Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite podcast series. We are not gonna be entering into the 4th industrial revolution. If we do things right, we have the opportunity to enter into the age of infinite, infinite possibilities, infinite resources, a new way of living.
And our podcast series is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon knot, through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn that these endeavors and paradigm shifting and innovations back on Earth to change how we live on earth for all species.
Today, we're going to be exploring an interesting topic, and it came about because I saw a post from an individual about space debris and the importance and the value and the challenges with space debris. And I thought I should reach out to this individual. We had a great conversation. We came up with the title, avoiding the tragedy of unusable space through Space Environmentalism. And that individual is Moriba Jha. He, how are you, Moriba? I know you're on the line, so I'll say hello. Hello.
Yep. Thank you. He works at the University of Austin, Texas in the aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics department. And without wasting any time, let's get to the program. Moriba, you have an outline, I'm assuming, for us. Yeah. I have it in the form of a kinda what, why, and how sort of thing. Okay. So what would be point number 1, point number 2 so I can write them down? Yeah. So so the what would be we want to achieve, space safety, security, and sustainability. That's the what.
And space security and what was the last one? Sustainability. Sustainability. Okay. Number 2. The the why is because space is geopolitically contested. Yeah. Space is commercially contested. K. And near earth space is a finite resource in need of protection. Okay. Next. And the last is the how. And the how is we need to make space more transparent. We need to make space more predictable. And we need to develop evidence to hold people accountable for their behaviors.
The interest I've gotta say that you have now just won the award for the longest titles ever given. So I don't know whether to say thanks or feel bad about that. I always tell people I've got to write. I didn't realize I was going to be writing essays. Okay. So let's start with the first one. We want to achieve space security and sustainability. So teach me, show me, explain to me, what you mean by this.
Yeah. So, basically, what what what what what we're getting at with the whole safety, security, sustainability is look. There are a lot of objects that are in near earth orbit. And when I say near Earth orbit, I mean everything from say, like, a 100 kilometers above, the Earth's surface out to about 36,000 or so kilometers above the Earth's surface where we have, you know, satellites that provide services like communications, you know, TV, routing information, that sort of stuff, even weather.
And so, you know, this kind of orbital ecosystem, is becoming, you know, more and more populated. More actors are involved, in these activities, and we need to have some sort of framework, for people to operate safely because we, rely on these services and capabilities. We want, you know, the long term sustainability of this orbital ecosystem.
And certainly, you know, we wanna make sure that people, have the security in mind, not just for themselves but with, you know, their neighbors, so to speak, on orbit. So that's that's the what. Okay. So, this comes to mind very quickly. I have not heard of, and I'm not a space junkie, or I hate to use that term. I I have not heard of an accident in space, or I had not heard of a lot. I've heard of a few little things.
But I've not really heard of an accident in space like the movies portray with Sandra Bullock. I've never heard of all of these particles going through the International Space Station, taking out a rocket, taking out satellites. So while it seems that space debris or space junk or space, volume of players is a big deal, it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Okay. So so so let me let me unpack that, for you a little bit. So Okay. Yeah. So everything started off with with Sputnik, in the late fifties.
And, you know, we've been adding more and more objects to this population. Most of the stuff that we put on orbit never comes back. And from time to time, every once in a while, 2 objects will will occupy the same space at the same time, unintentionally and and and bad things happen. So so objects collide, they become smaller pieces. Objects might explode if they have extra propellant on board and things deteriorate with satellite aging or satellite gerontology as I call it. Things explode.
And every once in a while too, some people might destroy one of their own satellites in orbit as a demonstration of might, saber rattling on orbit, so to speak, which is unfortunate. And and Was it the Indians and the Chinese have both done that? Or which of the the players have Yeah. Those are the 2? Yeah. So so so those 2, more recently, you know, the US has done it, as well. And, Russia has done anti satellite tests, but Russia hasn't, created debris, you know, during their tests.
So so China yeah. China, China to US and India. Yep. Yep. And so so these are things that have happened. In terms of accidents, Iridium Iridium satellite, which is one of these, satellites that provide, you know, communications type services in what's called low earth orbit. So up to about, you know, 1200 kilometer altitude, orbit. One of these things got run into by a dead satellite, which belonged to Russia.
Cosmos, can't remember the tail number exactly, but it was one of the Cosmos satellites. And so, yeah, this in 2,000, 2,007, 2,007 or 2,009, yeah, the COSMOS, this dead satellite, you know, like I said, most of the stuff up there doesn't come back. It just stays in its lane, and and this thing collided with this, you know, working satellite. And and there was definitely a loss of capability and and consequences, measurable consequences to such a thing.
And in terms of humans, you know, the space station, that sort of thing, I can tell you that I have friends that are astronauts that have told me, look, I've been in the station in one of the one of the forward compartments, and you can kind of hear dings on the external hole. And those are pieces of stuff, you know, colliding with the with the with the station.
Imagine going out on a what's called an extra vehicular activity, a spacewalk as in common vernacular, and all of a sudden having your, suit pierced by one of these things that's going, I don't know, 11 times the speed of a bullet, bad things happen. We don't we don't make suits to withstand those sorts of of impacts. And these are like random things that we can't even track because they're too small. So I would say that there's very real consequences of this, space traffic and, yeah.
We need we need a all hands on deck approach to try to, mitigate any sort of, you know, deal of conflict. That's the perfect term that I was going to use is the word mitigate because it sounds like we have situational conditions where we're experiencing some collisions, failures, whatever it may be. And what with the fact that we don't have 500 or 10000 to talk about is that we're projecting that at this current rate, and I forgot the number.
I don't even remember how many are up there right now that are recorded. They that we see the risk analysis becoming much more severe over the course of the next decade or 2 decades. And that's why you're studying it. That's why everybody else studies it. It's not that it has been a huge challenge. It just will be. Am I correct? Yeah. You're correct. Absolutely. Okay. Because we I see so much about space debris, and I'm thinking I thought about it when you started.
I said, I haven't heard that many cases. And so the pinging, I understand too, with, like, a car traveling with bugs hitting it or it's not gonna impact, but you can't stop a bullet. So that's something we have been able to solve, in in outfits for military. I don't think we're gonna solve that in space either at the present time. So okay. So it's a mitigation response, and it's proactive, which is, I would say, a good thing.
Well, so so the the bad news is that, most space debris experts around the globe, you know, European Space A and C, NASA, that sort of stuff, by consensus agree that, mitigating the preponderance of debris has a high non compliance rate. So so upwards of 50, 60% of space actors do not comply with guidelines that have been proposed, by, you know, experts in in the in the space debris community. They don't comply with it. So so non compliance is the biggest issue that we have.
And so one question would be, how do you incentivize people to actually comply with these guidelines? Okay. Do you wanna get into that now or is that something you wanna go over later? Because that's a big question. Well, this is this is your show, my brother, so I'm following up with you. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Remember, you're teaching me. I just had a question. So if if you wanted to go over this in-depth later, that's great. If you want to right now, you just brought it up.
So is it something you wanna address or do you wanna go over more of what's going on in space and and the security and sustainability issues that we've got on this first point? It's up to you. So I I think I think getting into more of the why in terms of the contested space and why it's a finite resource is probably good to get into that. So so let's go let's hit first because I wanna know more.
You we just talked about space and the challenges in there, but you really didn't talk much about security and sustainability. So So that's what I wanna get into with the the the whys will shed light on the the security. So we're doing okay. We'll go to 2, and then we'll get into that. So the security go ahead. Then let's take the why. Okay. So, so as like I said, the the population is growing.
The the rate of growth is is far, more than the rate of of things being sinks, or or or getting removed from the population. And, you know, at the beginning of the whole cold war war thing, there are 3 dominant, parties. Right? The US, Soviet Union, China. But now the UN recognizes, you know, over 90 countries, can be considered space faring. So that's a significant increase from the first kind of 3.
And, you know, these countries, space space is finite in the sense of where we put objects isn't random. You know, there's there's there's given how gravity behaves and and and interacts with these objects and all that other stuff, there are Goldilocks places to put certain satellites, orbital neighborhoods. And so, you know, one of the things that I said before is that physics tells us that, you know, when 2 when 2 things occupy the same space at the same time, bad things tend to happen.
So even though there are no titles or deeds, for orbital space, it is kind of a first come, first serve squatter's rights sort of environment. So different countries are trying to make as extensive a use of orbital space for their own national needs. And again, it's like first come, first serve. So so that's where it's geopolitically contested.
You hear things in the news all the time about all the US satellites who are doing this, and now we have a space force and the Russians are doing blah blah blah, and the Chinese this and that. So you can kinda see a bit of this tug of war playing out in the media, especially in the past few years more so than before. But then there's a new space race as of late, and that space race isn't necessarily geopolitically led.
It's commercially led because there's a lot of money to be made by the exploitation of near earth space to provide, you know, human based services. Right now, we live in an age of information, information, saturation, I would say. And people tend to be very allergic to latency of information.
They wanna know everything right now, you know, and and as predictive as possible and Internet of things and big data and a lot of the infrastructure to support those informational needs has been migrating, from ground based uniquely ground based infrastructure to now space based infrastructure. You have more and more services that are depending on space like banking and and these sorts of things, routing of of financial information.
Even the time stamping of financial transactions is, you know, mostly space based with, global navigation, space systems. And, you know, even the Internet itself is going to be migrating to a space based infrastructure with the Starlink satellites that are, being launched by Elon Musk and from SpaceX and now Jeff Bezos, from Amazon with his project Kuiper to do similar things. Again, squatters rights. No titles or deeds, but, let's see who can get there first kind of thing.
So so there's this new gold rush bonanza to try to put as much stuff up there as quickly as possible to to kind of make this de facto claim of orbital space, in my opinion. And because we don't put things just willy nilly anywhere and they are there are these neighborhoods, this is where the idea of a commons comes into play. Before you get to the commons, can you describe to me, because I've never heard about these neighborhoods, a little bit about the trajectory. Are they circles?
Are they ovals, in terms of space? And I see the world going like an atom, so they can go in all different directions. So can you give me a little bit of understanding of how that operates and then what these neighborhoods are? Yeah. So I can say that, you know, there's this guy, Johannes Kepler, sometime ago, in Prague. He made some observations taken by this guy named Tycho Brahi that said, yeah.
You know, there are these things called orbits and they tend to be ellipses with a central body at one focus. And so looking at just Earth and, you know, human made satellites, similar kinda thing, You know, you have satellites that are mostly a lot of them are in circular circular ish orbits because nothing is exactly circular. Some of them are in, these elliptical ish orbits as well depending on the mission.
Like if, if you wanted to do surveillance of the northern hemisphere, you wanted to spend a lot of time on top of the northern northern hemisphere, then you can imagine that the furthest distance from the planet, in this ellipse would be somewhere over the northern hemisphere, but then the closest approach would be over the, you know, the southern hemisphere and that sort of stuff. Okay. Yeah. That sounds cool.
Yeah. And then you you have this place called geo geosynchronous region, which is, one of my favorites. And, a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit means that the time it takes for the satellite to go around its orbit once is equivalent to an Earth day, so about 24 hours.
And that way, you know, for especially for, like, TV, DIRECTV and that sort of stuff, you can just point your dish in a specific direction and the satellite should mostly remain there relative to how your dish is pointing sort of thing. So the and and I do know this, and I'm just trying to clarify for the purposes at this point for listeners is that geosynchronous orbit stays with a location on earth and it travels with the earth's movement.
There are other satellites that go faster than this earth's movement for different purposes. And what you just described to me is the orbital also gives researchers, scientists, or commercial, military, whatever, route that's facilitating the satellite, you can put in orbit a certain type of, motion that allows it to be able to concentrate in certain areas of observation.
So you're saying these North Pole, South Pole, you can have it go elliptical so that it gets a closer or a more elongated time in that region. Is that correct where I said it? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I never thought about this elliptical doing that, which is really cool.
I understood the circular and I understand that it goes like an atom, so it can go in all different directions, but I never thought of the ability to be able to have it swing by at a closer rate so we can get a different type of perspective. So that's that's a cool way of looking at it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So so so given kind of this description back to circling back to, you know, the security and sustainability. On the security piece, David, I can tell you this. Right?
There's been no domain of human activity absent malice. Okay? You know, whether it's piracy on the seas, bandits, ambushing travelers between one coast and the next, you know, pioneering days in the US, that sort of stuff. So space is no different. And and and some people wanna think of space as a sanctuary of just peace and benevolence and and that's ridiculous, at best.
And I will say that in a domain that is, I would, you know, mostly unmonitored, where there are no legal consequences that, you know, observed, you know, ramifications of of behavior in space. You know, people don't go to jail. I haven't seen you know, that hasn't happened yet. So given that, look, it just opens it up for for for human malice to even be more pervasive. And when there's a lot of money to be made or lost, that is also, kind of underpinnings of of greed and these sorts of things.
So it's only a matter of time, really, before, you know, Acme Incorporated accuses, you know, Morbaja LLC of, hey. Listen. You know, my service was interrupted, degraded, or I lost this capability. And I think, you know, this other person, like, did something to me when when I wasn't looking. Alright. Well, how do we how do we prevent or mitigate that sort of stuff?
You know, what's the equivalent kind of coast guard activity, for instance, to help travelers, you know, get across, navigate the domain and that sort of stuff? So the security issues aren't just, you know, intelligence agencies and militaries. It's also for commerce. And and It's interesting you bring up coast guard because Peter, Peter Garretson just did a whole program on Space Force, and we talked about coast guards and all of the the the intent or uses of coast guards.
And I'm not sure everybody in the world understands that the and I'm all and I don't I'm assuming you do based upon the comment, is that the coast guard and I've worked with the coast guard. The coast guard does so many humanitarian services and so many at sea mitigations that I I don't think we hear enough about the fact that this is a group of individuals who go out and they rescue people at sea. If in fact there's piracy at sea, they have the right in terms of the US military.
I don't know how other militaries are. They can when they get on a ship, the captain can take over that vessel as a coast guard operator to ensure the safety of individuals at sea. So it's an interesting dynamic that you use, this word coast guard. I think it's perfect. It is we don't have a means today to monitor what's going on in this region at all. So, yes, commercial. And I think, did we did we take a jump that we might have missed first?
I think, maybe you can explain this because I'd like to understand it. We've primarily been talking about old space or or the military space and and commercial activity. And now we're entering what people are calling new space. So old space was monitored how, and how is new space being monitored? And I don't know if I said that right. Well, that that's okay. So so I would you know, when I talked about people like Elon and Jeff Bezos, people would consider them new space, actors.
Mhmm. Versus the quintessential Boeing's and Lockheed's of the world that have mostly been uniquely, you know, government funded and that sort of thing. Yeah. You know? So, so yeah. In terms of monitoring and and that has not changed. That's part of the problem in that, we have radars and telescopes. Those are the eyes and ears, that we that that we have. And, most of that is owned by the Department of Defense now, you know, moving into, you know, US Space Command and that sort of thing.
And it's part of what's called the space surveillance network, and these sensors weren't developed, for tracking things in, you know, in Earth orbit. They were mostly developed during the cold war for missile defense and and pointing north to see anything coming from the Soviet Union and that sort of stuff. And these sensors just happen to also detect, and are able to track, you know, things that aren't missiles.
So they've been used kind of, in a secondary serendipitous way, in a Band Aid way, to try to develop this catalog of these 26,000 objects currently being tracked ranging in size from the cell phone all the way up to the space station. So so so the way of monitoring has not changed from Sputnik all the way till today. So there is so as far as you know, there is no satellites that have been put into orbit whose objective is to monitor satellites No. No. So or debris.
Yeah. So so they're not monitoring debris per se. But, yes, there is a space based space surveillance system, SBSS, that the US military has and that I'm very familiar with because I've processed data from that satellite. And there's also, what what are called the GSAPS, which is like the geospace situational awareness program. And they launched a few satellites just in the past, you know, 10 years. So so so those are two additions to kind of the space surveillance network is yes.
There are now a couple of space based assets to complement the terrestrial or ground based space surveillance, systems. Okay. Okay. And let's see. I had interrupted you when you talked about the Commonwealth? No. The common. So basically what I'm saying yeah. So so it's back to this, you know, all of outer space might be infinite, but near earth space is finite because of these orbital neighborhoods that I spoke of, because most of the things that we put there don't come back.
And the way to think about this, I think the best analogy is to think about the oceans and how imagine that, you know, you're on a boat. The oceans have their own kind of, you know, currents kinda circulation, that sort of thing. So when you're on a boat, you don't just stay fixed. You're moving with the currents. So there are the equivalent type of currents in Earth orbit due to solar flux, gravity fields, these sorts of things that are pushing and tugging, objects along.
And so imagine that when things stop working, they don't just halt their motion. Things keep on going adrift. And so the best way to think about it is, let's say, a working satellite's one of these boats somewhere on the seas. You run out of fuel and you don't take the boat out of commission. You simply send another boat and, and then keep on doing your job while while the boat that ran out of fuel is just adrift to the mercy of the local ocean tides and currents and that sort of thing.
So that's the situate go ahead. So so what you just did is you and this is something that I I have I forget. You I tend to think of satellites floating in orbit at a certain pace, but what you're saying is some satellites to stay within their neighborhood, because we really don't go over neighborhoods, is to stay within their neighborhoods, have a propellant that will can be used to keep them on course. Yes. So so so there's whatever nature's doing to them.
And then for things that are actively controlled, you kind of, depending on the mission, at at the least amount possible, you try to fight you try to fight those natural, you know, forces and tides or whatever to to maintain a specific orbital configuration or what have you. Okay. Got it. Yes. Go ahead. No. That that's good. I just I I didn't I don't the curse of knowledge is always a very challenging part of being an expert, is that the rest of the world doesn't know about neighborhoods.
The rest of the world doesn't know or think about that there are fuel you see them fuel being used to keep them into a lane. So that's where I just needing a a a multidimensional perspective of this space activity. Yeah. So yeah. That's perfect. Yeah. And so and so the thing is to kind of finalize the this analogy with the with the oceans, you know, if you if you comb the seas, you're not gonna find garbage.
So the stuff that's not not the things that are adrift that nobody's controlling, you don't find that that litter, uniformly distributed across the oceans because you actually have currents and things go to specific places based on those currents. So it's the very similar to near earth space. Because you have these column currents or, you know, local space environment tugging and pushing, you know, even the debris the debris doesn't get scattered uniformly.
It stays within certain, you know, lanes, on orbit. And because there's no sweeper or cleaner of these these orbital neighborhoods or or or orbital, you know, lanes, that means that they're becoming more and more populated. And so there's a certain capacity that each one can sustain a carrying capacity for safety and sustainability.
And if we don't extend environmental protection narratives beyond oceans, atmospheres, and climates to include near earth space, we could very well end up in this whole idea of a tragedy of the commons because people are behaving, in their own way thinking about themselves. But the holistic, the holistic sustainability of near earth space is not being globally managed.
And that and and and so that that's the that's the piece that brings me to the sustainability and finite resource, aspect of things. Okay. Go ahead. I'm I'm following you. It's interesting because I had not taken the environmentalism the way you had given me the title. Now I see how you're seeing environmentalism as a means of extension of human understanding of the challenges, beyond atmosphere.
Yes. And so, you know, one of the things that I'm really looking at here is looking at things like traditional ecological knowledge or indigenous knowledge and how, certain indigenous people of the planet over millennia have found out, hey. If I do these things, I can actually achieve a balance between my life and the life of this region that I'm living in, and and my family can thrive and and and our our culture can thrive and that sort of thing.
So what are the tenets of things like traditional ecological knowledge, and can I apply those, to achieve space sustainability? So that's kind of the latest thing that I'm looking at. And examples of these tenants are things like do your due diligence and make lots of empirical observations of all the constituents in a given ecosystem and understand the causal relationships, in the ecosystem, what the relationships are between things.
That way you can be informed of how to behave in a way that allows you to, you know, not not, kinda shoot yourself in the foot towards extinction and these sorts of things. I gotta tell you, you know, every time I kind of see experiments in nature where you the input ceases, you know, you have a system, you're inputting something into the system. When you stop the input, mother nature tends to seek equilibrium.
And at the rate that we're launching stuff, David, it's like there's no way for us to really understand what ecological equilibrium means for near earth space in terms of these human made objects because we launch things at a rate that exceeds our ability to be able to predict and assess not only the intended but unintended consequences of pumping so many objects into that environment. And so that's another area of concern. I feel like we're kind of out in front of the headlights.
So how maybe this is a clarification I would need. Can you give me a, the math behind how many are we launching now versus later or a graph or a chart that I can kinda visualize to understand this rate you're talking about. Alright. So let me put it this way. So right now, we have about, you know, 26,000 or so things that we're tracking. Just SpaceX alone is trying to launch 60 things every 3 to 4 weeks. So that gives you an idea of and that's just one that's just one company.
And and that's just one company in the US. You know, you have launches that are occurring from other parts of the globe, you know, at least at least every month. So what was if I went back 5 years or 10 years ago, what number would I have ended up with? Man, you would I think, 10 years ago, it would be amazing if you had, a dozen things being launched in a year. And now it's, like, sick now it's, like, 60 or so in per month. So the rate has increased significantly.
Okay. Okay. That helps me to see. So if we went a dozen per year and now we're saying every 3 to 4 weeks we're doing 60 from just one company, we could theoretically be putting 3, 4, 500 pieces into space every month. We could be. Okay. Yeah. So so so what I wanna get to now is the alright. You talked about security, sustainability, safety. These things are contested, finite resource. So what's the how? Like, how do you do something about this stuff?
Like, what what what, you know, what what role, you know, somebody like me as a space environmentalist and astroDynamics, what role do I think I can play to help? And so I try to measure all of my work in one or more of the following three lenses. Okay? These are my measuring sticks. Number 1 is, does anything that I do contribute measurably, to making space more transparent in terms of knowing what's up there, you know, where it's at, who it belongs to, that sort of thing.
The second measuring stick of mine is, does any of my work contribute to making your space more predictable? Because I gotta tell you, if, you know, not only where objects are located. Right? I mean, if if if I'm operating in some orbital neighborhood and I have other people in my neighborhood and I know that my neighbor's gonna move their satellite from point a to point b 3 days from now, that helps me plan so I don't run into my neighbor. That sort of thing. You know?
So that sort of coordination, that predicting behaviors, not just based on the physics, but, you know, people joy sticking objects around, is important and even predictability from a cultural context. So what do I mean by that? Well, you know, interestingly enough, we can all agree that our behaviors as humans in great part is influenced by where we were born, how we were, you know, how we were raised, traditions, these sorts of things.
For some reason, many people think that behavior in near space is uniform. It's the same, which makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, it doesn't even stand to to reason as a as a leading hypothesis. And so the way American culture manifests itself in space, for instance, is, you know, most satellite operators in the US do not, you know, maneuver their satellites on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays. Don't wanna do it on a Monday because you just got back into the office kinda thing.
Don't wanna maneuver on a Friday because, you know, something goes wrong, you don't wanna stick around and work more than you have to, and you definitely don't wanna do work on weekends and holidays. So most American satellites maneuver on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. That is a cultural signature in the behavior of objects.
My guess is that, you know, in Islamic culture, there's probably times of the year, like Ramadan, for instance, where maybe operational, stuff on satellites is, you know, less than it typically is at other parts of the year. Or if you wanted to interpret a set of guidelines like the these debris mitigation guidelines that I spoke about earlier, well, is American or western interpretation of the guidelines equivalent to Sharia interpretation of those guidelines?
So cultural context is real, because, you know, we we we human beings, don't behave uniformly, based on culture and stuff. And so this is another thing that I'm actually trying to map into the work is from a predictability perspective, can we predict how people from different cultures will actually behave in a common scenario?
And in the measure that I can, you know, be successful at predicting that, it helps people not escalate, and maybe even deconflict, behaviors that could be adversely impactful to, you know, the, I would also assume that we can also overlay whether they are military, whether they are weather tracking to do with, disasters. I could also foresee that this is also going to follow some trajectory of surveillance for movement of anything that's happening.
It could be a society that's been like Syria having the movement of people out of a war torn area for relief. So I've gotta believe that there's many others that, probably could be a list of 20 different types of variables that could be added into that formula. You bet, my brother. Which makes it extremely complex, to to to kind of even fathom and and manage that sort of thing, which brings me to my last lens. So my first lens was transparency. The next one was predictability.
The last one is building a body of evidence, to which people can be held accountable for their behaviors. Right now, we have many eyes on the sky, but these eyes don't, they don't they don't they don't communicate to the same body, if you will. And so typical example, you know, with the whole Indian satellite that you, you know, brought up earlier with the, you know, destroying this thing in low earth orbit. The Indians basically said, listen.
When we destroyed this thing, the debris it created, all that stuff is gonna reenter the Earth's atmosphere in up to 45 days. And, the US says, well, turns out there's still to this day, there are pieces of debris, from your anti satellite test that still exist in orbit and even went above the altitude of the space station, which has humans. And and so now that's a hazard to, you know, their livelihoods and their safety.
But it's a he said, she said sort of thing because I don't know, my guess is that you don't have tracking data, on the debris and and most people don't. So, you know, how do we come up with a global pool of evidence where many people can infer from to try to to try to come up to some I idea or consensus. Do people agree? How many people agree that, yeah, there's still debris up there and that sort of stuff. And who saw it? And we need to get away from the he said, she saids.
And so I'm really trying to work towards crowdsourcing, information and trying to sift through that to pull out kind of a consensus estimate or or opinion about stuff in space and make that globally accessible so that people could be held accountable for their behaviors. So I think I think the in my mind, I'm breaking this down a little differently than you are. You You're saying accountability, which to me means that you can actually enforce something on somebody who's done something.
And so that's an that's an admirable objective. Yet when you defined it the way you did, I think there's multiple layers in there. It's not just accountability. There's a level of the first thing I hit was capabilities. The Indian's capability and understanding of space and space dynamics is far behind many other countries in the world. Therefore, their assessment of 45 days, they believed, was probably accurate. So you have a capabilities challenge. You then have a, a principles challenge.
If in fact this happened and it did exist for more than 45 days, maybe a country such as Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Belarus, or any of those countries who get involved, they would need a better data set to be able to say, if in fact, this trajectory, this type of satellite, this certain size, this neighborhood is impacted, this will be the occurrence.
For example, using your sea analogy, the if you do something in the Arctic, you will get a different type of implication than doing it in Antarctica just because of the flows and the neighborhoods in which they reach. So I think there's also a principle side of this that needs to be addressed, which once those are solved, we can then go back and say, okay. You knew, you understood, we have the data, you ignored it, or you didn't research it. Therefore, we can apply accountability.
Does that make sense? Of course, it does. So yeah. So I agree with you. Okay. Well, I mean, I I can see the accountability side kind of becomes a a larger umbrella, but it's almost too large because you're sorry. I'm advising giving some suggestions. I would turn it into 4. I would say accountability becomes a whole topic of the above, but your 3rd is really to help the ecosystem, not just predictability, but to to elevate the level of the industry as fast as possible.
Yeah. Okay. Cool. That's a that's actually a good one. And I so, when you come to accountability, accountability means what to you? So so to me, accountability means, you know, at some point, because there's this thing called the outer space treaty signed in 1967, and it says, you know, words like you have to behave responsibly and not interfere with other people's safety and their operations and yada yada yada.
And countries have the responsibility for continuing supervision, and it specifically says that continuing supervision of the activities even of nongovernment actors in the domain, I would say nobody actually achieves that. And so to me, the accountability is the evidence that would help, countries, eventually actually achieve and enforce, you know, the treaty that they ratified back in the sixties. Or whoever did sign it. So it would be to enforce it.
Now this becomes on on if you go back to that cultural difficulty of political geopolitical challenges, we might be able to do that in the vein of commercial space, yet there are enough players when you have a 193 countries plus miscellaneous brings about to 195. You end up with not everybody being playing in the sandbox, but there's enough of them where we're not gonna hold accountable our military and we're not gonna hold accountable these certain, spy satellites.
And and I can't even think of an AI way to do this because you won't be sharing enough data. How do you how do you bring accountability to chaos? Yeah. So so so so here's the thing, and this is where I love I love the laugh because that's exactly the way I feel. Yeah. So here's the thing. Right? Because I've been thinking about this for some time, and this is where, you know, I I I worked for the Department of Defense for a decade.
And, I will say that there are people that like me and my work a lot and some people that not so much. And and the reason I bring that up is because what I am trying to actually, you know, develop and demonstrate for this accountability thing is something like a Waze for space.
So just like the the Waze app is a so called participatory sensing network, my goal is to bring in observations not just from governments and industry, folks and that sort of stuff, but even amateurs which have quite, you know, interesting capabilities and combining all that stuff to get to that transparency and predictability piece and be able to say, yep. Here here are all these kind of, objects, in the domain. This is how they're moving and behaving. This is who owns them.
And if there's anything else that I can ascribe to them, sure. Do that kind of thing. And so under that paradigm, I can tell you right now, David, you know, there's a group of people. This they they're called the CSAT dash l group. They're amateur, astronomers. And one of the whole things that they dedicate themselves to is tracking so called spy satellites and making that, you know, globally known, for those that have an interest. You don't have to dig too deep to find these folks.
And so, I would say that if it's something that can be measured and detected and tracked, then I'm gonna have that in my system, you know, whether people like it or not. So I I think I I I love the the accountability one kind of to me with what you just said moves off the table. If you could solve the challenge of allowing individuals to be able to know where people are, know where satellites are, know where the motions might be, give them predictability within the ecosystem, which Waze does.
This person's traveling at a certain rate. This person is taking a left. This is a right. There's traffic in that region. You'd slow down and move. What you're doing is you're giving an informational database for those players to make better decisions, and you're hoping that the accountability will happen on their own because they don't wanna lose a satellite. They don't want to have an issue with running into another country's domain.
So Waze doesn't give accountability, but what Waze does is it allows you to be able to say, I need to be accountable to getting to my office on time. I need to be accountable to making sure that I am safe. I need to be accountable to slowing down early enough, staying in my lane, getting off earlier so that I can so I I think that it's it's more of I'm gonna use Peter Garretson because the last interview, he talked about what you had said.
This, the I forgot the not the not the military, but the coast guard. Mhmm. Is he then made a jump and he said the number one most environmental organization in the world is the US military. And I went, I mean, that's like, what are you talking about? And he said, GPS. We put up GPS, American centric, but we put up GPS, which allowed people to make more direct traveling. Yeah. And therefore, we cut down on 1,000,000,000 of gallons or or, 1,000,000,000 of gallons of fuel. Right.
But we are an environmental group. I'm thinking, I never thought of it that way. So what you just did was talk about, to some degree, ways being a by default, a means by which people could be it accountable, but we are not really making them accountable. Yeah. So so so so let me be clear. I I will never be able to make people accountable. Right? But, what what I'm saying is that I want to develop a body of evidence that could hold them accountable for their behaviors.
And the thing the the place where I wanna go beyond what Waze is is that, satellites experience anomalies. They fail or they experience disruptions. And I would like to get to the point where I could actually assign a cause or attribute a cause to that loss or disruption. And and yes. So that may be natural and that may be human made. And if it is human made, then the there's a question of intent. And and that one's a tough one to get to. But, you know, I'm an ambitious kinda guy.
Oh, and intent is looking at historical data and decisions that were being made so you could tie in geopolitical decisions, commercial decisions, possibilities of collusion between multiple satellite companies, opportunistic conditions on earth. Therefore, that move to the left by X degrees was a deliberate and, causal positioning because it didn't have to happen then. It could have been 7 seconds earlier or 10 seconds later, and it would not have happened.
So one is one is hitting the car next to you because you've been did it on purpose, and the other one is if you hit the brake and you could have waited less than 2 seconds and cleared it. So yes. Okay. Got it. You're still there. Right? Yeah. I'm still here. So so so I guess I thought I lost you for the because I hear I hear the I hear the bings coming through on your end. That's why.
Yeah. Yeah. No. So so so so I think, you know, that that that walks us through, you know, the what, which which was this, you know, space safety, security, and sustainability. Like, what is that all about and that sort of stuff?
The why given, the nature of the population geopolitically contested, commercially contested, and the fact that we have these neighborhoods that are increasingly populated, and then the the how, which is this idea of the transparency, predictability, and this body of evidence. Okay. So then give me, please, 2 scenarios.
The AI, assisted technological advancement where we go to a place where this works and what you see happening and give me with a timeline, and then give me the exact opposite if it's doesn't work and the timelines you see for I I've so you don't see it happening properly. The thing that popped into my head was just yesterday or day before.
There was an something that came out of Columbia or Cornell or one major university in the United States that said, if in fact the lockdown had happened 2 weeks earlier, it would have saved a week earlier, it would have saved 35,000 lives. If it was 2 weeks earlier, 57,000 lives would have been saved. So there's gotta be a point in which you feel this could be, ultimately damaging. So can you take both sides?
Well, with with with the the whole, the latter, I have a harder part I have a harder part with, at what point this becomes kind of, you know, ecologically damaging because there's still a lot that we don't know. Like, there's a lot there's a lot that I know that I don't know and and and other people don't. And so, on the front end of what you said with the whole AI thing, if this whole thing works, I'm in a race to try to give myself a big data problem.
And what I mean by that is, if I can find a way to, like I said, crowdsource aggregate these multiple source of information that are very, disparate from each other and and and independent, if I can bring those together, make the right linkages to discover causal relationships and even get to, predictive models and that sort of stuff, then I then I think that empowers the community writ large. And I think that AI clearly has a, you know, an ML.
They have a role there, even though AI and ML are inherently stupid. You know, because they they assume that, you know, tomorrow looks like today. Yeah. So if you feed it a crappy today, then you're gonna get a crappy tomorrow kind of prediction. So so I'm trying to find ways to to gather the most diverse set of today's, to feed into, you know, this sort of, you know, AIML infrastructure to get to the best, prediction of of tomorrow. So How much do you know about computational social science?
To be honest, I've heard of it. I've imagined what that means. I've spoken to, 2 people that claim to have some cognizance of that, but I can tell you that that is I've already identified computational social science as one of the most critical needs of my research program. I I had a company. We did computational social science, artificial intelligence, machine learning to do predictive analyst and telco, Fint, insurance, and banking.
Mhmm. And what you've just explored is a need for the understanding of the behavioral side. However, computational social scientists don't look at the human or the actions of people. They take the data of the actions of those people, and they can calculate what the behavior will be or has been. So, for example, they would take your financial transactions. They can go down and you got time, place, act, location time, act, location, amount.
And what you would do then is you can look through all their data and say, okay. They buy groceries on Saturday. They buy their gas on a 2 on a Tuesday. They work at a certain job, and you can see all those patterns.
But then you could also take their phone call records, their online activities, feed it into, for example, the Google Sentiment Engine, and you could take their words and be able to take their, the adjectives out of it and start to be able to understand how they're thinking and what decisions they've made based upon the financial activities they have, and you've never spoken to the person. And you will be more accurate.
So you're trying to do with satellites, in my opinion, almost the exact same thing. Sure. There's a lot of truth to what you just said. Yeah. There's a I I can connect you. I I have 2 friends who are both computational social scientists who are AI specialists. So I can connect you with 2 of them, and maybe there's a dialogue that will work there. Yeah. Okay. That's what That that's that's what it sounds like you're doing, and I think it's amazing that all of these pieces.
What are you missing in your data that people are not going to give you that you are really having challenges with? I would I would say satellite anomaly information. Yeah. I think that's that's the hardest one to get a hold of, the satellite anomaly information because people hold that very close hold because they don't want us that to get leaked out, scare investors. It's not like the airline industry where, you know, when there's some sort of failure, everybody knows it.
You ground the fleet and blah blah blah. When it comes to satellites, an anomaly happens and people pretty much keep it quiet and, try it for that not to leak out. So I think that's probably the most difficult. So you're looking for the black hole so that you could find it where you can't see it to be able to figure out what it is. Indeed.
Okay. I I go to, people who study space, and they look for the black hole, and then they look all around it because it's the only way to figure out what's happening in that environment. Right. So is there any on your end, is if you had to do this in 1 fifth the speed you were doing it now, You had to make take a theoretical huge jump. What would make you go 1 5th times faster? Whatever that I'm saying the number faster. How would you be able to what would be that really big jump?
Can you say that again? Because I'm sorry. To to make we humans go at a certain speed. We tend to do things by doing the same things over and over again. Is there some radical thought that you said, if I could do this right now, we could take giant leaps in the understanding of space debris?
Or Yeah. So so so I would say, you know, my biggest, bottleneck in terms of really understanding this stuff, even if I had all the data, would be to develop the ontological structure or the schema that would allow me to do this, you know, discover these things that you and I have been talking about. And so ontology, not just the development, but implementing these ontologies computationally, I that's that's the long pole in the tent.
And if I could do that much quicker, then I think, yeah, that that would accelerate things, big time. I and the reason I asked is because of project Moon Hut and the types of things we're looking at, and I'm trying to you've seen the Project Moon Hut classification system. I'm looking at other tools that will be able to facilitate our box of the roof and the door, the Moon Hut.
And maybe within what we're building, that type of structure that you just mentioned, the ontological, schema that needs to be developed might be accelerated by your connectivity with people who know how to think in this manner in a way that you don't know how. And not say that you're bad. It's that someone else has a different skill set.
No. No. No. But but but here's the thing, David, is that, you know, in my field, I would say that, you know, based on my work and people that you speak to, you could say people would say, yeah. This this dude has interesting ideas, and he's been kind of leading kinda where the field has been going. None of these ideas come from me. They come from other domains. So I already know that. So absolutely. You're right. I mean, that's exactly what I try to thrive on. Yeah. So okay.
Cool. I you you opened up my eyes to several things which I hadn't thought about, over the the notes I have. It's a it's a good interview when I at least pass 6 pages of notes. So I've got, I'm on my 7th page, and that's a that's a good sign because there's there are pieces here that I can get my mind around to understand a little bit more about space to be. This space to be has been very boring to me as a topic. And Understood.
Yeah. But it it's it's not, a boring topic when you take it from environmentalism or you take it from access or you take it from the scientific exploratory side or you start to think about the different types of satellites up there and what they mean, and then you look at it from behaviorally. For example, use the Indian. I believe the Indians, the Indian group who had put this, shut down the satellite, were doing it for two reasons.
1 is safety and security in the future, and the other one is to protect themselves in terms of maybe a satellite is they they don't want it to be seen. So anti and for their own, but they honestly believe in 45 days, it will go down. There are peep there are people in class that you went to school with who honestly believe that what they were working on their project would succeed. Like space, these Google XPRIZE.
No one started that and put in $50,000,000 believing that they were gonna be the one to fail. Right. They they believed it would work, and it didn't. So I believe that they did have that contention. And so taking that backwards, we have to say, how do we help them make those better decisions? And so I I hadn't thought about it in that in that vein. So that was also very enlightening. So I I definitely appreciate you taking the time to put together and and talk about this topic.
I think it's a extremely valuable topic. Well, I, I've I've definitely appreciated, talking to you about it and, you know, the the fact that, we had a great great exchange. And, you know, I'm very appreciative of of the opportunity to to basically teach you a couple things and and get you to to enlighten me on some stuff. So it's good. Yeah. Well, that's that's what we hope to do on this program is to have that great one on one conversation, and I I and thank you.
For those of you again, I who are listening in, I hope that you also had an interesting time. You learned something today, thought about something differently that may change your life, the lives of others, might be able to contribute in a place where space debris might have been considered terrible or something that you're not interested in. But if you use this term space environmentalism, which I think, Morbai, you had said that you had coined. I don't know if Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
In our region. So Yeah. Maybe this space environmentalism can be brought into a different, a different usage and expanded upon from just Earth environmentalism. So I think that's a a huge value for all of you listening in. And, again, project moon hut, our directive is to create that box of wood roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, so that we can, in fact, change how we live on Earth.
We move from Earth bound to a whole another age of infinite possibilities, which includes the fact that we do live between the moon and Earth. The moon influences everything we do on this planet in one way, shape, and form. So our ecosystem is growing where we build and live and grow. And with the help of people such as, Murba, we are going to make that next jump. So is there one best way to get a hold of you, Moriba? Yeah. I would say just, you know, [email protected].
That's the best way to get a hold of me, and I check it frequently. And it's spelled m o r I b a. Correct? Correct. Okay. Because that's not a, a, what, common western name. And for me, David Goldsmith, I'd love to connect with you. You could reach me at [email protected]. I do have my you can connect with us at at on Twitter at at project moon hot. We have a YouTube page. There's only 2 videos up there. We haven't marketed it till just recently or putting our material up.
So you can go to YouTube and type in Project Moon Hut. You'll see our logo. Project Moon Hut is there. You can also connect with me personally at at Goldsmith, Instagram, mister David Goldsmith, LinkedIn, Facebook, all of those so that we can be connected and we can change how we live on earth for all species. So for that, that being said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite podcast series.
We are not gonna be entering into the 4th industrial revolution. If we do things right, we have the opportunity to enter into the age of infinite, infinite possibilities, infinite resources, a new way of living.
And our podcast series is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon knot, through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn that these endeavors and paradigm shifting and innovations back on Earth to change how we live on earth for all species.
Today, we're going to be exploring an interesting topic, and it came about because I saw a post from an individual about space debris and the importance and the value and the challenges with space debris. And I thought I should reach out to this individual. We had a great conversation. We came up with the title, avoiding the tragedy of unusable space through Space Environmentalism. And that individual is Moriba Jha. He, how are you, Moriba? I know you're on the line, so I'll say hello. Hello.
Yep. Thank you. He works at the University of Austin, Texas in the aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics department. And without wasting any time, let's get to the program. Moriba, you have an outline, I'm assuming, for us. Yeah. I have it in the form of a kinda what, why, and how sort of thing. Okay. So what would be point number 1, point number 2 so I can write them down? Yeah. So so the what would be we want to achieve, space safety, security, and sustainability. That's the what.
And space security and what was the last one? Sustainability. Sustainability. Okay. Number 2. The the why is because space is geopolitically contested. Yeah. Space is commercially contested. K. And near earth space is a finite resource in need of protection. Okay. Next. And the last is the how. And the how is we need to make space more transparent. We need to make space more predictable. And we need to develop evidence to hold people accountable for their behaviors.
The interest I've gotta say that you have now just won the award for the longest titles ever given. So I don't know whether to say thanks or feel bad about that. I always tell people I've got to write. I didn't realize I was going to be writing essays. Okay. So let's start with the first one. We want to achieve space security and sustainability. So teach me, show me, explain to me, what you mean by this.
Yeah. So, basically, what what what what what we're getting at with the whole safety, security, sustainability is look. There are a lot of objects that are in near earth orbit. And when I say near Earth orbit, I mean everything from say, like, a 100 kilometers above, the Earth's surface out to about 36,000 or so kilometers above the Earth's surface where we have, you know, satellites that provide services like communications, you know, TV, routing information, that sort of stuff, even weather.
And so, you know, this kind of orbital ecosystem, is becoming, you know, more and more populated. More actors are involved, in these activities, and we need to have some sort of framework, for people to operate safely because we, rely on these services and capabilities. We want, you know, the long term sustainability of this orbital ecosystem.
And certainly, you know, we wanna make sure that people, have the security in mind, not just for themselves but with, you know, their neighbors, so to speak, on orbit. So that's that's the what. Okay. So, this comes to mind very quickly. I have not heard of, and I'm not a space junkie, or I hate to use that term. I I have not heard of an accident in space, or I had not heard of a lot. I've heard of a few little things.
But I've not really heard of an accident in space like the movies portray with Sandra Bullock. I've never heard of all of these particles going through the International Space Station, taking out a rocket, taking out satellites. So while it seems that space debris or space junk or space, volume of players is a big deal, it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Okay. So so so let me let me unpack that, for you a little bit. So Okay. Yeah. So everything started off with with Sputnik, in the late fifties.
And, you know, we've been adding more and more objects to this population. Most of the stuff that we put on orbit never comes back. And from time to time, every once in a while, 2 objects will will occupy the same space at the same time, unintentionally and and and bad things happen. So so objects collide, they become smaller pieces. Objects might explode if they have extra propellant on board and things deteriorate with satellite aging or satellite gerontology as I call it. Things explode.
And every once in a while too, some people might destroy one of their own satellites in orbit as a demonstration of might, saber rattling on orbit, so to speak, which is unfortunate. And and Was it the Indians and the Chinese have both done that? Or which of the the players have Yeah. Those are the 2? Yeah. So so so those 2, more recently, you know, the US has done it, as well. And, Russia has done anti satellite tests, but Russia hasn't, created debris, you know, during their tests.
So so China yeah. China, China to US and India. Yep. Yep. And so so these are things that have happened. In terms of accidents, Iridium Iridium satellite, which is one of these, satellites that provide, you know, communications type services in what's called low earth orbit. So up to about, you know, 1200 kilometer altitude, orbit. One of these things got run into by a dead satellite, which belonged to Russia.
Cosmos, can't remember the tail number exactly, but it was one of the Cosmos satellites. And so, yeah, this in 2,000, 2,007, 2,007 or 2,009, yeah, the COSMOS, this dead satellite, you know, like I said, most of the stuff up there doesn't come back. It just stays in its lane, and and this thing collided with this, you know, working satellite. And and there was definitely a loss of capability and and consequences, measurable consequences to such a thing.
And in terms of humans, you know, the space station, that sort of thing, I can tell you that I have friends that are astronauts that have told me, look, I've been in the station in one of the one of the forward compartments, and you can kind of hear dings on the external hole. And those are pieces of stuff, you know, colliding with the with the with the station.
Imagine going out on a what's called an extra vehicular activity, a spacewalk as in common vernacular, and all of a sudden having your, suit pierced by one of these things that's going, I don't know, 11 times the speed of a bullet, bad things happen. We don't we don't make suits to withstand those sorts of of impacts. And these are like random things that we can't even track because they're too small. So I would say that there's very real consequences of this, space traffic and, yeah.
We need we need a all hands on deck approach to try to, mitigate any sort of, you know, deal of conflict. That's the perfect term that I was going to use is the word mitigate because it sounds like we have situational conditions where we're experiencing some collisions, failures, whatever it may be. And what with the fact that we don't have 500 or 10000 to talk about is that we're projecting that at this current rate, and I forgot the number.
I don't even remember how many are up there right now that are recorded. They that we see the risk analysis becoming much more severe over the course of the next decade or 2 decades. And that's why you're studying it. That's why everybody else studies it. It's not that it has been a huge challenge. It just will be. Am I correct? Yeah. You're correct. Absolutely. Okay. Because we I see so much about space debris, and I'm thinking I thought about it when you started.
I said, I haven't heard that many cases. And so the pinging, I understand too, with, like, a car traveling with bugs hitting it or it's not gonna impact, but you can't stop a bullet. So that's something we have been able to solve, in in outfits for military. I don't think we're gonna solve that in space either at the present time. So okay. So it's a mitigation response, and it's proactive, which is, I would say, a good thing.
Well, so so the the bad news is that, most space debris experts around the globe, you know, European Space A and C, NASA, that sort of stuff, by consensus agree that, mitigating the preponderance of debris has a high non compliance rate. So so upwards of 50, 60% of space actors do not comply with guidelines that have been proposed, by, you know, experts in in the in the space debris community. They don't comply with it. So so non compliance is the biggest issue that we have.
And so one question would be, how do you incentivize people to actually comply with these guidelines? Okay. Do you wanna get into that now or is that something you wanna go over later? Because that's a big question. Well, this is this is your show, my brother, so I'm following up with you. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Remember, you're teaching me. I just had a question. So if if you wanted to go over this in-depth later, that's great. If you want to right now, you just brought it up.
So is it something you wanna address or do you wanna go over more of what's going on in space and and the security and sustainability issues that we've got on this first point? It's up to you. So I I think I think getting into more of the why in terms of the contested space and why it's a finite resource is probably good to get into that. So so let's go let's hit first because I wanna know more.
You we just talked about space and the challenges in there, but you really didn't talk much about security and sustainability. So So that's what I wanna get into with the the the whys will shed light on the the security. So we're doing okay. We'll go to 2, and then we'll get into that. So the security go ahead. Then let's take the why. Okay. So, so as like I said, the the population is growing.
The the rate of growth is is far, more than the rate of of things being sinks, or or or getting removed from the population. And, you know, at the beginning of the whole cold war war thing, there are 3 dominant, parties. Right? The US, Soviet Union, China. But now the UN recognizes, you know, over 90 countries, can be considered space faring. So that's a significant increase from the first kind of 3.
And, you know, these countries, space space is finite in the sense of where we put objects isn't random. You know, there's there's there's given how gravity behaves and and and interacts with these objects and all that other stuff, there are Goldilocks places to put certain satellites, orbital neighborhoods. And so, you know, one of the things that I said before is that physics tells us that, you know, when 2 when 2 things occupy the same space at the same time, bad things tend to happen.
So even though there are no titles or deeds, for orbital space, it is kind of a first come, first serve squatter's rights sort of environment. So different countries are trying to make as extensive a use of orbital space for their own national needs. And again, it's like first come, first serve. So so that's where it's geopolitically contested.
You hear things in the news all the time about all the US satellites who are doing this, and now we have a space force and the Russians are doing blah blah blah, and the Chinese this and that. So you can kinda see a bit of this tug of war playing out in the media, especially in the past few years more so than before. But then there's a new space race as of late, and that space race isn't necessarily geopolitically led.
It's commercially led because there's a lot of money to be made by the exploitation of near earth space to provide, you know, human based services. Right now, we live in an age of information, information, saturation, I would say. And people tend to be very allergic to latency of information.
They wanna know everything right now, you know, and and as predictive as possible and Internet of things and big data and a lot of the infrastructure to support those informational needs has been migrating, from ground based uniquely ground based infrastructure to now space based infrastructure. You have more and more services that are depending on space like banking and and these sorts of things, routing of of financial information.
Even the time stamping of financial transactions is, you know, mostly space based with, global navigation, space systems. And, you know, even the Internet itself is going to be migrating to a space based infrastructure with the Starlink satellites that are, being launched by Elon Musk and from SpaceX and now Jeff Bezos, from Amazon with his project Kuiper to do similar things. Again, squatters rights. No titles or deeds, but, let's see who can get there first kind of thing.
So so there's this new gold rush bonanza to try to put as much stuff up there as quickly as possible to to kind of make this de facto claim of orbital space, in my opinion. And because we don't put things just willy nilly anywhere and they are there are these neighborhoods, this is where the idea of a commons comes into play. Before you get to the commons, can you describe to me, because I've never heard about these neighborhoods, a little bit about the trajectory. Are they circles?
Are they ovals, in terms of space? And I see the world going like an atom, so they can go in all different directions. So can you give me a little bit of understanding of how that operates and then what these neighborhoods are? Yeah. So I can say that, you know, there's this guy, Johannes Kepler, sometime ago, in Prague. He made some observations taken by this guy named Tycho Brahi that said, yeah.
You know, there are these things called orbits and they tend to be ellipses with a central body at one focus. And so looking at just Earth and, you know, human made satellites, similar kinda thing, You know, you have satellites that are mostly a lot of them are in circular circular ish orbits because nothing is exactly circular. Some of them are in, these elliptical ish orbits as well depending on the mission.
Like if, if you wanted to do surveillance of the northern hemisphere, you wanted to spend a lot of time on top of the northern northern hemisphere, then you can imagine that the furthest distance from the planet, in this ellipse would be somewhere over the northern hemisphere, but then the closest approach would be over the, you know, the southern hemisphere and that sort of stuff. Okay. Yeah. That sounds cool.
Yeah. And then you you have this place called geo geosynchronous region, which is, one of my favorites. And, a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit means that the time it takes for the satellite to go around its orbit once is equivalent to an Earth day, so about 24 hours.
And that way, you know, for especially for, like, TV, DIRECTV and that sort of stuff, you can just point your dish in a specific direction and the satellite should mostly remain there relative to how your dish is pointing sort of thing. So the and and I do know this, and I'm just trying to clarify for the purposes at this point for listeners is that geosynchronous orbit stays with a location on earth and it travels with the earth's movement.
There are other satellites that go faster than this earth's movement for different purposes. And what you just described to me is the orbital also gives researchers, scientists, or commercial, military, whatever, route that's facilitating the satellite, you can put in orbit a certain type of, motion that allows it to be able to concentrate in certain areas of observation.
So you're saying these North Pole, South Pole, you can have it go elliptical so that it gets a closer or a more elongated time in that region. Is that correct where I said it? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I never thought about this elliptical doing that, which is really cool.
I understood the circular and I understand that it goes like an atom, so it can go in all different directions, but I never thought of the ability to be able to have it swing by at a closer rate so we can get a different type of perspective. So that's that's a cool way of looking at it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So so so given kind of this description back to circling back to, you know, the security and sustainability. On the security piece, David, I can tell you this. Right?
There's been no domain of human activity absent malice. Okay? You know, whether it's piracy on the seas, bandits, ambushing travelers between one coast and the next, you know, pioneering days in the US, that sort of stuff. So space is no different. And and and some people wanna think of space as a sanctuary of just peace and benevolence and and that's ridiculous, at best.
And I will say that in a domain that is, I would, you know, mostly unmonitored, where there are no legal consequences that, you know, observed, you know, ramifications of of behavior in space. You know, people don't go to jail. I haven't seen you know, that hasn't happened yet. So given that, look, it just opens it up for for for human malice to even be more pervasive. And when there's a lot of money to be made or lost, that is also, kind of underpinnings of of greed and these sorts of things.
So it's only a matter of time, really, before, you know, Acme Incorporated accuses, you know, Morbaja LLC of, hey. Listen. You know, my service was interrupted, degraded, or I lost this capability. And I think, you know, this other person, like, did something to me when when I wasn't looking. Alright. Well, how do we how do we prevent or mitigate that sort of stuff?
You know, what's the equivalent kind of coast guard activity, for instance, to help travelers, you know, get across, navigate the domain and that sort of stuff? So the security issues aren't just, you know, intelligence agencies and militaries. It's also for commerce. And and It's interesting you bring up coast guard because Peter, Peter Garretson just did a whole program on Space Force, and we talked about coast guards and all of the the the intent or uses of coast guards.
And I'm not sure everybody in the world understands that the and I'm all and I don't I'm assuming you do based upon the comment, is that the coast guard and I've worked with the coast guard. The coast guard does so many humanitarian services and so many at sea mitigations that I I don't think we hear enough about the fact that this is a group of individuals who go out and they rescue people at sea. If in fact there's piracy at sea, they have the right in terms of the US military.
I don't know how other militaries are. They can when they get on a ship, the captain can take over that vessel as a coast guard operator to ensure the safety of individuals at sea. So it's an interesting dynamic that you use, this word coast guard. I think it's perfect. It is we don't have a means today to monitor what's going on in this region at all. So, yes, commercial. And I think, did we did we take a jump that we might have missed first?
I think, maybe you can explain this because I'd like to understand it. We've primarily been talking about old space or or the military space and and commercial activity. And now we're entering what people are calling new space. So old space was monitored how, and how is new space being monitored? And I don't know if I said that right. Well, that that's okay. So so I would you know, when I talked about people like Elon and Jeff Bezos, people would consider them new space, actors.
Mhmm. Versus the quintessential Boeing's and Lockheed's of the world that have mostly been uniquely, you know, government funded and that sort of thing. Yeah. You know? So, so yeah. In terms of monitoring and and that has not changed. That's part of the problem in that, we have radars and telescopes. Those are the eyes and ears, that we that that we have. And, most of that is owned by the Department of Defense now, you know, moving into, you know, US Space Command and that sort of thing.
And it's part of what's called the space surveillance network, and these sensors weren't developed, for tracking things in, you know, in Earth orbit. They were mostly developed during the cold war for missile defense and and pointing north to see anything coming from the Soviet Union and that sort of stuff. And these sensors just happen to also detect, and are able to track, you know, things that aren't missiles.
So they've been used kind of, in a secondary serendipitous way, in a Band Aid way, to try to develop this catalog of these 26,000 objects currently being tracked ranging in size from the cell phone all the way up to the space station. So so so the way of monitoring has not changed from Sputnik all the way till today. So there is so as far as you know, there is no satellites that have been put into orbit whose objective is to monitor satellites No. No. So or debris.
Yeah. So so they're not monitoring debris per se. But, yes, there is a space based space surveillance system, SBSS, that the US military has and that I'm very familiar with because I've processed data from that satellite. And there's also, what what are called the GSAPS, which is like the geospace situational awareness program. And they launched a few satellites just in the past, you know, 10 years. So so so those are two additions to kind of the space surveillance network is yes.
There are now a couple of space based assets to complement the terrestrial or ground based space surveillance, systems. Okay. Okay. And let's see. I had interrupted you when you talked about the Commonwealth? No. The common. So basically what I'm saying yeah. So so it's back to this, you know, all of outer space might be infinite, but near earth space is finite because of these orbital neighborhoods that I spoke of, because most of the things that we put there don't come back.
And the way to think about this, I think the best analogy is to think about the oceans and how imagine that, you know, you're on a boat. The oceans have their own kind of, you know, currents kinda circulation, that sort of thing. So when you're on a boat, you don't just stay fixed. You're moving with the currents. So there are the equivalent type of currents in Earth orbit due to solar flux, gravity fields, these sorts of things that are pushing and tugging, objects along.
And so imagine that when things stop working, they don't just halt their motion. Things keep on going adrift. And so the best way to think about it is, let's say, a working satellite's one of these boats somewhere on the seas. You run out of fuel and you don't take the boat out of commission. You simply send another boat and, and then keep on doing your job while while the boat that ran out of fuel is just adrift to the mercy of the local ocean tides and currents and that sort of thing.
So that's the situate go ahead. So so what you just did is you and this is something that I I have I forget. You I tend to think of satellites floating in orbit at a certain pace, but what you're saying is some satellites to stay within their neighborhood, because we really don't go over neighborhoods, is to stay within their neighborhoods, have a propellant that will can be used to keep them on course. Yes. So so so there's whatever nature's doing to them.
And then for things that are actively controlled, you kind of, depending on the mission, at at the least amount possible, you try to fight you try to fight those natural, you know, forces and tides or whatever to to maintain a specific orbital configuration or what have you. Okay. Got it. Yes. Go ahead. No. That that's good. I just I I didn't I don't the curse of knowledge is always a very challenging part of being an expert, is that the rest of the world doesn't know about neighborhoods.
The rest of the world doesn't know or think about that there are fuel you see them fuel being used to keep them into a lane. So that's where I just needing a a a multidimensional perspective of this space activity. Yeah. So yeah. That's perfect. Yeah. And so and so the thing is to kind of finalize the this analogy with the with the oceans, you know, if you if you comb the seas, you're not gonna find garbage.
So the stuff that's not not the things that are adrift that nobody's controlling, you don't find that that litter, uniformly distributed across the oceans because you actually have currents and things go to specific places based on those currents. So it's the very similar to near earth space. Because you have these column currents or, you know, local space environment tugging and pushing, you know, even the debris the debris doesn't get scattered uniformly.
It stays within certain, you know, lanes, on orbit. And because there's no sweeper or cleaner of these these orbital neighborhoods or or or orbital, you know, lanes, that means that they're becoming more and more populated. And so there's a certain capacity that each one can sustain a carrying capacity for safety and sustainability.
And if we don't extend environmental protection narratives beyond oceans, atmospheres, and climates to include near earth space, we could very well end up in this whole idea of a tragedy of the commons because people are behaving, in their own way thinking about themselves. But the holistic, the holistic sustainability of near earth space is not being globally managed.
And that and and and so that that's the that's the piece that brings me to the sustainability and finite resource, aspect of things. Okay. Go ahead. I'm I'm following you. It's interesting because I had not taken the environmentalism the way you had given me the title. Now I see how you're seeing environmentalism as a means of extension of human understanding of the challenges, beyond atmosphere.
Yes. And so, you know, one of the things that I'm really looking at here is looking at things like traditional ecological knowledge or indigenous knowledge and how, certain indigenous people of the planet over millennia have found out, hey. If I do these things, I can actually achieve a balance between my life and the life of this region that I'm living in, and and my family can thrive and and and our our culture can thrive and that sort of thing.
So what are the tenets of things like traditional ecological knowledge, and can I apply those, to achieve space sustainability? So that's kind of the latest thing that I'm looking at. And examples of these tenants are things like do your due diligence and make lots of empirical observations of all the constituents in a given ecosystem and understand the causal relationships, in the ecosystem, what the relationships are between things.
That way you can be informed of how to behave in a way that allows you to, you know, not not, kinda shoot yourself in the foot towards extinction and these sorts of things. I gotta tell you, you know, every time I kind of see experiments in nature where you the input ceases, you know, you have a system, you're inputting something into the system. When you stop the input, mother nature tends to seek equilibrium.
And at the rate that we're launching stuff, David, it's like there's no way for us to really understand what ecological equilibrium means for near earth space in terms of these human made objects because we launch things at a rate that exceeds our ability to be able to predict and assess not only the intended but unintended consequences of pumping so many objects into that environment. And so that's another area of concern. I feel like we're kind of out in front of the headlights.
So how maybe this is a clarification I would need. Can you give me a, the math behind how many are we launching now versus later or a graph or a chart that I can kinda visualize to understand this rate you're talking about. Alright. So let me put it this way. So right now, we have about, you know, 26,000 or so things that we're tracking. Just SpaceX alone is trying to launch 60 things every 3 to 4 weeks. So that gives you an idea of and that's just one that's just one company.
And and that's just one company in the US. You know, you have launches that are occurring from other parts of the globe, you know, at least at least every month. So what was if I went back 5 years or 10 years ago, what number would I have ended up with? Man, you would I think, 10 years ago, it would be amazing if you had, a dozen things being launched in a year. And now it's, like, sick now it's, like, 60 or so in per month. So the rate has increased significantly.
Okay. Okay. That helps me to see. So if we went a dozen per year and now we're saying every 3 to 4 weeks we're doing 60 from just one company, we could theoretically be putting 3, 4, 500 pieces into space every month. We could be. Okay. Yeah. So so so what I wanna get to now is the alright. You talked about security, sustainability, safety. These things are contested, finite resource. So what's the how? Like, how do you do something about this stuff?
Like, what what what, you know, what what role, you know, somebody like me as a space environmentalist and astroDynamics, what role do I think I can play to help? And so I try to measure all of my work in one or more of the following three lenses. Okay? These are my measuring sticks. Number 1 is, does anything that I do contribute measurably, to making space more transparent in terms of knowing what's up there, you know, where it's at, who it belongs to, that sort of thing.
The second measuring stick of mine is, does any of my work contribute to making your space more predictable? Because I gotta tell you, if, you know, not only where objects are located. Right? I mean, if if if I'm operating in some orbital neighborhood and I have other people in my neighborhood and I know that my neighbor's gonna move their satellite from point a to point b 3 days from now, that helps me plan so I don't run into my neighbor. That sort of thing. You know?
So that sort of coordination, that predicting behaviors, not just based on the physics, but, you know, people joy sticking objects around, is important and even predictability from a cultural context. So what do I mean by that? Well, you know, interestingly enough, we can all agree that our behaviors as humans in great part is influenced by where we were born, how we were, you know, how we were raised, traditions, these sorts of things.
For some reason, many people think that behavior in near space is uniform. It's the same, which makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, it doesn't even stand to to reason as a as a leading hypothesis. And so the way American culture manifests itself in space, for instance, is, you know, most satellite operators in the US do not, you know, maneuver their satellites on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays. Don't wanna do it on a Monday because you just got back into the office kinda thing.
Don't wanna maneuver on a Friday because, you know, something goes wrong, you don't wanna stick around and work more than you have to, and you definitely don't wanna do work on weekends and holidays. So most American satellites maneuver on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. That is a cultural signature in the behavior of objects.
My guess is that, you know, in Islamic culture, there's probably times of the year, like Ramadan, for instance, where maybe operational, stuff on satellites is, you know, less than it typically is at other parts of the year. Or if you wanted to interpret a set of guidelines like the these debris mitigation guidelines that I spoke about earlier, well, is American or western interpretation of the guidelines equivalent to Sharia interpretation of those guidelines?
So cultural context is real, because, you know, we we we human beings, don't behave uniformly, based on culture and stuff. And so this is another thing that I'm actually trying to map into the work is from a predictability perspective, can we predict how people from different cultures will actually behave in a common scenario?
And in the measure that I can, you know, be successful at predicting that, it helps people not escalate, and maybe even deconflict, behaviors that could be adversely impactful to, you know, the, I would also assume that we can also overlay whether they are military, whether they are weather tracking to do with, disasters. I could also foresee that this is also going to follow some trajectory of surveillance for movement of anything that's happening.
It could be a society that's been like Syria having the movement of people out of a war torn area for relief. So I've gotta believe that there's many others that, probably could be a list of 20 different types of variables that could be added into that formula. You bet, my brother. Which makes it extremely complex, to to to kind of even fathom and and manage that sort of thing, which brings me to my last lens. So my first lens was transparency. The next one was predictability.
The last one is building a body of evidence, to which people can be held accountable for their behaviors. Right now, we have many eyes on the sky, but these eyes don't, they don't they don't they don't communicate to the same body, if you will. And so typical example, you know, with the whole Indian satellite that you, you know, brought up earlier with the, you know, destroying this thing in low earth orbit. The Indians basically said, listen.
When we destroyed this thing, the debris it created, all that stuff is gonna reenter the Earth's atmosphere in up to 45 days. And, the US says, well, turns out there's still to this day, there are pieces of debris, from your anti satellite test that still exist in orbit and even went above the altitude of the space station, which has humans. And and so now that's a hazard to, you know, their livelihoods and their safety.
But it's a he said, she said sort of thing because I don't know, my guess is that you don't have tracking data, on the debris and and most people don't. So, you know, how do we come up with a global pool of evidence where many people can infer from to try to to try to come up to some I idea or consensus. Do people agree? How many people agree that, yeah, there's still debris up there and that sort of stuff. And who saw it? And we need to get away from the he said, she saids.
And so I'm really trying to work towards crowdsourcing, information and trying to sift through that to pull out kind of a consensus estimate or or opinion about stuff in space and make that globally accessible so that people could be held accountable for their behaviors. So I think I think the in my mind, I'm breaking this down a little differently than you are. You You're saying accountability, which to me means that you can actually enforce something on somebody who's done something.
And so that's an that's an admirable objective. Yet when you defined it the way you did, I think there's multiple layers in there. It's not just accountability. There's a level of the first thing I hit was capabilities. The Indian's capability and understanding of space and space dynamics is far behind many other countries in the world. Therefore, their assessment of 45 days, they believed, was probably accurate. So you have a capabilities challenge. You then have a, a principles challenge.
If in fact this happened and it did exist for more than 45 days, maybe a country such as Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Belarus, or any of those countries who get involved, they would need a better data set to be able to say, if in fact, this trajectory, this type of satellite, this certain size, this neighborhood is impacted, this will be the occurrence.
For example, using your sea analogy, the if you do something in the Arctic, you will get a different type of implication than doing it in Antarctica just because of the flows and the neighborhoods in which they reach. So I think there's also a principle side of this that needs to be addressed, which once those are solved, we can then go back and say, okay. You knew, you understood, we have the data, you ignored it, or you didn't research it. Therefore, we can apply accountability.
Does that make sense? Of course, it does. So yeah. So I agree with you. Okay. Well, I mean, I I can see the accountability side kind of becomes a a larger umbrella, but it's almost too large because you're sorry. I'm advising giving some suggestions. I would turn it into 4. I would say accountability becomes a whole topic of the above, but your 3rd is really to help the ecosystem, not just predictability, but to to elevate the level of the industry as fast as possible.
Yeah. Okay. Cool. That's a that's actually a good one. And I so, when you come to accountability, accountability means what to you? So so to me, accountability means, you know, at some point, because there's this thing called the outer space treaty signed in 1967, and it says, you know, words like you have to behave responsibly and not interfere with other people's safety and their operations and yada yada yada.
And countries have the responsibility for continuing supervision, and it specifically says that continuing supervision of the activities even of nongovernment actors in the domain, I would say nobody actually achieves that. And so to me, the accountability is the evidence that would help, countries, eventually actually achieve and enforce, you know, the treaty that they ratified back in the sixties. Or whoever did sign it. So it would be to enforce it.
Now this becomes on on if you go back to that cultural difficulty of political geopolitical challenges, we might be able to do that in the vein of commercial space, yet there are enough players when you have a 193 countries plus miscellaneous brings about to 195. You end up with not everybody being playing in the sandbox, but there's enough of them where we're not gonna hold accountable our military and we're not gonna hold accountable these certain, spy satellites.
And and I can't even think of an AI way to do this because you won't be sharing enough data. How do you how do you bring accountability to chaos? Yeah. So so so so here's the thing, and this is where I love I love the laugh because that's exactly the way I feel. Yeah. So here's the thing. Right? Because I've been thinking about this for some time, and this is where, you know, I I I worked for the Department of Defense for a decade.
And, I will say that there are people that like me and my work a lot and some people that not so much. And and the reason I bring that up is because what I am trying to actually, you know, develop and demonstrate for this accountability thing is something like a Waze for space.
So just like the the Waze app is a so called participatory sensing network, my goal is to bring in observations not just from governments and industry, folks and that sort of stuff, but even amateurs which have quite, you know, interesting capabilities and combining all that stuff to get to that transparency and predictability piece and be able to say, yep. Here here are all these kind of, objects, in the domain. This is how they're moving and behaving. This is who owns them.
And if there's anything else that I can ascribe to them, sure. Do that kind of thing. And so under that paradigm, I can tell you right now, David, you know, there's a group of people. This they they're called the CSAT dash l group. They're amateur, astronomers. And one of the whole things that they dedicate themselves to is tracking so called spy satellites and making that, you know, globally known, for those that have an interest. You don't have to dig too deep to find these folks.
And so, I would say that if it's something that can be measured and detected and tracked, then I'm gonna have that in my system, you know, whether people like it or not. So I I think I I I love the the accountability one kind of to me with what you just said moves off the table. If you could solve the challenge of allowing individuals to be able to know where people are, know where satellites are, know where the motions might be, give them predictability within the ecosystem, which Waze does.
This person's traveling at a certain rate. This person is taking a left. This is a right. There's traffic in that region. You'd slow down and move. What you're doing is you're giving an informational database for those players to make better decisions, and you're hoping that the accountability will happen on their own because they don't wanna lose a satellite. They don't want to have an issue with running into another country's domain.
So Waze doesn't give accountability, but what Waze does is it allows you to be able to say, I need to be accountable to getting to my office on time. I need to be accountable to making sure that I am safe. I need to be accountable to slowing down early enough, staying in my lane, getting off earlier so that I can so I I think that it's it's more of I'm gonna use Peter Garretson because the last interview, he talked about what you had said.
This, the I forgot the not the not the military, but the coast guard. Mhmm. Is he then made a jump and he said the number one most environmental organization in the world is the US military. And I went, I mean, that's like, what are you talking about? And he said, GPS. We put up GPS, American centric, but we put up GPS, which allowed people to make more direct traveling. Yeah. And therefore, we cut down on 1,000,000,000 of gallons or or, 1,000,000,000 of gallons of fuel. Right.
But we are an environmental group. I'm thinking, I never thought of it that way. So what you just did was talk about, to some degree, ways being a by default, a means by which people could be it accountable, but we are not really making them accountable. Yeah. So so so so let me be clear. I I will never be able to make people accountable. Right? But, what what I'm saying is that I want to develop a body of evidence that could hold them accountable for their behaviors.
And the thing the the place where I wanna go beyond what Waze is is that, satellites experience anomalies. They fail or they experience disruptions. And I would like to get to the point where I could actually assign a cause or attribute a cause to that loss or disruption. And and yes. So that may be natural and that may be human made. And if it is human made, then the there's a question of intent. And and that one's a tough one to get to. But, you know, I'm an ambitious kinda guy.
Oh, and intent is looking at historical data and decisions that were being made so you could tie in geopolitical decisions, commercial decisions, possibilities of collusion between multiple satellite companies, opportunistic conditions on earth. Therefore, that move to the left by X degrees was a deliberate and, causal positioning because it didn't have to happen then. It could have been 7 seconds earlier or 10 seconds later, and it would not have happened.
So one is one is hitting the car next to you because you've been did it on purpose, and the other one is if you hit the brake and you could have waited less than 2 seconds and cleared it. So yes. Okay. Got it. You're still there. Right? Yeah. I'm still here. So so so I guess I thought I lost you for the because I hear I hear the I hear the bings coming through on your end. That's why.
Yeah. Yeah. No. So so so so I think, you know, that that that walks us through, you know, the what, which which was this, you know, space safety, security, and sustainability. Like, what is that all about and that sort of stuff?
The why given, the nature of the population geopolitically contested, commercially contested, and the fact that we have these neighborhoods that are increasingly populated, and then the the how, which is this idea of the transparency, predictability, and this body of evidence. Okay. So then give me, please, 2 scenarios.
The AI, assisted technological advancement where we go to a place where this works and what you see happening and give me with a timeline, and then give me the exact opposite if it's doesn't work and the timelines you see for I I've so you don't see it happening properly. The thing that popped into my head was just yesterday or day before.
There was an something that came out of Columbia or Cornell or one major university in the United States that said, if in fact the lockdown had happened 2 weeks earlier, it would have saved a week earlier, it would have saved 35,000 lives. If it was 2 weeks earlier, 57,000 lives would have been saved. So there's gotta be a point in which you feel this could be, ultimately damaging. So can you take both sides?
Well, with with with the the whole, the latter, I have a harder part I have a harder part with, at what point this becomes kind of, you know, ecologically damaging because there's still a lot that we don't know. Like, there's a lot there's a lot that I know that I don't know and and and other people don't. And so, on the front end of what you said with the whole AI thing, if this whole thing works, I'm in a race to try to give myself a big data problem.
And what I mean by that is, if I can find a way to, like I said, crowdsource aggregate these multiple source of information that are very, disparate from each other and and and independent, if I can bring those together, make the right linkages to discover causal relationships and even get to, predictive models and that sort of stuff, then I then I think that empowers the community writ large. And I think that AI clearly has a, you know, an ML.
They have a role there, even though AI and ML are inherently stupid. You know, because they they assume that, you know, tomorrow looks like today. Yeah. So if you feed it a crappy today, then you're gonna get a crappy tomorrow kind of prediction. So so I'm trying to find ways to to gather the most diverse set of today's, to feed into, you know, this sort of, you know, AIML infrastructure to get to the best, prediction of of tomorrow. So How much do you know about computational social science?
To be honest, I've heard of it. I've imagined what that means. I've spoken to, 2 people that claim to have some cognizance of that, but I can tell you that that is I've already identified computational social science as one of the most critical needs of my research program. I I had a company. We did computational social science, artificial intelligence, machine learning to do predictive analyst and telco, Fint, insurance, and banking.
Mhmm. And what you've just explored is a need for the understanding of the behavioral side. However, computational social scientists don't look at the human or the actions of people. They take the data of the actions of those people, and they can calculate what the behavior will be or has been. So, for example, they would take your financial transactions. They can go down and you got time, place, act, location time, act, location, amount.
And what you would do then is you can look through all their data and say, okay. They buy groceries on Saturday. They buy their gas on a 2 on a Tuesday. They work at a certain job, and you can see all those patterns.
But then you could also take their phone call records, their online activities, feed it into, for example, the Google Sentiment Engine, and you could take their words and be able to take their, the adjectives out of it and start to be able to understand how they're thinking and what decisions they've made based upon the financial activities they have, and you've never spoken to the person. And you will be more accurate.
So you're trying to do with satellites, in my opinion, almost the exact same thing. Sure. There's a lot of truth to what you just said. Yeah. There's a I I can connect you. I I have 2 friends who are both computational social scientists who are AI specialists. So I can connect you with 2 of them, and maybe there's a dialogue that will work there. Yeah. Okay. That's what That that's that's what it sounds like you're doing, and I think it's amazing that all of these pieces.
What are you missing in your data that people are not going to give you that you are really having challenges with? I would I would say satellite anomaly information. Yeah. I think that's that's the hardest one to get a hold of, the satellite anomaly information because people hold that very close hold because they don't want us that to get leaked out, scare investors. It's not like the airline industry where, you know, when there's some sort of failure, everybody knows it.
You ground the fleet and blah blah blah. When it comes to satellites, an anomaly happens and people pretty much keep it quiet and, try it for that not to leak out. So I think that's probably the most difficult. So you're looking for the black hole so that you could find it where you can't see it to be able to figure out what it is. Indeed.
Okay. I I go to, people who study space, and they look for the black hole, and then they look all around it because it's the only way to figure out what's happening in that environment. Right. So is there any on your end, is if you had to do this in 1 fifth the speed you were doing it now, You had to make take a theoretical huge jump. What would make you go 1 5th times faster? Whatever that I'm saying the number faster. How would you be able to what would be that really big jump?
Can you say that again? Because I'm sorry. To to make we humans go at a certain speed. We tend to do things by doing the same things over and over again. Is there some radical thought that you said, if I could do this right now, we could take giant leaps in the understanding of space debris?
Or Yeah. So so so I would say, you know, my biggest, bottleneck in terms of really understanding this stuff, even if I had all the data, would be to develop the ontological structure or the schema that would allow me to do this, you know, discover these things that you and I have been talking about. And so ontology, not just the development, but implementing these ontologies computationally, I that's that's the long pole in the tent.
And if I could do that much quicker, then I think, yeah, that that would accelerate things, big time. I and the reason I asked is because of project Moon Hut and the types of things we're looking at, and I'm trying to you've seen the Project Moon Hut classification system. I'm looking at other tools that will be able to facilitate our box of the roof and the door, the Moon Hut.
And maybe within what we're building, that type of structure that you just mentioned, the ontological, schema that needs to be developed might be accelerated by your connectivity with people who know how to think in this manner in a way that you don't know how. And not say that you're bad. It's that someone else has a different skill set.
No. No. No. But but but here's the thing, David, is that, you know, in my field, I would say that, you know, based on my work and people that you speak to, you could say people would say, yeah. This this dude has interesting ideas, and he's been kind of leading kinda where the field has been going. None of these ideas come from me. They come from other domains. So I already know that. So absolutely. You're right. I mean, that's exactly what I try to thrive on. Yeah. So okay.
Cool. I you you opened up my eyes to several things which I hadn't thought about, over the the notes I have. It's a it's a good interview when I at least pass 6 pages of notes. So I've got, I'm on my 7th page, and that's a that's a good sign because there's there are pieces here that I can get my mind around to understand a little bit more about space to be. This space to be has been very boring to me as a topic. And Understood.
Yeah. But it it's it's not, a boring topic when you take it from environmentalism or you take it from access or you take it from the scientific exploratory side or you start to think about the different types of satellites up there and what they mean, and then you look at it from behaviorally. For example, use the Indian. I believe the Indians, the Indian group who had put this, shut down the satellite, were doing it for two reasons.
1 is safety and security in the future, and the other one is to protect themselves in terms of maybe a satellite is they they don't want it to be seen. So anti and for their own, but they honestly believe in 45 days, it will go down. There are peep there are people in class that you went to school with who honestly believe that what they were working on their project would succeed. Like space, these Google XPRIZE.
No one started that and put in $50,000,000 believing that they were gonna be the one to fail. Right. They they believed it would work, and it didn't. So I believe that they did have that contention. And so taking that backwards, we have to say, how do we help them make those better decisions? And so I I hadn't thought about it in that in that vein. So that was also very enlightening. So I I definitely appreciate you taking the time to put together and and talk about this topic.
I think it's a extremely valuable topic. Well, I, I've I've definitely appreciated, talking to you about it and, you know, the the fact that, we had a great great exchange. And, you know, I'm very appreciative of of the opportunity to to basically teach you a couple things and and get you to to enlighten me on some stuff. So it's good. Yeah. Well, that's that's what we hope to do on this program is to have that great one on one conversation, and I I and thank you.
For those of you again, I who are listening in, I hope that you also had an interesting time. You learned something today, thought about something differently that may change your life, the lives of others, might be able to contribute in a place where space debris might have been considered terrible or something that you're not interested in. But if you use this term space environmentalism, which I think, Morbai, you had said that you had coined. I don't know if Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
In our region. So Yeah. Maybe this space environmentalism can be brought into a different, a different usage and expanded upon from just Earth environmentalism. So I think that's a a huge value for all of you listening in. And, again, project moon hut, our directive is to create that box of wood roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, so that we can, in fact, change how we live on Earth.
We move from Earth bound to a whole another age of infinite possibilities, which includes the fact that we do live between the moon and Earth. The moon influences everything we do on this planet in one way, shape, and form. So our ecosystem is growing where we build and live and grow. And with the help of people such as, Murba, we are going to make that next jump. So is there one best way to get a hold of you, Moriba? Yeah. I would say just, you know, [email protected].
That's the best way to get a hold of me, and I check it frequently. And it's spelled m o r I b a. Correct? Correct. Okay. Because that's not a, a, what, common western name. And for me, David Goldsmith, I'd love to connect with you. You could reach me at [email protected]. I do have my you can connect with us at at on Twitter at at project moon hot. We have a YouTube page. There's only 2 videos up there. We haven't marketed it till just recently or putting our material up.
So you can go to YouTube and type in Project Moon Hut. You'll see our logo. Project Moon Hut is there. You can also connect with me personally at at Goldsmith, Instagram, mister David Goldsmith, LinkedIn, Facebook, all of those so that we can be connected and we can change how we live on earth for all species. So for that, that being said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.