Kind: captions
Language: en
we think that self-assembly this modular
reconfigurable algorithm for
constructing space structures in orbit
is going to give us this promise of
space architecture that's actually worth
living in you see do believe we might
one day become
intergalactic civilization i have a hope
yeah
the following is a conversation with
ariel ekblah director of mit space
exploration initiative
she's especially interested in
autonomously self-assembling space
architectures
basically
giant space structures that can sustain
human life and that assemble themselves
out in space and then orbit earth moon
mars and other planets
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now dear friends
here's ariel agblo
when did you first fall in love with
space exploration and space in general
my parents are both ex-air force so my
dad's an a-10 fighter pilot and my mom
trained and had qualified to be a
fighter pilot but it was early enough
that women were not allowed in combat at
that time and so i grew up with these
two pilots
and although they themselves did not
become astronauts there's a really rich
legacy of air force pilots becoming
astronauts and this loomed large in my
childhood what does it mean to be
courageous to be an explorer to be at
the vanguard of something
uh hard and challenging
and to couple with that my dad was a
huge fan of science fiction and so i as
a kid read heinlein and isaac asimov
all these different classics of science
fiction that he introduced me to and
that just started a love affair with
space exploration and
really thinking about civilization scale
space exploration
so
did they themselves
dream about going to the stars as
opposed to flying here in earth's
atmosphere just looking up yeah my dad
always said he was absolutely convinced
because he was a child of the apollo
years that he would get to go in his
lifetime really thought it was gonna
happen and so it was a challenge and you
know sad for many people when um to
their view on the outside space
exploration slowed down for a period of
time in reality we were just catching up
i think we leapt so far ahead with
apollo
more than the rest of society was ready
for and now we're coming back to this
moment for space exploration where we
actually have an economy and we have the
other accoutrement that society needs to
be able to make space exploration more
real and my dad's thrilled because
finally you know not nearly i hope not
anywhere near the end of his life but as
he's an older man he now can see
still within his lifetime people really
getting a chance to build a sustainable
lunar settlement on the moon or maybe
even go to mars so settlements
civilizations and other planets that's
the that's the cool thing to dream about
in the future yes
what was the uh what was the favorite
sci-fi authors when you're growing up
probably a sick asimov foundation
trilogy this is a amazing story of harry
selden this you know foundation that he
forms at different ends of the
well according to the story uh
difference the universe and
has this
interesting focus on society so it's not
just space exploration for the sake of
space exploration or novel technology
which is a lot of what i work on data
data mit but how do you structure a
society
across those vast expanses of distance
and time and so i'd say absolutely a
favorite now though my favorite uh is
neil stephenson and seven eves it's a
book that inspired my own phd research
and some ongoing work that we're doing
with nasa now for the future of swarm
robotics for spacecraft
we were saying offline about uh
stevenson and because i just recently
had a conversation with him and i said
that you know not until i was doing the
research for him that i realized he also
had a
role to play in blue origin so it's like
sci-fi actually having a role to play in
the
design engineering
just the implementation of ideas that
come kind of um percolate up from the
sci-fi world and actually become reality
it's kind of a fascinating figure in
that way so do you do you also think
about uh him beyond just his work
in science fiction but his role in
coming up with wild crazy ideas that
actually become reality yes i think it's
a great example of this cycle between
authors and scientists and engineers
that we can be inspired in one
generation by what authors dream up we
build it we make it a reality and then
that inspires another generation of
really wild and crazy thought for
science fiction i think neil stephenson
does a beautiful job of being what we
would call a hard science fiction author
so it's really grounded in a lot of
science which makes it very compelling
for me as a scientist and engineer to
read
and then be challenged to make that
vision a reality
the other community you know that neil's
involved with and some of my other
mentors are involved with that we
are thinking about more and more in the
work that we do at mit
is the long now foundation
and this
focus on what does society need to
take in terms of steps at this juncture
this particular inflection point in
human history to make sure that we're
setting ourselves up for a long and
prosperous horizon for humanities
horizons there's a lot of examples of
what the long now foundation does and
thinks about but when i think about this
in my own work it's what does it take to
scale humanity's presence in orbit
we are seeing some additional investment
in commercial space habitats
so it'll no longer be just nasa running
the international space station but to
really democratize access to space to
have like bezos wants to have millions
of people living and working in space
you need architecture that's bigger and
grander and can actually scale that
means you need to be thinking about how
can you construct things for long time
horizons that are really sustainable in
orbit or on a surface of a celestial
body that are bigger than the biggest
rocket payload fairing that we currently
have available and that what led me to
self-assembly and other models of
in-space construction okay every every
time you speak i get like a million
tangent ideas but cut me off no no no no
no please keep talking this is amazing i
just there's uh there's like a million
invite
ideas so one sort of on the dark side
let me ask yeah do you think about the
threats to human civilization that kind
of motivate the scaling of the expansion
of humans in space and on other planets
what are you worried about nuclear war
pandemics
uh super intelligent artificial
intelligence systems
you know more not uh
existential crises but ones that have
significant potentially significant
detrimental effects on society like
climate change those kinds of things and
then there's of course the fun s story
coming out from the darkness and hitting
all earth there's been a few movies on
that anyway is there something that you
think about uh
that threatens us in this century
um i mean as an ex-military family we
used to talk about all of this we would
say that luck favors the prepared and so
growing up you know we had a plan
actually a family plan for what we would
do in a pandemic didn't think we were
going to have to put that plan into
place and here we are
we do
certainly you know among my own family
and my friends within our work at mit we
do think about existential threats and
risks to humanity and what role does
space exploration and getting humans off
world have to play in a resilient future
for humanity but what i actually find
more compelling
recently
is instead of thinking about a need to
ever abandon
earth
through a path of space exploration or
space foraging is to see how we can use
space technology to keep earth livable
the obvious direct ways of doing this
would be you know satellite technology
that's helping us learn more about
climate change or
emitters or co2 but there's also a
future for geoengineering that might be
space-based a lot of questions that
would have to be answered around that
but these are examples of
pivoting our focus away from maybe the
hollywood vision of oh and asteroid's
going to come we're all going to have to
escape earth to let's use our
considerable technology prowess and use
space technology to save earth and be
very much focused on how we can have a
worthwhile life for earth citizens even
if some of us go want to go out for
their venturing right just the the
desire to explore yeah the mysterious
yes but also it does seem
that by placing us in harsh conditions
the harsh conditions of space the harsh
conditions of planets and the biology
the chemistry the engineering the
robotics the
materials all of that that's just a nice
way to come up with cool new things
great forcing function yeah it's a force
exactly it's a forcing function like
survival you don't get this right you
die
so uh and that you can bring back to
earth and it will improve
um right like figuring out food in space
will make you figure out what how to eat
you know live healthier lives here on
earth so true i mean some of the
technologies that we're directly looking
at right now
for space habitats it's hard to keep
humans alive in this really fragile
little pocket against the vacuum and all
of the dangers that the space
environment presents
some of the technologies we were going
to have to figure out is energy
efficient you know cooling and air
conditioning
air filtration scrubbing co2 from the
air
being able to
have habitats that are themselves
resilient to extremes of space weather
and radiation
and some of these are direct
translational opportunities for areas
from financial disasters you know people
in california a decade ago would never
have had to think about having an
airtight house but now with wildfires
maybe you do want something close to an
airtight house how do you manage that
there's a lot of technologies from the
space habitation world that we are
hoping we can actually bring back down
to benefit life on earth as well in
these extreme environment contexts
okay so you mentioned to go back to
swarm
yeah so that was interesting to you
first of all in your own work but also i
i believe you said something that was
inspiring from neil stephenson as well
so when you say
swarm
are you thinking about
um
architectures
or are you thinking about artificial
intelligence like robotics are those
kind of intermixed i think the future
that we're seeing is that they're going
to be intermixed which is really
exciting so the future of space habitats
are one of
intelligent structures maybe not all the
way to hal and the you know 2001 space
odyssey reference that scares people
about the habitat having a mind of its
own but certainly we're building systems
now where the habitat
has sensing technology
that allows it to communicate
its basic functions you know maintaining
life support for the astronauts but
could also communicate in symbiosis
with these swarm robots that would be on
the outside of the spacecraft uh whether
it's in a microgravity orbiting
environment or on the surface and these
little robots they crawl just a la neil
stephenson and seven eaves they crawl
along the outside of the spacecraft
looking for micrometeorite punctures or
gas leaks or other faults and defects
and right now we're just working on the
diagnosis so can the swarm with its
collective intelligence act in symbiosis
with the spacecraft and detect things
but in the future we'd also love for
these little micro robots to repair in
situ and really be
like ants living in a tree
altogether connected to the spacecraft
do you
uh envision
system to be fully distributed
and just like an ant colony if one of
them
is damaged or you know whatever uh
loses control and all those kinds of
things that
that doesn't affect the performance of
the the the complete system or doesn't
need to be centralized this is more like
almost like a technical question do you
think it's an architecture question
right
from the ground up
it's so scary to go fully distributed
yes but it's also exceptionally powerful
right robust resilient to the harsh
conditions of space what do you
um if you look into the next 10 20 100
years
starting from scratch do you think we
should be doing architecture-wise
distributed systems
for space yes because it gives you this
redundancy and safety profile that's
really critical so whether it's small
swarm robots where it doesn't matter if
you lose a few of them to habitats that
instead of having a
central
monolithic habitat you might actually be
able to have
a decentralized node of a space station
so that you can kind of ride out of star
wars you can shut a blast door if
there's a fire or if there's a conflict
in a certain area and you can move the
humans and the crew into another
decentralized node of the spacecraft
there's another idea out of neil
stephenson seven eaves actually were
these arklets
which were decentralized spacecraft that
could form and dock
little temporary space stations with
each other and then separate and go off
on their way and and have a
decentralized approach to living in
space
so the self-assembly component of that
too so this is your phd work and beyond
you explored autonomously
self-assembling space architecture for
future space tourists habitats and space
stations in orbit around earth moon and
mars
there's few things i personally find uh
sexier than self-assembling
space autonomously self-assembling space
architecture in general it doesn't even
need to be space the idea of like
self-assembling architectures is really
interesting like building a bridge or
something like that through
self-assembling materials it feels like
a incredibly efficient way to do it
because optimization is built in so you
can build like the most optimal
structures
given
dynamic uncertain
changing conditions
so uh maybe can you talk about your phd
work about this this work about tesserae
what is it
in general also any any cool stuff
because this is super cool yeah yeah
absolutely
so tess ray is my phd research it's this
idea that we could take tiles
that construct a large structure like a
bucky ball yeah this is exactly what
we're looking at here which is the tiles
that are packed flat in a rocket they're
released to float in microgravity
magnets pretty powerful electropermanent
magnets on their edges draw them
together for autonomous docking so
there's no human in the loop here and
there's no central agent coordinating
saying tile one go to tile two it's
completely decentralized system they
find each other on their own
what we don't show in this video is what
happens if there's an error right so
what happens if they bond incorrectly
the tiles have sensing so proximity
sensing magnetometer other sensors that
allow them to detect a good bond versus
a bad bond and pulse off and
self-correct which anybody who works in
this you know the field of self-assembly
will tell you that error detection and
correction just like uh error detection
in a dna sequence or protein folding is
really important part of the system for
that robustness and so we've done a lot
of work to engineer that ability for the
tiles to be
self-determining they know whether
they're forming the structure that
they're supposed to form or not they
know if they're in a toxic relationship
and they need to get out right right if
they need if they need to separate
exactly yeah all right this is like so
amazing and for people who are just
listening to this yeah there's
a lot i mean how large are these tiles
so the size that we use in the lab they
can really be any size because we can
scale them down to do testing in
microgravity so we sent tiles that were
about three inches wide to the
international space station a couple
years ago to test the code test the
state machine test the algorithm of
self-assembly but now we're actually
building our first ever human scale
tiles they're me human size so a little
you know a little smaller than maybe
your average human um but they're 2.5
feet on edge length
the larger scale that we would love to
build in the future would actually be
tiles that are big enough to form a
bucky ball big open spherical volume
spherical approximation volume that'd be
about 10 meters in diameter so 30 feet
which is much bigger and grander in
terms of open space than any current
module on the iss
and one of the goals with this project
was to say what's the purpose of next
generation space architecture should it
be something that really inspires and
delights people when you float into that
space can you get goosebumps in the way
that you do when you walk into a really
stunning piece of architecture on earth
and so we think that self-assembly this
modular reconfigurable algorithm for
constructing space structures in orbit
is going to give us this promise of
space architecture that's actually worth
living in
living in oh i thought you also meant
from like outside artistic perspective
when you see the whole thing it's just
with the aesthetics of it absolutely you
know when you like go like in into vegas
whenever you go into a city
and it's like over the hill appears in
front of you and i mean there's
something majestic about
uh
seeing like wow humans created that it
gives you like hope about like if these
a bunch of ants were able to figure out
how to build skyscrapers that light up
and in general the design of these tiles
and the way you envision it are pretty
scalable yes and they're inspired by
exactly what you mentioned a moment ago
which is we have these patterns of
self-assembly on earth and there's a lot
of fantastic mit research that we're
building this concept on so like daniela
roos at csail and pebbles
taking the power of magnets to create
units that are themselves
interchangeable this notion of
programmable matter
and so we're interested in going really
big with it to build big scale space
structures with programmable tiles but
there's also a really fascinating you
know end of that on the other side of
the spectrum which is how small can you
go with matter that's programmable and
stacks and builds itself and creates a
bridge or something in the future
what do you envision the thing would
look like like when you imagine a thing
far into the future where there's um
so we're not even thinking about like uh
small space well let's not call them
small but are currently sized space
stations but like something gigantic
what do you envision is this something
with symmetry or is this something we
can't even come up with yet is it is
there's beautiful structures that you
imagine in your mind i've got three
candidates that i would love to build if
we're talking about monumental space
architecture one is what does a space
cathedral look like it can be a secular
cathedral doesn't necessarily have to be
about religion but that notion of long
sight lines
inspiring stunning architecture when you
go in and you can imagine floating
instead of you know being on the ground
and only looking up in space you could
be in a central node and each direction
you look at all the cardinal directions
are spires going off in a really large
and long way so that's concept number
one
number two would be something more
organic that's not just geometric so
here one of the ideas that we're working
on in mit in my lab is to say
could you
instead of the tesserae model right
which is self-assembling a shell
could you define a module that's a node
a small node that someone can live in
and you self-assemble a lot of those
together they're called uh plesiohedrons
like uh space filling solids and you
dock a bunch of them together and you
can create a really organic structure
out of that so it's the same way that
muscles accrete to appear you can have
these nodes that dock together and one
shape that i would love to form out of
this is something like a nautilus a
seashell that beautiful you know
fibonacci spiral sequence that you get
in that shape which i think would be a
stunning and fabulous
um aggregated space station you said so
many cool words please
plesiohedron yeah so that that's a
space filling
solid the simplest thing to think about
like here oh cube cube right so you can
stack cubes together and if you had an
infinite number of cubes you'd fill all
that space there's no gaps in between
the cubes they stack and fill space
uh another plesiohedron is a truncated
octahedron and that's actually one of
the candidate structures that we think
would be great for space stations what's
the truncated part ah so it you cut off
an octahedron actually has like little
pointy areas you truncate certain
sections of it and you get um
surfaces that are on the structure that
are cubes and i think hexagons i have to
remind myself exactly what the faces are
but overall a truncated octahedron can
be bonded to other truncated octahedrons
and just like a cube it fills all the
gaps as you build it out so you can
imagine
two truncated octahedrons they come
together at an airlock which is what we
space people call doors in space
and you dock them on all sides and
you've basically created this
decentralized network of space nodes
that make a big space station
and once you have enough of them and
you're growing with enough big units you
can do it in any macro shape you want
that's where the nautilus comes in is
could we design
an organically inspired shape for space
station can i just say how awesome it is
to hear you say
we space people i know you meant people
that are doing research on space
exploration space technology but it also
made me think of a future there's earth
people
and there's and there's those space
people and then i love them
too yeah no no for sure for sure but
like
it's like new yorkers and like texans or
something like that
yeah of course you you live for time in
new york and then you go up to boston
and but for tom you're the space people
i know those space people
they're kind of wild up there let's see
how that dynamic evolved yeah exactly
there's that culture culture forms and i
would love to see what kind of culture
once you once you have
sort of more and more civilians i mean
there's a human
i mean i love psychology and sociology
and
i'll maybe ask you about that too which
is like the dynamic between humans you
have to kind of start considering that
you start spending more and more time up
in space and and start sending civilians
start sending bigger and bigger groups
of people and then of course
the beautiful and the ugly emerges from
the
uh from
the human nature that we haven't been
able to escape up to this point uh but
when you say the plesiohedrons these
kinds of shapes
are they multi-functional like
is the idea you'd be able to
uh
uh humans cannot occupy them safely in
some of them and some others have some
other purposes exactly one could be
sleeping quarters one could be a
greenhouse or an agricultural unit one
could be a storage depot
essentially all of the different rooms
or functions that you might need in a
space station could be subdivided into
these nodes and then stacked together
and one of the promises of both tesserae
my original phd research which is these
shells and then this follow-on node
concept
is that
right now we build space stations and
once they're built they're done you
can't really change them profoundly but
the benefit of a modular self-assembling
system is you can disassemble it you can
completely reconfigure it as if your
mission changes or the number of people
in space that you want to host if you
have a space conference happening like
south by southwest i was thinking space
party but space conference is good too
then uh maybe all of a sudden you want
to change out what were window tiles
yesterday cupola tiles and make them
into a birthing port so that you can
welcome five new spaceships to come and
join you in space that's what this
promise of reconfigurable space
architecture might allow us to explore
i've been hanging out with grimes
recently i just feel like she belongs up
in space this is like designed for for
artists essentially like imagine i mean
this is what south by keeps introducing
me to is there's like the weird and the
beautiful people and like the artists
and
it feels like there's a lot of
opportunities for
art and design
it's like space is a combination of arts
design and great engineering with with
uh uh
it's a safety critical with like the
highest of stakes so don't you can't you
can't mess it up and is this is there
first of all you talking about tiling so
neil stephens is obsessed about time i
don't know if it's related to any of
this but he seems to be obsessed with
like how do you tell a space that's a
commandment geometric notion like the
tessellation and it's i mean it's a
beautiful
idea for architecture that you can
self-assemble these different shapes
and
you can have probably some centralized
guidance of the kind of thing you want
to build
but they also kind of figure stuff out
themselves in terms of the low level
details in terms of the figuring out
when the when if everything fits just
right
for the ocd people like
what's that subreddit uh
pleasantly
it's like really fun everything they
have like videos of everything is just
pleasant when everything just fits
perfectly very pleasing all the
tolerances come together
so they figured that out on themselves
and the local robotics problem but by
the way was danielle rose pebbles what's
the pebbles project the pebbles project
are little cubes that have epms in them
electro-permanent magnets and they can
self-disassemble so they'll turn off and
so you'll have this little structure
that all of a sudden can
flip the little pebbles over and
essentially just disaggregate they have
to make some pleasing sounds
that's gonna so i'm supposed to talk to
danielle so that i'll probably spend an
hour just discussing the sounds on the
pebbles okay uh what were we talking
about so the that's because you
mentioned two i think right my third one
yeah is there a third one my third one
is the ring world just because
every science fiction book ever that's
worth anything has a ring world in it
and uh it's just a donut a donut yeah so
a really big taurus that could encircle
a planet
uh or encircle another celestial body
maybe an asteroid or a small moon
and um the promise here is just the
the beauty of being able to have that
geometry in orbit and all that surface
area for solar panels and docking and
um
essentially just all of what that
enables to have a ring world at that
scale in orbit which by the way for the
viewers we're looking at figure alone
what paper is this from this is a
hexagonal tiling of a tourist generator
in mathematica referencing code an
approach from two citations so we're
looking at a tiled doughnut and i'm not
hungry so this is the is this is this
from your thesis or no uh this is
probably i mean this is in my thesis
this looks like it was one of my earlier
papers this was
an approach to say great we've come up
with this tessellation approach for a
buckyball and we picked the buckyball
because it is the most efficient surface
area to volume shape and what's
expensive in space the surface area
shipping up all that material so we
wanted something that would maximize the
volume but if we think about ring worlds
and other shapes we wanted to look at
how do you tile a taurus and this is one
example with hexagons to be able to say
could we take this same tesserae
approach of self-assembling tiles and
create other geometries this is so
freaking cool that's awesome so you
mentioned uh microgravity and i saw i
believe that uh there's a picture of you
floating microgravity uh when when did
you get to experience that what was that
like yeah so i've flown nine times on
the affectionately known as the vomit
comet
it's the parabolic flight and
essentially it does what you'd want a
plane never to do it pitches really
steeply upwards at 45 degrees that's a
picture you yeah yeah that's test rate
that's super early in my phd some of
just the passive tiles before we even
put electronics in we were just testing
the magnet polarity and the
essentially is it an energy favorable
structure to self-assemble on its own so
we tweaked a lot of things between are
we looking at a couple of them
yeah you're looking at a bunch of them
there's also almost 32 of them yeah
they're clumping they're clumping yeah
can you comment on what's the difference
between microgravity and and zero
gravity yes so there is
it's important difference there is no
zero gravity there's no nothing there's
in the universe there is no such thing
as zero gravity so newton's law of
gravity tells us that there's always
gravity attraction between any two
objects so zero g is a shorthand that
some of us fall into using or is a
little easier to communicate to the
public the accurate term is microgravity
where you are essentially floating
you're weightless but generally in free
fall
so on the parabolic flights the vomit
comet you're in free fall at the end of
the parabola and in orbit around the
earth when you're floating you're also
in free fall
so affectionately call vomit comment i'm
sure there's a reason why it's called
affectionately so so what's it like
what's uh your first time
to both philosophically spiritually and
biologically what's it like it's
profound it is
unlike anything else you will experience
on earth
because it is this true feeling of
weightlessness with no drag so the
closest experience you can think of
would be floating in a pool but you move
slowly when you float in a pool and your
motion is restricted when you're
floating it's just you and your body
flying like in a dream
it takes the littlest amount of energy
like a finger tap against the wall of
the plane to shoot all the way across
the fuselage wow and you can move at
full speed like you're you can move your
arms exactly your muscles there's no
yeah there's no resistance
they actually tell you to make a memory
when you're on the plane
because it's such a fleeting experience
for your body that even a few days later
you've already forgotten exactly what it
felt like it's so foreign to the human
experience they kind of that you
explicitly tried to really form this
into a membrane and then you could do
the replay cognitively freeze it yeah
save right uh when we have neural link
we can replay that um
that memory so in terms of
how much stress it has on your body is
it uh biologically stressful
you do feel a 2g pull out right so the
cost of getting those
micro g parabolas is you then have a 2g
pull out and that's hard you have to
train for it uh if you move your neck
too quickly in that 2g pull out you can
strain muscles
but i wouldn't say that it's
actually a a profound
tough thing on the body it's really just
an incredibly novel experience
and when you're in orbit and you're not
having to go through the ups and downs
of the parabolic plane there's a real
grace and elegance and you see the
astronauts learn to operate in this
completely new environment
what are some interesting differences
between the parabolic plane and when
you're actually going up in orbit is it
that with orbit you can look out and see
yeah that blue little planet of ours you
can see the blue marble the stunning
overview effect which is something i
hope to see one day
um what's also really different is if
you're in orbit for any significant
period of time there's going to be a lot
more physiological changes to your body
than if you just did an afternoon flight
on the vomit comet everything from your
bones your muscles your eyeballs change
shape uh there's a lot of different
things that happen for long duration
space flight and we still have to as
scientists we still have to solve a lot
of these interesting challenges to be
able to keep humans
thriving in microgravity or deep
duration space missions
deep duration space missions okay let's
talk about this
um i'm just gonna ask a bunch of dumb
questions so approximately how long does
it take to travel to mars asking for a
friend asking for a friend as we all do
uh about three years for a round trip
okay and that's not that it actually why
why the round trip is that well
you're just asking about the one like
we're getting one more
us okay cool so for just like literally
flying to mars and around it takes three
years there's some interstitial time
there because you really can only go
between earth and mars at certain points
in their orbits where it's favorable to
make that journey and so part of that
three years is you take the journey to
mars a few months six to nine months
you're there for a period of time until
the orbits find a favorable alignment
again and then you come back another six
to nine months so one way travel six to
nine months they hang out there on
vacation then come back forced vacation
well me who loves working all the time
all vacation is forced vacation uh all
right
uh so okay so that gives us a sense of
duration and we can maybe also talk
about longer and longer and longer
duration
uh as well
what are the hardest aspects of
this of living in space for
many days for let's say 100 days 200
days maybe there's a threshold when it
gets really tough what are what are some
stupid little things or big things that
are very difficult for human beings to
go through so one big thing and one
little thing there there's two classic
problems that we're trying to solve in
the space industry one is radiation
it's not as much of a problem for us
right now on the international space
station because we're still protected by
part of earth's magnetosphere but as
soon as you get farther out into space
and you don't have that protection once
you leave the van allen
belt area of the earth and the you know
cocoon around the earth
we have really serious concerns about
radiation the effect on human health
long term that's the big one
the small one and i say it's small
because it seems mundane but it actually
is really big in its own way is mental
health and how to keep people happy and
balanced and you were alluding to some
of the psychological challenges of
having humans together on missions and
especially as we try to scale the number
of humans in orbit or in space so that's
another big challenge is how to keep
people happy and balanced and
cooperating
that's not an issue on earth at all at
all
okay so
we'll talk about each of those in a bit
more detail but
let me continue on the chain of dumb
questions what about food what's a good
food source for food in space
uh and what are some sort of standard
go-to meals menus right now your go-to
menu is gonna be mostly freeze-dried
every so often nasa will arrange for a
fun stunt or fresh food to get up to
station so they did bake double tree
cookies with hilton a couple years ago
as i recall i think some time before the
pandemic
but there's work actually in our lab at
mit maggie koblenz one of my staff
researchers is looking at the future of
fermentation
everybody loves beer right beer and wine
and kimchi and miso these foods that
have just been you know really important
to human cultures for eons because we
love the umami and the better flavor in
them but it turns out they also have a
good shelf life if done properly and
they also have an additional health
benefit for the microbiome for
probiotics and prebiotics so we're
trying to work with nasa and convince
them to be more open-minded to fermented
food for long-duration deep space
missions that we think is one of the
future elements in addition to in situ
growing your own food no okay this is
this is essential for the space party is
the yes the space beer yes it's the
fermented product yes
okay cool in terms of water what's a
good source of drinkable water like
where do you get water do you have to
always bring it on board with you and is
there a compressed efficient way of
storing it so to steal a line from
charlie bolton who's the former
administrator of nasa uh this morning's
fresh water is yesterday's coffee
so if you think about what that means
you drank the coffee yesterday right as
it turned out it goes fully through the
body through the body as the recycling
system and then you drink what you peed
out as um you know clarified uh refined
fresh water the next day that is one
source of water another source of water
in the near neighborhood of our solar
system would be on the moon so water ice
deposits there's also water on mars this
is one of the big things that's bringing
people to want to develop infrastructure
on the moon is once you've gotten out of
the gravity well of earth if you can
find water on the moon and refine it you
can either make it into propellant or
drinkable water for humans
and so that's really valuable as a
potential gateway out into the rest of
the solar system to be able to get
propellant without always having to ship
it up from earth
so how much water is there on mars
that's a great question i do not know we
don't know water at the caps
i suspect nasa from all of the satellite
um studies that they've done of mars
have a decent idea of what the water
deposits look like but i don't know to
what degree they have characterized
those i really hope there's life or
traces of previous life on mars this is
a special spot in my heart because i got
to work on sherlock which is the
astrobiology experiment that's on mars
right now searching for what they would
say in a very cautious way is signs of
past habitability they want to be
careful not to get people overly excited
and say we're searching for signs of
life they're searching to see if there
would have been organics on the surface
of mars or water in certain areas that
would have allowed for life to flourish
and i really love this prospect i do
think within our lifetimes we'll get a
better answer about finding life in our
solar system if it's there if not on
mars maybe europa
one of the icy worlds so you like the
you like
astrobiology i do this is part part of
the it's not just about human biology
it's also other extraterrestrial alien
biology search for life in the universe
okay yeah does that scare you or excite
you it excites me profoundly there's
other alien civilizations potentially
very different than our our own i think
there's got to be some humility there
and certainly from science fiction we
have plenty of reasons to fear that
outcome as well but i do think as a
scientist it would be profoundly
exciting if we were to find life
especially in the near neighborhood of
our solar system
right now we would expect it to be most
likely microbial life but we have a real
serious challenge in astrobiology which
is it may not even be carbon-based life
and all of our detectors we only know to
look for dna or rna
how would you even build a detector to
look for silicon-based life
or different molecules than what we know
to be the fundamental molecules for life
and you mentioned offline sarah walker
she yes her the question that she's
obsessed with is even just defining life
what is life to look outside
the carbon base i mean to look outside
of basically anything we can even
imagine chemically uh to look outside of
any kind of notions that we think of as
biology
yeah it's it's really weird so you now
get into this land of like complexity of
a measuring
of like how many assembly steps it takes
to build that thing right and maybe
maybe uh dynamic movement or some
maintenance of some kind of membrane
structures like we don't even know like
which properties life should have right
uh whether it can should be able to
reproduce and all those kinds of things
or pass information genetic type of
information
we don't know and it's like it's that's
so humbling
i mean i tend to believe that there
could be
something like alien life here on earth
and we're just too
human biology obsessed to even recognize
it the shadow biosphere i remember you
and sarah was talking about i mean
that's like
speaking of beer i mean that's something
i wanted to make sure in all of science
to shake ourselves out of like remind
ourselves constantly how little we know
because it might be right in front of
our nose
like i wouldn't be surprised if like
trees are like orders of magnitude more
intelligent than humans they're just
operating at a much slower scale
and they're like talking about us
the whole time it's like about silly
humans that take everything seriously
and we start all kinds of nuclear wars
and we
quarrel and we tweet about it and then
but the trees are always there just
watching us silly humans as like ants
and lord of the rings exactly so i mean
i don't know i mean obviously i'm joking
on that one but there could be stuff
like that
uh well let me ask you the the the drake
equation the big uh the question how
many
like uh obviously nobody knows but
what's your gut what's your hope as a
scientist as a human how many alien
civilizations are out there
as a ex-physicist i'm now much more on
the aerospace engineering side for space
architecture but as an ex-physicist i
hope it is
uh prolific
i think the challenge is if it's as
prolific as we would hope if there are
many many many civilizations then the
question is
where are they why haven't we heard from
them uh and the fermi paradox is there
some great filter that life only gets to
some level of sophistication and then
kills itself off through war or through
famine or through different challenges
that filter that
society out of existence
and it would be an interesting question
to try to understand if the universe was
teeming with life why haven't we
found it or heard from it yet to our
knowledge yeah i mean i personally
believe that it's teeming with life and
you're right i think that's a really
useful productive engineering scientific
question
of what kind of great filter yeah can
just be destroying all that life or
preventing it from
just constantly talking to to us silly
descendants of apes that's a really nice
question like
what are the ways civilizations can
destroy themselves
and there's too many sadly well we i
don't think we've come up with most of
them yet that's also probably true
that's the thing it's uh
i mean and like if you look at nuclear
war some of it is physics
but some of it
is game theory it's uh
it's human nature it's how society's
built themselves how they interact
how we create and resolve conflict and
it gets back to the human question on
when you're doing long-term space travel
how do you
maintain this dynamical system of
of flawed
uh irrational humans such that it
persists
throughout time to not just maintain
their biological body but get people
from not murdering each other and like
like each other sufficiently
to where you kind of
fit well but i think you know if uh the
songs or poetry or books taught me
anything if you like each other a little
too much
um
i mean the problems arise because then
there's always a third person who also
likes and then there's the drama he's
like i can't believe you did that and
then last night whatever so and then
there's beer gets complicated gets
complicated quickly okay anyway um back
to the dumb questions because you you
answered this um there's an interview we
answer a bunch of cool little questions
from um from young students and so on
about like space
one of them was uh playing music in
space yeah um and he mentioned something
about
what kind of instruments
you could use to play music in space
could you could you mention about
uh like the spotify working space and if
i wanted to do a live performance what
what kind of instruments would i need
yeah i mean you referenced culture
before and this is one of the most
exciting things that we have at our
fingertips which is to define a new
culture for space exploration we don't
just have to import
cultural artifacts from earth
to make life worth living in space and
this musical instrument that you
referenced was a design of an object
that could only be performed in
microgravity oh cool so it doesn't sound
the same way when it's um it's a
percussive instrument when it's rattled
or moved in a gravity environment is
that can we look it up it's called the
telematron yep it's created by yeah
that is so awesome uh created by sans
fish and nicole boulier two amazing uh
graduate students and staff researchers
on my team what does it look like it's
uh it looks steampunk actually yeah
awesome yeah it's pretty cool design it
looks like it's a geometric solid that
has these interesting artifacts on the
inside and it has a lot of sensors
actually additionally on the inside like
imu's inertial measurement sensors that
allow it to detect when it's floating
and when it's not floating and provides
this really kind of ethereal um they
later sonify it so they use electronic
music to turn it into a symphony or turn
it into a piece and yeah this is the
object the telematron how does the human
interact with it uh by tossing it so
it's an interactive musical instrument
it actually requires another partner
so the idea was that it's something like
a dance
um or just like something like a
choreography in space got it and then
speaking of which you also talked about
sports
and uh like ball sports like playing
soccer so what
you you mentioned that so your muscles
can move with full speed
and then if you push off the wall
lightly
you fly
zoom zoom across so how does the physics
of that work for can you still play
soccer for example in space you can but
one of the most uh intuitive things that
we all learn as babies right is whenever
you throw something if i was gonna toss
something to you i toss it up because i
know that it has to compensate for the
fact that that keplerian arc is going to
draw it down the you know equations of
motion are going to drop down i would in
space i would just shoot something
directly towards you so like straight
line of sight and so that would be very
different for any type of ball sport is
to retrain your human mind to have that
as your intuitive
arc of motion or lack of arc from your
experience from understanding how
astronauts get adjusted to the stuff how
long does it take to adjust to the
physics of this world this other world
so even after one or two parabolic
flights you can gain a certain facility
with moving in that environment i think
most astronauts would say maybe several
days on station or a week on station and
their brain
flips it's amazing the plasticity of the
human brain and how quickly they are
able to adapt and so pretty quickly they
become
creatures of this new environment
okay so that's cool it's it's creating a
little bit of an experience what about
if you go for more than 100 days for one
year for two years for three years yeah
what challenges start to emerge in that
case
so scott kelly wrote this amazing book
after he spent a year in space and he's
a twin it's absolutely fantastic that
nasa got to do a twin studies perfect
so he wrote a lot about his experience
on the health side of what changed
things like
bone density muscle atrophy
eye sight changing because the shape of
your eyeball changes which changes your
lens which changes how you see
if we're then thinking about the
challenges between a year and three
years especially if we're doing that
three year trip to mars for your friend
who asked earlier
then you have to think about
nutrition and so how are you keeping all
of these different needs for your body
alive how are you protecting astronauts
against radiation either having some
type of a shell on the spacecraft which
is expensive because it's heavy you know
if it's something like lead a really
effective radiation shell it's going to
be a lot of mass
or is there a pill that could be taken
to try to make you
less
in danger of some of the radiator
radiation effects
a lot of this has not yet been answered
but radiation is a really significant
challenge for that three year journey
and what are the negative effects of
radiation on the human body out in space
a higher likelihood to develop cancer at
a younger age
so you'd probably be able to get there
and get back but you'd find yourself
in the same way if you were exposed to
significant radiation on earth you'd
find significant bad health effects as
you age
what do you think about
like decades do you think about decades
or is this like an entire i think about
centuries especially for myspace but
yeah for decades
i think as soon as we get past the
three-year mark we'll absolutely want
somewhere between three years and a
decade we'll want artificial gravity
and we know how to do that actually the
engineering questions still need to be
tweaked for how we'd really implement it
but the science is there to know how we
would spin
habitats in orbit generate that force so
even if the entire habitat's not
spinning you at least have a treadmill
part of the space station that is
spinning and you can spend some fraction
of your day in a near to one g
environment and keep your body healthy
wait literally from just spinning from
spinning yeah centripetal force so you
generate this force if you've ever been
in those um carnival rides the
gravitrons that spin you up around the
side that's the concept and this is
actually one of the reasons why we are
spinning out a new company from my mit
lab spitting out
accidental but well
well noted space pun is a composition
all right um but yeah we're spinning out
a new company to look at next generation
space architecture and how do we
actually scale humanity's access to
space and one of the areas that we want
to look at is artificial gravity
is there a name yet yep there's a name
we are brand new we are just exiting
stealth mode so your podcast listeners
will literally be among some of the
first to hear about it it's called
aurelia institute
aurelia is an old english word for
chrysalis and the idea with this is that
we humanity collectively are at this
next stage of our metamorphosis like a
chrysalis into a spacefaring species
and so we felt that this was a good time
a necessary time
to think about next generation space
architecture but also starfleet academy
if you know that reference from star
trek
uh yes so let me ask a silly sounding
ridiculous sounding but probably
extremely important question
sex and space including intercourse
conception procreation birth
like being a parent
like raising the baby so basically from
birth
well from the before the birth part um
like the birds and the bees and stuff
and then uh the whole thing how
complicated is that i remember looking
at the thank you
thank you
i remember looking at this exact
wikipedia page actually and it's i
remember being uh the wikipedia page of
sex and space and fascinating how
difficult of an engineering problem the
whole thing is is that something you
think about too how to have generations
of humans
self
uh self replicating
organization
yes societies essentially i mean i guess
with micro like if you solve the gravity
problem you solve a lot of these
problems that's the hope yeah it's like
this central challenge of microgravity
to human reproduction but we do host a
workshop every year at beyond the cradle
which is the space event that we run at
mit and we always do one on pregnancy in
space or motherhood or raising children
in space because there are huge
questions
there have been a few mammal studies
that have looked at reproduction in
space but there are still really major
questions about how does it work how
does the fetus evolve in microgravity if
you were pregnant in space and i think
the near-term answer is just going to be
we need to be able to give humans a 1-g
environment for that phase of our
development yeah so there's some studies
on mice in microgravity it's interesting
like i think the mice like one of them
the mice weren't able to walk or like
their understanding of physics i guess
is off or something like that yeah the
mental model when you're really young
and you're kind of getting your mental
model of physics we do think that that
would change um
kids abilities to if they were born in
microgravity their ability to have that
intuition around an earth-based 1g
environment might be missing because a
lot of that is really crystallized in
early development early childhood
development
so that makes sense that they would see
that in mice yeah so what about
life
when we uh
choose to park
our vehicles on another planet on the
moon but let's go to mars first of all
is that excite you
humans going to mars like stepping foot
on mars and when do you think it'll
happen it does excite me i think
visionaries like elon are working to
make that happen in terms of building
the road to space
we are really excited about building out
the human lived experience of space once
you get there so how are you going to
grow your food what is your habitat
going to look like
i think it's profoundly exciting but i
do think that there's a little bit of a
misunderstanding of mars anywhere in the
near future
being anything like a replacement for
earth so it is good for humanity to have
these other pockets of our civilization
that can expand out beyond earth but
mars is not in its current state a good
home for humanity too many perchlorates
in the soil you can't use that soil to
grow crops atmosphere is too thin
certainly can't breathe it but it's also
just really thin compared to our
atmosphere
a lot of different challenges that would
have to be fundamentally changed on that
planet to make it a good home for a
large human civilization
how does a large
civilization of humans get built on mars
and
what do you think
where do you think it gets starts being
difficult so can you have a small base
of like 10 people essentially
kind of like the international space
station kind of
situation and then can you get it to a
hundred to a thousand to a million are
there some interesting challenges there
that worry you saying that mars is just
not a good backup at this time yeah for
earth i think small outposts absolutely
like mcmurdo right so we have these
models of really extreme environments on
earth in antarctica for example where
humans have been able to go and make a
sustainable settlement
mcmurdo style life on mars probably
feasible in the 2030s so we want to send
the first human missions to mars and
maybe as early as the end of this decade
more likely early 2030s
moving anywhere beyond that in terms of
a place where like an entire human life
would be lived where it's not just you
go for a three-month deployment and you
come back that is actually the big
challenge line is just saying is there
enough um technological sophistication
that can be brought
that far out into space if you imagine
your electronics break there's no radio
shack this dates me a little bit that my
mind jumps to radio shack but there's no
you know there's no
supply chains on mars that can supply
the level of technological
sophistication for all the products that
we rely on on day-to-day life
so you'd be going back to actually a
very simple existence more like pioneer
life out west in the story of the u.s
for example and i think that the future
of larger scale gatherings of humans in
orbit or so in space is actually going
to be in microgravity floating space
cities not so much trying to
establish settlements on the surface
so you think sort of a significant
engineering investment in terms of our
efforts and money should be on
large
um spaceships that perhaps are doing
this kind of
self-assembly all these kinds of things
and doing an orbit maybe building a
giant donut around the planet over time
yeah that is the goal and i think the
current political climate is such that
you can't get the trillion dollar
investment to build to start from
scratch and build the sci-fi
megastructure but if you can build it in
fits and starts in little different
pieces which is another advantage of
self-assembly it's much more like how
nature works so it's biomimicry inspired
way for humanity to scale out in space
and whether it's out in space or on mars
the idea that sort of two people fall in
love
they have sex
uh a child is born
and then that couple has to teach that
child
that like we that they came from earth i
i just love the idea that somebody's
born on mars or out in space and you
have to be like
that this is not actually like the
original home right just them looking at
our at earth and being like this is
where it came from i don't know that's
really inspiring to me and the child
being really confused and then wanting
to go back to tick-tock or whatever
they do whatever they do in that area
i mean there's great sci-fi right about
um people being born on mars and because
it's a lower gravity environment they're
taller they're more gangly if they were
actually able to develop there and then
they come back to earth and they're like
second-class citizens because they can't
function here in the same way because
the gravity is too strong for them you
see this in series like the expanse with
the belters and these you know different
societies that uh if we were to succeed
in having human societies grow up in
different pockets it's
not necessarily going to be easy for
them to always come back to earth as
their home
yeah different cultures form which is
the positive way of phrasing it but it's
also
this human history teaches us that we
have we like to form the other yeah so
there's this kind of conflict that
naturally emerges
um let me ask another sort of dark
question uh what do you think about
coming from a military family
uh there's still
sadly wars in the world uh do you think
wars
a military conflicts will follow us into
space
between wars between nations
like from my perspective currently it
just seems like space is a place for
scientists and engineers to explore
ideas but the more and more progress you
make does it worry you that nations
start to step in and
form you know that's that go out and
full out military conflict whether it's
in cyber space
in space
or uh actual hot war
i am really concerned about that and i
do think for decades the scientific
community in space has hung on to this
notion from the 1967 outer space treaty
which is space is the province of all
humankind peaceful uses of outer space
only
but i do think the rise in tensions and
the geopolitical scene that we're seeing
um i do
yeah i do harbor a lot of concern about
hot wars following humanity out into
space
and it's worth trying
to
tie nations together with more
collaboration to avoid that happening
the international space station is a
great example i think it's something
like 18 countries are party to this
treaty it might be less it might be more
um and then of course there's a smaller
number of countries that actually send
astronauts but even
at the fall of the soviet union and
through some tense times with russia the
iss had been a place where the u.s and
russia were actually able to collaborate
between mirror and iss
i think it'd be really important right
now in particular
to find other platforms where these
hegemonic powers in the world and
developing world nations can come and
collaborate on the future of space and
purposefully intertwine our success so
that there's a danger to multiple
parties if somebody is a bad actor so
we're now talking as a there's a war in
ukraine
and i haven't been sleeping much of
family
friends colleagues
in both countries and i'm just
talking to a lot of people many of whom
are crying refugees
and
i you know there's a basic human
compassion and love for each other that
i believe technology can help
catalyze and accelerate
but there's also science there's there's
something about rockets there's
something about and i mean like space
exploration
that
that inspires the world
about the
positive possibilities of the human
species so in terms of ukraine and
russia and china and india and the
united states
and europe
and everywhere else it seems like
collaborating on giant space projects is
one way to escape these wars
uh to escape these sort of geopolitical
conflicts i mean there's something
there's so much camaraderie to the whole
thing and um even in this little
period of human history we're living uh
through it seems like that's essential
even through this pandemic
there's something so inspiring about
those like spacex rockets going on for
example that's true
uh this
re-invigoration of the space exploration
efforts by the commercial sector
i don't know that was
i had some
as many of us have sort of some dark
times during the this pandemic just like
loneliness and
sometimes emotion and anger and just and
just hopelessness and politics and then
you look at those rockets going up and
it just gives you hope so i i think
that's an understated sort of value of
space exploration is a thing that unites
us and gives us hope obviously also
inspires young generations of young
minds to also contribute in not
necessarily in space exploration but in
all of science and literature and poetry
there's something about when you look up
to the stars that makes you dream
very true and um so that that's a really
good reason to sort of invest in this
whether it's building giant
megastructure which is so freaking cool
but also uh
colonizing mars
yeah it's it's something to look forward
to
something that uh that
uh
and not make it a domain of war
but a a domain of human collaboration
and human compassion i think yeah you're
the founder and director of the mit
space exploration initiative
it includes a ton of projects so i just
wanted to
their focus i guess on life in space
from astrobiology like we talked about
to habitats are there some other
interesting projects part of this
initiative that you are
that pop to mind that you find
particularly cool absolutely one is the
future of in-space manufacturing so if
we're going to build large-scale space
structures yes it's great to ship them
up from earth and self-assemble them but
what about extrusion
in orbit it's one of the best
technologies to leverage in microgravity
because you can extrude a particularly
long beam that would sag in a normal
gravity environment but might be able to
become the basis of a truss or a large
scale space structure so we're doing
miniature tests of extrusion and are
excited to fly this on the international
space station in a few months
we are working on swarm robots uh we
have just announced actually mit's
return to the moon
so my organization is leading this
mission for mit going back to the
surface of the moon as early as the end
of this year 2022 maybe early 2023
and trying to take data
from our research payloads at this
historic south pole site where nasa's
supposed to send the first humans back
on the artemis iii mission so our hope
is to directly support that human
mission with our data
how does that connect to the swarm uh
aspects does it connect yes yeah so
we're actually going to fly one of the
little astro ants that's the current
plan one of the little swarm robots on
the top of a rover um that's part of the
riding a rover yes and exactly an ant
riding a rover that rover gets packed in
a lander that lander gets packed in a
spacex rocket so it's a whole nesting
doll situation to get to to get to the
moon mother of robot dragons yes okay so
this one
uh a swarm of one storm of one exactly
we're testing out it's a tech
demonstration mission not a true not a
true swarm yeah there they are those are
the astro ants
wow and they this was a distributed
system and they in in theory you could
have a ton of these yes these could also
be centralized so they they have
wireless technology that could also talk
to a central base station and we'll be
assessing kind of case by case whether
it makes sense to operate them in a
decentralized swarm or to command them
in a centralized swarm
each robot is equipped with four
magnetic wheels which enable the robot
to attach to any magnetic surface
so you can operate basically any
environment he tested the oh we tested
the mobility of all robots on different
materials
in a microgravity environment on the
vomit comet prior to going to the moon
that must look so cool so they're
basically moving along different
like metallic surfaces yeah exactly
it's interesting when you you know just
a minute ago talking about the
reflection of
how space can be so aspirational and so
uniting there's a great quote from bill
anders from the apollo 8 mission to the
moon which is he it's the earthrise
photo that was taken where you see the
earth coming up over the horizon of the
moon and the quote is something along
the lines of we came all the way to
discover the moon and what we really
discovered was the earth
this really powerful image looking back
and so we're also trying to think for
our lunar mission we realize we're very
privileged group at mit to get the
opportunity to do this how could we
bring humanity along with us and so one
of the things we're still testing out i
don't know if we're going to be able to
swing it would be to do something like a
twitch plays pokemon
but with the robot
so let a lot of people on earth actually
control the robot or at least benefit
from the data that we're gathering and
try to release the data openly
so we're exploring a couple different
ideas for how do we engage more people
in this mission that would be surreal to
be able to interact
in some way with the thing that's out
there exactly on another surface direct
connection direct connection
um i think about artificial intelligence
in that same way which is like building
robots
puts a mirror to us humans
it makes us like wonder about like what
is intelligence what is consciousness
and what is actually valuable about
human beings when when uh ai system
learns to play chess better than humans
you start to let go of this idea that
humans are special because of
intelligence
it's it's something else um
maybe the flame of human consciousness
it's the capacity to uh
to feel deeply to sort of
to both suffer and to love all those
things and that somehow ai to me said
puts a mirror to that you mentioned uh
hal 9000 you have to bring it up with
the
with with these swarm bots uh crawling
on the surface of your uh cocoon in
space right
i mean
all right let me uh steel man the uh
the hell 9000 perspective okay
the poor guy just wanted to maintain the
mission and the astronauts were i mean i
i don't know if people often talk about
that but you know um
like doctors have to make difficult
decisions too when there's limited
resources you actually do have to
sacrifice human life often because you
have to make uh decisions
and i think hal was probably making that
kind of decision uh about what
what's more important the lives of
individual astronauts or the mission the
mission and i feel like ai's when other
humans
will need to make
these decisions
and it also feels like ai systems will
need to
help
make those decisions
i don't know um i guess
my question is about greater and greater
collective intelligence by systems
um
do you worry about that
uh what is the right way to sort of
solve this problem keeping a human in
the loop do you think about this kind of
stuff are they sufficiently dumb now the
robots that that's not yet on the
horizon to think about i think it should
be on the horizon it's always good to
think about these things early because
we make a lot of technical design
decisions at this phase working with
swarm robots that it would be better to
have thought about some of these
questions early in the life cycle of a
project
there is a real interest in nasa right
now thinking about the future of human
robot interaction hri and what is the
right synergy in terms of level of
control
for the human versus level of dependence
or control for the robot and we're
beginning to test out
more of these scenarios for example the
gateway space station which is meant to
be in orbit around the moon as a staging
base for the surface operations is meant
to be able to function autonomously with
no humans in it for months at a time
because they think it's going to be
seasonal they think we might not be
constantly staffing it so this would be
a really great test of i don't know that
anybody's yet worried about hal 9000
evolving but certainly just the
robustness of some of these ai systems
that might be asked to autonomously
maintain the station while the humans
are away
or detection
algorithms that are going to say you
know if you had a human pilot they might
see debris in orbit and steer around it
there'll be a lot of autonomous
navigation that has to happen
that'll be one of the early test beds
where we'll start to get a little bit
closer to that future
well the hri component is really
interesting to me
um
especially when the eye includes like
almost
friendship because
like people don't realize this i think
that we you know we humans long for
connection and when you have even a
basic interaction that's just like
supposed to be just like serving you or
something
you still project it's still um
still a source of uh
meaning and connection
and so you do have to think about that i
mean hell 9000
we you know the movie maybe doesn't
portray it that way but i'm sure there's
a relationship there between the
astronauts and and the robot yeah
especially when you have greater and
greater level of intelligence maybe that
addresses the
the happiness question too
yeah i think there's a there's a great
book by kate darling who's one of my
she's colleagues
yeah she's amazing we've been she's
already been on this podcast
but we talk all the time and we're
supposed to talk
and we've been missing each other and
we're gonna make it happen soon yeah
come uh come down to texas okay all
right anyway yeah she's amazing she has
this book it's just her whole work is
about this connection with robots yeah
this beautiful connection that we have
with robots but i think it's greater and
greater importance when it's out in
space because it could help alleviate
some of the loneliness right one of the
projects in the book that i gave you
which is a catalog of the projects that
we've worked on over the last five years
is the social robot that was developed
at the media lab and we one of the first
years in 2017 that we flew a 0g flight
we took the social robot along and tried
to do a little bit of a very scaled-down
human study to look at these questions
because you do imagine that we would
form a bond a real bond with the social
robots that might be
not just serving us on a mission but
really be our teammates on a future
mission and i do think that that could
have a powerful role in the mental
health and just the stability of a crews
to have some other robot friends come
along what do you by the way the book
you mentioned
is
into the
anthra
cosmos a whole space catalog from the
space catalog
um get that reference yeah so call out
to earth catalog a whole space catalog
from the mit space exploration
initiative
um what about the happiness you said
that that's one of the problems of when
you're out in space
how do you keep humans happy again
asking for a friend yes i mean one of
the big challenges is you can't just
open a window or walk out a door and
blow off steam right you can't just
go somewhere to clear your head
and in that sense you need to build
habitats that are homes that really care
for the humans inside them and have
whether it's biophilia and a place where
you can go and feel like you're in
nature or a vr headset which for some
people is a
a poor simulcrum but is maybe better
than nothing
you need to be thinking about these
technological interventions that are
going to have to be part of your home
and be part of your maybe day-to-day
ritual to keep you steady and balanced
and happy or feeling fulfilled
what about other humans relationship
with other humans do those get
those get weird when you get past a
certain number of humans i'm not an
expert in this area but an anecdote that
i'll share my
understanding is that nasa has still not
decided whether it's better to send
married couples or single crew members
in terms of uh you want some level of
stability you don't want to have the
drama of romantic relationships like
you're you know alluding to before but
they can't decide because married
couples also fight and have a really
tough dynamic and so there's a lot of
open questions still to answer about
what is the ideal psychological makeup
of a crew and we're starting to test
some of these things with the civilian
crews that are going up with inspiration
four like last fall with spacex and acts
one that's going to fly in a few days
here in march
as we begin to lengthen the the time of
those civilian crews i think we'll start
to learn a little bit more about just
average everyday human to human dynamics
and not the astronauts that are
themselves selected to be perfect human
specimens very good to work with easy to
get along with i wish you collected more
data about this pandemic because i feel
like it's a good
rough simulation of what would be out in
space a lot of people weren't locked
down some married couples i think a lot
of marriages broke up a lot of marriages
got closer together
um so it's like
and then the the single people some of
them went off
the cliff and some of them discovered
their new happiness and meaning and so
on it's a beautiful little experiment a
painful one yeah is there a thorough way
to really test that
to
because it's such a costly experiment
to send humans up there but i guess you
can always return back to earth if it's
not working out that's what we hope
you hope you don't have like a you know
apollo 13 situation that doesn't quite
make it back but yeah the
this is also why mars is such a
challenge the moon is only three days
away that's a lot quicker to recover
from if there's a psychological problem
with the crew or any type of maintenance
problem anything
three years is
such a
challenge compared to these other
domains that we've been getting more
used to in terms of human space flight
so this is a question that we will need
to have explored more before we start
really sending crews to mars so you're a
young scientist do you think in your
lifetime
you will go out into orbit
you will
go out beyond into deep space and
potentially step
you i i don't know if you can call
yourself a civilian i don't know if
that's what you count as but you as
as a curious aunt
uh from mit uh land
step on mars yes
the firm that's the first coming back
firm yes yeah i'm coming back i don't
want that one-way mission i want the
two-way mission um but yes i mean i
think we're already talking about a
pretty near-term opportunity where i
could send graduate students to the
international space station yeah
not that not as you know not a sacrifice
no but send graduates
send graduate students to the iss to do
their research i do think you and i both
would have an opportunity to go to a
lunar base of some sort within our
lifetime and there's a good chance
if we really wanted to we might have to
really advocate for it you know apply to
an astronaut program there will be some
avenues for humans in our lifetime to go
to mars what's the bar for like
health
do you do you think that bar will keep
getting lower and lower in terms of how
healthy how athletic like how yes or the
psychological profile all those kinds of
things yeah for one we're going to build
more robust habitats that don't depend
on astronauts being so impeccably well
trained so we're going to make it better
for inclusion
and just opening access to space but
there's a fantastic group called astra
access that is already helping disabled
space fliers do zero-g flights and
potentially get access to the iss and
some of the things that we think of as
disabilities on earth are hyper
abilities in space you don't need really
powerful legs in space what you'd really
benefit from having is a third arm
more ways to kind of move yourself
around and grip and interact so
we are already seeing a much more
open-minded approach to
who gets to go to space and astr access
is a wonderful organization doing some
of that work
i'm hoping introversion uh will also be
a superpower in space okay well first
i'd love to get your opinion on
commercial space flight what spacex or
blue origin are doing yeah and also
another question on top of that is
because you've worked with a lot of
different kinds of people culturally
what's the difference between
uh
spacex or commercial type of efforts
nasa
and mit and academia academia yeah so
the first part of your question i am
thrilled by all of the commercial
activity in space it has really
empowered our program so instead of me
waiting for five years to get a grant
and get the money from the grant and
only then can you send a project to
space i go out and i fundraise a lot
like a startup founder and i directly
buy access to space on the international
space station through spacex or
nanoracks same with blue origin and
their suborbital craft same with axiom
now axioms
making plans for their own commercial
space station
it's not out of the realm of possibility
that in a few years i will rent lab
space in orbit i will rent a module from
the axiom space station or the orbital
reef uh which is the blue origin space
station or nana racks is thinking about
uh star lab oasis there's probably some
other companies that i'm not even aware
of yet that are doing commercial space
habitat so i think that's fabulous
and really empowering for our research
is it affordable
so like uh loosely speaking does it
become affordable for
like mit type of research lab
does it you know um or does it need to
be a multi-university like a gigantic
effort a consortium thing one of the
reasons we're spinning out aurelia is we
actually realized it's cheap enough it
doesn't even have to be mit and we
wanted to start democratizing access to
these spaceflight opportunities to a
much broader swath of humanity could you
take a you know con academy educational
course about hey students around the
world this is how you get ready for a
zero g flight and by the way come fly
with us next year which is something
we're going to do with our rallies we're
going to bring you know much more just
kind of day-to-day folks on zero-g
flights and get them access to engaging
in the space industry so it's become
cheap enough um and the prices have
dropped enough to consider even that so
that's amazing it definitely doesn't
have to be a consortium of universities
anymore depends on what you want to fly
if you want to fly james webb a huge
telescope that's decades in the making
sure you need a nasa allocation budget
you know you need billions but for a lot
of the stuff in the book uh and our
research portfolio it's actually
becoming far more accessible so that's
uh commercial what about nasa
and mit academia yeah i think you know
people have been
worried about nasa the last few years
because in some people's minds they are
seeding ground to these commercial
efforts but that's really not that's
really not what's happening nasa
empowered these commercial efforts
because they want to free themselves up
to go to mars and go to europa and
continue being that really aspirational
force for humanity of pushing the
boundary always pushing the boundary and
if they were anchored in low earth orbit
maintaining a space station indefinitely
that's so much a part of their budget
that it was keeping them from being able
to do more so it actually is really
fantastic for nasa to have grown this
commercial ecosystem and then that frees
nasa up to go further and in academia we
like to think that we will be able to do
the provocative next generation research
that is going to unlock things at that
frontier and uh we can partner with nasa
we can go through a program if we want
to send a probe out really far but we
can also partner with spacex and see
what human life in a spacex mars
settlement might look like and how we
could design for that
speaking of projects maybe other other
projects that pop to mind from the space
exploration initiative or maybe stuff
from the book the that you can mention
something super cool i mean everything
we've been talking about is cool but
just something that pops to mind again
yeah um so we talked about life in space
and you might need more arms than legs
uh one of the projects by valentina
sumini was a air-powered robotics tail
so it's a soft robotics tail that
essentially has a little camera on the
back end of it can do computer vision
and knows where to grapple so it's
behind you it grapples onto something
and holds you in space and then you can
actually free up both of your hands to
work so we're already starting to think
about the design of bionic humans or
prosthetics or things that would make
you kind of like a cyborg to augment
your capabilities when you're in a space
environment would you control something
like that so it's kind of like a
i mean you can't call it a leg
but whatever it's a additional appendage
appendage so how would you what are
ideas for controlling something like
that yeah so right now it's super yes
there you go that's cool right now it's
super manual um
it's uh basically just like a kind of a
set pattern of inflating as we're
testing it but in the future if we had a
neurolink i mean this is something that
you could imagine directly controlling
just thinking thoughts and controlling
it that's a ways away
yeah so we talked about on the biology
side astrobiology there's probably
agriculture stuff
uh is there other things that kind of
feed the ecosystem of out in space for
survival or or the robotics
architectures the self-assemblies so
kind of combining something we were
talking about you can form these
relationships with objects and
anthropomorphize yes one of the things
that we're thinking about for
agriculture created by um manway and
somu so two students at mit was this
little it looks like a planet uh but
it's inspired by i think a mandala or
nepalese spinning wheel and you plant
plants on the inside and that astronaut
has to spin it every day to help the
plants survive so it's a way to give the
astronauts something to care about
something that they are responsible for
keeping alive and can really
invest themselves in and it's not
necessary right we have other ways to
grow in orbit
hydroponics liquid medium trying to keep
the liquid around the plant roots is
hard because there's no gravity to pull
it down in a particular direction but
what i loved about this project was they
said
sure we have ways that the plants could
grow on their own but the astronauts
might want to care for it in the same
way that we have little plants that come
to be important to us little plant
friends
yeah so there's agrifuge that's an early
model of this spinning manually spinning
plant habitat
i guess this is the best of um
academic research is you can do these
kinds of wild wild ideas yeah well you
know i get to spend quite a bit of time
with mr elon musk and he's very stressed
especially about um starship and all
those kinds of engineering efforts yeah
what do you think about how damn hard it
is
to get up
like are we humans gonna be able to do
this
i don't know i i think it feels like
it's an engineering problem it's a
scientific problem but it's also just a
motivation problem for the entire
human species and you also need to have
superstar
uh researchers and engineers working on
it so you have to get like the best
people in the world inspire them and
starting from a young age and kind of uh
what's inculcating us into why i guess
this way it's exciting you don't know if
we're going to be able to pull this off
that we can like fail miserably and that
i suppose i mean that's where the best
of engineering is done it's like success
is not guaranteed and even if it happens
it might be very painful
i think that's what's so special about
what elon is doing with spacex is he
takes these risks and he tests
iteratively and he'll will see the
spectacular failures on the path to a
successful starship it's something that
you know people have said why isn't nasa
doing that well that's because nasa is
doing that with taxpayer dollars and we
would all revolt if we saw nasa failing
at all these different stages but that
level of you know spiral engineering
theory of development isn't super
impressive and it's a really interesting
approach that spacex has taken and i
think between people like elon and jeff
bezos
and firefly and nasa and eso we are
gonna get there they're building the
road to space these trailblazers are
doing it and now part of the challenge
is to get the rest of the public to
understand that it's happening
right a lot of people don't know that
we're going back to the moon that we're
going to send the first woman to the
moon within a few years a lot of people
don't know that there are commercial
space stations in orbit that it's not
just nasa that does space stuff so we
have a big challenge to get
more of humanity excited and educated
and involved again kind of like in the
apollo era where it was a big deal for
everybody well a lot of that is also one
of the big impressive things that elon
does i think uh extremely well is the
social media is the getting people
excited
and i think that actually he's he's he's
helped nasa step their game up in terms
of social media
there's something about yeah the
storytelling but also not like
um
you know like authentic and just real
and raw engineering there's a lot of
excitement for that
humor and fun also all of those things
you realize
the thing that make up the virality of
the meme is is beautiful you have to
kind of embrace that and
um
to me this kind of
uh i criticize a lot of companies uh
business i i talked to i talked to a
bunch of ceos and and so on and it's
just like there's a caution like yeah
let us let us do this like press
conference thing where we when the final
product is ready and it's overproduced
as opposed to the raw the gritty just
showed off i mean something that i think
mit is very good at doing is just
showing the raw
by nature the mess of it and the mess of
it is beautiful and people get really
excited and failure is really exciting
yeah when the thing blows up and you're
like oh that makes it even more
exciting when it doesn't blow up right
and doing all that on social media and
showing also the humans behind it the
individual young researchers or the
engineers or the leaders
where everything's at stake i don't know
i think i'm really excited about that i
do want mit to do that more for students
to show off their stuff and not be
uh pressured to do this kind of generic
official presentation but
show their become a youtuber also like
show off your raw research as you're
working on it in the early days i hope
that's the future things like i was
teasing about tech talk earlier but you
know these kinds of things and i think
inspire
uh young people to uh
to show off their stuff to show their
true self the rawness of it because i
think that's where engineering is best
and i think that will inspire people
about all the cool stuff we could do out
in space i should say i couldn't agree
more and i actually think that this is
why we need a real life starfleet
academy right now it was the place where
the space cadets got to go to learn
about how to engage in in a future of
life and space and uh we can do it in a
much better way there are a bunch of
groups that traditionally haven't
thought that they could engage in
aerospace whether it's because you were
told you had to be into math and science
now we need space lawyers we need space
artists like grimes right we need really
creative profoundly interesting people
to want to see themselves in that future
i think it's a big challenge to us in
the space industry to also do some more
diversity equity and inclusion and show
a broader swath of society that there's
a future for them in this space
exploration push back on one thing we
don't need space lawyers i'm just
kidding okay
it's a joke we do we do
okay
we do the lawyers are great i love them
yeah okay uh let me ask a big ridiculous
question what is the most beautiful idea
to you about space exploration whether
it's the engineering the astrobiology
the science the
inspiration that the human happiness uh
or aliens i don't know
what what do you like um inspires you
every day
in terms of its beauty in terms of
it's awe
as a ex-physicist but i've always found
so profound um
it's just that at really really small
scales like particle physics and really
really big scales like astrophysics
there are similarities in the way that
those systems behave and look and
there's a certain beautiful symmetry in
the universe that's just kind of waiting
for us to tie together the physics and
really understand it that is something
that just um
just really captivates me and i would
love to even though i'm now much more on
the applied space exploration side i
really try to keep up with what's
happening in those physics areas because
i think that will be a huge answer for
humanity along the lines of are we alone
in the universe
one of the fascinating things about you
is you have a degree in physics
mathematics and philosophy and now
i don't know what you want would you
call it aerospace engineering maybe kind
of thing so you're you have a foot in
all of these worlds the theoretic
uh the the the sort of the beauty of
that world and the the philosophy
somehow is in there and now the very
practical pragmatic implementation of
all these wild ideas
um plus you're an incredible
communicator all those things what did
you pick up from those different
disciplines um or maybe i'm just
romanticizing all those different
disciplines uh but what is there
what did you pick up from the variety of
that physics mathematics philosophy what
i loved about having this chance to do a
liberal arts education was trying to
understand the human condition and i
think more designers for space
exploration should be thinking about
that because there's so much depth of
like we were talking about issues of
issues and opportunities around human
connection human life
meaning in life how do you find
fulfillment or happiness and i think if
you approach these questions just purely
from the standpoint of an engineer or a
scientist you'll miss some of what makes
it a life worth living
and so i love being able to combine some
of this notion of philosophy and the
human condition with my work but i'm
also a pragmatist and i didn't want to
stay just purely in these big picture
questions about the universe i wanted to
have an impact on society and i also
felt like i had such a
a wonderful childhood and a really
fantastic setup that i i owe
society some work
to really make a positive impact
for broader swath of citizens and so
that kind of led me from the physics
domain to thinking about engineering and
practical questions for life in space in
physics was there a dream are you also
captivated by this search for the theory
of everything that kind of unlocks the
deeper and deeper
in the in the simple elegant way the
function of our universe do you think
they'll be useful for us
uh
for the actual practical engineering
things that you're working on now it
could be i mean i worked at cern for two
summers in undergrad and we were looking
for super symmetry
which was one of these alternatives to
the standard model and it was sad
because my professors were getting
sadder and sadder because they weren't
finding it they were excluding what we
would call this parameter space of
finding these supersymmetric particles
but the search for what that theory of
everything could be or a grand unified
theory that kind of answers some of the
holes within the standard model of
physics would presumably
kind of unlock a better understanding of
certain fundamental physical
laws that we should be able to build a
better understanding of engineering and
day-to-day services from that it might
not be an immediately obvious thing
when we discovered the higgs the higgs
boson i was there at cern that day it
was uh july 4th 2012 that it was
announced we all waited like nerds
overnight in line to get into the
announcement chamber i'd never waited
for even like a harry potter premiere in
my life but we waited for this like
announcement of the higgs boson to get
into this chamber
but did that immediately
translate to technology for engineering
no
um
but it's still a really important part
of our understanding of these
fundamental laws of physics and so i
don't know that it's always immediate
but i think it is really critical
knowledge for humanity to seek
it might just
shake up understanding of the world yeah
what scares me is it might help us
create more dangerous weapons so um and
then we'll figure out that great filter
situation and i still believe that human
compassion and love
uh is actually the way to defend against
all these greater and greater and more
impressive
weapons yeah let me ask a weird question
in terms of you disagreeing with others
what important idea do you believe is
true
that
many others uh don't agree with you on
maybe uh it's a tough question you might
have to think about that one but it was
very specific
like which material to use or something
about a particular project
or um
it could be grand priorities on missions
i think one you actually mentioned is
interesting is like
um
the thing we should be looking for is
like colonization of space versus
colonization of planets
meaning like
my best hot take that people would
disagree with me on is life
in floating cities as opposed to life on
on the surface how do you envision that
like
spread of humans because you said at the
beginning of the conversation something
about like
scale increasing the scale of basically
humans in space are they just
like
in um they're in orbit and then they get
a little farther and farther out like do
you see this kind of
uh
floating cities just getting farther and
far from earth they can always kind of
return but like if you look a few
centuries from now do you just see us
all these like floating
yes
and it just kind of envelops
uh the space around us
and it's like neighborhoods
yeah yeah it's like rural and there's
like
giant structures and there's small
pirates structures and that kind of
stuff structures yeah i think low earth
orbit might come to look like that and
it's a really interesting regulatory
challenge to make sure that um
there's some cross purposes so the more
cool space cities we have in orbit the
more shiny objects in the night sky the
worse it is for astronomers in a really
kind of overly simplified case
so there's some push pushback to this
like amoebaeing where we just grow kind
of um incongruously uh or
indiscriminately as an amoeba in
low-earth orbit beyond that though i
think we'll grow in pockets where there
are resources so we won't just expand
around the gravity well of earth
we'll do
some development around the moon some
development around asteroids some
development around mars because there'll
always be purposes for which we want to
go down to a physical object and study
it or extract something or learn from it
but i think we'll grow in fits and
starts in pockets um some of the coolest
pockets are the gravity balanced pockets
like the lagrange points which is where
we just sent we not me personally but
nasa just sent james webb
the big telescope i think it's at l2
so uh what's the nice feature about
those pockets so it's a stable orbit um
there are several different lagrange
points and so it just requires less
energy to stay where you're trying to
stay
yeah
that's fascinating what's also
fascinating is the interaction between
nations
regard like who owns that do you would
you would you say in those floating
cities do you envision
independent governments
that was going to be my next answer to
you which pushed me harder for a more
provocative question where i might
disagree with other people i don't yet
have my own opinions fully formed on
this but we are trying to figure out
right now what happens to the moon with
all of these first-come first-served
actors just arriving and setting
precedence that might really affect
future access and one example is
property rights we do want companies
that have the expertise to go to the
moon and mine stuff that will help us
uh you know develop a human settlement
there or a gateway but companies need to
know generally that they have rights to
a certain area or that they have some
legal right to sell things that they're
getting does that mean we're going to
grant property rights on the moon to
companies who has the right to give that
right away so there's a bunch of really
kind of gnarly questions we have to
think about which is why i think we need
space lawyers maybe that's the true
provocative answer is i think we need
space true i mean
yeah yeah i mean but those questions
again as you said
eloquently will help us answer questions
about here we hope so yeah it is a
little
strange
i mean it's obvious but it's also
strange if you look at the big picture
of it all that we draw these like
borders around geographical areas and we
say this is mine
like and then we fight wars over what's
mine and not there there it seems like
they're
there's possible alternatives but also
it seems like
there needs to be a public ownership of
some parts
um like you know what is it central park
in new york is there something
like preserving
the commons yeah the commons commons
that's why we titled the book into the
anthropo cosmos we know it's a long kind
of a mouthful but this notion of the
anthropocene we have a lot of commons
problems in humanity how are we treating
the earth global climate change how are
we going to treat and behave in space
how can we be responsible stewards of
the space commons and i would love to
see an approach to the moon that is
commons based but it's hard to know who
would be the protector or the enforcer
of that and if it's which it will be
probably in the early days a lot of
companies sort of working on the moon
working on mars working out in space
it feels like there still needs to be
a civilian representation
of like the greater effort or something
like that like where there should be a
president there should be a democracy
yeah of some kind where people can vote
some representative government those are
all again the same the same human
questions
what advice
would you give to a young person today
thinking about what they want to do with
their life career
so somebody in high school somebody in
college maybe somebody that looks up to
the stars and dreams to one day
take a one-way ticket to mars or to
contribute something to the effort
i'd say you should feel empowered
because it's really the first time in
human history that we're at this cusp of
interplanetary civilization and i don't
think we're gonna lapse back from it
so the future is incredibly bright for
young people that even younger than you
and i who will actually really get a
chance to go to mars for certain
um the other thing i would say is be
open-minded about what your own
interests are i don't think you anymore
have to be shoehorned into a particular
career to be welcomed into the future of
space exploration
if you are an artist and that is your
passion but you would love to do space
art or
if not space art use your artistry to
communicate a feeling or a message about
space
that's a role that we desperately need
just as much as we need space scientists
and space engineers so well when you
look at your own life
you're an incredibly accomplished
scientist young scientist but you know
and you hopped around from you know
physics to aerospace so going from the
the biggest theoretical ideas to the to
the biggest practical ideas is there
something from your own journey you can
give advice to
like how to
end up doing incredible research at mit
um
maybe the role of the university in
college and education and learning all
that kind of stuff i'd say one piece of
advice is find really good teammates
because i get to be the one that's
talking to you but there are
50 graduate students staff and faculty
that are part of my organization back at
mit and i'm actually you guys can't see
it on camera but i'm sitting here with
my co-founder and ceo danielle dalat
and that is really what makes these
large-scale challenges for humanity
possible is really fantastic teams
working together to scale more than what
i could do alone so i think that's an
important model that we don't talk about
enough in academia there's a big push
for this like lone wolf genius figure in
academia but that's certainly not been
the case in my life i've had wonderful
collaborators um and people that i work
with along the team also
cross-disciplinary so absolutely yeah
cross-disciplinary interdisciplinary
whatever you want to call it but
where do artists come in
do you work with artists we do we have
an arts curator on the space exploration
initiative side she helps make sure
partly around that communication
challenge that we talked about that
we're not just doing zero g flights and
space missions but that we take our
artifacts of this sci-fi space feature
to museums and galleries and exhibits
uh she pushed me to make sure her name
is shinglu
she pushed me for our first iss mission
i was just gathering all the engineering
payloads that i wanted to support for
the students to fly including my own
work and she said you know what we
should do an open call internationally
for artists to send something to the iss
and we found out it was the first time
we were the first ever international
open call for art to go to the iss and
that was thanks to shang and artists
bringing a perspective that i might not
have thought about prioritizing
so
yeah that's awesome so when you look out
there it's the flame of human
consciousness there does seem to be
something quite special about us humans
first of all what do you
what do you think it is
what's consciousness what
what are we trying to preserve here
what is it about humans that should be
preserved
or life here on earth
they would gives you hope to try to
expand it out farther and farther like
what makes you sad if it was all gone
i think we're a remarkable species that
we are aware of our own thoughts
we are meta aware of our own thoughts
and of ourselves and are able to speak
on a podcast about a matter of awareness
about our own thoughts about our own
thoughts yeah turtles all the way down
um
i think that that is a really
special gift that we have been given as
a species and that there's a worth to
expanding our circles of awareness so
we're very aware of as an earth-based
species we've become a little bit more
aware of the fragility of earth and how
special a place it is when we go to the
moon and we look back what would it mean
for us to have a presence
and our purpose in life as a
inter-solar system species or eventually
an intergalactic species i think it's a
really profound opportunity for
exploration for the sake of exploration
a real gift for the human mind yeah
if we're for anything we're curious
creatures
you see do believe we might one day
become
intergalactic civilization long long
time from now we have a lot of
propulsion
challenges to answer to get that far so
you have a hope for this yeah
uh another big ridiculous question
building on top of that what do you
think is the meaning
of life this individual life of ours
your life
that unfortunately has to come to an end
as far as we know for now
yeah um and our life here together
is there a why or do we just kind of
like let our curiosity carry us away
oh interesting is there a
single kind of driving purpose why or
can it just be curiosity-based
i certainly feel and this is not the
scientist in me talking but just more of
like a human soul talking i certainly
feel some sense
of
purpose and meaning in my life and
there's a version of that that's a very
local level within my family which is
funny because this whole conversation
has been big grand space exploration
themes but you asked me this question my
first thought is what really matters to
me my family my
biological reproducing unit
um
but then there's also another purpose
like another version of the meaning in
my life that is trying to do good things
for humanity so that sense that we can
be individual humans and have our local
meaning and we can also be global humans
maybe someday like the star trek utopia
we'll all be global citizens
i don't want to sound too
naive
but there is i think that beauty to a
meaning and a purpose of your life
that's bigger than yourself working on
something that's bigger and grander than
just yourself
the deepest meaning is from the local
biological reproduction unit and then it
goes to the engineering scientific um
what is it uh corporate like company
unit that can actually produce and
compete and interact with the world and
then there's the the giant human unit
that's
struggling with pandemics and commons
and and together struggling against the
forces of nature that keeps wanting to
kill us yeah there'd be nothing like an
alien invasion to unite the planet we
think
i can't wait bring it on aliens uh
listen your your work you're an
incredible communicator incredible young
scientist here it's a huge honor that
you would spend your time with me i
can't wait what you do
uh in the future and um thank you for
representing mit so beautifully so
masterfully you're incredible person
thank you for talking thank you so much
for having me it's been an absolute
pleasure it's a great conversation
thanks for listening to this
conversation with ariel ekblah to
support this podcast please check out
our sponsors in the description
and now let me leave you with some words
from seneca
the roman stoic philosopher
there is no easy way
from earth
to the stars
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time