T t.
There are two places we both say we don't want to mess around with. That's too deep in the ocean, that's right, and too far out into space.
We don't know what's out there, and we don't know it's down there. Okay, there you have it. The people are like, oh, I would want to live in the ocean at the I'm like, we don't know anything about what's going.
Y'all laughing at SpongeBob. But a pineapple under the sea. No thanks, Okay, you don't know what's down there, No one does. We don't know what's in space, but people are still trying to go there.
Right. Just this Monday that just passed, NASA was supposed to launch their Artemis moon rocket, but the launch was scrubbed, so it's canceled due to technical difficulties because of a fuel leak and some other things like a temperature issue with the engine.
When will we learn to see in space? We need to cool it down?
When will we learn?
I'm TT and I'm Zakiyah.
And from Spotify, this is Stop Labs.
Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that makes this hardcore science, pop culture, and a healthy dose of friendship.
This week, we're talking all about commercial space flights.
Before we even get into this too deep.
Uh huh.
I gotta know where everybody's landing. If you could go to space, and I mean first class to space, not in the cargo area. If you could go first class to space, would you go T T? Would you go?
Ooh? I'm still very terrified of space, you know me. I've said this in a few episodes, like the thought of space scares me, honey, like it scares me, but you know, the scientist in me is very curious what it's like, if it'll be cool, you know. So I'm kind of on the fence. I'm gonna say yes because I feel like I have to say yes.
Oh, y'all bullying my friend, and to be in a space, I'm.
Gonna bully me. Y'all always bullying me.
Okay, now it's time for y'all to tell us would you go to space? Yes or no? If you take a look in the app right now, you'll see the poll at the bottom. Let us know would you go to space? Yes or no? And also jump in our dms or respond to our story on Instagram because we really do want to hear I want to know why you're going or why you're not going.
You didn't say, are you going?
Oh, I'm in their life swim, We're terrified.
I'm going scared.
Okay, I'm going scared, straight to space. Everybody's going to space. When William Shatner went, I said, hey, I think I'm eligible.
Yeah, he took offense to everybody asking his age, but it's a valid question.
I mean, he's pretty much up there. So and how do you get on the list? I saw Michael Strahan went recently, I.
Don't know what the qualifications are, but Michael Strahan, William Shaddner, I don't know who's next.
And that made us ask a lot of questions. Specifically, we wanted to know more about the history of space exploration, how commercial space flights impact space exploration, and what that could mean for the future.
All right, let's get into the recitation.
So what do we know, Well, we are seeing quite a bit of dust being kicked up from the private space company SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic. Everybody is taking this thing to space.
And like we said, they have been taking a lot of celebrities and the folks with the coin because going to space is not.
Cheap going across the country is not cheap.
Ain't no spirit flights to space?
Okay, you know there's not any spirit flights anymore anyway, Right, they were just bought. Now, if I see Jeb Blue going to space, you're taking on too many risks. That's I'm going to tell anybody that has a ticket, that's just you're taking it too far.
Right, this is gonna be a slingshot. They're gonna put you in a slingshot and just let it happen.
But even though we're joking around, there seems to be a lot of excitement about and potential related to space exploration.
Absolutely, there's so much to be discovered in space. But because we don't know that much, that means there's a lot of unknowns. So it kind of makes you go, I don't know when you start thinking about just sending regular, regular, regular people into.
Space, and so what do we want to know? So I want to know.
Kind of the history of space exploration, who were the first folks to think about space and what questions were they asking and trying to answer?
And I want to know how we got here. I feel like I was just minding my business and then everybody was going to space, like, was this secretly happening? How did it become so popular? How did these people get on these lists? You know, was there space flight before Instagram when people couldn't post about it?
And I want to know what do we need to be thinking about for the future. I mean, you know, it's not going to just stop with those quick flights up and down. Are people going to start trying to living space? Are people going to be having hotels up there? Is there going to be Spotify space? If so, sign me up? Is that a part of my premium membership? My subscription.
Let's jump into the dissection.
Our guest for today's Lab is doctor Jordan Beim.
I'm doctor Jordan Bim. I'm a space historian at the University of Chicago. My research focuses on the hitt of space medicine and astrobiology. The best spaceship is friendship.
Doctor Bim is working on a book called Anticipating the Astronaut and it's all about the history of space medicine pre NASA. It's coming out next year with MIT Press. And since he's a space historian, we knew he could take us back into time. Okay, so The first thing that we wanted to know was when humans were first thinking about going into space, what were they thinking about and what did exploration look like.
We've been going to space for over sixty years, but humans have been thinking about going to space for almost as long as we have written records. The earliest space sciences were visual observations of the cosmos, and that was done just with the naked eye for many years, and then starting in the sixteen hundreds, it was the telescope.
The telescope was the main instrument for exploring space until the beginning of the twentieth century, and telescopes are still important for space exploration today. Doctor Bim told us it wasn't until nineteen forty five, at the end of World War Two, that we developed technology to actually reach space.
So most people think that space exploration starts with NASA, which was founded in nineteen fifty eight. But what my research as a space historian focuses on is this missing ten years or so where it was actually done in the military, mostly the US Air Force. And the context there is the Cold War, which was a military competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was framed by the fear of nuclear annihilation and the delivery
of atomic weapons. Someone said, hey, instead of putting a warhead on top of a rocket, what if we put a little capsule and a human in there. What could we do with that?
Now?
Why would they say that?
That is not my next? No line up thinking.
Instead of a warhead, what about a real head?
Right like that, Doctor Bem shared, it's important to understand how the military shaped the history of space exploration and research.
I always say history matters. You know, the past isn't really past. The past is all around us, and that counts for space as well. And it's my mission to recover those missing stories.
One of those missing stories includes Werner von Bront, a former Nazi and rocket engineer who was brought over to the United States by our government as part of a secret program called Operation Papercliff. And in this program, the United States brought over sixteen hundred German scientists, regardless of war crimes, to work against the Soviet Union and with the United States.
And so many people know that Verner von Brown and his team of Nazi rocket scientists built the rockets that took us to the moon. But what most people don't know is that doctors and psychologists came over as well, and they worked on the human who would ride inside that rocket. So the early history of the field of space medicine, which I write about in the US Air Force, it's not American doctors and psychologists, it's former Luftwaffe doctors
and psychologists. And they did not check their ideas about the perfectibility of certain humans at Ellis Island. When they came to the United States, they wove that into knowledge about the human body in the extreme environment of outer space. So when you look at the first astronaut groups and there are seven white male military test pilots, like all the same size, you know, the only thing that's different
is like their haircut and their tie or something. It kind of is this low key eugenics that gets in there, and we see the ripple effects of that. Even today, we're still trying to fight for diversity and equity of access to space because there has been this entrenched normal of the sort of white male body as space normal, which it's not.
You know, this gets back to what we talked about with Angela sayani H in Skin Deep Lap twenty five.
Absolutely, how our.
Historical underpinnings, what was going on in the world at that time affects the science that was being done, and we look back at it and say, the science doesn't lie of what baby, The science is biased. Okay, absolutely, and we're still reeling from those effects today. Yeah.
When you take a look back at all of the earliest you know, bright minds that people talk about in reference Darwin, all these folks they were racist, and they had verrely racist ideologies that they baked into their science, and that was the science that was then canonized by the scientific community. So we accepted as fact. And there's science that's built on top of that. So even though we are hundreds of years post those thoughts and we think, oh,
we're progressive, we're scientists. No, the roots, the foundation of some of these scientific principles are biased and racist.
We even see this in entertainment where people are upset about black people being in Marvel movies and being guardians of the galaxy. Hey, we talked about space people and you think they should all look like white man. That's wild to me.
I also saw a raccoon that y'all don't have no objections to that, or a piece of wood. I don't watch these Marvel movies, So I don't really know, Like there was a tree, that's all. But black folks aren't okay. Something's happening here. Spoiler alert, it's racism.
So when we get to moving from warhead to human hit going to space, the first question scientists wanted to answer was could the human body actually survive in space?
Can the human body survive the rigors of space travel, which include intense acceleration and deceleration, exposure to low pressure environments inside the cabin, perhaps temperature extremes of heat and cold, things like that.
The United States began to answer these questions with Project Mercury, NASA's first human space flight program, and it started in nineteen fifty eight and had its first flight, the Mercury Redstone three, in nineteen sixty one.
And those early space flights proved that for a short period of time, human body can survive those stresses. And then as we moved into longer duration missions like the famous Apollo missions that took us into deep space into the Moon, we learned that the transit from the Earth the Moon is possible. Remote field work on the extreme environment of the lunar is possible. It's possible to do science in these distant, hazardous places.
We've learned a lot in the past sixty years about sending humans to space, but there's still so much to learn and so many more open questions. For instance, we don't know how well people will do in longer space flights, like beyond a year, so it could be a while before we're all thinking about living on Mars.
Okay, so let's recap. We've talked about how the history of space exploration was rooted in the military, in some problematic history in early space research, and since the Cold War, space exploration and research has been more scientific inquiry focused. With the founding of NASA, so in nineteen sixty nine we put a man on the Moon and in nineteen
ninety eight we launched the International Space Station. But recently we've seen a boom in commercial space flight opportunities offered by private companies.
We have seen this transformation from military to science now to what I would call experience and experience that is for sale. The thing that's really interesting is that the answer to the question of what space is for, whether it's for military, whether it's for science, whether it's for experience, is always linked to who space is for. So it's for military, then you send soldiers. If it's for science,
you send scientists, engineers, and doctors. And if it's for experience, well then it's who has the money to pay for that and who they select as their chosen companions.
That's a really interesting point. As the goals of space exploration and travel shift, who is able to travel also changes.
Yeah, and while this shift to commercial space flight feels new, it's actually been going on a lot longer, right under our noses.
The commercialization of space began about twenty years ago with flights to the International Space Station that were sold by a company called Space Adventures. When the Soviet Union collapsed in nineteen ninety one, they had this space program and all of a sudden they needed money. So, you know, they just tried to sell spare seats on their Soyu's capsuless that's wild.
So basically the government had a arc.
You could basically buy a seat on a Soyu's space capsule launching from Russia, and about twenty or so people chose that route, and it was maybe twenty million dollars for a seat.
That's crowdfunding was twenty million for a seat. That's wild. So doctor bim is saying that when I was on AOL instant messenger, people were buying discount seats to crowdfund their government to go to space. Ooh, like that's wild to me.
It is, it is, I can't believe this was happening, And it feels like no one knows.
Nobody knew.
So it wasn't like they were a company that created a whole new infrastructure. They were basically selling something they already had as a way to generate income to keep their space program going.
Commercial spaceflight has expanded since the first Space Adventures flight to the International Space Station in two thousand and one. Today there are several companies that offer sub orbital or low Earth orbit flights, and ticket prices start at four hundred and fifty thousand dollars and go up from there.
What we've seen with SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic is the creation of an entirely new sets of infrastructure, and the key of this is reusability. And I'm sure we've all seen those videos of those rockets coming back and landing back on Earth with their stabilizers out. That is this sort of key technological innovation that is allowing these companies to lower the price of a space launch, which before was so expensive that it was really only governments
that could manage that. But now we're seeing, you know, the ascent of the billionaire class coming out of the Internet boom. They have money to basically start a space program, which is crazy, but it's happening now.
I got to stop you, because while the price might be getting lower, it's definitely not affordable.
No affordable for Diddy. So let's say someone does have the money to go to space, can anyone go? I saw William Shatner went up there, and he's pretty old, and I would hope that there is some health criteria for space travel, not just the coins. But if there isn't should there be?
He was ninety years old. And also Wally Funk, a amazing woman pilot who was part of a very early space medicine research program, got the chance to go to space as well, and I believe she was eighty two years old. So what we've seen is that people who are not these sort of eugenic specimens that we were sending to space in the nineteen sixties can also survive at least a short duration spaceflight. But that doesn't mean that anybody can go to space. Space does actually challenge
the human body in lots of ways. I'm not talking about the vacuum of space, but the environment inside the space capsule is usually a low pressure environment. There's the problem of weightlessness or zero G. So there are aspects of the body that do need to be checked out beforehand, because you don't want someone to become sick in space or Heaven forbid, you know, die there.
I think something that we often overlook is that the whole way we understand and study our bodies is with gravity. Like, as we stand and exist here now, gravity is being enacted on us. That's a force that's enacted on us. It ensures that our blood maintains an optimum blood pressure level. Your heart is pumping to pump your blood up against the force of gravity, your organs being situated, all of your muscles, and your scalear structure, all that stuff is
operating under the pressure of gravity. But when you move to a gravity list environment or an environment that has so little gravity that it's basically negligible, that changes things. And you can imagine that over time being in that environment, that will continue to change and affect how your body operates too.
My little sister, who is a very smart woman. She's an aerospace engineer. She just did a zero gravity flight and let me tell you, she said it was not for the faint of heart. It was tough, like really tough on the body. She did really well and was able to pull off all the experiences that she needed to do. But the description it didn't sound like something I wanted to do, Like, I don't like roller coasters. There's no way I'm finding zero G.
You know, another consideration beyond just like do you have the stomach for it? Is the training and selection process for commercial space flight. So you know, whenever I watch these documentaries about people going to space and NASA, they have years of training, and I know these people getting on these flights are only getting a few days at best. So even though the financial barriers are high, it feels like the barrier to entry is lower because a few
days of training does not equal a few years. Okay, So let's say you have the money and you're physically cleared to go on a commercial space flight.
What are people doing up there? Well, what's on the itinerary?
When people started going to space as tourists, they initially were going on those Russian rockets to the International Space Station, and there'd only be one of them at a time. So you're basically going to be up on the space station with a bunch of professional astronauts. You're not really going to be able to choose whatever you want to do at any given moment. What you want to do has to fit in with their busy research schedules and
station upkeep schedules. But last September, when we saw the Inspiration four flight, which was an early SpaceX orbital flight and was called the first all civilian space flight, that was sort of a turning point where they could choose whatever they wanted to do in that orbiting space capsule.
Yeah, and that flight, Inspiration four, was actually privately chartered by a billionaire named Jared Isaacman, and it launched September fifteenth of twenty twenty one, and the purpose of this launch was to raise money for Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital.
And you know what's really interesting is that doctor Bim told us, people on that flight chose to reference back to the previous goals of space travel and exploration.
So in their training, they always appeared in military jets. They always appeared dressed in like flight suits, as if they were soldiers, and then when they were up there, they made sure to tell everyone that they had a scientific research program that they were doing.
I like this, So basically, so they're playing dress up. Yea, they think this is what they should do if they go to space.
Yeah, It's like when you go to Paris and you see the Eiffel Tower, or in New York when you see the Empire State Building or a Times Square.
It just felt like that was part of their generation checklist for space vacation.
You got to get a beret when you're in Paris.
Doctor Bim says people shouldn't be ashamed to go to space and not do science.
I feel like there's some pressure to like perform or like recreate the sort of hits of the past that people are expecting from like the cultural history of space exploration. But like I'm waiting for someone who just wants to go up and say I'm just here to chill and look at the view, you know, or like I want to go up there and like write a play, do some art.
In some ways, it feels like traveling to space, like the TODA, the razzle, dazzle of it is the journey. But I think you do have to consider, like, Okay, if we start having these longer flights, like all right, we're up here, you know what do we do?
I know what I'm gonna do. I'm definitely taking a selfie with Earth. Okay, I'm waiting until you know, I can see, like right where my house is, and I'm gonna try and point and get the right selfie angle and smile like geez posting that on my Instagram. I'm gonna try and get some TikTok's flowing through the capsule. I gotta start thinking of captions now, nobody can hold me down something like that, you know what I mean, Like it writes itself.
Oh my goodness, so TT obviously has a plan. I can't even imagine my feet off the ground, especially not that far up. Okay, let's take a break and when we come back, we'll talk about some of the downsides or precautions we should think about when it comes to the future of space exploration.
We're back, and before we jump back into today's lab, let's talk about next week's lab. Next week we're talking all about friendship. Now, I know you remember our last lab on friendship when we brought doctor Marissa g Franco back to talk a little bit more about how to make and keep your friends as adults.
But for now, let's get back to today's lab with doctor Jordan Beim, where we're talking about the history of space exploration and commercial space flight. We've come so far from gazing up at the Cosmos, but there's still so much to discover about space. There's a lot of possibility, which feels really exciting. But what do we need to watch out for. What are we going to look back on and wish we did different?
You know, those are some really important questions, especially since we know certain companies are interested in building space hotels, settling on other planets, and finding ways to make a profit off of space.
I worry that there's actually a lot of negatives that we don't perceive because there is this sort of a popular fascination without her space. A lot of people think of space as like a utopian place where we transform ourselves. I worry deeply about who is holding the keys to space. And it was bad enough when it was NASA controlling
who gets to go to space. They were at least a government agency that had oversight from Congress, but now it's in the hands of private companies, and that changes the information environment drastically.
Doctor Bim says, we should really pay attention, you know, who's making decisions about space and what's the narrative that's being told about these commercial flights.
When I see these commercial space flights that have, you know, a bunch of billionaires or millionaires and then like one or two chosen celebrities or people who have really sympathetic stories, I worry that those people are selected basically just to help them control the air, so that you talk about your Wally Funk, but you don't talk about who is in the seat next to her, Jeff Bezos and the climate impacts of his empire, where it's like, look over here,
look at this person who really deserves to go to space, and it's really cool to go into space, But don't look over here at like the whole larger thing about Elon Musk's plans for putting people on Mars and starting a city there, Like you don't need a crystal ball to know how he's going to treat laborers in his Martian city. Just look at how workers in his Earth companies get treated and that to me is a huge red flag that we're not going in the right direction
here and it's time for a course correction. To use an astronautical term, I.
Think this is such a great point, and we already see similar red flags happening with meta the Facebook world, where people are going to be living kind of in virtual reality. When that was announced, very rich people started buying up a lot of meta land in the Metaverse, which could have ripple effects later on when other people want to engage with the metaverse and now they have to purchase land from someone else who can determine the price of it.
And when we're thinking about people with this much money and power that they are in the position to put a city on Mars, I don't think osha, And you know the labor laws here are gonna apply there, and quite frankly, I feel like Martians could be about about it. So are there any regulations for taking up space in space? Ah? You know, we might be.
Marsians wanted to smoke action.
Yeah we're weak, but the Martians might have something else up to sleeve. They don't even have sleeves.
Every alien movie proves that the aliens are smarter and stronger and oftentimes way bigger than us. We don't stand a chance. We don't good luck in Gotham City. On Mars.
We're gonna be underground. We're not gonna get no sun.
Doctor Bim says. The issue of taking up space in space is something we need to be thinking about.
That's going to be a huge issue. It already is when it comes to the topic of space junk. There's a huge amount of space around the Earth, but we're taking it up, and there's tens of thousands of things up there now, and eventually we're going to reach a limit. And there's this theoretical concept called the Kessler syndrome where if things get so dense, one collision can start, three collisions can start, nine collisions. Then it's just like exponential disaster.
That was the concept behind the movie Gravity. It's a real problem that we have to contend with of how to protect the environment of low Earth orbit. It is an environment. You know, the environment does not end at the top of the atmosphere.
We just saw an article about space junk.
Yeah, stuff is falling from the sky.
Yeah, And typically when stuff falls from space, it falls into the ocean, so we don't care. But we just saw an article where it actually fell into a sheep farm, So now it's getting a little bit too close for comfort. Yeah, we have to start thinking about this because as we start taking more opportunities to go to space and people are thinking about doing more space flights, that means more space junk.
I feel like it's basically going to be like National Parks when they're telling people to pick up their trash, pack up whatever you brought in.
Leave no trace in space.
Right there you go. That's the slogan, reach out to TT for more space slogans.
I'll put it on a T shirt. Yeah, I'll put it on a T shirt.
The environment does not end at the top of the atmosphere, but there is no FAA for space yet that is going to regulate the creation of a space hotel. And then you run into like all of these legal issues, like which countries laws govern that space hotel.
Commercial space flight companies are subject to the Federal Aviation Administration or the FAA their regulations because they pass through the atmosphere on the way up to space and back down the Earth. And doctor Bim says there's been friction between space companies and the FAA, and that space travel is starting to go beyond the scope of the existing laws.
That can be problematic because then it just becomes sort of like a first mover's game. Who has the money in the power to do something, especially if doing it in space. It's hard to enforce stuff like that, you know, it's hard to say, you know, you can't do that. Well, you know, stop me, you know is what maybe Elon Musk would say to doing something on Mars, and like, morally I would be like, yes, stop him, But practically
how do you do it? I worry though, that it is an actor's game and that the laws will struggle to keep up.
This is giving strong callbacks to colonialism. This feels like the Europeans going to the Americas. You know, we got to ask some questions, did we learn anything from that? Should we even be trying to go into space? Should we just you know, stay in our orbit, into the rivers and lakes that we're used to. I think there are so many frameworks for thinking about this.
Some people might be tempted to say, since there's no one living in space currently, we can't be colonizers or repeat the violence of European colonization, but doctor Bim says that's not true.
We absolutely can I push back forcefully on that. And the ways that we do that are, first, you can enact colonial relationships on Earth to get you to space. And you see that in different things like who are medical test subjects for space medicine? Where are spaceports located in the world. Do the locations of the spaceports benefit the people who live around them? Do they have a
say in whether that spaceport gets there? And then the second way that we can recreate the mistakes the past is we can speak about space with a colonial rhetoric
without being critical of it. So talking about colonization, talking about terraforming, this idea that we can just like go to a planet and like take it over and make it for us, that is an assumption that we got to back up a number of steps and think about whether or not that's the right way to think about doing that, because a lot of times we're just skipping right ahead to like, that's what we're doing.
I don't think most people are considering what doctor Bim just said when they're saying, oh, let's live on the moon or let's live on Mars. But that is absolutely a colonial mentality of people like they can leave where they are and inhabit another place just.
Because, just because they want to. Yeah, we're seeing this all over. We especially saw it with remote workers. Oh yeah, I saw folks just packing up and saying, now I'm going to this other country because the cost of living is lower. But you're not thinking about any of the systems that are already in place, who you're displacing, how you're exploiting folks, none of that.
Right there resources that they have available, And we're gonna be talking a lot more about this in an upcoming episode on eco tourism, So we're gonna step off our soapbox really quickly on that and make sure you tune into that episode.
Yes, but to bring it back to space we saw SpaceX recently building a rocket factory in South Texas and it affected the shore birds and other wildlife in that area. And then they had an explosion and it spread debris for five miles, including onto like a wildlife refuge.
Right, We've talked about this in past episodes. None of these things is this in isolation. Once you start affecting other species, the circle of life is real. It's not going to just be Oh, it's just this five miles, no big deal. The ripple effects from these types of interactions, these negative interactions with our environment, We're going to feel it.
And while there's a lot of negatives to consider and things we have to watch out for, there are also a ton of positives and potentials too.
I think there's a huge potential for space to be for good if we keep it for science and exploration, not to exploit resources, not to exploit other human beings. But if we go there humbly seeking knowledge, then that can be really, really exciting. And I think probably the most exciting aspect of it is the big question are we alone in the universe? What is our place in the cosmos? And we are close to answering that question.
You know, we have been looking at Mars for the last forty years or so as potentially the best place in the Solar System to perhaps find life. We have not found it in our many flybys and orbits and rovers on the surface, but there are new emerging sites
of astrobiological interest in our Solar system. And I'm talking about the icy ocean world, moons of Jupiter and Saturn, places like Europa and Enceladus, where underneath their thick icy crust there could be a vibrant ocean filled with all kinds of alien life that would just be fascinating to see and explore in an ethical way. We can't just
go and take them and capture them. Can't do that, but there are ways I think that we could, maybe without being too invasive, visit them and see who's there.
This is a really great point, and I think that there is a tiny bit of hope that we might be able to explore space in an ethical way. There is a United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, so they operate similar to the United Nations that we know, where they convene a lot of space experts and they are able to make decisions about space issues and how
we should be interacting with space on an international level. Also, just like the United Nations, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, they have a very limited enforcement capacity, so if folks are in violation, there may not be
much that they can do. But there is something called the National Space Council, which you know has been around for a long time, I think since nineteen eighty nine, and it's chaired by Kamala Harris, our vice president, and on September ninth, they're meeting to discuss a new rules framework for commercial space, so that's including a potential partnership between regulatory agencies and the private sector.
You know, this makes me think about the most exciting recent news about the James web Telescope.
Yes, oh my gosh. The images that came out from the telescope were breathtaking, honestly, and I think it got a lot of people's minds moving about. Wow, this universe is so vast, and when you think about how far away those images were taken from, it's just I can't think about it too much because, you know me, if I start thinking about how big the universe is, I start to feel like I am being crushed by the universe.
I mean, low key, who don't know.
I can't think about it.
It's a lot out there, friend, It's a lot to feel crushed by. That's all I'll say. I think the most exciting news for me from the James Webb telescope was about the presence of water on an exoplanet, Like they saw the potential because they saw what looked like evidence of clouds, water, vapor, and hazes. And that's not the only thing.
There's a team that was led by the University of Montreal and they used observations from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey satellite. We'll call it Test for short, to discover an Earth like exoplanet that could potentially support life.
Hey, one exoplanet door opens, we'll say another one closes, but it seems like another one.
Opens, another opens, perpetual doors, door after door after door.
It's the Russian doll of planet.
Yes, it's that kind of thing that is going to yield what we call a biosignature, which is not discovering life itself, but discovering a sign that we know is associated with biological processes. As a planetary level.
I feel like, you know, that gets us one step closer for all space kind to lead communication.
You know.
Yeah, I think it's always really interesting to wonder what is possible with space. And I am always skeptical of anybody who says that space is our destiny or certain engagements or uses of space are like preordained. Space is a series of choices and it's always open for us. Space is not a utopian, transformative place. Space is a place where all of our earthly problems are reproduced or even amplified, And we got to remember that. We can't
think of it as a separate realm. It's an extension of us and our values.
It's really exciting, and it's a really exciting time to be aware of what's going on and being to keep track of it and seeing how far we've come. I mean, we're talking about less than one hundred years that we've been going to space, and now we have these really amazing images. We know so much more. We've done a lot. We've done a lot in a short amount of time.
Yeah, I think if I were to give us a grade, we started out the first few semesters looking rough a lot of military, a lot of the wrong ideas. But I think, you know, at our midterms we kind of turned it around. Only time will tell if we will get an a moving forward.
Only time will sounds like my undergrad career turned off.
And look at you down getting paper all right, TC, you ready for one thing?
I sure, am, what's your one thing? Ze?
My one thing this week is you know I said I was interested in space, in learning about it, but I think we should all ways take lessons from the past and now this is fiction, but I think we need to just make sure we're looking at it and considering the lessons. There was a new movie called Pray that just came out and it's kind of playing on the Predator series of films. Pray is on Hulu and I watched it and I loved it. So that's my one thing, and I hope other folks are into it too.
If you're a science fiction person, I want to hear from you. I want to know if you like Prey or if you didn't like it, and if you didn't like it, what else do you recommend? What's your one thing?
Tt My one thing this week is Serena Williams. So when this episode comes out, it'll be a few weeks post but she announced her retirement and I think it's so exciting because I love when super athletes get the opportunity to explore other sides of themselves. And I mean, she's really into fashion. She had her own fashion line.
So my one thing this week is Serena Williams and cheers in to her success as one of the greatest athletes of all time, if not the greatest athlete of all time and seeing what else she has to give the world. I'm so excited.
Okay, that's it for Lab seventy seven. How are you feeling? Are you ready to go to space? Are you thinking we should reconsider and read some more literature on the subject. Call us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight and tell us what you thought, or you could give us an idea for a lab you think we should do the semester. That's two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight.
And don't forget that there is so much more to dig into on our website. There'll be a cheat keep for today's lab, additional links and resources in the show notes. Plus you can sign up for our newsletter check it out at Dope labspodcast dot com. Special thanks to today's guest expert, doctor Jordan Beim.
You can find Jordan on Twitter at Jordan.
And you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs Podcast.
TT's on Twitter and Instagram at d R Underscore t Sho.
And you can find Zakia at z Said So with. Dope Labs is a Spotify original production from Mega owned Media Group.
Our producers are Jenny Rattlet Mask and Lydia Smith of WaveRunner Studios.
Editing in sound design by Rob Smerciak.
Mixing by Hannes Brown.
Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugier from Spotify. Creative producer Miguel Contraras.
Special thanks to Shirley Ramos, Jess Borrison, Till krat Key, and Brian Marquis. Executive producers from Mega Own Media Group are us T T Show, Dia and Zakiah Wattley