How Mars will change human evolution (big time) - Scott Solomon

Scott Solomon is an evolutionary biologist, professor, and author. Since the earliest days of science fiction, we’ve wondered what it would mean to live on Mars. Today, that question is no longer hypothetical. As humanity moves closer to becoming an interplanetary species, a new question emerges: what happens when humans are born and raised on another world? How would Mars change our bodies, our minds, and the future of evolution? Expect to learn if it is possible for humans to live on Mars, how humans who were born on Mars will evolve with their new environment, if there have ever been any astronauts who have had sex in space, what being on Mars could do to morph the human brain, and how living in space will change our Biology and much more… - 0:00 Could We Really Live on Mars? 3:44 Is Space Exploration Part of Human Evolution? 13:17 What Space Travel Really Does to the Body 21:46 The Dangers of Space Radiation 25:14 What Living on Mars Would Do To Your Body 30:52 Will Mars Accelerate Genetic Mutations? 33:39 Would Humans Face a Genetic Bottleneck on Mars? 38:15 The Personality Traits Needed to Survive on Mars 42:59 Who Should Be in Charge of a Mars Colony? 46:37 The Psychological Effects of Isolation in Space 56:26 Can Humans Reproduce in Space? 01:06:44 How Long Until Humans Evolve on Mars? 01:15:00 The Ethical Problems of Living on Mars 01:21:51 Where to Find Scott - Get 10% discount on all Gymshark products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Check out Paul's book - ⁠https://tinyurl.com/yx9sdksa⁠ Paul's website - ⁠https://tinyurl.com/3ter5bcw⁠ Paul's podcast - ⁠https://tinyurl.com/4tmtnys8⁠ Paul's Instagram - ⁠https://tinyurl.com/4w7skd82 - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What's the NASA Chapier experiment? It's just hit the 100-day mark.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has. Yeah. So this is basically a, it's a simulation. It's a way of trying to understand what life would actually be like for people living on Mars. And the way that they're doing this is by, they've created a mock-up of a space settlement. And they've built it in Johnson Space Center in Houston. So just down the street from me here, really. And it's built to be kind of like what they think it would actually be like on Mars, right? So they actually 3D-printed it, which is one of the technologies that has been suggested for how we might build structures on Mars.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  And then a group of, I believe it's four, a crew of four people have entered it. And they are living inside it, as you said, for 100 days so far. But the plan is for it to last a full year. So this is kind of like a thing that people do when they're trying to understand what different aspects of space settlement might actually be like. Is they create what are called analogs, basically a model that sort of replicates some aspect of a space environment, a space settlement in this case. And then they put people inside and try to sort of understand what happens. So this is the second one that they've done. They did a full year already.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  And this is the second full-year study of people inside this kind of mock-up of a Mars habitat.

• 1:44Chris Williamson?

  How much do you think they're testing physiological change versus psychological change?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think a lot of what these analog studies try to get at, and is true of this study as well, is the psychology. Because of course, they can't replicate a lot of the physical conditions of being on Mars. You know, there's one-third the Earth's gravity, right? They're not simulating that. There's probably going to be a lot higher radiation exposure in a Mars habitat. And they're not simulating that.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Excuse me. So some of the things that they can simulate are, of course, being in a confined space, being in a area where you're limited to what you brought with you. They're not able to kind of come and go, and they're not able to bring new materials and supplies in or out. And another big part of it is sort of the the the interaction between the crew members. So what is it like to be more or less stuck with just the other three folks that you brought with you for an extended time period?

• 2:56Chris Williamson?

  It's the most boring episode of Love Island ever filmed, but it lasts for an entire 12 months.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  I really think they could make some reality TV shows out of these analogs because there's quite a few of these types of things that are in different places. I went and visited one of them, actually, when I was researching my first book, which just touched on the idea of how we might change in space. And that was out in Utah. It's called the Mars Desert Research Station, a remote facility in a place in the desert that really kind of looks like Mars. And so I went out there and visited a crew that had just begun a simulation. And it was fascinating to see what they're doing and how the ways that they try to kind of make it feel realistic and the kind of things that they try to learn. And there's a whole bunch of these.

• 3:44Chris Williamson?

  How much is space exploration an evolutionary event versus a technological one?

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Well, that's really the thing that I'm most interested in. So my background, I'm an evolutionary biologist, right? And so the thing that got me most interested in this topic of like, how will people be affected by being in space is the question of would making a long term settlement on Mars or anywhere else lead to evolutionary change? From my perspective, I think it's inevitable. I think basically if you are creating a situation where people are not just going and coming back, but they're going to live there. In other words, they're moving there. That's where their lives are. And most importantly, they're having families there. They're raising children there. Once you start talking about

• 4:36Speaker 01

  a multiple generation, generational presence on another world, we should expect evolutionary change. That's how evolution works, right?

• 4:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, migration in the past has caused divergence, right? What was that Homo floresius?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Florisensis, yeah, yeah.

• 4:58Chris Williamson?

  Florisensis, the pygmy people. So you're an evolutionary biologist. I've been telling this story on the show for ages. Can you tell me if this is true or not? So I'd heard they were Indonesia, right?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. The island of Flores, which is today part of Indonesia.

• 5:15Chris Williamson?

  So Indonesia, if anyone looks at it on a map, it's kind of like someone's thrown crumbs over a table. It's very, it's very broken up. And what it seemed like was a particular hominid, Homo previous species got split off. And the island that they were on was very, very restricted in terms of the calories that they could consume in terms of the resources. So that meant that over time, the smallest humans were the ones that were selected to survive because they needed the fewest calories. Then, one of the story that I've always told is this restriction in resources wasn't just affecting the humans, but it was affecting all of the other species as well. So there are sites of tiny, three feet, four feet

• 5:57Chris Williamson?

  high humans carrying tiny spears, chasing tiny elephants or mammoths. So all of the creatures had been diminutized down to this tiny little level because they were all on this little island. Is that bullshit or am I right?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Well, that is one of the ways that we think about it. And you've got a lot of the story correct there. So you're absolutely right that basically what people have found are the skeletal remains inside of a cave on this island of Flores, of these very short statured, small bodied hominids. The structure of their bones shows us that they were different from any other species that we know about anywhere else in the world that's ever been found. They're only ever been found from this one island. So based on that, we assume they were restricted to the island. Somebody could later find them somewhere else and that would change the story. But for now, you're absolutely right that our understanding is they only lived on this island. And because they're such short bodied hominids in a...

• 6:59Speaker 01

  You know, it's very different from pretty much any other species. I'll tell you the actual twist to that in just a moment. But yeah, we, we think what may have happened is that their ancestors made it there somehow. They were stranded on this island and basically they evolved to be shorter. And as you pointed out, they're not the only species that evolved to be smaller. We actually know that this is a common phenomenon that happens to species that are isolated on islands is that they change size. So there's all over the world, there's all of these examples of these miniature species that live on islands. And elephants are actually a good example. There's, there's small bodied fossil, you know, mammoths and

• 7:42Speaker 01

  other elephant relatives on islands like in the Mediterranean and elsewhere in Asia. So that definitely is something that happens on islands. But there's more to it, which is actually fascinating because on that same island of Flores, not only were there other small bodied species, but there were actually giants too. So you know, the Komodo dragon from Australia, this is, sorry, not from Australia, from, from Komodo is actually near the island of Flores. So there were species that were closely related to Komodo dragons, but were enormous, these absolutely giant lizards. I mean, really like a, like a real dragon on that same island at the same time as Homo floresiensis. And that's

• 8:27Speaker 01

  the thing that happens on islands is, you know, a lot of times they'll get smaller, but sometimes they'll get much bigger. Think about, you know, giant tortoises like in the Galapagos Islands, right? So we call this the island rule. And the idea is like things change size. They either get much bigger or much smaller. And that seems to be true of, of hominids, which are basically, you know, humans or human-like. Species as well. And I promised I would give you the twist. So there is actually, since that discovery, there was another discovery of another hominid, also small bodied on an island in the Philippines. And it's a different species.

• 9:09Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, Homo luzanensis now, Luzon. And so

• 9:14Chris Williamson?

  Same effect, but a different speciation.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  That's the, that's the interpretation. We think that this is like yet another instance where some type of hominid goes isolated and became smaller.

• 9:26Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't the, wasn't the Flores man, they were still alive, like 10,000 B.C., 12,000 B.C., I think.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  So the initial dates when those fossils were first discovered were, were that they survived up until very recently by like, you know, historical, not historical, by evolutionary standards, by sort of the geological time scale that, you know, we scientists are used to. Those dates have since been pushed back a bit as they've gotten more evidence. So still quite recently, I think, I want to say it's something like 50,000 years is now when they think they, they finally disappeared. But the thing is about that, that that still means that they probably overlapped with our species, with Homo sapiens, right? So like the first Homo sapiens were arriving in that area right around the time that Homo

• 10:19Speaker 01

  floresiensis disappears. So coincidence, you know?

• 10:24Chris Williamson?

  Dude, well, I mean, we've always thought about this, right? Like everyone's thought, what would it be like to meet an alien? We don't look at any other species and think, oh, they're just like us. I think they're a bit like us. Look at chimpanzee, you look at apes, you, they're a little bit. I went to the Burundi impenetrable forest, which is shockingly penetrable, actually. And it's a, it's a tourist, it's a tourist destination.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  I've been there as well. My wife and I went there.

• 10:55Chris Williamson?

  Did you do the silverback gorilla trekking thing?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  We did. One of the most amazing experiences I've ever had.

• 10:59Chris Williamson?

  It was, it was, I did the same thing as you and I'm Five yards, four yards away from this thousand pound monster. And you think, wow, it's so much like us, right? But it's not, you know, it's not, you know, it's not us. I wonder what, I wonder what would have happened culturally? If we did have a different hominid species still floating around. Are they us? Or are they other? Would we have more kin protection over them or something else? But anyway, I, I.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  I think about this all the time. I, I agree with you. It is because we're used to, as you said, we're used to a world where the closest thing to us.

• 11:40Chris Williamson?

  Is very different.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Is pretty different.

• 11:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  It's, there's, you know? And, and that is not the way the world has been for the vast majority of our species history. For most of our species history, there were multiple types of human on this planet. And we interacted with them.

• 11:57Chris Williamson?

  Perhaps at varying degrees of peacefulness, we'll see. So this is the first time, if this is the case, if we go to Mars, if we settle Mars as humans, this will be the first time in history that a species will knowingly place itself in an environment that almost guarantees biological divergence.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I mean, you know, you can think about how our species has gone to extreme places on Earth throughout history, right? Antarctica, the bottom of the ocean, these kinds of, you know, very high mountains. But we generally didn't go there to stay, right? There's nobody that is living on Antarctica, like raising their kids there and these kinds of things. And, and even in those extreme environments, what we think of as extreme, you know, you can be in Antarctica and it's very cold. Don't get me wrong, but you could still walk outside and breathe oxygen, right? Your blood doesn't boil if, if there's a leak in your habitat, the way it would on Mars.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  So we're talking about a very different level of extreme when we talk about how extreme the environment is on Mars. So yeah, I think you're right. I think that it would be the first time that we would be knowingly putting ourselves in that extreme of an environment and trying to actually live there.

• 13:17Chris Williamson?

  Okay, before we even get to Mars, what happens during spaceflight?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, it's funny because we haven't been flying in space for that long, right? Like, you know, we've got what, like 70 years of history of of human space.

• 13:32Chris Williamson?

  We're already looking past it. We're already thinking, ah, we've, you know, space, we've got that, that's in the bag. What's next?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, in the early days, like, we had no idea. Like, literally, people thought like your eyes might pop out of your head if you go into space. Like, that was a question. Could you swallow? These were unanswered questions when people first went to space. But we've learned a time. Like, we know quite a bit now about if you were to, you know, get on a rocket, fly up to space, spend, you know, a couple days there and come back, you know, we could tell you with a lot of certainty, kind of what is likely to happen to your body. And we know that, like, the main effects are the change in gravity, right? You're in a weightless environment typically when you're in space. And that does a lot to your body. It causes your your your muscles to weaken because they don't have to work as hard, right? Especially like in your lower body,

• 14:22Speaker 01

  your back. And and and because your muscles aren't working as hard, your bones basically respond to muscle. And so they start to kind of break down. Like, they basically will start to absorb, the body will absorb some of the minerals, right, the calcium and the potassium that makes up your bones. And

• 14:43Chris Williamson?

  Is that just because they're not being strained? Is this kind of like atrophy for the muscles, but for the structure?

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. And actually, one of the ways that people have studied the effects of prolonged space flight is through bedrest studies. So just by not moving your body much, it's not the, it's not a perfect replica, but it does simulate some of the the ways in which being in a lower gravity environment impacts the the body, the circulatory system, right? Your heart's not having to pump as much to get blood through the entire body, you know, to get blood up to your brain. You know, you got to work against gravity here, but in space, you don't. So we know a lot about that. We know that, you know, the fluids in your body actually, not just the blood, but all of your body fluids start to be redistributed because, you know, gravity normally pushes them down towards your lower body. So, you know,

• 15:34Speaker 01

  if you look at pictures of astronauts in space, you probably can tell, like especially at first, their faces look kind of puffy.

• 15:40Chris Williamson?

  Moon face.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:42Chris Williamson?

  Space face. They've got space face.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  They have space face and they have what they call chicken legs, right? Because their legs look super skinny because they've lost all this fluid. So they look a little silly, at least at first.

• 15:52Chris Williamson?

  What, hang on, just on that, at first, does that mean that the body somehow reaches a new kind of equilibrium? So I'm going to guess a lot of this is kind of what? Glymphatic, lymphatic clearance stuff?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so now that we've had people that have stayed for, for longer flights, you know, up to a year and even a bit longer, we have been able to see that like, yeah, there are ways in which some of the systems in the body have like an initial adjustment period, and then they start to kind of, you know, reach a plateau, or they start to kind of return to, to normal, you know, like the body, when it has all of this extra fluid in the head, or more fluid than you're used to having in the head, your body interprets that as too much fluid. And so one of the things that the body does is it starts to reduce the amount

• 16:42Speaker 01

  of plasma in your blood. And so you're actually losing blood volume by being in space for a longer period of time. And you start to reduce the production of red blood cells because your body's thinking, I don't need so much blood. And so astronauts often come back from space anemic. And that has other health implications, as, as you know. So, so that is something that is like an adjustment that the body makes. And then when you come back to Earth, you go through yet another adjustment. And that's just gravity. There's also radiation, right? So, so.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  That's something that is going to be really important for thinking about deep space, because actually, what we know about how radiation affects astronauts is mostly from how astronauts are affected by being in low Earth orbit. So the International Space Station is in low Earth orbit. It's orbiting the Earth, but it's close enough to the Earth that it's actually still inside the magnetic field that is surrounding our planet, which extends out quite far into space. And so that magnetic field actually traps a lot of the space radiation and prevents it from getting closer to the Earth. So astronauts

• 18:02Speaker 01

  on the International Space Station aren't exposed to as much radiation as astronauts on the Moon, on Mars, or traveling anywhere beyond the limits of that magnetic field, the magnetosphere. Those are called the Van Allen radiation belts. And interesting story how they were discovered. I talk about that in my book. But, you know, yeah, we know that that radiation affects the body, right? I mean, the thing that you typically think about is cancer. And the cancer risk for anybody traveling in space is certainly higher. It's one of the reasons that NASA limits the amount of time that astronauts are able to go to space. Astronauts essentially will kind of time out at a certain point if they

• 18:47Speaker 01

  have reached a radiation exposure that NASA deems to be, you know, too risky. And so, you know, that's a known risk. But, you know, we also know that, you know, there's things other than cancer that radiation does, right? So radiation can have cognitive effects. There's some really interesting research that looks at simulated space radiation and tries to understand like, what does this do to our nervous system, right? And research on rodents, for example, shows that if they're exposed to simulated space radiation, they

• 19:29Speaker 01

  actually have slower responses to tasks that they've been taught how to do. That's pretty concerning for anybody planning on going deeper into space.

• 19:39Chris Williamson?

  Quick thinking, trying to problem solve, fix whatever this pipe is that's just broken. Oh, hang on, the environment has made me stupid.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a thing that people call astronauts call space fog or space brain sometimes and

• 19:56Chris Williamson?

  Space face and space brain.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  There you go. Yeah, exactly. And, and you know, it's sort of like you're just kind of a little bit, a little out of it, a little, little slower to respond to tasks that you would otherwise be able to do quickly. And, you know, they can adjust, but if that is something that gets worse with more radiation exposure, that's important for us to know if we're going to spend more time in deep space.

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  How reversible are these?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  We don't know. So, you know, partly it's because the amount of radiation that those astronauts have been exposed to, as I said, isn't as great. It's actually a different type of radiation even then. So there's what's called these galactic cosmic rays that are out in space. This is, you know, radiation zipping around from other galaxies and it's largely trapped by our magnetic field. So, once you get out to the moon, to Mars, you know, any place that we might want to travel that goes, you know, beyond low Earth orbit, we're talking about a lot more radiation exposure. We just simply don't know what that will do to people, or especially if they're being exposed to it for a much longer period of time.

• 21:02Chris Williamson?

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• 21:46Speaker 01

  What was that story about how the Van Allen? Yeah, the Van Allen radiation belts. So, so, you know, it starts with basically trying to figure out like, you know, where is radiation coming from? We can detect on the surface of the earth that there's, that there's, you know, some radiation. And the initial experiments were actually done by putting radiation detectors on hot air balloons and allowing those balloons to go higher and higher. And the surprising thing was that the radiation exposure increased as they got higher and higher in the atmosphere. So at first people thought like, the radiation's probably coming from earth, maybe from the center of the earth. No, it's coming from somewhere up high. And, you know, even, maybe it's, maybe it's the sun, right?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Well, if it's the sun, then those exposures should be higher during daytime than during nighttime.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  And it wasn't. They even measured it during an eclipse. It should, it should like decrease slightly when the sun is being blocked by the moon, right? It doesn't do that. And then what ended up happening was, uh, once we were able to send satellites deeper into space, the initial measurements, this is done on a Geiger counter, right? So the thing that like clicks when you're trying to detect radiation, it makes like a, it's kind of sound like that, right? And the more rapid the clicks are, the higher the, the radiation exposure. Well, the very first time one of these was sent up on, uh, on a satellite, it's clicking, clicking, clicking, the rate is getting higher and then all of a sudden it just stops. So it's like, what, what the heck's going on?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  What, is there just no, suddenly no radiation? And it turned out, no, actually, there was so much radiation, it was just overwhelming the sensors of the Geiger counter. Yeah. Holy shit. Exactly. So I mean, I've, I've heard, this is like,

• 23:37Chris Williamson?

  I'm using the dramatized series of Chernobyl as my, well, I've heard Geiger counters and they were in Chernobyl. Okay. But even at least in the, and it was trying to be accurate, I think scientifically. And even in that, the Geiger counter still made a noise. It wasn't as if it blew out the top of it. It was just ticking super, super fast. So yeah, if you think, well, there's an elephant's foot down there. That's the most radioactive thing on the planet. But if you just go far enough away from us, you go to a point where Geiger counters just essentially top out. That's, that's pretty scary.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, what they did, they sent another satellite with a different, you know, type of device or calibrated differently or whatever. And then we're able to determine, oh yeah, you get to this certain kind of, you know, elevation in orbit around the earth. And all of a sudden there's just huge amounts of radiation. So we now know that there's these Van Allen radiation belts. There's like an inner belt and an outer belt. So you can kind of picture this as like, you know, imagine a ball, that's the earth. And then you take a rubber band that's bigger than that ball. And then you kind of pinch it in the middle around the ball. So you've got this kind of two sort of orbs coming out from, from the earth. And that's the shape of the Van Allen radiation belts.

• 24:56Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's why if we didn't have the iron core in the earth, the magnetosphere, magnetic sphere around us, would all of these rays would just be able to pepper us? I mean, there would be a ton of other problems as well, but one of them is that we would just get annihilated by radiation. Okay. So we've somehow, me and you have survived our journey across space. And we've managed to land in Mars. Some of the stuff may be reversible. Some of the stuff may not be reversible. We'll see, we can't walk, walk too much. We got space face and space brain and chicken legs.

• 25:32Chris Williamson?

  What will the different physics on Mars do to humans? Just more of the same from the, the space flight? Is there anything else to say on the, the sort of physics of the system?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, first of all, it takes something like six to nine months just to get there. So you're talking about you've been traveling through space, microgravity, right? Weightlessness for, for, you know, let's say six months, right? So your body is going through all those things that we were just talking about. Your, your, your muscles have become weaker, your bones have become more brittle. The fluids have redistributed. That has other effects like on our eyes. The vision actually has a tendency to get worse. So that's all happening. Then you arrive on Mars and let's assume that the landing goes well. Uh, and you are now on the surface. Now all of the sudden you're in a one-third gravity environment.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Three eighths, about one-third gravity environment compared to, to Earth's gravity. So you went from a weightlessness to one-third G. And so now all of a sudden, there's all this weight, all this force on your body.

• 26:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, even though it's one-third of what's on Earth, it's an infinity more than what was in space.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so, you know, if you look at like, you know, anytime astronauts come back from, from being in space, they need a lot of help in order just to get out of the spacecraft to walk. It's like it, there's a long adjustment period. So, um, one of the things is just immediately like that, even though it's just one-third G, that's going to be hard on somebody that has been in a weightless environment for that amount of time. So if there's nobody else there to help you, uh, just even getting out of your spacecraft might be.

• 27:17Chris Williamson?

  Robo-legs, maybe some of those assistance things, devices. Well, I mean, they're trying to offset this. I've seen astronauts using the sort of hand crank cycling machines. You know, you can artificially recreate, um, force and, and tension and pressure by using stuff that has it built into the system itself. But the globalness of gravity, working on the spine, working on the organs, working on, working on the lymph system, working on circulation, working on reproductive organs, working on, you know, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.

• 27:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I don't think, I don't think that you're going to be really trying to pick up pennies here when there's a shit ton of hundred dollar bills that you've left behind you.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, no, you're right. So I mean astronauts do a lot of exercise in space. You're absolutely right. You know, using kind of resistance because you can't use, you know, weightlifting doesn't make sense in a weightless environment. And all of that is really meant to minimize the, the, the deconditioning that happens to the body, right? But it doesn't eliminate it. If you didn't do that kind of exercise, and, and they exercise about two hours a day every day. So this is not like a, a small amount. If you didn't do that, you'd be in, in, in way worse shape. So, you know, we, we've, we've arrived at Mars, we're, we're, we've done our, our two hours a day, uh, every day. Still, it's going to be a challenge to just get up and move around. Who knows what the cognitive effects of, of that radiation exposure? You've been exposed

• 28:46Speaker 01

  to galactic cosmic rays for six months. Nobody's ever had that happen. We, we simply don't know what the effect will be. And then there's another factor. What have you been eating all this time? You know, astronauts, you know, we're all kind of familiar with the idea of like freeze dried foods and stuff like that, that, that astronauts typically bring with them. They are having to bring kind of, you know, shelf stable food. But even in the International Space Station, they're able to occasionally resupply them with some kind of fresh food, some fresh produce. There's a story of Russian cosmonauts,

• 29:28Speaker 01

  the first to be, uh, living for a, a longer period of time on a space station. And, uh, and they smuggled in an onion. And, and it was, it was the first ever birthday that a person had in space. And, and they gave this cosmonaut an onion for his birthday. And it was like the most wonderful thing.

• 29:48Chris Williamson?

  That is the most Russian shit I have ever heard in my entire life.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:53Chris Williamson?

  We have we have birthday. We have onion.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yep, contraband onion, no less.

• 29:59Chris Williamson?

  Illegal onion.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. And but like, the point is, people really get excited about any kind of fresh produce that you can have. We have not made major advances in our ability to grow large amounts of food in in any sort of space environment. This is something that people are actively trying to work on. They have grown plants on the International Space Station, but at very small scales. And astronauts tend to get really attached to those plants. And so, you know, we think that's going to be a major limiting factor in our ability to go deeper into space is what are we going to eat? You know, people, nobody wants to go and eat, you know, canned food, packaged food for years at a time without, you know,

• 30:45Speaker 01

  mixing it up with with some fresh food. So so that's another one of the challenges.

• 30:52Chris Williamson?

  Given the radiation issues, does that mean there's going to be higher mutation load just generally over time?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  I think it does. So I think we should expect that people are going to be exposed to higher radiation, even if they're living in some kind of an environment that's trying to shield, block that that radiation.

• 31:11Chris Williamson?

  Special 3D printed reflective anti-radiation, but they've already done the nine months to get out there. They're probably going in and out doing Mars walks or space walks or some sort of equivalent thing. And 3D printing machines, at least for the first few centuries, are not going to be able to block everything. And there's more radiation.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, even if you built a fully radiation proof enclosure that you could live in on Mars, who wants to go to Mars and never go walk around outside, right? I mean, you know, what's the point? So I think people will be exposed to more radiation. And yeah, radiation causes mutations, right? It causes damage to the DNA. And when the body repairs that damage, it's never a perfect process. There's always a risk that the the repair leads to a change in the sequence of DNA, and that's a mutation. So so that's a that's a health risk. But it also has implications for our ability to adapt over a much longer time scale of many generations.

• 32:14Chris Williamson?

  What does it do to adaptability?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Well, adaptation comes from natural selection and natural selection on its own can only really sift through whatever variation there is. And so the only way you get new variation is through mutation. Mutation is the ultimate source of all diversity.

• 32:33Chris Williamson?

  Why is this not a good thing then? Does this not push the dice rolling more quickly?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  So I think that what we should expect if we do nothing else is that if we're able to live for many generations in a space environment like on Mars, it would mean that basically you are kickstarting the evolutionary process. It would happen faster. Why that is something we should maybe be concerned about is that's a very messy and unpleasant process. You're basically talking about a lot of death.

• 33:00Chris Williamson?

  There's going to be tons of errors. There's going to be shit tons of errors. That one doesn't work. That one doesn't work. That one doesn't work. That one kind of works. That one doesn't work. That one doesn't work.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you're talking about a lot of suffering. You're talking about a lot of death. And so that's, you know, it would happen. I think what I try to argue is that's sort of the default that we should expect is that if we're living for many generations in this kind of an extreme environment, natural selection will do its thing. Mutation rates would be higher because of that radiation exposure. And so basically, the process that we normally think of as being generally pretty slow would actually happen faster.

• 33:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, okay, but what about selection bottlenecks? Because if Mars is going to accelerate this evolutionary roulette, you end up with selection bottlenecks.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, the idea of bottlenecks, I think this is an important concept that we have to think about if what we're trying to do is to create a long-term settlement, because we know that any time you take a large number of individuals and then you take a small number of them and put them somewhere else, right? You've gone through a population bottleneck. That's, you know, basically, it's like pouring. I do this simulation in my classes sometimes where you take like a bottle that's filled with like different colored gumballs, right? And you know how many different colors there are, and then you pour out a few of them and then you ask, okay, is the proportion of different colored gumballs the same as it was in the bottle at the starting point, or is it different? And of course, it's going to be different. It's never going to be exactly the same.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  So you take a small number of individuals from a large group, it's not going to be representative. So that kind of of reduction in population size that happens when, you know, when you found a new population.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  It leads to rapid evolutionary change and we call that the founder effect in evolutionary biology because it's a well-known phenomenon. Anytime, you know, a new population is founded, you tend to get a reduction of genetic diversity and whoever the individuals are that are the founders have this like really disproportionate effect on what happens later. Like they're really influential.

• 35:09Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever read Seven Eves by Neil Stephenson?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  I have, yes.

• 35:12Chris Williamson?

  Dude, this is exactly what the founder effect is, right?

• 35:15Speaker 01

  That's right. Yep.

• 35:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I don't want to spoil it. It's in my, it's in my first reading list that lots of people have downloaded. So maybe loads of people that are listening also know the spoiler too. Actually, skip forward. If you haven't read Seven Eves, skip forward by about 30 seconds. So halfway through the book, after the moon explodes, there's seven women left. I think only one of them can't reproduce. I think one of them's like a matron martial type lady. Or maybe there's eight and seven can reproduce. And yeah, you end up with these seven different races in future. And, and, and each one is very distinct. And welcome back to the people that didn't read Seven Eves. You end up, you end up with this sort of very distinct lineage. And that's the, that's the best. This is why hard sci-fi rules, because I get to learn about real, real stuff and it's snuck in under the guise of it being a story.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Oh, there's so many examples of how, you know, a science fiction author has already thought through a lot of the real challenges and the real consequences.

• 36:09Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember on, do you remember in Seven Eves that there was such a scarcity of food halfway through that somebody invented the idea of soft cannibalism? Do you remember that?

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Soft cannibalism?

• 36:21Chris Williamson?

  He ate his own legs because he decided that in space, legs were arbitrary.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  You don't eat them. Yeah.

• 36:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. And he reduced his energy requirement and increased his energy intake by eating his own legs. So cool. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I have been wearing Whoop for over five years now. Way before they were a partner on the show. I've actually tracked over 1,600 days of my life with it, according to the app, which is insane. And it's the only wearable I've ever stuck with because it tracks everything that matters. Sleep, workouts, recovery, breathing, heart rate, even your steps. And the new 5.0 is the best version. You get all the benefits that make Whoop indispensable. 7% smaller, but now it's also got a 14 day battery life and has health span to track your habits, how they affect your pace of aging.

• 37:10Chris Williamson?

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• 37:55Chris Williamson?

  It's basically like being in a closed system is more akin to being on an island than it is being in a city.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. I mean, you are, you are in an island, right? I mean, you're in a place where you can live, but you're surrounded by an inhospitable environment. And, and so, yeah, I mean, that's an island. Yeah, I think that's a good way to think about it.

• 38:15Chris Williamson?

  So presumably there's going to be huge survival pressures on psychological traits. Maybe just as much as the physical ones.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Psychological traits, definitely, and skills. I mean, you know, think about who are the people you would want to send to establish a new, you know, a new human population on Mars. I mean, you want people who are likely to be able to handle tough situations, but you also want people who know how to do all different sorts of things, you know. You need different skills, you need different, you know, personality traits. But you also want to make sure you've enhanced the kind of, you know, probability of success by making sure it's also a genetically diverse group of people, you know. I mean, the more genetically diverse it is, the more opportunity there is for for natural

• 39:10Speaker 01

  selection to be able to help people to adapt in future generations. So, yeah, you know, I think it would have to be quite different from how we have kind of historically chosen who gets to go to space, right? You know, I don't, did you ever read-

• 39:25Chris Williamson?

  So you would actually want, you would actually, oh, sorry, go ahead.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Well, so there's kind of this like famous book from, I think in 1979, called The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. I don't know if you ever read that. It's like one of the classic accounts of the early days of of the US space program. But that that title, that idea of the right stuff, like who is it that has the right stuff that gets to be the the select few that go to space? And at least initially for the US, it was all, first of all, it was all was all men, it was all white men, and then it was all like actually Navy test pilots, right? So they took them from the military. It was only people who were already in the military, and they were chosen for their

• 40:09Speaker 01

  ability to be able to handle the physical aspects of of a launch and being in space, and also the psychological challenges. And and, you know, I mean, the US space program is huge success, clearly. But if you use those same criteria to select people for who's going to found a new population on Mars, you'd get such a tiny fraction of human diversity. You'd be setting yourself up for failure.

• 40:37Chris Williamson?

  More bottlenecked over time.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:39Chris Williamson?

  Get tighter and tighter. So you need to make the base of this pyramid.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:42Chris Williamson?

  As broad as possible. So I mean, I was thinking as you were speaking, you know, people who have brittle bones, for instance, maybe they have something which is actually useful in there because all of the selection pressures that we have currently, we want someone who's big and strong. Why? Gravity's 30% of the, maybe we actually want people who are really petite.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 41:04Chris Williamson?

  They need fewer calories and therefore they don't need to eat their own legs.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 41:09Chris Williamson?

  When it, when it comes to the personalities, are there some personalities that are more suited for space colonization than others?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Well, we do know from a lot of the studies that have been done in analogs, like we were talking about earlier. And this includes things like people who are, you know, working in Antarctica in, in the most sort of similar environment that exists on earth to what it will be like that, right? You're in an isolated, extreme, confined environment, surrounded by, you know, hostile conditions. So, um, you know, what are the factors that lead to success? Especially for like people who are overwintering in Antarctica, like they're staying, you can't just, you know, leave whenever you want to, because there's no way to kind of get a, a ship or a plane in.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  People who, uh, who, who do well in that environment are people who are good team players, are people who are, um, uh, you know, open about kind of how the experience is, is going for them, willing to talk about it, willing to talk about it with others. Um, you know, you also want a, a good chemistry among the group, right? So you don't want, uh, you know, all type A personalities because they're likely to, to kind of clash, right? And, um, so there's all these studies that have like, looked at the psychology of group dynamics. An interesting one is you don't want an even number of people. You want an, you want an, you want an odd number.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  It's because it can split into, yeah, basically it could split into factions and, uh, and, and you need a, a tiebreaker, right? So, uh, there've been, there've been examples of where that has happened and, uh, and, and it hasn't always gone well. So, yeah, so there's interesting lessons that can be learned from, uh, you know, what happens here on earth.

• 42:57Chris Williamson?

  That is so good. Wow. Okay, so you you mentioned before about who gets to go to Mars first, sort of the best people, the strongest people, the richest people, the most obedient people. Who do you think should govern Mars? Is it Earth governments? Is it companies? Is it the colonists themselves? What about the politi- what about the astro Martian politics?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  You know, I think we have this tendency to think about going to space as being like an opportunity to to, you know, start completely fresh and get it right this time and and all, you know, this like we're gonna have a utopia in space. I I'm not convinced by that way of thinking about. I think, you know, humans are humans and we should we should learn from what has happened before and and not expect that it would be different there. So I think we need to to try to, you know, do the things that seem to work well here on Earth, right? I don't think you want to have, for example, like, you know, a government from Earth dictating what happens on Mars, because we know that that doesn't work well.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  You know, we know that people need to have their own ability to to make their own decisions. You you want leaders who have skin in the game.

• 44:07Chris Williamson?

  It's also highly inefficient.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Sure. And there's a communication delay. We haven't even talked about that. You can't you can't have this kind of conversation like we're having, where one person is on Earth and the other person is on Mars, because they're so far away that you'll have several minutes of delay between when you say something and when the person hears it on the other end. And it could be up to 20 minutes, depending on where Earth and Mars are in their respective orbits. So you can send emails, you know, or video messages back and forth, but you can't really have a conversation. So, yeah, imagine a government meeting where, you know, you can't even like have a conversation, right? You think it's dysfunctional now, man.

• 44:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, look, there was a campaign when Elon first started floating around the administration to decolonize Mars. And what they meant by that was, we don't want the same horrible inequity, oligopoly, powerful Matthew principle bullshit to go to this new planet. It was pointed out that there's a little bit of an irony in talking about decolonizing a planet that we haven't yet colonized. But yeah, the politics of this, I think, are just so fascinating. And again, my go to seven eves from Neil Stephenson, they need to work out what happens with murder. What happens if somebody commits a crime in space? Is there

• 45:36Chris Williamson?

  a prison? Who's the adjudicator? What are the law? Everything needs to be reinstated again. And if you've got people from multiple different countries, well, the Russians do it this way, but the Americans do it that way, but the Ukrainians do it a different way. Yeah, well, we disagree with your well, we need to it's a new it people aren't from nations anymore. And if they are that those factions are just going to become splinters that start to fracture what is supposed to be a cohesive unit into something which is, you know, very individualized, which you don't want. But do you want to say to people that you need to recant your current identity? Well, after a few generations, what does that mean? And then how do you avoid there being new splinter factions? You don't have that much tolerance for error with this stuff when it comes to governance, you know,

• 46:21Chris Williamson?

  you can have a good bit of tolerance for error if there's 156 countries or something. If you've got three pods, 200 people, like 10 people died, that's a lot of that's five percent, right? There's a lot of people. So yeah, just endlessly fascinating. All right, going back to the the personality thing, the psychological impact, what does long term isolation in space do to the human mind? Why are closed ecosystems so psychologically taxing?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's a few things, right? I mean, one is just, you know, knowing that you can't leave, right? This is something that, you know, again, people in Antarctica research stations or, you know, some of the remote field camps that they experience. You can't just, you know, go for a walk or say, that's it, I'm done, I'm out of here. A similar kind of thing happens to people who are on submarines, like nuclear submarines, that have to spend a long period of time submerged during military operations, right? Can't just step outside, you're, you're pretty much stuck there. The difference there is, you know, they're working within a kind of a military hierarchy

• 47:35Speaker 01

  system is sort of, you know, built into, to the nature of the experience. That's not the case so much in Antarctica, but, you know, it's, knowing that you can't leave is, is something that, that definitely takes a toll, you know? And you have to, you have to train for it, you have to be prepared for it, and you have to have, you know, systems in place to allow people to, to deal with whatever comes with it, right? So you need to be able to have, you know, for example, you know, a therapist available to speak with them. You need to have, you know, resources in place to, to, to deal with crises when they do take place as well. So, so I think that's something that has to be built in.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  But there's an interesting other side to it, right? So, so, you know, we think a lot about like, oh, how this is really going to be hard and it's going to be something that's going to have a, maybe a negative impact on, on a lot of folks. But there's also this idea that going to space can have a profound positive impact on people. So some of the first accounts of, of astronauts really, you know, talk about like just the awe and wonder. I mean, people still talk about that today. Everybody that goes to space talks about how incredible it is. Including Katy Perry, yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, everybody does. I mean, how could you not? Including the famed astronaut Katy Perry.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  And William Shatner, did you see he, when he went to space, he talked about this too.

• 49:06Chris Williamson?

  Was it called the blue dot effect or the whole earth effect or something?

• 49:10Speaker 01

  It's called the overview effect.

• 49:11Chris Williamson?

  Overview effect.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's the term that's been uh given to this phenomenon by Frank White, who's a philosopher of space, who uh, you know, he did all these interviews with initially with, with, you know, sort of NASA astronauts and cosmonauts as well. And even up to, you know, more recent flights where we have, you know, people who are kind of everyday citizens that are going up on these commercial space flights now. And so he has basically argued that like, people have this profound shift that happens to them by being in space and looking back at the earth and, and, you know, seeing, for example, how thin

• 49:54Speaker 01

  the atmosphere is, it just looks so fragile and delicate. You know, seeing how you, you know, the earth doesn't look like it does on the maps. There's no borders between nations, you know, this sense that like, we're really all in this together. And then just the vastness of space. So, you know, we're a tiny little dot, right? In the vastness of space. And so he has argued that basically, you know, it would be really good for as many people as possible to go into space and have that experience because it makes us, you know, better people, it makes us better stewards of our planet, of our environment.

• 50:31Chris Williamson?

  I get it, but the entire problem here is there's only one or two generations that are going to be actually traveling there. As soon as you have kids, the same tribal mechanism, yeah, I mean, what makes you think that the steward of your planet would change because you can see your mom and dad's home planet over there and you're on a different one now? The same psychological effect is just going to kick in in a different atmosphere.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  I think you're right. So this is one of the things I write about is that, you know, what I think it would be a fundamentally different thing for children born on Mars or born anywhere else, right? You won't have that same connection. I mean, it's the same kind of phenomenon that happens with, you know, with immigrant families, right? The first generation, they still feel very connected to their home country and culture and that lasts for a few generations, but eventually you have this kind of like loose identity with that, you know, home country. And maybe you go back and visit and maybe you adopt some of the, you know. The culture, the cuisine, the dress, et cetera. But you know, eventually people start to think of themselves as belonging to the place where they live.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

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• 52:20Chris Williamson?

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• 52:58Chris Williamson?

  What I think is really surprising, shocking to a lot of people will be to consider the idea that Martian human nature would be genetically distinct, like the texture of their minds and the way that their brains function.

• 53:17Chris Williamson?

  Would be not only distinct, but maybe unrecognizable. That sounds wild.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's possible. I mean, one thing is, look, I think the most likely kind of environment that we would be living in, like what we would build, where would we live on Mars, would be underground, because that is the easiest way to create a habitat that is

• 53:38Chris Williamson?

  You don't have to build anything.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Protected, yeah.

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  You get rid of the stuff that's in there. You don't need building materials. You just need building holes.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  That's right. And you don't have to worry about the space radiation. You don't have to worry about, we didn't even talk about like meteor impacts, right? Without, Mars has such a thin atmosphere. It has no magnetic field. Its radiation is very high, but also with that thin atmosphere, it's getting bombarded by meteors, much more so than Earth. You don't want a glass dome, you know, the way we often see depicted in sci fi. You want something much more protected. And so what's the, to your point, like, what is the, what is the psychology of an entire, you know, society? Underground species. Underground. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

• 54:26Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  You know, what does that do to your, sure, physical features like your eyes, your vision? I mean, presumably using artificial light, but, but what does it do to you psychologically? How do you think about your, your spatial awareness and your, your connection also with, you know, with the environment? I mean, for me, like, I'm a biologist. I love nature. I love being outside in nature. I think most of us do in some way. You know, we have this idea that like, going on a walk in the woods or in a park, it makes us feel better, right? There's a, there's a benefit to being out in nature that, that we can all recognize. And even just like having a, you know, an animal, like a pet, right? Like, I've got dogs, you know?

• 55:10Speaker 01

  We all love to be around animals. We have to think about what the world would be like if there wasn't nature around us.

• 55:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  I mean, living on Mars, there's no wildlife. There's no forests. Now, presumably we'll build habitats and environments that allow us to live, and we'll have to grow crops and things like that, but. I think we're unlikely to bring much in the way of animals with us. And so, you know.

• 55:40Chris Williamson?

  Look at, look at every sci fi movie ever where they're trying to go to some new habitat. Yeah, the physical effects start to kick in and a few people do this thing. But the big issue, like me justifying the future of Martian colonization through what I've seen in Hollywood. But the, and but it's how I can see it, that the psychological impacts are the things that are really, really destructive. Because they have a domino effect in a manner that the physical ailments are bounded, I guess, by, you know, I get sick. You didn't, you don't necessarily get sick, something happening to me. But if I become psychotic, I can take out an entire pod of people. Or I can, I can do something catastrophic to the air supply, or I can run out and get blown up.

• 56:25Chris Williamson?

  I do whatever myself. So, okay. Continuing, future people.

• 56:31Chris Williamson?

  How, how, how are we going to do reproduction in space? What happens with, what happens with keeping us going?

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Well, I, I will say that in terms of like what we do know and what we don't know about like how space affects the, the human body and our ability to actually live in, in a space environment or on other worlds. I think this is the biggest black box, the biggest unknown. We have done so little amount of research on reproduction in, in a lower gravity environment, in a space environment. That the bottom line is, we don't know. We're sort of assuming, anytime we talk about like, you know, moving to Mars or building a space settlement. We are assuming that reproduction is possible, that it will work well enough. And that's actually something that we can't be certain of without, without doing more research. There have been some studies.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  So there have been some studies in space, going back to the, the space shuttle days. And, and certainly through the International Space Station era. Some rodent studies, some studies on, on fish, some studies on other invertebrate animals like sea urchins. But the bottom line is that it's kind of inconclusive. Like, we really haven't done enough and we haven't done systematic enough studies to know that our own ability to, you know, to get pregnant, to have a, a full pregnancy, two term. Childbirth and then child development, like the entire process of growing.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  You know, what happens to a child's body as your, your, your bones are growing?

• 58:07Chris Williamson?

  Growing under zero.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  In a one third G.

• 58:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  We don't know.

• 58:12Chris Williamson?

  I asked Christopher Mason, you know him?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, of course. He's been on the show once, maybe twice. He was great. And I asked him, has anybody ever had sex in space? And he gave me this look. You're giving me the look as now as well.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Well, it's a question everybody wants to know. Absolutely. And the bottom line is that officially, the answer is no.

• 58:34Chris Williamson?

  You've given me the same answer.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  We don't have any documents.

• 58:37Chris Williamson?

  Have you guys been given some sort of talking sheet or something? Well, that's exactly what he said.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  This is a, this is a topic that, that comes up a lot. So, so there's a, there's, you know, a lot that's been written about it, including I, I, I write about it in my book. So, yeah, we don't know. We don't know. Nobody claims to have had sex in space. And there is definitely not any documentation of sex in space. There was a married couple, two NASA astronauts that were on the space shuttle at the same time.

• 59:05Chris Williamson?

  If you think, if you think that a married couple are going to space and they're not going to, they're not going to join the million mile high club, you are out of your mind.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yep. Then so the, because of that, there's been all this speculation that like, surely they must have. But, um, you know, NASA was very hush, hush about it. The, the two astronauts in question were very hush, hush. I've asked about this, uh, including, you know, contacts and friends of mine at, at NASA and in the space industry. And one of the things that I've been told is like, look, if you know what it was like on the space shuttle, there was no privacy. Like there is like, if that happened, it would not have been done in private. And so that, uh, maybe, you know, makes it a little less likely that it happened, but.

• 59:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay. Well, someone's, someone's got to be the first, right? And there's not many, that, that's the real territory to conquer. I don't care about being the first on Mars. I just want to be the first, I want to be the first guy to bone in space. Okay. Reproduction, we've already, I've done a lot of episodes about embryo selection, about IVG, some stuff with artificial wombs. Do you think it's realistic that reproduction will be technologically mediated to try and offset some of this stuff? How is the reproduction process gonna happen?

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Here's the thing that worries me. If what we're talking about is Mars, so you're talking about a one-third gravity environment, not a weightless environment, one-third gravity environment. I think the risk is, once we're talking about people who have lived their entire lives there, like a child born on Mars, right, who then, you know, basically is, you know, growing in that one-third gravity environment their entire childhood, by the time they get to adulthood and are, you know, childbearing age, right? Imagine a woman who gets pregnant and is going to give birth. She will have had her bones, losing bone density, her entire life because her genetics

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  are the same genetics that, you know, we all have here on Earth, meaning that you're born with a certain bone density. But in a one-third gravity environment, your entire life, you're losing bone density. So her bones will have become more brittle and weak throughout her childhood and into her adulthood. And now she is giving birth and experiencing, yeah, the, you know, forces of, you know, that a woman experiences during childbirth. I think there's a real risk of fractures. And we know that one of the parts of the body that's most prone to fractures from this kind of bone density loss is the hip and the pelvis.

• 1:01:46Chris Williamson?

  You know, are you familiar with Piers Morgan? You know who he is?

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:01:51Chris Williamson?

  British journalist guy. He fell off a single step and fractured his hip.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, they are. The- Fragile things.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  And so, you know, the reason I bring it up is because that's a, that's a kind of a fracture that could be, could, could actually be deadly if, if we're talking about it in the context of, of childbirth, you know, that, that baby might not survive the experience of, of childbirth. And so what does that do then? If we're looking about, you know, you know, the impact of this over multiple generations? Yeah. So one possibility is you just avoid the risk. And so all births are done through C-section. But that actually creates other situations because now if all the births are through C-section, because, you know, vaginal births are too risky, now.

• 1:02:40Chris Williamson?

  You're selecting against women who can have vaginal births.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and actually you've, you've, you've eliminated one of the constraints that has existed throughout human evolution.

• 1:02:50Chris Williamson?

  You're going to get bigger and bigger, bigger babies. Yeah. So Dr. Anna Machin, are you familiar with her?

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:02:55Chris Williamson?

  Evolutionary biologist and psychologist. She's in Robin Dunbar's lab.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 1:03:02Chris Williamson?

  University of Oxford. She's wonderful. And she wrote a book called Life of Dad. She's written, she's writing another one about dads actually as well. And she tells this story about how dads saved the human race because babies' heads got too big. And her point is that babies get this massive head because it turns out that intelligence is really good for survival. But in order to get this big head out of that woman without breaking her in half, which would have happened for a good amount of time, there would have been many, many, many women died in childbirth all the time, but just straight up, this baby is so big, it will, it will not come out and we don't know how to do C-section because

• 1:03:41Chris Williamson?

  it's 5,000 B.C. or it's 50,000 B.C. Dads were there to help along, not by pulling the baby out, but by the women who were able to get the baby out. This neotinous blob requires six, seven, eight, 10 years of full-time monitoring. So it doesn't get eaten by something or fall off a cliff. And that's where you need, that's why humans have higher MPI, male parental investment than many of the speak, not all species, but many of the species. And yeah, she tells, she tells that story. So you have basically this reversion back to that situation where because the constraint for baby size is no longer limited by birth canal.

• 1:04:26Chris Williamson?

  If everything's happening through C-section, you revisit this issue that was occurring a few hundred thousand years ago. And yeah, maybe you end up with ginormous babies that aren't being selected against because, and then maybe, maybe it causes some other thing. Maybe sex becomes difficult to do because we find out that some sort of selection pressure that birthing was having on women's physiology was in some way enhancing or productive towards the way that their other sexual function went like, it's a real, you change one, it's a butterfly effect, right? You change one thing genetically and the whole house of cards can come down.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. And so I think, you know, because of that, that's why I bring up this, you know, one specific challenge that I think we maybe haven't thought through enough yet. And that, as you said, could lead to all sorts of other sort of downstream consequences. So, um, so, you know, bottom line is we, we don't know whether human reproduction is in fact possible in the, in the conditions on Mars. So this is one thing I think, you know, it would actually be relatively straightforward to do a lot of research, even in the low Earth environment, uh, excuse me, low Earth orbit environment. That would help us to kind of get a little bit more insight into that.

• 1:05:41Chris Williamson?

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• 1:06:24Chris Williamson?

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• 1:06:45Chris Williamson?

  Will we, okay, how long will speciation take?

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, okay, here's the thing that I will say about that. So speciation, right, formation of new species. This is something, you know, I talk about this in my classes with my students all the time. It's not a black and white thing like, oh, now it's a new species, right? We, as biologists, debate constantly, all the time about, you know, how to even define a species, where do you draw the boundaries between one species and another? So partly it depends on, on that, but that's sort of dodging the question, which is not what I'm trying to do. I think the real question is like, how rapidly would you get individuals on Mars that we would recognize as being distinct from us, right?

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Like in some recognizable, meaningful way. And what I would say is I think it will happen much faster than what we would expect based on what we normally are used to here on Earth. And it boils down to this. So, you know, we've already talked about how being on Mars is going to make people different, right? Psychologically different, genetically different, culturally different, all of those things. As long as you have people who are moving back and forth between Earth and Mars and able to Travel freely between them and basically able to, you know, able to have sex, able to have children, able to reproduce. So if you can kind of move between those environments,

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  that will kind of reduce the differences between those populations, right? Like you're, as long as people are exchanging genes, you don't get speciation happening very easily. So, um, so then the question becomes like, well, is that going to be the case? Will it be easy for people to move back and forth between Earth and Mars? And I don't think it will be. I think it will be much harder for people to move back and forth between planets than we maybe have appreciated. And specifically, I mean, like people born on Mars. I think even as soon as the first generation of people born on Mars will potentially have a great difficulty with coming back to Earth. For one thing,

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  it's the gravity that we've talked about, right? A child born in a one-third gravity environment is unlikely to build a skeleton that is strong enough to be able to tolerate Earth gravity. And this is, and we've been talking about science fiction, right? So like this shows up in, you know, I don't know if you watched The Expanse or read the series, but it's like, that's, that's a, a theme that comes up is like, you know, the idea that if you're from a lower gravity environment, high G is, you know, going to be painful if not.

• 1:09:24Chris Williamson?

  Torturous to you, right?

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. Gravity torture is a concept from, from The Expanse. Um, that's one thing.

• 1:09:31Chris Williamson?

  Should I read that? Is it good? Cause I watched the first season, maybe season and a half, and then I kind of got a little bit lost in it. Is the book, how do you rate the book? If Seven Eves, if Seven Eves for me is a strong eight, where's The Expanse?

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  All right. Here, here, here's my admission. So I haven't read it. I've seen the series, but I haven't read the, the, I haven't read it. So, yeah, my bad. Um, but so, uh, gravity though, is something that, uh, I think will be a limiting factor, but I think there's an even potentially bigger factor that will keep people from being able to move between planets. And that is, uh, microbes, germs, our immune systems. So what happens to the immune system of a child born on Mars? They will only ever be exposed to whatever the microorganisms are that we bring with us. And that's going to be a tiny fraction, right? I mean, they're going through the same bottleneck. The microbes are going through the same kind of bottleneck.

• 1:10:27Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fuck, it's a big sterilization procedure for, yeah, for whatever you've brought with you. The peanuts and the wheat and the gluten and the everything.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, yep, exactly. And so now you've got a kid who has never been exposed to the vast majority of what we're breathing in right now and just all the microbes that are surrounding us. I don't think they would be able to easily come back to Earth without a whole lot of.

• 1:10:51Chris Williamson?

  Have you got a name? Have you got a name for this? Because this is, this is a unique kind of, it's not speciation. It's a hardcore sort of adaptation that's occurred due to being separated where you're no longer able to go back to your original habitat. Is there a name for this?

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  I don't know that there's a name for this specifically. I mean, I, I think that though this is basically the setup for speciation because what, what do you do in that situation, right?

• 1:11:18Chris Williamson?

  You're locked in to your new environment.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, it would be too dangerous for people from Mars to interact with people from Earth. And the other thing that's going to happen is over time, the microbes on Mars are going to be mutating, adapting, changing. You're going to get new infectious diseases on Mars that don't exist on Earth. They will evolve uniquely there. Even just the bacteria in our microbiome are going to change by being on Mars, right? I mean, they're also exposed to a lot of radiation. They've also gone through a population bottleneck. So now it becomes dangerous for people from Earth to interact with people from Mars because they've got germs that, you know, we're not used to. So what do you do? I think you enforce quarantine. You don't allow, or you very greatly reduce.

• 1:12:03Chris Williamson?

  Quarantina, yep.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. So. If you don't have close contact between people from Earth and people from Mars, you are accelerating how fast speciation will happen.

• 1:12:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because there's no cross. I mean, when is this? I guess, you know, the Homo floresius would have had that too, because they simply couldn't go back. It wasn't that they didn't choose to go back, it's that they couldn't go back. But that being said, are we really going to be able to get rockets that can do the round trip? That doesn't seem very likely until we start mining stuff on Mars. What, you're gonna have a rocket that's going to be able to take people and all the payload and all of the stuff that's needed out there? And you're going to be able to have enough fuel? I guess getting off at one third of Earth's gravity is probably gonna be way easier.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  It's a little easier to get off of Mars, because as you said, it's lower gravity. That's right. And it is conceivable that we can just manufacture rocket fuel there, right? So you can actually take, you know, carbon dioxide and split it. You've got oxygen, that's your, you know, that's your accelerant. So, yeah, so you can, you can potentially make rocket fuel there on Mars and get back. But again, I don't think the challenge is going to be technological. I think it's going to be biological. I think the risk to people of going back and forth and getting sick is going to keep people from doing it.

• 1:13:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's the biological, there's the sort of immunological part here. There's genes, but there's also memes. But what, what about a changing culture? What do you imagine a culture of Mars would look like? Because this is a culture that's going to be forged under scarcity and danger and dependence and darkness, perhaps? It's going to be pretty different.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. It's, I mean, you know, I think it's probably impossible for us to know. I think other than saying it would be very different, right? So, yeah, I think it would be, it would have to be self-contained, because there's not going to be as much interaction because of the communication delays. So I think it would be a unique thing. And this, you know, humans have done this, this type of thing over and over again. We reinvent ourselves. A culture rapidly changes when we have, you know, people that go off to a new place. Even just, you know, for short periods of time. I'm thinking about like, you know, you go on a trip with somebody and you come back with inside jokes, right? You know, it's, it happens fast. But yeah, I think people would be culturally different quite rapidly if they're living on Mars.

• 1:14:35Chris Williamson?

  Dude, it's so fascinating. The fact that this is my job, that I get to speak to you and call this a job is absolutely mind blowing. This is so interesting to me. Okay, but I guess the cultural evolution thing is going to feed back into the biological evolution. So you're tightening this divergence loop. You've got the concerns from the biome, the concerns about getting infected. I guess, what are the interesting ethical challenges that we've got here?

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06Chris Williamson?

  This is a...

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Well, there's some pretty serious ones. I mean, here's the thing, like you and I could decide that we're comfortable with the risk of going to Mars, right? And there are plenty of people who, you know, I've spoken with who are like, yep, I would absolutely sign up to go.

• 1:15:22Chris Williamson?

  Is it fair to condemn your future project to the same?

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. What happens when you're talking about bringing a child into the world who not only is living in a very dangerous environment, but they might not ever be able to go back to Earth? That, to me, is a totally different level of ethical consideration. So, you know, one thing we haven't really talked about is the idea that, well, rather than just sort of let natural selection, let evolution do its thing, maybe what we would do is, you know, take matters into our own hands and use CRISPR, use, you know, biological and genetic engineering techniques to facilitate, to make it easier for people to deal with the extreme conditions there.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  And, you know, obviously, there's important ethical considerations about, you know, altering our genetics, especially if you're talking about altering unborn children, future generations. But, you know, in some ways, though, the ethics are sort of, you know, maybe reversed compared to how we would think about this on Earth. Because if you had the ability to alleviate suffering of an unborn child or of, you know, future generations, and if you didn't do that, is that ethical?

• 1:16:38Chris Williamson?

  This is the entire argument that is put forward by the embryo selection crowd, which is, as soon as you say that protecting against something that's really horrendous, you know, it's some genetic defect that would cause you to be in pain or not live a flourishing life or whatever, even... Myopia, right? Even if you were to say we're able to select against people that don't have good eyesight. If you had, why do you think that LASIK and glasses exist? Because people want those traits. So if you have the opportunity to select against negative ones, you immediately open up the door for, it's a single parallel, or it's a single spectrum from select against negative traits to select for positive traits. And that does seem the ethical thing to do.

• 1:17:21Chris Williamson?

  Now, as soon as you get into genetic enhancement, that becomes a very different game, to me.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:17:27Chris Williamson?

  Ethically, as of yet, I haven't, I'm convinced on the value of embryo selection. Heracite is wonderful company that's doing great things in the space. The Johnny that runs it is just spectacular. I'm yet to hear an argument for genetic enhancement that doesn't make my toes curl underneath.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Well, and part of it, I think, is because the question is, okay, you're arguing that this person's life is going to be better, but are there other ways that you could make that person's life better without making a genetic alteration, right? Without making such a permanent change. And so I think, you know, any of the potential changes that we might make for a person here on Earth, in most cases, we have other ways of protecting them from that risk or improving their lives in that particular way. For a child born on Mars, thinking about the gravity environment or the radiation environment, right? There might not be any better way of doing it. So if that's the case, and if they don't have

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  a choice, if that's the only place that they can live, I think it might be different. Now, I'm not saying that we definitely should do that, but I think that the ethics are, I think, somewhat distinct when you're talking about, you know, having a situation where people don't have the option of getting out of that situation, right? You don't have a way to get away from the risk. But, you know.

• 1:18:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so there's multiple levels of ethics here. Is it ethical to condemn your future generations and progeny to live on this environment, which is going to be really inhospitable, and they've got to be underground, and maybe they're going to flourish less? Well, as soon as you do that, is it now incumbent on you to start manipulating their genomes so that they can survive this? Prison that you had put them into more effectively than if they, you know, it's a real

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:19:18Chris Williamson?

  Domino.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Well, and then, and then there's the added on top of that is the possibility that by making those changes, you might be improving their ability to thrive in that environment, but you might simultaneously.

• 1:19:32Chris Williamson?

  From being able to go back home.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:19:34Chris Williamson?

  Oh dude, it's a mess. It's such a mess. Oh my lord. What are you supposed to do?

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  There's a lot of, a lot of things. Well, you know, we don't have to go. That's, that's

• 1:19:45Chris Williamson?

  Well, then we condemn ourselves to being single planetary species and we just need one neutron, neutron star to go off in the wrong, at the wrong angle and then we're, we're done for.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  So, I mean, this is the question that I ultimately wrestled with in, in, in researching and writing this book is, you know, I wanted to really understand what would happen, right? What would be, if we go down this route of people living beyond Earth, what should we expect will happen to those people in future generations? That's what the book's all about. But throughout this, I sort of really struggled with like, okay, given what we know, is this a path we should be pursuing? Like, is this the right thing to do? And you're, I mean, you're, you're making a good point that like, in the long run, we might have to, because we've got all our eggs in, in one, you know, planetary basket here.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  So, um, that's risky. But the next question is, when? What's the timeframe for this? Right? And so to me, it's not that we should never go. I think, I think eventually, if we didn't do that, we would be dooming ourselves to extinction. It's a matter of how quickly should we be pushing this? And so, you know, that it, people differ, I think, if you ask them about like, how urgent, how pressing a need is this? Um, personally, I think we need to have answers to some of these unanswered questions like reproduction, right? What happens to, you know, a, a child conceived and born and raised in a one-third gravity,

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  high radiation environment? I don't think it makes sense for us to go there until we really have good answers to those types of questions. Um, but the ethical things, the, the, the politics, the psychology that we've been talking about, all of these are things we should be studying this, right? Like, we need to know. Um, and, uh, the technology is advancing, the rockets are, are, are flying. Let's do the experiments and research that we need to answer these questions that is more life sciences, more biology, more psychology, microbiology, all these cool things. Yeah.

• 1:21:51Chris Williamson?

  Scott Solomon, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, you are spectacular. You are so fun. I think.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks. This has been great.

• 1:21:58Chris Williamson?

  What an awesome topic to talk about. Where should people go? They're going to want to check out everything you're doing, buy the book, all the rest of it?

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, the book is available now. It's Becoming Martian and MIT Press. So, yeah, you know, check it out. We did a streaming series, too. It's also called Becoming Martian. That's on Curiosity Stream, which was a lot of fun. But I've also got a podcast. My podcast is called Wild World, and it's all about fieldwork and exploration right here on Earth. So, yeah, check that out, too.

• 1:22:31Chris Williamson?

  Heck, yeah. Scott, I appreciate you, man. Until next time.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. This has been so much fun.