Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseCan we settle space? Should we? Have we really thought this through?
Daniel talks to Kelly and Zach Weinersmith about whether humanity is ready to move into the stars.
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Hey Kelly, where do you think your kids are going to live when they grow up?
Well, right now, my oldest is saying she's gonna stay in the house and have fourteen cats and ten kids, and I guess I'm hoping that she's not in my house but when that happens.
But I also don't.
Want her too far because I'd love to see her and her many creatures as much as possible.
Well, what would mean too far? Are we talking like South America or Antarctica?
I'd make those trips, although I wouldn't be super excited about Antarctico. But I suspect I'm going to be a pretty determined grandparent.
What if they have grandbabies like in near Earth orbit on this space.
Station, I'd be a bit disappointed for her poor decisions because I'm not sure that that's safe yet. But if that's what i have to do to see the grandkids, and my love is unconditional, I'm in all right.
And what if they move to Mars and have little Martian babies.
Oh my gosh, I don't know.
Maybe we should set up a video link.
Well, it's good to know the limits of your love.
Yeah, no, there's alpha Centauri's a good limit.
But you know what's worrying me is we're having this conversation, and now I have to make sure that my kids in the future and my grandkids don't listen to this conversation because they're going to get ideas and they'll move out deep into the solar system.
Right now they know exactly how far they have to move to avoid grandparent visits.
Yep, good luck kids.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I hope my kids move far away.
I'm Kelly Weener Smith. I'm a parasitologist and adjunct Debt Race University. And you know, I'd like my kids to be close, but maybe not in the house.
I have lots of friends here whose kids graduate from high school, go to college, and then move back home. In this neighborhood, they call that failure to launch.
That's a big thing. Now, Yeah, my kids can stay with me as long as they need to.
I just feel like moving outside the influence of your parents is part of growing up and becoming an adult in the world.
You know, I did love it. I had so much fun when I moved out.
Well, welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. My usual friend and co host, Jorge can't be here today, but I'm very happy to be joined by our regular guest host, Kelly Wiersmith. Kelly, thanks very much for joining us.
It's a pleasure to be here as always.
And you know, today we're talking about maybe the best thing you've ever talked about on the podcast, and so I'm particularly excited about today's conversation.
That's right. Today we're not just talking about explaining the universe. We're talking about exploring the universe, actually settling the universe, sending humanity out to the rest of the cosmos to infect it with our disease. And as a special bonus, we have not one Wiener Smith today, we actually have two zach Wingers. May welcome to the podcast as well.
There, Hey, hello, I need some intro music.
What is your intro music? Is it sort of like the Darth Vader theme?
Song more of a more of a wrestling thing, I would I would like what did the Macho Man have?
Well, regular listeners the podcast no Kelly, of course, and some of you may also know Zach, her less famous husband, well known for a Saturday morning breakfast cereal whatever made in And there's a reason we have Zach and Kelly on the podcast together today, not just for marital therapy, but because these two folks have written a fantastic and fascinating book all about settling space and exploring the cosmos.
And it's finally almost available.
How long have you guys been working on this book?
We did four years of research on the book, and then it took a year between submitting the book and it going to Prince. So we've been thinking about this for like a decade between the two of us, and we are ready to crush everyone's dream.
If you feel about this book the way I feel about every paper I write that takes longer than a year, then by the time it's ready to go out in the world, I hate the thing and I never want to see it again.
I was happy to get it off of my desk when the time came, but I'm still pretty excited about it, and that year in between sort of helps me get excited about it again.
What about you, Zach, Yeah, I think you know. So the amount of time between submitting a manuscript you're basically not allowed to touch and the time you get to actually put the book out of the universe is quite substantial. So I think the other thing is, you know, the way publishing works now is you don't want to say too much because you might get to say it in some prominent place, So you kind of have you're sort of like you know, bound and gagged until the book comes out. So it's getting to where it's exciting to talk about this stuff again.
Awesome. So I hope we're catching you right in the upswing where you're excited about these topics again, because I'm very excited about it and I can't wait to talk to you both about it. And so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question can we settle space? Should we settle space? Have we really thought this through? I love the subtitles or your book. It really sets up the whole conversation, the skepticism, the nerdy analysis of whether this is something realistic. I really love the way you guys tackle this.
I feel like by reading the last question we propose you pretty much know where we're going to fall.
On the whole topic. But you know, we try to. We're still people who are excited about space settlement at the end of the day.
And space settlement is something that's definitely in the zeitgeisten has been for decades. Right, We've been hearing about the possibilities of moving humans out into space. Elon Musk is famously accelerating our ability to get into orbit, and so this is something people have been thinking about. And so, as usual on the podcast, before we dig into the topic, I pulled our listeners to hear what they thought about the possibilities of colonizing space, the Moon and Mars in this case, actually walked around campus here at UC Irvine where classes have recently started, and asked folks if they thought it's important that we colonize space and whether we will have the technology. So, before you hear these answers, think to yourself for a minute, do you think we should colonize space? Are we ready to do so? Here's what people had to say.
Sure, why not?
Do you think we're capable of doing it? Anytime in the near future. No, No, how long do you think before we're ready the moon?
Probably under the years, I would say that, I don't know fighting.
In the future.
Do you think humanity should colonize space the moon in Mars? No, because we kind of ruined our planet already. Are you worried we're going to ruin some more we don't deserve too. Do you think humanity should colonize space the moon in.
Marsh Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, definitely yeah.
Cool.
Why is that?
Oh?
Yeah, because like you know, like you never know, like what's going to happen in the future.
You know, do you think we're ready? Do we have the technology?
Maybe NASA does, but we never know like what's going to happen. Maybe they're like hiding something or at least that's what I think. I think we should colonize like those kind of.
Financial What is NASA hiding?
Do you think?
I have no clue?
Yeah, I'm just undergrad student here, but probably like some like super technology, you know, just came out that aliens does exist.
The question is, do you think humanity should colonize space the moon in Mars?
Yeah, I think so.
I think it's a good idea. So if we're capable of doing it, I think it's not.
A bad idea.
So do you think we are capable?
I think we will be very very likely, because I mean, we sure have the technology to go there.
It's just yeah.
So I guess if you asked me, in probably in one hundred years, there will be people living in March Mars. That's my guess.
Do you think it's important that humanity colonizes space, the Moon, Mars, et cetera.
Eventually, yes, but not in the immative future.
And do you think we'll have the capability the technology to do it anytime soon?
Eventually?
Eventually? What does eventually mean?
I don't know.
He is, all right, Zach Kelly. What do you guys think about those answers?
Well, I'll note that I didn't share them with Zach ahead of time, so he's unprepared.
But I'm going to go ahead and say that's his fault.
So one of the respondents said no, because we've ruined our planet already, so we don't deserve it. And I got to say, what as an ecologist, when I started telling people like, oh, I'm writing a book about space settlement, many of them immediately assumed that I was writing a book about how we don't deserve it because we've destroyed our own planet, and I almost felt guilty because that was not at all my angle. I'm excited, and I think we should. You know, I hope we do it at some point, but I hope we're just careful about it.
Zach.
When you talk to people, what is the response that you usually get from people when you tell them that you're writing a book about space settlements?
So I think, you know, the ecologist's example is good because what we've found is what we should do in space is almost like a roarshock test for your view of the universe, you know what I mean. There are these different strains. So there are people who are very kind of techy libertarian, read a lot of hindline Elon musk Is in this vein, who think it's not just that it would be cool to do it would be kind of like a thwarting of human ambition to not do it. But then you also have feel who are Yeah, I have this perspective that we have kind of befouled the Earth and we're a sort of you know, gross scurf on the surface of the planet, and ought not to extend ourselves to other planets. And I think it's almost like, you know how people say science fiction is never about the future, it's always about the present. I think what you think should be done in space settlement kind of works the same way. What you're often doing is really making rendering a sort of judgment on how we're doing right this second. You know. The deal is, of course space is actually a real place that interfaces with actual reality, and so you know, our book is hopefully it's an attempt to part from it just being a sort of philosophical thing and talk about what it would actually be like. But yeah, can you say about the ecology thing my biggest rebuttal to that. I mean, yeah, people tend to assume that we're going to be like, yes, Elon Muss is an idiot and he's defiled Earth and will defile Mars, and I just want to say, like that just fails to reckon with how thoroughly terrible Mars is. Like unless you are one of these people, and there are such people more than I would have thought, who think like Mars as an entity has agency like a person would. Unless you believe something like that, it's bizarre because there's no part of Earth that's even close to as bad as anywhere on Mars. You couldn't make it as bad without like slamming the Moon into Earth or something. So the idea in an ecological sense messing up Mars as sort of absurd, and the moon even more so. Yeah.
Well, one thing I think is really fascinating is hearing about how your opinions have changed. I mean, if this is like a ror shark test for who you are and what you think about where we are today, then it's really interesting that you guys went from like vaguely optimistic about space settlement to being you know, space cranks. Essentially tell us a little bit about your journey, like what book did you start out wanting to write? Did you intend to write when you started this project, Oh, so many years ago.
So we wrote soonish together and that was a book about emerging technologies, and two of the technologies in the book were cheap access to space and asteroid mining. And after writing both of those chapters, we thought like, oh, you know, maybe space settlements aren't that far away. So if you can launch mass to space cheaply, then you can send habitats with all the tech that you need to keep humans alive in space. And if asteroid mining is a thing, then pretty soon we're going to be able to use resources from space to build our habitats, and that's going to make things even cheaper. And so we thought that this is something that could happen in our lifetimes, and especially given all of the like pop size stuff you read about space settlement and all the rhetoric from space advocates, we thought like, this is something that we are one hundred percent prepared to do.
We just need to be able to afford to do it.
So we were going to write like the guide to what the next couple of years are going to be, like, like, you know, how do you put together the first crew? Should it be half male half female? How should you know if you have an international crew, kind of sociological stuff might they come up against? And what kind of governance should you have for the first settlement on the moon.
And you were excited to see these things happen, right, you were like, Ooh, let's figure this out. This would be fantastic if it happened.
I guess I shouldn't speak for both of us, but I was. I I think it's beautiful. The idea of like, you know, waking up on the moon and seeing Earth, you know, from the glass dome that you were sleeping in or whatever. That all sounded amazing and so I was super excited. But every chapter that we started working on, we were like, oh, man, we don't know anywhere near enough about this. So in the medicine chapter, we were like, we really don't know how bodies are going to respond to space. And then in the closed loop ecology chapter, where you know, can you recycle the carbon dioxide that you breathe out in the water, and how do you get like a habitat that recycles stuff so that you don't need more stuff flown in from Earth, And we really don't know how to do that very well. And then we got into the international law and we were like, oh, my gosh, there's so much that isn't figured out here, and it could create tons of conflict if we start trying to settle now. And I could just go on and on and on. Every chapter that we thought, oh, we've probably figured this out, it turned out that there's a lot of work to do, and so we ended up, yeah, writing the book that we wrote in ste.
So you discovered that a lot of these things hadn't really been explored thoroughly or viewed with a skeptical lens, or analyzed in detail. Essentially, it was all hidden under a bunch of pro space fluff. Is that the sense you got once you start digging into things?
Yeah, all of that, All of that is true.
So why is that, Zach? Why do you think nobody has written this sort of like skeptical are we really ready kind of book before? Why is it all sort of pro space gloss over the details?
That's a good question, I should say, first of all, as we got close to press a couple similar books not quite the same story coming out. I do think there's a kind of growing analytical approach to this problem. I will say, you know, it's hard to know other people's motivations. I think the generous assumption is that people don't tend to write pop technology books about a thing you're not going to get generally speaking, right, I was talking to a distinguished popular science author and I said, you know, I was talking to about it, and you know, basically explain this whole thing that where we're basically going to say it's going to be it's way harder than you expected. The timelines are much longer than you expected, and there are even arguments for not doing it outside of like extraordinary technological developments. He was like, you can't do that, you can't. You can't have a book for nerds. That's like, sorry, nerds, you don't get the thing. And so, you know, the upshot of that is, if you look as we did at the sort of corpus of future casting books about space written going back to the nineteen twenties, they tend to be about what problem space is going to solve?
Right.
They're not critical in that sense of saying, wait, maybe this problem is not worth solving, in a sort of boring economic sense, the kind of analysis you would do if you were trying to say drill and oil. Well, right, And so when you don't have that voice in the room, there tend to be major things that just get skipped. So like, for us, a huge turning point which will sound like almost nothing when you first hear it, but then you start thinking about it, which is the surface of the Moon is carbon poor, like extremely carbon poor. There's almost no carb right, And so you have a nerd audience they know what that means that you literally cannot have life. You have to import carbon. Right. It's not like you need to like sprinkle a little phosphorus or something, right, you have to sprinkle the whole farm. Which is crazy when you think that these you know, like if you look at Saturn fives, like the biggest rocket ever built, it was able to put this eeny weeny little thing on the moon.
Right.
It's the idea that we're going to scale up to where we're delivering mountains and mountains just to be able to like grow apples or whatever is kind of crazy, and so like whatever it could be solved, quote unquote, But why isn't this the first thing in all these books about space settlement?
Right?
Why aren't questions like this number one? Like these massive problems? And another huge one is radiation, which there's a book called The Case for Space, or is the Case from Mars. It's a huge book in this sector by Robert Zubrin. It has a section on radiation. It goes immediately as I recall, into this idea of hormesis hermesis meaning when you get some of something it might actually be good. Some of a bad something might be good in some circumstances, which is like a bizarre response to the unknown results of massive doses of non earth like radiation. But I think this is what you would expect if most of the books are written by advocates. They just don't want to linger on those problems.
You have this line in your book, which I thought was a great singer. You say, quote much of the discourse around why we should go to space and how society will work when we get there remains mired in uninformed opinion and unrealistic fantasy. Ouch Are you suggesting that we should have like a boring economist in every conversation to keep us like firmly rooted on the ground.
Yes, I mean there would be worse things. And I also, just to be clear, we are generally very nice to the space settlement community. We disagree, but we love them very much. These people are our friends, and we're sorry that we're wet blankets.
But yes, the rhetoric could use a bit of Well.
We're going to dig into all of your analysis of what it's like to live in space and where we could go, and what the real problems are in international law and cannibalism and sex in space on all these really fun topics that you guys analyze. But before we do, I just have one more question, which is, what do you think the response is going to be from the pro space settlement community when you call them uninformed and unrealistic fantasizers about the future.
Ah Okay, So I'll say that Daniel Dowdney came before us. He wrote a book called Dark Skies, which is very anti space settlement, and he has been called anti human. And I watched a panel that was set up where he was like invited to sort of like watch, but they didn't ask him to suggest any names for people to go on the panel, so it was just people tearing apart his ideas for like two hours, and which I thought there were plenty of good counter arguments that weren't presented. But anyway, I am not super sure that the community is going to be real kind to us. But there's also plenty of people in that community who are open to discussion, and so I'm optimistic that we'll have lots of productive discussions with lots of people, but no doubt there will be a subset of people who are going never really hate our guts.
Well, I hope you guys don't have to go into hiding after this book. I think it's a good idea to explore this constructively, and that in your book you were balanced and fair and didn't just throw wet blankets on these ideas suggested like actual ways forward and raise the issues that we need to confront if we're going to make this happen. So I think it's a very positive and forward thinking book. But let's dig into the details in a minute after we take this short break. With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill. The price you thought you were paying magically skyrockets. With mint Mobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really need it. I've used mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear. I can recommend it to you, So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts, so dit your overpriced wireless with mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless bill to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash universe. Forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only speeds slower about forty gigabytes On unlimited plan. Additional taxi, s, fees, and restrictions apply. See mint mobile for details.
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Well, so this was one of the first eye opening research topics for me. So we started with space medicine, and I assumed you know, Okay, So the Soviets sent up a bunch of Solutes, and then the Soviet Union slash Rush Russia sent up Mirror, and then ISS has been up there for like twenty years, and China has now fielded three space stations in Low Worth orbit and so, you know, I assumed that we would have a bunch of data on how radiation impacts the human body, and we'd have good answers to questions like does space radiation cause cancer? And I should note that radiation in space, as your listeners no doubt already know, is different than the kind of radiation we tend to encounter on Earth, and so we understand it even less well. But something I should have realized but didn't occur to me until I was reading these textbooks on space medicine, is that all of our space stations have been orbiting the Earth under the protection of Earth's magnetosphere, and so most of space radiation is not reaching them. Maybe they have slightly elevated levels, but a person living on the International Space Station isn't necessarily giving us the data that we need to understand how a person living on the Moon or Mars is going to hold up under space radiation.
So where does space radiation come from? I mean, they don't have like nuclear power plants melting down in the middle of space. Where is this coming from?
It's coming from the Sun, and it's coming from well, I really feel like this is a question for you then.
Right so you're right, the Sun generates a huge amount of radiation, you know, protons and electrons, very high speed, the solar wind. People think about space as empty, but it's really filled with high speed particles. And as you say, the Earth is protecting us from that. It's atmosphere and its magnetic field shields us from a lot of that space radiation. So if you think about radiation like Fukushima style, there's not a whole lot of that, but there's a huge amount of just solar wind. And we feel that already down here on Earth. You know, we get radiation from space penetrates through the atmosphere, and as you go higher and higher, you're more exposed to that radiation. So you know, one question I have for you is like, is it possible to learn more about this, not just from astronauts on the space station, but from like flight attendants who spend a lot of time at higher altitude and are more exposed to that radiation from space.
Well, so they're more exposed to that kind of radiation, but they are they also more exposed to like the galactic cosmic radiation like iron ions and stuff.
Are those also hitting the planes in space?
That's actually a really fascinating research question. We don't actually know what component of the radiation the cosmic rays that hit the Earth are like iron nuclei versus just protons. None of that actually makes it down to the surface. They'll just slam into the atmosphere and then turn into muons and other particles. So there's definitely no iron nuclei like passing through the bodies of stewardesses and airplane passengers fortunately, And so I guess your argument is that out there in space, on the surface of Mars or on the Moon, you have like no protection, so you're like really feeling the brunt of raw space radiation.
Itself and you're never escaping it.
And also, your habitat can create different kinds of radiation. So when the radiation hits your habitat, something called spallation happens, where the particles break into different kinds of particles that are also radioactive. And so what kind of habitat you're living in, the shape of the habitat all this stuff is going to matter. But with stewardesses, for example, you know, let's say they are getting exposed to some of that radiation. You know, they're exposed to it for parts of their lives, so you know, they're working lives start at like what eighteen, but maybe even older, and they're only up there part of the time. And so we're talking about people who are going to be like born on a planet and exposed to radiation from the moment they're conceived or you know, from maybe even the game meats in their parents were receiving radiation, and so that kind of accumulated dose over an entire lifespan, Maybe it's not going to be a problem. Maybe we can design habitats that totally keep the radiation out, or maybe like we read this one review paper from twenty eighteen that basically said, look, we don't even know if space radiation causes cancer, but it's probably best that we assume it could. And so like that's where we are right now, Like it probably causes cancer, but we don't even know. But I will note that most proposals for habitats on the Moon are Mars or even rotating space stations involve covering the habitat with meters of regalists. So that's the like dirt, dusty dirt that you find on the Moon and Mars and the idea is that if you're under a couple meters of that, it's going to block the radiation before it gets to your habitat. So that glass dome that I wanted to wake up underneath and look at the Earth, you know, on my vacation, that's not going to happen. I would be baked with radiation. So, yeah, there's a lot we don't know. And the answer might be either it's fine or it's fine with a little bit of engineering, but we don't have the kind of data that we need right now to really understand that. And there are so Brookhaven Laboratory now has a new device that can make galactic cosmic radiation or can mimic it, and so we're starting to be able to get some better data on rodents. But even then, it's not like they're being exposed for their entire life to the entire range of radiation that they're going to get in space. So there's still a lot we have left to learn.
So you're saying that the kind of habitats we're imagining long term life on Mars or the Moon or in a space station could end up like a horror movie where everybody gets like horrible cancer and your faces melt and all this kind of stuff that we just don't know the answer to whether it's even possible for humans to live in that scenario.
So I think face melting is probably off the table, but maybe not. But well, I don't.
Think that we have to, you know, start with babies and see what happens. Like, I think we could go to the Moon and set up a research station, and the Moon is only a couple of days away, so people could stay for a couple months, and if there was any indicator that they were having a problem, we could send them home, and then we could send a different habitat type and try again, and we could have rodent colonies out there. But it's going to be a slow process to make sure, you know, like, Okay, this amount of radiation is safe, and then that amount of radiation is safe, And it'll be a long time before you can convince me that it would be safe to conceive and have babies in space without too much extra risk. But somebody who read our book told us we were being whips about that.
So and you're like, well, why don't you send your grandkids to the moon.
Then they said they would because we did say that. We did say that, and they were like, I totally would I'd do it. And I was like, wow, I'm glad I'm not your child.
This is a great example for me. When reading your book, I was very surprised that we just don't know so much about what life will be like in space. Even things that seemed like they might not be a big deal could turn out to be a big deal because we just don't know because we have such a little limited experience. I was really enjoying the section on micro gravity, for example, like what's it like to live in very little gravity your whole life? I suppose we just don't know the answer to that as well.
Basically, Yeah, So one thing a lot of people maybe don't know is that the record consecutive space flight was I think four hundred and thirty seven days, and down from that, there's something like a dozen people who've been up for a year, and it's down from that. And I don't have it offhand, but I think if you looked it up, the majority of astronauts ever have been for like on a matter of weeks, like they went on on the Shuttle or something. Right, So the amount of longitudinal data like we literally could not have it. No one's gone up for a year and a half consecutively. If you look at people who've gone up, like the highest total is somewhere in the eight hundreds of days. So even then, you're talking about a really short amount of time to get like good longitudinal data. Like Kelly said, we're not talking about face melting for radiation, right, we're talking about like long term effects. But we do know that to come back to microgravity in particular, there are reliable bad effects of microgravity. So when you go to space. One thing we ended up not talking too much about, even though it has a rich history, is a lot of people get motion sickness. It's something it's called space motion sickness, and they spend the first few days throwing up. But we didn't talk about it too much because it's not really a settlement problem. You do adjust to it. The problems that show up when you stay longer are things like rapid loss and bone density in some parts of your body you lose I think the number we have was one and a half percent bone density per month, like an insanely fast rate of bone loss. And that's by the way, while astronauts are doing a huge amount of exercise every day, right, very time consuming exercise every single day, and there are other more subtle things. Obviously, you know coming with that is that you have a lot of loss of muscle strength. Jerry Linninger was an astronaut. He was on Mirror for about four months, and it was a huge point of pride for him as a kind of like muscly, slightly meat headed astronaut that he was able to walk just barely when he got out of the space station. But there are other things that happened, so they're like Lininger described, when he got home to his hotel room, he kind of freaked out a little because in space, if you feel pressure on your back, it means you're going to fling forward, because it's it's very Newtonian up there, right, So when he got down in bed, he felt like he was going to go flying. So he said he could only sleep once he had kind of wrapped himself up in a blanket.
You you need to be swaddled like a baby.
I think he was more like tied down, but I actually don't know. I don't remember what he did with the blanket in particular, and then there are these more subtle effects.
Right.
People often get dizzy, right because your body on Earth is used to pumping blood against gravity all day long, and in space there's no orientation, So when you suddenly return to full Earth gravity, your body is just not prepared to do this. I mean, it's kind of amazing to me that your body does eventually work it out. You don't just like die. And there are other subtle things. Reliably, people lose vision, so they actually, for especially for older astronauts, you have to be set up with these glasses that are adjusted because it's anticipated your vision will get worse, and it's not perfectly understood why. But one possibility is that microgravity you experience this fluid shift. Fluid shifts up in your body, especially at the beginning. You notably have what's called puffy face and chicken legs, as one person described it, which is like kind of funny but also kind of bad, maybe because it's possible what's happening is it's causing nerve damage or reshaping of the nerves that connect your eyes or something, which is like bad enough, but it's also a little creepy because you worry. There's like, you know, there's apparently equivocal evidence on cognitive effects of space. We don't know if that's because of microgravity, your aradiation, or just who knows what. So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff you wouldn't anticipate. In the particular context of babies, it gets like extra freaky. I'm willing to buy that a baby in ingestation is at least in kind of a neutral buoyancy tank. But you know, you try to imagine like a six month old trying to have normal bone development and microgravity, that would be enormously scary. It's possible on the Moon, which is about one six ers gravity, it wouldn't be so bad. But like, to add more more data to this, we have I think something like a grand total of ten days on the Moon between all of the missions, you know, and so like we really don't know. And that was of course all full grown, like particularly fit men, and so there are other things. But yeah, micro gravity is a big open question and would take a long time to get better data on it.
Well, I want to push back on your denial of my face melting concern, because you're talking about like lower bone density, weakened muscles, puppy eyes, to me, that sounds like, you know, that could lead to real face melting.
We could term the suite of negative effects face melting. What we'll call it whites and face melting.
Okay, there you go. But my real question is that it seems like it might be hard to go to space, have your body adapt to it, and then come back to Earth. But what if you just do a in a one way trip. Isn't it possible that kids who grow up in space are totally adapted and can live totally healthy lives in space with low bone density and super long chicken legs or whatever. Is this about going to space and coming back or is this about just surviving in space?
I think it's about both. So, you know, Mars has forty percent of Earth's gravity. Maybe that will be enough for normal development, maybe not. So it's the same as radiation, maybe it'll be fine, maybe not. But you know, especially initially, there's a lot of stuff we're going to be figuring out about Mars, like, you know, how can we live up there sustainably? Can we create an economy? How do we you know, create a society that has some freedom and likes being up there? And you know, it's a very delicate habitat. So if you have people who are you know, angry or become terrorists, they could very easily kill almost everybody. And so for a variety of different reasons, you would like to be able to have the option to bring people home, especially initially when this whole experiment is started. So if it turns out you have, you know, one hundred babies in the first generation at the settlement and they decide, you know what, this isn't economically feasible. We just can't make any money out here. We can't pay to get the supplies shipped in that we need from Earth because it's super expensive. What do you do with those babies who are now stuck out there? And so you know, yes, maybe a couple generations from now, when we're like safely settled on Mars and it's sustainable and we know that, you know, we're going to be able to stay out there permanently, maybe it's not such a big deal if they can't come back to the cradle of humanity. But I can still imagine that being depressing. I think Earth will always be I mean, Earth is beautiful. I'd want to be able to visit.
And it might be that babies who are raised on Mars have their faces melted, but maybe on Mars that's seen as really attractive, But then they can't really adjust back to life on Earth because you know, we're not that into it. But speaking of that kind of topic, self sustaining colonies, is it possible? Do we know if it's even possible for humans to reproduce in space? Like, you know, the mechanics and the chemistry of it doesn't all work in microgravity under high radiation. Do we know anything about that?
Yeah, So the basic deal is we know almost nothing. So one thing it's really important to understand about the history of space science is that space stations are not fielded because you know, the NSF sat down one day and said, we're going to do a systematic program on space medicine. They're fielded for geopolitical reasons and then science gets done in them, right, And so one result of that is that you really don't have a lot of systematic data on hardly anything. I think you can you can absolutely trust objective readings on things like bone density that seems like hard to mess up or fake, but when it comes to reproduction, you know, if someone had said, you know, when the first space station went up in nineteen seventy one, suppose the Soviet Union had said, one of our major goals is human reproduction in space. We're going to really orientate around that. You can imagine a world where they started with I don't know, lizards or something and just sort of worked their way up to more human like creatures and not just having babies, but having generations in space, and so that by now we would have this big corpus of data on reliable effects on going to space and microgravity on every stage of development. Right. And by the way, you know, we usually often when this comes up, to the extent it comes up at all, we talked just about can you have a baby, But of course, in order to have a sustaining settlement, that baby has to be able to grow up to have babies, and so that means they have to get through every stage of development successfully as to their gam metes. Right. So, you know, we don't have that data. What we do have is a pile of different experiments from you know, different agencies, done on different stations for different amounts of time, on different creatures, and it's very hard to look at all this and resolve a picture other than a big shrug. I will say, there have been cases where bad stuff happened, but it's literally a situation where you're talking like, we have data from a rat and it didn't go well for that rat, and it's sort of like, what can you extrapolate from this meaningful? So I would say, you know, you're kind of in the position of saying, well, at least a priori, there seem to be a lot of reasons to be really really scared, a lot of reasons to say I wouldn't want anyone having a baby in space. So you know, we talked about bone loss stuff. We don't know what that does to developing kids, let babies, let alone like teenagers. The atmosphere in space is really not like Earth's because it's actually very hard, at least on the ISS to reproduce an earth like atmosphere. So it's very high in carbon for example, very high in carbonocity, much higher than anywhere on Earth. And there are probably also like subtle outgassings from different pieces of equipment. We tolerate higher levels of this stuff because people aren't there that long, but we don't know what the effect is, you know, to just depend on what kind of artificial atmosphere you're able to create. You know, another thing you mentioned a second ago that you know, maybe in Mars gravity people will be taller, and that's like a sci fi thing, but actually we don't. You know, the bodies are weird, right, They're made of all these tiny nanomachines that have evolved over four billion years. It's possible the response will be something totally unexpected to being in that microgravity environment, or nothing at all.
We just don't know, face melting, for example.
I'm up to giving it a sixty percent chance.
All right, Zach. But this is a very highbrow answer. I was asking a much more lowbrow question, which is essentially like, do we have any data? Has anybody done it? In space?
Nobody has done Well, there's a family dispute about this. I should say, let me sketch the parameters of the dispute, and then Kelly can say something wrong. So the thing we absolutely agree on is nobody knows. It's not like there is someone with you know, pictures you can look upon the Internet. And then the question is like probabilities, and I would rate the probability is quite low, and I'm happy to explain that. But let me just say it's quite low, whereas Kelly thinks the odds are at least I don't know where we are. I'm at like one to five percent that it's happened.
I don't know what percent I'm at, but I don't know a coward's answer. See, okay, fifty to sixty percent.
Wow, who are we talking about here?
There has been a husband and wife pair, So they got married on the sly, didn't tell NASA, and then they went up on the shuttle. Zach argues that they're in a like tiny area, Like you know, they've got about as much space as you would in a bus, and there's like six other.
People on the crew.
It's not like there's a lot of options for them to sneak off and not be seen and not be caught by the cameras and blah blah blah. But I gotta say, man, if I was on a crew and there was a married couple, I would be like, I just want you to know that I'm going to be on the upper deck for about.
You would make it so I would make it so awkward.
But they keep coming up to them and being like, I'm just gonna tell you that door closes. I'm not saying anything.
Anyway, And you know, and there have been opportunities, but you know, I think Zach would would argue, yeah, you know, of course you don't have to be married to have sex. Zach would argue that there's a lot like it's cramp spaces, there's a lot of people there, there's a lot of surveillance equipment.
It would be hard to get any privacy.
And also, these people are super concerned about their careers and if they get caught doing something like that in space, they're not going to get sent up again. And so these like highly career oriented people might not be willing to risk their jobs. But you know, I'd say, I went to grad school to study animal behavior, and it would blow my mind to find out that no one has taken advantage of, you know, being able to have sex in space.
Well, it seemed to me like an important science frontier. I mean, somebody's got to figure this out for the future of humanity, right, I mean, if we are going to ever live in space, then that's going to be a necessary part of activity out there in space, all right, So I want to dig more into these questions about what life would actually be like in space, what it's like to go to the bathroom where we might actually live, is it legal? And can you eat people in space? But first we have to take another quick break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone. Know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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Okay, so we are back and we're talking about the nitty gritty of living in space. A lot of people think of space as a fantasya land where everything can come true, where life in space solves all the problems of life on Earth. But Zach and Kelly are here to tell us that it's messy and gooey and that your face might or might not melt. Nobody knows.
Okay, sure, so tell us more.
About what life might be like in space. You guys really dug into the details. I was amazed you had such a careful analysis of like toilets, tell us about what it's like to use the toilet in So.
When you read biographies or you hear interviews with astronauts, the question that they tell you that they get asked the most is what is it like using the restroom in space? So it is apparently a very deeply human thing to want to know what it is like to use the restroom in microgravity. And one thing we can tell you across all of the different vehicles that we studied is that it has never been pleasant. So like on the Apollo and the Gemini missions, they literally, you know, for number two, they had a bag that they would attach to their heinknees and it had a little like adhesive rim so it would stick a little bit better. And then it had a little thing where you a little fingercut they called it, so you could stick your finger in there because without gravity, nothing falls on its own, so you'd have to nudge it in the right direction. Yes, so gross, and then they'd have to put antibacterial tablets in there and sort of squish them around to make sure that like, you know, the bag the feces was being held in wouldn't explode in a horrible scent, would like go everywhere. In fact, Frank Borman was so uncomfortable with the procedure, which also had to happen in a super tiny space with the guy who you were in space with, like literally almost right next to you, that he tried to make it for a full fourteen days without going number two. And I think he made it today eight and then he said to Jim Lovell, I gotta go, man. And so anyway, it was pretty gross. So now instead of fingercuts and baggies with adhesives, we have vacuum systems, and you usually have one for urine and one for feces, but even then you lose stuff. So like again, every vehicle that we read about, there were stories about escapees sort of floating off into the habitat on the shuttle. This happened so frequently they became called brown trout floating around. And you know, these systems break regularly and need to be fixed and are pretty disgusting. I think Patty Whitson had a story about needing to put a glove on and sort of push the waist down to make you know, room to get it all in the bag. So it's disgusting and we haven't figured it all out yet. So on the one of the recent SpaceX missions there was problem with the toilet as well.
This is one of the ones where it was.
A bunch of tourists going around inspiration for something like that. It was reported that there were toilet problems. This is just a hard thing to deal with, but it should get easier when you have some gravity to sort of nudge the brown trout downstream. But yeah, it's probably going to remain sort of a messy process wherever we are in space.
But is this like a frontier issue where the first generation has sort of a harder life than you know, the wealthy folks back at home, and then eventually things build up and life on Mars is a comfortable, pleasant bathroom experience or is this something that's always going to be a feature of living out of the well of the Earth.
I think the first generation is going to have to spend quite a bit of time interacting intimately with human waste of all forms, because we're going to need to learn to recycle that. So Zach mentioned already that there's very little carbon on the Moon, so the carbon that your body releases, you're probably going to want to find some way to recycle that back into your garden and maybe eventually will sort of perfect this process. And you know, nowadays waste gets treated and most of us don't have to see or experience it like at all. But I think initially you're probably going to be pretty intimate with your wasste until we figure out nicer systems for handling this stuff.
Was there anything you wanted to add to.
That, Zach, I would just say to directly answer the question, Like the wacky like poop stories are all from microgravity. I think plausibly on Mars, your waist knows to go in the right direction. That's all you need, you know, like like so it'll go a little more slowly. But I would actually bet you'd be fine with like one percent gravity. You really just need you need your poop to know which way to go, and the vacuum is just an imperfect way to do that because you have to have like a part of the machine that is, you know, providing that vacuum which you don't want the poop to go into. Uh So, like for solid waste, you have to have a net, and so you can imagine like what complexity that adds to like waste management you have to like bag it and stew it and so. But probably I would guess on a plausible Mars setup where you've got some kind of gardening and waste management setup, probably it's not as big a deal. The bigger problem will just be that, like you know, on Earth, of your toilet breaks down, you can just go outside, whereas on market it better work.
I think that's less of an option in the city. But in the country where we live.
I've seen some stuff in San Francisco. I don't know.
Urban decay. Well, let's get a little bit more concrete about what we're talking about. You know, are we talking about living in space stations or the moon. Let's walk through the sort of the pros and cons of each scenario. Should we aim to be building our own habitats that float in space like in space stations, huge rotating rings? Are those plausible?
So, just to give a little context, the idea of giant rotating space stations has been kicked around in detail at least since the nineteen twenties, but it really became a big thing in the seventies. So if you've ever seen these images of a city around the rim of a giant wheel that like like the most awesome space station images, there could be those ten to descend from the nineteen seventies. And the reason they were arguably plausible, we say, is that if you look at the seventies in particular, the price of going to space has fallen drastically, by some measures, fallen by something like ninety nine percent since the late fifties, from like roughly nineteen fifty seven to nineteen seventy two. So if you plot that as continuing, it's going to get a lot cheaper. Meanwhile, there are these huge concerns about environmental damage. So there are books like The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth, which are predicting I think the Population Bomb, like the by the eighties, hundreds of millions of people will be dying of famine. Obviously we know now they failed to anticipate a bunch of things, But put that in your head as you think about this, and then third that there are no serious renewables on the horizon, right, I mean there's there's hydropower, but not enough to offset things, and that you know, nuclear is starting to look like a political problem. And so there's this idea that gets floated, most notably by Gerard K. O'Neil, that well, what if we just went to space, we kind of solve everything. You get access to limitless solar power all the time at high intensity. You could do all your farming up there. You can completely control the ecosystem. We can beam excess power down to the energy needing Earth. And so it's a sort of third way if you don't like these sort of environmental doomers, but you're also seriously worried about this stuff. Space is the way out with the added bonus, since again it's the like early seventies that you can kind of check out of society and try out new governments, you know, So it also appeals to a sort of counterculture impulse. The problem is it's basically just a bad idea. Like so, a big problem about building these things is you have to get an extraordinary amount of mass, probably millions of tons, into a point in space somewhere just to have a relatively small number of people, and so you say, well, where's that coming from, the usual answer. I think O'Neil's answer was the Moon. Other people have proposed asteroids. So let's take the moon. The way that you do this, and there are a number of proposals that say this is you build a mass driver on the Moon, and for your less you know, dorky audience, it's it's basically a train, if you want to visualize it, like a maglev train that points up and eventually the track just goes away, and so you can fling stuff of it just using energy. You can fling into space because the Moon is low gravity and has no atmosphere, and then your space station construction site catches this stuff into kind of giant catchers mint and takes this sort of like pure mass, just stuff from the surface of the Moon and converts it to suburbs around a giant space wheel. And so that the idea that this is going to be easier than just staying on the Moon or even going to Mars is just kind of crazy.
It does seem crazy to take the Moon apart and then reassemble something which is just basically doing the job the moon is already doing.
Yeah. Yeah, So to say why smart people believe this, I do think, you know, part of it's that beguiling promise of the limitless energy. There's also like, you know, suppose it is the case that you can't have babies on Mars, like that forty percent gravity just won't do it. It causes some weird metabolic thing who knows, Well, then you need full gravity, and then if you really need to get off Earth, you have no option in the Solar system, so you have to build these space wheels. There are other purported benefits like that you could manufacture, so for people who don't remember high school physics, as you walk up the axis, like if you walk a stairwell from the outermost floor of your spinning wheel to the middle, gravity falls off linearly, so you can select between zero and full Earth gravity or even extra Earth gravity. So there's these ideas that it would be like a manufacturing thing, but like the idea that would be economically plausible just seems sort of z any to us, And so it's like an extra hard version of a thing we already can't do, So it just seems unlikely.
So then what about colonies on the Moon. The Moon has access to a lot of sunlight, and there's lots of raw materials there. What's the issue with living on the moon? Where on the moon is a good place to build your space home.
So the Moon has very small patches that are probably what countries are going to fight over when we start heading out to the Moon. So on the poles you get areas where you have these craters, and inside of the crater there's water that's frozen and it stays frozen because it never gets exposed to sunlight. If it did get exposed to sunlight, it would you know, vaporize and end up in the vacuum of space, never to be recovered by us again. But it's frozen, so it stays there. And additionally, those rims, if you put solar panels on them, you could get sunlight almost all the time, Whereas if you're at the equator, you get two earth weeks of daylight and then you get two earth weeks of nighttime, and you would.
Need an incredible.
Number of battery packs to be able to store enough solar power to get you through that. But if you're at these areas where you can put your solar panels up it almost always gets sunlight, then a lot of your energy needs have been reduced, and so these are probably the spots where you'd want to be, where you can get water and where you can get some sunlight. But I'll note that that water still has some like chemicals and stuff you can't drink in there, and it's going to be very hard to extract because at the temperatures you find in these craters, water is more like a rock than anything else, So it's going to be difficult to get your hands on. You're gonna have to clean it up, and then you're gonna have to recycle it very efficiently because there's not a lot in there. So what was the lake that we looked up, Zach Sartus Lake.
Sartus Lake, I think was it Alabama or Minister.
Yeah, so there's this human made lake called Sartus Lake that has the same amount of water as what we predict is on.
All of the Moon.
And so you can imagine pretty quickly if you don't use that carefully, running out of it, and so you're going to need to recycle it. And this is why we think proposals for setting the Moon up as a gas station. Are you know, sort of robbing the future. So if you take the water and you split it and you use the oxygen and the hydrogen for rocket fuel, you can't bathe with it or drink it anymore. It gets lost in the vacuum of space, and there's not that much there to begin with. So anyway, those are the places on the Moon that you'd probably go to. There's not a lot of them, but the Moon remains awful, you know, even at the poles. The temperatures aren't ideal. But perhaps even more importantly, there's regolith everywhere. And the regolith is like this thick layer of super jagged dust and glass that clings to everything.
It's electrically charged.
It clings and if you breathe it, we think it's possible that it could scar your lungs over time and create something similar to stone grinder's disease on Earth. So you're gonna have to go to great lengths to make sure it doesn't get in your habitat, which again is going to be really hard because it clings to everything.
And that sounds like lung melting, which sounds pretty bad.
Yeah.
Yeah, so your face is gonna melt and your lungs are gonna.
Melt, so most of the Moon is totally inhospitable, and a tiny fraction of it is somewhat less inhospitable.
There's also the caves and the tubes on the Moon, which IM gonna let Zach tell you about because he really geeks out about these.
Oh yeah, sure, so, like you know, again at the intersection of still a bad idea, but it's super awesome. The Moon has lava tubes. It's not really very seismically ac of anymore, but it was in the past, and so people of Earth may know that. If you go to Hawaii, you can see lava tubes, these huge underground caves that are like sort of cylindrical, and we talk about the process by which these are made, but very loosely speaking, you can imagine lava pushes through forms this sort of vein shape and then goes on its way and leaves behind this giant cave. Now you can imagine if that process occurs somewhere where there's only one six as much gravity, you get a much bigger cave. And there are some estimates that you could have lava tubes on the Moon that are hundreds of times larger than anything on Earth. Right, So if you're going to pick a sort of dream mission for pure awesomeness, sending a little speedlunker bot to one of these caves to just look is probably about as cool as you can get. And it just happens to be on our closest neighbor in space. And these are desirable potentially for a space settlement because one of the deep problems of space element is essentially you have to create a little bubble that is protected from everything around you. If there's a pre existing tube, you're not completely predicted. But one of the ideas is you could go in there with some kind of spray on ceilant right or inflatable and just press it against those walls. And the cool thing about that is you've created a really big bubble. You might be talking about like literally thousands tens i I have to look at the numbers, but many words of magnitude more than like a habitat that is built and once you seal it, you can just build in there, right, You could just build a house. It doesn't have to be designed for space other than in case of danger. So you know, those are potentially extraordinarily valuable yeah.
It also saves you from needing to deal with the regolith because you're inside of a lava tube where that has all been sort of like turned into a crust by the lava, and it saves you from temperature swings. It's just there's lots of reasons why it would be great, but we're not good at moonwalking.
Moon splunking is another level.
All of the views from underground are not quite as spectacular as you were suggesting earlier. Kelly.
Well, but you're gonna be covered by dirt anyway, right, and so you know you might as well let the tube protect you from radiation as opposed to need to pile regolith bags on top of your habitat.
And then what about Mars? In your book, you say the only way you would believe that Mars would be a good idea would be quote if you had no idea, how thoroughly, incredibly, impossibly horrible Mars is? Why is Mars it such a horrible place to live?
I should say Mars is? We do argue that it's the least bad option, but while being the least bad option, it is a bad option. And so just to kind of go down the line, quickly can I just say the good stuff about Mars and then ruin it. So the biggest virtue of Mars is that, you know, the Moon, like we said, is pouring carbon, and Mars basically has all the stuff you'd need. You know, if you've imagined advanced civilization that can just perfectly move around elements however they like because they have infinite energy and science and whatever. The moon has all the stuff, right, And in addition, it has an atmosphere. It's not much of an atmosphere, it's about half a percent to a percent of Earth, is very low pressure, but that atmosphere is made of carbon dioxide, right, So there's your carbon and oxygen. Humans just can't get enough of it. We love it, so that's pretty huge. The downsides are one, it's really far away, right. A typical proposal is six months inbound. The only way to really fix that is to have something more exotic, like a fission or fusion reactor. And even if you had that, you might still take the slow trip to concern, you know, to just you know, bring more stuff. But anyway, so it's far away, which means at the longest length it takes something like twenty minutes to send a signal each way, so forget live communication. I think the closest it's something like three minutes. So it's still pretty bad. So no live conversations with your loved ones ever. Again. Also, you know, the surface is still really nasty, and unlike the Moon, it also has perchlorates, which are a hormone disrupting chemical, So you know, circling back to questions about reproduction, that would be interesting to find out what happens to like a teenager swimming in hormone disruptors. So that's bad. So one good thing is you have almost Earth like days. I think it's like twenty four point seven hours, so you do get sunlight. It's substantially dimmer than the sunlight of Earth. But the bigger problem from an energy standpoint is Mars has giant dust storms. Sometimes these dust storms are so big. There's a story that one of the Mariner probes is going toward Mars and suddenly Mars looks like a flat surface, and it turns out what had happened is there was a worldwide dust storm. So you try to imagine what that's like on the surface. It's just like the sky is like biblical right, like no more sky for you, So forget your solar panels. You better have really good batteries or a nuclear reactor or something more exotic. And so you know, those are some of the problems. There's also the stuff we've discussed before, like microgravity and extra radiation. But you know, it is the best game in town. Everywhere is not just worse, but like wildly worse. So it is extraordinarily dangerous and bad, and there's not an obvious economic payoff, but everywhere else is worse.
And Mars has a lot of water, and so that yeah, that's also good.
Oh I'm sorry, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, So crucially, you know, the Moon has very little water. This is important to us because you read articles sometimes that you are like, what are we gonna do with all the water, Like it's like a resource in a video game you just have all you want. But Mars actually does have plenty of water, the poles of tons of water ice, and actually in most places on Mars it looks like if you dig down far enough, there's there's water in some form. So like when you put that all together, it's not just that you can drink and breathe like if you have carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, at least in principle, you can make a lot of the stuff humans need, including rocket propellant and like fuel cells and things. So you really have everything you need except like a reason to be there is the tricky part. At the cost it's going to be well.
I also want to dig into the legal side of the that's saying that quote divides we and eat them. What laws govern activities in space or on Mars.
So since nineteen sixty seven, space has been governed by a United Nations treaty that goes by the shorter name the Outer Space Treaty. And it says a lot of stuff, and it says a lot of things vaguely, but for the purpose of space settlement, the most important points are no nation is allowed to appropriate any territory in space. But it also specifies that people come from somewhere and they are the responsibility of some nations. So you can't just say, like, okay, the US can't claim the south pole of the Moon, And some people will argue that like okay, but Elon Musk could because he's not a nation, he's just some guy. But according to the Outer Space treaty, he belongs to the US. The US is responsible for what he does up there, and so it's on the US if Elon Musk goes up there and says, I am creating Muscow and this is my new place to live, and so you're not allowed to appropriate the land. But here's where there's quite a bit of ambiguity. It's apparently unclear what you can do with the resources that are up there. So can Jeff Bezos go to those craters of eternal darkness where you can find water and extract the water and sell it to other people for rocket fuel? And the answer to that is it's not really provided in the Outer Space Treaty. And so countries are sort of coming up with if their interpretation of what the Outer Space Treaty means. And in the US, Obama passed an act that essentially said the United States, if our citizens go up there and extract resources and sell them, our interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty is that that's okay. And then Donald Trump released an executive order essentially saying the same thing.
So this is maybe the only thing that Obama and Trump can agree on.
And then the Artimist Accords came out while we were writing the book, and the Artemis Accords is sort of a NASA document that a bunch of other countries have signed onto. I think it's at around twenty now, and a bunch of other countries have signed on to it, and it essentially says it is our interpretation that it is okay to extract resources and sell them. And in fact, NASA supported a company that went up there and scooped a tiny bit of regolith and then sold it to NASA for a token fee of I think a dollar, And it was just meant to set the precedent that a resource can be collected by a company on the Moon and then saw, and that the United States is okay with that. But that is supposed to be a global commons. That was point to the Moon is a global commons, All of space is a global commons, and so other countries I think would argue that as a global commons, if you extract a resource, everybody should benefit from it. But that's not actually specified by the Outer Space Treaty, so there's a big fight over interpretation. But we like to note that the Moon and space in general is not like a completely weird legal structure that is unlike anything you see anywhere else. This is essentially what humanity has decided to do when we end up with vast swaths of land that technology suddenly opens up for us. So, for example, Antarctica is managed by the Antarctic Treaty System, where a bunch of countries come together, they agree, it's a global commons, they decide what can be done with the resources, and at the moment they've decided, you cannot extract any resources, and in fact you cannot even look for them because we don't want to start any trouble. And then the deep seabed is managed by close the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. So we have a couple of different global commons, a couple different ways of managing them. But you know, it's unclear how things are going to shape up in space.
So does that mean it is or is not legal to eat your neighbor in space?
I can speak to that question. Yes, I should say this is a short part of the book, but we do something like an answer. So the short version is it depends on what law you consider yourself to be under, which probably has to do with what country you're from or where you launched from, right, and it actually varies by country. We're more familiar with the American and British law, which in the US. This is beyond what we have in the book. So I'm digging a little deep for this, but I believe there's something called the homes test, which is this list of conditions which basically says, look, if you want to like engage in survival homicide, meaning kill some people so other people can live, there has to be a set of conditions met. And there are things like, you know, there has to be no other option, and you have to have a random draw. You can't like prefer the crews the passengers. So there's a set of criteria that have to be met for it to be considered okay or at least potentially okay, to engage in survival homicide. So you know, there's not a lot written about death and space generally, it's never happened. Well, I'm sorry, it's never happened other than just people suddenly die during a situation where they can't be saved, right, So there's no been a situation where like a guy dies in the space ship and everyone sort of crowded around like geez, what do we do? And so there's not a lot written on this, but we found a paper from nineteen seventy eight by a guy named Robert Fretis, who I think ended up being a nanotechnology guy, but in seventy eight he was interested in this question, and it said, you know, there's this movie and novel called Maroon where there's three guys in space and there's something goes wrong. There's not enough oxygen to save all of them. The rescue ship will like get there in five hours. They have four hours of oxygen. So if you're being if we were ants, one of the ants would be like, I'm going to go die. Problem solved. But we're not ants, and so it's like a really nauseating question. And so he actually kind of went through the literature of how we think about this question legally, and the basic deal is it's gonna depend on where you're from. So if you're in the ISS, the kind of funny thing is the modules are kind of like quasi sovereign territory, right, so the Japanese module is sort of like a piece of Japan. So you know, we say you should sort of call a lawyer. You should be like what country, you know, if I went to Japan or Russia, would I get a better deal if I have to eat somebody? But yes, that's the law. In terms of like the physical part, we found one guy who was willing to talk about it, who was like weirdly detailed about how to butcher a human and three D print a plastic knife in space. His name is Eric Seathhouse, and we advise against bringing him on your crew. And that's my main advice about eating your friends in space to summarize. The Outer Space Treaty obviously doesn't deal with cannibalism in space, so you will probably be dealt with as a national of some country. Preferably to keep it simple, don't eat someone from some other country because it's going to be an international incident.
That's going to complicate your life. So it sounds like you guys have done a really deep dive into the details of what it would be like the legit sticks, the legal side where we would actually live In the end, how did you feel about it? I mean, you started out optimistic and then you were a little disappointed in how much people had explored this. On balance, in the end, do you feel like this is something humanity should do, but maybe deeper into the future that we're not ready yet, but it's still something we should plan for, or maybe we need to dig even deeper before we have an answer even to that question.
So I think maybe Zach and I should both give our answers. In case we differ a little bit, I'd say that I still think it's a beautiful idea. I would love to see it happen at some point, but I think we need to not push for it to happen in our lifetimes. I will be personally very happy if in my lifetime there is a research base on the Moon where we get a better handle on creating closed loop ecosystems, figuring out safety measures for adults and the babies that we'd like to have one day. I think there's a lot of work on geopolitics and international law that I would like to see happen before we end up with the scramble for territory.
The book, we talk.
About how the way the deep seabed is managed could be a great way to manage resources in space as well, So I'd love to see some more work on stuff like that. So I'd like to see it happen, but I'd like to see us slow down and figure out, like step by step what needs to happen to do it safely, and then you know, start to see that kind of stuff funding. I would love it if Musk had not bought Twitter and had instead invested in closed loop ecosystems or research stations on the moon or something.
What about you, Zach, Yeah, So I would say my view is that it's something that we will eventually do entirely because it's awesome. I think the economic arguments are quite weak. We discussed this a little in the book. There's a lot of sort of what you might call sociological arguments, like if we don't do this, we're going to stagnate. There are arguments that we're going to save the environment. There's no way it's going to happen fast enough. There are all these different arguments for why we ought to do it, and we think they're basically no good. And I would also add that there's an argument Daniel Duden, he's big on this, as there's an argument that we should just never do it, because you know, people tend to say we should colonize space to decrease existential risk, but actually they're you know, plausibly, by getting that huge infrastructure above a gravity well, you're creating higher existential risk. So maybe it's never going to be a good idea until like, you know, does physics allowed tractor beams or something, you know, so there's an argument there. I think you can imagine a world at some distant date where you know, we are such an advanced, wealthy species that you could just go to Mars to set up there because it would be a cool thing to do. Like you're going to send you one hundred AI robots ahead of you. They're going to set up a cabin and space launch is totally safe, and Earth is so peaceful and harmonious that the idea of of like starting warfare between planets is unimaginable. And in that world it's a great idea. It's wonderful. It's sort of like in Star Trek they're just exploring around because exploring is a cool thing to do, and all the old problems have been solved. But I guess the big change for me is I just I just don't buy any of the arguments that there's a non esthetic reason to there. Just doesn't seem to be unless you're talking about like a Kardish of you know, eighteen civilization that's got to maximize every single photon in the universe. There's just no good reason to do it. So to me, that puts it on the scale of centuries. It requires a better humanity and a much richer humanity.
Well, thank you guys very much for writing this book. I know you described as something of a wet blanket, but I actually think it's necessary to think about these things carefully, to lay the groundwork to figure out what the problems are actually going to be. That, if anything, your book could makes it more likely that we do figure this stuff out because people think about it carefully. So from all the space nerds, thank you. You see this book positively, and I encourage everybody out there to get it. It's called a city on Mars can be settled Space should be settle space, and how we really thought this through. It's really exquisitely, deeply detailed and well researched. These guys definitely know what they're talking about. And in addition, it's really fun. I mean, obviously these two are very funny people, and so you'll read it, you'll learn a lot you'll laugh a lot. I totally encourage you and thank you very much Zach and Kelly for joining us today to talk about sex and space, poop in space, and face melting.
Thanks so much, Daniel, I can do a whole episode on face melting.
Collaboration. All right, Thanks again everyone for listening and tune in next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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