Transcript
00:00:00 We think that self assembly,
00:00:01 this modular reconfigurable algorithm
00:00:04 for constructing space structures in orbit
00:00:07 is gonna give us this promise of space architecture
00:00:10 that’s actually worth living in.
00:00:12 You see, you do believe we might one day
00:00:14 become intergalactic civilization.
00:00:17 I have a hope, yeah.
00:00:21 The following is a conversation with Ariel Ekblah,
00:00:24 Director of MIT Space Exploration Initiative.
00:00:27 She’s especially interested in autonomously
00:00:30 self assembling space architectures.
00:00:32 Basically, giant space structures
00:00:35 that can sustain human life
00:00:37 and that assemble themselves out in space
00:00:40 and then orbit Earth, Moon, Mars, and other planets.
00:00:46 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:00:48 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:00:50 in the description.
00:00:51 And now, dear friends, here’s Ariel Ekblah.
00:00:55 When did you first fall in love with space exploration
00:00:59 and space in general?
00:01:01 My parents are both ex Air Force.
00:01:04 So my dad’s an A10 fighter pilot
00:01:05 and my mom trained and had qualified to be a fighter pilot,
00:01:09 but it was early enough
00:01:11 that women were not allowed in combat at that time.
00:01:13 And so I grew up with these two pilots
00:01:16 and although they themselves did not become astronauts,
00:01:18 there’s a really rich legacy of Air Force pilots
00:01:20 becoming astronauts and this loomed large in my childhood.
00:01:24 What does it mean to be courageous, to be an explorer,
00:01:26 to be at the vanguard of something hard and challenging?
00:01:31 And to couple with that,
00:01:32 my dad was a huge fan of science fiction.
00:01:35 And so I, as a kid, read Heinlein and Isaac Asimov,
00:01:39 all these different classics of science fiction
00:01:41 that he had introduced me to.
00:01:42 And that just started a love affair with space exploration
00:01:45 and really thinking about
00:01:47 civilization scale space exploration.
00:01:50 So did they themselves dream about going to the stars
00:01:57 as opposed to flying here in Earth’s atmosphere,
00:02:01 just looking up?
00:02:02 Yeah, my dad always said he was absolutely convinced
00:02:04 because he was a child of the Apollo years
00:02:06 that he would get to go in his lifetime,
00:02:08 really thought it was gonna happen.
00:02:09 And so it was a challenge and sad for many people
00:02:12 when to their view on the outside,
00:02:15 space exploration slowed down for a period of time.
00:02:17 In reality, we were just catching up.
00:02:19 I think we leapt so far ahead with Apollo,
00:02:23 more than the rest of society was ready for.
00:02:25 And now we’re coming back to this moment
00:02:27 for space exploration where we actually have an economy
00:02:29 and we have the other accoutrement that society needs
00:02:32 to be able to make space exploration more real.
00:02:34 And my dad’s thrilled because finally,
00:02:37 not nearly, I hope not anywhere near the end of his life,
00:02:39 but as he’s an older man,
00:02:40 he now can see still within his lifetime,
00:02:44 people really getting a chance
00:02:45 to build a sustainable lunar settlement on the moon
00:02:47 or maybe even go to Mars.
00:02:49 So settlement, civilizations and other planets,
00:02:52 that’s the cool thing to dream about in the future.
00:02:55 It certainly is.
00:02:56 What was the favorite sci fi authors when you were growing up?
00:03:00 Pabé Eszeg Asimov Foundation Trilogy.
00:03:02 This is an amazing story of Harry Seldon,
00:03:05 this foundation that he forms at different ends of the,
00:03:09 well, according to the story,
00:03:10 different ends of the universe
00:03:12 and has this interesting focus on society.
00:03:16 So it’s not just space exploration
00:03:19 for the sake of space exploration or novel technology,
00:03:21 which is a lot of what I work on day to day at MIT,
00:03:23 but how do you structure a society
00:03:27 across those vast expanses of distance and time?
00:03:31 And so I’d say absolutely a favorite.
00:03:33 Now though, my favorite is Neal Stephenson and Seveneves.
00:03:38 It’s a book that inspired my own PhD research
00:03:40 and some ongoing work that we’re doing with NASA now
00:03:43 for the future of swarm robotics for spacecraft.
00:03:46 We were saying offline about Neal Stephenson
00:03:49 because I just recently had a conversation with him.
00:03:51 And I said that not until I was doing the research for him
00:03:54 that I realized he also had a role to play in Blue Origin.
00:03:59 So it’s like sci fi actually having a role to play
00:04:02 in the design, engineering,
00:04:06 just the implementation of ideas
00:04:07 that kind of percolate up from the sci fi world
00:04:10 and actually become reality.
00:04:11 It’s kind of a fascinating figure in that way.
00:04:14 So do you also think about him
00:04:16 beyond just his work in science fiction,
00:04:19 but his role in coming up with wild, crazy ideas
00:04:22 that actually become reality?
00:04:24 Yes, I think it’s a great example of this cycle
00:04:26 between authors and scientists and engineers
00:04:29 that we can be inspired in one generation
00:04:32 by what authors dream up.
00:04:33 We build it, we make it a reality.
00:04:35 And then that inspires another generation
00:04:37 of really wild and crazy thought for science fiction.
00:04:40 I think Neal Stephenson does a beautiful job
00:04:42 of being what we’d call a hard science fiction author.
00:04:44 So it’s really grounded in a lot of science,
00:04:46 which makes it very compelling for me
00:04:47 as a scientist and engineer to read
00:04:50 and then be challenged to make that vision a reality.
00:04:53 The other community that Neal’s involved with
00:04:56 and some of my other mentors are involved with
00:04:57 that we are thinking about more and more in the work
00:05:00 that we do at MIT is the Long Now Foundation.
00:05:03 And this focus on what does society need to take
00:05:08 in terms of steps at this juncture,
00:05:11 this particular inflection point in human history
00:05:14 to make sure that we’re setting ourselves up
00:05:16 for a long and prosperous horizon,
00:05:18 for humanity’s horizons.
00:05:20 There’s a lot of examples
00:05:21 of what the Long Now Foundation does and thinks about.
00:05:23 But when I think about this in my own work,
00:05:25 it’s what does it take to scale humanity’s presence
00:05:30 in orbit?
00:05:31 We are seeing some additional investment
00:05:34 in commercial space habitats.
00:05:36 So it’ll no longer be just NASA
00:05:37 running the International Space Station,
00:05:39 but to really democratize access to space,
00:05:42 like Bezos wants to have millions of people living
00:05:44 and working in space,
00:05:46 you need architecture that’s bigger and grander
00:05:49 and can actually scale.
00:05:50 That means you need to be thinking about
00:05:52 how can you construct things for long time horizons
00:05:55 that are really sustainable in orbit
00:05:56 or on a surface of a celestial body
00:05:59 that are bigger than the biggest rocket payload fairing
00:06:02 that we currently have available.
00:06:03 And that what led me to self assembly
00:06:05 and other models of in space construction.
00:06:08 Okay, every time you speak,
00:06:10 I get like a million tangent ideas.
00:06:12 You can cut me off.
00:06:13 No, no, no, no, no, no, please keep talking.
00:06:15 This is amazing.
00:06:16 I just, there’s like a million of ideas.
00:06:19 So one sort of on the dark side, let me ask,
00:06:21 do you think about the threats to human civilization
00:06:25 that kind of motivate the scaling of the expansion
00:06:28 of humans in space and on other planets?
00:06:31 What are you worried about?
00:06:32 Nuclear war, pandemics,
00:06:35 super intelligent, artificial intelligence systems,
00:06:40 more not existential crises,
00:06:44 but ones that have significant,
00:06:46 potentially significant detrimental effects on society,
00:06:48 like climate change, those kinds of things.
00:06:51 And then there’s of course the fun S story
00:06:52 coming out from the darkness and hitting all earth.
00:06:55 There’s been a few movies on that.
00:06:57 Anyway, is there something that you think about
00:07:00 that threatens us in this century?
00:07:03 I mean, as an ex military family,
00:07:04 we used to talk about all of this.
00:07:06 We would say that luck favors the prepared.
00:07:08 And so growing up, we had a plan, actually a family plan
00:07:13 for what we would do in a pandemic.
00:07:14 Didn’t think we were gonna have to put that
00:07:15 and plan into place and here we are.
00:07:17 We do, certainly among my own family and my friends
00:07:20 and then our work at MIT,
00:07:21 we do think about existential threats and risks to humanity
00:07:24 and what role does space exploration
00:07:27 and getting humans off world have to play
00:07:29 in a resilient future for humanity.
00:07:32 But what I actually find more compelling recently
00:07:35 is instead of thinking about a need to ever abandon earth
00:07:40 through a path of space exploration or space foraging
00:07:42 is to see how we can use space technology
00:07:44 to keep earth livable.
00:07:47 The obvious direct ways of doing this would be,
00:07:50 satellite technology that’s helping us learn more
00:07:52 about climate change or emitters or CO2.
00:07:56 But there’s also a future for geo engineering
00:07:58 that might be space based.
00:07:59 A lot of questions that would have to be answered
00:08:01 around that, but these are examples of pivoting our focus
00:08:04 away from maybe the Hollywood vision of,
00:08:06 oh, an asteroid’s gonna come,
00:08:08 we’re all gonna have to escape earth
00:08:09 to let’s use our considerable technology prowess
00:08:14 and use space technology to save earth
00:08:16 and be very much focused on how we can have
00:08:18 a worthwhile life for earth citizens.
00:08:20 Even if some of us wanna go out and further venturing.
00:08:24 Right, just the desire to explore the mysterious, yes.
00:08:28 But also it does seem that by placing us
00:08:31 in harsh conditions, the harsh conditions of space,
00:08:33 the harsh conditions of planets,
00:08:35 and the biology, the chemistry, the engineering,
00:08:38 the robotics, the materials, all of that,
00:08:41 that’s just a nice way to come up with cool new things.
00:08:43 Great forcing function, yeah.
00:08:45 Yeah, exactly, it’s a forcing function like survival.
00:08:48 You don’t get this right, you die.
00:08:50 So, and that you can bring back to earth
00:08:53 and it will improve, like figuring out food in space
00:08:57 will make you figure out how to eat,
00:09:01 live healthier lives here on earth.
00:09:04 So true, I mean, some of the technologies
00:09:05 that we’re directly looking at right now
00:09:08 for space habitats, it’s hard to keep humans alive
00:09:12 in this really fragile little pocket against the vacuum
00:09:15 and all of the dangers that the space environment presents.
00:09:19 Some of the technologies we are gonna have to figure out
00:09:20 is energy efficient cooling and air conditioning,
00:09:24 air filtration, scrubbing CO2 from the air,
00:09:28 being able to have habitats that are themselves resilient
00:09:34 to extremes of space weather and radiation.
00:09:36 And some of these are direct translational opportunities
00:09:39 for areas turned by natural disasters.
00:09:41 People in California a decade ago would never have had
00:09:43 to think about having an airtight house.
00:09:45 But now with wildfires, maybe you do want something close
00:09:48 to an airtight house, how do you manage that?
00:09:51 There’s a lot of technologies
00:09:52 from the space habitation world
00:09:55 that we are hoping we can actually bring back down
00:09:57 to benefit life on earth as well
00:09:58 in these extreme environment contexts.
00:10:01 Okay, so you mentioned to go back to swarm.
00:10:05 Yeah.
00:10:06 So that was interesting to you,
00:10:09 first of all, in your own work,
00:10:10 but also I believe you said something
00:10:12 that was inspiring from Niel Stevenson as well.
00:10:14 So when you say swarm, are you thinking about
00:10:19 architectures or are you thinking about
00:10:24 artificial intelligence like robotics
00:10:26 or are those kind of intermixed?
00:10:28 I think the future that we’re seeing
00:10:30 is that they’re going to be intermixed,
00:10:31 which is really exciting.
00:10:33 So the future of space habitats
00:10:35 are one of intelligent structures,
00:10:38 maybe not all the way to Hal
00:10:39 and the 2001 Space Odyssey reference that scares people
00:10:43 about the habitat having a mind of its own.
00:10:45 But certainly we’re building systems now
00:10:47 where the habitat has sensing technology
00:10:51 that allows it to communicate its basic functions,
00:10:56 maintaining life support for the astronauts,
00:10:58 but could also communicate in symbiosis
00:11:01 with these swarm robots
00:11:03 that would be on the outside of the spacecraft,
00:11:05 whether it’s in a microgravity orbiting environment
00:11:08 or on the surface.
00:11:09 And these little robots,
00:11:10 they crawl just a la Niel Stevenson in seven eves,
00:11:13 they crawl along the outside of the spacecraft
00:11:15 looking for micrometeorite punctures
00:11:18 or gas leaks or other faults and defects.
00:11:21 And right now we’re just working on the diagnosis.
00:11:24 So can the swarm with its collective intelligence
00:11:27 act in symbiosis with the spacecraft and detect things?
00:11:30 But in the future we’d also love
00:11:31 for these little micro robots to repair in situ
00:11:34 and really be like ants living in a tree
00:11:37 altogether connected to the spacecraft.
00:11:39 Do you envision the system to be fully distributed
00:11:44 and just like an ant colony,
00:11:45 if one of them is damaged or whatever,
00:11:51 loses control and all those kinds of things
00:11:53 that doesn’t affect the performance of the complete system
00:11:57 or doesn’t need to be centralized?
00:11:58 This is more like almost like a technical question.
00:12:01 Do you think we can?
00:12:01 Good architecture question.
00:12:03 Right, from the ground up,
00:12:05 it’s so scary to go fully distributed.
00:12:08 Yes.
00:12:10 But it’s also exceptionally powerful, right?
00:12:12 Robust, resilient to the harsh conditions of space.
00:12:15 What do you, if you look into the next 10, 20, 100 years,
00:12:22 starting from scratch,
00:12:23 do you think we should be doing
00:12:24 architecture wise distributed systems?
00:12:28 For space, yes, because it gives you this redundancy
00:12:31 and safety profile that’s really critical.
00:12:33 So whether it’s small swarm robots
00:12:35 where it doesn’t matter if you lose a few of them,
00:12:37 to habitats that instead of having a central monolithic habitat,
00:12:43 you might actually be able to have
00:12:45 a decentralized node of a space station
00:12:49 so that you can kind of right out of Star Wars,
00:12:50 you can shut a blast door if there’s a fire
00:12:53 or if there’s a conflict in a certain area
00:12:55 and you can move the humans and the crew
00:12:57 into another decentralized node of the spacecraft.
00:12:59 There’s another idea out of Neal Stephenson’s Seven Eves
00:13:01 actually where these arclets,
00:13:03 which were decentralized spacecraft that could form
00:13:06 and dock little temporary space stations with each other
00:13:09 and then separate and go off on their way
00:13:12 and have a decentralized approach to living in space.
00:13:15 So the self assembly component of that too,
00:13:19 so this is your PhD work and beyond,
00:13:21 you explored autonomously self assembling space architecture
00:13:25 for future space, tourists, habitats,
00:13:28 and space stations in orbit around Earth, Moon, and Mars.
00:13:31 There’s few things I personally find sexier
00:13:34 than autonomously self assembling space architecture.
00:13:40 In general, it doesn’t even need to be space.
00:13:42 The idea of self assembling architectures
00:13:46 is really interesting, like building a bridge
00:13:48 or something like that through self assembling materials.
00:13:51 It feels like an incredibly efficient way to do it
00:13:57 because optimization is built in.
00:13:59 So you can build the most optimal structures
00:14:03 given dynamic, uncertain, changing conditions.
00:14:09 So maybe can you talk about your PhD work,
00:14:11 about this work, about Tesserae, what is it in general?
00:14:17 Any cool stuff, because this is super cool.
00:14:19 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
00:14:21 So Tesserae is my PhD research.
00:14:23 It’s this idea that we could take tiles
00:14:26 that construct a large structure like a bucky ball.
00:14:30 Yeah, this is exactly what we’re looking at here,
00:14:31 which is the tiles that are packed flat in a rocket.
00:14:34 They’re released to float in microgravity.
00:14:38 Magnets, pretty powerful, electropermanent magnets
00:14:41 on their edges draw them together for autonomous docking.
00:14:44 So there’s no human in the loop here,
00:14:46 and there’s no central agent coordinating
00:14:48 saying tile one, go to tile two.
00:14:50 It’s completely decentralized system.
00:14:52 They find each other on their own.
00:14:54 What we don’t show in this video
00:14:56 is what happens if there’s an error, right?
00:14:58 So what happens if they bond incorrectly?
00:15:00 The tiles have sensing, so proximity sensing,
00:15:02 magnetometer, other sensors that allow them
00:15:04 to detect a good bond versus a bad bond
00:15:07 and pulse off and self correct,
00:15:10 which anybody who works in the field of self assembly
00:15:12 will tell you that error detection and correction,
00:15:15 just like error detection in a DNA sequence
00:15:19 or protein folding is really important part of the system
00:15:21 for that robustness.
00:15:23 And so we’ve done a lot of work to engineer that ability
00:15:26 for the tiles to be self determining.
00:15:29 They know whether they’re forming the structure
00:15:30 that they’re supposed to form or not.
00:15:32 They know if they’re in a toxic relationship
00:15:34 and they need to get out.
00:15:35 Right, right, if they need to separate, exactly, yeah.
00:15:38 All right, this is like so amazing.
00:15:40 And for people who are just listening to this,
00:15:41 yeah, there’s, I mean, how large are these tiles?
00:15:45 So the size that we use in the lab,
00:15:47 they can really be any size
00:15:49 because we can scale them down to do testing
00:15:51 in microgravity.
00:15:51 So we sent tiles that were about three inches wide
00:15:55 to the International Space Station a couple years ago
00:15:57 to test the code, test the state machine,
00:16:00 test the algorithm of self assembly.
00:16:02 But now we’re actually building
00:16:03 our first ever human scale tiles.
00:16:05 They’re me human size.
00:16:06 So a little smaller than maybe your average human,
00:16:09 but they’re 2.5 feet on edge length.
00:16:13 The larger scale that we would love to build in the future
00:16:16 would actually be tiles that are big enough
00:16:18 to form a bucky ball, big open spherical volume,
00:16:21 spherical approximation volume,
00:16:23 that’d be about 10 meters in diameter.
00:16:25 So 30 feet, which is much bigger and grander
00:16:29 in terms of open space than any current module on the ISS.
00:16:32 And one of the goals of this project was to say,
00:16:35 what’s the purpose of next generation space architecture?
00:16:38 Should it be something that really inspires
00:16:41 and delights people when you float into that space?
00:16:44 Can you get goosebumps in the way that you do
00:16:46 when you walk into a really stunning piece
00:16:48 of architecture on earth?
00:16:50 And so we think that self assembly,
00:16:52 this modular reconfigurable algorithm
00:16:55 for constructing space structures in orbit
00:16:58 is gonna give us this promise of space architecture
00:17:01 that’s actually worth living in.
00:17:03 Living in, oh, I thought you also meant
00:17:05 from like outside artistic perspective,
00:17:07 when you see the whole thing is just.
00:17:09 With the aesthetics of it, absolutely.
00:17:11 You know, when you like go like into Vegas,
00:17:14 whenever you go into a city
00:17:16 and it like over the hill appears in front of you.
00:17:19 And I mean, there’s something majestic about seeing like,
00:17:23 wow, humans created that.
00:17:25 It gives you like hope about like,
00:17:26 if these a bunch of ants were able to figure out
00:17:28 how to build skyscrapers that light up.
00:17:31 And in general, the design of these tiles
00:17:33 in the way you envision it are pretty scalable.
00:17:36 Yes, and they’re inspired by exactly
00:17:38 what you mentioned a moment ago,
00:17:39 which is we have these patterns of self assembly on earth.
00:17:42 And there’s a lot of fantastic MIT research
00:17:45 that we’re building this concept on.
00:17:46 So like Daniela Ruse at CSAIL and Pebbles,
00:17:49 taking the power of magnets to create units
00:17:53 that are themselves interchangeable,
00:17:56 this notion of programmable matter.
00:17:58 And so we’re interested in going really big with it
00:18:01 to build big scale space structures with programmable tiles.
00:18:05 But there’s also a really fascinating,
00:18:07 you know, end of that on the other side of the spectrum,
00:18:08 which is how small can you go with matter
00:18:11 that’s programmable and stacks and builds itself
00:18:13 and creates a bridge or something in the future.
00:18:16 What do you envision the thing would look like?
00:18:19 Like when you imagine a thing far into the future
00:18:22 where there’s, so we’re not even thinking about
00:18:25 like small space, well, let’s not call them small,
00:18:28 but our currently sized space stations,
00:18:30 but like something gigantic, what do you envision?
00:18:34 Is this something with symmetry
00:18:36 or is this something we can’t even come up with yet?
00:18:38 Is there beautiful structures that you imagine in your mind?
00:18:42 I’ve got three candidates that I would love to build.
00:18:45 If we’re talking about monumental space architecture,
00:18:48 one is what does a space cathedral look like?
00:18:51 It can be a secular cathedral,
00:18:52 doesn’t necessarily have to be about religion,
00:18:54 but that notion of long sight lines,
00:18:57 inspiring, stunning architecture when you go in.
00:19:01 And you can imagine floating instead of, you know,
00:19:03 being on the ground and only looking up in space,
00:19:07 you could be in a central node
00:19:08 and each direction you look at,
00:19:10 all the cardinal directions are spires going off
00:19:14 in a really large and long way.
00:19:15 So that’s concept number one.
00:19:17 Number two would be something more organic
00:19:19 that’s not just geometric.
00:19:21 So here, one of the ideas that we’re working on at MIT
00:19:24 in my lab is to say, could you,
00:19:27 instead of the tesserae model, right,
00:19:29 which is self assembling a shell,
00:19:31 could you define a module that’s a node,
00:19:34 a small node that someone can live in
00:19:36 and you self assemble a lot of those together,
00:19:39 they’re called plesiohedrons like space filling solids
00:19:43 and you dock a bunch of them together
00:19:45 and you can create a really organic structure out of that.
00:19:49 So this is the same way that muscles accrete to appear,
00:19:53 you can have these nodes that dock together
00:19:55 and one shape that I would love to form out of this
00:19:57 is something like a nautilus, a seashell,
00:20:00 that beautiful, you know, fibonacci spiral sequence
00:20:03 that you get in that shape,
00:20:04 which I think would be a stunning
00:20:06 and fabulous aggregated space station.
00:20:10 You said so many cool words, plesiohedron.
00:20:14 Yeah, plesiohedron.
00:20:15 So that’s a space filling.
00:20:18 Solid, the simplest thing to think of is like a cube.
00:20:20 Oh, cube. A cube, right?
00:20:21 So you can stack cubes together
00:20:23 and if you had an infinite number of cubes,
00:20:25 you’d fill all that space,
00:20:27 there’s no gaps in between the cubes,
00:20:28 they stack and fill space.
00:20:31 Another plesiohedron is a truncated octahedron
00:20:34 and that’s actually one of the candidate structures
00:20:36 that we think would be great for space stations.
00:20:38 What’s the truncated part?
00:20:40 Ah, so you cut off,
00:20:41 an octahedron actually has little pointy areas,
00:20:44 you truncate certain sections of it
00:20:46 and you get surfaces that are on the structure
00:20:50 that are cubes and I think hexagons,
00:20:52 I have to remind myself exactly what the faces are.
00:20:55 But overall, a truncated octahedron can be bonded
00:20:59 to other truncated octahedrons
00:21:00 and just like a cube, it fills all the gaps
00:21:03 as you build it out.
00:21:04 So you can imagine two truncated octahedrons,
00:21:07 they come together at an airlock,
00:21:09 which is what we space people call doors in space
00:21:12 and you dock them on all sides
00:21:14 and you’ve basically created this decentralized network
00:21:18 of space nodes that make a big space station
00:21:21 and once you have enough of them
00:21:23 and you’re growing with enough big units,
00:21:25 you can do it in any macro shape you want.
00:21:28 That’s where the Nautilus comes in,
00:21:29 is could we design an organically inspired shape
00:21:32 for a space station?
00:21:34 Can I just say how awesome it is to hear you say,
00:21:36 we space people.
00:21:38 I know you meant people that are doing research
00:21:41 on space exploration, space technology,
00:21:43 but it also made me think of a future.
00:21:45 There’s earth people and there’s those space people.
00:21:50 And then there’s the Mars people.
00:21:51 I’d love to unite those too.
00:21:52 Yeah, no, no, for sure, for sure.
00:21:54 But like, it’s like New Yorkers and like Texans
00:21:58 or something like that.
00:22:00 Yeah, of course you live for a time in New York
00:22:03 and then you go up to Boston
00:22:05 but for a time you’re the space people.
00:22:07 Oh, I know those space people.
00:22:09 They’re kind of wild up there.
00:22:11 We’ll see how that dynamic evolves.
00:22:12 Yeah, exactly.
00:22:13 There’s that culture, culture forms.
00:22:14 And I would love to see what kind of culture,
00:22:17 once you have sort of more and more civilians.
00:22:21 I mean, there’s a human,
00:22:22 I mean, I love psychology and sociology
00:22:24 and I’ll maybe ask you about that too,
00:22:27 which is like the dynamic between humans.
00:22:29 You have to kind of start considering that
00:22:31 and you start spending more and more time up in space
00:22:34 and start sending civilians, start sending bigger
00:22:37 and bigger groups of people.
00:22:39 And then of course the beautiful and the ugly emerges
00:22:42 from the human nature that we haven’t been able
00:22:47 to escape up to this point.
00:22:49 But when you say the plesiohedrons, these kinds of shapes,
00:22:53 are they multifunctional?
00:22:54 Like is the idea you’d be able to,
00:22:58 humans can occupy them safely in some of them
00:23:02 and some others have some other purposes?
00:23:04 Exactly.
00:23:05 One could be sleeping quarters.
00:23:07 One could be a greenhouse or an agricultural unit.
00:23:10 One could be a storage depot.
00:23:13 Essentially all of the different rooms
00:23:15 or functions that you might need in a space station
00:23:17 could be subdivided into these nodes
00:23:19 and then stacked together.
00:23:22 And one of the promises of both Tesseray,
00:23:24 my original PhD research, which is these shells,
00:23:26 and then this follow on node concept,
00:23:29 is that right now we build space stations
00:23:32 and once they’re built, they’re done.
00:23:33 You can’t really change them profoundly.
00:23:36 But the benefit of a modular self assembling system
00:23:38 is you can disassemble it.
00:23:40 You can completely reconfigure it.
00:23:42 So if your mission changes or the number of people
00:23:45 in space that you wanna host,
00:23:46 if you have a space conference happening
00:23:47 like South by Southwest.
00:23:48 I was thinking space party,
00:23:50 but space conference is good too.
00:23:52 Then maybe all of a sudden you want to change out
00:23:55 what were window tiles yesterday, cupola tiles,
00:23:58 and make them into a birthing port
00:24:00 so that you can welcome five new spaceships
00:24:02 to come and join you in space.
00:24:04 That’s what this promise of reconfigurable space architecture
00:24:07 might allow us to explore.
00:24:09 I’ve been hanging out with Grimes recently
00:24:10 and I just feel like she belongs up in space.
00:24:13 This is like designed for artists essentially.
00:24:15 Like imagine, I mean, this is what South by
00:24:18 keeps introducing me to is there’s like
00:24:20 the weird and the beautiful people and like the artists.
00:24:23 And it feels like there’s a lot of opportunities
00:24:26 for art and design.
00:24:28 100%.
00:24:29 It’s like space is a combination of arts, design,
00:24:32 and great engineering.
00:24:36 It’s safety critical with like the highest of stakes.
00:24:39 So don’t, you can’t mess it up.
00:24:41 And is this, is there, first of all,
00:24:43 you’re talking about tiling.
00:24:44 So Neil Stephenson is obsessed about tile.
00:24:46 I don’t know if it’s related to any of this,
00:24:48 but he seems to be obsessed with like,
00:24:50 how do you tile a space?
00:24:51 That’s like a mathematical, geometric notion.
00:24:54 Like the tessellation.
00:24:55 And it’s, I mean, it’s a beautiful idea for architecture
00:24:59 that you can self assemble these different shapes
00:25:03 and you can have probably some centralized guidance
00:25:07 of the kind of thing you want to build.
00:25:09 But they also kind of figure stuff out themselves
00:25:12 in terms of the low level details,
00:25:13 in terms of the figuring out when the,
00:25:15 when everything fits just right for the OCD people,
00:25:19 like what’s that subreddit?
00:25:23 Pleasantly, it’s like really fun.
00:25:25 Everything, they have like videos of everything
00:25:27 is just pleasant when everything just fits perfectly.
00:25:29 Very pleasing.
00:25:30 All the tolerances come together well, yeah.
00:25:32 So they figure that out on themselves
00:25:34 and the local robotics problem.
00:25:36 But by the way, what’s the Pebbles Project?
00:25:39 The Pebbles Project are little cubes
00:25:41 that have EPMs in them, electropermanent magnets,
00:25:44 and they can self disassemble.
00:25:46 So they’ll turn off.
00:25:47 And so you’ll have this little structure
00:25:48 that all of a sudden can flip the little pebbles over
00:25:51 and essentially just disaggregate.
00:25:54 They have to make some pleasing sounds.
00:25:56 Yes, they do.
00:25:57 And that’s gonna, so I’m supposed to talk to Danielle,
00:26:01 so I’ll probably spend an hour
00:26:02 just discussing the sounds on the pebbles.
00:26:04 Okay, what were we talking about?
00:26:07 So that’s, because you mentioned two, I think.
00:26:10 Right, my third one.
00:26:12 Yeah, is there a third one?
00:26:13 My third one is The Ringworld,
00:26:14 just because every science fiction book ever
00:26:17 that’s worth anything has A Ringworld in it.
00:26:19 Is it like a donut?
00:26:21 A donut, yeah, it’s a really big torus
00:26:24 that could encircle a planet
00:26:27 or encircle another celestial body,
00:26:29 maybe an asteroid or a small moon.
00:26:32 And the promise here is just the beauty
00:26:36 of being able to have that geometry in orbit
00:26:39 and all that surface area for solar panels and docking
00:26:43 and essentially just all of what that enables
00:26:46 to have a ring world at that scale in orbit.
00:26:48 By the way, for the viewers, we’re looking at Figure 11.
00:26:51 What paper is this from?
00:26:52 This is a hexagonal tiling
00:26:54 of a torus generated in Mathematica
00:26:57 referencing code and approach from two citations.
00:27:01 So we’re looking at a tiled donut, and I’m now hungry.
00:27:04 So this is the, is this from your thesis or no?
00:27:06 This is probably, I mean, this is in my thesis.
00:27:08 This looks like it was one of my earlier papers.
00:27:10 This was an approach to say, great,
00:27:13 we’ve come up with this tessellation approach
00:27:15 for a buckyball, and we picked the buckyball
00:27:18 because it is the most efficient surface area
00:27:21 to volume shape and what’s expensive in space,
00:27:23 the surface area shipping up all that material.
00:27:26 So we wanted something that would maximize the volume.
00:27:28 But if we think about ring worlds and other shapes,
00:27:30 we wanted to look at how do you tile a torus?
00:27:34 And this is one example with hexagons
00:27:36 to be able to say, could we take this same tesserae approach
00:27:39 of self assembling tiles and create other geometries?
00:27:42 This is so freaking cool.
00:27:43 That’s awesome.
00:27:44 So you mentioned microgravity, and I saw,
00:27:48 I believe that there’s a picture
00:27:50 of you floating in microgravity.
00:27:52 When did you get to experience that?
00:27:53 What was that like?
00:27:54 Ah, so I’ve flown nine times
00:27:56 on the affectionately known as the Vomit Comet.
00:27:59 It’s the parabolic flight, and essentially,
00:28:02 it does what you’d want a plane never to do.
00:28:04 It pitches really steeply upwards at 45 degrees.
00:28:07 Oh, that’s a picture of you.
00:28:07 Yeah, yeah, that’s tesserae.
00:28:09 That’s super early in my PhD,
00:28:11 some of just the passive tiles
00:28:12 before we even put electronics in.
00:28:14 We were just testing the magnet polarity
00:28:17 and the, essentially, is it an energy favorable structure
00:28:20 to self assemble on its own?
00:28:22 So we tweaked a lot of things between.
00:28:23 Are we looking at a couple of them?
00:28:25 Yeah, you’re looking at a bunch of them there.
00:28:27 Oh, oh, I see.
00:28:28 Almost 32 of them, yeah.
00:28:29 Cool.
00:28:30 They’re clumping, they’re clumping, yeah.
00:28:31 Can you comment on what’s the difference
00:28:33 between microgravity and zero gravity?
00:28:35 Yes, so there is, is that an important difference?
00:28:37 It’s an important difference.
00:28:38 There is no zero gravity.
00:28:41 There’s no nothing, there’s, in the universe,
00:28:43 there is no such thing as zero gravity.
00:28:46 So Newton’s law of gravity tells us
00:28:48 that there’s always gravity attraction
00:28:50 between any two objects.
00:28:51 So zero G is a shorthand that some of us fall into using,
00:28:54 where it’s a little easier to communicate to the public.
00:28:56 The accurate term is microgravity,
00:28:59 where you are essentially floating, you’re weightless,
00:29:02 but generally in free fall.
00:29:04 So on the parabolic flights, the vomit comet,
00:29:06 you’re in free fall at the end of the parabola.
00:29:09 And in orbit around the Earth when you’re floating,
00:29:12 you’re also in free fall.
00:29:14 So that’s microgravity.
00:29:15 So affectionately called vomit comet,
00:29:17 I’m sure there’s a reason why it’s called affectionately.
00:29:19 So what’s it like?
00:29:21 What’s your first time?
00:29:23 So both philosophically, spiritually, and biologically,
00:29:27 what’s it like?
00:29:28 It’s profound.
00:29:30 It is unlike anything else you will experience on Earth
00:29:35 because it is this true feeling of weightlessness
00:29:38 with no drag.
00:29:40 So the closest experience you can think of
00:29:41 would be floating in a pool,
00:29:43 but you move slowly when you float in a pool
00:29:44 and your motion is restricted.
00:29:46 When you’re floating, it’s just you and your body flying,
00:29:49 like in a dream.
00:29:52 It takes the littlest amount of energy,
00:29:54 like a finger tap against the wall of the plane
00:29:56 to shoot all the way across the fuselage.
00:29:58 And you can move at full speed.
00:30:01 You can move your arms.
00:30:02 Exactly.
00:30:03 So your muscles work.
00:30:04 There’s no resistance.
00:30:05 There’s no resistance.
00:30:06 They actually tell you to make a memory
00:30:09 when you’re on the plane
00:30:11 because it’s such a fleeting experience for your body
00:30:13 that even a few days later,
00:30:14 you’ve already forgotten exactly what it felt like.
00:30:17 It’s so foreign to the human experience.
00:30:20 They kind of suggest that you explicitly try
00:30:22 to really form this into a memory
00:30:24 and then you can do the replay.
00:30:25 Is that for training?
00:30:26 Cognitively freeze it.
00:30:27 Yeah.
00:30:28 Cognitively.
00:30:29 Yeah.
00:30:30 Save.
00:30:31 Right.
00:30:31 When we have Neuralink, we can replay that memory.
00:30:34 So in terms of how much stress it has on your body,
00:30:38 is it biologically stressful?
00:30:41 You do feel a 2G pullout, right?
00:30:43 So the cost of getting those micro G parabolas
00:30:46 is you then have a 2G pullout and that’s hard.
00:30:48 You have to train for it.
00:30:50 If you move your neck too quickly in that 2G pullout,
00:30:52 you can strain muscles.
00:30:54 But I wouldn’t say that it’s actually
00:30:56 a profound tough thing on the body.
00:31:00 It’s really just an incredibly novel experience.
00:31:02 And when you’re in orbit
00:31:04 and you’re not having to go through the ups and downs
00:31:06 of the parabolic plane,
00:31:07 there’s a real grace and elegance.
00:31:09 And you see the astronauts learn to operate
00:31:12 in this completely new environment.
00:31:14 What are some interesting differences
00:31:16 between the parabolic plane
00:31:17 and when you’re actually going up into orbit?
00:31:20 Is it that with orbit you can look out
00:31:22 and see that blue little planet of ours?
00:31:26 You can see the blue marble, the stunning overview effect,
00:31:28 which is something I hope to see one day.
00:31:31 What’s also really different is if you’re in orbit
00:31:34 for any significant period of time,
00:31:36 there’s gonna be a lot more physiological changes
00:31:38 to your body than if you just did an afternoon flight
00:31:41 on the Vomit Comet.
00:31:42 Everything from your bones, your muscles,
00:31:44 your eyeballs change shape.
00:31:47 There’s a lot of different things that happen
00:31:49 for long duration space flight.
00:31:51 And we still have to, as scientists,
00:31:52 we still have to solve a lot of these interesting challenges
00:31:54 to be able to keep humans thriving in microgravity
00:31:58 or deep duration space missions.
00:32:01 Deep duration space missions.
00:32:03 Okay, let’s talk about this.
00:32:05 I was just gonna ask a bunch of dumb questions.
00:32:08 So approximately how long does it take to travel to Mars?
00:32:11 Asking for a friend.
00:32:12 Asking for a friend, as we all do.
00:32:14 About three years for a round trip.
00:32:17 And that’s not that it actually takes that long.
00:32:19 Why the round trip, is that?
00:32:20 Well, you’re just asking about the one way trip.
00:32:23 Got it, got it, got it.
00:32:25 It’s okay, cool.
00:32:25 So for just like literally flying to Mars in a round,
00:32:29 it takes three years.
00:32:30 There’s some interstitial time there
00:32:32 because you really can only go between Earth and Mars
00:32:35 at certain points in their orbits
00:32:37 where it’s favorable to make that journey.
00:32:39 And so part of that three years
00:32:40 is you take the journey to Mars,
00:32:42 a few months, six to nine months.
00:32:45 You’re there for a period of time
00:32:46 until the orbits find a favorable alignment again.
00:32:49 And then you come back another six to nine months.
00:32:51 So one way travel, six to nine months.
00:32:54 They hang out there on vacation and come back.
00:32:56 Forced vacation.
00:32:57 Forced vacation.
00:32:58 You come back.
00:32:58 Well, me who loves working all the time,
00:33:00 all vacation is forced vacation.
00:33:03 All right.
00:33:04 So okay, so that gives us a sense of duration.
00:33:07 And we can maybe also talk about longer
00:33:10 and longer and longer duration as well.
00:33:13 What are the hardest aspects of living in space
00:33:18 for many days, for let’s say 100 days, 200 days?
00:33:23 Maybe there’s a threshold when it gets really tough.
00:33:25 What are some stupid little things or big things
00:33:29 that are very difficult for human beings to go through?
00:33:32 It’s one big thing and one little thing.
00:33:33 And there are these two classic problems
00:33:35 that we’re trying to solve in the space industry.
00:33:37 One is radiation.
00:33:38 It’s not as much of a problem for us right now
00:33:40 on the International Space Station
00:33:42 because we’re still protected
00:33:44 by part of Earth’s magnetosphere.
00:33:46 But as soon as you get farther out into space
00:33:47 and you don’t have that protection
00:33:49 once you leave the Van Allen belt area of the Earth
00:33:52 and the cocoon around the Earth,
00:33:55 we have really serious concerns about radiation
00:33:57 and the effect on human health longterm.
00:33:59 That’s the big one.
00:34:01 The small one, and I say it’s small
00:34:02 because it seems mundane,
00:34:04 but it actually is really big in its own way,
00:34:06 is mental health and how to keep people happy and balanced.
00:34:09 And you were alluding to some of the psychological
00:34:10 challenges of having humans together on missions
00:34:13 and especially as we try to scale the number of humans
00:34:16 in orbit or in space.
00:34:18 So that’s another big challenge is how to keep people happy
00:34:20 and balanced and cooperating.
00:34:24 That’s not an issue on Earth at all.
00:34:25 At all.
00:34:27 Okay, so we’ll talk about each of those
00:34:29 in a bit more detail,
00:34:31 but let me continue on the chain of dumb questions.
00:34:34 What about food?
00:34:35 What’s a good source for food in space?
00:34:38 And what are some sort of standard go to meals, menus?
00:34:42 Right now your go to menu is gonna be mostly freeze dried.
00:34:46 Every so often NASA will arrange for a fun stunt
00:34:50 or fresh food to get up to station.
00:34:51 So they did bake DoubleTree cookies with Hilton
00:34:54 a couple of years ago, as I recall,
00:34:55 I think sometime before the pandemic.
00:34:57 But there’s work actually in our lab at MIT,
00:35:00 Maggie Koblans, one of my staff researchers
00:35:02 is looking at the future of fermentation.
00:35:04 Everybody loves beer, right?
00:35:06 Beer and wine and kimchi and miso,
00:35:08 these foods that have just been really important
00:35:11 to human cultures for eons because we love the umami
00:35:15 and the better flavor in them.
00:35:16 But it turns out they also have a good shelf life
00:35:18 if done properly.
00:35:19 And they also have a additional health benefit
00:35:22 for the microbiome, for probiotics and prebiotics.
00:35:25 So we’re trying to work with NASA and convince them
00:35:28 to be more open minded to fermented food
00:35:30 for long duration deep space missions.
00:35:33 That we think is one of the future elements
00:35:35 in addition to in situ growing your own food.
00:35:38 Okay, this is essential for the space party
00:35:41 is the space beer.
00:35:43 Yes, it’s the fermented product, yes.
00:35:45 Okay, cool.
00:35:46 In terms of water, what’s a good source of drinkable water?
00:35:49 Like where do you get water?
00:35:50 Do you have to always bring it on board with you?
00:35:52 And is there a compressed efficient way of storing it?
00:35:56 So to steal a line from Charlie Bolden,
00:35:58 who’s the former administrator of NASA,
00:36:01 this morning’s fresh water is yesterday’s coffee.
00:36:04 So if you think about what that means,
00:36:06 you drank the coffee yesterday.
00:36:08 Right, as it travels, it goes fully through the body.
00:36:10 Fully through the body as the recycling system.
00:36:13 And then you drink what you peed out
00:36:15 as clarified, refined fresh water the next day.
00:36:20 That is one source of water.
00:36:22 Another source of water in the near neighborhood
00:36:24 of our solar system would be on the moon.
00:36:26 So water ice deposits, there’s also water on Mars.
00:36:29 This is one of the big things that’s bringing people
00:36:31 to want to develop infrastructure on the moon
00:36:34 is once you’ve gotten out of the gravity well of Earth,
00:36:36 if you can find water on the moon and refine it,
00:36:39 you can either make it into propellant
00:36:40 or drinkable water for humans.
00:36:43 And so that’s really valuable as a potential gateway
00:36:46 out into the rest of the solar system
00:36:47 to be able to get propellant
00:36:48 without always having to ship it up from Earth.
00:36:52 So how much water is there on Mars?
00:36:55 That’s a great question.
00:36:56 I do not know.
00:36:56 We don’t know this yet, right?
00:36:57 I know there’s water at the caps.
00:36:58 I suspect NASA from all of the satellite studies
00:37:03 that they’ve done at Mars have a decent idea
00:37:05 of what the water deposits look like,
00:37:07 but I don’t know to what degree
00:37:08 they have characterized those.
00:37:10 I really hope there’s life or traces
00:37:13 of previous life on Mars.
00:37:15 This is a special spot in my heart
00:37:17 because I got to work on SHERLOC,
00:37:20 which is the astrobiology experiment
00:37:22 that’s on Mars right now,
00:37:23 searching for what they would say
00:37:25 in a very cautious way is signs of past habitability.
00:37:30 They wanna be careful not to get people overly excited
00:37:32 and say we’re searching for signs of life.
00:37:34 They’re searching to see if there would have been organics
00:37:37 on the surface of Mars or water in certain areas
00:37:39 that would have allowed for life to flourish.
00:37:42 And I really love this prospect.
00:37:44 I do think within our lifetimes
00:37:46 we’ll get a better answer about finding life
00:37:49 in our solar system if it’s there.
00:37:51 If not on Mars, maybe Europa, one of the icy worlds.
00:37:54 So you like astrobiology.
00:37:58 I do.
00:37:59 This is part of the, it’s not just about human biology.
00:38:02 It’s also other extraterrestrial alien biology.
00:38:05 Search for life in the universe.
00:38:07 Okay.
00:38:08 Does that scare you or excite you?
00:38:09 It excites me, profoundly excites me.
00:38:11 That there’s other alien civilizations
00:38:13 potentially very different than our own?
00:38:16 I think there’s gotta be some humility there.
00:38:18 And certainly from science fiction
00:38:19 we have plenty of reasons to fear that outcome as well.
00:38:22 But I do think as a scientist
00:38:24 it would be profoundly exciting if we were to find life
00:38:26 especially in the near neighborhood of our solar system.
00:38:29 Right now we would expect it to be most likely microbial life
00:38:32 but we have a real serious challenge in astrobiology
00:38:34 which is it may not even be carbon based life.
00:38:37 And all of our detectors,
00:38:39 we only know to look for DNA or RNA.
00:38:42 How would you even build a detector
00:38:43 to look for silicon based life
00:38:47 or different molecules than what we know
00:38:49 to be the fundamental molecules for life?
00:38:51 And then you mentioned offline Sarah Walker.
00:38:53 I mean she, her, the question that she’s obsessed with
00:38:56 is even just defining life.
00:38:58 What is life?
00:38:59 To look outside the carbon base.
00:39:02 I mean to look outside of basically anything
00:39:04 we can even imagine chemically.
00:39:06 To look outside of any kind of notions
00:39:08 that we think of as biology.
00:39:10 Yeah, it’s really weird.
00:39:11 So you now get into this land of like complexity
00:39:14 of a measuring of like how many assembly steps
00:39:20 it takes to build that thing.
00:39:22 Right.
00:39:23 And maybe dynamic movement or some maintenance
00:39:27 of some kind of membrane structures.
00:39:29 We don’t even know like which properties life should have.
00:39:33 Right.
00:39:34 Whether it should be able to reproduce
00:39:36 and all those kinds of things or pass information,
00:39:39 genetic type of information.
00:39:41 We don’t know.
00:39:42 And it’s like, it’s so humbling.
00:39:45 I mean I tend to believe that there could be
00:39:48 something like alien life here on Earth
00:39:51 and we’re just too human, biology obsessed
00:39:54 to even recognize it.
00:39:55 The shadow biosphere, I remember you and Sarah
00:39:57 were talking about.
00:39:58 I mean that’s like, speaking of beer,
00:40:02 I mean that’s something I wanted to make sure
00:40:04 in all of science to shake ourselves out of like,
00:40:07 remind ourselves constantly how little we know.
00:40:10 Because it might be right in front of our nose.
00:40:13 Like I wouldn’t be surprised if like trees
00:40:15 are like orders of magnitude more intelligent than humans.
00:40:18 They’re just operating at a much slower scale
00:40:21 and they’re like talking shit about us the whole time.
00:40:23 Like about silly humans that take everything seriously
00:40:26 and we start all kinds of nuclear wars
00:40:28 and we quarrel and we tweet about it and then,
00:40:31 but the trees are always there just watching us silly humans.
00:40:35 Like the Ents in Lord of the Rings.
00:40:37 Exactly.
00:40:37 So I mean, I don’t know, I mean, obviously I’m joking
00:40:40 on that one, but there could be stuff like that.
00:40:44 Well, let me ask you the Drake equation,
00:40:46 the big question, how many, like obviously nobody knows,
00:40:51 but what’s your gut, what’s your hope as a scientist,
00:40:54 as a human, how many alien civilizations are out there?
00:40:58 As a ex physicist, I’m now much more
00:41:01 on the aerospace engineering side for space architecture,
00:41:03 but as an ex physicist, I hope it is prolific.
00:41:08 I think the challenge is if it’s as prolific
00:41:10 as we would hope, if there are many, many, many
00:41:12 civilizations, then the question is, where are they?
00:41:16 Why haven’t we heard from them?
00:41:18 And the Fermi paradox, is there some great filter
00:41:21 that life only gets to some level of sophistication
00:41:25 and then kills itself off through war or through famine
00:41:29 or through different challenges that filter
00:41:30 that society out of existence?
00:41:33 And it would be an interesting question to try
00:41:35 to understand if the universe was teeming with life,
00:41:38 why haven’t we found it or heard from it yet,
00:41:41 to our knowledge?
00:41:41 Yeah, I personally believe that it’s teeming with life,
00:41:44 and you’re right, I think that’s a really useful,
00:41:46 productive engineering scientific question
00:41:49 of what kind of great filter can just be destroying
00:41:53 all of that life or preventing it from just constantly
00:41:57 talking to us, silly descendants of apes.
00:42:01 That’s a really nice question, like what are the ways
00:42:05 civilizations can destroy themselves?
00:42:09 There’s too many, sadly.
00:42:10 Well, I don’t think we’ve come up with most of them yet.
00:42:13 That’s also probably true.
00:42:15 That’s the thing, it’s, I mean, and if you look
00:42:18 at nuclear war, some of it is physics,
00:42:21 but some of it is game theory, it’s human nature,
00:42:26 it’s how societies built themselves, how they interact,
00:42:29 how we create and resolve conflict,
00:42:32 and it gets back to the human question
00:42:34 on when you’re doing long term space travel,
00:42:37 how do you maintain this dynamical system
00:42:40 of flawed, irrational humans such that it persists
00:42:46 throughout time, and not just maintain the biological body,
00:42:50 but get people from not murdering each other,
00:42:52 like like each other sufficiently to where you kinda
00:42:56 fit well, but I think if songs or poetry or books
00:43:01 taught me anything, if you like each other a little too much,
00:43:05 I mean, the problems arise, because then there’s always
00:43:07 a third person who also likes, and then there’s the drama,
00:43:10 it’s like, I can’t believe you did that last night,
00:43:12 whatever, so, and then there’s beer.
00:43:14 Gets complicated quickly. Gets complicated quickly.
00:43:17 Okay, anyway, back to the dumb questions,
00:43:20 because you answered this, there’s an interview
00:43:22 where you answer a bunch of cool little questions
00:43:24 from young students and so on, about like space.
00:43:29 One of them was playing music in space.
00:43:32 Yeah.
00:43:33 And you mentioned something about what kind of instruments
00:43:37 you could use to play music in space.
00:43:39 Could you mention about like the Spotify work in space,
00:43:43 and if I wanted to do a live performance,
00:43:45 what kind of instruments would I need?
00:43:47 Yeah, I mean, you referenced culture before,
00:43:50 and I think this is one of the most exciting things
00:43:51 that we have at our fingertips, which is to define
00:43:55 a new culture for space exploration.
00:43:57 We don’t just have to import cultural artifacts from Earth
00:44:01 to make life worth living in space,
00:44:03 and this musical instrument that you referenced
00:44:05 was a design of an object that could only be performed
00:44:08 in microgravity.
00:44:09 Oh, cool.
00:44:10 So it doesn’t sound the same way when it’s,
00:44:13 it’s a percussive instrument when it’s rattled
00:44:15 or moved in a gravity environment, it is unique.
00:44:17 Can we look it up?
00:44:18 It’s called the Telematron.
00:44:19 Yeah, it’s created by.
00:44:20 Of course it’s called the Telematron.
00:44:21 Telematron.
00:44:22 That is so awesome.
00:44:23 Created by Sands Fish and Nicole Boulier,
00:44:25 two amazing graduate students and staff researchers
00:44:28 on my team.
00:44:29 What does it look like?
00:44:30 It looks steampunk, actually.
00:44:33 That’s awesome.
00:44:34 Yeah, it’s a pretty cool design.
00:44:35 It looks like it’s a geometric solid
00:44:37 that has these interesting artifacts on the inside,
00:44:39 and it has a lot of sensors, actually,
00:44:41 additionally on the inside,
00:44:42 like IMU’s inertial measurement sensors
00:44:44 that allow it to detect when it’s floating
00:44:47 and when it’s not floating,
00:44:49 and provides this really kind of ethereal,
00:44:52 they later sonify it.
00:44:53 So they use electronic music to turn it into a symphony
00:44:56 or turn it into a piece.
00:44:57 And yeah, this is the object, the Telematron.
00:44:59 How does the human interact with it?
00:45:01 By tossing it.
00:45:02 So it’s an interactive musical instrument.
00:45:04 It actually requires another partner.
00:45:06 So the idea was that it’s something like a dance
00:45:09 or just like something like a choreography in space.
00:45:12 Got it.
00:45:12 Speaking of which, you also talked about sports,
00:45:15 and like ball sports, like playing soccer.
00:45:18 So you mentioned that,
00:45:20 so your muscles can move at full speed,
00:45:23 and then if you push off the wall lightly,
00:45:26 you fly across, zoom across.
00:45:28 So how does the physics of that work?
00:45:31 Can you still play soccer, for example, in space?
00:45:34 You can, but one of the most intuitive things
00:45:37 that we all learn as babies, right,
00:45:39 is whenever you throw something,
00:45:40 if I was gonna toss something to you,
00:45:41 I’d toss it up,
00:45:42 because I know that it has to compensate
00:45:44 for the fact that that Keplerian arc is gonna draw it down,
00:45:47 the equations of motion are gonna draw it down.
00:45:50 I would, in space,
00:45:51 I would just shoot something directly towards you,
00:45:54 so like straight in line of sight.
00:45:56 And so that would be very different
00:45:57 for any type of ball sport,
00:45:58 is to retrain your human mind
00:46:00 to have that as your intuitive arc of motion
00:46:03 or lack of arc.
00:46:04 From your experience,
00:46:05 from understanding how astronauts
00:46:07 get adjusted to this stuff,
00:46:08 how long does it take to adjust to the physics
00:46:10 of this world, this other world?
00:46:12 So even after one or two parabolic flights,
00:46:15 you can gain a certain facility
00:46:18 with moving in that environment.
00:46:20 I think most astronauts would say
00:46:22 maybe several days on station
00:46:23 or a week on station,
00:46:25 and their brain flips.
00:46:26 It’s amazing the plasticity of the human brain
00:46:28 and how quickly they are able to adapt.
00:46:31 And so pretty quickly,
00:46:32 they become creatures of this new environment.
00:46:36 Okay, so that’s cool.
00:46:36 It’s creating a little bit of an experience.
00:46:38 What about if you go for more than 100 days
00:46:42 for one year, for two years, for three years?
00:46:46 What challenges start to emerge in that case?
00:46:49 So Scott Kelly wrote this amazing book
00:46:50 after he spent a year in space,
00:46:52 and he’s a twin.
00:46:53 It’s absolutely fantastic
00:46:54 that NASA got to do a twin study.
00:46:57 It’s perfect.
00:46:58 So he wrote a lot about his experience
00:47:00 on the health side of what changed,
00:47:02 things like bone density, muscle atrophy,
00:47:06 eyesight changing
00:47:08 because the shape of your eyeball changes,
00:47:10 which changes your lens,
00:47:11 which changes how you see.
00:47:12 If we’re then thinking about the challenges
00:47:14 between a year and three years,
00:47:16 especially if we’re doing that three year trip to Mars
00:47:18 for your friend who asked earlier,
00:47:20 then you have to think about nutrition.
00:47:23 And so how are you keeping
00:47:25 all of these different needs for your body alive?
00:47:28 How are you protecting astronauts against radiation?
00:47:30 Either having some type of a shell on the spacecraft,
00:47:33 which is expensive because it’s heavy.
00:47:35 If it’s something like lead,
00:47:36 a really effective radiation shell,
00:47:37 it’s gonna be a lot of mass.
00:47:39 Or is there a pill that could be taken
00:47:42 to try to make you less in danger
00:47:46 of some of the radiation effects?
00:47:49 A lot of this has not yet been answered,
00:47:51 but radiation is a really significant challenge
00:47:53 for that three year journey.
00:47:55 And what are the negative effects of radiation
00:47:57 on the human body out in space?
00:47:59 A higher likelihood to develop cancer at a younger age.
00:48:03 So you’d probably be able to get there and get back,
00:48:05 but you’d find yourself in the same way
00:48:08 of if you were exposed to significant radiation on Earth,
00:48:10 you’d find significant bad health effects as you age.
00:48:14 What do you think about like decades?
00:48:16 Do you think about decades?
00:48:19 Or is this like an entire?
00:48:21 I think about centuries for MySpace.
00:48:23 But yeah, for decades,
00:48:25 I think as soon as we get past the three year mark,
00:48:28 we’ll absolutely want,
00:48:29 somewhere between three years and a decade,
00:48:31 we’ll want artificial gravity.
00:48:33 And we know how to do that, actually.
00:48:35 The engineering questions still need to be tweaked
00:48:37 for how we’d really implement it,
00:48:38 but the science is there to know
00:48:39 how we would spin habitats in orbit and generate that force.
00:48:44 So even if the entire habitat’s not spinning,
00:48:46 you at least have a treadmill part of the space station
00:48:49 that is spinning,
00:48:50 and you can spend some fraction of your day
00:48:52 in a near to 1G environment and keep your body healthy.
00:48:56 Wait, literally from just spinning?
00:48:58 From spinning, yes, centripetal force.
00:49:00 That’s fascinating. So you generate this force.
00:49:01 If you’ve ever been in those carnival rides,
00:49:03 the gravitrons that spin you up around the side,
00:49:06 that’s the concept.
00:49:07 And this is actually one of the reasons
00:49:08 why we are spinning out a new company
00:49:12 from my MIT lab. Spinning out, ha.
00:49:13 Spinning out, ha.
00:49:14 That was accidental, but well noted space pun.
00:49:18 It’s like impossible to avoid. Dad jokes, all right.
00:49:20 But yeah, we’re spinning out a new company
00:49:23 to look at next generation space architecture,
00:49:27 and how do we actually scale humanity’s access to space?
00:49:30 And one of the areas that we wanna look at
00:49:32 is artificial gravity.
00:49:34 Is there a name yet?
00:49:34 Yep, there’s a name. We are brand new.
00:49:36 We are just exiting stealth mode.
00:49:38 So your podcast listeners will literally be among
00:49:40 some of the first to hear about it.
00:49:42 It’s called Aurelia Institute.
00:49:45 Aurelia is an old English word for chrysalis.
00:49:48 And the idea with this is that we, humanity collectively,
00:49:51 are at this next stage of our metamorphosis,
00:49:55 like a chrysalis, into a spacefaring species.
00:49:58 And so we felt that this was a good time,
00:50:00 a necessary time, to think about
00:50:04 next generation space architecture,
00:50:06 but also Starfleet Academy,
00:50:08 if you know that reference from Star Trek.
00:50:12 Yes, so let me ask a silly sounding, ridiculous sounding,
00:50:17 but probably extremely important question.
00:50:19 Sex and space, including intercourse, conception,
00:50:23 procreation, birth, like being a parent,
00:50:27 like raising the baby.
00:50:29 So basically from birth, well, from the before birth part,
00:50:33 like the birds and the bees and stuff,
00:50:34 and then the whole thing.
00:50:37 How complicated is that?
00:50:38 I remember looking at the, thank you.
00:50:43 I remember looking at this exact Wikipedia page actually,
00:50:46 and I remember being, the Wikipedia page is sex and space,
00:50:50 and fascinating how difficult of an engineering problem
00:50:52 the whole thing is.
00:50:53 Is that something you think about too,
00:50:55 how to have generations of humans?
00:50:58 Self, self replicating organizations.
00:51:03 Yeah, societies essentially.
00:51:04 I mean, I guess with micro,
00:51:05 like if you solve the gravity problem,
00:51:07 you solve a lot of these problems.
00:51:09 That’s the hope, yeah.
00:51:09 It’s like the central challenge of microgravity
00:51:12 to human reproduction.
00:51:13 But we do host a workshop every year at Beyond the Cradle,
00:51:16 which is the space event that we run at MIT.
00:51:18 And we always do one on pregnancy in space,
00:51:21 or motherhood, or raising children in space,
00:51:24 because there are huge questions.
00:51:26 There’ve been a few mammal studies
00:51:29 that have looked at reproduction in space,
00:51:31 but there are still really major questions
00:51:32 about how does it work?
00:51:33 How does the fetus evolve in microgravity
00:51:36 if you were pregnant in space?
00:51:37 And I think the near term answer is just gonna be,
00:51:39 we need to be able to give humans a 1G environment
00:51:43 for that phase of our development.
00:51:45 Yeah, so there’s some studies on mice in microgravity.
00:51:49 And it’s interesting, I think the mice,
00:51:51 like one of them, the mice weren’t able to walk,
00:51:53 or their understanding of physics, I guess,
00:51:55 is off or something like that.
00:51:56 Yeah, the mental model when you’re really young
00:51:59 and you’re kind of getting your mental model of physics,
00:52:03 we do think that that would change kids abilities
00:52:07 to if they were born in microgravity,
00:52:09 their ability to have that intuition
00:52:11 around an Earth based 1G environment might be missing,
00:52:13 because a lot of that is really crystallized
00:52:15 in early development, early childhood development.
00:52:17 So that makes sense that they would see that in mice, yeah.
00:52:20 So what about life when we choose to park our vehicles
00:52:27 on another planet, on the moon, but let’s go to Mars?
00:52:30 First of all, is that excite you, humans going to Mars,
00:52:35 like stepping foot on Mars?
00:52:37 And when do you think it’ll happen?
00:52:38 It does excite me.
00:52:39 I think visionaries like Elon are working
00:52:42 to make that happen in terms of building the road to space.
00:52:45 We are really excited about building out
00:52:48 the human lived experience of space once you get there.
00:52:51 So how are you going to grow your food?
00:52:53 What is your habitat going to look like?
00:52:55 I think it’s profoundly exciting,
00:52:56 but I do think that there’s a little bit
00:52:57 of a misunderstanding of Mars anywhere in the near future
00:53:02 being anything like a replacement for Earth.
00:53:04 So it is good for humanity to have these other pockets
00:53:07 of our civilization that can expand out beyond Earth,
00:53:10 but Mars is not in its current state,
00:53:13 a good home for humanity.
00:53:15 Too many perchlorates in the soil,
00:53:17 you can’t use that soil to grow crops.
00:53:19 Atmosphere is too thin, certainly can’t breathe it,
00:53:21 but it’s also just really thin compared to our atmosphere.
00:53:25 A lot of different challenges that would have
00:53:26 to be fundamentally changed on that planet
00:53:29 to make it a good home for a large human civilization.
00:53:33 How does a large civilization of humans get built on Mars?
00:53:37 And where do you think it starts being difficult?
00:53:42 So can you have a small base of like 10 people,
00:53:44 essentially, kind of like the International Space Station
00:53:47 kind of situation, and then can you get it to 100,
00:53:51 to 1,000, to a million?
00:53:53 Are there some interesting challenges there
00:53:55 that worry you, saying that Mars is just not a good backup
00:53:58 at this time for Earth?
00:54:00 I think small outposts, absolutely, like McMurdo, right?
00:54:04 So we have these models of really extreme environments
00:54:06 on Earth in Antarctica, for example,
00:54:08 where humans have been able to go
00:54:10 and make a sustainable settlement.
00:54:13 McMurdo style life on Mars, probably feasible in the 2030s.
00:54:18 So we want to send the first human missions to Mars
00:54:21 and maybe as early as the end of this decade,
00:54:22 more likely early 2030s.
00:54:24 Moving anywhere beyond that in terms of a place
00:54:28 where like an entire human life would be lived,
00:54:31 where it’s not just you go for a three month deployment
00:54:33 and you come back, that is actually the big challenge line,
00:54:36 is just saying, is there enough technological sophistication
00:54:41 that can be brought that far out into space?
00:54:44 If you imagine your electronics break,
00:54:46 there’s no RadioShack, this dates me a little bit
00:54:48 that my mind jumps to RadioShack,
00:54:50 but there’s no supply chains on Mars
00:54:54 that can supply the level of technological sophistication
00:54:58 for all the products that we rely on, on day to day life.
00:55:01 So you’d be going back to actually a very simple existence,
00:55:03 more like pioneer life out West,
00:55:06 in the story of the US, for example.
00:55:08 And I think that the future of larger scale gatherings
00:55:13 of humans in orbit, or sorry, in space,
00:55:15 is actually gonna be in microgravity,
00:55:17 floating space cities, not so much trying
00:55:21 to establish settlements on the surface.
00:55:25 So you think sort of a significant engineering investment
00:55:29 in terms of our efforts and money
00:55:31 should be on large spaceships,
00:55:34 that perhaps are doing this kind of self assembly,
00:55:40 all these kinds of things, and doing it in orbit,
00:55:41 maybe building a giant donut around the planet over time.
00:55:45 Yeah, that is the goal.
00:55:46 And I think the current political climate
00:55:48 is such that you can’t get the trillion dollar investment
00:55:52 to start from scratch and build the sci fi megastructure.
00:55:56 But if you can build it in fits and starts,
00:55:58 in little different pieces,
00:56:00 which is another advantage of self assembly,
00:56:02 it’s much more like how nature works.
00:56:04 So it’s biomimicry inspired way for humanity
00:56:07 to scale out in space.
00:56:09 And whether it’s out in space or on Mars,
00:56:12 the idea that sort of two people fall in love,
00:56:16 they have sex, a child is born,
00:56:21 and then that couple has to teach that child
00:56:25 that they came from Earth.
00:56:27 I just love the idea that somebody is born on Mars
00:56:30 or out in space, and you have to be like,
00:56:33 this is not actually like the original home.
00:56:36 Just them looking at Earth and being like,
00:56:38 this is where we came from.
00:56:40 I don’t know, that’s really inspiring to me.
00:56:42 And the child being really confused
00:56:43 and then wanting to go back to TikTok,
00:56:45 or whatever they do.
00:56:47 Whatever they do in that area.
00:56:49 I mean, there’s great sci fi, right,
00:56:50 about people being born on Mars.
00:56:52 And because it’s a lower gravity environment,
00:56:55 they’re taller, they’re more gangly,
00:56:56 if they were actually able to develop there.
00:56:58 And then they come back to Earth
00:56:59 and they’re like second class citizens
00:57:01 because they can’t function here in the same way
00:57:04 because the gravity’s too strong for them.
00:57:06 You see this in series like The Expanse
00:57:07 with the Belters and these different societies
00:57:10 that if we were to succeed in having human societies
00:57:13 grow up in different pockets,
00:57:14 it’s not necessarily going to be easy for them
00:57:17 to always come back to Earth as their home.
00:57:20 Yeah, different cultures form,
00:57:21 which is the positive way of phrasing it.
00:57:23 But it’s also, this human history teaches us
00:57:26 that we like to form the other.
00:57:29 So there’s this kind of conflict
00:57:30 that naturally emerges.
00:57:33 Let me ask another sort of dark question.
00:57:35 What do you think about coming from a military family?
00:57:38 There’s still sadly wars in the world.
00:57:43 Do you think wars, military conflicts
00:57:46 will follow us into space, wars between nations?
00:57:51 Like from my perspective currently,
00:57:54 it just seems like space is a place
00:57:56 for scientists and engineers to explore ideas.
00:58:00 But the more and more progress you make,
00:58:02 does it worry you that nations start to step in
00:58:05 and form, that go out and fall out military conflict,
00:58:11 whether it’s in cyberspace, in space,
00:58:15 or actual hot war?
00:58:18 I am really concerned about that.
00:58:19 And I do think for decades,
00:58:22 the scientific community in space
00:58:23 has hung on to this notion
00:58:24 from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,
00:58:28 which is space is the province of all humankind,
00:58:30 peaceful uses of outer space only.
00:58:32 But I do think the rise in tensions
00:58:35 and the geopolitical scene that we’re seeing,
00:58:38 I do harbor a lot of concern about hot wars
00:58:42 following humanity out into space.
00:58:44 And it’s worth trying to tie nations together
00:58:49 with more collaboration to avoid that happening.
00:58:51 The International Space Station is a great example.
00:58:53 I think it’s something like 18 countries
00:58:55 are party to this treaty.
00:58:57 It might be less, it might be more.
00:58:59 And then of course, there’s a smaller number of countries
00:59:01 that actually send astronauts.
00:59:02 But even at the fall of the Soviet Union
00:59:05 and through some tense times with Russia,
00:59:07 the ISS had been a place where the US and Russia
00:59:10 were actually able to collaborate between Mir and ISS.
00:59:13 I think it’d be really important right now in particular
00:59:17 to find other platforms where these hegemonic powers
00:59:20 in the world and developing world nations
00:59:23 can come and collaborate on the future of space
00:59:26 and purposefully intertwine our success
00:59:29 so that there’s a danger to multiple parties
00:59:31 if somebody is a bad actor.
00:59:32 So we’re now talking as there’s a war in Ukraine
00:59:36 and I haven’t been sleeping much.
00:59:37 I have family, friends, colleagues in both countries.
00:59:43 And I’m just talking to a lot of people,
00:59:45 many of whom are crying, refugees.
00:59:48 And there’s a basic human compassion
00:59:52 and love for each other that I believe technology
00:59:55 can help catalyze and accelerate.
00:59:59 But there’s also science.
01:00:00 There’s something about rockets.
01:00:02 There’s something about, and I mean like space exploration
01:00:05 that inspires the world about the positive possibilities
01:00:13 of the human species.
01:00:15 So in terms of Ukraine and Russia and China and India
01:00:18 and the United States and Europe and everywhere else,
01:00:22 it seems like collaborating on giant space projects
01:00:27 is one way to escape these wars,
01:00:31 to escape these sort of geopolitical conflicts.
01:00:33 I mean, there’s something,
01:00:34 there’s so much camaraderie to the whole thing.
01:00:37 And even in this little period of human history
01:00:42 we’re living through, it seems like that’s essential.
01:00:45 Even through this pandemic,
01:00:47 there’s something so inspiring about those
01:00:49 like SpaceX rockets going up, for example.
01:00:52 This reinvigoration of the space exploration efforts
01:00:57 by the commercial sector, I don’t know.
01:00:59 That was, as many of us have,
01:01:03 sort of some dark times during this pandemic,
01:01:06 just like loneliness and sometimes emotion and anger
01:01:10 and just hopelessness and politics.
01:01:13 And then you look at those rockets going up
01:01:15 and it just gives you hope.
01:01:17 So I think that’s an understated sort of value
01:01:21 of space exploration,
01:01:22 is the thing that unites us and gives us hope.
01:01:26 Obviously also inspires young generations
01:01:29 and young minds to also contribute
01:01:31 in not necessarily in space exploration
01:01:33 but in all of science and literature and poetry.
01:01:35 There’s something about when you look up to the stars
01:01:38 that makes you dream.
01:01:39 Very true.
01:01:40 And so that’s a really good reason
01:01:43 to sort of invest in this,
01:01:45 whether it’s building giant megastructure,
01:01:47 which is so freaking cool,
01:01:48 but also colonizing Mars.
01:01:52 Yeah, it’s something to look forward to.
01:01:55 Something that, and not make it a domain of war,
01:02:02 but a domain of human collaboration
01:02:04 and human compassion, I think.
01:02:06 You’re the founder and director
01:02:09 of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative.
01:02:12 It includes a ton of projects.
01:02:14 So I just wanted to, they’re focused, I guess, on life in space
01:02:18 from astrobiology, like we talked about, to habitats.
01:02:22 Are there some other interesting projects,
01:02:23 part of this initiative that pop to mind
01:02:27 that you find particularly cool?
01:02:29 Absolutely.
01:02:30 One is the future of in space manufacturing.
01:02:33 So if we’re gonna build large scale space structures,
01:02:35 yes, it’s great to ship them up from Earth
01:02:37 and self assemble them.
01:02:39 But what about extrusion in orbit?
01:02:41 It’s one of the best technologies
01:02:43 to leverage in microgravity
01:02:45 because you can extrude a particularly long beam
01:02:48 that would sag in a normal gravity environment,
01:02:51 but might be able to become the basis of a truss
01:02:53 or a large scale space structure.
01:02:55 So we’re doing miniature tests of extrusion
01:02:57 and are excited to fly this
01:02:59 on the International Space Station in a few months.
01:03:01 We are working on swarm robots.
01:03:04 We have just announced actually MIT’s return to the moon.
01:03:08 So my organization is leading this mission for MIT,
01:03:11 going back to the surface of the moon
01:03:12 as early as the end of this year, 2022,
01:03:15 maybe early 2023,
01:03:17 and trying to take data from our research payloads
01:03:21 at this historic South Pole site
01:03:24 where NASA is supposed to send the first humans back
01:03:27 on the Artemis III mission.
01:03:28 So our hope is to directly support that human mission
01:03:30 with our data.
01:03:32 How does that connect to the swarm aspects?
01:03:34 Does it connect?
01:03:35 Yeah, so we’re actually gonna fly
01:03:37 one of the little astro ants.
01:03:38 That’s the current plan.
01:03:39 One of the little swarm robots on the top of a rover.
01:03:42 That’s part of the mission.
01:03:44 Ants riding a rover?
01:03:45 Yes, exactly, an ant riding a rover.
01:03:48 That rover gets packed in a lander.
01:03:49 That lander gets packed in a SpaceX rocket.
01:03:52 So it’s a whole nesting dolls situation
01:03:53 to get to the moon.
01:03:55 Mother of robot dragons.
01:03:57 Yes, exactly.
01:03:58 So this one, a swarm of one?
01:04:01 Swarm of one, exactly.
01:04:02 We’re testing out.
01:04:03 It’s a tech demonstration mission,
01:04:05 not a true swarm.
01:04:06 Yeah, there they are.
01:04:07 Those are the astro ants.
01:04:09 Wow, and this was a distributed system,
01:04:11 and in theory, you could have a ton of these.
01:04:14 Yes, these could also be centralized.
01:04:15 So they have wireless technology
01:04:17 that could also talk to a central base station
01:04:19 and will be assessing kind of case by case
01:04:22 whether it makes sense to operate them
01:04:23 in a decentralized swarm
01:04:25 or to command them in a centralized swarm.
01:04:29 Each robot is equipped with four magnetic wheels
01:04:32 which enable the robot to attach to any magnetic surface
01:04:35 so you can operate basically in any environment.
01:04:37 He tested the, we tested the mobility of all robots
01:04:41 on different materials in a microgravity environment.
01:04:44 On the vomit comet prior to going to the moon.
01:04:46 That must look so cool.
01:04:48 So they’re basically moving along different
01:04:50 like metallic surfaces.
01:04:52 Yeah, exactly.
01:04:54 It’s interesting when you, just a minute ago
01:04:56 talking about the reflection of
01:04:59 how space can be so aspirational and so uniting.
01:05:01 There’s a great quote from Bill Anders
01:05:03 from the Apollo 8 mission to the moon,
01:05:05 which is he, it’s the Earthrise photo that was taken
01:05:08 where you see the Earth coming up
01:05:09 over the horizon of the moon.
01:05:11 And the quote is something along the lines of
01:05:12 we came all the way to discover the moon
01:05:15 and what we really discovered was the Earth.
01:05:17 This really powerful image looking back.
01:05:20 And so we’re also trying to think for our lunar mission
01:05:22 we realized we’re a very privileged group at MIT
01:05:24 to get the opportunity to do this.
01:05:26 How could we bring humanity along with us?
01:05:29 And so one of the things we’re still testing out
01:05:31 I don’t know if we’re gonna be able to swing it
01:05:32 would be to do something like a Twitch plays Pokemon
01:05:35 but with the robot.
01:05:36 So let a lot of people on earth actually control the robot
01:05:39 or at least benefit from the data that we’re gathering
01:05:42 and try to release the data openly.
01:05:44 So we’re exploring a couple of different ideas
01:05:45 for how do we engage more people in this mission.
01:05:48 That would be surreal to be able to interact
01:05:51 in some way with the thing that’s out there.
01:05:53 Exactly.
01:05:54 On another surface.
01:05:55 Direct connection.
01:05:56 Direct connection.
01:05:59 I think about artificial intelligence in that same way
01:06:01 which is like building robots
01:06:04 puts a mirror to us humans.
01:06:07 It makes us like wonder about like
01:06:09 what is intelligence?
01:06:10 What is consciousness?
01:06:11 And what is actually valuable about human beings?
01:06:14 When AI system learns to play chess better than humans
01:06:18 you start to let go of this idea
01:06:19 that humans are special because of intelligence.
01:06:22 It’s something else.
01:06:26 It’s maybe the flame of human consciousness.
01:06:29 It’s the capacity to feel deeply
01:06:32 to sort of to both suffer and to love all those things.
01:06:36 And that somehow AI to me sort of puts a mirror to that.
01:06:39 You mentioned HAL 9000.
01:06:41 You have to bring it up with these swarm bots
01:06:46 crawling on the surface of your cocoon in space.
01:06:50 I mean, all right.
01:06:52 Let me steel man the HAL 9000 perspective here.
01:06:56 Okay.
01:06:58 The poor guy just wanted to maintain the mission
01:07:02 and the astronauts were,
01:07:03 I mean, I don’t know if people often talk about that
01:07:05 but like doctors have to make difficult decisions too.
01:07:10 When there’s limited resources
01:07:11 you actually do have to sacrifice human life often
01:07:14 because you have to make decisions.
01:07:16 And I think HAL is probably making that kind of decision
01:07:20 about what’s more important,
01:07:22 the lives of individual astronauts or the mission.
01:07:26 And I feel like AI and other humans
01:07:30 will need to make these decisions.
01:07:33 And it also feels like AI systems will need to help
01:07:37 make those decisions.
01:07:38 I don’t know.
01:07:40 I guess my question is about
01:07:42 greater and greater collective intelligence by systems.
01:07:49 Do you worry about that?
01:07:51 What is the right way to sort of solve this problem
01:07:54 keeping a human in the loop?
01:07:56 Do you think about this kind of stuff
01:07:57 or are they sufficiently dumb now the robots
01:08:00 that that’s not yet on the horizon to think about?
01:08:03 I think it should be on the horizon.
01:08:04 It’s always good to think about these things early
01:08:06 because we make a lot of technical design decisions
01:08:09 at this phase working with swarm robots
01:08:11 that it would be better to have thought
01:08:12 about some of these questions early
01:08:13 in the life cycle of a project.
01:08:16 There is a real interest in NASA right now
01:08:18 thinking about the future of human robot interaction, HRI,
01:08:21 and what is the right synergy
01:08:22 in terms of level of control for the human
01:08:25 versus level of dependence or control for the robot.
01:08:29 And we’re beginning to test out more of these scenarios.
01:08:33 For example, the Gateway Space Station,
01:08:36 which is meant to be in orbit around the moon
01:08:37 as a staging base for the surface operations,
01:08:40 is meant to be able to function autonomously
01:08:43 with no humans in it for months at a time
01:08:46 because they think it’s gonna be seasonal.
01:08:47 They think we might not be constantly staffing it.
01:08:50 So this will be a really great test of,
01:08:51 I don’t know that anybody’s yet worried
01:08:53 about HAL 9000 evolving,
01:08:55 but certainly just the robustness of some of these AI systems
01:08:58 that might be asked to autonomously maintain the station
01:09:01 while the humans are away or detection algorithms
01:09:06 that are gonna say, if you had a human pilot,
01:09:07 they might see debris in orbit and steer around it.
01:09:09 There’ll be a lot of autonomous navigation
01:09:11 that has to happen.
01:09:12 That’ll be one of the early test beds
01:09:14 where we’ll start to get a little bit closer to that future.
01:09:16 Well, the HRI component is really interesting to me,
01:09:20 especially when the I includes like almost friendship
01:09:24 because people don’t realize this, I think,
01:09:27 that we humans long for connection.
01:09:29 And when you have even a basic interaction
01:09:32 that’s just like supposed to be just like serving you
01:09:35 or something, you still project,
01:09:37 it’s still a source of meaning and connection.
01:09:45 And so you do have to think about that.
01:09:47 I mean, HAL 9000, the movie maybe doesn’t portray it
01:09:51 that way, but I’m sure there’s a relationship there
01:09:53 between the astronauts and the robot,
01:09:56 especially when you have greater and greater level
01:09:57 of intelligence.
01:09:58 And maybe that addresses the happiness question too.
01:10:02 Yeah, I think there’s a great book by Kate Darling,
01:10:06 who’s one of my colleagues at MIT.
01:10:08 Yeah, she’s amazing.
01:10:09 She’s already been on this podcast,
01:10:11 but we talk all the time and we’re supposed to talk
01:10:14 and we’ve been missing each other
01:10:16 and we’re gonna make it happen soon.
01:10:18 Yeah.
01:10:18 Come down to Texas, Kate.
01:10:20 All right, anyway, yeah, she’s amazing.
01:10:22 She has this book, her whole work is about this.
01:10:25 Connection with robots, yeah.
01:10:26 This beautiful connection that we have with robots,
01:10:28 but I think it’s greater and greater importance
01:10:30 when it’s out in space,
01:10:32 because it could help alleviate some of the loneliness.
01:10:34 Right.
01:10:35 One of the projects in the book that I gave you,
01:10:37 which is this catalog of the projects
01:10:39 that we’ve worked on over the last five years,
01:10:40 is this social robot that was developed at the Media Lab.
01:10:43 And we, one of the first years in 2017
01:10:46 that we flew a zero G flight,
01:10:47 we took the social robot along
01:10:49 and tried to do a little bit
01:10:50 of a very scaled down human study
01:10:53 to look at these questions,
01:10:54 because you do imagine that we would form a bond,
01:10:56 a real bond with the social robots
01:10:58 that might be not just serving us on a mission,
01:11:01 but really be our teammates on a future mission.
01:11:04 And I do think that that could have a powerful role
01:11:06 in the mental health and just the stability of a crew
01:11:08 is to have some other robot friends come along.
01:11:10 What do you, by the way, the book you mentioned
01:11:13 is into the Anthropocosmos,
01:11:18 a whole space catalog from the space catalog.
01:11:22 Get that reference.
01:11:22 Yeah, so call out to Earth catalog,
01:11:25 a whole space catalog
01:11:26 from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative.
01:11:30 What about the happiness?
01:11:31 You said that that’s one of the problems
01:11:33 of when you’re out in space.
01:11:35 How do you keep humans happy?
01:11:37 Again, asking for a friend.
01:11:38 Yes, I mean, one of the big challenges
01:11:40 is you can’t just open a window
01:11:43 or walk out a door and blow off steam, right?
01:11:45 You can’t just go somewhere to clear your head.
01:11:49 And in that sense, you need to build habitats
01:11:52 that are homes that really care for the humans inside them
01:11:56 and have, whether it’s biophilia
01:11:59 and a place where you can go and feel like you’re in nature
01:12:02 or a VR headset, which for some people is a poor simulacrum
01:12:06 but is maybe better than nothing.
01:12:09 You need to be thinking
01:12:10 about these technological interventions
01:12:12 that are gonna have to be part of your home
01:12:14 and be part of your maybe day to day ritual
01:12:17 to keep you steady and balanced and happy
01:12:20 or feeling fulfilled.
01:12:22 What about other humans, relationship with other humans?
01:12:25 Do those get weird
01:12:28 when you get past a certain number of humans?
01:12:30 I’m not an expert in this area
01:12:31 but an anecdote that I’ll share.
01:12:33 My understanding is that NASA has still not decided
01:12:36 whether it’s better to send married couples
01:12:38 or single crew members in terms of,
01:12:41 you want some level of stability,
01:12:43 you don’t wanna have the drama of romantic relationships
01:12:45 like you’re alluding to before,
01:12:47 but they can’t decide because married couples also fight
01:12:50 and have a really tough dynamic.
01:12:52 And so there’s a lot of open questions still to answer
01:12:54 about what is the ideal psychological makeup of a crew?
01:12:57 And we’re starting to test some of these things
01:12:59 with the civilian crews that are growing up
01:13:01 with Inspiration4, like last fall with SpaceX
01:13:04 and Axe One that’s gonna fly in a few days here in March.
01:13:07 As we begin to lengthen the time of those civilian crews,
01:13:10 I think we’ll start to learn a little bit more
01:13:12 about just average everyday human to human dynamics
01:13:15 and not the astronauts that are themselves selected
01:13:18 to be perfect human specimens, very good to work with,
01:13:21 easy to get along with.
01:13:23 I wish you collected more data about this pandemic
01:13:26 because I feel like it’s a good rough simulation
01:13:29 of what it’d be like out in space.
01:13:30 A lot of people are locked down, some married couples,
01:13:33 I think a lot of marriages broke up,
01:13:35 a lot of marriages got closer together.
01:13:38 So it’s like, and then the single people,
01:13:41 some of them went off the cliff
01:13:43 and some of them discovered their new happiness
01:13:45 and meaning and so on.
01:13:46 It’s a beautiful little experiment, a painful one.
01:13:50 Is there a thorough way to really test that?
01:13:54 Because it’s such a costly experiment
01:13:58 to send humans up there,
01:13:59 but I guess you can always return back to Earth
01:14:01 if it’s not working out.
01:14:02 That’s what we hope, that’s what you hope.
01:14:04 You don’t have like a Apollo 13 situation
01:14:06 that doesn’t quite make it back.
01:14:08 But yeah, this is also why Mars is such a challenge.
01:14:11 The moon is only three days away.
01:14:13 That’s a lot quicker to recover from
01:14:15 if there’s a psychological problem with the crew
01:14:17 or any type of maintenance problem, anything.
01:14:19 Three years is such a challenge
01:14:23 compared to these other domains
01:14:25 that we’ve been getting more used to
01:14:26 in terms of human spaceflight.
01:14:27 So this is a question that we will need to have explored more
01:14:30 before we start really sending crews to Mars.
01:14:33 So you’re a young scientist, do you think in your lifetime
01:14:39 you will go out into orbit,
01:14:43 you will go out beyond into deep space
01:14:47 and potentially step, you,
01:14:50 I don’t know if you can call yourself a civilian.
01:14:53 I don’t know if that’s what you count as,
01:14:54 but you as a curious ant from MIT land step on Mars.
01:15:03 Yes.
01:15:06 That’s a firm, that’s a firm.
01:15:07 Are you coming back?
01:15:07 Firm, yes, yeah, I’m coming back.
01:15:08 I don’t want that one way mission, I want the two way mission.
01:15:12 But yes, I mean, I think we’re already talking
01:15:14 about a pretty near term opportunity
01:15:16 where I could send graduate students
01:15:17 to the International Space Station.
01:15:19 Yeah, not a sacrifice, but send graduate students.
01:15:25 For the experience.
01:15:25 For the experience.
01:15:26 Send graduate students to the ISS to do their research.
01:15:29 I do think you and I both would have an opportunity
01:15:31 to go to a lunar base of some sort within our lifetime.
01:15:35 And there’s a good chance if we really wanted to,
01:15:39 we might have to really advocate for it,
01:15:41 apply to an astronaut program.
01:15:43 There will be some avenues for humans
01:15:45 in our lifetime to go to Mars.
01:15:46 What’s the bar for like health?
01:15:51 Do you think that bar will keep getting lower and lower
01:15:53 in terms of how healthy, how athletic,
01:15:55 like how the psychological profile,
01:15:57 all those kinds of things?
01:15:59 Yeah, for one, we’re gonna build more robust habitats
01:16:01 that don’t depend on astronauts
01:16:03 being so impeccably well trained.
01:16:05 So we’re gonna make it better for inclusion
01:16:08 and just opening access to space.
01:16:10 But there’s a fantastic group called Astro Access
01:16:12 that is already helping disabled space flyers
01:16:15 do zero G flights and potentially get access to the ISS.
01:16:18 And some of the things that we think of
01:16:19 as disabilities on earth are hyper abilities in space.
01:16:24 You don’t need really powerful legs in space.
01:16:27 What you’d really benefit from having is a third arm,
01:16:30 more ways to kind of move yourself around
01:16:32 and grip and interact.
01:16:33 So we are already seeing a much more open minded approach
01:16:38 to who gets to go to space and Astro Access
01:16:40 is a wonderful organization doing some of that work.
01:16:43 I’m hoping introversion will also be a superpower in space.
01:16:47 Okay, well, first I’d love to get your opinion
01:16:50 on commercial space flight, what SpaceX,
01:16:52 what Blue Origin are doing.
01:16:54 And also another question on top of that is,
01:16:58 because you’ve worked with a lot of different kinds
01:17:01 of people, culturally, what’s the difference
01:17:03 between SpaceX or commercial type of efforts
01:17:07 NASA and MIT?
01:17:10 And academia.
01:17:11 Academia.
01:17:12 Yeah, so the first part of your question,
01:17:14 I am thrilled by all of the commercial activity in space.
01:17:18 It has really empowered our program.
01:17:20 So instead of me waiting for five years to get a grant
01:17:23 and get the money from the grant
01:17:24 and only then can you send a project to space,
01:17:26 I go out and I fundraise a lot like a startup founder
01:17:29 and I directly buy access to space
01:17:32 on the International Space Station
01:17:33 through SpaceX or NanoRacks, same with Blue Origin
01:17:36 and their suborbital craft, same with Axiom now.
01:17:38 Axiom’s making plans for their own commercial space station.
01:17:42 It’s not out of the realm of possibility,
01:17:44 but in a few years, I will rent lab space in orbit.
01:17:48 I will rent a module from the Axiom space station
01:17:50 or the orbital reef, which is the Blue Origin space station
01:17:54 or NanoRacks is thinking about Starlab Oasis.
01:17:56 There’s probably some other companies
01:17:58 that I’m not even aware of yet
01:17:59 that are doing commercial space habitats.
01:18:00 So I think that’s fabulous
01:18:02 and really empowering for our research.
01:18:04 Is it affordable?
01:18:06 So like loosely speaking, does it become affordable
01:18:09 for like MIT type of research lab?
01:18:13 Does it, or does it need to be a multi university
01:18:18 like a gigantic effort, a consortium thing?
01:18:20 One of the reasons we’re spinning out Aurelia
01:18:22 is we actually realized it’s cheap enough.
01:18:24 It doesn’t even have to be MIT.
01:18:26 And we wanted to start democratizing access
01:18:29 to these spaceflight opportunities
01:18:30 to a much broader swath of humanity.
01:18:33 Could you take a Khan Academy educational course
01:18:36 about, hey, students around the world,
01:18:38 this is how you get ready for a zero G flight.
01:18:40 And by the way, come fly with us next year,
01:18:43 which is something we’re gonna do with Aurelius.
01:18:44 We’re gonna bring much more just kind of day to day folks
01:18:48 on zero G flights and get them access
01:18:50 to engaging in the space industry.
01:18:52 So it’s become cheap enough
01:18:54 and the prices have dropped enough to consider even that.
01:18:57 So that’s amazing.
01:18:57 It definitely doesn’t have to be a consortium
01:18:59 of universities anymore.
01:19:00 Depends on what you wanna fly.
01:19:02 If you wanna fly James Webb,
01:19:03 a huge telescope that’s decades in the making,
01:19:05 sure, you need a NASA allocation budget.
01:19:08 You need billions.
01:19:10 But for a lot of the stuff in the book
01:19:12 and our research portfolio,
01:19:13 it’s actually becoming far more accessible.
01:19:16 So that’s a commercial.
01:19:17 What about NASA and MIT academia?
01:19:21 Yeah, I think people have been worried about NASA
01:19:25 the last few years because in some people’s minds,
01:19:28 they are ceding ground to these commercial efforts,
01:19:31 but that’s really not what’s happening.
01:19:34 NASA empowered these commercial efforts
01:19:37 because they wanna free themselves up to go to Mars
01:19:40 and go to Europa and continue being
01:19:43 that really aspirational force for humanity
01:19:46 of pushing the boundary, always pushing the boundary.
01:19:48 And if they were anchored in low earth orbit,
01:19:50 maintaining a space station indefinitely,
01:19:53 that’s so much a part of their budget
01:19:54 that it was keeping them from being able to do more.
01:19:57 So it actually is really fantastic for NASA
01:19:59 to have grown this commercial ecosystem
01:20:00 and then that frees NASA up to go further.
01:20:03 And in academia, we like to think that we will be able
01:20:05 to do the provocative next generation research
01:20:09 that is going to unlock things at that frontier.
01:20:13 And we can partner with NASA.
01:20:14 We can go through a program
01:20:15 if we wanna send a probe out really far,
01:20:18 but we can also partner with SpaceX
01:20:19 and see what human life in a SpaceX Mars settlement
01:20:22 might look like and how we could design for that.
01:20:24 Speaking of projects, maybe are there other projects
01:20:27 that pop to mind from the Space Exploration Initiative
01:20:30 or maybe stuff from the book that you can mention?
01:20:32 Something super cool.
01:20:34 I mean, everything we’ve been talking about is cool,
01:20:35 but just something that pops to mind again.
01:20:37 Yeah, so we talked about life in space
01:20:40 and you might need more arms than legs.
01:20:42 One of the projects by Valentina Sumini
01:20:44 was a air powered robotics tail.
01:20:48 So it’s a soft robotics tail
01:20:50 that essentially has a little camera on the back end of it,
01:20:53 can do computer vision and knows where to grapple.
01:20:55 So it’s behind you.
01:20:56 It grapples onto something and holds you in space
01:20:59 and then you can actually free up
01:21:00 both of your hands to work.
01:21:02 So we’re already starting to think about
01:21:03 the design of bionic humans or prosthetics
01:21:07 or things that would make you kind of like a cyborg
01:21:09 to augment your capabilities
01:21:11 when you’re in a space environment.
01:21:13 How would you control something like that?
01:21:14 So it’s kind of like a, I mean, you can’t call it a leg,
01:21:17 but whatever, it’s a. An additional appendage.
01:21:20 Appendage, so how would you,
01:21:21 what are ideas for controlling something like that?
01:21:23 Yeah, so right now it’s super, yeah, there you go.
01:21:26 That’s cool.
01:21:27 Right now it’s super manual.
01:21:29 It’s basically just like a kind of a set pattern
01:21:32 of inflating as we’re testing it.
01:21:34 But in the future, if we had a Neuralink,
01:21:35 I mean, this is something that you could imagine
01:21:38 directly controlling,
01:21:39 just thinking thoughts and controlling it.
01:21:41 That’s a ways away.
01:21:42 Yeah, so we talked about on the biology side,
01:21:45 astrobiology, there’s probably agriculture stuff.
01:21:48 Is there other things that kind of feed the ecosystem
01:21:51 of out in space for survival
01:21:53 or the robotics architectures, the self assembly stuff?
01:21:56 So kind of combining something we were talking about,
01:21:59 you can form these relationships with objects
01:22:01 and anthropomorphize.
01:22:02 One of the things that we’re thinking about for agriculture
01:22:04 created by Manwe and Somu, so two students at MIT,
01:22:08 was this little, it looks like a planet,
01:22:10 but it’s inspired by, I think, a Mandala
01:22:13 or Nepalese spinning wheel.
01:22:15 And you plant plants on the inside
01:22:16 and the astronaut has to spin it every day
01:22:19 to help the plants survive.
01:22:20 So it’s a way to give the astronauts
01:22:22 something to care about,
01:22:23 something that they are responsible for keeping alive
01:22:26 and can really invest themselves in.
01:22:29 And it’s not necessary, right?
01:22:30 We have other ways to grow in orbit,
01:22:33 hydroponics, liquid medium,
01:22:35 trying to keep the liquid around the plant roots is hard
01:22:37 because there’s no gravity to pull it down
01:22:39 in a particular direction.
01:22:40 But what I loved about this project was they said,
01:22:42 sure, we have ways that the plants could grow on their own,
01:22:45 but the astronauts might want to care for it
01:22:48 in the same way that we have little plants
01:22:49 that come to be important to us, little plant friends.
01:22:52 So there’s AgriFuge, that’s an early model
01:22:54 of this manually spinning plant habitat.
01:22:58 I guess this is the best of academic research
01:23:01 is you can do these kinds of wild ideas.
01:23:03 Wild ideas, yeah.
01:23:04 Well, I get to spend quite a bit of time
01:23:07 with Mr. Elon Musk and he’s very stressed,
01:23:12 especially about Starship
01:23:14 and all those kinds of engineering efforts.
01:23:17 What do you think about how damn hard it is
01:23:20 to get out of space?
01:23:23 Like, are we humans gonna be able to do this?
01:23:26 I don’t know, I think it feels like
01:23:28 it’s an engineering problem, it’s a scientific problem,
01:23:31 but it’s also just a motivation problem
01:23:33 for the entire human species.
01:23:35 And you also need to have superstar researchers
01:23:39 and engineers working on it.
01:23:40 So you have to get like the best people in the world,
01:23:42 inspire them and starting from a young age and kind of.
01:23:47 Almost inculcating us into why we do it.
01:23:48 I mean, I guess that’s why it’s exciting.
01:23:50 You don’t know if we’re gonna be able to pull this off.
01:23:52 Like, we could like fail miserably.
01:23:56 And that, I suppose, I mean,
01:23:57 that’s where the best of engineering is done
01:23:59 is like success is not guaranteed.
01:24:02 And even if it happens, it might be very painful.
01:24:06 I think that’s what’s so special
01:24:07 about what Elon is doing with SpaceX
01:24:08 is he takes these risks and he tests iteratively
01:24:12 and he’ll, we’ll see the spectacular failures
01:24:14 on the path to a successful Starship.
01:24:17 It’s something that, you know, people have said,
01:24:18 why isn’t NASA doing that?
01:24:19 Well, that’s cause NASA is doing that with taxpayer dollars
01:24:22 and we would all revolt if we saw NASA failing
01:24:25 at all these different stages.
01:24:26 But that level of, you know,
01:24:27 spiral engineering theory of development
01:24:30 isn’t super impressive.
01:24:31 And it’s a really interesting approach
01:24:32 that SpaceX has taken.
01:24:34 And I think between people like Elon and Jeff Bezos
01:24:37 and Firefly and NASA and ESO, we are gonna get there.
01:24:41 They’re building the road to space.
01:24:43 These trailblazers are doing it.
01:24:45 And now part of the challenge is to get the rest
01:24:47 of the public to understand that it’s happening, right?
01:24:52 A lot of people don’t know that we’re going back
01:24:53 to the moon, that we’re gonna send the first woman
01:24:55 to the moon within a few years.
01:24:57 A lot of people don’t know
01:24:58 that there are commercial space stations in orbit,
01:25:00 that it’s not just NASA that does space stuff.
01:25:03 So we have a big challenge to get more of humanity excited
01:25:07 and educated and involved again,
01:25:08 kind of like in the Apollo era
01:25:09 where it was a big deal for everybody.
01:25:12 Well, a lot of that is also one of the big impressive things
01:25:15 that Elon does, I think, extremely well
01:25:18 is the social media, is the getting people excited.
01:25:21 And I think that actually, he’s helped NASA
01:25:24 step their game up in terms of social media.
01:25:26 There’s something about, yeah, the storytelling,
01:25:28 but also not like, you know, like authentic
01:25:34 and just real and raw engineering.
01:25:36 There’s a lot of excitement for that humor and fun also.
01:25:40 All of those things you realize,
01:25:42 the thing that make up the virality of the meme
01:25:46 is beautiful, you have to kind of embrace that.
01:25:48 And to me, this kind of,
01:25:53 I criticize a lot of companies based on this.
01:25:56 I talked to a bunch of CEOs and so on,
01:25:59 and it’s just like, there’s a caution,
01:26:01 like let us do this like press conference thing
01:26:04 where when the final product is ready
01:26:06 and it’s overproduced,
01:26:08 as opposed to the raw, the gritty just showed off.
01:26:11 I mean, something that I think MIT is very good at doing
01:26:14 is just showing the raw, by nature, the mess of it.
01:26:17 And the mess of it is beautiful
01:26:18 and people get really excited and failure is really exciting.
01:26:21 When the thing blows up and you’re like, oh shit,
01:26:23 that makes it even more exciting when it doesn’t blow up.
01:26:27 And doing all of that on social media
01:26:29 and showing also the humans behind it,
01:26:31 the individual young researchers or the engineers
01:26:35 or the leaders where everything’s at stake.
01:26:38 I don’t know, I think I’m really excited about that.
01:26:40 I do want MIT to do that more for students
01:26:43 to show off their stuff and not be pressured
01:26:47 to do this kind of generic official presentation,
01:26:51 but show their, become a YouTuber also.
01:26:54 Like show off your raw research
01:26:55 as you’re working on it in the early days.
01:26:58 I hope that’s the future.
01:26:59 Things like, I was teasing about TikTok earlier,
01:27:02 but these kinds of things I think inspire young people
01:27:07 to show off their stuff, to show their true self,
01:27:11 the rawness of it,
01:27:12 because I think that’s where engineering is best.
01:27:13 And I think that will inspire people
01:27:16 about all the cool stuff we could do out in space.
01:27:18 I should say, I couldn’t agree more.
01:27:20 And I actually think that this is why we need
01:27:21 a real life Starfleet Academy right now.
01:27:24 It was the place where the space cadets got to go
01:27:27 to learn about how to engage in a future of life in space.
01:27:31 And we can do it in a much better way.
01:27:33 There are a bunch of groups that traditionally
01:27:35 haven’t thought that they could engage in aerospace,
01:27:37 whether it’s because you were told
01:27:38 you had to be into math and science.
01:27:40 Now we need space lawyers,
01:27:42 we need space artists like Grimes, right?
01:27:44 We need really creative, profoundly interesting people
01:27:48 to wanna see themselves in that future.
01:27:51 And I think it’s a big challenge to us
01:27:53 in the space industry to also do some more diversity,
01:27:55 equity and inclusion,
01:27:56 and show a broader swath of society
01:27:58 that there’s a future for them
01:28:00 in this space exploration vision.
01:28:01 Let me push back on one thing.
01:28:03 We don’t need space lawyers.
01:28:04 I’m just kidding.
01:28:05 Okay, it’s a joke.
01:28:06 We do, we do, we do.
01:28:07 Okay, we do.
01:28:09 The lawyers are great, I love them.
01:28:11 Okay, let me ask a big, ridiculous question.
01:28:13 What is the most beautiful idea to you
01:28:17 about space exploration?
01:28:19 Whether it’s the engineering, the astrobiology,
01:28:22 the science, the inspiration, the human happiness,
01:28:28 or aliens, I don’t know.
01:28:30 What do you, like, inspires you every day
01:28:35 in terms of its beauty, in terms of its awe?
01:28:39 As a ex physicist, what I’ve always found so profound
01:28:44 is just that at really, really small scales,
01:28:47 like particle physics,
01:28:48 and really, really big scales, like astrophysics,
01:28:51 there are similarities in the way
01:28:53 that those systems behave and look,
01:28:55 and there’s a certain beautiful symmetry in the universe
01:28:59 that’s just kind of waiting for us
01:29:01 to tie together the physics and really understand it.
01:29:04 That is something that just really captivates me,
01:29:07 and I would love to,
01:29:08 even though I’m now much more
01:29:09 on the applied space exploration side,
01:29:12 I really try to keep up with what’s happening
01:29:14 in those physics areas,
01:29:15 because I think that will be a huge answer for humanity
01:29:18 along the lines of, are we alone in the universe?
01:29:22 One of the fascinating things about you
01:29:24 is you have a degree in physics, mathematics,
01:29:28 and philosophy, and now, I don’t know,
01:29:31 would you call it aerospace engineering maybe kind of thing?
01:29:34 So you have at a foot in all of these worlds,
01:29:36 the theoretic, the beauty of that world,
01:29:42 and the philosophy somehow is in there,
01:29:44 and now the very practical, pragmatic implementation
01:29:48 of all these wild ideas,
01:29:50 plus your incredible communicator, all of those things.
01:29:53 What did you pick up from those different disciplines?
01:29:56 Or maybe I’m just romanticizing
01:29:57 all those different disciplines,
01:29:59 but what did you pick up from the variety
01:30:02 of that physics, mathematics, philosophy?
01:30:06 What I loved about having this chance
01:30:07 to do a liberal arts education
01:30:10 was trying to understand the human condition,
01:30:13 and I think more designers for space exploration
01:30:16 should be thinking about that,
01:30:17 because there’s so much depth of,
01:30:19 like we were talking about,
01:30:21 issues and opportunities around human connection,
01:30:24 human life, meaning in life.
01:30:27 How do you find fulfillment or happiness?
01:30:29 And I think if you approach these questions
01:30:31 just purely from the standpoint of an engineer
01:30:33 or a scientist, you’ll miss some of what
01:30:35 makes it a life worth living.
01:30:38 And so I love being able to combine
01:30:40 some of this notion of philosophy
01:30:41 and the human condition with my work,
01:30:43 but I’m also a pragmatist,
01:30:45 and I didn’t want to stay just purely
01:30:47 in these big picture questions about the universe.
01:30:49 I wanted to have an impact on society,
01:30:52 and I also felt like I had such a wonderful childhood
01:30:55 and a really fantastic setup that I owe society some work
01:31:01 to really make a positive impact
01:31:04 for a broader swath of citizens.
01:31:05 And so that kind of led me from the physics domain
01:31:07 to thinking about engineering and practical questions
01:31:10 for life in space.
01:31:11 In physics, was there a dream?
01:31:13 Are you also captivated by this search
01:31:16 for the theory of everything that kind of unlocks
01:31:19 the deeper and deeper, in the simple, elegant way,
01:31:23 the function of our universe?
01:31:25 Do you think that’ll be useful for us
01:31:28 for the actual practical engineering things
01:31:30 that you’re working on now?
01:31:31 It could be.
01:31:32 I mean, I worked at CERN for two summers in undergrad,
01:31:35 and we were looking for supersymmetry,
01:31:37 which was one of these alternatives to the standard model.
01:31:40 And it was sad because my professors
01:31:41 were getting sadder and sadder
01:31:43 because they weren’t finding it.
01:31:44 They were excluding what we would call this parameter space
01:31:47 of finding these supersymmetric particles.
01:31:50 But the search for what that theory of everything could be,
01:31:53 or a grand unified theory that kind of answers
01:31:55 some of the holes within the standard model of physics
01:31:58 would presumably kind of unlock a better understanding
01:32:02 of certain fundamental physical laws
01:32:05 that we should be able to build a better understanding
01:32:08 of engineering and day to day services from that.
01:32:10 It might not be an immediately obvious thing.
01:32:13 When we discovered the Higgs boson,
01:32:15 I was there at CERN that day.
01:32:16 It was July 4th, 2012 that it was announced.
01:32:19 We all waited like nerds overnight in line
01:32:22 to get into the announcement chamber.
01:32:23 I’d never waited for even like a Harry Potter premiere
01:32:25 in my life, but we waited for this announcement
01:32:27 of the Higgs boson to get into the chamber overnight.
01:32:30 But did that immediately translate
01:32:33 to technology for engineering?
01:32:35 No, but it’s still a really important part
01:32:39 of our understanding of these fundamental laws of physics.
01:32:41 And so I don’t know that it’s always immediate,
01:32:43 but I think it is really critical knowledge
01:32:44 for humanity to seek.
01:32:46 It might just shake up understanding of the world.
01:32:50 What scares me is it might help us create
01:32:52 more dangerous weapons.
01:32:54 So, and then we’ll figure out that great filter situation.
01:32:57 And I still believe that human compassion and love
01:33:02 is actually the way to defend against all these greater
01:33:04 and greater and more impressive weapons.
01:33:07 Let me ask a weird question in terms
01:33:10 of you disagreeing with others.
01:33:12 What important idea do you believe is true
01:33:15 that many others don’t agree with you on?
01:33:20 Maybe, it’s a tough question.
01:33:22 You might have to think about that one,
01:33:23 but whether it’s very specific,
01:33:26 like which material to use or something
01:33:28 about a particular project,
01:33:30 or it could be grand priorities on missions.
01:33:35 I think one you actually mentioned is interesting
01:33:36 is like the thing we should be looking for
01:33:40 is like colonization of space
01:33:43 versus colonization of planets.
01:33:45 Meaning like.
01:33:45 Yes, it’s probably my best hot take
01:33:47 that people would disagree with me on
01:33:49 is life in floating cities
01:33:51 as opposed to life on the surface.
01:33:54 How do you envision that like spread of humans?
01:33:58 Cause you said at the beginning of the conversation,
01:34:00 something about like scale, increasing the scale
01:34:03 of basically humans in space.
01:34:05 Are they just like in, they’re in orbit
01:34:09 and then they get a little farther and farther out.
01:34:11 Like, do you see this kind of floating cities
01:34:15 just getting farther and farther from earth?
01:34:17 They can always kind of return,
01:34:18 but like if you look a few centuries from now,
01:34:22 do you just see us, all these like floating cities.
01:34:24 Like Amoeba.
01:34:25 Yeah.
01:34:25 And it just kind of envelops the space around us
01:34:30 in these like neighborhoods.
01:34:31 Yeah, in these neighborhoods.
01:34:32 It’s like rural and there’s like giant structures
01:34:36 and there’s small pirate structures
01:34:38 and that kind of stuff.
01:34:39 Pirate structures, yeah.
01:34:40 I think low earth orbit might come to look like that.
01:34:43 And it’s a really interesting regulatory challenge
01:34:45 to make sure that there’s some cross purposes.
01:34:49 So the more cool space cities we have in orbit,
01:34:51 the more shiny objects in the night sky,
01:34:53 the worse it is for astronomers
01:34:55 in a really kind of overly simplified case.
01:34:58 So there’s some pushback to this like Amoebaing
01:35:00 where we just grow kind of incongruously
01:35:05 or indiscriminately as an Amoeba in low earth orbit.
01:35:08 Beyond that though, I think we’ll grow in pockets
01:35:10 where there are resources.
01:35:12 So we won’t just expand around the gravity well of earth.
01:35:15 We’ll do some development around the moon,
01:35:18 some development around asteroids,
01:35:20 some development around Mars,
01:35:21 because there’ll always be purposes
01:35:23 for which we wanna go down to a physical object
01:35:25 and study it or extract something or learn from it.
01:35:28 But I think we’ll grow in fits and starts in pockets.
01:35:32 Some of the coolest pockets are the gravity balanced pockets
01:35:35 like the Lagrange points, which is where we just sent,
01:35:37 we not me personally, but NASA just sent James Webb,
01:35:41 the big telescope, I think it’s at L2.
01:35:44 So.
01:35:44 What’s the nice feature about those pockets?
01:35:46 So it’s a stable orbit.
01:35:48 There are several different Lagrange points.
01:35:50 And so it just requires less energy
01:35:52 to stay where you’re trying to stay.
01:35:55 Yeah, that’s fascinating.
01:35:57 What’s also fascinating is the interaction
01:35:59 between nations on that regard.
01:36:04 Like who owns that?
01:36:06 Would you say in those floating cities,
01:36:09 do you envision independent governments?
01:36:13 That was gonna be my next answer to you,
01:36:14 which pushed me harder for a more provocative question
01:36:17 where I might disagree with other people.
01:36:19 I don’t yet have my own opinions fully formed on this,
01:36:22 but we are trying to figure out right now
01:36:24 what happens to the moon
01:36:25 with all of these first come first served actors
01:36:29 just arriving and setting precedents
01:36:32 that might really affect future access.
01:36:34 And one example is property rights.
01:36:37 We do want companies that have the expertise
01:36:40 to go to the moon and mine stuff
01:36:41 that will help us develop a human settlement there
01:36:45 or a gateway, but companies need to know generally
01:36:49 that they have rights to a certain area
01:36:50 or that they have some legal right to sell things
01:36:52 that they’re getting.
01:36:53 Does that mean we’re gonna grant property rights
01:36:55 on the moon to companies who has the right
01:36:58 to give that right away?
01:37:00 So there’s a bunch of really kind of gnarly questions
01:37:02 that we have to think about,
01:37:03 which is why I think we need space lawyers.
01:37:04 Maybe that’s the true provocative answers.
01:37:07 I think we need space lawyers.
01:37:09 I mean, yeah, yeah, I mean, but those questions,
01:37:12 again, as you said eloquently,
01:37:14 will help us answer questions about here on Earth.
01:37:17 We hope so, yeah.
01:37:18 It is a little strange.
01:37:20 I mean, it’s obvious, but it’s also strange
01:37:23 if you look at the big picture of it all
01:37:25 that we draw these like borders around geographical areas
01:37:28 and we say, this is mine, like,
01:37:32 and then we fight wars over what’s mine
01:37:34 and not, it seems like there’s possible alternatives,
01:37:39 but also it seems like there needs to be a public ownership
01:37:42 of some parts, like, what is it?
01:37:45 Central Park in New York.
01:37:47 Is there something like preserving?
01:37:51 The commons.
01:37:52 Yeah, the commons.
01:37:53 The commons.
01:37:54 That’s why we titled the book Into the Anthropocosmos.
01:37:57 We know it’s a long and kind of a mouthful,
01:37:59 but this notion of the Anthropocene,
01:38:02 we have a lot of commons problems in humanity.
01:38:04 How are we treating the Earth, global climate change?
01:38:07 How are we gonna treat and behave in space?
01:38:09 How can we be responsible stewards of the space commons?
01:38:12 And I would love to see an approach to the moon
01:38:15 that is commons based, but it’s hard to know
01:38:18 who would be the protector or the enforcer of that.
01:38:21 And if it’s, which it will be probably in the early days,
01:38:25 a lot of companies sort of working on the moon,
01:38:28 working on Mars, working out in space,
01:38:30 it feels like there still needs to be
01:38:33 a civilian representation of like the greater effort
01:38:37 or something like that.
01:38:38 Like where there should be a president,
01:38:40 there should be a democracy of some kind
01:38:42 where people can vote.
01:38:43 Some representative government.
01:38:45 Those are all, again, the same human questions.
01:38:49 What advice would you give to a young person today
01:38:54 thinking about what they wanna do with their life, career?
01:38:57 So somebody in high school, somebody in college,
01:39:01 maybe somebody that looks up to the stars
01:39:03 and dreams to one day, take a one way ticket to Mars
01:39:07 or to contribute something to the effort.
01:39:09 I’d say you should feel empowered
01:39:12 because it’s really the first time in human history
01:39:16 that we’re at this cusp of interplanetary civilization.
01:39:19 And I don’t think we’re gonna lapse back from it.
01:39:22 So the future is incredibly bright for young people
01:39:25 that even younger than you and I,
01:39:26 who will actually really get a chance to go to Mars
01:39:28 for certain.
01:39:30 The other thing I would say is be open minded
01:39:32 about what your own interests are.
01:39:34 I don’t think you anymore have to be shoehorned
01:39:36 into a particular career to be welcomed
01:39:39 into the future of space exploration.
01:39:41 If you are an artist and that is your passion,
01:39:43 but you would love to do space art or if not space art,
01:39:47 use your artistry to communicate a feeling
01:39:49 or a message about space.
01:39:51 That’s a role that we desperately need
01:39:54 just as much as we need space scientists
01:39:56 and space engineers, so.
01:39:57 Well, when you look at your own life,
01:40:00 you’re an incredibly accomplished scientist,
01:40:02 young scientist, but you know,
01:40:05 and you hopped around from physics to aerospace.
01:40:08 So going from the biggest theoretical ideas
01:40:11 to the biggest practical ideas.
01:40:14 Is there something from your own journey
01:40:15 you can give advice to,
01:40:17 like how to end up doing incredible research at MIT?
01:40:22 Maybe the role of the university and college
01:40:26 and education and learning, all that kind of stuff.
01:40:29 I’d say one piece of advice is find really good teammates
01:40:33 because I get to be the one that’s talking to you,
01:40:35 but there are 50 graduate students, staff and faculty
01:40:38 that are part of my organization back at MIT.
01:40:41 And I’m actually, you guys can’t see it on camera,
01:40:43 but I’m sitting here with my co founder and COO,
01:40:45 Danielle DeLotte, and that is really what makes
01:40:48 these large scale challenges for humanity possible
01:40:52 is really fantastic teams working together
01:40:55 to scale more than what I could do alone.
01:40:57 So I think that that’s an important model
01:40:58 that we don’t talk about enough in academia.
01:41:00 There’s a big push for this like lone wolf genius figure
01:41:03 in academia, but that’s certainly not been the case
01:41:06 in my life.
01:41:06 I’ve had wonderful collaborators and people
01:41:09 that I work with along the team.
01:41:10 Also cross disciplinary.
01:41:12 Absolutely, yeah.
01:41:13 Cross disciplinary, interdisciplinary,
01:41:15 whatever you wanna call it, but.
01:41:17 Artists, where do artists come in?
01:41:19 Do you work with artists?
01:41:20 We do.
01:41:21 We have an arts curator
01:41:22 on the space exploration initiative side.
01:41:24 She helps make sure partly around that communication
01:41:26 challenge that we talked about,
01:41:27 that we’re not just doing zero G flights
01:41:29 and space missions, but that we take our artifacts
01:41:32 of this sci fi space future to museums
01:41:35 and galleries and exhibits.
01:41:38 She pushed me to make sure her name is Shinglu.
01:41:41 She pushed me for our first ISS mission.
01:41:44 I was just gathering all the engineering payloads
01:41:46 that I wanted to support for the students to fly,
01:41:48 including my own work.
01:41:49 And she said, you know what?
01:41:50 We should do an open call internationally
01:41:52 for artists to send something to the ISS.
01:41:55 And we found out it was the first time.
01:41:57 We were the first ever international open call
01:42:00 for art to go to the ISS.
01:42:01 And that was thanks to Shing, an artist bringing
01:42:04 a perspective that I might not have thought
01:42:05 about prioritizing, so.
01:42:08 Yeah, that’s awesome.
01:42:09 So when you look out there,
01:42:11 it’s the flame of human consciousness.
01:42:12 There does seem to be something quite special
01:42:15 about us humans.
01:42:16 Well, first of all, what do you think it is?
01:42:21 What’s consciousness?
01:42:23 What are we trying to preserve here?
01:42:27 What is it about humans that should be preserved
01:42:32 or life here on earth?
01:42:34 What gives you hope to try to expand it out
01:42:37 farther and farther?
01:42:38 Like, what makes you sad if it was all gone?
01:42:43 I think we’re a remarkable species
01:42:46 that we are aware of our own thoughts.
01:42:49 We are meta aware of our own thoughts
01:42:52 and of ourselves.
01:42:52 And we’re able to speak on a podcast
01:42:54 about our meta awareness, about our own thoughts.
01:42:56 About our own thoughts, yeah.
01:42:58 Turtles all the way down.
01:43:00 I think that that is a really special gift
01:43:03 that we have been given as a species
01:43:04 and that there’s a worth to expanding
01:43:07 our circles of awareness.
01:43:09 So we’re very aware of, as an earth based species,
01:43:12 we’ve become a little bit more aware
01:43:13 of the fragility of earth and how special a place it is
01:43:15 when we go to the moon and we look back.
01:43:18 What would it mean for us to have a presence
01:43:21 and our purpose in life as a inter solar system species
01:43:26 or eventually an intergalactic species?
01:43:28 I think it’s a really profound opportunity
01:43:30 for exploration, for the sake of exploration.
01:43:34 A real gift for the human mind.
01:43:36 Yeah, for anything, we’re curious creatures.
01:43:41 You see, you do believe we might one day
01:43:43 become intergalactic civilizations.
01:43:46 Long, long time from now.
01:43:47 We have a lot of propulsion challenges
01:43:49 to answer to get that far.
01:43:51 So you have a hope for this.
01:43:53 Yeah.
01:43:54 Another big ridiculous question building on top of that.
01:43:57 What do you think is the meaning of life?
01:44:00 This individual life of ours, your life,
01:44:03 that unfortunately has to come to an end
01:44:06 as far as we know for now.
01:44:08 Yeah.
01:44:09 And our life here together, is there a why?
01:44:13 Or do we just kinda like let our curiosity carry us away?
01:44:20 Oh, interesting.
01:44:21 Is there a single kind of driving purpose why
01:44:25 or can it just be curiosity based?
01:44:28 I certainly feel, and this is not the scientist
01:44:30 in me talking, but just more of like a human soul talking.
01:44:34 I certainly feel some sense of purpose
01:44:38 and meaning in my life.
01:44:39 And there’s a version of that
01:44:40 that’s a very local level within my family,
01:44:43 which is funny because this whole conversation
01:44:44 has been big, grand space exploration themes.
01:44:47 But you asked me this question
01:44:48 and my first thought is what really matters to me,
01:44:50 my family, my biological reproducing unit.
01:44:53 But then there’s also another purpose,
01:44:57 like another version of the meaning in my life
01:44:59 that is trying to do good things for humanity.
01:45:02 So that sense that we can be individual humans
01:45:04 and have our local meaning,
01:45:06 and we can also be global humans.
01:45:08 Maybe someday like the Star Trek utopia
01:45:10 will all be global citizens.
01:45:12 I don’t wanna sound too naive.
01:45:15 But there is I think that beauty to a meaning
01:45:17 and a purpose of your life that’s bigger than yourself,
01:45:20 working on something that’s bigger and grander
01:45:21 than just yourself.
01:45:23 The deepest meaning is from
01:45:25 the local biological reproduction unit.
01:45:28 And then it goes to the engineering scientific,
01:45:32 what is it, corporate like company unit
01:45:35 that can actually produce and compete
01:45:37 and interact with the world.
01:45:38 And then there’s the giant human unit
01:45:41 that’s struggling with pandemics.
01:45:43 And commons.
01:45:45 And together struggling against the forces of nature
01:45:49 that keeps wanting to kill us.
01:45:50 Yeah, there’d be nothing like an alien invasion
01:45:52 to unite the planet, we think.
01:45:54 I can’t wait, bring it on aliens.
01:45:57 Listen, your work, you’re an incredible communicator,
01:46:00 incredible young scientist there.
01:46:01 It’s huge honor that you would spend your time with me.
01:46:04 I can’t wait what you do in the future.
01:46:07 And thank you for representing MIT so beautifully,
01:46:10 so masterfully.
01:46:11 You’re an incredible person.
01:46:12 Thank you for talking to me.
01:46:13 Thank you so much for having me.
01:46:14 It’s been an absolute pleasure.
01:46:15 It’s a great conversation.
01:46:17 Thanks for listening to this conversation
01:46:19 with Ariel Ekblah.
01:46:20 To support this podcast,
01:46:21 please check out our sponsors in the description.
01:46:25 And now let me leave you with some words from Seneca,
01:46:29 the Roman stoic philosopher.
01:46:31 There is no easy way from earth to the stars.
01:46:36 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.