The Research Powering Humanity_s First Space Civilization with Ariel Ekblaw

0:04 This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me co-host Matt Kirshen. Matt, welcome back.

0:16 Thank you so much. How's it going?

0:17 All right, dude. You host Probably Science. Yep. And you're based out in LA, right?

0:22 I am, and I'm briefly back there. I think every time I've recorded with you recently, I've been in a different hotel room, but this is.

0:28 I don't need to know your private life. Why are you giving me that much information? Did I ask?

0:34 Just.

0:35 The highest bidder. Wherever you need me to go.

0:38 Excellent. So, Matt, this is a Cosmic Queries edition on everybody's favorite subject. Space civilizations. Oh, my gosh.

0:49 Oh.

0:50 I love thinking about it, but I claim no particular expertise in it. So we combed the landscape and we found somebody who was all up in it. All up. In space civilizations and someone that goes by the name of Ariel Ekblow. Ariel, welcome to StarTalk.

1:11 Thank you so much for having me. It is such a treat to be here.

1:14 Excellent. Excellent. And so I'm looking at your resume here. It's like, what? What? I feel like a dog hearing a high-pitched whistle. You're CEO of the Aurelia Institute. Okay. I'll read some more here and then you're going to have to do some explaining here. Founder and director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. Author of Into the Anthropocosmos.

1:38 Got it. One word there. Whoa. And your research focuses on tesserae platforms, which sounds very acronym. So let's see if we can unpack that. Tessellated electromagnetic space structures for the exploration of reconfigurable adaptive environments. And you want people to buy that?

2:03 Terribly tortured acronym, never again. I learned my lesson.

2:07 Oh my gosh. You could call it just, let's go to space, right? So tell me what all this is. So what is the Aurelia Institute? What's your background first? What's your background?

2:17 Yeah. So background, my parents are both pilots. Grew up with a real love of science fiction. In undergrad, I studied physics, math, and philosophy. Always really loved big picture questions about the universe. But I decided I wanted to get more concrete, not just studying physics and cosmology and particle physics. So I transitioned in grad school to do space exploration. And my PhD was Tesserae, looking at robotic self-assembling systems to build habitats out in orbit that are way bigger than your biggest rocket-pillar ferry.

2:49 Wow. So I remember going decades back, because I'm an old fart here in this conversation, that... Who was it? Who's the guy... Matt, you might remember, who's the guy who had the L5 Society? He was founder of it, I think.

3:07 Oh, I don't know. This is the L5 Society?

3:10 Well, okay.

3:11 Gary O'Neill?

3:12 Oh, excuse me. I should just ask Ariel. See, I'm assuming we would only know it for having lived through it. But of course you would know who we're talking about here. So Mr. O'Neill, right? He was into big space colonies. Are you trying to make his vision real? 100%.

3:28 I am a huge Jerry O'Neill fan. High Frontier, like his vision for life in space, I think was really compelling. We'll do it a little differently now. It's a little different than how it was conceived up in the 60s and 70s.

3:37 Right, because he was almost cult-like. And I'm presuming you're born well after that man was long gone, but you're now trying to res... That's why I asked Matt instead of you, because he might've been alive, but you dug up his ashes and you're trying.

3:54 And try to reassemble them in space.

3:55 And try to reassemble the man's ashes. Because I've seen artist illustrations of what he was imagining. Is that what you're imagining?

4:03 That is what we're imagining. The secret keystone of our system is going to have Jerry O'Neill's ashes in the center corner.

4:10 I'm joking.

4:10 Okay.

4:11 But no, it is very much a source of inspiration, which is large-scale science fiction-worthy space structures. How do you build them? And then how do you think about the society operating and hopefully thriving, not just surviving inside of them?

4:25 So tell me, Tessa Lady, we've all seen that word and we think we know what it means. And I think I know what it means, but you've got it applied to space here. So tell me what's going on here. Because when I think of tessellated, I think of a same shape repeated, but maybe shifted a little bit so that you can build a surface out of it.

4:44 A big pattern.

4:45 Yeah, pattern. So tell me more about it, tessellating.

4:48 So the idea of tesserae is to take pentagons and hexagons. They tessellate in 3D. And when you have enough of them, they form a buckyball. Again, really inspired by Buckminster Fuller, spaceship Earth. People have seen geodesic domes before, but it's a particularly efficient shape for space. You want to maximize your interior volume for a given surface area. So a sphere would be super efficient. What's a little bit more easy to build than a sphere and is more modular?

5:14 A buckyball. And so the tiles of the tesserae are pentacons and hexagons that can pack flat in a rocket. Basically think about it like a glorified PEZ dispenser. Once you're out in orbit, those tiles are.

5:26 Now we're speaking my language.

5:27 Yeah, now we're like....

5:30 Does it have a little duck head on it?

5:31 It could have whatever you like. Thank you.

5:34 You can pop out the basic bricks, basically.

5:38 The bricks, exactly.

5:39 Your construction unit.

5:41 A building. We sometimes talk about them like space Legos if Legos had magnets. So it's meant to be really simple. They find each other. The tiles have some sophisticated code and sensors and electronics that help them dock. The magnets supply the docking. And if they do it wrong, if the two tiles come together incorrectly, they pick up on that themselves. They have this intelligence embedded into each building brick, into each unit. And then over time, they're able to assemble a large dome or a self-assembling habitat.

6:10 You have intelligent bricks, basically, self-assembling pieces here. Exactly. Well, if they're that intelligent, why would they misattach in the first place? Gotcha. Gotcha.

6:22 You got me. I was going to ask the tough questions. Well, we don't want to over-constraint them. And so there's some freedom of the magnets to dock in and out of plane. It's important for some of the flexibility of the system overall. And so then being able to have self-corrective logic is an important piece of it. The other aspect is the beauty of a modular habitat. It's very different than any other type of space habitat we have right now. If there's a micrometeorite impact that hits a tile or... In a happier situation, maybe you're having a conference in space and where you had a window tile yesterday. Now you need a birthing port to be able to welcome 10 other spaceships to come join you. With a reconfigurable modular habitat,

7:02 you can pop tiles on and off at will. And so you can have essentially a habitat that evolves to your mission needs over any period of time. Wow.

7:15 Okay. So it is Legos.

7:17 It is Legos. It is Legos.

7:19 I don't like my Lego being smarter than me.

7:21 Okay. You know, that could give people some angst out there. Right, right.

7:27 Yeah. No, no, no.

7:28 They're very friendly.

7:30 They're very friendly. No angst allowed.

7:35 How do you deal with gravity?

7:37 How do we deal with gravity?

7:39 Are you rotating? What do you have going there? Yes.

7:42 So the initial conception is using microgravity. to help themselves assemble, right? So they're floating in space. And then some of the work of Aurelia Institute that you had alluded to earlier is moving beyond these just kind of, you know, passive pressure containing orbs to actually rotating them to get artificial gravity.

7:59 So the next series of projects that we're working on designing are around the artificial gravity direction. But the way that we work at Aurelia is we test out these concepts in miniature in space demonstration missions, technology demonstration missions. So the technology behind Tesserae, the small tiles have been tested twice now on the International Space Station. They're still under development. And we're just beginning to conceive of a similarly small scale test bed that will help us learn more about bearings and rotating large pieces of architecture in space to get artificial gravity. But it's all part of this larger tech roadmap.

8:36 It's one thing to have the house. Now, where's the food come from?

8:39 Ah, the space food. Well, we're thinking about what are all of the accoutrements that need to go inside of that habitat to make it a real life worth living where more people see themselves in that environment. I think a lot of people look at the International Space Station and it's very impressive, but it looks like a science lab.

8:56 Not everybody wants to live inside a science lab. So the other things that we had worked on for the last six years at the MIT lab, that's where I started before we spun out Aurelia Institute, we were looking at fermented food miso we flew miso to the international space station we designed musical instruments that could only play in microgravity so that we're inventing new cultural artifacts for life in space looking at biophilia and how do you surround yourself with plants that's more than just a factory farm in space so.

9:26 What all of what is what is a mic what is a musical instrument that can only work in microgravity how does it physically differ Right.

9:33 So there's kind of a couple of ways to do it. One is that the physical mechanisms only make sound when they're floating. So when they're passive and they're on Earth, there's just passive. There's not anything happening, but they actually have some agency. And as they begin to float or are tossed between two human players, two musicians in orbit, that's where the sound is generated. The other way to do it is with accelerometers. So Nerd Nugget, a way that we're actually able to use sensors to measure the presence or absences gravity and acceleration. And so you can also do it with accelerometers and essentially a synthesized like digital music.

10:07 So you can have a whole zero G orchestra. That would be hilarious.

10:11 I love that you just said that. That's exactly what we have been working up towards is we have a few instruments and the idea is to have a zero gravity orchestra.

10:18 Okay. You know what you definitely need though? You need a theremin.

10:21 Oh, we still need a theremin.

10:23 Theremin doesn't need gravity. I think it's just electromagnetic fields. You know a theremin, Matt? I do, yeah.

10:30 A friend of mine had one.

10:31 It was a lot of fun. It's the official sound of aliens in 1950s movies.

10:35 That's so true. Have you actually tried... I'm aware of the idea of rotating a spacecraft to generate artificial gravity. Has that been tried in real life? Or is this just something that's theoretical?

10:49 So it's theoretical, but it's very practical. So it's not an open science question that we have to solve. It's more like open engineering logistics.

10:57 Very important distinction. Excellent distinction there.

11:00 Right.

11:00 It's not like, well, how do we do it? No, it's just like rotating. Right.

11:05 Right. Yeah.

11:05 Right.

11:05 Yeah. Got to build it. Yeah. So we're working on small scale mock-ups to get us there. And then the idea is to learn enough about the ways that subsystems interact that when we actually build the big one, that we've learned enough to make that a successful project.

11:20 Well, I can't believe we made this like a whole subject for this show, which means we solicited from our Patreon members questions on this subject. And Matt, you have them all. I haven't seen them.

11:31 I do, yes.

11:32 See if you can slip one in before we end the first segment.

11:35 I can certainly do that. So Cameron Bishop says, I've seen a lot of artist impressions of future human exploration in places like Cloak's proximity to Jupiter or Saturn. Apparently, Neil, you've even said you want to do ice fishing on one of those moons.

11:49 Yeah, I want to cut a hole in the ice and go ice fishing, yes.

11:52 Get in there. But aren't those planets in their close orbits encasing shells of very high energy belts of radiation? How are we going to ensure that future explorers aren't microwaved like a hot pocket when visiting the awesome planets in our solar system?

12:06 Nobody wants to be a hot pocket.

12:08 Okay.

12:09 Yeah, so, Errol, what are you doing? I mean, not only, obviously, Jupiter has a very hostile radiation environment, but even if you're outside of Earth's protective magnetic blanket, what protections do you have? It doesn't sound like your triangle, your pentagons and hexagons could do this. Can they?

12:28 It depends on what materials we choose. So we're modeling some of the structures for around lower orbit, similar to what the ISS is, so a stuffed Whipple structure. But once we're actually beyond lower orbit, beyond the Van Allen belts, there is a much more significant radiation load. And so some of the proposals, I wouldn't take credit for inventing them.

12:46 We're building on the shoulders of giants here at NASA and others. But things like water walls or additional metal shielding, other types of radiation protection that can be built into the habitat infrastructure for a longer duration.

12:59 Because water is highly absorbent of high energy radiation. So you're thinking maybe that your sphere, your Bucky sphere, it has a layer of water on its outer surface, perhaps?

13:12 And it's a good way to also get what we call the environmental control and life support system going. There's a lot of water that needs to be recycled in a space habitat, gray water, like what you do in a building on Earth. We do recycle urine in space. And so being able to make use of those liquids in other contexts, maybe for water walls or radiation protection, is one of the proposals that's out there.

13:32 So you recycle urine as well as like body sweat that evaporates into the air, right? I mean, all of that.

13:37 Right, right. All of that. It's important. It's a closed loop ecosystem. The best that we can do to really make it a closed loop recycling ecosystem.

13:44 Ariel, if I'm going there, I'm going to lasso a comet so I have fresh water every morning. Okay. Y'all could drink the pee. The recycled pee. I'm going to have my own tap of keg right out the window. I would have got my own damn comet. Yeah. So, okay. So it's an engineering challenge that does have solutions waiting to be invoked. But you don't foresee, for example, hanging out near Jupiter anytime soon. Is that right?

14:11 Probably not in our particular habitat. Not in the Tesseract. But we're working on different models. Who knows? I think other interesting points like Europa, there are other good justifications for getting out to Europa for the search for life in the universe. But the habitats that we were just talking about, the Tesseract. model is really meant for earth, moon, and Mars, like the near neighborhood of our solar system.

14:32 But if we find life on Europa, I think we should call them Europeans. Don't you? I'm pretty sure. Matt, what do you think of that? It's Europa.

14:41 I'll claim them. I'm a European.

14:45 All right. One more question. See if we slip one more in. Go. Okay.

14:49 So, well, you've answered the first half of this about microgravity, but Brady Harmon says, have there been any developments in artificial gravity? Is it all sci-fi or can we do it? And also Brady says, Vegemite serving tip of the day spread on a hard-boiled egg. I'm guessing Brady is from Australia.

15:05 He can only be from Australia if he's given culinary tips for Vegemite. Let's take a quick break and when we come back with our guest Ariel Ekblot, we're going to find out about how do we make artificial gravity. They do it in sci-fi with or without rotating space stations. So let's find out when we return. We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries. We're talking about space civilizations. And we have an actual, authentic, scientifically trained, engineeringly trained person thinking about this.

15:43 Not just crazy sci-fi people who just make stuff up. We have an authentic person making stuff up. Matt, where do we leave off? We had a question about artificial gravity.

15:53 We had Brady from Australia who... as well as Vegemite serving tips, wanted to know if there'd been any recent developments in artificial gravity.

16:01 Yeah, other than a rotating platform, Ariel, is there any other way to do this? Doesn't seem like there would be.

16:07 That's what we're focusing on, is the rotating platform. I think one interesting tidbit for Brady, there's a couple different ways to do it, right? You can do a smaller ring and rotate it fast, but that's going to be uncomfortable for the astronauts or the future spaceflight participants. Or you can do a really big ring and rotate it slowly, But then it's a bigger challenge to build and to operate.

16:27 And so we're trying to find that sweet spot, the right size of an artificial gravity station. And a quick, fun, recent update, there's a group called Gravity Labs that's looking at making real a technology that is described in Hail Mary, Andy Weir's latest book.

16:43 We love Andy Weir. He's a friend of Darkoff.

16:45 We love Andy Weir. I know we love Andy Weir. I also love Andy Weir. But that tether approach, a very basic approach to generating artificial gravity, even before you have some beautiful ring that's fully encased, there's a cool company out there, Gravity Labs, that's looking at doing that for a science lab, not necessarily to put humans in it just yet, but to be able to test out that platform.

17:05 So there's some kind of gondola at the end of a tether that gets swung around, and in that gondola you'd have the gravity that you seek.

17:12 I love the most high-tech science to get the stuff up there, but Underneath it, it's no more complex than when you're a kid and you swing a bucket on a rope.

17:21 It's fundamental physics. It turns out the laws of physics are supposed to behave somewhat consistently throughout the universe.

17:27 Yeah, not only when you're a kid, but when you're in space. All right, cool. What else you got, Matt?

17:33 Well, I'm going to combine these two questions because they're sort of opposite sides of the same coin. So Craig Cordwell from Bedford, U.K., says, Craig is 33, and do you think it'll be possible within my lifetime to visit space in some form or another, or for a reasonable price? I know you can go at the moment for a ridiculous price, but I imagine like most things, it'll become more affordable for everyday people in the future, and I love the show. And then Andrew O. says, why should I care about space tourism? It'll likely never be something I could afford, and wouldn't frequent rocket launches increase CO2 needlessly, all for the rich to get a front row seat to the fruits of their late Of their labor.

18:10 Oh, wait, so Ariel, so tell me about the exhaust of the main rockets in modern rockets.

18:19 Yes.

18:19 So this is a great question about the environmental impact that the space industry might have. Right now, the space industry's carbon footprint, much lower than aviation, right? But if we succeed in our goals of having way more frequent launches, then there is a significant potential impact. And so there's some fantastic research already into green propellants. how to try to, before we get as deep into things as the aviation industry, is actually try to solve this up front. I am not a rocket scientist. I am a space habitat engineer and designer, but we are very closely looking at the carbon footprint and the environmental impact for this scaling up of life in space.

18:56 Okay, and when is it going to be cheap?

18:58 Okay, this is the question. The answer to their question is absolutely in their lifetimes. They will get to go, and it will be more affordable than it is now. So if we're looking at the next... If there's 33, right, in the next 30 years, we are at the cusp right now of an explosion of new technology. Explosion, maybe it was not the right word to use.

19:17 Bad word. Don't talk about rockets and explosions of anything.

19:23 We are at this inflection point where the cost of going to space is coming down. Multiple different companies and not just governments. And that's why it's a big deal. There's actually an economy growing up around this now that's more sustainable. And the cost will be dropping.

19:37 I'm older than our 33-year-old guy. I don't have another 33 years to wait this out. So can you do it in my lifetime? Okay, thank you.

19:46 We'll get going. For you, Neil.

19:48 Call me when you're done. when it's ready.

19:52 I feel like you know some people who work at some of these companies, Neil. I feel like you're nearer the top of the guest list than most of us. What related to that as well, Amelia Silver asks, what do you think is the next most important technological advancement that we need to make in order to bring down the cost of space travel?

20:08 Duh, it's warp drives. Everyone knows that. Next question.

20:11 Okay. No.

20:13 Or just really big bottles and really big pumps.

20:17 Where is the biggest cost? Is it in the engineering setup? Is it the launch cost? Is it keeping you alive once you're there? It seems to me those expenses have been shifting relative to each other over the decades.

20:30 I think they really have been. Right now, people would still say it's mass to orbit, so it's the launch costs. But reusable rockets, like SpaceX's reusable platform, have actually been succeeding in really bringing those costs down. So there will be a point where the costs transition to maybe what is more driving it is the length of stay in orbit or the number of people or the logistics, the supply chain that you're trying to support once we have a large human society up there.

20:55 So per pound, what is it today per pound?

20:59 It varies really wildly. Usually quoted per kilogram. It can be in the thousands, like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. per kilogram right now to put a small CubeSat into orbit because the price is a little different depending on what you're paying to go up. A small CubeSat, about $ 200, 000 to go up.

21:18 I have a middle-aged man belly, so each pound of that man belly is like tens of thousands of dollars.

21:25 But now you have to measure it in CubeSats. You have to give me the use of... And then I can give you an accurate quote.

21:32 So I need like ripped abs and no excess fat and then I get a cheaper ride into space. That's what you're telling me here, I think.

21:42 It is still mass driven, but we're getting there. I think because it's not just SpaceX is the only game in town. Now Blue Origin, right? They're aiming to get orbital Starship, next generation SpaceX, ULA and others. It's a really fantastic ecosystem that's going to make it possible for your guests to go in their lifestyle.

21:58 So you haven't mentioned it until just now, but Is a lot of what you're doing on the backs of launch companies that are coming online right now?

22:07 It is. Absolutely. We need the road to space to be built to be able to empower this next generation life in space. So absolutely. Yeah. And we work really closely with a lot of these launch companies to get experiments to orbit.

22:20 Right.

22:20 Even before we're building the big habitats, all of those other things we talked about, we test the musical instruments on zero gravity flights. I've flown in zero gravity flights. nine times over the course of my career at MIT, hundreds of parabolas to test all this stuff. And that, yeah, it's incredibly amazing to get to work on the shoulders of those companies.

22:40 For people that don't otherwise know, so you can experience zero-g without, quote, going into space, you get on one of these vomit comets. I think they don't want to call it that anymore.

22:51 Affectionately known.

22:53 And so they can go very high and execute an arc where that arc is basically in free fall back to Earth. But it's only for seconds, right? How much time do you get in free fall?

23:06 Yeah, it's 15 to 20 seconds, but it's like a roller coaster in the sky because you do that arc that you described, that parabolic arc, 30 to 40 times.

23:15 Oh my gosh, okay.

23:16 I think I would love that. My favorite ride in theme parks rather than the roller coasters, I love the pirate ship.

23:22 Oh, the one that goes up and down, yeah.

23:23 The one that just rolls back and forward, and yeah, the sort of little.

23:26 And you feel it.

23:27 The zero gravity feeling in your belly or when you go over a hill quickly and you cut a little hump in the car.

23:31 I love that feeling.

23:32 I would take that all day.

23:33 You don't just transition to zero G. It's zero G and then you come out of zero G to more than one G. So my stomach will be floating. I know. I'm made of inadequate stuff.

23:45 I think you'd love it. I think you'd love it. And that's one of the cool things about the space industry. It's actually some of the work we're doing with Aurelia Institute. is to welcome everyday people onto the Zero-G flight. So we have an application program where you can come through Aurelia. We bring outreach partners and the people love it. I hate roller coasters, but I love the Zero-G flight. It's actually far smoother and it's an incredibly sublime experience to be truly weightless and imagine your life in space like that.

24:12 Nona Ariel, you're being badass here. Roller coasters don't excite me. Space. Put me in space. Get away, roller coaster. That's for regular people. There's a fun video of Stephen Hawking on one of the Zero G flights where he comes out of his wheelchair and there's a smile, if you've ever seen one, on the man's face.

24:33 On the man's face. It's a profound moment. It's a really profound moment.

24:37 Right, right, right. So Matt, keep them coming.

24:39 Well, this feeds very neatly into this and also overlaps with your parents' profession. Tarina from San Francisco says, I remember an episode of Things You Thought.

24:49 You Knew That's one of our spinoffs from StarTalk, yes.

24:53 And in that, you explained why people don't throw up on planes as often as they used to. How will space tourism manage to help several nauseated tourists enter orbit? Throwing up during every trip sounds like a tourism downer.

25:05 Especially since if you throw up in zero G... the throw-up just floats in the air.

25:11 This is true.

25:12 And it's just in the air, and it gets in your hair. Whereas on 1G, you know the splatter pattern on the sidewalk outside of bars at 2 a.m.? That's the famous throw-up pattern because gravity brings it down. All right, so Ariel, what are you going to do with all the tourist throw-up?

25:34 Well, it's a great question, Neil.

25:35 Have you thought about that?

25:37 We have thought about it. There's fantastic anti-motion sickness medication, either Dramamine or Scopalamine, things like that that NASA uses as well to help people feel a little bit more comfortable. But there's also a lot of really great research here at MIT and elsewhere around space sickness and how to overcome that, how to train your vestibular system to behave or to appreciate it a little bit differently.

25:58 So the vestibular, that's your inner ear? Inner ear, yes. Yeah.

26:03 So it's a little bit of that cognitive dissonance of your body feels a different gravity vector than it's used to, but your eyes are still seeing a stable environment in front of you. And that cognitive dissonance sometimes in the vestibular inner ear and versus what your eyes are seeing can make people feel pretty queasy.

26:18 My understanding, that's also behind just regular travel sickness, isn't it? That's why it's easier to look at the horizon when you're on a boat, because when you're inside the boat, your eyes are telling you everything's stable, but your body is telling you, no, it's not. You're bouncing around. And Same with reading at the back of a car as well, right?

26:34 Yes. Yes.

26:35 It's actually so, well, it's funny. It's not necessarily correlated. People who get, get space sick, but it is related. Some of the, yeah, some of the feelings and the sensations that you get, but some astronauts do and some astronauts don't. And it's actually one of the things that NASA has the most trouble predicting when they select astronauts is who is going to get, um, you know, have a little bit of a tough time acclimating to space.

26:55 I guarantee I'll get space sick.

26:57 You don't have.

26:59 To wonder about me on that one.

27:01 You're going further down the list now, Neil. No, I got iron stomach now. Put me in space right now. Let's go. All right.

27:09 Yeah, so because in a zero-g bubble, any throw-up that escapes whatever vacuum you're trying to, it just stays there, like, forever.

27:16 That's so fun. That's not the only thing that's interesting about the human body is From a health perspective in space, we can get into this in a minute, but if we're talking about space societies, shape of your eyeballs changes. Your heart gets weaker. You get space face because the fluids redistribute to your body in a crazy way. So there's all kinds of interesting human physiologic things.

27:35 What is space face?

27:37 So space face is because gravity is usually helping your fluids throughout your body drain towards your toes. In space, it redistributes and you get puffy space face. And that's part of why astronauts are obsessed with hot sauce because they can't taste anything. It's like having a head cold the whole time. And so the hot sauce and the sriracha really cuts through the space face.

27:57 That's both interesting.

27:58 And their eyes bulge or something? What happens?

28:01 It becomes slightly more spherical. And so any change to your eyeball shape is also going to affect your lens and your eyesight significantly. There's bone health challenges because you're not walking against gravity, so your bones weaken. This is all why artificial gravity in a space habitat is so important because we really do need to be able to have people spend time in close to 1G to keep their bodies healthy.

28:22 Okay, so Ariel, I'm waiting for 1G. I'm not paying you a million dollars for my eyeballs to pop out and my face to explode and to lose taste. No, no, I'm staying here on Earth, okay? Just so you know.

28:35 Can I just ask as well, so is... From a sort of body scientific point of view, if you do have a rotating spacecraft that generates the equivalent of 1G, will your body experience that exactly the same as the way someone on Earth just in regular 1G would experience it? Or are there different forces acting on you?

28:53 Interesting. So if you're actually able to spin the habitat adequately in the super local space where you're walking in 1G, you will experience it much like you would experience it on Earth. But there's going to be a gradient as you get close to the center of of the ring, it'll be more and more and more like microgravity. So you want to basically stay right on the edge of that ring where you're actually going to be able to be generating the forces that would be more like what you would feel on earth.

29:19 And I think I've seen some sci-fi where they have ladders that connect from the outer ring to the center. And as they move up the ladder, they become, they weigh less and less. And right in the core, the They don't weigh anything. So that transition is there, right?

29:35 Exactly. And to your point earlier, Neil, about the L5 Society and Jerry O'Neill, this is something he writes about. in The High Frontier that you could have, you could be bicycling.

29:42 High Frontier, one of his books. Yeah.

29:44 You could be bicycling up a mountain and then be floating and you have a flying bicycle as you get up to the level of the port of the habitat that's not rotating, that's not as fast. So, yeah.

29:55 Right, right. The core, the axis of the rotation. Right. The mountain goes up there. But also, there's something profound here, Matt, if you didn't know this, that the 1G you experience, minus this gradient effect going towards the center, right at the rotating outer section, is actually indistinguishably identical to the gravitational force that would give you 1G. And that is the foundation of Einstein's general theory of relativity. And it's called the equivalence principle. And it's one of the most profound acts of human thought in the history of human thought.

30:36 It's to equate those two forces. The force of rotation or acceleration, right? Like what you'd have in a rotating object. And standing here on Earth, what he said was these are indistinguishable from each other. In principle. And built all mathematics and a whole branch of physics based on that.

30:57 It's crazy. This is such a great point, Neil, too, because as a space person, I get asked a lot about zero gravity. And that's why we try to be careful to say microgravity, because there really is no zero gravity, right? Newton tells us, the law of gravity tells us that there's always a gravitational attraction between objects. But if you're in free fall, you're feeling like you're not being acted upon by gravity, but you very much are. Yeah, but I still don't like microgravity. You just might rather say zero.

31:25 I'm a zero-g guy. You're not getting me to say microgravity, unless I'm saying it to say that I'm not going to say it.

31:33 I'll take my wins where I can get them. As long as I get you into space, Neil, I'll be satisfied.

31:39 All right, Matt, give me one more before we go to our next break.

31:42 Andrew Atkins says, do you think that the future of space exploration and tourism will depend on our ability to develop some sort of cryogenesis or stasis for humans? Or will we work more towards sending out machine-based AI to do all the traveling for us? Love the show.

31:57 Ooh, because it seems to me, Ariel, it's a great question. I think Andrew is thinking, are we going to travel to the stars or something where we take decades or maybe even centuries where we'd have to somehow put ourselves in suspended animation? But all your destinations, you can get there in a few days, right?

32:13 Right, right.

32:14 It's a great question because the search for exoplanets and Goldilocks planets is raising these questions about if we find some would we want to go out and travel to them? How would we get to them? How would we do suspended animation? But for our near-term habitats in the area of the solar system that we're contemplating, we would not need to put humans in that level of stasis, but we would also, in kind of symbiosis with robots, we would work with those probes and with other tools. So I think the future of human exploration is going to be one where robots do play a really big role, especially with new evolution of AI, chat GPT, there's amazing... And.

32:50 I want to get back to you on that after this break, what role AI might play in this. When we return, StarTalk Cosmic Queries. This is the Space Civilization Edition when we return. We're back. StarTalk. This is a Space Civilization Edition of Cosmic Queries. And we've got one of the world's... I say the world's expert in thinking this stuff through, Ariel Ekblah. Ariel Ariel, how do we find you? Are you on social media? You have a footprint there?

33:21 I am on social media. I'm at Ariel underscore Ekblah on Twitter. You can also find our team on Braille.

33:26 You've got to spell Ekblah. You can't just say it by and not spell that for people.

33:29 The usual way, Neil.

33:30 The usual way. The way you always spell Ekblah.

33:32 The usual way.

33:33 The way you always spell Ekblah. E-K-B as in boy, L-A-W. Ariel underscore Ekblah.

33:39 And Ariel, not the way we spell in the Disney princess world.

33:44 Actually, the same way. Yep, it's A-R-I-E-L underscore Ekblah, E-K-B-L-A-W.

33:49 Okay, and that's your Twitter?

33:51 That's my personal, yep, Twitter. And then Aurelia, A-U-R-E-L-I-A, Aurelia underscore labs for both Twitter and Instagram.

34:00 That's what you're CEO of?

34:02 Yes, that's what I'm CEO of. That's the new habitat building lab. That's meant to be the Bell Labs of space.

34:09 And so you spun that off from your time at MIT, is that correct? Or is MIT still an umbrella to you? Yeah.

34:15 So I'm still, I'm actually here at MIT today. I'm sitting here at MIT. But we have passed the baton for the lab that I founded at MIT to another amazing person, Cody Page, who's going to take that forward. And so I ran that lab at MIT for seven years. But we'll still continue to support it because it's my baby.

34:32 So I love it.

34:33 You birthed it. Okay. But now, but you spun off and now you have like, you pay rent on a different space.

34:38 Is that correct? Yes.

34:39 Yep, yep.

34:40 I love that you asked that. That's what makes it real. It is so true. Okay, so then.

34:45 What money is paying for this if this is not going to happen for 30 years?

34:50 So this is the benefit of being a nonprofit. We're not a for-profit, and that was very intentional because I wanted the freedom to think really long-term for Humanities Horizons and do a lot of education and outreach work like the Zero-G flights that we run for Aurelia. But it's philanthropic support. It's support from companies and support from grants like NASA. Okay.

35:10 All right. Very good. Very good. We got my vote. If you need a vote. Thank you.

35:15 Well, you should come and visit sometime here when I talk to.

35:18 All right. Next time I'm in Cambridge. I'm totally. You're in Cambridge, I guess. Is that correct?

35:22 I'm in Cambridge.

35:22 Yes. All right.

35:23 Okay.

35:23 Cambridge, America, Matt.

35:26 Yeah. I know. Cambridge, Matt. I know. The other Cambridge, too.

35:30 Yeah. So, Matt, give me some more. Give me another question here. Yeah.

35:35 So, Christian Holmes says, hello, Director Ekblot. Are there any plans for terraforming planets in the future? If not, what would be viable ways for an advanced species to terraform a planet, you know, hypothetically?

35:47 So she doesn't want to terraform a planet because she wants everyone to live in her habitat. How did you know? I bet I know the answer to this question. It's going to say terraforming, that's for centuries from now. Okay, let's listen. Okay, Ariel, what's your answer to that question?

36:03 Terraforming, that's for centuries from now.

36:06 Well, yes.

36:07 Yes and no. There's two answers to the terraforming question. One thing, I just want to give a quick plug for Earth. There is no planet where humans have co-evolved in the way that we have co-evolved on Earth. So I think terraforming is an amazing concept, but it's not going to create a plan B planet. So when we go out to do space exploration, we should be still really protecting and preserving Earth, honoring that. It's not about abandoning Earth.

36:29 What do you mean co-evolved? Co-evolved with what?

36:32 With the biosphere, the geology, and the geophysics of Earth. This is the place where our human biology and the biology of the planet have lived in symbiosis, have lived in together.

36:43 That's what terraforming is going to be. What, will you tell me we can't figure that out?

36:48 Maybe we can figure it out. We will evolve if we succeed in it. Then humans will continue as a species, right, natural selection to evolve with terraforming. But, Mars is usually what people talk about terraforming. One of the challenges is there's no liquid iron core moving in the center of Mars to produce a magnetic field like what we have on Earth, which helps protect our atmosphere. So if you are going to terraform Mars, you're going to have to be constantly replenishing the atmosphere that you're trying to keep around the planet. NASA and some others have some fun ideas for this. You could put a basically a shade at a certain point in space and block the cosmic wind, block some of the solar radiation that would be coming

37:26 and blowing your atmosphere away. But that's one of the big challenges to get terraforming going. And then the final answer is exactly what Neil said. Yes, just come live in my floating space habitat, my space, my Jerry O'Neill space city. It will be better. There's no perchlorates in the soil. It's a much better place, I promise.

37:41 Oh, man. Okay. Fresh soils. That's what we want. Are you going to have farm animals there too? In the images I saw of the Jerry O'Neill space habitats, there was farming communities. And it was all on a sort of rotating inside surface of a rotating cylinder. And so you look at it, there's plots of farm, animals, silos.

38:05 So would you, I presume you wouldn't want supply ships to bring you food. You'd want it to be self-sustaining.

38:15 This is one of those lovely things that has changed a little bit since the 1960s. It's delightful to look at those Jerry O'Neill images, but they're a little bit like 1960s suburbia or rural taken up into space. We have a chance now, whether it's lab-grown meat or sophisticated urban architecture and agriculture in resource-constrained environments to design, we could design a more urban landscape within one of those habitats.

38:39 So there's a lot of choice now in how we think about the urban planning environment kind of at planetary scale or urban planning at this really massive habitat scale.

38:48 In a city, people are stacked high because there's not much space. But if you're in space, why would you ever need a city?

39:02 You stack radially. You stack radially. You grow in three dimensions in a way you never could on Earth.

39:08 Oh, okay.

39:10 All right.

39:10 They're a good answer.

39:12 You know, the other cool thing I just want to sneak in here is to spin those cities right now for artificial gravity. We're thinking motors, a lot of energy. There is a model where you could have a city in space that spins on the power of light alone. So you have solar sails like Planetary Society. Right. And they're able to pick up. the photons, that incident energy, and spin your habitat around. Right.

39:34 But once it's spinning, it'll just keep spinning, right? You don't have to just take energy to start it, but you don't have to need energy to sustain it, presumably.

39:41 Yes. Energy to sustain it and also to slow it down, to stop it. So you do also have to design in those features to basically be able to retract the solar sails if you need to.

39:50 That's when people start throwing up, when you start speeding it up and slowing it down. I'm still thinking about the throw up.

39:54 You're reminding me, keeping me honest.

39:56 It's the fun times.

39:57 I'm still thinking about the throw up. All right, Matt, what else you got?

40:01 So Matthew Swider, I hope I pronounced that close to correct, says, what safeguards are we putting into place to protect the planet from space debris with a push for space tourism?

40:11 I love it. Because it seems to me, Ariel, a lot of space debris might be closer to Earth than this place you might build your space station, your space habitat. So there's space debris that we're responsible for, and then there's just meteors that Earth plows through several hundred tons of meteors a day, and that's just stuff in space.

40:33 So if Earth is doing it, you're going to be doing it too. So what's your shield for this?

40:40 On the man-made debris side, this is actually one of the topics that's near and dear to my heart, We put out a book a few years ago called Into the Anthropocosmos. And the idea was, how do you be good stewards of the space commons? And over the last few decades, we really haven't been. There's so much debris, like Neil said, between where we are on the surface and where I want my habitats to be that we have to pass through now. And to answer the question from the audience member, one of the ways that we could address the man-made debris would be to do an approach kind of like Pac-Man in space. A large spacecraft of some sort goes and physically captures debris, maybe with a net, maybe with other mechanisms. With its mouth. With

41:19 its mouth, yeah, just like Pac-Man.

41:21 A net for a mouth.

41:22 A net for a mouth.

41:25 Like some kind of space goat.

41:26 Space goat, yeah. That's how you sell it. That's how you're going to sell it.

41:30 Yeah, Matt, that's how we're going to sell it. You've got to talk to Astroscale and some of these companies.

41:34 I have a better idea. I got it. I got this. Everyone participates in it. So you control your own Pac-Man space eater.

41:41 Oh, like Twitch. Twitch plays Pokemon, but Twitch plays Pac-Man.

41:45 Right, and so you see where a piece of debris is, and you navigate to it, and you chomp it. And it's a contest, so you can eat the most debris. Boy, you clear up space like that.

41:54 No, actually, we would crowdsource citizens.

41:56 You gamify it. Oh, my gosh.

41:58 Oh, my gosh.

41:58 Neil, all right.

41:59 Let's do this.

42:00 You got it.

42:00 You got it. So that.

42:03 So you, so, but you can't stop meteor showers from slamming into your, so what do you do about that?

42:11 That's the harder one. So that's where we need micrometeorite debris shields. And some of the technology that we developed in the Space Exploration Initiative back at MIT, one of the students here, Juliana Cherston, an amazing PhD student, who's looking at building next generation skins of habitats. So I'm working on the shell. She's working on these skins that can pinpoint exactly where a impact happened, maybe detect a gas leak or detect something from this impact, and then try to be able to self-heal the habitat. That works for small stuff. As Neil was saying, there's also big stuff that you just need to be able to navigate around it. And sometimes even the ISS has to boost its orbit and move out of a cloud of debris

42:51 that would be coming towards it. So lots of different things.

42:53 Way better to have, like, laser blasters.

42:56 Yes. A little bit of Dr. Evil-based laser.

43:01 No.

43:01 If something's heading your way, you don't move out of the way of it. You just vaporize it.

43:05 Move it out of the way. Yeah.

43:06 If I remember anything, though, from 80s computer games, if you blast something, it then splits into two slightly smaller ones, and then you need to blast them, and then eventually... That's true.

43:16 No, that would be like a kinetic kill, but a laser kill, you'd thermally vaporize it, and then it's just dust.

43:22 At that point. I had the wrong weapons in the game.

43:24 Gashes, gashes, dust. That's all. So, Ariel, tell me about what... Let's go revisit just the role of AI in this.

43:32 Yes.

43:34 How do you see it? at its most helpful? And how do you see it where it might be its least helpful, possibly detrimental to your goals?

43:44 Well, the latter first, that would be how. You definitely don't want to.

43:47 Have it in space.

43:47 How?

43:47 You don't want homicidal computers.

43:50 Open the pod, bay doors, how. Yeah, we're trying to avoid that version of the AI agent. But something that even just within the last few weeks, chat GPT, coming online and providing this nature of an AI assistant, that is almost as sophisticated as what we see in Star Trek. When they talk to the computer and it's a fully useful kind of native language experience, we have that now with ChatGPT. And so imagining responsive space habitats of the future with AI agents incorporated will be a really big part of what aerospace nerds would like to call human factors.

44:21 Okay, you know what scares the hell out of me? What? It's the capacity for language to be thoroughly ambiguous.

44:31 True.

44:32 So that to say we have language models that understand our language, no, I don't trust it. You know the most famous sentence in that world is, time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

44:53 Yes.

44:54 Okay.

44:55 Okay.

44:56 So, these two sentences are identical in structure.

45:01 Yeah.

45:02 With similar words and completely different meanings. And so you say, well, Chad GPT would just know. But what I'm saying is wars have been fought in the history of civilization over because a comma was in the wrong place in a sentence, or at least we're told that happened, but I can completely believe it. So I worry that the absence of precision of language should not be mixed with the precision necessary to not die in space. That's my opinion. That's my...

45:30 That's my public service announcement.

45:32 I think that extends, I think you're right, and that extends to many different things where there's a desire to integrate chat GPT all of a sudden really quickly, but there definitely is a need for a human in the loop or some type of AI safety control infrastructure as well, which absolutely would be something for a mission-critical context like space that we.

45:49 I served on a board of the Pentagon for several years, and AI was becoming that much more visible over those years, and so we drafted a document such that If any commander is going to, if any AI is in the position to judge whether a kill order should be given, there has to be a human in the loop. It cannot autonomously decide to take the life of another human.

46:15 And so that's a more extreme, of course, version of what you're saying. You're saying the value of a human, we want to retain that. Otherwise, just for philosophical reasons, but also we don't want AI to be our overlord necessarily.

46:30 Yes. Okay.

46:32 You agree with that.

46:33 Okay.

46:33 I agree.

46:34 I agree. Human in the loop is an architecture, a systems engineering term used in a lot of contexts, but you're absolutely right. That's a way to not just philosophically keep humans involved, but to have a shepherd, a shepherd of these interactions. And it's until we know more.

46:50 Matt, I think she's AI herself. I think. Don't tell Isaac.

46:56 Say a paradox at her and see what happens.

47:02 Okay, I'll try.

47:03 Thanks guys for the vote of confidence.

47:06 I've got one last question. And just by the way, for reference, I heard that fruit flies like a banana as a kid. And for years, I just thought it meant fruit flies like a banana flies. You know, if you throw a banana through the air, that's how fruit flies. But so Tegan Mercia says, I was wondering what a colony on space would look like. What kinds of jobs would be available and which would be of highest importance?

47:29 Are they similar to jobs we have on Earth? And it's not asking this question, but it is implied how high up the rank would stand-up comedian slash podcaster rank?

47:38 That's amazing.

47:44 Yeah, where do comedians fit? Is there a role for comedians in your future universe? That's a.

47:51 Yes. I mean, it seems like a silly quick answer, but one of the goals of democratizing access to life in space, building the artifacts of our sci-fi space future, is to build a really richly envisioned life in space. And so what I always say to people, even though I was trained in math and science, we need everybody in the future of a life in space. We need space doctors, space lawyers, space comedians, entertainers. And that's part of a message I think that we should be getting out to the public these days, which is math and science, incredibly important. It is really important to emphasize STEM fields.

48:21 It's the holistic view of the future space.

48:23 It's the holistic view of the future. Right. Yeah.

48:25 Okay. I love that. I love that. Matt, was that your last question?

48:29 That was the last of the Patreon questions that I had in front of me.

48:32 Micah, we never get through the whole list.

48:35 We completed it.

48:36 A testament to Ariel for being like tight and clean answers. And we just kept this train moving. Ariel, this is a first. We need an award or something.

48:45 I'm honored.

48:45 Great question.

48:46 I don't know what that is.

48:47 All right.

48:48 All right, guys, we got to call it quits there. This has been delightful and informative and hopeful. You know, how many hopeful anything's happened today? Like, never. So, Ariel, when you start launching your segments, give us a call.

49:04 I will.

49:05 We want, like, brand one StarTalk or something. We'll find it.

49:09 Oh, my God, I'd be honored.

49:10 The StarTalk hexagon.

49:10 The StarTalk hexagon. I'd love it.

49:12 You got it. Well, Eric, it's a delight to see what. the arc of your life is and will continue to be. And, maybe one day you'll take the whole StarTalk staff on a Zero-G plane. That would be fun.

49:25 We could make that happen.

49:27 Make a whole episode, film an episode in Zero-G. But you have to point it away when I throw up, okay?

49:32 Yes.

49:33 The boss can't be shown throwing up. You got to.

49:36 We'll take good care of you. We should put it together.

49:38 That would be amazing.

49:40 All right, Ariel. And Matt, always good to have you, man.

49:43 Always good to be here. Thanks for having me.

49:45 All right. This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries. Civilization in space. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.