Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures

00:00:00.000 | We think that self-assembly,

00:00:01.720 | this modular reconfigurable algorithm

00:00:04.760 | for constructing space structures in orbit

00:00:07.520 | is gonna give us this promise of space architecture

00:00:10.760 | that's actually worth living in.

00:00:12.320 | - You do believe we might one day

00:00:14.480 | become intergalactic civilization?

00:00:17.920 | - I have a hope, yeah.

00:00:19.060 | - The following is a conversation with Ariel Egbla,

00:00:24.240 | director of MIT Space Exploration Initiative.

00:00:27.400 | She's especially interested in autonomously

00:00:30.120 | self-assembling space architectures,

00:00:32.700 | basically giant space structures

00:00:35.880 | that can sustain human life

00:00:37.720 | and that assemble themselves out in space

00:00:40.440 | and then orbit Earth, Moon, Mars, and other planets.

00:00:45.440 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:00:48.280 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:00:50.240 | in the description.

00:00:51.480 | And now, dear friends, here's Ariel Egbla.

00:00:56.360 | When did you first fall in love with space exploration

00:00:59.560 | and space in general?

00:01:01.280 | - My parents are both ex-Air Force.

00:01:04.140 | So my dad's an A-10 fighter pilot

00:01:05.880 | and my mom trained and had qualified to be a fighter pilot,

00:01:09.680 | but it was early enough

00:01:11.040 | that women were not allowed in combat at that time.

00:01:13.420 | And so I grew up with these two pilots

00:01:16.400 | and although they themselves did not become astronauts,

00:01:18.680 | there's a really rich legacy of Air Force pilots

00:01:21.000 | becoming astronauts and this loomed large in my childhood.

00:01:24.300 | What does it mean to be courageous, to be an explorer,

00:01:26.800 | to be at the vanguard of something hard and challenging?

00:01:31.720 | And to couple with that,

00:01:32.940 | my dad was a huge fan of science fiction.

00:01:35.100 | And so I, as a kid, read Heinlein and Isaac Asimov,

00:01:38.780 | all these different classics of science fiction

00:01:41.300 | that he had introduced me to.

00:01:42.540 | And that just started a love affair with space exploration

00:01:45.920 | and really thinking about civilization scale

00:01:49.680 | space exploration.

00:01:51.880 | - So did they themselves dream about going to the stars

00:01:56.880 | as opposed to flying here in the Earth's atmosphere,

00:02:01.020 | just looking up?

00:02:02.020 | - Yeah, my dad always said he was absolutely convinced

00:02:04.100 | 'cause he was a child of the Apollo years

00:02:06.300 | that he would get to go in his lifetime.

00:02:08.620 | Really thought it was gonna happen.

00:02:09.940 | And so it was a challenge and sad for many people

00:02:12.780 | when to their view on the outside,

00:02:15.260 | space exploration slowed down for a period of time.

00:02:17.980 | In reality, we were just catching up.

00:02:19.740 | I think we leapt so far ahead with Apollo

00:02:23.160 | more than the rest of society was ready for.

00:02:25.280 | And now we're coming back to this moment

00:02:27.640 | for space exploration where we actually have an economy

00:02:30.000 | and we have the other accoutrement that society needs

00:02:32.800 | to be able to make space exploration more real.

00:02:35.000 | And my dad's thrilled because finally,

00:02:37.360 | not nearly, I hope not anywhere near the end of his life,

00:02:40.000 | but as he's an older man,

00:02:40.940 | he now can see still within his lifetime,

00:02:44.520 | people really getting a chance

00:02:45.560 | to build a sustainable lunar settlement on the moon

00:02:47.920 | or maybe even go to Mars.

00:02:49.240 | - So settlement, civilizations and other planets,

00:02:52.160 | that's the cool thing to dream about in the future.

00:02:55.640 | - It certainly is.

00:02:56.880 | - What was the favorite sci-fi authors when you're growing up?

00:03:00.640 | - Pablo Isaac Asimov Foundation Trilogy.

00:03:02.600 | This is an amazing story of Harry Seldon,

00:03:05.280 | this foundation that he forms at different ends of the,

00:03:09.240 | well, according to the story,

00:03:10.920 | different ends of the universe

00:03:12.480 | and has this interesting focus on society.

00:03:16.880 | So it's not just space exploration

00:03:19.240 | for the sake of space exploration or novel technology,

00:03:21.520 | which is a lot of what I work on day to day at MIT,

00:03:23.960 | but how do you structure a society

00:03:27.000 | across those vast expanses of distance and time?

00:03:31.580 | And so I'd say absolutely a favorite.

00:03:33.680 | Now though, my favorite is Neil Stevenson and "Seveneves."

00:03:38.080 | It's a book that inspired my own PhD research

00:03:40.640 | and some ongoing work that we're doing with NASA now

00:03:43.120 | for the future of swarm robotics for spacecraft.

00:03:46.680 | - We were saying offline about Neil Stevenson

00:03:49.720 | 'cause I just recently had a conversation with him.

00:03:51.600 | And I said that not until I was doing the research for him

00:03:54.680 | that I realized he also had a role to play in "Blue Origin."

00:03:59.680 | So it's like sci-fi actually having a role to play

00:04:02.800 | in the design, engineering,

00:04:06.120 | just the implementation of ideas

00:04:07.680 | that kind of percolate out from the sci-fi world

00:04:10.880 | and actually become reality.

00:04:12.000 | It's kind of a fascinating figure in that way.

00:04:14.560 | Do you also think about him beyond just his work

00:04:18.720 | in science fiction, but his role in coming up

00:04:21.200 | with wild, crazy ideas that actually become reality?

00:04:24.200 | - Yes, I think it's a great example of this cycle

00:04:26.880 | between authors and scientists and engineers

00:04:29.960 | that we can be inspired in one generation

00:04:32.100 | by what authors dream up.

00:04:33.880 | We build it, we make it a reality,

00:04:35.720 | and then that inspires another generation

00:04:37.400 | of really wild and crazy thought for science fiction.

00:04:40.520 | I think Neil Stevenson does a beautiful job

00:04:42.240 | of being what we'd call a hard science fiction author.

00:04:44.720 | So it's really grounded in a lot of science,

00:04:46.480 | which makes it very compelling for me

00:04:47.920 | as a scientist and engineer to read

00:04:50.120 | and then be challenged to make that vision of reality.

00:04:53.240 | The other community that Neil's involved with

00:04:56.080 | and some of my other mentors are involved with

00:04:57.600 | that we are thinking about more and more

00:04:59.920 | in the work that we do at MIT is the Long Now Foundation.

00:05:03.960 | And this focus on what does society need to take

00:05:08.840 | in terms of steps at this juncture,

00:05:11.440 | this particular inflection point in human history

00:05:14.480 | to make sure that we're setting ourselves up

00:05:16.160 | for a long and prosperous horizon for humanity's horizons.

00:05:20.440 | There's a lot of examples

00:05:21.360 | of what the Long Now Foundation does and thinks about.

00:05:23.840 | But when I think about this in my own work,

00:05:25.500 | it's what does it take to scale

00:05:28.840 | humanity's presence in orbit?

00:05:31.720 | We are seeing some additional investment

00:05:34.200 | in commercial space habitats.

00:05:36.280 | So it'll no longer be just NASA

00:05:37.640 | running the International Space Station,

00:05:39.400 | but to really democratize access to space,

00:05:42.080 | to have, like Bezos wants to have millions of people

00:05:44.520 | living and working in space,

00:05:46.000 | you need architecture that's bigger and grander

00:05:49.440 | and can actually scale.

00:05:50.920 | That means you need to be thinking about

00:05:52.080 | how can you construct things for long-time horizons

00:05:55.080 | that are really sustainable in orbit

00:05:56.720 | or on a surface of a celestial body

00:05:59.440 | that are bigger than the biggest rocket payload fairing

00:06:02.160 | that we currently have available.

00:06:03.440 | And that's what led me to self-assembly

00:06:05.400 | and other models of in-space construction.

00:06:08.280 | - Okay, every time you speak,

00:06:10.560 | I get like a million tangent ideas.

00:06:12.320 | - You can cut me off, keep going.

00:06:13.440 | - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, please keep talking.

00:06:15.200 | This is amazing.

00:06:16.120 | I just, there's like a million ideas.

00:06:19.080 | So one sort of on the dark side, let me ask.

00:06:21.800 | Do you think about the threats to human civilization

00:06:25.040 | that kind of motivate the scaling of the expansion

00:06:28.920 | of humans in space and on other planets?

00:06:31.720 | What are you worried about?

00:06:32.880 | Nuclear war, pandemics,

00:06:36.520 | super intelligent artificial intelligence systems,

00:06:39.720 | more not existential crises,

00:06:44.160 | but ones that have potentially significant

00:06:47.280 | detrimental effects on society like climate change,

00:06:50.280 | those kinds of things.

00:06:51.120 | And then there's of course the fun ass story

00:06:52.840 | coming out from the darkness and hitting all Earth.

00:06:55.480 | There's been a few movies on that.

00:06:57.120 | Anyway, is there something that you think about

00:06:59.480 | that threatens us in this century?

00:07:02.320 | - I mean, as an ex-military family,

00:07:04.600 | we used to talk about all of this.

00:07:06.480 | We would say that luck favors the prepared.

00:07:09.040 | And so growing up, we had a plan,

00:07:12.240 | actually a family plan for what we would do in a pandemic.

00:07:14.560 | Didn't think we were gonna have to put that

00:07:15.640 | in a plan into place and here we are.

00:07:17.600 | We do, certainly among my own family and my friends

00:07:20.880 | and then our work at MIT,

00:07:21.920 | we do think about existential threats and risks to humanity

00:07:24.960 | and what role does space exploration

00:07:27.360 | and getting humans off world have to play

00:07:29.280 | in a resilient future for humanity.

00:07:32.160 | But what I actually find more compelling recently

00:07:35.480 | is instead of thinking about a need to ever abandon Earth

00:07:40.480 | through a path of space exploration or space voyaging,

00:07:43.040 | is to see how we can use space technology

00:07:44.920 | to keep Earth livable.

00:07:47.320 | The obvious direct ways of doing this

00:07:49.480 | would be satellite technology that's helping us learn more

00:07:52.360 | about climate change or emitters or CO2.

00:07:56.320 | But there's also a future for geoengineering

00:07:58.200 | that might be space-based.

00:07:59.640 | A lot of questions that would have to be answered around that

00:08:01.920 | but these are examples of pivoting our focus away

00:08:05.320 | from maybe the Hollywood vision of,

00:08:06.960 | oh, an asteroid's gonna come,

00:08:08.240 | we're all gonna have to escape Earth

00:08:09.400 | to let's use our considerable technology prowess

00:08:14.400 | and use space technology to save Earth

00:08:16.440 | and be very much focused on how we can have

00:08:18.240 | a worthwhile life for Earth's citizens.

00:08:20.840 | Even as some of us wanna go out and further venturing.

00:08:24.080 | - Right, just the desire to explore the mysterious, yes.

00:08:28.120 | But also it does seem that by placing us in harsh conditions,

00:08:32.600 | the harsh conditions of space,

00:08:33.880 | the harsh conditions of planets,

00:08:35.680 | and the biology, the chemistry, the engineering,

00:08:38.000 | the robotics, the materials, all of that,

00:08:41.520 | that's just a nice way to come up with cool new things.

00:08:43.920 | - Great forcing function, yeah.

00:08:45.120 | - Yeah, it's a forcing, exactly.

00:08:46.200 | It's a forcing function like survival.

00:08:48.880 | Don't get this right, you die.

00:08:50.960 | So, and that you can bring back to Earth

00:08:53.400 | and it will improve, like figuring out food in space

00:08:57.920 | will make you figure out how to eat,

00:09:01.840 | live healthier lives here on Earth.

00:09:04.120 | - So true, I mean, some of the technologies

00:09:05.880 | that we're directly looking at right now

00:09:08.680 | for space habitats, it's hard to keep humans alive

00:09:12.040 | in this really fragile little pocket against the vacuum

00:09:15.600 | and all of the dangers that the space environment presents.

00:09:19.040 | Some of the technologies we are gonna have to figure out

00:09:20.880 | is energy efficient, cooling and air conditioning,

00:09:24.620 | air filtration, scrubbing CO2 from the air,

00:09:28.880 | being able to have habitats that are themselves resilient

00:09:33.880 | to extremes of space weather and radiation.

00:09:36.320 | And some of these are direct translational opportunities

00:09:39.360 | for areas turned by natural disasters.

00:09:41.720 | People in California a decade ago

00:09:43.160 | would never have had to think about having an airtight house

00:09:45.840 | but now with wildfires, maybe you do want something close

00:09:48.800 | to an airtight house, how do you manage that?

00:09:51.520 | There's a lot of technologies

00:09:52.760 | from the space habitation world

00:09:55.080 | that we are hoping we can actually bring back down

00:09:57.040 | to benefit life on Earth as well

00:09:58.680 | in these extreme environment contexts.

00:10:01.240 | - Okay, so you mentioned to go back to swarm.

00:10:05.880 | - Yeah.

00:10:06.720 | - So that was interesting to you,

00:10:09.120 | first of all, in your own work,

00:10:10.380 | but also I believe you said something

00:10:12.640 | that was inspiring from Neil Stephenson as well.

00:10:14.920 | So when you say swarm, are you thinking about architectures

00:10:19.920 | or are you thinking about artificial intelligence

00:10:25.360 | like robotics or are those kind of intermixed?

00:10:28.360 | - I think the future that we're seeing

00:10:30.200 | is that they're going to be intermixed,

00:10:31.760 | which is really exciting.

00:10:33.160 | So the future of space habitats

00:10:35.240 | are one of intelligent structures,

00:10:38.560 | maybe not all the way to how

00:10:39.960 | and the 2001 "Space Odyssey" reference

00:10:42.480 | that scares people about the habitat

00:10:44.520 | having a mind of its own.

00:10:45.820 | But certainly we're building systems now

00:10:47.820 | where the habitat has sensing technology

00:10:51.800 | that allows it to communicate its basic functions,

00:10:56.360 | maintaining life support for the astronauts,

00:10:58.360 | but could also communicate in symbiosis

00:11:01.520 | with these swarm robots

00:11:03.240 | that would be on the outside of the spacecraft,

00:11:05.720 | whether it's in a microgravity orbiting environment

00:11:08.180 | or on the surface.

00:11:09.240 | And these little robots, they crawl,

00:11:11.200 | just a la Neil Stephenson and "Seveneves,"

00:11:13.360 | they crawl along the outside of the spacecraft

00:11:15.500 | looking for micrometeorite punctures

00:11:18.200 | or gas leaks or other faults and defects.

00:11:21.560 | And right now we're just working on the diagnosis.

00:11:24.040 | So can the swarm with its collective intelligence

00:11:27.240 | act in symbiosis with the spacecraft and detect things?

00:11:30.200 | But in the future, we'd also love

00:11:31.280 | for these little micro robots to repair in situ

00:11:34.080 | and really be like ants living in a tree

00:11:37.600 | all together connected to the spacecraft.

00:11:39.480 | - Do you envision the system to be fully distributed

00:11:44.240 | and just like an ant colony

00:11:45.800 | if one of them is damaged or whatever,

00:11:50.640 | loses control and all those kinds of things

00:11:53.520 | that that doesn't affect the performance

00:11:55.880 | of the complete system

00:11:57.320 | or doesn't need to be centralized?

00:11:58.960 | This is more like almost a technical question.

00:12:01.160 | Do you think we could-- - Good architecture question.

00:12:03.040 | - Right, from the ground up,

00:12:05.880 | it's so scary to go fully distributed.

00:12:08.800 | - Yes. (laughing)

00:12:10.160 | - But it's also exceptionally powerful, right?

00:12:12.680 | A robust, resilient to the harsh conditions of space.

00:12:15.840 | Where do you, if you look into the next 10, 20, 100 years,

00:12:22.320 | starting from scratch,

00:12:23.440 | do you think we should be doing

00:12:24.600 | architecture-wise distributed systems?

00:12:27.180 | - For space, yes, because it gives you this redundancy

00:12:31.280 | and safety profile that's really critical.

00:12:33.360 | So whether it's small swarm robots

00:12:35.160 | where it doesn't matter if you lose a few of them,

00:12:37.320 | to habitats that instead of having

00:12:39.880 | a central monolithic habitat,

00:12:43.840 | you might actually be able to have

00:12:45.800 | a decentralized node of a space station

00:12:49.080 | so that you can kind of right out of "Star Wars,"

00:12:50.960 | you can shut a blast door if there's a fire

00:12:53.320 | or if there's a conflict in a certain area

00:12:55.080 | and you can move the humans and the crew

00:12:57.160 | into another decentralized node of the spacecraft.

00:12:59.840 | There's another idea out of Neil Stephenson's "Seveneves"

00:13:01.960 | actually where these arclets,

00:13:03.840 | which were decentralized spacecraft that could form

00:13:06.200 | and dock little temporary space stations with each other

00:13:09.960 | and then separate and go off on their way

00:13:12.120 | and have a decentralized approach to living in space.

00:13:15.880 | - So the self-assembly component of that too,

00:13:19.080 | so this is your PhD work and beyond.

00:13:21.760 | You explored autonomously self-assembling

00:13:24.400 | space architecture for future space tourists' habitats

00:13:28.200 | and space stations in orbit around Earth, Moon, and Mars.

00:13:31.400 | There's few things I personally find sexier

00:13:34.640 | than self-assembling space,

00:13:37.560 | autonomously self-assembling space architecture.

00:13:40.960 | In general, it doesn't even need to be space.

00:13:42.720 | The idea of self-assembling architectures

00:13:46.080 | is really interesting, like building a bridge

00:13:48.400 | or something like that through self-assembling materials.

00:13:51.560 | It feels like an incredibly efficient way to do it

00:13:56.560 | because optimization is built in.

00:13:59.880 | So you can build the most optimal structures

00:14:02.400 | given dynamic, uncertain changing conditions.

00:14:08.200 | So maybe can you talk about your PhD work,

00:14:11.360 | about this work, about Tesserae?

00:14:14.240 | What is it in general?

00:14:16.960 | Any cool stuff 'cause this is super cool.

00:14:19.400 | - Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:14:21.120 | So Tesserae is my PhD research.

00:14:23.680 | It's this idea that we could take tiles

00:14:26.840 | that construct a large structure like a buckyball.

00:14:30.000 | Yeah, this is exactly what we're looking at here,

00:14:31.840 | which is the tiles that are packed flat in a rocket.

00:14:34.680 | They're released to float in microgravity.

00:14:38.360 | Magnets, pretty powerful electropermanent magnets

00:14:41.200 | on their edges draw them together for autonomous docking.

00:14:44.480 | So there's no human in the loop here

00:14:46.080 | and there's no central agent coordinating,

00:14:48.160 | saying tile one, go to tile two.

00:14:50.720 | It's completely decentralized system.

00:14:52.480 | They find each other on their own.

00:14:54.840 | What we don't show in this video

00:14:56.040 | is what happens if there's an error, right?

00:14:58.200 | So what happens if they bond incorrectly?

00:15:00.160 | The tiles have sensing, so proximity sensing,

00:15:02.640 | magnetometer, other sensors that allow them

00:15:04.760 | to detect a good bond versus a bad bond

00:15:07.920 | and pulse off and self-correct,

00:15:10.040 | which anybody who works in the field of self-assembly

00:15:12.680 | will tell you that error detection and correction,

00:15:15.760 | just like error detection in a DNA sequence

00:15:19.040 | or protein folding is really important part of the system

00:15:21.900 | for that robustness.

00:15:23.160 | And so we've done a lot of work to engineer

00:15:25.360 | that ability for the tiles to be self-determining.

00:15:29.320 | They know whether they're forming the structure

00:15:30.880 | that they're supposed to form or not.

00:15:32.240 | - They know if they're in a toxic relationship

00:15:34.400 | and they need to get out.

00:15:35.800 | - Right, right, if they need to separate, exactly, yeah.

00:15:38.720 | - All right, this is like so amazing.

00:15:40.520 | And for people who are just listening to this,

00:15:42.000 | yeah, there's a lot, I mean, how large are these tiles?

00:15:45.200 | - So the size that we use in the lab,

00:15:47.800 | they can really be any size

00:15:49.160 | 'cause we can scale them down to do testing in microgravity.

00:15:51.880 | So we sent tiles that were about three inches wide

00:15:55.040 | to the International Space Station a couple of years ago

00:15:57.120 | to test the code, test the state machine,

00:16:00.120 | test the algorithm of self-assembly.

00:16:02.280 | But now we're actually building

00:16:03.520 | our first ever human scale tiles.

00:16:05.680 | They're me human size, so a little smaller

00:16:08.040 | than maybe your average human,

00:16:09.720 | but they're 2.5 feet on edge length.

00:16:14.040 | The larger scale that we would love to build in the future

00:16:16.720 | would actually be tiles that are big enough

00:16:18.720 | to form a buckyball, big open spherical volume,

00:16:21.920 | spherical approximation volume,

00:16:23.620 | that'd be about 10 meters in diameter, so 30 feet,

00:16:27.200 | which is much bigger and grander in terms of open space

00:16:30.360 | than any current module on the ISS.

00:16:32.560 | And one of the goals of this project was to say,

00:16:35.160 | what's the purpose of next generation space architecture?

00:16:38.800 | Should it be something that really inspires

00:16:41.640 | and delights people when you float into that space?

00:16:44.800 | Can you get goosebumps in the way that you do

00:16:46.720 | when you walk into a really stunning piece

00:16:48.760 | of architecture on Earth?

00:16:50.080 | And so we think that self-assembly,

00:16:52.280 | this modular reconfigurable algorithm

00:16:55.280 | for constructing space structures in orbit

00:16:58.060 | is gonna give us this promise of space architecture

00:17:01.280 | that's actually worth living in.

00:17:03.440 | - Living in, oh, I thought you also meant

00:17:05.320 | from like outside artistic perspective,

00:17:07.320 | when you see the whole thing, it's just--

00:17:09.640 | - With the aesthetics of it, absolutely.

00:17:11.480 | You know, when you like go like into Vegas,

00:17:14.440 | whenever you go into a city and it like over the hill

00:17:18.040 | appears in front of you, and I mean,

00:17:19.720 | there's something majestic about seeing like,

00:17:23.360 | wow, humans created that.

00:17:25.280 | It gives you like hope about like,

00:17:26.800 | if these a bunch of ants were able to figure out

00:17:28.800 | how to build skyscrapers that light up.

00:17:31.440 | And in general, the design of these tiles

00:17:34.000 | and the way you envision it are pretty scalable.

00:17:36.440 | - Yes, and they're inspired by exactly

00:17:38.440 | what you mentioned a moment ago,

00:17:39.560 | which is we have these patterns of self-assembly on earth.

00:17:43.000 | And there's a lot of fantastic MIT research

00:17:45.040 | that we're building this concept on.

00:17:46.520 | So like Daniela Rus at CSAIL and Pebbles

00:17:49.400 | taking the power of magnets to create units

00:17:53.880 | that are themselves interchangeable,

00:17:56.200 | this notion of programmable matter.

00:17:58.640 | And so we're interested in going really big with it

00:18:01.600 | to build big scale space structures with programmable tiles.

00:18:05.360 | But there's also a really fascinating, you know,

00:18:07.600 | end of that on the other side of the spectrum,

00:18:08.960 | which is how small can you go with matter

00:18:11.400 | that's programmable and stacks and builds itself

00:18:13.800 | and creates a bridge or something in the future.

00:18:16.920 | - What do you envision the thing would look like?

00:18:19.560 | Like when you imagine a thing far into the future

00:18:22.320 | where there's, so we're not even thinking about like,

00:18:26.720 | small space, let's not call them small,

00:18:29.000 | but are currently sized space stations,

00:18:30.800 | but like something gigantic.

00:18:33.000 | What do you envision?

00:18:34.280 | Is this something with symmetry

00:18:36.640 | or is this something we can't even come up with yet?

00:18:38.880 | Is there beautiful structures that you imagine in your mind?

00:18:42.880 | - I've got three candidates that I would love to build.

00:18:45.680 | If we're talking about monumental space architecture,

00:18:48.640 | one is what does a space cathedral look like?

00:18:51.680 | It can be a secular cathedral,

00:18:52.840 | doesn't necessarily have to be about religion,

00:18:54.400 | but that notion of long sight lines,

00:18:57.920 | inspiring, stunning architecture when you go in.

00:19:01.240 | And you can imagine floating,

00:19:03.080 | instead of being on the ground and only looking up,

00:19:06.560 | in space, you could be in a central node

00:19:08.720 | and each direction you look at,

00:19:10.760 | all the cardinal directions are spires going off

00:19:14.080 | in a really large and long way.

00:19:15.440 | So that's concept number one.

00:19:17.200 | Number two would be something more organic

00:19:20.000 | that's not just geometric.

00:19:21.800 | So here, one of the ideas that we're working on at MIT

00:19:24.440 | in my lab is to say, could you,

00:19:27.600 | instead of the tesserae model, right?

00:19:29.280 | Which is self-assembling a shell,

00:19:31.920 | could you define a module that's a node,

00:19:35.000 | a small node that someone can live in

00:19:36.960 | and you self-assemble a lot of those together,

00:19:39.640 | they're called a plesiohedrons, like space filling solids,

00:19:43.600 | and you dock a bunch of them together

00:19:45.560 | and you can create a really organic structure out of that.

00:19:49.800 | So the same way that muscles accrete to appear,

00:19:53.440 | you can have these nodes that dock together

00:19:55.560 | and one shape that I would love to form out of this

00:19:57.640 | is something like a nautilus, a seashell,

00:20:00.440 | that beautiful Fibonacci spiral sequence

00:20:03.480 | that you get in that shape,

00:20:04.920 | which I think would be a stunning and fabulous

00:20:07.280 | aggregated space station.

00:20:10.320 | - You said so many cool words, plesiohedron.

00:20:14.200 | - Yeah, plesiohedron.

00:20:15.040 | - So that's a space filling--

00:20:18.240 | - Solid, the simplest thing to think of is like a cube.

00:20:21.040 | - Oh, cubes. - A cube, right?

00:20:22.000 | So you can stack cubes together

00:20:23.640 | and if you had an infinite number of cubes,

00:20:25.400 | you'd fill all that space,

00:20:27.160 | there's no gaps in between the cubes,

00:20:28.920 | they stack and fill space.

00:20:31.400 | Another plesiohedron is a truncated octahedron

00:20:34.720 | and that's actually one of the candidate structures

00:20:36.480 | that we think would be great for space stations.

00:20:38.680 | - What's the truncated part?

00:20:40.080 | - Ah, so you cut off,

00:20:41.880 | an octahedron actually has little pointy areas,

00:20:44.560 | you truncate certain sections of it

00:20:46.320 | and you get surfaces that are on the structure

00:20:50.040 | that are cubes and I think hexagons,

00:20:52.840 | I have to remind myself exactly what the faces are.

00:20:55.600 | But overall, a truncated octahedron can be bonded

00:20:59.240 | to other truncated octahedrons and just like a cube,

00:21:02.040 | it fills all the gaps as you build it out.

00:21:04.880 | So you can imagine two truncated octahedrons,

00:21:07.760 | they come together at an airlock,

00:21:09.200 | which is what we space people call doors in space

00:21:12.280 | and you dock them on all sides

00:21:14.240 | and you've basically created this decentralized network

00:21:18.120 | of space nodes that make a big space station

00:21:22.000 | and once you have enough of them

00:21:23.680 | and you're growing with enough big units,

00:21:25.480 | you can do it in any macro shape you want,

00:21:28.040 | that's where the Nautilus comes in,

00:21:29.360 | this could be designed an organically inspired shape

00:21:32.920 | for a space station.

00:21:33.760 | - Can I just say how awesome it is to hear you say,

00:21:36.840 | we space people.

00:21:38.720 | I know you meant people that are doing research

00:21:41.200 | on space exploration, space technology,

00:21:43.840 | but it also made me think of a future,

00:21:45.920 | there's earth people and there's those space people.

00:21:50.600 | - I'd love to unite those two.

00:21:52.400 | - Yeah, no, no, for sure, for sure.

00:21:54.160 | But like, it's like New Yorkers

00:21:56.760 | and like Texans or something like that.

00:21:59.680 | Yeah, of course, you live for a time in New York

00:22:03.520 | and then you go up to Boston

00:22:05.160 | but for a time you're the space people.

00:22:07.120 | I know those space people, they're kind of wild up there.

00:22:11.160 | - Let's see how that dynamic evolves.

00:22:12.520 | - Yeah, exactly, there's that culture, culture forms

00:22:14.680 | and I would love to see what kind of culture,

00:22:17.040 | once you have sort of more and more civilians,

00:22:21.160 | I mean, there's a human,

00:22:22.560 | I mean, I love psychology and sociology

00:22:25.120 | and I'll maybe ask you about that too,

00:22:27.600 | which is like the dynamic between humans.

00:22:29.640 | You have to kind of start considering that

00:22:31.720 | and you start spending more and more time up in space

00:22:34.720 | and start sending civilians,

00:22:36.800 | start sending bigger and bigger groups of people.

00:22:39.160 | And then of course, the beautiful and the ugly emerges

00:22:42.960 | from the human nature that we haven't been able to escape

00:22:47.920 | up to this point.

00:22:49.240 | But when you say the plesiohedrons, these kinds of shapes,

00:22:53.120 | are they multifunctional?

00:22:54.560 | Like is the idea you'd be able to,

00:22:56.760 | humans can occupy them safely in some of them

00:23:02.280 | and some others have some other purposes?

00:23:04.880 | - Exactly, one could be sleeping quarters,

00:23:07.320 | one could be a greenhouse or an agricultural unit,

00:23:10.440 | one could be a storage depot,

00:23:13.800 | essentially all of the different rooms or functions

00:23:16.480 | that you might need in a space station

00:23:17.920 | could be subdivided into these nodes

00:23:19.960 | and then stacked together.

00:23:22.280 | And one of the promises of both Tesserae,

00:23:24.520 | my original PhD research, which is these shells,

00:23:26.960 | and then this follow-on node concept

00:23:29.560 | is that right now we build space stations

00:23:32.160 | and once they're built, they're done.

00:23:33.840 | You can't really change them profoundly,

00:23:36.320 | but the benefit of a modular self-assembling system

00:23:39.000 | is you can disassemble it,

00:23:41.000 | you can completely reconfigure it.

00:23:42.840 | So if your mission changes

00:23:44.280 | or the number of people in space that you wanna host,

00:23:46.360 | if you have a space conference happening

00:23:47.800 | like South by Southwest.

00:23:48.920 | - I was thinking space party,

00:23:50.120 | but space conference is good too.

00:23:51.600 | (Tesserae laughs)

00:23:52.520 | - Then maybe all of a sudden you want to change out

00:23:55.720 | what were window tiles yesterday, cupola tiles,

00:23:58.800 | and make them into a birthing port

00:24:00.560 | so that you can welcome five new spaceships

00:24:02.640 | to come and join you in space.

00:24:04.360 | That's what this promise of reconfigurable space architecture

00:24:07.360 | might allow us to explore.

00:24:09.160 | - I've been hanging out with Grimes recently,

00:24:10.760 | I just feel like she belongs up in space.

00:24:13.280 | This is like designed for artists, essentially.

00:24:15.560 | I imagine, I mean, this is what South by

00:24:18.280 | keeps introducing me to,

00:24:19.320 | there's like the weird and the beautiful people

00:24:22.080 | and like the artists.

00:24:23.480 | And it feels like there's a lot of opportunities

00:24:26.360 | for art and design.

00:24:28.720 | - 100%.

00:24:29.560 | - It's like space is a combination of arts,

00:24:31.920 | design and great engineering.

00:24:34.120 | It's a safety critical with like the highest of stakes.

00:24:39.840 | So don't, you can't mess it up.

00:24:41.760 | And is this, first of all, you're talking about tiling.

00:24:44.680 | So Neil Stephenson is obsessed about tiling.

00:24:46.640 | I don't know if it's related to any of this,

00:24:48.840 | but he seems to be obsessed with like,

00:24:50.640 | how do you tile a space?

00:24:51.680 | That's like a geometric notion, like the tessellation.

00:24:55.120 | And it's, I mean, it's a beautiful idea for architecture

00:24:59.560 | that you can self-assemble these different shapes

00:25:03.440 | and you can have probably some centralized guidance

00:25:07.520 | of the kind of thing you want to build.

00:25:09.760 | But they also kind of figure stuff out themselves

00:25:12.080 | in terms of the low level details,

00:25:13.560 | in terms of the figuring out

00:25:16.040 | when everything fits just right.

00:25:18.760 | For the OCD people, like, what's that subreddit?

00:25:23.080 | Pleasantly, it's like really fun.

00:25:25.680 | Everything, they have like videos of everything

00:25:27.400 | is just pleasant when everything just fits perfectly.

00:25:29.600 | - Very pleasing.

00:25:30.440 | All the tolerances come together.

00:25:32.560 | - So they figure that out on themselves

00:25:34.440 | and the local robotics problem.

00:25:36.360 | But by the way, was Daniela Rose Pebbles,

00:25:38.040 | was the Pebbles Project?

00:25:38.880 | - Yeah, the Pebbles Project are little cubes

00:25:41.560 | that have EPMs in them, electropermanent magnets,

00:25:44.160 | and they can self-disassemble.

00:25:46.160 | So they'll turn off and so you'll have this little structure

00:25:48.400 | that all of a sudden can flip the little pebbles over

00:25:51.720 | and essentially just disaggregate.

00:25:54.600 | - They have to make some pleasing sounds.

00:25:56.640 | - Yes.

00:25:57.480 | (imitates sound)

00:25:58.680 | - And that's gonna, so I'm supposed to talk to Daniela,

00:26:01.440 | so I'll probably spend an hour just discussing

00:26:03.720 | the sounds on the pebbles.

00:26:05.040 | Okay, what were we talking about?

00:26:07.600 | So that's, 'cause you mentioned two, I think.

00:26:11.040 | - Right, my third one.

00:26:12.120 | - Yeah, is there a third one?

00:26:13.280 | - My third one is a ring world,

00:26:14.640 | just because every science fiction book ever

00:26:17.360 | that's worth anything has a ring world in it.

00:26:19.880 | And--

00:26:20.720 | - Is it a donut?

00:26:21.840 | - A donut, yeah, so really big torus

00:26:24.520 | that could encircle a planet

00:26:27.480 | or encircle another celestial body,

00:26:29.600 | maybe an asteroid or a small moon.

00:26:32.160 | And the promise here is just the beauty

00:26:36.120 | of being able to have that geometry in orbit

00:26:39.920 | and all that surface area for solar panels

00:26:42.360 | and docking and essentially just all of what that enables,

00:26:46.600 | to have a ring world at that scale in orbit.

00:26:48.960 | - By the way, for the viewers,

00:26:50.440 | we're looking at figure 11, what paper is this from?

00:26:52.560 | This is a hexagonal tiling of a torus

00:26:55.600 | generated in Mathematica, referencing code

00:26:58.840 | and approach from two citations.

00:27:01.080 | So we're looking at a tiled donut, and I'm now hungry.

00:27:04.240 | So this is the, is this from your thesis or no?

00:27:06.920 | - This is probably, I mean, this is in my thesis.

00:27:08.720 | This looks like it was one of my earlier papers.

00:27:10.560 | This was an approach to say, great,

00:27:13.240 | we've come up with this tessellation approach

00:27:15.480 | for a buckyball.

00:27:16.840 | And we picked the buckyball

00:27:18.120 | because it is the most efficient surface area

00:27:21.320 | to volume shape and what's expensive in space,

00:27:23.940 | the surface area, shipping up all that material.

00:27:26.360 | So we wanted something that would maximize the volume.

00:27:28.780 | But if we think about ring worlds and other shapes,

00:27:30.820 | we wanted to look at how do you tile a torus,

00:27:34.040 | and this is one example with hexagons,

00:27:36.420 | to be able to say, could we take this same tesserae approach

00:27:39.120 | of self-assembling tiles and create other geometries?

00:27:42.200 | - This is so freaking cool.

00:27:43.560 | That's awesome.

00:27:44.380 | So you mentioned microgravity, and I saw,

00:27:48.440 | I believe that there's a picture of you

00:27:50.400 | floating in microgravity.

00:27:52.240 | When did you get to experience that?

00:27:53.760 | What was that like?

00:27:54.600 | - Ah, so I've flown nine times

00:27:56.920 | on the affectionately known as the Vomit Comet.

00:28:00.000 | It's the parabolic flight, and essentially,

00:28:02.520 | it does what you'd want a plane never to do.

00:28:04.280 | It pitches really steeply upwards at 45 degrees.

00:28:07.040 | - Oh, that's a picture of you.

00:28:07.880 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:28:08.920 | That's tesserae.

00:28:09.760 | That's super early in my PhD.

00:28:11.320 | Some of just the passive tiles,

00:28:12.800 | before we even put electronics in,

00:28:14.280 | we were just testing the magnet polarity

00:28:17.120 | and the, essentially, is it an energy favorable structure

00:28:20.920 | to self-assemble on its own?

00:28:22.260 | So we tweaked a lot of things between--

00:28:23.920 | - Are we looking at a couple of them?

00:28:25.920 | - Yeah, you're looking at a bunch of them there.

00:28:27.200 | It's almost 32 of them.

00:28:28.920 | Yeah, they're clumping.

00:28:30.600 | They're clumping, yeah.

00:28:31.680 | - Can you comment on what's the difference

00:28:33.160 | between microgravity and zero gravity?

00:28:35.920 | - Yes, so there is--

00:28:36.760 | - Is that an important difference?

00:28:38.000 | - It's an important difference.

00:28:38.840 | There is no zero gravity.

00:28:41.600 | There's no, nothing, there's, in the universe,

00:28:43.760 | there is no such thing as zero gravity.

00:28:46.000 | So Newton's law of gravity tells us

00:28:48.200 | that there's always gravity attraction

00:28:50.280 | between any two objects.

00:28:51.320 | So zero G is a shorthand that some of us fall into using,

00:28:54.240 | where it's a little easier to communicate to the public.

00:28:56.400 | The accurate term is microgravity,

00:28:59.400 | where you are essentially floating, you're weightless,

00:29:02.040 | but generally in free fall.

00:29:04.240 | So on the parabolic flights, the Vomit Comet,

00:29:06.600 | you're in free fall at the end of the parabola.

00:29:09.280 | And in orbit around the Earth when you're floating,

00:29:12.400 | you're also in free fall.

00:29:14.360 | So that's micro-G. - What was it like?

00:29:15.880 | So affectionately called Vomit Comet,

00:29:17.640 | I'm sure there's a reason why it's called affectionately.

00:29:19.760 | So what's it like?

00:29:21.040 | What's your first time,

00:29:23.560 | so both philosophically, spiritually, and biologically,

00:29:27.920 | what's it like?

00:29:28.840 | - It's profound.

00:29:30.320 | It is unlike anything else you will experience on Earth

00:29:35.120 | because it is this true feeling of weightlessness

00:29:38.640 | with no drag.

00:29:40.000 | So the closest experience you could think of

00:29:41.680 | would be floating in a pool,

00:29:43.000 | but you move slowly when you float in a pool

00:29:44.840 | and your motion is restricted.

00:29:46.520 | When you're floating, it's just you and your body flying,

00:29:49.960 | like in a dream.

00:29:51.160 | It takes the littlest amount of energy,

00:29:54.280 | like a finger tap against the wall of the plane

00:29:56.440 | to shoot all the way across the fuselage.

00:29:58.400 | - Wow, and you can move at full speed.

00:30:00.480 | You can move your arms. - Exactly.

00:30:03.120 | - So your muscles work. - There's no, yeah.

00:30:04.680 | - There's no resistance. - There's no resistance.

00:30:06.800 | They actually tell you to make a memory

00:30:09.960 | when you're on the plane

00:30:11.440 | because it's such a fleeting experience for your body

00:30:13.880 | that even a few days later,

00:30:14.960 | you've already forgotten exactly what it felt like.

00:30:17.800 | It's so foreign to the human experience.

00:30:20.120 | - They kind of suggest that you explicitly try

00:30:22.520 | to really form this into a memory

00:30:24.360 | and then you can do the replay.

00:30:25.680 | Is that for training? - Cognitively freeze it.

00:30:27.680 | Yeah. (laughs)

00:30:29.640 | - Save.

00:30:31.200 | When we have Neuralink, we can replay that.

00:30:32.960 | - There you go.

00:30:33.800 | - We can replay that memory.

00:30:35.000 | So in terms of how much stress it has on your body,

00:30:38.200 | is it biologically stressful?

00:30:41.200 | - You do feel a 2G pullout, right?

00:30:43.600 | So the cost of getting those micro G parabolas

00:30:46.480 | is you then have a 2G pullout.

00:30:48.280 | And that's hard.

00:30:49.120 | You have to train for it.

00:30:50.200 | If you move your neck too quickly in that 2G pullout,

00:30:52.640 | you can strain muscles.

00:30:54.800 | But I wouldn't say that it's actually

00:30:56.840 | a profound, tough thing on the body.

00:31:00.220 | It's really just an incredibly novel experience.

00:31:02.960 | And when you're in orbit and you're not having to go

00:31:05.480 | through the ups and downs of the parabolic plane,

00:31:07.840 | there's a real grace and elegance.

00:31:09.920 | And you see the astronauts learn to operate

00:31:12.480 | in this completely new environment.

00:31:15.000 | - What are some interesting differences

00:31:16.400 | between the parabolic plane

00:31:17.840 | and when you're actually going up in orbit?

00:31:20.000 | Is it that with orbit you can look out

00:31:22.920 | and see that blue little planet of ours?

00:31:26.200 | - You can see the blue marble,

00:31:27.240 | the stunning overview effect,

00:31:28.840 | which is something I hope to see one day.

00:31:31.960 | What's also really different is if you're in orbit

00:31:34.200 | for any significant period of time,

00:31:36.080 | there's gonna be a lot more physiological changes

00:31:38.200 | to your body than if you just did an afternoon flight

00:31:41.500 | on the Vomit Comet.

00:31:42.880 | Everything from your bones, your muscles,

00:31:44.920 | your eyeballs change shape.

00:31:47.480 | There's a lot of different things that happen

00:31:49.000 | for long duration spaceflight.

00:31:51.120 | And we still have to, as scientists,

00:31:52.520 | we still have to solve a lot of these interesting challenges

00:31:54.480 | to be able to keep humans thriving in microgravity

00:31:58.400 | or deep duration space missions.

00:32:01.000 | - Deep duration space missions.

00:32:03.560 | Okay, let's talk about this.

00:32:05.080 | I was just gonna ask a bunch of dumb questions.

00:32:08.240 | So approximately how long does it take to travel to Mars?

00:32:11.640 | Asking for a friend.

00:32:12.600 | - Asking for a friend, as we all do.

00:32:14.800 | About three years for a round trip.

00:32:17.800 | And that's not that it actually takes that long.

00:32:19.160 | - Why the round trip?

00:32:20.200 | Is that?

00:32:21.040 | - Well, you're just asking about the one way trip.

00:32:23.800 | - Got it, got it, got it.

00:32:24.640 | - So okay, cool.

00:32:25.680 | So for just like literally flying to Mars in a round,

00:32:29.440 | it takes three years.

00:32:30.720 | There's some interstitial time there

00:32:32.560 | because you really can only go between Earth and Mars

00:32:35.480 | at certain points in their orbits

00:32:37.560 | where it's favorable to make that journey.

00:32:39.440 | And so part of that three years

00:32:40.880 | is you take the journey to Mars a few months,

00:32:43.520 | six to nine months.

00:32:45.000 | You're there for a period of time

00:32:46.400 | until the orbits find a favorable alignment again.

00:32:49.880 | And then you come back another six to nine months.

00:32:51.920 | - So one way travel, six to nine months.

00:32:54.120 | They hang out there on vacation and come back.

00:32:56.400 | - Forced vacation.

00:32:57.240 | - Forced vacation.

00:32:58.080 | - You come back.

00:32:59.120 | - Me, who loves working all the time,

00:33:00.960 | all vacation is forced vacation.

00:33:03.240 | All right.

00:33:04.080 | Okay, so that gives us a sense of duration.

00:33:07.760 | And we can maybe also talk about longer and longer

00:33:10.640 | and longer duration as well.

00:33:13.600 | What are the hardest aspects of living in space

00:33:18.600 | for many days, for let's say 100 days, 200 days?

00:33:23.320 | Maybe there's a threshold when it gets really tough.

00:33:25.920 | What are some stupid little things

00:33:28.880 | or big things that are very difficult

00:33:30.680 | for human beings to go through?

00:33:32.360 | - So one big thing and one little thing.

00:33:33.880 | And there's two classic problems

00:33:35.480 | that we're trying to solve in the space industry.

00:33:37.280 | One is radiation.

00:33:38.840 | It's not as much of a problem for us right now

00:33:40.960 | on the International Space Station

00:33:42.320 | because we're still protected

00:33:44.120 | by part of Earth's magnetosphere.

00:33:46.160 | But as soon as you get farther out into space

00:33:48.000 | and you don't have that protection

00:33:49.360 | once you leave the Van Allen belt area of the Earth

00:33:52.760 | and the cocoon around the Earth,

00:33:55.440 | we have really serious concerns about radiation

00:33:57.960 | having an effect on human health long-term.

00:33:59.960 | That's the big one.

00:34:01.360 | The small one, and I say it's small

00:34:02.960 | because it seems mundane,

00:34:04.320 | but it actually is really big in its own way,

00:34:06.000 | is mental health and how to keep people happy and balanced.

00:34:09.080 | And you were alluding to some of the psychological challenges

00:34:11.480 | of having humans together on missions

00:34:13.960 | and especially as we try to scale

00:34:15.400 | the number of humans in orbit or in space.

00:34:18.160 | So that's another big challenge

00:34:19.360 | is how to keep people happy and balanced and cooperating.

00:34:22.840 | - That's not an issue on Earth at all.

00:34:25.920 | - At all.

00:34:27.200 | - Okay, so we'll talk about each of those

00:34:29.440 | in a bit more detail,

00:34:31.120 | but let me continue on the chain of dumb questions.

00:34:34.440 | What about food?

00:34:35.680 | What's a good source for food in space?

00:34:38.680 | And what are some sort of standard go-to meals, menus?

00:34:42.720 | - Right now, your go-to menu

00:34:44.040 | is gonna be mostly freeze-dried.

00:34:46.040 | Every so often, NASA will arrange for a fun stunt

00:34:50.360 | or fresh food to get up to station.

00:34:51.920 | So they did bake DoubleTree cookies with Hilton

00:34:54.520 | a couple of years ago, as I recall,

00:34:55.800 | I think sometime before the pandemic.

00:34:57.840 | But there's work actually in our lab at MIT,

00:35:00.160 | Maggie Koblentz, one of my staff researchers,

00:35:02.160 | is looking at the future of fermentation.

00:35:04.600 | Everybody loves beer, right?

00:35:06.160 | Beer and wine and kimchi and miso,

00:35:08.760 | these foods that have just been really important

00:35:11.920 | to human cultures for eons

00:35:13.240 | because we love the umami and the better flavor in them.

00:35:16.560 | But it turns out they also have a good shelf life

00:35:18.480 | if done properly.

00:35:19.760 | And they also have an additional health benefit

00:35:22.520 | for the microbiome, for probiotics and prebiotics.

00:35:25.720 | So we're trying to work with NASA

00:35:27.600 | and convince them to be more open-minded

00:35:29.280 | to fermented food for long-duration deep space missions.

00:35:33.120 | That we think is one of the future elements

00:35:35.160 | in addition to in-situ growing your own food.

00:35:38.560 | - Okay, this is essential for the space party,

00:35:41.440 | is the space beer.

00:35:43.320 | - Yes, it's the fermented product, yes.

00:35:45.760 | - Okay, cool.

00:35:46.720 | In terms of water,

00:35:47.560 | what's a good source of drinkable water?

00:35:49.680 | Like where do you get water?

00:35:50.680 | Do you have to always bring it on board with you?

00:35:52.880 | And is there a compressed, efficient way of storing it?

00:35:56.680 | - So to steal a line from Charlie Bolden,

00:35:58.880 | who's the former administrator of NASA,

00:36:01.360 | "This morning's fresh water is yesterday's coffee."

00:36:04.640 | So if you think about what that means,

00:36:06.440 | you drank the coffee yesterday.

00:36:08.160 | - Right, as a child.

00:36:09.000 | So it goes fully through the body.

00:36:10.840 | - Fully through the body as the recycling system.

00:36:13.120 | And then you drink what you peed out

00:36:15.400 | as clarified, refined fresh water the next day.

00:36:21.400 | That is one source of water.

00:36:23.320 | Another source of water in the near neighborhood

00:36:25.400 | of our solar system would be on the moon.

00:36:27.120 | So water ice deposits, there's also water on Mars.

00:36:30.000 | This is one of the big things that's bringing people

00:36:32.680 | to want to develop infrastructure on the moon,

00:36:35.200 | is once you've gotten out of the gravity well of earth,

00:36:37.800 | if you can find water on the moon and refine it,

00:36:40.360 | you can either make it into propellant

00:36:41.880 | or drinkable water for humans.

00:36:44.120 | And so that's really valuable as a potential gateway

00:36:47.120 | out into the rest of the solar system

00:36:48.600 | to be able to get propellant

00:36:49.840 | without always having to ship it up from earth.

00:36:52.240 | - So how much water is there on Mars?

00:36:56.280 | - It's a great question, I do not know.

00:36:57.560 | - We don't know this yet, right?

00:36:58.400 | - I know there's water at the caps.

00:36:59.840 | I suspect NASA from all of the satellite studies

00:37:04.200 | that they've done at Mars have a decent idea

00:37:06.720 | of what the water deposits look like,

00:37:08.520 | but I don't know to what degree

00:37:09.600 | they have characterized those.

00:37:11.480 | - I really hope there's life

00:37:13.320 | or traces of previous life on Mars.

00:37:16.760 | - This is a special spot in my heart

00:37:18.680 | because I got to work on SHERLOCK,

00:37:20.960 | which is the astrobiology experiment

00:37:23.200 | that's on Mars right now,

00:37:24.680 | searching for what they would say in a very cautious way

00:37:27.520 | is signs of past habitability.

00:37:31.080 | They wanna be careful not to get people overly excited

00:37:33.240 | and say we're searching for signs of life.

00:37:35.160 | They're searching to see if there would have been organics

00:37:38.480 | on the surface of Mars or water in certain areas

00:37:40.840 | that would have allowed for life to flourish.

00:37:43.680 | And I really love this prospect.

00:37:45.680 | I do think within our lifetimes,

00:37:47.480 | we'll get a better answer about finding life

00:37:50.320 | in our solar system if it's there.

00:37:52.360 | If not on Mars, maybe Europa, one of the icy worlds.

00:37:55.880 | - So you like astrobiology.

00:37:59.240 | - I do.

00:38:00.080 | - This is part of the,

00:38:01.320 | it's not just about human biology,

00:38:03.520 | it's also other extraterrestrial alien biology.

00:38:06.600 | - Search for life in the universe.

00:38:08.440 | - Okay. - Yeah.

00:38:09.280 | - Does that scare you or excite you?

00:38:10.480 | - It excites me, profoundly excites me.

00:38:12.160 | - That there's other alien civilizations

00:38:14.480 | potentially very different than our own?

00:38:16.800 | - I think there's gotta be some humility there

00:38:18.680 | and certainly from science fiction,

00:38:19.920 | we have plenty of reasons to fear that outcome as well.

00:38:23.240 | But I do think as a scientist,

00:38:24.600 | it would be profoundly exciting if we were to find life,

00:38:27.280 | especially in the near neighborhood of our solar system.

00:38:30.120 | Right now, we would expect it

00:38:31.160 | to be most likely microbial life,

00:38:33.160 | but we have a real serious challenge in astrobiology,

00:38:35.440 | which is it may not even be carbon-based life.

00:38:38.440 | And all of our detectors,

00:38:39.720 | we only know to look for DNA or RNA.

00:38:42.680 | How would you even build a detector

00:38:44.400 | to look for silicon-based life or different molecules

00:38:48.960 | than what we know to be the fundamental molecules for life?

00:38:51.960 | - And then you mentioned offline Sarah Walker.

00:38:53.880 | I mean, the question that she's obsessed with

00:38:56.920 | is even just defining life.

00:38:58.880 | What is life to look outside the carbon-based?

00:39:02.600 | I mean, to look outside of basically anything

00:39:04.960 | we can even imagine chemically,

00:39:07.320 | to look outside of any kind of notions

00:39:08.880 | that we think of as biology.

00:39:10.820 | Yeah, it's really weird.

00:39:12.280 | So you now get into this land of complexity,

00:39:14.960 | of measuring how many assembly steps

00:39:19.960 | it takes to build that thing.

00:39:23.120 | - Right.

00:39:23.960 | - And maybe dynamic movement or some maintenance

00:39:28.200 | of some kind of membrane structures.

00:39:30.880 | We don't even know which properties life should have,

00:39:34.520 | whether it should be able to reproduce

00:39:36.760 | and all those kinds of things,

00:39:37.800 | or pass information, genetic type of information.

00:39:41.680 | We don't know.

00:39:42.520 | And it's like, it's so humbling.

00:39:45.120 | I mean, I tend to believe that there could be

00:39:47.680 | something like alien life here on earth,

00:39:51.080 | and we're just too human biology obsessed

00:39:54.640 | to even recognize it.

00:39:56.000 | - The shadow biosphere,

00:39:57.140 | I remember you and Sarah were talking about.

00:39:58.960 | - I mean, that's like, speaking of beer,

00:40:02.240 | I mean, that's something I wanted to make sure,

00:40:04.400 | in all of science, to shake ourselves out of,

00:40:06.560 | like, remind ourselves constantly how little we know.

00:40:10.160 | 'Cause it might be right in front of our nose.

00:40:13.120 | Like, I wouldn't be surprised if, like,

00:40:15.000 | trees are, like, orders of magnitude

00:40:17.320 | more intelligent than humans.

00:40:18.880 | They're just operating at a much slower scale,

00:40:21.280 | and they're, like, talking shit about us the whole time.

00:40:23.840 | Like, about silly humans that take everything seriously,

00:40:26.560 | and we start all kinds of nuclear wars,

00:40:28.640 | and we quarrel, and we tweet about it,

00:40:31.120 | and then, but the trees are always there,

00:40:33.480 | just watching us silly humans.

00:40:35.200 | - Like the Ents in "Lord of the Rings."

00:40:37.080 | - Exactly.

00:40:38.200 | So, I mean, I don't know.

00:40:39.640 | I mean, obviously, I'm joking on that one,

00:40:41.320 | but there could be stuff like that.

00:40:43.040 | Well, let me ask you the Drake equation,

00:40:46.720 | the big question, how many, like,

00:40:50.000 | obviously, nobody knows, but what's your gut,

00:40:52.200 | what's your hope, as a scientist, as a human,

00:40:54.960 | how many alien civilizations are out there?

00:40:57.160 | - As a ex-physicist, I'm now much more

00:41:01.320 | on the aerospace engineering side for space architecture,

00:41:03.520 | but as an ex-physicist, I hope it is prolific.

00:41:08.680 | I think the challenge is, if it's as prolific

00:41:10.680 | as we would hope, if there are many, many,

00:41:12.640 | many civilizations, then the question is, where are they?

00:41:16.960 | Why haven't we heard from them?

00:41:18.760 | And the Fermi paradox, is there some great filter

00:41:21.840 | that life only gets to some level of sophistication

00:41:25.560 | and then kills itself off through war,

00:41:28.360 | or through famine, or through different challenges

00:41:30.240 | that filter that society out of existence?

00:41:33.840 | And it would be an interesting question

00:41:34.920 | to try to understand if the universe was teeming with life,

00:41:38.120 | why haven't we found it or heard from it yet,

00:41:41.080 | to our knowledge?

00:41:41.920 | - Yeah, I personally believe that it's teeming with life,

00:41:44.880 | and you're right, I think that's a really useful,

00:41:46.920 | productive engineering and scientific question

00:41:49.480 | of what kind of great filter can just be destroying

00:41:53.520 | all of that life, or preventing it from just constantly

00:41:57.360 | talking to us silly descendants of apes.

00:42:01.560 | That's a really nice question, like,

00:42:04.120 | what are the ways civilizations can destroy themselves?

00:42:08.680 | And-- - There's too many, sadly.

00:42:10.680 | - Well, I don't think we've come up with most of them yet.

00:42:13.640 | - That's also probably true.

00:42:15.600 | - That's the thing, it's, I mean,

00:42:17.920 | and like, if you look at nuclear war, some of it is physics,

00:42:21.880 | but some of it is game theory, it's human nature,

00:42:26.200 | it's how societies built themselves, how they interact,

00:42:29.280 | how we create and resolve conflict,

00:42:32.680 | and it gets back to the human question

00:42:34.640 | on when you're doing long-term space travel,

00:42:37.120 | how do you maintain this dynamical system

00:42:40.320 | of flawed, irrational humans such that it persists

00:42:45.320 | throughout time, to not just maintain the biological body,

00:42:50.120 | but get people from not murdering each other,

00:42:52.640 | and like each other sufficiently

00:42:54.920 | to where you kinda fit well, but I think, you know,

00:42:59.280 | if songs or poetry or books taught me anything,

00:43:02.440 | if you like each other a little too much,

00:43:05.800 | I mean, the problems arise,

00:43:07.240 | 'cause then there's always a third person who also likes,

00:43:09.280 | and then there's the drama, it's like,

00:43:10.800 | I can't believe you did that last night, whatever,

00:43:13.560 | so, and then there's beer,

00:43:14.760 | - Gets complicated quickly. - And it gets complicated

00:43:16.400 | quickly, okay, anyway, back to the dumb questions,

00:43:20.240 | 'cause you answered this, there's an interview

00:43:22.960 | where you answer a bunch of cool little questions

00:43:24.520 | from young students and so on about like space.

00:43:28.340 | One of them was playing music in space,

00:43:32.320 | and you mentioned something about

00:43:35.280 | what kind of instruments you could use

00:43:37.800 | to play music in space, could you mention about

00:43:40.640 | like does Spotify work in space,

00:43:43.160 | and if I wanted to do a live performance,

00:43:45.120 | what kind of instruments would I need?

00:43:47.800 | - Yeah, I mean, you referenced culture before,

00:43:50.320 | and I think this is one of the most exciting things

00:43:51.960 | that we have at our fingertips,

00:43:53.880 | which is to define a new culture for space exploration,

00:43:57.760 | we don't just have to import cultural artifacts from Earth

00:44:01.600 | to make life worth living in space,

00:44:03.480 | and this musical instrument that you referenced

00:44:05.120 | was a design of an object that could only be performed

00:44:08.200 | in microgravity, - Oh, cool.

00:44:10.200 | - So it doesn't sound the same way

00:44:12.200 | when it's a percussive instrument,

00:44:14.200 | when it's rattled or moved in a gravity environment,

00:44:16.760 | it is unique. - Can we look it up?

00:44:18.280 | - It's called the Telemetron, yeah, it's created by--

00:44:20.640 | - Of course it's called the Telemetron,

00:44:22.360 | that is so awesome.

00:44:23.520 | - Created by Sans Fish and Nicole Lillier,

00:44:25.760 | two amazing graduate students and staff researchers

00:44:28.520 | on my team. - What does it look like?

00:44:30.320 | - It looks steampunk, actually, yeah,

00:44:33.840 | it's a pretty cool design, it looks like

00:44:35.640 | it's a geometric solid that has these interesting artifacts

00:44:38.720 | on the inside, and it has a lot of sensors, actually,

00:44:41.240 | additionally on the inside, like IMUs,

00:44:43.120 | inertial measurement sensors, that allow it to detect

00:44:46.960 | when it's floating and when it's not floating,

00:44:49.120 | and provides this really kind of ethereal,

00:44:52.480 | they later sonify it, so they use electronic music

00:44:55.000 | to turn it into a symphony or turn it into a piece,

00:44:57.760 | and yeah, this is the object, the Telemetron.

00:44:59.600 | - How does a human interact with it?

00:45:01.400 | - By tossing it, so it's an interactive

00:45:03.320 | musical instrument, it actually requires another partner,

00:45:06.400 | so the idea was that it's something like a dance,

00:45:09.400 | or just something like a choreography in space.

00:45:12.040 | - Got it, and speaking of which,

00:45:13.720 | you also talked about sports, and ball sports,

00:45:17.440 | like playing soccer, so you mentioned that,

00:45:20.280 | so your muscles can move at full speed,

00:45:23.000 | and then if you push off the wall lightly,

00:45:26.520 | you fly across, zoom across, so how does the physics

00:45:30.160 | of that work, can you still play soccer,

00:45:33.000 | for example, in space?

00:45:34.480 | - You can, but one of the most intuitive things

00:45:37.280 | that we all learn as babies, right,

00:45:39.200 | is whenever you throw something,

00:45:40.660 | if I was gonna toss something to you,

00:45:42.000 | I'd toss it up, 'cause I know that it has to compensate

00:45:44.720 | for the fact that that Keplerian arc is gonna drop down,

00:45:47.680 | the equations of motion are gonna drop down,

00:45:50.900 | I would, in space, I would just shoot something

00:45:53.080 | directly towards you, so like straight line of sight,

00:45:56.320 | and so that would be very different

00:45:57.440 | for any type of ball sport, is to retrain

00:45:59.600 | your human mind to have that as your intuitive

00:46:02.780 | arc of motion, or lack of arc.

00:46:04.400 | - From your experience, from understanding

00:46:06.280 | how astronauts get adjusted to this stuff,

00:46:08.560 | how long does it take to adjust to the physics

00:46:10.400 | of this world, this other world?

00:46:13.040 | - So even after one or two parabolic flights,

00:46:15.480 | you can gain a certain facility

00:46:18.680 | with moving in that environment,

00:46:20.720 | I think most astronauts would say,

00:46:22.240 | maybe several days on station, or a week on station,

00:46:25.080 | and their brain flips, it's amazing,

00:46:27.500 | the plasticity of the human brain,

00:46:29.000 | and how quickly they are able to adapt,

00:46:31.160 | and so pretty quickly, they become creatures

00:46:34.360 | of this new environment.

00:46:36.160 | - Okay, so that's cool, it's creating

00:46:38.080 | a little bit of an experience, what about if you go

00:46:40.460 | for more than 100 days, for one year,

00:46:43.520 | for two years, for three years,

00:46:46.140 | what challenges start to emerge in that case?

00:46:49.120 | - So Scott Kelly wrote this amazing book

00:46:50.960 | after he spent a year in space, and he's a twin,

00:46:53.480 | it's absolutely fantastic that NASA got to do

00:46:56.000 | a twin study, it's perfect.

00:46:58.600 | So he wrote a lot about his experience

00:47:00.800 | on the health side of what changed,

00:47:03.040 | things like bone density, muscle atrophy,

00:47:06.960 | eyesight changing because the shape of your eyeball changes,

00:47:10.140 | which changes your lens, which changes how you see.

00:47:12.960 | If we're then thinking about the challenges

00:47:14.680 | between a year and three years,

00:47:16.560 | especially if we're doing that three year trip to Mars

00:47:18.600 | for your friend, who asked earlier,

00:47:20.420 | then you have to think about nutrition,

00:47:24.000 | and so how are you keeping all of these different needs

00:47:26.760 | for your body alive, how are you protecting astronauts

00:47:29.600 | against radiation, either having some type of a shell

00:47:32.200 | on the spacecraft, which is expensive because it's heavy,

00:47:35.360 | you know, if it's something like lead,

00:47:36.440 | a really effective radiation shell,

00:47:38.000 | it's gonna be a lot of mass, or is there a pill

00:47:41.360 | that could be taken to try to make you less in danger

00:47:46.360 | of some of the radiation effects?

00:47:49.320 | A lot of this has not yet been answered,

00:47:51.100 | but radiation is a really significant challenge

00:47:53.440 | for that three year journey.

00:47:55.560 | - And what are the negative effects of radiation

00:47:57.480 | on the human body out in space?

00:47:59.160 | - A higher likelihood to develop cancer at a younger age.

00:48:03.320 | So you'd probably be able to get there and get back,

00:48:05.320 | but you'd find yourself in the same way

00:48:08.120 | if you were exposed to significant radiation on Earth,

00:48:10.800 | you'd find significant bad health effects as you age.

00:48:13.500 | - What do you think about, like, decades?

00:48:17.200 | Do you think about decades, or is this, like,

00:48:20.220 | an entire human lifetime? - I think about centuries.

00:48:22.840 | - Centuries? - For my space,

00:48:24.040 | but yeah, for decades, I think as soon as we get past

00:48:27.280 | the three year mark, we'll absolutely want,

00:48:29.640 | somewhere between three years and a decade,

00:48:31.160 | we'll want artificial gravity.

00:48:33.680 | And we know how to do that, actually.

00:48:35.380 | The engineering questions still need to be tweaked

00:48:37.440 | for how we'd really implement it,

00:48:38.520 | but the science is there to know how we would spin

00:48:41.360 | habitats in orbit and generate that force

00:48:44.160 | so even if the entire habitat's not spinning,

00:48:46.440 | you at least have a treadmill part of the space station

00:48:49.140 | that is spinning, and you can spend some fraction

00:48:51.560 | of your day in a near to 1G environment

00:48:55.480 | and keep your body healthy.

00:48:56.840 | - Wait, literally from just spinning?

00:48:58.480 | - From spinning, yeah, centripetal force.

00:49:00.200 | - That's fascinating. - So you generate this force.

00:49:01.560 | If you've ever been in those carnival rides,

00:49:03.600 | the Gravitrons that spin you up around the side,

00:49:06.120 | that's the concept.

00:49:07.400 | And this is actually one of the reasons why

00:49:09.240 | we are spinning out a new company from my MIT lab.

00:49:13.200 | - Spinning out, ha. - Spinning out, ha.

00:49:14.680 | That was an accidental but well-noted space pun.

00:49:18.080 | It's impossible to avoid. - Dad jokes, all right.

00:49:20.740 | - But yeah, we're spinning out a new company

00:49:23.920 | to look at next-generation space architecture

00:49:27.880 | and how do we actually scale humanity's access to space,

00:49:30.640 | and one of the areas that we wanna look at

00:49:32.640 | is artificial gravity.

00:49:34.160 | - Is there a name yet?

00:49:35.000 | - Yep, there's a name.

00:49:35.840 | We are brand new.

00:49:36.660 | We are just exiting stealth mode,

00:49:38.880 | so your podcast listeners will literally be among

00:49:41.040 | some of the first to hear about it.

00:49:42.640 | It's called Aurelia Institute.

00:49:44.800 | - Beautiful.

00:49:45.640 | - Aurelia is an old English word for chrysalis,

00:49:48.360 | and the idea with this is that we, humanity, collectively,

00:49:52.020 | are at this next stage of our metamorphosis,

00:49:55.660 | like a chrysalis, into a space-faring species.

00:49:58.740 | And so we felt that this was a good time,

00:50:00.940 | a necessary time, to think about

00:50:04.380 | next-generation space architecture,

00:50:06.140 | but also Starfleet Academy,

00:50:08.140 | if you know that reference from Star Trek.

00:50:10.240 | - Yes, so let me ask a silly-sounding,

00:50:16.380 | ridiculous-sounding, but probably extremely important

00:50:18.400 | question, sex in space, including intercourse,

00:50:22.520 | conception, procreation, birth,

00:50:24.780 | like being a parent, like raising the baby.

00:50:29.200 | So basically, from birth, well,

00:50:31.120 | from the before-birth part,

00:50:32.600 | like the birds and the bees and stuff,

00:50:34.780 | and then the whole thing, how complicated is that?

00:50:38.480 | I remember looking at the, thank you.

00:50:41.020 | I remember looking at this exact Wikipedia page, actually,

00:50:46.000 | and I remember being, the Wikipedia page is sex in space,

00:50:50.320 | and fascinated how difficult of an engineering problem

00:50:52.640 | the whole thing is.

00:50:53.720 | Is that something you think about, too,

00:50:55.360 | how to have generations of humans,

00:50:58.800 | self-replicating organisms?

00:51:02.720 | - Societies, yes, we are. - Yeah, societies, essentially.

00:51:04.720 | I mean, I guess with micro,

00:51:05.800 | like if you solve the gravity problem,

00:51:07.480 | you solve a lot of these problems.

00:51:09.040 | - That's the hope, yeah, is like the central challenge

00:51:11.320 | of microgravity to human reproduction,

00:51:13.680 | but we do host a workshop every year at Beyond the Cradle,

00:51:16.680 | which is the space event that we run at MIT,

00:51:18.840 | and we always do one on pregnancy in space,

00:51:21.600 | or motherhood, or raising children in space,

00:51:24.440 | 'cause there are huge questions.

00:51:26.760 | There've been a few mammal studies

00:51:29.120 | that have looked at reproduction in space,

00:51:31.120 | but there are still really major questions

00:51:32.520 | about how does it work, how does the fetus evolve

00:51:35.320 | in microgravity if you were pregnant in space?

00:51:37.480 | And I think the near-term answer is just gonna be

00:51:39.560 | we need to be able to give humans a 1G environment

00:51:43.960 | for that phase of our development.

00:51:45.240 | - Yeah, so there's some studies on mice in microgravity,

00:51:49.280 | and it's interesting, like I think the mice,

00:51:51.200 | like one of them, the mice weren't able to walk,

00:51:53.200 | or like their understanding of physics, I guess,

00:51:55.400 | is off or something like that.

00:51:56.600 | - Yeah, the mental model, when you're really young

00:51:59.960 | and you're kind of getting your mental model of physics,

00:52:03.480 | we do think that that would change kids' abilities

00:52:07.040 | to if they were born in microgravity,

00:52:09.040 | their ability to have that intuition

00:52:11.120 | around an Earth-based 1G environment might be missing,

00:52:13.880 | 'cause a lot of that is really crystallized

00:52:15.360 | in early development, early childhood development.

00:52:17.820 | So that makes sense that they would see that in mice, yeah.

00:52:20.040 | - So what about life when we choose to park our vehicles

00:52:25.040 | on another planet, on the moon, but let's go to Mars?

00:52:30.480 | First of all, does that excite you,

00:52:32.920 | humans going to Mars, like stepping foot on Mars?

00:52:37.440 | And when do you think it'll happen?

00:52:38.800 | - It does excite me.

00:52:39.840 | I think visionaries like Elon are working to make that

00:52:42.880 | happen in terms of building the road to space.

00:52:45.800 | We are really excited about building out

00:52:48.440 | the human lived experience of space once you get there.

00:52:51.400 | So how are you gonna grow your food?

00:52:53.160 | What is your habitat gonna look like?

00:52:55.200 | I think it's profoundly exciting,

00:52:56.600 | but I do think that there's a little bit

00:52:57.960 | of a misunderstanding of Mars anywhere in the near future

00:53:02.420 | being anything like a replacement for Earth.

00:53:04.960 | So it is good for humanity to have these other pockets

00:53:07.280 | of our civilization that can expand out beyond Earth.

00:53:10.040 | But Mars is not in its current state

00:53:13.600 | a good home for humanity.

00:53:15.760 | Too many perchlorates in the soil,

00:53:17.400 | you can't use that soil to grow crops.

00:53:19.560 | Atmosphere is too thin, certainly can't breathe it,

00:53:21.820 | but it's also just really thin compared to our atmosphere.

00:53:25.420 | A lot of different challenges that would have to be

00:53:27.240 | fundamentally changed on that planet to make it a good home

00:53:31.280 | for a large human civilization.

00:53:33.360 | - How does a large civilization of humans get built

00:53:37.040 | on Mars and what do you think it gets,

00:53:41.520 | starts being difficult?

00:53:42.540 | So can you have a small base of like 10 people essentially,

00:53:46.240 | kind of like the International Space Station

00:53:47.840 | kind of situation?

00:53:49.760 | And then can you get it to 100 to 1,000 to a million?

00:53:53.240 | Are there some interesting challenges there

00:53:55.640 | that worry you, saying that Mars is just not a good backup

00:53:58.920 | at this time for Earth?

00:54:01.000 | - I think small outposts, absolutely, like McMurdo, right?

00:54:04.060 | So we have these models of really extreme environments

00:54:06.540 | on Earth in Antarctica, for example,

00:54:08.760 | where humans have been able to go

00:54:10.360 | and make a sustainable settlement.

00:54:13.460 | McMurdo style life on Mars, probably feasible in the 2030s.

00:54:18.460 | So we wanna send the first human missions to Mars

00:54:21.080 | and maybe as early as the end of this decade,

00:54:22.640 | more likely early 2030s.

00:54:24.760 | Moving anywhere beyond that in terms of a place

00:54:28.080 | where like an entire human life would be lived,

00:54:31.040 | where it's not just you go for a three month deployment

00:54:33.440 | and you come back,

00:54:34.400 | that is actually the big challenge line,

00:54:36.820 | is just saying, is there enough technological sophistication

00:54:41.420 | that can be brought that far out into space?

00:54:44.520 | If you imagine your electronics break,

00:54:46.540 | there's no Radio Shack, this dates me a little bit

00:54:48.860 | that my mind jumps to Radio Shack,

00:54:50.360 | but there's no supply chains on Mars

00:54:54.140 | that can supply the level of technological sophistication

00:54:58.100 | for all the products that we rely on on day-to-day life.

00:55:01.100 | So you'd be going back to actually a very simple existence,

00:55:03.940 | more like pioneer life out West

00:55:06.000 | in the story of the US, for example.

00:55:08.700 | And I think that the future of larger scale gatherings

00:55:13.140 | of humans in orbit, or sorry, in space,

00:55:15.180 | is actually gonna be in microgravity,

00:55:17.660 | floating space cities,

00:55:19.580 | not so much trying to establish settlements on the surface.

00:55:24.580 | - So you think sort of a significant engineering investment

00:55:29.500 | in terms of our efforts and money

00:55:31.420 | should be on large spaceships

00:55:36.420 | that perhaps are doing this kind of self-assembly,

00:55:40.060 | all these kinds of things, and doing it in orbit,

00:55:41.940 | maybe building a giant donut around the planet over time.

00:55:45.460 | - Yeah, that is the goal.

00:55:46.300 | And I think the current political climate

00:55:48.220 | is such that you can't get the trillion dollar investment

00:55:52.340 | to build, to start from scratch

00:55:54.340 | and build the sci-fi megastructure.

00:55:56.740 | But if you can build it in fits and starts,

00:55:58.980 | in little different pieces,

00:56:00.020 | which is another advantage of self-assembly,

00:56:02.020 | it's much more like how nature works.

00:56:04.140 | So it's biomimicry inspired way

00:56:06.700 | for humanity to scale out in space.

00:56:09.740 | - And whether it's out in space or on Mars,

00:56:12.700 | the idea that sort of two people fall in love,

00:56:15.300 | they have sex,

00:56:17.440 | a child is born,

00:56:21.580 | and then that couple has to teach that child

00:56:24.980 | that like we, that they came from Earth.

00:56:27.620 | I just love the idea that somebody is born on Mars

00:56:30.540 | or out in space, and you have to be like,

00:56:33.020 | that this is not actually like the original home,

00:56:36.380 | just them looking at Earth

00:56:38.380 | and being like, this is where we came from.

00:56:40.260 | I don't know, that's really inspiring to me.

00:56:42.060 | And the child being really confused

00:56:43.620 | and then wanting to go back to TikTok,

00:56:45.780 | or whatever they do.

00:56:47.500 | - Whatever they do in that era.

00:56:49.100 | I mean, there's great sci-fi, right,

00:56:50.500 | about people being born on Mars,

00:56:52.960 | and because it's a lower gravity environment,

00:56:54.980 | they're taller, they're more gangly,

00:56:56.820 | if they were actually able to develop there,

00:56:58.220 | and then they come back to Earth,

00:56:59.360 | and they're like second-class citizens,

00:57:01.380 | 'cause they can't function here in the same way,

00:57:04.060 | 'cause the gravity's too strong for them.

00:57:06.060 | You see this in series like "The Expanse"

00:57:07.800 | with the Belters and these different societies

00:57:10.100 | that if we were to succeed in having human societies

00:57:13.860 | grow up in different pockets,

00:57:14.960 | it's not necessarily going to be easy for them

00:57:17.880 | to always come back to Earth as their home.

00:57:20.380 | - Yeah, different cultures form,

00:57:21.780 | which is the positive way of phrasing it,

00:57:23.460 | but it's also, this human history teaches us

00:57:26.700 | that we like to form the other,

00:57:29.380 | so there's this kind of conflict that naturally emerges.

00:57:32.180 | Let me ask another sort of dark question.

00:57:35.260 | What do you think about, coming from a military family,

00:57:38.020 | there's still, sadly, wars in the world.

00:57:43.340 | Do you think wars, military conflicts,

00:57:46.460 | will follow us into space, wars between nations?

00:57:51.340 | Like, from my perspective currently,

00:57:54.060 | it just seems like space is a place for scientists

00:57:57.740 | and engineers to explore ideas,

00:58:00.140 | but the more and more progress you make,

00:58:02.700 | does it worry you that nations start to step in

00:58:05.980 | and form, you know, that go out,

00:58:09.780 | unfold military conflict, whether it's in cyberspace,

00:58:13.320 | in space, or actual hot war?

00:58:18.420 | - I am really concerned about that,

00:58:19.900 | and I do think for decades,

00:58:22.020 | the scientific community in space has hung on

00:58:24.220 | to this notion from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,

00:58:28.000 | which is space is the province of all humankind,

00:58:30.400 | peaceful uses of outer space only,

00:58:32.800 | but I do think the rise in tensions

00:58:35.000 | and the geopolitical scene that we're seeing,

00:58:37.340 | I do, yeah, I do harbor a lot of concern

00:58:40.980 | about hot wars following humanity out into space,

00:58:44.860 | and it's worth trying to tie nations together

00:58:49.340 | with more collaboration to avoid that happening.

00:58:51.960 | The International Space Station is a great example.

00:58:53.760 | I think it's something like 18 countries

00:58:55.500 | are party to this treaty.

00:58:57.040 | It might be less, it might be more,

00:58:59.340 | and then of course, there's a smaller number of countries

00:59:01.120 | that actually send astronauts,

00:59:02.620 | but even at the fall of the Soviet Union

00:59:05.640 | and through some tense times with Russia,

00:59:07.900 | the ISS had been a place where the US and Russia

00:59:10.700 | were actually able to collaborate between Mir and ISS.

00:59:13.960 | I think it'd be really important right now, in particular,

00:59:17.060 | to find other platforms where these hegemonic powers

00:59:20.600 | in the world and developing world nations

00:59:23.500 | can come and collaborate on the future of space

00:59:26.740 | and purposefully intertwine our success

00:59:29.560 | so that there's a danger to multiple parties

00:59:31.320 | if somebody is a bad actor.

00:59:32.940 | - So we're now talking as there's a war in Ukraine,

00:59:36.540 | and I haven't been sleeping much.

00:59:37.900 | I have family, friends, colleagues in both countries,

00:59:42.900 | and I'm just talking to a lot of people,

00:59:45.500 | many of whom are crying, refugees,

00:59:48.780 | and there's a basic human compassion and love

00:59:53.100 | for each other that I believe technology

00:59:55.800 | can help catalyze and accelerate,

00:59:59.160 | but there's also science.

01:00:00.440 | There's something about rockets.

01:00:02.160 | There's something about, and I mean like space exploration,

01:00:05.800 | that inspires the world about the positive possibilities

01:00:10.800 | of the human species.

01:00:15.600 | So in terms of Ukraine and Russia and China and India

01:00:18.760 | and the United States and Europe and everywhere else,

01:00:22.840 | it seems like collaborating on giant space projects

01:00:27.840 | is one way to escape these wars,

01:00:30.080 | to escape these sort of geopolitical conflicts.

01:00:33.680 | I mean, there's so much camaraderie to the whole thing,

01:00:37.400 | and even in this little period of human history

01:00:42.400 | we're living through, it seems like that's essential.

01:00:45.440 | Even through this pandemic,

01:00:47.680 | there is something so inspiring

01:00:49.160 | about those like SpaceX rockets going up, for example.

01:00:52.240 | - It's true.

01:00:53.400 | - This reinvigoration of the space exploration efforts

01:00:57.120 | by the commercial sector.

01:00:58.920 | I don't know.

01:00:59.760 | That was, as many of us have,

01:01:03.160 | sort of some dark times during this pandemic,

01:01:06.400 | just like loneliness and sometimes emotion and anger

01:01:10.120 | and just hopelessness and politics,

01:01:13.640 | and then you look at those rockets going up

01:01:15.720 | and it just gives you hope.

01:01:17.160 | So I think that's an understated sort of value

01:01:21.400 | of space exploration,

01:01:22.960 | is the thing that unites us and gives us hope.

01:01:26.360 | Obviously also inspires young generations

01:01:29.160 | and young minds to also contribute

01:01:31.520 | in not necessarily in space exploration,

01:01:33.040 | but in all of science and literature and poetry.

01:01:35.440 | There's something about when you look up to the stars,

01:01:38.160 | it makes you dream.

01:01:39.800 | - Very true.

01:01:40.640 | - And so that's a really good reason

01:01:43.600 | to sort of invest in this,

01:01:45.120 | whether it's building giant megastructures,

01:01:47.160 | which is so freaking cool,

01:01:48.440 | but also colonizing Mars.

01:01:52.680 | Yeah, it's something to look forward to,

01:01:55.000 | something that,

01:01:56.840 | and not make it a domain of war,

01:02:02.080 | but a domain of human collaboration

01:02:04.560 | and human compassion, I think.

01:02:06.840 | You're the founder and director

01:02:09.240 | of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative.

01:02:12.280 | It includes a ton of projects.

01:02:14.480 | So I just wanted to,

01:02:15.760 | they're focused, I guess, on life in space

01:02:18.560 | from astrobiology, like we talked about, to habitats.

01:02:22.200 | Are there some other interesting projects,

01:02:23.840 | part of this initiative that you are,

01:02:26.360 | that pop to mind that you find particularly cool?

01:02:29.320 | - Absolutely.

01:02:30.320 | One is the future of in-space manufacturing.

01:02:33.360 | So if we're gonna build large-scale space structures,

01:02:35.760 | yes, it's great to ship them up from Earth

01:02:37.800 | and self-assemble them.

01:02:39.240 | But what about extrusion in orbit?

01:02:41.880 | It's one of the best technologies

01:02:43.800 | to leverage in microgravity

01:02:45.280 | because you can extrude a particularly long beam

01:02:48.480 | that would sag in a normal gravity environment,

01:02:51.040 | but might be able to become the basis of a truss

01:02:53.600 | or a large-scale space structure.

01:02:55.080 | So we're doing miniature tests of extrusion

01:02:57.960 | and are excited to fly this

01:02:59.320 | on the International Space Station in a few months.

01:03:01.880 | We are working on swarm robots.

01:03:04.320 | We have just announced, actually, MIT's return to the moon.

01:03:08.880 | So my organization is leading this mission for MIT,

01:03:11.480 | going back to the surface of the moon

01:03:12.960 | as early as the end of this year, 2022,

01:03:15.440 | maybe early 2023,

01:03:17.440 | and trying to take data from our research payloads

01:03:21.640 | at this historic South Pole site

01:03:24.440 | where NASA's supposed to send the first humans back

01:03:27.120 | on the Artemis III mission.

01:03:28.200 | So our hope is to directly support

01:03:29.960 | that human mission with our data.

01:03:32.120 | - How does that connect to the swarm aspects?

01:03:34.400 | Does it connect?

01:03:35.240 | - Yes, yeah.

01:03:36.080 | So we're actually gonna fly one of the little astro-ants,

01:03:38.400 | that's the current plan,

01:03:39.840 | one of the little swarm robots on the top of a rover

01:03:43.400 | that's part of the mission.

01:03:44.240 | - Ants riding a rover?

01:03:45.680 | - Yes, exactly, an ant riding a rover.

01:03:48.200 | That rover gets packed in a lander.

01:03:49.900 | That lander gets packed in a SpaceX rocket.

01:03:52.040 | So it's a whole nesting doll situation to get to the moon.

01:03:55.440 | - Mother of robot dragons.

01:03:57.240 | - Yes, yeah, exactly.

01:03:58.680 | - So this one, a swarm of one?

01:04:01.600 | - Swarm of one, exactly.

01:04:02.760 | We're testing out.

01:04:03.760 | It's a tech demonstration mission,

01:04:05.520 | not a true swarm.

01:04:06.880 | Yeah, there they are.

01:04:07.720 | Those are the astro-ants.

01:04:09.240 | - Wow, and this was a distributed system,

01:04:11.600 | and in theory, you could have a ton of these.

01:04:14.200 | - Yes, these could also be centralized.

01:04:15.920 | So they have wireless technology

01:04:17.440 | that could also talk to a central base station,

01:04:19.840 | and we'll be assessing, kind of case by case,

01:04:22.540 | whether it makes sense to operate them

01:04:23.880 | in a decentralized swarm,

01:04:25.120 | or to command them in a centralized swarm.

01:04:27.840 | - Each robot is equipped with four magnetic wheels,

01:04:32.220 | which enable the robot to attach to any magnetic surface,

01:04:35.720 | so you can operate basically in any environment.

01:04:37.760 | - He tested the, we tested the mobility of all robots

01:04:41.000 | on different materials in a microgravity environment.

01:04:44.840 | - On the vomit comet prior to going to the moon.

01:04:46.920 | - That must look so cool.

01:04:48.360 | So they're basically moving along

01:04:49.840 | different metallic surfaces.

01:04:52.080 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:04:53.120 | It's interesting when you, just a minute ago,

01:04:56.460 | talking about the reflection of

01:04:58.320 | how space can be so aspirational and so uniting.

01:05:01.900 | There's a great quote from Bill Anders

01:05:03.700 | from the Apollo 8 mission to the moon,

01:05:05.320 | which is he, it's the Earthrise photo

01:05:07.640 | that was taken where you see the Earth

01:05:09.200 | coming up over the horizon of the moon,

01:05:10.800 | and the quote is something along the lines of,

01:05:12.760 | "We came all the way to discover the moon,

01:05:15.120 | "and what we really discovered was the Earth."

01:05:17.900 | This really powerful image looking back.

01:05:20.080 | And so we're also trying to think for our lunar mission,

01:05:22.360 | we realize we're a very privileged group at MIT

01:05:24.560 | to get the opportunity to do this.

01:05:26.280 | How could we bring humanity along with us?

01:05:29.040 | And so one of the things we're still testing out,

01:05:31.080 | I don't know if we're gonna be able to swing it,

01:05:32.760 | would be to do something like a Twitch Plays Pokemon,

01:05:35.560 | but with the robot.

01:05:36.920 | So let a lot of people on Earth actually control the robot,

01:05:39.560 | or at least benefit from the data that we're gathering,

01:05:41.960 | and try to release the data openly.

01:05:44.000 | So we're exploring a couple of different ideas

01:05:45.540 | for how do we engage more people in this mission.

01:05:48.320 | - That would be surreal to be able to interact

01:05:51.420 | in some way with the thing that's out there.

01:05:53.880 | - Exactly. - On another surface.

01:05:55.480 | - Direct connection. - Direct connection.

01:05:57.680 | I think about artificial intelligence in that same way,

01:06:01.280 | which is like building robots puts a mirror to us humans.

01:06:06.720 | - Certainly.

01:06:07.560 | - It makes us wonder about what is intelligence,

01:06:10.520 | what is consciousness,

01:06:11.640 | and what is actually valuable about human beings.

01:06:14.560 | When an AI system learns to play chess better than humans,

01:06:18.320 | you start to let go of this idea

01:06:19.760 | that humans are special because of intelligence.

01:06:22.800 | It's something else.

01:06:24.680 | It's maybe the flame of human consciousness.

01:06:29.160 | It's the capacity to feel deeply,

01:06:32.680 | to both suffer and to love, all those things.

01:06:36.840 | Somehow AI to me puts a mirror to that.

01:06:39.840 | You mentioned HAL 9000.

01:06:41.880 | You have to bring it up.

01:06:43.080 | With these swarm bots crawling on the surface

01:06:47.520 | of your cocoon in space.

01:06:50.080 | - Right.

01:06:50.920 | - I mean, all right, let me steel man

01:06:53.840 | the HAL 9000 perspective here.

01:06:56.680 | - Okay.

01:06:57.520 | - The poor guy just wanted to maintain the mission,

01:07:02.160 | and the astronauts were,

01:07:03.240 | I mean, I don't know if people often talk about that,

01:07:05.720 | but you know, like doctors have to make difficult decisions.

01:07:09.960 | So when there's limited resources,

01:07:11.640 | you actually do have to sacrifice human life often

01:07:14.040 | 'cause you have to make decisions.

01:07:16.000 | - Right.

01:07:16.840 | - And I think HAL is probably making that kind of decision

01:07:20.160 | about what's more important,

01:07:22.840 | the lives of individual astronauts or--

01:07:25.240 | - The mission.

01:07:26.080 | - The mission.

01:07:26.920 | And I feel like AI and other humans

01:07:30.240 | will need to make these decisions.

01:07:33.000 | And it also feels like AI systems

01:07:35.160 | will need to help make those decisions.

01:07:38.920 | I don't know.

01:07:40.200 | I guess my question is about

01:07:42.680 | greater and greater collective intelligence by systems.

01:07:46.020 | Do you worry about that?

01:07:51.560 | What is the right way to sort of solve this problem,

01:07:54.720 | keeping a human in the loop?

01:07:56.000 | Do you think about this kind of stuff?

01:07:57.480 | Or are they sufficiently dumb now,

01:07:59.360 | the robots that's not yet on the horizon to think about?

01:08:03.480 | - I think it should be on the horizon.

01:08:04.840 | It's always good to think about these things early

01:08:06.560 | because we make a lot of technical design decisions

01:08:09.280 | at this phase working with swarm robots

01:08:11.160 | that it would be better to have thought about

01:08:12.840 | some of these questions early in the life cycle of a project.

01:08:16.320 | There is a real interest in NASA right now

01:08:18.600 | thinking about the future of human robot interaction, HRI,

01:08:21.640 | and what is the right synergy

01:08:22.940 | in terms of level of control for the human

01:08:25.800 | versus level of dependence or control for the robot?

01:08:29.120 | And we're beginning to test out more of these scenarios.

01:08:33.560 | For example, the Gateway Space Station,

01:08:36.080 | which is meant to be in orbit around the moon

01:08:37.900 | as a staging base for the surface operations,

01:08:40.680 | is meant to be able to function autonomously

01:08:43.640 | with no humans in it for months at a time

01:08:46.360 | 'cause they think it's gonna be seasonal.

01:08:47.800 | They think we might not be constantly staffing it.

01:08:50.160 | So this will be a really great test of,

01:08:51.800 | I don't know that anybody's yet worried

01:08:53.460 | about how 9,000 evolving,

01:08:55.280 | but certainly just the robustness of some of these AI systems

01:08:58.780 | that might be asked to autonomously maintain the station

01:09:01.840 | while the humans are away.

01:09:03.140 | Or detection algorithms that are gonna say,

01:09:06.640 | if you had a human pilot,

01:09:07.960 | they might see debris in orbit and steer around it.

01:09:09.920 | There'll be a lot of autonomous navigation

01:09:11.280 | that has to happen.

01:09:12.800 | That'll be one of the early test beds

01:09:14.160 | where we'll start to get a little bit closer to that future.

01:09:16.640 | - Well, the HRI component is really interesting to me,

01:09:19.400 | especially when the I includes almost friendship

01:09:24.760 | because people don't realize this, I think,

01:09:27.560 | that we humans long for connection.

01:09:29.840 | And when you have even a basic interaction

01:09:32.320 | that's just supposed to be just serving you or something,

01:09:36.280 | you still project,

01:09:37.720 | it's still a source of meaning and connection.

01:09:42.720 | And so you do have to think about that.

01:09:47.040 | I mean, how 9,000,

01:09:48.700 | the movie maybe doesn't portray it that way,

01:09:51.960 | but I'm sure there's a relationship there

01:09:53.800 | between the astronauts and the robot,

01:09:56.240 | especially when you have greater and greater level

01:09:57.800 | of intelligence.

01:09:58.720 | And maybe that addresses the happiness question too.

01:10:02.960 | - Yeah, I think there's a great book by Kate Darling,

01:10:06.280 | who's one of my colleagues at MIT.

01:10:08.200 | - Yeah, she's amazing.

01:10:09.480 | She's already been on this podcast,

01:10:11.500 | but we talk all the time and we're supposed to talk

01:10:14.840 | and we've been missing each other

01:10:16.160 | and we're gonna make it happen soon.

01:10:18.000 | - Yeah.

01:10:19.000 | - Come down to Texas, Kate.

01:10:20.520 | All right.

01:10:21.360 | Anyway, yeah, she's amazing.

01:10:22.280 | And she has this book,

01:10:23.120 | and she has her whole work is about this.

01:10:25.160 | - Connection with robots, yeah.

01:10:26.520 | - This beautiful connection that we have with robots.

01:10:28.440 | But I think it's greater and greater importance

01:10:30.580 | when it's out in space.

01:10:32.240 | 'Cause it could help alleviate some of the loneliness.

01:10:34.920 | - Right.

01:10:35.760 | One of the projects in the book that I gave you,

01:10:37.360 | which is a catalog of the projects that we've worked on

01:10:39.640 | over the last five years,

01:10:40.720 | is this social robot that was developed at the Media Lab.

01:10:43.920 | And one of the first years in 2017

01:10:46.320 | that we flew a zero-g flight,

01:10:47.880 | we took the social robot along

01:10:49.680 | and tried to do a little bit of a very scaled down

01:10:51.840 | human study to look at these questions.

01:10:54.080 | Because you do imagine that we would form a bond,

01:10:56.880 | a real bond with the social robots

01:10:58.860 | that might be not just serving us on a mission,

01:11:01.600 | but really be our teammates on a future mission.

01:11:04.480 | And I do think that that could have a powerful role

01:11:06.640 | in the mental health and just the stability of a crew

01:11:08.640 | is to have some other robot friends come along.

01:11:10.880 | - What do you, by the way, the book you mentioned

01:11:13.320 | is "Into the Anthropocosmos,"

01:11:18.320 | a whole space catalog from the space catalog.

01:11:22.000 | - Get that reference.

01:11:22.840 | - Yeah, so call it to Earth catalog,

01:11:25.280 | a whole space catalog

01:11:26.360 | from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative.

01:11:29.500 | What about the happiness?

01:11:31.920 | You said that that's one of the problems

01:11:33.960 | of when you're out in space.

01:11:35.920 | How do you keep humans happy?

01:11:37.520 | Again, asking for a friend.

01:11:38.880 | - Yes.

01:11:39.720 | I mean, one of the big challenges is

01:11:41.160 | you can't just open a window or walk out a door

01:11:44.540 | and blow off steam, right?

01:11:45.960 | You can't just go somewhere to clear your head.

01:11:49.320 | And in that sense, you need to build habitats

01:11:52.800 | that are homes that really care for the humans inside them

01:11:56.960 | and have, whether it's biophilia

01:11:59.280 | and a place where you can go and feel like you're in nature

01:12:02.040 | or a VR headset, which for some people is a poor simulcrum,

01:12:06.960 | but is maybe better than nothing.

01:12:09.240 | You need to be thinking about

01:12:10.600 | these technological interventions

01:12:12.960 | that are gonna have to be part of your home

01:12:15.000 | and be part of your maybe day-to-day ritual

01:12:17.760 | to keep you steady and balanced and happy

01:12:20.800 | or feeling fulfilled.

01:12:22.900 | - What about other humans, relationship with other humans?

01:12:25.620 | Do those get weird

01:12:28.060 | when you get past a certain number of humans?

01:12:30.420 | - I'm not an expert in this area,

01:12:31.700 | but an anecdote that I'll share,

01:12:33.100 | my understanding is that NASA has still not decided

01:12:36.300 | whether it's better to send married couples

01:12:38.460 | or single crew members in terms of

01:12:41.120 | you want some level of stability,

01:12:43.120 | you don't wanna have the drama of romantic relationships

01:12:45.620 | like you're alluding to before,

01:12:47.660 | but they can't decide because married couples also fight

01:12:50.660 | and have a really tough dynamic.

01:12:52.100 | And so there's a lot of open questions still to answer

01:12:54.420 | about what is the ideal psychological makeup of a crew?

01:12:57.540 | And we're starting to test some of these things

01:12:59.820 | with the civilian crews

01:13:01.180 | that are going up with Inspiration4,

01:13:02.780 | like last fall with SpaceX and Axe-1

01:13:04.940 | that's gonna fly in a few days here in March.

01:13:07.380 | As we begin to lengthen the time of those civilian crews,

01:13:10.920 | I think we'll start to learn a little bit more about

01:13:13.060 | just average everyday human-to-human dynamics

01:13:15.780 | and not the astronauts that are themselves selected

01:13:18.300 | to be perfect human specimens, very good to work with,

01:13:21.580 | easy to get along with.

01:13:23.060 | - I wish we collected more data about this pandemic

01:13:26.340 | because I feel like it's a good rough simulation

01:13:29.220 | of what it'd be like out in space.

01:13:30.420 | A lot of people were locked down, some married couples.

01:13:33.500 | I think a lot of marriages broke up,

01:13:35.340 | a lot of marriages got closer together.

01:13:37.600 | And then the single people, some of them went off the cliff

01:13:43.100 | and some of them discovered their new happiness

01:13:45.660 | and meaning and so on.

01:13:46.820 | It's a beautiful little experiment, a painful one.

01:13:50.100 | Is there a thorough way to really test that?

01:13:52.580 | 'Cause it's such a costly experiment.

01:13:56.780 | Send humans up there,

01:13:59.800 | but I guess you can always return back to Earth

01:14:01.540 | if it's not working out.

01:14:02.740 | - That's what we hope.

01:14:03.580 | (laughs)

01:14:04.400 | That's what we hope, you don't have like a Apollo 13

01:14:06.500 | situation that doesn't quite make it back.

01:14:08.040 | But yeah, this is also why Mars is such a challenge.

01:14:11.920 | The moon is only three days away.

01:14:13.540 | That's a lot quicker to recover from

01:14:15.260 | if there's a psychological problem with the crew

01:14:17.020 | or any type of maintenance problem, anything.

01:14:19.380 | Three years is such a challenge

01:14:23.700 | compared to these other domains

01:14:25.020 | that we've been getting more used to

01:14:26.240 | in terms of human space flight.

01:14:27.940 | So this is a question that we will need to have explored

01:14:30.540 | more before we start really sending crews to Mars.

01:14:33.020 | - So you're a young scientist.

01:14:36.140 | Do you think in your lifetime you will go out into orbit,

01:14:41.140 | you will go out beyond into deep space

01:14:47.340 | and potentially step, you,

01:14:50.380 | I don't know if you can call yourself a civilian.

01:14:53.300 | I don't know if that's what you count as,

01:14:54.740 | but you as a curious aunt from MIT, land, step on Mars.

01:14:59.740 | - Yes.

01:15:04.500 | (laughs)

01:15:06.340 | That's a firm, that's a firm--

01:15:07.180 | - Are you coming back?

01:15:08.020 | - Firm, yes.

01:15:08.840 | Yeah, I'm coming back.

01:15:09.680 | I don't want that one-way mission,

01:15:10.520 | I want the two-way mission.

01:15:12.100 | But yes, I mean, I think we're already talking

01:15:14.220 | about a pretty near-term opportunity

01:15:16.260 | where I could send graduate students

01:15:17.900 | to the International Space Station.

01:15:19.140 | - First, okay.

01:15:19.980 | (laughs)

01:15:21.260 | - Not a sacrifice, but send graduate students--

01:15:25.100 | - For the experience.

01:15:25.940 | - For the experience.

01:15:26.940 | Send graduate students to the ISS to do their research.

01:15:29.420 | I do think you and I both would have an opportunity

01:15:31.720 | to go to a lunar base of some sort within our lifetime.

01:15:35.640 | And there's a good chance if we really wanted to,

01:15:39.620 | we might have to really advocate for it,

01:15:41.740 | apply to an astronaut program.

01:15:43.260 | There will be some avenues for humans

01:15:45.100 | in our lifetime to go to Mars.

01:15:46.780 | - What's the bar for health?

01:15:51.060 | Do you think that bar will keep getting lower and lower

01:15:53.380 | in terms of how healthy, how athletic,

01:15:55.300 | like how, the psychological profile,

01:15:57.860 | all those kinds of things?

01:15:58.980 | - Yeah, for one, we're gonna build more robust habitats

01:16:01.580 | that don't depend on astronauts

01:16:03.340 | being so impeccably well-trained.

01:16:05.300 | So we're gonna make it better for inclusion

01:16:08.260 | and just opening access to space.

01:16:10.460 | But there's a fantastic group called Astro Access

01:16:12.780 | that is already helping disabled space flyers

01:16:15.500 | do zero-G flights and potentially get access to the ISS.

01:16:18.380 | And some of the things that we think of as disabilities

01:16:20.740 | on Earth are hyper abilities in space.

01:16:24.780 | You don't need really powerful legs in space.

01:16:27.500 | What you'd really benefit from having is a third arm,

01:16:30.760 | more ways to kind of move yourself around

01:16:32.380 | and grip and interact.

01:16:33.640 | So we are already seeing a much more open-minded approach

01:16:38.060 | to who gets to go to space.

01:16:40.020 | And Astro Access is a wonderful organization

01:16:41.900 | doing some of that work.

01:16:43.460 | - I'm hoping introversion

01:16:45.580 | will also be a superpower in space.

01:16:47.660 | Okay, well, first I'd love to get your opinion

01:16:49.980 | on commercial space flight,

01:16:51.780 | what SpaceX, what Blue Origin are doing.

01:16:54.180 | And also another question on top of that is,

01:16:57.700 | because you've worked with a lot of different kinds

01:17:01.340 | of people, culturally, what's the difference between

01:17:03.860 | SpaceX or commercial type of efforts, NASA, and MIT?

01:17:09.940 | - And academia.

01:17:11.780 | - And academia.

01:17:12.740 | - Yeah, so the first part of your question,

01:17:14.420 | I am thrilled by all of the commercial activity in space.

01:17:18.340 | It has really empowered our program.

01:17:19.980 | So instead of me waiting for five years to get a grant

01:17:23.500 | and get the money from the grant,

01:17:24.580 | and only then can you send a project to space,

01:17:26.940 | I got my fundraise, a lot like a startup founder,

01:17:29.660 | and I directly buy access to space

01:17:32.420 | on the International Space Station

01:17:33.580 | through SpaceX or NanoRacks.

01:17:35.220 | Same with Blue Origin and their suborbital craft.

01:17:37.500 | Same with Axiom now.

01:17:38.720 | Axiom's making plans for their own commercial space station.

01:17:42.480 | It's not out of the realm of possibility,

01:17:44.200 | but in a few years, I will rent lab space in orbit.

01:17:48.360 | I will rent a module from the Axiom space station

01:17:50.920 | or the orbital reef, which is the Blue Origin space station,

01:17:54.000 | or NanoRacks is thinking about Starlab Oasis.

01:17:56.840 | There's probably some other companies

01:17:58.000 | that I'm not even aware of yet

01:17:59.040 | that are doing commercial space habitat.

01:18:00.880 | So I think that's fabulous.

01:18:02.800 | And really empowering for our research.

01:18:04.800 | - Is it affordable?

01:18:06.320 | So like loosely speaking, does it become affordable

01:18:09.760 | for like MIT type of research lab?

01:18:13.800 | Does it, you know, or does it need to be a multi-university,

01:18:18.160 | like a gigantic effort? - Consortium thing.

01:18:19.800 | - Yeah, consortium thing.

01:18:20.760 | - One of the reasons we're spinning out Aurelia

01:18:22.760 | is we actually realized it's cheap enough,

01:18:24.600 | it doesn't even have to be MIT.

01:18:26.640 | And we wanted to start democratizing access

01:18:29.600 | to these spaceflight opportunities

01:18:30.920 | to a much broader swath of humanity.

01:18:33.000 | Could you take a, you know,

01:18:34.160 | Khan Academy educational course

01:18:36.600 | about, hey, students around the world,

01:18:38.800 | this is how you get ready for a zero-g flight.

01:18:40.720 | And by the way, come fly with us next year,

01:18:43.280 | which is something we're gonna do with Aurelia.

01:18:44.800 | We're gonna bring, you know,

01:18:46.240 | much more just kind of day-to-day folks on zero-g flights

01:18:49.040 | and get them access to engaging in the space industry.

01:18:52.600 | So it's become cheap enough

01:18:54.720 | and the prices have dropped enough to consider even that.

01:18:56.960 | So that's amazing.

01:18:57.960 | It definitely doesn't have to be

01:18:58.800 | a consortium of universities anymore.

01:19:00.880 | It depends on what you wanna fly.

01:19:02.000 | If you wanna fly James Webb,

01:19:03.400 | a huge telescope that's decades in the making,

01:19:05.840 | sure, you need a NASA allocation budget.

01:19:08.920 | You need billions.

01:19:10.480 | But for a lot of the stuff in the book

01:19:12.440 | and our research portfolio,

01:19:13.560 | it's actually becoming far more accessible.

01:19:15.960 | - So that's commercial.

01:19:17.480 | What about NASA and MIT academia?

01:19:21.160 | - Yeah.

01:19:22.040 | I think, you know,

01:19:22.880 | people have been worried about NASA the last few years

01:19:26.680 | because in some people's minds,

01:19:28.360 | they are ceding ground to these commercial efforts.

01:19:31.560 | But that's really not what's happening.

01:19:34.320 | NASA empowered these commercial efforts

01:19:37.520 | because they wanna free themselves up to go to Mars

01:19:40.040 | and go to Europa

01:19:41.200 | and continue being that really aspirational force

01:19:45.240 | for humanity of pushing the boundary,

01:19:47.400 | always pushing the boundary.

01:19:48.800 | And if they were anchored in low-Earth orbit,

01:19:50.800 | maintaining a space station indefinitely,

01:19:53.160 | that's so much a part of their budget

01:19:54.760 | that it was keeping them from being able to do more.

01:19:57.080 | So it actually is really fantastic for NASA

01:19:58.960 | to have grown this commercial ecosystem

01:20:00.840 | and then that frees NASA up to go further.

01:20:02.960 | And in academia,

01:20:03.840 | we like to think that we will be able to do

01:20:05.840 | the provocative next-generation research

01:20:09.400 | that is going to unlock things at that frontier.

01:20:13.040 | And we can partner with NASA.

01:20:14.800 | We can go through a program

01:20:15.880 | if we wanna send a probe out really far,

01:20:18.080 | but we can also partner with SpaceX

01:20:19.480 | and see what human life in a SpaceX Mars settlement

01:20:22.640 | might look like and how we could design for that.

01:20:24.800 | - Speaking of projects,

01:20:25.760 | maybe are there other projects that pop to mind

01:20:28.320 | from the Space Exploration Initiative

01:20:30.040 | or maybe stuff from the book, the convention?

01:20:32.760 | - Yeah. - Something super cool?

01:20:34.240 | I mean, everything we've been talking about is cool,

01:20:35.760 | but just something that pops to mind again?

01:20:37.760 | - Yeah, so we talked about life in space

01:20:40.480 | and you might need more arms than legs.

01:20:42.640 | One of the projects by Valentina Sumini

01:20:44.760 | was an air-powered robotics tail.

01:20:48.640 | So it's a soft robotics tail

01:20:50.360 | that essentially has a little camera on the back end of it,

01:20:52.960 | can do computer vision and knows where to grapple,

01:20:55.640 | so it's behind you.

01:20:56.800 | It grapples onto something and holds you in space

01:20:59.280 | and then you can actually free up both of your hands to work

01:21:02.040 | so we're already starting to think about the design

01:21:04.040 | of bionic humans or prosthetics or things

01:21:07.360 | that would make you kind of like a cyborg

01:21:09.200 | to augment your capabilities

01:21:11.560 | when you're in a space environment.

01:21:13.120 | - How would you control something like that?

01:21:14.560 | So it's kind of like a, I mean, you can't call it a leg,

01:21:17.960 | but whatever, it's a-- - An additional appendage.

01:21:20.240 | - Appendage, so how would you,

01:21:21.720 | what are ideas for controlling something like that?

01:21:23.800 | - Yeah, so right now it's super, yeah, there you go.

01:21:26.520 | - That's cool.

01:21:27.360 | - Right now it's super manual.

01:21:28.860 | It's basically just like a kind of a set pattern

01:21:32.440 | of inflating as we're testing it,

01:21:34.200 | but in the future, if we had a Neuralink,

01:21:36.000 | I mean, this is something that you could imagine

01:21:38.040 | directly controlling, just thinking thoughts

01:21:40.120 | and controlling it.

01:21:41.400 | That's a ways away.

01:21:42.600 | - Yeah, so we talked about on the biology side,

01:21:45.400 | astrobiology, there's probably agriculture stuff.

01:21:47.880 | Is there other things that kind of feed the ecosystem

01:21:51.280 | of out in space for survival?

01:21:53.200 | Or the robotics architectures, the self-assembly stuff?

01:21:56.200 | - So kind of combining something we were talking about,

01:21:58.960 | you can form these relationships with objects

01:22:01.000 | and anthropomorphize.

01:22:02.600 | One of the things that we're thinking about for agriculture

01:22:04.800 | created by Manwe and Somu, so two students at MIT,

01:22:08.680 | was this little, it looks like a planet,

01:22:10.840 | but it's inspired by, I think, a mandala

01:22:13.120 | or Nepalese spinning wheel.

01:22:14.960 | And you plant plants on the inside

01:22:16.640 | and the astronaut has to spin it every day

01:22:19.120 | to help the plant survive.

01:22:20.860 | So it's a way to give the astronaut something to care about,

01:22:23.900 | something that they are responsible for keeping alive

01:22:26.280 | and can really invest themselves in.

01:22:28.800 | And it's not necessary, right?

01:22:30.480 | We have other ways to grow in orbit.

01:22:33.400 | Hydroponics, liquid medium, trying to keep the liquid

01:22:35.960 | around the plant roots is hard

01:22:37.320 | 'cause there's no gravity to pull it down

01:22:38.920 | in a particular direction.

01:22:40.320 | But what I loved about this project was they said,

01:22:42.480 | "Sure, we have ways that the plants could grow

01:22:44.520 | "on their own, but the astronauts might wanna care for it

01:22:47.820 | "in the same way that we have little plants

01:22:49.440 | "that come to be important to us, little plant friends."

01:22:52.560 | So there's AgriFuge, that's an early model

01:22:54.560 | of this manually spinning plant habitat.

01:22:58.120 | - I guess this is the best of academic research

01:23:01.560 | is you can do these kinds of wild ideas.

01:23:03.200 | - Wild ideas, yeah.

01:23:04.600 | - Well, I get to spend quite a bit of time

01:23:07.320 | with Mr. Elon Musk and he's very stressed,

01:23:11.460 | especially about Starship

01:23:14.600 | and all those kinds of engineering efforts.

01:23:16.760 | What do you think about how damn hard it is

01:23:20.680 | to get out of space?

01:23:23.600 | Like, are we humans gonna be able to do this?

01:23:25.840 | - I don't know, I think it feels like

01:23:29.000 | it's an engineering problem, it's a scientific problem,

01:23:31.480 | but it's also just a motivation problem

01:23:33.480 | for the entire human species.

01:23:35.480 | And you also need to have superstar researchers

01:23:39.600 | and engineers working on it.

01:23:40.880 | So you have to get the best people in the world,

01:23:43.000 | inspire them, and starting from a young age and kinda--

01:23:47.280 | - It's inculcating us into why we do it.

01:23:49.000 | - I mean, I guess this way it's exciting.

01:23:50.440 | You don't know if we're gonna be able to pull this off.

01:23:52.400 | (laughs)

01:23:54.240 | We could fail miserably.

01:23:56.360 | And that, I suppose, I mean,

01:23:57.840 | that's where the best of engineering is done,

01:24:00.040 | is success is not guaranteed.

01:24:02.960 | And even if it happens, it might be very painful.

01:24:06.400 | - I think that's what's so special

01:24:07.280 | about what Elon is doing with SpaceX

01:24:09.000 | is he takes these risks and he tests iteratively

01:24:12.080 | and he'll see the spectacular failures

01:24:14.960 | on the path to a successful Starship.

01:24:17.560 | It's something that people have said,

01:24:18.720 | "Why isn't NASA doing that?"

01:24:20.040 | Well, that's 'cause NASA is doing that with taxpayer dollars

01:24:22.520 | and we would all revolt if we saw NASA failing

01:24:25.200 | at all these different stages.

01:24:26.280 | But that level of spiral engineering theory of development

01:24:30.280 | isn't super impressive.

01:24:31.640 | And it's a really interesting approach

01:24:32.840 | that SpaceX has taken.

01:24:34.440 | And I think between people like Elon and Jeff Bezos

01:24:38.000 | and Firefly and NASA and ESO, we are gonna get there.

01:24:41.600 | They're building the road to space.

01:24:43.240 | These trailblazers are doing it.

01:24:45.080 | And now part of the challenge is to get the rest

01:24:47.840 | of the public to understand that it's happening.

01:24:51.120 | A lot of people don't know that we're going back to the moon,

01:24:54.320 | that we're gonna send the first woman to the moon

01:24:56.560 | within a few years.

01:24:57.820 | A lot of people don't know

01:24:58.720 | that there are commercial space stations in orbit,

01:25:00.760 | that it's not just NASA that does space stuff.

01:25:03.400 | So we have a big challenge to get more of humanity excited

01:25:07.120 | and educated and involved again,

01:25:08.560 | kind of like in the Apollo era

01:25:09.920 | where it was a big deal for everybody.

01:25:12.440 | - Well, a lot of that is also one of the big,

01:25:14.560 | impressive things that Elon does, I think,

01:25:17.840 | extremely well is the social media,

01:25:19.560 | is the getting people excited.

01:25:21.360 | And I think that actually, he's helped NASA step their game

01:25:24.920 | up in terms of social media.

01:25:26.580 | There's something about, yeah, the storytelling,

01:25:28.760 | but also not like, you know, like authentic

01:25:33.760 | and just real and raw engineering.

01:25:36.280 | There's a lot of excitement for that.

01:25:38.480 | Humor and fun also.

01:25:40.600 | All of those things you realize,

01:25:42.640 | the thing that make up the virality of the meme

01:25:46.120 | is beautiful.

01:25:47.240 | You have to kind of embrace that.

01:25:48.760 | And to me, this kind of,

01:25:52.360 | I criticize a lot of companies based on this.

01:25:56.240 | I talked to a bunch of CEOs and so on,

01:25:59.400 | and it's just like, there's a caution.

01:26:01.080 | Like, let us do this like press conference thing

01:26:04.660 | where when the final product is ready and it's overproduced

01:26:08.240 | as opposed to the raw, the gritty just showed off.

01:26:11.520 | And something that I think MIT is very good at doing

01:26:14.040 | is just showing the raw by nature, the mess of it.

01:26:17.560 | And the mess of it is beautiful.

01:26:18.960 | And people get really excited and failure is really exciting.

01:26:21.800 | When the thing blows up and you're like, oh shit,

01:26:23.960 | that makes it even more exciting when it doesn't blow up.

01:26:27.120 | And doing all of that on social media

01:26:29.080 | and showing also the humans behind it,

01:26:31.720 | the individual young researchers or the engineers

01:26:35.260 | or the leaders where everything's at stake.

01:26:38.520 | I don't know.

01:26:39.360 | I think I'm really excited about that.

01:26:40.880 | I do want MIT to do that more for students

01:26:43.840 | to show off their stuff and not be pressured

01:26:47.280 | to do this kind of generic official presentation,

01:26:51.100 | but show their, become a YouTuber also.

01:26:54.480 | Like show off your raw research as you're working on it

01:26:56.880 | in the early days.

01:26:58.120 | I hope that's the future.

01:26:59.480 | Things like, I was teasing about TikTok earlier,

01:27:02.300 | but these kinds of things I think inspire young people

01:27:07.360 | to show off their stuff, to show their true self,

01:27:11.280 | the rawness of it.

01:27:12.120 | 'Cause I think that's where engineering is best.

01:27:14.000 | And I think that will inspire people

01:27:16.160 | about all the cool stuff we could do in space.

01:27:18.960 | - I should say, I couldn't agree more.

01:27:20.280 | And I actually think that this is why we need

01:27:21.960 | a real life Starfleet Academy right now.

01:27:24.720 | It was the place where the space cadets got to go

01:27:27.140 | to learn about how to engage in a future of life in space.

01:27:31.400 | And we can do it in a much better way.

01:27:33.920 | There are a bunch of groups that traditionally

01:27:35.160 | haven't thought that they could engage in aerospace.

01:27:37.880 | Whether it's because you were told

01:27:38.960 | you had to be into math and science.

01:27:40.700 | Now we need space lawyers.

01:27:42.200 | We need space artists like Grimes, right?

01:27:44.280 | We need really creative, profoundly interesting people

01:27:48.160 | to wanna see themselves in that future.

01:27:50.740 | And I think it's a big challenge to us

01:27:53.220 | in the space industry to also do some more diversity,

01:27:55.440 | equity and inclusion and show a broader swath of society

01:27:58.940 | that there's a future for them

01:28:00.380 | in this space exploration vision.

01:28:01.960 | - Let me push back on one thing.

01:28:03.200 | We don't need space lawyers.

01:28:04.520 | I'm just kidding.

01:28:05.360 | Okay, it's a joke.

01:28:06.720 | - We do, we do, we do.

01:28:07.880 | - Okay, we do.

01:28:09.480 | The lawyers are great.

01:28:10.440 | I love them.

01:28:11.440 | Okay, let me ask a big ridiculous question.

01:28:13.860 | What is the most beautiful idea to you

01:28:17.160 | about space exploration?

01:28:19.240 | Whether it's the engineering, the astrobiology,

01:28:22.600 | the science, the inspiration, the human happiness

01:28:27.600 | or aliens, I don't know.

01:28:31.240 | What do you like inspires you every day

01:28:35.440 | in terms of its beauty, in terms of its awe?

01:28:39.640 | - As a ex physicist, what I've always found so profound

01:28:43.320 | is just that at really, really small scales,

01:28:47.140 | like particle physics and really, really big scales,

01:28:50.240 | like astrophysics, there are similarities

01:28:53.040 | in the way that those systems behave and look.

01:28:55.600 | And there's a certain beautiful symmetry in the universe

01:28:59.480 | that's just kind of waiting for us to tie together

01:29:02.200 | the physics and really understand it.

01:29:04.300 | That is something that just really captivates me.

01:29:07.780 | And I would love to, even though I'm now much more

01:29:09.960 | on the applied space exploration side,

01:29:12.520 | I really try to keep up with what's happening

01:29:14.280 | in those physics areas 'cause I think that will be

01:29:16.480 | a huge answer for humanity along the lines of

01:29:19.680 | are we alone in the universe?

01:29:21.520 | - One of the fascinating things about you

01:29:24.240 | is you have a degree in physics, mathematics,

01:29:28.160 | and philosophy, and now, I don't know,

01:29:30.880 | would you call it aerospace engineering maybe kind of thing?

01:29:34.280 | So you have it afoot in all of these worlds,

01:29:36.940 | the theoretic, the beauty of that world,

01:29:41.940 | and the philosophy somehow is in there,

01:29:44.680 | and now the very practical, pragmatic implementation

01:29:48.360 | of all these wild ideas, plus your incredible communicator,

01:29:52.520 | all of those things.

01:29:53.360 | What did you pick up from those different disciplines?

01:29:56.120 | Or maybe I'm just romanticizing

01:29:57.540 | all those different disciplines.

01:29:59.400 | But what is there, what did you pick up

01:30:01.800 | from the variety of that physics, mathematics, philosophy?

01:30:06.200 | - What I loved about having this chance

01:30:07.880 | to do a liberal arts education

01:30:10.120 | was trying to understand the human condition,

01:30:13.400 | and I think more designers for space exploration

01:30:16.420 | should be thinking about that

01:30:17.720 | because there's so much depth of,

01:30:19.800 | like we were talking about, issues and opportunities

01:30:23.280 | around human connection, human life, meaning in life,

01:30:27.060 | how do you find fulfillment or happiness?

01:30:29.400 | And I think if you approach these questions

01:30:31.200 | just purely from the standpoint of an engineer

01:30:33.280 | or a scientist, you'll miss some of what makes it

01:30:36.160 | a life worth living.

01:30:38.240 | And so I love being able to combine

01:30:40.360 | some of this notion of philosophy

01:30:41.800 | and the human condition with my work.

01:30:43.680 | But I'm also a pragmatist, and I didn't wanna stay

01:30:46.280 | just purely in these big picture questions

01:30:48.680 | about the universe.

01:30:49.960 | I wanted to have an impact on society,

01:30:52.320 | and I also felt like I had such a wonderful childhood

01:30:55.960 | and a really fantastic setup that I owe society some work

01:31:00.960 | to really make a positive impact

01:31:04.400 | for a broader swath of citizens.

01:31:05.640 | And so that kinda led me from the physics domain

01:31:07.820 | to thinking about engineering and practical questions

01:31:10.340 | for life in space.

01:31:11.240 | - In physics, was there a dream?

01:31:13.960 | Are you also captivated by this search

01:31:16.120 | for the theory of everything that kind of unlocks

01:31:19.400 | the deeper and deeper, in the simple, elegant way,

01:31:23.560 | the function of our universe?

01:31:25.320 | Do you think that'll be useful for us

01:31:27.160 | for the actual practical engineering things

01:31:30.360 | that you're working on now?

01:31:31.520 | - It could be.

01:31:32.360 | I mean, I worked at CERN for two summers in undergrad,

01:31:35.200 | and we were looking for supersymmetry,

01:31:37.560 | which was one of these alternatives to the standard model.

01:31:40.040 | And it was sad because my professors

01:31:41.640 | were getting sadder and sadder

01:31:43.200 | 'cause they weren't finding it.

01:31:44.520 | They were excluding what we would call this parameter space

01:31:47.080 | of finding these supersymmetric particles.

01:31:50.000 | But the search for what that theory of everything could be,

01:31:53.100 | or a grand unified theory that kinda answers

01:31:55.440 | some of the holes within the standard model of physics,

01:31:58.320 | would presumably kind of unlock a better understanding

01:32:02.280 | of certain fundamental physical laws

01:32:05.440 | that we should be able to build a better understanding

01:32:07.960 | of engineering and day-to-day services from that.

01:32:10.720 | It might not be an immediately obvious thing.

01:32:13.120 | When we discovered the Higgs, the Higgs boson,

01:32:15.120 | I was there at CERN that day.

01:32:16.560 | It was July 4th, 2012 that it was announced.

01:32:19.800 | We all waited like nerds overnight in line

01:32:22.200 | to get into the announcement chamber.

01:32:23.760 | I'd never waited for even like a Harry Potter premiere

01:32:25.720 | in my life, but we waited for this like announcement

01:32:27.720 | of the Higgs boson to get into the chamber overnight.

01:32:30.840 | But did that immediately translate

01:32:33.800 | to technology for engineering?

01:32:35.680 | No, but it's still a really important part

01:32:39.160 | of our understanding of these fundamental laws of physics.

01:32:41.520 | And so I don't know that it's always immediate,

01:32:43.120 | but I think it is really critical knowledge

01:32:44.620 | for humanity to seek.

01:32:45.960 | - It might just shake up understanding of the world.

01:32:50.640 | - What scares me is it might help us create

01:32:52.840 | more dangerous weapons.

01:32:54.120 | So, and then we'll figure out that great filter situation.

01:32:57.640 | And I still believe that human compassion and love

01:33:00.760 | is actually the way to defend against all these

01:33:03.920 | greater and greater and more impressive weapons.

01:33:07.720 | Let me ask a weird question

01:33:10.120 | in terms of you disagreeing with others.

01:33:12.480 | What important idea do you believe is true

01:33:15.620 | that many others don't agree with you on?

01:33:20.360 | Maybe it's a tough question.

01:33:22.080 | You might have to think about that one,

01:33:23.800 | but it was very specific,

01:33:26.320 | like which material to use or something

01:33:28.800 | about a particular project,

01:33:30.680 | or it could be grand priorities on missions.

01:33:35.200 | I think one you actually mentioned is interesting

01:33:36.920 | is like the thing we should be looking for

01:33:40.640 | is like colonization of space

01:33:43.000 | versus colonization of planets, meaning like-

01:33:45.640 | - Yes, that's probably my best hot take

01:33:47.520 | that people would disagree with me on

01:33:49.080 | is life in floating cities

01:33:51.840 | as opposed to life on the surface.

01:33:54.840 | - How do you envision that like spread of humans?

01:33:58.320 | 'Cause you said at the beginning of the conversation

01:34:00.720 | something about like scale, increasing the scale,

01:34:03.800 | basically humans in space.

01:34:05.560 | Are they just like in, they're in orbit

01:34:09.480 | and then they get a little farther and farther out.

01:34:11.640 | Like, do you see these kind of floating cities

01:34:15.760 | just getting farther and farther from earth

01:34:17.480 | that can always kind of return?

01:34:18.960 | But like, if you look a few centuries from now,

01:34:22.000 | do you just see us all these like floating cities?

01:34:24.160 | - Like Namibia?

01:34:25.000 | - Yeah. - Correct.

01:34:25.840 | - And it just kind of envelops the space around us

01:34:30.640 | in these like neighborhoods.

01:34:32.000 | - Yeah, yeah, in these neighborhoods.

01:34:32.840 | - It's like rural and there's like giant structures

01:34:36.760 | and there's small pirate structures

01:34:38.960 | and that kind of stuff. - Pirate structures, yeah.

01:34:40.480 | I think low earth orbit might come to look like that.

01:34:43.400 | And it's a really interesting regulatory challenge

01:34:45.680 | to make sure that there's some cross purposes.

01:34:49.200 | So the more cool space cities we have in orbit,

01:34:51.640 | the more shiny objects in the night sky,

01:34:53.800 | the worse it is for astronomers

01:34:55.320 | in a really kind of overly simplified case.

01:34:58.080 | So there's some pushback to this like amoebaing

01:35:00.840 | where we just grow kind of incongruously

01:35:05.120 | or indiscriminately as an amoeba in low earth orbit.

01:35:08.000 | Beyond that though, I think we'll grow in pockets

01:35:10.640 | where there are resources.

01:35:12.240 | So we won't just expand around the gravity well of earth.

01:35:15.880 | We'll do some development around the moon,

01:35:18.640 | some development around asteroids,

01:35:20.240 | some development around Mars

01:35:21.800 | because there'll always be purposes

01:35:23.320 | for which we wanna go down to a physical object

01:35:25.520 | and study it or extract something or learn from it.

01:35:28.500 | But I think we'll grow in fits and starts in pockets.

01:35:32.040 | Some of the coolest pockets are the gravity balanced pockets

01:35:35.200 | like the Lagrange points,

01:35:36.800 | which is where we just sent, we, not me personally,

01:35:38.880 | but NASA just sent James Webb, the big telescope.

01:35:42.160 | I think it's at L2.

01:35:44.020 | - What's the nice feature about those pockets?

01:35:46.480 | - So it's a stable orbit.

01:35:48.480 | There are several different Lagrange points.

01:35:50.520 | And so it just requires less energy

01:35:52.400 | to stay where you're trying to stay.

01:35:54.320 | - Yeah, that's fascinating.

01:35:57.480 | What's also fascinating is the interaction between nations.

01:36:02.480 | - That was gonna be--

01:36:03.680 | - On that regard, like who owns that?

01:36:05.960 | Would you say in those floating cities,

01:36:09.200 | do you envision independent governments?

01:36:13.080 | - That was gonna be my next answer to you,

01:36:14.520 | which pushed me harder for a more provocative question

01:36:17.480 | where I might disagree with other people.

01:36:19.320 | I don't yet have my own opinions fully formed on this,

01:36:22.720 | but we are trying to figure out right now

01:36:24.280 | what happens to the moon

01:36:25.840 | with all of these first come first served actors

01:36:29.820 | just arriving and setting precedents

01:36:32.360 | that might really affect future access.

01:36:34.520 | And one example is property rights.

01:36:37.260 | We do want companies that have the expertise

01:36:40.080 | to go to the moon and mine stuff

01:36:41.880 | that will help us develop a human settlement there

01:36:45.960 | or a gateway, but companies need to know generally

01:36:49.200 | that they have rights to a certain area

01:36:50.800 | or that they have some legal right to sell things

01:36:52.900 | that they're getting.

01:36:53.740 | Does that mean we're gonna grant property rights

01:36:55.760 | on the moon to companies?

01:36:57.320 | Who has the right to give that right away?

01:37:00.720 | So there's a bunch of really kind of gnarly questions

01:37:02.760 | that we have to think about,

01:37:03.580 | which is why I think we need space lawyers.

01:37:04.920 | Maybe that's the true provocative answer

01:37:07.240 | is I think we need space lawyers.

01:37:08.440 | - True.

01:37:09.280 | I mean, yeah, yeah.

01:37:10.920 | I mean, but those questions again, as you said eloquently,

01:37:14.580 | will help us answer questions about here.

01:37:17.120 | - We hope so, yeah.

01:37:17.960 | - It is a little strange.

01:37:20.920 | I mean, it's obvious, but it's also strange

01:37:23.100 | if you look at the big picture of it all,

01:37:25.640 | that we draw these like borders around geographical areas

01:37:28.940 | and we say, this is mine.

01:37:30.340 | And then we fight wars over what's mine and not.

01:37:34.480 | It seems like there's possible alternatives,

01:37:39.200 | but also it seems like there needs to be

01:37:41.760 | a public ownership of some parts.

01:37:43.920 | - Something.

01:37:44.880 | - Like, what is it, Central Park in New York?

01:37:47.280 | Is there something like preserving--

01:37:50.540 | - The commons.

01:37:52.400 | - Yeah, the commons.

01:37:53.240 | - The commons.

01:37:54.080 | That's why we titled the book "Into the Anthropocosmos."

01:37:57.320 | We know it's a long and kind of a mouthful,

01:37:59.680 | but this notion of the Anthropocene.

01:38:02.360 | We have a lot of commons problems

01:38:04.360 | in humanity, how are we treating the earth,

01:38:06.160 | global climate change?

01:38:07.000 | How are we gonna treat and behave in space?

01:38:09.200 | How can we be responsible stewards of the space commons?

01:38:12.920 | And I would love to see an approach to the moon

01:38:15.120 | that is commons-based, but it's hard to know

01:38:18.360 | who would be the protector or the enforcer of that.

01:38:21.960 | - And if it's, which it will be probably in the early days,

01:38:25.120 | a lot of companies sort of working on the moon,

01:38:28.100 | working on Mars, working out in space,

01:38:30.840 | it feels like there still needs to be

01:38:33.100 | a civilian representation of the greater effort

01:38:37.440 | or something like that,

01:38:38.720 | like where there should be a president,

01:38:40.200 | there should be a democracy of some kind

01:38:42.880 | where people can vote.

01:38:43.880 | - Some representative government.

01:38:45.320 | - Those are all, again, the same human questions.

01:38:49.200 | What advice would you give to a young person today

01:38:54.000 | thinking about what they wanna do with their life, career?

01:38:57.840 | So somebody in high school, somebody in college,

01:39:01.540 | maybe somebody that looks up to the stars

01:39:03.280 | and dreams to one day take a one-way ticket to Mars

01:39:07.120 | or to contribute something to the effort.

01:39:09.920 | - I'd say you should feel empowered

01:39:12.800 | because it's really the first time in human history

01:39:16.080 | that we're at this cusp of interplanetary civilization,

01:39:19.940 | and I don't think we're gonna lapse back from it.

01:39:22.240 | So the future is incredibly bright for young people

01:39:25.200 | that even younger than you and I

01:39:26.680 | who will actually really get a chance

01:39:27.840 | to go to Mars for certain.

01:39:30.280 | The other thing I would say is be open-minded

01:39:32.820 | about what your own interests are.

01:39:34.380 | I don't think you anymore have to be shoehorned

01:39:36.500 | into a particular career

01:39:38.380 | to be welcomed into the future of space exploration.

01:39:41.340 | If you are an artist and that is your passion,

01:39:43.820 | but you would love to do space art,

01:39:45.620 | or if not space art, use your artistry

01:39:48.360 | to communicate a feeling or a message about space,

01:39:51.920 | that's a role that we desperately need

01:39:54.440 | just as much as we need space scientists

01:39:56.100 | and space engineers.

01:39:57.900 | - Well, when you look at your own life,

01:40:00.260 | you're an incredibly accomplished scientist,

01:40:02.820 | young scientist, and you hopped around

01:40:06.260 | from physics to aerospace,

01:40:08.940 | so going from the biggest theoretical ideas

01:40:11.660 | to the biggest practical ideas.

01:40:14.260 | Is there something from your own journey

01:40:15.780 | you can give advice to,

01:40:17.740 | like how to end up doing incredible research at MIT?

01:40:22.300 | Maybe the role of the university and college

01:40:26.700 | and education and learning, all that kind of stuff?

01:40:29.460 | - I'd say one piece of advice is find really good teammates

01:40:33.180 | because I get to be the one that's talking to you,

01:40:35.340 | but there are 50 graduate students, staff, and faculty

01:40:38.980 | that are part of my organization back at MIT,

01:40:41.700 | and I'm actually, you guys can't see it on camera,

01:40:43.220 | but I'm sitting here with my co-founder and COO,

01:40:45.620 | Danielle DeLotte, and that is really what makes

01:40:48.980 | these large-scale challenges for humanity possible

01:40:52.640 | is really fantastic teams working together

01:40:55.220 | to scale more than what I could do alone,

01:40:57.420 | so I think that that's an important model

01:40:58.660 | that we don't talk about enough in academia.

01:41:00.460 | There's a big push for this lone wolf genius figure

01:41:03.780 | in academia, but that's certainly not been the case

01:41:06.060 | in my life.

01:41:06.900 | I've had wonderful collaborators and people

01:41:09.540 | that I work with along the team.

01:41:10.780 | - Also cross-disciplinary.

01:41:12.660 | - Absolutely, yeah, cross-disciplinary,

01:41:14.620 | interdisciplinary, whatever you wanna call it.

01:41:17.340 | - Artists, where do artists come in?

01:41:19.340 | Do you work with artists?

01:41:20.260 | - We do, we have an arts curator

01:41:22.180 | on the Space Exploration Initiative side.

01:41:24.220 | She helps make sure,

01:41:25.420 | partly around that communication challenge

01:41:27.000 | that we talked about, that we're not just doing

01:41:28.580 | zero-G flights and space missions,

01:41:30.780 | but that we take our artifacts of this sci-fi space future

01:41:34.420 | to museums and galleries and exhibits.

01:41:38.080 | She pushed me to make sure, her name is Xing Liu,

01:41:41.820 | she pushed me for our first ISS mission.

01:41:44.500 | I was just gathering all the engineering payloads

01:41:46.780 | that I wanted to support for the students to fly,

01:41:48.660 | including my own work, and she said,

01:41:50.260 | "You know what, we should do an open call internationally

01:41:52.940 | "for artists to send something to the ISS,"

01:41:55.980 | and we found out it was the first time.

01:41:57.780 | We were the first ever international open call

01:42:00.140 | for art to go to the ISS, and that was thanks to Xing

01:42:03.260 | and artists bringing a perspective

01:42:04.620 | that I might not have thought about prioritizing.

01:42:07.060 | - Yeah, that's awesome.

01:42:09.060 | So when you look out there,

01:42:11.100 | it's the flame of human consciousness.

01:42:12.940 | There does seem to be something quite special about us humans.

01:42:16.200 | First of all, what do you think it is?

01:42:21.780 | What's consciousness?

01:42:24.100 | What are we trying to preserve here?

01:42:25.940 | What is it about humans that should be preserved,

01:42:32.100 | or life here on Earth?

01:42:33.920 | What gives you hope to try to expand it out

01:42:37.940 | farther and farther?

01:42:39.100 | What makes you sad if it was all gone?

01:42:43.140 | - I think we're a remarkable species,

01:42:46.220 | that we are aware of our own thoughts.

01:42:49.860 | We are meta-aware of our own thoughts and of ourselves.

01:42:52.780 | - We're able to speak on a podcast

01:42:54.580 | about a meta-awareness about our own thoughts.

01:42:56.940 | - About our own thoughts, yeah, turtles all the way down.

01:42:59.660 | I think that that is a really special gift

01:43:03.140 | that we have been given as a species,

01:43:04.740 | and that there's a worth to expanding

01:43:07.660 | our circles of awareness.

01:43:09.540 | So we're very aware of, as an Earth-based species,

01:43:12.140 | we've become a little bit more aware

01:43:13.740 | of the fragility of Earth and how special a place it is

01:43:15.980 | when we go to the moon and we look back.

01:43:18.140 | What would it mean for us to have a presence

01:43:21.980 | and our purpose in life as a inter-solar system species,

01:43:26.220 | or eventually an intergalactic species?

01:43:28.580 | I think it's a really profound opportunity for exploration,

01:43:32.140 | for the sake of exploration,

01:43:34.540 | a real gift for the human mind.

01:43:36.340 | - Yeah, for anything, we're curious creatures.

01:43:41.060 | You do believe we might one day become

01:43:44.180 | intergalactic civilization?

01:43:46.380 | - Long, long time from now.

01:43:47.740 | We have a lot of propulsion challenges

01:43:50.020 | to answer to get that far.

01:43:51.540 | - So you have a hope for this.

01:43:53.220 | - Yeah.

01:43:54.820 | - Another big, ridiculous question,

01:43:56.700 | building on top of that,

01:43:57.660 | what do you think is the meaning of life?

01:44:00.300 | This individual life of ours, your life,

01:44:03.900 | that unfortunately has to come to an end,

01:44:06.380 | as far as we know for now?

01:44:08.100 | - Yeah.

01:44:09.260 | - And our life here together, is there a why?

01:44:13.940 | Or do we just kinda let our curiosity carry us away?

01:44:20.780 | - Oh, interesting.

01:44:21.620 | Is there a single kind of driving purpose why,

01:44:25.420 | or can it just be curiosity based?

01:44:28.060 | I certainly feel,

01:44:29.340 | and this is not the scientist in me talking,

01:44:31.420 | but just more of like a human soul talking.

01:44:34.140 | I certainly feel some sense of purpose

01:44:38.500 | and meaning in my life.

01:44:39.620 | And there's a version of that,

01:44:40.620 | that's a very local level within my family,

01:44:43.380 | which is funny, 'cause this whole conversation

01:44:44.900 | has been big, grand space exploration themes,

01:44:47.100 | but you asked me this question,

01:44:48.180 | and my first thought is what really matters to me,

01:44:50.100 | my family, my biological reproducing unit.

01:44:53.540 | (both laughing)

01:44:56.220 | But then there's also another purpose,

01:44:57.940 | like another version of the meaning in my life

01:44:59.820 | that is trying to do good things for humanity.

01:45:02.460 | So that sense that we can be individual humans

01:45:05.060 | and have our local meaning,

01:45:06.780 | and we can also be global humans,

01:45:08.660 | maybe someday like the Star Trek Utopia

01:45:10.540 | will all be global citizens.

01:45:12.500 | I don't wanna sound too naive,

01:45:14.500 | but there is, I think, that beauty to a meaning

01:45:17.300 | and a purpose of your life that's bigger than yourself,

01:45:20.140 | working on something that's bigger and grander

01:45:21.980 | than just yourself.

01:45:23.700 | - The deepest meaning is from

01:45:25.180 | the local biological reproduction unit,

01:45:28.060 | and then it goes to the engineering, scientific,

01:45:31.300 | what is it, corporate, like company unit

01:45:35.260 | that can actually produce and compete

01:45:37.420 | and interact with the world.

01:45:38.660 | And then there's the giant human unit

01:45:41.380 | that's struggling with pandemics.

01:45:43.980 | - And commons.

01:45:45.220 | - And together struggling against the forces of nature

01:45:49.220 | that keeps wanting to kill us.

01:45:50.820 | - Yeah, there'd be nothing like an alien invasion

01:45:52.900 | to unite the planet, we think.

01:45:54.980 | - I can't wait, bringing on aliens.

01:45:57.980 | Listen, your work, you're an incredible communicator,

01:46:00.660 | incredible young scientist, Sarah.

01:46:01.940 | It's a huge honor that you would spend your time with me.

01:46:04.860 | I can't wait what you do in the future.

01:46:07.740 | And thank you for representing MIT so beautifully,

01:46:10.980 | so masterfully, you're an incredible person.

01:46:12.780 | Thank you for talking to me.

01:46:13.620 | - Thank you so much for having me.

01:46:14.620 | It's been an absolute pleasure.

01:46:15.660 | It's a great conversation.

01:46:17.660 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

01:46:19.180 | with Ariel Ekblal.

01:46:20.740 | To support this podcast,

01:46:21.980 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

01:46:25.300 | And now let me leave you with some words from Seneca,

01:46:29.300 | the Roman Stoic philosopher.

01:46:31.220 | "There is no easy way from earth to the stars."

01:46:36.500 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

01:46:40.500 | (upbeat music)

01:46:43.100 | (upbeat music)

01:46:45.700 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures | Lex Fridman Podcast #271

Chapters