back to indexAriel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures | Lex Fridman Podcast #271
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We think that self assembly,
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this modular reconfigurable algorithm
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for constructing space structures in orbit
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is gonna give us this promise of space architecture
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that's actually worth living in.
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You see, you do believe we might one day
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become intergalactic civilization.
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I have a hope, yeah.
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The following is a conversation with Ariel Agblah,
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Director of MIT Space Exploration Initiative.
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She's especially interested in autonomously
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self assembling space architectures.
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Basically, giant space structures
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that can sustain human life
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and that assemble themselves out in space
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and then orbit Earth, Moon, Mars, and other planets.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, we check out our sponsors in the description
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and now dear friends, here's Ariel Agblah.
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When did you first fall in love
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with space exploration and space in general?
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My parents are both ex Air Force.
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So my dad's an A10 fighter pilot
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and my mom trained and had qualified to be a fighter pilot
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but it was early enough
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that women were not allowed in combat at that time.
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And so I grew up with these two pilots
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and although they themselves did not become astronauts,
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there's a really rich legacy of Air Force pilots
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becoming astronauts and this loomed large in my childhood.
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What does it mean to be courageous, to be an explorer,
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to be at the vanguard of something hard and challenging
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and to couple with that,
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my dad was a huge fan of science fiction.
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And so I as a kid read Heinlein and Isaac Asimov,
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all these different classics of science fiction
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that he had introduced me to.
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And that just started a love affair with space exploration
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and really thinking about civilization scale,
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space exploration.
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So did they themselves dream about going to the stars
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as opposed to flying here in the Earth's atmosphere,
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My dad always said he was absolutely convinced
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because he was a child of the Apollo years
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that he would get to go in his lifetime.
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I really thought it was gonna happen.
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And so it was a challenge and sad for many people
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and to their view on the outside,
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space exploration slowed down for a period of time.
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In reality, we were just catching up.
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I think we leapt so far ahead with Apollo
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more than the rest of society was ready for.
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And now we're coming back to this moment
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for space exploration where we actually have an economy
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and we have the other accoutrement that society needs
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to be able to make space exploration more real.
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And my dad's thrilled because finally,
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not nearly, I hope not anywhere near the end of his life,
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but as he's an older man,
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he now can see still within his lifetime,
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people really getting a chance
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to build a sustainable lunar settlement on the moon
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or maybe even go to Mars.
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So settlement, civilizations and other planets,
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that's the cool thing to dream about in the future.
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What was the favorite sci fi author when you're growing up?
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Probably Aztec Asimov Foundation Trilogy.
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This is an amazing story of Harry Selden,
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this foundation that he forms at different ends of the,
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well, according to the story,
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different ends of the universe
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and has this interesting focus on society.
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So it's not just space exploration
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for the sake of space exploration or novel technology,
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which is a lot of what I work on, data, data, MIT,
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but how do you structure a society
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across those vast expanses of distance and time?
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And so I'd say absolutely a favorite.
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Now though, my favorite is Neil Stevenson and Seven Eves.
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It's a book that inspired my own PhD research
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and some ongoing work that we're doing with NASA now
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for the future of swarm robotics for spacecraft.
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We were saying offline about Neil Stevenson
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because I just recently had a conversation with him
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and I said that, not until I was doing the research form
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that I realized he also had a role to play in Blue Origin.
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So it's like sci fi actually having a role to play
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in the design, engineering,
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just the implementation of ideas
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that come kind of percolate up from the sci fi world
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and actually become reality.
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It's kind of a fascinating figure in that way.
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So do you also think about him beyond just his work
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in science fiction,
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but his role in coming up with wild, crazy ideas
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that actually become reality?
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Yes, I think it's a great example of this cycle
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between authors and scientists and engineers
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that we can be inspired in one generation
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by what authors dream up.
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We build it, we make it a reality,
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and then that inspires another generation
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of really wild and crazy thought for science fiction.
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I think Neil Stevenson does a beautiful job
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of being what we'd call a hard science fiction author.
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So it's really grounded in a lot of science,
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which makes it very compelling for me
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as a scientist and engineer to read
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and then be challenged to make that vision of reality.
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The other community that Neil's involved with
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and some of my other mentors are involved with
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that we are thinking about more and more
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in the work that we do at MIT
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is the long now foundation and this focus
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on what does society need to take in terms of steps
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at this juncture, this particular inflection point
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in human history to make sure that we're setting ourselves
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up for a long and prosperous horizon,
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for humanities horizons.
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There's a lot of examples
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of what the long now foundation doesn't think about.
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But when I think about this in my own work,
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it's what does it take to scale humanities presence in orbit?
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We are seeing some additional investment
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in commercial space habitats,
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so it'll no longer be just NASA
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running the International Space Station,
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but to really democratize access to space
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to have like Bezos wants to have millions of people
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living and working in space.
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You need architecture that's bigger and grander
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and can actually scale.
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That means you need to be thinking about
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how can you construct things for long time horizons
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that are really sustainable in orbit
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or on a surface of a celestial body
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that are bigger than the biggest rocket payload fairing
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that we currently have available.
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And that what led me to self assembly
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and other models of in space construction.
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Okay, every time you speak,
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I get like a million tangent ideas,
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but no, no, no, no, no, no, please keep talking.
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I just, there's like a million of ideas.
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So one sort of on the dark side, let me ask,
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do you think about the threats to human civilization
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that kind of motivate the scaling of the expansion
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of humans in space and on other planets?
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What are you worried about?
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Nuclear war, pandemics, super intelligent,
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artificial intelligence systems,
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more not existential crises,
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but ones that have significant,
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potentially significant detrimental effects on society
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like climate change, those kinds of things.
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And then there's of course the fun S story coming out
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from the darkness and hitting all earth.
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There's been a few movies on that.
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Anyway, guys, there's something that you think about
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that threatens us in this century.
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I mean, as an ex military family,
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we used to talk about all of this.
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We would say that luck favors the prepared.
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And so growing up, we had a plan,
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actually a family plan for what we would do in a pandemic.
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Didn't think we were going to have to put that
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and plan into place and here we are.
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We do certainly, among my own family and my friends
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and then our work at MIT,
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we do think about existential threats and risks to humanity
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and what role does space exploration
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and getting humans off world have to play
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in a resilient future for humanity.
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But what I actually find more compelling recently
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is instead of thinking about a need to ever abandon earth
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through a path of space exploration or space foraging,
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is to see how we can use space technology
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to keep earth livable.
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The obvious direct ways of doing this would be satellite
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technology that's helping us learn more
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about climate change or emitters or CO2.
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But there's also a future for geoengineering
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that might be space based.
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A lot of questions that would have to be answered around that.
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But these are examples of pivoting our focus away
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from maybe the Hollywood vision of oh,
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an asteroid's going to come,
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we're all going to have to escape earth to,
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let's use our considerable technology prowess
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and use space technology to save earth
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and be very much focused on how we can have a worthwhile life
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for earth citizens, even as some of us go,
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want to go out and for their venturing.
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Right, just the desire to explore the mysterious, yes.
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But also it does seem that by placing us
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in harsh conditions, the harsh conditions of space,
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the harsh conditions of planets,
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on the biology, the chemistry, the engineering,
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the robotics, the materials, all of that,
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that's just a nice way to come up with cool new things.
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Great forcing function, yeah.
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Yeah, it's a forcing, exactly.
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It's a forcing function like survival.
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You don't get this right, you die.
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So, and that you can bring back to earth
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and it will improve like figuring out food and space
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will make you figure out how to live healthier lives
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I mean, some of the technologies
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that we're directly looking at right now
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for space habitats, it's hard to keep humans alive
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in this really fragile little pocket against the vacuum
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and all of the dangers that the space environment presents.
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Some of the technologies we are gonna have to figure out
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is energy efficient, cooling and air conditioning,
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air filtration, scrubbing CO2 from the air,
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being able to have habitats that are themselves resilient
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to extremes of space weather and radiation.
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And some of these are direct translational opportunities
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for areas from financial disasters.
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People in California a decade ago
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would never have had to think about having an airtight house.
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But now with wildfires,
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maybe you do want something close to an airtight house.
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How do you manage that?
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There's a lot of technologies
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from the space habitation world
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that we are hoping we can actually bring back down
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to benefit life on earth as well
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in these extreme environment contexts.
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Okay, so you mentioned to go back to Swarm.
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So that was interesting to you.
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First of all, in your own work,
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but also I believe you said something
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that was inspiring from you Stevenson as well.
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So when you say Swarm, are you thinking about architectures
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or are you thinking about artificial intelligence
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like robotics or are those kind of intermixed?
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I think the future that we're seeing
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is that they're going to be intermixed,
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which is really exciting.
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So the future of space habitats
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are one of intelligent structures,
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maybe not all the way to how
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and the 2001 Space Odyssey reference
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that scares people about the habitat
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having a mind of its own.
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But certainly we're building systems now
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where the habitat has sensing technology
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that allows it to communicate its basic functions,
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maintaining life support for the astronauts,
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but could also communicate in symbiosis
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with these Swarm robots
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that would be on the outside of the spacecraft,
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whether it's in a microgravity orbiting environment
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or on the surface.
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And these little robots, they crawl,
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just a la Neil Stevenson in 70s,
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they crawl along the outside of the spacecraft
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looking for micrometeorite punctures
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or gas leaks or other faults and defects.
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And right now we're just working on the diagnosis.
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So can the Swarm with its collective intelligence
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act in symbiosis with the spacecraft and detect things?
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But in the future, we'd also love
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for these little micro robots to repair in situ
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and really be like ants living in a tree
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altogether connected to the spacecraft.
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Do you envision the system to be fully distributed?
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And just like an ant colony,
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if one of them is damaged or, you know, whatever,
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loses control and all those kinds of things
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that doesn't affect the performance of the complete system
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or doesn't need to be centralized.
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This is more like almost like a technical question.
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Do you think we could...
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Good architecture question.
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Right, from the ground up,
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it's so scary to go fully distributed.
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But it's also exceptionally powerful, right?
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A robust, resilient to the harsh conditions of space.
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Where do you, if you look into the next 10, 20, 100 years
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starting from scratch,
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do you think we should be doing
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architecturalized distributed systems?
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For space, yes, because it gives you this redundancy
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and safety profile that's really critical.
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So whether it's small swarm robots,
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where it doesn't matter if you lose a few of them,
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to habitats that instead of having a central monolithic habitat,
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you might actually be able to have
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a decentralized node of a space station
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so that you can kind of write out a Star Wars.
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You can shut a blast door if there's a fire
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or if there's a conflict in a certain area
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and you can move the humans and the crew
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into another decentralized node of the spacecraft.
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There's another idea out of Neil Stevenson's Seven Eves,
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actually, where these arclets,
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which were decentralized spacecraft that could form
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and dock little temporary space stations with each other,
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and then separate and go off on their way
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and have a decentralized approach to living in space.
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So the self assembly component of that
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too, so this is your PhD work and beyond,
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you explored autonomously self assembling
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space architecture for future space tourist habitats
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and space stations in orbit around Earth, moon and Mars.
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There's few things I personally find sexier
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than self assembling space, autonomously self assembling
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space architecture.
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In general, it doesn't even need to be space.
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The idea of like self assembling architectures
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is really interesting,
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like building a bridge or something like that
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through self assembling materials.
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It feels like an incredibly efficient way to do it
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because optimization is built in.
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So you can build like the most optimal structures
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given dynamic, uncertain, changing conditions.
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So maybe can you talk about your PhD work,
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about this work, about Tesla Ray?
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What is it in general?
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Also any cool stuff, cause this is super cool.
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
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So Tesla Ray is my PhD research.
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It's this idea that we could take tiles
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that construct a large structure like a bucky ball.
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Yeah, this is exactly what we're looking at here,
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which is the tiles that are packed flat in a rocket.
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They're released to float in microgravity.
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Magnets, pretty powerful electro permanent magnets
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on their edges, draw them together for autonomous docking.
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So there's no human in the loop here
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and there's no central agent coordinating
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saying tile one, go to tile two.
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It's completely decentralized system.
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They find each other on their own.
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What we don't show in this video is
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what happens if there's an error, right?
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So what happens if they bond incorrectly?
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The tiles have sensing.
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So proximity sensing, magnetometer,
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other sensors that allow them to detect a good bond
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versus a bad bond and pulse off and self correct,
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which anybody who works in this, you know,
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the field of self assembly will tell you
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that error detection and correction
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just like error detection in a DNA sequence
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or protein folding is really important part
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of the system for that robustness.
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And so we've done a lot of work to engineer
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that ability for the tiles to be self determining.
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They know whether they're forming the structure
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that they're supposed to form or not.
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They know if they're in a toxic relationship
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and they need to get out.
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If they need to separate exactly, yeah.
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All right, this is like so amazing.
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And for people who are just listening to this,
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yeah, there's a lot, I mean, how large are these tiles?
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So the size that we use in the lab,
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they can really be any size
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because we can scale them down to do testing
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So we sent tiles that were about three inches wide
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to the International Space Station a couple of years ago
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to test the code, test the state machine,
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test the algorithm of self assembly.
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But now we're actually building
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our first ever human scale tiles.
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They're me human size.
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So a little, you know, a little smaller
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than maybe your average human,
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but they're 2.5 feet on edge length.
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The larger scale that we would love to build in the future
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would actually be tiles that are big enough
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to form a bucky ball, big open spherical volume,
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spherical approximation volume,
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that'd be about 10 meters in diameter.
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So 30 feet, which is much bigger and grander
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in terms of open space
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than any current module on the ISS.
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And one of the goals of this project was to say,
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what's the purpose of next generation space architecture?
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Should it be something that really inspires
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and delights people when you float into that space?
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Can you get goosebumps in the way that you do
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when you walk into a really stunning piece of architecture
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And so we think that self assembly,
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this modular reconfigurable algorithm
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for constructing space structures in orbit
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is gonna give us this promise of space architecture
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that's actually worth living in.
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Living in, oh, I thought you also meant
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from like outside artistic perspective,
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see the whole thing is just.
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With the aesthetics of it, absolutely.
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You know, when you like go like into Vegas or something,
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whenever you go into a city
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and it like over the hill appears in front of you.
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And I mean, there's something majestic
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about seeing like, wow, humans created that.
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It gives you like hope about like,
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if these are bunch of ants,
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we're able to figure out how to build skyscrapers
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And in general, the design of these tiles
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and the way you envision it are pretty scalable.
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And they're inspired by exactly what you mentioned a moment ago,
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which is we have these patterns of self assembly on earth.
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And there's a lot of fantastic MIT research
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that we're building this concept on.
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So like Daniela Roos at Seasale and Pebbles,
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taking the power of magnets to create units
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that are themselves interchangeable,
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this notion of programmable matter.
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And so we're interested in going really big with it
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to build big scale space structures with programmable tiles.
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But there's also a really fascinating, you know,
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end of that on the other side of the spectrum,
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which is how small can you go with matter
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that's programmable and stacks and builds itself
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and creates a bridge or something in the future.
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What do you envision the thing would look like?
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Like when you imagine a thing far into the future
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where there's, so we're not even thinking
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about like small space, well, let's not call them small,
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but our currently sized space stations,
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but like something gigantic.
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What do you envision?
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Is this something with symmetry
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or is this something we can't even come up with yet?
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Is there beautiful structures that you imagine in your mind?
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I've got three candidates that I would love to build.
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If we're talking about monumental space architecture,
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one is, what does a space cathedral look like?
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It can be a secular cathedral,
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doesn't necessarily have to be about religion,
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but that notion of long sight lines,
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inspiring stunning architecture when you go in.
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And you can imagine floating instead of, you know,
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being on the ground and only looking up in space,
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you could be in a central node and each direction
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you look at all the cardinal directions
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are spires going off in a really large and long way.
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So that's concept number one.
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Number two would be something more organic
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that's not just geometric.
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So here, one of the ideas that we're working on in MIT
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in my lab is to say, could you,
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instead of the tesserae model, right,
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which is self assembling a shell,
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could you define a module that's a node,
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a small node that someone can live in
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and you self assemble a lot of those together?
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They're called plesiohedrons, like space filling solids
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and you dock a bunch of them together
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and you can create a really organic structure out of that.
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So this is the same way that muscles accrete to appear.
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You can have these nodes that dock together
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and one shape that I would love to form out of this
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is something like a nautilus, a seashell,
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that beautiful, you know,
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Fibonacci spiral sequence that you get in that shape,
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which I think would be a stunning and fabulous
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aggregated space station.
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You said so many cool words, plesiohedron.
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Yeah, plesiohedron.
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So that's a space filling.
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The simplest thing to think about is like a cube.
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Oh, cube. A cube, right?
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So you can stack cubes together
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and if you had an infinite number of cubes,
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you'd fill all that space.
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There's no gaps in between the cubes.
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They stack and fill space.
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Another plesiohedron is a truncated octahedron
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and that's actually one of the candidate structures
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that we think would be great for space stations.
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What's the truncated part?
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Ah, so you cut off an octahedron
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actually has little pointy areas.
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You truncate certain sections of it
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and you get surfaces that are on the structure
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that are cubes and I think hexagons.
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I'd have to remind myself exactly what the faces are.
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But overall, a truncated octahedron
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can be bonded to other truncated octahedrons
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and just like a cube,
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it fills all the gaps as you build it out.
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So you can imagine two truncated octahedrons,
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they come together at an airlock,
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which is what we space people called doors in space
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and you dock them on all sides
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and you've basically created this decentralized network
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of space nodes that make a big space station.
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And once you have enough of them
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and you're growing with enough big units,
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you can do it in any macro shape you want.
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That's where the nautilus comes in.
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This could be design and organically inspired shape
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for a space station.
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Can I just say how awesome it is to hear you say,
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I know you meant people that are doing research
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on space exploration, space technology,
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but it also made me think of a future.
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There's earth people and there's those space people.
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I'd love to unite those two.
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Yeah, no, no, for sure.
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For sure, but like, it's like New Yorkers
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and like Texans or something like that.
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Yeah, of course, you live for a time in New York
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and then you go up to Boston.
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But for a time, you're the space people.
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All I know those space people, they're kind of wild up there.
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We'll see how that dynamic of all.
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There's that culture, culture forms.
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And I would love to see what kind of culture,
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once you have sort of more and more civilians.
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I mean, there's a human,
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I mean, I love psychology and sociology
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and I'll maybe ask you about that too,
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which is like the dynamic between humans.
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You have to kind of start considering that.
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You need to start spending more and more time up in space
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and start sending civilians,
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start sending bigger and bigger groups of people.
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And then of course, the beautiful and the ugly emerges
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from the human nature that we haven't been able
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to escape up to this point.
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But when you say the plesorhedrons, these kinds of shapes,
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are they multifunctional?
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Like, is the idea you'd be able to,
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humans cannot occupy them safely in some of them
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and some others have some other purposes?
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Exactly, one could be sleeping quarters.
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One could be a greenhouse or an agricultural unit.
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One could be a storage depot.
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Essentially all of the different rooms
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or functions that you might need in a space station
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could be subdivided into these nodes
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and then stacked together.
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And one of the promises of both Tesseray,
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my original PhD research, which is these shells
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and then this follow on node concept,
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is that right now we build space stations
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and once they're built, they're done.
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You can't really change them profoundly,
link |
but the benefit of a modular self assembling system
link |
is you can disassemble it.
link |
You can completely reconfigure it.
link |
So if your mission changes
link |
or the number of people in space that you wanna host,
link |
if you have a space conference happening
link |
like South by Southwest.
link |
I was thinking space party,
link |
but space conference was good too.
link |
Then maybe all of a sudden you want to change out
link |
what were window tiles yesterday,
link |
cupola tiles and make them into a birthing port
link |
so that you can welcome five new spaceships
link |
to come and join you in space.
link |
That's what this promise of reconfigurable space architecture
link |
might allow us to explore.
link |
I've been hanging out with Grimes recently
link |
and just feel like she belongs up in space.
link |
This is like designed for artists essentially.
link |
Like imagine, I mean, this is what South by
link |
keeps introducing me to is there's like,
link |
the weird and the beautiful people and like the artists
link |
and it feels like there's a lot of opportunities
link |
for art and design.
link |
It's like space is a combination of arts,
link |
design and great engineering with a,
link |
it's a safety critical with like the highest of stakes.
link |
So don't, you can't mess it up.
link |
And is this, first of all, you're talking about tiling.
link |
So Neil Stevens is obsessed about tiling.
link |
I don't know if it's related to any of this,
link |
but he seems to be obsessed with like,
link |
how do you tile a space?
link |
That's a mathematical geometric notion.
link |
Like the tessellation.
link |
And it's, I mean, it's a beautiful idea for architecture
link |
that you can self assemble these different shapes
link |
and you can have probably some centralized guidance
link |
of the kind of thing you want to build,
link |
but they also kind of figure stuff out themselves
link |
in terms of the low level details,
link |
in terms of the figuring out when the,
link |
when if everything fits just right for the OCD people,
link |
like, what's that subreddit?
link |
Pleasantly, it's like really fun, everything.
link |
They have like videos of everything's just pleasant
link |
when everything just fits perfectly.
link |
All the tolerances come together well.
link |
So they figure that out on themselves
link |
and the local robotics problem.
link |
But by the way, was Daniela Rose Pebbles,
link |
what's the Pebbles Project?
link |
The Pebbles Project are little cubes that have EPMs
link |
on them, electromagnetic magnets,
link |
and they can self disassemble.
link |
So they'll turn off.
link |
And so you'll have this little structure
link |
that all of a sudden can flip the little Pebbles over
link |
and essentially just disaggregate.
link |
They have to make some pleasing sounds.
link |
And what that's gonna,
link |
so I'm supposed to talk to Daniela,
link |
so that I'll probably spend an hour
link |
just discussing the sounds on the Pebbles.
link |
Okay, what were we talking about?
link |
So that's, cause you mentioned two, I think.
link |
Right, my third one.
link |
Yeah, is there a third one?
link |
My third one is a ring world,
link |
just because every science fiction book ever
link |
that's worth anything has a ring world in it.
link |
So a really big torus that could encircle a planet
link |
or encircle a Nether celestial body,
link |
maybe an asteroid or a small moon.
link |
And the promise here is just the beauty
link |
of being able to have that geometry in orbit
link |
and all that surface area for solar panels
link |
and talking and essentially just all of what that enables
link |
to have a ring world at that scale in orbit.
link |
By the way, for the viewers,
link |
we're looking at figure alone, what paper is this from?
link |
So a hexagonal tiling of a torus generated in Mathematica,
link |
referencing code and approach from two citations.
link |
So we're looking at a tiled donut and I'm not hungry.
link |
So this is the, is this from your thesis or no?
link |
This is probably, I mean, this is in my thesis.
link |
This looks like it was one of my earlier papers.
link |
This was an approach to say, great,
link |
we've come up with this tessellation approach
link |
And we picked the bucky ball
link |
because it is the most efficient surface area
link |
to volume shape and what's expensive in space,
link |
the surface area shipping up all that material.
link |
So we wanted something that would maximize the volume.
link |
But if we think about ring worlds and other shapes,
link |
we wanted to look at how do you tile a torus?
link |
And this is one example with hexagons to be able to say,
link |
could we take this same tesserae approach
link |
of self assembling tiles and create other geometries?
link |
This is so freaking cool.
link |
So you mentioned microgravity and I saw,
link |
I believe that there's a picture of you
link |
floating in microgravity.
link |
When did you get to experience that?
link |
What was that like?
link |
So I've flown nine times on the,
link |
affectionately known as the vomit comet.
link |
It's the parabolic flight and essentially it does
link |
what you'd want a plane never to do.
link |
It pitches really steeply upwards at 45 degrees.
link |
That's a picture of you.
link |
That's super early in my PhD.
link |
Some of just the passive tiles,
link |
before we even put electronics in,
link |
we were just testing the magnet polarity
link |
and the essentially,
link |
is it an energy favorable structure
link |
to self assemble on and so on?
link |
So we tweaked a lot of things between.
link |
Are we looking at a couple of them?
link |
Yeah, you're looking at a bunch of them there.
link |
Almost 32 of them.
link |
Can you comment on what's the difference
link |
between microgravity and zero gravity?
link |
Is that an important difference?
link |
It's an important difference.
link |
There is no zero gravity.
link |
There's no nothing.
link |
There's in the universe,
link |
there is no such thing as zero gravity.
link |
So Newton's law of gravity tells us
link |
that there's always gravity attraction
link |
between any two objects.
link |
So zero G is a shorthand
link |
that some of us fall into using
link |
where it's a little easier to communicate to the public.
link |
The accurate term is microgravity
link |
where you are essentially floating your weightless
link |
but generally in free fall.
link |
So on the parabolic flights,
link |
the vomit comet you're in free fall
link |
at the end of the parabola
link |
and in orbit around the earth when you're floating,
link |
you're also in free fall.
link |
So that's microgravity.
link |
So affectionately called vomit comet,
link |
I'm sure there's a reason why it's called affectionately.
link |
So what's it like?
link |
What's your first time
link |
to both philosophically, spiritually and biologically?
link |
It is unlike anything else you will experience on earth
link |
because it is this true feeling of weightlessness
link |
So the closest experience you can think of
link |
would be floating in a pool
link |
but you move slowly when you float in a pool
link |
and your motion is restricted.
link |
When you're floating,
link |
it's just you and your body flying like in a dream.
link |
It takes the littlest amount of energy
link |
like a finger tap against the wall of the plane
link |
to shoot all the way across the fuselage.
link |
And you can move at full speed.
link |
Like you can move your arms to your muscles.
link |
There's no resistance that it will be in the pool.
link |
They actually tell you to make a memory
link |
when you're on the plane
link |
because it's such a fleeting experience for your body
link |
that even a few days later,
link |
you've already forgotten exactly what it felt like.
link |
It's so foreign to the human experience.
link |
They kind of suggest that you explicitly try to
link |
really form this into a memory
link |
and then you can do the replay for training.
link |
Cognitively freeze it.
link |
Say, when we have neural link, we can replay that.
link |
The replay, that memory.
link |
So in terms of how much stress it has on your body,
link |
is it biologically stressful?
link |
You do feel a 2G pullout, right?
link |
So the cost of getting those micro G parabolas
link |
is you then have a 2G pullout.
link |
You have to train for it.
link |
If you move your neck too quickly in that 2G pullout,
link |
you can strain muscles.
link |
But I wouldn't say that it's actually
link |
a profound tough thing on the body.
link |
It's really just an incredibly novel experience.
link |
And when you're in orbit
link |
and you're not having to go through the ups and downs
link |
of the parabolic plane,
link |
there's a real grace and elegance.
link |
And you see the astronauts learn to operate
link |
in this completely new environment.
link |
What are some interesting differences
link |
between the parabolic plane
link |
and when you're actually going up in orbit?
link |
Is it that with orbit you can look out and see
link |
that blue little planet of ours?
link |
You can see the blue marble,
link |
the stunning overview effect,
link |
which is something I hope to see one day.
link |
What's also really different is
link |
if you're in orbit for any significant period of time,
link |
there's going to be a lot more physiological changes
link |
to your body than if you just did an afternoon flight
link |
on the vomit comet.
link |
Everything from your bones, your muscles,
link |
your eyeballs change shape.
link |
There's a lot of different things
link |
that happen for long duration space flight.
link |
And we still have to, as scientists,
link |
we still have to solve a lot of these interesting challenges
link |
to be able to keep humans thriving
link |
in microgravity or deep duration space missions.
link |
Deep duration space missions.
link |
Okay, let's talk about this.
link |
I was just going to ask a bunch of dumb questions.
link |
So approximately how long does it take
link |
to travel to Mars, asking for a friend?
link |
Asking for a friend, as we all do.
link |
About three years for a round trip.
link |
And that's not that it actually takes like that.
link |
Why the round trip, is that?
link |
Well, the friend was asking about the one way trip.
link |
Got it, got it, got it.
link |
That's okay, cool.
link |
Before just like literally flying to Mars in a round.
link |
It takes three years.
link |
There's an interstitial time there
link |
because you really can only go between Earth and Mars
link |
at certain points in their orbits
link |
where it's favorable to make that journey.
link |
And so part of that three years
link |
is you take the journey to Mars a few months,
link |
six to nine months.
link |
You're there for a period of time
link |
until the orbits find a favorable alignment again.
link |
And then you come back another six to nine months.
link |
So one way travel is six to nine months.
link |
You hang out there on vacation and come back.
link |
Well, me who loves working all the time,
link |
all vacation is forced vacation.
link |
But all right, so okay.
link |
So that gives us a sense of duration.
link |
And we can maybe also talk about
link |
longer and longer and longer duration as well.
link |
What are the hardest aspects of this,
link |
of living in space for many days?
link |
For let's say a hundred days, 200 days.
link |
Maybe there's a threshold when it gets really tough.
link |
What are some stupid little things or big things
link |
that are very difficult for human beings to go through?
link |
So one big thing and one little thing.
link |
And there are these two classic problems
link |
that we're trying to solve in the space industry.
link |
It's not as much of a problem for us right now
link |
on the International Space Station
link |
because we're still protected
link |
by part of Earth's magnetosphere.
link |
But as soon as you get farther out into space
link |
and you don't have that protection
link |
once you leave the Van Allen belt area of the Earth
link |
and the cocoon around the Earth,
link |
we have really serious concerns
link |
about radiation and the effect on human health long term.
link |
That's the big one.
link |
The small one, and I say it's small
link |
because it seems mundane,
link |
but it actually is really big in its own way,
link |
is mental health and how to keep people happy and balanced.
link |
And you were alluding to some of the psychological challenges
link |
of having humans together on missions
link |
and especially as we try to scale
link |
the number of humans in orbit or in space.
link |
So that's another big challenge
link |
is how to keep people happy and balanced
link |
That's not an issue on Earth at all.
link |
Okay, so we'll talk about each of those
link |
in a bit more detail,
link |
but let me continue on the chain of dumb questions.
link |
What's a good source for food and space?
link |
And what are some sort of standard go to meals, menus?
link |
Right now, your go to menu is gonna be mostly freeze dried.
link |
Every so often, NASA will arrange for a fun stunt
link |
or a fresh food to get up to station.
link |
So they did bake double tree cookies with Hilton
link |
a couple of years ago, as I recall,
link |
I think sometime before the pandemic.
link |
But there's work actually in our lab at MIT.
link |
Maggie Copeland, one of my staff researchers,
link |
is looking at the future of fermentation.
link |
Everybody loves beer, right?
link |
Beer and wine and kimchi and miso,
link |
these foods that have just been really important
link |
to human cultures for eons
link |
because we love the umami and the better flavor in them.
link |
But it turns out they also have a good shelf life,
link |
And they also have an additional health benefit
link |
for the microbiome, for probiotics and prebiotics.
link |
So we're trying to work with NASA
link |
and convince them to be more open minded
link |
to fermented food for long duration deep space missions.
link |
That we think is one of the future elements
link |
in addition to in situ growing your own food.
link |
Not, okay, this is essential for the space party
link |
is the space beer.
link |
Yes, it's the fermented product, yes.
link |
Okay, cool, in terms of water,
link |
what's a good source of drinkable water?
link |
Like where do you get water?
link |
Do you have to always bring it on board with you?
link |
And is there compressed efficient way of storing it?
link |
So to steal a line from Charlie Bolden,
link |
who's the former administrator of NASA,
link |
this morning's fresh water is yesterday's coffee.
link |
So if you think about what that means,
link |
you drank the coffee yesterday.
link |
Oh right, as a child, it goes fully through the body.
link |
Fully through the body as the recycling system.
link |
And then you drink what you peed out
link |
as clarified refined fresh water the next day.
link |
That is one source of water.
link |
Another source of water in the near neighborhood
link |
of our solar system would be on the moon.
link |
So water ice deposits, there's also water on Mars.
link |
This is one of the big things that's bringing people
link |
to want to develop infrastructure on the moon,
link |
is once you've gotten out of the gravity well of earth,
link |
if you can find water on the moon and refine it,
link |
you can either make it into propellant
link |
or drinkable water for humans.
link |
And so that's really valuable as a potential gateway
link |
out into the rest of the solar system
link |
to be able to get propellant
link |
without always having to ship it up from earth.
link |
So how much water is there on Mars?
link |
It's a great question.
link |
We don't know this yet, right?
link |
There's water at the caps.
link |
I suspect NASA from all of the satellite studies
link |
that they've done at Mars have a decent idea
link |
of what the water deposits look like,
link |
but I don't know to what degree they have characterized those.
link |
I really hope there's life or traces of previous life on Mars.
link |
This is a special spot in my heart
link |
because I got to work on Sherlock,
link |
which is the astrobiology experiment
link |
that's on Mars right now,
link |
searching for what they would say in a very cautious way
link |
is signs of past habitability.
link |
They want to be careful not to get people overly excited
link |
and say we're searching for signs of life.
link |
They're searching to see if there would have been organics
link |
on the surface of Mars or water in certain areas
link |
that would have allowed for life to flourish.
link |
And I really love this prospect.
link |
I do think within our lifetimes,
link |
we'll get a better answer about finding life
link |
in our solar system if it's there.
link |
If not on Mars, maybe Europa, one of the icy worlds.
link |
So you like astrobiology?
link |
This is part of the,
link |
so it's not just about human biology.
link |
It's also other extraterrestrial alien biology.
link |
Search for life in the universe.
link |
Is that scary you or excited you?
link |
It excites me profoundly excitedly.
link |
That there's other alien civilizations,
link |
potentially very different than our own?
link |
I think there's gotta be some humility there.
link |
And certainly from science fiction,
link |
we have plenty of reasons to fear that outcome as well.
link |
But I do think as a scientist,
link |
it would be profoundly exciting if we were to find life,
link |
especially in the near neighborhood of our solar system.
link |
Right now, we would expect it to be
link |
most likely microbial life,
link |
but we have a real serious challenge in astrobiology,
link |
which is it may not even be carbon based life.
link |
And all of our detectors,
link |
we only know to look for DNA or RNA.
link |
How would you even build a detector
link |
to look for silicon based life or different molecules
link |
than what we know to be the fundamental molecules for life?
link |
And then you mentioned offline, Sarah Walker.
link |
I mean, she heard the question that she's obsessed with,
link |
even just defining life.
link |
What is life to look outside the carbon base?
link |
I mean, to look outside of basically anything
link |
we can even imagine chemically,
link |
to look outside of any kind of notions
link |
that we think of as biology.
link |
Yeah, it's really weird.
link |
So you now get into this land of like complexity
link |
of measuring like how many assembly steps
link |
it takes to build that thing.
link |
And maybe dynamic movement or some maintenance
link |
of some kind of membrane structures.
link |
Like we don't even know like
link |
which properties life should have,
link |
whether it can, should be able to reproduce
link |
and all those kinds of things or pass information,
link |
genetic type of information, we don't know.
link |
And it's like, that's so humbling.
link |
I mean, I tend to believe that there could be
link |
something like alien life here on earth
link |
and we're just too human biology obsessed to even recognize it.
link |
The shadow biosphere, I remember you and Sarah
link |
was talking about.
link |
I mean, that's like speaking of beer.
link |
I mean, that's something I wanted to make sure,
link |
in all of science to shake ourselves out
link |
of like remind ourselves constantly how little we know.
link |
Cause they might be right in front of our nose.
link |
Like I wouldn't be surprised if like trees
link |
are like orders of magnitude more intelligent than humans.
link |
They're just operating at a much slower scale
link |
and they're like talking shit about us the whole time.
link |
Like about silly humans that take everything seriously
link |
and we start all kinds of nuclear wars
link |
and we quarrel and we tweet about it.
link |
And then, but the trees are always there
link |
just watching us silly humans.
link |
It's like the ants in Lord of the Rings.
link |
So, I mean, I don't know.
link |
I mean, obviously I'm joking on that one,
link |
but there could be stuff like that.
link |
Well, let me ask you the Drake equation,
link |
How many, like obviously nobody knows,
link |
but what's your gut?
link |
What's your hope as a scientist, as a human?
link |
How many alien civilizations are out there?
link |
As a ex physicist,
link |
I'm now much more on the aerospace engineering side
link |
for space architecture, but as an ex physicist,
link |
I hope it is prolific.
link |
I think the challenge is,
link |
if it's as prolific as we would hope,
link |
if there are many, many, many civilizations,
link |
then the question is, where are they?
link |
Why haven't we heard from them?
link |
And the Fermi paradox is there's some great filter
link |
that life only gets to some level of sophistication
link |
and then kills itself off through war,
link |
or through famine, or through different challenges
link |
that filter that society out of existence.
link |
And it would be an interesting question to try to understand
link |
if the universe was teeming with life,
link |
why haven't we found it or heard from it yet,
link |
Yeah, I personally believe that it's teeming with life.
link |
And you're right, I think that's a really useful
link |
productive engineering scientific question
link |
of what kind of great filter
link |
can just be destroying all of that life
link |
or preventing it from just constantly talking to us,
link |
silly descendants of apes.
link |
That's a really nice question,
link |
like, what are the ways
link |
civilizations can destroy themselves?
link |
There's too many, sadly.
link |
Well, I don't think we've come up with most of them yet.
link |
That's also probably true.
link |
That's the thing, it's, I mean,
link |
and like, if you look at nuclear war,
link |
some of it is physics,
link |
but some of it is game theory.
link |
It's human nature, it's how societies built themselves,
link |
how they interact, how we create and resolve conflict.
link |
And it gets back to the human question on
link |
when you're doing long term space travel,
link |
how do you maintain this dynamical system
link |
of flawed irrational humans
link |
such that it persists throughout time?
link |
And not just maintain the biological body,
link |
but get people from not murdering each other.
link |
Like, like each other sufficiently
link |
to where you kind of fit well.
link |
But I think, you know,
link |
if the songs or poetry or books taught me anything,
link |
if you like each other a little too much,
link |
I mean, the problems arise.
link |
Cause then there's always a third person who also likes,
link |
and then there's the drama is like,
link |
I can't believe you did that last night, whatever.
link |
So, and then there's beer.
link |
Gets complicated quickly.
link |
Gets complicated quickly.
link |
Okay, anyway, back to the dumb questions.
link |
Cause you answered this,
link |
there's an interview where we answer
link |
a bunch of cool little questions from,
link |
from young students and so on about like space.
link |
One of them was playing music in space.
link |
And he mentioned something about
link |
what kind of instruments you could use
link |
to play music in space.
link |
Could you, could you mention about
link |
like the Spotify work in space?
link |
And if I wanted to do a live performance,
link |
what kind of instruments would I need?
link |
I mean, you referenced culture before.
link |
And I think this is one of the most exciting things
link |
that we have at our fingertips,
link |
which is to define a new culture for space exploration.
link |
We don't just have to import cultural artifacts from earth
link |
to make life worth living in space.
link |
And this musical instrument that you referenced
link |
was a design of an object
link |
that could only be performed in microgravity.
link |
So it doesn't sound the same way
link |
when it's a percussive instrument,
link |
when it's rattled or moved in a gravity environment.
link |
Is that, can we look it up?
link |
It's called the telemetron.
link |
Oh, the telemetron.
link |
That is so awesome.
link |
It's created by Sans Fish and Nicole Villiere
link |
to amazing graduate students
link |
and staff researchers on my team.
link |
What does it look like?
link |
It looks steampunk, actually.
link |
Yeah, it's a pretty cool design.
link |
It looks like it's a geometric solid
link |
that has these interesting artifacts on the inside.
link |
And it has a lot of sensors actually,
link |
additionally on the inside,
link |
like IMUs, inertial measurement sensors,
link |
that allow it to detect when it's floating
link |
and when it's not floating
link |
and provides this really kind of ethereal,
link |
they later sonify it.
link |
So they use electronic music to turn it into a symphony
link |
or turn it into a piece.
link |
And yeah, this is the object, the telemetron.
link |
How does the human interact with it?
link |
So it's an interactive musical instrument.
link |
It actually requires another partner.
link |
So the idea was that it's something like a dance
link |
or just like something like a choreography in space.
link |
And speaking of which,
link |
you also talked about sports
link |
and like ball sports, like playing soccer.
link |
So you mentioned that,
link |
so you're also gonna move at full speed.
link |
And then if you push off the wall lightly,
link |
you can fly across, zoom across.
link |
So how does the physics of that work?
link |
Can you still play soccer, for example, in space?
link |
You can, but one of the most intuitive things
link |
that we all learn as babies, right?
link |
Is whenever you throw something,
link |
if I was gonna toss something to you,
link |
I toss it up because I know that it has to compensate
link |
for the fact that that Keplerian arc
link |
is gonna draw it down, the equations of motion
link |
are gonna draw it down.
link |
I would, in space, I would just shoot something
link |
directly towards you, so like straight line of sight.
link |
And so that would be very different
link |
for any type of ball sport is to retrain your human mind
link |
to have that as your intuitive arc of motion
link |
From your experience from understanding
link |
how astronauts get adjusted to the stuff,
link |
how long does it take to adjust to the physics
link |
of this world, this other world?
link |
So even after one or two parabolic flights,
link |
you can gain a certain facility
link |
with moving in that environment.
link |
I think most astronauts would say
link |
maybe several days on station or a week on station
link |
and their brain flips.
link |
It's amazing the plasticity of the human brain
link |
and how quickly they are able to adapt.
link |
And so pretty quickly they become creatures
link |
of this new environment.
link |
Okay, so that's cool, it's creating
link |
a little bit of an experience.
link |
What about if you go for more than 100 days
link |
for one year, for two years, for three years,
link |
what challenges start to emerge in that case?
link |
So Scott Kelly wrote this amazing book
link |
after he spent a year in space and he's a twin.
link |
It's absolutely fantastic that NASA
link |
got to do a twin study, it's perfect.
link |
So he wrote a lot about his experience
link |
on the health side of what changed.
link |
Things like bone density, muscle atrophy,
link |
eyesight changing because the shape of your eyeball changes
link |
which changes your lens, which changes how you see.
link |
If we're then thinking about the challenges
link |
between a year and three years,
link |
especially if we're doing that three year trip
link |
to Mars for your friend who asked earlier,
link |
then you have to think about nutrition.
link |
And so how are you keeping all of these different needs
link |
for your body alive?
link |
How are you protecting astronauts against radiation
link |
either having some type of a shell on the spacecraft
link |
which is expensive because it's heavy.
link |
If it's something like lead
link |
of really effective radiation shell,
link |
it's gonna be a lot of mass.
link |
Or is there a pill that could be taken
link |
to try to make you less in danger
link |
of some of the radiation effects?
link |
A lot of this has not yet been answered,
link |
but radiation is a really significant challenge
link |
for that three year journey.
link |
And what are the negative effects of radiation
link |
on the human body out in space?
link |
A higher likelihood to develop cancer at a younger age.
link |
So you'd probably be able to get there and get back,
link |
but you'd find yourself in the same way
link |
of if you were exposed to significant radiation on earth,
link |
you'd find significant bad health effects as you age.
link |
What do you think about like decades?
link |
Do you think about decades?
link |
Or is this like an entire human life?
link |
I think about centuries, centuries.
link |
For my space knowledge, but yeah, for decades.
link |
I think as soon as we get past the three year mark,
link |
we'll absolutely want somewhere
link |
between three years and a decade,
link |
we'll want artificial gravity.
link |
And we know how to do that actually.
link |
The engineering questions still need to be tweaked
link |
for how we'd really implement it,
link |
but the science is there to know how we would spin habitats
link |
in orbit and generate that force.
link |
So even if the entire habitat's not spinning,
link |
you at least have a treadmill part of the space station
link |
that is spinning and you can spend some fraction of your day
link |
in a near to one G environment and keep your body healthy.
link |
Wait, literally from just spinning?
link |
From spinning, yes, and triple force.
link |
So you generate this force.
link |
If you've ever been in those carnival rides,
link |
the gravitrons that spin you up around the side,
link |
that's the concept.
link |
And this is actually one of the reasons
link |
why we are spinning out a new company from my MIT lab.
link |
That was accidental, but well, well noted space pun.
link |
It could possibly do it.
link |
That jokes, all right.
link |
But yeah, we're spinning out a new company
link |
to look at next generation space architecture
link |
and how do we actually scale humanities access to space?
link |
And one of the areas that we wanna look at
link |
is artificial gravity.
link |
Is there a name yet?
link |
Yep, there's a name.
link |
We are just exiting stealth mode.
link |
So your podcast listeners will literally be
link |
among some of the first to hear about it.
link |
It's called Aurelia Institute.
link |
Aurelia is an old English word for chrysalis.
link |
And the idea with this is that we, humanity, collectively,
link |
are at this next stage of our metamorphosis,
link |
like a chrysalis, into a space fairing species.
link |
And so we felt that this was a good time,
link |
a necessary time, to think about
link |
next generation space architecture,
link |
but also Starfleet Academy,
link |
if you know that reference from Star Trek.
link |
Yes, so let me ask a silly sounding,
link |
ridiculous sounding, but probably extremely important
link |
question, sex and space, including intercourse,
link |
conception, procreation, birth, like being a parent,
link |
like raising the baby.
link |
So basically from birth, well, from the before the birth
link |
part, like the birds and the bees and stuff.
link |
And then the whole thing, how complicated is that?
link |
I remember looking at the, thank you, thank you.
link |
I remember looking at this exact Wikipedia page, actually.
link |
And it's, I remember being, the Wikipedia page is sex
link |
and space, and fascinating how difficult of an
link |
engineering problem the whole thing is.
link |
Is that something you think about too,
link |
how to have generations of humans,
link |
self replicating, organizations, yeah, society is essentially.
link |
I mean, I guess with micro, like if you solve
link |
the gravity problem, you solve a lot of these problems.
link |
That's the hope, yeah, is like the central challenge
link |
of microgravity to human reproduction.
link |
But we do host a workshop every year at Beyond the Cradle,
link |
which is the space event that we run at MIT.
link |
And we always do one on pregnancy in space,
link |
or motherhood, or raising children in space,
link |
because there are huge questions.
link |
There've been a few mammal studies that have looked
link |
at reproduction in space, but there are still really
link |
major questions about how does it work,
link |
how does the fetus evolve in microgravity
link |
if you were pregnant in space?
link |
And I think the near term answer is just gonna be,
link |
we need to be able to give humans a 1G environment
link |
for that phase of our development.
link |
Yeah, so there's some studies on mice in microgravity,
link |
and it's interesting, like I think the mice,
link |
like one of them, the mice weren't able to walk,
link |
or like their understanding of physics,
link |
I guess is all for something like that.
link |
Yeah, the mental model when you're really young
link |
and you're kind of getting your mental model of physics,
link |
we do think that that would change kids abilities
link |
to if they were born in microgravity,
link |
their ability to have that intuition
link |
around an Earth based 1G environment might be missing,
link |
because a lot of that is really crystallized
link |
in early development, early childhood development.
link |
So that makes sense that they would see that in mice, yeah.
link |
So what about life when we choose to park our vehicles
link |
on another planet on the moon, but let's go to Mars?
link |
First of all, is that excite you humans going to Mars,
link |
like stepping foot on Mars?
link |
And when do you think it'll happen?
link |
It does excite me.
link |
I think visionaries like Elon are working to make that happen
link |
in terms of building the road to space.
link |
We are really excited about building
link |
out the human lived experience of space once you get there.
link |
So how are you gonna grow your food?
link |
What is your habitat gonna look like?
link |
I think it's profoundly exciting,
link |
but I do think that there's a little bit
link |
of a misunderstanding of Mars anywhere in the near future
link |
being anything like a replacement for Earth.
link |
So it is good for humanity to have these other pockets
link |
of our civilization that can expand out beyond Earth,
link |
but Mars is not in its current state,
link |
a good home for humanity.
link |
Too many perchlorates in the soil,
link |
you can't use that soil to grow crops.
link |
Atmosphere is too thin, certainly can't breathe it,
link |
but it's also just really thin compared to our atmosphere.
link |
A lot of different challenges
link |
that would have to be fundamentally changed
link |
on that planet to make it a good home
link |
for a large human civilization.
link |
How does a large civilization of humans get built on Mars?
link |
And where do you think it gets starts being difficult?
link |
So can you have a small base of like 10 people essentially,
link |
kind of like the international space station kind of situation?
link |
And then can you get it to a hundred, to a thousand,
link |
Are there some interesting challenges there
link |
that worry you saying that Mars is just not a good backup
link |
at this time for Earth?
link |
I think small outposts absolutely, like McMurdo, right?
link |
So we have these models of really extreme environments
link |
on Earth and Antarctica, for example,
link |
where humans have been able to go
link |
and make a sustainable settlement.
link |
McMurdo style life on Mars,
link |
probably feasible in the 2030s.
link |
So we want to send the first human missions to Mars,
link |
and maybe as early as the end of this decade,
link |
more likely early 2030s.
link |
Moving anywhere beyond that in terms of a place
link |
where like an entire human life would be lived,
link |
where it's not just you go for a three month deployment
link |
and you come back.
link |
That is actually the big challenge line is just saying,
link |
is there enough technological sophistication
link |
that can be brought that far out into space?
link |
If you imagine your electronics break,
link |
there's no radio shack.
link |
This dates me a little bit that my mind jumps to radio shack.
link |
But there's no supply chains on Mars
link |
that can supply the level of technological sophistication
link |
for all the products that we rely on on day to day life.
link |
So you'd be going back to actually a very simple existence,
link |
more like pioneer life out West
link |
in the story of the US, for example.
link |
And I think that the future of larger scale gatherings
link |
of humans in orbit, or sorry, in space,
link |
is actually gonna be in microgravity,
link |
floating space cities,
link |
not so much trying to establish settlements
link |
So you think sort of a significant engineering investment
link |
in terms of our efforts and money
link |
should be on large spaceships
link |
that perhaps are doing this kind of self assembly,
link |
all these kinds of things and doing an orbit,
link |
maybe building a giant donut around the planet over time.
link |
Yeah, that is the goal.
link |
And I think the current political climate is such
link |
that you can't get the trillion dollar investment
link |
to build, to start from scratch
link |
and build the sci fi megastructure.
link |
But if you can build it in fits and starts
link |
in little different pieces,
link |
which is another advantage of self assembly,
link |
it's much more like how nature works.
link |
So it's biomimicry inspired way for humanity
link |
to scale out in space.
link |
And whether it's out in space or on Mars,
link |
the idea that sort of two people fall in love.
link |
And then that couple has to teach that child
link |
that they came from Earth.
link |
I just love the idea that somebody's born on Mars
link |
And you have to be like,
link |
that this is not actually like the original home.
link |
Just them looking at Earth and being like,
link |
this is where it came from.
link |
I don't know, that's really inspiring to me.
link |
And the child being really confused
link |
and then wanting to go back to TikTok or whatever they do.
link |
Whatever they do in that area.
link |
I mean, there's great sci fi right about
link |
people being born on Mars.
link |
And because it's a lower gravity environment,
link |
they're taller, they're more gangly
link |
if they were actually able to develop there.
link |
And then they come back to Earth
link |
and they're like second class citizens
link |
because they can't function here in the same way
link |
because the gravity is too strong for them.
link |
You see this in series like the expanse
link |
with the belters and these different societies
link |
that if we were to succeed
link |
in having human societies grow up in different pockets,
link |
it's not necessarily going to be easy for them
link |
to always come back to Earth as their home.
link |
Yeah, different cultures form,
link |
which is the positive way of phrasing it,
link |
but it's also this human history teaches us
link |
that we like to form the other.
link |
So there's this kind of conflict that naturally emerges.
link |
Let me ask another sort of dark question.
link |
What do you think about coming from a military family?
link |
There's still sadly wars in the world.
link |
Do you think wars,
link |
a military conflicts will follow us into space?
link |
Wars between nations?
link |
Like from my perspective currently,
link |
it just seems like space is a place for scientists
link |
and engineers to explore ideas.
link |
But the more and more progress you make,
link |
does it worry you that nations start to step in
link |
and form that go out on full out military conflict,
link |
whether it's in cyberspace in space or actual hot war?
link |
I am really concerned about that.
link |
And I do think for decades,
link |
the scientific community in space has hung on to this notion
link |
from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,
link |
which is space is the province of all humankind,
link |
peaceful uses of outer space only.
link |
But I do think the rise in tensions
link |
and the geopolitical scene that we're seeing,
link |
I do, yeah, I do harbor a lot of concern
link |
about hot wars following humanity out into space.
link |
And it's worth trying to tie nations together
link |
with more collaboration to avoid that happening.
link |
The International Space Station is a great example.
link |
I think it's something like 18 countries
link |
are party to this treaty.
link |
It might be less, it might be more.
link |
And then of course,
link |
there's a smaller number of countries
link |
that actually send astronauts.
link |
But even at the fall of the Soviet Union
link |
and through some tense times with Russia,
link |
the ISS had been a place where the US and Russia
link |
were actually able to collaborate between mirror and ISS.
link |
I think it'd be really important right now in particular
link |
to find other platforms where these hegemonic powers
link |
in the world and developing world nations
link |
can come and collaborate on the future of space
link |
and purposefully intertwine our success
link |
so that there's a danger to multiple parties
link |
if somebody is a bad actor.
link |
So we're now talking as there's a war in Ukraine
link |
and I haven't been sleeping much at family, friends,
link |
colleagues in both countries.
link |
And I'm just talking to a lot of people,
link |
many of whom are crying, refugees.
link |
And I, you know, there's a basic human compassion
link |
and love for each other that I believe technology
link |
can help catalyze and accelerate.
link |
But there's also science.
link |
There's something about rockets.
link |
There's something about, and I mean like space exploration
link |
that inspires the world about the positive possibilities
link |
of the human species.
link |
So in terms of Ukraine and Russia and China and India
link |
and the United States and Europe and everywhere else,
link |
it seems like collaborating on giant space projects
link |
is one way to escape these wars,
link |
to escape these sort of geopolitical conflicts.
link |
I mean, there's something, there's so much camaraderie
link |
to the whole thing.
link |
And even in this little period of human history,
link |
we're living through, it seems like that's essential.
link |
Even through this pandemic, there is something so inspiring
link |
about those like SpaceX rockets going up, for example.
link |
This reinvigoration of the space exploration efforts
link |
by the commercial sector, I don't know.
link |
That was, as many of us have sort of some dark times
link |
during this pandemic, just like loneliness
link |
and sometimes emotion and anger and just hopelessness
link |
and politics, and then you look at those rockets going up,
link |
and it just gives you hope.
link |
So I think that's an understated sort of value
link |
of space exploration is the thing that unites us
link |
and gives us hope.
link |
Obviously, it also inspires young generations of young minds
link |
to also contribute in not necessarily in space exploration,
link |
but in all of science and literature and poetry.
link |
There's something about when you look up to the stars,
link |
it makes you dream.
link |
And so that's a really good reason to sort of invest
link |
in this, whether it's building giant megastructure,
link |
which is so freaking cool, but also colonizing Mars.
link |
Yeah, it's something to look forward to.
link |
Something that, and not make it a domain of war,
link |
but a domain of human collaboration and human
link |
compassion, I think.
link |
You're the founder and director of the MIT Space
link |
Exploration Initiative.
link |
It includes a ton of projects.
link |
So I just wanted to, they're focused, I guess,
link |
on life in space from astrobiology,
link |
like we talked about, to habitats.
link |
Are there some other interesting projects
link |
part of this initiative that pop to mind
link |
that you find particularly cool?
link |
One is the future of in space manufacturing.
link |
So if we're going to build large scale space structures,
link |
yes, it's great to ship them up from Earth
link |
and self assemble them.
link |
But what about extrusion in orbit?
link |
It's one of the best technologies
link |
to leverage in microgravity, because you
link |
can extrude a particularly long beam that
link |
would sag in a normal gravity environment,
link |
but might be able to become the basis of a truss
link |
or a large scale space structure.
link |
So we're doing miniature tests of extrusion
link |
and are excited to fly this on the International Space
link |
Station in a few months.
link |
We are working on swarm robots.
link |
We have just announced, actually, MIT's return to the moon.
link |
So my organization is leading this mission for MIT,
link |
going back to the surface of the moon
link |
as early as the end of this year, 2022, maybe early 2023.
link |
And trying to take data from our research payloads
link |
at this historic South Pole site, where
link |
NASA's supposed to send the first humans back
link |
on the Artemis III mission.
link |
So our hope is to directly support that human mission
link |
How does that connect to the swarm aspects?
link |
Yeah, so we're actually going to fly
link |
one of the little astro ants.
link |
That's the current plan.
link |
One of the little swarm robots on the top of a rover.
link |
That's part of the mission.
link |
Ant riding a rover?
link |
Yes, exactly, an ant riding a rover.
link |
That rover gets packed in a lander.
link |
That lander gets packed in a SpaceX rocket.
link |
So it's a whole nesting dolls situation
link |
to get to the moon.
link |
Mother of robot dragons.
link |
So this one, a swarm of one?
link |
Swarm of one, exactly.
link |
We're testing out.
link |
It's a tech demonstration mission, not a true swarm.
link |
Yeah, there they are, those are the astro ants.
link |
Wow, and this was a distributed system,
link |
and in theory, you could have a ton of these.
link |
Yes, these could also be centralized.
link |
So they have wireless technology that could also
link |
talk to a central base station.
link |
And we'll be assessing kind of case by case,
link |
whether it makes sense to operate them in a decentralized
link |
swarm or to command them in a centralized swarm.
link |
Each robot is equipped with four magnetic wheels,
link |
which enable the robot to attach to any magnetic surface
link |
so you can operate basically any environment.
link |
He tested the, we tested the mobility of all robots
link |
on different materials in a microgravity environment.
link |
On the vomit comet prior to go into the moon.
link |
That must look so cool.
link |
So they're basically moving along
link |
different metallic surfaces.
link |
It's interesting when you, just a minute ago,
link |
talking about the reflection of how space can be
link |
so aspirational and so uniting.
link |
There's a great quote from Bill Anders
link |
from the Apollo 8 mission to the moon,
link |
which is he, it's the Earthrise photo that was taken,
link |
where you see the Earth coming up over the horizon
link |
of the moon, and the quote is something along the lines of,
link |
we came all the way to discover the moon,
link |
and what we really discovered was the Earth.
link |
This really powerful image looking back.
link |
And so we're also trying to think for our lunar mission,
link |
we realized we're a very privileged group at MIT
link |
to get the opportunity to do this.
link |
How could we bring humanity along with us?
link |
And so one of the things we're still testing out,
link |
I don't know if we're gonna be able to just swing it,
link |
would be to do something like a Twitch plays Pokemon,
link |
but with the robot.
link |
So let a lot of people on Earth actually control the robot
link |
or at least benefit from the data that we're gathering
link |
and try to release the data openly.
link |
So we're exploring a couple of different ideas
link |
for how do we engage more people in this mission?
link |
That would be surreal to be able to interact in some way
link |
with the thing that's out there.
link |
On another surface.
link |
Direct connection.
link |
Direct connection.
link |
I think about artificial intelligence in that same way,
link |
which is like building robots,
link |
puts a mirror to us humans.
link |
It makes us like wonder about like,
link |
what is intelligence?
link |
What is consciousness?
link |
And what is actually valuable about human beings?
link |
When an AI system learns to play chess better than humans,
link |
you start to let go of this idea that humans are special
link |
because of intelligence.
link |
It's something else.
link |
Maybe the flame of human consciousness.
link |
It's the capacity to feel deeply,
link |
to sort of to both suffer and to love all those things.
link |
And it somehow AI to me puts a mirror to that.
link |
You mentioned Hal 9000,
link |
and you had to bring it up with these swarm bots
link |
crawling on the surface of your cocoon in space.
link |
Let me steel man the Hal 9000 perspective here.
link |
The poor guy just wanted to maintain the mission
link |
and the astronauts were,
link |
I don't know if people often talk about that,
link |
but doctors have to make difficult decisions too.
link |
When there's limited resources,
link |
you actually do have to sacrifice human life often
link |
because you have to make decisions.
link |
And I think Hal is probably making that kind of decision
link |
about what's more important,
link |
the lives of individual astronauts or the mission.
link |
And I feel like when other humans
link |
will need to make these decisions,
link |
and it also feels like AI systems will need to help
link |
make those decisions.
link |
I don't know, I guess my question is about
link |
greater and greater collective intelligence by systems.
link |
Do you worry about that?
link |
What is the right way to sort of solve this problem,
link |
keeping a human in the loop?
link |
Do you think about this kind of stuff?
link |
Or are they sufficiently dumb now,
link |
the robots that's not yet on the horizon to think about?
link |
I think it should be on the horizon.
link |
It's always good to think about these things early
link |
because we make a lot of technical design decisions
link |
at this phase working with swarm robots
link |
that it would be better to have thought about
link |
some of these questions early
link |
in the life cycle of a project.
link |
There is a real interest in NASA right now
link |
thinking about the future of human robot interaction, HRI,
link |
and what is the right synergy in terms of level of control
link |
for the human versus level of dependence
link |
or control for the robot.
link |
And we're beginning to test out more of these scenarios.
link |
For example, the Gateway Space Station,
link |
which is meant to be in orbit around the moon
link |
as a staging base for the surface operations,
link |
is meant to be able to function autonomously
link |
with no humans in it for months at a time
link |
because they think it's going to be seasonal.
link |
They think we might not be constantly staffing it.
link |
So this will be a really great test of,
link |
I don't know that anybody's yet worried
link |
about how 9,000 evolving,
link |
but certainly just the robustness of some of these AI systems
link |
that might be asked to autonomously maintain the station
link |
while the humans are away or detection algorithms
link |
are going to say, you know, if you had a human pilot,
link |
they might see debris in orbit and steer around it.
link |
There'll be a lot of autonomous navigation
link |
that has to happen.
link |
That'll be one of the early testbeds
link |
where we'll start to get a little bit closer to that future.
link |
Well, the HRI component is really interesting to me,
link |
especially when the AI includes like almost friendship
link |
because like people don't realize this, I think,
link |
that we humans long for connection
link |
and when you have even the basic interaction
link |
that's just like supposed to be just like serving you or something,
link |
you still project, it's still a source of meaning and connection.
link |
And so you do have to think about that.
link |
I mean, how 9,000, you know,
link |
the movie maybe doesn't portray it that way,
link |
but I'm sure there's a relationship there
link |
between the astronauts and the robot,
link |
especially when you have greater and greater level
link |
of intelligence, maybe that addresses
link |
the happiness question too.
link |
Yeah, I think there's a great book by Kate Darling,
link |
who's one of my colleagues at MIT.
link |
Yeah, she's amazing.
link |
She's already been on this podcast,
link |
but we talk all the time and we're supposed to talk
link |
and we've been missing each other
link |
and we're gonna make it happen soon.
link |
Come down to Texas, Kate.
link |
Anyway, yeah, she's amazing and she has this book,
link |
and she has her whole work is about this.
link |
Connection with robots, yeah.
link |
This beautiful connection that we have with robots,
link |
but I think it's greater and greater importance
link |
when it's out in space,
link |
because it could help alleviate some of the loneliness.
link |
One of the projects in the book that I gave you,
link |
which is this catalog of the projects
link |
that we've worked on over the last five years,
link |
is this social robot that was developed at the Media Lab,
link |
and we, one of the first years in 2017
link |
that we flew a Zergy flight,
link |
we took the social robot along
link |
and tried to do a little bit
link |
of a very scaled down human study
link |
to look at these questions,
link |
because you do imagine that we would form a bond,
link |
a real bond with the social robots
link |
that might be not just serving us on a mission,
link |
but really be our teammates on a future mission.
link |
And I do think that that could have a powerful role
link |
in the mental health and just the stability of a crew
link |
is to have some other robot friends come along.
link |
What do you, by the way, the book you mentioned
link |
is into the Anthropocosmos,
link |
a whole space catalog from the space catalog.
link |
Get that reference.
link |
Yeah, so call out to Earth catalog,
link |
a whole space catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative.
link |
What about the happiness?
link |
You said that that's one of the problems
link |
of when you're out in space.
link |
How do you keep humans happy?
link |
Again, asking for a friend.
link |
Yes, I mean, one of the big challenges is
link |
you can't just open a window or walk out a door
link |
and blow off steam, right?
link |
You can't just go somewhere to clear your head.
link |
And in that sense, you need to build habitats
link |
that are homes that really care for the humans inside them
link |
and have, whether it's biophilia
link |
and a place where you can go and feel like you're in nature
link |
or a VR headset, which for some people is a porcimal crumb,
link |
but is maybe better than nothing.
link |
You need to be thinking about these technological interventions
link |
that are gonna have to be part of your home
link |
and be part of your maybe day to day ritual
link |
to keep you steady and balanced and happy
link |
or feeling fulfilled.
link |
What about other humans,
link |
relationship with other humans?
link |
Did those get weird
link |
when you get past a certain number of humans?
link |
I'm not an expert in this area,
link |
but an anecdote that I'll share.
link |
My understanding is that NASA has still not decided
link |
whether it's better to send married couples
link |
or single crew members in terms of,
link |
you want some level of stability,
link |
you don't wanna have the drama of romantic relationships
link |
like you're alluding to before,
link |
but they can't decide because married couples also fight
link |
and have a really tough dynamic.
link |
And so there's a lot of open questions still to answer
link |
about what is the ideal psychological makeup of a crew?
link |
And we're starting to test some of these things
link |
with the civilian crews that are going up
link |
with Inspiration 4, like last fall with SpaceX,
link |
and Acts 1 that's gonna fly in a few days here in March.
link |
As we begin to lengthen the time of those civilian crews,
link |
I think we'll start to learn a little bit more
link |
about just average everyday human to human dynamics
link |
and not the astronauts that are themselves selected
link |
to be perfect human specimens, very good to work with,
link |
easy to get along with.
link |
I wish you collected more data about this pandemic
link |
because I feel like it's a good rough simulation
link |
of what it'd be out in space.
link |
A lot of people were locked down, some married couples,
link |
I think a lot of marriages broke up,
link |
a lot of marriages got closer together.
link |
So it's like, and then the single people,
link |
some of them went off the cliff and some of them discovered
link |
their new happiness and meaning and so on.
link |
It's a beautiful little experiment, a painful one.
link |
Is there a thorough way to really test that to,
link |
because it's such a costly experiment
link |
to send humans up there,
link |
but I guess you can always return back to Earth
link |
if it's not working out.
link |
That's what we hope.
link |
We hope you don't have like a Apollo 13 situation
link |
that doesn't quite make it back,
link |
but yeah, this is also why Mars is such a challenge.
link |
The moon is only three days away.
link |
That's a lot quicker to recover from
link |
if there's a psychological problem with the crew
link |
or any type of maintenance problem, anything.
link |
Three years is such a challenge
link |
compared to these other domains
link |
that we've been getting more used to
link |
in terms of human spaceflight.
link |
So this is a question that we will need to have explored more
link |
before we start really sending crews to Mars.
link |
So you're a young scientist.
link |
Do you think in your lifetime,
link |
you will go out into orbit,
link |
you will go out beyond into deep space
link |
and potentially step you.
link |
I don't know if you can call yourself a civilian.
link |
I don't know if that's what you can't ask,
link |
but you as a curious ant from MIT,
link |
land step on Mars.
link |
Are you coming back?
link |
Yeah, I'm coming back.
link |
I don't want that one way mission.
link |
I want the two way mission, but yes.
link |
I mean, I think we're already talking
link |
about a pretty near term opportunity
link |
where I could send graduate students
link |
to the International Space Station.
link |
No, not a sacrifice,
link |
but send graduate students to the ISS to do their research.
link |
I do think you and I both would have an opportunity
link |
to go to a lunar base of some sort within our lifetime.
link |
And there's a good chance if we really wanted to,
link |
we might have to really advocate for it,
link |
apply to an astronaut program.
link |
There will be some avenues for humans
link |
in our lifetime to go to Mars.
link |
What's the bar for like health?
link |
Do you think that bar will keep getting lower and lower
link |
in terms of how healthy, how athletic,
link |
like how the psychological profile,
link |
all those kinds of things?
link |
For one, we're going to build more robust habitats
link |
that don't depend on astronauts being
link |
so impeccably well trained.
link |
So we're going to make it better for inclusion
link |
and just opening access to space.
link |
But there's a fantastic group called Astra Access
link |
that is already helping disabled space flyers do zero G
link |
flights and potentially get access to the ISS.
link |
And some of the things that we think of as disabilities
link |
on Earth are hyper abilities in space.
link |
You don't need really powerful legs in space.
link |
What you'd really benefit from having is a third arm,
link |
more ways to kind of move yourself around
link |
and grip and interact.
link |
So we are already seeing a much more open minded approach
link |
to who gets to go to space and Astra Access
link |
is a wonderful organization doing some of that work.
link |
I'm hoping introversion will also be a superpower in space.
link |
OK, well, first I'd love to get your opinion
link |
on commercial space flight with SpaceX
link |
with Blue Origin are doing.
link |
And also another question on top of that
link |
is because you've worked with a lot of different kinds
link |
of people, culturally, what's the difference between SpaceX
link |
or commercial type of efforts, NASA and MIT?
link |
Yeah, so the first part of your question,
link |
I am thrilled by all of the commercial activity in space.
link |
It has really empowered our program.
link |
So instead of me waiting for five years to get a grant
link |
and get the money from the grant and only then can
link |
you send a project to space, I got my fundraise,
link |
a lot like a startup founder, and I directly
link |
buy access to space on the International Space Station
link |
through SpaceX or Nanorax, same with Blue Origin
link |
and their suborbital craft, same with Axiom now,
link |
Axiom's making plans for their own commercial space station.
link |
It's not out of the realm of possibility,
link |
but in a few years, I will rent lab space in orbit.
link |
I will rent a module from the Axiom space station
link |
or the Orbital Reef, which is the Blue Origin space
link |
station, or Nanorax is thinking about star lab oasis.
link |
There's probably some other companies
link |
that I'm not even aware of yet that are doing commercial space
link |
So I think that's fabulous.
link |
And really empowering for our research.
link |
So loosely speaking, does it become
link |
affordable for MIT type of research lab?
link |
Or does it need to be a multi university,
link |
like a gigantic effort?
link |
It's a consortium thing.
link |
Yeah, consortium thing.
link |
One of the reasons we're spinning out Oralea
link |
is we actually realize it's cheap enough.
link |
It doesn't even have to be MIT.
link |
And we wanted to start democratizing access
link |
to these spaceflight opportunities
link |
to a much broader swath of humanity.
link |
Could you take a Khan Academy educational course
link |
about, hey, students around the world,
link |
this is how you get ready for a zero G flight?
link |
And by the way, come fly with us next year,
link |
which is something we're going to do with Oraleas.
link |
We're going to bring much more just kind of day to day folks
link |
on zero G flights and get them access
link |
to engaging in the space industry.
link |
So it's become cheap enough.
link |
And the prices have dropped enough to consider even that.
link |
So that's amazing.
link |
It definitely doesn't have to be a consortium of universities
link |
anymore, depends on what you want to fly.
link |
If you want to fly James Webb, a huge telescope that's
link |
decades in the making, sure, you need a NASA allocation
link |
budget, you need billions.
link |
But for a lot of the stuff in the book and our research
link |
portfolio, it's actually becoming far more accessible.
link |
So that's commercial.
link |
What about NASA and MIT academia?
link |
Yeah, I think people have been worried about NASA
link |
the last few years because in some people's minds,
link |
they are seeding ground to these commercial efforts.
link |
But that's really not what's happening.
link |
NASA empowered these commercial efforts
link |
because they want to free themselves up to go to Mars
link |
and go to Europa and continue being
link |
that really aspirational force for humanity
link |
of pushing the boundary, always pushing the boundary.
link |
And if they were anchored in low Earth orbit,
link |
maintaining a space station indefinitely,
link |
that's so much a part of their budget
link |
that it was keeping them from being able to do more.
link |
So it actually is really fantastic for NASA
link |
to have grown this commercial ecosystem,
link |
and then that frees NASA up to go further.
link |
And in academia, we like to think
link |
that we will be able to do the provocative next generation
link |
research that is going to unlock things at that frontier.
link |
And we can partner with NASA.
link |
We can go through a program if we want to send a probe out
link |
really far, but we can also partner with SpaceX
link |
and see what human life in a SpaceX Mars settlement
link |
might look like and how we could design for that.
link |
Speaking of projects, maybe there are other projects
link |
that popped to mind from the Space Exploration Initiative
link |
or maybe stuff from the book, the convention.
link |
Something super cool.
link |
I mean, everything we've been talking about is cool,
link |
but just something that pops to mind again.
link |
Yeah, so we talked about life in space
link |
and you might need more arms than legs.
link |
One of the projects by Valentina Sumini
link |
was an air powered robotics tail.
link |
So it's a soft robotics tail
link |
that essentially has a little camera
link |
on the back end of it, can do computer vision
link |
and knows where to grapple.
link |
So it's behind you.
link |
It grapples onto something and holds you in space
link |
and then you can actually free up both of your hands to work.
link |
So we're already starting to think about the design
link |
of bionic humans or prosthetics
link |
or things that would make you kind of like a cyborg
link |
to augment your capabilities
link |
when you're in a space environment.
link |
How would you control something like that?
link |
So it's kind of like a, I mean, you can't call it a leg,
link |
It's an additional appendage.
link |
So how would you, what are ideas
link |
for controlling something like that?
link |
Yeah, so right now it's super, yeah, there you go.
link |
Right now it's super manual.
link |
It's basically just like a kind of a set pattern
link |
of inflating as we're testing it.
link |
But in the future, if we had a neuro link,
link |
I mean, this is something
link |
that you could imagine directly controlling,
link |
just thinking thoughts and controlling it.
link |
That's a ways away.
link |
So we talked about on the biology side, astrobiology,
link |
there's probably agriculture stuff.
link |
Is there other things that kind of feed the ecosystem
link |
of out in space for survival
link |
or the robotics, architectures, the self assembly stuff?
link |
So kind of combining something we were talking about,
link |
you can form these relationships with objects
link |
and anthropomorphize.
link |
One of the things that we're thinking about
link |
for agriculture created by Manway and Somu,
link |
so two students at MIT, was this little,
link |
it looks like a planet, but it's inspired by,
link |
I think a Mandala or Nepalese spinning wheel.
link |
And you plant plants on the inside
link |
and the astronaut has to spin it every day
link |
to help the plant survive.
link |
So it's a way to give the astronaut something
link |
to care about, something that they are responsible
link |
for keeping alive and can really invest themselves in.
link |
And it's not necessary, right?
link |
We have other ways to grow in orbit,
link |
hydroponics, liquid medium,
link |
trying to keep the liquid around the plant roots is hard
link |
because there's no gravity to pull it down
link |
in a particular direction.
link |
But what I loved about this project was they said,
link |
sure, we have ways that the plants could grow on their own,
link |
but the astronauts might wanna care for it
link |
in the same way that we have little plants
link |
that come to be important to us, little plant friends.
link |
Yeah, so there's AgriFuge.
link |
That's an early model of this spinning,
link |
manually spinning plant habitat.
link |
I guess this is the best of academic research
link |
is you can do these kinds of wild ideas.
link |
Well, you know, I get to spend quite a bit of time
link |
with Mr. Elon Musk and he's very stressed,
link |
especially about starship
link |
and all those kinds of engineering efforts.
link |
What do you think about how damn hard it is
link |
to get out of this space?
link |
Like are we humans gonna be able to do this?
link |
I think it feels like it's an engineering problem,
link |
it's a scientific problem,
link |
but it's also just a motivation problem
link |
for the entire human species.
link |
And you also need to have superstar researchers
link |
and engineers working on it.
link |
So you have to get like the best people in the world,
link |
inspire them and starting from a young age and kind of...
link |
It wasn't calcating us into why we do it.
link |
I mean, I guess that's why it's exciting.
link |
You don't know if we're gonna be able to pull this off.
link |
Like we could like fail miserably.
link |
And that, I suppose, I mean,
link |
that's where the best of engineering is done,
link |
is like success is not guaranteed.
link |
And even if it happens, it might be very painful.
link |
I think that's what's so special
link |
about what Elon is doing with SpaceX
link |
is he takes these risks and he tests iteratively
link |
and he'll, we'll see the spectacular failures
link |
on the path to a successful starship.
link |
It's something that, you know,
link |
people have said, why isn't NASA doing that?
link |
Well, that's cause NASA is doing that with taxpayer dollars
link |
and we would all revolt if we saw NASA failing
link |
at all these different stages.
link |
But that level of, you know,
link |
spiral engineering theory of development
link |
isn't super impressive.
link |
And it's a really interesting approach
link |
that SpaceX has taken.
link |
And I think between people like Elon and Jeff Bezos
link |
and Firefly and NASA and ESO, we are gonna get there.
link |
They're building the road to space.
link |
These trailblazers are doing it.
link |
And now part of the challenge is to get the rest
link |
of the public to understand that it's happening, right?
link |
A lot of people don't know that we're going back to the moon,
link |
that we're gonna send the first woman to the moon
link |
within a few years.
link |
A lot of people don't know
link |
that there are commercial space stations in orbit,
link |
that it's not just NASA that does space stuff.
link |
So we have a big challenge to get more of humanity
link |
excited and educated and involved again,
link |
kind of like in the Apollo era
link |
where it was a big deal for everybody.
link |
Well, a lot of that is also one of the big impressive things
link |
that Elon does, I think, extremely well
link |
is the social media, is the getting people excited.
link |
And I think that actually he's helped NASA step their game up
link |
in terms of social media.
link |
There's something about, yeah, the storytelling,
link |
but also not like authentic and just real
link |
and raw engineering.
link |
There's a lot of excitement for that humor and fun also.
link |
All of those things you realize,
link |
the thing that make up the virality of the meme
link |
is beautiful, you have to kind of embrace that.
link |
And to me, this kind of,
link |
I criticize a lot of companies based on this.
link |
I talked to a bunch of CEOs and so on.
link |
And it's just like, there's a caution,
link |
like let us do this press conference thing
link |
where when the final product is ready
link |
and it's overproduced as opposed to the raw, the gritty,
link |
I mean, something that I think MIT is very good at doing
link |
is just showing the raw by nature, the mess of it.
link |
And the mess of it is beautiful
link |
and people get really excited
link |
and failure is really exciting.
link |
When the thing blows up and you're like, oh shit,
link |
that makes it even more exciting when it doesn't blow up
link |
and doing all of that on social media
link |
and showing also the humans behind it,
link |
the individual young researchers or the engineers
link |
or the leaders where everything's at stake.
link |
I don't know, I think I'm really excited about that.
link |
I do want MIT to do that more for students
link |
to show off their stuff and not be pressured
link |
to do this kind of generic official presentation,
link |
but show their, become a YouTuber also.
link |
Like show off your raw research
link |
as you're working on it in the early days.
link |
I hope that's the future.
link |
Things like, I was teasing about TikTok earlier,
link |
but these kinds of things, I think inspire young people
link |
to show off their stuff, to show their true self,
link |
the rawness of it,
link |
because I think that's where engineering is best.
link |
And I think that will inspire people
link |
about all the cool stuff we could do in space.
link |
I shouldn't say, I couldn't agree more.
link |
And I actually think that this is why we need
link |
a real life Starfleet Academy right now.
link |
It was the place where the space cadets got to go
link |
to learn about how to engage in a future of life in space.
link |
And we can do it in a much better way.
link |
There are a bunch of groups that traditionally haven't thought
link |
that they could engage in aerospace,
link |
whether it's because you were told
link |
you had to be into math and science.
link |
Now we need space lawyers,
link |
we need space artists like Grimes, right?
link |
We need really creative, profoundly interesting people
link |
to want to see themselves in that future.
link |
I think it's a big challenge to us in the space industry
link |
to also do some more diversity, equity and inclusion
link |
and show a broader swath of society
link |
that there's a future for them in this space exploration vision.
link |
Let me push back on one thing.
link |
We don't need space lawyers.
link |
I'm just kidding, it's a joke.
link |
We do, we do, we do.
link |
Okay, we do, the lawyers are great, I love them.
link |
Okay, let me ask a big ridiculous question.
link |
What is the most beautiful idea
link |
to you about space exploration?
link |
Whether it's the engineering, the astrobiology,
link |
the science, the inspiration,
link |
that the human happiness or aliens, I don't know.
link |
What do you like inspires you every day
link |
in terms of its beauty, in terms of its awe?
link |
As a ex physicist, what I've always found so profound
link |
is just that at really, really small scales
link |
like particle physics and really, really big scales
link |
like astrophysics, there are similarities
link |
in the way that those systems behave and look
link |
and there's a certain beautiful symmetry in the universe
link |
that's just kind of waiting for us
link |
to tie together the physics and really understand it.
link |
That is something that just really captivates me
link |
and I would love to, even though I'm now much more
link |
on the applied space exploration side,
link |
I really try to keep up with what's happening
link |
in those physics areas,
link |
because I think that will be a huge answer for humanity
link |
along the lines of are we alone in the universe?
link |
One of the fascinating things about you
link |
is you have a degree in physics, mathematics,
link |
and philosophy and now, I don't know what would you call
link |
aerospace engineering, maybe kind of thing.
link |
So you have a foot in all of these worlds,
link |
the theoretic, the sort of the beauty of that world
link |
and the philosophy somehow is in there
link |
and now the very practical, pragmatic implementation
link |
of all these wild ideas.
link |
Plus your incredible communicator, all those things.
link |
What did you pick up from those different disciplines?
link |
Or maybe I'm just romanticizing all those different disciplines.
link |
But what did you pick up from the variety
link |
of that physics, mathematics, philosophy?
link |
What I loved about having this chance
link |
to do a liberal arts education
link |
was trying to understand the human condition
link |
and I think more designers for space exploration
link |
should be thinking about that
link |
because there's so much depth of,
link |
like we were talking about issues and opportunities
link |
around human connection, human life,
link |
meaning in life, how do you find fulfillment or happiness?
link |
And I think if you approach these questions
link |
just purely from the standpoint of an engineer or a scientist,
link |
you'll miss some of what makes it a life worth living.
link |
And so I love being able to combine
link |
some of this notion of philosophy
link |
and the human condition with my work.
link |
But I'm also a pragmatist and I didn't wanna stay
link |
just purely in these big picture questions about the universe.
link |
I wanted to have an impact on society
link |
and I also felt like I had such a wonderful childhood
link |
and a really fantastic setup that I owe society some work
link |
to really make a positive impact
link |
for a broader swath of citizens.
link |
And so that kind of led me from the physics domain
link |
to thinking about engineering
link |
and practical questions for life in space.
link |
In physics, was there a dream?
link |
Are you also captivated by this search
link |
for the theory of everything that kind of unlocks
link |
the deeper and deeper in the simple, elegant way,
link |
the function of our universe?
link |
Do you think they'll be useful for us
link |
for the actual practical engineering things
link |
that you're working on now?
link |
I mean, I worked at CERN for two summers in undergrad
link |
and we were looking for supersymmetry,
link |
which was one of these alternatives to the standard model.
link |
And it was sad because my professors
link |
were getting sadder and sadder
link |
because they weren't finding it.
link |
They were excluding what we would call this parameter space
link |
of finding these supersymmetric particles.
link |
But the search for what that theory of everything could be
link |
or a grand unified theory that kind of answers
link |
some of the holes within the standard model of physics
link |
would presumably kind of unlock a better understanding
link |
of certain fundamental physical laws
link |
that we should be able to build a better understanding
link |
of engineering and day to day services from that.
link |
It might not be an immediately obvious thing.
link |
When we discovered the Higgs boson,
link |
I was there at CERN that day.
link |
It was July 4th, 2012 that it was announced.
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We all waited like nerds overnight in line
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to get into the announcement chamber.
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I had never waited for even like a Harry Potter premiere
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in my life, but we waited for this like announcement
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of the Higgs boson to get into the chamber overnight.
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But did that immediately translate
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to technology for engineering?
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No, but it's still a really important part
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of our understanding of these fundamental laws of physics.
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And so I don't know that it's always immediate,
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but I think it is really critical knowledge
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for humanity to seek.
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It might just shake up our understanding of the world.
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What scares me is it might help us create
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more dangerous weapons.
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So, and then we'll figure out that great filter situation.
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And I still believe that human compassion and love
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is actually the way to defend against all these greater
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and greater and more impressive weapons.
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Let me ask a weird question.
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In terms of you disagreeing with others,
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what important idea do you believe is true
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that many others don't agree with you on?
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Maybe it's a tough question.
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You might have to think about that one,
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but whether it's very specific,
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like which material to use or something
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about a particular project,
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or it could be grand priorities on missions.
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I think one you actually mentioned is interesting
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is like the thing we should be looking for
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is like colonization of space
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versus colonization of planets.
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That's probably my best hot take
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that people would just agree with me on
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is life in floating cities
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as opposed to life on the surface.
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How do you envision that like spread of humans?
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Because you said at the beginning of the conversation,
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something about like scale, increasing the scale,
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basically humans in space.
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Are they just like, they're in orbit
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and then they get a little farther and farther out?
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Like, do you see these kind of floating cities
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just getting farther and farther from Earth?
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They can always kind of return.
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But like, if you look a few centuries from now,
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do you just see us all these like floating cities?
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And it just kind of envelops the space around us.
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And it's like neighborhoods.
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Yeah, it needs to be.
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It's like rural and there's like giant structures
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and there's small pirate structures
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and that kind of stuff.
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I think low Earth orbit might come to look like that.
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And it's a really interesting regulatory challenge
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to make sure that there's some cross purposes.
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So the more cool space cities we have in orbit,
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the more shiny objects in the night sky,
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the worst it is for astronomers
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in a really kind of overly simplified case.
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So there's some pushback to this like amoebaing
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where we just grow kind of incongruously
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or indiscriminately as an amoeba in low Earth orbit.
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Beyond that though, I think we'll grow in pockets
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where there are resources.
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So we won't just expand around the gravity well of Earth.
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We'll do some development around the moon,
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some development around asteroids,
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some development around Mars,
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because there'll always be purposes
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for which we wanna go down to a physical object
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and study it or extract something or learn from it.
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But I think we'll grow in fits and starts in pockets.
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Some of the coolest pockets are the gravity balanced pockets
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like the Lagrange points,
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which is where we just sent, we not me personally,
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but NASA just sent James Webb, the big telescope.
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I think it's at L2, so.
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What's the nice feature about those pockets?
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So it's a stable orbit.
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There are several different Lagrange points.
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And so it just requires less energy
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to stay where you're trying to stay.
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Yeah, that's fascinating.
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What's also fascinating is the interaction
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between nations on that regard, like who owns that.
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Do you, would you say in those floating cities,
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do you envision independent governments?
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That was gonna be my next answer to you,
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which pushed me harder for a more provocative question
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where I might disagree with other people.
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I don't yet have my own opinions fully formed on this,
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but we are trying to figure out right now
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what happens to the moon
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with all of these first come, first served actors
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just arriving and setting precedents
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that might really affect future access.
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And one example is property rights.
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We do want companies that have the expertise
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to go to the moon and mine stuff
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that will help us develop a human settlement
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there or a gateway.
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But companies need to know generally
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that they have rights to a certain area
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or that they have some legal right
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to sell things that they're getting.
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Does that mean we're gonna grant property rights
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on the moon to companies who has the right
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to give that right away?
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So there's a bunch of really kind of gnarly questions
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that we have to think about,
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that's why I think we need space lawyers.
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Maybe that's the true provocative answers.
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I think we need space lawyers.
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True, I mean, yeah, yeah.
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I mean, but those questions again, as you said,
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eloquently will help us answer questions about here.
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It is a little strange.
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I mean, it's obvious, but it's also strange.
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If you look at the big picture of it all,
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that we draw these like borders around geographical areas
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and we say, this is mine.
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Like, and then we fight wars over what's mine or not.
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It seems like there's possible alternatives,
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but also it seems like there needs to be a public ownership
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of some parts, like, you know,
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what is it, Central Park in New York?
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Is there something like preserving?
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Yeah, the commons.
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That's why we titled the book into the Anthropocosmos.
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We know it's a long and kind of a mouthful,
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but this notion of the Anthropocene,
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we have a lot of commons problems in humanity.
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How are we treating the Earth global climate change?
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How are we going to treat and behave in space?
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How can we be responsible stewards of the space commons?
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And I would love to see an approach to the moon
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that is commons based,
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but it's hard to know who would be the protector
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or the enforcer of that.
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And if it's, which it will be probably in the early days,
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a lot of companies sort of working on the moon,
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working on Mars, working out in space,
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it feels like there still needs to be
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a civilian representation of like the greater effort
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or something like that,
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like where there should be a president,
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there should be a democracy of some kind
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where people can vote.
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Some representative government.
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Those are all, again, the same human questions.
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What advice would you give to a young person today
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thinking about what they want to do with their life, career?
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So somebody in high school, somebody in college,
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maybe somebody that looks up to the stars
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and dreams to one day, take it one way,
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take it to Mars or to contribute something to the effort.
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I'd say you should feel empowered
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because it's really the first time in human history
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that we're at this cusp of interplanetary civilization.
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And I don't think we're gonna lapse back from it.
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So the future is incredibly bright for young people
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that even younger than you and I,
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who will actually really get a chance to go to Mars
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The other thing I would say is be open minded
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about what your own interests are.
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I don't think you anymore have to be shoehorned
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into a particular career to be welcomed
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into the future of space exploration.
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If you are an artist and that is your passion,
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but you would love to do space art or if not space art,
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use your artistry to communicate a feeling
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or a message about space.
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That's a role that we desperately need
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just as much as we need space scientists and space engineers.
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Well, when you look at your own life,
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you're an incredibly accomplished scientist,
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young scientist, but you know,
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and you hopped around from physics to aerospace.
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So going from the biggest theoretical ideas
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to the biggest practical ideas,
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is there something from your own journey
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you can give advice to?
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Like how to end up doing incredible research at MIT?
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Maybe the role of the university and college
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and education and learning, all that kind of stuff.
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I'd say one piece of advice is find really good teammates
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because I get to be the one that's talking to you,
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but there are 50 graduate students, staff and faculty
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that are part of my organization back at MIT.
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And I'm actually, you guys can't see it on camera,
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but I'm sitting here with my co founder and COO,
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And that is really what makes these large scale challenges
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for humanity possible,
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is really fantastic teams working together
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to scale more than what I could do alone.
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So I think that that's an important model
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that we don't talk about enough in academia.
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There's a big push for this like lone wolf genius figure
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in academia, but that's certainly not been the case
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I've had wonderful collaborators
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and people that I work with along the team.
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Also cross disciplinary.
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Yeah, cross disciplinary, interdisciplinary,
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whatever you want to call it, but.
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Artist, where do artists come in?
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Do you work with artists?
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We do, we have an arts curator
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on the space exploration initiative side.
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She helps make sure partly
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around that communication challenge that we talked about
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that we're not just doing zero G flights and space missions,
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but that we take our artifacts of this sci fi space future
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to museums and galleries and exhibits.
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She pushed me to make sure her name is Shinglu.
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She pushed me for our first ISS mission.
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I was just gathering all the engineering payloads
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that I wanted to support for the students to fly,
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including my own work.
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And she said, you know what?
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We should do an open call internationally for artists
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to send something to the ISS.
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And we found out it was the first time
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we were the first ever international open call
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for art to go to the ISS.
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And that was thanks to Shing, an artist bringing a perspective
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that I might not have thought about prioritizing.
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Yeah, that's awesome.
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So when you look out there,
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it's the flame of human consciousness.
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There does seem to be something quite special about us humans.
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Well, first of all, what do you think it is?
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What's consciousness?
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What are we trying to preserve here?
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What is it about humans that should be preserved
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or life here on earth?
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They, what gives you hope to try to expand it out
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farther and farther?
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Like what makes you sad if it was all gone?
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I think we're a remarkable species
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that we are aware of our own thoughts.
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We are meta aware of our own thoughts and of ourselves.
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And are able to speak on a podcast
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about our meta awareness about our own thoughts.
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About our own thoughts, yeah, turtles all the way down.
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I think that that is a really special gift
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that we have been given as a species
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and that there's a worth to expanding
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our circles of awareness.
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So we're very aware of as an earth based species.
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We've become a little bit of more aware
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of the fragility of earth and how special a place it is
link |
when we go to the moon and we look back.
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What would it mean for us to have a presence
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and our purpose in life as a inter solar system species
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or eventually an intergalactic species?
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I think it's a really profound opportunity for exploration
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for the sake of exploration.
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A real gift for the human mind.
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Yeah, for anything we're curious creatures.
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You see, you do believe we might one day
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become intergalactic civilization.
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Long, long time from now.
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We have a lot of propulsion challenges
link |
to answer to get that far.
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So you have a hope for this.
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Another big ridiculous question building on top of that.
link |
What do you think is the meaning of life?
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This individual life of ours, your life
link |
that unfortunately has to come to an end
link |
as far as we know for now.
link |
And our life here together, is there a why?
link |
Or do we just kind of like let our curiosity carry us away?
link |
Is there a single kind of driving purpose why
link |
or can it just be curiosity based?
link |
I certainly feel, and this is not the scientist
link |
in me talking, but just more of like a human soul talking.
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I certainly feel some sense of purpose
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and meaning in my life.
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And there's a version of that that's a very local level
link |
within my family, which is funny because this whole conversation
link |
has been big grand space exploration themes,
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but you asked me this question and my first thought
link |
is what really matters to me, my family,
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my biological reproducing unit.
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But then there's also another purpose,
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like another version of the meaning in my life
link |
that is trying to do good things for humanity.
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So that sense that we can be individual humans
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and have our local meaning,
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and we can also be global humans,
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maybe someday like the Star Trek utopia
link |
will all be global citizens.
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I don't want to sound too naive,
link |
but there is I think that beauty to a meaning
link |
and a purpose of your life that's bigger than yourself,
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working on something that's bigger and grander
link |
than just yourself.
link |
The deepest meaning is from the local biological
link |
reproduction unit, and then it goes to the engineering
link |
scientific, what is it, corporate like company unit
link |
that can actually produce and compete
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and interact with the world.
link |
And then there's the giant human unit
link |
that's struggling with pandemics.
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And together struggling against the forces of nature
link |
that keeps wanting to kill us.
link |
Yeah, there'd be nothing like an alien invasion
link |
to unite the planet, we think.
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I can't wait, bring it on aliens.
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Listen, your work, you're an incredible,
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communicating, incredible young scientist,
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it's huge honor that you would spend your time with me.
link |
I can't wait what you do in the future.
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And thank you for representing MIT so beautifully,
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so masterfully, you're an incredible person.
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Thank you for talking to me.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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It's been an absolute pleasure.
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It's a great conversation.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation
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with Ariel at Bloch.
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To support this podcast,
link |
please check out our sponsors in the description.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words
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from Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher.
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There is no easy way from Earth to the stars.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.