Kind: captions
Language: en
we think that self-assembly this modular
reconfigurable algorithm for
constructing space structures in orbit
is going to give us this promise of
space architecture that's actually worth
living in you see do believe we might
one day become
intergalactic civilization i have a hope
yeah
the following is a conversation with
ariel ekblah director of mit space
exploration initiative
she's especially interested in
autonomously self-assembling space
architectures
basically
giant space structures that can sustain
human life and that assemble themselves
out in space and then orbit earth moon
mars and other planets
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now dear friends
here's ariel agblo
when did you first fall in love with
space exploration and space in general
my parents are both ex-air force so my
dad's an a-10 fighter pilot and my mom
trained and had qualified to be a
fighter pilot but it was early enough
that women were not allowed in combat at
that time and so i grew up with these
two pilots
and although they themselves did not
become astronauts there's a really rich
legacy of air force pilots becoming
astronauts and this loomed large in my
childhood what does it mean to be
courageous to be an explorer to be at
the vanguard of something
uh hard and challenging
and to couple with that my dad was a
huge fan of science fiction and so i as
a kid read heinlein and isaac asimov
all these different classics of science
fiction that he introduced me to and
that just started a love affair with
space exploration and
really thinking about civilization scale
space exploration
so
did they themselves
dream about going to the stars as
opposed to flying here in earth's
atmosphere just looking up yeah my dad
always said he was absolutely convinced
because he was a child of the apollo
years that he would get to go in his
lifetime really thought it was gonna
happen and so it was a challenge and you
know sad for many people when um to
their view on the outside space
exploration slowed down for a period of
time in reality we were just catching up
i think we leapt so far ahead with
apollo
more than the rest of society was ready
for and now we're coming back to this
moment for space exploration where we
actually have an economy and we have the
other accoutrement that society needs to
be able to make space exploration more
real and my dad's thrilled because
finally you know not nearly i hope not
anywhere near the end of his life but as
he's an older man he now can see
still within his lifetime people really
getting a chance to build a sustainable
lunar settlement on the moon or maybe
even go to mars so settlements
civilizations and other planets that's
the that's the cool thing to dream about
in the future yes
what was the uh what was the favorite
sci-fi authors when you're growing up
probably a sick asimov foundation
trilogy this is a amazing story of harry
selden this you know foundation that he
forms at different ends of the
well according to the story uh
difference the universe and
has this
interesting focus on society so it's not
just space exploration for the sake of
space exploration or novel technology
which is a lot of what i work on data
data mit but how do you structure a
society
across those vast expanses of distance
and time and so i'd say absolutely a
favorite now though my favorite uh is
neil stephenson and seven eves it's a
book that inspired my own phd research
and some ongoing work that we're doing
with nasa now for the future of swarm
robotics for spacecraft
we were saying offline about uh
stevenson and because i just recently
had a conversation with him and i said
that you know not until i was doing the
research for him that i realized he also
had a
role to play in blue origin so it's like
sci-fi actually having a role to play in
the
design engineering
just the implementation of ideas that
come kind of um percolate up from the
sci-fi world and actually become reality
it's kind of a fascinating figure in
that way so do you do you also think
about uh him beyond just his work
in science fiction but his role in
coming up with wild crazy ideas that
actually become reality yes i think it's
a great example of this cycle between
authors and scientists and engineers
that we can be inspired in one
generation by what authors dream up we
build it we make it a reality and then
that inspires another generation of
really wild and crazy thought for
science fiction i think neil stephenson
does a beautiful job of being what we
would call a hard science fiction author
so it's really grounded in a lot of
science which makes it very compelling
for me as a scientist and engineer to
read
and then be challenged to make that
vision a reality
the other community you know that neil's
involved with and some of my other
mentors are involved with that we
are thinking about more and more in the
work that we do at mit
is the long now foundation
and this
focus on what does society need to
take in terms of steps at this juncture
this particular inflection point in
human history to make sure that we're
setting ourselves up for a long and
prosperous horizon for humanities
horizons there's a lot of examples of
what the long now foundation does and
thinks about but when i think about this
in my own work it's what does it take to
scale humanity's presence in orbit
we are seeing some additional investment
in commercial space habitats
so it'll no longer be just nasa running
the international space station but to
really democratize access to space to
have like bezos wants to have millions
of people living and working in space
you need architecture that's bigger and
grander and can actually scale that
means you need to be thinking about how
can you construct things for long time
horizons that are really sustainable in
orbit or on a surface of a celestial
body that are bigger than the biggest
rocket payload fairing that we currently
have available and that what led me to
self-assembly and other models of
in-space construction okay every every
time you speak i get like a million
tangent ideas but cut me off no no no no
no please keep talking this is amazing i
just there's uh there's like a million
invite
ideas so one sort of on the dark side
let me ask yeah do you think about the
threats to human civilization that kind
of motivate the scaling of the expansion
of humans in space and on other planets
what are you worried about nuclear war
pandemics
uh super intelligent artificial
intelligence systems
you know more not uh
existential crises but ones that have
significant potentially significant
detrimental effects on society like
climate change those kinds of things and
then there's of course the fun s story
coming out from the darkness and hitting
all earth there's been a few movies on
that anyway is there something that you
think about uh
that threatens us in this century
um i mean as an ex-military family we
used to talk about all of this we would
say that luck favors the prepared and so
growing up you know we had a plan
actually a family plan for what we would
do in a pandemic didn't think we were
going to have to put that plan into
place and here we are
we do
certainly you know among my own family
and my friends within our work at mit we
do think about existential threats and
risks to humanity and what role does
space exploration and getting humans off
world have to play in a resilient future
for humanity but what i actually find
more compelling
recently
is instead of thinking about a need to
ever abandon
earth
through a path of space exploration or
space foraging is to see how we can use
space technology to keep earth livable
the obvious direct ways of doing this
would be you know satellite technology
that's helping us learn more about
climate change or
emitters or co2 but there's also a
future for geoengineering that might be
space-based a lot of questions that
would have to be answered around that
but these are examples of
pivoting our focus away from maybe the
hollywood vision of oh and asteroid's
going to come we're all going to have to
escape earth to let's use our
considerable technology prowess and use
space technology to save earth and be
very much focused on how we can have a
worthwhile life for earth citizens even
if some of us go want to go out for
their venturing right just the the
desire to explore yeah the mysterious
yes but also it does seem
that by placing us in harsh conditions
the harsh conditions of space the harsh
conditions of planets and the biology
the chemistry the engineering the
robotics the
materials all of that that's just a nice
way to come up with cool new things
great forcing function yeah it's a force
exactly it's a forcing function like
survival you don't get this right you
die
so uh and that you can bring back to
earth and it will improve
um right like figuring out food in space
will make you figure out what how to eat
you know live healthier lives here on
earth so true i mean some of the
technologies that we're directly looking
at right now
for space habitats it's hard to keep
humans alive in this really fragile
little pocket against the vacuum and all
of the dangers that the space
environment presents
some of the technologies we were going
to have to figure out is energy
efficient you know cooling and air
conditioning
air filtration scrubbing co2 from the
air
being able to
have habitats that are themselves
resilient to extremes of space weather
and radiation
and some of these are direct
translational opportunities for areas
from financial disasters you know people
in california a decade ago would never
have had to think about having an
airtight house but now with wildfires
maybe you do want something close to an
airtight house how do you manage that
there's a lot of technologies from the
space habitation world that we are
hoping we can actually bring back down
to benefit life on earth as well in
these extreme environment contexts
okay so you mentioned to go back to
swarm
yeah so that was interesting to you
first of all in your own work but also i
i believe you said something that was
inspiring from neil stephenson as well
so when you say
swarm
are you thinking about
um
architectures
or are you thinking about artificial
intelligence like robotics are those
kind of intermixed i think the future
that we're seeing is that they're going
to be intermixed which is really
exciting so the future of space habitats
are one of
intelligent structures maybe not all the
way to hal and the you know 2001 space
odyssey reference that scares people
about the habitat having a mind of its
own but certainly we're building systems
now where the habitat
has sensing technology
that allows it to communicate
its basic functions you know maintaining
life support for the astronauts but
could also communicate in symbiosis
with these swarm robots that would be on
the outside of the spacecraft uh whether
it's in a microgravity orbiting
environment or on the surface and these
little robots they crawl just a la neil
stephenson and seven eaves they crawl
along the outside of the spacecraft
looking for micrometeorite punctures or
gas leaks or other faults and defects
and right now we're just working on the
diagnosis so can the swarm with its
collective intelligence act in symbiosis
with the spacecraft and detect things
but in the future we'd also love for
these little micro robots to repair in
situ and really be
like ants living in a tree
altogether connected to the spacecraft
do you
uh envision
system to be fully distributed
and just like an ant colony if one of
them
is damaged or you know whatever uh
loses control and all those kinds of
things that
that doesn't affect the performance of
the the the complete system or doesn't
need to be centralized this is more like
almost like a technical question do you
think it's an architecture question
right
from the ground up
it's so scary to go fully distributed
yes but it's also exceptionally powerful
right robust resilient to the harsh
conditions of space what do you
um if you look into the next 10 20 100
years
starting from scratch do you think we
should be doing architecture-wise
distributed systems
for space yes because it gives you this
redundancy and safety profile that's
really critical so whether it's small
swarm robots where it doesn't matter if
you lose a few of them to habitats that
instead of having a
central
monolithic habitat you might actually be
able to have
a decentralized node of a space station
so that you can kind of ride out of star
wars you can shut a blast door if
there's a fire or if there's a conflict
in a certain area and you can move the
humans and the crew into another
decentralized node of the spacecraft
there's another idea out of neil
stephenson seven eaves actually were
these arklets
which were decentralized spacecraft that
could form and dock
little temporary space stations with
each other and then separate and go off
on their way and and have a
decentralized approach to living in
space
so the self-assembly component of that
too so this is your phd work and beyond
you explored autonomously
self-assembling space architecture for
future space tourists habitats and space
stations in orbit around earth moon and
mars
there's few things i personally find uh
sexier than self-assembling
space autonomously self-assembling space
architecture in general it doesn't even
need to be space the idea of like
self-assembling architectures is really
interesting like building a bridge or
something like that through
self-assembling materials it feels like
a incredibly efficient way to do it
because optimization is built in so you
can build like the most optimal
structures
given
dynamic uncertain
changing conditions
so uh maybe can you talk about your phd
work about this this work about tesserae
what is it
in general also any any cool stuff
because this is super cool yeah yeah
absolutely
so tess ray is my phd research it's this
idea that we could take tiles
that construct a large structure like a
bucky ball yeah this is exactly what
we're looking at here which is the tiles
that are packed flat in a rocket they're
released to float in microgravity
magnets pretty powerful electropermanent
magnets on their edges draw them
together for autonomous docking so
there's no human in the loop here and
there's no central agent coordinating
saying tile one go to tile two it's
completely decentralized system they
find each other on their own
what we don't show in this video is what
happens if there's an error right so
what happens if they bond incorrectly
the tiles have sensing so proximity
sensing magnetometer other sensors that
allow them to detect a good bond versus
a bad bond and pulse off and
self-correct which anybody who works in
this you know the field of self-assembly
will tell you that error detection and
correction just like uh error detection
in a dna sequence or protein folding is
really important part of the system for
that robustness and so we've done a lot
of work to engineer that ability for the
tiles to be
self-determining they know whether
they're forming the structure that
they're supposed to form or not they
know if they're in a toxic relationship
and they need to get out right right if
they need if they need to separate
exactly yeah all right this is like so
amazing and for people who are just
listening to this yeah there's
a lot i mean how large are these tiles
so the size that we use in the lab they
can really be any size because we can
scale them down to do testing in
microgravity so we sent tiles that were
about three inches wide to the
international space station a couple
years ago to test the code test the
state machine test the algorithm of
self-assembly but now we're actually
building our first ever human scale
tiles they're me human size so a little
you know a little smaller than maybe
your average human um but they're 2.5
feet on edge length
the larger scale that we would love to
build in the future would actually be
tiles that are big enough to form a
bucky ball big open spherical volume
spherical approximation volume that'd be
about 10 meters in diameter so 30 feet
which is much bigger and grander in
terms of open space than any current
module on the iss
and one of the goals with this project
was to say what's the purpose of next
generation space architecture should it
be something that really inspires and
delights people when you float into that
space can you get goosebumps in the way
that you do when you walk into a really
stunning piece of architecture on earth
and so we think that self-assembly this
modular reconfigurable algorithm for
constructing space structures in orbit
is going to give us this promise of
space architecture that's actually worth
living in
living in oh i thought you also meant
from like outside artistic perspective
when you see the whole thing it's just
with the aesthetics of it absolutely you
know when you like go like in into vegas
whenever you go into a city
and it's like over the hill appears in
front of you and i mean there's
something majestic about
uh
seeing like wow humans created that it
gives you like hope about like if these
a bunch of ants were able to figure out
how to build skyscrapers that light up
and in general the design of these tiles
and the way you envision it are pretty
scalable yes and they're inspired by
exactly what you mentioned a moment ago
which is we have these patterns of
self-assembly on earth and there's a lot
of fantastic mit research that we're
building this concept on so like daniela
roos at csail and pebbles
taking the power of magnets to create
units that are themselves
interchangeable this notion of
programmable matter
and so we're interested in going really
big with it to build big scale space
structures with programmable tiles but
there's also a really fascinating you
know end of that on the other side of
the spectrum which is how small can you
go with matter that's programmable and
stacks and builds itself and creates a
bridge or something in the future
what do you envision the thing would
look like like when you imagine a thing
far into the future where there's um
so we're not even thinking about like uh
small space well let's not call them
small but are currently sized space
stations but like something gigantic
what do you envision is this something
with symmetry or is this something we
can't even come up with yet is it is
there's beautiful structures that you
imagine in your mind i've got three
candidates that i would love to build if
we're talking about monumental space
architecture one is what does a space
cathedral look like it can be a secular
cathedral doesn't necessarily have to be
about religion but that notion of long
sight lines
inspiring stunning architecture when you
go in and you can imagine floating
instead of you know being on the ground
and only looking up in space you could
be in a central node and each direction
you look at all the cardinal directions
are spires going off in a really large
and long way so that's concept number
one
number two would be something more
organic that's not just geometric so
here one of the ideas that we're working
on in mit in my lab is to say
could you
instead of the tesserae model right
which is self-assembling a shell
could you define a module that's a node
a small node that someone can live in
and you self-assemble a lot of those
together they're called uh plesiohedrons
like uh space filling solids and you
dock a bunch of them together and you
can create a really organic structure
out of that so it's the same way that
muscles accrete to appear you can have
these nodes that dock together and one
shape that i would love to form out of
this is something like a nautilus a
seashell that beautiful you know
fibonacci spiral sequence that you get
in that shape which i think would be a
stunning and fabulous
um aggregated space station you said so
many cool words please
plesiohedron yeah so that that's a
space filling
solid the simplest thing to think about
like here oh cube cube right so you can
stack cubes together and if you had an
infinite number of cubes you'd fill all
that space there's no gaps in between
the cubes they stack and fill space
uh another plesiohedron is a truncated
octahedron and that's actually one of
the candidate structures that we think
would be great for space stations what's
the truncated part ah so it you cut off
an octahedron actually has like little
pointy areas you truncate certain
sections of it and you get um
surfaces that are on the structure that
are cubes and i think hexagons i have to
remind myself exactly what the faces are
but overall a truncated octahedron can
be bonded to other truncated octahedrons
and just like a cube it fills all the
gaps as you build it out so you can
imagine
two truncated octahedrons they come
together at an airlock which is what we
space people call doors in space
and you dock them on all sides and
you've basically created this
decentralized network of space nodes
that make a big space station
and once you have enough of them and
you're growing with enough big units you
can do it in any macro shape you want
that's where the nautilus comes in is
could we design
an organically inspired shape for space
station can i just say how awesome it is
to hear you say
we space people i know you meant people
that are doing research on space
exploration space technology but it also
made me think of a future there's earth
people
and there's and there's those space
people and then i love them
too yeah no no for sure for sure but
like
it's like new yorkers and like texans or
something like that
yeah of course you you live for time in
new york and then you go up to boston
and but for tom you're the space people
i know those space people
they're kind of wild up there let's see
how that dynamic evolved yeah exactly
there's that culture culture forms and i
would love to see what kind of culture
once you once you have
sort of more and more civilians i mean
there's a human
i mean i love psychology and sociology
and
i'll maybe ask you about that too which
is like the dynamic between humans you
have to kind of start considering that
you start spending more and more time up
in space and and start sending civilians
start sending bigger and bigger groups
of people and then of course
the beautiful and the ugly emerges from
the
uh from
the human nature that we haven't been
able to escape up to this point uh but
when you say the plesiohedrons these
kinds of shapes
are they multi-functional like
is the idea you'd be able to
uh
uh humans cannot occupy them safely in
some of them and some others have some
other purposes exactly one could be
sleeping quarters one could be a
greenhouse or an agricultural unit one
could be a storage depot
essentially all of the different rooms
or functions that you might need in a
space station could be subdivided into
these nodes and then stacked together
and one of the promises of both tesserae
my original phd research which is these
shells and then this follow-on node
concept
is that
right now we build space stations and
once they're built they're done you
can't really change them profoundly but
the benefit of a modular self-assembling
system is you can disassemble it you can
completely reconfigure it as if your
mission changes or the number of people
in space that you want to host if you
have a space conference happening like
south by southwest i was thinking space
party but space conference is good too
then uh maybe all of a sudden you want
to change out what were window tiles
yesterday cupola tiles and make them
into a birthing port so that you can
welcome five new spaceships to come and
join you in space that's what this
promise of reconfigurable space
architecture might allow us to explore
i've been hanging out with grimes
recently i just feel like she belongs up
in space this is like designed for for
artists essentially like imagine i mean
this is what south by keeps introducing
me to is there's like the weird and the
beautiful people and like the artists
and
it feels like there's a lot of
opportunities for
art and design
it's like space is a combination of arts
design and great engineering with with
uh uh
it's a safety critical with like the
highest of stakes so don't you can't you
can't mess it up and is this is there
first of all you talking about tiling so
neil stephens is obsessed about time i
don't know if it's related to any of
this but he seems to be obsessed with
like how do you tell a space that's a
commandment geometric notion like the
tessellation and it's i mean it's a
beautiful
idea for architecture that you can
self-assemble these different shapes
and
you can have probably some centralized
guidance of the kind of thing you want
to build
but they also kind of figure stuff out
themselves in terms of the low level
details in terms of the figuring out
when the when if everything fits just
right
for the ocd people like
what's that subreddit uh
pleasantly
it's like really fun everything they
have like videos of everything is just
pleasant when everything just fits
perfectly very pleasing all the
tolerances come together
so they figured that out on themselves
and the local robotics problem but by
the way was danielle rose pebbles what's
the pebbles project the pebbles project
are little cubes that have epms in them
electro-permanent magnets and they can
self-disassemble so they'll turn off and
so you'll have this little structure
that all of a sudden can
flip the little pebbles over and
essentially just disaggregate they have
to make some pleasing sounds
that's gonna so i'm supposed to talk to
danielle so that i'll probably spend an
hour just discussing the sounds on the
pebbles okay uh what were we talking
about so the that's because you
mentioned two i think right my third one
yeah is there a third one my third one
is the ring world just because
every science fiction book ever that's
worth anything has a ring world in it
and uh it's just a donut a donut yeah so
a really big taurus that could encircle
a planet
uh or encircle another celestial body
maybe an asteroid or a small moon
and um the promise here is just the
the beauty of being able to have that
geometry in orbit and all that surface
area for solar panels and docking and
um
essentially just all of what that
enables to have a ring world at that
scale in orbit which by the way for the
viewers we're looking at figure alone
what paper is this from this is a
hexagonal tiling of a tourist generator
in mathematica referencing code an
approach from two citations so we're
looking at a tiled doughnut and i'm not
hungry so this is the is this is this
from your thesis or no uh this is
probably i mean this is in my thesis
this looks like it was one of my earlier
papers this was
an approach to say great we've come up
with this tessellation approach for a
buckyball and we picked the buckyball
because it is the most efficient surface
area to volume shape and what's
expensive in space the surface area
shipping up all that material so we
wanted something that would maximize the
volume but if we think about ring worlds
and other shapes we wanted to look at
how do you tile a taurus and this is one
example with hexagons to be able to say
could we take this same tesserae
approach of self-assembling tiles and
create other geometries this is so
freaking cool that's awesome so you
mentioned uh microgravity and i saw i
believe that uh there's a picture of you
floating microgravity uh when when did
you get to experience that what was that
like yeah so i've flown nine times on
the affectionately known as the vomit
comet
it's the parabolic flight and
essentially it does what you'd want a
plane never to do it pitches really
steeply upwards at 45 degrees that's a
picture you yeah yeah that's test rate
that's super early in my phd some of
just the passive tiles before we even
put electronics in we were just testing
the magnet polarity and the
essentially is it an energy favorable
structure to self-assemble on its own so
we tweaked a lot of things between are
we looking at a couple of them
yeah you're looking at a bunch of them
there's also almost 32 of them yeah
they're clumping they're clumping yeah
can you comment on what's the difference
between microgravity and and zero
gravity yes so there is
it's important difference there is no
zero gravity there's no nothing there's
in the universe there is no such thing
as zero gravity so newton's law of
gravity tells us that there's always
gravity attraction between any two
objects so zero g is a shorthand that
some of us fall into using or is a
little easier to communicate to the
public the accurate term is microgravity
where you are essentially floating
you're weightless but generally in free
fall
so on the parabolic flights the vomit
comet you're in free fall at the end of
the parabola and in orbit around the
earth when you're floating you're also
in free fall
so affectionately call vomit comment i'm
sure there's a reason why it's called
affectionately so so what's it like
what's uh your first time
to both philosophically spiritually and
biologically what's it like it's
profound it is
unlike anything else you will experience
on earth
because it is this true feeling of
weightlessness with no drag so the
closest experience you can think of
would be floating in a pool but you move
slowly when you float in a pool and your
motion is restricted when you're
floating it's just you and your body
flying like in a dream
it takes the littlest amount of energy
like a finger tap against the wall of
the plane to shoot all the way across
the fuselage wow and you can move at
full speed like you're you can move your
arms exactly your muscles there's no
yeah there's no resistance
they actually tell you to make a memory
when you're on the plane
because it's such a fleeting experience
for your body that even a few days later
you've already forgotten exactly what it
felt like it's so foreign to the human
experience they kind of that you
explicitly tried to really form this
into a membrane and then you could do
the replay cognitively freeze it yeah
save right uh when we have neural link
we can replay that um
that memory so in terms of
how much stress it has on your body is
it uh biologically stressful
you do feel a 2g pull out right so the
cost of getting those
micro g parabolas is you then have a 2g
pull out and that's hard you have to
train for it uh if you move your neck
too quickly in that 2g pull out you can
strain muscles
but i wouldn't say that it's
actually a a profound
tough thing on the body it's really just
an incredibly novel experience
and when you're in orbit and you're not
having to go through the ups and downs
of the parabolic plane there's a real
grace and elegance and you see the
astronauts learn to operate in this
completely new environment
what are some interesting differences
between the parabolic plane and when
you're actually going up in orbit is it
that with orbit you can look out and see
yeah that blue little planet of ours you
can see the blue marble the stunning
overview effect which is something i
hope to see one day
um what's also really different is if
you're in orbit for any significant
period of time there's going to be a lot
more physiological changes to your body
than if you just did an afternoon flight
on the vomit comet everything from your
bones your muscles your eyeballs change
shape uh there's a lot of different
things that happen for long duration
space flight and we still have to as
scientists we still have to solve a lot
of these interesting challenges to be
able to keep humans
thriving in microgravity or deep
duration space missions
deep duration space missions okay let's
talk about this
um i'm just gonna ask a bunch of dumb
questions so approximately how long does
it take to travel to mars asking for a
friend asking for a friend as we all do
uh about three years for a round trip
okay and that's not that it actually why
why the round trip is that well
you're just asking about the one like
we're getting one more
us okay cool so for just like literally
flying to mars and around it takes three
years there's some interstitial time
there because you really can only go
between earth and mars at certain points
in their orbits where it's favorable to
make that journey and so part of that
three years is you take the journey to
mars a few months six to nine months
you're there for a period of time until
the orbits find a favorable alignment
again and then you come back another six
to nine months so one way travel six to
nine months they hang out there on
vacation then come back forced vacation
well me who loves working all the time
all vacation is forced vacation uh all
right
uh so okay so that gives us a sense of
duration and we can maybe also talk
about longer and longer and longer
duration
uh as well
what are the hardest aspects of
this of living in space for
many days for let's say 100 days 200
days maybe there's a threshold when it
gets really tough what are what are some
stupid little things or big things that
are very difficult for human beings to
go through so one big thing and one
little thing there there's two classic
problems that we're trying to solve in
the space industry one is radiation
it's not as much of a problem for us
right now on the international space
station because we're still protected by
part of earth's magnetosphere but as
soon as you get farther out into space
and you don't have that protection once
you leave the van allen
belt area of the earth and the you know
cocoon around the earth
we have really serious concerns about
radiation the effect on human health
long term that's the big one
the small one and i say it's small
because it seems mundane but it actually
is really big in its own way is mental
health and how to keep people happy and
balanced and you were alluding to some
of the psychological challenges of
having humans together on missions and
especially as we try to scale the number
of humans in orbit or in space so that's
another big challenge is how to keep
people happy and balanced and
cooperating
that's not an issue on earth at all at
all
okay so
we'll talk about each of those in a bit
more detail but
let me continue on the chain of dumb
questions what about food what's a good
food source for food in space
uh and what are some sort of standard
go-to meals menus right now your go-to
menu is gonna be mostly freeze-dried
every so often nasa will arrange for a
fun stunt or fresh food to get up to
station so they did bake double tree
cookies with hilton a couple years ago
as i recall i think some time before the
pandemic
but there's work actually in our lab at
mit maggie koblenz one of my staff
researchers is looking at the future of
fermentation
everybody loves beer right beer and wine
and kimchi and miso these foods that
have just been you know really important
to human cultures for eons because we
love the umami and the better flavor in
them but it turns out they also have a
good shelf life if done properly and
they also have an additional health
benefit for the microbiome for
probiotics and prebiotics so we're
trying to work with nasa and convince
them to be more open-minded to fermented
food for long-duration deep space
missions that we think is one of the
future elements in addition to in situ
growing your own food no okay this is
this is essential for the space party is
the yes the space beer yes it's the
fermented product yes
okay cool in terms of water what's a
good source of drinkable water like
where do you get water do you have to
always bring it on board with you and is
there a compressed efficient way of
storing it so to steal a line from
charlie bolton who's the former
administrator of nasa uh this morning's
fresh water is yesterday's coffee
so if you think about what that means
you drank the coffee yesterday right as
it turned out it goes fully through the
body through the body as the recycling
system and then you drink what you peed
out as um you know clarified uh refined
fresh water the next day that is one
source of water another source of water
in the near neighborhood of our solar
system would be on the moon so water ice
deposits there's also water on mars this
is one of the big things that's bringing
people to want to develop infrastructure
on the moon is once you've gotten out of
the gravity well of earth if you can
find water on the moon and refine it you
can either make it into propellant or
drinkable water for humans
and so that's really valuable as a
potential gateway out into the rest of
the solar system to be able to get
propellant without always having to ship
it up from earth
so how much water is there on mars
that's a great question i do not know we
don't know water at the caps
i suspect nasa from all of the satellite
um studies that they've done of mars
have a decent idea of what the water
deposits look like but i don't know to
what degree they have characterized
those i really hope there's life or
traces of previous life on mars this is
a special spot in my heart because i got
to work on sherlock which is the
astrobiology experiment that's on mars
right now searching for what they would
say in a very cautious way is signs of
past habitability they want to be
careful not to get people overly excited
and say we're searching for signs of
life they're searching to see if there
would have been organics on the surface
of mars or water in certain areas that
would have allowed for life to flourish
and i really love this prospect i do
think within our lifetimes we'll get a
better answer about finding life in our
solar system if it's there if not on
mars maybe europa
one of the icy worlds so you like the
you like
astrobiology i do this is part part of
the it's not just about human biology
it's also other extraterrestrial alien
biology search for life in the universe
okay yeah does that scare you or excite
you it excites me profoundly there's
other alien civilizations potentially
very different than our our own i think
there's got to be some humility there
and certainly from science fiction we
have plenty of reasons to fear that
outcome as well but i do think as a
scientist it would be profoundly
exciting if we were to find life
especially in the near neighborhood of
our solar system
right now we would expect it to be most
likely microbial life but we have a real
serious challenge in astrobiology which
is it may not even be carbon-based life
and all of our detectors we only know to
look for dna or rna
how would you even build a detector to
look for silicon-based life
or different molecules than what we know
to be the fundamental molecules for life
and you mentioned offline sarah walker
she yes her the question that she's
obsessed with is even just defining life
what is life to look outside
the carbon base i mean to look outside
of basically anything we can even
imagine chemically uh to look outside of
any kind of notions that we think of as
biology
yeah it's it's really weird so you now
get into this land of like complexity of
a measuring
of like how many assembly steps it takes
to build that thing right and maybe
maybe uh dynamic movement or some
maintenance of some kind of membrane
structures like we don't even know like
which properties life should have right
uh whether it can should be able to
reproduce and all those kinds of things
or pass information genetic type of
information
we don't know and it's like it's that's
so humbling
i mean i tend to believe that there
could be
something like alien life here on earth
and we're just too
human biology obsessed to even recognize
it the shadow biosphere i remember you
and sarah was talking about i mean
that's like
speaking of beer i mean that's something
i wanted to make sure in all of science
to shake ourselves out of like remind
ourselves constantly how little we know
because it might be right in front of
our nose
like i wouldn't be surprised if like
trees are like orders of magnitude more
intelligent than humans they're just
operating at a much slower scale
and they're like talking about us
the whole time it's like about silly
humans that take everything seriously
and we start all kinds of nuclear wars
and we
quarrel and we tweet about it and then
but the trees are always there just
watching us silly humans as like ants
and lord of the rings exactly so i mean
i don't know i mean obviously i'm joking
on that one but there could be stuff
like that
uh well let me ask you the the the drake
equation the big uh the question how
many
like uh obviously nobody knows but
what's your gut what's your hope as a
scientist as a human how many alien
civilizations are out there
as a ex-physicist i'm now much more on
the aerospace engineering side for space
architecture but as an ex-physicist i
hope it is
uh prolific
i think the challenge is if it's as
prolific as we would hope if there are
many many many civilizations then the
question is
where are they why haven't we heard from
them uh and the fermi paradox is there
some great filter that life only gets to
some level of sophistication and then
kills itself off through war or through
famine or through different challenges
that filter that
society out of existence
and it would be an interesting question
to try to understand if the universe was
teeming with life why haven't we
found it or heard from it yet to our
knowledge yeah i mean i personally
believe that it's teeming with life and
you're right i think that's a really
useful productive engineering scientific
question
of what kind of great filter yeah can
just be destroying all that life or
preventing it from
just constantly talking to to us silly
descendants of apes that's a really nice
question like
what are the ways civilizations can
destroy themselves
and there's too many sadly well we i
don't think we've come up with most of
them yet that's also probably true
that's the thing it's uh
i mean and like if you look at nuclear
war some of it is physics
but some of it
is game theory it's uh
it's human nature it's how society's
built themselves how they interact
how we create and resolve conflict and
it gets back to the human question on
when you're doing long-term space travel
how do you
maintain this dynamical system of
of flawed
uh irrational humans such that it
persists
throughout time to not just maintain
their biological body but get people
from not murdering each other and like
like each other sufficiently
to where you kind of
fit well but i think you know if uh the
songs or poetry or books taught me
anything if you like each other a little
too much
um
i mean the problems arise because then
there's always a third person who also
likes and then there's the drama he's
like i can't believe you did that and
then last night whatever so and then
there's beer gets complicated gets
complicated quickly okay anyway um back
to the dumb questions because you you
answered this um there's an interview we
answer a bunch of cool little questions
from um from young students and so on
about like space
one of them was uh playing music in
space yeah um and he mentioned something
about
what kind of instruments
you could use to play music in space
could you could you mention about
uh like the spotify working space and if
i wanted to do a live performance what
what kind of instruments would i need
yeah i mean you referenced culture
before and this is one of the most
exciting things that we have at our
fingertips which is to define a new
culture for space exploration we don't
just have to import
cultural artifacts from earth
to make life worth living in space and
this musical instrument that you
referenced was a design of an object
that could only be performed in
microgravity oh cool so it doesn't sound
the same way when it's um it's a
percussive instrument when it's rattled
or moved in a gravity environment is
that can we look it up it's called the
telematron yep it's created by yeah
that is so awesome uh created by sans
fish and nicole boulier two amazing uh
graduate students and staff researchers
on my team what does it look like it's
uh it looks steampunk actually yeah
awesome yeah it's pretty cool design it
looks like it's a geometric solid that
has these interesting artifacts on the
inside and it has a lot of sensors
actually additionally on the inside like
imu's inertial measurement sensors that
allow it to detect when it's floating
and when it's not floating and provides
this really kind of ethereal um they
later sonify it so they use electronic
music to turn it into a symphony or turn
it into a piece and yeah this is the
object the telematron how does the human
interact with it uh by tossing it so
it's an interactive musical instrument
it actually requires another partner
so the idea was that it's something like
a dance
um or just like something like a
choreography in space got it and then
speaking of which you also talked about
sports
and uh like ball sports like playing
soccer so what
you you mentioned that so your muscles
can move with full speed
and then if you push off the wall
lightly
you fly
zoom zoom across so how does the physics
of that work for can you still play
soccer for example in space you can but
one of the most uh intuitive things that
we all learn as babies right is whenever
you throw something if i was gonna toss
something to you i toss it up because i
know that it has to compensate for the
fact that that keplerian arc is going to
draw it down the you know equations of
motion are going to drop down i would in
space i would just shoot something
directly towards you so like straight
line of sight and so that would be very
different for any type of ball sport is
to retrain your human mind to have that
as your intuitive
arc of motion or lack of arc from your
experience from understanding how
astronauts get adjusted to the stuff how
long does it take to adjust to the
physics of this world this other world
so even after one or two parabolic
flights you can gain a certain facility
with moving in that environment i think
most astronauts would say maybe several
days on station or a week on station and
their brain
flips it's amazing the plasticity of the
human brain and how quickly they are
able to adapt and so pretty quickly they
become
creatures of this new environment
okay so that's cool it's it's creating a
little bit of an experience what about
if you go for more than 100 days for one
year for two years for three years yeah
what challenges start to emerge in that
case
so scott kelly wrote this amazing book
after he spent a year in space and he's
a twin it's absolutely fantastic that
nasa got to do a twin studies perfect
so he wrote a lot about his experience
on the health side of what changed
things like
bone density muscle atrophy
eye sight changing because the shape of
your eyeball changes which changes your
lens which changes how you see
if we're then thinking about the
challenges between a year and three
years especially if we're doing that
three year trip to mars for your friend
who asked earlier
then you have to think about
nutrition and so how are you keeping all
of these different needs for your body
alive how are you protecting astronauts
against radiation either having some
type of a shell on the spacecraft which
is expensive because it's heavy you know
if it's something like lead a really
effective radiation shell it's going to
be a lot of mass
or is there a pill that could be taken
to try to make you
less
in danger of some of the radiator
radiation effects
a lot of this has not yet been answered
but radiation is a really significant
challenge for that three year journey
and what are the negative effects of
radiation on the human body out in space
a higher likelihood to develop cancer at
a younger age
so you'd probably be able to get there
and get back but you'd find yourself
in the same way if you were exposed to
significant radiation on earth you'd
find significant bad health effects as
you age
what do you think about
like decades do you think about decades
or is this like an entire i think about
centuries especially for myspace but
yeah for decades
i think as soon as we get past the
three-year mark we'll absolutely want
somewhere between three years and a
decade we'll want artificial gravity
and we know how to do that actually the
engineering questions still need to be
tweaked for how we'd really implement it
but the science is there to know how we
would spin
habitats in orbit generate that force so
even if the entire habitat's not
spinning you at least have a treadmill
part of the space station that is
spinning and you can spend some fraction
of your day in a near to one g
environment and keep your body healthy
wait literally from just spinning from
spinning yeah centripetal force so you
generate this force if you've ever been
in those um carnival rides the
gravitrons that spin you up around the
side that's the concept and this is
actually one of the reasons why we are
spinning out a new company from my mit
lab spitting out
accidental but well
well noted space pun is a composition
all right um but yeah we're spinning out
a new company to look at next generation
space architecture and how do we
actually scale humanity's access to
space and one of the areas that we want
to look at is artificial gravity
is there a name yet yep there's a name
we are brand new we are just exiting
stealth mode so your podcast listeners
will literally be among some of the
first to hear about it it's called
aurelia institute
aurelia is an old english word for
chrysalis and the idea with this is that
we humanity collectively are at this
next stage of our metamorphosis like a
chrysalis into a spacefaring species
and so we felt that this was a good time
a necessary time
to think about next generation space
architecture but also starfleet academy
if you know that reference from star
trek
uh yes so let me ask a silly sounding
ridiculous sounding but probably
extremely