Factually! with Adam Conover - Why You Don't Actually Want to Live on Mars with Dr. Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

The prospect of human life on Mars, once a science fiction fantasy, now seems increasingly plausible. But does actually warrant being anything other than a fantasy? This week, Adam speaks with Dr. Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, authors of A City on Mars, to discuss the practicalities of becoming a space-faring species, the challenges that lie ahead, and whether it's even a good idea to begin with. Find Zach and Kelly's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself. Plus, they throw in a handy guide filled with info about each snack and about Japanese culture. And let me tell you something, you are going to need that guide because this box comes with a lot of snacks. I just got this one today direct from Bokksu. And look at all of these things. We got some sort of seaweed snack here. We've got a buttercream cookie.

We've got a dolce. I don't I'm going to have to read the guide to figure out what this one is. It looks like some sort of sponge cake. Oh, my gosh. This one is I think it's some kind of maybe fried banana chip. Let's try it out and see. Is that what it is? Nope. It's not banana. Maybe it's a cassava potato chip. I should have read the guide. Ah, here they are. Iburigako smoky chips. Potato chips made with rice flour, providing a lighter texture and satisfying crunch. Oh my gosh, this is so much fun. You got to get one of these for themselves and get this for the

month of March. Bokksu has a limited edition cherry blossom box and 12 month subscribers get a free kimono style robe and get this while you're wearing your new duds, learning fascinating things about your tasty snacks. You can also rest assured that you have helped to support small family run businesses in Japan because Bokksu works with 200 plus small makers to get their snacks delivered straight to your door. So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Boxu.com.

Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show once again. You know, these days it seems like everybody wants to go to Mars. Every president going back at least to George H.W. Bush has made some sort of statement in favor of exploring Mars and getting good old American space boots on that Martian ground. Elon Musk has been more than vocal about wanting to settle Mars for years now in order to save humanity, which seems pretty bleak if that's what we're resorting to, but whatever. Putting aside narratives of nationalist glory and the savior fantasy of one of the worst and stupidest people on the planet, I have a very important question when it comes to human settlement on Mars or any other planet, really.

Why? Like, seriously, why? Because it would be cool? I mean, it would certainly satisfy my childhood science fiction fantasies, but what substantive purpose would it actually serve? And the issue of why only gets bigger when you weigh it against what I imagine to be the immense and incredible resources and effort required to make it happen. And I don't say that just to poo poo it. I just wonder, is space colonization a good or realistic idea? I mean, when you think about what it would actually take to actually do it, is it something

we actually want to do? We need to ask this question. Well, our guests today have spent years researching the answer and writing a fascinating, entertaining, and funny book exploring just that question. But before we get to it, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash adam conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this podcast ad-free. And by the way, if you want to see me do stand-up comedy,

I got a brand new hour that I am touring around the country this January. Come catch me in D.C., Philly, New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, or Nashville. Head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. I'd love to see you there. Now, I'm a strong believer that you can only really understand something by getting into the details and by examining the how of human space exploration and colonization, we might get a better sense of the why. So our guests today are the wife-husband duo of Dr. Kelly Wienersmith and Zach Wienersmith. Their new book is A City on Mars. Can we settle space? Should we settle space? And have we really

thought this through? Without further ado, please welcome Dr. Kelly and Zach Wienersmith. Kelly and Zach, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks for having us. Okay, so there's been a whole lot of billionaires the past 10 years or so saying, we need to build a city on Mars or some other planet that humans must become a multi-planetary species. What do you think?

You've spent a lot of time researching this. Should we become multi-planetary or not? And why or why not? Well, that's a huge question, really. Right. And I expect you to answer it very briefly. And it's going to be a short podcast. You got the wrong guess on your show then.

But so, you know, we hope, I hope that we become multi-planetary at some point, but I hope that we don't do it quickly because doing it quickly has all sorts of ethical geopolitical problems, including the fact that we don't even know if we can safely have babies in space yet. So you'd essentially be doing like human experimentation on Mars if you just go out there and have babies. So that's sort of a dark angle to start things on. But, you know, it's it's well, I'm sorry to drill into this immediately. Now, when you say babies in space, you mean space or on another planet. Right. So we don't know what it would be like. We don't know what would happen if you had a baby on Mars. What could go wrong? Well, so these billionaires that you talked about at the beginning of the show,

they are proposing that, you know, for example, Elon Musk is saying that we need to go to Mars so that we can be multi-planetary. So if anything happens to Earth, there's a backup of humanity. So if you're going to have- Right, but he loves,

we know that he loves having babies. He has so many kids. And so if he goes to Mars, you know, Elon's going to be fucking and Elon's going to want to have a lot of kids with weird names. He put people in a settlement on his own, so many kids and so if he goes if he goes to mars you know elon's gonna be fucking and elon's gonna want to have a lot of kids with weird names he's going to people a settlement on his own almost one generation you get inbreeding problems in generation two well anyway so uh

okay so we you know we don't understand much about how space radiation impacts human bodies let alone babies when they're developing so most of our research has been done on the international space station and they're protected from space radiation by the magnetosphere and so space radiation is different than what you experience on earth we don't understand how bad it is. I was actually, Oh yeah. I was at a, so you mean the magnetos, the magnetosphere, which is around the earth,

right there. So they're still protected by the earth sort of natural space radiation protection. When the, when they're, when they're on the international space station, they say they're in space, but no,

they're inside the magnetosphere, but on Mars, you wouldn't be protected by that. I'm sorry. I cut you off. I mean, I'm still impressed. But you're right. They're not getting all of them.

They're officially in space. There's a technical definition according to which they are astronauts. Okay. But they're just doing it on easy mode is all we're saying. All right. I love it when people shade astronauts on this show. We can go there in a big way. They lie about everything. They're liars. What? Astronaut a big way they're liars astronauts are liars

we we started collecting admitted lies in astronaut memoirs and we had a whole section the editor made us cut it short because it was so long we had to just summarize astronauts lying the reason they lie is because they're like especially in the early days they're mostly test pilots all they want to do is fly all they want to do is go in space there's a guy named walter cunningham he's an astronaut in the 70s he thought he was having a heart attack the day before launch while maybe having bone cancer and he hid everything he went to like a secret doctor found by a fixer so he wouldn't have to tell nasa staff that's just one example uh mike mike mullin pulled papers out of his medical record uh because the idiots uh in charge of uh of medical stuff thought they could

trust an astronaut which you cannot wow never trust an astronaut that's the first lesson of the podcast holy shit that's a movie That's a movie all by itself. But, okay, let's go back to the babies. I don't want to derail too much. Yes. Well, you were explaining. I was at this working group and they had a biology group with all these like medical experts who were talking about, well, what would you need to have babies in space? And the woman in charge was saying you should have artificial wombs so that you can protect

the babies from space radiation because it could be that bad. And needless to say, we don't have artificial wombs yet. And so maybe we shouldn't be doing this yet. And also like so the astronauts on the International Space Station, they lose every month 1.5 percent of aerial bone mineral density. So this is how you measure osteoporosis uh and every month they're losing that from their hips and so like i don't want i wouldn't want to be the woman who had spent 20 years growing up on mars hoping that partial gravity is enough and hoping that when labor kicks in my hips are gonna hold up like that doesn't sound so awesome so yeah there's a lot

well when when you say just having babies on mars I was imagining birth or what you said, like, you know, fetal stuff, fetal development. But then when you point out, okay, if an adult on the International Space Station is losing 1.5% bone density or whatever every single, what, year? Month. Every month. Okay. And then, well, hold on a second. That means I really don't want to fucking grow up there from ages like what zero to 25 what the hell is going to happen to me am i going to have bones that's a very good observation so we when we talk about this we tend to talk

about can you have babies which which i think we we believe probably it'd be dangerous but you could do it but then the kids have to grow up and so for example on mars the soil which kicks up in dust storms has a thyroid hormone disruptor in it at high percentage whoa so what does that do to teenagers or babies or we don't even if it's we don't even know if it's safe for adults but you imagine like you've got a 10 year old it's just crazy and that's again just one among many problems we don't have the answer to because we don't take children and expose them to, like, high doses of perchlorate for fun or science because it would be, you know, monstrous. I feel like you guys have researched this so heavily. We're already down the rabbit hole on a very specific problem of being on Mars, which is you're like, hey, guess what? The dust has a high concentration of a thyroid disruptor.

OK, that's fine. What the fuck do they eat up there, Zach? They're on fucking Mars. Where's the water coming from? Are they, what, they live in a bubble? Like, what the fuck? Tell me about the basics. Are those even possible? Yeah. So, well, we don't know. This is like one of the major problems. So the best data we have on how to build uh a sort of ecosystem in a sealed bubble which is what you'd want on mars because mars is awful and will kill you uh the best data we have is from biosphere 2 from the 90s you know that polyshore movie oh yeah i visited i visited the biosphere 2 um with a family road trip like out west i don't know if you can still do it now but at the time i was like you can go visit the biosphere too and it was sort of like yeah here was this dome that

we built out west and we put some scientists in it for a while to see if they could live in a self-contained environment and uh basically what happened didn't they all go crazy and start fucking each other isn't that what happened yes i mean i'm sure yes it did go well that was my memory of what they told us when we visited it so so so i will first a slight correction i would say it was not scientists it was people these slightly cultish leaders thought were cool oh okay okay got it all right all right understood they were scientists but but mostly it was like people john allen who is kind of like a proto steve jobs thinks they're cool right now so this was by and at its start a fucked up project by a megalomaniac got it uh and a billionaire yeah so so we do it with elon musk was in charge you could just have

two for one um but like uh uh yes you're right so by the end they were starving at one point they had to have oxygen piped in because they were like running out of it. You know, and humans like oxygen. And and the other thing is, and this is important for your like Utopia Mars plan, they spent almost all their time working, like just to run the farm and not die. And they were eating like, green bananas and beans meant for goats. And they had to kill their pigs because the pigs weren't surviving and the chickens wouldn't lay eggs it was kind of a disaster and they split there were eight people they split into two groups and at one point there was a drive by spitting by one group on the other uh and so they didn't literally didn't speak to each other for a year during the two-year voyage so wow that is a source of data and it's for eight people not the million people elon musk would like and it didn't eight people, not the million people Elon Musk would like. And it didn't go well, that sort of like contained environment, growing your own food, like we're going to create a sustainable environment for human life.

It has not worked. There have been follow up experiments like Japan and China have had smaller facilities where they're trying to do the same thing with two or three people. But where we are on that right now is like in China, they had three big guys in the facility and they started running out of oxygen. So they had to switch out two of the big guys for two smaller women, which is like, so that's where we are right now. You can't do those swaps. If you're on Mars, we have not figured these equations out yet. We shouldn't be sending people yet. But wait, are there, so you guys are saying very firmly, we shouldn't be sending people yet but wait are there so you guys are saying very firmly we shouldn't be sending people yet is someone trying to send people now because when elon says it at this point i'm just like that guy just says shit

i don't believe anything he says right but are there are there people who you think are trying to do it too soon uh i would say you know musk is probably the main one pushing he are trying to do it too soon? I would say, you know, Musk is probably the main one pushing. He's trying to build the vehicle to do it now. There are a lot of advocates who are pushing it soon. Probably the most prominent is a guy named Robert Zubrin. He's one of the founders of the Mars Society. He would like to see boots on Mars very soon. There are people who are pushing to get to the moon faster as part of like a space race

with China and maybe set up research stations that could become settlements. But I agree. I don't think there's any chance of us actually getting to the moon and starting a settlement. Maybe we'll do some research in the next couple of decades, but I don't think we're going to be starting a settlement anytime soon, despite what Musk says. Yeah.

Yeah. It's mostly a fantasy. And the interesting thing is like, what, what, how is the fantasy used to get people to do things? Right. That's so that's the interesting question is there's sort of two things going on.

There's people who say we should go to Mars and they have a justification for why they think we should go. And we could debate what that justification is. You know, Musk says he wants to save us from natural disaster or whatever, become a multiplanetary species. And, you know, I know that the government has before said, oh, let's send people to Mars for X, Y, and Z reason. But then there's also the actual reasons that people might, might want such a program to exist, which might involve personal enrichment, you know, some sort of national propaganda campaign, maybe just, you know, hey, wouldn't it be great to spend a couple hundred billion dollars on anything that, you know, the military industrial complex could build for us because a lot of people would get get rich off of that, et cetera.

Which do you think is more driving the push to go to Mars, the good faith reasons or the ulterior motives? Well, prestige is definitely what sent us to the moon. I think, you know, the U.S. government isn't pushing for settlements on Mars right now. And so I'd say, you know, maybe you don't have to choose amongst any of those. I really think that Elon Musk does care about making the species multi-planetary. He's been like into this kind of stuff since he was very young. thing with jeff bezos so i you know i believe i think they're wrong but i believe that their intentions are maybe beyond making a dollar um they're sincere sincere yes exactly they're true believers yeah um yeah yeah in terms of like the using of space settlement i mean i think i would add that

i believe elon musk is absolutely a true. I do think these kind of fantastic ideas really help onboard young engineers and get them to work 23 hours a day. So I do think that is part of what's going on. But like Kelly says, the government's not spending very much on settlement. I do think there's a good case that human spacefaring is in general almost always for PR purposes. And then the scientific aspects are pretty questionable um you know i could go into like the history of that but um but but there's a great book by alex mcdonald who i think is the nasa chief economist called the long space age like basically arguing that the main reason we do stuff like humans to space is because it signals power to other nations it's like a way to declare yourself a superpower

right of course and it's well you know also i'm one of those people where in terms of humans going to space you know uh you know neil armstrong and them on the moon it's just fucking sick i mean like we got like it's it was it was sick it was awesome you know like it was awesome it was great we sent people across the the great the great expanse of vacuum and death to the thing in the sky. And then they came back. Holy shit. I mean, we do a lot of stuff just because it's cool, right? That's why we try to run a mile as fast as we can.

That's why we do. There's a lot of things we do just because everyone else says you can't do it. And someone's like, I want to try. And I do think there is some value in doing that. But go for it. I don't disagree. The fact that we brought Apollo 13 back is incredible. That was huge.

And I'm kind of a cold-hearted person. But when we landed Curiosity on Mars, I got tears in my eyes. And maybe that's the only time in the last two decades. So I get it. Can I wet blanket this a little bit all right so so like one point to make at the peak budget of nasa i think was 1968 it was like four percent of the budget like so i think like however awesome like you you want to you want to you want to like like i don't know that anyone today would seriously want four percent of the budget

to put two dudes on the moon. Yeah. Actually Kennedy, Kennedy himself before he, he read all or pushed for all this, wanted to do desalinization because he couldn't convince himself. I think correctly that going to the moon had like a lot of scientific merit. He thought desalinization would actually be valuable, but he's like, their transcripts have been saying this basically like,

but it won't show up the Soviets. So like we can't, we can't Congress to open the wallet. I mean, I do think like to, to get into like the the i don't want to get too in the weeds but like there were proposals back in the 50s before apollo to build like a giant space station first and then kind of organize an armada that would go to the moon in style right so instead of sending two test pilots you'd send like 10 people who are like geologists and chemists and stuff which would have at least you know whether it could be done set that aside but what we actually ended up doing basically because kennedy said we do it in a

certain amount of time is sending the tiniest possible dinghy we could to the moon that could get back people alive so that i mean so that's like i i think there's a historian named john lodgton who wrote a whole book just about Kennedy's decision making process in the early 60s. And it's PR and geopolitics at the core. And that explains why it was not done in a way that could be repeated. Right. So like the program gets killed sort of infamously after Apollo 17. But part of that's because it was done in this crazy, expensive, like difficult to repeat way because it was PR. It was just to do the stunt. And after it it was done people wouldn't even tune in to watch so it's not just like

bureaucrats saying let's close this program it's like the public in general doesn't want to spend this money yeah i mean the you're absolutely right that the initial moon landing was simply the greatest pr event of all time i I mean, not only did it happen, there was live footage of it on television. I mean, even just that technically, to get live television from the moon back home is like unbelievable. Even if all you did was send a camera, it's incredible.

So then see the moment of the person walking, it's like absolutely unbelievable. And maybe it's valuable just as PR, but's absolutely true that's all it is and if you look at nasa as an organization talked about this a lot in our research for our show about the government called the g word nasa is the only government department that has a good website because if you go to nasa.gov they got a sick. They got like photos and like news updates and et cetera. If you go to the website of the national weather service, which is a far more important department to the lives of everyday Americans,

because it generates the original weather predictions and data that all of our, all of the world's weather prediction is based on. If you go to weather.gov, it looks like a geocities website from 1998 um you can get the data from it and i do but uh that's because it does not have that pr mission but you can tell if when you go to nasa that is that is like what nasa is for yeah i know you know like we're nasa geeks they do a lot of real good science it's just that like the the it exists for p like this this was was all created, you know, as, as a big PR move scientists, God bless them, load their stuff onto that cash pile. Yeah.

And that's great. But like the cash pile exists because it shows up other countries. Yeah. But okay. What, why do we want to show up other countries? Like, okay. If, if the U S they're like, we want to show up the Soviets, who's the audience for the showing up? I mean, these two countries are already the biggest,

baddest countries in the world. Are you trying to impress Peru? Like what's going on? You might be. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot there. So one, the public historically and to this day overestimates the value of space to national economies. Right. So if it was like 1957, Sputnik goes up. Everyone, including like Khrushchev and Eisenhower, both shocked the morning after how much people gave a shit.

Wow. They thought it was like, cool. But everybody was planning to put up a satellite. It was it was an international geophysical year. It was a stated goal. Soviets got there first by like actively making this eeny weeny crappy useless satellite called Sputnik. It was just a radio transmitter on a shiny ball. And they got they beat us by like 90 days. And the public at large assumed that meant their system was not not everybody. But it really shifted the needle on how much the public of the world thought they were winning. Meanwhile, the U.S. was way ahead in the actual meaningful technology of the 20th century, which was microelectronics.

But you can't go to the public and be like, hey, every year, 3% improvement in the number of transistors. The public doesn't care. There's a deep overestimation of how important rockets are. And part of that is because they can kill people, right? So part of Alex McDonald's argument about human spacefaring, it doesn't just show that you're rich. It doesn't just show that you're organized and technologically advanced. It also shows you can deliver with precision objects to anywhere on giant rockets. It's like the perfect signaling

technology. The other thing I would add, this is often forgotten, the period of decolonization that happened in the 20th century, the high mark of that is 1945 to 1975. The space race occurs right in the middle of it. So there's a huge number of new nations. to 1975 the space race occurs right in the middle of it so there's a huge number of new nations it literally like the number of countries during that period multiplies by

something like four or five we have the numbers in our book so like that is the audience for this got it and that's that's why it's like hey our flag isn't flying above your capital building anymore but we're still fucking in charge don't mess up like we're we're the ones on the moon and you are not right i got it or look at how great our system is you know the socialist system can't get you communism can't get you there but capitalism got you there so you should be capitalist like us too which is ironic because it's not like nasa is capitalist like it's a huge government funded like it's a socialist enterprise and i I mean, you know, we've privatized a lot of space flights since then with SpaceX and everything else. But like that shit ain't going to the moon.

I guess, well, maybe that is why Elon is now declaring that he wants to do it because he's, you know, it's capitalism trying to advertise itself. Right. We're going to make money by starting a settlement or by going up there. So it's a little bit of the same logic. Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, I think, you know, rocket science is absolutely hard. I couldn't do it, but it is as an important economic factor, like an economist will tell you, like, well, advanced algorithms

for shopping at Walmart are really what drove economic growth, but the public thinks it's things like rockets, right? And not that they don't matter. Like, I'm talking to you on on starlink which i have like complex feelings about are you really i mean we live in the country it's it's the only option i'm i'm prepared to make fun of elon musk while defending starlink i've got complex feelings about it well starlink is very complex technology with the astronomers are all pissed off about starlink right because it's uh what the the orbit is so low that it's like fucking up the night sky even more than it's

already fucked up for their purposes you know especially you know especially you know coming out of covid there were all those kids who needed to be able to zoom into their classrooms and stuff like we didn't have a lot of options we're in the middle of nowhere we couldn't afford the like 40k we needed to trench comcast up to our house and so we got starlink and it you know we're the only people who are like man i miss comcast that's what it's like to be in the country that's how bad it is in in the country you it was right ever have a problem with comcast i'll just say and i've talked about on this show before that you know for instance when you know the the federal government decided in when when the 40s or so that everyone in the country should have electricity.

Well, they just embarked on a big rural electrification project and forced all the electric companies to run the fucking lines out there. Because guess what? It's not that expensive. Just fucking do it so that everyone in the country can get electricity. And like we could do that without sending thousands of satellites up to fuck up the night sky. We could just like run some goddamn pipe. Just get some fiber optic cable is cheap, motherfuckers. Yeah, I let me I will 90 percent agree with what you're saying, because like it's absolutely true that the government has repeatedly paid local companies to run trench out.

And they just they seem to not do it. It does seem to slowly get happening. The FCC allocates billions for it. But yeah, like why isn't it like something like 10 of americans though this is shrinking now have crappy internet and so that that has created this gap into which starlink has jumped i will say that's true in the u.s i don't think it's true in like recently electrified rural india where i think starlink would actually be quite valuable um in a way like like that you know in a way that would be hard to reproduce by just saying let's build out infrastructure to a billion people.

Well, India has infrastructure problems all over the place. Like, you know, I'm certainly not saying anything that I say about American infrastructure should hold in India, but I'm just making the point about, you know, the solutions that we choose are choices that we make. They're not inevitabilities. And there are often options that are a little bit more sustainable or at least don't fuck up our view of,

you know, Alpha Centauri or whatever. But let's get back to space colonization, space settlement, whatever you want to call it. Is there in your view, how about this? What is the best argument for why it should be done in your view? How about this? What is the best argument for why it should be done in your view? So we propose two arguments that we think are the best, but probably the best of the best is this, you know, long term plan B.

So, you know, Elon Musk wants us to have a million people on Mars in the next two to three decades, and he claims that's going to be a backup for humanity. two to three decades. And he claims that's going to be a backup for humanity. But like, if, if Earth in the next two to three decades tanks, Mars is only a couple years behind, maybe only a couple weeks behind, like in order to make that self sustaining, that is the work of generations. And so if you're willing to say you like humans, and some of my favorite people are humans, then maybe you want to like, start this product or this process, get it rolling so that maybe in like a hundred years or something like that, you can have a self-sustaining society on Mars. So if something happens on earth, humans will persist. We feel like that's a pretty good argument. The other

argument that we liked when we started the book was it's awesome and who has any right to tell you no. But by the end of the book, we thought that was a really bad argument because going out to places like the moon could start space races, you know, between like nuclear wielding powers like China and the United States. And so going out does create some existential threat for us back here on earth. And so it's not just something awesome that nobody has a right to tell you not to do. There's risks for the rest of us if you do it. And so now I think our best argument is if you do it slowly and carefully, it can be a nice long-term plan B for humanity in case something bad happens. But you got to be careful. Now, my understanding is that, in fact, countries can't just do it if they want because there's already treaties governing outer space

to some degree, right? And what are those? See want, because there's already treaties governing outer space to some degree. Right. And what are those? See here, what's the Outer Space Treaty of 1967? So that's through the United Nations. It's a widely ratified treaty. The U.S. and all the major space faring powers have signed onto it. And it essentially says that the parts that are relevant to space settlement, that when you go out into space, you are not allowed to claim sovereignty over anything. So the U.S. can't land on the moon and say, this is ours.

But, and it also says that anybody who goes to space is the responsibility of some country. So if Musk were to go to Mars, the United States would be responsible for what he does when he's there. And so they need, you know, they're responsible to someone, but there's a lot of ambiguity.

So for example, it's not clear if you can extract resources from the moon and sell those because that's not quite sovereignty. And so the United States has actually said that our interpretation of the outer space treaty is that you can extract and sell resources. That's not sovereignty. It's fine. And this is called the Artemis. Of course, that's what the United States, that's what we do. fine and this is called the art of course that that's what the

united states that's what we do we extract resources maybe yeah so we're not of course that is our interpretation is that like oh you better believe if you can frack the moon we are gonna frack it yeah and and and that's by the way obama said it and Trump said it. So, like, it's the one bipartisan thing is Americans can do whatever the hell they want in space. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the other thing about that. So I think most nations would agree that you're allowed to, like, take samples because, like, Apollo took samples. The Russians had some probes.

A couple samples. The question is, like, whether that's unlimited because you can see how you can't claim territory, but you could do literally whatever you want. unlimited because because you can see how if you can't claim territory but you could do literally whatever you want it gets absurd really fast because you could like it this is like stupid but you could literally grind up the moon and turn it into something else and now it's yours because it's a resource you extracted you know it's like bizarre uh and there is stuff in os in the outer space treaty that like we said environmental husbandry but it's kind of like you know please do your best and tell everyone while you're screwing up the environment,

you know, keep us keep us in the loop for that. Can we tell the story about why that clause went in there? Project Westward? Please. So so we were worried

for a while, like what would happen? We were setting off nuclear weapons in space and so was the Soviet Union. And the reason we were doing it was because it could knock out satellites

and we were sort of interested as a way to like, you know, take the other countries capabilities away. And so we were worried, like, well, what if that happens? How could we continue to communicate? And we thought, well, if there were tons of needles in space, we could bounce our messages off the needles and back. And so we literally set up many, many, many many many tiny little needles and dispersed them and some of them are still up there and and so this happened around the time that the outer space treaty was getting written and so some people were like we should probably put something in there about how if you're gonna like totally screw up the space environment you should like

run that by some people first hundreds of thousands of needles into orbit destroy satellites and so anyway that was another american project i mean and this is a problem my understanding is in orbit around the earth that there's at this point lots and lots of space debris that like like leftover pieces of shit that like fell off the space shuttle or whatever and it's going around really fast and sometimes sometimes it'll just hit a satellite and go like, bang, and like, fuck the satellite up. Or like if you, you know, if you do a spacewalk, like you could just get hit by one of these needles. Like, is this a, this is a problem I've heard. Is that true?

Yeah, it's a problem. So eventually that stuff will de-orbit and it will burn up in the atmosphere and go away. But a bunch of people, you know, like when they're done with the satellite, they're supposed to stick it in what's called a graveyard orbit, which is so high up that it's functionally out of the way of everything and isn't going to come back down and destroy anything. And, you know, fun fact, some of those things in the graveyard orbit are nuclear reactors. But yeah, there's tons of junk up there. And, you know, there's a lot of people monitoring the junk to try to make sure that the satellites don't run into each other or don't run into the junk so that we don't end up with more debris.

But yes, it's becoming increasingly crowded up there. Yeah, I would say if you go on an EVA, if you go on a space flight, it's not like you're going to be dodging bullets. But the bigger concern is that if we keep on the current trajectory, especially if people keep doing what are called ASAT tests where they explode their own satellites, you could eventually get to a world where you get a problem there's this idea called the kessler syndrome and the thought is you get a bunch of stuff in space and then one thing explodes and it explodes something else you get a chain reaction and it becomes very hard to do anything we're not there yet but the concern is that you know so like spacex now has i or through starlink has more than half the satellites i I think, ever fielded. Wow.

Yeah. So, I mean, they're small, you know, but still. And they're not nearly close to complete on their project. And meanwhile, you know, Kuiper, which is, I think, is it Amazon or Jeff Bezos directly? Anyway, there's some world in which you get so much crap in space that it does become legitimately hard

to, like, launch through it or operate generally. Especially once you have multiple billionaires tossing tons of stuff up there, you know, I mean, you start to worry that space is going to become like, you know, just a piece of wilderness where like, there's a bunch of dudes with ATVs just sort of hauling ass around and like

tossing beer bottles all over the place and like building fire pits and like, Oh, I'm, I got a tiny home out here, you know, or whatever. I would say, yeah, they will probably die. So our joke is if you hate billionaires, you should hope they're they've got a space plane because they can probably die. I would say that actually I'd be less worried about their crap than about like someone deciding like, so Jeff Bezos proposes these giant like million ton orbital or Lagrange point vehicles that like like I think would be a legitimate threat to Earth just to have an object that large and fast moving around space like at a high enough speed objects high enough speed high enough mass objects can hit Earth like a nuclear weapon.

So, you know, if there's just tons of independent actors in space that's just inherently dangerous right uh okay let's take a really quick break here we'll be right back with more kelly and zach wienersmith talking about all the incredible shit that you have to say because everything you say is fascinating to me we'll be right back with more dr kelly and zach okay we're back with dr ke Kelly and Zach Wienersmith. We're talking about space, international law, space colonization, settlement, whatever you want to call it. I just, when we were talking about the space treaties, it reminded me of the one time I looked up like, hey, hold on a second. Who runs Antarctica?

Because, you know, Antarctica is down there. And I've always been fascinated by Antarctica. Holy shit. There's a whole continent that's so snowy. Just nobody wants to do anything there. Like we got so many people on this planet. But, you know, we're just like, no, fuck that place. But yet we but we have what we live in a society where everybody wants to own everything.

And so someone must own this. And I looked it up and all the countries on earth or the biggest, most powerful countries have like chopped it up into like a pie chart where like each of them has like a quadrant, like an arc. If you draw a line from the South Pole out, they each own like a slice,

like they sliced Antarctica into a really skinny pizza, into a pizza with a whole bunch of slices. And I find that very bizarre. Is there any comparison between that and space? And you know, one of the things that's kind of scary is that some of those pizza slices overlap. So Chile, Argentina, and I think Britain all made claims on the same chunk of Antarctica.

But somehow, despite the fact that claims had been made, we have figured out how we can manage that area peacefully. And the solution to that problem was, okay, everybody, we're going to accept that you have made claims. You can't make any more claims. And we're not going to say those claims are okay, but we're all just going to like chill. We're all going to be cool. We can all have research stations, but nobody is allowed to search for minerals and nobody is allowed to extract minerals. So there was a time when they were talking about getting mining going in Antarctica, but then like Jacques Cousteau was like, no, you can't destroy

Antarctica. And all these environmental people started like speaking up good for them. And they didn't want there to be like a scramble for resources. And so they said, look, let's just decide we're not going to mine Antarctica. And this is the Antarctic Treaty System made these decisions. And now there's a system where for 50 years, there's a moratorium on even looking for minerals. Science can happen now. You can't look for minerals.

You can't extract it. You can't extract krill from the ocean, but you can't go out there and look for anything in the ice. But let me ask something, though. krill from the ocean but you can't go out there and look for you know anything in the ice but let me ask something though is the success of that treaty based on is it partially because it's just really fucking hard to get minerals out of antarctica because you know that if there was a whole bunch of oil there that was like really easy to get that treaty wouldn't stop anybody we i think we actually yeah i think we disagree a little on that hell yes tell me why please

so two things. Like one, we do get oil from really tough environments like in the Gulf, like at the bottom of the sea, the North Sea. That's a very tough place to operate. We figured out a way to do it. There was some evidence. So like Kelly said, you're not even allowed under what's called the Madrid Protocol of 1998. You're not even allowed to look for resources in Antarctica. But there's some evidence from before then, like in the 70s, that maybe there were actually gettable minerals in Antarctica. And, but there's some evidence from before then, like, uh, in the

seventies that maybe there were actually gettable minerals in Antarctica. And the concern, there are basically two concerns. One of which is that you could start an international fight because as you said, there, there are these slices, but they're also like research bases of other countries in those slices. And then there are overlapping slices, like countries literally sent women to have birth in their slices to kind of prove ownership. And so the concern was you get war. And then, yeah, there's a big environmental outcry. There's a corollary in seabed law, where countries have repeatedly looked into using land off their coast that they are legally allowed to use to get minerals off the bottom of the sea and they decided not to do it uh maybe it was because it was hard to make a profit it's hard to know but there were these huge environmental outcries and so like the governments ended up saying no we don't want to piss people off so i don't think there's like i think if you want to model humans as goblins that's a pretty good model but it's's not unlimited. Okay, I'm glad to have my cynicism dispelled about that. That it actually is for concern about the environment of Antarctica.

The same thing is happening on the deep seabed. So this is another international common. So space, Antarctica, deep seabed, these are all international commons where we're all supposed to be sharing stuff. We know there are these polymetallic nodules down there. So they contain stuff that could be used to make, you know, like the batteries. Oh, I love polymetallic nodules. That's my they contain stuff that could be used to make, you know, like the batteries. Oh, I love polymetallic nodules. That's my favorite kind of nodule. Yeah, no, who doesn't?

I totally agree. I gotta have them. But we do have a system, the International Seabed Authority, which is working through rules for like, can you extract them? How much can you extract? How do we share the wealth from that extraction

with other countries? Because you're extracting from the global commons and they do seem to be caring about environmental concerns and they're moving very slowly as they work through these concerns. So, you know, I don't think we immediately just drop laws when we just discover there's money to be made.

But I agree with Zach. They are mostly goblins, but not a hundred percent. To circle it back to space though. And this is, this is a thing like, as far as I know, we're the only book that really hammers on this a lot which is people hear space on they're

like oh it's some stupid law we're going to get rid of because elon and me are going moon to mars and like if you look at the post 1945 era there have been three places we accessed with technology and inhabited or not inhabited but access with technology could have made money on which are the seabed uh that is the open international waters bottom of the sea there's antarctica and there's outer space which like just antarctica the seabed is more than half of the surface of the earth and in all three cases we set up a commons like big wimps it's not like the 19th century we all think it's going to be like the 19th century where we plant a flag and start shooting and killing people but that's not what we didth century. We all think it's going to be like the 19th century where we plant a flag and start shooting and killing people. But that's not what we did.

The international rules-based order is really nice. It's really cool. And everybody thinks it's stupid and bureaucratic and wants to get rid of it because it isn't awesome. But it's great. It stopped. Who knows what would happen if we had a scramble over these places? There's a whole 15% of Antarctica is unclaimed. do you imagine that happening in the 19th century okay so you have really dispelled my cynicism that we actually we actually have people are making rules that are

hopefully largely prudent and following the rules because it's better for everybody and cooler heads are prevailing uh for the time being yeah so can we we can we can roll that back so the one thing we one thing that scares us about space so i think space is somewhere where you could legitimately say part of the piece is that it's so hard to operate right there's just it's been historically hard to get in fights because who gives a shit but like so a lot of players want to go to the moon now right and the moon is big but the parts of it that are valuable are tiny the parts of it that are actually good for settlement are tiny actually kelly can explain

this better than i can if you want to go to the moon to start a settlement you need to be at the poles so at the poles there are areas where there there are these craters that the sunlight never hits the center of and that's where you find the water. So anywhere that sunlight hits, water gets vaporized and lost in the vacuum of space, but it is a solid ice chunk in those craters. And on the rims of those craters, you can also set up solar panels that get sunlight something like 80 to 93% of the time, which is way better than the equator where you have a solid two week chunk of night. So like earth two weeks is night. We do not have the batteries to handle that if you're running on solar power. But these areas are like the size of a handful of like, I don't know,

200 acre farms or something. They're not huge. And you could, they're very tiny. You could very easily like set up a couple of research stations and essentially be like, hey, these are ours. Like we know we're not sovereign over it. We're not saying that, but we're also not moving. And so there's no room for you. Yeah. And that could create problems. And so I think one way that space differs from Antarctica and the deep sea bed is that it's way more tied to prestige than those other areas. And so I can imagine there being a you know a new space race with china some people have said that this has already started over trying to you know get back to the moon not just some people sorry sorry just a department of defense and like nasa heads like people with power have said it's not just like nerds like us it's it's like people with the

same as i've said we are already in a race we are already in a race to create a station like that, like in the very rare territory on the moon of in the middle of a crater on the North Pole of the moon. And it's such a shitty place to fight over. Like the water there is there's not that much of it to begin with. Like there's Sardis Lake, I think in Minnesota. We need to remember the name of the state. But there's this human made lake that nobody has heard of because it's that small. And that's how much water is estimated to be on the moon. It's not like Lake Superior or all the Great Lakes.

It's a small amount. Fighting over a puddle. And worse than that, you hear people like big, very wealthy people and big government actors who will be like, we've got to get the water first so that we can do X, Y, and Z. And you can't do X, Y, and Z because there's not that much water and it never replenishes. It's just literal bullshit. Oh, wait, it doesn't replenish. No! No! No! Okay, yeah,

yeah. Okay, let's go there. Yeah, so the moon is drier than concrete. There is a tiny number of places. So the moon has no atmosphere. So if you throw a water balloon on the moon, that water just disperses. It's gone. Right? Into space. Into the back of the space.

Yeah, right. Wow. Yeah, I mean, some of it might get bound up with some minerals, but basically it's gone. But if you happen to throw it in a pitch black part of the moon under the rim of a crater, some of it will remain. And so over billions of years, that has happened when like uh have water in them smack into the moon and so this is collected in these crater rims but it's it's a one-time deal you can use it once at great difficulty but set that aside you can use it once and it's gone it's it's just gone and it doesn't come back and the only other option is to cook uh h2o out of uh the surface which it's in there. There are these rocks called hydrates.

But again, it's drier than concrete. So it's like baking concrete to get your daily water. You have to do like tons per day just to drink. So it's, yeah. If I went to the moon, I'd drink all the water so fast because I'm like a really thirsty guy. I'm always drinking and peeing and drinking and peeing, especially after a long flight when I haven't slept.

You know, I'm like super thirsty. I'm going to the bathroom all the time. So if I was on the moon, like literally two days, all that water is gone. I'd be like, sorry, guys. You're going to have to explain to the Chinese embassy that you were on a plane all day. One guy showed up and he drank all the water on the moon. Fuck. Well, this kind of meant your Biosphere 2 conversation.

Like part of what those facilities are trying to figure out is how do you recycle water so like on the international space station uh when they take a drink of water they call it yesterday's coffee because they drank it as coffee they pissed it out they cleaned it they drank it again we're gonna have to do stuff like that on space because you can't keep shipping water up from earth and so you know yeah all that peeing that you're doing, that's what you're drinking tomorrow. And you're going to have to get good at recycling that stuff. And there are people who propose setting up gas stations where you like split the water into hydrogen and oxygen and burn it as rocket fuel.

And they're just burning the, you're never, you can't start a settlement if you've burned all the water away. And I feel like I don't recognize how little is there. And then, you know, you eat, you eat too much asparagus and then your water the next day tastes weird.

Everybody hates you for it. No, it's awful. If you're washing in it, it's funky. Not cool. Not cool. Okay. But, but so there actually is like a space law issue at, at play here. Cause somebody might want to go get that puddle of stinky water before uh, before anybody else and just sort of like squat on the, on the property.

Literally squat. Yeah. Yeah. So you can imagine. So, you know, one thing we like to hit on is, is if you look at the space race to the sixties, it's a race to do something, not to take something. I mean, other than like some samples, whereas the space race, if we have it now is everyone's talking about building a base. And so if you build a base on one of those crater rims you are occupying a non-trivial portion because it's not just that your base is squatted on the moon the surface is this dangerous dust called regolith if you put it under a microscope it looks like tiny knives okay it's not like regular dust so you cannot land a rocket near that station right so if you plunk a station down under the artemis accords a document put out by out by the US but signed by a lot of other powers, not including China, says you can set up what's called a safety zone, which is a sort of perimeter where they're not supposed to land.

Wow. So you're not claiming sovereignty, which is like a somewhat formal definition in international law, but you're sort of like you're doing something uh that's in between yeah you're you're oh there's got to be there's like a board game or a video game that works this way where it's just like oh here's my first marker down and i got this amount of space and then someone else puts another marker down and if you put down three or four of those like well holy shit you just kind of ate up all the area um well and and and i would say it's like it's very human sort of ape behavior so you imagine like you set up a human sort of ape behavior. So imagine you set up a human base. Jesus.

You set up a U.S. base. What's an ape base like on the moon? An ape base. Yeah, right. Well, that goes back to reproduction because we need to get the apes to do it first. But so suppose you set up your base and you're not sovereign over, say, a mile radius perimeter. But suppose over the generations like people say die in accidents and you have a graveyard right so it's not american sovereignty

but there are american bodies in the ground so the idea that some other country can come by and say move that is crazy even if even if outer space treaty kind of says they should there's no way you're going to do it right right like like this is this is human ingrained territory turf stuff and it's dangerous. And what's causing the the space race? Is it just literally to have the territory? Because because you're like, well, there's very little water. You already said earlier that the scientific capability of doing this is probably not that large, you know, to have a human man settlement of some kind. So what's the what would be the purpose of doing this? I think it's mostly prestige again.

So China has been, you know, putting up space stations. They're up to their third now. And so they're sort of trying they're working on getting the same capabilities that the U.S. has had. And now they're talking about having this lunar economy. And the lunar economy is for things like extracting helium three to sell back on Earth, which is just absolutely ridiculous and that's a whole rant that zach could go on if you want him to go on it but but i think

the fact that like china is going up there and talking about an economy is making the u.s be like okay this is this is a new space race they're doing it maybe we should be doing it too and so i do think it's all tied up in prestige and i'm not convinced there's anything worth going there or you gotta keep up with the joneses oh they got all that really luxurious helium-3 from the moon it's like everyone's oohing and aahing uh you know oh their helium-3 is better than our helium-3 and then so and then before we know we're on the way to the moon mall no you know in i think it was 2019 uh india blew up one of its own satellites which is not that weird it's just to show capability and so nations do this from time to time it's frowned on modi literally said that

we have it in our book i don't i won't get it verbatim but he said something like india has declared itself a space power like that's it that's what's going on um and so yeah that's part of why we're so we argue there should be a really boring bureaucratic uh space regulation agency that regulates these claims, not because we think UN bureaucracies are awesome or dynamic or like are going to get us all to the moon sooner. It's just because we don't think there's actually anything worth doing on the moon for a money reason. There's nothing worth fighting over. There's no military advantage that was looked into in the 60s. It's bullshit. Well, well and so far peace has been maintained and we haven't

destroyed antarctica or the deep sea bed and again maybe that won't always be the case but if you could do the same thing for space that seems like it would be a win for us so i look i love what you guys are doing because you are rigorously like testing you know what what can we do now what could we do in the future is it possible is it worth doing and your answers to most of those questions are no you just you say well we're in a race right now but we probably shouldn't because it's just for you know uh comparing national dick size uh what elon is doing is like that that's the work of many, which may be off in the future, yada, yada, yada. I mean, what excites you about the prospect of human space settlement, if anything? This isn't the book we thought we were going to write.

Like one of our friends, we explained our book to him. He's like, you can't write the like the dream is dumb book. You're like, that's not a book people are going to buy. I'm the intended audience for that book. I'll buy that book. Well, I hope there's more of you. people are gonna buy i'm i'm the intended audience for that book i'll buy that book i love the idea of humans in space and humans being a multi-planetary species i'm a sci-fi nerd it sounded awesome to me it still sounds awesome to me but i think we need to be way more careful about how we do it and so and i'm you know totally down for exploring space i'd like

to you know i love seeing rovers on mars and on the moon uh you know i still totally down for exploring space i'd like to you know i love seeing rovers on mars and on the moon uh you know i still have a lot of like joy in my life but i do happen to be a bit of a pretty solid down here on earth too but what do you want to add zach what what do you like uh you know i was just gonna say when when you said national dick measuring contest there's an actual story from the first time the russians and americans docked with each other that each refused to be the female dock and so they john young john young who was an astronaut who an engineer who worked on it said the phrase he used was nobody wanted to be getting the business and so and so they they literally had to design an androgynous docking mechanism.

And what I love about that story, too, is that Young said it worked better, which I feel like there's a sort of beautiful lesson embedded in there. Things work better when no one's getting fucked, right? Sure. Yeah. That's right. No one needs to get fucked. That's right. We can just – I won't go further down the metaphor yeah that's that's good um uh yeah yeah but but so um what i wanted to say is uh separate

from settlement like there's so much awesome stuff we can do even in a framework where there's a big boring international bureaucracy and we're not doing elon musk plans so like on the moon we talked about the awesome places on the moon the other thing than those poles is lava tubes so you know you know how in hawaii there are lava tube caves or these giant caves you can go into they almost look like cathedrals and what's happened is like lava flowed through and went on it left this sort of crust behind so those exist on the moon they're these ancient lava tubes they may be hundreds of times larger than anything on earth there's like just objectively amazing like i there's probably no return investment other than sending rich people there but like i don't know like you want to talk about science that we do just because it's cool like send a robot in there send a guy in

there whatever like so there's like you know just saying there's a lot of problems with on mass human space settlement and people like like random space billionaires being able to do whatever they want. That's a problem, but there's so much cool stuff you can do within the existing framework. It's exciting and uplifting and like, you know, not sad and pathetic and miserable. Like we're,

but then you have to ask, would it be worth, you know, 4% of the national budget, right? Like you have this, there's this argument of, uh,

you know, space. We had a researcher on Adam Ruins Everything one year, very great researcher named Natalie Scher who pitched the idea. We did not do this topic, but she pitched the idea. Space sucks. We shouldn't go there. Not worth the time. Not worth the money.

If we were to devote all those resources to our own planet, right, we would, that's the way to save humanity. That's the way to, you know, improve human flourishing. That's the backup plan we actually need. Are you guys amenable to that argument? Or do you think it's, hey, humans are always going to want to go explore. So, so, you know, that's always going to fall on deaf ears. So what I would say, I think the first person I heard make this argument was Mary Roach, who wrote a great book called Packing for Mars, which kind of inspired this book. And she said very astutely, the way that like these big budgets work, it's not as if you pull money from NASA, it automatically goes to really good science.

Or to feeding hungry people. So like, or to feeding hungry people or whatever, like nice cause you want it to go, or even like lowering taxes. Like it's not like, like the budget is this giant thing that we handle politically so it's all well and good to say it'd be better to take nasa's 20 billion bucks and like eliminate poverty for a lot of people it's just it's just not how the budget works if it did i think there'd be a great argument for it and there's the additional argument that unfortunately we as a society do not want to eliminate poverty if we actually wanted to we would have done it right like you can say hey we have all this money when we say we have all this money we have all this food we could eliminate hunger and poverty right why don't we

do it is always the implication well the answer is not oh geez we just forgotten we accidentally spent all the money on other shit no the answer the answer is we don't want to eliminate poverty. You might individually want to, I might individually want to, but as a society, somebody doesn't want to, those people have the power. And until we change that, so it's sort of pointless to argue,

oh, what if we shifted the money over? Because yeah, we would spend it on something else fucking stupid. Like if you said, hey, billionaire, you can't buy a yacht, they're not going to say, okay, you're right. Let me just spend the money on some poor people who need it. No, they're going to buy a gigantic, I don't know, land cruiser or something. They're going to buy some other fucking billionaire shit because they're a selfish asshole and they have the money. So anyway, sorry, go on.

No, no, I'm basically just sitting here nodding my head. The example I really like is in the 90s, there was a project called the Superconducting Super Collider. It would have been three times more powerful than the LHC. I think it was going to be outside Dallas. It would have been like, you know, super symmetry with a Texas accent. Yeah. It would have been awesome. And it was canceled for, for reasons like what you're describing. And I don't think anyone believes that that, uh,

extra $20 billion immediately went to poverty or even like lowering taxes. And that was actually scientifically very valuable. It could have been, um, but I think so. Yeah. But instead the money just went to normal government shit. Right.

Right. Yeah. Some of which is good. And some of which is, is maybe bad. Uh, exactly. Yeah. Uh, so I mean, like what, how do you suggest people feel about this? Because, you know, one of the problems with this conversation is that, you know, it is so often used to weaponize people's optimism and idealism, right? That's a lot of what, I mean, look, people at some point are gonna come into my comments

and say, if you hate Elon so much, why do you keep talking about him? And guilty, fair accusation. But one of the things that bothers me about the guy, especially in his first sort of 10 years of his career, was he weaponized people's optimism, right? He said, we are gonna change the world. We can do it.

We're gonna use engineering and science and math to make the world a better place. And then over the course of the decade, we realized, oh, this guy's making himself rich. He's hurting a lot of people. And, you know, he's done a couple of nice things, but he's also full of shit. Right. But that story that he told in many ways was so powerful to people and it gave people something important. I remember that feeling of going, oh my God, like, wow, we could really do this stuff, right? If, you know, oh, this guy's spending money on electric cars and whatnot. And what a great positive thing for the world. And so I don't know, is it hard to dispel this stuff? He's tapping into a long tradition of techno utopism as it relates to

space. So for as long as people have been talking about space, so Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was part of this bio-cosmism movement. He came up with the rocket equation. This is long before we had rockets in space and space was going to perfect everything. We were going to bring back the dead. We were all going to have all of space to live. So we'd be all harmonious. It would be awesome. So like, this has been a problem for space from from the beginning of our dreams about space. People have always oversold space. And I think, you know, the anecdote is information. The anecdote is our book. But no, like, you know, you should read about it. You should think critically about these things. And you know, like, oh, few things in life are black and white. And most of the things that you're told about why

space is going to be awesome. Don't hold up when you look at the numbers. You know, I think my favorite example is for a while, the rotating space station people were saying we could solve overpopulation by sending people to space. But we put on enough people every year that you'd have to literally send 220,000 people to space every day just to tread water. So we're not going to take care of overpopulation. We don't have rockets that can even take more than like, what, three people to space every day just to tread water. So we're not going to take care of overpopulation. We don't have rockets that can even take more than like, what, three people to space right now. We don't know how to make these habitats. And so, you know, I think when you hear one of these claims,

you just need to sit back and think about like, okay, what are the assumptions in this claim? And do they make sense? But all that said, do you guys want to go to space? No. Hell no. Oh, wow. Okay. Listen, listen oh wow listen listen no here's why well first of all like so i was there's a proposal by donald rapp who's a kind of like crotchety guy but he was part of the moxie project for breaking co2 on mars uh which was done recently was very successful he said he thought if you sent people to mars on a mission around now you could at best say they'd have i think he said like a 92 of survival, which is not a good percent. That's not high enough for me.

I'm not sitting around rolling 2D10 trying to figure out what my, you know, hoping I don't get a nine on the first one. I'm glad you had those stats off hand. That's very impressive. I play. I play. Yeah, but no, I wouldn't go now it's much too dangerous um uh i mean can i can i yeah yeah earth is great um you know well uh but um you know the thing with like in terms of this technical optimism stuff like something like in like in terms of the human

future one thing i'm interested in is this idea of like, under what circumstances is this a good idea? And essentially, we argue like, there's a lot of technical stuff to work out. There's also a lot of human harmony that has to be worked out to make this not a dangerous activity. There's also just these huge developments we would need in things like robotics. So to my mind, settling Mars is something we do when we're like in Star Trek universe. It's not something we do now for any purported social benefit or economic benefit. Cause it's just not there.

It's something we do eventually when we are very rich and very advanced and very harmonious. And that's, that's, that's what is, is likely to be the case. And it's what should be the case. And the meantime,

we can have a lot of fun doing the thought experiments, plotting it out, talking about all the things that could happen if we were to try too soon it's been a blast talking to both of you uh the name of the book is a city on mars you can pick it up at factuallypod.com slash books which is our special bookshop um but uh where else can people find you on the internet uh if you search wiener smith you're only gonna find us zach there's nobody making hot dogs somewhere who's who's using the name there's a wiener hyphen smith who's an obstetrician good for her she's helping people but we're the only ones where it's all one word as far as i know and our kids love it that's right thank uh kelly and zach

thank you so much for coming on the show this has been an absolute blast thanks we had a blast too thanks this is fun well thank you so much to dr kelly and zach wiener smith for coming on the show show. This has been an absolute blast. Thanks. We had a blast too. Thanks. This was fun. Well, thank you so much to Dr. Kelly and Zach Wienersmith for coming on the show. Once again, if you want to pick up a copy of their book, head to factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. If you want to support this show, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. For 15 bucks a month, your name will go in the credits of every single one of my video monologues, and I will read your name in this podcast. This week, I want to thank Richard McVeigh, Emily Wilson, Lee Dotson, Blamo, and Michael Fresco.

Thank you so much for your support. Once again, to remind you, if you want to come see me do stand-up comedy in New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Philly, Nashville, Boston, D.C., and other cities. Head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. I want to thank my producers, Sam Radman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for helping make this show possible. Look at this beautiful New York City studio we're recording in right now. What a wonderful group of people.

Love working with them. And we'll see you next week on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast.