Robert Zubrin: Here's How We Get To Mars

hello everyone welcome to palladium magazines digital salon on NASA and Mars with Robert Zubrin I'm wolfed IV editor-in-chief of palladium we're also joined by ash milton managing editor of palladium how's it going guys good to be here our special guest today is Robert Zubrin like I said Robert is known for his advocacy of Mars exploration and colonization especially the Mars direct plan welcome Robert thanks for inviting me great great to have you so these salons are an opportunity to get together for interesting conversations virtually since we can't really meet for in-person events anymore this conversation is being recorded it will be published as sort of like a podcast the salon will run about 90 minutes first half hour will be a discussion between Robert ash and myself and then we'll open it up to moderated audience Q&A so please start thinking about questions you might have for Robert or or questions that come up during the discussion and be sure to put those in a queue a future on Zoom rather than the chat itself yes is right at the bottom on the bar by chat and everything else please do not mix them up because we will not be getting questions in the chat to the speaker great so Robert if you could just give us a brief introduction to yourself and your work as you're seeing it these days you know we've we've all heard of Mars direct and of your general work with Mars colonization and so on but I'd love to get your view on on what it is you do and what you have been doing well I do number of things first of all you know for a living I'm a working engineer I have a small aerospace R&D company called pioneer astronautics and we do a lot of research and development on contract for NASA develop a number of new technologies most particularly in the areas of what you might call planetory resource utilization or resource creation since it's not a resource until you develop the technology that can use it the I'm also the author of number of books primarily books on the space exploration case for Mars recent book the case from space and I lead a organization called the Mars Society whose mission is to promote the human exploration and ultimately settlement Mars by both public and private means all over the world we're gonna have an international conference this year virtually it's in the International teleconnections out about that and Mars Society org great we'll definitely check that out yeah I just wanted to say you know I first came across your work Robert I think through the New Atlantis and your writing there I definitely encourage people to check it out I think that for people who maybe have read a bit about these issues but are not specialists it's an extremely good introduction to some of the distinctions here because you know there's a lot of esthetic hype I think around these topics it can be difficult to discern what has substance versus what is just kind of baggage you're left over from an earlier era of height that hasn't really managed to see through results and your work in particular it seems to focus quite a lot on the idea of mission orientation the idea of actually achieving results maybe to start the discussion you could kind of elaborate a bit on your analysis of NASA right now and why it seems to you know why we seem to have fallen globally short on these goals that we had fifty years ago when our grandparents were around yeah or when I was I was okay look in the 60s NASA's human space flight program Apollo was Purpose Driven okay all right his purpose wasn't scientific it was geostrategic but it was definitely Purpose Driven it had a definite goal and we were trying to achieve that goal as quickly and as efficiently as possible we're willing to take risks to achieve that goal we're willing to do whatever it took to achieve that goal but following the end of the Apollo program you had this large technical organization with many contractors attached to it as well and you know and what happened to it was what happens to a lot of organizations that whether you're talking about trade unions and political parties that are formed to achieve a certain cause after a certain amount of time whether they achieved the cause or not the organizational one was about the cause it's about the organization and so NASA instead not NASA as a whole but the human spaceflight program of NASA became not so much a Purpose Driven organization as a vendor driven organization it would not spend money to do things it would do things in order to spend money now and so it ripped it and you know in 1989 when the first president Bush on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing gaana up on the steps of the air and space machine with Armstrong and alchun and Collins Apollo 11 crew and said it was a 20th anniversary that's what we're all about America pioneer spirit you know so I'm committing the country to go back to the moon on to Mars this trying to stay NASA instead of going off and developing the most efficient plan for how to do it when well could develop the least efficient plans on how to do it with a 30 year timeline and it was so complex that people and and there were many people in NASA in 1989 who had been enduring Apollo it's only 20 years apart actually said if we could put a man on the moon why can't we put him in on the way because the bureaucracy was mandating that the moon program let alone the Mars program be used as a kind of a Christmas tree on which to hang all the ornaments that is to come up with the most complex plan in order to make all their pet programs mission-critical which is the exact opposite of the correct way to do engineering and and this is also afflicting the Artemis program which is the Trump administration's alleged program to go back to the moon coming up with a very complex plan same floor we go to the moon we have to go balloon the orbiting space station why we didn't need it the last time uh it was certified this is the this is the lunar gateway correct yeah or Tollbooth isn't caught and the you know during Apollo there were people who said before you go to the space station in orbit around the earth they were pushing out of the way well that was sort of that was sort of fun Brown's original idea right it's like the first thing is low-cost access to space then you have your outpost in low-earth orbit then on to them to Moon and Mars but but basically with with the very tight kind of focus on the goal of landing on the moon all that stuff I guess they realized was was not quite necessary to that focused goal well yeah well there's actually a very interesting story about a meeting that took place at the Marshall Space Flight Center around 1963 and at this time the Johnny ho bolts faction which was pushing lunar orbit rendezvous it was a way to do apollo initially they had people thought they were whack jobs but by now they were a strong faction but they had not yet prevailed and they were in competition with three other major factions on how you might accomplish the moon mission one was the space station faction so before then there was a saturnine people who before you go to the moon you have to have a saturnine set and fives not good enough too small gotta have a Saturday night and the the third was the nuclear rocket people gotta have nuclear rockets you can't go to the moon okay so they're having this big food fight over there and you know with all these people basically saying you can't do your program until you do my program and and then at a certain point somebody said look do we really want to go to the moon or don't and there was dead silence in the room for about thirty seconds and then they all Taranis it it's got to be moon order the only one so it was that tight schedule and the imperative of we are going to do this to astound the world with what three people can do you know this is important uh that's what pushed all these other programs out of the way because you're always going to have all sorts of people around saying you can't do your program until you do myself am and and that's you have now and so you know the the NASA people are kind of wrestling with this they have some pressure from some people in the Trump administration are actually serious about wanting to get to the moon by 2024 but it's not enough I mean it's not like it was with Kennedy and Johnson this is this is not that level of priority and so I got very much they're gonna make it's good new by twenty two right now so that's Eugene a purpose-driven program and a vendor driven program now it has to be said that there are parts of NASA that have named purpose driven most notably the science program which includes the space astronomy program and robotic planetary missions the Rovers to Mars Cassini to Saturn this kind of stuff those people remain Purpose Driven and in consequence they've accomplished a great deal the accomplishments of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Mars rovers and the Voyager these are epic people are going to read about this 500 years from now as some of the great accomplishments of our time the accomplishment of shuttle mission number 74 no okay the but that yes and so the issue is having a Purpose Driven space program now the when I was sorry if I was jumping here when I was reading your work on this concept of Purpose Driven I think this might be useful for our listeners when they're thinking about this you kind of have a few bullet points you know this the definition of a Purpose Driven program which I found useful the goal has to be definite it has to be proximate you know technology the means have to be oriented toward the end it has to be efficient and I thought the most interesting for you actually the goal need to be rationally chosen to accomplish the most we can I I thought you know and as you're talking here right the the moon landing goal was as you're saying geostrategic this was not like a pure engineering goal and I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit on this because it seems like to really make that work to mobilize governments and societies even to achieve this kind of goal you kind of have to be thinking like on a much broader and more dramatic level than just wanting to do an engineering program well you do uh and once again you know in the 60s Apollo it was geostrategic but it was real and you know everybody who was around then has a story of where they were when we landed on the moon okay it's like perhaps you can remember where you were at nine eleven or so but you know where I was when we landed on the moon leningrad okay um I was as a kid I was a chess wizard and so anyway if you wanted to play serious just at that time you had to be able to move the Soviet chess tax and I was there to learn Russian anyway all the Russians I knew you know knowledge jets which is like thattaboy uh the the leaders may have been having kittens but for the average Russian and Russians were really into space okay there's reason for that but we had excelled in a sport that they could appreciate and and in a way that was not harmful to them it was not aggressive against them it was didn't excite their paranoia it excited their admiration and so it did and certainly did much more to help the US and the Cold War than our deployments in Vietnam at that time which was far more expensive in both treasure in life and but in this case there are some geo strategic goals that could be pursued that that are perforce being pursued if you're simply showing that America does still remain technology and accomplish that we're still the people who do incredible things you know I mean ever since Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison and the Wright brother you know we've been people you know this is one of the more popular stereotypes of Americans there's a number of stereotypes but this is one of the yeah and positive that's the word but you know we're talking about opening up the human future you know and and this is why but I believe the goals gotta be Mars it's not like you're not interested in a moon return at all really well there are some points of merit to a moon return and it certainly beats a program that has no goal at all which is what we've had between the moon landing and recently um but it's it's not the best goal it's the second-best program uh the best program is units to Mars uh because we've already proven that we can go to the moon we did it 50 years ago okay b.p and it no longer has you know at that time the metaphor reaching for the moon meant doing the impossible and it no longer means that our Kading old glories isn't really yeah it doesn't have the same effect you want to get to the interplanetary accomplishment level furthermore I mean look there are three reasons to take on Mars okay one is scientific Mars is definitely where the real science is here Mars is a planet was once warm and wet planet could have supported development of life did it you know is life a general phenomenon in the universe that occurs wherever it has a reasonably decent planet to develop on in that case lives everywhere because we now know that the Kepler mission that planets are everywhere or is it just the one in a trillion shot and we just happen to have won the lottery okay um you know the nature of the universe this is really something okay now second is is the challenge you know the best most important benefit we got out of Apollo weren't the technical spin-offs that NASA likes to cite the teflon or even solar energy which was a spinoff of the space program at that time and that's a pretty important thing it's the intellectual capital um that is we doubled the number of science graduates in the United States in the 60s during Apollo and you can look at the graph and it takes off really right at Kennedy's speech and then it stops going up as soon as the program was shut down just uh and the and it's this youthful loves adventure and the Apollo program made science the great adventure and if he had a humans to Mars program today we would not only get millions of young boy scientists which is what we've got then you'd get millions of boys and girls scientists engineers technological entrepreneurs inventors doctors medical researchers these are the kinds of people that move society forward is the intellectual capital you know who were the 40 year-old you know technological entrepreneurs that made Silicon Valley in the 1990s they were the 12 year old little boy man scientists making robots and rocket fuel in the basement in 1960s and I know because I was one of those people right and and that's a much more real sort of inspiration than sort of all the fake ways you could imagine increasing the number of science graduates and so on like like there's always programs thrown around to sort of get more people inspired into science but it's always some some sort of fake program whereas actually going and doing something real and inspiring is is not just for for the people involved in that program we get the experience and the expertise but for everyone watching it's a much more like a real exposure to to the possibilities and then there's the third reason to go to Mars I said mention science challenge in the third is for the future okay because Mars is the closest planet has all the materials to support life and therefore technological civilization and if we can go there and learn how to turn those materials into resources then Mars becomes a place we can settle Mars comes a place where new branches of human civilization and and it opens up an open yoomin future which has significance by the way not just for that future it has significance for the present because the way we conceive of the future affects what's going to happen in the present this is really important and and is something that people do not get but they need to get it okay which is this you know people talk about the threat to humanity today climate change resource exhaustion some people talk about asteroid impacts well okay these all have a certain amount of validity but in fact none of them were the causes of the major disasters but the humanity experienced in the 20th century okay the major and and we had some real doozies and none of them were caused by climate change or resource exhaustion or asteroids they were all caused by something else entirely which was bad ideas and in particular one bad idea in a multitude of forms which is there isn't enough for everybody that is the idea that underlie fundamentally both world wars the Holocaust the holida more and any numbers of other Union caused catastrophes that you could mean and which threatens us for the catastrophe today I can tell you for a fact yes I've spoken with them that there are people in the American national security establishment who believe that war with China is inevitable because if they develop fully so that they all have cars just like us there's not going to be enough oil in the world and and you can bet that they have opposite numbers of the same sort in China who will look at us from the opposite side of the chessboard and think essentially the same thing okay and if that kind of thinking is allowed to prevail there will be war and it will be far more destructive than World War two because we've got yeah we sure do and the but it's a false view okay look as the world's population has gone up to standard living has gone up not down how's that if there's only so much to go around you should go down like malthus's yes something I want something I wanted to ask you about here is um you know it's one thing when one is able to like create this dramatic ideal or picture but then you also need to build the human and like institutional infrastructure to carry it out and there there's a way in which like our inability to do this now you know I think for a lot of people when we have these discussions right like are we in a declining society or something like this this is one of those things that is there you know I'm I'm iPhone dad was he's in his sixties now he was a young kid when all this happened and it's always struck me that you know if I have kids I'll be living in a world where they can say in our grandfather's day people walked on the moon and that is animate that to me is a horrific conception but just to have the idea of that isn't enough and you Robert have talked about you know the causes people give for why the human spaceflight programs have declined and you know people say there's not enough money or maybe democracies aren't able to do long term projects and you've kind of given some credence but I think you reject them as total explanations I'd like to hear you elaborated on this well I certainly reject them as explanations and but but I do want to finish the point I was working on which is refuting this idea that there isn't enough to go around the issue is not that we're gonna get oil for Mars or anything like that the issue is that what we're going to show is that it's not true that there is only so much to go around because the earth comes with the infinite sky and it's wide open if we work together okay in the fundamental condition of humanity is not one of nations in a struggle for existence over limited resources but of a bumptious family of Nations each capable of making various sorts of contributions to the general project of expanding the total human prospect now to get to your question look okay without a clear goal NASA deteriorate and it also has to be said that the quality of the political class has deteriorated considerably since the 1960's in this country you know prominent examples holding press conferences every day uh the but and but this is also true internationally I mean you can compare Trump to JFK you can compare my Franta Charles to glawler or Boris Johnson to Winston Churchill but the you know they all don't compare okay and the generation that got us to the moon then is the political generation in many cases are the same people or the younger brothers of those who won world war two and we got to the moon Mike Kennedy was able to get up in 1961 and say we're gonna put him in on the moon in eight years wasn't if they knew how to get to the moon in eight years they didn't have a clue what they knew though was that this America we can do anything okay we not only won the war we won the peace we knew not only defeated Germany and Japan we rebuilt them in a way that they had better than they had ever been before and the people there you know you know in Japan they're playing baseball and they call themselves MacArthur's children and and they you know in this kind of thing so we know we can do it and we did it and the so there's been this deterioration now but precisely because of that vacuum of leadership there's been a new leadership has stepped forward look from a different quarter and that's from the private quarters so now you have this entrepreneurial space revolution which is being spearheaded by SpaceX although it is not limited to SpaceX and by any stretch and but what musk is done as he's proven that it's possible for a well led entrepreneurial team to do things that was previously thought that only the governments of super powers to do and not only that do it in one third time in one-tenth the cost and even things they had deemed impossible all together and the Rockets yeah exactly um so and so this is happening and and and he's being emulated okay he's think there's gonna be a Chinese SpaceX you can count on it and and and you know there's now a New Zealand company has reached orbit New Zealand doesn't even have a space program okay but New Zealand has reach orbit through private enterprise and by the way led by people who are not billionaires like Elon Musk but just working engineers people know craft needs who've managed to mobilize investment and this is Han effects outside the space program because there's now fusion power startups getting funded okay you know because you know fusions been one of these things like cheap space launch oh that will always be in the future so always gonna be in the future but then people looked at musk and this those Rockets landing they said huh maybe the problem with fusion is the same thing maybe the problem it's not technical maybe it's institutional and so now you have fusion power startups getting serious money try alpha energy in California 500 million dollars that's more than the u.s. fusion budget and these people are not looking at 30 year timelines they've got investors they're looking at five-year timelines uh you know to try to make something happen and it's gonna happen so when you look at the previous generation you know we call them maybe the generation of MacArthur Eisenhower and Kennedy or something like this it seems like you're right there was this coordination this risk tolerance that they had this understanding of how to build mission oriented institutions for some reason there was a succession failure it seems like and you know at palladium one of our unifying questions is how do we build a better political class but even if one solves that problem you kind of have to now ask how do you create mechanisms for a succession and I'm interested Robert you know if you could sit down people like Moscow these intrapreneurs you're discussing and say you know when you built the things you want to build here's how you can avoid the succession failure of this previous generation do you have any theories there as to how that can be done that's a tough one how to convince must to create a successor I haven't thought that one through at all that's hard I I think it's most likely that he will create successors not through tutelage and mentoring but through example can you elaborate on that what's the distinction you're drawing well I know musk and I just don't see him as he's not taking apprentices you don't know pedagogical type right in that sense but but the example that he is sitting there is he's gonna teach through example okay and not through paternal mentoring but example people are gonna look at him they're gonna see what he did right didn't see what he did wrong uh you know and and some of them take this it's just human nature people gonna say you know you know if he could do it I can do it you know and and and some of them will be right and the he's proving it can be done it's like the secret of the atom bomb you know the secret of the Janna bomb was okay that was possible uh as soon as they showed it was possible it was the dead certainty that others would mobilize the resources necessary to it and you know and and he shown that this is possible so musk is not the richest man in the world there are plenty of people out there they'd have much more material resources than houses riches and you can do it you've referred to must before as a Greek hero I was wondering if you could explain that and then also are those born or made or both but George what I meant was um you know people sometimes ask me what I think his motivation is and it's not money um he likes money everybody likes money he finds money useful but the money is not as motivation at all he's after clothes which is what Homer's heroes were after which is eternal glory for doing great deeds it you know he he's not after cheap fame at the Harris Paris Hilton variety he wants fame for doing great deeds okay and he's not just interested in doing great deeds he wants the credit absolutely okay and you know the the the limitations of this outlook sometimes have a darker side to it for instance people saw the unpleasant way he reacted when someone else managed to save the boys in Thailand but nevertheless he wanted to save those boys in Thailand okay and right now he wants to do something about the corona burners and he wants to do something about global warming and he wants to do something about getting humanity a space if you went to musk and you said look Elon I got this great deal it's this lamb didn't st. croix we could put up a casino in a strip joint and the deal it's a lock you're gonna make millions of dollars throw you out of his office okay he would you know you will go to him with a money-making proposition that does not have a quality of greatness to it and in this case greatness judged by a humanist point of view okay uh you know must is not a nice person but he is definitely a humanist that is his criteria for things that are worth doing is extremely humanistic and so you know subjected to human ends this gets into the question of like you know given outside of kind of the the existential geostrategic kind of motivational environment you need some human energy some human institution that is creating that that sort of intense drive to achieve to be able to motivate something like going to Mars and you know in our case it's it's musk in the 60s it was this you know not just it would you know von braun and those guys they had that that drive but they also had the geostrategic need and and this is like the the interesting question for me is like okay if we're going to go to Mars it does seem like a great idea but you need someone who's going to be the champion of that idea you need some institution that's going to be have have enough influence and enough sort of intensity of that goal to be able to you know you discipline I guess the the efforts towards that end okay well okay look you know Victor you go once said nothing can stop an idea whose time has come right and the reason why that is true is if the idea has messengers is that the idea with its messengers which it hasn't created I was able to recruit further forces to expand us that are capable of making it prevail now I had a role in this okay you know I wrote this book called the case for Mars and must read this book and then he came to a Mars Society event in the Bay Area in 2001 and he joined our board and he gave some money meanings with us for a while and certain point he said to me look you know I'm not the kind of purse want some part of someone else's deal I got a you know lead my own initiative you know one lying on a hill all that kind of thing and and so he went off and get SpaceX but the idea whose time has come this is what has recruited must in a different form I was not involved with it in that case it recruited Bezos he was recruited more by the ideas of Gerard O'Neill as relayed to him by Peter Diamandis some other people and and O'Neill himself actually and the of the space colonies this kind of thing also and there's the - right but you know be Zoe's is not doing Blue Origin to make money and that's ridiculous he's not making any money origin most will probably make money with SpaceX but he could make a lot more money doing things that were are much less counterintuitive as business propositions in a rocket company the you know it's the idea and I think this is an idea whose time is coming and this is why I think we're gonna win actually in that you know with Kennedy even you know in the 50s a von Braun had got together with Walt Disney and they put together this this movie destination moon and some other film projects along those lines and and they put this out there so this was out there in the 50s and so that Kennedy when he was confronted with a need to do something about the Cold War losing the cold war propaganda war this idea came to mind there were other things I mean they could have sent the Marines to Cuba okay to get rid of Castro not leaving it up to a bunch of Cuban exiles didn't know how to fight and send them a range do the job um they know so this is or thigh all tonight so putting that idea out there that is what made a power possible Apollo occurred during the Cold War it was not caused by the Cold War it it was caused by the idea that had been generated well even earlier than von Braun at people like Oberth Goddard and science fiction writers of this idea of humanity expanding into space in case von Braun and Disney worthy the messengers and Kennedy picked it up and so the idea to the advantage of as it were energies that were available during the Cold War to support projects you know during the Cold War if you had any project whether it's improving teacher salaries or anything you would say this is to help win the Cold War right okay and so here one go to the movie I'm just looking at the time here as well I think we should start getting to some of the Q and a wolf you have those on your end I believe yeah so so Brian hartong asks an interesting question which is the question I also wanted to ask which was right around the the shutdown of the Apollo program which is sort of 1970 to 1973 was kind of the end of it all it wasn't just the Apollo program there was a larger kind of shift in in how America seemed to think about achievement and and organization of potentials and and social organization and everything there was it clears quite a large shift in in 1973 is something that's puzzled us for some time every time you look at a graph of any kind of achievement there's always some big inflection point right around then and and this also relates to the question of the successors who the successors of that generation that you know won the war and took us to the moon and so on and and there's particular succession failure so it would be interesting to get kind of your perspective you know with your inside view and all this stuff that you've studied and being involved in what what happened in in the politics and the organizations and and the people retiring and being replaced and so on around that time that that caused that sort of change in consciousness from that goal driven purposeful organization to the the less purposeful organism that's a very easy question to answer we lost the Vietnam War is Vietnam Vietnam took the wind out of our sails Vietnam disk undermined it's the right word this idea that we could do anything wrong you know because here it was me here beat Nazi Germany which the war they had all of continental Europe under their control out to the gates of Moscow uh and we brought down that third reich and and so forth and and and in the japanese empire and then here's a stinky little vietnam and we couldn't even win and the fifi and and not only that the way the war was fought undermined our concept of who we were of that we were the good guys that we you know watching on television american troops go into the enemy's villages and clark their bayonets and stab all the pigs so they'd have no food to eat what the hell is going on here uh and so you know robert mcnamara can take a lot of credit for destroying the American Century and and and and and you know our our own sense of our P you know that we actually stood for something that was you know and and you can see this now in in the failure of the Bush administration they did not have the moral certainty we they went into Afghanistan in Iraq that MacArthur had when he went in Japan and he was there saying okay here's the new rules okay it's good women even have rights when the trade unions and all this stuff that was not there before this how it's gonna be instead we go to Afghanistan we get a bunch of warlords and terrorists we sit him around tables what kind of government you think they didn't go in with a plan certainty that that we actually represented something that that that was really true and good and you know the way the truth in the light and VP so yes so I would say that that this notion of decline and this acceptance of decline of the rest West was written by a German in the 1920s okay once again Spangler okay so we had our own Spangler's uh so you start getting books like the Population Bomb and limits to growth and and and all the famine 1975 and and all this stuff of we have now entered the age of limits we used to think everything was possible um B now there's only endings endings right yes so we lost we lost the ideal so first of all like the confidence in ourselves and the ideal of sort of continued growth and capability and achievement and and somehow it became kind of inward-looking and afraid of that stuff right now i think there's a good follow-up question here actually on so Ryan asks I was reading Charles Fishman's one giant leaf I assume you're probably familiar with that book Robert one of the interesting points in it was how the Apollo program was vital for economic development in the United States by disciplining manufacturing and encouraging domestic production does the National Development angles seem an effective way of pitching the case for Mars so I guess you know right now there's a lot of discussions about you know on maybe the political left is the green new deal on the right there's kind of industrial policy discussions but there seems to be this hunger especially now during this pandemic for the idea of let's rebuild story you know supply lines rest rebuild industry manufacturing and and kind of create an economy that's producing real things again in North America so do you think that there there's an opportunity here to pitch the case for Mars in this context well yeah although well certainly the phenomena that you just described the government mobilizing American industry turning that certainly was the case in World War two we went from a depression to an economy that was touring at rates of 20% a year in Apollo less Sao Paolo of course was a much smaller affair than the war after the world war two but certainly there were elements of that I I think if we did have an industrial mobilization to solve the problems of humans to Mars which by the way would be smaller than Apollo because the challenges of going to Mars today are significantly less than those that we faced during to get to the moon we we've already 85 percent of the technology needed to go to Mars was 1961 going to the moon I mean we didn't even know if people could eat in space you've mentioned that even now the the funding for NASA correcting for inflation is actually higher than in its first years correct yeah although it's close to the same I mean it's not much higher he in my new atlantis article i go through the numbers on that to show that the argument that the money isn't there it's false there's actually about the same amount of money a few percent more the fee that is in the past 20 years in real inflation adjusted dollars nASA has been a little more than it it's first 20 years from 58 78 when we went from no space program to and through the moon landing in Skylab and Voyager to Jupiter the but because enough look at the last 20 years you will see a robotic space program whose accomplishments are comparable to the robotic space program at that time which was significant but a human spaceflight program of in no way comparable in its accomplishments because they had a goal in the current program doesn't um entropy but but sure it's certainly the case that a human's de Mars program would help industrial growth and technological development but actually the biggest crisis that we're facing right now in this country is in education and there's all these stem programs and and well some of those have some merit what has no merit at all are all these programs to try to improve education to increased amounts of standardized testing then it blows my mind as totally counterproductive but but you know a bold space grandma would make science the great adventure and we get millions of young scientists that way yeah you could organize organize people's thoughts about what to do and organize what we're actually doing around the accomplishment of functional goals yeah I can totally see that so speaking of the robotic space program Steven Pimentel asks why human exploration of Mars as opposed to say scaled up a robotic exploration of Mars now I imagine there's factors there in terms of robots are not yet quite as capable of as humans were also more interested in humans perhaps but I'm curious to hear your view on why would like robots versus humans on Mars there isn't a robot in the world today that you could send to the store to buy you a bag of carrots uh let alone explore a planet Fifi No and Steven Squires who is the is a field geologist himself but is also the project scientist on the mars exploration rover mission that spirit and opportunity right he compared to what spare an opportunity to do on mars to what he could do if he was there himself with a rock hammer and he basically said there about one one-thousandth as effective and it's a working field geologist and and that's even the things that they can do ok you know the mars society leads a program called the Mars desert Research Station which we have in the desert in Utah and I was there in the first crew that we had and in our first motorized eda that as we go out and mock spacesuits and explore the surrounding terrain traveled around four kilometers to the north of the station and then we saw this hill that we could climb and get a view and climb this little hill and got a few and we saw this interesting little box canyon and we figured that would be place to go we went over there and there's about a two meter climb down into the canyon two meter drop and we walk around in the canyon and there after going through a lot of false finds i found this rock which i show to gentleman's geologists who was on the EDA and she looked at it and said this looks to me this is bone this is this is fossil I took it back to the hab she thin section it was indeed dinosaur bone and we reported that to the Bureau of Land Management and a couple of years later scientists from the Burpee Museum in Illinois contacted the BLM anybody over there find some dinosaur fossils yeah these large people found some stuff at these GPS coordinates and they went there they dug the place out it's the largest find of dinosaur fossils in North America in 50 years and the it's more it's a significant is dinosaur national monument no robot Rober would ever have found it no robotic rover would have even found the canyon and certainly couldn't have gotten into the canyon cuz there's a two meter drop and then walking around the canyon okay you know you turning your head from left to right you're taking the equivalent of millions of high-resolution pictures with your eyes you see something that looks interesting you give it a double take no forget it you continue you see something interesting enough to go over there and pick it up you dust it off no it's nothing okay you continue finally you pick one up dust it off hey this is interesting Jen have a look at this let's take this one back in the hand I'll think section okay you report it and then they come and take it out this is all way beyond the ability of robotic Rovers and right you you could land you know hey I'm here in Colorado this is dinosaur heavens you know all the dinosaurs went here to die and the no I mean really I mean you go to many of the major collections of dinosaurs especially the classic could not seem like Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops you know they all came from this place five miles from where I'm sitting right now called Morrison Colorado you may have heard of the Morrison Formation uh you could land a hundred robotic Rovers in Morrison Colorado you'd never find a dinosaur bone in a century even if you knew to land them in Morrison R and V and now if you talk about go to Mars and now you don't want to just look for fossils you want to get to the groundwater which is where they still might be extant life on Mars in the underground water okay great that's a good drilling rig drilled down a kilometer bring up the water bring it to the hab subject to the biochemical examination trying to culture it this is so far beyond the ability of robotic Rovers so while I approve of robotic Rovers don't get me wrong I'm big fan and the Mars Society had a significant role in helping to save the curiosity mission which was in danger of being cut because it was over budget humans could do some right great that's inspiring so I mean and and this there's another question sort of on this sort of human inspirational kind of topic which is the what actually what is it that makes Elon Musk or anyone else to be motivated by the sort of Greek Cleo's idea what is it that creates those kind of people versus other kinds of motivations in society like in I can imagine that you know maybe some of our education maybe the the ideals that were exposed to maybe the material conditions of how we live what is it in your view that creates people that are so strongly motivated to kind of achieve great things as opposed to simply you know being interested in money or luxury or all the various other things that well I think it's the desire for immortality huh that's what eternal glory is right it's immortality so immortal Florrie yeah and that's what motivated homers heroes that's what motivates us that's what motivates people who try to write the Great American Novel um so why not ever pay it so so it is it's a fundamental impulse and in this game the case of musk it's expressing it towards this goal yeah I'm what I guess what I'm getting at is like there's many people who I guess motivated by things that are not so obviously you know immortality through through sort of great deeds but but other things or not so clearly immortality at all but so what I I'm curious just like what is it what are the conditions that create kind of that productive drive as opposed to all the other things that that that the drive gets turned into well okay about that but I will say that people who are not focused on some form of immortality whether it's through great deeds or through children or something that's going to last are mistaken yeah like that I think the thing is that the the thing where you know why do people get these desires right I think a lot of people and you were saying this earlier right examples you read about me at homers heroes or the Apollo missions or whatever there is this desire that is given by seeing others achieving great things and I see obby here has asked something which i think is relevant given that we had this first generation of space pioneers why did the example emulation mechanism fail in this case and are there like conditions necessary for like say that we have created you know and yet I can think here we were talking earlier about how the myth of space exploration was created before even these missions were announced like it does does there have to be this consciousness or living tradition that we know we should look to those people like what has to be in place for people that actually emulate the examples even when they are available well look ok the Apollo program which did envision continuing which did envision having a moon base by the late 70s and landing on Mars by 1981 and a Mars base by 1988 and that was the plan okay that was a truncated it was aborted by the Nixon administration so we had an enormous failure of leadership there it was like Columbus coming back from the new world the first time and Ferdinand and Isabella saying uh so what get lost um you know who cares about this but that was the response of Nixon and his gang but there were those of us who grew up watching this uh who you know did have this vision and had a vision of it as being something significant or important than a competition with the Soviets that this you know wasn't he'd a great leap for mankind' how greatly but mankind has not the u.s. meeting the Soviet Union to the moon great leap of mankind is humanity's setting foot on another world okay and that understood it in this context because we understood okay that that which had motivated von Braun and Disney not just JFK uh that there was a deeper vision here than the Cold War and we would determined to counter it on and I think you know people of my own generation were left carrying the torch and carrying that vision whatever we could and transmitted it and it has now been okay transmitted more broadly in culture of course not just my books but any number of science fiction and you know era of science fiction and Star Trek and you know movies you know I think there's now a broad appreciation that there was not yet in the 60s of a human future that is of a spacefaring humanity and that this is very much or there's two competing visions one is the Star Trek future the other is the Soylent Green future and but but then that makes it clear which future do you want and then a lot of people determined to make that and I think that you know that that more broadly that expression of the idea is what recruited Muscovy those and the things like the Mars direct plan is just me or that there was a way that this could be done here now as opposed to further out um but yeah I I think I'm looking at the other questions here as well so just to let people know I think you can in fact upload questions if you particularly want to see them I'm just looking through here here's an interesting one bye Brian our planets or space habitats better for long-term human colonization so I you know I remember seeing this in I think it was interstellar near the end of that movie you know you you get these I forget the name of these habitats but essentially artificial habitats and I guess you know I don't really know the what the answer there looks like on whether one even has the resources for these but in terms of like the imagination around space I think this is something that hasn't even really been suggested to be built yet do you think it's even worth trying to create sustainable colonies on a place like Mars rather than creating some kind of sustainable habitat artificially or absolutely I think it's much easier to settle a planet than to build one you know if you look at Neil colony you're talking about like a billion tons of mass you know Mars direct mission to Mars is about 300 tons of mass the worst NASA Mars mission plants have ever seen have been maybe a thousand tons of mass if you were to colonize Mars with you know thousand starship launches that'd be a hundred thousand tons of mass uh and you've got this planet there with trillions of tons of mass waiting and with the the resources needed and and and and virtually unlimited compared to what you could launch and put in orbit now it if I did want to create fee flying space colonies that weren't on Mars I would put them inside of asteroids where at least you've got a billion tonnes of mass right there okay you want to have a free flying colony uh you know want to have your own space city away from everybody else yes some merit because actually and I think people will do it someday because having the ability to have your own place we can cut your own path and make your own worlds of freedom but I think we're gonna colonize Mars before we do that it sounds like you know when the the utility of these ideas is that they create images for us of what we should pursue so you know in here the question of whether or not we should go to Mars it has very near implications you know these are policies these are decisions we can make now I see Steven in the chat is mentioning which i think is a good point a lot of our science fiction is kinda you know Star Trek Star Wars this kind of thing it's about a galaxy in the far future I guess Star Trek is a bit near but you know a lot of steps have been reached by the time that universe emerges do you think we need more of a science fiction that's focused on our solar system and like the next fifty to a hundred years I think we could use it um I mean you know the expanse is okay that's more like 150 years or something like that but it's still it's not the interstellar empire it's a solar system future no I think you'll be very useful to have visions of 50 years a hundred years from now things that are more within sight things that we could create uh you know in in my book this case for space I I talk about three levels of civilization okay and this is my own modification of an earlier scheme that was put forth by Nicolai part but I call a type one civilization a civilization that has access to the resources of its planet and we've more or less attained that now that is we have not only become global and extend which we've been for thousands and years but interconnected globally which we've been since about 1500 with the long-distance sailing ship but intimately interconnected globally which we now are with the internet and with various international organizations and world trade organization and travel and all this we now truly a global civilization on a type two civilization is one that has access to the resources of its solar system so that is one that is a interplanetary space faring civilization that has colonies on Mars it's colonizing asteroids it's accessing the helium-3 resources the outer solar system and in this type 3 which is Inter's step that has access to the resources of its galaxy and it's fully develop interstellar you know silicon ski said you know the earth is the cradle of me and kind but one cannot live in the cradle forever the solar system is the school guard you leave the crater we go into the school yard ok and it's there that you grow big enough that you can leave the school yard and go into the world at large so it is within the context of a tie to civilization that will develop the capabilities that will allow us to become type 3 so an interesting question on the the planets versus habitats point is the question of terraforming versus pressurized habitats and I know you've advocated for some level of terraforming though of course that that would take a while it'd be a very large kind of project but I'd be curious to hear on the feasibility of terraforming Mars the ethics of terraforming Mars and and that general part of the question what is it okay well terraforming Mars big project okay yes but I think we know how to do it um the answer is global warming we've got to do that don't for the nuclear bomb solution oh no no no bombs are not gonna do it b-but greenhouse gases are the way to go we can produce extremely powerful greenhouse gases if we want to like cf4 per floor or methane is like a methane but fluorines instead of hydrogens and it's thousands of times more powerful greenhouse agent than carbon dioxide for example and if we were producing this stuff at about the same rate that we produce that general sort of compounds fluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons on earth which are produced commercially for refrigerants if we were to produce them on mars not to put in refrigerators but to release into the atmosphere we can warm the planet by 10 degrees in 50 years and to put in perspective in the past century and a half that is since 1870 when industrial civilization became strong enough to matter we've warmed earth by about one degree centigrade so 10 degrees in 50 years that would be a lot and and that would be enough to cause massive amounts of carbon dioxide to come out gas soil and I would thicken the atmosphere and of course co2 is also a greenhouse gas and in those quantities to be very strong greenhouse gas you'd warm mars another 50 c and then all the ice starts to melt the permafrost starts to melt the rivers omar start to flow again you got rain you could start spreading plants that's how you do it now I think as technology advances we'll probably come up with ways to accomplish this that make that description seem quaint doing it fluorocarbon factories and green plants how 20th century kikinda like jewels for moon mission you know launched from Florida was crew of three they were in a capsule they orbited the moon they landed in the Pacific Ocean and they were picked up by the United States Navy worship all has actually happened a hundred and five years later except his mode of power was heavy artillery so 19th century mine grappling with a 20th century problem he gets a lot of it right some of its going wrong same thing with this but I think we could do it I think well the fact that I can come up with a general scheme for how to do it proves that an age in the future which will only be more technically capable than anything I can dream of will certainly be able to do it now as far as the ethics are concerned I think it'd be unethical not to do it mm-hmm okay how else is the community of life on earth going to spread to Mars unless we make it possible you know we have have attained dominant access to the resources of our planet at the expense of many other species okay so to those who much has been given much as expected and um where the vanguard of the community of life of Earth and right you know these people who say and I don't get this at all people call themselves environmentalists saying it would be wrong from an environmental ethics point of view to terraform Mars well let me ask any environmentalist this question or frankly any developmentalists this question I got an idea let's take earth with all of its forests and pine trees and rainforests and coral reefs and everything and we'll make it a desert like Mars how would you okay we get rid of all the cities and the used book stores and and and and and you know the farms and the wilderness areas and everything and it can just be a nice red desert with maybe a few bacteria in the groundwater wouldn't that be swell say your nuts okay that would be insane from any point of view have we just be just crazy right okay well it to be the greatest environmental crime you could possibly imagine well if if transforming the living earth into dead Mars like world is an enormous environmental crime then transforming a dead Mars like world into a living earth has got to be the most positive act of environmental improvement anyone could propose and so you know if we can make the environment worse we can make it better it is it is there's no logic to the point of view that says that anything we do is war okay that's just that same loss of nerve that happened to sort of around the last quarter of the 20th century that yeah lost the space program and so on yeah or even though view that human activity isn't that beneficial right you word the cosmos you know something grand that that nature and has produced or are we the cancer I think there's a good question it's here in the QA and it's a good follow-up we're talking here about planets there's a flip side to this which is the effect on human beings because obviously you know the the environment of space and settling on their worlds is going to be a tremendous like the selection pressures there we probably haven't understood them all yet I would think you know Xavier is asking you know how will this change our experience of senses time perspective curiosity the flesh like do you have some theories about what kind of human being will exist you know in in this perhaps in the next one to three hundred years if we get to the stage of interplanetary of a civilization of the solar system well certainly if we go elsewhere we're going to diversify and first we're going to diversify culturally and then eventually biologically um cultural diversification will happen much quicker and this is a good thing you know in biology a type of animal for example has many diverse species we consider it to be a strong genus for order of the animals if it's down to just one type then it is on a narrow thread threatened with extinction okay humanity through electronic telecommunications jet aircraft and this general level of technology that we have today it has made the earth a small place and we're having cultural fusions and there's a positive aspect to this for sure of course you know well once the epidemic ends you'll be able to go to Chinese restaurants and Japanese restaurants and Italian restaurants and all this and and and and you know you can play chess so you can play go and and and and and there's all these different cultures have something to offer but there's a fusion going on and and and so I think it's kind of an energy that's being released through the coming together in the Earth's cultures but once the potentials have been leveled that energy has been lost that diversity and the power that it represents and but that same general level of technology represented by jet planes and electronic communications speaking generically it gives you the capability of becoming an interplanetary sources and so while the earth may become small we're now have a much larger theater of operations which will be big and there'll be new cultures created in new places and now I'm very hopeful that some of these cultures are going to be more supportive of the development of human potential and human freedom than anything we'll have on earth I think there's a reason why it's because if they are then people will want to go there uh and time they'll accomplish more accomplished more they will be more successful they will grow they will become examples to others and you know the noble experiment as Thomas Jefferson called it of the United States has been in one respect or another emulated positively in most of the world it has become the standard that there should be equal rights under the law for people of imperfectly followed if you're richer you have a better shake with the law than if you're poor but we do not have you know blood aristocracy and and and and different legal standards for different kinds of people and anyway but the feet but I think a Mars colony the most successful ones will be ones that are the most inviting in this respect and also greater freedom means greater innovation and the Mars colony is going to have to innovate both in order to address its own problems of you know for instance realizing adequate agricultural yield within green house agriculture just much limited in acreage so forth developing robotics and artificial intelligence in order to have a greater diversity of skills and labor power that is available from a limited population and so forth um and and and and by developing technologies it will have something to export ie patents on which would be a source of income just an idea now there are people who say extraterrestrial colonies will be tyrannies because the government can shut off your air supply if it wants to but I think the opposite I think on earth that the the easiest people to oppress actually are nominally self-sufficient peasants because none of them are essential city populations urban civilizations particular people their individual skills are more important they know the narrow group of workers goes on strike they can [ __ ] the whole economy but so they have to be more respected than a peasant village just Terry tyrant could just wipe it out what's the loss very that's a very interesting idea the idea that as people sort of pick up more important functional roles within the system it becomes much more important to treat them well that's right and in a space colony one person could wreck the whole colony so you better treat everybody well you know so I I believe there will be extraterrestrial Liberty I also believe that there will be diversity because I think there's always going to be people that have a different idea of how society should be organized and in general they're not going to be popular among everybody else and you know if you look at the most remarkable colonization efforts that have occurred over the past 400 years which I would say are the pilgrims going to Massachusetts the Mormons going to Utah and the Jews going to Palestine um they're all done for transcendent reasons they were all done in defiance of an easier path to prosperity the you know the Mormons so I stopped off in Salt Lake when you could have gone to California Oregon where much nicer land and water and you know more fertile well so no one else is gonna want to come here you could say the same thing for the other two groups that I mentioned and they're both the all three are motivated actually by religious and associated cultural transcendent motivations as opposed to commercial motivations the fee and I think there'll be people like this in the future who want to have their own place and and if they're right that their ideas are better then their colonies will grow and prosper and become examples if they're wrong it'll simply disappear but the so I think we're gonna have a great diversity of cultures now course diversity of environments will lead to biological diversity human beings are what they are because and all other animals because they are well adapted to these conditions if you change the gravity field for example the design optimization change and and that'll have effects on biological evolution and particularly if we're moving into an era where people are capable of controlling to one extent or another biological evolution and also I think for instance if you take this question of genetic engineering and not just of crops and such but even people now there are a lot of people think that's wrong and their societies won't practice it but there might be people who think it's right and they'll go off to a place where they can practice it and that will accelerate the diversification of humanity so II you know if you you know if you look at like Star Trek and they have conventions of different species of aliens but they all kind of look like humans except some have pointy ears of loose skin or something that's very unlikely if these were actually extraterrestrials that originated biologically from a separate origin but if we think of humanity traveling out to the stars and different cultures evolving with different aesthetics and some might like blue skin it might become the fashion and so they'll all have loose skin and and then when you meet them you'll meet humanoids with blue skin but they didn't evolve on Alpha Centauri they um they were human colonists who roots are here yeah so so we're reaching I think the end of our time yeah I I think there's one more question that would be good to close on here for one okay let me this is a quick answer so let's do both and cheat go for it we're looking at very large-scale big picture stuff now to achieve any of this we need to create the mechanisms so the question here ultimately do you consider NASA bureaucratically salvageable or do we need to just give you on a trillion dollars and say go for it or some other option I think this house is gonna come down okay musk is moving ahead uh and assuming that he doesn't stayed off the edge of the ice which could happen when you service taker but if he doesn't okay he says he's gonna have starship flying to orbit this year I don't think so I think he might have it next year I think they'll certainly have it by 2024 and if starships are which are launch vehicles with the capability of the saturn v moon rocket but fully reusable equal compete ability lists an attempt the cost if those things are flying to armed by 2024 when we elect a new president that person he or she is going to look at their advisors and say look at this with that could we have people on mars by the end of my second term the answer is gonna be yes will cost hundreds of billions of dollars Oh certainly not tens of billions of dollars well maybe ten billion dollars well then what are we waiting for and at that point by making it feasible musk will have made it sellable and the US government will be in and then you'll have a president saying I want to be on Mars right and in my second term NASA I want you to get with the program okay I want to meet musk halfway okay he's got the Rockets let's develop the space nuclear reactor because he can't get his hands on uranium-235 you know there's a lot of stuff that needs to be made in order to colonize Mars it'd be really a lot to expect much to do at all but he's knocking down the biggest tall poles I think we'll meet him halfway and and at that point with that kind of pressure from the top get with the program let's get together musk and I want this done before they in my second term so don't come up with all sorts of stupid projects like we have to build the Venus orbiting space station before we go to Mars just another ridiculous thing let's just do this um it'll be done so I think we're gonna be on Mars by 2030 and I think it's gonna be a public okay I I have another question on this bold vision sort of line of questioning which is is in the context of the goal to achieve a type two civilization what fraction of sunlight should we aim to capture in the next 250 years well this is where I differ from Kardashev Kardashev defined a type two civilization as one that captures all the energy of the Sun I think that's ridiculous uh I so I do not regard it tight to find a type two civilization as one that captures the energy of its star I think it's one that has access to the resources of its solar system so I think will make a lot of use of solar energy I think will make a lot of use of fusion energy we're gonna make our own Suns right okay okay you know our ancestors turn dirt into metal we're gonna turn water into light great and grand vision yes all right well this has been a lot of fun thanks so much Robert for coming on it's been it's been a pleasure to have you think about the most glorious things we could be doing and please send me a link to it when it is available online absolutely all right thanks everyone for joining as well we can get everyone's questions as usual but I think it was an engaging discussion so we'll see you next time all right thanks a lot

Channel: Palladium Magazine

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Id: RI8-8B70p60

Length: 84min 19sec (5059 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020