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Welcome to Going Off World, your gateway to the cosmos beyond our Earth.
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Underwriting provided by the Waypaver Foundation.
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Join us as we embark on this journey together to the Moon, mars, venus and beyond.
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Welcome to the podcast.
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Nice to have you on, doc.
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I like to call you Doc, everyone Doctor, so you know a good way to start.
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This is always you know the people that don't know you.
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To kind of go into your background, Can you share a bit about that and what inspired you to pursue a career in planetary science?
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I think your story is really compelling.
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Sure, really compelling.
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Sure, my career has kind of been all over the place, but I have been really focused on wanting to work in space since I was about five years old, based on a lot of influences, but mostly things like Star Trek, the Next Generation because that started when I was pretty young and the book the Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System.
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But it wasn't until 1997, when the Pathfinder mission landed on Mars, that my interest went from kind of space in general to Mars specifically.
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Nasa released an animated GIF of images that Pathfinder took of the tiny little Sojourner rover driving off the lander platform and onto the surface of Mars, and this was a huge deal at the time, like animated GIFs were not a thing all over the internet.
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Obviously, pathfinder was the first mission that even had a website, which is mind blowing to think about now.
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But seeing this little animation I thought this is the coolest thing I've ever seen.
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I have to work on Mars rovers and so you know, kind of fast forward.
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After my master's degree I ended up working in mission operations for cameras on a few different missions, including Curiosity, mars Acquaintance, orbiter, perseverance and Opportunity.
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Then I ended up kind of pivoting a little bit into the commercial space sector, first working at Arizona State University for something called the New Space Initiative, where their goal was to link academia, industry and government in Arizona, mostly to do engineering and science development for missions, instruments, things like that.
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And through that role, we were interfacing with a lot of new space companies.
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Somewhat early in the new space industry in terms of, you know, if you went out and asked people what companies could you name, probably the only ones that would come to mind would be SpaceX, virgin Galactic, maybe Blue Origin for people that are kind of more in the know.
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So it was a great way to survey the landscape and see, you know, this is like 2016,.
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What was going on at the time?
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What companies were doing what, who seemed like they were legitimate, who were just people with a lot of money and an idea but maybe didn't have anything to execute on it yet.
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And through that I got connected with planets and I ended up kind of shifting away from Mars and focusing on earth.
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So I came in as their head of science strategy, first focused on federal researchers and then eventually expanding to the global research community.
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And now I'm working in another position with kind of trying to do this linkage again of not academia but researchers, industry and government again for innovation in this new space sector.
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Wow, that's quite a journey.
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A few things to kind of link into, I mean, next Generation.
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You know I grew up with the original series, with my father watching it with my dad, and, of course, you know, tng for those who are Star Trek fans.
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You know TNG for those who are Star Trek fans, uh, you know that was a profoundly new show because it was the first that you know really brought back.
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There were a few, there were movies, but a new cast and, uh, you know a lot of new adventures and you know it, it definitely sparked a lot of people's interest in, uh, outer space and just just in general, I think the space industry at that time was very much, very quiet.
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There wasn't a lot happening.
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You know there's shuttle missions, but it wasn't just part of the.
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There isn't a lot of excitement, I, you know it's funny.
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You mentioned the Mars rovers.
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What was the one that was, I would say, in 2010,?
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What was the big one?
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Was it Curiosity?
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Was that the one with the big cameras?
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What was the one operating in 2010,?
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The one that went on forever?
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Oh, that was Opportunity.
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Opportunity.
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I was at a conference in Seattleattle called nomdex.
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It was once a year and the person who drove the rover who drove that rover was speaking and shared a photo of the first view of earth, like from, from another planet, like it was the view of earth from.
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It was just incredible Just see the sun, to see the earth.
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The first view of earth from another planet, the first photo of earth from another planet.
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It was very profound and I was just uh.
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I'll never forget seeing that it's uh.
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I could see why your passion is there, cause, I mean, that's where we're headed to many planets.
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You know we're hopefully to be a multi-planetary species.
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You know your experiences in your personal and professional.
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You know how they shaped your vision for the future of space exploration.
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Yeah, it's a big question.
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Yeah, I like big questions, A lot of ways to go, a lot of directions to go in.
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I feel like my visions have shifted over time as I've gotten older and gotten more experience in different areas.
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So I really am appreciative of the fact that you know I didn't just go in and stick in one very specific career the whole time I've been in space.
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It's given me an appreciation for you know, some of the things that government does really well, some of the things that research does really well, some of the stuff that commercial sector does really well, because they've all got their pros and cons.
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I think my biggest view for the future is all of those groups working together to try to push forward a really innovative and inclusive future for all of humanity.
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We have a really great opportunity here to be very intentional about the way that we decide to do these things.
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So how are we going to explore?
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What are the priorities that we have?
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Where do we want to go?
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Um, how can we do it sustainably, so that we don't just kind of end up in a situation where we're, you know, traipsing around the solar system and wrecking places as we go and then suddenly we can't live there anymore and we got to go to the next place?
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So, really thinking about, like, what does it mean to bring as many voices to the table as possible, to think about, you know, what is sustainability?
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What are the priorities that we should have as a species as we expand beyond the earth, beyond just what you know a scientist might think the priorities are for the moon, or what a commercial company that's interested in, you know mining helium-3, or you know a philosopher or somebody that studies cultural history around what different people in history have thought about the moon.
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Like getting all those people together to think about like hey, this is a massive step for our species.
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Like we should really think about how we're going to do this that's great.
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Well, that leads us to the creation of epic.
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So let's talk about that.
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Where did that kind of?
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Or the incubation of the incubation of that, where did that come from?
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And you know, is you're building this, what's the mission, the mission and the vision for this?
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I mean explain obviously what it stands for, but yeah, kind of kind of give people a background or on, that would be great.
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Yeah, so EPIC is the Earth and Planetary Institute of Canada and the goal is?
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There's three different goals.
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There's the subversive goal of trying to create more jobs for scientists, particularly in Canada, because we have a big brain drain problem with people getting degrees in many fields, but in this case, earth and planetary related sciences, and then they end up going to places like the United States because there's a lot more opportunities there when it comes to the space sector and climate technology and stuff like that.
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So I wanted to help support the Canadian new space sector and climate tech, while also trying to kind of change the success metrics by which we measure science, and this was kind of inspired by some of the work that I did at Planet with some of our external collaborators.
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We had a case in early 2020, like shortly after the pandemic started, when there were all these supply chain shutdowns around the world.
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The government of Togo in Africa approached a group called NASA Harvest, which is NASA's food security arm, run out of the University of Maryland, but it's a consortium of a bunch of different partners at universities, companies and a few different government agencies, and the Ministry of Agriculture in Togo asked Harvest if they could make a map of all the cropland in the country to proactively distribute aid to farmers, because they were worried that the supply chain shutdowns were going to lead to a ripple effect of food insecurity in the country, so they wanted to help farmers boost their domestic production.
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We worked with NASA Harvest almost 24-7 for 10 days and then in 10 days we're able to deliver these maps to the government and they use that to distribute over 50,000 interest-free loans to smallholder farmers.
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And it was amazing to see research leading to action in the real world, and I think, especially when it comes to earth science and planetary science, you don't see that happen very often.
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Scientists are judged by in terms of their career success.
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If you're working at a university, how many
papers have you published that year?
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What is the so-called impact factor of the journal you're publishing in?
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So how prestigious is that journal?
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Things that don't necessarily translate to did the work that you did actually have an impact in the real world, and especially when it comes to earth sciences.
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When we're dealing with a climate crisis and like especially in Canada like Canada's literally on fire right now it's very selfish of a scientist to think that our responsibility stops at writing that paper.
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So I wanted to take inspiration from seeing these scientists working with the right partners in, in this case, government, but it could also be a nonprofit, it could be a community organization, it could be politicians or, sorry, local stakeholders to get the results of research implemented in the world somehow implemented in the world somehow.
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You can also do that through commercialization.
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So did you invent an idea or a concept as a researcher that could, if you put it into the right hands, be commercialized into something that could solve a problem?
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So the goal with Epic is to not have researchers that are judged by how many publications they're pumping out, but connecting them with the right people to figure out what does your community actually need, what does the world need in terms of climate solutions or innovating for the moon and Mars, or living on the space station, any of that kind of stuff, so that we can make sure that we're doing research that matters at the end of the day.
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That's a great segue to the future of space exploration.
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You know we can talk about the earthbound problems, but they are extrapolations of, you know, space and the livability of it.
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So there's three areas of sustainability and equity and ethical considerations.
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Yeah, so let's talk about sustainability.
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I have my own ideas, but I want to hear yours.
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Why is sustainability such a crucial aspect of space exploration?
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So a big consideration is that I think on Earth we are so used to having access to a ton of resources whether that is food or energy or people and we lose all of that in space.
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Everything that you use is such a limited resource that needs to be replenished somehow, whether that is through some kind of in-situ resource utilization.
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If you're on a place like the moon or Mars, or if you're on a space station, you're sending that stuff up from Earth.
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There's a huge cost to that.
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So try to figure out how can you live as sustainably as possible in the place where you are living, and can we take lessons from that and apply them back to Earth so that we can live more sustainably here and realize that the sort of view that we have that the resources here are infinite, even though we know that they're not, we kind of live like they are in a lot of cases, and so shifting our mindset to think about these extremely constrained environments, like living on a space station or living on Mars, can help us approach these problems in a way that's a little more exciting and interesting to deal with them.
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I like to think of the example, since I used to work at ASU Arizona State University.
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If you task somebody with designing a water reclamation system for Phoenix, they're probably not going to come up with as creative of ideas as if you say, design me a water reclamation system for Mars.
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But in both cases you're dealing with a desert type climate.
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Mars is just a cold desert instead of a burning hot desert, but the scarcity of water is a similar situation, but there's still way more water in genics.
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So getting people to think in context of solving for space, it lets our imaginations run wild a little bit, and then we can take that and say, oh, that idea, we could actually apply that also somewhere here on Earth where we're running into a very similar or the exact same problem.
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Yeah, I worked a lot with Singularity startups.
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They would come through their accelerator and singular university, had this program for a long time and they would always be about their moon shots right, creating their, and there were brilliant scientists and entrepreneurs, but they would have material scientists who kind of we're going to build habitats on mars and this I said this on another podcast, but it's like let's build them in africa.
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It's like let's tell you you got to test it out here, but it also applies because they're, if you can solve it here, there's maybe some modifications, but it does have, you know, commercialization, applicability on on earth.
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Well, you know, you mentioned Mars and you mentioned the moon.
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You mentioned space station.
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Like, what do you think are the biggest challenges?
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Is it like re?
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Is it it sounds like it's recyclability, reclamation and just recreation or creation, like you know, generation of something.
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Those are the three things that come to my mind, you know.
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Yeah, I mean the moon.
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You're sort of lucky in that Earth is close enough.
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By that you could send resources there that you can't get natively on the moon.
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It's just very expensive to do that.
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So how you want to define sustainability in terms of the moon could be a little variable.
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Do you need it to be everything that you can utilize on the moon, or is it okay to send some stuff from the Earth?
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When you look at Mars, though, that's far enough away and hard enough to get there, in the grand scheme of things, that it's not practical to like have to keep sending shipments of food and water and oxygen.
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So we started to do some experiments there for things like.
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There's an instrument on the Perseverance rover called MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Experiment.
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I always forget what it stands for.
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It's an oxygen generator mounted on the rover and it's meant to be a skill test of building larger versions of this experiment that pulls in carbon dioxide, pulls apart, essentially, the carbon and the oxygen, sequesters the carbon and releases breathable oxygen back into the air.
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Mars also has a lot of water that we can utilize in terms of water in the atmosphere and water buried beneath the surface in the form of ice, massive ice deposits on Mars, so there's a lot more that we can take advantage of there compared to the moon.
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So I think a lot of the issues that we're going to run into are actually more social than technological.
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Are actually more social than technological, or social and biological?
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We only have a very limited amount of data in terms of how microgravity, or low gravity, affects the human body.
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We don't really have any data on how it would affect development of a child if you were trying to raise them in another environment, which would be pretty critical if we're going to live somewhere else beyond Earth.
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As a species, we do a lot of experiments in analog habitats here on the Earth to understand what the social dynamics are in these isolated environments.
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But part of me feels like even if you were in this fake habitat you know, at the top of a volcano in Hawaii, pretending you're on Mars there's still some part of you that has to know I'm still on Earth and if anything went wrong we can call 911 or we can get out of this habitat Like there's still a safety net there.
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But there's some point when you are on your way to Mars that if something goes wrong, like there's nothing you can do.
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We're.
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We don't have ships that can fly around like on Star Trek, right?
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So you're just stuck in this line, in in your sort of slingshot between the Earth and Mars and you have to finish your, your journey.
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There's nothing you can do.
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So how would people respond to those kinds of situations when it's literally life and death on the line and there's no one that can help you except for you?
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I mean, at some point you're even too far away from Earth to have any real-time communication with anybody other than the people that are in your crew and, if you're talking early, crews where it might be six, 10 people.
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If you only can talk to six to 10 people for five years of your life, like I feel like you might go a little bit insane.
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Yeah, it's kind of like having permanent roommates and you can't get away from them, can't even go out.
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You know the bar and you know get some space, you know there's no alone time, kind of really it's a really big spaceship, kind of really um was a really big spaceship, yeah.
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So you know, what do you think of the?
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You know you mentioned water on mars.
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I've often wondered why we haven't sent probes to dig, go below the aquifer like real mining, like mining mining rigs, to kind of get a better sense of site location where we can get water.
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You know, and then at the same time, like send a you know, I know they've built them, but like scramjet type of aircraft, that can you know they can fly through the Martian atmosphere to start some type of LIDAR, you know, kind of scanning the like, trying to figure out where there might be places to base.
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Maybe you have information on that.
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So but uh, I'd wonder.
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I've wondered some of that because that's a the huge aspect of sustainable, you know, like you said, resources, that you can't be shipping water, right do you?
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what are your thoughts on?
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Yeah, go ahead sorry water is really heavy too, so like that's, yes, we still.
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We still have to deal with that.
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The nice thing is with Mars, we have two spacecraft in orbit that have ground penetrating radar on board, and so we've been able to use those.
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One is a European mission, mars Express and the other one is NASA mission Mars Condescension Orbiter and they've given us a really detailed picture of what the sort of deep subsurface looks like.
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So we're talking like tens to hundreds of meters down, which would be really easy for us to drill on the earth, but that's really hard for us to do on Mars.
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You would need
gigantic industrial equipment to be able to get that deep.
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So we've sent some rovers that can scratch at the surface, like the Phoenix lander back in 2008, dug little trenches and exposed some ice there, which was our first real confirmation that there was ice so close to the surface.
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So there's plans now for a mission called Mars Ice Mapper that Canada is slated to build the main radar instrument for because it's one of the things that Canada's really known for in space is radar expertise we have a whole constellation called RadarSat that images the Earth every day.
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So they want to take that heritage and send it to Mars and that will tell us what sort of the upper 10 meters of the subsurface looks like and we can figure out where is the shallow ice.
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The ice would be easy, in the relative sense, for astronauts to get to.
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We can kind of guess where those places are based on like to use a technical term morphology the shapes of stuff on the surface, because ice leaves very characteristic features, so we could see things like old glaciers that have slowed on the surface of mars and they're not flowing anymore, from what we can tell, because it's so cold, but we can see just the shape of like oh, this is a glacier, and then, thanks to the radar data, we could confirm oh, there's still ice in there.
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So we used a lot of that information to try to pick candidate human landing sites.
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With SpaceX back in the day, they held these Mars landing site workshops where they invited a handful of Mars experts to come in, for I think we did it for four years, and each year there was a different focus area of what we would talk about, and a lot of human landing site selection and ice accessibility were big parts of this, and so if you search for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter high-rise camera online, there are some photos that have the caption on them.
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This is like candidate SpaceX landing site or candidate human landing site, one of the two.
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Those areas will show you some of the icy spots that we kind of discussed as a group would be really great for humans to land at in terms of being able to dig down to that buried ice.
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That's great.
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I think a lot of people are going to check that out because I didn't know everything.
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You can't know everything.
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It's great to understand that.
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But as a planetary scientist, when you look at Mars, what do you put in your best conjecture, with kind of crossing with science, like, what do you think happened to Mars?
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What do you think the history of Mars has been?
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It's like, was it, I don't know, a couple million years ago it was.
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My theory is that it was like it was oceans, it was more green it had.
00:23:16.278 --> 00:23:23.823
I think there's something up with the core, like it lost its gravitational field, which makes you know the people that want to terraform Mars.
00:23:23.823 --> 00:23:28.965
You kind of need gravity, you need a gravitational, you need to change the construct of the planet.
00:23:28.965 --> 00:23:34.352
You know to like really green, you know terraform it, but that's just my opinion.
00:23:34.352 --> 00:23:59.369
But like because they have all that ice to have these rivers, like it just seemed like there was something no-transcript.
00:23:59.369 --> 00:24:02.960
And what would you like to know once we kind of get there?
00:24:04.993 --> 00:24:05.955
What would you like to know?
00:24:05.955 --> 00:24:06.738
Oh, kind of get there.
00:24:06.738 --> 00:24:07.378
What would you like to know?
00:24:07.398 --> 00:24:11.614
oh, man, I want to know everything but it's big questions, right yeah, uh.
00:24:11.874 --> 00:24:18.974
Well, I mean, we have a really good picture of kind of the evolution of mars over time thanks to the number of missions that we've sent there.
00:24:18.974 --> 00:24:25.211
So we know that early on it's in its history it was very earth-like, it was a lot warmer, it was wetter.
00:24:25.211 --> 00:24:29.319
We can see on the surface like ancient channels.
00:24:29.319 --> 00:24:33.676
All over the place we can see craters that used to be lakes.
00:24:33.676 --> 00:24:37.971
Um, two, I mean two of the rovers are driving in those crater lakes right now.
00:24:37.971 --> 00:24:44.814
I'm looking at rocks that tell us about the chemical composition of what the lakes would have been when the water was still there.
00:24:44.814 --> 00:24:51.496
So we know that all of this water also had the right chemical conditions for life to thrive.
00:24:51.496 --> 00:25:07.226
But it looks like somewhere around sort of three and a half billion years ago Mars started to make this shift from being a warm and wet planet to this cold polar desert that we see today, and it probably is tied to the core solidifying.
00:25:07.226 --> 00:25:15.897
So one of the big things that our liquid core here on Earth does is the sloshing around of all that liquid metal generates a protective magnetic field.
00:25:15.897 --> 00:25:38.897
It protects us from radiation, but it also protects the atmosphere from being stripped away into space and at Mars, the hypothesis for a long time had been well, it's a smaller planet, it cooled off faster since the formation of the solar system, and so, as that happened, it lost its magnetic field, and so then the solar wind was able to just slowly start stripping the atmosphere away into space.
00:25:38.897 --> 00:25:50.992
That lowers the atmospheric pressure, it lowers the temperature, and so a lot of the water on the surface either just evaporated into space or permeated into the ground into ice, and we can see that ice today.
00:25:50.992 --> 00:26:01.192
We were able to confirm that this is happening in about 2014, 2015, with NASA's MAVEN mission, which is specifically designed to study the atmosphere of Mars.
00:26:01.192 --> 00:26:07.196
So a lot of people probably haven't heard about it because it's not a mission that's taking cool pictures of the surface like we're used to seeing.
00:26:07.196 --> 00:26:25.377
It literally is just like measuring how much of the atmosphere is blowing away over time and taking some cool-ish UV images of the atmosphere, but not the kind of stuff that people usually tend to see in like press releases very much, and so with this mission, we were actually able to measure the atmospheric loss rate.
00:26:25.377 --> 00:26:31.998
So Mars is actually losing its atmosphere into space at a rate of about a kilogram or two every second.
00:26:32.779 --> 00:26:35.753
So the point that you made about terraforming is really important here.
00:26:35.753 --> 00:26:48.503
If you're going to try to terraform Mars, in the sense that you want people to be able to live on the surface without a spacesuit as if they were on Earth, you'd have to be generating your atmosphere at a faster rate than it is being lost to space.
00:26:48.503 --> 00:26:56.630
But that also means that that atmosphere you're generating is now a non-renewable resource, because the atmosphere of Mars is already very thin to begin with.
00:26:56.630 --> 00:27:07.736
It's kind of the equivalent of being at about 130,000 feet up here on the Earth, so higher than you can slide an airplane, higher than you can breathe as a human, obviously.
00:27:07.736 --> 00:27:10.161
So there's still a lot of atmosphere.
00:27:10.161 --> 00:27:12.051
It would take a long time to deplete it.
00:27:12.513 --> 00:27:22.692
But again, we should be learning our lesson from here on earth about non-renewable resources and be like okay, if there's a way that we can do this more efficiently, that makes a lot more sense.
00:27:22.692 --> 00:27:30.344
So it makes much more sense on Mars to live in these habitats where you can be recycling the air, you can have CO2 scrubbers.
00:27:30.344 --> 00:27:39.476
You're just working with what you have, and that will be much more stable at the end of the day than trying to terraform the entire planet to become Earth 2.0.
00:27:39.476 --> 00:27:40.916
To become Earth 2.0.
00:27:40.957 --> 00:27:53.366
Well, it sounds like if it's losing the atmosphere, is there going to become a time where it becomes a dead like there's none, there's nothing left, and it almost sounds like we have.
00:27:53.366 --> 00:28:08.741
If we're going to have a long-term habitat, it's almost like we have to produce stuff enough to keep it in a stabilized but even if we're not terraforming it which may come later if we have more resources to do it but again you're still going to be facing loss.
00:28:08.741
--> 00:28:10.953
It's like you got to keep the.
00:28:10.953 --> 00:28:13.159
You know, got to keep the.
00:28:13.159 --> 00:28:15.243
I was thinking of the cast iron stove.
00:28:15.243 --> 00:28:17.833
You got to keep that stoked in order to heat the house, right?
00:28:17.833 --> 00:28:19.654
It's like you know I got to keep feeding it a little.
00:28:19.654 --> 00:28:21.355
You know bit of wood, little bit of wood, right?
00:28:21.355 --> 00:28:22.438
Yeah.
00:28:22.998 --> 00:28:23.438
How did that?
00:28:23.438 --> 00:28:31.611
I mean, it's not the way of an answer, but it sounds like it's going to be one to kind of maintain our livability, because it could Well.
00:28:31.611 --> 00:28:32.013
How long?
00:28:32.013 --> 00:28:34.009
When would the atmosphere be gone?
00:28:34.009 --> 00:28:41.938
Are we talking a hundred, like a thousand years, a hundred thousand years, a million years, like it'll be just done as a planet?
00:28:41.958 --> 00:28:46.914
That's a good question years, million years, like it'll be just done as a planet question.
00:28:46.914 --> 00:28:49.704
I it's probably like many many millions of years down the line in terms of, like, what's currently there.
00:28:49.704 --> 00:28:53.960
I've actually I haven't done the math, but uh, now I'm curious to take a look.
00:28:53.960 --> 00:28:55.002
So it's not something.
00:28:55.022 --> 00:28:56.912
That's what I do give you some homework.
00:28:56.912 --> 00:29:05.439
So that's no, I think it's, you know, because it makes me think of shows like the expanse, right, which is like you know they try to, at least probably the most.
00:29:05.439 --> 00:29:18.433
I would say that's probably the show that's got the most practical use of physics and the realities of it, versus like firefly, which is near and dear to my heart as a show, but it's like you know they they terraformed a planet in, like you know, 100 years or 50, like just doesn't.
00:29:18.433 --> 00:29:19.715
It doesn't work like that.
00:29:19.715 --> 00:29:32.837
So, unless there's leaps of technology where we're not even talking about, um, you know, I could get into, you know, the opposite of that is the runaway of like venus, which is kind of where you know is with the, with the venus foundation.
00:29:32.897 --> 00:29:41.443
I know that guillermo and rohan, which is which you've worked with and you've spoken at, how, uh, you know, is that kind of?
00:29:41.443 --> 00:29:43.036
Will that ever cool down again?
00:29:43.036 --> 00:29:57.167
It's like, will that over passage of time, or is it going to get get, is it going to go in the other direction, cause it's close, you know, is it the runaway greenhouse or could we even cool it like could we actually bombard it and try and cool it down?
00:29:57.188 --> 00:30:04.763
you know, you know, so not to say we're talking about bad sci-fi movies like the Core or Snowpiercer or something.
00:30:04.763 --> 00:30:14.005
But could we try and do that to kind of affect its livability or usability for us beyond floating platforms?
00:30:15.691 --> 00:30:17.996
Yeah, I mean there's certainly more resources to work with there.
00:30:17.996 --> 00:30:30.237
In terms of the atmosphere, yeah, of the atmosphere, um yeah, and the way that venus orbits, it kind of generates its own like weird induced magnetic field, so it has some protection.
00:30:30.237 --> 00:30:38.810
But if you started trying to like thin out the atmosphere to make it so that humans could live on the surface, then you're going to lose some of that.
00:30:38.810 --> 00:30:54.343
So there's like all these different factors at play, and I think it's for any planet, whether it's Earth, venus, mars I think that we haven't as a species truly appreciated how interconnected systems are as a whole, like on Earth.
00:30:54.584 --> 00:31:25.573
You know our relatively new understanding of how important fungi and mycelial networks are to like the health of entire forests, or the role that certain types of bacteria play in our own bodies, like these are things that we've only known about for a few years relative to like all of science that that humans have been doing, and so, um, actually the bacteria is something that comes up in some experiments on the space station now is how does the microbiome in our body change in microgravity?
00:31:25.573 --> 00:31:39.615
Because that wasn't something that was really appreciated as being so impactful to how our body functions, and now we understand like bacteria might be related to, you know, certain types of mental health issues.
00:31:39.615 --> 00:31:42.652
It's certainly related to a lot of gut issues in people.
00:31:42.652 --> 00:31:54.717
I think there was an ISS International Space Station study where they were looking at how your microbiome influenced your risk of developing certain types of cancers.
00:31:55.377 --> 00:32:12.958
So there's so much interconnectedness in our ecosystem that we don't understand very well yet, and so for me, I'd say that's one of my personal biggest arguments against terraforming in the near term is we don't even understand how all this stuff works here.
00:32:12.958 --> 00:32:21.372
So if we start going and trying to figure out, like just playing, like we know, what's going on on another planet, it feels like a potential recipe for disaster.
00:32:21.372 --> 00:32:28.160
But you know it could also be a safer place for us to practice some of that kind of stuff before we try to do.
00:32:28.160 --> 00:32:42.865
You know, if we got to a point on Earth where we needed really radical geoengineering to combat climate change, you know, if you practice in the atmosphere of Venus like maybe less consequential than trying to do that here uh, consequential than trying to do that here.
00:32:42.884 --> 00:32:44.726
Well, and it's like we know we're talking about terraforming.
00:32:44.726 --> 00:32:50.439
It's like it's not that we know anybody lives there, but it's like it brings up the issues
of ethics.
00:32:50.439 --> 00:33:01.951
Right, when you think about how we advance in space exploration, what ethical issues do you believe need more attention?
00:33:01.951 --> 00:33:07.683
I mean, there's things on here on Earth, but just things to consider, you know, with ethics.
00:33:08.971 --> 00:33:21.377
Yeah, I think a couple of big ones that I think about quite a bit at least, are as a geologist, but I know that this is also really aligned with a lot of indigenous worldviews too.
00:33:21.377 --> 00:33:21.959
Is that?
00:33:21.959 --> 00:33:34.633
Is that, you know, we talk about these other planets like we have some inherent right to change them to suit us, and it's a very like human-centric view at the same time.
00:33:34.633 --> 00:33:52.121
You know, for me, as a geologist, looking at mars, the question that comes to my mind is well, doesn't mars have a right to exist as a place that was never designed for us to live there Like we we probably like evolved on this planet.
00:33:52.121 --> 00:34:12.043
You know, maybe there was some panspermia going on, we don't really know, but regardless, like we are very much designed to live here, and so is it right for us to just assume that anything else we come across is there for us to change, to suit our needs, to extract the resources for us to use.
00:34:12.043 --> 00:34:15.621
I think there's a little in my mind.
00:34:15.621 --> 00:34:27.606
There's a little bit of a difference between going somewhere to live there and utilizing the resources to live there versus the idea of, say, extracting resources from another place to come back and utilizing the resources to live there versus the idea of, say, extracting resources from another place to come back and use it on earth.
00:34:27.606 --> 00:34:48.063
Because I think that's when we start to hit the antithesis of sustainability, like if our species has gotten to a point where we require the resources of other planets and asteroids to sustain our lifestyle, that, like I feel like that's something where we need to sit down, have some serious reflection on like okay, what, what could we be doing to not require that?
00:34:48.063 --> 00:34:51.813
But at the same time, does that limit our development as species?
00:34:51.813 --> 00:34:52.956
So it's really tricky.
00:34:52.956 --> 00:35:01.380
Um, the other side of it, I think kind of ties back to what we're talking about earlier in taking into account multiple worldviews.
00:35:03.126 --> 00:35:09.757
There was some controversy pretty recently with a commercial lunar mission that was carrying human remains on board.
00:35:09.757 --> 00:35:24.576
That mission didn't end up making it to the lunar surface, but the Navajo Nation kind of protested to NASA saying, hey, you said that you were going to consult us about cultural viewpoints when it came to utilization of the moon and you didn't talk to us about, like, cultural viewpoints when it came to utilization of the moon and you didn't talk to us
about this.
00:35:24.576 --> 00:35:33.460
And nasa's response was like the quote that I saw was almost verbatim like well, this is a commercial mission, so we don't have any control over what they do on the moon.
00:35:33.460 --> 00:35:38.460
And technically that's true, that kind of regulation doesn't come from nasa.
00:35:38.460 --> 00:35:40.132
That comes from, like the.
00:35:40.132 --> 00:35:50.458
Uh, there's a commercial regulation group, like in the government, that deals with that stuff, but the general public doesn't know that, like in general, people think space, they think of NASA.
00:35:51.090 --> 00:35:54.159
So I think that the answer to that question could have been handled a little bit better.
00:35:54.159 --> 00:36:05.842
But it does raise the question of you know the moon as a public good and like part of human history, human religion, mythology, mythology, like all this kind of stuff.
00:36:05.842 --> 00:36:13.233
And suddenly we're at a point where it's it could potentially turn into the wild west, like anybody that can get there can do whatever they want.
00:36:13.233 --> 00:36:21.536
And, uh, some of this is what inspired um, I think people only hear the audio of this and not see video.
00:36:21.536 --> 00:36:24.483
But next to to me is a book that I wrote, called For All Humankind.
00:36:24.483 --> 00:36:25.896
It was my friend, danny Bednar.
00:36:25.989 --> 00:36:27.034
This is video and audio.
00:36:27.034 --> 00:36:29.121
There'll be a video version.
00:36:29.121 --> 00:36:32.518
Okay, people are watching now as they see.
00:36:32.518 --> 00:36:36.876
So yeah, the audio will be out, but yeah, there's the books behind you.
00:36:36.876 --> 00:36:38.876
Your book is For All Humankind.
00:36:46.690 --> 00:36:47.050
Yeah, that book is.
00:36:47.050 --> 00:36:48.052
Do you want to talk about that book behind you?
00:36:48.052 --> 00:36:57.460
Yeah, so the inspiration here was to hear stories from people who watched or listened to the apollo 11 moon landing live as it happened, but were not people involved in space.
00:36:57.460 --> 00:37:04.443
We've heard the stories all the time about people that got inspired by ap Apollo and they went on to become engineers or planetary scientists, astronauts.
00:37:04.443 --> 00:37:22.494
I wanted to know how did this moment in human history impact everybody else, and specifically not just people that didn't go into space as a career, but people that were not from the US or the USSR, so people that were not invested in the space race from a political standpoint.
00:37:22.494 --> 00:37:27.364
And I wanted to see like what was this broader cultural impact?
00:37:27.364 --> 00:37:31.121
Did people see this as a human achievement or an American achievement?
00:37:31.121 --> 00:37:33.715
Did they feel inspired?
00:37:33.715 --> 00:37:38.112
The way that the dialogue in America tends to be around Apollo Like?
00:37:38.112 --> 00:37:39.737
Was that inspiration a global thing?
00:37:41.731 -->
00:38:03.518
And the stories were remarkably consistent, like the people that we talked to range from you know a woman who was a five-year-old girl in rural India at the time to a 44-year-old Holocaust survivor from Lithuania who had, after the war, immigrated to South Africa, saw stuff was not going well there politically.
00:38:03.518 --> 00:38:06.496
He's like I know where this goes, and he immigrated to Canada.
00:38:06.496 --> 00:38:17.936
And then you have a bunch of other like age ranges and countries in between, and just the consistency of all these people saying like this was something that we thought was going to bring humanity together.
00:38:17.936 --> 00:38:20.496
We had a brighter view of the future because of this.
00:38:20.496 --> 00:38:30.510
Multiple people were like I felt like I was a part of this, even though they had no personal connection to the united states or the space race or space at all.
00:38:31.192 --> 00:38:59.610
So that gives me so much like hope and like a lot of heartwarming feelings to see like, okay, we were able at one point to bring everybody together, united around this idea of humans going into space and doing something bigger than ourselves, bigger than like a single country, bigger than just the ideas of, like, the minutiae of Earth, and so I think people want to be engaged in that conversation.
00:38:59.610 --> 00:39:05.032
They want to think about like, what will this look like as humans go back into space?
00:39:05.032 --> 00:39:16.092
So, making sure that we have ways for those voices to be heard and we actually, you know, do more than give the lip service of saying, yeah, okay, you wrote us a report or you sent us some comments, that's great.
00:39:16.092 --> 00:39:23.056
What can we actually do to make sure that we listen to these other voices and then take that stuff into account in the planning?
00:39:23.056 --> 00:39:25.581
That, I think, is the harder part, and I'm not sure.
00:39:36.510 --> 00:39:39.855
I don't have a great answer as to how to fix that part, because we're not doing a great job of incorporating all the voices to begin with just yet.
00:39:39.855 --> 00:39:40.755
Yeah, I want to touch on that in a second.
00:39:40.755 --> 00:39:50.623
It reminds me of at the Kennedy Space Center, in the museum where you have the bottom of the Saturn V, you can see how big it is.
00:39:50.623 --> 00:39:53.427
There's front pages from all over the world.
00:39:53.427 --> 00:40:00.021
I use my Google Translate to see them and you can see the landing, how much the global event that it was.
00:40:00.021 --> 00:40:04.925
So I think there's two facets to it the global event that it was and what you know.
00:40:04.925 --> 00:40:05.789
So I think there's two facets to it.
00:40:05.789 --> 00:40:15.673
I think there's one, the humanity aspect, and two, the military-industrial complex aspect or the superpower dominance aspect, which you can see in the For All Mankind, which is an excellent show.
00:40:15.673 --> 00:40:30.954
If you all haven't seen it, I assume probably most listeners have, but it's if the Soviets landed on the moon first and the space race never stopped, and it's amazing to see what kind of would have maybe played out the humanity.
00:40:30.954 --> 00:40:34.630
I think it's definitely it was a shared experience, no matter who you were.
00:40:34.630 --> 00:40:44.724
I think at that level of achievement and as a human race, there's unique things that bring us together as a, as a, as humanity.
00:40:44.724 --> 00:40:46.974
I think it's there and I think it's.
00:40:46.974 --> 00:40:50.262
It's a shame there wasn't more of a quest to kind of go further.
00:40:50.262 --> 00:41:03.523
But that ties it to the second part, which is the superpower dominance, the real reason it kind of went it because it was this viewed as a threat of dropping missiles from space or, you know, communications or just another.
00:41:03.523 --> 00:41:09.572
I mean constantly the Cold War turning into a hot war, the Third World War, and it was interesting.
00:41:09.572 --> 00:41:12.121
It was like well, just because you landed on the moon, is it really over?
00:41:12.121 --> 00:41:13.030
So did it?
00:41:13.030 --> 00:41:17.242
Just kind of like when you know you cross the ticker tape and you stop.
00:41:18.030 --> 00:41:30.458
I also think that it's come out now too, is the russians technology was they might have gotten the leg up on the early stuff, but the real complexities, if you look at the if anybody studied the apollo program, you know, you do it's.
00:41:30.458 --> 00:41:33.733
It's a perfect example of when we build things today and you iterate on it.
00:41:33.733 --> 00:41:36.907
Right, they did, and you're seeing this even with spaceship one.
00:41:36.907 --> 00:41:42.257
Right, it's like they get up into orbit and they figure that part out, then they do a space walk, then they connect the lemon.
00:41:42.257 --> 00:41:43.277
They do these?
00:41:43.277 --> 00:41:47.644
The last thing is actually, you know they go to the moon, but they circle it.
00:41:47.644 --> 00:41:49.532
They come back the you know.
00:41:49.532 --> 00:41:50.936
So they don't just like go.
00:41:50.936 --> 00:42:00.764
Russians just wanted to like shoot into space and go, and I think that was the biggest fundamental engineering uh difference in the approach to it.
00:42:00.764 --> 00:42:09.405
And, uh, many people in the Soviet side is is, you know, apollo one we lost, but they, a lot of people died uh trying that bad approach.
00:42:10.447 --> 00:42:15.516
You know, and you talked about the aspect of uh, you know more.
00:42:15.516 --> 00:42:18.521
You know people travel.
00:42:18.521 --> 00:42:21.833
We have the new programs for the astronauts, but that's just not going to be enough.
00:42:21.833 --> 00:42:26.420
I I mean, how can we get the?
00:42:26.420 --> 00:42:30.025
How can we ensure that this benefits all of humanity?
00:42:30.025 --> 00:42:35.182
Like, how
can we get people into being a part of this more?
00:42:35.182 --> 00:42:39.822
Like you know, I stray away from the inclusivity words or diversity.
00:42:39.822 --> 00:42:45.353
It's just about people that really want to be a part of this and really participate.
00:42:45.353 --> 00:42:46.175
How do they?
00:42:46.175 --> 00:42:51.153
What do you think are things we can do over the next decade to really kind of change the game?
00:42:51.153 --> 00:42:52.177
Because you're going to need a lot of people.
00:42:52.177 --> 00:42:56.096
You're going to need lawyers, you're going to need, you know, entrepreneurs.
00:42:56.096 --> 00:43:01.333
You're going to need all kinds of people, not just, you know, scientists and test pilots, right what?
00:43:01.393 --> 00:43:04.038
are your thoughts on that.
00:43:04.057 --> 00:43:17.474
I think the stuff you just listed off is really important in terms of helping people realize that being involved in the space program is far beyond just being an astronaut or just being one of those people in mission control with the headset on.
00:43:17.474 --> 00:43:21.072
I think that's what people obviously think of when you think of space.
00:43:21.072 --> 00:43:32.586
I remember when I was a kid, my one of my parents kind of uh like discouraged me from studying space like in university because they're like well, you're never going to be an astronaut, so that's going to be useless.
00:43:32.586 --> 00:43:35.275
Uh, I'm really glad that that turned out to not be the case.
00:43:35.275 --> 00:43:41.842
Um, but it's true, I would not have been able to be an astronaut for many reasons, partly because I am too short to be an astronaut.
00:43:48.269 --> 00:43:49.574
Although maybe that's different now with commercial astronauts.
00:43:49.574 --> 00:43:53.704
But anyway, yeah, there's so many ways to be involved in the space sector and even just 10 years ago, the opportunities were so much more limited.
00:43:53.704 --> 00:44:02.782
There were, you know, corporate lawyers and accountants and admin folks at, you know, the big prime companies and at places like nasa.
00:44:02.782 --> 00:44:06.653
But now you have so many companies out there like we.
00:44:06.653 --> 00:44:09.719
We have graphic designers in the field.
00:44:09.719 --> 00:44:14.376
There's a few people online that are really well known for just being launch photographers.
00:44:14.376 --> 00:44:15.541
Like that is their role.
00:44:15.541 --> 00:44:19.038
They work for rocket lab or they work for spacex and they photograph the launches.
00:44:19.398 --> 00:44:23.469
Like I feel like that would have been my other dream job if I hadn't done mars rovers.
00:44:23.469 --> 00:44:25.052
Like just data photograph launches.
00:44:25.052 --> 00:44:25.954
How cool is that?
00:44:25.954 --> 00:44:29.021
Um, you have sales people.
00:44:29.021 --> 00:44:35.711
You have, yeah, I'm trying to think of like basically at some point, everything that we have on earth we're going to need in space.
00:44:35.711 --> 00:44:44.338
You know, medical doctors, veterinarians at some point, I'm sure people are going to want to be like, hey, if I'm going to a space hotel, I'd love to bring my dog with me, you know.
00:44:44.338 --> 00:44:49.739
So, figure out if we can do that and really making sure that people understand.
00:44:50.201 --> 00:44:56.797
Like I feel like a lot of people kind of exclude themselves pretty early on, say because I read this all the time.
00:44:56.797 --> 00:45:03.603
When I talk to people they're like oh yeah, I love space but I wasn't good at math and so I didn't try to pursue it as a career.
00:45:03.603 --> 00:45:11.592
Or you know, I didn't really think I'd be a very good engineer, so I went into some completely unrelated fields, that's.
00:45:11.592 --> 00:45:15.181
I did terribly in calculus in college and I still got to work on bargeovers.
00:45:15.181 --> 00:45:29.538
So I'm sure teachers hate it when I say that to their classrooms, but I want people to understand like, just because you work in the space program doesn't mean you're some kind of super genius by portraying it as this idea that it's a bunch of really smart people.
00:45:29.538 --> 00:45:31.516
They're mostly just really passionate.
00:45:31.670 --> 00:45:39.653
That's not to say that people are dumb, but I think we we attach this level of intelligence to the whole field.
00:45:39.653 --> 00:45:48.998
That on the one hand is kind of cool if people are like oh my god, you must be so smart, but on the other hand I think it, you know, scares some people away if they feel like they're not smart enough to be involved.
00:45:48.998 --> 00:45:55.414
And I think space is really unique in that it is a group of such passionate people.
00:45:55.414 --> 00:46:01.039
I feel like that level of excitement about your job and like living what you do.
00:46:01.039 --> 00:46:16.465
I don't see that a lot of other fields like, uh, it's a special place to be, and so trying to get more people to be a part of that vision and mission and like want to be part of crafting the future for humanity.
00:46:16.465 --> 00:46:23.940
I think like we should be doing everything we can to encourage people to be involved if they want to, in whatever way they can or want to contribute.
00:46:25.266 --> 00:46:27.050
Yeah, and it's not in this.
00:46:27.050 --> 00:46:28.532
This segues to kind of the.
00:46:28.532 --> 00:46:33.534
The working in the business of space is that space is not just an industry, it's a place.
00:46:33.534 --> 00:46:36.005
You know it's, it's and you know.
00:46:36.005 --> 00:46:41.518
You talked about the resources and I kept thinking about a intergalactic manifest destiny.
00:46:41.518 --> 00:46:44.273
It's like trying to feel like you need to capture those.
00:46:45.306 --> 00:47:05.293
But the business of space has always fascinated me as an entrepreneur, as just someone wanting to be that astronaut Not strong with STEM, not strong with math,
right, we will need artists, we will need people to capture the beauty of humanity.
00:47:05.293 --> 00:47:07.293
I mean, that's hopefully something I can do.
00:47:07.293 --> 00:47:16.956
It's what I'm trying to do with this podcast is capture the voices in this, you know, that are helping, you know, bring us, to bring us off world Right.
00:47:16.956 --> 00:47:25.572
And you know there's two roles I think that I want to explore with you is one as a scientist, the other is kind of a consultant, right?
00:47:25.572 --> 00:47:30.213
So as a scientist, you talked about the Mars rover, being working on those projects.
00:47:30.675 --> 00:47:33.985
What's it like to be a missions operations specialist?
00:47:33.985 --> 00:47:34.809
Like working in space?
00:47:34.809 --> 00:47:36.833
Like what is it like to do that kind of job?
00:47:36.833 --> 00:47:38.748
What's a day in the life First?
00:47:38.748 --> 00:47:40.405
Like what is the job and like what's a day in the life first, like what is the job?
00:47:40.405 --> 00:47:41.889
And like what is a day in the life?
00:47:41.889 --> 00:47:44.135
Is it just getting coffee, staring at screens?
00:47:44.135 --> 00:47:47.090
Like what, what is the, what is the work?
00:47:47.090 --> 00:47:55.992
I think it would be really helpful for people that you know they they kind of try and imagine and I think it's a bit far other mental models to know what it, what, what it is about.
00:47:56.614 --> 00:47:59.498
So, yeah, I mean it's very unique, right?
00:47:59.498 --> 00:48:17.829
So people ask a lot of the time and I remember at one point somebody was saying, oh, you should have a live stream camera that's set up in mission control for curiosity, I think it was, and I kind of laughed and I was like, oh, you'd probably be really bored watching it, because you know we're not sitting there driving the Rover with a joystick or anything like that.
00:48:17.829 --> 00:48:20.215
Know, the time delay between earth and mars is too big.
00:48:20.215 --> 00:48:24.686
So, um, it's very different doing operations for a satellite versus a rover.
00:48:24.686 --> 00:48:30.063
But for the rovers, um, it's sort of this daily thing that it's very routine.
00:48:30.063 --> 00:48:43.775
Like you would come in in the morning and, uh, you basically package up all the commands that you want the rover to do for a single day and send them all at once, and then you wait for the commands to execute.
00:48:43.775 --> 00:48:50.380
The rover generally sends the data back to one of the satellites in orbit and then those satellites in orbit of Mars.
00:48:50.380 --> 00:48:52.268
Then those satellites will send it back to the Earth.
00:48:52.268 --> 00:49:15.072
So when you come in in the morning, like for me, for Opportunity, for example, I was the payload downlink lead for the pan cams, like the color eyes of the rover, so my job would be to come in in the morning, pull down all the images that come back from Mars overnight on Earth and then
step through those images and look at them both from the standpoint of kind of an engineer, like is the camera functioning properly?
00:49:15.072 --> 00:49:20.572
Looking at all the telemetry data that came in along with it to see if it's operating within the right temperatures.
00:49:20.572 --> 00:49:23.538
Did it do everything we asked it to do?
00:49:23.538 --> 00:49:26.126
Because it was so late in the opportunity mission.
00:49:26.166 --> 00:49:29.355
At that point the rover was not fully functional.
00:49:29.355 --> 00:49:31.427
Sometimes it would have what we call amnesia events.
00:49:31.427 --> 00:49:40.458
So like you would ask it to take 15 images and it might take seven of them, and so you'd check and see which ones came back and which ones didn't, and then kindly ask the rover to do the missing ones.
00:49:40.458 --> 00:49:44.514
And then you would also look at the images from the standpoint of a geologist.
00:49:44.514 --> 00:50:03.159
Is there anything in this image that's telling me something important about the history of Mars, telling me something that we should be connecting with one of the other instrument teams on board to say like hey, could we shoot this rock with one of the spectrometers, or should we drive closer to this rock and take some closer images?
00:50:03.159 --> 00:50:03.664
Stuff like that.
00:50:04.385 --> 00:50:21.516
And then there's a lot of teleconferences where, like, all the different teams are sitting there, we're debating about, like, which targets we want to look at, what to do that day, and you're basically arguing over every single watt of power, because the power determines everything that we can do on Mars.
00:50:21.516 --> 00:50:22.945
We're so power constrained.
00:50:22.945 --> 00:50:33.672
Compared to doing stuff on Earth With satellites, the power is not so much an issue because we've got these big solar panels, but in both cases we're really limited by downlink.
00:50:33.672 --> 00:50:39.974
So how much data can we send back between Earth and Mars when Mars is really close?
00:50:39.974 --> 00:50:48.867
I'm trying to remember what a data rate might be, generally speaking, like an average data rate between Earth and Mars would be on par with a dial-up modem.
00:50:48.867 --> 00:50:54.119
So we are limited in the amount of data we can collect and send back.
00:50:54.724 --> 00:51:05.567
So, as a mission operations person, a lot of what you're doing is planning around the available downlink for that week, depending on how close Earth and Mars are to each other, and doing a lot of data triage.
00:51:05.788 --> 00:51:10.806
Like, okay if the mission were to die tomorrow, because you always have to operate under that assumption.
00:51:10.806 --> 00:51:18.833
What is the most important thing for you to accomplish today in terms of science, in terms of tactical goals, when it comes to the rover and in terms of science.
00:51:18.833 --> 00:51:29.572
In terms of tactical goals when it comes to the rover, and in terms of taking certain things into account, like what time of year is it?
00:51:29.572 --> 00:51:31.010
What does the shadowing look like?
00:51:31.010 --> 00:51:36.413
You don't want to take a picture of something if it's going to be in deep shadow and you can't see your feature of interest.
00:51:36.413 --> 00:51:41.070
So, planning around all those things, there's a lot of different factors to take into account.
00:51:41.070 --> 00:51:51.070
I think people probably assume the satellites are just orbiting and like taking pictures of whatever's beneath them, because that's what we do a lot on the Earth with things like Landsat from NASA.
00:51:51.070 --> 00:52:01.378
But on Mars, because of this limitation of how much data we can send back, having a human in the loop to make those decisions is really critical from a science standpoint.
00:52:03.708 --> 00:52:14.889
You know that's great, and it kept prompting me to ask you about, you know, the consulting side of this, where you are kind of now right, it's like you know, epic.
00:52:14.889 --> 00:52:29.472
I was fascinated by this as someone who builds products Like Epic offers science as a service, a new kind of sass you know it's like, instead of software as a service, it's so you know, can you explain that in a bit more detail, like that would be?
00:52:29.472 --> 00:52:33.688
It's trying to, kind of, for those might see the term or hear like what does that mean?
00:52:33.688 --> 00:52:39.155
It seems like it's a new new version, unless it's, you know, I can't find any reference, so could.
00:52:39.155 --> 00:52:40.867
So could you go into that a little more detail?
00:52:42.391 --> 00:52:47.608
Yeah, I mean, it's basically what kind of the way you just put it, like it's fancier way to say consulting.
00:52:47.608 --> 00:53:00.630
But the idea is that usually science is driven by, like a particular government grant program or a particular space mission and there's money attached to being able to do research with the data from that mission.
00:53:00.630 --> 00:53:07.251
But that doesn't necessarily mean that that type of research has a practical, real-world application.
00:53:07.251 --> 00:53:11.429
A lot of that stuff is funded for scientists to write papers, and that's still important.
00:53:11.429 --> 00:53:18.012
I'm not trying to bash fundamental research that's very important but that's something universities are really good at.
00:53:18.012 --> 00:53:23.911
Universities are not very good at operating at a pace that is useful to industry.
00:53:23.911 --> 00:53:37.336
I interviewed a bunch of different CEOs and CTOs and other leadership folks at different companies about trying to work with universities and what the pain points were, and the common theme that came up was they're just not fast enough.
00:53:37.336 --> 00:53:44.215
There's too many competing priorities when you're trying to work with students and professors because they have a thousand other things on their
plate.
00:53:44.215 --> 00:54:11.177
So the idea behind creating this independent institute that is not affiliated with the university is you can have people that are tasked to do scientific research for R&D purposes with government partners, with industry partners, and you can do it as fast as they need it to go, because you don't have a grad student that's also trying to write their thesis at the same time, or a professor that is also bogged down with a ton of administrative duties for their department.
00:54:11.177 --> 00:54:16.213
These are just people that are gonna do the science that needs to be done to be applied in the real world.
00:54:17.085 --> 00:54:23.030
The flip side to that is that means you need somebody coming in to do this work with a bit of a different mindset.
00:54:23.030 --> 00:54:30.617
It's not going to be the type of scientist that's looking to become, you know, the world leading expert in like a hyper niche research area.
00:54:30.617 --> 00:54:36.617
You are coming in knowing that this is more of an applied research type focus at the end of the day.
00:54:36.617 --> 00:54:40.114
But I think people just really want to be motivated by a vision.
00:54:40.173 --> 00:54:45.932
A lot of the time, and especially if you have become a scientist like I think, you just want to do research.
00:54:45.932 --> 00:54:56.411
I don't think everybody goes into it wanting to become, you know, some prestigious tenured professor somewhere, because there are a lot of downsides to academia too, like beyond being overloaded.
00:54:56.411 --> 00:54:58.088
That could be.
00:54:58.088 --> 00:55:00.375
It's a whole podcast on its own, so we won't get into that.
00:55:00.375 --> 00:55:05.418
But if you've ever been in academia, you know.
00:55:05.418 --> 00:55:18.295
So trying to create a new pathway that is, like you know, a different place and a different way of doing science, so that it's more beneficial for getting stuff out in the real world, like that's the goal at the end of the day, that's great.
00:55:19.385 --> 00:55:23.347
So what's one question you wish people would ask you about your work Like and how?
00:55:23.347 --> 00:55:24.610
And what would you?
00:55:24.610 --> 00:55:25.675
How would you answer?
00:55:28.485 --> 00:55:35.273
Oh, man, trying to think of something I wish they would ask that people don't ask, cause I feel like, in general, people ask really good questions.
00:55:35.273 --> 00:55:59.391
Um, I think one that I do get asked a lot but I think is important for people to ask and for us to talk about is the why, you know, why are we doing all this in the first place you get that common question of like why are we spending money on space when there's so many problems here on the earth but one?
00:55:59.572 --> 00:56:02.869
it's because they don't necessarily see a direct application one.
00:56:02.869 --> 00:56:08.789
Even if we stop spending money on space tomorrow, it would not solve most of the problems that we have here on the earth.
00:56:08.789 --> 00:56:17.097
Because our problems are social, they're kind of endemic, because we as a species are just not good at cohabitating with each other a lot of the time.
00:56:17.097 --> 00:56:18.492
So how do we fix that?
00:56:19.094 --> 00:56:30.315
um again, that could be a whole other podcast on its own, um, but also I've always said, like aliens, aliens don't want anything to do with us because we're a backwater planet that just engages in tribal warfare.
00:56:30.315 --> 00:56:40.188
So we're kind of, hey, we split the atom, but hey, we're kind of, you know, and is it in our nature to always be that you know, you don't know, we don't know, I don't know?
00:56:41.672 --> 00:56:52.856
yeah, I feel like you know, we keep creating science fiction where we hope that like an alien species you know, like star trek it's the vulcans comes down and unites us.
00:56:52.856 --> 00:56:56.833
It's like, oh, there's something bigger than just us and like that's the thing that'll be the catalyst.
00:56:56.833 --> 00:57:09.731
It's like, well, could we do that without the aliens?
00:57:09.731 --> 00:57:13.092
Like why can't we just figure out how to be better as a species on our own?
00:57:13.092 --> 00:57:15.373
Like let's just try a little bit harder.
00:57:15.373 --> 00:57:21.998
Or how much you use satellite data in your day-to-day life through GPS or the weather app and stuff like that.
00:57:21.998 --> 00:57:27.780
The real fundamental thing behind a lot of this, at least when you're talking to a scientist why are you doing this?
00:57:27.780 --> 00:57:31.882
It's because we want to answer that question of whether or not we're alone in the universe.
00:57:35.465 --> 00:57:45.675
And I think Mars is a particularly good example of this, because we know that it used to be very Earth-like at the same point in the history of the solar system as the time that life arose on Earth.
00:57:45.675 --> 00:57:59.614
So if you have two planets that are right next to each other in the same solar system with the right conditions for life as we know it to thrive, and you had life on both planets, and then life on Mars died off because it's turned into this very inhospitable place we see today.
00:57:59.614 --> 00:58:24.099
That seems like kind of an expected answer, like okay, we now know there's a sample set of two of what it takes for life to thrive, and maybe it's just fragile enough that changing the parameters to the point of Mars was too fast or too much for life to survive.
00:58:24.099 --> 00:58:31.865
But I think the more interesting answer would be if we keep looking on Mars and we find out that Mars never had life Again.
00:58:31.865 --> 00:58:39.960
Two planets right next to each other in the same solar system with the same conditions tells us that something really special happened here that didn't happen on Mars.
00:58:39.960 --> 00:58:40.561
So what was that?
00:58:40.561 --> 00:58:42.403
Tells us that something really
special happened here that didn't happen on Mars.
00:58:42.403 --> 00:58:43.224
So what was that Like?
00:58:43.224 --> 00:58:48.655
What happened here that doesn't seem to have happened anywhere else in our solar system to make Earth so special?
00:58:49.327 --> 00:59:01.606
So even though we're going to all these other planets and moons and we're studying exoplanets and studying the stars, at the end of the day it's to put humanity and Earth in the context of the universe and to understand our own existence.
00:59:01.606 --> 00:59:08.967
That's hard to quantify as like an economic benefit or a technology spinoff, because it's not.
00:59:08.967 --> 00:59:17.753
I think it's totally okay for us to say that we are doing this because we want to understand the universe and people want to understand.
00:59:17.753 --> 00:59:27.534
They ask questions about this constantly, every time I give a talk or you see comments on YouTube videos about big existential things for the universe.
00:59:27.534 --> 00:59:31.932
This is something that people are curious about, whether they're five or 105.
00:59:31.932 --> 00:59:38.532
They want to understand where we came from and what else is out there, and I think that that's beautiful.
00:59:41.786 --> 00:59:45.096
And it ties into like it was your work, it was forward.
00:59:45.096 --> 00:59:45.436
What do you?
00:59:45.436 --> 00:59:50.577
What are your long term goals, like taking that perspective of life for Epic and your research?
00:59:50.577 --> 00:59:54.376
Like, what are you going to be focusing on to support that?
00:59:56.485 --> 01:00:29.969
I think for me, the two big things that I've been really focused on I've kind of mentioned them already, but like getting science out into the world because I think then people will have a better understanding and appreciation for what research can do and hopefully try to break down some of these perceptions of you know, research in the academic sense being this ivory tower that isn't, you know, a place for everybody to inhabit.
01:00:29.989 --> 01:00:41.327
I think it's important to have as many people participating in the scientific process as want to be, because asking more questions and getting more perspectives does nothing but good when it comes to trying to do research, does nothing but good when it comes to trying to do research.
01:00:41.347 --> 01:00:54.938
And then that kind of ties to the greater overall vision of getting more people involved in helping us create this journey and craft the vision of humans as we move into our next level, becoming an interplanetary species.
01:00:55.304 --> 01:01:14.942
How do we get people to want to be involved in that, to feel like they're a part of it, to feel like their voices are being heard and that they want to participate in that process and not just viewing it as something where, oh, I'm not smart enough or I'm not rich enough, or whatever their perception might be as to what it means to explore space.
01:01:14.942
--> 01:01:28.096
You know, how can we break down those barriers and try to recapture more of that Apollo era spirits which I feel like we've lost in society today?
01:01:28.096 --> 01:01:30.199
Just there's so many other things going on.
01:01:30.199 --> 01:01:36.769
It's hard to get people united around something, and certainly for more than five seconds in someone's attention span.
01:01:36.769 --> 01:01:53.536
But I feel like we did, did it before and that was sort of the takeaway message in, like writing the the apollo book was we've done this before, so I feel like that means we as a species have the capability to do this again that's.
01:01:54.018 --> 01:02:01.065
That's a great kind of segue into kind of the future of human space settlement, cause I I agree with you.
01:02:01.065 --> 01:02:07.068
I mean we're, if you're in, if you understand generational theory or you kind of can kind of subscribe to that kind of work.
01:02:07.068 --> 01:02:09.856
We're in a crisis period was started in around 2008,.
01:02:09.856 --> 01:02:27.251
Probably take 20, you know, probably another couple of years and then you know, and then we go to a new cycle, kind of like the way the fifties, you know kind of that excitement that you know newness, the fresh kind of the spring, if you will, versus our this winter, and I think that changes people's.
01:02:27.652 --> 01:02:56.110
Things are a lot of kind of like the new, the new institutions have formed a kind of a new kind of way of the world, the world order, not conspiratorial, just the way the world will be safe for the next, you know, under 200 years, with that kind of positivity coming back and probably the excitement of going to Mars and getting everybody kind of re-engaged that way and kind of making it more social, more engaged, like you said, like people in the neighborhood and people talked about it, but like real global communicate, like sharing this experience as a humanity.
01:02:56.170 --> 01:03:05.751
I think that's exciting and it's a different way we can do it and even just having, you know, interviews with the astronauts as they go, or it's just there's such a difference.
01:03:05.751 --> 01:03:19.168
But like, let's go 500, sorry, 50 or a hundred years out, how do you, what do you envision like the human space settlement, you know, in that kind of what do you think will kind of just in generalities, what do you think will kind of just in generalities?
01:03:19.168 --> 01:03:25.619
What do you think if we are able to re-engage, or just what do you think the play is not apart from the Vulcans which is supposed to happen in 2063?
01:03:25.619 --> 01:03:32.809
But you know, I don't want that one, because that means world war, that means decimated planet.
01:03:32.809 --> 01:03:34.456
I'm good, like you know.
01:03:34.456 --> 01:03:37.778
So what do you think the world will, what do you think things will be like?
01:03:37.778 --> 01:03:37.940
So what?
01:03:37.940 --> 01:03:38.242
Do you think?
01:03:38.262 --> 01:03:39.525
the world will what do?
01:03:39.547 --> 01:03:45.000
you think things will be like?
01:03:45.000 --> 01:03:55.690
I think this is going to sound like a cop-out answer, but I think it's going to be hard for us to predict when it comes to space, because I don't think that 10, 15 years ago we would have adequately predicted where space is right now.
01:03:55.690 --> 01:04:17.456
Just the advance that we've seen from things like SpaceX launching and landing at like a weekly or sub weekly cadence, the number of companies that have just I feel like I shouldn't use the word exploded in this context, but I mean it in a good way, you know and they're building entire constellations of satellites that can just like do all sorts of stuff in Earth's orbit.
01:04:17.456 --> 01:04:27.746
And now we have companies that are focused on mars and venus and going back to the moon, and so, like we went from a period where it didn't feel like a whole lot was happening.
01:04:27.746 --> 01:04:36.545
You know, it's just kind of like, oh, the shuttle's launching back to the space station again, like people didn't really care all that much unless they were already a space nerd.
01:04:36.545 --> 01:04:46.795
So getting to a point now where, like there's a renewed excitement about the fact that there's so much happening in space, feels really positive.
01:04:46.795 --> 01:04:54.967
So I think if things keep going on this upward trajectory of, you know, more frequent launches, more companies are popping up.
01:04:54.967 --> 01:05:01.059
We're seeing investment from countries around the world forming new space agencies, which is really incredible.
01:05:01.059 --> 01:05:08.659
Like my hope is that, you know, we will see a sustained human presence on the moon within 50 years.
01:05:08.659 --> 01:05:18.775
I think we'll probably start to see, at the very least, like a scientific outpost on Mars, maybe something kind of akin to what we've got in Antarctica akin to what we've got in Antarctica.
01:05:18.815 --> 01:05:37.998
Whether that's long enough for us to have full-on cities, I think the skeptical part of me thinks that's a little too soon, because the old view would have been well, we need a lot of political backing and government money to make that happen.
01:05:37.998 --> 01:05:42.873
But now you have billionaires that are funding this kind of stuff and I feel like that really changes the game too.
01:05:42.873 --> 01:06:06.974
Uh, you know, elon musk does everything that he does because you know, regardless of what your opinions are of him, like he is genuinely focused on that goal of wanting to go to mars and starting all these other companies and all these things he do does he does in service to that goal that he has, and that's just something that governments don't have the ability to do.
01:06:06.974 --> 01:06:12.918
They can't maintain good focus, generally speaking, across different administrations.
01:06:12.918 --> 01:06:17.335
Everybody wants to have their own vanity project, especially when it comes to space.
01:06:18.065 --> 01:06:37.974
So these space billionaires have kind of opened up a new lane for stuff to happen, like they can keep a focused goal and funnel as many of their resources as they want to into making these things happen, and so that, like as a whole, has probably been really good for reinvigorating the space sector.
01:06:37.974 --> 01:06:40.664
So are we going to see more people doing that?
01:06:40.664 --> 01:06:44.833
Are we going to see, like the legacy of some of these people carry on?
01:06:44.833 --> 01:06:53.483
Like you know, if people like musk and bezos are dead in 50 years or when they die, like what, what happens to those companies?
01:06:53.724 --> 01:06:55.588
or we have life extension and they live.
01:06:55.588 --> 01:06:57.733
You know they can live 500 years, right they?
01:06:58.474 --> 01:06:58.775
that's true.
01:06:58.775 --> 01:07:01.327
Yeah, isn't bezos investing in that kind of stuff too?
01:07:01.327 --> 01:07:02.289
Maybe he'll figure that out.
01:07:02.971 --> 01:07:07.635
I just I just keep thinking of altered carbon, where you have meths which are like methuselahs.
01:07:07.815 --> 01:07:11.507
You know like they, you know the rich live forever and yeah.
01:07:11.507 --> 01:07:13.954
So I think you're exactly right.
01:07:13.954 --> 01:07:18.190
You're the first person and I've interviewed that really guess I call it.
01:07:18.190 --> 01:07:23.427
You know he's building the complete ecosystem to go to Mars, but he's proven it out.
01:07:23.427 --> 01:07:35.730
Like there's people that want tunnels you know to, to transport you and enter in the city of Los Angeles, or there's, you know, starlight for the for people here on earth, like X is all these things.
01:07:35.730 --> 01:07:37.655
Everything he does is, like you said, in service.
01:07:37.655 --> 01:07:39.079
He is creating the essentially like the robots they're.
01:07:39.079 --> 01:07:41.367
He is creating the essentially like the robots.
01:07:41.367 --> 01:07:45.126
They're going to be the cheap labor to do things on Mars, right, the dangerous stuff too.
01:07:45.126 --> 01:07:47.836
It's all there, it doesn't he Earth?
01:07:47.836 --> 01:07:54.715
Earth is the way that makes money and gets it funded and gets investors in, but the real, the real outcome, the long game, is Mars, right?
01:07:55.338 --> 01:07:57.329
Yeah, I agree, you have a very good sense of things.
01:07:57.329 --> 01:07:59.775
I think you're right about the research stations, the Moon Bay.
01:07:59.775 --> 01:08:00.697
Yeah, I think that's true.
01:08:00.697 --> 01:08:03.228
You know it's been a, you know it's.
01:08:03.228 --> 01:08:10.659
As we kind of start to kind of close this conversation, I want to have you back because there's so many other things we can rich, things we can dive into.
01:08:10.659 --> 01:08:32.353
But you know, I'd love to kind of kind of do a little bit of our rapid fire, one of the things that I like to ask people and there's a lot of different questions, but you know you talked about your book, like what are, what is one book that's really profoundly influenced your thinking, and you know, about the future.
01:08:32.373 --> 01:08:34.586
What has it really impacted you About the future?
01:08:34.586 --> 01:08:47.001
It's not a book about space, but it's called.
01:08:47.001 --> 01:08:49.304
I always forget the subtitle.
01:08:49.304 --> 01:08:55.717
It's like wayfinding the art and science of how humans navigate the world, or something to that effect in the subtitle.
01:08:55.717 --> 01:09:35.435
Um, it's a book that goes into both the history and the neuroscience of how humans interact with the world around them through, uh like on the ground, exploration in three different cultures and looking at, like the historical ways of navigating so one was Polynesian seafarers, one was um indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic and the other one was Aboriginal communities in Australia and looking at how the way that these different cultures navigate impact your brain and like how all of our senses are incorporated into how we experience the world.
01:09:36.356 --> 01:09:39.949
Like that book fundamentally changed the way that I interact with the world around me.
01:09:39.949 --> 01:09:53.418
Like, um, I very rarely wear headphones when I go for walks now because it talked about the impact of like the sounds around us and how that helps things better imprint into our limbic system.
01:09:53.418 --> 01:10:18.149
Basically for memory smells of things really imprint on our memory and so seeing how much the multisensory experience impacts our memory and navigation and just emotion in general got me really thinking about how is the sensory deprived environment of being in space or living in a habitat on the moon or on Mars like.
01:10:18.149 --> 01:10:23.012
How is that going to impact our brains and the way that we interact with the world?
01:10:23.012 --> 01:10:26.572
It really got me thinking.
01:10:26.572 --> 01:10:28.873
I feel like I rave about that book to people constantly.
01:10:28.873 --> 01:10:34.136
If you want to maybe change your perspectives on the world, I highly recommend it.
01:10:34.944 --> 01:10:36.150
That's a great recommendation.
01:10:36.150 --> 01:10:41.193
What's the one thing you've learned in your career that you wish you knew when you started?
01:10:45.926 --> 01:10:55.039
I wish I knew that if I wanted to work on Mars rovers, I should have studied engineering and geology rather than going into astronomy at the beginning.
01:10:55.039 --> 01:10:57.908
I don't regret it, but it would have been a more direct path.
01:10:57.908 --> 01:10:58.390
That's good.
01:10:58.409 --> 01:10:59.931
I don't regret it, but it would have been a more direct pass.
01:10:59.931 --> 01:11:00.171
That's good.
01:11:00.171 --> 01:11:05.640
Well, what advice would you give those who are starting out like
thinkers, innovators, who want to make that impact?
01:11:10.295 --> 01:11:12.140
What advice would you give them?
01:11:12.140 --> 01:11:12.987
I would say go for it.
01:11:12.987 --> 01:11:20.534
Like the space community is so enthusiastic and generally really supportive and, like you know, all nerds on board kind of thing.
01:11:20.534 --> 01:11:22.729
So find your way in.
01:11:22.729 --> 01:11:32.262
Yeah, find your way in, find your people like, start building that community and, you know, chase that goal because it's, it's worth it.
01:11:32.262 --> 01:11:34.127
It's the thing that's going to make you happy at the end of the day.
01:11:35.591 --> 01:11:36.654
So how would you?
01:11:36.654 --> 01:11:43.233
This legacy question I always love to ask people because it's, even if you're young and early in your career, in your career but how would you?
01:11:43.233 --> 01:11:48.603
This legacy question I always love to ask people because it's, even if you're young and early in your career, but how would you want your work to be?
01:11:48.662 --> 01:11:49.965
remembered, like what impact do you hope it has on the world?
01:11:49.965 --> 01:12:01.621
Other people find opportunities, especially students, and then kind of watch them grow into their dream careers.
01:12:01.621 --> 01:12:02.890
I find that really rewarding.
01:12:02.890 --> 01:12:05.273
Maybe that's the part of me that was meant to be a professor, I don't know.
01:12:05.273 --> 01:12:24.554
So I think I would like to be remembered for helping to create opportunities for other people, to really grow the number of people that we see in space and the impact that those people are having because they can do more than just one person that's great.
01:12:25.194 --> 01:12:33.065
So let's be kind of like so how do people you know stay updated with your work, the developments with epic and just your research in general?
01:12:33.065 --> 01:12:39.457
So, like all the things about you, like how we can, how people can connect with you uh, I'm really easy to find on.
01:12:39.497 --> 01:12:53.911
Pretty much any social media platform is at Tanya of Mars T-A-N-Y-A, so my website, tanyaharrisoncom, and if you have questions that you want answered, we'll say about Mars, but you can put other stuff in there too.
01:12:53.911 --> 01:13:02.873
I have a forum at askthemartiancom and I'm going to start using those questions to create some video content.
01:13:02.873 --> 01:13:04.969
It's been up for a little while.
01:13:04.969 --> 01:13:11.452
I haven't done it yet because I've been in like nomad mode, but once that is over, I can start digging into people's questions.
01:13:11.452 --> 01:13:14.770
So definitely looking forward to seeing what people submit there.
01:13:14.789 --> 01:13:16.375
That's great.
01:13:16.375 --> 01:13:22.872
Well, thank you for being on the show and it's been a pleasure to learn about you and your journey, so thanks a lot.
01:13:24.168 --> 01:13:24.891
Thanks so much for having me.
01:13:24.891 --> 01:13:26.532
Thanks for listening to Going Offworld.
01:13:26.532 --> 01:13:34.622
You can find us on all the major podcast platforms and at wwwbaduoffworldpodcastcom, as well as on YouTube under Going Offworld.
01:13:34.622 --> 01:13:39.671
You can also learn more about the Waypaver Foundation at waypaverfoundationorg.
01:13:39.671 --> 01:13:40.934
See you next time.