#1065 - Scott Solomon - The Insane Biological Cost of Living on Mars

14:16Chris Williamson:It causes your muscles to weaken because they don't have to work as hard, right? Especially like in your lower body, your back. And because your muscles aren't working as hard, your bones basically respond to muscle. And so they start to kind of break down. Like they basically will start to absorb, the body will absorb some of the minerals, right? The calcium and the potassium that makes up your bones. Is that just because

14:44Scott Solomon:they're not being strained? Is this kind of like atrophy for the muscles, but for the structure?

14:50Chris Williamson:Exactly. And actually one of the ways that people have studied the effects of prolonged space flight is through bed rest studies. So just by not moving your body much, it's not a perfect replica, but it does simulate some of the ways in which being in a lower gravity environment impacts the body, the circulatory system, right? Your heart's not having to pump as much to get blood through the entire body, you know, to get blood up to your brain. You know, you got to work against gravity here, but in space you don't. So we know a lot about that. We know that, you know, the fluids in your body, actually, not just the blood, but all of your body fluids start to be redistributed because, you know, gravity normally pushes them down towards your lower body.

15:33Chris Williamson:So, you know, if you look at pictures of astronauts in space, you probably can tell, like, especially at first, their faces look kind of puffy. Moon face. Yeah. Space face. Space face.

15:43Scott Solomon:They've got space face.

15:44Chris Williamson:They have space face and they have what they call chicken legs, right? Because their legs look super skinny because they've lost all this fluid. So they look a little silly, at least at first.

15:52Scott Solomon:Hang on, just on that, at first, does that mean that the body somehow reaches a new kind of equilibrium? So I'm going to guess a lot of this is kind of what, glymphatic, lymphatic clearance stuff? That's right.

16:04Chris Williamson:Right. Yeah, so now that we've had people that have stayed for longer flights, you know, up to a year and even a bit longer, we have been able to see that like, yeah, there are ways in which some of the systems in the body have like an initial adjustment period and then they start to kind of, you know, reach a plateau or they start to kind of return to normal. You know, like the body, when it has all of this extra fluid in the head or more fluid than you're used to having in the head, your body interprets that as too much fluid. And so one of the things that the body does is it starts to reduce the amount of plasma in your blood.

16:44Chris Williamson:And so you're actually losing blood volume by being in space for a longer period of time. And you start to reduce the production of red blood cells because your body's thinking, I don't need so much blood. And so astronauts often come back from space anemic. And that has other health implications, as you know. So that is something that is like an adjustment that the body makes. And then when you come back to Earth, you go through yet another adjustment. And that's just gravity. There's also radiation, right? So that's something that is going to be really important for thinking about deep space, because actually what we know about how radiation affects astronauts is mostly from how astronauts are affected by being in low Earth orbit.

17:38Chris Williamson:So the International Space Station is in low Earth orbit. It's orbiting the Earth, but it's close enough to the Earth that it's actually still inside the magnetic field that is surrounding our planet, which extends out quite far into space. And so that magnetic field actually traps a lot of the space radiation and prevents it from getting closer to the Earth. So astronauts on the International Space Station aren't exposed to as much radiation as astronauts on the moon, on Mars, or traveling anywhere beyond the limits of that magnetic field, the magnetosphere. Those are called the Van Allen radiation belts.

18:17Chris Williamson:And interesting story how they were discovered. I talk about that in my book. But, you know, yeah, we know that that radiation affects the body, right? I mean, the thing that you typically think about is cancer. And the cancer risk for anybody traveling in space is certainly higher. It's one of the reasons that NASA limits the amount of time that astronauts are able to go to space. Astronauts essentially will kind of time out at a certain point if they have reached a radiation exposure that NASA deems to be, you know, too risky. And so, you know, that's a known risk. But, you know, we also know that, you know, there's things other than cancer that radiation does, right?

19:06Chris Williamson:So radiation can have cognitive effects. There's some really interesting research that looks at simulated space radiation and tries to understand, like, what does this do to our nervous system, right? And research on rodents, for example, shows that if they're exposed to simulated space radiation, they actually have slower responses to tasks that they've been taught how to do. that's pretty concerning for anybody planning on going deeper into space quick thinking trying to

19:41Scott Solomon:problem solve fix whatever this pipe is that's just broken oh hang on the environment has made

19:47Chris Williamson:me stupid yeah i mean there's a there's a thing that people call uh astronauts call um space fog

19:53Scott Solomon:or space brain sometimes and space face and space brain there you go yeah exactly and and you know

20:00Chris Williamson:No, it's sort of like you're just kind of a little bit, a little out of it, a little slower to respond to tasks that you would otherwise be able to do quickly. And, you know, they can adjust. But if that is something that gets worse with more radiation exposure, that's important for us to know if we're going to spend more time in deep space.

20:19Scott Solomon:How reversible are these?

20:21Chris Williamson:We don't know. So, you know, partly it's because the amount of radiation that those astronauts have been exposed to, as I said, isn't as great. it's actually a different type of radiation even than, so there's what's called these galactic cosmic rays that are out in space. This is radiation zipping around from other galaxies, and it's largely trapped by our magnetic field. So once you get out to the moon, to Mars, any place that we might want to travel that goes beyond low Earth orbit, we're talking about a lot more radiation exposure. We just simply don't know what that will do to people, or especially if they're being exposed to it for a much longer period of time.

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21:46Chris Williamson:What was that story about how the Van Allen? Yeah, the Van Allen radiation belts. So, you know, So it starts with basically trying to figure out like, you know, where is radiation coming from? We can detect on the surface of the earth that there's, you know, some radiation. And the initial experiments were actually done by putting radiation detectors on hot air balloons and allowing those balloons to go higher and higher. And the surprising thing was that the radiation exposure increased as they got higher and higher in the atmosphere. So at first people thought like the radiation is probably coming from earth, maybe from the center of the earth.

22:23Chris Williamson:No, it's coming from somewhere up high. And, you know, even maybe it's the sun, right? Well, if it's the sun, then those exposures should be higher during daytime than during nighttime. And it wasn't. They even measured it during an eclipse. It should decrease slightly when the sun is being blocked by the moon, right? It doesn't do that. And then what ended up happening was once we were able to send satellites deeper into space, the initial measurements, this is done on a Geiger counter, right? So the thing that like clicks when you're trying to detect radiation, it makes like a kind of sound like that, right?

23:03Chris Williamson:And the more rapid the clicks are, the higher the radiation exposure. Well, the very first time one of these was sent up on a satellite, it's clicking, clicking, clicking. The rate is getting higher. And then all of a sudden it just stops. So it's like, what the heck's going on? Is there just no, suddenly no radiation? And it turned out, no. Actually, there was so much radiation, it was just overwhelming the sensors of the Geiger counter. Yeah.

23:32Scott Solomon:Holy shit. Exactly. So I mean, I've heard, this is like, I'm using the dramatized series of Chernobyl as my, well, I've heard Geiger counters and they were in Chernobyl. Okay. But even at least in the, and it was trying to be accurate, I think, scientifically. And even in that, the Geiger counter still made a noise. It wasn't as if it blew out the top of it. It was just ticking super, super fast. So yeah, if you think, well, there's an elephant's foot down there that's the most radioactive thing on the planet. But if you just go far enough away from us, you go to a point where Geiger counters just essentially top out.

24:13Scott Solomon:That's pretty scary.

24:15Chris Williamson:Exactly. Yeah. So what they did, they sent another satellite with a different type of device or calibrated differently or whatever. And then we're able to determine, oh, yeah, you get to this certain kind of elevation in orbit around the Earth. And all of a sudden, there's just huge amounts of radiation. So we now know that there's these Van Allen radiation belts. There's like an inner belt and an outer belt. So you can kind of picture this as like, you know, imagine a ball, that's the Earth, and then you take a rubber band that's bigger than that ball, and then you kind of pinch it in the middle around the ball.

24:48Chris Williamson:So you've got this kind of two sort of orbs coming out from the Earth, and that's the shape of the Van Allen radiation belts.

24:56Scott Solomon:Well, that's why if we didn't have the iron core in the Earth, the magnetosphere, magnetic sphere around us, all of these rays would just be able to pepper us. I mean, there would be a ton of other problems as well. But one of them is that we would just get annihilated by radiation. Okay, so somehow me and you have survived our journey across space. We've managed to land in Mars. Some of the stuff may be reversible. Some of the stuff may not be reversible. We'll see. We can't walk too much. We've got space face and space brain and chicken legs. What will the different physics on Mars do to humans?

25:36Scott Solomon:Just more of the same from the space flight? Is there anything else to say on the sort of physics of the system?

25:44Chris Williamson:Yeah. So, you know, first of all, it takes something like six to nine months just to get there. So you're talking about you've been traveling through space, microgravity, weightlessness for, let's say, six months. So your body is going through all those things that we were just talking about. Your muscles have become weaker. Your bones have become more brittle. The fluids have redistributed. That has other effects on our eyes. The vision actually has a tendency to get worse. So that's all happening. Then you arrive on Mars and let's assume that the landing goes well and you are now on the surface.

26:23Chris Williamson:Now, all of a sudden, you're in a one third gravity environment. Three eighths, about one third gravity environment compared to Earth's gravity. So you went from weightlessness to one third G. And so now all of a sudden there's all this weight, all this force on your body.

26:41Scott Solomon:normally even though it's one third of what's on earth it's an infinity more than what was in space

26:46Chris Williamson:yeah exactly exactly and so you know if you look at like you know anytime astronauts come back from from being in space uh they need a lot of help in order just to get out of the spacecraft to walk it's like it there's a long adjustment period so um one of the things is just immediately like that even though it's just one third g that's going to be hard on somebody that has been in a weightless environment for that amount of time. So if there's nobody else there to help you, just even getting out of your spacecraft might be tricky.

27:18Scott Solomon:Maybe some of those assistance things, devices. I mean, they're trying to offset this. I've seen astronauts using the sort of hand crank cycling machines. You know, you can artificially recreate force and tension and pressure by using stuff that has it built into the system itself. but the globalness of gravity, working on the spine, working on the organs, working on the lymph system, working on circulation, working on reproductive organs, working on, you know, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. I don't think that you're going to be really trying to pick up pennies here when there's a shit ton of hundred dollar bills that you've left behind you.

28:01Chris Williamson:Right. Yeah, no, you're right. So, I mean, astronauts do a lot of exercise in space. You're absolutely right. You know, using kind of resistance because you can't use, you know, weightlifting doesn't make sense in a weightless environment. And all of that is really meant to minimize the deconditioning that happens to the body, right? But it doesn't eliminate it. if you didn't do that kind of exercise. And they exercise about two hours a day every day. So this is not like a small amount. If you didn't do that, you'd be in way worse shape. So, you know, we've arrived at Mars. We've done our two hours a day every day.

28:39Chris Williamson:Still, it's going to be a challenge to just get up and move around. Who knows what the cognitive effects of that radiation exposure? You've been exposed to galactic cosmic rays for six months. Nobody's ever had that happen. We simply don't know what the effect will be. And then there's another factor. What have you been eating all this time? You know, astronauts, you know, we're all kind of familiar with the idea of like freeze-dried foods and stuff like that, that astronauts typically bring with them. They are having to bring kind of, you know, shelf-stable food. but even in the International Space Station they're able to occasionally resupply them with some kind of fresh food, some fresh produce.

29:25Chris Williamson:There's a story of Russian cosmonauts the first to be living for a longer period of time on a space station and they smuggled in an onion and it was the first ever birthday that a person had in space and they gave this cosmonaut an onion for his birthday.

29:46Scott Solomon:And it was the most wonderful thing. That is the most Russian shit I have ever heard in my entire life. Yeah.

29:53Chris Williamson:We have birthday.

29:55Scott Solomon:We have onion.

29:56Chris Williamson:Yep. Contraband onion, no less. Legal onion. Yep. Yep. But the point is people really get excited about any kind of fresh produce that you can have. we have not made major advances in our ability to grow large amounts of food in any sort of space environment. This is something that people are actively trying to work on. They have grown plants on the International Space Station, but at very small scales. And the astronauts tend to get really attached to those plants. And so, you know, we think that's going to be a major limiting factor in our ability to go deeper into space is what are we going to eat?

30:38Chris Williamson:You know, people, nobody wants to go and eat, you know, canned food, packaged food for years at a time without, you know, mixing it up with some fresh food. So that's another one of the challenges.

30:52Scott Solomon:Given the radiation issues, does that mean there's going to be higher mutation load just generally over time?

31:00Chris Williamson:I think it does. So I think we should expect that people are going to be exposed to higher radiation, even if they're living in some kind of an environment that's trying to shield, block that radiation.

31:12Scott Solomon:Special 3D printed reflective anti-radiation. They've already done the nine months to get out there. They're probably going in and out doing Mars walks or space walks or some sort of equivalent thing. And the 3D printing machines, at least for the first few centuries, are not going to be able to block everything. And there's more radiation.

31:30Chris Williamson:Yeah. I mean, even if you built a fully radiation-proof enclosure that you could live in on Mars, who wants to go to Mars and never go walk around outside, right? I mean, you know, what's the point? So I think people will be exposed to more radiation. And yeah, radiation causes mutations, right? It causes damage to the DNA. And when the body repairs that damage, it's never a perfect process. There's always a risk that the repair leads to a change in the sequence of DNA, and that's a mutation. So that's a health risk, but it also has implications for our ability to adapt over a much longer timescale of many generations.

32:14Chris Williamson:What does it do to adaptability? well adaptation comes from natural selection and natural selection on its own can only really sift through whatever variation there is and so the only way you get new variation is through mutation mutation is the ultimate source of all diversity of all living things why is this not a good thing then does this does this not push the dice rolling more quickly so i think that what we should expect if we do nothing else is that if we're able to live for many generations in a space environment like on Mars, it would mean that basically you are kickstarting the evolutionary process.

32:52Chris Williamson:It would happen faster. Why that is something we should maybe be concerned about is that's a very messy and unpleasant process. You're basically talking about a lot of - There's going to be tons of errors. There's going to be shed tons of errors.

33:02Scott Solomon:That one doesn't work. That one doesn't work. That one doesn't work. That one kind of works. That one doesn't work. That one doesn't work.

33:08Chris Williamson:Yeah. I mean, you're talking about a lot of suffering. You're talking about a lot of death. and so that's you know it would happen I think what I try to argue is that's sort of the default that we should expect is that if we're living for many generations in this kind of an extreme environment natural selection will do its thing mutation rates would be higher because of that radiation exposure and so basically the process that we normally think of as being generally pretty slow, would actually happen faster. Yeah, well, okay.

33:38Scott Solomon:But what about selection bottlenecks? Because if Mars is going to accelerate this evolutionary roulette, you end up with selection bottlenecks.

33:48Chris Williamson:Yeah, the idea of bottlenecks, I think this is an important concept that we have to think about if what we're trying to do is to create a long-term settlement. Because we know that any time you take a large number of individuals, and then you take a small number of them and put them somewhere else, right? You've gone through a population bottleneck. That's, you know, basically it's like pouring. I do this simulation in my classes sometimes where you take like a bottle that's filled with like different colored gumballs, right? And you know how many different colors there are. And then you pour out a few of them and then you ask, okay, is the proportion of different colored gumballs the same as it was in the bottle at the starting point or is it different?

34:26Chris Williamson:And of course it's going to be different. It's never going to be exactly the same. So you take a small number of individuals from a large group, it's not going to be representative. So that kind of reduction in population size that happens when you found a new population, it leads to rapid evolutionary change. And we call that the founder effect in evolutionary biology because it's a well-known phenomenon. Anytime, you know, a new population is founded, you tend to get a reduction of genetic diversity. And whoever the individuals are that are the founders have this like really disproportionate effect on what happens later.

35:07Chris Williamson:Like they're really influential.

35:09Scott Solomon:Have you ever read Seven Eves by Neil Stevenson? I have, yes.

35:13Chris Williamson:This is exactly what the founder effect is, right? That's right.

35:16Scott Solomon:I don't want to spoil it. It's in my first reading list that lots of people have downloaded. So maybe loads of people that are listening also know the spoiler too. Actually, skip forward. If you haven't read 70, skip forward by about 30 seconds. So halfway through the book after the moon explodes, there's seven women left. I think only one of them can't reproduce. I think one of them's like a matron marshal type lady, or maybe there's eight and seven can reproduce. And yeah, you end up with these seven different races in future. And each one is very distinct. and welcome back to the people that didn't read Seven Ebs.

35:47Scott Solomon:You end up with this sort of very distinct lineage. And that's the best. This is why hard sci-fi rules, because I get to learn about real stuff and it's snuck in under the guise of it being a story.

36:00Chris Williamson:Oh, there's so many examples of how, you know, a science fiction author has already thought through a lot of the real challenges and the real consequences.

36:09Scott Solomon:Do you remember in Seven Ebs that there was such a scarcity of food halfway through that somebody invented the idea of soft cannibalism. Do you remember that? Soft cannibalism. He ate his own legs because he decided that in space, legs were arbitrary. You don't need them. Yeah, they're superfluous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he reduced his energy requirement and increased his energy intake by eating his own legs. So cool. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I have been wearing Whoop for over five years now, way before they were a partner on the show. I've actually tracked over 1600 days of my life with it, according to the app, which is insane.

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37:42Chris Williamson:That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom.

37:45Scott Solomon:So you've got habitats on Mars, 3D printed, hopefully protective, but closed systems magnify small errors even more. It's basically like being in a closed system is more akin to being on an island than it is being in a city.

38:02Chris Williamson:That's right, yeah. I mean, you are in an island, right? I mean, you're in a place where you can live, but you're surrounded by an inhospitable environment. And so, yeah, I mean, that's an island. Yeah, I think that's a good way to think about it.

38:16Scott Solomon:So presumably there's going to be huge survival pressures on psychological traits, maybe just as much as the physical ones.

38:26Chris Williamson:Psychological traits, definitely, and skills. I mean, think about who are the people you would want to send to establish a new, you know, a new human population on Mars. I mean, you want people who are likely to be able to handle tough situations, but you also want people who know how to do all different sorts of things, you know, you need different skills, you need different, you know, personality traits, but you also want to make sure you've enhanced the kind of, you know, probability of success by making sure it's also a genetically diverse group of people, you know? I mean, the more genetically diverse it is, the more opportunity there is for natural selection to be able to help people to adapt in future generations.

39:15Chris Williamson:So, yeah, you know, I think it would have to be quite different from how we have kind of historically chosen who gets to go to space, right? You know, I don't, did you ever read actually one, you would actually, Oh, sorry, go

39:27Scott Solomon:ahead.

39:28Chris Williamson:Well, so there's kind of this like famous, uh, a book from, I think in 1979 called the right stuff by Tom Wolf. I don't know if you've ever read that. It's like one of the classic accounts of the early days of, um, of the U S space program. But that, that title, that idea of the right stuff, like who is it that has the right stuff that gets to be the select few that go to space. And at least initially for the U.S., it was all, well, first of all, it was all men, it was all white men. And then it was all like actually Navy test pilots, right? So they took them from the military. It was only people who were already in the military and they were chosen for their ability to be able to handle the physical aspects of a launch and being in space and also the psychological challenges.

40:19Chris Williamson:And, you know, I mean, the U.S. space program is a huge success, clearly. But if you use those same criteria to select people for who's going to found a new population on Mars, you'd get such a tiny fraction of human diversity. You'd be setting yourself up for failure.

40:37Scott Solomon:Which is only going to get more bottlenecked over time. That's right. It's going to get tighter and tighter. So you need to make the base of this pyramid as broad as possible. So, I mean, I was thinking as you were speaking, you know um people who have brittle bones for instance maybe they have something which is actually useful in there because all of the selection pressures that we have currently we want someone who's big and strong why gravity is 30 percent of the maybe we actually want people who are really petite and therefore they need fewer calories and therefore they don't need to eat their own legs that's right when it when it comes to the personalities are there some personalities that are more suited for space colonization than others?

41:15Chris Williamson:Well, we do know from a lot of the studies that have been done in analogs, like we were talking about earlier, and this includes things like people who are, you know, working in Antarctica in the most sort of similar environment that exists on Earth to what it will be like that, right? You're in an isolated, extreme, confined environment surrounded by, you know, hostile conditions. So, um, you know, what are the factors that lead to success, especially for like people who are overwintering in Antarctica, like they're staying, you can't just, you know, leave whenever you want to, because there's no way to kind of get a ship or a plane in, um, people who, uh, who, who do well in that environment are people who, um, are good team players are people who are, um, you know, open about kind of how the experience is going for them, willing to talk about it, willing to talk about it with others.

42:14Chris Williamson:You know, you also want a good chemistry among the group, right? So you don't want, you know, all type A personalities because they're likely to kind of clash, right? And so there's all these studies that have like looked at the psychology of group dynamics. An interesting one is you don't want an even number of people. You want an odd number. It's because it can split into, yeah, basically it could split into factions and you need a tiebreaker, right? So there've been examples of where that has happened and it hasn't always gone well. So yeah, so there's interesting lessons that can be learned from what happens here on earth.

42:57Scott Solomon:That is so good. Wow. Okay. So you mentioned before about who gets to go to Mars first, sort of the best people, the strongest people, the richest people, the most obedient people. Who do you think should govern Mars? Is it Earth governments? Is it companies? Is it the colonists themselves? What about the politics? What about the astro-Martian politics?

43:16Chris Williamson:You know, I think we have this tendency to think about going to space as being like an opportunity to, you know, start completely fresh and get it right this time. And all, you know, this like we're going to have a utopia in space. I'm not convinced by that way of thinking about it. I think, you know, humans are humans and we should learn from what has happened before and not expect that it would be different there. So I think we need to try to, you know, do the things that seem to work well here on Earth, right? I don't think you want to have, for example, like, you know, a government from Earth dictating what happens on Mars, because we know that that doesn't work well.

43:59Chris Williamson:We know that people need to have their own ability to make their own decisions. You want leaders who have skin in the game.

44:07Scott Solomon:It's also highly inefficient.

44:09Chris Williamson:Sure, and there's a communication delay. We haven't even talked about that. You can't have this kind of conversation like we're having where one person is on Earth and the other person is on Mars because they're so far away that you'll have several minutes of delay between when you say something and when the person hears it on the other end. And it could be up to 20 minutes, depending on where Earth and Mars are in their respective orbits. So you can send emails, you know, or video messages back and forth, but you can't really have a conversation. So yeah, imagine a government meeting where, you know, you can't even like have a conversation, right?

44:45Chris Williamson:You think it's dysfunctional now, man.

44:51Scott Solomon:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, look, there was a campaign when Elon first started floating around the administration to decolonize Mars. And what they meant by that was we don't want the same horrible, inequity, oligopoly, powerful, Matthew principle bullshit to go to this new planet. It was pointed out that there's a little bit of an irony in talking about decolonizing a planet that we haven't yet colonized. But yeah, the politics of this, I think, are just so fascinating. And again, my go-to, Seven Eves from Neil Stevenson, they need to work out what happens with murder. What happens if somebody commits a crime in space?

45:35Scott Solomon:Is there a prison? Who's the adjudicator? Everything needs to be re-instantiated again. And if you've got people from multiple different countries, well, the Russians do it this way, but the Americans do it that way, but the Ukrainians do it a different way. Well, we disagree with your, well, we need to, it's a new, people aren't from nations anymore. And if they are, those factions are just going to become splinters that start to fracture what is supposed to be a cohesive unit into something which is, you know, very individualized, which you don't want. But do you want to say to people that you need to recant your current identity?

46:12Scott Solomon:Well, after a few generations, what does that mean? And then And how do you avoid there being new splinter factions? You don't have that much tolerance for error with this stuff when it comes to governance. You know, you can have a good bit of tolerance for error if there's 156 countries or something. If you've got three pods and 200 people, 10 people die. That's a lot of, that's 5%, right? There's a lot of people. So yeah, just, I endlessly fascinate. Going back to the personality thing, the psychological impact. What does long-term isolation in space do to the human mind? Why are closed ecosystems so psychologically taxing?

46:54Chris Williamson:Well, I think there's a few things, right? I mean, one is just, you know, knowing that you can't leave, right? This is something that, you know, again, people in Antarctica research stations or, you know, some of the remote field camps that they experience, you can't just, you know, go for a walk or say, that's it, I'm done, I'm out of here. A similar kind of thing happens to people who are on submarines, like nuclear submarines that have to spend a long period of time submerged during military operations. Can't just step outside. You're pretty much stuck there. The difference there is they're working within a kind of a military hierarchy system is sort of built into the nature of the experience.

47:39Chris Williamson:And that's not the case so much in Antarctica. But, you know, it's knowing that you can't leave is is something that that definitely takes a toll, you know, and you have to you have to train for it. You have to be prepared for it and you have to have, you know, systems in place to allow people to to deal with whatever comes with it. Right. So you need to be able to have, for example, a therapist available to speak with them. You need to have resources in place to deal with crises when they do take place as well. So I think that's something that has to be built in. But there's an interesting other side to it.

48:21Chris Williamson:So we think a lot about how this is really going to be hard and it's going to be something that's going to have maybe a negative impact on a lot of folks. But there's also this idea that going to space can have a profound positive impact on people. So some of the first accounts of astronauts really, you know, talk about like just the awe and wonder. I mean, people still talk about that today. Everybody that goes to space talks about how incredible it is. Including Katy Perry, yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, everybody does. I mean, how could you not? Including the famed astronaut, Katy Perry.

49:02Chris Williamson:And William Shatner, did you see when he went to space, he talked about this too?

49:06Scott Solomon:What is it called, the blue dot effect or the whole earth effect or something? It's called the overview effect. Overview effect.

49:12Chris Williamson:Yeah. So that's the term that's been given to this phenomenon by Frank White, who's a philosopher of space. He did all these interviews initially with NASA astronauts and cosmonauts as well. and even up to more recent flights where we have people who are kind of everyday citizens that are going up on these commercial space flights now. And so he has basically argued that people have this profound shift that happens to them by being in space and looking back at the Earth and seeing, for example, how thin the atmosphere is. It just looks so fragile and delicate. you know, seeing how, you know, the Earth doesn't look like it does on the maps.

50:03Chris Williamson:There's no borders between nations, you know, this sense that, like, we're really all in this together. And then just the vastness of space. So, you know, we're a tiny little dot, right, in the vastness of space. And so he has argued that basically, you know, it would be really good for as many people as possible to go into space and have that experience because it makes us, you know, better people. It makes us better stewards of our planet, of our environment.

50:31Scott Solomon:I get it. But the entire problem here is there's only one or two generations that are going to be actually traveling there. As soon as you have kids, the same tribal mechanism. Yeah. I mean, what makes you think that the steward of your planet would change because you can see your mom and dad's home planet over there and you're on a different one now? The same psychological effects are just going to kick in in a different atmosphere.

50:54Chris Williamson:I think you're right. So this is one of the things I write about is that, you know, what I think it would be a fundamentally different thing for children born on Mars or born anywhere else, right? You won't have that same connection. I mean, it's the same kind of phenomenon that happens with, you know, with immigrant families, right? The first generation, they still feel very connected to their home country and culture. And that lasts for a few generations, but eventually you have this kind of like loose identity with that, you know, home country. And maybe you go back and visit and maybe you adopt some of the, you know, the culture, the cuisine, the dress, et cetera.

51:29Chris Williamson:But, you know, eventually people start to think of themselves as belonging to the place where they live. Look at me.

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52:38Scott Solomon:That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash modern wisdom modern wisdom. I check out. So I think people understand that future humans will physically be different, right? It makes an awful lot of sense. And then if you understand how evolution works, there's going to be some speciation over time. What I think is really surprising, shocking to a lot of people will be to consider the idea that Martian human nature would be genetically distinct, like the texture of their minds and the way that their brains function would be not only distinct, but maybe unrecognizable. That sounds wild. Yeah.

53:23Chris Williamson:Yeah. I think that's possible. I mean, one thing is, look, I think the most likely kind of environment that we would be living in, like what we would build, where would we live on Mars would be underground because that is the easiest way to create a habitat that is -

53:37Scott Solomon:You don't have to build anything.

53:39Chris Williamson:Protect it.

53:39Scott Solomon:You get rid of the stuff that's in there. You don't need building materials. You just need building holes.

53:45Chris Williamson:That's right. And you don't have to worry about the space radiation. You don't have to worry about, we didn't even talk about like meteor impacts, right? Mars has such a thin atmosphere. It has no magnetic field. Its radiation is very high, but also with that thin atmosphere, it's getting bombarded by meteors much more so than Earth. You don't want a glass dome, you know, the way we often see depicted in sci-fi. You want something much more protected. And so what's the, to your point, like what is the psychology of an entire society underground? Yeah, that's right. That's right. You know, what does that do to your physical features like your eyes, your vision?

54:32Chris Williamson:I mean, presumably using artificial light, but what does it do to you psychologically? How do you think about your spatial awareness and your connection also with, you know, with the environment? I mean, for me, look, I'm a biologist. I love nature. I love being outside in nature. I think most of us do in some way. You know, we have this idea that like going on a walk in the woods or in a park, it makes us feel better, right? There's a benefit to being out in nature that we can all recognize. And even just like having a, you know, an animal, like a pet, right? Like I've got dogs, you know, we all love to be around animals.

55:12Chris Williamson:we have to think about what the world would be like if there wasn't nature around us yeah i mean living on mars there's no wildlife there's no forests now presumably we'll build habitats and environments that allow us to live and we'll have to grow crops and things like that but i think we're unlikely to bring uh much in the way of animals with us and so you know look at

55:40Scott Solomon:every sci-fi movie ever where they're trying to go to some new habitat yeah the physical effects start to kick in and a few people do this thing but the big issue like me justifying the future of martian colonization through what i've seen in hollywood um but the and but it's how i can see it that the psychological impacts are the things that are really really destructive uh because they have a domino effect in a manner that the physical ailments are bounded i guess by you know i get sick. You don't necessarily get sick. It's something happening to me. But if I become psychotic, I can take out an entire pod of people or I can do something catastrophic to the air supply or I can run out and get blown up.

56:25Scott Solomon:I do whatever myself. So, okay. Continuing future people, how are we going to do reproduction in space? What happens with keeping us going?

56:35Chris Williamson:Well, I will say that in terms of what we do know and what we don't know about how space affects the human body and our ability to actually live in a space environment or another world, I think this is the biggest black box, the biggest unknown. We have done so little amount of research on reproduction in a lower gravity environment, in a space environment, that the bottom line is we don't know. We're sort of assuming anytime we talk about like, you know, moving to Mars or building a space settlement, we are assuming that reproduction is possible, that it will work well enough. And that's actually something that we can't be certain of without doing more research.

57:19Chris Williamson:There have been some studies. So there have been some studies in space going back to the space shuttle days and certainly through the International Space Station era, some rodent studies, some studies on fish, some studies on other invertebrate animals like sea urchins. But the bottom line is that it's kind of inconclusive. Like we really haven't done enough and we haven't done systematic enough studies to know that our own ability to, you know, to get pregnant, to have a full pregnancy, two term childbirth and then child development, like the entire process of growing. you know, what happens to a child's body as your bones are growing?

58:07Chris Williamson:Growing under zero. In a one-third G.

58:10Scott Solomon:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

58:11Chris Williamson:We don't know.

58:12Scott Solomon:I asked Christopher Mason, you know him? Yes. Yeah, of course. He's been on the show once, maybe twice. He was great. And I asked him, has anybody ever had sex in space? And he gave me this look. You're giving me the look now as well.

58:27Chris Williamson:Well, it's a question everybody wants to know. Absolutely. And the bottom line is that officially the answer is no. You've given me the same answer. We don't have any documents.

58:37Scott Solomon:Have you guys been given some sort of talking sheet or something? That's exactly what you said.

58:40Chris Williamson:This is a topic that comes up a lot. So there's a lot that's been written about it, including I write about it in my book. So yeah, we don't know. We don't know. Nobody claims to have had sex in space. And there is definitely not any documentation of sex in space. There was a married couple, two NASA astronauts that were on the space shuttle at the same time.

59:05Scott Solomon:If you think that a married couple are going to space and they're not going to join the million mile high club, you are out of your mind.

59:15Chris Williamson:Yep. And so because of that, there's been all this speculation that like surely they must have. But, you know, NASA was very hush hush about it. The two astronauts in question were very hush hush. I've asked about this, including, you know, contacts and friends of mine at NASA and in the space industry. And one of the things that I've been told is like, look, if you know what it was like on the space shuttle, there was no privacy. Like there is like if that happened, it would not have been done in private. And so that maybe, you know, makes it a little less likely that it happened.

59:47Scott Solomon:But OK, OK, well, someone's someone's got to be the first. Right. And there's not many that's the real territory to conquer. I don't care about being the first on Mars. I just want to be the first guy to bone in space. Okay. Reproduction. We've already, I've done a lot of episodes about embryo selection, about IVG, some stuff with artificial wombs. Do you think it's realistic that reproduction will be technologically mediated to try and offset some of this stuff?

1:00:20Chris Williamson:How is the reproduction process going to happen? And here's the thing that worries me. If what we're talking about is Mars, so you're talking about a one-third gravity environment, not a weightless environment, a one-third gravity environment. I think the risk is, once we're talking about people who have lived their entire lives there, like a child born on Mars, right, who then, you know, basically is, you know, growing in that one-third gravity environment their entire childhood. by the time they get to adulthood and are, you know, childbearing age, right? Imagine a woman who gets pregnant and is going to give birth.

1:00:55Chris Williamson:She will have had her bones losing bone density her entire life because her genetics are the same genetics that, you know, we all have here on Earth, meaning that you're born with a certain bone density. But in a one-third gravity environment your entire life, you're losing bone density. So her bones will have become more brittle and weak throughout her childhood and into her adulthood. And now she is giving birth and experiencing the forces of the woman experiences during childbirth. I think there's a real risk of fractures. And we know that one of the parts of the body that's most prone to fractures from this kind of bone density loss is the hip and the pelvis.

1:01:47Scott Solomon:Are you familiar with Piers Morgan? You know who he is? Sure. British journalist guy. He fell off a single step and fractured his hip. Yeah. So, yeah, they are fragile things.

1:01:57Chris Williamson:And so, you know, the reason I bring it up is because that's a kind of a fracture that could actually be deadly if we're talking about it in the context of childbirth. You know, that baby might not survive the experience of childbirth. And so what does that do then? If we're looking about the impact of this over multiple generations. Yeah. So one possibility is you just avoid the risk. And so all births are done through C-section. But that actually creates other situations because now if all the births are through C-section because, you know, vaginal births are too risky, now...

1:02:40Scott Solomon:You're selecting against women who can have vaginal births. Yeah.

1:02:43Chris Williamson:And actually you've eliminated one of the constraints that has existed throughout human evolution.

1:02:50Scott Solomon:You're going to get bigger and bigger and bigger babies. Yeah. So Dr. Anna Machen, are you familiar with her? No. evolutionary biologist and psychologist. She's in Robin Dunbar's lab at the University of Oxford. She's wonderful. And she wrote a book called Life of Dad. She's writing another one about dads actually as well. And she tells this story about how dads saved the human race because baby's heads got too big. And her point is that babies get this massive head because it turns out that intelligence is really good for survival. But in order to get this big head out of that woman, without breaking her in half, which would have happened for a good amount of time, there would have been many, many, many women died in childbirth all the time.

1:03:36Scott Solomon:But just straight up, this baby is so big, it will not come out. And we don't know how to do C-section because it's 5000 BC, or it's 50 ,000 BC. Dads were there to help along, not by pulling the baby out, but by the women who were able to get the baby out, this neotenous blob requires six, seven, eight, 10 years of full-time monitoring. So it doesn't get eaten by something or fall off a cliff. And that's why humans have higher MPI, male parental investment, than many of the species, not all species, but many of the species. And yeah, she tells that story. So you have basically this reversion back to that situation where because the constraint for baby size is no longer limited by birth canal, if everything's happening through C-section, you revisit this issue that was occurring a few hundred thousand years ago.

1:04:34Scott Solomon:And yeah, maybe you end up with ginormous babies that aren't being selected against because, and then maybe it causes some other thing. Maybe sex becomes difficult to do because we find out that some sort of selection pressure that birthing was having on women's physiology was in some way enhancing or productive towards the way that their other sexual function went. It's a real, you change one thing. It's a butterfly effect, right? You change one thing genetically and the whole house of cards can come down.

1:05:04Chris Williamson:Yeah, that's right. Exactly. And so I think because of that, that's why I bring up this one specific challenge that I think we maybe haven't thought through enough yet. And that, as you said, could lead to all sorts of other sort of downstream consequences. So, you know, bottom line is we don't know whether human reproduction is in fact possible in the conditions on Mars. So, this is one thing I think, you know, it would actually be relatively straightforward to do a lot of research, even in the low Earth environment, excuse me, low Earth orbit environment, that would help us to kind of get a little bit more insight into that.

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1:06:45Scott Solomon:Will we, okay, how long will speciation take?

1:06:49Chris Williamson:Yeah, so, okay, here's the thing that I will say about that. So speciation, right, formation of new species. This is something, you know, I talk about this in my classes with my students all the time. It's not a black and white thing like, oh, now it's a new species, right? We, as biologists, debate constantly all the time about how to even define a species. Where do you draw the boundaries between one species and another? So partly it depends on that. But that's sort of dodging the question, which is not what I'm trying to do. I think the real question is, how rapidly would you get individuals on Mars that we would recognize as being distinct from us, right?

1:07:29Chris Williamson:like in some recognizable, meaningful way. And what I would say is I think it will happen much faster than what we would expect based on what we normally are used to here on Earth. And it boils down to this. So, you know, we've already talked about how being on Mars is going to make people different, right? Psychologically different, genetically different, culturally different, all of those things. As long as you have people moving back and forth between Earth and Mars and able to travel freely between them and basically able to, you know, able to have sex, able to have children, able to reproduce.

1:08:09Chris Williamson:So if you can kind of move between those environments, that will kind of reduce the differences between those populations, right? As long as people are exchanging genes, you don't get speciation happening very easily. So then the question becomes like, well, is that going to be the case? Will it be easy for people to move back and forth between Earth and Mars? And I don't think it will be. I think it will be much harder for people to move back and forth between planets than we maybe have appreciated. And specifically, I mean like people born on Mars. I think even as soon as the first generation of people born on Mars will potentially have a great difficulty with coming back to Earth.

1:08:55Chris Williamson:For one thing, it's the gravity that we've talked about, right? A child born in a one-third gravity environment is unlikely to build a skeleton that is strong enough to be able to tolerate Earth gravity. and this is we've been talking about science fiction right so like this shows up in you know i don't know if you watch the expanse or read the the series but it's like that's that's a theme that comes up is like you know the idea that if you're from a lower gravity environment high g is you know going to be painful if not torturous to you right that's right yeah gravity torture is a concept from from the expanse um that's one thing read that is it good because i watched the first

1:09:35Scott Solomon:season, maybe season and a half. And then I kind of got a little bit lost in it. Is the book, how do you rate the book? If seven eaves, if seven eaves for me is a strong eight, where's the expanse? All right.

1:09:45Chris Williamson:Here, here, here's my, uh, admission. So I haven't read it. I've seen the series, but I haven't read the, the, I haven't read it. So yeah, my bad. Um, but so, uh, gravity though is something that, uh, I think will be a limiting factor, But I think there's an even potentially bigger factor that will keep people from being able to move between planets. And that is microbes, germs, our immune systems. So what happens to the immune system of a child born on Mars? They will only ever be exposed to whatever the microorganisms are that we bring with us. And that's going to be a tiny fraction, right? I mean, they're going through the same bottleneck.

1:10:25Chris Williamson:The microbes are going through the same kind of bottleneck.

1:10:27Scott Solomon:Oh, fuck. It's a big sterilization procedure for whatever you've brought with you, the peanuts and the wheat and the gluten and everything. Yep, yep, yep, exactly.

1:10:38Chris Williamson:And so now you've got a kid who has never been exposed to the vast majority of what we're breathing in right now and just all the microbes that are surrounding us. I don't think they would be able to easily come back to Earth without a whole lot of connection. Have you got a name for this?

1:10:53Scott Solomon:Because this is a unique kind of, it's not speciation. It's a hardcore sort of adaptation that's occurred due to being separated where you're no longer able to go back to your original habitat. Is there a name for this?

1:11:10Chris Williamson:I don't know that there's a name for this specifically. I mean, I think that though, this is basically the setup for speciation, because what do you do in that situation, right? You're locked into your new environment. Yeah, it would be too dangerous for people from Mars to interact with people from Earth. And the other thing that's going to happen is over time, the microbes on Mars are going to be mutating, adapting, changing. You're going to get new infectious diseases on Mars that don't exist on Earth. They will evolve uniquely there. Even just the bacteria in our microbiome are going to change by being on Mars, right?

1:11:45Chris Williamson:I mean, they're also exposed to a lot of radiation. They've also gone through a population bottleneck. So now it becomes dangerous for people from Earth to interact with people from Mars because they've got germs that we're not used to. So what do you do? I think you enforce quarantine. You don't allow or you very greatly reduce. Quarantina. Exactly. So if you don't have close contact between people from Earth and people from Mars, you are accelerating how fast speciation will happen. Because there's no cross.

1:12:17Scott Solomon:I mean, when is this? I guess, you know, the Homo florensis would have had that too because they simply couldn't go back. It wasn't that they didn't choose to go back. It's that they couldn't go back. But that being said, are we really going to be able to get rockets that can do the round trip? That doesn't seem very likely until we start mining stuff on Mars. What, you're going to have a rocket that's going to be able to take people and all the payload and all of the stuff that's needed out there. and you're going to be able to have enough fuel. I guess getting off at one-third Earth's gravity is probably going to be easier.

1:12:50Chris Williamson:Yeah, it's a little easier to get off of Mars because, as you said, it's lower gravity. That's right. And it is conceivable that we can just manufacture rocket fuel there, right? So you can actually take carbon dioxide and split it and you've got oxygen that's your accelerant. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, so you can potentially make rocket fuel there on Mars and get back. But again, I don't think the challenge is going to be technological. I think it's going to be biological. I think the risk to people of going back and forth and getting sick is going to keep people from doing it.

1:13:24Scott Solomon:Well, there's the biological, there's the sort of immunological part here. There's genes, but there's also memes. But what about a changing culture? What do you imagine a culture of Mars would look like? Because this is a culture that's going to be forged under scarcity and danger and dependence and darkness, perhaps it's going to be pretty different.

1:13:48Chris Williamson:Yeah, I know. It's, uh, I mean, you know, I think it's probably impossible for us to know. I think other than saying it would be very different. Right. So yeah, I think it would be, it would have to be self-contained because there's not going to be as much interaction because of the communication delays. Um, so I think it would be a unique thing. And this, you know, humans have done this, this type of thing over and over again. We reinvent ourselves. A culture rapidly changes when we have, you know, people that go off to a new place. Even just, you know, for short periods of time, I'm thinking about like, you know, you go on a trip with somebody and you come back with inside jokes, right?

1:14:24Chris Williamson:You know, it happens fast. But yeah, I think people would be culturally different quite rapidly if they're living on Mars.

1:14:35Scott Solomon:Dude, it's so fascinating. And the fact that this is my job, that I get to speak to you and call this a job is absolutely mind-blowing. This is so interesting to me. Okay, but I guess the cultural evolution thing is going to feed back into the biological evolution. So you're tightening this divergence loop. You've got the concerns from the biome, the concerns about getting infected. I guess, what are the interesting ethical challenges that we've got here? Yeah.

1:15:07Chris Williamson:Well, there's some pretty serious ones. I mean, here's the thing. You and I could decide that we're comfortable with the risk of going to Mars, right? And there are plenty of people who I've spoken with who are like, yep, I would absolutely sign up to go -

1:15:21Scott Solomon:But is it fair to condemn your future progenite to the same?

1:15:24Chris Williamson:Yeah, exactly. What happens when you're talking about bringing a child into the world who not only is living in a very dangerous environment, but they might not ever be able to go back to earth. That to me is a totally different level of, you know, of ethical consideration. So, you know, one thing we haven't really talked about is the idea that, well, rather than just sort of let natural selection, let evolution do its thing, maybe what we would do is, you know, take matters into our own hands and use, you know, use CRISPR, use, you know, biological and genetic engineering techniques to facilitate, to make it easier for people to deal with the extreme conditions there.

1:16:08Chris Williamson:And, you know, obviously there's important ethical considerations about, you know, altering our genetics, especially if you're talking about altering unborn children, future generations. But, you know, in some ways, though, the ethics are sort of, you know, maybe reversed compared to how we would think about this on earth. Because if you had the ability to alleviate suffering of an unborn child or of future generations? And if you didn't do that, is that ethical?

1:16:38Scott Solomon:This is the entire argument that is put forward by the embryo selection crowd, which is as soon as you say that protecting against something that's really horrendous, some genetic defect that would cause you to be in pain or not live a flourishing life or whatever, even myopia right even if you were to say we're able to select against people that don't have good eyesight if you had why do you think that lasik and glasses exist because people want those traits so if you have the opportunity to select against negative ones you immediately open up the door for it's a single parallel or just it's a single spectrum from select against negative traits to select for positive traits and that does seem the ethical thing to do now as soon as you get into genetic enhancement, that becomes a very different game.

1:17:27Scott Solomon:To me, ethically, as of yet, I haven't, I'm convinced on the value of embryo selection. Herocyte is a wonderful company that's doing great things in the space. The Johnny that runs it is just spectacular. I'm yet to hear an argument for genetic enhancement that doesn't make my toes curl underneath.

1:17:48Chris Williamson:Well, and part of it, I think is because the question is, okay, you're arguing that this person's life is going to be better, but are there other ways that you could make that person's life better without making a genetic alteration, right? Without making such a permanent change. And so I think, you know, any of the potential changes that we might make for a person here on earth, in most cases, we have other ways of protecting them from that risk or improving their lives in that particular way. for a child born on Mars, thinking about the gravity environment or the radiation environment, right?

1:18:26Chris Williamson:There might not be any better way of doing it. So if that's the case, and if they don't have a choice, if that's the only place that they can live, I think it might be different. Now, I'm not saying that we definitely should do that, but I think that the ethics are, I think, somewhat distinct when you're talking about, you know, having a situation where people don't have the option of getting out of that situation, right? You don't have a way to get away from the risk. But, you know.

1:18:53Scott Solomon:So there's multiple levels of ethics here. Is it ethical to condemn your future generations and progeny to live on this environment, which is going to be really inhospitable and they've got to be underground and maybe they're going to flourish less? Well, as soon as you do that, is it now incumbent on you to start manipulating their genome so that they can survive this prison that you had put them into more effectively than if they, you know, it's a real domino.

1:19:19Chris Williamson:Well, and then, and then there's the added on top of that is the possibility that by making those changes, you might be improving their ability to thrive in that environment, but you might simultaneously from being able to go back home.

1:19:33Scott Solomon:Oh dude, it's a It's such a mess. It's such a mess.

1:19:37Chris Williamson:Oh my God. What do you still do? There's a lot of things. Well, you know, we don't have to go. Well, then we're condemning ourselves to being single planetary species and we just need one

1:19:48Scott Solomon:neutron star to go off at the wrong angle and then we're done for.

1:19:52Chris Williamson:So, I mean, this is the question that I ultimately wrestled with in researching and writing this book is, you know, I wanted to really understand what would happen, right? What would be if we go down this route of people living beyond earth, what should we expect will happen to those people in future generations? That's what the book's all about. But throughout this, I sort of really struggled with like, okay, given what we know, is this a path we should be pursuing? Like, is this the right thing to do? And you're, I mean, you're, you're making a good point that like in the long run, we might have to, because we've got all our eggs in, in one, you know, planetary basket here.

1:20:32Chris Williamson:So that's risky. But the next question is when? What's the time frame for this, right? And so to me, it's not that we should never go. I think eventually, if we didn't do that, we would be dooming ourselves to extinction. It's a matter of how quickly should we be pushing this? And so, you know, people differ, I think, if you ask them about like how urgent, how pressing a need is this. Personally, I think we need to have answers to some of these unanswered questions like reproduction, right? What happens to, you know, a child conceived and born and raised in a one-third gravity, high radiation environment?

1:21:17Chris Williamson:I don't think it makes sense for us to go there until we really have good answers to those types of questions. But the ethical things, the politics, the psychology that we've been talking about, all of these are things we should be studying this, right? Like we need to know. And the technology is advancing. The rockets are flying. Let's do the experiments and research that we need to answer these questions that is more life sciences, more biology, more psychology, microbiology, all these cool things. Yeah.

1:21:51Scott Solomon:Scott Solomon, ladies and gentlemen dude, you are spectacular you are so fun oh thanks, this has been great what an awesome topic to talk about where should people go? they're going to want to check out everything you're doing buy the book all the rest of it yeah, yeah

1:22:06Chris Williamson:I mean the book is available now it's Becoming Martian and MIT Press so yeah, check it out we did a streaming series too it's also called Becoming Martian that's on CuriosityStream which was a lot of fun. But I've also got a podcast. My podcast is called Wild World and it's all about fieldwork and exploration right here on Earth. So yeah, check that out too.

1:22:31Scott Solomon:Heck yeah. Scott, I appreciate you, man. Until next time.

1:22:34Chris Williamson:Thank you so much. This has been so much fun.

1:22:38Scott Solomon:I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found, and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them, and it's completely free, and you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.