Should We Settle in Space? - Tim Peake, Kelly Weinersmith and Alan Davies

23:51Who's going to tell? I'll take a grow bag. Is that the worst idea I've ever had? Can you say, you mentioned the South Pole. Why is it the South Pole that's the target? Well, Kelly mentioned there water ice. Where you've got water, it makes habitation easier. You can split that hydrogen and oxygen for your atmosphere. You can have water to drink. You can make rocket fuel for your future missions, for example. And also minerals. We have had some rovers now exploring that region. and we're looking for what kind of rare earth metals, for example, what minerals could be useful. Helium-3 is a potential future source of energy for fusion, for example.

24:30So these are the kind of things that we want to find out about the South Pole. I feel like I want to keep asking you. So we've got the low earth orbit, and I share your view that I would love to go, even on one of the suborbital flights, I'd love to see the earth from space. What about the moon, though? Because this becomes a whole different commitment, perhaps a different level of risk and so on. So if I said to you, right, the first moon base is out at the South Pole, do a gig at the South Pole of the moon. They'll need entertainment. I suppose they could probably get all the sports channels.

25:00I mean, the satellites are right outside the door. I mean, I just think everything about, you know, I'm sitting looking at Tim here and I'm thinking, Tim did this. He went in the rocket. What a ride. Is it relaxing? Is it relaxing? Just like taking off from Heathrow or is it a bit more? it's a bit it's a bit more exciting um it's relaxing once you get there actually it's the ride back home that's that's the worst that's where the spacecraft kind of blows itself into three bits and it gets a little bit warm outside the g-forces are higher and stronger and then the parachutes open and that's quite uncomfortable for half a minute or so uh so coming back to earth is still you know it's a bit of a roller coaster i've got to say one of the best because i was at my son's school and there was a special day i think it was it was a saturday he came back i can't remember but it was anyway there was an open day and it was a lovely sunny day and one of the things most impressed me was how chris hadfield filled the air time when what you're really saying is still coming back at the moment the same thing still coming back it's going to be coming back for a while and he just managed to fill it with so many little details it was like watching the home shopping channel but nasa based so it seems you both share the view that it's likely that that we'll be back on the moon with presumably a permanent settlement, where would you estimate we would be 10 years, 20 years?

26:23I think it's really hard to estimate, so I'm wiggling out of that question a little bit. So I think it has to do a lot with political will. So for example, if getting back to the moon kicks off a really strong space race part two between the US and China, I can imagine us making sure we get there really fast and staying on a timeline. I imagine we could be there pretty soon if we decided we really wanted to. If you look at what's happening in the short term, Artemis 2 is scheduled to launch next year. Four crew training on that, on the Orion spacecraft, on SLS rocket, to test out the orbits and the Orion.

26:56And then at the moment, 2027 is Artemis 3, which is boots back on the surface of the moon again. Still, these are exploratory missions. So Artemis 2 is an Apollo 8 style crew mission? It's an Apollo 8 style in a different orbit, obviously, not equatorial, looking at a polar orbit. But Artemis 3 is the moment when, you know, generations are going to be watching those images coming back from the surface of the moon in full color, high definition. It's going to be quite incredible. And that will be a significant moment, I think, for so many of us who didn't get to watch that the first time around.

27:29And then after that, the pace of the missions, I think, will depend, as Kelly says, on political will, on the Artemis program, on technology to an extent. what will the Chinese be doing and what will commercial companies be doing? If funding and political will starts to fall down, will somebody like Elon Musk just say, well, I didn't build Starship for the moon anyway. I built Starship for Mars and I'm going to go there with or without NASA. So that's what's going to be really interesting to see how that sort of shapes out over the next 10, 15 years. You said the word settlement, which to me implies you're having families there and that you're having children who live there and go on to have children.

28:07I meant a base. Oh, a base. Okay, yeah. I feel like settlements is way farther off. We have learned a lot in our 50 years of having space stations orbiting the Earth, but we haven't really learned what we need to know to live on the moon or Mars. So we're protected largely by the magnetosphere on the International Space Station. So we don't have a great handle on how space radiation impacts cancer, and that kind of radiation is different than the kind of radiation we encounter here on Earth. and we know that having no gravity and being in free fall is bad for things like bones and muscles and vision but the moon has one-sixth of that gravity and maybe that makes most of those problems go away especially if you're exercising and you have the right diet and you're taking some of the countermeasures that we know about from our time on the international space station but i think feeling confident enough to have babies in space would require a lot more data and we haven't even had rodents go through like the whole process of reproduction in space so I think we've got a lot of work to do before you have...

29:02Still waiting really, aren't we, for rodents to build rockets? Yeah. It turns out pandas make rockets and it's only gravity that's been slowing them down in terms of having sex, because they're not keen, are they? But imagine if we find out, if you send pandas to the moon, you go, there's about a population, about 2 ,000 of them now, they won't stop doing it. Wow, that'd be great. Very cute. I was sort of assuming, I suppose, that you're on the space station we've got a very a lot of data about the way that the human body functions in low earth orbit long duration but the moon is a radically different environment not only gravitationally but in terms of radiation as well so does that imply that we really have to redo this whole program of research again with humans spending long months and even years on the moon yes to a degree we don't know what a low gravity environment is like for the human body how much is helpful is one six enough with a bit of exercise to really make it so much easier to live and work without those sort of negative effects of microgravity as we experience on the International Space Station.

30:08And most of the proposals that I've seen for life on the moon or Mars involve burying ourselves under a couple meters of that horrible regolith that I was talking about as a radiation shield. And when it comes to babies, we have had some rodents in space having sex. We've had geckos and all kinds of animals up there. But I think in general, we're sort of squeamish about questions related to this. So there hasn't been a very strong, consistent program to try to get a good handle on reproduction in space. So yes, I think when we get to the moon, there's a lot of stuff we'd need to start from the beginning.

30:38Did we send them up to have sex? Or did we just catch them at it? It would be fun to be running that lab on the moon. Alan, are there other experiments now that we're talking about these animal sex experiments? What are you thinking in terms of the experiments you'd like to. Well, I just feel like you're going to need a really, really big, probably centrifugal... I read a science fiction novel like this when it had a centrifugal spaceship, so it created its own gravity, and it was enormous, and you can replicate the Earth's atmosphere inside it, and then off you go in that cylinder for years. And the people initially, for the first 50 years, they die, get jettisoned or eaten or turned into fertiliser, and the next generation take the ship on.

31:22And that's the only way you can get really far is by humans reproducing in a cylinder over thousands of years. I guess that's not in the planning at the moment. I suppose at the moment it's some sort of clipped-together flooring, laminate probably, basic furnishings, I imagine. Basic furnishings. Sort of rudimentary environment. Not unlike being a student in halls. Yeah. and what about psychologically as well because we've been talking about the radiation sector but obviously we know it's an incredibly long journey to mars you know for you how a long journey is generally you know are you someone who you think you know i can i can handle that well you need to be like the guy in close encounters who goes with them at the end like he's burnt all his bridges on earth hasn't he and his family's saying yeah go yeah and if your family's saying yeah go dad but at the moment I've got quite a lot of ties here on on earth so you're implying that essentially to be a successful astronaut you have to be tremendously unpopular well so that's what the selection criteria is all about yeah this does bring us naturally Kelly to the next step your book city on Mars so earth orbit the moon relatively close to the earth you know, a few days journey and so on.

32:39Mars, a completely different idea, but the one that is probably in everybody's consciousness at the moment, partly because of SpaceX and they're designing these spacecrafts. So could you describe how big a difference it is going to Mars from going, let's say, to the moon? Oh my gosh, such a big difference. Yeah, so Musk is saying he's going to have a million people on the surface of Mars in the next 30 years. To get there, it's a six-month journey with current propulsion techniques, and you can't just leave at any time. So Earth and Mars are traveling around the sun, but they're not traveling together.

33:13So you have to wait until they're sort of in the right positions, where if you leave the Earth, you're going to shorten the distance it takes to get to Mars. And that window only opens up every two years. So it's six months to get there, then you're stuck there for over a year, and it's about six months to get back. It's so far away that the minimum communication delay is three minutes, and there's a maximum of about 20 to 22 minutes. So if you have a problem on Mars, you can't call and get live advice back home. So you're much more on your own than you would be on the moon where communication is near live.

33:43There's a little bit of a delay, but you can ignore it. Mars is a really harsh environment. It has 1 % of the atmosphere we have here on Earth, which means you still need a spacesuit to walk around on the surface. And that's not really enough to protect you from radiation. So again, you're probably going to be living underground. There's some proposals for living in lava tubes or caves. which sounds like kind of epic, but I think I'd get depressed pretty quickly. And then you also have to worry about that regolith and breathing it in. But on Mars, it has this added difficulty where there's also perchlorates in there.

34:12So these are endocrine-disrupting chemicals that mess with the hormones your thyroid makes. And your thyroid is making hormones that controls your temperature, your heart rate, and brain development in fetuses. And we know that if you grow plants in dirt that has perchlorates, the plants will take that dirt up. And so you could be eating it if you're trying to garden in it, for example. There's ways to get it out, but just about everything that you would do on Mars would be a real pain in the rear end. And I've talked to plenty of people who don't care. They tell me that I can't stop them. They're going there anyway.

34:44I was never trying to stop them. I don't know why they think I have any power there. But, you know, they'll tell you I would be happy to die on the surface of Mars, and I hope we get good data. But it's a very harsh environment. What do you think it is, Alan, about this desire to explore? When I think in many ways, and I know we've talked about it before in the show, when we think about how much remains unexplored on this planet alone, that desire of going, I have to get to Mars. Well, it's got a romantic image, hasn't it? It's the red planet, we've all seen it in the sky, there's loads of films about it, Martians have been here, apparently, it's been on the radio.

35:21But the practicalities are obviously, they're seemingly not insurmountable. insurmountable. Then you see, I saw one little short film about how they would create, using hopefully the water that's on the planet, create an atmosphere on Mars. And then they did an animation of Mars turning green as humans turned it into a habitant environment with the application of science. It's very convincing. When I say Mars sucks, but it sucks way less than just about anywhere else in space. Like it's got water. It's got a lot of the building blocks you need for life. It has a 24-ish hour day-night cycle, so very much like what we have here.

35:57And at the equator at the right time of year, it's almost room temperature. So it's kind of Earth-like in a lot of ways, but it'll still be difficult. I agree with that completely. If we don't go there, we'll never go anywhere. It's the only planet we can go, conceivably. And there are plenty of places on Earth we can't go. We live on small little bits of our own planet. So the idea that you'd go to Mars and you could only live in a strip around the equator that's okay but tim the only plan at the moment is spacex's plan with starship there are many different opinions on the timeline but from your perspective what would be a realistic timeline do you feel for the first landing on mars well nasa have uh looking at kind of late 2030s is is what they've publicly advertised as that kind of mission time frame that could be brought forward driven by commercial companies who want to get there faster and do things more quickly.

36:50But I wouldn't expect to see a mission to Mars this decade. But by the end of the 2030s, we really could see humans on the surface of Mars, even if just for a very short mission there and back. So would you be disappointed if we weren't there by the end of the 2030s? I wouldn't be necessarily disappointed, depending on what we're doing on the Moon, because I think that's quite exciting. And if we've got the research laboratory, then Mars can wait. We'll get there in good time. And is it inevitable, do you think, that once we've been there, then this idea of a city, how do you see that unfolding?

37:30I don't know that it's inevitable. I think there's a good chance we get there and then we don't stay. And I think one of the problems is that we don't have a really good economic case for a settlement on Mars. Mars doesn't really have anything that would be worth going all the way out there to collect and then bring back to Earth. And the proposals that I've seen involved things like, well, we can do a reality TV show, and that will fund the settlement. But for the Apollo missions, everyone tuned in to Apollo 11. By Apollo 12, people were paying less attention, and Apollo 13 had really low ratings until the oxygen canister burst.

38:02And then people were tuning in again. And so I don't know that people would want to watch a reality TV show on Mars unless you had really interesting characters. And so, yeah, I don't know what the financial case is to sustain a settlement. I mean, it's hard to see. We've still got a lot to learn. I think there's a scientific case for Mars, definitely. And I think those first missions, yes, and a small research module on Mars, I can see that happening. And then it will be a case of, OK, is there a commercial case that follows on? Or is there political will? Is it going to be scientifically driven that will continue to have these missions sustained on Mars?

38:38So Alan, I should carry on this theme of asking you. So you said yes to a suborbital flight, yes to an orbital flight, yes to the space station, yes to the moon, one-way trip to Mars. Well, it would take a pretty serious pandemic on Earth to get me to the launch pad. I'll tell you what, we'll ask your family and we'll let them do the vote. Don't ask them! Do you understand it though? Send me a sort of serious question. I suppose it's often described as the settlers who went out and crossed oceans in our past without knowing where the destination was. Are you that kind of person? Because there are people who are that kind of person.

39:15Obviously, there were in our history. They've got on a boat and sailed over the horizon. What pushed a lot of people to go was terrible poverty where they were living. It would be a desperate situation on Earth for a larger number of people to want to up sticks and move to an inhospitable planet, although they could make a very nice brochure about it, very convincing humans are very susceptible to promotion and pr look at the roomy room and the view of the you know don't mention the temperature or the chemicals or anything else but it's kind of depends how life is here although i don't think it's an either or let's go and explore space and the planets and the moon and neglect our own planet we do need to think at the same time about how we can apply perhaps what we learn to improving our treatment of the planet yeah one thing that really struck me while I was researching this book is how great the earth is and it's hard for me to imagine anything we could do to the earth that would make it as bad as Mars like Mars is really rough and you know when you were when you know people were escaping religious persecution and going to the United States they were in New Jersey which like a lot of people don't love but New Jersey had like deer that you can eat and flowing water that you can drink and you don't step outside and immediately like die because the nitrogen boils out of your blood So Earth has a lot of things going for it.

40:35I think it's hard for me to imagine escaping Earth and going to Mars. I can imagine long-term planning where you set up a settlement on Mars. That could be a plan B if hundreds and thousands of years from now, something happens to Earth. But I think for the foreseeable future, if something bad happens to Earth, the people living on Mars are toast as well, because they're going to need resupply from this amazing planet we have here. There's a lot of questions we didn't get to because I couldn't read them because of the dark. So, Alan, what do you think are some of the challenges of operating machinery on Mars?

41:11I think that all the machinery is going to be operated by robots, right? I think, you know, I mean, we're sending drones to deliver pizzas now, aren't we? I think that surely that's the plan. And also, I mean, what about Alan? Do you feel that the space law we've got now is good enough? Or do you think we need to change it? Do you think it might be a bit like the Wild West? We're going to have to send a sheriff up there. I do want to just pick that up because we focused on the technological difficulties. How would you imagine the management or these outposts of civilization? How, in our wildest dreams, how do those things develop?

41:49Yeah, so we're still trying to figure some of that stuff out. So the 1967 Outer Space Treaty says that you can't claim sovereignty over anything in space. So Elon Musk says in his Starlink terms of service that he's going to start a nation on Mars and that they're not going to have to answer to Earth-based law. But according to international law, the people who go to space are still the responsibility of some nation. And so if Musk does start a settlement, the way it's managed should be consistent with U.S. law. And so if you had a Chinese settlement, that would probably be consistent with Chinese law.

42:21But it's going to be really hard to police what people are doing out there. And because of that communication delay we were talking about, you need people who can make decisions right at that moment. And I don't think we've had enough discussions right now to figure out what will punishment look like on Mars, because that's going to be a difficult problem. Go outside. Out the door you go. That's what everybody says when I talk about punishment. They're like, oh, you kick them out the airlock. But presumably you'd like to have some other options for minor infractions. But we need to figure out the system for that.

42:50And we don't really know yet. So I think there's a lot of work that still needs to get done. but it's fascinating. Imagine being the people figuring out the rules to govern the first settlements in space. What a cool time to be working in international law. I remember reading... It's quite interesting on the space station. If you commit a crime in the Japanese segment, you can be tried under Japanese law, float into the US segment and commit the same crime. You can be tried under US law. So it depends on which module you're in that has jurisdiction. Do you think that? I'm going to steal someone's biscuits.

43:19What's the best place to do it? But it does. it opens up so many questions about all these legal frameworks that have been built up over so many years here on earth and Mars is its fresh planet at what point will the Mars colony break away and become independent and also thank you Kelly because one of the complaints we often get from Radio 4 listeners is people who are really into S &M feel that we don't inspire them enough and I think you're just what will punishment look like on Mars is going to lead some really great role play this weekend for a few people in the Droitwich area. I'm glad I could help with that.

43:56Those are my people. What do you think punishment would look like on Mars? I think people will be required to write a hundred lines. No one talks to you. You get sent to Coventry. Communes are a model for life in space that you hear a lot of the space settlement community talk about. In those communities, shunning is actually a main way that they get people to behave so they don't have prisons. Maybe shunning will be how we punish people in space. Or eating the raw potato, freshly picked out. See, I'd hoped to finish this in some kind of inspirational and educational way. Oh, we'll do. We always dub a bit later on where you go, to explore space, the wonder of touching starlight.

44:39You know we always have that bit at the end. You can't touch starlight. No, I know, but that's why I deliberately did the impression of you being factually inaccurate. Apparently it's affecting your sails. But we asked the audience a question. This is even better than the script, right? Because the light is blue, the pens you've used are blue, the likelihood of us being able to read them out. So here we go. What did we ask them, Brian? We asked, what would you take to occupy your time on a journey to Mars? There's one here from someone called Kat, who says, a truckload of Prosecco and a karaoke machine.

45:13I'm assuming the geeks will bring sensible stuff. That is your answer to everything. No, no. We've got noise, cancels and earphones in case there's a baby on board. Brian Cox, so he can lull me to sleep with his treacle voice for the long journey and so I can have sweet D-reams. What have you got there, Aaron? Chris Fuller says he'd take an IKEA self-assembly shelf system. Very practical. This is a better one. teach yourself rocket maintenance do you remember I remember, I think it's in Norman Mailer's book about the Apollo programme when they were asking Buzz Aldrin in particular your last few minutes on the moon if the engine had failed how would you spend your last few moments and he said, fixing the engine well thank you very much to our fantastic panel Tim Peake, Kelly Wintersmith and Alan Davis

46:17Next week we will be asking how can you create the perfect athlete? You're asking for a friend, right? Yeah. Do you think Robin would make a good astronaut? I think he'd be a brilliant astronaut, yeah. As long as you could kind of just go to your crew quarter. You know, when you get away from it. Perhaps five minutes every hour and just have a break. No one could shun Robin. He'd wake us up with a Brian Blessed voice every morning. Oh, that would be great, wouldn't he? Come on, let's go look at Earth and see what they're doing down there. Oh, the fools, I'll crush them. Every morning for eight months, the same joke.

46:55Good night.

46:59In the infinite monkey cage. Do you want that one, Ash again? Hi, Greg. Hi, Greg. Hi, Greg. I'm Greg Foots and my BBC Radio 4 show, Sliced Bread, is back to investigate more of your suggested Wonder products and find out if the latest fads really deliver on their bold claims. It just seems a bit too good to be true. Once again, I'll be talking to the experts and separating the science fact from the marketing fiction. They're duped into thinking that it's something that has a degree of scientific rigour when it just doesn't. from jet lag products and home allergy tests to how a plant-based banger compares to a regular meat sausage.

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