Is There More Out There? Analyzing the Benefits of Settling in Space With Christopher Wanjek

Alexander McCaig (00:10):
Hello, Chris. Thanks for joining me on Turtle Cast. I wanted to bring you on, one, because I nerd out a little bit about space and there's many others, and you wrote a phenomenal book. Not because it speaks about space exploration, but you're reasonable.

Christopher Wanjek (00:28):
Thank you.

Alexander McCaig (00:29):
I think that's the most attractive thing. It's the most attractive thing for me when I read Space Fairers is that there's reasonable steps that gets to a certain point in why we shouldn't rush certain other things. You've compounded this on the history of the space race itself, and how it's gone from a very war driven economic machine to a very privatized now pseudo economic focused machine of human achievement, like what's the next step for us.

Christopher Wanjek (01:00):
Yes.

Alexander McCaig (01:01):
So I think that the bridges you made between history, how it's developed and where it's brought us now are phenomenal. Then from that, the feasibility, when we do go to choose to live on the moon or live on Mars, or hang out above the clouds on Venus, whatever it might be. I hope I'm getting this right.

Christopher Wanjek (01:19):
You got it. [crosstalk 00:01:22].

Alexander McCaig (01:24):
The options are there. The question is how do we get there.

Christopher Wanjek (01:27):
Right.

Alexander McCaig (01:27):
So where I want to start is with you. Chris, what was the draw for you? How is it that you even get to the focus of space and your own personal history, your own background personally and professionally, that brought you to that point to, I got to put a book together and I got to talk about the reasonable trajectory for how we launched this thing off. No pun intended.

Christopher Wanjek (01:49):
Okay. Well, it's kind of a funny answer because I wasn't that kind of space enthusiasts. I worked at NASA for 10 years and it was a great experience, and I had a rather envious title there. I was the senior writer for the structure and evolution of the universe. The pay didn't match that, but nonetheless, that was my title, senior writer for the structure and evolution of the universe. Big concepts of big bang, black holes, gravitational ways. That was my beat when I was working at NASA. So then Harvard came to me, Harvard University Press, they were starting a book series. They said, well, listen, you can have any subject you won in the universe, and you think that would be pretty broad, but they were all taken. Big bang, someone was writing it. Gravitational way, someone was writing it.

Christopher Wanjek (02:40):
So I came up with this idea of colonizing space, which was honestly down on my list because I didn't see it as very practical. If you talk to astrophysicists, they will see that this space colonization is so complicated and so tedious and difficult to do that. It's not even worth discussing. We're not at that point. So that was never on my radar screen. But then I started reading it and I had these incredible arches. I read Robert Dubrin, Case for Mars. Yeah, we can do this. Then I read some things from astrophysicists. No, we're not going to do this. Then it goes up and down, depending on who you're reading. I thought to myself exactly what you're saying, well, let's approach this rationally. There has to be, not necessarily a middle ground, but there has to be a practical way to approach this.

Christopher Wanjek (03:34):
I'm a skeptic by nature. One of my early books was Bad Medicine in which I looked about misconceptions in medicine and things that just don't quite work. So I was very skeptical about these claims that we could live on these places. I found that a lot of the people's stance was, well, it doesn't break laws of physics. Therefore, we can do it. What was never addressed was the why we would do this. We got these things like it's in our DNA to explore. Well, that gets you out there, but it doesn't keep you there. When I give these presentations, I like to talk about Mount Everest. Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (04:11):
George [inaudible 00:04:12].

Christopher Wanjek (04:12):
Exactly. Why did we climb it? Because it's there. We're not living on Mount Everest. We're not setting up ... There's no schools up there. No one's working up there, but there's not very practical. That's what you have to think about with the moon and Mars. Yeah, we'll get there. But what would actually keep us there? What would be the economic and emotional motivations, just like you and me and our families coming to United States. There were economic and emotional motivations that brought us here. Not simply because someone invented a boat and likewise, what would cause these migrations? That's what I wanted to investigate. What would keep you there? There has to be some economics in place and philosophy in place in addition to the basic engineering.

Alexander McCaig (05:04):
Let's touch on that. There's three reasons you stated that somebody would want to take this sort of risky approach. One is for reasons of deity or religious reasons, right?

Christopher Wanjek (05:17):
Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (05:17):
That's numero uno. The second one is war. If China says we're going to be on Mars or the moon with a base by this time and you have this exact line, I think. We're going to be on there a year earlier than the US.

Christopher Wanjek (05:31):
Yes.

Alexander McCaig (05:33):
Then the third one was economic reasons. So maybe we find some sort of material efficiency by going to mine and asteroid that has a massive amount of titanium. Much more than we would have from a supply here on earth. But just getting to that specific point really is a tough place to get to. So fundamentally, the simplest one for a political sense for people to get behind is pretty much the war based one. That's how I kind of read it. It worked in the fifties, did it not?

Christopher Wanjek (06:09):
Yeah, sure.

Alexander McCaig (06:11):
With the ice race.

Christopher Wanjek (06:12):
Yeah. We're not on the moon.

Alexander McCaig (06:15):
No, we're not.

Christopher Wanjek (06:16):
We got to the moon, but didn't keep us on the moon because it sets you up as just a race. I won.

Alexander McCaig (06:21):
Yeah.

Christopher Wanjek (06:22):
That's it. I won. It didn't set you up for permanency on the way.

Alexander McCaig (06:29):
Right. When I think about this, Chris, and tell me if I'm wrong ... when you go to make these sort of explorations, there's a lot technology that also has to be built that gets you to that specific place.

Christopher Wanjek (06:40):
Right.

Alexander McCaig (06:42):
I'll use a basic metaphor. George Mallory was climbing Everest in britches. I don't care how much bees wax you put on your britches. It's really not going to block the ice and the wind and all that other stuff that's going to give you frosted and kill you.

Christopher Wanjek (06:56):
Right.

Alexander McCaig (06:57):
But we developed over time companies like North Face that allow us to make these things more feasible.

Christopher Wanjek (07:04):
Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (07:04):
Or during the Manhattan project, that sort of technology eventually down the road leads us to things like cat scans. So getting there isn't really the big thing. It's all the technology developed to that point to actually it gets us to that point. So I feel like there's such a focus on the fact that we have to have a habitable moon base. This'll be a solve for us. It's great to get here. We want to do it. It's a human achievement, but really it's actually more beneficial for what goes on in our planet alone. Because if I go up, say to Mars, I'm going to need phenomenal engineering for close systems where we do great amounts of recycling and hydro cropping and all that other stuff for our greenhouse to grow these plants, but do it efficiently and recyclable stuff. These things will help us learn in very strenuous environments, how we can teach us in our own environment where we're currently lacking that sort of technology and insight. Am I right about that?

Christopher Wanjek (08:00):
You nailed it. On Mars, you can't open the window.

Alexander McCaig (08:04):
No, you can't.

Christopher Wanjek (08:05):
You can't open the window. There's no airing things out. It all has to be 100% recycled. We haven't succeeded in that.

Alexander McCaig (08:13):
No. Frankly, I find this interesting. Earth is a relatively close system.

Christopher Wanjek (08:18):
Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (08:18):
We do a poor job of may maintaining it. Then people want to jump from this planet and then create these artificial closed systems and think that we're going to do a phenomenal job at it, but you start to fill those gaps on in between. I would love if you could explain what sort of, in the simplest format, the logical process you see for our future and the timeline for how we get from point A, earth, to point B, the moon, just the moon as the first example.

Christopher Wanjek (08:44):
Okay. Sure. Lot of babysitting, baby stepping and I think what we're seeing right now, it's hard to connect this to the moon, but with Bezos and Richard Branson "going into space," I think that's a fine first step. Cause it's starting to cultivate interest and creating a new market for very wealthy people to go straight up and straight down. It's really nothing really significant about that. They're not in orbit, as you might know. They're just going up 50 to 60 miles, which is just breaking into space, and then coming back down. But there's so much interest in this and if they continue to lower the price for those tickets, you're going to have a new kind of industry of space tourism. I think that's a fine step to get more people into this business and to make the rocket launches that much more efficient.

Christopher Wanjek (09:46):
That's what Elon Musk has been brilliant at. The efficiency of the rocket launch and bringing the cost of payload down from $20,000 a kilo down to about $2,000 a kilo. So he's done ... That's a factor too. He's done tremendous work in that, making things cheaper and getting more people interested in it. So that was a great first step. I think a next good step is to have people in low earth orbit like the international space station, which if you read in the book, I'm not a fan of whatsoever. But there are other clever ideas like what's done by [inaudible 00:10:29] Aerospace, if they can remain open through this pandemic. But they're going to launch these inflatable expandable units. Instead of the price tag of billions of dollars, which is what the International Space Station is, over 100 billion for a few tens of millions of dollars, he could launch these up and people could visit them on various rockets run by other companies through Blue Origin and maybe not Version Galactic, but SpaceX.

Christopher Wanjek (10:58):
So it's that business to business happening in space, which is always great to lower the cost, that kind of competition. Then you could have ordinary, very wealthy people living in lower earth orbit for a week or a month, again, building up the excitement and learning what is possible in these closed environments.

Christopher Wanjek (11:22):
Then we could go back to the moon right now if we put enough money to it.

Alexander McCaig (11:29):
Sure.

Christopher Wanjek (11:31):
I think the logical way back to the moon was not this still on the books, 2024 deadline set by the Trump administration. No one ever believed that, and eventually it's going to just fade away. But not only was it too rushed to get back to the moon with people, it didn't serve any long term purpose. It brought you back to the space race, and just getting people there just to dance around and plan a flag. But if we can be systematic about this and start building the infrastructure now concurrently, as we're getting more people into lower earth orbit, and set up robotic devices that can build the infrastructure, some inflatable domes on the moon. Now that we have inflatable domes in space, get them on the moon and get some robots to cover them over with the regular stuff for the radiation protection, and set this up in the next 10 years so that we can take a rocket and get ready to live there indefinitely.

Alexander McCaig (12:38):
This is sort of my focus here. Rockets, they're great. They're fun, but they're really not efficient.

Christopher Wanjek (12:46):
No.

Alexander McCaig (12:48):
It's like, I have a rowboat and I have all these big, heavy rocks in it. And I have to throw the rock out as fast as I can to then hopefully generate enough momentum to move this boat forward that already has rocks on it.

Christopher Wanjek (13:01):
Right.

Alexander McCaig (13:02):
I don't have an infinite capacity of that energy. So to fly there, you're going to have to go to probably the moon first and then make another jump over to Mars or wherever else you're going. It takes a huge body of time. So you have this massive increase in risk because of essentially the energy problem that we currently have. So when I read your book, we have a massively growing population. That's obvious. There's only so much airable land we have on earth and we waste a lot of our food. By the time we build an energy system on earth, the population's already outgrown it because it takes three to seven years to even build that energy infrastructure into a country or that area.

Christopher Wanjek (13:48):
Hmm.

Alexander McCaig (13:49):
So we're in this sort of constant deficit and space be the solve for us only if we can fix, in my mind, the energy issue here on earth. Fusion's a great proponent for it, but also what's the sort of the fact of propulsion systems actually moving large amounts of mass efficiently. That's a hard thing to do. It's like cattle in a field. Mm. I'm a farmer with a thousand acres. How do I efficiently move a 2000 pound bull from all the way on this side of the ranch to the other side of the ranch? It's so much energy, so much time. I have to physically move them, but they also have to graze and go to the bathroom and create waste before I get there.

Alexander McCaig (14:35):
So when I think about ourselves, I think there's been a lack of focus on the actual energy systems themselves. I think that people are reappropriating technologies like rocketry. Yes, I love the vision of being on other planets, but then you also have energy deficits when you get to those planets. What happens when a severe storm comes by rips off the solar panels, right? It's not like we're going to be launching micro nuclear reactors that we use in some of our satellites. It's like, you have to do something that's actually feasible when you get there. But the thing is, you're going to have to test it here on earth first. So I feel like we're almost getting ahead of ourselves. How do you feel about that?

Christopher Wanjek (15:13):
Yeah. A lot of what you say is true. There's going to be short term solutions and then long term solutions with the energy problem, say on Mars. I think we can get by for a year mission, but if we actually want to be there permanently in some way, whether it's science bases or some people living there all the time, we would have to come up with a new kind of energy source, because you certainly can't rely on, on solar.

Alexander McCaig (15:44):
You can't.

Christopher Wanjek (15:46):
I do think people are thinking about this because what's nice about Mars is that everything we need to live is there, but in forms we don't necessarily want. So the whole atmosphere is carbon dioxide, but you can take that, add some hydrogen and convert that to methane. That could be a major fuel, natural gas. That could be a predominant fuel for moving things on Mars. On the moon, you can, I think, rely on solar all the time, because there are no dust clouds like there are on Mars. So, in the south pole region, or the north pole region, there's these areas of near constant sunlight because the planet isn't tilted. So all year round, it's getting this light from the sun coming from the top and the bottom, and you could set up solar panels there and have constant energy.

Christopher Wanjek (16:51):
It's only when you move to the equator that you're going to have light only half a month, two weeks of light, two weeks of darkness, then you're going to have to come up with some battery solutions. I don't know if it's directly addressing your question, but even on the moon there's uranium. You could have nuclear power plants on the moon. That would be very difficult to set up, but the raw material is there to go nuclear on the moon and you don't have to worry about the waste because the moon is one giant pit.

Alexander McCaig (17:27):
That's also an interesting question. What do you do with waste? How do you determine, okay, so I have a growing population. I have energy issues, but I still have to grow food. But then I also have to set up the aspects of the infrastructure itself to live. Before I can even start growing the food, I'm going to have to have many, many missions going there, dropping things off so that we have enough raw material resources and whatever sort of stored energy to build these things together. I know that, even during the ice race we had here on earth, setting up nuclear reactors in the Arctic or Antarctica was a very difficult task, especially some of the earlier mobile ones that we had, that the US set up, and that took a lot of manpower.

Alexander McCaig (18:16):
But when you describe the situations of people living in those environments currently right now doing research studies, whether it be Russia or ... I think you said New Zealand or Iceland, they have skeleton crews. Sometimes they don't get fresh food. So it's like, I know what it is trying to run a company, trying to keep people happy and do these other things. I could not imagine what it's like grabbing a group of individuals to say that you're going to go to an extremely high risk environment. There's going to be massive energy deficits. There's no guarantees we're going to get you these resources. Oh, but we need you to build this stuff.

Christopher Wanjek (18:47):
Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (18:47):
So how is it that you ... Chris, how would you incentivize somebody? How would you sort of ... do you have to hire a bunch of psychopaths to do the job? What is it? Who's the right sort of human character that fits that bill?

Christopher Wanjek (19:00):
Oh, they're out there apparently. I think Antarctica, like you described this, the perfect test area. I've met some of these guys that go down there. They're totally into the adventure. They're a bit crazy and they're willing to take this on. Phil Saddler comes to mind. He lives out in Arizona now, but he's the one who decided to build the first greenhouses down there, first at McMurdo Station because he's going through the winter and it's like, I need some lettuce. I need some crunchy food or something. So, he took it upon himself to start building these kind of things on their own. They're wacky engineer types and it's just in their blood to have that sense of adventure. He brought that concept down to the south pole, as well as building greenhouses down there to grow year round under lights.

Christopher Wanjek (19:54):
So I do think those kind of Mavericks are out there to set things up, to MacGyver the situation until civilization follows later. I think that's always been the case with human development. When you look at the United States, of course you had the Native Americans, but the first be people came over weren't necessarily the pilgrims, but you had these traders, the people getting pellets and such from deep into Canada and the Northern part of North America and bringing out. These guys were purely into adventure, living on their own, and these people still exist today.

Alexander McCaig (20:33):
Yeah, no, I think you're right about that. Actually, you are absolutely right about that, but to consider one aspect of it. Okay, say we've built our system. Say we're on the moon, we're on Mars, or floating around in a low earth orbit in a balloon. What happens when a foreign biological substance shows up?

Christopher Wanjek (20:55):
Can I go back to the previous point though? I just wanted to say one more thing that came to mind.

Alexander McCaig (21:00):
Yeah, absolutely. Go for it.

Christopher Wanjek (21:03):
With Antarctica, I think that's a good example of how long things take and how that can apply to the moon. Cause we got to the Antarctica around 1900, but it took about 50 years before the technology developed for us to actually be there permanently. Then another 50 years until you started adding these kind of luxuries, like energy that works all the time and crunching food in greenhouses. So that's a long process, obviously didn't happen overnight. When people complain about how we're not back on the moon, it's been 50 years and coincidentally Antarctica took that long. We go there, 50 years later, the technology developed. Maybe we can go back and forth a little easily now and start setting up the infrastructure that allows us to live there with some element of comfort. So I wanted to add that, that it's a step by step process that it takes time unfortunately.

Alexander McCaig (21:59):
Yeah. I think what you're speaking about, Chris, and we'll jump into my other comment about the biological factors in a second, but things have a natural evolution. Everybody wants to jump past the steps, but the steps are actually required. If we don't build the right fundamental bases, we're taking on risks that don't need to be there. That's why I think you said Nixon, he's like, oh, the oxygen tank blows up. We're not doing this ever again. Totally emotional response. I'm not doing it. We've pushed it too hard. But I think that, if we skip the fundamentals, even solving them here on our own planet, it's going to be very difficult for us to solve them in very high risk environments outside of this current closed system we're on.

Christopher Wanjek (22:42):
Hmm. Absolutely.

Alexander McCaig (22:47):
Say for instance, how we handle epidemic, plagues, things of that nature. They spread very quickly. We have high populations, but it's not the fact that the population's high. It's that people live so close together and we're interconnected. So say I send you up there and some sort of biological contaminant comes into one of our stations. The rate in which that spreads, it could shut down the whole operation immediately.

Christopher Wanjek (23:08):
Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (23:09):
Then how are we going to know? Because those plants are spinning. So there's going to be a point where information cuts off from the radio signal and people could be essentially dead for a bit and it's just floating around and everything getting in NASA. Everything's great. Everything's looking good. We haven't heard anything bad. You know what I mean?

Christopher Wanjek (23:24):
No news is good news.

Alexander McCaig (23:27):
Right. So how do you look at the biological factors of this? Cause I know that there are certain contaminants that do float around in space, certain fungi, certain microbiomes. What is it that that poses as an actual threat? Is there any data that can support or say that maybe we should focus on fixing that here first before going out?

Christopher Wanjek (23:51):
Right. Well, yeah, there has been unintentional experiments on the International Space Station. People have brought up colds and viruses and everyone gets the cold. There's no way to avoid that. Now COVID comes down and you have intense quarantining and all these tests to make sure no going to the International Space Station is bringing anything contagious. That was a hard ... it was an obvious lesson to learn, but it was a hard lesson to learn because people had been getting sick. Then other contaminations can happen with the food supply you're sending. Of course there could be E coli on there. So they have to be in incredibly careful with what the biologics that they're sending to these places. I think that's the main risk, what we carry there, and people who are visiting are going to have to go through a quarantine.

Christopher Wanjek (24:56):
Of course, going to Mars, it takes so long. That is your quarantine. If anyone sick, I think it would've manifested in the nine months to get there or even nine weeks, if we ever get it down to that point. Going to the moon's a little trickier. It's only a couple days away, so I think people would have to be quarantined before and after going to the moon to prevent the risk. I don't think there's other space risks in terms of organics in space that we would have to worry about on the moon or Mars, because space is so sterilizing. I think it's very hard for anything harmful to be coming from space, coming from earth naturally and landing on Mars or wherever.

Alexander McCaig (25:48):
Yeah. I brought that up because you probably worked at NASA at the same time my uncle did. His name's John Romo. He was the interplanetary protection officer. So he dealt with excel biology. So anything that either came into Earth or was leaving Earth's atmosphere, he had to be there to actually scan it, see it what's going on, what possible contaminants are on or what you'd be bringing with you into space itself.

Christopher Wanjek (26:11):
Oh, interesting.

Alexander McCaig (26:13):
So that's why I focus on that because a lot of things can go wrong in the unseen world. Someone's walking around with a microscope 24/7, the focus is I got to build a base.

Christopher Wanjek (26:23):
Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (26:25):
When I look at those things, I see there are all these challenges that really need to be thought through that the general public typically doesn't look at and there's so much data. There's just so many catalysts in this specific system to make it work that we need to make sure they're all represented appropriately.

Christopher Wanjek (26:43):
Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (26:43):
There was one that you touched on, which I thought was cool. That's what happens to human biology, especially in low gravity environments.

Christopher Wanjek (26:52):
Yes.

Alexander McCaig (26:52):
Your eyes start to fail, the shape of your platelets change, things of that nature. So what happens in terms of long term effects? If you could explain this for people. I'm in a place that has a much different gravity specifically on my organ structure, skeletal structure and my cellular biology itself.

Christopher Wanjek (27:11):
Well, yeah, that's just it. The short answer is we don't know. When we think about gravity's effect on the body, we only have two data points. We know what it's like on Earth and we know it's like at the ISS. That's zero and one and that's all we know. How do these lines connect? How do these two points connect? Is it a straight line, where if you have a little more gravity, you got a little better health. Or maybe you need a lot of gravity before you can have full health, or maybe you just need a little bit. Like in mining, just a little bit of gravity helps things settle. You don't need a lot, just a little bit.

Alexander McCaig (27:52):
Yeah.

Christopher Wanjek (27:52):
Zero gravity's impossible. As long as things are eventually falling, that's okay. Maybe human health is like that. So maybe the 16, 17% of gravity on the moon is enough for us to develop naturally. We have absolutely no idea. That's a big open-ended question.

Alexander McCaig (28:10):
That's a tough one. It's the thing that humanity always tries to escape.

Christopher Wanjek (28:15):
Right.

Alexander McCaig (28:16):
It's our own gravity. It's gravity of our situations. It's gravity of atmosphere. Think about atom. You know atom's for instance.

Christopher Wanjek (28:24):
Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (28:24):
You have angular momentum. It's like, is it enough for the electron to leave its shell and go somewhere else? Everything's always trying to essentially escape this sort of this gravity within itself, but how things develop in different states of gravity is what I find abundantly interesting and probably one of the more difficult solves. I think that a more poignant focus on gravity and the energy systems around it may be beneficial to us in the long run, rather than just shooting a rocket up there and saying, everything's going to be all good, but I don't know if my organ's going to end up internally crushing me over time or I'm going to have a lack of a structure and my bones become brittle. You see?

Christopher Wanjek (29:01):
Right. Yeah. I think that's how blinded we are about Mars in particular. People talking about just assuming we could live on Mars and that's the overarching question of gravity of the 37%, 38% gravity on Mars. If you can't gestate, if you can't raise a child in that, that's the end of colon. There's nothing else you can do. That's the end of it. You can only go there as a science base for a couple years. We just don't know. It just is some stupid [inaudible 00:29:36].

Alexander McCaig (29:35):
That's my point. This is really my point. We can all focus on colonization, but if you don't fix the issue with energy and gravity, everything's pretty much for nil.

Christopher Wanjek (29:47):
Right.

Alexander McCaig (29:48):
You just would have to accept the fact that you're stuck on Earth, just doing what you can in the environment that we have biologically developed to over the past couple million years.

Christopher Wanjek (29:59):
Right.

Alexander McCaig (29:59):
I think that's where that focus kind of lies. I love the fact that people say, you want to mine stuff. Well, I think about the advanced trigonometry to launch a rocket and have it land on the moon or even launch from the moon to another planet is insane. Then you're saying, I want to send robots or satellites out to capture something that is moving through in some sort of orbital arc ellipsis through our solar system and try and mine this object at speed, and then bring it back. The difficulties just seem a little insane at that point. Your book adds so much reasonable stuff. I feel like we just need to continue to focus on the reason aspects of this.

Christopher Wanjek (30:43):
Right. We're catching a little bit of that with these two missions that went to asteroids just to scoop up a tablespoon, just a few grands of material, how challenging that was, because you got that action reaction thing. There's very little gravity. So you put a digger down and then you push off because you can't land on it. We talk about mining these asteroids, but it took that much effort, years of effort just to get closeness, to get a little scoop to bring back to earth. That's the beginning of it. It has to get much, much better before we can go on.

Alexander McCaig (31:22):
You mentioned-

Christopher Wanjek (31:24):
I like the idea better of towing an asteroid to Earth in between the Earth and the moon. That's probably more feasible, as difficult that might be. You can put some solar panels on it. Once you give it a push, then you have to stop if it lands on the Earth.

Alexander McCaig (31:41):
I hope you find a small enough, more slower moving one because if you get that wrong, you just launched a big old bomb towards the Earth.

Christopher Wanjek (31:52):
That's right. That's the concern also of weaponizing space. You might be able to weaponize asteroids, but they're not very precise. Hard to pin down.

Alexander McCaig (32:03):
If you can get generally close, if you just nick the planet, I mean, you're going to do plenty of carnage.

Christopher Wanjek (32:08):
Right.

Alexander McCaig (32:15):
I'd like your take on this. You had mentioned objects like ʻOumuamua. What's sort of your flavor on that? I've spoken with Avi Loeb. He's come on the Turtle Cast to speak about it. What's your take on this sort of archeological, extraterrestrial object is how he would explain it.

Christopher Wanjek (32:36):
No, I heard that podcast. That was great. He's a wonderful individual.

Alexander McCaig (32:40):
Thank you.

Christopher Wanjek (32:42):
So he doesn't really know me, but he's an astrophysicist. In my time at NASA, I interacted with him. It was a while ago, but a brilliant individual. Really went out on the limb on this and he took a lot of heat from people in his field, but that's good. He's speculating and there's nothing wrong with that. My personal take. For the background, ʻOumuamu was that long [inaudible 00:33:11] asteroid comet. No one really knows what it was, but it came out of nowhere, passed through our solar system and went away few years ago.

Alexander McCaig (33:20):
Yep.

Christopher Wanjek (33:20):
It was about, I don't know, a kilometer long and not half a kilometer long, maybe like a hundred kilometers.

Alexander McCaig (33:28):
Yeah, oblong spheroid.

Christopher Wanjek (33:30):
Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (33:30):
Something like that.

Christopher Wanjek (33:32):
The funny thing about it was that it was very reminiscent of the author C. Clark book, [inaudible 00:33:37] Rama where something like that with aliens, hibernating aliens came through. So very, very fascinating. But to that, I say sometimes to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cigar shape rock is just a cigar shape rock.

Christopher Wanjek (33:53):
But that concept is fascinating. I think what obvious is really pointing to. When you think about that, that is like a perfect interstellar space vehicle. If we could have hopped onto that hundreds of years from now and get inside it, and build a rotating habitat inside there where we would have our artificial gravity. If we could have the fusion thing down by then, we would have all this water ice, we could isolate the hydrogen and have fusion energy. We could ride that asteroid. That would be the comment, the structure of the asteroid, whatever you want to call it, that provides incredible protection from cosmic radiation. With a little bit of a push, as that's coming through, you could whip around the sun. With a little bit of push with fusion energy, you could accelerate that to 10% the speed of light.

Christopher Wanjek (35:03):
That means you could get to Alpha Centuri in 40 years. It's four light years away, so it could get there in like 40 years at 10%, the speed of light. That's what's fascinating about that concept. Now was anything living in there? That's where I would disagree with Avi. I think I do believe there could be intelligent life in the universe, but for it to be humanoid or for it to want the kinds of things we want, the sense of adventure, I think that's asking too much.

Alexander McCaig (35:38):
Interesting.

Christopher Wanjek (35:39):
The universe is so big and all we tap into is this 10% that's ordinary matter. We view things in this little strip of electromagnetic radiation that's visible. That's our little world or the universe. If you are evolving someplace else, maybe you're evolved to take in dark matter. Maybe you can see or possess dark matter or tap into dark energy. We don't know that, but they would've evolved. I think evolution would be universal and they would've evolved utterly different, and it'd be beyond our comprehension.

Alexander McCaig (36:17):
I love what you just said, and I want you to go a little deeper on that. What do you mean by evolution is universal?

Christopher Wanjek (36:27):
Well, things happen. People think about evolution in terms of life on earth. Of course, that's what it's mostly applied to. But as I started this talk, I was the senior writer for the structure and evolution of the universe. Yu had a big bang. Later this year, we're going to launch the James Webspace Telescope, and then maybe in another year, we'll be able to see the very early universe when stars and galaxies were first forming. But that obviously took some time. It was an evolution of just dust and stuff and just hydrogen and helium and electrons. Eventually they evolved into atoms and then they evolved into higher ... they formed clouds. They evolved into clouds and they evolved into stars. Then physics took over and there was nuclear energy that takes place and the stars burned.

Christopher Wanjek (37:28):
Then they exploded and released the fuel, the ash from those stars, the carbon and all these heavier elements. They went out and they started evolving into other things. They started to get together to form complex molecules of water. So call complex and carbon dioxide and oxygen, and all these things we depend on. This is an evolution that took billions of years before the sun came around about four billion years ago. It's just a long process. So it's happening all across this massive universe that's what, 96 billion years across. The same mechanism that's making things change and evolve on earth is taking place every inch of this universe in ways that are defined by that local of heat and water and all these types of elements.

Alexander McCaig (38:30):
Regardless of where it is and not to deal with relativity too much. But if you think about the aspects of our viewpoint as the viewer, it takes a long time for light to get to us. Correct?

Christopher Wanjek (38:42):
That's right.

Alexander McCaig (38:43):
So for you to say that nothing else has evolved as us becomes a very ignorant statement. And I'm not saying you, but individual saying that, because if you view things from your perspective, you're capturing it a long time later. So these things could be far, far, far developed, far beyond what we are still taking that natural path of evolution that evolution takes. You just can't see where it is depending on your relative view as an observer..

Christopher Wanjek (39:06):
Right.

Alexander McCaig (39:07):
So if you launch a telescope, it's all well and good, but you're staring at the past. So unless you actually move with this specific thing as it develops and that local time space, vector space, time vector, that's when you start to see evolution really occur. What my hope is, is that we continue to still have our focus here on earth, on our space time, time space vector, whenever it might be for dealing with our own evolution of understanding each other and understanding the planet because we're on a very good trajectory of burning ourselves out.

Alexander McCaig (39:41):
You did talk about this and I want to bring this up. And that's the issues with climate change. Now, I understand that we sit on the outer rim of what we would call our Milky Way galaxy. Now our solar system is translational movement. It's spinning and moving in a direction, but we've moved closer to a galactic center. So there's an increase, slight, very slight increase in that cosmic radiation, which we received from the galactic center of our galaxy. That has increased the brightness of our plant, along with the other ones in our solar system. Through that increase in brightness, we have an increase in temperature.

Alexander McCaig (40:22):
But then when we come in as human beings and exacerbate that with our own internal systems, with our own internal waste, we're causing a problem for ourselves. I want to have the focus on going out into space, seeing these things, exploring, living longer lives, dealing with new environments, learning more, evolving, but I feel like we're shooting ourselves in the foot because our focus is that we can't solve our own internal issues here, especially solve the issue with us respecting this thing that actually affords us the ability to have life. But we think we can go out and architect close systems that can sustain us, but we can't even sustain the one that has developed itself. We haven't learned from it. That's a huge issue for me. So how do you look at that in sense of that logic?

Christopher Wanjek (41:08):
Well, I think the modern environmental movement really got a kickstart with those first images of earth from space. Wow, that's it, isn't it? That's everything. And then we got even deeper and we saw that Earth was just that little spec when you pull out back towards Pluto and that's everything. That's all humanity right there, and that's all we got, and we better start taking care of this. I thought going out into space really changed our perspective of how important Earth is. Not what's out there, but what's in here that we have to monitor. So I get this all the time. It seems like whenever I have a lecture or something on YouTube, people comment, why are we going into space? Because it's just a waste of money. We've got so many problems here on earth. I think, well, that's just it. Everything we're doing so far in space has helped earth.

Christopher Wanjek (42:09):
That's what communication satellites are doing. That's what weather satellites are doing. That's why we know we're in amount of trouble that we're in because of what we're doing in space. We have to keep on going into space to better our life on earth. Tap into that energy you were talking about with the sun. It's never a cloudy day in space, so you could be collecting solar energy all the time, and beaming it down. You could be putting super computers in space where they're much more efficient a for Kelvin of space. They operate far more efficiently. There could be all these things that we're doing in space that would make life incredibly better.

Christopher Wanjek (42:50):
In an ironic way, allow to be more primitive on earth. So if we could get our ... it's infinite resources out there, and if we could get those resources out there, then we don't have to go to the Amazon or the Philippines or these other places that we're ripping up. The last places that we can possibly get stuff from, we don't have to keep on ripping that up, and we can allow people to live more primitive, ironically, and more closer to nature. With this space age technology of communications and iPhones and solar panels on your roof, and everything's connected, you could live closer to nature than ever before. If we can grab the resources and the energy and the materials for from space, that's my take on it.

Alexander McCaig (43:40):
I do like that. Here's my rep. I want you to help me think through this. Say the oceans, by 2100, rise to an unfeasible area, Micronesia gone, [inaudible 00:43:57] gone. Most of our coastal areas gone. Refugees are forced to go to the Arctic areas. Well, that's just about at the time when we supposedly would start to colonize a planet. You're kind of like racing to get to space and also racing to kill yourself at the same time. So it's like, you have to really put focus into one first because the timeline for both actually don't work.

Christopher Wanjek (44:25):
Right.

Alexander McCaig (44:25):
From what NASA's currently projected for where our atmosphere is headed and what you have projected for where you've reasonably see us in space around 2100, those timelines, actually, it doesn't look beneficial. So how do we have a focus, Chris?

Christopher Wanjek (44:44):
Right. Yeah, I would argue that this idea that we have to get many people off the earth to save people, to be a so-called multi planet species in case all these bad things happen on earth to save our species. I think that's the wrong logic, because that breaks apart in so many ways in terms of the global warming, if things become so untenable here. To be on Mars, to live on Mars, a lot of people living on Mars, you would have to create mini earths on Mars. If you could create a mini earth on Mars, if you had that technology, you would do it on-

Alexander McCaig (45:25):
You'd do it on earth.

Christopher Wanjek (45:26):
To save earth, right.

Alexander McCaig (45:27):
And you wouldn't leave. Yeah. You wouldn't leave. You'd be like, oh perfect. Great.

Christopher Wanjek (45:30):
Yeah. So the argument is exactly what you alluded to the beginning of our conversation. The process of going out there is inherent with new technologies that makes things that much more efficient with water purification and with air purification, and with new forms of efficiencies that reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. That all goes hand in glove with our pursuit of going out into space. So that's why I think it's worthwhile going out into space because that's the main root for the technology that can help save the earth and keep more people here. I am pro-life in this regard that I'd like to see more people on earth. I know there's a limited finite amount of space on earth, but I think we could house many more with better efficiencies.

Christopher Wanjek (46:34):
Maybe it's too altruistic, but I think more people mean more ideas, more entrepreneurs, more inventors.

Alexander McCaig (46:40):
Yep.

Christopher Wanjek (46:41):
I don't think it means more criminals, but if there's not an expansion of the resources or an expansion of the efficiencies yet, then yes, then it's going to be war over the limited resources that we have. That's why I tried to end the book with this, what is our future? There's two different futures. We stay on earth and only take care of earth. That means a forced reduction in the population and constant fighting over the limit resources, because God forbid, if everybody in China wants to start driving like we do in the states, they have every right to do that. But where are these resources going to come from? So there's fighting over that. Or you go into space and, instead of every person born on Earth stealing your resources, every person on Earth is contributing to knowledge and the betterment of humanity. That's how I see the future going if we pursue more space activities.

Alexander McCaig (47:40):
Yeah. Chris, I appreciate deeply the fact that you're reasonable and optimistic. Cause a lot of times logic and reason can be met with great pessimism. Essentially a negative outlook for the future. But I like how you have married a bright future with looking at the obvious trajectories we're on right now and how we can reasonably solve that and learn to live a more symbiotic life with not only what we have going on here on earth, but what we can also learn from the technology with going into space. I think that this is a great first step in reason for mankind. The thing is now we just got to take the leap.

Christopher Wanjek (48:27):
Yeah. I think the things are getting better. When you look at things day by day, it may seem like things are horrible. But when you look at things over the centuries, I think human life expectancy growing, people out of poverty growing, were now down to, compared to the 1800s when I think it was upwards of 80% people living in absolute poverty, we're down to 10% people living in poverty. That's a mind blowing achievement that's been enabled by technology of not saying no to these technologies because they don't put food directly on somebody's plate. Why are we doing it if it's not giving that person food? These technologies are just enabling the water purification systems and the irrigations and jobs and you know, all types of changes that raised billions of people out of poverty. That's the progress has been happening over all these years. So that's why I'm optimistic that this continuation of our pursuit of technology can even make things even better as much as we're fighting at the very moment.

Alexander McCaig (49:40):
Yeah. I'm optimistic that, in the future, there will continue to be more people like you. It won't specifically be you, Chris, but there will be more of you. The fact that you have progenitors and you get to teach them that sort of mindset, I think is a really healthy and beneficial evolution of mindset for humanity going forward. So thank you for doing that.

Christopher Wanjek (50:03):
Thank you.

Alexander McCaig (50:04):
Yeah. Well, listen, Chris, it's been 50 minutes and I appreciate you coming on. I'd love to have you back on because there are a lot of other sub points in this book that require a lot more attention and a lot more dialogue. So if you're ever interested, we'd love to have you back.

Christopher Wanjek (50:19):
Excellent. Thanks. It's out in Korea now, believe it or not.

Alexander McCaig (50:23):
Listen. I got to say that's amazing. Because out in Korea, where is it where people would go to find your book? Where's the best place for them to do so, or find out more about you?

Christopher Wanjek (50:32):
Well, it's Harvard University Press and bookstores kind of carry it, kind of don't. I've had a 50/50 mix, but it's Amazon. I don't work for Amazon, but online I think a lot of people are buying it. Oh, here's the Korean version. It's called Space Rush. I don't know where that comes from.

Alexander McCaig (50:56):
Listen. I love it though.

Christopher Wanjek (50:59):
But yeah, I think-

Alexander McCaig (51:01):
That's absolutely fabulous.

Christopher Wanjek (51:02):
Harvard University Press. I saw it in a bunch of Barnes and Nobles and things like that. Sometimes I go in and surprise the people and I say, "I'm this guy, you want me to sign the book?" It's all around Baltimore, I've hit a lot of bookstores where I could sign it.

Alexander McCaig (51:21):
Well, I think that's fabulous. Well, next time I'm there, I'm going to have to have you sign my copy because I'd really enjoy that. But for the time being, please keep up the great work. I think this sort of insight, this sort of intellectual challenge is important and it's one of those things that pushes us forward. Even if it's not a material technology, it's the thought that counts.

Christopher Wanjek (51:41):
Yes. That's a nice point, yeah. Appreciate your interest, absolutely.

Alexander McCaig (51:41):
Thank you again, Chris.

Christopher Wanjek (51:41):
Yeah. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (51:54):
Thank you for listening to Turtle Cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and source data defines the path. What's your data worth?