by a global average. citizen. So it's this entirely, you know, enormous leveraging effect of just how damaging you are. And that is because of materials and fuel and just the effort involved in doing anything to get out of this gravity well or move things around the gravity well of

the sun. It's enormous. The costs are really enormous. Yeah, I think maybe you'd put that into perspective. They had an asteroid return mission, went and grabbed some dirt. It was, I think, the Osiris Rex mission and returned it to Earth. And the cost, and this wasn't metal ore or pure platinum or anything, this was just dirt. And it worked out to about $132,000 an ounce. So to be ore or not to be ore, that is the question. And it's wrong and not just a little bit wrong. This is a belief that this is going to happen is a lot.

like a binary litmus test for understanding basic physics and innumeracy and belief in magical thinking. I mean, how many orders of magnitude would we have to somehow conjure up to get something from $130,000 an ounce to cheaper than we can still get it on the crappy ores that are still left on earth? So without naming specific names, but there's a lot of people in our. newsfeeds that are talking very confidently about this, just lumping them all together. And before we get into more details, because I have a ton of questions, why do you think this

disparity exists? I mean, you just said that this is not going to happen. It's orders of magnitude away from happening. What is it in our human brains that the two of you who are among the smartest people I've ever met, and I've met a lot, are really confident in what you're saying here that this isn't going to happen. And a lot of other people have the opposite view. Just can you speculate on what's, what's really from an aerial view looking down on our species? What do you think is happening? Yeah, it is really perplexing. I mean, because in our culture, the prospect of dismissing space

future is to be the outlier. And to me, it's insane. It's really, inverted. The real question is, as you're asking, how, basically, how can so many people be so gullible in this kind of fairy tale? And it's probably a lot of things going on at once. I mean, movies, entertainment, we really get saturated with visions. I mean, we've kind of lived it. We've seen it. We've, we've experienced it. We've lived and loved that world. Childhood fantasy plays a role. I think there's a lot of unexamined. extrapolation, that we've seen this crazy rocket ride that's literally become a rocket ride in some sense associated with this fossil fuel boom. It's a very anomalous period in history.

And so you can easily sort of extrapolate that trajectory. Maybe though it's a psychological antidote to an understanding of the finite of the carbon pulse, and instead of facing the downslip of the carbon pulse, we replace it with this story. And you might not even have to agree with it or understand it, but the fact that it's there kind of gives some sort of dopamine and hope. DJ, what do you think? Well, I mean, it's magical thinking. And we've always knew, we've got brains that are really tuned for magical thinking. We're even healthier if we have magical beliefs. And, you know, this is akin to believing that leprechauns fix your shoes every night.

You know, most such things are not harmful. But in this case, it's, well, let's use the R word. This is a religion now. And I think we could, if you want to, I can go more into that. But it's got it all. It's the new tech religion. I mean, we've got the prophets who are making prophets are now talking, talking about, you know, tech singularities where AIs are going to become gods that we control,

where we get immortality by uploading our souls in our robot bodies, where we expand the space and build, you know, encasing Dyson spheres around stars. And it's just nuts. And I think it goes back, flipping it back away from religion. One of the key things that people don't. understand is the concept that I've tried to push called energetic remoteness, which I think Tal, our aliens from Reality 101, wanted to call foa. But it's a basic concept that most people don't really get. It's related to entropy, but it's really what is beyond our thresholds of

possible possession with the energy of materials that we have. most things in the universe are. There's no actual limit effectively in the universe, how much stuff there is. There are huge energetic and complexity limits to what we can get and hold in our hands and process. And those thresholds are pretty extreme. Like there are oceans of methane on Titan.

Can we bring it back here and use it in trucks and burn it the way we do methane? No. single word answer, why not? Fua. Energetic remoteness, man. And it's, yeah, yeah, I am using this. We'll see if this word, if you don't cut it out,

we'll see if this word catches on. But it's energetic remoteness, modus doesn't work. And actually, if you take energetic remoteness, plus an understanding of aggregate probability of doing difficult things that each require on everything going right, you quickly come to the point of,

you know, you get back to Nate, you're what can happen, what won't happen, and what might happen. And this is, this is, Tom and I love space studies. I love the space telescope stuff and everything, but so much of what people now are believing with motivated beliefs is in a religious way

about stuff that is no more real than Cinderella's pumpkin carriage. So just to, clarify what you're saying is there's in the example of Titan there's enormous amount of hydrocarbons there methane but the the energy required to get it to where we could use it would dwarf the amount of energy that's there despite its size yeah and you could also call that stranded resources but i like fo i'm guessing that's fw u h yeah that's the way and uh there's actually a backstory where that term came from that

I won't divulge unless it's widely adopted, which I don't know it should. It needs a single syllable, you know. Aggregate probability needs a single syllable, too, but we'll tackle that at different times. We need a lot of words to have single syllables that are tethered to reality and relevant to our more than human predicament. For sure. If I could just pick up on some of that and say, you know, this kind of belief, this faith, part of that faith, I believe, is this unshakable faith in human greatness and ingenuity. So we're really proud of the things that we've accomplished and see no limits because we don't really, as a whole, understand how limits work. And so anytime somebody says

ingenuity is unlimited, it's a real biophysical ignorance. But I think we're also persuaded by empty metaphors about evolution, you know, crawling out of the water onto land and taking flight to the air, then humans take to space. It's an empty metaphor. That earth is a cradle. Empty metaphor, it's just a word. It's not, doesn't mean it's an actual cradle. The idea of new worlds and exploring and finding new continents or new planets, you know, continents are a lot different because they're connected by water that you can sail across while breathing the air and fishing, you know, for food and you're still part of the whole ecology or the final frontier. So these are empty metaphors that really fuel it undergirded by a complete ecological ignorance. And so I think

that allows these religions to flourish because if you don't understand ecological constraints, then, you know, your imagination can run off with all kinds of fun fantasies. But it's a little embarrassing for adults to continue holding these fantasies. And it'd be nice to see that spill broken, although I'll say that it doesn't matter whether we break the spell or not, because the universe will protest more loudly than either I or DJ or anybody else could. It's simply not going to happen. Guess what? So it's kind of sad to see the people really invested in this because there's no amount of emotional investment that will overcome the real limits. So adjacent but separate from space mining,

when we're talking about humans colonizing space, where exactly in space are we talking about? And can you describe some of the most popular ideas or what that might look like in a pro form of sense? Well, so the two that really come up most are moon and Mars. Moon, usually not very sexy. It's just sort of what you got to do before you can go do Mars, as it's somewhat understood.

But, you know, just to put things in perspective, we haven't had humans on the moon since 1972. It doesn't mean it will never happen again, but it was a stunt then, and it will be a stunt if it happens again. And the reason I say a stunt is because, you know, the proponents would say, no, these are baby steps. They're not stunts, they're baby steps.

Well, that depends on the ultimate future. If nothing ever develops, if we don't have space colonization, then they're not baby steps, they're just stunts. And so in my framing, all of these are stunts. So you've got the moon, which is pretty stupid because there's no air, no water, no food, huge thermal swings, radiation is really difficult.

But even then, you know, this is something that's super hard. The Apollo program spent 100 billion sorry, $1 billion per astronaut day of space time, of time and space. You know, the International Space Station is a thousand times cheaper than the moon, but that's still a million dollars a day. Like what's the most expensive place you've ever stayed? And it was in a million dollars a day. That's just to keep it supported with air and water all from Earth,

like expensive launches that are basically a million. umbilical cords that are deeply tying the international space station. That's not living in space. That's living with a straw that's sucking Earth resources, actually at quite an alarming rate. There has been no living in space. And Mars is 600 times further than the moon on average. And as hard as the moon is, that it's prevented us, the cost has prevented us from being there for, you know, over 50 years. Mars is 600 times farther and would be, you know, $100 million a day roughly.

It's cold. It's got a 95% CO2 atmosphere. We complain when ours is 400 parts per million. It's got a 950,000 part per million CO2 atmosphere. That's only less than a percent as dense as our atmosphere. So it's almost a vacuum. It's really like 99.4% vacuum compared to Earth atmosphere. Radiation, big deal.

Low gravity, big deal for bones and physiology. How so, the bones part, I don't understand that. Our physiology is really fully adapted to one-earth gravity. Any time astronauts, so astronauts who spend time on the space station and kind of effectively zero gravity. It's just a free fall. It's, I think 90% of Earth gravity is present, but you're just falling all the time,

so you feel weightless. Bone loss is a huge problem. Eye degeneration is a huge problem. So, you know, the shape of the eye changes. And so, you know, even though in the space station, they spend hours per day strapped to a treadmill, and that's no fun way to live, right? hours per day and it's still not enough.

When they get back to Earth, they can't walk. They, you know, they're immobile. It takes like six months or a year for them to sort of recover normal strength. So low gravity, we haven't spent much time in low gravity. It's either been kind of effectively no gravity or earth gravity. And no gravity is problematic that, you know, any betting person would put money on. Mars is going to be problematic physiologically. I mean, just our muscles and our bones are not going to adapt well.

But, yeah, the soil is toxic on Mars. But Matt Damon planned potatoes there. Yeah, and I'm sure that the actor Matt Damon was not eating Mars perchlorate-riddled potatoes or we wouldn't have a movie because he would have died. Yeah, that was pretty incredible. But we're going to science the shit out of it is kind of a popular. popular meme, it hits our hot buttons. On that, I'll just say, if you science the shit out of this, you don't go.

Full stop, you know, that's what science is for. That's what, you know, that's why you talk to guys like Tom. It's like, no, there isn't a path. I mean, I'm not a space scientist, but my expertise, such as it is, has been finding narrow paths to possible outcomes that others would think to be impossible. And that's given me, you know, a real appreciation, you know, in addition to it, just how thin a path you have to walk to have a successful space mission. You can't just screw around. You need things to be done very exactly.

You need to husband your propellant and you, you know, get your gravity assists and everything like that. And, yeah, and of course, Mars, Tom has really given even a short list. You'd have to be living in a cave. But the first thing you do when you get to Mars would probably dig a cave and hunker there hoping your pressure shoot doesn't fail to your blood boils and eating your perchlorate-filled potatoes while, you know, writing your memoirs because it's going to be a one-way trip. Any of the vessels that they're developing now, excuse me, you're not going to see any billionaires writing those. It's basically if they ever launch to Mars, and I don't think they will, but if they do, it's a suicide mission. And, you know, that's the way to bet. So there's a tendency when we discuss these things to fixate on the actual getting to space part of the story while we ignore basic prerequisites to these super complex operations.

So what are kind of the foundational issues with this line of thinking? Yeah, I've used this analogy recently that it's kind of like going to a, up to a 25-year-old and saying, hey, we have, we're holding a position for you open for chief neurosurgeon at this prestigious hospital. And we'll hold it for 10 years. And all you've got to do is prepare yourself for 10 years, by 10 years if you're ready for the job, it's yours for life. And it pays well. And so it's as if this guy, this 25-year-old, says, all right, well, what I need to do is work out what sweet, ride I'm going to use to commute and it can't be a normal vehicle. It's going to have to have maybe ion propulsion or, you know, it's going to be really amazing. And 10 years is short,

but this is amazing opportunity. I'm going to really commit to it. I think I can work out my commute in 10 years without what is, what is there a guy missing, the first bit of knowledge of what it means to be a neurosurgeon. I mean, so that's what it's like in this. sort of space fetishizing where the focus is on how we get there and not on the actual hard job of living there because that requires ecological, what's the opposite of ignorance? It requires you to know the first thing about ecology, and that's just not where the focus is. So there's a movement called effective altruism that's quite popular. And some of the logic, in these circles, is that anything we do right now,

we're in adolescence and the success of humans. Well, well into the future is we will eventually be starbound. And that maybe someone of that philosophy listening so far to this conversation might say, well, they have a point now, but humans are clever and we're going to innovate. and these things will get cheaper over time, and we have the ability to overcome these challenges over time. What would you say to that?

Yeah, I think this cuts down to the core of one of the big magical thinking, you know, things that are suffused in our culture now. And that's the bizarre assumptions of neoclassical economics, which are interwoven into these people who are the effective altrues, which is, you know, I think it's a good name that it'd be nice. It was attached to some, you know, more realistic ideas. But central to neoclassical economics is the power of human demand can create anything from nothing forever. If the price gets high enough. Yeah. Well, you have to probably, and why wouldn't the price get high enough?

if you've got price signals that you can create, you can even create your own gods. You can create your own robot bodies and mortality as long as humans demand it. And of course, you know, as you know here on this channel, no, it's about we've had like 500 million carbon slaves and we're cresting the peak sometime soon of the carbon pulse. And so the thing that allowed that magical thinking to be underpin, like, well, it seems like we could do magic. Well, no, that's not the case. You need to have possible courses of actions. And, you know, the last couple hundred years, it seems like we can do magic. But, you know, you can't.

And moreover, something that hasn't been mentioned yet, there's something called the Great Simplification coming. That is, human economies are... cresting a point that they're going to parallel the carbon pulse and the globalization is going to disaggregate and things are going to get simpler and it's going to feel kind of collapsey. And, you know, it's things like launching people into space. They don't rate very high when people can't keep their electricity on in the winter. Unless it's a bread and circuses sort of thing. Well, and it will be.

Yeah, I fully agree. I mean, the context here is going to change out from under our feet. And so all of this will seem very silly. But, you know, the fact is, you know, so the folks who believe that, yes, we're going to science the shit out of it or we're going to, you know, work our way towards this. We've got, you know, untapped innovation. The problem, just like our neurosurgeon example, we're not even working on the actual. challenge of living in space. And I think the reason is it's just too hard.

So failure is not as fun as stunts. And so we're focusing on the stunts and not on what's actually hard. So consider the fact that no one has made a closed environment that can even support a shrimp or a cockroach or something like that for more than a few years. And those are simple, you know, we're talking about nuclear Armageddon survivors here, right cockroaches, we always talk about surviving almost anything. Well, you can kill them really fast by trying to put them in a closed ecological system. They're going to be gone pretty quick.

We can't do that. It's not even on the radar. That's even in a room temperature environment with low radiation. I mean, you know, hundreds of times lower than in space, non-toxic environment, having all the resources available to us and a full biodiversity to choose for. from and we can't do that, that simple thing. Like, even for a decade or two, like, show me that for a cockroach. And maybe I'll be 0.2% of the way there to believing you can do it for a human.

But come on, don't be just absolutely ridiculous. They're not even working on the actual difficulty here because they're ecologically ignorant. And that's not on their radar. I think that kind of leads into the fact that we are, all space travelers now. We're on a great spaceship, which through luck and not our own doing is perfectly tuned to humans, or used to be, we're stripping it for parts. We are going during the course of this interview, we'll probably travel a million miles relative or more, relative to cosmic microwave background radiation farther certainly than any of the moon

missions that are coming up. We're on a spaceship and we need to adopt that kind of a a mentality. I think Carl Sagan used to say that. It's still true. You know, the pale blue dot. We're hanging out here in the midst of everything. We've got radiation shielding. We've got air. There is no single square inch of earth on top of the ocean, on the crust of the seabed, on Antarctica, and the tunneling in the glaciers of Greenland that is not a million times better to colonize than any other planet. in the solar system and cheaper. You can still order from Amazon at those places. I mean, it's, this becomes very surreal, very quickly.

And, you know, I could do an aside. It's, I become embarrassed for people who are working as professional scientists who believe all this magical stuff. You run into them and you mention, and you realize they're fully bought in to the Cinderella's pumpkin coach. And it's like, oh, geez, it's like, and there's no place for the conversation to go. So while I have you both, I want to make sure that we really answer the questions that I can imagine others might have. So Tom earlier, you gave a little bit of rundown on gravity and what that does to bones.

But again, let me ask this again in a different way. say we do get to humans, humans into space, whether it's 10 or a thousand or more, what are some of the other major biological and medical risks that humans would face traveling or living long term off of Earth? And how long would it take for those to manifest? You mentioned gravity. What else is there? Well, radiation is the big one.

So we're extremely well protected on Earth by a thick atmosphere above everything else, above, literally. The magnetosphere contributes a little bit, but it's mainly the thick atmosphere. That's about like 10 meters of water, okay, 30 feet of water. So that's kind of what we're living under, and that's a big shield.

That's a huge blanket. It's very important. So that on the surface of the earth, I'm going to give you some numbers to sort of put this all in context. Our typical radiation dose on Earth is two milliseverts per year. So I'm going to use this term of cvert,

And so two milliseverts, 2,000ths of a severt per year, that's from cosmic rays, that's from, you know, coming from space. That's from the ground, from, you know, radioactive materials in the ground and in the air like radon and the food that we eat. So there's no escaping it. You're going to have some low level of radiation. But on the International Space Station, it goes from 2 to somewhere like 150 to 250 depending on how puffed up the magnetosphere is. the time. So roughly an order of magnitude, two orders of magnitude, rather, increase, by the time you get to the moon surface or Mars surface, that's 300 per year. So we're talking about 150 times the background that we're used to. And if you're out away from a surface, because what happens

when you're on a surface like the moon or Mars, that big body shields half of your space. And you only have half space of exposure. But if you're out in space on, you know, travel for the half a year it takes to get there, or if you do an O'Neill type colony out of asteroids and rotating shells, you don't have that protection and it's 600 milliseconds per year. So it's double what you would have on the surface of a big body. And now that's, you know, 300 times what we're used to. I'll put that in context in a minute, but first I want to say that being in a spacecraft doesn't really shield you because the cosmic ray comes in or the high energy particle. Basically, these are bullets, you know, very high energy bullets that could damage DNA that can cause cancer and that kind of thing. These bullets will hit the spacecraft and make shrapnel and lots of other bullets that come in and hit you anyway.

So you have to have something like 10 meters worth of material or the equivalent 10 meters of water, something like that in order to have effective shielding. And so that's why caves, right? You'd have to be a caveman on Mars of the moon. And I'm sure that just sucks. I mean, how could that be living the good life? What does this mean? So 300 times the, or a few hundred times the radiation, but what does that translate to? Well, the definition of the sivert is that one severt of exposure increases your chance of lethal cancer by 5.5%.

Okay, so that's still somewhat modest. But what that means is that by the time you get seven severts, you've doubled your risk of cancer death from like 40% for all of us here on Earth to something like 80%. And that happens in 12 years in just sort of remote space or 25 years on a surface like the moon and Mars, which means that a lifetime living in space is basically guaranteed to end in cancer death, a premature cancer death. But I'm only, I'm kind of joking there because what really is going to get you asphyxiation, desiccation, starvation, decompression, bone loss, you know, but. cancer is also waiting there. So it's just a killer, killer, killer, killer in, you know,

coming at you from every direction. Don, I don't know what more you could add to that, but go ahead. I'll throw in the brain thing, which is that psychologically, you're talking about extreme isolation, extreme conditions, immobility, you know, suicidality, you know, you get people wanting to commit suicide in low earth orbit. If you're way the hell, where you're a couple days maybe away from splashing down. Once you, once there's no,

yeah, well, that's if you got one on the pad, but yeah. I mean, you can get back down. You can escape back down. They've got,

oh, that's right. So it's close. But you're, if you're, you know, halfway to Mars or something like that, there is no turning around. You're there and you're stuck with whatever situation.

There are no doctors, you know, if you need surgery, it's going to, and the thing is, you're going to need probably a lot of heroin and zip ties because some people are going to go bug nuts and want to vent the atmosphere

and you're going to need to medicate them and strap them to their thing and then live with them the rest of the time. Here's the thought I had while you were speaking, both of you. Well, firstly, I miss talking to you. There's so much craziness going on in the world right now with AI and war and all the things.

And I just miss talking to my Earth-Center systems ecology friends. But when you were talking, I have a PhD, not, I mean, not in either of your IQ quotient league, and this is a topic I don't know well, but I read science and I understand it, but even while you were speaking,

my reaction was based on all the movies I've seen in my life where this didn't happen. which is fantasy, of course, it's fiction. They're movies for entertainment, and yet that's built up in my system over decades. So that was my initial emotional reaction to your science-led explanation of this. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah, fascinating. It's very human. So some of the ideas for space colonization are based on the prospect of interstellar travel and what's called a generation ship. Can you explain, maybe Tom, start with you, what a generation ship is,

and what it would take to build one, and naturally I'll ask what our current energy and material resources would be anywhere near sufficient for such a project. Yeah, I kind of feel like I should start by describing in exquisite detail what Santa Claus's workshop on the North Pole looks like and how it works.

Because it is fantasy, and I'm not really into writing science fiction here, but, I mean, the idea is a ship where you're in some sort of stasis or can have, you know, generations of people, you know, for the long haul in space. And it's just so thoroughly absurd, again, completely ecologically ignorant. and based on this fallacy that we are somehow separable from Earth, we're really not, we're deeply embedded as a fruiting body, one of many fruiting bodies of the earth as our mushrooms and everything else. So, yeah, we can do these short-term stunts,

but I think when I think about generation ship now, I think about the Don't Lookup movie where, you know, this was the sort of ultimate solution for the elite to, had a backup plan. And I was really hoping that. So they did a fair job in that movie of showing failures, technological enthusiasm and hubris that just fell flat, right? Their attempt to divert or explode this asteroid.

So they could use the parts for, you know, valuable resources, mineral resources. But they had this. kind of generation ship or at least a stasis ship that went away. And I fully expected that one of the, you know, it was flying through all this debris from the earth. And I thought, okay, one of those things is going to hit it in like 20 seconds into its journey. It's dead. You know, that's, that's what I wanted to see. But it failed in a more humorous way, I will say. But yeah, none of this is, I mean, what device do you have that still works after even 25 years, right?

And so, and this is in a low radiation environment with environmentally, you know, decent temperatures and pressures and so forth. So it's pretty outlandish. You should be ashamed of yourself for even using the words generation ship. Not you, Nate, but anybody, you're wanting us to sort of shed light on this. And I'm saying it's an embarrassing thing to even talk about. Well, I know DJ has at least one piece of technology that still works after 25 years, his old green Honda that I've driven in.

Don, do you have anything to add to that? Oh, well, probably the best answer to generation ships is too much foe. It's like there's energetically materially, it's beyond the thresholds of what we will ever be able to possess or deploy. Because if you build something that huge with, you know, 10 meters or more radiation shielding, then you somehow got to boost it to if you don't want it to last forever to get to even nearest stars, you've got to boost it with just ungodly amounts of propellment. It would exhaust the entire resources of Earth to even get it going slowly. So here's the thing.

Every good science fiction book, and certainly I've read a lot of them, you need to fudge reality some way. And you could pretty much go down the list of, okay, how is reality fudged to make this storyline work at all? Because otherwise, you've got just depressing stories about people being diluted and dying in space and, you know, that's it. Yeah. So let's go there briefly because I know all three of us were big fans of Star Trek.

Don, in past years and decades, you and I often referenced in our books together. We referenced Star Trek. So science fiction writ large often invokes light speed or faster than light speed travel or these special fuel. to solve some of the issues that we've discussed. So can you briefly explain some of the concepts that are used in this way, like maybe from Star Trek warp drives or nuclear propulsion or dilithium crystals and talk about why these remain firmly in the realm of fiction? Yeah, well, first off,

dilythium crystals is what Alfred Hitchcock called them McGuffin. It's like a made-up thing to move a plot along. And in Star Trek, they actually didn't get energy out of dilithium crystals. They used it to channel flows of antimatter. Where'd they get the antimatter? They didn't say, and just as well, they didn't. Now, antimatter is a thing. We actually make it regularly for medical scans,

but lots of luck bottling up a bunch of it and carrying it around, much less having a giant magnetic bottle of it in space and then doing it for anything useful other than creating gamma rays. I actually did a survey. of physics professors, of physics graduate students and physics undergraduate students back in, I think, around 2012. And it's on the do-the-math blog. I think it's called futuristic physicists or something like that. And it was a survey. It was, you know, professors and graduate students from the top institutions in our country.

And open survey to them, so it wasn't selected. You know, it was just anybody who, was interested in taking this. And, you know, the results were kind of fascinating in the sense that you could see a progression from undergrad enthusiasm and optimism into, you know, a harder stance among the faculty so that, you know, basically you could forget things like warp drive, teleportation, wormhole travel, time travel, artificial gravity other than, say, rotating, you know, that's a cheap trick. but, you know, just sort of dead, forget about it. And then basically forget about, you know, food synthesizers or jet packs.

You know, I threw that one in as well. And there were a lot of sort of fun ideas. But even things like Mars colony and colonizing and terraforming were put out beyond 5,000 years by this cohort. So definitely not in our lifetimes. And even not within 500 years would we expect. to see a lunar colony or changing life expectancy to 200 years. And these are the experts saying this. These are the experts.

These are physicists, but not the ones working at the spatial exploration companies that are in the news. That's right. These are just kind of a random pool of physicists. And, you know, in 500 years, we all know that this place is going to look a lot different. We're not going to be doing fossil fuels. We're not going to have growth. based economies. Hopefully we'll still have a functioning biosphere. That is the only goal worth

focusing on, yes. Yeah, we're not, we're not going to probably have ambulances, air conditioners, or any of that basic stuff in 500 years either. We're going the other way. So, so Mars colonies, much less Mars terraforming, it's, it's just fairy stories. Yeah, that's home. So there are two overlapping yet distinct space travel ambitions that I've personally seen sending machines

to extract resources remotely and sending humans to live beyond Earth and what sort of relationship do these two camps have to one on another and why might each of them face their own unique barriers?

Yeah, I would say that I mean there's a night and day difference between those two in the sense that, I mean, obviously we do a lot of robotic probing of the solar system now in environments that humans can possibly imagine being. It tends to be, you know, orders of magnitude cheaper. I mean, we can send something to Mars for a few hundred million dollars, not a few hundred billion dollars. So it's a huge difference. And so you're not trying to do this impossible task of trying to recreate an ecology, which is something far beyond our means. And nobody's even thinking or working on that. We can't even understand the ecology that is that we're

born into because it's too complex for our meat brains, as I call them. And so, yeah, I think there's some absolute difference in those two modes. But then the question becomes what is the underlying motivation of those activities, because they still are very expensive, very materials heavy, and, you know, to what end? What is the, what is the end goal? I mean, I've benefited tremendously from all of the knowledge that we've gained, but I've only benefited in some sort of intellectual sense, it's actually hurt me more than it's helped me because it has contributed to the overall, you know, lead up and initiation of a six mass extinction. And so you can't separate these things and say, oh, well, let's have only the good parts that we like and just get rid of the bad

parts that are causing things like extinctions. It's all of a piece. And so, in the net balance would I rather have a healthy ecology or or sharp pictures of Jupiter's cloud belts? It should be a no-brainer. And again, you can't, well, you can separate those in your head, but that's just your meat brain. And reality, how do you carry out one without perpetrating the other? Nobody's demonstrated anything like that kind of. separable capability. And so I get at the space exploration, the robotic side of it, but to what end and at what cost, ultimate cost?

Yeah, I'll have to say I love the kind of images we're getting back from the James Webb Space Telescope. I think that that is an example of how non-human machines can do wonderful things to help us answer profound questions about the universe and stuff like what's out there. I love that. I love that. That's the best uses of my taxes ever. Whereas the human missions are a stunt, you know, in the past, those stunts may have, you know, it's better than having a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Let's race to the moon. But it's stunts. And it's very expensive stunts. And there's no actual reason for it. There's, I don't know a moon mission. I mean, the reflecting things that Tom has bounced lasers off of, those were cool. But they're there. A few more of them could be landed without humans, but we're not going to be mining helium-3. We don't even have fusion reactors that will burn helium-3 yet, and we're not going to, we're not going to have robotic factory crawlers that scrape off hundreds of square miles of the top rail and then separate the helium isotopes.

That's just bonkers. So, you know, they're stunts. And I say this as a guy who loved that and who understands it and who was, you know, back when I was college age and nobody really knew this stuff, I was into O'Neill colonies. Yeah, on the stunt thing, I just wanted to point out that, and this ties back to something that we were saying before, that, you know, look at the, there's a common theme that we're natural explorers, right, that this is part of just humans being explorers, and we can't, we can't stop that element about us. And so, but think about the fact that all the places

that Jacques Cousteau explored or Sir Edmund Hillary climbed, not a single person lives there. Right? Those are not, we don't connect those in our heads that to explore is to colonize. I mean, yes, it did happen in some cases. But maybe it's just the dopamine we did it because we can

and now what is next? It's some flaw in our wiring. Yeah, it is. Yeah, and getting back to the question of the profundity, you know, what's profound about doing that of sending a person off towards Mars or circling the moon with a flush toilet or anything like that? I suppose the ultimate would be finding fossil bacteria on Mars or something like that because then we would know something about life in the cosmos. And I think that's not that profound compared to other stuff that we have. we can focus on. There probably is micro fossils of bacteria on Mars just from splashing in the early universe. Venus probably had, you know, if we could ever get there, which we won't, because it's

too hot and high pressure, there's probably micro fossils of bacteria on there, too. Maybe fish fossils for all I know. It lasted a long time before it cooked. But what's real profundity, and I think maybe is the kind of thing that had Arthur Clark writing about space elevators while funding my work, is that we are on a planet and we share it with alien minds. There are brains four times the size of ours singing songs to each other under the ice now. And we've turned them into dog food and they're looking to go extinct. I've had dolphin, I've introduced dolphins to computers. to learning computers. And you know how long, these are animals that are, you know,

don't have a common ancestor with us for 60 to 80 million years at least. And yet, you give them the opportunity to use a computer and learn it, and they learned as fast as the kid does. It's essentially immediate. So they are brains that will do what our brains will. They're just a non-technological species. So we're murdering them. It's like, I would suggest to everyone,

who thinks space is exciting, realize we're on a spaceship, and there are aliens here we can talk to. I've known them. I've hugged them. I've loved them. They are here. I've also been exposed to the horrible massacres and actually trying to save conscious species that are now extinct.

Well, at least one that's now extinct, the Baiji in China. We had them there. We tried to get funding to keep them alive, and nobody gave a shit. that's the huge disconnect for me. Because to me, the profundity of life and the big bang, the start of everything, and what else is there out there, all the real profound stuff is here. On the spaceship we're on. And the beautiful diversity of stuff that we're wiping out as we stripped a spaceship for parts.

It's like, yeah, I know I'm autistic. It's like maybe I'm missing. what normal people can see. But, I mean, folks, we're wiping out all the other conscious species we know of in the universe with brains larger than ours and their equivalent of language

and brains that in their own way process far better than ours do. And not only are they singing songs, they're telling stories. Oh, absolutely are. You give some dolphins who can't see each other a telephone and they will immediately use it and adopt the limitations of the foam without talking over

each other back and forth and exchange information just because they can. In other words, I'm sure a gorilla could learn to use a microwave oven, and I'm sure the average human would be no more likely to be able to build a microwave oven from scratch than a gorilla would. You know, it's, we're in an amazing. place and we're killing off. I mean, I would have rather been a comedy writer, frankly. I didn't want to do this kind of eco-hero Jedi crap until I'm 75, but ethically, once you realize that you're sharing the planet with these other species and wiping them out, what else is there to choose? I've never seen

why anybody felt if there was any other thing to do. I want to get back to the space, because I have a few more questions, but on your logical science-tethered spiritual appeal there, Don, why isn't something like that the religion that we go towards instead of trying to science the shit out of it on Mars and colonize outer space in an effective altruism long-term story? It seems like we evolved as part of the web of life and the story that, you shared just now and you've shared a lot of other stories with me over the years about your cetacean friends and maybe we have a dedicated episode where you can tell some of those stories without me interrupting some time but what that resonates with me and I would think a lot of people listening to this show why haven't we gone in that direction with our religions and

fanaticism and beliefs I would say and Tommy have something to say on this too but It's because we tend to measure things that we're good at. It's like I've had people walk up to them and say, well, if dolphins are intelligent, why don't they build skyscrapers? It's like, what? It's like, well, if whales are intelligence, why haven't they conquered space? And it's like total disconnect. And we tend to measure others on things that we think we're good at. And like, then, you know, not that this is about AI, but AI is part of the tech singularity.

And now we think that, oh, well, we're smarter than anybody else. Therefore, if we build machines that are a million times as good as we are, then they will give us miracles and we'll have miracles. And that's very much not necessarily so at all. But we love believing the magic. We lack it of magic. And we, nobody tries given, uh, Nobody tries giving IQ test. Nobody had even tested non-primates for self-awareness by human criteria until I did it.

In a lab that I made out of my back pocket and put together, I'm a four-year geophysics student. Why should that guy be the guy that first demonstrates self-aware consciousness by human standards outside primate lineage? It shouldn't be. Because he did. Science needs to change its priorities and get its head out of its goddamn ass. Well, riffing a bit on, you know, if they're that smart, why? So if dolphins, whales, chimps, whatever, we're smart, as smart as we are, why haven't they initiated a six mass extinction? So, I mean, that's the other side of the coin of all the things that we're proud of, of the skyscrapers.

and so why should we be proud of something that's really part of the most devastating story that the planet has seen since an impact 66 million years ago? But I think that, you know, the core of it and the kind of religious angle that I imagine is, you know, the religion that was prevalent on this planet among humans for 99% of the time humans have been on the planet is an animistic kind of religion. And it's not really a religion. It's just sort of almost a metaphysics belief system about the nature of the world. And, you know, the thing that the whales have done and the dolphins have done that we recently

haven't is lived ecologically sound lives embedded in a community of life. That's no small feat. That's something that I think we. should be proud of and ourselves, but we're not doing that. And for the last 10,000 years, we've been on this track away from that animistic past, and a large part of it is exercising control and mastery over the world, believing ourselves to be separate from it. And then we need a God. We need religions that reinforce that sense of, uh, supremacy and separateness. And so I do think it's very much tied in to our religions that we

have this faith that we can solve any problem, that Earth is ours to do with as we want. We have this destiny to do that and a destiny in space and that this is a logical step in evolution. And none of that is demonstrically true. All of that is mythology. And all of it's dangerous. And all of it's causing a huge problem. So I think that this space religion is really very much a part of that same religious foundation of we are special. We can do whatever the hell we want. And we're in control. And that's all delusion.

Yeah. And I want to point out what could be an upside to this. Because I think a lot of people have looked at humans and the threshold of nuclear war and stuff and wondering, and Drake Equation, things like that, I'm wondering, is advanced intelligence inherently self-destructive in this universe? And not only have many animals, including dozens of species of cetaceans, developed cerebral cortices advanced that are larger than our own, they've had them for many millions of years longer, so no, advanced intelligence is not inherently self-destructive. That alone is profound.

It's the crap we're doing that's inherently self-destructive, and that has to do with magical thinking and getting our little dopamine and our tribal, you know, stimulations going on. It's we can have an Earth trek. One of the other things I've introduced is Naya, the trillionth human child. I've named her.

Nobody else has even thought about her. There could easily, should be at least a human, a trillion human childhoods on planet Earth. It's been roughly 100 billion so far. There will not be the way we're going. She's in the same basket as my friends, the dolphins, and the whales and, of course, the elephants and everything else. Even if you're totally human-focused, a humanitarian,

you need to look at not breaking the planet because we are taking it away from the planet. involved on in the little slice of Holocene that gave us a boost. And we're turning it into something else that we've never survived in. Intelligence is not inherently self-destructive. Humans acting the way we are now are inherently self-destructive. So at some point, almost every conversation about expansion and growth of the human enterprise rums into the same wall.

There's only so much energy and stuff for us to use. in the universe and we can't create something out of nothing. So some voices, some prominent voices claim that human ingenuity and technology and the markets can break down that wall. So what do you think will happen when humanity finally hits biophysical limits that we can't overcome? That's it. It happens all the time that we hit biophysical limits.

that we can't overcome. I mean, look, we all sleep. Why the hell do we suffer that biophysical limit? Why do we have to go poop? You know, like, what an annoying biophysical limit. We have to eat. God damn it. You know, so we are creatures and we are biophysical limited machines. Some people really object to that word machines, but we are made of atoms. So, you know, we have limits all the time. And even economically, there are things that we started to do at one point and then just failed to continue because they were not possible. I mean, supersonic commercial flight, you know, just fell into the dustbin. And it wasn't. So the trajectory is not always this sort of march.

And in fact, I like to play this little game of take somebody from 1900 and drop them into 1960 all of a sudden. And then take somebody from 1960 and drop them into 2020 pre-COVID, let's say. And which one is more baffled, more bewildered, more, you know, confused about the world they see? Most people that you ask will say, well, obviously the later one. And that's the mythology speaking. That is our programming that says that. But if you really spend a few minutes on this problem, you realize that the earlier person from 1900 dropped in 1960 won't have ever seen a freeway, a rocket, a satellite, a television, a radio, an airplane, like appliances in the kitchen and in the home. And computers and calculators and just like most of it, you know, are just magic.

whereas the person from 1960 dropped into 2020 will recognize almost everything they see. And even the stupid rectangle you hold to your head, they'll say, oh, yeah, that's a phone, and it must be radio communication. It's not magic. And so, you know, they basically got it. So we've seen a lot of kind of embellishment

and sort of better resolution and higher quality and that kind of development. But the fundamentals were not on this absolute tear that just continues to accelerate. That's not the life that I've seen where very few transformative inventions. I mean, I'm not saying zero, but way fewer than, you know,

my great-grandfather experienced, have transpired. So I think that, you know, we're hitting limits already. We're not able to do everything that our dreams wish us to be able to do, and that's always going to be true, and I think it's going to get even more profoundly obvious. Yeah, my grandfather grew up with horse and buggy, and he ended up

jet hopping on jets around the world. I mean, he saw a lot of changes, and I learned, I was learning new tech stuff from him. He was totally with it. There's this great wall of foie that is coming, or you could say it's receding horizons. And, We are cresting the carbon pulse, you know, who pick a year. It's not 100 years from now, you know, it's fairly soon. And then a lot of things are going to go down with it, the complexity we can maintain, the number of humans that can be alive. But there could be a much smaller number of humans and an increase in complexity

based on some of the tech feudalism and AI stories. It's not explicitly stated, but there is an implicit assumption. So let me build on that by asking some of the space expansion advocates argue that branching beyond Earth is about preserving life itself. But when people talk about safeguarding life through technological expansion into space, what do you think they're really trying to preserve? Like, I don't think all biological life, is it human civilization or a particular narrative about progress or a particular subset of humans? What's going on there? It's startups. There's money to be made in startups from credulous people.

What is it that's driving it? It's a number of things, and it's different for different people. I think there is this awareness of an existential problem and that, you know, things might go. poorly on the earth and are going poorly in some sense. And this idea of having this arc, you know, that can preserve humanity. I get that impulse, but that's just into this impossible realm, that we don't know how to even make a little glass ball of shrimp that can live, you know, let alone how to keep humans as an arc that's just completely out of like 15 or 18 or 25 orders of

magnitude beyond, you know, what we're capable of doing other than saying the words about it. So we can, you know, write some words on it, but we can't actually do much in that regard. So, but it is this sort of myth of progress. It's what we're proud of, but cherry picking what we don't understand what the consequences are of those things that we're proud of. And so I'm not sure we should be proud of the things that many people are. I'll just note that mentioned any names that the leading billionaire proponent of this has explicitly said, fuck Earth. That is true. And the entire idea that, oh, well, if there is humans wildly reproducing on some other planet, then we're a multi-planet species entirely ecologically blind.

And I get back to, you know, Joseph Smith and reading, with the magic goggles into the, you know, when the religion, it's like, oh, yeah, and I need to impregnate a lot of women and my sperm is available. And that's the way this is going. It's people able to enrich themselves. I think, Nate, you once called the tragedy of the energy investing commons that you, any string of words, because people, most people, not me, most people think in strings of words. And strings of words that sound good, well, you can do a startup. And even if it fails, you're still rich. So, I mean, that's, I think, very much the dynamic that's driving this as opposed to any

actual desire for deep time survival of Earth species or human species. You know, it's con-autists will be con artists. Yeah, and I'd like to also touch on this idea that, well, couldn't Earth be, you know, have a much smaller human population, but high-tech, you know. And the question that I would have is, how do you, propose a glide path to that because as soon as you have a decline in population, markets fail because growth isn't really happening. And services fail and institutions fail and supply chains fail.

And I actually build as a side thing, I invented an airplane detector as part of my, you know, laser ranging job so it didn't hit airplanes. and it caught on and it's been successful. And so I occasionally build these guys. And after the supply chain disruptions from COVID, it was really hard, really hard to build a successful unit. A third of the parts that I needed were really just hard to find out of, you know, a list of over 100 parts.

And it really made me work. And that was a baby thing. That was, you know, a hiccup. So I don't know how you. maintain the complexity through the transition that series? That goes beyond the topic and complexity of this, but maybe you come back, Tom,

and we talk about that because I think with endicind disrupting chemicals and the demographic changes where two-thirds of the countries in the world are below replacement rate on their total fertility, it is an issue in how those things snowball and fit together.

but that's a different topic. So for those listening watching this, who are maybe Don like you were when you were in your 20s enthused by the idea of space exploration and even going to space themselves, listening to this conversation, where would you ask them to point their excitement and passion towards instead,

given all of the constraints that you've outlined on that endeavor. I'd say keep the passions, keep the ideals, but grounded in reality. Grounded in reality. Realized there's some stuff that's simply not going to happen. And, you know, if you want to have a fun religion, have a fun religion, there's lots of them to choose from. But if you want to actually do something real in the world, this is the spaceship we're on, pick a species. There's a bunch of them going to go extinct. You know, I pick several and I've kept them from the brink. There are so many things you can do.

Also, contact me if you want to, you know. Nate's got a pretty good audience now, but there's not going to be tens of thousands of you who, there will be tens of thousands who the hell are these guys to say we're not going to Mars. That's going to happen in the comments probably, I would imagine. And I'll take it. You send me those two. But, you know, ask me, there are things to you.

you can redirect it. You can try and step outside the conversations that suffuse all around you, the people you know and the things that you automatically agree with, to step outside that a little bit, see what's in the blind spots, see the really important and profound things that are right there and that you might wind up being the only earth advocate for, the only being with agency over some really important thing. And you can do that. I don't see it happening a lot.

Humans move as groups. And unfortunately, I don't see that happening. I have to say that the environmental movement has failed by any reasonable measure. I don't even call it. I haven't called myself an environmentalist in a long time. I'm an eco-interventionist or whatever you want to say because even the word environmentalist implies that it's here for us to use up. It's the human environment. Whereas what I started doing was an ecology movement in which humans are one bit of a big, beautiful overall balanced thing.

So try and build a new ecology movement. And the wonderful level of expertise and brilliance that people with physics degrees and stuff who want to go into space, think about the fact you're already in space, and, you know, let's keep us there. Let's extend the human story and let's extend the story of the only other non-human minds we will ever meet. Well, I've gone through this journey myself, I would say, in that I started out a space enthusiast and wholly bought in. It was exciting.

And what I experience now is maybe even more exciting in that I love. I like to think about what could we as humans be on this planet. I don't buy into the idea that we're just bad news because for most of the time on this planet, we weren't bad news. And that doesn't mean we have to live the way that we lived for that 99% of the time. But there are wise lessons there that we might explore. And so rather than trying to master this, Earth that we live on, which is a failing prospect anyway. We just don't have the brains for it.

Anything that we invent in our brains, we have to suspect compared to things that are biologically, ecologically, evolutionarily invented. Those are far more robust. I mean, we can't, using our brains, you get the best experts in the world and give them, you know, computer resources even, and ask them to design a novel protein that you, You can't find a template for in life, so you can't copy what has been evolved, a novel protein to do some novel task like, I don't know, bring an aluminum atom in through the cell membrane or some task, you know, forget it. We don't have the capability of doing even that. That's just one protein out of tens of thousands in a living organism that interact with each other, the proteins to form a, you know, complex dense. and those proteins in those organisms interact with millions of other species and all of their funny little quirks.

And it's all been vetted to work together. That's far beyond anything that we can invent. And so let's get excited about how do we live within that amazing community of life. Look into things like animism, belief systems that might better to living in as part of, of a world. There's a lot of awe and excitement and just amazingness out there to be really enthusiastic about. And so I would say drop the skyscrapers on Mars stupidity and think about where we can't possibly create an ecology. We've got an ecology here and it's incredible and we're lucky to be a part of it. So that's where I would try to find some excitement. My friends, this has been eye-opening and

informative and rewarding, actually, for me. Thank you both for your continued vigilance about highlighting reality and dispelling fantasy, because I think that is one of the baby steps towards better futures than the default. Don, I'm going to give you the closing word, my old friend and co-writer of three books. What closing thoughts do you have for the viewers of this episode? Well, remember foie. But in addition to that, oh, it's important.

And it's something that we don't talk about enough. But I'll just say, I've stood in the surf with my arms around a young humpback whale, which was unfortunately dying, and in contact with it, heard its young cries in singing with quite complex, did my best to do it back, give it comfort,

as, you know, and not to get into it, but I found it to be a profound thing. This thing, it had not been born that long before it had a larger brain than mine. It was going to die, and it was a cosmic moment.

thing. If those noises we detected, say, coming from, we thought that those noises were on Europa, there would be a trillion dollar project. Let's build an Orion nuclear rocket to get us to Europa and see what this thing has to say. But instead, our history has been, we've turned these things into corset stays and dog food and oil for intercontinental ballistic missile. and they're mostly gone now. At least a lot of species are mostly gone now. It's, there's so much. All that we hope to find in space is here, still a lot of it.

And, you know, maybe people, maybe so far gone now, you can't be friends with a dolphin for a long time like it was. Maybe you don't get to hug a whale. But that's not necessary. It's just open your mind to the blind spots that are out there. find something that you personally think is sacred and save that sacred thing. And you can do it.

You don't have to be, I'm not particularly smart. I barely graduate. I was in slow classes when I was in grade school. I barely graduated high school. You don't need to be particularly smart. You just need to be usefully different. And you need to have a sense of something sacred and not just that everybody else says is sacred,

but is sacred to you. When you're in your inner self, you don't even need to tell anybody else what it is. But have a sacred thing that has meaning to you that when you get to be my age, you can look back and go, well, you know, that was quite a life and I didn't blow it. You know, I actually tried to do something that had meaning for me. Yeah, even before Don mentioned giving comfort and talking to this young whale who's dying, I'd already thought, you know, if I wanted to give any advice, I would say talk to animals. I mean, go outside and plants and find them and appreciate what's genius about each one.

Each one can do something that you can't do, know something that you don't know, lots of things that you don't know. Find that genius, be inspired and open up to talk to them as equals. And I think that can hugely heal this kind of human supremacy that we've assumed upon ourselves. and just be a part of it, not separate from it, not above it, but within it. Amen. Thank you both. I really appreciate you both. And it's great to be on this traveling spaceship, this blue-green earth at the same time as both of you.

To be continued, my friends. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit the great simplification.com for references and share. show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe to our Substack Newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann, Julia Maxwell, Gabriella Sleman, and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.