This Week in Space 122 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
00:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
On this episode of this Week in Space. We're talking space settlement and about the recent book A City on Mars with National Space Society. Senior Vice President, Dale Scran. Join us. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is this Week in Space, episode number 122, recorded on August 2nd 2024. No city on Mars. Hello and welcome to another episode of this Week in Space, the no City on Mars edition. That was with a question mark. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Ad Astra magazine, and I'm here with my pal, Isaac Arthur of the Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur YouTube channel, and Isaac is also the president of the National Space Society. Thank goodness, how are you, Isaac?
00:50 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
Doing pretty good. I've had a bit of a long week, but I would say I'm very much looking forward to the weekend.
00:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, what are you going to do? Anything we should know about.
00:58 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
Oh, good God, Hopefully catch me in my sleep. I'm doing house renovations Much more boring than it probably sounds like that Enlightened scripts.
01:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, at least you're working on your show. And today we have the good fortune to be joined by my friend, dale Scran, the COO and Senior Vice President of the National Space Society. Talk about a new book you may or may not have read yet, called A City on Mars by Zach and Kelly Wienersmith. How are you doing, dale? I am doing fine and I'm glad to be here. That's good, because if you weren't, it would be a lousy afternoon. Before we start, I want to remind you to please not forget to do us a solid and make sure to like, subscribe and do all those other podcast things that help keep us afloat. And now I'm imagining a drumroll, a joke from loyal listener Greg Pinto. This is not a call and respond, this is just a single one-liner. Hey, my kid is obsessed with the moon. Do you think it's serious? I'm hoping it's just a phase. Yeah, bringing the laugh track for the subtle chuckles from the in-house audience. Okay, yeah, I've heard, as I mentioned last week, I've heard some folks swear off my dad humor when it's joke time on this show. But you know that's partly on you. You've got to send us your jokes, so save the cosmos from my humor. It's a good cause. Send your best, worst or indifferent space joke to us at twisttv. That's T-W-I-S. At twittv I answer all the emails and I will use your joke and I'll even give you credit for it.
02:33
Now this week we're going to skip headlines because we got a lot to cover and because our good pal Tarek Malik has decided to take a powder on us for a week or two. So let's jump right into this. We're here to talk about the Zach and Kelly Wintersmith book A City on Mars, which is a somewhat comprehensive and slightly tongue-in-cheek look at space settlement. And specifically they went into this book, as they say, as, if not advocates, at least enthusiasts about the idea of humans moving off Earth and settling the solar system and possibly beyond. But that's not what the final book turned out to be. And Amaya Culpa up front I'm listed in the text as an advisor, as are a couple of other people who are space settlement advocates, and the conversation I had with them was fairly early on and I gave them the best pointers I could, primarily in the role of author of Space 2.0 book I put out a couple of years ago. And I won't say that they turned it against me or anything, it just wasn't what I expected to come out of that interview or that series of interviews.
03:46
So what are you going to do? They write it as they see it, and it's a different view. As they put it, authors Zach and Kelly Wienersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren't so sure it's a good idea. They claim we lack the knowledge needed to have kids in space, build space farms and create space nations in a way that doesn't spark conflict back home. Can you make babies in space? Should corporations govern space settlements? What about space war? Are we headed for a housing crisis on the moon? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? I don't know about that last one. Actually, we do know about that last one they I don't know about that last one, actually, we do know about that last one they can't taste anything. And their final sting, speaking of meals, what's the legal status of cannibalism in space? So there we go, dale. What's your sweeping overall take on this volume?
04:42
now that I've set it up for you a little bit.
04:44 - Dale Skran (Guest)
Well, look, as I said in my, I wrote a 40,000-word review of the response to this book. That's my claim to fame here, and a good review, a very good review. Well, actually I wrote a short review for the no City on Mars that appears in Ed Astor, and then I wrote a much, much longer review, 40,000 words, which is basically a third of a book.
05:07 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Are you serious with 40,000 words?
05:08 - Dale Skran (Guest)
I thought you were being glib. No, that's, that is not an exaggeration. It's 40,000 words, um, so it's, it's like it's not quite book length, but it's, uh, it's a serious thing to read it. You know, um, and I think that, look, I was expecting. The thing that you need to know is they we had fall of 2021. We had this workshop space workshop to re-envision O'Neill's future and they attended. We invited them. We're delighted to have them there. They announced they were doing a book, or at least Kelly was there and she announced herself and we applauded she mentions it in the book that we applauded her and I was there. I was applauding, and the reason I was applauding is that this promised to be like the first serious book on space settlement in generations, because if you ask yourself when was the last sort of popular book advocating for space settlement, I'd have to say Colonies of Space by Heppenheimer.
06:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's the last one.
06:13 - Dale Skran (Guest)
I should have it in front of me, and that was about the same time as High Frontier came out. It's certainly of that epoch and Heppenheimer was one of O'Neill's associates and colleagues, so it's been a long, long time. There have been a lot of books by our good friend Zubrin on Mars, but there are not very many books on free space settlement, especially serious books. I mean obviously not a chapter or a few words. Oh yeah, there was this guy O'Neill somewhere hanging gardens in the space settlement, but an actual, serious book advocating. And so when I saw what I read, the book, I was really disappointed because it's basically, you know, 50,000 gallons of FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt about space settlement and but. But it's. It is humorous, but, and a lot of it is, I have to say, irrelevant, and a lot of it is, I have to say, irrelevant. Having thousands of words about how radiation is bad for you is not really all that interesting. We know radiation is bad for you. We don't need to see thousands of words about how microgravity is bad for you, zero gravity is bad for you, and so on.
07:24
The question is, why do space settlementates think there's a solution? And what is it? And is there some problem with that and in that sense I think they didn't go into it as deeply as they could and they actually missed some anti-arguments that I can think of. So but the bottom line is this was a serious book. It has a lot of depth, even though there's a lot of pointless humor and even, I think, some mean-spirited jokes about Herman Obert that I didn't appreciate. It's got a lot of thought and they raise a lot of issues.
07:59
You might say it may not be. It is the most comprehensive anti-space element book and because of that it's very useful if you're a space settlement advocate, because you can look at it and say well, you know, do I have an answer to this? Do I have an answer to that? Does this make any sense? And so in that sense it's part of the dialogue of ideas and that's why I wrote the 40,000 word response, which is currently being peer reviewed to appear in the NSS Space Settlement Journal as an essay. It's not a journal article, it's very personal, it's, rod knows I tend to do I tend to write like I talk, just like I'm talking to somebody, and it's not a journal style, you know it's. Hopefully it's more fun. Anyway, I don't know what next, rod.
08:43 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, so just to note, Heppenheimer's book was written or published in 1977. So certainly things have changed since then. And I would add, you know that it's possible to write a populist, tongue-in-cheek space book. I mean, I like to think a couple of mine are, but Witness, a Bigger Success than Mine Packing for Mars by Mary Roach. I mean that was extremely popular and it was very snarky. I mean, there were even fart jokes and things in there, but it was still well researched and I think the points held up to scrutiny for the most part. So, um, yeah, this one felt to me I don't want to mischaracterize it, but just a little flabbier around the edges in terms of, uh, of how they went after it, isaac.
09:27 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
I liked some of the artwork that was in there.
09:29
I actually had mentioned that in an upcoming episode on the cities of Mars and I thought the biology was probably one of the stronger points.
09:36
There's bits being discussed there that for a lot of us who are rocket enthusiasts or engineering enthusiasts, we tend to overlook how difficult it is to make soil, how hard it is to actually propagate any kind of even very shallow ecosystem in an environment like that.
09:50
So they were raising good points in the book. In many cases there are some, I agree, that were overdone or not really relevant, but to me the points were valid. It's just that they were looking from the well, this is a problem we don't know how to fix at this exact moment, or we have many possible solutions that have been field tested. So therefore we can't do it, and that's kind of like saying we'd like to build ourselves a big cathedral or a big skyscraper and we don't have every last point ticked down for sure yet, so let's not even try, and I think that was kind of. The weakness of the book is that it's very pessimistic. I mean, I'm known for my techno-optimism on space, so maybe I go the other direction, but overall there's a lot to like about the book, but there's a lot more to dislike in terms of its advocacy on basically being against space, which is unfortunate.
10:36 - Dale Skran (Guest)
I think we should say something about the art. So the viewer, the listener has warned is that Kelly Wienersmith is a PhD biologist and she does research in parasitic worms. So it shouldn't be surprising that the biological parts of the book tend to be the strongest parts of the book. I agree with that as a comment and I'm not even. I don't even think they're that far from what I think, and I say that in my review. I mean I think there's a lot of thoughts there that make a lot of sense and a lot of common ground. But her husband, zach Wienersmith, is a cartoonist, so I wouldn't want you to see, expect to see, mccall style art there.
11:15
This is cartoon art. It's funny. I think I find it entertaining and I, like you, know Zach Wienersmith as a humorous artist. It definitely adds something to it. But this is not like. This is a book that's intended to be snarky, it's intended to be popular, it's intended to be funny and for the most part it's entertaining. So you know, I read the whole thing and even if you know, if you read the book, that's good right.
11:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
There's a lot of books that you start out and after 30 pages you stop, and this one I did. Read the whole book, All right. Well, we're going to be back with my next burning question right after this short break, so go nowhere. So let me jump into, I guess, one of the bigger questions from my point of view, and I'll just read one of their quotes no vast new riches, no new independent nations, no second home for humanity, not even a safety bunker for the elite. Now I'll contextualize this by saying in their summary, at the end of the book and in a few places within, they do admit they're talking about the next couple of decades versus hundreds and hundreds of years. And they have this go slow and go big philosophy that they talk about. But that's, you know. For an organization like the National Space Society, that's kind of a big jab. What do you think?
12:32 - Dale Skran (Guest)
Well, that's a lot to unpack in that and that's why I wrote 40,000 words. So you know, because there's four or five completely different points being made and you know, let me just focus on the. There's no, nothing of value in space, and this is really kind of horrendously wrong. I mean they are very down on possible benefits for space and they don't actually. I mean, this is a book about space settlement, so it's appropriate they focus on that, but it's hard to disentangle space development and space settlement. So it's appropriate that they focus on that, but it's hard to disentangle space development and space settlement.
13:07
I always say that profitable space development will enable space settlement. And if there's really nothing to be made in space, no money to be made, no products, no valuable resources, we're not going to settle space because it will be impossible. It's a desert, and so they're really not very attuned to what's being done in terms of benefits for space. That's all you can really say. They don't see any and in particular, they dump on asteroid mining. They just think it's a total waste, and I don't think they make a very good case.
13:40
They quote from Elvis's book on asteroids. It's a great book, by the way, we should probably. I need a rate of review of that one. And you know they like him. But they basically say well, he's wrong. You know we won't buy any asteroids, it's not going to work. But the case is, I don't think they make the case. It's just not that strong and I couldn't tell you exactly what the real argument is, except that they don't know how to do it so it can't be done. So that's just one point. I can keep talking about it.
14:09 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
That's a big one. There's nothing valuable in space, and almost everything is in space, If you really want to be able to keep growing as a civilization. You've got this one pale blue dot and you've got all of everything in the cosmos, Right right, so at that level.
14:25 - Dale Skran (Guest)
it's absurd. It's an absurd viewpoint. They're also very anti-space solar power. They're very much in the thrall of a blogger called Casey Handmare, who I've written a point-by-point refutation of that you can see on the NSS blog. But you know. So if you sort of say, well, space solar power, that's a big benefit, but we think that's a big stupid idea. And mining asteroids, that's a stupid idea. Mining the moon, that's a stupid idea, I mean they make a.
14:49
I hate it when people make straw man examples that are absurd. So they say that you know we can't, it doesn't make sense to mine cement on the moon and ship it to Earth. Well, that's true. As I see in my response, we're not going to import sand from Mars or oxygen from the moon or whatever, because it doesn't make any economic sense. But that doesn't mean there are no resources in space. They're picking an absurd example and then shooting down at the fish in the barrel and that's not good. It's not good, it's dishonest argumentation. And they have to know that importing cement from the moon is something that nobody has ever suggested.
15:31 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That felt like very low-hanging fruit. Now, isaac, just to contextualize this, a rough estimate how many hours of research, writing and programming would you say you've done on utilization of space resources all around? Good God, well, hundreds.
15:46 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
It's got to be at least half the topics we talk about on the show. I actually use an example there. There's a lot of debate on whether or not you should use solar into space. I know Casey Handmeyer. He and I had some good conversations about his own project, which is solar-based, and he likes solar for up in space and he likes solar down on the ground for making hydrocarbons carbon neutrally and it was pretty interesting product. I don't know if I necessarily agree with him on all points, but it was some good ideas. We have a different view of it, we have different data, we all you know, but there's room for discussion there. But to just kind of set it aside as we don't like it, I think it's a mistake.
16:20 - Dale Skran (Guest)
I think she also doesn't survey the weaner system. I also don't see that. You know, maybe building real autarkic our topic, that is, self-sufficient space elements is hundreds of years in the future. I personally I think it's hundreds of years in the future. But you know there's going to be a continuous, you know, set of settlements in space, starting with the ISS, going all the way to the true autarkic space settlement far off in the asteroid belt, and in the time span it will be centuries.
16:51
But that means we need to build the first rotating space station in LEO in the next 10 years and then we need to build one, you know, that's around the moon, and we need to have mass drivers on the moon and lunar mines in the next 20 years and so on, to get to that point hundreds of years from now. And I think as non-engineers they just don't get that. You can't, you know, wait 500 years and go big. I mean, that's what they suggest and it really doesn't work and that's part of the reason I think it's a bad argument, a bad idea, and I spend a lot of time. I can talk a lot more about why it's a bad idea.
17:31 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, well, we'll probably ask you to, but I'd like to shift topics a little bit. They have a fairly extensive discussion of society and space and they like to use use an example, a lot of us like to use star trek versus the expanse. So we all three of us have read tons and tons of material, mostly from uh writers in the west uh, because that's where most of this material came from at least a couple decades ago and there's a lot of writing from a Western standpoint that compares, you know, doing space to the American expansion of the West, and then a lot of the one particular author I could think of that I did some work with, who really just loves Star Trek, and it's like OK, we leave Earth, we leave all our problems behind. Society is perfected, you know. We no longer have greed or avarice or lust or any of those things. We're all just these perfect, g-rated beings just like star trek, and all the furniture is mauve and there's push button gravity on the floor.
18:32
On the other hand, you have the expanse for people who've seen it, which is a gritty, fairly realistic approach to what space is like. People are still people, they still have the same kind of conflicts, they have envy and greed and they don't have gravity with push buttons. You know they have to wear magnetic boots or be accelerating to be stuck to the floor. So for my money, that's a more realistic in general, the more realistic view of things, which still it was a little more international and multicultural in scope, but it was still a little Western oriented, as you expect. But that doesn't mean it's going to be awful and it doesn't mean that it's going to be like working at Chernobyl when the reactor was melting down. You know there are a lot of in-betweens those two extremes. What do you, what do you think about that, both of you?
19:24 - Dale Skran (Guest)
Well, I guess, look, I love the Expanse. You think about that, both of you? Well, I guess, look, I love the expanse. It's great science fiction. I love star trek.
19:28
Um, people confuse fiction with fact and it just because somebody tells a story doesn't mean that has much to do with what's going to actually happen. The thing I like to point out and I agree, the expanse is by far the more realistic it's also near term. The expanse is something that could happen 100 years from now or 200 years from now. Star Trek is in some misty future, far off and, frankly, probably has a lot of impossible technology, so it's more almost a fantasy on that level. But the thing is this expanse is a cautionary tale.
19:59
In the expanse the people in space are seeking they're basically colonial native, they're indigenous space, indigenous peoples being oppressed by the earth. The UN is this ruthless global military state that lives in an arms truce with Mars after a big war and seems to be bent on exploiting the outer colonies to get cheap food to maintain toiling masses of proles on a dole. It's a very dystopian view. It may be realistic, but it is, I think. Certainly one less nightingale way is that the idea that the UN should exploit people living on Ganymede is not a good plan for our future. Ok, it's just not a good plan Anyway, but anyway.
20:55
But the thing that I really disagree with the Wienersche sign is they think we should wait until humanity is perfected and every problem is solved before we go anywhere in space, and I think that's basically a suicide pact. I mean, if you think the chance of human extinction is one in a thousand every year and then you say we should wait 500 years to settle space, which is basically what they're saying, you're saying that you're willing to accept a 50-50 chance of human extinction over the next 50 years and I am not willing to accept that. I do not think that's a good plan, it's a bad bet. But that's what anybody who wants to delay selling space, that's what they're saying, and I think one in a thousand chance of extinction every year I think that's actually very optimistic.
21:42 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
Now I know isaac and I disagree on some of this, so he has his own view and maybe we should hear from him well, I did the analysis that once I was going to walk through what the decay rate was, he assumed this percentage of the population and I said, if you ask most people, there's a one, you know, 100 chance that we wipe ourselves out this century. They'd say well, absolutely, say okay, that case, you got basically a 0% chance of being here 10,000 years, and most people would say the odds are way, way better than that. I think with Star Trek, you know, we do see a lot of impossible things there. My favorite anti-Star Trek or anti-Federation is probably from Blake's Seven, which is a much lower budget, older thing than the BBC. But I love the Expanse, love the books and the series, and this is an example, though, of so many stories we see in sci-fi.
22:26
Even when they get things right, what they're trying to do is write a story, and it's got to be a good story about people. So we have things that just would not happen. Like I have a civilization that can run a fusion torch drive non-stop economically to run ice back and forth. That is not a civilization that's ever low on air or water period Never. That's not how that works. That engine is so powerful to haul a one-kilometer rock that far, that fast it could one-handedly just itself run the entire global power grid. That's the difference and that's one of the things that gets overlooked. So you want to make your core mining analogy to West Virginia or any number of other exploitive situations. You do have to keep in mind that when you have technology that automatically makes you a post-scarcity civilization, they don't work up as well, they're not fitting, and that is a weakness that you get in that particular series. I would say the books are probably a little bit more realistic than the TV series in that regard is. But it's something we do on my show all the time is we take science fiction and we say it's great, so I enjoy it.
23:27
But here's what this is probably missing scientifically and here's maybe a pathway to it scientifically, and the intent is to try to problem solve, if I had to say, one of the weaknesses that we've seen, not just in this book by the Wiener Express but by a lot of stuff in just the last few years. There's a great deal of pessimism about it and this is kind of surprising, because when I was a kid and you only got to see Neil Armstrong on the moon on MTV and we didn't send anything on the shuttles up for everyone. Today it was making sense. You're getting kind of depressed about this stuff. It's been years, it's decades.
24:01
It's still irritating that we haven't gotten back to the moon, but we're starting to really snowball on progress. And not just how fast can we launch a rocket we paid billions of taxpayer dollars for, but an economically viable launch by a private company? These are starting to really happen a lot. This should be a time for enthusiasm, not for oh no, this is never going to happen or we've got to wait 500 years. The only problems we can solve with humanity right now. We can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time, and if we don't, we're still going to fall on our face with us now, 500 years from now. Because if you're trying to create civilizations away from Earth and most of your civilization problems are built by people away from Earth and most of your civilization problems are built by people you're exporting your problems with you, so you've got to solve them in route. They're going to be different everywhere, so I think they're just going for a needlessly pessimistic look at it.
24:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, so I got it.
24:53 - Dale Skran (Guest)
What's that?
24:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I have something I want to say to that Okay, you will, but we have to take another break. But I just want to point out you know, being one of the old men in the room which I share with you, dale sort of you know this argument they have about. Well, we should do this later. And here's the reasons why. It feels suspiciously familiar to the one I heard as a kid during the Apollo program in the early and mid 60s, which is why are we doing this now? We should wait, we should wait, we should wait. We haven't patched the potholes or saved the world from poverty and hunger and that kind of thing, and we still have not done those things.
25:27
And that argument still persists. And you know it's a hard thing to counter. I mean, there are a lot of discussions around that and many of them are in that book and of course, with the NSS we talk about this all the time. You know what the benefits are, but it's a hard sell to the general public, partly out of just general disinterest, I think. But even the people that are fascinated, but but lay people have trouble really understanding what some of the benefits are. So maybe we could talk about that when we come back, which will be in just a few moments, so don't go anywhere. Tell us, tell us everything.
26:05 - Dale Skran (Guest)
Why is it good? Well, look, the pessimism that Isaac so correctly identifies is in fact, a sign of progress. It's often said that there are three stages in any really radical idea. First they laugh, then they fight. Then they claim they invented it all along, and we are definitely in the. And. Then they fight. Then they claim they invented it all along, and we are definitely in the. And then they fight stage.
26:25
Every month I'm reading a new book that's against space settlement. There is a cottage industry cranking out these books and you know, serious people are spending years of their lives to write anti-settlement books. Why are they doing that? It's because they actually are terrified. It's going to happen and, contrary to what the winners would say, it's going to happen soon. They're terrified of Bezos, terrified of Musk, terrified of capitalists on the moon, terrified that we will have infinite material wealth and space, solar power and asteroid mines just absolutely bonkers scared because it completely upsets their political apple cart and their assumptions about how the world is. And you know, so that's kind of a sweeping Dale statement. But this book you were talking about Ground Control. It's an argument for the end of human space exploration. I'm reading a Martin Rees book right now called the End of Astronauts. It's all the same thing. We got to stop space right now, before it makes a difference Over.
27:28 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, let me just ask one follow-up there. When you say people are terrified because it upsets their constructs of various types, are you talking about? They're terrified of the billionaires primarily. Would it be different if NASA and the Chinese Space Agency were doing it? Or are they terrified of just the fact that it changes society as they understand it? Or what do you mean?
27:51 - Dale Skran (Guest)
Well, there's at least there's several kinds of terror here. One is the. I think there are people who have an ideological, sort of anti-capitalist kind of feeling and they're interested in opposing capitalism and free enterprise on the earth and their fear is that we will go into space, people in space will mine and become rich and it will just reinforce that capitalism is a good idea and they will lose out on their chance to use climate change as a lever to make sure that capitalism is expunged. And you may think these are grand, big, speculative ideas, but I believe that that's behind a lot of this. Now there are also people who have very narrow interests. I think we're getting to the point where there are people who own mines in various countries who do not want to see asteroid mining because they do not want to see platinum at a penny a pound. They just don't want to see it and because they'll lose their shirts, they're going to lose their mind and their money and their Swiss bank accounts and you know it's just going to happen.
28:59
And you know, I think the Wienersmiths they have a somewhat different approach. I think their big issue is really a fear of war. They don't. They just don't believe in resources If they believe in the resources. They don't believe in space resources, so they're not too worried about it. But I think that the Savannah Mandel and ground control and who spent a lot of time in the commercial space industry is much more concerned about just it being successful, that it will actually be true. Now there's also people who don't like the idea of billionaires in space having fun. They just don't like it, or they personally dislike Bezos and Musk, which we can understand. Why they might feel that way. But there's a lot of reasons. Actually, you're going gonna see it soon. I I've got an outline for like 10 reasons why people oppose space settlement.
29:49 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, it'll show up at some point and let me just mention very quickly uh, dale was referring to another book called ground control that we were talking about before we came on the air, which is uh, newer. Uh, just came out, uh, I think a few weeks ago or a couple months ago. A few weeks ago I just got my copy. It's another take on the subject, but by any stretch not a positive one. So it's something, if we have time, we'll talk about.
30:15 - Dale Skran (Guest)
It is titled An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration.
30:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It kind of puts it right in front of your face there.
30:22 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
On that note, a lot of the push seems to be on regulatory front, and this is something that we obviously discuss a lot. Is that all the regulations and treaties actually in the way of getting space development, while at the same time, many folks feel there needs to be more regulation, and not without some justifications? Do you feel like we have the right set of regulations right now? What's in the way that's going to help us better develop space, versus what are some of these folks asking for? That might actually make it harder.
30:51 - Dale Skran (Guest)
Well, look there's. I mean, good regulations are key to development. If you have no regulations, I mean, look, I hate this term wild west that people use all the time. I mean, look, I hate this term Wild West that people use all the time. But you need to have some rules of the road that you can't just dump mercury on your neighbor's lawn. That ought to be illegal because it's a really bad thing to do to your neighbor's lawn and your neighbor. And we need those kind of rules of space.
31:17
And I think that as the scale of activity in space has risen, people are seeing that things that they previously thought weren't problems really are problems. There's an article in the latest science magazine about the you know, satellites burning up. If one satellite burns up every year, it doesn't really matter. If a thousand burn up an hour, it pollutes the atmosphere with aluminum which creates aluminum oxide which eventually attacks the ozone layer, but after about a 30-year delay, which is kind of tricky. So yeah, we do need reasonable regulations and you know that's a fact. And the NSS is very interested in regulations for space, debris regulations, for obviously we're going to be interested in atmospheric pollution and things like that. We're going to be interested in dust on the moon causing problems for people doing things on the moon. But the answer is not to ban people doing things in space or arrest Elon Musk or something like that. It's to have a reasonable set of regulations, just like we have on Earth.
32:20 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
Well, speaking of that, we've got the Outer Space Treaty most people have heard of, and we've got the Moon Treaty, and there's a big difference between the two. Do you see one of those as helpful, or either of them as helpful, or are they doing any modification?
32:33 - Dale Skran (Guest)
Well, this kind of strikes to the Wienersmith's main concern. One of the strengths of the Wienersmith's book is they have a really pretty comprehensive explanation of discussions about the August Race Treaty and the Moon Treaty and even though I disagree with their conclusion, I think they've done a service by exposing a lot of L5 and NSF's history. There's a lot of people like Alan Wasser who walk on the stage in that book and are given a chance to defend an idea that I don't really agree with, but it's kind of historically significant. And the bottom line is the Outer Space Treaty has been agreed to by nations pretty much everywhere and nobody is really pushing to overturn it, even though it probably in the expanse future it will be obsolete, but nobody wants to overturn it now.
33:28
The Moon Treaty, at least from a US perspective, is an absolute dead letter. It was only ratified by a small number of non-space-faring nations, some of whom only signed it and didn't ratify it. One of the signers, saudi Arabia, has withdrawn. So it is not a strong treaty and it has basically prevented space development for 40 years or 50 years, because it says that we will create an authority to regulate mining on all celestial bodies, not just the moon, everyone everywhere, but we don't know what it is and it will be negotiated in the future. Well, that is a formula, for why should I invest in the moon or mining the moon? At the future, the UN can put together an authority and tax me, and I don't know what the tax rate is going to be. I don't know what the rules are going to be. This is the argument.
34:23
I think our governor, art Dula, wrote an essay in a law review in like 1976, making this exact point. There will be no investment in space under the Moon Treaty as it exists today. And you could say well, we should define, you know, some kind of rules of the road. If you look at the rules that have come out of the law of the sea, those rules have not encouraged mining of the seabed, and the rules that will come out of an international treaty will not encourage mining of the moon.
34:52
They will be exploited. They will be a step on the path to an oppressive United Nations exploiting colonists in space. That's actually the thing I fear is that we will colonize space and then the people living in space will be little more than slaves. They'll be paid for billionaires but in reality they'll live as slaves in service of a UN bureaucracy and in the end there will be a war, kind of like in the Expanse, and it will not be a pretty war and I think that's a terrible future. We have to start out with the idea that we're gonna we're gonna develop and settle space and we're gonna have fair regulations and of course, people should pay taxes in space just like they pay on earth, but they shouldn't be exploited over.
35:36 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, your, your illustration of that reminds me of my time working in television. But we won't go there. All right, we have another break to go to very quickly, and then we'll be back to talk about one of the Wiener Smith's favorite chapters, I'm sure sex in space. Stand by about human reproduction in space, which is a concern, and it's a legitimate one, because we have not yet had any real experience with mammalian reproduction in less than 1G, because, you know, human beings evolved on Earth where there's one gravity and it doesn't change much regardless of where you are on this planet, and so that's how we know that it works to make babies. So the activity getting there is one thing, but the gestation and proper formation and birthing of a child is something we don't know about.
36:27
There were plans to run a rodent centrifuge on the space station. I think they did some work with it, but as far as I know, the data was never released. That was from the Japanese. But you know, this is a problem and it's it's one of those things that, as so often in that book, the problems identified, but there is little hope offered up for how it might be addressed. And this is not a hard thing to address it just requires a technological and financial commitment. Do you agree?
36:56 - Dale Skran (Guest)
I look this is. I mean, I certainly agree with the way this that this is an area where we ought to be doing research, but we're only going to do that research if we think space settlement is something that ought to happen, and doing it right will take quite a while. So so you know it's like they're saying it's important and somebody had to do it, but they're also saying it's not a nobody. You know it's not worth spending any money on and you know so it's, I don't know, a little disingenuous, I think. I think it is very important to understand the effect of gravity on reproduction and health in general.
37:35
Some results have started to appear from that Japanese centrifuge. They're not totally encouraging. I mean, I think these are very incomplete early reports and you have to consider the fact that the mice are put in a rocket and bounced around and then stuck in a little cage for a month and they might be unhealthy for reasons other than the gravity. But what I've seen from the papers I've read is that artificial gravity definitely alleviates a significant fraction of the impacts of zero G and more gravity is better. What's surprising is that it doesn't seem like one G of artificial gravity completely alleviates all the impacts of zero g, and there there are many complex. I don't want to get into the biochemical things they're looking at, but they're it's. It's not just grip strength. I mean that's one of the things they test on the mice is grip strength, but it's. There's a bunch of other things and you know. So that is a burning question as far as I'm concerned. Is it because if 1G cannot be simulated with rotation, then you can't really have settlements of space without maybe genetic engineering, and that puts it on like a centuries time scale, I think, because it's going to take a while to get that right.
39:02
So I'd love to see a real centrifuge in space as soon as possible. I'd love to see a real centrifuge in space as soon as possible. I'd love to see VAS and Gravix thinking about building rotating stations. It's shameful that NASA canceled the big centrifuge and that they've allowed the Japanese to do this. Thank you to the Japanese for putting money into this. It's just shameful that we've spent $100 billion on the station and spent 20 years or 30 years building it and we have no idea about gravity. And, of course, nasa I hope NASA's not listening. They're terrified of artificial gravity. I mean because it would create bigger, heavier spaceships, make it more expensive to go to Mars. Put a focus on space settlement as opposed to zipping around the universe in a fusion-powered rocket like Buzz Lightyear, and they just don't want it.
40:04 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
So they've avoided. I think if there's any serious work that needs to be done for space on what NASA avoids doing it, I would say that I kind of agree with that point. The loss is that in the entirety of space history, while we've had people up on zero gravity or microgravity for over a year at a time and we've had hundreds, at this point in time, of days of people experiencing this, we only have what maybe 12 total man days on the Moon of people actually there in low gravity. Most suspicious of that one day or two, 12 people, Not a lot of data.
40:31
And at the same time that's the one we're really kind of looking at is what can we do with artificial gravity, with spin gravity, and what can we do in low gravity on the Moon? And it just kind of goes back to that point is we know people can live on the Moon, at least temporarily. Why are we not pushing for more of a base there to actually start checking out ISRU and things like can rats have children in space or can people have children in space? And it does seem like NASA tends to flinch away from doing that research a lot, though at least partially, for budgetary concerns. Do you think that's more of a climate or the environment of who's at NASA right now, or is that more of just a concern about getting the funding?
41:08 - Dale Skran (Guest)
This, I think, is a complex question that historians will write papers about and books about for a long time. There definitely was a period in the 70s and 80s the last century where NASA had a lot of high level support of space settlement, space solar power, and that when the Challenger disaster came, I think there was just sort of a seismic shock, a tremor in the force, as it were, and over a period of time, the support for space settlement and space solar power declined dramatically. Ultimately, you know, space solar power continued for a while until John Mankins was ushered out the doors at NASA. And now I think space and NASA, I think, is arguably anybody who's interested in space settlement or space solar power is not allowed to work at NASA. And you know, you see people that are that might be interested in this. They seem to end up working at SpaceX. So is it just budgetary? I'm going to throw out a theory. I think this is total speculation and probably wrong, but I think that they're aware that there is significant number of stakeholders on the Hill do not support space settlement or space development. They just think it's bad. They think it's bad to have corporations doing things in space. They don't like Elon Musk and that is part of the but those same people are willing to spend billions on supposedly sending astronauts to Mars. So they're trying to make those stakeholders happy.
42:36
I'm going to roll out a speculation here. I think NASA is afraid that if they did real research on zero G or on our spin gravity, one of the two things is going to happen. It's going to work really well and create an impetus for them to build space settlements, which they do not want to do. So they don't want to know the answer. But it also might turn out that the answer is it doesn't work. And what would happen then? Well, people like us would sit around and say, wow, we can't build O'Neill Cylinders, we're going to think of something new and we would redirect our energies. We might stop supporting space altogether. We might focus on genetic engineering. I don't know what would happen, but NASA might lose our support and I think they're terrified of that. So they want to have this big tent with all these stakeholders and they don't want to know the answers to any difficult questions. That's.
43:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Dale's theory All right. Well, next up, a fan favorite Space War. And I say that because during my time on DSpace9, when I was working, laboring away in the basement of the effects department we spent a lot of time talking about that, because Roddenberry was not a fan of episodes that had warfare in them. However, every time people started shooting at the Cardassians or whoever was the enemy of the week, ratings went up a lot. So clearly it's something people are interested in and we're going to talk about it as soon as we come back from this break. It's something people are interested in and we're going to talk about it as soon as we come back from this break.
44:05
Dale the Wienersmiths talked fairly comprehensively about space war and various kinds of conflicts and reasons for conflict in space, and certainly that's been discussed in a number of books that we've read articles. We've worked on the settlement book we're working on right now through the NSS. What about space war? You know, do colonies, settlements, war against other settlements? Do they go to war with Earth? Is it inevitable that every society that is unto itself is going to have a conflict with the one that it springs from? What do you think?
44:40 - Dale Skran (Guest)
So two points here. One is that the in terms of like this war of rebellion that you see in the in orbit, it's going to be under US law. The Europeans build something and the Chinese build something. It will be under Chinese law and there's not going to be any sovereign, say, spacers revolting in 100 years, in 200 years. It's going to be a long-term thing and I think they kind of admit that term thing and I think they kind of admit that their fear is that Artemis will lead to a land rush on the moon because the people will go, they will establish keep out zones and they will. You know, they will. Basically there will be disputes over the peaks of eternal light, particularly juicy lava tubes or things like that, and it's like, yes, yes, this could happen. I suppose and I guess that's my other point is they eviscerate the idea that space will make us peaceful or that it will unite the Earth, and I think they're right. It's not going to make us peaceful. Okay, nothing has made us peaceful, so I don't know why space would.
46:05 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
It's that usual notion that you're going to get into space. We talk about this a lot. On the episodes we have tons of episodes on space warfare. Our most popular episode last year was Rebel Space Colonies. People just love that one.
46:18 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Why am I not?
46:19 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
surprised it was really popular. We talk about how realistic that can be, and it's a very different tree in an interplanetary context versus a stellar context. But one of the kind of recurring themes is if we leave Earth, we can go make a bunker on some other planet and redo it, and I don't think people ever realize just how hard it is to terraform a planet compared to fixing Earth, which doesn't mean you can't do the one or both, but it's the idea that you can't just go set up shop there very easily. And so we get these rebel colonies and they're popular in so much sci-fi. Moon is a Horse Mistress by Robert Heinlein, one of the best out there and yet you're looking at a colony that usually is portrayed as having like 10,000 people on it or a million people on it.
47:00
It's like that's a county, that's not a state, that's a county, not a country. They nearly need all those resources, all those options, and it's just I'm saying this could be a reason for a billion, but it could also be a reason for something new. Like you hire out to the country back on the United States or back on Earth that is most able to accommodate your diplomatic needs. So you're part of Switzerland for diplomacy, or you're part of Liechtenstein for banking, or you've a mutual defense pact with this country, or you get in touch with England or the United States for their high courts, because you need a Supreme Court to handle your stuff. These are new opportunities. Not always. We all pay a loss to the past, but the idea that you're gonna have not a lack of conflict no, no, technology has not gotten rid of conflict. It's changed how we do it. But conflict is part of human interaction. So if you want to get rid of humans, sure that doesn't mean you can't have more peaceful conflicts, though.
47:53 - Dale Skran (Guest)
The question, though, is I totally agree with the way this is Going to space settling space, dwelling space is not going to eliminate worker there will be war. Sorry, Jerry Brunel's right, there will be war. The question is, will it be an existential war where the spacers grow two heads and wipe out humans because they hate natural humans or something?
48:14 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
And that's the.
48:15 - Dale Skran (Guest)
Daniel Doudna's thesis in Dark Skies, which is mentioned a lot in the City on Mars Apparently, and which is mentioned a lot in the city on Mars Apparently. I mean, you're supposed to take that very seriously. Basically, I think it's nonsense, you know. It's the idea that people are going to live in space and they're going to become genetically modified monsters who hate natural humans on the Earth and then wage some sort of existential war against us. It's like, I mean, it might happen, many things might happen over the next million years right, many things, but there's nothing inevitable about it and it isn't, I think, particularly likely.
48:52
And one species of argument that I do not I reject, is long-termism. So you can argue for virtually anything by making the argument that billions of years from now there will be lots of people if we settle space and there will be maximal happiness. Therefore we should settle space. Or you can argue that billions of years from now, people will live on settlements and they'll all lack vitamins and oxygen and they'll suffer. Therefore we shouldn't settle space. This is complete nonsense. It's just complete nonsense. Any argument like that, including Doudna's, is not, I think, a valid argument to be against space element, because it's totally speculative.
49:36
You know revisions of what amounts to. You're saying the second law of thermodynamics says you shouldn't bother with civilization, right, because everything runs downhill. You know it's like this is just complete nonsense. So there will be war. And the other thing that the Wienersmiths talk a lot about is the idea that war in space will be fundamentally more destructive than wars on the Earth. And I think that is technically a very dubious idea and I almost think it's nonsense.
50:04
And space is big, I hear, and one of the things that going into space gets you back is time to prepare a defense. So if I have an orbital around Ganymede and Earth decides to fire a nuclear missile at Ganymede, it's going to take a long time for that missile to get there and asteroids aren't going to get there faster. So it's just this idea that there's going to be this speedy warfare with people zipping around blowing up the fragile space elements, nonsense. Also, space elements aren't going to be as fragile as people say. O'neill's cylinders are fragile, but the ones that are really going to build are going to be hardened against meteor impacts and coronal mass ejections. And if you can withstand a coronal mass ejection, you can take a nuclear strike nearby, because it's just the big EM people.
50:57
So you better be able to take a big EM people or you're not going to last very long as a settlement, and I think we as settlement advocates have not focused enough. I mean, there's a tendency to be like, oh, we'll all be happy. Every space settlement needs to be designed to deal with natural and artificial threats, and it's not, it will be as vulnerable I think it will be less vulnerable than a city on the earth, because everybody will basically be living in a bunker and they'll have a CBW suit handy. How are you going to nerve gas attack a space settlement? Everybody's got a space suit under their bed. The alarm will go off. People will put on their space suits.
51:38 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
I disagree with you on that one. I figure you get surrounded by drones calling you out with a space suit so you don't have to carry. I disagree with you on that one. I figure you get surrounded by drones going around the spacesuit so you don't have to carry it around with you. The drone's just got there and it can go swallowing your bubbles in a second.
51:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, I plan to be genetically all-in-one, so that I don't need a spacesuit.
51:54 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
They're much safer than people realize, and this comes up a lot in conversations about space colonization is like well, earth is safe. Earth is safe. You're floating on a pad of like rock, on magma, inside a molten hot core full of radiation that's hotter than the sun's surface. That's safe. Well, it's more like above us asteroids come down through the air In a space colony. They have to go through the floor first. They actually have to punch through armor at least. So no, they're not perfectly safe. What is? Punch through armor, at least. So no, well, they're not perfectly safe. What is? But you can make them much safer because it's like any other tailored environment. You can build what you need based on what you think you need, and that's something we have with a space colony the ability to be flexible in design well, and let me just point out, base elements can move that too yeah they're all
52:38 - Rod Pyle (Host)
spaceships point out that that we've recently learned that having a house on Earth in Florida, even if it's two stories tall, is not protection against rocks dropping from space, as that family found out to their chagrin. Guys, I've got two more topics I'd like to cover, so I thought I'd just throw this out to both of you as a free-for-all Discussions of the building of large space structures and how challenging they think that is and we don't think it is. And the claimed fallacy of the westward expansion idea which, although it's not quite in vogue as much as it was, you do still see writing about we'll settle space just like we settled the wild west, and all it takes is a railroad and some lumber to build a town. So, uh, pick your poison and take it away I think the Westward expansion one.
53:24 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
First, not all science fiction comes to the United States. A lot of it does. A lot comes from Japan, and in any type of fiction you get people who draw on historical parallels. One of the big ones that inspires people in the United States is that pioneer front. So we do draw on it pretty heavily and I use it a lot for conversations like how do you build this infrastructure? Say, well, if we're going to build these big orbital infrastructures, why don't we do it right now? It's like the Organ Trail you don't build a freeway or a railroad until you have millions of people already there. That's when you come through with your heavy infrastructure that you really develop an area more.
53:56
But I think that's just a tendency to say well, this had its upsides and it inspires us. Hell, our downsides too. So yes, absolutely, this is something to happen in history. What we'll plan to do in the future can be informed by history. That's the whole idea. We learn our lessons as we go, and we're going to learn more lessons in space too. It's not going to be perfect. I don't see how that is an excuse to flinch away from it while at the same time, if it helps to inspire people towards that future, absolutely should embrace that. And if you look at science fiction with the cultures, they frequently try on their own local histories for that to their own inspiration, as they should. That's the whole idea of space. It's there for all of humanity.
54:33 - Dale Skran (Guest)
So I guess my response to this would be that the focus on the Western expansion is misguided. You know, space is just not like that. I mean, there's no natives to exploit and space is really different and there's so many differences. But using the, you know, the Europeans coming to the US is just a bad example. I think a much more reasonable historical analogy are humans crossing the Bering Strait into the uninhabited North and South America, which was full of exotic animals and dangers, and they just slowly spread out over a long period of time and eventually populated area and then built empires the Inca, the Maya Empire, and also there were a lot of indigenous empires using earthen mounds in North America that are not well known to people who don't study the archaeology, and that there are actually some pretty impressive cities, you know, on the Mississippi River and so on, that were really kind of interesting. So I think that's what we should be looking at as the model for going into space. The other thing I think that people make we should be looking at as the model for going into space. The other thing I think that people make a mistake is they think because we like to think of, we're like really advanced.
55:51
I recommend you watch Isaac's channel. He has a great vision of future technology. The technology we have is really very primitive. My idea is that trying to settle space with Starship is like trying to cross the Red Sea in a canoe or something like that. A canoe is kind of cool really, especially if you have like paddle and a fishnet and maybe even a sail or something. It's really quite an amazing thing as opposed to just swimming across the Red Sea. But it's nothing compared to what we'll have a thousand years from now in terms of traveling around the solar system.
56:29 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right. Well, I think we've covered it all. Dale, do you have any grand capstone thought you'd like to convey?
56:36 - Dale Skran (Guest)
Look, if you are a serious space settlement advocate I think it's great to read A City on Mars you will learn something. There is good stuff here. I think I wouldn't have spent 40,000 words responding to it if I didn't think it really advanced the dialogue. And there's an idea that the Wienersis mentioned somewhat briefly, which may be original to them, which I think is actually a really cool idea, which is that one way to get our let's assume for the moment that spin gravity works at 1G.
57:12
One of the questions about settling the moon and Mars is it's not 1G, maybe you just can't really reproduce there, but you could put a 1G spin gravity settlement around the moon, around Mars, around Mars or around any low gravity body in the solar system, and you could have a dual life cycle where you actually reproduce in 1G on the spin gravity settlement, but then you spend much of your adult life in the low gravity environment doing the mining or whatever it is you're doing, and that's different than how people live now, but it's not that different and it would work. It doesn't require fanciful technology. So I thank the Wiener Swiss for that idea. It's a great idea and I expand on it quite a bit in my 40,000-word essay. Thank you.
58:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right, and I also want to mention, besides Isaac's channel, which is a great resource, the National Space Society also has a publication on their website, nssorg, called Roadmap to Space Settlement, which we update every couple of years, and I think we're about to do that again. So thank you everybody for joining us today for Episode 122. That's 122 of this Week in Space, called no City on Mars. Be sure to check out Isaac's channel. As I've said a number of times, we're going to find some very brain-stimulating material and some really cool, catchy titles. I love your titles, I'm so envious of your titles. And also, you can, of course, find the National Space Society website at nssorg, where you're going to find a variety of things, including an awful lot of blog posts from our very own Dale Scranton. And, of course, you can always find me at pilebookscom or at adastramagazinecom. Do remember to drop us a line at twist at twittv if you have any comments. We read them all and respond to them.
59:03
All new episodes, this podcast published every friday on your favorite podcatcher. So, as I keep whining, be sure to subscribe. Tell your friends to give us reviews. We'll take five thumbs up, five smileys, five milk bottles, whatever you got. Probably half our audience has never even seen a milk bottle. Now think about it. You can also head to our website at twittv slash TWIS.
59:26
Finally, don't forget, you can get all the great programming with video streams and without commercials on the Twit Network, as well as some extras that are only found there for just $7 a month. It's a good investment and we could really use your help because, as you hear Leo talk about frequently if you listen to the other shows, times are not good for podcasting, so we want to keep bringing you this programming and you can give us a hand to do that. Finally, you can follow the TwitTech Podcast Network at Twit on Twitter and on Facebook and TwitTV on Instagram. Thank you very much. Thank you Dale, thank you Isaac. It's been a pleasure, as always, and I'll see at least one of you next week. Take care.
