Living on Mars

0:00Today Explained Shaw Robbinsurb outside the Arid Space Museum in Washington DC to ask would you want to live on Mars? No, I wouldn't want to live on Mars. No. I just think simply it's just too dangerous. Yeah. Oh hell yeah, of course. It'd be cool to see something different and be pioneers. Even with the risk involved? I mean, we risk our lives when we walk out here on the streets. No, I would miss my family. They're all here. I would not want to leave them behind. If I got paid for it, yeah. How much did you want to get paid for it? $10 ,000. That's it? Yeah? You gotta ask her more! Okay, one million dollars.

0:41That's more like it. No, because the risk of death is too high. What are the risks? Have you seen the Martian? With Matt Damon? Yeah, thank you. Living on Mars, on Today Explained from Vox.

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1:37Today Explained, Sean Ramosverham here with biologist Kelly Wienersmith, who's the co-author of a book called A City on Mars, all about our subject today, settling Mars. Yeah, so Elon Musk wants a self-sustaining settlement, so he wants a backup for humanity. Having two planets that are both self-sustaining and strong, I think is going to be incredibly important for the long-term survival of civilization. Jeff Bezos wants us to move heavy industry to space to save Earth and move population from Earth to space. We can move all heavy industry and all polluting industry off of Earth and operate it in space.

2:19And then other common arguments are, you know, space resources will make us rich. The first trillionaire in the world is going to be the person who first mines asteroids. Space will allow humans to spread out. We won't fight over land anymore, so it will make war either obsolete or at least a lot less common. I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system. But the arguments that I think are the best are that we need a backup for humanity, but I totally disagree with Musk on the timeline. Elon Musk has said that his company, SpaceX, can get humans to Mars as early as 2029.

2:57And I think most people, if you push, what they really want to say is that space is awesome and no one has a right to stop them. And so that argument holds as long as the thing you're doing really doesn't hurt anyone. And by the end of the book, it wasn't clear to us that that was the case, because if we end up for a scramble for territory and space between nuclear-wielding superpowers, that could have implications for all of us. So it is an activity that impacts us all. We've been talking about Mars for a while on this show. So I think we need to, like, just start from square one. Like, how do we go about getting humans to Mars?

3:33Yeah, so the trip to Mars is going to be a long one. With current technology, it will take somewhere between six to nine months to get there. During that trip, you're going to be exposed to space radiation. Yes, we'll have shielding, but shielding is heavy and expensive, so we might not have all the shielding that we need. Additionally, none of the current proposals include spacecraft that are rotating. So that would create artificial gravity. So during this trip, you're going to be seeing the loss of bone and muscle and maybe even vision that we see on astronauts on the space stations. So it could be, you know, not just a dangerous trip, but also a trip where your body is sort of breaking down along the way.

4:13And then hopefully you're still alive when you get there. Yeah, fingers crossed. When people are generally talking about space settlements, what exactly might that look like on Mars? Would it just look like Earth? I don't think so. No, no, it's not going to look like Earth at all. And I think most of the people who want to go to Mars are totally comfortable with that idea. But like, you know, a typical day on Mars, you would wake up in an underground bunker because radiation is raining down on the surface of Mars because Mars doesn't have the radiation protections we have here on Earth. So most of the proposals include living underground.

4:51You can't step outside of your habitat because Mars has 1 % of the atmosphere of Earth, and that's too low for our bodies to survive. So, like, the nitrogen would bubble out of your blood and kill you. Probably not a great way to go. So no going outside. A lot of the day is going to be spent on things like subsistence farming. It's going to be hard to grow our own food and do the recycling that we would need to do to make these habitats sustainable. And probably a lot of exercise, because 40 % of Earth's gravity might not be enough to keep our muscles strong and our bones strong. It's funny to think of this toxic, deathly, desolate planet being the sort of salvation for humanity because what you're describing right now sounds not exactly like something that's going to save us.

5:43Yeah, but so the rest of space sucks even more is the thing. So, like, Mars has some good stuff. So it has a day and night cycle that's pretty close to Earth, so that'll feel kind of home-like. The temperature swings on Mars are pretty moderate compared to what you find on a lot of other planets. And it has a lot of the building blocks that we're going to need to live. It's got oxygen and carbon and water just about everywhere. You've got to work a little hard to find it. You've got to clean out some chemicals to make it drinkable. But all the stuff we need is there. So I think you can imagine a day when you would have a self-sustaining settlement on Mars, And it's hard to imagine that happening just about anywhere else in the solar system.

6:23Okay, so let's say we get to that settlement and whatever, there's a group of a half dozen or a dozen people living up there. We've talked about some of the physical challenges. What about the psychological ones? Yeah, those could be pretty intense. So you're going to need plans for how to provide them with support. You might want to send a psychologist with you on this trip because they're not going to be able to make calls home. So, you know, if you're on the International Space Station and you're bummed out, you can call your wife. You know, they're close enough. It works. But Mars has a communication delay that's a minimum of three minutes and as much as like 20 to 22 minutes.

6:58And sometimes when Mars is on the other side of the sun from Earth, you can't call at all.

7:05So all of your support needs to be self-contained because you're not going to be able to have, you know, live calls with your girlfriend, your mother, your psychiatrist, any of those things. And it's probably going to be a little boring. So you'll want to plan ahead. You'll want to bring Netflix if you can.

7:24There's also this idea of like terraforming Mars and making it more Earth-like, right? Would that help? Is that even possible? I mean, it may technically be possible. When you think about how awful Mars is and the lengths that you'd have to go to to terraform it, It seems crazy when you think about how, you know, we're dealing with a two degrees Celsius increase in temperature here on Earth and it's causing us all these problems. The idea that we could control the Martian climate to get it to be Earth-like is a bit out there. But, you know, most of the proposals involve things like dropping nuclear weapons on the poles to liberate the water vapor, which would get trapped in Mars' thin atmosphere and slowly warm things up.

8:03It's the fast way and the slow way. Okay. Give me the fast way. The fast way is drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles. You're a supervillain. That's what a supervillain does. Yeah. This would be something that would take decades, maybe hundreds of years to accomplish. And it's not really clear according to international law that you're allowed to do that. So Mars and all of the rest of space belongs to all of humanity. So before you go dropping nuclear weapons on Mars, you should probably get the whole international community to give that activity the thumbs up. And I'm not super optimistic that would go down well at the U.N.

8:42I'm glad you brought up the U.N. Who's in charge up there? Well, it depends on where the Martians came from. So according to international law, somebody is in charge of people or corporations once they go. So if Elon Musk, through SpaceX, sends a bunch of United States citizens to space, then the United States would be in charge of making sure that the Martians continue to follow international law. And if it's China, it's China. And yep, that's right. But there's the potential for conflict there, too, of course. Absolutely. Yeah. So international law is not clear about what you're allowed to do once you're up there.

9:17So you're not allowed to claim sovereignty over anything in space. So Musk can't go up there and claim a nation that he calls Moscow or something like that. But you can land anywhere you want and then never leave. And it looks like you can extract resources and sell them. And so, you know, whereas the first space race was just to get to the moon first and step on it and then go home, it looks like this new space race is going to be between the United States and China. And now it's about grabbing the best parts of space and staying there so that even if you don't call them, you know, China and the U.S.

9:52Part 2, you're still essentially keeping them just for yourself. You know, it's funny. Our last show about Mars, we talked about this sort of potential for humanity to work together to accomplish remarkable things out in space as sort of a motivating factor. Is there any chance that like instead of maybe ending up in some turf war with China or whomever else in Mars one day, like right now, as we're starting to hatch plans to do this, we could collaborate with our adversaries? Is anyone talking about that? There's absolutely people who are trying to get all the parties together to figure out a plan that makes everybody happy so that you don't end up with this scramble.

10:35This is why I call myself in the book a space bastard. Am I allowed to say bastard on your show? I can say a space jerk. No, you're allowed to say bastard. OK, great. Yeah. A space bastard because, you know, you go to space settlement conferences and people say all of these beautiful things. And I also am inspired and awed by space. But I think that when you're taking on a task where people could die and there could be implications for people back here on Earth, it's important that you also be clear eyed about, you know, the kinds of things that humans do. But I hope that we figure out a path forward that's peaceful.

11:11Kelly Wienersmith, space bastard or space jerk if the kids are around. She's got a podcast. It's called Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Check it out. I don't know where you land on Mars, but for me it's like, why not both? Why not work on all our earthly problems while exploring space to the best of our abilities? Why not both? An astrophysicist will tell us why not both when we're back on Today Explained.

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15:41Hello, Earth. Hello, what? If that's the earth, where the heck am I?

15:55My name is Adam Becker, and I am a journalist, author, and astrophysicist. Perfect. What a combo. Thanks. Tell me about the author part. What have you written? Books? Yeah, I've written two books. And the more recent one is called More Everything Forever. And it is about the horrible ideas that tech billionaires have about the future that they're trying to shove down our throats and why they don't work. Is one of them Mars? One of them is Mars, yeah. So you think Mars is a horrible idea? Mars is a horrible idea. Mars is a terrible place. But you're an astrophysicist slash author slash journalist, which means at some point you were a young child who dreamt of space.

16:38And part of the dream of space is Mars, right? Sure, yeah. No, I mean, when I was a kid, I thought that the future was just in space. You know, I watched a lot of Star Trek, right? Because I'm a huge nerd and I was like a young, growing nerd. And a young, growing nerd needs to consume healthy amounts of Star Trek in order to grow up to be like a big, strong nerd. And when I was a kid, I sort of thought of Star Trek as kind of like a documentary about the future, not like literally a documentary. But I thought, yeah, this is what we're shooting for. This is what we want. We want to be in space.

17:16That's where the good future is. And then I grew up. Notably, there weren't a lot of billionaires on Star Trek, or they didn't talk about it, at least. No, in fact, what they talked about was that there was no money. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century. No money? You mean you don't get paid? The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves. and the rest of humanity. So you grow up and you see the intersection of space and money and you kind of change your mind about how you feel about space? Or at least Mars? Yeah. I mean, look, I love space, right?

17:57You know, I did a PhD in astrophysics for a reason. I love space. I think that space research and, like, exploring space with robots and, you know, satellites is amazing. But yeah, seeing billionaires turning space into another kind of status icon for the ultra-wealthy, it's gross. You know, Musk talks about Mars as if it's the inevitable future of humanity and that, you know, going to Mars as a project to sort of save humanity, like some giant philanthropic effort. And it's just nonsense. He says, we got to go to Mars in case there's a disaster here on Earth. And we got to put a million people on Mars by 2050.

18:39And they got to be able to survive even if the rockets from Earth stop coming. The fundamental fork in the road for human destiny is where Mars can continue to grow, even if the supply shifts from Earth stop coming for any reason. I'm like, dude, that is not happening. Mars is awful. And there is nothing that could happen to Earth that would make it a worse place than Mars. Okay, what about the Bezos argument for space colonization? I mean, look. I hate to be in the position of trying to like devils advocate for these billionaires, but I'm just curious what you make of their arguments. Okay, I will say one nice thing about one billionaire, right?

19:17Jeff Bezos got it right about Mars. Jeff Bezos, I think at one point, made fun of Musk for promoting Mars. He's like, Mars sucks. I'm like, yeah, you know what? Jeff Bezos is right. Mars does suck. It's everything he said after that. That was a problem, right? Because Bezos also has a specific vision for space. He says, oh, well, we need to go out into space to live in hundreds of thousands or millions of enormous space stations so we can have a trillion humans living in space in a couple of centuries. If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

19:54And before you tell us what you think of that idea, we see a lot of this in the science fiction that we love to watch. Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. From Star Trek to Interstellar to 2001 A Space Odyssey. Space, a final frontier. Endurance rotation is 67, 68 RPM. Okay, get ready to match our span with the retro thrusters. It's not possible. No, it's necessary. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But science fiction is fiction, right? It is a set of stories that we tell. And we tell those stories not to predict the future, but to say, oh, what if we use this as a setting to explore some question about being a human?

20:49One of the great science fiction authors of all time, Ursula Le Guin, said that science fiction is not a guide to the future and that science fiction authors are not good guides to the future and that that's not what the subject is about. But I think like any good millennial, there are tweets that live rent-free in my head, and one of them is the Torment Nexus tweet, where it says something like, science fiction author, in my book, I created the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale. Tech billionaire. At long last, we've created the Torment Nexus from classic science fiction novel, don't create the Torment Nexus.

21:26Yes. I agree that science fiction can give us something to aspire to, but it's not the literal technology in the science fiction stories. One of the things I love about Star Trek is it does show a kind of future to aspire to in terms of how the people relate to each other and the kind of world that they've built independent of the technology. You know, Star Trek was groundbreaking even in the original series in terms of, you know, showing a diverse group of people on an aspirational mission of exploration and self-actualization and working together as friends to explore the world that we live in.

22:10I understand, Mr. Spock. The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity. and the ways our differences combine to create meaning and beauty. That is a future to aspire to. That is not what Jeff Bezos has in mind. Jeff Bezos's idea is to put a trillion people in space. And he says he wants this because if we stay here on Earth in a few centuries, we're going to run out of resources and run out of energy. And he's right about that. That's true. If you just assume the current rate of constant growth in usage of energy, then a few centuries after that, 700 or 1 ,000 years after that, you're using all of the energy output of the sun.

22:56But what you're saying is there's an alternate, and that is to not use all of our resources? Yeah, or at least to, you know, safeguard them more wisely and use them, you know, in a more sustainable way. It sounds like for all you disagree on with these tech billionaires when it comes to Mars or space colonization, like we all have to agree that life on Earth is not infinite. Sure. Our sun, the source of life here on Earth, will eventually die. Yes. And I know it's very far away. It is. But we made it to the moon. Yep. And making it to Mars feels like it could be, you know, a step in the right direction.

23:42And, you know, when I sat on the steps of the Air and Space Museum here in Washington, D.C. and asked people whether we should go to Mars or whether they would want to go to Mars, they don't talk about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. I think we need to see it. I think we need to expand what we know, what we see. They kind of talk about that idea that space is infinite and as a race, a human race, I just think it's a cool advancement for human kind and everything. It's something we should pursue. You have to push the limit of science to discover new things. Do you really think that we should skip the stepping stone just because these guys have some maybe wrongheaded ideas about why we should be taking that step in the first place?