944: Zach Weinersmith | Out-of-This-World Hurdles to Colonizing Mars

23:35So it's like literally possible. So usually we say that the best option until like some sci-fi stuff happens is you have a good old fashioned nuclear reactor, you ship up some uranium or plutonium, you run your reactor. And for all the downsides to that that some of your audience is imagining, it is a kind of like power source in a box that works night or day. As one of the upsides, you're already kind of going to be bathed in radiation. yeah at least of your concerns i was gonna say the radiation thing like at this point it's like a smoker being like i think the jackhammering outside that bad for my health that's exactly right yeah yeah so i mean you know probably what you do is you go out some distance from your habitat you dig a hole and you put it in there you'll still have to have like people to operate it and stuff but when you compare that to having to like clean like acres and acres and acres of solar panels in like doom it's just probably the best option until some sort of, you know, crazy sci-fi tech comes along.

24:25I'd like to highlight your earlier point, which is colonizing Mars is not a solution for a messed up earth. And I like this for a few reasons. One, I think a lot of people are like, ah, climate change can't do anything about that. Plastics in the ocean can't do anything about that. Litter and garbage and lack of recycling and big oil and all this other can't do anything about that. It's fine. We're going to go to Mars. And it's like, again, you're leaving a messy bedroom for a toxic waste dump. This is not just like the oh good we get a second crack at things it's not really like that we joke like if you had earth we actually looked up what is the worst case climate change scenario anyone's predicting take that and like add nuclear war and any other catastrophe you like like i don't know like there's a hole in the earth and demons are pouring out that's still a planet where you can breathe and where like they have gravity they have gravity gravity's nice we haven't even gotten into that you know the lack of gravity probably has all sorts of bad long-term effects we don't even know about so yeah any idea that in the anywhere in the near term space is going to save us from any calamity is absurd it's just too hard too expensive and also just the general idea that we're going to be launching like millions billions of tons of stuff to space requiring hundreds of thousands of skyscraper size rocket launches every day and that's going to improve the environment is just absurd yeah it's unlikely let's say i you know i'm sure there's there's some space nerd who's angry at me right now.

25:47Well, basically, the sub name of this show, the subtext of this show is pissing off bunches of listeners for things you'd never imagine. I get it. When I do an episode where somebody's like, hey, plastics in the ocean art is being of a problem, as we thought, you shouldn't let this guy say his thing. I get why people are angry about that. I understand why when somebody says Hamas is not a terrorist organization, people are angry about that. I'm angry about that. But the thing that's going to trigger someone in this episode is going to be something that you and I both think is completely benign.

26:14That's how this works. Yes. That's how this works. So don't even try to not piss people off. It's not worth it. Yeah, no, I think what I found is all ideas about going to space, they're kind of bound up with utopianism. Like whatever you think is wrong with Earth will be better over there because you can get a clean break with your people and fix it all. And it's just like there are all sorts of different scenarios and they just don't hold up because humans are just going to be people over there only like surrounded by poison. Yeah. And unfortunately, surrounded by other people. Yes. Which is what happened in Biosphere 2, which seems like it was a big problem.

26:47And in fact, I know you've said that space settlements might actually favor autocratic authoritarian governments. That is a really interesting point that makes perfect sense to me, because it's probably going to have to start off basically like a military outpost, just because the stakes are so high. You can't have people being like, I got freedom of poking holes in the wall if I want to. You can't do that. you have to have people that are all rowing in the same direction if you're going to survive in space. But, and this is nerdy, but it reminds me of, there's a Call of Duty, which is a video game, there's an installment where the Mars Settlement Defense Force essentially attacks the Earth because they're like, hey, we don't need these guys anymore.

27:27We have our own planet, we got our own thing going. It's a totalitarian military regime along the lines of, I guess, maybe Sparta or whatever. I'm a little less worried about Mars Settlement Defense Force attacking us. That scenario is a little out of mind. But I think you might be right about autocracy in a place like Mars or in space anywhere, at least for the first few slash several generations of humans there, because how else are you going to function? How else are you going to create a society like that? And it's tough growing up in an environment like that. Ask anybody who defected from North Korea, for example.

27:57And it's going to be tough to transition to what might look like a functioning democracy from authoritarianism because those values have to be there somewhere behind the scenes. And I'm not sure how you do that unless you have really good contact with Earth the whole time. Right. Yeah, I think there's a good case for that. There's a scholar named Charles Cookel who writes a lot about this, about like, as an example, if you're living in a built structure on Mars, there is some source of oxygen under somebody's control in a way that's just not true on Earth, right? No matter, like the worst company town you can imagine, like your boss didn't have control over oxygen.

28:35The closest analog sometimes uses submarines And we actually did, we read some submarine books And we found a case of a guy who at least claimed He tuned the oxygen up or down To like adjust mood in the submarine So like apparently people are capable of this sort of thing I mean you hear it from casinos and it's not true Apparently Yeah I could see that I mean he who controls the spice controls the universe That's a soundbite I should have gotten for this show But it's, if you want to put down a rebellion In one corner of your space settlement And all you have to do is be like, well, I'm turning the air off if you guys don't calm down.

29:07I mean, that'll do it. Yeah, yeah. You could even, I mean, you know, if you want to get really nasty, all you have to do is crank the CO2 level up to about one, one and a half percent. People start to get headaches. And so you can give them carbon narcosis and just make them chill. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I know it is a problem. And then that's the question is like, you know, it's one thing if a bunch of people want to voluntarily go live this lifestyle by all means. But if they decide they want to have children, then it seems to me to be like an ethical nightmare that should probably be stopped. I mean, this is something we get into because sometimes we'll talk about like, well, we have concerns about like ethical things.

29:38And so we'll say, well, you're just a bunch of ninnies and me and Elon are going to Mars and you can't stop us and you shouldn't be able to stop us. To which I say, like, if you just want to personally go and hurt yourself, that's awesome. Have an adventure. I would like to watch the movie. I like reading about like Arctic explorers. They're kind of crazy, but awesome. But if you're talking about like having children or setting up some kind of rival state structure, these sorts of things, then there's a conversation to be had about what the rights of other people on earth are. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Zach Wienersmith.

30:12We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by LinkedIn. If you've ever hired for your small business, you know how important it is to find the right person. And that's why LinkedIn Jobs is stepping things up with their new AI assistant so you can feel comfortable you're finding top talent you can't find anywhere else. The best part is that those great candidates are already on LinkedIn. In fact, employees hired through LinkedIn, they're 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. That's a big deal when every hire counts.

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31:34Pardon the pun. As for the episode, there's no awkward strategies or cheesy tactics that are going to make you look like a jerk or make the people that you're trying to keep in touch with feel gross about you. It's just going to make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. And six minutes a day is all it takes. And many of the guests on the show, they already subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Zach Wienersmith. Can current construction gear even function on Mars temperatures?

32:06Because I look at construction sites around here, and I grew up in Michigan. I live in California now. And I just thought, wow, these guys out here, they have it much, much easier than they did in Michigan. They got to go in the winter. And then I thought to myself, OK, the winter. Now, imagine that's way colder. There's no air. And you'd have to modify the engine, right? You can't run a diesel engine on Mars with no atmosphere, oxygen, whatever I would imagine. But even then, what about the treads on a bulldozer? What about a crane? Don't those require certain amounts of gravity to stay put and other?

32:39you have to redesign all this stuff, not to mention just temperature stuff, temperature issues. Yeah. So this sort of thing is really important. One of my favorite cranky rants by an astro guy was he was talking about, there are these proposals for melting some of the water on the moon for all sorts of uses. And he was complaining about a proposal that said, you know, we'll use all this water and here's how we're going to recycle it and all this stuff. It didn't mention that part of getting it involved something like an eight mile traverse through the darkness in like whatever it was negative 200 fahrenheit on the surface of the moon which of course has no air among other problems and there's i think a kind of like tendency for people who've never had to do this sort of work to think we can just run some numbers as an example we talked to a guy who had worked on lunar rovers and he said a really hard problem is just making a lubricant that can survive you alternating between like 600 degrees of fahrenheit on a two weeks basis as it does on the moon and And so, yeah, I mean, actually, once you start thinking about this, it gets really crazy.

33:39Like if you have something that depends on a heavy weight dropping, well, you have less gravity, right? So you need more weight to get the same oomph when it slams into the surface. And then you just think about like the pressure. So as an example, you know, in a movie, if your buddy has a problem outside the space station, you throw on the pressure suit and you run out. In real life, if you do that, you will get the bends. You will get nitrogen bubbles in your blood because of the pressure change and you will just die. you actually have to go into an airlock and there are different ways for doing this but something like say a half hour to an hour has to be spent breathing pure oxygen to get the nitrogen out of your system so it's like there's all this stuff that makes sense until you start getting finicky about how it's actually going to work when an actual person has to actually go do the thing yeah that's interesting i hadn't thought about that tell me about this moon thing 600 degrees does the moon change 600 degrees every two weeks what is i had no idea yeah so the moon on the moon a day is two earth weeks long right so meaning like you get 14 days of light 14 days of darkness and also no atmosphere which would kind of spread out the ambient temperature right you're just blasted or not i see yeah so temperatures tend to get really really really hot like hot as an oven and then really really really cold much colder than ice and so obviously that's havoc for a little rover that needs to survive all these conditions also what we do to get them to survive is you put a little bit of plutonium in there to just keep them toasty.

35:03Wouldn't want that in my pocket, though, as a human, I don't think. Well, you know, if you have enough cladding. Maybe. Depend on where you're holding it. Keep it family friendly. I'm sorry. Yeah, so you get these huge temperature swings, and it's a real problem for all sorts of reasons. So we go back to, like, solar power. So you say to yourself, well, can we use solar power? Well, it's going to switch off two weeks at a time. The only exception to that is if you set up up at the poles, right? If you're at the North or South Pole, you get grazed by the sun most of the time. There are even a couple tiny areas where like 95 % of the time there's light.

35:37But it's very unusual. Most of the moon is not that way. You know, I just never thought about the temperature on the moon. I guess I just thought it was probably like a brisk morning in Michigan at worst. Not like negative 600 degrees or whatever, negative 400 degrees slash 400 plus, whatever it is. I never thought the moon would actually get hot. That for sure is a surprise. Yeah. So that seems miserable. And yes, we're flip-flopping between the moon and Mars, but I guess at this point, what's the difference? It's mostly just settling space. What about the building materials themselves? You know, my house is largely made out of wood and metal.

36:12That's fine when you're talking about maybe zero degrees up to 150 in the most extreme areas. But now we're talking about negative 200 or negative 300 to positive 300. You can't just build something out of wood or metal. It's just going to melt or shatter or whatever, right? Yeah. So there are parts of Mars that are a little more temperate near the equator. But if you're going to do the moon, you're going to have these huge temperature swings. The solution is pretty much the same in every mission proposal, which is you need to be under a huge amount of soil. So there are different ways you could do that.

36:43You could set a sort of tin can to the surface and just, you know, using the construction equipment we just said would be really hard. You know, a huge pile of what's called regolith, this messed up soil on the moon, on top. And what that does is it just kind of protects you from those big temperature swings, kind of like if you were a mole. A more interesting proposal, which to me is like, separate from whether I think it's a good idea, is maybe the most awesome idea. Which is, the moon isn't really seismically active anymore, but it once was. Which meant there used to be flowing lava in places.

37:11Have you ever been to Hawaii? Yeah. Or I'm told they had these. Yeah, yeah. So you've been to like lava tube caves, right? Or maybe. Oh, yeah. They have those on the moon. They have them on the moon, only they're much, much bigger, maybe as much as 100 times bigger. Wow. You could drive any size, well, multiple, 100 times bigger. That's like a freeway. More, maybe, even. To me, it's like if you were going to pick a mission for sheer awesomeness just about anywhere in the solar system, sending somebody into one of these would be top of my list. Wow. But from a settlement perspective, the exciting thing would be instead of like landing a tin can and piling stuff on it or else trying to build stuff out of the surface, you go into this cave and you have some kind of, say, spray-on sealant.

37:52And you just seal up the cave or a chunk of the cave. And then you pump it full of air and whatever else you need. And then you've got a little pocket. And now you can just build in there, right? So not everything has to be defended against space. The cave is doing it for you. So that's a pretty typical proposal with the real. That's cool. Yeah, it's awesome, right? I mean, you just talk about like, I've always amazed people have never heard of these, but my understanding is they were only really understood starting about 20 years ago. There's actually not that much. Everybody gets excited about Mars.

38:19There's a lot of scientists who are like, why don't we send more stuff to the moon? The moon is amazing. Yeah, that's, I just had no idea. They were so massive too, because it's so amazing how big that must be. Because those lava tubes in Hawaii, you can walk through those. Right. Yeah, they're like cathedrals. Yeah. So something that's a hundred times bigger, you could fit my neighborhood in there. No, yeah. It's crazy. You can imagine, you know, whole cities, you know, and the only real downside other than like it being difficult to get into these things, there's some questions about structural stability, but it's probably fine, is just that there aren't many.

38:51And so, you know, where it gets scary is like if the US goes first, and then China says, hey, you took the best spot, I don't know, does it get weird? But yeah, if you were going to set up a settlement, that would be one of the cooler places to do it. Well, we'll talk about what get weird might mean, because I have a feeling things will get weird with space. Before we get into that, though, Mars has a bunch of CO2 on it. Plants love CO2. Is there a fit here? Can we terraform Mars somehow by putting plants that eat the CO2 and make oxygen? Or is that just going to cause all kinds of other issues?

39:22Yes and no. Okay, so setting aside total terraforming for a second, and I'll come back to it. The big upside of CO2 is, as you say, plants will take it in, build themselves, and then spit out oxygen, which is just great. On the moon, there is very little carbon in the soil. This is often skipped, so you literally cannot grow plants in it. You can't do it. On Mars, with that CO2 just floating around for the taking, you can grow plants. They can release oxygen. You do need, and I won't get into the chemistry, but you need a hydrogen source if you want to also get water. But if you have that source, you have water, you have oxygen, you can even make fuel in the form of methane, which is just a flammable gas that you could also use to, like, fuel up a rocket or make, like, fuel for a buggy on the Martian surface.

40:05So it's incredibly convenient. In terms of terraforming, meaning turning Mars into at least something like Earth. So I don't think just by having plants you could do that because the atmosphere is really thin. So even if you cracked all the oxygen out of that CO2, I don't think it would be nearly enough. Typical proposals call for something like slamming, like redirecting comets into the poles of Mars or even like a huge amount of nuclear weapons. And the idea there is just you're going to, the poles have water. And so if you spew so much water into the atmosphere, you'll get a greenhouse effect like we're trying to avoid on Earth, which would be desirable on Mars to some extent.

40:41What would that do, though? I'm confused. We would somehow smash a comet or a giant bunch of nukes into Mars. the frozen water would go in the air and then what no no water vapor is a greenhouse gas so it vaporizes a bunch of water because of the explosion and then the atmosphere has water in it but wouldn't that be temporary or am i just not understanding how these might so this this is getting toward the edge of my expertise my understanding it was it would be literally temporary but it would still be like a million years worth of atmosphere so you don't have a little time to work it out right so time to figure yeah buys us some time to figure it out So that's actually really kind of cool.

41:17Yeah. Just to think you could do something like that. I guess you have to do that before you put anything else on Mars because it's going to be like explosion like the world has never seen to try and do that to a planet. It seems like something else could go wrong. Like, so it worked. But now Mars is on a different orbit and we definitely can't colonize it because it's way further out or something now or it's turned weird. I don't know. So that's one of those geoengineering things where you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube and then suddenly you realize it was a huge mistake and now you've got to solve that problem.

41:47Yeah, and there are also there are people, and I feel complicated about this, but who would say, you know, we only have one Mars and it's like a record of everything that's ever happened here. And if we changed it drastically, we would just lose all this potential information forever. Yeah, that's a valid argument in many ways, I suppose. that said the question is how much do we care about that versus colonizing another planet is successfully i don't know that's a tough calculation i i think it's a really tough question actually i mean so the moon to me is the more interesting example because the moon is a like it's just like a rock i know that's like a stupid thing to say but meaning how dare you how yeah but like everything that has happened to earth has happened to the moon right it's been there with us for eons and eons and eons so there are records of what has happened to our planet that are gone from our planet because we have, you know, climate and life and the movement of oceans and things.

42:36That information is, so to speak, embedded in the moon. Yeah, fossilized, essentially, right? Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, some of these proposals for tearing up huge parts of the surface of the moon for minerals, I don't think they're plausible in general, but I do think it's worth considering the scientific aspects. Let's talk about mining because people talk about asteroid mining and, well, I'm going to get a bunch of, what is it, helium three from the surface of the, I don't really even know what that is, but tell me about that, the valuable elements of the moon. Why is that not a thing that you think is possible?

43:10Right. So there's a couple of things going on here. So yeah, we can talk about moon mining in particular, and then I can try to expand out to the other places. So in order to justify getting something off the moon, it has to be extremely valuable. Like it has to be a small thing that's quite valuable because it is so expensive to go to the moon. Even with the modern price drops, like there's a lot of other stuff that has to go on. You still need a spacecraft and a lander and trained people, and it's quite dangerous. In 2017, there was a scientist named Michel Van Pelt, and I'll get this almost verbatim, but he said something like, if there were bars of gold on the surface of the moon, it would not be worth it to go get them.

43:45Really? Wow. So there's just not enough like density of value in gold. Maybe if there were like, you know, diamonds, I don't know what it would take. But the point is there's not, right? So There's been this desire to find some reason to go to the moon other than it just like showing up the Soviets or being generally awesome. And people just haven't come up with that much. I don't think anything that's convincing. You will sometimes hear people say helium-3. Yeah. Which without getting into the details, but it does come up a lot. What is it? You know, so there's helium. The usual helium, the stuff you get in a balloon is helium-4.

44:13Yeah. Helium-3 just is a different amount of neutrons. It's what's called an isotope. It's just a different form of the same element. But it has certain qualities that make it useful. One, it has medical applications. It's just useful for some screenings we do. But the usual thing people say is that you could use it for a certain type of fusion drive. And I can get very nerdy about this, but I will just say it's sort of like we already can't do an easier version of fusion that's in a lower temperature. So, like, scaling up to helium-3 fusion plus adding in that you have to get it from the moon is, like, showing off or something.

44:44It's like doing fusion, like, while doing a backflip. Like, why are we doing this? And so if you want to get really nerdy, there's a paper we talk about in the book. But the basic deal is like, it's for a spacey thing we probably won't build and don't need to build. And anyway, right now can't build. But also you can get helium-3 by other processes on Earth without going to the moon. I think there's just a really strong desire for there to be some kind of moon economy. Because it would be awesome. I think people queue a lot on the age of exploration. Like they have this idea that it'll be like the 1600s or the 1700s when people sail from Europe to India.

45:14But the difference is India was this vast, rich place full of people with awesome stuff. And the moon just isn't. It's a big rock, like you said, so nonchalant, so callously. It's a cool rock. Yeah. And then so people, you know, someone out there is saying, okay, shut up about the moon, but the asteroids, there's whatever,$700 trillion worth of iron or whatever people want to say. And in some sense, that is literally true, right? But you could also say that about like Earth's core, which is made of iron and nickel. Yeah, there's like 20 trillion tons of gold in the core. I made that number up.

45:46But it's something like that. It's just massive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, so there's more Earth than there is massive asteroids. So almost by definition, there's more value of stuff in the Earth. But the point is, it definitely has value if it can be got at a profit. And right now, it is extraordinarily expensive. So people have this idea, because they watch Star Wars, that if you go to an asteroid belt, it's just awash in these big potato-shaped rocks, and you need to go get one. Actual asteroids tend to be what are called rubble piles. They're these sort of loose agglomerations of dust and rock.

46:14They're very hard to capture or land on. Also, if you were on one, to the extent you could be on one with the microgravity, you wouldn't be able to see another one typically. They're quite sparse on the human scale. And the stuff in them is like regular stuff, okay? There's not like one made of diamonds. The most valuable ones are, they have what are called PGM, platinum group metals. So just imagine there's a high concentration of platinum. And so that sounds very tempting, but there's still low concentration in general. You still have to refine out these rocks to get this platinum. And there's just not that many of these super desirable ones that are relatively gettable and valuable.

46:48And so it's just not really a serious industry. Maybe one day if we're like awesome at space and we want to build giant spaceships, it is handy that there's already mass that's outside of Earth's gravity pole. But that's it. The idea that we're going to get rich because of asteroids, I think, is not serious. Yeah, that always sort of struck me as something that didn't make a ton of sense. But I thought, oh, maybe there's stuff on there that we really can't get. I did some research for an episode on gold, and I just remembered the statistic is there's enough gold in Earth's core to coat every bit of land on Earth with a 20-inch thick layer of gold.

47:21So you don't need to go anywhere other than the core of the Earth for gold. I guess the question is, is it easier to get to the core of the Earth and refine that stuff than it is to go to Mars or to the moon or an asteroid? And honestly, I don't have the answer to that. My gut says yes, but I don't have a clue. So my guess is not worth anything. The other big thing to note there, though is if we had all that gold it would not mean we were all rich right because the value of gold would go to nothing crash right yeah so we use the example of like so if you go back 200 years aluminum is really valuable the tip of the washington monument to this day is aluminum because that used to be fancy right right but then industrial processes made it cheap and that's great like airplanes use aluminum i'm the microphone i'm talking to i'm sure uses aluminum aluminum is awesome but it doesn't mean like i have like aluminum foil in my kitchen it doesn't make me rich it makes my life better but it doesn't end poverty like you're showing off with your aluminum foil in my kitchen i threw some away yesterday that's right i did this freaking guy that makes a lot of sense i mean gold has industrial uses especially when it comes to space because it doesn't corrode and all that stuff but if you suddenly have another let's say trillion tons you got five percent of the gold out of the earth's core and you have a trillion tons of it now it's you're making coke cans out of gold because it's so damn cheap and we're all better off in that world.

48:39But the idea that poverty is over or that you can just like take the raw number, whatever that is worth, you could quadrillion dollars and say that like it's as if we got that money. It doesn't work that way. Now, that makes a lot of sense. Actually, I'd love to know more about the economics of mining and extracting resources in space, because even if let's say we get a good modular nuclear reactor up there and we're ready to build, where do we get raw materials and building materials? Do we have to ship them from Earth or are we able to rip stuff out of the ground on Mars or the moon and use that?

49:10Is there metal in there? Or is it just like, no, you've got to freaking FedEx this stuff from Alabama like everybody else? Yeah, so if you have to boost it from Earth, that's really bad. The usual proposals are what's called ISRU, in situ resource utilization, just meaning you use local stuff. And there's a kind of danger here, right? Okay, so the moon has titanium, has magnesium, has silicon, has all sorts of stuff. There was a thing that made a splash recently where some people at Blue Origin, which is Jeff Bezos' rocket company, made solar panels using this little machine that used, I guess, you know, moon-like soil.

49:46The problem is it's incredibly energy intensive to do a lot of this stuff. I'm not saying it can't be done. It is going to be quite tricky. But yeah, I mean, so part of why we're pro Mars, if you are going to do a space settlement, is that Mars has everything you need. So as I said a minute ago, moon is carbon poor. Human bodies are about 20 % carbon. Plants are generally higher than that. And for people who don't remember high school physics, you can't just get more carbon. You can't like shape stuff into carbon. Carbon is made in the stars. You have what you have. so if you have to boost carbon from earth to the moon you're just it's not going to work it's like having to boost a farm rather than ameliorating local soil right yeah whereas mars has what you need now i get frustrated sometimes because people will say there's titanium therefore we can have titanium structures but like titanium is really hard to work with that you actually need a whole sort of industrial facility if you're going to make this work which is i'm not saying you can't do it on mars it's just going to be extremely difficult and you know we never talk about earth like this.

50:44So like I'm looking at my backyard, there's absolutely some amount of titanium in the soil here. That doesn't mean I can have I-beams made of titanium, right? You know, on Earth, when we talk about getting metals, we find places where it's at high concentration, even for something like aluminum. We look for bauxite as a precursor. And then we say, OK, it's going to be mined in West Virginia, shipped off to China for refining, then it's going to get shipped off to three more countries wrapped in plastic every single time to take advantage of their expertise and economies of scale. And you have to transport all that to another planet, which is not, again, not impossible, but just we often forget that like the Apple store doesn't make your iPhone.

51:24It's such a good point, actually. So very late in writing this book, we were talking to a developmental economist about this. So usually when people talk about the space economy, they talk about resources. And he said, you know, you should see this report from the World Bank, which says 97 and a half percent, I think it was, of all human wealth is not in natural resources, right? And natural resources in the sense of like stuff in the ground, not things like rainforest or whatever, right? So about two and a half percent of all of our wealth is that kind of stuff. And actually 90 % of that is fossil fuels, which don't exist in space.

51:56People tend to drastically overestimate the importance of minerals. I think because you go to the gas pump and it like kills you when it's up 50 cents. But then you pick up your iPhone, which is made of like, you know, plastic and a little glass and is of extraordinary value. And you don't think about how cheap it is. But actually, like most of the wealth we have is those processes you just described, where you have like factories and you have people with ideas and you have these complex processes for making microchips. That's where the money is. You know, the minerals, you got to have them because stuff has to be made of stuff.

52:24But it's not where most, I feel like this is like one of the most optimistic facts I ever heard. It's like the real wealth humans have is just coming up with stuff and making institutions for building things. That's actually a bonus, right? Because that means, because we can ship our ideas. That's one of the easier things to communicate or move to another place, I guess, if you really think about it. But it's not quite all the raw material that we actually need to succeed. You mentioned growing food in space and how difficult this is. I guess quantity would be tough. You mentioned the biosphere, two people working on the farm six hours a day just to make starvation level rations.

52:59What about actual nutrition? Because let's say you're managing to grow all these plants and whatnot, you still, were they growing animals there and slaughtering them and getting enough nutrition? Or was it like they're just existing on soy? That's a great question. So the truth is, I should say, Biosphere 2 probably could have been optimized a lot. So without getting into the details, it was kind of run by these crazy Captain Planet types. Hippies? No, beyond hippies, like proto-Silicon Valley, kind of zany. Anyway. This is the 80s when they ran that? Was this the 80s or the 90s? 90s, but they're part of a group that kind of comes out of the late 60s and early 70s, sort of proto-Silicon Valley.

53:35It sounds like some, what is it, Esalen, like redwood forest culty types. And they're like, well, let's live in a biosphere. They were called the synergists. They lived on a ranch. You can look it up. It was like that. Yeah. And so biosphere was about three acres. Only about a half an acre was what's called intensive agriculture. The rest was like biomes. Like they had a ghost forest or ghost desert. I don't really know what it is. They had like a coral reef. Like I said, it's very Captain Planet. So by the end, they were actually moving ag stuff into those zones. So there probably was a lot of optimization to do.

54:06They did have animals, but they actually had a lot of trouble with animals. So for example, this is a true story. They wanted to have pigs. They were going to have potbelly pigs because potbelly pigs are like a small manageable pig. But then it was like that period where potbelly pigs were like everybody's favorite pet. And so they thought the PR would be bad. Oh yeah. Yeah, they got this other type of pig. I forget from where that was like a pygmy species, but it was just kind of wild. And I guess it ran around killing stuff. so they ended up eating them and so i go down the line they had other problems at one point the crew which was an all-white crew and i only mentioned that because they were eating taro they're growing taro they didn't know how to process it so they're like slightly poisoning themselves what is that taro oh it's a root oh taro taro i'm sorry yeah i'm saying it right yeah yeah yeah no you're or you're saying it right and i said um yeah that like potatoey crap that taiwanese people love to put in their bubble tea yeah yeah yeah purple stuff yeah it's good stuff not like that for the record don't give me a two-year-old tarot in it no thanks my wife loves it get a little potato in your drink drinking potato it's no what are you doing way to ruin you can ruin any meal with that potatoes included for that matter yeah so yeah it's funny uh you have to process it a little or it's toxic right it's just like a lot of foods when you get it fresh uh or raw it needs a little work they didn't know that they were all i think american and british and this was like the 90s before like food was good and they had to actually call someone they got connected to a guy like in puerto rico had a recipe and then it was okay so there were a lot of kind of like little stupid things so nowadays if we reran the experiment probably what you do is have it be almost entirely intensive agriculture assuming that could support enough oxygen and then you might not bring any animals so as a general rule the bigger the animal the less less efficient it is it like converting input to output so in other words like to get a whole cow worth of meat takes a huge huge you've ever seen cows grazing they just all day long just get this one cow it's insane whereas if you wanted to survive off crickets if you could stomach it it's much more efficient crickets aren't that bad i've eaten many insects you know in japan or whatever it's fine i wouldn't necessarily want it every day i wouldn't want anything every day but if i were starving you could eat cricket if i had to choose crickets or taro i'm choosing crickets that is a bold choice that's the thing that's going to piss everyone off that's where the email people are going to start emailing me cricket based foods and you know what i'm here for it send it to me i'll send you my address yeah my daughter when she was four she tried crickets and she was like these are great the heads are really crunchy and i was like i can't even watch you oh my god you can eat things like that though like i when i was in cambodia i said i was hungry and the girls i was with decided to sort of play, I guess you'd call it a trick.

56:48They went and they bought me a big paper bag full of tarantulas. There you go. Roasted tarantulas. And you know what? They were good. They were really good. I was quite hungry and possibly a little bit drunk, but I ate a whole bag of tarantulas that they probably bought off the roadside. And I, God knows where that guy got them and I didn't get sick. You could live on that kind of stuff in algae and things like that.

57:14I because it's so here on earth you grow it by accident you're trying to get rid of it yeah actually algae is an interesting one yeah so there was actually a soviet union experiment where they tried to live only off it was a type of algae i believe it was called chlorella and apparently you could literally in some sense do this because they have protein and fat they make oxygen but like the people hated it so much they never did it again because it's just like nobody wants to live off algae yeah yeah so there is something to account for there which is like you don't want to optimize too much because eventually the humans are not happy that you they've been optimized on.

57:45But yeah, actually a very typical proposal is to go vegan if people don't want to eat bugs, because it's just so much more efficient to grow something like soy than to have animals. But I do think there's like a reasonable trade-off because I am a vegetarian, so like, you know, I'm down for this. But for a lot of people, they do want that variety. If you go back to old polar missions, like polar explorations in Antarctica, where they were like up there for years, it's very important to have variety of like flavor and texture for people to be happy. So there is a kind of trade-off against optimization there.

58:15This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Zach Wienersmith. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support one of our amazing sponsors, or preferably more than one. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support this show are at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, you can email me. I'm jordan at jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important. All right. Well, thank you for supporting those who support the show.

58:47Now for the rest of my conversation with Zach Wienersmith. What about humans being able to live in different gravity? You sort of touched on this earlier in the show. How long has anyone been in space? Do we know if anybody could live longer than that record? Because I assume it's not 10 years. It's probably like two years or something, right? It's an open question. So the longest day ever was by a cosmonaut named Polyakov. He stayed up for 37 consecutive days. I think the record for total days across multiple missions is somewhere in the 800s. It would have also been done by Soviet cosmonauts.

59:2137 days, that's it? 437. Oh, 437 days. Yeah, sorry. Okay, I was like, 37 days? No, no, no. That doesn't sound like that long. Okay, 400, that's still, though, in the scheme of things, not that long, right? He was up there for a year and change. That's a long time objectively, but if you're like, we're going to go live on Mars and have a family, that's nothing. It's nothing. So that's in what's called microgravity. just you can think of it as no gravity reliably that does all sorts of bad things to your body notably you lose something like one percent of bone density in your hips per month very quickly and so you also lose muscle strength very quickly right now astronauts they do like two three hours of exercise six days a week just to kind of keep it from getting worse than that but it does get worse you reliably lose vision in space this is one of the lesser known things about space is that people are actually sent up with glasses to adjust to the expected vision loss and that doesn't come back it's just a thing that happens in space wait what you lose vision yeah in your eyes why we don't know uh the thought is when you go to space so your body right is used to pumping blood around and you don't think about it but like it's hard to pump blood from your feet it's easier to pump blood near your heart right so your body's used to this complex system of pumping blood around this you know a person who's you know two meters tall pillar of liquid right when you go to space that confuses your body.

1:00:38If you look at astronauts, they often kind of have baby faces. That's because fluid shifts upward, right? So they actually call it puffy face. They also have a term chicken legs, right? So the fluid comes out of your legs. You can lose something like 30 % of your fluid volume in your legs very quickly. You actually also end up, astronauts have to pee a lot because your body gets really confused. All of a sudden there's all this fluid in your upper body. What's going on? Anyway, what that has to do with vision, maybe, I think my understanding is it's still not well understood, but it's possible all that fluid pressure going up is somehow messing with the feeding system for your eyes and it's causing some kind of damage wow or distortion of the shape but we don't know what's extra ominous there is there's equivocal evidence meaning just like we don't know for sure there's maybe some evidence that there are negative cognitive effects like you would lose like so to speak this is a dumb way to say it but like you lose a couple iq points for every so often you spend in space wow meaning like if that nerve damage is just in the eyes that's not great but okay but if it's some sort of overall nerve damage, that's really freaky if you start to imagine 10, 20, 30 years in space, right?

1:01:37Also, if it's damaging our eyes, and we know that because our vision gets worse, what's it doing to my brain that I have no idea is happening, or my liver, or other parts of my body where I'm not like, hey, this is darker, and I didn't have that blind spot? That's happening in other areas that you just don't realize, right? Yeah, not only that, but I would add, so I'm giving you a story about the pressure shift, but other stuff that's going on is you're getting a higher rate of doses of radiation. Yeah, let's talk about radiation for sure. Yeah, yeah. So the short version is when you're sitting down here on Earth, you're protected by the atmosphere from radiation and by the magnetosphere, which is, you know, Earth is a giant magnet, and so it slams these hot ionizing bits of radiation into the poles.

1:02:14And so instead of getting extra radiation, you just get little aurora shows at the poles, which is a pretty sweet deal. In the International Space Station, you don't have that. You have some protection there from the magnetosphere. If you go out towards the moon, you don't get that. But so the basic deal is you are generally getting a higher dose of radiation of types you don't normally get on Earth. And there's also some risk now and then. The sun sort of belches out blasts of high-intensity radiation. And if you happen to be caught in the beam, you could be in real trouble. You could die of acute radiation sickness, which I would just say is one of the worst ways I can imagine dying.

1:02:47It's very unlikely, but it is there. So there's other stuff, right? So the atmosphere is also high in carbon. It's fairly different from an Earth atmosphere. So meaning if we find cognitive decline, it could be from a variety of stuff. It could even be due to persistent stress or combinations of these different things. We don't know. The one thing I wanted to add is a kind of like pushback against my own point, though. This is really important. This is all on the International Space Station where you're in microgravity. On the moon, you would be at something like one-sixth Earth gravity. On Mars, it'd be something like 40 % Earth gravity.

1:03:15So that might stop or slow down some of the effects, but we just really don't know. What's this about astronauts? they report seeing flashes that people on earth can't see what's going on there that's kind of scary actually yeah yeah yeah yeah so um i'm trying to remember i think the first report from this by an american might have been john glenn but don't quote me on it but basically just seeing like these little flashes and it's thought what's going on is just there are parts where you're experiencing these high levels of radiation as you zoom around in orbit so you you know persistently hear stories of people even with their eyes closed seeing these flashes we're all we're apes we're evolved for the surface down here you know and space is just not going to behave nicely for us.

1:03:52Wow. So it's almost like, remember back in the day, you'd have a cell phone and it would be next to a speaker, like a radio in your house and it would go and you go, my phone's about to ring. That's what this reminds me of. Your eyes are picking up some sort of interference that normally when they're not right next to outside the atmosphere, closer to the sun or whatever, or a supernova, they don't experience this. But now you're outside of that Faraday cage or whatever that we have on earth and you're picking up all kinds of stuff because the antennae are designed to function on Earth, not in space where we would have evolved to, our brain would have just decided we don't see those flashes or whatever.

1:04:28That's right. That's a good way to say it. Yeah, we're evolved for this. That's really, somehow that's disturbing that you're getting hit by stuff and you can see, I don't know, that's sort of eerie. And there's gonna be a lot of that stuff that they're gonna discover, I suppose, when they go to space. So back to radiation on bodies and technology, solar flares are, those things suck on Earth. And I don't, again, I don't know what they are, so maybe explain what they are, but don't they destroy electronics and they can, if we have a big one, it can take the whole grid down and all this stuff? Yeah, so we put in a little bit there the story in, I think, 1859.

1:04:59So you sort of imagine the sun just firing off radiation in some direction, and fortunately space is big, so if you're in a spaceship, it just probably doesn't hit you, but if it does, you're in trouble, and now and then one of these smacks into Earth. So in 1859, there was a really big one, and this is, you have to think, like, early in the age where people are even thinking about electronics, right? And so there are these stories of like telegraph stations just suddenly like sparking for no reason. And just problems around the planet with like these electrical surges. It's like not great in 1859.

1:05:32And it would be maybe worse now. But it'd be really scary if you were in a technology dependent habitat on the moon or Mars. And I should say that, you know, the solution to this is almost certainly the same as we talked about earlier, which is just living underground forever instead of in a shining Mars dome. Yeah. Oh, my. How do we shield ourselves from radiation? There's radiation shielding, I guess. But when I go to the dentist, they put that lead blanket over me. That's probably not something you can build over your entire city in space. Yeah. I mean, you know, of course, in principle, you could.

1:06:05Yeah. So part of why lead is good is just lead is very dense. Right. So it's hard for stuff to get through. But yeah. So, you know, I said we'll use dirt. There are kind of, you know, more high-tech solutions are these special materials that are especially good at absorbing radiation. If you know anything about nuclear reactors, they often use boron to catch neutrons, which are bad stuff if they smack into you. So you can use boron-related compounds to absorb radiation. The problem is essentially anytime you're not using local mass, you're having to carry it all the way out of Earth's gravity well or wherever, you know, over to where you're going.

1:06:37So ideally, almost all proposals call for just figuring out some way to deal with the local dirt. If you're in a spaceship, that's a different question again, right? So the trip to Mars is like six months inbound, six months outbound. I think usually what you'd say is for the radiation that's in the background, you're just going to deal with it and probably some increased risk of cancer. If there's a flare, you could have like a panic room, like you could have like a small area that was lined with some sort of protective material so it wouldn't use up that much mass and everyone would just sort of run to it until the storm was over.

1:07:07It's kind of terrifying, but it's better than acute radiation poisoning. Right, so an air raid siren would go off and instead of grabbing your gas mask, if you're an Israeli, you'll know, right? You grab your gas mask. This would be like, oh, we got to go to the radiation room because there's a storm. So everybody's got their little shelter there for that and the bathroom and I don't know, some board games or whatever to pass the time. Yeah, yeah. I don't have the numbers in front of you, but I believe you'd get very short notice because there's like going to be some preliminaries from the sun before the ions hit you, but I don't think there's a lot of time.

1:07:38Yikes. Yeah. Yeah, that's not great. That's not great. I suppose if it doesn't kill you right away, it's just like, ah, I got hit by the last one, but I make it to the shelter 70 % of the time. It's all right. No, but that's the worst thing about radiation poisoning is like, if you get really blasted by radiation, like some guys did in the early days, fiddling with uranium and stuff, like, you know you're going to die a while before it happens because your tissues are sort of slowly just going to degrade and fall apart. Sloughing off. Ugh, gross. Yeah. Tell me about regolith. This is what, space dirt?

1:08:06Space dirt. Yeah. Yeah, so regolith comes from the root words meaning blanket of rock. So yeah, this is really important. So you look at the surface of the moon, and it looks like it's just dust, but it's actually, if you put it under a microscope, it looks a lot of it. It looks like little tiny knives, which is not what happens when you do that on Earth. And the difference is that you remember that the moon doesn't have weather, right? It doesn't have running water. It doesn't have life or anything. So the surface is just kind of naked to stuff. So you imagine like a heavy rock from space smashes the surface, heats it, fuses it.

1:08:36Then another one comes later, does the same thing, but now it shatters that, does this over and over and over and over. There's also radiation pelting all this stuff. And you imagine this just going on for eons and eons and eons. So it's much more like shattered glass and rock than it is just like sand on the beach. The result of that is a couple things. So the astronauts from the Apollo program landed. They described it almost like it was alive because it was static charged and very clingy, right? So we'd get up in equipment. and when people breathed it in, I remember, I think Harrison Schmidt, who was on Apollo 17, said it was like he had an allergic reaction to it.

1:09:07The concern, and we just don't know, the concern is that if you breathe this stuff long enough, you might get something similar to what's called stone grinder's disease, which you can imagine how that comes about. But the result of it is intense lung scarification over time means that it basically becomes very hard to breathe, very energy intensive just to breathe. It's very bad, very awful disease to get. And so it's possible exposure to regolith is going to do that to you. You can also imagine what effects it might have on equipment. Part of the problem is the grand total of time that people spend walking around the moon is something like two weeks, right?

1:09:39We did it all in a very brief period, not for very long. So we really don't know much about long-term medical effects of this stuff, but it's probably something you do not want to interact with. It sounds like it could get all goopy and possibly get into machinery and things like, I mean, like sand does that too. This sounds almost worse because it's not smoothed out by weather and atmosphere. And I guess if stuff also cakes on, it starts to insulate, which may or may not be a good thing. I mean, we're talking about using it as an insulator for radiation here, but there's other cases where you don't want that.

1:10:12Yeah, yeah, yeah. So part of why spacesuits are white is because that's to reflect heat, right? Just like when it's summer and you're told to wear your white shirt, that's the same reason. And so whereas regolith is this kind of plastery gray color. So if it gets caked on all over the suit, you can get heating problems, and that's dangerous. And yeah, there's a story, I forget which Apollo mission it was, but they landed and they actually picked up a robotic probe that had been sent years earlier. It was called Surveyor, I think Surveyor 3. And they said it looked like it had been sandblasted.

1:10:40Now, in fairness, that's probably because their rocket shot a lot of the regolith at it. But still, it's like, that's what this stuff does. It's like gritty sand. It's probably quite dangerous. And the basic upshot of this is just going to be a huge problem all the time, and it'll have to be dealt with. All right. Now, my family's here for the holidays, which makes me wonder, just how many humans do we need in a population before we have no risk of inbreeding? Ah. Yeah. I didn't think that was the direction that was going. No. So. I'm sure you didn't. This is an old question. Questions like this usually come up in conservation biology, right?

1:11:13So when there's four and a half of this species of rhinos left, can we save them? And the usual answer is if it's that low, the answer is no. A general rule of thumb, and it's very rule of thumb-y among conservation biologists, is about 500 is how many you need. It can get a little complicated because it depends on how related those 500 are and a bunch of other factors. But the very short version of this is there have been a lot of models built by space geeks mostly to see like, well, what would be the minimum number of humans we would need so that if we never had any more immigration, we'd have a shot at not eventually succumbing to inbreeding.

1:11:45and the lowest number we found was 98 the more typical numbers are in the like 5 000 to like 30 000 range and i should say 98 was not a joke but like it was a science project which was like what is the absolute minimum and it depended on essentially like a computer telling everybody who to mate with and how many kids to have right preserved genetic yeah you know and also assumes nothing ever goes wrong uh which is you know probably not a great assumption yeah right that's a good point you have to have some small amount of immigration or just genetic engineering to the point where they can be like all right normally this would cause a problem but we're going in and we're going over your dna with a fine-tooth comb and we're putting this test tube baby together for you yeah yeah totally it's gonna have to be something like that yeah yeah i mean so you can get into these sci-fi solutions so there's another solution which is where you can freeze dry male gametes i mean like men are basically worthless you just send all only women and supply like a library of male gametes and then you can introduce genetic diversity that way the basic downside being like you have to enforce this which you know gets dystopian very quickly right so i don't know there are a lot of sorts of gadget solutions to genetic diversity i think they're probably bad ideas because you know trying to convince your kids like you should obey the computer mating selection algorithm that's going to be a tough conversation yeah that's that's a tough one you thought romeo and julia was rough wait are the ai's telling you who you can mate with i mean i guess it would almost be like you pick your partner based on who you want, but then you just don't actually, what is it?

1:13:12Was that movie Demolition Man? Like you don't actually do any real mating at all. Everyone's sterilized or whatever. And you just make babies in test tubes only. That is dystopian. That's pretty out there. All right. I know we're running out of time. Is it legal for Elon Musk or the United States or China to colonize space in the first place? I know space law is a thing. Is space a commons? I don't even know if that's the case or not. Right. The short version is there's a document called the Outer Space Treaty. All the big powers have agreed to it since 1967. It says you countries cannot claim chunks of space.

1:13:46It's very clear. Article 2 says it in plain language. You cannot claim chunks of space. The U.S., contra what Newt Gingrich proposed once, cannot claim the moon as a state. That would be an assertion of national sovereignty over the moon, which you can't do. Nor can Elon Musk independently say, I'm not part of Earth. my own state on the moon that would still violate international law. You might say that's fine because he's Elon Musk and he's allowed to do what he wants. I think that's pretty questionable, but whatever. But yeah, it is absolutely against the rules. Space is supposed to be regulated as a commons.

1:14:15People sometimes debate exactly what that means, but it at least means that there are no national territories, right? So China cannot claim a chunk of the moon is China. They could set up a base and they can even be fairly exclusive about it, but they cannot literally claim sovereignty over it. The other issue here is space law, much like international law. It's just not really super enforceable outside of what you would, I guess, Earth-based conflict, right? And add to it that space powers are nuclear powers, generally, I think without exception, now that I think about it. We risk nuclear conflict on Earth or, yeah, well, nuclear conflict on Earth if we try to compete for space resources.

1:14:53So if China goes and says, you know, we rescind our acceptance of this treaty or we're doing this, but it doesn't count. We get a loophole the U.S. is going to go, okay, fine, well, we're blockading your Navy on Earth, because no, we disagree. The way I think about it, so people will sometimes say, you know, international law is not like domestic law, because there's no police who are going to, like, put you in country jail when you're a bad country, right? That's true. One way you can think of it is sort of like gang warfare, right? So, like, gangs, you know, there is no overarching law, because they're outside the law.

1:15:22They still have conventions between each other, and there are still behaviors that are not done, and that, you know, obviously has a lot to do with power, but it's still real. It doesn't disappear because you've identified that it's just the powerful nations enforcing their views, right? So the international law that governs space is generally agreed upon by the most powerful countries. And I think the thing to realize here is, suppose Elon Musk did start his own city on Mars tomorrow and claimed it was independent of Earth. It's not just that that would violate the international law. It would probably anger, say, China and Russia a lot more than it would anger Western powers.

1:15:55I think Western powers would still be frustrated. But the idea of setting up a liberal West aligned nation on Mars, assuming that's what Elon Musk would want to do, would obviously be more offensive to certain parts of the planet than others. So the geopolitics would be more complicated than a kind of Mars law versus Earth law situation. So what is the best plan in your mind for colonizing something in space? Do we wait for more scientific leaps and then send people? And if so, what leaps are we waiting for? Nuclear fusion or what else? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we argue for what we call a wait-and-go-big approach, which is wait because there is a lot of science that needs to be done.

1:16:32We don't know enough about human reproduction to do this ethically. We don't know how to build these complex ecosystems. We still need to scale the rockets quite a bit. But really, we need that basic science of reproduction that's going to take at least decades if someone started spending on it now, which they are not. And we also, I think you could make a good argument that we need better legal structures. We could argue all day long about what that should be, but something that is less conducive to war than the system we have now. And then, too, you'd want to go big, and that obviously requires a lot of technology, but there's so many advantages to going big just to going to scale.

1:17:02Like, we might have touched on this, but we have a chapter about the idea of space psychology. And the short version is, you know, there's no evidence contrary to what people sometimes say that people go mad in space, but they do have regular psychiatric issues like anywhere else. And so we need a big enough settlement that you can have regular division of labor to take care of all these problems. We talk about some of the economics that are also helped by just scale. Probably it's the case that with ecosystem design, it gets easier at scale. Making an ecosystem functional at the size of a thimble is probably harder than the size of a city.

1:17:34So if you can wait long enough to take this big approach, I think a whole lot of different problems get solved. And there's also just time to work out a lot of the really freaky stuff ethically. because if you have a world where because of all the medical problems we discussed there's a higher than normal rate of birth abnormality but you're also in a world where everyone's considered to have to pull their own weight that's like a potential nightmare scenario right yeah you end up with some pretty horrible ideas on what to do about that right yep and often people are surprisingly cool with it and it's just like this is a choice let's not make this choice let's wait until we can do it in a way that doesn't like create an evil space empire i've had this conversation with people where it's just like they'll be like yeah it's probably gonna be a lot more authoritarian and dangerous on mars like why are we building an evil enemy on mars uh like completely incompatible not just with american values but with earth values yeah just basic human decency stuff yeah like oh when you have a child that's not born strong enough to withstand the environment and the pressure you don't just murder them as a child and feed them to the rest of the team for protein like no we we don't do that oh well we're gonna have a problem here yeah Like you thought you think North Korea is bad.

1:18:43It's going to make that place look like Disneyland. So it sounds like you think we should hold off for now. What is the timeline on a lot of this science? You mentioned decades and that's if people are spending now, which they aren't. So are we talking about like a hundred plus years from now? That would be my guess. I mean, I always want to say you mentioned like nuclear fusion. There is some world in which next week we have advanced AI and it showers us with insights and everything changes. But with what I see now, especially given that some of these problems are biological and have to do with human medicine, which means we have to go slow, I think at least decades, if not centuries, is the timelines we should be thinking about.

1:19:17First settlement. I mean, if you're talking about putting a cool base on the moon, that could be done in 10 years. I don't know if it will be, but the technology is there. But trying to have families, generations, like having to really settle and make a new life for humanity somewhere else, that's centuries. Zach, thank you so much. Which, by the way, what we're going to get emails about is people going, there already is a base on Mars. I've gotten that. You just keep talking about it. That's what we're going to get emails about. It's slid in right at the end of the show. That's where the kooks are going to come from.

1:19:44Let me tell you. Zach, thank you very much, man. I really appreciate you doing the show. This is fascinating stuff. There's no getting around it. Really interesting. Thank you very much. Now, I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before we get into that, here's a sample of my interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We talk about why an interest in science serves every field of expertise from law to art, what our education should ideally train us for. Here's a quick look inside. Walt Whitman, when I heard the learned astronomer, when the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add, divide, and measure them, when I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick, till rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself into the mystical, moist night air, and from time to time looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

1:20:50It's the same curiosity you have as a kid, but I just have it as an adult. I've had it since childhood. You don't have to maintain it, you just have to make sure nothing interferes with it. So the counterpart to this would be, oh, sir, literate one, why ruin what something looks like by describing it with words when I can see it fully with my eyes? Your words just get in the way. I'd rather my mind float freely as I gaze upon something of interest than have the writer step in between me and it and interpose his or her own interpretation. You don't know the thoughts that you're not having. What keeps me awake is wondering what questions I don't yet know to ask because they would only become available to me after we discover what dark matter and dark energy is.

1:21:37Oh, man. Because think about it. The fact that we even know how to ask that question, that's almost half the way there. But I want to know the question that I can't know yet. What is the profound level of ignorance that will manifest after we answer the profound questions we've been smart enough to pose thus far? For more, including how science denial has gained a global foothold, what it'll take for the U.S. to get to Mars before China, and why it's dangerous for people to claim the Earth is flat, check out episode 327 of The Jordan Harbinger Show with Neil deGrasse Tyson. I love stuff like this.

1:22:18This is one of those things that most of us don't spend much time thinking about it, but I guess if we do, we never really take the time to do the math, so to speak. And so it was amazing to hear from somebody who did that and then brought receipts. We don't know, actually, if people can adopt psychologically to confined space spaces. You'd have to have a lot of room for folks to move around or people might just go nuts. What about mental illness in space? There's going to be stuff we haven't even discovered yet that's unique to space, medical issues in general, medical treatment in space, medications aren't going to work the same because you're not digesting the same.

1:22:51Anesthesia might not be available. Maybe it kills you because of, who knows, gravity, the oxygen content. I mean, we just don't know. You almost have to do or redo all medication testing and FDA clinical trials all over again with a space population that's in different gravity, different temperatures. I mean, is just an insane undertaking. You can't even safely take aspirin up there, probably. I mean, we don't really know yet. That's the thing. And what if somebody dies in space? It's never really happened other than when you lose the whole crew at once. But what if somebody just passes away from some kind of food poisoning or they have an accident?

1:23:27What do you do with them? And man, on the other side of the coin, space pregnancy. Has this ever happened? No. Certainly there have been no space births yet, but are they a citizen of the country that the parents are in? And what sort of facilities do we have? And can babies grow up during those developmental phases in less gravity than Earth? That seems like it's possibly a really, really, really bad idea. Or at least if they're going to ever come back to Earth, a terrible idea. Again, don't know. Some folks argue that an endeavor like colonizing Mars will unify Earth. And I am looking at social media, which is not really a great indicator, but hear me here.

1:24:03And I'm not so convinced, Okay, space isn't going to unify us. We do joint space things as a group of countries when things are already unified. We don't often get along with other countries because our values differ fundamentally. One of the reasons we didn't do joint space exercises with the Soviet Union is because we were concerned primarily with their human rights perspective, among other things. So the idea that we're then suddenly going to be like, you know what, let's put aside our differences and work with like North Korea on sending people to space, not to bloody likely? And do we want to change our human rights perspective so that we can send people to space?

1:24:38Do we even need to do that? I think we can do this without unifying the Earth. I just don't think that doing this is going to end up unifying the Earth. It just seems a little bit more far-fetched than the science fiction of colonizing space in the first place. All things Zach Wienersmith will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. You can also ask the AI chatbot on the website. Transcripts are in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show. all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. By the way, all books are at jordanharbinger.com slash books.

1:25:09Even using those links also can help. We've also got our newsletter where every week the team and I dig into an older episode of the show, dissect the lessons from it. So if you are a fan of the show, and I hope you are, and you want a recap of important insights and takeaways, or you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do just that. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about 6-Minute Networking as well over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter, Instagram, or you can find me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One.

1:25:40My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Milio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in space, colonizing space, all that stuff, definitely share this episode with them. I think they'll be into this. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.