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Can We Survive on Mars? Hot Tips with Zach Weinersmith (Part 2)
3.7k Plays5 months ago
In this conversation, Autumn Phaneuf interviews Zach Weinersmith, a cartoonist and writer, about the feasibility and implications of space settlement. They discuss the challenges and misconceptions surrounding space colonization, including the idea that it will make us rich, mitigate war, and make us wiser. They explore the potential of the moon and Mars as settlement options, as well as the concept of rotating space stations. They also touch on the physiological effects of space travel and the need for further research in areas such as reproduction and ecosystem design. The conversation explores the challenges and implications of human settlement in space. It discusses the lack of data on the long-term effects of space travel on the human body, particularly for women. The conversation also delves into the need for a closed-loop ecosystem for sustainable space settlement and the legal framework surrounding space exploration and resource extraction. The main takeaways include the importance of addressing reproductive and medical challenges, the need for a better legal regime, and the debunking of misconceptions about space settlement.
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A City on Mars, Keywords space settlement, feasibility, challenges, misconceptions, moon, Mars, rotating space stations, reproduction, ecosystem design, space settlement, human reproduction, closed-loop ecosystem, space law, resource extraction, logistics, math.
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Transcript
Building a Society on Mars
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome back to Breaking Math. The podcast for numbers are imaginary and we have the opportunity to explore another planet, Mars to be exact. I'm your host, Autumn FNAF, and today we're diving into part two of A City on Mars, where we're getting into the nitty-gritty of building a Martian society.
00:00:37
Speaker
In this episode, we're here to talk about everything from the biology to space politics with the authors at William & Mary Smith, the mind behind the wildly popular webcomic Saturday morning breakfast cereal, where science meets punchlines.
Supporting the Podcast
00:00:53
Speaker
If you like our content, consider supporting us at Breaking Math for future episodes. You can subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com slash Breaking Math for a dollar. You end up getting the episodes ad-free.
00:01:08
Speaker
We're also looking for hot new topics and potential new guests on the show. If you're interested in connecting with us or giving us an intro to someone that you know and think would be a really awesome person on the show, feel free to fill out the form below in the description or email us at breakingmathpodcastatgmail.com. Now let's take a moment to listen to our sponsors.
Challenges of Reproduction in Space
00:01:37
Speaker
So if we're thinking about this and we're looking at the whole ecosystem there, think of what what is like the repercussions of us from planting all the way to actually building a population. If you assume
00:01:54
Speaker
Say it this way like say the starship is working the rockets are flying ass to space is is a if not a solve problem a much easier problem What what's left we argue there's essentially two big hurdles Which are reproduction?
00:02:11
Speaker
and ecosystem design. So let's talk about human reproduction. I'll keep it PG-13. So the first thing to know about space is it reliably, rapidly produces all sorts of physiological problems for people in space. It degrades bone density in your hips at a rate of something like 1% per month. Let me emphasize per month, right? So you might say, per month, why do astronauts not end up like that Harry Potter spell where your bones disappear?
00:02:36
Speaker
There might be some upper limit, but we haven't found it yet. So like I said, the longest trip to space ever was Poliakov in 93 to 94. He was up 4 in 37 days. Down from that, I think it's about a year and I think something like six people have been up for more than 300 days. And so we don't have really good longitudinal day. I think that the largest total for an individual is on the order of like a little under 900 days.
00:02:59
Speaker
So we really don't know a lot. We're missing a lot, but we do know it's really bad for your bones, very bad for muscles. It's considered very impressive. If after a few months in space, you can come home and walk. Didn't they also do a twin experiment that parallels that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Kelly brothers. Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Mark and Scott Kelly, one is a senator, one is an astronaut. They're a very impressive family. I'm sorry. No, the astronaut is also a senator. Let me not, let me not. I don't want to get this mixed up. I've got it mixed up by Kelly's.
00:03:29
Speaker
Yeah, so you have a twin state, which is nice for space. So one is up for a year and one's just down on Earth, which is, you know, for real science, you'd rather have more controls than one to one, but they're twins, that's pretty cool. Yeah, so what's a little scary about that is my understanding from that study is there are even equivocal concerns about, meaning the data is equivocal, it's hard to know for sure, but about cognitive effects.
00:03:52
Speaker
So meaning like there might be some sort of cognitive decline having to do with space.
Health Challenges in Space
00:03:56
Speaker
People have talked about having a kind of brain fog from doing space. The problem is we don't know. It's obviously quite stressful to be in space, both physiologically and just sort of in the usual sense of stress. But also, yeah, I mean, all sorts of weird stuff is having your body. You get bacterial loads that are different from the ones you get on Earth, reliably there is damage to vision, which could actually just be an indicator of other nerve damage. We don't know.
00:04:17
Speaker
You're also getting hit by more and different types of radiation than you tend to get on Earth. You're breathing an atmosphere that's actually quite different. So people think if you go to space, you're breathing an atmosphere that's kind of like Earth. It's actually like an Earth. We don't breathe a lot of carbon dioxide. It's a couple hundred parts per million in space. It's about 1%. And people complain about headaches from that.
00:04:35
Speaker
because it's just hard to scrub all that carbon. There may also be micro effects, so one thing we do with space equipment is we check it for outgassing, right? So when you buy, we get a package from Amazon, you open it, maybe there's a little kind of weird plasticy chemically smell, but who cares? Yeah, it goes out into the atmosphere or whatever. In space, that stuff gets, you know, you're in a sealed system, so they have to check equipment for outgassing.
00:04:55
Speaker
even if it's at trivial levels. Right? So NASA keeps a document called, it's called SMACs that I will never remember. I think A is for atmosphere, but I get real what the SM and C are for. I'm bad with these things. But yeah, so essentially they say it's like, you know, the more, the longer you're in space, the more we require there to be earth-like levels of all sorts of chemicals.
00:05:12
Speaker
Um, and so, you know, I, we just, I've teamed this up for reproduction because my point is we really don't know what this does, but everyone who's been to space, almost everyone who's been to space has been a mature adult. So they have a mature adult body. By the way, just as a by the by, only about something like one in seven of those have been women. So we're even really lacking data on women in the longterm. And so.
00:05:34
Speaker
Is that historically accurate for everything, though? Oh, yes, no. It's one of the stakes, too, where it's just like, you know, it's like sexism is like, it keeps biting you because like, well, NASA is now, the astronaut classes are now highly integrated. It's about 50-50 boys and girls. But, you know, the first class that allowed women was 1978. It was not that long ago. You know, it was like, it was after Star Wars, right? So like really recent, and that was six out of 35.
00:06:00
Speaker
And none of them were, you know, the first pilot was Eileen Collins, I think in, would have been 94, I think. So, so, you know, so, so you, in that caveat supply that we don't have a lot of longitudinal or, or variety of bodies type of data for women, it's like times 10. And so when you, when you want to talk about, can we do human
Ethical Implications of Space Experiments
00:06:16
Speaker
reproduction space? We don't even know if we can do rat reproduction. We don't even know like, like we could do like duck reproduction, right? And so honestly, to have a permanent presence in space, that is like the sine qua non is that you can make babies on site.
00:06:27
Speaker
And one thing that's quite ominous, prima facie from all that stuff I just described, you would worry. When we add, we do have a kind of grab bag set of experiments on all sorts of lizards, geckos, frogs, fish, quail eggs, that show in many cases cell deformities, in one case stillbirth.
00:06:44
Speaker
Uh, or, or gigantism in an offspring. Some, some are really weird. We had cases where like, I can't remember what organisms, maybe lizards, where at one point they had unusually large heads, but then somehow it kind of reverted. So maybe it was okay. We've obviously never done this for like monkeys. In the case of rats, we've done like reproduction related experiments, but what you really want is mammals over generations.
00:07:04
Speaker
This often gets elided because I think when people are in a bar or something, they've had this babies in space conversation to the extent it goes on anywhere, but nerds are interested in this topic. It does happen. Rarely do they talk about the part where now that you have the baby, it has to develop into a being that can also have children.
00:07:25
Speaker
It has to endure all the stuff I just described, maybe somewhat mitigated if you're on Mars, where a lot of the effects are due to microgravity, but you're just going to have atmosphere issues, partial gravity, etc. We don't know. And so one thing I didn't mention about Mars, this is fairly recent stuff, that Mars' surface is about half percent to one percent per chlorate, thyroid hormone disrupting chemical.
00:07:47
Speaker
So that really works in everything from your evolution over potentials for reproduction just as a population. Just as a population, yeah. Yeah. So if you're growing up there, what's that going to look like?
00:08:03
Speaker
That is the deep question, and something that really frustrates us is you'll often get people who will say things like, we'll evolve because there's X constraint on us. Like, Mars has a lot of radiation, so we'll get radiation proof, which is like, one, just sort of biologically absurd, because you're not going to be walking around outside. You only get evolution if there's a differential survival rate for offspring.
00:08:22
Speaker
Right? So a much more likely case, for example, is if I were going to predict a type of evolution I would expect in space, it might be that there are some genotypes that, for example, under all the conditions described, experience a high rate of spontaneous abortion. And so you'll get a gene shift. But it's not obvious that you're going to get something like, some people will say, well, maybe we'll be tall on Mars because gravity is low. And it's like, this is just bizarre. We have no idea if that's going to happen. It could be the opposite. There could be some gravity deterministic process and gestation that does the exact opposite.
00:08:51
Speaker
We have no idea. You're dealing with fluid dynamics of your body. Absolutely. And you have that as a pressurized system. So. Yep. Yep. No, no, totally. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's unpredictable. It really depends. Like suppose we don't go to Mars for 200 years and we're like cyborg super advanced people. And so everyone, nobody's like exposed to anything bad. Then why would you expect any change in gene frequency?
00:09:12
Speaker
Right. So it just really depends. I think people need to think more deeply about this. But I would say in terms of like day to day life, I mean, it really just depends on one thing we advocate for is kind of waiting until more people can go at once. Right. So one thing that really creeps us out about these scenarios.
00:09:27
Speaker
is suppose you say, well, we'll start with a population of 100. You know, the population of 100, if one person can't work, that's 1% of your labor force is out, right? Yeah. And so one thing we talked about, like, if you have all these conditions, you should expect a higher than normal rate of people dealing with, say, physical or cognitive handicaps.
00:09:45
Speaker
You know, people who need help. People on Earth, we have a really wonderful ecosystem infrastructure to help these people. Many of us have complaints about
Mars Settlement Resources
00:09:52
Speaker
it, but it's surely better than if you were living in a hostile environment, like the equivalent of a submarine. And you will often find space advocates. We have three quotes from different people from different parts of this universe who say essentially we should let evolution take its course, whatever precisely that means to you. So meaning like to my mind, essentially saying we should create an ethically monstrous society because Mars is cool.
00:10:15
Speaker
And so that's why we advocate for going big, so at least then you can have division of labor to help these people. But so it's like this kind of ethical quagmire we're stepping into. And I like to think, you know, we've been accused of being too right leaning and too left leaning. To my mind, the idea of conducting a vast experiment on babies for no reason seems to be incentive of politics. That just seems like an ethical no-no.
00:10:39
Speaker
And I would also say, like I said, we have quotes from people who are saying this out loud, who are saying, well, we'll change our ethical standards, or we'll change what counts as valuable as human life. They're just saying it out loud. At that point, it comes down to, is it science? Is it religion? Is it huge topics for us for evolution? Is it going to be an orphan black scenario where we
00:11:00
Speaker
That's what I think. Like I said, we wrap a lot of fantasies around space about a more sort of beautiful, awesome civilization. And we're saying from the beginning, you're going to be saying people who can't pull their weight because of defects they were born with because you put them here. It's okay to do away with them.
00:11:17
Speaker
I hope, obviously, ethically monstrous. It's not like, you're a big wimp with your being anti my cool Davy Crockett frontier. It's just obviously terrible. If it can be avoided, it should. That brings us full circle to you. You would ask what the research impediments are. Nothing is being spent on this comparatively.
00:11:37
Speaker
like NASA has like small programs, Joe speaking historically, the agencies around the world have been very squeamish, not unreasonably, because nobody wants to go before Congress and be like, we're, we're doing experiments in human sexy times in space, you know, but that's what you need to know. Of course. Now, thinking, I'm just thinking about everything Apple said, like big picture, what
00:12:02
Speaker
What happens with everything from that to props to... Right, yeah, so the thing to understand, most likely to start
Learnings from Biosphere Experiments
00:12:11
Speaker
a solution. Supply chains. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, right, so, you know, a human being eats a lot. Not to mention, we also like changes of underwear and clothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we require a lot. There are different estimates for how much a human being needs for, say, a year, but it's on the order of tens of tons, right? It's non-trivial.
00:12:31
Speaker
so you know you would like to be able to grow crops right so cuz growing crops it's not just that it's a food source it's also a way to clean up water it's also a way to get materials it's also a way to get oxygen out of carbon dioxide which is especially cool on Mars
00:12:47
Speaker
People often imagine you'll have a glass dome. This is, in some sense, physically possible, and it would be kind of cool to get that solar power. The problem is you have basically zero pressure outside, so you can't just put up windows, right? And windstorms, right? Yes, and windstorms. I don't know. I haven't thought about that. The windstorms do get up to 60 to 100 miles per hour, but remember, the atmosphere is only 1%, so I actually don't know that that would be the biggest challenge if you had a big geodesic dome, especially considering how reinforced it would need to be for the glass to be there.
00:13:16
Speaker
But I don't know, I could be wrong, that's not easy physics for me to do in my head. But someone out there can come in with a calculation. Yeah, so you would ideally like to build a sealed ecosystem that could close the loop. So it's called closed loop ecology, the closed loop meaning like people create waste, the waste becomes plant life, the plant life becomes food, the food becomes waste. The loop is closed.
00:13:41
Speaker
And so obviously this is basically what we have on earth, not counting the input of the sun, but of course on these other surfaces, you'd want the sun's input too. We don't know a lot about how to do this. So there were a couple of Soviet experiments called BIOS. We talked about them in the sixties. They were not close to closed loop. They put in a lot of food. They were not trying to do a solid waste. I don't believe in any of them. The biggest one amply is Biosphere 2, which I'm finding people under about
00:14:07
Speaker
35 years old old remember biosphere 2 it's getting to where it's becoming old news and people don't know enough to explain it So in short you have 3.14 acres in Arizona. It's a giant greenhouse, but it's basically sealed That's not to say there's no gas exchange, but not on purpose So they claim it was tighter than the space shuttle which also leaks a little bit
00:14:25
Speaker
And the idea is that they were going to live off the land. And they basically did this for two years. There are some ways in which it wasn't completely closed. They got energy off the grid. Worth noting that they were basically starving by the end. At one point, they were running out of oxygen due to a glitch in the design of the system. So they had to have piped in oxygen. But they did basically do it. And it's worth noting that they did, despite a whole lot of stuff going wrong, that would have been, I think, fairly trivial to fix in round two. But there never was a round two due to financial mismanagement stuff. There was part of one.
00:14:54
Speaker
And so it's interesting, it's a good segue because we talked about the problem of pressure with building a dome. One thing that is not commonly known about biosphere, one of the features they had was called lungs. So these giant tunnels on the system that routed to these huge chambers with nothing in them but these sort of giant flexible surfaces. And that was because if you have a greenhouse that's sealed, it tends to get hotter on the inside than outside, you get a pressure difference and you're gonna crack your windows. So they have to have these huge pressure management systems.
00:15:21
Speaker
So it's very, very complex. They had like, you know, the 90s, but they actually like underground server banks to monitor everything was really cool. I mean, there are a lot of jokes about it. Go ahead. That is really cool. Like, you don't think about how much gas and pressure is built up in one of those greenhouse. So like, you walk into like a nursery or something on earth, and
00:15:41
Speaker
it's it's hot as sin yes yes yes and muggy what's actually going on there there's a lot of chemical interactions that we kind of have to pull also for potentially reserves if we need that yes
00:15:58
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, that's the thing. You want to use this as efficiently as possible. And so the problem is because that system didn't do it a second run, everything since then, there aren't going to experience. They're quite small. They're like on the scale of like a small part of a warehouse. They have two to three people. Some don't even have people.
00:16:16
Speaker
You know, if you want to do this on Mars, we need, like, so much more science, but it's just, like, objectively cool. Like, I'm, like, a botany gardening nerd, so maybe I'm a little more in the tank than other people, but it's just so awesome! Like, you have this greenhouse that's sealed and people are living off the produce of the land, they're even having animals to help do stuff, which is, you know, kind of controversial in the design community for this stuff, but, like...
00:16:37
Speaker
But still, this is a huge open area of science. If I were Elon Musk and I were really serious about humans on Mars in 30 years on mass, I would buy Biosphere 2 yesterday and spin it back up and build three or four copies. Compared to the cost of putting stuff in space, it's cheap. I think the current estimates are that in modern dollars, it costs several hundred million dollars to build the system and operate it.
00:16:59
Speaker
It's like compared, you know, NASA's budget is $20 billion. If the goal was space settlement, this would be a good spend, but possibly with also cool spin-offs for like Ag stuff. But basically, like with reproduction, there is money being spent. It's quite trivial, even though it's like this crucial problem that will take many decades
Mental Health on Space Missions
00:17:15
Speaker
to solve.
00:17:15
Speaker
Now, two things that I'm thinking about right now is what about people and their mental health? How does that change? That's a cool question. Like medical side of stuff, right? Yeah. You talked about that in the book a little bit.
00:17:34
Speaker
Yeah. So this is actually probably the hardest chapter for us to write. It was originally like 20,000 words, which is a real no-no. You can't do a fifth of your book on this one topic. So it's, I think it's now like a fifth of that length. So the basic deal though, the reason it took so long is that there isn't really a clear picture. So there was an article going around, I forget it was New York Times or somewhere saying like the real impediment to space settlement is the psychiatric trauma
00:17:59
Speaker
And I hate to be a kind of wet blanket on such a cool title, but like actually the severe impediment is probably exactly what you'd expect. It's getting oxygen to breathe and having a place to live. So I think maybe because of movies or books or something, humans have this idea that we go mad in confined environments. But nuclear submarines have operated since the 50s. They go down for three to six months. Rate of psychological incidents for the limited data available is actually lower than back home. Mind you, there's a lot of selection that goes on. There's also a lot of actions taken to mitigate distress.
00:18:27
Speaker
Right? So they make sure there's good food, there's letters home, this and that. We're like, also humans have been going up for extended periods to space for very long periods. There is not one incidence of a severe psychiatric break. We found in the whole history of both space programs, both the big programs, there were two incidents when missions were called short due to maybe psychiatric stuff, both under extraordinary conditions.
00:18:48
Speaker
Like so one case just to give the example of the one time which which is pretty clear that the mission was called off early due to psychological stuff. What had happened is there were some Soviets in a space station. You have to imagine it's much smaller than an apartment room. You've got two people and then the power goes off. Right. There's no lights. The oxygen system. Nothing is working right.
00:19:05
Speaker
How did they survive? You might wonder, well, there's a lot of, you know, the oxygen system, I think you can make it run without electricity. And also just there's a lot of residual oxygen. There's no ventilation, though, so you have to move around so you don't get carbon dioxide poisoning. And they just existed like this, I think, for hours until they finally got the system on and it was decided to bring them home early, which doesn't seem weird to me. It doesn't seem like it was due to humans go mad every time they get confined.
00:19:27
Speaker
So unfortunately, there's not a clue story that says we really need to be careful about this. The lessons we know, stretching back to the era of polar exploration, which had somewhat similar conditions, is like little bit important stuff. Like people like to have the news. They like to have entertainments. They don't like to be bored. They like to have letters from home if they can have them. They like the food to be good and novel in texture and taste if they can. And so NASA does this.
00:19:51
Speaker
But that's the answer. There's no kind of space madness problem, except the only big question mark is, I mentioned earlier, there's equivocal evidence of cognitive decline. It could be if people are in space for five, 10, 20 years, there is something due to say the radiation or the microgravity or who knows what, and that'll have to be dealt with. The other issue, I think really the more serious thing is like,
00:20:12
Speaker
You know, I wouldn't want to have anyone walk away thinking, okay, the psychological stuff is overrated. I think some versions, the sort of fantastic versions of it are overrated. However, if you want to have a thousand people on Mars who cannot easily get home, you have to assume at least a baseline rate of psychiatric distress, which means both you have to deal with chronic issues, meaning there has to be some psychological counseling for people who do experience depression, which has happened in space.
00:20:35
Speaker
and has happened in Antarctica. But also, what do you do if someone has occasionally, very occasionally happened in Antarctica? What do you do if someone pulls a knife on somebody? Or is it clearly experiencing an unforeseen development of schizophrenia? What do you do? I mean, worth noting that a lot of the drugs we have for this, the good stuff for it, are not designed to be shelf-stable in space for six years. And what do you do? So NASA has a protocol for the ISS, which essentially consists of tying someone up with bungee cards and doping them.
00:21:04
Speaker
uh but uh but on the which is already you know it's never happened and and the protocol does include like you know the hope that they will do this voluntarily but you can you know on the iss you can get home in under 24 hours in an emergency right we have escape pods sure uh you can't do that on margins you might literally not even even if you have the rocket the launch window may not be open so what do you do uh
00:21:25
Speaker
like you are dependent on whatever resources you have there and we will be dependent on I'll say Earth or if Earth ends up migrating to some other space station like the per se home planet we are dependent on
00:21:45
Speaker
For us, this is another case where the answer is ideally a space settlement shouldn't be bootstrapped. It should be a large population at the outset so that there's more redundancy, more division of labor, more resources in terms of keeping pharmacology and just facilities for people who do have problems.
00:22:03
Speaker
So one finding that for us was very interesting about Antarctica. You might think people are more likely to go crazy in Antarctica. And indeed, people report struggles with that long overwinter when there's not much light. But the rate of acute psychiatric incidence is different studies, but it's at least not higher. It's equal or lower. And again, some of that selection, it's not random people, but like- See, that's the big thing. It's selection.
00:22:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. So for people who don't know, so one, there's self selection, like I personally would not want to go to Antarctica. So people who do want to go are not going to be psychologically normal or psychologically baseline, let's say, but also there is a questionnaire, right? There's a fairly involved questionnaire and there's other stuff, right? So they are similar to what they do for space, right? And so also, and also just worth noting,
00:22:49
Speaker
I think you're also just selecting the kind of people who have the wherewithal to get to a point where they're like a grad student in whatever that allows you to petition to go to enter. This is not a random subset. Now, if they were having children though, it is a kind of random draw, right? If they weren't having children, those children did not fill out a questionnaire. They did not say they wanted to be here, right?
00:23:08
Speaker
so yeah so so they're going to be more more likely to be baseline so i you know i don't want to speak for you in particular but very there are very few uh parent offspring astronaut combinations there are a few uh they're probably more likely to be astronauts than random people the kids of astronauts but but like
00:23:24
Speaker
But it's very rare that they tend to just be regular people like anyone. You know, there's a regression to the mean. They're not going to be these like bizarre, weird, ultra competent people like their parents were. And so you should just expect that in space. You should expect baseline rates of everything and time for that. Just a little topic shift. Yes.
Space Law and Sovereignty
00:23:44
Speaker
So we're looking at outer space treaties, right? Yeah.
00:23:51
Speaker
And what is technically a legal breach with these things? How do we go about space treaties just in general? Yes. The first thing to know about space law is that it exists. Most people I find are surprised when you say space law. Of course, they also imagine it's like a guy in a space suit with a briefcase that it's not, that either it's like property law for international regimes, very similar to the law of like the international waters and Antarctica.
00:24:17
Speaker
Um, it exists. The second thing to know is, unfortunately, we're stuck with this word law. And when people hear international law, they imagine it's like domestic law where there's like a police branch, um, and like courts that everyone obeys and there's not. No, no, we actually do have a space force.
00:24:34
Speaker
I say this, if China is behaving badly, this is worth delineating, because people don't understand this. If China does something bad that's quote-unquote illegal in space, the repercussion is not that someone like Space Force shows up and knocks on the door and says, you're under arrest, ladies and gentlemen.
00:24:55
Speaker
That's not international. International law refers to the set of treaties and established norms between countries and the way they interface with great powers. And that said, people tend to, when they hear that, they say, oh, so it's just made up. And it's like, well, the law of all nations is made up. The question is enforcement.
00:25:17
Speaker
Let me give the background real quick. I won't go into crazy detail because I worry people will start getting bored, but essentially, the big governing document for space is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed by all the major powers, including the major space powers. Essentially, for all purposes, as people interested in space settlement, the main things to know are, number one, Article 2 says, no sovereignty in space. That means no national claims. You might say, what does sovereignty mean? It essentially means Canada. It means there is some region.
00:25:45
Speaker
that has a single government over it. It regulates what goes in and out and what the rules are internally and importantly that everyone else basically agrees to this. So the news standard is Canada. The news standard is Canada. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so I use Canada because there are these like edge cases. People will be like, well, what about like the Vatican or like the Knights Templar? And you're like, oh, they're weird edge cases. But essentially, you know what I mean. Nation states, you know, so like you can't do that in space, period.
00:26:11
Speaker
Utterly unambiguous, people try to come up with loopholes like, well, what if I had, what if McDonald's claim to check with space? No, McDonald's would be made up of people from earth states, so it would be a claim. You can't do it. Anything you could think of as a loophole some lawyer thought of 60 years ago, no. No national claims. You can't have a US state. You can't have a new nation that doesn't recognize the treaty. None of this is allowed under international law. You can, of course, violate international law, but it should be recognized as such.
00:26:39
Speaker
The other thing to know, other than that you can't have a nation or sovereignty, is that you can claim resources ad libidum. You know, the most absurd example we could think of is, well, there are a couple, but like one of my favorites is you could, you know, we said earlier the water is very limited, you could say you were Jeff Bezos, you could land a rocket on the moon, collect all the water for yourself, turn it into an ice sculpture of yourself and explode it. And there's not obviously anything illegal under space law about that.
00:27:09
Speaker
Would you anger many people and nations? Yes. But you would probably have not violated the law, especially under the current understanding that the U.S. is pushing and which many nations are signing on to, which is quite a libertarian. So you might say to yourself, well, this is perverse. You have a regime where I could like...
00:27:24
Speaker
grind up an asteroid into my own spaceship and claim it as mine, but I could not put a flag on that asteroid before I did it. It's kind of bizarre and arguably sort of conflict prone because it does allow for like sort of quasi territory claims. Like you could set up a strip mining operation on half the moon, but it's not your territory. It's weird. And the deal is essentially there was an attempt in the late seventies to clarify the regime. It was called the moon agreement. You can look it up. That would have clarified the proper regime, essentially making some sort of international body to regulate claims. It probably would have been quite restrictive.
00:27:53
Speaker
And the short version is none of the space power signed onto it. The US thought it actually wanted to ratify it, or diplomats wanted to ratify it. The Congress thought it was too socialist-y. But the Soviets, the officially socialist Soviet Union, also said no. And I think the parsimonious guess is that why would you give up access to all these resources as a space power? Why would you give that up to France?
00:28:18
Speaker
or Italy or Australia when you can keep it for yourself if it's going to be useful. So the agreement was technically ratified because enough nations signed it, but none of the space powers did. It's largely considered to not be important. And no major space law has been signed since other than there have been resolutions and things.
00:28:36
Speaker
and so that's where we are right now and it's kind of not been an issue because you know after the crazy 60s everyone thought space was going to be a big deal soon and it turned out not to be and it's changing now because SpaceX made the price so low where we're getting to a world where there's much more space activity to give you a cool stat to embody that
00:28:54
Speaker
You know, prior to SpaceX launching satellites, Starlink satellites, there'd ever been something like 9,000 satellites ever, ever, ever launched. Starlink itself, SpaceX's ISP company, controls something like over 3,000 now. So like, so there's been a real change. I mean, it's a little, it's a little Apple storages because size, you know, they're small satellites, blah, blah, blah, but things have genuinely changed.
00:29:15
Speaker
And so our worry is that you get some kind of scramble over the good spots on the moon. Like I said, I don't think they're economically viable, but space is very national security, saber rattly stuff. It always has been.
00:29:30
Speaker
Well, imagine how you feel, say, if you're a Western-aligned person, if you wake up one morning and China says, hey, we just put 100 people in a base on the most valuable parts of the moon, and we're not formally claiming sovereignty, but all the water here is ours. Obviously, that's a crisis.
00:29:48
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's why we're in favor of a boring international regime. Right. So out of curiosity, for us traveling there, what are the big takeaways that you would want people to know? Yeah. Okay.
Solving Space Settlement Challenges
00:30:05
Speaker
Big takeaways. One, there is a kind of route forward to space settlement and we give a kind of roadmap, which is we need to solve, obviously we need to solve the tech stuff, but that's kind of on a good trajectory.
00:30:15
Speaker
We need to solve reproduction, medical stuff, and ecology, and then we also really need a better legal regime that doesn't permit a kind of free-for-all that could exacerbate international tension and endanger the home planet. And so, in terms of the takeaways and knowledge, so that's the roadmap. I would just want to say, if you haven't read our book,
00:30:35
Speaker
Or a couple other books I could recommend like Erika Nezvold's Off Earth or maybe Daniel Dudeney's Dark Skies. You will be frequently exposed to articles in the news or in headlines that are basically simply wrong. Eli major issues having to do with what is physically likely or you're allowed to do. Such as the claim that we're in some sort of cold war moon race with the moon. And like, you know, it's bad enough as nerds, we're all nerds here, it's bad enough to be misinformed.
00:31:03
Speaker
But to be misinformed by agency heads and leaders of countries who stand to benefit from your fear of other countries is not just to be misinformed. It's dangerous. We are not going to be in a mining war with China because there is nothing worth mining. Don't believe the articles. So my pitch to people is please read our book if for no other reason than to avoid this kind of insane posturing stuff that you might be misled into. OK.
00:31:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, so my actual list, what I'm fretting about currently is I write children's books.
Upcoming Projects and Engagement
00:31:52
Speaker
I'm actually like, my other foot is in poetry for children. So I'm working on, I wrote an adaptation of Beowulf for Children called Beowulf, which is about a sort of girl who fights old people.
00:31:57
Speaker
and anything that you have for big projects that are coming up.
00:32:06
Speaker
It was fairly popular with the right crowd anyway, but I'm certified to finish the story and it's agonizing. And then Kelly has some cool pop science ideas. She might do one on her own. She's got some cool stuff. She's a parasitologist. Some of her work is too icky for me. And so there's that. Honestly, this book was such murder to research. We're still kind of catching our breath a year later.
00:32:28
Speaker
Yeah, but I know the feeling. Some of those are just very large undertakings. Yes, endless. So I just thank you for coming on the show today and getting to talk with me. Yes. I can assure you that the audience is going to be really jazzed about this. I'm always glad when people ask about the law stuff because I can talk about space poop all day, but the law is more interesting.
00:32:54
Speaker
Okay, mathematicians go right alongside philosophers. So this is where it is. There it is. The single stuff is heavy into philosophy. It is, it is. You love that. So thank you, Zach, for your time and for joining us on Breaking Math. Thanks very much for having me.
00:33:13
Speaker
That was a wild ride through Martian society and the potential pitfalls of living on a new planet. But fear not, math enthusiasts. There's more brain and math goodness where that came from. If you're still feeling the after-effects of our journey through space travel, we will have more math next week. So here's how to stay connected. We're on all major podcast platforms. Just search for breaking math. Follow us on social media.
00:33:40
Speaker
at Breaking Math Pod on Twitter or your favorite mathematical figure, X, and at Breaking Math Media on Instagram and Reels for exclusive content and terrible jokes and the occasional thread where we'll be doing a lot of our math and maybe some cute and nerdy surprise content that we've been cooking up behind the scenes. So until next time, I'm Autumn Feneff, your host on Breaking Math Podcast.