This Week in Space 132 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 looking into alternative housing on Mars, inside mushrooms. That is yep, you heard me right. We're a couple of fun guys. Stay with us. Podcasts you love From people you trust this is Tolt. This is this Week in Space, episode number 132, recorded on October 11th 2024, living in Martian Mushrooms. Hello and welcome to another episode of this Week in Space, the Living in Martian Mushrooms edition. I'm Rod Pyle, as you probably know, editor-in-chief of Ad Astra magazine, and I'm joined, as always, by the eccentric Tarek Malik, editor-in-chief of Spacecom. Hello partner, hello partner.

00:45 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Hello Rod, you know I always love being here. You know why? Because I'm here, because you're a fun guy, right, Right Because we're talking about.

00:56 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I had that further down on this lead-in oh no, well, and just to ruin it, it's fungi, so that doesn't work quite as well. That sounds more. Today we're diving, as you can tell, into alternative living arrangements on mars, and that is living inside structures made of martian mushrooms. Now, before you start clicking over to joe rogan to bear with me uh, it's an incredibly cool story, and we'll be joined in a few minutes by dr lynn rothschild of nasa's ames Research Center, to learn here it was how to be fun. Guys, get it. It was better before you stole my thunder.

01:32
I'm sorry you didn't tell me Before we start, don't forget to do us a solid and make sure to like, subscribe and other podcast things. We'll take five or ten of, whatever their unit of measurement is, because we want to keep doing this show and that way you make sure that, especially if you join club twit, that we can't continue doing this show. We're counting on you. And now from barry hayworth, our space joke of the week, barry hey dark. Yes, rod, why didn't the russians bring the space dog back to earth? I don't know why, because they didn't like it oh, that's so sad that dog died well.

02:19
But you know, for years I thought, oh that poor thing. She slowly suffocated in orbit. And all that, and all the most recent evidence says no, she expired on the way up and didn't even make it to orbit because of heat.

02:30 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Really Wow, I got to read that yeah that was a couple years ago.

02:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So unless that's been recanted, that was what I read, so I don't think she lasted long.

02:40 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No one should watch the animated film Laika as a dog lover none of us enjoy that.

02:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I mean I can think of people I wouldn't mind sending there, but not dogs.

02:49
Okay, okay, Now I've heard some folks want to sick their space dogs on us when it's joke time on this show. But of course you can help save us from ourselves and put us on joke. Life support, Send your best, worst or most different space joke to us at twist tv. And now it's time for headlines. Headline news I like it. I like I done that all by myself. Okay, no breath of fresh air. The iss turns out it's been leaking for you. We got all panicked when we had these other leaks, but it's been leaking at a lower level for years yeah, yeah.

03:33 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, there was a a report out uh just recently, I think about a week or two ago. We didn't we we forgot to talk about it last week, but this um uh Office of the Inspector General has cited this really super slow leak on the International Space Station as one of its top safety risks.

03:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Excuse me, but why did that come from the OIG instead of from NASA?

03:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, NASA, several years ago, when they first I think they brought it back up in February of this year they said hey, they've got this leak. It's been going on for a while. They thought they could manage it, but now it's increased, it's like at 2.4 pounds of air per day from a historic low of 0.2 pounds per day. So you know, I guess it's. It's just it's getting worse. And the fact that they haven't been able to to staunch it uh has uh the office of the inspector general a bit concerned, because it just keeps getting worse. Do they know?

04:32
where it is well, I believe they were saying that it was uh in the, the russian segment.

04:37 - Rod Pyle (Host)
If it's always in the russian side.

04:41 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But but see what happened was back in february, joel montalbano, then the ISS program managers, saying that the leak has increased to this 2.4 pounds a day. Two months later, the leak increased another 50% 3.7 pounds per day according to the Office of the Inspector General. So they can't. It's getting worse.

05:02 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You simply light a Russian cigarette, watch smoke go towards hole. Then stuff with bubble gum, so they don't like bubble gum because it's decadent.

05:13 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So they've detected cracks and leaks in the Russian module that they're looking at and it's been an issue that the aging space station, you know, has been undergoing for quite some time. The space station for people, these are the core modules since like 2000, that the 98, even some of the earliest modules like launched up there, and so this has been an ongoing issue, like for many, many years. But it's, you know, nasa wants to keep this going until 2030 before they bring it back to Earth and you don't want your spaceship to leak air at all, let alone at an ever-increasing rate, right? Because there's going to be leaks. There are leaks on ships. I didn't know that until recently.

05:57 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's what build pumps are for.

05:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Exactly, exactly, and they repressurize over time.

06:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So you need to reverse the region of that, yeah.

06:03 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So this is the issue. The issue is that this new report, which came out September 26th from the OIG, says hey, it's getting worse. It's getting a lot worse, a lot faster. So something needs to be done about it, and we've seen leaks in the past. We had the hole in the Soyuz spacecraft right.

06:24 - Rod Pyle (Host)
They just had to putty over and I think oh, another piece of Russian technology.

06:27 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's right, and I remember there being an air leak in a window on the US segment too, if memory serves, and I could be wrong about that, so it was like a gasket seal, yeah, like right along the seam or something that they were monitoring it and so.

06:41
But that was. It was a quite quite a long time ago that I'd heard anything about that. So I guess it's done and fixed. So huzzah, you know, but. But but this is. This is just an issue where NASA has said they just have to keep working with Roscosmos to try to figure out the sources of this leak and how it's going to change, if at all, how they operate the space station.

07:04 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Hold on here. Hold on, nasa. Change, uh, if at all, how they operate the space station. Hold on, sir, hello nasa. Yeah, can I send you a, a jar of spackle that you can send over to the russians to patch that? Okay, thanks, oh, that's not very okay. Wow, they hung up on me. Um, yeah, it would seem that you could kind of staunch that with, uh, almost any kind of sealant. But what the hell do I know? Um, let's move on. Uh, I'm going to ignore the next story you have by executive fiat here, because I thought this story about the jupiter's red spot was really interesting yeah pulsing, it's pulsing, yeah this is like.

07:45 - Tariq Malik (Host)
By the way, the story Rod's skipping is the fact that there is a G4 class solar storm that spawned auroras.

07:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, no, we'll get to it. I wanted to tell this one next.

07:54 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But yeah, no, no, the scientists have used the Hubble Space Telescope. This is just from spacecom, by the way, the other story also from spacecom but Hubble lives on. Yeah, exactly exactly. They've been studying archival data of the Great Red Spot. They've been observing it since what the 19th century astronomers have, but Hubble's observations in particular, like the high-res images of the Earth, have shown that the Red Spot has been shrinking over the decades that Hubble's been up there. Right now it measures it's like 9,000 plus miles across, although it used to be. It has been measured down to just 7,000 miles, so it's getting smaller. And they tracked all these images over time and you can see it kind of I don't know.

08:43
You said pulsing, but they made it sound like it's quivering like jello, so it'll shrink and then it bounces back and then it shrinks and then it bounces back over time and they don't know what the deal is with it, because right now it's called an anticyclone, this giant storm that used to at one point, be able to hold a few different Earths, I think.

09:03
Right now it's just two Earths in it and it's oblong. It's not a perfect sphere and they think that over time, this oscillation that they're seeing is going to work itself out as it gets smaller and it will just circularize itself and be a much more stable storm. That's still many, many years in the future. It's it's just a really strange behavior and it's it's mesmerizing to watch these videos of the great red spot, like because they stacked them all up, as you can just see it, uh, quibbling about, uh, as it's trying to to turn on the giant planet and uh, and it's just, it's just a really weird fact. They have this time lapse. You can see, and you see it expand and shrink, uh, along its kind of uh, long axis I think is what the semi-major axis is and um, and it's just really strange, just for strange, strange emotions on jupiter pulsing red spots sounds like a.

10:02
Sounds like a problem for some topical cream yeah, I would say keep your health problems to yourself.

10:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
This is a podcast. You want to see what's in my spam folder they keep asking me about? Is your body leaking, which I guess they? They know how old I am. I don't need to even think about that. All right, go ahead and close with the Aurora. I know you're excited about that. The solar think about that. Uh, all right, go ahead and close with the aurora. I know you're excited about that. The solar storm, by the way how much longer can it possibly be before the sun just lashes out and erases all life on the sunlit side of the planet? I?

10:34
mean it feels like we're having kind of a weird year here, you know, by the way, I think that's the plot of the nicholas cage movie. Knowing, by the way uh, okay, I thought it was something else, but yeah, wasn't it was.

10:47 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Maybe it was a gamma ray burst. Could it have been that?

10:49
I don't know so you know that's a weird movie, but it does hold up. It gets better with age, I think, as does nick cage, to be honest, but anyway. Anyway, yeah, we had a. We had a. The sun's been popping off, man.

11:04
We talked a little bit about it, I think last week or last, or in a recent episode, but NOAA, their space weather prediction group, this week had an ad hoc press conference and they, they had a. They issued a very rare G4 solar storm warning Only the second that they've done since 2005 and the whole cause of it was an x2 solar flare, I think on the 8th of october, that was barreling towards earth. It was the second fastest cme of the of the solar cycle this, this that we're in right now and uh, and it just hit the, the uh atmosphere overnight, the magnetosphere, pardon me and it triggered. It triggered global auroras that were forecast to be as low as Alabama and so people in California, much, much lower than the Arctic Circle that it normally sets. In fact, one of my writers was on an aurora hunting trip, daisy Dobryjevic in Norway, and she was able to catch some of it before the clouds came in, and here in New Jersey we got too much light pollution. So we weren't able to see too much and, in fact, we couldn't even hang out in one of the darkest parts in my neighborhood because the sheriff showed up and told everyone to go home because the park was closed.

12:17
And it's like man, there's this G4 geomagnetic storm. I don't want to miss it, and yet what are you going to do? You magnetic storm I don't want to miss it, and yet what are you gonna do? You know, uh, but we have to argue with the cops, exactly right, if this, I, I'm not gonna fight the sheriff, because when you fight the law, the law wins, right? So, um, but, uh, but we got amazing photos, uh, from around the world, including some of our own, our own team members and I. It's just a reminder that there are times you don't have to go all the way to the Arctic to do it. You just need a really dark sky during these geomagnetic storms. So just keep watching it.

12:54
Everyone I talked to at this park was using the same Aurora app and it's very easy to find it. It shows you where stuff is. So I didn't see a lot of power grid disruptions. That was a concern by NOAA, especially in North Carolina and Florida, which have power systems that have been greatly affected by the recent hurricanes there. They issued warnings to them to safeguard all of that, and the same was true for communications satellites, radio communications, I mean. They were all affected or had the potential to be. Not a lot of threats, though, to the astronauts in space, which is good.

13:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Boy, Florida sure doesn't need any more problems, huh.

13:33 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I mean the Hurricane Milton in particular has already delayed NASA's Europa Clipper, which we've been talking about in the past. We're also waiting to hear on a few other missions to crew 8 return, to other missions to create return to earth because they're going to splash down off the coast of florida.

13:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So hopefully we'll get some more forward information on that, maybe shortly after we wrap the podcast today yeah, lori leshin, who's the new director at uh jpl, has been posting uh multiple updates per day of basically the view of ksc from her hotel. Yeah, okay, there's this much wind, the rockets okay, the instruments are okay, but you know we're we're holding on launch. We'll let you know. So it's. It's cool to have you know. We're used to social media from from nasa news outlets to some extent not not a lot, but to have the actual director of a field center tweeting live updates for stuff, it's a whole new era. All right, we will be right back after this short message with Dr Lynn Rothschild to talk about mushrooms on Mars. Stand by.

14:38
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16:18
And within an hour, us Cloud responded with, I want to say, four engineers. So not only did they bring the right guys to the call, but they brought the cavalry. I just felt like, wow, this was amazing. That was unlike anything I had experienced with Microsoft in my eight years of being with Premier. We made the right choice.

16:37
So, when it comes to compliance, no one gets it more than US Cloud. Iso, gdpr and ESG compliance are not just regulatory requirements, but strategic imperatives that drive operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management and corporate reputation. These standards foster trust and loyalty among customers and stakeholders, attract investment and ensure long-term sustainability and success in a competitive global market. Visit uscloudcom and book a call today to find out how much your team can save. No-transcript. All right, everyone, we are back with Dr Lynn Rothschild, who is a research scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center and has been an adjunct professor at Stanford University and is currently an adjunct professor at Brown University because she's smart enough to do both those things at once and primarily as an astrobiologist, focusing on the origin of evolution of life on Earth and elsewhere and a whole bunch of other fascinating things we're going to talk about. Hello, lynn, and welcome to the show. Thanks for coming.

17:52 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
Oh, thanks so much for inviting me, Rod. I'd love to be able to talk about all the fun things we're doing.

17:57 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, the article that caught my attention, of course, as you know, is about making off-world habitats from mushroom fungus, which is of course treated in various ways, which I'm sure generated a bunch of really fascinating headlines when the article first came out. But we'll try to control ourselves. But I guess the center point that I saw in your um, in your, your list of various things you do, is called synthetic biology. Can you sort of explain to us what that is?

18:31 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
absolutely so. The way I look at it is, for centuries people did descriptive chemistry, for example, and then about 150, 200 ago, people started making new things, making well, literally calling it synthetic chemistry. And I believe that we have a parallel in the biological world that for literally thousands of years, humans have been describing the biological world, whether it's looking at trees or lions or whatever, or going at a molecular level, but they're describing what has already been evolved. Synthetic biology is making something new with biology, whether it's altering a current organism or actually trying to make a new organism from scratch.

19:18 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, I think that gives it to us. It sounds like mad doctor science right there it does, and I just want to mention that. Lynn that you got. Was it five NIAC grants or six?

19:34 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
I have had five phase ones, two phase twos and one phase three, which the running joke is that makes me the queen of nyack yeah, so.

19:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So for those in the audience who don't know, nyack is the uh, nasa, advanced innovation. What's the c stand for? I forgot that's the innovative advanced concept innovative advanced, nasa innovative advanced. There we go which yeah it.

20:01 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
Yeah, it's my, it's my absolute favorite program at headquarters, not just because they fund me, but because they are thinking the 20 to 30 year in advance timeframe. There are many programs and not just NASA but throughout the world where the focus is you know what's going to happen in the next quarter, or maybe you know you're doing something like weather forecasting the next day or two, whereas NIAC is one of the few programs that really takes that long vision and says if we are going to change the world in 20 to 30 years, what is it going to take that we need to do now to see if there really is a there there and then start to develop it, to see where the pitfalls might be. Or maybe this was a wild idea that that's not going to go anywhere.

20:48 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well said and I'd have to add, I participated in two NIAC workshops as a minor figure and it's amazing. The people there are amazing. It's an incredibly smart group in the case where I was involved and I felt like a labrador retriever sitting in the corner watching smart people do things I didn't understand, um can I jump in?

21:13 - Tariq Malik (Host)
can I jump in real quick? Because we're starting to get into like sciencey, techy, sci-fi stuff like really really fast, and I I did want to uh talk, to ask you, lynn, real quick, what your path to space really was like, like what brought you to synthetic biology like in the first place, and were you bitten by the space bug like as a kid, or is it something that you found yourself into? I usually like to start out with that kind of intro question there oh, my goodness, there's so many ways to answer this.

21:48 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
But, um, I I am just gonna blow people's minds. Yes, I am absolutely ancient sputnik and I are very close and so, yes, um, I do remember neil armstrong stepping on um the moon. I remember as a kid at summer camps, um, managing to talk the director of the camp into finding a little TV and staying up half the night with her bless her heart and being really excited. But I never thought that I would be at NASA. I got bitten by the bug of microbiology, by looking through a microscope when I was eight, seeing an amoeba, and that was it, and so sort of fast forward. I ended up doing a PhD on the evolution of photosynthesis, gave a talk at Harvard shortly afterwards and my host said did you know that NASA would have funded that? And I looked at him. I said that's the space agency. You know, you do understand. I said no, you don't understand that they have a program to look for life in the universe and so they need to be able to understand the evolution of life on planet Earth. And so I suspected that for many years and finally confirmed he sent NASA my name and next thing I knew I was getting advertisements for postdoctoral fellowships and anyway, cut to the chase is. I got one, and that was in the end of the 80s, and I thought maybe that would be something fun for year two, two, particularly since it was post-Viking, and so it was not really a great time for biologists to be looking for life in the universe.

23:10
The feeling was after the Viking missions to Mars, that the biologists had given it their best shot and it was dead and it's time for the geologists, the big boys, to come in, just the big boys to come in. And then all sorts of really cool things happened by the end of the 90s. The discovery of extrasolar planets was ramping up, the really advances in molecular biology were ramping up, the discovery of ALH 84001, the Mars meteorite that some people thought had evidence that potentially there was extinct life on Mars. And all these things sort of came together with the really visionary view of our administrator at the time, dan Golden, who really kickstarted a program in astrobiology. And I got hired. And here we are decades later and I'm still at NASA with one of the best jobs in the world.

24:03
That being said, you asked about synthetic biology, so I could have spent the rest of my life happily looking for Martians, which is sort of the shorthanded cocktail parties. But what happened was about 15 or so years ago. Our center director at the time had gotten wind of this thing called synthetic biology and felt that this was going to be the future, particularly as an enabling technology for getting humans off planet, and it's something that I was totally unaware of, but in my checkered career I do happen to have gotten a PhD in cell and molecular biology, and so he thought it would be a good idea to put a graduate student in my lab in that area, and he directed me to start a program in synthetic biology for NASA, and so off I was to the races. Of course, the first question was, as you asked what is synthetic biology, what am I doing? What is synthetic biology, what am I doing? But it's turned out to be an incredibly cool thing. It's not completely taken over my life. My lab is somewhat balanced between the two areas and there's obviously interaction between the two.

25:16
The synthetic biology is an enabling tool for astrobiology. Astrobiology is an enabling tool for synthetic biology, biology, astrobiology as an enabling tool for synthetic biology. But what's really sort of interesting is synthetic biology, unlike astrobiology, is something that is really going to revolutionize a lot of what goes on on planet Earth, whether you're talking about agriculture or medicine or you know, on and on and on. It is really important, and so it is a technology that is unusual for NASA to have any sort of relationship to. Usually, when we're involved in technologies, we are the big gorilla in the room the heat shields, the supercomputers, the wind tunnels, the propulsion systems. We are the world's leaders in this Synthetic biology because there's so many Earth-based applications. I don't believe we will ever be the leaders in it, but we are I hate to use the word fast followers, but we can exploit what's going on in these different areas in ways that no one else can.

26:19
I've been representing NASA on a government synthetic biology working group for over 10 years now, and about once every two years I try to describe myself as weird. We are the Ginger Rogers of synthetic biology. You remember the comment that Ginger was such a great dancer and Ginger Rogers, you know? The point was she had to do everything Fred Astaire did except backwards in high heels. And I feel that's exactly what we are for synthetic biology. We have to do everything. The Department of Agriculture and NIH and everyone else does, except, oh, you have oxygen how nice you have gravity. No can do. And so we are sort of. You know, I feel we're the Ginger Rogers of synthetic biology, but you have to be a certain age to really appreciate that.

27:04 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, I was just going to say. There's a whole cadre of people that are going what's a Ginger Rogers? Is that like a cookie?

27:13 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
And I would say to those people start Googling, You're missing something.

27:18 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Right. So what really got our attention, of course, was this article I saw from NASA Ames, on your work on creating potential Martian habitats out of fungus mushrooms, essentially, but actually the roots of mushrooms, as it were, which was just. It was kind of a transformative moment I thought. I think this is the most brilliant thing I've seen in at least 10 years. It's just so far. It's not in left field, but to where most of us are thinking about, you know, aluminum and titanium enclosures buried under a bunch of dirt on the martian surface, or something. It's really quite extraordinary. So, uh, I'll let you kind of jump into describing that however you wish. But I thought what was also fascinating was, if I understood it correctly, that the project got its start for some students that were trying to figure out how they might grow a drone on another planet. Is that right, wow?

28:20 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
That is absolutely correct, boy, have you done your homework? So for about 10 years I was the faculty advisor for a synthetic biology team for a competition called iGEM, which is the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition. These are primarily teams of undergraduates. As you mentioned, I had faculty positions at both Brown and Stanford, so I had a combined group of students from both universities, with some input over the years from Princeton and Spelman and so on, and anyway, I could give you lots of stories but cut to the chase that the parts that they were being judged on did not involve the main body of the drone, and obviously you cannot make a drone, the polite way to call it. It's actually uncrewed aerial system or uncrewed aerial vehicle, not drone, but anyway, yeah, um, and so they. It needed body, and I had a student on the team who is a dual degree student with the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University and he was the one, in fairness, had heard about a company called Ecovative that was in the business of making mycelial products, and they still are a leader in the field.

29:42
So basically, when you look at a mushroom, you're just looking at the fruiting body of a large group of what we call filamentous fungi, ones that have filaments, so not things like yeast that make your bread or beer, that are single cells, but ones that form filaments and out in nature they bind soil, they bind and eat decaying wood. In fact they're the ones responsible for the decaying. So they do all sorts of things that you can't necessarily see, and many of them then produce fruiting bodies that pop up overnight, called mushrooms, and they are important for their reproduction. But this main part of the fungus, these filaments called the mycelium, do this binding anyway. They're really good at that. And so Ecovative took advantage of that to bind wood chips and start to make packing material and other sorts of sort of cool things. And so this student thought well, that would be a great way to make the body of a biodegradables drone, because in essence, it would only be great way to make the body of a biodegradables drone because, in essence, it would only be made out of wood chips and fungal material. And so they made this, and I must say I was somewhat oblivious to what he was doing. And then that particular project went viral in the media, which it was an interesting lesson in the power of the media was an interesting lesson in the power of the media. Anyway, long and short, is it made me really focus on that aspect? When EcoBait have called me the next day, it's like what's going on? Anyway, long and short, is that made me start to think. Well, if you could make the body of a drone, maybe you could use the same approach to make a habitat off planet. And the beauty of this would be you would not be carrying up these huge steel structures.

31:25
A lot of the cost of a space mission is lifting things off of Earth's gravity. Well, if you've seen a launch, even on television, you see a lot of the mass of the rocket is released just in the first few minutes. It's because so much of the fuel goes into just getting us off planet. So anytime you can shave ounces, grams, kilograms off of the payload. You have increased your mission capability and obviously, while steel is very reliable, it's going to be a very heavy way to go. And so you've got the weight problems that are going to compromise your mission. And so you've got the weight problems that are going to compromise your mission. Then you've got the issues that you really can't conform to. Whatever's there.

32:10
If you put a prefab steel house on a building site, you better have had the excavators there and everything else, not ooh oops, there's a crater there. What are we going to do now? So you can't really conform to the building site, and it's not really all that, you know, psychologically friendly. I don't know about you. I don't really want to live in a stainless steel house. It's one thing to go into an office like it, but it's another thing to live in. And so all these reasons, plus the fact that the fungal mycelia can solve all of those problems, it also is actually very good acoustically. It's very low flammability, and so I thought well, gosh, what if you just make an inflatable? You know, I sort of imagine like one of those jumpy things that the kids use at the, you know, in the summer, at fairs and so on.

32:55 - Tariq Malik (Host)
What if?

32:55 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
you have an inflatable, the seeded fungal mycelium, maybe even dehydrated wood chips, and you send it off planet and you let it inflate with a little oxygen it won't take much because the pressure is so low on the moon or Mars and then you have the mycelium growing. You add a little water and it grows to bind maybe dehydrated wood chips or some kind of aerogel or whatever and then you literally are growing your habitat on site and once you buy into that vision, you realize you could do rover shells, you could build tables and chairs and beds and basically almost anything. I mean, it really boggles the mind, but we have this vision that I think is very compelling. I think is very compelling. Fortunately, at that point, as I was starting to develop this vision, I met Chris Maurer, who's the principal architect at Red House Studios in Cleveland, and he was starting to look at the idea of using fungi to build houses on the earth. And I said I have this crazy idea what about using this to build habitats off planet? And he looked at me and said I had the same crazy idea and we decided to go on this together. So this, really, we wouldn't be where we are today if it weren't for Chris working with me, because he's both a powerhouse working with actually making the ideas a reality. Plus, he has the architectural experience.

34:17
I can't, as a scientist, just say, oh, you just blow up this thing and people live in it. The NIAC program has pushed us. What are you going to do in terms of heat? What are you going to do in terms of plumbing? What are you going to? You know, that's not my job, that's what an architect is really brilliant at. But again, he has just been amazing. So it's you know. I want to give him a huge shout out.

34:44 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So years ago I guess gosh, it was in the early 80s, I think I went to a talk at Caltech by Dr Robert Forward, who is kind of famous for being an out-of-the-box thinker, and he was talking to the group about someday we'll grow rockets like we grow carrots, and everybody in the audience sort of snickered and looked around like, oh, what's this guy smoking? But you know, we could be on the cusp of that. We're going to jump to a quick break. This episode of this Week in Space is brought to you by Veeam.

35:11
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36:13 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I just want to make a couple of things clear. I think outright because I know two things about, I guess, mycelium and mushrooms. Number one they make houses for Smurfs, and also that's like how the USS Discovery gets around in Star Trek Discovery. But it sounds like, lynn, this kind of an approach to you're calling it. Is it mycotecture, the architecture? So we call it mycotecture.

36:48 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
Yeah, just to be clear, mycology is the technical word for the study of fungi, so the myco is from the fungi and the texture is from the architecture. I believe that's called portmanteau, so that's why we came up with the word microtexture.

37:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I love it with fungi I love it, I love it and and so so I. I guess, as I understand you, like the fungi. They're inside this frame, so you could prefab an inflatable frame for whatever you would need, and maybe even component parts, and then just grow that. But is it really tough? I mean, I imagine if astronauts are going to live on the moon or on Mars, you know they're going to need like a hardy kind of a thing. How strong I guess? In your studies have you found that this material can get, I guess, to safeguard astronauts over time?

37:41 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
So I am so glad you brought that up, because it is what we call tunable material. So when you just grow fungal mycelia on, say, something like sawdust, you end up with something that looks and kind of feels like you'd left a piece of whole wheat bread out in the counter for three weeks. So it's sort of this dry, lightweight brownish thing, and you think I'm not going to build anything out of that. So it depends partly what you're binding and partly the post-processing. So we've been able to get fungal mycelium to bind sand. That's easy with a little nutrient added Lunar regolith simulant, martian regolith simulant so sort of the best we have on the Earth that simulates these planets. And so obviously if you're binding together the surface material from a planet or sand, you're getting something much harder. We also use it to bind together wood chips.

38:38
Now my students made me a little stool that you can find on the internet out of wood chips. It took about two weeks for the fungi to bind it and then it wasn't much harder than a piece of stale bread. So they then baked it, for I believe it was about 12 hours at a high temperature and then it ended up being incredibly hard and strong. In fact I can stand on it and it's gotten to be a tourist attraction in our life. I can, say, line up to get their photo taken standing on it. It's kind of the funniest thing.

39:10
This was built by another iGEM team of mine in 2018 that was specifically looking at my architecture off planet when we were just getting started on this project. So, yeah, you can really tune the materials of Alaska who uses approach, where he makes a foam out of the fungal mycelia and has gotten a lot of funding to make this material as a substitute for styrofoam to ship frozen fission out of Alaska. And this is I saw him two weeks ago. This is absolutely incredible stuff. So you can range from basically a styrofoam substitute all the way to a really hard building material that you would think was a piece of particle board or harder.

39:58 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's just crazy. When this company starts up, I'm definitely buying it. Sorry, tarek, go ahead, I know you have a follow-up.

40:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No, it's funny. I actually thought that this whole technology sounded familiar and I went back in the space archives and I found it. I found a headline that my colleague, megan bartels wrote uh uh I think she spoke with you, lynn uh uh, where it was called, there could be fungus among us on mars. Uh, with this, with this astronaut house idea.

40:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So the guy who says he never does clickbait.

40:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Hey, hey, hey that might not be the first time we use fungus, because I think it's fun to say, but I was thinking about go ahead.

40:42 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
Yeah, sort of give another plug. That was when we were just getting started and, as I mentioned, with the NIAC program, their phase ones are really looking to see if there is a there there, and somehow we managed to convince them there was a there there and that there certainly was a lot of interest, which is not true of every project because many of them are very difficult to understand. I sit there at the meetings every year so I know I have difficulty with many of them, with the engineering and the technology, with many of them with the engineering and the technology. So we then tried to get a phase two, which is really to see if there's something they're worth developing, and it took us three tries and we did finally get that. And then for the phase three, which is very unusual, they've only given three or four. They maybe give one a year. They really wanna see that you can start to move this on that there's someone who's interested.

41:32
And so we started working with one of the NASA seed funded commercial space stations, starlab, which is interested in using this approach for paneling inside their space station as well as potentially in the astronaut habitats, for the beds and the tables and so on that I mentioned to you, and we are also working towards trying to get a mission where we show that this can work on the surface of Mars or sorry, I'm sorry, please, please. I mean, of course, the moon. Yeah, I would love to get to the surface of Mars. Don't know how to do that right now, to get to talk NASA into that, but there is a way to get to the surface of the thing and it requires a very competitive proposal. But I am determined that that is going to be the mic drop of my career.

42:19 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We're going to show that these things work well, I wanted to ask because, as a layperson, you know that one of the things that I dread the most in my house is fungus right On the walls, the mildew in the bathroom or whatever on the tile, and I've had people I know who were impacted by black mold or whatnot, and so one of the first things that I thought about is what happens if astronauts breathe this stuff in. Is it a very inert and a safe building material, or could it mutate from space radiation run amok and then we're all running away from mutant space mycelium.

43:02 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, okay.

43:03 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I don't know. I don't know, I have to ask the question, Rod because, people are going to want to know.

43:07 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It's not attack of the muscle people?

43:09 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
I promise Reasonable question. Um, the fungus that we've been primarily using is the same one that reishi it's um derived from, so it's a common one. People can eat it. Um, so that's not a problem. Breathing hazard it's going to be true of anything that creates, you know, dust, your your-off skin cells every day. So that's sort of one way to answer it. Another way is that nothing is going to be able to grow on the surface of the moon or Mars, because the atmospheric pressure is such that we don't have liquid water. So, in fact, to be able to grow any of these things, we're going to have to have a pressurized inflatable. And so if there is such a leak in the inflatable that people are breathing it, we're going to have to have a pressurized inflatable. And so if there is such a leak in the inflatable that people are breathing it, they're going to have a lot bigger problem to worry about than breathing fungal mycelia. They've got a leak.

44:01
But the other point is that you know this is a big group of organisms. If you look at fungi, we're among the animals. There are also some not very nice animals. I do not, you know, I am not in a position to defend what a wasp or a mosquito does, or malaria. There are a lot of bad you know actors out there. That's true of fungi. There are a lot of ones that are totally benign and then there are ones that are pathogens.

44:31
But I'm glad you brought up the black ones.

44:34
That has been a problem on space stations Mir, I think, in particular, had some black fungal issues on the electronics, but that again totally separate from what we're doing.

44:45
But the black ones are very interesting because the reason they're black is because they have a pigment called melanin, which is the same reason that our skin has pigmentation in it. No matter what color skin we are, we have some melanin in it and the melanin protects us from radiation. It's got partial protection from ultraviolet radiation, which is why people get darker in the summer when they're exposed to radiation, and it turns out there may be some protection from ionizing from space radiation, and so we are, as part of our phase three, also looking at some black fungi that could potentially be used as part of this building material. That would have the advantage that they could also protect the astronauts from some of the radiation that they would be subjected to in space. So it was not actually such a crazy comment, really interesting. And yes, we are starting to sort of incorporate, or think about incorporating, due to some preliminary data, some of these heavily melanized, these black fungi.

45:50 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Thank you, thank you, you hear that Rod, you hear that Not crazy question, real interesting, yeah, yeah.

45:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
She didn't say it was an intelligent question. She said it wasn't crazy. Okay, everybody, stand by for a second. We're going to jump to a quick break and we'll be right back. So, lynn, one of the other things I thought was fascinating in looking into this in a little more detail was this idea of a multi-layered habitat that starts with a layer of something frozen that we find we think a lot of on Mars, which is water. You just have to melt it, to use it, mine it and melt it, and then that, I guess, as it warms from the inside, trickles down to the second layer of the structure, which is the cyanobacteria. Then that layer and I hope you'll correct me on this, I'm sure I'm not getting it completely right that layer takes the water and photosynthesizes, using light that shines through the ice to produce oxygen that the astronauts can breathe, the nutrients for the final inner layer of mycelia. Do I have that right?

46:55 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
You're really, really, really, really, really close.

46:59 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's what they said in calculus, but it didn't work.

47:04 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
Asymptotically. So my vision for actually having a really stable system not just habitats, but a biologically enabled human colony on the moon or Mars is to be able to take advantage of the raw materials there. And, just like on Earth, we have raw materials that our planet's provided for us. At the origin of life that we had an atmosphere that had a fair amount of carbon dioxide in it, had virtually no free oxygen, but it had nitrogen in it and you had minerals, rocks and so on and various elements. So what happened was life arose and provided an interface between these raw materials and then the rest of the biological world, in particular photosynthetic organisms, ones that take light and use that energy from the sun, to take those raw materials from the planet, the gases like carbon dioxide and the minerals and so on, to make organic compounds. And this is not like organic, like at the grocery store, you know organic section, but things that are, you know, made from carbon, like sugars and amino acids and proteins and all the fats and all those sorts of things. So my vision is that we do the same thing off planet. Why haul up a lot of stuff? Eventually we have a system where we have life as that interface between the raw materials off planet and then this production system, and for that we would again go to photosynthetic organisms. So in my dream we end up with something, as you describe it, where we mine the water or maybe we just take up a little with us and then we have something like a cyanobacterium that can take the nitrogen and make it into something that's usable for other organisms, which turns out only a few organisms can do. It takes the carbon dioxide and turns that into sugars and proteins and so on that other organisms can use and fats, and these then become and as a waste product, by the way, they produce oxygen, which is how we got the oxygen that we breathe. So then those waste products of the cyanobacteria then go ahead and feed the fungi.

49:20
That is my ultimate dream for this. But of course, if you're going to have humans up there in fact if you're going to talk anyone into taking your technology up, you're going to need to de-risk it as much as possible. So that is definitely my ultimate vision, I suspect in our earlier iterations, till people feel comfortable with this crazy idea that we're going to make habitats and furniture and stuff out of fungal mycelia that we are going to de-risk by probably removing some of that so that we maybe bring up some, let's say, dehydrated wood chips, which we know the fungi love this is what they've evolved to do and maybe just add a little water to dehydrated wood chips and then we have the material for them to bind and their food and they're off and running. And then sometime later, when we're more confident, we start to add the fungal, the cyanobacterial part feeding the fungi and so on, the entire sort of system as you described it.

50:21 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Can you imagine like a Mars base that needs, like a fungi engineer right To make sure that they're growing? I love that. Like a chief fungi engineer right to make sure that they're growing.

50:33 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
I love that Like a chief fungi engineer, you know, like O'Brien or whatever from Star Trek. Then we have a problem. We need our microtecture engineer here. That's right, I love it.

50:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yes, mark, that's a college program you and I might have actually been able to complete. I tell you Thank you for thinking it out.

50:56 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Are there any Lynn Cross contamination concerns? When I think about organisms that can metabolize carbon dioxide and put out oxygen, for example, I think about how the atmosphere of Mars is like super carbon dioxide and that's like a big, ripe food source, but I do know it's still a very harsh environment for anything that we would call living on Earth. Is that something that in the future, this technology will have to contend with, either to keep it contained or to just allay fears of what we might want to find like actual Martian organisms or whatnot? That we don't mess that up with anything that we bring that would be a growing tool for a Mars base or the like.

51:46 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
Once again, you're absolutely on track. So, switching hats, I know it's a static picture, but you can imagine I'm switching hats now as an astrobiologist and I believe that if there was light, there was an indigenous life on Mars and we destroyed it before we had a chance to discover it. That would be one of the greatest biological tragedies ever. I mean, we would have destroyed the chance to answer that question are we alone in a very, you know, in our lifetime? So yes, we cannot just go release things on the surface of Mars. And there are treaties and you know planetary protection protocols. In fact NASA has a planetary protection officer, their coast bar trees and so on and so forth. So there's that aspect. But then getting back to the idea that the atmospheric pressure is such that there isn't liquid water on the surface, there could be places where there are fluid inclusions and so on. But heck, I've got students in my lab who can't grow things when they're handed a jar of culture medium, who can't grow things when they're handed a jar of culture medium. The chance of things just happening to float out and happening to grow and take over in my dreams. So that's unlikely to happen. But obviously because of the planetary protection protocols, we do need to be extra, extra careful. That being said, once we actually have humans on Mars, human life is going to obviously be a very high priority. You can't say, well, let the six astronauts die because there might be life on the other side of the planet. It's just not going to happen, and so this is why it's so important for us to have these robotic precursors there prior to having humans on Mars.

53:32
The moon is a totally different situation. It's dead. It's very, you know, as likely as anything to have been dead forever, and so, therefore, we don't have planetary protection protocols in place. So it's a great place for us to test these technologies. It's closer, it's easier to get to, it's easier to get to, it's cheaper to get to. We don't have the planetary protection. The gravity is actually worse. It's one six G, it's a third G on Mars. The atmosphere is worse. Everything is worse on Mars, on the moon, except getting there for us, and so if it works on the moon, I have incredible confidence that it's going to work on mars so just to continue that thought, and then we have our last break for the show.

54:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Um, you know, whatever I talk to people at jpl about planetary protection with regard to, you know, spores on rover wheels or something of that nature, they're very careful to state what the protocols are and why they're important, but in the same breath will say but you know, mars is pretty hostile, it's high radiation, there's perchlorates and other things in the soil that aren't particularly helpful for growing things and, of course, where we're talking about landing, at least for these early missions, are in places that won't have liquid water or the RSLs that they thought they might have seen in slopes and so forth. So, in your opinion and I'm not asking this, I don't want to get you in trouble with anybody, but just for the sake of conversation do you think it's likely that something of this nature would be able to actually exist on the future from on the surface for about 15 minutes or more?

55:22 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
oh yeah, I mean, things can certainly survive on the surface. We have organisms on the earth that can withstand vacuum, that can withstand incredibly high, high levels of radiation, including. Many of your audience probably have heard of tardigrades, which are little water bears. So they're actually animals. They're not even microbes. Deinococcus radiodurans is a microbe that can withstand very high levels of radiation. It's interesting Its DNA actually fragments and then it's able to put it back together like a puzzle. So I think a lot of these things can survive.

55:55
I'm really glad that you brought up perchlorates. I will totally deflect here and say that our latest NIAC is to detoxify perchlorates on Mars. Now there are organisms on the Earth that can easily withstand the levels of perchlorates on Mars. That's not the issue. The issue is that the levels of perchlorates on Mars. That's not the issue. The issue is that the levels of perchlorate on Mars are toxic to humans, so you don't want them in your drinking water. It's not that there aren't organisms that can survive it, so I don't think it's.

56:22
I don't think the surface of Mars is actually self-sterilizing, and even if it were, we've done work over many years of looking at organisms under very thin layers of sand. I started doing this because I was walking on a beach in Mexico and I turned around and my footprints were green. So even being able to live under a very thin layer of sand or dust or the Martian regolith will provide an enormous amount of protection. Martian regolith will provide an enormous amount of protection. So I don't want to contradict my good friends at JPL, but I do believe that you could have organisms surviving some period of time on the surface certainly mixed in with the regolith on the surface. I don't think that would be a problem for a lot of spores and so on. You know again, the ability to to divide, thrive and so on.

57:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
is is a totally different situation and there you really are going to need the liquid water and organics okay, uh, we're gonna jump to one more break and then it's back to tarik for his other burning question. We'll be right back.

57:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
All right, tark, you have to really do something about this burning, you have okay, you said you wouldn't tell Rod, but no, no, no, I actually I wanted to point out one thing. You were talking about tardigrades earlier, and they are also part of the mycelium network in the in the propulsion system of the USS Discovery, at least in season one. So we're tying everything to Star Trek with this episode.

57:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It's fantasy.

57:52 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Right now Well hey, hey we can dream. We can dream.

57:56
Rod but no, I wanted to ask about some of the other things that this technology might be capable of, because it seems pretty remarkable and Rod had a bunch of really great notes about different types of things that it could be used for things biomining wastewater for nutrients that try to get get resources back out of that, or even using it uh in in lighting, uh from uh uh mycelia that that might glow, that kind of a thing. It sounds like there's a lot more applications beyond just the core architecture of a habitat that you might be able to apply this technology to with somewhat more limited resources than like what you'd have to take up to power lights or whatever overall. I mean, what are the sorts of promises that you see there?

58:48 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
So I'm really glad you brought that up, because we have been working on a couple of projects with fungal mycelia that could be integrated into the structure or could be an add-on and so on, and one of them that you mentioned was mining. Now there are fungi that bind some metals to the surface, and when people talk about biomining they usually mean changing the pH and leaching minerals out. But once we learned that some metals bind to the surface, we had this idea I don't know, maybe 10 years ago I've had this idea that you could take particular parts of proteins that bind specific metals, and at the time we thought you could have those growing on the ends of bacteria and therefore bind metals. And then, once we started in with the fungal mycelia, we thought, ooh, why not combine the projects and take proteins that will bind a specific metal and decorate them on the surface of the fungal mycelia? So instead of just waiting for them to evolve the ability to bind something, we actually decorate them with proteins that will grab whatever metal we want. And so we did do a proof of concept with that. We had a paper out a few years ago and we just had a patent granted, so we're very excited about that. So now you have the ability to bind basically any metal you want. Specifically, why not combine that with the microtexture?

01:00:16
So if you wanted part of your habitat metallicized for whatever reason, you could do that. You could potentially bind other things. You could maybe detoxify the water going through. You could have a filtration system, which is part of this patent. You could I don't know. There are all sorts of things. I'm sort of laughing because my wonderful branch chief did manage to tell a company recently that I could make them a metal mushroom. I guess in principle we could make them a metal mushroom, but you think about it.

01:00:54
There are other sorts of things that we rely on fungi for. One thing is producing food, so you could, in principle, allow some of these fungi to form their fruiting body. So imagine you made a mycelial table but for part of it you allowed them to make their fruiting bodies. You could basically make your dinner on the table. It goes without saying that there aren't any fermented products that are based on fungi. Beer is one of them, but of course the Japanese in particular have for centuries and centuries made fermented products out of fungi, including sake, and so I'm sorry I have to just tell you that the very first time I mentioned this at the first NIAC meeting and this is what happens when you're with a group of engineers I did mention that one of the benefits is you could make sake, and someone asked me privately that word, word. What did s-a-k-e stand for?

01:01:55
again you know, oh, that's funny that's what happens when you sort of mix the acronym disease right anyway, yes, yes, yes. So yes, you could do a whole lot of other things once you're building with fungi, because you can do remarkable things. And I say this is a new convert because my background really is with algae and protozoa, not with fungi, but I definitely can see fungi right now are having their time in the sun, mixing metaphors, and I can see that we could do really great things with them. So very bullish on that possibility.

01:02:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I wanted to ask what is an astropharmacy?

01:02:35 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
Oh, I'm so glad you asked. You're asking all my favorite questions. So Well, if you think so, totally switching gears. Astropharmacy is another project we have that's in phase two in NIAC right now and actually has some other external funding, and what we're trying to do is develop an on demand drug production system for astronauts. Now, if you think about drugs the pharmaceutical industry on the earth they're interested obviously in making a profit. Drugs the pharmaceutical industry on the earth they're interested obviously in making a profit. They're interested in things that you know. Many people need An orphan drug.

01:03:15
In the United States is 20,000 or fewer Americans who need that particular drug, and so they want, you know, mass market things. They also don't test to see whether their drugs are stable in space. They are not too concerned about really long-term longevity. We, however, have a totally different problem at NASA in that we are talking about very few people. We're maybe talking about two or three astronauts at a time, or maybe six for a Mars mission or a few more on ISS, but when they need a particular pharmaceutical, they might need it. Now. There might not be a cold chain. We don't know how long drugs are good for in space, and certainly we have an issue that I don't think any of them are rated for a round trip to Mars, particularly when you add in the radiation. And so since we don't know what someone's going to need and we can't bring everything and it wouldn't last anyway, we decided to try to develop a really miniaturized system so that we could make drugs on demand in 24 hours at very low mass. Now, immediately.

01:04:19
I'm sure your audience is thinking this would have huge use on the earth as well, as does the microtexture, but in this particular case for orphan drugs, for remote areas, point of care, diagnostics and treatment and so on.

01:04:33
In fact, I was at UCSF last Friday for a cancer meeting which they were particularly interested in the astropharmacy for possible cancer therapeutics.

01:04:42
So I mean, this has been a really interesting ride, because I'm not an architect, I'm not a pharmacist, I don't, you know, I'm not a specialist in a lot of these things. But what I've gotten I am a reasonably good biologist and what I've gotten reasonably good at is looking at where NASA's needs are and, from what I know of the biological world, is there a way that we can use life to solve these problems? And so that's what I've been trying to do, whether it's detoxifying perchlorates, or building with my architecture, or developing an astropharmacy, or we've had projects making DNA into wires one or two atoms thick, or, oh gosh, done work with bioprinting. We've had a lot of what I think are really cool projects, taking really the cutting edge of what's going on in the biological world in terms of the technology but maybe very old technology that evolution came up with three billion years ago and seeing how that could be torqued for our needs at NASA.

01:05:51 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You know, you kind of had a touch on something that I was going to. It kind of sparked an idea. You know you're talking about the discussions you were having at the cancer meeting. No, no, no, it's a good one, because we've been talking a lot about building off world, right on the moon, on Mars, systems that astronauts might need to survive and it is hard to get to space, lynn, right? It seems like all of the technologies that you're looking at here are ones that would be really helpful if we were just using them for, like, I think about low cost housing, right, that you could use this to build low cost housing for people that might need that. You could use it to get, like, the remote medications to people that might need them. I mean, it seems to have spinoffs or uses that we should be using this stuff on earth right now, right, what, what, what? Why aren't we? Or or is it that it's so tailored? Okay?

01:06:52 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
so two answers. One is that, yes, we should be. And again, a shout out to chris mauer um, we discussed the idea of using it for refugee shelters and next thing I knew he had founded a founded, a nonprofit in Namibia where they are actually building shelters and using using fungal mycelium approach that we've been using here. He's starting to work on something that's called biocycler in Cleveland. So, absolutely, my job is not to do the terrestrial based applications, but I'm thrilled when we do have terrestrial spinoffs. But that does bring to it's to a really important question that I'm asked all the time.

01:07:30
Well, you know we have problems on the earth. Why are you working on, you know, off planet? This is silly and besides the fact that our budget is minuscule compared to the other, I firmly believe that we have a role in this, that if you right now, if you look at the Earth's problems, whether it's sustainability or climate, or housing, or medication and so on, there is already an existing solution. So if I were starting a company, for example, or if I wanted to change the world, I have to dislodge a current plan, I have to come up with the money, I've got to have an investor that believes in me, and so on. There is no existing infrastructure on the moon or Mars. You're starting with a blank slate. And, even better, for sustainability, there is no petrochemical industry because there is no oil on either planet. So you can really start fresh and think OK, if I were starting fresh, what would be the best idea that I could come up with with this, even though right now it may not be the most economically viable on Earth in particular, and so I have a little bit more breathing room to try to develop these ideas that I think are really cool and will ultimately revolutionize the world, these ideas that I think are really cool and will ultimately revolutionize the world.

01:08:49
And so if we're able to prove that we can do this, or at least start to get this development money, I'm hoping that other people will see that this is incredibly important for the earth. In fact, we've already had one spinoff from my lab looking at some of the biomining technologies, and I mentioned the work that Chris is doing in Namibia and Cleveland, where he happens to be located. I believe a lot of these things will have spinoffs Perchlorate, it turns out there's not much perchlorate problem on the Earth, but it is used in aircraft fuel, and so there is the occasional spill and a problem with detoxifying. So, yes, I do care very much about this planet detoxifying. So, yes, I do care very much about this planet.

01:09:30
In spite of people in the press trying to push me elsewhere, this is my favorite planet. This is my home. I want to stay successful, I want to do good, but I think by using the conceit of thinking about how we get people off planet, I think that is allowing me the space and the freedom to really think of revolutionary ideas and start to develop them in a way that I couldn't any other way.

01:09:56 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, that's a great summary and I think that's a perfect place to wrap up. I want to thank everybody for joining us today for episode 132, which we like to call Living in Martian Mushrooms with Dr Lynn Rothschild from the NASA Ames Research Center. Lynn, where's the best place for us to keep up with these exciting programs you've been talking about?

01:10:18 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
Oh gosh, I'm not always as good at publishing. Chris is very good about LinkedIn and tweeting about the microtexture work. Hopefully we'll. I don't know. I don't really know the best answer for that. I do apologize, but we do try to get things out there, and I know the NIAC program is particularly, you know, careful about making sure that we have reports up there on their website and so on that people certainly can look at. Get in touch with me if that's the turns out to be the best way to do it.

01:10:52 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, and I'll. I'll put a link to NIAC at the show notes online. Tarek, where can we find you fruiting your spores these days?

01:11:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, when you put it like that Rod, you know, no, no, it like that rod, you know, no, uh, no. Well, you can find me at spacecom as always on the twitter, I guess x I keep forgetting to call it that at tarik j malik, this weekend I will have my eyes to the sky to try to see comet I'm gonna get it wrong. Atlas 3, the comet that's up there right now. Um, and hopefully, if we get this g4 solar storm, maybe some more auroras, uh again, uh two and uh new, uh new lego fortnight season.

01:11:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So new pass for the for halloween, looking forward to fort nightmares I just want to see one aurora someday before I I kick the bucket here. Um, and of course you can find me at pilebookscom or at astromagazinecom. Uh, please remember you could drop us a line at twist twittv. That's twis twittv. We always welcome your comments and at least one of us usually me will answer your email because we we love you as much as we hope you love us because ron's a doll like that.

01:12:01
So yeah, gee, thanks so much. Nobody says that new episodes this podcast published every friday on your favorite podcatcher, so make sure to subscribe, tell your friends and give us reviews. We'll. We'll take whatever you got, but five of whatever that unit is would be appreciated. Also, don't forget, you can get all the great programming with videos on the twit network ad free on club twit, as well as some extras that are only available there for just $7 a month. I mean, the only other thing you can get that's great for about $7 is a pound of your favorite mushrooms, but alternate between that and Club Twit. We'd appreciate it and it helps us stay here and do what we do. Finally, you can follow the Twit Tech Podcast Network at Twit on Twitter and on Facebook and twittv on instagram. Thank you very much everybody. Lynn, thank you so much for coming. This has been one of the most interesting interviews I think we've had and, uh, I just love what you're doing.

01:12:57 - Dr. Lynn Rothschild (Guest)
It's really sensational thank you so much thanks all right, everybody, we'll see you next week.