Where No Man Should Go Ever?

haven't we? We probably have, but it's still very fitting for this particular episode. So that's why I had to have extras to fill in for the fact that I was already quoting myself again next myself. But anyway, it sounds like we're talking about space. We aren't talking about space. It's very cold in space. But yeah, we're going to

talk about space and space exploration. And really, this whole idea of exploring space using manned missions versus unmanned mission is like, why do should we concentrate on one more than the other? Is one intrinsically better than the other? Uh? Is the era of manned space exploration, at least for the time being over is a just beginning and and kind of have a just a full discussion about the whole idea. So, uh, I mean, what do you I guess we should probably start with kind of a historical

look at at manned and unmanned missions. Right. Well, okay, so y'all know when we first landed on the Moon, right, Yeah, I wasn't born yet, but yes, it was ninety nine yeah, the Apollo missions, unless you watch Arrested Development, in which case the first real moon landing was nine one. Yeah. Or if you're yeah, if you're one of those conspiracy theorists generally right, right, if you're if you if you somehow believe that that that the most amazing human achievement

arguably was actually faked. It's a product of Stanley Kuberick and a set in the desert somewhere right right, which, by the way, we do not subscribe to that. Yeah, well, okay, it turns out that's still wrong either way, depending on how you define the question. We actually put tons of stuff on the Moon before any humans got there. That's where my remote control is. Actually, I'm pretty sure I don't have any direct proof, but I can't find it anywhere here on Earth, and most of my left socks.

Yeah wait, you know, wow, your socks are actually left and right now. No, seriously, we so we actually had something on the Moon in the fifties. Fifties. Yeah, in nineteen nine, the Soviet probe Luna two smashed into the Moon. It's not quite what you'd call a landing, but it it took some molecules from Earth and it put them on the surface of the Moon, and so, and they're

still there in one way or another. Now, that's honestly I did not I had known of the Soviet space program and the fact that they had fired stuff to the Moon and actually landed things on the Moon, but unto we did the research for this, I honestly could not remember the act, the name of the program at all. And uh. And the reason why I bring that up is because that plays into what part of our conversation

later on. I just think it's an interesting thing, is that I'm aware of it, but I wasn't really knowledgeable about it. Sure, And I think the part of that is that none of us were alive. Then you know, it's um and so you know, perhaps if we had been the geeks that we are in that particular time period we would remember these things, but maybe, but there are so many of those, and I was just astonished how many things we put on the Moon that I didn't even know about. And so you had this, you

had this impact in theft and the hard landing. Yeah, the first soft landing was another Soviet spacecraft. It was the same It was from Luna nine, so the same series, and that was in nineteen sixty six, so still years before we managed to land any people. But only a couple of years. I mean, that's that's an impressive It's sorry the loose definition of a but no, that's that's a very short period of time between manned and unmanned. Well, it's amazing what we didn't know about the Moon back then.

So when they put down the Luna nine on the Moon, one of the important things they found out is oh, okay, so you can put stuff on the Moon and it won't sink. Right. Can you imagine to think about this, You're you're a NASA scientist planning a manned mission to the Moon. We're gonna put some astronauts on there. But one option in your mind is that the Moon is completely covered in dry quicksand, and that when you set foot on it, you would sink into the moon right

then sink into the moon. Perhaps it was just so powdery that you would end up so deeply entrenched in it that there would be no way to get back out again. Yeah, but so the Luna nine they learned that, Okay, no, you won't sink. Uh, you know, it's it's safe for human landing. The Surveyor one was the first US spacecraft land on the Moon. That was a few months after

the Lunar nine. And then we had a bunch of other in packs and landers before we ever got to uh, the Apollo eight, which orbited the Moon, and then eleven, which finally set down, And so it took us this long to get to the human landing. But the human landing is what everybody remembers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you if you talk to people about moon landings and there, naturally tend to think of the Apollo missions, specifically Apollo eleven,

although six missions did ultimately land on the Moon. I think twelve astronauts were able to walk on the surface of the Moon and uh, and so you know, that's one of those missions was supposed to go there but didn't quite manage. We'll talk about that later, but so this kind of puts something in perspective. We haven't been back to the Moon with human beings since the seventies, right, and we've we've seriously cut back on just manned missions

into space in general. With what we haven't been anywhere else either. Well, well, I'm talking about being like just even going into ornaments. I mean, you know, the Space Shuttle program has been shelved. It's actually well been scrapped

at this point. It's it's retired, it's done. So we don't have a Space Shuttle mission anymore speaking anyway, Yeah, we have privately we well even then it's not Space Shuttle, but yeah, it's the like the Dragon space program, things like that over at SpaceX and then a few other countries of course still have space programs that are sending

people to and from the International Space Station. But you know, I think when we had the first Moon landing and we had the first experience of seeing people walking on the surface of the Moon, the natural progression there was to think, wow, this is this is the beginning. Here we go, Yeah, we're gonna go out there and we are going to explore the solar system and beyond and and people are going to play a big part of that. And as it turns out, a lot of that hasn't happened.

I mean, we we have explored the Solar System quite a bit, but we've done so with these un manned missions, and we kind of wanted to talk a little bit about why that is, Why have we gone down this route of unmanned versus manned? So I think first we should just give a real brief overview of of what these unmanned missions look like, and then um, what kind of advantages they provide overmanned missions or what are the

disadvantages of manned missions. So a lot of what we're talking about is space probes or planetary orbiter probes and occasional rovers and rovers and so the most common is will send out a probe that's like it orbits other planetary bodies and it takes data readings of all different kinds, sometimes photographs. Right, You've got the deep space probes like Voyager, and they're just going you know, yeah, these are ones. The Voyager probes in particular, we're designed to do surveys

of the outer planets in our Solar System. And then once they were done with that, they were to continue on into uh, the furthest reaches of our Solar system grab tationally ricocheted off of Jupiter. Yeah, it all depends on which voyager you're talking about, because one of them, one of them just visited essentially, uh, you know, like like Saturn and Jupiter, and the other one went further out all the way to Neptune and then hit it

off into interstellar space or toward interstellar space. We should say that it's one of those milestones that has constantly shifted the idea of leaving the Solar system. Right, it seems about every three months now, so it goes like it's leaving the kind of thing that we thought was the edge of the Solar System, but we're finding out that it's bigger than we thought. I kind of think of that as like trying to leave Atlanta. The further

out you go, the bigger Atlanta becomes. So, for example, if you if you live within Atlanta, you tend to think Atlanta is the city like the city of Atlanta. The city has an extremely high escape velocity. Right you get to the perimeter and then you're thinking, all right, well that now now because the perimeter is actually bigger than the city, right, So you know, you get to the perimeter and then other people who are outside the

are saying, no, you're still in Atlanta. You get a little further out of there and people who are like an Athens are saying, no, you're still in Atlanta. Even if you say you're in Stone Mountain, you're still in Atlanta. I know that this has lost everybody else who doesn't live in the Metro Atlanta neighborhood. But hey, it's true. It's one of those things where the soldar system gets bigger the further out we go, and nope, you're not

done yet. So you've got the space probes, you've got you've got a few landers, like the Venera Landers that landed on Venus. Those were Soviet craft that if you ever see the pictures these things take if you haven't seen a google the photographs taken by the Venera Lander, they're they're just kind of some rocks. But it's still haunting. This this eerie yellow mist over, this scary looking gravel.

I don't know something about it haunts one young girl wearing a night shift in her hair down over her face. She basically I might be looking at the wrong pictures. Um. But a lot of these landers don't make it back. We've we've had Japanese Space Agency had to put a lander on an asteroid and then got that to return to Earth, but not a whole lot of landers. We've had some rovers like rovers on the Moon and on Mars. Um the Mars rovers. We've had a bunch of those, right,

and the most recently the Opportunity, the Curiosity. Yeah, Viking was Viking one. Viking was I thought that was a probe. Might have been Viking landed, but it wasn't a rover. It landed on Mars and it gave us our first color images of Mars one, but it I don't remember it being mobile. Okay, that might I think that's right. Um. Yeah,

And the most recent, obviously is Curiosity one. Thing. Um, a lot of these and of course we we mentioned orbiters, but there have been more recent orbiters of different planets. We we've seen like Cassini doing its schoolwork and Saturn and um the Grail probes doing gravity research on the Moon. Right. One thing all of these unmanned missions seem to have in common is that their suicide missions. You know, like

the Yeah, there's sort of a planned end. It's just like, well, because we've got all these dead rovers on Mars, right, Uh, some are still going, some are, some are some are destined to die on Mars, while they're all destined to die pretty much unless unless we get our bets over there real quick and and find a way of picking them up and bring them back. Yeah. But at the same time, we've learned a lot of cool stuff from

these these unmanned probes, right sure. Yeah, I mean we we learn lots of basic information about the the environments that we send them to. For instance, we can learn things like the chemical composition, composition of the soil or the regular on these these surfaces. Well, whether it's the Moon or Mars or whatever. We can get images back. We can take samples of atmosphere if there is one, and learn what is what makes up the atmosphere of

that planet or moon or whatever. We can get a lot of information things like whether or not the you know, the plant has a magnetosphere, all this other kind of stuff that that is important for us to know, particularly if we want to do further uh, scientific endeavors that involve this planetary body and I would imagine for all of these we want to do that, um, and even just figuring out how how our universe works, right Yeah, and the history of our solar system, in the history

of our planet, in our place in the universe. I mean, all of these things play a role in in why we would do this. And Uh, to your point about these suicide missions, I think that's one of the big reasons why we why unmanned missions have taken such precedents, because it means that we can send stuff that we

don't have to get back. We don't have to get it back, so so that takes care of a huge engineering problem, right, I mean, creek coming up with an engineering solution to not only get a spacecraft out to another body in space, but then back again is an enormous challenge, and it is amazing to me that we have managed to do that so many times. But it definitely makes missions I hesitate to use the word easier,

but less complex too. If you don't have to worry about getting them back home again, then we can go ahead and say easier. I think that I usually want to come home well, and also that they want to breathe air and eat food. Yeah, so well, that takes us to where we're going next, the whole the whole idea about the the benefits versus the costs and risks of of of manned and unmanned flights. So okay, so what's wrong with manned missions? Well, let's talk about let's

talk about cost a bit. Okay, alright, So about twenty five billion dollars was spent on the Apollo program in the nineteen sixties and today's money, that's about a hundred and eighty five billion, which is a few dollars. That's a lot, and it's more than two it's more than what I'm making an average year. Uh and and a lot of that went to the human spaceflight element of of the mission. Um I I think about um out

of wow. So essentially that money, yeah, so that that's covering everything from the systems on board the spacecraft to the personnel both in the spacecraft and on the ground that are in charge of all the things that are keeping the astronauts alive. And you know, you think about there there, it's not a surprise that so much money would need to go in to the safety and health of astronauts. As it turns out, space is not a

very forgiving environment. Space want to kill you. Yeah, so alright, so twenty five billion dollars or like you said, about eighty five billion in today's money. So how does that compare against an unmanned mission. Well, the Mars Curiosity Space Lab project as of right now sits it about two point five billion, significantly less. We should also point out that, uh, other things to take into consideration involve the proximity of

the Moon as compared to the proximity of Mars. Turns out Moon is a bit closer by it like millions and millions of miles, but a bunch of the cost Yah, it's going to be in fuel, um and and just yeah, getting it, getting it all the way out there, and making sure that your instrumentation is um uh powerful enough to transmit It's It's interesting though, because you sit there and you think about it, and you think, well, if it costs a hundred essentially a hundred and eighty five

billion dollars to run the Apollo program, which granted is greater than just the Moon landing, sure, sure, and it's it's also it's a bunch of missions. Um, you know, the Curiosity rover is is one mission on Mission Apollo was seventeen missions and only six of those landed on the Moon and came back. Um, whereas the Curiosity Rover

one mission out to Mars. But if you if you just extrapolate, if you sit there and think, well, if it cost us two point five billion dollars to send essentially a remote controlled car onto the surface of Mars move it around something, uh, then how expensive would it have been to have had a Mars landing program where we're putting in the same care and and development in life support systems as well as everything else just to get people there and back. And you know, it's it's

a huge expense. And while we don't want to suggest that scientific discovery should all boil down to how much money does it cost, that is a factor you have to take any consideration. YEA, whether I would love it if we didn't have to worry about money when it comes to science, I would love it if that were just not something we had to think about at all.

But the reality is you do uh yeah, Well, whatever your feelings about allotting money to science, you have to accept that these projects have a budget, and whatever that budget is, you need to deal with it, and uh so we've got to do the best we can with the money that we can get in. Uh. In In further contrast, the Voyager program and the numbers here get a little bit squiggly because because you know, Voyager was launched a little while ago, and and and an inflation

rates and and you know differences. I mean, and we're still putting money into that project, into building satellite rays to to better detect the signals from these guys. This is this is the project where we have these probes.

They're going further and further away. So it means that we have to keep building more sensitive radar technology or radio technology I should say, like radio antennas, uh to pick up the signals that these things are sending back because they're getting weaker and weaker over time because we can further and further away from us. Right right. But

but overall that's cost about a billion dollars. Yeah, so again the cost of unmanned missions that I think that plays a big part in why there's been such a concentration in them. It's it's the idea that we can do a lot more research for less money. Uh. And then they're the other factors. Well, yeah, a lot of that cost comes from so a lot of the cost of the manned mission. The reason that costs more is because you're having to spend huge amounts of money on

training and safety to keep the astronauts alive. Yeah. Yeah, like we said, space is not a very forgiving environment at all. It's very dangerous. Let's just talk about all the ways space wants to kill you. Lack of air. Yeah, so there's a lack of air. The most common ones you'd think about our lack of air, maybe lack of gravity, uh, coldness, So we can talk about those. Lack of air, that's

pretty obvious. You have to take oxygen tanks, but that's not always so easy because of course, like oxygen is explosive, and as we saw in the Apollo thirteen, wasn't one of their oxygen tanks that had the major malfunction. And then there was the build up of carbon dioxide within the capsule itself, and we'll talk about that more later. But so you've got that problem you've got of course, it's freezing in space. Yeah, you've got the vacuum of space,

which that will kill you. I mean, even if we talk about the lack of air, but explosive decompression, right, lack of air goes beyond lack of oxygen. Obviously we're talking about like they're not really that many molecules out there in the first place. Um, yeah, you have to having a pressurized spacecraft in a near vacuum out in space. Is it's like having a balloon, you know, it's just

it's waiting to pop. Yeah, it's yeah. And so if you were to have a whole breach, you know, people talk about uh, stuff getting sucked out of the spacecraft. That's not really what's happening. It's getting blown out, as data on Star Trek next Generation would one day correct Captain card Um, Yeah, I saw that episode not that long ago, but anyway, uh that Yeah, So there's the vacuum space, there's the lack of oxygen. Like you said, microgravity, or as I like to call it, zero G because

I like to see Joe go crazy. Hey, so this is a little nerd happiness moment we're going to share with you. So if you're talking with your friend who works for for NASA and you're talking about being in space, you don't want to say zero gravity because you're not really at zero gravity in space, you're what you're at what we would call micro gravity. It's gravity so small that it might be almost noticeable or even totally negligible. Yeah, that's why it's not totally zero. So if you're in

zero G one of the problems. Even your own hand has gravity, so you're never okay, so you're in zero graph zero, you would be you'd be floating. In any case, you you are effectively witless, if not completely witless, Jonathan, What does that do to your body? Does a lot of things. First of all, it can are they nice things? They are not? Well, I mean you can do flippy flips, that's nice, and rules and those are nice. That's fun. If you don't have a strong stomach, you might also

do some barfie barfs. Um, don't they report? Yeah, there's so people who are new to micro gravity environments experienced space sickness. Well, yeah, I mean it's you've got your you've got you've got some organs in your ear, these little micro organs that are essentially like a three axis uh accelerometers. It's essentially the same sort of thing as you would find in a three excess accelerometer device. It's what tells your body how it's oriented in comparison to

the ground. And then you have your your visual input that you come in to play. And if the visual input and the input you're getting from those little micro organs are at odds, you start to feel a bit dizzy, disoriented, sometimes nauseated. Furthermore, if if I mean a lot of those those microorgans involved fluid, and if the fluid is floating, then your ear just does not know how to read that data. It's like, well screw it, like something is happening,

what ought not to happen? Uh? And so yeah, you can definitely feel disoriented, auseated, But that's that's small potatoes comparatively. Yeah, so let's talk about prolonged exposure to micro gravity alright. So if prolonged exposure, it can mean everything from muscle loss just because your your muscles aren't having to work against gravity, so you are starting to lose muscle mass that way. Also, on the I S S they spend a lot of time exercising just to try to make muscle.

But even then, I think despite you know, they however long they spend on the treadmill every day, they still have muscle density, they have to go through a lot of physical therapy when they get back to Earth. And then there's bone density loss, and that's mainly serious. Muscle you can rebuild bone, you cannot, so you start to lose bone. That's a serious problem. And and uh, prolonged

exposure to microgravity environments does result in bone loss. So that means that you could suffer some pretty serious problems when you get back to Earth. Things like, you know, your bones may not be as as sturdy as they

used to be, and you may experience joint issues as well. Uh, exposure to micro gravity I think can affect your digestive tract too, can it can anything that's not just making you sick, but affect your gut flora, the bacteria that and not only that, but anything that involves fluid and bodies are nothing if sacks of fluid can really get affected to Yeah, that's what I meant. They are sacks and fluid. In other words, Um, ignore my my circuitous

uh speaking, which confuses even myself. Uh. At any rate, you the fluids get redistributed away from the extremities, which is not the way they normally are. So um, this causes some problems. Now, initially, the problems involved for those of us who are vain, a bit of puffiness around the face, for example, and so people might look a little more flushed and a bit you know, a little swollen around the face. Uh, and you know I think, oh,

that's kind of that's not attractive. Well, it's worse than that, because you can actually develop prol issues like cardiovascular issues due to these redistributed fluids um and blood pressure problems. When you come back down to Earth, you can have issues with your blood pressure and that can cause more issues down the line. So there are a lot of problems just by being in an environment that's got microgravity for a long time. Speaking of body fluid ix, it

affects the shape of the eye, doesn't it. Yeah, And then you can see things that are invisible to the naked eye. At least that's the that's that's the reported reaction. So it's like an event horizon because that turned out poorly. No. No, it's like it's like like like things that are outside

the visible spectrum for most of us. But apparently because of the way the eye can be reshaped in microgravity, you can start to see things that normally you would not be able to notice that though all seems most of the reports seem anecdotal in nature. It's kind of hard. I haven't read too many, like serious scientific papers on it, so I hesitate to go into it here. Like I like the idea that astronauts are just punking us on

some of this. It could be it could be like let's tell them, let's tell them you can see the China, let's tell them that. Okay, so it gets listed on trivial pursuit, which is wrong. I think we need to get to the big one. I think the biggest, the most dangerous effect of prolonged space travel radiation. Types of radiation. A lot of lay people might not think about this as much as the lack of oxygen and stuff. But yeah,

we're being in space. You're exposed to radiation from two sources, right, Well, yeah, there's the Sun and then there's everything. Yeah, there's the entire converse. Yeah, cosmic radiation, which really that tends to be high speed, low mass particles, yea, cosmic rays. And then you have solar radiation, which can involve everything from what we're familiar with, like ultra violet radiation, things of that like that stuff that is also harmful to us if we absorb too much of it over over any

length of time. Where we're protected on Earth by two things, by the atmosphere and by the magnetospheres of the Earth is surrounded by gases that absorb some of this radiation and it also puts out a magnetic field that repels it. Yes, some stuff like some stuff like anything that's a charged ion can get repelled by our magnetosphere. Anything that is not a charge to ion but is a particle that's traveling very quickly, once it hits our atmosphere, it slows down,

and that both of these things protect us. Now if you are in orbit, so for example, if you're on the International Space Station, you still have the benefit of the magnetosphere because that extends out pretty far from the Earth. It's not like, you know, as soon as you get up above you know fort you suddenly don't have it.

But the fact that the atmosphere isn't there to protect you is a concern, which is why they have to build in certain types of shielding, particularly if there is something that they know, like an event has happened and they have to essentially move away from areas that are

more vulnerable to such a thing. So, for example, a coronal mass ejection a CME from the Sun might mean that they need to relocate for a couple of hours so that they can ride it out while these particles that are traveling at incredible speeds move through the area so that they don't get affected by it. Now, one of the things that can happen if you do encounter a lot of this radiation, assuming that the radiation levels

aren't super high. If they are super high, you could suffer radiation sickness and radiation poisoning immediately and start seeing some really serious symptoms develop upon contact. But if they are lower levels than that's still a problem because it could mean an increase in your chance of developing diseases like cancer. So this is not a trivial problem. This is something that has had to have been in consideration

for every manned space flight. The idea that even even if it's a short, relatively short jaunt out and back, you have to uh think about this stuff and think, well, how how do we minimize this effect on the astronauts so that they don't end up coming back sick. So it gets even worse if you leave the I S. S.

I've got some facts here. This from a National Geographic article where they they interviewed a scientist named carry Zeitland, and he said that basically, an astronaut, say flying to Mars going interplanetary space, would get three times the amount of radiation somebody gets on the I S. S UM and during the trip that would amount to u the what he used was it would be like getting a whole body CT scan every five or six days the

entire trip. Right. And we'll go into more detail about the problems of getting to Mars in a future episode because we've got some more information about that that gets you know, it's it's sobering stuff. Now, it doesn't mean that we should shy away from it necessarily, but these are some of the and there are other ones too. Beyond just these space risks, there's also always the risk of something going wrong, either doing launch or landing or

re entry to Earth. There are a lot of these risks as well that you know, we do our best

to minimize by doing all our safety checks. But I mean, even though Apollo program had some pretty famous failures that that resulted in the loss of human life and then of course there was a polic their team where we were, against all odds able to rescue or the actually the astronauts themselves were able to address the situation so that no one died, right right, And you know it's you could argue that the capacity of human people to fix what problems go wrong, um is one of the benefits

of manned missions, because you know, robots don't have the thing that they can. I mean, you know people are a little bit quicker on their feet. Yeah, that's their brains. That's one of those things that we can definitely, uh look at as how how a man mission can be superior to an unmanned mission and the of being able to respond to changing situations and adapt to them or or address them in some other way. Also, um, diapers have never been the same since we sent manned missions

out into space. Oh, you're talking about sort of the earth based practical benefits like inventions we get. Yeah, there there are a crazy number of inventions that might say a crep ton oh dear um that that we've gotten out of the NASA program. I need to recover from that entire phrase for a second. No one of them is in fact diapers. NASA developed the maximum absorbancy garment UH during the space program, which space space diapers just

makes the whole thing that much more glamorous, doesn't it. No, I mean you know that these have These have terrific healthcare industry uses and are are also used by by race car drivers and skiers other professional athletes during uh huh, Suddenly being a podcaster seems way more glamorous than I did before. Also, I kind of wants some of them those now important reflective coatings, UM when I'm just gonna

move on. That's probably best for everybody. When when when sky Lab was set in position back in ninety three, UM, one of the solar panels famously fell off during launch and a company called National Metalizing helped NASA put together this this thin plastic material coated in vaporized aluminum UM to send up to replace it. And it can deflect or conserve radiant energy depending on what's needed at the time. UM. And and this is used to uh to to protect

people and also manatees from hypothermia. People and manatees, well, it's it's Manatees can suffer from hypothermia at like sixty degrees fahrenheit. It's it's important um bulletproof materials. During the Mars Pathfinder and Rover landings, Warwick Mills developed a layered coated liquid crystal polyester fiber that can withstand punctures from needles, knives, and bullets. It's currently used for military and least protective gear.

So the way that was developed through which program Mars Pathfinding? Wow? So it was it was for the for kushioning the landing. Oh okay, I was thinking there were muggers in space the other ways, other ways that space is trying to kill you. Dustbusters. Engineers at Black and Decker developed a cordless, self contained power drill during the Apollo Moon landings that

ended up leading to the Dustbuster. Yeah, before the Yeah, the power tools in general basically, right, A lot of these benefits, you know, whether it's a manned or unmanned mission, are are due to you know, space exploration. Things that you wouldn't necessarily associate with space, you know have directly benefited us in many ways that you might be unaware of. And uh, and the neat thing to me is that we get these whether it's unmanned or manned missions, But

when it's a man mission. Because of the just the nature of having to take even more things into consideration, it is pushed entire industries forward. I mean, for instance, transistors, those were pretty young when the Apollo program started. I mean, transistors had not been around for very long. But the Apollo program was the number one destination for transistors that were being produced at that time, like they were. NASA was the number one customer for transistors that for for

years because the Apollo program. But that meant that it gave other companies this incentive to continue to improve their manufacturing processes and development processes, so that that entire industry, uh grew quite a bit in those years, which benefited everybody. Further down the line, you go another decade, and then that's when the rise of the personal computer happened. That would not have been possible, or at least it wouldn't have happened at that time without the space industry. Yeah.

I want to pick up another benefit you mentioned a minute ago, actually, Lauren, which was the sort of human adaptability factor. I think this is kind of crucial to the long term future of space exploration. And this also connects to something we said earlier that most of these probes or suicide missions. You know, we we put a rover on Mars and it goes until it can't go anymore,

and then that's just a planned obsolescence. It's you know, at some point we know it's just not going to work right, and and if we're lucky, it will work beyond what the parameters were for the mission, but eventually it will stop working. Yeah. Um, but one thing that occurred to me is that wouldn't necessarily have to be the case if we get to a point where, well, okay, we're better at protecting humans at space, we're smarter, we know how to do it, and it's cheaper. Um, if

we could have humans to provide for contingencies. Basically that that's where the real human strength lies, is that a human can deal with a problem that was not foreseen in a way that machines can't really. So imagine if you're we're exploring Mars and you have a bunch of rovers going around on the surface, but you also have a human technician. Well, if a rover breaks, if there's something wrong with its drive train, uh, the human can

go and fix that. Or if the rover gets stuck, you know, if there's a dust storm and the rover is all right, Like the rover manages the despite the dust storm, the instrumentation is fine, the rovers fine, but as a result it is now lodged because of you know, a drift of sand has stuck it where it was. You know, we didn't plan for that, because there was

no sand there when the rover started moving there. Things like that, Or just imagine even outside of maintenance, simple piloting, I mean, there might be a lot of situations where it would be much more beneficial to have somebody near by controlling or rover as opposed to uh, you know, several million miles away. Because because as we've talked about before, that you know pesky uh you know light speed limit. Yeah, the transmission time might actually mean the death of a mission.

If you if you've got say a probe exploring Europa and it encounters some kind of atmospheric variable, something that threatens it or something that needs to be responded to in real time. If it takes an hour for the signal to get to mission control and then it's operators on Earth to send some direction back to it, that might be too late. Like think about all these these sort of time bound contingencies that have popped up in previous missions and took humans to deal with. You could

think about Apollo thirteen, so they had they had. One of their many problems was, um, oh, man, we've got a CEO to build up in the capsule and the only CEO two scrubbers we have don't fit the little slot they need to go in. Um. So what they had to do was have engineers on the ground instruct the astronauts on how to basically invent a portal to fit the fitting scrubber. They had a jerry rig, Yeah, a new type of connection there, and so that was nearby.

But you can't imagine a machine being able to invent like that, right, and so if that had been say something other than now it's worth observing that was life support, which wouldn't have been necessary without the human, but it could have affected any number of necessary It could have affected like a navigation system or some sensor that would uh, you know, indicate that thrusters were supposed to fire at a very specific moment and they didn't. That kind of stuff.

Another one was jim and I eight, so Jimminy Jiminy. According to pilot Neil Armstrong, who by all accounts sort of saved the mission by some quick thinking. Um. So that was supposed to be a sort of experimental mission where they were going to practice docking procedures in orbit. Uh. But they get up there and they had a malfunction where one of their thrusters started firing and wouldn't stop firing, and it's sent the ship they were in into an

uncontrolled role, so it was rolling in three directions. Um. And basically the human crew had to make really fast decisions and and use smart piloting to get out of that situation and to land back safely on Earth and they survived. Um. But it was a lot of people would say it was basically because they had a human crew there that was smart, that that knew what they were doing and was able to respond in real time. Yeah.

And so it's just hard to imagine that a machine would be able to have a planned, programmed response to a contingency that's unpredictable, right until we get to a point where we have artificial intelligence that can not only uh, detect detect stimuli or detect specific scenarios and then respond to them, but also anticipate and even improvise at that time. Until we get to that point, then it's pretty clear that humans are going to be better at those kind

of situations the machines are. Yeah. Another thing that I think human adapt ability really helps is uh is changing research goals. Think about this, I mean Curiosity Rover. The Curiosity Rover is amazing for science. It's taught us a lot of really cool stuff. But it has set mission

parameters and stuff it can do. And if you suddenly discovered something, if you wanted to change the mission, that would be hard to do because if you discovered that when you landed on Mars that you just sank right into it, then for example, then you know, yeah that that the rover couldn't have done anything about that. Of course, we we knew when we launched it that it wouldn't. But say it just wanted to do some kind of sampling or any any kind of experiment that was the

original mission. It just it wouldn't be able to do that because it wouldn't have the right hardware, it wouldn't have the you know, it just wasn't programmed. Um, but a human astronaut, I mean essentially they could be able to do anything. Yeah, anything, as long as they had

as long as they got the materials. Yeah. Well then that kind of leads us on to another big benefit of manned missions, which is that you know, you can't really discount the fact that it's an inspiring thing to have, like to have someone who goes out into space and explores truly what we call the final frontier. Uh, that's that's a big thing. And you know, it really is an inspiring thing they have. The world changed when people walked on the moon. The world changed the first time

that a Soviet astronaut orbited the Earth. I mean it's we consider these people heroes, right, Well, things you can say orbited the Earth but went into Earth orbit. But yes, think back to what I said at the beginning. Remember all those landers that we put on the Moon that we couldn't remember the names of. I mean, that was

all before Apollo Eleve. That's the one. Yeah, and and you know it's I you could you could argue that that it's all it's all marketing or something like that, because you know, of of course a human face and that hero element is is something inspiring that these programs that are looking for funding kind of want to latch onto um. But but at the same time, they they

are I mean, they these are these are stories. I mean if you look at something like like you know, any of the space exploration stories that we have from the past hundred years, and even the even some of the more famous rovers, like you know, we we saw it with the rise of social media giving rovers a voice of having the Curiosity rover giving them a Twitter account, right and even before Curiosity, we had rovers that had their own Twitter accounts, and and we kind of anthropomorphized

these these Wiley came out and yeah, and that helped too. But I mean I remember getting a little weepy when getting messages about how rovers Battery was dying and essentially its job was done, and people were all like, hey, good job, And I mean, like, why am I feeling emotional about robot something that cannot feel It actually isn't. I mean, it's essentially as if I had really did chuck my remote and roll onto the moon. There's I might be frustrated that I can't change my channel, but

I'm not really sad about the remote control. But it is this thing where we have identified with with something that's doing a mission for science, for the good of mankind, for us to learn more about how our universe works, and when it's a person doing that. I mean the reason why we felt that way about the robot is because they gave the robot of a human voice, right, I mean, otherwise we just would have been like, Wow, that was a really cool device and I'm glad we

did it, but you wouldn't have an emotional connection. Then you put you put this whole like number five is alive kind of concept to it, and and that's that's a powerful story. Yeah, I think in at the bottom line, a rover can do amazing research, but a human being is an adventure yes, And and there's something about adventure that runs deep within the human psyche. There's this desire for adventure and need for adventure for a lot of us.

I mean, uh, you know, I wonder. Yeah, this the the itchy feat syndrome, the idea that you know you are exploring and learning, and it's it's something that goes really really to the core of being human. It's it's kind of you know know, it's hard to put it into words because it's just one of those experiences that we kind of all feel. But you know, it's it's just part of who we are. So how do we reconcile this?

We know that for now, unmanned missions seem like the much better deal, Like we can learn so much from them, they're really useful, uh, and they cost so much less and there's less risk to human life. But the manned missions we've talked about have all these great advantages. What's the how does this balance out? Well? I think you

have to have a you have to have both. I mean, I think unmanned missions being are important so that we can gain as much information about our potential destinations as possible so that we can prepare for when we actually do go there. But I think that, uh, there are a lot of things that that you can only do if humans are directly involved. In fact, one of the things NASA has said about the Mars missions is that we've pretty much done everything we can do on Mars

with without getting our hands on Martian stuff. So right now, the proposed mission next mission to Mars is not a manned mission from NASA. This is specifically NASA's approach um, but rather to send a series of robots that will gather material from Mars and then bring it back to Earth, and actually one robot gathers at another robot retrieves the the canister and goes into Martian orbit, and a third one goes into Martian orbit and retrieves the canister from

the second robot and then brings it back here. It's a three robot mission. It's actually the guy from NASA who was explaining it to me was he could he was thrilled at how My jaw just kept hitting the floor over and over it because I was thinking, how what an amazing achievement it was to land the Curiosity rover onto the surface of Mars. The way that it happened, it was just so a phenomenal feat of engineering and science that I was speechless when it worked. I could

not believe it. I had been hoping and hoping, but when it happened, I was just I I cannot believe we humans have come up with a way of doing this, And now we're talking about taking the complexity of that mission and essentially, I mean, I could say tripling it, but that really doesn't even bring it into It's just crazy that what what would be uh necessary for this to work? But we've already done the crazy, So why stop there now that even then we're talking about bringing

stuff back, not going there yet. But I think that it is really important that we continue to uh have the human element and exploration. And not only is it important, it's kind of unavoidable because it is who we are, you know. I mean to think about the explorers back in the early early early days, hundreds and thousands of years ago, people who risk their lives to find out what is on the other side of these mountains. You know, that's something that is kind of just intrinsic in us.

So while it might be really difficult, I think it's impossible for us not to go out there. Sure, and I think that that that dream is going to drive a lot of dum. That's a that's a really interesting way of putting it. It's not can we do it? It's can we not do it? How? How can we not do it? I mean, how could we deny that part of ourselves? Um? And I have I grabbed a collection of sort of interesting quotes about space and astronomy and and space exploration, and I just thought i'd share

a few of these with you. Some of them are are pretty amusing, uh, and some of the one of them at least could be apocryphal, but I will I will let you know which one that is. Um So the first one I have really just kind of to set the scene. This one comes to us all the way from three hundred forty two BC. This is Plato who said astronomy compels the soul to look upward and lead us from this world to another, which, really that goes right to the heart of what I was saying.

This idea of exploration, Now that was just intellectual exploration at that point. Of course, there was no way that Plato was ever going to get off the surface of the Earth. But I think it really does speak to that desire. Then there's um Ray Bradbury who said in July nine, this is the result of six billion years of evolution. Tonight we have given the lie to gravity. We have reached for the stars. And you know, it's this sense of wonder at the achievement of landing people

on the Moon. And then uh uh. I love this quote because I mean I love watching the footage of the moon landing and the news, the news reporting that was going around with it, because it just shows how phenomenal that moment was. So when the eagle landed on the Moon. I was speechless and overwhelmed, like most of the world, couldn't say a word. I think all I said was wow, geez, not exactly immortal, Well, it was nothing if not human. That was Walter Cronkite, who you know.

I mean, he was like the voice of a generation. He was. He was the voice of the news. And yeah, he really was. And then like if you watch the moon landing, you see him break down and like, just he's so overwhelmed. I mean, that's a phenomenal thing. Um. And then Arthur C. Clark, famous science fiction author, said the moon is the first milestone on the road to

the stars. Which I think we'll have more to say about that in our next episode because we were thinking about a particular exploration type episode for for Friday's show. And then a man This is the apocryphal quote, possibly apocryphal quote, A man is the best computer available to place in a spacecraft. It is also the only one

that can be mass produced with unskilled labor. That that quote is attributed and again could be apocryphal, to Werner von Brown, faded rocket scientist UM David R. Scott, who was the commander of the Apollo fifteen mission, had a couple of really good ones. One of them is for when I look at the Moon, I do not see a hostile, empty world. I see the radiant body where man has taken his first steps into a frontier that

will never end. And then his other one is as I stand out here in the wonders of the unknown at Hadley, I sort of realized there's a fundamental truth to our nature. Man must explore, and this is exploration at its greatest. Uh. Then this one might be my favorite one. It's the penultimate quote in my list. So I do have one more, but it's will be Man. That may have been a small one for Neil, but

it's a long one for me. It was Charles Conrad Jr. Who was commander of the Apollo twelve and the shortest astronaut in the Apollo program. Uh. Reportedly he made that quote because he had gotten into a discussion with a friend of his who had said that the words of astronauts when they sat down the moon must have been dictated by the United States government, and that, in fact, Big Brother was making sure where that they said exactly what was on script. And he said I'll say something

that will prove you wrong. And that's what he came up with. And he said, the only thing I regret is he never made good on the bet um. And then here's my final quote, Bob. This is Gane and I'm on the surface. And as I take man's last step from the surface back home for some time to come, but we believe not too long into the future, I'd like to just say what I believe history will record that America's challenge of today has forged Man's destiny of tomorrow.

And as we leave the Moon at taras Littrow, we leave as we came, and God willing as we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind. God speed the crew of Apollo seventeen, says Jene Sermon, who was the final person to walk on the surface of the Moon December fourteenth nine. So far, yeah, we hope that that will not be too far into the future when someone else can make history yet again and say the next first words on the moon. So uh, I uh, you know, this is this is something that I really

find very inspirational myself. Um, you know, I I definitely love the whole space exploration theme. We have covered that so many times and forward Thinking I think it's pretty obvious, but this kind of gets to the heart of why I think it's really incredible stuff. So, guys, if you have any comments about space exploration, or any thoughts of your own about manned versus unmanned space, or even just just a suggestion for a topic that we should cover

in the future, get in touch with us. Let's know what you're thinking. You can email us our addresses f W Thinking at discovery dot com, or just go to FW thinking dot com. Check out the videos there, the blog posts, the podcasts. We have links to some pretty incredible articles that can go into even further detail about things like space exploration and other topics as well. We want you to be part of the conversation. We look forward to hearing from you, and we will talk to

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