From UFOs to psychic powers. Since government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Welcome back to the show, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They call me Ben. You are you that makes this stuff they don't want you to know? And as always, it feels great to be back in the booth with you guys. And that is the sweetest thing you said to me all week. That is the only nice thing I think I've ever said in my life. You do one nice thing a year. I tried to. I tried to to make it count. And of course shout out to our super producer Alex on the ones and twos. What a time to be alive. Right as we record this, this is uh, let's see towards the end of June, and we are in a renaissance of technology, you know what I mean, uh, innovation of bounds right right now. It's so weird to think that nowadays we are closer than ever before to the idea of not only bringing the human species to Mars, but maybe actually staying there. It's so cool, I mean in the same way that you know, people are able to make movies and records because the technology has gotten so much more affordable and accessible. This is obviously on a higher level, but now we have private companies like SpaceX that are developing stuff that you know before could have only even been conceived by government programs, and they're doing it with such attention to detail, with such a kind of a niche approach that they're making leaps and bounds strides in this kind of technology that could do exactly what you just described, Ben. And then last year Elon Musk, the person who heads SpaceX, got up in front of a crowd at the sixty seven International Astronautical Congress and he made the announcement that he and SpaceX want to achieve a million person Mars colony, and he outlined all of the different rockets and the spacecraft that they are trying to design and build to achieve this. And then someone that we know personally wrote up a very long thought experiment about what this colony might actually look like. I would say, yeah, I would, I would say, uh thorough. And it really makes you think, because look, this is a huge and uh increasingly crucial step in the expansion of the human species, and we didn't want it just to be the three of us digging through stuff and and telling you just our opinions. So we went directly to one of the most intelligent men we have ever met, and that is the man who literally founded how stuff works, Marshall Brain, and we have him here today to help us explore what a colony on Mars would actually look like. Thank you so much for coming today, Marshall. Hey, it's great to be here, and it's great to talk about Mars because that is one of those things that, uh, was just mind blowing when he announced it. You you you were talking about technology and all this stuff that's happened, and this is an example, and it's mind blowing that we could even conceive of getting a million people onto another planet. Now, I guess first things first, the big question that a lot of people would have is we know that, uh, scientific progress often gets exaggerated in the mainstream, you know, when it becomes like a share able article on social media. So we wanted to ask you, you know, um, how like is this definitely a real thing? That's going to be the first question A lot of our audience members have so there are a lot of, um, the problems that have kind of been swept under the rug. And that is a little bit like Elon Musk sometimes does that. He'll put something out there. It's seemingly just to make us think or to imagine or to wonder, um, you know, like he proposed this idea of digging tunnels under Los Angeles. I don't know that that's practical, but it definitely is a different way to think about the traffic problem in Los Angeles. So with Mars, I think the technology side of it, him making the rockets and moving the people, that is all fathomable. The thing I think people are unsure of is once they get there, could they actually live on a planet that's bombarded with radiation and that has much weaker gravity, Like we just don't know if you have a kid on a planet with gravity that's significantly different from Earth, Like can you even have a pregnancy in that situation? And does it work and does the kid come out normal? And you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff like that that in this discussion, we're just going to kind of leave under the rug and assume that you know that it works out now martial oft science fiction has taught me anything. We would obviously be living in some sort of gravity controlled biodome. Well, I don't know that we can control gravity yet. Like I would assume that too, because that's what Star Wars says. Right, then all this stuff is easier and straightforward. But I I I'm not sure that humans on Mars is even a possible thing from a long term standpoint. We don't know. Well, let's talk about some of the problems then. I mean, you address gravity right up front. That's obviously a biggie, But what are some of the other issues that you kind of tackled in putting together this thought experiment about what it would take to actually accomplish such a you know, seemingly insurmountable task. Well, so Elon Musk has said, you know, and as and as articulated pretty clearly that the transit problem, uh is solvable, And he's implied that the money problem is solvable. So we would have assumed that it would be so ridiculously expensive to move a million people to Mars that you could never consider it. But he's he's put down a stake and said, I'm going to solve the money problem. As well, I'm going to make it cheap to get people to Mars. So now they land there. And we don't know a lot about this planet. We you know, we know some things, but a million people is a lot of people. And uh, you have the gravity thing, you have radiation, which you could probably solve by shoving everybody underground. But then the question is a million people living underground? Does that work? Like? Do people function okay living underground for long periods of time? We don't, you know, as sunlight important, I guess would be another way to phrase that question. You have the whole climate thing, the temperature problem, which means you've got to enclose this whole structure. And as you start to think about that, um just it becomes a materials problem. You have logistics. You know, as we get into this conversation, one of the most interesting things about it is how do you move all the technology to make all the stuff that humans have today to Mars. Like that doesn't have anything to do with the geophysics of it or anything like that. It's just when you when you think about all the stuff that we consider normal today and that you know is everything from scotch tape to microprocessors to move all that manufacturing capability and knowledge to Mars. That's chapter thirt the book. That that one problem alone, UH is just mind boggling to think about. Yeah, when you started breaking that stuff down in the book and just showing the list, I think you put a list in there of how it's made episodes where it just shows you all the different factories and things you and different resources you would need to make structure, right, I mean even get that in place in such a way where you could have factories that could produce that kind of stuff and the weight of the stuff you need to build the factory. And I think there's I think there's a a brilliant point here. Uh. One of the one of the headings for that chapter is how will we chips on Mars or pharmaceuticals medical devices? Uh? In will Mars be able to be a viable backup plan for humanity? It reminds me in a way of that old time travel question where people say, you know, I would love to travel back in time to you know, the thirteen hundreds, and I would be like as this um intellectual giant and this demi god. But the average person does not have the knowledge, much less the means to create so many of these common things, you know, probably including to your early example Marshal scotch tape. So yeah, so how would we how like, how would we, to an old's point, uh, make this infrastructure? And it would almost would it almost certainly have to be something where we severely limit the kind of products that we would have. Would this be like the the effect of living on a remote island times of a billion. That's a great Ushian And and that's one of the things that makes it such a great thought experiment is, you know, Elon Musk has said, Okay, I can get the people there, and I can get them there cheap enough for us to imagine it. But as soon as you open your mind to well, what are they gonna do once they land? And the desert island thing is really a funny way to think about it, then the number of questions is gigantic, thousands and thousands of questions you have to start going through. So you mentioned this, this notion that Mars could be a backup plan for humanity, meaning that we have a second civilization that's on a different planet. So if planet Earth gets struck by an asteroid, or it gets blown up by nukes or some other catastrophe happens. There's a whole another instantiation of humanity somewhere else that could carry on without Earth anymore. And that makes you wonder, what could you take everything that's happening on Earth today and and actually bring it up like booted up on another planet. And if you if you drill down into it, that just it seems incredibly difficult. It's imaginable, but it definitely would require a huge amount of thought and logistics and training. I like I came up with a rough estimate that you might have to have two d thousand people trained in all these different disciplines to make Scotch tape and to make aluminum oil, and to make chips and to make tires, and like there's there's all these things we make that are all so specialized. The amount of knowledge you'd have to send there and skill and practice and stuff, it's it's fascinating to think about it, especially when you think that you can't, uh, you can't have a wood making facility that just procures would or something like that. It's something as simple as that, you know, you have to manufacture a lot of these different elements essentially that then go into the product. Yeah, we take carbon really for granted that planet. Yeah, and wood is a great example because you aren't gonna have any wood for like thirty years if you want real wood, you know, because it takes time for the tree to grow. Well, thankfully, I Kea has those flat packs, which surely would uh. And so one of these landers. Um no, but seriously, like, who's gonna build this stuff? Like? Is it like this is a volunteer situation. I mean, obviously this is part of the thought experiment, is the fact that stuff hasn't been discussed, and it's also amorphous at this point. But you sort of lay out and make a case for how will people contribute once they get there? Can you talk a little bit about that? So if you're gonna if you're going to create a complete backup of human activity on Mars, if you're going to try to do that, then uh, you mentioned chip making as an example. Chip making is probably the most advanced thing humans are doing right now. I guess we could argue there's other you know, there's competitors, but chip making is really hard at the at the scale we're doing it at and at the precision we're doing it at. So if you wanted to bring that whole industry up on Mars, you start you know, you asked about what are the roles of different people, Well, there is a crazy amount of really esoteric expertise that would have to be trained into the passengers that go to Mars so that they know how to land on the planet, build the different parts of the chip making you know, activity, get it all up running, uh like, have it produced its first product, and then they would have to start moving it forward on the research side like we do on Earth as well, or they're going to get behind very quickly. So yeah, when you think about the roles people would have, um, you know, like one of the one of the little riffs in chapter thirteen is that there are people on this planet inside of Apple and Intel and other chip making companies that their whole specialty might be, you know, the floating point multiplier of a CPU, or the branch prediction part of the CPU, or you know these really esoteric memory features of a CPU or something. There's like thousands of those little specialties just to make CPUs And that doesn't have to do with the manufacture of it. That just has to do with a layout and design of it and the improvement of it. So you're talking hundreds of thousands of people who know such amazingly esoteric things so that all this stuff can actually start working on Mars. And then you can't just send one of them, right because what if that guy gets hit by a meteor or his ship crashes on landing, or you have to send enough redundancy, and then you have to send an education system so that you can train up new people so when those people die, they're replaced. And just it's like this huge rabbit hole if you actually start to think about what Elon Musk is proposing. But are you incentivizing these people to get the best in the brightest? Are we talking about like only the super elite are even going to be considered for this, Like like yeah, I mean is it like Australia and a prison colony. Yeah, maybe they're the first round to go and they do all the work and then we ship them back to the States. It's a great question, though, I just wonder. I mean, there's us Like you said, it's like each question begets like fifty other questions and that's that's why it's so much fun to talk about, but no, but really, like, I mean, who, how do you incentivize people that even have these skill sets to go like on this dangerous, you know, dicey expedition. I would say being part of history is a huge argument, right, being on the the backup planet that might be an incentive, I think if we're just honest about it. And one of the things that the book starts with is that there are like pick a number, two billion, three billion, four billion people on planet Earth who are living in misery. Like just to put it succinctly, they are getting the raw end of the economic deal on this planet. Like there's this fun statistic of the people on planet Earth make less than ten dollars a a that like, that's impossible to imagine, but nonetheless that's a fact. And there are lots of people, like billions who make less than five dollars a day, and there's a billion that make less than two dollars a day. There are plenty of people whose lives would be radically like a hundred times better if they had the opportunity to do something like this. They don't necessarily have anything right now, but if they could be trained and brought up to speed and then sent to a place like Mars. The incentives for them are far different from the incentives that you know, someone living in America or Germany or Canada might have. That it's a whole different world for them. So then it leads us to a really big question. Um, for us, the three of us in the studio, for many of you listening, not all of you, we are familiar with a capitalist economic system, especially if you live in the West, and one of the huge questions asked are proposed by you, and here is why not export the American economic system to Mars? And we're going to get to that right after a quick word from our sponsor, and we're back. We have returned not from Mars, but from an ad break, not from Mars. Yet we left on one of the biggest questions, and a singular thing explored in the book, which is not not just the technology, but beyond the technology. Um. You know, you could argue that one of the most intangible and important technologies that humanity has evolved are socioeconomic systems. Right, So one of the questions is if we're making a backup planet, not only what should we bring from Earth, but are there improvements or are their superior approaches that we would want to institute on this you know, Earth two point oh, or do we just think about it in a completely new light right and m The the socio economic part of it is absolutely fascinating to think about because there are a number of different systems that are like in place on planet Earth. But if we look across the whole planet at the effects those systems are having on people, we have not figured out the socioeconomic part to any degree on planet Earth yet. So before the break, there was this fund statistic that of the planet makes less than ten dollars a day, so you know that would be less than a year, and of the planet would be something like five five and a half billion people, maybe billions and billions of people are really getting shafted by the economic systems that we're using today. So it forces us to ask, if we're going to create this whole new colony, what kind of economic system do we want to put there? And if we're starting with a blank sheet of paper, which we are, why not come up with something much much much better for everyone who's going to live on that planet. Why don't we come up with a set of goals for the whole society and then figure out how to make an economic system that delivers on those goals. And ay, those goals are easy to figure out, like all we have to do is think about what we want in our own lives and be the the goals that we set, we want them to apply to everyone. We like, when we think about put bringing up this whole new thinging on on Mars, we expect it to be cool and shiny and new and wonderful, you know, kind of the word utopia's way overused. We would like it to be good for the people who go there. And we know from looking at Earth that if we take what we're doing on Earth now, it's gonna be just as bad on Mars. So how do we conceive of a new economic system? How do we think about that? And there's a number of chapters in the book that tries to lay out this whole new economic way of thinking that benefits everyone and that delivers on all the goals we would have for a Martian society. Things like everybody gets food, and everybody gets clean water, and everybody gets housing, and everybody gets health care. I mean, those are so obvious that they don't even bear you know, thought really except that on planet Earth, billions and billions of people don't even have those essentials. It's like, it's crazy when you think about Earth and then you think, well, what what will we do to make it better on Mars? You know, I had kind of a freudy and listening heretic a second ago when you said a Martian society, I heard Marxist society. And I can't help but think that that plays into this a little bit. I mean, you know what I mean, like just the idea of putting everyone on equal playing field, making where everyone works together towards a common goal. And this is a system that we've seen, you know, fail time and again. How do you feel like it would be I'm not saying this is straight up communism, but it has the feel of that in certain ways. How do you feel like that would work from a you know, setting up a brand new society when it hasn't worked, you know, in in the planet we have. Well, so the first thing I think we could ask is does the system we have now work? Like we like to say that it works, but if we were to really look at it and no things like that there's a billion people living slums, and there's billions of people who don't have any real access to modern healthcare and are making less than ten dollars a day, and you know, we look at that. Is that success? Like I you could argue that it is radically successful for some of us. Like if you happen to have a good job in a developed country, you're doing great, but you're like five percent of the planet or something. So it's working great for five percent of the planet and it's working less and less great for the other Is that success? I agree completely? But aren't those people that are successful in our economic system is the one that would be more likely to want to escape and live in a utopian you know, society and kind of own everything well after everything's been built. That's kind of what I'm hearing. Let's send to the poor people there to build everything poisoning, right, and then like you know, we go and live on our Martian villas. I don't know that's maybe being negative, but that's one thing I'd like to One thing I'd like to examine here, Marshall is um. I think there's a really strong point to the book's approach, where it is grounding the thought experiment in current statistics from international institutions to current socio economic practices. Nol. I'm really interested in what you brought up about, uh, the idea of Marxism as we as we know, international economists and people who study international affairs have routinely given backhanded, uh like back handed compliments to the American system. They've called it the least worst of all disasters. But I mean, and uh, the thing that you said, like, why what where would something like this succeed rather than fail? And first, it seems like there's a smaller sample size if it's a million people and they're going to be pre selected to some sort of rubric or through some sort of rubric. But the question I would ask you, Marshall, is how would you see a I interacting in this or and to what degree? If so? So, if we're gonna design a society from scratch, we would be silly not to take AI into account in designing that whole system. So the problem we're facing in America right now, or a problem economically, is that when AI comes along, it is increasingly displacing people from their jobs, and then those people really don't have anywhere to go and and a great example of that that's that's coming in the near term is is truck drivers. Like we can pretty much say that in X years, where X might be ten or it might be twenty, but it probably isn't more than twenty. In X years, all the truck drivers are going to get bounced out of their jobs by AI, by self driving trucks. And that's one point six million jobs just for truck drivers of eighteen wheeler kind of trucks. That doesn't count all the FedEx trucks and the UPS trucks and all the taxis and all the other jobs. Just the big rig truck drivers is one point six million people. They're gonna get bounced out of their jobs and then they're gonna do what like that? That is the problem our economy has with AI is that it displaces people from jobs and then their destitute Like there, it's gonna be very hard for them to find new jobs, and that's going to get worse and worse and worse as AI accelerate. So why don't we design an economy where that where AI is a good thing rather than a bad thing, And why don't we apply it everywhere we can from healthcare to education to truck driving, to apply it everywhere, and then as it frees up more and more people, we take advantage of that and spread all that automation, all the advantages and wealth from it out to everyone, rather than letting it concentrate as it is right now in an increasingly small slice of humanity. Like they're sometimes called the one percent, they're sometimes called the elite, whatever you want to call the the percent of humanity that's taking all these gains right now, Why don't we design an economy that spreads it out to everybody instead of concentrating it. And that that's a big part of the underpinning of the book's thought process is how do we make this planet, this new planet, how do we make it benefit everyone in instead of having most of the people being destitute and then some being okay, in this tiny group being you know, ultra wealthy, which is what the Earth is Like. Yeah, we know we we have in our society benevolent billionaires. They do exist. But you wouldn't it require that, wouldn't it require wealthy people to be willing to spread that out and like participate in a system where everyone is benefited equally. As opposed to being in the position they're used to being in, which is kind of at the top of the mountain. I think we have to create an economy that automatically you like, that is structurally designed so that everyone benefits from the economy, instead of an economy that is what we're experiencing right now, which is a very small number of winners takes pretty much everything. Was this really weird statistic that came out at the beginning of the year where eight human beings on Earth own as much wealth as the whole bottom half of humanity, So eight own as much wealth as three point seven billion people. And that is happening because that's how today's economy on Earth is structured, that's how the rules are written, that's how it's all designed to work that way. Well, what if you do it on Mars in a completely different way, Like why not make a different set of rules that have much much better outcomes? And the advantage of Mars is that gives you a blank slate. You don't have to force existing billionaires out of the way to make it happen. You just make it happen organically by designing it that way from the start. Yeah, in chapter fifteen of the of the book, you examine the political system or possibilities for a Martian political system, and of the one of the first when the first proposals that you explore is the concept of the direct vote. You know, and just for all our listeners who are outside of the US, the way the system would work here in the US is that the average voter votes for a representative. Still at this point human who or you know, I don't know that, but yeah, yeah, I mean it's a great point. But you know, the big difference here is that, um, the average voter votes for a representative who then in theory, pursues the interest of the forces they represent, which you know, the big criticism is that in practice the forces they represent tend not to be the voters who elected them. Yes, that is one big problem. And we know this. That the folks get elected, they go to Washington, then they start receiving large amounts of money from rich people in a wide variety of ways, and then they start doing what the rich people want them to do. So the voice of the people basically is meaningless now, uh, except in those rare cases where the voice of the people happens to intersect with what the rich want to happen. And you know, if we want to make this topical to today's news, we kind of see this with the whole healthcare thing that's coming down, where tens of millions of people are gonna lose access to healthcare coverage. Like, I don't think normal rank and file folk, which is us most everybody else, would want that to happen. But for whatever reason, the wealthy people want that to happen. And since they are pulling the strings there, they're ramming that through the House and then the Senate. Uh. And the president who we elected, who said he would never do this, like he would never modify Medicare or Medicaid and abandon all these working class people, has totally flipped and is now on the side of really really hurting working class people. So he promised one thing to get elected, and he's not delivering on that promise at all. That is that is the problem with electing human beings to political positions. It really uh forces you to think about how to get humans out of politics, representative humans like like we're experiencing in the United States right now. So I feel like we're really getting to the point we've been beating around this whole time, is what's the government going to be on Mars, Who's going to be running it? Well, I just have to interview one of the things, Marshal, that you propose in here, which isn't necessarily the government, but I can or what would be a government, but I can see it functioning somewhat in that way. I think we're talking about the same. It's the software that you talk about that will be constantly monitoring all of the inhabitants of the colony, all the colonists, and it's it will distribute work based on the needs of the colony to these colonists. And it seems like this really highly entirely government right. Well, in a way, yeah, in a way, it is right. But at the same time, it's also resource allocation because it's looking at what the colony needs and here's all of the work. I need to get that done at its best though, isn't that what the government's kind of supposed to do? Kind of? But so so, ultimately, Marshall, I just want to talk to you about the way you would see that functioning and mostly the problems that you see arising from that system. So if you think about how this Mars colony could be structured and how it could be organized, and how you could uh spread the benefits of the economy around everyone. Uh. In the book, it starts with the premise of food, like how could the colony produce its own food? And the way we do that in America today is a real hodgepodge. Like a person randomly seemingly decides that he or she wants to be a farmer and grows some food, and then it goes into this very odd commodity marketplace where prices can fluctuate wildly depending on this thing we call supply and demand. And then it goes into a you know, a whole giant corporate apparatus that distributes you know, that turns raw food products into manufactured food products a lot of the times, and then it gets distributed through these other things, and and it's all hodgepodge. It's all uh, completely random. There's a hundred, like a million places for people to extract money out of that system and concentrate it. And and so then you think, well, what is government supposed to do, like how how is government supposed to behave in that system or in a better system. And if you think about food down at the bottom, you you need people to do certain tasks to make the food available so that we can consume it. And fifty years from now that will all be done with robots. But right now we don't have robots to do certain parts of the problem, so we use human beings to do those parts. And the system that's proposed in the book is we just let and you know, a piece of software help people to find the things that need to get done based on their preferences of what they would prefer to be doing, and it manages the whole allocation of those tasks and the production of all the things that the colony needs. That is not unlike the system that you might use on well, like on the International Space Station right now at a tiny scale, or on an aircraft carrier at a bigger scale, or on a you know, like an Antarctic base or anything else. Like, we're just taking it up to the million person level so that everybody gets the benefits of the work that they input into the system. So that's the basic idea. Okay, yes, So would this be a situation then where where for instance, matt or null as Mars colonists have a profile of some sort a database just about them that list their their skills, their expertise, um, there are other concurrent projects or past experience, and then based on the needs of the of the overall system, uh, they're they're assigned a particular role that would be fluid depending on the state of those needs. Well, there's a lot of different aspects to it. So what the stuff you're talking about that's important. Then there's like, how do you guys prefer to work. Do you prefer to work at night? Do you prefer to work a little bit every day? Or would you prefer to work for a month and then have a month off? You know, there's like what kind of conditions do you prefer working in? There's what are you really good at? Um? And what really brings you joy when you do it? Like like let's say you had a system and you could talk to it and you could say, well, you know, I like doing podcasts, but I also I don't know, pick something I also like preparing engines, or you pick something so I would say farming repairing engines. Okay, So you know, if if we had a system that that understood all of that, it could customize a set of tasks for you that might be much better than the mix of tasks you're having right now. And if you're one of the classic millennials who went to college but then couldn't find a job and now you're working in a coffee shop and that seems like a totally uh useless way to use your time, the system can prevent that kind of just amazing waste from happening, because, you know, the the problem that a lot of millennials have right now is either they don't have a job Millennial unemployment is way higher than average unemployment, or if they do have a job, it is a job they have no desire to be doing because it's unrelated to anything they've been trained for. So again, and we look at the American system and we think, well, this is okay, But as soon as you look at it with any kind of uh, you know, critical thinking, it really isn't good at all. For probably a majority of the people they're in. They're in positions that they would never choose to be doing strictly because they have to do something to make money, or they're unemployed. So the system can just ring all of that inefficiency out and and give everybody a much better mix of tasks that are matched to their skill and their preferences and their dreams, their passions, whatever. Yeah, and this is this point is perhaps one of the points that would be uh controversial for some audience members. It reminds me of the arguments people used to make about autonomous vehicles, which you know candidly are going to be the rule rather than the exception within our lifetimes in many parts of the world. Uh. And and that argument that some critics would make is they would say, well, this is removing my own autonomy or my own personal freedom. And I really appreciate how you know, how you took steps to emphasize that this would be not a soulless uh putting a person into a slot or a box for a given amount of time, but it would it would engage with their preferences too. So I guess for our members of the audience who would say, you know, well that I am making my own human and decisions. Uh, you know, I'm not gonna let a piece of software tell me what to do. How would you respond to those members of the audience. Well, the flip it responses don't go to Mars you don't want to live that way? Uh, you know it, anything, no matter what we create, there's gonna be people who don't like it, and they're going to complain at whatever volume they choose to complain at. The nice thing about Mars, uh, you know, if we went back ten minutes, someone mentioned this is that there's a very strong filter possible on who gets to go to be in the Martian colony and you know, a selection process, training, vetting, whatever you want to call it, and everyone gets housing and food and clothing and healthcare, then off you go. And if you're not down with that, like if you think that half the people on Mars shouldn't get healthcare, chances are we don't want you on Mars. Like why would we want to create a society where half the people don't get healthcare? That's that's insanity really, But there are a lot of people who believe that, so, I mean most of the Senate a representative seems to believe it. Right now. It's as crazy as that is. So we just choose people who are aligned with this way of thinking. Uh, as we select the people who go to to the Mars colony. Okay, so this brings us to the most important, in my opinion, question that you pose in this entire thought experiment, Marshal, and that is what do we do with all the assholes on mars And we're going to get to that right after a quick word from our sponsor. Welcome back to the show everyone. We are still here with Marshall brain talking about colonizing Mars, right, and Matt raised a very interesting question at the end of the break, what do we do with all the assholes on mars um and which which leads me to something I was thinking about bringing up before the break, but I think it works perfectly here Marshall. We're talking about this sort of software AI kind of task master governing system I guess for lack of a better term, and that then it needs to be an acronym. By the way, it's an efficiency system. Big fan of acronyms. But if it knows all of this stuff about us, it assigns us these tasks, it knows our strengths, it knows our weaknesses, does it not also record black marks against us and potentially mark us as undesirable elements over time as we interact and engage, you know, with this new society, if you know, to the point of what happens to all the jerks? Is it the machine that filters them out and sends them to work in the minds? Like what are we talking here? So I don't know about you, but I personally, I'm great with living with people who are nice, and I'm great with people who are neutral, that is, they're just trying to get on with their lives and and make things happen. But then there's this group of people who actively works to make other people miserable. Those I've I've just applied the colloquial word assholes to them. And I think society is much much better if we can control, preferably eliminate asshole behavior, because it does make everybody miserable. And and we could sit here and we could list off a bunch of asshole things that we experience pretty regularly today that we would like to eradicate. On Mars, I'll just pick one simple one, like racism, Like, think, what is the point of that? Why so why would we want to have a group of people who are actively trying to oppose or to make other people miserable? Like why what benefit does that have for the society? For you know all the people living in that society when they're actively working to make the lives of others miserable. I think a big part of the Mars colony of any kind of perfected human society would be to recognize those behaviors that make people miserable and then do everything possible to eradicate them. That's one of my questions just to jump in here, that I would I think a lot of people would have on their mind. Is is there a degree of uh? To put to a coin of phrase, is there a degree of asshol ery here? You know? Because there are people who are an inconvenience or inconsiderate and daily life, and then there are people who are clear and present dangers, perhaps like a chronic a chronic drug abuser who operates heavy machinery. You know what I mean. So what's what's the scale here? I guess is the question? Man? Who gets to make the list? Right? Both good questions. So there is a spectrum of asshol eryn't want to say it that way, right? And you've you mentioned one like people who are intoxicated who are operating heavy machinery and are are endangering people's lives. We can throw murderers and robbers and rapists. You know, they're at one end of the scale. We all get that there a problem, and we already have systems that try to contain and deal with that end of the spectrum. That's the police force, the court, the prison system. You know that all UH is pretty well understood. Then there's stuff in the middle UH. And then there's the really lightweight stuff at the other end of the spectrum. So if someone gets into the line at the grocery store that clearly says ten items are less and they dropped fifty items on the conveyor belt. Yo, that is a level of Assholarry. It's far different from murdering someone, but it is. There's said, we are getting very dangerously into like Larry David. But I feel like I'm learning a lot about you right now. Okay, looks sometimes I do twelve. I try. Sometimes I look at my basket and likely visually it looks like ten. But then as I'm placing them. But you know what, they don't care. They don't care. Yeah, well someone should. The science hast said, I'm sorry. I could see. I could see, even in the microcosm of our own society, how this is already how how there are points of contention, and I think that's an excellent point um that that you're making here, Marshall, is that whether or not their degrees of um conflicts creating behaviors or or or misery causing behaviors, they they still have an appreciable impact over time. So this is the this is the very light example, but humorously egregious. Someone goes into they go to the local uh mars safe way and they get uh they see the science as ten things and then let's say they get uh fifty noodle packs and they argue that it's one thing because they're all the same noodles. Whatever. What if they rubber banded together at a giant bundle and the nuts I mean, if it's one upc anyway, yeah, yeah, sorry, we don't mean to de ray. Also, so what happens in that situation. Well, so one thing that's proposed uh in the book is that everybody in the society has the ability to report what they believe to be asshole behaviors. So the book goes so far as to suggest, like what if everybody wore a body camera and now we have this record of stuff that's happening in society all the time. And let's pick something a slightly less trivial than the ten items. Let's um, let's you know, one of the videos I linked to in the book is the one where the woman walks around New York City. She's just walking around, living her life. And the number of people who can't call her or to reach out to her a toucher or who follow one ft behind her and you know, stalking her. Just the amount of harassment she receives just walking around as a normal human being in New York. It's on camera, and it's easy to see that it's asshole behavior. And if all of that stuff can be picked up, documented, and then everybody who's doing it gets sanctioned for it, in the book, it proposes that we call him out and retrain them in you know, in that case, in uh, you know, some kind of literacy about social etiquette. Then all of that behavior is gone, and she and every other woman can walk around New York City without that happening anymore. You know. That's the kind of thing that the book is proposing, is that we just create a system so that this crap that happens to normal people as they're living their lives gets documented and the people who are doing it gets shut down and and we eliminate this huge amount of you know, societal junk and misery from the Mars colony. So this brings us to anonymity. Is we have discussed on this show on several occasions about how personal privacy is increasingly becoming a thing of the past or a privilege, you know, for the elite, a new currency if you will. Yes, Ben has the best ideas on this, and im that don't mean to jump on those, but um in the thought experiment, it goes into this same AI, which is keeping track of the work you're doing and that you need to do, is also tracking where you are at all times, and coupled with the proposed body cameras, anything that goes wrong can be proven immediately. This is where person A is and where person B is. Person A stopped breathing, person B is at fault, that that kind of scenario. But I know that thought of being constantly tracked and being constantly watched or watching UH is terrifying to a lot of people listening and is not something they would want to be a part of. Why could it be a a really good thing. I'll take it even not a less diplomatic route. I mean, to me, when I first read some of this stuff, it struck me as like the plot of like every dystopian sci fi book I've read in high school. I mean, it has that sense. But I'm wondering, like, how is this better? How is this not that? And how would it not be abused? Right? So, I think one thing to understand is that we're going down this path already. You know, if we went back to the seventeen hundreds, we had an aonymity and there was no way for anybody really to get rid of it. But today we're well past the halfway point. You know, like every everything I charge on my credit card is tracked, every camera I walked past looks at me, my cell phone tracks every step I take. Already, you know, like all this stuff is happening, and it's just happening in degrees. So why don't we just fast forward and take it to its limit, you know where it's going to end up anyway, and then ask, now that everyone has no anonymity, what are the advantages of that? And the advantage is that you can radically reduce crime, and any crime that does occur, you can instantly know who did it. There's no more of this detective that has to go around. And you know, it takes a whole hour for the show to figure out what the the murderer's identity was. You know, we watched these cops shows on television. It takes days, weeks to solve these crimes. Well, you now know the perpetrator instantly, and you can get all those criminals out of society so that again, the rest of us can live our lives without the misery that they're causing. I don't I don't think any of us has anonymity anymore. There's a patina that makes us think, you know, and there are places where we can gain it, but like, why not just embrace it and take advantage of every benefit that it has to offer. If we remove anonymity from the equation. I think that's a really I think that's a really fascinating point because you know, we're we're almost looking at two different paths for um, you know, the removal of privacy. UH. Currently in the in the system we've mentioned, the terrestrial system, we have the removal of privacy largely for UH corporate interest and largely for state control. There's not very much compelling evidence that uh, illegal wire tapping activities have actually stopped, for instance, the great boogeyman of our time terrorism. But there's pretty compelling evidence rather that this information has been sold at a profit right and the people generating the information don't profit from it. Um. I would like that just add on, uh, just the dovetail what you said marshall. Um. We have to remember as well that this is not Earth. People can't walk outside and live off the land by a coast somewhere, you know. Uh. So, so anonymity I think uh could be disadvantageous in a situation where disasters are much more likely. And if one thing goes wrong with this very delicate mobile ecosystem, uh, and we don't know where people are, then we would just have to assume they have died. Like so is it? Does anonymity also provide um? We talked about crime for um or excuse me? Does the lack of anonymity? Does constant surveillance also provide benefits beyond just person on person crime? Right? It has you know, a lot of advantages. And the other thing about Mars is that we will know every single person who's there. You know, they all cost a million dollars each to get there or something. So it's not like, uh, you know, the United States has this weird problem right now where ten or eleven million people are here illegally, like technically they don't exist in our society because they aren't, uh, you know, registered citizens of the society. That can't happen on Mars. That's sort of the ultimate anonymity. If you think about it, you just walk over a border and you're in the United States. Is this kind of ghost doing things that you know that are completely untracked. That's you know, that's not a good situation for society to be in either. So on Mars, you know every single person who's there. We already know the location of everybody from their cell phones. So we simply take advantage of that when crimes occur and and know who was where when the crime happened. And suddenly every crime, just about every crime is solvable in that kind of scenario, which has an incredible reductive force on the on the crime that's going to happen. And this, since we're talking about population, I have a I have a couple of different questions I wanted to explore, and I'm gonna save one for the end if that's okay with everybody. But right now, well, let's stay on society. So one of the one of the things that I think is implied, and it's it's explicitly stated in the book. I think it's implied in the proposition of people living on Mars is that the way as society grows and the way generation cycle will have to be radically different. Right. Um, so what would what would change about, say, reproduction on Mars or you know, Um, it reminds me of Okay, this is kind of a deep cut for for sci fi nerds in the crowd. Um, but do you all remember Logan's Run? Do you do you remember that one? Marshall, I have not seen that movie and illiterate when it claims the Logan's Run. Uh. In Logan's Run, there is a there there is Uh. It's like an post apocalyptic thing where in a lot of the members of a society are given a specific amount of time during which they live, you know, and after that timeline expires, they are um, they you know, they are eliminated. Uh. One thing that's interesting about that is, it focuses on the end of human life. But in in your book, in your exploration here we talk a little bit about reproduction, about the beginning of human life, which is pretty much. Um. You know, nowadays, nobody would have to pass the test to have a child. Nobody would have to And when I say tests, you know, you know, I mean like no one would have to pass some sort of socioeconomic litmus tests like can you afford a child? Uh, do you have any health problems, etcetera. Um, would this change on Mars? Well, first of all, I haven't written this chapter yet, although it's coming. Second of all, it is a great question because in the United States anyway, once someone becomes fertile, they can have a child. And in addition, anybody who's fertile can have as many children as she wants. And uh, she can do that with absolutely no training of any kind. Notes you know, training or you mentioned background checks or uh, you know she's strung out on heroin. You know, nothing stops someone from having a child in today's society. And the question you would ask about Mars, is that an appropriate way to be raising children? And should it be rethought? The cool thing about the thought experiment of Mars is that it is this blank sheet of paper. So would you reath think how parenthood would work in a situation like Mars where everybody's living under a bubble and you can't necessarily just have the population explode without some forethought and some adjustment. And the other thing that's happening is that human lifespan is is stretching out right now. So there's a number of different large organizations working on making people immortal, and a lot of speculation that our lifespans are about to get much much longer in the near term future. So in in all, you think about all those things, and and the question for the Mars colony is can anybody just have a kid whenever they feel like it? And if not, how do you how do you organize the system that's going to to make reproduction more rational in the Mars environment? And it's like a lot of these questions. It really makes you think, like deeply about how we run our society today. Why should anybody, you know, like I have four kids, I had no training when I had four children, Like why not what a barber, for example, in these fis of training just to cut a person's hair, like, how is it possible that I'm a parent without any training at all? It's it's weird, Marshall, is that when it's my kids might have some interesting perspectives on this, I'm not going to let them near the phone. So the you know, it's it's very odd to run something as important as reproduction as as loosely as we do on planet Earth. And if you look over at Africa and what's happening over there with reproduction right now, that's a whole another dimension of it. But that is a very sticky issue, very controversial. When you start trying to intervene in people's reproductive systems the way they use their bodies. People are repelled by that in general, can be but the flip side of that should have should an untrained human be able to create and then mold a new human life? You know, both sides of it are fascinating to look at and to think about. Uh, and I it's something we should talk about as a society, like it should be out there and getting discussed because the idea that a fifteen year old can have a kid with no training is weird that you know, we wouldn't let someone drive a car with no training, and we wouldn't. Let you know, thousands of other activities occur in our society without training, but bringing up a whole new human life, uh, and the ramifications of that are just startling to think about. And and I think the Mars Colony is a great place to explore the different options. So there's uh, there's another thing here that that occurs to us when we talk about options. Um. One thing that we we haven't addressed yet is the interaction between what would be too radically different systems or you know, in the case of Earth uh and Mars, one radically different system being the Mars Colony, and then this pastiche of these other systems. Of to what degree, given the distance and the chasm of space there, to what degree would the Martian colony and the people of Earth interact? That's a great question. And like they're there are ten different forms of interaction that we might think about. So do they like just a phone call between the two places That doesn't work, But you can't have a phone call from Mars to Earth because of the time delay. It's as short as six minutes, it gets as long as forty minutes. I think I'm doing that off memory. But you know, you you just can't have a phone call. So now that's gone. That means video calls are gone. You can do email. They can interact that way. They can interact economically, like through trade, but that's hard to imagine because of the cost of moving freight around. Then there's trade of intellectual property. Uh. You could develop things on Mars, you know, books, movies, digital products, you can move those back in four can communicate that way with Earth. Then there's travel like moving actual physical bodies around. That's possible, but really hard and really expensive, so unlikely to occur very many times. Uh. And so you look at all those different forms of of communication, the it's quite likely that Mars, the people on Mars would spin up their own way of doing things because of the isolation that the distance is gonna uh force onto the two societies. It seems more plausible that they would inevitably begin to drift apart than it does that they would maintain very very close relations um. You know, most one thing we know about a lot of colonies in human history, just on the planet is that they end up doing their own thing eventually. And I'm gonna go uper rabbit hole with this over a long enough timeline, would they evolve differently? Oh? I think that's almost certain. Yeah, over even a relatively short timeline. Because of there's so many uh weird things about Mars, from the gravity to the radiation and the places and ways they're going to live and so on. It it's going to impose a lot of uh new pressures on the human genome that will cause them to diverge. I would expect sooner rather than later. So really fast, Marshal, the timeline for this that Elon Musk played out, can you just tell us about that really fast? Well, it moves around a little bit, but the thought was that it could start in thees and I think his architecture moves a hundred people at a time, so that would probably take decades, you know, a couple of decades, three four to move a million people across. But as soon as you move any people there, they're probably going to start reproducing in some form, so you don't necessarily have to import all one million folks uh into the colony. But in his vision, it's starting in the twenties, and it maybe is is taking to three or four decades for the colony to ramp up to its full million person scale. I'm just as I was reading through, I was trying to imagine the innovations that will be occurring with our current technology by the time the first you know, series of ships leaves, and then what Earth, what planet Earth is going to look like from maybe just a climate perspective at that time, And uh, I don't know. We just started making me a bit nervous for the future, but also you know, hopeful in a way that we are sending these flow tillas out to Mars. So overall, I think the economic system that you have outlined here and you you've kind of proposed in all the different situations, it does seem like it would at least lift or it would be possible to lift everyone up to footing that is somewhat equal from a socioeconomic standpoint, yes, agreed, less unequal, and would provide him with all the food that they need, um and you know, clothes and everything they need for a healthy and happy life. But in trying to apply that to the Earth currently or maybe even in that time frame in the twenties and the forties, um, it seems like that won't be possible because of all the powerful forces that currently control our system. There would have to be some kind of very big and elaborate con flict for that to occur. Right. Well, Chapter seventeen came out yesterday, so this is a serialized book. I had a chapter every week, and chapter seventeen looks at this one interesting problem, which is the Syrian refugee problem. So we have pick a number, you know, a couple of million Syrian refugees living in pretty much absolute squalor in refugee camps, and there's no good solution to that problem on the table. So one of the things proposed in chapter seventeen is, well, let's take these people and let's apply the theories of the Mars Colony to them today on Earth in order to improve their situation. They're so bad off that anything we do is an improvement. And the other thing is they're already costing money. The u N and NGOs in the international community are spending some amount of money, billions of dollars every year on this pretty much intractable problem. So I understand what you're saying about. You know, it's hard to imagine this happening on Earth, but I think a situation like the Syrian refugee situation, which is at a lot of people living in abject poverty and misery. They're already consuming resources, but it's never going to get them out of that misery. If we do it the way we're doing it now, it gives us a chance to think about trying something different with them. And and that's what chapter seventeen is about. Could we take these principles and bring them to life on planet Earth, you know, starting six months that use the money that's being used to support them already but re allocated so that they get to build themselves a modern city to live in that is really a great place to live as opposed to a miserable, almost prison like existence that they're having now. Yes, I think this is This is a great point for anybody who hasn't read uh Chapter seventeen. As as Marshall has said, this is a serialized and ongoing work, Uh Marshall. As we as we wrap up the episode today, we want to thank you so much for your time, and most importantly, we want to know if you have any closing statements or thoughts that we have an addressed yet in the podcast that would be um of particular interest or use to our audience. Well, the first thing I would say is I would love to get feedback, positive and negative feedback on on the book as it's developing, and I already get uh a lot of really interesting thoughts. Like you guys brought up a lot of really interesting thoughts, and they uh, they truly helped with the development of the book. So my email address UH is online and publicly visible. It's easy to find me on the internet, so you can look at the book and send me email. The other thing is, UH, you know, I I left how stuff works and one of the things I want to do with my life is solved some of the big problems on Earth. And this Mars Colony thought experiment is a way of exploring the poverty problem and the concentration of wealth problem, and the inequality problem. And that has been a really interesting UH experience and an interesting x floration to try to think of a new economic system that would radically improve the lives of billions of people on the planet. So the more people who know about it and are thinking about it and are discussing ways to improve society for everyone, I think the better. What what is the website? That you do all that work for Marshall. It's called Marshall Brain dot com if you come there. UH. The Mars Colony book is UH at Mars dot htm on Marshall brain dot com or you'll see links to it on the homepage. It's a free book. It's UH available to anyone. Lots of people reading it right now. So UH feedback is welcome and encouraged, and we also welcome our listeners to send us feedback about the interview and any questions you have, UM, any thoughts you have about all of this stuff. We think it's super fascinating and we really appreciate you talking with us about it today. Marshall Brain. Thanks so much. Yeah, thank thank you so much, because I do I do want to mention as we close that this is only the latest in a long line of books that you have written, Marshall, including How God Works, the Engineering Book, multiple How Stuff Works books, Manna UH Teenager's Guide to the Real World. You can you can find all of these uh if you search online. And as Nola Marshall said, UH, this is this is ongoing. We want your feedback in a very real way. What we like to say here on the show is that you, the audience, are the most important part of this whole of this whole crazy thing. Uh so yes, Uh. Marshall Brain uh, founder of how Stuff Works, the author of the ongoing serialized work imagining Ellen Musk, million person Mars Colony. You can check it out today at Marshall Brain dot com. And if you want to send us feedback, you can find us on Twitter where we're conspiracy Stuff Conspiracy Stuff Show. On Instagram, Facebook, guess what, We're conspiracy stuff there too. And if you don't want to do any of that social media, you want to send us a line, or if you're on Mars you know, because apparently that's the best way to do it, send us an email. We are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com.