TRIGGERnometry - "Mars is Our Future" - Dr Robert Zubrin

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

SPONSORED BY: Manscaped. Receive 20% off Manscaped products when you use the code Trigger20. Check out their products: https://www.manscaped.com SPONSORED BY: Express VPN. Get 3 months extra free when you sign up for a 12 month contract at: www.expressvpn.com SPONSORED BY: easyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ Dr Robert Zubrin is an American aerospace engineer and advocate for human exploration of Mars. He is the author of, among others, 'The Case for Mars', 'The Case for Space', and 'Merchants of Despair'. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​/ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  03:05 Who is Dr Robert Zubrin? 09:47 Our Lost Excitement for Space Exploration 17:04 Lessons from Space on How to Improve Earth Life 21:48 Why Mars?  35:58 What Would the Martian Economies be Based Around? 41:29 The Dangers & Challenges of Going to Mars  53:22 When Will We See Civilisations and Advanced Tech on Mars? 56:35 Intelligent Alien Life Forms 1:01:08 Origin of Anti-Humanism 1:07:57 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why Mars? What's so magical about Mars? Because Mars is the closest planet that has on it all the materials needed to support life and technological civilization. On Mars, there are glaciers on Mars that have more water than the American Great Lakes. There are continent-sized regions that are 60% water by weight in the soil. Mars has got a carbon dioxide-dominated atmosphere. Carbon is fundamental to life. There's no carbon on the Moon at all. But nitrogen exists on Mars. It doesn't exist on the moon.

So these are the fundamental things we're like. And Mars is a 24-hour day, which is what plants want. We can set up greenhouses and grow food. The Martian atmosphere is that it is this, can mask out solar flares. I really like Musk's approach to engineering, which is you build a lot of them. You're flying, crash them. You fix the next one try again. They're going to look at this and say, well, this guy wants to go to Mars.

if we got together with him and developed all the rest of the stuff that's needed. I think we can have people walking around on Mars 10 years from now, and I think we can have very substantial bases on Mars starting to develop this technology and maybe even the first children born on Mars 20 years from now. You know, for our generation, Mars is the new world. Hey, KKK, do you believe in spring cleaning? Yes, but only when my wife does it. In Russia, men who cleaner executed for not being real men, which is correct.

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Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating. Our brilliant guest today is an aerospace engineer, author and an advocate for the human exploration of Mars. Dr. Robert Zuber and welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for inviting me. Oh, it's such a pleasure to have you on. We have got a ton of questions for you, both from us and from our audience. Before we get to all of those, tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us about space exploration and many of the other things we'll go on to talk about. Okay. Well, I'm kind of a time traveler. Here's an artifact. My period. I was born in 52, and my first memory of any major world event in terms of direct experience was Sputnik. It was five. And I was already a reader reading science fiction. And while the adults may have been terrified of Sputnik, I was delighted with it. It was delighted. It may.

that space travel was going to be real. I wanted to be part of that. And my parents encouraged my interest. So, you know, my father got me a telescope and I did drawings of the moon through the eyepiece. And I launched rockets and did all that stuff. And, you know, in the 60s, I was all in, you know, we were going to the moon by 1970, Mars by 1980, Saturn by 1990 Alpha Centauri by the year 2000, and I wanted to be part of that. Now, we did achieve the first milestone in that program.

We did make it to the moon before 1970, but the rest of it was put aside. And at least the next step in it was, in fact, achievable. NASA actually had plans to send humans to Mars by 1981. the Nixon administration canceled them. And so at the same time that Nixon was enjoying celebrating the Apollo achievements and riding in the tick or tape parades with astronauts, they were actually shutting down the assembly lines, wrecking it. It was as if Columbus had come back from the New World the first time, and Ferdin and Isabella had said, so what, let's burn the ship.

And so the thing went aground. And so I by then was in college and the real world got to me that in the real world, you know, people don't grow up to be space explorers. That's the television people. That is the people on the other side of the TV screen who live in that world. And in fact, not many of them were going to be going to the moon either. And so got to get real. And so I became a science teacher. And because I had science education, I could do that.

It's a noble profession. I'm the kind of person that I have to understand a purpose to what I'm doing. And so that does fulfill that. But, you know, around a decade later, you know, I'm living in North Manhattan and teaching in Brooklyn and riding the subway an hour each way every day and reading novels by Herman Neville about sailing the South Seas and saying, you know, what am I doing here?

And so I decided to go back to graduate school and become an engineer. And I did. And then I heard about these people of my own generation who were members of this thing called the Mars Underground who were trying to put. for a visionary space program. NASA by this time had embraced the idea of a space program as shuttles, putting satellites in Earth orbit because, you know, that's practical, going to planets,

that's the dreams of youth, forget it. And they said, no, that's what we should be doing. And so I got connected with them. I became a member of the Mars underground myself. Then I managed to get hired at an aerospace company, Martin Marietta, which is now Lockheed Martin, and started making my mark at planetary mission design. And then I became very well known. I was one of the two principal authors of a new way of approaching human Mars missions called the Mars Direct Plan, which basically was sort of a travel light and live off the land approach to sending humans to Mars.

and it got away from trying to build giant spaceships and Earth orbit at giant space stations, which would not exist until the 22nd century or any of that stuff. And, well, became well known, got contacted by a literary agent when there was an article about me in Newsweek. And she said, have you ever thought about writing a book about this? I said, well, you know, I wrote a book once before and I couldn't get published. And she said, what kind of book was in? I said, spy in a spy. She said, were you ever a spy?

I said, no. You know, did you have a literary agent? Nope. Well, you are an astronautical engineer, and I am a literary agent. And if you write this book, I will get it published. And that is what happened. And I wrote the case for Mars, and she got it published. And it became, well, not exactly a bestseller, but a very high seller internationally.

And I got thousands of letters from people who read it, and I got together with other Mars underground types. And I said, look, if we could pull these people together, we'd have a force. We'd have something that could actually make this vision happen, because the diversity of people who had contacted us, which included not only engineers at JPL and astronauts and people like this, but, you know, firemen in Saskatoon and 12-year-old kids in Poland. and the director of the Metropolitan Opera in, I forget, New York, and a banker in Paris, it was incredible. And the, you know, pull them together, we could do something. So we founded the Marst Society.

And that was in 98. It was covered in the New York Times, the BBC, all over the place. We came out of it with chapters in about 25 countries, including most of the major countries and a few ones you wouldn't expect. and, you know, we're still here. So there I am. There you are, Robert. Well, let me ask you the question that you've kind of alluded to when you were talking about your childhood,

because my father was born in the Soviet Union about 10 years after you, the year after Yuri Gagarin became the first man to go into space. And then 20 years later, when I was born, you know, my generation, we read Isaac Asimov and all of this. stuff about space and robots and all of that. And this was a moment of excitement when I think we looked out into space with a sense of that almost being our destination to go out and to explore the universe. But in the last 20 years, it doesn't feel like we've been having that conversation to me.

We've been very focused internally, even when we talk about things like the destruction of the Earth that some people would be keen to talk about. We never, other than Elon Musk, I've never really heard anyone talking in public about the idea that even with that, the solution might be to ensure the resilience of human species by going beyond Earth. So what happened? Why did we lose our excitement, our zeal, for going out into space and exploring it? Well, as I mentioned, there was an enormous failure in leadership on the part of governments

in terms of abandoning the program at the point of success, and then the quality of political leadership in most governments deteriorated markedly in the following period so that they were not able to resume any such project. And, you know, if I compare either Trump or Biden to John F. Kennedy, I mean, really, it's a joke or compare recent British leadership. to Winston Churchill or Mahran to Charles de Gaul. I mean, it's ridiculous.

However, precisely because the political classes dropped the ball, there's a new group that has stepped forward, and that's the entrepreneurial leaders. I mean, in the 60s, no one would have looked for an entrepreneurial

leader to save the day from failing NASA. NASA wasn't failing. But, you know, starting in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, you know, for a while, I mean, I certainly hoped that NASA would, you know, just sort of recover. And I mean, that was certainly my outlook and was skeptical of the people who said that they would save the day with the private companies. But as time went on and the government, and continue to underperform and the private companies, in particular, SpaceX, overperformed,

I've altered my view. And now it's a real possibility again. But I'd like to come back to something more fundamental that you alluded to, which is this more pessimistic view of the future. I think that that is the greatest threat facing humanity. the we're not destroying the earth I don't think we're capable of destroying the earth we're damaging certain places the rainforest we're also improving certain places but we are in danger of destroying each other and the thing that will drive us to destroy each other is the same thing that caused the mega disasters in the 20th century which is the

belief that there isn't enough for everyone. This belief that there's only so much here to go around and so we have to kill them to get it. Okay. You know, 1912, Friedrich von Bernhardy, the chief intellectual, a German general staff, wrote a book. It became an international bestseller. English title was Germany in the next war. It's still available. It's a Kindle book. And which he said, look, you know, here's Eurasia. Who's going to get it? It's either going to be us Germans or the Russians. We're going to have to have it out with them. Should it be sooner or later? Well, clearly sooner because we can take them down now because they haven't industrialized yet. And then, you know, a quarter century later, Hitler even more hysterically, you know,

Germany needs living space. The laws of existence require uninterrupted killings so that the better may live. This was all nonsense. Germany never needed living space. Germany today, small than the Third Reich, has a larger population and a vastly higher standard of living. And how did they achieve that? Not by invading other countries and murdering people and killing and stealing their cows. Okay, they were openly unsuccessful in that program. And had they succeeded in that program, it would not have made them any richer at all. Germany today is vastly richer than it was in the 1930s because of the advance of science and technology,

which is a global human project to which Germans have contributed, certainly, but so have numerous other peoples, including those they were trying to exterminate. And so it's not true that the human condition is one of antagonistic races in the struggle for existence over limited resources. Rather, the truth is that we are a somewhat disorderly family of nations, a very disorderly family of nations, to be sure. but nevertheless, a family engaged in a joint project to create new possibilities through new technologies. And, you know, inventions made anywhere, sooner or later become used everywhere. So, I mean, is America the enemy of China? Well, China is enormously advanced its standard of living over the past 30 years because of inventions like electricity and iPhones and everything that were created in the West.

But the West itself had its Renaissance because of inventions like paper and printing that were made in China. And so, but nevertheless, if we have this zero-sum point of view, we could end up killing each other. And we're fundamentally in a pre-war situation right now because of this point of view. Okay. For Putin, war is inevitable, and so he must acquire Ukraine in order to strengthen his strategic position. And, you know, and that's exactly why he must be denying Ukraine, actually, aside from the fact that Ukrainians don't want to get killed, as far as everybody else is concerned, that's it. But this is all insanity. There is no reason for war. Human race today, it's the largest

population and the highest standard living by far than it has ever had in human history. But you know, that was also true in 1914. Robert, I mean, it's a very powerful thing that you're saying here. The question that I would like to ask is, why is space exploration so important? Because there will be people who go, why are we going out there when we've got poverty, addiction, all of these different things, these huge problems that we haven't managed to solve in our own countries? Why are we investing so much in space? Well, we're not really investing somewhere.

Okay, the NASA budget is less than one hand. Why should we, I guess? Why should we invest in any money? But it's less than one half of one percent of the federal budget. Okay. So I am not suggesting that we should shut down the public school system so we could devote that money in the space exploration. But, you know, the fact that there are people hungry today is not a reason to eat the seed corn. And, in fact, that's a very bad move.

Now, there are three reasons here. Okay, going to space is going to get us a lot of knowledge. And by the way, there's nothing more valuable than knowledge. Frankly, the reason why people live better today than they did 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago is because of knowledge. So, Robert, sorry to interrupt. What knowledge will we get from going out into space that could then come and enrich life on Earth? Oh, any amount. I mean, for instance, most of what we know about physics we gain through astronomy. Newton's laws, a lot of electromagnetism, relativity, nuclear fusion,

all came to astronomy. And there's a reason why, because the universe is the biggest and best lab there is, and you can discover phenomena there that you hadn't suspected existed before. And believe me, our knowledge of physics today is not complete. It is not complete. In fact, it makes no sense. I mean, it's useful. I'm an engineer. I use it all the time.

But if, for instance, you take the most basic law of physics, matter cannot be created or destroyed. Well, then tell me, how is this created? There it is. Okay. you've got a law of physics that's in direct defiance of not only some data, but all the data. And, you know, so if we could discover a greater degree of truth about the true laws of physics, it would have enormous applications. The laws of biology are very incompletely known.

All life on earth uses the same biochemical system, DNA, RNA, it's, one system for recording and using biological information. Now, look, we speak English, okay, and we use the Latin alphabet. So do the French, the Spanish, Germans, even the Poles. Okay, so if you travel around in our parts of the world, you might think that that's what an alphabet is. But, of course, in Russian, they use a somewhat different alphabet, although it works on the same set of principles. in Israel or Arab countries, they use an even more difficult different alphabet, although it still works on the same set of principles because they all have a common origin in the Phoenician alphabet. But the Chinese alphabet is totally different.

It not only is it different characters, it works on a completely different set of principles, and yet it does the same thing. You can write books in it. Okay. And so here's thing. Biology and bioengineering is going to be one of the great technological sciences of the 21st century. And yet we only know about one system, one information system. It's like only knowing about PCs and not understanding there could be things like Max, let alone DNA computers or other kinds of computer or human minds.

So if we can discover alternative types of biomes, of biology, our capabilities in the bioengineering area will be enormously expanded. And because right now we're just like linguists who are only acquainted with one language and are unaware of the existence of other languages. They don't know what languages. They only know what English is. And so the games could be phenomenal. So that being the case, so you've made a case for SpaceX exploration very well.

Why Mars? What's so magical about Mars? Why is Mars so important to you? Because Mars is the closest planet that has on it all the materials needed to support life and technological civilization. It's vastly richer and useful materials than the moon, for example. the moon Most of the moon is so bereft in water that if they found concrete on the moon they would mine it for its water That there is potentially some water and permanently shadowed craters near the south pole of the moon But under extremely ultra-cultr 40 Kelvin conditions on Mars, there are glaciers on Mars that have more water than the American Great Lakes.

There are continent-sized regions that are 60% water by weight in the soil. That Mars has got a carbon dioxide dominated in atmosphere. Carbon is fundamental to life. There's no carbon on the moon at all. Nitrogen exists on Mars. It doesn't exist on the moon. So these are the fundamental things for life. They don't exist on the moon.

They exist on Mars. And then about half the elements needed by industry, don't exist on the moon, whereas they do all exist on Mars. And furthermore, Mars has had a complex geological history, which is necessary for differentiating elements into useful ores. And the moon hasn't had that. And Mars has a 24-hour day, which is what plants want. The Martian atmosphere is then as this can mask out solar flares.

You know, for our generation, Mars is the new world. Hey Francis, do you want to protect kids? I was a teacher for 12 years, so no. I will never forget what those little puss put me through. Francis, what did your therapist say about moving on with your life? They ruined me. I was filled with joy and goodness

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I'm going to use it right now to find Francis a new therapist. I fucking hate them. And you talk about some of the things that make Mars an appealing play. to go to. How far or how close are we from having the technology we have to go? Because from my very layman understanding, the problem isn't just being able to get there. Obviously, you need to be able to get back. The problem is, can you have people travel that far without physical problems? You know, can you, do you have the technology for people to be able to survive on Mars, etc., etc.

How far are we from being actually being, if we said today we want to go and we're prepared to use whatever resources and money that we have, how far away are we from actually being able to go to Mars or send some people to Mars that more likely? Well, if you pose it that way, I would say five years. If you're asking more for a prediction, I would say 10.

the you know there's all sorts of hardware that needs to be developed but we're not talking about Los Alamos in 1943 here we're not talking about venturing into new realms of physics we're talking about engineering uh we're talking about creating things done it doing it right not making mistakes people make mistakes and so you know this is why I really like Musk's approach to engineering which is you build a lot of them you're flying, but crash them, you fix the next one try again. The, you know, because, yeah, we make mistakes. But if you push through that, you get it right.

And I think, you know, Starship, if it's not blocked by bureaucrats, it'll probably reach orbit next year and be reaching orbit frequently in 2024. And if that's the reason, reality that we have in the year 2024, you know, we're going to have a president elected here then. And if, you know, we've got these ships going to orbit with 100-ton payloads comparable to a Saturn-5 moon rocket, but 1% the cost because they're reusable instead of expendable, they're going to look at this and say, well, this guy wants to go to Mars. If we got together with him and developed all the rest of the stuff that's needed, could we get there by the end

of my second term? The answer is going to be yes. Well, is it going to cost a trillion No, we can probably do it within NASA's existing budget because he's already developed the flight system. Well, then why aren't we doing this? In other words, by making it practical, Musk is going to make it sellable. Now, if Musk skates off the edge of the ice, which could happen because he's a risk taker, it'll take somewhat longer. But I think if SpaceX should fail, other entrepreneurial companies will step up and pick up the flag because he's already proven. that these entrepreneurial approach can work and work great. And so regardless of his own particular circumstances,

he's already basically proven the point at the essential point. And what would the first voyage to Mars look like? Is it a moon landing type of thing where you get off, you collect some samples, you plan a flag in the ground, and you get out of there, Or are you looking more to establish some kind of permanent presence there? Even if it's just robotic to start? Well, there are different visions associated with this.

But if you ask for mine, I believe that, first of all, that is not the right approach. We do not want to do a Flags and Footprints Mars mission. That's not why you go to Mars. I think we need a purpose-driven program. And the purpose of early Mars missions is exploration. and then later settlement. But let's take the first thing first. Exploration requires time on the surface.

Okay. So there's actually two different trajectories you can take to Mars. One is one that fits in with the flags and footprints approach, which involves spending about two years in transit and one month on the surface, two years and two unequal legs, totaling two years, and a month on the surface. That's known as the opposition class mission. The other is known as the conjunction class mission, which is the one that I support,

which involves a total of two and a half years for the mission, but a year to a year and a half of it is on the surface and the remainder is spent in transit. So, for instance, six months out, six months back, a year and a half on the surface. And so instead of sending 5% of the mission time on Mars, you spend 60% of the mission time on Mars. and you do a comprehensive program of regional field exploration while you're there. That's the right way to do it. Now, Musk wants to move directly to settlement, but I believe that we need a certain amount of exploration to choose the best place to put the settlement.

And what would it look like, Robert, in your eyes, to have a colony on Mars or to live on Mars? because it's going to be fundamentally different to life on earth, isn't it? Well, sure. I mean, we're going someplace new. Now, I get asked this question a lot, what's going to be the political system, what's going to be the social mores and so forth. We're just thinking practically at this point, like physically, what is it going to look like?

Are you going to have to walk around in the suit and all of that? Live in a biodem. Okay. You can make domes, but with present-day materials, they would have to be of limited size, not more than 100 meters in diameter, because otherwise the pressure in them would blow them up. But you could have a lot of 100-meter domes and link them together with tunnels and stuff like this. You could have domes and then have more extended living quarters underneath them. imagine, you know, systems like the underground, you know, subway system as it were, but designed as living quarters.

Okay, essentially things that are kind of like shopping malls, but you could put housing in them and all that. The purpose of doing that would be, first of all, you have a lot more housing space within a given dome, but also people would spend most of their time underground, which means shielded from cosmic radiation completely. Now, the radiation dose on the Martian surface is essentially the same as that at the International Space Station. And people go there, they go there routinely for six months at a time, and I think the longest one's about a year and a half. And we haven't seen any radiological effects. But if you did want to limit the dose more than that, you could spend the majority of your time within living quarters that are underground and only come up. into the dome to walk around and enjoy the orchards and, you know, play baseball.

You probably wouldn't play baseball. You probably want Martian sports that are more economical in terms of the use of space. Volleyball, basketball, these kinds of things. The, but I mean, how much of your time do you spend outside right now? except for farmers, most people spend less than 10% of their time outdoors. And that'd be two and a half hours a day. A lot of people don't spend that much time outdoors.

So if you spend 10% of your time in the dome and the rest of it under Graham, then your radiation dose would be 1 tenth of that of the ISS. So that would solve that problem. I think that Martian cities need to be designed to be functional and beautiful. Why? Clearly functional. Why beautiful?

Because the Martian cities that grow will be the ones that attract the most immigrants. And no one's going to want to live in, you know, an environment like that of the city in total recall. you know, they wouldn't want to go there. Similarly, I don't think Martian cities can be tyrannies because no one would emigrate to one of them. Martian cities will be experiments, and the winners will be those that attract the most immigrants. And so that's also my answer to the social system as well,

the one that people find the most attractive. You know, at the time of the American Revolution, Caribbean islands had a bigger economy than the 13 colonies. That's why the Battle of Yorktown, British fleet didn't come to rescue Cornwallis because they were busy stealing islands in the Caribbean from the French because they were worth a lot more in dollars or pounds. But in the time after that,

the United States so outpaced Caribbean as well as Latin America in European immigration, because it was a much more attractive place for people to move to, for any number of reasons. And thus, it became, you know, an economic and political superpower, while the Caribbean Islands, you know, a pretty minor affair in global calculations today. And so that's what's going to determine it, that the noble experiments on Mars, different political systems, different physical architectures, different mores, different customs, the ones that prevail will be the ones that people find the most attractive. And what would the Martian economy or economies be based around? because obviously there's a huge initial investment, not only to get human beings there, but to build even the first dome, I imagine,

would be a very costly affair. Is there an economic rationale to all of this? Yeah, I think it could be. Now, of course, this is a tricky business. The projectors that advocated colonization in North America in the Elizabethan age, you know, looked for items that, weren't there like gold or a passage to India.

The some when they discovered they could grow tobacco that that started to work. There were fisheries that could be supported out of New England that started to work. Timber for the Navy started. But in other words, a lot of these things that they looked for were wrong. Some of them guessed right. But actually, the biggest economic game that Europe got out of America wasn't timber for the Royal Navy. It was steamboats, telegraphs, electric white boats, airplanes, nuclear power, the Internet. That is, the way in which America has benefited Europe and the world has been as an engine of invention.

and not a particular product. And I think Mars will be a terrific engine of invention. Many of the same things that drove America to be a very inventive culture will exist on Mars but to orders of magnitude higher degree. That is, for instance, the labor shortage, which drove us to gadgeteering and labor-saving machinery. be much more intense on Mars. So I think the Martians are going to be virtuosos, not only in labor-saving machinery

and automation and robotics and artificial intelligence, all these things that they will need to compensate for their labor shortage will have tremendous benefits to the Earth. And they'll be licensable here as patents, and that is one way they'll get income. I think also they're going to be driven to want to create ultra-productive greenhouse agriculture because of limited acreage. And once again, and so they're going to be virtuosos at GMO bioengineering and so forth. And once again, these will have enormous benefits to the earth. Fusion power. You know, okay, there's some people working at fusion power right now on Earth, but there isn't really a sense of

there. We have lots of other ways you can make electricity. You can burn oil or gas or coal. You can have waterfalls or windmills. You know, you can have nuclear fission reactors. But most of that does not exist on Mars. And while you could use nuclear fission reactors on Mars, the fuel for them requires a great industrial base to refine uranium ore, which won't exist on Mars. The But Mars, deuterium, which is the heavy isotope of hydrogen, is five times as common on Mars as it is on Earth. And that's the fuel for fusion reactors. And, you know, British invented the steam engine. Early America invented the steam boat.

Okay. Why? Because the only real highways we had were rivers. Sailboats really don't do that well. It's transportation in rivers because the current can be too strong. You need powered boats. And we figured out of a way to put the steam engine to use. And in order to make steam engines compact and efficient enough to power steam boats,

we have to go to higher pressure and more efficient engines, which then made possible railroads, which, okay, Brits invented. But this is how this thing went. And the, but then railroad systems of great expanse were pioneered here. And I think that, you know, just as steam engines were really only made efficient when they were forced to be disciplined to meet the requirements of a steam boat and then even more efficient for a railroad. And nuclear reactors, frankly, the first practical nuclear reactors were on submarines. And that remains the one place where they are unchallenged because their capabilities for submarine propulsion are unique,

whereas for electricity generation there are competing technologies. But the fusion may very well be developed by Mars because they will have the necessity for it. And then, of course, it may be advanced considerably when it is made more compact to drive spacecraft. And Robert, what are going to be the challenges of going to Mars and starting a new colony on a new planet? And what are also going to be the dangers? Because, I mean, I'm an absolute layman when it comes to this. To me, the dangers are multiple, aren't they, really? No.

There's dangers here, too. No, there's going to be dangers. Look, if a person's values are that the good life is one of comfort and security, they should probably not choose being a first-generation Mars colonist. If a person's idea of the good life is one of doing deeds of great significance, then they might want to consider it. That is it. Okay, those are two different ideas of the good life. And, you know, now I'm obviously more in sympathy to the second point of view.

But different strokes for different folks. I'm not asking everybody to move to Mars. Only those people should move to Mars who want to create a new branch of human civilization, who want to open up a new kind of human future. Now, if you look at the three most remarkable and counterintuitive, colonization episodes of recent history, I would list the pilgrims going to Massachusetts,

the Mormons going to Utah, and the Jews going to Palestine as examples. In that, you know, I mean, look, Massachusetts was much colder than England, and the pilgrims were doing just fine in Holland. In fact, they left because the Dutch were too nice, and they were. assimilating them. They wanted to have their own world and half of them died in the first winter in New England because it was much colder than England or Holland. You're not selling it to me, Robert. What?

I said you're not selling it to me. I was joking. Well, no, but what I'm telling you is this, is that these people did these things going to unfavorable places so they could have their own world. Yeah, got you. Okay. And in all three examples, they were motivated by transcendic ideas, ideas that went beyond economics, the religious ideas and things that went along with that in terms of being able to make their own world, which is a fundamental kind of freedom. And so they did it. Now, I think that. The people who the initial Martian colonists will need to have comparable zeal. Because in other words, they're going to have to have a sense of mission,

an understanding that what they're doing is important in order to take on the hardships and risks associated with this. But, you know, there's no free lunch. You stay here. You're going to die here. Okay. you know, so the question is, what do you do with your life? And I believe there'll be people that'll be up for it. No, I'm sure.

I guess what Francis was more coming out is. It's not like we're trying to dissuade people from going to Mars. I think I'm actually really inspired by what you're saying in many ways. Whether I myself would go, I don't know. But I suppose we're just curious about the technical difficulties. Obviously, the colonizations that you've talked about, there would have been the local climate would have been a challenge. The sometimes hostile native population would have been a challenge.

Distance from the original point of departure would have been a big challenge in terms of getting manufactured goods and things like that initially. So what are going to be the biggest technological challenges in terms of going to Mars and eventually having a colony on Mars? Okay. If you want to stick strictly, okay, first of all, there's the transportation system. And this is being worked on both by SpaceX and by a number of other entrepreneurial companies, as well as at a much slower pace by official space agencies.

You know, this is a solvable problem. Then, from my life support, we basically have. As far as the transit is concerned, you know, the space station recycles some materials, others are just replaced. But if you made a space station like life support system for the Mars transit vehicle and made it sufficiently redundant to be robust against failure, you can do this. the routine stay on the space station is six months, which is how long it takes to fly from Earth to Mars, with chemical propulsion today. A number of our recent Mars probes went to Earth to Mars in that amount of time.

So it's not futuristic. The Okay, life support. landing, well, we land things on Mars. It is a challenging thing to do, but it can be done. And, you know, I think if we're sending starships or something like this to Mars, we're going to send the first five or six with no one in them and we'll probably crash the first three. And then we'll get it right and be able to land them routinely.

and others will exercise the technology before we commit people to it. Okay, then life support on Mars is actually easier than life support in space because the Mars has got water, it's got carbon dioxide, there's materials there to work with. We can set up greenhouses and grow food. Now, part of the trick of this will be to do greenhouse agriculture with a minimum of human labor. okay, because there's a lot of other things to do on Mars, both by necessity and by choice, and you don't want to commit the large majority or even a significant fraction of your time to growing the plants. You're going to have to devote some, because I don't think any totally automated system will do the job,

but I think you can greatly reduce the amount of actual time in the greenhouse. else. And once there are children on Mars, I think that's a place where they can help out. And I think that'll be useful, actually, not just to the colony, but to them. The, what are some of the other issues? Some things that are overblown are dust storms. You don't want to land during the dust storm because the winds can be high. and if you're coming down as an aerodynamic dominated object, they could take you and crash you. But once you're on the surface,

they're not really a problem other than impairing visibility and solar power. Because in other words, the thing they have in the movie, The Martian, where the windstorm is blowing over the base is fiction. The air is too thin for the wind to have much force. The, you know, but we're going to have to develop technologies to make the base as self-sufficient as possible, in particular with bulk materials.

That includes food, water, oxygen. It also includes things like plastic, steel, aluminum, glass. Now, I think that can all be done. The materials are there. The technologies are fairly straightforward, although they have to be repackaged. Now, to make something like this is more complicated. Okay.

So I think for some time, Mars is going to have to import high-tech objects. But even this thing here, most of the weight of this is like the glass cover and the metal back. And, you know, the guts of this that is actually high-tech is maybe 20% of its mass. So this is maybe 200 grams, maybe 40 grams of this is actually something you can't make on Mars. Now, that's the most expensive part. But as things are shippable by advanced transportation to the extent they have a high value per mess. In other words, you don't ship coal by air freight. Okay, because the cost of air freight is much higher.

than the value per kilogram of coal. Shipping this by air freight is no problem at all. Now, space freight is the same fundamental issue. We're not going to want to ship food and steel to Mars, except at the very initiation of the base. Okay, so you want to build greenhouses on Mars. So you can make the steel frame. You can make the glass, okay, on Mars.

Those are the heaviest stuff. You can probably make the motors that power the pumps and fans for the greenhouse on Mars too. But the computers that control the motors and fans, you probably want to import from Earth. So you see what I'm saying. Now, as Mars becomes more populated and has a greater division of labor,

more sophisticated objects will be makeable there. But that's going to be a progressive thing. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website? Because if you do, then EasyDNS is a company for you. EasyDNS is the perfect domain name registrar provider and web host for you. They have a track record of standing up for their clients, whether it be cancelled culture, de-platform attacks or overzealous government agencies. He knows about that.

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It's really interesting the way that you're speaking about this, Robert, because to most people, this sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel or a sci-fi movie. But the way you're talking about it shows that it is achievable. It is achievable, and it's going to be in the realms of possibility. So do you think that these kind of... How long do you think it's going to take before we set up these kinds of... kind of civilizations, this type of technology on Mars. You think it's going to be 100 years, or could it be less than that? I think it could be a lot less than that. Let me tell you a story

about this, okay? It's an interesting story. In 1970, Apollo astronauts visited the crater Aristarchus on the moon. And the crater Aristarchus is the scene where Arthur Clark set one of his most famous novels called Earthlight. And the Apollo astronauts were aware of this novel. And so landing in the crater, one of them proudly proclaimed, you know, we are here in the crater Aristarchus, the scene of Arthur Clark's great novel, Earthlight. And wouldn't he be proud to know that we're here if he was alive today?

Okay. Now, of course, Arthur Clark was alive in 1970, and he heard this remark, and so he commented on it publicly. He said, well, you know, I actually am alive, and I am very proud of this. But I wrote that novel in 1940 while I was manning a radar station in England during the Blitz. Okay, and this is how he was spending the boredom between attacks, writing Earthlight. And he said, and if anybody had told me then that 30 years later there would be people walking around in that crater, I would have thought it was the wildest poppycock imaginable. There's only 30 years that separate the blitz from walking on the moon. 30 years.

Wow. Okay. And things can happen much faster than we anticipate. I think we can have people walking around on Mars 10 years. years from now, and I think we can have very substantial basis on Mars starting to develop this technology and maybe even the first children born on Mars 20 years from now. I think that that future is entirely possible. But it's not destiny. There's no such thing as destiny. The future is what we make it. Robert, that's a really fascinating way to talk about it. I have to thank you for kind of

recapturing the spirit of curiosity in terms of exploring space that I certainly remember from my childhood that I haven't felt for a very long time. So thank you for that. I really appreciate it. We've got about 10, 15 minutes left and I wanted to talk. Did you want to say something about Mars? It's not just about Mars. It is something I have to ask. And I would kick myself if I didn't. And it's going to sound like a ridiculous question. But here we go. Robert, what is your opinion of alien life forms. Do you think that they exist? Do you think that there is intelligent alien life form out there? Sure. Yeah, I'm... Yes, I am pretty certain that there's intelligent alien life forms out there. I think we're living in a living universe. Now, that's a question of belief, because we don't have the data

that proves that at the moment, except that here's what we know. we know from the Kepler Space Telescope that planets around stars are the rule, not the exception. And that 20% of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy have Earth-sized planets orbiting stars in their habitable zone. That is the right distance from the star where you get the reasonable temperatures where water is liquid and not. all frozen or all gaseous or something like that. So the potential homes for life are innumerable. There's no reason to believe that the processes that led to the origin of life from chemistry are unique to the earth. You know, that just doesn't make any sense.

the Roman philosopher I believe said Is it reasonable to assume that an entire field Only one blade of grass should grow Well no it's not Okay and furthermore even if life didn't originate in multiple places It can travel across space

We get rocks from Mars landing on Earth all the time 500 kilograms of them a year And examination of them have shown that in the process of their ejection from Mars, which is by meteor impact, flight through space and reentry and landing on Earth. There are large fractions of those rocks that were never raised above 40 centigrade, which means that if there were microbes in them, they could survive the trip. And the rocks are going the other way, too.

And, you know, when the Earth was impacted, say, the time of the dinosaur extinction, it spread rocks containing microbes out into space, not just to Mars, but into interstellar space. and all other planets that might have life are doing this too. So any planet that has life is spreading life. Now, okay, that's microbes. But then we know about evolution. And we know that life continues evolve. And while it's not true that life evolves in a unique,

in a directed way towards higher and higher forms, it evolves in all directions, which includes towards higher and higher forms. Okay. You know, people say, well, only humans are intelligent. We have intelligence is a unique human thing. Well, intelligence is really shades of gray. You know, if you look at the array of life on earth, say, as it was 30 million years ago,

long before there were people, but it was diverse mammals, vastly more intelligent than the animals were 300 million years ago. And they, in turn, were vastly more intelligent than the life forms that were here 3 billion years ago. So, yes, there is progress that occurs in biology. It doesn't occur in just one direction. Okay, we got new viruses being mutated too. But the idea that intelligence, which is one form of adaptation that is useful, not evolve elsewhere. It makes no sense. Intelligence, capacity for intelligence, adaptability,

communicative and cognitive abilities, all have been increasing on Earth more or less continually for the past three billion years. And so if life's everywhere, I think it means intelligence is quite widespread as well. Very interesting. I'm glad Francis I asked you that question, because the question I was going to ask you is about matters back here on Earth, which you alluded to somewhat right at the beginning of the interview, which is, I feel like the conversation we've just had is all about expanding humanity beyond the remits of Earth and, you know, growing the impact of human civilization on the universe and reaching further and grasping for more.

But there is a tendency, particularly in modern society, which is, I would argue, quite anti-humanist that sees human beings as a plague that is unleashed on this planet. You know, even the mere mention of colonization obviously has its negative connotations for a good reason, historically speaking. But I think underneath that, there is a kind of anti-humanism more broadly, which is the idea that, you know, having children is bad, that human beings are inherently bad,

the impact that we have on the world is defined by its negative impact on the world and so on. Where does that come from, in your opinion? Why have some people embrace this as much as they have? Well, this is fundamentally the Malthusian point of view, that there's only so much to go around, and so the more people, the worse, and therefore human numbers, activities, and liberties must be severely constrained. Now, the corollary to this is there must be someone to do the constraining. And so this worldview is fundamentally a justification for tyranny, and therefore, intellectuals that expouse it will never lack for sponsors.

Which was the case with Malthus himself, who was an employee of the East India Company. And, you know, first of all, the Malthus theory is completely false. the actually it's been false through all of human history and it was spectacularly false and now this is own time and more recently as the population is sore standard of living is sore because what is standard of living crudely speaking it's product divided by the number of people okay what determines the product available per person equals on average the product produced per person which mean, and what is product produced per person? That is technology.

That is new technologies multiply what each person can produce. Okay. And where do inventions come from? They come from inventors. The more people, the more inventors. The more inventors, the more inventions. And inventions are cumulative. And this is why, as the number of people has gone up,

the standard of living has gone up and not down. I mean, you know, and now this is time. World had one billion people. and the average income per person per year was about $200, about 50, 60 cents a day in today's money. This is the world described in the novels of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo in which there are starving people in London and Paris, the two most advanced cities in the world.

Today, the world average is $10,000 per person. Okay, now it's higher in advanced countries, but that's the average. Okay, that's like Brazil. 10,000, it's 50 times as much as 200. So the world population has increased sevenfold. The product per capita has increased 50fold, which is like seven squared, which means the total product has increased as the population cute. So Malthusianism could not be more counterfactual.

Okay. And one could go on along these lines. But these ideas are promoted. You know, Hitler, Hitler said, he took the opposite point of view, and in fact, he particularly singled out this idea that science, scientific progress could produce more per person than population growth. He called it a Jewish plot to dissuade people from understanding the necessity for war. That's what he said. He said in other words, this idea that

human creativity, science, can overcome resource limitations, is undermining people's belief in the necessity for war, which he wanted people to believe in. Okay. And, okay, Jews have contributed to the advance of science and technology, certainly, but certainly the idea that science and technology can alleviate scarcity is, is not a Jewish plot. It's simply true. And as history proves, history proves that wars for Leibonstram are unnecessary. And, and, as history proves, stupid. But that won't stop them from happening because there are people who need this bad idea. And it is fundamental to their power. It is the justification for tyranny, including totalitarian forms of tyranny. And frankly, this is why I think gone to Mars is important.

We're not going to get oil from Mars, okay, to alleviate the oil shortage. We may, I think we will get inventions from Mars, which will help us a lot. But the main thing we're going to get from Mars is the truth. That it's not true that there's only so much to go around here on Earth because the Earth comes with an infinite sky. And if we work together, we can throw it wide open. And there's no reason killing each other fighting over provinces if by working together we can open planets.

What a beautiful way to wrap it up. Robert, I'll say for myself, I absolutely love speaking with you. I'm so glad we got to tap into what I said earlier, which is part of the excitement and optimism about the future of human civilization, frankly, that we don't often come across now. And I really appreciate the time you've given us.

We're going to ask you a couple of questions from our audience that only they will get to see for our locals. But before we do, we've got one final question for you, as always. Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Well, you should be talking about my books. Okay. There's enough of them to go around. I've got a number of books.

I mean, if you got time for one, it's the case for Mars. I mean, it's published it in 96, updated in 2011, 2011, the most recent edition has an endorsement by Elon Musk on the cover. But you got time for one of my books, that's the one. Okay, I have a more recent book. It's called The Case for Space. It's also out there. And a book that may, is on the flip side of this, which is called Merchants of

despair, which is my attack on this anti-humanist concept and showing how not only it's wrong, but how it has been responsible for almost all the major human cause disasters in the past 200 years. And so, you know, if you're up for that, also if you're not technical and just more into history and stuff, that's the book, Merchants of Despair. and they're all available on Amazon. Well, I can't where I'm going to start my. I haven't had a chance to read any of them yet, but I'm definitely going to start with the case for Mars,

and I really, really look forward to that. Okay. Robert Zubin, thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find you online, where is the best place to do that? Well, I'm president of the Mars Society. We have a website, which is at marssociety.org. That's fantastic.

Thank you so much. Don't go anywhere because we're going to ask you a couple of questions, But for now, Dr. Robert Zuberan, thank you so much for coming on. And thank you for watching and listening. We'll see you with another brilliant episode like this one or also. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.

Any life form that goes to a new environment is going to re-optimized for that environment. And a taller and more lightly built might very well be. way that dumb marshes evolve.