Reinventing Sexuality and Reproduction in Space is the Equivalent of Forging the Keys to the Universe w/ Alex Layendecker #36

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 into ages. You personally have just experienced the information age and what a ride it has been and will continue to be. Now consider that you may right now be living through another transformational age, the age of infinite.

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The podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, h u t, to the accelerate development of an earth and space based ecosystem. Then to use the endeavors, the paradigm shift thinking, and the innovations and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Today, we're going to be exploring an absolutely incredible topic.

Reinventing sexuality and reproduction in space is the equivalent to forging the keys to the universe. And we have with us today, Alex Landecker. How are you, Alex? I'm good. How are you doing, David? I'm doing great. Typically, if you've heard one of the podcast, there is a very, very brief introduction to the guest and that's intentional. It's because the content stands on its own.

Yet when you bring up something like sexuality reproduction in space, or I've brought it up, individuals have kind of questioned, who can do this? Who has the quality or capability to do this? So I'm going to give you a little bit more that might help you to understand our guest, Alex. And he is currently a US Air Force helicopter pilot. So I'll bring this up immediately is because he is a pilot.

He has to put through a disclaimer that because he is a pilot, he has to put through a disclaimer that anything he says, articulates, conjectures in any way, shape, or form is not a representation of his role in the US Air Force. And anything that he says also does not or is not relayed or covered through any other affiliation he's had in government roles or positions throughout the industry, whether it be as a sexologist or the industry as a whole.

These are Alex's, opinions, thoughts, hypothesis. And as we all know, everybody learns and lives on the shoulders of others. Alex will be bringing his. So that said, Alex, has been a sexologist since 2,009, 10 ish period. He does happen to have a PhD in human sexuality. And his research has been focused on human sexuality and reproduction factors in off Earth environments. Realize I just said off Earth environments.

And the future research that be needed to make a long term colonization on other worlds a viable possibility. So now you can understand Alex is coming from a, not only an academic but research side of a topic that we really haven't had the experiences to experience in the way that we would on earth. So, Alex, did I do that okay for you? Yeah. That'll work. Appreciate it. There we go. Let's start. Do you have an outline for us? Yes. Okay. So how many points do you have?

So I have 4 major bullets and, one sort of overarching bullet that I want the listeners to keep in mind as we go through this. Okay. So you you want me to understand. I get it. Yeah. Alright. So let's give me number 1. Okay. So the overarching, sort of theme is wherever we go in the universe, our sexuality as human beings is coming with us. Hold on. Is coming with us.

Number 2. Is that the quote unquote standard, human sexual pursuit narratives that you have experienced, grown up with, know as your perception are somewhat misleading to human nature. And there it is. Are somewhat misleading. I'm cutting them a little shorter just so that we don't spend all our time on the program writing. Number 3?

Number 3, researching and determining the solutions for sexual reproduction in outer space environments is almost totally essential for ultimate survival as a species. I have outer space is essential for survival as a specie as a species. Okay. Next. Okay. And then the, bullet for challenges of the environment to the reproductive process. To the reproductive process. Next. Research on sexual reproduction in space is not moving quickly enough when you consider the external factors.

Space is not moving fast enough. Okay. I think I should give a course on title writing or or bullet points. Some people can go wild here. Okay. So let's start let's start with number 1. Wherever we go in the universe or sexuality becoming with us, what's going on? Tell me what you're thinking.

So, again, this is sort of a, an overarching theme that I wanna just want you to keep in mind as as we discuss these other bullet points, but I want you to think about the history of, space exploration and the nations that have actually gone into space.

So to date, you only have the United States, the soviet union now russians, the chinese and, india that have launched their own spacecraft domestic domestically built spacecraft into space You also have a lot of other nations that have had representatives there.

You know, a lot of European nations, the ESA, European Space Agency, Japanese, astronauts that have gone up, they all bring their own character as well, but kinda stay focused on the nations that, that are actually sort of leading the charge. So you want you're saying just focus on the launch capability nations?

What they not only focused on them, but it is important to recognize that those are the nations that currently have launch capability and effectively are acting as the standard bearers, for humanity as as we continue to push out and explore new worlds. So as we go to Mars, as we go to these other places in the universe, those are the nations generally, it's accepted, that are in the lead. And we have to consider the sexual culture that a lot of those nations are gonna be bringing with them.

Okay. So we've got a, I would say, a conservative nation. I mean, I'd love to hear how you are going to outline these US, Soviet, Chinese, and India as nation sexual sexuality? Because I'd I'd like to know your interpretation. So go ahead. So really, really looking at it. I'll start with, you know, I'll start with, my my home nation here, the United States. I think that, generally, folks can agree that there is a lot of hypersexualization in US culture. You see it everywhere.

You see it in our advertising, in, just just culture in general, proliferation of of, pornography, sexual rights, etcetera, etcetera, while it experiences a enormous amount of restraint and constriction by, separate political and also religious entities. So America was a nation that was founded on, obviously looking for a lot of, a lot of different rights that they did not have back over in Europe, and they brought a lot of their religious mores with them.

I don't think anybody's really gonna disagree with me when I say that the United States, at least from a political and religious context tends to be less, I would say, sexually liberal or less open about sexuality in general on a national level than most of, say, our European counterparts. I I don't I having lived outside the United States for over a decade, the United States, is looked at as very prudish. Yeah. That's that's generally the word that, that I hear.

And Yeah. And and, again, I'm not trying to, you know, I don't try to say anything is right or wrong. This is just observe cultural observation. You weigh that against other nations that, that are going into space that are their own space faring nations, for example, the Chinese also have a very generally conservative attitude toward sexuality where you don't have sex before marriage. You've got the 3 primary pillars, which is family, tradition, and the state.

And for a lot of young people in that country, marriage is the peak event in your life. So under the Communist Party over there, certainly before the, open up to the rest of the world, sex was always very strictly controlled. Conformity to the masses was enforced. So like many authoritarian regimes, there was persecution of sexual minorities, and that is a pretty common theme with authoritarian regimes throughout history. I'll speak a little bit more on that later.

Okay. But the the point is is that the Chinese have very heavy censorship. So their Internet, for example, you cannot show exposed body parts like the nipples or genitals. That is that is illegal for them. So you can actually be in prison for, trying to access that type of material. Not saying people don't. It just it gives you an idea of the level of censorship. They're culturally, you could consider them to be much more reserved and expected to control their sexual desire.

And they have a saying that happy family, a happy family is 4 generations under one roof. So there is a lot of pressure on the children in the family to find a spouse and get married. There's even, I've heard tell of, marriage markets, quote, marriage markets, where parents actually will get together to find matches for their children. And it's sort of the street market version of a dating app, if you will, where parents are showing around pictures of of their children that have stats. So, hey.

This is their job, their income, their education, and this is what sometimes, hey. This is what they are looking for, so you have to be a certain height, etcetera, etcetera. I have not in all my time in, living in Hong Kong. I have not once seen that in China, but I'd I'll I'll have to look that up at another point. That's interesting because I don't know I I haven't heard that, but that's interesting. Okay. Go on.

Yeah. So that so that is, that's something that to my knowledge as of now is only, only in Shanghai, but from what I understand, it is, not uncommon through throughout the rest of the country. It's probably my my take is probably Shanghai would be less likely than some of the more rural places that because Shanghai is a lot more metropolitan. I mean, the the city is, actually an amazing city. So a lot of nightlife, a lot of people going out, a lot of money being transferred.

It it's a incredible city overall with that. I I'm gonna have to check into that. So that's yes. There is a conservativeness compared to other countries, such as Sweden, Norway, or the those are the most common we hear about. Yeah. Okay. Well, I I'm waiting. So we've got China. We've got US. The, so and then you take a look at countries like Russia, which, you know, is the other sort of heavyweight in the in the launch industry at the moment.

India is newer to the game, and the Europeans, of course, are are able to launch rockets from, from South America. They have, a ESA launch center there as well. I think, you know, we've already kind of talked about Europeans in general are a little perhaps quite a lot more sexually liberal than their American counterparts. They are at least much more open to the scientific aspects of it. They're much more acknowledging.

We do tend to have an issue with anti science movements in the United States, that that much has been evident, you know, as we've gone through the pandemic in, in the last couple years. But, the Europeans are not only cultural culturally more open to it on a education level, and all these things work into each other, but on an education level, they provide much better comprehensive sex education early on, and it's not viewed as something dirty.

Sex is not something dirty that needs to be hidden away. There are still conservative elements in every European society. There always will be. Europe is, you know, really where the I I come, for example, I come from the Roman Catholic church, pretty conservative sexually, obviously. Coming from there, I can I can attest that not everything that the Moors are are going to tell you that you're going to be raised knowing aligns with what the actual facts are?

And you're still gonna have pockets of that throughout all these European countries because there still is that influence. So some place, and you could tell me if I'm wrong, the Icelandic culture, it is not uncommon to have sex on the first date. And the reason is individuals, because I know some Icelandic people, have said that why would you want to go into relationship that you find that you don't have any sexual compatibility in the beginning?

So there immediately, there's no, there's no, there's no bad thought about a woman taking the man home or the win man taking the woman home immediately because they're checking out to see if this person could be someone that they should pursue. Yeah. Why waste the time? Right?

So and if you if you look at sort of those more Nordic countries, you also have a lot of, influences from their earlier earlier cultures, Viking culture, pagan culture, which was a much more free type of society when it came to sexuality. It was also far more egalitarian in terms of, status that women had in society. There were women warriors. They fought alongside the men, and were able to to be lords in that society. Not so the case with a lot of their southern European counterparts.

As far as Russia goes, I would say that you still have a lot of authoritarian elements, obviously, with Vladimir Putin's government, and you hear in the news all the time about their persecution of, of the homosexual community there in Russia. I'll I'll hope I'll I'll I'd like I wanna hear this definition because I know a lot of Russians Yeah. And I've I've worked in Moscow. I've worked in Saint Petersburg. So what's your take from a sexologist perspective?

Well, I would say that the people, culturally are actually far more open, to sexual freedoms. They it's interesting because it is sort of built on a, misogynistic framework, because women there, generally, you know, you're expected to dress up, you're expected to throw on makeup, look pretty, have a great body, etcetera, etcetera, or you're not, you know, you don't have value as a mate.

I think there's that general perception that runs through that society, but at the same time, they're they're much more free about sharing their sexuality with other people, at least with each other, engaging in in sexual activity. I would probably say of the people I know in the world, the Russians have more have compare the Greeks are supposed to be number 1 in terms of number of, the frequency, but the Russian society since tends to be extremely open.

And when it comes to the women to kind of maybe give you my knowledge, having worked and lived and know individuals, is that it's a it's a means to further their career. So a Russian woman is a very powerful woman, often extremely bright, and she's using everything she, she has just like a male would. She's using everything she has at her disposal to make sure that she succeeds.

And I'm not saying the sexuality is one of those pieces, but to, Russian women behind, and it's often said behind, behind every rush of powerful man is a strong Russian woman. They're extremely they wanna build. They wanna grow. They wanna create a future. So sexuality is all part of that whole culture. I don't know if I'm saying it right, but I'm trying to be as as politically correct on this as I can without stepping over the line.

It's a very interesting culture and way they look at sexuality. Yeah. Yeah. And and I I totally get you. I constantly have to pause when I talk about this because I'm always sort of worried about, saying the wrong thing that's gonna run, you know, rub people the, the wrong way when I didn't obviously intend it. No. No. It's in the the conversation between us is that I, both being Americans, there is a, a hesitancy to say certain things, and a friend of mine is, doctor Ruth. And I give a yeah.

I I give a presentation what women need to know about men that men don't know how need need to know about themselves. Doctor Ruth has been in the audience. She said I should write a book on it.

And so when I share some of these constructs, for example, the Greeks being the number one most sexual, I think they're rated number 1 in terms of the most frequency of sex, as compared to numb the United States, which I think is number 19 or 20, it's pretty far down there as compared to frequency of times per year in a couple relationship or a married couple. Those that's coming from data.

It's not just coming from a It's also interesting interesting that you bring that up, because looking at different sexual cultures around the world that don't really fit the standard narrative, and we'll talk a little bit more about this in a moment, that we are used to hearing in industrialized societies would actually challenge that point.

I think there are other societies that have been identified, small societies, micro societies that have been identified, where frequency of sex is is far more, common. It's much higher higher frequency. There was a pretty fantastic book, written by 2, psychologists that had backgrounds in in anthropology. It was published in, I want to say, 2010. The name of the book is Sex at Dawn. It's by, Christopher Ryan, and I'm probably gonna butcher her name, but, Casilda Jetha.

They used that book to argue against the grain of what we know and accept as the standard narrative. So I'll be I'll kind of be quoting them a lot, when I'm discussing that particular bullet point, but one of the things that they bring up in their discussion is the first step in discerning the cultural from the human is what a, mythologist named Joseph Campbell called detribalization. So you have all these societies, all these cultures all over the world. That's your tribe.

And in big countries like the United States, you're gonna find different tribes all over the place, in terms of what the local society and culture is like. I think you could agree that culture in New York City, even from borough to borough, is going to be very, very different from culture at, you know, some small town in the deep south. Yeah. What the norms the norms are. So every try, every culture has their own truth, and that can apply across the board. It applies to everything.

For example, just to give a kind of neutral example, I don't know if you've ever eaten crickets as a food. Have you? No. I have not. Have you? I actually have tried them. I don't know. Well, have I tried a cricket? I might have tried cricket? Yeah. In a in a Mexican restaurant in Las Vegas of all places, but crickets are actually very high in in protein. Yes. Beneficial minerals.

There are cultures around the world that, consume them as a main part of their diet, especially foraging societies the some of those that still exist We you and I generally are going to look at that We see somebody eating a grub or a bug Our first natural instinct is to recoil because that is not our experience we you know your initial feeling is, you know, how could how could somebody do that? But it is completely normal to that society and that culture.

So in in order to make that distinction between the cultural and the human, again, we have to extricate ourselves, from our really unexamined assumptions of what is normal and what is natural, so that we can really recognize, what is observed in nature. Humanity as a species, man, we are big messy complicated and, you know, the more you study humanity, I think especially sexuality The more you realize that you really know nothing in the context of of the grand scheme of things.

So I always used to to tell people that I know if you want to understand human beings, study history and study sexuality. But even those, have been very biased in their literature because Oh, Unbelievably. Yeah. History is written by the winners, right? So hence you can't you can't expect it to be wholly accurate and a lot of the early, literature on sexuality the quote scientific, sexual literature Was very flawed. It was complicated from the start.

A lot of it was based in western religious moors initially, you know you had these giants of science and, you know, counting Freud and and others who applied a lot of their own biases and their own corner of the world perceptions into their scientific theories, which were then steamrolled into everything that we base psychology and a lot of other stuff on today.

So a neat thing about, this book, and I do I do recommend reading it if you ever get a chance, is that it it addresses that confirmation bias, you know, that tendency to lock onto findings that support our own view while we tend to play down or disregard evidence contrary to our positions. You're seeing that a lot more these days with the advent of the Internet, echo sound chambers in Internet chat rooms, you know, on social media, etcetera.

But the the key thing that I kind of, wanna bring up with regard to the standard human narrative is well, actually, let me put it this way. Let me ask you a question, David. Sure. What do you think of as the standard mating practice between or just sort of an analysis a quick analysis of each between males and females, human males and females, as you have been able to observe in your life and society, and what has been around? The standard mating practice.

Yeah. Oh, my God. They they there's an extreme. There's a an extreme from one end to the other. So I have seen and been privy to been seen happen, where the culture determines who the mate is. It's between the parents, the parents decide Mhmm. And the people have gotten married. I I've seen that I know it. I know of couples who've been set up this way. And they have lived their their living their lives this way.

Yeah. And I've seen it all the way to the other extreme, where there's a, the mating ritual is very promiscuous. It goes all the way to the extreme of multiple partners at the same time, determining which one they like, and then eventually settling down with one or many individuals. So I've seen the the the extremes, and I'm I'm actually thinking of people. So it's not I'm just Yeah. Throwing it out there.

And I do so I would say that if I was to take a more middle of the road cultural bias or cultural perspective, it is the search for a mate, the trial of a mate.

I would say more of the world is the as one of the extremes, but it is, in the tier 4 countries, which are countries that have, have economics where I think it's like over 35 or $50,000 a year in income is you will find searching for a mate, discovering a mate, trying the mate, acceptance by parents, then the marriage, and then moving on.

So I would say that's more of a western tier 4, where I would and then if I went to for others, I could probably say it was just the parents deciding everything. I don't know if I answered the question. Did I answer the question? I don't know. That's right. So so you went somewhere that I I wasn't really expecting. You did give a much, broader spectrum than most people would normally answer with. So it well, first, is the spectrum okay? Yeah. Yeah. No. It's Okay.

The things you said, yes, are, are correct. Those types of, you know, types of, traditions do ex do exist all around the world, different, societies. When it comes to western society specifically, and I probably should have been more clear, you you have this, perception that you the the classical description of it is the quote war between the sexes, at which I'm guessing I'm sure you've heard. No. I actually I I I have my I have some thoughts, but I've not heard that term as a definition.

So it's what is the definition of that? Okay. So, let me frame it this way. There is this standard narrative that exists that, even a lot of sex reach researchers get this wrong, one way or the other. And, you know, disclaimer, I could be totally wrong as, yeah, as I go through this, but the standard narrative that you generally hear is that males, when they are seeking a mate, they are out to screw anything that moves.

They want to find a young, attractive partner, attractive female partner, who he can have children with, while, and and basically have what is known as paternal investment. So he has a young attractive partner to have children with, protect, give resources to, while also taking every opportunity to spread his seed around, so low cost for high reward or potential high reward Yep.

By sleeping around with other women behind his primary mate's back, in order to give him the best chances of, passing along his genetic line. Females on the on the opposite end so that's the that's the general perception of the male, in this standard narrative theory.

Females are seeking a dependable, stable mate, the highest value mate, that they can possibly find while, so having children that with this guy that they know will protect their young because he is all but convinced that these children are mine, so he's going to continue to support her financially, and provide protection.

And this goes all the way back to, you know, the early, early ages where a man literally had to protect his family, as a warrior, but also provide food and nourishment, and the, female was the razor of primarily the razor of the children. Mhmm. So she is sitting in that role but still also is out seeking genetically superior alternatives to her primary mate.

So if she comes across Brad Pitt, she will take a risk and sleep with the guy on the, off chance that he will, get her pregnant, and she will end up raising a much more attractive and strong and high value, child who has a much better chance than somebody with her husband's genes, for example, of finding a mate of their own, reproducing, and continuing continuing her genetic line.

So that is what the standard narrative in evolutionary psychology has has latched onto, and I should have, I should have preempted that with I I wanna say this really fast. Human beings, if you look at them overall, they have what I believe to be 3 innate drives. I used to argue that they had 2 primary drives, but, really, it comes down to 3. The first is the pursuit of sex and to reproduce.

So again, passing your genes down, which is twofold because you propagate your own genes, you know, you you continue your own genetic line that is your version of immortality as long as it continues, and you propagate the species as a whole. So that's sort of twofold. There's that that drive that we have. Yeah. And obviously sex is important to that.

The second drive that humans have, and this is important to the space aspect of this this conversation, is the drive to explore, to push new frontiers and conquer new horizons. There and that ties back to, you know, modern humans have been around for, around 200000 years. It's generally understood that we originated in Africa and spread out and populated the rest of the planet. Every reach of the planet has has found, you know, human footsteps. Our ancestors are the ones that did that.

We carry their drive to explore and to do that. So the only it only makes sense that we now go into space and continue pushing new frontiers. The 3rd, innate drive that humans have, and again I want to, iterate that sex is also very important to this, is the drive for connection. So we are inherently social creatures. We operate off a very social construct. You need connection to other human beings. We pursue, connection to the wider universe.

You know, people seek connection to a a quote higher plane or a higher power, which it it can help explain the draw of, faith and religion to a lot of to a significant percentage of people on the planet. It's the pursuit, that connection is pursuit of significance. We want to know that our being here actually means something, and that is why we seek that connection on all these, you know, various different planes and, and modes that that I just described.

Sexuality is also, again, very important to that connection, because we are sexually social creatures. I'll get a little bit more into that later, but it's another thing that is important to recognize is, and I say this, you know, personally as a sexologist, your sexuality is one of the few things that runs through your body, your mind, and, you know, we can remember that the brain, the human brain, is the biggest sex organ of all, and your soul.

If you believe in the soul, there's a spiritual element to it. I happen to. So we are biologically, neurologically, spiritually wired to pursue sex. So not just reproduction, but sex. Sex for sex's sake. So it is basically is essentially an element of our social bonding and method of improving group cohesion. So I tell you before I take a step, if I can, because I we had the the multiple cultures that you're talking about. And I'm not trying to be politically correct when I say this.

I'm asking a serious question about it. Yeah. Where his history has not been kind to the fact that there are versions of sexuality, LBGTQ, that the entire spectrum, and that we probably have a lot more variations of all of these in between that we we really don't talk about when we say male and female. It how does has that played a role in when you're looking at, for example, space or when you're looking at the sexuality and reproduction overall? It does. And there's there are yeah.

While the, Well, it's but it's a very fundamental question because, I'm I'm gonna take it from an I've had people say to me, David, you talk about things that I wouldn't talk about in public any day, and I find them talking about them with you on your program. Is what if there are many variations of humans, meaning there there as there's deviations in, for example, the virus, there's variants.

That humans have changed over time, and they become different versions of the same type of species with micro adjustments or differentiations between them. Sexuality is one of them. That's an example of a variation of a certain bottle biological structure, a genetic structure, a a neurological structure. Yeah. So how does that now that we're at a time in the world where it's more open in certain cultures to talk about it, where we are today, you and I can.

How do you address that or what are you thinking about it? So that actually ties back to sort of the first and overarching, point that I made that wherever we go, our sexuality will come with us. Something else to keep in mind is that human sexuality, at least in, my experience of studying it, is as varied and wide and deep as humanity itself. If you look at somebody at just how different humans can be physically, Sexuality easily meets and and I would say surpasses that.

Studying it is a lot like studying the ocean, but I can only study 1 cubic foot of water in this particular area, you know, at a time. So Well, the reason I you know, I'm as I'm as we're talking, there's an easy way to express this. In almost all the tell of all the movies and television series that we've seen that are sci fi related, we run into androgynous species, species with no sexual reproduction that they that that they go the gamut.

So in theory, the human sci fi experience often is a representation of many ways in which the human humans do live on Earth, and they're just disguised as aliens. Does that make sense, what I just said? Yeah. Yeah. I I think I can see that. And and something to keep in mind as well is, we have seen with programs, for example, such as, Star Trek. That's yes. That's what I meant.

Yeah. Examples of, people that didn't meet the, you know, meet the standard narrative of what sexuality is or should be, which for a lot of people for a long time has been, well, obviously, a heterosexual male and female, and we only have sex when we get married and anything outside of that is a sin. And it, you know, it go it goes on and on.

Obviously, as we become a more secular society, which the United States is designed as is to be a a secular republic, So we are we are made stronger by our differences, but the fact that we are are still united, I don't seek to, you know, reach for We're we're not gonna talk politics today. Yeah. Yeah. For politics or grand or grandeur here. That could be a whole another show. Yeah. Yeah. That's that we could that would take that would take a while.

You have many, many variations, on human sexuality, and again, they will all come with us. And that includes, paraphilias. There's earlier in, my sex sexological career and in in tandem You gotta help me here. What's a paraphilia? Okay. So a well, let me give you the definition, the textbook definition.

K. Because I'm I'm looking at So a a paraphilia is a condition characterized, the psychiatric term is a condition characterized by abnormal sexual desires typically involving extreme or dangerous activities. Okay. Now that I would say is not a totally or at least as I'm able to see it, a totally correct interpretation of what a paraphilia is. Not most of them are not what I would deem dangerous. There's a lot of things that I personally consider odd, because I don't know.

I think you just did I think you did a Google search like I did. So that was the first definition, but if you if you read if you drop down where people also ask what what are the most common paraphilias, they say the most common, yeah, pedophilia, sexual focus on children, exhibitionism, exposure of genitals to strangers, voyeurism, observing private activities of unaware victims. And Yeah. What is that? Frauduism?

Frauduism, which is the rubbing it it's basically sexual excitement caused by rubbing up on people, unwilling. Okay. People who are not willing to let you rub up on them. Is that a better definition of what you were thinking about? Well, that so paraphilias are yes. Those are what are known as the, 6 illegal paraphilias. There are paraphilias absolutely that are illegal. Yeah. I see I see them. I went down. I got sex So those sadomasochism, chilgis term, vestic disorder. There's a few of them.

There's 8. Yeah. And and, and not so not for example, transvestism is not illegal. Right. It's not in the United States. But it is still considered a paraphilia by the, DSM in the DSM 5, which is the diagnostic, Diagnostic Statistical Manual of, of Disorders, under the American Psychiatric Association, and I I think I butchered the title. My copy's around here somewhere. That's okay. I don't wanna go dig it out. No. No. I I got it.

So there are quite a few different sexual appetites, that exist in the world that have been documented.

Most of which are again, we just listed the most extreme of them, and, I've studied extreme paraphilias for a very long time in relation to to other, to other research projects that were more military oriented in nature, what I was originally supposed to do my PhD on, but I ended up segging to, to, you know, sex and space because they're logistically, it was gonna be a lot easier for me to actually complete the PhD and be done, to continue on as a researcher. So, yeah, I can I can see?

So my I know there's more on this topic, but my mind yes. We are bringing with us not only the definitions of sexuality, what they mean spiritually, physically and biologically. We are bringing along the cultural side of the culture in which you, affiliate with and the extremes within those cultures.

Because there's a it's a I don't know how many accesses I would develop, but there's there's a liberal and a conservative or there's an extreme versus a less extreme version of each one of these in each culture, and each definition of them makes it to a factorial of, I don't know, bazillion. Yeah. And and the majority of, people that you're gonna find going into into space, which, by the way, we have already had, homosexual individuals travel into space.

Sally Ride was the first lesbian astronaut. She this was not revealed. I I wanna say it wasn't actually revealed, until after her death, but, you know, she had her own reasons for not revealing that to the world at the time, probably because, you know, she wanted to keep it personal. She didn't want that to be the focus. She just wanted to be an astronaut as opposed to being known as a lesbian astronaut or, you know, however other people would have framed it. So I I get that.

Totally, you know, totally understand that. Most people are going to that do travel in the space, though, will fall somewhere inside what referred to as the, the normative curve, where it I don't you I don't mean to define it as, quote, normal because really nobody is ever really totally normal, and I I I I know what you're trying to say. You're trying to say that you used the word normative for to Yeah. What's commonly the data points. So so maybe we can use it as most commonly referred to.

Yeah. But doesn't mean that there's a normalistic, trait or characteristic behind it. So, yes, I would say that we're now in testing for space. Possibly, Sally wasn't known at that time. I don't know. And I don't know how much testing there is around the globe to say to an individual, are you a pedophiliac? Are you a a voyeur, voyeuristic in your approach? Are you x, y, and z? So I don't think you tell me if I'm wrong. In the space industry, they test those things.

Well and you need to consider the group of people that have been going into space. And I am going to speak a little bit about the some of the pitfalls of this process, further on down Okay. Yep. In the conversation. But astronauts tend to undergo a high number of psychological evaluations. They're constantly assessed.

When you are on the space station, obviously, you're having all your vital signs are being monitored, read, everything more or less everything you do is gonna be on film, and this is, not only for your health and welfare, but it's also for the health and were welfare of the mission that ground control elements are able to monitor what is going on and if there is conflict developing, etcetera. So just given You do you do know what you just said is already ending. And it yes.

And it will con so it will continue to It will continue, but it is ending this whole thing of every time someone goes up in every single scenario, and everybody's watching, and everybody's monitoring. That can't go on forever. It it can't. And especially as we enter the commercialization period of space where, quote, unquote, regular people are are going up. You know?

So people who don't have years of astronaut training and time in thousands of hours as a jet pilot or a or a, a medical doctor and, you know, behind them. So you you, up to this point, have had this, cadre of extremely high performing, very focused individuals.

And as a result, the study of sexuality has been considered a more of a nonissue by a lot of these agencies because the people that they're sending up there are there to focus on the mission and they're constantly monitored, etcetera, etcetera. So there's no there's no really room for any of that to to be going on, any sexual hanky pank, if you will.

But what I before we kinda move on to that, what I would like to bring us back to is, I told you about that standard narrative, that we have in western society and which has been exported to a lot of other societies around the globe. You know, our the influence of the Western world runs deep around the the global society that is now Earth. That narrative is primarily a reproduction oriented narrative. Notice it's all about passing on your genetic line and the best way to attain your goals.

It's a very selfish type of narrative, and it's mutually exploitative, which kind of you know, I remember I mentioned the war between the sexes. That's what I'm talking about. It's it's a really sort of depressing concept. And we wonder why people, you know, constantly feel alone, why we have high divorce rates in the United States. I think this year the divorce rate well, actually, this year after the pandemic and everybody's been locked up, I guarantee the divorce rate's skyrocketing.

The divorce rate typically though is at least 50% in the United States. 50% of marriages end in in divorce, and I think the number has actually been taking up higher in recent years. Again, we are a species that has sex for sex's sake as a social bonding activity. Probably this is an extreme example, but, one that I can give is trauma bonding. So people have sex to overcome shared grief.

That is a pretty well documented behavior, and it's even talked about in, you know, books books and movies and TV. You know, it's it's a pretty common theme, but it's believable because it is a very common behavior.

So Ryan and and Jeff are the authors of Sex at Dawn, they talk about how the bartering of by a female of her fertility and her fidelity in exchange for goods and services to the male is one of the foundational premises for evolutionary psychology, which pretty much originated with, with Charles Darwin. And Darwin was obviously a giant of his day, but he as far as sexuality went, he got a lot of things wrong because he was coming from his own perception and perspective.

And there's a lot more to that that, I won't I won't get into, but, if you look at other accounts so there was a Lewis Henry Morgan. He's considered the father of American anthropology, inside the United States, Canada.

He hypothesized that prehistoric relations so before the dawn of agriculture, we need to go back before the dawn of agriculture, Wilma, who were primarily hunter gatherer foraging societies, was that, the husbands lived in polygyny, I so they had more than 1 wife, and wives lived in polyandry, so they had more than 1 husband. And that kind of family was neither unnatural nor remarkable. So you had multi male, multi female mating systems that are typical of our closest primate relatives.

And I'm so pop quiz question. Sure. What are the 2 primate groups that are closest to humans in DNA? Oh, it's something that's, I'm I could say I'm probably going to be off. I've learned this in my biology classes long, long, long time ago. We typically say that it is the the, the ape or the monkey, but I believe that there are others that are closest to us in terms of DNA sequencing. So I can't tell you. I was I was gonna answer another question.

I thought you were gonna say, what's closest to and I was to sex well, I was gonna say bonobo monkeys. And Yes. Actually. Oh, I was right? Yeah. Okay. So That that's where I went, and I wasn't sure. So the go ahead. So bonobos and Bonobos. The the the one that everybody thinks of typically Wow. My my body is sweating. I got that one right.

So so the the ape relative that people typically are gonna jump to are chimps, and there's been a lot of, scientific literature that has compared, especially in evolutionary psychology, that compares human beings and their societies to chimps. But we are actually more closer closely related to bonobos. And that's important because of how differently those two groups organize.

They are, they organize in social groups, which numerous apes do that, but, again these being closest to us as humans, we also organize in social groups. It's important to note that our DNA is only 1.6% different from chimps and bonobos, so we split and we're a little bit closer to bonobos, overall. We split from them on the evolutionary tree only about 5 or 6000000 years ago. So by contrast, let me let me give you a different example.

Gibbons, only monogamous ape, that well, I believe there's actually several monogamous apes, but gibbons are the most prominent example. They split off from us 22000000 years ago and they live isolated. They don't live in groups. They don't have the same group dynamics that humans, chimps, or bonobos have. Alright. Really, I should say humans, bonobos, and then chimps. They are monog gibbons are monogamous. They live in the treetops and they have acreages of trees to themselves.

1 family unit, 1 male, 1 female, and the offspring. So monogamy is really not found, and this is important to the challenging of the standard narrative that I was discussing, when we consider how foraging groups, in prehistory lived and how we live now in our current structured society, monogamy is not found in any social group living primate except for humans because we apply that forced standard narrative, which is based on cultural factors, not natural factors, if you will.

Not what's in our DNA. But it might help explain why humans are generally what you, you know, generally so much what you would call promiscuous. So why would humans that are in happy marriages risk it all? Why would you risk, a divorce So just just before you get to that, because I want your perspective, I have mine on the bonobo. Okay. Please define the bonobos because you did the chimps. I didn't know if you were going to do the bonobos.

Okay. So, what are the talking about social and the chimps and how they are, but then you went to the gibbons. But the, bonobos, I have my definition of what I know of them. Can you explain what you when you think of them in the context of genetics and sexuality, what makes them special? Okay. So, actually super super interesting. If you look at, well, first off, let me let me address chimps.

So Okay. Often in evolutionary psychology in the literature, we have been compared as humans, we have been compared to chimps, which just from a societal perspective are very warlike, brutal. They can be very cruel when, 2 opposing groups meet each other. The males seek to kill the males in the other group and rape the females, and then basically take them captive.

And now the females in group b that was, you know, where the males were killed off now join, not necessarily by choice, but are essentially forced into group a and to mate with, mate with the male chimps in that group. So people look at that and they look at the history of human behavior, which I should say since the dawn or I should correct that, since the dawn of agriculture. Yeah. I get it.

We've for we've created a culture and a society built around a premise that caused individuals to act in a certain way that fulfills the profile of the chimps. Yep. And Did I say that right? Yes. Absolutely. Nailed it, actually. And, and it, it has created in the the literature confirmation bias, that thing I just we see that behavior in chimps. We see it in ourselves. We say, oh, that must be where we get it. That must be man's natural state of being.

How he deals, you know, how he deals with, competitors, with males. So chimps, it should be noted, they resolve sexual issue is sexual issues and sexual control with power.

So war power and violence Yeah, and whoever the strongest chimp is whereas bonobos Actually resolve power issues with sex If you look at groups of bonobos, which for a long time they were actually known as pygmy chimps, they have a much more egalitarian, peaceful community that is primarily maintained through bonding that happens between the females. They are a very free sexual society with virtually no levels of conflict, because the males have no reason to be aggressive with each other.

So let me contrast to that that to the earlier example I gave where the 2 groups of apes meet. If it's bonobos, they the 2 groups will quickly intermingle and start having sex. For them, it is like shaking hands. It is a form of greeting, and like humans, bonobos can mate thousands of times before they will actually conceive offspring. So if you and there's numerous factors that go into this.

Obviously humans have contraception, etcetera, but, in the wild, bonobos can actually engage in sex many many many times, a thousand plus times before, they'll actually conceive a baby, and that's probably Has a lot to do with just the fact that they have so much sex in between their, their reproductive cycle. So Maybe the female is not, ovulating, but she's still having tons of sex constantly so again bonobos, they tend to resolve, sexual issues.

So let me let me let me tie this together a little bit to You talked about pre agricultural you talked about the husband with polygamy going out and the female having multiple partners. Now what I have read and learned, over the years is that in pre agricultural time that there were societies because there were societies where women would have multiple partners in the same day or at the same time only because the male cannot keep up with the needs of the female.

And in the bonobo society, you have a society where if you go up and the woman or the male will be instantly willing to, quote unquote, as using your terms, shake hands with you, and they will have sex multiple times during a day. And the the tie in is that pre agricultural, we were as a species closer to that. Yes. And and I'm going to address more of that as we get further down Okay. And, you know, as we continue to drive here.

But, couple more quick points on bonobos before we go there and we address the dawn of agriculture and how we completely, probably, screwed ourselves as a as a species. No pun intended. So yeah.

So, something that bonobos and and human females, share, bonobo females and human females share bonobo females and human females share that no other ape species has is the fact that the vulva, her genitalia, are oriented on the front of the body, whereas with other apes, it's more oriented toward the rear for, entry from behind. Another thing that is much more typical of human excuse me. I'm stumbling over my words here.

That you see as behavior in humans that you also see in bonobos is that before sexual activity, before coitus, bonobos will actually stare into each other's eyes, stare deeply into each other's eyes. It is romantic for them. They are known to walk arm and arm together, kiss, hands, kiss feet, human typical behavior, right, and, engage in French kissing, so tongue kissing that occurs between bonobos. That isn't really observed in all these other great ape groups.

So there's your sort of, I would say argument right there that we are actually from a sexual perspective, we are much, much closer to bonobos, or have more in common with them than we would with chimps. Okay. Interesting. Hadn't thought about it that way. Yeah. And it's important to note that those are primarily the Novos, groups are primarily female dominated groups. Again, remember I told you about how the bonds between the females are what holds the group.

It is also the peacemaking mechanism between them and other groups of bonobos that they come across. So I'll just so you could hear what's going through my mind, because I I'm I'm that we don't have to address it now. I'm thinking about space. Okay. And in Project Moon Hut, which you've seen videos and content on, we have one of piece of our platform we're delivering, which has to do with governance.

And I had not put an emphasis or thought as much about the governance when it comes to sexuality and reproduction. I had not thought about the the opportunity that some cultures might take to take space as a means to explore, not cultures.

I'd say individual groups, meaning subsets of groups no different than 1,000 of 100 of years ago, groups leaving groups to form their own society, is that there's an opportunity in space to create a different type of structure that is very different governance wise, including Christianity, policy, economics that allows for a much different society to be formed than I had thought about prior to getting to this point in this conversation. Yeah. And, and sort of Did I get a did I get a star?

Yeah. Yeah. No. Absolutely. Yeah. So you you do make a very good point, and and I'll talk, talk a bit more about this when we talk about micro societies. And frontier type societies and and stuff down the line. Okay. It just I wrote it up only because I wanted you to know that at this point, I I am questioning a lot that I'm not sharing. And I'm questioning it because I'm looking at it from the perspective of, how and this is not to pick on a society.

I've I've worked in about 50 countries, not just spoken, but actually worked in them. So spending time meeting people, being engaged that when in the the Russian society to me, while it has its more of authoritarian rule, when it comes to promiscuity and sexuality, the the Russian men and women that I've spoken to who have have numbers that I have just never heard before as compared to other cultures in terms of how many partners they have had over their lifetime.

And just be beyond imagination, and I've heard, I know there's no proof of this, that the couple that went up, Russian couple has been up into space, and it is believed in the space industry that the first sexual experience has already occurred in space between 2 Russians. So I I have also heard that, you know, as as I've gone through my research. And that is a very interesting question, and and we'll get definitely back around to it of has sex act sex actually happened in space before.

And I'll address that kind of Okay. That that's fine. Just I want you to hear what's going on because, as you know, I'm actually I'm trying to figure this out for how do we create improve how we live on earth for all species, which includes this Mearth construct, the moon and earth Yep. And how we might transition to a a different way of living that might give opportunities in different levels or different ways that we might not have thought possible.

So this is this is giving me food for thought or fodder. Yes. And as you think about that, always keep in mind that first bullet point again, wherever we go in the universe, we're going to bring our sexuality with us. So Yeah. That's exactly why I'm saying it. The we're it's gonna come with us as we have choices to make. Yeah. So who whoever gets there and establishes governance, sort of first, it's it's going to be their prerogative.

These are going to be the decision makers, effectively when it comes to these outposts that that they are establishing. But speaking of governance, so let's talk about, the dawn of agriculture and the first, second, or third order effects that that had across societies.

So it's been assessed, looking back at, the available evidence that the dawn of agriculture for humans really occurred around somewhere between 10,1200 years ago, and it was important for a number of reasons, to these formerly, foraging hunter gatherer groups that used to move around. It established an anchor to a specific area.

It created a concentration of resources, so individuals could now concentrate resources, could concentrate wealth, concentrate power, that was effectively the birth of capitalism, or the the root and seed of it. You know, if I'm if I am a man who has a bountiful harvest access to a lot of food, I can control how I distribute that and we see the start of sort of our standard narrative.

So we can assume that I can have many females as that male who can provide a lot of food, which now I'm not having to hunt and I'm not having to hunt in a group because you cannot take down a wooly mammoth just with 1 guy. You know, these these foraging hunter gatherer societies, they were dependent on each other for survival, period, dot. So not just for food, but also for protection, for sex, for social construct and interaction.

So for most of prehistory until the dawn of agriculture, there were no food surpluses that you could seize from a different tribe. There were there was no home base that you had to defend. There was no field that you had to keep outsiders from stealing food out of. So those earlier humans, they lived in primarily female centered societies, not male centered societies, female centered, where sex served important social functions and honestly in which warfare was mostly rare or altogether absent.

And that's from, Franz de Waal. He's a Dutch American biologist and primatologist. He studied bonobos a lot. So if we bring it back to, the bonobos for a moment and how they compare to that prehistory society, they've got engaged in frequent sexual activity, which leads to lower aggression levels and lower stress for males, which means we do, as males, we do pretty well in a female run society. I already told you about the similar, sexual traits and, courting behaviors that bonobos engage in.

The big the biggest, comparison to draw or similarity is that both bonobos and humans, we primarily you use our sexuality for social purposes. Again, you remember that figure I told you earlier? We can have sex a 1000 times before we might conceive a baby as human beings. Same with bonobos, whereas you look at the numbers on the chip side and I think it's it's much lower. It's, definitely in the lower 100, if not in the 30 ish or something like that. I've got my notes around here somewhere.

This whole place is covered in papers. Don't you love me? Yeah. So, so if you if you look at the social aspect of it, social purposes for sex, it helps reduce tension, it creates bonding, it resolves conflict, it's entertainment. Mostly we engage in, sex with other human beings because it's fun and we want to have sex, not because we want to have a baby. And remember even historically, and also in some societies today, marriage is still seen as a sort of a corporate merger.

A so it's a social contract. So that part of the of the standard narrative does feed into, hey, this is a this is primarily a social function that sexuality has in our lives. Us having sex that is primarily social. It's this development of those bonding mechanisms through sex that, these, these psychologists, they argue that that helped our brains to grow to the size that they did by by creating these social networks and developing our language capacity as a result.

So it created this feedback loop that furthered brain growth and allowed us to grow into a species that eventually came to dominate the planet. It was actually our sexuality and our sexual interaction patterns as social cohesion that allowed us to grow to this level of intelligence. So if you compare now the and I I really quickly, I don't wanna beat this to death as far as different sexuality around the world and everything, but I would like to go over some of today's human foragers.

So, doctor De Waal that I mentioned earlier, he talks about a virtual absence of organized warfare among human foraging groups that you still see today, and the fact that they have very egalitarian tendencies, they're very generous with information, with resources across groups.

So they have established they still have an established shared sexual partner environment, they share their resources, they share gathering responsibilities, and they share responsibility for the upbringing of the young in the tribe, a cooperative care system. So for males in these societies, as far as they know, breaking away from the standard narrative, as far as they know, any and all of those children in the tribe could possibly be yours. This was Right.

You know It could be any anybody in the group. Yeah. It it so you have a vested interest, as far as you know, in helping protect, nurture, and raise that child to adulthood. So in a lot of these societies, the men, are referred to by all the children as father or uncle, and the women are all mothers or or aunts. It's effectively seen as one big family, even if genetically they're not, you know, that closely related depending on the size of the tribe.

Because you can't unless you're gonna do a DNA test, which they would not do.

Yeah. You you just you you live a life of I do like the construct and not to say it's my construct, but I do like the fact that because you don't because you don't have anything of value that stays around that has duration such as my stock of whiskey or my stock of wheat or my my home or whatever or any ownership that lasts for a period of time, the individuals have to work with one another because their next meal, their next future is based upon cohesion. Exactly.

And, again, you know, especially during the prehistory periods, these groups faced a lot of challenges. They were not the biggest predators out there, really. You know, you back in the age of saber tooth tigers and wolf packs and and everything else that you might experience as a forging society when there were no cities and a whole lot of wilderness around you. So So you had said I don't know if I'm breaking this up a little bit.

You said the dawn of agriculture were three things, Humans 10 to 12000 years ago. Did we hit number 23, or is that still part of 1? Let me see here. Because we went through moving around the anchor, the, the resources, the wealth, capitalism, females, no food support, tensions. Go ahead. Basic basically, you had the three things that I I was just essentially alluding to, were the fact that you had an anchor point.

Okay. That you had a concentration of resources of wealth and power, and that as a result, the power dynamic switched to a male run and male centric governance model, of of society. Oh, and I I think I think it's important to bring up, at least in my mind, that just shifting to a woman a female dominated society in a tier 4 culture today or 1, 2, or 3, it does not mean that it's a reversion to the bonobo society.

It will still be a society that's run under the auspices of what has been created over these past few 1000 years. So just shifting to a woman now in charge doesn't mean that it all works. Yeah. And and Am I correct? I'm going to go on? Absolutely. Absolutely. Cultural influences are extremely powerful. So you have seen, for example, you know, the United States just swore in the, first female vice president, that it's ever had. We have existed for, what, 244 years at this point?

Yeah. If you consider the fact that the date that the United States was founded, which is very different than the day that, the Indians were around on the side, but this culture came together. Yeah. Yeah. It's 100 100 of years. It's 100 of years, but we've still had there was Golda Meir in Israel. There's, Angela in, in Germany. There have been leaders around the world. I believe I don't know all the names, but I'm thinking about there's another culture cultures.

And it doesn't mean That sexism and misogyny is over. Correct. Because I there was a piece of data that I had seen that if you attribute war to may a male or a female, that many more wars actually came out of the influence of a woman than they did a man. And I I I'd have to find the data. I I have the article someplace, stored someplace, but it was interesting because they noted all of the different conflicts. And, a queen could be an influencer as to whether someone goes to war.

And but that queen could be saving their empire. The queen could be protecting the agricultural or the industrial ownership. Well and and to that point, I think you also see that in literature. I mean, some of the oldest, if not the oldest, western what is considered western literature that exists, you have Homer's Iliad Yeah. Helen, faced it, launched a 1,000 ships.

That was a war that purportedly was obviously, there's probably a lot of other power dynamics at play, but the reasoning that is given is that the ultimate prize, this woman, the most beautiful woman in the world, was stolen and that was an affront that could only be punished with a war that lasted a decade in the text obviously.

So you definitely have seen this shift in how societies are modeled, structured, how governance is structured since the dawn of agriculture and since we switched from these, forging societies. But And just by the way, I did look it up. If you type in, wars started by women as compared to men, you will get one of these. I'm not sure how the data is. Haven't gone into it. Female rulers were 27% more likely to wage war than males. There's another there's a few of these that immediately pop up.

And so I the only reason I'm bringing it up because I'm I'm fixated in my head while thinking about the future of all species on earth and and the things that we're working on is you would you can't pull one lever. It's like I I the the analogy I don't know how old you are, but you've seen an equalizer. There's no perfect music sound. There's none. You can pot up, which is the potting is up and down. You can pot up and down, and someone might like more bass and someone might like more treble.

So you can have women in charge or men in charge. It doesn't mean it will change if the underlying constructs are, they could be religious. They could be a geographical. They could be, socialism, capitalism, communism. They could be authoritarian. They can have so many different references that shifting one lever doesn't change the entire construct.

Yeah. And and one thing to the point that you brought up about that 27% more likely to start a war figure on the on the female side is I I would wonder what the level of influence is, so I'd be very interested in reading that paper. I'd be very curious to know what the level of influence is of males in the power structure below her who are pressuring her to, to execute a certain action or go a certain way, or her power is effectively threatened.

So she is facing more pressure than a typical male ruler would would face, because the sub the substructures underneath her level of power are still sort of controlled on a male level. And obviously And she's still trying to protect. It goes back to the, agricultural, though. She she as a human species, character, she has learned to protect her territory. She has learned that if she is these are often Queens. She has learned that she protects the family, the the region, the whatever.

So, yeah, it could be fascinating because you're you're really exposing to me. You're tying pieces together about. The biological side of the sounds awful to say it in this way, but maybe it's not. Is the release of tension, the capability, the non conflict that came about with pre agricultural, but also at the same time, societies like the Icelandic or the the Swedes, Norway, Russians, and how they interact and tie sexuality together into this. Yeah. Interesting.

And, and then another interesting point since we're we're talking about this is, I I may have already mentioned this as we were talking earlier, but something Sigmund Freud was sort of, famous for saying is that all of western society was probably built you know, all western capitalism and the structures that you see was built on pent up sexual energy. So when you bottle up testosterone and don't allow for outlet, it can be vectored and applied to basically to building.

Which is the challenge that the Chinese have with the one child policy. Yeah. That is one of the fears that is part of the Chinese, challenges moving forward. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And and, I mean, the yeah. The Chinese are also, you know, still very interesting because if you look culturally at them, traditional Chinese love, they say it is about sacrifice. In in China, happiness is considered a luxury, and family is so much more important.

Helping your family, pleasing your family, happiness is not a necessity. So marriage and everything that comes with it is not always necessarily going to be out of a sense of love as opposed to a sense of duty. And I don't and the Chinese are certainly not, the only society. The Japanese society. Yeah. You can go down the list of societies that have had that. So that that's just an example an example of yes. I understand. Yeah. But and I know we've been on this this one bullet point for a while.

What I would like to what I would like to do really quick, to kind of round this out is talk about a few of the tribes around the world of the forager tribes, that still exist. So you got the Canela tribe in the Amazon k e l l? It's c a n e l a. C a n a l a. Okay. And I just picked some random ones from around the world, but I thought they were good examples, and they're much more eloquently discussed, in the in the sex at dawn book that I told you about.

Yep. But they give many, many, many different examples of different tribes and different customs. A lot of them have a lot of the same underlying traits of which, some of which I described earlier, but you have the Kanala tribe, that's in the Amazon. You have the Dagara tribe, d a g a r a. Yep. That's in Burkina Faso in West Africa. Yep. You have the, Montanes, natives, so North America, North American continent, Canada, Native American tribe there.

Yep. And then you have the Masuo people in, South Central China. I'll talk a little bit more about them in a minute. Those those are that group I find particularly interesting just because of the fact that they actually have infrastructure as opposed to, a more mobile forging type society. Okay. So to start off with the Canelo tribe in the Amazon, it's important to note that culturally, they believe the tribe is more important than the individual.

So generosity, sharing, selflessness, that is considered the ideal. Withholding so keeping resources to yourself or not sharing not sharing with people who need it, that is considered a social evil. So sharing actually is something that brings good esteem upon upon people in that tribe, and that also extends to one's body. So control over yourself or or always wanting control over yourself is considered a form of stinginess.

So they they do have bodily autonomy, but there's also the cultural pressures of, being making sure you share. So no one is sort of the underlying point with this tribe is no one's so self important that satisfying a fellow tribesman is less gratifying than the personal gain that you would get out of a situation. And that culture, that's recognized as a way to build and maintain a network of mutually beneficial relationships, and sex does not require explanation. It just is.

So nonreproductive sex, you don't have to explain it away as you might in many other social groups that we are familiar with in more industrialized societies. Okay. Another another group, I mentioned the, the Degara tribe there there in in West Africa. So a very, a very interesting aspect of this tribe is any number of of women in the tribe might nurse any child in the tribe.

So it's common for groups of sisters, for example, to share nursing functions or even the mother of the woman that had the baby to also nurse the baby, even if she's no longer lactating, just to keep the keep the child occupied. Yeah. And children in the villages, they are able to and this is, from what I've been told, pretty typical in rural African communities.

They are able to wander in and out of the houses throughout the village and always know that they are going to be looked at looked after. There's a very familial element to how children are brought up in that society. So it gives the child a very broad sense of belonging. Everybody's chipping in to help raise the child. This is a pretty consistent consistent element across all these societies that that I'm describing.

And the psychological advantages that come out of that, you it's very uncommon for children to feel isolated or develop psychological problems. Everybody is very aware that he or she belongs. And remember I mentioned that 3rd innate human drive, which is connection. Belonging, knowing that you're here for a purpose.

And that is very it's very important to note that you've got very few psychological issues, at least noted psychological issues, in that society, and then you compare it to Western society, where we have an opioid epidemic, we have a mental health epidemic, high suicide rates. Japan is, very Suicide. Yep. Bad example of of high suicide rates when you feel cut off from connection. And a lot of that is, I would say, by my assessment, connected to Japanese sexual culture.

Yes. Which is also, you know, which is also more of a an isolated isolated kind of contract. I would say I would say it differently. It's not connected to sexual. It's connected to the orientation of the society around sexuality as a construct. Because it's easy to say that because they don't have sex, but it's not the sex. It is the construct around the openness, the sharing, and all of the other components. And the connection. And the connection. So I'm kind of expanding that.

I don't know if I I think that's a good one to say. I think that that is that's absolutely Because it's very easy to say, well, they don't have sex. Well, yeah, but sex won't solve the suicide situation. Yeah. And because I I it's very close. I know someone whose, sister's, daughter just committed suicide, so, in Japan.

So it's, I I immediately went to it and said, it won't be solved by that because that wasn't the issue, But the society as a whole might be delivering this challenge for that one child. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And and suicide is so that's that one is also, you know, not just from studies, but, yeah, that that one is also a problem that's very near and dear, to my heart. We we won't go off on that. No. No. I I I will before we you'll do this next one. Right?

Just if you put down on your note, I do wanna know how because we're looking at developing new societies going out into space.

I would like to explore I'd like to explore for just a moment or 2 about the abuses that happen in the societies or, and I'm gonna throw this in, I don't wanna always give answers to the question, could our representation of the stories that have worth 100 or 1000 of years ago happening, could they have been distorted enough that the reality was that the world as a culture was better and we just don't know it or remember it? Well, I So let's let's let's finish these 2.

Yeah. The the, you've got the Matan, Matanesa and then the, Mosiah? The Maasau. Maasau. So we've got those 2 more. I could also be butchering that, but, That that's you spelled it, so that's good enough for me. Yeah. So the, the Montanet, there's a there there's a incident that was described, by, some of these anthropologists where a missionary was and this was man, when was it? I want to say it was in 17th century.

There was a Jesuit missionary who started off on a lecture, to a, Montanese native man talking about the dangers of the rampant infidelity that he was witnessing, you know, all the males sleeping with all the females, vice versa, and that that was not conducive to proper parenthood and how it's not honorable for a woman to love anyone except her husband, that this is evil, on and on and on, applying your standard Roman Catholic doctrine.

And one of the examples that the missionary gave was that you don't even know if this young boy here, who you call your son, is in fact your son. And the native responded to him, you don't have any sense. You French people, you only love your own children, but we love all the children of our tribe.

Yep. And it's it's an important distinction to make that, the the way that we view care in a community I I think that there is still a at least from what I'm able to witness, there is still a, a deep instinct among humans in general to protect the young of that society. You know, if you see, you know, if we're out and we see a a child crying, he's lost his mom, your instant instinct is to go help that child and help them find their mom.

If, you know, if a child you know, I used to take my I used to take my brother to the park, when we were younger, and I remember one time he fell off the, you know, he fell off this play set that that, I was standing at the base of and pancaked onto the ground, started screaming bloody murder. You know, he he was hurt, and every single parent I I wanna say I was 12 at the time.

Like, 12 or 13. Every single parent on the on the playground descended on on that scene and and was, you know, trying to take control of of the situation. So there is there is an instinct societally, there is an instinct, even if that kid's not mine and I'm not gonna put resources toward that kid, you know, even if there's that standard narrative, structure, we still have that instinct in our DNA. So it I I do wanna I do wanna make note of that.

But the the point you just made, that what you just shared was an example of a story that I had never heard, and I've got to believe many others have not heard. I that's an example of what the question I just asked you. Did history stamp out such as this missionary who probably could write and this tribesman could not? Did the did the story come back? These people live like heathens. They are terrible. They do not they have sex all over. So the story was wiping out the cultural history.

Well, certainly, I mean, it wasn't so much that the story was wiping out the cultural history. It was that exported cultures were wiping out Okay. And both. Yes. Agree. So, you know, we have the whole history of colonialization and, what's the word I'm I'm looking for here? Assimilation of of cultures into a a more dominant forced one. Yep. You had the, you know, the old outages of the sun never set on the British Empire.

The British have it you still see a lot of British cultural influence in places all around the world. A lot of I lived in Hong Kong, and I've been all over Asia. So Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you you've seen this. Oh, it's it's prevalent. The names, the the roads, the I lived on the street, which was the first street that whenever you, the royalty or or any of the high or echelon came, they would actually go up the street that I was on to meet with dignitaries. So, yes, it's still there.

Yeah. So, I would I would say that it was more of the forced adoption of elements of Western culture and Western religion that wreaked a lot more havoc on a lot of these societies, than necessarily the written history would.

I I think the reason that we know about these possibilities and and the fact that our society may have looked very different during prehistory period and before the dawn of agriculture is because these accounts have been taken and are written in and these we had a, a way of documenting it before certain cultures were stamped out.

Yep. So I wanna move to let's move really quick to the final, because sort of on that note, you know, let's let's look at this final, final culture, who are not really a, a hunter gatherer forager society, but they are an incredibly fascinating society. They are, again, the Massau Massau people of South Central China. They, live in the mountains surrounding Lugu Lake, which is near the border of China's, Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. Really only about 50,000 plus people, so less than a 100,000.

And they worship the lake itself as their mother goddess, and the mountain that towers over it is the respected as the, goddess of love. Another really interesting thing about this society, they had the sole pictographic language that is still used in the world today, and this is incredibly interesting to me as a researcher. They do not have words in that society for murder, war, or rape, And they do not have words for husband or wife. They prefer the word Azu, which means friend.

So this is a society that is focused around the sexual autonomy of all adults. So that includes the women as well as men. So the first explorers to come through there, Marco Polo was, was an example. He came through that region and misinterpreted the situation, writing that the men here are so generous with their women toward the foreigners, who come through. You know, you could you could spend days with, with one of these women in her bed.

What he didn't understand is that culturally, no men own women in that society. That is not how it is looked at. And, your, your more frequent lovers can have or, well, obviously, more frequent, but, you're more what we would call promiscuous members of that society, male and female. They may have hundreds of lovers over the course of their life. So, again, they are an agricultural people, but they're a female centric power society.

They pass property and family name from mother to daughter instead of father to son. So the household itself revolves around the women. Father figures are uncles in that society. So if, if a girl gets pregnant, it is actually her brothers who act as the, act as the fathers to her children because that child, as far as they know, is more closely related to them than the the other children of obviously, they have, they have passed their own genetic line through other women, throughout the society.

But the point is is that the society working like this guarantees the sexual sexual availability for every member of the society. In fact, the, the Massau woman, once she, reaches fertility age, she has complete autonomy as to who gets to enter her bedroom. And there is a door that is open to the street, and there is a door that is open to the main house. And again, she's protected by her brothers, but her bedroom is what is known, and I I actually thought this was really sweet.

Her bedroom is known as her flower room. And the and the she can have a different lover every night or many in the same night if she chooses. There's no expected commitment and that like I said before, the child that she conceives is raised in her mother's house, and it's done with the help of the girls' brothers and the rest of the community. So it is a shared effort, cooperative cooperative effort among the society to raise the children.

So and I'll quote actually, I'd like to quote the book directly here really quick. Every adult was responsible for every child, and every child in turn was respectful of every adult. So the language the in the Maso language, this is also very interesting because we talked a little bit about how they don't have these certain words. The word Awu in their language translates to both father and uncle.

So a child has many uncles, and they all protect and and cooperatively take care of this child and help raise the child. But, ironically, an interesting thing about this society is that they are very hush-hush when it comes to discussion of sexuality. Certainly, a you don't discuss it with your family. It's very similar to the Chinese in that fashion. You don't talk about sexuality. You just don't. And that's that's not, that's not common only to that region of the world.

It's also very common in in other Asian societies, in Middle Eastern societies, etcetera. So no kissing and telling, but privacy is paramount. So you give each other your privacy, and they only have what are known as walking marriages. So you are allowed, of course, to take the same lover again and again, but that person never is wholly bonded to you. When the person leaves, when the lover leaves the the flower room, that is considered the end of it.

He may come back, but for the girl's purposes, she considers that the end of the relationship. So jealousy is a huge negative thing in that society. It's considered a form of aggression. It's implied that it is intrusion upon that sexual autonomy of another person. And I I kind of, fall in line with this line of thinking. I think that a person's, sexual autonomy, or I call it sexual sovereignty, is one of the most important things that a person can have.

So, you know, I consider, like, sex crimes are some of the worst crimes that you can commit against humanity. And it yeah. It's interesting because that's what's going through my mind, and I'm trying to wrestle with how much of what we have is an orientation to what we've constructed as to what it could have been if it had been different. I would honestly say much.

Now it's it's a very interesting paradigm because if we did not have the dawn of agriculture and the the fiefdoms, kingdoms, empires that would follow and eventually those would become republics over the course of 1000 of years, we wouldn't have reached technologically, I think, the Right. Well, and that's that that is the multi the multiverse paradox. Yeah. We don't know.

So, I mean, honestly, just from an economic and technological perspective, that is sort of the way I see it is that it's awesome that we are going into space.

I don't know that we would have at least not by this point in history, I don't know that we would have been able to develop the technology, and and the system, socioeconomic systems that were necessary to get Again, we don't know because it could have been if everybody got along better, they could have invented faster, and and we don't know. It's a it's a question.

I'm still I still go back in my mind saying, I think just as you were saying, rape and all of these activities, pedophilia are all horrific types of conditions. The situations and no one should go through them in any society. Yet I'm wondering, has society in general wiped away a lot of all of these positive attributes that were never recorded because there was no video, there was no written word. It was just a society.

I wonder if we went back 5000 or 10000 or 20000 years And we took many of these societies and could do a study on them. Would they have come back with? No, no, no. They don't have these things. There are less of these or more of them. There could be more rape. There could be more. I don't know. I there I'd it's not an answer that we can deliver. So let let's go on to the next one. Where do you wanna take us from here? Oh, okay. So, want to yeah.

Just to to wrap this and, so that was another major area of my study was what causes psychosexual dysfunction. Again, I wanted to originally apply military science against sexual science. Yeah. What's the difference between military science and sexual science? The military science is obviously the the application of, tactics and structuring, actions in in a certain way. So, you know, we in the military, we break things into into different levels of responsibility.

So you have strip, strategy, operations, tactics. Strategically, you know, we have our strategic goals. What is the strategic goal? To win the war. Okay. So what do we need? You break it down to the next level. What is the next level, which is the operational level? You have these massive operations that are put together to win the war, win the proverbial war.

So for example, D Day, and met you know, many many other operations through so Operation Overlord, Operation Market Garden, these these camp famous campaigns that you hear about in World War 2, those were operational level. Mhmm. And they were feeding into the strategic mechanism of what the overall giant strategy was to eventually secure victory. Yep. And then on the tactical level, tactics is the stuff that you see on the battlefield. It is, hey, how do we take out this tank?

How do we move from this building to the next building? I know I'm giving a lot of World War 2 examples here, but, you know, that's one of the one of the best known best known versions that really the the world has a deeper memory for. I was interested in applying the sexual sciences to combat, so studying forensic sexology, and what I hope to eventually develop into some sort of sexological counterintelligence, fundamentals or program.

Studying some of our most most messed up adversaries, if you will. So at the time, the the adversary of the day, and still sort of is, although they're less of a, I think, less of a threat now, are, you know, your Al Qaeda, ISIS guys. There was a very consistent attribute that a lot of them shared that not a lot of people know or at least did not would not talk about, and that was that they have extreme psychosexual deviations, most of them that fall into that group of illegal paraphilias.

Really? Most of these guys. And that is, I believe, connected to origins for violence and origins for extremism. And it is dark. It is I mean, it it is some some dark dark stuff. So looking looking at at how could we possibly mitigate that, how could we develop counter strategies, counter tactics to effectively stop these extremists from becoming extreme to begin with.

Because I believed, and I, you know, I found conflicting data here and there, but, so my belief, at the time at least going into it, my hypothesis was that extreme psychosexual deviations are root are potentially a root cause in extreme violence or vice versa. And you see this in other extreme communities, especially online, for example. So, I don't know if you've heard of the Incel community. It is a they're known as, quote, involuntary celibates.

They're sort of low status males who are angry at women. They choose to be angry at women for never giving them sex. They blame women for all their problems. They're extremely misogynistic. They're very anti woman, and, they will perpetuate violence against women. They support violence against women. So for example, I don't know if you remember, this was back, probably back in the early 20 tens. I forget the exact year, but the Santa Barbara shooter at at UCSB in Santa Barbara, California Mhmm.

Was one of these individuals. So he was an extremist in cell. He showed up with a gun and targeted women. So he targeted young college women that were there. I forget how many died. I feel, you know, terrible for for not being able to to give that, but that is not an isolated incident. And you've seen more, you know, for a multitude of factors, easy access to firearms, growing extremism in different communities, all over the states where you've seen more and more attacks like that.

But an interesting thing, because, you know, I've spoken with, spoken with counterintelligence agents as well. An interesting thing to note is that people who commit espionage, and this this blew me away, and I had to kind of reanalyze a lot of my, you know, hypothesis because it went deeper, it went further. People who commit espionage tend to be or tend to have extreme paraphilic behavior.

And it it's I there's I I'm assuming that there is probably a pretty significant chemical element to it, but that is not the that is not the only thing going on. So this was originally the reason why I came into the field. It's what I hope to eventually be my big contribution to humanity in the field, is how do we mitigate these issues? And I think a lot of it is connected because you mentioned earlier, what was lost? You know, what how would society be different? I have had hypotheses.

I'm not the only one, but, I have argued for years that extreme repression by, cultural and religious influences, which themselves have major psychological power, extreme repression of human sexuality and biology compounds to lead and develop to psychosexual deviations in human beings at higher rates than would exist if you had a even more just comprehensively sexual society.

You wouldn't nearly see the amount of, male violence that you see in Western societies and other societies around the world that are male dominated in century. And I'm I know I'm probably gonna piss a lot of dudes around the world off saying this. Don't worry about it. Generally generally, we find the data points to the fact that female centric societies typically are more peaceful. The males are, under far less stress. They're much more satisfied.

They have a higher quality of life, and, this is an interesting fact and maybe it's why it's it's an issue for our current capitalist model. Males who get all the sex they want constantly are actually much more lazy. They've been found to to be much more lazy. Because if you think about it logically, reverse the logic, why do I, a male in Western society, do all the things that I do? I I I say the same thing.

I say this what I say is if in fact there were no women on this planet, and let's just use women as a in the male side, I'd say there would be no buildings. There would no be no big cars or cars, race cars. You wouldn't need them.

There would be they wouldn't shave, wouldn't take care of anything because a lot when we break it down, a lot of the things that humans do have an orientation to finding a mate, to showing up to be more impressive, to look a certain way to do things, and that the the male driver would be lost if there were just males on the planet.

And we're assuming, again, let's to be correct here, that it is a single society heterosexual type orientation, that we could probably break it down multiple other ways. But, yeah, I don't think there there would be a lot less going on, so I'm actually taken to another extreme versus having all the sex. What if women didn't exist? Yes. So I I am in the same boat. If, I'm well, I'm not saying that if women didn't exist, males wouldn't still be horny. I don't wanna No. No. No. I yes.

I agree with you on that. Yeah. About how that would go. Probably not very cool. But, the I I guess, really, the the ultimate point to really take away from all this, from this bullet point in this discussion that we've been having, is that our perceived normal, as we call it, isn't necessarily the natural way of things. The nat the natural normal. How our ancestors interacted with each other for social cohesion.

So Yeah. I really look at it as from the evidence, most of the current structure was emplaced by those who seized power, so kings, emperors, rulers, who ensured that they themselves, by the way, had unlimited access to sex. Aztec emperors, for example, are known to have kept, thousands of concubines and rulers of of, you know, the Aztec kingdom. They were expected to copulate with a minimum of 2 female 2 females a day and often more in order to spread the seed of of the sun king.

And that was a way of establishing an order that they could control. So really, the current structure that you see has always been about control of sexuality. And a really, really interesting point that, so for example, the the guy who founded, the institute where I did my postgraduate research, Ted McElvena, who is in himself an extremely controversial guy, and I certainly didn't agree with a lot of the things that came out of his mouth.

But one thing he said that I think was pretty dead on, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he said something I've noticed about fundamentalist religious organizations and authoritarian governments alike is their total understanding that if you can control someone's sexuality, you can control them completely.

And if you look through history, and you look at authoritarian regimes, and you look at, for example, the inquisition the Spanish Inquisition, a huge part of how they go by their playbook is the, first and foremost, the persecution of sexual minorities, even before religious minorities. So the Nazis, for example, they burned Magnus Hirschfeld's, sex institute, the Institute for Sex with Disenchantment, 5 years, 5 years before Kristallnacht ever happened.

They persecuted and killed homosexuals in German society first. Transsexuals, anybody who did not fit the standard narrative, they were others. They were unwanted, and you will find that is very typical of authoritarian regimes across history. So I think it's important to to make that point.

We now have these societies that are going in the space that I think have primarily been built up on repressed sexual energy, especially the United States, who we now have the opportunity to sort of reassess and redefine thing. Hopefully, it redefine things, hopefully, from a more, scientifically based kind of view because we do bring all these biases and mores and all of it with us. Okay. So I I think we've beaten that.

No. No. No. I think I it was, when you're doing a podcast, one of the challenges is how long do you let something go? Because you could say that the that maybe the listener won't listen. Yet at the same time, I'm interested. So I this was a great topic, and I think it helps to I think we explored it in a way that gave opportunities for creating a new future. So it it very it was perfect. I mean, it was a lot, but it's what needs to be said. So, we won't have to go to this topic again.

So it's great. Have a great job so far. So let where do we go now? Where where do you where are you taking me? Okay, so I'll I'll try to to shorten this up. No, no, don't turn it. You're doing fine. Where would you like to take me? So I don't know if you're looking to go watch the Super Bowl or anything, but I'm not particularly I just I don't I'm I'm a Super Bowl is not right now. This is it. Don't worry. I will stay. What, what's the where do we go now?

Okay. So, kind of so coming down to the next point, the next bullet, which what are we on? Wapping number 3 here. Yeah. Talked about the fact that researching and determining solutions for sexual reproduction in these environments in outer space is, and I'll put this in parentheses, nearly completely essential to our ultimate survival as a species. And I'll explain why I said nearly here in a minute.

But the first major point to make, with regard to this argument is that, simply put, when you apply math, single planet species do not ultimately survive. If you stay in the same place forever, eventually some calamity is going to come along and happen that wipes your species out. Human beings have proven to be a very hardy species overall. You know, we had we've had definitely a, couple close calls.

The best one I can think of is we barely, as a as human population, barely survived a volcanic supereruption that occurred around 74000 years ago. So when we were still foragers, hunter gatherers, there was a supervolcano that went off in, I wanna say it was Toba, or possibly the, Sumoffshore Flats. Point the point to to exercise here is this explosion was 5,000 times larger than the Mount Saint Helens eruption that we saw in the 19 eighties. How many times larger? 5000 times.

So if you remember that countries around the world, I mean, were seeing ash from Mount Saint Helens descend into their streets, you can imagine multiply that by times 5,000, and you've got a pretty good It was Toba, t o b a. Toba. Yeah. So this, this was a very actually a very important event in a lot of ways. First off, it ushered in a volcanic winter, sort of very similar to a nuclear winter, if we were to send nuclear bombs off all over the planet. So it blocked out the sun.

It, created to a a mass dying of a lot of species. That volcanic winter that lasted for about 6 to 10 years, it's assessed, when they look at the geological history, and it led to a 1000 year, so the full millennium, of cooling of the earth's surface, which is very important to how humans eventually became the the more dominant, more dominant species on the planet, because we managed to master things such as tools, fire, etcetera.

But the ice age, the proverbial ice age that you that you hear of, this was, this was an onset. It is estimated by a lot of, a lot of geologists and anthropologists, scientists down the line, that human society may have shrunk to as few as 10,000 human beings on the on the face of the planet, primarily concentrated in Africa again, that actually survived. So all of us as human beings are more or less descendants of those original survivors.

So that is an example of one of our close calls that we have already had. And all it take you know, as I as I'll tell people, all it takes is one asteroid strike. You know, you could ask the dinosaurs, but they're no longer here to tell you that. Earth has already gone through 5 mass extinctions in our recorded history, and insofar as we're able to to tell from, geological data.

And right now, it's been estimated that we are already in the middle of a 6th mass extinction of species around the globe that is being caused by primarily human activity and associated climate change, etcetera, overpopulation, deforestation, all the Our our 6 mega our 6 mega challenges that are Project MoonNet. Yes. Exactly.

So you've got asteroids, super volcanoes, nuclear war, if it ever comes to that, climate change, food shortages, mass migration, all all these calamities that could happen that, again, could bring us to the brink of extinction. And right now, we're looking at what I think geopolitically is a destabilization or at least reordering of the post World War 2 international order.

So you had societies that were able to industrialize and grow in relative peace since relative global peace since the last World War with the United States and originally alongside them, sort of the Soviet Union had their 2 different sides. And once the Soviet Union fell, the US has sort of acted as the enforcer of its own, system of development and government around the globe.

So the US Navy really has allowed for the growth and protection of commerce across earth's oceans and has led to, arguably, has led helped lead to the rise of all these other industrial societies around the globe, not just Europe and the rebuilding of Europe. So you've seen the rise of China, the rise of India, countries in Africa that are rapidly industrializing and again You could go down the list.

I mean, North South Korea, Japan, all over the countries around the world have benefited over the past 50 years or 60 years. So yeah. Yeah. I I I've kind of I have looked at it and I've said maybe everybody's looking at the future of this new awakening. I've said, what if the past 50 years of peace, more or less as a global condition? Maybe this was the good time. And as you're saying, there's a reordering.

So maybe there And and I'm I'm hoping that ultimately what we are actually entering, as you like to put it, is the age of infinite where we rise as a species, as a global species to certain challenges and create opportunities out of what previously were very extreme challenges. Yep. Absolutely.

So but sort of the the point that, that I'm I'm trying to make with the single planet species don't survive is as a species and as a hopefully a guardian of other species on our planet, what we need to establish is an existential what I call an existential insurance policy, not just on our own species, but on many others. So you have in Norway, in Svalbard, you've got the doomsday seed vault that I'm just you probably heard of.

We also need to do that with living species, with, with embryos and gametes of species elsewhere from Earth in the universe, and that could be the moon, it could be even further depending on the risk of calamity that we are talking about. Because if an asteroid comes and strikes the earth, you can bet the moon is somehow probably going to be affected, considering they are so close to each other and captured on the size and scale and scope.

Yeah. Captured in each other's orbit or in this orbital dance with each other. So there's, I'd like to read a quote really fast. I wanna stay light on the quotes, but That's okay. You're doing fine. There's a a former NASA roboticist named Randall Munro who became a cartoonist, and he he had a quote that said, and I'll read it for you here. The universe is probably littered with the 1 planet graves of cultures that made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space.

Each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones that made the irrational decision. So if you really need a reason to, you know, if you need motivation to go into space and to, to find, sell new worlds, or at least create this existential insurance policy as I described it, there you go. The clock eventually, just based on that, the clock is ticking for eventually when a cataclysmic event that could trigger total mass extinction is going to happen on earth.

It has happened before, numerous times. It will happen again. I did not mean to quote Armageddon or whatever movie it was there. Well, yes. There's mathematically, the odds are at some point, and the challenge becomes what is that math actually, equate to in 500 to 5000 years, 5000 years, 200, whatever the math may be, there will be a time in which something will hit this planet. Yeah. And the and the speed and, honestly, it may not even be something hitting this planet.

Another another interesting, thing that I like to to quote for people, nice little factoid that I like to quote for people sometimes is Yellowstone National Park. Yep. Great park to go to. You can see the the, steam pits, caldera, all that. What many people fail to realize when they visit is that they are actually standing on the mouth of a supervolcano that is crushed over.

And the size of that magma chamber, I'm this may be completely off or or incorrect, but in the back of my mind I want to say the size of that magma chamber is roughly 1 third of the United States and the it it volcanologists have determined that Yellowstone on average goes off, I wanna say, every 600000 years. There's 641000 years ago is when it went off, and it's it's measures this the edge of the supervolcano is, approximately 30 to 45 miles wide or 50 to 70 kilometers wide.

So that's the opening. So I think the best way to think about it is if you were to look at a volcano that someone has flown over that's not operating, it's not a kilometer wide. It's not a mile wide. And then to think of a volcano where the top of it is that large. Yeah. And as you mentioned, it's the last eruption occurred roughly 6440000 years ago by our math, and the average of that volcano going off is every 600000 years.

So it would seem, if we go by the averages, we are about 40,000 years overdue on this thing going off. And when it does go off, it will probably go off with a force beyond imagining. And if you wanna talk about volcanic winter, and by the way being cut off from all the technological capabilities that we have because of satellites in orbit, etcetera, and the sun being blocked out, the list goes on and on, society as we know it would end completely. Modern society would end completely.

So earth We might go back to 10,000. Oh, yeah. So apoca apocalypse levels that we're that we're discussing here. So what what can we do by establishing it in order to establish this insurance policy? What are the things that we can potentially do, the pathways that we could potentially take to, provide an insurance policy and prevent that from happening to the whole species.

So, one is and this this has been mentioned in science fiction, it's been advocated for in a lot of academic papers, is to create a quote unquote second Earth simulated environment, so something like a Stanford torus or an O'Neill cylinder, this giant rotating space station which provides artificial gravity. But and, it I've seen a number of these in films. What was the It was the one with Matthew McConaughey. Matt Matt Damon was in in, in one of these films.

And it was Matthew McConaughey where he comes back Oh, okay. Yeah. There is there is one in in, so an O'Neill cylinder is what you're you're shown in Interstellar with Interstellar. Yes. In Elysium, that was the name of the film. Yeah. In Elysium with Matt Damon, it shows what is a Stanford Taurus. So this gigantic rotating wheel, and if you think about ever going down inside a wheel downhill as a kid, same same mechanics. Right?

Yeah. The the the challenge that I have whenever I see these, especially from individuals who are promoting this to be in the near future, meaning in 5, 7, 10, 15 years, is that you have I mean, we you'd have to have the amount of material that would have to go into space, including beds and electronics and things that cannot be manufactured in space or cannot it it would take rocket after rocket after rocket after rocket just to build it, and we're talking 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars.

Oh, more than I would I would estimate quadrillions, pentillions. Okay. If we use More than more than Earth's global economy and GDP is by a lot, in order to build a superstructure of that size. I so I I was just mentioning a small one, say, 2, 300, 400, meters of diameter. That's what I was thinking. But if to actually have a full sequencing like you see in the movies where there there's full cities inside, hey.

Yeah. It it takes on Earth to build a home, a home where you have all the supplies on earth. You have trucks. You have gravity. You have people. It could take from planning to 6 months to 2 years. If you build a city with a 1000000 people, how long does that take? 10 years? 15 years? I mean and we make it and that's with all the supplies on Earth. That's with all the transportation tools. That's with all the materials right here. Imagine having to ship every bit of it, including the people.

Just so, yes, I that is an insurance policy, but it's a challenging one. Yes. So that is that one, I would say, is primarily engineering based. Taking what we know works and, engineering a insanely expensive thing that would take decades but could potentially provide you that simulated environment. So so there was a paper by, actually one of the one of the gentlemen who was on my PhD committee, Jim doctor Jim Logan.

He was NASA's, former chief medical officer at, at Johnson Space Center for a number of years, and later he was the provost of the International Space University when it was when it was founded. He released a paper, I forget when it was, it may have been around 2014, that discussed, the concept for hollowing out a celestial body like an asteroid or, the one he advocates for is Mars' smaller moon, Deimos Yeah. Hollowing out so that you, have a nest, if you will.

You have radiation protection from the external galactic cosmic radiation GCR coming in and and tearing through the molecular bonds of carbon based life forms that are living there. So having this big shield around you in the form of of that celestial body and then having the rotating station inside there to, apply. Okay. So there's a with inside of it, you create the gravity field by using the actual astro the the rock. It's not a full planet.

I've been told it's more of a rock floating around, but you're inside of it because then you can bolt on, you can hold on to and create this Giant hamster wheel, effectively. Yeah. Yep. So so that is an engineering only type solution, but again, would take decades, possibly 100 of years, trillions upon quaggaon. In your case, we're talking about society of at large, meaning humans.

And we don't the the challenge that I have with all many of these conversations is it's not whales, amoebas, dolphins, alligators. There's just so many creatures on the there's 50,000,000 species on this planet. This is really human survival. Yes. And and we are specifically talking about human survival here.

Although, if I could pose the question to you really quick or really to anybody, I would think that you wouldn't really want to live in a simulated earth environment that did not have trees and grass and ladybugs, butterflies, all these things that we would need to bring with us, sort of like the, what was it, the Genesis project in Star Trek. I know we're nerding out here, but I think that was in the Wrath of Khan film, if I'm if I'm quoting that correctly. But let's not beat this one to death.

Engineering that environment, that second simulated earth environment, that is one of the things that we can do. Directly settling other celestial bodies is the most immediately obvious option to a lot of people, whether that be settling on the moon, settling Mars. Some folks out there will argue for the upper atmosphere of Venus, but logistically, there's a lot of questions there.

In order to do that, because we are talking talking about differing radiation levels, we're talking about, most importantly, differing gravity levels. The acceleration of gravity is different on these on these bodies. On Mars, it's roughly 38% that of as on Earth. On the moon, it's 1 sixth of Earth gravity, which is why we were able to see people bounce around in in the old videos of the Apollo astronauts.

So we need to know and establish what the reproductive limits that humans have in these altered environments is and develop technologies, practices, and procedures that are going to mitigate the risks in a way that is medically, ethically, and socially acceptable. And while we have time on our side, now is the time to do that. I'll get more to this a little bit later. Right now, we are facing a lot of challenges here on earth, but we are not quite yet facing apocalypse.

There's still time to turn things around on this, the cocoon of our of our civilization, of our existence, the only place that we have ever existed. So we all And which is what you've seen in our project Moon Knight. We're trying to solve for space and Earth simultaneously. Yes. And which is why I lobbed the effort. And we biologically looking at it.

We have evolved on earth over the last What three and a half 1000000000 years all the way from single celled organisms all the way to the complex thinking talking breathing believing organisms that sentient organisms that we are today And during that entire time, we have only ever really had 2 constants that we have the benefit of of having.

1 was protection from radiation, given to us by our both our magnetosphere, the magnet the Van Allen belts and which which has generated that electromagnetic field shield that is generated by our spinning molten metallic core at the at the center of the earth and our atmosphere. The heaviness of our atmosphere radiation protection that it provides, a lot of people don't realize.

But despite our atmosphere being very thin, when you look at it from, say, the space station, you realize how thin the atmosphere is. It's barely above the surface from what you're able to see. But the amount of mass that it contains is a huge saving grace for all of us living on the surface protecting us from, external space borne radiation from galactic cosmic radiation, which is the majority that we would be absorbing if we did not have the magnetosphere and the atmosphere protecting us.

It's about the equivalent of, 12 to 14 feet, and I'll bring up this I'll bring up this stat later again. 12 to 14 feet of regolith piled on top of you. That's what we're talking about in terms of air particles, the mass that is above you.

So ionized radiation particle comes, you know, somehow makes it through the magnet magnetosphere shield, penetrates the atmosphere and it continues coming down toward the earth, most of those particles are going to collide with an air particle before they ever get down to the surface level and smash into, you know, into your skin and start creating skin cancer potentially. So that's why when we talk about flying in space at 50,000 for 35,000, 40000 feet, we equate it to radiation.

Precisely. And there are I never tried the I knew we were up there. I knew we had less shield, but I never realized that the cons the the activity that was happening, that they were bomb they were hitting, molecules as they came down, and they therefore were stopped. Yeah. It's it is a it really is a cocoon that we have around us in the form of our magnetosphere and our and our atmosphere. So we've had the benefit of that protection throughout the history of life as far as we're able to to tell.

When these organisms were developing, we went through all these different ages and periods and you had dinosaurs and then mammals and, sea creatures of all all kinds and we a 1,000 on the order of factors of a 1000 species have gone extinct, but they always had those, that constant of radiation protection. The only other constant was the gravitational constant.

Earth is made up of this amount of mass, which gives us the acceleration of 9.807 meters per second squared toward the center of mass of Earth. So we are pulled to the earth at that acceleration rate. Our entire biology has evolved under that gravity constant and under that radiation protection constant. Everything else has changed, the environments, the way that, you know, the types of plants that existed, the, acidity levels in the oceans, the atmospheric composition even.

For example, during the age of the dinosaurs, it was much hotter, wetter, more humid. There was more carbon in the atmosphere. And as the plants of those periods and the dinosaurs died off and were absorbed into the earth's crust, that helped with the cooling overall cooling of the planet. And that's why we call those fossil fuels because we are taking the carbon that was sucked into the earth's crust and now burning it and releasing it back in the atmosphere.

So hence the the atmosphere is warming up again, and we're seeing climate change and and all the results that that come with that. But the important thing to note is that when we suddenly and radically change those constants against the human body and against our physiology and our our biology, that can have profound effects on our cellular development and how the whole system works.

And it's been noted that spaceflight has compounding effects on all the different systems within the human body, whether it be cytoskeletal cytoskeletal, neurovestibular, organs, the the whole lot are affected in some way. So it should be assumed until we can prove otherwise that the reproductive systems are also affected.

And if you can't reproduce in space or in these other environments where these constants that I've mentioned are different, you are not going to be able to have a self sustained society, as Elon Musk describes it, a self sustaining civilization past the 1st generation because if we cannot have babies and we can't raise young as we have for 100 of 1000 of years It's game.

Yeah, it's a game over game over Because you will we won't have any babies that live to adulthood, and all the adults that are there that did make it there are going to die off eventually.

One of the first conversations I had at NASA Ames, not being a person who studied space my whole life, I mentioned something and Lynn Harper said we don't even know if a cell will divide properly in space For reproduction purposes, we don't know that today and I'll so I'll talk, I've already been talking about about the challenges a little bit. I will talk to this 4th, point of challenges of the environment to the reproductive process and the the different stages that you you kind of go through.

But one thing that I'd like to bring up so part of my PhD dissertation, I developed a conceptual scale, which I called the radio double e scale, which, stands for reproduction and development in off Earth Environments Scale. That scale is basically completely empty at this point. We simply do not have data. We certainly don't have any human data, from a reproductive standpoint, And really, nor should we until we are able to experiment experiment with, sort sort of, lower lower risk, mammals.

Yeah. We we have we have Stephanie Countryman who's gonna be coming on. She's in the life sciences, and we're gonna be talking about, for example, spiders and what has happened in the International Space Station and other experimentation that's been done in space. So there will be a whole section that we'll be doing on this. So this is very valuable. Oh, outstanding. Yeah. And and the life sciences, I'll say this for the life sciences.

They have not been given enough, attention or credence by most of the, national space agencies. It frankly just has not been enough, and least of all in the area of reproductive health. It's especially at NASA, it's generally considered a non issue. Although there have been, I'll discuss these here in a moment.

There have been sort of small leaps forward type experiments that experiment with mammalian reproduction, and observe different aspects of prenatal and postnatal development care, in mammals, primarily mice rats. But again, I'll just discuss that in a minute.

The point I wanna make with the radioe scale is that it weighs microgravity and radiation against those different phases, against your reproductive phase, prenatal, postnatal, and all all the way up to really the point where you can at least wean the baby.

So if we want to be able to have to go and settle Mars, establish a city on Mars as as Elon Musk again has said he wants to do or do that on the moon or elsewhere, we need to be able to have babies and most preferably we need to figure out how to do that the old fashioned way. And we need to figure that out because settlers again, we're taking our sexuality with us. Settlers, wherever they go, they are going to have sex. Human beings are going to have sex. You cannot stop them.

Just look at Earth and all the repression sexual repression in all these societies and the enormous amount of effort that goes into preventing people from having sex, And you'll see that it has not worked. People do not fall inside the lines of the traditional expected model. So they're going to have sex no matter what planet they're on or what moon they're on or whatever they do.

And to, the the moon hut, it's part of the construct is we get the ability to be 3 days away using current technology. Yes. We get 3 days away to be able to have sex on the moon and then come back and see if something normal or abnormal. We've had the Kelly brothers and their experimentation of what happens in space. So And I'll I'll talk a little bit about them too.

So and we have the ability to have someone stay for long instead of 3 months, they could say 6 months or a year, And then they're in a there's less shielding. There is a form of gravity. So part of what we've been talking about for the past 6 years is is this ability to do the experimentation and make sure that there is a viability. Because if you go to Mars, while it's a great endeavor and I and I've I'm I'm pro everybody working on it who wants to work on it. We are as an organization.

There are some benefits to being 3 days away. Yes. There certainly are, but, sort of what I have I actually in my dissertation sort of what I have in mind, and I put this in my dissertation as a theoretical example. I created a hypothesized situation of what happens when the first woman gets pregnant on Mars. And we don't have this really figured out. What situation has she now been placed in where it's a situation with very few good options? Because people go to Mars, they're gonna have sex.

We don't know how well contraception will work, if it will work in altered gravity. There's no data on that. And and maybe it will, but even contraception itself occasionally does fail. So pregnancies very well could occur, just perhaps not safely, but they could occur, and they more than likely will occur if we ever reach that stage.

So regardless, this is something that we need to figure out, because And I think that I don't know if you planned on touching on it, but there are biological challenges on the male side that could also occur that we are not familiar with, in this in being in space or being on another planet with less gravity? Yes. So there are issues on the male side. They are I think generally with males, they're a little bit easier to overcome, but there are still major concerns of, for example Development.

Yeah. Of, you know, development, gametogenesis, which is the generation of, you know, sperm and ova. So women are born with with all their all their eggs. But men, you know, we generate millions of new sperm per day, and especially the more sexually active we are, it's this constant revolving, you know, revolving door. Yeah. So our gametogenesis in males is is, much much more robust. It can survive.

If you lose a few sperm to ionize radiation because they took a particle, you got a million more behind them that are are gonna be able to get the job done. If you irradiate the testes entirely, this is the difference between men and women in in this particularly the the radiation, situation. We have a descended external to the body sack that holds our testes, that holds where the reproductive organs are. So they are more exposed naturally to that ionizing radiation, and that is a danger.

That is potentially a danger if you want to talk about long term exposure and potential sterilization in nails. If it's short term and there is no damage no significant damage to the testes, we should be able to continue comedogenesis. I had not even thought about the fact that they're exposed on the outside of the body. I had not thought about that. Yeah. They're so external to the body.

Whereas the female, she has her, reproductive organs are internal to her body, so her body at least provides some shielding from ionizing radiation. However, if her ova are damaged or, destroyed, she cannot generate more of them. A female only has so many over over the course of her life and only ovulates monthly. So, there's a lot of ups and downs to both sexes for just nat in terms of natural protection. Those are the most immediate ones that I that I can present here.

So real quick before we hop to the rest of this discussion and the and the challenges the environment does because I wanna talk about the the course of the reproductive process.

But, option 3, other than doing all the math here and, or, you know, creating a giant simulated earth environment, is potentially we can cryogenically freeze and store human and other species gametes and store them in sort of a doomsday vault excuse me, doomsday vault similar to that seed vault in Svalbard, but perhaps do it on under the surface of the moon. And you remember I told you that figure earlier for 12 to 14 feet worth of regolith?

Yep. If you burrow into the surface of the moon, about 12 to 14 feet of regolith is going to give you about the same level of, radiation protection that you're going to get at sea level on earth. And that exposure, I wanna say, is about 360 milligram a year, is the average. 300 milligram at sea level, 400 milligram if you're living up higher in elevation someplace like Denver.

And even with that, with this, with the vault, the Svalbard vault vault, there's climate change that's been warming the permafrost around the region, which is not good for that vault. So even that protectiveness has not been, positive. There are challenges with it. There yes. There are certainly still gonna be challenges on earth. I am all for us establishing a second seed vault and a second, gamete vault, if you will, under the surface of the moon.

So at least you sort of have it You have the code, to rewrite the program if if necessary. And there was a very similar, concept that was used in the movie Interstellar. I'll bring up the movie again where they were carrying. I want to say it was 5,000 human fertilized Zygotes or human embryos. I forget which stage they're in.

I think they were embryos if I'm remembering the movie correctly that they brought to a very earth like planet that met the met the biological parameters for cellular development and being able to raise those young in that environment and raise them to adulthood. And that was sort of where the movie left off. Is that somebody, one of the main characters, the man, I can't I can't remember her name yet. It's okay. I I I don't remember names of people in movies out there.

So I'm I'm I I you're you're you're with family right now. Yeah. But but the point was is that that that was their Hail Mary. And it is a Hail Mary to try and do it that way, because you're going to effectively have to restart society from 0. And what if something happens to the humans that are the caretakers of the vault? So there's all these things to consider. But let's let's move on to so we established our three ways. I wanna move on to the challenges of the environment.

We've already talked about the 2 main physiological challenges, which are radiation and microgravity. And those 2, a lot of the data suggests that those two forces tend to work synergistically together in terms of the negative impact they have on the human body. So you mentioned earlier the NASA twin study. So Scott and Mark Kelly, only identical twins that have ever flown in space.

Something that, is not, I think, widely advertised or that a lot of people didn't realize when you had the, you know, you had year and space on the cover of Time and and all the other magazines, whichever they were, talking about the year and space. It wasn't actually a whole year and space for captain Kelly. It was actually only 340 days.

He came down around the 11 month point, and it was conveyed to me by somebody who's more intimately familiar with the situation that, the reason for him coming down sort of early was because medically he was starting to degrade. You know, you've heard the statistics of up to 20% bone loss in the heel on astronauts when they're, you know, when they're up there in microgravity on the on the space station.

You've heard of weakening organs that, you know, they degrade in mass, and it takes a while for astronauts to get used to walking. And then after being on the space station for 6 months or whatever it may be, it takes them a while to readjust to the earth gravity environment.

And as somebody who has gone through different levels of g forces when I was going through Air Force pilot training, you know, I've experienced 3 times the amount of G's, 6 times the amount of G's, 7 times it is very taxing on the body. I mean, I felt like I'd been squeezed out, just going through that experience. And I was only experiencing it for moments at a time, and it wasn't particularly sustained.

Mhmm. But to have to have to go through that again and again if we try some sort of centrifuge solution as a microgravity dosage. I kind of jumped ahead of myself here, but something that's been suggested to combat microgravity is use a small centrifuge and give a person a dosage of the right level of gravity every day, let them sleep in the centrifuge, and that cellularly should be able to should be enough.

And I I have trouble seeing that, but again that's based primarily on my personal experience, with varying g forces throughout the day, how, you know, how taxing it is, physically. Important point to make on the Kelly twins.

So the changes of gene expression that were noted in flight, most of, captain Scott Kelly's genes returned to normal post flight, except for roughly 7% of the modulated genes related to the immune system, related to DNA repair, bone formation networks, and then hypoxia and, hypercapnia. I don't wanna get medically excessive here, but it hypercapnia. So d DNA repair, bone, I wanna write that. I've I've missed getting the you said it very quickly. Bone bone formation networks.

Yep. Hypoxia, which is not getting enough oxygen. And then hand in hand with that, hypercapnia, which is excessive carbon dioxide. What was the first one you had said? The first one was, immune system Immunity. Yeah. Gene expression. They're really bad. Yeah. Those are bad those are bad things. Those are like bad things to have as an issue. Not, you know, to not have functioning properly. So and that you know, and this is just radiation and microgravity, that we're talking about.

You've got the noise and light of being on the space space station, the, circadian rhythm, obviously, you know, what is it? They call it Earth Sunrise. Sunrise on the space station happens every 90 minutes. So there's the and NASA keeps their astronauts very regulated in their schedule and, and keeps good control, but those those are just other factors to keep And just they they exist. And even if you even if you control them, they still exist. They still exist.

And again, let's remember space is the most hostile sustained environment known to man. And I I I was listening to one of your other podcasts, the one with Shauna, and she, she has this phrase that she constantly, you know, has reiterated again and again, space is trying to kill you. And I absolutely agree. And I think we mentioned that so she and I together actually authored a paper a couple years back where that that was put in I believe that was put into the paper.

Well, even Sonya who did the talked about the fact that, how did she say it? It wasn't that they tried to is that you age extremely fast in space was the topic. Is that it's a challenge that we humanly age. Now we come back, things return back to normal, but now we're saying here there's a sever 7% that that percentage is extremely challenging. Yeah. Your so your cells have aged at at a much faster rate.

It's interesting that while that happens, microgravity has some physical aspects that that people, view as positives. For example, when you first arrive in that environment, it's not uncommon for people to or for astronauts and cosmonauts to feel very stuffy in the head because the fluid shift that occurs in the body because of the differences in gravity. So you now have a lot of fluid that goes to your head. Your body interprets that as I have excess fluid, I need to dump fluid.

And so you have very stuck, you know, stuck with those astronauts and they have to go to the bathroom a lot. Because the body is the the sensor tech is saying, hey. Yeah. Too much up here. You need to go to the bathroom. Get rid of it because we're overloaded. Yeah. Because the body is shedding that what it perceives to be additional additional fluid. The upside to microgravity levels is it causes the skin to look tauter and more youthful. So wrinkles sort of go away in space.

Now they all come back when you return to earth, unfortunately. You know, it's not it's not a permanent effect. But and you also even sort of have, like, there's more perkiness of the breasts in space and and, and stuff like that. So the physical the external physical aspects appear to improve when you go into that environment, and that may factor in for for tourists going up there for a jaunt in the coming decades. But, it is all stuff that that returns with, with when you return to Earth.

So really quick, I want to I wanna hit one more thing really on radiation since the other thing aside when we talk about Mearth, but we're also talking about Mars as a potential candidate for future settlement. And this is directly pulled from a paper that, doctor Logan, Jim Logan, who I mentioned earlier, offered. Some estimates suggest that crew members on a mission to Mars might be exposed to approximately 50 rem per year. Do you remember what I mentioned is the the average at sea level?

I I have it on another page. I don't remember the number. It's about 300 millirem, 360 millirem on average. Alright. Right. So 50 rem on the mission to Mars. So you've got the trip out there, being on the surface, the trip back, roughly a 2 and a half year mission, it as it currently stands. So he states doctor Logan states, this is the equivalent equivalent of experiencing a full body CT CT scan every 5 to 6 days. Yeah. So quite a lot.

Constituting a 120 rem exposure over the course of a roughly two and a half year mission or roughly 333 times the amount of radiation experienced during a lifetime on earth. Does do you have because we have Project Moon Hut and and Mearth, Moon and Earth, Do you have a number for living on Mars on the on the moon? On the moon, you are going to okay. So it depends on the level of exposure that you have.

If you are on the surface of the moon and you don't have anything blocking you from, say, GCR or from solar particle events, etcetera, And I do have some figures here, which I which I'm gonna pass to you. It is effectively, about as saturated as an environment as you can experience. Because remember, the moon, let me double check this here. The the the moon is beyond the Van Allen belts, beyond where we see the Correct. The northern lights.

So you don't have the benefit of the Van Allen belts protection. You don't have that shield above you. You don't have an atmosphere above you. You are open to the elements out there on the moon. Now remember I said you could burrow about 12 to 14 feet deep and receive that same level of protection. So that is definitely going to be the way that we have to do it, because at least that way we have radiation protection.

On the surface of the moon, you can't really do anything as far in so far as much we know about the gravity level, we're gonna have to sort of get creative there. But you know that you can at least get the radiation protection by providing a physical shield digging in like an earthworm or an ant into the surface of the moon and protecting yourself that way. So so what I'm reading here is it's about 2.6 times higher than the International Space Station of a daily dose. Yes. And it it does vary.

So I'll let me, read some of these stats off for you really quick. So the highest percentage of radiation exposure that was ever experienced on the surface of the moon was by the crew of Apollo 14. They received, roughly 1.14 rads, which is it's about 0.0114sieverts over the course of 33 hours. So if you calculate it into the math of what your average is per year in the space of less than a day and a half, they received 3 times the yearly dose that you would get on earth.

Apollo 15, very different. They were on the surface, I wanna say, 67 hours. They experienced about 0.3 rads. And Apollo 17, they were there for 75 hours and they experienced 0.55. So the rate of exposure was different depending on, really just depending on the situation and what GCR was pelting you from the rest of the galaxy because that is what GCR is. So so, excuse my, naivete here. I guess that's the way to say it is radiation from space comes from everywhere in space.

So being on the far side of the moon compared to the near side of the moon is is just radiation consistent through space, or does do we get more because there's the sun? Do you know what I'm asking? Let me, let me read you another, I actually love this quote. I even quoted it directly in my dissertation. Again, it's from Doctor. Logan, but he talks about the concept of space. Space is a misnomer. The very term implies nothing nothing out there but emptiness. So this kind of just benign vacuum.

It sounds calm, unthreatening, and serene. In reality, interplanetary space space is a seething, undulating, ever changing cauldron of ionizing radiation with energy sufficient to destroy molecular bonds, strip atoms strip electrons off atoms creating free radicals, and wreak havoc on biological systems. So roughly 95% of the radiation that we measure, at any given time is from galactic cosmic rays, that GCR. That is from stars across the the wide universe.

So so it's it's a it's a pool of radiation flying all over the place. Yes. It is radiation saturating all the area, the space, if you will, in between. So if you could put on a a pair of special glasses that you could see the radiation, it would not look empty Okay, so so the there I feel like we're doing a thriller movie.

There is no place to hide You are really you have to create a shelter that would stop the radiation or be underneath the regolith or be under something with water, which they've talked about as a as a means of stopping on on rocket travel. Something has to stop this radiation. Otherwise, there is no chance for survival and there's no chance of reproductive success. Yes. And, not just so you mentioned survival. Step 1, we have to get the humans there alive.

And I think so I I'm of the opinion that the commercial space launch industry in the United States has advanced at a rate, far more rapidly than, say, the traditional government sponsored mechanism. And, yes, the a lot of the contracts that's that SpaceX gets are government contracts or NASA contracts, etcetera. But their streamlined model has proved far more efficient, and that's why they're able to launch payloads in the space for much cheaper.

And you see their, vehicle development has leapt forward. Now they're developing, or have developed, I'm not precisely sure of what stage they're at, but you have Starship, you have the Falcon Heavy, that are going to be the spacecraft per SpaceX that take humanity to Mars and take take us back to the moon, etcetera. If you look at the design of those spacecraft, very 19 fifties looking, you know, kind of cool, sleek, conical, right, with the cool windows and all of that.

I doubt Elon has listened this far into the podcast, but if No. No. That's okay. I would Maybe he will one day. And anybody who is developing a spacecraft, you need to build into the spacecraft a system of shielding. And that might be done by water, it might be done by a material we have yet to develop that is a more dense material than anything that that we know currently, that's that's not for me to to really speculate on.

I mean, there's different different ways we could go, but the point is you do need the shielding. It Need the shielding. You need But it's even what you're saying from a biological perspective, which is not talked about as much as that, the survival of the human species, and I I'm sorry I go to the exposure of the testicles, is that if you don't, the males cannot seed, and so you'd have to have artificial insemination protecting. There it's it won't be a natural course of order.

Yes. So the traditional way, of reproduction would would be definitely threatened by that. But even just the traditional way of surviving of the physiological processes in fully grown adult human beings, is is going to be threatened. So what needs to happen is a reduction in the time of exposure and a reduction in the exposure itself.

That is done by making faster rockets somehow or some kind of propulsion that gets us there faster, more efficiently, and it is done by creating a level of shielding that reduces the overall amount of ionizing radiation that astronauts and settlers and crews are absorbing as they make this journey. Right now, interstellar space is too dangerous for us to cross with the current vehicles that we have.

I I don't think we actually currently have any vehicles that really could make the trip, but if they were designed the same way that they currently are, we wouldn't be able to get people really to the surface of Mars alive. One of the things that I share with individuals, because I am, I'm not a space person is I will say, we don't have a human rated rocket right now that has been approved to get to the moon.

So I I think if you're not in the space industry, you actual people like me would think, oh, no. No. We we can do this. But our rocketry has been designed for low earth orbit, to to the International Space Station or in the proximity of Earth, not to take the trip all the way to the moon again. So we're not this is this is a challenge that is being faced today, and it is a challenge for being on the moon even just the 3 days away.

How do we make sure these individuals survive and thrive and are able to be reproductive? So are there any other challenges the environment to the reproductive process? So we already touched on most of the major challenges. Again, the two primary pillars of destruction here are the are the radically, altered levels of microgravity and the and the radically altered levels of radiation. If you can mitigate those, you have fixed most of the problem.

Now in Yeah. The the so you're saying is if we can create this gravity environment, that's a huge one because even if you're talking about spinning in an O'Neil system. Yeah. Or If you're on Mars, though, if you're on Mars or on the moon, you have not solved the challenge of gravity. Yes. So it the surface of other celestial worlds is gonna be the biggest challenge as far as gravity is concerned. Going from place to place will be the biggest challenge as far as as radiation is concerned.

And then obviously, you've got the sustained civilizations on or I should say under the surface because, yeah, I I have to surface activity is gonna have to be very restricted generally. I just had a conversation with someone on our team about I I brought I brought up we could be in the lava tubes and on the moon. And he said to me, we don't know this. We have a lot of individuals who say that we can, but we don't know the security and safety.

We don't know how they will the structures will last. And and then I brought up, well, on the Mars television series that was on I don't know what series line Netflix or or no. Was it Netflix? Might have been Amazon? Whichever series is on. They went down into the lava tube. They went down underground to protect themselves, and they were very far underground. And he said, yes. I've seen this one. There are a lot of individuals who propose that that's the safety, but we don't know that.

We're just making conjecture. So, yes. So let's get to this next one then. The the research of sexuality in space is not moving fast enough. Yes. And sorry. I don't mean to drag on. So the Sure. Before we before we hit that, there's something that I that I do want to just state is, you know, we talk about different parts of, the reproductive cycle. So, you know, you've got gametogenesis, the release of the gametes.

We haven't talked so much about what the effects are that the effects that microgravity go into it. Let's dig in. So from a, Gamida Genesis point, we've already discussed pretty at length, I think, the the risks of the radiation. So just from a microgravity perspective, there were a number of well, not a number, but a a couple of sperm experiments that were conducted.

I believe the principal researcher was doctor Joseph Tash, if I'm recalling this correctly, that measured sperm's ability to swim in microgravity, and they found that sperm could actually swim much faster in microgravity, and the opposite effect was found in hypergravity. So in centrifugal environments, if you increase the gravity, the sperm swam much slower, but they were actually able to speed up in the microgravity environment.

They were still able to, to find their, you know, find their way around the, around the system. So in order for proper fertilization to occur, you obviously need the, female ova to travel down her fallopian tubes and the sperm to find and bind with and fertilize her eggs. So that creates the fertilized zygote, eventually develops into, the embryo. But before that can happen, you need implantation to happen in the uterine wall.

And that is where a lot of, imminent NASA scientists so, there was a OBGYN, doctor April Ronka, who was a chief researcher at NASA, and she's one of the few that has actually conducted mammalian reproductive research, within the within the, parameters that that, NASA set for her. So we we have actually had reproductive experiments, mammalian experiments that occurred on the space shuttle and the space station.

She has stated that because of microgravity, you may have a situation where implantation cannot occur in the uterine wall, and perhaps the placenta cannot form. It there is some potential major showstoppers that exist that we need to determine whether or not they will, in fact, be showstoppers. And even if they are only a little bit, what that percentage percentage is of failure versus success. Again, this is along the lines of filling in that radio a scale concept that I was discussing.

Yep. Microgravity, when it comes to, when it comes to cytoskeletal development of the fetus as the baby grows in the mother's womb, becomes more important as you and let's assume for a second that we managed to get implantation, placenta formed, everything is as normal on earth. A lot of people point out that the first couple trimesters in the womb are more a water environment for the the fetus, for the baby to begin with. So perhaps microgravity isn't as big of an issue in the early on stages.

However, it does become very important later on, as you get into the later into the 2nd trimester, especially the 3rd trimester, where the baby is reaching full development and has to orient to, to be born out out the mother's birth canal. And this is all prenatal development that I'm talking about. This isn't even postnatal considerations, but I will, discuss a few Mhmm. Please do. Mice studies that that occurred.

So there have been, well, to to make the point, there have been a number of rat and mice studies that, have gone on. The first was actually in 1979. It was a Soviet biosat, Kosmos 1129. That was the first attempt at mating mammals in space. So they sent up 2 male rats, 2 female rats, and on the second day, they opened the, the separating door, if you will, and let them into the the mating, compartment.

The team that wrote the paper, they concluded that mating happened and fertilization actually occurred, but neither of the, females that had ovulated and their ova was fertilized got pregnant actually got pregnant.

So that suggests issues with potentially, it suggests issues with zygote with the, fertilized zygote traveling through the reproductive system, implantation of the uterine wall, the other, you know, these things Do you know how let me do you know how long they were in space before they allowed that to happen so that there was a, an acclimation to space? It was, if I'm recalling this correctly from the reading, it was on the second day that they actually opened opened the door.

So you and, again, mating did. They determined that mating did occur, but it was understood that the embryos dissolved. They did not grow into, grow into, offspring. So the, you have that, which points to potentially a lot of issues due to microgravity or radiation or a, synergistic combination thereof. The males that were flown on that flight, they were mated 5 days post flight to non flown females, and this was sort of interesting.

They actually those females ended up having larger litters of pups, but also with significantly higher levels of abnormalities. So they had edema, which is, swelling in the extremities, hemorrhaging, hydrocephaly, which is fluid pressure created on the brain, and growth retardation. Now that was the post flight effects that were observed in the females and the males. They were both later mated, the males and the female rats in that study, and they yielded normal healthy offspring after the fact.

So there was some issue of gamete damage or something that occurred that prevented proper reproduction, but, they did manage to later have healthy offspring. So it suggests that it it So you suggested that there there was a healing or a change back. What what surprises me was just 2 days into it. So what I was getting at was it didn't take long for the space, whatever the challenge is.

It didn't take long for the impact to happen because I was when I was thinking about the timeline, I was saying, okay. We're talking about the uterine layer. We're talking about a variety of things have to happen simultaneously, but the body was immediately impacted by not being in by being in space. It didn't take time. Well and you also have to so we do need to consider the gestation period of of mice and rats.

So the entire prenatal period from fertile fertilization to birth for rats, on average, and this is why they make great test subjects, on average is 22 to 23 days. Okay. Whereas as as opposed to human beings, which we our gestation period is roughly 36 weeks. Mhmm. The postnatal period is roughly also a 20 it's 20 plus, 21 days or so of postnatal growth to the point where you can wean the baby rats off, off their mothers they're able to be weaned off their mother's milk.

And there have been a handful of experiments sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, so the rodent 1, rodent 2, and rodent 3 experiments, and then also experiment known as NEURO Lab that studied various, stages that that I've just described. So prenatal, postnatal, implantation, and, and placentation. I don't wanna I don't wanna get too deep into the weeds here. No. No. It's it's this is good.

This is great because if we're going that the the the space industry shares similar information across multiple channels. And we're hoping with Project Moon Hut and the work that we're working on, we're reaching outside of that traditional sphere of listeners and participate participants. So today, someone might not listen the same way they will in a in a 6 months or a year as we continue to grow. And my hope is that somebody, some place in the world picks this up and says, I'm interested.

I wanna solve for x. So give the information that would help us to solve the challenges or what you think is important today. That's all we can do is is lay the foundation for new thoughts on solving these challenges. Yeah. And and one thing that I'll get around to is some of that is is already starting to occur. So it's an exciting time, but, yeah, we we will get to that here, in a few. Okay. So bay space shuttle missions that carried these experiments.

So for example, I mentioned, rodent 1, 2, and 3. Those were carried on, STS 66, STS 70, and STS, 72, respectively, I wanna say. So those all occurred in the mid to late nineties. And the first two, they studied pregnant female rats that were flown so the rats were already pregnant when they went up. They were flown for the last 2 thirds of their gestation period, and then they gave birth on earth.

And there were some pretty, interesting findings that the females, the rat females in question, they had much weaker uterine contractions, and only about half the number of uterine contractions as a control group that was being examined at the same time did on earth. So why is you know, we have to consider why is that important.

First off, because the contractions are important for giving birth to the baby, get pushing the baby out, if your uterine muscles are much, much weaker, it's going to create complications in the birthing process itself.

On top of that, the massive stress, and I don't want to say trauma, but the massive stress that uterine contractions create on the baby as they are born, into the world, is actually very important to helping jump start the baby's physiological systems operating on their own, which is why in some cases if a baby is ever born not breathing, what's what's one of the first things the doctor does? Turn them over and Slap them on the back.

Yep. And and, you know, in the happier stories, baby starts crying, coughing, and congrats. So that being reduced or taken away that could have pretty, could result in pretty serious birth complications. For the litters that were born, the ones that had been flown, they were all roughly the same size as the controls and the and the weights were roughly the same. But rodent 2, the, the second experiment, their weights were all significantly less until they reached postnatal day 14.

And again, they were growing in an earth environment for all their postnatal period. There were really ultimately no, observable changes in developmental or general behavior of the prenatally flown off. So they went on to university, got degrees. Yeah. Okay. Got their dream careers. Right. And and now working in high in in advanced tech. So for, for rodent 3, the rodent 3 experiment, rat pups so these were pup groups that were actually flown during the postnatal period.

So after almost immediately after they had been born or at least immediately insofar as we we put our timelines. Yep. Because a few days to a human is not a lot. Few days to a rat, and as far as postnatal growth goes, it is quite a bit. Yeah. So these, groups were done in groups of, 5 day olds, 8 day olds, and 14 day olds. Important to note the statistics here. The 5 day olds had a mortality rate of 90%. Wow. Yeah. 3 days may be difference of completely flipping that statistic.

By the time, you were looking at the 8 day old groups, those 8 day olds had a survival rate of or or excuse me. They had a mortality rate of only 10%. So 90% survived. Flip the charts. The 14 day olds, they all survived. So those 3 days made a huge difference in the survival of the pups and the overall growth development of, them growing into into adults. And again, like I said, 14 day olds, all survive.

So that is indicative that something went very wrong during a critical phase of postnatal growth. So to us, that would be like the first few months of a baby growing up. And you think how how quickly human babies grow relative to the size that they they came out as, in terms of, bone lengths and, how quickly that, you know, their heads are gonna grow and and how quickly they start to respond, open their eyes, etcetera.

And and all these systems start working and and gaining autonomy and gaining them traction in their environment into the world. So I don't wanna say that say that awkwardly. But, no. I mean, it makes sense. There's there is a period of time we relate it to human, growth that that has to be addressed because if not, the babies in space will not survive.

So we it's no different than when we hear on Earth the beginning few months of a baby's fur, from being born, how they're cuddled, how they're spoken to, how the the imprinting is done. All of these are considered important for long term survival. And we can take many other species where that imprinting immediately and the teaching that is transferred makes a difference in survival of other species too. Precisely. There was one more point that I kinda wanted to make on, rodent 3.

Oh, so, yes, you had some pups that made it. You had survivors, and again, the that last group that had mostly developed already, all of them survived. But among all the surviving pups, they the researchers, discovered that they weighed on average about 25% less than the ground controls on earth. So just from a growth, and physiological health That's a that's a huge difference. Yes. That is a huge, huge difference. If we I I I'm, I'm approximately a 100 kilo or £200 just to make numbers easy.

That with 20% would be I am a £160, which is a huge difference in my weight. I mean, I if if you take a take a typical human male or a human female, let's say she's a £150 or let's say not. Let's try to she's a £130 to take off £26. You're now a £100. Not doing perfect math. I know that. I'm just trying to give a reference point. You could go from looking healthy to emaciated, which means that your body might not be able to might not be getting as much nutrients as it should.

It might not it might have some of these other issues that you've spoken about, earlier, such as immunity system challenges when you're lightweight. You could have bone formation issues because you're not getting enough calcium in your body. You could have many other challenges when you are that much sig that significantly less, in size. Yes. And another thing to consider, and you sort of already touched on it, is cascading order of effects Mhmm. Just in terms just in terms of development.

So that brings us to, STS 90. There was the NeuroLab mission that was flown, and the rat pups group the rat pup groups that were flown, in that mission were a postnatal period for a group of 8 day 8 day olds and 15 day olds. So the 8 day olds had a, 50% mortality rate this time compared to the 10% that we'd previously seen, and the 15 day olds all survived. Of all the, surviving pups, they weighed half the weight of ground controls.

So they suffered from malnutrition, hypothermia, and there was also, the maternal nurturing bond interruption to consider. You already you already mentioned as far as imprinting and, and and other factors to consider. So the point that I think we've sort of been beating to death is from a mammalian reproductive development, both prenatal and postnatal aspects, there is so much that can go wrong, an enormous amount that can go wrong.

And from what we've seen from the mailing experiments, we have not quite yet found the boundaries for where that begins because we've been conducting these experiments in complete microgravity. Mhmm. Okay. So, now that we're all nice and depressed No. No. No. No. What it it it's either it's either a challenge to solve or you give up. And the question I was, do we are you gonna give up?

And I don't think I think that if the belief of an individual is we should be a space faring species or that there's an extinction level event or that this is just the next frontier, whatever it may be, then there are the individuals who will work on solving this, and there becomes a timeline issue, and that's what I think you saw I think in one of the videos, the Macadonia video, I talked about timelines.

And if we're going to solve something in a timeline that makes reasonable sense, then the other all the pieces have to come together. You cannot put on roof if you haven't built the foundation. You cannot put in windows if you haven't framed the building. And part of taking off, if if the objective is these individuals will not reproduce, then you have an ability to have a mission that works in one way.

If it is to survival of the species through reproduction and sexuality, the sexuality they can have, but the reproduction won't happen, and that becomes a challenge for the entire mission survival. Agree? Yeah. Okay. Sometimes I have to ask myself, am I going in circles? No. No. No. No. No. Yeah. You and I you and I are definitely in agreement there.

And there's many other things to, you know, to consider especially as it applies to sexuality and human, interaction in general, the psychological, the social, I'll touch on those a little bit. Really quick before I leave the the physiological aspect of it, mammals are not the only, are not the only animals that we have conducted experiments with, reproductive reproduction experiments.

They, primarily the Russians, have sent geckos, newts, snails, gerbils, even cockroaches have been sent to space, and there was actually a, experiment, I want to say it was in 2007, that Roscosmos sent up, the Russian Space Agency sent up, where cockroaches bred, they mated in space, and were able to conceive. So you had proof of concept that reproduction can happen, but again, roaches are extremely hardy creatures, and they don't necessarily equate to, to human beings and human systems.

Sort of some interesting findings there is that when the roaches were born back on earth, the offspring were actually able to run much faster than ordinary cockroaches. They had a lot more energy. They were larger. They were, slightly orange in color as opposed to, you know, kind of your more common darker brown, and they were far more aggressive. So this this is what's that? There's been so many movies where the aliens come and they look like, insects.

Yeah. So, yeah, I we're literally talking about mutant roaches right now. So and, I mean, we have so I'm I'm coming to you from Cape Canaveral, Florida. We have a we have a lot of them in Florida, and I literally walked in on 1 couple months ago, in my previous house that, he was eating a tide pod. This roach was eating a tide pod.

So we know now if we look at the scoreboard, roaches can survive in highly irradiate highly irradiated environments, and they can eat tide pods, which What's a Tide Pod? I don't know what a you know, a tadpole or Oh, it's a, so, like, Tide the detergent. Oh, really? Yeah. So it was eating So you're not eating I'm trying to think of what animal is called a Tide Pod. Yeah. So you're saying they're eating detergent. It was and I don't know if you've heard of this.

There was a very stupid YouTube thing that was going around for a while where people were taking it as a calling it the Tide Pod Challenge, and they were eating Tide Pods. Yes. A lot of people were getting sick, going to the hospital, and dying. But the roaches cockroaches could eat that. But the cockroaches could eat the Tide Pod. So if you look at the scoreboard, cockroaches can survive in radiation and eat Tide Pods.

Humans can't do either of those things, and we know because we've tried Okay. So for those of you at this point, I I don't we we're talking between the 2 of us. But if you are from another country or you've not been involved, the Tide pod, what we're talking about are those encapsulated, detergent packets that can be put into a dishwasher or into a, laundry machine washing machine or even into a dishwasher where you don't have to pour in the fluid or pour in the the detergent.

It actually comes as a whole unit. So what we're talking about is this creature, this cockroach, is eating an even a nonbiological. It's eating a a poison to humans and and doing okay. So, getting back to you, Alex, I'm thinking of Star Trek's Starship Troopers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And stars Starship Troopers had those big kind of like insects. So what you're you're saying is don't take cockroaches to space.

Yeah. Don't make sure that there's no stowaways because that could get out of hand very quick. And that's actually that's actually an important thing. Make sure there are no cockroaches going to the moon or to Mars because if they reproduce, if you've got 2 of them, you can have thousands of these larger and larger because we don't know what the next version will be. 2 or 3 generations down, they could be, 15 centimeters or 6 inches. Oh god.

Pretty scary to think about because I I I'm not a huge fan of roaches to begin with. But that but that's a there is a if we think about viral mutations and variants that are happening with COVID, and it's a challenge that I've tried to describe to individuals recently, is that UK already has, I believe, 2 variants. South Africa has 3 variants.

And a variant is caused by, I'm I'm assuming you know this, a variant is caused by a reproduction in the body that is not a perfect representation of its original match. So you get this different mutation, a different version, and then that ends up propagating. Well, we have 3 variants of the South African.

The United States has done a horrible, horrible, horrible job of tracking its the mutations that have happened in COVID 19, which one of the countries around the world has not been tracking it to the degree in which it should. So I'm going to guess that there's probably a variant on in the United States. There are another countries. Brazil is having challenges.

The point is if you you can have a variant of a variant of a variant, and what I'm seeing here, the way you're describing it, is we don't know the implications of the fact that if another one was done in the same space environment, could they potentially have another variant because they haven't e they haven't formed an equilibrium with space. We don't know that. And those mutations and those variances are already observed in a lot of these other, other animal studies.

And getting back to the the rats, for example, one thing that was noted was that some of these rats ended up having lengthier long bones, their their hind leg bones. So we have, we have already talked a lot about some of the effects that you see with humans. A benefit another benefit of microgravity is your spine stretches out a little bit. You don't have the same compression that you do on Earth, so you're actually taller in space.

So that's these are all things that need to be taken into consideration, but especially when we're talking talking about cellular development and formation, can we made are we able to ensure that the cell will properly form, and are the typical structures, the physiological structures that we rely on to grow normally, how badly will they be affected?

We know that there's degradation, significant degradation, in people that are all already fully grown and formed, but what is that impact as you are going through the growth process? And how I'm jumping back to the Kelly Brothers scenario where they came back a month earlier because of challenges that we didn't we've not that have not been fully expressed because I I think partially it's unknown what was happening. But that ex that situation kind of to me says, okay, we have to solve this.

Yet there is a a school of thought that going to the moon when you're old will be where you will go because of the microgravity, and you will do much better as a as a human being. But there are implications to being on the moon. The lower gravity might give you one benefit, but you might be trading off 5 other disadvantages for being there. Yes.

And, I mean, one thing to consider if you wanna talk about elderly human beings going to the moon is if you are having difficulty standing or walking in earth's gravity and then you go to the moon and you sustain that environment, you sustain physiologically in that environment for a period of time, and I don't know what that period of time would be or or how many days would have to pass, it is going to degrade your physiological systems and your bone strength even more so that you are now facing a situation where you may not be able to go back and survive on earth.

Right. That's how I say there's one benefit is you can walk around for a period of time. The second is your kidneys are failing, your liver is failing, you're losing your bone density, and you can never return back to earth. Yeah. Which put it down to the person, I guess, depending on on what they want. I would, so I would like to sort of end this part of the conversation with a bit of a positive.

So there was a, Japanese experiment was held on held on the International Space Station for a period of 9 months, and it was and again, radiation on the ISS is a 100 times stronger than on earth, on average. So the purpose of this study was to study mouse gametes. It was called SpacePuff freeze dried mouse sperm, and it was held on the space station for 9 months with the knowledge that irradiation can cause DNA damage in cells and gametes.

It was effectively cryogenically stored, freeze dried, and what was found that when the samples were brought back to Earth, they were able to yield healthy offspring Wow. When they when they, conducted, fertilization. How did they keep them safe from the radiation though? Were they shielded? Were they boxed? Did they do something different?

So they were about getting the same, per my understanding, they were getting about the same level of protection that most spots on the on the space station are going to going to have. I don't know exactly where in the ISS they were kept and how much, additional exposure that they would have had, but we can assume, for the purposes of the experiment roughly a 100 times what you would expect on earth. Now some of the spermatosa were damaged.

They were genetically damaged, but there appeared to be, self healing by the cytoplasm when the, fertilization process, was begun. So the cells managed to effectively managed to heal themselves from, from any sort of ionizing damage that had happened. So that is should be viewed as a positive because it lends a lot of credence and possibility to cryogenically storing our gametes as humans, and being able to raise healthy young using that and using in vitro fertilization, etc, down the line.

So the the whole seed vault idea, that is still in play. As a matter of fact, this experiment, Space Pups, sort of provides proof of concept. So in in theory, if it was if this vault was created on the moon and there was robotic technology just in case humankind was wiped out, the robots could take these and the earth was reborn again. Tens of 1,000 or 100 of 1000 of years later, they could fit they could bring them back and regenerate on earth. You know, I had not thought about it that way.

But, yes, if if you had a robotic system, AI system that kept kept those gametes stored safely long enough, the, the point is that the oocytes and the zygotes, they have a strong DNA repair capacity. So it's likely that any, you know, DNA damage that they sustain in space was repaired after fertilization, and ultimately had no effect on the overall birth rate when compared to control.

So But it makes sense that if you had a robot that could wait the only thing is you'd have to birth and raise the child because but the ability to be able it was an automated process that was built into the safe that if the earth has been damaged, it now is appear safe. There's oxygen or the the conditions are now viable. Yeah. It could get into a rocket, shoot back to earth, bear the children, and then life on earth could continue in a new path.

Yes. That I honestly, from a logistical standpoint, that sounds totally viable to me, as long as you're able to keep those systems intact all the way through to Right. To hitting the goalpost there. Okay. And actually so following we keep bringing up movies, but I think this exact concept, not on the moon, but on earth, this exact concept was in a movie I saw not not too long ago.

It was within the last, I wanna say, year or 2 called, I believe the name of the movie is called Mother, and it's about an AI robot raising a a human child. Right. There is I I saw that movie. It is where an AI but and the world had gone into disrepair and yes. I won't we won't give away the storyline, but yes. So so yeah. The potentially, you have the, the parts that you need to to build a survival plan that follows that.

So, so finally, before before we move on, you we already pretty much earlier, we talked extensively about psychological effects, you know, isolation, the monotony, the danger, you know, the constant threat that is sort of held over you by that ultra dangerous environment. That drives a deeper that awakens in human beings a deeper need to connect. The isolation part especially, and remember, sexuality over the course of our human history has been used as a social bonding mechanism.

So you can bet that it's going to happen, that in these new micro societies that are formed, whether it's on a spaceship that is traveling years years away, to a new celestial body or it's an isolated crew on an outpost somewhere on some other some other body, you can expect that things like pairing off could occur. We already, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about the Russian the, 2 Russian crew members who were suspected of having engaged in sexual activity.

And if I'm recalling correctly, I wanna say both those cosmonauts were married. They yeah. But it was a lot of information wasn't released. Yeah. But not to each other. And, That I don't know. So so if if I'm recalling this right, I I believe that both both of the cosmonauts I think they got married when they got back or something. You may be confusing that with a with an American couple, which I'll get to, here momentarily. I I'm reading something that says Russians never had sex in space.

It's official. But I that doesn't mean anything. Yeah. And and that was one of the big questions I originally started out with when I was doing doing this dissertation, and eventually I discarded it because I realized, a, I don't really care and it's not pertinent to what I was Mhmm. I was trying to effectively pursue, because really it's a sideshow. The whole, you know, hey, who is first or whatever, it's it's tabloid fodder kind of thing, and and I didn't really need to focus in on that.

I did think, hey, man. If I was able to get an interview with all 500 plus people that have been in space, then we're talking about qualitative analysis. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Quantitative and quali first, quantitative qualitative analysis, and, and being able to get hard data on who did and did not do what. Because masturbation has certainly happened in space. Erections have been known to happen in space, and it's been talked about openly by astronauts in their memoirs.

Mike Mullane, who is a shuttle astronaut, he comes to mind. His memoir Riding Rockets, he talks about, I I want to say it was his first mission that he went up in the shuttle and he awoke on day 1, the next day. He awoke his first wake up in space and, said that he had an erection so intense it could it could have quote drilled through Kryptonite, unquote, and he is not the only one to allude to what others have called space viagra.

So that is a physiological effect that happens from fluid shift in males, or it's been observed at least and documented. Has it been documented over time? Like, you you could do it the first few days, but doesn't happen. From what I was able to find oh, oh, okay. So from what I was able to find, there's there's been only a sprinkling of people discussing it. I haven't been able to find anything, where females talk about vulva engorgement or anything.

Mike Mullane's memoirs, discussed, if if I'm remembering the rest of that paragraph correctly, I'm kind of rewinding in my head here. He said that most of the mornings that he woke up on that mission, it was, I forget how long the mission was. It might have been 10 days or so. Most of the mornings that he woke up, he he had his, you know, puppet friend there with him. So it was pretty consistent, he said, through through the course of, through the course of the mission.

Okay. It's just another one of those challenges we don't know if you're going on a several month mission or you're staying on the moon for a period of months on end. Yeah. What will happen? So it just becomes and we don't know what the offspring will capabilities will be. We do know that that we do know that the, the cockroaches, however, they're probably gonna be okay. Yeah. They'll be fine. As long as the cockroaches are okay, we should all breathe easy.

But, yeah, the whole concept of pairing off, so something that I'm pretty sure most of the people who who will probably listen into this may already know, and I'm sure you already know. So there was actually there has been a married couple in space, an American married couple, who flew on the same mission at the same time. It was in 1992, STS 47. The astronauts were Markley and Jan Davis.

I believe they have since they're no longer together, in the in the couple deck you know, decades since, they got divorced later on, but they met while in astronaut training, fell in love, got married in secret, and then they told NASA. They waited to tell NASA until, I want to say, it was a couple months before their mission was scheduled to launch off. So it was effectively already too late to replace them.

And I don't know if that was planned on their part or or any of the, you know, the gossip around around the situation, just that it was basically too late. NASA made the decision. It was too late for them to replace either of the astronauts and that they would go into space on the same mission. So they're the only married couple that has been into space so far together. I am personally of the opinion that nothing probably really happened.

Again, I don't like to speculate, and I don't like to to go down the tabloid route. Really, all that's there for me as a sex researcher is what is published, what's observable. So knowing that NASA was not happy with them, and I believe they actually placed them on opposite 12 hour shifts as a result, there's probably not a lot of chance that they've gotten, especially given the when you consider the shuttle, not a lot of chance for privacy, particularly when you have 7 crew members.

And I know Mae Mae Jemison was actually also on that crew. And I want to say she is now the now the head of the, 100 year Starship program, if if I am recalling this correctly. But that was one of the highest levels of drama that NASA was ever willing to put up with, and the 2 astronauts were bombarded with questions from the press about, hey, did anything happen up there? And they have basically had to live with the fallout of it ever since.

So it wasn't a it wasn't an ideal situation for them, but It is it is history. Yeah. It it is history. So they were the 1st married couple in space. I'm not gonna speculate whether they were they were the 1st, married couple to have relations in space. They were probably the first to To kiss or hold hands. Or, you know, something like that. Although I don't I don't know the story they're at.

I would assume that there was at least one kiss in their mission, and I would assume that they held hands at least once. Yeah. And and there's pictures, you know, of all the crew together, and you see them holding hands and stuff like that.

So, when we consider though these small groups and personality conflicts that can occur between other crew members, you have to consider the whole concept of pairing off and how jealousy can come into play, which is why it is important to reframe our sexuality in the way that our social bonding in our societies work when we go into these these new environments and we We're now full circle. We're now full circle to the beginning.

Yeah. So so something that NASA, released as a finding was that they found the most effective crews were actually mixed crews. So not full male, not full female, but mixed crews tended to have the best social and crew dynamics. So you need that mix of folks in there, to get the best effects and the best social cohesion that you can out of the crew. That being said, there are inherent dangers. Again, we are still human.

We're still going to carry our amores and our jealousy and the things that we were raised with with us into into space and into those environments. And probably the best example I can give of that was one that happened, a few years back. I want to say it was in the mid 2000s. Lisa Nowak and, Bill Offline were 2 astronauts that had an affair.

They were I want to say they were they were also both married, at the at the same time, but they ended up meeting in, meeting at NASA, ended up having an affair. And in 2007, this all sort of came out because the female astronaut was left by the male astronaut for a another female. You know, he found another girlfriend and she had an explosive rage of jealousy. This actually made headlines across the country.

So she was charged with attempting kidnap, kidnapping and attempted murder after she attacked her romantic rival. So she was already married to another man. She was a mother of 3 kids. She drove 950 miles from Houston to Orlando, wore adult diapers the entire time so she wouldn't have to stop to use the bathroom. That's how focused she was. Again, these are very focused individuals, astronauts. But you can see when things go awry, how how issues could be created, especially in micro societies.

And she was arrested after assaulting the other woman. The other woman was an Air Force captain, with pepper spray. And then when police arrested her, they found a steel mallet, a 4 inch buck knife, and a BB gun in her car and a map to the other woman's home.

So it was very historical for NASA because it resulted I think it was the first time that people were dismissed from the astronaut corps, and it resulted in the establishment of a code of conduct for the astronaut corps, which before they hadn't really needed, I guess. It was automatically assumed that, hey, you'll behave to a certain level of professionalism. And even these extremely well trained individuals who've been through all these psychological tests, you had a reaction like that.

Which is what I asked of you earlier. How much can they be able to determine through all these interviews? What is their propensity for? How do they live? What culture are they coming for? What do they believe in sexuality and jealousy? You can't know. And and as we get to, you know, 5 months or 3 months of training, you're not going to know even more. Yeah. And this is and this is us coming full circle there. Yeah. So there was a there was another NASA flight physician, Kiara Bacall.

She authored a paper, a medical paper in, 2008 that I had also used as a source, for my dissertation dissertation. She described psychosexual issues that might arise when you have sex and romance on these long isolated, long duration missions.

And she made reference to that that even professional astronauts on active flight status, after you've already been through selection, you can develop serious mental health issues based on those interpersonal relationships, and that can be exacerbated by the extreme prolonged stressors of that long duration spaceflight environment. That'll only make it worse, really.

And then you have limited social networks to consider, that can lead to problems, privacy issues, love triangles, and then imagine a imagine somebody pairs off on this multi year mission, and then they break up. Now you are stuck with your ex in a floating tin can Right. Away from all of society. So so what are the, again, what are the multiple order effects that that occur? And that's something that has to be looked at and considered very seriously.

And so, not to I'm not joking when I say this. If in fact people going on multiyear missions are taught about the bonobos, they are taught many of the things we talk about here. They are indoctrinated to the possibilities of a new social structure. There might be a means by which the individuals in that group, if they are kept isolated from the rest of the society during training or during that time frame, that they might adopt if it's the right people.

I mean, it's a it's a it's a long shot, but there's an adoption of possible exclusionary positions that could be used for the survival of the human species. Tracking. Yeah. Tracking what you're saying. But and like you said, it's it is a it's a question that because we have grown up in this other narrative, most of us, and especially the the space faring nations, how is that gonna go? Can we re I I don't think it's necessarily a rewiring.

I think if, I think biologically, we are already wired that way. But can we re Unwire. Can we unwire, can we re culture, to create the most effective crew that you're possibly possibly going to be able to have? At least prevent some of these major, psychosexual issues from arising and and conflict within the crew. So we've discussed a lot of the, you know, the physiological, psychological, social, issues.

And those all factor into sexological considerations when we, when we consider what I've termed as astrosexology, which is sexology as it applies to these off earth environments. Point to that final bullet point. Yes. That research on sexual reproduction and sexuality and space in general, it is not moving quickly enough when we consider all these external factors.

I already talked a lot about the history of the research, the fact that there have been a handful of mammalian experiments here and there, and the different national agencies have participated. The Chinese had a 6,000 embryo experiment, that I wanna say was completed back in 2016. The Russians have been doing it for a very long time.

We even have been doing it, since the nineties, But these experiments are very, very few and far in between, and generally they are oriented toward the physiological and then only in parts. There is no continuous multi generational sort of experiment that has yet occurred, although there have been structures and plans developed for them. So NASA had a a project called, the Mark III rodent habitat, which was developed by, doctor Epil Ranca, who I mentioned earlier.

She was one of the chief scientists for, for a number of these mammal experiment these mice experiments that I mentioned earlier, the rodent habitat ones.

She and her team developed a habitat that I I if I'm recalling this correctly, pulling a lot from the back of my mind right now, and we have been talking a while so I'm kinda worn out, but, she developed a concept for a multi generational colony, and I I believe Mark 3 was designed to be able to be held and operated on the International Space Station.

Since there has been a new plan, a much more recent plan that, has been published called, MICE Hab, which that is I know we don't like, I know we don't like acronyms too much. Love them in the military, but, MICEHAB is short for multi generational independent colony for extraterrestrial habitation, autonomy, and behavior health or MICE HAB. So I'm not writing that down. Just Yeah. Don't worry about it.

So so this, in a nutshell, this would be a robot operated multi generational colony, so like a BioSat, but larger scale, that looks at multi generational effects of, different levels of microgravity, different levels of radiation, all on board this station. And again, it's maintained and the mice are fed and looked after by, robots that are incorporated into the, into the spacecraft. So that allows occasional human visitation and repair.

It's sort of its own floating, independent biosat experiment, and it would be put into orbit around the moon. It would effectively allow us to study, hey, what are the multi generational compounding effects of these different levels of gravity using centrifuges as we discussed earlier. So Yes. You have a centrifuge that simulates moon gravity, one that simulates Mars gravity, and trying to establish where is that line, where is that sweet spot.

And on the rate on the radio e scale, I actually, early on, I described that conceptual line as the Ronco Logan line, ironically enough. So I don't believe doctor Ronco was directly involved in this MICE HAB paper or contributed to it, but it was effectively based on her work, and they make, they do make reference to her work. She was at NASA Ames Research Center when they authored the Mark III rodent habitat paper, and MICE HAB was done at NASA Langley in Virginia.

So the beach ball is still there. It's still getting bounced around, and the idea is getting more grand, as as it goes. And again, this is a NASA published paper. Well, it's done by, NASA Associates and was published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. So it is a serious paper with a plan saying this is what we could do, and this is what we would expect the product to be able to be.

I have discussed this concept with, commercial entities, and there is a commercial start up company called Spaceborne United that was founded in, I want to say, 20 2018.

They're at least a couple years old, who have stated that their their goal is to solve a lot of these problems for humanity, to effectively fill in the data that would fill the the radio e scale, store human gametes in orbit, eventually, see the first human conception conception in space, and, eventually be able to give birth to human young in space. Now speaking with their CEO, that is easily 10, 15, 20 years out. Easily. And and it is not a singular, organizational answer.

One thing about Project Moon Hunt and what we've been talking about, which I have shared with you some, is that this requires new eyes, new thinking, not old school, and I'm not saying that they are, but a new way of addressing these challenges from multiple different angles.

You've just brought up through this the different cultural perspectives, and you might get one answer when you do this experiment from a from the United States, but it could be completely viewed differently if it was done by another society's, baseline as to what is good for society and what is not. So we need more, and the billion hearts and minds, which is the community engagement side of what we're looking at, will bring new answers to the equation. It's not just one company.

There's going to be hundreds of companies that will need to organizations that need to come into play to make this a reality. And as you said, 10, 15, 20 years. Well, I I could swear there's someone who plans to go on Mars in the next few years. Yeah. And it's almost what comes first or and and not to be protective. Society has had a long history of individuals jumping on a boat and going when other people said, you're gonna fall off the the edge of the cliff.

And Yeah. And, again, that's that second innate human desire, which is to explore, to expand. Right. So it ties in, and I I think that we can get to these solutions. It's how fast. And I think the more more individuals engaged in this, the faster we can get there. Yes. In which I reiterate this, you know, this final bullet point. The research on this at the moment is not moving quickly enough when you consider the factors.

You consider there's a lot of, developing instability on earth that will be occurring here in the coming decades. There have been rise of authoritarian regimes around, you know, around the globe, and strongmen have been sort of gaining more more traction.

This all contributes to a a much more, I would say, contested type environment where the the post World War 2 peaceful order, we can't rely wholly on that anymore, and we do need to cooperate as a global society to address a lot of these challenges. When it comes to addressing climate change and nuclear proliferation, the list is long. Plastic in the oceans is another great one, you know, we could cause Yeah.

We mass extinction events in the ocean food supply chain because too many fish are dying from eating plastic. And I think if you recall in one of the videos, it's the it's the solid waste, which is worse than the plastics. The United States dumps 12,000,000,000 gallons, not dumps intentionally, but there's 12,000,000,000 gallons of multi municipal waste landing in the ocean every day. In Europe.

Yeah. If you take Europe and assume that Europe, China, and India, just to take 4 countries, are the same, but they're not, that's 50,000,000,000 gallons of poison into the ocean every day. That's not radioactive waste. That's an industrial waste. That's not pesticide waste. It's not a mining waste. Would you our our water already has plastics in it, but imagine having to drink poison every day, and our oceans could be completely killed just by the municipal waste runoff that we have.

Yeah. So we do have some major challenges that we have to address. So we in that, we have the potential for calamity that we discussed earlier. Yep. That, hey, single planet species don't survive. We have the need.

We have already established a growing unfortunately, we have already established a growing need that is getting more and more immediate in nature to solve these problems, not just solve the solve the problems themselves on earth, but to solve the reproduction issues and establishing that, that existential insurance policy as I called it earlier. So we we've taken go ahead. Go ahead. Keep it going.

So there as I mentioned, there has been research conducted by major space agencies and using science dollars that had been given to those space agencies. But given placed against the backdrop in the context of the history of human space exploration, we've been going to space now, what, we just had the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 not that long ago. Sorry. Doing the math here.

Yeah. So the the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 was, I wanna say, a year year and a half ago, and we were in space a decade before that with the Mercury Gemini programs and obviously starting with Sputnik, we have had many decades in space. The space life sciences have not advanced at the same rate that they need to, just in terms of keeping people alive and healthy, and certainly as far as reproduction, is able to be able to be parsed out here.

So you have a very small number of experiments scattered throughout the history of space exploration that have to do with solving this fundamental issue, which is what is required for settlement.

We've already talked about, the the threats and the fact that NASA and a lot of these other agencies are primarily focused on building the vehicles, the process of getting us there, not necessarily the aftermath or the the interim where we have squishy carbon based life forms that they need to survive and reproduce, they're going to be in that craft that's traveling across interplanetary space.

Given all that, you would think that this would be a much more prominent area of study, but it really hasn't been. And especially the, the reproductive side. I will give you a quick I'll give you a very quick example. There was a, I go I wanna say she was also at, NASA Ames. Doctor Yvonne Clearwater, who was a psychologist at NASA. This was, I wanna say, in the mid eighties. She wrote a sidebar article in a journal called Psychology Today.

Title the title of the article was intimacy in space, and she her role at NASA was helping design the t the crew quarters to allow people to, the crew members to to have more privacy. And she stated in this in this sidebar article, I'll just quote her here, it seems obvious, however, that a group of normal healthy professionals will probably possess normal healthy sexual appetites. If we lock people up for 90 day periods, we must prepare for the possibility of intimate behavior, unquote.

Sounds reasonable. Right? There's yeah. It sounds reasonable. There's there's an economic reason for creating a launch vehicle. There's an economic reason for putting a satellite into space. While there is a a mission success need, it's not an economic need today. And the challenge becomes once, I'm forecasting.

Once individuals realize that we had not solved these challenges and it becomes too late, it becomes far and full or something goes wrong, there might be a backpedaling to say we need to solve this quickly. Yes. And I I'm of the same opinion that, there would be pretty quick funding to to be thrown, thrown out this kind of research if we were put into an existential crisis situation Right.

And we re and or an economic situation where SpaceX is able to get you to Mars, but they can't keep you alive on the way there, suddenly that threatens them economically and it threatens the whole Correct. The whole enterprise. But to come back so sort of to come back to one more point I wanna make on Sure.

The issue with waiting until 11th hour when it comes to this kind of research is that the ethical, moral, and legal guidelines that we want to stay within where we're not using humans as human babies, especially as lab rats, and that we are able to justify that we took every precaution possible, we did all the research we possibly could to ensure the parameters in which to safely birth human young in these environments.

All those all those ethical guidelines and everything could quickly drop away if we are put in a no kidding survival situation, which you look at any situation in human history where it is a fight for basic survival, all moral ethical guidelines fall the wayside. And that's how a lot of exploration has been done also. They have been the the renegades, the people on the outside.

And you're asking for individuals to be cognizant of a future possibility where I think the we all have had I've gotta believe we all have had I'm making this up. I have had a lot of conversations about COVID. And the question is, why won't someone wear a mask, and why will they wear a mask, or why will they be protected? So you cannot walk outside. There's a law that says you cannot walk outside naked. Yes. There are laws.

You cannot walk outside naked and go around to bars and restaurants to do everything, and it is not questioned as a right that I have to wear clothing. It is a law. You follow it. Period. Putting on a mask is in essence, you can't leave your privates out, which is your bodily functions. Part of that, I believe, or one reason it is not being, it is not as powerful is that in COVID, you don't see the people die.

You don't go into the hospital and live with someone for 3 weeks or 4 weeks while they're trying to breathe and then die. You don't see the trauma that people go through every day. So therefore, you drop someone at the door and they they go in, and then they die away from everybody. It's horrible. It's terrible, the whole experience. Yeah. It's awful. But the world of the Vietnam War changed when the media brought into the living room through television the horrors of war.

There's a very big difference in seeing it on television. And in television today, we only see the aisles and the feet hanging out of people who are sick because of privacy laws, but we do not see the death. Yeah. And because of that, I think that even family members who don't believe in wearing a mask would come out and said, my father died. You put on that mask. If they had spent a month and a half watching their loved one die.

I think in the case, this is just conjecture, I think in the case of space, there's an excitement of the opportunity in 2021 and in the 20 twenties that it will happen, And it's almost overriding some of the basic principles of what's necessary to create a full human experience or a full mammalian or full species experience in space.

So I'm not sure that no matter how much people bang on the drum, people are going to hear it until it becomes either the existential threat or there's a challenge where people died or there's a financial challenge because it's not solved. Those are locked, but I don't know if it may I think it made sense. No. No. It makes sense.

And and to be frank, that is so that is actually precisely the scenario that I am arguing arguing we should do our damndest to avoid because that scenario is not necessary yet. The I mentioned earlier in my dissertation that you have the you have a a theoretical scenario where you have a a woman becomes pregnant on the surface of Mars, and we don't know anything about how pregnancy there works or what the the differences will be. So now she is faced with an extremely difficult decision.

She basically has 3 options. She can either stay there in the Mars environment and give birth to her baby, which could result in all sorts of anomalies and effects as we've seen from some of these these experiments. She could choose to leave, so get on a rocket and undergo the g forces to leave the planet and hopefully go up to some sort of orbital incubator space station or or something like that or potentially We're we're this is so far down the pipeline.

Yeah. Well and and this is again, I just wanna provide this as a A solution. As a example of what we don't want to end up in. The the earth example is is much nearer to home. When we talk about people going up into space and getting sick, because they spent a few months up there, but maybe they have some kind of underlying physiological condition where, they are not as healthy as your your standard astronaut or potentially getting getting sick when they when they get home. So to sorry.

To to round out this example of the of the Mars situation, she can either leave she can have the baby there on Mars, or she can choose to abort the pregnancy. Those are effectively her three options. They all suck for an expecting mother who wants to keep her child and keep her child safe and healthy. We cannot allow ourselves to get into a situation like that because then We we are humans. Yeah. Yeah. We are Oh, yeah. No. I'm I'm sure we probably will.

So so let me let me share with you something, Alex, because I think you'll appreciate this. The first question, the the reason Project Moon Hot exists as it does today had to do with a woman getting pregnant on the moon. The reason it was because someone made a comment about reproduction on of having a baby on the moon. Project Moon Hut was formed. That was the impetus for me to write out the 4 phases.

That was the impetus for the beginning of the 4 phases of development of the moon and everything else that slides under it. The reason you're on the program today is not because we can go out and tell people. It's because you just shared information, 5 hours of information. You just shared information that potentially potentially could reach the right person at the right time who feels the same way and makes the change. So you've done I'm gonna say, we've done our job today, the 2 of us.

We've done the job because it is an important topic. Otherwise, you would not be on today. The the way I pick guests is as a post, we get to choose who we want. Some people just every week, I have to put someone on. Every week, there has to be somebody on because I'm trying to make money off of this. Project Moon Hut is bringing on people who we think could add value to the ecosystem of the Age of Infinite and Project Moon Hut Foundation. We don't go for every week.

We don't go for just getting us guest on. And how long did you prepare for this? I mean, if you had to add hours or time or months, how long was it? So, you and I first spoke, I wanna say, about a month and It was, it was December it was December 3rd we first spoke. So so I had to I definitely had to get back in my books, go back through all these papers, and, you know, there's nothing I love more than reading dry medical literature. That's a joke. You I know.

You prepared you prepared for 2 months. Yeah. Because, it so this is you know, in my in my day to day life, this is not something that, is it It's not my point. You you you no. It's not my point. You were standing, waiting to go do your job in the military, and you were thinking about it. And you read an article, and you thought about it, and you decided what to put in and what not to put in. So you took 2 months. It doesn't have to be reading something. You thought about it.

It took you 2 months to come to today. That's how we build our programs. That's how everybody does it. They show up prepared, and they share something amazing that adds to the to the answers that people who are interested in, project moon hot, space moon, Mearth, Mars, that they can help make a change. And so I because we can go on forever, I'm gonna. It's 5 hours. It just hit the 5 hour mark, but we actually started a few minutes after. I'm going to say, I'm gonna say it. That's fine.

Thank you. Oh, thank you. I, I appreciate you having me on, and, I hope that this discussion has hopefully reached some of the right ears or will eventually and has helped push things in a direction that they need to go. And it even helped you. And most guests will say that they learn a lot just going through the experience of being on the podcast.

So I wanna thank you for taking all the time that you have to prepare to build and the time today to make sure that we had this fantastic overview, taking it from all different perspectives, psychological, cultural, physiological, down the list. And I'm still afraid of the cockroaches, but down the list. Same. So thank you. And I wanna thank all of you who have taken the time to listen in. Seriously, this was a a long call. It was yet I would have stopped it.

Honestly, I would have stopped it there if I didn't see that there was a path to finding new answers, and we did. So at least I did. I'm hoping you did too. I hope that you learn something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others, whether it be on Earth, within Mearth, or anywhere. And bringing it back, the Project Moon Hut Foundation is we are looking to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, the Moon Hut.

By the way, we were named by NASA, so we were named project moon hut. Through the accelerated development of an earth and space space ecosystem, then to turn the endeavor to use the endeavors, the paradigm shifting, the innovations, and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. And so I wanna ask you, Alex, what is the single best way for someone to connect with you?

Okay. So I, I do have a Twitter account if you want to connect with me via social media, which is just my name. It's Alex Leyendecker, atalexleyendecker. So alexlayende e c k e r. And then, you can also contact me, via by email at [email protected], common spelling. So s p a a Perfect. And if you'd like to connect with me, it's David. Now we have at project moonhut dot org, but we also [email protected], if you don't wanna type all that in.

You can connect with us on Twitter at at project moonhut or at goldsmith for me. LinkedIn, we're on. We're on Facebook. We are reaching everywhere. We have a lot of things happening in the background. 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 into ages.

You personally have just experienced the information age and what a ride it has been and will continue to be. Now consider that you may right now be living through another transformational age, the age of infinite. An age that is not determined by scarcity and abundance, but by a redefining lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources. The ingredients for an absolutely amazing sci fi story that has come to life as together we can create a new definition of the future.

The podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, h u t, to the accelerate development of an earth and space based ecosystem. Then to use the endeavors, the paradigm shift thinking, and the innovations and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. Today, we're going to be exploring an absolutely incredible topic.

Reinventing sexuality and reproduction in space is the equivalent to forging the keys to the universe. And we have with us today, Alex Landecker. How are you, Alex? I'm good. How are you doing, David? I'm doing great. Typically, if you've heard one of the podcast, there is a very, very brief introduction to the guest and that's intentional. It's because the content stands on its own.

Yet when you bring up something like sexuality reproduction in space, or I've brought it up, individuals have kind of questioned, who can do this? Who has the quality or capability to do this? So I'm going to give you a little bit more that might help you to understand our guest, Alex. And he is currently a US Air Force helicopter pilot. So I'll bring this up immediately is because he is a pilot.

He has to put through a disclaimer that because he is a pilot, he has to put through a disclaimer that anything he says, articulates, conjectures in any way, shape, or form is not a representation of his role in the US Air Force. And anything that he says also does not or is not relayed or covered through any other affiliation he's had in government roles or positions throughout the industry, whether it be as a sexologist or the industry as a whole.

These are Alex's, opinions, thoughts, hypothesis. And as we all know, everybody learns and lives on the shoulders of others. Alex will be bringing his. So that said, Alex, has been a sexologist since 2,009, 10 ish period. He does happen to have a PhD in human sexuality. And his research has been focused on human sexuality and reproduction factors in off Earth environments. Realize I just said off Earth environments.

And the future research that be needed to make a long term colonization on other worlds a viable possibility. So now you can understand Alex is coming from a, not only an academic but research side of a topic that we really haven't had the experiences to experience in the way that we would on earth. So, Alex, did I do that okay for you? Yeah. That'll work. Appreciate it. There we go. Let's start. Do you have an outline for us? Yes. Okay. So how many points do you have?

So I have 4 major bullets and, one sort of overarching bullet that I want the listeners to keep in mind as we go through this. Okay. So you you want me to understand. I get it. Yeah. Alright. So let's give me number 1. Okay. So the overarching, sort of theme is wherever we go in the universe, our sexuality as human beings is coming with us. Hold on. Is coming with us.

Number 2. Is that the quote unquote standard, human sexual pursuit narratives that you have experienced, grown up with, know as your perception are somewhat misleading to human nature. And there it is. Are somewhat misleading. I'm cutting them a little shorter just so that we don't spend all our time on the program writing. Number 3?

Number 3, researching and determining the solutions for sexual reproduction in outer space environments is almost totally essential for ultimate survival as a species. I have outer space is essential for survival as a specie as a species. Okay. Next. Okay. And then the, bullet for challenges of the environment to the reproductive process. To the reproductive process. Next. Research on sexual reproduction in space is not moving quickly enough when you consider the external factors.

Space is not moving fast enough. Okay. I think I should give a course on title writing or or bullet points. Some people can go wild here. Okay. So let's start let's start with number 1. Wherever we go in the universe or sexuality becoming with us, what's going on? Tell me what you're thinking.

So, again, this is sort of a, an overarching theme that I wanna just want you to keep in mind as as we discuss these other bullet points, but I want you to think about the history of, space exploration and the nations that have actually gone into space.

So to date, you only have the United States, the soviet union now russians, the chinese and, india that have launched their own spacecraft domestic domestically built spacecraft into space You also have a lot of other nations that have had representatives there.

You know, a lot of European nations, the ESA, European Space Agency, Japanese, astronauts that have gone up, they all bring their own character as well, but kinda stay focused on the nations that, that are actually sort of leading the charge. So you want you're saying just focus on the launch capability nations?

What they not only focused on them, but it is important to recognize that those are the nations that currently have launch capability and effectively are acting as the standard bearers, for humanity as as we continue to push out and explore new worlds. So as we go to Mars, as we go to these other places in the universe, those are the nations generally, it's accepted, that are in the lead. And we have to consider the sexual culture that a lot of those nations are gonna be bringing with them.

Okay. So we've got a, I would say, a conservative nation. I mean, I'd love to hear how you are going to outline these US, Soviet, Chinese, and India as nation sexual sexuality? Because I'd I'd like to know your interpretation. So go ahead. So really, really looking at it. I'll start with, you know, I'll start with, my my home nation here, the United States. I think that, generally, folks can agree that there is a lot of hypersexualization in US culture. You see it everywhere.

You see it in our advertising, in, just just culture in general, proliferation of of, pornography, sexual rights, etcetera, etcetera, while it experiences a enormous amount of restraint and constriction by, separate political and also religious entities. So America was a nation that was founded on, obviously looking for a lot of, a lot of different rights that they did not have back over in Europe, and they brought a lot of their religious mores with them.

I don't think anybody's really gonna disagree with me when I say that the United States, at least from a political and religious context tends to be less, I would say, sexually liberal or less open about sexuality in general on a national level than most of, say, our European counterparts. I I don't I having lived outside the United States for over a decade, the United States, is looked at as very prudish. Yeah. That's that's generally the word that, that I hear.

And Yeah. And and, again, I'm not trying to, you know, I don't try to say anything is right or wrong. This is just observe cultural observation. You weigh that against other nations that, that are going into space that are their own space faring nations, for example, the Chinese also have a very generally conservative attitude toward sexuality where you don't have sex before marriage. You've got the 3 primary pillars, which is family, tradition, and the state.

And for a lot of young people in that country, marriage is the peak event in your life. So under the Communist Party over there, certainly before the, open up to the rest of the world, sex was always very strictly controlled. Conformity to the masses was enforced. So like many authoritarian regimes, there was persecution of sexual minorities, and that is a pretty common theme with authoritarian regimes throughout history. I'll speak a little bit more on that later.

Okay. But the the point is is that the Chinese have very heavy censorship. So their Internet, for example, you cannot show exposed body parts like the nipples or genitals. That is that is illegal for them. So you can actually be in prison for, trying to access that type of material. Not saying people don't. It just it gives you an idea of the level of censorship. They're culturally, you could consider them to be much more reserved and expected to control their sexual desire.

And they have a saying that happy family, a happy family is 4 generations under one roof. So there is a lot of pressure on the children in the family to find a spouse and get married. There's even, I've heard tell of, marriage markets, quote, marriage markets, where parents actually will get together to find matches for their children. And it's sort of the street market version of a dating app, if you will, where parents are showing around pictures of of their children that have stats. So, hey.

This is their job, their income, their education, and this is what sometimes, hey. This is what they are looking for, so you have to be a certain height, etcetera, etcetera. I have not in all my time in, living in Hong Kong. I have not once seen that in China, but I'd I'll I'll have to look that up at another point. That's interesting because I don't know I I haven't heard that, but that's interesting. Okay. Go on.

Yeah. So that so that is, that's something that to my knowledge as of now is only, only in Shanghai, but from what I understand, it is, not uncommon through throughout the rest of the country. It's probably my my take is probably Shanghai would be less likely than some of the more rural places that because Shanghai is a lot more metropolitan. I mean, the the city is, actually an amazing city. So a lot of nightlife, a lot of people going out, a lot of money being transferred.

It it's a incredible city overall with that. I I'm gonna have to check into that. So that's yes. There is a conservativeness compared to other countries, such as Sweden, Norway, or the those are the most common we hear about. Yeah. Okay. Well, I I'm waiting. So we've got China. We've got US. The, so and then you take a look at countries like Russia, which, you know, is the other sort of heavyweight in the in the launch industry at the moment.

India is newer to the game, and the Europeans, of course, are are able to launch rockets from, from South America. They have, a ESA launch center there as well. I think, you know, we've already kind of talked about Europeans in general are a little perhaps quite a lot more sexually liberal than their American counterparts. They are at least much more open to the scientific aspects of it. They're much more acknowledging.

We do tend to have an issue with anti science movements in the United States, that that much has been evident, you know, as we've gone through the pandemic in, in the last couple years. But, the Europeans are not only cultural culturally more open to it on a education level, and all these things work into each other, but on an education level, they provide much better comprehensive sex education early on, and it's not viewed as something dirty.

Sex is not something dirty that needs to be hidden away. There are still conservative elements in every European society. There always will be. Europe is, you know, really where the I I come, for example, I come from the Roman Catholic church, pretty conservative sexually, obviously. Coming from there, I can I can attest that not everything that the Moors are are going to tell you that you're going to be raised knowing aligns with what the actual facts are?

And you're still gonna have pockets of that throughout all these European countries because there still is that influence. So some place, and you could tell me if I'm wrong, the Icelandic culture, it is not uncommon to have sex on the first date. And the reason is individuals, because I know some Icelandic people, have said that why would you want to go into relationship that you find that you don't have any sexual compatibility in the beginning?

So there immediately, there's no, there's no, there's no bad thought about a woman taking the man home or the win man taking the woman home immediately because they're checking out to see if this person could be someone that they should pursue. Yeah. Why waste the time? Right?

So and if you if you look at sort of those more Nordic countries, you also have a lot of, influences from their earlier earlier cultures, Viking culture, pagan culture, which was a much more free type of society when it came to sexuality. It was also far more egalitarian in terms of, status that women had in society. There were women warriors. They fought alongside the men, and were able to to be lords in that society. Not so the case with a lot of their southern European counterparts.

As far as Russia goes, I would say that you still have a lot of authoritarian elements, obviously, with Vladimir Putin's government, and you hear in the news all the time about their persecution of, of the homosexual community there in Russia. I'll I'll hope I'll I'll I'd like I wanna hear this definition because I know a lot of Russians Yeah. And I've I've worked in Moscow. I've worked in Saint Petersburg. So what's your take from a sexologist perspective?

Well, I would say that the people, culturally are actually far more open, to sexual freedoms. They it's interesting because it is sort of built on a, misogynistic framework, because women there, generally, you know, you're expected to dress up, you're expected to throw on makeup, look pretty, have a great body, etcetera, etcetera, or you're not, you know, you don't have value as a mate.

I think there's that general perception that runs through that society, but at the same time, they're they're much more free about sharing their sexuality with other people, at least with each other, engaging in in sexual activity. I would probably say of the people I know in the world, the Russians have more have compare the Greeks are supposed to be number 1 in terms of number of, the frequency, but the Russian society since tends to be extremely open.

And when it comes to the women to kind of maybe give you my knowledge, having worked and lived and know individuals, is that it's a it's a means to further their career. So a Russian woman is a very powerful woman, often extremely bright, and she's using everything she, she has just like a male would. She's using everything she has at her disposal to make sure that she succeeds.

And I'm not saying the sexuality is one of those pieces, but to, Russian women behind, and it's often said behind, behind every rush of powerful man is a strong Russian woman. They're extremely they wanna build. They wanna grow. They wanna create a future. So sexuality is all part of that whole culture. I don't know if I'm saying it right, but I'm trying to be as as politically correct on this as I can without stepping over the line.

It's a very interesting culture and way they look at sexuality. Yeah. Yeah. And and I I totally get you. I constantly have to pause when I talk about this because I'm always sort of worried about, saying the wrong thing that's gonna run, you know, rub people the, the wrong way when I didn't obviously intend it. No. No. It's in the the conversation between us is that I, both being Americans, there is a, a hesitancy to say certain things, and a friend of mine is, doctor Ruth. And I give a yeah.

I I give a presentation what women need to know about men that men don't know how need need to know about themselves. Doctor Ruth has been in the audience. She said I should write a book on it.

And so when I share some of these constructs, for example, the Greeks being the number one most sexual, I think they're rated number 1 in terms of the most frequency of sex, as compared to numb the United States, which I think is number 19 or 20, it's pretty far down there as compared to frequency of times per year in a couple relationship or a married couple. Those that's coming from data.

It's not just coming from a It's also interesting interesting that you bring that up, because looking at different sexual cultures around the world that don't really fit the standard narrative, and we'll talk a little bit more about this in a moment, that we are used to hearing in industrialized societies would actually challenge that point.

I think there are other societies that have been identified, small societies, micro societies that have been identified, where frequency of sex is is far more, common. It's much higher higher frequency. There was a pretty fantastic book, written by 2, psychologists that had backgrounds in in anthropology. It was published in, I want to say, 2010. The name of the book is Sex at Dawn. It's by, Christopher Ryan, and I'm probably gonna butcher her name, but, Casilda Jetha.

They used that book to argue against the grain of what we know and accept as the standard narrative. So I'll be I'll kind of be quoting them a lot, when I'm discussing that particular bullet point, but one of the things that they bring up in their discussion is the first step in discerning the cultural from the human is what a, mythologist named Joseph Campbell called detribalization. So you have all these societies, all these cultures all over the world. That's your tribe.

And in big countries like the United States, you're gonna find different tribes all over the place, in terms of what the local society and culture is like. I think you could agree that culture in New York City, even from borough to borough, is going to be very, very different from culture at, you know, some small town in the deep south. Yeah. What the norms the norms are. So every try, every culture has their own truth, and that can apply across the board. It applies to everything.

For example, just to give a kind of neutral example, I don't know if you've ever eaten crickets as a food. Have you? No. I have not. Have you? I actually have tried them. I don't know. Well, have I tried a cricket? I might have tried cricket? Yeah. In a in a Mexican restaurant in Las Vegas of all places, but crickets are actually very high in in protein. Yes. Beneficial minerals.

There are cultures around the world that, consume them as a main part of their diet, especially foraging societies the some of those that still exist We you and I generally are going to look at that We see somebody eating a grub or a bug Our first natural instinct is to recoil because that is not our experience we you know your initial feeling is, you know, how could how could somebody do that? But it is completely normal to that society and that culture.

So in in order to make that distinction between the cultural and the human, again, we have to extricate ourselves, from our really unexamined assumptions of what is normal and what is natural, so that we can really recognize, what is observed in nature. Humanity as a species, man, we are big messy complicated and, you know, the more you study humanity, I think especially sexuality The more you realize that you really know nothing in the context of of the grand scheme of things.

So I always used to to tell people that I know if you want to understand human beings, study history and study sexuality. But even those, have been very biased in their literature because Oh, Unbelievably. Yeah. History is written by the winners, right? So hence you can't you can't expect it to be wholly accurate and a lot of the early, literature on sexuality the quote scientific, sexual literature Was very flawed. It was complicated from the start.

A lot of it was based in western religious moors initially, you know you had these giants of science and, you know, counting Freud and and others who applied a lot of their own biases and their own corner of the world perceptions into their scientific theories, which were then steamrolled into everything that we base psychology and a lot of other stuff on today.

So a neat thing about, this book, and I do I do recommend reading it if you ever get a chance, is that it it addresses that confirmation bias, you know, that tendency to lock onto findings that support our own view while we tend to play down or disregard evidence contrary to our positions. You're seeing that a lot more these days with the advent of the Internet, echo sound chambers in Internet chat rooms, you know, on social media, etcetera.

But the the key thing that I kind of, wanna bring up with regard to the standard human narrative is well, actually, let me put it this way. Let me ask you a question, David. Sure. What do you think of as the standard mating practice between or just sort of an analysis a quick analysis of each between males and females, human males and females, as you have been able to observe in your life and society, and what has been around? The standard mating practice.

Yeah. Oh, my God. They they there's an extreme. There's a an extreme from one end to the other. So I have seen and been privy to been seen happen, where the culture determines who the mate is. It's between the parents, the parents decide Mhmm. And the people have gotten married. I I've seen that I know it. I know of couples who've been set up this way. And they have lived their their living their lives this way.

Yeah. And I've seen it all the way to the other extreme, where there's a, the mating ritual is very promiscuous. It goes all the way to the extreme of multiple partners at the same time, determining which one they like, and then eventually settling down with one or many individuals. So I've seen the the the extremes, and I'm I'm actually thinking of people. So it's not I'm just Yeah. Throwing it out there.

And I do so I would say that if I was to take a more middle of the road cultural bias or cultural perspective, it is the search for a mate, the trial of a mate.

I would say more of the world is the as one of the extremes, but it is, in the tier 4 countries, which are countries that have, have economics where I think it's like over 35 or $50,000 a year in income is you will find searching for a mate, discovering a mate, trying the mate, acceptance by parents, then the marriage, and then moving on.

So I would say that's more of a western tier 4, where I would and then if I went to for others, I could probably say it was just the parents deciding everything. I don't know if I answered the question. Did I answer the question? I don't know. That's right. So so you went somewhere that I I wasn't really expecting. You did give a much, broader spectrum than most people would normally answer with. So it well, first, is the spectrum okay? Yeah. Yeah. No. It's Okay.

The things you said, yes, are, are correct. Those types of, you know, types of, traditions do ex do exist all around the world, different, societies. When it comes to western society specifically, and I probably should have been more clear, you you have this, perception that you the the classical description of it is the quote war between the sexes, at which I'm guessing I'm sure you've heard. No. I actually I I I have my I have some thoughts, but I've not heard that term as a definition.

So it's what is the definition of that? Okay. So, let me frame it this way. There is this standard narrative that exists that, even a lot of sex reach researchers get this wrong, one way or the other. And, you know, disclaimer, I could be totally wrong as, yeah, as I go through this, but the standard narrative that you generally hear is that males, when they are seeking a mate, they are out to screw anything that moves.

They want to find a young, attractive partner, attractive female partner, who he can have children with, while, and and basically have what is known as paternal investment. So he has a young attractive partner to have children with, protect, give resources to, while also taking every opportunity to spread his seed around, so low cost for high reward or potential high reward Yep.

By sleeping around with other women behind his primary mate's back, in order to give him the best chances of, passing along his genetic line. Females on the on the opposite end so that's the that's the general perception of the male, in this standard narrative theory.

Females are seeking a dependable, stable mate, the highest value mate, that they can possibly find while, so having children that with this guy that they know will protect their young because he is all but convinced that these children are mine, so he's going to continue to support her financially, and provide protection.

And this goes all the way back to, you know, the early, early ages where a man literally had to protect his family, as a warrior, but also provide food and nourishment, and the, female was the razor of primarily the razor of the children. Mhmm. So she is sitting in that role but still also is out seeking genetically superior alternatives to her primary mate.

So if she comes across Brad Pitt, she will take a risk and sleep with the guy on the, off chance that he will, get her pregnant, and she will end up raising a much more attractive and strong and high value, child who has a much better chance than somebody with her husband's genes, for example, of finding a mate of their own, reproducing, and continuing continuing her genetic line.

So that is what the standard narrative in evolutionary psychology has has latched onto, and I should have, I should have preempted that with I I wanna say this really fast. Human beings, if you look at them overall, they have what I believe to be 3 innate drives. I used to argue that they had 2 primary drives, but, really, it comes down to 3. The first is the pursuit of sex and to reproduce.

So again, passing your genes down, which is twofold because you propagate your own genes, you know, you you continue your own genetic line that is your version of immortality as long as it continues, and you propagate the species as a whole. So that's sort of twofold. There's that that drive that we have. Yeah. And obviously sex is important to that.

The second drive that humans have, and this is important to the space aspect of this this conversation, is the drive to explore, to push new frontiers and conquer new horizons. There and that ties back to, you know, modern humans have been around for, around 200000 years. It's generally understood that we originated in Africa and spread out and populated the rest of the planet. Every reach of the planet has has found, you know, human footsteps. Our ancestors are the ones that did that.

We carry their drive to explore and to do that. So the only it only makes sense that we now go into space and continue pushing new frontiers. The 3rd, innate drive that humans have, and again I want to, iterate that sex is also very important to this, is the drive for connection. So we are inherently social creatures. We operate off a very social construct. You need connection to other human beings. We pursue, connection to the wider universe.

You know, people seek connection to a a quote higher plane or a higher power, which it it can help explain the draw of, faith and religion to a lot of to a significant percentage of people on the planet. It's the pursuit, that connection is pursuit of significance. We want to know that our being here actually means something, and that is why we seek that connection on all these, you know, various different planes and, and modes that that I just described.

Sexuality is also, again, very important to that connection, because we are sexually social creatures. I'll get a little bit more into that later, but it's another thing that is important to recognize is, and I say this, you know, personally as a sexologist, your sexuality is one of the few things that runs through your body, your mind, and, you know, we can remember that the brain, the human brain, is the biggest sex organ of all, and your soul.

If you believe in the soul, there's a spiritual element to it. I happen to. So we are biologically, neurologically, spiritually wired to pursue sex. So not just reproduction, but sex. Sex for sex's sake. So it is basically is essentially an element of our social bonding and method of improving group cohesion. So I tell you before I take a step, if I can, because I we had the the multiple cultures that you're talking about. And I'm not trying to be politically correct when I say this.

I'm asking a serious question about it. Yeah. Where his history has not been kind to the fact that there are versions of sexuality, LBGTQ, that the entire spectrum, and that we probably have a lot more variations of all of these in between that we we really don't talk about when we say male and female. It how does has that played a role in when you're looking at, for example, space or when you're looking at the sexuality and reproduction overall? It does. And there's there are yeah.

While the, Well, it's but it's a very fundamental question because, I'm I'm gonna take it from an I've had people say to me, David, you talk about things that I wouldn't talk about in public any day, and I find them talking about them with you on your program. Is what if there are many variations of humans, meaning there there as there's deviations in, for example, the virus, there's variants.

That humans have changed over time, and they become different versions of the same type of species with micro adjustments or differentiations between them. Sexuality is one of them. That's an example of a variation of a certain bottle biological structure, a genetic structure, a a neurological structure. Yeah. So how does that now that we're at a time in the world where it's more open in certain cultures to talk about it, where we are today, you and I can.

How do you address that or what are you thinking about it? So that actually ties back to sort of the first and overarching, point that I made that wherever we go, our sexuality will come with us. Something else to keep in mind is that human sexuality, at least in, my experience of studying it, is as varied and wide and deep as humanity itself. If you look at somebody at just how different humans can be physically, Sexuality easily meets and and I would say surpasses that.

Studying it is a lot like studying the ocean, but I can only study 1 cubic foot of water in this particular area, you know, at a time. So Well, the reason I you know, I'm as I'm as we're talking, there's an easy way to express this. In almost all the tell of all the movies and television series that we've seen that are sci fi related, we run into androgynous species, species with no sexual reproduction that they that that they go the gamut.

So in theory, the human sci fi experience often is a representation of many ways in which the human humans do live on Earth, and they're just disguised as aliens. Does that make sense, what I just said? Yeah. Yeah. I I think I can see that. And and something to keep in mind as well is, we have seen with programs, for example, such as, Star Trek. That's yes. That's what I meant.

Yeah. Examples of, people that didn't meet the, you know, meet the standard narrative of what sexuality is or should be, which for a lot of people for a long time has been, well, obviously, a heterosexual male and female, and we only have sex when we get married and anything outside of that is a sin. And it, you know, it go it goes on and on.

Obviously, as we become a more secular society, which the United States is designed as is to be a a secular republic, So we are we are made stronger by our differences, but the fact that we are are still united, I don't seek to, you know, reach for We're we're not gonna talk politics today. Yeah. Yeah. For politics or grand or grandeur here. That could be a whole another show. Yeah. Yeah. That's that we could that would take that would take a while.

You have many, many variations, on human sexuality, and again, they will all come with us. And that includes, paraphilias. There's earlier in, my sex sexological career and in in tandem You gotta help me here. What's a paraphilia? Okay. So a well, let me give you the definition, the textbook definition.

K. Because I'm I'm looking at So a a paraphilia is a condition characterized, the psychiatric term is a condition characterized by abnormal sexual desires typically involving extreme or dangerous activities. Okay. Now that I would say is not a totally or at least as I'm able to see it, a totally correct interpretation of what a paraphilia is. Not most of them are not what I would deem dangerous. There's a lot of things that I personally consider odd, because I don't know.

I think you just did I think you did a Google search like I did. So that was the first definition, but if you if you read if you drop down where people also ask what what are the most common paraphilias, they say the most common, yeah, pedophilia, sexual focus on children, exhibitionism, exposure of genitals to strangers, voyeurism, observing private activities of unaware victims. And Yeah. What is that? Frauduism?

Frauduism, which is the rubbing it it's basically sexual excitement caused by rubbing up on people, unwilling. Okay. People who are not willing to let you rub up on them. Is that a better definition of what you were thinking about? Well, that so paraphilias are yes. Those are what are known as the, 6 illegal paraphilias. There are paraphilias absolutely that are illegal. Yeah. I see I see them. I went down. I got sex So those sadomasochism, chilgis term, vestic disorder. There's a few of them.

There's 8. Yeah. And and, and not so not for example, transvestism is not illegal. Right. It's not in the United States. But it is still considered a paraphilia by the, DSM in the DSM 5, which is the diagnostic, Diagnostic Statistical Manual of, of Disorders, under the American Psychiatric Association, and I I think I butchered the title. My copy's around here somewhere. That's okay. I don't wanna go dig it out. No. No. I I got it.

So there are quite a few different sexual appetites, that exist in the world that have been documented.

Most of which are again, we just listed the most extreme of them, and, I've studied extreme paraphilias for a very long time in relation to to other, to other research projects that were more military oriented in nature, what I was originally supposed to do my PhD on, but I ended up segging to, to, you know, sex and space because they're logistically, it was gonna be a lot easier for me to actually complete the PhD and be done, to continue on as a researcher. So, yeah, I can I can see?

So my I know there's more on this topic, but my mind yes. We are bringing with us not only the definitions of sexuality, what they mean spiritually, physically and biologically. We are bringing along the cultural side of the culture in which you, affiliate with and the extremes within those cultures.

Because there's a it's a I don't know how many accesses I would develop, but there's there's a liberal and a conservative or there's an extreme versus a less extreme version of each one of these in each culture, and each definition of them makes it to a factorial of, I don't know, bazillion. Yeah. And and the majority of, people that you're gonna find going into into space, which, by the way, we have already had, homosexual individuals travel into space.

Sally Ride was the first lesbian astronaut. She this was not revealed. I I wanna say it wasn't actually revealed, until after her death, but, you know, she had her own reasons for not revealing that to the world at the time, probably because, you know, she wanted to keep it personal. She didn't want that to be the focus. She just wanted to be an astronaut as opposed to being known as a lesbian astronaut or, you know, however other people would have framed it. So I I get that.

Totally, you know, totally understand that. Most people are going to that do travel in the space, though, will fall somewhere inside what referred to as the, the normative curve, where it I don't you I don't mean to define it as, quote, normal because really nobody is ever really totally normal, and I I I I know what you're trying to say. You're trying to say that you used the word normative for to Yeah. What's commonly the data points. So so maybe we can use it as most commonly referred to.

Yeah. But doesn't mean that there's a normalistic, trait or characteristic behind it. So, yes, I would say that we're now in testing for space. Possibly, Sally wasn't known at that time. I don't know. And I don't know how much testing there is around the globe to say to an individual, are you a pedophiliac? Are you a a voyeur, voyeuristic in your approach? Are you x, y, and z? So I don't think you tell me if I'm wrong. In the space industry, they test those things.

Well and you need to consider the group of people that have been going into space. And I am going to speak a little bit about the some of the pitfalls of this process, further on down Okay. Yep. In the conversation. But astronauts tend to undergo a high number of psychological evaluations. They're constantly assessed.

When you are on the space station, obviously, you're having all your vital signs are being monitored, read, everything more or less everything you do is gonna be on film, and this is, not only for your health and welfare, but it's also for the health and were welfare of the mission that ground control elements are able to monitor what is going on and if there is conflict developing, etcetera. So just given You do you do know what you just said is already ending. And it yes.

And it will con so it will continue to It will continue, but it is ending this whole thing of every time someone goes up in every single scenario, and everybody's watching, and everybody's monitoring. That can't go on forever. It it can't. And especially as we enter the commercialization period of space where, quote, unquote, regular people are are going up. You know?

So people who don't have years of astronaut training and time in thousands of hours as a jet pilot or a or a, a medical doctor and, you know, behind them. So you you, up to this point, have had this, cadre of extremely high performing, very focused individuals.

And as a result, the study of sexuality has been considered a more of a nonissue by a lot of these agencies because the people that they're sending up there are there to focus on the mission and they're constantly monitored, etcetera, etcetera. So there's no there's no really room for any of that to to be going on, any sexual hanky pank, if you will.

But what I before we kinda move on to that, what I would like to bring us back to is, I told you about that standard narrative, that we have in western society and which has been exported to a lot of other societies around the globe. You know, our the influence of the Western world runs deep around the the global society that is now Earth. That narrative is primarily a reproduction oriented narrative. Notice it's all about passing on your genetic line and the best way to attain your goals.

It's a very selfish type of narrative, and it's mutually exploitative, which kind of you know, I remember I mentioned the war between the sexes. That's what I'm talking about. It's it's a really sort of depressing concept. And we wonder why people, you know, constantly feel alone, why we have high divorce rates in the United States. I think this year the divorce rate well, actually, this year after the pandemic and everybody's been locked up, I guarantee the divorce rate's skyrocketing.

The divorce rate typically though is at least 50% in the United States. 50% of marriages end in in divorce, and I think the number has actually been taking up higher in recent years. Again, we are a species that has sex for sex's sake as a social bonding activity. Probably this is an extreme example, but, one that I can give is trauma bonding. So people have sex to overcome shared grief.

That is a pretty well documented behavior, and it's even talked about in, you know, books books and movies and TV. You know, it's it's a pretty common theme, but it's believable because it is a very common behavior.

So Ryan and and Jeff are the authors of Sex at Dawn, they talk about how the bartering of by a female of her fertility and her fidelity in exchange for goods and services to the male is one of the foundational premises for evolutionary psychology, which pretty much originated with, with Charles Darwin. And Darwin was obviously a giant of his day, but he as far as sexuality went, he got a lot of things wrong because he was coming from his own perception and perspective.

And there's a lot more to that that, I won't I won't get into, but, if you look at other accounts so there was a Lewis Henry Morgan. He's considered the father of American anthropology, inside the United States, Canada.

He hypothesized that prehistoric relations so before the dawn of agriculture, we need to go back before the dawn of agriculture, Wilma, who were primarily hunter gatherer foraging societies, was that, the husbands lived in polygyny, I so they had more than 1 wife, and wives lived in polyandry, so they had more than 1 husband. And that kind of family was neither unnatural nor remarkable. So you had multi male, multi female mating systems that are typical of our closest primate relatives.

And I'm so pop quiz question. Sure. What are the 2 primate groups that are closest to humans in DNA? Oh, it's something that's, I'm I could say I'm probably going to be off. I've learned this in my biology classes long, long, long time ago. We typically say that it is the the, the ape or the monkey, but I believe that there are others that are closest to us in terms of DNA sequencing. So I can't tell you. I was I was gonna answer another question.

I thought you were gonna say, what's closest to and I was to sex well, I was gonna say bonobo monkeys. And Yes. Actually. Oh, I was right? Yeah. Okay. So That that's where I went, and I wasn't sure. So the go ahead. So bonobos and Bonobos. The the the one that everybody thinks of typically Wow. My my body is sweating. I got that one right.

So so the the ape relative that people typically are gonna jump to are chimps, and there's been a lot of, scientific literature that has compared, especially in evolutionary psychology, that compares human beings and their societies to chimps. But we are actually more closer closely related to bonobos. And that's important because of how differently those two groups organize.

They are, they organize in social groups, which numerous apes do that, but, again these being closest to us as humans, we also organize in social groups. It's important to note that our DNA is only 1.6% different from chimps and bonobos, so we split and we're a little bit closer to bonobos, overall. We split from them on the evolutionary tree only about 5 or 6000000 years ago. So by contrast, let me let me give you a different example.

Gibbons, only monogamous ape, that well, I believe there's actually several monogamous apes, but gibbons are the most prominent example. They split off from us 22000000 years ago and they live isolated. They don't live in groups. They don't have the same group dynamics that humans, chimps, or bonobos have. Alright. Really, I should say humans, bonobos, and then chimps. They are monog gibbons are monogamous. They live in the treetops and they have acreages of trees to themselves.

1 family unit, 1 male, 1 female, and the offspring. So monogamy is really not found, and this is important to the challenging of the standard narrative that I was discussing, when we consider how foraging groups, in prehistory lived and how we live now in our current structured society, monogamy is not found in any social group living primate except for humans because we apply that forced standard narrative, which is based on cultural factors, not natural factors, if you will.

Not what's in our DNA. But it might help explain why humans are generally what you, you know, generally so much what you would call promiscuous. So why would humans that are in happy marriages risk it all? Why would you risk, a divorce So just just before you get to that, because I want your perspective, I have mine on the bonobo. Okay. Please define the bonobos because you did the chimps. I didn't know if you were going to do the bonobos.

Okay. So, what are the talking about social and the chimps and how they are, but then you went to the gibbons. But the, bonobos, I have my definition of what I know of them. Can you explain what you when you think of them in the context of genetics and sexuality, what makes them special? Okay. So, actually super super interesting. If you look at, well, first off, let me let me address chimps.

So Okay. Often in evolutionary psychology in the literature, we have been compared as humans, we have been compared to chimps, which just from a societal perspective are very warlike, brutal. They can be very cruel when, 2 opposing groups meet each other. The males seek to kill the males in the other group and rape the females, and then basically take them captive.

And now the females in group b that was, you know, where the males were killed off now join, not necessarily by choice, but are essentially forced into group a and to mate with, mate with the male chimps in that group. So people look at that and they look at the history of human behavior, which I should say since the dawn or I should correct that, since the dawn of agriculture. Yeah. I get it.

We've for we've created a culture and a society built around a premise that caused individuals to act in a certain way that fulfills the profile of the chimps. Yep. And Did I say that right? Yes. Absolutely. Nailed it, actually. And, and it, it has created in the the literature confirmation bias, that thing I just we see that behavior in chimps. We see it in ourselves. We say, oh, that must be where we get it. That must be man's natural state of being.

How he deals, you know, how he deals with, competitors, with males. So chimps, it should be noted, they resolve sexual issue is sexual issues and sexual control with power.

So war power and violence Yeah, and whoever the strongest chimp is whereas bonobos Actually resolve power issues with sex If you look at groups of bonobos, which for a long time they were actually known as pygmy chimps, they have a much more egalitarian, peaceful community that is primarily maintained through bonding that happens between the females. They are a very free sexual society with virtually no levels of conflict, because the males have no reason to be aggressive with each other.

So let me contrast to that that to the earlier example I gave where the 2 groups of apes meet. If it's bonobos, they the 2 groups will quickly intermingle and start having sex. For them, it is like shaking hands. It is a form of greeting, and like humans, bonobos can mate thousands of times before they will actually conceive offspring. So if you and there's numerous factors that go into this.

Obviously humans have contraception, etcetera, but, in the wild, bonobos can actually engage in sex many many many times, a thousand plus times before, they'll actually conceive a baby, and that's probably Has a lot to do with just the fact that they have so much sex in between their, their reproductive cycle. So Maybe the female is not, ovulating, but she's still having tons of sex constantly so again bonobos, they tend to resolve, sexual issues.

So let me let me let me tie this together a little bit to You talked about pre agricultural you talked about the husband with polygamy going out and the female having multiple partners. Now what I have read and learned, over the years is that in pre agricultural time that there were societies because there were societies where women would have multiple partners in the same day or at the same time only because the male cannot keep up with the needs of the female.

And in the bonobo society, you have a society where if you go up and the woman or the male will be instantly willing to, quote unquote, as using your terms, shake hands with you, and they will have sex multiple times during a day. And the the tie in is that pre agricultural, we were as a species closer to that. Yes. And and I'm going to address more of that as we get further down Okay. And, you know, as we continue to drive here.

But, couple more quick points on bonobos before we go there and we address the dawn of agriculture and how we completely, probably, screwed ourselves as a as a species. No pun intended. So yeah.

So, something that bonobos and and human females, share, bonobo females and human females share bonobo females and human females share that no other ape species has is the fact that the vulva, her genitalia, are oriented on the front of the body, whereas with other apes, it's more oriented toward the rear for, entry from behind. Another thing that is much more typical of human excuse me. I'm stumbling over my words here.

That you see as behavior in humans that you also see in bonobos is that before sexual activity, before coitus, bonobos will actually stare into each other's eyes, stare deeply into each other's eyes. It is romantic for them. They are known to walk arm and arm together, kiss, hands, kiss feet, human typical behavior, right, and, engage in French kissing, so tongue kissing that occurs between bonobos. That isn't really observed in all these other great ape groups.

So there's your sort of, I would say argument right there that we are actually from a sexual perspective, we are much, much closer to bonobos, or have more in common with them than we would with chimps. Okay. Interesting. Hadn't thought about it that way. Yeah. And it's important to note that those are primarily the Novos, groups are primarily female dominated groups. Again, remember I told you about how the bonds between the females are what holds the group.

It is also the peacemaking mechanism between them and other groups of bonobos that they come across. So I'll just so you could hear what's going through my mind, because I I'm I'm that we don't have to address it now. I'm thinking about space. Okay. And in Project Moon Hut, which you've seen videos and content on, we have one of piece of our platform we're delivering, which has to do with governance.

And I had not put an emphasis or thought as much about the governance when it comes to sexuality and reproduction. I had not thought about the the opportunity that some cultures might take to take space as a means to explore, not cultures.

I'd say individual groups, meaning subsets of groups no different than 1,000 of 100 of years ago, groups leaving groups to form their own society, is that there's an opportunity in space to create a different type of structure that is very different governance wise, including Christianity, policy, economics that allows for a much different society to be formed than I had thought about prior to getting to this point in this conversation. Yeah. And, and sort of Did I get a did I get a star?

Yeah. Yeah. No. Absolutely. Yeah. So you you do make a very good point, and and I'll talk, talk a bit more about this when we talk about micro societies. And frontier type societies and and stuff down the line. Okay. It just I wrote it up only because I wanted you to know that at this point, I I am questioning a lot that I'm not sharing. And I'm questioning it because I'm looking at it from the perspective of, how and this is not to pick on a society.

I've I've worked in about 50 countries, not just spoken, but actually worked in them. So spending time meeting people, being engaged that when in the the Russian society to me, while it has its more of authoritarian rule, when it comes to promiscuity and sexuality, the the Russian men and women that I've spoken to who have have numbers that I have just never heard before as compared to other cultures in terms of how many partners they have had over their lifetime.

And just be beyond imagination, and I've heard, I know there's no proof of this, that the couple that went up, Russian couple has been up into space, and it is believed in the space industry that the first sexual experience has already occurred in space between 2 Russians. So I I have also heard that, you know, as as I've gone through my research. And that is a very interesting question, and and we'll get definitely back around to it of has sex act sex actually happened in space before.

And I'll address that kind of Okay. That that's fine. Just I want you to hear what's going on because, as you know, I'm actually I'm trying to figure this out for how do we create improve how we live on earth for all species, which includes this Mearth construct, the moon and earth Yep. And how we might transition to a a different way of living that might give opportunities in different levels or different ways that we might not have thought possible.

So this is this is giving me food for thought or fodder. Yes. And as you think about that, always keep in mind that first bullet point again, wherever we go in the universe, we're going to bring our sexuality with us. So Yeah. That's exactly why I'm saying it. The we're it's gonna come with us as we have choices to make. Yeah. So who whoever gets there and establishes governance, sort of first, it's it's going to be their prerogative.

These are going to be the decision makers, effectively when it comes to these outposts that that they are establishing. But speaking of governance, so let's talk about, the dawn of agriculture and the first, second, or third order effects that that had across societies.

So it's been assessed, looking back at, the available evidence that the dawn of agriculture for humans really occurred around somewhere between 10,1200 years ago, and it was important for a number of reasons, to these formerly, foraging hunter gatherer groups that used to move around. It established an anchor to a specific area.

It created a concentration of resources, so individuals could now concentrate resources, could concentrate wealth, concentrate power, that was effectively the birth of capitalism, or the the root and seed of it. You know, if I'm if I am a man who has a bountiful harvest access to a lot of food, I can control how I distribute that and we see the start of sort of our standard narrative.

So we can assume that I can have many females as that male who can provide a lot of food, which now I'm not having to hunt and I'm not having to hunt in a group because you cannot take down a wooly mammoth just with 1 guy. You know, these these foraging hunter gatherer societies, they were dependent on each other for survival, period, dot. So not just for food, but also for protection, for sex, for social construct and interaction.

So for most of prehistory until the dawn of agriculture, there were no food surpluses that you could seize from a different tribe. There were there was no home base that you had to defend. There was no field that you had to keep outsiders from stealing food out of. So those earlier humans, they lived in primarily female centered societies, not male centered societies, female centered, where sex served important social functions and honestly in which warfare was mostly rare or altogether absent.

And that's from, Franz de Waal. He's a Dutch American biologist and primatologist. He studied bonobos a lot. So if we bring it back to, the bonobos for a moment and how they compare to that prehistory society, they've got engaged in frequent sexual activity, which leads to lower aggression levels and lower stress for males, which means we do, as males, we do pretty well in a female run society. I already told you about the similar, sexual traits and, courting behaviors that bonobos engage in.

The big the biggest, comparison to draw or similarity is that both bonobos and humans, we primarily you use our sexuality for social purposes. Again, you remember that figure I told you earlier? We can have sex a 1000 times before we might conceive a baby as human beings. Same with bonobos, whereas you look at the numbers on the chip side and I think it's it's much lower. It's, definitely in the lower 100, if not in the 30 ish or something like that. I've got my notes around here somewhere.

This whole place is covered in papers. Don't you love me? Yeah. So, so if you if you look at the social aspect of it, social purposes for sex, it helps reduce tension, it creates bonding, it resolves conflict, it's entertainment. Mostly we engage in, sex with other human beings because it's fun and we want to have sex, not because we want to have a baby. And remember even historically, and also in some societies today, marriage is still seen as a sort of a corporate merger.

A so it's a social contract. So that part of the of the standard narrative does feed into, hey, this is a this is primarily a social function that sexuality has in our lives. Us having sex that is primarily social. It's this development of those bonding mechanisms through sex that, these, these psychologists, they argue that that helped our brains to grow to the size that they did by by creating these social networks and developing our language capacity as a result.

So it created this feedback loop that furthered brain growth and allowed us to grow into a species that eventually came to dominate the planet. It was actually our sexuality and our sexual interaction patterns as social cohesion that allowed us to grow to this level of intelligence. So if you compare now the and I I really quickly, I don't wanna beat this to death as far as different sexuality around the world and everything, but I would like to go over some of today's human foragers.

So, doctor De Waal that I mentioned earlier, he talks about a virtual absence of organized warfare among human foraging groups that you still see today, and the fact that they have very egalitarian tendencies, they're very generous with information, with resources across groups.

So they have established they still have an established shared sexual partner environment, they share their resources, they share gathering responsibilities, and they share responsibility for the upbringing of the young in the tribe, a cooperative care system. So for males in these societies, as far as they know, breaking away from the standard narrative, as far as they know, any and all of those children in the tribe could possibly be yours. This was Right.

You know It could be any anybody in the group. Yeah. It it so you have a vested interest, as far as you know, in helping protect, nurture, and raise that child to adulthood. So in a lot of these societies, the men, are referred to by all the children as father or uncle, and the women are all mothers or or aunts. It's effectively seen as one big family, even if genetically they're not, you know, that closely related depending on the size of the tribe.

Because you can't unless you're gonna do a DNA test, which they would not do.

Yeah. You you just you you live a life of I do like the construct and not to say it's my construct, but I do like the fact that because you don't because you don't have anything of value that stays around that has duration such as my stock of whiskey or my stock of wheat or my my home or whatever or any ownership that lasts for a period of time, the individuals have to work with one another because their next meal, their next future is based upon cohesion. Exactly.

And, again, you know, especially during the prehistory periods, these groups faced a lot of challenges. They were not the biggest predators out there, really. You know, you back in the age of saber tooth tigers and wolf packs and and everything else that you might experience as a forging society when there were no cities and a whole lot of wilderness around you. So So you had said I don't know if I'm breaking this up a little bit.

You said the dawn of agriculture were three things, Humans 10 to 12000 years ago. Did we hit number 23, or is that still part of 1? Let me see here. Because we went through moving around the anchor, the, the resources, the wealth, capitalism, females, no food support, tensions. Go ahead. Basic basically, you had the three things that I I was just essentially alluding to, were the fact that you had an anchor point.

Okay. That you had a concentration of resources of wealth and power, and that as a result, the power dynamic switched to a male run and male centric governance model, of of society. Oh, and I I think I think it's important to bring up, at least in my mind, that just shifting to a woman a female dominated society in a tier 4 culture today or 1, 2, or 3, it does not mean that it's a reversion to the bonobo society.

It will still be a society that's run under the auspices of what has been created over these past few 1000 years. So just shifting to a woman now in charge doesn't mean that it all works. Yeah. And and Am I correct? I'm going to go on? Absolutely. Absolutely. Cultural influences are extremely powerful. So you have seen, for example, you know, the United States just swore in the, first female vice president, that it's ever had. We have existed for, what, 244 years at this point?

Yeah. If you consider the fact that the date that the United States was founded, which is very different than the day that, the Indians were around on the side, but this culture came together. Yeah. Yeah. It's 100 100 of years. It's 100 of years, but we've still had there was Golda Meir in Israel. There's, Angela in, in Germany. There have been leaders around the world. I believe I don't know all the names, but I'm thinking about there's another culture cultures.

And it doesn't mean That sexism and misogyny is over. Correct. Because I there was a piece of data that I had seen that if you attribute war to may a male or a female, that many more wars actually came out of the influence of a woman than they did a man. And I I I'd have to find the data. I I have the article someplace, stored someplace, but it was interesting because they noted all of the different conflicts. And, a queen could be an influencer as to whether someone goes to war.

And but that queen could be saving their empire. The queen could be protecting the agricultural or the industrial ownership. Well and and to that point, I think you also see that in literature. I mean, some of the oldest, if not the oldest, western what is considered western literature that exists, you have Homer's Iliad Yeah. Helen, faced it, launched a 1,000 ships.

That was a war that purportedly was obviously, there's probably a lot of other power dynamics at play, but the reasoning that is given is that the ultimate prize, this woman, the most beautiful woman in the world, was stolen and that was an affront that could only be punished with a war that lasted a decade in the text obviously.

So you definitely have seen this shift in how societies are modeled, structured, how governance is structured since the dawn of agriculture and since we switched from these, forging societies. But And just by the way, I did look it up. If you type in, wars started by women as compared to men, you will get one of these. I'm not sure how the data is. Haven't gone into it. Female rulers were 27% more likely to wage war than males. There's another there's a few of these that immediately pop up.

And so I the only reason I'm bringing it up because I'm I'm fixated in my head while thinking about the future of all species on earth and and the things that we're working on is you would you can't pull one lever. It's like I I the the analogy I don't know how old you are, but you've seen an equalizer. There's no perfect music sound. There's none. You can pot up, which is the potting is up and down. You can pot up and down, and someone might like more bass and someone might like more treble.

So you can have women in charge or men in charge. It doesn't mean it will change if the underlying constructs are, they could be religious. They could be a geographical. They could be, socialism, capitalism, communism. They could be authoritarian. They can have so many different references that shifting one lever doesn't change the entire construct.

Yeah. And and one thing to the point that you brought up about that 27% more likely to start a war figure on the on the female side is I I would wonder what the level of influence is, so I'd be very interested in reading that paper. I'd be very curious to know what the level of influence is of males in the power structure below her who are pressuring her to, to execute a certain action or go a certain way, or her power is effectively threatened.

So she is facing more pressure than a typical male ruler would would face, because the sub the substructures underneath her level of power are still sort of controlled on a male level. And obviously And she's still trying to protect. It goes back to the, agricultural, though. She she as a human species, character, she has learned to protect her territory. She has learned that if she is these are often Queens. She has learned that she protects the family, the the region, the whatever.

So, yeah, it could be fascinating because you're you're really exposing to me. You're tying pieces together about. The biological side of the sounds awful to say it in this way, but maybe it's not. Is the release of tension, the capability, the non conflict that came about with pre agricultural, but also at the same time, societies like the Icelandic or the the Swedes, Norway, Russians, and how they interact and tie sexuality together into this. Yeah. Interesting.

And, and then another interesting point since we're we're talking about this is, I I may have already mentioned this as we were talking earlier, but something Sigmund Freud was sort of, famous for saying is that all of western society was probably built you know, all western capitalism and the structures that you see was built on pent up sexual energy. So when you bottle up testosterone and don't allow for outlet, it can be vectored and applied to basically to building.

Which is the challenge that the Chinese have with the one child policy. Yeah. That is one of the fears that is part of the Chinese, challenges moving forward. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And and, I mean, the yeah. The Chinese are also, you know, still very interesting because if you look culturally at them, traditional Chinese love, they say it is about sacrifice. In in China, happiness is considered a luxury, and family is so much more important.

Helping your family, pleasing your family, happiness is not a necessity. So marriage and everything that comes with it is not always necessarily going to be out of a sense of love as opposed to a sense of duty. And I don't and the Chinese are certainly not, the only society. The Japanese society. Yeah. You can go down the list of societies that have had that. So that that's just an example an example of yes. I understand. Yeah. But and I know we've been on this this one bullet point for a while.

What I would like to what I would like to do really quick, to kind of round this out is talk about a few of the tribes around the world of the forager tribes, that still exist. So you got the Canela tribe in the Amazon k e l l? It's c a n e l a. C a n a l a. Okay. And I just picked some random ones from around the world, but I thought they were good examples, and they're much more eloquently discussed, in the in the sex at dawn book that I told you about.

Yep. But they give many, many, many different examples of different tribes and different customs. A lot of them have a lot of the same underlying traits of which, some of which I described earlier, but you have the Kanala tribe, that's in the Amazon. You have the Dagara tribe, d a g a r a. Yep. That's in Burkina Faso in West Africa. Yep. You have the, Montanes, natives, so North America, North American continent, Canada, Native American tribe there.

Yep. And then you have the Masuo people in, South Central China. I'll talk a little bit more about them in a minute. Those those are that group I find particularly interesting just because of the fact that they actually have infrastructure as opposed to, a more mobile forging type society. Okay. So to start off with the Canelo tribe in the Amazon, it's important to note that culturally, they believe the tribe is more important than the individual.

So generosity, sharing, selflessness, that is considered the ideal. Withholding so keeping resources to yourself or not sharing not sharing with people who need it, that is considered a social evil. So sharing actually is something that brings good esteem upon upon people in that tribe, and that also extends to one's body. So control over yourself or or always wanting control over yourself is considered a form of stinginess.

So they they do have bodily autonomy, but there's also the cultural pressures of, being making sure you share. So no one is sort of the underlying point with this tribe is no one's so self important that satisfying a fellow tribesman is less gratifying than the personal gain that you would get out of a situation. And that culture, that's recognized as a way to build and maintain a network of mutually beneficial relationships, and sex does not require explanation. It just is.

So nonreproductive sex, you don't have to explain it away as you might in many other social groups that we are familiar with in more industrialized societies. Okay. Another another group, I mentioned the, the Degara tribe there there in in West Africa. So a very, a very interesting aspect of this tribe is any number of of women in the tribe might nurse any child in the tribe.

So it's common for groups of sisters, for example, to share nursing functions or even the mother of the woman that had the baby to also nurse the baby, even if she's no longer lactating, just to keep the keep the child occupied. Yeah. And children in the villages, they are able to and this is, from what I've been told, pretty typical in rural African communities.

They are able to wander in and out of the houses throughout the village and always know that they are going to be looked at looked after. There's a very familial element to how children are brought up in that society. So it gives the child a very broad sense of belonging. Everybody's chipping in to help raise the child. This is a pretty consistent consistent element across all these societies that that I'm describing.

And the psychological advantages that come out of that, you it's very uncommon for children to feel isolated or develop psychological problems. Everybody is very aware that he or she belongs. And remember I mentioned that 3rd innate human drive, which is connection. Belonging, knowing that you're here for a purpose.

And that is very it's very important to note that you've got very few psychological issues, at least noted psychological issues, in that society, and then you compare it to Western society, where we have an opioid epidemic, we have a mental health epidemic, high suicide rates. Japan is, very Suicide. Yep. Bad example of of high suicide rates when you feel cut off from connection. And a lot of that is, I would say, by my assessment, connected to Japanese sexual culture.

Yes. Which is also, you know, which is also more of a an isolated isolated kind of contract. I would say I would say it differently. It's not connected to sexual. It's connected to the orientation of the society around sexuality as a construct. Because it's easy to say that because they don't have sex, but it's not the sex. It is the construct around the openness, the sharing, and all of the other components. And the connection. And the connection. So I'm kind of expanding that.

I don't know if I I think that's a good one to say. I think that that is that's absolutely Because it's very easy to say, well, they don't have sex. Well, yeah, but sex won't solve the suicide situation. Yeah. And because I I it's very close. I know someone whose, sister's, daughter just committed suicide, so, in Japan.

So it's, I I immediately went to it and said, it won't be solved by that because that wasn't the issue, But the society as a whole might be delivering this challenge for that one child. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And and suicide is so that's that one is also, you know, not just from studies, but, yeah, that that one is also a problem that's very near and dear, to my heart. We we won't go off on that. No. No. I I I will before we you'll do this next one. Right?

Just if you put down on your note, I do wanna know how because we're looking at developing new societies going out into space.

I would like to explore I'd like to explore for just a moment or 2 about the abuses that happen in the societies or, and I'm gonna throw this in, I don't wanna always give answers to the question, could our representation of the stories that have worth 100 or 1000 of years ago happening, could they have been distorted enough that the reality was that the world as a culture was better and we just don't know it or remember it? Well, I So let's let's let's finish these 2.

Yeah. The the, you've got the Matan, Matanesa and then the, Mosiah? The Maasau. Maasau. So we've got those 2 more. I could also be butchering that, but, That that's you spelled it, so that's good enough for me. Yeah. So the, the Montanet, there's a there there's a incident that was described, by, some of these anthropologists where a missionary was and this was man, when was it? I want to say it was in 17th century.

There was a Jesuit missionary who started off on a lecture, to a, Montanese native man talking about the dangers of the rampant infidelity that he was witnessing, you know, all the males sleeping with all the females, vice versa, and that that was not conducive to proper parenthood and how it's not honorable for a woman to love anyone except her husband, that this is evil, on and on and on, applying your standard Roman Catholic doctrine.

And one of the examples that the missionary gave was that you don't even know if this young boy here, who you call your son, is in fact your son. And the native responded to him, you don't have any sense. You French people, you only love your own children, but we love all the children of our tribe.

Yep. And it's it's an important distinction to make that, the the way that we view care in a community I I think that there is still a at least from what I'm able to witness, there is still a, a deep instinct among humans in general to protect the young of that society. You know, if you see, you know, if we're out and we see a a child crying, he's lost his mom, your instant instinct is to go help that child and help them find their mom.

If, you know, if a child you know, I used to take my I used to take my brother to the park, when we were younger, and I remember one time he fell off the, you know, he fell off this play set that that, I was standing at the base of and pancaked onto the ground, started screaming bloody murder. You know, he he was hurt, and every single parent I I wanna say I was 12 at the time.

Like, 12 or 13. Every single parent on the on the playground descended on on that scene and and was, you know, trying to take control of of the situation. So there is there is an instinct societally, there is an instinct, even if that kid's not mine and I'm not gonna put resources toward that kid, you know, even if there's that standard narrative, structure, we still have that instinct in our DNA. So it I I do wanna I do wanna make note of that.

But the the point you just made, that what you just shared was an example of a story that I had never heard, and I've got to believe many others have not heard. I that's an example of what the question I just asked you. Did history stamp out such as this missionary who probably could write and this tribesman could not? Did the did the story come back? These people live like heathens. They are terrible. They do not they have sex all over. So the story was wiping out the cultural history.

Well, certainly, I mean, it wasn't so much that the story was wiping out the cultural history. It was that exported cultures were wiping out Okay. And both. Yes. Agree. So, you know, we have the whole history of colonialization and, what's the word I'm I'm looking for here? Assimilation of of cultures into a a more dominant forced one. Yep. You had the, you know, the old outages of the sun never set on the British Empire.

The British have it you still see a lot of British cultural influence in places all around the world. A lot of I lived in Hong Kong, and I've been all over Asia. So Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you you've seen this. Oh, it's it's prevalent. The names, the the roads, the I lived on the street, which was the first street that whenever you, the royalty or or any of the high or echelon came, they would actually go up the street that I was on to meet with dignitaries. So, yes, it's still there.

Yeah. So, I would I would say that it was more of the forced adoption of elements of Western culture and Western religion that wreaked a lot more havoc on a lot of these societies, than necessarily the written history would.

I I think the reason that we know about these possibilities and and the fact that our society may have looked very different during prehistory period and before the dawn of agriculture is because these accounts have been taken and are written in and these we had a, a way of documenting it before certain cultures were stamped out.

Yep. So I wanna move to let's move really quick to the final, because sort of on that note, you know, let's let's look at this final, final culture, who are not really a, a hunter gatherer forager society, but they are an incredibly fascinating society. They are, again, the Massau Massau people of South Central China. They, live in the mountains surrounding Lugu Lake, which is near the border of China's, Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. Really only about 50,000 plus people, so less than a 100,000.

And they worship the lake itself as their mother goddess, and the mountain that towers over it is the respected as the, goddess of love. Another really interesting thing about this society, they had the sole pictographic language that is still used in the world today, and this is incredibly interesting to me as a researcher. They do not have words in that society for murder, war, or rape, And they do not have words for husband or wife. They prefer the word Azu, which means friend.

So this is a society that is focused around the sexual autonomy of all adults. So that includes the women as well as men. So the first explorers to come through there, Marco Polo was, was an example. He came through that region and misinterpreted the situation, writing that the men here are so generous with their women toward the foreigners, who come through. You know, you could you could spend days with, with one of these women in her bed.

What he didn't understand is that culturally, no men own women in that society. That is not how it is looked at. And, your, your more frequent lovers can have or, well, obviously, more frequent, but, you're more what we would call promiscuous members of that society, male and female. They may have hundreds of lovers over the course of their life. So, again, they are an agricultural people, but they're a female centric power society.

They pass property and family name from mother to daughter instead of father to son. So the household itself revolves around the women. Father figures are uncles in that society. So if, if a girl gets pregnant, it is actually her brothers who act as the, act as the fathers to her children because that child, as far as they know, is more closely related to them than the the other children of obviously, they have, they have passed their own genetic line through other women, throughout the society.

But the point is is that the society working like this guarantees the sexual sexual availability for every member of the society. In fact, the, the Massau woman, once she, reaches fertility age, she has complete autonomy as to who gets to enter her bedroom. And there is a door that is open to the street, and there is a door that is open to the main house. And again, she's protected by her brothers, but her bedroom is what is known, and I I actually thought this was really sweet.

Her bedroom is known as her flower room. And the and the she can have a different lover every night or many in the same night if she chooses. There's no expected commitment and that like I said before, the child that she conceives is raised in her mother's house, and it's done with the help of the girls' brothers and the rest of the community. So it is a shared effort, cooperative cooperative effort among the society to raise the children.

So and I'll quote actually, I'd like to quote the book directly here really quick. Every adult was responsible for every child, and every child in turn was respectful of every adult. So the language the in the Maso language, this is also very interesting because we talked a little bit about how they don't have these certain words. The word Awu in their language translates to both father and uncle.

So a child has many uncles, and they all protect and and cooperatively take care of this child and help raise the child. But, ironically, an interesting thing about this society is that they are very hush-hush when it comes to discussion of sexuality. Certainly, a you don't discuss it with your family. It's very similar to the Chinese in that fashion. You don't talk about sexuality. You just don't. And that's that's not, that's not common only to that region of the world.

It's also very common in in other Asian societies, in Middle Eastern societies, etcetera. So no kissing and telling, but privacy is paramount. So you give each other your privacy, and they only have what are known as walking marriages. So you are allowed, of course, to take the same lover again and again, but that person never is wholly bonded to you. When the person leaves, when the lover leaves the the flower room, that is considered the end of it.

He may come back, but for the girl's purposes, she considers that the end of the relationship. So jealousy is a huge negative thing in that society. It's considered a form of aggression. It's implied that it is intrusion upon that sexual autonomy of another person. And I I kind of, fall in line with this line of thinking. I think that a person's, sexual autonomy, or I call it sexual sovereignty, is one of the most important things that a person can have.

So, you know, I consider, like, sex crimes are some of the worst crimes that you can commit against humanity. And it yeah. It's interesting because that's what's going through my mind, and I'm trying to wrestle with how much of what we have is an orientation to what we've constructed as to what it could have been if it had been different. I would honestly say much.

Now it's it's a very interesting paradigm because if we did not have the dawn of agriculture and the the fiefdoms, kingdoms, empires that would follow and eventually those would become republics over the course of 1000 of years, we wouldn't have reached technologically, I think, the Right. Well, and that's that that is the multi the multiverse paradox. Yeah. We don't know.

So, I mean, honestly, just from an economic and technological perspective, that is sort of the way I see it is that it's awesome that we are going into space.

I don't know that we would have at least not by this point in history, I don't know that we would have been able to develop the technology, and and the system, socioeconomic systems that were necessary to get Again, we don't know because it could have been if everybody got along better, they could have invented faster, and and we don't know. It's a it's a question.

I'm still I still go back in my mind saying, I think just as you were saying, rape and all of these activities, pedophilia are all horrific types of conditions. The situations and no one should go through them in any society. Yet I'm wondering, has society in general wiped away a lot of all of these positive attributes that were never recorded because there was no video, there was no written word. It was just a society.

I wonder if we went back 5000 or 10000 or 20000 years And we took many of these societies and could do a study on them. Would they have come back with? No, no, no. They don't have these things. There are less of these or more of them. There could be more rape. There could be more. I don't know. I there I'd it's not an answer that we can deliver. So let let's go on to the next one. Where do you wanna take us from here? Oh, okay. So, want to yeah.

Just to to wrap this and, so that was another major area of my study was what causes psychosexual dysfunction. Again, I wanted to originally apply military science against sexual science. Yeah. What's the difference between military science and sexual science? The military science is obviously the the application of, tactics and structuring, actions in in a certain way. So, you know, we in the military, we break things into into different levels of responsibility.

So you have strip, strategy, operations, tactics. Strategically, you know, we have our strategic goals. What is the strategic goal? To win the war. Okay. So what do we need? You break it down to the next level. What is the next level, which is the operational level? You have these massive operations that are put together to win the war, win the proverbial war.

So for example, D Day, and met you know, many many other operations through so Operation Overlord, Operation Market Garden, these these camp famous campaigns that you hear about in World War 2, those were operational level. Mhmm. And they were feeding into the strategic mechanism of what the overall giant strategy was to eventually secure victory. Yep. And then on the tactical level, tactics is the stuff that you see on the battlefield. It is, hey, how do we take out this tank?

How do we move from this building to the next building? I know I'm giving a lot of World War 2 examples here, but, you know, that's one of the one of the best known best known versions that really the the world has a deeper memory for. I was interested in applying the sexual sciences to combat, so studying forensic sexology, and what I hope to eventually develop into some sort of sexological counterintelligence, fundamentals or program.

Studying some of our most most messed up adversaries, if you will. So at the time, the the adversary of the day, and still sort of is, although they're less of a, I think, less of a threat now, are, you know, your Al Qaeda, ISIS guys. There was a very consistent attribute that a lot of them shared that not a lot of people know or at least did not would not talk about, and that was that they have extreme psychosexual deviations, most of them that fall into that group of illegal paraphilias.

Really? Most of these guys. And that is, I believe, connected to origins for violence and origins for extremism. And it is dark. It is I mean, it it is some some dark dark stuff. So looking looking at at how could we possibly mitigate that, how could we develop counter strategies, counter tactics to effectively stop these extremists from becoming extreme to begin with.

Because I believed, and I, you know, I found conflicting data here and there, but, so my belief, at the time at least going into it, my hypothesis was that extreme psychosexual deviations are root are potentially a root cause in extreme violence or vice versa. And you see this in other extreme communities, especially online, for example. So, I don't know if you've heard of the Incel community. It is a they're known as, quote, involuntary celibates.

They're sort of low status males who are angry at women. They choose to be angry at women for never giving them sex. They blame women for all their problems. They're extremely misogynistic. They're very anti woman, and, they will perpetuate violence against women. They support violence against women. So for example, I don't know if you remember, this was back, probably back in the early 20 tens. I forget the exact year, but the Santa Barbara shooter at at UCSB in Santa Barbara, California Mhmm.

Was one of these individuals. So he was an extremist in cell. He showed up with a gun and targeted women. So he targeted young college women that were there. I forget how many died. I feel, you know, terrible for for not being able to to give that, but that is not an isolated incident. And you've seen more, you know, for a multitude of factors, easy access to firearms, growing extremism in different communities, all over the states where you've seen more and more attacks like that.

But an interesting thing, because, you know, I've spoken with, spoken with counterintelligence agents as well. An interesting thing to note is that people who commit espionage, and this this blew me away, and I had to kind of reanalyze a lot of my, you know, hypothesis because it went deeper, it went further. People who commit espionage tend to be or tend to have extreme paraphilic behavior.

And it it's I there's I I'm assuming that there is probably a pretty significant chemical element to it, but that is not the that is not the only thing going on. So this was originally the reason why I came into the field. It's what I hope to eventually be my big contribution to humanity in the field, is how do we mitigate these issues? And I think a lot of it is connected because you mentioned earlier, what was lost? You know, what how would society be different? I have had hypotheses.

I'm not the only one, but, I have argued for years that extreme repression by, cultural and religious influences, which themselves have major psychological power, extreme repression of human sexuality and biology compounds to lead and develop to psychosexual deviations in human beings at higher rates than would exist if you had a even more just comprehensively sexual society.

You wouldn't nearly see the amount of, male violence that you see in Western societies and other societies around the world that are male dominated in century. And I'm I know I'm probably gonna piss a lot of dudes around the world off saying this. Don't worry about it. Generally generally, we find the data points to the fact that female centric societies typically are more peaceful. The males are, under far less stress. They're much more satisfied.

They have a higher quality of life, and, this is an interesting fact and maybe it's why it's it's an issue for our current capitalist model. Males who get all the sex they want constantly are actually much more lazy. They've been found to to be much more lazy. Because if you think about it logically, reverse the logic, why do I, a male in Western society, do all the things that I do? I I I say the same thing.

I say this what I say is if in fact there were no women on this planet, and let's just use women as a in the male side, I'd say there would be no buildings. There would no be no big cars or cars, race cars. You wouldn't need them.

There would be they wouldn't shave, wouldn't take care of anything because a lot when we break it down, a lot of the things that humans do have an orientation to finding a mate, to showing up to be more impressive, to look a certain way to do things, and that the the male driver would be lost if there were just males on the planet.

And we're assuming, again, let's to be correct here, that it is a single society heterosexual type orientation, that we could probably break it down multiple other ways. But, yeah, I don't think there there would be a lot less going on, so I'm actually taken to another extreme versus having all the sex. What if women didn't exist? Yes. So I I am in the same boat. If, I'm well, I'm not saying that if women didn't exist, males wouldn't still be horny. I don't wanna No. No. No. I yes.

I agree with you on that. Yeah. About how that would go. Probably not very cool. But, the I I guess, really, the the ultimate point to really take away from all this, from this bullet point in this discussion that we've been having, is that our perceived normal, as we call it, isn't necessarily the natural way of things. The nat the natural normal. How our ancestors interacted with each other for social cohesion.

So Yeah. I really look at it as from the evidence, most of the current structure was emplaced by those who seized power, so kings, emperors, rulers, who ensured that they themselves, by the way, had unlimited access to sex. Aztec emperors, for example, are known to have kept, thousands of concubines and rulers of of, you know, the Aztec kingdom. They were expected to copulate with a minimum of 2 female 2 females a day and often more in order to spread the seed of of the sun king.

And that was a way of establishing an order that they could control. So really, the current structure that you see has always been about control of sexuality. And a really, really interesting point that, so for example, the the guy who founded, the institute where I did my postgraduate research, Ted McElvena, who is in himself an extremely controversial guy, and I certainly didn't agree with a lot of the things that came out of his mouth.

But one thing he said that I think was pretty dead on, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he said something I've noticed about fundamentalist religious organizations and authoritarian governments alike is their total understanding that if you can control someone's sexuality, you can control them completely.

And if you look through history, and you look at authoritarian regimes, and you look at, for example, the inquisition the Spanish Inquisition, a huge part of how they go by their playbook is the, first and foremost, the persecution of sexual minorities, even before religious minorities. So the Nazis, for example, they burned Magnus Hirschfeld's, sex institute, the Institute for Sex with Disenchantment, 5 years, 5 years before Kristallnacht ever happened.

They persecuted and killed homosexuals in German society first. Transsexuals, anybody who did not fit the standard narrative, they were others. They were unwanted, and you will find that is very typical of authoritarian regimes across history. So I think it's important to to make that point.

We now have these societies that are going in the space that I think have primarily been built up on repressed sexual energy, especially the United States, who we now have the opportunity to sort of reassess and redefine thing. Hopefully, it redefine things, hopefully, from a more, scientifically based kind of view because we do bring all these biases and mores and all of it with us. Okay. So I I think we've beaten that.

No. No. No. I think I it was, when you're doing a podcast, one of the challenges is how long do you let something go? Because you could say that the that maybe the listener won't listen. Yet at the same time, I'm interested. So I this was a great topic, and I think it helps to I think we explored it in a way that gave opportunities for creating a new future. So it it very it was perfect. I mean, it was a lot, but it's what needs to be said. So, we won't have to go to this topic again.

So it's great. Have a great job so far. So let where do we go now? Where where do you where are you taking me? Okay, so I'll I'll try to to shorten this up. No, no, don't turn it. You're doing fine. Where would you like to take me? So I don't know if you're looking to go watch the Super Bowl or anything, but I'm not particularly I just I don't I'm I'm a Super Bowl is not right now. This is it. Don't worry. I will stay. What, what's the where do we go now?

Okay. So, kind of so coming down to the next point, the next bullet, which what are we on? Wapping number 3 here. Yeah. Talked about the fact that researching and determining solutions for sexual reproduction in these environments in outer space is, and I'll put this in parentheses, nearly completely essential to our ultimate survival as a species. And I'll explain why I said nearly here in a minute.

But the first major point to make, with regard to this argument is that, simply put, when you apply math, single planet species do not ultimately survive. If you stay in the same place forever, eventually some calamity is going to come along and happen that wipes your species out. Human beings have proven to be a very hardy species overall. You know, we had we've had definitely a, couple close calls.

The best one I can think of is we barely, as a as human population, barely survived a volcanic supereruption that occurred around 74000 years ago. So when we were still foragers, hunter gatherers, there was a supervolcano that went off in, I wanna say it was Toba, or possibly the, Sumoffshore Flats. Point the point to to exercise here is this explosion was 5,000 times larger than the Mount Saint Helens eruption that we saw in the 19 eighties. How many times larger? 5000 times.

So if you remember that countries around the world, I mean, were seeing ash from Mount Saint Helens descend into their streets, you can imagine multiply that by times 5,000, and you've got a pretty good It was Toba, t o b a. Toba. Yeah. So this, this was a very actually a very important event in a lot of ways. First off, it ushered in a volcanic winter, sort of very similar to a nuclear winter, if we were to send nuclear bombs off all over the planet. So it blocked out the sun.

It, created to a a mass dying of a lot of species. That volcanic winter that lasted for about 6 to 10 years, it's assessed, when they look at the geological history, and it led to a 1000 year, so the full millennium, of cooling of the earth's surface, which is very important to how humans eventually became the the more dominant, more dominant species on the planet, because we managed to master things such as tools, fire, etcetera.

But the ice age, the proverbial ice age that you that you hear of, this was, this was an onset. It is estimated by a lot of, a lot of geologists and anthropologists, scientists down the line, that human society may have shrunk to as few as 10,000 human beings on the on the face of the planet, primarily concentrated in Africa again, that actually survived. So all of us as human beings are more or less descendants of those original survivors.

So that is an example of one of our close calls that we have already had. And all it take you know, as I as I'll tell people, all it takes is one asteroid strike. You know, you could ask the dinosaurs, but they're no longer here to tell you that. Earth has already gone through 5 mass extinctions in our recorded history, and insofar as we're able to to tell from, geological data.

And right now, it's been estimated that we are already in the middle of a 6th mass extinction of species around the globe that is being caused by primarily human activity and associated climate change, etcetera, overpopulation, deforestation, all the Our our 6 mega our 6 mega challenges that are Project MoonNet. Yes. Exactly.

So you've got asteroids, super volcanoes, nuclear war, if it ever comes to that, climate change, food shortages, mass migration, all all these calamities that could happen that, again, could bring us to the brink of extinction. And right now, we're looking at what I think geopolitically is a destabilization or at least reordering of the post World War 2 international order.

So you had societies that were able to industrialize and grow in relative peace since relative global peace since the last World War with the United States and originally alongside them, sort of the Soviet Union had their 2 different sides. And once the Soviet Union fell, the US has sort of acted as the enforcer of its own, system of development and government around the globe.

So the US Navy really has allowed for the growth and protection of commerce across earth's oceans and has led to, arguably, has led helped lead to the rise of all these other industrial societies around the globe, not just Europe and the rebuilding of Europe. So you've seen the rise of China, the rise of India, countries in Africa that are rapidly industrializing and again You could go down the list.

I mean, North South Korea, Japan, all over the countries around the world have benefited over the past 50 years or 60 years. So yeah. Yeah. I I I've kind of I have looked at it and I've said maybe everybody's looking at the future of this new awakening. I've said, what if the past 50 years of peace, more or less as a global condition? Maybe this was the good time. And as you're saying, there's a reordering.

So maybe there And and I'm I'm hoping that ultimately what we are actually entering, as you like to put it, is the age of infinite where we rise as a species, as a global species to certain challenges and create opportunities out of what previously were very extreme challenges. Yep. Absolutely.

So but sort of the the point that, that I'm I'm trying to make with the single planet species don't survive is as a species and as a hopefully a guardian of other species on our planet, what we need to establish is an existential what I call an existential insurance policy, not just on our own species, but on many others. So you have in Norway, in Svalbard, you've got the doomsday seed vault that I'm just you probably heard of.

We also need to do that with living species, with, with embryos and gametes of species elsewhere from Earth in the universe, and that could be the moon, it could be even further depending on the risk of calamity that we are talking about. Because if an asteroid comes and strikes the earth, you can bet the moon is somehow probably going to be affected, considering they are so close to each other and captured on the size and scale and scope.

Yeah. Captured in each other's orbit or in this orbital dance with each other. So there's, I'd like to read a quote really fast. I wanna stay light on the quotes, but That's okay. You're doing fine. There's a a former NASA roboticist named Randall Munro who became a cartoonist, and he he had a quote that said, and I'll read it for you here. The universe is probably littered with the 1 planet graves of cultures that made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space.

Each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones that made the irrational decision. So if you really need a reason to, you know, if you need motivation to go into space and to, to find, sell new worlds, or at least create this existential insurance policy as I described it, there you go. The clock eventually, just based on that, the clock is ticking for eventually when a cataclysmic event that could trigger total mass extinction is going to happen on earth.

It has happened before, numerous times. It will happen again. I did not mean to quote Armageddon or whatever movie it was there. Well, yes. There's mathematically, the odds are at some point, and the challenge becomes what is that math actually, equate to in 500 to 5000 years, 5000 years, 200, whatever the math may be, there will be a time in which something will hit this planet. Yeah. And the and the speed and, honestly, it may not even be something hitting this planet.

Another another interesting, thing that I like to to quote for people, nice little factoid that I like to quote for people sometimes is Yellowstone National Park. Yep. Great park to go to. You can see the the, steam pits, caldera, all that. What many people fail to realize when they visit is that they are actually standing on the mouth of a supervolcano that is crushed over.

And the size of that magma chamber, I'm this may be completely off or or incorrect, but in the back of my mind I want to say the size of that magma chamber is roughly 1 third of the United States and the it it volcanologists have determined that Yellowstone on average goes off, I wanna say, every 600000 years. There's 641000 years ago is when it went off, and it's it's measures this the edge of the supervolcano is, approximately 30 to 45 miles wide or 50 to 70 kilometers wide.

So that's the opening. So I think the best way to think about it is if you were to look at a volcano that someone has flown over that's not operating, it's not a kilometer wide. It's not a mile wide. And then to think of a volcano where the top of it is that large. Yeah. And as you mentioned, it's the last eruption occurred roughly 6440000 years ago by our math, and the average of that volcano going off is every 600000 years.

So it would seem, if we go by the averages, we are about 40,000 years overdue on this thing going off. And when it does go off, it will probably go off with a force beyond imagining. And if you wanna talk about volcanic winter, and by the way being cut off from all the technological capabilities that we have because of satellites in orbit, etcetera, and the sun being blocked out, the list goes on and on, society as we know it would end completely. Modern society would end completely.

So earth We might go back to 10,000. Oh, yeah. So apoca apocalypse levels that we're that we're discussing here. So what what can we do by establishing it in order to establish this insurance policy? What are the things that we can potentially do, the pathways that we could potentially take to, provide an insurance policy and prevent that from happening to the whole species.

So, one is and this this has been mentioned in science fiction, it's been advocated for in a lot of academic papers, is to create a quote unquote second Earth simulated environment, so something like a Stanford torus or an O'Neill cylinder, this giant rotating space station which provides artificial gravity. But and, it I've seen a number of these in films. What was the It was the one with Matthew McConaughey. Matt Matt Damon was in in, in one of these films.

And it was Matthew McConaughey where he comes back Oh, okay. Yeah. There is there is one in in, so an O'Neill cylinder is what you're you're shown in Interstellar with Interstellar. Yes. In Elysium, that was the name of the film. Yeah. In Elysium with Matt Damon, it shows what is a Stanford Taurus. So this gigantic rotating wheel, and if you think about ever going down inside a wheel downhill as a kid, same same mechanics. Right?

Yeah. The the the challenge that I have whenever I see these, especially from individuals who are promoting this to be in the near future, meaning in 5, 7, 10, 15 years, is that you have I mean, we you'd have to have the amount of material that would have to go into space, including beds and electronics and things that cannot be manufactured in space or cannot it it would take rocket after rocket after rocket after rocket just to build it, and we're talking 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars.

Oh, more than I would I would estimate quadrillions, pentillions. Okay. If we use More than more than Earth's global economy and GDP is by a lot, in order to build a superstructure of that size. I so I I was just mentioning a small one, say, 2, 300, 400, meters of diameter. That's what I was thinking. But if to actually have a full sequencing like you see in the movies where there there's full cities inside, hey.

Yeah. It it takes on Earth to build a home, a home where you have all the supplies on earth. You have trucks. You have gravity. You have people. It could take from planning to 6 months to 2 years. If you build a city with a 1000000 people, how long does that take? 10 years? 15 years? I mean and we make it and that's with all the supplies on Earth. That's with all the transportation tools. That's with all the materials right here. Imagine having to ship every bit of it, including the people.

Just so, yes, I that is an insurance policy, but it's a challenging one. Yes. So that is that one, I would say, is primarily engineering based. Taking what we know works and, engineering a insanely expensive thing that would take decades but could potentially provide you that simulated environment. So so there was a paper by, actually one of the one of the gentlemen who was on my PhD committee, Jim doctor Jim Logan.

He was NASA's, former chief medical officer at, at Johnson Space Center for a number of years, and later he was the provost of the International Space University when it was when it was founded. He released a paper, I forget when it was, it may have been around 2014, that discussed, the concept for hollowing out a celestial body like an asteroid or, the one he advocates for is Mars' smaller moon, Deimos Yeah. Hollowing out so that you, have a nest, if you will.

You have radiation protection from the external galactic cosmic radiation GCR coming in and and tearing through the molecular bonds of carbon based life forms that are living there. So having this big shield around you in the form of of that celestial body and then having the rotating station inside there to, apply. Okay. So there's a with inside of it, you create the gravity field by using the actual astro the the rock. It's not a full planet.

I've been told it's more of a rock floating around, but you're inside of it because then you can bolt on, you can hold on to and create this Giant hamster wheel, effectively. Yeah. Yep. So so that is an engineering only type solution, but again, would take decades, possibly 100 of years, trillions upon quaggaon. In your case, we're talking about society of at large, meaning humans.

And we don't the the challenge that I have with all many of these conversations is it's not whales, amoebas, dolphins, alligators. There's just so many creatures on the there's 50,000,000 species on this planet. This is really human survival. Yes. And and we are specifically talking about human survival here.

Although, if I could pose the question to you really quick or really to anybody, I would think that you wouldn't really want to live in a simulated earth environment that did not have trees and grass and ladybugs, butterflies, all these things that we would need to bring with us, sort of like the, what was it, the Genesis project in Star Trek. I know we're nerding out here, but I think that was in the Wrath of Khan film, if I'm if I'm quoting that correctly. But let's not beat this one to death.

Engineering that environment, that second simulated earth environment, that is one of the things that we can do. Directly settling other celestial bodies is the most immediately obvious option to a lot of people, whether that be settling on the moon, settling Mars. Some folks out there will argue for the upper atmosphere of Venus, but logistically, there's a lot of questions there.

In order to do that, because we are talking talking about differing radiation levels, we're talking about, most importantly, differing gravity levels. The acceleration of gravity is different on these on these bodies. On Mars, it's roughly 38% that of as on Earth. On the moon, it's 1 sixth of Earth gravity, which is why we were able to see people bounce around in in the old videos of the Apollo astronauts.

So we need to know and establish what the reproductive limits that humans have in these altered environments is and develop technologies, practices, and procedures that are going to mitigate the risks in a way that is medically, ethically, and socially acceptable. And while we have time on our side, now is the time to do that. I'll get more to this a little bit later. Right now, we are facing a lot of challenges here on earth, but we are not quite yet facing apocalypse.

There's still time to turn things around on this, the cocoon of our of our civilization, of our existence, the only place that we have ever existed. So we all And which is what you've seen in our project Moon Knight. We're trying to solve for space and Earth simultaneously. Yes. And which is why I lobbed the effort. And we biologically looking at it.

We have evolved on earth over the last What three and a half 1000000000 years all the way from single celled organisms all the way to the complex thinking talking breathing believing organisms that sentient organisms that we are today And during that entire time, we have only ever really had 2 constants that we have the benefit of of having.

1 was protection from radiation, given to us by our both our magnetosphere, the magnet the Van Allen belts and which which has generated that electromagnetic field shield that is generated by our spinning molten metallic core at the at the center of the earth and our atmosphere. The heaviness of our atmosphere radiation protection that it provides, a lot of people don't realize.

But despite our atmosphere being very thin, when you look at it from, say, the space station, you realize how thin the atmosphere is. It's barely above the surface from what you're able to see. But the amount of mass that it contains is a huge saving grace for all of us living on the surface protecting us from, external space borne radiation from galactic cosmic radiation, which is the majority that we would be absorbing if we did not have the magnetosphere and the atmosphere protecting us.

It's about the equivalent of, 12 to 14 feet, and I'll bring up this I'll bring up this stat later again. 12 to 14 feet of regolith piled on top of you. That's what we're talking about in terms of air particles, the mass that is above you.

So ionized radiation particle comes, you know, somehow makes it through the magnet magnetosphere shield, penetrates the atmosphere and it continues coming down toward the earth, most of those particles are going to collide with an air particle before they ever get down to the surface level and smash into, you know, into your skin and start creating skin cancer potentially. So that's why when we talk about flying in space at 50,000 for 35,000, 40000 feet, we equate it to radiation.

Precisely. And there are I never tried the I knew we were up there. I knew we had less shield, but I never realized that the cons the the activity that was happening, that they were bomb they were hitting, molecules as they came down, and they therefore were stopped. Yeah. It's it is a it really is a cocoon that we have around us in the form of our magnetosphere and our and our atmosphere. So we've had the benefit of that protection throughout the history of life as far as we're able to to tell.

When these organisms were developing, we went through all these different ages and periods and you had dinosaurs and then mammals and, sea creatures of all all kinds and we a 1,000 on the order of factors of a 1000 species have gone extinct, but they always had those, that constant of radiation protection. The only other constant was the gravitational constant.

Earth is made up of this amount of mass, which gives us the acceleration of 9.807 meters per second squared toward the center of mass of Earth. So we are pulled to the earth at that acceleration rate. Our entire biology has evolved under that gravity constant and under that radiation protection constant. Everything else has changed, the environments, the way that, you know, the types of plants that existed, the, acidity levels in the oceans, the atmospheric composition even.

For example, during the age of the dinosaurs, it was much hotter, wetter, more humid. There was more carbon in the atmosphere. And as the plants of those periods and the dinosaurs died off and were absorbed into the earth's crust, that helped with the cooling overall cooling of the planet. And that's why we call those fossil fuels because we are taking the carbon that was sucked into the earth's crust and now burning it and releasing it back in the atmosphere.

So hence the the atmosphere is warming up again, and we're seeing climate change and and all the results that that come with that. But the important thing to note is that when we suddenly and radically change those constants against the human body and against our physiology and our our biology, that can have profound effects on our cellular development and how the whole system works.

And it's been noted that spaceflight has compounding effects on all the different systems within the human body, whether it be cytoskeletal cytoskeletal, neurovestibular, organs, the the whole lot are affected in some way. So it should be assumed until we can prove otherwise that the reproductive systems are also affected.

And if you can't reproduce in space or in these other environments where these constants that I've mentioned are different, you are not going to be able to have a self sustained society, as Elon Musk describes it, a self sustaining civilization past the 1st generation because if we cannot have babies and we can't raise young as we have for 100 of 1000 of years It's game.

Yeah, it's a game over game over Because you will we won't have any babies that live to adulthood, and all the adults that are there that did make it there are going to die off eventually.

One of the first conversations I had at NASA Ames, not being a person who studied space my whole life, I mentioned something and Lynn Harper said we don't even know if a cell will divide properly in space For reproduction purposes, we don't know that today and I'll so I'll talk, I've already been talking about about the challenges a little bit. I will talk to this 4th, point of challenges of the environment to the reproductive process and the the different stages that you you kind of go through.

But one thing that I'd like to bring up so part of my PhD dissertation, I developed a conceptual scale, which I called the radio double e scale, which, stands for reproduction and development in off Earth Environments Scale. That scale is basically completely empty at this point. We simply do not have data. We certainly don't have any human data, from a reproductive standpoint, And really, nor should we until we are able to experiment experiment with, sort sort of, lower lower risk, mammals.

Yeah. We we have we have Stephanie Countryman who's gonna be coming on. She's in the life sciences, and we're gonna be talking about, for example, spiders and what has happened in the International Space Station and other experimentation that's been done in space. So there will be a whole section that we'll be doing on this. So this is very valuable. Oh, outstanding. Yeah. And and the life sciences, I'll say this for the life sciences.

They have not been given enough, attention or credence by most of the, national space agencies. It frankly just has not been enough, and least of all in the area of reproductive health. It's especially at NASA, it's generally considered a non issue. Although there have been, I'll discuss these here in a moment.

There have been sort of small leaps forward type experiments that experiment with mammalian reproduction, and observe different aspects of prenatal and postnatal development care, in mammals, primarily mice rats. But again, I'll just discuss that in a minute.

The point I wanna make with the radioe scale is that it weighs microgravity and radiation against those different phases, against your reproductive phase, prenatal, postnatal, and all all the way up to really the point where you can at least wean the baby.

So if we want to be able to have to go and settle Mars, establish a city on Mars as as Elon Musk again has said he wants to do or do that on the moon or elsewhere, we need to be able to have babies and most preferably we need to figure out how to do that the old fashioned way. And we need to figure that out because settlers again, we're taking our sexuality with us. Settlers, wherever they go, they are going to have sex. Human beings are going to have sex. You cannot stop them.

Just look at Earth and all the repression sexual repression in all these societies and the enormous amount of effort that goes into preventing people from having sex, And you'll see that it has not worked. People do not fall inside the lines of the traditional expected model. So they're going to have sex no matter what planet they're on or what moon they're on or whatever they do.

And to, the the moon hut, it's part of the construct is we get the ability to be 3 days away using current technology. Yes. We get 3 days away to be able to have sex on the moon and then come back and see if something normal or abnormal. We've had the Kelly brothers and their experimentation of what happens in space. So And I'll I'll talk a little bit about them too.

So and we have the ability to have someone stay for long instead of 3 months, they could say 6 months or a year, And then they're in a there's less shielding. There is a form of gravity. So part of what we've been talking about for the past 6 years is is this ability to do the experimentation and make sure that there is a viability. Because if you go to Mars, while it's a great endeavor and I and I've I'm I'm pro everybody working on it who wants to work on it. We are as an organization.

There are some benefits to being 3 days away. Yes. There certainly are, but, sort of what I have I actually in my dissertation sort of what I have in mind, and I put this in my dissertation as a theoretical example. I created a hypothesized situation of what happens when the first woman gets pregnant on Mars. And we don't have this really figured out. What situation has she now been placed in where it's a situation with very few good options? Because people go to Mars, they're gonna have sex.

We don't know how well contraception will work, if it will work in altered gravity. There's no data on that. And and maybe it will, but even contraception itself occasionally does fail. So pregnancies very well could occur, just perhaps not safely, but they could occur, and they more than likely will occur if we ever reach that stage.

So regardless, this is something that we need to figure out, because And I think that I don't know if you planned on touching on it, but there are biological challenges on the male side that could also occur that we are not familiar with, in this in being in space or being on another planet with less gravity? Yes. So there are issues on the male side. They are I think generally with males, they're a little bit easier to overcome, but there are still major concerns of, for example Development.

Yeah. Of, you know, development, gametogenesis, which is the generation of, you know, sperm and ova. So women are born with with all their all their eggs. But men, you know, we generate millions of new sperm per day, and especially the more sexually active we are, it's this constant revolving, you know, revolving door. Yeah. So our gametogenesis in males is is, much much more robust. It can survive.

If you lose a few sperm to ionize radiation because they took a particle, you got a million more behind them that are are gonna be able to get the job done. If you irradiate the testes entirely, this is the difference between men and women in in this particularly the the radiation, situation. We have a descended external to the body sack that holds our testes, that holds where the reproductive organs are. So they are more exposed naturally to that ionizing radiation, and that is a danger.

That is potentially a danger if you want to talk about long term exposure and potential sterilization in nails. If it's short term and there is no damage no significant damage to the testes, we should be able to continue comedogenesis. I had not even thought about the fact that they're exposed on the outside of the body. I had not thought about that. Yeah. They're so external to the body.

Whereas the female, she has her, reproductive organs are internal to her body, so her body at least provides some shielding from ionizing radiation. However, if her ova are damaged or, destroyed, she cannot generate more of them. A female only has so many over over the course of her life and only ovulates monthly. So, there's a lot of ups and downs to both sexes for just nat in terms of natural protection. Those are the most immediate ones that I that I can present here.

So real quick before we hop to the rest of this discussion and the and the challenges the environment does because I wanna talk about the the course of the reproductive process.

But, option 3, other than doing all the math here and, or, you know, creating a giant simulated earth environment, is potentially we can cryogenically freeze and store human and other species gametes and store them in sort of a doomsday vault excuse me, doomsday vault similar to that seed vault in Svalbard, but perhaps do it on under the surface of the moon. And you remember I told you that figure earlier for 12 to 14 feet worth of regolith?

Yep. If you burrow into the surface of the moon, about 12 to 14 feet of regolith is going to give you about the same level of, radiation protection that you're going to get at sea level on earth. And that exposure, I wanna say, is about 360 milligram a year, is the average. 300 milligram at sea level, 400 milligram if you're living up higher in elevation someplace like Denver.

And even with that, with this, with the vault, the Svalbard vault vault, there's climate change that's been warming the permafrost around the region, which is not good for that vault. So even that protectiveness has not been, positive. There are challenges with it. There yes. There are certainly still gonna be challenges on earth. I am all for us establishing a second seed vault and a second, gamete vault, if you will, under the surface of the moon.

So at least you sort of have it You have the code, to rewrite the program if if necessary. And there was a very similar, concept that was used in the movie Interstellar. I'll bring up the movie again where they were carrying. I want to say it was 5,000 human fertilized Zygotes or human embryos. I forget which stage they're in.

I think they were embryos if I'm remembering the movie correctly that they brought to a very earth like planet that met the met the biological parameters for cellular development and being able to raise those young in that environment and raise them to adulthood. And that was sort of where the movie left off. Is that somebody, one of the main characters, the man, I can't I can't remember her name yet. It's okay. I I I don't remember names of people in movies out there.

So I'm I'm I I you're you're you're with family right now. Yeah. But but the point was is that that that was their Hail Mary. And it is a Hail Mary to try and do it that way, because you're going to effectively have to restart society from 0. And what if something happens to the humans that are the caretakers of the vault? So there's all these things to consider. But let's let's move on to so we established our three ways. I wanna move on to the challenges of the environment.

We've already talked about the 2 main physiological challenges, which are radiation and microgravity. And those 2, a lot of the data suggests that those two forces tend to work synergistically together in terms of the negative impact they have on the human body. So you mentioned earlier the NASA twin study. So Scott and Mark Kelly, only identical twins that have ever flown in space.

Something that, is not, I think, widely advertised or that a lot of people didn't realize when you had the, you know, you had year and space on the cover of Time and and all the other magazines, whichever they were, talking about the year and space. It wasn't actually a whole year and space for captain Kelly. It was actually only 340 days.

He came down around the 11 month point, and it was conveyed to me by somebody who's more intimately familiar with the situation that, the reason for him coming down sort of early was because medically he was starting to degrade. You know, you've heard the statistics of up to 20% bone loss in the heel on astronauts when they're, you know, when they're up there in microgravity on the on the space station.

You've heard of weakening organs that, you know, they degrade in mass, and it takes a while for astronauts to get used to walking. And then after being on the space station for 6 months or whatever it may be, it takes them a while to readjust to the earth gravity environment.

And as somebody who has gone through different levels of g forces when I was going through Air Force pilot training, you know, I've experienced 3 times the amount of G's, 6 times the amount of G's, 7 times it is very taxing on the body. I mean, I felt like I'd been squeezed out, just going through that experience. And I was only experiencing it for moments at a time, and it wasn't particularly sustained.

Mhmm. But to have to have to go through that again and again if we try some sort of centrifuge solution as a microgravity dosage. I kind of jumped ahead of myself here, but something that's been suggested to combat microgravity is use a small centrifuge and give a person a dosage of the right level of gravity every day, let them sleep in the centrifuge, and that cellularly should be able to should be enough.

And I I have trouble seeing that, but again that's based primarily on my personal experience, with varying g forces throughout the day, how, you know, how taxing it is, physically. Important point to make on the Kelly twins.

So the changes of gene expression that were noted in flight, most of, captain Scott Kelly's genes returned to normal post flight, except for roughly 7% of the modulated genes related to the immune system, related to DNA repair, bone formation networks, and then hypoxia and, hypercapnia. I don't wanna get medically excessive here, but it hypercapnia. So d DNA repair, bone, I wanna write that. I've I've missed getting the you said it very quickly. Bone bone formation networks.

Yep. Hypoxia, which is not getting enough oxygen. And then hand in hand with that, hypercapnia, which is excessive carbon dioxide. What was the first one you had said? The first one was, immune system Immunity. Yeah. Gene expression. They're really bad. Yeah. Those are bad those are bad things. Those are like bad things to have as an issue. Not, you know, to not have functioning properly. So and that you know, and this is just radiation and microgravity, that we're talking about.

You've got the noise and light of being on the space space station, the, circadian rhythm, obviously, you know, what is it? They call it Earth Sunrise. Sunrise on the space station happens every 90 minutes. So there's the and NASA keeps their astronauts very regulated in their schedule and, and keeps good control, but those those are just other factors to keep And just they they exist. And even if you even if you control them, they still exist. They still exist.

And again, let's remember space is the most hostile sustained environment known to man. And I I I was listening to one of your other podcasts, the one with Shauna, and she, she has this phrase that she constantly, you know, has reiterated again and again, space is trying to kill you. And I absolutely agree. And I think we mentioned that so she and I together actually authored a paper a couple years back where that that was put in I believe that was put into the paper.

Well, even Sonya who did the talked about the fact that, how did she say it? It wasn't that they tried to is that you age extremely fast in space was the topic. Is that it's a challenge that we humanly age. Now we come back, things return back to normal, but now we're saying here there's a sever 7% that that percentage is extremely challenging. Yeah. Your so your cells have aged at at a much faster rate.

It's interesting that while that happens, microgravity has some physical aspects that that people, view as positives. For example, when you first arrive in that environment, it's not uncommon for people to or for astronauts and cosmonauts to feel very stuffy in the head because the fluid shift that occurs in the body because of the differences in gravity. So you now have a lot of fluid that goes to your head. Your body interprets that as I have excess fluid, I need to dump fluid.

And so you have very stuck, you know, stuck with those astronauts and they have to go to the bathroom a lot. Because the body is the the sensor tech is saying, hey. Yeah. Too much up here. You need to go to the bathroom. Get rid of it because we're overloaded. Yeah. Because the body is shedding that what it perceives to be additional additional fluid. The upside to microgravity levels is it causes the skin to look tauter and more youthful. So wrinkles sort of go away in space.

Now they all come back when you return to earth, unfortunately. You know, it's not it's not a permanent effect. But and you also even sort of have, like, there's more perkiness of the breasts in space and and, and stuff like that. So the physical the external physical aspects appear to improve when you go into that environment, and that may factor in for for tourists going up there for a jaunt in the coming decades. But, it is all stuff that that returns with, with when you return to Earth.

So really quick, I want to I wanna hit one more thing really on radiation since the other thing aside when we talk about Mearth, but we're also talking about Mars as a potential candidate for future settlement. And this is directly pulled from a paper that, doctor Logan, Jim Logan, who I mentioned earlier, offered. Some estimates suggest that crew members on a mission to Mars might be exposed to approximately 50 rem per year. Do you remember what I mentioned is the the average at sea level?

I I have it on another page. I don't remember the number. It's about 300 millirem, 360 millirem on average. Alright. Right. So 50 rem on the mission to Mars. So you've got the trip out there, being on the surface, the trip back, roughly a 2 and a half year mission, it as it currently stands. So he states doctor Logan states, this is the equivalent equivalent of experiencing a full body CT CT scan every 5 to 6 days. Yeah. So quite a lot.

Constituting a 120 rem exposure over the course of a roughly two and a half year mission or roughly 333 times the amount of radiation experienced during a lifetime on earth. Does do you have because we have Project Moon Hut and and Mearth, Moon and Earth, Do you have a number for living on Mars on the on the moon? On the moon, you are going to okay. So it depends on the level of exposure that you have.

If you are on the surface of the moon and you don't have anything blocking you from, say, GCR or from solar particle events, etcetera, And I do have some figures here, which I which I'm gonna pass to you. It is effectively, about as saturated as an environment as you can experience. Because remember, the moon, let me double check this here. The the the moon is beyond the Van Allen belts, beyond where we see the Correct. The northern lights.

So you don't have the benefit of the Van Allen belts protection. You don't have that shield above you. You don't have an atmosphere above you. You are open to the elements out there on the moon. Now remember I said you could burrow about 12 to 14 feet deep and receive that same level of protection. So that is definitely going to be the way that we have to do it, because at least that way we have radiation protection.

On the surface of the moon, you can't really do anything as far in so far as much we know about the gravity level, we're gonna have to sort of get creative there. But you know that you can at least get the radiation protection by providing a physical shield digging in like an earthworm or an ant into the surface of the moon and protecting yourself that way. So so what I'm reading here is it's about 2.6 times higher than the International Space Station of a daily dose. Yes. And it it does vary.

So I'll let me, read some of these stats off for you really quick. So the highest percentage of radiation exposure that was ever experienced on the surface of the moon was by the crew of Apollo 14. They received, roughly 1.14 rads, which is it's about 0.0114sieverts over the course of 33 hours. So if you calculate it into the math of what your average is per year in the space of less than a day and a half, they received 3 times the yearly dose that you would get on earth.

Apollo 15, very different. They were on the surface, I wanna say, 67 hours. They experienced about 0.3 rads. And Apollo 17, they were there for 75 hours and they experienced 0.55. So the rate of exposure was different depending on, really just depending on the situation and what GCR was pelting you from the rest of the galaxy because that is what GCR is. So so, excuse my, naivete here. I guess that's the way to say it is radiation from space comes from everywhere in space.

So being on the far side of the moon compared to the near side of the moon is is just radiation consistent through space, or does do we get more because there's the sun? Do you know what I'm asking? Let me, let me read you another, I actually love this quote. I even quoted it directly in my dissertation. Again, it's from Doctor. Logan, but he talks about the concept of space. Space is a misnomer. The very term implies nothing nothing out there but emptiness. So this kind of just benign vacuum.

It sounds calm, unthreatening, and serene. In reality, interplanetary space space is a seething, undulating, ever changing cauldron of ionizing radiation with energy sufficient to destroy molecular bonds, strip atoms strip electrons off atoms creating free radicals, and wreak havoc on biological systems. So roughly 95% of the radiation that we measure, at any given time is from galactic cosmic rays, that GCR. That is from stars across the the wide universe.

So so it's it's a it's a pool of radiation flying all over the place. Yes. It is radiation saturating all the area, the space, if you will, in between. So if you could put on a a pair of special glasses that you could see the radiation, it would not look empty Okay, so so the there I feel like we're doing a thriller movie.

There is no place to hide You are really you have to create a shelter that would stop the radiation or be underneath the regolith or be under something with water, which they've talked about as a as a means of stopping on on rocket travel. Something has to stop this radiation. Otherwise, there is no chance for survival and there's no chance of reproductive success. Yes. And, not just so you mentioned survival. Step 1, we have to get the humans there alive.

And I think so I I'm of the opinion that the commercial space launch industry in the United States has advanced at a rate, far more rapidly than, say, the traditional government sponsored mechanism. And, yes, the a lot of the contracts that's that SpaceX gets are government contracts or NASA contracts, etcetera. But their streamlined model has proved far more efficient, and that's why they're able to launch payloads in the space for much cheaper.

And you see their, vehicle development has leapt forward. Now they're developing, or have developed, I'm not precisely sure of what stage they're at, but you have Starship, you have the Falcon Heavy, that are going to be the spacecraft per SpaceX that take humanity to Mars and take take us back to the moon, etcetera. If you look at the design of those spacecraft, very 19 fifties looking, you know, kind of cool, sleek, conical, right, with the cool windows and all of that.

I doubt Elon has listened this far into the podcast, but if No. No. That's okay. I would Maybe he will one day. And anybody who is developing a spacecraft, you need to build into the spacecraft a system of shielding. And that might be done by water, it might be done by a material we have yet to develop that is a more dense material than anything that that we know currently, that's that's not for me to to really speculate on.

I mean, there's different different ways we could go, but the point is you do need the shielding. It Need the shielding. You need But it's even what you're saying from a biological perspective, which is not talked about as much as that, the survival of the human species, and I I'm sorry I go to the exposure of the testicles, is that if you don't, the males cannot seed, and so you'd have to have artificial insemination protecting. There it's it won't be a natural course of order.

Yes. So the traditional way, of reproduction would would be definitely threatened by that. But even just the traditional way of surviving of the physiological processes in fully grown adult human beings, is is going to be threatened. So what needs to happen is a reduction in the time of exposure and a reduction in the exposure itself.

That is done by making faster rockets somehow or some kind of propulsion that gets us there faster, more efficiently, and it is done by creating a level of shielding that reduces the overall amount of ionizing radiation that astronauts and settlers and crews are absorbing as they make this journey. Right now, interstellar space is too dangerous for us to cross with the current vehicles that we have.

I I don't think we actually currently have any vehicles that really could make the trip, but if they were designed the same way that they currently are, we wouldn't be able to get people really to the surface of Mars alive. One of the things that I share with individuals, because I am, I'm not a space person is I will say, we don't have a human rated rocket right now that has been approved to get to the moon.

So I I think if you're not in the space industry, you actual people like me would think, oh, no. No. We we can do this. But our rocketry has been designed for low earth orbit, to to the International Space Station or in the proximity of Earth, not to take the trip all the way to the moon again. So we're not this is this is a challenge that is being faced today, and it is a challenge for being on the moon even just the 3 days away.

How do we make sure these individuals survive and thrive and are able to be reproductive? So are there any other challenges the environment to the reproductive process? So we already touched on most of the major challenges. Again, the two primary pillars of destruction here are the are the radically, altered levels of microgravity and the and the radically altered levels of radiation. If you can mitigate those, you have fixed most of the problem.

Now in Yeah. The the so you're saying is if we can create this gravity environment, that's a huge one because even if you're talking about spinning in an O'Neil system. Yeah. Or If you're on Mars, though, if you're on Mars or on the moon, you have not solved the challenge of gravity. Yes. So it the surface of other celestial worlds is gonna be the biggest challenge as far as gravity is concerned. Going from place to place will be the biggest challenge as far as as radiation is concerned.

And then obviously, you've got the sustained civilizations on or I should say under the surface because, yeah, I I have to surface activity is gonna have to be very restricted generally. I just had a conversation with someone on our team about I I brought I brought up we could be in the lava tubes and on the moon. And he said to me, we don't know this. We have a lot of individuals who say that we can, but we don't know the security and safety.

We don't know how they will the structures will last. And and then I brought up, well, on the Mars television series that was on I don't know what series line Netflix or or no. Was it Netflix? Might have been Amazon? Whichever series is on. They went down into the lava tube. They went down underground to protect themselves, and they were very far underground. And he said, yes. I've seen this one. There are a lot of individuals who propose that that's the safety, but we don't know that.

We're just making conjecture. So, yes. So let's get to this next one then. The the research of sexuality in space is not moving fast enough. Yes. And sorry. I don't mean to drag on. So the Sure. Before we before we hit that, there's something that I that I do want to just state is, you know, we talk about different parts of, the reproductive cycle. So, you know, you've got gametogenesis, the release of the gametes.

We haven't talked so much about what the effects are that the effects that microgravity go into it. Let's dig in. So from a, Gamida Genesis point, we've already discussed pretty at length, I think, the the risks of the radiation. So just from a microgravity perspective, there were a number of well, not a number, but a a couple of sperm experiments that were conducted.

I believe the principal researcher was doctor Joseph Tash, if I'm recalling this correctly, that measured sperm's ability to swim in microgravity, and they found that sperm could actually swim much faster in microgravity, and the opposite effect was found in hypergravity. So in centrifugal environments, if you increase the gravity, the sperm swam much slower, but they were actually able to speed up in the microgravity environment.

They were still able to, to find their, you know, find their way around the, around the system. So in order for proper fertilization to occur, you obviously need the, female ova to travel down her fallopian tubes and the sperm to find and bind with and fertilize her eggs. So that creates the fertilized zygote, eventually develops into, the embryo. But before that can happen, you need implantation to happen in the uterine wall.

And that is where a lot of, imminent NASA scientists so, there was a OBGYN, doctor April Ronka, who was a chief researcher at NASA, and she's one of the few that has actually conducted mammalian reproductive research, within the within the, parameters that that, NASA set for her. So we we have actually had reproductive experiments, mammalian experiments that occurred on the space shuttle and the space station.

She has stated that because of microgravity, you may have a situation where implantation cannot occur in the uterine wall, and perhaps the placenta cannot form. It there is some potential major showstoppers that exist that we need to determine whether or not they will, in fact, be showstoppers. And even if they are only a little bit, what that percentage percentage is of failure versus success. Again, this is along the lines of filling in that radio a scale concept that I was discussing.

Yep. Microgravity, when it comes to, when it comes to cytoskeletal development of the fetus as the baby grows in the mother's womb, becomes more important as you and let's assume for a second that we managed to get implantation, placenta formed, everything is as normal on earth. A lot of people point out that the first couple trimesters in the womb are more a water environment for the the fetus, for the baby to begin with. So perhaps microgravity isn't as big of an issue in the early on stages.

However, it does become very important later on, as you get into the later into the 2nd trimester, especially the 3rd trimester, where the baby is reaching full development and has to orient to, to be born out out the mother's birth canal. And this is all prenatal development that I'm talking about. This isn't even postnatal considerations, but I will, discuss a few Mhmm. Please do. Mice studies that that occurred.

So there have been, well, to to make the point, there have been a number of rat and mice studies that, have gone on. The first was actually in 1979. It was a Soviet biosat, Kosmos 1129. That was the first attempt at mating mammals in space. So they sent up 2 male rats, 2 female rats, and on the second day, they opened the, the separating door, if you will, and let them into the the mating, compartment.

The team that wrote the paper, they concluded that mating happened and fertilization actually occurred, but neither of the, females that had ovulated and their ova was fertilized got pregnant actually got pregnant.

So that suggests issues with potentially, it suggests issues with zygote with the, fertilized zygote traveling through the reproductive system, implantation of the uterine wall, the other, you know, these things Do you know how let me do you know how long they were in space before they allowed that to happen so that there was a, an acclimation to space? It was, if I'm recalling this correctly from the reading, it was on the second day that they actually opened opened the door.

So you and, again, mating did. They determined that mating did occur, but it was understood that the embryos dissolved. They did not grow into, grow into, offspring. So the, you have that, which points to potentially a lot of issues due to microgravity or radiation or a, synergistic combination thereof. The males that were flown on that flight, they were mated 5 days post flight to non flown females, and this was sort of interesting.

They actually those females ended up having larger litters of pups, but also with significantly higher levels of abnormalities. So they had edema, which is, swelling in the extremities, hemorrhaging, hydrocephaly, which is fluid pressure created on the brain, and growth retardation. Now that was the post flight effects that were observed in the females and the males. They were both later mated, the males and the female rats in that study, and they yielded normal healthy offspring after the fact.

So there was some issue of gamete damage or something that occurred that prevented proper reproduction, but, they did manage to later have healthy offspring. So it suggests that it it So you suggested that there there was a healing or a change back. What what surprises me was just 2 days into it. So what I was getting at was it didn't take long for the space, whatever the challenge is.

It didn't take long for the impact to happen because I was when I was thinking about the timeline, I was saying, okay. We're talking about the uterine layer. We're talking about a variety of things have to happen simultaneously, but the body was immediately impacted by not being in by being in space. It didn't take time. Well and you also have to so we do need to consider the gestation period of of mice and rats.

So the entire prenatal period from fertile fertilization to birth for rats, on average, and this is why they make great test subjects, on average is 22 to 23 days. Okay. Whereas as as opposed to human beings, which we our gestation period is roughly 36 weeks. Mhmm. The postnatal period is roughly also a 20 it's 20 plus, 21 days or so of postnatal growth to the point where you can wean the baby rats off, off their mothers they're able to be weaned off their mother's milk.

And there have been a handful of experiments sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, so the rodent 1, rodent 2, and rodent 3 experiments, and then also experiment known as NEURO Lab that studied various, stages that that I've just described. So prenatal, postnatal, implantation, and, and placentation. I don't wanna I don't wanna get too deep into the weeds here. No. No. It's it's this is good.

This is great because if we're going that the the the space industry shares similar information across multiple channels. And we're hoping with Project Moon Hut and the work that we're working on, we're reaching outside of that traditional sphere of listeners and participate participants. So today, someone might not listen the same way they will in a in a 6 months or a year as we continue to grow. And my hope is that somebody, some place in the world picks this up and says, I'm interested.

I wanna solve for x. So give the information that would help us to solve the challenges or what you think is important today. That's all we can do is is lay the foundation for new thoughts on solving these challenges. Yeah. And and one thing that I'll get around to is some of that is is already starting to occur. So it's an exciting time, but, yeah, we we will get to that here, in a few. Okay. So bay space shuttle missions that carried these experiments.

So for example, I mentioned, rodent 1, 2, and 3. Those were carried on, STS 66, STS 70, and STS, 72, respectively, I wanna say. So those all occurred in the mid to late nineties. And the first two, they studied pregnant female rats that were flown so the rats were already pregnant when they went up. They were flown for the last 2 thirds of their gestation period, and then they gave birth on earth.

And there were some pretty, interesting findings that the females, the rat females in question, they had much weaker uterine contractions, and only about half the number of uterine contractions as a control group that was being examined at the same time did on earth. So why is you know, we have to consider why is that important.

First off, because the contractions are important for giving birth to the baby, get pushing the baby out, if your uterine muscles are much, much weaker, it's going to create complications in the birthing process itself.

On top of that, the massive stress, and I don't want to say trauma, but the massive stress that uterine contractions create on the baby as they are born, into the world, is actually very important to helping jump start the baby's physiological systems operating on their own, which is why in some cases if a baby is ever born not breathing, what's what's one of the first things the doctor does? Turn them over and Slap them on the back.

Yep. And and, you know, in the happier stories, baby starts crying, coughing, and congrats. So that being reduced or taken away that could have pretty, could result in pretty serious birth complications. For the litters that were born, the ones that had been flown, they were all roughly the same size as the controls and the and the weights were roughly the same. But rodent 2, the, the second experiment, their weights were all significantly less until they reached postnatal day 14.

And again, they were growing in an earth environment for all their postnatal period. There were really ultimately no, observable changes in developmental or general behavior of the prenatally flown off. So they went on to university, got degrees. Yeah. Okay. Got their dream careers. Right. And and now working in high in in advanced tech. So for, for rodent 3, the rodent 3 experiment, rat pups so these were pup groups that were actually flown during the postnatal period.

So after almost immediately after they had been born or at least immediately insofar as we we put our timelines. Yep. Because a few days to a human is not a lot. Few days to a rat, and as far as postnatal growth goes, it is quite a bit. Yeah. So these, groups were done in groups of, 5 day olds, 8 day olds, and 14 day olds. Important to note the statistics here. The 5 day olds had a mortality rate of 90%. Wow. Yeah. 3 days may be difference of completely flipping that statistic.

By the time, you were looking at the 8 day old groups, those 8 day olds had a survival rate of or or excuse me. They had a mortality rate of only 10%. So 90% survived. Flip the charts. The 14 day olds, they all survived. So those 3 days made a huge difference in the survival of the pups and the overall growth development of, them growing into into adults. And again, like I said, 14 day olds, all survive.

So that is indicative that something went very wrong during a critical phase of postnatal growth. So to us, that would be like the first few months of a baby growing up. And you think how how quickly human babies grow relative to the size that they they came out as, in terms of, bone lengths and, how quickly that, you know, their heads are gonna grow and and how quickly they start to respond, open their eyes, etcetera.

And and all these systems start working and and gaining autonomy and gaining them traction in their environment into the world. So I don't wanna say that say that awkwardly. But, no. I mean, it makes sense. There's there is a period of time we relate it to human, growth that that has to be addressed because if not, the babies in space will not survive.

So we it's no different than when we hear on Earth the beginning few months of a baby's fur, from being born, how they're cuddled, how they're spoken to, how the the imprinting is done. All of these are considered important for long term survival. And we can take many other species where that imprinting immediately and the teaching that is transferred makes a difference in survival of other species too. Precisely. There was one more point that I kinda wanted to make on, rodent 3.

Oh, so, yes, you had some pups that made it. You had survivors, and again, the that last group that had mostly developed already, all of them survived. But among all the surviving pups, they the researchers, discovered that they weighed on average about 25% less than the ground controls on earth. So just from a growth, and physiological health That's a that's a huge difference. Yes. That is a huge, huge difference. If we I I I'm, I'm approximately a 100 kilo or £200 just to make numbers easy.

That with 20% would be I am a £160, which is a huge difference in my weight. I mean, I if if you take a take a typical human male or a human female, let's say she's a £150 or let's say not. Let's try to she's a £130 to take off £26. You're now a £100. Not doing perfect math. I know that. I'm just trying to give a reference point. You could go from looking healthy to emaciated, which means that your body might not be able to might not be getting as much nutrients as it should.

It might not it might have some of these other issues that you've spoken about, earlier, such as immunity system challenges when you're lightweight. You could have bone formation issues because you're not getting enough calcium in your body. You could have many other challenges when you are that much sig that significantly less, in size. Yes. And another thing to consider, and you sort of already touched on it, is cascading order of effects Mhmm. Just in terms just in terms of development.

So that brings us to, STS 90. There was the NeuroLab mission that was flown, and the rat pups group the rat pup groups that were flown, in that mission were a postnatal period for a group of 8 day 8 day olds and 15 day olds. So the 8 day olds had a, 50% mortality rate this time compared to the 10% that we'd previously seen, and the 15 day olds all survived. Of all the, surviving pups, they weighed half the weight of ground controls.

So they suffered from malnutrition, hypothermia, and there was also, the maternal nurturing bond interruption to consider. You already you already mentioned as far as imprinting and, and and other factors to consider. So the point that I think we've sort of been beating to death is from a mammalian reproductive development, both prenatal and postnatal aspects, there is so much that can go wrong, an enormous amount that can go wrong.

And from what we've seen from the mailing experiments, we have not quite yet found the boundaries for where that begins because we've been conducting these experiments in complete microgravity. Mhmm. Okay. So, now that we're all nice and depressed No. No. No. No. What it it it's either it's either a challenge to solve or you give up. And the question I was, do we are you gonna give up?

And I don't think I think that if the belief of an individual is we should be a space faring species or that there's an extinction level event or that this is just the next frontier, whatever it may be, then there are the individuals who will work on solving this, and there becomes a timeline issue, and that's what I think you saw I think in one of the videos, the Macadonia video, I talked about timelines.

And if we're going to solve something in a timeline that makes reasonable sense, then the other all the pieces have to come together. You cannot put on roof if you haven't built the foundation. You cannot put in windows if you haven't framed the building. And part of taking off, if if the objective is these individuals will not reproduce, then you have an ability to have a mission that works in one way.

If it is to survival of the species through reproduction and sexuality, the sexuality they can have, but the reproduction won't happen, and that becomes a challenge for the entire mission survival. Agree? Yeah. Okay. Sometimes I have to ask myself, am I going in circles? No. No. No. No. No. Yeah. You and I you and I are definitely in agreement there.

And there's many other things to, you know, to consider especially as it applies to sexuality and human, interaction in general, the psychological, the social, I'll touch on those a little bit. Really quick before I leave the the physiological aspect of it, mammals are not the only, are not the only animals that we have conducted experiments with, reproductive reproduction experiments.

They, primarily the Russians, have sent geckos, newts, snails, gerbils, even cockroaches have been sent to space, and there was actually a, experiment, I want to say it was in 2007, that Roscosmos sent up, the Russian Space Agency sent up, where cockroaches bred, they mated in space, and were able to conceive. So you had proof of concept that reproduction can happen, but again, roaches are extremely hardy creatures, and they don't necessarily equate to, to human beings and human systems.

Sort of some interesting findings there is that when the roaches were born back on earth, the offspring were actually able to run much faster than ordinary cockroaches. They had a lot more energy. They were larger. They were, slightly orange in color as opposed to, you know, kind of your more common darker brown, and they were far more aggressive. So this this is what's that? There's been so many movies where the aliens come and they look like, insects.

Yeah. So, yeah, I we're literally talking about mutant roaches right now. So and, I mean, we have so I'm I'm coming to you from Cape Canaveral, Florida. We have a we have a lot of them in Florida, and I literally walked in on 1 couple months ago, in my previous house that, he was eating a tide pod. This roach was eating a tide pod.

So we know now if we look at the scoreboard, roaches can survive in highly irradiate highly irradiated environments, and they can eat tide pods, which What's a Tide Pod? I don't know what a you know, a tadpole or Oh, it's a, so, like, Tide the detergent. Oh, really? Yeah. So it was eating So you're not eating I'm trying to think of what animal is called a Tide Pod. Yeah. So you're saying they're eating detergent. It was and I don't know if you've heard of this.

There was a very stupid YouTube thing that was going around for a while where people were taking it as a calling it the Tide Pod Challenge, and they were eating Tide Pods. Yes. A lot of people were getting sick, going to the hospital, and dying. But the roaches cockroaches could eat that. But the cockroaches could eat the Tide Pod. So if you look at the scoreboard, cockroaches can survive in radiation and eat Tide Pods.

Humans can't do either of those things, and we know because we've tried Okay. So for those of you at this point, I I don't we we're talking between the 2 of us. But if you are from another country or you've not been involved, the Tide pod, what we're talking about are those encapsulated, detergent packets that can be put into a dishwasher or into a, laundry machine washing machine or even into a dishwasher where you don't have to pour in the fluid or pour in the the detergent.

It actually comes as a whole unit. So what we're talking about is this creature, this cockroach, is eating an even a nonbiological. It's eating a a poison to humans and and doing okay. So, getting back to you, Alex, I'm thinking of Star Trek's Starship Troopers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And stars Starship Troopers had those big kind of like insects. So what you're you're saying is don't take cockroaches to space.

Yeah. Don't make sure that there's no stowaways because that could get out of hand very quick. And that's actually that's actually an important thing. Make sure there are no cockroaches going to the moon or to Mars because if they reproduce, if you've got 2 of them, you can have thousands of these larger and larger because we don't know what the next version will be. 2 or 3 generations down, they could be, 15 centimeters or 6 inches. Oh god.

Pretty scary to think about because I I I'm not a huge fan of roaches to begin with. But that but that's a there is a if we think about viral mutations and variants that are happening with COVID, and it's a challenge that I've tried to describe to individuals recently, is that UK already has, I believe, 2 variants. South Africa has 3 variants.

And a variant is caused by, I'm I'm assuming you know this, a variant is caused by a reproduction in the body that is not a perfect representation of its original match. So you get this different mutation, a different version, and then that ends up propagating. Well, we have 3 variants of the South African.

The United States has done a horrible, horrible, horrible job of tracking its the mutations that have happened in COVID 19, which one of the countries around the world has not been tracking it to the degree in which it should. So I'm going to guess that there's probably a variant on in the United States. There are another countries. Brazil is having challenges.

The point is if you you can have a variant of a variant of a variant, and what I'm seeing here, the way you're describing it, is we don't know the implications of the fact that if another one was done in the same space environment, could they potentially have another variant because they haven't e they haven't formed an equilibrium with space. We don't know that. And those mutations and those variances are already observed in a lot of these other, other animal studies.

And getting back to the the rats, for example, one thing that was noted was that some of these rats ended up having lengthier long bones, their their hind leg bones. So we have, we have already talked a lot about some of the effects that you see with humans. A benefit another benefit of microgravity is your spine stretches out a little bit. You don't have the same compression that you do on Earth, so you're actually taller in space.

So that's these are all things that need to be taken into consideration, but especially when we're talking talking about cellular development and formation, can we made are we able to ensure that the cell will properly form, and are the typical structures, the physiological structures that we rely on to grow normally, how badly will they be affected?

We know that there's degradation, significant degradation, in people that are all already fully grown and formed, but what is that impact as you are going through the growth process? And how I'm jumping back to the Kelly Brothers scenario where they came back a month earlier because of challenges that we didn't we've not that have not been fully expressed because I I think partially it's unknown what was happening. But that ex that situation kind of to me says, okay, we have to solve this.

Yet there is a a school of thought that going to the moon when you're old will be where you will go because of the microgravity, and you will do much better as a as a human being. But there are implications to being on the moon. The lower gravity might give you one benefit, but you might be trading off 5 other disadvantages for being there. Yes.

And, I mean, one thing to consider if you wanna talk about elderly human beings going to the moon is if you are having difficulty standing or walking in earth's gravity and then you go to the moon and you sustain that environment, you sustain physiologically in that environment for a period of time, and I don't know what that period of time would be or or how many days would have to pass, it is going to degrade your physiological systems and your bone strength even more so that you are now facing a situation where you may not be able to go back and survive on earth.

Right. That's how I say there's one benefit is you can walk around for a period of time. The second is your kidneys are failing, your liver is failing, you're losing your bone density, and you can never return back to earth. Yeah. Which put it down to the person, I guess, depending on on what they want. I would, so I would like to sort of end this part of the conversation with a bit of a positive.

So there was a, Japanese experiment was held on held on the International Space Station for a period of 9 months, and it was and again, radiation on the ISS is a 100 times stronger than on earth, on average. So the purpose of this study was to study mouse gametes. It was called SpacePuff freeze dried mouse sperm, and it was held on the space station for 9 months with the knowledge that irradiation can cause DNA damage in cells and gametes.

It was effectively cryogenically stored, freeze dried, and what was found that when the samples were brought back to Earth, they were able to yield healthy offspring Wow. When they when they, conducted, fertilization. How did they keep them safe from the radiation though? Were they shielded? Were they boxed? Did they do something different?

So they were about getting the same, per my understanding, they were getting about the same level of protection that most spots on the on the space station are going to going to have. I don't know exactly where in the ISS they were kept and how much, additional exposure that they would have had, but we can assume, for the purposes of the experiment roughly a 100 times what you would expect on earth. Now some of the spermatosa were damaged.

They were genetically damaged, but there appeared to be, self healing by the cytoplasm when the, fertilization process, was begun. So the cells managed to effectively managed to heal themselves from, from any sort of ionizing damage that had happened. So that is should be viewed as a positive because it lends a lot of credence and possibility to cryogenically storing our gametes as humans, and being able to raise healthy young using that and using in vitro fertilization, etc, down the line.

So the the whole seed vault idea, that is still in play. As a matter of fact, this experiment, Space Pups, sort of provides proof of concept. So in in theory, if it was if this vault was created on the moon and there was robotic technology just in case humankind was wiped out, the robots could take these and the earth was reborn again. Tens of 1,000 or 100 of 1000 of years later, they could fit they could bring them back and regenerate on earth. You know, I had not thought about it that way.

But, yes, if if you had a robotic system, AI system that kept kept those gametes stored safely long enough, the, the point is that the oocytes and the zygotes, they have a strong DNA repair capacity. So it's likely that any, you know, DNA damage that they sustain in space was repaired after fertilization, and ultimately had no effect on the overall birth rate when compared to control.

So But it makes sense that if you had a robot that could wait the only thing is you'd have to birth and raise the child because but the ability to be able it was an automated process that was built into the safe that if the earth has been damaged, it now is appear safe. There's oxygen or the the conditions are now viable. Yeah. It could get into a rocket, shoot back to earth, bear the children, and then life on earth could continue in a new path.

Yes. That I honestly, from a logistical standpoint, that sounds totally viable to me, as long as you're able to keep those systems intact all the way through to Right. To hitting the goalpost there. Okay. And actually so following we keep bringing up movies, but I think this exact concept, not on the moon, but on earth, this exact concept was in a movie I saw not not too long ago.

It was within the last, I wanna say, year or 2 called, I believe the name of the movie is called Mother, and it's about an AI robot raising a a human child. Right. There is I I saw that movie. It is where an AI but and the world had gone into disrepair and yes. I won't we won't give away the storyline, but yes. So so yeah. The potentially, you have the, the parts that you need to to build a survival plan that follows that.

So, so finally, before before we move on, you we already pretty much earlier, we talked extensively about psychological effects, you know, isolation, the monotony, the danger, you know, the constant threat that is sort of held over you by that ultra dangerous environment. That drives a deeper that awakens in human beings a deeper need to connect. The isolation part especially, and remember, sexuality over the course of our human history has been used as a social bonding mechanism.

So you can bet that it's going to happen, that in these new micro societies that are formed, whether it's on a spaceship that is traveling years years away, to a new celestial body or it's an isolated crew on an outpost somewhere on some other some other body, you can expect that things like pairing off could occur. We already, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about the Russian the, 2 Russian crew members who were suspected of having engaged in sexual activity.

And if I'm recalling correctly, I wanna say both those cosmonauts were married. They yeah. But it was a lot of information wasn't released. Yeah. But not to each other. And, That I don't know. So so if if I'm recalling this right, I I believe that both both of the cosmonauts I think they got married when they got back or something. You may be confusing that with a with an American couple, which I'll get to, here momentarily. I I'm reading something that says Russians never had sex in space.

It's official. But I that doesn't mean anything. Yeah. And and that was one of the big questions I originally started out with when I was doing doing this dissertation, and eventually I discarded it because I realized, a, I don't really care and it's not pertinent to what I was Mhmm. I was trying to effectively pursue, because really it's a sideshow. The whole, you know, hey, who is first or whatever, it's it's tabloid fodder kind of thing, and and I didn't really need to focus in on that.

I did think, hey, man. If I was able to get an interview with all 500 plus people that have been in space, then we're talking about qualitative analysis. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Quantitative and quali first, quantitative qualitative analysis, and, and being able to get hard data on who did and did not do what. Because masturbation has certainly happened in space. Erections have been known to happen in space, and it's been talked about openly by astronauts in their memoirs.

Mike Mullane, who is a shuttle astronaut, he comes to mind. His memoir Riding Rockets, he talks about, I I want to say it was his first mission that he went up in the shuttle and he awoke on day 1, the next day. He awoke his first wake up in space and, said that he had an erection so intense it could it could have quote drilled through Kryptonite, unquote, and he is not the only one to allude to what others have called space viagra.

So that is a physiological effect that happens from fluid shift in males, or it's been observed at least and documented. Has it been documented over time? Like, you you could do it the first few days, but doesn't happen. From what I was able to find oh, oh, okay. So from what I was able to find, there's there's been only a sprinkling of people discussing it. I haven't been able to find anything, where females talk about vulva engorgement or anything.

Mike Mullane's memoirs, discussed, if if I'm remembering the rest of that paragraph correctly, I'm kind of rewinding in my head here. He said that most of the mornings that he woke up on that mission, it was, I forget how long the mission was. It might have been 10 days or so. Most of the mornings that he woke up, he he had his, you know, puppet friend there with him. So it was pretty consistent, he said, through through the course of, through the course of the mission.

Okay. It's just another one of those challenges we don't know if you're going on a several month mission or you're staying on the moon for a period of months on end. Yeah. What will happen? So it just becomes and we don't know what the offspring will capabilities will be. We do know that that we do know that the, the cockroaches, however, they're probably gonna be okay. Yeah. They'll be fine. As long as the cockroaches are okay, we should all breathe easy.

But, yeah, the whole concept of pairing off, so something that I'm pretty sure most of the people who who will probably listen into this may already know, and I'm sure you already know. So there was actually there has been a married couple in space, an American married couple, who flew on the same mission at the same time. It was in 1992, STS 47. The astronauts were Markley and Jan Davis.

I believe they have since they're no longer together, in the in the couple deck you know, decades since, they got divorced later on, but they met while in astronaut training, fell in love, got married in secret, and then they told NASA. They waited to tell NASA until, I want to say, it was a couple months before their mission was scheduled to launch off. So it was effectively already too late to replace them.

And I don't know if that was planned on their part or or any of the, you know, the gossip around around the situation, just that it was basically too late. NASA made the decision. It was too late for them to replace either of the astronauts and that they would go into space on the same mission. So they're the only married couple that has been into space so far together. I am personally of the opinion that nothing probably really happened.

Again, I don't like to speculate, and I don't like to to go down the tabloid route. Really, all that's there for me as a sex researcher is what is published, what's observable. So knowing that NASA was not happy with them, and I believe they actually placed them on opposite 12 hour shifts as a result, there's probably not a lot of chance that they've gotten, especially given the when you consider the shuttle, not a lot of chance for privacy, particularly when you have 7 crew members.

And I know Mae Mae Jemison was actually also on that crew. And I want to say she is now the now the head of the, 100 year Starship program, if if I am recalling this correctly. But that was one of the highest levels of drama that NASA was ever willing to put up with, and the 2 astronauts were bombarded with questions from the press about, hey, did anything happen up there? And they have basically had to live with the fallout of it ever since.

So it wasn't a it wasn't an ideal situation for them, but It is it is history. Yeah. It it is history. So they were the 1st married couple in space. I'm not gonna speculate whether they were they were the 1st, married couple to have relations in space. They were probably the first to To kiss or hold hands. Or, you know, something like that. Although I don't I don't know the story they're at.

I would assume that there was at least one kiss in their mission, and I would assume that they held hands at least once. Yeah. And and there's pictures, you know, of all the crew together, and you see them holding hands and stuff like that.

So, when we consider though these small groups and personality conflicts that can occur between other crew members, you have to consider the whole concept of pairing off and how jealousy can come into play, which is why it is important to reframe our sexuality in the way that our social bonding in our societies work when we go into these these new environments and we We're now full circle. We're now full circle to the beginning.

Yeah. So so something that NASA, released as a finding was that they found the most effective crews were actually mixed crews. So not full male, not full female, but mixed crews tended to have the best social and crew dynamics. So you need that mix of folks in there, to get the best effects and the best social cohesion that you can out of the crew. That being said, there are inherent dangers. Again, we are still human.

We're still going to carry our amores and our jealousy and the things that we were raised with with us into into space and into those environments. And probably the best example I can give of that was one that happened, a few years back. I want to say it was in the mid 2000s. Lisa Nowak and, Bill Offline were 2 astronauts that had an affair.

They were I want to say they were they were also both married, at the at the same time, but they ended up meeting in, meeting at NASA, ended up having an affair. And in 2007, this all sort of came out because the female astronaut was left by the male astronaut for a another female. You know, he found another girlfriend and she had an explosive rage of jealousy. This actually made headlines across the country.

So she was charged with attempting kidnap, kidnapping and attempted murder after she attacked her romantic rival. So she was already married to another man. She was a mother of 3 kids. She drove 950 miles from Houston to Orlando, wore adult diapers the entire time so she wouldn't have to stop to use the bathroom. That's how focused she was. Again, these are very focused individuals, astronauts. But you can see when things go awry, how how issues could be created, especially in micro societies.

And she was arrested after assaulting the other woman. The other woman was an Air Force captain, with pepper spray. And then when police arrested her, they found a steel mallet, a 4 inch buck knife, and a BB gun in her car and a map to the other woman's home.

So it was very historical for NASA because it resulted I think it was the first time that people were dismissed from the astronaut corps, and it resulted in the establishment of a code of conduct for the astronaut corps, which before they hadn't really needed, I guess. It was automatically assumed that, hey, you'll behave to a certain level of professionalism. And even these extremely well trained individuals who've been through all these psychological tests, you had a reaction like that.

Which is what I asked of you earlier. How much can they be able to determine through all these interviews? What is their propensity for? How do they live? What culture are they coming for? What do they believe in sexuality and jealousy? You can't know. And and as we get to, you know, 5 months or 3 months of training, you're not going to know even more. Yeah. And this is and this is us coming full circle there. Yeah. So there was a there was another NASA flight physician, Kiara Bacall.

She authored a paper, a medical paper in, 2008 that I had also used as a source, for my dissertation dissertation. She described psychosexual issues that might arise when you have sex and romance on these long isolated, long duration missions.

And she made reference to that that even professional astronauts on active flight status, after you've already been through selection, you can develop serious mental health issues based on those interpersonal relationships, and that can be exacerbated by the extreme prolonged stressors of that long duration spaceflight environment. That'll only make it worse, really.

And then you have limited social networks to consider, that can lead to problems, privacy issues, love triangles, and then imagine a imagine somebody pairs off on this multi year mission, and then they break up. Now you are stuck with your ex in a floating tin can Right. Away from all of society. So so what are the, again, what are the multiple order effects that that occur? And that's something that has to be looked at and considered very seriously.

And so, not to I'm not joking when I say this. If in fact people going on multiyear missions are taught about the bonobos, they are taught many of the things we talk about here. They are indoctrinated to the possibilities of a new social structure. There might be a means by which the individuals in that group, if they are kept isolated from the rest of the society during training or during that time frame, that they might adopt if it's the right people.

I mean, it's a it's a it's a long shot, but there's an adoption of possible exclusionary positions that could be used for the survival of the human species. Tracking. Yeah. Tracking what you're saying. But and like you said, it's it is a it's a question that because we have grown up in this other narrative, most of us, and especially the the space faring nations, how is that gonna go? Can we re I I don't think it's necessarily a rewiring.

I think if, I think biologically, we are already wired that way. But can we re Unwire. Can we unwire, can we re culture, to create the most effective crew that you're possibly possibly going to be able to have? At least prevent some of these major, psychosexual issues from arising and and conflict within the crew. So we've discussed a lot of the, you know, the physiological, psychological, social, issues.

And those all factor into sexological considerations when we, when we consider what I've termed as astrosexology, which is sexology as it applies to these off earth environments. Point to that final bullet point. Yes. That research on sexual reproduction and sexuality and space in general, it is not moving quickly enough when we consider all these external factors.

I already talked a lot about the history of the research, the fact that there have been a handful of mammalian experiments here and there, and the different national agencies have participated. The Chinese had a 6,000 embryo experiment, that I wanna say was completed back in 2016. The Russians have been doing it for a very long time.

We even have been doing it, since the nineties, But these experiments are very, very few and far in between, and generally they are oriented toward the physiological and then only in parts. There is no continuous multi generational sort of experiment that has yet occurred, although there have been structures and plans developed for them. So NASA had a a project called, the Mark III rodent habitat, which was developed by, doctor Epil Ranca, who I mentioned earlier.

She was one of the chief scientists for, for a number of these mammal experiment these mice experiments that I mentioned earlier, the rodent habitat ones.

She and her team developed a habitat that I I if I'm recalling this correctly, pulling a lot from the back of my mind right now, and we have been talking a while so I'm kinda worn out, but, she developed a concept for a multi generational colony, and I I believe Mark 3 was designed to be able to be held and operated on the International Space Station.

Since there has been a new plan, a much more recent plan that, has been published called, MICE Hab, which that is I know we don't like, I know we don't like acronyms too much. Love them in the military, but, MICEHAB is short for multi generational independent colony for extraterrestrial habitation, autonomy, and behavior health or MICE HAB. So I'm not writing that down. Just Yeah. Don't worry about it.

So so this, in a nutshell, this would be a robot operated multi generational colony, so like a BioSat, but larger scale, that looks at multi generational effects of, different levels of microgravity, different levels of radiation, all on board this station. And again, it's maintained and the mice are fed and looked after by, robots that are incorporated into the, into the spacecraft. So that allows occasional human visitation and repair.

It's sort of its own floating, independent biosat experiment, and it would be put into orbit around the moon. It would effectively allow us to study, hey, what are the multi generational compounding effects of these different levels of gravity using centrifuges as we discussed earlier. So Yes. You have a centrifuge that simulates moon gravity, one that simulates Mars gravity, and trying to establish where is that line, where is that sweet spot.

And on the rate on the radio e scale, I actually, early on, I described that conceptual line as the Ronco Logan line, ironically enough. So I don't believe doctor Ronco was directly involved in this MICE HAB paper or contributed to it, but it was effectively based on her work, and they make, they do make reference to her work. She was at NASA Ames Research Center when they authored the Mark III rodent habitat paper, and MICE HAB was done at NASA Langley in Virginia.

So the beach ball is still there. It's still getting bounced around, and the idea is getting more grand, as as it goes. And again, this is a NASA published paper. Well, it's done by, NASA Associates and was published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. So it is a serious paper with a plan saying this is what we could do, and this is what we would expect the product to be able to be.

I have discussed this concept with, commercial entities, and there is a commercial start up company called Spaceborne United that was founded in, I want to say, 20 2018.

They're at least a couple years old, who have stated that their their goal is to solve a lot of these problems for humanity, to effectively fill in the data that would fill the the radio e scale, store human gametes in orbit, eventually, see the first human conception conception in space, and, eventually be able to give birth to human young in space. Now speaking with their CEO, that is easily 10, 15, 20 years out. Easily. And and it is not a singular, organizational answer.

One thing about Project Moon Hunt and what we've been talking about, which I have shared with you some, is that this requires new eyes, new thinking, not old school, and I'm not saying that they are, but a new way of addressing these challenges from multiple different angles.

You've just brought up through this the different cultural perspectives, and you might get one answer when you do this experiment from a from the United States, but it could be completely viewed differently if it was done by another society's, baseline as to what is good for society and what is not. So we need more, and the billion hearts and minds, which is the community engagement side of what we're looking at, will bring new answers to the equation. It's not just one company.

There's going to be hundreds of companies that will need to organizations that need to come into play to make this a reality. And as you said, 10, 15, 20 years. Well, I I could swear there's someone who plans to go on Mars in the next few years. Yeah. And it's almost what comes first or and and not to be protective. Society has had a long history of individuals jumping on a boat and going when other people said, you're gonna fall off the the edge of the cliff.

And Yeah. And, again, that's that second innate human desire, which is to explore, to expand. Right. So it ties in, and I I think that we can get to these solutions. It's how fast. And I think the more more individuals engaged in this, the faster we can get there. Yes. In which I reiterate this, you know, this final bullet point. The research on this at the moment is not moving quickly enough when you consider the factors.

You consider there's a lot of, developing instability on earth that will be occurring here in the coming decades. There have been rise of authoritarian regimes around, you know, around the globe, and strongmen have been sort of gaining more more traction.

This all contributes to a a much more, I would say, contested type environment where the the post World War 2 peaceful order, we can't rely wholly on that anymore, and we do need to cooperate as a global society to address a lot of these challenges. When it comes to addressing climate change and nuclear proliferation, the list is long. Plastic in the oceans is another great one, you know, we could cause Yeah.

We mass extinction events in the ocean food supply chain because too many fish are dying from eating plastic. And I think if you recall in one of the videos, it's the it's the solid waste, which is worse than the plastics. The United States dumps 12,000,000,000 gallons, not dumps intentionally, but there's 12,000,000,000 gallons of multi municipal waste landing in the ocean every day. In Europe.

Yeah. If you take Europe and assume that Europe, China, and India, just to take 4 countries, are the same, but they're not, that's 50,000,000,000 gallons of poison into the ocean every day. That's not radioactive waste. That's an industrial waste. That's not pesticide waste. It's not a mining waste. Would you our our water already has plastics in it, but imagine having to drink poison every day, and our oceans could be completely killed just by the municipal waste runoff that we have.

Yeah. So we do have some major challenges that we have to address. So we in that, we have the potential for calamity that we discussed earlier. Yep. That, hey, single planet species don't survive. We have the need.

We have already established a growing unfortunately, we have already established a growing need that is getting more and more immediate in nature to solve these problems, not just solve the solve the problems themselves on earth, but to solve the reproduction issues and establishing that, that existential insurance policy as I called it earlier. So we we've taken go ahead. Go ahead. Keep it going.

So there as I mentioned, there has been research conducted by major space agencies and using science dollars that had been given to those space agencies. But given placed against the backdrop in the context of the history of human space exploration, we've been going to space now, what, we just had the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 not that long ago. Sorry. Doing the math here.

Yeah. So the the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 was, I wanna say, a year year and a half ago, and we were in space a decade before that with the Mercury Gemini programs and obviously starting with Sputnik, we have had many decades in space. The space life sciences have not advanced at the same rate that they need to, just in terms of keeping people alive and healthy, and certainly as far as reproduction, is able to be able to be parsed out here.

So you have a very small number of experiments scattered throughout the history of space exploration that have to do with solving this fundamental issue, which is what is required for settlement.

We've already talked about, the the threats and the fact that NASA and a lot of these other agencies are primarily focused on building the vehicles, the process of getting us there, not necessarily the aftermath or the the interim where we have squishy carbon based life forms that they need to survive and reproduce, they're going to be in that craft that's traveling across interplanetary space.

Given all that, you would think that this would be a much more prominent area of study, but it really hasn't been. And especially the, the reproductive side. I will give you a quick I'll give you a very quick example. There was a, I go I wanna say she was also at, NASA Ames. Doctor Yvonne Clearwater, who was a psychologist at NASA. This was, I wanna say, in the mid eighties. She wrote a sidebar article in a journal called Psychology Today.

Title the title of the article was intimacy in space, and she her role at NASA was helping design the t the crew quarters to allow people to, the crew members to to have more privacy. And she stated in this in this sidebar article, I'll just quote her here, it seems obvious, however, that a group of normal healthy professionals will probably possess normal healthy sexual appetites. If we lock people up for 90 day periods, we must prepare for the possibility of intimate behavior, unquote.

Sounds reasonable. Right? There's yeah. It sounds reasonable. There's there's an economic reason for creating a launch vehicle. There's an economic reason for putting a satellite into space. While there is a a mission success need, it's not an economic need today. And the challenge becomes once, I'm forecasting.

Once individuals realize that we had not solved these challenges and it becomes too late, it becomes far and full or something goes wrong, there might be a backpedaling to say we need to solve this quickly. Yes. And I I'm of the same opinion that, there would be pretty quick funding to to be thrown, thrown out this kind of research if we were put into an existential crisis situation Right.

And we re and or an economic situation where SpaceX is able to get you to Mars, but they can't keep you alive on the way there, suddenly that threatens them economically and it threatens the whole Correct. The whole enterprise. But to come back so sort of to come back to one more point I wanna make on Sure.

The issue with waiting until 11th hour when it comes to this kind of research is that the ethical, moral, and legal guidelines that we want to stay within where we're not using humans as human babies, especially as lab rats, and that we are able to justify that we took every precaution possible, we did all the research we possibly could to ensure the parameters in which to safely birth human young in these environments.

All those all those ethical guidelines and everything could quickly drop away if we are put in a no kidding survival situation, which you look at any situation in human history where it is a fight for basic survival, all moral ethical guidelines fall the wayside. And that's how a lot of exploration has been done also. They have been the the renegades, the people on the outside.

And you're asking for individuals to be cognizant of a future possibility where I think the we all have had I've gotta believe we all have had I'm making this up. I have had a lot of conversations about COVID. And the question is, why won't someone wear a mask, and why will they wear a mask, or why will they be protected? So you cannot walk outside. There's a law that says you cannot walk outside naked. Yes. There are laws.

You cannot walk outside naked and go around to bars and restaurants to do everything, and it is not questioned as a right that I have to wear clothing. It is a law. You follow it. Period. Putting on a mask is in essence, you can't leave your privates out, which is your bodily functions. Part of that, I believe, or one reason it is not being, it is not as powerful is that in COVID, you don't see the people die.

You don't go into the hospital and live with someone for 3 weeks or 4 weeks while they're trying to breathe and then die. You don't see the trauma that people go through every day. So therefore, you drop someone at the door and they they go in, and then they die away from everybody. It's horrible. It's terrible, the whole experience. Yeah. It's awful. But the world of the Vietnam War changed when the media brought into the living room through television the horrors of war.

There's a very big difference in seeing it on television. And in television today, we only see the aisles and the feet hanging out of people who are sick because of privacy laws, but we do not see the death. Yeah. And because of that, I think that even family members who don't believe in wearing a mask would come out and said, my father died. You put on that mask. If they had spent a month and a half watching their loved one die.

I think in the case, this is just conjecture, I think in the case of space, there's an excitement of the opportunity in 2021 and in the 20 twenties that it will happen, And it's almost overriding some of the basic principles of what's necessary to create a full human experience or a full mammalian or full species experience in space.

So I'm not sure that no matter how much people bang on the drum, people are going to hear it until it becomes either the existential threat or there's a challenge where people died or there's a financial challenge because it's not solved. Those are locked, but I don't know if it may I think it made sense. No. No. It makes sense.

And and to be frank, that is so that is actually precisely the scenario that I am arguing arguing we should do our damndest to avoid because that scenario is not necessary yet. The I mentioned earlier in my dissertation that you have the you have a a theoretical scenario where you have a a woman becomes pregnant on the surface of Mars, and we don't know anything about how pregnancy there works or what the the differences will be. So now she is faced with an extremely difficult decision.

She basically has 3 options. She can either stay there in the Mars environment and give birth to her baby, which could result in all sorts of anomalies and effects as we've seen from some of these these experiments. She could choose to leave, so get on a rocket and undergo the g forces to leave the planet and hopefully go up to some sort of orbital incubator space station or or something like that or potentially We're we're this is so far down the pipeline.

Yeah. Well and and this is again, I just wanna provide this as a A solution. As a example of what we don't want to end up in. The the earth example is is much nearer to home. When we talk about people going up into space and getting sick, because they spent a few months up there, but maybe they have some kind of underlying physiological condition where, they are not as healthy as your your standard astronaut or potentially getting getting sick when they when they get home. So to sorry.

To to round out this example of the of the Mars situation, she can either leave she can have the baby there on Mars, or she can choose to abort the pregnancy. Those are effectively her three options. They all suck for an expecting mother who wants to keep her child and keep her child safe and healthy. We cannot allow ourselves to get into a situation like that because then We we are humans. Yeah. Yeah. We are Oh, yeah. No. I'm I'm sure we probably will.

So so let me let me share with you something, Alex, because I think you'll appreciate this. The first question, the the reason Project Moon Hot exists as it does today had to do with a woman getting pregnant on the moon. The reason it was because someone made a comment about reproduction on of having a baby on the moon. Project Moon Hut was formed. That was the impetus for me to write out the 4 phases.

That was the impetus for the beginning of the 4 phases of development of the moon and everything else that slides under it. The reason you're on the program today is not because we can go out and tell people. It's because you just shared information, 5 hours of information. You just shared information that potentially potentially could reach the right person at the right time who feels the same way and makes the change. So you've done I'm gonna say, we've done our job today, the 2 of us.

We've done the job because it is an important topic. Otherwise, you would not be on today. The the way I pick guests is as a post, we get to choose who we want. Some people just every week, I have to put someone on. Every week, there has to be somebody on because I'm trying to make money off of this. Project Moon Hut is bringing on people who we think could add value to the ecosystem of the Age of Infinite and Project Moon Hut Foundation. We don't go for every week.

We don't go for just getting us guest on. And how long did you prepare for this? I mean, if you had to add hours or time or months, how long was it? So, you and I first spoke, I wanna say, about a month and It was, it was December it was December 3rd we first spoke. So so I had to I definitely had to get back in my books, go back through all these papers, and, you know, there's nothing I love more than reading dry medical literature. That's a joke. You I know.

You prepared you prepared for 2 months. Yeah. Because, it so this is you know, in my in my day to day life, this is not something that, is it It's not my point. You you you no. It's not my point. You were standing, waiting to go do your job in the military, and you were thinking about it. And you read an article, and you thought about it, and you decided what to put in and what not to put in. So you took 2 months. It doesn't have to be reading something. You thought about it.

It took you 2 months to come to today. That's how we build our programs. That's how everybody does it. They show up prepared, and they share something amazing that adds to the to the answers that people who are interested in, project moon hot, space moon, Mearth, Mars, that they can help make a change. And so I because we can go on forever, I'm gonna. It's 5 hours. It just hit the 5 hour mark, but we actually started a few minutes after. I'm going to say, I'm gonna say it. That's fine.

Thank you. Oh, thank you. I, I appreciate you having me on, and, I hope that this discussion has hopefully reached some of the right ears or will eventually and has helped push things in a direction that they need to go. And it even helped you. And most guests will say that they learn a lot just going through the experience of being on the podcast.

So I wanna thank you for taking all the time that you have to prepare to build and the time today to make sure that we had this fantastic overview, taking it from all different perspectives, psychological, cultural, physiological, down the list. And I'm still afraid of the cockroaches, but down the list. Same. So thank you. And I wanna thank all of you who have taken the time to listen in. Seriously, this was a a long call. It was yet I would have stopped it.

Honestly, I would have stopped it there if I didn't see that there was a path to finding new answers, and we did. So at least I did. I'm hoping you did too. I hope that you learn something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others, whether it be on Earth, within Mearth, or anywhere. And bringing it back, the Project Moon Hut Foundation is we are looking to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, the Moon Hut.

By the way, we were named by NASA, so we were named project moon hut. Through the accelerated development of an earth and space space ecosystem, then to turn the endeavor to use the endeavors, the paradigm shifting, the innovations, and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. And so I wanna ask you, Alex, what is the single best way for someone to connect with you?

Okay. So I, I do have a Twitter account if you want to connect with me via social media, which is just my name. It's Alex Leyendecker, atalexleyendecker. So alexlayende e c k e r. And then, you can also contact me, via by email at [email protected], common spelling. So s p a a Perfect. And if you'd like to connect with me, it's David. Now we have at project moonhut dot org, but we also [email protected], if you don't wanna type all that in.

You can connect with us on Twitter at at project moonhut or at goldsmith for me. LinkedIn, we're on. We're on Facebook. We are reaching everywhere. We have a lot of things happening in the background.