The Case for Space with Robert Zubrin, Ph.D., Lecture at Florida Atlantic

good evening everybody thank you so much for joining us this evening for a Robert zubrin's talk my name is at saw Roger Dean iam the Dean of the college of science here that Faye you I'm so excited to welcome dr. Zubrin this evening he's a respected author of a number of books including the case for space and the case for Mars in a renowned expert on Mars he's president and member of the board of directors of Mars Society president of Pioneer astronautics and aerospace R&D company in Colorado former staff engineer at Lockheed Martin he earned his master's degree in aeronautics and Astronautics and a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Washington and as many of you know he's actually here as part of a new course we've developed at FAU called human mission to Mars we're using dr. zubrin's book in the class we're covering all aspects of how to get to Mars from getting there to establishing a colony to growing plants water psychological aspects of Mars and the mission to that planet we think the class is pretty unique and actually so did CBS 12 they that station sent the reporter Lauren Olesky to our class a few weeks ago and she produced two reports on the class both reports are available on the college of science website but I want to play for you part one and ask you to go to the website to watch part two so here is part one let's meet Lauren you went back to college for the day I did and it was awesome I got to sit in on what I think the coolest class and this was the other day at FAU the class is called human mission to Mars and while I thought it was simply about just how to get humans to the Red Planet I learned that a lot more goes into this miss admission than just blasting off into outer space how we solve problems in Sonya's solving problems three what with a little side of how to get to Mars what do I really want to teach the students and the in tourism autopsy Roger Dini the Dean of the College of Science at Florida Atlantic University created this class to teach students how to solve problems no matter what their background is a lot more goes into this course than even I originally thought once you get there how do you water and there are even more topics being taught like the impact space has on our bodies does anyone have property rights well taxes exist up there this class is unlike anything else taught on campus no other class here that's taught by 12 faculty there's no other class here that involves last count I had seven different departments this is really cool so every two weeks about every two weeks to a week and a half or so they have a new teacher and they go over different subjects and different aspects of how to get to Mars like they learn how to grow fruit in one of the classes the one I went to the other day was about the psychology what kind of leader do we want to have best group dynamic we need for all of us to work together if someone's angry how do we you know get over the conflicts so many questions yeah it's really how did they dress the topic of will taxes exist something we I haven't learned about the tax part just yet really we're just kind of learning about psychology just the other day we're gonna dive into more about the psychology of what it's like to maybe you know be stuck on a planet with just a group of people okay essentially all right so that was Lauren's first report she had another segment about the same length that's available on the college website is it science at FAU dot edu and I think that last lady's was most important which is that there was something for everyone in the class and we deliberately designed the class there would be no prerequisites you come in the class knowing essentially nothing and we teach you all you need to know about these different aspects of going to Mars with the intent to teach you how to solve problems and to think about problems critically so that was one of the most important aspects of the course now before I bring dr. Zubrin onstage I'd like to ask all of you to stop your cellphone's if you haven't done so already please and let's go ahead and welcome dr. Robert Zubrin to the stage [Applause] okay so it's the mic on is it on now yes it is okay great so thank you a tie for that very kind introduction and thanks to all of you for turning out to hear what I have to say tonight and more broadly for your interest in in this subject because I think that this subject is the most important thing going on in the world today and that while okay the newspapers don't agree with me on that space gets a little coverage here and there but it's not the headline today from the point of view of future ages it will be viewed as the most important thing going on today for example I mean look if I was to ask anyone here what happened in 1492 I think pretty much all of you would be able to say well that's when Columbus sailed and that's true but there were any number of other things that happened in 1492 for example England and France signed a peace treaty in 1492 the Boer jeus took over the papacy in 1492 Lorenzo de Medici the richest person in the world died in 1492 if there had been big-time newspapers in 1492 those would have been the headline items not Italian Weaver's son gets in some leaky boats and sails off to nowhere comes back from nowhere no okay but we don't remember that stuff okay what we remember is Columbus because he is what made our society here possible and I think we have a little feedback here on this thing the so similarly I think that 500 years from now people are not going to remember Trump or Bragg's it or which gang of thugs one in Syria or whatever but what we do to make their civilization on hundreds of planets orbiting hundreds of stars in this region of the galaxy possible that is what they will remember so anyway I'm going to talk about this I'm gonna talk about the case for space how the revolution in spaceflight is opens up a future of unlimited possibility now that's a lot to talk about a revolution in spaceflight unlimited possibilities the case for why you must do it and I won't be able to cover it all adequately in a talk of an hour or even any one of those three major areas but fortunately I have written a book on the subject and they've got them here and if after this talk you think what I have to say is worth looking into more you buy them I'll sign them it's a win-win situation and the profit goes to Florida Atlantic University okay so let's start with the revolution this is something here that many people may remember you may have seen this the day it happened on your computer screens or maybe even in person uh cuz you're in Florida but this is February 2018 you're looking at here this is the launch and landing of Falcon Heavy now this was a pretty cool thing to see but unless you know the background you don't know quite how cool this really was this is really cool and I'll tell you why in 2010 Barack Obama called for a blue-ribbon committee which was headed by my former boss norm Augustine the CEO of Lockheed Martin to look into whether the Bush plan for returning astronauts to the moon was possible within reasonable financial constraints and they came to the conclusion that it was not because the required heavy lift vehicle take at least 12 years to develop and cost at least wait for it 36 billion dollars so they called it all off musk went and developed a heavy lift vehicle in six years at a cost of less than 1 billion dollars none of which came from the taxpayers by the way and to cap it all it's 3/4 reusable so this was mind-blowing to people who actually knew what the expectations were ok and so this is a shot heard round the world and it has set off an entrepreneurial space race spanning five continents ok because what musk has done in addition to introducing a very useful Space Launch System is he's proven a point and what that point is is that it's possible for a well led entrepreneurial team to do things that it was previously thought that only the governments of major powers could do and not only that do it in half the time at less than 1/10 the cost that they had considered normative and furthermore even do things that they had considered impossible all together launch vehicles that come and land ok and so now of course this was not the first shot out of must the first was the development of the Falcon 9 a cheaper than anyone thought and making the Falcon 9 reusable and now the Falcon Heavy reusable and so on and now they're on their way developing a vehicle to make this obsolete he calls it starship we'll have a few words more to say about that but that's a fully reusable two-stage heavy lift vehicle that is now in development ok so unlike the traditional aerospace companies who would stick with existing systems until they were paid by the government to try to improve them he's more like the people who created this stuff who have been racing to make their previous models ops huit before the next guy makes it obsolete okay and and now he's been emulated he's been emulated by people of his own general type Jeff Bezos the head of Amazon he's got his company called Blue Origin they're working on a reusable two-stage vehicle called new Glen Richard Branson with the Virgin Galactic and in fact this is going on internationally and we'll get to it a little more in a minute and the effects have been pronounced let me give you one important aspect to this space-age began in 1957 with Sputnik from Sputnik in 57 through the moon landing in 1969 the cost of space launch dropped from absolutely astronomical levels to about ten thousand dollars a kilogram to orbit by 1969 where it stood flat for the next 40 years that is from 69 to 2009 the cost of space launch did not drop at all 40 years of stagnation so yes the initial space race there was a lot of progress then but then stagnation however in the past 10 years since 2009 the cost of space launch has dropped by a factor of 5 it's gone from 10,000 a kilogram to 2,000 a kilogram and if starship is successful in meeting expectations it'll drop to less than 700 dollars a kilogram a further factor of 3 okay so this is is astonishing and furthermore this revolution is not being limited to people of Musk's types that is billionaires with discretionary money who are seeking to make history it has now become the province of working engineers so this is rocket lab reaching orbit this is a company started by a working engineer a person with no more means at his disposal than any middle-class person but he got 300 million dollars of investment money behind him and they reached orbit and here's a real kicker for you this is a New Zealand company New Zealand doesn't even have a space program okay New Zealand has reached orbit not through the effort of its government which has no space program but through a private individual and this is real this is happening they've reached orbit now several times it's not science fiction fans talking about what they might do this is happening okay and these companies are all going to compete with each other and I should add by the way that this is fully international in March I witness a launch in China not of the Chinese government rocket but of an entrepreneurial company in China called link space where they launched up several hundred meters and then they came back down and landed right at the center of the pad okay putting it down like a crate of eggs dead center on the pad now they haven't reached orbit yet but probably within two years they will and they're going to be given SpaceX a run for its money and there's there's companies in Ukraine that are doing this so these are all going to compete with each other and as they compete with each other they're going to be driving the price down and the more the price is driven down the more launches they're going to be that's basically supply and demand and furthermore the more launches there are the faster spacecraft technology is going to advance both because there are more missions but also because with the launch price going down spacecraft designers will not need to be as conservative as they have been forced to be it when the for the past half century the wisdom among spacecraft designers has been don't use anything that hasn't been used before okay because if it's going to cost you a billion dollars to reach orbit you don't want to lose the whole mission because you try to get one little part here a little better than the last kind okay no okay but this is a formula for stagnation is like the person who won't see any movies they haven't seen before because you don't want to see a bad movie so you saw The Wizard of Oz when you're a kid it's a good movie right why take chances on anything else the okay so you know it's not really that [Music] encouraging a formula for progress but now that has changed and then there's another revolution that has occurred which at is a result of the advance of electronics and computers and such which is the miniaturization of satellites and we now have these things called cube sets this thing was initiated two decades ago initially just as educational projects so we'll make these little satellites and the students will have some fun doing some electronics and it'll be a blast if they see if it sends back beep-beep now these things are really doing missions in fact two of them went to Mars okay and relayed the entry descent and landing data of the NASA insight probe okay and these little spacecraft here is now possible to build 10 kilogram spacecraft that can do what previously took a thousand kilograms spacecraft to do and they don't cost hundreds of millions of dollars they cost a million dollars two million dollars three million dollars each so now it is possible so they're much cheaper to launch and they're much cheaper to manufacture themselves so that what you're going to have is space missions launch not just by NASA but maybe by Florida Atlantic University or you know medium-sized businesses okay a lot more opportunity to get into space now in 2018 there were a total of about a hundred launches in the world of which SpaceX got 24 which is incredible actually for a single medium-sized company to take a quarter of the world launch market it's that's even a more impressive figure if you realize that half the launches were Russia and China and they were not open to competition so really half of the launch market that you could have competed for they got okay and that's great and because they're driving the price down there's going to be more launches so probably you know within a year or two we're gonna have 200-300 launches a year which is a very radical expansion of the launch market but ok starship it's going for seven hundred dollars a kilogram and and musk by the way you some of you may have seen his presentation in Texas a month ago we claimed he was going to have it reaching orbit in six months now I don't think so okay that's busk time the but two years yeah okay and two years we'll call it three years whatever that's really pretty short in the larger scheme of things it's going to happen so he's going to get the price of launch down to seven hundred dollars a kilogram but the price of air travel is five or ten dollars a kilogram I mean you depending upon how far you're flying your ticket might cost you five hundred dollars a thousand dollars and you with your luggage is 100 kilograms so that's five or ten dollars a kilogram how do we get down into that range with space trouble how do we make space travel the kind of everyday reality that air travel is today okay well I think we need a bigger market than is available from Satellite Launch and I'll tell you what I believe that market is travel global travel going through space you can go anywhere to anywhere on earth in less than an hour now here is how I think about this okay for the past 3,000 years people have made money on the Earth's ocean now some of them have made money by extracting wealth from the ocean itself for example by fishing okay that's been a substantial business and people have made some money doing it and I had a livelihood doing it but far more money has been made not by extracting wealth from the ocean but by using the ocean as a low drag medium of transport from point to point on earth that's been a much bigger business than fishing okay because the ocean connects every port to every port with a relatively low drag medium of transport well space is a global ocean connecting every point on earth to every other point with a zero drag medium of transport now when we had expendable launch vehicles that was inconceivable that we would travel by expendable launch vehicles that's like traveling by expendable airplanes okay it's a non-starter but now that we have reusable launch vehicles like the starship okay or we don't have it now but in the relatively near future when we have it okay starship is two stages the first stage will launch and go up pretty high and pretty fast but then come back and land at the same place where it launched from the other stage then proceeds into near orbit and goes and lands on the other side of the earth where it lands and there is another first stage operational there to send it back so this is for example Los Angeles to Sydney in less than an hour okay now I believe that initially these sorts of things will have to be in coastal cities because these Rockets make a lot of noise and so you'll actually have the launch pad 20 miles offshore and you'll have little ferry planes taking you there and back which will be quicker than the cab that takes you to the airport here but the but that that's how it'll go and okay now starship by the way uses its propellant is methane natural gas and oxygen and the reason why that was chosen I've been a champion of methane oxygen propulsion for a very long time because it's the easiest propellants to make on Mars and if you want to go to Mars and make your propellant to come back that's the propellant to choose and musk also picked up on that for the same reason and it's also a pretty good propellant combination as propellants go but there's another feature to it which is of interest in this context which is that it's the cheapest propellant combination by far now if you're expending the rocket it really doesn't matter whether your fuel costs a dollar a gallon ten dollars a gallon or $100 a gallon because you're throwing away hardware that cost much more than that anyway but the if you are not throwing away the rocket then fuel costs matter just as they do for aircraft and this is the cheapest and I looked at using starship for travel say from Los Angeles to Sydney with say a hundred passengers and I looked at the propellant costs and I said well if we say the whole mission we're going to price it at ten times the propellant cost then you come out with a ticket price of like twenty thousand bucks now I personally have never bought an airplane ticket that cost twenty thousand dollars alright so that's not me but there are people that do in fact that is the current price for a first-class ticket from Los Angeles to Sydney and all those people get for that extra 19 grand is a tablecloth a bigger chair and a couple of treats okay they still have to sit in that airplane for 14 hours okay here you're getting there in less than an hour and you got half an hour of zero gravity in the middle of a flight and a view of the blacks innocent bright stars of space out your window okay that's a better deal and I think it'll happen and after a while we'll get it down to five thousand dollars a ticket and then I'm in for New Zealand and the point here is this is okay we may soon be a 300 satellite launches a year but there are hundreds of intercontinental flights every hour on earth and so if you break into that market we're talking orders of magnitude more flights so these vehicles though are basically orbital vehicles so let's say you're not really interested in going to Australia let's say you want to enjoy space well I say well here's an excursion we're just going to go into space and we'll orbit the earth three times and come back down in five hours same price okay so now you have day rides into space for this kind of money if you want to spend a week in space it doesn't make sense to keep the rocket plane up there a week because it could be making money flying everyday so now you're talking space hotels you know 20 years ago there was a fella there is a fellow named Bob Bigelow who started a space hotel company which didn't make any sense at that time because there was no way to get to it cheaply but shortly there will be so he was ahead of his time but time is catching up to him so that'll happen to orbital research labs orbital industries all this kind of thing but to me I'm interested in space to open up the new worlds on the other side of space how do we become not just a species that exploits immediate near-earth space but actually travels across space to other worlds how to become a spacefaring species how do we go to the moon how do we go to Mars okay now here's a bit of bad news as you may have heard the Trump administration has made a commitment to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 and there is one good part of this if they took that deadline seriously it would have the effect of forcing NASA to accomplish something material within a deadline in this way however that is not what is occurring the the that is siphoned the fact that we could choose a better goal which is Mars and I'll get to that in a minute if we're going to the moon we should go to the moon and what has happened okay nASA has two different modes of operation a purpose-driven mode and a vendor driven mode in a purpose-driven mode they spend money to do things in the vendor driven mode they do things in order to spend money okay those are two alternative approaches to doing business now the Apollo was a purpose-driven program it was not a scientific purpose it was a geostrategic purpose but it definitely had a purpose the purpose was to astonish the world what free people can do and they were going to get to the moon by 1970 and if anybody came in with peripheral programs diversions cetera pushed out of the room okay the science program both then and since that is the Space Telescope's the Rovers on Mars the orbiters to Saturn these are purpose driven programs you can quibble they could have done it this way instead of that way but you know they didn't send the Rovers to Mars in order to give business to the airbag conglomerate okay the fee you know they used airbags on Spirit and Opportunity because that's what the engineers thought was the best idea but since the end of Apollo the human spaceflight program without a definite goal has become vendor driven it has not become about accomplishing rational missions it has become about distributing funds so for instance if you take the shuttle program shuttle flew about 130 times now of those missions there's five of them that I think were really great and absolutely justified five times over which were the launches of Hubble it's repair its upgrade doesn't know there may be ten missions that you could say well they were justifiable they they did something that we could look at and say okay that's worth a mission but over a hundred of those missions were just flying the shuttle to just fly the shuttle okay they were literally doing things in order to spend money okay and in that light the Trump administration has come up with a vendor driven approach to the moon which maximizes cost and schedule nodes here is their plan known as the Artemis program it involves first building a lunar orbiting space station which we certainly don't need to go to the moon but then after you have that here's the plan for each lunar mission which involves four launches five different flight elements six rendezvous operations that's 15 critical items any one of which if it fails it kills the whole mission in contrast Apollo for example involved one launch vehicle three flight elements one rendezvous okay so this is why such complexity well it's like rewriting the school play to give every kid apart okay piece of the action for all the stakeholders and it's not the way to do engineering now however if they take advantage of the entrepreneurial space revolution there's much simpler and more cost-effective ways to do it this is the plan I call moon direct I won't go through it in detail in this talk but it basically uses a few Falcon heavies to get the base going and then after that okay there's one more revolution which is a result of knowledge of the planets in the moon we now know about materials on the Moon and Mars that can be turned into resources in particular on the moon water that can be used to make propellant for the return trip and once you have going for you you don't even need the Falcon heavies anymore you can do the recurring lunar mission with a single launch of the Falcon 9 Falcon 9 is the one that flew 24 times last year in other words twice a month okay and single launch of a falcon 9 to get to the moon means you can go to the moon many times in the year whereas the other plan where four launches for every mission you'd be lucky if you have a mission every couple of years so this is the way to do it and the importance by the way of making use of lunar materials as rapidly as you can is that once you have it you free up your heavy hitters the heavy lift vehicles whether it's the Falcon 9 heavy or even SLS or even starship so they can do other things okay you don't want to while you may need to use your heavy lift vehicle to get the lunar base started you don't want to have to keep using it for that purpose the analogy I give is think Normandy Beach okay you take the beach with your absolute best crack combat divisions but once the beach is taken it can be administered by rear-echelon units and your crack divisions can go and liberate the rest of France okay so it's the same thing here okay you use your heavy lift to get your foothold on the moon and then you make lunar propellant and then you don't need the heavy lift vehicles to sustain the moon base then they can be redirected to where they really should be going which is Mars of course now I think Mars should be the primary goal okay the of our generation in space which is Mars is where the science says Mars is where the challenge is Mars is where the future is Mars is the closest planet that has honored all the resources all the materials needed to support life and therefore technological civilization it is a place that we can explore that the early Mars is very similar to the early Earth so that if the theory is correct that life naturally evolves from chemistry wherever it has an appropriate environment that should have appeared on Mars did it and if so did it evolve into the same kind of life that we have on earth that uses RNA and DNA or are those idiosyncratic methods of conveying information genetically in life you know in other words we use the Latin alphabet so do the Spanish people and the French and the Germans but the Chinese use a totally different alphabet it accomplishes the same function but it works on different principles okay so is life everywhere what life on earth is RNA DNA Latin alphabet life or could you have Chinese life okay you know this is what you find out by going to Mars okay so nothing like that is to be found on the moon okay it's where the challenge is which simply is not equivalent in returning to the moon you're not going to inspire the next generation of youth with replicating things that were accomplished by their grandparents generation and it's where the future is it is where you could develop a new branch of human civilization okay we don't need giant futuristic spaceships to go to Mars this is you know what you're seeing here is the basic concept of what's known as the Mars direct mission plan which is explained in detail in my book the case for Mars and an abbreviated form in the other book but use a heavy lift vehicle first we send to earth return vehicle to Mars okay with no one in it and it makes its return propellant methane and oxygen out of Martian I water and carbon dioxide which is what the atmosphere of Mars is once that propellant has been made the next launch shoots a habitat module to Mars with a crew of four or five maybe six people in it they go and land near the earth return vehicle they use this as their house and base on Mars for a year and a half while they explore the end of that time they get in the earth return vehicle they fly back to earth leaving the habitat behind on Mars so that over time each habitat adds to the base and before you know it you have the beginning of the first human settlement on a new world the germ of a new branch of human civilization on a new world okay and and there's a lot to be said about this beyond Mars is the asteroids you may have heard that there are many asteroids that are quite rich in precious metals now it's clear that you know if all of a sudden you start taking hundreds of billions of dollars worth of platinum and exporting it to earth the price is going to drop but the way this works it won't drop to zero is the people who do this first will make lots and lots of money then other people will rush into the business and as they do the price will will go down and it will go down not to zero but to the point where the business is no more profitable than the average business at which point it will stop expanding that's basically how it works but this will lead to the development of the asteroids and human settlements in the asteroids and then there's the outer solar system now why would we be interested in settling the outer solar system well there's something in the atmosphere of the outer planets which is of great interest it's a memento called helium-3 now you may have heard of helium-3 in conjunction with the moon helium-3 does not exist on earth it does exist in some quantities on the moon although the total lunar resource of helium-3 helium-3 is the ideal fuel for fusion reactors okay and before you get too old fusion reactors oh what's that okay forget it it's not going to happen I'll talk about that in a minute but just for the moment stipulate fusion reactors helium-3 is the ideal fuel for them and it exists on the moon and not on earth but the total energy resource of helium-3 on the moon is comparable to say the resource of fossil fuels on earth it's it's important but it's not exponentially larger than what we have however there's also helium-3 in the atmospheres of the gas giants Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune and the amounts of helium-3 available for mining there is like billions of times more than the total fossil fuel energy of the earth so it's unlimited resource now Jupiter be very hard to mind the atmosphere at Jupiter because it has massive gravity and be hard you can get a spacecraft into the atmosphere of Jupiter but not out however Saturn Uranus and Neptune there's ways to do it and so now but to come to the point you say oh well yeah but that's all fusion power and it's never going to happen well guess what it's happening and it's happening as a result of the revolution in spaceflight how's that Elon Musk is not interested in fusion power Elon Musk doesn't believe in fusion power he's as solar energy advocate but what happened was as a result of musk success in creating reusable launch vehicles a number of heavy funds have looked at this problem and they said wait a second maybe the problem with fusion power was the same problem as reusable launch vehicles maybe the problem is not fundamentally insta technical but institutional and so there's a whole raft of fusion power startups that have gotten heavy investment here's a try alpha energy in California they've gotten five hundred million dollars in investment that's larger than the US government fusion program and these people are moving very fast this is not a sleepy bureaucracy like the Department of Energy because it in private industry in a high-tech R&D company cost as people times time if you want to get it done cheap you have to get it done fast and so the these people are leaping ahead and I'm convinced we're gonna see fusion from one of these companies before the end of the 20s and I have to tell you actually I myself worked in the fusion program in the 80s I was at Los Alamos and I can remember one group lunch we had where the group leader is said to us he said look you know when fusion powers finally developed it's not going to be at a place like Los Alamos or Livermore it's going to be a couple of crackpots working in a garage and we all laughed our hottest fusion powers hard it takes big expensive machines and we're a crackpots are going to get them well if not a couple of crackpots in a garage then a start-up working in a warehouse yes and I think that's how it's going to happen it's gonna happen and the thing about fusion is this fusion is an additional source of energy you can use it to light light bulbs and do all the other stuff but that's not why it's important okay it's useful but there are plenty of ways to light light bulbs you'd be doing with windmills solar panels natural gas coal waterfalls fission whatever okay a lot of ways to light light bulbs but fusion power is not just that it is a new kind of energy and you can do new kinds of things with it in particular fusion Rockets okay and a fusion rocket can obtain an exhaust velocity as 7% the speed of light and it is generally possible to engineer rockets that can get up to twice their exhaust velocity so you're talking about rocket vehicles that can get speeds exceeding 10% the speed of light which is not just a way to get around the solar system pretty fast it is a marginal capability for interstellar travel is Alpha Centauri in 40 years okay which okay it's not an easy trip but some people will do it they'll do it and then finally there's the prospect of terraforming okay this is Mars it's odd it's green and blue okay well this is the Mars of the future okay here's the Valles Marineris and so forth okay and the ocean Mars actually was once a warm and wet planet we can see that from the water erosion features on its surface it could be made so again we need to warm it we know how to do that we're developing quite the expertise in that area and but yes through human engineering efforts I mean if we want to warm a planet on purpose instead of by accident we know how to do it and producing super greenhouse gases though much more effective than carbon dioxide emissions you could warm Mars you could melt the water and and and create a biosphere and there's a lot to be said about this but I think that will do it in my books I outline a general scheme of how it could be done although actually I don't believe it will be done that way because the people who get around to do this are going to know a lot more than me okay you know for me to go through a terraforming plan which I do do it's kind of like Jules Verne designing a moon mission you may know in 1865 Jules Verne wrote a design for a moon mission and he got an awful lot right he long in Florida there was a crew of three they were in a capsule they orbited the moon they landed in the Pacific Ocean and were picked up by a United States Navy warship all has actually happened 104 years later however the method he used to get them into space was heavy artillery so okay give him a break he's a 19th century mind grappling with a 20th century problem I'm a 20th century mind grappling with a 22nd century problem so don't take my terraforming plants too literally because I'm sure the people that pull it off when they read my books they'll say oh how quaint but the but their existence proofs because but the fundamental principle is you see we're gonna do it because we're life and it's the nature of life to take barren environments and transform them that are friendly for the development and propagation of life that's why life on Earth has been a success okay you know it's life that put oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere its life the created soil on the continents and no sooner does any dead place appear on earth you know think of Hawaii coming out of the Pacific Ocean initially it's just dead it's okay but then birds fly over and they drop seeds and the place becomes lusha then Polynesians show up and let loose some pigs so there's something good to eat and then Europeans come and build Swank hotel so there's a nice place to check in this is what we do okay and it would be unnatural if humans is the kind of bird as it were that the biosphere has evolved to take the seeds of life from here and transport them to barren islands out there and bring them to life did not do that so we're gonna do it now so that's some of the things we're going to do and that's some of how we're going to do them but now I want to talk about why it's imperative that we seize this opportunity and there's a number of reasons that I'm going to give and they include for the knowledge for our survival for the challenge and for the future okay now for the knowledge well this is one that NASA does talk about and with justification so astronomy okay space is the best place to do astronomy for sure and astronomy has led our knowledge of physics we learned about the laws of gravity and there are four classical physics to astronomy much of electromagnetism through astronomy relativity through astronomy nuclear fusion through astronomy and the reason why we learned so much through astronomy is because the universe is the biggest lab there is and it does all sorts of experiments for us and if you go up and look you can learn a lot and there's a lot that is left to be learned and anyway here what you're looking that's the astronomer Sara Seager who some of you may have heard of she's giving the punchline of the recent Kepler mission looking for planets and it found thousands of them and the conclusion from this mission is one in five stars has an earth-sized planet in its habitable zone that's the punchline one in five stars there's 400 billion stars in the Milky Way counts that's 80 billion stars in our galaxy have an earth-sized planet habitable zone we're living in a living universe ok and then you know new laws of physics there's things we do not understand about physics including the most fundamental question of all is why are the laws of physics what they are in particular why are they so fine-tuned to allow for the development of life because believe me if they are a little bit different life would be impossible and there's no good explanation ok and if we understand what caused the laws of physics to be what they are who knows what what powers over nature that would give us what creative powers ok and so on and also there's the question of biology I alluded to possibly discovering new types of life on Mars which means new kinds of biotechnology and all that that implies there's for our survival ok now here's something a lot of people don't realize about which is where it's located the earth is in space okay this is this is a fundamental fact the earth is in space and everything in space is moving around and crashing into each other periodically because it doesn't have good traffic control okay and these spaceships have repeatedly caused mass extinctions on the earth of course the most famous is the extinction of dinosaurs there have been many others okay now these are some of the big ones okay there's the dinosaur one right there but this is not just ancient history this is the past 25 years in fact December 18th 2018 we had an impact over the Bering Sea 150 kiloton so it's 10 times the force of the hiroshima bomb went off okay now we have to deal with this now I do not have sympathy for the argument that has been advanced by some people that we need to go to space so that if the earth is destroyed by an asteroid will be some survivors somewhere else to me that that is a repulsive argument okay we're not going into space to desert the earth we're going into space to protect the earth and it is by becoming spacefaring you have the capability of deflecting these things but only by being spacefaring because especially the more massive ones the only way to deflect them is to deflect them when they are far out so just a little push makes a Miss okay so this is another reason why we have to take this on for the challenge this is a graph that shows the number of stem that science technology engineering and math graduates in the United States during the period from 1960 to 1990 and what you see is here's 1960 here's 1970 these are the Apollo and look at this the number of graduates doubles and in the advanced degrees it triples and then as soon as the Apollo program is ended it flattens and this is actually a decrease because it leases absolute numbers and the population is increasing okay why does this happen simple it's because youth loves adventure and a bold space program makes science the great adventure and so the Apollo program caused millions of boys to go into science and we have benefited from their efforts ever since now I happen to be of that generation I went into science because of Sputnik and Apollo and all of that and I happened to be somewhat unusual in my cohort and that I actually ended up doing space most of the rest of them went off and built Silicon Valley and that's why they're a lot richer than me but they're the people that gave you this okay now a bold space program today in my view would have a much bigger effect than this because the science and engineering professions today are open not just two boys but two girls and two minorities in a way that simply was not the case in the 1960s so not only would you have millions a little boy mad scientists making rocket fuel and robots in the basement to the great distress of their parents you will have little girl plant scientists which is frightening but the but there it is and and and and that by the way if you're looking for what is the near-term but if what is why you know II you know what about the here and now what about our needs intellectual capital is how you address all these needs it is how you improve national defense national prosperity health care all these things are best addressed to the development of intellectual capital and there's no more pout you're not going to get more people into science by testing the kids to death with more standardized tests okay the you know but this will do it and then finally I want to talk about the future now there's two futures I want to talk about one is the far future the 500-year future the grand future which is if we do what we can do in our time yes there will be new branches of human civilization on Mars the asteroids and planets orbiting hundreds of other stars and they will have new cultures new forms of social organization they'll have made numerous contributions to invention and technology they'll have created literature's languages all sorts of things and that is something grand and a magnificent and if you have it in your power to create something grand and magnificent men you should okay so that's the one thing but I want to shift gears and I want to talk about the more immediate future and the immediate future that we hear about is one of threat global warming resource exhaustion asteroid impact well these things are issues I won't deny him but none of these are what caused the great disasters of the 20th century the great disaster the 20th century were not caused by climate change or resource exhaustion or asteroid impacts they were caused by something else entirely which were bad ideas and in particular one bad idea in a number of different formats and what that one bad idea was is that there isn't enough to go around that there's only so much here and there isn't enough to go around and sooner or later we're gonna have to fight over it so for example see this book here Germany in the next war is written by Friedrich von Bern Hardy one of the chief intellectuals of the German General Staff international best in 1912 okay and what he said is well there's only so much here and as far as Eurasia is concerned you either we the Germans are gonna get it or the Russians are gonna get it ah and so we're gonna have to have it out with them sooner or later should it be sooner or later well clearly sooner because we need to knock them out before they industrialize so two years later they take advantage of the pretext of the assassination of the Archduke to initiate World War 1 which is the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century because it's set in motion the forces did the rest 1939 Hitler even more hysterically the laws of existence require uninterrupted killing so that the better may live Germany needs living space bunk okay it was bunk deadly bunk but bunk why how can I say it well they never needed living space Germany today is smaller than the Third Reich it has a larger population and a vastly higher standard of living why not through successfully acquiring other people's land and cattle okay and and so forth and stealing what they had they were unsuccessful in that venture no it's through the advance of Science and Technology and some of those contributions were made by German but many more were made by people of many other nations including groups that they were trying to exterminate okay so there was all nonsense okay but it drove a catastrophe and then today I can tell you for a fact because I have spoken to them myself that there are people in the national security establishment in Washington DC who believe that war with China is inevitable why because there's 1.3 billion of them and if they develop said they have a living standard comparable to us so they all have cars there won't be enough oil in the world okay and you can bet your bottom dollar that there are people in Beijing there are counterparts who look at this problem from the opposite side of the chessboard and think exactly the same sort of thing about us and if this kind of thinking is allowed to prevail here's going to be war okay unnecessary but catastrophic war much worse than the 20th century worse cuz we have much more effective weaponry now this is a nonsensical point of view okay it is not true that there is only so much to go around the theory that there's only so much to go around breaks down to the Malthusian theory which says the more people there are the lower the standard of living is going to be because they won't be as much to go around now this is counter as this graph shows okay here is the world's population here is GDP per capita in inflation-adjusted dollars and what you can see is as the world's population has gone up the standard of living has gone up how's that possible I'll tell you how it's possible it's possible because product per capita is equal to productivity per capita and productivity per capita is determined by technology and technology is created by inventors and the more people there are and the higher their standard of living the more inventions there are and inventions are cumulative okay and that is why this has occurred okay but convincing people of this is very difficult you know in in in 1972 there was a very prestigious group some of the older people here people my age were the older people now remember the Club of Rome who this was a bunch of very prestigious people and they had a computer which made them quite authoritative they could not be wrong and they predicted that we would run out of everything by the year 2000 they did the calculation these are the oil reserves this is how much we're using each year it will all be gone by the year 2000 this is the copper it will be gone by 1997 this is the zinc it will be gone by 2002 etc etc and so forth now the year 2000 has come and gone and none of these predictions have come true okay fine but and the reason why none of them came true is what is an is not a resource is determined by technology there's no such thing as a natural resource there's only natural raw materials it is resourceful people who turn materials into resources but here's the punchline about 15 years ago the gang held a reunion and they actually published the the Proceedings of this conference it was called the limits to growth revisited and in the procedure he said look a lot of people think we were wrong because none of our predictions came true okay but we were right we have to be right because there's only so much to go around the earth is finite we're using things it's all gonna get used up sooner or later yeah we missed a few things you know about you know they discovered oil here we didn't realize that was gonna happen and blah blah you know we have to be right they were wrong okay and similar predictions made at every point in history have been wrong and but convinced but they seem it seems self-evident that fundamentally they have to be right and to me the problem is like convincing someone who does not know mathematics that there's an infinite number of points in a line segment okay if you know math you know that there's actually an infinite number of points in a line segment say between 1 & 2 on the number line if you don't know math that doesn't seem to be possible but it is ok so you really have to understand things a bit more deeply to get that however anyone can see that a line that goes infinitely in both directions without end has an infinite number of points that is quite clear to to anyone and so the issue is this is is we're not going to Mars in order to get oil from Mars ok we'll probably get inventions from Martian society which will be a group of technologically adept people in a frontier environment where they'll be inventing all kinds of stuff for their own use and licensing on earth and contributing to progress but no we're not going to get oil from Mars or you know so forth but what we're gonna get is proof that it is not true that there isn't enough to go around that there's only so much here because it'll become clear to people that the earth is not limited because it comes with an infinite sky and it's wide open and that's the case for space [Applause] so I'm delighted to take questions thank you very much dr. Zook that was an excellent talk we have some microphones set up on each side Torian if you'd like to come forward with your question please do so this gentleman in the front right here we'd like to come forward and ask your question how you doing sir thank you for coming out really appreciate that my name is Jake my secretary is here as well we're with the aerospace experimental Association here at FAU and you mentioned cube SATs we're actually starting next semester launching the CubeSat launch initiative at FAU with your experience is there any tips that you can provide for starting out for designing and launching a satellite hmm okay test a lot okay kid a vacuum chamber test you know especially the thermal issues the you know and also seek advice from others who have done CubeSat projects okay thank you professor right in the case of terraforming where we're changing Mars in if you relate this to I guess the idea of invasive species of how we're changing the natural habitat how do you think that changing space and in that relation do you think that could do more harm than good and what is your opinion on that well I'm not quite sure what you're getting at but let me bring up what the an argument that some people make and my counter to it okay there are some people who say that if we're altering the environment of Mars we're committing an act of environmental sacrilege and isn't that wrong well look if I came to you and said why don't we take the earth that make it like Mars you would say whether you're an environmentalist or you know hardcore developer you would say that's ridiculous that's insanity uh you're gonna take this wonderful lush earth with all its different life forms and turn it into a place like Mars there's a desert with maybe some bacteria living in the groundwater underground that's that that's criminal and I would agree with that assessment so if turning the earth into a desolation like Mars is a horrible act then taking a place that is a desolation like Mars and turning it into a living earth is a wonderful act it's an act of creation something isn't wrong just because people are doing it you know I mean that isn't a living world better than a dead world I think it is and one question that Kant I that came up was if we are to go to Mars and inhabit the place and eventually you know bring in you know plants and other life-forms to inhabit Mars as well how would we go about or how would there be any evolutional evolutionary changes for the life here to adapt to the life you know environment on Mars yeah that's an excellent point there certainly would be because even if you gave Mars an atmosphere and you warmed it and you had liquid water and all this Mars would still be quite different than Earth for instance it would always have 1/3 gravity so if you take species from Earth and bring them to Mars if we take because we will will will go with ourselves and our domesticated animals and many non domesticated animals raccoons will come to Mars you can bet on it the and [Music] but in a new environment they will adapt in new way so when an animal moves into a new environment it reacts yttrium eise's for the new conditions so you will get speciation and and I think this is a good thing I like to see more new species of things out there in the universe and to give animals and plants an opportunity to create new species and eventually of course well the first thing that will change among humans will be culture ok that will happen away before genetic change occurs go to a new place start a new society there'll be new cultures developed impossibly quite a few new ones because Mars is big enough for more than one society the but eventually especially as humans go out to the stars and go to many different kinds of planets some with less gravity some with more gravity I believe that humans will speciate as well and so you know if you watch Star Trek ok you see these alien races that are all pretty much like humans except I'll have pointy ears or blue skin or this or that ok and it's really and they can even have relationships and children with each other right like Spock ok but now it's really extremely unlikely that any genuinely alien species could you know shack up with a human and and half children um but the if you think of the far future when Humanity has gone to the stars and diversified so that these races are not actually alien races but different varieties of humans that have differentiated out in space perhaps you might see something like that and who knows meet someone you like on match week properly yes not through intention but I mean come on don't get there yes what is your take on earth becoming like its sister Venus and how we can avoid it and if it's unavoidable and is that one of the reasons why you want to go to Mars okay I think it's extremely unlikely that earth becomes Venus through answer of pro genital wart erm that is for the next thousand years or anything like that because it has it has a lot of negative feedback to resist that however although there could be other consequences not as drastic as that that make it worth avoiding but the in the long term in five hundred million years the Sun is the Sun is continually getting warmer the Sun you know at the early history of the solar system was only about seventy percent as strong as it is today and and then 1890 and so forth and if the Sun gets to about a hundred and ten that is about ten percent more strong than it is now it will overwhelm any negative feedbacks that the biosphere has against global warming and yeah we could become too hot for life so that's a more distant prospect but certainly in the ultimate sense either we become spacefaring or we become extinct okay I'd like there's a question in the past the space programs were very much driven by like political competition between for example Russia and the United States for the ban in space and first to the moon and so on you're describing many things that with imagination could be accomplished how much do you think they'll be limited just by a nation for example wanting to be the first on Mars and that's it and we'll do all these other things that you're talking about beyond that well I hope I don't offend the sensibilities of people here if I offer my opinion that we've had a deterioration in the quality of the political class in this country the fee and I'd be delighted if they were to get it together enough to commit to send humans to Mars and do it as they did Apollo ok but the generation that did Apollo that is a political leadership were the same people or the younger brothers of the people that won world war two and they knew how to pull together across party lines to accomplish great projects where there was winning the war the Manhattan Project the interstate highway system or going to the moon and that that seems to that virtue seems to have faded and this senility on their part has actually been one of the driving forces that created a need for this entrepreneurial revolution you know in the 1960s looking for an entrepreneurial Savior like musk would have they wouldn't even have occurred to anyone because the government was doing such a great job in pushing the frontier in space now you say whoa Elon where are you please the so know with the entrepreneurial revolution we're gonna see a much more multifaceted space program because for instance musk is focused on Mars Bezos is focused on the moon okay and if there's a hundred different players focused on different objectives then there'll be a hundred different objectives pursuit how was Mars made okay well I wasn't there at the time but but Mars to the best of our knowledge was formed along with the other planets at the same time as the rest of the solar system that it's believed that there was a whirling cloud of gas which condensed the biggest part of it condensed at the center to form the Sun and other parts condense to form planets at different distances from the Sun and it's not really well understood exactly why the set of planets that we have were formed in the sizes that they formed that and where they formed that used to be that people thought they knew because they had a pharaoh well of course we'll have the rocky planets in the movie early in and the gas planets on the out because that seemed to be the pattern and they had all sorts of explanations on why it must be that way but then the Kepler telescope discovered thousands of other solar systems that were arranged every which way and so now all those theories are out the window so it could be that there isn't a rule and except for the fact that planets do certainly form and we also see that every big object in our solar system has little planets going around it for instance Jupiter has over 60 moons and so does Saturn and Uranus and Neptune have have you know a dozen or so each and of course the earth has one and Mars has two so it's pretty much the case that every large object in our solar system gets other objects going around it and of course the Sun is the biggest object so Mars was formed at the same time as the earth but here's an interesting thing because it's smaller Mars cooled down faster than the earth so that you know the when earth was first formed it was all molten it was too hot for life and started cooling down so did Mars Mars cooled first okay so life would have had an opportunity to evolve on Mars before it appeared on earth so they were there first hey doing my question actually has a little bit to do with the cooling down of Mars first you had mentioned terraforming on a planetary scale potentially on other planets like Mars and hinted at our superior knowledge at warming planets so I was my curiosity is in planetary protection against like solar radiation for example how would we do that on such a large scale because I know that out a smaller scale with the bases we'd be using water filled walls and things of that nature to dissipate that is there anything I mean how would you be protected on Mars against radiation correct yeah well if you thickened Mars's atmosphere that's a lot of protection you know the main thing protecting you from space radiation is not the Earth's magnetic field it's the Earth's atmosphere you have standing on top of you right now in terms of air a mass equivalent to 33 feet of water you got 33 feet of water sitting on top of you here that's what's shielding you against cosmic rays not the Earth's magnetic field and and if you had a third of that if you had ten feet of water that would still be at am good shield so if if we create an atmosphere on Mars that would create a very substantial seal to the surface even the thin atmosphere that Mars has right now which is only 1% as thick as the Earth's atmosphere um well 1% of 33 feet is 4 inches um so that's like 4 inches of water but that's looking straight up okay if you [Music] take the average over all the angles that things can come into you from different directions of the sky that to pi star radians of the sky it actually is like two feet of water which means actually that on Mars while there is cosmic rays do you make it to the surface solar flares don't so but certainly once you terraform it it'll be a massive shield so I know there's a lot of good questions out there I'm sorry we can't take them all right now I want to save some time for the book signing and dr. Zubrin will be in the back there signing his book case from Mars and the case for space let's thank him one more time for an excellent talk [Applause]

Channel: FAU Charles E. Schmidt College of Science

Views: 16,037

Rating: 4.8777776 out of 5

Keywords: robert zubrin, zubrin, human mission to mars, the case for mars, the case for space, fau college of science, florida atlantic university, fau charles e. schmidt college of science, fau science, mars, space, space exploration, elon musk, space x, jeff bezos, blue origin

Id: 4wUhwQpWnwo

Length: 78min 1sec (4681 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2019