Unpacking the Interactions Between Environmental Hostility and Technology Dependance w/ Casey Handmer #51

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 just experienced the information age, and boy, what a ride it's been. Now consider you may be right now living through a transitional page into a new age, the age of infinite.

An age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, but by a redefined lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources, which will be possible through a new construct where the moon and Earth, as we call it, Mearth, will create a new ecosystem and a new economic system that will transition us into this infinite future. The ingredients for an amazing sci fi story that will come to life in your lifetime.

This podcast has been 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. We were named by NASA. Through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and paradigm shifting thinking from that endeavor back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species.

If you're interested, there are videos in the top right hand corner at www.projectmoon dot org where you can learn a little bit more. So on to our program. Today, we're gonna be exploring a fantastic topic, unpacking the interactions between environmental hostility and technology dependence. And we have with us an amazing guest, and I will do a a short bio and then share a little bit about why he's on. Casey Hanmer. Hi, Casey. How are you? I'm very well. Thank you.

K. Casey is the founder of TerraForm Industries, an organization which scrub c o two from the atmosphere and uses renewable hydrogen converted to natural gas. Casey has also worked with, worked at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Hyperloop 1, and he has an unbelievable PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics. Now why Casey? I had watched I had read an article about, Beyond Earth, and it was incredibly well written. And I don't tend to see them.

I see there's a lot of hyperbole, a lot of hype, a lot of misdirection, but it was so well written that I reached out to Casey, and at the same time, I reached out one of our team members in Germany, Andreas. And he wrote back, Casey is at the top of my list. And he respected him. And if our team members feel that way, I we had to have Casey on.

So before we get into the actual content, let me share with you that it's a miss there's a belief that Casey and I or any of the guests have spoken about what we're going to talk about today. We have not. We have not had we had one meeting, and in that interaction, what we did is we created a title. So here it go. This is the process. We select the guest. The guest watches or listen to some Project Moon Hut material. They might have listened to, of the videos or content.

Then there's a call where, for example, Casey and I decide on a title. We don't really go into the topic, just the title. Then and that can last up to 3 hours. When we're done, Casey goes on his own, and I don't hear anything until today. I have no clue where Casey's going to go. So right now in front of me, I have 12 pieces of blank paper. I take notes during the entire program. He and I don't see each other, so I don't see his reactions.

He doesn't see mine, And we're both or all of us are going to learn together from Casey. So let's get started. Casey, do you have an outline for us? I do. And you give it to me, please. Okay. If you ask so nicely. I have, round about 8 points here. Okay. Some of them will be pretty quick, and some of them potentially could spool out into 20 hours of conversation. I'll just see how we go. As I I as long as you've got enough to drink, we're good. I think I'll be okay.

So the first point is let's be humble. The second point is, and you can let me know when you're ready as well. I'm good. Number 2. Is is the vision of rugged self reliance and its limitations. Vision of rugged? Are you g g e d? Yeah. Yep. That's correct. Self reliance and its limitations. Point 3 is autac y. A u t a c y? K y. A r k y? I'm not talking. Never heard of that. 4? Don't worry. We'll define that. 4 is is labor scarcity. 5 is environmental hostility and population stability.

6. Are you ready for 0.6? Yeah. 6 is development prioritization. 7? The Iceland case study. Great. And then point 8 is depending on what we've already covered, we might wanna talk about Starship and the 9 missing technologies. Also. Alright. K. So let's start with number 1. So let's be humble. It's kind of the mandatory disclaimer.

And even though people have been writing more or less seriously about living in space for almost a 100 years, it's important to remember that, humanity as a whole knows almost nothing about this problem. Yes. We have operated the space station for a couple of decades, but the total number of people who've lived in space is fewer than a1000. Many more people have lived at the south pole, for example.

We know a lot more about living at the south pole than it's than than in than in space, and no one has lived on the moon for any length of time. No one has lived on Mars. No one has ever built a city outside of the earth. Very, very few cities have even been built in anything but ideal environments on earth. So I think it's important that when we begin this conversation, we we kind of make it explicit that we don't really know what we're talking about. We don't have any direct experience.

We can take our best guess, but we have to recognize that if these cities in space are ever built, the people who build them will necessarily know millions of times more about about the process than than we can possibly hope to know by speculating, even if, as we were doing today, we're using a lot of math while we speculate. Actually, I am gonna what you just said is I I think I shared with you that I'm not a space enthusiast. I I don't wake up in every morning and wanna learn and go and do.

And this these these points, I didn't know about the South Pole. I think that's brilliant add on that gives that, polar view. I've always said we've had more well, I think it's no more than 13 people beyond Earth at any given time. When someone says they wanna have 50,000 people in 8 years or a a huge city, I'm thinking, do you know how long it takes to build a building on Earth? I mean, seriously, how long does it take to build a city on Earth? Well, David, we're gonna do it different.

So the my point is I love what you've just said because you articulated it very succinctly, and it's exactly what I have thought about is that we we're making the idea bigger than or the prospects bigger than the possibilities are are there today. So brilliant. You did those you did really well. Thank you. I mean, there are a handful of, kind of examples of, instances where where humans in large organizations have done enormous logistic kind of miracles in very short periods of time.

And the the 2 that come to mind would be the Berlin Airlift, and also Operation Overlord, during d day, in which, you know, quite literally tens of thousands of people and and millions of tons of stuff were moved around in a very short period of time, sometimes with very little planning. Just for the sake, I I know with the Berlin air airlift, but what was the scope and scale?

I can't remember off the top of my head, but the the I think they flew more than a1000000 flights, and the the average cargo per flight was on the order of 5 tons, because these were pretty pretty early aircraft like c 47, DC 3. So, yeah, basically, fairly primitive stuff, and and that was over 16 months. And there were earlier airlifts, and there have been airlifts since then as well, but it was just kind of a yeah.

Over a period of months, the the whole process became a very well oiled machine. They pioneered things like instrument landing, so they could maintain the flight rate even as as the weather got bad, for example. That's where it came out of?

Well, I mean, people have been trying instrument landing for a long time, but that was the first time it was kind of crucial, because the one of the fundamental limitations they had was the number of aircraft and number of pilots, and so they couldn't really afford to have them crash. And and, of course, they well, I I don't wanna get any detail. We'll get No. But I I it's cool because I It's actually I've not heard I've not heard videos on on the Berlin Airlift.

So The the the interesting, the first thing that came to mind soon as you said it was, yes, but it was we weren't. We were we already understood a little bit about lift. We already understood we had we'd already flown. So this was the Well, yeah, we've done World War 2. So So in in many ways, the structures that existed to to organize these things had not been completely demobilized yet. This is 1948. So, yeah.

I mean, I I think the Soviets were trying to to blockade Berlin, to force capitulation of of the part of Berlin that was still controlled by Western forces, and was otherwise surrounded by by the Soviets, and they, you know, unfortunately did not, or unfortunately for them did not succeed. But, you know, I mean, as part of this process, for example, an entire new airport was built, so it was like kind of a a big a big big procedure. Anyway, I don't I don't wanna get sidetracked by Berliner.

It it gave me enough because I didn't know enough about what you said was brilliant, and then you added an example of it, which is perfect. So I love it. Thank you. Yeah. But there are actually people out there, who've done some amazing amazing, work in recent videos and stuff on YouTube on it. There's a guy called Real Engineering on YouTube. I think I think he's done a whole series on it.

And, and you could maybe get them as a guest, and they could talk about it because, like, part of the reason that that I said, let's talk about interactions between environmental hostility and technology dependence is that I could probably make a claim that that relatively few people would have more insight on this topic than me right now. Because I've gone to the effort of writing, like, dozens of blogs that very few people have ever read on it.

Whereas, you know, basically, at this point, the world is full of people who know a lot more about space than I do on almost any topic. And and that's and that's great. The the challenge is is the interconnectedness of their ideas to a realistic time frame and possibilities and to strip out the hype and bring it down to something that someone can work with. And that's one of the challenges. That's why I liked what I read what you wrote because it was so pragmatic.

You weren't trying to prove that we can do we can fly to another solar system. You were saying, this is the engine, this is the way it works, this is the possibilities, and it was just so well written. So, yeah, the real engineering, if you know those people, please feel free to connect. I don't, but I wish I did. Well, it's okay. I will I will tell them that you said something, and they'll say, oh, Casey. He's the guy. I wish.

So let's jump on to point 2 then, which is the vision of rugged self reliance and its limitations. So, you know, basically, a lot of people have written stuff about, I'm gonna say going to live on Mars, it could also be like going to live on the moon. Backed up, you know, Hyland, and various science fiction authors, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote an absolutely beautiful trilogy about living on Mars. Buzz Aldrin's written a couple of books about about living on Mars.

Obviously, Robert Zubrin who's been on the show, has has written quite extensively. I think he's written 3 or 4 books now about, about, you know, basically living on Mars and building up cities and towns and stuff there. And whenever I read these books, I always kind of delve into the details that I'm like, okay, so what what what's really happening? What is what is the manifest for the first cargo?

Like, let's let's dig into details here, and and actually, as far as that goes, with with some exceptions, a lot of the a lot of the writing involved kind of, use a metaphor or or kind of extrapolates from a vision of, you know, the rugged the rugged pioneer, you know, on the on the frontier. And, and that the kind of canonical example that makes sense, in the context of American culture is this somewhat fictitious historical analog of 20 acres and a mule.

And the idea is that, you know, you can have someone who's who's very clever, who's a generalist, who's able to do many things. They have a small patch of land. They have a they have an animal to do some work for them, and they're able to eke out an existence, you know, kind of on the on the on the margins, but they're they're incredibly rugged and and resourceful. And I think this is it's a nice image, but it it fundamentally does not work in space.

There's there's no way that a city on Mars could possibly be bootstrapped, from something like 20 acres and a mule or maybe, you know, 3 small domes and a robot or something like that into something that that is that is self reliant. And, I'm not quite sure, like, the best way to illustrate this, but but I mean, it's it's probably instructive to to point out that, for most of the American pioneers, the 20 acres they were farming was was already farmed by indigenous Americans.

Like, it had already been cultivated for 1000 of years. So there wasn't any question as to whether the environment was livable by humans with, in this case, you know, less advanced, metallurgy than, say, the European settlers. So that wasn't really a question. And and and in fact, if you watch TV shows like man versus wild with bagrileus or whatever, that's probably dating me at this point.

You can see that, like, there's these environments that that that bear will get dropped off in, but all the environments, almost all of them are basically fundamentally, hospitable to human life. And and in fact, there are some places on earth, like, where we evolved in Africa and and maybe Hawaii, where where you could drop someone with almost no resources and they could live indefinitely, you know, get stranded on a desert island and live on coconuts or something, without dying.

But, you know, just even on earth, it's not that hard to find an environment that is so hostile that that if you drop Bear Gryllis off, he would die instantly, and then that would be the end of the show. Put him in a place that he's definitely gonna win at. Yes. Well, in this case, definitely gonna lose. It's very short show and and no no advertising and and no follow on season because he wouldn't make it.

But, like, if if you drop Bear Gryllis 10 meters under the water and he wasn't able to surface, that would be the end of the show. You know? Like, humans can't live underwater. Some animals can, but humans can't, just by themselves. If you if he was dropped underground, you know, that's it. If he was dropped 10 meters above the ground, and he would fall and die, if he was dropped on the top of a tall mountain without any equipment. You know?

And I think he has done a couple of kind of snow traverse shows and things over the years, but but in general, like, part of the reason that we we kind of admire alpinists and mountain climbers is that it's just, like mountains are not friendly places to be. It's it's actually super common even even for professional climbers to die while they're while they're climbing mountains. And then you have deserts, windy places, remote places, places no food or water.

And then even, you know, even like places that are technologically supported if you lack the right knowledge. So for example, if Bear Gryllis was stranded, in the cockpit of an airplane, he didn't know how to fly, you know, he wouldn't last very long. So I think it's important to point out that even on earth, we have a huge variety of environments that we are unable to survive without severe, like huge quantities of technological dependence.

You know, and just to make that explicit, all the environments that I just mentioned humans live and work in every day, but they do so in tunnel boring machines and submarines and boats and airplanes and helicopters and, or with climate controlled skidoos. I mean, I live in Southern California, which is, you know, much more lush than it would have been if we hadn't dug giant tunnels to bring water in from color to to water the area here.

So, you know Well, to add to California and Florida effectively pretty terrible. Yeah. To add to your list, I was having one of the conversations we were having with our team, and I was describing the challenges, not in the way you articulate a little bit differently.

And the conversation came to the point where this guy had said, do you know trying to what the the moon hut and our construct and what we've put together and the designs and the plans, he said it would probably be more difficult to build at the bottom of the Marianas Trench than it would be comparable to build on the moon. I don't know if that's an exact agree with that. You would agree? Yeah. Yeah. That's I would agree with that.

The the just just like the Mars or the moon is not the most hostile environment you can imagine. You know, it'd be much much more difficult to build, you know, a facility, for example, inside an active volcano or on the surface of the sun. Just just to kind of give 2 examples of places that are being much much more difficult. And that's what I and because he said to me, I think you're the first person I've ever run into who considers the moon the 8th continent.

You're not looking at it in the same way that I've met other people. You see it as a a project, a construction project on a different place with a different set of parameters. But if you were going to do it, and this is these are the words we were talking about. If you were gonna do it in us on the, poles, you'd have one condition.

If you have to do it in the middle of a desert where you didn't have any airlifting capabilities, be another, but even if you did, try to build in the middle of the Amazon rainforest in the middle, that's challenging. But then he added, and the Marianas trench would be more difficult. And I said, exactly. This is a this is a construction project, and you have to look at it to say it is not the the most damaging or most difficult place to build. So yes. Again Yeah. Nailing exactly that.

Mhmm. Yeah. So I think the key, like, the key takeaway from this point is that, it's not really possible to build, environment on on the moon or on Mars or in anywhere in space. And this is gonna sound painfully obvious, but but it does not depend on on, like, very advanced technology. And so you think, well, you know, even, like, 19 eighties level technology is probably not good enough. So it's like super super new stuff, like stuff we've just barely invented is necessary to make this work.

And that's, you know, that's interesting. Right? Because So can I ask a behavioral question? Yes, please. Why do you believe and, again, I I don't put myself in the classification. I'm not an enthusiast. I don't watch all I don't wait for the next launch. I know what's going on. I I have a lot of other things going on. I'm always surprised at how the beyond Earth ecosystem and I think I shared this with you. Space is not an industry. It's a space is not an industry. It's a geography.

So when I use beyond Earth, it means anything beyond the above our atmosphere. Why is there so much I'm gonna try to be nice here. Delusional thinking, I'm trying to be nice, but why is there such a a disconnect between the realities of what you just said and the realities of what we're discussing here? Like, we can we are this is easy or this is hard space so are. It's easy, but we're going to put 50,000 people in a, in a Van Braun or an O'Neil Sidlander. We're going to travel and live on Mars.

And it makes it as if there's a whole missing segment of the you know, it's a 20 step it's a 20 chapter book, but we're gonna cut out numbers 2 through 12 and just concentrate on we're here, now we're there. Why? Do you do you have any, your perception of why? Well, I think for the Anelians and and a lot of other people that kind of get interested in space science fiction, it's a science fiction writer's prerogative to suspend disbelief and make it seem believable and and possible.

And, and so and a lot of people come to identify with these kind of alternative worlds, as places you know, it's basically fantasy. It's like a it's a place where people can be different and and, you know, you know, you know, myself as an example, traditionally kind of shy, introverted, you know, 8 year old or 10 year old or something could could be a different kind of person there and and not suffer the same kind of psychic limitations.

But, so it's very attractive to think that it would be, quote, unquote, easy to go to Mars, and then on Mars, I would be less of a loser or something. But, you know, I think it is it's it's necessary to to kind of realize that if you are serious about doing more than fantasy fantasizing about about these possibilities that you kind of get real about the the real the challenges that you encounter. That's where that's the disconnect for me.

It's that you you understand there's fantasy, you see the realities, and yet I hear some people you know, I hear the names, they're out there, and they're professing things that I can't logically figure out a plus b plus c or even any mathematical formula equals x. It doesn't work. And I don't know how a person who's skilled in these disciplines would not make that connection. Is it just the desire to have something more? Well, I think, you have to be pretty optimistic to try this at all.

Like, if you think about the actual industry of making spacecraft, for example, No. It's it's very unusual for a spacecraft to be completed under budget and under and, like, before schedule. Right? Like, ahead of schedule. And there there could be a couple of different reasons for that, but but one of them basically comes down to optimism in that, you know, we always think that it'll be easier than it will be, especially the first the first few times you do it.

So I think it's it's important to just kind of build that into your assumptions and recognize that that, you know, again, going back to the first point, because we don't really know what we're talking about, we will we will tend to be surprised and have to learn things along the way that we were not expecting. That's kinda part of it, and it's a good thing.

So anyway You know, it's it's just an it's interesting for me only because my in my head, I'm just saying with our team, we talk about it as what are we doing here, and what's possible without adding on these layers of unbelievably unbelievable travel. It's great to dream, but that connection has to be, this is my dream, and I wanna get there, but don't talk about it as if it's a reality today. And I know there's so many sayings, if if you dream it, believe it it believe it, it could be done.

I I heard those. You still have to start with gravity, oxygen, hydrogen. We have to look at some of the, the I'm not gonna call pragmatic, but the the realities of economics, as you just brought up, the cost and, the project timelines. It's a fascinating thing for me, and I don't know how to be able to to the reason I ask is, how do we bring some of those people who are brilliant into the fold of what we're working on? So this is a a personal question for project Moon Knight.

I'm trying to figure out how we get a person who I think is absolutely brilliant to understand that they're brilliant, but they have to be able to work in an environment that the brilliance is not tainted by a delusional aspect of we're gonna have 50,000 people living in space in 10 years. Yeah. I, I I I see what you're talking about, and I agree.

And and, actually, I gave a talk on this at the Mars Society conference many years ago, which I called confronting the credibility gap, in space exploration advocacy. And the reason for that was that I saw that, you know, basically people let their enthusiasm get ahead of them. And and within within the culture, you know, within the the club, if you like, that was fine. People understood what they were talking about.

But, unfortunately, when that message would would try and jump out into the real world, it would encounter people who, you know, didn't have the same reasons for optimism, didn't understand that necessarily some things are being kind of elided or exaggerated, and and instead, it would just kind of come across as crazy talk.

And so one of the reasons that I wrote this blog series that we referred to earlier, was that I kind of saw, and I talked about I, you know, I framed it as like, inaccuracies in space journalism or something, misconceptions in space journalism.

But but really the secret the secret strategy all along, which is so secret that I wrote it on the first blog was that, I wanted to begin I wanted to try and promote a way of thinking about these problems that began with asking the right questions, and asking questions rather than insisting that we already knew the answers, and and kind of going from there.

And so I found that if we if we just kind of asked the right questions and then thought about how we could go about becoming less ignorant with respect to those questions, we could actually get quite a long way towards something like a solution, even though necessarily a lot of the details are very, very difficult for us to fill in right now. That's kind of been my my professional specialty in my career is And and you did a brilliant job. Pieces and interpolating them together.

You did a brilliant job, and I I'm going to relate it, and I don't know if we get to it later. The there's the SDG and ESG construct. But if you notice, they're goals. And the challenges, I don't see how when you add those goals up, we actually solve for x. What it what we have is the 6 mega challenges. What we're saying is these are our challenges. Let's start with our challenges and our questions and get better questions and better answers and then more questions.

Because by telling someone this is the goal, you've kinda skipped over the formulaic part of it as options. Maybe this isn't the solution. So in your sense, that's one reason I liked your piece is that you brought it to a sense of let's take away some of these misperceptions that you have, and let's break it down. The challenges, Casey, and maybe you run into this, people then take it as you being negative or that you really don't understand.

And I think, Casey, you understand you understand better. Does that make sense? Yeah. You you see more because you didn't go down the rabbit hole. Throughout my career and my life, actually, I've struggled to avoid negativity, in describing certain things. So in some ways, writing this blog post is is kind of a personal journey, and it was precipitated in in a couple of cases by reading articles by people who I felt should know better, saying things that were plainly ludicrous.

And I don't wanna kinda go into specifics in terms of details, but, no. I just it's just yeah. We'll get distracted. I don't wanna, like, spend half an hour relating wrong things to you, but, but I was like, well, I could I could write, you know, a 10,000 word blog basically just dismantling this this post piece by piece, of of someone who I've never met and frankly have little interest in, or I could be like, that's interesting.

Why is this person who obviously didn't set out to, like, advertise their ignorance, nevertheless managed to do so? Why why have they gotten so confused? Maybe other people are confused this way. Let's drill in and understand where this misconception comes from and explain what's going on and, you know, be necessarily humble about what we don't know, and just kind of unpack, you know, some of the the key details here.

And and I was like, this is good because instead of making the blog post, you know, inherently negative and attacking, and thus quite repellent to most readers, and also specific to a particular article that probably no one read in the first place anyway, or very few people read in the first place, and also we'll date it.

Now we have we have a a topic focused email that that kind of assumes, from the outset that we are engaged in a positive exercise, which is, you know, basically, trying to have a conversation about dispelling certain kinds of uncertainty or ignorance within different populations.

And it was, probably just that realization that there was a way of approaching these questions in a way that was constructive was the single most important thing, in this entire exercise because now people all kinds of people have read these blog posts, and I get emails from them almost every day saying thank you so much for writing this because it helped me understand this problem, and now I can, you know, move forward with confidence or I can I know what sort of questions to ask, or, you know, I know what to talk about with my weird uncle on our Sunday dinners or something like that?

And, and so instead of instead of basically just me adding to the noise and the mayhem and the pain, and and and the ignorance and so on on the Internet, which which there's plenty, you know, I actually kind of tried to shift the Overton window toward towards a form of discourse that's more constructive.

Instead of instead of basically just, you know, the mooners and the mars' pointing fingers at each other and being like you're wrong because of something that no human has any way of possibly knowing, you know, just in terms of like ontological limitations to knowledge. It said they can say, well, actually, we can both recognize that we don't we don't know a whole bunch of stuff and let's look into this.

And one of the reasons that I wrote one of these books about about industrializing Mars was I wanted to convince myself that Mars was a better target than the moon to start out with. By the time I was done I realized that actually 99% of the challenge is common to both to both places.

And and the common the common differences that we know about these about these things, so the moon is closer, but you need a bit more delta v to get there, and Mars has perhaps slightly better minerals on on its available on its surface, and slightly less delta v, but it takes a lot longer to get there. You know, if you can't deal with those problems, you sure as hell can't deal with all the other problems that you're gonna encounter before you get to, like, industrialization.

So it's kind of in the noise. I mean, like, in both places, you need giant machines that chew up rocks and produce metal. That's it. So, and I and I do love the I I do love the I do love the imagery that people put out, which are these huge machines, and I ran a rock quarry. We dropped 22,000 tons of stone a day. That's equivalent to 10 barges going to, up to 20 barges going down a river that are a 1000 ton each and 250 American semis. That's a lot. And people talk about doing this on the moon.

How are you gonna get this equipment up there? I mean, do you know what mass you would need to be able to do what you're showing? And what what type of you you have to have a 100, payloads going up. So the Well, you need full unlimited mass. Yeah. Right. The thing that I really love about what you just said shared, and it's it's something that I do think about, and I I share it also, but in a different way. It's much easier for me personally. If you said, David, write an article.

It's much easier for me for you to send me what you want me to write about, and then I could say, oh, wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Okay. Let me share with you this. But if you say start from scratch, I I don't have the same opportunity to expand and deliver. So when someone writes a an article or a piece, it's easy for me to say, okay. Where are they coming from? What are they doing? Now I could write for hours. But to just say write something, I need an audience.

I need a person I'm talking to. I need to be sharing something for this person to see a new reality. That's one reason the podcast is done this way, is so that you're helping me. Yes. It's done specifically because you're not thinking about a a an infinite crowd. You're thinking of David needs some help. Maybe a lot of help. My wife would probably say I need infinite amount of help. That's a different story. Is, you are able to take and break down these pieces.

So I love that it's not negative, and we don't wanna be negative. Yet I I find ourselves at Project Moon Hut having to almost talk down from the ledge some of the people who are, no. No. No. We'll do this. And it's often far easier to find somebody who's really wants to build, who doesn't know a lot about this ecosystem, who will spend the time reading and learning and looking for truths.

And it's kind of a challenge because you don't wanna be you don't want the wrong person in your team, and you can easily find somebody who will misdirect the conversation. I I don't I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah. But does So I I know I know exactly what you're what you're talking about. It it's occurred.

Yeah. I mean, so one of the one of the key challenges is how do you take all kinds of people who end up on your team whether you want them or not and and kind of create a create a a natural way of talking about a particular problem that means that everyone is able to contribute constructively without necessarily becoming too attached to opinions that are probably premature. Yeah. So that's, you know, that's just kind of excuse me. That's how I approach this problem.

It it and it's that's why we don't call it cislunar and lunar, and we don't use those words, the word Mearth, moon and earth. We use words that don't alienate a 9 year old or a 7 year old, and one of the challenges in the beyond Earth ecosystem is acronyms. I could sit in a meeting with with people in the beyond Earth, and they all know all the acronyms. But I'm it's another language to me. I don't I I can't even participate because I'd need to be looking up every 4th word or every 4th acronym.

So we avoid acronyms, and we avoid all of these this complexity. If I can't have a kid in a if we can't have a kid in a classroom at 12 years old or 9 years old, be able to understand it and talk about it, then you really have a challenge, not because of the 9 year old, not because of their grade level, but because then it's ubiquitous, because other languages have to learn them too. Other cultures who don't have the same knowledge of technological advances that have happened.

And this makes it a much easier conversation. And so I I do love your example of how you I do like your, what I've been writing. So now thank you. You you reinforced some things and gave me some ideas. Oh, with so what I hope I suppose. No. Oh, no. Well, that's I I think I shared with you the the number one reason we do the podcast is so that I learn. Because if I learn, the person sitting behind me who's in theory there is gonna learn too. Yep. Because these are real questions.

This is a real challenge. We are building for We have designed 4 faces of the moon knot. We have people who have seen it, not a lot, people like Grant Anderson from Paragon, and he has said, oh my god. There's nothing like this out there. And we don't we're not looking for praise. We're looking for people who'd help us, and you're helping by giving us, listeners, a new sense of framework. So I I appreciate it. So, I guess, on the next is there anything more with resiliency and limitations?

Are we on to anarchy? NRC? How did you say it? It's not anarchy. So Yeah. So autarky is a is a ancient Greek word. It's an English word as well, but it's an it means self reliance.

So it's kind of most commonly used in in in modern usage in political terms, so we talk about which countries are able to, you know, produce all their own stuff within their own borders, And actually many many countries, more than 50 countries have tried this probably in the last 100 years, and almost all of them have failed.

And I'm talking like Albania, Cambodia, you know, a bunch of North Korea, for example, Cuba does trade quite a bit, but at times has tried to be extremely self reliant within its own borders. And and the United States has been, I think, probably the closest to autarkic. But roughly speaking today, there are there are about 5 countries that can quote, unquote make everything within their own borders, and even then, it's not really the case.

Like, they still have to import certain kinds of technology and and and energy and things like that. And the smallest of those is South Korea, which has a population of almost 50,000,000 people. So the and and also South Korea trades a lot. So so it's kind of a it's kind of a false thing in in, on the world today, in our globalized world.

But, the reason we talk about it is that, one of the main strands of of modern thought for building cities and spaces to make it a self supporting or self sustaining city and space. I loving you in a case. What is that? What is that? Why am I loving you? Because you're, like, yes. Yes. I love this. Keep on going. Sorry. This is yeah. Why are we asking that question? Well, I think I think it's a worthwhile thing to do, personally.

And and the reason for that is that, I mean, even on the earth today, like, the barriers to trade at an artificial low.

I mean, like, the only reason that everyone is able to trade with everyone else, you know, in a post mercantilist era is because at the end of the 2nd world war, the United States and its allies decided that, they were going to allow everyone, even the people who had been on the losing side, or the traditionally losing side of the 2nd World War would be able to trade and and quote unquote get wealthy and rich and and happy.

And it's been enormously beneficial to the world as a whole, that that essentially 99% of the spending, security spending is is to the US Navy, has been able to safeguard, the sea lanes for for trade. That said, it's much easier to trade on the earth where, it it costs something like 5 or 10¢ per kilogram to send cargo anywhere, than to trade between earth and space where, you know, in my wildest dreams, it might be as cheap as $100 a kilogram to send stuff that's a 1,000 times more expensive.

And so, there there's the the outside possibility that if we built a large town on the moon or on Mars, that we may lose the ability temporarily or permanently to resupply it via spaceships from Earth, you know, launching lots and lots of rockets from earth, and so it would probably be prudent to to do what you could to make the respective cities in these places as self reliant as possible as quickly as possible.

And and the way you would measure that is you would say, well, if the spaceship stopped coming tomorrow, how long would it take before everyone here suffocated or starved to death?

And, and that's actually a question that is posed right now for humans on earth who are deployed, for example, on on nuclear submarines where the the major constraint to their deployment length is the amount of food they can pack on board, or in Antarctica, where resupply is quite logistically challenging, and sooner or later in place especially in places that that can't really grow their own food, you know, you will run out of food.

So, and and potentially in space, you could run out of other things as well. So I think it is worthwhile to think about self sufficiency in space.

And and the way that I like to define it is is not like how many people, presumably well trained people and well resourced people, do you need, on a in a Mars base or a moon base or an asteroid or whatever, to make anything, you know, so to have the ability to prototype anything, you know, they have a machine shop, and they have a little custom fab, and they can make their own chips and stuff like that.

Effectively, you know, you could imagine that if you had 2,000 really, really smart people, you could make an iPhone from scratch. But that's not enough. Right? Because because actually, the challenge is not being able to make anything. The challenge is being able to make everything, and to make everything faster than kind of all the equipment that you depend on to do it degrades with normal use.

So there's kind of this closure problem, which is that if you have 2,000 really smart technicians, they could they could replace 1 machine, but in the time it took them to replace that machine, maybe 20 other machines broke. And so in fact, you you need many, many more people because you have to have the ability to replace all the machines in real time. It's kind of like jumping off a cliff with a bag of parts and and having to assemble it into into an airplane, before you left. While flying.

While dropping. Yes. While dropping. Yeah. Yeah. So, so it's actually it's it's a huge challenge, and this is one of the reasons why why there's basically no no countries on earth despite being extremely well motivated in the case of North Korea or Cuba have have managed to succeed.

And it's also why I think when people insist that it it might be possible to make a self reliant Mars city with a few 100 people, as for example, you can make a more or less self reliant medieval town with a few 100 people, it's not really, realistic because the the medieval town, invariably lived in a place with access to air and food and water, or at least arable land. And And those are huge challenges. The the huge challenges. Any of that. Right. You you if you're in the box.

You don't and and there's a I would add, there is a misunderstanding of the interconnectedness of to for everything. Something had to be mined. Something had to be extracted. Something had to be separated. Someone had to make the tire. Someone had to make the gearbox so you could do that. Someone had to Yes. And when you put all the pieces together, it's not a1000. It's millions of innovations, and millions of constructs, and millions of tools and dies.

So people the the the belief that we have a 3 d printer solves that challenge. It doesn't. It just solves a it solves a small fraction of a challenge. And I I think one of the examples of the puzzle. It's a piece of the puzzle. It's not the whole it's not the whole puzzle.

You're off. And I don't You can kind of wave your hands and say you can wave your hands and say, well, you know, it's gotta be around a 1000000 people, but actually in order to be a 1000000 people, we'd have to be really a lot smarter than we are right now. Because if it was a 1000000 people, well, Cuba has Cuba has 11,000,000 people and they can't even make the they can't make pretty much anything except their food.

But at least as far as experiments in communism go, Cuba's only had one major famine and all the others have had more than one major famine. But that, you know, various capitalist countries also had famines prior to the invention of of fertilizers and mechanized, farm machinery, but but, you know, the the the in this case, Cuba and and North Korea and other prior states, lose the ability to to fuel and produce their own farm machinery and their own fertilizers.

And so, you know, they're basically back to square 1. It's it's it's now I'm not saying that that, necessarily the the moon city would would, become a pariah state and be unable to import things. But, but it is it's worthwhile to kind of, I mean, it's kind of bleeds into into point 4, which is about labor scarcity, which is that it's necessary to have a very highly productive workforce.

And so if you wanted to do it with just a 1000000 people, the per capita productivity would have to be about 10 times higher, at least than than we can manage today. And that's that's with a workforce composed almost entirely of specialists. They have to be experts are doing just kind of one thing and doing it extremely well.

So that again, this gets away from this idea of the rugged generalist on the frontier with his mule and 20 acres, just kind of eking out in existence and doing a bit of everything. In contrast, because it's it's so expensive to have humans in space, they have to be, you know, fully supported with all the tooling you could possibly imagine, and all the machinery, and all the power, and all the space, and all the mass, all these other constraints, we'd wanna get rid of them. Right?

Because at the end of the day, all these constraints slow you down. And so that's why Starship is such a powerful kind of thing because it says, finally, for the first time, we don't have to worry about making everything out of titanium in space because we can just ship pallets of materials, with relatively low cost.

But even so, even with all of that, labor is still astonishingly scarce, and we have to be, like, the critical and the defining challenge is how we, you know, maximize the productivity of a workforce over a very very long period of time, which is, you know, in this case the workforce is extremely hard to to replace, they're extremely expensive to import and to operate.

There are analogous industries here on earth such as, oil drilling, for example, where the workforces are typically rotated in and out and they're extremely highly paid because the what they're working on has an extremely high burn rate in terms of in terms of capital expenses. So, you know, it's kind of we have to think about it that way, I think.

The the overwhelming thing is that if we wanted to do something like Otaki or self reliance or self sustainability on a space city that the challenge is not just being able to make anything, so having a prototyping workshop that can make anything, but having, like, a whole huge set of factories that are able to make things efficiently and productively with a relatively low, labor inputs.

So a lot of mechanization, a lot of automation, so that the kind of average productivity of someone living in one of these bases is extremely high. So it's it's completely different from the idea of of kind of the rugged generalist living on the pioneer with their mule for company, who's able to do a bit of everything, and has to be able to do a bit of everything in order to survive, because that just doesn't scale.

In space it's the environment is so hostile that, that you cannot survive without extremely advanced technology, and you cannot maintain extremely advanced technology with a given population size unless you are extremely careful about how you use people's time. So in order to make that work sorry. Go on. No. I what I was gonna say go ahead. I've got a question that might you might be filling it answering it now. Go ahead.

Yeah. So, the various things that can make labor more productive, include working conditions, you know, pay obviously, but also, the sort of machinery and tooling they have access to.

And in most examples of cases where we think about building small towns or something on on the moon or on Mars, those small towns have to be built with very very lightweight materials and it's all kind of very cramped or maybe it's in a lava tube or a cave, and so when we think about the constraints on productivity, actually there's all kinds of constraints, there's there's power availability constraints, there's space constraints, there's material constraints, as well as labor constraints, but if we wanna make sure that we're doing the absolute best we can here then it's necessary to push all those constraints away as as aggressively as we possibly can, and labour scarcity is the is the last and the final constraint to deal with, and that's what's so powerful about Starship as an idea which is that it says, what if, how many sins can we cover with a lot of up mass, what if we weren't constrained on how much mass we could send, what if we could just send a lot of stuff, does that make it easier, yes it makes it a lot easier, so that's kind of the key recognition there, which is that

I I I mean, I'm gonna jump in there. To be very clever. I'm gonna jump in because I I think what I I love the articulation of it because it does define these parameters that we're confined to. Yet labor constraints, if we were to amplify that a little bit more, it is not only the labor constraints or the or the capabilities on earth. It is the learning curve and that individual's capability to be able to live beyond earth, which is something that's a variable we don't understand.

We don't we understand in the International Space Station, confined quarters, but we're talking about living on another rock. We're talking about living in confined quarters, a whole different set of parameters and responsibilities that the person is would have to achieve, and the learning curve to get enough population to be able to do that with these models of 50,000 to a 1000000 people would require a massive undertaking. You and I just got kicked off of Zoom. I mean, we're on Earth.

I I could run into another room. Yeah. I had my backup. I I ran into another room, got my computer, but I've got 2 34 inch monitors here. I've got 3 boom mics. I mean, I've got all the tools in the world and all of, the the analogy I use with people all the time we talk about the advances. I say, you know, if someone put us an asterisk or a forward slash on a program that you and I are talking on, we wouldn't be able to communicate.

It it doesn't matter that I'm sitting here and you're there and we're talented we've got. If there is in the software a forward slash where there should be an asterisk, the call won't go through. So Agree. But but just to point out, like, because you were prepared and because you had, you know, basically, backups and spam machinery and things like that, we were able to recover the podcast in 10 minutes. Correct.

It wasn't the case that it wasn't the case that your computer failed and and all the data was lost, heaven forbid, and also one of us died. So it's, so Yeah. We we we but we have to assume that things are gonna go wrong, and we have to build our systems to be robust to expected and unexpected failures. And one of the ways of doing that is to, just send a lot of stuff. Yes. And Starship or let's not call it just Starship.

Any large mass capable rocket or transport system, let's just maybe it's not just one vehicle, but any transport system that enables you to be able to resupply or supply or provide in the beginning makes a difference. And Yeah. And that yet if you were to extrapolate that in terms of moving beyond Earth, we don't know what all of those components may be. And so when you when a a target is selected in my head, such as Mars, 8 months away, you you have to live a different paradigm.

But if you're 3 days away, granted running out of oxygen would be a really bad thing, granted running out of food, well, 3 days, some people will survive. You can't Yeah. You can't I think it's necessary to think about, like, 3 days, how long does it actually take to get the cargo together and put it on the rocket and then send the rocket. It's probably a little bit longer than 3 days.

Yep. But also at the same time, you know, we're not we're not seriously thinking about building a base on the moon and just, like, sending 1 rocket and it's done. Instead, we have, you know, routine flights. In fact, arguably, the major constraint on earth is how quickly you can launch rockets and how big they are.

And I would just say at this point, like, the key characteristic of Starship and then other Starship like launch systems that are not yet built, is that they maximize, tonnes per year to orbit, and then minimize dollars per tonne. So there's, like, 2 you could kind of imagine a graph if you like or or a figure with with 2 key those 2 key parameters. 1 is, is dollars per ton, and that has to be small, and the other one is tons per year that has to be large.

And so any any rocket that's kinda built around that assumption of, like, you know, dropping cargo in 100 ton increments or more, anywhere in the solar system, with minimum of fuss, has the potential to turn the logistics problem of moving stuff around in space from the main problem to something that's kind of below the API. You just kind of click the button and it and it arrives, which is Yeah. How it has to be. Let me my my perspective is slightly different.

Not that we're not talking the same language, but we're there's a slight difference. The minute you have the capability of doing resupply, you mitigate or diminish the need for a lot of the other activities that would happen otherwise. For example, let's assume a 100 ton or 50 ton, whatever it may be, in a regular supply position. You then don't need to have agri farming because there's a lot of space necessary.

There's the you have to have water or some type of mechanism for the plants to grow in, and you'd have to ship modules or a coverage or create domes. You can then take that off the table from the beginning. You could say we don't need an agri farm or 40 of these because that's a lot of cost, time, and energy. You take that off. You could also say we're not going to be Star Trek y and walk up to the tele tele, the food replicator. We're not gonna have to create that.

We could ship enough food so your activities, your design, your construct is about creating the next opportunity of development. It doesn't have to be about and so in our in Project Moon Hut, because you haven't seen the designs we're working on, we don't have any agricultural components of it in its design. It's a 40 year plan because we're looking at a sequential, restocking supply system so that we can take those ancillary challenges off the table in this new environment.

Does that make sense? Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And and, actually, that's actually the next point that I wanted to come to once we've once we've retired the labor scarcity thing, which is talking about development prioritization. But, yes, I I I will say right right here that I agree that, that the the total amount of food that someone needs on a yearly basis is is relatively small compared to, other stuff that people would need to survive in space.

And also the the the hassle of producing it locally is is non negligible. But even even in the South Pole base, they actually have a small greenhouse so they can make a bit of fresh food to augment their rice and beans and beans and rice. So so there's, like, a bit of a mixture going on there. But, but that I would bet you to I would argue that that was not for food. That was a psychological decision. Yes. A psychological thing. Yeah. Correct. And even on our It's also a research thing. Right.

And on our on our team design construct, someone had said, we you have to have a psychologist, but we added people that many of the activities you would do for humankind require the psychological question, not the biological. So to be able to put a little parsley on top of your food makes you feel human, but it doesn't mean more that it's not it's not your nutrient. It's the mental state of feeling connected to the outside world. Yes. That's that's that's completely correct.

And and on that point, you wouldn't necessarily send a psychologist. You would have, an entire hospital. Like Mhmm. Think think big. So just to come back to your point We do mention By the way, we do have a hospital, but yes. Yeah. You mentioned you mentioned confined spaces. So, you know, for for humans, for example, who live on submarines, who work on submarines, it's it's common for them to have extremely limited personal space.

Yep. But that's actually a major constraint, and and you could imagine, like, what would it take to make a nuclear submarine self sufficient for a 100 years as opposed to 3 months? And you could kind of run through that that, that thought experiment, but but essentially, if that's one of the constraints that can reduce the productivity of the workforce on Mars or on the moon, maybe we should do what we can to reduce that constraint.

And so instead of having people live in tiny steel boxes underground, we could build structures on the surface as we do here on earth, so you don't have to move too much dirt, that are much larger. And in fact, I I think that if you're in the business of doing self sufficiency on on Mars, and this is where I've done all the math and all the examples, the moon is pretty much exactly the same. You have to have such enormous volumes.

I'm talking like millions and millions of square feet for factories that it's not actually all that hard to say we'll have millions of square feet for living areas as well. You know, giant kind of open open air plazas and and individual, apartments or or small dwellings or whatever, like that's not a problem. We don't have to we don't have to kind of sign ourselves away to living in a sleeping bag for the rest of our lives Right. If we're going to do this the the proper way.

And then you also mentioned a very interesting point, which I I kind of plan to gloss over, but I'll come back to it, which is that, the learning curve. And so the learning curve, I think, in the way you're referring to it, kind of talks about how we take a a generic, you know, trained human here on earth. I don't have to have a degree or anything like that, but they have to be able to do useful things and and then train them to be able to function on on Mars or something.

And and the key, insight is that actually on on on the the Mars base or the moon base, we want them to be as productive as possible, which we want which means we want their environment to be as close to a productive earth like environment as possible. So room temperature, shirt sleeves environment, open sky, you know, well laid out workplaces, good, ergonomics, all that kind of stuff.

But there will still obviously be training, as a result of living in a hostile environment as there are there is specialized training if you live on a submarine or an aircraft carrier or something like that. Mhmm. But the the other aspect of the learning curve that I I kind of wanted to dive into, is this idea of labor abstraction.

So, we mentioned just just now that you could have a small greenhouse where you grow a few lettuces or something, but then as the base grows over time, you know, essentially, at some point, you get to the point where it becomes cheaper to make food locally than to import it, just just depending on the relative cost of labor and productivity and the cost of shipping. And this we'll talk about in some more detail in a few minutes.

And so you could imagine like you have a couple of people whose job it is to like make sure the greenhouse works and grow a few lettuces, but then a few years after that and now it's their job to actually grow like a lot of plants so enough basil for everyone for example. And so you're starting to produce all the fresh food that you need locally, while still depending on, say, imported pasta and rice for a lot of carbohydrates and and, you know, the bulk caloric needs.

And then, you know, a few years after that, well, you start kind of, you know, spacing out, and now you've got, you know, more millions of square feet of land that's being actively cultivated by robotic, farming machines and and so on. But the key thing is that the the population of people who are operating this this operate like operating this part of the economy or this part of the industry, doesn't doesn't grow proportional to its productivity.

So so ideally, like, more people would be sent up to work on these systems, but the sorts of jobs they would be doing would go would go from, like, individually handle handling seeds and plants and, like, planting things and watering stuff to then, you know, personally operating machinery that does it for them to operating a computer server that then just automatically dispatches the machinery, does the work for them, to then, you know, basically automating that process away as well.

And so every time this you take another step here, the human in the loop is moving one step further in abstraction away from actually physically handling the matter, the the atoms and so on, that is making the process. And this this works in any constructive industry, in any factory, in anything.

You go from having someone whose job is actually to sit there at the lathe and make a screw to someone whose job is to press the button that makes the screw to someone whose job it is to assemble the machine that presses the button that makes the screw to someone whose job it is to assemble robots that make robots and make robots and make robots. And this this seems absolutely crazy in bananas. Right? But if you look at its incredible premise made in software, we're doing exactly the same thing.

No. No. What you're you're saying what you're saying is is perfect. It's not you're you downplay it. You've watched Star Trek. I've gotta believe someone like you would watch Star Trek. My question is The some of the movies. Not as much as not not a lot of movies. But you've seen at least a few television shows. Have you ever said to yourself, this is in the future. Why is anybody working in the engine room? Well, Star Trek is a, strategic It's it's just a construct.

Why in this advanced society, we still have people taking a screw you know, a a a tool and a device in the few these type of advances be able to do that as well. I I understand that. You don't lose the prototyping capability. You just augment it. And so that means if something breaks and you happen to not have a spare part, you can make that spare part even though it's quite costly in terms of labor and material inputs to do it.

You would rather have the spare part rolling off an assembly line, but if you didn't, you would you have to have the ability to make it. I understood. Mine was more a question of you you just started talking about the expansion. And the there's a psychological, there's a behavioral. There's an organizational environment. You work in this engine room. The engine room is gonna become more and more sophisticated, more and more automated. And at some point, your job will become obsolete.

What happens next? What types of roles will you fulfill over a long period of time? However and I'm gonna jump. Sorry. I'm gonna jump backwards. Yeah, please. The timeline is the challenge that I think that while you're discussing what you're saying, it's very easy for that group we talked about early to say, see, that's where we need to go. And I've seen the imagery, you have too, of the proposed structures on the moon, the proposed scale, scope, and size on Mars. And it They're all too small.

They're all too small, but they're also done in an unrealistic timeline without a full ecosystem behind it. And when I say ecosystem, that includes logistics, food creation, techno tech the advancements of techno the ability to transport humans. The entire ecosystem doesn't match. It's one of these things is not like the other. It's the the math doesn't add up.

And what you're talking about here when we were you started to talk about the learning curve and being able to put food and then grow, you took a very, very mental jump. You didn't mean I'm putting words in your mouth. You told me if I'm wrong. You didn't mean, first we go, then we build 1, and the next iteration, we now have a farm. You're saying over time over time, and a 1,000,000 tons, whatever is being sent, over time, which could be 25 years, we will get to that point.

And I think the belief structure is we could bring that down to, I don't know, 3 weeks. Well, there's essentially, it is possible to make the timeline go faster, probably with exponentially more investment Yep. Up to a point. And I would certainly say that that SpaceX is developing Starship about as quickly as they're able to given their various constraints, some of which are regulatory and outside their control.

Political, economic, religious, even I wouldn't say that, like, SpaceX is fundamentally limited by a shortage of money at this point. That's not always been the case, but I think it's probably true now. But but there's also, like, you know, some people say I would take a 1000 years to get there, and some people say we could do it in 20 years.

And I I prefer to lean more towards the shorter end of the spectrum, and not just because I think I will die one day, but also because there You said that that's wait. Wait. Wait. One day I think I will die I I will think I will die one day. Do you have an alternative universe in your head that you won't die? No. I mean, I think I think human mortality is is is the default option. No. No. You just said it was one day I think I will die, and that's something.

Okay. Do you have an alternative belief that I wish to know about? Well, okay. I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll take that one, and I'll answer it after I've after I finish this little section, which is that, but, yes, I'm sure you wanna get into that. But the, the the thing is, like, the basically, there's there's a critical size of of a of a moon hut or a city or whatever where you can evacuate everyone quickly if you have to, and then there's there's a size that's large enough to sustain indefinitely.

Even if all the rockets stop coming and all the imports stop coming, they could they could make it. And in between those two sizes is this kind of dangerous no man's land, and you wanna get across that as quickly as possible. Yep. Right? Because because in that in that scale, you're you're really vulnerable. And so, like, do I say, well, do you wanna spend 10 years in that zone? Or do you wanna spend a 100 years in that zone? It has been a 1000 years in that zone.

And I think you'd wanna spend as little time as you possibly can, however you can in that zone. How how that's done is is is another question. To come back to human mortality, there's no law of physics that says that that our our kind of meat robots have to get old and die. And so, you know, many people since ancient times have wondered how we could go about living longer.

And I think, you know, there's there's some strides being made in that area, but, but it's also important to realize that if we were able to have a serious go at at compactifying the industrial stack enough that we could do everything with a 1000000 people that that would imply enormous advances in science and technology. And and, you know, at some point, we will we will complete the tech tree enough to make us die, less less quickly. I'll put it that way.

Yep. Maybe we live for a 1000 years instead of a 100 years, but but, but essentially, we'd have more time to think about these problems, which, I think is an interesting it's an interesting thing. And in many ways, actually, solving age related diseases is is like one of the major major challenges, to be done this century. I think climate is probably more pressing. But, but certainly age related diseases are enormous enormous enormous challenge for our species as a whole.

I I don't really wanna go into vast detail, but interested readers, I do have a, or interested listeners, I do have a, a blog that I wrote about this a few months ago, which contains basically everything I know about this, at least 50% of which is not true. It's obviously wrong. So but don't take my word for it. I'm not an expert on on biology by any means. But No. That that's cool.

We have we have a person we have a a person who's worked with us in our, in our biotech side, and she's she just created the first from scratch. They created a a live a, a pumping heart from cells. So they didn't they they her name is Doris Taylor. Brilliant person. Oh, awesome. And if you're ever interested in meeting her, I I'm gonna be on a call next week with her. But if you're interested in meeting with her, I'll I'll be sure to introduce you.

There was a presentation she gave, and I can also find that link for you afterwards if you're interested to watch what they had done, and it's fascinating. She's absolutely brilliant. So, the the challenge inside there is that if you're if you're 20 years old, right, you can abuse your body horribly, and it basically will always get better. Right?

Like, with with with small exceptions, you can, you can drink too much alcohol and stay up too late and and run marathons and and do all kinds of horrible things to yourself in your twenties, and you're basically okay. But if you try and live that lifestyle in your eighties and you're not Mick Jagger, you're gonna run into trouble.

And so the question you have to ask yourself, why is it that that that, like, when I'm 20, it's not like, you know, for for 10 whole years, for, like, 3000 days, my body knows how to fix itself. You know? And then at some point, it's along the way, it's like, fuck that. I'm not doing that anymore. And and it slows down and, and loses that ability and, you know, eventually leads to frailty and and age related diseases and death.

And so you say, well, what if we could figure out how to make it not forget, how to fix itself, and take itself back to that equilibrium state where where it basically is is able to do all these things? And and the thing is, there are there's like several strong clues that this should be possible, and one of them is that, obviously humans are much much better at doing that than rats are.

So for example, human mortality curves and rat mortality curves are identical, except that a rat ages about the same as a human does, in like a week versus a year. So like a rat loses the ability to heal itself about 50 times faster than a human does, and so if that's the case, why can't we make humans heal themselves 50 times better than a human does? You know, in in which case that, you know, the the whole issue would be moot. We'd live for 5000 years.

So, yeah, that that's kind of a that's kind of a big clue. No. No. No. Those are those are great those are great questions because then if we overlaid it, and I can give other examples, if we overlaid that on the Star Trek Enterprise, we have this engine room, we have people working in it, no one dies. Well, do you move up in the ladder if the person above you doesn't retire and move on?

And do you how does your life structure so while there's a biological challenge, there's also a psychological challenge on a a planet like Earth where you will have people haves and haves and have nots. When Pelosi can be in the senate forever. Sorry. No. I mean, I think if we get into the negative consequences of the gerontocracy, it's almost always related to the fact that that there's this perception.

I don't know how how real it is, but there's a perception that as people get old, they kinda get more conservative and and maybe less, you know, less cerebral in some ways, at least some people do. And, and certainly, there are age related, consequences on cognition. And so, you know, if you're gonna live for a 1000 years, maybe you don't wanna spend all 1000 years working working in the United States Congress. Maybe you'd, like, go on a vacation once in a while.

But Can I ask you how old you are? Where you depend on natural death to to advance, it's already pretty, like, you you might wanna give up. Can I ask how old you are, Casey? I'm 34. Yeah. You're 34. Okay. I'm 58. My my wife says I'm a my wife says I'm a child, so I'm actually going backwards. But, hopefully, Actually, she just say, I I I my hair tends to be getting blacker, and I don't use any dyes or anything. So she'll laugh and say, what's happening to you?

And I think that's just because of living and and being excited and working on things that are are interesting. But the there my point to your point was there's a biological side to it. I agree. And I believe that there are capabilities in that construct to be able to amplify the ability to be able to live longer with a higher quality of life. The challenge on the flip side is it it creates all the non relatives in society as well.

Yeah. And it creates a different construct as to, well, if you believe that you'll live forever or longer, what will you do compared to the person who doesn't have access to that? And there's all a tremendous amount of psychological, political, economic, religion Yeah. Religion atones that can all fall into the under that category of challenges. So it's not as if living longer is the answer. Well, I think it's already the case that if you're rich and privileged, you live twice as long.

I mean, like, like, that that's not really controversial. Right? So actually, we we it wouldn't be much use if the way to live forever was to spend more money than what we currently spend right now. I mean, like, maybe a little bit more for some people, but but I I happen to think that, like, it's not expensive to create a rat.

So, if we're able to figure out if if we're able to figure out how to how to kind of encourage our silly machinery to be a bit more convergent, which is basically the fundamental problem, it's it's convergence issue, then then it should be, you know, cheap enough that that essentially anyone can benefit from it.

And and actually, you know, it makes sense that the the wealthier countries might have access to it first, but then the wealthier countries are the ones that are bearing the the highest burden The brunt of the and and and, and so on. And to the point where, like, you know, Japan, for example, you know, has has way, way more people who are, beyond retirement age right now than than people who are at childbearing age, which is which is kinda crazy.

But, but, yeah, this is we're kind of running the experiment in real time now. And and I've lived in Asia for 10 years. People finally got rich for a while. Yeah. I've lived in Asia for 10 years, so I've seen a variety of different conditions. Everything from the Kamarouge and what has happened in their society all the way to the Japanese and the the challenges facing China.

This, China's in a similar pickle except unlike Japan, China got old before it got rich, and Japan got rich before it got old. Yep. So, you know, it's it's it's it's a huge it's a huge challenge. Yeah. So We're gonna get sidetracked here if we don't we're gonna stay on fire. You answered a great a a good question. I like the I like the answer and the direction because what we're talking about is timelines, and the timelines for what you're perceiving. Our project Moon Hut is 40 years.

We have 8 people, 90 people, 578 and 1644. It does not mean that there won't be rotations of those people, but the structures we have built fit that timeline. And there's a development, I think, and I'd like to talk to you afterwards. I think what we've created, and this is what someone like Grant Anderson from Paragon had seen, was we created a logical in between set of circumstances that makes that end game work where I often see, first, we do this, now we end up with this.

Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. The numerical because. Yes. Yeah. I I I missed Yeah. I missed the story in the middle. You gave me chapters 1, 2, and 9, and 10. And the that story line was missing. So I liked how you had put it together. But our timeline, you went 100, you said 10, 100, 1,000. Ours is a 40 year, so about 2061 is our endgame. But 2061 also, and then you went to population, 3,500,000,000 people will die in the next 25 years on this planet, and that's, 3.2. And that's just age.

Not no one's gonna not including anything else, but that's age. And there'll be a whole another generation. Here's the psychology that you were bringing up, what we're talking about, is this generation, if we add 25 years on to a a 10 year old, well, they're 35 years old. They will have lived through a pandemic.

Ukraine, the challenges now that we're having with the, economics when I talk western versa and the dollar versus this new brick, financial markets that they're trying to create and everything else that's compounded on top of it from climate change, mass extinction, ecosystems collapsing, and they will want a different future. So that has to o be overlaid on top of it. It's not like it's gonna be forced on top of people. It's just going to happen.

Yep. So, so we've got environmental hostility and, labor scarcity. So is there anything else you wanted to add there? Yeah. So actually, the next the next point, in line 0.5, and I think I switched, switched this from 0.6, while while we're taking our break, but it makes more sense this way around Sure. Development prioritization.

So we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but but essentially, our our industry kind of depends on 100 of thousands of key inputs from things like, you know, standardized sized billets of 6061 aluminum to water to, fertilizers, chemicals, paints, plastics, hydrocarbons in general is something that I've had on the brain recently.

I've got here gold, flash memory, specialty foods, certain other drugs, you know basically pharmaceuticals, you've got advanced construction machinery, you've got different different kinds of metals and and different, different quantities of them, you've got aggregate corn sorry, aggregate concrete, rocks, you've got fuels, you've got oxygen, other gases, all kinds of things, textiles.

And so if you're if you're in the business of trying to build a factory on Mars or a series of factories on Mars that produce all of these things, then it probably helps to figure out which ones you should do first. And what I have done, over a series of posts, essentially, most recently, a few months ago, is is take this entire dataset of, of of items and then classify them by 2 key metrics. The first is, their, you know, dollar dollars per, sorry, sorry, annual consumption per person.

So it's in it's in kilograms per person per year. And that's that's that's important because that speaks to the fundamental constraint on importation, which is, that, essentially, cargo that you fly to the moon or to Mars will be paid for by weight, and, and and also there's not you know, hopefully, there's a very large pipeline of of the ability to move stuff to Mars, like we're talking 1,000 or 100 of 1,000 of tons, of stuff rather than, say, tens of kilograms, but but it's not infinite.

Right? So that's that's one major constraint. And the other major constraint is the labor scarcity constraint. And so that comes down to, like, how hard is a thing to make? How difficult is something to produce? And and the way I've categorized that is in the, the cost per person per year. So how much how much money does a person typically spend on one of these items, per person per year? And the reason for that is that is that cost, is is a first of all, it's quite available.

You know, you can figure out what the cost of something is quite easily by looking it up in a catalog. And and second, it's a it's a pretty good analog, it's a pretty good, yeah, cost is a pretty good, index on on how hard something is to actually make.

So you take all these different things and you you throw them on a scatter plot, where on the vertical axis you have the, the annual cost in in dollars per per person, and then on the horizontal axis you have the annual consumption in kilograms per person. And what you find is that you kind of have this this broad swath that goes off and up to the right, and at the top right, you have things like water.

And actually the per capita consumption of water is incredibly high, and the per capita, cost of water is extremely low because, water is generally like in terms of its manufacture or you like it's it's a recycled product and we are able to move it around the canals quite easily. And just to just to make this explicit, the in the United States people use a 1,000,000 tons, sorry a 1,000 tons of water per year is is the per capita consumption and a lot of that is in agriculture.

But a 1,000 a 1,000 tons per person views that 3 tons a day. It's it's just a it's a lot of water. So obviously like importing 3 tons of water per person per day to the moon is is a nonstarter. Like, it would cost, more than $1,000,000,000 per person just to import that much stuff. Yep. Assuming assuming, like, all of SpaceX's wireless streams come true, and it's only a $100 a kilogram to import, to import stuff. So, that's kind of on the extreme right hand end.

And other things that are also, on the right hand end include things like fuel, oxygen, concrete aggregate rubble, nitrogen, hydrogen, steel, bricks, ceramics, basic ceramics, and then yeah. So it's it's basically like a class of things where people use more than a ton of it per year.

And and bear in mind that in Mars, if we're asking our people on Mars to be more productive than on earth, then their baseline consumption will also be higher because if their productivity is higher, then they're also consuming more materials in order to make more materials.

So so broadly speaking, anything where a person who weighs around around about 80 kilograms needs more than 1,000 kilograms of stuff and so for imperial audiences, a person is about a £150 if they need more than £2,000 of material per year, you would really really rather rather prefer that you're able to make it locally. Unfortunately, if you are in the business of building a Mars or a moon base, you'd have to do it near a source of water.

You'd have to do it near a source of oxygen, near a source of, of of raw materials and rocks and stuff. So so you don't have to make metals out of the rocks, but you have to be able to grind them up and turn them into cement or concrete, for example.

So, so, so essentially, when we think about, you know, the 1st generation Mars base, even the 1st generation Mars base would have to be able to produce enough electricity to be able to, process these materials and make them locally using what's called in situ resource utilization. Yep. The next the next class of materials are things where people use, let's say, between 1 kilogram and a 1000 kilograms per year, so that's between £2,000, although frankly, this is all order of magnitude anyway.

And and then the annual cost, the annual expenditure, if you like, on earth, for these things would be between a dollar per person per year and and up to, you know, a couple of $1,000 per person per year, which is typically what what someone in the west would spend on food. And obviously on Mars, these things are harder to make, and so they'd cost you more, but maybe not a whole lot more depending on what they are.

And, and then obviously importing these things also costs more because you, even though you only pay the earth manufacturing cost you also have to pay the importation cost, which works out to a $100, around about $100 per kilogram in this in this particular instance, although you could change that number if you wanted to.

And so, for, for items with a low, cost density, right, so like bricks, for example, cost less than $100 per kilogram, the importation really hurts because most of what you're paying for is the importation cost. But if you're if you're trying to obtain something which actually costs a lot more, per kilogram such as a flash memory chip or something like that, then the importation cost barely adds any cost to the to the, to the overall cost on Mars.

It's actually probably much much cheaper to import, for example, computer chips, to Mars than to try and produce them locally because local production costs will be much higher. And in fact, materials that or items that fall into this category are typically ones where the supply chain on earth involves flying things around.

So if the if the materials that go into your mobile phone are transported between, say, Australia, China, United States, and Europe by airplane, so that's a pretty good sign that they'll they'll be quite hard to manufacture cost effectively on Mars. But in the middle, we have these we have a whole bunch of materials which are typically transported by ship on earth. They're not necessarily sourced locally.

It is quite unusual, for example, on earth to have large scale importation of water, by ship, certainly not by plane. But it is quite common, for example, to have, importation of steel or raw bulk materials or oil, or obviously, like, things that have a relatively low cost of goods in transit, clothe clothing, for example. This is stuff that moves around by container, in in ships. So I'll I can just kind of list a whole bunch of materials, a whole bunch of things here. We've got, let's see.

I'm just looking at a at a diagram here. We've got fasteners, so like screws and bolts. We've got carbon dioxide. Well, we don't use that much of it, but there's plenty of that on Mars. Textiles, finished textiles, electric motors, aluminum. Aluminum is an interesting case because it it aluminum for American orders American listeners, requires a lot of energy to make it. Bearings, glass, fertilizer, plastics, sulfuric acid, ethane, various other chemicals.

So these are the ones that you would probably import initially. You can't imagine, like, day 1 on Mars, stepping out and being like, oh, I better set up the screw factory. No. You you just import screws. But then over time, once you have the ability to make steel locally or, aluminum locally, then you would start to produce materials, produce items from those raw materials locally, that that you needed in very large numbers.

And if you're in the process of of building an extremely large station, you know, extremely large base where the surface area is measured in 1,000,000 of square feet, then you would have to you'd have to produce most of the raw materials, to produce those stations locally. So that includes things like Just for a reference point. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. I agree. No. No. Sorry. I agree with you. I I worked with Maersk for about 5 years.

So largest shipping company in the world, and I'm very familiar with the transit times from from Asia to, to Rotterdam and what we would ship, and I've been on the ships themselves. The Yep. You you're Absolutely. Yeah. Fabulous machines, and it's amazing. You'll have on a, an 18,000 container ship, you'll have 13 people. That's it. And even the way they steer it is absolutely fascinating.

When you see one of those large ships, I don't know if you you when you look at them, they tend to have this one large from end side to side, center, station for them to live in. And the reason is when they're up there and they're managing it, they actually steer the ship in the center.

But when they wanna when they wanna do something that they need to be close to the left side, they there's another steering column on the left, and there's another one on the right so they can move into port properly. Yeah. It's really fascinating. Yep. And and and their their engines are the are so massive. I mean, they're just Endless. Enormous. Yeah. Like So 6 story building. Yeah. They're just fascinating.

The, when you're it's easy to hear what you're saying, and and it makes it jump a timeline sequence very quickly. So and then this is just a perception that I hear. We can bring this, but then we can get to this. On Earth, if we were to say if I was to say to you, we're going to set up a society right now, and it's gonna be brand new, and we're going to have to put in place a water treatment center. Put in and by the way, there we there's somebody I might be talking to about how they don't work.

But, 90% of the water I heard on Earth is not treated, which is fascinating that that doesn't happen in the way we think it does. But if I said, do you have to put in a treatment plants. Right. It's, I think the number of treatment plants, it's over 90% of the water we drink is just treated by biological treatments that exist in nature, not by systems that work effectively to clean and, our water. It's really a number.

Even New York City doesn't just start pulling online, but most of it's done through swamplands and other places. Get to my point is that if I was to say to you on earth, I want you to build a city, and I want you to start it off, and I want you to put in place some of these things, you know, a place for people to live. They can have a home.

They can, they they have to bring in some parts and supplies, fasteners, c o 2, textiles, motors, aluminum aluminum bearings, glass I want you to we're gonna help you ship that. And then we want you to set up a factory to do all of this or a mechanism to be able to replicate and do it yourself to feed the size of the society, which will have to grow in today's times. It'll decrease over time in terms of optimization and and advances.

You're this is a this is not a 5 year, 7 year, 12 year endeavor. You took a jump from, a group of individuals who need these things, and now you're jumping to, in my mind, 40 years later. Yeah. That I think I think that's a very fair argument. And in fact, we're get we're gonna come to that soon. Okay. As long as Right now I'm I'm painting the picture which is optimistic, and then I'm gonna add a add a dose of of cold water and and harsh reality to that.

As you know, I don't I don't know where you're going, so I this is my this is running through my head. I'm saying, there's a timeline component in here. You're not talking about a 7 year or 12 year endeavor. You're saying over time for society to be able to reach this, and it could be a 100 years to get to some of these things that you're saying are going to be resupplied and are going to be manufactured on premise?

The fastest any nation has managed to industrialize thus far is about 1 and a half generations, and that's that's really fast. So, like, Britain industrialized over 7 generations, for example. But more recently, we're getting faster at it, and part of the reason for that is that we've already figured out how to do it. But even so, like, if you wanted to be serious about saying, well, first of all, we have to build out our ability to process raw material. That's gonna take a few years.

And then we have to build out our ability to to take that raw material and then turn it refine it into steel. It's gonna take a few years. And then we have to have have the ability to take the refined steel and turn it into the into, like, obviously, like, low grade steel components, so, like, beams and screws and fasteners and bolts and things like that. That's gonna take a few years.

And then in order to go from that to, like, you know, essentially having the ability to produce, say, 99% of the mass you'd need to build your own, pressure containers and things on Mars, or on the moon, that would also take a few years because in addition to, you know, essentially the membrane, which contains the pressure and and, and airlocks and doors and seals and and precision surfaces and and valves and control systems and all that kind of stuff. You know?

There's there's basically a lot of different moving parts that are needed there. And and yet at the same time, you have made you you're tossing a ton of assumptions. You're you're tossing in the assumption, for example, on earth that you will have the ecosystem, which could be engineers who understand this.

You'll, you'll understand on Earth, it would be what what are the conditions you're working on oxygen, the during the normal on Mars or moon, you have to then step back and say, we don't know if this piece of equipment that we have used for 50 years on earth, even with all the proper assumptions going back to that forward slash and an asterisk, that we've made the calculations properly, that we came out at a 100 degrees Celsius that we need to do this. And it's actually a 100.137.

And because we didn't hit 137, everything we transported, everything we had designed into it, even though we thought we were great, we missed. And that adds time limits. So one of the reasons that you wanna build the the environment on the moon or on Mars to be as earth like as possible, so basically a giant terrarium with short sleeves environment, is that, the number of modifications you need to make to existing industrial machinery is is much lower.

So so, basically, you need to change maybe configuration of pumps or or, coolant feed systems to compensate for the fact that the gravity is lower in these places. And then also if the atmosphere that you that you use is of a lower pressure, then then that reduces the amount of heat that you can transport away easily, so you have to upsize the cooling systems.

But it's much, much easier to take, for example, a washing machine or a CNC mill or something and and adapt it to work at a lower lower gravity, and you can even test that, in a limited way on earth reasonably well, than to say, well, we need the c and c machine, and it's gotta work outside on Mars or outside on the surface of the moon where half the time it's exposed to 400 degrees Celsius from the direct sun and the other half of the time it's cryogenically cold when when the moon is facing away from the sun when the surface of the moon faces away from the sun.

What so You've That's kind of the challenge there. Okay. But what you've just articulated, which I didn't hear before, and I'm not picking on you. I'm learning, is you didn't bring up this whole entire build the ecosystem of build the terrarium, build the life space so that we minimize the need for adaptation. And if we include that as a variable, if I said to you on Earth, look. We're going to put up this building. It's gonna be a 10 story building. It's gonna house a 100 people.

It's going to have several off rooms off on the side of it to be able to do x, y, and zed. We we put all that together, and I said, oh oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we need to put a dome over the whole thing and have it act like this environment. The first part was tough enough. Now you've said, we need a dome over this? What are you talking about a dome? Oh, it's going to have to be, a 150 meters high or 200 meters wide. It's going to have to be able to clear and do the following.

You'd say, well, that alone is a a big challenge. Yeah. And so that's That's that's the last point in my in my chart. Maybe I should've gone back to front. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. We made it in the list. But I told I I what I told you that we're we're talking. I'm asking questions as they come to my head. We don't know where we're going. So this is perfect. What you're doing is perfect.

So if I'm saying what you're saying, so tell me what you think are the process to get to this point or wherever you wanna take me. Because you're saying it perfectly.

Okay. So I just I just wanna kind of wrap up this, like, development prioritization point, which is essentially deciding what order you build things in, and and it it's not really a genius statement to say, like, oh, well, you start off making the the stuff that's easy to make that you need a lot of, and then over time, you gradually make more stuff that is harder to make and you don't need as much of.

But then, you know, there's kind of this class of of things that, you know, your plausible and lifetime consumption is like less than a 100 kilograms. So you could actually, plausibly import a lifetime supply with you when you when you first went to when you first went to the moon or Mars. And so there's there's no real need to make it locally because, a, it's really hard to make, and b, you just don't need that much of it. Like, the importation costs are extremely low.

If you're in the process of importing, you know, 80 kilograms of human plus you know, 20 kilograms of personal effects and underwear and food to keep them alive on the trip, and, you know, and and various things, then it's not really a big a big deal to, like, shove an envelope full of, like, spare computer chips, in amongst their gear, and that would be enough for them for a lifetime.

So just in that category of things like, gold, morphine, Tylenol, various kinds of processed food, flash memory, you know, computer chips, basically things like that. So, and and obviously, there's there's that's not a complete nor exhaust exhaustive list, but but anything where your annual consumption is less than about a 100 grams, which is, what's a 100 grams? Like, 5 ounces or something. But, you know, just pick pick some small number of ounces. It doesn't really matter.

You could you could bring a lifetime supply with you. And so while it is probably worthwhile to have the ability to make any of that locally on Mars in in small and inefficient batches, you know, going into full scale production of, like, a morphine factory on Mars is certainly like a long term problem. Yep. Anyway, so that's that's kind of the thing there.

To go back to our chart, we're going to we're gonna skip over 0.6 because it's I I realized it's redundant with 0.7, which is the Iceland case study. So we've talked about how What just for quick. What is Iceland? You don't have we don't have to go into detail. What was the Iceland case study? Well, we're about to describe it. Oh, okay. You said we're so we're not gonna we're skipping over 6, which is the environmental. It's it's the 5 and 6 that you you reordered. Okay. That's right.

Yeah. I'm I'm making it up so go alone now. No. No. I love it. I love it. This is I I conversation has changed a bit. Yeah. I I have I'm on page 13 of notes, so it's great. It's great. Well, you only got 3 pages left. No. No. No. I I actually have about 70 pages underneath it. So Don't worry. I might have to get another glass of water. So the the Iceland case study, is is an example that I kind of wrote a blog about a few years ago.

I happen to know a couple of Icelanders, and they referred me to these incredible websites that the Icelandic government has made that that basically have, comprehensive information on the Icelandic economy. And I was like, this is super interesting because Iceland, has been occupied by humans for more than a 1000 years. It has, it's got a strong kind of tradition of self reliance. The population is about 360,000 people, so somewhat less than a1000000.

But at the same time, the the environment on Iceland is somewhat more mild, than the surface of the moon. There's breathable air, there's fresh water available. There's plenty of fish in the ocean, and and there's plenty of rocks and ice and lichens and tundra and stuff there as well. It's it's much more, much less hostile environment than than than the moon, but it's also quite isolated.

And so, it's worth noting that prior to industrialization in Iceland, the population there did wax and wane quite a lot. There was an eruption in the 18 fifties, I think, maybe 18 forties, that killed like a third of the population, which is kind of horrific.

So, you know, it is it is it's kind of an isolated and a very marginal place for humans to live in many ways, and and prior to industrialization and prior to modern technology, the people there did live pretty difficult lives, with very limited access to technology. They had, obviously, they had wool. They had the ability to make small amounts of steel, from from what's called bog iron, which is not not used today anymore. We don't make steel that way.

But if you needed it, you could make enough for swords and knives and things, which is important to Icelanders, and they have had access to wood. In fact, they cut down nearly all the forests, on Iceland over a few 100 years. So so it's an interesting very interesting place, and and then, of course, there's this treasure trove of data available.

And and we've just spent, you know, an hour and a half talking about how you could potentially, you know, build a self sustaining city on on the moon or on Mars with only a 1000000 people, and it might take you 30 years and and maybe a 1000000 tons of stuff. And I said, okay. Let's make this real. Let's talk about Iceland. Iceland has 360,000 people. By and large, they're some of the best educated people on earth.

Your challenge is to take one of your 18,000 container container ships that you used to work on at Maersk, which has a cargo capacity of, I don't know what does that work have to be, like, 600,000 tons or something. Mhmm. And you can put whatever you want in those containers.

In fact, you can delete all the containers and just pile the deck up with anything you want, any material you want, any food you want, anything, cost is no object, you can fill up with c and c machines, you can fill up nuclear reactors, it's your choice, but you get one ship. Right? One ship's worth of stuff, which is plausibly as much as we could possibly hope to ship to the moon or Mars with starships over the next 50 years. One container ship's worth of stuff.

It's like, you know, a 100,000 rocket launches is about 1 container ship's worth of stuff. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna sail that container ship to Iceland, and you're gonna beach it on the shore at Reykjavik. And and then after that the island is cut off. It's cut off from the rest of the world.

Obviously, it can still connect by radio, so you can still talk to the Europeans, you can still talk to Americans, but no further transport of materials, in and out of the island is allowed. And your challenge is to slow down the inevitable reversion of Icelandic quality of living back to, like, 1700 era, with, like, short lifespans and no dental care, as for as long as possible with only one containership worth of stuff. What do you put on board? And and, you know, what are the key things?

And, actually, the key thing you run out of first is fuel. Iceland doesn't produce its own fuel, so it only has a couple of months supply. And so once that runs out, well, now none of your cars work, Very little of your heating works properly. Electricity doesn't work properly unless some in some places, there's hydroelectricity there. But, okay, so you got a hydroelectric power plant. That's great, but but, you know, it has parts and the parts wear out.

How are you gonna get new bearings to operate your turbines? How are you going to get lubricants to operate operate the turbines? How are you gonna replace relays and contacts with switches and and refine aluminum and copper to, to make new wires? You know, it becomes this kind of enormous headache, logistical challenge. It's it's compounding possible. Compounding set of conditions. Every time you ask a question, you have another question.

Yeah. Exactly. It's it's I'm not saying it's an unsolvable problem, but it's definitely a very difficult problem. And the thing is, not only is it a very difficult problem, it's also a much much easier problem than doing this on the moon or on Mars. Like, way easier.

So because because we already know that that, the environment in Iceland can sustain a small population, a smaller population indefinitely at a lower technological level, and this is kind of where that point 6 environmental hostility and population stability comes in. So it turns out that, for a given level of technology and a given level of environmental hostility, either it is possible to sustain a population or it isn't.

So if you say for example, if you back off the environmental hostility, maybe you can support some people if you gradually increase the environmental hostility. So say you've got Iceland, but then over time it's getting colder and colder and colder, or perhaps your technology is regressing over time, so your your ability to make advanced technology is is being lost. And this has occurred throughout human history, you know, when small populations get isolated, they lose technology.

Then then over time, the ability of of your technology to sustain your population diminishes, and actually it can undergo what's like a catastrophic phase shift, where where actually you can't sustain the population, like how to put this? There are environments that are hostile enough that once your technology drops below a certain level, no one can live there at all. Yep. Right?

And so and so you then then you go from, like, gradual population declines due to starvation and illness to catastrophic population declines, due to, like, everyone freezing to death overnight kind of situation. And so so that's kind of the situation that you have by default, even in a place like Iceland, let let alone in space, where where there's kind of a minimum population you need to sustain your technology, and then there's a minimum level of technology needed to sustain your population.

And if you're not on the the right side of both of those curves, you're in deep shit. And so yeah. I just I think that's kind of just an interesting thing to think about. And you have to say, well, what is what is the minimum technology set you need to survive on Mars, and and how many people do you need to sustain that technology? Not just the knowledge, but also the ability to produce it and to produce it, efficiently in large quantities and at relatively low cost.

And and certainly, like, if Iceland had this challenge, it would be an enormous headache.

We're seeing even now that, like, as a result of sanctions levied against Russia, which is a much larger country that was in many ways industrially self sufficient for periods of its history, in the last century, you know, has since since the fall of the Soviet Union completely lost the ability to operate any tech so it's built almost any of its own technology, all of its manufacturing is dependent on foreign imports, all of its oil production is dependent on foreign contractors, and expertise.

It's it's a really, you know, it's a really, really phony problem, and and Russia is a country of nearly a 100,000,000 people, I think, with with a long standing tradition of technical excellence. Unfortunately, diminished in recent years. No. I think it's not a 100 and tiny fly spec island of 300,000 people. I I think they wish it was more like a 130,000,000 people. It's falling really quickly. Sorry. A 144, 1,000,000 people. Yeah. I I stand corrected.

Yep. So it's it's double the way it's falling Just the just the way I remember it. It's almost double France. So France has twice the GDP and half the population of Russia. So just use that as your math, and it's pretty close. Okay. Yeah. That's I like that. France is also its population is still increasing. France is one of the few developed countries that still has a lot of children. So a lot of their own children.

And children and their own I like how you say they have a lot of children and their own children. Well, I mean, there are countries that that, import children. I said Yeah. I I understand that, but it was just an interesting phraseology if you want to think about it. Yeah. France has a lot of children, and they have a lot of their own children. It it's not the way I was thinking you were going to say it. Whereas well, I mean, I I I raised my own children, for example, like, you know Yeah.

As as a as a an interesting exercise in masochism. If they're listening to this, I love you kids. But, my my kids would say, you didn't actually raise us. It was mom. Well, exactly. But but, in this case, my wife and I try and try and split the No. No. We we've been together. It was my I've been together with my wife for now 35. We were married Congratulations. 37 years. Okay. So you you got married before I was born. Yes. Yeah. So yes. We we were no. We not married before you were born.

We've been together. So we Oh, together. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We've been together for 30 some odd years. So yes. I don't wanna think about what the playlist was that you're waiting. I mean, it's just terrifying. The 19 eighties. Yeah. No. We were yes. It was, 19 nineties we got married. Okay. Well, I don't know. No. No. No. No. I wasn't married. We were married? Don't don't tell my wife this. I always but I'll tell you a short quick story then we get back to it. I I don't remember dates.

It's not something that I try. I tried to as much as I can. I don't remember birthdays that easily. And 1 year, I missed my she wasn't married to me. I missed my, fiance's girlfriend's date, her birthday, and she was very upset. So next year, I wanna make it up to her. I no. I wanna make it up to her next year, and I put together one hell of a surprise party. And I called her, my father-in-law, and said we would like you to come. We'd like you to be at the party. And she said he said, wow.

That she is going to be surprised. And I said, I know. I really don't want her to know. And I was playing along, and he says that you don't understand how surprised she's gonna be. And he's egging me on. And then he says, just so you know, her birthday is not till next month. So I completely missed the month. And when she heard that, she just burst out laughing and said, I understand. You're fine. So I completely missed the month. Well, you're a fortunate man.

My my my spouse does not like surprises at all, and and I was informed that if I if I plan a surprise party, I'd be divorced or something. So That also that was also part of the conversation. She does not want a surprise. Never. So, yeah, same thing. So so getting, yes. Russia, France. Alright. Yeah. So as the Iceland case study, you can also do a similar case study where you say, well, I can provision an aircraft carrier with anything you want.

You can put as many people on it as you want, then you have to anchor it in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and your challenge is to make the people on it on it, like, the last person die as late as possible kind of thing. Like, how long can you keep people alive on a on a stranded aircraft carrier with provision with anything you want? So it's a very, very large ship. It's got a big flat deck.

You can put a lot of dirt on there and grow plants and things, but at the end of the day, the hull will rust and it will crack and then it will sink. And that'll happen, you know, within the lifetime of the first generation of people who are living on it. So it's, you know, if you don't have the ability to obtain your steel and to repair it, no matter how much spare parts you bring, it's just a matter of time.

And so, you know, it's just it's just interesting interesting, It's an it's an interesting challenge, but I was gonna ask you this afterwards, but I'll ask it now. When you're thinking of the question you're asking, there's a and what I hear, and I'm trying to phrase this properly. What I hear is the question kind of of, sustainability. How do you create a new society off planet? How do you off earth? How do you how do you meet this need?

And my first take, the I've said it on the podcast before, my first take was never that. Mine was what if we really live between moon and earth? We we exist between the moon and earth. And, again, I didn't know enough about it when I came up with this question. I said the we need the moon for tides, for biological cycles. Even if you look back in, prehistoric not prehistoric, but old history, that you hunted to the moon's light. You traveled because you could use the moon.

It's it's a part of our ecosystem. And so Yes. I my mind immediately said, no. No. No. Instead of thinking of us living on Earth, we we live between this construct called Mearth. Now, and I'm trying to remember his name, and I it'll come to me. Burton Lee and I were in San Francisco. We were at a place across from scratch, and I'm saying, moon on Earth, moon on Earth. We got moon on Earth. And I'm putting my hands together closer and closer, and he looks at me and says, Mearth.

What if that construct of Mearth is that we if you change the paradigm and say, this is really the land that we live in, this is the space, the geography we live in, and we leveraged both of them no different than old explorers would consider that they were going to find an an extension of their where they live or a faster path. And you you you escape this whole belief structure that it's independent, that that that doesn't even cross your mind.

And you you ask the question, how do you make this ecosystem thrive? And that's the question we work on. Does that make you understand the the the question is very different.

Yeah. I would just caution, making analogies to kind of explorers during the age of exploration because by and large, they were you know, the ships the ships themselves are dangerous and they didn't have very advanced navigation technology, but the the lands that they discovered were already by and large occupied by humans who already lived there and and lived there quite successfully, thank you very much, up to a constant up to a constant in smallpox.

So, it's it's a little bit different, but I know it's different. I'm asking the question. I like the, I like the the concept, the conceptual framework. I was just asking, you're you're extremely bright, and I I I love learning from you. I I I get so many kind of directional needles if you wanna say. The one piece that keeps on coming back as I hear your language, and I do pay attention to language, is your language tends to be in a slightly different direction.

It's not that you're arguing the full point. So let's just say it's a we're a 100% in the same we're one is at a 100 degrees and the other one is 99. Everything else is the same. But that difference is if you are taking a laser beam and pointing it at to the moon and you moved it 1 centimeter left or 1 centimeter right, you're gonna miss the moon. We are just different. So I'm asking the question, why that question? Why do you go that way? What are you solving for? Does that make sense?

Did I ask that right? Well, I mean, for me, it's just been this kind of exploration of ideas around, you know, this seemingly impossible goal, and then and then just using the tools that I've been trained to do, to to kind of understand aspects of that problem, and just try and find insights, you know, like, if someone says, oh, Casey, what what is the what is the the cargo manifest gonna be for the first 10 flights?

I I don't know, you know, like, this I I could take a stab at it, but I don't really know. But if someone says, you know, Casey, is it more important that the manifest for the first 10 flights has, you know, food and and and and, you know, some building materials than than it has, you know, the entire thing composed exclusively of of Tylenol. And I'd say, well, you know, I think it's probably probably more reasonable to to include materials that you're gonna need a lot of.

But but the the overwhelming message, if you like, is that is that I would rather not have to choose, I would rather just have post scarcity cargo transport capacity. Okay. And that's that's kind of, I think, where where the people who are actually doing this work and not just kinda speculating on Twitter late at night like I do, kind of, concentrating their efforts, which kinda leads into the Go ahead. Into the last the last topic, which is which is Starship and and the 9 missing technologies.

So so Starship is kind of, without Starship, the whole the whole thing is moot. Right? Without Starship, the Iceland thought experiment is container ships don't exist, so you can't even get the material to Iceland to even have a go. Because it's it's hard to overstate just how different Starship is compared to our existing rockets, even the really good ones.

That's but Starship, you know, is basically it's designed to be a logistical system, a conveyor belt that just transports large quantities of material from Earth to other places, at at at the lowest possible cost, at the highest possible cadence, no questions asked, no frills, no nothing, just it just, you know, eats eats cargo 1 in and dumps it out the other. And, and that's so different from how rockets work right now, which is the it's the it's the merge line. Care and feeding and Right.

It's the it's the MERSK line. We we're just gonna you put it into a container. It doesn't matter what it is. It's harsh conditions. We're gonna bring it there. It's gonna take 32 days to get from Hong Kong to Rotterdam. And in 32 days, you will know that your package will your your container will be there. We won't guarantee what's inside of it. We're not gonna we're not gonna ensure that. You have to take care of it. It's gonna be tough, but in 32 days, you're gonna get it.

Yes. So I don't have to explain that to you because you've worked in logistics. A lot of people don't really think about where this stuff comes from, but but essentially, you know, Paul Wooster who's one of the architects of Starship, you know, pointed out in a talk he gave a few years ago, which is publicly available at a Mars Society conference that, that as I said before, mass covers a lot of sins. You know, you don't have to be all that clever, and you don't wanna be all that clever.

You wanna focus your cleverness on on more important problems, for mass than mass optimization. Whereas if you look at why it is that Mars Rovers, for example, right now cost $1,000,000,000 to make, it's because you need a team of, like, 200 different experts in different things figuring out how to fit what would ordinarily consume several rooms of a large research building into, you know, essentially the front seat of a small car.

And that's really really hard to do, but if you don't have to worry about mass anymore, it's no it's no longer that hard to do. It's it's actually something where where there's an existing supply chain for a lot of that stuff, you know, in the form of of, robotic mining machinery that works in in very hostile environments that are not that different in terms of, you know, chemical treatments and and acidity and corrosion and so on than than than the surfaces of Mars or or the moon.

It's just right now if you said, oh, well, I wanna dump a, a caterpillar mining excavator on the moon, you have no way of doing it because we don't have rockets that can deliver more than a couple 100 kilograms to the moon. But once we have a starship, that's a 100 tons. No. There are some machines out there that weigh a lot more than a 100 tons, like the the giant, bucket wheel excavators that weigh about 15,000 tons.

But you could conceivably send those in pieces and assemble them if you really needed them. It's when I see obsolete. Anyway. But When I see a 3 d printed arm that's 20 meters long, I I I I my mind just says, okay. First of all, you need a dozer or a mechanism to feed that machine. How big is that going to be? And do we even know because the on earth, the the soil moves in circles around? And we don't know how the regolith will perform when it's pushed and moved in that way.

How are you gonna bring a beam that's that large, and it's gotta weigh a lot to be able to do what you're talking about? So you're kind of asking that same question of the cart before the horse here with size dumping a caterpillar. How do you do that? We can't do that today. Yep. Well, certainly not.

But I think if Starship is developed and basically performs according to expectations, which is to say, rapidly reusable space spacecraft is able to do on orbit refueling, is able to transport a 100 tonnes or more into low earth orbit, and then once it's refuelled a 100 tonne, that same cargo Yep. To the moon or to Mars, a lot of these problems go away, and we can focus on other more interesting problems.

But until that happens, there's so much point thinking about the other problems at scale, I think, unless they're incidentally useful for something else. But there are 9 key technology areas that need to be developed in order to make a decent, city, on the moon or on Mars or on an asteroid or something like that that don't currently exist, or if they do, if it does, it's not mature enough to be used. And I'll just list them here.

I don't think we've got time to go through all of them, but maybe we can touch on 1 or 2. Yeah. We could put whatever you like. Yep. Yeah. All 9, we need a solar farm. So we need hold on. Solar farm. Yep. Solar farm.

So so in that case, we basically need the ability to produce, solar solar panels, if we're importing them from Earth that are incredibly light, like on order the thickness of a thick sheet of paper, we can roll them up and unroll them in in situ with very low labor inputs and generate a lot of power. If it produces them on Mars, we don't care about the weight, but it's extremely hard to make solar panels, I think, in the early days on Mars.

So so we need to be able to import, you know, many, many megawatts of, of solar power on Mars because the last thing we need is for, like, the lights to flicker. If we want our humans on Mars to be highly productive, they have to have unlimited access to electricity. So we need a solar farm. We need solar better solar farm technology. I agree. That's also useful on Earth because we need to get smarter about deploying solar farms on Earth at at large scale. Right?

So Mhmm. With less less labor input. We we actually do talk we do talk about this, and we have been talking about that one component. So yes. On on Mars, we need an air miner. So that's, basically a giant machine, with a fan that sucks in air and separates it into into the different components. So on Mars, that would be carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and and water vapor primarily, a little bit of, argon as well, and separate those into their respective fractions for usage later.

And so there's not that much water vapor on Mars, but it may be easier to get water at least initially from from atmosphere, from from Mars' air than to, you know, go and find a chunk of ice somewhere and melt it. That said, point 3 is we need a water miner. So, ideally, we would be able to put a city on Mars on top of an artesian hot spring, you know, like a a subsurface liquid water that we could drill into and suck water out of, at in semi infinite quantities.

I'm talking like, if we want to create and then fill an artificial lake, that should be straightforward. I'm not talking like, oh, no. We need to recycle this bottle of water because we only have, like, you know, 400 moles of water on the entire station.

I'm talking like, we need gushes gushes of water flying to the surface and and forming snow and and just there's no shortage of it because, again, every industrial process you've ever heard of uses a lot of water, and and making it use less water is a huge pain in the ass.

And so if we don't have a a geothermally heated, source of liquid water, then the next best would probably be a glacier, you know, a large a large patch of old ice, that we can build what's called a rod well in, which is you drill a hole and then you melt the water and suck it out. But you pump in hot water and then suck out some some fresh water. You know, go going out and, like, chewing up dirt and melting the water out of it, I think is probably not scalable.

That said, point 4 is we need rock minus. So on Mars, it's probably plausible to assume that we'll be able to locate areas which have, many of the metals that we need close to the surface because, you know, on Mars, there weren't any, you know, iron age or bronze age people running around taking all the good stuff.

It's still it's still lying out there on the surface, and a lot of these materials, particularly what I call the siderophiles, which are the the iron loving ones, basically commonly found in in metal metallic meteorites, and the surface of Mars is much older than Earth, and so the surface should be strewn with the remnants of meteorites.

So if you find if you find a good a good fall somewhere, then then perhaps you can you can scoop up what you need on the surface without having to drill a huge mine shaft deep underground. But that said, you still have to be able to go out and, like, crunch up rocks and throw them in a in a giant truck and drive them to a a refinery somewhere. That was a rock quarry. That's what we did. We took 22,000 tons of stone and made them into all these different sizes. So yes. Yeah.

So so, I mean, it'd be amazing if you if you were in a place that had, like, a local source of iron and a source of aluminum and a source of, like, copper and tin and silver and lydamin and lead and, and maybe some scone with titanium in it, and then, you know, while we're at it, it'd be good if there was a gold deposit, but I mean realistically speaking, you might get lucky on say 2 or 3 of those axis, but the others, either you'll have to go further afield and set up a remote mining site or you have to import it.

So we'll we have to see that's those sorts of surveys haven't even been performed yet. So there are some candidate landing sites which have probably access to the sort of water you need, which is the most important thing, in Arcadia Planitia. But but in terms of, like, doing detailed surveys, close to the surface there hasn't been done, so we don't really know, what's on the surface be it below, like, a thin layer of dust that you can see an image from orbit.

Everything's covered in a little bit of dust, which makes figuring out what's underneath more more challenging. Okay. Point 5 is a fuel plant, so you need the ability to convert carbon dioxide and water into fuel. And by that, I mean synthetic hydrocarbons. And I've actually I founded a company to do that here on earth because I think that we should be making hydrocarbons out of c o 2 in the air rather than getting it out of the ground.

Mhmm. But, but on Mars, it's it's super important because there almost certainly isn't any hydrocarbons on Mars. Sometimes I I I tell my geologist friends that the recurrence slope linear, which is seasonal kind of seeps that we see on Mars are not water. They're hydrocarbons, but I don't think anyone believes that, least more me. But it is fun to watch their faces.

But but in any case, you need hydrocarbons because if you don't have hydrocarbons, it's not that you need them for fuel necessarily. You can have electricity, and a lot of the electricity usage on Mars will be fixed machinery, so you can just plug it in. But, you do need, hydrocarbons for plastics. You need them for chemicals.

You need them for, you know, yeah, essentially essentially all the other stuff that we like that is that is cheap and made of plastics and and things like plastics, paints, insulation, you know, anything that isn't made of metal essentially is made of hydrocarbons. We probably wouldn't be making much out of wood, at least not initially.

You could conceivably, you know, build build a series of giant domes and plant trees in them that would grow up and be, you know, giant sequoia forest on Mars and that'd be pretty neat, and you could have a a forestry division of the industry there, but at least not initially. Okay. So point 6 is life support.

So it's not that different from an air miner except it works inside the the dome or inside the, the habitat, and what it does is it it basically ingests ingests the air and it scrubs out contaminants, it scrubs out c02, it scrubs out water vapor, and and refreshes the air.

And this technology exists right now, it exists in submarines, it exists in spacecraft, it exists in specialized money applications, and and in in some sense exists in the form of air conditioning in most buildings in the west, but the sort of systems that would be reliable enough and have low enough labor requirements, maintenance requirements and stuff to work on Mars is is not really not really mature, the the technology that's used for life support in nuclear submarines that's used in spacecraft on the space station it's it's very old technology at this point it was developed in the 1980s in some cases I can't speak to the specifics specifics of nuclear submarines.

I don't know when that was developed, but but in any case, it's certainly not like, how would we do this in 2030, level level technology. Absolutely. Particularly on the space station that breaks down all the time, which is which is a nonstarter because labor is so expensive. You don't wanna spend labor, like, constantly fixing things. You want things to be a bit more reliable. It doesn't matter if they consume more power. It doesn't matter if they consume more raw materials. Right?

You can always vent waste gases outside into the environment provided you have enough input gases to top top it back up again. Okay. Point 7 is heavy machinery telerobotics. So, basically, it just says, like, giant tractors and diggers and trucks and stuff, but instead of having people in the cab driving them around, you have people either in the base or on on the earth driving them around remotely. And ideally, with enough software that you don't actually have to, like, physically drive them.

You can just task them and say, okay. Well, drive over drive over there, pick up some stuff, and then drive back here. Mhmm. And that's as much direction as they need. The reason for that is that the the the opposite the opposite kind of extreme of that is you have a a poor critter, you know, poor poor person, outside in a space suit with a shovel, you know, trying to dig a hole. Obviously, like, that's not gonna work.

So so if you want to be able to, you know, move vast quantities of dirt around and, and and build your mines, and extract the materials you need and and build build habitats and and get water and You need to have a common you need to have a sophisticated enough set of technologies to be able to manage that. And there are there are The way that's done at scale is with giant machines. Like Yes. Like, too large to fit on roads. Like, giant giant things that can just move stuff around.

The farming industry has gotten there more than the quarry industry if you wanna use. The farming industry has these class 9 harvesters, so these large harvesters, and they are run by GPS systems and autumn it's more or less automated. They'll run through the middle of the night. They don't need any lights on. A person sitting in there, they do have people sitting in there, but they're they're just doing their job all day, all night to be able to harvest.

And a class 9 harvester is one of those type, and then it feeds off to trucks. That could all be run automated. But, yes, it it's not gotten to the point that you're talking about where you can say Yeah. Go get it, come back. Well, so the main reason I think that the agricultural systems there are fully automated mines now.

There's one built in Western Australia, but the the the reason that the reason that that agricultural equipment is still able to have the person sitting in the cab aside from, like, the legal responsibility to not run anyone over, is that the per person productivity is very high because instead of having a person out there with a sickle and a scythe, you know, cutting down the the stems, they have a giant machine that's 40 feet wide, you know, eating eating all the eating all the wheat, which is great.

It's an obvious win. So it's mechanization of labor, right, rather than automation in this case. But but the other thing is that, like, the cost of agricultural labor is not that high. Like, the cost of someone to sit in the cab, a, it's not that high, and, b, it could be quite a bit higher and it wouldn't actually affect the economics of the operational that much. It's just not Yeah. It's it's a it's a municipal component. They're they they're there to make will be high.

So they're they're they're there to make sure they're there to make sure more of an observer that it makes the turn at the end properly, that the feeder that's being the trucks that are being fed are being fed properly. So Yeah. They're not there to do function. They're there to more or less supervise, and they sit in the cab as their office.

Yes. Yes. But say say the I'm I'm not exactly sure what those agricultural labors get paid, but I would say it's probably on the order of 30 to $50 an hour or something like that. It's not it's nothing significant. But on Mars on Mars, like, the per hour labor cost would never be lower than $1,000 an hour.

So, so you'd have to think very carefully about whether you actually wanna have a person, like, in the cab of each machine, you know, out out of the bloody shell, like, digging up rocks, or if you could figure out some way of taking them out of the loop. Yeah. My my point was that it's we haven't gotten there to the point of this fully automate automated telerobotic system, and the the and we haven't had that need on Earth.

I think there will be some of those changes over the next 40 years just because of population challenges. You brought up the Japanese. We have the the Chinese, challenges with their society, its population going down to a 600,000,000 or 700,000,000 people, just because of the curve and the the one child policy. And we have it around the world. We have these type of challenges. So I think the the question will be answered if you add on top of it the advances in electronics.

I think you'll and software design and and all of the other No. I don't think it requires any miracles. No. It doesn't. It just requires the the willpower, the need, and today we don't have it. Well, the other thing is, like, if you were, but, yeah, there's there's already, you know, numerous tractor companies, for example, John Deere or Caterpillar or whatever, that have active r and d divisions that are working on this sort of automation right now.

So it's like Yes. It there's already a profit motive to do it here on the earth. So I think that's, like, more of a solved problem than say, you know, a Mars Mars solar farm or something like that, which is Mine was just a matter of the timeline. It's a solved challenge, but the ubiquitous in usage of it is still, it's not a tomorrow answer. And I think it would be easy I'm not saying the problem is solved. I'm saying the development, like No. I know.

I would I would I didn't I sorry for development is a solved problem. No. I didn't say I'm sorry. That was my my miss speaking. What I meant was Yeah. It's easy for someone who doesn't understand this category of number 7 to make the assumption by saying that they're working on it.

Working on it could mean and it's very easy to go 3 years, 7 years, 10 years before we get to the point of a ubiquitous mechanism that we that insurance companies I mean, got a an insurance company will ensure that a farmer or a or a user will say, I'm willing to invest in that. The scale, scope, sky, price comes down. So it's not a it's not a even though it's an exponential growth curve for the ability to do it, it doesn't mean well, it doesn't mean it will happen.

I'll give you the example that the Boca Chica challenges with the environmental conditions and the political conditions that are happening down in Southern Texas were not part of the equation of we can do it. It was, oh, you we have to answer to something else that we didn't anticipate. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. No. It makes sense. Alright. We're we're all good. And all no worries. We're all good. I I was sitting here thinking, and it's okay that people hear it.

I I love I love your analysis and the way you've taken some constructs that I don't hear many people discuss, and I've broken it down into chunkable, positive or negative conditions that allows an individual to be able to including myself, to be able to say, okay. I got where you're going with this, for example, heavy machinery, the life support, or all of these. So I'm I I love the, direction you've taken it. So we're on to 8. Thank you. Is that it? Alright.

Yeah. So that was that was heavy heavy machinery teller robotics. And, actually, I should state, like, all of these areas are things where, like, SpaceX would have to develop them if no one else did.

But if you were a, you know, an r and d specialist in a company that already did these, it probably wouldn't hurt your business to, like, spool up an internal division that that is able to figure out how to make these work, on the moon or on Mars so that when it's time for SpaceX to do them, they don't have to vertically integrate in your industry and destroy your market share. But I I so recruit all your good people.

So I I'm going to take it, from a completely different I I love what you just said. Love it. However, what you the the belief then where you started from, it sounded if, SpaceX to I would say to many I've spoken to in the, people who are space enthusiasts or in the in the ecosystem, it is that SpaceX will deliver the answer. And instead, it should be that SpaceX is primarily it's going into different directions, but primarily a logistics company.

And you don't ask the logistics company to also create the manufacturing of the garment and to also create and to also create. What you're saying is stop looking at it, I think. Stop looking at it as that's the solution. It's that you've got an opportunity, and and that's where this space is not an industry. It's a geography.

That's where that comes from is it's not difficult for an organization to say if there's a viable ecosystem, if there's insurance that can cover it, if there is a, an economics of the study of economics and markets. If you were to say, okay. If I took 5% of my research, my r and d, or my efforts and put it towards this development, I could be a part of another ecosystem. I sell, I sell I'm gonna take one of yours. What did you say? You used it. I sell rivets, bolts. You said used another term.

Fasteners. I make fasteners. Yeah. Okay. What if you were to say, I'm gonna create a hardened steel fastener that can work in a vibration or intensity or a condition of this. If I create that, now I've got a completely different market. I still am in the fastener business, in the industry of fasteners. And I make fasteners for submarines. I make fasteners for things on land, for example, in, farming, as we just talked about.

But now we'll make fasteners for high, highly disruptive environments such as taking off and landing or, beyond earth where there could be a different type of, atmospheric condition. So Yeah. We that's the challenge in my mind in many of the in in discussion is it's not about entering the space industry. It is about because there is none. It's about working in a different geography. Does that make sense the way I said it? Yeah. I understand.

I I don't know if I would do a a high tensile, I'm sorry, like a hard hardened steel fastener. That seems like a bad idea to me, but I I was just sending a sample because their fasteners came to mind. Yeah. Yeah. It's just you want your fasteners to have good cracking properties, and and hardened steels tend to not have those. But, but, yeah, it's a good example.

The, in this case, SpaceX is able to do stuff that other companies are not, and the reason is that SpaceX is the destination of choice for a lot of, not necessarily all of, but a lot of the most ambitious engineers and the best engineers on earth. And as a result, they can make problems that are impossible merely late. And and so, you know, one of the reasons why, for example, it might be worthwhile for, say, Caterpillar who already spends $4,000,000,000 a year on r and d to be like, oh, yeah.

We're gonna make a moon moon compatible version of our of our of our trucks by making a vacuum compatible power head and upgrading the hydraulic hose connectors and switching out the paint and changing the the the quality of the lubrication used in our seals, in our, in our bearings.

And that's basically the main major substitutions you would need just like a slightly different set of parts also obtainable through standard supply chains, is that, you know, if Caterpillar is able to slap NASA or SpaceX on the side of their, on the side of their products, suddenly they have a recruiting halo and a retention halo that makes it easier for them to go and hire really good people that will help them out innovate their own competition in their commercial markets.

And and this was kind of a hypothetical, you know, 10 years ago when I first started thinking about this, but now it's pretty damn obvious that, like, essentially, Elon's companies are able to crush the competition, because they just they have an infinite an exhaustive supply of incredibly ambitious, engineers working and technicians and so on working on their products, which the other companies, if you've seen their products in detail, obviously, do not have access to quite the same same level of of, of ambition.

So, yeah, I think it's I think it's a worthwhile thing. That's kind of why I wrote this what the call you're talking words from. I'm gonna add another layer on top. In 2014 Sure. The first time that Project Moon Hot was created in Scratch in Silicon Valley, The example I used when I shared how to build the ecosystem and everything is I used Caterpillar. I used exactly Caterpillar. And, so you're you're talking exactly what I had said in 2014 in a different construct, in a in a different manner.

You've you've articulated a little bit differently tying it to SpaceX, but it's the exact same mode. It's the exact same framework that, yes, if you do what you had just mentioned, you open up different opportunities not just for beyond earth, but you also change because of that paradigm shifting thinking, because of the different questions you're asking. You'll probably, in Caterpillar, improve remote mining capabilities on Earth.

You'll probably improve some type of gear technology that could be used in cars. You'll probably be and there's an amplification of all of that innovation. That's exactly project Moonhead. It's exactly great. So you you're I'm agreeing with you a 100%. Number 8. Excellent. Well, up to a point. Number 8 is pressure structures. What did you say? What what type of structures? Point 8 is precious structures. Pressure structures.

So when it comes to, you know, in figuring out how to enclose and, essentially terraform locally, you you know, millions of square feet of land. It's not quite the problem is not like, well, how do we make a little a little cylinder like we have in the space station, or how do we dig a hole on the ground and pressurize it or something.

It's kind of like how do we, it's sort of the problem that Amazon has when they build a new distribution center, which is like how do we take this greenfield, you know, open space, and then enclose it in a giant building as quickly and cheaply as possible. And so in order to get the the surface area that they need, which is kind of on a similar scale actually. And and so the way the way I think about this is I say, well, if I don't have to, I would rather not move any dirt. Right?

Because moving dirt is expensive and time consuming. If I don't have to, I would rather not make the structure out of something really heavy and big. Right? So you could potentially, enclose a space by by building a vault out of cement and bricks or or or cement blocks or something, and then and then loading up with with, with more dirt on the outside to provide some pressure to to resist the the the explosive pressure of of pressurizing the interior.

You could certainly do that on the moon, and it might be a good idea on the moon to defend against micrometeoroids, but on Mars, they they get burned up in the atmosphere. So, so you just need to enclose some pressure.

It would be amazing if it let through natural light because then you could use the space inside for living and growing plants, and you wouldn't have to do artificial lighting, and it would be, you know, oh, so when you kind of throw all these different ideas in into the into the box, it kind of seems that a tensile structure might be the way to go, and a tensile structure, a little bit like a suspension bridge as opposed to an arch bridge, uses less material because materials are typically, 10 times stronger in intention than compression.

I know engineers listening to this are gonna get angry, but, but, you know, at at the 0th 0th level, that's certainly true, because intention, you don't have to worry about material buckling. And so you say what does a tensile pressure structure look like? And it actually looks like an air mattress.

So instead of instead of an air mattress, yeah, so an air mattress you kind of think of as having like a series of dimples, and those dimples correspond to internal pillars, that connect one side of the air mattress to the other to stop it turning into a sphere. And those pillars are not compressional, they're tensile. Right? So they're actually they're holding 10 they're holding tension. They're holding the two sides together.

You could make them out of string, whereas you could not make a compressive, compressive pillar out of out of string. It would just collapse. So but instead of instead of, like, a a complete air mattress, just imagine you've got the top half of an air mattress, and then around the edges, you kind of integrate it with some kind of membrane that's anchored into the ground.

And then in between where where the tensile columns are, you have anchors that are piles driven into the ground that allow you to transfer the load, the tensile load of of steel cables into into the ground. So essentially just making sure that the anchors end up underneath many, many tons of rock. And that way you don't have to pick up the rock and put it on top where it'll block the light.

You can just leave it where it is, and all you have to be able to do, and that's it's as easy as this, is is drive a bunch of anchors into the ground at regular intervals, probably every, you know, 100 feet or so, that are able to connect to, to steel tensile cables that then run upwards vertically to a transparent plastic, you know, reinforced, perfluoroethylene, I think it's PTFE, membrane, which is materials routinely used in in building flexible, roof structures here on earth because it's UV UV resistant and water resistant.

And, and you could reinforce it with, with some kind of fiber fiber material to to prevent material creep over time, which is also a standard standard production practice here on earth for, boat sales and things like that.

And and so the nice thing about that is that, you know, the marginal cost to enclose an additional, you know, 1,000 square feet of land is really, really low because there there only needs to be a, a small, you know, small anchor, a couple of anchors put in, and then and then a membrane that literally weighs a couple of kilograms per square meter, put in place instead of, you know, you want another 1,000 square feet of lead.

Well, now you gotta dig a whole 50 feet deep and a 1,000 square feet in area, or now you have to, now now you have to, like, figure out how to how to produce, you know, a 10 10 meter thick layer of, of cement and and dirt, in order to cover that over.

And the nice thing about PTFE is it's transparent, so you can you can get light through it as well, which means you can you can grab plants and stuff inside, and you can get greenhouse greenhouse heating of the interior as well, which will be important. And the nice thing about the tensile structure is that is is that if you wanna make the roof high, you just need a bit more steel to make the cables longer.

Mhmm. And so in principle, you could have, you know, essentially this is vaulted structure with, regularly spaced vertical cables, looking more or less like a Gothic cathedral. And the ceiling instead of being a rock or a stone vault, would be, you know, essentially a transparent window. And I'm not saying it would work flawlessly.

You'd have to have, you know, repair mechanisms and machinery and and and internal man manifolds and bulkheads in in case of leaks and catastrophic failure and and testing and so on. But this is why this is technology that needs to be developed and prototyped here on earth.

There are already pressure supported structures here on earth, so you can have like a pressure supported, gym roof or something like that, but the pressure difference across those membranes is much much lower here on earth than it would be on Mars where you'd need it you need to actually pressurize the interior so you could breathe and the same the same would go on the moon if you build 1 on the moon.

On the moon it's a bit more of a challenge to have a tensile structure because of again micrometeoroid impacts, but and and also thermal cycling doing this step.

But, but, you know, you could you could certainly I could I could imagine, for example, having a a vaulted ceiling where where the the the roof part is covered, is covered with covered with dirt to to provide the shielding, but then the the the the perimeter of the area has has kind of a vertical wall that is exposed, which is which is less vulnerable to impacts.

And also if you are building on the pole of the moon, then then all the stuff you'd wanna look at, which is like the ecliptic, the sun, the earth, would be, you know, within a few degrees of the horizon anyway. It wouldn't really be overhead. Mhmm. So, you know, just some just some random ideas. And I don't I don't claim to have, like, the final word on this, but but certainly if I'm thinking like, well, you know, I'm in the business of of encapsulating millions and millions of square feet.

I want my roof to be really, really light and really, really cheap. So I think tensile tensile plastic membrane is probably, instructive there, but that's it certainly needs to be developed. Mhmm. And then the the 9th point is surface activity suits, which are it's a fancy word for space suits that you'd use on the surface of a planet.

And actually there was just NASA just announced a $3 a half $1,000,000,000 development contract with, Axiom and Collins, I think, aerospace, 2 two private companies in the US to build the next generation of spacesuits for Artemis after their own internal programs kind of flamed out in various ways. But, basically, spacesuits are really complicated. They're really hard to make.

There's been probably a dozen different different kinds designed over the years, and and they're all really, really suck. No. They're incredibly expensive, but they they all really, really suck in their own way as well. Some of them suck in different ways, but, but, like, they're just extraordinarily limited in in what they're able to do, and and and what they have to do is is it also extremely broad. They have to do all kinds of really complicated things in order to work properly.

So, and and just to to I think it's just for this. I've spoken we've spoken to, not I, we. We have spoken to several, people engaged in this type of activity, and you're looking at a $12,000,000 suit, 2000 hours to make a glove, the there's an interchangeable like 1 person for a full year. Right. And that then there's a there is but it's multiple disciplines, so it's even more than that.

They're Yeah. Then the way it's modulized is you have your hands fit your hands and your your lengths of arms, but bodies in cases are interchangeable. So you don't need to have 12,000,000 per person, but when you get to a certain scale, you're actually reusing different components to be able to fit that individual. But there's a guy, and I think it's I think it's University of North Dakota. He's working on a completely different structure.

He his goal is to take that 2000 hours and bring it down to a a cost variable that will be 200 to $500 to make those gloves as compared to the the numbers that we're talking about here. And it is a huge challenge, and I bring up Paragon because they just purchased the, a spacesuit company because they that's just on my mind. So we've talked to a few of them in turn as to what progress they've made, and you can't have 50,000 people or if you did need 20,000 suits.

Just think of that supply chain challenge. It's just Well, I think in practice, most people would not be in spacesuits most of the time. I agree with you because, you know, they'd they'd live inside the terrarium, and the terrarium would be enormous, you know, like, 10 miles wide kind of thing.

But if you're having a 100 if you have a 100000 or 200000 people, and you need 20,000 suits, and you need and you add a and then you have the emergency evacuation suits, There's a complexity to these numbers no matter how you play it. Yeah. I'm saying, like, probably everyone have their own suit. They might not use it all that much. But, yes, you don't wanna be $12,000,000 each. So this the suits need to be cheaper, which means they need to be easier to make.

Ideally, they'd be field maintainable. But they also need to work better. I mean, like, current spacesuits are super heavy and and super hard to use, and and so, you know, that's why one of the one of the reasons the image of, like, an astronaut digging a hole with a shovel wearing a spacesuit is ridiculous because because like wearing a space suit is like having a person giving you a bear hug trying to stop you do what you're doing the whole time while girls are carrying them.

Yeah. And also making you like hot and sweaty and eating all your oxygen for you.

So so I think you know if you if you go to if you go to the the museum at Catalina, Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles where Jacques Cousteau and his friends basically did all the development for scuba diving, you can see like they went through probably 30 or 40 or 50 different iterations in terms of how scuba systems were designed to the point where now they're basically you can rent them and they cost a couple $100 and they'll work more or less flawlessly for an entire career and they have to work flawlessly, and and they can be operated by idiots as I can attest, and and they they work really nicely, but the problem with spacesuits is that spacesuits are about as sophisticated in terms of the development of modern scuba systems as like, antique diving bell or something would be.

They're just like, we just haven't gone through those 50 iterations of technology yet to get to something that actually works really, really well, and is and is usable and cheap. And so, you know, a lot of work is needed to be done there. And you can be really clever and maybe maybe skip 10 of those generations by by being super clever.

But but at the end of the day, I think we just need to, like, serious money needs to be invested in, like, solving this problem long term so that the suit is less like a spacecraft that you strap on and more like a pair of Carhats, you know, like like, you know, heavy overalls that you put on and basically does does the job for you. I I agree completely.

Yeah. I I'm trying to look at because of the the Zoom stopping, I'm I I have 3 computers in front of me right now, I'm trying to look up the university. I think it was University of North Dakota or Pablo de Leon, I believe is his name. And he is working on a new type of approach to addressing exactly what you're talking about, creating an iteration where you don't you you can have a repairable suit.

You don't need the the thousands of hours to create just a glove and bringing down that cost variable. So there are people out there working on this. It's we're we're far from it as you've said, 30 to 40 iterations for Jack Cousteau. We're we're not far enough along to make that cost effectiveness, and that's your number 9. So it makes sense. Yeah. So that's the that's the 9th the 9th kind of requirement. You know, I've got some random ideas there, but they're probably not very good.

But, yeah, it's it's certainly something that needs to be done. It needs to be done sooner rather than later. And, you know, especially if you wanna have humans being able to go outside and walk around even just, you know, for fun, if not for work. You know, you could you could imagine a situation where you have giant airlocks and you bring all the machines in and you work on them in a short sleeves environment and and no one ever goes outside.

And that's more or less how submarines are operated, for example. Yep. Although some submarines do carry divers, but those divers are not typically used for maintaining the submarine. But, yeah, I mean, like, for example, like the Russian typhoon class strategic ballistic nuclear missile submarine, has a operating depth of 900 meters. So even if they wanted to, they wouldn't be able to they wouldn't be able to put, times on the You're not gonna put a person outside to be doing some repair work.

Yeah. Not not the atmospheres. Our our blink our blinker is out, and I need you to go out and change the bulb. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Can you can you please go and repeat the letters on the side of the hole? Right. It's it's wearing off a little bit more like anglofission Right. Squints and things. Yeah. We're gonna come up I just have a whale dive down that day. Yeah. We're gonna come up in a in about 2 months. We wanna look good.

So can you please put a coat of that special paint on to make us look a little shinier when we get up? Yes. It's not gonna happen. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, some whales dive that deep, actually, which is pretty extraordinary, like, from a physiological point of view.

But but, yeah, it's it's but, yeah, I think I think having the ability to operate out outs out outside of enclosures and outside of vehicles is, you know, it's just important on a psychological basis as well as, you know, potentially it's a technical shortcut. But the current generation of spaces is not up to the challenge. Not up to it. While you were going through this list, one of the questions that came to mind, and yes.

You probably heard or at least because you've listened to enough podcasts, you probably heard some of the things that I've said. Why in your head do you, not should we as humans and the why do you work on this? Why do you think it should be done? Why do you see the value on it? Because you you thought a lot about it. What what is it for you? Well, it's kind of a hobby for me for a long time.

I've I spend a lot less time thinking about it now than I used to, but we all need escapism, and, you know, I was I've always been really inspired by, science fiction, stuff. I actually met Robert Zubrin when I was 9 years old and and read his books and was like, that'd be neat. And then, and then when I came of age, technically, I decided to read them with my, you know, red red pen in hand and redo all these calculations and and see what I thought about them for myself.

And, you know, they're mostly it's mostly, like, on the right track. It's fine. Like like, he and I, we we we know each other collegially now as well, but, which is kind of amazing. Like, as a as a kid growing up in a remote part of Australia, like, kinda getting to meet these people, but also, like, what SpaceX is doing I find super inspiring. And and Sifero, you know, kinda started out trying to reverse engineer what they were doing on the inside, trying to anticipate what they're up to.

And then, and then, you know, I was lucky enough to get to meet some of the people involved and and, sometimes they'd ask me questions and I'd think about it for a while and write a blog or write a book about it and and, see if I can just, you know, in in my own way, you know, improve the quality of the discourse and, you know, increase the signals noise ratio and and and maybe even potentially have an insight or 2 that might help.

The, I I love the the framework or the the way you approach many of the questions that you're you you bring up. And the the last one that I I've saved for the end just because I thought it was because of the way in which you speak and not the the accent, but the way in which you frame things. Is it your belief or desire, or is it just a a challenge that you this escapism and hobby that are you we need to Mars is the deck the next place, and that's the solution, and that's where we need to go.

Is moon to you? And I'm trying to say this is how do you say? As sterile as possible? Because I'd like to hear where you're coming from, if that makes sense. Well, I mean, I think for a long time, there was this kind of zero sum mentality, driven by senior bureaucrats at NASA and and sometimes presidential administrations, that would kinda say, we go to Mars, go to the moon, we go to Mars, go to the moon.

And actually we've gone to either of them, and we're not really on track to go to either of them at this rate. But the nice thing about Starship is that it lets you go to both and at basically the same marginal cost because, you can only go to Mars every 2 years, so in the in between time you may as well go to the moon.

And and the thing is the starship means that you can build a base on the moon that looks and feels and operates like a large Antarctic station, like, motor station with a 1000 people without much difficulty. Right? Whereas without a starship, even a base of, like, 4 people on the moon that's occupied for 3 weeks of a year is basically impossible. Right? Just it it you know, people have been trying to square that circle for for for decades and they haven't solved it.

It's one of these things where like I was describing before in the context of techno technological and population collapse, but but in this case it's it's it's slightly less dire, but even so you say well we have a system we wanna build it well it weighs too much, well we'll make it weigh less we'll take out some of the parts. But now, you know, in order to make the remaining parts work well, they have to weigh more, so they still weigh too much. Okay. We'll make it really, really clever.

Now it costs too much. You know? And and the the technical phrase is the system does not close. You know? Once once you once you kind of, you know, go in this merry-go-round of, like, updating all the requirements for each different subsystem as you change the previous one in order to solve the previous problem, you know, hopefully, over time, you converge on a solution that works.

And that that's more or less how aircraft are designed, but but in the case of, like, Moonbasis with rockets and existing budgets and existing technical suites and existing levels of ambition, it doesn't work. But with Starship, it can work. It can you know, that a lot of those problems go away. So so I think we can do we can do both the moon and we can do Mars.

I think, it makes more sense to try and do a big city on Mars than on the moon, but you could easily do a big city on both places if you really wanted to. If you had to pick 1, you'd you'd do Mars. And I think the really compelling thing is if you can solve or at least get close to solving the Autarky problem, the self sustaining problem on Mars, you can solve it in Iceland easily. Right? By by extension from our discussion. Right?

And if Iceland is able to be technologically self reliant, for everything, that means basically any city on earth like, you know, Columbus, Ohio can be self reliant. Birmingham, Alabama can be self reliant. And I think that, you know, it would certainly have complications as far as geopolitics and and and so on go, if if the smaller cities were able to be self reliant.

But I think it would be a net a huge net positive, because, you know, essentially, you you alleviate scarcity, for for all humans everywhere. And we think about what do we want our future to look like. It's a lot more like the Star Trek where there's where there's no scarcity, really. It's the the age event the age of Self scarcity. The age of it, which is something that you've discussed with other people on this on this podcast.

Yeah. But, you know, how do we get to how do we get the age of infinite? We need the ability to more or less seamlessly with relatively low overhead and input and complexity, convert generic materials, dirt and, you know, stuff you can find in the backyard essentially, and solar power into any material you could possibly want.

And, you know, right now we're at the we're at the point as a civilization with by by building these extremely large organizational structures like nation states essentially, we're able to organize very very large groups of people to build machines that are extremely specialized and high performance and, you know, think about, you know, a 787 aircraft or something like that, basically miracle miracle machine, And, and that's great, but at the same time, we also need to make efforts to compactify the industrial stack so that we don't run out of people.

You know? Yep. If we want to go on making amazing things and more amazing things and more capable things, we need to figure out how to do more with fewer people. And that also means that we can have greater diversity. You know, like, right now, there's really only 2 major aircraft manufacturers, like large large aircraft manufacturers. There's there's Boeing and Airbus.

But if Birmingham, Alabama is able to, quote, unquote, make everything, you know, with their own local materials and energy supply, then then we're no longer kind of stuck in this world where where, like, tiny oligopolies control major, you know, major aspects of factors of production. We we may not want, you know, Tampa, Florida to have the resources to build their own nuclear weapons, but, you know, that's kind of one of the complications.

But, and and certainly some some degree of regulation will be necessary to avoid making aircraft that crash and kill everyone, But our current system I like how you put that item. I like how you use Tampa. You didn't use, cans. You didn't use Melbourne. You didn't Well, Canberra. Canberra for starters should just be walled off and, you know, but the I said the tidying shade over the top. So stop them getting power. Yeah. That's I'm I'm from Australia. No. No. I mean No.

That's why I said it because that's why I use Glance. That's why I use Melbourne. What makes That's Brisbane. What makes the great cities great? You know, what makes the great cities great? You know, and and and would it would it make them less or more great if they're able to do more stuff, you know, within their own limits, and and their people there were able to have access to cheaper materials and cheaper energy. And and that's kind of what is possible. Right?

If you can build a city on Mars with a 1000000 people that is self sustaining, and to be fair, those people are highly trained, like but it wouldn't be that it wouldn't be a stretch to do a 10,000,000 here on earth, and that it just make a huge difference, I think. And I I don't know if you realize that, but you quite literally took using the using the innovations, the paradigm shifting thinking, and the endeavor, and turning it back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.

Because we're not just about humans and project moon. You actually just did that. I don't know if you consciously thought about it, but you took exactly what our framework is.

Solve for x, add those complexities in there, create the network effect that happens, accelerate the innovations, create enough of them to be able to reduce the cost to load the the access to it, then translate that back to a different human existence or a different planetary existence over a period of time, which also accounts for behavioral, political, economic conditions that will allow for a different future. You you just said it. I don't know if you did realize that.

Well, it it could be said that I've been on a podcast once or twice before and did my homework and stay on stay on brand. Stay on point. Yes. But yeah. Stay on. I'll make it look accidental. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. See no. It's it's fascinating, and I I've gotta say that when I first, you have an unbelievable breath of knowledge, and there's a lot of guests we've had who've had this. And you brought up, Zubrin, fantastic interview only because I don't hear him do a lot of moon type related work.

He's the you'd know that interview went in in that direction. I don't think I planned. I don't know if he planned it. No. It was good. It was good because Zubrin obviously has done a lot of talks over the years and a lot of them are publicly available. But, but, you know, it's it's fairly unusual to get him, talking or most of these people are professional communicators kind of, talking about stuff that you haven't heard before, one way or another.

And, and so, yeah, I I I credit that that interview and and the questions to kind of really digging into some of the questions that I think I think, you know, doctor Zivran would enjoy, thinking about some more probably if he It was it was it was fascinating. Day to day. It's much Yeah. Some of these have been and, Jeffrey Mamber Jeffrey Mamber's Yes.

Interview was fascinating to hear some of the things that people saying I I didn't know this about him, but his his construct and his belief structure, where it comes from and how they've he's evolved is fascinating. I I'm going to say that Casey, when Andreas in the Andreas in, Germany had said you were top on the list that gave me that sign of approval that we needed to have you on, and I'm going to I know this is public. It doesn't make a difference.

We're all working on what we're doing together, is, if you're willing to explore and see, most of what we do is not out in the general public. You know that. Most people say, I I don't even know about you. I can't find anything on you. That's okay. We have, Dan Dunbacher, who's running the he's the executive director of the American Institute For Astronautics and Aeronautics. There's nothing out there, but I see all these people you're talking to.

I'd like to expand an offer that we'd spend a little bit of time because I think your questioning, the way you think is is amazing. It's incredible. And you you have a you have such a depth of and breadth of knowledge that if you wanna explore more with Project Moon Hut, and it's not Project Moon Hut per se as you've heard, there's more. And I'd love to see how not a full time job. I'm not looking at that in terms of the way I'm thinking.

I'm thinking of I believe that you'd be able to find opportunities. We're here to solve. We're not looking for people to tell us we can't do it. We're not because that's okay. Do something else. We are not your game. That's fine. But we're looking for people like yourself who have the ability to look at things completely differently, and I I I'm fascinated by the way you think. So, that's very kind of you. I'm I'm, of course, curious to learn more and, and, very, very happy to be asked.

So we'll see if we can we can fit it in. No. We'll we'll we'll fit it in. It's not it's not a rush type thing, but you've heard. We have KPMG, Deloitte, PWCEY, White and Case, Maples Group. These are law firms, accounting firms. We have JPMorgan Private Banking took us on. Carta's doing things for us, which is the this the, you'd you heard the name I'm assuming, because where you're located. I used them. Yeah. Yeah. You've used them.

We have, we have companies that you would never have anticipated working with us because their skill set is not beyond earth. Their skill set is something you need. You need to set up an account. You need j and you can get JPMorgan Private Banking to help you, not because it's that. It's the they're giving us the suite of services. And we have Microsoft gave us a 100 seats because we're a 501c3. We're looking for different types of individuals who can help us create a new future.

And it's something that it sounds like, even with your answer that you gave, is you have you have children. You're looking for your children to have a newer different life, and we're hoping that tomorrow will be a better day. And that's the 6 mega challenges which you've also heard about. So, again, I fascinated. I absolutely loved having you. I I appreciate meeting you. And so I wanna thank everybody out there in the world today who is listening in.

I I sincerely hope you learned something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Again, Project Moon Hut Foundation is we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut. We're not about settlement, colonization, science.

We're about changing the the future through that to the accelerate development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to take the in the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking, and then to turn everything from that to turn the endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. And website, videos, top right hand corner, project moon hot dot org. You will see they're not project moon hot.

You're not if you watch them, you're not you're not gonna walk away and say, oh my god. I understand it. That's what we use as the intro. If you're interested in taking the next step and talking to us, we have people texting us, working with us all over the world from from Asia to, EMEA, which is Europe, Middle East, Africa, all through the Americas. So we're looking for you to for anybody listening in. So with you, Casey, what's the best way to get hold of you?

Usually, Twitter is a a safe place to find me. So I'm at cjhendmer, Charlie Juliet hotel alpha November delta Mike echo Romeo, on, on Twitter. You can find me there. Oh, that's perfect. And for any of you who are listening in, I'd love to connect with you. You could reach me at [email protected]. You can connect with us at at project moon hut on Twitter or at goldsmith if you wanna get me directly. LinkedIn, we have a small group. We're we're not a big marketing group. We're not trying to.

We're trying to find the right people who can help us. We are on Facebook, Instagram. So there's many different ways that anybody can reach out to us. So that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite. Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes, which in turn have led to the renaming of periods into ages.

You personally just experienced the information age, and boy, what a ride it's been. Now consider you may be right now living through a transitional page into a new age, the age of infinite.

An age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, but by a redefined lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources, which will be possible through a new construct where the moon and Earth, as we call it, Mearth, will create a new ecosystem and a new economic system that will transition us into this infinite future. The ingredients for an amazing sci fi story that will come to life in your lifetime.

This podcast has been 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. We were named by NASA. Through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and paradigm shifting thinking from that endeavor back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species.

If you're interested, there are videos in the top right hand corner at www.projectmoon dot org where you can learn a little bit more. So on to our program. Today, we're gonna be exploring a fantastic topic, unpacking the interactions between environmental hostility and technology dependence. And we have with us an amazing guest, and I will do a a short bio and then share a little bit about why he's on. Casey Hanmer. Hi, Casey. How are you? I'm very well. Thank you.

K. Casey is the founder of TerraForm Industries, an organization which scrub c o two from the atmosphere and uses renewable hydrogen converted to natural gas. Casey has also worked with, worked at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Hyperloop 1, and he has an unbelievable PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics. Now why Casey? I had watched I had read an article about, Beyond Earth, and it was incredibly well written. And I don't tend to see them.

I see there's a lot of hyperbole, a lot of hype, a lot of misdirection, but it was so well written that I reached out to Casey, and at the same time, I reached out one of our team members in Germany, Andreas. And he wrote back, Casey is at the top of my list. And he respected him. And if our team members feel that way, I we had to have Casey on.

So before we get into the actual content, let me share with you that it's a miss there's a belief that Casey and I or any of the guests have spoken about what we're going to talk about today. We have not. We have not had we had one meeting, and in that interaction, what we did is we created a title. So here it go. This is the process. We select the guest. The guest watches or listen to some Project Moon Hut material. They might have listened to, of the videos or content.

Then there's a call where, for example, Casey and I decide on a title. We don't really go into the topic, just the title. Then and that can last up to 3 hours. When we're done, Casey goes on his own, and I don't hear anything until today. I have no clue where Casey's going to go. So right now in front of me, I have 12 pieces of blank paper. I take notes during the entire program. He and I don't see each other, so I don't see his reactions.

He doesn't see mine, And we're both or all of us are going to learn together from Casey. So let's get started. Casey, do you have an outline for us? I do. And you give it to me, please. Okay. If you ask so nicely. I have, round about 8 points here. Okay. Some of them will be pretty quick, and some of them potentially could spool out into 20 hours of conversation. I'll just see how we go. As I I as long as you've got enough to drink, we're good. I think I'll be okay.

So the first point is let's be humble. The second point is, and you can let me know when you're ready as well. I'm good. Number 2. Is is the vision of rugged self reliance and its limitations. Vision of rugged? Are you g g e d? Yeah. Yep. That's correct. Self reliance and its limitations. Point 3 is autac y. A u t a c y? K y. A r k y? I'm not talking. Never heard of that. 4? Don't worry. We'll define that. 4 is is labor scarcity. 5 is environmental hostility and population stability.

6. Are you ready for 0.6? Yeah. 6 is development prioritization. 7? The Iceland case study. Great. And then point 8 is depending on what we've already covered, we might wanna talk about Starship and the 9 missing technologies. Also. Alright. K. So let's start with number 1. So let's be humble. It's kind of the mandatory disclaimer.

And even though people have been writing more or less seriously about living in space for almost a 100 years, it's important to remember that, humanity as a whole knows almost nothing about this problem. Yes. We have operated the space station for a couple of decades, but the total number of people who've lived in space is fewer than a1000. Many more people have lived at the south pole, for example.

We know a lot more about living at the south pole than it's than than in than in space, and no one has lived on the moon for any length of time. No one has lived on Mars. No one has ever built a city outside of the earth. Very, very few cities have even been built in anything but ideal environments on earth. So I think it's important that when we begin this conversation, we we kind of make it explicit that we don't really know what we're talking about. We don't have any direct experience.

We can take our best guess, but we have to recognize that if these cities in space are ever built, the people who build them will necessarily know millions of times more about about the process than than we can possibly hope to know by speculating, even if, as we were doing today, we're using a lot of math while we speculate. Actually, I am gonna what you just said is I I think I shared with you that I'm not a space enthusiast. I I don't wake up in every morning and wanna learn and go and do.

And this these these points, I didn't know about the South Pole. I think that's brilliant add on that gives that, polar view. I've always said we've had more well, I think it's no more than 13 people beyond Earth at any given time. When someone says they wanna have 50,000 people in 8 years or a a huge city, I'm thinking, do you know how long it takes to build a building on Earth? I mean, seriously, how long does it take to build a city on Earth? Well, David, we're gonna do it different.

So the my point is I love what you've just said because you articulated it very succinctly, and it's exactly what I have thought about is that we we're making the idea bigger than or the prospects bigger than the possibilities are are there today. So brilliant. You did those you did really well. Thank you. I mean, there are a handful of, kind of examples of, instances where where humans in large organizations have done enormous logistic kind of miracles in very short periods of time.

And the the 2 that come to mind would be the Berlin Airlift, and also Operation Overlord, during d day, in which, you know, quite literally tens of thousands of people and and millions of tons of stuff were moved around in a very short period of time, sometimes with very little planning. Just for the sake, I I know with the Berlin air airlift, but what was the scope and scale?

I can't remember off the top of my head, but the the I think they flew more than a1000000 flights, and the the average cargo per flight was on the order of 5 tons, because these were pretty pretty early aircraft like c 47, DC 3. So, yeah, basically, fairly primitive stuff, and and that was over 16 months. And there were earlier airlifts, and there have been airlifts since then as well, but it was just kind of a yeah.

Over a period of months, the the whole process became a very well oiled machine. They pioneered things like instrument landing, so they could maintain the flight rate even as as the weather got bad, for example. That's where it came out of?

Well, I mean, people have been trying instrument landing for a long time, but that was the first time it was kind of crucial, because the one of the fundamental limitations they had was the number of aircraft and number of pilots, and so they couldn't really afford to have them crash. And and, of course, they well, I I don't wanna get any detail. We'll get No. But I I it's cool because I It's actually I've not heard I've not heard videos on on the Berlin Airlift.

So The the the interesting, the first thing that came to mind soon as you said it was, yes, but it was we weren't. We were we already understood a little bit about lift. We already understood we had we'd already flown. So this was the Well, yeah, we've done World War 2. So So in in many ways, the structures that existed to to organize these things had not been completely demobilized yet. This is 1948. So, yeah.

I mean, I I think the Soviets were trying to to blockade Berlin, to force capitulation of of the part of Berlin that was still controlled by Western forces, and was otherwise surrounded by by the Soviets, and they, you know, unfortunately did not, or unfortunately for them did not succeed. But, you know, I mean, as part of this process, for example, an entire new airport was built, so it was like kind of a a big a big big procedure. Anyway, I don't I don't wanna get sidetracked by Berliner.

It it gave me enough because I didn't know enough about what you said was brilliant, and then you added an example of it, which is perfect. So I love it. Thank you. Yeah. But there are actually people out there, who've done some amazing amazing, work in recent videos and stuff on YouTube on it. There's a guy called Real Engineering on YouTube. I think I think he's done a whole series on it.

And, and you could maybe get them as a guest, and they could talk about it because, like, part of the reason that that I said, let's talk about interactions between environmental hostility and technology dependence is that I could probably make a claim that that relatively few people would have more insight on this topic than me right now. Because I've gone to the effort of writing, like, dozens of blogs that very few people have ever read on it.

Whereas, you know, basically, at this point, the world is full of people who know a lot more about space than I do on almost any topic. And and that's and that's great. The the challenge is is the interconnectedness of their ideas to a realistic time frame and possibilities and to strip out the hype and bring it down to something that someone can work with. And that's one of the challenges. That's why I liked what I read what you wrote because it was so pragmatic.

You weren't trying to prove that we can do we can fly to another solar system. You were saying, this is the engine, this is the way it works, this is the possibilities, and it was just so well written. So, yeah, the real engineering, if you know those people, please feel free to connect. I don't, but I wish I did. Well, it's okay. I will I will tell them that you said something, and they'll say, oh, Casey. He's the guy. I wish.

So let's jump on to point 2 then, which is the vision of rugged self reliance and its limitations. So, you know, basically, a lot of people have written stuff about, I'm gonna say going to live on Mars, it could also be like going to live on the moon. Backed up, you know, Hyland, and various science fiction authors, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote an absolutely beautiful trilogy about living on Mars. Buzz Aldrin's written a couple of books about about living on Mars.

Obviously, Robert Zubrin who's been on the show, has has written quite extensively. I think he's written 3 or 4 books now about, about, you know, basically living on Mars and building up cities and towns and stuff there. And whenever I read these books, I always kind of delve into the details that I'm like, okay, so what what what's really happening? What is what is the manifest for the first cargo?

Like, let's let's dig into details here, and and actually, as far as that goes, with with some exceptions, a lot of the a lot of the writing involved kind of, use a metaphor or or kind of extrapolates from a vision of, you know, the rugged the rugged pioneer, you know, on the on the frontier. And, and that the kind of canonical example that makes sense, in the context of American culture is this somewhat fictitious historical analog of 20 acres and a mule.

And the idea is that, you know, you can have someone who's who's very clever, who's a generalist, who's able to do many things. They have a small patch of land. They have a they have an animal to do some work for them, and they're able to eke out an existence, you know, kind of on the on the on the margins, but they're they're incredibly rugged and and resourceful. And I think this is it's a nice image, but it it fundamentally does not work in space.

There's there's no way that a city on Mars could possibly be bootstrapped, from something like 20 acres and a mule or maybe, you know, 3 small domes and a robot or something like that into something that that is that is self reliant. And, I'm not quite sure, like, the best way to illustrate this, but but I mean, it's it's probably instructive to to point out that, for most of the American pioneers, the 20 acres they were farming was was already farmed by indigenous Americans.

Like, it had already been cultivated for 1000 of years. So there wasn't any question as to whether the environment was livable by humans with, in this case, you know, less advanced, metallurgy than, say, the European settlers. So that wasn't really a question. And and and in fact, if you watch TV shows like man versus wild with bagrileus or whatever, that's probably dating me at this point.

You can see that, like, there's these environments that that that bear will get dropped off in, but all the environments, almost all of them are basically fundamentally, hospitable to human life. And and in fact, there are some places on earth, like, where we evolved in Africa and and maybe Hawaii, where where you could drop someone with almost no resources and they could live indefinitely, you know, get stranded on a desert island and live on coconuts or something, without dying.

But, you know, just even on earth, it's not that hard to find an environment that is so hostile that that if you drop Bear Gryllis off, he would die instantly, and then that would be the end of the show. Put him in a place that he's definitely gonna win at. Yes. Well, in this case, definitely gonna lose. It's very short show and and no no advertising and and no follow on season because he wouldn't make it.

But, like, if if you drop Bear Gryllis 10 meters under the water and he wasn't able to surface, that would be the end of the show. You know? Like, humans can't live underwater. Some animals can, but humans can't, just by themselves. If you if he was dropped underground, you know, that's it. If he was dropped 10 meters above the ground, and he would fall and die, if he was dropped on the top of a tall mountain without any equipment. You know?

And I think he has done a couple of kind of snow traverse shows and things over the years, but but in general, like, part of the reason that we we kind of admire alpinists and mountain climbers is that it's just, like mountains are not friendly places to be. It's it's actually super common even even for professional climbers to die while they're while they're climbing mountains. And then you have deserts, windy places, remote places, places no food or water.

And then even, you know, even like places that are technologically supported if you lack the right knowledge. So for example, if Bear Gryllis was stranded, in the cockpit of an airplane, he didn't know how to fly, you know, he wouldn't last very long. So I think it's important to point out that even on earth, we have a huge variety of environments that we are unable to survive without severe, like huge quantities of technological dependence.

You know, and just to make that explicit, all the environments that I just mentioned humans live and work in every day, but they do so in tunnel boring machines and submarines and boats and airplanes and helicopters and, or with climate controlled skidoos. I mean, I live in Southern California, which is, you know, much more lush than it would have been if we hadn't dug giant tunnels to bring water in from color to to water the area here.

So, you know Well, to add to California and Florida effectively pretty terrible. Yeah. To add to your list, I was having one of the conversations we were having with our team, and I was describing the challenges, not in the way you articulate a little bit differently.

And the conversation came to the point where this guy had said, do you know trying to what the the moon hut and our construct and what we've put together and the designs and the plans, he said it would probably be more difficult to build at the bottom of the Marianas Trench than it would be comparable to build on the moon. I don't know if that's an exact agree with that. You would agree? Yeah. Yeah. That's I would agree with that.

The the just just like the Mars or the moon is not the most hostile environment you can imagine. You know, it'd be much much more difficult to build, you know, a facility, for example, inside an active volcano or on the surface of the sun. Just just to kind of give 2 examples of places that are being much much more difficult. And that's what I and because he said to me, I think you're the first person I've ever run into who considers the moon the 8th continent.

You're not looking at it in the same way that I've met other people. You see it as a a project, a construction project on a different place with a different set of parameters. But if you were going to do it, and this is these are the words we were talking about. If you were gonna do it in us on the, poles, you'd have one condition.

If you have to do it in the middle of a desert where you didn't have any airlifting capabilities, be another, but even if you did, try to build in the middle of the Amazon rainforest in the middle, that's challenging. But then he added, and the Marianas trench would be more difficult. And I said, exactly. This is a this is a construction project, and you have to look at it to say it is not the the most damaging or most difficult place to build. So yes. Again Yeah. Nailing exactly that.

Mhmm. Yeah. So I think the key, like, the key takeaway from this point is that, it's not really possible to build, environment on on the moon or on Mars or in anywhere in space. And this is gonna sound painfully obvious, but but it does not depend on on, like, very advanced technology. And so you think, well, you know, even, like, 19 eighties level technology is probably not good enough. So it's like super super new stuff, like stuff we've just barely invented is necessary to make this work.

And that's, you know, that's interesting. Right? Because So can I ask a behavioral question? Yes, please. Why do you believe and, again, I I don't put myself in the classification. I'm not an enthusiast. I don't watch all I don't wait for the next launch. I know what's going on. I I have a lot of other things going on. I'm always surprised at how the beyond Earth ecosystem and I think I shared this with you. Space is not an industry. It's a space is not an industry. It's a geography.

So when I use beyond Earth, it means anything beyond the above our atmosphere. Why is there so much I'm gonna try to be nice here. Delusional thinking, I'm trying to be nice, but why is there such a a disconnect between the realities of what you just said and the realities of what we're discussing here? Like, we can we are this is easy or this is hard space so are. It's easy, but we're going to put 50,000 people in a, in a Van Braun or an O'Neil Sidlander. We're going to travel and live on Mars.

And it makes it as if there's a whole missing segment of the you know, it's a 20 step it's a 20 chapter book, but we're gonna cut out numbers 2 through 12 and just concentrate on we're here, now we're there. Why? Do you do you have any, your perception of why? Well, I think for the Anelians and and a lot of other people that kind of get interested in space science fiction, it's a science fiction writer's prerogative to suspend disbelief and make it seem believable and and possible.

And, and so and a lot of people come to identify with these kind of alternative worlds, as places you know, it's basically fantasy. It's like a it's a place where people can be different and and, you know, you know, you know, myself as an example, traditionally kind of shy, introverted, you know, 8 year old or 10 year old or something could could be a different kind of person there and and not suffer the same kind of psychic limitations.

But, so it's very attractive to think that it would be, quote, unquote, easy to go to Mars, and then on Mars, I would be less of a loser or something. But, you know, I think it is it's it's necessary to to kind of realize that if you are serious about doing more than fantasy fantasizing about about these possibilities that you kind of get real about the the real the challenges that you encounter. That's where that's the disconnect for me.

It's that you you understand there's fantasy, you see the realities, and yet I hear some people you know, I hear the names, they're out there, and they're professing things that I can't logically figure out a plus b plus c or even any mathematical formula equals x. It doesn't work. And I don't know how a person who's skilled in these disciplines would not make that connection. Is it just the desire to have something more? Well, I think, you have to be pretty optimistic to try this at all.

Like, if you think about the actual industry of making spacecraft, for example, No. It's it's very unusual for a spacecraft to be completed under budget and under and, like, before schedule. Right? Like, ahead of schedule. And there there could be a couple of different reasons for that, but but one of them basically comes down to optimism in that, you know, we always think that it'll be easier than it will be, especially the first the first few times you do it.

So I think it's it's important to just kind of build that into your assumptions and recognize that that, you know, again, going back to the first point, because we don't really know what we're talking about, we will we will tend to be surprised and have to learn things along the way that we were not expecting. That's kinda part of it, and it's a good thing.

So anyway You know, it's it's just an it's interesting for me only because my in my head, I'm just saying with our team, we talk about it as what are we doing here, and what's possible without adding on these layers of unbelievably unbelievable travel. It's great to dream, but that connection has to be, this is my dream, and I wanna get there, but don't talk about it as if it's a reality today. And I know there's so many sayings, if if you dream it, believe it it believe it, it could be done.

I I heard those. You still have to start with gravity, oxygen, hydrogen. We have to look at some of the, the I'm not gonna call pragmatic, but the the realities of economics, as you just brought up, the cost and, the project timelines. It's a fascinating thing for me, and I don't know how to be able to to the reason I ask is, how do we bring some of those people who are brilliant into the fold of what we're working on? So this is a a personal question for project Moon Knight.

I'm trying to figure out how we get a person who I think is absolutely brilliant to understand that they're brilliant, but they have to be able to work in an environment that the brilliance is not tainted by a delusional aspect of we're gonna have 50,000 people living in space in 10 years. Yeah. I, I I I see what you're talking about, and I agree.

And and, actually, I gave a talk on this at the Mars Society conference many years ago, which I called confronting the credibility gap, in space exploration advocacy. And the reason for that was that I saw that, you know, basically people let their enthusiasm get ahead of them. And and within within the culture, you know, within the the club, if you like, that was fine. People understood what they were talking about.

But, unfortunately, when that message would would try and jump out into the real world, it would encounter people who, you know, didn't have the same reasons for optimism, didn't understand that necessarily some things are being kind of elided or exaggerated, and and instead, it would just kind of come across as crazy talk.

And so one of the reasons that I wrote this blog series that we referred to earlier, was that I kind of saw, and I talked about I, you know, I framed it as like, inaccuracies in space journalism or something, misconceptions in space journalism.

But but really the secret the secret strategy all along, which is so secret that I wrote it on the first blog was that, I wanted to begin I wanted to try and promote a way of thinking about these problems that began with asking the right questions, and asking questions rather than insisting that we already knew the answers, and and kind of going from there.

And so I found that if we if we just kind of asked the right questions and then thought about how we could go about becoming less ignorant with respect to those questions, we could actually get quite a long way towards something like a solution, even though necessarily a lot of the details are very, very difficult for us to fill in right now. That's kind of been my my professional specialty in my career is And and you did a brilliant job. Pieces and interpolating them together.

You did a brilliant job, and I I'm going to relate it, and I don't know if we get to it later. The there's the SDG and ESG construct. But if you notice, they're goals. And the challenges, I don't see how when you add those goals up, we actually solve for x. What it what we have is the 6 mega challenges. What we're saying is these are our challenges. Let's start with our challenges and our questions and get better questions and better answers and then more questions.

Because by telling someone this is the goal, you've kinda skipped over the formulaic part of it as options. Maybe this isn't the solution. So in your sense, that's one reason I liked your piece is that you brought it to a sense of let's take away some of these misperceptions that you have, and let's break it down. The challenges, Casey, and maybe you run into this, people then take it as you being negative or that you really don't understand.

And I think, Casey, you understand you understand better. Does that make sense? Yeah. You you see more because you didn't go down the rabbit hole. Throughout my career and my life, actually, I've struggled to avoid negativity, in describing certain things. So in some ways, writing this blog post is is kind of a personal journey, and it was precipitated in in a couple of cases by reading articles by people who I felt should know better, saying things that were plainly ludicrous.

And I don't wanna kinda go into specifics in terms of details, but, no. I just it's just yeah. We'll get distracted. I don't wanna, like, spend half an hour relating wrong things to you, but, but I was like, well, I could I could write, you know, a 10,000 word blog basically just dismantling this this post piece by piece, of of someone who I've never met and frankly have little interest in, or I could be like, that's interesting.

Why is this person who obviously didn't set out to, like, advertise their ignorance, nevertheless managed to do so? Why why have they gotten so confused? Maybe other people are confused this way. Let's drill in and understand where this misconception comes from and explain what's going on and, you know, be necessarily humble about what we don't know, and just kind of unpack, you know, some of the the key details here.

And and I was like, this is good because instead of making the blog post, you know, inherently negative and attacking, and thus quite repellent to most readers, and also specific to a particular article that probably no one read in the first place anyway, or very few people read in the first place, and also we'll date it.

Now we have we have a a topic focused email that that kind of assumes, from the outset that we are engaged in a positive exercise, which is, you know, basically, trying to have a conversation about dispelling certain kinds of uncertainty or ignorance within different populations.

And it was, probably just that realization that there was a way of approaching these questions in a way that was constructive was the single most important thing, in this entire exercise because now people all kinds of people have read these blog posts, and I get emails from them almost every day saying thank you so much for writing this because it helped me understand this problem, and now I can, you know, move forward with confidence or I can I know what sort of questions to ask, or, you know, I know what to talk about with my weird uncle on our Sunday dinners or something like that?

And, and so instead of instead of basically just me adding to the noise and the mayhem and the pain, and and and the ignorance and so on on the Internet, which which there's plenty, you know, I actually kind of tried to shift the Overton window toward towards a form of discourse that's more constructive.

Instead of instead of basically just, you know, the mooners and the mars' pointing fingers at each other and being like you're wrong because of something that no human has any way of possibly knowing, you know, just in terms of like ontological limitations to knowledge. It said they can say, well, actually, we can both recognize that we don't we don't know a whole bunch of stuff and let's look into this.

And one of the reasons that I wrote one of these books about about industrializing Mars was I wanted to convince myself that Mars was a better target than the moon to start out with. By the time I was done I realized that actually 99% of the challenge is common to both to both places.

And and the common the common differences that we know about these about these things, so the moon is closer, but you need a bit more delta v to get there, and Mars has perhaps slightly better minerals on on its available on its surface, and slightly less delta v, but it takes a lot longer to get there. You know, if you can't deal with those problems, you sure as hell can't deal with all the other problems that you're gonna encounter before you get to, like, industrialization.

So it's kind of in the noise. I mean, like, in both places, you need giant machines that chew up rocks and produce metal. That's it. So, and I and I do love the I I do love the I do love the imagery that people put out, which are these huge machines, and I ran a rock quarry. We dropped 22,000 tons of stone a day. That's equivalent to 10 barges going to, up to 20 barges going down a river that are a 1000 ton each and 250 American semis. That's a lot. And people talk about doing this on the moon.

How are you gonna get this equipment up there? I mean, do you know what mass you would need to be able to do what you're showing? And what what type of you you have to have a 100, payloads going up. So the Well, you need full unlimited mass. Yeah. Right. The thing that I really love about what you just said shared, and it's it's something that I do think about, and I I share it also, but in a different way. It's much easier for me personally. If you said, David, write an article.

It's much easier for me for you to send me what you want me to write about, and then I could say, oh, wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Okay. Let me share with you this. But if you say start from scratch, I I don't have the same opportunity to expand and deliver. So when someone writes a an article or a piece, it's easy for me to say, okay. Where are they coming from? What are they doing? Now I could write for hours. But to just say write something, I need an audience.

I need a person I'm talking to. I need to be sharing something for this person to see a new reality. That's one reason the podcast is done this way, is so that you're helping me. Yes. It's done specifically because you're not thinking about a a an infinite crowd. You're thinking of David needs some help. Maybe a lot of help. My wife would probably say I need infinite amount of help. That's a different story. Is, you are able to take and break down these pieces.

So I love that it's not negative, and we don't wanna be negative. Yet I I find ourselves at Project Moon Hut having to almost talk down from the ledge some of the people who are, no. No. No. We'll do this. And it's often far easier to find somebody who's really wants to build, who doesn't know a lot about this ecosystem, who will spend the time reading and learning and looking for truths.

And it's kind of a challenge because you don't wanna be you don't want the wrong person in your team, and you can easily find somebody who will misdirect the conversation. I I don't I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah. But does So I I know I know exactly what you're what you're talking about. It it's occurred.

Yeah. I mean, so one of the one of the key challenges is how do you take all kinds of people who end up on your team whether you want them or not and and kind of create a create a a natural way of talking about a particular problem that means that everyone is able to contribute constructively without necessarily becoming too attached to opinions that are probably premature. Yeah. So that's, you know, that's just kind of excuse me. That's how I approach this problem.

It it and it's that's why we don't call it cislunar and lunar, and we don't use those words, the word Mearth, moon and earth. We use words that don't alienate a 9 year old or a 7 year old, and one of the challenges in the beyond Earth ecosystem is acronyms. I could sit in a meeting with with people in the beyond Earth, and they all know all the acronyms. But I'm it's another language to me. I don't I I can't even participate because I'd need to be looking up every 4th word or every 4th acronym.

So we avoid acronyms, and we avoid all of these this complexity. If I can't have a kid in a if we can't have a kid in a classroom at 12 years old or 9 years old, be able to understand it and talk about it, then you really have a challenge, not because of the 9 year old, not because of their grade level, but because then it's ubiquitous, because other languages have to learn them too. Other cultures who don't have the same knowledge of technological advances that have happened.

And this makes it a much easier conversation. And so I I do love your example of how you I do like your, what I've been writing. So now thank you. You you reinforced some things and gave me some ideas. Oh, with so what I hope I suppose. No. Oh, no. Well, that's I I think I shared with you the the number one reason we do the podcast is so that I learn. Because if I learn, the person sitting behind me who's in theory there is gonna learn too. Yep. Because these are real questions.

This is a real challenge. We are building for We have designed 4 faces of the moon knot. We have people who have seen it, not a lot, people like Grant Anderson from Paragon, and he has said, oh my god. There's nothing like this out there. And we don't we're not looking for praise. We're looking for people who'd help us, and you're helping by giving us, listeners, a new sense of framework. So I I appreciate it. So, I guess, on the next is there anything more with resiliency and limitations?

Are we on to anarchy? NRC? How did you say it? It's not anarchy. So Yeah. So autarky is a is a ancient Greek word. It's an English word as well, but it's an it means self reliance.

So it's kind of most commonly used in in in modern usage in political terms, so we talk about which countries are able to, you know, produce all their own stuff within their own borders, And actually many many countries, more than 50 countries have tried this probably in the last 100 years, and almost all of them have failed.

And I'm talking like Albania, Cambodia, you know, a bunch of North Korea, for example, Cuba does trade quite a bit, but at times has tried to be extremely self reliant within its own borders. And and the United States has been, I think, probably the closest to autarkic. But roughly speaking today, there are there are about 5 countries that can quote, unquote make everything within their own borders, and even then, it's not really the case.

Like, they still have to import certain kinds of technology and and and energy and things like that. And the smallest of those is South Korea, which has a population of almost 50,000,000 people. So the and and also South Korea trades a lot. So so it's kind of a it's kind of a false thing in in, on the world today, in our globalized world.

But, the reason we talk about it is that, one of the main strands of of modern thought for building cities and spaces to make it a self supporting or self sustaining city and space. I loving you in a case. What is that? What is that? Why am I loving you? Because you're, like, yes. Yes. I love this. Keep on going. Sorry. This is yeah. Why are we asking that question? Well, I think I think it's a worthwhile thing to do, personally.

And and the reason for that is that, I mean, even on the earth today, like, the barriers to trade at an artificial low.

I mean, like, the only reason that everyone is able to trade with everyone else, you know, in a post mercantilist era is because at the end of the 2nd world war, the United States and its allies decided that, they were going to allow everyone, even the people who had been on the losing side, or the traditionally losing side of the 2nd World War would be able to trade and and quote unquote get wealthy and rich and and happy.

And it's been enormously beneficial to the world as a whole, that that essentially 99% of the spending, security spending is is to the US Navy, has been able to safeguard, the sea lanes for for trade. That said, it's much easier to trade on the earth where, it it costs something like 5 or 10¢ per kilogram to send cargo anywhere, than to trade between earth and space where, you know, in my wildest dreams, it might be as cheap as $100 a kilogram to send stuff that's a 1,000 times more expensive.

And so, there there's the the outside possibility that if we built a large town on the moon or on Mars, that we may lose the ability temporarily or permanently to resupply it via spaceships from Earth, you know, launching lots and lots of rockets from earth, and so it would probably be prudent to to do what you could to make the respective cities in these places as self reliant as possible as quickly as possible.

And and the way you would measure that is you would say, well, if the spaceship stopped coming tomorrow, how long would it take before everyone here suffocated or starved to death?

And, and that's actually a question that is posed right now for humans on earth who are deployed, for example, on on nuclear submarines where the the major constraint to their deployment length is the amount of food they can pack on board, or in Antarctica, where resupply is quite logistically challenging, and sooner or later in place especially in places that that can't really grow their own food, you know, you will run out of food.

So, and and potentially in space, you could run out of other things as well. So I think it is worthwhile to think about self sufficiency in space.

And and the way that I like to define it is is not like how many people, presumably well trained people and well resourced people, do you need, on a in a Mars base or a moon base or an asteroid or whatever, to make anything, you know, so to have the ability to prototype anything, you know, they have a machine shop, and they have a little custom fab, and they can make their own chips and stuff like that.

Effectively, you know, you could imagine that if you had 2,000 really, really smart people, you could make an iPhone from scratch. But that's not enough. Right? Because because actually, the challenge is not being able to make anything. The challenge is being able to make everything, and to make everything faster than kind of all the equipment that you depend on to do it degrades with normal use.

So there's kind of this closure problem, which is that if you have 2,000 really smart technicians, they could they could replace 1 machine, but in the time it took them to replace that machine, maybe 20 other machines broke. And so in fact, you you need many, many more people because you have to have the ability to replace all the machines in real time. It's kind of like jumping off a cliff with a bag of parts and and having to assemble it into into an airplane, before you left. While flying.

While dropping. Yes. While dropping. Yeah. Yeah. So, so it's actually it's it's a huge challenge, and this is one of the reasons why why there's basically no no countries on earth despite being extremely well motivated in the case of North Korea or Cuba have have managed to succeed.

And it's also why I think when people insist that it it might be possible to make a self reliant Mars city with a few 100 people, as for example, you can make a more or less self reliant medieval town with a few 100 people, it's not really, realistic because the the medieval town, invariably lived in a place with access to air and food and water, or at least arable land. And And those are huge challenges. The the huge challenges. Any of that. Right. You you if you're in the box.

You don't and and there's a I would add, there is a misunderstanding of the interconnectedness of to for everything. Something had to be mined. Something had to be extracted. Something had to be separated. Someone had to make the tire. Someone had to make the gearbox so you could do that. Someone had to Yes. And when you put all the pieces together, it's not a1000. It's millions of innovations, and millions of constructs, and millions of tools and dies.

So people the the the belief that we have a 3 d printer solves that challenge. It doesn't. It just solves a it solves a small fraction of a challenge. And I I think one of the examples of the puzzle. It's a piece of the puzzle. It's not the whole it's not the whole puzzle.

You're off. And I don't You can kind of wave your hands and say you can wave your hands and say, well, you know, it's gotta be around a 1000000 people, but actually in order to be a 1000000 people, we'd have to be really a lot smarter than we are right now. Because if it was a 1000000 people, well, Cuba has Cuba has 11,000,000 people and they can't even make the they can't make pretty much anything except their food.

But at least as far as experiments in communism go, Cuba's only had one major famine and all the others have had more than one major famine. But that, you know, various capitalist countries also had famines prior to the invention of of fertilizers and mechanized, farm machinery, but but, you know, the the the in this case, Cuba and and North Korea and other prior states, lose the ability to to fuel and produce their own farm machinery and their own fertilizers.

And so, you know, they're basically back to square 1. It's it's it's now I'm not saying that that, necessarily the the moon city would would, become a pariah state and be unable to import things. But, but it is it's worthwhile to kind of, I mean, it's kind of bleeds into into point 4, which is about labor scarcity, which is that it's necessary to have a very highly productive workforce.

And so if you wanted to do it with just a 1000000 people, the per capita productivity would have to be about 10 times higher, at least than than we can manage today. And that's that's with a workforce composed almost entirely of specialists. They have to be experts are doing just kind of one thing and doing it extremely well.

So that again, this gets away from this idea of the rugged generalist on the frontier with his mule and 20 acres, just kind of eking out in existence and doing a bit of everything. In contrast, because it's it's so expensive to have humans in space, they have to be, you know, fully supported with all the tooling you could possibly imagine, and all the machinery, and all the power, and all the space, and all the mass, all these other constraints, we'd wanna get rid of them. Right?

Because at the end of the day, all these constraints slow you down. And so that's why Starship is such a powerful kind of thing because it says, finally, for the first time, we don't have to worry about making everything out of titanium in space because we can just ship pallets of materials, with relatively low cost.

But even so, even with all of that, labor is still astonishingly scarce, and we have to be, like, the critical and the defining challenge is how we, you know, maximize the productivity of a workforce over a very very long period of time, which is, you know, in this case the workforce is extremely hard to to replace, they're extremely expensive to import and to operate.

There are analogous industries here on earth such as, oil drilling, for example, where the workforces are typically rotated in and out and they're extremely highly paid because the what they're working on has an extremely high burn rate in terms of in terms of capital expenses. So, you know, it's kind of we have to think about it that way, I think.

The the overwhelming thing is that if we wanted to do something like Otaki or self reliance or self sustainability on a space city that the challenge is not just being able to make anything, so having a prototyping workshop that can make anything, but having, like, a whole huge set of factories that are able to make things efficiently and productively with a relatively low, labor inputs.

So a lot of mechanization, a lot of automation, so that the kind of average productivity of someone living in one of these bases is extremely high. So it's it's completely different from the idea of of kind of the rugged generalist living on the pioneer with their mule for company, who's able to do a bit of everything, and has to be able to do a bit of everything in order to survive, because that just doesn't scale.

In space it's the environment is so hostile that, that you cannot survive without extremely advanced technology, and you cannot maintain extremely advanced technology with a given population size unless you are extremely careful about how you use people's time. So in order to make that work sorry. Go on. No. I what I was gonna say go ahead. I've got a question that might you might be filling it answering it now. Go ahead.

Yeah. So, the various things that can make labor more productive, include working conditions, you know, pay obviously, but also, the sort of machinery and tooling they have access to.

And in most examples of cases where we think about building small towns or something on on the moon or on Mars, those small towns have to be built with very very lightweight materials and it's all kind of very cramped or maybe it's in a lava tube or a cave, and so when we think about the constraints on productivity, actually there's all kinds of constraints, there's there's power availability constraints, there's space constraints, there's material constraints, as well as labor constraints, but if we wanna make sure that we're doing the absolute best we can here then it's necessary to push all those constraints away as as aggressively as we possibly can, and labour scarcity is the is the last and the final constraint to deal with, and that's what's so powerful about Starship as an idea which is that it says, what if, how many sins can we cover with a lot of up mass, what if we weren't constrained on how much mass we could send, what if we could just send a lot of stuff, does that make it easier, yes it makes it a lot easier, so that's kind of the key recognition there, which is that

I I I mean, I'm gonna jump in there. To be very clever. I'm gonna jump in because I I think what I I love the articulation of it because it does define these parameters that we're confined to. Yet labor constraints, if we were to amplify that a little bit more, it is not only the labor constraints or the or the capabilities on earth. It is the learning curve and that individual's capability to be able to live beyond earth, which is something that's a variable we don't understand.

We don't we understand in the International Space Station, confined quarters, but we're talking about living on another rock. We're talking about living in confined quarters, a whole different set of parameters and responsibilities that the person is would have to achieve, and the learning curve to get enough population to be able to do that with these models of 50,000 to a 1000000 people would require a massive undertaking. You and I just got kicked off of Zoom. I mean, we're on Earth.

I I could run into another room. Yeah. I had my backup. I I ran into another room, got my computer, but I've got 2 34 inch monitors here. I've got 3 boom mics. I mean, I've got all the tools in the world and all of, the the analogy I use with people all the time we talk about the advances. I say, you know, if someone put us an asterisk or a forward slash on a program that you and I are talking on, we wouldn't be able to communicate.

It it doesn't matter that I'm sitting here and you're there and we're talented we've got. If there is in the software a forward slash where there should be an asterisk, the call won't go through. So Agree. But but just to point out, like, because you were prepared and because you had, you know, basically, backups and spam machinery and things like that, we were able to recover the podcast in 10 minutes. Correct.

It wasn't the case that it wasn't the case that your computer failed and and all the data was lost, heaven forbid, and also one of us died. So it's, so Yeah. We we we but we have to assume that things are gonna go wrong, and we have to build our systems to be robust to expected and unexpected failures. And one of the ways of doing that is to, just send a lot of stuff. Yes. And Starship or let's not call it just Starship.

Any large mass capable rocket or transport system, let's just maybe it's not just one vehicle, but any transport system that enables you to be able to resupply or supply or provide in the beginning makes a difference. And Yeah. And that yet if you were to extrapolate that in terms of moving beyond Earth, we don't know what all of those components may be. And so when you when a a target is selected in my head, such as Mars, 8 months away, you you have to live a different paradigm.

But if you're 3 days away, granted running out of oxygen would be a really bad thing, granted running out of food, well, 3 days, some people will survive. You can't Yeah. You can't I think it's necessary to think about, like, 3 days, how long does it actually take to get the cargo together and put it on the rocket and then send the rocket. It's probably a little bit longer than 3 days.

Yep. But also at the same time, you know, we're not we're not seriously thinking about building a base on the moon and just, like, sending 1 rocket and it's done. Instead, we have, you know, routine flights. In fact, arguably, the major constraint on earth is how quickly you can launch rockets and how big they are.

And I would just say at this point, like, the key characteristic of Starship and then other Starship like launch systems that are not yet built, is that they maximize, tonnes per year to orbit, and then minimize dollars per tonne. So there's, like, 2 you could kind of imagine a graph if you like or or a figure with with 2 key those 2 key parameters. 1 is, is dollars per ton, and that has to be small, and the other one is tons per year that has to be large.

And so any any rocket that's kinda built around that assumption of, like, you know, dropping cargo in 100 ton increments or more, anywhere in the solar system, with minimum of fuss, has the potential to turn the logistics problem of moving stuff around in space from the main problem to something that's kind of below the API. You just kind of click the button and it and it arrives, which is Yeah. How it has to be. Let me my my perspective is slightly different.

Not that we're not talking the same language, but we're there's a slight difference. The minute you have the capability of doing resupply, you mitigate or diminish the need for a lot of the other activities that would happen otherwise. For example, let's assume a 100 ton or 50 ton, whatever it may be, in a regular supply position. You then don't need to have agri farming because there's a lot of space necessary.

There's the you have to have water or some type of mechanism for the plants to grow in, and you'd have to ship modules or a coverage or create domes. You can then take that off the table from the beginning. You could say we don't need an agri farm or 40 of these because that's a lot of cost, time, and energy. You take that off. You could also say we're not going to be Star Trek y and walk up to the tele tele, the food replicator. We're not gonna have to create that.

We could ship enough food so your activities, your design, your construct is about creating the next opportunity of development. It doesn't have to be about and so in our in Project Moon Hut, because you haven't seen the designs we're working on, we don't have any agricultural components of it in its design. It's a 40 year plan because we're looking at a sequential, restocking supply system so that we can take those ancillary challenges off the table in this new environment.

Does that make sense? Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And and, actually, that's actually the next point that I wanted to come to once we've once we've retired the labor scarcity thing, which is talking about development prioritization. But, yes, I I I will say right right here that I agree that, that the the total amount of food that someone needs on a yearly basis is is relatively small compared to, other stuff that people would need to survive in space.

And also the the the hassle of producing it locally is is non negligible. But even even in the South Pole base, they actually have a small greenhouse so they can make a bit of fresh food to augment their rice and beans and beans and rice. So so there's, like, a bit of a mixture going on there. But, but that I would bet you to I would argue that that was not for food. That was a psychological decision. Yes. A psychological thing. Yeah. Correct. And even on our It's also a research thing. Right.

And on our on our team design construct, someone had said, we you have to have a psychologist, but we added people that many of the activities you would do for humankind require the psychological question, not the biological. So to be able to put a little parsley on top of your food makes you feel human, but it doesn't mean more that it's not it's not your nutrient. It's the mental state of feeling connected to the outside world. Yes. That's that's that's completely correct.

And and on that point, you wouldn't necessarily send a psychologist. You would have, an entire hospital. Like Mhmm. Think think big. So just to come back to your point We do mention By the way, we do have a hospital, but yes. Yeah. You mentioned you mentioned confined spaces. So, you know, for for humans, for example, who live on submarines, who work on submarines, it's it's common for them to have extremely limited personal space.

Yep. But that's actually a major constraint, and and you could imagine, like, what would it take to make a nuclear submarine self sufficient for a 100 years as opposed to 3 months? And you could kind of run through that that, that thought experiment, but but essentially, if that's one of the constraints that can reduce the productivity of the workforce on Mars or on the moon, maybe we should do what we can to reduce that constraint.

And so instead of having people live in tiny steel boxes underground, we could build structures on the surface as we do here on earth, so you don't have to move too much dirt, that are much larger. And in fact, I I think that if you're in the business of doing self sufficiency on on Mars, and this is where I've done all the math and all the examples, the moon is pretty much exactly the same. You have to have such enormous volumes.

I'm talking like millions and millions of square feet for factories that it's not actually all that hard to say we'll have millions of square feet for living areas as well. You know, giant kind of open open air plazas and and individual, apartments or or small dwellings or whatever, like that's not a problem. We don't have to we don't have to kind of sign ourselves away to living in a sleeping bag for the rest of our lives Right. If we're going to do this the the proper way.

And then you also mentioned a very interesting point, which I I kind of plan to gloss over, but I'll come back to it, which is that, the learning curve. And so the learning curve, I think, in the way you're referring to it, kind of talks about how we take a a generic, you know, trained human here on earth. I don't have to have a degree or anything like that, but they have to be able to do useful things and and then train them to be able to function on on Mars or something.

And and the key, insight is that actually on on on the the Mars base or the moon base, we want them to be as productive as possible, which we want which means we want their environment to be as close to a productive earth like environment as possible. So room temperature, shirt sleeves environment, open sky, you know, well laid out workplaces, good, ergonomics, all that kind of stuff.

But there will still obviously be training, as a result of living in a hostile environment as there are there is specialized training if you live on a submarine or an aircraft carrier or something like that. Mhmm. But the the other aspect of the learning curve that I I kind of wanted to dive into, is this idea of labor abstraction.

So, we mentioned just just now that you could have a small greenhouse where you grow a few lettuces or something, but then as the base grows over time, you know, essentially, at some point, you get to the point where it becomes cheaper to make food locally than to import it, just just depending on the relative cost of labor and productivity and the cost of shipping. And this we'll talk about in some more detail in a few minutes.

And so you could imagine like you have a couple of people whose job it is to like make sure the greenhouse works and grow a few lettuces, but then a few years after that and now it's their job to actually grow like a lot of plants so enough basil for everyone for example. And so you're starting to produce all the fresh food that you need locally, while still depending on, say, imported pasta and rice for a lot of carbohydrates and and, you know, the bulk caloric needs.

And then, you know, a few years after that, well, you start kind of, you know, spacing out, and now you've got, you know, more millions of square feet of land that's being actively cultivated by robotic, farming machines and and so on. But the key thing is that the the population of people who are operating this this operate like operating this part of the economy or this part of the industry, doesn't doesn't grow proportional to its productivity.

So so ideally, like, more people would be sent up to work on these systems, but the sorts of jobs they would be doing would go would go from, like, individually handle handling seeds and plants and, like, planting things and watering stuff to then, you know, personally operating machinery that does it for them to operating a computer server that then just automatically dispatches the machinery, does the work for them, to then, you know, basically automating that process away as well.

And so every time this you take another step here, the human in the loop is moving one step further in abstraction away from actually physically handling the matter, the the atoms and so on, that is making the process. And this this works in any constructive industry, in any factory, in anything.

You go from having someone whose job is actually to sit there at the lathe and make a screw to someone whose job is to press the button that makes the screw to someone whose job it is to assemble the machine that presses the button that makes the screw to someone whose job it is to assemble robots that make robots and make robots and make robots. And this this seems absolutely crazy in bananas. Right? But if you look at its incredible premise made in software, we're doing exactly the same thing.

No. No. What you're you're saying what you're saying is is perfect. It's not you're you downplay it. You've watched Star Trek. I've gotta believe someone like you would watch Star Trek. My question is The some of the movies. Not as much as not not a lot of movies. But you've seen at least a few television shows. Have you ever said to yourself, this is in the future. Why is anybody working in the engine room? Well, Star Trek is a, strategic It's it's just a construct.

Why in this advanced society, we still have people taking a screw you know, a a a tool and a device in the few these type of advances be able to do that as well. I I understand that. You don't lose the prototyping capability. You just augment it. And so that means if something breaks and you happen to not have a spare part, you can make that spare part even though it's quite costly in terms of labor and material inputs to do it.

You would rather have the spare part rolling off an assembly line, but if you didn't, you would you have to have the ability to make it. I understood. Mine was more a question of you you just started talking about the expansion. And the there's a psychological, there's a behavioral. There's an organizational environment. You work in this engine room. The engine room is gonna become more and more sophisticated, more and more automated. And at some point, your job will become obsolete.

What happens next? What types of roles will you fulfill over a long period of time? However and I'm gonna jump. Sorry. I'm gonna jump backwards. Yeah, please. The timeline is the challenge that I think that while you're discussing what you're saying, it's very easy for that group we talked about early to say, see, that's where we need to go. And I've seen the imagery, you have too, of the proposed structures on the moon, the proposed scale, scope, and size on Mars. And it They're all too small.

They're all too small, but they're also done in an unrealistic timeline without a full ecosystem behind it. And when I say ecosystem, that includes logistics, food creation, techno tech the advancements of techno the ability to transport humans. The entire ecosystem doesn't match. It's one of these things is not like the other. It's the the math doesn't add up.

And what you're talking about here when we were you started to talk about the learning curve and being able to put food and then grow, you took a very, very mental jump. You didn't mean I'm putting words in your mouth. You told me if I'm wrong. You didn't mean, first we go, then we build 1, and the next iteration, we now have a farm. You're saying over time over time, and a 1,000,000 tons, whatever is being sent, over time, which could be 25 years, we will get to that point.

And I think the belief structure is we could bring that down to, I don't know, 3 weeks. Well, there's essentially, it is possible to make the timeline go faster, probably with exponentially more investment Yep. Up to a point. And I would certainly say that that SpaceX is developing Starship about as quickly as they're able to given their various constraints, some of which are regulatory and outside their control.

Political, economic, religious, even I wouldn't say that, like, SpaceX is fundamentally limited by a shortage of money at this point. That's not always been the case, but I think it's probably true now. But but there's also, like, you know, some people say I would take a 1000 years to get there, and some people say we could do it in 20 years.

And I I prefer to lean more towards the shorter end of the spectrum, and not just because I think I will die one day, but also because there You said that that's wait. Wait. Wait. One day I think I will die I I will think I will die one day. Do you have an alternative universe in your head that you won't die? No. I mean, I think I think human mortality is is is the default option. No. No. You just said it was one day I think I will die, and that's something.

Okay. Do you have an alternative belief that I wish to know about? Well, okay. I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll take that one, and I'll answer it after I've after I finish this little section, which is that, but, yes, I'm sure you wanna get into that. But the, the the thing is, like, the basically, there's there's a critical size of of a of a moon hut or a city or whatever where you can evacuate everyone quickly if you have to, and then there's there's a size that's large enough to sustain indefinitely.

Even if all the rockets stop coming and all the imports stop coming, they could they could make it. And in between those two sizes is this kind of dangerous no man's land, and you wanna get across that as quickly as possible. Yep. Right? Because because in that in that scale, you're you're really vulnerable. And so, like, do I say, well, do you wanna spend 10 years in that zone? Or do you wanna spend a 100 years in that zone? It has been a 1000 years in that zone.

And I think you'd wanna spend as little time as you possibly can, however you can in that zone. How how that's done is is is another question. To come back to human mortality, there's no law of physics that says that that our our kind of meat robots have to get old and die. And so, you know, many people since ancient times have wondered how we could go about living longer.

And I think, you know, there's there's some strides being made in that area, but, but it's also important to realize that if we were able to have a serious go at at compactifying the industrial stack enough that we could do everything with a 1000000 people that that would imply enormous advances in science and technology. And and, you know, at some point, we will we will complete the tech tree enough to make us die, less less quickly. I'll put it that way.

Yep. Maybe we live for a 1000 years instead of a 100 years, but but, but essentially, we'd have more time to think about these problems, which, I think is an interesting it's an interesting thing. And in many ways, actually, solving age related diseases is is like one of the major major challenges, to be done this century. I think climate is probably more pressing. But, but certainly age related diseases are enormous enormous enormous challenge for our species as a whole.

I I don't really wanna go into vast detail, but interested readers, I do have a, or interested listeners, I do have a, a blog that I wrote about this a few months ago, which contains basically everything I know about this, at least 50% of which is not true. It's obviously wrong. So but don't take my word for it. I'm not an expert on on biology by any means. But No. That that's cool.

We have we have a person we have a a person who's worked with us in our, in our biotech side, and she's she just created the first from scratch. They created a a live a, a pumping heart from cells. So they didn't they they her name is Doris Taylor. Brilliant person. Oh, awesome. And if you're ever interested in meeting her, I I'm gonna be on a call next week with her. But if you're interested in meeting with her, I'll I'll be sure to introduce you.

There was a presentation she gave, and I can also find that link for you afterwards if you're interested to watch what they had done, and it's fascinating. She's absolutely brilliant. So, the the challenge inside there is that if you're if you're 20 years old, right, you can abuse your body horribly, and it basically will always get better. Right?

Like, with with with small exceptions, you can, you can drink too much alcohol and stay up too late and and run marathons and and do all kinds of horrible things to yourself in your twenties, and you're basically okay. But if you try and live that lifestyle in your eighties and you're not Mick Jagger, you're gonna run into trouble.

And so the question you have to ask yourself, why is it that that that, like, when I'm 20, it's not like, you know, for for 10 whole years, for, like, 3000 days, my body knows how to fix itself. You know? And then at some point, it's along the way, it's like, fuck that. I'm not doing that anymore. And and it slows down and, and loses that ability and, you know, eventually leads to frailty and and age related diseases and death.

And so you say, well, what if we could figure out how to make it not forget, how to fix itself, and take itself back to that equilibrium state where where it basically is is able to do all these things? And and the thing is, there are there's like several strong clues that this should be possible, and one of them is that, obviously humans are much much better at doing that than rats are.

So for example, human mortality curves and rat mortality curves are identical, except that a rat ages about the same as a human does, in like a week versus a year. So like a rat loses the ability to heal itself about 50 times faster than a human does, and so if that's the case, why can't we make humans heal themselves 50 times better than a human does? You know, in in which case that, you know, the the whole issue would be moot. We'd live for 5000 years.

So, yeah, that that's kind of a that's kind of a big clue. No. No. No. Those are those are great those are great questions because then if we overlaid it, and I can give other examples, if we overlaid that on the Star Trek Enterprise, we have this engine room, we have people working in it, no one dies. Well, do you move up in the ladder if the person above you doesn't retire and move on?

And do you how does your life structure so while there's a biological challenge, there's also a psychological challenge on a a planet like Earth where you will have people haves and haves and have nots. When Pelosi can be in the senate forever. Sorry. No. I mean, I think if we get into the negative consequences of the gerontocracy, it's almost always related to the fact that that there's this perception.

I don't know how how real it is, but there's a perception that as people get old, they kinda get more conservative and and maybe less, you know, less cerebral in some ways, at least some people do. And, and certainly, there are age related, consequences on cognition. And so, you know, if you're gonna live for a 1000 years, maybe you don't wanna spend all 1000 years working working in the United States Congress. Maybe you'd, like, go on a vacation once in a while.

But Can I ask you how old you are? Where you depend on natural death to to advance, it's already pretty, like, you you might wanna give up. Can I ask how old you are, Casey? I'm 34. Yeah. You're 34. Okay. I'm 58. My my wife says I'm a my wife says I'm a child, so I'm actually going backwards. But, hopefully, Actually, she just say, I I I my hair tends to be getting blacker, and I don't use any dyes or anything. So she'll laugh and say, what's happening to you?

And I think that's just because of living and and being excited and working on things that are are interesting. But the there my point to your point was there's a biological side to it. I agree. And I believe that there are capabilities in that construct to be able to amplify the ability to be able to live longer with a higher quality of life. The challenge on the flip side is it it creates all the non relatives in society as well.

Yeah. And it creates a different construct as to, well, if you believe that you'll live forever or longer, what will you do compared to the person who doesn't have access to that? And there's all a tremendous amount of psychological, political, economic, religion Yeah. Religion atones that can all fall into the under that category of challenges. So it's not as if living longer is the answer. Well, I think it's already the case that if you're rich and privileged, you live twice as long.

I mean, like, like, that that's not really controversial. Right? So actually, we we it wouldn't be much use if the way to live forever was to spend more money than what we currently spend right now. I mean, like, maybe a little bit more for some people, but but I I happen to think that, like, it's not expensive to create a rat.

So, if we're able to figure out if if we're able to figure out how to how to kind of encourage our silly machinery to be a bit more convergent, which is basically the fundamental problem, it's it's convergence issue, then then it should be, you know, cheap enough that that essentially anyone can benefit from it.

And and actually, you know, it makes sense that the the wealthier countries might have access to it first, but then the wealthier countries are the ones that are bearing the the highest burden The brunt of the and and and, and so on. And to the point where, like, you know, Japan, for example, you know, has has way, way more people who are, beyond retirement age right now than than people who are at childbearing age, which is which is kinda crazy.

But, but, yeah, this is we're kind of running the experiment in real time now. And and I've lived in Asia for 10 years. People finally got rich for a while. Yeah. I've lived in Asia for 10 years, so I've seen a variety of different conditions. Everything from the Kamarouge and what has happened in their society all the way to the Japanese and the the challenges facing China.

This, China's in a similar pickle except unlike Japan, China got old before it got rich, and Japan got rich before it got old. Yep. So, you know, it's it's it's it's a huge it's a huge challenge. Yeah. So We're gonna get sidetracked here if we don't we're gonna stay on fire. You answered a great a a good question. I like the I like the answer and the direction because what we're talking about is timelines, and the timelines for what you're perceiving. Our project Moon Hut is 40 years.

We have 8 people, 90 people, 578 and 1644. It does not mean that there won't be rotations of those people, but the structures we have built fit that timeline. And there's a development, I think, and I'd like to talk to you afterwards. I think what we've created, and this is what someone like Grant Anderson from Paragon had seen, was we created a logical in between set of circumstances that makes that end game work where I often see, first, we do this, now we end up with this.

Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. The numerical because. Yes. Yeah. I I I missed Yeah. I missed the story in the middle. You gave me chapters 1, 2, and 9, and 10. And the that story line was missing. So I liked how you had put it together. But our timeline, you went 100, you said 10, 100, 1,000. Ours is a 40 year, so about 2061 is our endgame. But 2061 also, and then you went to population, 3,500,000,000 people will die in the next 25 years on this planet, and that's, 3.2. And that's just age.

Not no one's gonna not including anything else, but that's age. And there'll be a whole another generation. Here's the psychology that you were bringing up, what we're talking about, is this generation, if we add 25 years on to a a 10 year old, well, they're 35 years old. They will have lived through a pandemic.

Ukraine, the challenges now that we're having with the, economics when I talk western versa and the dollar versus this new brick, financial markets that they're trying to create and everything else that's compounded on top of it from climate change, mass extinction, ecosystems collapsing, and they will want a different future. So that has to o be overlaid on top of it. It's not like it's gonna be forced on top of people. It's just going to happen.

Yep. So, so we've got environmental hostility and, labor scarcity. So is there anything else you wanted to add there? Yeah. So actually, the next the next point, in line 0.5, and I think I switched, switched this from 0.6, while while we're taking our break, but it makes more sense this way around Sure. Development prioritization.

So we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but but essentially, our our industry kind of depends on 100 of thousands of key inputs from things like, you know, standardized sized billets of 6061 aluminum to water to, fertilizers, chemicals, paints, plastics, hydrocarbons in general is something that I've had on the brain recently.

I've got here gold, flash memory, specialty foods, certain other drugs, you know basically pharmaceuticals, you've got advanced construction machinery, you've got different different kinds of metals and and different, different quantities of them, you've got aggregate corn sorry, aggregate concrete, rocks, you've got fuels, you've got oxygen, other gases, all kinds of things, textiles.

And so if you're if you're in the business of trying to build a factory on Mars or a series of factories on Mars that produce all of these things, then it probably helps to figure out which ones you should do first. And what I have done, over a series of posts, essentially, most recently, a few months ago, is is take this entire dataset of, of of items and then classify them by 2 key metrics. The first is, their, you know, dollar dollars per, sorry, sorry, annual consumption per person.

So it's in it's in kilograms per person per year. And that's that's that's important because that speaks to the fundamental constraint on importation, which is, that, essentially, cargo that you fly to the moon or to Mars will be paid for by weight, and, and and also there's not you know, hopefully, there's a very large pipeline of of the ability to move stuff to Mars, like we're talking 1,000 or 100 of 1,000 of tons, of stuff rather than, say, tens of kilograms, but but it's not infinite.

Right? So that's that's one major constraint. And the other major constraint is the labor scarcity constraint. And so that comes down to, like, how hard is a thing to make? How difficult is something to produce? And and the way I've categorized that is in the, the cost per person per year. So how much how much money does a person typically spend on one of these items, per person per year? And the reason for that is that is that cost, is is a first of all, it's quite available.

You know, you can figure out what the cost of something is quite easily by looking it up in a catalog. And and second, it's a it's a pretty good analog, it's a pretty good, yeah, cost is a pretty good, index on on how hard something is to actually make.

So you take all these different things and you you throw them on a scatter plot, where on the vertical axis you have the, the annual cost in in dollars per per person, and then on the horizontal axis you have the annual consumption in kilograms per person. And what you find is that you kind of have this this broad swath that goes off and up to the right, and at the top right, you have things like water.

And actually the per capita consumption of water is incredibly high, and the per capita, cost of water is extremely low because, water is generally like in terms of its manufacture or you like it's it's a recycled product and we are able to move it around the canals quite easily. And just to just to make this explicit, the in the United States people use a 1,000,000 tons, sorry a 1,000 tons of water per year is is the per capita consumption and a lot of that is in agriculture.

But a 1,000 a 1,000 tons per person views that 3 tons a day. It's it's just a it's a lot of water. So obviously like importing 3 tons of water per person per day to the moon is is a nonstarter. Like, it would cost, more than $1,000,000,000 per person just to import that much stuff. Yep. Assuming assuming, like, all of SpaceX's wireless streams come true, and it's only a $100 a kilogram to import, to import stuff. So, that's kind of on the extreme right hand end.

And other things that are also, on the right hand end include things like fuel, oxygen, concrete aggregate rubble, nitrogen, hydrogen, steel, bricks, ceramics, basic ceramics, and then yeah. So it's it's basically like a class of things where people use more than a ton of it per year.

And and bear in mind that in Mars, if we're asking our people on Mars to be more productive than on earth, then their baseline consumption will also be higher because if their productivity is higher, then they're also consuming more materials in order to make more materials.

So so broadly speaking, anything where a person who weighs around around about 80 kilograms needs more than 1,000 kilograms of stuff and so for imperial audiences, a person is about a £150 if they need more than £2,000 of material per year, you would really really rather rather prefer that you're able to make it locally. Unfortunately, if you are in the business of building a Mars or a moon base, you'd have to do it near a source of water.

You'd have to do it near a source of oxygen, near a source of, of of raw materials and rocks and stuff. So so you don't have to make metals out of the rocks, but you have to be able to grind them up and turn them into cement or concrete, for example.

So, so, so essentially, when we think about, you know, the 1st generation Mars base, even the 1st generation Mars base would have to be able to produce enough electricity to be able to, process these materials and make them locally using what's called in situ resource utilization. Yep. The next the next class of materials are things where people use, let's say, between 1 kilogram and a 1000 kilograms per year, so that's between £2,000, although frankly, this is all order of magnitude anyway.

And and then the annual cost, the annual expenditure, if you like, on earth, for these things would be between a dollar per person per year and and up to, you know, a couple of $1,000 per person per year, which is typically what what someone in the west would spend on food. And obviously on Mars, these things are harder to make, and so they'd cost you more, but maybe not a whole lot more depending on what they are.

And, and then obviously importing these things also costs more because you, even though you only pay the earth manufacturing cost you also have to pay the importation cost, which works out to a $100, around about $100 per kilogram in this in this particular instance, although you could change that number if you wanted to.

And so, for, for items with a low, cost density, right, so like bricks, for example, cost less than $100 per kilogram, the importation really hurts because most of what you're paying for is the importation cost. But if you're if you're trying to obtain something which actually costs a lot more, per kilogram such as a flash memory chip or something like that, then the importation cost barely adds any cost to the to the, to the overall cost on Mars.

It's actually probably much much cheaper to import, for example, computer chips, to Mars than to try and produce them locally because local production costs will be much higher. And in fact, materials that or items that fall into this category are typically ones where the supply chain on earth involves flying things around.

So if the if the materials that go into your mobile phone are transported between, say, Australia, China, United States, and Europe by airplane, so that's a pretty good sign that they'll they'll be quite hard to manufacture cost effectively on Mars. But in the middle, we have these we have a whole bunch of materials which are typically transported by ship on earth. They're not necessarily sourced locally.

It is quite unusual, for example, on earth to have large scale importation of water, by ship, certainly not by plane. But it is quite common, for example, to have, importation of steel or raw bulk materials or oil, or obviously, like, things that have a relatively low cost of goods in transit, clothe clothing, for example. This is stuff that moves around by container, in in ships. So I'll I can just kind of list a whole bunch of materials, a whole bunch of things here. We've got, let's see.

I'm just looking at a at a diagram here. We've got fasteners, so like screws and bolts. We've got carbon dioxide. Well, we don't use that much of it, but there's plenty of that on Mars. Textiles, finished textiles, electric motors, aluminum. Aluminum is an interesting case because it it aluminum for American orders American listeners, requires a lot of energy to make it. Bearings, glass, fertilizer, plastics, sulfuric acid, ethane, various other chemicals.

So these are the ones that you would probably import initially. You can't imagine, like, day 1 on Mars, stepping out and being like, oh, I better set up the screw factory. No. You you just import screws. But then over time, once you have the ability to make steel locally or, aluminum locally, then you would start to produce materials, produce items from those raw materials locally, that that you needed in very large numbers.

And if you're in the process of of building an extremely large station, you know, extremely large base where the surface area is measured in 1,000,000 of square feet, then you would have to you'd have to produce most of the raw materials, to produce those stations locally. So that includes things like Just for a reference point. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. I agree. No. No. Sorry. I agree with you. I I worked with Maersk for about 5 years.

So largest shipping company in the world, and I'm very familiar with the transit times from from Asia to, to Rotterdam and what we would ship, and I've been on the ships themselves. The Yep. You you're Absolutely. Yeah. Fabulous machines, and it's amazing. You'll have on a, an 18,000 container ship, you'll have 13 people. That's it. And even the way they steer it is absolutely fascinating.

When you see one of those large ships, I don't know if you you when you look at them, they tend to have this one large from end side to side, center, station for them to live in. And the reason is when they're up there and they're managing it, they actually steer the ship in the center.

But when they wanna when they wanna do something that they need to be close to the left side, they there's another steering column on the left, and there's another one on the right so they can move into port properly. Yeah. It's really fascinating. Yep. And and and their their engines are the are so massive. I mean, they're just Endless. Enormous. Yeah. Like So 6 story building. Yeah. They're just fascinating.

The, when you're it's easy to hear what you're saying, and and it makes it jump a timeline sequence very quickly. So and then this is just a perception that I hear. We can bring this, but then we can get to this. On Earth, if we were to say if I was to say to you, we're going to set up a society right now, and it's gonna be brand new, and we're going to have to put in place a water treatment center. Put in and by the way, there we there's somebody I might be talking to about how they don't work.

But, 90% of the water I heard on Earth is not treated, which is fascinating that that doesn't happen in the way we think it does. But if I said, do you have to put in a treatment plants. Right. It's, I think the number of treatment plants, it's over 90% of the water we drink is just treated by biological treatments that exist in nature, not by systems that work effectively to clean and, our water. It's really a number.

Even New York City doesn't just start pulling online, but most of it's done through swamplands and other places. Get to my point is that if I was to say to you on earth, I want you to build a city, and I want you to start it off, and I want you to put in place some of these things, you know, a place for people to live. They can have a home.

They can, they they have to bring in some parts and supplies, fasteners, c o 2, textiles, motors, aluminum aluminum bearings, glass I want you to we're gonna help you ship that. And then we want you to set up a factory to do all of this or a mechanism to be able to replicate and do it yourself to feed the size of the society, which will have to grow in today's times. It'll decrease over time in terms of optimization and and advances.

You're this is a this is not a 5 year, 7 year, 12 year endeavor. You took a jump from, a group of individuals who need these things, and now you're jumping to, in my mind, 40 years later. Yeah. That I think I think that's a very fair argument. And in fact, we're get we're gonna come to that soon. Okay. As long as Right now I'm I'm painting the picture which is optimistic, and then I'm gonna add a add a dose of of cold water and and harsh reality to that.

As you know, I don't I don't know where you're going, so I this is my this is running through my head. I'm saying, there's a timeline component in here. You're not talking about a 7 year or 12 year endeavor. You're saying over time for society to be able to reach this, and it could be a 100 years to get to some of these things that you're saying are going to be resupplied and are going to be manufactured on premise?

The fastest any nation has managed to industrialize thus far is about 1 and a half generations, and that's that's really fast. So, like, Britain industrialized over 7 generations, for example. But more recently, we're getting faster at it, and part of the reason for that is that we've already figured out how to do it. But even so, like, if you wanted to be serious about saying, well, first of all, we have to build out our ability to process raw material. That's gonna take a few years.

And then we have to build out our ability to to take that raw material and then turn it refine it into steel. It's gonna take a few years. And then we have to have have the ability to take the refined steel and turn it into the into, like, obviously, like, low grade steel components, so, like, beams and screws and fasteners and bolts and things like that. That's gonna take a few years.

And then in order to go from that to, like, you know, essentially having the ability to produce, say, 99% of the mass you'd need to build your own, pressure containers and things on Mars, or on the moon, that would also take a few years because in addition to, you know, essentially the membrane, which contains the pressure and and, and airlocks and doors and seals and and precision surfaces and and valves and control systems and all that kind of stuff. You know?

There's there's basically a lot of different moving parts that are needed there. And and yet at the same time, you have made you you're tossing a ton of assumptions. You're you're tossing in the assumption, for example, on earth that you will have the ecosystem, which could be engineers who understand this.

You'll, you'll understand on Earth, it would be what what are the conditions you're working on oxygen, the during the normal on Mars or moon, you have to then step back and say, we don't know if this piece of equipment that we have used for 50 years on earth, even with all the proper assumptions going back to that forward slash and an asterisk, that we've made the calculations properly, that we came out at a 100 degrees Celsius that we need to do this. And it's actually a 100.137.

And because we didn't hit 137, everything we transported, everything we had designed into it, even though we thought we were great, we missed. And that adds time limits. So one of the reasons that you wanna build the the environment on the moon or on Mars to be as earth like as possible, so basically a giant terrarium with short sleeves environment, is that, the number of modifications you need to make to existing industrial machinery is is much lower.

So so, basically, you need to change maybe configuration of pumps or or, coolant feed systems to compensate for the fact that the gravity is lower in these places. And then also if the atmosphere that you that you use is of a lower pressure, then then that reduces the amount of heat that you can transport away easily, so you have to upsize the cooling systems.

But it's much, much easier to take, for example, a washing machine or a CNC mill or something and and adapt it to work at a lower lower gravity, and you can even test that, in a limited way on earth reasonably well, than to say, well, we need the c and c machine, and it's gotta work outside on Mars or outside on the surface of the moon where half the time it's exposed to 400 degrees Celsius from the direct sun and the other half of the time it's cryogenically cold when when the moon is facing away from the sun when the surface of the moon faces away from the sun.

What so You've That's kind of the challenge there. Okay. But what you've just articulated, which I didn't hear before, and I'm not picking on you. I'm learning, is you didn't bring up this whole entire build the ecosystem of build the terrarium, build the life space so that we minimize the need for adaptation. And if we include that as a variable, if I said to you on Earth, look. We're going to put up this building. It's gonna be a 10 story building. It's gonna house a 100 people.

It's going to have several off rooms off on the side of it to be able to do x, y, and zed. We we put all that together, and I said, oh oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we need to put a dome over the whole thing and have it act like this environment. The first part was tough enough. Now you've said, we need a dome over this? What are you talking about a dome? Oh, it's going to have to be, a 150 meters high or 200 meters wide. It's going to have to be able to clear and do the following.

You'd say, well, that alone is a a big challenge. Yeah. And so that's That's that's the last point in my in my chart. Maybe I should've gone back to front. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. We made it in the list. But I told I I what I told you that we're we're talking. I'm asking questions as they come to my head. We don't know where we're going. So this is perfect. What you're doing is perfect.

So if I'm saying what you're saying, so tell me what you think are the process to get to this point or wherever you wanna take me. Because you're saying it perfectly.

Okay. So I just I just wanna kind of wrap up this, like, development prioritization point, which is essentially deciding what order you build things in, and and it it's not really a genius statement to say, like, oh, well, you start off making the the stuff that's easy to make that you need a lot of, and then over time, you gradually make more stuff that is harder to make and you don't need as much of.

But then, you know, there's kind of this class of of things that, you know, your plausible and lifetime consumption is like less than a 100 kilograms. So you could actually, plausibly import a lifetime supply with you when you when you first went to when you first went to the moon or Mars. And so there's there's no real need to make it locally because, a, it's really hard to make, and b, you just don't need that much of it. Like, the importation costs are extremely low.

If you're in the process of importing, you know, 80 kilograms of human plus you know, 20 kilograms of personal effects and underwear and food to keep them alive on the trip, and, you know, and and various things, then it's not really a big a big deal to, like, shove an envelope full of, like, spare computer chips, in amongst their gear, and that would be enough for them for a lifetime.

So just in that category of things like, gold, morphine, Tylenol, various kinds of processed food, flash memory, you know, computer chips, basically things like that. So, and and obviously, there's there's that's not a complete nor exhaust exhaustive list, but but anything where your annual consumption is less than about a 100 grams, which is, what's a 100 grams? Like, 5 ounces or something. But, you know, just pick pick some small number of ounces. It doesn't really matter.

You could you could bring a lifetime supply with you. And so while it is probably worthwhile to have the ability to make any of that locally on Mars in in small and inefficient batches, you know, going into full scale production of, like, a morphine factory on Mars is certainly like a long term problem. Yep. Anyway, so that's that's kind of the thing there.

To go back to our chart, we're going to we're gonna skip over 0.6 because it's I I realized it's redundant with 0.7, which is the Iceland case study. So we've talked about how What just for quick. What is Iceland? You don't have we don't have to go into detail. What was the Iceland case study? Well, we're about to describe it. Oh, okay. You said we're so we're not gonna we're skipping over 6, which is the environmental. It's it's the 5 and 6 that you you reordered. Okay. That's right.

Yeah. I'm I'm making it up so go alone now. No. No. I love it. I love it. This is I I conversation has changed a bit. Yeah. I I have I'm on page 13 of notes, so it's great. It's great. Well, you only got 3 pages left. No. No. No. I I actually have about 70 pages underneath it. So Don't worry. I might have to get another glass of water. So the the Iceland case study, is is an example that I kind of wrote a blog about a few years ago.

I happen to know a couple of Icelanders, and they referred me to these incredible websites that the Icelandic government has made that that basically have, comprehensive information on the Icelandic economy. And I was like, this is super interesting because Iceland, has been occupied by humans for more than a 1000 years. It has, it's got a strong kind of tradition of self reliance. The population is about 360,000 people, so somewhat less than a1000000.

But at the same time, the the environment on Iceland is somewhat more mild, than the surface of the moon. There's breathable air, there's fresh water available. There's plenty of fish in the ocean, and and there's plenty of rocks and ice and lichens and tundra and stuff there as well. It's it's much more, much less hostile environment than than than the moon, but it's also quite isolated.

And so, it's worth noting that prior to industrialization in Iceland, the population there did wax and wane quite a lot. There was an eruption in the 18 fifties, I think, maybe 18 forties, that killed like a third of the population, which is kind of horrific.

So, you know, it is it is it's kind of an isolated and a very marginal place for humans to live in many ways, and and prior to industrialization and prior to modern technology, the people there did live pretty difficult lives, with very limited access to technology. They had, obviously, they had wool. They had the ability to make small amounts of steel, from from what's called bog iron, which is not not used today anymore. We don't make steel that way.

But if you needed it, you could make enough for swords and knives and things, which is important to Icelanders, and they have had access to wood. In fact, they cut down nearly all the forests, on Iceland over a few 100 years. So so it's an interesting very interesting place, and and then, of course, there's this treasure trove of data available.

And and we've just spent, you know, an hour and a half talking about how you could potentially, you know, build a self sustaining city on on the moon or on Mars with only a 1000000 people, and it might take you 30 years and and maybe a 1000000 tons of stuff. And I said, okay. Let's make this real. Let's talk about Iceland. Iceland has 360,000 people. By and large, they're some of the best educated people on earth.

Your challenge is to take one of your 18,000 container container ships that you used to work on at Maersk, which has a cargo capacity of, I don't know what does that work have to be, like, 600,000 tons or something. Mhmm. And you can put whatever you want in those containers.

In fact, you can delete all the containers and just pile the deck up with anything you want, any material you want, any food you want, anything, cost is no object, you can fill up with c and c machines, you can fill up nuclear reactors, it's your choice, but you get one ship. Right? One ship's worth of stuff, which is plausibly as much as we could possibly hope to ship to the moon or Mars with starships over the next 50 years. One container ship's worth of stuff.

It's like, you know, a 100,000 rocket launches is about 1 container ship's worth of stuff. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna sail that container ship to Iceland, and you're gonna beach it on the shore at Reykjavik. And and then after that the island is cut off. It's cut off from the rest of the world.

Obviously, it can still connect by radio, so you can still talk to the Europeans, you can still talk to Americans, but no further transport of materials, in and out of the island is allowed. And your challenge is to slow down the inevitable reversion of Icelandic quality of living back to, like, 1700 era, with, like, short lifespans and no dental care, as for as long as possible with only one containership worth of stuff. What do you put on board? And and, you know, what are the key things?

And, actually, the key thing you run out of first is fuel. Iceland doesn't produce its own fuel, so it only has a couple of months supply. And so once that runs out, well, now none of your cars work, Very little of your heating works properly. Electricity doesn't work properly unless some in some places, there's hydroelectricity there. But, okay, so you got a hydroelectric power plant. That's great, but but, you know, it has parts and the parts wear out.

How are you gonna get new bearings to operate your turbines? How are you going to get lubricants to operate operate the turbines? How are you gonna replace relays and contacts with switches and and refine aluminum and copper to, to make new wires? You know, it becomes this kind of enormous headache, logistical challenge. It's it's compounding possible. Compounding set of conditions. Every time you ask a question, you have another question.

Yeah. Exactly. It's it's I'm not saying it's an unsolvable problem, but it's definitely a very difficult problem. And the thing is, not only is it a very difficult problem, it's also a much much easier problem than doing this on the moon or on Mars. Like, way easier.

So because because we already know that that, the environment in Iceland can sustain a small population, a smaller population indefinitely at a lower technological level, and this is kind of where that point 6 environmental hostility and population stability comes in. So it turns out that, for a given level of technology and a given level of environmental hostility, either it is possible to sustain a population or it isn't.

So if you say for example, if you back off the environmental hostility, maybe you can support some people if you gradually increase the environmental hostility. So say you've got Iceland, but then over time it's getting colder and colder and colder, or perhaps your technology is regressing over time, so your your ability to make advanced technology is is being lost. And this has occurred throughout human history, you know, when small populations get isolated, they lose technology.

Then then over time, the ability of of your technology to sustain your population diminishes, and actually it can undergo what's like a catastrophic phase shift, where where actually you can't sustain the population, like how to put this? There are environments that are hostile enough that once your technology drops below a certain level, no one can live there at all. Yep. Right?

And so and so you then then you go from, like, gradual population declines due to starvation and illness to catastrophic population declines, due to, like, everyone freezing to death overnight kind of situation. And so so that's kind of the situation that you have by default, even in a place like Iceland, let let alone in space, where where there's kind of a minimum population you need to sustain your technology, and then there's a minimum level of technology needed to sustain your population.

And if you're not on the the right side of both of those curves, you're in deep shit. And so yeah. I just I think that's kind of just an interesting thing to think about. And you have to say, well, what is what is the minimum technology set you need to survive on Mars, and and how many people do you need to sustain that technology? Not just the knowledge, but also the ability to produce it and to produce it, efficiently in large quantities and at relatively low cost.

And and certainly, like, if Iceland had this challenge, it would be an enormous headache.

We're seeing even now that, like, as a result of sanctions levied against Russia, which is a much larger country that was in many ways industrially self sufficient for periods of its history, in the last century, you know, has since since the fall of the Soviet Union completely lost the ability to operate any tech so it's built almost any of its own technology, all of its manufacturing is dependent on foreign imports, all of its oil production is dependent on foreign contractors, and expertise.

It's it's a really, you know, it's a really, really phony problem, and and Russia is a country of nearly a 100,000,000 people, I think, with with a long standing tradition of technical excellence. Unfortunately, diminished in recent years. No. I think it's not a 100 and tiny fly spec island of 300,000 people. I I think they wish it was more like a 130,000,000 people. It's falling really quickly. Sorry. A 144, 1,000,000 people. Yeah. I I stand corrected.

Yep. So it's it's double the way it's falling Just the just the way I remember it. It's almost double France. So France has twice the GDP and half the population of Russia. So just use that as your math, and it's pretty close. Okay. Yeah. That's I like that. France is also its population is still increasing. France is one of the few developed countries that still has a lot of children. So a lot of their own children.

And children and their own I like how you say they have a lot of children and their own children. Well, I mean, there are countries that that, import children. I said Yeah. I I understand that, but it was just an interesting phraseology if you want to think about it. Yeah. France has a lot of children, and they have a lot of their own children. It it's not the way I was thinking you were going to say it. Whereas well, I mean, I I I raised my own children, for example, like, you know Yeah.

As as a as a an interesting exercise in masochism. If they're listening to this, I love you kids. But, my my kids would say, you didn't actually raise us. It was mom. Well, exactly. But but, in this case, my wife and I try and try and split the No. No. We we've been together. It was my I've been together with my wife for now 35. We were married Congratulations. 37 years. Okay. So you you got married before I was born. Yes. Yeah. So yes. We we were no. We not married before you were born.

We've been together. So we Oh, together. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We've been together for 30 some odd years. So yes. I don't wanna think about what the playlist was that you're waiting. I mean, it's just terrifying. The 19 eighties. Yeah. No. We were yes. It was, 19 nineties we got married. Okay. Well, I don't know. No. No. No. No. I wasn't married. We were married? Don't don't tell my wife this. I always but I'll tell you a short quick story then we get back to it. I I don't remember dates.

It's not something that I try. I tried to as much as I can. I don't remember birthdays that easily. And 1 year, I missed my she wasn't married to me. I missed my, fiance's girlfriend's date, her birthday, and she was very upset. So next year, I wanna make it up to her. I no. I wanna make it up to her next year, and I put together one hell of a surprise party. And I called her, my father-in-law, and said we would like you to come. We'd like you to be at the party. And she said he said, wow.

That she is going to be surprised. And I said, I know. I really don't want her to know. And I was playing along, and he says that you don't understand how surprised she's gonna be. And he's egging me on. And then he says, just so you know, her birthday is not till next month. So I completely missed the month. And when she heard that, she just burst out laughing and said, I understand. You're fine. So I completely missed the month. Well, you're a fortunate man.

My my my spouse does not like surprises at all, and and I was informed that if I if I plan a surprise party, I'd be divorced or something. So That also that was also part of the conversation. She does not want a surprise. Never. So, yeah, same thing. So so getting, yes. Russia, France. Alright. Yeah. So as the Iceland case study, you can also do a similar case study where you say, well, I can provision an aircraft carrier with anything you want.

You can put as many people on it as you want, then you have to anchor it in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and your challenge is to make the people on it on it, like, the last person die as late as possible kind of thing. Like, how long can you keep people alive on a on a stranded aircraft carrier with provision with anything you want? So it's a very, very large ship. It's got a big flat deck.

You can put a lot of dirt on there and grow plants and things, but at the end of the day, the hull will rust and it will crack and then it will sink. And that'll happen, you know, within the lifetime of the first generation of people who are living on it. So it's, you know, if you don't have the ability to obtain your steel and to repair it, no matter how much spare parts you bring, it's just a matter of time.

And so, you know, it's just it's just interesting interesting, It's an it's an interesting challenge, but I was gonna ask you this afterwards, but I'll ask it now. When you're thinking of the question you're asking, there's a and what I hear, and I'm trying to phrase this properly. What I hear is the question kind of of, sustainability. How do you create a new society off planet? How do you off earth? How do you how do you meet this need?

And my first take, the I've said it on the podcast before, my first take was never that. Mine was what if we really live between moon and earth? We we exist between the moon and earth. And, again, I didn't know enough about it when I came up with this question. I said the we need the moon for tides, for biological cycles. Even if you look back in, prehistoric not prehistoric, but old history, that you hunted to the moon's light. You traveled because you could use the moon.

It's it's a part of our ecosystem. And so Yes. I my mind immediately said, no. No. No. Instead of thinking of us living on Earth, we we live between this construct called Mearth. Now, and I'm trying to remember his name, and I it'll come to me. Burton Lee and I were in San Francisco. We were at a place across from scratch, and I'm saying, moon on Earth, moon on Earth. We got moon on Earth. And I'm putting my hands together closer and closer, and he looks at me and says, Mearth.

What if that construct of Mearth is that we if you change the paradigm and say, this is really the land that we live in, this is the space, the geography we live in, and we leveraged both of them no different than old explorers would consider that they were going to find an an extension of their where they live or a faster path. And you you you escape this whole belief structure that it's independent, that that that doesn't even cross your mind.

And you you ask the question, how do you make this ecosystem thrive? And that's the question we work on. Does that make you understand the the the question is very different.

Yeah. I would just caution, making analogies to kind of explorers during the age of exploration because by and large, they were you know, the ships the ships themselves are dangerous and they didn't have very advanced navigation technology, but the the lands that they discovered were already by and large occupied by humans who already lived there and and lived there quite successfully, thank you very much, up to a constant up to a constant in smallpox.

So, it's it's a little bit different, but I know it's different. I'm asking the question. I like the, I like the the concept, the conceptual framework. I was just asking, you're you're extremely bright, and I I I love learning from you. I I I get so many kind of directional needles if you wanna say. The one piece that keeps on coming back as I hear your language, and I do pay attention to language, is your language tends to be in a slightly different direction.

It's not that you're arguing the full point. So let's just say it's a we're a 100% in the same we're one is at a 100 degrees and the other one is 99. Everything else is the same. But that difference is if you are taking a laser beam and pointing it at to the moon and you moved it 1 centimeter left or 1 centimeter right, you're gonna miss the moon. We are just different. So I'm asking the question, why that question? Why do you go that way? What are you solving for? Does that make sense?

Did I ask that right? Well, I mean, for me, it's just been this kind of exploration of ideas around, you know, this seemingly impossible goal, and then and then just using the tools that I've been trained to do, to to kind of understand aspects of that problem, and just try and find insights, you know, like, if someone says, oh, Casey, what what is the what is the the cargo manifest gonna be for the first 10 flights?

I I don't know, you know, like, this I I could take a stab at it, but I don't really know. But if someone says, you know, Casey, is it more important that the manifest for the first 10 flights has, you know, food and and and and, you know, some building materials than than it has, you know, the entire thing composed exclusively of of Tylenol. And I'd say, well, you know, I think it's probably probably more reasonable to to include materials that you're gonna need a lot of.

But but the the overwhelming message, if you like, is that is that I would rather not have to choose, I would rather just have post scarcity cargo transport capacity. Okay. And that's that's kind of, I think, where where the people who are actually doing this work and not just kinda speculating on Twitter late at night like I do, kind of, concentrating their efforts, which kinda leads into the Go ahead. Into the last the last topic, which is which is Starship and and the 9 missing technologies.

So so Starship is kind of, without Starship, the whole the whole thing is moot. Right? Without Starship, the Iceland thought experiment is container ships don't exist, so you can't even get the material to Iceland to even have a go. Because it's it's hard to overstate just how different Starship is compared to our existing rockets, even the really good ones.

That's but Starship, you know, is basically it's designed to be a logistical system, a conveyor belt that just transports large quantities of material from Earth to other places, at at at the lowest possible cost, at the highest possible cadence, no questions asked, no frills, no nothing, just it just, you know, eats eats cargo 1 in and dumps it out the other. And, and that's so different from how rockets work right now, which is the it's the it's the merge line. Care and feeding and Right.

It's the it's the MERSK line. We we're just gonna you put it into a container. It doesn't matter what it is. It's harsh conditions. We're gonna bring it there. It's gonna take 32 days to get from Hong Kong to Rotterdam. And in 32 days, you will know that your package will your your container will be there. We won't guarantee what's inside of it. We're not gonna we're not gonna ensure that. You have to take care of it. It's gonna be tough, but in 32 days, you're gonna get it.

Yes. So I don't have to explain that to you because you've worked in logistics. A lot of people don't really think about where this stuff comes from, but but essentially, you know, Paul Wooster who's one of the architects of Starship, you know, pointed out in a talk he gave a few years ago, which is publicly available at a Mars Society conference that, that as I said before, mass covers a lot of sins. You know, you don't have to be all that clever, and you don't wanna be all that clever.

You wanna focus your cleverness on on more important problems, for mass than mass optimization. Whereas if you look at why it is that Mars Rovers, for example, right now cost $1,000,000,000 to make, it's because you need a team of, like, 200 different experts in different things figuring out how to fit what would ordinarily consume several rooms of a large research building into, you know, essentially the front seat of a small car.

And that's really really hard to do, but if you don't have to worry about mass anymore, it's no it's no longer that hard to do. It's it's actually something where where there's an existing supply chain for a lot of that stuff, you know, in the form of of, robotic mining machinery that works in in very hostile environments that are not that different in terms of, you know, chemical treatments and and acidity and corrosion and so on than than than the surfaces of Mars or or the moon.

It's just right now if you said, oh, well, I wanna dump a, a caterpillar mining excavator on the moon, you have no way of doing it because we don't have rockets that can deliver more than a couple 100 kilograms to the moon. But once we have a starship, that's a 100 tons. No. There are some machines out there that weigh a lot more than a 100 tons, like the the giant, bucket wheel excavators that weigh about 15,000 tons.

But you could conceivably send those in pieces and assemble them if you really needed them. It's when I see obsolete. Anyway. But When I see a 3 d printed arm that's 20 meters long, I I I I my mind just says, okay. First of all, you need a dozer or a mechanism to feed that machine. How big is that going to be? And do we even know because the on earth, the the soil moves in circles around? And we don't know how the regolith will perform when it's pushed and moved in that way.

How are you gonna bring a beam that's that large, and it's gotta weigh a lot to be able to do what you're talking about? So you're kind of asking that same question of the cart before the horse here with size dumping a caterpillar. How do you do that? We can't do that today. Yep. Well, certainly not.

But I think if Starship is developed and basically performs according to expectations, which is to say, rapidly reusable space spacecraft is able to do on orbit refueling, is able to transport a 100 tonnes or more into low earth orbit, and then once it's refuelled a 100 tonne, that same cargo Yep. To the moon or to Mars, a lot of these problems go away, and we can focus on other more interesting problems.

But until that happens, there's so much point thinking about the other problems at scale, I think, unless they're incidentally useful for something else. But there are 9 key technology areas that need to be developed in order to make a decent, city, on the moon or on Mars or on an asteroid or something like that that don't currently exist, or if they do, if it does, it's not mature enough to be used. And I'll just list them here.

I don't think we've got time to go through all of them, but maybe we can touch on 1 or 2. Yeah. We could put whatever you like. Yep. Yeah. All 9, we need a solar farm. So we need hold on. Solar farm. Yep. Solar farm.

So so in that case, we basically need the ability to produce, solar solar panels, if we're importing them from Earth that are incredibly light, like on order the thickness of a thick sheet of paper, we can roll them up and unroll them in in situ with very low labor inputs and generate a lot of power. If it produces them on Mars, we don't care about the weight, but it's extremely hard to make solar panels, I think, in the early days on Mars.

So so we need to be able to import, you know, many, many megawatts of, of solar power on Mars because the last thing we need is for, like, the lights to flicker. If we want our humans on Mars to be highly productive, they have to have unlimited access to electricity. So we need a solar farm. We need solar better solar farm technology. I agree. That's also useful on Earth because we need to get smarter about deploying solar farms on Earth at at large scale. Right?

So Mhmm. With less less labor input. We we actually do talk we do talk about this, and we have been talking about that one component. So yes. On on Mars, we need an air miner. So that's, basically a giant machine, with a fan that sucks in air and separates it into into the different components. So on Mars, that would be carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and and water vapor primarily, a little bit of, argon as well, and separate those into their respective fractions for usage later.

And so there's not that much water vapor on Mars, but it may be easier to get water at least initially from from atmosphere, from from Mars' air than to, you know, go and find a chunk of ice somewhere and melt it. That said, point 3 is we need a water miner. So, ideally, we would be able to put a city on Mars on top of an artesian hot spring, you know, like a a subsurface liquid water that we could drill into and suck water out of, at in semi infinite quantities.

I'm talking like, if we want to create and then fill an artificial lake, that should be straightforward. I'm not talking like, oh, no. We need to recycle this bottle of water because we only have, like, you know, 400 moles of water on the entire station.

I'm talking like, we need gushes gushes of water flying to the surface and and forming snow and and just there's no shortage of it because, again, every industrial process you've ever heard of uses a lot of water, and and making it use less water is a huge pain in the ass.

And so if we don't have a a geothermally heated, source of liquid water, then the next best would probably be a glacier, you know, a large a large patch of old ice, that we can build what's called a rod well in, which is you drill a hole and then you melt the water and suck it out. But you pump in hot water and then suck out some some fresh water. You know, go going out and, like, chewing up dirt and melting the water out of it, I think is probably not scalable.

That said, point 4 is we need rock minus. So on Mars, it's probably plausible to assume that we'll be able to locate areas which have, many of the metals that we need close to the surface because, you know, on Mars, there weren't any, you know, iron age or bronze age people running around taking all the good stuff.

It's still it's still lying out there on the surface, and a lot of these materials, particularly what I call the siderophiles, which are the the iron loving ones, basically commonly found in in metal metallic meteorites, and the surface of Mars is much older than Earth, and so the surface should be strewn with the remnants of meteorites.

So if you find if you find a good a good fall somewhere, then then perhaps you can you can scoop up what you need on the surface without having to drill a huge mine shaft deep underground. But that said, you still have to be able to go out and, like, crunch up rocks and throw them in a in a giant truck and drive them to a a refinery somewhere. That was a rock quarry. That's what we did. We took 22,000 tons of stone and made them into all these different sizes. So yes. Yeah.

So so, I mean, it'd be amazing if you if you were in a place that had, like, a local source of iron and a source of aluminum and a source of, like, copper and tin and silver and lydamin and lead and, and maybe some scone with titanium in it, and then, you know, while we're at it, it'd be good if there was a gold deposit, but I mean realistically speaking, you might get lucky on say 2 or 3 of those axis, but the others, either you'll have to go further afield and set up a remote mining site or you have to import it.

So we'll we have to see that's those sorts of surveys haven't even been performed yet. So there are some candidate landing sites which have probably access to the sort of water you need, which is the most important thing, in Arcadia Planitia. But but in terms of, like, doing detailed surveys, close to the surface there hasn't been done, so we don't really know, what's on the surface be it below, like, a thin layer of dust that you can see an image from orbit.

Everything's covered in a little bit of dust, which makes figuring out what's underneath more more challenging. Okay. Point 5 is a fuel plant, so you need the ability to convert carbon dioxide and water into fuel. And by that, I mean synthetic hydrocarbons. And I've actually I founded a company to do that here on earth because I think that we should be making hydrocarbons out of c o 2 in the air rather than getting it out of the ground.

Mhmm. But, but on Mars, it's it's super important because there almost certainly isn't any hydrocarbons on Mars. Sometimes I I I tell my geologist friends that the recurrence slope linear, which is seasonal kind of seeps that we see on Mars are not water. They're hydrocarbons, but I don't think anyone believes that, least more me. But it is fun to watch their faces.

But but in any case, you need hydrocarbons because if you don't have hydrocarbons, it's not that you need them for fuel necessarily. You can have electricity, and a lot of the electricity usage on Mars will be fixed machinery, so you can just plug it in. But, you do need, hydrocarbons for plastics. You need them for chemicals.

You need them for, you know, yeah, essentially essentially all the other stuff that we like that is that is cheap and made of plastics and and things like plastics, paints, insulation, you know, anything that isn't made of metal essentially is made of hydrocarbons. We probably wouldn't be making much out of wood, at least not initially.

You could conceivably, you know, build build a series of giant domes and plant trees in them that would grow up and be, you know, giant sequoia forest on Mars and that'd be pretty neat, and you could have a a forestry division of the industry there, but at least not initially. Okay. So point 6 is life support.

So it's not that different from an air miner except it works inside the the dome or inside the, the habitat, and what it does is it it basically ingests ingests the air and it scrubs out contaminants, it scrubs out c02, it scrubs out water vapor, and and refreshes the air.

And this technology exists right now, it exists in submarines, it exists in spacecraft, it exists in specialized money applications, and and in in some sense exists in the form of air conditioning in most buildings in the west, but the sort of systems that would be reliable enough and have low enough labor requirements, maintenance requirements and stuff to work on Mars is is not really not really mature, the the technology that's used for life support in nuclear submarines that's used in spacecraft on the space station it's it's very old technology at this point it was developed in the 1980s in some cases I can't speak to the specifics specifics of nuclear submarines.

I don't know when that was developed, but but in any case, it's certainly not like, how would we do this in 2030, level level technology. Absolutely. Particularly on the space station that breaks down all the time, which is which is a nonstarter because labor is so expensive. You don't wanna spend labor, like, constantly fixing things. You want things to be a bit more reliable. It doesn't matter if they consume more power. It doesn't matter if they consume more raw materials. Right?

You can always vent waste gases outside into the environment provided you have enough input gases to top top it back up again. Okay. Point 7 is heavy machinery telerobotics. So, basically, it just says, like, giant tractors and diggers and trucks and stuff, but instead of having people in the cab driving them around, you have people either in the base or on on the earth driving them around remotely. And ideally, with enough software that you don't actually have to, like, physically drive them.

You can just task them and say, okay. Well, drive over drive over there, pick up some stuff, and then drive back here. Mhmm. And that's as much direction as they need. The reason for that is that the the the opposite the opposite kind of extreme of that is you have a a poor critter, you know, poor poor person, outside in a space suit with a shovel, you know, trying to dig a hole. Obviously, like, that's not gonna work.

So so if you want to be able to, you know, move vast quantities of dirt around and, and and build your mines, and extract the materials you need and and build build habitats and and get water and You need to have a common you need to have a sophisticated enough set of technologies to be able to manage that. And there are there are The way that's done at scale is with giant machines. Like Yes. Like, too large to fit on roads. Like, giant giant things that can just move stuff around.

The farming industry has gotten there more than the quarry industry if you wanna use. The farming industry has these class 9 harvesters, so these large harvesters, and they are run by GPS systems and autumn it's more or less automated. They'll run through the middle of the night. They don't need any lights on. A person sitting in there, they do have people sitting in there, but they're they're just doing their job all day, all night to be able to harvest.

And a class 9 harvester is one of those type, and then it feeds off to trucks. That could all be run automated. But, yes, it it's not gotten to the point that you're talking about where you can say Yeah. Go get it, come back. Well, so the main reason I think that the agricultural systems there are fully automated mines now.

There's one built in Western Australia, but the the the reason that the reason that that agricultural equipment is still able to have the person sitting in the cab aside from, like, the legal responsibility to not run anyone over, is that the per person productivity is very high because instead of having a person out there with a sickle and a scythe, you know, cutting down the the stems, they have a giant machine that's 40 feet wide, you know, eating eating all the eating all the wheat, which is great.

It's an obvious win. So it's mechanization of labor, right, rather than automation in this case. But but the other thing is that, like, the cost of agricultural labor is not that high. Like, the cost of someone to sit in the cab, a, it's not that high, and, b, it could be quite a bit higher and it wouldn't actually affect the economics of the operational that much. It's just not Yeah. It's it's a it's a municipal component. They're they they're there to make will be high.

So they're they're they're there to make sure they're there to make sure more of an observer that it makes the turn at the end properly, that the feeder that's being the trucks that are being fed are being fed properly. So Yeah. They're not there to do function. They're there to more or less supervise, and they sit in the cab as their office.

Yes. Yes. But say say the I'm I'm not exactly sure what those agricultural labors get paid, but I would say it's probably on the order of 30 to $50 an hour or something like that. It's not it's nothing significant. But on Mars on Mars, like, the per hour labor cost would never be lower than $1,000 an hour.

So, so you'd have to think very carefully about whether you actually wanna have a person, like, in the cab of each machine, you know, out out of the bloody shell, like, digging up rocks, or if you could figure out some way of taking them out of the loop. Yeah. My my point was that it's we haven't gotten there to the point of this fully automate automated telerobotic system, and the the and we haven't had that need on Earth.

I think there will be some of those changes over the next 40 years just because of population challenges. You brought up the Japanese. We have the the Chinese, challenges with their society, its population going down to a 600,000,000 or 700,000,000 people, just because of the curve and the the one child policy. And we have it around the world. We have these type of challenges. So I think the the question will be answered if you add on top of it the advances in electronics.

I think you'll and software design and and all of the other No. I don't think it requires any miracles. No. It doesn't. It just requires the the willpower, the need, and today we don't have it. Well, the other thing is, like, if you were, but, yeah, there's there's already, you know, numerous tractor companies, for example, John Deere or Caterpillar or whatever, that have active r and d divisions that are working on this sort of automation right now.

So it's like Yes. It there's already a profit motive to do it here on the earth. So I think that's, like, more of a solved problem than say, you know, a Mars Mars solar farm or something like that, which is Mine was just a matter of the timeline. It's a solved challenge, but the ubiquitous in usage of it is still, it's not a tomorrow answer. And I think it would be easy I'm not saying the problem is solved. I'm saying the development, like No. I know.

I would I would I didn't I sorry for development is a solved problem. No. I didn't say I'm sorry. That was my my miss speaking. What I meant was Yeah. It's easy for someone who doesn't understand this category of number 7 to make the assumption by saying that they're working on it.

Working on it could mean and it's very easy to go 3 years, 7 years, 10 years before we get to the point of a ubiquitous mechanism that we that insurance companies I mean, got a an insurance company will ensure that a farmer or a or a user will say, I'm willing to invest in that. The scale, scope, sky, price comes down. So it's not a it's not a even though it's an exponential growth curve for the ability to do it, it doesn't mean well, it doesn't mean it will happen.

I'll give you the example that the Boca Chica challenges with the environmental conditions and the political conditions that are happening down in Southern Texas were not part of the equation of we can do it. It was, oh, you we have to answer to something else that we didn't anticipate. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. No. It makes sense. Alright. We're we're all good. And all no worries. We're all good. I I was sitting here thinking, and it's okay that people hear it.

I I love I love your analysis and the way you've taken some constructs that I don't hear many people discuss, and I've broken it down into chunkable, positive or negative conditions that allows an individual to be able to including myself, to be able to say, okay. I got where you're going with this, for example, heavy machinery, the life support, or all of these. So I'm I I love the, direction you've taken it. So we're on to 8. Thank you. Is that it? Alright.

Yeah. So that was that was heavy heavy machinery teller robotics. And, actually, I should state, like, all of these areas are things where, like, SpaceX would have to develop them if no one else did.

But if you were a, you know, an r and d specialist in a company that already did these, it probably wouldn't hurt your business to, like, spool up an internal division that that is able to figure out how to make these work, on the moon or on Mars so that when it's time for SpaceX to do them, they don't have to vertically integrate in your industry and destroy your market share. But I I so recruit all your good people.

So I I'm going to take it, from a completely different I I love what you just said. Love it. However, what you the the belief then where you started from, it sounded if, SpaceX to I would say to many I've spoken to in the, people who are space enthusiasts or in the in the ecosystem, it is that SpaceX will deliver the answer. And instead, it should be that SpaceX is primarily it's going into different directions, but primarily a logistics company.

And you don't ask the logistics company to also create the manufacturing of the garment and to also create and to also create. What you're saying is stop looking at it, I think. Stop looking at it as that's the solution. It's that you've got an opportunity, and and that's where this space is not an industry. It's a geography.

That's where that comes from is it's not difficult for an organization to say if there's a viable ecosystem, if there's insurance that can cover it, if there is a, an economics of the study of economics and markets. If you were to say, okay. If I took 5% of my research, my r and d, or my efforts and put it towards this development, I could be a part of another ecosystem. I sell, I sell I'm gonna take one of yours. What did you say? You used it. I sell rivets, bolts. You said used another term.

Fasteners. I make fasteners. Yeah. Okay. What if you were to say, I'm gonna create a hardened steel fastener that can work in a vibration or intensity or a condition of this. If I create that, now I've got a completely different market. I still am in the fastener business, in the industry of fasteners. And I make fasteners for submarines. I make fasteners for things on land, for example, in, farming, as we just talked about.

But now we'll make fasteners for high, highly disruptive environments such as taking off and landing or, beyond earth where there could be a different type of, atmospheric condition. So Yeah. We that's the challenge in my mind in many of the in in discussion is it's not about entering the space industry. It is about because there is none. It's about working in a different geography. Does that make sense the way I said it? Yeah. I understand.

I I don't know if I would do a a high tensile, I'm sorry, like a hard hardened steel fastener. That seems like a bad idea to me, but I I was just sending a sample because their fasteners came to mind. Yeah. Yeah. It's just you want your fasteners to have good cracking properties, and and hardened steels tend to not have those. But, but, yeah, it's a good example.

The, in this case, SpaceX is able to do stuff that other companies are not, and the reason is that SpaceX is the destination of choice for a lot of, not necessarily all of, but a lot of the most ambitious engineers and the best engineers on earth. And as a result, they can make problems that are impossible merely late. And and so, you know, one of the reasons why, for example, it might be worthwhile for, say, Caterpillar who already spends $4,000,000,000 a year on r and d to be like, oh, yeah.

We're gonna make a moon moon compatible version of our of our of our trucks by making a vacuum compatible power head and upgrading the hydraulic hose connectors and switching out the paint and changing the the the quality of the lubrication used in our seals, in our, in our bearings.

And that's basically the main major substitutions you would need just like a slightly different set of parts also obtainable through standard supply chains, is that, you know, if Caterpillar is able to slap NASA or SpaceX on the side of their, on the side of their products, suddenly they have a recruiting halo and a retention halo that makes it easier for them to go and hire really good people that will help them out innovate their own competition in their commercial markets.

And and this was kind of a hypothetical, you know, 10 years ago when I first started thinking about this, but now it's pretty damn obvious that, like, essentially, Elon's companies are able to crush the competition, because they just they have an infinite an exhaustive supply of incredibly ambitious, engineers working and technicians and so on working on their products, which the other companies, if you've seen their products in detail, obviously, do not have access to quite the same same level of of, of ambition.

So, yeah, I think it's I think it's a worthwhile thing. That's kind of why I wrote this what the call you're talking words from. I'm gonna add another layer on top. In 2014 Sure. The first time that Project Moon Hot was created in Scratch in Silicon Valley, The example I used when I shared how to build the ecosystem and everything is I used Caterpillar. I used exactly Caterpillar. And, so you're you're talking exactly what I had said in 2014 in a different construct, in a in a different manner.

You've you've articulated a little bit differently tying it to SpaceX, but it's the exact same mode. It's the exact same framework that, yes, if you do what you had just mentioned, you open up different opportunities not just for beyond earth, but you also change because of that paradigm shifting thinking, because of the different questions you're asking. You'll probably, in Caterpillar, improve remote mining capabilities on Earth.

You'll probably improve some type of gear technology that could be used in cars. You'll probably be and there's an amplification of all of that innovation. That's exactly project Moonhead. It's exactly great. So you you're I'm agreeing with you a 100%. Number 8. Excellent. Well, up to a point. Number 8 is pressure structures. What did you say? What what type of structures? Point 8 is precious structures. Pressure structures.

So when it comes to, you know, in figuring out how to enclose and, essentially terraform locally, you you know, millions of square feet of land. It's not quite the problem is not like, well, how do we make a little a little cylinder like we have in the space station, or how do we dig a hole on the ground and pressurize it or something.

It's kind of like how do we, it's sort of the problem that Amazon has when they build a new distribution center, which is like how do we take this greenfield, you know, open space, and then enclose it in a giant building as quickly and cheaply as possible. And so in order to get the the surface area that they need, which is kind of on a similar scale actually. And and so the way the way I think about this is I say, well, if I don't have to, I would rather not move any dirt. Right?

Because moving dirt is expensive and time consuming. If I don't have to, I would rather not make the structure out of something really heavy and big. Right? So you could potentially, enclose a space by by building a vault out of cement and bricks or or or cement blocks or something, and then and then loading up with with, with more dirt on the outside to provide some pressure to to resist the the the explosive pressure of of pressurizing the interior.

You could certainly do that on the moon, and it might be a good idea on the moon to defend against micrometeoroids, but on Mars, they they get burned up in the atmosphere. So, so you just need to enclose some pressure.

It would be amazing if it let through natural light because then you could use the space inside for living and growing plants, and you wouldn't have to do artificial lighting, and it would be, you know, oh, so when you kind of throw all these different ideas in into the into the box, it kind of seems that a tensile structure might be the way to go, and a tensile structure, a little bit like a suspension bridge as opposed to an arch bridge, uses less material because materials are typically, 10 times stronger in intention than compression.

I know engineers listening to this are gonna get angry, but, but, you know, at at the 0th 0th level, that's certainly true, because intention, you don't have to worry about material buckling. And so you say what does a tensile pressure structure look like? And it actually looks like an air mattress.

So instead of instead of an air mattress, yeah, so an air mattress you kind of think of as having like a series of dimples, and those dimples correspond to internal pillars, that connect one side of the air mattress to the other to stop it turning into a sphere. And those pillars are not compressional, they're tensile. Right? So they're actually they're holding 10 they're holding tension. They're holding the two sides together.

You could make them out of string, whereas you could not make a compressive, compressive pillar out of out of string. It would just collapse. So but instead of instead of, like, a a complete air mattress, just imagine you've got the top half of an air mattress, and then around the edges, you kind of integrate it with some kind of membrane that's anchored into the ground.

And then in between where where the tensile columns are, you have anchors that are piles driven into the ground that allow you to transfer the load, the tensile load of of steel cables into into the ground. So essentially just making sure that the anchors end up underneath many, many tons of rock. And that way you don't have to pick up the rock and put it on top where it'll block the light.

You can just leave it where it is, and all you have to be able to do, and that's it's as easy as this, is is drive a bunch of anchors into the ground at regular intervals, probably every, you know, 100 feet or so, that are able to connect to, to steel tensile cables that then run upwards vertically to a transparent plastic, you know, reinforced, perfluoroethylene, I think it's PTFE, membrane, which is materials routinely used in in building flexible, roof structures here on earth because it's UV UV resistant and water resistant.

And, and you could reinforce it with, with some kind of fiber fiber material to to prevent material creep over time, which is also a standard standard production practice here on earth for, boat sales and things like that.

And and so the nice thing about that is that, you know, the marginal cost to enclose an additional, you know, 1,000 square feet of land is really, really low because there there only needs to be a, a small, you know, small anchor, a couple of anchors put in, and then and then a membrane that literally weighs a couple of kilograms per square meter, put in place instead of, you know, you want another 1,000 square feet of lead.

Well, now you gotta dig a whole 50 feet deep and a 1,000 square feet in area, or now you have to, now now you have to, like, figure out how to how to produce, you know, a 10 10 meter thick layer of, of cement and and dirt, in order to cover that over.

And the nice thing about PTFE is it's transparent, so you can you can get light through it as well, which means you can you can grab plants and stuff inside, and you can get greenhouse greenhouse heating of the interior as well, which will be important. And the nice thing about the tensile structure is that is is that if you wanna make the roof high, you just need a bit more steel to make the cables longer.

Mhmm. And so in principle, you could have, you know, essentially this is vaulted structure with, regularly spaced vertical cables, looking more or less like a Gothic cathedral. And the ceiling instead of being a rock or a stone vault, would be, you know, essentially a transparent window. And I'm not saying it would work flawlessly.

You'd have to have, you know, repair mechanisms and machinery and and and internal man manifolds and bulkheads in in case of leaks and catastrophic failure and and testing and so on. But this is why this is technology that needs to be developed and prototyped here on earth.

There are already pressure supported structures here on earth, so you can have like a pressure supported, gym roof or something like that, but the pressure difference across those membranes is much much lower here on earth than it would be on Mars where you'd need it you need to actually pressurize the interior so you could breathe and the same the same would go on the moon if you build 1 on the moon.

On the moon it's a bit more of a challenge to have a tensile structure because of again micrometeoroid impacts, but and and also thermal cycling doing this step.

But, but, you know, you could you could certainly I could I could imagine, for example, having a a vaulted ceiling where where the the the roof part is covered, is covered with covered with dirt to to provide the shielding, but then the the the the perimeter of the area has has kind of a vertical wall that is exposed, which is which is less vulnerable to impacts.

And also if you are building on the pole of the moon, then then all the stuff you'd wanna look at, which is like the ecliptic, the sun, the earth, would be, you know, within a few degrees of the horizon anyway. It wouldn't really be overhead. Mhmm. So, you know, just some just some random ideas. And I don't I don't claim to have, like, the final word on this, but but certainly if I'm thinking like, well, you know, I'm in the business of of encapsulating millions and millions of square feet.

I want my roof to be really, really light and really, really cheap. So I think tensile tensile plastic membrane is probably, instructive there, but that's it certainly needs to be developed. Mhmm. And then the the 9th point is surface activity suits, which are it's a fancy word for space suits that you'd use on the surface of a planet.

And actually there was just NASA just announced a $3 a half $1,000,000,000 development contract with, Axiom and Collins, I think, aerospace, 2 two private companies in the US to build the next generation of spacesuits for Artemis after their own internal programs kind of flamed out in various ways. But, basically, spacesuits are really complicated. They're really hard to make.

There's been probably a dozen different different kinds designed over the years, and and they're all really, really suck. No. They're incredibly expensive, but they they all really, really suck in their own way as well. Some of them suck in different ways, but, but, like, they're just extraordinarily limited in in what they're able to do, and and and what they have to do is is it also extremely broad. They have to do all kinds of really complicated things in order to work properly.

So, and and just to to I think it's just for this. I've spoken we've spoken to, not I, we. We have spoken to several, people engaged in this type of activity, and you're looking at a $12,000,000 suit, 2000 hours to make a glove, the there's an interchangeable like 1 person for a full year. Right. And that then there's a there is but it's multiple disciplines, so it's even more than that.

They're Yeah. Then the way it's modulized is you have your hands fit your hands and your your lengths of arms, but bodies in cases are interchangeable. So you don't need to have 12,000,000 per person, but when you get to a certain scale, you're actually reusing different components to be able to fit that individual. But there's a guy, and I think it's I think it's University of North Dakota. He's working on a completely different structure.

He his goal is to take that 2000 hours and bring it down to a a cost variable that will be 200 to $500 to make those gloves as compared to the the numbers that we're talking about here. And it is a huge challenge, and I bring up Paragon because they just purchased the, a spacesuit company because they that's just on my mind. So we've talked to a few of them in turn as to what progress they've made, and you can't have 50,000 people or if you did need 20,000 suits.

Just think of that supply chain challenge. It's just Well, I think in practice, most people would not be in spacesuits most of the time. I agree with you because, you know, they'd they'd live inside the terrarium, and the terrarium would be enormous, you know, like, 10 miles wide kind of thing.

But if you're having a 100 if you have a 100000 or 200000 people, and you need 20,000 suits, and you need and you add a and then you have the emergency evacuation suits, There's a complexity to these numbers no matter how you play it. Yeah. I'm saying, like, probably everyone have their own suit. They might not use it all that much. But, yes, you don't wanna be $12,000,000 each. So this the suits need to be cheaper, which means they need to be easier to make.

Ideally, they'd be field maintainable. But they also need to work better. I mean, like, current spacesuits are super heavy and and super hard to use, and and so, you know, that's why one of the one of the reasons the image of, like, an astronaut digging a hole with a shovel wearing a spacesuit is ridiculous because because like wearing a space suit is like having a person giving you a bear hug trying to stop you do what you're doing the whole time while girls are carrying them.

Yeah. And also making you like hot and sweaty and eating all your oxygen for you.

So so I think you know if you if you go to if you go to the the museum at Catalina, Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles where Jacques Cousteau and his friends basically did all the development for scuba diving, you can see like they went through probably 30 or 40 or 50 different iterations in terms of how scuba systems were designed to the point where now they're basically you can rent them and they cost a couple $100 and they'll work more or less flawlessly for an entire career and they have to work flawlessly, and and they can be operated by idiots as I can attest, and and they they work really nicely, but the problem with spacesuits is that spacesuits are about as sophisticated in terms of the development of modern scuba systems as like, antique diving bell or something would be.

They're just like, we just haven't gone through those 50 iterations of technology yet to get to something that actually works really, really well, and is and is usable and cheap. And so, you know, a lot of work is needed to be done there. And you can be really clever and maybe maybe skip 10 of those generations by by being super clever.

But but at the end of the day, I think we just need to, like, serious money needs to be invested in, like, solving this problem long term so that the suit is less like a spacecraft that you strap on and more like a pair of Carhats, you know, like like, you know, heavy overalls that you put on and basically does does the job for you. I I agree completely.

Yeah. I I'm trying to look at because of the the Zoom stopping, I'm I I have 3 computers in front of me right now, I'm trying to look up the university. I think it was University of North Dakota or Pablo de Leon, I believe is his name. And he is working on a new type of approach to addressing exactly what you're talking about, creating an iteration where you don't you you can have a repairable suit.

You don't need the the thousands of hours to create just a glove and bringing down that cost variable. So there are people out there working on this. It's we're we're far from it as you've said, 30 to 40 iterations for Jack Cousteau. We're we're not far enough along to make that cost effectiveness, and that's your number 9. So it makes sense. Yeah. So that's the that's the 9th the 9th kind of requirement. You know, I've got some random ideas there, but they're probably not very good.

But, yeah, it's it's certainly something that needs to be done. It needs to be done sooner rather than later. And, you know, especially if you wanna have humans being able to go outside and walk around even just, you know, for fun, if not for work. You know, you could you could imagine a situation where you have giant airlocks and you bring all the machines in and you work on them in a short sleeves environment and and no one ever goes outside.

And that's more or less how submarines are operated, for example. Yep. Although some submarines do carry divers, but those divers are not typically used for maintaining the submarine. But, yeah, I mean, like, for example, like the Russian typhoon class strategic ballistic nuclear missile submarine, has a operating depth of 900 meters. So even if they wanted to, they wouldn't be able to they wouldn't be able to put, times on the You're not gonna put a person outside to be doing some repair work.

Yeah. Not not the atmospheres. Our our blink our blinker is out, and I need you to go out and change the bulb. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Can you can you please go and repeat the letters on the side of the hole? Right. It's it's wearing off a little bit more like anglofission Right. Squints and things. Yeah. We're gonna come up I just have a whale dive down that day. Yeah. We're gonna come up in a in about 2 months. We wanna look good.

So can you please put a coat of that special paint on to make us look a little shinier when we get up? Yes. It's not gonna happen. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, some whales dive that deep, actually, which is pretty extraordinary, like, from a physiological point of view.

But but, yeah, it's it's but, yeah, I think I think having the ability to operate out outs out outside of enclosures and outside of vehicles is, you know, it's just important on a psychological basis as well as, you know, potentially it's a technical shortcut. But the current generation of spaces is not up to the challenge. Not up to it. While you were going through this list, one of the questions that came to mind, and yes.

You probably heard or at least because you've listened to enough podcasts, you probably heard some of the things that I've said. Why in your head do you, not should we as humans and the why do you work on this? Why do you think it should be done? Why do you see the value on it? Because you you thought a lot about it. What what is it for you? Well, it's kind of a hobby for me for a long time.

I've I spend a lot less time thinking about it now than I used to, but we all need escapism, and, you know, I was I've always been really inspired by, science fiction, stuff. I actually met Robert Zubrin when I was 9 years old and and read his books and was like, that'd be neat. And then, and then when I came of age, technically, I decided to read them with my, you know, red red pen in hand and redo all these calculations and and see what I thought about them for myself.

And, you know, they're mostly it's mostly, like, on the right track. It's fine. Like like, he and I, we we we know each other collegially now as well, but, which is kind of amazing. Like, as a as a kid growing up in a remote part of Australia, like, kinda getting to meet these people, but also, like, what SpaceX is doing I find super inspiring. And and Sifero, you know, kinda started out trying to reverse engineer what they were doing on the inside, trying to anticipate what they're up to.

And then, and then, you know, I was lucky enough to get to meet some of the people involved and and, sometimes they'd ask me questions and I'd think about it for a while and write a blog or write a book about it and and, see if I can just, you know, in in my own way, you know, improve the quality of the discourse and, you know, increase the signals noise ratio and and and maybe even potentially have an insight or 2 that might help.

The, I I love the the framework or the the way you approach many of the questions that you're you you bring up. And the the last one that I I've saved for the end just because I thought it was because of the way in which you speak and not the the accent, but the way in which you frame things. Is it your belief or desire, or is it just a a challenge that you this escapism and hobby that are you we need to Mars is the deck the next place, and that's the solution, and that's where we need to go.

Is moon to you? And I'm trying to say this is how do you say? As sterile as possible? Because I'd like to hear where you're coming from, if that makes sense. Well, I mean, I think for a long time, there was this kind of zero sum mentality, driven by senior bureaucrats at NASA and and sometimes presidential administrations, that would kinda say, we go to Mars, go to the moon, we go to Mars, go to the moon.

And actually we've gone to either of them, and we're not really on track to go to either of them at this rate. But the nice thing about Starship is that it lets you go to both and at basically the same marginal cost because, you can only go to Mars every 2 years, so in the in between time you may as well go to the moon.

And and the thing is the starship means that you can build a base on the moon that looks and feels and operates like a large Antarctic station, like, motor station with a 1000 people without much difficulty. Right? Whereas without a starship, even a base of, like, 4 people on the moon that's occupied for 3 weeks of a year is basically impossible. Right? Just it it you know, people have been trying to square that circle for for for decades and they haven't solved it.

It's one of these things where like I was describing before in the context of techno technological and population collapse, but but in this case it's it's it's slightly less dire, but even so you say well we have a system we wanna build it well it weighs too much, well we'll make it weigh less we'll take out some of the parts. But now, you know, in order to make the remaining parts work well, they have to weigh more, so they still weigh too much. Okay. We'll make it really, really clever.

Now it costs too much. You know? And and the the technical phrase is the system does not close. You know? Once once you once you kind of, you know, go in this merry-go-round of, like, updating all the requirements for each different subsystem as you change the previous one in order to solve the previous problem, you know, hopefully, over time, you converge on a solution that works.

And that that's more or less how aircraft are designed, but but in the case of, like, Moonbasis with rockets and existing budgets and existing technical suites and existing levels of ambition, it doesn't work. But with Starship, it can work. It can you know, that a lot of those problems go away. So so I think we can do we can do both the moon and we can do Mars.

I think, it makes more sense to try and do a big city on Mars than on the moon, but you could easily do a big city on both places if you really wanted to. If you had to pick 1, you'd you'd do Mars. And I think the really compelling thing is if you can solve or at least get close to solving the Autarky problem, the self sustaining problem on Mars, you can solve it in Iceland easily. Right? By by extension from our discussion. Right?

And if Iceland is able to be technologically self reliant, for everything, that means basically any city on earth like, you know, Columbus, Ohio can be self reliant. Birmingham, Alabama can be self reliant. And I think that, you know, it would certainly have complications as far as geopolitics and and and so on go, if if the smaller cities were able to be self reliant.

But I think it would be a net a huge net positive, because, you know, essentially, you you alleviate scarcity, for for all humans everywhere. And we think about what do we want our future to look like. It's a lot more like the Star Trek where there's where there's no scarcity, really. It's the the age event the age of Self scarcity. The age of it, which is something that you've discussed with other people on this on this podcast.

Yeah. But, you know, how do we get to how do we get the age of infinite? We need the ability to more or less seamlessly with relatively low overhead and input and complexity, convert generic materials, dirt and, you know, stuff you can find in the backyard essentially, and solar power into any material you could possibly want.

And, you know, right now we're at the we're at the point as a civilization with by by building these extremely large organizational structures like nation states essentially, we're able to organize very very large groups of people to build machines that are extremely specialized and high performance and, you know, think about, you know, a 787 aircraft or something like that, basically miracle miracle machine, And, and that's great, but at the same time, we also need to make efforts to compactify the industrial stack so that we don't run out of people.

You know? Yep. If we want to go on making amazing things and more amazing things and more capable things, we need to figure out how to do more with fewer people. And that also means that we can have greater diversity. You know, like, right now, there's really only 2 major aircraft manufacturers, like large large aircraft manufacturers. There's there's Boeing and Airbus.

But if Birmingham, Alabama is able to, quote, unquote, make everything, you know, with their own local materials and energy supply, then then we're no longer kind of stuck in this world where where, like, tiny oligopolies control major, you know, major aspects of factors of production. We we may not want, you know, Tampa, Florida to have the resources to build their own nuclear weapons, but, you know, that's kind of one of the complications.

But, and and certainly some some degree of regulation will be necessary to avoid making aircraft that crash and kill everyone, But our current system I like how you put that item. I like how you use Tampa. You didn't use, cans. You didn't use Melbourne. You didn't Well, Canberra. Canberra for starters should just be walled off and, you know, but the I said the tidying shade over the top. So stop them getting power. Yeah. That's I'm I'm from Australia. No. No. I mean No.

That's why I said it because that's why I use Glance. That's why I use Melbourne. What makes That's Brisbane. What makes the great cities great? You know, what makes the great cities great? You know, and and and would it would it make them less or more great if they're able to do more stuff, you know, within their own limits, and and their people there were able to have access to cheaper materials and cheaper energy. And and that's kind of what is possible. Right?

If you can build a city on Mars with a 1000000 people that is self sustaining, and to be fair, those people are highly trained, like but it wouldn't be that it wouldn't be a stretch to do a 10,000,000 here on earth, and that it just make a huge difference, I think. And I I don't know if you realize that, but you quite literally took using the using the innovations, the paradigm shifting thinking, and the endeavor, and turning it back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.

Because we're not just about humans and project moon. You actually just did that. I don't know if you consciously thought about it, but you took exactly what our framework is.

Solve for x, add those complexities in there, create the network effect that happens, accelerate the innovations, create enough of them to be able to reduce the cost to load the the access to it, then translate that back to a different human existence or a different planetary existence over a period of time, which also accounts for behavioral, political, economic conditions that will allow for a different future. You you just said it. I don't know if you did realize that.

Well, it it could be said that I've been on a podcast once or twice before and did my homework and stay on stay on brand. Stay on point. Yes. But yeah. Stay on. I'll make it look accidental. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. See no. It's it's fascinating, and I I've gotta say that when I first, you have an unbelievable breath of knowledge, and there's a lot of guests we've had who've had this. And you brought up, Zubrin, fantastic interview only because I don't hear him do a lot of moon type related work.

He's the you'd know that interview went in in that direction. I don't think I planned. I don't know if he planned it. No. It was good. It was good because Zubrin obviously has done a lot of talks over the years and a lot of them are publicly available. But, but, you know, it's it's fairly unusual to get him, talking or most of these people are professional communicators kind of, talking about stuff that you haven't heard before, one way or another.

And, and so, yeah, I I I credit that that interview and and the questions to kind of really digging into some of the questions that I think I think, you know, doctor Zivran would enjoy, thinking about some more probably if he It was it was it was fascinating. Day to day. It's much Yeah. Some of these have been and, Jeffrey Mamber Jeffrey Mamber's Yes.

Interview was fascinating to hear some of the things that people saying I I didn't know this about him, but his his construct and his belief structure, where it comes from and how they've he's evolved is fascinating. I I'm going to say that Casey, when Andreas in the Andreas in, Germany had said you were top on the list that gave me that sign of approval that we needed to have you on, and I'm going to I know this is public. It doesn't make a difference.

We're all working on what we're doing together, is, if you're willing to explore and see, most of what we do is not out in the general public. You know that. Most people say, I I don't even know about you. I can't find anything on you. That's okay. We have, Dan Dunbacher, who's running the he's the executive director of the American Institute For Astronautics and Aeronautics. There's nothing out there, but I see all these people you're talking to.

I'd like to expand an offer that we'd spend a little bit of time because I think your questioning, the way you think is is amazing. It's incredible. And you you have a you have such a depth of and breadth of knowledge that if you wanna explore more with Project Moon Hut, and it's not Project Moon Hut per se as you've heard, there's more. And I'd love to see how not a full time job. I'm not looking at that in terms of the way I'm thinking.

I'm thinking of I believe that you'd be able to find opportunities. We're here to solve. We're not looking for people to tell us we can't do it. We're not because that's okay. Do something else. We are not your game. That's fine. But we're looking for people like yourself who have the ability to look at things completely differently, and I I I'm fascinated by the way you think. So, that's very kind of you. I'm I'm, of course, curious to learn more and, and, very, very happy to be asked.

So we'll see if we can we can fit it in. No. We'll we'll we'll fit it in. It's not it's not a rush type thing, but you've heard. We have KPMG, Deloitte, PWCEY, White and Case, Maples Group. These are law firms, accounting firms. We have JPMorgan Private Banking took us on. Carta's doing things for us, which is the this the, you'd you heard the name I'm assuming, because where you're located. I used them. Yeah. Yeah. You've used them.

We have, we have companies that you would never have anticipated working with us because their skill set is not beyond earth. Their skill set is something you need. You need to set up an account. You need j and you can get JPMorgan Private Banking to help you, not because it's that. It's the they're giving us the suite of services. And we have Microsoft gave us a 100 seats because we're a 501c3. We're looking for different types of individuals who can help us create a new future.

And it's something that it sounds like, even with your answer that you gave, is you have you have children. You're looking for your children to have a newer different life, and we're hoping that tomorrow will be a better day. And that's the 6 mega challenges which you've also heard about. So, again, I fascinated. I absolutely loved having you. I I appreciate meeting you. And so I wanna thank everybody out there in the world today who is listening in.

I I sincerely hope you learned something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Again, Project Moon Hut Foundation is we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut. We're not about settlement, colonization, science.

We're about changing the the future through that to the accelerate development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to take the in the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking, and then to turn everything from that to turn the endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species. And website, videos, top right hand corner, project moon hot dot org. You will see they're not project moon hot.

You're not if you watch them, you're not you're not gonna walk away and say, oh my god. I understand it. That's what we use as the intro. If you're interested in taking the next step and talking to us, we have people texting us, working with us all over the world from from Asia to, EMEA, which is Europe, Middle East, Africa, all through the Americas. So we're looking for you to for anybody listening in. So with you, Casey, what's the best way to get hold of you?

Usually, Twitter is a a safe place to find me. So I'm at cjhendmer, Charlie Juliet hotel alpha November delta Mike echo Romeo, on, on Twitter. You can find me there. Oh, that's perfect. And for any of you who are listening in, I'd love to connect with you. You could reach me at [email protected]. You can connect with us at at project moon hut on Twitter or at goldsmith if you wanna get me directly. LinkedIn, we have a small group. We're we're not a big marketing group. We're not trying to.

We're trying to find the right people who can help us. We are on Facebook, Instagram. So there's many different ways that anybody can reach out to us. So that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.