Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Zach Weinersmith: Spacesuits are kept at lower pressure than spacecraft. And the reason is that it’s hard to operate, like a balloon inside, if it’s at full pressure. So we keep it at lower pressure. Just makes it easier to bend and operate the suit. In order to do that, you have to up the oxygen concentration so your lungs can still get enough. And we don’t like to do that in the craft because on both sides of the Cold War, there were tragedies related to pure-oxygen environments. It’s a real problem.

So the joke we have is, if you’re on your Mars hab and your friend is dying outside the facility, you literally can’t go save them. Because if you put on your suit without pre-breathing oxygen for a while, you’ll just get the bends, like a diver surfacing too soon. So you’ll just wriggle and die while your friend also dies. And actually, the only three guys who’ve ever died in space were Soviet cosmonauts — Patsayev, Dobrovolsky, and Volkov — who all died due to a valve opening when they were moving toward descent. So it’s not a little thing. Everything is going to be annoying.

Luisa’s intro [00:01:02]

Luisa Rodriguez: Hi listeners, this is Luisa Rodriguez, one of the hosts of The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

I’ve got a really fun episode for you today. I spoke with Zach Weinersmith about settling space, and how he went from hyped about space settlement to a self-proclaimed “space bastard” — aka space pessimist — after he learned about the many enormous scientific, social, and legal challenges that need to be overcome to settle space.

We cover everything from:

• Bizarre proposals to make sure we could reproduce in space — from “unchastity belts” to “snuggle tunnels” to the “pregnadrome.”
• Whether adult humans can live in microgravity indefinitely, let alone developing children.
• Zach’s best guess at where in space we should settle, and why early space settlements might resemble old company towns, mostly in a not-good way.
• Whether there are any good reasons to think space settlement would be more profitable, safer, or more peaceful than Earth.
• Plus just loads more.

All right, without further ado, it is my sincere pleasure to bring you Zach Weinersmith.

The interview begins [00:02:21]

Luisa Rodriguez: Today I’m speaking with Zach Weinersmith. Zach’s the cartoonist behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and the coauthor of several books, including Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything and A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? — both of which he wrote with his wife, Kelly Weinersmith, and both of which are somehow really fact-filled and interesting, but also exceptionally funny. Which is why I’ve been extremely excited to do this interview for maybe over a year now, or maybe not quite, but something like that. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Zach.

Zach Weinersmith: Very excited. I’m excited to do some depth.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yes, exactly.

Space optimism and space bastards [00:03:04]

Luisa Rodriguez: So I’m hoping to talk about why you’re sceptical we’ll settle space anytime soon and how you think we should govern space. But first, why did you write A City on Mars?

Zach Weinersmith: It’s a kind of weird story. As you said, we wrote this book called Soonish, and it was just a more typical book about cool future stuff.

Two chapters did deal with space explicitly. One was about asteroid mining, about which I think we reached the correct conclusion, though I think I’m even more cynical now, which is that it’s almost certainly not useful for Earth — maybe if you’re going to build a giant spaceship in space, for whatever reason, it’s useful.

Then the other chapter was about cheap access to space, which was a really weird chapter to write, because we had a list of kind of zany stuff you might do — especially zany, like space elevators and whatever. And then we also talked about reusable rockets — which when we started writing didn’t exist, and then they started landing at SpaceX. So we had to keep updating. There’s been one, there’s been two, there’s been six, you know — and I don’t remember what the final number was when they clawed the manuscript from us,

So then we were like, cool, this is true that there’s a genuine revolution in what has heretofore been the bottleneck for doing cool stuff in space, which is the sheer cost of putting mass into orbit. That was changing, and it still is changing very quickly. For your more mathy audience, it’s dropped by about three-quarters in terms of price per thing to orbit in the last 10 years. Enormous change.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s pretty wild.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. Crazy numbers. By the way, which hadn’t happened for 40 years, so big change. We were like, space settlement might be coming really soon, and it sounds really cool. And we thought it’d be cool to write a book. Actually, our original internal thought was, we should write a book about space governance. And our editor was like, “Do not use the word ‘governance’ in a popular press book. Do not.” But, the cool thing is, once you start talking about space governance — which we didn’t say — you open up questions like, what is it physiologically like? And what is the environment actually like? So you actually end up having to dig up all these other topics.

The last part of the story, though, is that about two years into what was like a four- or five-year research project for two people, we started having a lot more doubt about a lot of the stuff that gets said in public. And I’m sure that’s a lot of what we’ll get into, but the basic picture is we had hit enough things that had changed our minds about something that eventually we changed our whole thesis. And blessedly, our editor found the new thesis as interesting as the one we had pitched, and basically insisted that we go with it because the book was starting to get weird. Because you get to a point where you’re like, “I have a thesis-free book about space settlement, but here’s all the bad stuff.” She was like, “You have to declare what the point is, otherwise this feels very meandering.”

And also, it also helped cut: we cut about 30% of the book out after we zeroed in on that thesis. That’s how we arrived at this… I don’t want to say it’s a naysaying book, but I would say realist — some would say pessimistic — book.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, so I didn’t realise it was two years in. I think in the book you say something like you started considering yourself “space bastards.”

Zach Weinersmith: Space bastards, yes!

Luisa Rodriguez: Because everyone in this field is really excited trying to make space settlement happen. And you’re like, learning, learning, learning; super excited to jump on board and be like, “This is how it’s gonna happen.” And then you’re like, “Ooh, we think maybe it’s not gonna happen that way.”

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. And the reason I like space bastards, I met some people who have the same viewpoint, but call themselves “space humanists” — which sounds nicer, but I think “bastard” is more appropriate.

I had the experience not that long ago of talking to a young undergraduate going into aerospace, and I was talking about this thing called the overview effect, which maybe we’ll get into, but it’s a very nice idea about how space will sort of make us all better. And she was, like, basically saying that she believed in it. And I didn’t want to, but I don’t know what to do. So I was just kind of like, “I’ll tell you the book you should read that’s in favour, and you can ask yourself if you feel the data is very good, and I can give you papers.” But not one bit of me felt good about it, but I was like, I don’t know what else to do. I can’t be like, “Actually, nevermind. It’s all true.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. It’s such a bummer.

Zach Weinersmith: It’s such a bummer.

Luisa Rodriguez: People believe space is going to make us better, and you’re like —

Zach Weinersmith: “I don’t see why.”

Luisa Rodriguez: “No reason to think that.” Yeah, I do want to come back to that. But first, do you mind saying a bit more for people who aren’t totally aware that it does look like it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to send things into space? Can you say more about what the background is, why people are so hyped? I think one example of the hype is Elon Musk says we’ll have boots on the ground on Mars in 2029, and a million-person city potentially by 20 or 30 years later — which sounds insane to me, but why are people so optimistic?

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. Let me give you a kind of potted history up to now. One way to think about all this is that it’s only in the late 19th century that it becomes clear you could even get to orbit. That’s because we’ve managed to liquefy these gases that are used as propellant. You know, rockets have been around for centuries, but they’re just kind of like a crappy military thing that’s not as good as just like setting mortars throughout most of history. And then we hit the scientific chemistry breakthrough, and it’s like, oh, you can do this. And there are multiple founding fathers in different countries, and there’s a kind of mania for space stuff. And it’s mostly amateur stuff: it’s like goofball cranks, like weird young men blowing themselves up in parking lots.

And then there’s this kind of hinge point, which is for a variety of reasons that we go through a little in the book. The Nazis put a lot of money into rockets, and in particular they happen to have this guy named Wernher von Braun. People could debate this, but I think he’s generally considered a sort of genius — at least at management, possibly also at engineering. A kind of Elon Musk figure, in that sense: he seems to be the guy who can get things across the finish line. He invents this technology that is called the V-2 rocket. It’s the basis for all initial rockets both in the US and the Soviet Union after the war. But it’s still kind of a sleepy technology. But then ICBMs, nuclear missiles come up, and it suddenly is quite serious to have rockets. But no satellites until 1957 with Sputnik. And then everybody knows the story of this crazy Space Race.

And there’s a great quote that I love about this. I think it was by Michel van Pelt, who’s a scientist, and he said something like prior to Apollo 8 — which if you remember, is the one where three guys went around the Moon and came back; not that they landed, that was Apollo 11 — prior to Apollo 8, every estimate of the future of space was an underestimate. Nobody had expected it would happen so fast. But after Apollo 8, everything was an overestimate.

So it’s after about like 1970, that would be 1968, I think, people start having the zany space fantasies. And the reason they could reasonably think that is the price to put stuff in space, the numbers we have now, say, if you take from 1957 to like 1970, the price drops by between 90% and 99%. It’s an insane super fast drop.

Luisa Rodriguez: That is insane.

Zach Weinersmith: Right. But the reason for that is it’s starting from a crazy high point, right? So very loosely speaking, it falls from something like $1 million a pound — or let’s say kilogramme; you know, it’s order of magnitude, so I can do that — let’s say it’s about $1 million a kilogramme down to about, we used to always say $10,000. But then it stops. And in fact it probably goes up a little bit after the Saturn V era with the Moon landings, and the Space Shuttle — which was supposed to make space access cheap, regular, and safe — did none of those things, and possibly was the most expensive ride to space for 40 years.

So if you want to see depressing space literature, go to the ’90s when all the dreams are just super dead, and everyone’s trying to figure out some other path and nothing is there. And then in the late ’90s and up through Obama, we get these programmes through NASA. And I really think this is the big change: in the past we’d done cost-plus contracts with these companies — meaning they deliver the rockets, and then we pay them more money, regardless of how much they cost to make them — which is, for obvious reasons, not the optimal way to do it. It’s a kind of way to de-risk a risky business, but not a great way to save money.

So there are these programmes looking for private suppliers, and into the fray steps this young billionaire — millionaire at the time — Elon Musk, who makes a huge bet on a company that is called SpaceX. And with a lot of luck — it almost goes off the rails — they manage to make a rocket that’s a clean sheet design. All rockets pretty much are based on old military designs, which creates problems. This is a streamlined, simplified design. It uses a lot of off-the-shelf parts that only became possible because modern electronics are so good that you could just send stuff. A lot of NASA stuff is made to order, and so they made this much cheaper rocket.

So that’s the first big cost drop: when the Falcon comes along. That’s Falcon 1. But then Falcon 9 really changes the game. I know we can all make fun of Elon Musk on this and that, without this play by him and his company, you don’t get the big change, I don’t think. So starting around 2015, the price starts dropping, especially when they add reusable rockets. If you don’t know your space economics, the big cost of launching a rocket to space is you destroy it afterwards. The fuel to get up is quite cheap by comparison. But because you destroy the machine, as with any transport system, if you destroyed the aeroplane or the bus when you got to your destination, the tickets would be expensive. So they are able to reuse part of the rocket.

And since then, between mass manufacturing — at least by rocket standards — and reusability, and just their streamlined design, costs have dropped precipitously, in a way that wasn’t true from 1970 to 2015. So all those dreams from the early ’70s are back — some of them directly, like they’re referencing the literature from the ’70s. But I think the hype is really down to the change in cost, and it’s real and there’s genuine hype.

My favourite example of this is SpaceX. I haven’t checked the number lately, but Starlink has some number of thousands of satellites, it’s like over 3,000 now. I think prior to them starting to launch Starlink satellites the total number ever was like 9,000. I don’t think it’ll be long before the majority of all satellites are Starlink satellites. Unless something changes. So it’s a real change. Anyone trying to deny that there’s a real revolution is just, I think it’s like borderline conspiracy theory stuff. It’s a real change.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I guess maybe lots of people will be familiar with that. I think I knew that there was an initial revolution. I think I hadn’t kept up with the fact that there’s been another one, and for that reason, people are re-hyped. And I also only kind of half-understood why people are so excited about space.

Bad arguments for why we should settle space [00:14:01]

Luisa Rodriguez: So let’s turn to some of these arguments for why it’s even a good thing. First, there are some arguments for settling space that you don’t think are very good. One is that space will save humanity from near-term calamity by providing a new home. Why do you think that is a bad argument?

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, I’m excited to talk to y’all about this one, because it’s in your wheelhouse.

Luisa Rodriguez: Exactly.

Zach Weinersmith: So we’re talking about existential risk, right? So imagine you have the ability to shift funds around however you like to try to make it through the next century. The question then is: is space settlement on your docket? Or what’s your allocation?

And I would say it’s probably zero. So pick your calamity, right? If your calamity is some sort of worldwide disaster like nuclear war or an asteroid, maybe we’ll get to this later, but we calculate the amount of people you need to have a permanent Mars settlement is going to be enormous: probably on the order of a million people, maybe multiple orders of magnitude larger, to have a settlement that could survive the death of Earth, or loss of contact, let’s say.

Then additionally, a lot of the stuff you’d need you would basically never make on site. There’d be no incentive to. So, for example, if you want to have three-nanometer microchips or whatever to run, or even less complicated ones, to make those on Earth requires a globalised planet with billions of people. And also, by the way, huge amounts of water — which is, even on Mars, fairly precious. And they’re low mass, so you could ship… Like if you had a 50-tonne starship, if those come online, that’s a lot of microchips. So in addition to needing an enormous amount of people on Mars, you’re not even economically incentivised to make the stuff of permanence. So if you’re worried about total annihilation of Earth and you want like a Noah’s Ark, probably a bad call.

If you’re talking about climate calamity, massive global warming and the Southern Hemisphere is just uninhabitable, the thing to know is that Mars is still a million times worse. Maybe we’ll get to this, but Mars is worse than a Superfund site. It’s a disaster. It’s worse than trying to live in Antarctica. And so unless that climate change is even beyond a worst-case IPCC scenario, it’s still a bad idea. And even then, if the goal was just to have a human pocket that survives, you should dig a hole or put a city underwater. It’s going to be much easier than doing Mars. So I don’t think the x-risk stuff applies.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I do think that was an argument that, as soon as I read your counterarguments, I was like, “Wow. Yeah, it completely falls apart.”

Zach Weinersmith: Sorry.

Luisa Rodriguez: Any bad thing I can think of in the US — and like you said, we’ll talk about why Mars is so inhospitable — but Mars is just more toxic, it’s more bad in every way. And so we’re just kind of imagining that somehow we’ll make Mars wonderful, even though we couldn’t have just found the same kinds of technologies to solve climate change. Well, easier ones to solve problems like climate change.

OK, so that’s one bad argument. Another one you don’t buy is that space resources will make us all rich. And I think this one I was initially more sympathetic to. So what’s the basic argument, to start?

Zach Weinersmith: There are a couple ways people talk about this. One is space-based solar. The classic argument is that you put a solar panel in space, there are different estimates, but let’s say you get about 10 times more power per area. Then you beam that back. And by the way, it’s also always on; there’s no intermittency. The old joke, which I think goes back to the ’70s, is the problem with solar is that there’s a planet in the way.

So it superficially sounds plausible. I think that 10 times per area is valuable because you say that’s my constraint: I can’t spend more than 10 times per panel if this is going to be worthwhile. And then you start thinking, already you’re really far in the hole just because of launch costs. It’s still something like $2,000 a kilogramme, say. And I looked this up, I think a solar panel weighs like 20 kilogrammes. So you’re already pretty far in the hole just putting the thing in place. So you have to ask yourself, what’s the marginal cost of putting an extra panel up in New Mexico or the Sahara or the Outback or wherever, versus trying to put it in space somewhere?

But then you add a lot of realism. People have this idea that space is empty. It’s not. It’s quite empty compared to your backyard, but it is still crisscrossed with radiation and little bits of debris — little rocks and dust and things that are moving at high speed, often. So you’re going to have people who maintain this stuff, and it’s got to be extra tough.

But the other thing, and this is something that really does it for me: people think space is cold, and in a physics sense, that’s true. But actually, if you look at the International Space Station, a lot of what you’re looking at, if you get an overhead view, is radiators radiating away heat. Why? Because you can’t dump heat into the void. There’s nothing. My nine-year-old was asking about this, and the example I came up with was: if you’re a blacksmith, and you have a red-hot piece of iron and you want to cool it off, what do you want to put in? Would you rather put it in the cold winter air or lukewarm water? I think intuitively the water, because you just have that density of stuff to take away heat. You don’t have that in space. You can only use electromagnetic radiation. So if you have a solar panel always facing into the Sun, this is a thing you’re going to have to deal with. It’s just this ultra-complex system that you have to maintain.

And by the way, when you beam back power, you have to have a giant receiver. So you’re not even off the hook for taking up land area. It’s not as big as solar on Earth, but it’s still big. So my theory on space-based solar — because if anyone at home wants to do a back-of-the-envelope, you’ll very quickly see it’s a bad idea — is I think it’s a kind of zombie idea. It sort of made sense in the ’70s when photovoltaics, like the cost of the panel itself, was quite high, meaning you have to maximise per area. And it’s just not true anymore.

So I think it’s just not good. Unfortunately, agency heads and VC people bring it up a lot. I just think, if you just run some numbers on a piece of paper, you won’t get even close.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so that’s solar. What about other resources in space?

Zach Weinersmith: So maybe someday — and I would say sort of trivially, if you want to be like, 10,000 years in the future, where we’re all on a Dyson sphere, by all means — but if you’re talking about anytime soon, the first thing to know is that absolutely there’s valuable stuff in the asteroid belt. There is, it’s worth noting, a lot more valuable stuff just in the earth. If we’re allowed to say anything, Earth is very big. The question is what you can get at a profit.

And I guess what I want to say is that it’s just really hard to get stuff from the belt. So the belt is far away. It’s farther than Mars, which already takes six months to get to. You may have this idea from Star Wars that asteroids are kind of like big potatoes that you can just sort of grab, but actually they’re generally rubble piles, these loose agglomerations of dust and stone. People seem to have this idea that there are like hunks of platinum or gold floating around — and there are not. There are asteroids that are high in what’s called PGM, platinum-group metals — like rhodium, platinum obviously, I think iridium maybe — which are valuable. But they’re not made of this stuff; they’re just fairly high in it compared to Earth.

So if you look at the ideal asteroids — which are asteroids that are going to come near Earth and kind of lock velocity with us so that we can go get them more easily, and which are high in PGM — it’s on the order of like a dozen. There aren’t many. So you start to add up all the stuff you have to successfully do to just get one of these, and then maybe you want to try to refine it in space — which is really hard, because a lot of refining processes assume gravity — and you can see why there are all these dead startups that didn’t even get off the drawing board phase. It’s just a really, really hard problem, especially when you compare it to just digging a hole on Earth.

Now, you can imagine a scenario, and some people do, where like, Earth has such ultra-restrictive policies about environmental stuff that it becomes plausible to go to the asteroids. But that’s just a very different planet.

The last thing on that is: by the way, what are the rules for flinging a million tonnes of iron and nickel towards the place where we live, the only planet we can survive on with no clothes and no mask? So it just seems like a nonstarter. If you want the positive view, Martin Elvis, who was a reviewer of our book, wrote a book called Asteroids that argues that it will happen. We’re sceptical.

And then last thing, I’ll be quick about this. Sometimes people will say there’s going to be a translunar mining economy. All that stuff I just talked about is crazy; this is out-crazying all of that. The usual argument is you’ll get helium-3, which is an isotope of helium, which is valuable. But we estimated to get an OK amount, you’d have to strip mine miles of the lunar surface — which is, for reasons we get into, extraordinarily difficult. Michel van Pelt, who I think I quoted earlier, said something like, “If there were bars of gold on the surface of the Moon, it would not be worth it to collect them.”

The insight for me on that: if you think about Saturn V rockets, you’re talking about a skyscraper-sized rocket that goes to space, drops off like a dinghy on the Moon. Like, by the time they get to the Moon, it’s like a scrap of dust from this giant skyscraper. And in all those missions, they brought back half a tonne of rock, right? So what half-tonne material can you just pick up that’s going to repay the hundreds of billions of dollars? It’s just not plausible. So, sorry, I don’t buy it.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK. And you also just don’t think we’re on track in the next several decades, for example, to make that easier and more economic?

Zach Weinersmith: No. I mean, I think someone out there is screaming, “What about Starship?!” And Starship is awesome. It’s this giant rocket SpaceX is working on, and it would really change things. So I estimate Starship could fling like a full ISS, international space station, two to three launches. It’s amazing.

But the real problem on the Moon is not just grabbing stuff; it’s that if you want valuable stuff, it has to be mined out of the surface, which is made of really nasty materials. There’s no air. We’ll get to this when we talk about the Moon, but it’s tough. It’s only solving one of a long chain of problems. Not that they can’t be solved, but the idea that it’s a better move to get that stuff from the Moon than, again, digging a really big hole somewhere on Earth is not super plausible.

Luisa Rodriguez: It seems plausible to me that some progress in AI — like progress that means we get actual human-level intelligence, or intelligence that’s above that of human-level — might help solve some of these problems faster than you might be imagining, at least in the kind of status quo. But that’s a very big topic on its own, so I want to come back to it later.

For now, sticking to arguments that might be bad, but also some that might be good: space settlement will end or at least mitigate war is another argument that you hear. And I think, again, you think this is not a good argument. What is the story that people tell for why that might happen?

Zach Weinersmith: So there are at least three versions of “space will end war,” and I will give them to you in order of increasing seriousness.

I think the most silly one, which you hear various versions of, is space will just be so awesome and Star Trek-y that we’ll stop with this war business — which I hope is just kind of obviously a sort of mystical, silly belief. Unfortunately.

Second is an argument — and the earliest version of it I found was in Gerard K. O’Neill from I think the late ’70s; it’s probably been around longer — which is that war is about territory. In space we can create more territory, therefore we won’t have war, because people could just expand wherever they want.

And I think a lot of people making arguments that space will stop war are basically partaking of folk beliefs about why war starts that are not believed by people who actually study war. So if you think war is all about territory per se — in the sense of, like, square footage — you should be able, right this second, to stop the war in Ukraine by promising Putin a chunk of Antarctica or Greenland. Which is just so obviously ludicrous. It’s not about the quantity of territory. It can be about particular territory, but it’s not about quantity. So the idea that you could just say, “Don’t worry about Ukraine; don’t have your specific theory of the entire history of the Russian population; you could go to space,” it just doesn’t pass the sniff test. So no to that argument.

The third argument, which at least sounds plausible — but you talk to war scholars, most don’t believe it — is that war is always about scarcity. Lots of people repeat this. Neil deGrasse Tyson repeated it in a book called Accessory to War. We talk about this, and the basic deal is: you talk to war scholars and they usually say no, and at least people argue about it. I think the idea is, “We all get rich, we’ll all be nice.” But the insight for me is, if you imagine a room full of people and you throw a bar of gold in the middle, do you expect peace to follow?

But more aligned with how the war theorists think: if you have two nations of roughly equal power, and let’s say they don’t love each other and that one discovers oil, do you expect peace to reign? In fact, a rationalist theory of war should say that the one that doesn’t have oil should attack immediately, before the other one is in a better bargaining position. So you could actually get war as a result of reducing scarcity, depending on how it’s distributed — which is obviously a problem with space.

I don’t believe there’s anything worth getting with current technology, or even near-term-future technology, but if there were, it’s not like it would be evenly distributed. The world is becoming more multipolar, but the US is the overwhelming hegemon in space to this day, so there’s no reason to suppose an even distribution.

So the idea that we’re going to end war on any of these bases is just, I think, incorrect. War is a human behaviour that happens for reasons that often have to do with the relative status of nations, not the objective wellbeing of individuals.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. I find that all just very compelling. I think one other counterargument you might make in the book is just that, at best, there are very tiny, tiny pockets of even remotely worthwhile pieces of territory, in at least near space. So the Moon is I think Africa sized, if Africa were a sphere?

Zach Weinersmith: I think that’s about right. Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez: So already, that is some territory. It’s not like we’re 10x-ing the territory available though. And then beyond that, there are like tiny parts of the Moon that are even worth considering maybe, maybe doing anything with.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. The way I would say it — and maybe we want to get to the details later — but essentially the Moon is big, but if your goal is to have a base, or even something like a settlement, the areas you would pick are very small, and it has to do with where you could get water, power, and safety.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. So we will come back to that. But again, that all just felt pretty damning to me.

Superficially plausible arguments for why we should settle space [00:28:54]

Luisa Rodriguez: So what’s a good argument for why we should settle space?

Zach Weinersmith: We say there are at least two what you might call superficially plausible arguments, which we take the rest of the book to sort of adjudicate.

One we call “the hot tub argument.” We actually went through a bunch of iterations: it was originally I think called the Doritos argument, and then the Oreos argument. And the basic idea was straightforward: often, you talk to a space geek and you go round and round some of the stuff we just talked about, and at some point they’ll just say, “Well, I don’t care if you ninnies don’t want to go. It’s a free planet, and me and Elon are going, and it doesn’t matter what you naysayers say.” In other words, it’s a private choice and nobody has any right to say no.

The reason it’s the hot tub argument, the joke is it’s like if you go to buy a hot tub, there’s no third party that gets to say no. I mean, maybe if you’re in a homeowners association or something. But generally speaking, it’s just a choice. And it doesn’t matter if the hot tub is going to make you a better person or end conflict between you and your spouse, you just do it.

Luisa Rodriguez: No one’s even really questioning the economics of a hot tub. They’re not like, “Mmm, that’s not the best way to increase your happiness.” They’re just like, “It’s cool if you want a hot tub.”

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, exactly. There’s no anti-argument that’s like we ought to do it. There’s no philosophy; it’s just a thing. So then the question is: does a third party in the case of space have a right to say no? The way we say it is you can imagine a spectrum from like hot tub to nuclear weapons, where essentially everyone agrees building your own nuclear weapon is not an individual choice. Even the ultra libertarians are like no, because you’re still threatening your neighbours, which we frown upon.

The other argument is something we call “the cathedral of survival.” And the idea is essentially that, in the very long run, it would be good to have a second reserve of humanity in case something goes drastically wrong on this planet. Now, as I said, I don’t buy that as a short-term thing, but there is at least a kind of plausible, this is something that humanity should have worked toward in the next 100 years. And we do argue, for reasons we might get to, that it is a project of a great period of time for research and development. Then there’s no reason not to put in the first bricks of the cathedral now, even if we’ll all be dead when the project is completed. So that’s the second superficially plausible argument: that we must do this eventually for this grand goal.

Luisa Rodriguez: And the “grand goal” being… Do you think of it as protective of humanity, or do you think of it as just more humanity? We think humans getting to live seems good. We like to prevent people from dying. We like to give humans the opportunity to listen to music and see art — and more humans listening to music and seeing art seems good. And so maybe this is a way to grow?

Zach Weinersmith: That’s a good point. I think we are mostly hung up on the survival aspect just because it seems more important than the philosophical stuff. But you’re absolutely right. I forget who said it first, but maybe it was Sagan, which was something like, “Either we have Earth, or we have the rest of the universe if we expand.” So I do find that quite compelling. But then the question you have to ask yourself is: what’s more likely to get us the rest of the universe? Short-term settlement or not?

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Well, for what it’s worth, I personally am excited about the idea of just like, I hope that humanity is going to keep flourishing more and more. And when I think about whether I want more people that get to live lives as good as mine or better, I feel great about that. And so if on the order of the next 100 or multiple hundreds of years, we get to create settlements that mean that more people get to live good lives, I’m excited about that. So for that reason in particular, I’m super interested in what the path to space settlement looks like.

Is settling space even biologically feasible? [00:32:43]

Luisa Rodriguez: But I guess you’re still not totally convinced it’s even realistic, at least not on the timescales that lots of enthusiasts seem to have in mind. Hence the subtitle of the book, which I thought was great: “Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?” And a big reason for that is that it’s just really, really hard in lots of ways that people I think don’t appreciate — myself included. So I want to talk about those, in part because I think they’re important and interesting, but also because I think they’re really fun and fascinating.

First, I guess there’s the fact that space is a terrible environment for a human body. Can you talk about why that is?

Zach Weinersmith: Right. So I’ll just try to go down the line quickly on this, because there’s a bunch. One worth noting: just almost anywhere in space, the moment you step outside your suit or ship, you die. Nontrivial, right? And definitely in the places we are likely to go that is true, and that’s just the deal.

To give just a quick example of why space is a really fussy place to live. To me, this is a fascinating detail. Spacesuits are kept at lower pressure than spacecraft. And the reason is that it’s hard to operate, like a balloon inside, if it’s at full pressure. So we keep it at lower pressure. Just makes it easier to bend and operate the suit. In order to do that, you have to up the oxygen concentration so your lungs can still get enough. And we don’t like to do that in the craft because on both sides of the Cold War, there were tragedies related to pure-oxygen environments. Most American audiences know Apollo 1, but in the Soviet Union, there was a very similar incident with a trainee named Bondarenko. So it’s a real problem.

So the joke we have is, if you’re on your Mars hab and your friend is dying outside the facility, you literally can’t go save them. Because if you put on your suit without pre-breathing oxygen for a while, you’ll just get the bends, like a diver surfacing too soon. So you’ll just wriggle and die while your friend also dies. And actually, the only three guys who’ve ever died in space were Soviet cosmonauts — Patsayev, Dobrovolsky, and Volkov — who all died due to a valve opening when they were moving toward descent. So it’s not a little thing. Everything is going to be annoying, you know.

The next thing is radiation. Radiation is real bad. I won’t go into the details, but the short version is that in space, you get higher doses of different kinds of radiation than you get down here, and with unknown consequences. Radiation is poorly understood even on Earth; it’s even worse understood up there.

The data we have mostly comes from space stations, which are still in the Van Allen belts, so they get more radiation than we get down here. But it’s still different. We only have a tiny amount of data from the guys who got sent to the Moon, and they weren’t there for very long. It was on the order of weeks total. And it’s just, you know, we don’t know the effects of this stuff. And it’s scary. Probably the main practical effect is you’re going to have to bury your base under a lot of dirt. No glass domes for you. There’s a bunch more detail in the book if people want.

Then the big thing probably is microgravity. So in the International Space Station, you experience free fall, as if you’re in zero gravity. And reliably, that degrades bones. So we know bones — especially like hip bones; bones you don’t use a lot — lose something like 1% of density per month.

Luisa Rodriguez: That is crazy.

Zach Weinersmith: It’s crazy. And that’s with intense exercise, like six days a week on like a treadmill with a spring to pull you into it, and you still have this loss. Similar effects on muscles: they degrade over time. It’s considered very impressive if, when you come home, you can walk.

And there are other reasons for that, but one weird thing that happens in space is when you lose that gravity, you get a massive upward fluid shift. So you lose like 30% of the volume in your legs, and your face is sort of just poofy like a baby. They actually call it puffy face. It happens. The sinister side of it is it’s probably associated with this phenomenon where astronauts tend to come back with worse vision. And in fact, astronauts over 40 are sent up with what are called “space anticipation goggles,” assuming they’ll come back with it. This happens even on short trips. As I recall, it’s in our book, but I think it’s permanent, or at least semi-permanent. So it’s a problem.

And what’s most scary about this — you can always get glasses, I guess — but it’s possible that’s actually an early sign of broader nerve damage. So there’s equivocal evidence of cognitive negative effects on astronauts. We don’t have enough data. A big thing underpinning all this is that we don’t have anyone who’s gone longer than 437 days. I think the next person down is about a year. And it’s only like half a dozen people have gone that long. Most people are much shorter. So we really don’t have any kind of really long-term data. And by the way, a Mars mission is on the order of two to three years.

The last thing I will say is we don’t have a lot of science of trauma medicine. Trauma medicine is when you’re bleeding where you shouldn’t be bleeding, or you can’t breathe, and you need to be helped quickly. It’s never come up in space. We have some funny studies where people took pig carcasses into parabolic trajectories on aeroplanes. They got a little weightless time to see what happens. And they found internal organs, as you might think, they float, they do weird stuff. They could float outside the body cavity if you’re not careful. Blood pools in domes — it doesn’t go to the bottom; it forms bubbles if it escapes. No one’s qualified to do this.

So that’s all the stuff. There’s slight other stuff, but those are the main things. The one big caveat: all that data — everything I just said, with a tiny bit of exception — is from space stations. Space stations are in microgravity. The Moon is one-sixth Earth’s gravity. Mars is about two-fifths. It’s possible that mitigates a lot of this stuff, like the fluid shift problems of microgravity. The problem is we really just don’t know. There’s some very preliminary work recently on rats, and that’s about it.

Luisa Rodriguez: So what’s the difference between microgravity on the Moon and Mars? Microgravity is just much less?

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. So effectively, on the ISS, if you’re a physics student, you know they are actually experiencing gravity, but because they’re falling on this orbit, it’s as if they’re just in open space, right?

Luisa Rodriguez: Basically zero.

Zach Weinersmith: Basically zero gravity. Stuff floats when you drop it, right? On the Moon, it drops slowly. It’s about one-sixth. And on Mars it’s about two-fifths — so nontrivially smaller. But we have no idea of the long-term effect of that.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. I guess it seems like my best guess would be maybe that helps some. But it doesn’t seem like there should be some mechanism where zero gravity has these effects and one-sixth gravity has none of them. It seems like probably there will just be the effects, but maybe a bit less.

Zach Weinersmith: It’s quite possible. Where it gets interesting, the thing you said: some people will say that we’ll send old people to the Moon because it’ll be easy on the joints or whatever. And I’m like, you’re literally producing osteoporosis-like effects on the ISS. It just seems like a dicey call.

I mean, there’s a great quote. I should have written it down. April Ronca is one of the few people who studies reproduction in space. There was someone who interviewed her and was like, “Will kids growing up on Mars with low gravity, will they be really tall?” And she said something like, “Look, we don’t even know if you could properly make the bones. Biology doesn’t work this way.” It’s not like kids think it works. It might have unforeseen effects. So I just don’t think these sort of optimistic, “maybe that’ll be nice” ideas are necessarily plausible.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. It seems like our default assumption going in should be we evolved on Earth, so probably other environments are not going to be better.

Zach Weinersmith: I think that’s a good way to say it, yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez: So how close are we to developing workarounds for these kinds of bodily problems?

Zach Weinersmith: Not super close. There are basically two ways to look at these problems. One is that we can create some drug that obviates some or all of the effects. I know there’s some recent stuff about osteoporosis, drugs for the bone loss. Of course, you’d wonder what is the long-term effect of giving healthy 35-year-olds osteoporosis drugs? I don’t know. But yeah, there’s some drug ideas.

I think usually the more ideal solution is going to be a tech fix. So if you’re worried about radiation, rather than trying to come up with some cool drugs, or even in some cases genetic engineering, probably better to just go down a hole, let the dirt block the radiation, and just have a TV so you can look outside through the TV.

And similarly, the gravity is a much harder fix. You’d have to have a rotating space station. There’ve been a few crazy proposals — I think crazy — for like a banked racetrack on the surface of Mars. So you’d at least sort of be on Mars. You’d have to be on this racetrack at least part of the time. But other than that, maybe there’s some sort of drug set, but I don’t know what it is.

One other possibility would be that — like I said, we just don’t know — it’s possible that maybe if in 40% gravity, we just walk around with like a weighted vest, and you do OK. It might be. We just don’t know. So I think that’s about the state of the art, I’m afraid.

Luisa Rodriguez: Not super impressive.

Zach Weinersmith: Yes.

Sex, pregnancy, and child development in space [00:41:41]

Luisa Rodriguez: Another challenge is that if we’re actually going to settle space, we need to make new people in space. And you just alluded to someone who’s thinking about space fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, and then child development. How hard is this category of thing?

Zach Weinersmith: We actually think this is kind of a centrepiece of concerns about doing space for us. So let’s go down the line.

Can you have sex in space? I would say probably. I think Kelly thinks maybe it’s already happened. I’m sceptical. I find often people think there’s some story that it happened and there’s at least no conclusive evidence of that. There’s no sort of tell-all. But I mean, who knows? And we certainly don’t want to get on a tangent on this, but basically there are anecdotal reports that people would have been up for it — although exclusively for men; I searched in vain to find any women who were. I mean, part of that is only one-seventh of all astronauts have been women. So there’s historical reasons. I suspect also, my sense from their memoirs is that they’re much more careful about their words, because the media tends to monitor what women say about this sort of stuff much more carefully. So who knows?

I’d be willing to guess you could bring the baby to term, maybe. Although, you take that suite of stuff I just described and throw it at a foetus: who knows? It’s obviously never come up on Earth. But who knows? Probably, maybe. Who knows?

But the real question… You know, often when this comes up, it’s like, “Can you have sex? Can you have babies?” But in order to have a settlement, babies have to develop through all the stages of human development to be adults who can have children — and that’s where it gets really scary. So you describe all these medical things: imagine applying them to a kid whose bones are developing, whose vascular system is developing, whose brain is developing. We really have no idea.

And so the scary thing is, it’s not that we can’t get this data; it’s that without this data… You know, we have Elon Musk saying we’ll be there in 30 years. No one is collecting this data. There’s really haphazard experiments over time. There’s not much agency funding. As far as I can tell, there’s no funding from crazy billionaires. You know, we need this data. It’s going to be very painstaking to get — arguably unethical to get, because you at least have to experiment on primates before you’re willing to do it on human women. And it’s hard to imagine how you could even get good data unethically in a matter of decades. It should be a problem we’re pursuing now, if we’re really serious about space. Like, if tomorrow we found out Earth was going to be dead in 100 years, this would be part of the crash course, a big part of it.

What also worries is that if you do execute on this settlement, and you’ve got kids being born in these conditions, where you would expect a higher than normal rate of abnormality — you know, kids with cognitive deficits, physical deficits, who have trouble contributing to this hostile environment where they can’t get any care — on Earth, when you have special-needs children, some of us have complained about government services not being quite adequate, but there are at least services; there are ways to take care of these human beings. And that wouldn’t be true on any kind of medium-term Mars settlement.

And what’s scary is we found three different quotes from advocates in this community willing to say some version of, “We’ll just have to have natural selection do its thing” — which, you’re like, holy crap, this is like a horror science-fiction novel.

Luisa Rodriguez: That really is horrifying.

Zach Weinersmith: They’re just saying the quiet part out loud, though. This is what would happen if tomorrow you snapped your fingers and there were a million people on Mars: you would be doing a mass experiment on babies, the result of which would probably be a large number of children who couldn’t be cared for.

So you know, I always say we’re concerned about space ethics. People are imagining we’re going to be like, “Do you really want capitalism on the Moon?” And there are people who want to bark up that tree, but we’re like, what we don’t want is vast experiments on babies for no reason — which seems to be a reasonable ethical posture for anyone, anywhere, ever.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep, yep. It’s really horrible and disturbing. And I guess all we can do is laugh at it, because it’s so disturbing.

I actually want to take a few of those things and talk about them in more detail, even though some of them are arguably kind of silly. First, you said we can probably have sex in space. Is the hard thing gravity?

Zach Weinersmith: Gravity. I’m debating how graphic to get here. It’s funny, one of the things we did for this book is we read a lot of old books forecasting the future of space. And there’s a sort of golden age of talking about sex in space, which is from somewhere like 1960 to 1980. I think it was just the right time. And it’s like Arthur C. Clarke, I don’t remember if we put this in the book, but he had some quote that was like, “Space is about to become more erotic.” And you’re like, oh god, Arthur.

So yeah, space is Newtonian if you’re in microgravity; it’d be easier on the Moon. But basically that means if someone bumps into somebody else, they both go flying. So, again, from this period, there were attempts to figure out how to manage that.

We found two different proposals for what one guy called an “unchastity belt,” which is a sort of elastic waistband for two. And it’s funny; you hear that and you’re like, “OK.” And then you think, “But wait. Like, how, exactly?” And then you’re like, “Maybe I’m just not gonna…” Yeah.

And then there’s another one called the “snuggle tunnel.” I forget who proposed that, but it was basically, imagine a large pipe with holes in it for ventilation, because CO2 tends to build up in your mouths if there’s not ventilation. And I could go on, but…

Luisa Rodriguez: I’d argue that space did not get more erotic.

Zach Weinersmith: No, it has not gotten more erotic. The dream of Clarke has died. I mean, worth noting that space notoriously kind of smells bad. And by the way, you change undies every something like four to seven days. So it’s just not… The mood lighting is not present. There’s not a lot of private space.

But when I say it probably could happen, basically I’m referring to anecdotal reports from men who said they were up for it. We found two men admitting to space onesomes.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, interesting.

Zach Weinersmith: So that’s what I mean by that. Whether you could actually bring the baby to term, I mean, who knows? I say the human body is not designed for zero gravity. But you could note, and this is kind of goofy, but we looked up, does anyone do headstands while pregnant? And apparently this comes up in yoga, and it’s OK. And so apparently foetuses could do negative one gravity. I mean, they are kind of in a neutral buoyancy tank. So maybe it’s fine.

I’d be more worried about some sort of cellular-level process that depends on gravity in some way or another that we’re not thinking about. But, you know, it is the case that evolution would at least design it so a woman could trip and fall and the foetus would be OK. So clearly you can alter the sort of acceleration that’s being put on the foetus, to say it in a weird way.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. At least temporarily, and be basically fine.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. So that’s why I say it seems plausible that the baby might be able to come to term, unless something we don’t know is happening.

There are also little other off-ramps. The atmosphere in a space station is very different from what we get on Earth, so they tolerate a much higher level of CO2, because they have to. It’d be very expensive and mass-consuming to have a bunch of CO2 scrubbing going on. Ideally on a Mars base, you’d have a lush ecosystem to manage that, which is a tall order. And there’s other stuff. So imagine you get a package from Amazon: you open it and you often smell factory gases, and you don’t care because they go out the door. In the space station, they actually have to check stuff for outgassing because it can stay in the system. You have to be really careful about this stuff. So a plausible scenario is you might have, say, a high rate of spontaneous abortion for unknown reasons.

I could go on, but there’s just a lot of stuff that we don’t know about.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, great. And then child development is basically just all the stuff we already talked about. Seems hard enough on an adult human, and then child development seems hard and complicated.

One unsettling fact from your book is that there was a startup called SpaceLife Origin that was announced in 2018 and their goal was to have the first human birth in space by 2024 — so this year we could have had a human birth. But in 2019, their CEO left, citing serious ethical safety and medical concerns. So yeah, it seems like this does just seem ethically incredibly fraught and we have to do really like years and years — because child development takes time; you can’t rush it — of experimentation somehow ethically. I mean, have animals of any kind had babies in space?

Zach Weinersmith: This is a Kelly area of research, but I want to say no. The bigger issue with this stuff is people have this idea that space stations are kind of organised, scientific projects that are going down the line on big questions — and they’re not. Space stations are built for politics and then cool scientists jam stuff onto them. The result of that is if you’re someone like us who’s had to do research, you say, have we solved space psychology? There’s not going to be a textbook that goes through the 50-year experiment that we’ve been honing in on issues. What you have is 50 years of grab-bag stuff.

And it’s the same in reproduction. So quail eggs have gone to space, and some rat systems have gone to space. Various plants have gone to space. Geckos and certain types of fish have gone to space. But there’s not what you would want. What you would want is something like a module devoted to rats having generations in space. And that would be a start, right? You still wouldn’t say humans could do this, but that would be what you would want to start answering these questions, to see if you get problems over time.

And I will say some experiments seem to go just fine; some don’t. We see in some cases cellular deformation. One case had stillbirth — I think that was with rats, I want to say — when they got home, though. And some have head deformation and stuff like this. And what’s worrisome about that is we don’t know the culprit, right? There are many altered conditions in space.

So you can keep a control group back home; that’s great. But we don’t… To give you one example, we observe in males lower testosterone, and in females lower oxytocin. Very scary for reproduction. And maybe it’s just stress. I think we talked about this in the book, that the early experiments suggested that I think it was rats stop cycling: female rats stop cycling when they go up. And turns out that’s not true. You just have to wait longer. So probably what happens is you’ve just put them through enormous stress. And at least with a human, you’re like, “By the way, we’re going to space now.” A rat is just like, “What the hell is going on?”

But it’s like, not only are there scary things happening, but we don’t know the precise cause. So that’s why I say these experiments would take at least decades, because you’d have to start from simpler systems, and you’d have to slowly, ideally, work your way up to something like a Moon base with human beings in it, somehow ethically.

Luisa Rodriguez: Can we just make a bunch of progress on creating space stations with Earth-like conditions before we bother with reproduction? Or do we have to figure out reproduction in some intermediate stage?

Zach Weinersmith: Well, for our purposes, we’re talking about settlement. So if you’re talking about something like McMurdo base, the South Pole station, on the Moon, you’re almost certainly talking about exclusively sending middle-aged men and women. “Middle-aged” generously — say, 30 to 60.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, don’t say that.

Zach Weinersmith: I’m 42. I’m unambiguous. But the reason that’s really relevant is their bodies have stopped developing, in the sense of development to adulthood. So their bodies have stopped developing, and that’s who we tend to send to space. And there are very good reasons for that. One is the lack of data. There’s other stuff, though. A lot of psychiatric conditions tend to manifest before middle age. So it’s an excellent selection mechanism to just take older people.

And the reason that’s relevant to this question is, some people don’t agree, but I think Kelly and I both are libertarian enough to say that if an adult human being of sound mind signs a waiver and is told of all the stuff I just described, and they want to go be on a space base, by all means. But the moment you start talking about bringing children into this zone, the way I think about it is it’s an ethical thing. It’s like if you had a couple and they were like, “We’re gonna have babies in Chernobyl just to see if it works,” that would, I think, be obviously unethical. Even though we generally say reproductive choices like that are down to the individual couple, there are situations in which it is so obviously deleterious to the child, who obviously gets to make no choice here, that it’s, I think, clearly unethical. It’s a sort of pointless experiment on a child.

So if you’re just talking about sending cool people to do cool stuff, awesome — I’m all for it. But when you talk about children, which are the sine qua non of settlement, which is permanence, then it’s a different question.

Where’s the best space place to settle? [00:55:02]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so those are some of the biological challenges at the individual level. And then there’s the question of where to settle. What are the options?

Zach Weinersmith: The way I like to say it is: space is big, but the places you might go are actually quite small.

So just going through the solar system: Mercury, way too hot. It’s hard to drop in, down toward the Sun and then get into orbit. I think we only found one serious proposal, which was you would situate your civilisation on the day/night line, the terminus, and just move with the terminus as the day wore on. I think Mercury days are quite long, so it wouldn’t be as bad as you’re imagining, but still a terrible idea.

Luisa Rodriguez: But you’d be in like a giant motorhome and just be slowly driving around the surface of Mercury?

Zach Weinersmith: Slowly driving around. I mean, it would be objectively cool. But no: bad call, I would say.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so that’s Mercury.

Zach Weinersmith: No to Mercury. Then you get to Venus. Venus, often compared unfavourably with hell, has surface temperatures that melt lead. The surface pressure is something like 90 times Earth pressure, sulfuric acid clouds — and yet has a nontrivial community of enthusiasts. We don’t linger on it a lot in the books. We think it’s just obviously crazy. There’s a group called Venus to Mars, if you’d like to be an enthusiast.

The basic idea, if you’re wondering, and this is true, is there’s a band of the Venusian atmosphere that has CO2 — which is good for plants, if not for humans — and is roughly Earth temperature and pressure and gravity. So you could stick a sort of bubble there, and it would be buoyant on the thick atmosphere of Venus with the sulfuric acid clouds below you. So it’s one of these, you could literally maybe do this in a kind of physics sense. What the upside is is a mystery to me, but I think usually the Venus excitement tends to either be tongue-in-cheek or in the vein of, it’s for human frontiers type of stuff — which, as you know, I’m sceptical of.

OK, then you get to Earth, which is solid. Good place. Earth has a moon, called the Moon, and it’s usually what people talk about as one of the primo locations to start space settlement. Very few people want to have the permanent next world for humans be the Moon. But as a stepping stone, it’s pretty good. So let’s talk about the Moon. I’ll give you cons followed by pros.

Cons of the moon: the surface is made of nasty stuff called regolith. If you put it under a microscope, it looks like tiny knives. That’s because the moon doesn’t have wind, doesn’t have flowing water, any of that. So it’s just smashed over aeons by stuff from space. And when you smash stuff, it fuses the surface and then breaks it again, and fuses and breaks. And eventually you just get these little knife-looking things. They’re not just dust; they’re dust and fines, which is, if you like, ultra-fine dust. We think it probably gives you something like silicosis, meaning lung scarification, if you’re exposed too much. I think Harrison Schmitt was the one on Apollo 17, who said he had an allergy or asthma-like reaction to it. It statically clings. It’s probably bad for equipment, et cetera.

Luisa Rodriguez: It’s terrible.

Zach Weinersmith: Absolutely terrible. And as a general thing, because we try to be pragmatic, it’s not just the stuff I describe, it’s also just a huge annoyance. So people talk about mining the surface — but a lot of it is this dust that’s going to cling to your equipment. So if you want to imagine, as people unfortunately often do, some sort of perfect extraction of some mineral from the surface using somehow construction equipment that can handle this, it’s going to be really tough.

And then adding to that, you’re exposed to radiation. The Moon is very weakly magnetic. No big magnetosphere like we have here. No atmosphere to protect you. So if you’re on the surface, you’re exposed to high levels of radiation. There’s of course no atmosphere, no weather, anything like that.

And then you have these day/night cycles that are fortnights — 14 Earth-days of day, 14 Earth-days of night — so huge temperature swings. And this could do weird stuff, right? One of my favourite little details, the Apollo guys very often fell on the surface, because they’re in this weird gravity regime, wearing what would be 300- or 400-pound suits on Earth. So they would just trip a lot, and their suits got coated in this grey, plastery dust, which is statically charged. And the suits were white to reflect heat, to reflect sunlight. And suddenly you’re covered in this stuff, which both absorbs heat and insulates. So just as an example of a little nightmare problem you wouldn’t even think about that’s going to be an everyday difficulty.

So I think that’s the main bad stuff on the moon — but you know, it’s nontrivial. What are the upsides?

One: it’s close. It’s only about a second and a quarter to send a signal one-way. So you can have almost live conversation, which is probably good for psychological reasons. It means you can call Mom when there’s dust in your throat and you’re sad about it. But more realistically, you can call psych staff. And also you can probably have people remote-operate equipment. If you have an emergency, you can get live-ish help. That stuff is all really important. Also, you can get home pretty quickly. The Moon is, by space standards, quite close: you can get back in a day or two. It also means that you can get back, in principle, at any time, because it’s always just the same distance. Other planets, we’re all on different orbits, so we’re at different positions in space from each other.

The other big argument for the Moon, which the space nerds listening are thinking of, is this idea that you could have a lunar gas station. So the Moon, this is true, has water in the form of ice. The idea is you get that water, you melt it. You can use it to drink, for air because it’s got oxygen in it, and also you can convert it: you could split it into oxygen and hydrogen, very common chemicals recombined as rocket propellant.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s cool.

Zach Weinersmith: The idea is you set up a Moon base. Because the other thing is the Moon is low gravity, no atmosphere: that makes it a lot easier to launch payload. It’s actually very hard to launch from Earth. If you look at a rocket on Earth, it’s 80% propellant just to get you there. You can do a lot better on the Moon, but I don’t have the numbers in front of me.

So there’s this idea that people often say: we’ll set up a lunar gas station. Either you can come by and get fuel boosted to you, or maybe one day we have a rocket-building station on the Moon and we can do much bigger payloads. It’ll be like Star Trek.

Here’s the problem: there’s not that much water. There’s not that much. We looked at the numbers, and we found a lake we think has about the same amount of water, using very generous numbers. It’s a manmade lake, I want to say in Mississippi. You’ve never heard of it. There’s like a barbecue joint and a golf course or something. It’s quite small. And that moonwater never replenishes — because the way it gets there is by being in these very specific craters on the poles that are dark all the time, so they can hold onto stuff even though there’s no atmosphere. So there’s a very limited supply. Once you use it, it is gone. It’s just gone. It will take nonhuman time scales to replenish. It’s gone.

There is water in the minerals of the Moon. You’ll often hear this ludicrous stat that there’s more water in the Moon than in all the oceans of Earth. And it’s true — but the trick is they’re comparing surface area and volume, which is a bullshit move. Because yeah, you can crack the hydrates out of the moonrocks, but it’s still drier than concrete, so it’s not a serious solution to anything.

So I’m actually fairly sceptical of this version of events. If people want to email me, they’re welcome to. So those are the pros of the Moon.

Luisa Rodriguez: That just makes it sound totally absurd, like completely nonsensical. How can you imagine having a gas station if you have a lake that doesn’t replenish?

Zach Weinersmith: What people will say is that people have sort of crunched the numbers, and if you make some assumptions — like perfect extraction, and you are only launching; you’re not using it to drink or to shower or to have crops or whatever — then you can get some fairly large number of launches. And that’s true.

My gripe with a lot of this stuff is people tend to quadruple-book the water. So they’ll be like, you could actually get a huge amount of water to drink. That’s true. And also you get a huge amount of oxygen. That’s true. You could also get all this propellant. That’s true. But you have to subtract each from the other. I think when you do that, the numbers are not that good, even if you assume the water’s relatively gettable — which, by the way, it is only gettable by space standards. I forget the temperature, but it’s something like -200°C or some crazy number. So it’s really more like stone. You have to have a big melting apparatus. It’s in permanent darkness; it’s freezing. I would not assume you’ll get 100%. By the way, it’s also not pure. It has nasty volatiles like ammonia in it that will have to be cleansed out.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, good.

Zach Weinersmith: So it’s really nontrivial. You know, I hate to be a complete wet blanket, because I do believe humans are capable of amazing stuff. Stuff we do now was impossible 100 years ago. I’m not saying you can’t do it, but there are some showstoppers. Like I said, it doesn’t replenish and there’s not that much. And by the way, who gets to use it if it’s not replenishable?

So yeah, if you want something like a McMurdo-style base, absolutely. There’s enough water to run these things if you can get it. And you could also boost a lot of water and maybe just be very careful with your recycling. But what I want to point out is, mysteriously to me, people will talk about this stuff and not centre the fact that the resource is quite limited.

The other thing I should have mentioned is the Moon is poor in carbon. For me, that seems…

Luisa Rodriguez: That seems like a big one.

Zach Weinersmith: This is one of the first things that, for Kelly and me, started to change our minds about the feasibility. So humans are about 20% carbon; plants are more carbon. The crazy thing, if you think about it, since you don’t have that carbon, if you want an oak tree, I don’t know how many tonnes of… I mean, I guess you wouldn’t want an oak tree. Let’s say an apple tree. Maybe an apple tree is like a quarter-tonne or half-tonne of carbon. That means just to have that structural integrity, like the cellulose that the tree builds itself out of, you have to bring that half-tonne of carbon or whatever it is. Which is wild.

You’ll see headlines — and I don’t blame the scientists for this — but you see headlines that are like “Plants grown in Moon soil.” And first of all, usually it’s not even Moon soil; it’s usually a simulant that doesn’t chemically simulate Moon soil. This is a really boring rant, but the two times to my knowledge that we have grown plants in actual Apollo soil, one was quite recent, so we have really cool recent data. I think it was 2022 when they did this. But a better headline in a nerdier world would be “Plants grown in Moon soil with added water, nutrients, sunlight, and atmosphere” — which, if you’re a gardener, you know is literally true of anything that is not currently poisoning your plant. And even then, they had a stress response in the plant. Maybe it’s because of the chemicals, maybe it’s the regolith being sharp. We don’t know. So it’s really tough.

So that’s the Moon. Not great. But again, because it’s a kind of stepping stone out, gravity wise, it’s interesting. And also just because, if you did want to say, can we have babies in altered gravity, it would be way easier to put your experiment on the Moon — where you can evacuate people or whatever — than it is on Mars. Which, if we want, I could segue to Mars now.

Luisa Rodriguez: Perfect.

Zach Weinersmith: All right. I gently segue to Mars. Mars is the next planet up, and it has a lot of the problems I just described. So I’ll go through some additional cons. It also has a very thin atmosphere, which is mostly in the pro segment. But it’s a con because it’s enough atmosphere — even though it’s about 1% the barometric pressure, the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere — to whip up dust storms. So you get worldwide dust storms that blot out the Sun for weeks at a time.

Which is a real bummer, because you might think, “I could use solar panels” — which would be tough on the Moon with those 14-cycle nights, fortnightly nights, whatever you would call it. Tough on the Moon. Mars has Earth-like daytimes — it’s 24.7 hours — except the sky is gone for weeks at a time at somewhat random intervals. So never mind about the solar panels, unless you’ve got some really good batteries.

Also — and this brings us back to the fertility stuff — that soil is high in what are called perchlorates. It’s a chemical that disrupts thyroid hormones, and it’s just there. Space nerds will say, and it is true, that you can run some water over it and cleanse it. But it means you can’t grow plants in it without doing this extra process. So it’s really nontrivial that you’re going to have to manage this, and hopefully it doesn’t get to the kids. We don’t even know what high exposure for long periods to perchlorates does to adults, let alone developing children. Seems ominous.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep. I like my thyroid.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, it’s good. It’s doing good stuff for you. And then the other thing is you’re far away, which does a couple things. One, due to the inverse-square law, you are getting much less light, something like 40% the light incident on the surface, it’s actually a bit better than that because there’s not as much weather, like clouds and stuff. But still — as people know, I’m a solar geek; I think it’s awesome; I think it’s the future — solar panels do have a giant footprint. It’s the main problem with them. Well anyway, it’s a big problem with them. So on Mars, you double it and in an environment where it’s much harder to maintain.

One other con is it takes six months to get there. So of course, if you want to imagine future-y stuff, maybe we get compact fusion reactors in 20 years and that changes the equation. But realistically, anytime fairly soon, you’re talking about six months inbound, six months outbound. And then, even if we do get that future stuff, there’s a certain point where — because Earth has 365-day years and Mars has [687]-day years — we’re at some point on the opposite sides of the Sun from each other. So unless you’re really talking zany technology, we just can’t get to each other. So if you have an emergency, you are on your own.

And we talked earlier about calling Mom. You can’t call mom: it’s three minutes each way at shortest transmission, longest it’s 22 minutes each way. There is no live call home, either for psychiatric or just comfort reasons or for life help when your habitat is on fire or you need to do surgery or something.

Pros of Mars —

Luisa Rodriguez: And just to be really explicit: Mars is your preferred option?

Zach Weinersmith: Oh, yeah. Mars is easily the best place in the whole solar system.

Luisa Rodriguez: And that’s including all those things. OK, so what are the pros?

Zach Weinersmith: Yes, pros: lots of water, icy poles, and we think if you dig down just about anywhere, you eventually get to water. That’s not to say it’s easy, but by space standards, that’s pretty darn good. That thin atmosphere of CO2 is actually kind of a blessing, because it means there’s O2 available, if you break the C off of it. Humans like to breathe O2. If you bring a supply of hydrogen or can source it locally, that means you can make, if you remember your chemistry class, you can make H2O. You can also make CH4: methane. You could store methane for your rockets. It’s stable. You could store it even for a buggy that runs off methane and that O2 you generated. So it’s not easy, but a lot of Mars mission proposals — famously, Dr Robert Zubrin‘s — calls for making a lot of methane on the surface to get home. So not the easiest way.

And if you want to get really zany, their proposals are like, once you have these basic things, you can make stuff like plastics — like with huge energy inputs for all this, but you at least literally can do it. And that is the main appeal here. So, the Moon is carbon- and water-poor; really not a great place for a permanent plan B for humanity. And as I’ll say in a minute, everywhere past Mars is worse. Mars has the elemental buffet that you need to craft humans and plants and things. That’s not to say it’s easy or even a good idea, but it is literally possible.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right, right.

Zach Weinersmith: So then past Mars, everything else is worse. There are almost no proposals for anywhere else. The belt, as we described it a bit earlier, is just not a great place to set up a permanent habitation. There’s not a lot of gravity, there’s a lot of rubble, and typically you can’t see one asteroid from another. Again, it’s not like Star Wars, where there’s just all sorts of stuff to work with.

Go further out, you get to Saturn and Jupiter: gas giants; you can’t even land on them, and if you could, you’d get smushed. They do have interesting moons people will talk about, like Enceladus or Ganymede or Io. There are planets that might have liquid water, but they’re even farther and harder to get to. Often when people talk about virtues, it’s stuff like “the atmosphere is made of methane” — which, again, it’s like Mars: in some sense, that is a virtue. It wouldn’t be on Earth, obviously. I hope. You wouldn’t say, “Thank goodness I could gas up my rocket.” But there are a couple of proposals for going to Titan or some of these places. That seems even farther off.

And then beyond that, you’ve got the ice planets, and then way beyond that, the rest of the universe — which is very, very far away. We are not going there as humans in our present form, I don’t think.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, and then I think some people picture just rotating space stations. How optimistic are you about those?

Zach Weinersmith: Not very. So for people who don’t know, this is an idea that’s been around since the 1920s, but was really fleshed out throughout the ’70s. The main guy was a guy named Gerard K. O’Neill. Big inspiration for Jeff Bezos’s ideas today. And the basic idea is you have some sort of object, like a cylinder or torus or a sphere that rotates, creating artificial gravity that you build.

And you ask yourself, why would I do this? Let me, in this case, start with the pros. One, you can get Earth-like gravity. So if you really do need Earth gravity, this might be the only game in town. You know either to survive or have babies.

Also, there’s a lot of what I would describe as “cute stuff.” Like, if you go up a staircase towards the axis, you lose weight as you go until you get to zero. Which people have talked about for years, like cool manufacturing stuff maybe. If you were building giant ships, like a dockyard, maybe you would want something like this, so you can have an object that sort of floats in the middle. If you want to get Star Trek-y, people often promote kind of silly stuff, we think. So people will say stuff like, you can completely control climate and temperature and rainfall, so we could have amazing production. And you’re like, we already have greenhouses on Earth where we do that. It’s not a space feature. It just, for some reason, sounds very compelling when you say it’s going to happen in space.

There are many problems here. To just give one: a typical proposal to get your mass… So you’re building in a Lagrange point or something, say: there’s no mass there. Where do you get it? Well, usually we say asteroids or the Moon.

O’Neill was proposing the Moon, and what he wanted was a giant mass driver on the surface. That’s like a maglev train. So you imagine the train goes up and then the track just kind of stops — so you just launch stuff, and you have a kind of giant space mitten that catches this stuff and funnels it into a furnace or whatever: some kind of sometimes-unspecified system that converts mass into suburbs.

Suffice it to say that on Earth we don’t tend to do anything with just raw mass. We usually look for concentrations of good stuff. So not a great way to do stuff. And as we said, actually, the Moon is missing a bunch of stuff we now know that you would need. So you’d probably have to also throw some asteroids. So the way we say it is just like, if you can already do this — you can already build a maglev train on the Moon — you’ve already really mastered space. Could you just set up where the mass is on the Moon? And if you want extra sunlight, put a giant mirror up. You’re already really good at this.

Broadly speaking, the way I’d say it is the only case for this is that we need it; you have to have it to survive. But if so, you are now admitting this is way harder than even the way hard it’s going to be on Mars or the Moon.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, that all sounds really damning. Let’s move on to another reason this is really, really hard.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah.

Creating self-sustaining habitats [01:15:32]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so the next challenge is creating self-sustaining habitats wherever we go. How hard is that?

Zach Weinersmith: Super hard, but super awesome. I’m an avid gardener, so this question of closed-loop ecology just brings me joy to talk about. So let’s spend a lot more money on it. Just ’cause Zach thinks it’s cool.

Luisa Rodriguez: Because it sounds fun.

Zach Weinersmith: OK, if you’re on Mars, say you would much rather grow food on site, right? Probably in the form of plants. We could talk about animals later if you want, but likely plants. And plants are good for a variety of reasons. They help you ameliorate Mars soil. Mars soil is dead, awful stuff. But if you have organic matter and you’re careful about the chemicals, you could, in principle, turn it into real soil that you could use. Also, plants generate oxygen. They can be part of bacterial systems that help cleanse water and turn waste into healthy, safe stuff.

And the question is how to do that, when on Mars you’re going to be in a sealed container, most likely. Almost certainly. And we never do this on Earth: the greenhouse is almost never sealed, with the exception of times we tried to do it to learn about how to do it in space. And the problem is, we haven’t done this very much, and we’ve never really done it at scale. On a short document, you could bullet point every time it’s been tried.

The first couple attempts were by the Soviets. There’s a set of systems called BIOS: BIOS-1, BIOS-2, BIOS-3. And they’re kind of funny. BIOS-1 is, you can imagine just like an apartment or something, but there’s a huge algae vat running chlorella, that’s good at generating oxygen. So they tried this. One problem with chlorella is, in theory, you can get a lot of fat and protein from it. Apparently, it just tastes bad or is kind of sad to only eat algae. Like it’s a bad sci-fi novel. But also, they didn’t fully close the system. I think they brought in meat, and I don’t think they had all the oxygen. I’d have to look at my notes, but it wasn’t fully closed. It was kind of small, still kind of cool.

They did BIOS-2 and BIOS-3. They kind of expanded the system, added more variety of plants. Never fully closed though. The phrase we found was, “Siberians have to have their meat.” So typically, you don’t necessarily want meat, because meat is a very inefficient source of calories. Effective altruists are up on this, right? Like, don’t eat beef. It’s just a really bad way — I’m a vegetarian, but it’s delicious, I’m sure — but not a great way to deal with carbon. Better to have basically always a smaller animal. You know, go to a goat or a chicken or a gerbil, if you can, or just eat insects, or not. So generally, for that same reason, you don’t want them in space — because, if you imagine you have a bowl of soybeans and you could either eat it or feed it to a cow, obviously the better call is the soybeans.

The best experiment we’ve done to date is Biosphere 2. If you’re wondering what Biosphere 1 is, Biosphere 1 refers to Earth. Biosphere 2 is kind of a cute name. So this was a facility kind of made by crazy people in Arizona in the early ’90s. It was a sealed greenhouse — and sealed, they claimed, as tightly as the Space Shuttle, which might surprise you is not perfectly sealed, but good enough. But a really tight seal. And it was a 3.14-acre campus. Just absolutely enormous, for people who don’t have an offhand sense, a football pitch is one acre. Huge, right? And eight people went in, and eight people came out two years later. It’s often remembered as a failure, but it did kind of work.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s pretty awesome.

Zach Weinersmith: I think so. I think it’s awesome. And it’s easy to make fun of. They screwed up a lot of stupid stuff. At one point, they had to pipe in oxygen. And I think we get this right in the book. There’s this story, and I’ve repeated this myself, which is that the concrete was pulling out oxygen. I was just talking to a guy about this, and it actually pulled out CO2 — but that’s kind of the same problem, because the oxygen is bound up in the CO2, so when that happens, slowly oxygen is leaving the system. So at one point, they’re not quite suffocating, but getting listless and it’s hard to climb the stairs. So they had to pipe in oxygen, which is actually a big controversy. Like, “Do we do this? Do we wuss out and breathe?” So that’s a problem.

Food was a problem. They lost a lot of body weight. I think for women it was like 10%; men was like 18%. And they weren’t chubby to begin with.

And a big thing — but actually, this seems small when you start to think about a realistic space base — the numbers are in the book, but they spent something like most of their time, six days a week, were just survival. Just growing enough food and processing it to live and eat subsistence. You know, it’s funny, I always think, I have a great-grandfather who was a farmer, and probably if you told him that they spent most of their time on the farm, he’d be like, “Yes, obviously.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep. But yeah, now I’m like, “They what?!”

Zach Weinersmith: They what? Right, right. Which you should think about every time someone’s like, “…and they’ll run the nuclear reactor, and they’ll cleanse all the soil, and they’ll XYZ…” you know?

But again, it did basically work. And there’s a lot of stupid stuff they could have corrected for the second run. So they went two years: like, a lot of the trees weren’t even fruiting yet. If you’ve grown fruit trees, you know they can take three or five years to bear fruit. They had some animals that were just basically stupid calls. They got the wrong species of chickens and pigs and things. A lot of stuff that could have been fixed.

By the way, also, the crew, by about one year in were in two factions of four that were no longer on speaking terms. At one point, two people from one faction spat on another, like in a coordinated spit. And so it was bad. They’re just nasty. Literally nasty. So not great. So since then, it was called off during the second run for financial and organisational and just like crazy people reasons. There’s some interesting history written about it if people want.

But you know, you can imagine a world where it kept going and it was well run, and we had like 30 years of running this, and we’d know a lot, right? We don’t. It’s like with babies, where what we really want is longitudinal data over a great amount of time. You know, there was a concern at the beginning that this sealed ecosystem would just turn into like green goo, and it didn’t. But there were problems. They had mildew; they lost all of their beans — which, as you might imagine, are one of the best sources of protein — and so they had to eat fodder beans meant for goats, and it was bad. And this is stuff that probably could be fixed, but maybe not, or maybe not without a lot of knowledge about how to manage ecosystems.

By the way, one of my favourite examples: often when people talk about those giant rotating space stations, they’re like, “It’s like you’re Noah’s Ark. You can control all the species. No mosquitoes, no XYZ.” And actually, that didn’t work on Biosphere 2. They accidentally brought in cockroaches. And this is the best part: bark scorpions — whose fun fact we found is that they’re the only lethal scorpion in North America — got into their system. So controlling Noah’s Ark is harder than you might guess.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s crazy.

Zach Weinersmith: It’s crazy. I mean, it’s a huge campus. It’s hard. Maybe it’d be easier for space because you have a long transit to work things out, but certainly not for microbes.

So that is easily, easily the biggest, most elaborate experiment like this we have ever done. Modern systems, you’re talking two to three people. There’s one in Europe called MELiSSA, one in Japan called CEEF, one in China called Lunar Palace. They’re small. I think the one in Europe doesn’t even have humans in the system yet — which is, by the way, probably the scientifically correct way to grow these things. You know, we probably shouldn’t have started with three acres.

But the thing we say is, if it scales linearly from Biosphere… which, it may go either way. You’re talking for a million people. Elon Musk is saying that you need a greenhouse the size of double Singapore. So we do not have a science for this. The last textbook is from like 2003. What you really want is to run this experiment many ways, many times. To give you a trivial thing, Biosphere 2 only had a half-acre for intensive agriculture. By the end, they were colonising the other biomes with more ag stuff. And so probably what you really want, if you’re not run by slightly crazy artsy ’90s people, is to just start with intensive ag with an eye toward oxygen production. But again, we don’t know. You want some sort of massive software system that can think about this really intricate ecosystem design. We don’t have it.

And the last thing to say on that is: with babies, you can’t just get the data, right? You can’t even throw money at it. You should, but you’re not going to go fast, because it’s an ecosystem. You’re moving at the speed of saplings, right? It’s going to take decades. Nobody is throwing the right amount of money at it. We have little tiny systems. Again, if Jeff Bezos or whoever wants us on the Moon or Mars in 30 years, we need the answer to this, unless you want a massive armada bringing food all the time at enormous cost.

Luisa Rodriguez: It just makes me wonder, what are the conversations Jeff Bezos is having with people that make him think this is even remotely feasible? Or Elon Musk.

Zach Weinersmith: You’re opening a huge question. We get asked some version of this a lot, which is like, to what extent are they serious? And all I can say is, if you read their biographies, the conclusion, if I were to debate it, I would rather defend that they are serious believers who are just missing part of the puzzle and should read my book.

But no. I mean, as you know; you’ve interacted with Silicon Valley people: they’re very big believers in progress, which is a belief I share, but have not always done their homework on some of the social or historical or what you might call “soft science” stuff. What I always want to say about this stuff is, remember Juicero? Do you know this story?

Luisa Rodriguez: Maybe tell it, just in case people don’t.

Zach Weinersmith: Just really quickly. So something like $400 million of VC was raised for a machine. It was an over-engineered machine that basically could squish little bags that had, like, juice stuff in them. And partway through them having lots of engineers and fundraising, it was discovered that it was just a machine that squished bags — and that actually the human hand could exert enough force to squish the bags. And shortly thereafter, though maybe not as fast as you thought, the company folded. And so I always wanted to say that this is just obviously a bad idea, right? Someone is going to need to pay $400 and a subscription to get a tiny bag of some berries and stuff. But people went for it anyway.

So I think it’s not impossible for very smart, much smarter than me, Silicon Valley people to be missing crucial pieces of the picture, because they’re enamoured of the progress aspect of it.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep. That doesn’t sound crazy to me at all.

What about AI advances? [01:26:23]

Luisa Rodriguez: So these are a bunch of very compelling reasons to me to think that if progress continues as it’s been, or maybe speeds up at the rate that you’d expect it to, based on historical trends, we shouldn’t actually expect to have a million people on Mars anytime in the next decades, maybe much longer.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez: One reason I wonder if it might happen faster than that is if AI becomes as smart or smarter than humans and is therefore able to accelerate progress on some of these technological challenges. So right now, there are companies spending enormous amounts of compute trying to train really smart AI systems. But at some point, if they become really smart and we have trained systems that can do a bunch of science — which I think is the goal of many or some of these companies — then we can kind of redirect that compute to running many, many of these systems, potentially millions of systems. And if we threw just even a tiny fraction of that at space settlement as a scientific and social problem, you might think that not all, but some of these problems might get solved on much shorter timescales.

There’s still the problem of, some of these things you can only get data on them at kind of biological time scales — humans need as much time as they need to develop, trees need as much time to grow as they need — but still, you might think that we can accelerate a lot of it, and AI might help us kind of optimise these experiments to get the kinds of data we need in the most efficient way. Does that sound at all plausible to you?

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. So I’m excited about this AI stuff. It’s tough because on the one hand, you want to, as we try to in this book, stick as closely to what’s known. We don’t like to do a lot of speculating. But you’re right: if the truth is that everything’s going to change completely in 20 years, that would suggest that some of the stuff we say is wrong.

So a couple of thoughts. One is, yeah, you can imagine a world where, for example, we have in-silico drug development, and actually it turns out there’s a great way to halt bone loss and muscle loss. And hey, it’s safe for pregnant women and babies. That would be great. I mean, it’s possible. We don’t even know if such a drug exists, but it could be, and that would definitely change that aspect of things. Although, gosh, it’s hard to imagine a future where even if you say, in silico, this is totally safe for pregnant women, that it’s still ethical to do, you know? But I don’t know, maybe it’s a brave new world. I don’t know.

The next thing is, if we’re talking about x-risk, then I am not sure how much that technological improvement reduces it. For example, people will often say to me, you know, “There’s some really cool fusion stuff going on right now. It’s these neat new superconducting tapes and things, and AI is helping with plasma confinement. So hey, maybe in 10 years we can send a plasma rocket to space and it’ll be able to either bring a lot more mass or get there a lot faster, or maybe both. Is that going to change your equation?” Absolutely.

But on the other hand, one of the things we haven’t talked about yet is that one way you’re increasing existential risk is just by putting massive amounts of big heavy stuff in space operated by many players. So the math I like to give on that is: if you have an object moving at three kilometres per second, when it impacts it has an explosive yield equivalent to it being made entirely of TNT. Objects in low Earth orbit go more than twice as fast, and the yield is the velocity squared: it scales with the square of the velocity.

So if you imagine a world where every country has access to millions of tonnes of space objects — like many corporations do, individual rich people do — that’s just a world of enhanced existential risk. And I don’t know that there’s a way to avoid that unless you also want to postulate like tractor beams and weird, really spacey stuff. So if you strap a plasma rocket to that, it gets there faster, but you haven’t obviously reduced your danger. So, at least if the question is colonising another planet to reduce existential risk, it’s not obvious to me that adding sci-fi elements, even if they’re real, makes you safer.

The last thing I want to say is: when we look at numbers, we try to look at numbers of how many humans you’d need for one of these operations. And there’s a lot of debate, there’s questions like genetic inbreeding stuff, but the bigger question is: can you go economically independent? The lowest number we found was from what I would say is a very optimistic analysis done by Dr Casey Handmer. And the balance he came up with, which assumed big advances in AI robotics, I think the lowest number he was willing to do was 100,000. Now, mind you, he was writing in like 2018, right before everything went really crazy.

Luisa Rodriguez: Sorry, 100,000?

Zach Weinersmith: Humans. Yes, 100,000 humans to have a permanent settlement, vastly assisted by robots. So we talked about Biosphere. Biosphere, they didn’t have to assemble it and they got power off the grid; they didn’t have to run a nuclear reactor. So you’re imagining this huge amount of assistance. So my response to that is one, at least short term, there’s no way — you know, depending on what “short term” means. But I would also say, to me, if you’re saying we can do Mars just as soon as every person has the equivalent of 100 robot butlers, we are talking about Mars not as a kind of destiny thing, not as a frontier thing, not as a human enhancement thing: we’re talking about it as the aesthetic choice of an advanced humanity. Right? It’s Star Trek.

And so to me, that’s the deep answer here. I mean, we’re worried about the existential risk aspect, but you know, say it this way: for me, if I’m in a world where we all get 100 butlers, I’m probably staying home. I’m glad there are people who are ready to go to Mars. I will be walking my orchard, being fanned and fed cupcakes. But that’s what I mean. So at the very least, set aside any idea that this is about a rough-and-tumble Heinlein-style universe or something we have to do urgently.

And the last point I want to make — and this ties to the x-risk thing — if that sounds very tempting to you, and it does to me, then you need to make sure humanity makes it through the next century, or the next 20 or 30 years. And as we agreed earlier, if your goal is to reduce existential risk, it’s really not obvious that space is the way to go.

So you’re absolutely right: I want to absolutely admit AI has gotten so weird in the last few years, I don’t feel like I have any kind of prediction capacity for what five years looks like, at least in terms of LLMs and stuff. But if we say that if you have it for Mars, you have it back on Earth, I think it at least changes the nature of the question.

A roadmap for settling space [01:33:45]

Luisa Rodriguez: So for now, let’s assume that AI might speed up space settlement research, but that it won’t be that much more transformative than, say, computers or electricity, because I think that’s the kind of world where the 10 human years of research that you’ve put into this question is really super relevant. So given all of that, just to help us really picture what this could look like in that kind of status-quo world, if you were in charge of Operation Settle Space, what would the roadmap that you’d advocate for look like?

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, so our roadmap is how we close out the book. We say, you know, with all the naysaying we’re doing, if you put us two in charge of a NASA level of funding for an agency oriented around putting a permanent settlement on Mars, the three big tracks for us…

So one thing I will say: we’re making an assumption, which is that the rocket tech will continue improving. Because basically, I was sceptical of a bunch of economic stuff, but orbital stuff geosynchronous and below are extremely valuable for data transmission, remote sensing, navigation, all sorts of stuff: no doubt big money. So I’m just going to assume the rockets and spacecraft just keep getting better.

And so rather, what we focus on is: one is the reproductive question that we’ve already gone through in detail. But you’d want some kind of experiment that basically goes up the phylogenetic chart from simple organisms to humans. Again, that is still ethically questionable, but let’s just say you had to do it. That would be the way you’d want to do it.

Two, you would want to design these closed-loop ecosystems, and proof them out. That means building a lot of them, trying to find the minimum size and the optimal blend of species, and making sure they can last indefinitely. “Optimal blend” meaning it produces a lot of calories and clean water and air.

And then you would want to take those two tracks, ideally, and converge them on the Moon. So if you really wanted to prove we could do Mars, you would want to build a pocket somewhere on the Moon — maybe in the lava tubes, which are something we didn’t get into — where you would have one of these greenhouse systems that’s sealed, and where you have animal organisms. Maybe show that, you know, goats can have baby goats. And like I said, I’m still sort of ethically like, gosh, given that there’s no obvious short-term reason to do this, is it ever ethical to do this for human children? But we could set that aside. This is what you’d want to do if you had to.

And then the third track is something we’ll get into in the second half of this, which is that right now, we have a really bizarre legal international order in our approach towards space sovereignty. And that can be changed; this is all human culture stuff. And we know from the history of how the sea has been managed that the scribblings of a philosopher in one age become the law of the Earth in another.

So right now, and without getting into the details, which I think we’ll get into later, we have a system that is kind of conflict-prone: it allows no sovereignty claims, no territorial claims, but does allow, depending on your interpretation, ad libitum claims of resources. And so, if you were setting up an agency to proof this out, you would want one oriented around governance — both to try to think about, and maybe even try to implement, an optimal international legal framework; and then perhaps even harder, determine the least bad way to govern a small initial outpost under these extraordinarily difficult conditions.

Luisa Rodriguez: Seems really hard.

Zach Weinersmith: It’s a tall order.

Space law [01:37:22]

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s actually a great transition to our next topic: the space law of property, resource extraction, et cetera. And to set us up to talk about that, can you paint a picture for me for why you think a kind of serious conflict over space stuff is so plausible?

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. To lay it out. First thing is, we had a space race in the ’60s, and what we say is that race was essentially a race to do a stunt, right? To do a cool thing to impress the worldwide public. Notably, by the way, what’s often forgotten is there was a lot of extra reason to impress the public during that period, because the period of high decolonisation is 1945 to 1975. So all these new governments are being created and picking an alignment in this bipolar world. And so there’s this race to do this cool thing that for kind of weird historical reasons convinces the public that whoever does it is in some sense winning.

But you could at least say of that race in the ’60s that one person doing it didn’t prevent someone else from doing it. In fact, the Soviets continued a clandestine Moon landing programme for I think something like five years after the first US Moon landing. It just didn’t quite succeed for a variety of reasons. The difference now — and this is where we can segue into talking about what space law actually is — is that if we do get to a more advanced space era, you can imagine turf-like claims: claims that are kind of like territory.

Now here’s my gentle segue: that is illegal, to be clear. Let me give a little quick primer for your audience on space law. So space law: it exists, that’s number one. You might be surprised about that because it’s often left out of books and papers by advocates, but it exists. You can arguably say it goes back to the early ’60s, when there’s banning of nuclear weapons in the high atmosphere.

But sort of formally real modern space law starts in 1967 with the Outer Space Treaty. It has some long, crazy UN name, but everybody just calls it the Outer Space Treaty. And it’s a short document; you can read it in 10 minutes. It’s pretty readable for a legal document. And most importantly, if your goal is settlement, is Article II, which says, in very clear language, no sovereignty in space.

Now, whole books are written about what sovereignty means — you can get weird and you could bring up edge cases, but it’s pretty straightforward, like a lot of things in international law, when you talk about actual cases. Sovereignty is basically like, if you imagine Canada, what is Canada? It’s a single government over defined territory. It can regulate what goes in and out. There is no competing government over the same territory. And importantly, everyone else agrees to this. You can also say it has “effective government” in the sense of it’s not a sort of chaos zone that’s officially under some government, but…

So that’s what sovereignty is. That. And you can’t do that in space. Countries can’t do that. And if I talk to nerds, they always do the same thing, which is what I did when I first read this, which is, “I figured out some clever loophole: I’m not a country. I could claim it.” No, you can’t. “I could renounce my statehood and claim it.” No, almost certainly that won’t work either. A corporation can’t claim a chunk of space. A multinational organisation cannot claim a chunk of space. You cannot do it. You can break the law that every major power and every major space power has agreed to, but the loopholes are not real.

So I could get into why, but what it really boils down to is, if you start to imagine how it works in practice, you come up with something like, when McDonald’s is claiming the Moon, actually, it’s like an American corporate board that’s claiming it; they’re American nationals. It’s actually pretty unambiguous that they’re acting on behalf of the US. The US is responsible for their behaviour, et cetera.

OK, so that’s the state of space law. Let me grind on one little point — just because nobody else talks about it, and we think it’s super important — which is: this is not weird law by 20th century standards. I think there’s a tendency when people find out about the Outer Space Treaty to be like, “What a weird ’60s thing we did. We made the whole solar system everybody’s” — or nobody’s; it’s kind of the same difference. And actually, that is kind of how business was done in the 20th century.

The two other major zones that were formerly inaccessible were Antarctica and the deep seabed. Prior to 1948, there were no permanent inhabitants of Antarctica. There were obviously excursions and adventures and things, but it was only mid-century when you could even contemplate a serious mining operation. And we get the Antarctic Treaty System I think in 1961. And it’s like space: it’s a commons. It’s different rules, but basically the same concept.

Likewise, we have deep seabed law, bottom of the ocean — which, incidentally, is 50% of the planet and has provably valuable resources. Not necessarily ones we get into profit yet, but definitely has valuable resources. And we regulated it starting in the modern law in the ’80s, then finalised in the ’90s. And it is also a commons. So that’s more than half of Earth.

And the rest of the solar system, when it became available to regulate, this is what humanity chose. It is not like a freak law thing; it is broadly what nations agreed to. This is often left out of these discussions, but it’s like, this is how we have done things. And you could debate why, but probably it has a lot to do with memories of the 19th century, and the nasty scrambles for territory, and the crises and wars that ensued.

Luisa Rodriguez: Interesting.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, yeah. And also, I should hasten to add that all these places suck, right?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I mean, my immediate reaction is like, deep sea: I have no idea what the bottom of the deep sea has, but no one’s ever sold it to me as potentially really profitable in a way that makes me that surprised that we decided on a commons.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, I totally agree. So there are what are called polymetallic nodules. There’s a great book called The Deepest Map that just came out that discusses this stuff, but there are resources that are at least potentially valuable. It’s getting to where it will probably be maybe in the next few decades. But yeah, an interesting sort of college dorm room question would be, if by magic, something the size of France rose in the ocean that was all temperate forest, would we make it a commons, or would there be this sort of battle royale? And honestly, my guess would be we’d make it a commons.

Luisa Rodriguez: Huh.

Zach Weinersmith: To this day, you cannot even look for resources in Antarctica. At least on the Moon you can look. Under something called the Madrid Protocol, it’s not just that you can’t exploit; you can’t even look. My understanding is there’s slight legal controversy over science projects that are geological, because they might qualify as “looking.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Because maybe they’d find oil or something.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. Or, like, stuff that related to stuff that related to whatever. And in an article [of the protocol], we say no. And a big part of that was that there was an attempt in the late ’80s to make it so you could exploit, and there was a concern about conflict. And this will circle us back to space, but there’s also an environmental concern. Jacques Cousteau led a sort of environmental outcry around the world.

And I would add, it is worth noting, if you read your seabed law (which you shouldn’t, because it’s boring), a lot of the times that people have tried to do undersea mining when it was not in an international water — so it’s like it was off the coast of a country, so it was what’s called an exclusive economic zone, basically like how Australia has rights off its coast — when people have tried to do that, there’s always been a local massive backlash, environmental backlash, because I think modern people just kind of find it yucky. So I think you can’t underestimate that that is a change from the 19th century.

OK, to circle back to space: here’s where it gets weird. So I said you can’t have sovereignty, which makes it sound like you can just be peaceful and nice, and that’s it. However, under the Outer Space Treaty, you can — especially if you buy the US interpretation — consume resources ad libitum.

So to give an absurd example, under this interpretation — which is, I think, broadly becoming normal — say you have the Millennium Falcon and you ride up to a big asteroid. You cannot get out of the Falcon and say “this is mine” in the sense of sovereign territory, or this is like a new US state, or this is like a new… But you could grind it up, rebuild it into a spaceship, and say, “This is my spaceship. Because, after all, I can use space resources.”

Of course, in law, it’s always easy to come up with perverse examples. I think a more realistic concern — and as I’ve said repeatedly, I don’t think there’s economic value on the Moon — we talked about that water on the Moon. So the water on the Moon is in specific locations that probably total in area something on the order of hundreds of acres. It’s a very small region, and we detail this in the book, but at the poles of the Moon, there are places that are crater rims where you get almost constant light. So you don’t have those long days and nights. You have, by Moon standards, moderate temperatures, and they’re right next to these places that trap water. It’s the only large-scale source of water on the Moon. So really good Moon real estate. Well, Jeff Bezos, if he felt like it, under this interpretation, could land a spaceship there, melt all the ice, load a spaceship up for his gas station, blast off, use every dot of it, and it wouldn’t, at least strictly speaking, be illegal.

Luisa Rodriguez: As long as he didn’t claim that area.

Zach Weinersmith: Right. As long as he never once claimed sovereignty in the sense of like national governance. Now, where it gets a little weird is if he put like a tent over the whole thing and the people asked him to move. And that leads to the other weird thing.

Just to give a kind of potted history here: so you have the ’67 treaty, which is kind of doable in this bipolar world where the big players of the USSR and the US. Even Europe doesn’t really have much of a space presence at that point. But then there’s a couple more treaties that come out during the ’70s — they’re just sort of elaborations on OST; we don’t really need to go over them unless they come up. And then nothing. There is no additional space law. Well, in some sort of formal sense, there are resolutions and things which in a sense are law, but they’re not big treaties, right?

And there’s an attempt to fix the thing we were just talking about, called the Moon Agreement of 1979 that would have created a kind of overarching authority regime, like an international or UN-based regime that would have been handling these claims, adjudicating stuff. And actually, in a formal sense, strictly formally, it was ratified, in the sense that something like that, I forget, like 15 nations signed it. But none of the major powers signed it, none of the space powers signed it. So it’s basically, the weird way international law works, it doesn’t matter that it’s formally sort of real — it’s a dud, it doesn’t work, nobody minds it.

And so you have this kind of lacuna. And by the way, part of what’s going on is that, as we discussed, space was anticipated to be this big thing, and it wasn’t. The Shuttle was kind of a failure, and the Soviet programme wasn’t developing much. And actually, Europe became a big player, but didn’t really change the game that much.

So into the breach, as this new era of cheap stuff has happened, in 2020 comes the Artemis Accords. This is what people need to know about. So where does this come from? In 2015, the US signs the Space Competitiveness Act under Obama that basically says, among other things, that whatever else anybody could do, Americans can do what they want with space resources. There’s an executive order from the Trump administration, I think in 2020, that basically says the same thing. And incidentally, both say something like, “…and we do not understand this to violate space law.” And I think at least one of them explicitly says the Moon Agreement is bullshit.

So NASA releases this thing called the Artemis Accords that basically instantiates this relatively libertarian view of resources. And something like 20 nations now have agreed to it. And it’s not like the US strong-armed Luxembourg. It’s like the UK, Germany signed recently. I think Australia’s on board. It’s really powerful countries. It’s an interesting question why. I was actually talking to a German journalist about this, and we had come to the same conclusion, which is that this is the best deal you’re going to get. You don’t want to bandwagon with China. And anyway, China seems to be at least saying they want a Moon mining regime in space, which suggests they believe something like what we’re saying, what the US is saying.

So that sort of thing seems to be where we’re going. Where it gets really ominous is under the Artemis Accords, you could set up what’s called a safety zone. What is a safety zone? A safety zone is a perimeter of undeclared-so-far radius that you can put around a base. So say you land a cool base on Shackleton crater, and you say, “Some region around this base, it’s not mine, it’s not sovereign territory, but I would appreciate, under the Artemis Accords, if you do not land here.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Sounds like territory to me.

Zach Weinersmith: It’s at least turfy, right? You know what I mean? It’s a little uncomfortable. And I should say it is totally reasonable as well, because the regolith we talked about, it’s nasty. If someone lands next to your base, like, we know from I think Apollo 12, we picked up Surveyor 3, which was an old robot probe. It had probably gotten blasted by regolith when they landed, and they said it was like it had been sandblasted.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, wow. OK.

Zach Weinersmith: It’s a legit thing to say these should exist. But as I said, the best spots on the Moon are small. So you can imagine inside one safety zone you could claim a nontrivial portion of all the most desirable territory.

And that’s where we are. I could go on, but the point is that there’s this really ambiguous… You can see how it’s conflict prone. I should say I don’t think it’s going to lead to World War III. I just think it leaves a lot of room for provocation between countries. And the reason that’s relevant is to the hot tub argument, which says third parties shouldn’t have a say over your behaviour. But if you’re doing something that’s liable to create large-scale tension between major nuclear powers, that seems like a third party should be given an opinion.

Space signalling and propaganda [01:51:28]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so there’s some reason to think that the situation’s a little bit ripe for maybe some tension. But just picking up on one thing you said, which is that China wants to do Moon mining. The US just did this big thing that’s a little bit controversial, to be like, “We want to be able to extract resources, and we want special little zones where nobody else can come in.” It really makes it sound like they think that resource mining is going to be a thing, and that it’s valuable enough to declare that they’d like to. That seems like a bit in tension with your take. What’s going on there?

Zach Weinersmith: So as I said, our view is that there is nothing worth doing economically on the Moon. There’s awesome science, all sorts of cool stuff, but in the sense of someone gives you money and you come back with more money, probably not.

So let’s see. I would say my view is: one, I don’t want to question any individual’s motivations, but when an agency head says national security is at stake if you don’t fund me to do this cool thing, you should maybe be a little nervous. Like, if you’ve ever watched joint chiefs of staff in the US come before Congress, they have never said, “You know what? We’ve got enough money. You really should pull it back, put it back in the budget. We don’t need more stuff.” It doesn’t happen. So again, without questioning any individual person’s motivations, I think you have to be a little wary.

The other thing I would say is, in terms of national prestige, you cannot underestimate the salience of space behaviour, even if it’s basically stupid. So if you go back to the late ’50s, when this stuff is starting up — Sputnik happens in ’57, when Eisenhower is in charge — Eisenhower really wants to avoid any kind of race because he thinks it’s going to be a crazy waste of money. He’s famously concerned about the tradeoff between guns and butter. You know, that famous quote about every missile or whatever is food from hungry children. So he doesn’t want to turn the US into a garrison state in order to compete over this stupid thing, which he thinks is absolutely stupid.

My sense is, and I don’t know if historians say this, but I think a lot of people think that he kind of whiffed on understanding the importance. So there’s this famous story that Sputnik happens, and both Khrushchev and Eisenhower were surprised how much people cared. So it’s a really weird context. You put yourself back to 1957. Satellites aren’t just a random thing. They’re part of what’s called the International Geophysical Year of 1957, the two themes of which are space and Antarctica. This is a thing people have done for many years, where a bunch of countries agree to do exploration stuff. A little more salient back when there weren’t satellites to easily just discover everything, right? So the US and USSR say, “We’re going to do satellites. They’ve never been done. We’re going to do them. We can do them.”

The story — Asif Siddiqi writes about this — is that Khrushchev is kind of sceptical. Korolev, his master designer, is working on something called Object D, which is this really big, awesome satellite system. He shelves it, wanting to beat the US. And so you get Sputnik, which is just literally like a shiny ball with a battery and a transmitter on it, and that’s it. The morning after it goes up, the story Khrushchev tells is that he goes up, he calls the engineers and is like, “Good job, fellas,” and goes to bed. And he wakes up and it’s just every headline of every city, everywhere on Earth is “Sputnik, Sputnik, Sputnik.”

And so ever after, every leader has known that the public will basically broadly be confused about the importance of rockets and doing stuff in space. To the importance: if you were an economist, and a really boring, sad person — but I repeat myself — in 1958, you could have said to yourself, look, this is not useful. The US is vastly winning on microelectronics, which are so much more important. Like, by 1958, the US has much better spy satellites. The Soviet Union is trying to walk back some of the standards they set when they went first. The US has clearly got the upper hand before any of this Moon race business starts.

To give an amazing fun fact: the only reason the USSR is ahead is because their fusion bombs were not as miniaturised as US ones. They had to have these giganto boosters, right? That’s why they’re suddenly able to throw a dog into space. And the US is playing catchup. And it also helps you understand why, by the late ’60s, the US is winning — because the US was already ahead in everything else.

But the propaganda lives on. You will see what I think of as propaganda from like 1963 lives in the mouths of people. Propaganda from a dead nation is still circulating. That’s how powerful it is. And so when countries are coming out today with bulletins saying, “We are going to be the first to mine the Moon,” I think they’re doing the same thing that Khrushchev was doing after Sputnik when he said, “Can we put a dog in space?” There is no reason to put a dog in space, OK? It just blows people’s minds, and they overestimate… You can see from survey data from this period, all over Europe, not a complete shift, but a huge shift in opinion — like double-digit opinion shifts — goes toward the Soviet Union as being the technological powerhouse.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. It’s all just signalling.

Zach Weinersmith: There’s a great book by Alex MacDonald, NASA chief economist, The Long Space Age is explicitly that: useless space behaviour — like putting people into space, I’m sorry. He argues you can go back to the 19th century and, say, observatories: love the science, it’s awesome. But they’re just prestige moves by rich people in countries. And for whatever reason that is hard to suss out, having an awesome submarine, or if you found out tomorrow Russia had a city on the bottom of the ocean, it wouldn’t have the same effect as a city on the Moon. There’s just something about it. I think that’s somewhere between the stories we tell about space and also the fact that it’s literally above you, so there’s a kind of military component to it. But yeah, when people make these statements, I think signalling before I think anything else.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK. If I’m just like, “Do I really buy this, deep down?” Part of me does, and then part of me is also like, maybe in the longer term, technology will advance enough that the kinds of behaviours these countries are considering now do matter. And if I try to make it even more concrete, it is something like, maybe it’s AI, maybe it’s some combination of technologies, make it so that the challenges of all of this stuff are at least way easier. And maybe we’ve got like this huge AI labour force, and so actually a limiting factor is physical resources, and then the space physical resources start to look really good. What’s your reaction?

Zach Weinersmith: Right. I mean, the only thing I would say about the physical resources argument — because this is what I encounter a lot from sci-fi fans — is there is this quote from David Attenborough that makes every economist I know angry, where he says something like, “If you think growth can continue forever, you’re either a lunatic or an economist.” And what economists always want to scream is, “That is not how we measure growth!” So you can have infinite growth, because growth is a measure of the value of things.

So we were talking to an economist named Charles Kenny, and he gave us this great number out of the World Bank — and I might get this slightly wrong, but it’s in the book. If you look at wealth, which is like a measure of the total value of assets of nations, you could look at the technical way they do it, but I think it’s like 97.5% is not natural resources. There’s a folk belief that resources are everything. And I would add vis-a-vis space that of that 2.5%, about 90% of that is fossil fuels, which don’t exist in space.

The way we say it is that it’s like, if you take a phone… I have an iPhone in my pocket: nothing in it is worth anything if you melt it down, right? And yet it’s worth whatever. Well, it’s pretty beat up, so it’s probably worth about $10 now, but it was worth a lot of money at some point. So I think you want to be a little careful being like, eventually we’ll use all the resources, and we need a Ringworld or a Kardashev 92 or something.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it is very like, “…resources?” When actually, I mean, you’ve said a couple of examples, but I barely know what resources we’re even talking about. And if it’s like, some precious metals that are very kind of nichely relevant and important, then this does kind of get silly.

Zach Weinersmith: But as a way to think about it, if you want to get sci-fi and talk about crazy stuff, if you dump everybody’s brain into virtual reality, and value is about how people feel something is worth, you can cram infinite value into their lives. It’s weird, and frankly, it seems kind of sad. But if we’re cool postulating out-there sci-fi stuff, resources are not the limiting factor in human wellbeing.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow, this got really philosophical, and I loved it.

Zach Weinersmith: It got weird. Yeah.

Space war [02:00:40]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so let’s say my argument is bad and move on for now. Then we’re back to conflict, which is like one argument I find, at least in theory, compelling for why going to space is way less promising, at least for now, than I would have thought [before] reading your book. If you try to take a step back, just how worried should we be about this in particular?

Zach Weinersmith: I don’t think this is like a “World War III is gonna happen” situation. I do think, generally speaking, if you think some individual player could nontrivially exacerbate international tensions, the major point is that someone should be allowed a say in their behaviour, right? So I think that matters.

We do have a chapter at the end of the book which is about as speculative as we get on the potential for space war, and the very short version of that… Because the big question is x-risk in the case of space war, right? So we’ve already dispensed with the idea that space is going to end war. That’s important to just get rid of that. However, anytime in the near- or even medium-term future, we wouldn’t expect there’d be war between the Moon or Mars and Earth, because it would be over very quickly, because any Mars or Moon civilisation is going to be very dependent on electronic technology — so a couple of well placed EMPs and you’re probably good.

I think it’d be probably very easy to take out one of these. In that Heinlein novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, they fling rocks at Earth, but probably just a couple carefully placed bombs and they’ll cut it out. I don’t think space war is a risk in that period. I would be more concerned about accidents or terrorism or Earth-against-Earth war, using stuff in space.

But in the long term — and this is where it gets interesting to me — we could say in the long term that we want another civilisation, another planet because of existential risk. However, one of the reasons we’re concerned is you have a situation where there’s war between gravity wells — which has, of course, never happened, right?

Let me give you two reasons that matters. One is because if you’re shooting something down somebody else’s gravity well, especially if it’s a nice deep one like Earth’s, it’s fairly easy to make big booms. It’ll probably always be easy to knock out satellite infrastructure, right? You throw a few nuclear weapons in the right orbit, you can really damage things, maybe permanently or semi-permanently.

But the other thing is that on Earth — and there are arguments about this — but it’s thought that part of why we don’t use certain weapons very often is because they harm our own atmosphere or our own environment, right? So part of why we don’t use nuclear weapons is because in the ’50s, researchers found strontium-90 in baby teeth. And we still kept testing after that. But it was a big part of why it was like, oh god, even testing is causing our babies to have an increased risk of cancer. It’s killing some number of people every year. And it’s not selective; it just kills people. So not great.

Luisa Rodriguez: Not great.

Zach Weinersmith: But it’s similar with chemical weapons and biologics, right? Part of why we don’t use them is we don’t want them to be used against us. But part of why we don’t use them is probably that they’re hard to control. Famous cases in World War I of the wind changing, and gas blowing back into the troops that sent it. Or of course, with biologics, it could just come back at you through typical means.

If you’re fighting between gravity wells, that’s not a problem. So I think that you could at least make a cogent argument that it’s not obvious that existential risk is diminished if there’s an equal civilisation on Mars. If it’s a totally harmonious solar system, that’s one thing — and again, in the future where it’s all AI and we’re nice Star Trek people, then don’t worry about it. But not right now.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK. And then, just in case anyone wants the explainer, when you say conflict between deep gravity wells, you mean basically…?

Zach Weinersmith: Oh yeah, sure. So gravity well is a kind of metaphor used in physics. The usual analogy is to imagine you have an air hockey table, and here and there, there are kind of whirlpool-shaped drops in it, and at the bottom, that’s a planet. That’s like a 2D analogue for how space works in 3D. So to speak, a planet is like a 3D hole: anywhere you drop something at it, it speeds up, right? So if you’re going to be fighting someone down the hole, you have a huge advantage against them. You have effectively not just high ground — like you’re shooting down — but you can drop things at them, and the things gain energy by falling at them. And of course, likewise, it’s hard to throw stuff out of a gravity well.

So The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which is a kind of goofy Heinlein novel, the way the Moon people win — I think they win; I can’t remember — is they have a catapult that just throws hunks of Moon, and the Earth can’t do that. It’s very hard to gun stuff off the surface of the Earth. But on the Moon, you just fire a catapult at high enough speed and off it goes. Whereas the Earth people have to make nuclear warheads, the Moon people just throw stuff. So that’s what I mean by gravity wells.

Luisa Rodriguez: Perfect. OK, so that sounds like there are some risks you can think up that are troubling, but the default scenario doesn’t sound super worrying. And it doesn’t really sound like — even though there are some reasons that space race-y countries have got their interests and they’re going to be pushing for them in various kind of tension-y ways — it’s not the kind of thing that’s so important that it’s going to be causing nuclear war on Earth. Probably.

Zach Weinersmith: I doubt it. I would say it’s the kind of thing where what you want is just to establish an appropriate regime, so that you don’t get some kind of scramble. I mean, people were talking about this in the ’50s: we don’t want to get an environment where there’s like a Scramble for Africa situation.

Mining asteroids [02:06:29]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so another risk has to do with the potential for individuals or corporations or countries to own and mine asteroids. You point out that the asteroid belt contains over 2 sextillion kilogrammes’ worth of stuff like metals and carbon and oxygen and water. So there’s, in theory, valuable stuff on asteroids for the taking. What’s the story for why that is worrying?

Zach Weinersmith: I wouldn’t worry as much about asteroids in terms of a scramble. Asteroids are very spread out, and as I said, I don’t think they’re very valuable, in the sense of versus the cost to get them. I would cite a paper by Sagan and Ostro — that Sagan — from 1994. It’s actually barely even a paper; it’s kind of a monograph. But I think it’s worth noting that I think they’re the first to point out that the power to deflect the trajectory of an asteroid away from Earth implies the power to redirect into the Earth.

And then the second piece of that puzzle, which I don’t remember if Sagan and Ostro said explicitly, but Daniel Deudney, who wrote a somewhat controversial book I quite like called Dark Skies, points out: people will often say, I think this goes back to Larry Niven said something like, “The dinosaurs went extinct because they didn’t have a space programme.” And I think Neil deGrasse Tyson has repeated this. It’s kind of all over the place, and it sounds plausible when you hear it. But Deudney was the first, at least to me, who pointed out those asteroids come once every 50 to 100 million years. It’s something like that. He has the numbers in his book, and I forget if we have them.

And so you say to yourself, well, what increases existential risk more: just waiting and accepting those odds, or giving humanity the power to push around asteroids? And, of course, it’s hard to say. It doesn’t seem obviously that the best bet is to get the power and give it out to everyone. And that’s where you would say, some kind of regulatory regime would be nice.

Luisa Rodriguez: And so is there a concrete reason we’d nudge asteroids toward Earth? Would it be to more easily mine them? Or is it more like, while nudging them around to mine them because we’re blowing stuff up, one accidentally gets nudged toward Earth?

Zach Weinersmith: So there have been proposals that you could nudge an asteroid to go around the Moon for research or access purposes. I mean, it depends.

Luisa Rodriguez: That does sound really scary.

Zach Weinersmith: That’s how I feel. Space is big, and you’re nudging into our zone. If you get into the nitty-gritty, there are different proposals for exactly how to go about this sort of thing. So there’s a book by John Lewis called Asteroid Mining 101, and he’s an advocate for this sort of stuff. And he talks about how, though it’s very hard to refine asteroids, a lot of refining processes we use on Earth require gravity. And it’s kind of neat if you’re a geek: he’s figured out that there’s some chemical processes you can use for separation. You could also build a huge centrifuge. You imagine a world where you say, we will refine all this nickel and iron in space, then we just send it home. At some point, that thing is crossing the atmosphere, and there are ways you could do it to make it more safe. You could chop it into little bitty bits or something.

But it’s the kind of thing where, to me, it’s like, if this was so extraordinarily valuable that we’re talking about ending worldwide poverty or something, we’re talking about huge benefits — and I’m a big believer that growing GDP means less child mortality, and all sorts of good stuff happens when people get richer. I’m all for it. If I believed it, I think there’d be a debate. I just don’t believe it. So you’re adding this additional risk of we have to deal with heavy stuff from space being thrown at Earth by —

Luisa Rodriguez: Into our deep gravity well.

Zach Weinersmith: Yes. And note, maybe you’re imagining like NASA doing it — but like, can Vladimir Putin do it? Pick your country. I mean, could the US do it? I’m sure that makes a lot of people uncomfortable if the Americans are throwing hunks of metal at the planet. “That’s fine.” So, you know, it’s a little dicey.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep. OK, I’m sufficiently scared. It doesn’t sound like it’s on the horizon, but if it were, it’d be like, let’s think about that way harder, and maybe not.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, I think that’s our boring deal on a lot of stuff: we probably can’t do this, and if we could it’d be a bad idea.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, great.

Company towns and communes in space [02:10:55]

Luisa Rodriguez: Moving on, another argument for why settling space might be terrible is that space settlement might have bad or even really horrible consequences for norms and values. And this is some of the stuff I find most fascinating to think about. I guess, as you’ve already said, a bunch of the constraints in space that we’ve already talked about might make space conducive to something like totalitarianism and other undesirable sociopolitical structures and norms.

One example that you talk about a lot in your book and that I just found really compelling and freaky is the fact that it’d be really hard to build things on Mars, in a way that might mean that the first Mars settlement ends up looking like a company town. So can you explain that worry, including just what a company town is and why they might be bad?

Zach Weinersmith: I’m super excited you asked about that. Nobody asks about the sociology parts, but we did try to get into it. So let me say that the starting condition here is that, for a lot of people, the whole point of this — of going to Mars or wherever — is to create a society with better values, right? That takes different forms. There are some leftist versions, like “we’ll leave capitalism behind” — you know, the sort of Fallen Earth way of being. And there are, I would say, like, quasi-mystical, “the absolute awesomeness of space, and we’ll be sort of utopian.”

But I would say the majority of the fantasies I encounter are some kind of libertarian frontier — somewhere between libertarian and kind of old style conservative. You know, the Earth is kind of bureaucratic and wussy; we’re all wimps, and we’re all like children, and we need to go get tough. And we’ll create this better, freer democratic-er society by going to space. People have this idea that you’ll have freedom, because somehow we’re constrained by all these Earth governments that are just tightening the screws on us all the time.

OK, so two angles on that. First, before I get to company towns in particular, Charles Cockell has a lot of papers about this. And he argues that if you have a society where it’s easy to destroy the place you live in and kill everyone — and where, by the way, oxygen ain’t free; it’s a supplied consumable, like food — the potential and the need for surveillance and control are vast. So he argues, and this is kind of on the smaller scale, but he’s like, at least everybody should have their own oxygen generator, just for liberty reasons. But that alone tells you what you’re up against, right? You’re having to think about, make sure everybody can breathe.

Luisa Rodriguez: Without being completely reliant on whoever has the power over the oxygen supply.

Zach Weinersmith: Exactly. And so we, as far as I know, we’re the first people to write a serious paper about how a company town might actually work, based on mostly company town literature, not space speculation. So a lot of people, when they are willing to propose a government for space, they will say it’d be like a company town. Whatever company will show up, and they’ll set up a city.

Well, there’s a lot of research on company towns. Probably a lot of your listeners are already cringing at the proposal to build a company town. What I would first say is, actually, the picture is quite a bit more complicated. I think people tend to think a company town is equivalent to the worst excesses of company towns. People think of, like in the US, the Battle of Blair Mountain during the Coal Wars, which was a horrible, vicious period of violence between management and labourers — including, at one point, dropping off bombs from surplus aircraft from World War II on strikers. Like, oh my god. But if you read the nice, boring literature on company towns, there’s a lot of just towns that are set up and they kind of run like regular towns.

And a company town is essentially, there’s debate about this, but a basic idea is a town where almost all labour is downstream from a single employer. So a classic example would be like a copper mill, where almost everybody works at the mill, or is like a doctor doctoring people who work at the mill, or running a store for people at the mill. Everybody’s downstream from the mill. Does copper have a mill? I mean sawmill. Copper mine.

But anyway, a classic version would be like, imagine somewhere in northern Canada, some geologists discovered there’s a huge reserve of copper, let’s say. And so they say, “We could get rich if we could get this copper to market. But there’s no labour pool here. There’s almost nobody here. There’s not the skilled engineers we need, there’s not the regular employees we need. There’s not even people to clean the bathrooms.” So what do you do? Classically, what you do is you hire a bunch of young men to show up and work crazy hours in a flop house to build out a city.

And that means that you build housing. You build, in many cases, medical supplies, and in some cases even churches and entertainment experiences, and of course workspace. You build roads: stuff that would normally be reserved to a municipal government, you build as the company.

And then typically, you subsidise housing. You subsidise all this. Why? For the simple reason that you need humans and they’re not already there. So the thing to note is this at no point requires you to be like a top-hat-and-moustache evil capitalist, right? This is just inherent in the structure of trying to access a resource at a distance from a labour pool. In fact, there’s even evidence that most companies, if they can hire another party to do the housing at a reasonable price, they do. They’d rather not build. The way I think about it is like if a company said, “By the way, we’re providing subsidised housing and healthcare,” you’d be like, what? That’s so nice, right? It’s not something you would instantly associate with exploitation.

So where it gets dangerous — and I’m talking about Earth still; I’ll get to Mars at the end of this — where it gets dangerous is you essentially, by the nature of these towns, create a huge asymmetry of power between employer and employed. So a classic example is these company towns often had pretty hardcore rental agreements that said if you stop working for a company, you have to get out quick — often in some cases on the order of weeks, which seems to be just inherently a nasty way to do it.

And you might ask, why don’t employees own housing? Wouldn’t that be better? And there are actually, again, very good structural reasons: employees don’t tend to want to own housing in a mine that might close down in 10 years. And likewise, the company would rather own it, because they are subsidising it. So if you’re not working, if you decide you want to write a novel instead of working at the mine, they need you to clear out because they’re subsidising housing. So people tend to not own their housing at these places. But what that means is if they want to strike, it’s implicit that they can be evicted. And there are oral accounts — narrative accounts; it’s not necessarily standard — but there are plenty of narrative accounts of families being kicked out of their homes, with children, as part of a strike procedure.

So I don’t want to get too deep into company towns, but, OK, the basic point is when you create a company town — when a company owns all services, all housing, healthcare, even churches, entertainment — they have extraordinary power over employees. And that means both implicit power — when they’re setting wages, when they’re setting conditions for work — and explicit power if, say, employees are trying to unionise or going on strike for something.

And on Earth, Earth economists, when they measure how bad the potential for exploitation is, they look at things like, how is labour mobility? How much possibility do labourers have otherwise to go somewhere else? Well, if you are on the one company town on Mars, your labour mobility is zero, which has never existed on Earth. Even in your stereotypical West Virginian company town run by immigrant labour, there’s still, by definition, a train out. On Mars, you might not even be in the launch window. And even if there are five other company towns or five other settlements, they’re not necessarily rated to take more humans. They have their own oxygen budget, right?

And so economists use numbers like these, like labour mobility, as a way to put an equation and estimate the ability of a company to set noncompetitive wages or to set noncompetitive work conditions. And essentially, on Mars you’re setting it to infinity.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Oh, god. Sounds like a terrible setup.

Zach Weinersmith: You know, our view is essentially like, we have this argument we call “wait and go big.” Part of the argument for go big is that scale probably, you know, with all the caveats I’ve said about our concerns about space settlement, if you have to do it, scale probably helps a lot with something like a company town, because it just means you can build in labour mobility, you can give employees choices. And so if you do want a more freewheeling liberal society, bigger probably helps, as it does on Earth. Tribes of 10 people don’t have a lot of division of labour.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. And just to be really explicit, “wait and go big” is basically, don’t set up that one company town now; come up with a bunch of technology that means that in a century you can just build large cities. I think in your book you want many Starbucks before…

Zach Weinersmith: Yes, many Starbuckses! Once there are four Starbucks, it’s ready for human reproduction, yeah. Big solves other stuff too. It helps with psychology, probably. It might help with ecosystem design. We don’t know. But yeah, in company towns in particular, it would be really nice to not have just obvious room for exploitation, especially if the goal is a freewheeling, de-bureaucratised society.

Luisa Rodriguez: So coming back to company towns. Maybe they’re not a certainty, and maybe they’re not created on Mars by evil capitalists to deliberately exploit people as much as they possibly can. But it just seems like the default is that there’ll be a pretty serious concentration of power, a real difficulty to bargain, plus a bunch of other factors related to the hardness of living on Mars that might mean that there are like weird, bad values that become more normalised, and are kind of set in stone and less negotiable because of those factors making the power so concentrated.

So one example that, again, you use in your book: I don’t remember if you combine it with a company town, but certainly where my brain went was, yeah, if there’s a heavy use of abortion because we only want really fit people on Mars — which is a thing that you say could happen, which doesn’t sound crazy to me.

Zach Weinersmith: It’s been proposed by people.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh right, I forgot that. That’s actually really disturbing. And then also maybe a heavy use of genetic testing for the same reason. Then it’s really easy for me to imagine — and I’m actually a pretty optimistic person; I don’t go immediately to “everything will become a dystopia” — but it’s pretty easy to imagine enforced genetic testing and enforced abortion, because this company town is run by a corporation who doesn’t want to pay for the healthcare of children who aren’t going to be as fit as a child could be on Mars. And that’s just one tiny example. But it gives me kind of a glimmer into why all of a sudden I feel really queasy about at least some of the ways this could go.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, I am generally fairly optimistic too, but my feeling is the optimism should come in with the idea that we can notice these problems beforehand. Not that they’ll be just fine. We could say, “Don’t set it up this way. This is well studied. Let’s do better.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Does it seem to you like I’m being overly pessimistic? Do these things seem like remote possibilities to you? Do they seem like it’d be easy to fall into them, or at least plausible that we’d fall into them?

Zach Weinersmith: To tell you the truth, this part of the book was originally a much longer section. We wanted to do a lot more sociology. So we had another whole chapter on space communes, which were maybe the second most suggested form. We actually ended up putting out a paper with two of the top communes people, Ran Abramitzky and John Lehr. It’s called “To each according to their space-need.” It’s a little bit tongue in cheek. But to be honest, for me, I’m less concerned with the specific how pessimistic or optimistic we are, and I’m more concerned with just wanting to scream that for any proposal for a space settlement, there’s a body of sociological economic literature that’s like detailed, quantitative; it’s legit, it’s not like floofy stuff.

So in the particular case of both company towns and communes, they’re extremely well studied. So company towns, economists love to study them, because they are like a really tight little form of what’s called monopsony, which just means there’s only one buyer of something — which is just an interesting economic question. So they’re very well studied. Communes are ultra well studied, especially the Kibbutz Movement. The economics of them, we understand deeply. And they are very similar across space and time, which means we can make predictions.

So in addition to whatever concerns you might have about a particular system, something that drives me crazy with this literature of space settlement we have is that people will just say, there’s literally a proposal out released via The Mars Society where someone said we should have communes because there’s no theft on communes — which any book on communes, including a memoir, would convince you was not true. There’s a body of literature for any proposal people want to make. Please, for god’s sake, would the physicists stop assuming they can intuit all of human behaviour throughout history?

Sorry, that became a rant. But I just mean, the way I would say it is, if you want to propose a settlement with enough people that you require a governance beyond just a mission profile, you should state explicitly what you think the system should be. And then there is a body of literature that is accessible. If you don’t state it, it’s hard to know. That’s part of why we wanted to do communes or company towns, because at least there’s a body of literature. And importantly, the way we like to say it is that something was relevant for us in this book if, by learning it, you would change your proposal. That became our way to cut things out, like, OK, but this wouldn’t actually change what you did. So forget it, it’s just neat.

So yeah, with a company town, these questions about monopsony and labour exploitation, there are moves you can make that would limit them, right? And likewise with the commune, there are just absolutely bog standard occurrences in all communes. We have data from like 500 years on what goes wrong, and we can use it. There’s so many cool papers that ought to be written. It makes me crazy.

Luisa Rodriguez: I guess what I’m hearing is like, yes, there are some reasons to think space might be conducive to some sociological things that we don’t like. Also, there’s some proposals for solutions, but they don’t seem totally thought out, and there’s way more literature we could be drawing from.

Zach Weinersmith: I would say there’s a lot of work on the shape of the rocket nozzle, and not enough on the municipal government.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep.

Sending digital minds into space [02:26:37]

Luisa Rodriguez: One other worry one might have that’s kind of related to this general theme: we talked a bit about whether AI might bring settlement timelines forward earlier, but another way some of this might matter sooner than later is because of the possibility that we’ll send digital minds into space. So if we did that, we wouldn’t necessarily have to solve all of the biological problems, and even necessarily all the sociological problems. We just have to solve some hardware problems, plus also create digital consciousness. But holding that aside, does that seem plausible to you? I know this is very left field.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t say I’ve thought too much about it. The thing that occurs to me immediately is there’s an old idea of, could we send humans to Alpha Centauri? You know, send them many light years away to another star? The problem typically being that even if you go fast, you’re talking at least centuries — probably, realistically, maybe millennia. So a nontrivial endeavour.

The one upside, I would say, of those proposals is that at least there’s no danger between the settlements. They’re too far away to harm each other. You imagine you fired a missile at your opponent, and by the time it gets there, they’re like 100 years advanced to when you sent it.

Luisa Rodriguez: They’ve evolved.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, exactly. They don’t really have the gravity well problem, because they’re so far away. But I guess I don’t think humans will ever do this. At least humans like you and me, who are made of meat and have three-pound brains. And I don’t think we’ll ever do this unless we’re like pets of some future intelligence.

So if the goal is simply to instantiate mind around other stars, and we could figure out a way to somehow make the particles dance, that seems like a way to go, I guess. You know, I actually don’t know what the effective altruism stance on nonhuman minds proliferating throughout the universe. That seems like, I don’t know, good and bad. Are more minds better? I don’t know.

Luisa Rodriguez: It’s a pretty big open question. But more happy minds may be more better?

Zach Weinersmith: Right. May be more better.

Luisa Rodriguez: Putting digital minds into space without having thought much about space governance first seems troubling.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. Maybe they’ll be better behaved. Maybe they’ll just be nice space minds, and they’ll treat each other right.

The most promising space governance models [02:29:07]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so probably all of these things are especially likely to go badly if we rush. And probably what people do in space early on has potential to last for a long time. So if it starts bad, it might be likely to stay bad. So for all these reasons, along with others we haven’t even discussed, space governance — this very boring term that’s going to cause listeners to drop off now; maybe I’d think of as how to allocate resources and property and what space settlement constitution should look like and stuff like that — might end up being really important. And so it’s worth thinking about sooner than later.

We’ve already talked a bit about space law, so what it looks like now, but I’m curious what you think we should aim for. Clearly you’re pretty pessimistic that we’re anywhere near space settlement. But imagine you knew that space settlement would be possible in 50 years. What would you want us to be thinking about now?

Zach Weinersmith: So let’s look at that at two levels. One is the governance, like just what the international regime is going to be. And then two is maybe something like, what if you had territory in space?

So for the international regime, we propose something based on the International Seabed Authority. So without wanting to bore your audience to tears, the very short version of this is: under the ISA, the International Seabed Authority, under what’s called UNCLOS, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, in very short terms, if you want to exploit something — “you” being a company backed by a state — you can petition for the right to check it out and then for the right to exploit it. And getting that right involves maybe having to give some stuff to have-not countries to make it sort of equal, since in some sense this all belongs to all of us. How much you think that will happen in practice is an interesting question. And I say will happen in practice because it hasn’t been done yet. We’re probably getting close to it now, but we’ll see.

Luisa Rodriguez: Interesting. Can you say something really quickly about that?

Zach Weinersmith: Oh yeah, sure. So a number of countries have petitioned to exploit. I don’t think anyone’s extracted yet. I’m a year or two behind on this now because I haven’t read it in a little bit. But as I remember, there were some countries, like China, there are rumblings of countries interested in these things that are called polymetallic nodules. If you want to imagine them, they’re just these sort of accretions of valuable metals, like little… I always visualise little metal potatoes on the bottom of the ocean. It’s probably not quite accurate. There’s also sulphates, which are valuable fertiliser input.

So there’s probably valuable stuff on the bottom of the ocean. And as technology improves, it’ll eventually cross the line. However, this is a case where there’s these ecosystems we know almost nothing about, so we don’t even know what we’re destroying. There’s some evidence that these ecosystems, these polymetallic nodules matter to the life down there. So tough question.

The reason we say ISA is a good way to go… So the only other model you can look to is the Antarctic Treaty System — which, as we said, since 1998 the rule is not only can you not exploit, you cannot even look. Then we have space, which is like, you can’t claim territory, but you could grab stuff all you want — which is, as we said, a little weird.

And then we have the UNCLOS, the law of the seabed, which says you can go get stuff, you can’t claim territory — it’s similar to the Moon. You can go get stuff, but it has to operate through this bureaucratic, highly undynamic regime. And I’m not usually opposed to dynamism, and I’m not usually in favour of things being boring and slow and terrible. But if the goal is to avoid conflict and perhaps destroying ecosystems we know nothing about, I think a lot of people, at least, would sign up for something like that.

So if you believe, as I do, that there’s nothing worth doing money-wise right now or anytime soon in space, saying we’re going to have a system to adjudicate these claims and keep the peace seems like a no-lose move. If people are like, “These stupid Weinersmiths are wrong and we’re moving forward,” then this gives them a path. Incidentally, if you’re very pro-capitalism-in-space, capitalists like a legal regime that’s at least clear, which they don’t have right now. So there would be benefits in that direction too, I suspect. This is the regime we think would be a good way to move forward if space is to remain a commons.

Now, if you want to imagine a world where we have like nation-states in space, I don’t know. I guess I’m boring enough that I just think if you can by some means produce a liberal democracy, that seems to be the least bad way to run a government. But the only thing I would say about that is we actually have a whole chapter — one we’re quite proud of — on legally, could you create a state in space and it actually turns out to be quite rich. The answer is a very, very qualified yes. It would require very particular circumstances, probably, and it would still be kind of new legal territory.

But what we are at pains to emphasise is people will often talk about doing this as if there’s some sort of “we” doing it — like “we, the collective humanity” — starting a nation on the Moon. But of course, there is no “we” in that sense, until we have like a Star Trek federation; maybe like Captain Kirk can say “we.” But of course, if you just want to think about it, like think about the emotional valence you feel, regardless of where you’re from, of it being, say, the US versus it being China versus it being Belgium, versus… So you have a completely different feeling, and of course, the people from those different countries have completely different feelings toward the other. And so that matters, even if they don’t claim to be legally part of the home country, right?

So I do think we want to think very carefully about this stuff, and I would just add that, to me anyway, as a dork, it is objectively fascinating that we have rules for how space land is apportioned in these bizarre regimes, that’s just separate from what the best way to do it is. It’s really interesting research.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. I was really, really interested in these chapters.

The tragedy of the commons [02:35:02]

Luisa Rodriguez: So I don’t know that much about commons, except for there’s this thing called “the tragedy of the commons.” It sounds like commons are used for the seabed floor, they’re used for Antarctica, and those don’t seem to be going terribly. But it does seem like in lots of cases where there are commons, there’s this thing where the resources get kind of overexploited, and some people benefit and some people don’t. Why aren’t you worried about that more here?

Zach Weinersmith: So tragedy of the commons, I think it’s a paper from 1968. Let’s say the commons is like a common pasture, right? So I run my cattle on it, I get some benefit, which you could put a dollar amount on. There is some deficit to the commons, but since it’s not my commons, I get all the benefit privately, and the negatives are socialised among everybody, and so why would I ever stop? And why would anyone else? And the net result of that is we all lose because we destroy this pasture. That’s the tragedy of the commons. That is all true. That would happen under those circumstances, which is why people around the world, since time immemorial, have figured out ways to manage commons, so that they work just fine.

And there are lots of ways to do it. It often is going to involve something like a random assortment of who gets what. But a sort of classic, boring way to do it is, if you look at cattlemen’s associations in, like, the midwest in the US in the past — they might still do this — where you have commons, essentially one way to do it is just to regulate the amount of members. So you just say, you can rent your cattle, but you have to pay a fee, and there’s only so many cattle you can run. So it is a commons, but it’s like a club, so we’re going to just regulate how much you can use it. No one’s going to pull out more than they put in, because they have to pay into the system and they can’t run too many cattle. Fine, then you’re done.

There are lots of ways. Elinor Ostrom is the famous person, she’s a sociologist with an econ Nobel Prize, and did wonderful work on the ways around the world people have solved commons problems for fisheries and collecting wood, and other environments where if people could just do whatever they want, they might destroy it.

It is only a problem if you have a regime where people can cause damage in a way that benefits them on net. So that is part of why it’s a little scary, if you say of the Moon that people can do whatever they want and pay no price. But I don’t know. I’m sceptical of anyone doing that anytime soon. I would think that the example you think of would be that limit of water supply on the Moon, where if a couple countries are like, “We’re going to start doing water stuff, to show that we can,” it goes away very quickly — and at least in principle, that water should have belonged to everybody.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. OK, so you think this is not a non-problem, but a solvable problem?

Zach Weinersmith: That’s right. Like I said with the sociology stuff, where you could be optimistic is that we have solved this problem many times, and it’s very well studied.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. So in general, how optimistic are you that we’ll get the sensible space regulation in place that you’re excited about?

Zach Weinersmith: You know, we were on the Lawfare podcast talking about this, and one critique of us was that he felt we were too optimistic that any of this could be done. To which I say, I didn’t think we were that optimistic. We were just saying what we thought was good. So there’s this often-repeated thing we found in a number of I guess you’d say space lawyers’ books, or space law scholars’ books, which was like, it’s viewed that if you can get ahead of a problem before it’s a problem, you would probably save everybody a lot of strife and money, but it seldom happens in international law.

So part of why we have space law, at least according to James Clay Moltz, who’s a scholar of war and space. He thinks part of why we have space law at all is that if you go back to ’62 and ’63, the US and USSR were detonating nuclear weapons in space and basically scared the pants off everybody, including themselves — which is not a great way to do things, to go right up to the brink.

But I wonder, actually, if there’s an analogue for AI legislation or regulation: first we’ll need to have a robot start killing people, and then we’ll be like, “Maybe there should be some rules.” On the other hand, though, and this is again salient for AI, you don’t want to regulate too soon before you know what you need to regulate. So there is a kind of dance here. There’s probably a sort of sweet spot in terms of when you want to come in with the rules, but you’re more likely to come up with the rules after everyone’s a little scared or after there’s problems.

But with sea law, there was a multi-decade, horribly boring process that eventually resulted in a law everybody could sign, which is part of why we’re in favour of it, just because it literally really got done. Unlike, say, the Moon Agreement, which would have been much more narrow about what you’re allowed to do in space.

So I would say I’m not optimistic we’re going to get this. You could imagine a world. I think it’s conceivable you could write a really boring science fiction novel in which some country gets there first, and that causes enough of a provocation that it becomes desirable for there to be rules before things get tense. But I don’t know.

The tampon bandolier and other bodily functions in space [02:40:14]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, cool. Let’s leave that there. We’ve got a bit of time left, so I would love to talk about some of the stuff I found most fun in the book. Let’s start with the tampon bandolier. What’s that story?

Zach Weinersmith: All right. You’re the first person… I love this story, as a researcher. So 1978 is the first year NASA allows women in the Astronaut Corps. NASA, the way they do it is they have classes, meaning there’s a bunch of people who become candidates to go to space at the same time. You can call them astronauts if you want, but they’re usually called “ascans” now, which is “astronaut candidates.”

So in 1978, 35 people get selected. Six of them are women. These are the very first women selected for the NASA programme. And the most famous of them is, of course, Sally Ride. Some people know Kathy Sullivan. She wrote a book fairly recently about all this. And she also was head of the [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] for many years. She’s kind of an ultimate badass, as many astronauts are. And she had this story. I think it comes from her. She and Sally Ride are brought in to check out the new hygiene kit for women in the programme, because it had only been men so far. And they’re just going through it. It’s just regular stuff. And then Sally Ride, I think it is, pulls out a tampon and it’s tied to a bunch of other ones. And I might get this wrong, but I believe the joke Kathy Sullivan had, she said it was like when a clown does that trick where they pull out scarves. Like, it just kept coming. And you sort of imagine their eyes getting wider and wider as they’re like, what the hell is going on?

And then you sort of visualise, there’s some young dudes who brought in the tech kit and they’re like, “So what do you think?” And Sally Ride, who is sort of famously even-keeled, says something — has literally 100 of these — and is like, “Maybe you could cut that by half.” And I always visualise the guy making notes, like, “OK, half.”

So this is just kind of a funny story. And it had a kind of resurgence on the internet, like in the late ’10s, I think, probably kind of as an example of structural sexism during the #metoo stuff.

Luisa Rodriguez: Like, all the people designing this programme were men, and so…

Zach Weinersmith: Exactly. Had so little concept. And some comedian made a musical bit about it. It was kind of everywhere for a while.

So I’d heard this story. It was just one of the many funny space stories. And then I happened to be reading a kind of obscure academic text, Integrating Women into the Astronaut Corps by Foster. And she had an interview with Rhea Seddon. Rhea Seddon, many people, unfortunately, have never heard of. She’s one of the most interesting characters among astronauts. She’s one of the first six women, the only one who was a doctor. And if you just want to talk about crazy amazing people, she was literally, to keep up her skill level, she was being a doctor while also training to be an astronaut. She also had three kids during this period. She must have had a time machine or something.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, stop.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, right. You just feel bad about yourself. An amazing person, an amazing human being, also just kind of a funny person. She did have a memoir out in 2015, and she was part of the design of the hygiene kit. She was consulted for it, which you might imagine, as the one woman doctor astronaut in the American programme. One of the few who’d ever lived — actually, might have at that point been the only doctor/astronaut/woman on the planet.

And the story she told, which was not a rebuttal to that story; it was just a story she had told in an interview when she was asked about this stuff, was that, first of all, this had never happened. So you might get reverse blood flow, which could cause all sorts of scary problems. They didn’t know. Nobody knew. But then also the usual NASA protocol is to take a number that’s a maximum and then double it. And we actually found another source on that, which was a guy named Mike Mullane, who wrote maybe the funniest astronaut memoir, called Riding Rockets, who said that probably what happened is they just did the NASA thing, which was like, “Let’s decide how much is too much and then double it.”

And then the other piece of the puzzle was, there’s a document NASA puts out. It’s publicly available. It’s called the Human Integration Design Handbook. It’s 1,301 pages of agony of every human thing you can imagine in space. There’s literally a clause that says astronauts must be able to go poopy and peepee at the same time. It doesn’t say it that way, but that is what it means. And it’s very technical jargon, but that’s what it says. So that document is full of maxima. If you want to know the maximum faecal output, maximum output of any bodily fluid you please, NASA has the data. And they’re very concerned with maxima for reasons that are obvious once you think about it, which is you don’t want the system to have more than you accounted for, for anything that’s coming out of a human body.

And so, all in all, it’s actually not surprising that they would do this. It might have been overkill, but if you actually go through data for like absolute maximum and then you double it, you are at about 100. And so what I love about this story is it’s actually not what you think. It’s probably a quite boring story.

Luisa Rodriguez: Less about sexism, more about NASA’s approach to dealing with bodily functions.

Zach Weinersmith: Exactly. And that is not to in any way gainsay NASA absolutely being sexist in the ’70s. Like Deke Slayton was explicitly opposed to women. There’s a document where LBJ gets sent a document that’s like, “We could put women in the court.” He wrote something on it like, “We have to stop this.” That’s only the late ’60s, it’s not that long ago.

So I don’t want to say there’s no sexism. I would say you have to say that NASA has been making a very good effort since the late ’70s, which is not true of the Russian space programme. And our go-to example of structural sexism is that the initial urination kit for women was based on the men’s kit. There are pictures in our book, I won’t get into it, but it was just absurd. And Rhea Seddon, there’s some joke where she was like, “Did any of you have wives you could have asked about whether they would do this?”

But yeah, but I love that story because it’s such a good example of how it took on this meaning for a lot of people that it probably didn’t really have. It was just a kind of comedy of errors. So just funny. Someone could be the actual historian who goes to NASA and finds the paperwork, but it at least seems like the story as such is unlikely.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. I mean, it happened, it’s funny. It also doesn’t represent the sexism thing. And also the sexism thing is true, separately.

Zach Weinersmith: Exactly. Exactly. Nuance. Nuance is great. Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice.

Is space cannibalism legal? [02:47:09]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK: is space cannibalism legal?

Zach Weinersmith: Is it legal? Great question. We do have a section on this. The answer is: probably, under very narrow circumstances. And I will keep this short.

We found a paper that had never been cited from 1978 on the question of whether you can conduct survival homicide in space. Survival homicide is quite well studied, but not in space. It’s a situation where you have to kill to live. Classic case would be three dudes in a boat deciding who to eat, who to kill so you can eat. It has actually come up. The classic case in the UK is R v Dudley and Stephens; the classic one in the US is United States v Holmes. Lots of countries have a version where this has come up.

The short answer is: most countries are very uncomfortable recognising the idea that you’re allowed to kill someone if you have to. So they usually will say there’s a very kind of narrow set of circumstances. I think in US v Holmes there’s like a test that’s established. It’s like, it has to be like a random draw, you can’t prefer crew to passengers, et cetera. You have to have very particular conditions.

And even then, my understanding is — at least in the US, and I think this is general — usually we don’t recognise contracts that have to do with the sanctity of the human body. So, in other words, if you signed a contract that says, like, this person agrees to have sex with that person, most people would say they can renege on that contract at any point, and they might have to give back some money or whatever the agreement was. But it is different in kind from agreeing to give someone your car, right? Likewise, you can’t say, to be a little morbid, “I’ll cut off a finger and give it to you.” You’re allowed to renege on that. And likewise, you know, it’d be an interesting question if you said, “We’ll draw lots, and if it falls on me, you can kill me,” and then you said no, I don’t actually know what would happen. It might be legally dicey.

But anyway, countries do recognise this. They have slight variations in laws. And where it gets kind of funny is the International Space Station is made of modules from many countries, so you have quasi-legal territories.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, wow. So it might be legal to commit space cannibalism in one of the modules and not another?

Zach Weinersmith: I would say that it is probably legal under some circumstances in all of them, but the circumstances vary. So I believe the modules right now are Japan, Russia, the US, Italy, Canada, and then Europe generally. I don’t know how it would work if you were in a Europe module. But yeah, so we joke that you’d want to call mission control and be like, “Where’s the gentlest regime for eating someone else if I’m going to die?” So is it legal? Probably shop around.

Luisa Rodriguez: Fascinating.

The pregnadrome and other bizarre proposals [02:50:02]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, can you explain the pregnadrome, which is what you call it in the book?

Zach Weinersmith: Yes. That is a term that originates with us. If you see it, send us $3 for copyright. So we talked about microgravity or low gravity being a potential problem, and we were fascinated to find at least one, maybe more than one proposal. I think exclusively by The Mars Society, though maybe they’re elsewhere. And I should say I’ve heard this many times in conversation, so it is something that’s kind of in the zeitgeist of a tiny number of oddballs, which is: what if you put a banked, like, racetrack on the surface of Mars so that you could have your babies, if it was a showstopper for having kids?

And I don’t know exactly what the proposal is. I assume you sort of look at your partner, and you’re like, “We’ve been thinking, darling, about bringing a new life into the world. So let us go to the great racetrack in Muskville, and spend the next 18 years in rotation.”

Luisa Rodriguez: So weird.

Zach Weinersmith: And I’ve actually talked to space geeks who seriously propose this with no kind of smile on their faces. And I just, maybe I’m just not… I’m not imaginative enough.

Luisa Rodriguez: Do they know any humans?

Zach Weinersmith: Right?! I know, that’s how I feel. I mean, I guess the idea is… Well, let me walk that back a little. So you say, do you know any humans? There was a proposal called Mars One out of the Netherlands, I think starting in 2006, to do a Mars reality show. The outcome — if it had been successful, which it couldn’t have been — would almost certainly have been the death of everyone involved in this Mars reality show. And they signed up thousands of people. So as much as I would like to say that probably not a lot of women are going to go for the pregnadrome, there are people who are tempted by Mars in a way that is hard for other people to fathom. So maybe we shouldn’t say no. You might not get standard-issue people.

Luisa Rodriguez: We just don’t know the humans that they’re talking about.

Zach Weinersmith: That’s right. Yeah. So it might, like many things, it might literally work. Is it a good idea? I would say probably not.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep. Great. What was the most bizarre proposal for where to settle or how to settle?

Zach Weinersmith: I think I’ve gone over the weirdest proposals that I can think of, but something that’s funny to me, if you want to think about the mindset for these proposals… So The Mars Society I think was maybe more of the libertarian end of proposals, and they run like sim operations in the Utah desert and elsewhere. Anyway, they put out books where they asked people to propose how they would set up their Mars city-state or nation. And one of these has got like 25 proposals, which were the best ones they got. And I forget how many, but some nontrivial number of them, while not going into any detail about how the municipal government is going to work, do say the public services will be put on blockchain. Which, if you want like peak Silicon Valley thinking: “I haven’t worked out how the sewage is going to work. However, one thing I’m sure about is it’s on the blockchain.”

Luisa Rodriguez: You’d better believe it’ll be on blockchain.

Zach Weinersmith: Yeah. So just as a window.

Luisa Rodriguez: I love that one. I guess similarly open-ended, it sounds like you had to cut a bunch from the book. What is the thing that you enjoyed learning about most that ended up getting cut?

Zach Weinersmith: Oh, lots of choices. I’m gonna give two because one’s quick.

Luisa Rodriguez: Great.

Zach Weinersmith: We originally had this longer discussion of private claims that had been made to space that we had to cut out, basically because they’re just stupid. I think we didn’t talk about the Bogota Declaration, which was an attempt by Colombia to claim a chunk of geosynchronous orbit on the basis that it is perpetually over them. Actually, I think eight equatorial nations signed this, and basically nobody cared because they have no power. But it’s actually, to this day, in the Colombian constitution.

We found another claim from the ’40s. Virgiliu Pop, who is a Romanian space researcher, has two books out about this, if you just want endless, amazing past claims to the Moon. There was a guy I think in Illinois who claimed Celestia. He claimed, well, nobody’s claimed the space between planets, so that’s mine. And what was funny is he actually doled out positions. I think his last name was Stump. And there’s literally a guy named Donald Stump, which sounds completely made up.

Luisa Rodriguez: So made up.

Zach Weinersmith: So made up. But he’s like Duke of the Milky Way or something. I think he’s still alive.

Luisa Rodriguez: None of that is real.

Zach Weinersmith: No, it was in an earlier draft. But if you look at just Virgiliu Pop, you can look this up. Look up Celestia.

Luisa Rodriguez: Incredible.

Zach Weinersmith: So that’s some of my just absolute favourite space fun facts, are these weird competing claims.

In terms of stuff we left out, the other one that was a little more serious we ended up basically taking out because we ran out of time and space in the book, which was the idea of answering the question of, how would you design a Martian constitution? And there’s a great book by Elkins, Ginsburg, and Melton from 2012, called The Endurance of National Constitutions, which is a sort of quantitative analysis of how you get constitutions that last. And you might ask: is lasting the most salient question for a constitution? And it turns out — they argue, I think, convincingly — that it’s a big one, at least. Because long-lasting constitutions tend to result in law and order, because people actually know what’s in them and believe what’s in them.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. And believe they’ll be upheld.

Zach Weinersmith: Exactly. Precisely. They become venerated. And if you want to find a nation with a basketcase government, find one where the constitution changes a lot. Like Haiti, which unfortunately, this week is especially in a bad situation. I think they have the record for most constitutions per year. Their average survival of their constitution is like six or seven years or something. Average constitution survival overall I think was 19 years at the time they wrote the book. So the US is very anomalous in having a 200-plus-year document.

But what was really interesting is we wanted to ask, if you’re going to design a constitution, are there knobs you can turn? Do we know stuff now about what you would do? And there kind of are. There were interesting correlations. And it’s just a correlation, but the more words in the document, the more likely it is to hold up. So it’s not like you could just add, you know, “…the, the, the, the…” to the end of a document, right? A good guess they had was that what it’s actually measuring is how invested people were in the document, like how many parties were present for it.

But the deep thing that was really interesting to me is that I think nerds who tend to think about space constitutions — and they do exist — tend to think of a constitution as a kind of game, like it’s a list of institutions and rules. And in fact, a better way to think of constitutions is as political documents. So the way we were going to say it is that it’s like even if God came to you and was like, “Here is the best set of rules for governing in a Mars colony,” you might still not use it because you would have to have buy-in from whoever’s going. This is a classic conundrum with constitution design: you have a country full of just maybe millions of people; how do you get representatives from whatever count as the different parties, and then have them walk away agreeing to this document? That it’s going to be in their interest to enforce it on their own people.

Why this matters and isn’t just trivial is you can think of the case of what we now know as Pakistan was maybe going to be part of India, but the representatives of Muslims in India — or at least a subset of them, maybe not unreasonably — were concerned they would be second-class citizens in a predominantly Hindu country. And lots of offers were made to try to give a subset of rights to get them in, and it was not successful. And to this day, India and Pakistan are, I don’t know if you’d say enemies, but not on friendly terms. They have skirmishes and they both have nuclear weapons. So that is the kind of fallout of failure to integrate all these communities under one. Maybe it was impossible. There’s a complex history. I’m probably pissing somebody off right now.

But this is a big question, right? If you can’t solve this problem of getting everybody who’s a party to this thing to agree, you maybe create enemies. So that was going to be a really fun chapter. I don’t know. It’s also very speculative, but maybe one of these days we’ll have a paper.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. I hope you do. That sounds right up our listeners’ alleys.

Space sexism [02:58:38]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, another one: Your book is full of examples of space sexism, one of which is not the tampon bandolier. What is your favourite example of space sexism that is probably real?

Zach Weinersmith: Oh yeah, there are, of course, many. If you do want a lot of examples, Mike Mullane’s Riding Rockets is really interesting because it’s from the perspective of a guy who’s realised in retrospect that he was a colossal sexist. And also just a great writer, which is very unusual for astronauts. It’s just a wonderful book, and it’s great because I think a lot of men who wrote memoirs from that period, and even a lot of the women, just don’t talk about it. And I don’t know if that’s because they don’t want to stick out or they don’t want to implicate themselves. He just kind of says it, I think. I don’t know. And he’s been very open about how, you know, “We were all meatheads out of the air force and we were idiots.” And you know, he’s still maybe not quite over all the sexism. You might want a little more out of him, but it’s like he’s telling the truth, which is maybe a little unusual for astronauts who are often a little political.

But anyway, probably the most notorious story — and I wish I had Kelly for this, because she’s more the expert in Russian history — but there’s this idea, which I consider propaganda, that the Soviets were more women-forward. And it is true that they had the first two women in space, including, amply, the first woman — who was Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. I think it would be fair to say, though, that it was a stunt. They picked a woman who could do it. And the reason I say that is not to take away her laurels, but is that they didn’t have any women after, until I think 1970, like literally right before Sally Ride was going up, or pretty soon before it, they sent up one more woman who was Svetlana Savitskaya.

And also Tereshkova was not… You know, she was like, they found a woman who had done parachuting. They didn’t have, because women weren’t test pilots, they weren’t allowed to be. So you can’t absolve the Russian system of sexism. Also today, it’s like one in 30 something Russian astronauts. I think there’s a woman in the programme right now; it might be up to two now. So I do not buy the idea that either the Soviets or Russians were behaving well in this regard.

That said, Svetlana Savitskaya went up in Salyut 7, I think in the late ’70s. Absolute badass of a person, a real honest-to-god astronaut — again, without wanting to diminish Tereshkova, who was a very brave person. But the first person who did a sort of standard astronaut qualifying set would have been Savitskaya. And this amazing person, she goes up and one of the first things that happens is she’s presented with an apron, and the men aboard ship — and I’m forgetting which the men were, but maybe that’s acceptable in this particular example; let’s leave them out — there’s a very well-known anecdote where they give her an apron and they basically say, “Could you do the cooking and cleaning? You know, it would be so much more homey if a woman was doing it.”

And to her credit — and I forget who it was, maybe it was Lebedev, but let me not implicate — one of the men who was one of the culprits here later said essentially that Savitskaya set the tone for women in space when she said, “No, we will all be sharing in the chores up here.” And that is the way it has been ever since. Not that there hasn’t been stuff, but that is such an example of, like, Jesus Christ. And this was, again, not that long ago. This was like after Star Wars came out.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow.

Zach Weinersmith: So yeah, I mean, there are other examples, but to me that’s one where it’s just so utterly blatant. I should say neither I nor Kelly are experts on Soviet or Russian culture. And we did talk to a guy who said it might have been more of, like, not a literal apron, but a kind of ceremonial, decorative apron. But I don’t know, it’s kind of hard to —

Luisa Rodriguez: I don’t love that either.

Zach Weinersmith: No. I’m trying to be like, well, I’m not from this culture, but I can’t see a way to spin it that makes it much nicer.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I mean, she said no. It couldn’t have been the highest honour.

Zach Weinersmith: Exactly. So yeah, Svetlana Savitskaya: a very interesting person. And by the way, there is a really goofy Russian movie about Salyut 7 that features her. It’s highly fictionalised, if you want to see a funny kind of space movie.

What excites Zach about the future [03:02:57]

Luisa Rodriguez: Great. OK, I think we should wrap up. I’ve got one final question, which is potentially totally unrelated or maybe totally related. What are you most excited about possibly happening over your lifetime?

Zach Weinersmith: In space or just in general?

Luisa Rodriguez: In general.

Zach Weinersmith: Oh, man. Gosh, that’s a good question. Technology-wise, I guess I would say the thing that most excites me… I’m kind of an econ dork. So if you’re an econ dork, you know that the whole world has been in a productivity growth slump since like 2008, and now we have AI and it hasn’t… I’ve tried to look for it. The productivity is actually up. I don’t think it’s because of AI yet, but it may. And this is a dorky way to say it, but the difference between a world with, like, 1.5% total factor productivity growth per year versus 3% growth is tremendous.

I think of when my great-grandmother was born, I think she had the perfect lifespan to experience technology. She was born in 1900. She grew up on a farm that I don’t know if they even would have had a tractor with a combustion engine. She would have lived to see aeroplanes come, electrification, widespread phones and radios, and then of course rockets going to space, satellite communication — you know, this period of time when everything changed so drastically.

And I wonder if we’re getting to another period that’s going to be like that. Like, people argue about this. Tyler Cowen kind of famously argues that if you go from the ’70s through today, there’s been a kind of slowdown in grand change.

Luisa Rodriguez: The great stagnation.

Zach Weinersmith: The Great Stagnation is his book on it. And it’s a perspective not everybody agrees with, but I think there’s at least something qualitative to it. And I would love to see an end to that — with all the caveats of, as an artist, watching AI creep up on my career is a little creepy. But you know what? It’s coming for the rest of you too.

So I would love to see a world where everyone just has lives of greater leisure. I know I sound like a tech dork, but one of my hobbies is rose gardening. And when I think about AI taking over the world, one of the things I think is, “I guess maybe I’m out of a job, but maybe I can just spend more time in the rose garden.” I would love to see a world of more leisure, and especially where leisure kind of allows us to reintegrate into the real world in a way that smartphones seem to have been detrimental to.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I am with you. Probably not gardening. Probably making ceramics.

Zach Weinersmith: That’s your happy hands-on. Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. That’s my “I’m out of a job. What am I doing?”

Zach Weinersmith: You can make the pots and I will put the trees in them.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, perfect.

Zach Weinersmith: We’ll all go back to nature because the robots, until they kill us, they will be doing all the stuff we don’t want to do.

Luisa Rodriguez: Exactly, exactly. My guest today has been Zach Weinersmith. Thank you so much for coming on. This was so fun.

Zach Weinersmith: Thanks for having me. It’s been delightful.

Luisa’s outro [03:05:59]

Luisa Rodriguez: All right, The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris.

The audio engineering team is led by Ben Cordell, with mastering and technical editing by Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong.

Full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site, and put together as always by Katy Moore.

Thanks for joining, talk to you again soon.