Capturing Pictures of Space as a Means to Improving the Human Species w/ Andrew McCarthy #40

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite. Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes, which in turn have led to the renaming of periods. We call them ages. You've personally just experienced the information age and what a ride it's been. Now consider that you might now just be living through that into this new transitional age, the age of infinite.

The age in which is not defined by scarcity and abundance by a redefining lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources. The ingredients for an amazing sci fi story that has come to life as together we create a new definition of the future. The podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hot Foundation where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon.

The moon hot, we were named by NASA, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn those endeavors, the paradigm shifting thinking and the innovations back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Today, we're going to be exploring, which I thought was going to be our topic, but we've got a merger here, is capturing pictures of space as a means of improving the human species.

But then it's kind of got a different twist here a little bit, taking pictures of space to improve the human race. And before I get into this, this is the first time I'm going to share this with anybody. Creating a title can take up to 3 hours, and it is not an easy, ordeal. We don't just come up with a topic. Our guest today, Andrew McCarthy. Hi, Andrew. How are you? Good. We had a an awesome experience trying to come up with the title, and Andrew can share that it was it's challenging.

It's not an easy process. But, we found 1 and Andrew just gave me another one. So I figured I'd kind of toss it in there. So let me add to you why Andrew's on and I think that'll be valuable. On Instagram. Andrew has his, username is, cosmic background. He has today about 380,000 followers. And in my feed, I consistently see these absolutely amazing images of space and the moon. A few of the moon were just mind boggling. And I, he's in a freelance Astro Astro photographer.

And I decided at this point where I think this is going to be our 40th in our sequence, that we need to continue to expand the view of who's in the space industry and what they deliver and what they can help us to do moving forward. And I decided to reach out to Andrew, amazing guy, and we're going to be covering whichever topic. I'll use the first one, capturing pictures of space as a means of improving human species so that we can make a difference as we move forward, as humans on this planet.

So, Andrew, do you have an outline? I sure do. Okay. Can you give them give give me the points, please? Sure. So to start, I'm going to discuss the status quo. 1, the status quo. Okay. Number 2? Why should we care if people like space? Should we care if people like space. Next. Why space is the ultimate motivator. Is the ultimate motivator. Next. The modern information age versus the arts. Information age versus the arts. Next. And lastly, why the moon is key. Why the moon is key. So I love you.

Okay. Let's start with this first one. You started with, the status quo. What do you mean? Well, with any any change in human history is always a disruption of the status quo. So, you know, any the fundamental driving force behind life on this planet is, you know, our organism, humans, basically looking at the status quo and deciding to make a change. And that is even precedes humans, of course, when you look at, like, basic evolution, for example.

Basic organisms mutating to form appendages, and, you know, early early creature early humans actually becoming, like, bipedal, for example. You know, evolutionary changes, to figuring out how to use tools to solve problems, and learning basic survival skills, and things like migration. Those are all born out of, looking at a problem and coming up with a solution. Okay. Whether whether naturally through, through evolution, through mutations, or through intelligence.

And humans, we're, intelligent creatures, so we're accelerating that process today. And disrupting the status quo has become a means to reach capitalistic goals and, reach, new frontiers, physical frontiers and, more, metaphorical frontiers. So there's people that stand out, as disruptors. You know, like, I came from the tech start up space, and people are always coming up with new ideas to fill consumer gaps, and, you know, those people are disruptors. They identify a problem.

They come up with a way to change. Just just for my knowledge, what was your background, in the tech space? I worked in the in sales and business operations. So I, have convinced people that they had a problem in the current business model and tried to sell them some software to solve that problem. What what type of, applications? I sold marketing software for a while, and then I moved on to partner management software.

Mhmm. So, software for a while, and then I moved on to partner management software. Mhmm. So things that, just help people manage their business. Okay. Just wanted to know your background a little bit in that sense. That's great. Okay. So it's a means of capitalistic goals. People who stand, stand out from them and stand up to make these changes. Okay. Go ahead. So humans in general, being very, very, general here, we're very, very adaptable. So we're we're a super virus. Right?

Like, you can throw us in pretty much any environment, any situation, and we adapt to that environment. And I I think that can be a good thing and a bad thing. And the reason I think it's a bad thing is because I think fewer people seek to change their environment for the better. Where one type of person potentially adapt to that environment and they essentially just suffer through it, others are looking at ways to improve their their situation. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.

You just said you believe most people adapt for for worse? Is that what you were saying? Well, so so I'm saying we we are survivors. Right? Like, so you we can adapt to any environment. And when I when I say adapt, I don't necessarily mean, like, in a way where we're changing. Maybe it's a psychological adaptation to where we just we're con we become content with the status quo. Maybe it's living in poverty. Maybe it's living in a poor climate.

You know, there's, there's a certain type of person that is compelled to leave that situation. Yep. And there's a type of person that is content staying in that situation. And I'm not saying that's good or bad. You know, it's simply a, simply I'm just making an observation about human nature. And but your your contention was that most people, don't don't change it for the better and they actually make it worse?

Not necessarily make it worse, but they simply they simply don't work to improve their situation. Yeah. Okay. That's that's an observation that I'm making. And, by the way, I could be completely wrong. No. No. That that's okay. It's it's what's driving you to do your photography and do your work. It's an interesting take that you're believing that individuals who get into a bad position, and it's okay.

Again, I'm not I'm just trying to I'm listening to what you're saying, and you see the world as not enough individuals trying to make a change, or don't know how to make a change, maybe that could be added, that they don't know how to make a change or they're making a change to improve their conditions for the better. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. That's the observation that I've made simply about human nature. Yeah. And, you know, I'll make a a very rudimentary example of that.

You know, for example, early humans, you have, you you know, they're sitting in a cave. Winter comes around. One guy sits there and shivers through winter. One guy learns how to knit himself a sweater. One guy moves to warmer climate. Right? So there's 2 people that are disrupting the status quo. 1 guy is not.

1 is disrupting the status quo by staying where he is and figuring out how to stay warm by knitting status quo by staying where he is and figuring out how to stay warm by knitting himself some clothes. The other guy figures out how to stay close or, stay warm by simply relocating. He's he's marching across the desert now looking for a better climate, and, hopefully, he finds it. Might die too, but, for a better climate and, hopefully, he finds it. Might die too, but at least he's he's happening.

Something. Yep. So so we've got two examples of disruptors there. And, you know, in many ways, our modern civilization is based on those people. The guy sitting in the cave shivering, he didn't, he didn't really contribute anything to the development of society. And, then again, nothing against this guy because, you know, he's making he's making a situation work one way or another.

But the guy that's inventing clothing, you know, that's that's knowledge that is going to be passed around other humans. The guy that's the guy that's migrating, he's now going to spawn offspring in a better climate. So you could say that they're actively advancing, the human race just by just by making these simple changes to make their life better. They've disrupted the status quo. They no longer have to shiver in a cave every single winter.

So the reason I'm focusing on the status quo is because I have found that there's a status quo associated with modern perception of space. And, perception of space, in my experience, falls into 3 main categories. You have groups of people that are very, very positive about space. People, like, I I would say I fall into this category because To me, I put them into the enthusiastic the the enthusiast world. There there you go. There you go. I'm very enthusiastic about space.

I, it's a big part of my life. I'm actively working in the industry to an extent, and, like, everything that I do, space is in the back of my mind, because it's it's just simply falls in line with what I personally believe and what is interesting to me. Okay. You also have a group of people, that are neutral about space. And I'm I'm being generous with the word neutral because, you know, there's there's they're they're going to have moments of positivity about space.

But, where I've where I've found, in my interactions with people and my interactions with my audience is your average person, their their knowledge of space is really limited. You know, perhaps they learned about space in elementary school. You know, they they read about the Apollo programs, you know, unless they're old enough to have lived through them.

And their their perception of space is really molded off of maybe pictures they've seen from the Hubble Telescope, random news snippets about things that we've discovered on Mars. And they enjoy those things, but it's set at such a superficial level that it doesn't really change anything about their life. They go around their day just simply knowing that, oh, there's astronauts in space, but how does that help me?

And they're, they they might be aware that space is involved in some of their modern comforts like GPS, for example. I think most people understand that that's because of the space program. We have satellites that can track your position so you can, you know, find the nearest Starbucks when you're on a road trip. And there's, there's other comforts as well, you know, like maybe maybe Wi Fi.

A lot of people understand Starlink is, you're going to be providing Internet for people, and, they understand those things. But but how much does it really affect their daily life? They don't really think it does. So they don't really care. They care a little bit, but not enough to to really change anything. So let let me expand that a little bit. It's not that they don't think about it. They they you just have it. And I I'm using that from personal experience.

I have always been most of my life, I've not been an enthusiast. So I see moments of positivity. But when I go through my day, I then say, oh my I got my weather because of GPS. Oh, my glasses are scratch resistant. Oh, I'm in a plane and the the boots on the plane are because of GP, because of space. I don't think that way. So my day, if I really broke it down, even as engaged as I am in the space industry, I don't think about it more than I would say a little bit.

So I probably am more of this neutral person. It's just that I don't take this, I don't brush it off. I'm actually learning about it. You're you're I I would say you'd lean more into the positive category just simply because you, I think, understand the impact on your life a little more than the average person? Yes. I I would agree with you. The only difference is it's only been the past 5 years. Well, you, at least you're not in the other camp. There's a negative camp.

Okay. And I didn't even know that this existed. But there is a mainstream perception that is growing that money, that money that is spent on advancements in space are a complete waste and that they should be spent on humanitarian or to day life. Okay. Yeah. This is this is a huge group. This is a to day life. Oh, yeah. This is this is a huge group. This is an amazingly large group.

I honestly didn't realize it because I was so blinded by my own love of space that I didn't understand how people couldn't see it as being so important. So that was my own naivete. Oh oh my it's you this is this group is so large that in some cases, I believe it supersedes both the other groups together. That is depressing to hear. Well, I think about it in this light. How, I how much space education did you have your entire life growing up? Not much.

I think it was a little section in elementary school, maybe a little section in 7th grade. And then I think, all of my knowledge after that was really self motivated as an adult. So I I will tell you that I had just as little. So what would be the belief that would change my mind otherwise if I never saw, learned about it, or experienced it? I we have a little different age group categories between the 2 of us.

I remember I I don't remember, but I have my parents took the newspaper, and I think we still have it from one of the Apollo missions. So those these things happened, but during that same time, there were there was conflict for in the United States if we look at just my home. So it wasn't a big deal, and we had Charlie Bolden on from NASA as a former administrator, and he said while the whole space industry thinks everybody's watching Elon Musk, they're not.

So, yeah, this was a very large group. Well, I I really wanted to bring up that group, because I feel like it is very important to me, personally, that I change that perception on as many people as I can. And, you know, there's it's it's a challenging road because there's foundational beliefs, almost like a religion.

And I feel like when it comes to things that come that that come down to, like, environmentalism, humanitarianism, and anything political with a political slant to it, you'll it's it's almost like a religion, to where it's such a foundational belief that it becomes a part of your personality, and it becomes and, like, it may like, space is a part of my personality. If you told me going to space is a waste of time, I would just laugh at you.

I mean, there's there's nothing you can do to change my mind. And, like, I I'll I'll recognize that right now. Like, you could have the best argument in the world, and I just simply won't take it seriously because it's a foundational belief for me. I I believe it like that. And they have and they have the opposite. So yes. Exactly. Exactly. So so how do you how do you prevent that? How do you change that status quo?

And, you know, unfortunately, the answer for a lot of people is you really can't, because like I said, it's a foundational belief. Now I know where my passion for space comes from. When I was a little kid, I was, like, 7 or 8 years old, and my dad had this big old telescope, and he showed me, Jupiter and Saturn through that, just in our back yard in Folsom, California growing up. And, like, I seeing the rings of Saturn with my own eyes changed me forever.

I didn't I didn't realize at the time, but that set me down a very particular path. And it's it made me, I think, understand my place in the world, almost like that overview effect astronauts talk about, which I've obviously never experienced. But, but I imagine it's to a similar degree. The moment you recognize your place in the cosmos, it changes your perception of the potential of the human race. So let me let me do one thing just to help anybody who's listening in for the one moment.

The overview effect is the experience that is the outcome of being in space and seeing the world aside from being on it. So, you're either on the International Space Station looking down and you see the world in a view that you've never seen, or from the 24 astronauts who've seen the world from afar. And it was named by Frank White who we've done a program on. And that name that what the reference that was just given was that Andrew gave was based upon this thing called the overview effect.

So you can continue on. I just wanna make sure people understand what that meaning is. Great call. Great call. Yep. So I I think I experienced a mini version of that over effect overview effect when I saw, when I saw planets for the Did you remember that experience, or are you just remembering that you had the experience? Well, that's the funny thing about memories. Who knows? So so when you had that experience at that time, your father brought you up to the microscope.

He said, take a look here. He had positioned it to see the the rings of Saturn. And what went through your head? I think at first, I thought it was a picture. Okay. And I was like, okay. That's interesting. There's like a picture in the telescope. And my dad was just explaining to me. He's like, no. That's a whole other planet. It's like like Earth, but different. And he's like, oh, okay.

Then he's like, you know, the that has has rings around it because the rings are held in place by gravity and, you know, of course, I have no clue what he's talking about. I just knew that it was pretty. It was it was fascinating. I just I didn't wanna stop looking at it. And he revisited that a few times with me, over the course of the the next couple years. You know, every time he had his telescope out, he'd give me a look through it. And so I, you know, I saw Jupiter.

And this was around the time, the Shoemaker Levy impact happened. That was the comet that was broken up in Jupiter, as it passed Jupiter, and it struck Jupiter, left a series of stars all along the side. And you can actually see them with an amateur telescope. They just look like little little dark blemishes along the surface. So the the Shoemaker Levy is what they named it? Correct. Yeah. That was named after the 2 astronomers that discovered it. Oh, so Levy is the name.

Okay. So I'm thinking of Levy like a a dam breaking, levies for water and things. So this is a Shoemaker Levy are 2 people and they came up with this concept. They it's called the Shoemaker Levy because they saw, Jupiter being struck. Did they see it, or did they just see the impact of it? They just discovered the comet.

Okay. They discovered the comet, and then once they discovered the comet and I'm not too clear on who exactly made you know, calculated the orbit and figured out that it was actually going to hit Jupiter, but it was known fairly quickly after discovery that it would that it was on course to actually impact Jupiter. Wow. So they were they they were they did they actually see it happen? Yeah. Yeah. We we actually watched the impacts happen. Oh, really? Cool. And Hubble's got some great pictures.

You can just Google, you know, Hubble Shoemaker Levy, and you'll you'll see the impact scars on Jupiter, because the the comet broke up and struck the Jupiter's atmosphere and, you know, it didn't even hit a surface. It's just, you know, impacting the atmosphere at that speed. It's basically like hitting concrete. So it just, you know, exploded in. It left like Earth sized stars, like stars bigger than our planet on on the side of Jupiter. So Really?

Just this crazy celestial event that we're all able to witness, and we're incredibly lucky it happened at a time when we had the technology to actually watch it. So so I'm gonna stop you. Sorry. Mhmm. If it if it leaves Earth size impacts, I need a reference to how big Jupiter is to Earth. It's about 10 times as wide. So if Jupiter or if if Earth is about 8,000 miles wide, Jupiter is about 80,000 miles wide. Okay. That helps me. So so you can have these large craters on that size.

Okay. Yep. Not exactly craters per se. It's more like a discoloration in the atmosphere because, again, it's it's not a it's not a rocky surface on Jupiter. So it's just when the impacts hit, it basically just cooks everything because the energy just converts directly into heat and left these, like, dark brown scars that look like, you know, basically just burned to the surface of Jupiter. But it's really just the atmosphere discoloring because of the impact.

Okay. But but, yeah, those pictures on Hubble, they're really cool. But but, again, that was happening, and I think that helped me understand just the way space worked, because, you know, small developing brain. You know, like, it's really hard to wrap your head around the the cosmos. I mean, I mean, it's hard as an adult to understand the scales involved, so as, you know, as a kid, it's especially hard.

But, you know, seeing these things progress, played a really big role in, I think, developing, you know, my personal attitude about space. So but and here's the attitude about space. So but and here's the challenge, and here I think this is why the status quo is such a thing. To your point, most people don't really receive a lot of exposure to this stuff.

You know, if you if you have a little bit of exposure in in elementary school when your brain isn't quite developed enough to truly grasp the incredibleness of what what you're learning about, there's no real reason to get that excited about it. And especially so because there's so little discussion about humanity. They're just they're just happening out there, and we're just we're just observing. We're just sitting here on the planet watching them happen.

And and how does it how does well, it impacted you as a person. Mhmm. But how did these things impact humanity? So that's where that's where I think I I I I wanna it almost touches on my next point. You know, it's like why why should we care that that people like me exist? Why should we care that there's people that love space? Well, I I the the interesting thing as you're going through this is I, in 7th grade, I can't remember the teacher's name, but the teacher had a saltwater aquarium.

And I really loved it. I got along with this biology teacher and the science class. I, it was really amazing. And I decided that I was going to have a saltwater aquarium, which if you don't know about aquariums, freshwater is much easier than saltwater to be able to maintain. You have to keep a certain pH. You have to keep a certain cleanliness. You have to have certain types of fish in it or animals in it. So what I did is I didn't go to the space route.

I continued on with my interest in biology and I hadn't see aquarium for years years years. And my upbringing was sciences, but never touched on space ever. Right. Right. And and you know what? We need people with passion about those things. So it's it it and is and, like, my passion about space is in no way critical of other people's Oh, I I didn't mutual passion. I didn't take it that way.

I was just thinking about how much of an influence your father, that one experience had on you, and you probably had other experiences. Where I look back in my history, I had this experience that I gravitated towards and how impactful that those little minor moments, which your father might not remember at all, yet had all that influence in your future life? Yeah. It's it's it's crazy. The little things that that shape young brains. But, it sets you So so you said you wanted to go to number 2?

Yeah. So, and I I sorry. I I don't recall the exact wording of your question, but I think it ties in really nicely to, you know, what what I'm where I'm taking this, and that's why should we care that other people like space? You know? As we mentioned, there's a, there there's a a large group of people that are just negative about space, and they see it as a waste of money. And I don't want to debate that point, and here's why. So those people are also disruptors.

You know, I mentioned the the value in disruptors in a society. Those people are also disruptors. They're not disruptors that are helping, you know, me out and what I wanna see in the world, but they're helping in their own ways. And, so so I'm I'm I wanna be be sure I'm clear on that, that it's okay to have people that feel the way they do about Earth and be passionate about these humanitarian projects.

But I want them to like space because they need to see that we're actually on the same page and have the same goals. So I think I think if you were to if we were to go back and I knew what you were gonna go to today, I in this in this one comment you made, I would not do it positive, negative, and neutral. I would do it something such as enthusiast something and another thing so that they don't have a negative connotation.

Because what you're really saying is there are 3 different types of people in the world, and they're all necessary, and they fill a certain need. Ever everybody's necessary. Absolutely. But Okay. Within the within the, the the the the specific the specific topic of of space exploration and space technologies, I think there's people that are working backwards, and that's why I I refer to them as negative. It's not that the people, you know, in general are a waste. They're wonderful people.

They have valid perspectives. They have valid agendas. They just simply, in my opinion, go they they're they're not seeing space for what it is. Yeah. And that's that's where that's what That's what you're working on. That's what I'm working on. What I'm working on. Yep. Exactly. Okay. So so, yeah, I just maybe there's a better word for them. But, I I don't I don't mean to call them out as being negative. But No. And I I know that. That's what I'm saying.

If if we if we were to go back in time and be able to adjust those few comments, I would have probably thought of different words because we're not saying that individuals who are not interested in space are negative.

We're saying that they have a different perspective of how the world should run, what to do, which we should go, and what should be engaged in while there are people who are very enthusiastic and believe spaces, an instrument or a change vehicle or something exciting to explore and develop. And every and people have different interests. Exactly. Exactly. They do. And they make very valid observations.

You know, like, I I don't want to necessarily debate some of the points that they'll make about wasteful spending in the history of the space program because, honestly, they're probably right. There's probably has been wasteful spending in the history of the space program. But but we you know, you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's you know, we'd we we screw up sometimes, but overall, we're marching forward.

Mhmm. And it's something that's overlooked, by by individuals in that in that camp is the huge list of humanitarian, environmental, technological advancements that were born from these programs that push the boundaries in space, like solar technology, for example. You know, if we're talking about, you know, environmental concerns on earth, solar technology is, you know, is absolutely huge for, you know, green renewable energy. You know?

And and that's just one one small example, but solar technology wouldn't be where it is today if it weren't for the space program. And then things like water and air filtration. You know, think about, you know, how important important water filtration is, for, you know, people that don't necessarily have access to clean water. Things like LEDs that change the way we use energy.

LED bulbs are in every home now, and they used to use, you know, these horribly inefficient bulbs that were literally just cooking inside their, their their their glass bulbs radiating heat, which is, you know, just a just a waste of energy. You don't use light bulbs to heat your home, but they are heating your home, and that's just wasted energy. So so things like LED technology are huge.

Insulation insulation in your home has been molded by the space program because insulation is so important in space. So so the list goes on. And understanding these impacts is hard before we have them. So before we developed these technologies, we didn't know what we what was going to what kind of challenges we were humanitarian or environmental impact these these endeavors would have. We couldn't have known. So Yeah. Pushing the boundaries is important, but we don't always know why.

We just know that it is important. So you're what you're, what you're trying to articulate is that there are a lot of spin offs, and I from the ideation and development of the space ecosystem that have benefited individuals. And if they if an individual could connect and understand it, they would be less likely to fit in the camp of antispace activity. Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. These in my opinion, these are the types of things that that be taught, and and actually actually claimed.

You know? That these technologies are born out of the space industry, and this is how they've helped because people see these impacts in their day to day lives. You know? You can you'll see a reduced heating bill and energy bill, and we know how wrong it is to waste energy. So so people that have solar on their house, like, that's people have solar on their house because of the space program.

The technology was would have it like, it would've been very hard to have developed that kind of technology without that incentive. Not saying it wouldn't have developed, but we we really don't have a way of knowing. I I I agree. And the it it's I agree that they should be taught. I don't know how you see it should be done yet. Even with us knowing that people like me, because I'm not in the enthusiast camp, I'm working in it is that I I open up my phone and I see the weather.

I know it comes from satellite, but I don't sit there and say, oh, wow, satellites. I don't. And I know when my UPS package is delivered, I know they use GPS to figure out turns and efficiency. But yet when I get the package, I just want the package. Yeah. That's that's honestly how I feel about a lot of that stuff too.

So, you know, I'm an enthusiast enthusiast more because the long term benefits of pushing the boundaries on the space, which, which is actually the second part of my point about why should we care if people like space. Right? So right now we have, I think, 7 people in the International Space Station, and we've had a continued presence in space for the last 21 years. So right now let's say that Shoemaker Levy comet hit earth instead of Jupiter. What would happen to the human race?

I just said it left Earth sized marks on Jupiter, so I don't think we have to use our imaginations very much to to say it would be catastrophic. And, those thankfully, those events are extremely rare. They like, some an impact of that size happens on the order of, like, maybe every 1000000 years. So very, very, very rare. But who would survive? Maybe cockroaches and the seven astronauts that we have in the ISS. Seven people.

And they wouldn't live long because they need a resupply mission to stay up there. So And there might be collateral damage from the fact that the Earth has been shattered. Well, if well, so in theory, as long as it keeps the mass and the mass doesn't get too misshape Right. Otherwise, they're just flown in. They're flown into they're they're shot into anywhere. They're they're gonna keep on going. There's gotta be I don't even know.

Would there be I've gotta believe there'll be a shock wave that would hit them going outward. Well, so so if there's enough ejecta from the impact, it would, it would throw the debris into orbit and then they would probably collide with the debris. Shock waves need a medium to propagate through, so they actually don't move through space.

But even because it's low Earth at, low Earth orbit, would there be wouldn't there still be enough of a reverberating impact outside because they're so close to the Earth? Well, I am not an astrophysicist, so I'm afraid I don't You're an astrophotographer. Oh, come on. So I I would think and I'm taking a wild guess because you're still in you're in low Earth orbit, but you're right next to that sphere.

That probably would be like a a bomb going off, but somebody who's listening to this can tell us later that what how how far off I was. So, yes, if we hit, there would be 7 and then 0. Exactly. And let's say they were in, geostationary orbit instead or maybe they had a base on the moon instead. They'd live a lot longer.

If they had a, you know, some kind of, you know, self, self sustained ecosystem on the moon, you know, maybe they they were able to, you know, farm on the soil or something, they could potentially live indefinitely. And if you have a population of a 1000000 people off planet, you've essentially, guaranteed the human race endures.

A lot of people didn't endure, but the human race and the our, you know, past achievements and the the great things we've accomplished technologically can live on, you know, through that new settlement. So it's a personal question. Yep. Do you actually I mean, honestly, honestly, honestly care that the human species goes on? Well, if I was one of those people, you're in that lunar settlement, I would definitely care. You would definitely okay.

So, I I love the argument that people will say, but the human species goes on. I'm thinking, so you really don't care if there's 10,000,000,000 people who die on this planet in 20, 40 years. You just wanna make sure the human species goes on. That's all that's important to you. And I I personally I'm personally about myself and my children and the people I know enduring. I I don't I'm not gonna profess to say that I sit around and think about the human species must endure.

Well, no. Of course not. Because No. No. Some people care. If if you're dead, why would you care? So, but that's an often an argument that's tossed out. The human species, we have to continue the survival of the human species. Yeah, but my kids aren't going to be on it and their children probably won't be. So, if there's only 500 to a 1000 people or a 1000000 people, even with those numbers, odds are I'm not gonna be part of that group. Well, that's just, of course, one example.

But if you look at let's say there's constant travel between earth and moon enough to where you could evacuate a planet. Okay. Like, I'm I'm obviously getting far out there in the space. No. No. No. No. That's I theoretically possible. Like, that's the angle here.

That that's an interesting angle, which I've never heard anybody say because we have and I think you had seen it in the video, the Mearth, moon, and earth economic and eco ecosystem is, and by the way, anybody listening in, there are 2 videos that I send people who are going to be a part of the podcast. So there's something called Mearth. It is moon and earth, and that was something that I came up with Burton Lee out of Stanford.

So what you're saying, which is an interesting construct, I like it, is that if there's an Mearth based ecosystem and there is the chance of an issue with a foreign flying object, which is very rare, but if there is one that we could accelerate the movement into space into the moon. And if we get there fast enough with enough rockets and enough capabilities, we have the ability to have more individuals survive. Exactly. Okay. I I'd not I'd not thought about that way.

That's you're the first person who's ever said it in that way, which even gives more credence to the fact that we should have our Mearth ecosystem. So okay. That's in in my opinion, having that type of ecosystem is necessary for people to, endure, to people to endure, you know, whatever life throws at them. You know, we we're we're on the the the back end of a pandemic here, which could have been a lot worse. Oh, they they've been a lot worse.

Yeah. And they've been a lot worse, exactly, in the in the past. You know? Right? You know, thankfully, we have, you know, things like hygiene and, you know, there's there's ways we've we've prevented them. We have we have hygiene. We just haven't figured out the human side of wearing a mask or the political side of it doesn't help or it's a hoax. We haven't figured those things out, but we do have hygiene. Yeah. We people know to to to wash their hands or at least most people do.

And So so the, it's interesting. You you've taken it okay. Go ahead. Continue with the pandemic. So, yeah. But again, if there's a pandemic, everybody on the moon would just be like, oh, well, it doesn't affect us. So, so there's benefits to sectioning, people. You know, imagine if there was no boat or air travel during the pandemic, it would have stayed and it ground it, at patient 0, like the country of patient 0.

It would it wouldn't have traveled to America or, you know, unless, of course, it actually started here. And I did and forgive me. I'd like every time I read the news, I feel like it looks like it started somewhere else. So I don't I don't really know. We we and we don't know how far back, and we probably will never know. The the the thing picture that comes to mind in my head when you're saying this is I would wanna make sure that my children were on that ship.

It wouldn't it would be okay if I couldn't be one to make it. Yeah. Get get them tested. Get them on the get them on the ship. Right. Just get them on the ship and get them on their way.

And I would, in that sense, with the moon earth ecosystem, which Mearth, I believe, is going to be what we develop next, And that's, again, what we're working on is that this gives a a capability to put in space individuals in what's it it's called the Van Braun, Van Braun, system, which is the circuit the, like, a a Ferris wheel in space that people can live in, or is the what's the other one that, Bezos has been talking about?

The Orion, O'Neil. The O'Neil station is like a tube in space that people can float or the moon. Okay. I I like that. Example of that, not moving interstellar. Right. Interstellar. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. The I I just learned recently from one of our team members Andreas Bergwiler who's fantastic out of Germany. He's amazing wealth of information. He just said to me one day, it's not an O'Neil station. It's a Von Braun station. Okay. I don't know the difference.

And so there are 2 different types. 1 is like a Ferris wheel and the other one is like a tube in space, and they're very different. Yeah. The the 2001 Space Odyssey, I think, is the example of the von Braun stuff. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. I I don't know if he was picturing something bigger, though. That one was pretty small. No. The I just I know that individuals have been professing that they're going to do this in short periods of time. And it these are huge massive structures.

You you don't even have a place to stand and you're going to put 400 people in space or 600 people in space. It's not as much of an impact of this moon, which is, can house and survive many millions of people. So there's more opportunity in that at the present time. I never I I hadn't brought it into the ecosystem survival. That's interesting. You you kinda did a shift off for me. Thank you. Yeah. Well, that's that's what I'm here for.

Okay. Well so, you know, and obviously, the example we made was was just talking about the moon and, you know, you're discussing, you know, if we had stations in orbit. You know, and then but, of course, this this these problems that I discussed facing the human race become even more insignificant if the human race was actually on multiple planets, multiple multiple moons, there's other places we can live besides the moon. You know, obviously, Earth is ideal.

Earth is the favorite, but we could we could, in theory, go everywhere. And, you know, obviously, we've, you know, discussed, you know, why I think people should care in a sense where it potentially gives your lineage a chance to endure and survive, get off world, whatever. But why do we really need people to to care so much still? Yeah. And, and the the reason is right now, I think the obstacles are more political than anything else. And, Space Ventures are government funded for the most part.

There's obviously, there's a commercial sector now that's growing, and, thankfully, it's really pushing the industry right now. Yeah. Well, yet yet without the government, without satellites from government and contracts from government, there would be a whole different story. Oh, absolutely. And and what NASA's mission was was to fill in the gaps on what the commercial sector couldn't do because there was no financial incentive for it.

Now there's financial incentive for certain things, so it's kinda growing on its own. And, you know, of course, NASA is still still going to be pushing that envelope, so they're still very important to this whole thing. But, you know, NASA is you know, it's getting it's getting funding from the government, and politicians are involved. Politicians are public servants that need to do what people want them to do. So if funding for space isn't popular, it's not gonna happen.

And if you have a growing camp of people that say, no. NASA is a waste of money. We need to take that money and put it towards, you know, whatever whatever, you know, humanitarian, you know, causes to focus that year. We'll simply stop pushing those boundaries outside of the commercial sector. And, you know, there's a a chance our space program is just dead. It just it just it just stops right there, and we never go anywhere.

And yet if we if we look at a full world, the Chinese are gonna continue to develop. They run it as a government agency and develop it. The Japanese space agency tying in with, Europe and the US, but the European Space Agency I read the other day is they're feel with something, and don't quote me, 70 to 80% of all launches came out of SpaceX as a percentage of what go went into space that they're now going to try to amp up their position in the space industry.

So there's also a competitive nature of who's going to take on this lead and who's going to take advantage of the opportunities that come out of space. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And, of course, one of SpaceX's biggest customers is still NASA. Yes. So NASA is still driving that even just by being a customer. Mhmm. And I I don't know exactly how it works out. Like, because I know there's they they do a lot of, a lot of launches for private companies too.

They they put up commercial satellites and things. So it's I know it's not just NASA. A lot of it's, a lot of it's private money too. Yeah. You've got Rocket Labs. You've got the there's there are a variety of different types of launches going on at the present time. Yes. So so, you know, look at look at, where we were in the sixties when we got 5% of the federal budget going to NASA because the everybody was really on board. I'm okay. That's not true. Not everybody was on board.

But it was a the public perception was, let's get to the moon. And it was like a very like and it was like this amazingly just, like, patriotic thing. You know? Like, we're gonna go to the moon. We're gonna beat the Soviets, and and and people were on board. And once people lost interest in that, it was no longer a popular political decision, put 5% on of the budget towards, you know, getting people on the moon.

And there's a lot of good arguments for, you know, you know, maybe we didn't need to keep going to the moon. You know, it's it was dangerous. It was expensive. Were you really learning more about the moon? Was there really any reason to keep people up there? So so it's I I I'm not necessarily here to debate that point. I'm just showing, look at what we accomplished when we got a lot of people interested.

A lot of people were interested in that, and it was a it was a popular thing to to get people on the moon. So we did it. We did it, what, like, less than 10 years. We went from, you know, barely, barely figuring out how to get a rocket into orbit to landing American boots on the moon. And that's just crazy. And the fact that we've driven the cost of launches down so much, and we're we there we've really polished the technology.

You could say that rocket rocket technology has been matures probably since the sixties. Saturn 5 was, you know, was pretty pretty bug free considering what it was, and we've not been able to continue to do this. It's there's there hasn't been an incentive. So we need that incentive. We need people to support it. And So which which incentive ranks highest than yours? It is is it the saving the human species forever? Is it what's your your personal reason that this is done? For for mine?

Yeah. My my personal reason, is I wanna I wanna stand on the moon and take pictures of Earth. Oh, cool. That is my personal reason. Reason. That's why I wanted. Everybody has their own their own reasons, though. There's this I I think there's this romanticism to the moon, that's, you know, we we look up there. It's this beautiful thing, and people like the idea of going there. Honestly, it. It's interesting because I'm an earther. It's a if coming from what is it? The which series Expanse?

They have the Belters. Mhmm. In the movie in the television series, The Expanse, they have a group called the Belters. They live within the the the what do you what belt do you call that? I can't remember off the top of my head. But the the it's the belt, outside of Mars. And so I'm an Earther, and what you just described is you'd like to go to space. You think there's many many values in space, but you would like to be on Earth. Well, I think Earth is just simply the best possible place.

Okay. I I just I'm not judging. I'm just saying I now know you're an Earther. Well, you know, who knows? You know, maybe they, you know, they so so it's I I can actually look at the moon kinda like Las Vegas. You know, think about what I I don't I don't know if you you you know anything about Vegas history, but that guy, Bugsy. Right? He just had this dream. He's like, let's just build this hotel in the middle of nowhere. And he did it, and it turned into frigging Las Vegas.

And who would have thought? Yeah. The middle of the desert, there was nothing out there. And he puts a casino out there. So now suddenly there's this economy in in Vegas and in the middle of the desert that's huge, and people love it. People go there and they stay. Yeah. And that could be the move. Good good analogy. Excellent analogy.

Yes. There will be people I wouldn't mind I would like to visit if I knew it was safe and I could do, and I could travel the 3, 4 days, get to the moon, stay, look around, do my thing, maybe invest if there's a possibility, and then I'll be on my trip back home. So so the one of the next reasons that people we need to care that people are passionate about space because it's going to increase the size of the pool that people like Bugsie are born out of. People with vision, people like Elon Musk.

Alright? If you have a 1000000 people and one of them is, you know, potentially the next Jeff Bezos, for example. You know, he's he's doing, Blue Origin. Right? So he's also working in the working in the space industry. If you have a pool of a 1000000000 people instead, all jazzed about space, you'll have a 1000 leaders like that born up. So we need this pool of people passionate about space to grow if we want people like that to be taking risks to getting us up there.

So you might have this visionary that's like, I figured out a way to put a casino on the moon, and I'm gonna do it. It's gonna be an absolute lunatic. No. No. In in project Moon Hut, we call you call it a 1000000000 hearts and minds. Okay. So, yeah, you're you're exactly right. And the number is a 1000000000, so it's very good. Alright. Cool. I nailed it.

So, my point is we need to increase that that pool size of people passionate about space because, otherwise, you're not going to have enough people taking these risks. You're you're we're limited with just Elon Musk, who's really only focused on the transportation. That's that's his thing. That's his game. He's focused on building the vessel that gets us back and forth. Once that's built, it's gonna make things easier, but still, why would somebody take a risk to do anything?

And that's why we need these visionaries. We need people that are going to like, it's not me. I know it's not me. But there's going to be people that that see these problems and look to solve them, and there are people like Bugsy that build a hotel in the desert. And they'll build an economic of course. I think Apollo was an exception. That was a society, all making this of course. I think Apollo was an exception.

That was a society all making a decision to go, we're gonna get on the moon because it required public support. Space, I think, is different. I think you're going to get capitalists' interest in space, and it's gonna be individuals that actually end up pushing those boundaries. People that say, you know what? I'm just gonna risk it all through caution of the wind and see what happens if I, if I create a financial incentive for people to go to the moon because it could pay off huge.

Imagine the value of the first mining operation on the moon. Right? So there's a huge cost to transport materials up to the moon. So anything in space is instantly worth more than its value on earth. Right? So if you set up a a mining operation on the moon, you're you're going to be worth a fortune to people that wanna build settlements near your mining operation because they don't need to bring your raw materials. You have them. Right?

So so there's people that are going to see that and take advantage of it. In my opinion, that's the next step in space exploration, and it's I think it's soon. I think it's going to happen within my lifetime. And how old are you? I'm 37. Okay. So within the next within the next couple decades, I bet we will see that. Yes. Yes. You will. Gotta stay focused. You gotta stay focused. Yes. You will. You will. I love the optimism. Alright. Otherwise otherwise, what am I doing every day?

So that's kind of a if if if I didn't think that way, we'd be I'd be in trouble. I'd have to I should do something else. Okay. I I I love what you're saying and you actually articulated it very well differently than I have said in certain places, which I like. Okay. That that kinda brings me to my point, and I kind of I think I got into it a little early. But space is really the ultimate motivator.

So you you have like, if if you're a capitalist and you're looking at the value of raw materials, you're you're instantly able to expand your wealth by getting those materials in the space, however however you do it. There's, so so there's this meme that that floats around every so often. I think I've seen it on Facebook that says something like this asteroid is worth 10,000 quadrillion dollars or something like that, because it's, like, filled with rare metals. Have you seen that?

And what do you know what the name of the asteroid is? Oh, I don't know. But I don't think it matters either because No. It I I it does because it's very important to me. Its name is its name is Davida. I didn't know that. There is an asteroid. It's, like, worth, 19 quadrillion dollars or something like that. And I was looking at what they say. What's the name of this thing? And it says it was named Davida. Oh, that's great.

So that so so it might not be important to you, but it's important to me. Well, I'm glad it's important to you. But, but I hate to break it to you, but those economics actually don't make sense. Because if you were to transport that asteroid, davida, to Earth, it would no longer be worth, 19 quadrillion dollars because those rare metals that are on it are no longer rare now that we have them in abundance on Earth. So that's Yeah. That's just basic economics for you.

Can't just flood the market with something. And however, it definitely has value in space. In fact, I would argue that it has more value in space because the energy required to get something off of Earth is huge. You know, I I don't know the actual math. So, again, I'm not an astrophysicist. Not a do I. But it's, like, 1,000 of dollars per pound or something like that.

And I know SpaceX is they're taking really great strides and figuring out efficiencies to get that price down, but it's not gonna get really much cheaper, because it just can't. You need chemicals to propel these things. Chemical rocketry is fundamentally inefficient because you just simply you have to reject so much mass to get something to move into space. It's, you know, thank you, Newton. Yep. Basic laws of physics there.

So because the gravity wall of earth is so steep, it makes sense to harvest these materials elsewhere, get them onto rockets, and then you could, in theory, bootstrap civilization across the entire solar system, because you're now able to harvest things off planet and build the raw materials necessary to to do construction, to build rocket fuel, to do, even water, which is obviously necessary for survival. All these things become available off planet and thus are worth their weight in gold.

And go ahead. Yeah. No. That that's an interesting point that it's not worth it bringing it back. I looked the numbers up. This might be useful for your thinking. When the Space Shuttle was in operation, it could be launched a payload of 27,500 kilograms for 1,500,000,000 or $54,500 per kilogram. For a SpaceX Falcon 9, the rocket used to access the International Space Station, the cost is now down to $2,720 per kilogram. That was in 2019. Right.

And the his the starship that he's working on should get it down even lower. I think it was down something like $500 a Yeah. It's it's gotten down. I I was looking at I tried I was doing this as quickly as possible, but it's it's really dropped significantly to and I I could, again, I don't know the number, but it's dropped significantly. So yes. But that's still expensive. You know? I I mean, imagine building a skyscraper on the moon with materials from Earth.

It's just it'd be just silly expensive. However, if you can repurpose lunar regolith, you know, if you have a monopoly on a nice iron mine on the moon, you're gonna make a killing, you know, selling those materials. And the people that are building the skyscrapers are going to wanna use you because it's gonna be expensive to set up their own mining operation or transport the materials themselves. So so there's a there's a really cool economic opportunity there.

And, you know, like I'm saying, I think it's just a matter of time before this this powder keg up there kinda get dead slit, and we're going to see an explosion, in the in the moon economy just because that that potential is there. Once once the cost per launch gets low enough to where your average, maybe upper middle class person can get on a trip to space, I guarantee you everybody's gonna try to do it.

I mean, even people that aren't jazzed about space, they're like, oh, where were you last weekend? Oh, I was in space. Like, how cool is that? I mean, it's a bucket list. It just wasn't accessible before, but it's becoming accessible to have civilians travel to space and travel to the moon. It it will become financially accessible for, I would say, anybody that owns a house, for example. They could probably also pull this off, you know, take out a second mortgage or something.

It wouldn't be a smart financial decision, but they're not gonna do it. Yeah. And because of because of that, you're going to have potential consumers up there. Yeah. There's gonna be people saying, you know, I heard this podcast from Andrew, and I needed a second mortgage on my home. And it's not a bad it's not a good decision, but I'm doing it anyway. So you'll be getting calls one day. Yep. Exactly. We we have this so we have this motivator. Right?

This this motivator where you're going to have consumers interested in it. You're going to have, resources available for people to capitalize on those resources and grow. So so we definitely have, like, kinda everything lined up. So what's missing, I think, with what's holding us back is, again, going back to do enough people really care about this? Do they feel passionate about it?

Do we have enough people willing to take these risks to, you know, set something up that's going to drive that incentive, to set up the first mining operation. And that's, of course, where, where, hopefully, people like me come in and people like me taking advantage of the informational age that we're all in to get these people interested in the potential out there. And that's kinda where I get into my next point, about the information age and how the arts can play a role in this whole thing.

So, as I mentioned, you know, as a kid, I, you know, obviously had really fond memories of space. And, you know, it wasn't until I was an adult really that I thought about it, and I was like, alright. You know what? I'm gonna buy a telescope. I wanna revisit that experience I had. And I I did. I bought a telescope. I spent, like, I think, like, 4 or 500 dollars on just just basically a Dobsonian, very simple telescope. And What what did you call it? A Dobsonian.

It's a very simple type of telescope. It's essentially just 2 meters and an eyepiece. Okay. But but they're big, and they they allow for very easy, like, backyard viewing. So I bought this thing, and I didn't know anything about what I was doing. I didn't know anything really about space other than that I liked it. And Mhmm. I I bought this telescope. I assembled it and took it into my backyard. I pointed it at the first bright thing I saw in the sky, which happened to be Jupiter.

And I look in the eyepiece, and immediately, I'm getting that that that feeling again, that overview feeling, that, it's like suddenly I'm just I'm just there. I'm understanding my place in the cosmos. And I see Jupiter, this gas giant, just floating out there in the vastness of space, and it's never been more apparent to me my place in the universe.

I am on a rock flying through space, and there's these other rocks flying through space, and we can we can sit there, we can look at them, and we can travel to them. It seemed like it was right there in my grasp. I could see 4 little moons next to Jupiter. I was thinking myself as I was looking through there, how cool would Jupiter look from one of those moons? Alright. So I'm getting all these feelings. Right?

So I did what any millennial would do, and I took the iPhone that was in my pocket and tried to take a picture through the icons. And that didn't work out too well because it's just like, I don't wanna I'm not gonna get into the mechanics of astrophotography here, but it's just a lot harder than just taking a picture through the eyepiece. So my mission there was how do I get more people to feel what I'm feeling when I look through the eyepiece?

And I immediately started researching astrophotography because I was like, I just I just have to do this. I don't know. It was just an add I was bit by the bug, I guess, and slowly worked my way into learning the ropes of this this very niche hobby and started sharing my pictures with the world. Now what I didn't expect was just some guy in his backyard, me, was able to take a picture that gets in front of millions and millions of people because that's what happened.

I took a picture of the moon, did my best to recreate how the moon looked through through the eyepiece, by researching all the photography techniques, etcetera. I spent, like, a week on this picture, and it went viral and got just millions of eyes on my work. And I think more importantly, it inspired other people to try to take pictures themselves.

So the information age has made it possible for people like me with an idea to spread it through other spread it through virality to plant, like, almost like little little franchises of other photographers that are doing the same thing and getting it out to more people. I have counted since I started doing this in the last year, I think maybe a couple dozen people that are just like me that started doing this because I was doing.

Cool. So my goal here isn't necessarily to inspire the next leader. Right? Like, I'm not gonna I don't necessarily think I'm going to, like, inspire the next Elon Musk because he sees my picture. However, it's very likely that I inspire somebody who gets into the photography, who does inspire the next leader to that that wants to put a set up a mining operation on them. And that's possible just due to the nature of social media.

So if if I'm able to do this, I could potentially play a role in shaping the economy on the moon because there's, you know, kids looking at my pictures that are that are getting the the space bug like I did. And who knows what they're going to go on to do? Not everybody has a dad with a telescope to show them Saturn or Jupiter, But pretty much everybody has social media now or they have parents that have social media that can introduce them to these pictures.

And, you know, I ideally, that's going to that's going to spondle that curiosity that we're talking about. That's going to get people that would have been in that negative camp who don't see space as necessarily a means to to their end, whatever whatever it has to be, humanitarian causes, environmental causes, but could see space as the solution for truly everything, because it's, to an extent, how I feel.

I feel that by pushing these boundaries, we solve a number of problems here on earth, potentially all the problems on earth. And, it's like, I know I I probably come across a little bit like a, like a cultist, maybe a space cultist. No. No. Even at that much. I'm I'm I'm I'm looking at I I pulled up your imagery just for the sake of helping me to talk, myself, to you about this. Is that your imagery is beautiful. You have some amazing photographs.

And yet at times, I ask myself how much was the coloration? How much did you change it? How much did you do? These things don't might not exist this way. How much are you do you alter as compared to how much do you deliver exactly what you see? So with the moon, particularly, I try to recreate what my eyes see with a couple exceptions. For example, with the moon, I always try to draw out the color in there. So the moon is actually really, really colorful, but our eyes are very, very weak.

We can't discern the subtle variations in color on the moon. It just looks gray to us. But there are there is color variations on the moon. So I I use some some technology obviously to, like, extract that. So you have you have one that I'm looking at. It's fairly recent on your Instagram accounts, where the moon looks like it's got blues and browns and golds and a variety of colors. It's fairly new on this list, so at the top. Is that what is that? So those are the real colors on the moon.

So there is there are sections that are golden and some that are bluish and some that are brownish and some that are yellowish. Those exist on the moon as they are. So so here's here's the thing, thing, and I think it comes down to asking yourself, what is real? Is your eyes the barometer of truth, or is it some something else? So exist what's existing in my data is things that my eyes are not sensitive enough to discern. So I have to manipulate the picture to make it visible to your eyes.

I have to. It's, it's So so what it balancing. I manipulate. I stretch the image, saturation. It's it's software. Okay. Yeah. So you're you're changing the software you're you're altering the software to enhance different, color combinations that exist. But if you were on the moon, you wouldn't see exactly that. Not exactly. You but if you had a if you had a a certain lens on, an infrared or a I'm using names that come to my mind. But if you had a certain lens on, you would see it more readily.

So so let me let me put it this way. The moon is gray Yeah. To our eyes. It is gray. Like, you look at it, you look at it through a telescope, it's gray. I swear sometimes I see hints of the color. Well, if I really focus and I use some some observing techniques like averted vision, but the the moon is the moon is gray. However, in my data, when I'm picking these pictures, there are variations.

Variations, in in data, if you're looking at RGB channels, in order for something to be gray, the numbers for each of those channels have to be identified. Yeah. Yeah. But they're not. They're always a little bit different. Mhmm. So what that's telling me is, obviously, the moon does have color, but also, these colors, what they represent is actually really important to some of the last points I was making and that there's mineral content on the moon.

And that's what those colors actually represent, and that's what I'm showing by exaggerating those subtle differences between the numbers of my data. I exaggerate them, create and it what it's what it's showing is the the mineral composition. So Now Go ahead. Continue. Sorry.

Now, something that that's really important to point out actually is one of the reasons the moon is gray is because it's been beaten so much, by by the asteroid striking it in the late Hedica bombardment, and unlike the Earth, it hasn't had erosion to erase the evidence of those things. So it has a really nice layer of film over the entire thing, and that film is gray. However, if you dig just a little bit, the soil changes color, and that's what the Apollo 15 astronauts discovered.

He was just kicking around the sand with his boot, and he saw that it was orange under his boot. And if you look in my photo near where the Apollo 15 craft landed, I'm not sure if you're familiar with who that is on the moon, it's, Montez Apanines, and there's Hadley Rille. It's a little little can in there. It is very orange in my picture. So what the astronaut was seeing is actually visible from Earth, and it's iron deposits in that spot. There's iron in areas where it's orange on the moon.

There's titanium in places where it's more blue on the moon. So you can you can see from these photos that the moon actually is while it looks boring and gray to your eyes maybe, it's this very dynamic place that has a rich geological history. And I never would have thought I I know about the moon being bombarded, and I know about the regolith. I know that there are challenges we don't even know if we can dig, on the moon as of now. There are a lot of challenges. Yet I never I don't know why.

I'd never thought of that being just a like a dust over the top of the moon that is not allowing some of the true colors to come through. So if so if you can you or would you have you or have you thought of taking a picture as of the one I think you know what I'm talking about. It's got a large blue speck on it on the left hand side, and anybody can look who's listening on. You can look up his images on Instagram.

Is there's one with the blue kinda looks like a little bit of an American look, I hate to say it, or a horse. Could you identify what that color would represent as a mineral? Do we know those things? The USGS has a very detailed map of the composition of the moon. So, yeah, if if you take my picture and you compare it to the USGS map of the mineral map of the moon, it will you should be able to figure it out.

So, I just color alone is a strong indicator of the composition, but it's not the only indicator of the composition. For example, there's, within the color variations, there's there's differences. Like, maybe a blue has more green to it. Maybe a maybe a a red area has more magenta to it. So, like, at the top of my head, I couldn't tell you what that meant. Yeah. The the only reason I I'm thinking about it is we're redesigning our website right now.

And one of the things we're trying to articulate is the value of the moon or the value of the innovations or or of these pieces. And this type of image with a rollover, a mouse rollover, where you could say this is anticipated or thought to believe or could be the possibility of these resources would be an interesting image because it's so beautiful. So that's that's where I was going and talking out loud, thinking out loud, with you.

I just think you've done a phenomenal job of giving the moon a different feel. And so that's where my mind went is the what does that mean? So even when you do so let's go to the others, and we can come back to the topic or the outline is you have galaxies or distant photographs of the other images, not just the moon. Are those colors just another type of filtration, or do you enhance any just for the purposes of giving it color so people can see it?

So space is very colorful, and there's this misconception somehow that space is not colorful. And I don't know exactly where it comes from, but there's an important distinction. Like I mentioned earlier, what is the barometer of truth? Is it your eyes? Because if you look at a telescope at a galaxy, it kinda looks like a fuzzy gray blob. Does that mean it's actually a fuzzy gray blob? Because when I take a picture of it with my camera, it looks colorful. There's blues. There's reds.

There's, you know, there's a a warm core and a cool outer arms. So so your eyes aren't necessarily the right way to judge what space looks like, in my opinion. And the best way I can say it is if you're in a dark room and you're wearing a pink shirt, your eyes won't see the pink shirt. It'll probably look gray if there's any light in there at all, because your eyes just simply don't register color while in low light. However, we know the shirt is pink. The the shirt's pink.

Like, we saw you put it on. So, you know, it's what so what's the what's the barometer of truth? It's, there's an in my mind, there's an interesting comparison is that dinosaurs were considered all to be green. Yet over the research that's been done in the, say, the past 50 years, they're now saying that dinosaurs had all sorts of bright and amazing colors. And that because we didn't have pictures of the dinosaurs' colors, we we didn't know how to articulate back then.

But today, we would there are dinosaurs that were vibrantly colorful. So that's why I asked the question. You just have they're so beautiful that sometimes the it's almost as if in order for you to have it this way, you had to color it. Do you know what what I mean? Exactly. Exactly. And let me let me tell you this. Like, I'm my goal here like, I'm not a scientist. Right? Like, I'm an astrophotographer. My goal is to make pretty pictures.

So if that means pushing the saturation slider way over in Photoshop, like, I do that. Like so it doesn't mean that the color is fake. It just means that for the purposes of my photo, I made it look as pretty as possible. However, everything I do is with science at the heart of it. So if you're looking at a colorful nebula there's false color in this true color, by the way. I don't have to get into the semantics of that. Let's see. Yeah. I understand.

The colors represent true data, and it's usually it's red here. It's blue here. It's orange here. That that's what those colors usually mean. I I just make it as pretty as possible. Yes. And and I appreciate that. And I I what I mean, I appreciate your honesty because I feel, for to some degree, it's easy to say it's easy to say that it is adjusted so much that it's not real, and and I I apologize for anybody who would hear this and feel differently.

You've probably seen the photographs of a woman who is behind a filter or with makeup, and then they show themselves without the makeup or without the filter. They do a split screen, and they're they're not even close. So you're saying that it's not that type of interpret. You're not doctoring it and adding makeup on.

You're using what's already there and creating tonal and tonal variations and distinctions, yet you're still staying within the constructs of, not maybe nature, but natural type reoccurring conditions. Did I say that well? Yeah. Yeah. You did. And something to keep in mind with astrophotography is it's not like, traditional photography in many ways is just documenting what your eyes are saying. Yep. But astrophotography is not really like that.

With the exception of my moon shots, the deep space shots are really about revealing the invisible. So these things are so faint. If you if you were in a spacecraft and you flew up to a nebula, it would just look like more space. It wouldn't look like anything because it's so diffuse and it's so faint that it's basically invisible. There's pockets of space that would look really cool to your eyes, but for the most part, they don't.

You know, you're you're talking about gases where you have just a couple extra molecules per square meter. Yep. That's not something you can discern with your eyes. Cameras can pick it up. Because you also because also because you're seeing the totality of it, but I think, the, you're not the forest from the trees. When you're from a distance, it looks one way, but when you get up, you it's not the same because you're now so close to it.

Well, in space, when you're so close to it, it's just open space. Yeah. Exactly. You you nailed it. It's like, you know, when you're in a forest, you can see through the trees. When you're outside the forest, you can't. Mhmm. It's it's there's this, it it it's hard to convey that, I think. You you said it you said it well. I think I got it.

I just had never thought about it that way is because of things like Star Trek where you would they get to this nebula or this new region, and they would be going through this orange thick deposit. And what you're really saying is, and tell me if I'm wrong, is when you would finally get to that nebula or distant place, it's gonna be a few molecules per square meter. So, therefore, it will not look the same way as it does from the distance. The distance gives you that different perspective.

Well, I'll I'll make an example here. I take pictures of galaxies and they look incredibly colorful and vibrant and beautiful. Not to, like, you know, pat not to, like, you know, pat myself on the back. No. No. You you you do. You do. So I'm gonna let let me pat you on the back. But, we are really close and inside a very big, bright, beautiful galaxy called the Milky Way. Yeah. But when you look outside at night, what do you see? You see nothing. Well, if you're in the city, you see nothing.

If you're in a very, very dark sky, you see a very, very faint shimmer from the collective mass of all those stars. Mhmm. So and that's something that looks incredible in photos. Milky Way photos are incredible. You see these beautiful colors. You see oranges. You see splashes of red. You see blues. You see areas where there seems to be thick dust blocking stars. Like, you see all this structure, but you don't see that at all with your eyes. It's not because it's not there or that it's not real.

It's just it's so sparse. These things are very far away. They're very faint, and that's that's just the nature of space. Everything is so spread out. Again, I had not thought about it in that way, so I love it because I had I I bring Hollywood or cinema or theater, whatever you wanna call it. That comes to mind before the reality of what comes to mind. And and so to your moon images, you see the gray and you take it as the gray.

Yet, it's kind of like finding a, beautiful antique under some dust, and you wipe it off and say, oh my god. Look what's underneath this. And that example of what was it Apollo 15 you said, where you kicked the boot and there was orange on his boot is an example that I had never heard, and it now helps me to think very differently about the moon in a way that I had not thought about before. Great. Great. So maybe I should, segue into Yep. My final point, which is why the moon is so important.

Yep. So I I've been sharing space photos with public for a little over 2 years, and I've dabbled in a little bit of everything. I've you've seen my page. I I shoot galaxies, nebulas, dabbled in a little bit of everything. I've you've seen my page. I I shoot galaxies, nebulas, planets, our sun, and, of course, the moon.

And I found that despite being the easiest thing to shoot and, you know, arguably the most recognizable object, most familiar object, the moon is by far the most popular object for my audience. I see it in my analytics. I take pictures of the moon versus a galaxy. The galaxy being what I think is the cooler target, it's my moon pictures outperform them from an analytics standpoint. I look at likes, I look at shares, so I'm understanding these photographs are resonating more with them.

So it kind of hurts me as an astrophotographer because, frankly, I spend more work on the deep space stuff. You know, I'm like, oh, I pushed the limits of my equipment. I took a picture of something millions of light years away. And, you know, I'm watching stars being born in a mission nebula, and they're like, oh, cool. Big gray rock. Upvote. Alright. So so it's it's frustrating and funny, but I think it says a lot.

And so my theory on why the moon, despite being the most accessible thing I'm shooting, is the most popular thing in my in my feed is the familiarity is very important. It adds context to it. People know what the moon is. Everybody knows. Everybody's seen the moon with their naked eye, but it kinda looks like this little sticker in the sky. There's no depth to it. There's no structure.

There's you know, unless you're really focused on clear night, you don't even really can't really tell there's anything to it aside from the phases. But you obviously in, you know, good seeing conditions, you look up, you can see the maria, you see like the the the darker plains, where hardened basaltic lava once flowed. And, really focused observers can even make out the ejecta pattern of Tycho crater. So the moon is, in my opinion, taken for granted by everybody.

It's just simply a subtle part of your life that you don't really think about. So what's different about my pictures, I think, is I am showing it to you in a way that you've never seen before because your naked eyes are showing you this flat distant thing, and I'm showing you, wow, it's actually three-dimensional. It has it has a definite curve to it. It has irregularities around the edges. It has deep craters and tall mountains that you can see in the photos.

And by the way, that's how it looks through binoculars too. So if you haven't, look look at the moon through binoculars. It looks Really? You'll get more of the that. Okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You can and if you're in early phases, you can actually see the faint shadowed side, which is really cool because that's only illuminated by Earth. Is it, Earth's Earth sunlight's bouncing off Earth, illuminating the backside of the moon.

And then along the terminator line, that's where the shadow meets the light, you see the long shadows from mountains. So you can see not only just the fact that the moon is spherical, but you can see the depth to individual features on the moon. So you're saying, wow. That's a tall mountain right there. That's a shallow crater right there.

So that brings a that kind of sense of wonder that I'm talking about earlier is that there's this familiar object that you've taken for granted your whole life and suddenly you're seeing it in a new light. That sparks curiosity, and I think that's why so many people follow my page. It is that they like being fed that. You get endorphins from seeing something in a new way. That's why we like, you know, really cool new movies and, you know, we we we wanna watch the the newest thing.

We wanna read things that feed us endorphins. We need our dopamine fixed by going on social media. There's we we get something out of this. And by feeding into that, I'm able to hopefully inspire people to look at the moon as more than just something to take for granted in your sky. There's this actual object there, that's accessible, surprisingly accessible, and it looks very close when you look at it through binoculars or when you look at it, in my pictures.

It's, of course, you know, quarter of a 1000000 miles away. It's pretty far away, but it feels so close you could almost touch it. And I want people to feel like they can touch it because they can.

They can if things go well in the commercial space sector, if we figure out this whole this whole, you know, kind of political barrier that's preventing us from, you know, having this this recurring trips to the moon, it is entirely possible within your lifetime that you could just go to the moon for for a week or 2, as a as a just normal civilian. We we have we have the timeline ready. We're working on it. You it'll happen. Don't worry. Yeah. We we actually Project Moon Hut does.

So no. I I agree with you. I think that in this in the timeline, depending on how old you are, there is a chance that there is the opportunity for individuals to get to the moon and to really transform how we live on this planet through that exercise as you brought up the innovations and everything else to go with it. Yeah. So that's really, that gets the the point of this whole topic is, you know, how are these pictures going to be shaping the future of humanity?

And, you know, it's I'm not necessarily, like I said, going to inspire the the next big pioneer that that forges their way, into space. But, you know, if you look throughout history, these pioneers all had various sources of inspiration. It wasn't just they didn't just, you know, just pull this idea out of the ether to push the boundaries of human exploration. Like, Elon Musk, he's, you know, like, he was a big nerd growing up. You know, he he was inspired by astrophysicists.

And, you know, that's I'm not an astrophysicist, but he was inspired by people that were pushing the boundaries from, like, a mathematical stand and and learn about our universe through them. And but, you know, going back further, like Galileo, for example. Galileo was inspired by a a philosopher. He was inspired by Aristotle. So you I I doubt Aristotle knew he was going to inspire Galileo, which changed our view of them of our place in the universe. Aristotle was just doing what Aristotle did.

Very much. Making observations. In Columbus, I don't know what who who thinks he's a good person versus a bad person. I'm not here to make that argument. Columbus, definitely was an explorer, and, you know, he was inspired by other explorers. So he took he looked at what other people were doing and pushed the next step. I'm hoping to inspire other other people that are looking to push the boundaries in photography and looking just at my moon pictures and saying, how can I make this better?

How can I make this cooler? How can I get more people to look at this? And I feel like I've already been successful in that in that regard, which is why I tend to focus on that as my objective because that's a victory for me. I feel like that's a legacy that I'm going to have. By taking pictures of space, I'm guaranteeing other people will take pictures of space.

And those people taking pictures of space are going to inspire people that might have the resources and the drive to assist with your goals. Getting people on the moon, getting an economy, a sustainable economy that makes sense and just grows that Mearth ecosystem until it isn't a big deal if we just need to suddenly, you know, skip off Earth for a few weeks while a virus blows over.

Or in turn, there's an innovation that comes out of it that improves how we live on Earth because of the photography that you've taken. That's the practical answer. I'm more the dreamer, I think. But there was a very important reason that I brought up that point because I think it's honestly the most relevant. There's there's a little the little bit of dreamer is part of that thing that gets you up in the morning. The practicality is the outcome out of the efforts that are put forward.

And so, practicality. Your dreaming and getting up is to find that next photograph that changes so that it's out there, that you'll find it. So I think you've done a beautiful work, and as I as I shared with, in the introduction, this was a big departure from what we've had so far, and there was an there's an been a process that we've done for Project Moon Knot and and for the age of infinite. So the beginning, we brought on very technology oriented individuals, and we still do.

We have some great individuals coming on and and have had, but we're also expanding out into different realms of thinking. And that's the reason I reached out to you, and that's the reason I felt that you you fit our narrative, and I felt it. And that that landed us landed us to this day. Great. I'm, glad you feel like it it fits in. I it's funny that I I never really thought about these these things, until you forced me to. Mhmm. I it's like I understood why why I like taking pictures of space.

It's because I'm a dreamer. It's because I'm, you know, I I I like thinking about space. I like the idea of going to space. But, but really when it comes down to it, like, I wanna play a role in the space program. And I can like, I have have unique skills that I that fit into that role. So But the the journey the journey of us creating the title and forcing you to find your way and to then have to teach me, which is what our methodology is. You're teaching me something.

And forced you to reexamine so much of who you are, I think. And that happens every time we have these podcasts. So what do you think? Do you think that we've, that taking pictures of space is helping, you know, improve the human race? Good question. I would say that taking pictures of space will help to do a few things. Number 1, it will further the interest of those who are in space.

Number 2, it'll it's an information source to be able to share and discuss what's actually happening out there as compared to the way it's been presented in the past. I think you give it a colorful texture flavor that if someone want to share something, they would go to your imagery. And if they knew, I don't know, I've never read underneath yours. I read under some. If you explained more that this is actually what it is, that would be useful for someone who's articulating and sharing.

And the third one is, I do believe there are be going to be people who would might not have given the moon a second look. And by seeing it in through your eyes, to seeing it through your photography, it will change them. I think the only challenge that I have, and this is not a complaint, it is just the suggestion is, I didn't know how real they were.

So the challenge becomes am I seeing a real image like we've discussed earlier, or are we seeing one that's been enhanced just for the purposes of marketing? And so now today, I will look at your work in a much different light because now I know that you're not enhancing it. You're you're giving me a view that does exist in a in a tonal change, but you're not changing it is, I think I'm hoping you're getting what I'm saying.

I've you've done more today than all the images I've looked at since I've seen you because now I know. Right. Right. So, yes, I I do think and I do think that you, with what you've said, you are a definite person who we want involved in project Moon Hut, because project Moon Hut is about developing, achieving a box of the roof and a door on the moon, this first phase. We have 4 phases of development.

It is about expanding the moon ecosystem and creating this Mearth ecosystem so that there is constantly, travel between the earth and the moon and the selling of materials and content back and forth. And it also is about changing the and improving the world. And yet and I think that your imagery and I I would like to connect you with Andreas who's connecting creating our website because I think that he's a space space space space space space space guy. He is on the extreme. He's brilliant.

He would have fun with you because of his love for space and your love for space. So I I appreciate the work that you're doing, and I think that we together can create a new future. I don't know. That's a goal. So, this was fantastic, Andrew. It was absolutely fantastic. We went into places I really wanted to go, finding out a little bit about the art itself, and also where it came from, and how you got to where you are today. I think also was a great journey to have explored. So thank you.

Thank you very much. It was my pleasure. I want to thank all of you out there for taking the time to listen in today. And I do hope you learned from Andrew. I do hope you check out his Instagram, feed. I do hope that you learned something today that will also make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Again, we are sponsored by and we're in association with the Project Moon Hut Foundation.

We were named by NASA, Project Moon Hut, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, the moon knot, to the accelerate development of an earth and space space system. Then to use those endeavors, that paradigm shifting thinking, the innovations, and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Now, Andrew, what is the best single best way for people to connect with you? Definitely on Instagram. It's where I'm the most active.

Cosmic underscore background on there. Okay. But I'm on all the major social media channels. So they can reach out to you through any of those channels. It's the easiest way to connect, and you do reply. I I try to. Sometimes, sometimes my inbox gets a little crazy, but I do my best. If I don't reply, you just have to keep bugging me, and I will eventually. I will I had I had to fight my way through the same same clutter, and we ended up connecting, so I appreciate that.

So for all of these, again, you listening in, there's multiple ways to connect to me. It's [email protected]. There's the Twitter account at Project Moon Hut. You can also directly to me at goldsmith. There's we have a LinkedIn account. We have a Facebook account for project moon hut, and, we have an Instagram account. We haven't been putting things up there, but we do have an Instagram account. We also just put up at, at the URL www.projectmoonhot.org, or you can go to moonhot.org.

Both will get you there. We have just put up a temporary placeholder. We took down our old website. We're in the process of building a new one. Hopefully, in the next few weeks, it'll die be up. You can keep in touch with us and see what's going on as we move forward. There's a a short form to fill in. We're not gonna spam you. We're not gonna be any with all sorts of information. You could start to feel what Project Moon Hut is about. That said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite. Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes, which in turn have led to the renaming of periods. We call them ages. You've personally just experienced the information age and what a ride it's been. Now consider that you might now just be living through that into this new transitional age, the age of infinite.

The age in which is not defined by scarcity and abundance by a redefining lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources. The ingredients for an amazing sci fi story that has come to life as together we create a new definition of the future. The podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hot Foundation where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon.

The moon hot, we were named by NASA, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn those endeavors, the paradigm shifting thinking and the innovations back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Today, we're going to be exploring, which I thought was going to be our topic, but we've got a merger here, is capturing pictures of space as a means of improving the human species.

But then it's kind of got a different twist here a little bit, taking pictures of space to improve the human race. And before I get into this, this is the first time I'm going to share this with anybody. Creating a title can take up to 3 hours, and it is not an easy, ordeal. We don't just come up with a topic. Our guest today, Andrew McCarthy. Hi, Andrew. How are you? Good. We had a an awesome experience trying to come up with the title, and Andrew can share that it was it's challenging.

It's not an easy process. But, we found 1 and Andrew just gave me another one. So I figured I'd kind of toss it in there. So let me add to you why Andrew's on and I think that'll be valuable. On Instagram. Andrew has his, username is, cosmic background. He has today about 380,000 followers. And in my feed, I consistently see these absolutely amazing images of space and the moon. A few of the moon were just mind boggling. And I, he's in a freelance Astro Astro photographer.

And I decided at this point where I think this is going to be our 40th in our sequence, that we need to continue to expand the view of who's in the space industry and what they deliver and what they can help us to do moving forward. And I decided to reach out to Andrew, amazing guy, and we're going to be covering whichever topic. I'll use the first one, capturing pictures of space as a means of improving human species so that we can make a difference as we move forward, as humans on this planet.

So, Andrew, do you have an outline? I sure do. Okay. Can you give them give give me the points, please? Sure. So to start, I'm going to discuss the status quo. 1, the status quo. Okay. Number 2? Why should we care if people like space? Should we care if people like space. Next. Why space is the ultimate motivator. Is the ultimate motivator. Next. The modern information age versus the arts. Information age versus the arts. Next. And lastly, why the moon is key. Why the moon is key. So I love you.

Okay. Let's start with this first one. You started with, the status quo. What do you mean? Well, with any any change in human history is always a disruption of the status quo. So, you know, any the fundamental driving force behind life on this planet is, you know, our organism, humans, basically looking at the status quo and deciding to make a change. And that is even precedes humans, of course, when you look at, like, basic evolution, for example.

Basic organisms mutating to form appendages, and, you know, early early creature early humans actually becoming, like, bipedal, for example. You know, evolutionary changes, to figuring out how to use tools to solve problems, and learning basic survival skills, and things like migration. Those are all born out of, looking at a problem and coming up with a solution. Okay. Whether whether naturally through, through evolution, through mutations, or through intelligence.

And humans, we're, intelligent creatures, so we're accelerating that process today. And disrupting the status quo has become a means to reach capitalistic goals and, reach, new frontiers, physical frontiers and, more, metaphorical frontiers. So there's people that stand out, as disruptors. You know, like, I came from the tech start up space, and people are always coming up with new ideas to fill consumer gaps, and, you know, those people are disruptors. They identify a problem.

They come up with a way to change. Just just for my knowledge, what was your background, in the tech space? I worked in the in sales and business operations. So I, have convinced people that they had a problem in the current business model and tried to sell them some software to solve that problem. What what type of, applications? I sold marketing software for a while, and then I moved on to partner management software.

Mhmm. So, software for a while, and then I moved on to partner management software. Mhmm. So things that, just help people manage their business. Okay. Just wanted to know your background a little bit in that sense. That's great. Okay. So it's a means of capitalistic goals. People who stand, stand out from them and stand up to make these changes. Okay. Go ahead. So humans in general, being very, very, general here, we're very, very adaptable. So we're we're a super virus. Right?

Like, you can throw us in pretty much any environment, any situation, and we adapt to that environment. And I I think that can be a good thing and a bad thing. And the reason I think it's a bad thing is because I think fewer people seek to change their environment for the better. Where one type of person potentially adapt to that environment and they essentially just suffer through it, others are looking at ways to improve their their situation. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.

You just said you believe most people adapt for for worse? Is that what you were saying? Well, so so I'm saying we we are survivors. Right? Like, so you we can adapt to any environment. And when I when I say adapt, I don't necessarily mean, like, in a way where we're changing. Maybe it's a psychological adaptation to where we just we're con we become content with the status quo. Maybe it's living in poverty. Maybe it's living in a poor climate.

You know, there's, there's a certain type of person that is compelled to leave that situation. Yep. And there's a type of person that is content staying in that situation. And I'm not saying that's good or bad. You know, it's simply a, simply I'm just making an observation about human nature. And but your your contention was that most people, don't don't change it for the better and they actually make it worse?

Not necessarily make it worse, but they simply they simply don't work to improve their situation. Yeah. Okay. That's that's an observation that I'm making. And, by the way, I could be completely wrong. No. No. That that's okay. It's it's what's driving you to do your photography and do your work. It's an interesting take that you're believing that individuals who get into a bad position, and it's okay.

Again, I'm not I'm just trying to I'm listening to what you're saying, and you see the world as not enough individuals trying to make a change, or don't know how to make a change, maybe that could be added, that they don't know how to make a change or they're making a change to improve their conditions for the better. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. That's the observation that I've made simply about human nature. Yeah. And, you know, I'll make a a very rudimentary example of that.

You know, for example, early humans, you have, you you know, they're sitting in a cave. Winter comes around. One guy sits there and shivers through winter. One guy learns how to knit himself a sweater. One guy moves to warmer climate. Right? So there's 2 people that are disrupting the status quo. 1 guy is not.

1 is disrupting the status quo by staying where he is and figuring out how to stay warm by knitting status quo by staying where he is and figuring out how to stay warm by knitting himself some clothes. The other guy figures out how to stay close or, stay warm by simply relocating. He's he's marching across the desert now looking for a better climate, and, hopefully, he finds it. Might die too, but, for a better climate and, hopefully, he finds it. Might die too, but at least he's he's happening.

Something. Yep. So so we've got two examples of disruptors there. And, you know, in many ways, our modern civilization is based on those people. The guy sitting in the cave shivering, he didn't, he didn't really contribute anything to the development of society. And, then again, nothing against this guy because, you know, he's making he's making a situation work one way or another.

But the guy that's inventing clothing, you know, that's that's knowledge that is going to be passed around other humans. The guy that's the guy that's migrating, he's now going to spawn offspring in a better climate. So you could say that they're actively advancing, the human race just by just by making these simple changes to make their life better. They've disrupted the status quo. They no longer have to shiver in a cave every single winter.

So the reason I'm focusing on the status quo is because I have found that there's a status quo associated with modern perception of space. And, perception of space, in my experience, falls into 3 main categories. You have groups of people that are very, very positive about space. People, like, I I would say I fall into this category because To me, I put them into the enthusiastic the the enthusiast world. There there you go. There you go. I'm very enthusiastic about space.

I, it's a big part of my life. I'm actively working in the industry to an extent, and, like, everything that I do, space is in the back of my mind, because it's it's just simply falls in line with what I personally believe and what is interesting to me. Okay. You also have a group of people, that are neutral about space. And I'm I'm being generous with the word neutral because, you know, there's there's they're they're going to have moments of positivity about space.

But, where I've where I've found, in my interactions with people and my interactions with my audience is your average person, their their knowledge of space is really limited. You know, perhaps they learned about space in elementary school. You know, they they read about the Apollo programs, you know, unless they're old enough to have lived through them.

And their their perception of space is really molded off of maybe pictures they've seen from the Hubble Telescope, random news snippets about things that we've discovered on Mars. And they enjoy those things, but it's set at such a superficial level that it doesn't really change anything about their life. They go around their day just simply knowing that, oh, there's astronauts in space, but how does that help me?

And they're, they they might be aware that space is involved in some of their modern comforts like GPS, for example. I think most people understand that that's because of the space program. We have satellites that can track your position so you can, you know, find the nearest Starbucks when you're on a road trip. And there's, there's other comforts as well, you know, like maybe maybe Wi Fi.

A lot of people understand Starlink is, you're going to be providing Internet for people, and, they understand those things. But but how much does it really affect their daily life? They don't really think it does. So they don't really care. They care a little bit, but not enough to to really change anything. So let let me expand that a little bit. It's not that they don't think about it. They they you just have it. And I I'm using that from personal experience.

I have always been most of my life, I've not been an enthusiast. So I see moments of positivity. But when I go through my day, I then say, oh my I got my weather because of GPS. Oh, my glasses are scratch resistant. Oh, I'm in a plane and the the boots on the plane are because of GP, because of space. I don't think that way. So my day, if I really broke it down, even as engaged as I am in the space industry, I don't think about it more than I would say a little bit.

So I probably am more of this neutral person. It's just that I don't take this, I don't brush it off. I'm actually learning about it. You're you're I I would say you'd lean more into the positive category just simply because you, I think, understand the impact on your life a little more than the average person? Yes. I I would agree with you. The only difference is it's only been the past 5 years. Well, you, at least you're not in the other camp. There's a negative camp.

Okay. And I didn't even know that this existed. But there is a mainstream perception that is growing that money, that money that is spent on advancements in space are a complete waste and that they should be spent on humanitarian or to day life. Okay. Yeah. This is this is a huge group. This is a to day life. Oh, yeah. This is this is a huge group. This is an amazingly large group.

I honestly didn't realize it because I was so blinded by my own love of space that I didn't understand how people couldn't see it as being so important. So that was my own naivete. Oh oh my it's you this is this group is so large that in some cases, I believe it supersedes both the other groups together. That is depressing to hear. Well, I think about it in this light. How, I how much space education did you have your entire life growing up? Not much.

I think it was a little section in elementary school, maybe a little section in 7th grade. And then I think, all of my knowledge after that was really self motivated as an adult. So I I will tell you that I had just as little. So what would be the belief that would change my mind otherwise if I never saw, learned about it, or experienced it? I we have a little different age group categories between the 2 of us.

I remember I I don't remember, but I have my parents took the newspaper, and I think we still have it from one of the Apollo missions. So those these things happened, but during that same time, there were there was conflict for in the United States if we look at just my home. So it wasn't a big deal, and we had Charlie Bolden on from NASA as a former administrator, and he said while the whole space industry thinks everybody's watching Elon Musk, they're not.

So, yeah, this was a very large group. Well, I I really wanted to bring up that group, because I feel like it is very important to me, personally, that I change that perception on as many people as I can. And, you know, there's it's it's a challenging road because there's foundational beliefs, almost like a religion.

And I feel like when it comes to things that come that that come down to, like, environmentalism, humanitarianism, and anything political with a political slant to it, you'll it's it's almost like a religion, to where it's such a foundational belief that it becomes a part of your personality, and it becomes and, like, it may like, space is a part of my personality. If you told me going to space is a waste of time, I would just laugh at you.

I mean, there's there's nothing you can do to change my mind. And, like, I I'll I'll recognize that right now. Like, you could have the best argument in the world, and I just simply won't take it seriously because it's a foundational belief for me. I I believe it like that. And they have and they have the opposite. So yes. Exactly. Exactly. So so how do you how do you prevent that? How do you change that status quo?

And, you know, unfortunately, the answer for a lot of people is you really can't, because like I said, it's a foundational belief. Now I know where my passion for space comes from. When I was a little kid, I was, like, 7 or 8 years old, and my dad had this big old telescope, and he showed me, Jupiter and Saturn through that, just in our back yard in Folsom, California growing up. And, like, I seeing the rings of Saturn with my own eyes changed me forever.

I didn't I didn't realize at the time, but that set me down a very particular path. And it's it made me, I think, understand my place in the world, almost like that overview effect astronauts talk about, which I've obviously never experienced. But, but I imagine it's to a similar degree. The moment you recognize your place in the cosmos, it changes your perception of the potential of the human race. So let me let me do one thing just to help anybody who's listening in for the one moment.

The overview effect is the experience that is the outcome of being in space and seeing the world aside from being on it. So, you're either on the International Space Station looking down and you see the world in a view that you've never seen, or from the 24 astronauts who've seen the world from afar. And it was named by Frank White who we've done a program on. And that name that what the reference that was just given was that Andrew gave was based upon this thing called the overview effect.

So you can continue on. I just wanna make sure people understand what that meaning is. Great call. Great call. Yep. So I I think I experienced a mini version of that over effect overview effect when I saw, when I saw planets for the Did you remember that experience, or are you just remembering that you had the experience? Well, that's the funny thing about memories. Who knows? So so when you had that experience at that time, your father brought you up to the microscope.

He said, take a look here. He had positioned it to see the the rings of Saturn. And what went through your head? I think at first, I thought it was a picture. Okay. And I was like, okay. That's interesting. There's like a picture in the telescope. And my dad was just explaining to me. He's like, no. That's a whole other planet. It's like like Earth, but different. And he's like, oh, okay.

Then he's like, you know, the that has has rings around it because the rings are held in place by gravity and, you know, of course, I have no clue what he's talking about. I just knew that it was pretty. It was it was fascinating. I just I didn't wanna stop looking at it. And he revisited that a few times with me, over the course of the the next couple years. You know, every time he had his telescope out, he'd give me a look through it. And so I, you know, I saw Jupiter.

And this was around the time, the Shoemaker Levy impact happened. That was the comet that was broken up in Jupiter, as it passed Jupiter, and it struck Jupiter, left a series of stars all along the side. And you can actually see them with an amateur telescope. They just look like little little dark blemishes along the surface. So the the Shoemaker Levy is what they named it? Correct. Yeah. That was named after the 2 astronomers that discovered it. Oh, so Levy is the name.

Okay. So I'm thinking of Levy like a a dam breaking, levies for water and things. So this is a Shoemaker Levy are 2 people and they came up with this concept. They it's called the Shoemaker Levy because they saw, Jupiter being struck. Did they see it, or did they just see the impact of it? They just discovered the comet.

Okay. They discovered the comet, and then once they discovered the comet and I'm not too clear on who exactly made you know, calculated the orbit and figured out that it was actually going to hit Jupiter, but it was known fairly quickly after discovery that it would that it was on course to actually impact Jupiter. Wow. So they were they they were they did they actually see it happen? Yeah. Yeah. We we actually watched the impacts happen. Oh, really? Cool. And Hubble's got some great pictures.

You can just Google, you know, Hubble Shoemaker Levy, and you'll you'll see the impact scars on Jupiter, because the the comet broke up and struck the Jupiter's atmosphere and, you know, it didn't even hit a surface. It's just, you know, impacting the atmosphere at that speed. It's basically like hitting concrete. So it just, you know, exploded in. It left like Earth sized stars, like stars bigger than our planet on on the side of Jupiter. So Really?

Just this crazy celestial event that we're all able to witness, and we're incredibly lucky it happened at a time when we had the technology to actually watch it. So so I'm gonna stop you. Sorry. Mhmm. If it if it leaves Earth size impacts, I need a reference to how big Jupiter is to Earth. It's about 10 times as wide. So if Jupiter or if if Earth is about 8,000 miles wide, Jupiter is about 80,000 miles wide. Okay. That helps me. So so you can have these large craters on that size.

Okay. Yep. Not exactly craters per se. It's more like a discoloration in the atmosphere because, again, it's it's not a it's not a rocky surface on Jupiter. So it's just when the impacts hit, it basically just cooks everything because the energy just converts directly into heat and left these, like, dark brown scars that look like, you know, basically just burned to the surface of Jupiter. But it's really just the atmosphere discoloring because of the impact.

Okay. But but, yeah, those pictures on Hubble, they're really cool. But but, again, that was happening, and I think that helped me understand just the way space worked, because, you know, small developing brain. You know, like, it's really hard to wrap your head around the the cosmos. I mean, I mean, it's hard as an adult to understand the scales involved, so as, you know, as a kid, it's especially hard.

But, you know, seeing these things progress, played a really big role in, I think, developing, you know, my personal attitude about space. So but and here's the attitude about space. So but and here's the challenge, and here I think this is why the status quo is such a thing. To your point, most people don't really receive a lot of exposure to this stuff.

You know, if you if you have a little bit of exposure in in elementary school when your brain isn't quite developed enough to truly grasp the incredibleness of what what you're learning about, there's no real reason to get that excited about it. And especially so because there's so little discussion about humanity. They're just they're just happening out there, and we're just we're just observing. We're just sitting here on the planet watching them happen.

And and how does it how does well, it impacted you as a person. Mhmm. But how did these things impact humanity? So that's where that's where I think I I I I wanna it almost touches on my next point. You know, it's like why why should we care that that people like me exist? Why should we care that there's people that love space? Well, I I the the interesting thing as you're going through this is I, in 7th grade, I can't remember the teacher's name, but the teacher had a saltwater aquarium.

And I really loved it. I got along with this biology teacher and the science class. I, it was really amazing. And I decided that I was going to have a saltwater aquarium, which if you don't know about aquariums, freshwater is much easier than saltwater to be able to maintain. You have to keep a certain pH. You have to keep a certain cleanliness. You have to have certain types of fish in it or animals in it. So what I did is I didn't go to the space route.

I continued on with my interest in biology and I hadn't see aquarium for years years years. And my upbringing was sciences, but never touched on space ever. Right. Right. And and you know what? We need people with passion about those things. So it's it it and is and, like, my passion about space is in no way critical of other people's Oh, I I didn't mutual passion. I didn't take it that way.

I was just thinking about how much of an influence your father, that one experience had on you, and you probably had other experiences. Where I look back in my history, I had this experience that I gravitated towards and how impactful that those little minor moments, which your father might not remember at all, yet had all that influence in your future life? Yeah. It's it's it's crazy. The little things that that shape young brains. But, it sets you So so you said you wanted to go to number 2?

Yeah. So, and I I sorry. I I don't recall the exact wording of your question, but I think it ties in really nicely to, you know, what what I'm where I'm taking this, and that's why should we care that other people like space? You know? As we mentioned, there's a, there there's a a large group of people that are just negative about space, and they see it as a waste of money. And I don't want to debate that point, and here's why. So those people are also disruptors.

You know, I mentioned the the value in disruptors in a society. Those people are also disruptors. They're not disruptors that are helping, you know, me out and what I wanna see in the world, but they're helping in their own ways. And, so so I'm I'm I wanna be be sure I'm clear on that, that it's okay to have people that feel the way they do about Earth and be passionate about these humanitarian projects.

But I want them to like space because they need to see that we're actually on the same page and have the same goals. So I think I think if you were to if we were to go back and I knew what you were gonna go to today, I in this in this one comment you made, I would not do it positive, negative, and neutral. I would do it something such as enthusiast something and another thing so that they don't have a negative connotation.

Because what you're really saying is there are 3 different types of people in the world, and they're all necessary, and they fill a certain need. Ever everybody's necessary. Absolutely. But Okay. Within the within the, the the the the specific the specific topic of of space exploration and space technologies, I think there's people that are working backwards, and that's why I I refer to them as negative. It's not that the people, you know, in general are a waste. They're wonderful people.

They have valid perspectives. They have valid agendas. They just simply, in my opinion, go they they're they're not seeing space for what it is. Yeah. And that's that's where that's what That's what you're working on. That's what I'm working on. What I'm working on. Yep. Exactly. Okay. So so, yeah, I just maybe there's a better word for them. But, I I don't I don't mean to call them out as being negative. But No. And I I know that. That's what I'm saying.

If if we if we were to go back in time and be able to adjust those few comments, I would have probably thought of different words because we're not saying that individuals who are not interested in space are negative.

We're saying that they have a different perspective of how the world should run, what to do, which we should go, and what should be engaged in while there are people who are very enthusiastic and believe spaces, an instrument or a change vehicle or something exciting to explore and develop. And every and people have different interests. Exactly. Exactly. They do. And they make very valid observations.

You know, like, I I don't want to necessarily debate some of the points that they'll make about wasteful spending in the history of the space program because, honestly, they're probably right. There's probably has been wasteful spending in the history of the space program. But but we you know, you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's you know, we'd we we screw up sometimes, but overall, we're marching forward.

Mhmm. And it's something that's overlooked, by by individuals in that in that camp is the huge list of humanitarian, environmental, technological advancements that were born from these programs that push the boundaries in space, like solar technology, for example. You know, if we're talking about, you know, environmental concerns on earth, solar technology is, you know, is absolutely huge for, you know, green renewable energy. You know?

And and that's just one one small example, but solar technology wouldn't be where it is today if it weren't for the space program. And then things like water and air filtration. You know, think about, you know, how important important water filtration is, for, you know, people that don't necessarily have access to clean water. Things like LEDs that change the way we use energy.

LED bulbs are in every home now, and they used to use, you know, these horribly inefficient bulbs that were literally just cooking inside their, their their their glass bulbs radiating heat, which is, you know, just a just a waste of energy. You don't use light bulbs to heat your home, but they are heating your home, and that's just wasted energy. So so things like LED technology are huge.

Insulation insulation in your home has been molded by the space program because insulation is so important in space. So so the list goes on. And understanding these impacts is hard before we have them. So before we developed these technologies, we didn't know what we what was going to what kind of challenges we were humanitarian or environmental impact these these endeavors would have. We couldn't have known. So Yeah. Pushing the boundaries is important, but we don't always know why.

We just know that it is important. So you're what you're, what you're trying to articulate is that there are a lot of spin offs, and I from the ideation and development of the space ecosystem that have benefited individuals. And if they if an individual could connect and understand it, they would be less likely to fit in the camp of antispace activity. Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. These in my opinion, these are the types of things that that be taught, and and actually actually claimed.

You know? That these technologies are born out of the space industry, and this is how they've helped because people see these impacts in their day to day lives. You know? You can you'll see a reduced heating bill and energy bill, and we know how wrong it is to waste energy. So so people that have solar on their house, like, that's people have solar on their house because of the space program.

The technology was would have it like, it would've been very hard to have developed that kind of technology without that incentive. Not saying it wouldn't have developed, but we we really don't have a way of knowing. I I I agree. And the it it's I agree that they should be taught. I don't know how you see it should be done yet. Even with us knowing that people like me, because I'm not in the enthusiast camp, I'm working in it is that I I open up my phone and I see the weather.

I know it comes from satellite, but I don't sit there and say, oh, wow, satellites. I don't. And I know when my UPS package is delivered, I know they use GPS to figure out turns and efficiency. But yet when I get the package, I just want the package. Yeah. That's that's honestly how I feel about a lot of that stuff too.

So, you know, I'm an enthusiast enthusiast more because the long term benefits of pushing the boundaries on the space, which, which is actually the second part of my point about why should we care if people like space. Right? So right now we have, I think, 7 people in the International Space Station, and we've had a continued presence in space for the last 21 years. So right now let's say that Shoemaker Levy comet hit earth instead of Jupiter. What would happen to the human race?

I just said it left Earth sized marks on Jupiter, so I don't think we have to use our imaginations very much to to say it would be catastrophic. And, those thankfully, those events are extremely rare. They like, some an impact of that size happens on the order of, like, maybe every 1000000 years. So very, very, very rare. But who would survive? Maybe cockroaches and the seven astronauts that we have in the ISS. Seven people.

And they wouldn't live long because they need a resupply mission to stay up there. So And there might be collateral damage from the fact that the Earth has been shattered. Well, if well, so in theory, as long as it keeps the mass and the mass doesn't get too misshape Right. Otherwise, they're just flown in. They're flown into they're they're shot into anywhere. They're they're gonna keep on going. There's gotta be I don't even know.

Would there be I've gotta believe there'll be a shock wave that would hit them going outward. Well, so so if there's enough ejecta from the impact, it would, it would throw the debris into orbit and then they would probably collide with the debris. Shock waves need a medium to propagate through, so they actually don't move through space.

But even because it's low Earth at, low Earth orbit, would there be wouldn't there still be enough of a reverberating impact outside because they're so close to the Earth? Well, I am not an astrophysicist, so I'm afraid I don't You're an astrophotographer. Oh, come on. So I I would think and I'm taking a wild guess because you're still in you're in low Earth orbit, but you're right next to that sphere.

That probably would be like a a bomb going off, but somebody who's listening to this can tell us later that what how how far off I was. So, yes, if we hit, there would be 7 and then 0. Exactly. And let's say they were in, geostationary orbit instead or maybe they had a base on the moon instead. They'd live a lot longer.

If they had a, you know, some kind of, you know, self, self sustained ecosystem on the moon, you know, maybe they they were able to, you know, farm on the soil or something, they could potentially live indefinitely. And if you have a population of a 1000000 people off planet, you've essentially, guaranteed the human race endures.

A lot of people didn't endure, but the human race and the our, you know, past achievements and the the great things we've accomplished technologically can live on, you know, through that new settlement. So it's a personal question. Yep. Do you actually I mean, honestly, honestly, honestly care that the human species goes on? Well, if I was one of those people, you're in that lunar settlement, I would definitely care. You would definitely okay.

So, I I love the argument that people will say, but the human species goes on. I'm thinking, so you really don't care if there's 10,000,000,000 people who die on this planet in 20, 40 years. You just wanna make sure the human species goes on. That's all that's important to you. And I I personally I'm personally about myself and my children and the people I know enduring. I I don't I'm not gonna profess to say that I sit around and think about the human species must endure.

Well, no. Of course not. Because No. No. Some people care. If if you're dead, why would you care? So, but that's an often an argument that's tossed out. The human species, we have to continue the survival of the human species. Yeah, but my kids aren't going to be on it and their children probably won't be. So, if there's only 500 to a 1000 people or a 1000000 people, even with those numbers, odds are I'm not gonna be part of that group. Well, that's just, of course, one example.

But if you look at let's say there's constant travel between earth and moon enough to where you could evacuate a planet. Okay. Like, I'm I'm obviously getting far out there in the space. No. No. No. No. That's I theoretically possible. Like, that's the angle here.

That that's an interesting angle, which I've never heard anybody say because we have and I think you had seen it in the video, the Mearth, moon, and earth economic and eco ecosystem is, and by the way, anybody listening in, there are 2 videos that I send people who are going to be a part of the podcast. So there's something called Mearth. It is moon and earth, and that was something that I came up with Burton Lee out of Stanford.

So what you're saying, which is an interesting construct, I like it, is that if there's an Mearth based ecosystem and there is the chance of an issue with a foreign flying object, which is very rare, but if there is one that we could accelerate the movement into space into the moon. And if we get there fast enough with enough rockets and enough capabilities, we have the ability to have more individuals survive. Exactly. Okay. I I'd not I'd not thought about that way.

That's you're the first person who's ever said it in that way, which even gives more credence to the fact that we should have our Mearth ecosystem. So okay. That's in in my opinion, having that type of ecosystem is necessary for people to, endure, to people to endure, you know, whatever life throws at them. You know, we we're we're on the the the back end of a pandemic here, which could have been a lot worse. Oh, they they've been a lot worse.

Yeah. And they've been a lot worse, exactly, in the in the past. You know? Right? You know, thankfully, we have, you know, things like hygiene and, you know, there's there's ways we've we've prevented them. We have we have hygiene. We just haven't figured out the human side of wearing a mask or the political side of it doesn't help or it's a hoax. We haven't figured those things out, but we do have hygiene. Yeah. We people know to to to wash their hands or at least most people do.

And So so the, it's interesting. You you've taken it okay. Go ahead. Continue with the pandemic. So, yeah. But again, if there's a pandemic, everybody on the moon would just be like, oh, well, it doesn't affect us. So, so there's benefits to sectioning, people. You know, imagine if there was no boat or air travel during the pandemic, it would have stayed and it ground it, at patient 0, like the country of patient 0.

It would it wouldn't have traveled to America or, you know, unless, of course, it actually started here. And I did and forgive me. I'd like every time I read the news, I feel like it looks like it started somewhere else. So I don't I don't really know. We we and we don't know how far back, and we probably will never know. The the the thing picture that comes to mind in my head when you're saying this is I would wanna make sure that my children were on that ship.

It wouldn't it would be okay if I couldn't be one to make it. Yeah. Get get them tested. Get them on the get them on the ship. Right. Just get them on the ship and get them on their way.

And I would, in that sense, with the moon earth ecosystem, which Mearth, I believe, is going to be what we develop next, And that's, again, what we're working on is that this gives a a capability to put in space individuals in what's it it's called the Van Braun, Van Braun, system, which is the circuit the, like, a a Ferris wheel in space that people can live in, or is the what's the other one that, Bezos has been talking about?

The Orion, O'Neil. The O'Neil station is like a tube in space that people can float or the moon. Okay. I I like that. Example of that, not moving interstellar. Right. Interstellar. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. The I I just learned recently from one of our team members Andreas Bergwiler who's fantastic out of Germany. He's amazing wealth of information. He just said to me one day, it's not an O'Neil station. It's a Von Braun station. Okay. I don't know the difference.

And so there are 2 different types. 1 is like a Ferris wheel and the other one is like a tube in space, and they're very different. Yeah. The the 2001 Space Odyssey, I think, is the example of the von Braun stuff. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. I I don't know if he was picturing something bigger, though. That one was pretty small. No. The I just I know that individuals have been professing that they're going to do this in short periods of time. And it these are huge massive structures.

You you don't even have a place to stand and you're going to put 400 people in space or 600 people in space. It's not as much of an impact of this moon, which is, can house and survive many millions of people. So there's more opportunity in that at the present time. I never I I hadn't brought it into the ecosystem survival. That's interesting. You you kinda did a shift off for me. Thank you. Yeah. Well, that's that's what I'm here for.

Okay. Well so, you know, and obviously, the example we made was was just talking about the moon and, you know, you're discussing, you know, if we had stations in orbit. You know, and then but, of course, this this these problems that I discussed facing the human race become even more insignificant if the human race was actually on multiple planets, multiple multiple moons, there's other places we can live besides the moon. You know, obviously, Earth is ideal.

Earth is the favorite, but we could we could, in theory, go everywhere. And, you know, obviously, we've, you know, discussed, you know, why I think people should care in a sense where it potentially gives your lineage a chance to endure and survive, get off world, whatever. But why do we really need people to to care so much still? Yeah. And, and the the reason is right now, I think the obstacles are more political than anything else. And, Space Ventures are government funded for the most part.

There's obviously, there's a commercial sector now that's growing, and, thankfully, it's really pushing the industry right now. Yeah. Well, yet yet without the government, without satellites from government and contracts from government, there would be a whole different story. Oh, absolutely. And and what NASA's mission was was to fill in the gaps on what the commercial sector couldn't do because there was no financial incentive for it.

Now there's financial incentive for certain things, so it's kinda growing on its own. And, you know, of course, NASA is still still going to be pushing that envelope, so they're still very important to this whole thing. But, you know, NASA is you know, it's getting it's getting funding from the government, and politicians are involved. Politicians are public servants that need to do what people want them to do. So if funding for space isn't popular, it's not gonna happen.

And if you have a growing camp of people that say, no. NASA is a waste of money. We need to take that money and put it towards, you know, whatever whatever, you know, humanitarian, you know, causes to focus that year. We'll simply stop pushing those boundaries outside of the commercial sector. And, you know, there's a a chance our space program is just dead. It just it just it just stops right there, and we never go anywhere.

And yet if we if we look at a full world, the Chinese are gonna continue to develop. They run it as a government agency and develop it. The Japanese space agency tying in with, Europe and the US, but the European Space Agency I read the other day is they're feel with something, and don't quote me, 70 to 80% of all launches came out of SpaceX as a percentage of what go went into space that they're now going to try to amp up their position in the space industry.

So there's also a competitive nature of who's going to take on this lead and who's going to take advantage of the opportunities that come out of space. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And, of course, one of SpaceX's biggest customers is still NASA. Yes. So NASA is still driving that even just by being a customer. Mhmm. And I I don't know exactly how it works out. Like, because I know there's they they do a lot of, a lot of launches for private companies too.

They they put up commercial satellites and things. So it's I know it's not just NASA. A lot of it's, a lot of it's private money too. Yeah. You've got Rocket Labs. You've got the there's there are a variety of different types of launches going on at the present time. Yes. So so, you know, look at look at, where we were in the sixties when we got 5% of the federal budget going to NASA because the everybody was really on board. I'm okay. That's not true. Not everybody was on board.

But it was a the public perception was, let's get to the moon. And it was like a very like and it was like this amazingly just, like, patriotic thing. You know? Like, we're gonna go to the moon. We're gonna beat the Soviets, and and and people were on board. And once people lost interest in that, it was no longer a popular political decision, put 5% on of the budget towards, you know, getting people on the moon.

And there's a lot of good arguments for, you know, you know, maybe we didn't need to keep going to the moon. You know, it's it was dangerous. It was expensive. Were you really learning more about the moon? Was there really any reason to keep people up there? So so it's I I I'm not necessarily here to debate that point. I'm just showing, look at what we accomplished when we got a lot of people interested.

A lot of people were interested in that, and it was a it was a popular thing to to get people on the moon. So we did it. We did it, what, like, less than 10 years. We went from, you know, barely, barely figuring out how to get a rocket into orbit to landing American boots on the moon. And that's just crazy. And the fact that we've driven the cost of launches down so much, and we're we there we've really polished the technology.

You could say that rocket rocket technology has been matures probably since the sixties. Saturn 5 was, you know, was pretty pretty bug free considering what it was, and we've not been able to continue to do this. It's there's there hasn't been an incentive. So we need that incentive. We need people to support it. And So which which incentive ranks highest than yours? It is is it the saving the human species forever? Is it what's your your personal reason that this is done? For for mine?

Yeah. My my personal reason, is I wanna I wanna stand on the moon and take pictures of Earth. Oh, cool. That is my personal reason. Reason. That's why I wanted. Everybody has their own their own reasons, though. There's this I I think there's this romanticism to the moon, that's, you know, we we look up there. It's this beautiful thing, and people like the idea of going there. Honestly, it. It's interesting because I'm an earther. It's a if coming from what is it? The which series Expanse?

They have the Belters. Mhmm. In the movie in the television series, The Expanse, they have a group called the Belters. They live within the the the what do you what belt do you call that? I can't remember off the top of my head. But the the it's the belt, outside of Mars. And so I'm an Earther, and what you just described is you'd like to go to space. You think there's many many values in space, but you would like to be on Earth. Well, I think Earth is just simply the best possible place.

Okay. I I just I'm not judging. I'm just saying I now know you're an Earther. Well, you know, who knows? You know, maybe they, you know, they so so it's I I can actually look at the moon kinda like Las Vegas. You know, think about what I I don't I don't know if you you you know anything about Vegas history, but that guy, Bugsy. Right? He just had this dream. He's like, let's just build this hotel in the middle of nowhere. And he did it, and it turned into frigging Las Vegas.

And who would have thought? Yeah. The middle of the desert, there was nothing out there. And he puts a casino out there. So now suddenly there's this economy in in Vegas and in the middle of the desert that's huge, and people love it. People go there and they stay. Yeah. And that could be the move. Good good analogy. Excellent analogy.

Yes. There will be people I wouldn't mind I would like to visit if I knew it was safe and I could do, and I could travel the 3, 4 days, get to the moon, stay, look around, do my thing, maybe invest if there's a possibility, and then I'll be on my trip back home. So so the one of the next reasons that people we need to care that people are passionate about space because it's going to increase the size of the pool that people like Bugsie are born out of. People with vision, people like Elon Musk.

Alright? If you have a 1000000 people and one of them is, you know, potentially the next Jeff Bezos, for example. You know, he's he's doing, Blue Origin. Right? So he's also working in the working in the space industry. If you have a pool of a 1000000000 people instead, all jazzed about space, you'll have a 1000 leaders like that born up. So we need this pool of people passionate about space to grow if we want people like that to be taking risks to getting us up there.

So you might have this visionary that's like, I figured out a way to put a casino on the moon, and I'm gonna do it. It's gonna be an absolute lunatic. No. No. In in project Moon Hut, we call you call it a 1000000000 hearts and minds. Okay. So, yeah, you're you're exactly right. And the number is a 1000000000, so it's very good. Alright. Cool. I nailed it.

So, my point is we need to increase that that pool size of people passionate about space because, otherwise, you're not going to have enough people taking these risks. You're you're we're limited with just Elon Musk, who's really only focused on the transportation. That's that's his thing. That's his game. He's focused on building the vessel that gets us back and forth. Once that's built, it's gonna make things easier, but still, why would somebody take a risk to do anything?

And that's why we need these visionaries. We need people that are going to like, it's not me. I know it's not me. But there's going to be people that that see these problems and look to solve them, and there are people like Bugsy that build a hotel in the desert. And they'll build an economic of course. I think Apollo was an exception. That was a society, all making this of course. I think Apollo was an exception.

That was a society all making a decision to go, we're gonna get on the moon because it required public support. Space, I think, is different. I think you're going to get capitalists' interest in space, and it's gonna be individuals that actually end up pushing those boundaries. People that say, you know what? I'm just gonna risk it all through caution of the wind and see what happens if I, if I create a financial incentive for people to go to the moon because it could pay off huge.

Imagine the value of the first mining operation on the moon. Right? So there's a huge cost to transport materials up to the moon. So anything in space is instantly worth more than its value on earth. Right? So if you set up a a mining operation on the moon, you're you're going to be worth a fortune to people that wanna build settlements near your mining operation because they don't need to bring your raw materials. You have them. Right?

So so there's people that are going to see that and take advantage of it. In my opinion, that's the next step in space exploration, and it's I think it's soon. I think it's going to happen within my lifetime. And how old are you? I'm 37. Okay. So within the next within the next couple decades, I bet we will see that. Yes. Yes. You will. Gotta stay focused. You gotta stay focused. Yes. You will. You will. I love the optimism. Alright. Otherwise otherwise, what am I doing every day?

So that's kind of a if if if I didn't think that way, we'd be I'd be in trouble. I'd have to I should do something else. Okay. I I I love what you're saying and you actually articulated it very well differently than I have said in certain places, which I like. Okay. That that kinda brings me to my point, and I kind of I think I got into it a little early. But space is really the ultimate motivator.

So you you have like, if if you're a capitalist and you're looking at the value of raw materials, you're you're instantly able to expand your wealth by getting those materials in the space, however however you do it. There's, so so there's this meme that that floats around every so often. I think I've seen it on Facebook that says something like this asteroid is worth 10,000 quadrillion dollars or something like that, because it's, like, filled with rare metals. Have you seen that?

And what do you know what the name of the asteroid is? Oh, I don't know. But I don't think it matters either because No. It I I it does because it's very important to me. Its name is its name is Davida. I didn't know that. There is an asteroid. It's, like, worth, 19 quadrillion dollars or something like that. And I was looking at what they say. What's the name of this thing? And it says it was named Davida. Oh, that's great.

So that so so it might not be important to you, but it's important to me. Well, I'm glad it's important to you. But, but I hate to break it to you, but those economics actually don't make sense. Because if you were to transport that asteroid, davida, to Earth, it would no longer be worth, 19 quadrillion dollars because those rare metals that are on it are no longer rare now that we have them in abundance on Earth. So that's Yeah. That's just basic economics for you.

Can't just flood the market with something. And however, it definitely has value in space. In fact, I would argue that it has more value in space because the energy required to get something off of Earth is huge. You know, I I don't know the actual math. So, again, I'm not an astrophysicist. Not a do I. But it's, like, 1,000 of dollars per pound or something like that.

And I know SpaceX is they're taking really great strides and figuring out efficiencies to get that price down, but it's not gonna get really much cheaper, because it just can't. You need chemicals to propel these things. Chemical rocketry is fundamentally inefficient because you just simply you have to reject so much mass to get something to move into space. It's, you know, thank you, Newton. Yep. Basic laws of physics there.

So because the gravity wall of earth is so steep, it makes sense to harvest these materials elsewhere, get them onto rockets, and then you could, in theory, bootstrap civilization across the entire solar system, because you're now able to harvest things off planet and build the raw materials necessary to to do construction, to build rocket fuel, to do, even water, which is obviously necessary for survival. All these things become available off planet and thus are worth their weight in gold.

And go ahead. Yeah. No. That that's an interesting point that it's not worth it bringing it back. I looked the numbers up. This might be useful for your thinking. When the Space Shuttle was in operation, it could be launched a payload of 27,500 kilograms for 1,500,000,000 or $54,500 per kilogram. For a SpaceX Falcon 9, the rocket used to access the International Space Station, the cost is now down to $2,720 per kilogram. That was in 2019. Right.

And the his the starship that he's working on should get it down even lower. I think it was down something like $500 a Yeah. It's it's gotten down. I I was looking at I tried I was doing this as quickly as possible, but it's it's really dropped significantly to and I I could, again, I don't know the number, but it's dropped significantly. So yes. But that's still expensive. You know? I I mean, imagine building a skyscraper on the moon with materials from Earth.

It's just it'd be just silly expensive. However, if you can repurpose lunar regolith, you know, if you have a monopoly on a nice iron mine on the moon, you're gonna make a killing, you know, selling those materials. And the people that are building the skyscrapers are going to wanna use you because it's gonna be expensive to set up their own mining operation or transport the materials themselves. So so there's a there's a really cool economic opportunity there.

And, you know, like I'm saying, I think it's just a matter of time before this this powder keg up there kinda get dead slit, and we're going to see an explosion, in the in the moon economy just because that that potential is there. Once once the cost per launch gets low enough to where your average, maybe upper middle class person can get on a trip to space, I guarantee you everybody's gonna try to do it.

I mean, even people that aren't jazzed about space, they're like, oh, where were you last weekend? Oh, I was in space. Like, how cool is that? I mean, it's a bucket list. It just wasn't accessible before, but it's becoming accessible to have civilians travel to space and travel to the moon. It it will become financially accessible for, I would say, anybody that owns a house, for example. They could probably also pull this off, you know, take out a second mortgage or something.

It wouldn't be a smart financial decision, but they're not gonna do it. Yeah. And because of because of that, you're going to have potential consumers up there. Yeah. There's gonna be people saying, you know, I heard this podcast from Andrew, and I needed a second mortgage on my home. And it's not a bad it's not a good decision, but I'm doing it anyway. So you'll be getting calls one day. Yep. Exactly. We we have this so we have this motivator. Right?

This this motivator where you're going to have consumers interested in it. You're going to have, resources available for people to capitalize on those resources and grow. So so we definitely have, like, kinda everything lined up. So what's missing, I think, with what's holding us back is, again, going back to do enough people really care about this? Do they feel passionate about it?

Do we have enough people willing to take these risks to, you know, set something up that's going to drive that incentive, to set up the first mining operation. And that's, of course, where, where, hopefully, people like me come in and people like me taking advantage of the informational age that we're all in to get these people interested in the potential out there. And that's kinda where I get into my next point, about the information age and how the arts can play a role in this whole thing.

So, as I mentioned, you know, as a kid, I, you know, obviously had really fond memories of space. And, you know, it wasn't until I was an adult really that I thought about it, and I was like, alright. You know what? I'm gonna buy a telescope. I wanna revisit that experience I had. And I I did. I bought a telescope. I spent, like, I think, like, 4 or 500 dollars on just just basically a Dobsonian, very simple telescope. And What what did you call it? A Dobsonian.

It's a very simple type of telescope. It's essentially just 2 meters and an eyepiece. Okay. But but they're big, and they they allow for very easy, like, backyard viewing. So I bought this thing, and I didn't know anything about what I was doing. I didn't know anything really about space other than that I liked it. And Mhmm. I I bought this telescope. I assembled it and took it into my backyard. I pointed it at the first bright thing I saw in the sky, which happened to be Jupiter.

And I look in the eyepiece, and immediately, I'm getting that that that feeling again, that overview feeling, that, it's like suddenly I'm just I'm just there. I'm understanding my place in the cosmos. And I see Jupiter, this gas giant, just floating out there in the vastness of space, and it's never been more apparent to me my place in the universe.

I am on a rock flying through space, and there's these other rocks flying through space, and we can we can sit there, we can look at them, and we can travel to them. It seemed like it was right there in my grasp. I could see 4 little moons next to Jupiter. I was thinking myself as I was looking through there, how cool would Jupiter look from one of those moons? Alright. So I'm getting all these feelings. Right?

So I did what any millennial would do, and I took the iPhone that was in my pocket and tried to take a picture through the icons. And that didn't work out too well because it's just like, I don't wanna I'm not gonna get into the mechanics of astrophotography here, but it's just a lot harder than just taking a picture through the eyepiece. So my mission there was how do I get more people to feel what I'm feeling when I look through the eyepiece?

And I immediately started researching astrophotography because I was like, I just I just have to do this. I don't know. It was just an add I was bit by the bug, I guess, and slowly worked my way into learning the ropes of this this very niche hobby and started sharing my pictures with the world. Now what I didn't expect was just some guy in his backyard, me, was able to take a picture that gets in front of millions and millions of people because that's what happened.

I took a picture of the moon, did my best to recreate how the moon looked through through the eyepiece, by researching all the photography techniques, etcetera. I spent, like, a week on this picture, and it went viral and got just millions of eyes on my work. And I think more importantly, it inspired other people to try to take pictures themselves.

So the information age has made it possible for people like me with an idea to spread it through other spread it through virality to plant, like, almost like little little franchises of other photographers that are doing the same thing and getting it out to more people. I have counted since I started doing this in the last year, I think maybe a couple dozen people that are just like me that started doing this because I was doing.

Cool. So my goal here isn't necessarily to inspire the next leader. Right? Like, I'm not gonna I don't necessarily think I'm going to, like, inspire the next Elon Musk because he sees my picture. However, it's very likely that I inspire somebody who gets into the photography, who does inspire the next leader to that that wants to put a set up a mining operation on them. And that's possible just due to the nature of social media.

So if if I'm able to do this, I could potentially play a role in shaping the economy on the moon because there's, you know, kids looking at my pictures that are that are getting the the space bug like I did. And who knows what they're going to go on to do? Not everybody has a dad with a telescope to show them Saturn or Jupiter, But pretty much everybody has social media now or they have parents that have social media that can introduce them to these pictures.

And, you know, I ideally, that's going to that's going to spondle that curiosity that we're talking about. That's going to get people that would have been in that negative camp who don't see space as necessarily a means to to their end, whatever whatever it has to be, humanitarian causes, environmental causes, but could see space as the solution for truly everything, because it's, to an extent, how I feel.

I feel that by pushing these boundaries, we solve a number of problems here on earth, potentially all the problems on earth. And, it's like, I know I I probably come across a little bit like a, like a cultist, maybe a space cultist. No. No. Even at that much. I'm I'm I'm I'm looking at I I pulled up your imagery just for the sake of helping me to talk, myself, to you about this. Is that your imagery is beautiful. You have some amazing photographs.

And yet at times, I ask myself how much was the coloration? How much did you change it? How much did you do? These things don't might not exist this way. How much are you do you alter as compared to how much do you deliver exactly what you see? So with the moon, particularly, I try to recreate what my eyes see with a couple exceptions. For example, with the moon, I always try to draw out the color in there. So the moon is actually really, really colorful, but our eyes are very, very weak.

We can't discern the subtle variations in color on the moon. It just looks gray to us. But there are there is color variations on the moon. So I I use some some technology obviously to, like, extract that. So you have you have one that I'm looking at. It's fairly recent on your Instagram accounts, where the moon looks like it's got blues and browns and golds and a variety of colors. It's fairly new on this list, so at the top. Is that what is that? So those are the real colors on the moon.

So there is there are sections that are golden and some that are bluish and some that are brownish and some that are yellowish. Those exist on the moon as they are. So so here's here's the thing, thing, and I think it comes down to asking yourself, what is real? Is your eyes the barometer of truth, or is it some something else? So exist what's existing in my data is things that my eyes are not sensitive enough to discern. So I have to manipulate the picture to make it visible to your eyes.

I have to. It's, it's So so what it balancing. I manipulate. I stretch the image, saturation. It's it's software. Okay. Yeah. So you're you're changing the software you're you're altering the software to enhance different, color combinations that exist. But if you were on the moon, you wouldn't see exactly that. Not exactly. You but if you had a if you had a a certain lens on, an infrared or a I'm using names that come to my mind. But if you had a certain lens on, you would see it more readily.

So so let me let me put it this way. The moon is gray Yeah. To our eyes. It is gray. Like, you look at it, you look at it through a telescope, it's gray. I swear sometimes I see hints of the color. Well, if I really focus and I use some some observing techniques like averted vision, but the the moon is the moon is gray. However, in my data, when I'm picking these pictures, there are variations.

Variations, in in data, if you're looking at RGB channels, in order for something to be gray, the numbers for each of those channels have to be identified. Yeah. Yeah. But they're not. They're always a little bit different. Mhmm. So what that's telling me is, obviously, the moon does have color, but also, these colors, what they represent is actually really important to some of the last points I was making and that there's mineral content on the moon.

And that's what those colors actually represent, and that's what I'm showing by exaggerating those subtle differences between the numbers of my data. I exaggerate them, create and it what it's what it's showing is the the mineral composition. So Now Go ahead. Continue. Sorry.

Now, something that that's really important to point out actually is one of the reasons the moon is gray is because it's been beaten so much, by by the asteroid striking it in the late Hedica bombardment, and unlike the Earth, it hasn't had erosion to erase the evidence of those things. So it has a really nice layer of film over the entire thing, and that film is gray. However, if you dig just a little bit, the soil changes color, and that's what the Apollo 15 astronauts discovered.

He was just kicking around the sand with his boot, and he saw that it was orange under his boot. And if you look in my photo near where the Apollo 15 craft landed, I'm not sure if you're familiar with who that is on the moon, it's, Montez Apanines, and there's Hadley Rille. It's a little little can in there. It is very orange in my picture. So what the astronaut was seeing is actually visible from Earth, and it's iron deposits in that spot. There's iron in areas where it's orange on the moon.

There's titanium in places where it's more blue on the moon. So you can you can see from these photos that the moon actually is while it looks boring and gray to your eyes maybe, it's this very dynamic place that has a rich geological history. And I never would have thought I I know about the moon being bombarded, and I know about the regolith. I know that there are challenges we don't even know if we can dig, on the moon as of now. There are a lot of challenges. Yet I never I don't know why.

I'd never thought of that being just a like a dust over the top of the moon that is not allowing some of the true colors to come through. So if so if you can you or would you have you or have you thought of taking a picture as of the one I think you know what I'm talking about. It's got a large blue speck on it on the left hand side, and anybody can look who's listening on. You can look up his images on Instagram.

Is there's one with the blue kinda looks like a little bit of an American look, I hate to say it, or a horse. Could you identify what that color would represent as a mineral? Do we know those things? The USGS has a very detailed map of the composition of the moon. So, yeah, if if you take my picture and you compare it to the USGS map of the mineral map of the moon, it will you should be able to figure it out.

So, I just color alone is a strong indicator of the composition, but it's not the only indicator of the composition. For example, there's, within the color variations, there's there's differences. Like, maybe a blue has more green to it. Maybe a maybe a a red area has more magenta to it. So, like, at the top of my head, I couldn't tell you what that meant. Yeah. The the only reason I I'm thinking about it is we're redesigning our website right now.

And one of the things we're trying to articulate is the value of the moon or the value of the innovations or or of these pieces. And this type of image with a rollover, a mouse rollover, where you could say this is anticipated or thought to believe or could be the possibility of these resources would be an interesting image because it's so beautiful. So that's that's where I was going and talking out loud, thinking out loud, with you.

I just think you've done a phenomenal job of giving the moon a different feel. And so that's where my mind went is the what does that mean? So even when you do so let's go to the others, and we can come back to the topic or the outline is you have galaxies or distant photographs of the other images, not just the moon. Are those colors just another type of filtration, or do you enhance any just for the purposes of giving it color so people can see it?

So space is very colorful, and there's this misconception somehow that space is not colorful. And I don't know exactly where it comes from, but there's an important distinction. Like I mentioned earlier, what is the barometer of truth? Is it your eyes? Because if you look at a telescope at a galaxy, it kinda looks like a fuzzy gray blob. Does that mean it's actually a fuzzy gray blob? Because when I take a picture of it with my camera, it looks colorful. There's blues. There's reds.

There's, you know, there's a a warm core and a cool outer arms. So so your eyes aren't necessarily the right way to judge what space looks like, in my opinion. And the best way I can say it is if you're in a dark room and you're wearing a pink shirt, your eyes won't see the pink shirt. It'll probably look gray if there's any light in there at all, because your eyes just simply don't register color while in low light. However, we know the shirt is pink. The the shirt's pink.

Like, we saw you put it on. So, you know, it's what so what's the what's the barometer of truth? It's, there's an in my mind, there's an interesting comparison is that dinosaurs were considered all to be green. Yet over the research that's been done in the, say, the past 50 years, they're now saying that dinosaurs had all sorts of bright and amazing colors. And that because we didn't have pictures of the dinosaurs' colors, we we didn't know how to articulate back then.

But today, we would there are dinosaurs that were vibrantly colorful. So that's why I asked the question. You just have they're so beautiful that sometimes the it's almost as if in order for you to have it this way, you had to color it. Do you know what what I mean? Exactly. Exactly. And let me let me tell you this. Like, I'm my goal here like, I'm not a scientist. Right? Like, I'm an astrophotographer. My goal is to make pretty pictures.

So if that means pushing the saturation slider way over in Photoshop, like, I do that. Like so it doesn't mean that the color is fake. It just means that for the purposes of my photo, I made it look as pretty as possible. However, everything I do is with science at the heart of it. So if you're looking at a colorful nebula there's false color in this true color, by the way. I don't have to get into the semantics of that. Let's see. Yeah. I understand.

The colors represent true data, and it's usually it's red here. It's blue here. It's orange here. That that's what those colors usually mean. I I just make it as pretty as possible. Yes. And and I appreciate that. And I I what I mean, I appreciate your honesty because I feel, for to some degree, it's easy to say it's easy to say that it is adjusted so much that it's not real, and and I I apologize for anybody who would hear this and feel differently.

You've probably seen the photographs of a woman who is behind a filter or with makeup, and then they show themselves without the makeup or without the filter. They do a split screen, and they're they're not even close. So you're saying that it's not that type of interpret. You're not doctoring it and adding makeup on.

You're using what's already there and creating tonal and tonal variations and distinctions, yet you're still staying within the constructs of, not maybe nature, but natural type reoccurring conditions. Did I say that well? Yeah. Yeah. You did. And something to keep in mind with astrophotography is it's not like, traditional photography in many ways is just documenting what your eyes are saying. Yep. But astrophotography is not really like that.

With the exception of my moon shots, the deep space shots are really about revealing the invisible. So these things are so faint. If you if you were in a spacecraft and you flew up to a nebula, it would just look like more space. It wouldn't look like anything because it's so diffuse and it's so faint that it's basically invisible. There's pockets of space that would look really cool to your eyes, but for the most part, they don't.

You know, you're you're talking about gases where you have just a couple extra molecules per square meter. Yep. That's not something you can discern with your eyes. Cameras can pick it up. Because you also because also because you're seeing the totality of it, but I think, the, you're not the forest from the trees. When you're from a distance, it looks one way, but when you get up, you it's not the same because you're now so close to it.

Well, in space, when you're so close to it, it's just open space. Yeah. Exactly. You you nailed it. It's like, you know, when you're in a forest, you can see through the trees. When you're outside the forest, you can't. Mhmm. It's it's there's this, it it it's hard to convey that, I think. You you said it you said it well. I think I got it.

I just had never thought about it that way is because of things like Star Trek where you would they get to this nebula or this new region, and they would be going through this orange thick deposit. And what you're really saying is, and tell me if I'm wrong, is when you would finally get to that nebula or distant place, it's gonna be a few molecules per square meter. So, therefore, it will not look the same way as it does from the distance. The distance gives you that different perspective.

Well, I'll I'll make an example here. I take pictures of galaxies and they look incredibly colorful and vibrant and beautiful. Not to, like, you know, pat not to, like, you know, pat myself on the back. No. No. You you you do. You do. So I'm gonna let let me pat you on the back. But, we are really close and inside a very big, bright, beautiful galaxy called the Milky Way. Yeah. But when you look outside at night, what do you see? You see nothing. Well, if you're in the city, you see nothing.

If you're in a very, very dark sky, you see a very, very faint shimmer from the collective mass of all those stars. Mhmm. So and that's something that looks incredible in photos. Milky Way photos are incredible. You see these beautiful colors. You see oranges. You see splashes of red. You see blues. You see areas where there seems to be thick dust blocking stars. Like, you see all this structure, but you don't see that at all with your eyes. It's not because it's not there or that it's not real.

It's just it's so sparse. These things are very far away. They're very faint, and that's that's just the nature of space. Everything is so spread out. Again, I had not thought about it in that way, so I love it because I had I I bring Hollywood or cinema or theater, whatever you wanna call it. That comes to mind before the reality of what comes to mind. And and so to your moon images, you see the gray and you take it as the gray.

Yet, it's kind of like finding a, beautiful antique under some dust, and you wipe it off and say, oh my god. Look what's underneath this. And that example of what was it Apollo 15 you said, where you kicked the boot and there was orange on his boot is an example that I had never heard, and it now helps me to think very differently about the moon in a way that I had not thought about before. Great. Great. So maybe I should, segue into Yep. My final point, which is why the moon is so important.

Yep. So I I've been sharing space photos with public for a little over 2 years, and I've dabbled in a little bit of everything. I've you've seen my page. I I shoot galaxies, nebulas, dabbled in a little bit of everything. I've you've seen my page. I I shoot galaxies, nebulas, planets, our sun, and, of course, the moon.

And I found that despite being the easiest thing to shoot and, you know, arguably the most recognizable object, most familiar object, the moon is by far the most popular object for my audience. I see it in my analytics. I take pictures of the moon versus a galaxy. The galaxy being what I think is the cooler target, it's my moon pictures outperform them from an analytics standpoint. I look at likes, I look at shares, so I'm understanding these photographs are resonating more with them.

So it kind of hurts me as an astrophotographer because, frankly, I spend more work on the deep space stuff. You know, I'm like, oh, I pushed the limits of my equipment. I took a picture of something millions of light years away. And, you know, I'm watching stars being born in a mission nebula, and they're like, oh, cool. Big gray rock. Upvote. Alright. So so it's it's frustrating and funny, but I think it says a lot.

And so my theory on why the moon, despite being the most accessible thing I'm shooting, is the most popular thing in my in my feed is the familiarity is very important. It adds context to it. People know what the moon is. Everybody knows. Everybody's seen the moon with their naked eye, but it kinda looks like this little sticker in the sky. There's no depth to it. There's no structure.

There's you know, unless you're really focused on clear night, you don't even really can't really tell there's anything to it aside from the phases. But you obviously in, you know, good seeing conditions, you look up, you can see the maria, you see like the the the darker plains, where hardened basaltic lava once flowed. And, really focused observers can even make out the ejecta pattern of Tycho crater. So the moon is, in my opinion, taken for granted by everybody.

It's just simply a subtle part of your life that you don't really think about. So what's different about my pictures, I think, is I am showing it to you in a way that you've never seen before because your naked eyes are showing you this flat distant thing, and I'm showing you, wow, it's actually three-dimensional. It has it has a definite curve to it. It has irregularities around the edges. It has deep craters and tall mountains that you can see in the photos.

And by the way, that's how it looks through binoculars too. So if you haven't, look look at the moon through binoculars. It looks Really? You'll get more of the that. Okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You can and if you're in early phases, you can actually see the faint shadowed side, which is really cool because that's only illuminated by Earth. Is it, Earth's Earth sunlight's bouncing off Earth, illuminating the backside of the moon.

And then along the terminator line, that's where the shadow meets the light, you see the long shadows from mountains. So you can see not only just the fact that the moon is spherical, but you can see the depth to individual features on the moon. So you're saying, wow. That's a tall mountain right there. That's a shallow crater right there.

So that brings a that kind of sense of wonder that I'm talking about earlier is that there's this familiar object that you've taken for granted your whole life and suddenly you're seeing it in a new light. That sparks curiosity, and I think that's why so many people follow my page. It is that they like being fed that. You get endorphins from seeing something in a new way. That's why we like, you know, really cool new movies and, you know, we we we wanna watch the the newest thing.

We wanna read things that feed us endorphins. We need our dopamine fixed by going on social media. There's we we get something out of this. And by feeding into that, I'm able to hopefully inspire people to look at the moon as more than just something to take for granted in your sky. There's this actual object there, that's accessible, surprisingly accessible, and it looks very close when you look at it through binoculars or when you look at it, in my pictures.

It's, of course, you know, quarter of a 1000000 miles away. It's pretty far away, but it feels so close you could almost touch it. And I want people to feel like they can touch it because they can.

They can if things go well in the commercial space sector, if we figure out this whole this whole, you know, kind of political barrier that's preventing us from, you know, having this this recurring trips to the moon, it is entirely possible within your lifetime that you could just go to the moon for for a week or 2, as a as a just normal civilian. We we have we have the timeline ready. We're working on it. You it'll happen. Don't worry. Yeah. We we actually Project Moon Hut does.

So no. I I agree with you. I think that in this in the timeline, depending on how old you are, there is a chance that there is the opportunity for individuals to get to the moon and to really transform how we live on this planet through that exercise as you brought up the innovations and everything else to go with it. Yeah. So that's really, that gets the the point of this whole topic is, you know, how are these pictures going to be shaping the future of humanity?

And, you know, it's I'm not necessarily, like I said, going to inspire the the next big pioneer that that forges their way, into space. But, you know, if you look throughout history, these pioneers all had various sources of inspiration. It wasn't just they didn't just, you know, just pull this idea out of the ether to push the boundaries of human exploration. Like, Elon Musk, he's, you know, like, he was a big nerd growing up. You know, he he was inspired by astrophysicists.

And, you know, that's I'm not an astrophysicist, but he was inspired by people that were pushing the boundaries from, like, a mathematical stand and and learn about our universe through them. And but, you know, going back further, like Galileo, for example. Galileo was inspired by a a philosopher. He was inspired by Aristotle. So you I I doubt Aristotle knew he was going to inspire Galileo, which changed our view of them of our place in the universe. Aristotle was just doing what Aristotle did.

Very much. Making observations. In Columbus, I don't know what who who thinks he's a good person versus a bad person. I'm not here to make that argument. Columbus, definitely was an explorer, and, you know, he was inspired by other explorers. So he took he looked at what other people were doing and pushed the next step. I'm hoping to inspire other other people that are looking to push the boundaries in photography and looking just at my moon pictures and saying, how can I make this better?

How can I make this cooler? How can I get more people to look at this? And I feel like I've already been successful in that in that regard, which is why I tend to focus on that as my objective because that's a victory for me. I feel like that's a legacy that I'm going to have. By taking pictures of space, I'm guaranteeing other people will take pictures of space.

And those people taking pictures of space are going to inspire people that might have the resources and the drive to assist with your goals. Getting people on the moon, getting an economy, a sustainable economy that makes sense and just grows that Mearth ecosystem until it isn't a big deal if we just need to suddenly, you know, skip off Earth for a few weeks while a virus blows over.

Or in turn, there's an innovation that comes out of it that improves how we live on Earth because of the photography that you've taken. That's the practical answer. I'm more the dreamer, I think. But there was a very important reason that I brought up that point because I think it's honestly the most relevant. There's there's a little the little bit of dreamer is part of that thing that gets you up in the morning. The practicality is the outcome out of the efforts that are put forward.

And so, practicality. Your dreaming and getting up is to find that next photograph that changes so that it's out there, that you'll find it. So I think you've done a beautiful work, and as I as I shared with, in the introduction, this was a big departure from what we've had so far, and there was an there's an been a process that we've done for Project Moon Knot and and for the age of infinite. So the beginning, we brought on very technology oriented individuals, and we still do.

We have some great individuals coming on and and have had, but we're also expanding out into different realms of thinking. And that's the reason I reached out to you, and that's the reason I felt that you you fit our narrative, and I felt it. And that that landed us landed us to this day. Great. I'm, glad you feel like it it fits in. I it's funny that I I never really thought about these these things, until you forced me to. Mhmm. I it's like I understood why why I like taking pictures of space.

It's because I'm a dreamer. It's because I'm, you know, I I I like thinking about space. I like the idea of going to space. But, but really when it comes down to it, like, I wanna play a role in the space program. And I can like, I have have unique skills that I that fit into that role. So But the the journey the journey of us creating the title and forcing you to find your way and to then have to teach me, which is what our methodology is. You're teaching me something.

And forced you to reexamine so much of who you are, I think. And that happens every time we have these podcasts. So what do you think? Do you think that we've, that taking pictures of space is helping, you know, improve the human race? Good question. I would say that taking pictures of space will help to do a few things. Number 1, it will further the interest of those who are in space.

Number 2, it'll it's an information source to be able to share and discuss what's actually happening out there as compared to the way it's been presented in the past. I think you give it a colorful texture flavor that if someone want to share something, they would go to your imagery. And if they knew, I don't know, I've never read underneath yours. I read under some. If you explained more that this is actually what it is, that would be useful for someone who's articulating and sharing.

And the third one is, I do believe there are be going to be people who would might not have given the moon a second look. And by seeing it in through your eyes, to seeing it through your photography, it will change them. I think the only challenge that I have, and this is not a complaint, it is just the suggestion is, I didn't know how real they were.

So the challenge becomes am I seeing a real image like we've discussed earlier, or are we seeing one that's been enhanced just for the purposes of marketing? And so now today, I will look at your work in a much different light because now I know that you're not enhancing it. You're you're giving me a view that does exist in a in a tonal change, but you're not changing it is, I think I'm hoping you're getting what I'm saying.

I've you've done more today than all the images I've looked at since I've seen you because now I know. Right. Right. So, yes, I I do think and I do think that you, with what you've said, you are a definite person who we want involved in project Moon Hut, because project Moon Hut is about developing, achieving a box of the roof and a door on the moon, this first phase. We have 4 phases of development.

It is about expanding the moon ecosystem and creating this Mearth ecosystem so that there is constantly, travel between the earth and the moon and the selling of materials and content back and forth. And it also is about changing the and improving the world. And yet and I think that your imagery and I I would like to connect you with Andreas who's connecting creating our website because I think that he's a space space space space space space space guy. He is on the extreme. He's brilliant.

He would have fun with you because of his love for space and your love for space. So I I appreciate the work that you're doing, and I think that we together can create a new future. I don't know. That's a goal. So, this was fantastic, Andrew. It was absolutely fantastic. We went into places I really wanted to go, finding out a little bit about the art itself, and also where it came from, and how you got to where you are today. I think also was a great journey to have explored. So thank you.

Thank you very much. It was my pleasure. I want to thank all of you out there for taking the time to listen in today. And I do hope you learned from Andrew. I do hope you check out his Instagram, feed. I do hope that you learned something today that will also make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Again, we are sponsored by and we're in association with the Project Moon Hut Foundation.

We were named by NASA, Project Moon Hut, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, the moon knot, to the accelerate development of an earth and space space system. Then to use those endeavors, that paradigm shifting thinking, the innovations, and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Now, Andrew, what is the best single best way for people to connect with you? Definitely on Instagram. It's where I'm the most active.

Cosmic underscore background on there. Okay. But I'm on all the major social media channels. So they can reach out to you through any of those channels. It's the easiest way to connect, and you do reply. I I try to. Sometimes, sometimes my inbox gets a little crazy, but I do my best. If I don't reply, you just have to keep bugging me, and I will eventually. I will I had I had to fight my way through the same same clutter, and we ended up connecting, so I appreciate that.

So for all of these, again, you listening in, there's multiple ways to connect to me. It's [email protected]. There's the Twitter account at Project Moon Hut. You can also directly to me at goldsmith. There's we have a LinkedIn account. We have a Facebook account for project moon hut, and, we have an Instagram account. We haven't been putting things up there, but we do have an Instagram account. We also just put up at, at the URL www.projectmoonhot.org, or you can go to moonhot.org.

Both will get you there. We have just put up a temporary placeholder. We took down our old website. We're in the process of building a new one. Hopefully, in the next few weeks, it'll die be up. You can keep in touch with us and see what's going on as we move forward. There's a a short form to fill in. We're not gonna spam you. We're not gonna be any with all sorts of information. You could start to feel what Project Moon Hut is about. That said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.