- 5 months ago
If you’ve ever dreamed of going to space, watch this first. In this episode of The Limit, we investigate the brutal reality behind the dream of space colonization. We talk to astronauts, scientists, engineers, billionaires, and space nerds about the biggest challenges to life beyond Earth—from radiation and reproduction to building bunkers on the Moon and farming on Mars.
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00:00with more people going to space than ever before I wanted to know are human beings ready to leave
00:08earth behind so I talked to an astronaut who spent over a year up there is it true that
00:14you're just wearing a diaper you know it is what it is if you outpace your diaper it could just be
00:20a bad day I met with science writers this is my copy of your guys's book health experts as far as
00:29you know has anybody ever had sex in space love this question and a man who paid 30 million dollars
00:38to join Russia's space program where I would gladly volunteer for a one-way trip to live on Mars so
00:45what did I learn taking homo sapiens multi-planetary isn't just hard it's almost impossible space can
00:53kill you rapidly or it can kill you slowly but it's always trying to kill you and even if this
00:59migration to the stars take centuries the decades in between are gonna get weird chat GBT what would
01:07a real Mars colony look like you're probably gonna have to drink recycled urine protein sources might
01:12be insects which isn't for me you might die of cancer you'll probably be living underground your
01:17bones and your vision and your muscles might be degrading maybe you'll be okay maybe not and
01:21you're gonna be living in a small cramped habitat with people you may or may not like you so how
01:26long can you actually last in space which dangers still stump even the scientists what if the hard
01:34part isn't the rockets and robots it's us the first limit of living in space is that we don't have that
01:47many places to go mercury's climate is both extremely hot and cold the surface of Venus can melt lead and
01:55the rest of the planets too far away so the first idea is staying local in low earth orbit that's
02:02convenient but it's getting crowded with thousands of satellites and space junk then there's the moon
02:08it's not too far away and people have been there before but it barely has an atmosphere and nights last two
02:15earth weeks then there's Mars which has some of the stuff we need to support life like frozen water but what if
02:23building on something isn't the best idea there's a whole group of engineers who think the future of humanity
02:29isn't on Mars or the moon it's floating somewhere in between that vision comes from a particle physicist named
02:37gerard k o'neil he imagined giant rotating habitats long before we even had wi-fi i'll come back to him
02:45but first i want you to meet some of his followers actually trying to make it happen time to get in the
02:51space mode i went to houston texas new worlds to an event called the new worlds conference
02:57whoa whoa whoa whoa that would get hit by technology be careful with that look at how janky this looks
03:05it's space expo meets burning man here's a astronaut the event's founder rick tumlinson studied under
03:12o'neil he used to call ourselves jerry's kids he was a true visionary he was like let's go out there
03:16and build space solar power plants and let's these communities will be funded by building these and
03:22selling energy to the earth and then new worlds is where we can start bringing the tribe together
03:27and inspire those people who are going to go right and give them a home but by the way you do have
03:34people coming to this event this time and probably in the past who are major space investors absolutely
03:40we got there'll be a couple of billionaires in the audience it's time for the space cowboy ball
03:45saturday night i'm heading over there now and y'all i came prepared
03:56the event culminates with the space cowboy ball don't tell my wife or my rabbi that i was here
04:02it's part networking the best deals happen when you're at parties like this part costume party brock
04:07tell us what your outfit is i'm a space pirate as the people at the space ball partied like it's 2099
04:20i wandered through the empty exhibits at the space center houston from sky lab to 20 mile space stations
04:26look we got a guy taking a little shower break over there hi stuff that used to feel like pure sci-fi
04:35it's starting to look kind of doable so how do we get from something as spartan as sky lab to o'neill's
04:42full-on space cities good evening for roundtable i'm harold hayes the most mind-boggling idea comes
04:51from the mind of a professor of physics named gerard kitchen o'neill this is something which we feel
04:58could be made as a first model space colony for about the cost of the apollo project
05:04o'neill didn't just imagine floating cities he detailed how to build them starting with
05:10materials from the moon it's probably a rotten place to live but as a mining source it's great
05:17lunar soil called regolith contains oxygen aluminum iron and silica and could theoretically
05:24be used to make fuel glass and solar panels
05:27rather than hauling heavy materials up from earth o'neill invented something called a mass driver
05:35an electromagnetic launcher that works like a rail gun or magnetic roller coaster to fling raw material
05:42from the moon into orbit the bucket carries a payload of lunar material and it's accelerated
05:49by these magnetic coils in orbit those payloads would be caught and melted down in solar-powered
05:54furnaces to extract metals this would feed a kind of orbital job shop capable of manufacturing beams
06:02solar cells and eventually more mass drivers o'neill's plan was a self-replicating industrial loop
06:09one seed system could duplicate itself without needing anything new from earth and it could all be run remotely
06:16the result would be giant habitats that rotate to generate artificial gravity now known as o'neill cylinders
06:26inside lakes farms cities powered by constant sunlight built from moon dust populated by people
06:35and possibly plants and animals brought from earth they'd orbit at stable points called lagrange points
06:42the perfect parking spots in space just a few days from earth once you know the shape you start noticing
06:48o'neill inspired designs in lots of movies and tv shows here's babylon 5 humans and aliens wrapped
06:54in 2 million 500 000 tons of spinning metal all alone in the night and the craft seen in the movie
07:02interstellar we're not meant to save the world we're meant to leave it ready-made space colonies no long
07:10trips to mars required in his original notes o'neill admitted this vision might take centuries but it
07:17remains one of the most compelling and fully thought out ideas for how humans could live long term in
07:22space o'neill passed away in the 90s but his legacy lives on and one of his most famous students is
07:29closer than ever to bringing the stream into reality
07:32we can have a trillion humans in the solar system which means we'd have a thousand mozarts and a
07:42thousand einsteins this would be an incredible civilization just imagine prime one-day shipping
07:49for one trillion people jeff bezos has been a space nerd since he was a teenager
07:54then as an undergrad at princeton he attended seminars with o'neill
07:57so far he's taken celebrities on suborbital rides with his company blue origin but now
08:06he's going for something much more ambitious landers on the moon built to unlock its buried treasure
08:13the scientific term for this quest is in situ resource utilization or isru and if humans can't
08:20figure it out the entire future of living in space could fall apart here's the problem even with
08:26reusable rockets arguably the biggest advancement in space exploration in recent years it's still
08:32really expensive to launch stuff off earth so if you want to build a base or a civilization you
08:39can't bring everything with you you have to live off the land that means taking dirt ice or atmospheric
08:45gases and transforming them into what you need air water and fuel blue origin has already isolated
08:52near pure silicon and other elements from simulated moon dirt in a lab next they want to do it on the
08:59moon to extract materials for solar panels and maybe even manufacture them right there on the surface
09:06icon a texas-based construction company plans to melt moon dust and then use robots to 3d print
09:13structures on the moon it's basically powdered sandpaper that we turn into a liquid sandpaper and put it
09:18through machinery is it like 10 000 wallys is it like one big robot like what is the what's the crew
09:25that's the robot crew that's going up there great question i would say it's close to 10 to 15 robots
09:32would be just a wonderful fleet to go after a couple of pretty big ambitious plans so things like landing
09:38pads roads protective structures some of the early infrastructure that we want and that would provide
09:44the redundancy but also the fit to function other groups are focused on pulling oxygen and hydrogen
09:50from lunar ice to make breathable air drinking water and rocket propellant if that works you don't have
09:56to ship fuel from earth anymore you just gas up on the moon sounds simple right well it's not just ask
10:04kelly and zach wienersmith they wrote an entire book about what makes space so hard so there is
10:10technically water in the regolith but you could also technically say that about concrete so we did a
10:15back of the envelope calculation and you would need to bake about six tons of lunar regolith to get
10:22enough water to have like the three kilograms that you would need for things like drinking every day
10:27and that doesn't even include the water you would need for things like showering or water balloon fights
10:33there are higher concentrations of water ice at the moon's south pole in the bottom of craters that never
10:39receive sunlight but turning any of that water into fuel using electrolysis requires a ton of power
10:47when you're making the propellant to go to mars on the moon that's when you need the megawater so
10:52and the moon only gets sunlight for half the month which makes getting all your energy from solar
10:58a challenge and so that's why we're a big fan of nuclear fission power for the moon to be able to
11:06make enough power to do propellant production at scale and finally you have to build all of this
11:13on the moon outside the lab the only space mission to do isru was the mars perseverance rover it produced
11:21about 120 grams of oxygen from the martian atmosphere in 2023 that's about as much oxygen as a human breathes
11:28in about four hours and while this sounds like science fiction a survey shows that commercial space
11:34insiders are gung-ho on the technology estimating that isru could be operational and commercial by 2040.
11:46elon musk on the other hand is looking for volunteers to build a city on mars for a million people
11:51you may not come back alive but it's a glorious adventure also a very expensive one musk's plan hinges
11:59on starship the biggest most powerful rocket ever built the idea launch starship into orbit send five
12:07to eight tanker ships to refuel it then fly to mars if we achieve orbital refilling in time then we will
12:14launch the first uh uncrewed uh starship to mars at the end of next year aside from the fact that it will
12:21be the longest manned space mission of all time just to get there the first challenge is landing
12:28mars descent is one of the hardest problems in aerospace engineering nasa's blunt about it
12:34the system that landed perseverance does not scale to human class elements it's like dropping a winnebago
12:40from orbit into a windstorm and hoping the airbags work and if you crash you don't just lose cargo
12:47you lose the crew and even if they stick the landing the entire return trip depends on isru
12:54the spacex plan is to mine water ice for hydrogen and suck co2 from the thin martian air
13:03then run it all through a sabatier reactor an industrial device that turns it into water oxygen
13:09and methane that's rocket fuel baby spacex calls this plan refillable mars but critics say it's more
13:17like regrettable mars aerospace enthusiast miguel gurrea says the spacex mission gambles everything
13:25on a single point of failure it's a bit fragile in that if it fails and you don't have a backup
13:30astronauts can be stranded there if the sabatier reactor breaks if the martian ice is buried too deep
13:36if dust storms disable the solar panels your may be forever and remember there's no second ship
13:44no alternate ride home just one crew one plan one shot the biggest challenge power a mars to earth
13:52return using spacex's starship would require a massive isru infrastructure consuming 3.37 megawatts
14:00of continuous power and producing 2400 tons of propellant for two returning starships that's enough to power
14:06about 1500 american homes it's equivalent to a solar farm the size of 20 football fields delivered to mars
14:14fully operational and able to run 24 7 for over a year but mars is dusty very dusty dust storms can last
14:24weeks and even months and they happen about 40 to 50 percent of the time during a standard two-year mars
14:30mission that means your solar array could get buried just when you need it most
14:35gurea's alternative send smaller missions pre-deploy the fuel use multiple vehicles and build in
14:42backups it's not flashy but it's safer and even if you survive the final boss awaits launching off mars
14:51we've never done it before not even with robots nasa's current concept for a mars ascent vehicle would
14:57require over 25 tons of fuel to get four people back into orbit whether it's bezos building moon factories
15:04or musk betting it all on martian methane isru is the lynchpin of the two most prominent off-world
15:11plans until these companies prove they can mine ice generate megawatts of power and build chemical
15:18plants on alien worlds the dream of living in space is just one broken sabatier reactor away from
15:24becoming a very expensive camping trip and with odds like that who's actually going to take the two to
15:30three-year trip to mars only someone who spends most of their adult life preparing for it
15:38march 1995 arkhalik kazakhstan cosmonaut valery polyakov has just landed after 437 consecutive days in
15:49orbit the longest space flight in human history as he stumbled out of the capsule he reportedly says
15:55we can go to mars and that really showed that there were no fundamental deal breakers to staying in
16:04orbit for years at a time jonathan mcdowell would know he spent the last 50 years documenting every
16:11single object and person who's ever left earth i'm the chronicler of the space age i try and be the
16:18journal of record for what actually happened in outer space he's currently got 200 bookcases and
16:24counting roughly 1500 square feet of binders filled with space history and yes he's still workshopping
16:32the name one of the places i i might uh might end up is uh is bromley in in london and so it might be the
16:40the bromley astronautics research facility or barf on jonathan's master list polyakov is
16:47astronaut number 214 katie perry i'm going to tell you something right now you are officially an
16:52astronaut thank you so much i believe i have her as uh astronaut number or space traveler number 729
17:02that's it only 750 people ever have crossed 80 kilometers into space according to jonathan's records
17:10the older people will be blown away by how many it is and younger people will be surprised by how few it is
17:16the american with the record for the longest stint in space nasa astronaut frank rubio what do you
17:21think it's amazing oh man who spent 371 days aboard the iss it took about six months to get back to 100
17:33but about two months i was for all intents and purposes to any outsider they would have said that
17:38i was back to 100 getting to space takes more than a dream it takes a resume built like tony stark's
17:44linkedin i always like to say we look for uh adventurous nerds or nerdy adventurers right and
17:49so you kind of have to have both uh type of things where you love to learn at minimum you'll need a
17:54master's degree technical or military expertise russian language skills survival training and years of
18:02physical and psychological prep you think of the billions and billions of people who've ever lived
18:06that's just a small small number and so we just don't have enough data to generalize you know hey how is
18:12it going to affect humanity as a whole versus these individuals altogether you're looking at 10 to 15
18:18years of work before your first space mission if you ever get to travel that is even though you can
18:23look down and see the planet it's just this weird dynamic where you have a view like no other but
18:29you're stuck in this little baby space but not everyone goes through nasa if you've got deep
18:46enough pockets you can just buy your way to space no one knows exactly what katy perry paid blue origin
18:53but the deposit alone is 150 000 and the full price ticket can cost millions that's amazing
19:02if that's too steep mach 1 pilots are now trimming those up virgin galactic offers a shorter hop to
19:08the edge of space for about 600 000 i was once a child with a dream looking up to the stars now i'm an
19:17adult in a spaceship which brings us to one of the wildest space tourists of all meet nick halleck
19:26certified cosmonaut millionaire investor rock musician lifelong thrill seeker this shop goes all the way
19:36down to the blast doors he's also the proud owner of a large decommissioned nuclear missile silo
19:41like his little universal studios here it's like this is your dystopian disneyland you know so welcome
19:48to the abode welcome to the complex one he's turning into a disaster-proof commercial hub
19:55complete with a firing range diesel tanks a faraday cage and eventually its own nuclear micro reactor
20:02this can withstand a direct nuclear strike and it is emp proof to nick it's not a doomsday bunker
20:08it's an insurance policy well i'm not a doomsday prepper i'm not trouble no i think what you're
20:13going to find is a lot of individuals culminating together with like-minded folk to ride out any
20:18turbulence or any storm out down the marketplace and i think that's where we are right now nick has
20:23spent tens of millions of dollars buying rare historic real estate he's invested in castles lighthouses
20:29farmland and now cold war era bunkers russia assigned nick to two space missions as a backup crew
20:36member he hasn't been in orbit yet but he says he's ready to leave earth for good my goal is to walk
20:43on the moon but there will come a time where i would gladly volunteer for a one-way trip
20:50to live on mars and colonize and um yeah terraform mars and those go to mars you'll have to understand
20:56it's a one-way trip for people like nick space is within reach because they can afford it do you think
21:03that space is only destined to be like a billionaire's playground or do you think like the average joe
21:08might i think it'll be billionaires and like nine figure multi-millionaires and eventually it'll come
21:15down as the passage to space becomes far more inexpensive but let's be real most of us are never
21:22going not unless something changes dramatically that's amazing and even the elite few who do go
21:29still face a universe that's filled with an invisible force that can slow roast you alive
21:37floating around earth are two invisible donut-shaped rings of charged particles
21:42they're called the van allen belts a benefit of earth's active molten core
21:47these belts trap harmful solar and cosmic radiation acting as part of a larger shield that protects
21:53everything below but the further away from earth you go the weaker that protection becomes and radiation
22:00levels rise fast i think radiation is probably the biggest concern once we get outside of the van allen
22:06belt that probably that risk exponentially grows and what happens when we do cancer cataracts heart
22:15problems brain damage down the pike genetic mutations just your standard doggy bag from the galactic barbecue
22:23we've now added a new one and that is cognitive decline from neurotoxicity basically from radiation
22:30dr james logan was a medical advisor in mission control for 25 nasa missions but he says his former
22:37agency isn't taking this threat seriously and it's funny that nasa really doesn't seem to care about
22:43radiation and the reason is you can almost compare nasa to the nfl and radiation to cte chronic traumatic
22:53encephalopathy what nasa is concerned about is the mission what a football coach is concerned about is
23:00winning the game but cte is bad chronically later on for a football player and radiation can be terrible
23:09for an astronaut later on in their lives astronauts aboard the iss are exposed to radiation levels
23:16100 times stronger than earth's surface to reduce astronauts risk of cancer nasa limits crew members
23:22total career radiation dose to 600 millisieverts for comparison the average american living to 70 years
23:30years old is exposed to around 430 millisieverts over their entire lifetime but step outside earth's magnetic
23:37double that number jumps fast take a three-year mission to mars and you could be exposed to 1650
23:45millisieverts that's the equivalent of over 16 000 chest x-rays the sun is always blasting out
23:52hot ions which is not great if you're in space but now and then it shoots a sort of flashlight of
23:57doom in one direction uh in what's called a solar particle event which is an event in the same way
24:03that a tsunami is a water event and the good news is that space is big so if the sun is shooting out
24:10beams of doom you're probably not in them but if you are essentially the risk is you get acute radiation
24:14sickness which is essentially the worst way to die a direct hit from a solar flare could expose astronauts
24:20to 2 000 millisieverts and cause radiation sickness within hours in 1972 one such flare
24:26erupted between apollo missions if it had struck while astronauts were on the moon it likely would
24:32have killed them in hours dr logan says radiation protection should change how spacecraft are designed
24:39so you basically build the spacecraft around the crew so instead of long pencil thin rocket ships
24:47for interplanetary flight they would be short stubby spherical spacecraft in which the crew is right in the
24:55center so they're surrounded by as much mass as you can get and that would enhance their radiation
25:02protection so this yeah not exactly realistic if human beings ever live or work on the moon or mars
25:10they're gonna have to live like ants earthworms or moles because otherwise the environment just won't
25:17tolerate it that means no strolls under the stars more like digging in and staying there some scientists
25:24think ancient lava tubes natural tunnels carved by molten rock could be our best hope buried beneath
25:30meters of rock they could provide natural radiation shielding for long-term habitats others have
25:36suggested piling rocks into a mound before the humans arrive and we don't know where the caves are we
25:41don't know if there's many caves if they're reachable or not so what we're doing is we're creating
25:47our own cave our own shell structure under which these astronauts would be living so it's made with
25:53local uh material local regolith or mars dust to protect our astronauts from that so that's kind
25:59of a really really big design driver for a base like that we came up with some walls that were about
26:06somewhere around a meter thick and we did something i thought was pretty clever at the time you can see
26:11the sort of waffle cone structure here and we can fill that with compressed regolith that we don't process
26:17whether we end up burrowing into lava tubes or piling up space rocks one thing's clear even if we
26:23manage to survive all that space radiation we've still got another pesky problem our squishy
26:29human bodies need calories constantly the first human meal in space two tubes of meat puree and one
26:37of chocolate sauce yuri gagarin slurped them down during his 108 minute flight in 1961 and in doing so
26:45proved that you can eat upside down at 17 000 miles per hour since then space cuisine has come a long way
26:53out with the squeeze tubes in with the thermostabilized entrees meat and vegetable russian stew roasted quail
27:02oatmeal with brown sugar but look at how it's packaged
27:09real astronaut
27:15mac and cheese anybody you might notice there's all sorts of foods here
27:21it's like opening the refrigerator today's astronauts rotate through menus curated by food scientists
27:27designed to be balanced shelf safe and ideally edible frank rubio told us one of the biggest surprises
27:34all the food in general was pretty good i love seafood and so i had them fly me a bunch of canned seafood
27:41uh and so any times i you know and for most people like a can of sardines uh doesn't sound great but
27:47for some reason up there for me any sort of canned seafood anytime i would open it whether it was mackerel or
27:53sardines or tuna uh it was great but that's feeding a crew of six in low earth orbit with regular supply runs
28:00from houston try doing that for a million people 34 million miles away that's the real challenge
28:09most sci-fi movies show gleaming greenhouses on mars lush with crops and tended by astronauts in cool
28:15visors in reality the dirt alone is trying to kill you it's called regolith the loose jagged
28:22rock and dust covering the moon and mars is nothing like earth soil breathe it in enough times
28:28and it scars your lungs you could die just from that even nasa's tech isn't immune in 2009 the spirit
28:36rover got stuck in martian soil so badly that engineers on earth built a full-scale replica of the terrain
28:42just to figure out how to free it they never did spirit is still there buried alive by martian dust
28:49and even if you could grow food in martian soil you probably shouldn't it's full of perchlorates
28:55toxic compounds that interfere with thyroid function and would need to be filtered out before you could
29:00safely grow anything martian soil has just a one percent concentration of perchlorates but that's 400
29:08thousand times too toxic for humans so how would we actually feed people if you want to get protein
29:14from animals you might be getting it from insects the idea was you can grow plants and the part of the
29:20plants that you don't eat or that humans don't eat can get fed to the mealworms and now you turn
29:25food waste into protein lentils and bugs it's not exactly the interstellar farm fantasy and if you're thirsty
29:33keep in mind water is scarce which means you'll likely be drinking well yourself on the international
29:41space station water is recovered from everything urine sweat exhaled breath you name it nasa's system
29:49recycles about 98 of all water on the iss in space every drop counts even the ones you've already had
29:57and what goes in must come out in case you ever wondered what a space toilet looks like here it is
30:04early space travelers used plastic bags skylab had a slightly upgraded system involving suction and leg
30:11restraints time to go today's astronauts use more advanced toilets and uh you turn it on you hear the fan
30:20noise check for airflow that's where your business goes but the core challenge remains dealing with
30:29human waste in zero gravity okay so what's a brown trout okay what's a brown trout a brown trout is
30:38one of the many euphemisms astronauts have developed uh for floating fecal waste which is a common feature
30:45of outer space i believe that coinage is from the space shuttle program but there were others
30:50escapees was a nice one um and you know maybe worth noting this is you know maybe one of the funnier
30:56things in space it's also incredibly dangerous but on spacewalks there's only one way to handle your
31:01business i hadn't used a diaper in 40 plus years right usually around one year old most of us stop
31:07and things that you don't think about is essentially you have to meter your urine flow right because
31:13you're in it because of the lack of gravitational force and so if you let go of your full bladder worth
31:19of urine uh it's going to overwhelm the diaper and essentially form a blob of floating urine inside
31:24your spacesuit because if you if you outpace your diaper it could just be a bad day and on mars waste
31:30becomes even more valuable not just something to get rid of but something to reuse poop sweat breath all
31:38of it gets cycled back into the system there have even been experiments to grow vegetables using human hair
31:44and nails and before you think this all sounds a little extreme just remember we've tried to build
31:49a self-sustaining ecosystem on earth once it was called biosphere 2 a 200 million dollar dome in the
31:57arizona desert designed to house eight people grow all their food recycle their air and water and prove
32:04humans could survive in a completely sealed environment they had sunlight gravity earth air right outside the
32:11walls and still it barely worked oxygen levels dropped crops struggled the team split into
32:18factions they made it two years but barely and now the plan is to do that again on a dead planet with dirt
32:26that's poisonous so yes the future of space settlement may involve sustainable farms closed loop water
32:32systems and eco-friendly martian composting but right now we're still figuring out how to deal with poop
32:39and even if we manage to feed and hydrate a colony millions of miles away there's still one big
32:44problem what happens when someone gets sick in 2023 an er physician named nathan jones spent 378 days
32:54sealed inside a 3d printed habitat in houston alongside three other volunteers the goal to find out what it
33:02would be like to live and work on mars the minute that we were in and they closed the door was like man
33:08did i just do that nasa called it the chapia mission short for crew health and performance
33:14exploration analog analog astronauts are people who simulate space missions without leaving earth
33:20chapia was nasa's longest analog to date but it's only about a third the length of a crewed mission to mars
33:27for a full year the team lived in isolation inside a hangar eight shelf stable plant-based meals and
33:33even suited up to explore a simulated martian surface no escape no sunlight no shortcuts i felt like our
33:42mission was success and that we kind of proved that the isolation was something that humans can overcome
33:47with the right with the right tools astronaut frank rubio agrees we're getting pretty good at the
33:52psychological parts of it a lot of that is just picking the right people the right personalities
33:56okay so maybe the mental toll of space isn't as scary as we feared i mean we all survived covid
34:02lockdowns kind of but on earth healthcare is a 9-1-1 call away on mars you could be 200 million miles
34:11from the nearest hospital that's the closest uh hospital you know you've got to really be able to
34:16think under that pressure now imagine someone needs surgery in microgravity if you make an incision in the
34:23skin you're going to hit some blood vessels some small ones or maybe some venous blood vessels hopefully
34:29you don't hit an arterial vessel and what's going to happen is blood isn't going to come out and just
34:34roll down through the force of gravity it's going to pool at the wound so yes surgery is possible in
34:42simulated zero g but it's also risky equipment heavy and prone to failure infection control
34:49questionable anesthesia a whole other challenge you can't use gas-based painkillers in a sealed cabin
34:56one leak could contaminate the air so you'd have to worry about everyone getting anesthetized but you
35:02know you could be pretty careful about that another option is to sort of inject into the spinal cord but
35:07fluids tend to shift upwards in space and so you might have problems where the anesthesia doesn't
35:13get distributed as well as you would like it to back in the 1990s nasa ran surgical tests aboard a
35:18parabolic aircraft that simulates microgravity nicknamed the vomit comet in one test a surgeon opened an
35:26artery in a rabbit and watched the blood form floating globes later they successfully performed laparoscopy
35:33on a hundred pound pig so the answer to when will we understand this problem better is when pigs fly
35:39another issue with medical equipment it takes up a lot of space as you can imagine uh mars or lunar
35:45habitat are going to be pretty space limited and so it's going to be important to find ways to work in
35:51a space that you hopefully never need that's why researchers are turning to on-demand fabrication
35:58like 3d printed splints customized to the astronaut's body no worries sorry it didn't break it didn't
36:05break all good this is the kind of research that happens at trish the translational research institute
36:12for space health it's a nasa-funded consortium based in houston trish collects biomedical data
36:19from commercial space flights and it's building a database to help understand what happens to the human
36:24body in orbit and beyond we work with nasa on the same risks but we are trying to understand this
36:30for all of humanity so at some point as our race or species further and further starts going into
36:37space more and more of us going to space we got to understand how the body changes in space flight
36:42trish is also working on real-time solutions like treatments for space motion sickness which
36:48doesn't act quite like sea sickness or car sickness the symptoms are exactly the same but we
36:53like i said we were unable to predict it heel the toe let's do 10 steps two three astronauts undergo
37:01pre- and post-flight testing including obstacle courses to measure balance and coordination
37:09and splashdown crew 9 back on earth
37:14as returning astronauts know gravity is virtually non-existent in free space
37:18and on other worlds it's wildly different if you weigh 150 pounds on earth you'd weigh just 57 pounds
37:26on mars and only 25 pounds on the moon my weight on the moon
37:3362.2 pounds astronauts adjust surprisingly quickly to moving around in low gravity after about eight months
37:40like you genuinely almost not that you forget how to walk but you forget what it feels like to walk
37:46and floating just becomes your your perfectly normal feeling day-to-day kind of moving yourself around
37:52and so i think one of the things that surprised me the most is how adaptable our brain is but while
37:56your brain adjusts your body doesn't in microgravity your bodily fluids shift upward and for the first
38:04couple weeks you feel really stuffy and just kind of like you have a head cold and that's just due to
38:09all that extra volume in your in your head and so your heart uh for every stroke that it pumps
38:14it now has a significantly greater volume so the stroke volume is as increased and that puts a lot
38:20of stress on your on your heart but perhaps the biggest challenge in zero g is bone loss without
38:26gravity constantly pulling on your skeleton your bones start to deteriorate fast it hits the weight
38:32bearing bones first your spine hips and legs that's why treadmills and resistance machines are essential
38:38in orbit one of the most important a red the advanced resistive exercise device a red uses two vacuum
38:45cylinders to recreate that resistance an hour of intense work in to replicate the 24 hours worth of
38:51pressure that your bones would otherwise be feeling some scientists say the answer to all this is simple
38:57just spin the spacecraft rotating a habitat can simulate gravity through centrifugal force like in the o'neill
39:04cylinders but there's a catch and the wienersmiths call it the washing machine effect which is that
39:10if you have ever had a washing machine and all the towels were on one side when it started spitting
39:14it didn't just spin nicely it started wobbling right now in your washing machine that's a slight concern
39:20in a rigid outer space structure that's a terrifying concern and so you try to imagine you've got a
39:26rotating space station and then there's a taylor swift concert on one side so everybody goes right now
39:31you've created the washing machine problem i depending on where the crack goes maybe all of taylor's
39:37audience gets sucked out into the void so do we bounce back after a stint in zero g nasa's landmark
39:44twin study helped answer that astronaut scott kelly spent nearly a year in space his identical twin mark
39:51stayed on earth when scott returned researchers compared everything right down to the dna many of scott's
39:58physiological changes reversed after he came home but some didn't he came back with dna damage from
40:05radiation increased inflammation slower cognitive processing dizziness and nausea on re-entry and here's
40:12the catch we've only studied zero gravity and earth gravity we know almost nothing about what happens in
40:18between how does the body respond to living on mars gravity or moon gravity for years what we don't know
40:25after 63 years of space human space flight we do not know the gravity prescription we don't know the
40:32dose we don't know the frequency and we don't know the side effects and there will be side effects
40:40we just don't know them yet right now it's an open question with no good answers nasa has tried
40:45countermeasures including one particularly strange solution sucky pants so the idea here is that you get
40:52into these pants or in some cases it's a sleeping bag and it creates lower pressure around the bottom
40:58of you which results in the fluids up higher shifting down in response to that change of pressure but
41:04sometimes it happens too fast and there have been stories about cosmonauts sort of passing out as the
41:10fluids like go down into the sucky pants uh and i've seen pictures of the sucky sleeping bag and it doesn't look very comfortable
41:18it turns out zero gravity makes it hard to stand sleep and snuggle
41:27in the 1980s engineer g harry stein made a shocking claim sources inside nasa have informed him that
41:35there is work on uh in in neutral buoyancy tanks uh having space sacks and so what do dolphins have to do
41:43with this well there's a claim that what dolphins do is have what you might call scientifically
41:48obligate threesomes in which in order for two to clasp each other there has to be uh a third wheel
41:55a third flipper i don't know to to make sure everyone's going in the right place yeah hold them in
42:00place yeah uh and so there's just let's say some problems with this idea one of which is dolphins don't
42:06um and so they may just be just fine yeah yeah they're not the one maybe there's some organism
42:13that actually does this but it seems like evolution might have been i don't know having a late night i
42:18don't know but um what we figure is either someone at nasa or just someone was having a laugh with stein
42:24and stein just bought it like they apparently sent him a document with like their logo like they had a
42:28club and then anyway so the point is the three dolphins club is supposedly assigned to anyone who had
42:34actually accomplished it in space um and which supposedly happened repeatedly on the shuttle
42:40again according stein and no one else um we are skeptical every step of human reproduction
42:48implantation fetal development delivery evolved on earth in space we're in the dark as far as you
42:55know has anybody ever had sex in space love this question uh so there are uh you know looking at it um
43:09i do not believe personally that um intercourse has ever happened in space uh to answer that question um
43:18um self-activity um as can i say master the word masturbation on here um so yeah uh self uh self
43:28activity has uh has certainly occurred uh in in space alex leyendecker is the founder and director of
43:35the advanced space life research institute we're a 501c3 a non-profit research organization based in cape
43:42canaveral studying the space life sciences but a lot more specifically human sexuality and reproduction
43:49factors as they apply to outer space so far science has never seen a successful mammalian pregnancy in
43:55space not in humans not even in mice it was five female rats and two male rats uh into orbit and those rats
44:05copulated but no pregnancies uh resulted not a great look for the million astronaut musk plan
44:13i guess our view is if you do as some very rich people are advocating and send a million people
44:19to mars at once they are going to try to have children and we consider that essentially unethical
44:24it'd be kind of like having babies in the middle of chernobyl just to see how it goes it is possible it's
44:28going to be fine you know people in the early spacefaring days thought maybe it would be impossible to eat
44:33in the space and it just turned out you can so we'd like to get those data first though before we
44:39start sending children to this environment and so the best way to do that would probably be to
44:43gradually ramp up invertebrates on the moon alex's asri organization has designed future rodent
44:50experiments but human experiments could be a long way off as we have a projector right now we're looking
44:57at hopefully being able to have the first full-scale human conception development and live birth and
45:06delivery in space by 2055. but private space stations are coming soon civilians are already flying and
45:14eventually someone is going to try they're going to go up there and try to do the deed and we don't know
45:19the outcome yet we don't know how it's going to work for sure without human reproduction there is no future
45:26in space no colonies no cities no second generation we can launch billionaires we can build bunkers on
45:33the moon but if we can't make more humans then space isn't a new frontier it's just a very expensive hotel
45:40with no checkout policy we've talked about fuel food gravity radiation and reproduction but there's
45:49one more thing space explorers will have to figure out rules so according to the 1967 outer space
45:57treaty through the united nations no individual or nation or company is supposed to go out and claim
46:03sovereignty over anything in space but elon musk in the starlink terms of service says that they're
46:09going to go out and start a nation on mars and that the people on mars will not be beholden to the
46:13laws of earth and so what concerns me is that the person who has the most money and the highest
46:18probability of actually starting settlements in space clearly plans to disregard international law
46:25if a billionaire builds a habitat hires a crew and something goes wrong whose court do you go to
46:31there's no precedent no sheriff no enforcement agency space governance might sound boring until it isn't
46:38because when things go wrong in a sealed metal tube 34 million miles from earth you better know who's in
46:44charge it's easy to get swept up in the fantasy of cities on mars space cowboy balls and trillion
46:51person solar civilizations but the truth is we've barely figured out the plumbing so how long can humans
46:59survive in space probably years at a time at least long enough to make it to mars and back but even if
47:05that's true it's fair to ask why leave earth at all a 2023 pew survey found that only a small
47:13fraction of americans think sending astronauts to the moon or mars should be a top nasa priority far
47:19more say nasa should focus on things closer to home like climate change and asteroid defense can we
47:26be as humanity live on mars um i think with the uh the mindset that we have or the the the knowledge
47:36that that we have today uh the answer would be no but i think if you you know if you had asked any of
47:42us uh 20 years ago about certain technologies that we have now right like hey are we ever going to have
47:48rockets that are landing their first stage back on earth right are we uh ever going to have humans that
47:53are living in space for more than a year heck are we ever going to have all the the capacity that a
47:58cell phone has right all of us would probably said no 20 years ago so i think only time and creativity
48:04and you know engineering are the things that are not limited so i think we can resolve any of those
48:10problems it's just going to be a little bit of time and creativity and we'll get there right now
48:15civilization is not ready to expand to the stars not technically not biologically not politically
48:23but that doesn't mean we won't try if we continue on the same trajectory right now we probably have
48:29another 90 to about 120 years of existence on this planet before we may become endangered because space
48:35has always been a mirror reflecting not just our technology but our fears our ambition and our
48:42imagination we're all standing on the edge of this this possibility yeah and out there is this
48:48undiscovered country called the future it's called the galaxy it's called the universe okay it's called
48:52hope okay we need hope then and in space even the skeptics in the end think that our only future will be
49:00among the stars i have to admit i'm kind of a true believer when it comes to permanent human expansion
49:07in the solar system i think it's real clear we either leave the planet or perish it's just that simple
49:14and the universe doesn't seem to have a stake in the matter at all it's almost like you know we
49:21can do that and survive or we cannot do that and eventually perish it is true single planet species
49:29don't survive to be honest to the extent people see our book as a kind of like
49:34let's never do this manifesto we regret it i mean i don't think we say that anywhere
49:39we're we're mostly pushing back against silly ideas or the idea that we can do this immediately
49:43or that it would be ethical to do it immediately for us you know doing it right means
49:49handling all these difficult medical problems especially reproduction handling the need to be
49:54able to create artificial ecologies on other planets that can sustain people safely and then
50:00somehow finding a way to make a legal structure that allows all of this to be at least moderately
50:06harmonious so that we don't increase the danger to ourselves by expanding outward
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