Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures
Guests: Ariel Ekblaw
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents14 chapters
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We think that self-assembly,
this modular reconfigurable algorithm
for constructing space structures in orbit
is gonna give us this promise of space architecture
that's actually worth living in.
- You do believe we might one day
become intergalactic civilization?
- I have a hope, yeah.
- The following is a conversation with Ariel Egbla,
director of MIT Space Exploration Initiative.
She's especially interested in autonomously
self-assembling space architectures,
basically giant space structures
that can sustain human life
and that assemble themselves out in space
and then orbit Earth, Moon, Mars, and other planets.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Ariel Egbla.
When did you first fall in love with space exploration
and space in general?
- My parents are both ex-Air Force.
So my dad's an A-10 fighter pilot
and my mom trained and had qualified to be a fighter pilot,
but it was early enough
that women were not allowed in combat at that time.
And so I grew up with these two pilots
and although they themselves did not become astronauts,
there's a really rich legacy of Air Force pilots
becoming astronauts and this loomed large in my childhood.
What does it mean to be courageous, to be an explorer,
to be at the vanguard of something hard and challenging?
And to couple with that,
my dad was a huge fan of science fiction.
And so I, as a kid, read Heinlein and Isaac Asimov,
all these different classics of science fiction
that he had introduced me to.
And that just started a love affair with space exploration
and really thinking about civilization scale
space exploration.
- So did they themselves dream about going to the stars
as opposed to flying here in the Earth's atmosphere,
just looking up?
- Yeah, my dad always said he was absolutely convinced
'cause he was a child of the Apollo years
that he would get to go in his lifetime.
Really thought it was gonna happen.
And so it was a challenge and sad for many people
when to their view on the outside,
space exploration slowed down for a period of time.
In reality, we were just catching up.
I think we leapt so far ahead with Apollo
more than the rest of society was ready for.
And now we're coming back to this moment
for space exploration where we actually have an economy
and we have the other accoutrement that society needs
to be able to make space exploration more real.
And my dad's thrilled because finally,
not nearly, I hope not anywhere near the end of his life,
but as he's an older man,
he now can see still within his lifetime,
people really getting a chance
to build a sustainable lunar settlement on the moon
or maybe even go to Mars.
- So settlement, civilizations and other planets,
that's the cool thing to dream about in the future.
- It certainly is.
- What was the favorite sci-fi authors when you're growing up?
- Pablo Isaac Asimov Foundation Trilogy.
This is an amazing story of Harry Seldon,
this foundation that he forms at different ends of the,
well, according to the story,
different ends of the universe
and has this interesting focus on society.
So it's not just space exploration
for the sake of space exploration or novel technology,
which is a lot of what I work on day to day at MIT,
but how do you structure a society
across those vast expanses of distance and time?
And so I'd say absolutely a favorite.
Now though, my favorite is Neil Stevenson and "Seveneves."
It's a book that inspired my own PhD research
and some ongoing work that we're doing with NASA now
for the future of swarm robotics for spacecraft.
- We were saying offline about Neil Stevenson
'cause I just recently had a conversation with him.
And I said that not until I was doing the research for him
that I realized he also had a role to play in "Blue Origin."
So it's like sci-fi actually having a role to play
in the design, engineering,
just the implementation of ideas
that kind of percolate out from the sci-fi world
and actually become reality.
It's kind of a fascinating figure in that way.
Do you also think about him beyond just his work
in science fiction, but his role in coming up
with wild, crazy ideas that actually become reality?
- Yes, I think it's a great example of this cycle
between authors and scientists and engineers
that we can be inspired in one generation
by what authors dream up.
We build it, we make it a reality,
and then that inspires another generation
of really wild and crazy thought for science fiction.
I think Neil Stevenson does a beautiful job
of being what we'd call a hard science fiction author.
So it's really grounded in a lot of science,
which makes it very compelling for me
as a scientist and engineer to read
and then be challenged to make that vision of reality.
The other community that Neil's involved with
and some of my other mentors are involved with
that we are thinking about more and more
in the work that we do at MIT is the Long Now Foundation.
And this focus on what does society need to take
in terms of steps at this juncture,
this particular inflection point in human history
to make sure that we're setting ourselves up
for a long and prosperous horizon for humanity's horizons.
There's a lot of examples
of what the Long Now Foundation does and thinks about.
But when I think about this in my own work,
it's what does it take to scale
humanity's presence in orbit?
We are seeing some additional investment
in commercial space habitats.
So it'll no longer be just NASA
running the International Space Station,
but to really democratize access to space,
to have, like Bezos wants to have millions of people
living and working in space,
you need architecture that's bigger and grander
and can actually scale.
That means you need to be thinking about
how can you construct things for long-time horizons
that are really sustainable in orbit
or on a surface of a celestial body
that are bigger than the biggest rocket payload fairing
that we currently have available.
And that's what led me to self-assembly
and other models of in-space construction.
- Okay, every time you speak,
I get like a million tangent ideas.
- You can cut me off, keep going.
- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, please keep talking.
This is amazing.
I just, there's like a million ideas.
So one sort of on the dark side, let me ask.
Do you think about the threats to human civilization
that kind of motivate the scaling of the expansion
of humans in space and on other planets?
What are you worried about?
Nuclear war, pandemics,
super intelligent artificial intelligence systems,
more not existential crises,
but ones that have potentially significant
detrimental effects on society like climate change,
those kinds of things.
And then there's of course the fun ass story
coming out from the darkness and hitting all Earth.
There's been a few movies on that.
Anyway, is there something that you think about
that threatens us in this century?
- I mean, as an ex-military family,
we used to talk about all of this.
We would say that luck favors the prepared.
And so growing up, we had a plan,
actually a family plan for what we would do in a pandemic.
Didn't think we were gonna have to put that
in a plan into place and here we are.
We do, certainly among my own family and my friends
and then our work at MIT,
we do think about existential threats and risks to humanity
and what role does space exploration
and getting humans off world have to play
in a resilient future for humanity.
But what I actually find more compelling recently
is instead of thinking about a need to ever abandon Earth
through a path of space exploration or space voyaging,
is to see how we can use space technology
to keep Earth livable.
The obvious direct ways of doing this
would be satellite technology that's helping us learn more
about climate change or emitters or CO2.
But there's also a future for geoengineering
that might be space-based.
A lot of questions that would have to be answered around that
but these are examples of pivoting our focus away
from maybe the Hollywood vision of,
oh, an asteroid's gonna come,
we're all gonna have to escape Earth
to let's use our considerable technology prowess
and use space technology to save Earth
and be very much focused on how we can have
a worthwhile life for Earth's citizens.
Even as some of us wanna go out and further venturing.
- Right, just the desire to explore the mysterious, yes.
But also it does seem that by placing us in harsh conditions,
the harsh conditions of space,
§02Transcript · 08:33–17:09
the harsh conditions of planets,
and the biology, the chemistry, the engineering,
the robotics, the materials, all of that,
that's just a nice way to come up with cool new things.
- Great forcing function, yeah.
- Yeah, it's a forcing, exactly.
It's a forcing function like survival.
Don't get this right, you die.
So, and that you can bring back to Earth
and it will improve, like figuring out food in space
will make you figure out how to eat,
live healthier lives here on Earth.
- So true, I mean, some of the technologies
that we're directly looking at right now
for space habitats, it's hard to keep humans alive
in this really fragile little pocket against the vacuum
and all of the dangers that the space environment presents.
Some of the technologies we are gonna have to figure out
is energy efficient, cooling and air conditioning,
air filtration, scrubbing CO2 from the air,
being able to have habitats that are themselves resilient
to extremes of space weather and radiation.
And some of these are direct translational opportunities
for areas turned by natural disasters.
People in California a decade ago
would never have had to think about having an airtight house
but now with wildfires, maybe you do want something close
to an airtight house, how do you manage that?
There's a lot of technologies
from the space habitation world
that we are hoping we can actually bring back down
to benefit life on Earth as well
in these extreme environment contexts.
- Okay, so you mentioned to go back to swarm.
- Yeah.
- So that was interesting to you,
first of all, in your own work,
but also I believe you said something
that was inspiring from Neil Stephenson as well.
So when you say swarm, are you thinking about architectures
or are you thinking about artificial intelligence
like robotics or are those kind of intermixed?
- I think the future that we're seeing
is that they're going to be intermixed,
which is really exciting.
So the future of space habitats
are one of intelligent structures,
maybe not all the way to how
and the 2001 "Space Odyssey" reference
that scares people about the habitat
having a mind of its own.
But certainly we're building systems now
where the habitat has sensing technology
that allows it to communicate its basic functions,
maintaining life support for the astronauts,
but could also communicate in symbiosis
with these swarm robots
that would be on the outside of the spacecraft,
whether it's in a microgravity orbiting environment
or on the surface.
And these little robots, they crawl,
just a la Neil Stephenson and "Seveneves,"
they crawl along the outside of the spacecraft
looking for micrometeorite punctures
or gas leaks or other faults and defects.
And right now we're just working on the diagnosis.
So can the swarm with its collective intelligence
act in symbiosis with the spacecraft and detect things?
But in the future, we'd also love
for these little micro robots to repair in situ
and really be like ants living in a tree
all together connected to the spacecraft.
- Do you envision the system to be fully distributed
and just like an ant colony
if one of them is damaged or whatever,
loses control and all those kinds of things
that that doesn't affect the performance
of the complete system
or doesn't need to be centralized?
This is more like almost a technical question.
Do you think we could-- - Good architecture question.
- Right, from the ground up,
it's so scary to go fully distributed.
- Yes. (laughing)
- But it's also exceptionally powerful, right?
A robust, resilient to the harsh conditions of space.
Where do you, if you look into the next 10, 20, 100 years,
starting from scratch,
do you think we should be doing
architecture-wise distributed systems?
- For space, yes, because it gives you this redundancy
and safety profile that's really critical.
So whether it's small swarm robots
where it doesn't matter if you lose a few of them,
to habitats that instead of having
a central monolithic habitat,
you might actually be able to have
a decentralized node of a space station
so that you can kind of right out of "Star Wars,"
you can shut a blast door if there's a fire
or if there's a conflict in a certain area
and you can move the humans and the crew
into another decentralized node of the spacecraft.
There's another idea out of Neil Stephenson's "Seveneves"
actually where these arclets,
which were decentralized spacecraft that could form
and dock little temporary space stations with each other
and then separate and go off on their way
and have a decentralized approach to living in space.
- So the self-assembly component of that too,
so this is your PhD work and beyond.
You explored autonomously self-assembling
space architecture for future space tourists' habitats
and space stations in orbit around Earth, Moon, and Mars.
There's few things I personally find sexier
than self-assembling space,
autonomously self-assembling space architecture.
In general, it doesn't even need to be space.
The idea of self-assembling architectures
is really interesting, like building a bridge
or something like that through self-assembling materials.
It feels like an incredibly efficient way to do it
because optimization is built in.
So you can build the most optimal structures
given dynamic, uncertain changing conditions.
So maybe can you talk about your PhD work,
about this work, about Tesserae?
What is it in general?
Any cool stuff 'cause this is super cool.
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So Tesserae is my PhD research.
It's this idea that we could take tiles
that construct a large structure like a buckyball.
Yeah, this is exactly what we're looking at here,
which is the tiles that are packed flat in a rocket.
They're released to float in microgravity.
Magnets, pretty powerful electropermanent magnets
on their edges draw them together for autonomous docking.
So there's no human in the loop here
and there's no central agent coordinating,
saying tile one, go to tile two.
It's completely decentralized system.
They find each other on their own.
What we don't show in this video
is what happens if there's an error, right?
So what happens if they bond incorrectly?
The tiles have sensing, so proximity sensing,
magnetometer, other sensors that allow them
to detect a good bond versus a bad bond
and pulse off and self-correct,
which anybody who works in the field of self-assembly
will tell you that error detection and correction,
just like error detection in a DNA sequence
or protein folding is really important part of the system
for that robustness.
And so we've done a lot of work to engineer
that ability for the tiles to be self-determining.
They know whether they're forming the structure
that they're supposed to form or not.
- They know if they're in a toxic relationship
and they need to get out.
- Right, right, if they need to separate, exactly, yeah.
- All right, this is like so amazing.
And for people who are just listening to this,
yeah, there's a lot, I mean, how large are these tiles?
- So the size that we use in the lab,
they can really be any size
'cause we can scale them down to do testing in microgravity.
So we sent tiles that were about three inches wide
to the International Space Station a couple of years ago
to test the code, test the state machine,
test the algorithm of self-assembly.
But now we're actually building
our first ever human scale tiles.
They're me human size, so a little smaller
than maybe your average human,
but they're 2.5 feet on edge length.
The larger scale that we would love to build in the future
would actually be tiles that are big enough
to form a buckyball, big open spherical volume,
spherical approximation volume,
that'd be about 10 meters in diameter, so 30 feet,
which is much bigger and grander in terms of open space
than any current module on the ISS.
And one of the goals of this project was to say,
what's the purpose of next generation space architecture?
Should it be something that really inspires
and delights people when you float into that space?
Can you get goosebumps in the way that you do
when you walk into a really stunning piece
of architecture on Earth?
And so we think that self-assembly,
this modular reconfigurable algorithm
for constructing space structures in orbit
is gonna give us this promise of space architecture
that's actually worth living in.
- Living in, oh, I thought you also meant
from like outside artistic perspective,
when you see the whole thing, it's just--
- With the aesthetics of it, absolutely.
§03Transcript · 17:11–25:25
You know, when you like go like into Vegas,
whenever you go into a city and it like over the hill
appears in front of you, and I mean,
there's something majestic about seeing like,
wow, humans created that.
It gives you like hope about like,
if these a bunch of ants were able to figure out
how to build skyscrapers that light up.
And in general, the design of these tiles
and the way you envision it are pretty scalable.
- Yes, and they're inspired by exactly
what you mentioned a moment ago,
which is we have these patterns of self-assembly on earth.
And there's a lot of fantastic MIT research
that we're building this concept on.
So like Daniela Rus at CSAIL and Pebbles
taking the power of magnets to create units
that are themselves interchangeable,
this notion of programmable matter.
And so we're interested in going really big with it
to build big scale space structures with programmable tiles.
But there's also a really fascinating, you know,
end of that on the other side of the spectrum,
which is how small can you go with matter
that's programmable and stacks and builds itself
and creates a bridge or something in the future.
- What do you envision the thing would look like?
Like when you imagine a thing far into the future
where there's, so we're not even thinking about like,
small space, let's not call them small,
but are currently sized space stations,
but like something gigantic.
What do you envision?
Is this something with symmetry
or is this something we can't even come up with yet?
Is there beautiful structures that you imagine in your mind?
- I've got three candidates that I would love to build.
If we're talking about monumental space architecture,
one is what does a space cathedral look like?
It can be a secular cathedral,
doesn't necessarily have to be about religion,
but that notion of long sight lines,
inspiring, stunning architecture when you go in.
And you can imagine floating,
instead of being on the ground and only looking up,
in space, you could be in a central node
and each direction you look at,
all the cardinal directions are spires going off
in a really large and long way.
So that's concept number one.
Number two would be something more organic
that's not just geometric.
So here, one of the ideas that we're working on at MIT
in my lab is to say, could you,
instead of the tesserae model, right?
Which is self-assembling a shell,
could you define a module that's a node,
a small node that someone can live in
and you self-assemble a lot of those together,
they're called a plesiohedrons, like space filling solids,
and you dock a bunch of them together
and you can create a really organic structure out of that.
So the same way that muscles accrete to appear,
you can have these nodes that dock together
and one shape that I would love to form out of this
is something like a nautilus, a seashell,
that beautiful Fibonacci spiral sequence
that you get in that shape,
which I think would be a stunning and fabulous
aggregated space station.
- You said so many cool words, plesiohedron.
- Yeah, plesiohedron.
- So that's a space filling--
- Solid, the simplest thing to think of is like a cube.
- Oh, cubes. - A cube, right?
So you can stack cubes together
and if you had an infinite number of cubes,
you'd fill all that space,
there's no gaps in between the cubes,
they stack and fill space.
Another plesiohedron is a truncated octahedron
and that's actually one of the candidate structures
that we think would be great for space stations.
- What's the truncated part?
- Ah, so you cut off,
an octahedron actually has little pointy areas,
you truncate certain sections of it
and you get surfaces that are on the structure
that are cubes and I think hexagons,
I have to remind myself exactly what the faces are.
But overall, a truncated octahedron can be bonded
to other truncated octahedrons and just like a cube,
it fills all the gaps as you build it out.
So you can imagine two truncated octahedrons,
they come together at an airlock,
which is what we space people call doors in space
and you dock them on all sides
and you've basically created this decentralized network
of space nodes that make a big space station
and once you have enough of them
and you're growing with enough big units,
you can do it in any macro shape you want,
that's where the Nautilus comes in,
this could be designed an organically inspired shape
for a space station.
- Can I just say how awesome it is to hear you say,
we space people.
I know you meant people that are doing research
on space exploration, space technology,
but it also made me think of a future,
there's earth people and there's those space people.
- I'd love to unite those two.
- Yeah, no, no, for sure, for sure.
But like, it's like New Yorkers
and like Texans or something like that.
Yeah, of course, you live for a time in New York
and then you go up to Boston
but for a time you're the space people.
I know those space people, they're kind of wild up there.
- Let's see how that dynamic evolves.
- Yeah, exactly, there's that culture, culture forms
and I would love to see what kind of culture,
once you have sort of more and more civilians,
I mean, there's a human,
I mean, I love psychology and sociology
and I'll maybe ask you about that too,
which is like the dynamic between humans.
You have to kind of start considering that
and you start spending more and more time up in space
and start sending civilians,
start sending bigger and bigger groups of people.
And then of course, the beautiful and the ugly emerges
from the human nature that we haven't been able to escape
up to this point.
But when you say the plesiohedrons, these kinds of shapes,
are they multifunctional?
Like is the idea you'd be able to,
humans can occupy them safely in some of them
and some others have some other purposes?
- Exactly, one could be sleeping quarters,
one could be a greenhouse or an agricultural unit,
one could be a storage depot,
essentially all of the different rooms or functions
that you might need in a space station
could be subdivided into these nodes
and then stacked together.
And one of the promises of both Tesserae,
my original PhD research, which is these shells,
and then this follow-on node concept
is that right now we build space stations
and once they're built, they're done.
You can't really change them profoundly,
but the benefit of a modular self-assembling system
is you can disassemble it,
you can completely reconfigure it.
So if your mission changes
or the number of people in space that you wanna host,
if you have a space conference happening
like South by Southwest.
- I was thinking space party,
but space conference is good too.
(Tesserae laughs)
- Then maybe all of a sudden you want to change out
what were window tiles yesterday, cupola tiles,
and make them into a birthing port
so that you can welcome five new spaceships
to come and join you in space.
That's what this promise of reconfigurable space architecture
might allow us to explore.
- I've been hanging out with Grimes recently,
I just feel like she belongs up in space.
This is like designed for artists, essentially.
I imagine, I mean, this is what South by
keeps introducing me to,
there's like the weird and the beautiful people
and like the artists.
And it feels like there's a lot of opportunities
for art and design.
- 100%.
- It's like space is a combination of arts,
design and great engineering.
It's a safety critical with like the highest of stakes.
So don't, you can't mess it up.
And is this, first of all, you're talking about tiling.
So Neil Stephenson is obsessed about tiling.
I don't know if it's related to any of this,
but he seems to be obsessed with like,
how do you tile a space?
That's like a geometric notion, like the tessellation.
And it's, I mean, it's a beautiful idea for architecture
that you can self-assemble these different shapes
and you can have probably some centralized guidance
of the kind of thing you want to build.
But they also kind of figure stuff out themselves
in terms of the low level details,
in terms of the figuring out
when everything fits just right.
For the OCD people, like, what's that subreddit?
Pleasantly, it's like really fun.
Everything, they have like videos of everything
§04Transcript · 25:27–32:32
is just pleasant when everything just fits perfectly.
- Very pleasing.
All the tolerances come together.
- So they figure that out on themselves
and the local robotics problem.
But by the way, was Daniela Rose Pebbles,
was the Pebbles Project?
- Yeah, the Pebbles Project are little cubes
that have EPMs in them, electropermanent magnets,
and they can self-disassemble.
So they'll turn off and so you'll have this little structure
that all of a sudden can flip the little pebbles over
and essentially just disaggregate.
- They have to make some pleasing sounds.
- Yes.
(imitates sound)
- And that's gonna, so I'm supposed to talk to Daniela,
so I'll probably spend an hour just discussing
the sounds on the pebbles.
Okay, what were we talking about?
So that's, 'cause you mentioned two, I think.
- Right, my third one.
- Yeah, is there a third one?
- My third one is a ring world,
just because every science fiction book ever
that's worth anything has a ring world in it.
And--
- Is it a donut?
- A donut, yeah, so really big torus
that could encircle a planet
or encircle another celestial body,
maybe an asteroid or a small moon.
And the promise here is just the beauty
of being able to have that geometry in orbit
and all that surface area for solar panels
and docking and essentially just all of what that enables,
to have a ring world at that scale in orbit.
- By the way, for the viewers,
we're looking at figure 11, what paper is this from?
This is a hexagonal tiling of a torus
generated in Mathematica, referencing code
and approach from two citations.
So we're looking at a tiled donut, and I'm now hungry.
So this is the, is this from your thesis or no?
- This is probably, I mean, this is in my thesis.
This looks like it was one of my earlier papers.
This was an approach to say, great,
we've come up with this tessellation approach
for a buckyball.
And we picked the buckyball
because it is the most efficient surface area
to volume shape and what's expensive in space,
the surface area, shipping up all that material.
So we wanted something that would maximize the volume.
But if we think about ring worlds and other shapes,
we wanted to look at how do you tile a torus,
and this is one example with hexagons,
to be able to say, could we take this same tesserae approach
of self-assembling tiles and create other geometries?
- This is so freaking cool.
That's awesome.
So you mentioned microgravity, and I saw,
I believe that there's a picture of you
floating in microgravity.
When did you get to experience that?
What was that like?
- Ah, so I've flown nine times
on the affectionately known as the Vomit Comet.
It's the parabolic flight, and essentially,
it does what you'd want a plane never to do.
It pitches really steeply upwards at 45 degrees.
- Oh, that's a picture of you.
- Yeah, yeah.
That's tesserae.
That's super early in my PhD.
Some of just the passive tiles,
before we even put electronics in,
we were just testing the magnet polarity
and the, essentially, is it an energy favorable structure
to self-assemble on its own?
So we tweaked a lot of things between--
- Are we looking at a couple of them?
- Yeah, you're looking at a bunch of them there.
It's almost 32 of them.
Yeah, they're clumping.
They're clumping, yeah.
- Can you comment on what's the difference
between microgravity and zero gravity?
- Yes, so there is--
- Is that an important difference?
- It's an important difference.
There is no zero gravity.
There's no, nothing, there's, in the universe,
there is no such thing as zero gravity.
So Newton's law of gravity tells us
that there's always gravity attraction
between any two objects.
So zero G is a shorthand that some of us fall into using,
where it's a little easier to communicate to the public.
The accurate term is microgravity,
where you are essentially floating, you're weightless,
but generally in free fall.
So on the parabolic flights, the Vomit Comet,
you're in free fall at the end of the parabola.
And in orbit around the Earth when you're floating,
you're also in free fall.
So that's micro-G. - What was it like?
So affectionately called Vomit Comet,
I'm sure there's a reason why it's called affectionately.
So what's it like?
What's your first time,
so both philosophically, spiritually, and biologically,
what's it like?
- It's profound.
It is unlike anything else you will experience on Earth
because it is this true feeling of weightlessness
with no drag.
So the closest experience you could think of
would be floating in a pool,
but you move slowly when you float in a pool
and your motion is restricted.
When you're floating, it's just you and your body flying,
like in a dream.
It takes the littlest amount of energy,
like a finger tap against the wall of the plane
to shoot all the way across the fuselage.
- Wow, and you can move at full speed.
You can move your arms. - Exactly.
- So your muscles work. - There's no, yeah.
- There's no resistance. - There's no resistance.
They actually tell you to make a memory
when you're on the plane
because it's such a fleeting experience for your body
that even a few days later,
you've already forgotten exactly what it felt like.
It's so foreign to the human experience.
- They kind of suggest that you explicitly try
to really form this into a memory
and then you can do the replay.
Is that for training? - Cognitively freeze it.
Yeah. (laughs)
- Save.
When we have Neuralink, we can replay that.
- There you go.
- We can replay that memory.
So in terms of how much stress it has on your body,
is it biologically stressful?
- You do feel a 2G pullout, right?
So the cost of getting those micro G parabolas
is you then have a 2G pullout.
And that's hard.
You have to train for it.
If you move your neck too quickly in that 2G pullout,
you can strain muscles.
But I wouldn't say that it's actually
a profound, tough thing on the body.
It's really just an incredibly novel experience.
And when you're in orbit and you're not having to go
through the ups and downs of the parabolic plane,
there's a real grace and elegance.
And you see the astronauts learn to operate
in this completely new environment.
- What are some interesting differences
between the parabolic plane
and when you're actually going up in orbit?
Is it that with orbit you can look out
and see that blue little planet of ours?
- You can see the blue marble,
the stunning overview effect,
which is something I hope to see one day.
What's also really different is if you're in orbit
for any significant period of time,
there's gonna be a lot more physiological changes
to your body than if you just did an afternoon flight
on the Vomit Comet.
Everything from your bones, your muscles,
your eyeballs change shape.
There's a lot of different things that happen
for long duration spaceflight.
And we still have to, as scientists,
we still have to solve a lot of these interesting challenges
to be able to keep humans thriving in microgravity
or deep duration space missions.
- Deep duration space missions.
Okay, let's talk about this.
I was just gonna ask a bunch of dumb questions.
So approximately how long does it take to travel to Mars?
Asking for a friend.
- Asking for a friend, as we all do.
About three years for a round trip.
And that's not that it actually takes that long.
- Why the round trip?
Is that?
- Well, you're just asking about the one way trip.
- Got it, got it, got it.
- So okay, cool.
So for just like literally flying to Mars in a round,
it takes three years.
There's some interstitial time there
because you really can only go between Earth and Mars
§05Transcript · 32:35–40:10
at certain points in their orbits
where it's favorable to make that journey.
And so part of that three years
is you take the journey to Mars a few months,
six to nine months.
You're there for a period of time
until the orbits find a favorable alignment again.
And then you come back another six to nine months.
- So one way travel, six to nine months.
They hang out there on vacation and come back.
- Forced vacation.
- Forced vacation.
- You come back.
- Me, who loves working all the time,
all vacation is forced vacation.
All right.
Okay, so that gives us a sense of duration.
And we can maybe also talk about longer and longer
and longer duration as well.
What are the hardest aspects of living in space
for many days, for let's say 100 days, 200 days?
Maybe there's a threshold when it gets really tough.
What are some stupid little things
or big things that are very difficult
for human beings to go through?
- So one big thing and one little thing.
And there's two classic problems
that we're trying to solve in the space industry.
One is radiation.
It's not as much of a problem for us right now
on the International Space Station
because we're still protected
by part of Earth's magnetosphere.
But as soon as you get farther out into space
and you don't have that protection
once you leave the Van Allen belt area of the Earth
and the cocoon around the Earth,
we have really serious concerns about radiation
having an effect on human health long-term.
That's the big one.
The small one, and I say it's small
because it seems mundane,
but it actually is really big in its own way,
is mental health and how to keep people happy and balanced.
And you were alluding to some of the psychological challenges
of having humans together on missions
and especially as we try to scale
the number of humans in orbit or in space.
So that's another big challenge
is how to keep people happy and balanced and cooperating.
- That's not an issue on Earth at all.
- At all.
- Okay, so we'll talk about each of those
in a bit more detail,
but let me continue on the chain of dumb questions.
What about food?
What's a good source for food in space?
And what are some sort of standard go-to meals, menus?
- Right now, your go-to menu
is gonna be mostly freeze-dried.
Every so often, NASA will arrange for a fun stunt
or fresh food to get up to station.
So they did bake DoubleTree cookies with Hilton
a couple of years ago, as I recall,
I think sometime before the pandemic.
But there's work actually in our lab at MIT,
Maggie Koblentz, one of my staff researchers,
is looking at the future of fermentation.
Everybody loves beer, right?
Beer and wine and kimchi and miso,
these foods that have just been really important
to human cultures for eons
because we love the umami and the better flavor in them.
But it turns out they also have a good shelf life
if done properly.
And they also have an additional health benefit
for the microbiome, for probiotics and prebiotics.
So we're trying to work with NASA
and convince them to be more open-minded
to fermented food for long-duration deep space missions.
That we think is one of the future elements
in addition to in-situ growing your own food.
- Okay, this is essential for the space party,
is the space beer.
- Yes, it's the fermented product, yes.
- Okay, cool.
In terms of water,
what's a good source of drinkable water?
Like where do you get water?
Do you have to always bring it on board with you?
And is there a compressed, efficient way of storing it?
- So to steal a line from Charlie Bolden,
who's the former administrator of NASA,
"This morning's fresh water is yesterday's coffee."
So if you think about what that means,
you drank the coffee yesterday.
- Right, as a child.
So it goes fully through the body.
- Fully through the body as the recycling system.
And then you drink what you peed out
as clarified, refined fresh water the next day.
That is one source of water.
Another source of water in the near neighborhood
of our solar system would be on the moon.
So water ice deposits, there's also water on Mars.
This is one of the big things that's bringing people
to want to develop infrastructure on the moon,
is once you've gotten out of the gravity well of earth,
if you can find water on the moon and refine it,
you can either make it into propellant
or drinkable water for humans.
And so that's really valuable as a potential gateway
out into the rest of the solar system
to be able to get propellant
without always having to ship it up from earth.
- So how much water is there on Mars?
- It's a great question, I do not know.
- We don't know this yet, right?
- I know there's water at the caps.
I suspect NASA from all of the satellite studies
that they've done at Mars have a decent idea
of what the water deposits look like,
but I don't know to what degree
they have characterized those.
- I really hope there's life
or traces of previous life on Mars.
- This is a special spot in my heart
because I got to work on SHERLOCK,
which is the astrobiology experiment
that's on Mars right now,
searching for what they would say in a very cautious way
is signs of past habitability.
They wanna be careful not to get people overly excited
and say we're searching for signs of life.
They're searching to see if there would have been organics
on the surface of Mars or water in certain areas
that would have allowed for life to flourish.
And I really love this prospect.
I do think within our lifetimes,
we'll get a better answer about finding life
in our solar system if it's there.
If not on Mars, maybe Europa, one of the icy worlds.
- So you like astrobiology.
- I do.
- This is part of the,
it's not just about human biology,
it's also other extraterrestrial alien biology.
- Search for life in the universe.
- Okay. - Yeah.
- Does that scare you or excite you?
- It excites me, profoundly excites me.
- That there's other alien civilizations
potentially very different than our own?
- I think there's gotta be some humility there
and certainly from science fiction,
we have plenty of reasons to fear that outcome as well.
But I do think as a scientist,
it would be profoundly exciting if we were to find life,
especially in the near neighborhood of our solar system.
Right now, we would expect it
to be most likely microbial life,
but we have a real serious challenge in astrobiology,
which is it may not even be carbon-based life.
And all of our detectors,
we only know to look for DNA or RNA.
How would you even build a detector
to look for silicon-based life or different molecules
than what we know to be the fundamental molecules for life?
- And then you mentioned offline Sarah Walker.
I mean, the question that she's obsessed with
is even just defining life.
What is life to look outside the carbon-based?
I mean, to look outside of basically anything
we can even imagine chemically,
to look outside of any kind of notions
that we think of as biology.
Yeah, it's really weird.
So you now get into this land of complexity,
of measuring how many assembly steps
it takes to build that thing.
- Right.
- And maybe dynamic movement or some maintenance
of some kind of membrane structures.
We don't even know which properties life should have,
whether it should be able to reproduce
and all those kinds of things,
or pass information, genetic type of information.
We don't know.
And it's like, it's so humbling.
I mean, I tend to believe that there could be
something like alien life here on earth,
and we're just too human biology obsessed
to even recognize it.
- The shadow biosphere,
I remember you and Sarah were talking about.
- I mean, that's like, speaking of beer,
I mean, that's something I wanted to make sure,
in all of science, to shake ourselves out of,
like, remind ourselves constantly how little we know.
'Cause it might be right in front of our nose.
§06Transcript · 40:13–48:41
Like, I wouldn't be surprised if, like,
trees are, like, orders of magnitude
more intelligent than humans.
They're just operating at a much slower scale,
and they're, like, talking shit about us the whole time.
Like, about silly humans that take everything seriously,
and we start all kinds of nuclear wars,
and we quarrel, and we tweet about it,
and then, but the trees are always there,
just watching us silly humans.
- Like the Ents in "Lord of the Rings."
- Exactly.
So, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, obviously, I'm joking on that one,
but there could be stuff like that.
Well, let me ask you the Drake equation,
the big question, how many, like,
obviously, nobody knows, but what's your gut,
what's your hope, as a scientist, as a human,
how many alien civilizations are out there?
- As a ex-physicist, I'm now much more
on the aerospace engineering side for space architecture,
but as an ex-physicist, I hope it is prolific.
I think the challenge is, if it's as prolific
as we would hope, if there are many, many,
many civilizations, then the question is, where are they?
Why haven't we heard from them?
And the Fermi paradox, is there some great filter
that life only gets to some level of sophistication
and then kills itself off through war,
or through famine, or through different challenges
that filter that society out of existence?
And it would be an interesting question
to try to understand if the universe was teeming with life,
why haven't we found it or heard from it yet,
to our knowledge?
- Yeah, I personally believe that it's teeming with life,
and you're right, I think that's a really useful,
productive engineering and scientific question
of what kind of great filter can just be destroying
all of that life, or preventing it from just constantly
talking to us silly descendants of apes.
That's a really nice question, like,
what are the ways civilizations can destroy themselves?
And-- - There's too many, sadly.
- Well, I don't think we've come up with most of them yet.
- That's also probably true.
- That's the thing, it's, I mean,
and like, if you look at nuclear war, some of it is physics,
but some of it is game theory, it's human nature,
it's how societies built themselves, how they interact,
how we create and resolve conflict,
and it gets back to the human question
on when you're doing long-term space travel,
how do you maintain this dynamical system
of flawed, irrational humans such that it persists
throughout time, to not just maintain the biological body,
but get people from not murdering each other,
and like each other sufficiently
to where you kinda fit well, but I think, you know,
if songs or poetry or books taught me anything,
if you like each other a little too much,
I mean, the problems arise,
'cause then there's always a third person who also likes,
and then there's the drama, it's like,
I can't believe you did that last night, whatever,
so, and then there's beer,
- Gets complicated quickly. - And it gets complicated
quickly, okay, anyway, back to the dumb questions,
'cause you answered this, there's an interview
where you answer a bunch of cool little questions
from young students and so on about like space.
One of them was playing music in space,
and you mentioned something about
what kind of instruments you could use
to play music in space, could you mention about
like does Spotify work in space,
and if I wanted to do a live performance,
what kind of instruments would I need?
- Yeah, I mean, you referenced culture before,
and I think this is one of the most exciting things
that we have at our fingertips,
which is to define a new culture for space exploration,
we don't just have to import cultural artifacts from Earth
to make life worth living in space,
and this musical instrument that you referenced
was a design of an object that could only be performed
in microgravity, - Oh, cool.
- So it doesn't sound the same way
when it's a percussive instrument,
when it's rattled or moved in a gravity environment,
it is unique. - Can we look it up?
- It's called the Telemetron, yeah, it's created by--
- Of course it's called the Telemetron,
that is so awesome.
- Created by Sans Fish and Nicole Lillier,
two amazing graduate students and staff researchers
on my team. - What does it look like?
- It looks steampunk, actually, yeah,
it's a pretty cool design, it looks like
it's a geometric solid that has these interesting artifacts
on the inside, and it has a lot of sensors, actually,
additionally on the inside, like IMUs,
inertial measurement sensors, that allow it to detect
when it's floating and when it's not floating,
and provides this really kind of ethereal,
they later sonify it, so they use electronic music
to turn it into a symphony or turn it into a piece,
and yeah, this is the object, the Telemetron.
- How does a human interact with it?
- By tossing it, so it's an interactive
musical instrument, it actually requires another partner,
so the idea was that it's something like a dance,
or just something like a choreography in space.
- Got it, and speaking of which,
you also talked about sports, and ball sports,
like playing soccer, so you mentioned that,
so your muscles can move at full speed,
and then if you push off the wall lightly,
you fly across, zoom across, so how does the physics
of that work, can you still play soccer,
for example, in space?
- You can, but one of the most intuitive things
that we all learn as babies, right,
is whenever you throw something,
if I was gonna toss something to you,
I'd toss it up, 'cause I know that it has to compensate
for the fact that that Keplerian arc is gonna drop down,
the equations of motion are gonna drop down,
I would, in space, I would just shoot something
directly towards you, so like straight line of sight,
and so that would be very different
for any type of ball sport, is to retrain
your human mind to have that as your intuitive
arc of motion, or lack of arc.
- From your experience, from understanding
how astronauts get adjusted to this stuff,
how long does it take to adjust to the physics
of this world, this other world?
- So even after one or two parabolic flights,
you can gain a certain facility
with moving in that environment,
I think most astronauts would say,
maybe several days on station, or a week on station,
and their brain flips, it's amazing,
the plasticity of the human brain,
and how quickly they are able to adapt,
and so pretty quickly, they become creatures
of this new environment.
- Okay, so that's cool, it's creating
a little bit of an experience, what about if you go
for more than 100 days, for one year,
for two years, for three years,
what challenges start to emerge in that case?
- So Scott Kelly wrote this amazing book
after he spent a year in space, and he's a twin,
it's absolutely fantastic that NASA got to do
a twin study, it's perfect.
So he wrote a lot about his experience
on the health side of what changed,
things like bone density, muscle atrophy,
eyesight changing because the shape of your eyeball changes,
which changes your lens, which changes how you see.
If we're then thinking about the challenges
between a year and three years,
especially if we're doing that three year trip to Mars
for your friend, who asked earlier,
then you have to think about nutrition,
and so how are you keeping all of these different needs
for your body alive, how are you protecting astronauts
against radiation, either having some type of a shell
on the spacecraft, which is expensive because it's heavy,
you know, if it's something like lead,
a really effective radiation shell,
it's gonna be a lot of mass, or is there a pill
that could be taken to try to make you less in danger
of some of the radiation effects?
A lot of this has not yet been answered,
but radiation is a really significant challenge
for that three year journey.
- And what are the negative effects of radiation
on the human body out in space?
- A higher likelihood to develop cancer at a younger age.
So you'd probably be able to get there and get back,
but you'd find yourself in the same way
if you were exposed to significant radiation on Earth,
you'd find significant bad health effects as you age.
- What do you think about, like, decades?
Do you think about decades, or is this, like,
an entire human lifetime? - I think about centuries.
- Centuries? - For my space,
but yeah, for decades, I think as soon as we get past
the three year mark, we'll absolutely want,
somewhere between three years and a decade,
we'll want artificial gravity.
And we know how to do that, actually.
The engineering questions still need to be tweaked
for how we'd really implement it,
but the science is there to know how we would spin
habitats in orbit and generate that force
§07Transcript · 48:44–57:10
so even if the entire habitat's not spinning,
you at least have a treadmill part of the space station
that is spinning, and you can spend some fraction
of your day in a near to 1G environment
and keep your body healthy.
- Wait, literally from just spinning?
- From spinning, yeah, centripetal force.
- That's fascinating. - So you generate this force.
If you've ever been in those carnival rides,
the Gravitrons that spin you up around the side,
that's the concept.
And this is actually one of the reasons why
we are spinning out a new company from my MIT lab.
- Spinning out, ha. - Spinning out, ha.
That was an accidental but well-noted space pun.
It's impossible to avoid. - Dad jokes, all right.
- But yeah, we're spinning out a new company
to look at next-generation space architecture
and how do we actually scale humanity's access to space,
and one of the areas that we wanna look at
is artificial gravity.
- Is there a name yet?
- Yep, there's a name.
We are brand new.
We are just exiting stealth mode,
so your podcast listeners will literally be among
some of the first to hear about it.
It's called Aurelia Institute.
- Beautiful.
- Aurelia is an old English word for chrysalis,
and the idea with this is that we, humanity, collectively,
are at this next stage of our metamorphosis,
like a chrysalis, into a space-faring species.
And so we felt that this was a good time,
a necessary time, to think about
next-generation space architecture,
but also Starfleet Academy,
if you know that reference from Star Trek.
- Yes, so let me ask a silly-sounding,
ridiculous-sounding, but probably extremely important
question, sex in space, including intercourse,
conception, procreation, birth,
like being a parent, like raising the baby.
So basically, from birth, well,
from the before-birth part,
like the birds and the bees and stuff,
and then the whole thing, how complicated is that?
I remember looking at the, thank you.
I remember looking at this exact Wikipedia page, actually,
and I remember being, the Wikipedia page is sex in space,
and fascinated how difficult of an engineering problem
the whole thing is.
Is that something you think about, too,
how to have generations of humans,
self-replicating organisms?
- Societies, yes, we are. - Yeah, societies, essentially.
I mean, I guess with micro,
like if you solve the gravity problem,
you solve a lot of these problems.
- That's the hope, yeah, is like the central challenge
of microgravity to human reproduction,
but we do host a workshop every year at Beyond the Cradle,
which is the space event that we run at MIT,
and we always do one on pregnancy in space,
or motherhood, or raising children in space,
'cause there are huge questions.
There've been a few mammal studies
that have looked at reproduction in space,
but there are still really major questions
about how does it work, how does the fetus evolve
in microgravity if you were pregnant in space?
And I think the near-term answer is just gonna be
we need to be able to give humans a 1G environment
for that phase of our development.
- Yeah, so there's some studies on mice in microgravity,
and it's interesting, like I think the mice,
like one of them, the mice weren't able to walk,
or like their understanding of physics, I guess,
is off or something like that.
- Yeah, the mental model, when you're really young
and you're kind of getting your mental model of physics,
we do think that that would change kids' abilities
to if they were born in microgravity,
their ability to have that intuition
around an Earth-based 1G environment might be missing,
'cause a lot of that is really crystallized
in early development, early childhood development.
So that makes sense that they would see that in mice, yeah.
- So what about life when we choose to park our vehicles
on another planet, on the moon, but let's go to Mars?
First of all, does that excite you,
humans going to Mars, like stepping foot on Mars?
And when do you think it'll happen?
- It does excite me.
I think visionaries like Elon are working to make that
happen in terms of building the road to space.
We are really excited about building out
the human lived experience of space once you get there.
So how are you gonna grow your food?
What is your habitat gonna look like?
I think it's profoundly exciting,
but I do think that there's a little bit
of a misunderstanding of Mars anywhere in the near future
being anything like a replacement for Earth.
So it is good for humanity to have these other pockets
of our civilization that can expand out beyond Earth.
But Mars is not in its current state
a good home for humanity.
Too many perchlorates in the soil,
you can't use that soil to grow crops.
Atmosphere is too thin, certainly can't breathe it,
but it's also just really thin compared to our atmosphere.
A lot of different challenges that would have to be
fundamentally changed on that planet to make it a good home
for a large human civilization.
- How does a large civilization of humans get built
on Mars and what do you think it gets,
starts being difficult?
So can you have a small base of like 10 people essentially,
kind of like the International Space Station
kind of situation?
And then can you get it to 100 to 1,000 to a million?
Are there some interesting challenges there
that worry you, saying that Mars is just not a good backup
at this time for Earth?
- I think small outposts, absolutely, like McMurdo, right?
So we have these models of really extreme environments
on Earth in Antarctica, for example,
where humans have been able to go
and make a sustainable settlement.
McMurdo style life on Mars, probably feasible in the 2030s.
So we wanna send the first human missions to Mars
and maybe as early as the end of this decade,
more likely early 2030s.
Moving anywhere beyond that in terms of a place
where like an entire human life would be lived,
where it's not just you go for a three month deployment
and you come back,
that is actually the big challenge line,
is just saying, is there enough technological sophistication
that can be brought that far out into space?
If you imagine your electronics break,
there's no Radio Shack, this dates me a little bit
that my mind jumps to Radio Shack,
but there's no supply chains on Mars
that can supply the level of technological sophistication
for all the products that we rely on on day-to-day life.
So you'd be going back to actually a very simple existence,
more like pioneer life out West
in the story of the US, for example.
And I think that the future of larger scale gatherings
of humans in orbit, or sorry, in space,
is actually gonna be in microgravity,
floating space cities,
not so much trying to establish settlements on the surface.
- So you think sort of a significant engineering investment
in terms of our efforts and money
should be on large spaceships
that perhaps are doing this kind of self-assembly,
all these kinds of things, and doing it in orbit,
maybe building a giant donut around the planet over time.
- Yeah, that is the goal.
And I think the current political climate
is such that you can't get the trillion dollar investment
to build, to start from scratch
and build the sci-fi megastructure.
But if you can build it in fits and starts,
in little different pieces,
which is another advantage of self-assembly,
it's much more like how nature works.
So it's biomimicry inspired way
for humanity to scale out in space.
- And whether it's out in space or on Mars,
the idea that sort of two people fall in love,
they have sex,
a child is born,
and then that couple has to teach that child
that like we, that they came from Earth.
I just love the idea that somebody is born on Mars
or out in space, and you have to be like,
that this is not actually like the original home,
just them looking at Earth
and being like, this is where we came from.
I don't know, that's really inspiring to me.
And the child being really confused
and then wanting to go back to TikTok,
or whatever they do.
- Whatever they do in that era.
I mean, there's great sci-fi, right,
about people being born on Mars,
and because it's a lower gravity environment,
they're taller, they're more gangly,
if they were actually able to develop there,
and then they come back to Earth,
and they're like second-class citizens,
'cause they can't function here in the same way,
'cause the gravity's too strong for them.
You see this in series like "The Expanse"
with the Belters and these different societies
that if we were to succeed in having human societies
§08Transcript · 57:13–1:05:35
grow up in different pockets,
it's not necessarily going to be easy for them
to always come back to Earth as their home.
- Yeah, different cultures form,
which is the positive way of phrasing it,
but it's also, this human history teaches us
that we like to form the other,
so there's this kind of conflict that naturally emerges.
Let me ask another sort of dark question.
What do you think about, coming from a military family,
there's still, sadly, wars in the world.
Do you think wars, military conflicts,
will follow us into space, wars between nations?
Like, from my perspective currently,
it just seems like space is a place for scientists
and engineers to explore ideas,
but the more and more progress you make,
does it worry you that nations start to step in
and form, you know, that go out,
unfold military conflict, whether it's in cyberspace,
in space, or actual hot war?
- I am really concerned about that,
and I do think for decades,
the scientific community in space has hung on
to this notion from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,
which is space is the province of all humankind,
peaceful uses of outer space only,
but I do think the rise in tensions
and the geopolitical scene that we're seeing,
I do, yeah, I do harbor a lot of concern
about hot wars following humanity out into space,
and it's worth trying to tie nations together
with more collaboration to avoid that happening.
The International Space Station is a great example.
I think it's something like 18 countries
are party to this treaty.
It might be less, it might be more,
and then of course, there's a smaller number of countries
that actually send astronauts,
but even at the fall of the Soviet Union
and through some tense times with Russia,
the ISS had been a place where the US and Russia
were actually able to collaborate between Mir and ISS.
I think it'd be really important right now, in particular,
to find other platforms where these hegemonic powers
in the world and developing world nations
can come and collaborate on the future of space
and purposefully intertwine our success
so that there's a danger to multiple parties
if somebody is a bad actor.
- So we're now talking as there's a war in Ukraine,
and I haven't been sleeping much.
I have family, friends, colleagues in both countries,
and I'm just talking to a lot of people,
many of whom are crying, refugees,
and there's a basic human compassion and love
for each other that I believe technology
can help catalyze and accelerate,
but there's also science.
There's something about rockets.
There's something about, and I mean like space exploration,
that inspires the world about the positive possibilities
of the human species.
So in terms of Ukraine and Russia and China and India
and the United States and Europe and everywhere else,
it seems like collaborating on giant space projects
is one way to escape these wars,
to escape these sort of geopolitical conflicts.
I mean, there's so much camaraderie to the whole thing,
and even in this little period of human history
we're living through, it seems like that's essential.
Even through this pandemic,
there is something so inspiring
about those like SpaceX rockets going up, for example.
- It's true.
- This reinvigoration of the space exploration efforts
by the commercial sector.
I don't know.
That was, as many of us have,
sort of some dark times during this pandemic,
just like loneliness and sometimes emotion and anger
and just hopelessness and politics,
and then you look at those rockets going up
and it just gives you hope.
So I think that's an understated sort of value
of space exploration,
is the thing that unites us and gives us hope.
Obviously also inspires young generations
and young minds to also contribute
in not necessarily in space exploration,
but in all of science and literature and poetry.
There's something about when you look up to the stars,
it makes you dream.
- Very true.
- And so that's a really good reason
to sort of invest in this,
whether it's building giant megastructures,
which is so freaking cool,
but also colonizing Mars.
Yeah, it's something to look forward to,
something that,
and not make it a domain of war,
but a domain of human collaboration
and human compassion, I think.
You're the founder and director
of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative.
It includes a ton of projects.
So I just wanted to,
they're focused, I guess, on life in space
from astrobiology, like we talked about, to habitats.
Are there some other interesting projects,
part of this initiative that you are,
that pop to mind that you find particularly cool?
- Absolutely.
One is the future of in-space manufacturing.
So if we're gonna build large-scale space structures,
yes, it's great to ship them up from Earth
and self-assemble them.
But what about extrusion in orbit?
It's one of the best technologies
to leverage in microgravity
because you can extrude a particularly long beam
that would sag in a normal gravity environment,
but might be able to become the basis of a truss
or a large-scale space structure.
So we're doing miniature tests of extrusion
and are excited to fly this
on the International Space Station in a few months.
We are working on swarm robots.
We have just announced, actually, MIT's return to the moon.
So my organization is leading this mission for MIT,
going back to the surface of the moon
as early as the end of this year, 2022,
maybe early 2023,
and trying to take data from our research payloads
at this historic South Pole site
where NASA's supposed to send the first humans back
on the Artemis III mission.
So our hope is to directly support
that human mission with our data.
- How does that connect to the swarm aspects?
Does it connect?
- Yes, yeah.
So we're actually gonna fly one of the little astro-ants,
that's the current plan,
one of the little swarm robots on the top of a rover
that's part of the mission.
- Ants riding a rover?
- Yes, exactly, an ant riding a rover.
That rover gets packed in a lander.
That lander gets packed in a SpaceX rocket.
So it's a whole nesting doll situation to get to the moon.
- Mother of robot dragons.
- Yes, yeah, exactly.
- So this one, a swarm of one?
- Swarm of one, exactly.
We're testing out.
It's a tech demonstration mission,
not a true swarm.
Yeah, there they are.
Those are the astro-ants.
- Wow, and this was a distributed system,
and in theory, you could have a ton of these.
- Yes, these could also be centralized.
So they have wireless technology
that could also talk to a central base station,
and we'll be assessing, kind of case by case,
whether it makes sense to operate them
in a decentralized swarm,
or to command them in a centralized swarm.
- Each robot is equipped with four magnetic wheels,
which enable the robot to attach to any magnetic surface,
so you can operate basically in any environment.
- He tested the, we tested the mobility of all robots
on different materials in a microgravity environment.
- On the vomit comet prior to going to the moon.
- That must look so cool.
So they're basically moving along
different metallic surfaces.
- Yeah, exactly.
It's interesting when you, just a minute ago,
talking about the reflection of
how space can be so aspirational and so uniting.
There's a great quote from Bill Anders
from the Apollo 8 mission to the moon,
which is he, it's the Earthrise photo
that was taken where you see the Earth
coming up over the horizon of the moon,
and the quote is something along the lines of,
"We came all the way to discover the moon,
"and what we really discovered was the Earth."
This really powerful image looking back.
And so we're also trying to think for our lunar mission,
we realize we're a very privileged group at MIT
to get the opportunity to do this.
How could we bring humanity along with us?
And so one of the things we're still testing out,
I don't know if we're gonna be able to swing it,
would be to do something like a Twitch Plays Pokemon,
but with the robot.
§09Transcript · 1:05:36–1:13:33
So let a lot of people on Earth actually control the robot,
or at least benefit from the data that we're gathering,
and try to release the data openly.
So we're exploring a couple of different ideas
for how do we engage more people in this mission.
- That would be surreal to be able to interact
in some way with the thing that's out there.
- Exactly. - On another surface.
- Direct connection. - Direct connection.
I think about artificial intelligence in that same way,
which is like building robots puts a mirror to us humans.
- Certainly.
- It makes us wonder about what is intelligence,
what is consciousness,
and what is actually valuable about human beings.
When an AI system learns to play chess better than humans,
you start to let go of this idea
that humans are special because of intelligence.
It's something else.
It's maybe the flame of human consciousness.
It's the capacity to feel deeply,
to both suffer and to love, all those things.
Somehow AI to me puts a mirror to that.
You mentioned HAL 9000.
You have to bring it up.
With these swarm bots crawling on the surface
of your cocoon in space.
- Right.
- I mean, all right, let me steel man
the HAL 9000 perspective here.
- Okay.
- The poor guy just wanted to maintain the mission,
and the astronauts were,
I mean, I don't know if people often talk about that,
but you know, like doctors have to make difficult decisions.
So when there's limited resources,
you actually do have to sacrifice human life often
'cause you have to make decisions.
- Right.
- And I think HAL is probably making that kind of decision
about what's more important,
the lives of individual astronauts or--
- The mission.
- The mission.
And I feel like AI and other humans
will need to make these decisions.
And it also feels like AI systems
will need to help make those decisions.
I don't know.
I guess my question is about
greater and greater collective intelligence by systems.
Do you worry about that?
What is the right way to sort of solve this problem,
keeping a human in the loop?
Do you think about this kind of stuff?
Or are they sufficiently dumb now,
the robots that's not yet on the horizon to think about?
- I think it should be on the horizon.
It's always good to think about these things early
because we make a lot of technical design decisions
at this phase working with swarm robots
that it would be better to have thought about
some of these questions early in the life cycle of a project.
There is a real interest in NASA right now
thinking about the future of human robot interaction, HRI,
and what is the right synergy
in terms of level of control for the human
versus level of dependence or control for the robot?
And we're beginning to test out more of these scenarios.
For example, the Gateway Space Station,
which is meant to be in orbit around the moon
as a staging base for the surface operations,
is meant to be able to function autonomously
with no humans in it for months at a time
'cause they think it's gonna be seasonal.
They think we might not be constantly staffing it.
So this will be a really great test of,
I don't know that anybody's yet worried
about how 9,000 evolving,
but certainly just the robustness of some of these AI systems
that might be asked to autonomously maintain the station
while the humans are away.
Or detection algorithms that are gonna say,
if you had a human pilot,
they might see debris in orbit and steer around it.
There'll be a lot of autonomous navigation
that has to happen.
That'll be one of the early test beds
where we'll start to get a little bit closer to that future.
- Well, the HRI component is really interesting to me,
especially when the I includes almost friendship
because people don't realize this, I think,
that we humans long for connection.
And when you have even a basic interaction
that's just supposed to be just serving you or something,
you still project,
it's still a source of meaning and connection.
And so you do have to think about that.
I mean, how 9,000,
the movie maybe doesn't portray it that way,
but I'm sure there's a relationship there
between the astronauts and the robot,
especially when you have greater and greater level
of intelligence.
And maybe that addresses the happiness question too.
- Yeah, I think there's a great book by Kate Darling,
who's one of my colleagues at MIT.
- Yeah, she's amazing.
She's already been on this podcast,
but we talk all the time and we're supposed to talk
and we've been missing each other
and we're gonna make it happen soon.
- Yeah.
- Come down to Texas, Kate.
All right.
Anyway, yeah, she's amazing.
And she has this book,
and she has her whole work is about this.
- Connection with robots, yeah.
- This beautiful connection that we have with robots.
But I think it's greater and greater importance
when it's out in space.
'Cause it could help alleviate some of the loneliness.
- Right.
One of the projects in the book that I gave you,
which is a catalog of the projects that we've worked on
over the last five years,
is this social robot that was developed at the Media Lab.
And one of the first years in 2017
that we flew a zero-g flight,
we took the social robot along
and tried to do a little bit of a very scaled down
human study to look at these questions.
Because you do imagine that we would form a bond,
a real bond with the social robots
that might be not just serving us on a mission,
but really be our teammates on a future mission.
And I do think that that could have a powerful role
in the mental health and just the stability of a crew
is to have some other robot friends come along.
- What do you, by the way, the book you mentioned
is "Into the Anthropocosmos,"
a whole space catalog from the space catalog.
- Get that reference.
- Yeah, so call it to Earth catalog,
a whole space catalog
from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative.
What about the happiness?
You said that that's one of the problems
of when you're out in space.
How do you keep humans happy?
Again, asking for a friend.
- Yes.
I mean, one of the big challenges is
you can't just open a window or walk out a door
and blow off steam, right?
You can't just go somewhere to clear your head.
And in that sense, you need to build habitats
that are homes that really care for the humans inside them
and have, whether it's biophilia
and a place where you can go and feel like you're in nature
or a VR headset, which for some people is a poor simulcrum,
but is maybe better than nothing.
You need to be thinking about
these technological interventions
that are gonna have to be part of your home
and be part of your maybe day-to-day ritual
to keep you steady and balanced and happy
or feeling fulfilled.
- What about other humans, relationship with other humans?
Do those get weird
when you get past a certain number of humans?
- I'm not an expert in this area,
but an anecdote that I'll share,
my understanding is that NASA has still not decided
whether it's better to send married couples
or single crew members in terms of
you want some level of stability,
you don't wanna have the drama of romantic relationships
like you're alluding to before,
but they can't decide because married couples also fight
and have a really tough dynamic.
And so there's a lot of open questions still to answer
about what is the ideal psychological makeup of a crew?
And we're starting to test some of these things
with the civilian crews
that are going up with Inspiration4,
like last fall with SpaceX and Axe-1
that's gonna fly in a few days here in March.
As we begin to lengthen the time of those civilian crews,
I think we'll start to learn a little bit more about
just average everyday human-to-human dynamics
and not the astronauts that are themselves selected
to be perfect human specimens, very good to work with,
easy to get along with.
- I wish we collected more data about this pandemic
because I feel like it's a good rough simulation
of what it'd be like out in space.
A lot of people were locked down, some married couples.
I think a lot of marriages broke up,
§10Transcript · 1:13:35–1:21:09
a lot of marriages got closer together.
And then the single people, some of them went off the cliff
and some of them discovered their new happiness
and meaning and so on.
It's a beautiful little experiment, a painful one.
Is there a thorough way to really test that?
'Cause it's such a costly experiment.
Send humans up there,
but I guess you can always return back to Earth
if it's not working out.
- That's what we hope.
(laughs)
That's what we hope, you don't have like a Apollo 13
situation that doesn't quite make it back.
But yeah, this is also why Mars is such a challenge.
The moon is only three days away.
That's a lot quicker to recover from
if there's a psychological problem with the crew
or any type of maintenance problem, anything.
Three years is such a challenge
compared to these other domains
that we've been getting more used to
in terms of human space flight.
So this is a question that we will need to have explored
more before we start really sending crews to Mars.
- So you're a young scientist.
Do you think in your lifetime you will go out into orbit,
you will go out beyond into deep space
and potentially step, you,
I don't know if you can call yourself a civilian.
I don't know if that's what you count as,
but you as a curious aunt from MIT, land, step on Mars.
- Yes.
(laughs)
That's a firm, that's a firm--
- Are you coming back?
- Firm, yes.
Yeah, I'm coming back.
I don't want that one-way mission,
I want the two-way mission.
But yes, I mean, I think we're already talking
about a pretty near-term opportunity
where I could send graduate students
to the International Space Station.
- First, okay.
(laughs)
- Not a sacrifice, but send graduate students--
- For the experience.
- For the experience.
Send graduate students to the ISS to do their research.
I do think you and I both would have an opportunity
to go to a lunar base of some sort within our lifetime.
And there's a good chance if we really wanted to,
we might have to really advocate for it,
apply to an astronaut program.
There will be some avenues for humans
in our lifetime to go to Mars.
- What's the bar for health?
Do you think that bar will keep getting lower and lower
in terms of how healthy, how athletic,
like how, the psychological profile,
all those kinds of things?
- Yeah, for one, we're gonna build more robust habitats
that don't depend on astronauts
being so impeccably well-trained.
So we're gonna make it better for inclusion
and just opening access to space.
But there's a fantastic group called Astro Access
that is already helping disabled space flyers
do zero-G flights and potentially get access to the ISS.
And some of the things that we think of as disabilities
on Earth are hyper abilities in space.
You don't need really powerful legs in space.
What you'd really benefit from having is a third arm,
more ways to kind of move yourself around
and grip and interact.
So we are already seeing a much more open-minded approach
to who gets to go to space.
And Astro Access is a wonderful organization
doing some of that work.
- I'm hoping introversion
will also be a superpower in space.
Okay, well, first I'd love to get your opinion
on commercial space flight,
what SpaceX, what Blue Origin are doing.
And also another question on top of that is,
because you've worked with a lot of different kinds
of people, culturally, what's the difference between
SpaceX or commercial type of efforts, NASA, and MIT?
- And academia.
- And academia.
- Yeah, so the first part of your question,
I am thrilled by all of the commercial activity in space.
It has really empowered our program.
So instead of me waiting for five years to get a grant
and get the money from the grant,
and only then can you send a project to space,
I got my fundraise, a lot like a startup founder,
and I directly buy access to space
on the International Space Station
through SpaceX or NanoRacks.
Same with Blue Origin and their suborbital craft.
Same with Axiom now.
Axiom's making plans for their own commercial space station.
It's not out of the realm of possibility,
but in a few years, I will rent lab space in orbit.
I will rent a module from the Axiom space station
or the orbital reef, which is the Blue Origin space station,
or NanoRacks is thinking about Starlab Oasis.
There's probably some other companies
that I'm not even aware of yet
that are doing commercial space habitat.
So I think that's fabulous.
And really empowering for our research.
- Is it affordable?
So like loosely speaking, does it become affordable
for like MIT type of research lab?
Does it, you know, or does it need to be a multi-university,
like a gigantic effort? - Consortium thing.
- Yeah, consortium thing.
- One of the reasons we're spinning out Aurelia
is we actually realized it's cheap enough,
it doesn't even have to be MIT.
And we wanted to start democratizing access
to these spaceflight opportunities
to a much broader swath of humanity.
Could you take a, you know,
Khan Academy educational course
about, hey, students around the world,
this is how you get ready for a zero-g flight.
And by the way, come fly with us next year,
which is something we're gonna do with Aurelia.
We're gonna bring, you know,
much more just kind of day-to-day folks on zero-g flights
and get them access to engaging in the space industry.
So it's become cheap enough
and the prices have dropped enough to consider even that.
So that's amazing.
It definitely doesn't have to be
a consortium of universities anymore.
It depends on what you wanna fly.
If you wanna fly James Webb,
a huge telescope that's decades in the making,
sure, you need a NASA allocation budget.
You need billions.
But for a lot of the stuff in the book
and our research portfolio,
it's actually becoming far more accessible.
- So that's commercial.
What about NASA and MIT academia?
- Yeah.
I think, you know,
people have been worried about NASA the last few years
because in some people's minds,
they are ceding ground to these commercial efforts.
But that's really not what's happening.
NASA empowered these commercial efforts
because they wanna free themselves up to go to Mars
and go to Europa
and continue being that really aspirational force
for humanity of pushing the boundary,
always pushing the boundary.
And if they were anchored in low-Earth orbit,
maintaining a space station indefinitely,
that's so much a part of their budget
that it was keeping them from being able to do more.
So it actually is really fantastic for NASA
to have grown this commercial ecosystem
and then that frees NASA up to go further.
And in academia,
we like to think that we will be able to do
the provocative next-generation research
that is going to unlock things at that frontier.
And we can partner with NASA.
We can go through a program
if we wanna send a probe out really far,
but we can also partner with SpaceX
and see what human life in a SpaceX Mars settlement
might look like and how we could design for that.
- Speaking of projects,
maybe are there other projects that pop to mind
from the Space Exploration Initiative
or maybe stuff from the book, the convention?
- Yeah. - Something super cool?
I mean, everything we've been talking about is cool,
but just something that pops to mind again?
- Yeah, so we talked about life in space
and you might need more arms than legs.
One of the projects by Valentina Sumini
was an air-powered robotics tail.
So it's a soft robotics tail
that essentially has a little camera on the back end of it,
can do computer vision and knows where to grapple,
so it's behind you.
It grapples onto something and holds you in space
and then you can actually free up both of your hands to work
so we're already starting to think about the design
of bionic humans or prosthetics or things
that would make you kind of like a cyborg
to augment your capabilities
§11Transcript · 1:21:11–1:29:12
when you're in a space environment.
- How would you control something like that?
So it's kind of like a, I mean, you can't call it a leg,
but whatever, it's a-- - An additional appendage.
- Appendage, so how would you,
what are ideas for controlling something like that?
- Yeah, so right now it's super, yeah, there you go.
- That's cool.
- Right now it's super manual.
It's basically just like a kind of a set pattern
of inflating as we're testing it,
but in the future, if we had a Neuralink,
I mean, this is something that you could imagine
directly controlling, just thinking thoughts
and controlling it.
That's a ways away.
- Yeah, so we talked about on the biology side,
astrobiology, there's probably agriculture stuff.
Is there other things that kind of feed the ecosystem
of out in space for survival?
Or the robotics architectures, the self-assembly stuff?
- So kind of combining something we were talking about,
you can form these relationships with objects
and anthropomorphize.
One of the things that we're thinking about for agriculture
created by Manwe and Somu, so two students at MIT,
was this little, it looks like a planet,
but it's inspired by, I think, a mandala
or Nepalese spinning wheel.
And you plant plants on the inside
and the astronaut has to spin it every day
to help the plant survive.
So it's a way to give the astronaut something to care about,
something that they are responsible for keeping alive
and can really invest themselves in.
And it's not necessary, right?
We have other ways to grow in orbit.
Hydroponics, liquid medium, trying to keep the liquid
around the plant roots is hard
'cause there's no gravity to pull it down
in a particular direction.
But what I loved about this project was they said,
"Sure, we have ways that the plants could grow
"on their own, but the astronauts might wanna care for it
"in the same way that we have little plants
"that come to be important to us, little plant friends."
So there's AgriFuge, that's an early model
of this manually spinning plant habitat.
- I guess this is the best of academic research
is you can do these kinds of wild ideas.
- Wild ideas, yeah.
- Well, I get to spend quite a bit of time
with Mr. Elon Musk and he's very stressed,
especially about Starship
and all those kinds of engineering efforts.
What do you think about how damn hard it is
to get out of space?
Like, are we humans gonna be able to do this?
- I don't know, I think it feels like
it's an engineering problem, it's a scientific problem,
but it's also just a motivation problem
for the entire human species.
And you also need to have superstar researchers
and engineers working on it.
So you have to get the best people in the world,
inspire them, and starting from a young age and kinda--
- It's inculcating us into why we do it.
- I mean, I guess this way it's exciting.
You don't know if we're gonna be able to pull this off.
(laughs)
We could fail miserably.
And that, I suppose, I mean,
that's where the best of engineering is done,
is success is not guaranteed.
And even if it happens, it might be very painful.
- I think that's what's so special
about what Elon is doing with SpaceX
is he takes these risks and he tests iteratively
and he'll see the spectacular failures
on the path to a successful Starship.
It's something that people have said,
"Why isn't NASA doing that?"
Well, that's 'cause NASA is doing that with taxpayer dollars
and we would all revolt if we saw NASA failing
at all these different stages.
But that level of spiral engineering theory of development
isn't super impressive.
And it's a really interesting approach
that SpaceX has taken.
And I think between people like Elon and Jeff Bezos
and Firefly and NASA and ESO, we are gonna get there.
They're building the road to space.
These trailblazers are doing it.
And now part of the challenge is to get the rest
of the public to understand that it's happening.
A lot of people don't know that we're going back to the moon,
that we're gonna send the first woman to the moon
within a few years.
A lot of people don't know
that there are commercial space stations in orbit,
that it's not just NASA that does space stuff.
So we have a big challenge to get more of humanity excited
and educated and involved again,
kind of like in the Apollo era
where it was a big deal for everybody.
- Well, a lot of that is also one of the big,
impressive things that Elon does, I think,
extremely well is the social media,
is the getting people excited.
And I think that actually, he's helped NASA step their game
up in terms of social media.
There's something about, yeah, the storytelling,
but also not like, you know, like authentic
and just real and raw engineering.
There's a lot of excitement for that.
Humor and fun also.
All of those things you realize,
the thing that make up the virality of the meme
is beautiful.
You have to kind of embrace that.
And to me, this kind of,
I criticize a lot of companies based on this.
I talked to a bunch of CEOs and so on,
and it's just like, there's a caution.
Like, let us do this like press conference thing
where when the final product is ready and it's overproduced
as opposed to the raw, the gritty just showed off.
And something that I think MIT is very good at doing
is just showing the raw by nature, the mess of it.
And the mess of it is beautiful.
And people get really excited and failure is really exciting.
When the thing blows up and you're like, oh shit,
that makes it even more exciting when it doesn't blow up.
And doing all of that on social media
and showing also the humans behind it,
the individual young researchers or the engineers
or the leaders where everything's at stake.
I don't know.
I think I'm really excited about that.
I do want MIT to do that more for students
to show off their stuff and not be pressured
to do this kind of generic official presentation,
but show their, become a YouTuber also.
Like show off your raw research as you're working on it
in the early days.
I hope that's the future.
Things like, I was teasing about TikTok earlier,
but these kinds of things I think inspire young people
to show off their stuff, to show their true self,
the rawness of it.
'Cause I think that's where engineering is best.
And I think that will inspire people
about all the cool stuff we could do in space.
- I should say, I couldn't agree more.
And I actually think that this is why we need
a real life Starfleet Academy right now.
It was the place where the space cadets got to go
to learn about how to engage in a future of life in space.
And we can do it in a much better way.
There are a bunch of groups that traditionally
haven't thought that they could engage in aerospace.
Whether it's because you were told
you had to be into math and science.
Now we need space lawyers.
We need space artists like Grimes, right?
We need really creative, profoundly interesting people
to wanna see themselves in that future.
And I think it's a big challenge to us
in the space industry to also do some more diversity,
equity and inclusion and show a broader swath of society
that there's a future for them
in this space exploration vision.
- Let me push back on one thing.
We don't need space lawyers.
I'm just kidding.
Okay, it's a joke.
- We do, we do, we do.
- Okay, we do.
The lawyers are great.
I love them.
Okay, let me ask a big ridiculous question.
What is the most beautiful idea to you
about space exploration?
Whether it's the engineering, the astrobiology,
the science, the inspiration, the human happiness
or aliens, I don't know.
What do you like inspires you every day
in terms of its beauty, in terms of its awe?
- As a ex physicist, what I've always found so profound
is just that at really, really small scales,
like particle physics and really, really big scales,
like astrophysics, there are similarities
in the way that those systems behave and look.
And there's a certain beautiful symmetry in the universe
that's just kind of waiting for us to tie together
the physics and really understand it.
That is something that just really captivates me.
And I would love to, even though I'm now much more
on the applied space exploration side,
I really try to keep up with what's happening
§12Transcript · 1:29:14–1:37:28
in those physics areas 'cause I think that will be
a huge answer for humanity along the lines of
are we alone in the universe?
- One of the fascinating things about you
is you have a degree in physics, mathematics,
and philosophy, and now, I don't know,
would you call it aerospace engineering maybe kind of thing?
So you have it afoot in all of these worlds,
the theoretic, the beauty of that world,
and the philosophy somehow is in there,
and now the very practical, pragmatic implementation
of all these wild ideas, plus your incredible communicator,
all of those things.
What did you pick up from those different disciplines?
Or maybe I'm just romanticizing
all those different disciplines.
But what is there, what did you pick up
from the variety of that physics, mathematics, philosophy?
- What I loved about having this chance
to do a liberal arts education
was trying to understand the human condition,
and I think more designers for space exploration
should be thinking about that
because there's so much depth of,
like we were talking about, issues and opportunities
around human connection, human life, meaning in life,
how do you find fulfillment or happiness?
And I think if you approach these questions
just purely from the standpoint of an engineer
or a scientist, you'll miss some of what makes it
a life worth living.
And so I love being able to combine
some of this notion of philosophy
and the human condition with my work.
But I'm also a pragmatist, and I didn't wanna stay
just purely in these big picture questions
about the universe.
I wanted to have an impact on society,
and I also felt like I had such a wonderful childhood
and a really fantastic setup that I owe society some work
to really make a positive impact
for a broader swath of citizens.
And so that kinda led me from the physics domain
to thinking about engineering and practical questions
for life in space.
- In physics, was there a dream?
Are you also captivated by this search
for the theory of everything that kind of unlocks
the deeper and deeper, in the simple, elegant way,
the function of our universe?
Do you think that'll be useful for us
for the actual practical engineering things
that you're working on now?
- It could be.
I mean, I worked at CERN for two summers in undergrad,
and we were looking for supersymmetry,
which was one of these alternatives to the standard model.
And it was sad because my professors
were getting sadder and sadder
'cause they weren't finding it.
They were excluding what we would call this parameter space
of finding these supersymmetric particles.
But the search for what that theory of everything could be,
or a grand unified theory that kinda answers
some of the holes within the standard model of physics,
would presumably kind of unlock a better understanding
of certain fundamental physical laws
that we should be able to build a better understanding
of engineering and day-to-day services from that.
It might not be an immediately obvious thing.
When we discovered the Higgs, the Higgs boson,
I was there at CERN that day.
It was July 4th, 2012 that it was announced.
We all waited like nerds overnight in line
to get into the announcement chamber.
I'd never waited for even like a Harry Potter premiere
in my life, but we waited for this like announcement
of the Higgs boson to get into the chamber overnight.
But did that immediately translate
to technology for engineering?
No, but it's still a really important part
of our understanding of these fundamental laws of physics.
And so I don't know that it's always immediate,
but I think it is really critical knowledge
for humanity to seek.
- It might just shake up understanding of the world.
- What scares me is it might help us create
more dangerous weapons.
So, and then we'll figure out that great filter situation.
And I still believe that human compassion and love
is actually the way to defend against all these
greater and greater and more impressive weapons.
Let me ask a weird question
in terms of you disagreeing with others.
What important idea do you believe is true
that many others don't agree with you on?
Maybe it's a tough question.
You might have to think about that one,
but it was very specific,
like which material to use or something
about a particular project,
or it could be grand priorities on missions.
I think one you actually mentioned is interesting
is like the thing we should be looking for
is like colonization of space
versus colonization of planets, meaning like-
- Yes, that's probably my best hot take
that people would disagree with me on
is life in floating cities
as opposed to life on the surface.
- How do you envision that like spread of humans?
'Cause you said at the beginning of the conversation
something about like scale, increasing the scale,
basically humans in space.
Are they just like in, they're in orbit
and then they get a little farther and farther out.
Like, do you see these kind of floating cities
just getting farther and farther from earth
that can always kind of return?
But like, if you look a few centuries from now,
do you just see us all these like floating cities?
- Like Namibia?
- Yeah. - Correct.
- And it just kind of envelops the space around us
in these like neighborhoods.
- Yeah, yeah, in these neighborhoods.
- It's like rural and there's like giant structures
and there's small pirate structures
and that kind of stuff. - Pirate structures, yeah.
I think low earth orbit might come to look like that.
And it's a really interesting regulatory challenge
to make sure that there's some cross purposes.
So the more cool space cities we have in orbit,
the more shiny objects in the night sky,
the worse it is for astronomers
in a really kind of overly simplified case.
So there's some pushback to this like amoebaing
where we just grow kind of incongruously
or indiscriminately as an amoeba in low earth orbit.
Beyond that though, I think we'll grow in pockets
where there are resources.
So we won't just expand around the gravity well of earth.
We'll do some development around the moon,
some development around asteroids,
some development around Mars
because there'll always be purposes
for which we wanna go down to a physical object
and study it or extract something or learn from it.
But I think we'll grow in fits and starts in pockets.
Some of the coolest pockets are the gravity balanced pockets
like the Lagrange points,
which is where we just sent, we, not me personally,
but NASA just sent James Webb, the big telescope.
I think it's at L2.
- What's the nice feature about those pockets?
- So it's a stable orbit.
There are several different Lagrange points.
And so it just requires less energy
to stay where you're trying to stay.
- Yeah, that's fascinating.
What's also fascinating is the interaction between nations.
- That was gonna be--
- On that regard, like who owns that?
Would you say in those floating cities,
do you envision independent governments?
- That was gonna be my next answer to you,
which pushed me harder for a more provocative question
where I might disagree with other people.
I don't yet have my own opinions fully formed on this,
but we are trying to figure out right now
what happens to the moon
with all of these first come first served actors
just arriving and setting precedents
that might really affect future access.
And one example is property rights.
We do want companies that have the expertise
to go to the moon and mine stuff
that will help us develop a human settlement there
or a gateway, but companies need to know generally
that they have rights to a certain area
or that they have some legal right to sell things
that they're getting.
Does that mean we're gonna grant property rights
on the moon to companies?
Who has the right to give that right away?
So there's a bunch of really kind of gnarly questions
that we have to think about,
which is why I think we need space lawyers.
Maybe that's the true provocative answer
is I think we need space lawyers.
- True.
I mean, yeah, yeah.
I mean, but those questions again, as you said eloquently,
will help us answer questions about here.
- We hope so, yeah.
- It is a little strange.
I mean, it's obvious, but it's also strange
if you look at the big picture of it all,
that we draw these like borders around geographical areas
and we say, this is mine.
§13Transcript · 1:37:30–1:45:49
And then we fight wars over what's mine and not.
It seems like there's possible alternatives,
but also it seems like there needs to be
a public ownership of some parts.
- Something.
- Like, what is it, Central Park in New York?
Is there something like preserving--
- The commons.
- Yeah, the commons.
- The commons.
That's why we titled the book "Into the Anthropocosmos."
We know it's a long and kind of a mouthful,
but this notion of the Anthropocene.
We have a lot of commons problems
in humanity, how are we treating the earth,
global climate change?
How are we gonna treat and behave in space?
How can we be responsible stewards of the space commons?
And I would love to see an approach to the moon
that is commons-based, but it's hard to know
who would be the protector or the enforcer of that.
- And if it's, which it will be probably in the early days,
a lot of companies sort of working on the moon,
working on Mars, working out in space,
it feels like there still needs to be
a civilian representation of the greater effort
or something like that,
like where there should be a president,
there should be a democracy of some kind
where people can vote.
- Some representative government.
- Those are all, again, the same human questions.
What advice would you give to a young person today
thinking about what they wanna do with their life, career?
So somebody in high school, somebody in college,
maybe somebody that looks up to the stars
and dreams to one day take a one-way ticket to Mars
or to contribute something to the effort.
- I'd say you should feel empowered
because it's really the first time in human history
that we're at this cusp of interplanetary civilization,
and I don't think we're gonna lapse back from it.
So the future is incredibly bright for young people
that even younger than you and I
who will actually really get a chance
to go to Mars for certain.
The other thing I would say is be open-minded
about what your own interests are.
I don't think you anymore have to be shoehorned
into a particular career
to be welcomed into the future of space exploration.
If you are an artist and that is your passion,
but you would love to do space art,
or if not space art, use your artistry
to communicate a feeling or a message about space,
that's a role that we desperately need
just as much as we need space scientists
and space engineers.
- Well, when you look at your own life,
you're an incredibly accomplished scientist,
young scientist, and you hopped around
from physics to aerospace,
so going from the biggest theoretical ideas
to the biggest practical ideas.
Is there something from your own journey
you can give advice to,
like how to end up doing incredible research at MIT?
Maybe the role of the university and college
and education and learning, all that kind of stuff?
- I'd say one piece of advice is find really good teammates
because I get to be the one that's talking to you,
but there are 50 graduate students, staff, and faculty
that are part of my organization back at MIT,
and I'm actually, you guys can't see it on camera,
but I'm sitting here with my co-founder and COO,
Danielle DeLotte, and that is really what makes
these large-scale challenges for humanity possible
is really fantastic teams working together
to scale more than what I could do alone,
so I think that that's an important model
that we don't talk about enough in academia.
There's a big push for this lone wolf genius figure
in academia, but that's certainly not been the case
in my life.
I've had wonderful collaborators and people
that I work with along the team.
- Also cross-disciplinary.
- Absolutely, yeah, cross-disciplinary,
interdisciplinary, whatever you wanna call it.
- Artists, where do artists come in?
Do you work with artists?
- We do, we have an arts curator
on the Space Exploration Initiative side.
She helps make sure,
partly around that communication challenge
that we talked about, that we're not just doing
zero-G flights and space missions,
but that we take our artifacts of this sci-fi space future
to museums and galleries and exhibits.
She pushed me to make sure, her name is Xing Liu,
she pushed me for our first ISS mission.
I was just gathering all the engineering payloads
that I wanted to support for the students to fly,
including my own work, and she said,
"You know what, we should do an open call internationally
"for artists to send something to the ISS,"
and we found out it was the first time.
We were the first ever international open call
for art to go to the ISS, and that was thanks to Xing
and artists bringing a perspective
that I might not have thought about prioritizing.
- Yeah, that's awesome.
So when you look out there,
it's the flame of human consciousness.
There does seem to be something quite special about us humans.
First of all, what do you think it is?
What's consciousness?
What are we trying to preserve here?
What is it about humans that should be preserved,
or life here on Earth?
What gives you hope to try to expand it out
farther and farther?
What makes you sad if it was all gone?
- I think we're a remarkable species,
that we are aware of our own thoughts.
We are meta-aware of our own thoughts and of ourselves.
- We're able to speak on a podcast
about a meta-awareness about our own thoughts.
- About our own thoughts, yeah, turtles all the way down.
I think that that is a really special gift
that we have been given as a species,
and that there's a worth to expanding
our circles of awareness.
So we're very aware of, as an Earth-based species,
we've become a little bit more aware
of the fragility of Earth and how special a place it is
when we go to the moon and we look back.
What would it mean for us to have a presence
and our purpose in life as a inter-solar system species,
or eventually an intergalactic species?
I think it's a really profound opportunity for exploration,
for the sake of exploration,
a real gift for the human mind.
- Yeah, for anything, we're curious creatures.
You do believe we might one day become
intergalactic civilization?
- Long, long time from now.
We have a lot of propulsion challenges
to answer to get that far.
- So you have a hope for this.
- Yeah.
- Another big, ridiculous question,
building on top of that,
what do you think is the meaning of life?
This individual life of ours, your life,
that unfortunately has to come to an end,
as far as we know for now?
- Yeah.
- And our life here together, is there a why?
Or do we just kinda let our curiosity carry us away?
- Oh, interesting.
Is there a single kind of driving purpose why,
or can it just be curiosity based?
I certainly feel,
and this is not the scientist in me talking,
but just more of like a human soul talking.
I certainly feel some sense of purpose
and meaning in my life.
And there's a version of that,
that's a very local level within my family,
which is funny, 'cause this whole conversation
has been big, grand space exploration themes,
but you asked me this question,
and my first thought is what really matters to me,
my family, my biological reproducing unit.
(both laughing)
But then there's also another purpose,
like another version of the meaning in my life
that is trying to do good things for humanity.
So that sense that we can be individual humans
and have our local meaning,
and we can also be global humans,
maybe someday like the Star Trek Utopia
will all be global citizens.
I don't wanna sound too naive,
but there is, I think, that beauty to a meaning
and a purpose of your life that's bigger than yourself,
working on something that's bigger and grander
than just yourself.
- The deepest meaning is from
the local biological reproduction unit,
and then it goes to the engineering, scientific,
what is it, corporate, like company unit
that can actually produce and compete
and interact with the world.
And then there's the giant human unit
that's struggling with pandemics.
- And commons.
- And together struggling against the forces of nature
that keeps wanting to kill us.
§14Transcript · 1:45:50–1:46:43
- Yeah, there'd be nothing like an alien invasion
to unite the planet, we think.
- I can't wait, bringing on aliens.
Listen, your work, you're an incredible communicator,
incredible young scientist, Sarah.
It's a huge honor that you would spend your time with me.
I can't wait what you do in the future.
And thank you for representing MIT so beautifully,
so masterfully, you're an incredible person.
Thank you for talking to me.
- Thank you so much for having me.
It's been an absolute pleasure.
It's a great conversation.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Ariel Ekblal.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Seneca,
the Roman Stoic philosopher.
"There is no easy way from earth to the stars."
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
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