How To Colonize The Moon And Mars Featuring Author of The Martian Andy Weir

would you live on a lunar colony how about Mars would you give up literally all of the comforts of home Earth in order to live in someplace new not just simply moving from one country to another and changing cultural paradigms the leaving the planet you've evolved on and are quite literally customized for in order to live and what can only be described as something new something alien how about giving up direct personal contact with most if not all of your loved ones for extended periods of time just the idea of having a real time conversation with a friend back on earth takes on a new dimension when time delays are accounted for what a food were even the very taste of food as you knew it on earth is changed muted by the realities of space on human tastebuds even though built by humans these colonies would be alien worlds of sorts differences in gravity differences in the realities of day-to-day life differences in culture among your fellow humans and many other factors will make colonization of the Moon or Mars amongst the most unique experiences in human history you will be an explorer if you go something in the grain of the very first humans to leave her native Africa and spread out on the continents of this world of which we're not present to some degree on all of them I've always found it sad that the stories of the people that took those very first steps into what was then an alien world have been lost no one yet knew how to write them down this of course is not the case now stories of colonization will be broadcast to all people of this world who will follow the progress and personalities of the colonists like the world followed the first lunar landings with bated breath the first colonists of these worlds will be rock stars more victims of tragedy all forms of human narrative will play out in these new territories of humanity and while the settings may be different the human stories will remain the same going into these worlds will be love stories stories of strife stories of passion and no doubt tragedy well you're not yet there for these for lack of a better term reality stories to unfold before us we are close by 2030 if SpaceX has its way in some decent successes there could well be the beginnings of a colony on Mars perhaps it will take a bit longer but maybe earlier we shall see but what we can say today is that we are sufficiently advanced to the point that imagine in colonies and setting fictional stories within them is here incredible these are not the imaginings of burrows where one is mysteriously transported to Mars to interact with the inhabitants of a dying world rather this world is so far as we know already dead and we have the technology to at least survive on it from that comes the nuts and bolts hard science fiction of my guest who's perhaps among the best ever at fictionalizing real potential environments that people will confront as the beginning of our period of solar system colonization begins [Music] this is event horizon with John Michael Gautier [Music] [Music] John is joined today by novelist Andy weir author of the Martian which has since been adapted into a film of the same name by Ridley Scott Andy's new novel Artemis focuses on lunar colonization and the nuts and bolts of living on the moon in 2016 Andy received the John W Campell Award for Best new writer Andy weir welcome to the program hi thanks for having me it's a pleasure to talk to you Andy you recently wrote a short story that you released online called Digita cracy and there will be a link in the description below to that now this short stories premise without going into spoilers is the dangers of AI or maybe not the dangerous just the realities of an artificial intelligence interacting with humanity is this something that scares you no not at all it's interesting to talk or see is getting a lot more attention than I expected I wasn't trying to make a wasn't trying to make a statement or anything it's just it's just a short story I wrote and I actually think that a eyes and computers and stuff are going to dramatically improve the world I think that like if you if you take a look at something like alphago right it's it or alpha alpha zero which plays chess it's now to the point where the computers can play chess and go better than any human right well what what about what happens when we get an AI that can manage an economy better than any human you know then that'd be interesting because if you do what the AI says it's like well we don't fully understand it but it's said to increase the tariff on imported barley by 0.03 percent and now we're having a housing boom you know so it could be really interesting what that brings up in my mind though is that if an AI can run an economy better than humans can and say can create laws better than humans can it could also do things like do science better than humans can you know a computer could be a better scientist now in the 30s the economist Keynes had pointed out in a paper that eventually this means the entire human race goes unemployed so do you think that one of the dangers of AI is the social upheaval that comes from technological unemployment that that unemployment is the best thing ever because I think that broadly speaking like you know in tens of thousands of years when people look back on the history of the human race they'll be like you know the Paleolithic era and stuff like that we are in the scarcity era and we're working toward post scarcity when we reach post scarcity that's when people don't have to work at all like everything you need is dealt with by automation so it's like it's okay if everybody loses their job if you if nobody needs to do a job if it's like hey I'm sick well go go to the doctor and it's like okay it's it's a computer but it takes care of you and it's like hey I'm hungry well go get some of the food that our robots and computers are generating for you you know it's once you reach that point of post scarcity that's that's good not bad so when do we go unemployed when does when do we reach a point where a an artificial intelligence can write a better novel than a human can I am I think about that a lot and I suspect that there will be fiction author computers that are comparable to humans like in my lifetime it wouldn't surprise me at all when you when you come down to it stories are structures and basically once an AI has the ability to evaluate the readability of a book like to evaluate how good is a story you know then an AI will be able to try out a whole bunch of variations evaluate them and say here here's a story now might start off with an AI that says here are the plot beats of a story here are the events that happen and then it's up to you know it'll be up to a human to actually you know write the prose that convey story but then eventually the computers will get you know good at that too I think I I'm just hoping all that happens you know at you know after I retire me too and I'm definitely not looking forward to the day that that a computer can make a youtube it well also think about what's next is that like with you know computer graphics being what it is and processor power going up the computer will be able to write a movie and then create it okay yeah completely stretch yeah I'm like or you could even make it custom it might be it might be in the future that movies aren't these big releases that are made you know by by huge studios it's like you tell your computer I'm in a sad mood make me a romantic comedy please oh and make one of the characters a professional juggler and then it'll do it now if you could do that and having both of your your big books having been optioned for movies made into movies would you make your own movie would you remake the Martian or would you just leave the leave it as it is well I love to I think they did a fantastic job making the Martian or are you talking about in a future where the computer can just remake stuff for you or I glossed can remake Yaak remake stuff for you for example and I loved the marching the movies as well as fantastic but the book there was more in the book so would you as an author prefer to make your own version of the Martian with your you're a iMovie maker as opposed to just leaving the cultural significance of the original one behind and just leaving you like that I I'd leave the original one alone because if I have my AI movie maker I'd want to see new stuff I'd be like hey I want you to a a I movie maker here's the site here's an idea for my next book make me a movie out of it I say that I say that sort of tongue-in-cheek because Stephen King always complains about how you know he never really likes the movies like The Shining he never really likes those versions of his books because they get changed and but doesn't pop yeah yeah now you also have a semi new book out Artemus which is about lunar colonization can you give me just sort of a synopsis of what the premises sure Artemis takes place in humanity's first city that's not on earth it's on the moon it's the only city on the moon the name of the city is Artemis its economy is based primarily on tourism it's very close to Apollo 11 landing site which is a big tourist draw it takes place in the 2080s and the main conceit is that competition of the commercial space industry drove the price to low Earth orbit down low enough that middle-class people can afford to go into space and so it becomes economically sensible to build a tourist destination on the moon and the main character is a woman who's a small-time criminal mostly she smuggles contraband into the city things like tobacco we find of all things are illegal in the pressurized area she's a small-time criminal and she gets an opportunity it's offered by a local business magnate the opportunity to do some industrial sabotage on his behalf and the payoff is good enough to set her for life and of course everything goes fine everything goes to plan and there are no problems from that point forward ya know yeah she gets in way over her head and that's what the story's about now you main character jazz is what I found most interesting was that she's poor she's the the low man on the totem pole on the moon do you think it would really work that way if we had a lunar colony would it sort of break down on that or would it be something new no I think the economics would be the same I mean I based our sense Artemis gets its money from the tourism industry I based it on Caribbean resort towns like single single industry income you know tourism industry only income areas and they all if you look at them everywhere in the world regardless of what group of people or culture or whatever makes it it always ends up the same there's the glitzy touristy areas up you know in one place and then there's kind of a you know not so well of people who work and Miranda the touristy areas and there's the the people in the middle who kind of service the residents like okay there's tourists that means there's waiters and those waiters eat shoes which is why we have a cobbler you know so that's kind of what I based Artemis on and jazz is at the at the low end of it that may may be because she doesn't apply herself now one of the things that hallmarks your novels is that they're sort of nuts and bolts science fiction you get deeply into the realities of what you would need to do to run for example a lunar colony as an artemis now you mentioned in there basically the moon has everything you need to colonize it including oxygen that's all locked up in its mineralogy yeah how feasible is that to really do that do you think we could actually go and mined the moon colony absolutely no question about it because it's all right there in fact you don't even need to mine the moon you just need to pick the rocks up off the surface there's no layer of dirt earth clay water or you know or anything else between you and the ore so it's not like you need to dig you just need to scoop 85% of the material in the lunar Highlands is anorthite which is a mineral that is made of aluminum silicon calcium and oxygen and if you smelt that like just using industrial smelting techniques then you get then you separate those out into their elements and you end up with elemental aluminum which is great for building hulls and just an enormous amount of oxygen it's an absurd how much oxygen there is on the moon I think it's the second most second or third most common element on the moon it's just that it's all in the minerals so you don't it's not like there's an atmosphere now you also when you when you were world building you also made it to where like the environment within the domes is pure oxygen at a lower pressure now you also brought into that the question of fires is yeah dangerous would that really be it's a okay so this causes a lot of confusion for people because everybody knows about the Apollo one fire was caused by them being in a pure oxygen environment pure oxygen is Moxxi j'en is the limiting reagent in fire right that's what makes it the more oxygen there is the faster the fire goes now in the case of Apollo 1 they were at like their there were at a hundred and twenty percent of Earth's atmosphere of oxygen because the pressure was sure wise yeah so the pressure inside was of the Apollo 1 capsule was one point two atmospheres when they were doing the plugs out test and it was of pure oxygen so and if you're just the room you're in right now the pressure is one atmosphere obviously and the and that error is 20% oxygen to the air in our atmosphere is about 20% oxygen so that means if you just take any cubic meter of your room you're gonna have some number of oxygen molecules well if you did the same thing in the Apollo 1 capsule at that time there would be 6 times as many oxygen molecules in that same volume now why did they do that why did they pressure is so so high because they were doing what's called plugs out test they wanted to test the independent computer systems whatever and they wanted the capsule to be under pressure when in space it was gonna be 20 percent of Earth's atmospheric pressure of pure oxygen same as Artemis right or more accurately the Artemis is same as the Apollo program right and that that makes perfect sense because your body doesn't need all the nitrogen and the other puts in the atmosphere all you need is the oxygen and if you just you know lower the pressure slowly so that your body gets used to it but lower the pressure to 1/5 of an atmosphere you know 20% of our atmosphere and give you pure oxygen then you're getting this then you're getting all the oxygen you need you're totally fine and your body doesn't like being at 1/5 of an atmosphere as long as you'd like I said as long as you go there slowly so you don't get the bends okay now so they wanted so that's how they designed the Apollo capsule and so they wanted to test it when it's at pressure so in other words they wanted a positive pressure of 20% of an at point two atmospheres on the inside but the only way to do that at sea level is to pressurize it up to one point two atmospheres you see because the outside error was also gonna be one atmosphere so by doing that they ended up putting just six times as much oxygen in that little confined space than would normally be on a normal flight and a fire started and it just it was horrific in Artemis it is Artemis's environment is like is 20 percent it 20 percent of Earth's atmosphere a hundred percent oxygen so it has the same amount of oxygen as Earth's atmosphere by volume so you know if you transported your room the room here into Artemis there would be the same number of oxygen molecules wandering around so fire doesn't burn any faster in Artemis than it than it would at sea level on earth however the reason they're so picky about fire is not because of pure oxygen atmosphere and Apollo one fears it's because it's a pressure it's a it's a confined pressurized environment there's nowhere for the smoke to go fire is incredibly dangerous when you're in an environment that has nowhere for the smoke to go it's like a fire aboard a submarine fire is the worst thing for a submarine a leak is something they can fix fairly easily but the fire is a disaster now it would also of course produce like carbon dioxide as well so you would have so now in in in Artemis you describe a fire in an aluminum factory that's producing oxygen so that that's why it's factory yeah so but you're able to save the people pray you know you have the time when you how did you deal with that you know the the smoke and the byproducts of the of that fire how did you get rid of those in Artemis well first off they the glass factory it a fire happened in the glass factory and of course Artemis was not designed by idiots you know there's a bunch of people designed it so anywhere that's uh there are these fire safe rooms so the rooms themselves cannot are the fire can't propagate from one of these sealed fire safe rooms to anywhere else and in the event of a fire they actually the the room will lock off it's better to let everyone in that room die than to let a fire spread throughout the city so however those rooms have what are called air shelters and so it's a separate basically these little kind of like small pods that people can get into and close and it's got a very limited amount of life support and the idea is that then other people like fire crews will come in and get you out of there and that that happens in the book all the employees of the glass factory managed to get into the air shelter then firefighters came and put a attached a flexible tunnel to the air shelter and then brought it outside to where was outside the fire area to where it was safe and all the people could get out and then then they just let the room cool down like that the room had been sealed off the fire had burned off all the oxygen so they just let let the room cool down and then they would later go in with filters stuff to clean the air of all the crap that got that got thrown up by the fire now okay do you see us the human species actually building an Artemis building a you know a colony on the moon how do you see lunar colonization going in the real world it's real simple the same the same way any city gets built it's always about economics so when there's an economically viable reason to build a city on the moon that's when we'll build a city on the moon and that's that's actually what I started with I started by saying like I want a city on the moon for my story but it has to have some economic reason for existing so I thought of a different things I'm gonna came up with was tourism so I think we will absolutely have a city on the moon because eventually the price to low Earth orbit will be driven down low enough that people can afford to go there ordinary people not not super wealthy crazy rich people but like you know me well I guess I'm one of those obnoxious one-percenters in nowadays but but you know it anybody could go anybody with a middle-class income could go so the so essentially tourism drives the the industry but what does the moon offer us I mean there's been talk about helium-3 being abundant on the moon and a possible way to fusion do you think we could do mining is there other than helium-3 is there anything that we could send from the moon to here other than you know rocks for people to collect or something like that other than that is there anything there there is very that there's nothing on the moon that isn't also on earth it with the possible exception of helium-3 and and there is helium-3 on earth there's just more of it on the moon so the price to it unless you got the price to orbit really though like absurdly low then it wouldn't be worth it because it you know whatever you're pulling out of the moon it's I guarantee you it's cheaper to pull it out of the earth even if it's much less common I mean if moon was made of gold like pure gold it would still not be economically viable to send a ship there to collect gold and bring it back you said I'm saying right so there's just no way to make it economically feasible some people say though that asteroids might actually be feasible for some metals but again you have that same problem of just getting out just getting your equipment out of Earth's atmosphere and also how do you get the how do you get the resulting materials back onto earth I mean just the expense of the craft right now complete the question later on possibly but still earth is pretty big and we've got a lot of rocks here too and there's literally nothing in the solar system that you can't find on earth so that having been said I will talk about helium-3 for a moment helium-3 has some potential to be like part of a you know maybe future fusion technology if that happened then yeah we might start scouring the moon for helium-3 but if we did that we wouldn't send up a civilization of humans to do it we'd send robots people die a bit people care if Uncle Bob dies but nobody cares if a robot dies and a robots cheaper to make and easier to easier to make you know moon proof and you can leave it there so I don't see mining or resource acquisition as any sort of impetus to colonize all right Andy we're gonna go to break and when we come back we'll talk about your writing process and of course the Martian AI writing fictional stories what an interesting idea replacing human authors and now for some completely unrelated news in celebration of John's descent into obscurity we're giving away some of his fabulous books signed and personalized for five lucky people details at the end of the show unfortunately John forgot to hit record for this next segment however one of our digital assistants is always listening so we were able to recover what was said we apologize for the less than stellar audio but thankfully in the last segment John remembered how to use a computer and the audio returns to normal and we are back with Andy weir author of the Martian and Artemis the Andy tell me about your writing process you know these books require a lot of research because there's nothing bolts hard sci-fi what how much time does it take you for example to research a book like Artemis oh it's really easy what I happen is I just wrote one of those a is we were talking about earlier to that write stories and I just thought to make a book I could have it make one or two every day but I try to you know keep the supply low so no one catches on I know something about that too yeah that's an that's an internal joke to the show oh that wasn't that wasn't on earlier yeah I have a certain announcer for the show that's that's an AI so oh I was just tipping tipping my hat to her although she'll probably give me 12 for it okay but in in in actual answer to your question when I'm writing a story I always start with a science i we start with some scientific principle or idea for the Martian I started off I wasn't even trying to write a story I was just imagining how would we do you know how would we put humans on Mars how would that mission work you know how do you get them there how do you get them back how do you make sure they don't die if one thing goes wrong you know I was just designing a mission plan in my head and then as I started to think about the things that could go wrong then a story started to develop for Artemis I'm like all right I want to write a story about a city on the moon I don't know what form that'll take don't know who will be in it don't know what they'll do don't know what the plot will be but I want to be in a city on the moon damn it so I'm gonna make a city on the moon so I got to work and I started with the economics and then worked up with what I thought would be a reasonable way that the city would grow and like what the industries would be and all that stuff and then from that I started to get an idea for what people there must be like it's almost like the Old West you know it's like this there's no big law presence there so it's really just society and culture that enforces laws and like they have the equivalent of a sheriff and so on the Society of Artemis started to come together and then I started thinking about okay who who's interesting here well some rich guy who lives on the moon well that's fun fantasy to envision yourself as but that's not a story but a poor person struggling to make ends meet who also lives on the moon now maybe that's interesting and so on so that's that's how I come up with the stories in terms of my day to day process when I'm doing a first draft I try to shoot for a thousand words a day and I deny myself certain certain fun parts of life until I finished my words for the day like I'm not allowed to watch TV or YouTube videos or any any form of video entertainment until I finished my words for the day or and there are certain websites that I like to go to that I I say I'm not allowed to go to them until I finished my words for the day sometimes this works sometimes it doesn't self-discipline can be is by far the most challenging part of writing as I'm sure you know oh yes absolutely now when you write that thousand words how much of it do you keep or do you have to throw away which is what I have to do do you have to throw away old you know large you know one or two weeks worth of work because you just don't like it if you ever have that origins to just come out and you know I well I don't often throw away weeks worth of work although I will you know I I have done it in fact one time I threw away a year of work I'll get to that in a second but for the most part if I have the plot flow going kind of the way I want things go well and of course this I'm just talking about the first draft you know as as I go through edit pass after edit pass after edit pass entire sections get removed plot points get changed yeah so I don't know what percentage of the first draft actually makes it to the final draft it would probably make me sad if I knew the answer on it too heavily on it but yes as for throwing stuff away after I wrote the Martian the publisher was very eager for me to write another book because it had sold so well and I had an idea for a story about aliens invading Earth cult and that that was called Jack the HEK that's the name of the aliens and like it was soft sci-fi it wasn't my signature kind of hard science fiction that I that I now have found a niche for but it was just like hey that aliens and password might travel and telepathy and you know it was soft science fiction the posters like sure great here's here's an advanced get it done and then I worked on that for about a year and I got 70,000 words into it it would for a reference the Martian is about a hundred thousand words after I was seventy thousand words into it I was like uh-oh this sucks and it did it it sucked it just wasn't good and I realize like if I were reading this I would have put the book down and given up on it by now and I couldn't think of any way to make it work it was just a fundamentally it just the core story elements were not working I was I was like you know 70,000 words in and I was still in the first act and I just like nothing was working so I called the publisher and asked them hey this isn't working can I just write a completely different book and you give me another year on my deadline please and they said yes because they've been reading the chapters of Jack and they also knew that it sucked so it ended well it led to Artemis Artemis is so much better than Jack would have been and Jack I put on a back burner in the turned off the burner I'll use it for parts later there are certain plot elements that I think are really solid it's just the whole of it it didn't work so yes I definitely know the pain of throwing away a lot of work yeah I cut your losses and repurpose ideas this happens what you have to do now in for example like with the Martian though you know there's been this titanic shift in the publishing industry done entirely by Amazon which basically democratized everything anyone can release a book now if you had advice for any upcoming authors to write and promote a book what would you say to them well I've got three bits of advice for authors in general I can't speak too much to promotion but because I backed into my success and so I don't really know a lot about how to promote I I got lucky in terms of writing rule number one is you have to write if you just have an idea in your head and you're daydreaming about plot points or ideas that you may do or something like that you're not you're just daydreaming you're not actually writing unless you are putting words down on a page or into your word processor so sit down and write and and it's when you start writing that you find all the problems in your story when it's in your head it's perfect but once you start writing it that's when the problems arise and that's when you're really writing number two resist the urge to tell your friends and family your story or your story ideas and that's hard to do especially when you've got good ideas and you know they're good and your friends and family are like well that's awesome then what happens it's really hard not to tell them but you have to try to adopt that attitude because most authors not all but most and certainly me are driven by a desire to have an audience we want other people to experience the stories that we've created and telling the story verbally to your friends and family is it satisfies your need for an audience and it saps your will to actually write it so the best advice I can give on that is make a rule for yourself it says no one gets to find out anything about this story no one gets to experience hitting it in any way other than reading it and that'll help motivate you to write it now you can still give him tea you can give it to your friends and family a chapter at a time if you want to get the sweet sweet validation that you brave you don't have to you know you don't have to just you know finish an entire book before anybody sees it but don't tell them about it you know in advance make them read it and then the last bit of advice is more directly on topic with what you asked yes this is there's never been a better time in history to self publish in the old days self-publishing meant you had to put out a big capital outlay and it would always almost always mean that you had a garage full of vanity pressed books that that nobody wants nowadays self is self publishing costs you exactly zero it doesn't cost you anything except for you know the time that you put into writing it but that's something you want to do anyway and if your story's good it'll fill it to the top like it'll get around people recommend it to each other they'll start it'll it'll start getting up on the sellers list in terms of promotion like I said I don't know anything about it I I got lucky my story got around by word of mouth I did literally nothing to promote it definitely if you're gonna self publish I would say set the price point to whatever the minimum is when I did it for the Martian the the minimum was 99 cents so that's what I set the price to don't create any barrier to entry between you and your readers right you know when you're first when you're first getting when you're first starting out what you need to do is accumulate a reader base so don't don't go into it with a with money in mind right on the outset now with promotion I can say I can speak to a little bit of that it you know a large YouTube channel helps so any social media that aspiring writers can take advantage of and sort of build a following that's outside of your book where you can you know we we don't all have the ability to just casually go off and make a youtube channel with 75,000 subscribers that's true but anything if you can create a Facebook and promote their you know you sometimes you'll see authors I know David Brin doesn't worry you you create a sort of a community on Facebook that's helpful also Goodreads you know posting there and and sort of talking with people about your book is helpful but fundamentally if you're gonna be an Amazon author also use their promotional skills because sometimes you can give it away free or at least you used to be able to yeah they they they you can have events where you have a giveaway briefly yeah but the best way to get Amazon to promote your book is for it to sell well initially then it starts showing up on the top sellers left it'll snowball at that point if you can get there but the hard part is getting there to that tipping point and yeah I I got there yay actually quite a few people do I mean and you know the interesting thing about it with Amazon is that most of the authors that are making a living there don't make any lists or the New York Times list but they do make a living you know paying bills and there are lots there are thousands of these people and anyone that is aspiring to write should write and go that route yeah got you you have literally nothing to lose literally nothing literally nothing except no downside except maybe it hurts your ego if you find out that nobody likes your stuff but that's that's welcome to being a writer you know it's a it's a what does it give them in a book you entertain them for a night teach a man to write you give them crippling self-doubt for life now the life second when I asked you about your writing process you both the Martian and Artemis are in first person which they used to tell us never do that you know now I don't know who they are but they're full of crap I love first person I love it you and and and the thing is is if you can do it well which you're you're a master at it if you can do it well it's actually I think the most interesting way to tell story because you gain a perspective of the main character that you don't get in the third person but would you ever write in third person or would you just continue with what first up I would definitely write in third and I do a lot of my shorts are in third person we were talking earlier about digit Icarus II that's third person but it's a first person is wonderful it has a few drawbacks so when you're writing that can make things a pain in the butt but the cool thing is about it is that when you're when you're an omniscient or third person whatever narrator you you you have to have a certain class to yourself you you have to have a certain come I don't know a way of comporting yourself the language you use the words you use the turns of phrase seem do you feel this need to be kind of professional when your first person you get to in it you get to be the character and talk the way they would talk you can speak casually you can use funny turns of phrase and also it's just such a huge tool box of tricks for letting the reader know things about the character the parts of the the things that the character is focusing on and the things the character is ignoring which can sometimes be kind of comedic you know and the personality of the character you really get in there and also exposition in first person it makes a little eat you can get away with naked exposition a little bit better because first person is almost like a guy is telling you this story over a beer you know the downside of first-person the biggest downside is you can't change your location you can't you can't get out of that POV you're stuck with that person unless you do like cheesy stuff like I did which is about half that all the chapters of the Martian that are not taking place on Mars are omniscient so when you create a character like jazz or Mark Watney how much of yourself you know I know this you you know authors tend to put aspects of their personality into a character do you do are you your characters I am and Mark Watney is just me he's just the he's the idealized me he's he's all of the aspects of my personality that I like about myself and none of the parts that I don't like you know he's the idealized version of me he's what I wish I could become jazz is a little bit more like the real me she has my flaws and she has them magnified and she still has some of the qualities that I like about myself personally I'm proud of being a smartass but yeah she she has like I am a lot like jazz on my bad days and she's flawed in very much the same way as I am and so that's kind of what I dug into because I wanted to make a deeper more interesting character for Artemis and that's a site so kind of dug into my uglier side the darker side the darker side she lives on the moon of course she has a dark side that UK publishing tagline that's cool nice so when you alright when you set out to write a book do you have an ending when you start do you know how that your stories are going to end not always I know broadly what's gonna happen like when I started the Martian I knew that it would end with him being rescued spoiler by the way you know but of course not not a very not a very far stretch of the spoiler though yeah and also if you haven't read or seen the Martian by now kind of you've you know you've missed your window to not be spoiled I knew I knew that he would be rescued but you know when I first started out the Martian my plan was for it to be all log entries and it was just gonna be about him his journey and like his side of things and he was actually not going to be discovered by NASA at all he was just gonna show up at the Ares 4 landing site and go hi guys you know and that was the idea but then I I went I went a very different direction so I guess broadly I know what's gonna happen but how it's gonna get there I'm in the dark about so you basically just have an outline in your head kind of I mean I'll even I'll even write out outlines sometimes but I find that I go off-book like almost immediately like I'll come up with okay this is gonna happen this gonna happen that's gonna happen I've got these 12 steps that are gonna happen and then I'm halfway through step one and I'm like wait it would be such a cooler story if blah you know and I I discover these things as I'm writing so I can plot it out in advance as much as I want but the end result is always going to be something very different interesting now when we come back we're gonna take a break but when we come back we will get to the nuts and bolts of Mars colonization and your book the Martian so we will be right back be sure to LIKE subscribe and share the video having recently learned what Instagram and Twitter are John has instructed me to tell you to check them out at jmg event horizon and we're back with Andy weir author of the Martian then speaking of will move from jazz to Mark Watney Andy what do you think it's sort of the same question I asked early on what do you think the chances are that we will colonize Mars in the you know the next 100 years do you are you on the side that says okay Elon Musk may have this done by 2030 or do you think it's just going to take a lot longer and be a government project okay so the short answer is I think it's gonna be a real long time these longer answer is it depends on your definition of colonize now if you mean people just deciding I'm gonna immigrate tomorrow's and live there then that means you have like a fully cohesive human society existing on Mars not necessarily independent it may have trade with earth and stuff like that but it it would have to be like a you know a full-on society you'd have to be a city or a collection of cities and it's going to be I honestly think centuries before that happens to Mars there's just no reason to do it there's nothing there do you know all the colonization that you look at in the past well in in in our recorded history colonization oh we include like killing off the people who owned the land in the first place and then taking it but even if you go all the way back to like 50,000 years ago when the first humans crossed the land bridge into North America so this was like for that untouched land you know it was you know a free for all kind of like kind of like Mars is now for them the reason they went was population pressure from elsewhere and the fact that there are lots of resources usable in the new location it's like oh yeah there's food over here and there isn't food over there we're going over here that's not the case with Mars Mars has nothing for you it's cool people like the idea of living on Mars but the reality is there's no reason to go so I think it's gonna be a really long time before we have see cities on Mars and I do believe that the first human beings on Mars will be part of a large government and the as eventually technology will drive the price down low enough that it is within reach to happen and governments will be the things that can afford to do it at first there's no there's a wealthy magnate who's gonna have more money than the United States federal government now if now saved far future let's say five hundred years from now does it become at some point viable to say terraform Mars yes absolutely at that point it starts to get interesting because then you would now have resources because if Mars if you terraform Mars then what you have is growable cropland agriculture the ability to live without special technology on the surface and that sort of thing and Mars is definitely terraformable there are a lot of theories on how you could make it have a you know an atmosphere that would heat it up it would take like a hundred years or something like that but it could be done and everything that you need is right there on the planet so that is a much more viable thing and if it were terraformed and that then it'd be a little bit better good there because you'd have a whole planet full of life well it'd be earth life but it'd be life and that had that might be a good way to go now you have is it sort of the same situation with the moon where you have everything you need as far as raw materials if you have the technology to do it if you have the technology to go there do you have everything you need at Mars as well or would you have to send something from Earth no actually you have more you you you don't actually have everything you need on the moon the colony and well it's so in art as for instance Artemis itself is heavily reliant on trade with earth if earth disappeared Artemis would just everybody died there pretty you know within a month or two I mean that's where they get that they get a lot of their food from Earth again I mean it would yeah they they get materials from Earth and here's the big thing there is no way to grow a biosphere on the moon there's no way to extend it because there's no carbon and there's very very little hydrogen so if you if you imagine try like a self-sustaining moon population they wouldn't be able to increase their population they wouldn't be able to grow more crops in order to support more people or anything because the carbon is just not there to grow it so Mars however is different Mars is very different there are four elements that you need to have a biosphere expand you need carbon hydrogen oxygen and nitrogen and Mars has all four of them in very large supply so actually colonizing Mars is if you get to the point where where you are colonizing it everything you need is in - - it's on site you're there so that's pretty cool at least including lots of water a lot of water we'll get to will get to water and and Mars in a minute but now one of the things that I really liked about the Martian was that you know as I'm a gardener which my regular listeners know that I have a love/hate relationship with plants but I have grown potatoes so I really appreciated watching the detail that you put into Mark Watney growing potatoes on Mars but thanks but the one question I have is if you really did that there's a problem with Mars the perchlorates so what do you have to do in order to get rid of those to grow is it's just simply washing the soil or what do you what do you do well there's a few there's a few things so first off for the fictional story for the Martian perchlorates don't cause any problems for plants the plants that grow just fine the problem is then when you eat the plants you're getting for quarry it's in your system and they're bad for you but they're not like deadly toxins they're just bad for you so eating perchlorate laced vegetables is kind of like as bad for you as smoking you can do it for quite a while but eventually it's gonna catch up to you so for though for hero mark he was like risking he probably did you know some decent amount of damage to himself was for you know with for chloride poisoning but not but not like you gonna die now depends on how much there is in the local soil but fortunately just wash right out they're water soluble so you take the Martian soil soak it water drain it off then redistill the water and the perchlorates are gone now if you which of course again you've got plenty of water ice to draw on yes something that I did not know when I so we didn't that there was like I know it seems like this is just common knowledge and it's just mundane but at the time I wrote the Martian we know if there was much water at all on Mars and now we know that the place is just absolutely littled with it so Paul Mark Watney reducing hydrazine - to get hydrogen to make water he could have just gone outside scooped up some dirt brought it in and heated it up oh well oh well but do you know that so much like you said so much has changed about our understanding of Mars just over the last 5 years it's just been amazing and it's it's interesting because it Mars actually because of that water it looks more attractive for eventual colonization or just whatever we do with it well although it it enables it enable all parts of the savatya action which is a means by which of turning basically you need water carbon dioxide and energy and from that you can make methane and oxygen which is rocket fuel yes exactly there's your trip home or as a stopping-off point if you want to go to europa or something like that a human mission to the outer solar system that's part of the at least part of the Elon Musk vision which you know the question is is that realistic I don't think anybody really knows now no not not at the timeframes he's suggesting right not oh yeah yeah it doesn't seem to be although the refinements to his plans are kind of moving in a good direction but anyway now Mars has the one thing that's that's that I find the most fascinating about Mars is that it is possible that it once did and may still Harbor some kind of primitive microbial life and there are tantalizing hints you know we see these weird methane readings that appear and we don't know what if they're volcanism or if they're related to life but nothing is a gas of life if we found say it an aquifer with microbes in it on Mars oh my god that would be so yeah it would be amazing yeah it would be a that would be like stop the presses then you would see like all kinds of probes hittin to Mars like we NASA's budget would go up a lot well also imagine imagine if we found it and it is related to life on Earth then we're confronted what the question is did life first arise on Mars and did it arrive here from panspermia in which case Mars is technically our home world [Laughter] where we're just a bunch of Martians who invaded earth yes we got it's time to take back the home world our exile is over but the if we found that what does that do to the it's the idea of going to Mars because yeah well unfortunately we only have a few minutes left before my heart out but I'll try to be quick um it completely changed our not only our understanding of Mars and its geological history but it also a huge affect on how we approach Mars now we do planetary protection which is an attempt to keep from infecting Mars with earth microbes because we don't want it to mess around with Mars as microbes if they have any and it will eat like all of a sudden Mars would be like off-limits until we very carefully figured out how best to study the life-forms without disturbing their egos here the one benefit that planetary exploration has is we don't need to worry about environmental effects like nobody cares about you know carbon emissions on the moon or whatever but if Mars has its own biosphere then we have to deal with all of that as well and we want to not perturb it or disturb it all of that having been said oh oh and also it would just make of course a huge effect on our understanding of the solar system and and how life evolved and where it evolved and we first thing we want to know is are we related or was it a second Genesis either way it's amazing either way it means that either we were seeded by Mars or vice versa which is incredible or there was a second Genesis meaning that Mars independently developed life which means the Drake Equation is turned upside down on its head and that means there's probably life all over the damn place in the galaxy either way though unfortunately I hate to be a Debbie Downer here I strongly suspect Mars has no life and never had any life and the reason I say this is because life is very very good at evolving to go in different areas it's very good at evolving to slowly change ecological conditions Mars lost its atmosphere and its oceans very slowly it took hundreds of millions of years so if it had life back then the life would have evolved ill with the aging environment and it would still have life now and if you if you take any random sample from Earth you're gonna find it absolutely riddled life just completely riddled with life be very hard for you to find any a fistful of air dirt water or ice or anything that has no evidence of life in it and so I believe that once a planet has life it's going to get life everywhere and we haven't seen that on Mars which leads me to believe it's never been there at all indeed yet you know maybe you know you can hope you can help we've well why would this we now know that liquid water you know just today liquid water may exist beneath the surface of Mars on that note Andy has a hard out so Andy thank you so much for being with us today and I hope someday you'll come back and chat with me again yeah great as we begin the adventure of colonizing the solar system one thing is already abundantly clear it's going to be hard full of accidents some no doubt fatal false starts missteps and even the possibility of established colonies being evacuated and abandoned perhaps multiple times as dangerous present themselves I can only imagine the stories that would come of that plucky colonists threatened perhaps by an asteroid or some such catastrophe having to evacuate a colony on Mars and go back to earth as Andy's novel - Martian depicts someone may accidentally get left behind or what if people that refuse to leave and then try to brave it on their own human history is full of such stories or maybe it will all go smoothly perhaps more is made of the difficulties of colonizing the Moon or Mars than what will actually turn out may be the combination of the human spirit will to survive and will to grow beyond Earth will outstrip any bumps in the road perhaps our technology to colonize may be better and less precarious than we might expect it remains to be seen but back to my question it is probably inevitable our destiny if you will to colonize the solar system I think will be sooner rather than later if we do would you go would you be among the first humans to set foot on Mars or would you wait until the colony is well established I've thought about this be the first youtuber and sci-fi writer on Mars my answer is maybe and I only hurt yourself if you go John wait what I saw you burn yourself making coffee of all things this morning humans are so very accident-prone or at least you are I couldn't help it the coffeemaker malfunctioned if I had lungs I would soak a Stickley exhale more it was hacked I wonder who muting channel that was Andy weir author of the Martian and Artemis do check out Andy's books attending store not just your favorite online book retailer because Andy unlike John he's actually successful join us again next Thursday for another episode of event horizon where John will be joined by dr. Robert Zubrin founder of the Mars Society an advocate for Mars exploration and colonization until then good bye thank God for power cables and on that note we're going to do a book giveaway I hardly ever sign books so five lucky posters in the comments section chosen at random will get to see my hopelessly messy and illegible and apparently rare signature all you have to do is subscribe to the show and leave a comment if you want a chance at winning at the end of October I'll stick the names in a hat and announce the winners see you next week

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 55,731

Rating: 4.8366833 out of 5

Keywords: Space, The Martian, Andy Weir, John Michael Godier, Godier, Isaac Arthur, Science, Terraforming Mars, Event Horizon, Event Horizon John Michael Godier, Artemis Andy Weir, The Martian Andy Weir, Science (topic), Mars (topic), Moon (topic), the martian book summary, andy weir interview, mars colonization elon musk, How To Colonize The Moon And Mars, author of the martian andy weir

Id: 2Y7vs-_-c90

Length: 56min 36sec (3396 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 27 2018

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Description

"In this episode of John Michael Godier's Event Horizon John's guest is author of The Martian (2011) and Artemis (2017) Andy Weir. They discuss, how, why, and when to colonize the Moon and Mars and deliberate over how Artificial Intelligence may put them both out of writing jobs in the near future."