Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures | Lex Fridman Podcast #271
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