Going Off World: Moon, Mars, Venus, and beyond
Welcome to Going Offworld, your gateway to the cosmos beyond our Earth. We will explore our familiar celestial neighbors and venture into the vast, uncharted territories of our solar system. Each episode, we'll explore the cutting-edge of space exploration, the latest discoveries, and the incredible technological advances propelling humanity into a new era of interstellar adventure. Underwriting provided by the WayPaver Foundation. Join us, as we embark on this journey together, to the moon, Mars, Venus, and beyond.
Going Off World: Moon, Mars, Venus, and beyond
Going Off World EP 6: Mars...Soonish? with Dr Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Kelly and Zach Wienersmith bring their scientific rigor and trademark humor to the Offworld Podcast, challenging our assumptions about Mars colonization while offering a thought-provoking roadmap for humanity's spacefaring future.
The husband-wife team behind "A City on Mars" and the New York Times bestseller "Soonish" discuss how their research journey began with optimism about imminent space settlements but evolved into a pragmatic assessment of the monumental challenges we still face. From Kelly's expertise as a parasitologist to Zach's perspective as a science cartoonist, they provide a uniquely accessible window into complex questions about our cosmic future.
"The data we have from 50 years of astronauts orbiting Earth is largely irrelevant to life on Mars," Kelly explains, highlighting how the lack of medical data on reproduction in space, effects of prolonged radiation exposure, and Mars' 40% gravity create significant unknowns. Meanwhile, Zach brings sobering perspective to the ecological challenges: "Biosphere 2 had eight people in three acres. We're talking about supporting a million people on Mars, and we barely have the science for eight."
• Kelly's background as a parasitologist studying how organisms affect behavior provides unique perspective on biological challenges
• Zach brings his experience as creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics to make complex science accessible
• Their previous book "Soonish" explored emerging technologies including space access and asteroid mining
• Medical data from space stations may not apply to Mars conditions due to different gravity levels and radiation exposure
• 40% Martian gravity might not prevent the health issues seen in zero gravity environments
• Human reproduction in space remains largely unstudied but critical for long-term settlements
• Closed-loop ecosystems like Biosphere 2 encountered significant problems with just eight people
• Creating self-sustaining habitats for larger populations requires massive scientific advancements
• Space law development is crucial now as it will shape humanity's cosmic activities for centuries
• Technical challenges must be addressed alongside social, political and biological considerations
• Mars settlement requires interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists, engineers, artists, and legal experts
Find Kelly and Zach's work at wienersmith.com, where you can also join their Discord community. Kelly co-hosts the podcast "Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe" twice weekly, and Zach continues creating SMBC comics available on his website and social platforms.
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Thank you for joining me on this ongoing journey into the future. Until next time, stay curious, and always think forward.
Welcome to the Offworld podcast, your gateway to the cosmos beyond our Earth. We will explore our familiar celestial neighbors and venture into the vast uncharted territories of our solar system, to the Moon, mars, venus and beyond Coming up on today's show.
Speaker 3:I think it is such an exciting time to be in space right now, Like there is a fair bit of money going into certain avenues, but things like space law. If you try to clarify what is allowed in space and you help establish space law, either internationally or for your own nation, you could be changing the way that we do things in the heavens for hundreds of years to come. It's a very important time to be figuring out the rules of the road for space.
Speaker 2:Welcome to episode six of Going to come Like. It's a very important time to be figuring out the rules of the road for space. Welcome to episode six of Going Off World. I'm your host, steve Fisher.
Speaker 2:Today, we're taking a critical and often humorous look at the challenges of settling Mars with Kelly and Zach Wienersmith, authors of A City on Mars and the New York Times bestseller Soonish. From Kelly's background as a parasitologist studying how organisms can affect behavior to Zach's work as the creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast cereal comics, they bring a unique perspective to examining the realities of establishing human settlements beyond Earth. Through their extensive research, they challenge many common assumptions about space colonization, while highlighting crucial questions we need to answer before attempting to live on Mars. So whether you're curious about the biological challenges of having babies in space, the complexities of creating closed-loop ecosystems or what we should include on humanity's next message to the stars, you will not want to miss this fascinating and thought-provoking conversation. Join us on this journey where the sky is not the limit and the stars are just the beginning. Kelly, zach, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having us.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So I know you from your amazing book about Mars, which we'll get into shortly. But for those who don't know you, will you each kind of give your respective journeys and where we are today. So, Kelly, you want to go first?
Speaker 3:Sure, so my journey doesn't really involve space at all until the last couple years. So I'm an ecologist who studies how parasites change the behavior of their hosts. So I studied a brain infecting parasite of fish and looked at how it changed the fish's behavior. But I, you know, I'm like afraid of getting bored, and so anytime there's a new project, no matter how far outside of my expertise, I'm like yes, I'm in. And so Zach and I had the opportunity to write a book about emerging technologies, and that sounded great. So we did it, and it turns out we really enjoy writing books together, and so then we decided, uh, space settlements were probably coming soon, based on all of the hype and all the pop sci articles that we were reading and all the like space settlement advocates, yeah, we were talking to, and so we decided we'd write a book about that. And that's not the book we ended up writing. We ended up writing about why it's probably not coming super soon, uh, but yeah, that's my sort of tortuous journey to right now what about you, zach?
Speaker 4:oh, I mean I was on that same trip. Yeah, I, I, I think we we had roughly the same change of feeling about it about the same time. So, uh, I don't have too much of a different story but.
Speaker 3:But what else have you done with your life?
Speaker 2:yeah, what am I? Doing my life yeah, let's have some. Let's have zach, let's have some deep conversations like so what have you done? What have you done with your life?
Speaker 4:what have I done? Yeah, I'm trying to do less, um, uh, well, you know, I, I mean I, I I'm a cartoonist and we kind of slipped into PopSci by accident because the, you know, having a comic strip people read led to the opportunity to write books. And I think after our last one, we did a book called Soonish and it did reasonably well, and so we got to write another one. We wanted to do something a little bit more in depth, or I should say a lot more in depth, and it ended up being a lot more in depth, um, and, and it ended up being a lot more depth than we had imagined I would say um reasonably well, being a new york times bestseller, that's yeah that's.
Speaker 2:That's reasonably well. You know, yeah, um, we were happy. Yeah, I'm, I would be, as well as you know, as a fellow author. So you also created saturday morning breakfast cereal, so can you? What is that so for the audience? Like what?
Speaker 4:is that? Uh it? It's a comic strip. It's like a daily uh joke comic strip about a lot of different things. It's it's like been around for 20 years now, so I think it's like an old internet comic that is uh shambled forward into the modern era. Um, comic that is uh shambled forward into the modern era. Um, uh yeah, I don't know. It's about science and philosophy and dirty jokes and kind of a little of everything?
Speaker 2:where did the inspiration come from to do it like? Where did it kind of start?
Speaker 4:uh, I guess it started that I had like a day job I hated and uh, on like early internet it became clear that you could make. You know, very early Internet there was no money and then at some point there was a small amount of money. But when you're like 22, a small amount of money is enough to eat and and survive. And so you know that seemed more appealing than than having a real job and then, by you know luck and some amount of work, it ended up being a career.
Speaker 2:And by luck and some amount of work, it ended up being a career. So when you were sitting around having coffee and you say, you know, space colonization, let's write a book about that. Like, did you have connections in the space industry? Were you always like kind of, as I like to say, space junkies, like interestedies, like interested in in space? Like where did like is it just analysis of the market? You saw, like a lot like where did that all kind of because soon let's go, maybe let's go back, let's talk about soonish. Where did soonish come from? Like from the conversations and and the and the kind of we'll call it the opportunity analysis, as we like in you know you see that opportunity, where did Soonish kind of come from?
Speaker 3:So Zach and I both try to pick projects based on like what do we want to be spending the next couple of years of our lives learning about? And so at the time we thought it would be fun to spend a few years learning about emerging technologies and thinking about what still remains to be accomplished to make those technologies part of our lives, and so basically, it just that sounded like fun, and so there was no like business analysis. We were like that sounds neat. And so there were two chapters that were related to space. One of them was cheap access to space, and that chapter was hard to write because we had some stuff in there like space elevators, which are still a really long way way off. But then we were also writing about how, like hey, coming soon, we'll have these reusable rockets which will drop the cost of sending mass to space.
Speaker 3:And while we were writing it, we had to keep updating the chapter because SpaceX just kept doing amazing things. And by the time that chapter, you know, hit the shelves a year after we submitted the manuscript to our publisher, it was already way out of date because SpaceX was just like doing such a great job. And the other chapter was about asteroid mining, and so we interviewed a guy from Deep Space Industries and we talked to some other folks who were excited about asteroid mining, and they convinced us that law was changing to make asteroid mining more feasible, that money was just being like absolutely plowed into this field and that, like technology was moving along fast enough that this is something that could be feasible in the not too distant future. And at the same time, we were talking to space advocates who were saying, like these are the pieces we've been needing to have settlements, like we know how to live in space.
Speaker 3:The thing that's been holding us back is that it's really expensive. But now we can ship habitats from Earth to space because we're going to have this cheap, this way to get mass to space cheaply with SpaceX rockets. And if we don't want to send everything from Earth, we're going to have asteroid mining and so we'll be able to build stuff like habitats using resources that are already available in space. And so, between those various pieces of information, we felt like we knew enough people that we could start writing this book, but there were a lot of people we still needed to meet along the way, and it turned out there was a lot of additional research and that maybe we had selectively met the people who were excited about space settlements and were maybe overselling them a little bit, and so, yeah, that's how. That's how that played out.
Speaker 2:Excellent. So I was thinking, like in the book, you kind of said that, like space elevators are far away, what do you think you know are going to arrive soonish-est, like what's in the scale of things? Because, well, let me preface this, because I think when I saw the book and I read through some of it and I went through parts of it, it reminded me of there's a book and I'm I want to say the physics of Star Trek. It was a book. I think Michio Kaku wrote it. It was about Star Trek.
Speaker 2:It was like all the technologies in Star Trek, like how far things were away or what was just completely out of there. The thing about Star Trek is it's an abundance society. Right, he said that most of these things will kind of get there, but the thing that's probably the amount of energy required is like the replicator to like materially transfer. But you also talked about programmable matter inside of the book as well. So, yeah, what do you think like is in that scan, a scale of like next 10 years, 20 years, versus like, oh, we've got a hundred, you know it's a hundred like way, it's way, still soon, but not too close.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, I mean, we really don't like to make, uh, numerical predictions. It's a very good way to embarrass yourself um but um you know.
Speaker 2:You should tell that to everybody in that writes predictions, because in about a month we're going to be blanketed with yeah, this is what I thoughturists do not predict the future. Let me I put the. I will say this on every podcast. We look at possible futures. There's the probable, there's the you know the preferred right, but they're all kind of possible and it's on it Like the predictions are more like you know, bets, like on technology or things that might happen. They're not. So yeah, so like. Yes, you don't have to put the debt, but how about just on the range of like, don't put years on it, but like soonish versus soon, far away.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah. So the way I tend to think about this sort of stuff is like, if anything is already on an exponential learning curve, it's relatively easy to predict the future. So the question is, could you go through our like list of technologies and say which are on that? So if you look at, uh, reusable rockets, rocketry generally, it's very clearly on a nice exponential learning curve. The price is going down at a fairly predictable rate. Um, the amount of freight is going up, so you should expect that to just keep getting better, with the one caveat that there's really only one major player right now. Spacex is like over. You know, people can talk abstractly about the change in the space market, but it's really all down to SpaceX there are a couple other players.
Speaker 4:Maybe that'll change in the next few years.
Speaker 4:But, anyway, so you can look at. I actually think Fusion is similar If you look at what's called the triple product or the Lawson criterion, which is a measure of essentially how good you're doing. Fusion. That's been on a nice exponential curve over time, and there's some cool projects going on right now that are, unlike 10 years ago, well funded and run by non-cranks uh, such as commonwealth fusion some people think, helium energy. There's also, of course, eater in europe, uh. So I would say fusion, at least you know. Getting to like, uh, ignition seems like it'll happen fairly soon. Whether or not it's economically viable is a different question and we don't know yet. Um, most of the stuff we talk, oh, go ahead oh no, go ahead, yeah, go ahead, go ahead oh yeah, just most of the rest of the stuff we talk about are pretty skeptical.
Speaker 4:So, like, just to give a few examples, like we talk about, could you have a robotic construction of buildings? And you know it's possible. And AI is moving fast now and maybe nobody knows, but you know this keeps getting tried and it's just humans are really good at like manual tasks that require you to like assess things like how viscous is something, how hard is something, you know. So, like we talked, for example, about mortar, mortar is actually a very sophisticated process because Mortar changes its consistency over the course of the day and you have to do this complicated move with your hand, just kind of slop it in place. So if AI really turns out to be on the upper limit of what we're hoping it does in the next 10 years, who knows maybe? But then other stuff, like programmable matter, is really cool.
Speaker 4:Right now I have trouble visualizing the path forward, like to get on a nice learning curve. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of like like a short-term viability for product, which I feel like is really important to trying to imagine the future. Yeah, I don't know. Like asteroid mining, I'd say pretty questionable. We were fairly skeptical in the book that it was like economically viable. It was like cool if you're already doing something in space, but but but pretty skeptical that it's like a good economic move versus like digging a really big hole on Earth, which will probably be cheaper forever.
Speaker 4:So, I'm trying to be like a downer. I'm mostly positive on fusion. The rest are pretty skeptical.
Speaker 2:Well, it's funny when you talk I was earlier going to positive on fusion, the rest I'm pretty skeptical of. Well, it's funny when you talk about I was earlier going to talk about fusion. So I'm a big proponent of fusion and even fish, like nuclear, current nuclear fusion technology. Because the reactor everyone thinks about Three Mile Island they think about like these are reactors and technology from like the 60s and 70s. Like this is like the stuff now there was a documentary with Bill Gates that they talked about I think him I forget who he worked with his partner from Microsoft.
Speaker 2:These things are small and they're very they're. The waste is minimal and it's very safe, like you could really regionalize, like nuclear power, like and they're. I know they're doing it in China because their coal is they need to offset their energy and I also I haven't bought an electric car purely out of principle yet because the fact that you're doing that you're still burning coal at the end state right, we need a full stack energy solution and I believe you're right. I think you're going to see more. I think you're going to see a lot safer. Microsoft actually bought through my island, I think, and they're going to use it, so I think they're going to overhaul it with the newer reactor technology and kind of prove, like I think that's a big case for them, but their ability to do AI using that tech with nuclear, that's awesome, right. So then it changes the like, the acceleration curve of fusion, of actual like, how do we get it commercially viable by the 20, you know, mid-2030s, 2040s and kind of start a fusion era? That that takes it. So I agree, I mean you can't put years on it. I try and at least I put have to put like kind of windows when, when we look at you know trends and the, the signals and tech, like people, like you said, the non cranks that are doing it. So you know we'll we'll talk about CEO Mars in a second, but you know, for those on the podcast listening, like so we both share something very cool and common.
Speaker 2:We both have spouses, like my wife and I wrote a book and we have another one coming Like we've written a book together and it's quite an experience. So how is this? Is, you know, as someone you can ask this, but also to have lived it, writing a book with your spouse, your significant other, what was it like for both of you? What did that kind of. What was that? You know, let's do this together. Are you out of your? Was this together? Are you out of your? Was anyone like you're out of your mind or like are we gonna gonna kill each other? Like what? How did you kind of and you find a flow. So, yeah, tell me about the both of you. Like, what was your experience doing this?
Speaker 3:so we've worked together on other projects before we wrote a book. So we uh organized a live event called boffest, the festival of bad ad hoc hypotheses.
Speaker 2:Uh, and organizing a live event wait, go back, go back. So if you explain that one, that one's people's gonna fly by and even in the, even in the, the transcript subtext, when there are people like what is that? Let let's deal with that.
Speaker 3:So the idea is you come up with a theory that is quite clearly wrong, but you try to support it with data anyway, and so I think one of my favorites is a guy named Michael Anderson was arguing that as men get older their waistlines expand because in the past there were lots of floods and this would help them float and keep their families safe. And so he went through and he found a bunch of historical data for like there used to be regular floods and like how much more planned, are you?
Speaker 3:This is like a whole yeah, wow, it's a whole thing. So a bunch of people submit proposals and then we pick the proposals that we think are, you know, the most convincing and hilarious. We've got a panel of judges who listen to the six proposals and then they ask questions, and they ask questions as though they're seriously asking the question, like you know. Do you? Would you expect men with you know broader waistlines to have advantages, with global climate change bearing down on us? Will there be more floods? And will those men you know broader waistlines to have advantages, with global climate change bearing down on us? Will there be more floods, and will those men you know being more successful, or something? And then you have to like, seriously answer that question. And then at the end you get a trophy of a Hennig brand.
Speaker 3:He was a chemist who boiled his own urine and accidentally discovered phosphorus, and so we 3D printed a trophy of that moment based on a famous painting. And so, anyway, we, we ordered, we did this live event in in Boston, london, san Francisco, houston. We did it in a bunch of different cities, and organizing a live event is a lot of work, and so we're pretty good at working together. We also used to have a podcast together called the Weekly Wienersmith, and so we're you know, we like having projects together. And then when we got this opportunity to write a book together, we were like, yeah, okay, let's do it. And it was different than organizing a live event and we had we had there were some tense moments. What our biggest debate was uh, I really like microsoft word and zach prefers google docs, and that got heated I totally understand that.
Speaker 2:Yes, I I love scrivener, but you can't share it. You can't, you can't, you can't, you can't collaborate on it. It's definitely for the single author. It's a wonderful tool, right. But to your point, like, how do you? Yeah, we, we found detente with word because that was the way to comment and work with our editor. That's like really, it's just funny like people think why would you like just use this tool, like when you're both together and you have varying degrees of of opinions? That's, it's the simple things and how you have a creative, collaborative workflow, right, it's like that is tantamount to just getting because you have to focus on the content. Like, how did you split the content? Because I know jack, you're, obviously, you're an illustrator, you're, you know, um, so, kelly, how did kelly's act? How did you both and I'll share our perspective I want to hear yours like, how did you say, like, how did you divide and conquer or break the book up? Um, how did you do that so that the flow kind of started to come?
Speaker 4:you want to take this one, zach, sure, yeah, we, um. So this book was like this is like an extraordinary research load. I would say there's not a lot of like popular science that has this much depth of research, and that was really hard. And so we ended up having to do more division of labor to essentially play to each other's strengths and talents. So you know, at first we were kind of just doing whatever, and then, maybe, like a year or two in, we decided it had to be broken down more carefully. And so, you know, we both did everything, but, loosely speaking, it was kind of like we both would do research, but I tend to do, I generally did a lot more like reading everywhere, more light content, like.
Speaker 4:So I was the one reading you know, 800 astronaut memoirs and like these weird old like future casting books about space from like, uh, from the past and and but also like technical stuff. But but then for like the real drill down, kelly was reading like nas, nasa documentation and that kind of stuff. And then we would. We had like a big Google drive full of documents on different topics that we would both fill out with notes on everything we read and then Kelly would go through, you know. So there was a chapter on psychology. Kelly's job was to like go through I think psychology particularly was literally like a thousand pages of notes and condense it into notes, a short, uh, much shorter draft. That was kind of like a first proposal for how this chapter might go.
Speaker 4:And then my job was to take that document and convert it into something a little more light and fluffy, uh, for a, for a general audience, and then the, the sort of humor and comic stuff. That was like the very last thing that was done. That was, um, you know me going through and just putting a little sprinkle on top, and then kelly would say whether it sucked or not, and then we would kind of fuss a little over the language and then at that point it was off to some experts, uh, to make sure we didn't tell any whoppers, uh, which usually we didn't, and uh, and then, uh, I think at that point there would be like a last pass and that was it. But yeah, it was. It was a much more layered approach than we did like for soon, as we essentially just divide and conquer, like you do this chapter, I'll do that chapter, whereas this, like that, that wouldn't have worked because it was. It was too much work we had to play to to like talent and interest.
Speaker 3:Well, and then there was the very last stage, where I went through literally every single line of the book and was like what is our citation for that? What is our? Citation for that, and so we have another version that has citations for every single line, just to make sure, like that was our fact checking run that was like two months where I was like all right zach, you're watching the kids. Uh, I'm just going to lose my mind did you?
Speaker 2:did you hire so obviously. So the proposal process for those who who think about doing a book or have done, you know, you know, aren't aware, like usually do a book proposal, if you can find a literary agent who can kind of promote it, get to the right publishers, that's one pathway. Another pathway is you find an acquisitions editor and your target, you know maybe a referral or just through you know half a cent and you get them to the proposal and they're. That's a more direct, obviously, method. Uh, when you wrote that, did you how did did someone approach you to like, write a book? Did you put the proposal together and just kind of pitch it out there, like how did it kind of come about?
Speaker 3:Uh, the the first book came about because, uh, randall Monroe wrote a really great book. He does a comic called XKCD and his book just like went huge. And then the publishing industry was like, oh well, maybe this, like books written by cartoonists, is a good angle, who's?
Speaker 3:the next one on the list. And so and you know, zach, that's Zach. So we got approached by an agent who was was like do you have any? Have ideas for books? Um, and so then we pitched our book and ended up at penguin for soonish, uh, and then we took a year or two off after soonish and then we pitched the same book to our uh editor, because she's amazing and we loved working with her. So we pitched it to the same editor, uh, and she was willing to pick up this book. And then she was a really great sport when, two years in, when we were supposed to be done, we changed the thesis entirely and took an extra two years to write it. Um, is that your memory of the process too, zach?
Speaker 4:oh well, I was. We didn't take it extra to you. I think we asked for three years and took three and a half uh that's uh.
Speaker 2:so the, the it reminds me of. So startup equation is a book we did. Um, we started writing in 2013, right after we got married, the day at the end of the day, literally the day after and. But the, the, the manuscript itself. So our book is kind of like that landscape book, like business model generation, a lot of it. So it had 140 graphics in it. A lot of it was like diagrams, models. It basically like taking 20 pages of the venture capital funding process and turning it into a two-page infographic, like making, you know, taking that complex information to distill it right. So it was like the.
Speaker 2:The book itself, like the core text, was like I want to say a year, six months to a year, to write it, but the graphics took like a year and a half because we had to like figure that out and a lot of things we kind of had, but we didn't want to create because we had a team, we had to hire a visual. I was the creative lead on it, but you don't want to create graphics, just create graphics Right and them out right. So it was that kind of. So when you went through that, you know, zach, you being the illustrator and having that that capability? Did you have things maybe already? Were you kind of just kind of concepting and just kind of, you know, like high level sketching, like we want this to go along and like this, you know kind of, as you were writing, kind of like how to flow it? Did that help? Because these I feel like it's one thing to write a textbook, like we just wrote a text based. We have I don't know 15 graphics in our new book and that was easy to generate.
Speaker 2:The book itself took about six, seven months to do the whole manuscript and it's in right, very different process. So like, how did you kind of flow that Very different process? So like, how did you kind of flow that? Did you go back and forth with tech? Or did you kind of write the book and then do the visuals with it after the fact? How did you work that?
Speaker 4:Yeah well, so you know, I think it depends on what you're doing. So in the case of Soonish, the illustrations were really just like for jokes. It was like just being goofy For A City on Mars. We wanted the illustrations to mostly be um explanatory. We have a few that are thrown in, mostly to like break up a particularly, you know, potentially boring section, like, say, say, like the nature of international law. We have a few that are just jokes or like aids to memory. Uh, but actually I, I I do believe the way. I mean, I think we had a few notions, but mostly it was like once there was something resembling a chapter done, then I would go through and suggest comics and then Kelly would comment.
Speaker 4:But I think all the illustrations were done in like under two weeks.
Speaker 2:Wow, Awesome Well.
Speaker 4:I'm part of. You know it would be. It would be very different if it were a graphic novel or something, when it was like where they really hung on the illustrations, but you know these were substantial. I mean, there's just some stuff like if you want to say, like you know the the way astronauts go to the bathroom in space, I could describe it, but it's much better to have a visual uh, but it's not like for someone who's a cartoonist, it doesn't take long to draw that visual.
Speaker 4:It's just you kind of get a reference image and you say, okay, it looks like this um so I mean, you know, whereas if we had written a graphic novel, a graphic novel, you know, I would have expected it to take a year just to do the drawing. I think I've illustrated a graphic novel which was, I think, 200 pages in it and, like, going at blazing speed, took five months and that was like brutal. You know, I would have rather had a year. So, but you know, part of being like a daily cartoonist is you get pretty quick at turning in something that looks good, or at least good enough. So but but no, in this, in this book, there wasn't as much back and forth, it was mostly like what would help illustrate this section or break up the text a little.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned City on Mars, which kind of leads us to the get your ass to Mars Quaid, part of the of this episode, of this uh, this interview. So the city on a city on mars was the next book and you know, you challenge, I would say, many of the uh we'll call it optimistic, not not not utopian, but optimistic claims about space colonization. Um, I was like so have you got any uh angry emails from any billionaires?
Speaker 3:any uh, no, just you know any not the billionaires, okay I don't think the billionaires have taken the time to read our book. I don't think we expected they would. Uh, we've definitely gotten some angry emails or tweets, you know. One person compared our book to mind comp. Someone else compared us to the unabomber. Uh, wow, really, uh, really interesting uh, comparisons there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow that's um, that's extreme, but we seem to live in a world of extreme. But you know, you've got this kind of approach to colonizing the planet. You talk about things like there's challenges right, having kids in space, right it's like or legal aspects. I did an interview in a previous episode with Sarah Pusho, so she runs Space Bridge Partners and one of the things that they've been studying, one of the things they've been funding a mission for, is conceiving in space, right, or like on low Earth, like if you have a baby in low Earth orbit. I mean, for those who saw the For All Mankind episode, the girl had a kid on Mars and they had to get out off, but he actually needed to go back because of his body was used. You know he was healthier on Mars, right, but her research has actually helped with earth, like IVF. They've learned a lot about that. So there's a lot of advantages in it. But the research.
Speaker 2:But so talk about the, the things you think are challenges we may not have talked about, like, like things that were really not even thinking, because it's like let's just get there and let's just have domes and let's, you know, go, you know, cruise around the, around the rock looking for ice like but what? What do you want? You went a lot deeper. Can you guys elaborate on, like your kind of journey and what you kind of started? How'd you pose the questions to yourself like?
Speaker 3:yeah, uh, babies, and then you want to do closed loops, sure, okay, uh, so I I think when we we started off looking at, uh, how the human body responds to space, uh, and like what kind of medical data we have so far, and we were really surprised by how we have a lot of data but very little of it is relevant to life on Mars.
Speaker 3:So we have 50 years of data from astronauts orbiting Earth. So essentially like in constant free fall, but the longest journey is a year and a half, or less than a year and a half 437 days, and so the data that we have are sort of like inconsistent. You get like a little bit of data from, you know, people who are for a couple of weeks, and then a little bit more data from a whole different group of people who are up for a month, and we're being exposed to totally different things. But at the end of the day, you know, so they're in free fall and we know that that's bad for bones and muscles and might explain why vision degrades. So the idea is that when you're in free fall, your fluids shift up towards your head and they put pressure on your eyes and they change the shape of your eyes and so, uh, lots of astronauts come home with poorer vision than when they went up.
Speaker 3:Uh and so we know that free fall is bad and that maybe it also causes, you know, maybe there's a whole slew of other problems that come along with it, but we don't know if the 40% gravity that you experience on Mars will be enough to make those problems go away. So one problem that we like to use as an example is that hip bones lose 1% of their density every month when people are orbiting the Earth, and you know, the longest stay again has only been about a year and a half. No-transcript. Be a be a problem in lots of different ways, but particularly I'm thinking about reproduction and going into labor, uh, and then additionally on the international space station and all the stations that came before.
Speaker 3:Earth's magnetosphere protects you from radiation for the most part, and so we don't really have a good sense of how space radiation, which differs from the radiation we experience here on earth, uh like how that increases cancer risk, for example. So now you're going to send people out to mars and hope that their gametes aren't mutated by the high levels of radiation, or maybe you're going to keep them forever underground so that they're protected from radiation by, like, the regolith above um. Anyway, there's just a slew of problems that we understand kind of okay from data on space stations orbiting the earth. But mars is just a totally different environment. It doesn't have a magnetosphere or a thick atmosphere to protect us from radiation, so you're just exposed to it and at the end of the day, we don't know if moms or babies can survive that ordeal and if we're going to be even able to have babies on on the red planet.
Speaker 2:So cheery, I'm happy. Yeah, you know you have a lot of humor in the book, so it's. But it is, you know, dealing with your, your, quite well.
Speaker 4:So for zach. So closed loop system. So like, how does that? Yeah, yeah, yeah so. So I think closed loop systems are a really good example of how often you talk to people who are a little more engineering and they tend to think a solution exists, therefore the problem is solved.
Speaker 4:So you literally get people who say, well, like, mars has carbon and nitrogen and oxygen so we can eat, drink, breathe and have food. But it's like at some point there has to be an actual process that converts these elements into dinner, and so one of the things you basically have to have on Mars is local consumable production, right? So, for example, if you have plants producing oxygen, that means carbon dioxide is getting scrubbed, plants are getting grown and oxygen is being created. If you don't have those things, you have to use chemical means to remove the carbon dioxide and chemical means to produce the oxygen, notably having high-density oxygen produce the fire on Mir in the mid-'90s, right? It's not ideally something you'd rather not have, and so you want to be able to produce consumables on site, so you don't have to boost them over and over and over and be sure that you get a resupply to distant Mars Promise. We don't know a lot about this right. So the biggest system ever created by far was biosphere 2 in the 90s, which had eight people in three acres. So you know, if you imagine it scales linearly and it might not in either direction, we're talking about having a million people. You need to go through six orders of magnitude to uh to get to be able to supply this, this martian city, and we barely have the science for eight people.
Speaker 4:When it was run by the end, people were starving. They lost a high percent of body weight. At one point they were suffocating because of uh the structure leaching co2 out of the system, meaning it was effectively leaching oxygen out of the structure, leaching CO2 out of the system, meaning it was effectively leaching oxygen out of the system. There were all sorts of basic problems.
Speaker 4:They brought in animals that didn't perform as well as expected. A bunch of plants died. They accidentally brought in lethal scorpions that they didn't want and generally they had a hard time, even though, unlike on Mars, they had direct access to the sun and power off the Arizona grid. So you talk about having a million people on Mars in 20, 30 years and no one's spending on the science to get a project like this done, even not at scale, like there are tiny versions of this being done around the world. There's a facility in China for three people. There's one in Europe that doesn't even include people. So if you were a billionaire really, really serious about making this work, you ought to buy Biosphere and refurbish it and get it running, because we don't have this closed loop ecosystem science and we need it.
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting, they're building this major Elon Musk is building this major Starship factory, kind of like the Gigafactory for batteries, and when you think in Texas since he owns a portion of Texas at this point is that create a biosphere there? To really understand that in parallel, right as they prepare? Because I mean right now, they caught a rocket. They caught a rocket in midair. Most people don't understand the. The engineer like that is that is historic. I know people are like, oh, you caught it, so there's more, but be able to like take it, you know, move it out, you know, like kind of like catch it, move it over. I mean, the reusability is just insane and yeah, but if we get to your point, like when you were writing the book, there's things that we've already surpassed and in the speed in which that innovation happens and they're ready to go, but they haven't done this type of work, okay, like, what are you gonna? You're just gonna get there and like, hey, we got there, we're good no doubt about it the rockets are absolutely amazing.
Speaker 3:But there's a lot of absolutely amazing stuff that needs to happen before we settle mars. There's a lot of, like you know, research stations on the moon would be great to get the biology data that we need to know it's safe to have babies on mars. If you could have these facilities doing closed loop ecologies in texas, that would be amazing, but the money for these things is just largely not showing up. And and you know musk is musk argues that like his job is to get the rockets to get us there and then other people can solve the other problems, and that's true, like he doesn't have to solve all the problems. But the other problems need to be solved before we leave and at the moment I'm not seeing a lot of progress happening on them because there's just not a lot of money to answer these sorts of questions.
Speaker 2:Maybe it keeps reminding me. There's a classic movie from the 80s called Real Genius. If you ever saw it, it's one of my favorite movies with Val Kilmer. So it's about he's like a one of the top geniuses and they do laser experiments. They're like a Caltech but he has to graduate and it's a comedy but it's also seriously cause. It's also like the eighties, cold war, the defense department. So he creates this laser. It's like a gig. It's hugely powerful. Like at the end he finally figured. You know, they finally do it and they're in the bar.
Speaker 2:At the end he's like do you know what this thing can do? He's like I don't know. The engineers figure it out. But then they realize it's basically, if you have a large spinning mirror and a targeting tracking system, you can vaporize people from space. So even though you are the inventor and you just figured it, you might want to actually figure out. You know the rest. You just have a good sense of that, just saying yeah. So I want to kind of take you know, we've, we've heard the books and the things together. It's like you also have the respective work. So, like kelly, you are a parasitologist. Like you, I know nothing about this field. I've read. I've read a few things on it. Obviously people might think of zombie apocalypse. Um, but like what, what is this work and how does it kind of contribute to? Like maybe even the field of exobiology, like you know, as we look at it, for life on other planets, like that, yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't really know. They're two totally separate parts of my life that I really enjoy and I don't. I don't think about the overlap between the two of them very often. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, I, you know, I will occasionally think about, like you know, if we're bringing, if we ever get to the point where we can bring like tilapia with us to space to farm for protein and I think that that's a long way off, Like you know how do you make sure that they don't bring parasites with them or something? And then there's a little bit of a concern that if people live in environments that are too sterile, then that's bad for our immune systems and that's why people get allergies or autoimmune diseases. And so sometimes I think about, like, what kinds of things might we want to bring with us to space so that we can have, you know, microbiomes that are sort of similar to what we have on earth and you know whether or not that will impact our health? But these all seem like problems that are way, way, way down the line, and so I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about parasites in space yet.
Speaker 2:Okay, good, so with the work here, like what is someone, what does a parasitologist do? Like on earth-based stuff. So like what is that job? Like people might want to know.
Speaker 3:Sure, I mean. So there's lots of different kinds of jobs that you can find parasitologists doing, so some are medical doctors we're pretty lucky in the United States to not encounter parasitic diseases very often but there are medical doctors who do things like study. Tick-borne diseases like Lyme disease is common in the United States, and then when you get closer to the tropics there can be more problems with things like malaria or hookworms, various nematodes. So there's a lot of medical doctors. There's researchers trying to understand how these parasites impact ecological communities, or, you know, fisheries and stuff like that, so looking at parasite and animal interactions. And then there's curators at museums. You know we do. You find us in lots of different places and we're weird wherever you find us. Well, weird can be very good. You know we do. You find us in lots of different places and we're weird wherever you find us.
Speaker 2:Well, we were just weird can be very good. So on the so, Zach, you, you, you tackle some really complex scientific stuff with comics. So what's the most challenging topic you've ever had to? Like illustrate, like communicate, what's the craziest one?
Speaker 4:like illustrate, like communicate. What's the craziest man? I don't know. I I honestly, if it's it was too complicated, I probably wouldn't illustrate it. What?
Speaker 4:about your quantum computing one with scott aronson well, yeah, that's right, we did a comic together. So so, um, scott aronson is a well-known, one of the most well-known quantum computing scientists, and we, for Soonish, actually, we had at one point planned to have a chapter on quantum computing and we basically ended up feeling like no offense to any of the various pop treatments of the topic, but it really can't possibly be done in under about 30,000 words, because, like to, to understand it in a way that's not hand wavy, just requires you to build up a number of concepts which are, which are like, at core, mathematical, and so, um, we ended up dropping it. I think we had like a 20,000 word chapter. We were just like this is gonna end up being like, you know, a third to a half of our book, which is not good.
Speaker 4:And, um, and scott was one of the people we talked to and so, you know, I think he was actually relieved when I read him.
Speaker 4:I was like we're giving up and he was like I think that's the right choice and, uh, but we ended up doing a comic together, which is mostly written by him, just kind of describing um, so he, he called the mathematical part, which I won't get into, the the adult conversation about quantum computing, which is just, you know essentially that it's it's more complicated than the sort of like you tried the universe in parallel, etc. Type of stuff about quantum computing, which is just, you know essentially that it's more complicated than the sort of like you tried the universe in parallel, et cetera, type of stuff. And so we did do a comic together. But even then, like you know, in terms of complexity, essentially we were saying it's more complicated, not telling you what it is. So I, you know, we've been talking for years about could you do a book on quantum computing? And hopefully one of these days we will do it, but I think that's. That's like a graphic novel.
Speaker 2:I was just gonna say it sounds like it's a graphic novel, like it's almost like you need a protagonist to kind of like almost like a researcher trying to figure it out. You know, I'm not saying like a Keanu Reeves like you know movie from what years ago? Or something you know some kind of cold, that cold fusion movie, but just something that engages a reader. I, I think of my, my son, is, uh, seven and a half and he, he loves reading but he, he's engaged when he gets to read, like minecraft books or like real. I mean, his, his reading is excellent now but it's really helped him and I think, like those type of graphic novels, even for people just in high school, it's just, it's it's a complex topic, right, it's like I deal with it. So I know that, kelly, you're, you do a lot of academic research. So like, how do you balance that work? Are you teaching now? Are you? What research you work? How do you balance that with this type of, with this side of the world of your work too?
Speaker 3:I balance poorly honest answer.
Speaker 2:We appreciate that yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, so between you know, trying to keep my research program running and having kids and writing and uh and all the other stuff, it's tough. So right now, mostly what I'm doing is, uh, I have some data sets that I collected during my phd and my master's and you know so many data sets sit I collected during my PhD and my master's and so many data sets sit on computers but never get analyzed or written up, and so I'm working on actually analyzing that stuff when I find a free moment.
Speaker 3:And then I also mentor students who do various questions related to behavior and parasites or I do a lot of fish behavior work also so if a student has a question that they want help designing an experiment, they'll send me an email and we'll chat about how to do that and I'll help them analyze their data. And yeah, so I'm staying up on research in that way, but lately writing books and doing interviews and stuff like that has occupied most of my time, but I'm never bored.
Speaker 2:I know I can tell you both are quite a quite a put a power couple in the fun way. So not not the, yes, the, because it's also a balance right, cause you have the kids and you know you have to. They come first. So this is so much so many other things right, and it's like their, their needs, their balance, and then we, then we have to find our creative corners as well to keep us sane. So you've written those books. Taking a break, are you considering another project? Are you looking at any kind of space exploration topics, things you're looking to do in the next one? Is there anything that are circling the orbit of your creative brains right now that you're interested in?
Speaker 4:We are both working on stuff, so my other hat is I write kids' books, and so I'm kind of knee-deep in that right now.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 4:And so that's what I'm doing. I mean, I'm also doing comics, and I don't know. Kelly has other stuff. I don't know what she wants to say, though.
Speaker 3:I'm thinking about. So the next book I write, I'll probably write solo, because I want it to be about parasites, and Zach is not super excited about parasites, which I get, and I'm not super excited about writing kids books. So we are taking separate paths for a little while. Not super excited about writing kids books, so we are taking separate paths for a little while, and then, when we both wrap up these projects, we'll come together and figure out what our next mega book, mega project is going to be. But uh, right now we're taking paths of less resistance. Uh, for a little while nice, nice.
Speaker 2:So it's good because you get the separation and could work on and then come back. That's, that's always great. So let's um, I have some kind of uh, fun questions too, because I had this kind of imagining like, you know, voyager, like voyager 3, like, not not the vger, like that goes to, like becomes a star trek, uh, enemy or something you know the super compute, super super intelligence, but like, if you wanted to contribute, each one, to contribute something for humanity, right, the new golden record, if you will. So, like Zach, if you had a comic pen, what would you depict to communicate the world? I love this kind of stuff, cause it's just like, just what.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean you know, so the there are a lot of people. Actually, we're friends with a guy named Daniel Weitz and Kelly does a podcast with him who's like studied this type of question a lot and from like reading his stuff I've become fairly convinced that there's not too much you could do. That would actually be meaningful, because we don't like know what aliens would be like in a lot of ways. You know, one of the things I thought was very clever on the Voyager disc is they have this image I think people see a lot of ways. Uh, you know, one of the things I thought was very clever on the the voyager disc is they have there's this image I think people see a lot they don't know what it means which looks kind of like a starburst and what it actually is is um, I think at that time, something like 17 pulsars were known, where we knew their um, how they pulsed and their distance from earth, and so each of them represents a relative distance, uh, and so, like, in principle, some very smart aliens could look at that and decipher it, whereas, like you know, other stuff on that is like a picture of naked humans and um, like jazz music and classical music.
Speaker 4:I'm especially skeptical of the music working nicely. Like lots of animals on earth don't understand music. Possibly, you know, if they're like, uh, you know an organism, something like us, they could understand the naked people, uh, but I I'm actually skeptical that it, like you could, you could make something really that useful. I I think probably the least bad option is is some sort of math, but uh, I think even then there's reasons to to doubt that. So sorry for the non-answer. We're just I like the.
Speaker 2:I like the interstellar GPS. That is cool. Like more pulsars Like you can you know you're giving them that map of interstellar location. That's cool. I love that.
Speaker 3:As you can see, any question you ask will find a way to be downers. We're not downers we're consistent.
Speaker 2:I look at it as pragmatist realists in the, in the, in the fun sense, you know. So would you, would you? Yeah, because you talk about, yeah, music, art and literature. It's like you know, would you include something? Because it's like you don't know what they're going to communicate, to take it as hostile because, like, you could put like a parasite as a in a in a petri dish, but they could think it's an alien. You know, it's like it's a, it's a weapon, right, it's like, well, yeah, that would be not be good.
Speaker 3:It might be interesting if I had, if I sat down with an alien and they were like what have your people done? Where your people are parasitologists that you're most proud of? I think I'd say something like well, we eradicated smallpox and so, but. But I don't know how you convey that there was a disease that, like, covered us in awful pimples and we got rid of it, like on you know succinctly. So I would probably leave parasites off the you know void. The new Voyager disc.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:So if you show okay, then let's get away from music. This is a good one. So this is both kind of think. It tells you that our planet is a planet that has flowing water, and so maybe that's useful in some way for understanding. I mean, we think that's critical for life, um, so yeah, I don't know, I get the sound of flowing water. What about you, zach?
Speaker 4:no, I think that's you couldn't do too much better than that. Like maybe sounds of atmosphere or something. I mean, you know, like, like, like, obviously like uh, sega and drayon went with uh, a little more like cerebral stuff, but but uh, we're we're big old skeptics over here I mean.
Speaker 4:I mean I also think, you know, when we send these sort of things, it's it's much more about us than it is about aliens, like the odds that voyager is ever going to encounter something that can interpret it, or pretty low. So I think part of what we're doing is is making art projects for ourselves. I think that's a maybe a better way to think about the golden disc.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's gotta be the most negative take on the golden disc ever.
Speaker 2:Well, look, you said water and air. I mean those are optimistic things. I mean mean you could have said farts. So I mean like the sound of a fart, yeah, you could have said there's a lot of, there's a lot of sounds out, there growls, yeah, yeah. So I, I applaud you for the positive. You know your triangulation water planet. Either that's a come they're going be great, or we have a resource planet to invade.
Speaker 3:So we don't know that's right, but stay here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know. So I know we're, you know, as we're coming to kind of wrapping things up here, you've done so much of the looking to the soonish future. Is there anything boldly you'd like to kind of put out there? I don't even say predictions, but just kind of like what you've seen and what you're, maybe what you're excited about, if it can kind of within our lifetimes, that really kind of you know through your work, maybe not even in the book, but just really kind of like this do these? Each of you have like something that's like.
Speaker 3:that's like wow, this is if this comes to pass or this is going to come I mean I would be absolutely thrilled if fusion research was both feasible and affordable, and those are two pretty big hoops to jump through, um, but I, you know, I feel like you know a lot of people you know, read our book and they're like, oh, the wienersmiths, they're like downers because they don't think we're going to be settling mars anytime soon. But I think if we actually got to the work of answering the questions we should answer before we do that. That would be awesome, like learning about how reproduction works in space and trying to make these closed-loop ecosystems where you have to figure out recycling very efficiently, like that could be good for earth too, uh, and so I don't know, I'm I'm excited about research always and I would. I just think it's amazing that, like in the next couple generations, you know, we could be the people who figure out the answers to these questions and then that will open up space for everybody and that would be incredible zach, what about you?
Speaker 4:um, I think what I get excited about in terms of uh future stuff you know there's a lot of talk about ai now and it's gonna like take over the world and and um and whatever crazy stuff. Um, I get more excited about the potential for um like modest increases in yearly labor productivity change. So like um, for me that's the big cool hype about technology like this. If you go back to, you know the periods we think of as especially pleasant, at least like economically, like the 40s through the early 70s. One of the big differences is productivity is growing about twice as fast. If you look at the period from like 1970 through the mid 90s, it's growing quite slowly, um, and then it's again been growing quite slowly since about 2005 and then especially since the financial crisis.
Speaker 4:And there's this like twinkle of hope in the data right now that either because of ai or other things that are happening right now, we could return to something like the 90s or the the 40s or the 70s era and like that's. You know it's, it's life-changing. It's like the difference, like if you set that back uh in the us by one percent per year, it's the difference between, like the us and mexico economically. So you think about what we're missing out by not having had a higher rate of growth and human productivity. Uh, so I'm I'm extremely hyped about this boring macroeconomic stat. Uh, that might be changing in the next 10 years this, this is life in the Wienersmith house hey.
Speaker 2:I, I, I shared, I want the four day work week. You know I want. I think it's going to be hard for people, many people who just see work as their identity and wanting to work, there's a work, but then there's the other side of people who don't want to work at all and it's a question of what? Where does, where does productivity and where does freedom to contribute to society give you the space to contribute? Right? You could make arguments in the United States here about health care. It's like what if we I'm not espousing any political position, but like imagine if you, you had healthcare paid for, universal healthcare, right? What would that do?
Speaker 2:For you know, people, many people, take jobs because they need the healthcare. That's what you hear a lot. What if you could have six months to a year to start a business and not have to worry about that for your family? Or you lost your job and you, you know you don't have to. You know it's, it's a. It's a very interesting. I agree with you. I just saw a video of robots folding towels in a hotel.
Speaker 4:Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, I mean, think of it. They can go 24-7, right, but it's not about replacing the labor, it's a redeployment of the skills, because I often think of systems, design systems, things that are repeatable. It's like it gives me the space to work on the hard stuff, so I think if we can view it through the lens of that, it'll be in a better place, you know. So I think it kind of leads me to like, if you're giving advice to other innovators, people thinking on this, you know your pragmatic view like, what advice would you give people maybe trying to create um?
Speaker 3:they want to make a positive impact on this, like on space and and just, maybe even just being writers, just want to hear your, your advice to the future generation, if you will I think it is such an exciting time to be in space right now, like there is a fair bit of money going into you know certain avenues, but like things like space law, like if you try to clarify what is allowed in space and you help establish space law either internationally or for your own nation, like you could be changing the way that we do things in the heavens for hundreds of years to come. Like it's a very important time to be figuring out the rules of the road for space. So I you know if you're interested but like math isn't your thing going into space law could have a profound effect. And you know I encourage researchers to start thinking about you, know how their research could contribute to understanding things like reproduction in space. There's just a lot of exciting questions right now to answer.
Speaker 4:And almost any skill set that you have, you can contribute in some way. Zach, what are your thoughts? Um, yeah, uh, well, I guess I guess I could do. I could do the arts. Uh, since kelly's doing science, um, I would say, uh, you know, there's a tendency now, I think, for media to be kind of fragmented because everyone has to be on like 18 platforms, and that's probably going to continue to get worse. And so one thing I argue with people is is, if you at least get to a position where you have a little safety as an artist, you should try doing crazy things, because, uh, one of the effects of, I think, social medialization of everything is a tendency toward mediocrity in order to satisfy an algorithm. So maybe leave a little more room to try dangerous stuff. I think there's still a market for it, if people would just do it.
Speaker 2:I agree. I think there's, yeah, two parts of that. There's the race to the middle, the mediocrity to kind of do the algorithm. But then if you do the things that are edgy or experimental, it changes the algorithm. Because I think about how YouTube or other channels have changed because of what content draws people or, like, what kind of breaks through. Otherwise you have we'd have 15 years of cat videos, you know, and now you know. But we have a lot know some things good, some things you know not. My favorite is the reaction to the reaction to the reaction. I literally watched the. I saw a video of a guy reacting, watching a reaction video to an original video. Reacting to the react like, what, like why I'm doing this yeah don't do it I think that's.
Speaker 4:That's not, that's a, that's a discovery. All this time we were making scripted tv and trying really hard and it turned out all we needed to do was have like one human doing something bad and another human making faces. That's, that's all we want, uh yeah, that's.
Speaker 2:That's the evolved version of that. Yeah, the category, that's true, that's true so what's?
Speaker 3:what's your advice?
Speaker 2:oh, to people. I think yeah, that's a great question Be the interviewer. I love you, I love you both. My whole thing is to get futures literate, understand that everything is not short term, that there are applications that solve problems here on earth that just apply to just as much as doing things in space. I agree with you that this has never been a better time, other than maybe the Apollo program, but that was such a narrow band of people that could do that. I think we're going to have a Cambrian explosion of a space economy and I like to say, like, space is a place, it's also there's an economy and an industry sector serving it. But I think the next 15 years are gonna be so exciting to be in this space.
Speaker 2:So I would say, you know, find an aspect of, because it will require not just the scientists and not no offense, kelly, I love you but but not just the scientists, the engineers, but the artists, the philosophers, the musicians, the people who communicate the beauty and the wonder and kind of challenge our place in the universe, even people of faith. Like how do we position ourselves, you know, in relationship to the universe? I think we're ready as a civilization to kind of take that next step. I do because if an alien civilization came over and be like they're a backwater planet with tribal warfare, that's basically their position, you know view of a. So if we can rise above that, I think, if we can start to kind of you know, that's the whole purpose of this podcast. This show is like how do we kind of become a multi-planetary species? How do we reach for the stars? So, I think, you know, to be alive, you know, like our children, you know they're going to grow up with this. It's not going to kind of loop itself into oh, here's the big wave and now we're done.
Speaker 2:Mars, like the apollo, like apollo 17, was it, and there was no need to go back or battle. Or, you know, with the cold war, no, I think people, not just the, the economic advantage of it, but just the, the, the, just the massive opportunities to to, you know, have careers in it and just to do unique things with it. So that's, that would be my, it's my advice. So hopefully that that's good. So, um, well, that's a great way to kind of wrap things, I think. I think the best thing to do is always how do people, you know, and I've been on your discord. Got to mention that. That's fun. That's a lot of. I am on your discord. I am crazy Irish. Yes, I am on your discord. So, um, how do people upstate it up? Obviously they can get soonish. You know a city on mars. Like, how do they stay up with your work? Both of you, you have lots of different shows. You have a lot of different things. You're doing?
Speaker 3:uh I I have a go ahead, I have a website uh, wienersmithcom, and uh I. My new podcast, daniel and kelly's extraordinary universe, comes out every every Tuesday and Thursday, and that is taking most of my time right now. What about you, zach?
Speaker 4:I draw a comic called SMBC. It's on the usual platforms. I have a website and Instagram, et cetera, and in addition to our space books, I wrote a. I worked on a graphic novel called Open Borders, which is a position book on immigration, and a kid's book called Beewolf, which is an adaptation of Beowulf, the old English poem.
Speaker 3:For kids.
Speaker 4:For kids.
Speaker 2:Without all the gory stuff.
Speaker 4:No scattered gore in the meat hall.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I read it in high school. I'm like, yeah, I don't think I would give that to my son at seven and a half. He probably would love it though, because it's you know. But that's great. That's great, and the Discord which you can find on your website if you wanted to kind of join the community there. It's a great, it's a fun, fun community. So thank you both for being on the show today. It's been great.
Speaker 1:I'll have a lot of fun. So thank you for the time today. Yeah, great question. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks, thanks for listening to the off-world podcast. You can find us on all the major podcast platforms and at wwwoffworldpodcastcom. See you next time.
