Dreaming Against the Machine - October 06, 2026


Episode 26： Space Ain't the Place (solo episode)

Episode 25： Transhumanism and Faith, with Meghan O'Gieblyn

Episode Stats


Length

53 minutes

Words per minute

167.98

Word count

8,934

Sentence count

535

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week, it's
00:00:07.460 just me. You know, we've got plenty of guests booked up for future weeks. It's going to
00:00:12.100 be fun. We're going to have some good conversations. But this time, we're trying something a little
00:00:16.640 bit different. I think we're going to start doing the occasional solo episode. So this
00:00:21.200 is a little bit of an experiment, and we're going to see how it goes. But first of all,
00:00:26.320 before I get started in earnest, I just want to say, you know, we started this podcast,
00:00:32.720 what, a few months ago now. Oh, God, I guess the first episode came out in April. As I'm
00:00:39.340 recording this, it's September. So that's about five months ago, we started-ish, four or five
00:00:45.800 months. And, you know, we prepped for it for longer than that, you know, really started working
00:00:51.200 on this in earnest around the beginning of this year. And if you told me then that we would be
00:00:59.140 here now, that, you know, we'd be a few months in, that we would have put out an episode every
00:01:04.740 single week without fail, that we would have thousands of people downloading it every single
00:01:10.400 week, that we would have, you know, a bunch of really loyal supporters on Patreon, and that we'd
00:01:16.560 be part of this amazing podcast collective.
00:01:19.980 I don't know if I would have believed
00:01:22.680 that that could have all happened as quickly as it has.
00:01:25.720 I've been really completely bowled over
00:01:29.180 by the support for this show
00:01:31.560 that you all have shown, the listeners.
00:01:35.140 Yeah, I'm very happy about it,
00:01:37.100 and I'm honestly very humbled by it.
00:01:39.900 Everyone on this team,
00:01:41.320 and Nick, my producer, is listening to me
00:01:43.700 as I say this right now,
00:01:44.780 and I'm sure he is just nodding along
00:01:46.400 and is probably going to turn on his camera in a second
00:01:48.620 and, like, give me that face he gives me.
00:01:50.800 But, like, everyone involved with the production of this show
00:01:55.160 from the beginning, you know, Nick, the team at Multitude,
00:01:59.560 our former associate producer, Rosie,
00:02:03.440 who is still a dear friend of the show,
00:02:06.220 everybody, all of the guests,
00:02:08.720 everybody believed in this more than I did.
00:02:10.800 Everybody was like, yeah, of course this is going to go well, Adam.
00:02:13.820 Of course this is going to be good.
00:02:14.840 And I was like, I don't know.
00:02:17.520 And like, you know, and that was not false modesty on my part.
00:02:21.840 Like, you know, I think it makes sense, right?
00:02:24.640 You know, the person who's at the center of the storm is the one who has the most trouble seeing it for what it is, I guess.
00:02:29.400 But like, I really wasn't sure how this was going to go.
00:02:34.620 This was an experiment, just like this episode is an experiment.
00:02:37.380 I don't know how it's going to go.
00:02:38.780 But I really didn't know how it was going to be.
00:02:44.620 I hoped for all of these things, I wanted this to go well, and I am just really happy that it has, and I suppose I should take some of the credit for that, but instead I'm going to say that mostly, really, almost entirely, that's about you, that's about the listeners.
00:03:03.320 So, thank you for being here, and for coming back to this show week after week.
00:03:09.760 Now, as for today's show, I started thinking about this, actually, after the episode a few weeks ago, a little while back, we had Lucien and Erica on, and we talked about space colonization and why it's a terrible idea.
00:03:28.220 And, you know, we got into a lot of things, a lot of reasons why it's a bad idea.
00:03:33.920 But I felt like there was something more that we could have done there.
00:03:40.240 And that's what I'm going to try to do today.
00:03:42.580 And that's to talk about, in detail, why space is such an inhospitable place for us.
00:03:51.060 One of the things that's always difficult about what I do and really what I think anybody who's trying to talk to a wide audience in any format tries to do is you don't know what things you know and take for granted because of various experiences and expertise that you have that are not widely known among the public.
00:04:13.180 Like, you know, I am an astrophysicist by training, and I don't always know what people
00:04:19.740 know or don't know about space, even people who are close to me, who, you know, who are
00:04:25.360 educated people who know a lot.
00:04:27.360 This is what comes with, you know, years of training and expertise in something.
00:04:33.460 I spent many years learning a lot about physics and about space and about science and also
00:04:41.840 learning about the philosophy of science, the history of science. And through that,
00:04:45.700 tried to keep a sense of like, okay, what do other people know? Because I always like talking about
00:04:50.620 this stuff. Part of the reason why I ended up in the career path that I have is that I found myself
00:04:56.440 talking very excitedly about all the things that I had learned to people who weren't learning those
00:05:02.960 things and having a really good time, you know, explaining these things and then learning about
00:05:07.460 what they knew. And the fact that I get to do that for a living is one of the great privileges
00:05:12.980 of my life. But I do think that in large part because of science fiction, which you all know
00:05:21.140 I love science fiction, but I think that science fiction has depicted space as a more hospitable
00:05:30.360 place than it really is. And also, of course, it's not just science fiction. It's also the
00:05:36.160 billionaires who've been out there misreading science fiction. So I'm going to spend most of
00:05:41.960 today talking about what it is exactly that makes space such a hostile place for us.
00:05:50.440 We're going to start with the one good line that I am aware of that Elon Musk has ever uttered in
00:05:59.080 public. I think that this is from, I mean, this is from earlier on in his career. This is from
00:06:05.780 10 or 15 years ago. Back then, I think he still had a PR team that he listened to, and they would
00:06:11.140 write lines for him. I find it difficult to believe that Musk himself could have come up
00:06:15.140 with a line this good. This is a good line, though. The line is, it would be cool to die on Mars,
00:06:20.160 just not on impact. And, you know, I mean, that's solid, right? That's a solid line. Credit where
00:06:27.420 credit's due. Credit to whoever wrote that line for him. And, you know, before and since he said
00:06:33.240 that. He has been going on and on, as we talked about on that episode a few weeks ago. He's been
00:06:37.860 going on and on about wanting Mars as a backup for humanity. And the good news for his aspiration
00:06:47.440 to die on Mars, just not on impact, the bad news for Mars as a backup for humanity is
00:06:53.560 it's real, real easy to die on Mars. But this is why his idea of a backup for humanity on Mars
00:07:02.860 It's just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard. 0.99
00:07:04.500 So let's get into it. 1.00
00:07:05.580 Mars.
00:07:07.520 As I have said on this show and elsewhere many times, the radiation is too high.
00:07:13.560 The gravity is too low.
00:07:15.120 There's basically no air.
00:07:16.760 And the dirt is made of poison.
00:07:19.920 So let's take each of those one at a time.
00:07:21.800 Radiation.
00:07:22.840 There are two major sources of radiation out in space in our solar system.
00:07:27.100 One, our sun.
00:07:29.400 Our sun, as you may have heard, is a gigantic nuclear furnace where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.
00:07:40.120 And as you might expect from a gigantic nuclear furnace, it gives off enormous amounts of radiation.
00:07:44.700 Now, some of that radiation is the light and the heat that we get from the sun.
00:07:48.200 Again, we need our sun, as the song says.
00:07:53.500 uh and and yes by the way to answer a question that i've gotten many times by email yes when i
00:07:59.820 said that stuff in more everything forever it was an intentional reference to they might be giants
00:08:05.000 come on i am a nerd of course i was making a reference to they might be giants but yeah there's
00:08:12.800 a whole bunch of other nasty radiation that our son gives off uh our son gives off x-rays even a
00:08:20.160 little bit of gamma rays, ultraviolet radiation, the stuff that, you know, gives us sunburns and
00:08:24.960 stuff like that. There's some nasty stuff coming out of the sun and, you know, other sorts of high
00:08:29.920 energy particle radiation. Now, the other major source of radiation that we have in our solar
00:08:36.160 system is cosmic radiation. There are incredibly violent cosmic events happening at great distances
00:08:42.600 outside of our solar system, and they give off enormous amounts of radiation and small fractions
00:08:48.260 of that radiation come to our solar system. And a lot of that stuff comes in toward the Earth
00:08:57.060 and hits the Earth. But we are protected from that radiation by two major things that the Earth has.
00:09:06.160 First of all, the Earth has a relatively strong magnetic field. And so when charged particles
00:09:12.000 like really fast-flying electrons or helium nuclei,
00:09:18.000 which are called alpha particles, protons, that kind of thing.
00:09:21.820 Subatomic particles with electric charge
00:09:24.020 will get deflected by magnetic fields.
00:09:27.140 And so those sorts of radiation,
00:09:31.020 we are protected from that in large part by Earth's magnetic field.
00:09:34.360 And that keeps us safe from that stuff.
00:09:36.900 But the other thing that protects us is the Earth's atmosphere,
00:09:41.720 which is also relatively thick, especially for a rocky planet like ours.
00:09:46.120 So that atmosphere also stops a bunch of that radiation
00:09:50.640 because, you know, the radiation hits the material in the atmosphere.
00:09:53.920 It hits the air and it gets stopped.
00:09:55.740 The ozone layer protects us from a lot of UV.
00:09:58.760 Yes, there's a hole in the ozone layer,
00:10:00.660 but it's a lot less bad than it was when I was a kid.
00:10:03.860 It's a great example of international cooperation
00:10:06.980 actually leading to solving a major global problem.
00:10:11.840 It would be cool if we could do that again for, you know, I don't know, the climate crisis.
00:10:20.220 But in any event, here on Earth, we have that thick atmosphere.
00:10:25.820 We have that magnetic field.
00:10:27.960 Mars doesn't have either of those.
00:10:29.420 It has no magnetic field to speak of.
00:10:31.860 And it has barely any atmosphere, less than 1% of what we've got on Earth.
00:10:35.280 And so the amount of radiation on the surface of Mars is just so, so, so, so, so much higher.
00:10:41.040 and that means that your cancer risk
00:10:44.560 and, you know, all sorts of problems
00:10:47.480 that radiation can cause in your body
00:10:49.000 is just really high the longer you spend
00:10:52.380 on the surface of Mars.
00:10:53.400 It's bad for you.
00:10:54.840 That will cause serious problems.
00:10:57.940 There's also that problem on your way to Mars,
00:11:00.920 you know, and this is another problem with Mars.
00:11:03.160 Mars, as you may have noticed, is far away.
00:11:07.180 Mars is very far away.
00:11:09.420 It's so far away that it actually takes light quite a few minutes to get there and back.
00:11:15.000 So this is another problem.
00:11:16.320 You can't have real-time communication with Mars because even at the speed of light, it takes at least a few minutes and sometimes as much as, I think, about 15 to 20 minutes for light to get from Earth to Mars.
00:11:30.660 Which means that a round trip, you know, conversation, like just a question and then an answer coming back is going to take twice as long.
00:11:39.420 So that could take anywhere from, you know, 10 to 15 minutes to the better part of an hour.
00:11:45.660 And without real time communication, if you get in trouble on the surface of Mars, you're stuck.
00:11:51.300 But also the fact that it's so far away means that it's very hard to get there.
00:11:55.380 It takes quite a bit of time.
00:11:56.600 We have landed stuff on the surface of Mars.
00:11:58.120 It always took at least, you know, about six to nine months to get there.
00:12:01.380 And because Mars orbits the sun independently of the Earth, there are only so many launch windows to get to Mars from Earth and back.
00:12:12.360 You know, when we send people to the moon, well, the moon orbits the Earth, and its orbit only takes about a month.
00:12:19.440 And so there's just a lot more opportunities to get to the moon from Earth, and the moon's distance from the Earth is pretty constant.
00:12:27.760 The distance between the Earth and Mars can vary very, very widely,
00:12:31.480 depending on whether we're on the same side of the sun
00:12:33.480 or opposite sides of the sun from each other.
00:12:36.020 And Mars is just a lot farther away than the moon is.
00:12:39.820 And so you can go to the moon, I don't want to say any old time,
00:12:43.580 but, you know, there's, like, significant chunks of each month
00:12:47.560 when you can get to the moon relatively easily,
00:12:50.300 depending on where your landing site is.
00:12:52.320 And when it comes to Mars, these launch windows happen only like once every, I think it's about 15 to 18 months.
00:13:03.280 And so, you know, you have to wait for the launch window.
00:13:07.260 Hopefully you get to launch during that window.
00:13:09.620 Then you take six to nine months to get there.
00:13:11.860 You've had to shield yourself from radiation the whole way there.
00:13:15.020 Although, you know, you are in a spaceship of some kind, a spacecraft, and these spacecrafts are built with some sort of shielding in there, but it can't protect you from everything.
00:13:23.920 If you have the bad luck to get hit by a solar storm on your way out there, that could seriously give you a very high radiation dose.
00:13:32.820 And then once you're there, you've got to deal with radiation on the surface, and then you've got to come back.
00:13:40.820 And there's only so many launch windows to come back to the Earth from Mars.
00:13:44.060 And so you have a choice of sticking around for just a month or you have to wait something like a year before another launch window shows up, depending on, you know, the exact details of when and how you make this trip.
00:13:58.660 But let's forget that.
00:14:00.440 Let's say that you're, I don't know, trying to live out Musk's dream and you want to go there to stay.
00:14:05.940 You want to build a city on Mars.
00:14:08.060 You want to colonize Mars.
00:14:09.760 Okay, fine.
00:14:11.740 So you go to Mars, and you immediately have to deal with this radiation.
00:14:16.860 So the best way to protect yourself from it there is to dig a tunnel under the surface and live in that tunnel.
00:14:22.320 And then you can pressurize that tunnel with air.
00:14:24.560 So that also helps deal with the fact that the Martian atmosphere has no oxygen in it and is extraordinarily thin.
00:14:31.480 If you were on the surface of Mars without a space suit, the air is so thin that the saliva on your tongue would boil off as you asphyxiate.
00:14:42.260 But let's say, let's say you go out there, you build your tunnel, you fill it with air, fine.
00:14:49.720 So now you've got a tunnel under the surface of Mars.
00:14:52.420 Well, you had to tunnel into the toxic dirt to do that, and that dirt is poisonous for humans and most life.
00:15:01.100 So good luck keeping that out of your airlocks and everything.
00:15:05.160 And you can tunnel under the surface all you want.
00:15:08.440 You can do what you can to get the dirt out of there, whatever.
00:15:11.460 You can pressurize your tunnels.
00:15:13.720 And you've still got the problem that the gravity is too low.
00:15:16.800 Martian gravity is about a third of what we experience here at the surface of the Earth.
00:15:21.520 And our bodies evolved to have that much gravity because the gravitational pull of the Earth just doesn't vary that much from place to place.
00:15:30.580 on the surface. It varies by a very small amount. And so that big difference of one, you know, it's
00:15:37.200 only one third of what we've got here can cause all kinds of physiological problems that we don't
00:15:43.240 even know that much about yet. We know that being in zero gravity for extended periods, as astronauts
00:15:49.720 are on the International Space Station and other space stations before that, we know that that's
00:15:54.800 really bad for you. It causes loss of muscle mass, loss of bone density, which is really pretty
00:16:01.340 scary. Astronauts up on the ISS spend an enormous fraction of their time engaging in exercise to
00:16:08.440 try to combat this, and it still doesn't fully stop these effects on their bodies. When they
00:16:15.100 get back to Earth, they still have much reduced muscle tone. They still have much reduced bone
00:16:20.420 density. It also changes the shape of your eyes a bit, causes all sorts of other problems. Your
00:16:26.760 body, again, evolved to be in 100% Earth gravity. So zero G causes all sorts of issues. We don't
00:16:38.380 know how much of that would still be the case if you were in one third gravity. It could be that
00:16:45.820 it's like what we've got in zero G, but, you know, not as bad. It could be that it's just as bad.
00:16:53.220 It could be not too bad at all. We do not know, and we will not know until we send people there.
00:16:59.780 We also don't know. It might be, for example, that you can have adults there, but that kids
00:17:05.180 can't grow up in that environment. It might be that you can have kids in that environment,
00:17:09.320 But that you cannot successfully bring a pregnancy to term in that environment. And if you want to have a city of people living on Mars full time, good luck doing that if they can't have kids.
00:17:22.660 So we don't know the answer to that. And the experiments that you would need to do to get the answers to questions like that. I don't feel good about experimenting on human children. And I don't think that we should feel good about that.
00:17:42.960 um so i mean yes you could try to perform those experiments on animals animal experimentation is
00:17:50.980 its own ethical box of worms but i i think most people would agree it's not as bad as conducting
00:17:55.840 those experiments on people but still there's a lot of science that you need to do just to answer
00:18:02.020 the question of what effect does mars gravity have on the development of plants and animals
00:18:09.260 and mammals and specifically humans.
00:18:12.760 And that's just one issue.
00:18:15.320 And again, there's all of these other issues.
00:18:18.200 You know, you don't have real-time comms.
00:18:19.960 Like I said, you've got the atmosphere,
00:18:21.640 you've got the toxic dirt,
00:18:22.940 you've got the radiation.
00:18:24.820 Now, Musk likes to wave this stuff away
00:18:26.920 and say, oh, you know, we'll terraform Mars.
00:18:28.940 We'll make it more like Earth.
00:18:31.620 First of all, that is only going to get you so far.
00:18:34.480 That's not going to solve the gravity problem.
00:18:36.680 Second, we don't have the technology to do that,
00:18:40.580 to, you know, radically change the temperature
00:18:44.660 because, oh yeah, by the way, Mars is very cold.
00:18:48.280 Warm day on Mars is like a brisk winter day here on Earth.
00:18:51.660 A cold day on Mars is cold enough
00:18:54.380 to solidify carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
00:18:57.900 In fact, one of Mars' polar caps
00:19:00.380 is made primarily of dry ice,
00:19:02.420 which is frozen carbon dioxide.
00:19:03.820 If we had the technology to radically transform the thickness and composition of Mars' atmosphere, its temperature, its biosphere, it would be a lot easier to apply a much punier version of that technology here on Earth to, I don't know, solve the climate crisis.
00:19:25.840 Wouldn't that be a more straightforward solution to our problems?
00:19:29.060 But we aren't even good enough at doing that to have done it easily.
00:19:34.120 So, you know, that gives you a sense of how far away we are from that kind of technology.
00:19:38.800 Musk and others have said, oh, well, we'll just melt the Martian polar ice caps,
00:19:43.380 and that will put enough stuff into the atmosphere to get us started with terraforming.
00:19:47.140 No, it won't. There's just not enough material.
00:19:49.360 It would not get the trick done.
00:19:51.320 It would not bring up the atmospheric thickness enough.
00:19:53.600 It would not bring up the temperature by very much.
00:19:56.900 There's just not nearly enough material.
00:19:58.800 The amount of material that you'd need is truly vast.
00:20:01.060 You'd need to bring it in from off-world somewhere.
00:20:04.420 The most straightforward way to do that, and straightforward is very much in air quotes here,
00:20:11.120 is probably to go get a comet and have an impact on Mars or a bunch of comets.
00:20:18.800 Because comets bring in, like, volatile gases and liquids from the outer atmosphere,
00:20:25.620 including, like, water, ice, carbon dioxide, oxygen, you name it.
00:20:29.080 So, you know, that's the stuff you need.
00:20:31.860 So you need to, you know, just steer, like, hundreds or maybe even thousands of comets
00:20:37.000 to impact Mars, which, first of all, that wouldn't be so great for Mars, right?
00:20:44.720 A place that you're trying to make livable.
00:20:46.720 Second, we don't have that technology.
00:20:48.920 That is not an easy thing to accomplish.
00:20:51.180 Third, what if you miss?
00:20:52.120 and instead, I don't know,
00:20:53.940 one of them is heading toward Earth?
00:20:56.060 A comet hitting Earth would be very bad,
00:20:58.860 possibly as bad as the day that that asteroid
00:21:01.820 killed off all the dinosaurs except for the birds
00:21:03.900 66 million years ago.
00:21:06.160 And as I think I said on that episode
00:21:08.220 with Lucy and Erica,
00:21:10.700 that day, the worst day for complex life on Earth,
00:21:14.700 was still a nicer day
00:21:16.080 and more survivable environment than Mars is.
00:21:19.760 And we know that because mammals survived
00:21:21.280 and there are no mammals that would survive
00:21:23.160 on the surface of Mars, then or now.
00:21:26.000 Speaking of asteroid impacts, by the way,
00:21:27.640 Mars gets more of those than Earth does.
00:21:29.480 It's been called the solar system's punching bag.
00:21:32.380 It is, after all, quite a bit closer
00:21:34.220 to the asteroid belt than we are.
00:21:36.540 So, yeah, terraforming, that's not going to work either.
00:21:40.180 And then finally, the last thing I'll say
00:21:42.380 about using Mars as a backup for humanity,
00:21:44.880 You would need so many people
00:21:51.920 Musk has said he wants to put a million people on Mars
00:21:54.820 That's not going to happen
00:21:56.620 He said he wants to do it by 2050
00:21:58.440 That's very much not going to happen
00:22:00.280 But also, that's not enough
00:22:02.960 He said he wants to have those people there
00:22:05.020 In the event of, you know, something that kills off
00:22:07.440 Our entire species here on Earth
00:22:09.660 If that happened
00:22:11.760 And you had a million people living on Mars
00:22:13.860 somehow they would all die too, because a million people is not enough to have them have a completely
00:22:20.580 self-sufficient, high-tech civilization. You need more people than that to get that done.
00:22:27.480 And they'd still need supplies from Earth. And so it would just be a question of dying in the
00:22:32.900 initial impact versus slowly starving on Mars. The best estimates that we've got, and I get into
00:22:39.220 this in my book. The best estimates that we've got for how many people you would need to have
00:22:44.900 an independent civilization on Mars that doesn't need anything from Earth is around 500 million
00:22:52.860 people. We're definitely not going to have half a billion people on Mars. That's just not a thing
00:23:02.900 that's going to happen, probably ever, definitely anytime remotely soon. That is a lot of people.
00:23:13.340 And, you know, and there's other issues here as well. Like, you know, okay, say that you just want
00:23:18.360 like a domed city on Mars where a bunch of people live. And you want it to like have its own closed
00:23:26.480 biosphere. We don't know how to do that either. We've tried to have closed biospheres just here
00:23:31.020 on Earth where it's strictly easier. And that has not gone well. That's not to say that we
00:23:37.560 couldn't do that. That might be one of the easier problems to solve. I don't know. Nobody knows.
00:23:42.320 You'd have to figure that out. But, you know, keeping an entire biosphere with just a few people
00:23:50.000 and a bunch of plants running is an experiment that was done down at the Biosphere 2 project
00:23:56.180 a few decades ago, it did not go well. They couldn't get it to work. And that was a much
00:24:02.980 smaller and easier endeavor than trying to live on Mars. So as amazing and appealing as I've just
00:24:10.080 made Mars sound, Mars is probably the best option in the solar system for a place for people to live
00:24:18.260 other than Earth. So Musk has that one thing right. If you're going to target someplace other
00:24:23.500 than Earth in our solar system, Mars is what you want to target. The rest of the solar system
00:24:28.880 is just so, so much worse. You know, yes, we've been to the moon, but the moon is bad. The moon
00:24:37.120 gets more radiation than Mars. It has less protection from that radiation than Mars because
00:24:41.440 it has no atmosphere whatsoever, not even the 1% of Earths that Mars does. The moon dust is like
00:24:49.060 both electrostatically sticky,
00:24:51.820 like it just,
00:24:52.400 it has a lot of static electrical charge
00:24:54.300 and just sticks to everything,
00:24:55.500 and it's also incredibly abrasive
00:24:57.600 to the point where, like,
00:24:59.100 every Apollo mission
00:25:00.080 that landed on the moon
00:25:00.960 was pushed to its operational limits
00:25:03.720 just from the issue of moon dust.
00:25:08.380 It's got a better location than Mars.
00:25:11.160 It's easier to get home
00:25:12.960 and to communicate with home than Mars.
00:25:15.960 You know, the light communication
00:25:18.960 delay to the moon is only about a second, that's not so bad. You can have near real-time
00:25:25.620 conversations that way. And you can get home in just a few days, and you don't have to really
00:25:30.740 wait for a launch window. But in basically every other way, the moon is worse than Mars.
00:25:37.280 And everything else is even worse than that. Just going through the planets and their moons,
00:25:44.300 Mercury is like a hotter,
00:25:47.820 significantly hotter,
00:25:49.240 and way more irradiated version of the moon
00:25:52.580 with a little bit more gravity than the moon,
00:25:55.000 but not as much as Mars.
00:25:57.840 You know, the moon's gravity
00:25:58.720 is about half that of Mars,
00:26:00.200 and Mercury's, I think, is a bit more than that
00:26:02.160 because Mercury is denser.
00:26:04.180 Venus is a hellscape.
00:26:06.240 Venus is the hottest place
00:26:07.160 in the solar system on the surface.
00:26:08.720 It's hot enough to melt lead.
00:26:10.140 The Soviets sent some probes there,
00:26:11.920 and they managed to send back
00:26:13.260 a few pictures before they melted. And these were, you know, like Soviet over-engineered 0.85
00:26:19.460 planetary landers from the 1970s. Like, no, no, absolutely not. There's a spot in the clouds of
00:26:25.940 Venus where the temperature and atmospheric pressure is actually not too bad. But then you
00:26:30.020 just have to deal with the complete lack of a solid surface at that altitude. You're like 60
00:26:34.320 miles up. The fact that if you do fall in, you're going to be hit with like crushing atmospheric
00:26:39.480 pressure and crushing, uh, heat. And of course, you know, the clouds of sulfuric acid that are
00:26:46.940 just, you know, floating around in Venus's atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide. Uh,
00:26:53.800 well, okay. Yeah. So Venus and the next out is earth. Earth is good. Uh, the asteroid belt
00:26:58.940 is a bunch of rocks that are all real small and, uh, there's, you know, nothing there for us to
00:27:05.140 live on, really. The biggest one is a place called Ceres, which is, you know, really still pretty
00:27:10.220 damn small and, you know, no atmosphere, not much gravity, nothing doing. Jupiter is massive and has
00:27:17.240 no solid surface. Its moons are pretty interesting. It's possible people have speculated about possible
00:27:23.000 life on at least one or two of those moons because some of them are pretty big. In fact, the biggest
00:27:29.020 moon in the solar system is one of the moons of Jupiter. Oh, Jesus. I never remember whether it's
00:27:35.500 Ganymede or Callisto. It's one of those two. But those moons are pretty big. Europa actually has
00:27:42.380 a surface made of water ice. It's miles deep, but underneath that, it's widely speculated that
00:27:47.760 there's liquid water ocean, and there could be life living there. It's also true that on the
00:27:54.240 surface of Europa and all the other moons of Jupiter, the amount of sunlight that you get is
00:27:58.980 about 4% what you get here on Earth. It's not very much. It's pretty cold. That's why there's
00:28:08.400 miles of ice on the surface of Europa. Io isn't cold. So one moon of Jupiter that's really not
00:28:15.920 very cold at all. It's not cold because it's so close into Jupiter that the tidal forces it
00:28:21.900 experiences keep its interior completely molten. And so it's just covered in volcanoes.
00:28:28.820 So you don't want to be on Io. It's just like, you know, just constant volcanic eruptions all
00:28:35.180 the time to the point where its surface really looks an awful lot like a slice of pizza,
00:28:40.140 except the red sauce is not tomatoes. Yeah. And then, what, the other two big moons,
00:28:48.580 of Jupiter, Ganymede, and Callisto, icy balls of not very much sunlight. Yes, there's water,
00:28:55.980 but no atmosphere. Plenty of radiation, by the way. Jupiter has an incredibly strong magnetic
00:29:01.420 field that captures a lot of radiation, and then those moons go through that magnetic field and
00:29:06.720 get bathed in it. So have fun with that. There's like 20 or 30 other moons of Jupiter, all of which
00:29:13.300 are basically pebbles, a lot like the asteroid belt. A lot of them are captured asteroids.
00:29:18.220 Saturn and Uranus and Neptune,
00:29:22.200 they all also, they're gas giants.
00:29:25.060 They have no solid surfaces.
00:29:26.360 They have moons.
00:29:27.080 Some of those moons are pretty big.
00:29:28.880 The most interesting one is probably Titan,
00:29:32.280 the biggest moon of Saturn.
00:29:35.200 Titan has an atmosphere, actually.
00:29:38.240 In fact, atmospheric pressure at the surface of Titan
00:29:41.040 is pretty similar to atmospheric pressure
00:29:43.160 at the surface of Earth.
00:29:43.960 It's the only solid surface in the entire solar system
00:29:46.800 aside from Earth, where you can walk around without a pressure suit. But the oxygen in your
00:29:53.760 oxygen tanks might liquefy because of how cold it is there. And there are surface lakes. It's
00:30:00.780 actually the only other place in the solar system that we know of that has liquid lakes on the
00:30:07.600 surface. And that's not a coincidence that it also has the atmospheric pressure. It's the pressure
00:30:12.260 that allows for that, but those lakes are not made of water. It's so cold there that water has
00:30:18.400 the consistency of rock, right? It's so, so, so, so, so cold. Those lakes are made of hydrocarbons.
00:30:26.180 So yeah, no, you'd be under an orange sky of toxic gases walking around lakes of hydrocarbons,
00:30:35.400 and it's, you know, a brisk 200 below out there,
00:30:40.260 but as long as you can keep your air
00:30:42.500 from condensing into liquid,
00:30:46.000 yeah, you could hang out there for a little bit.
00:30:48.380 You're not going to colonize it, though,
00:30:50.100 and you're never going to see the sun. 0.88
00:30:52.740 So, yeah, no, Titan sucks,
00:30:54.400 and it's the best spot out there 0.91
00:30:57.080 past the orbit of Jupiter by far
00:30:59.400 because the moons of Uranus and Neptune
00:31:02.040 are like frozen ice balls.
00:31:04.340 You know, the biggest moon of Neptune, Triton, is actually quite a bit like Pluto and other objects out there in what's called the Kuiper Belt.
00:31:12.840 Those things are made of ice, but it's not ice the same way that, say, Europa is.
00:31:18.920 Those are objects that are made of frozen air.
00:31:26.160 Like, there's nitrogen frost on the surface of Triton.
00:31:31.260 Nitrogen is most of what Earth's atmosphere is made of.
00:31:34.340 Out there, it takes hundreds of years to just get around the sun once.
00:31:41.240 Gravity on Kuiper Belt objects is like maybe 1% what we've got here on Earth.
00:31:46.700 It's really, really small.
00:31:49.140 And you don't have to worry too much about solar radiation, though you've still got the cosmic stuff.
00:31:54.300 There's no magnetic fields.
00:31:55.980 You've got nothing.
00:31:57.960 And the sun is only slightly brighter than the background stars in the sky out there.
00:32:03.340 It's gorgeous and desolate, and we've only ever spent, we've only ever sent about, what, I guess we've sent five probes out that far.
00:32:14.680 None of them are coming back.
00:32:16.720 They will go off and escape the solar system and drift in the interstellar void forever.
00:32:24.020 So that's the remaining natural options in the solar system.
00:32:28.180 Unfortunately, we still live in capitalism, and that means we need to talk about our partners
00:32:33.800 and sponsors. But fortunately, our partners and sponsors are great. And if you want to support
00:32:38.960 Dreaming Against the Machine directly, you can join us on Patreon, where $5 a month gives you
00:32:44.420 the chance to ask questions of upcoming guests and a dedicated stream of cat pictures. And here's a
00:32:50.200 word from our sponsors. I think that makes it pretty clear that Earth is our best option here
00:32:57.460 in the solar system, Jeff Bezos,
00:33:00.040 again, credit where credit's due,
00:33:01.660 he agrees he wants us to build
00:33:03.440 giant space stations, because
00:33:05.380 he thinks that there's
00:33:07.500 nothing natural that we could live on in the
00:33:09.400 solar system aside from Earth, so we need big space
00:33:11.440 stations. The reasons he
00:33:13.400 gives for this are complete bullshit. 1.00
00:33:16.160 You know, he says we need to 1.00
00:33:17.360 just keep our population growing
00:33:18.940 and have growing, growing
00:33:21.260 use of resources, because otherwise
00:33:22.860 we'll have a civilization of stasis.
00:33:24.880 I, that's just nonsense. Uh, and also resources are not unlimited out in space either. And,
00:33:34.740 you know, actually that's a good idea for another episode and maybe we should talk about
00:33:39.100 exponential growth and, and all of that at some point. But Bezos's idea is to have a whole bunch
00:33:46.280 of enormous space stations, each one with millions of people on them, the size of Manhattan,
00:33:50.680 or more. And then he wants to have like hundreds of thousands of them so we can have a trillion
00:33:56.680 people living in space stations in the solar system. And this is, you know, as I think Kelly
00:34:04.500 and Zach Wienersmith say in their excellent book that covers a lot of the same stuff I'm talking
00:34:08.840 about today called The City on Mars. And I should really bring them on this show at some point. I
00:34:13.700 think we will. They say, you know, such space stations are not the worst option, but there's
00:34:20.020 still really bad. Yeah, you could have them roughly the same distance from the sun as Earth,
00:34:25.680 and you could have them be giant cylinders that spin around their long axis, and so then you'd
00:34:32.700 have something like gravity on the inside. So that solves some of the problems. And yes,
00:34:38.220 you could shield them from radiation by, you know, having their walls be very thick.
00:34:43.600 But you still got to build them, and good luck doing that. Just building one of those on the
00:34:49.640 ground would be the largest engineering project that humanity has ever engaged in. Building them
00:34:53.720 in space? Because you're not going to build them on the ground and launch them, that's for sure.
00:34:58.520 You have to build them in space. And building just one of those would be incredibly difficult.
00:35:04.540 I don't want to say impossible, but incredibly, incredibly difficult. Then you have to fill it
00:35:09.480 with water and life and air and whatnot that you get from somewhere. Bezos doesn't want to spoil
00:35:16.860 Earth, so those things have to come from somewhere else. I mean, you bring the plants from Earth,
00:35:21.860 but the water and the air, again, you're going to have to go out and get some comets from the
00:35:26.540 outer solar system and bring them in to get those resources, especially if you want to build enough
00:35:30.600 of these things to have a trillion people living in space stations. That's not going to work too
00:35:36.000 well. And then say that you do have a bunch of them. How are you going to maintain them? Bezos
00:35:40.840 wants us to live there forever. That's where he wants most people to live for the rest of the
00:35:47.480 lifetime of the solar system. How are you going to maintain those systems over civilizational
00:35:53.320 timescales, right? How are you going to have them maintained for tens of thousands of years
00:35:59.820 without an accident that kills millions of people in an instant? And speaking of killing millions
00:36:06.700 of people in an instant. What about, you know, somebody going crazy inside one of these things 0.97
00:36:11.220 and, you know, engaging in some act of sabotage or something like that?
00:36:17.060 And you also still have the problem of maintaining a separate biosphere from Earth
00:36:22.360 indefinitely. These are colossal problems. I'm not going to say that they are insurmountable,
00:36:27.700 but I am going to say we are nowhere near knowing how to solve them or even if they are solvable.
00:36:34.260 It is totally possible that we could discover a reason why they are actually completely impossible.
00:36:39.760 And until we do more research on this stuff, somebody saying, well, we could do it because there's no reason why we know we can't, that's just not how reality works.
00:36:51.860 And speaking of not how reality works, there's also, of course, the option of leaving the solar system.
00:36:59.660 I've gone through all of the terrible options here in our solar system.
00:37:03.480 It is true that there are probably planets way, way, way more like Earth around stars kind of like our sun somewhere else in our galaxy or in other galaxies.
00:37:16.300 I remember I was once on a podcast and somebody asked me about, you know, what about when we want to travel to and colonize some world that looks just like Earth around a distant star in a distant galaxy?
00:37:29.560 and I didn't say it forcefully enough at the time,
00:37:33.340 so I'm going to say it now.
00:37:34.920 That is not happening.
00:37:37.060 Of all the things that are not going to happen,
00:37:38.780 that one's really not going to happen.
00:37:40.120 We certainly are not leaving the Milky Way
00:37:41.920 and I really don't think we're leaving the solar system either
00:37:45.120 because we can't travel faster than light.
00:37:47.960 That is something that we have tested in the lab
00:37:50.140 over and over and over again.
00:37:51.480 We know that one real well.
00:37:52.640 You can't go faster than light.
00:37:54.980 That is not going to work.
00:37:56.540 And the nearest stars are four light years and change away.
00:38:02.380 And, you know, our entire galaxy is about 100,000 light years across.
00:38:08.300 Other galaxies, meanwhile, the nearest other galaxy, aside from, you know, our Milky Way satellite galaxies, is the Andromeda galaxy, which is about two and a half million light years away, just to get to the nearest star, aside from our sun.
00:38:24.740 And if you could somehow go a tenth of the speed of light, that's going to take 40 years. And good luck getting up to a tenth of the speed of light. And if you do, you're going to have to deal with some really nasty radiation. Because at a tenth of the speed of light, hitting any particle, any atom, any speck of dust that's out there is going to be like having it come at you at a tenth of the speed of light, which is really fast with a lot of energy.
00:38:50.760 And so for small particles, we call that radiation. And for anything like, I don't know, a speck of dust, it's going to be more like, oh, that's a tiny explosion on the outside of your ship. And God forbid you hit something like a grain of sand at that speed, because that would be like a very large bomb going off on the side of your ship.
00:39:11.760 But even if you find a way around that problem, that's just too long. You are not going to send people on decade or century or millennium-long journeys to other solar systems, to planets that may or may not already have life on them, that may or may not actually be places that you can live.
00:39:32.900 This is another staple of science fiction, the generation ship.
00:39:36.480 You know, you send people out on a journey that's going to take hundreds of years and their descendants are the ones who arrive.
00:39:42.320 That's a bad idea for many of the same reasons that Bezos' rotating cylinders are a bad idea.
00:39:48.120 And it's also a crime against your own descendants.
00:39:51.420 And, of course, you don't know that it's actually going to work, that the place that you've sent them is actually going to be a place that they can go.
00:39:58.920 now this leads to an important question one that we did talk about on that episode with
00:40:06.060 Lucien and Erica does this make me a bummer people want to live out in space they want to go
00:40:14.380 colonize space they feel like that's the future that the future is inevitably in space
00:40:19.260 does me coming out here and saying that's really not very likely to happen it's not
00:40:24.740 going to happen anytime soon and could very easily never happen at all. Does that make me a bummer?
00:40:30.500 Well, as Lucien said, I think that if you find this a bummer, your bummer meter needs to be
00:40:36.580 seriously recalibrated. We don't have people living and raising families and whatnot in like
00:40:45.820 the frozen wastes of Antarctica. We don't have people doing that at the bottom of the ocean.
00:40:51.780 We don't have people doing this, you know, in the middle of, you know, some of the Earth's biggest deserts. People are not clamoring to move to the empty quarter. Now, I believe people when they say that they want to go live in space.
00:41:11.020 But I think that they don't know the stuff that I've just been talking about for the last, you know, what, 45 minutes.
00:41:18.620 I think that the people who say that they want to colonize space don't actually understand what it is that's waiting for them out there and what the barriers are to doing something like that.
00:41:31.360 And that's, again, putting aside the problems that we talked about on the earlier episode with, you know, the C word, colonization.
00:41:36.820 I just think that they don't know.
00:41:38.360 You know, that same podcast host who said the thing about a planet in a distant galaxy, he pointed out that, you know, he'd interviewed a bunch of people saying that they wanted to go to space, like a whole bunch of, you know, person-on-the-street interviews.
00:41:51.480 Like, he was asking them if they wanted to move to Mars.
00:41:54.480 I don't think they know what Mars is like.
00:41:57.400 If people are not willing to go live in Antarctica, a place that is much, much, much, much, much easier to live in than Mars.
00:42:07.380 If people are not clamoring to live at the bottom of the ocean, I think that they don't understand what Mars is. I think that they think that Mars is like, I don't know, kind of like the American Southwest, a big old desert with weird rock formations. And, you know, maybe you need, maybe you need a spacesuit sometimes.
00:42:25.080 times. That's not what Mars is, as I've just explained. The bummer is not that space is so
00:42:32.500 inhospitable. The bummer is that we are not doing a better job of taking care of this wonderful
00:42:40.460 place that we already live. Earth is so fantastic. It's so, so amazing. It is such a beautiful place.
00:42:51.780 we get to live here. We get to be in this one place in the solar system, the one place that
00:42:58.740 we know of in all of the galaxy in the universe that is so, so, so easy to live in. We get to
00:43:11.320 breathe the air. We get to walk around outside without pressure suits, without gas masks.
00:43:17.380 We get to be in such beautiful natural splendor here. There's so many species of beautiful plants and animals. Food literally grows on trees here.
00:43:33.940 Um, and, and as one of my favorite tweets of all time said, uh, we live on a planet where food literally grows on trees. How did we fuck up so bad that I need a credit score? 0.92
00:43:50.440 That's the bummer, is that we've somehow created these systems to oppress ourselves that have things like credit scores in them.
00:43:59.780 I was lucky enough this summer to take a backpacking trip up into the Sierra Nevada.
00:44:04.980 And I got to camp with some friends up in a lake basin at 11,000 feet, where we just had these beautiful lakes spread out around us like jewels.
00:44:15.420 We were on the shores of a lake.
00:44:16.660 I lost my hat.
00:44:17.820 I had to jump into the water and get it.
00:44:19.720 Um, you know, there are these trees that were gorgeous, both, both when they were alive and
00:44:24.880 also some of them were dead and had turned into these like gorgeous twisting forms of wood.
00:44:30.440 There were mountains surrounding us with some fields of ice on them, even though it was August.
00:44:37.580 Uh, and one day we hiked up to, to the top of one of them. We hiked up to 14,000 feet
00:44:41.960 for listeners outside the U S that's like, I think 4,200 meters and change. Uh, so, you know,
00:44:47.960 pretty high. And it was just absolutely gorgeous. And I had a thought when I was up there, wow,
00:44:53.580 this looks like something else. This looks like the surface of Mars. And then I thought, no,
00:45:00.460 no, it does not, actually. It looks like what sci-fi wants us to think the surface of Mars
00:45:06.460 looks like. But that's because, you know, sci-fi movies and TV shows mostly film in the American
00:45:13.540 Southwest when they wanted to have the surface of, you know, an alien planet. In fact, on our way to
00:45:19.320 where we, where we camped, we drove through an area called the Alabama Hills, which is like a
00:45:24.860 very famous science fiction and Western filming location. And so, you know, I was looking at it,
00:45:32.060 I was like, oh yeah, you know, this looks like something out of Star Trek. It's because Star
00:45:36.180 track film there the variety of natural places here on earth and also the community of people
00:45:44.520 that we have here on earth our civilization is far from perfect but it is really quite amazing
00:45:50.160 what what we have here and that we have so many people who we can get to know and spend time with
00:45:57.660 and form community with and take care of and have them take care of us
00:46:03.200 and rather than trying to go out and live in space maybe we can find a way to work together to
00:46:11.940 beat down this system that gives us credit scores to beat down capitalism and make our global
00:46:18.840 civilization more sustainable and more oriented toward human enrichment and joy rather than
00:46:24.580 trying to extract and squeeze out every single ounce of economic value from every waking moment
00:46:30.480 of our lives. So I'm going to close with some listener questions. First of all, we got a
00:46:39.760 question actually from a friend of mine, someone I know, Wayne Mervold, asked if we could bring
00:46:45.460 on someone to talk about AI and art, specifically music. And the answer is, yeah, we can do that.
00:46:53.840 We've got some episodes already in the can and some coming up where we're going to be talking
00:46:59.200 about some of that stuff so thank you wayne and thanks for listening and supporting the show
00:47:04.200 and another supporter on patreon asked in fact hold on let me get the name this was andrea a
00:47:12.680 again a supporter on patreon thank you for your support asked if i would ever consider doing an 0.67
00:47:19.100 audiobook version of as she wrote these fucking people or i mean more everything forever and
00:47:27.920 And the answer is that I would have liked to have done that. 0.54
00:47:36.320 I love more Everything Forever, and I did want to do the audiobook for it.
00:47:39.740 But my publisher, my editor floated it and tried to get the rest of my people at my publisher to be okay with me doing it.
00:47:47.720 But they shot it down and said, no, we want to have the same guy who did Adam's first book, who's a professional.
00:47:53.100 And they had their reasons for doing that, and that makes sense.
00:47:55.180 cheaper and he's a professional and knows what he's doing. But I do think it's very likely that
00:48:03.000 I will write a third book eventually. I'm already thinking about what it could be. I'm nowhere near
00:48:07.720 knowing. Please don't ask what it is about yet. If you send in that question, I am not going to
00:48:15.160 answer it. Ask other questions. Please send in questions, but not that one. But I am going to
00:48:21.480 write a third book at some point. And when I do, I do think that the existence of this podcast will
00:48:26.840 make it easier for me to convince my publisher to let me do my own audio book. And in the meantime,
00:48:33.440 the paperback of More Everything Forever is coming out in January. You can pre-order it already.
00:48:38.120 There is a new afterword, and I don't want to make any promises. This is not a promise,
00:48:42.900 But it is possible that I may be doing the audio version of that new Afterword, though I don't know yet. I will hopefully know soon.
00:48:55.100 But, Andrea A., it is not all bad news. We have a special treat for you and for the rest of our Patreon subscribers.
00:49:03.360 There is a part of More Everything Forever that is, for lack of a better phrase, it is very near to my heart. It is something that I see as being like the heart of the book.
00:49:20.960 It's a particular part of chapter four.
00:49:23.420 I think some of you know what part I'm talking about, some of you who've read the book.
00:49:28.260 I've had several people who've read the book come up to me and tell me that that was their
00:49:34.040 favorite part of the book, that it made them cry.
00:49:37.780 And what I told them was the truth, which is it's my favorite part of the book, too.
00:49:43.400 And I wanted to make you cry because sometimes as authors, that's what we want to do.
00:49:49.280 You know, that's high praise as far as I'm concerned.
00:49:54.060 I have recorded myself reading that part of Chapter 4, and it is available online for our Patreon subscribers.
00:50:05.020 It went up the same day this episode went up.
00:50:07.700 So, if you want to hear it, and you're not already supporting us on Patreon,
00:50:11.920 please, please consider subscribing and supporting us at what we call the Bobka tier on Patreon.
00:50:20.880 It comes with that episode and opportunities to ask me questions and even chat with me sometimes
00:50:29.520 on Patreon. And also, and I think most importantly, and what the tier is named after, a steady stream
00:50:36.380 of pictures of my cat, Bobka, the greatest cat in the observable universe, who is currently
00:50:43.320 sleeping on a futon right behind me, I think, where she was a minute ago. She is not. She is
00:50:51.420 a cat. That is what cats do. They move around. But yeah, Bobka is part of what makes the show 1.00
00:50:58.820 possible, but so are you. And again, thank you for listening and for your support. And I will
00:51:08.600 see you next week. Well, normally I would thank my guest for this week, but didn't really have
00:51:16.140 one. So thanks to all of you for listening. And if you liked this, we're going to be doing some
00:51:23.580 more solo episodes here and there going forward. And we're also going to have some more solo
00:51:27.760 content for our supporters on Patreon. So if you want to hear more like this, please consider
00:51:36.120 supporting the show on Patreon. I did that in my best NPR voice. I hope you appreciate it.
00:51:41.940 Also, I should mention that later this week, there is a nearly four hour long documentary
00:51:49.500 movie about Elon Musk coming out that you may have heard about called, you know, appropriately
00:51:54.720 enough, Musk. And I promise that that movie does not make him look like some sort of technological
00:52:02.940 wizard or visionary. And the reason I feel pretty confident in telling you that is that I'm in the
00:52:09.820 movie. I haven't seen it yet, but I hear it's good. So you may want to check that out. And we'll be
00:52:16.880 back with our usual format next week with Brandon Ogbunu, who is a biology professor at Yale and a
00:52:24.340 friend of mine and just one of the coolest guys I know. So see you then. To submit questions for
00:52:32.060 future guests and to suggest other guests and to see more pictures of Babka, join the conversation
00:52:38.420 on Patreon. You can also find us on YouTube, on Instagram at DATMPod, on the web and on Blue Sky
00:52:45.580 at DreamingAgainstTheMachine.com or just find us wherever you get your podcasts. Dreaming Against
00:52:51.960 the Machine is a proud member of Multitude Productions. Our executive producer is Nick
00:52:57.060 Carissimi. Our theme music is by Jared Emerson Johnson. Our show logo is by Nick James. And
00:53:04.100 our fearless leader is Babka, the greatest cat in the observable universe. I'm Adam Becker,
00:53:09.580 and I'll see you next week.