Guest: Ariel Ekblaw, director of MIT Space Initiative
Host: Lex Fridman
Parents are ex-Air Force, both pilots
Legacy of pilots > astronauts
Dad was huge sci-fi fan, Heinlein, Asimov
Love affair with civilization scale space exploration
Apollo program leapt far ahead, now rest of space industry is catching up
Favorite book now is Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves
Cycle between authors and engineers – authors dream it up, engineers build it, inspire next generation of authors, and cycle continues
Long Now foundation – what does society need to do now for a long and prosperous future?
Instead of abandoning Earth, how do we use space tech to keep Earth livable?
Harsh conditions (such as those in space) are great forcing function for innovation and survival
Future of space habitats = intelligent structures + swarm robots (micro robots that can inspect, repair)
Distributed systems are critical for redundancy – eg, Space Station as a structure of decentralized nodes where, if an emergency happens, people can isolate it and move to another area
Tesserae – her PhD research topic – self assembling space structures – tiles with magnets for autonomous assembly, a decentralized system with sensors and self-determination
Building human sized tiles now
Want to build large enough tiles to form Buckyball (10m in diameter) – much bigger than current ISS modules
Buckyball is most efficient surface-area-to-volume shape
What’s purpose of next gen space architecture? Can we give you goosebumps?
Programmable matter – she’s focused on big scale, but there’s other research on tiny self assembling structures
What’s a space cathedral look like? Long sight lines, stunning architecture, more organic (vs geometric), like a nautilus seashell
(truncated) Octahedrons as a great shape / structure for this self-assembly – one could be sleeping quarters, one a storage depot, etc
Unlike modern space stations, these can be re-configured, incorporate more space ships and crew and arrangements
Another favorite book – Ringworld (scifi novel by Larry Niven)
Microgravity vs zero gravity – no such thing as zero gravity, always gravity between two objects
Microgravity is essentially floating, but you’re actually in free fall
Flew 9 times on Vomit Comet
True feeling of weightlessness, like flying in a dream
Instructors tell you to make a memory while you’re experiencing it, because it’s so novel and time flies by so quickly
Takes 3 years round-trip to fly to Mars – journey takes 6-9 months, then wait for planets to find favorable alignment before you can fly back (!)
If you stay in orbit a long time, will be lots of physiological changes
“Deep duration space missions”
Problems include:
–Radiation is biggest risk (on Earth you’re protected by magnetosphere)
–Mental health (small space, long duration, few people)
Space food – all freeze dried
Researching fermented food in space – lots of tasty foods (beer, wine, umami), good for microbiome
After several days to weeks, astronauts can adapt to space / micro gravity
Physical changes – Bone density, muscle atrophy, eyeball shape
There’s water on moon – can use it for drinking water, propellent
Sherlock experiment on Mars – searching for signs of past habitability, organic life potential
Search for alien life is profoundly exciting – may not be carbon based life, how do you build a detector for non-carbon (eg, silicon) life?
If life is as prolific as we hoped, why haven’t we heard of it yet? The challenge of Fermi Paradox
Shadow biosphere – concept of potentially alien / unrecognizable life that already exists on Earth
Lex: Challenge of human unpredictability / motivations – if you like someone too much, problems arise; if you don’t like someone at all, also problems arise
We want artificial gravity eventually – so for example there’s a treadmill part that’s near to 1G (Earth gravity) that astronauts can spend part of the day
Many questions about sex in space – how does fetus evolve in low g?
Mars is not a good home currently for humanity
Atmosphere very thin, hard to grow crops
Small outpost is definitely possible – like in Antarctica (McMurdo)
likely early 2030s for first such mission
No supply chain for broken electronic parts, no grocery stores
Thinks floating space cities are more likely – built incrementally
ISS – joint effort of 18 countries, great example of international cooperation even during periods of eg US-Russia conflict
Lex: Space exploration unites us and gives us hope; Look up to the stars and dream
MIT going back to moon as early as this year or 2023
Testing swarm robots that ride on a Rover
Each robot has 4 magnetic wheels
Bill Anders: We came all the way to discover the Moon, and what we really discovered is the Earth
stopped 2/3 of way