#271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures

Ariel Ekblaw is the director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off – Coinbase: https://coinbase.com/lex to get $10 in free Bitcoin – Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit – ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free – Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil EPISODE LINKS: Ariel’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ariel_ekblaw MIT Space Exploration Initiative: https://media.mit.edu/groups/space-exploration Books and resources mentioned: Into the Anthropocosmos (book): https://amzn.to/3CUIchM Seveneves (book): https://amzn.to/36ipd4O Endurance (book): https://amzn.to/3CYdKDJ PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (06:51) – Space exploration (15:58) – Swarm robotics and self-assembling space habitats (33:39) – Microgravity (37:56) – Deep duration space missions (43:06) – Extraterrestrial life (49:29) – Music and sports in space (56:08) – Colonizing space (1:03:28) – War in space (1:08:02) – Robots in space (1:22:43) – Commercial space exploration (1:26:21) – Future of space exploration (1:34:07) – Beauty of the universe (1:39:03) – Space cities (1:44:44) – Advice for young people (1:48:04) – Consciousness (1:49:50) – Meaning of life

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Ariel Ekblaw, Director of MIT Space Exploration Initiative. She's especially interested in autonomously self-assembling space architectures, basically giant space structures that can sustain human life and that assemble themselves out in space and then orbit Earth, Moon, Mars, and other planets. And now, a quick use second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description is the best way to support this podcast. We got BetterHelp for the mind, Coinbase for the wallet, Indeed for hiring, ExpressVPN for privacy, and Athletic Greens for health. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads.

• 0:45Lex Fridman?

  As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. I am a big believer of, obviously, talking as a way to figure out stuff about yourself, to dig deep into your past, deep into your subconscious, and figure out what trauma you haven't really dealt with. Obviously, I do this podcast partially for that reason, but also in my private life. There's nothing more,

• 1:30Lex Fridman?

  I don't know, intimate than conversation, just the purity of it. Asking the deepest, the honest, the most delving questions of each other, of two people,

• 1:42Lex Fridman?

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• 1:57Lex Fridman?

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• 2:41Lex Fridman?

  I mean, the blockchain cryptocurrency is going to be one of the things that the 21st century is remembered for, I believe. Anyway, Coinbase is a great place to get started with all of that and to learn about cryptocurrency in general. Go to Coinbase.com/Lex to get 10 bucks in free Bitcoin when you sign up. That's Coinbase.com/Lex. This show is brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. I've used them as part of many hiring efforts I've done for the teams I've led in the past. They have tools like Indeed Instant Match, giving you quality candidates whose resumes on Indeed fit your job description immediately.

• 3:21Lex Fridman?

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• 4:06Lex Fridman?

  Get it at Indeed.com/Lex. Terms and conditions apply. Go to Indeed.com/Lex.

• 4:14Lex Fridman?

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• 4:58Lex Fridman?

  It works on any device. My favorite operating system, Linux, but also Windows, Android, the whole thing. Big sexy red button. It does one thing and it does it well. Anyway, go to expressvpn.com/lexpod to get an extra three months free. It's expressvpn.com/lexpod. This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and its newly renamed AG1 Drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It replaced the multivitamin for me and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals. I'm just reminding how people are making fun of me for loving Athletic Greens as much as I do. That's okay.

• 5:43Lex Fridman?

  That's okay. It really is one of my favorite sponsors. It's the first thing I drink every day. Or rather, it's the thing I drink before I break the fast. Or I guess it counts as the thing you break the fast with. Fasting makes me feel good. Eating low carb makes me feel good. And you have to be careful with that stuff to make sure you get the nutrition that you need. And that's what I rely on Athletic Greens to do, to make sure I have that nutritional base for all the wild things I do in terms of work, in terms of food, in terms of exercise, all that kind of stuff. Anyway, they'll give you one month's supply of fish oil, another thing I love, when you sign up to athleticgreens.com/lex.

• 6:26Lex Fridman?

  That's athleticgreens.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Ariel Agblaw.

• 6:51Lex Fridman?

  When did you first fall in love with space exploration and space in general?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  My parents are both ex-Air Force. So my dad's an A-10 fighter pilot and my mom trained and had qualified to be a fighter pilot, but it was early enough that women were not allowed in combat at that time. And so I grew up with these two pilots. And although they themselves did not become astronauts, there's a really rich legacy of Air Force pilots becoming astronauts. And this loomed large in my childhood. What does it mean to be courageous, to be an explorer, to be at the vanguard of something hard and challenging? And to couple with that, my dad was a huge fan of science fiction. And so I, as a kid, read Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, all these different classics of science fiction that he had introduced me to.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  And that just started a love affair with space exploration and really thinking about civilization-scale space exploration.

• 7:47Lex Fridman?

  So did they themselves dream about going to the stars as opposed to flying here in Earth's atmosphere, just looking up?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, my dad always said he was absolutely convinced, because he was a child of the Apollo years, that he would get to go in his lifetime, really thought it was going to happen. And so it was a challenge and sad for many people when, to their view on the outside, space exploration slowed down for a period of time. In reality, we were just catching up. I think we leapt so far ahead with Apollo, more than the rest of society was ready for. And now we're coming back to this moment for space exploration where we actually have an economy. And we have the other accoutrement that society needs to be able to make space exploration more real. And my dad's thrilled because finally, you know, not nearly, I hope not anywhere near the end of his life, but as he's an older man, he now can see still within his lifetime,

• 8:40Speaker 01

  people really getting a chance to build a sustainable lunar settlement on the moon, or maybe even go to Mars.

• 8:44Lex Fridman?

  So settlements, civilizations and other planets, that's the cool thing to dream about in the future?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Certainly is.

• 8:52Lex Fridman?

  What was the favorite sci fi authors when you were growing up?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Probably Isaac Asimov, Foundation Trilogy. This is an amazing story of Harry Seldon, this foundation that he forms at different ends of the, well, according to the story, different ends of the universe and has this interesting focus on society. So it's not just space exploration for the sake of space exploration or novel technology, which is a lot of what I work on, data data MIT. But how do you structure a society across those vast expanses of distance and time? And so I'd say absolutely a favorite. Now, though, my favorite is Neal Stephenson and Seven Eves. It's a book that inspired my own PhD research and some ongoing work that we're doing with NASA now for the future of swarm robotics for spacecraft.

• 9:42Lex Fridman?

  We were saying offline about Neal Stephenson, because I just recently had a conversation with him. And I said that not until I was doing the research for him that I realized he also had a role to play in Blue Origin. So it's like sci fi actually having a role to play in the design, engineering, just the implementation of ideas that come kind of percolate up from the sci fi world and actually become reality. It's kind of fascinating figure in that way. Do you also think about him beyond just his work in science fiction, but his role in coming up with wild, crazy ideas that actually become reality?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Yes, I think it's a great example of this cycle between authors and scientists and engineers, that we can be inspired in one generation by what authors dream up. We build it, we make it a reality, and then that inspires another generation of really wild and crazy thought for science fiction. I think Neal Stephenson does a beautiful job of being what we would call a hard science fiction author. So it's really grounded in a lot of science, which makes it very compelling for me as a scientist and engineer to read and then be challenged to make that vision of reality. The other community that Neil's involved with and some of my other mentors are involved with that we are thinking about more and more in the work that we do at MIT is the

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Long Now Foundation and this focus on what does society need to take in terms of steps at this juncture, this particular inflection point in human history, to make sure that we're setting ourselves up for a long and prosperous horizon, for humanities horizons. There's a lot of examples of what the Long Now Foundation does and thinks about, but when I think about this in my own work, it's what does it take to scale humanities' presence in orbit? We are seeing some additional investment in commercial space habitats, so it'll no longer be just NASA running the International Space Station, but to really democratize access to space, like Bezos wants to have millions of people living and working in

• 11:40Speaker 01

  space, you need architecture that's bigger and grander and can actually scale. And that means you need to be thinking about how can you construct things for long-time horizons that are really sustainable in orbit or on a surface of a celestial body that are bigger than the biggest rocket payload fairing that we currently have available. And that's what led me to self-assembly and other models of in-space construction.

• 12:03Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Every time you speak, I get like a million tangent ideas.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  You can cut me off.

• 12:09Lex Fridman?

  No, no, no, no, no, please, keep talking. This is amazing. I just, there's like a million of ideas. So, one, sort of on the dark side, let me ask, do you think about the threats to human civilization that kind of motivate the scaling of the expansion of humans in space and on other planets? What are you worried about? Nuclear war, pandemics, super intelligent, artificial intelligence systems, more not existential crises, but ones that have significant, potentially significant detrimental effects on society, like climate change, those kinds of things? And then there's, of course, the fun asteroid coming out from the darkness and hitting all Earth. There's been a few movies on that. Anyway, guys, is there something that you think about?

• 12:55Lex Fridman?

  That threatens us in this century.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Hmm. I mean, as an ex military family, we used to talk about all of this. We would say that luck favors the prepared. And so, growing up, you know, we had a plan, actually a family plan for what we would do in a pandemic. Didn't think we were going to have to put that in plan into place. And here we are. We do, certainly, you know, among my own family and my friends and then our work at MIT, we do think about existential threats and risks to humanity. And what role does space exploration and getting humans off world have to play in a resilient future for humanity? But what I actually find more compelling recently is instead of thinking about a need to ever abandon Earth through a path of space exploration or space foraging, is to see how we can use space technology to keep Earth livable.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  The obvious direct ways of doing this would be, you know, satellite technology that's helping us learn more about climate change or emitters or CO2. But there's also a future for geoengineering that might be space based. A lot of questions that would have to be answered around that. But these are examples of pivoting our focus away from maybe the Hollywood vision of, oh, an asteroid's going to come. We're all going to have to escape Earth to let's use our considerable technology prowess and use space technology to save Earth and be very much focused on how can we have a worthwhile life for Earth citizens, even if some of us go, want to go out and further venturing.

• 14:19Lex Fridman?

  Right. Just the, yeah, the desire to explore the mysterious. Yes. But also it does seem that by placing us in harsh conditions, the harsh conditions of space, the harsh conditions of planets and the biology, the chemistry, the engineering, the robotics, the materials, all of that, that's just a nice way to come up with cool new things.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Great forcing function. Yeah.

• 14:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's a forcing, exactly. It's a forcing function like survival. If you don't get this right, you die. So, and that you can bring back to Earth and it will improve. Like figuring out food in space will make you figure out what, how to eat, you know, live healthier lives here on Earth.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  So true. I mean, some of the technologies that we're directly looking at right now for space habitats, it's hard to keep humans alive in this really fragile little pocket against the vacuum and all of the dangers that the space environment presents. Some of the technologies we are going to have to figure out is energy efficient, you know, cooling and air conditioning. Air filtration, scrubbing CO2 from the air, being able to have habitats that are themselves resilient to extremes of space weather and radiation. And some of these are direct translational opportunities for areas torn by natural disasters. You know, people in California a decade ago would never have had to think about having an airtight house.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  But now with wildfires, maybe you do want something close to an airtight house. How do you manage that? There's a lot of technologies from the space habitation world that we are hoping we can actually bring back down to benefit life on Earth as well in these extreme environment contexts.

• 15:56Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so you mentioned to go back to swarm.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Hmm, yeah.

• 16:02Lex Fridman?

  So that was interesting to you, first of all, in your own work, but also I believe you said something that was inspiring from Neil Stephenson as well. So when you say swarm, are you thinking about architectures? Or are you thinking about artificial intelligence, like robotics? Are those kind of intermixed?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  I think the future that we're seeing is that they're going to be intermixed, which is really exciting. So the future of space habitats are one of intelligent structures. Maybe not all the way to HAL and the, you know, 2001 Space Odyssey reference that scares people about the habitat having a mind of its own. But certainly we're building systems now where the habitat has sensing technology that allows it to communicate its basic functions, you know, maintaining life support for the astronauts, but could also communicate in symbiosis with these swarm robots that would be on the outside of the spacecraft, whether it's in a microgravity orbiting environment or on the surface. And these little robots, they crawl, just à la Neil Stephenson in Seven Eves.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  They crawl along the outside of the spacecraft looking for micrometeorite punctures or gas leaks or other faults and defects. And right now, we're just working on the diagnosis. So can the swarm with its collective intelligence act in symbiosis with the spacecraft and detect things? But in the future, we'd also love for these little micro robots to repair in situ and really be like ants living in a tree, all together connected to the spacecraft.

• 17:35Lex Fridman?

  Do you envision?

• 17:37Lex Fridman?

  The system to be fully distributed and just like an ant colony, if one of them is damaged or, you know, whatever, loses control and all those kinds of things that that doesn't affect the performance of the complete system or doesn't need to be centralized. This is more like almost a technical question.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Good architecture question.

• 17:58Lex Fridman?

  Right. From the ground up, it's so scary to go fully distributed.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:05Lex Fridman?

  But it's also exceptionally powerful, right? Robust, resilient to the harsh conditions of space. What do you, if you look into the next 10, 20, 100 years, starting from scratch, do you think we should be doing architecturized distributed systems?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  For space, yes, because it gives you this redundancy and safety profile that's really critical. So whether it's small swarm robots where it doesn't matter if you lose a few of them to habitats that instead of having a central monolithic habitat, you might actually be able to have a decentralized node of a space station so that you can, kind of right out of Star Wars, you can shut a blast door if there's a fire or if there's a conflict in a certain area and you can move the humans and the crew into another decentralized node of the spacecraft. There's another idea out of Neal Stephenson's Seven Eves, actually, were these arclets, which were decentralized spacecraft that could form and dock little temporary space

• 19:04Speaker 01

  stations with each other and then separate and go off on their way and have a decentralized approach to living in space.

• 19:11Lex Fridman?

  So the self-assembly component of that too, so this is your PhD work and beyond, you explored autonomously self-assembling space architecture for future space tourists, habitats and space stations in orbit around Earth, Moon and Mars. There's few things I personally find sexier than self-assembling space, autonomously self-assembling space architecture. In general, it doesn't even need to be space. The idea of like self-assembling architectures is really interesting, like building a bridge or something like that, if there was self-assembling materials. It feels like incredibly efficient way to do it because optimization is built in.

• 19:55Lex Fridman?

  So you can build like the most optimal structures. Given dynamic, uncertain, changing conditions. So maybe can you talk about your PhD work about this? This work about Tesseract? What is it in general? All any, any cool stuff? Cause this is super cool.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Tesseract is my PhD research. It's this idea that we could take tiles that construct a large structure like a buckyball. Yeah, this is exactly what we're looking at here, which is the tiles that are packed flat in a rocket. They're released to float in microgravity. Magnets, pretty powerful electro-permanent magnets on their edges draw them together for autonomous docking. So there's no human in the loop here and there's no central agent coordinating saying tile one, go to tile two. It's completely decentralized system. They find each other on their own. What we don't show in this video is what happens if there's an error, right? So what happens if they bond incorrectly? The tiles have sensing, so proximity sensing, magnetometer, other sensors that allow them

• 21:00Speaker 01

  to detect a good bond versus a bad bond and pulse off and self-correct, which anybody who works in this, you know, the field of self-assembly will tell you that error detection and correction, just like error detection in a DNA sequence or protein folding is really important part of the system for that robustness. And so we've done a lot of work to engineer that ability for the tiles to be self-determining. They know whether they're forming the structure that they're supposed to form or not.

• 21:27Lex Fridman?

  They know if they're in a toxic relationship and they need to get out.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Right, right. If they need to, if they need to separate, exactly. Yeah.

• 21:34Lex Fridman?

  All right. This is like so amazing. And for people who are just listening to this, yeah, there's a lot. I mean, how large are these tiles?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  So the size that we use in the lab, they can really be any size because we can scale them down to do testing in microgravity. So we sent tiles that were about three inches wide to the International Space Station a couple of years ago to test the code, test the state machine, test the algorithm of self-assembly. But now we're actually building our first ever human scale tiles. They're me, human size, so a little, you know, a little smaller than maybe your average human, but they're 2.5 feet on edge length.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  The larger scale that we would love to build in the future would actually be tiles that are big enough to form a bucky ball, big, open spherical volume, spherical approximation volume, that'd be about 10 meters in diameter, so 30 feet, which is much bigger and grander in terms of open space than any current module on the ISS. And one of the goals of this project was to say, what's the purpose of next generation space architecture? Should it be something that really inspires and delights people? When you float into that space, can you get goosebumps in the way that you do when you walk into a really stunning piece of architecture on Earth? And so we think that self-assembly, this modular, reconfigurable algorithm for

• 22:51Speaker 01

  constructing space structures in orbit, is going to give us this promise of space architecture that's actually worth living in.

• 22:59Lex Fridman?

  Living in, oh, I thought you also meant from like outside artistic perspective.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:03Lex Fridman?

  See the whole thing is just...

• 23:05Speaker 01

  With the aesthetics of it, absolutely.

• 23:07Lex Fridman?

  You know, when you like go like into Vegas, whenever you go into a city and it like over the hill appears in front of you. And I mean, there's something majestic about seeing like, wow, humans created that. It gives you like hope about like, if these a bunch of ants were able to figure out how to build skyscrapers that light up. And in general, the design of these tiles and the way you envision it are pretty scalable.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Yes. And they're inspired by exactly what you mentioned a moment ago, which is, we have these patterns of self-assembly on Earth. And there's a lot of fantastic MIT research that we're building this concept on. So like Daniela Ruess at Seasail and Pebbles, taking the power of magnets to create units that are themselves interchangeable, this notion of programmable matter. And so we're interested in going really big with it to build big scale space structures with programmable tiles. But there's also a really fascinating, you know, end of that on the other side of the spectrum, which is how small can you go with matter that's programmable and stacks and builds itself and creates a bridge or something in the future?

• 24:12Lex Fridman?

  What do you envision the thing would look like? Like when you imagine a thing far into the future where there's...

• 24:20Lex Fridman?

  So we're not even thinking about like, uh, small space, well, let's not call them small, but our currently sized space stations, but like, something gigantic. What do you envision? Is this something with symmetry? Or is this something we can't even come up with yet? Is there beautiful structures that you imagine in your mind?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  I've got three candidates that I would love to build. If we're talking about monumental space architecture, one is, what does a space cathedral look like? It can be a secular cathedral, doesn't necessarily have to be about religion, but that notion of long sightlines, inspiring, stunning architecture when you go in. And you can imagine floating, instead of, you know, being on the ground and only looking up, in space, you could be in a central node, and each direction you look at, all the cardinal directions, are spires going off in a really large and long way. So that's concept number one. Number two would be something more organic, that's not just geometric. So here, one of the ideas that we're working on at MIT in my

• 25:20Speaker 01

  lab is to say, could you, instead of the tesseract model, right, which is self-assembling a shell, could you define a module, that's a node, a small node that someone can live in, and you self-assemble a lot of those together, they're called, uh, plesiohedrons, like, uh, space-filling solids, and you dock a bunch of them together, and you can create a really organic structure out of that. So this is, uh, the same way that muscles accrete to appear, you can have these nodes that dock together, and one shape that I would love to form out of this is something like a nautilus, a seashell, that beautiful, you know, Fibonacci spiral sequence that you get, uh, in that shape, which I think would be a stunning and fabulous, um, aggregated space station.

• 26:05Lex Fridman?

  You said so many cool words. Plesiohedron.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:10Lex Fridman?

  So that's a space-filling...

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Solid. The simplest thing to think of is like a cube.

• 26:16Lex Fridman?

  It's here? Oh, cube.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  A cube, right? So you can stack cubes together, and if you had an infinite number of cubes, you'd fill all that space. There's no gaps in between the cubes. They stack and fill space. Another pleseurhedron is a truncated octahedron. And that's actually one of the candidate structures that we think would be great for space stations.

• 26:34Lex Fridman?

  What's the truncated part?

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Ah, so you cut off an octahedron, actually has little pointy areas. You truncate certain sections of it and you get surfaces that are on the structure that are cubes. And I think hexagons, I'd have to remind myself exactly what the faces are. But overall, a truncated octahedron can be bonded to other truncated octahedrons. And just like a cube, it fills all the gaps as you build it out. So you can imagine two truncated octahedrons, they come together at an airlock, which is what we space people call doors in space. And you dock them on all sides and you've basically created this decentralized network of space nodes that make a big space station.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  And once you have enough of them and you're growing with enough big units, you can do it in any macro shape you want. That's where the nautilus comes in, is could we design an organically inspired shape for a space station?

• 27:29Lex Fridman?

  Can I just say how awesome it is to hear you say, "we space people"? I know you meant people that are doing research on space exploration, space technology, but it also made me think of a future, there's Earth people.

• 27:44Lex Fridman?

  And there's those space people.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  I'd love to unite those too.

• 27:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, no, no, for sure, for sure. But like, it's like New Yorkers and like Texans or something like that. Yeah, of course, you live for a time in New York and then you go up to Boston. And then, but for a time, you're the space people. All I know those space people, they're kind of wild up there.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Let's see how that dynamic evolves.

• 28:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly. There's that culture, culture forms. And I would love to see what kind of culture, once you have sort of more and more civilians. I mean, there's a human, I mean, I love psychology and sociology. And I'll maybe ask you about that too, which is like the dynamic between humans. You have to kind of start considering that. And you start spending more and more time up in space and start sending civilians, start sending bigger and bigger groups of people. And then, of course, the beautiful and the ugly emerges from the, from the human nature that we haven't been able to escape up to this point. But when you say the pleseurhedrons, these kinds of shapes, are they multifunctional? Like is the idea you'd be able to?

• 28:52Lex Fridman?

  Humans can occupy them safely and some of them and some others have some other purposes.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. One could be sleeping quarters. One could be a greenhouse or an agricultural unit. One could be a storage depot. Essentially, all of the different rooms or functions that you might need in a space station could be subdivided into these nodes and then stacked together. And one of the promises of both TESS array, my original PhD research, which is these shells, and then this follow-on node concept, is that right now we build space stations and once they're built, they're done. You can't really change them profoundly. But the benefit of a modular self-assembling system is you can disassemble it. You can completely reconfigure it. So if your mission changes or the number of people in space that you want to host, if you have a space conference happening, like South by Southwest.

• 29:44Lex Fridman?

  I was thinking space party, but space conference is good, too.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Then maybe all of a sudden you want to change out what were window tiles yesterday, cupola tiles, and make them into a birthing port so that you can welcome five new spaceships to come and join you in space. That's what this promise of reconfigurable space architecture might allow us to explore.

• 30:04Lex Fridman?

  I've been hanging out with Grimes recently. I just feel like she belongs up in space. This is like designed for artists, essentially. Imagine, I mean, this is what South by keeps introducing me to is there's like the weird and the beautiful people and like the artists. And it feels like there's a lot of opportunities for art and design.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 30:25Lex Fridman?

  It's like space is a combination of arts, design, and great engineering with a, it's a safety critical with like the highest of stakes. So don't, you can't, you can't mess it up. And is this, is there, first of all, you're talking about tiling. So Neil Stevens is obsessed about tile. I don't know if it's related to any of this, but he seems to be obsessed with like, how do you tile a space? That's a geometric notion, like the tessellation. And it's, I mean, it's a beautiful idea for architecture that you can self-assemble these different shapes and you can have probably some centralized guidance of the kind of thing you want to build. But they also kind of figure stuff out themselves in terms of

• 31:08Lex Fridman?

  the low level of details, in terms of the figuring out when the, when if everything fits just right. For the OCD people, like, what's that subreddit? Pleasantly?

• 31:20Lex Fridman?

  It's like really fun, everything, they have like videos of everything is just pleasant when everything just fits perfectly.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Very pleasing, all the tolerances go together.

• 31:27Lex Fridman?

  So they figure that out on themselves and the local robotics problem. But by the way, was Danielle, was Pebbles, was the Pebbles project?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  The Pebbles project are little cubes that have EPMs in them, electro permanent magnets, and they can self disassemble, so they'll turn off and so you'll have this little structure that all of a sudden can flip the little pebbles over and essentially just disaggregate.

• 31:49Lex Fridman?

  They have to make some pleasing sounds.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:53Lex Fridman?

  And what's, what that's gonna, so I'm supposed to talk to Danielle, so I'll probably spend an hour just discussing the sounds on the Pebbles. Okay, what were we talking about? So the, so that's, because you mentioned two, I think.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Right, my third one.

• 32:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, is there a third one?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  My third one is a ring world, just because every science fiction book ever that's worth anything has a ring world in it and.

• 32:16Lex Fridman?

  It's like a donut?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  A donut, yeah, so a really big torus that could encircle a planet or encircle another celestial body, maybe an asteroid or a small moon. And the promise here is just the, the beauty of being able to have that geometry in orbit and all that surface area for solar panels and docking and essentially just all of what that enables to have a ring world at that scale in orbit.

• 32:44Lex Fridman?

  By the way, for the viewers, we're looking at figure 11, what paper is this from? This is a hexagonal tiling of a torus generated in Mathematica referencing code and approach from two citations. So we're looking at a tiled donut and I'm now hungry. So this is the, is this, is this from your thesis or no?

• 33:02Speaker 01

  This is probably, I mean, this is in my thesis, this looks like it was one of my earlier papers. This was an approach to say, great, we've come up with this tessellation approach for a bucky ball. And we picked the bucky ball because it is the most efficient surface area to volume shape and what's expensive in space, the surface area, shipping up all that material. So we wanted something that would maximize the volume. But if we think about ring worlds and other shapes, we wanted to look at how do you tile a torus, and this is one example, with hexagons, to be able to say, could we take this same tesserae approach of self assembling tiles and create other geometries?

• 33:37Lex Fridman?

  This is so freaking cool, this is awesome. So you mentioned microgravity and I saw. I believe that there's a picture of you floating in microgravity. When did you get to experience that? What was that like?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Ah, so I've flown nine times on the affectionately known as the vomit comet. It's the parabolic flight and essentially it does what you'd want a plane never to do. It pitches really steeply upwards at forty-five degrees.

• 34:02Lex Fridman?

  That's a picture of you.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's test rate. That's super early in my PhD. Some of just the passive tiles before we even put electronics in. We were just testing the magnet polarity and the essentially is it an energy favorable structure to self assemble on its own. So we tweaked a lot of things between.

• 34:19Lex Fridman?

  Are we looking at a couple of them?

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're looking at a bunch of them there. Almost thirty-two of them. Yeah. They're clumping. They're clumping. Yeah.

• 34:27Lex Fridman?

  Can you comment on what's the difference between microgravity and zero gravity?

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yes. So there is, it's important difference. There is no zero gravity. There's no, nothing, there's in the universe, there is no such thing as zero gravity. So Newton's law of gravity tells us that there's always gravity attraction between any two objects. So zero G is a shorthand that some of us fall into using, where it's a little easier to communicate to the public. The accurate term is microgravity, where you are essentially floating, you're weightless, but generally in free fall. So on the parabolic flights, the vomit comet, you're in free fall at the end of the parabola. And in orbit around the earth, when you're floating, you're also in free fall.

• 35:09Lex Fridman?

  What was it like? So affectionately called vomit comet, I'm sure there's a reason why it's called affectionately. So what's it like? What's your first time to both philosophically, spiritually and biologically? What's it like?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  It's profound. It is unlike anything else you will experience on earth because it is this true feeling of weightlessness with no drag. So the closest experience you can think of would be floating in a pool, but you move slowly when you float in a pool and your motion is restricted. When you're floating, it's just you and your body flying like in a dream. It takes the littlest amount of energy, like a finger tap against the wall of the plane to shoot all the way across the fuselage.

• 35:54Lex Fridman?

  And you can move at full speed, like you can move your arms.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 35:58Lex Fridman?

  Your muscles.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  There's no, yeah.

• 36:00Lex Fridman?

  There's no resistance.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  There's no resistance. They actually tell you to make a memory when you're on the plane because it's such a fleeting experience for your body that even a few days later, you've already forgotten exactly what it felt like. It's so foreign to the human experience.

• 36:15Lex Fridman?

  They kind of suggest that you explicitly try to really form this into a memory and then you could do the replay.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Cognitively freeze it. Yeah.

• 36:25Lex Fridman?

  Save.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:26Lex Fridman?

  When we have Neuralink, we can replay that, that memory. So in terms of how much stress it has on your body, is it biologically stressful?

• 36:36Speaker 01

  You do feel a 2G pullout, right? So the cost of getting those micro G parabolas is you then have a 2G pullout. And that's hard. You have to train for it. If you move your neck too quickly in that 2G pullout, you can strain muscles. But I wouldn't say that it's actually a profound, tough thing on the body. It's really just an incredibly novel experience. And when you're in orbit and you're not having to go through the ups and downs of the parabolic plane, there's a real grace and elegance. And you see the astronauts learn to operate in this completely new environment.

• 37:10Lex Fridman?

  What are some interesting differences between the parabolic plane and when you're actually going up in orbit? Is it that with orbit, you can look out and see?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:19Lex Fridman?

  That blue little planet of ours?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  You can see the blue marble, the stunning overview effect, which is something I hope to see one day. What's also really different is if you're in orbit for any significant period of time, there's going to be a lot more physiological changes to your body than if you just did an afternoon flight on the vomit comet. Everything from your bones, your muscles, your eyeballs change shape. There's a lot of different things that happen for long duration spaceflight. And we still have to, as scientists, we still have to solve a lot of these interesting challenges to be able to keep humans thriving in microgravity or deep duration space missions.

• 37:56Lex Fridman?

  Deep duration, space missions. Okay, let's talk about this. I was just gonna ask a bunch of dumb questions. So approximately, how long does it take to travel to Mars? Asking for a friend.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Asking for a friend, as we all do. About three years for a round trip. And that's not that it actually takes that long.

• 38:15Lex Fridman?

  Why the round trip?

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Well, you're just asking just for one way. Got it, got it, got it.

• 38:20Lex Fridman?

  That's okay, cool. So for just like literally flying to Mars in a round, it takes three years?

• 38:26Speaker 01

  There's some interstitial time there because you really can only go between Earth and Mars at certain points in their orbits where it's favorable to make that journey. And so part of that three years is you take the journey to Mars a few months, six to nine months. You're there for a period of time until the orbits find a favorable alignment again. And then you come back another six to nine months.

• 38:47Lex Fridman?

  So one-way travel, six to nine months, they hang out there on vacation and then come back.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Forced vacation. You come back.

• 38:54Lex Fridman?

  Well, me, who loves working all the time, all vacation is forced vacation. All right. So, okay, so that gives us a sense of duration. And we can maybe also talk about longer and longer and longer duration as well. What are the hardest aspects of this, of living in space for many days? For let's say 100 days, 200 days? Maybe there's a threshold when it gets really tough? What are, what are some stupid little things or big things that are very difficult for human beings to go through?

• 39:27Speaker 01

  So one big thing and one little thing. And there's two classic problems that we're trying to solve in the space industry. One is radiation. It's not as much of a problem for us right now on the International Space Station because we're still protected by part of Earth's magnetosphere. But as soon as you get farther out into space and you don't have that protection, once you leave the Van Allen Belt area of the Earth and the, you know, cocoon around the Earth, we have really serious concerns about radiation and the effect on human health long-term. That's the big one. The small one, and I say it's small because it seems mundane, but it actually is really big in its own way, is mental health and how to keep people happy and balanced. And you were alluding to some of the psychological challenges of having humans together on

• 40:08Speaker 01

  missions and especially as we try to scale the number of humans in orbit or in space. So that's another big challenge is how to keep people happy and balanced and cooperating.

• 40:19Lex Fridman?

  That's not an issue on Earth at all.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  At all.

• 40:22Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so we'll talk about each of those in a bit more detail. But let me continue on the chain of dumb questions. What about food? What's a good food source for food in space? And what are some sort of standard go to meals, menus?

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Right now, your go to menu is going to be mostly freeze dried. Every so often NASA will arrange for a fun stunt or fresh food to get up to station. So they did bake DoubleTree cookies with Hilton a couple of years ago, as I recall. I think sometime before the pandemic. But there's work actually in our lab at MIT. Maggie Koblenz, one of my staff researchers, is looking at the future of fermentation. Everybody loves beer, right? Beer and wine and kimchi and miso. These foods that have just been, you know, really important to human cultures for eons because we love the umami and the better flavor in them. But it turns out they also have a good shelf life if done properly. And they also have an additional health benefit for the microbiome, for probiotics and prebiotics.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  So we're trying to work with NASA and convince them to be more open minded to fermented food for long duration, deep space missions. That we think is one of the future elements in addition to instituting growing your own food.

• 41:33Lex Fridman?

  Okay, this is essential for the space party is the space beer.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Yes, it's the fermented product, yes.

• 41:41Lex Fridman?

  Okay, cool. In terms of water, what's a good source of drinkable water? Like, where do you get water? Do you have to always bring it on board with you? And is there compressed efficient way of storing it?

• 41:52Speaker 01

  So to steal a line from Charlie Bolden, who's the former administrator of NASA, this morning's fresh water is yesterday's coffee. So if you think about what that means, you drank the coffee yesterday.

• 42:03Lex Fridman?

  Right, as it goes fully through the body.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Fully through the body as the recycling system. And then you drink what you peed out as, you know, clarified, refined, fresh water the next day. That is one source of water. Another source of water in the near neighborhood of our solar system would be on the moon. So water ice deposits, there's also water on Mars. This is one of the big things that's bringing people to want to develop infrastructure on the moon is once you've gotten out of the gravity well of Earth, if you can find water on the moon and refine it, you can either make it into propellant or drinkable water for humans. And so that's really valuable as a potential gateway out into the rest of the solar system to be able to get propellant without always having to ship it up from Earth.

• 42:49Lex Fridman?

  So how much water is there on Mars?

• 42:51Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I do not know.

• 42:53Lex Fridman?

  We don't know this yet, right?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  The caps. I suspect NASA, from all of the satellite studies that they've done of Mars, have a decent idea of what the water deposits look like, but I don't know to what degree they have characterized those.

• 43:07Lex Fridman?

  I really hope there's life or traces of previous life on Mars.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  This is a special spot in my heart because I got to work on Sherlock, which is the astrobiology experiment that's on Mars right now, searching for what they would say in a very cautious way is signs of past habitability. They want to be careful not to get people overly excited and say we're searching for signs of life. They're searching to see if there would have been organics on the surface of Mars or water in certain areas that would have allowed for life to flourish. And I really love this prospect. I do think within our lifetimes, we'll get a better answer about finding life in our solar system if it's there. If not on Mars, maybe Europa, one of the icy worlds.

• 43:51Lex Fridman?

  So you like the, you like astrobiology?

• 43:54Speaker 01

  I do.

• 43:55Lex Fridman?

  This is part, part of the, it's not just about human biology. It's also other extraterrestrial alien biology.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Search for life in the universe.

• 44:04Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Does that scare you or excite you?

• 44:06Speaker 01

  It excites me profoundly.

• 44:07Lex Fridman?

  That there's other alien civilizations, potentially very different than our own?

• 44:12Speaker 01

  I think there's got to be some humility there. And certainly from science fiction, we have plenty of reasons to fear that outcome as well. But I do think as a scientist, it would be profoundly exciting if we were to find life, especially in the near neighborhood of our solar system. Right now, we would expect it to be most likely microbial life. But we have a real serious challenge in astrobiology, which is it may not even be carbon-based life. And all of our detectors, we only know to look for DNA or RNA. How would you even build a detector to look for silicon-based life? Or different molecules than what we know to be the fundamental molecules for life?

• 44:47Lex Fridman?

  And then you mentioned offline, Sarah Walker. I mean, she, her, the question that she's obsessed with is even just defining life. What is life? To look outside the carbon base? I mean, to look outside of basically anything we can even imagine chemically, to look outside of any kind of notions that we think of as biology. Yeah, it's really weird. So you now get into this land of like complexity of a measuring. Of like how many assembly steps it takes to build that thing.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:19Lex Fridman?

  And maybe maybe dynamic movement or some maintenance of some kind of membrane structures. Like we don't even know like which properties life should have. Whether it can should be able to reproduce and all those kinds of things or pass information, genetic type of information. We don't know. And it's like it's that's so humbling. I mean, I tend to believe that there could be something like alien life here on earth. And we're just too human biology obsessed to even recognize it.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  The shadow biosphere, I remember you and Sarah were talking about.

• 45:54Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's that's like, speaking of beer, I mean, that's something I wanted to make sure in all of science to shake ourselves out of like, remind ourselves constantly how little we know. Cause it might be right in front of our nose. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if like trees are like orders of magnitude more intelligent than humans. They're just operating in a much slower scale. And they're like talking shit about us the whole time. Like about silly humans that take everything seriously. And we start all kinds of nuclear wars and we quarrel and we tweet about it and then, but the trees are always there just watching us silly humans.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Like the ants in Lord of the Rings.

• 46:32Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. So, I mean, I don't know. I mean, obviously I'm joking on that one, but there could be stuff like that. Well, let me ask you the the Drake equation, the big, the question, how many, like, obviously nobody knows, but what's your gut? What's your hope as a scientist, as a human? How many alien civilizations are out there?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  As a ex physicist, I'm now much more on the aerospace engineering side for space architecture, but as an ex physicist, I hope it is prolific.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  I think the challenge is, if it's as prolific as we would hope, if there are many, many, many civilizations, then the question is, where are they? Why haven't we heard from them? And the Fermi paradox, is there some great filter that life only gets to some level of sophistication and then kills itself off through war, or through famine, or through different challenges that filter that society out of existence? And it would be an interesting question to try to understand. If the universe was teeming with life, why haven't we found it or heard from it yet? To our knowledge.

• 47:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I personally believe that it's teeming with life. And you're right, I think that's a really useful, productive, engineering, scientific question of what kind of great filter can just be destroying all of that life, or preventing it from just constantly talking to us, silly descendants of apes. That's a really nice question, like, what are the ways civilizations can destroy themselves?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  There's too many, sadly.

• 48:06Lex Fridman?

  Well, I don't think we've come up with most of them yet.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  That's also probably true.

• 48:11Lex Fridman?

  That's the thing, it's, I mean, and like, if you look at nuclear war, some of it is physics, but some of it is game theory. It's human nature, it's how societies built themselves, how they interact, how we create and resolve conflict. And it gets back to the human question on when you're doing long-term space travel, how do you maintain this dynamical system of flawed irrational humans such that it persists throughout time? And not just maintain the biological body, but get people from not murdering each other, like, like each other sufficiently to where you kind of fit well?

• 48:53Lex Fridman?

  But I think, you know, if the songs or poetry or books taught me anything, if you like each other a little too much, I mean, the problems arise. Because then there's always a third person who also likes, and then there's the drama. It's like, I can't believe you did that last night, whatever. So, and then there's beer.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Gets complicated quickly.

• 49:11Lex Fridman?

  Gets complicated quickly. Okay, anyway, back to the dumb questions. Because you answered this, there's an interview where you answer a bunch of cool little questions from young students and so on, about like, space.

• 49:25Lex Fridman?

  Uh, one of them was playing music in space.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:28Lex Fridman?

  Um, and he mentioned something about what kind of instruments you could use to play music in space. Could you, could you mention about, uh, like the Spotify work in space? And if I wanted to do a live performance, what, what kind of instruments would I need?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you referenced culture before, and I think this is one of the most exciting things that we have at our fingertips, which is to define a new culture for space exploration. We don't just have to import cultural artifacts from Earth to make life worth living in space. And this musical instrument that you referenced was a design of an object that could only be performed in microgravity.

• 50:05Lex Fridman?

  Oh, cool.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  So it doesn't sound the same way when it's, um, it's a percussive instrument when it's rattled or moved in a gravity environment.

• 50:12Lex Fridman?

  Is, is that, can we look it up?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  It's called the Telematron. Yep. It's created by.

• 50:16Lex Fridman?

  Of course, it's called the Telematron. That is so awesome.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Uh, created by Sands Fish and Nicole Bullier, two amazing graduate students and staff researchers on my team.

• 50:25Lex Fridman?

  What does it look like?

• 50:25Speaker 01

  It, uh, it looks steampunk, actually.

• 50:28Lex Fridman?

  That's awesome.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a pretty cool design. It looks like it's a geometric solid that has these interesting artifacts on the inside. And it has a lot of sensors, actually, additionally on the inside, like IMUs, inertial measurement sensors, that allow it to detect when it's floating and when it's not floating, and provides this really kind of ethereal, um, they later sonify it. So they use electronic music to turn it into a symphony or turn it into a piece. And yeah, this is the object, the Telematron.

• 50:55Lex Fridman?

  How does the human interact with it?

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Uh, by tossing it. So it's an interactive musical instrument. It actually requires another partner. So the idea was that it's something like a dance, um, or just like something like a choreography in space.

• 51:07Lex Fridman?

  Got it. And then, speaking of which, you also talked about sports and, uh, like ball sports, like playing soccer. So what, you, you mentioned that, so your muscles can move at full speed. And then if you push off the wall lightly, you fly across, zoom, zoom across. So how does the physics of that work? For can you still play soccer, for example, in space?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  You can, but one of the most intuitive things that we all learn as babies, right, is whenever you throw something, if I was going to toss something to you, I'd toss it up because I know that it has to compensate for the fact that that Keplerian arc is going to draw it down. The, you know, equations of motion are going to draw it down. I would, in space, I would just shoot something directly towards you. So like straight line of sight. And so that would be very different for any type of ball sport is to retrain your human mind to have that as your intuitive arc of motion or lack of arc.

• 52:00Lex Fridman?

  From your experience, from understanding how astronauts get adjusted to this stuff, how long does it take to adjust to the physics of this world, this other world?

• 52:08Speaker 01

  So even after one or two parabolic flights, you can gain a certain facility with moving in that environment. I think most astronauts would say maybe several days on station or a week on station and their brain flips. It's amazing, the plasticity of the human brain and how quickly they are able to adapt. And so pretty quickly they become creatures of this new environment.

• 52:31Lex Fridman?

  OK, so that's cool. It's, it's, it's creating a little bit of an experience. What about if you go for more than 100 days for one year, for two years, for three years?

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:41Lex Fridman?

  What challenges start to emerge in that case?

• 52:44Speaker 01

  So Scott Kelly wrote this amazing book after he spent a year in space and he's a twin. It's absolutely fantastic that NASA got to do a twin study. It's perfect. So he wrote a lot about his experience on the health side of what changed. Things like bone density, muscle atrophy, eyesight changing because the shape of your eyeball changes, which changes your lens, which changes how you see. If we're then thinking about the challenges between a year and three years, especially if we're doing that three year trip to Mars for your friend who asked earlier, then you have to think about nutrition. And so how are you keeping all of these different needs for your body alive? How are you protecting astronauts against radiation?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Either having some type of a shell on the spacecraft, which is expensive because it's heavy, you know, if it's something like lead, a really effective radiation shell, it's going to be a lot of mass. Or is there a pill that could be taken to try to make you less in danger of some of the radiation effects? A lot of this has not yet been answered, but radiation is a really significant challenge for that three-year journey.

• 53:51Lex Fridman?

  And what are the negative effects of radiation on the human body out in space?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  A higher likelihood to develop cancer at a younger age. So you'd probably be able to get there and get back, but you'd find yourself in the same way if you were exposed to significant radiation on Earth, you'd find significant bad health effects as you age.

• 54:10Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about like decades? Do you think about decades? Or is this like an entire?

• 54:16Speaker 01

  I think about centuries for my space artists, but yeah, for decades. I think as soon as we get past the three-year mark, we'll absolutely want somewhere between three years and a decade, we'll want artificial gravity. And we know how to do that, actually. The engineering questions still need to be tweaked for how we'd really implement it, but the science is there to know how we would spin habitats in orbit and generate that force. So even if the entire habitat's not spinning, you at least have a treadmill part of the space station that is spinning and you can spend some fraction of your day in a nearer to one G environment and keep your body healthy.

• 54:52Lex Fridman?

  Wait, literally from just spinning?

• 54:54Speaker 01

  From spinning, yes, and trip ital force. So you generate this force. If you've ever been in those carnival rides, the gravitrons that spin you up around the side, that's the concept. And this is actually one of the reasons why we are spinning out a new company from my MIT lab. Spinning out, ha, that was accidental, but well, well noted space pun. It's impossible to avoid that. But yeah, we're spinning out a new company to look at next generation space architecture and how do we actually scale humanities access to space? And one of the areas that we want to look at is artificial gravity.

• 55:29Lex Fridman?

  Is there a name yet?

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Yep, there's a name. We are brand new. We are just exiting stealth mode. So your podcast listeners will literally be among some of the first to hear about it. It's called Aurelia Institute.

• 55:40Lex Fridman?

  Beautiful.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Aurelia is an old English word for chrysalis. And the idea with this is that we, humanity collectively, are at this next stage of our metamorphosis, like a chrysalis, into a spacefaring species. And so we felt that this was a good time, a necessary time, to think about next generation space architecture, but also Starfleet Academy, if you know that reference from Star Trek.

• 56:07Lex Fridman?

  Yes. So let me ask a silly sounding, ridiculous sounding, but probably extremely important question. Sex in space, including intercourse, conception, procreation, birth, like being a parent, like raising the baby. So basically from birth, well, from the before the birth part, like the birds and the bees and stuff, and then the whole thing. How complicated is that? I remember looking at the, thank you. I remember looking at this exact Wikipedia page, actually. And it's, I remember being, the Wikipedia page is Sex in Space. And fascinating how difficult of an engineering problem the whole thing is.

• 56:49Lex Fridman?

  Is that something you think about to, how to have generations of humans? Self, self-replicating organisms?

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, societies essentially. I mean, I guess with micro, like if you solve the gravity problem, you solve a lot of these problems.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  That's the hope, yeah, is like this central challenge of microgravity to human reproduction. But we do host a workshop every year at Beyond the Cradle, which is the space event that we run at MIT. And we always do one on pregnancy in space, or motherhood, or raising children in space, because there are huge questions. There've been a few mammal studies that have looked at reproduction in space, but there are still really major questions about how does it work? How does the fetus evolve in microgravity if you were pregnant in space? And I think the near term answer is just going to be we need to be able to give humans a 1G environment for that phase of our development.

• 57:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so there's some studies on mice in microgravity. And it's interesting, like I think the mice, like one of them, the mice weren't able to walk or like their understanding of physics, I guess, is all for something like that.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, the mental model, when you're really young and you're kind of getting your mental model of physics, we do think that that would change kids' abilities to if they were born in microgravity, their ability to have that intuition around an Earth-based 1G environment might be missing because a lot of that is like crystallized in early development, early childhood development. So that makes sense that they would see that in mice, yeah.

• 58:15Lex Fridman?

  So what about life when we choose to park our vehicles on another planet, on the moon, but let's go to Mars? First of all, does that excite you? Humans going to Mars, like stepping foot on Mars? And when do you think it'll happen?

• 58:34Speaker 01

  It does excite me. I think visionaries like Elon are working to make that happen in terms of building the road to space. We are really excited about building out the human lived experience of space once you get there. So how are you going to grow your food? What is your habitat going to look like? I think it's profoundly exciting, but I do think that there's a little bit of a misunderstanding of Mars anywhere in the near future being anything like a replacement for Earth. So it is good for humanity to have these other pockets of our civilization that can expand out beyond Earth. But Mars is not, in its current state, a good home for humanity. Too many perchlorates in the soil. You can't use that soil to grow crops. Atmosphere is too thin, certainly can't breathe it, but it's also just really thin compared

• 59:19Speaker 01

  to our atmosphere. A lot of different challenges that would have to be fundamentally changed on that planet to make it a good home for a large human civilization.

• 59:28Lex Fridman?

  How does a large civilization of humans get built on Mars? And what do you think, where do you think it gets, starts being difficult? So can you have a small base of like 10 people, essentially, kind of like the International Space Station kind of situation? And then can you get it to 100 to 1,000 to a million? Are there some interesting challenges there that worry you? Saying that Mars is just not a good backup at this time for Earth?

• 59:56Speaker 01

  I think small outpost, absolutely, like McMurdo, right? So we have these models of really extreme environments on Earth and Antarctica, for example, where humans have been able to go and make a sustainable settlement. McMurdo-style life on Mars, probably feasible in the 2030s. So we want to send the first human missions to Mars and maybe as early as the end of this decade, more likely early 2030s. Moving anywhere beyond that in terms of a place where like an entire human life would be lived, where it's not just you go for a three-month deployment and you come back? That is actually the big challenge line. It's just saying, is there enough technological sophistication that can be brought that far out into space?

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  If you imagine your electronics break, there's no Radio Shack. This dates me a little bit that my mind jumps to Radio Shack. But there's no, you know, there's no supply chains on Mars that can supply the level of technological sophistication for all the products that we rely on, on day-to-day life. So you'd be going back to actually a very simple existence, more like pioneer life out west in the story of the US, for example. And I think that the future of larger-scale gatherings of humans in orbit, or sorry, in space, is actually going to be in microgravity, floating space cities, not so much trying to establish settlements on the surface.

• 1:01:21Lex Fridman?

  So you think sort of a significant engineering investment in terms of our efforts and money should be on large?

• 1:01:30Lex Fridman?

  Spaceships that perhaps are doing this kind of self-assembly, all these kinds of things and doing in orbit, maybe building a giant donut around the planet over time.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is the goal. And I think the current political climate is such that you can't get the trillion-dollar investment to build, to start from scratch and build the sci-fi megastructure. But if you can build it in fits and starts in little different pieces, which is another advantage of self-assembly, it's much more like how nature works. So it's biomimicry-inspired way for humanity to scale out in space.

• 1:02:05Lex Fridman?

  Whether it's out in space or on Mars, the idea that sort of two people fall in love, they have sex.

• 1:02:15Lex Fridman?

  A child is born and then that couple has to teach that child that like we, that they came from Earth. I just love the idea that somebody's born on Mars or out in space. And you have to be like, that, this is not actually like the original home.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:32Lex Fridman?

  Just them looking at Earth and being like, this is where we came from. I don't know, that's really inspiring to me. And the child being really confused and then wanting to go back to TikTok. Or whatever they do.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Whatever they do in that era. I mean, there's great sci-fi, right? About people being born on Mars. And because it's a lower-gravity environment, they're taller, they're more gangly if they were actually able to develop there. And then they come back to Earth and they're like second-class citizens because they can't function here in the same way because the gravity is too strong for them. You see this in series like The Expanse with the Belters and these, you know, different societies that if we were to succeed in having human societies grow up in different pockets, it's not necessarily going to be easy for them to always come back to Earth as their home.

• 1:03:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, different cultures form, which is the positive way of phrasing it. But it's also this human history teaches us that we have, we like to form the other.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25Lex Fridman?

  So there's this kind of conflict that naturally emerges. Let me ask another sort of dark question. What do you think about coming from a military family? There's still. Sadly, wars in the world. Do you think wars, military conflicts will follow us into space? Wars between nations? Like, from my perspective currently, it just seems like space is a place for scientists and engineers to explore ideas. But the more and more progress you make, does it worry you that nations start to step in and form, you know, that go out on full military conflict?

• 1:04:07Lex Fridman?

  Whether it's in cyberspace, in space, or actual hot war?

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  I am really concerned about that. And I do think for decades, the scientific community in space has hung on to this notion from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which is space is the province of all humankind, peaceful uses of outer space only. But I do think the rise in tensions and the geopolitical scene that we're seeing, I do, yeah, I do harbor a lot of concern about hot wars following humanity out into space. And it's worth trying to tie nations together with more collaboration to avoid that happening. The International Space Station is a great example. I think it's something like 18 countries are party to this treaty. It might be less, it might be more. And then, of course, there's a smaller number of countries that actually send astronauts.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  But even at the fall of the Soviet Union and through some tense times with Russia, the ISS had been a place where the US and Russia were actually able to collaborate between Mir and ISS. I think it'd be really important right now, in particular, to find other platforms where these hegemonic powers in the world and developing world nations can come and collaborate on the future of space and purposefully intertwine our success, so that there's a danger to multiple parties if somebody is a bad actor.

• 1:05:28Lex Fridman?

  So we're now talking as a, there's a war in Ukraine. And I haven't been sleeping much. I have family, friends, colleagues in both countries. And I'm just talking to a lot of people, many of whom are crying, refugees. And I, you know, there's a basic human compassion and love for each other that I believe technology can help catalyze and accelerate. But there's also science. There's something about rockets, there's something about, and I mean like space exploration, that

• 1:06:03Lex Fridman?

  That inspires the world about the positive possibilities of the human species. So in terms of Ukraine and Russia and China and India and the United States and Europe and everywhere else, it seems like collaborating on giant space projects is one way to escape these wars, to escape these sort of geopolitical conflicts. I mean, there's something, there's so much camaraderie to the whole thing. And even in this little period of human history we're living through, it seems like that's essential. Even through this pandemic, there's something so inspiring about those SpaceX rockets going up, for example.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:06:48Lex Fridman?

  This reinvigoration of the space exploration efforts by the commercial sector. I don't know. That was, as many of us have, sort of some dark times during this pandemic, just like loneliness and sometimes emotion and anger and just, and just hopelessness and politics. And then you look at those rockets going up and it just gives you hope. So I think that's an understated sort of value of space exploration is a thing that unites us and gives us hope. Obviously also inspires young generations of young minds to also contribute in not necessarily in space exploration, but in all of science and literature and poetry.

• 1:07:31Lex Fridman?

  There's something about when you look up to the stars, it makes you dream.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Very true.

• 1:07:36Lex Fridman?

  And so that, that's a really good reason to sort of invest in this, whether it's building giant megastructure, which is so freaking cool, but also colonizing Mars. Yeah, it's something to look forward to, something that, that.

• 1:07:54Lex Fridman?

  And not make it a domain of war, but a domain of human collaboration and human compassion, I think.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Lex Fridman?

  You're the founder and director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. It includes a ton of projects. So I just wanted to, they're focused, I guess, on life in space from astrobiology, like we talked about, to habitats. Are there some other interesting projects, part of this initiative, that you're, that pop to mind, that you find particularly cool?

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. One is the future of in-space manufacturing. So if we're going to build large-scale space structures, yes, it's great to ship them up from Earth and self-assemble them. But what about extrusion in orbit? It's one of the best technologies to leverage in microgravity, because you can extrude a particularly long beam that would sag in a normal gravity environment, but might be able to become the basis of a truss or a large-scale space structure. So we're doing miniature tests of extrusion and are excited to fly this on the International Space Station in a few months. We are working on swarm robots. We have just announced, actually, MIT's return to the moon. So my organization is leading this mission for MIT, going back to the surface of the

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  moon as early as the end of this year, 2022, maybe early 2023, and trying to take data from our research payloads at this historic South Pole site, where NASA is supposed to send the first humans back on the Artemis III mission. So our hope is to directly support that human mission with our data.

• 1:09:27Lex Fridman?

  How does that connect to the swarm aspects? Does it connect?

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, so we're actually going to fly one of the little astro ants. That's the current plan. One of the little swarm robots on the top of a rover. That's part of the mission.

• 1:09:40Lex Fridman?

  Ant riding a rover?

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. An ant riding a rover. That rover gets packed in a lander. That lander gets packed in a SpaceX rocket. So it's a whole nesting doll situation to get to, to get to the moon.

• 1:09:51Lex Fridman?

  Mother of robot dragons.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:53Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so this one, a swarm of one?

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  Swarm of one, exactly. We're testing out, it's a tech demonstration mission, not a true, not a true swarm. Yeah, there they are. Those are the astro ants.

• 1:10:04Lex Fridman?

  Wow. And they, so it's a distributed system and they, in theory, you could have a ton of these?

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Yes. These could also be centralized. So they, they have wireless technology that could also talk to a central base station and will be assessing kind of case by case, whether it makes sense to operate them in a decentralized swarm or to command them in a centralized swarm.

• 1:10:24Lex Fridman?

  Each robot is equipped with four magnetic wheels, which enable the robot to attach to any magnetic surface. So you can operate basically any environment. He tested the, we tested the mobility of all robots on different materials in a microgravity environment.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  On the Vomit Comet, prior to going to the moon.

• 1:10:42Lex Fridman?

  That must look so cool. So they're basically moving along different, like metallic surfaces.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's interesting when you, you know, just a minute ago, talking about the reflection of how space can be so aspirational and so uniting. There's a great quote from Bill Anders from the Apollo eight mission to the moon, which is he, it's the Earthrise photo that was taken where you see the Earth coming up over the horizon of the moon. And the quote is something along the lines of, we came all the way to discover the moon. And what we really discovered was the Earth. This really powerful image looking back. And so we're also trying to think for our lunar mission, we realized we're a very privileged group at MIT to get the opportunity to do this. How could we bring humanity along with us? And so one of the things we're still testing out, I don't know if we're going to be able to swing it, would be to do something like a Twitch Plays Pokemon, but with the robot.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  So let a lot of people on Earth actually control the robot, or at least benefit from the data that we're gathering and try to release the data openly. So we're exploring a couple of different ideas for how do we engage more people in this mission.

• 1:11:43Lex Fridman?

  That would be surreal to be able to interact in some way with the thing that's out there.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:11:49Lex Fridman?

  On another surface.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Direct connection.

• 1:11:52Lex Fridman?

  Direct connection. I think about artificial intelligence in that same way, which is like building robots puts a mirror to us humans. It makes us like wonder about like, what is intelligence? What is consciousness? And what is actually valuable about human beings? When, when AI system learns to play chess better than humans, you start to let go of this idea that humans are special because of intelligence. It's, it's something else. It's maybe the flame of human consciousness. It's the capacity to, to feel deeply, to sort of, to both suffer and to love, all those things. And that somehow AI to me sort of puts a mirror to that.

• 1:12:35Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned Hal 9000, you have to bring it up with, with, with these swarm bots crawling in the surface of your cocoon in space.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:46Lex Fridman?

  I mean, all right, let me steel man the, the Hal 9000 perspective.

• 1:12:54Lex Fridman?

  The poor guy just wanted to maintain the mission and the astronauts were, I mean, I don't know if people often talk about that, but you know, like doctors have to make difficult decisions too. When there's limited resources, you actually do have to sacrifice human life often because you have to make decisions.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:12Lex Fridman?

  And I think Hal was probably making that kind of decision about what's more important, the lives of individual astronauts or?

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  The mission.

• 1:13:21Lex Fridman?

  The mission. And I feel like AI or other humans will need to make these decisions. And it also feels like AI systems will need to help make those decisions. I don't know. I guess my question is about greater and greater collective intelligence by systems. Do you worry about that? What is the right way to sort of solve this problem, keeping a human in the loop? Do you think about this kind of stuff? Or are they sufficiently dumb now, the robots that's not yet on the horizon to think about?

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  I think it should be on the horizon. It's always good to think about these things early because we make a lot of technical design decisions at this phase, working with swarm robots, that it would be better to have thought about some of these questions early in the life cycle of a project. There is a real interest in NASA right now, thinking about the future of human robot interaction, HRI, and what is the right synergy in terms of level of control for the human versus level of dependence or control for the robot? And we're beginning to test out more of these scenarios. For example, the Gateway Space Station, which is meant to be in orbit around the moon as a staging base for the surface operations, is meant to be able to function autonomously with no humans in it for months

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  at a time because they think it's going to be seasonal. They think we might not be constantly staffing it. So this will be a really great test of, I don't know that anybody's yet worried about Hal 9000 evolving, but certainly just the robustness of some of these AI systems that might be asked to autonomously maintain the station while the humans are away. Or detection algorithms that are going to say, you know, if you had a human pilot, they might see debris in orbit and steer around it. There'll be a lot of autonomous navigation that has to happen. That'll be one of the early test bets where we'll start to get a little bit closer to that future.

• 1:15:11Lex Fridman?

  Well, the HRI component is really interesting to me.

• 1:15:16Lex Fridman?

  Especially when the I includes like almost friendship. Because like people don't realize this, I think, that we, you know, we humans long for connection. And when you have even a basic interaction, that's just like, supposed to be just like serving you or something, you still project, it's still a, it's still a source of meaning and connection. And so you do have to think about that. I mean, Hal 9000, you know, the movie maybe doesn't portray it that way, but I'm sure there's a relationship there between the astronauts and the, and the robot.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:51Lex Fridman?

  Especially when you have greater and greater level of intelligence. And maybe that addresses the, the happiness question, too.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's a, there's a great book by Kate Darling, who's one of my colleagues at MIT.

• 1:16:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, she's amazing. We've been, she's already been on this podcast, but we talk all the time and we're, we're supposed to talk and we've been missing each other and we're gonna make it happen soon.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Lex Fridman?

  Come, come down to Texas, Kate. All right. Anyway, yeah, she's amazing. She has this book, it's just, her whole work is about this.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Connection with robots, yeah.

• 1:16:22Lex Fridman?

  This beautiful connection that we have with robots. But I think it's greater and greater importance when it's out in space.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Space.

• 1:16:27Lex Fridman?

  Cause it could help alleviate some of the loneliness.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Right. One of the projects in the book that I gave you, which is this catalog of the projects that we've worked on over the last five years, is this social robot that was developed at the Media Lab. And we, one of the first years in 2017 that we flew a ZERG flight, we took the social robot along and tried to do a little bit of a very scaled down human study to look at these questions, because you do imagine that we would form a bond, a real bond with the social robots that might be not just serving us on a mission, but really be our teammates on a future mission. And I do think that that could have a powerful role in the mental health and just the stability of a crew is to have some other robot friends come along.

• 1:17:06Lex Fridman?

  What do you, by the way, the book you mentioned is Into the Anthropoccosmos, a whole space catalog from the space catalog.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  Get that reference.

• 1:17:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so call out to Earth catalog, a whole space catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. What about the happiness? You said that that's one of the problems of when you're out in space. How do you keep humans happy? Again, asking for a friend.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  I mean, one of the big challenges is you can't just open a window or walk out a door and blow off steam, right? You can't just go somewhere to clear your head. And in that sense, you need to build habitats that are homes that really care for the humans inside them and have, whether it's biophilia and a place where you can go and feel like you're in nature, or a VR headset, which for some people is a poor simulacrum, but is maybe better than nothing. You need to be thinking about these technological interventions that are going to have to be part of your home and be part of your maybe day-to-day ritual to keep you steady and balanced and happy or feeling fulfilled.

• 1:18:17Lex Fridman?

  What about other humans, relationship with other humans?

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Lex Fridman?

  Do those get, do those get weird when you get past a certain number of humans?

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  I'm not an expert in this area, but an anecdote that I'll share, my understanding is that NASA has still not decided whether it's better to send married couples or a single crew members in terms of you want some level of stability, you don't want to have the drama of romantic relationships like you're, you know, alluding to before, but they can't decide because married couples also fight.

• 1:18:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  And have a really tough dynamic. And so there's a lot of open questions still to answer about what is the ideal psychological makeup of a crew? And we're starting to test some of these things with the civilian crews that are going up with Inspiration 4, like last fall with SpaceX, and Ax1 that's going to fly in a few days here in March. As we begin to lengthen the, the time of those civilian crews, I think we'll start to learn a little bit more about just average, everyday, human-to-human dynamics and not the astronauts that are themselves selected to be perfect human specimens, very good to work with, easy to get along with.

• 1:19:18Lex Fridman?

  I wish you collected more data about this pandemic, because I feel like it's a good, rough simulation of what it'd be out in space. A lot of people were locked down, some married couples, I think a lot of marriages broke up, a lot of marriages got closer together. So it's like, and then the, the single people, some of them went off the cliff and some of them discovered their new happiness and meaning and so on. It's, it's a beautiful little experiment, a painful one.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46Lex Fridman?

  Is there a thorough way to really test that to, because it's such a costly experiment?

• 1:19:54Lex Fridman?

  Send humans up there, but I guess you can always return back to Earth if it's not working out.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  That's what we hope. We don't have like a, you know, Apollo 13 situation that doesn't quite make it back. But yeah, the, this is also why Mars is such a challenge. The moon is only three days away. That's a lot quicker to recover from if there's a psychological problem with the crew or any type of maintenance problem, anything. Three years is such a challenge compared to these other domains that we've been getting more used to in terms of human spaceflight. So this is a question that we will need to have explored more before we start really sending crews to Mars.

• 1:20:28Lex Fridman?

  So you're a young scientist. Do you think in your lifetime,

• 1:20:35Lex Fridman?

  you will go out into orbit? You will go out beyond into deep space and potentially step you. I, I don't know if you can call yourself a civilian. I don't know if that's what you count as, but you as a, as a curious ant

• 1:20:55Lex Fridman?

  from MIT land, step on Mars?

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Firm, that's a firm.

• 1:21:02Lex Fridman?

  Are you coming back?

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Firm, yes. Yeah, I'm coming back. I don't want that one way mission. I want the two way mission. But yes, I mean, I think we're already talking about a pretty near term opportunity where I could send graduate students to the International Space Station. Yeah.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Not the, not a, you know, not a sacrifice. No, but send graduate students.

• 1:21:20Lex Fridman?

  The experience.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Send graduate students to the ISS to do their research. I do think you and I both would have an opportunity to go to a lunar base of some sort within our lifetime. And there's a good chance if we really wanted to, we might have to really advocate for it. You know, apply to an astronaut program. There will be some avenues for humans in our lifetime to go to Mars.

• 1:21:42Lex Fridman?

  What's the bar for like? Health, do you think that bar will keep getting lower and lower in terms of how healthy, how athletic, like how

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21:52Lex Fridman?

  Or the psychological profile, all those kinds of things?

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. For one, we're going to build more robust habitats that don't depend on astronauts being so impeccably well-trained. So we're going to make it better for inclusion and just opening access to space. But there's a fantastic group called AstroAccess that is already helping disabled space flyers do zero-g flights and potentially get access to the ISS. And some of the things that we think of as disabilities on Earth are hyper-abilities in space. You don't need really powerful legs in space. What you'd really benefit from having is a third arm, more ways to kind of move yourself around and grip and interact. So we are already seeing a much more open-minded approach to who gets to go to space. And AstroAccess is a wonderful organization doing some of that work.

• 1:22:39Lex Fridman?

  I'm hoping introversion will also be a superpower in space. Okay. Well, first, I'd love to get your opinion on commercial spaceflight, what SpaceX or Blue Origin are doing.

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:49Lex Fridman?

  And also, another question on top of that is, because you've worked with a lot of different kinds of people culturally, what's the difference between SpaceX or commercial type of efforts, NASA, and MIT?

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  And academia.

• 1:23:07Lex Fridman?

  Academia.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So to the first part of your question, I am thrilled by all of the commercial activity in space. It has really empowered our program. So instead of me waiting for five years to get a grant and get the money from the grant, and only then can you send a project to space, I go out and I fundraise, a lot like a startup founder, and I directly buy access to space on the International Space Station through SpaceX or Nanoracks, same with Blue Origin and their suborbital craft, same with Acxiom now. Acxiom's making plans for their own commercial space station. It's not out of the realm of possibility that in a few years, I will rent lab space in orbit. I will rent a module from the Acxiom Space Station or the Orbital Reef, which is the Blue Origin Space Station, or Nanoracks is thinking about StarLab Oasis. There's probably some other companies that I'm not

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  even aware of yet that are doing commercial space habitats. So I think that's fabulous. And really empowering for our research.

• 1:24:00Lex Fridman?

  Is it affordable? So like loosely speaking, does it become affordable for like MIT type of research lab? Does it, you know, or does it need to be a multi-university, like a gigantic effort?

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  Consortium thing.

• 1:24:15Lex Fridman?

  A consortium thing.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  One of the reasons we're spinning out Aurelia is we actually realized it's cheap enough. It doesn't even have to be MIT. And we wanted to start democratizing access to these spaceflight opportunities to a much broader swath of humanity. Could you take a, you know, Khan Academy educational course about, hey, students around the world, this is how you get ready for a Xerogee flight. And by the way, come fly with us next year, which is something we're going to do with Aurelia. Because we're going to bring, you know, much more just kind of day to day folks on Xerogee flights and get them access to engaging in the space industry. So it's become cheap enough and the prices have dropped enough to consider even that. So that's amazing. It definitely doesn't have to be a consortium of universities anymore. Depends on what you want to fly.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  If you want to fly James Webb, a huge telescope that's decades in the making, sure, you need a NASA allocation budget, you need billions. But for a lot of the stuff in the book and our research portfolio, it's actually becoming far more accessible.

• 1:25:11Lex Fridman?

  So that's commercial. What about NASA and MIT academia?

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think, you know, people have been worried about NASA the last few years because in some people's minds, they are seeding ground to these commercial efforts. But that's really not, that's really not what's happening. NASA empowered these commercial efforts because they want to free themselves up to go to Mars and go to Europa and continue being that really aspirational force for humanity of pushing the boundary, always pushing the boundary. And if they were anchored in low Earth orbit, maintaining a space station indefinitely, that's so much a part of their budget that it was keeping them from being able to do more. So it actually is really fantastic for NASA to have grown this commercial ecosystem. And then that frees NASA up to go further.

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  And in academia, we like to think that we will be able to do the provocative next generation research that is going to unlock things at that frontier. And we can partner with NASA. We can go through a program if we want to send a probe out really far. But we can also partner with SpaceX and see what human life in a SpaceX Mars settlement might look like and how we could design for that.

• 1:26:20Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of projects, maybe are there other projects that popped to mind from the Space Exploration Initiative, or maybe stuff from the book, the convention?

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Lex Fridman?

  Something super cool? I mean, everything we've been talking about is cool, but just something that pops to mind again?

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we talked about life in space, and you might need more arms than legs. One of the projects by Valentina Sumini was an air-powered robotics tail. So it's a soft robotics tail that essentially has a little camera on the back end of it, can do computer vision, and knows where to grapple, so it's behind you. It grapples onto something and holds you in space, and then you can actually free up both of your hands to work. So we're already starting to think about the design of bionic humans, or prosthetics, or things that would make you kind of like a cyborg, to augment your capabilities when you're in a space environment.

• 1:27:08Lex Fridman?

  How would you control something like that? It's just kind of like a, I mean, you can't call it a leg, but whatever.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  An additional appendage.

• 1:27:15Lex Fridman?

  Appendage. So how would you, what are ideas for controlling something like that?

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so right now it's super, yeah, there you go.

• 1:27:22Lex Fridman?

  That's cool.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  Right now it's super manual. It's basically just like a kind of a set pattern of inflating as we're testing it. But in the future, if we had a Neuralink, I mean, this is something that you could imagine directly controlling, just thinking thoughts and controlling it. That's a ways away.

• 1:27:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so we talked about, on the biology side, astrobiology, there's probably agriculture stuff. Is there other things that kind of feed the ecosystem of out in space for survival? Or the robotics architectures, the self-assembly stuff?

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  So, kind of combining something we were talking about, you can form these relationships with objects and anthropomorphize.

• 1:27:57Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  One of the things that we're thinking about for agriculture, created by Manway and Somu, so two students at MIT, was this little, it looks like a planet, but it's inspired by, I think, a mandala or Nepalese spinning wheel. And you plant plants on the inside, and the astronaut has to spin it every day to help the plant survive. So it's a way to give the astronauts something to care about, something that they are responsible for keeping alive, and can really invest themselves in. And it's not necessary, right? We have other ways to grow in orbit. Hydroponics, liquid medium, trying to keep the liquid around the plant roots is hard because there's no gravity to pull it down in a particular direction. But what I loved about this project was they said, Sure, we have ways that the plants could grow on their own, but the astronauts

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  might want to care for it in the same way that we have little plants that come to be important to us, little plant friends. Yeah, so there's Aggrifuge. That's an early model of this spinning, manually spinning plant habitat.

• 1:28:53Lex Fridman?

  I guess this is the best of academic research is you can do these kinds of wild ideas.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  Wild ideas, yeah.

• 1:29:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, you know, I get to spend quite a bit of time with Mr. Elon Musk and he's very stressed, especially about starship and all those kinds of engineering efforts.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:13Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about how damn hard it is to get out of space? Like, are we humans going to be able to do this? I don't know. I think it feels like it's an engineering problem. It's a scientific problem, but it's also just a motivation problem for the entire human species. And you also need to have superstar researchers and engineers working on it. So you have to get like the best people in the world, inspire them, and starting from a young age and kind of.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  Almost inculcating us into why we do it.

• 1:29:44Lex Fridman?

  I guess this way it's exciting. You don't know if we're going to be able to pull this off. That we could like fail miserably. And that, I suppose, I mean, that's where the best of engineering is done, is like, success is not guaranteed. And even if it happens, it might be very painful.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  I think that's what's so special about what Elon is doing with SpaceX is he takes these risks and he tests iteratively and he'll will see the spectacular failures on the path to a successful starship. It's something that, you know, people have said, why isn't NASA doing that? Well, that's because NASA is doing that with taxpayer dollars and we would all revolt if we saw NASA failing at all these different stages. But that level of, you know, spiral engineering theory of development isn't super impressive. And it's a really interesting approach that SpaceX has taken. And I think between people like Elon and Jeff Bezos and Firefly and NASA and ESA, we are going to get there. They're building the road to space. These trailblazers are doing it. And now, part of the challenge is to get the rest of the public to understand that it's happening.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  Right? A lot of people don't know that we're going back to the moon, that we're going to send the first woman to the moon within a few years. A lot of people don't know that there are commercial space stations in orbit, that it's not just NASA that does space stuff. So we have a big challenge to get more of humanity excited and educated and involved again, kind of like in the Apollo era where it was a big deal for everybody.

• 1:31:08Lex Fridman?

  Well, a lot of that is also one of the big impressive things that Elon does, I think, extremely well is the social media, is the getting people excited. And I think that actually he's helped NASA step their game up in terms of social media. There's something about, yeah, the storytelling, but also not like,

• 1:31:28Lex Fridman?

  you know, like authentic and just real and raw engineering. There's a lot of excitement for that. Humor and fun also. All of those things you realize the thing that make up the virality of the meme is beautiful. You have to kind of embrace that. And to me, this kind of, I criticize a lot of companies based on this. I talked to a bunch of CEOs and so on. And it's just like, there's a caution, like, let us do this like press conference thing where when the final product is ready and it's overproduced as opposed to the raw, the gritty, just show it off. And something that I think MIT is very good at doing is just showing the raw, by nature, the mess of it.

• 1:32:13Lex Fridman?

  And the mess of it is beautiful and people get really excited and failure is really exciting. When the thing blows up and you're like, oh shit, that makes it even more exciting when it doesn't blow up. And doing all of that on social media and showing also the humans behind it, the individual young researchers or the engineers or the leaders where everything's at stake. I don't know. I think I'm really excited about that. I do want MIT to do that more for students to show off their stuff and not be pressured to do this kind of generic official presentation, but show their, become a YouTuber also. Like show off your raw research as you're working on it in the early days. I hope that's the future.

• 1:32:55Lex Fridman?

  Things like, I was teasing about TikTok earlier, but you know, these kinds of things I think inspire.

• 1:33:02Lex Fridman?

  Young people to to show off their stuff, to show their true self, the rawness of it. Because I think that's where engineering is best. And I think that will inspire people about all the cool stuff we could do out in space.

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  I should say, I couldn't agree more. And I actually think that this is why we need a real life Starfleet Academy right now. It was the place where the space cadets got to go to learn about how to engage in in a future of life in space. And we can do it in a much better way. There are a bunch of groups that traditionally haven't thought that they could engage in aerospace, whether it's because you were told you had to be into math and science. Now, we need space lawyers. We need space artists like Grimes, right? We need really creative, profoundly interesting people to want to see themselves in that future. And I think it's a big challenge to us in the space industry to also do some more diversity, equity and inclusion and show a broader swath of society that there's a future for them in this space exploration vision.

• 1:33:57Lex Fridman?

  Let me push back on one thing. We don't need space lawyers. I'm just kidding. Okay, it's a joke.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  We do, we do, we do.

• 1:34:03Lex Fridman?

  Okay, we do. The lawyers are great. I love them. Okay, let me ask a big ridiculous question. What is the most beautiful idea to you about space exploration? Whether it's the engineering, the astrobiology, the science, the inspiration, the human happiness, or aliens, I don't know. What do you like inspires you every day in terms of its beauty, in terms of its awe?

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  As a ex-physicist, what I have always found so profound is just that at really, really small scales, like particle physics, and really, really big scales, like astrophysics, there are similarities in the way that those systems behave and look. And there's a certain beautiful symmetry in the universe. It's just kind of waiting for us to tie together the physics and really understand it. That is something that just just really captivates me. And I would love to, even though I'm now much more on the applied space exploration side, I really try to keep up with what's happening in those physics areas because I think that will be a huge answer for humanity along the lines of, are we alone in the universe?

• 1:35:18Lex Fridman?

  One of the fascinating things about you is you have a degree in physics, mathematics and philosophy. And now, I don't know, would you want to, would you call aerospace engineering maybe kind of thing? So you're, you have it afoot in all of these worlds. The theoretic, uh, the, the, the sort of, the, the beauty of that world and the, the philosophy somehow is in there. And now the very practical, pragmatic implementation of all these wild ideas. Plus you're an incredible communicator, all those things. What did you pick up from those different disciplines? Or maybe I'm just romanticizing all those different disciplines. Uh, but what is there? What did you pick up from the variety of that physics, mathematics, philosophy?

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  What I loved about having this chance to do a liberal arts education was trying to understand the human condition. And I think more designers for space exploration should be thinking about that because there's so much depth of, like we were talking about, issues of, issues and opportunities around human connection, human life, meaning in life, how do you find fulfillment or happiness? And I think if you approach these questions just purely from the standpoint of an engineer or a scientist, you'll miss some of what makes it a life worth living. Um, and so I love being able to combine some of this notion of philosophy and the human condition with my work. But I'm also a pragmatist and I didn't want to stay just purely in these big picture questions about the universe.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  I wanted to have an impact on society. And I also felt like I had such a, a wonderful childhood and a really fantastic setup that I, I owe society some work to really make a positive impact for a broader swath of citizens. And so that kind of led me from the physics domain to thinking about engineering and practical questions for life in space.

• 1:37:06Lex Fridman?

  In physics, was there a dream? Are you also captivated by this search for the theory of everything that kind of unlocks the deeper and deeper? In the in the simple elegant way, the function of our universe. Do you think they'll be useful for us? For the actual practical engineering things that you're working on now?

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  It could be. I mean, I worked at CERN for two summers in undergrad and we were looking for supersymmetry, which was one of these alternatives to the standard model. And it was sad because my professors were getting sadder and sadder because they weren't finding it. They were excluding what we would call this parameter space of finding these supersymmetric particles. But the search for what that theory of everything could be, or a grand unified theory that kind of answers some of the holes within the standard model of physics, would presumably kind of unlock a better understanding of certain fundamental physical laws that we should be able to build a better understanding of engineering and day to day services from that. It might not be an immediately obvious thing. When we discovered the Higgs, the Higgs boson, I was there at CERN that day.

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  It was July 4th, 2012 that it was announced. We all waited like nerds overnight in line to get into the announcement chamber. I had never waited for even like a Harry Potter premiere in my life, but we waited for this like announcement of the Higgs boson to get into the chamber overnight. But did that immediately translate to technology for engineering? No.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  But it's still a really important part of our understanding of these fundamental laws of physics. And so I don't know that it's always immediate, but I think it is really critical knowledge for humanity to seek.

• 1:38:42Lex Fridman?

  It might just shake up understanding of the world.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:46Lex Fridman?

  What scares me is it might help us create more dangerous weapons. So and then we'll figure out that great filter situation. And I still believe that human compassion and love is actually the way to defend against all these greater and greater and more impressive weapons.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask a weird question. In terms of you disagreeing with others, what important idea do you believe is true? That many others don't agree with you on? Maybe it's a tough question. You might have to think about that one, but it was very specific. Like which material to use or something about a particular project? Or it could be grand priorities on missions. I think one you actually mentioned is interesting is like. Um, the thing we should be looking for is like colonization of space versus colonization of planets, meaning like.

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  Yes, that's probably my best hot take that people would disagree with me on is life in floating cities as opposed to life on, on the surface.

• 1:39:50Lex Fridman?

  How do you envision that like spread of humans? Cause you said at the beginning of the conversation, something about like scale, increasing the scale of basically humans in space. Are they just like in, um, they're in orbit and then they get a little farther and farther out? Like, do you see this kind of, uh, floating cities just getting farther and far from Earth that can always kind of return? But like, if you look a few centuries from now, do you just see us all these like floating cities?

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  Like amoeba.

• 1:40:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And it just kind of envelops, uh, the space around us and it's like neighborhoods.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:27Lex Fridman?

  It's like rural and there's like giant structures and there's small pirate structures and that kind of stuff.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  Structures, yeah. I think low Earth orbit might come to look like that. And it's a really interesting regulatory challenge to make sure that, um, there's some cross purposes. So the more cool space cities we have in orbit, the more shiny objects in the night sky, the worse it is for astronomers in a really kind of overly simplified case. So there's some pushback to this like amoeba-ing where we just grow kind of, um, incongruously or indiscriminately as an amoeba in low Earth orbit. Beyond that though, I think we'll grow in pockets where there are resources. So we won't just expand around the gravity well of Earth. We'll do some development around the moon, some development around asteroids, some development around Mars, because there'll always be purposes for which we want to go down to a physical

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  object and study it or extract something or learn from it. But I think we'll grow in fits and starts in pockets. Um, some of the coolest pockets are the gravity balanced pockets, like the Lagrange points, which is where we just sent, we, not me personally, but NASA just sent, uh, James Webb, the big telescope. I think it's at L2.

• 1:41:38Lex Fridman?

  So what's the nice feature about those pockets?

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  So it's a stable orbit. Um, there are several different Lagrange points. And so it just requires less energy to stay where you're trying to stay.

• 1:41:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. That's fascinating. What's also fascinating is the interaction between nations.

• 1:41:58Lex Fridman?

  On that regard, like who owns that? Do you, would you, would you say in those floating cities, do you envision independent governments?

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  That was gonna be my next answer to you, which pushed me harder for a more provocative question, where I might disagree with other people. I don't yet have my own opinions fully formed on this, but we are trying to figure out right now, what happens to the moon with all of these first come, first served actors just arriving and setting precedents that might really affect future access? And one example is property rights. We do want companies that have the expertise to go to the moon and mine stuff that will help us, you know, develop a human settlement there or a gateway. But companies need to know generally that they have rights to a certain area or that they have some legal right to sell things that they're getting. Does that mean we're gonna grant property rights on the moon to companies?

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  Who has the right to give that right away? So there's a bunch of really kind of gnarly questions that we have to think about, which is why I think we need space lawyers. Maybe that's the true provocative answer is, I think we need space lawyers.

• 1:43:04Lex Fridman?

  True. I mean, what, yeah, yeah. I mean, but those questions, again, as you said eloquently, will help us answer questions about here.

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  We hope so, yeah.

• 1:43:13Lex Fridman?

  It is a little strange. I mean, it's obvious, but it's also strange if you look at the big picture of it all, that we draw these like borders around geographical areas and we say, this is mine.

• 1:43:27Lex Fridman?

  Like, and then we fight wars over what's mine and not. There, there, it seems like there, there's possible alternatives, but also it seems like there needs to be a public ownership of some parts.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  Something.

• 1:43:40Lex Fridman?

  Like, you know, what is it, Central Park in New York? Is there something like preserving?

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  The commons.

• 1:43:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the commons.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  Commons. That's why we titled the book Into the Anthropoc cosmos. We know it's a long, kind of a mouthful, but this notion of the Anthropocene, we have a lot of commons problems in humanity. How are we treating the Earth, global climate change? How are we gonna treat and behave in space? How can we be responsible stewards of the space commons? And I would love to see an approach to the moon that is commons based, but it's hard to know who would be the protector or the enforcer of that.

• 1:44:17Lex Fridman?

  And if it's, which it will be probably in the early days, a lot of companies sort of working on the moon, working on Mars, working out in space. It feels like there still needs to be a civilian representation of like the greater effort or something like that. Like where there should be a president, there should be a democracy

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:37Lex Fridman?

  of some kind where people can vote.

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  Some representative government.

• 1:44:40Lex Fridman?

  Those are all, again, the same, the same human questions. What advice would you give to a young person today thinking about what they want to do with their life, career? So somebody in high school, somebody in college, maybe somebody that looks up to the stars and dreams to one day, take a one-way ticket to Mars or to contribute something to the effort?

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  I'd say you should feel empowered because it's really the first time in human history that we're at this cusp of interplanetary civilization, and I don't think we're going to lapse back from it. So the future is incredibly bright for young people that even younger than you and I, who will actually really get a chance to go to Mars for certain. The other thing I would say is be open-minded about what your own interests are. I don't think you anymore have to be shoehorned into a particular career to be welcomed into the future of space exploration. If you are an artist and that is your passion, but you would love to do space art, or if not space art, use your artistry to communicate a feeling or a message about space, that's a role that we desperately need, just as much as we need

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  space scientists and space engineers. So.

• 1:45:53Lex Fridman?

  Well, when you look at your own life, you're an incredibly accomplished scientist, young scientist, but, you know, and you hopped around from physics to aerospace. So going from the biggest theoretical ideas to the biggest practical ideas. Is there something from your own journey you can give advice to, like how to end up doing incredible research at MIT?

• 1:46:19Lex Fridman?

  Maybe the role of the university and college and education and learning, all that kind of stuff.

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  I'd say one piece of advice is find really good teammates because I get to be the one that's talking to you. But there are 50 graduate students, staff and faculty that are part of my organization back at MIT. And I'm actually, you guys can't see it on camera, but I'm sitting here with my co-founder and COO, Danielle Delott.

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  And that is really what makes these large scale challenges for humanity possible is really fantastic teams working together to scale more than what I could do alone. So I think that that's an important model that we don't talk about enough in academia. There's a big push for this lone wolf genius figure in academia. But that's certainly not been the case in my life. I've had wonderful collaborators and people that I work with along the team.

• 1:47:06Lex Fridman?

  Also cross disciplinary.

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, cross disciplinary, interdisciplinary, whatever you want to call it.

• 1:47:12Lex Fridman?

  Artists, where do artists come in? Do you work with artists?

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  We do. We have an arts curator on the Space Exploration Initiative side. She helps make sure, partly around that communication challenge that we talked about, that we're not just doing zero G flights and space missions, but that we take our artifacts of this sci fi space future to museums and galleries and exhibits. She pushed me to make sure, her name is Shing Lu. She pushed me for our first ISS mission. I was just gathering all the engineering payloads that I wanted to support for the students to fly, including my own work. And she said, you know what, we should do an open call internationally for artists to send something to the ISS. And we found out it was the first time, we were the first ever international open call for art to go to the ISS.

• 1:47:57Speaker 01

  And that was thanks to Shing, an artist, bringing a perspective that I might not have thought about prioritizing.

• 1:48:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's awesome. So when you look out there, it's the flame of human consciousness. There does seem to be something quite special about us humans.

• 1:48:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, first of all, what do you, what do you think it is? What's consciousness? What, what are we trying to preserve here? What is it about humans that should be preserved? Or life here on earth? They, what gives you hope to try to expand it out farther and farther? Like, what makes you sad if it was all gone?

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  I think we're a remarkable species that we are aware of our own thoughts. We are meta-aware of our own thoughts and of ourselves.

• 1:48:48Lex Fridman?

  And are able to speak on a podcast about a meta-awareness about our own thoughts.

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  About our own thoughts, yeah, turtles all the way down.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  I think that that is a really special gift that we have been given as a species and that there's a worth to expanding our circles of awareness. So we're very aware of, as an earth-based species, we've become a little bit more aware of the fragility of earth and how special a place it is when we go to the moon and we look back. What would it mean for us to have a presence and our purpose in life as a intersolar system species or eventually an intergalactic species? I think it's a really profound opportunity for exploration for the sake of exploration. A real gift for the human mind.

• 1:49:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. If we're, for anything, we're curious creatures. You see, do believe we might one day become intergalactic civilization.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  Long, long time from now. We have a lot of propulsion challenges to answer to get that far.

• 1:49:47Lex Fridman?

  So you have a hope for this?

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:50Lex Fridman?

  Another big ridiculous question, building on top of that. What do you think is the meaning of life? This individual life of ours, your life, that unfortunately has to come to an end, as far as we know for now?

• 1:50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:04Lex Fridman?

  And our life here together? Is there a why? Or do we just kind of, like, let our curiosity carry us away?

• 1:50:16Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting. Is there a single kind of driving purpose why? Or can it just be curiosity based? I certainly feel, and this is not the scientist in me talking, but just more of like a human soul talking. I certainly feel some sense of purpose and meaning in my life. And there's a version of that that's a very local level within my family, which is funny because this whole conversation has been big, grand, space exploration themes, but you asked me this question. And my first thought is what really matters to me. My family, my biological reproducing unit.

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  But then there's also another purpose, like another version of the meaning in my life that is trying to do good things for humanity. So that sense that we can be individual humans and have our local meaning. And we can also be global humans. Maybe someday, like the Star Trek utopia, we'll all be global citizens. I don't want to sound too naive. But there is, I think, that beauty to a meaning and a purpose of your life that's bigger than yourself, working on something that's bigger and grander than just yourself.

• 1:51:19Lex Fridman?

  The deepest meaning is from the local biological reproduction unit. And then it goes to the engineering, scientific, what is it? Corporate, like company unit that can actually produce and compete and interact with the world. And then there's the giant human unit that's struggling with pandemics.

• 1:51:39Speaker 01

  And comments and.

• 1:51:40Lex Fridman?

  And together, struggling against the forces of nature that keep wanting to kill us.

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, there'd be nothing like an alien invasion to unite the planet, we think.

• 1:51:50Lex Fridman?

  I can't wait. Bring it on, aliens. Listen, your work, you're an incredible communicator, incredible young scientist. It's a huge honor that you would spend your time with me. I can't wait what you do in the future. And thank you for representing MIT so beautifully, so masterfully. You're an incredible person. Thank you for talking.

• 1:52:09Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure. It's a great conversation.

• 1:52:13Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ariel Eckblatt. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher.

• 1:52:27Lex Fridman?

  There is no easy way from Earth to the stars. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.