When Do We Move to Mars? (or the Moon)

23:17It's like a very dizzying experience. A little cliffhanger. We'll be right back. All right. Today's sponsored dumb question is from me, Naima Raza. And I'm telling you to subscribe, follow, like, share the show. Share it with people in your life. Send it to an ex-boyfriend who has nothing better to do because he just misses you all the time. Send it to an ex-girlfriend who you want to be your future girlfriend again. Send it to your mom or that aunt who has a lot of time and keeps sending you life advice. because this show is an independent show. I make it every week with a great team, but to keep things running, I really need you guys to help me grow the show.

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23:59Okay, so 2050, holiday on the moon. 2040, commuting. Yeah, exactly. Baby kids going commuting for like a field trip. They play with magnet tiles as they grow up. They learn about the space station. They pack some trail mix and they go four hours up into the lower Earth. To the actual magnet tiles up in orbit, yeah. Okay. And when they go there, you have this vision that they're going to be hanging out in these space stations that are built with your new technology. That's the hope. Okay. And this technology is called? Tesserae. Tesserae. And tell us about Tesserae. Yes. So I've been teased by my PhD advisor to never have this tortured of an acronym again.

24:36but Tesserae stands for a tessellated electromagnetic space structures for the exploration of reconfigurable adaptive environments. And my advisor's basically like, honey, never again. No one will do it again. Okay, but say it. No one will remember that. Tesserae sounds like a great Latin word. Yes, it is a Latin word. What does it mean? Okay, so I went on this project trip when I was in grad school to go clean Roman mosaics. It was a total boondoggle. It had nothing to do with my main research. and we got taught that the little glass tiles that make a mosaic are called tesserae. And what are we trying to do?

25:11We're taking small tiles that pack flat in a rocket and we're putting them together in orbit to make a mosaic of a big habitat. So I was super inspired by this notion from ancient Roman architecture of tesserae tiles in these mosaics. I got like the last letters of it, but the first one. Tessellated. Tessellated. What is tessellated? You take tiles, like hexagons. In this case, we take hexagons and pentagons, and you make a pattern out of them. That's what it means to tessellate something. So for us, it's basically a glorified soccer ball. If you picture a black pentagon with the white hexagons around it, it's also known as a buckyball.

25:47I was very inspired by Buckminster Fuller. That is a sphere approximation. So you can launch flat tiles like Pringles in a can or like a Pez dispenser. You can launch these tiles to orbit. They have little magnets on the edges of the tiles, the edges of the pentagons and the hexagons, like magnet tiles, exactly like you said. And then because you're floating in space, the tiles come together on their own. And they know how they're supposed to click? Or is it like dating? You can only have one? Like there's a perfect match? There's chemistry. Or do they just click into any which piece? It is polygamy.

26:22You can have lots of different papers. Oh, really? They're interchangeable. They're interchangeable. The window kind of needs to go in a special spot, and the airlock, which is the glorified door, needs to kind of go in a special spot. But other than that, the tiles are interchangeable. You actually have, like, tested this technology on Earth and sent it to space twice? Thrice. And about to go for a fourth time this summer. Yeah. And how are they assembling themselves, these polygamous magnet tiles? These polygamous magnet tiles. Yeah. Yeah, so they have these fancy little magnets called electropermanent magnets on their edges.

26:53They're permanent magnets, so they're always on, which basically means they just want to draw the tiles together. There's a bunch of sensing and AI built into the tiles so that once the tiles dock, they basically say, hey, who are you? Am I supposed to be docked with you? They can communicate. And then they keep doing that over and over until they form an entire ball. Once the ball's formed, that buckyball, we then have clamps that come out to basically make the pressure airtight, right? Because you want to put air pressure on the inside, which would push out against the vacuum. In a second, I want to know what you have learned from doing this thrice and almost to four times.

27:25And what's gone wrong? Like, what's fucked up? Because I'm sure things have gone wrong. We learned so much. What is the weirdest thing that's gone wrong? Magnets are magnets. They love to stick together even when they're not supposed to. So we've seen that the tiles clump together. Instead, like, they form, like, this little crystal clump instead of a perfect, you know, mag charger fitting into your Mac exactly how that magnet's supposed to work. So a lot of our design has been figuring out how to design what we call the polarity of the magnets to make it perfect, to make the tiles want to come together exactly like they're supposed to and not be clumping.

27:57Have you lost tiles? We haven't lost any tiles in free space. We've done all of the tests so far inside the International Space Station. So we're basically incubating and testing and prototyping inside the big real estate that's already there. We then want to build something much bigger than the ISS. So as we increase the tile size, we're eventually going to have to go outside. And we're actually, I've never announced this publicly before, but the first time this summer is when we're finally going to have space-grade tiles the size of me, so like five feet plus, and actually fly them free space outside of the International Space Station.

28:30So that'll be our fifth mission. And how expensive are these things? Oh my gosh, that's a great question. It hasn't been that expensive to test the prototypes. Yeah, the plastics are easy. Yeah, the plastics are easy, and the cost to get to space is cheap. We've been able to do it for like 200K a mission, which is a lot of money for a lot of people. But that is a level of money in the space industry that is like, oh my God, yes, we can raise a grant. We can raise 200K. We can go do a test mission. I think for this next mission, like the big space grade run, the company that we're working with that we've spent out called Rendezvous Robotics, they're probably going to raise like a$15 million seed round, something like that, in the next few months.

29:07And so that's around the cost that you can imagine is going to go into that next mission. If this works, then how quickly would you want to go be inside of it? Because one thing to build that, and it's another thing to put like a human inside of this thing. And you're hitting on something that I take really seriously, which is this will be my personal responsibility as a human. Yeah. To decide when I think it's safe to risk another human life in something that I have built. Especially if it's a member of NSYNC. Yes, especially. Last Bass NSYNC or the other Backstreet Boys. Right. Massive responsibility.

29:37Yeah, big responsibility. Yes, truly. He's like the nicest one. We do like him. Yeah, we want to keep them alive. Yeah, all jokes aside, it is like a really serious thing that we think about. So what we'll probably do is we'll self-assemble this big ball. We'll put a bunch of air inside of it. We'll start loading in some autonomous science stuff that could happen even without humans, so autonomous robotic science. And then we'll wait for six months, and we'll have a bunch of sensors. We'll make sure that there's no air leaks. We'll make sure that the ball is stable, that it's not tumbling through space.

30:05Basically, that we have to keep it pointed in a good way. And when we have six months' worth of data, then we will welcome a test pilot. So in the same way that military has test pilots that fly the first time a plane ever flies, we'll have someone like that who's an incredibly well-trained astronaut come in and basically certify the structure. This is a private company. Yes, yeah. Do you get grants from the government from NASA and stuff? Yeah, we get grants from NASA. We do corporate sponsorships, philanthropy. And then we are—or really, the institute is kind of like the nursery. So we incubate cool tech ideas.

30:38But when we feel like they have a commercial product market fit, we spin them out. I think of it kind of like a skyscraper in New York. So there's a fancy architecture design firm. There's a civil engineering firm who makes sure that their drawings are legit and safe. There's a construction company that builds the drawings. And then there's like a developer owner operator, right, who makes money off the building. O 'Reilly Institute is the space architecture design firm. We're also kind of the civil engineers. The construction company is going to be Rendezvous Robotics. And then what we need is a developer, owner, operator.

31:09So who has a commercial interest in an orbital biolab? We think it could be a Pfizer or a Merck or a Novodis. Merck, for example, has actually already sent novel drug development experiments to space to basically do new types of cancer drugs. So we think a biotech company might be the owner, operator, developer. Got it. And when they go in and do that, like when work sends people in to test this drug that I have not heard of, and we're not flacking on this show for sure, but do they send people up there with it to test it? And then do they have to go to the International Space Station, or do they go hang out somewhere else?

31:45Yeah, right now they go to the International Space Station. What we're hoping to do with Tesserae with these big scaled up self-assembled tiles is to make it possible to do more of the research autonomously. When they're doing that right now, like these private companies are basically like saying, hey, I want to get like one of the 14 bedrooms in the International Space Station. And they're able to do that. And do they pay for that? So they don't get to send their own humans up. What they do is they send up a box that's like a microwave. All of their experiment stuff has to fit inside the microwave.

32:14It's not an actual microwave, but it's like a box that size. An astronaut, like a NASA astronaut or an ESA astronaut, gets briefed over the phone about what to do. and they, if it's required, the astronaut executes the experiment. Now that's amazing. It's so lovely and gracious of them to do that and you typically pay for their time too. But what we want is we want to send scientists themselves to space to do their own research. Okay, but let's stick with what's happening right now for a second, not what you're going to build, which is great, but I really want to understand this. So right now, I think that there's a sense across, this is like bigger than what we've been talking about, but there's a sense in the American culture and in the global culture, that everything has become too privatized.

32:57Yeah. When you look at people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, yourself, you're all doing things that are great for civilization, et cetera, but it's also taxpayer-funded dollars that are going in to subsidize the development of what—I know yours is a nonprofit right now with this venture arm that is going to be, I imagine, hugely profitable, but it's going to subsidize someone becoming a trillionaire. And I think there's a question like I have, which is how are the Europeans doing that versus the Americans? And is everybody equally privatized and capitalistic in outer space? Or are like the Europeans more socialist in space too?

33:36That's a great question. The Europeans are more heavily regulated, which I think we see kind of across European tech industry compared to the U.S. But they're also trying to incentivize entrepreneurs and their culture to privatize space. And I think the argument goes something like, you know, what follows. NASA and ESA have been spending so much money pumped into low-Earth orbit just to keep the ISS alive that they haven't had the resources to go out and do science in the solar system. And at some point, it makes sense for the, you know, the cocoon of low-Earth orbit to become a commercial domain as we as humans expand outward as we kind of figure out how to be a space-faring species.

34:14and that frees up NASA and ESA to go find life on Europa in those weird liquid seas or see if there's, you know, a way to communicate with Alpha Centauri. It frees up the science-based agencies to go do the vanguard of human knowledge. What I think a lot of people are critiquing in the space industry, which is really important for us to address honestly, is why spend money on space? Why are we spending so many taxpayer dollars on space in the face of climate change or other existential threats? I mean, I think we've had that conversation on the show, so we don't need to rehash that. Like, people can go check out the conversation with Bill Nye or with Casey Dreyer on that.

34:51That's not my question. My question is more like, if it's taxpayer money, like even that Merck example, if there's a dude in outer space who's being paid on the U.S. dime, and even if that dude or dudette in outer space is, you know, they're paying for an hour of this person's time to do their research for Merck, I'm like, is that a fair exchange actually? Like, should the U.S. taxpayer—then, by the way, when you need that cancer drug, it's going to cost, like, a shitload of money, which is going to be paid to a private insurance company, which is going to be, you know, charged through a private—like, the whole system feels like it's not helping in some way the end user.

35:30Now, of course, we need breakthroughs. We need innovation. Maybe the government's not going to have the skills, talent, resourcing, foresight to develop that. But I do think there's this—like, space to me is the extreme version of privatization because it's so inaccessible right now, even as it's getting more accessible, in large part because of private companies that are subsidized by taxpayer dollars to make it so. And I think there's like a philosophical question I have, and you studied physics and philosophy, about like, how do you actually make this thing more accessible? Not just in terms of people being able to go commute there and being people, but like, how do we make sure that in the year 2080, the like real estate of the lower Earth orbit and beyond and the moon and maybe by then Mars is not terraformed at like huge, crazy rents that like mimic related rentals in Manhattan.

36:25You know what I mean? Yeah. I think you're asking a great question, which is kind of like, what's the philosophy that's going to seed this next wave of human space travel? Is it purely commercial? Is it just about profit? Are we going to try to preserve maybe the spirit of original NASA, which was kids like my parents when the moon landing happened, the original moon landing in 1969, they looked up and they thought, oh, in my lifetime, I'll get to go. Like, I'll get to be part of it without having to be rich or without having to have a company to go do it. I think Jared Isaacman, who's the new administrator of NASA, has come out with a really very inspirational new plan for a lunar base that NASA is going to reinsert themselves in.

37:01And NASA is going to do it in a way that is for all of American citizens. The extent to which we can get NASA to still collaborate around the globe, I think is important. So it really does become for all global citizens and not just American citizens. In the film Project Hail Mary, they have this global consortium in the book as well, right? But that doesn't actually exist. There's not some global convening of all the NASAs. NASA, ESA, China, whatever it's called. Because of global geopolitics, there's still a lot of butting of heads between the different space programs. There are a few different uniting groups like UNUSA, which is the Office of Outer Space Affairs, but it technically doesn't get as much collaboration going.

37:38There's definitely a need for international collaboration, coordination, but there is a balance that we also want to set within Aurelia. So that's one reason I run a nonprofit, and we have the VC fund to do investments to accelerate, But my passion is the nonprofit to basically say, how could we have space be a public utility for the public good and not only be owned by disparate corporate forces that have their own needs? I think we need both. I'm very pro-capitalism, but I think that there is an opportunity to set up some structures. I'll give you an example. Our Orbital Biolab, because it's nonprofit funded, even if we ultimately get Merck or Pfizer or Novonordis to be part of it, we will protect half the volume.

38:18It has to be at minimum 51 % of the volume for open science, which means it gets published, which means Merck can't have proprietary data only for themselves. There are ways and structures like this kind of as we build to make sure that it's—try to keep some balance of public general interest and commercial development. Though, of course, I find that we're friendly. But at the same time, I'm like, I think you might end up having a fight with yourself about these things. the two sides of yourself that are invested in the venture capital arm versus the nonprofit arm. Look at OpenAI, right? Started as a nonprofit company, became for-profit.

38:53Now it's like a controlling stake for the nonprofit and Microsoft in the overall company. And there are real debates that are real philosophical debates about how to structure it, about who the value is for, who merits that value, right? Like, oh, was it really the taxpayer? Was it really all the data that we ingested or was it us with our hard work and our LM? It's like there are a lot of ways that people come to believe that they have more merit in the thing than they originally believed when they set it up as an open society. And I'm not saying it's wrong all the time. I think often like that person probably has some right in it.

39:35But I do think it's like, is it an unsustainable structure to be like part nonprofit, part for profit? Like how do you think about that? And when will you know, as a business leader, that like you're— That we're hitting the right balance. That you're pulled in—yeah, that you need to like delegate something. Like maybe you can't do the nonprofit arm because you're going to do the for-profit or vice versa. I mean, I think one of the big structural issues— Don't give up the for-profit because I think you're going to be rich, and I like that for you. I'm going to come visit you in your space second home.

40:02I think one of the structural issues with OpenAI is that there was a for-profit stake, right? For our nonprofit, it really is just a nonprofit. It's a separate legal entity from the VC fund. The reason I think both structures are important, because I am pro-capitalist, is you want to have levers to pull in all of these different strategic parts of society. I graduated from MIT, and I looked out in the space industry, and I realized that there are technologies that are missing. And there are technologies that tend to get funded by the entrenched interests in any industry. I'm a new actor, and I basically said, I want to be able to empower mission-driven good work in the space industry to get funded.

40:39So I'm going to raise some capital. I'm going to pull levers for that. And then on the nonprofit side, I want to work on space habitats that would be transformative for human society. There's not an immediate revenue model in that. If I did that as a for-profit, I probably wouldn't get the opportunities to do it. So it needs to live in this incubator nursery of a nonprofit. And so I have that lever. And what I'm trying to do is really intentionally, like, rising tide lifts all boats because I have this vision of how space can benefit humanity. First step is space for Earth. infrastructure in orbit, like GPS, weather satellites, biotech, that's good here.

41:14And then step two is off-worlding. Get the heavy, polluting shit off of Earth and into space in a responsible way. In modern day society, I think you need to have the for-profit lever and the non-profit lever to do it well. So I think I really resonate with what you're challenging me on, which is how do I maintain that balance as I go forward? It's very front of mind for me. Yeah, because at some point, like, you know, like these, you know, these retina things, they're going to make you rich. and then like you're going to become an entrenched— Make Nicole Wagner the founder, not me. But maybe partly you through the foundry, right?

41:44Like, I mean, you're probably an LP of the fund. Yes. And so, you know, you have a stake there. And at some point, like, we become, like, we grow up and we become like the entrenched interest or the person that's there. But if you, Ariel, had to choose like where your heart is and what you want to be spending your time doing, is it in the nonprofit side? or is it in the investing VC commercializing side? It's definitely in the space architecture research. I'm a scientist. That's my life's passion. The other elements of the ecosystem, I'm incredibly excited by. I spend time in. I think that they're parts of the ecosystem, but I wouldn't have started a space fund just purely to do a space fund.

42:26I'm starting a space fund with this mission of how do I democratize access to space? How do I get more humans a chance to participate in this really sublime experience of a zero-gravity flight or even better, the overview effect, which I even myself haven't gotten a chance to do yet. Yeah. So I think the core of it is that mission-driven work, and then we have strategic opportunities around that to leverage. Okay, I like that. Because you were so passionate about space and building and the kind of engineering aspect of it, if you could build anything at all in space, what would you build? What would it look like?

43:00And when can we go there? I would build a ring world. A rain world? A ring world. Like a big ring. Picture a big donut around the Earth. It's this amazing concept from science fiction. There's one in Neil Stevenson's Seven Eves, which is a book about women. Really cool sci-fi book that inspired a bunch of my PhD. And it's this notion that you can build infrastructure at planetary scale. So it's like a thin ring. It's like if Earth had a Saturn ring, basically. Basically, imagine a artificial Saturn ring that humans have built to do research and space tourism and just basically scale up activity, industrial activity around Earth.

43:37So if we had a way to do that safely and could turn that on tomorrow, that's what I would build. If you were to do this, dumb question, like how far away would that be? That would be fewer than 250 miles. It might even be a little farther out than 250 miles. This is a great question. No one's ever asked me to pin me down, okay, where is your space ring? Yeah, where is your space ring? How far would it be? Probably a little further out than the International Space Station. You don't want it to be too further out because the other cool aspect of ring worlds is you could build a space elevator to your ring world.

44:05So you would like just from Earth go pop up to a ring world? This is another sci-fi concept that has like captured people's imagination for decades. So yeah, that would be goal number two is build the ring and little spaceships go first and then eventually can you build a space elevator. But as the Earth is like rotating. Yes. The ring can rotate. The ring will rotate too. Yeah. So that's why it's a little further out. I feel like I need like ice skates or something to stay stuck to it. Yeah. Or I need something. So if you're spinning in a big enough ring— I haven't read this book, so I don't know.

44:33Yes, yes. You'll get artificial gravity. Okay. So you'll have a little bit of centripetal force. Like, have you ever been on a carnival ride where they like whip you around at the edge of the gravitron? It's like that, but much more graceful and bigger. Okay. And so that's the idea. You'd actually have some artificial gravity at the edge of this ring. Okay. Very fun. And you've also talked about Space Cathedral. Yes. This is a goal that I have for myself as an architect. Have you ever walked into a building on Earth and you just get goosebumps? It's so beautiful. Yeah, all the time. And you're just thinking to myself, oh my God, I would love to inhabit this space.

45:05Yeah, the DMV. The DMV, yeah. Most other buildings, never the DMV. Yes, yes. Yeah. What would you do or imagine floating into something like a space microgravity concert hall where you get to be truly in the round? or a space cathedral where the spire doesn't just go up because it's not just gravity. You could be in a space cathedral. You're in the center and there are spires going out in every direction because you're basically in the middle of a star. Like these are types of structures you could never build on Earth. You can kind of uniquely build when you're floating. And it's the kind of ambitious like monument to humanity that I think would be a worthy longer term aspiration for space architects.

45:48We need to start a little practical first. Are you trying to be a space god? No. Tribal Space Cathedral? No, no space cults, just space architecture. I feel like space is kind of a cult. Okay, I want to do a little bit of a lightning round with you. Okay. What is the Park Avenue of space? Right now, probably one of the three commercial space stations. So Axiom, Vast, or Voyager will be the future Park Avenue. Okay, so when you said we had two space stations, you meant— Currently. Currently. We're about to have—there's three or four or five other commercial space station companies that are coming on board.

46:19and they all want to build a mix of science labs and space tourism. So they would probably be the first Park Avenues. When this space station gets decommissioned, we're just going to have the Chinese option for a little bit. The U.S. is probably not going to let us decommission our current one without having a U.S. domiciled replacement, even if it's no longer a government station, even if it's commercial. So we might extend the lifetime of the ISS even further to make it overlap with the U.S. commercial space stations that are coming online. I personally would not go on an extended warranty space station situation.

46:51But, you know, I'm not an astronaut, but I don't know. Okay, moon base or Mars colony? Moon base. Moon base. Because it's closer to us. It's closer. There's so much cool stuff you can do. It's kind of a jumping off point. Why go all the way to Mars with human life at colony scale when you haven't even figured out how to have humans live on the moon? Okay. The other problem with the Mars colony, and people love to forget this, is Mars is one-third Earth's gravity. We're not sure that women can bring babies to term in 1.3 G. And there's all this talk about Mars civilization. It might be more like a Mars outpost where you can have humans visit, but they have to go home to have babies.

47:28Have babies. Or a little dystopian, the pregnant women. Sounds very hands-made and tails. Yes. Go up into an artificial gravity habitat while they're pregnant, and then they're allowed to return. So there's all these problems. There's all these challenges with really having a civilization on Mars. Elon Musk's contributions to space, net positive? Net complicated? Net positive for space. Net positive. That's a well phrased question. For the world? For space. I think he is still net positive for the world. That's my personal take. Best space movie ever made? I have been told it's Hail Mary, which I haven't seen yet.

47:59Before that, 2001 Space Odyssey. 2001 Space Odyssey. Oldie but goodie. What's the worst space movie? Like Neil deGrasse Tyson did this. He had like a bunch of like a litany of complaints against bad space movies. You know, like his critiques of what wouldn't happen, really. There are some really corny dunes, like before Denis Villeneuve's new dune, which I'm obsessed with. I love this, like, Star Wars, like space opera, space epic. There's some really corny dunes out there. Okay. What is Gravity the Movie? Yes. Would Sandra Bullock survive in real life? Yes. Okay. Armageddon the Movie. Would those guys have stopped it?

48:38Yes. They would have stopped the asteroid hitting the Earth? I'm so pro Bruce Willis, yes. We actually have tech thanks to Obama who did this—well, it changed kind of in the Obama administration, but there's an asteroid redirect mission that was designed by NASA. And so, yeah, we maybe have the tech to actually pull off Armageddon. Fuck, marry, kill. NASA, SpaceX, or Blue Origin? Marry SpaceX. Fuck NASA. Wow, really? Poor Jeff Bezos. I'm actually a big fan of blue, but you can make me pick. Yeah, pick. Okay. But marry SpaceX. Yeah. Okay. Okay. You're like, yeah. You don't approve of my marriage.

49:14But like eventually, you know, like give me a chance to re-give you these answers in 10 years and then I'll update mine. What is like when you tell people that you're a space architect? I love that you just said elegant because that's like the most architectural term ever. I just imagined you coming. Like before I met you, we met last year. Or actually earlier this year. Earlier this year, yeah. We met earlier this year. It seems like a while ago. But before I met you, I imagined you like in a turtleneck. Like, I don't know, like some Steve Jobs. I almost wore a black turtleneck today. I was like, don't do it.

49:40Don't do it. Wear some color. Yes, you don't want to do that. But like a space architect, do you feel like you have like a taste to what you're building? I definitely have an aesthetic. It's an organic aesthetic. We're trying to build spaceships that look like things from the ocean. Because when you're in the sea, you're floating. You're buoyant. And so I think that there's a certain beauty to honoring creatures from Earth by making our space-faring society kind of recall some of our earthly origins. which actually to give some credit to Blue Origin is also the idea behind their name that we are of Blue Origin.

50:14So my aesthetic is mainly organic. And even like the design for these magnet tiles is a little bit, I'm going to just call it that, for Trata. I love it, yeah. But it's really came from nature. Exactly. Yeah, and how proteins and DNA self-assemble in our bodies. That was the direct inspiration for a Tesserae self-assembling algorithm. Yeah. How much will one of these things cost for a person to buy. You're saying it's$200 ,000 to kind of right now go and test it, a prototype into a space. And that's like one buckyball maybe that you're sending in? A tiny one. Yeah, I mean to actually like something that could put a human in.

50:51Yeah, or a family. Or a family. Yeah. The first one that we're going to do is probably the most expensive one because then once you figure out how to do it, you can improve the cost curve from there. But probably like$400 or$500 million, which is a lot. the same price that like a Pfizer or a Merck would pay to build an R &D facility on Earth. The reason it's not billions of dollars is that we're going to have these other commercial space stations that already exist in orbit, and we get to attach our cool little self-assembling module to them. I mean, this is a really dumb question, but like, will it become darker on Earth when all the orbit is covered?

51:26Oh, that's a great question. We do not want to cover the orbits. Luckily, space is insanely vast, and so when you see those diagrams of all the space debris, the size of the dot, like literally the size of a period on a piece of paper, to the scale of the orbit that it's drawn in is so off. There's so, so, so much more space in space than you think. The debris problem that you might have heard about, like there is just a lot of trash that's up there that we need to clean up. Where's that trash coming from? We're sending it there. Yeah, we're sending it there over the last several decades of the space industry.

51:56When countries, and they're not supposed to do this anymore, but when countries want to demonstrate that they become space powerful, They will launch a rocket, basically, or like a missile, and they will blow up one of their own satellites to prove to everybody else, I could blow up yours, so I just blew up mine to show you. Oh, yeah. That demonstrates capability, but it puts an ungodly amount of debris. There's probably some psychological, like, assessment of a person who does that kind of thing. Well, entire nation states like China and Russia are still doing it, sadly. But in general, we now have losses that you're not supposed to do that because it contributes so much tiny, sharp, you know, ballistic debris.

52:30It's a big problem. There's amazing recommendations, mostly out of ESA. European Space Agency is taking really good seriousness of purpose here to do something like a Pac-Man, where the Pac-Man will come through orbit and eat up the space trash, which basically means get all the space trash so it sticks together so it gets heavy, and then it will burn up on reentry. So amazing. And there's like nets and all these other different suggestions for how to handle space debris. Does it also have like a special bead where it eats it and gets super fast and it can kill all the bad people? We should give them some intel or like some recommendations that it needs to have a mode.

53:03It needs to have like a badass. Yeah, it's a beast mode. You can't have Pac-Me Out without beast mode. When you tell people you're a space architect, this is what you do, what's the dumbest thing they've asked you? And have I asked you it? The silliest, goofiest question, usually asked by kids when I say that, is like, how do you go to the bathroom? Yeah, how do you go to the bathroom and out of space? They suck it away. There's like a little bit of counter pressure. So you sit down and there's like a little bit of a tube. It's like the airlines where it goes right away? Yeah. So this is one of the things.

53:31A tube for number one and number two? Yeah. Oh, wow. Basically, yeah. So you sit and you like put this tube inside of you? Not quite inside, but like right around. I hope everybody gets their own tube. Yeah, everybody gets their own hygienic adapter to your body to be able to help you relieve yourself in space. But this is one of those things that there's like a very pragmatic way in which this was designed for the International Space Station. if we're going to actually welcome tens of thousands of people to orbit, we need to design all different aspects of the space habitats. Yeah, you need some Toto engineer and toilet.

54:03Yeah, we need a Toto washlet. Yeah. Really nice bidet. Yeah. Float, although that also, oh boy. I mean, if I pay, let me say, I paid$400 million for your, Yes, you want your Toto bidet. I really want a Toto. No, I want your list after this. I'm going to, you're going to be my plus one. You can be my guinea pig if you agree. So I need your list of what you want. I would actually totally go do it. Okay. We end every episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions asking our guests what they are dumb about. You know so many things, you know, about physics, about philosophy. What's a question you have that you are afraid to ask out loud?

54:32I'm obsessed with the idea of personalized healthcare. I've heard of peptides. All these people are doing peptides. Should we be doing peptides? That's my dumb question. Oh, I love it. We just had a longevity episode that is out right now, just like just went out. I saw the doctor, the woman who was talking to you. I don't know about this peptide thing. I'm not sold, but I'm curious. I actually recently— I know, it's kind of gray market. But then you have to, like, send some of it to the Czech Republic to get it tested for purity before you take it. Like, there's just all this crazy stuff. Yes.

55:01Yes. We're not hawking peptides here. That's my dumb question is, like, how to do peptides. How to do peptides. Okay, great. We will not answer it for all kinds of, like, medical disclaimer reasons. But thank you so much, Ariel, for coming on. We so appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. This was a blast.

55:18What do you think? Like, would you move to the moon or lower Earth orbit or to Mars? Would you commute there, like, from Monday to Friday on rush hour? I'm so curious. You can leave us a comment. Let us know what you think. You can call us at 1-855-MY-DUMB-Qs or drop us an email at naimorazo101 at gmail.com because I'm fascinated to know what you thought of that conversation. From my perspective, I love how Ariel sees space and the potential of it. Like, I think there's a lot of beauty in the kind of architecture she's talking about. the earth ring, the cathedrals in outer space. I think there's also a set of practical considerations, like some philosophical and also practical considerations that are meaningful for earth as well as to space.

55:59So like who owns the fruits of our labor? What, like to whom does the earth and, you know, space belong? Is it the people that get there first? Is it the people that helped us get there? Is it the people whose science, history, taxpayer money, dollars got you there in the first place? and who governs that? I think that it's scary to think about expanding our presence in the universe when sometimes it feels like we're not doing the best job on Earth. Anyways, that's it for this episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions. Write us, call us, text us, whatever. If you have$400 million to buy a space retreat, definitely text me and invite me to come with you.

56:35I'm Nehemi Maraza, your host. This episode was produced with Desta Wunderad, Melissa Lee Gibson, Sanjana Nagam. It was edited by Darlena Chiem, mixed and engineered by Johnny Simon, Special thanks to Ayesha Jordan, and we'll see you next week for an all-new Smart Girl Dumb Questions.