Cosmic Queries – Building Space Civilizations with Ariel Ekblaw

When will we create a livable habitat in space? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Matt Kirshen explore the possibilities of tessellated space structures, artificial gravity, and other challenges with Founder of MIT Space Exploration Initiative, Ariel Ekblaw.

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

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:26Matt Kirshen?

  Thank you so much. How's it going?

• 0:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, dude. Your host, probably science? And you're based out in LA, right?

• 0:33Matt Kirshen?

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

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't need to know your private life. Why you give me that much information? I didn't, did I ask?

• 0:44Matt Kirshen?

  Just, I'm the highest bidder. We'll take wherever you need me to go, just.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. So Matt, this is a Cosmic Queries edition on everybody's favorite subject. Space civilizations. Oh my gosh. Oh. I love thinking about it, but I claim no particular expertise in it. So we combed the landscape and we found somebody who was all up in it. All up in space civilizations and someone that goes by the name of Ariel Ekblaw. Ariel, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:21Speaker 02

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

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One word there. Whoa. And your research focuses on TESS array platforms, which sounds very acronym. So let's see if we can unpack that. Tessellated electromagnetic space structures for the exploration of reconfigurable adaptive environments.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you want people to buy that?

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Terribly tortured acronym, never again. But I learned my lesson.

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 2:27Speaker 02

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

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So I remember going decades back. Who's the guy who had the L5 Society? Or was the, he was founder of it, I think?

• 3:11Matt Kirshen?

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

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Jerry O'Neill.

• 3:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mr. O'Neill, right? He was into big space colonies. Are you trying to make his vision real?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. I am a huge Jerry O'Neill fan. High frontier, like his vision for life in space, I think, was really compelling. We'll do it a little differently now. It's a little different than how it was conceived of in the 60s and 70s. But yes.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because he was almost cult-like. And I presume you're born well after that man was long gone. But you're now trying to res, that's why I asked, that's why I asked Matt instead of you. Because he might have been alive, but you dug up his ashes. And you're trying, you're.

• 3:48Matt Kirshen?

  And trying to reassemble them in space.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reassemble the man's ashes.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 3:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I've seen, I've seen, I've seen artists' illustrations of what he was imagining. Is that what you're imagining?

• 3:57Speaker 02

  That is what we're imagining. The secret keystone of our system is going to have Jerry O'Neill's ashes in the 17th quarter.

• 4:05Speaker 02

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

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Big pattern, a tile.

• 4:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A pattern. Yes. So tell me more about it, tessellating.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  So the idea of tesserae is to take pentagons and hexagons. Uh, they tessellate in 3D and when you have enough of them, they form a bucky ball. Again, really inspired by Buckminster Fuller, Spaceship Earth. People have seen geodesic domes before, but it's a particularly efficient shape for space. You want to maximize your interior volume for a given surface area. So a sphere would be super efficient. What's a little bit more easy to build than a sphere and is more modular, a bucky ball. And so the tiles of the tesserae are pentagons and hexagons that can pack flat in a rocket. Basically, think about it like a glorified Pez dispenser. Once you're out in orbit, those tiles are. Yeah. Now we're like, okay, we're good.

• 5:23Matt Kirshen?

  Does it have a little duck head on it?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  It's a pile of whatever you like.

• 5:27Matt Kirshen?

  Thank you.

• 5:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just pop out the, the, the, the basic bricks, basically.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  The bricks, exactly.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your unit of, of your construction unit.

• 5:35Speaker 02

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

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have, you have intelligent bricks, basically, self-assembling pieces here.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, if they're that intelligent, why would they miss attach in the first place? Gotcha.

• 6:16Speaker 02

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

• 6:59Speaker 02

  And so you can have a, essentially a habitat that evolves to your mission needs at any period of time.

• 7:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Okay, so it is Legos.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  It is Legos. Yes, space Legos.

• 7:13Matt Kirshen?

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

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, that could be, that could give people some angst out there. Right, right.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  No, no, no, they're very friendly. They're very friendly. No angst at all.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you, how do, how do you deal with gravity?

• 7:31Speaker 02

  How do we deal with gravity?

• 7:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you rotating? What do you have going there?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Yes. So the initial conception is using microgravity to help themselves, right? So they're floating in space. And then some of the work of Aurelia Institute that you had alluded to earlier is moving beyond these just kind of passive pressure-containing orbs to actually rotating them to get artificial gravity. So the next series of projects that we're working on designing are around the artificial gravity direction. But the way that we work at Aurelia is we test out these concepts in miniature in space demonstration missions, technology demonstration missions. So the technology behind TESS Array, the small tiles have been tested twice now on the International Space Station. They're still under development and we're just beginning to conceive of a similarly small-scale test bed

• 8:18Speaker 02

  that will help us learn more about bearings and rotating large, you know, pieces of architecture in space to get artificial gravity, but it's all part of this larger tech roadmap.

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Ah, the space food. Well, fermented food. We're thinking about what are all of the accoutrement that need to go inside of that habitat to make it a real life worth living? Where more people see themselves in that environment? I think a lot of people look at the International Space Station and it's very impressive, but it looks like a science lab. Not everybody wants to live inside a science lab. So the other things that we had worked on for the last six years at the MIT lab, that's where I started before we spun out Aurelia Institute. We were looking at fermented food, MISO. We flew MISO to the International Space Station. We designed musical instruments that could only play in microgravity so that we're inventing new cultural artifacts for life in space. Looking at biophilia and how do you surround yourself with plants?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  That's more than just a factory farm in space. So.

• 9:19Matt Kirshen?

  What is a musical instrument that can only work in microgravity? How does it physically differ?

• 9:24Speaker 02

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

• 9:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you could have a whole zero G orchestra. That would be hilarious.

• 10:02Speaker 02

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

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. You know what you definitely need though?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  What?

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need a theremin.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Oh, we so need a theremin. That's, that's very popular.

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Theremin doesn't need gravity. I think it's just electromagnetic fields. And you know a theremin, Matt?

• 10:20Matt Kirshen?

  I do. Yeah. I.

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:21Matt Kirshen?

  A friend of mine had one. It was a lot of fun.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the official sound of aliens in 1950s movies.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  It's so true.

• 10:28Matt Kirshen?

  Um, I, uh, have, have you actually tried, like, I, I'm aware of the idea of rotating a spacecraft to generate artificial gravity. Has that been tried in real life? Has, or is this just something that's theoretical?

• 10:40Speaker 02

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

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very important distinction. Excellent distinction there. Right. It's not like, well, how do we do it? No, it's just like rotating gravity. Right.

• 10:56Speaker 02

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

• 11:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 11:22Matt Kirshen?

  I do. Yes.

• 11:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So yeah, see what you can slip one in before we end the first segment.

• 11:25Matt Kirshen?

  I can certainly do that. So Cameron Bishop says, I've seen a lot of artist's impressions of future human exploration in places like close proximity to Jupiter or Saturn. Apparently, Neil, you've even said you want to do ice fishing on one of those moons, but aren't those

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I want to cut a hole in the ice and go ice fishing.

• 11:43Matt Kirshen?

  Get in there. But aren't those planets in their close orbits encased in shells of very high energy belts of radiation? How are we going to ensure that future explorers aren't microwaved like a Hot Pocket? We're visiting the awesome planets in our solar system.

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobody wants to be a Hot Pocket. Okay. Yeah. So, Errol, what are you doing? I mean, not only, obviously Jupiter has a very hostile radiation environment, but even if you're outside of Earth's protective magnetic blanket, what protections do you have? It doesn't sound like your, your triangle, your pentagons and hexagons could do this. Could, can they?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  It depends on what materials we choose. So we're modeling some of the structures for around lower orbit, similar to what the ISS is. So a stuffed wheel structure. But once we're actually beyond lower orbit, beyond the Ben Allen belts, there is a much more significant radiation load. And so some of the proposals, I wouldn't take credit for inventing them, we're building on the shoulders of giants here at NASA and others, but things like water walls or additional metal shielding, other types of radiation protection that can be built into the habitat infrastructure for a longer duration mission.

• 12:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because water is highly absorbent of high-energy radiation. So you're thinking maybe that your sphere, your bucky sphere,

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Bucky sphere.

• 13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It has a layer of water on its outer surface, perhaps?

• 13:03Speaker 02

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

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you recycle urine as well as like body sweat that evaporates into the air, right?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of that.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  All of that. It's important. It's a closed-loop ecosystem. The best that we can do to really make it a closed-loop recycling ecosystem, super important.

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ariel, if I'm going there, I'm going to last through a comet, so I have fresh water every morning.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 13:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Y'all could drink the pee, recycle pee. I'm gonna have my own tap a keg right out the, right out the window.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Nice, fresh.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would've got my own, my own damn comet.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, okay, so it's, it's an engineering challenge

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that does have solutions waiting to be invoked. But you don't foresee, for example, hanging out near Jupiter anytime soon, is that right?

• 14:01Speaker 02

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

• 14:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it. But if we find life on Europa, I think we should call them Europeans.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm pretty sure, Matt. Matt, what do you think of that? Europ-?

• 14:32Matt Kirshen?

  I'll claim them. I'm a European, technically.

• 14:36Matt Kirshen?

  I'll claim it.

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Get one more question. See if we slip one more in. Go.

• 14:39Matt Kirshen?

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

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that he can only be from Australia.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  With the.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If he's giving culinary tips for Vegemite.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's take a quick break and when we come back with our guest Ariel Ekblaw. We're going to find out about any, how do we make artificial gravity? They do it in sci fi with or without rotating space station. So let's find out when we return.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  I'm Joel Cherico and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 15:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk, Cosmic Queries. We're talking about space civilizations. And we have an actual, authentic, scientifically trained, engineeringly trained person thinking about this, not just crazy sci fi people who just make stuff up. So we have an authentic person making stuff up.

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Ariel, um, so the what? Matt, where do we leave off? We had a question about artificial gravity.

• 16:17Matt Kirshen?

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

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 16:30Speaker 02

  That's what we're focusing on is the rotating platform. I think one interesting tidbit for Brady. So there's a couple of different ways to do it, right? You can do a smaller ring and rotate it fast. But that's going to be uncomfortable for the astronauts or the future spaceflight participants. Or you can do a really big ring and rotate it slowly. But then it's a bigger challenge to build and to operate. And so we're trying to find that sweet spot, the right size of an artificial gravity station. And a quick, fun, recent update, there's a group called Gravity Labs that's looking at making real a technology that is described in Hail Mary, Andy Weir's latest book.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We love Andy Weir.

• 17:08Speaker 02

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

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's some kind of gondola at the end of a tether.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 17:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That gets swung around.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 17:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that gondola, you'd have the gravity that you see.

• 17:35Matt Kirshen?

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

• 17:45Speaker 02

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

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Not only, you know, when you're a kid, but when you're in space.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, all right, cool. What else you got, Matt?

• 17:57Matt Kirshen?

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

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 18:41Speaker 02

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

• 19:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And when is it going to be cheap?

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Okay. This is the question. Their answer to their question is absolutely in their lifetimes. They will get to go and it will be more affordable, more affordable than it is now. Yep. So if we're looking at the next, if they're thirty three, right, in the next thirty years, we are at the cusp right now of a explosion of new tech, maybe it was not the right word to use in this context.

• 19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bad word.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, bad word.

• 19:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bad. Don't talk about rockets and explosions of anything. Okay.

• 19:45Speaker 02

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

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. I'm older than our thirty three year old guy. I don't have another thirty three years to wait this out. So when, can you do it in my lifetime?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 20:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, thank you.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Okay, we'll get going. For you, Neil, anything.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Call me when you, well, okay.

• 20:13Matt Kirshen?

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

• 20:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Duh, it's warp drives. Everyone knows that. Next question. Okay.

• 20:36Matt Kirshen?

  Or just really big bottles and really big pumps.

• 20:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 20:52Speaker 02

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

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So per pound, what is, what is it today per pound?

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Uh, it's, it varies really wildly. Um, usually quoted per kilogram, it can be in the thousands, like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, um, per kilogram right now to put a, like a small CubeSat into orbit. Cause the price is a little different depending on what you're paying to go up.

• 21:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  A small CubeSat, about $200,000 to go up to orbit.

• 21:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So I have a middle-aged man belly. So each pound of that man belly is like tens of thousands of dollars.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  But now you have to measure it in CubeSats. Like you have to give me the use of, and then I can give you an accurate quote.

• 21:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 22:03Speaker 02

  It is. Yeah. It's still mass driven, but we're, we're getting there. I think, uh, cause it's not just SpaceX is the only game in town. Now Blue Origin, right? They're aiming to get Orbital, um, Starship, Next Generation SpaceX, ULA and others. It's a really fantastic ecosystem that's going to make it possible for your, for your guests to go in their lifetime.

• 22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 22:27Speaker 02

  It is absolutely. We need the road to space to be built to be able to empower this next generation life in space. So absolutely. Yeah. And we work really closely with a lot of these launch companies to get experiments to orbit, right? Even before we're building the big habitats, all of those other things we talked about, we test the musical instruments on zero gravity flights. I've flown in zero gravity nine times over the course of my career to MIT, hundreds of parabolas to test all this stuff. And that, yeah, it's incredibly amazing to get to work on the shoulders of those companies. It's empowering.

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just for people, for people that don't otherwise know, so you can experience zero G without quote going into space.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get on one of these vomit comets. I think they don't want to call it that anymore.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Affectionately known as the vomit comet.

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so they can go very high and execute an arc.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where that arc is basically in free fall back to earth. For how much, but it's only for seconds, right? How much time do you get in free fall?

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's fifteen to twenty seconds, but it's like a roller coaster in the sky. Because you do that, that arc that you described, that parabolic arc thirty to forty times.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my God.

• 23:37Matt Kirshen?

  I think I would love that. Like, my favorite ride in theme parks, rather than the roller coasters, like, I love, I love the pirate ship. The one that just rolls back and forth.

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Goes up and down, yeah.

• 23:46Matt Kirshen?

  The, the sort of little.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  You feel it.

• 23:47Matt Kirshen?

  The zero gravity feeling in your belly, or when you go over a hill quickly on your little hump in the car. I like, I love that feeling.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but wait a minute, Ariel.

• 23:53Matt Kirshen?

  I would take that all day.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just, you don't just transition to zero G. It's zero G, and then you come out of zero G to more than one G.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you go, so my stomach will be floating and, I know. I'm, I'm made of the inadequate stuff.

• 24:07Speaker 02

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

• 24:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, Ariel, you're being badass here. I don't, roller coasters don't excite me. Space, it's like, put me in space. I don't like roller coasters. Yeah, that's for you, that's for regular people. You know, there's a fun video of Stephen Hawking on one of his zero G flights where he comes out of his wheelchair. And there's a smile, if you've ever seen one, on the man's face.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  On the man's face. It's, it's a profound moment. It's a really profound moment.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right. So Matt, keep them coming.

• 25:00Matt Kirshen?

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

• 25:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's one of our, that's one of our spinoffs from StarTalk, yes, uh huh.

• 25:14Matt Kirshen?

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

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially since if you throw up in zero G, the throw up just floats in the air.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  This is true.

• 25:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's just in the air and it gets in your hair. And whereas on one G, the you know, the splatter pattern on the sidewalk outside of bars at 2am. That's the famous throw up pattern because gravity brings it down. All right. So Ariel, what are you going to do with all the tourists throw up?

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Well, it's a great question.

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you thought about that?

• 25:57Speaker 02

  We have. We have thought about it. There's fantastic anti-motion sickness medication, either Dramamine or Esco palamine, things like that that NASA uses. But there's also a lot of really great research here at MIT and elsewhere around space sickness and how to overcome that, how to train your vestibular system to behave or to appreciate it a little bit differently. But it is something that.

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the vestibular, that's your inner ear?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Inner ear.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 26:21Speaker 02

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

• 26:36Matt Kirshen?

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

• 26:52Speaker 02

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

• 27:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guarantee I'll get space.

• 27:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have to wonder about me on that.

• 27:19Matt Kirshen?

  You're going down further down the list now, Neil. You need to.

• 27:23Matt Kirshen?

  No, I am stumped now. Put me in space right now. Let's go.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, yeah, so because in a zero G bubble, any throw up that escapes whatever vacuum you're trying to, it just stays there like forever.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  That's so fun.

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  That's not the only thing that's interesting about the human body from a health perspective in space, we can get into this in a minute, but if we're talking about space societies, shape of your eyeballs changes, your heart gets weaker, um, you get space face because the fluids redistribute through your body in a crazy way. So there's all kinds of interesting human physiological.

• 27:53Matt Kirshen?

  What is space face?

• 27:55Speaker 02

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

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and their eyes bulge or something? What happens?

• 28:19Speaker 02

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

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Ariel, I'm waiting for one G. I'm not, I'm not paying you a million dollars for my eyeballs to pop out, my face to explode and my, and to lose taste. No, no, I'm staying here on earth. Okay. Just so you know.

• 28:53Matt Kirshen?

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

• 29:11Speaker 02

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

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think I've seen some sci fi where they have ladders.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That connect from the outer ring to the center. And as they move up the ladder, they become, they weigh less and less.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And right in the core, they, they don't weigh anything. So that transition is there.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Exactly. And to your point earlier, Neil, about the L five society and Jerry O'Neill. This is something he writes about in the High Frontier that you could have, you could be bicycling.

• 30:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  High Frontier, one of his books.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. You could be bicycling up a mountain and then be floating. And you have a flying bicycle as you get up to the, the level of the, the port of the habitat. That's not rotating. That's not as fast. So yeah, it's just a while.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 30:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is to equate those two forces, the force of rotation or acceleration, right? Like what you'd have in a rotating object. And standing here on earth, what he said was these are indistinguishable from each other. In, in principle, and built all mathematics and a whole branch of physics.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Around that.

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Based on it.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's crazy.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  This is such a great point, Neil, too, because as a space person, I get asked a lot about zero gravity. And that's why we try to be careful to say microgravity, because there really is no zero gravity. Right? Newton tells us, the law of gravity tells us that there's always a gravitational attraction between objects. But if you're in free fall, you're feeling like you're not being acted upon by gravity, but you very much are. And so that's a nuance.

• 31:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but I still don't like, I still don't like microgravity.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  He's just, I'd rather say zero.

• 31:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm a zero G guy.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  You're a zero G guy.

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not getting me to say microgravity. Unless I'm saying it to say that I'm not going to say it.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  I'll take my wins where I can get them. As long as we get you into space, Neil, I'll be fine.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 32:00Matt Kirshen?

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

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, because it seems to me, Ariel, it's a great question, but I think that that questioner, what's the fellow's name, is it?

• 32:23Matt Kirshen?

  That is Andrew Atkins.

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think Andrew is thinking, are we going to travel to the stars or something where we take decades or maybe even centuries where we'd have to somehow put ourselves in suspended animation? But all your destinations, you can get there in a few days, right?

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Right, right. It's a great question because the search for exoplanets and Goldilocks planets is raising these questions about if we find some, would we want to go out and travel to them? How would we get to them? How would we do suspended animation? But for our near-term habitats in the area of the solar system that we're contemplating, we would not need to, yeah, put humans in that level of stasis. But also, the future of human space exploration will absolutely be one in symbiosis with humans and robots. And so there's a really large role to play for robot probes and AI systems, even with the future of chat and GPT and other AI tools that I think will be really significant for the future of life in space.

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I want to get back to you on that after this break, what role AI might play in this. When we return, StarTalk, Cosmic Queries. This is a space civilization edition when we return.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. This is a space civilization. Edition of Cosmic Queries. And we've got one of the world's, I say the world's expert in thinking this stuff through, Ariel Ekblaw. Ariel, how do we find you? Are you on social media? You have a footprint there?

• 34:03Speaker 02

  I am on social media. I'm at Ariel underscore Ekblaw on Twitter. You can also find our team.

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got to spell Ekblaw. You can't just say that by not spell that for people. The usual way, Neil, the usual way. The way you always spell Ekblaw.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  The way you always spell Ekblaw. E K B as in boy, L A W. Ariel underscore Ekblaw.

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Ariel, not the way we spell in the Disney princess.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Actually, the same way. Actually, the same way. It's A R I E L underscore Ekblaw, E K B L A W.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ekblaw. Okay, and so that's your?

• 34:33Speaker 02

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

• 34:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what you're CEO of?

• 34:44Speaker 02

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

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you spun that off from your time at MIT? Is that correct?

• 34:55Speaker 02

  I did.

• 34:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or is MIT still an umbrella to you?

• 34:57Speaker 02

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

• 35:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You birthed it, okay. But now, but you spun off and now you have, like, you pay rent on a different space? Is that correct?

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. It's, yeah, that's, I love that you asked that. That's what makes it real. It is so true. I pay rent at a different space.

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What money is paying for this?

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If this is not going to happen for 30 years?

• 35:32Speaker 02

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

• 35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right. Very good. Very good. You got my vote.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need a vote.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Thank you. Well, you should come and visit sometime, Neil, when I talk to.

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, next time I'm in Cambridge. I'm totally, you're in Cambridge, I guess, is that correct?

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, all right, okay. Cambridge, America. Yeah, I know. I know. The other Cambridge too.

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, give me some more.

• 36:15Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, so Christian Holmes says, hello, Director Ekblaw. Are there any plans for terraforming planets in the future? If not, what would be viable ways for an advanced species to terraform a planet? You know, hypothetically.

• 36:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So she doesn't want to terraform a planet because she wants everyone to live in her habitat.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  How did you know?

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw, I bet I know the answer to this question. It's gonna say terraforming, that's for centuries from now. Okay, let's, let's listen. Okay, Ariel, what's your answer to that?

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Terraforming, that's for centuries from now. Well, yes, yes and no. Um, there's two answers to the terraforming question. One thing, I just want to give a quick plug for Earth. There is no planet where humans have co-evolved in the way that we have co-evolved on Earth. So I think terraforming is an amazing concept, but it's not going to create a Plan B planet. So when we go out to do space exploration, we should be still really protecting and preserving Earth. Honoring that, it's not about abandoned Earth.

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean co-evolved? Co-evolved with what?

• 37:13Speaker 02

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

• 37:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what terraforming is gonna be. What, you tell me we can't figure that out?

• 37:29Speaker 02

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

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Yes, just come live in my floating space habitat, my space, my Jerry O'Neill space city. It will be better. There's no perchlorates in the soil. It's a much better place, I promise.

• 38:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man, okay, fresh soils, that's what we want. Are you gonna have farm animals there too? Like, in the images, I saw that Jerry O'Neill Um, space habitats, there were these, there was farming communities and it was all on a sort of rotating inside surface of a rotating cylinder.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you look at it, there's farm, plots of farm, animal silos, uh, uh, so, so would you, I presume you wouldn't want supply ships to bring you food, you'd want it to be self-sustaining.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Self-sustaining.

• 38:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct?

• 38:56Speaker 02

  This is one of those lovely things that has changed a little bit since the 1960s. It's delightful to look at those Jerry O'Neill images, but they're a little bit like 1960s suburbia or rural taken up into space. We have a chance now, whether it's lab-grown meat or sophisticated urban architecture and agriculture, um, in resource-constrained environments to design, we could design a more urban landscape within one of those habitats. So there's a lot of choice now in how we think about the urban planning, kind of at planetary scale, or urban planning at this really massive habitat scale.

• 39:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, in a city, people are stacked high because there's not much space. But if you're in space,

• 39:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  why would you ever need a city?

• 39:43Speaker 02

  You stack radially, you stack radially, you grow in three dimensions in a way you never could on Earth.

• 39:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. All right, there, good answer.

• 39:52Speaker 02

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

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but once it's spinning, it'll just keep spinning, right? You don't, it does take energy, energy to start it, but you don't have, need energy to sustain it.

• 40:21Speaker 02

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

• 40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's when people start throwing up, when you start speeding it up and slowing it down.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  That's true. You're reminding me, keeping me honest.

• 40:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the fun times. I'm still thinking about the throw up. All right, Matt, what else you got?

• 40:41Matt Kirshen?

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

• 40:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it, because it seems to me, Ariel, a lot of space debris might be closer to Earth than this place you might build your space station, your space habitat. So there's space debris that we're responsible for, and then there's just meteors that Earth plows through several hundred tons of meteors a day, and that's just stuff in space. So if Earth is doing it, you're going to be doing it too. So what's your shield for this?

• 41:19Speaker 02

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

• 41:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or its mouth.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  With its mouth, yeah.

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said Pac-Man.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  A net for a mouth.

• 42:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pac-Man, it's got to eat it, okay?

• 42:04Matt Kirshen?

  Like some kind of space goat that you can...

• 42:06Speaker 02

  A space goat.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's how you sell it.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Oh, Matt.

• 42:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how you're going to sell it.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, Matt, that's how we're going to sell it. You've got to talk to astroscale and some of these companies and tell them to...

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or I have a better idea. I got it, I got this. Everyone participates in it, so you control your own Pac-Man space eater.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  Oh, like Twitch, Twitch plays Pokemon, but Twitch plays Pac-Man in space.

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 42:34Speaker 02

  No, actually, we put crowdsourced citizen space debris.

• 42:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you gamify it, oh my gosh.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, all right, let's do this.

• 42:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it, you got it. But you can't stop meteor showers from slamming into your... So what do you do about that?

• 42:47Speaker 02

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

• 43:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, way better to have like laser blasters.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. A little bit of Dr. Evil, like, space mixer. Yes.

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, if something's heading your way, you don't move out of the way of it, you just vaporize it. That's all.

• 43:42Matt Kirshen?

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

• 43:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 43:56Matt Kirshen?

  Ah, I had the wrong weapons in the game.

• 43:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gases, gasses, dust. That's all. So Ariel, tell me about what... Let's go revisit just the role of AI in this. How do you see it at its most helpful? And how do you see it where it might be its least helpful, possibly detrimental to your goals?

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Well, the latter first. That would be how. We definitely don't want a how.

• 44:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How? You don't want homicidal...

• 44:23Speaker 02

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

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 45:05Speaker 02

  True, that's so true.

• 45:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that to say, we have language models that understand our language, no, I don't trust.

• 45:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you know, the most famous sentence in that world is time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 45:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So this is, these two sentences are identical in structure with similar words and have completely different meanings. And so you say, well, chat GPT would just know. But what I'm saying is wars have been fought.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  Over misunderstanding.

• 45:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, I worry that the absence of precision of language should not be mixed with the precision necessary to not die in space. That's my opinion. That's my, that's my.

• 45:54Speaker 02

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

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I served on a board of the Pentagon for several years and AI was becoming that much more visible over those years. And so we drafted a document such that if any commander is gonna, if any AI is in the position to judge whether a kill order should be given, there has to be a human in the loop. It cannot autonomously decide to take the life of another human. And so that may, that's a more extreme, of course, version of what you're saying. You're saying the value of a human, uh, we want to retain that. Otherwise, uh, just for philosophical reasons, but also we don't want AI to be our overlord necessarily.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. You agree with that?

• 46:55Speaker 02

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

• 47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt, I think she's AI herself. I think, don't tell her I said that.

• 47:17Matt Kirshen?

  Say a paradox at her and see what happens.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Thanks, guys, for the vote of confidence.

• 47:28Matt Kirshen?

  I've got one last question. And just by the way, for reference, I heard that fruit flies like a banana as a kid. And for years, I just thought it meant fruit flies like a banana flies. You know, if you throw a banana through the air, that's how fruit flies. But so Tegan Mercia says, I was wondering what a colony on space would look like. What kinds of jobs would be available and which would be of highest importance? Are they similar to jobs we have on Earth? And it's not asking this question, but it is implied, how high up the rank would stand up comedian slash podcaster rank?

• 48:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we're the comedians. Is there a role for comedians in your future universe? That's a.

• 48:12Speaker 02

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

• 48:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the holistic view of the future of space.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, I love that. I love that. Matt, was that your last question?

• 48:51Matt Kirshen?

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

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 48:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my God, we never get through the whole list.

• 48:56Matt Kirshen?

  We completed it.

• 48:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 49:06Speaker 02

  I'm honored. Great question.

• 49:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know what that is. All right. All right, guys, we got to call it quits there. This has been delightful and informative and hopeful. You know, how many hopeful anythings happen today? Like, never. So Ariel, when you start launching your segments, give us a call.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  I will.

• 49:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We want it like brand one StarTalk or something.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Oh my God, I'd be honored.

• 49:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The StarTalk Hexagon.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 49:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 49:47Speaker 02

  We could make that happen.

• 49:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Make a whole episode, film an episode in zero G. But you have to point it away when I throw up.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Yes, I promise.

• 49:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The boss can't be shown throwing up.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  We'll take good care of you. We should.

• 50:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 50:05Matt Kirshen?

  Always good to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 50:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.