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Can We Survive on Mars? Hot Tips with Zach Weinersmith
4k Plays6 months ago
In this conversation, Autumn Phaneuf and Zach Weinersmith discusses his new book, A City on Mars, which takes a humorous look at the challenges of building a Martian society. He explores the misconceptions and myths surrounding space settlement and the feasibility of colonizing Mars. He argues that space is unlikely to make anyone rich and that the idea that space will mitigate war is unsupported. He also discusses the potential benefits and limitations of settling on the Moon and Mars, as well as the technical challenges involved.
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A City on Mars, space settlement, Mars colonization, misconceptions, myths, feasibility, space myths, space economics, war, Moon settlement, technical challenges, logistics, math.
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Transcript
Introduction to Breaking Math and Mars Discussion
00:00:16
Speaker
Greetings space cadets and math nerds alike. Welcome back to Breaking Math podcast where numbers get real and existential dread. That's maybe if you're ready to discover a new planet and talk about something with definite liftoff like taking a rocket ship to Mars and some space travel. What? Yes, space travel.
00:00:39
Speaker
Now, I'm your host, Autumn Fenaf, and today we're going to be diving into some cute, quirky, logistical content about Mars in part one of this two-part series, joined with Zach Rainer-Smith to chat about his new book, A City on Mars.
00:00:55
Speaker
Before we dive into this episode, if you're looking for the best way to support us and continue our work on breaking math is to donate on our Patreon. You can go to patreon.com slash breaking math and give us a buck or five, and maybe we can create something together. Let us know. What do you think? We'd love to have feedback from the community and work with you more.
Meet Zach Wienersmith: Webcomic Creator and Author
00:01:22
Speaker
Now today we are joined with Zach Wienersmith, a cartoonist and writer best known for his wildly popular webcomic Saturday morning breakfast cereal. He's a man of many hats though. Beyond Saturday morning breakfast cereal, he's created other webcomics, co-hosts, the science podcasts, and even written a few books. His latest book, A City on Mars, takes a humorous
00:01:48
Speaker
look at the challenges of building a Martian society. This isn't surprising considering that Zach loves to infuse science in his work.
00:02:02
Speaker
His latest book, A City on Mars, takes a humorous look at the challenges of building a Martian society. This isn't surprising considering Zach loves to infuse science with witness work. If you enjoy quirky humor and a good dose of where science meets punchlines, you quite often know that Zach isn't always a lone wolf.
Challenges of Building a Martian Society
00:02:24
Speaker
He's part of a dynamic science duo with his wife, Kelly.
00:02:28
Speaker
She's a biologist with a resume that boasts parasite research and holds a faculty position at Rice University. Together, they co-author witty science books like the New York Times bestseller Soonish and now their latest book, A City on Mars. They've even teamed up for a science podcast, the weekly Wiener Smith. So buckle up for a science adventure with Zach and me and dive deep into the nitty-gritty building of a Martian society.
00:02:57
Speaker
Now, think red tape and resource scarcity and the ever present existential dread of colonizing another planet. Basically, the relatable stuff for any office worker, right? Now, we're going to be dissecting the science, the humor, and the question of whether humanity can actually build a sustainable Mars without succumbing to the logistical nightmares. Now, Zach, how are you doing today? Super jazz for you to be here.
00:03:28
Speaker
I'm crazy, but everyone's crazy in the post COVID era, so it's not special anymore. I think that that is so true. Everyone went from always thinking out and about to everybody's at home.
00:03:45
Speaker
Yeah, and doing their own thing. So it changes on the day to day. That's right. That's right. So tell us a little bit about yourself for our listeners beyond.
00:04:02
Speaker
Sure. I'm, I guess I write books and I draw pictures and relevant to this conversation. My wife Kelly and I wrote, my wife's like a distinguished scientist. She's not just, and we wrote a book on space settlement. The very short version of it is, is it was a four year research project that
00:04:24
Speaker
first two years, the assumption we were working on was that it was going to be a sort of very pro space settlement. Here's what comes next sort of book. And the just sort of piece by piece became clear that that wasn't the picture that, broadly speaking, the feasibility, a lot of the stuff is misrepresented in media and by famous people with lots of money and that there may be even some aspects of it that would be undesirable even if we could do it. And so it became a very, very different book, not necessarily a pessimistic one, but let's say a more realistic one.
00:04:54
Speaker
I love your little disclaimer at the beginning and like the amount of salt. You're like, yes, we're pro-bar settlement. And then it goes, wait, but there's a lot of problems that's going on. So much. Yeah, disappointing. Right?
00:05:11
Speaker
You don't think about what we feel really privileged living on earth and you kind of talk about that narration between being on earth versus even the moon. Yeah. One of my favorite sort of nerd intellectual games to bring up to give you a little sense of the scope is like if you had a budget of like say a trillion dollars
00:05:33
Speaker
Could you make earth as bad as mars? Like you're just trying to absolutely devastate earth so it couldn't harbor life of any like familiar kind I don't think you could do it. Um, it's that awful on mars. Yeah, so Let's talk about that right so you had like eight big points that you brought up. Yes Well, let's let's delve into that a little bit so
00:05:59
Speaker
We're talking about how are we going to save humanity for where we're going to end up on Mars? Is this really going to be our new home? Yeah. One thing we would call space myths. Space has a kind of interesting history where if you talk to someone in the early part of the 20th century, it's like pure fantasy. It's like talking about werewolves or something, the idea that we go to the moon.
00:06:21
Speaker
And then all of a sudden, in a very brief period, it becomes very, very real and kind of scary because the route to it is through missiles. And I think we're kind of still dealing with the fallout of
00:06:35
Speaker
Well, a little bit literally, the fallout, but we went so quickly from nothing to guys on the moon that if you look back at books from the 70s, there's a really deep belief that all sorts of things are about to change immediately. Kind of like how we feel about AI right now, I think. Only, I don't know what will happen with AI, but in the case of space expansion,
00:06:58
Speaker
For a variety of reasons, it just didn't happen. There's, I think, a myth that it was down to like, well, the US, we lost our nerve and we should have kept investing. It's like, oh no, I think we have kept investing. We would have still been a very marginal program, just because space is just much harder than expected. All
Debunking Space Wealth Myths
00:07:13
Speaker
the analogies to it being like the American frontier or the age of exploration won't do.
00:07:18
Speaker
And so in that time since, people have wanted a justification, a reason that this is a good idea. And I think a lot of sort of uplifting but basically incorrect ideas have sprouted in that gap. So for example,
00:07:34
Speaker
It's widespread belief among a lot of space people that something called the overview effect is true. And the idea of the overview effect is you go to space and you look at Earth and you see that thin blue ribbon of atmosphere and you realize we're all fragile and beautiful and you don't see borders and you care more about the Earth or whatever it is. There's just no good evidence for it. It's a beautiful idea. It's obviously in some trivial sense true that if you go to space, many astronauts remark on this that it's a kind of deeply moving experience.
00:08:00
Speaker
There's no evidence that astronauts become even better people morally. There are plenty of biographical pieces of evidence to the contrary. I could go down the line on this. I don't want to ramble on about it, but we have to go through. Big topics that we really want to delve into is, will this make us rich? Yeah, make us rich.
00:08:25
Speaker
how we are going about our ecosystem right now, capitalism. Capitalism is the only thing that's going to get us there.
00:08:40
Speaker
regardless of your sort of political leaning, space is almost certainly not going to make anyone rich, not even a billionaire who needs more billions. You know, usually when we talk about this question, space will make us rich. There's a couple of particular things people mention. So an example of space-based solar power, the idea is you have these like huge photovoltaic arrays, they beam energy down to earth and we use it. And I won't get into the, I guess this is a math show, maybe I should get into details, but like,
00:09:20
Speaker
Please do.
00:09:36
Speaker
right now you can offset that of course because there's more solar energy hitting you and there's no clouds and there's no night so you're getting more energy per area but like because you start so far in the hole and it's so cheap to put up a panel in like Arizona the numbers just don't stack and then the other thing that people don't consider which which even like if you talk to some pretty hardcore space geeks they'll point this out as a serious problem which is that
00:09:59
Speaker
You know, if you're a scientist, well, let me put it this way. If you look at the ISS, it's very big. A lot of what you're looking at, I'm sorry, the International Space Station for people to know, if you look at it like you could pull it up on Wikipedia, a lot of what you're looking at is radiators, just things to dump heat. And you might say, but space is cold.
00:10:15
Speaker
And it turns out, though, when you're floating in void, there's not a lot to dump heat into, right? Like, so a blacksmith has a pool of water, even though they're surrounded by atmosphere that they could technically dump heat into. But you need those molecules to pull the heat away. So it's actually quite hard to dump heat in space. So you have to imagine you have a black solar photovoltaic surface always facing the sun.
00:10:35
Speaker
It's going to have to have a vast radiation system that you don't require on Earth. And all of this is going to have to be maintained by some means, either by astronauts floating around or fancy robots, because space is not empty. It's filled with radiation, but also high speed, like micrometeorites, not to mention the occasional larger object.
00:10:53
Speaker
And all this for like, you know, a moderate improvement in the amount of energy by the time you beam it all back to Earth. So I could go on, but basically the numbers don't add up. Other ideas are asteroid mining. Asteroids, it just turns out, are much harder to mine than you would think. And so it's like six months to get to them. Most of them are like loose agglomerations. They're not like balls of platinum, as you may have heard. They're not like Star Wars where they're even like nice potato-y rocks. They're quite sparse, actually. Star Wars notwithstanding, if you're on one asteroid, you probably can't see another.
00:11:22
Speaker
And so the idea that we're going to use these for vast wealth on Earth, it's pretty questionable. There are other claims, but the deep thing, to throw some numbers on this, we're talking to a developmental economist, and he pointed out to us, like, when we had sent him a draft of this, like, by the way, the World Bank has a report out, and if you look at wealth, which is kind of measure of total assets of countries,
00:11:44
Speaker
I think it was two and a half percent of all human wealth is in natural resources. And 90% of that is fossil fuels which don't exist in space. And so there's this idea probably stretching back deeply in history to when it was more true that most of human well-being, most of human wealth is about having access to stuff. And of course, we all feel this when we go get gasoline. But actually, the total amount of wealth you have is much more about technology, ideas, people.
00:12:10
Speaker
even granting that there's a lot of value that you could potentially get one day to profit in the asteroids, it's not what's going to make us rich compared to something like huge new developments in AI or plasma confinement or other spacey stuff. Absolutely. I can see that, especially where the climate on Mars, the really decent byproducts will be water and methane.
00:12:34
Speaker
Right. Yeah, exactly. So you can say, you know, if like you had a magic genie who could just instantly put a million people in some sort of sustainable habitat on Mars, then all sorts of stuff would be worth it for their economy. But obviously, it's not worth it for us to go somewhere to collect water or like carbon or nitrogen or the typical things talked about as valuable in asteroids.
00:12:54
Speaker
Definitely. What about when we're going into, this is new airspace. We're looking at nations fighting over space. What's going to end or at least mitigate war?
Space Exploration and Human Nature Myths
00:13:08
Speaker
Yeah, that's a big question. There are two parts of this, and I don't know how much of a tangent it should go on. Go for it.
00:13:16
Speaker
Okay, great, yeah. So the first thing, which is, I think, trivial but really important to state, which is that there is no good evidence that anything we might do in space will mitigate war. This is a very common claim that you hear by space people, and there are a couple variants on it. So one is we'll all get rich and then stop doing war.
00:13:33
Speaker
You talk to war scholars, you read the correlates of war literature and increase in wealth. It's at least like not clear that it mitigates war. And in fact, some people believe it does the opposite. I mean, it's hard to know. It's context dependent. But the joke we had is like, you know, that's counterintuitive. Imagine you have a room with 100 people in it. You throw a bunch of gold in the middle of it. Do you expect violence to decrease? And that's the intuition, but it's at least not obvious that wealth will stop war. Another claim, which my mind is bizarre, but I hear it a lot. It's in a number of books by space people.
00:14:02
Speaker
is that access to additional land will mitigate war. And the essential claim is, well, war is about land possession. And therefore, if there's more land, we'll stop fighting, which is, you know, so it is true that, of course, war necessarily involves territorial claims. And in fact, you can just look at Ukraine when, like, a war seems to be largely senseless unless you imagine there's a kind of like humans as apes desire for a certain chunk of land in particular, or Israel and Palestine being maybe the definitive example that most people think about.
00:14:30
Speaker
But you could see how absurd this is if someone said to you, well, what if we just said to everybody in Ukraine, well, hey, you can have a Ukraine-sized chunk of Antarctica, right? Or you can have a Ukraine-sized chunk of the Yukon or something. Obviously, they're not going for that because war is about particular territory. Another good example of that, which I don't know if we got into,
00:14:50
Speaker
You look at the history of the American West when mostly white settlers were allowed to essentially just dispossess land from Native Americans. You had this huge swath of land where people were allowed, well, not people, white men were allowed to just grab chunks of land for almost free. That led to war because it led to status disputes about having free or slave states.
00:15:14
Speaker
So there's just no good evidence that access to territory or access to capital eliminates war. There's one other claim sometimes made, which I think should simply be dismissed, which is something like that space will just be so unbelievably awesome that people will be like, why did we ever do war? Now they're in the awesomeness of space, which is just expecting humans to behave better because they're in a setting that's comparable to a submarine in a hostile death planet. Seems unlikely. So much for war. I mean, I could get into the legal stuff, but maybe we want to save that for later.
00:15:43
Speaker
Absolutely, but you look at this, why is this such a natural human urge to just go and explore? That's not going to really solve anything, is it? Right. No, I don't think so. To be clear, there's all sorts of good uses for space, like satellites for data transmission are awesome, they help us and they're good money. It's the second thing which is trying to build an independent civilization
00:16:07
Speaker
on Mars, there's a desire for there to be some return investment for it, I think, because it's just so objectively awesome. And I fully can see that it is absolutely the coolest thing I can imagine, or it's the least up there, but so there's a desire to glom on a kind of economic or even a sort of philosophical case for it, and usually the case is quite weak.
00:16:27
Speaker
For any of these cases so far, it does not unify us, and it really does not make us any wiser. No, I wish it did. I mean, like I said, I'm sure it's a transcendent, beautiful, magical experience, but I've read enough astronaut memoirs. I am waiting for the grand philosophical tome. The new Buddha from space has not arrived, and I don't anticipate they will. No, waiting to hear from some of the people that I know at NASA. I know that's going to be like, uh-oh.
00:16:56
Speaker
Uh-oh, yeah, sorry. I did read a lot of memoirs.
00:17:00
Speaker
I mean, I've only got to name, without saying her name, because I don't want to get into stuff, but the one astronaut who tried to maybe murder her ex-boyfriend, who's also an astronaut, murder his new girlfriend. She was an astronaut. That was after going to space. Yeah, this is a big media story, and I think it's since been sort of resolved, and so I don't want to make fun of someone who had clearly a psychological upset and seems to have been fine since. But the idea that sort of-
00:17:30
Speaker
Yeah, there's other bad behavior, infidelity, all sorts of addiction problems, you know, sexism. It didn't go away with all these people going to space. That society, that's human nature as a whole. Right. Yeah, I think there's just such a desire for space to be different. I think, you know, you talk about capitalism, a lot of the fantasies for space do involve a kind of like rugged frontier fantasy capitalism, like the earth is bureaucratic and monocultural and we want to get away and start over.
00:17:59
Speaker
There are also left-wing versions of that. They're in my experience rarer, but they do exist. They're just like, well, we could leave it all behind. We could leave behind corporations and this obsession with money and stuff. If you don't think you can do that on Earth, it's hard to imagine why a space civilization which would for maybe centuries be highly dependent on the home planet could do that. Even if we believe somehow human nature could be altered.
00:18:32
Speaker
Yeah, totally, no, 100%. You know, I mean, you know, Space Food, we actually, you know, we originally, we had like a 7,000 word treatment on Space Food. We should publish it at some point. We were made to cut it down. It would have been like 10% of the books is about Space Food. But there's like a wonderfully rich history of, like, I know the curators, Cecil Weir Harmony, she wrote a wonderful book called Operation Moomglow, but she also is in charge of the collection that like includes the fruitcake Armstrong didn't eat. We still have it.
00:18:45
Speaker
I mean, thinking about that, like, people are still dependent on getting packages when going to space stations, right?
00:19:05
Speaker
It's like that seat in Indiana Jones where they have the Ark of the Company, but we have the uneaten fruitcake of Armstrong, you know. Okay. Okay. That is good to know. I would like to take a whole sample of that if it were to take the book. I would publish a book with all of the illustrations on the side. Oh, totally. That's titled Fruit Cakes and Other Food.
00:19:31
Speaker
Fruitcakes. It is interesting. This gets into talking about how bad it is in ways you don't think. Part of why you would have fruitcake. I don't know in specific why fruitcake other than it being the 60s and it being a bad time for cuisine in general.
00:19:47
Speaker
but like part of what's going on is you don't want crumbs in space so they would pick low crumb foods and then like package them in bites you know because you just crumbs floating around in the interiors is a good way to mess up your your your hardware so there's a lot of food choices oriented around that problem
00:20:02
Speaker
Yep. So, extremely dense chocolate cake. Totally. The Russians kind of do that. I mean, it's not chocolate cake. They have this... I don't know if this ended up in the book, so I had to cut a lot of stuff, but they have... So Americans eat tortillas in space. That's our preferred bread. It's a low from... And it's also like an edible plate, right? Yeah. Since the 80s, that's what we use.
00:20:21
Speaker
And in Russia, though, I guess they don't like tortillas. I don't know. They have something called barbie bites, meaning it's some bread that's been engineered to just be a super low crumb, like black bread, and they have it in bites. So you can get your bread fix, but it's done in such a way that it's safe for the equipment. That is very interesting. Yeah, yeah, I know. A heavy, dense pumpernickel. That's always what I imagined. I always imagined a super horribly thick... I like pumpernickel, but I don't know. There are limits.
00:20:51
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely agree. But thinking about that, not just the food, not just all of the other stuff, what are the good cases?
Potential for Lunar and Martian Settlements
00:21:02
Speaker
Well, the way I'd say it, if you must, if the goal is to have a settlement, or we could even just say some kind of permanent human presence in space. The way we like to say it is space is very large, you may have heard. Really?
00:21:18
Speaker
but the actual places you go are extremely limited, substantially smaller than the surface of the Earth. So the two located, the only really serious locations, like there are other places that people get into, Venus probably that takes third place, but the really serious locations are the moon and Mars. And then after that, you could add rotating space stations that are like basically built spaceships in like a Lagrange point.
00:21:40
Speaker
But so, you know, we have a whole detailed treatment of the stuff in the book. The basic deal on the moon, the moon kind of sucks. It's very dead. It's got no atmosphere. The surface is like, well, I won't say toxic. It's made of what's called regolith, which if you put it under microscope, it looks like tiny knives. You know, it hasn't had water running over it or wind or anything for eons. And so it's just like short rocks and glass. Not great.
00:22:02
Speaker
And what's it got going for it though? Well, the main thing is that it is close and it is low gravity. So the common claim, which I think is at least sort of in a physics sense true, is that if you could get rockets to launch from the moon, like one day build rockets on site. I don't actually have the numbers in front of me, but so like, if you look at rocket on earth going just to low earth orbit, it's something like 3% payload and 97% stuff you historically have thrown away with SpaceX, some of it gets kept.
00:22:30
Speaker
Actually, most of it, something like 80% is propellant, just the propellant that gets burned up on the way up. On the Moon, with the low gravity, you can do a lot better. The way I like to say it is, like, on Earth, essentially, we can just barely get to space. Like, if things were just a little tweaked, we couldn't do it, or at least it'd be really hard. We can just barely do it, but you can only put, like, a teeny tip of the rocket into space, whereas on the Moon, you can do a lot more, because it's one-sixth gravity and no atmosphere slowing you down.
00:22:51
Speaker
The problem is that's going to be just really hard. A very frequent claim, you'll see this in the media a lot, is that we're going to do moon mining. The problem is there's nothing worth mining on the moon. I could go into detail, we do in the book, but basically know if there were bars of gold sitting on the moon to quote someone we quote in the book, it would not be worth it to go get them. And there is not something like that.
00:23:09
Speaker
So the only claim you sometimes hear that at least rings a little more plausibly is there are certain places on the moon that have water reserves in the form of very, very, very cold ice, places that never see the sun on the moon. So like, you know, this is not how it always works, but just to get your intuition going, if you imagine like a hunk of ice smacks
00:23:28
Speaker
into the moon's surface, most of that gets lost to space, but some of it will happen to plop into the rim of a certain type of crater and get trapped, because it's just so cold. And over many, many, many, many, many years, much longer than humans have been around, that accumulates into water. And often in articles, this is talked about, articles and speeches by Jeff Bezos, this is talked about as if it's a lot of water, but it's in fact very limited and absolutely finite. It's about as much as a small lake, and then it's gone.
00:23:58
Speaker
So the thought is, well, if you know your chemistry, you could get this water, break it into hydrogen and oxygen, which are some very good fuel and oxidizer for rockets and have other useful purposes for energy storage. And so maybe you could use it as a kind of gas station. And like I said, the problem is the amount of gas ups is pretty limited. And it's especially limited when you consider that most people would also like to use that water for drinking.
00:24:19
Speaker
Showers would be nice. Oxygen is something we like to breathe. Spacekicks will sometimes push back and say, well, we ran the numbers and if you get perfect efficiency, you can get some very high number of shuttle launches. But you have to remember that we actually have to triple, double, quadruple book this stuff because we need the water for lots of other purposes. And also you can't assume high efficiency. So that's the moon. Not great, but it has that going for it. There would be a good stepping stone elsewhere. Like we are going to do Mars. You want to start by proving you can do stuff on the moon.
00:24:46
Speaker
Mars six months to get there or longer doesn't the window isn't always open you have to wait till it's the right position with respect to the earth unless you're imagining in some future date we have like fusion drives or something right the main the main upside of Mars is it does have the complete set of elements we want Mars doesn't like Mars for example is low in carbon which is what we are made of
00:25:03
Speaker
You can't just make it on site, it requires stellar processes to get more. So you got what you got. Mars has carbon, actually it's in the atmosphere, which, though very thin, has carbon dioxide. Normally we don't like breathing thin pure carbon dioxide, but it does mean you have carbon and oxygen and they're just there for the taking if you have the right equipment.
00:25:21
Speaker
Also, water is fairly available by space standards on Mars, both at the poles, and if you dig down enough further down, the temperatures are fairly moderate, again, by space standards. They're actually temperate Earth in equatorial regions, although the idea of temperature gets a little weird when you're talking about 1% Earth pressure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, all the stuff is there.
00:25:41
Speaker
So if you want to talk about a place you could, at least in theory, in a kind of chemistry sense, have a permanent civilization that could survive the death of Earth, Mars is basically it. Other planets have the elemental buffet you'd like, like people talk about Venus, but Venus is like 90 times Earth pressure at the surface, it's hot enough to melt lead, there's like part of its problems, and everywhere else is substantially worse. And then you get to rotating space stations, so like
00:26:06
Speaker
Super cool. Clearly the most awesome visuals ever created for space are these like Tusken suburbs, Tusken Villa style suburbs and rotating toroids. It's just so cool. But like it's essentially space on a hard mode. If you count nothing else, you have to consider that you have to deliver mass to a lagrange point on the order of millions of tons. And so that requires you to already master all sorts of processes elsewhere. So why you would just
00:26:28
Speaker
not sit on the mass, like on the moon or something. I've never understood. And then there are kind of like, you know, non-trivial technical challenges. So for example, you know, if you're in a rotating wheel and it's unbalanced, you know, if you've ever operated a centrifuge, you know that's bad, or a washing machine for that matter.
00:26:47
Speaker
And so the typical proposal is to have some kind of ballast shifting system. So you could shift weights or even like water with hydraulic pumps. So if everybody goes to the Taylor Swift concert on one side, you're okay. You don't have to all die because everyone went to that side. So there are ways to overcome this, but that's just to give a kind of insight into the deep technical challenges. So it's kind of space settlement on hard mode. The only argument for it, we think, is if
00:27:14
Speaker
You know, we don't, no human has ever been up in space for longer than 437 days consecutively. So if there's like deep health problems that emerged beyond say three, four, five years or longer, that you need full G, you know, foremost among them, we think problems with reproduction, we don't know anything hardly about it. If you really need that full one G, then space, rotating space wheels or trying to live in the atmosphere of Venus, which as we said is a bad idea, those are the only games in town, town being the solar system. So that would be the case for it, but there's not a good case otherwise.
00:27:43
Speaker
So thinking about that, like where you live, you have all of these torrid shades. Yes. How are they packing them? How are they getting that up there? Like I did origami for here.
00:27:59
Speaker
Um, for research. So thinking about how to do just like solar panels on the space station, it's like, it's a rotated Miriam map full. How are they actually getting this up there?
00:28:14
Speaker
Well, yeah, so as we said, you can just barely launch from Earth, right? So even at the drastically dropped price, even if you assume like Starship, which is this new giant vehicle by SpaceX, if you assume their claim that it'll get the price of launch down to like 10 kilogram, or I'm sorry, $10 per kilogram, they're claiming to low Earth orbit, although presumably much more to
Logistics of Space Construction
00:28:33
Speaker
non-trivially more, let's say to a Lagrange point or wherever else. So you try to imagine, that's pretty non-trivially expensive. If you want to launch everything from earth, nevermind whatever environmental costs you're willing to incur, but the sheer number of launches requires. Oh, so for reference, like the biggest rocket ever, the Saturn 5, I think could have delivered to low earth orbit, something on the order. Oh, I hope I'm not switching pounds for kilograms. I want to say a hundred tons. I don't have it in front of me. It's about how much you could get to low earth orbit. So a fairly small one of these rotating space stations, you want to like millions of tons.
00:29:02
Speaker
So it's a pretty big scale. So very few people would say launch from Earth. I actually don't know anyone seriously who would say that because you have to get this mass. So the alternatives are usually said to be the moon or asteroids. So on the moon, the way this would work is you build what's called a mass driver, which is a sort of maglev train that just kind of goes up and then the track just stops. And so you would kind of just have a system that uses energy to fire stuff into space in like maybe containers. And then somewhere there's essentially a large catcher's mitt.
00:29:33
Speaker
a large sort of funnel that gets this stuff and by means that are not always specified converts it into suburbs which is a tall order but you know the reason that fantasy is made plausible or at least not entirely crazy is the ideas you have basically unlimited energy from the sun which you know we could debate but okay but assume you do then then maybe you could do a lot of stuff of course we never do this on earth we don't just like if you want to build a house you don't say I need some massive sub-kind right but
00:29:57
Speaker
But, you know, there are problems with that. So the moon is like high in like silicon and aluminum and magnesium. It's very low in carbon. So you'd have to get some ash from elsewhere so you can go to the asteroid belt. But you see how this is becoming enormously complex. But of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are kind of like
00:30:14
Speaker
Intermediate ways you could do it like like essentially you can get the 1g by any Rotational surface since you know for math people write you so it doesn't have to be a toroid towards your clue But like it could be a cylinder it can even be a sphere though you know that would create some weirdness or it could even be like Objects on a tether to each other that are spinning around a center of mass Which would be nice because at least in principle it could be stretched although I I would say at least for me personally I find that a little creepy the idea that it's kind of stretching and bending But I guess maybe you can get materials that are have enough specific strength to endure that
00:30:47
Speaker
Yeah, right, right, right. There are people who have worked this out in details. Some of us might say not enough detail on the day-to-day aspects. But yeah, it's like none of this is forbidden by physics, which is why it is very tempting. For the moment, it seems pretty forbidden by economics, but the fantasy is permitted.
00:31:11
Speaker
Now, we're short for time, folks. Thanks for joining us on another mind-bending episode of Breaking Math. Want to keep the equations flowing in the Existential Dread F.A.? Here's where to find us. We're on all major podcast platforms, so just search for Breaking Math.
00:31:27
Speaker
You can follow us on social media for exclusive content, terrible jokes, and the occasional existential meltdown. So on Twitter, we're on BreakingMathPod, Instagram Reels, BreakingMathMedia, and BreakingMath on Patreon, and pretty much everywhere else. If you want to support Zach, you can find him illustrating Saturday morning breakfast cereal, and on Twitter, as Zach Weiner. And if you want to find me,
00:31:57
Speaker
You can find me on most major platforms at one autumn underscore leaf. Sometimes it doesn't have the underscore, but sometimes it does. And if you're feeling particularly studious, check out our website at breakingmath.io for bonus content, blog posts, and maybe even a dog picture or two.
00:32:22
Speaker
Don't tell my co-host Gabe that there will be a dedicated page on the website for fans to submit pictures of their pets. That's going to be coming out very shortly. So until next time, stay curious, stay skeptical, and for goodness sake, do not leave for Mars just yet.