Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowAs more and more countries -- and corporations -- make astonishing breakthroughs in space exploration, the public becomes increasingly convinced the world has entered a new space race. In tonight's episode, Ben and Matt explore the dangerous future of this journey to the stars... and why powerful forces may conspire to turn this space race into a genuine space war.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. Our colleague Nola is not here today but will be returning shortly.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Michigan control decant. Most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Matt off Air, we were joking just a second ago about intros episodes, about intros to the show, and this one I totally ripped off Star Trek just because that beginning monologue of the original Star Trek is so good. Space the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of our odd little podcast. It's continuing mission to explore strange new ideas, to seek out new life and new civilization, to boldly go where no conspiracy realist has gone before, et cetera, et cetera. We both love space. We both went to Space Camp and we thoroughly enjoyed that. I guess it is propaganda, but not all propaganda is bad.
Hey, all right, Well, come on, we learned how the space shuttles work inside and out, baby, come on.
Yeah, we had our little log books, We did our little experiments.
You know, dude, Space Camp was the jam. If you don't like Space Camp, get out of here. Yeah, just get out, Just go.
Don't say anything, don't write an email, just go somewhere. Uh So, it's nuts because you know, we've talked about this in previous episodes, on things like the militarization of space, things like conspiracy theories about the moon landing. And the truth is that tonight, if you look up to the sky, regardless of the amount of light pollution that is in your area, your neck of the Global Woods, what you're seeing is increasingly a battlefield in the making a possible new dimension of war. You see, Folks, If you tuned into our one of our recent Strange News segments, then you probably have heard that a lot of people, a lot of countries and companies are resurrecting the Cold War space race. As we record this evening, the space race is back on, baby, and there are a lot more players in the game. It's not just us playing Starfield, though Matt I will confess to you that I did. As you know, I work on reward mechanisms. I did start playing Starfield.
Well you must have done a lot of hard work to get there, buddy. I can't wait to see your character.
Oh that's I think that's very kind of you to say it's not super creative. Of course, he's Max Powers, astronaut with a secret. Oh yeah, but here are the facts, now, Matt, You and I and Paul and Noel and Doc Holiday, we all grew up in the United States, so we were very familiar with the shadow of the space race, which was a very Cold War type thing. And I was looking back on the on the just the timeline, just the broad strokes. It was kind of a one on one grudge match between the United States and the USSR.
Yeah, oh yeah, Well those two superpowers, very powerful countries, right, organizations of large swaths of land. They have a bunch of moving parts within them, you know, states like almost like many countries. They're all together in their own little sectors. And after World War Two, when they're victorious and they've got all this war that they've been doing with all of you know, we call them toys, but you know, all this might, military might, that they built up and were victorious. It's like looking at the treasure deep within the cave and both teams are in there and they both see the treasure and they're like, well, which one of us guess the treasure? Is it gonna be you or me? I don't know. Let's build spaceships and then whoever could get to the moon first wins, or rather, whoever can control space as you know, land, air and sea, now space you win.
Yeah, very well, put man, I love that you're pointing out that race that began the instant World War two ended. The Russians and the Americans were stealing Nazi scientists left and right, and as soon as the world knew about nuclear weapons, both of these countries scrambled like mad to build as many ballistic mi so based nukes as possible, and that research naturally led to the exploration of space. Both countries wanted to be the supreme power in orbit, and they.
Ultimately it was rocketry right, absolutely, how to send a nuke far away into enemy territory? Well, what if we just shot it more up?
Yeah, I shot an arrow in the air, as the old Twilight Zone episode goes, And this idea was sold to each public of that country as or that respective country as a noble, greater good mission, the ultimate destiny of man, manifest destiny in fact in space. But really, you know that when this became a battle of conflicting ideologies, Uncle Sam was no longer just the United States, the USSR was no longer just Soviet Russia. One was the idea of capitalism, the other was the idea of commune. And they created a feedback loop with their dueling research. They were spurrying each other on, egging each other on to go further and further and further. I think, you know, we all know the pivotal moments. One of the biggest ones was the launch of Sputnik, which I did not know this because my Russian is for crap, but sputnik means traveler.
Apparently, Oh yeah, that's perfect because ultimately it's a satellite. It's going to travel around through space just above us, just hanging out up there. And the way they got it up there is through that old rocketry stuff, an intercontinental ballistic missile that they shot up in nineteen fifty seven. It was a October fourth, nineteen fifty seven that the USSR launched you know, a ballistic missile and sent the Traveler aka Sputnick up there. And it really was the first satellite that human beings had created and successfully gotten into orbit.
And as we record, we're just a few days away from the sixty sixth anniversary of Sputnik's launch when this happened, because you can't hide a satellite, really, when this happened, America was pissed and terrified. Yeah, because to your point about rockets, right and nukes.
A rockets, Yes, and it was a really good one to make it all the way up there. And two, there's something up there now that we have no way to access. It's just up in space. What's it doing up there?
Man? And how many rockets do the Soviets possess? What if they decided, hey, it's easier to hit DC than it is to hit lower Earth orbit. Yeah, And this means that quote unquote beating the Soviet forces became a number one priority for the United States because the US saw this as an existential threat. Just you can see it in the timeline. Just year after Sputnik launches, the US launches its own satellite, designed of course by Werner von Braun, and then Eisenhower in the same year nineteen fifty eight creates NASA. These are wild times. This is one of those times that the fence contractors love because the pocketbook is open.
Oh yeah, Oh my god. I'm over here just having a moment because I'm realizing my father is only seven years older than Sputnik and just thinking that satellites have only been a thing for sixty six years. Though it feels again like much of our newer technology like has just been around forever because we've built so much of our infrastructure. Our daily lives on the technology that's not old at all. Well, and it also makes you realize that NASA isn't old at all, like the major space corporations that work together with countries have only been doing it for sixty something years. Yeah.
Yeah, they've been making a lot of progress too. It's nuts that now, how sci fi is this? Now we can refer to the old Space Race? Yeah, the Cold War thing was the old Race. It was full of glory, conspiracy of plenty, tragedy, heartbreak, innocent people died. The end of the Old Space Race is generally considered to be the US moon landings, and the US was almost not the first of the finish line. There. The Soviet government made four different failed attempts to launch their own lunar craft between like nineteen sixty nine to nineteen seventy two. There was even an explosion on a launch pad. Ugly stuff, Ugly stuff.
Ugly stuff. But there are also some really fun conspiracies rolling around out there about how the Soviet Union was super successful but they projected that they were unsuccessful, and then they built bases already on the dark side of the moon. Oh, you really sink your teeth into that stuff. Can't really prove much of anything about it, really anything at all, but it is super fun to think about.
Yeah, we can't prove it yet. But also I do want to give a very light spoiler, low key shout out to a project, Matt, that you have been working on with our pals Dan Bush and Nick Takowski, called The Passage. I was immensely fortunate to be able to write a little bit for that one, which touches on space races in a very weird way. I think, Oh, wait, which episode did you do Hoover?
Oh man, that's awesome. I haven't heard the rough cut yet, but everybody if you're listening, you're going to love this show. Oh my gosh, not just because Ben wrote part of it. It's really good.
And that means a lot. Man, Thank you. I can't I can't wait to hear it as well. You guys know, we love creepy story, we love world building in fiction. So stay tuned sometime next year and walked through the passage with us. It's an all star cast. You got a lot of got a lot of firepower on that team met and when you look at the conclusion of the space race, usually you're going to see people say it ended. When Americans landed on the Moon, the US government lost interest in lunar missions. They slowly waned after the early nineteen seventies, and then there was a armistice of sorts when the Apollo Soyuz mission sent three US astronauts into space on an Apollo craft that docked in orbit with a Soyuz vehicle. The commanders of the two craft, one US n one Soviet national, they met, They shook hands in space, and this was the end of the rivalry. It was a new era of cooperation. Awesome, go team. It worked for a second.
Yeah, yeah, I did what a wonderful vision of the future. Right, you can't get much more future than that. Some astronauts shaking hands in space, come on, amazing. But well, yeah, the big problem is it's almost like that happened, that moment happened in nineteen seventy five. Then what happened to everybody's interest in space? Oh? Yeah, really not everybody, because I think there was a there was still a public fascination with space when it comes to our popular television and the films that were being created, to even interest in extraterrestrials. To I mean, popularly, the human mind is all about some space. But governments, it seems, had a real cooling off period. There maybe a refractory period.
There we go nice. However, while this public attention kind of decreased over the intervening decades, make no mistake, world powers, both countries and corporations, never stopped planning for space exploration. And the first things they the first things they really thought about in their smoky back rooms were things like command and control of that of near Earth orbit force projection, being able to prevent activity from rival powers, and people just kept launching satellites. You know, like if you've ever driven by a house where people just keep putting little yard gnomes in the front yard and little sculptures and stuff that is earth. That is what Earthlings did.
But they aren't doing it publicly anymore. That's the thing that I think I kind of got it wrong when I said they're not interested there, But what I meant was you are. If you're a citizen of any of these countries, you probably don't even notice that anything is happening with the space race. Before it was all about being in the public eye. Any and all maneuvering that's occurring on any side, either side, it's going to be a newspaper article right front page, the Soviets did this and or the Americans did that. And now it's almost like a press release might go out and it would say like several satellites or several things were put into orbit today on behalf of X Corporation or something, and that's it.
Yeah, that's exactly what happens, you know. Now the propaganda machine has moved on to focus on other things, but the actual work, both the military work and the pure science continues. There are so many amazing experiments that have been done in space. The while we talked about this previously. While launching missions into outer space can seem like a misuse of re sources, the fact of the matter is thousands of people are employed by these activities, right, hundreds of thousands, and the science learned through space exploration has very real world valuable applications here on.
The ground, like preventing a giant space body from impacting the planet and destroying a lot of us or most of us, if not all of us m hm.
And then Tang and Velcrow, I'm kind of joking.
Well, well, I mean it's serious with that. The new We've talked about one of the new things, and we're probably gonna mention it again later in today's episode. But there's brand new news coming out right now about how a mission went up and got Basically, it's not a soil sample, it's a rock and debris sample from a comet or from a space body that is flying through the air, that is that may impact the Earth in like one hundred and fifty years, and this mission might actually help us prevent it.
Yeah, And that's that everyone on the planet should agree with, right, Because a large catastrophic body from outer space hitting Earth, it's not going to check your zip code. It's not going to check who you voted for. It's just going to say, let's do the dinosaur thing again.
Yeah, enjoy this forty foot wall of water. Let's see what happens.
Yeah. And so it should be no surprise that, as of this month, a great website called orbiting now list a total of eight seven hundred and five different active satellites in various Earth orbits. My god, a lot of stuff, A lot of garden gnomes, you know what I mean. We might be the trashy house in the neighborhood. This number is going to increase over time up to a certain point, and eventually the massive amount of stuff out there is going to be a serious problem. However, tomorrow is not today. Today, there is a new space. It includes multiple countries, billions of dollars, several billionaires, and breathtaking new technology. Sounds super cool. You might be surprised that some folks are very, very concerned about this. They're staying awake at night worried because they're wondering how far a space race can go before it becomes a space war.
Space war coming up next on stuff they don't want you to know. We'll be right back.
Here's where it gets crazy. It's true a space race could become a space war, and very easily. It is frightening. But to explain that, we need to learn a little bit more about this new space race, Matt, you and I spoke recently about the Indian lunar lander that did something no one has done before. The Russian conspiracy theories are true.
Exactly, it went to the south pole of the Moon. It's awesome. That's a place where scientists have been wanting to land for a long time, approximately let's say sixty six years. No, I mean, but since we've been fascinated by the Moon and India did it. It's the Indian Space Research Organization. They landed a I think this is how you say it, Chandra over AON three probe. And isn't this the first Moon mission that India has successfully completed?
Yes, so, like what a very difficult one.
Yeah, exactly, what a first go My goodness.
Yeah. Let's also keep in mind that several other countries tried this before. Brilliant people. We're taking top minds in Japan, in Israel and Russia. Also. Russia had around the same time, pretty recently launched the Luna twenty five spacecraft and it crashed to the surface of the Moon just a few days before India landed successfully. This is not a ding on any of those engineers, physicists, or scientists. It is just incredibly difficult to do this.
Yeah, it really is. Well and again it's another reason. Well, you tell me, Ben, I think the reason NASA and the United States are headed back to the Moon is because other people are headed back to the Moon as well. Hey, I think it's kind of the same thing that was happening before. It really is just happening now. That's why the Artemis mission is a go.
Yes, NASA is preparing the Artemis mission to return to the Moon. It might also be surprised to learn that countries like Saudi Arabia and Luxembourg that's a real dark horse, have also decided they're going to do Moon missions. In short, as you said, mat, a ton of stuff is happening. But this new space race is different in several key ways. First, lower cost, economy of scale, you know what I mean. You don't have to love elod Musk, but SpaceX and its reusable rockets are a big factor in this. Also, satellites are getting smaller and smaller every year, which makes them cheaper and cheaper to launch into space.
Oh yeah, I got a little lost there in the Artemis mission. Go to NASA dot gov slash Specials slash Artemis. That's a r t e mis to learn more. It's fascinating. It's so cool, dude. There's a whole section in there about the how it's going to make a ton of money.
Ah, yes, yeah, because there are higher stakes, but also the technological and jee political giants of the world as it stands today have learned things their predecessors did not know. Water has been found on the Moon rare earth metals or just rare metals, I guess we can call them now. Have any gases and gases? Yeah, we'll get to the gas toode. You should get gassed up about that, folks. The Nation of China and the Nation of the US have both also demonstrated their ability to destroy satellites with missiles launched from Earth. And look, there are more players in the game. That's another key difference. Right now, the big three are the US, China, and Russia, but more than eighty different countries have a presence in space. You might be surprised to learn the United Arab Immirates sent to probe to Mars. We were surprised to learn that.
Oh sure, absolutely. And I think people often overlooked that Israel did. They planned a Moon mission. It didn't go the way they wanted, it crashed on the Moon, but they still did it. And there are countries that you don't think about every day that want they want to have a stake in this game.
Yeah, and they're not doing it just for the soft power of hearts and minds, no, that, Let's be very clear about that. You know. Also, private companies are a huge deal in this now, and we're not talking about your you know, mom and pop defense contractors. Here in the West. Government funding is still the biggest source of revenue overall, but it's occurring in step with investment from private enterprise, and that piece of the puzzle, that piece of the puzzle is growing at a rapid rate. Like I think it was a decade ago in the US, the private sector was spending overall about a billion dollars on R and D for space exploration. Now that number, just ten years later is between five and six billion dollars for profit companies don't do stuff for the warm and fuzzies. They have quarterly p fit expectations, they have five year plans. They're doing this as an investment, and that's where that's where you start having to, you know, walk through the calculations yourself. Right, these private entities are working with all of the big state run space works, and the risk are incredibly high. You know, it is terrifyingly easy to crash a very expensive lander on the Moon and never get it back. Yeah, profits though, you know what I mean, and so much data.
My goodness, Well, I guess let's get to the gas bend helium three. This is an important thing. This is something is something the world needs, and not just for party balloons. It's up there, it's on the moon, and if you could mine that stuff, you know, well, if you could capture it, let's say, really well and actually get it back to Earth for our purposes. Whoo, you're going to be in the monday.
Yeah, you'll why possibly be beyond money at a certain point, because we have to realize there's a hidden hand to all this noble talk about humanity reaching the stars. The Cold War space race had different goals. It was all about getting the public in both of those countries to agree to this high fluting idea of exploring for the betterment of humanity, because if they said we're spending billions to invent new ways to blow stuff up, it wouldn't have been as popular.
It's defense spending by way of inspiration in propaganda, and.
Now there's a little bit more transparency about it because it's tougher to keep these things secret. You are absolutely right. The helium three, it's nuts. On Earth, there's only about I think it's point zero zero zero one percent of helium on this planet is helium three. But on the Moon there might be a million tons plus of this stuff. And helium three is like the holy Grail of nuclear fusion because it can produce higher amounts of energy than nuclear fission, and it's also way less radioactive. So finding these deposits, if you could somehow get a hold of this stuff right and either use it in manufacturing on the Moon or ship it back to Earth, which is pretty ambitious, then you are officially king of the hill.
Oh man, I got yes. Absolutely. I have to give you just a quick example from my minecraft life with my son, so we will often build So we'll play together, right, two players. One player is in survival. They're at the whims of the game itself, the enemies, the all all the things you got to deal with. You got to eat food, and you got to survive. Right. The other player is in creative and will create a scenario for the other player. So we go back and forth, right, and in that if I'm the one in the creative seat, I will put little I will put little pockets of resources for him to discover and find that he can use on his survival journey. Right, he does the same thing for me.
Cool.
I'm imagining somebody places the moon where it is chock full of rare earth minerals that you need to build the technology, chock full of helium three that you need to run fusion energy for all the brand new tech that you're going to build from all the rare earth minerals you find. It's like somebody, somebody gave us a little like a I don't know, it's almost like a stepping stone to the stars. I'm just I'm kidding. I don't think somebody, a creator actually did that, and I don't have That's not my opinion, but that's an interesting thought, isn't it.
That is a fascinating thought. I'm my mind's go in a million different directions on that one. Yeah, I mean, this is what fiction has always dreamt of, right, This is the end goal of humanity establishing outpost beyond the bounds of Earth. And if you can make a little money on the way, you got way more people interested immediately. There's also evidence of metal oxides in some of the larger craters of the Moon. Experts currently believe the Moon has reserves of silicon, titanium, aluminum all the hits, and there was a line that stood out to us from the chief scientist in China's lunar exploration O Yang Jiuan, says that harvesting helium three could quote solve humanity's energy demand for around ten thousand years. So if everyone can cooperate, things will be pretty cool.
Telling you, man, it's a little convenient that it's just floating around above us and we've all been looking at it for thousands and thousands of years trying to get there.
I love that idea, I always, I always love in fiction. I love the idea of some ancient force that is extraterrestrial or whatever, and you never directly meet it, but you find little things it's left for you, you know what I mean, A wormhole, a warp inch and with a ton of helium three.
Yeah, on the in the the timeframe that they're operating on seems impossible to us, but it's just because it's all it's almost like setting something in motion that eventually becomes what you want it to be.
That's weird over a large time horizon. Yeah, Yeah, it's nuts because they're also you know, the idea of extraterrestrials or greater purpose aside, there are very few world precedents for this situation, and this is a situation that affects all of humanity. You could say, you could think about the age of sale, right, maritime exploration, you can say, yes, sail. You could also think about the old space race. But even though both of those situations have commonalities, those commonalities are dwarfed by new, unknown variables that leads us to serious, serious problems. Okay, like you said, Matt, all of this technology is relatively new in the grand scheme of things so far as we know, and that means legislation is lagging behind. Humanity has as the Royal Museum's Greenwich put it, humanity has quote failed to establish so far a set of universally agreed upon rules to regulate this competition aka space race. Without laws governing human activity in space, the stage is set for disagreements on wait for it, an astronomical level. Golf clap Royal Museums.
Just man, I can barely contain my golf clap bit, same bro.
And you know, of course we talked about this in the past. There are treaties meant to prevent militarization and war in space. The problem is they have not really ever been put to the test. And it's totally fine for everybody to sign a piece of paper that says, yeah, we're gonna like obey these cute little rules until the rubber hits the cosmic road, you know what I mean?
Oh yeah, I want to give you just a little insight into my ignorance. I didn't know there was a thing called the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. Cool job, right, What how often do you have to work like a once a week? Now, I'm just joking. There's all kinds of stuff in space, and the.
Outer Space Treaty is written with the best information they had at hand. It is, you know, like any other UN declaration. It's got some problems, right, and you can criticize any number of things about this agreement. However, we all have to admit it was made in good faith and the idea was out of the billions of people on the planet. If we can convince everyone to work together just a little bit, then we might be able to save this species.
That's the idea, and that treaty has been in effect since before Spudnik, when when countries were just testing launching people into orbit. Right, I think back to Uri Gagaron and some of the original activities that man was kind of playing around with up in just low Earth orbit. We've all kind of come together and decided it's a good idea to not have war up there and you know, and not let it be just another theater of war.
Right.
Yeah, it's the new big thing to the point where as we'll see, we're getting to the scary part here, folks. It's to the point where one nation or corporation's dominance over those previously established theaters may be rendered an irrelevant if they do not also have capabilities in space. We talked about this again in the past the part. One of the new goals is to be first to the field on the moon, not counting landing on the moon and taking a cool picture or putting down your flag or whatever, landing on the moon and staying there, establishing a permanent lunar base, because that means you get to set the rules for everybody else who follows. It's like, you know, it's like, let's say you're playing a pickup basketball game, or you're playing soccer or something. These forces want to be the person who shows up early because if they show up early, they can say, we're not playing soccer, we're not playing basketball, We're playing a new game. I invented the rules.
And I've got rail guns set up all around my base, so if you try and do anything, I'm gonna take out your little wonky spaceship.
Yes, you set the parameters. This is key because a dominant power with lunar control can hamstring other nations or companies. They can deny access to lunar resources. They also are in pole position too, as he said, snipe down anything they don't like. This is gonna lead to massive tensions. It's already on the way. I mean could we even call these geopolitical tensions at this point? Are they astro political? Now? I don't know the right word.
I don't know, man, They're GPS geopolitical Shenanigans.
Oh beautiful, Yes, yes, and whatever we want to call it. The first tensions are going to arise around satellites. Defending satellites, tracking satellites, attacking them. Part of most modern countries' early warning systems. Virtually all modern countries early warning systems are satellites. Satellites help you know if someone is launching a nuke, hopefully in enough time for you to defend yourself or to at the very least react accordingly. And if any nation thinks their satellites are being threatened, their chances, their likelihood of taking a preemptive action increase dangerously so. And that's because, like you said, GPS, without our little Kohi boxes in the sky sending out those ones and zeros, international comm networks will not work. Emergency services go could put Think about the last time, folks, that you drove any distance and used a physical map.
This is yeah, unless you absolutely had to, right because you didn't have signal or something.
Yeah, ship, big ships just drift off course and they're forced to resort to old school navigation, astro labs and whatnot. A country without satellite access is thoroughly disadvantaged in any field of war, and that's the big concern. Will the new space race become a war? I suggest we pause for a word from our sponsors so we can further regale Paul Mission Control with stories about space Camp.
We teased the war the last break, we promise it's comment.
Yeah, this time for real. We have returned here. The problems this idea of a space war is a multi billion dollar question. It should frighten you a little bit because there's nothing really we can do as individuals to prevent the outbreak of this war. We're gonna see why. But we're getting some really bad signals from different government space agencies. NASA in particular is super heat it up about China. It's like they it's like they used to date or something and the relationship didn't end.
Well. Yeah, we've got a quote here from I guess a rep from NASA who had this to say. Quote, China could potentially lay claim to prime resource areas on the Moon under the guise of research, potentially barring other countries' access and potentially endangering United States satellites. Here just here's my response to that the Senates. It came right after that is uh, because that's definitely what we're planning to do. And don't mean that NASA. I just mean I feel like whoever gets there first, as we said just before this break, is gonna kind of get to dictate some of that stuff, no matter what the treaties say.
Yeah. I think it's a good point. Man. We're not We're not being too far off the mark when we say that multiple countries are thinking the same thing, and you can hide a lot under the umbrella of research. Just look at the search history on our work computers.
Yeah. Well, it's just like I'm not gonna run rough shot over the moon if you don't right, Yeah, no, huh, I'm not gonna do that. Sorry. I was looking very intensely at the camera. That to me is what it feels like the main power are doing.
Bro, I am calm you call.
Yeah, yeah, I'm not going to do anything. As long as you don't, I'm not going to do anything. Long and then everybody quietly, you know, moves while still staring at each other exactly.
Yeah, And it's troubling stuff because you know, for a long time, one really beautiful thing about space exploration is that scientists, tychokonats, cosmonauts, astronauts, they were all above the fray of earthly disagreements, sometimes literally, and they were continuing to collaborate despite whatever territorial tensions might exist. But to certain factions of the United States government and scientific establishments, China is the new adversary. It is the new USSR. That is great for defense funding, but it's not so great for the people who happen to be alive on Earth.
I don't know.
We also learned that back in the nineteen nineties and Western authorities accused China of stealing space technology, and as a result, Uncle Sam passed something called the Wolf Amendment in twenty eleven. This is like big post breakup energy. The legislation prevents NASA from ever collaborating with China specifically, and there aren't a lot of people in the game at that point, So who else can China work with? If you guessed Russia, congratulations.
Yeah, that's it, Ben. I don't know much about the Wolf Amendment at all. It really is what was allegedly stolen or what was the big problem here?
The big problem was technical information that American satellite manufacturers corporations may have given up to China. Got it, so better know how regarding the launch of a satellite, the maintenance of it, and one of the very big concerns again, remember this stuff happens together. One of the big concerns is that knowing how to better launch a satellite also gives you insight on how to better launch missiles.
Got it, Okay, So it's.
Kind of like nuclear research. You know, the same process you use to make nuclear power is similar to the process you would make you would use to make a nuclear bomb. So it's not an unreasonable concern. It's just it just leads to a rough situation, folks, because China and Russia working together is, for the record, not NASA's dream collaboration. It's that can be their favorite mixtape. Just earlier this year, Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, put these concerns in pretty blunt terms. He said, quote, it is a fact we're in a space race, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they, meaning China, say keep out, we're here. This is our territory. Nelson goes on to note that there he sees an earthly president in China's claims around the South China Sea. Right, it's considered international water by everybody else except for China.
Yeah, and they defend it with military might, or at least the threat of military might consistently. So I wonder if I don't know, I actually see that, I really do see that. I wonder what the equivalent argument would be if you were, let's say, in China and then looking at the United States in the same way.
You would probably if off the top of my head, you might say manifest destiny, like think of all the think of all the agreements that the United States made with indigenous communities and then later broke at their convenience.
Yeah, yep, and.
You know too, again to be objective and fair, what would stop the United States from doing something very similar on the Moon? You know, I don't know if it's convenient to call one side good and one side bad, but they have similar, at times mutually exclusive goals. So it really depends on where you standing.
Yeah, get the helium three and make the coolest, scariest space lasers you can imagine.
M and You can find all sorts of similar statements in Western media, but China itself finds these accusations baseless and biased and unfair. U Pingyu again, partner our pronunciation. Here is the spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, or one of the spokespeople and set the following quote. Outer space is not a wrestling ground. China always advocates the peaceful use of outer space, and China is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty. But the problem is, the thing that people aren't maybe gaming out far enough in the public sphere is that this is bigger than earthly nations. Tensions are always going to grow between any permanent lunar population and their bosses back on the mud ball, because it doesn't matter if they're countries or corporations, they will be so far away that they are going to want independence. And it wouldn't be surprising, honestly, if in the back rooms of whatever a country's equivalent of the RAND organization is, it wouldn't be surprising if they're already planning a way to ensure continued dependence, like how the United Kingdom attempted to control American colonists with mercantilism.
Right, yeah, your way over there, But you are still beholden to me, and you cannot make your own decisions. You might do all that you do for the king, and you.
Can only buy or sell certain things to us. It can only be sold to us, and we are the sole provider of the following mission critical resources.
The lifeline. Right, how do you actually get supplies on the moon? Well, you can only get them from us. These are the only ones that are certified for use in our lunar facilities.
And the problem is, if we again look at our the closest thing we have to precedent here. The problem is that both in the age of sale or maritime exploration and the age of colonialism, there was one continual pattern that civilization saw over and over that attempt to control people doesn't work forever. The history of human exploration is inherently a history of mutiny and rebellion. So why would the age of lunar expansion be any different?
I don't know.
Man, Like the do you want lunar colonists to be self reliant? They will inevitably become their own nation. That's just what would happen, I think.
Yeah, dude, there's gonna be a breakaway country on the Moon. Whoa, it's gonna happen at some point.
There are a bunch of if thens to get through, right, Like, first you have to have the base working.
Yeah, you have to.
One of the I think one of the big problems will be reproduction, honestly developed, because a human embryo or fetus developing in lunar gravity is going to have a very different experience to you know, human developing the old fashioned way on Earth.
Oh sure, We're gonna have to find a way to spin the Moon effectively enough to where it has this is triptal force. No wait, no, that's not the right term for it. If it's that's moving out And I don't know what the force would be to keep people on the Moon. Probably just a type of gravity, but that wouldn't go great for you know, the whole relationship with the Earth and the Moon. Wait a second, Oh right, no, atmosphere gonna be locked in these things. I'm thinking back to our conversation with Marshall brain. He made it seem like, oh no, it's definitely gonna happen on Mars, Like we're going to Mars it's going to happen, and this is what it's going to be like, and it felt so inspiring. For some reason, it's even harder for me to imagine on the Moon. I don't know why.
I guess because we've heard so much about it that we we are we like the rest of the world, already have a bunch of established scenarios in our heads, right, So, yeah, the moon is kind of old beings in the world of science fiction. And you know, I remember talking to people learning about this stuff and one of the questions they have is, well, why aren't we on the moon yet? It's one of the one of the biggest, one of the biggest points raised when you talk about lunar conspiracy theories is why did the US go all the way out there, put some people on it, bring them back, and just not do anything else.
You know what I always get confused about. It's just because I didn't get far enough in my studies of physics. But the idea that you have to take a ship out, lock it in orbit with the Moon, and then send down a smaller fraction of that spaceship as a separate spaceship to land, and then shoot that back up to get off of the Moon. That was always weird to me. It felt like, why don't you build something they can do both. But then you realize, like impact with the Moon with a giant, huge, massive vessel, or even an attempted landing, probably the physics probably don't work out. I'm just not smart enough to understand all of that, or I don't know the formulas. But it feels like in the future, if you've got something that can take off from Earth land like literally itself, land on the Moon, and then vice versa, then we're talking.
Then we're talking agreed, and that is a game changer. The problem is that these these very optimistic scenarios all rely on one idea, and that idea is that any nation or corporation will set aside its beefs and its conflicts to make sure everything else survives in space. Because the truth of the matter is this, should any power conspire to wage war in space, things will escalate super quickly. War in space will inevitably destroy most, if not all, satellites. Here's the way I was thinking about it, Like, so, all right, picture any fantasy or horror story with the undead. One of the problems with fighting the undead is that every time one of your people is killed by a zombie, it reanimates and it starts working for the other side. In this situation, if one person or one force excuse me, blows up a satellite shoots it with a bullet, I guess for the sake of argument, then that satellite is like a zombie. It becomes a source of new bullets and they're just flying around. You can try to predict them, but you probably won't be able to get all of your stuff out of the way. So imagine a gun that turns the people you shoot into guns of their own.
Whoa yeah, and then good luck launching anything out of that debris field.
Oh yeah, no, terrible, terrible, And all it will take, it's such a razor's edge. All it will take is one side choosing to target satellites. To date, both China and the US have proven they can shoot down satellites. They shot down their own. Because the shoot down another entity satellite is you know, tantamount to a war.
Decoration frowned upon it.
It's not a good look, you know. And so if one side decided we're going to start targeting satellites, other players in the game will be forced to respond with similar tactics, and many satellites can be weaponized to some degree, even if it's just turning them into dumb kinetic impact agents. And you raise one of the most dangerous points there, man, Earth's orbital environment would become useless and impassable, and this would show absolute chaos on the ground. You don't care about space too bad, because what happens in space affects all of what happens on the planet. We're talking a situation where at the worst, civilization is pushed back decades in terms of innovation. You know, it's it's like a it's like we're being pushed down the stairs.
Oh of time, of time, time.
Time, And you know, this means we might be looking at an era of mutually assured destruction. Either way, humanity is definitely at a dangerous crossroads. It just seems so classic human to get to the edge of a real space age and then totter backwards into into the dark ages.
Yeah.
When don't you talk about space nukes yet? No, no, no, that's all the mad together. Mm hmm.
Yeah, I mean that's the question, what would you do? And folks, we don't know the answer. We'd love to hear your thoughts, fellow conspiracy realists. What would you do if you were in a position of power, would you be able to set aside earthly squabbles for the greater good of human expansion into the stars, or would you make the call to burn it all down and rule over whatever wreckage remains?
Yeah, what do you think? Go ahead right to us. Find us on social media. We're all over the place. Conspiracy stuff on YouTube. Also, conspiracy stuff on x slash, the old Twitter machine. What's the other thing that we're conspiracy stuff on? Benas Facebook?
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