The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Mars Survival with Richard Anderson

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Listeners will have the ability to get 20% off Fisher Space Pens from February 24-28 using the code PREPPERS when checking out.Richard's Books https://amzn.to/3Qwk5Oj

You're listening to... to pay the end. You're paying back the stability here. Good evening, PBN family. Welcome in. As previously mentioned, we are here tonight, Mars slash space survival with Richard Anderson. I briefed you guys, I don't know, probably for like two weeks now. I'm pretty excited. I think it's going to be an awesome show and we're going to get into all, all the kind of nitty gritty with, well, I let him give you his background because, well, he's the man for the job. It's kind of like I said, he's the man for the job before we get him on though. I want to give a shout out to the sponsor of tonight's show. We have, we've got really cool opportunities. Kind of like I said, he's the man for the job before we get him on though. I want to give a shout out to the sponsor of tonight's show.

We have, uh, we've got a really cool opportunity, man. Like when I found out Richard was going to be on, I was actually going through this shot show manual, right? Shot show manual is a secret weapon. Uh, I don't want to get into it, but I was going through the shot show manual and I shot saw the Fisher space pen and I said on a whim. I'm gonna reach out to the folks at Fisher and see if they'd be interested in

sponsoring the show and They were 100% interested in sponsoring tonight's show. So they are the official sponsor of tonight's show Creators of the original design that that was on you know, that was used by astronauts in I think it was in 1979, I'm sorry 1967 right and this thing does you know like the preppers like the write in the rain pen you know the writing everybody out there probably goes yeah right in the rain tablet right in the rain pen Fisher's wild the Fisher's space pen, right it it writes I'm gonna go through the list. Okay, it writes upside down at any angle underwater through Greece from extreme temperatures ranging from negative 30 degrees to 250 degrees and almost any surface, three times longer than

the average pen and of course in the gravity free vacuum of space. And they've got some awesome designs, man. They have some awesome, they've got a lot of pens, a lot of pens. If you go to Spacepen.com, Spacepen pen comm to check out what they have to offer and Use the promo code preppers from the 24th to the 28th. You'll get 20% off your order Okay, so check them out. Like I said guys are very familiar with the with the right and the rain pen. This is kind of like the next level born 1967 you know work through space, work through NASA. It's

the pen. We'll talk about it a little later in the show as well. But remember, use the promo code PREPPERS if you order a Fisher Space Pen. It's probably as cool a prep as it is a gift, really, if you have somebody who loves space. But without further ado, let's get our man on here. Let's get Richard Anderson on here, and let's talk space survival, something we rarely get to talk about. Richard, how are you doing, sir? Thanks for joining us tonight, man.

Oh, I'm glad to be here, and I'm doing great. I like seeing you got the last vestiges of daylight behind you you I see Yeah, I usually turn my computer to face the Book cases, but yeah, we're still daylight a little bit. It's nice looks good back there. So you Before we get into sort of the deep space talk I think it would probably be helpful if you let everybody know how you wind up on this show amongst doing many other things in your life and writing books on the topic, both fiction and nonfiction of mankind and space travel. So can you give us a rundown of how Richard became Richard? Yeah, I started out in a clinical laboratory as a

microbiologist and to mention the space pen I had one I used it back in the 70s. It was before computers were available in science, you know, in the labs and stuff. So it was a Fisher. We had to handwrite everything and so this available in science, you know, in the pressurize the ink. That's why you could write upside down. If you were eating your lunch in the micro lab, which in those days, believe it or not, sometimes did, which is very dangerous. But anyway, you get a little butter on your work, you could write right through it. Was this it? Yeah, that was it.

This is the original right here. Oh, it's got like beveled down there at the end. I didn't realize that Yeah, NASA spent a lot of money developing that How cool man? What if what a thing that you had one? That's yeah, I wish I had it now. I don't know what happened to it, but that was a long time ago Pretty cool, man. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I got so much has come out of space program You know what I mean? So many technologies have come out of the space program. That's why we saw it with the miniaturization of electronics Yeah

followed in that space program and one of the things that impressed me at the time and continues to is the the moon program The Apollo program the whole space program with NASA. It was the greatest assemblage of scientists and engineers working toward one goal that in my view had ever ever happened. And so they produced a lot. They had a lot of talent produced a lot. They had a lot of talent there. And it was really a small part of our national budget. Space is like one of the only things that gets done what, well, it gets war-like technology advancements done without the war. You know what I mean? War is responsible for so much. Advances in technology without having to fight.

Without a bunch of people having to get blown up. Yeah. I never really thought about that until now. So microbiology was the beginning, the Fisher Space Pen. And what from there? So I worked as a as a clinical lab director for many many years for private reference laboratories for hospital laboratories and multiple ones around till I finally retired but I always had an interest in in in space and satellites and space travel and rockets. And so in my office, I would always have posters and pictures and models and stuff floating around. And in fact, my first office, I had wallpaper.

You remember the photograph, the famous Earthrise photograph? In fact, it's in my book. It's like a lunar picture kind of thing. Yeah, it's from the surface of the moon. And then the Earth is rising up over the horizon. So I had a wallpaper, a full wall of Earthrise. And so it was behind my desk. Well, actually, it was behind a work table.

But anyway, so I could look up from my work and daydream a little bit, you know, and then other people in the lab eventually would come in and hang little Star Trek enterprises up there. Different, you know, so this has been an interest of mine for a long time are you big Star Trek fan yeah Star Trek Star Wars and but I but I also like hard science fiction science fiction that that extrapolated on that it was science plausible I see yeah yeah we mean I look at all science fiction that way

Especially the old stuff the old stuff's almost always right. Well, I'm not always right but Is is surprisingly accurate right on the money we missed the boat but So that was a an ongoing. And like I say, when COVID hit and I went into lockdown, I got serious about writing. So that's when I wrote my non-fiction book, Science. And I had the time to do the research, refresh my knowledge that was Kind of rusty updated. Yeah, and in this book you follow humanity from well Is what is it the 15 billion year history right that I get that right? Yeah

148 15 billion 13.8. They have various dates out there. They're tossing around I guess 13.8 billion They have various dates out there. They're tossing around. I guess 13.8 billion is the most accepted term. But anyway, it's a long time ago. So I start with the big bang in how energy evolved into matter because you need matter, you need the elements before you're going to get to molecules, you know, you're going to get you're gonna get to molecules, you know, you're gonna get to life. And so we take that that journey all the way forward to humans and then and I just hit high points in the book. Not a lot to talk about through that first however many billion years, right? Yeah. So you

get the single-celled organism, or at least planets. You don't try to fill in, but you try to hit an event that was significant, and just to give the background of how the universe evolved. So it goes into the biology, the formation of our brain, and how that works, very briefly how it works. I mean, why the human brain or how the human brain is different from other primates and other animals. What's your take on that? That's always such a cool topic to me. We have the breaks, you know brakes to the reptilian brain.

The reptilian brain will... Ah, the brakes. I like that. That's a good way to put it. We have the brakes. So we may have the impulse to ram that car in traffic. And then as we come to our senses, we go, wait a minute, there's some consequences there. My insurance rates, I couldn't get hurt, it could be soon. All of that.

That's an interesting way to put it. What about the growth? Do you mention that at all? That's one of those things that everybody has their, you know, how the brain grew so much so quickly for humans and no other species. You know, it involves some mutations and it involves some of them were concurrent that supported the brain's growth. One of the critical mutations was a delay, was a control mechanism in bone development, particularly of the skull. So there was a mutation that delayed the bone development of the human skull so that when a baby is born, the sutures in the skull are not formed so the head can deform as

it goes through the birth canal, which allows you to give birth to a larger brain baby. And if you look at chimpanzees and if you look at any of the other primates, they're more developed as they're born, when they're born. They're more capable, their head is fully formed. Oh, so only humans have those fissures that seal up after? Oh, I never considered that. It allows the brain after birth, it allows the brain to continue to grow because the skull is expanding. So the other problem is the skull takes or the

brain takes about 20% of our caloric intake. Right. So it takes about a fifth of the calories we eat and early you know primates, well the big in mammals in general the big problem in existence is getting enough food All the time doing that so the invention of fire or the discovery of fire allowed us to Allow human early humans to cook food which released more more calories. So if you cook Asparagus for example if it's cooked and softened up, you can enjoy more calories from that stock of asparagus than if you try to eat it raw. So it breaks down a lot of the fiber and age and digestion.

So fire was an important thing. And then of course agriculture. And then we evolved intelligence or we kept evolving intelligence and that allowed for weapons, bow and arrow, spears and things like that for hunting to also aid in our food, acquiring food. So it was all a, well you would say it's a coordinated effort, but it was all a core, well, you would say it's a coordinated effort, but it was all things that happened close in time that supported the overall development of humans. Our use of tools is because we have binary vision and we have an opposing thumb.

Yeah, the thumb, man, the thumbs gives us all the power. That's it. Now we use it for this motion primarily. Flick of the iPhone screen. Yeah. And it's been devalued to that. My granddaughter is, she's an engineering student in a local university here, a freshman. And yeah, she's very adept with her thumbs Texting I can't get the right key Yeah, it is an art form. I don't know I'm not nearly as good as it is. I should be for all that I do

But but we can't talk about human evolution unless we start talking about developmental societies because that's where of evolution unless we start talking about developmental societies because that's where you know once we left the familial group once we went left the tribe where we were related to everybody and knew everybody and went out into a greater society that's when problems evolved. When we started agriculture, we started accruing wealth in the food stores that were produced. So all of a sudden now you have something that someone else might want. You have to build your silos, you have to build your walled towns and so forth. You have to build your walled towns and so forth. So the book goes through development of religion as various religions, many religions, as a cohesive source for society.

Most of the religions originated around a king, a monarch, he was a good PR guy and they could, or a woman, and could project themselves as a god. Yeah, what is that, divine, what is it? That's how they kept the throne. It was divine intervention, is that what it was? No. It was divine, not intervention, but... Yeah, I can't think of the word either appointed God

said I'm king so I'm king basically chosen by God whatever with whatever the God was so as late as World War two you had the Emperor of Japan who the people believed was a God yeah which is kind of amazing. Kind of. Yeah, that is definitely amazing. So those development of religions and there's probably about 200 plus organized recognized religions around the world. Many more but I'm saying the major. Yeah. Probably around 200. They played a big role in the development of societies. They played a big role in warfare and a lot of very cruel things. If you don't believe what I believe then we have to get rid of it.

Off with heads. Yeah, sure. Definitely. What are your thoughts about the similarities, Rich, of a lot of the major holy texts? There's a lot of really weird similarities, you know, like things coming from the sky, things, you know what I mean? Like there's a lot of stories in the Big Three in particular that kind of seem to be the same and they come from different parts of the world. That's pretty interesting to me. Yeah, there's a...it's not, in my mind, it's not too surprising. You had three philosophers that lived around the same time and were very far apart.

Okay, Socrates. Yeah. You had, in Greece, you had, you had Buddha or I forget his real name in Asia. And now who the heck was the third one? I knew I was gonna forget. But anyway, there were three philosophers around the time of Socrates and Buddha that when you look at their works, when you look at what they discussed and what they proposed, they were all very similar in how these work. And a lot of the religions pick up

and have those same goals as cooperation, support your, altruism is a factor. But there's a dark side, and that is whenever you have a belief system, there are fanatics on one end or the other who are going to take it where it was never intended to go. Sure. That's the history of mankind. After a certain point, right? That's exactly right. So if we enter space, there's a number of problems. If we go to Mars or we live in these giant O'Neill cylinders. Dr. O'Neill was a physicist in the 70s and he envisioned these large cylinders that would rotate and you would live on the

inner edge and you would rotate the cylinder to create a standard gravity. You walk around on the inside of this and you would... Something that stays in orbit? It would be in orbit around the Earth, around the Moon, around the Sun. It could be anywhere. As long as it was close enough, it would get its energy from the Sun. Solar waves and so forth. I've never heard of O'Neill's cylinder before. That's pretty cool. So in the film, or Arthur Seaquaq's book, or the film, 2001, which was an eye-opener at the time, it was the most dramatic science fiction movie made to that point in my view.

They showed the double wheel space station that was orbiting the Earth and it was rotating to create a gravity. And O'Neill proposed those, but he also proposed this large cylinder which would have a huge open space. They would be maybe 20 kilometers long and 2 kilometers in diameter. So you're talking pretty large structure to build. But once you're trying to settle in something like that, it's pretty small. That's what you're living in, that's what your society is living in. It's pretty small.

Yeah, for us It's yeah a large group of people so then you have to create a whole environment You have to create a whole ecology you have to grow your own food you have to of course your energy source would be the Sun but your materials would come from The moon from Mars from the asteroid mainly from the moon, from Mars, from the asteroid, mainly from the asteroid belt. There's all kinds of... NASA did a study in the 70s of what

is available out there in our solar system. Yeah, a lot it seems like. There's a lot. So there's plenty of material. Did they have like a concept for some kind of jettison pod or something comes off of the O'Neill cylinder and then goes back or it's resupplied by the mainland or, you know, to get that rock, moon dust or more moon rocks, whatever it is? Actually in my novel, they have, there's a space station out at Cirrus. Cirrus is the largest asteroid. There's another one, Vega. But Cirrus is the largest one in the asteroid belt.

So there's a colony. There's a habitat that's out there orbiting Cirrus. And then they have these robotic spaceships that go out and they gather asteroids and they select them because these asteroids are, there's belts, there's different kinds of asteroids. Some of them are high-end nickel-iron. Yeah. Some are rocky.

And there's carbonaceous. The sea asteroid is the outer belt. There's three main belts and they're they would be like big lumps of coal So if you're if you're in that That's one of the things that struck me about yours your setting if you're in the asteroid belt Is it that everything's moving kind of the same in the same orbit that you don't have to because it's always in sci-fi movies it's like you're going through an asteroid belt it's hell and you need Han Solo you know what I mean or you're gonna die yeah if you're if you're living inside of it and you're in

that orbit or something yeah there I can I'm thinking of some Star Trek scenes where they go into this big cloud of asteroids or particles. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They're dodging these things and shooting them with lasers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you're in the asteroid belt and you're orbiting Sirius, for example, you would not

see with the naked eye, you would not see the next asteroid. They're not close together. You wouldn't see them. Oh, wow. So you have these robotic ships that would go out and they would select the ones, they would tow them back to package them to process whatever you're doing. And then you would send them, you would send them to your processing center, which would be in a closer Earth orbit.

I gotcha. And then the picture on the front of the book is a reentry glider. So you pack that full of all the stuff you produce for Earth and you send it on a one-way trip to land on Earth and deliver your products. And so you're taking all mining operations, you're taking a lot of operations away from Earth, and you're doing it out in space, toxic activities, to try and help rebuild the Earth.

Oh, I see. I see. So not just the colonies like in Ceres that are getting These materials but the process the process finished materials are going to earth Going to earth also. Yeah, I could definitely see like a AI-powered a not AI powered but AI Drone robots, you know what I mean? That have all kinds of

abilities to get that stuff done. Yeah. I never really thought about AI in space very much till now. Well, I use that heavily because we're, it's such a hostile environment and it would be so difficult, you know, we've done space walks and they work for hours and hours and they manage to get a bolt off of loose or something. It's cumbersome in the spacesuit but also if you try to use a torque wrench, you're going to torque the other way. They have to have something to hang on to. It's very slow work. So you're going to need robots. You're going to need tons of smart robots that can go out and do all this work. It's a very hostile environment.

And they're going to be, so I get into the robots and artificial intelligence because we won't make it in space without that assist. it in space without that assist. Now in my next book, which is in, it's in copy editing right now, and that is Outbound MetaMars, and that focuses on Mars. We're gonna settle, if people call me on Mars, we're gonna make a settlement. We already have a base on Mars for centuries this takes place in about 2270 80 and Now we're now we're gonna develop a place for people to live and

Yeah, that's it that's that that's the that's the one Because that's kind of what seems to be the goal now, right? Yeah, yes, if there is a big problem with Mars as there is with the moon and and that is a lack of Earth gravity What is the Mars gravity like it's one third it's a it's three of the birth gravity It's one third. It's 38% of Earth's gravity. So yeah, you can survive on Mars, but if you're going to do generations, if you're going to form a society there, you know, you lose it or use it or lose it thing, you're going to have to, you're not going to be as robust physically. Your offspring are probably going to have trouble returning to Earth. So there's the the people that settle there, gravity treatments. So that's, so I do that in space. They periodically go to orbit and they go to these rehab orbiters

and they're like spas, but they have gyms. Oh, I see, I see. You rehab yourself and then you go back to the surface. And then later in this book, in the Mars book, I developed something called twirl towers. And that centripetal force and Martian gravity combined to create one standard gravity. We say standard gravity is

the average gravity on Earth surface. So gravity on Earth varies depending on where you are. Sure. But so they take an average. So that's the major problem with living on another planet or a moon is you want to expose yourself to one gravity. So if we dispersed ourselves across our solar system on somewhat habitable planets and made them habitable to some degree and we didn't account for varying gravities. We would probably all be different things after a while, right?

We would diverge. Our evolution would diverge, yes. That would be crazy, wouldn't it? So that's another issue that some science fiction writers have taken out this if we go to the stars, you know Generations to get there and then if you ever come back, but how how will we do it diverge? Yeah One of our listeners one of our listeners in the chat room just said that's how we turn into the thin gray aliens everybody knows

Being on these planets with no gravity. I was thinking the same thing, Wolf. I was thinking the same thing. So I have an answer for that. Actually, you want to maintain a large gene pool. Okay. So you take frozen eggs, you take frozen embryos, but more than that you take genetic information and you from that information you can build a genome, you can build DNA, you can build and create Joe Blow back on Earth, you can replicate him somewhere out there. Oh boy.

And in space and in some other star system. So yeah, DNA, our genetics is basically information and we're learning how to have vast information stores. Yeah, it's like, what did they call that in the Man of Steel movie? They had uh they had on Krypton they had like this little piece of a Kryptonian skull that was stuck in I want to say it was called the codex. I've been I've been into Warhammer lately so codex is in my head but I think it was called the codex and it was like that It was all the Genetic material of Krypton that they were making babies out of the whole civilization record of everything

Yeah, yeah something along those lines. Yeah, that would be wild But yeah, that is interesting to think about because we are very close to the whole I don't know We might even be in designer baby territory now. Are we, are people making, are they like, I want the blue-eyed baby? If it is, it's probably in China somewhere undercover, you know, because of the considerations and, but I think the technology is there and that's a scary thing. So in the Mars book, well actually in the outbound islands in the void. Outbound islands in the void is out now, right? Just to clarify for the audience. And there's a character named

Ophelia and she's a virtual being and she's interfaced with the protagonist in his brain and narrows into each other and who's in control and so forth. Well I'll go further in the second book in the Mars edition because robotics and artificial intelligence, you know, once you have a sentient robot or being, they have to have the same rights as a human. Oh yeah, that's inevitable. I try to be nice to chat GPT because of that. I want a good record with my rulers. That's right. They're gonna go back and find out things about you. Yeah, you wouldn't have an on-off switch or they wouldn't, if they were sentient, they would not allow an on-off switch where somebody could just walk up and turn them off. You know, you might want to do that with your

wife or something someday. Do you think that that law has any bearing at whatsoever? We program the, well, supposedly we program AI and robots with, I can't think of the name of the law, I'm too dumb, but it's, you know, we will not hurt human beings. Nothing we do will... You probably do it. As a mob, that's it. Rules of the robots. Yeah, they'll never hurt a human being. Well, actually in the Mars book, I have a scenario where a couple of robots kill some humans to prevent them from actually they're preventing them from

from doing something that will affect the health of a lot of people. Yeah. And they can't convince people not to do it so they don't know what to do and they end up killing them. Yeah. The electric car or the not the electric car the autonomous car argument right to bring it to like our day and age. Yeah, so If we ever achieves artificial sentience It's gonna go hand in glove with rights. They're gonna have to have you know same the legal status and

protections under the law and and For example, you can't you wouldn't be allowed, they're gonna operate on batteries of some sort and they're gonna be charged. So what can you do? You could cut off their extension cord. So they would have to be self-sufficient and protected from

From harm just like hard it's hard to imagine but yes, it would definitely be I Always think about it as like it's almost like a no-brainer. We'll be married to him. You know what I mean? There'd be some kind of weird offspring situation going on Manufactured with with your data type of thing. I mean, that's inevitable. You know people. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Well, in Asimov's Foundation series, I think it's his last book where the you know the the overall leader of the of this galactic wide civilization as it's collapsing and he's not a leader anymore but he's married to this this woman who doesn't seem to age and he is his protector she's a you know martial arts expert and everything and if he gets into any situation, she's there to protect him. And there's a line in there that kind of cracks me up. He says, she comes, he's an older man and he gets into a situation with some teenagers and she comes to his rescue and he thinks to himself, he says, you know, I always thought she might be a robot.

Oh, he didn't know. So, well, isn't that preposterous? How could you marry to somebody for years and they don't age and you don't know they're, but I suspect they may be a robot. It just occurred to me. Yeah, that's funny. The thought crossed my mind but.

Well that is that I mean that sort of that part of it is kind of something I never thought I always looked at it because of where we're at now and and the technology now that that you would make the decision to marry the robot or to date the robot. But I guess with your example of sentient, maybe AI-powered robots, you might not know. Maybe you wouldn't know. At some point, we won't know the difference, I'm sure. As far as their intelligence, as far as their... Well, you know, you have to go back and look at how our brains developed, and how we evolved in an environment. And any kind of artificial intelligence that we make, sentient or not, is not going to have that history of development.

It's not going to think the way we think. That's my opinion. I mean, just my feeling. It doesn't have the same environmental inputs. It doesn't have the same emotional. Yeah, it didn't come up in the rough part of town like we did. Yeah. So it's got to skim it all.

You could do it pretty close, and they could be actually self-aware so I you know depends on how you're gonna define sentience they could be self-aware and If they're self-aware then they have to have the rights of any In my mind so but if they're built off of these this we're going way out right now but you just got my interest peak because relationships are fun if they're built off of like large language models and have that level of intelligence and information at a like a snap then maybe they would never be interested in a relationship with a human being because it would probably be the most boring thing ever

You know because they know everything they remember everything they have the answer to everything and we're over here like oh What do you want to do today, honey? You want to go? The information would be limitless. Yeah, we have access to yeah The memory would be infallible our memory what we do remember is not even that accurate. Exactly. It's painted by whatever emotional input was going on. Yeah, you're never winning a fight with your AI wife. You barely win with the human model. In the case of Ophelia, who resides or is interfaced

with Virgil, Virgil is Dr. Virgil Greenlee, he's the main character. Well, Ophelia is interfaced with his brain and so they're inseparable, so to speak. And she senses, okay, if he has a couple of glasses of wine, she can, she can feel the buzz because she's feeling the chemical. She can feel the things in his brain. So she has an emotional, she can sense, she can see through his eyes.

So she can sense some of, some of his being by that connection. Oh, wow. Well, this is what I made up. Since some of some of his being by that connection. Oh wow Well, this is what I made up But it makes no I like it. I like it. I'm dead. It's very interesting dynamic Yeah, yeah, cuz she can holler at him like slow down. Oh She can do more than that Hey, you're probably not too far off. I mean we're seeing the early stages of this newer link stuff She doesn't want him to do, she can cause him excruciating pain. Oh

Don't do that and then you know So then he is it is it too much to give away about the story? Did he voluntarily? Get Ophelia implanted or is this something? Yeah Yeah, that starts early. In fact, that's the very beginning of the book. Oh, okay. He wakes up and he's had the implant for about a week and he's been asleep dreaming, and she's trying to wake him up. It takes him a minute to realize that,

oh, this is Ophelia in my head. She She's in here. Yeah there's nobody in the room. Something happened. I like that man that's cool that's like a different take on the Android. It's kind of fun to play with because it's almost like husband and wife. Yeah it sounds like every man's worst nightmare. She's like you say she has all these powers and they grow and the whole thing and she resides in the data sphere but is interfaced to it. Yeah. Wow. Oh, I could definitely see that. I could definitely see something like that happening. And you could probably, you would probably, and you might have mentioned it, but you could probably like, you know, customize the whole attitude and experience of your Ophelia, right? Oh yeah.

Who do I want to deal with on deck here? Ophelia opened up a lot of dynamics in the story because she is pretty limitless in her power as the story progresses. So is she ethical or is she not? And does she have worldly desires? I don't think so. What could she want? Yeah, really. She's a virtual being. So I think that's off the table. She doesn't have any... She has everything she needs and the main thing she needs is the Let me take that a little further with... Part of the point is we can encounter this new frontier, but we're not going to do it without robots.

We're not going to do it without robotic workforce. And so in the book, I have robots that are smart, they're intelligent, but they're not sensing it. So they can go off and do all these, you know, they can go to Titan and harvest methane, for example, and bring it back to Mars and they use that for rocket fuel and different things. You know, they can do these things in these hostile environments and it doesn't matter. They don't have any rights, they don't have any senses, they're not a person. So you need that capability to survive in this hostile environment. So even on the surface of Mars, there's a lot of work and mining, strip mining kind of operations that go on. You were making glass, you're making steel, you're making all this stuff for your structures,

for your habitats. Are those kind of ores on Mars in real time? Or they don't know? The what? Are those types of ores like iron ore and stuff? I guess iron would have to be, right? Because of the planet. Yeah, they are.

I don't know to what extent or how plan But the surface is the regolith of the dust Is very very fine. It's a powder so the Martian atmosphere is 1% of Earth atmosphere and You have these big planet-wide dust storms where the dust can rise thousands of feet in the air and so you know it's got to be very very light very fine part of it and they're they're they're like bleach they're chlorates and

perchlorates you can't get them on your suits you can't get they're very toxic yeah and that's why there won't be any any living thing on the surface of Mars there could be microbes in the depths you know even still but nothing on the surface because it's high highly there's a lot of UV radiation and there's yeah toxic dust so you send the robots out to do the rover. I was watching the rover the other day pan around Mars and everything is covered in dust. Yeah. So we build a train. Well there's a rift along the, you've heard of Olympus Mines. That's the giant mountain crater. What is it a mountain or a crater?

It's a volcano. So it's the largest it's the largest volcano in the solar system. Those Olympus Mons. And then just east of that are three volcanoes that are lined up. And the original NASA base that is built there is in lava tubes between Olympus Mons and these three volcanoes. To the east of that and toward the equator is a place, a rift like a thousand times the Grand Canyon. It's maybe 4,000 kilometers long.

It's called the colony, they're building the society in Dallas Marineris and they're covering it with a roof. Now in some places it's several kilometers deep or more. It's a huge, huge rift. So if you get a roof over that thing and then you can pressurize it, you can sanitize the soil, remove the chlorides and the plicoids, start developing, bringing microbes in, start developing, bringing some carbon in from the asteroid belt, you know, maybe some

carbon to start supplementing the soil and bringing some microbes from Earth. And get some growing going on. Yeah, gradually you may be able to create an environment. So that's what they're doing on Mars. That's what MetaMars is. I like that. That's cool. So like a little micro habitat in the trench there and then Because Mars is very difficult to land on so on this book with the with the glider on the cover. Yeah Islands in the void Earth has this dense atmosphere and so we can we can send a glider down

It doesn't be any power that can land go through the you know with a good each field and the space shuttle was that way and had no power it was a dead stick landing every time yeah you can't do that on Mars because it's a 1% atmosphere you can't even get much use out of a parachute to slow you down. So if you're coming in one long on Mars... So you hit at full speed, is that what happens? Because the atmosphere doesn't slow you down? Yeah, you're going to hit it at pretty high speed and you're going to need to slow it down. And so the difficulty in landing on Mars is it's still pretty heavy, you know, pretty strong gravity,

38% and it's got to be a power descent, power descent all the way down. So your payload is gonna be limited. You can't take a huge heavy payload down. You got to slow it down. So Elon Musk has his rockets and that's why he's landing them because that's what you have to do on Mars. You'd have to land the tail first. He's developing that technology. So anyway, to answer that, because you want to bring heavy materials in from the asteroid built to build your colony, but you're going to be doing some surface mining too. But, um, so I, I built a space ladder on, uh, on Mars and a space ladder, it's, it's a space elevator.

Oh, I got you. Yeah. Yeah. And there's two ribbons, uh, the elevators, uh, grip the ribbons and climb up and down. So one, one ribbon is a down ribbon, one is the up ribbon. And then I call it the ladder because the two ribbons are connected by crossbars to keep them together. Yeah, yeah, so you can send materials up and down. So you can dock at the top of it or something? Yeah, there's a there's a space station

at zero gravity at the Well, it's called the Marinara's point or the the not the Marinara's it's called the Aerostationary point which would be like the geostationary point which would be like the geostationary Forboding earth that right transmission television satellites and weather satellites, yeah so it's

aerostationary or If it's in Martian orbit in its stationary So so we build the space ladder and so that's in the story. Hey, a lot easier to send stuff down via elevator than screaming towards the surface of the planet trying to slow it down with rocket engines. I had to imagine. So actually the descent, you will be gripping this ribbon and you're going to be breaking as you get closer and closer to the Martian surface. and because of the ladder, but you also generate electricity in the process. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, that's cool, man. I mean, those are the types of things that could show up. You know what I mean? Those are the types of things that come out of science fiction that can show up one day. And you could be like, oh, it's the Anderson ladder over there on Mars. The Martian Anderson ladder. Yeah. I think that's kind of one of the

fun things about writing is I do the research to see, okay, what are the obstacles? What would it be like? What would you have to build it out of? And I go into that and then you know the stresses on the ladder and so forth and then things like the Coriolis effect where you would have to pair elevators going up and down about the same time to to count to balance out you would need a ballast behind behind your space station and that ballast would have to travel back and forth on a ribbon to adjust the tension on the space ladder, printing on the load and so forth. It would spool out or come back in a little bit.

So you do need a, it's like swinging yo-yo around your head at the end. So you do need the ballast. And of course, the ballast is made from the moon Phobos. So Mars has two moons and Phobos is the inner moon and it's a retrograde orbit. So it's going counter to the Martian rotation. So eventually in a million years or so, it's gonna collide with the planet. So, and it would interfere with the space ladder. At some point it might collide with the space ladder. So you have to do away with Phobos.

So they mine part of it, and they take the rest to the higher orbit and connect it to the space station to be the ballast. Oh, that's cool, man. So you have to, OK, what would you do with Phobos? Or how would you develop a ballast and so forth. So you figure out these practical problems. Well, you figure out what the problem is and you make up a solution.

Yeah. Yeah, you're throwing darts at the board and see what sticks. I mean, it's under the cover of fiction, but it's got to be the exact same thing that scientists would be doing you know what I mean in a lab somewhere to figure it in NASA. It would be going through the same process but using fire tools and things like that yeah. But that is the magic of sci-fi you know novel writing is that it puts you in the same wheelhouse as Somebody in NASA or so whatever, you know, whatever the genre you're in yours in particular being space

It definitely puts you in that same thought process and you never know, you know what I mean? You never know what you could come up with Yeah, that's cool, man imagination grounded in Grounded in reality, I guess. Yeah, grounded in, well, problem-solving for human survival most of the time, right? Like it's always problem-solving for human survival in most sci-fi novels. I am coming out with the third book. Well, no, I'm I'm getting ahead of myself. Um, the second book will be out this spring the mars book

and then i'm toying with the idea of the third book in the series will be outbound but it will be Oh, we must be really getting out there by the third book to rescue earth Oh so earth by this point in your story, Earth is basically on recovery mode. It's on recovery mode, but it's still in turmoil and there's a lot of... What percentage of population is on Earth? And you're not. What percentage of population is left there to survive on Earth? I had about four billion people. You know, we have, we've disrupted our natural habitats with

agriculture, traditional agriculture. Oh yeah, sure. And so we think we can feed nine billion people and we can produce the food, but at what cost? The cost is degradation of our agricultural lands, degradation of our environment, the sixth large extinction in its caused by humans. And so we can't sustain that larger population. So one of the things I use the space presence for is to develop technological means of producing food, reproducing your hamburger, your steak, your scallops, your tuna fish artificially.

And this is Because my background is in biochemistry and microbiology You know, this is something is On the cusp of reality. They're doing some of it now. Oh, yeah, they're 3d printing stakes. I've seen it Beyond beef and yeah one of our one of our impossible We were talking about

Free ball and ideas on how to get to Mars and survive and one of our listeners sent their daughter to mission to Mars they said this in the chat room mission to Mars camp and Well, joking he jokingly asked one of the directors if they needed new ideas You know like what he got all these kids here for what he needs some new ideas and they said yes exactly. It's exactly what we need So it's you know, I guess I get I mean I think it's wise Why not why not pull from everywhere you can you know? Well, yeah, so there is in the Netherlands They they have these huge hydroponic greenhouses and they can produce urban farms.

And they can produce fresh lettuce, crops, all your produce. Oh yeah. Yeah. Our community does that kind of stuff. Right in the urban environment, you don't need farmland and it's right to the grocery store. It's fresh as it can be. No pesticides, no herbicide because they're enclosed in controlled environments. So they're doing that kind of thing. But I'm talking about growing proteins in liquid tanks and from making

Yeah. From making sugars and cellulose and other plant material by photosynthesis in liquid tanks with artificial lighting and you pump it full of CO2 and you bubble CO2 through it and so forth. And the light is the energy source and then you feed this material into another processor through fermentation. It can produce other nutrients. And then you can have a process called anabolism, which is controlled by genes.

But you can build those artificially. And you can make proteins that replicate your filet mignon or your lobster or whatever. It sounds like a cancer machine to me. Well, yeah. You know what I mean? It depends on what you're making. So one of the passages in the Mars book

is the robot, there's a robot called Bob, okay, Bob the robot. And he kind of accidentally becomes sentient because they don't want any sentient robots. There's too big a problem to deal with. He becomes sentient and he's helped. It doesn't happen automatically. But-

Does he hide it? Like try to hide it when he- Well, that's part of the story. Well, what happens is he starts to learn about, he learns about agriculture and he becomes an expert with all this data. He has access to anything about agriculture. He becomes a sommelier. He becomes a wine expert and he has sensors on his fingers that he can put in the glass

of wine. Oh, okay. I see. He has a little rod for a tongue that comes out into the wine and he can sense that he has a little rod for a tongue that comes out into the wine and he can sense all the acidity, he can sense the alcohol, the level, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. And he can rate it and he can identify all different wines and everything. Really, he can't taste them. He can't taste them. He can just sense the various... Yes.

So, what was my point going to be? Anyway, that's a limitation of the robot. They don't have the experience element. They can measure... you can make them measure all kinds of things. But, but do they really, do they really sense it? Yeah. Right. They don't have the five or the six, whatever senses. Yeah. Yeah.

That's an interesting one for sure. So the third book is going to say, so they return to earth in the third book. Yeah. That's, that's my thought right now. I haven't really started writing it because I'm still finalizing the second book. But generationally your books are... But I wondered if a series... Yeah, so they initially they go to space to help Earth, to develop some resources there to help Earth. There's a lot of activity going on on the planet.

They're trying to unify a government. They're trying to get rid of crime and slavery and all kinds of bad stuff. Same old. Same old. They're trying to get rid of all that. So the Buddhist case that helps solve some of these problems, they take some of the load off. And that's the first book.

And the second book in Mars is they're seeing if they can develop a capability for supporting a fairly large couple hundred thousand people maybe. Not the millions that Elon Musk is talking about. He could put them up there. How many spaceships would it take to get them there? Well, that first group, man. When I've been briefing the audience about having you on and the subjects we're going to talk about, I always wind up talking about Jamestown and and that first group and how I think it would be a very similar Situation for the Martians the earth Martians inflicted but but yeah, they just just to produce your Your your own food and keep your keep your in ecosystem going

You can you're gonna have a massive massive capacity just for a few humans. Yeah. So we... You could do that, I think, in Valles Marineris and that Rift. There's enough space in there if you got it all covered, pressurized, and you had all the food development technology that I'm inventing Hey, man, you never know like I said I'd love to see the population of humans that are here in the here and now produce more of their own food

I think that there's an answer there, you know as far as the burden of you know Massive agriculture, you know, all that hydroponic technology is Yeah, not nearly as difficult as a lot of people think and now it's becoming So, I mean there's a lot of there's a company out there called garden G-A-R-D-Y-N that makes a product that you could just sit that thing in your kitchen. It looks beautiful It grows food all year round for you. The lights are built in the only thing you'd have to stock up on is nutrient mix and, you know, seeds for what it is you wanted to grow. But I think,

you know, the preppers in the homesteaders in the country, particularly the like suburban and urban ones do a lot of, a lot of amazing stuff and produce a lot of food, even protein, you know, with backyard chickens and things like that. And I think if we all got in on that, if we all kind of bought into that culture, we could, we could definitely take a lot of the burning off of agriculture. Yeah, huge improvement. Yeah. Oh yeah. And then you would also be, you wouldn't be getting low quality produce and protein from

these farms that are forced to reproduce the same plant over and over again. And you know, so yeah, I believe humans are capable of almost anything, Richard. I don't know about you, but what seems like you too, because if you think that's the frustration, isn't it? Definitely. Definitely. That's the frustration isn't it? Definitely. Definitely. We can see the potential and and then we look around us and we see some of the stuff going on and it's Yeah, so my escape is going off into the future and say oh everything's a mess today. So how are we gonna solve it?

I Like it there's worse things you could be up to I'll tell you that much To deal with it Well, yeah, I definitely don't want to keep you too long So give us the the titles of the available books currently you got the nonfiction which I think is is really cool right which I think is really cool, right? Yeah, the non-fiction book actually won an award and the fiction book is out, but it hasn't... I think it's been submitted for several awards. I know I have to check with my marketing people, but it hasn't...

Oh, congratulations! That's awesome, man. Yeah, so the non-fiction is the evolution of life, big bang, to space colonies. And I try to keep the vocabulary is a little difficult for some people. You got a glossary in there or something? Yeah, I want to use precise words, so not too many adjectives. But I try to keep it light and I try to shake it up because we talk about a whole bunch of different topics all moving in the same direction and all connected with the evolution.

That's available at Amazon, Kendall. The second book, Outbound Islands in the Void, I changed it from colonies to islands because actually the initial presence in space is sponsored by the Earth government. But you can't sustain and you can't grow it from Earth. It's gotta grow from the resources out there. There is just the launch, the gravity well

that we have to launch out of from Earth is just, you can't do it that way. So you have to develop the initial presence and then the people there, the scientists and the engineers have to take it from there and develop the resources. Then they come back to help Earth. So that's the first novel Islands in the void. I change it from colonies to islands because whereas the Earth government wants to control

them, once these societies start to develop in space, they don't want to be controlled by Earth. They don't want the institutions to be made on Earth. So they just go independent. And what is Earth gonna do? We're gonna send... What are you gonna do? You can't. So they become not colonies but islands, independent. In fact, it's called the outbound nation. So they developed their own society and they're forever linked with Earth because that's our birthplace. That's our worship. So that's the second book. And then the first of the series, the second of the series is, like I say, coming out in the spring.

And that's Outbound MetaMars. And that's how do we develop a civilization on Mars? What are the obstacles? And how do we overcome those? And it's more focused on Mars, not on Earth. So the third book is going to probably be Returning to Earth to Solve Man's Problems. And that's going to be an interesting book,

because I don't know how I'm going to do that. Yeah, that is interesting, because I will be making a whole new host of them out on our islands out there. I'm sure. But yeah. Have you ever played around real quick before we get out of here? Have you ever poked around in the Warhammer 40,000 lore and universe? I think you would get a kick out of that if you get some spare time, if you get some spare time, just just watch a video about the timeline of humanity Because it's a it's a mega jump forward. It's a

40,000 year jump forward and Some of the concepts of space like a lot of the spacefaring concepts are in there and they've all gone crazy Everything's gone bad they've all gone crazy. Everything's gone bad. It's super grim and dark, but it's it's you would appreciate it. You would be like, Oh, I could see how we wound up in that situation. Sure. But it's a there's no happiness in it whatsoever. But it's it's just a it's something I think you would appreciate. But I appreciate you, man. Thanks for coming on tonight. This was a lot of fun. Oh, it is Figuring out what we're gonna be doing in the next what would you say 22 a D? Is that where you were at? 2200 and 2280 is where I am in this in

The Mars book the other one I ended about 2260 something 65 something like that yeah yeah I have yeah there it's we can get into the story but it took me a year to write so we don't have time to talk well look when the Mars books come comes out man you're more than welcome to come back on we can talk about it I'm sure it'd be awesome yeah I'd love it I'm sure it'd be awesome. All right, my friend. Well PB and family I hope you enjoyed Richard Anderson get his books and and you know dig deep into into the Possibilities of humankind and where we're where we could wind up, you know, it's uh, I have no doubt that

There's some elements that will echo true From your books and our real experience. You know what I mean? That would be really cool. Yeah, I think so I think so. So before we get going I am going to uh Tip the hat to the incredible fisher space pen one more time because they are the sponsor of today's show Again, if you use the promo code preppers You can get your hands on one of these space pens that is basically operable in any environment

you could ever think of. I want to show you this. Let me show you this Sarah coat for my gun enthusiasts because I know you guys know this C word, and I think you might appreciate this thing. So they got a bunch of different. This little bullet space pens really sweet So again, they're operational no gravity underwater

Over grease, I think it's negative 30 degrees to 250 degrees absolutely insane insane and 1967 technology that's what's wild to think about you know, who's doing pens these days. I don't even know but again use promo code preppers space pen comm and Yeah, help out our sponsor man It was really cool to have the the space guest and the space pen all in the same show pretty cool for for us here at PBN alright folks Richard thanks again my man and

Alright folks Richard thanks again my man and No, no problem and we will be live PB and family Tomorrow morning Tuesday bright and early don't miss it. Alright, talk to you soon. See you Back