Scientific Benefits of Practicing Any Religion & What It’s Like to Live in Space - SYSK Choice

Today on Something You Should Know, a simple way to get more done in less time and only one out of five people do it. Then, religion.
Science tells us that being religious is good for your health. And if you look at the data, what it shows is that people who are engaged with their religion, so it's not just believing, it's not just saying you believe in God, but people who engage with the spiritual practices of their religion tend to live longer, healthier, and happier lives.
Then a look at the phrase, a whole nother story. Is nother really a word? And living in outer space, what does it do to people? You'll hear from someone who's lived there.
So yeah, I got taller in space on earth. I'm 6'1".
In space, I was 6'2 and 3 quarters because without gravity, your spine essentially elongates. It stretches out a little bit and the normal curve you have in your back on Earth disappears when you're in space.
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Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi there.
Welcome to Something You Should Know. This time of year, during the holidays, there's a lot to do.
So who wouldn't like some ways to get more done in less time? Well, here are three easy ways to do just that from productivity expert Don Wetmore of the Productivity Institute. First, have a daily plan.
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Even a simple to-do list will make a big difference, and it's much better than having no list at all. Plan to get a lot done.
If you only plan one thing to do, it will take you all day to do it. When you pack your day with tasks, it creates a healthy pressure to be more productive.
And clean up your workspace. Studies show that working in a messy work environment will cause you to waste an hour a day being distracted.
Organize your desk, and you'll get that hour back. And that is something you should know.
During the holiday season, even people who aren't very religious can get a little religious. There are probably a lot of people who attend church at Christmas time, but at no other time of year.
I think people have a sense that religion is good for you. And as it turns out, religion can be very good for you, even though the number of people who are part of an organized religion has fallen.
So what effects does religion have on the people who practice it? Well, this has been studied scientifically, and the results are fascinating and impressive. Here to talk about this is David Desteno.
He's author of a book called How God Works, The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion. He's also host of a podcast called How God Works.
Hi, David. Thanks for coming on Something You Should you should know hi thanks for having me on so i think people have a sense that there's something good about religion that it it does have benefits but what exactly are the benefits and who benefits i mean what what does it mean to be religious and how religious do you do you have to be to get the? It's a good question.
You know, what led me to this wasn't any pre-existing agenda, just following the data. And if you look at the data, what it shows is that people who are engaged with their religion, so it's not just believing.
It's not just saying you believe in God, but people who engage with the spiritual practices of their religion tend to live longer, healthier, and happier lives. And so what we're finding out as scientists is what it really is, is that in the practice of religion, whether it's prayer, whether it's meditation, whether it's grieving rituals, all of these things nudge our minds and bodies in ways that help us deal with life's challenges.
And as a scientist,

it's my goal to try and understand how that works and to see if we can extract anything

from that wisdom for people who might not be a member of a traditional faith.

Well, and I've heard other people talk in general terms about the benefits of religion,

but often those are people who advocate religion. They're often clergy members or whatnot.
So they somewhat have an agenda, but not you. You're coming at this from a scientific point of view.
Yeah, I mean, I was raised Catholic, but I kind of left the church and have no religious affiliation. But what I found in my research, you know, is that a lot of the practices that spiritual traditions ask people to engage in, I'll give you an example in a minute, makes their health and their well-being better.
And because there's data there, that's what I want to follow. I think asking the question as a scientist, does God exist, is kind of useless.
It's not that it's not an important question, but it's not a question science can answer. So you can think of these practices as something that a divine God gave to his, her, or its creatures to help them.
Or you can think of them as things that people stumbled into and that have been honed over the centuries to help people live better lives. And I can't answer that question, but what I can tell you is that they help us in many ways meet life's challenges.
Well, it's interesting this time of year in particular, you know, there are those people who go to church once a year and it's usually at Christmas time and then they never come back. But I think that people who even do that have a sense of that there is some comfort.
There is something about the religious part of Christmas that is very, I don't know, it just it feels right. It feels good.
And then it's gone. Yeah, I mean, in those practices.
So when you go, let's use Christmas for the time of the year, as you're saying, part of what those ritual practices do and the giving and the singing together, et cetera, they create feelings of connection. So for example, one way I got into this is in my lab, we were trying to see how we can make people feel more connected.
And we had them sit across from each other, strangers, and we had them put on earphones. And they had to simply tap their hands on a sensor on the table as they heard beats.
And we rigged the beats so that they were either, they would be tapping their hands in synchrony, or they'd be kind of, you know, completely random and out of sync. And what we found is that simple act of moving in synchrony made people feel not only more connected to one another, these were complete strangers, but they subsequently reported feeling more connection to one another.
And then when we created a situation where one of them got stuck doing something god awful, a really boring task, the other people were more willing to come and help them. And so what you can see is that simple act of doing things together makes people feel more connected, makes them feel more compassionate and have empathy for each other.
And work since that time has shown that if you do this in a religious context, it is even more so in terms of feeling bonded and connected. And those feelings that we get of gratitude when we pray and thank God, those feelings of gratitude when we induce them in my lab for any reason, make people more willing to help one another, more generous, more fair, more kind.
And so what religions have done is found a way to alter our emotional states, what the brain is perceiving, etc., in ways that kind of bring out our better angels. Why does it have to be around a religion? Why can't you do all those rituals or those kinds of things and not have a god somewhere in the mix? That's an open question.
You might be able to. But, you know, people will create rituals all the time just on their own.
Why don't those rituals have the same effect or why doesn't being in a club, right, have the same effect on connection? It's because over millennia, these rituals have been honed to nudge our bodies in certain ways. So it's not, they're not just put together in ways that are random.
Let me give you one great example. One of my favorite examples is things like grieving.
When someone dies and we face loss, grief is a very difficult emotion for people to feel. And many people get stuck in it.
The trick is to move through it without it becoming too intense or going on too long. And one thing that religions do is we all come together to eulogize a person.
And it seems normal, but if you think about it, it's kind of weird. Like if my wife just left me who I love or I lost a job that I love, I wouldn't want to spend time thinking about it and saying how great she was or the job was because it would make the pain even worse.
But what we know from recent psychological research is that actually focusing on the person you've lost and consolidating a positive memory of them is one of the best predictors of moving through grief. And all religions help us do this.
The ritual of Shiva in Judaism incorporates lots of elements. When someone dies, people come to your house for seven days in groups and they say prayers together called minions.
Saying those prayers together creates that synchrony and increases feelings of empathy and connection. They cover mirrors in their houses.
Why do they do this? Well, one thing we know from scientific research is when you look in a mirror, whatever emotion you're feeling becomes intensified. And so if you're feeling grief and you look in a mirror, you're going to feel it even more.
And so sure, there's a theological reason for this, but what it's really doing is a slight way to reduce the grief that people are feeling. And so whether or not there has to be a God, we don't know.
But what we do know is that there's a wisdom to these rituals that have been honed over time to work on our bodies physiologically and psychologically. If a person who doesn't believe, if an atheist were to dive into a religious community and do all the rituals and do all the things, do they still get the benefits or is belief, faith in that religion, a necessary element?

So there hasn't been an empirical test of that, as you said. What we do know from certain studies is that some of it, especially the things that affect you physiologically, you can garner the benefit.
So, for example, when people pray the rosary or when they meditate or when Hindus chant kirtan, it slows down the breathing rate. When the breathing rate slows down, it's a signal to the brain that the world around you is safe.
It reduces anxiety. It calms people down.
Things like that, I think you can get the benefit without belief. Or things like sitting shiva, people come together and maybe they sing together but not sing Jewish prayers, you would get similar benefits.
But in some areas, belief certainly does matter. People who have a greater belief tend to have less stress and less anxiety in life, especially around issues of death.
So I think there is clearly some benefit that can come without belief, but in each case, we kind of have to examine the phenomenon we're talking about. And I don't want to diminish belief.
Belief certainly plays a role. But there are some benefits that can be extracted from these rituals in respectful ways where belief isn't necessary.
What typically draws people to a religion? I imagine in a lot of cases, you grow up with a religion, you went to church because your parents took you to church, so you stick with that church. But other than that, what draws people to a religion and what causes people to resign from a religion? For a lot of people, and we're seeing this in our society right now, people are leaving traditional religions in droves, I think, because they don't agree with the policies of them, or there have certainly been institutional failings in the Catholic churches and others.
But most of the people who are leaving religion aren't becoming atheists. They are checking the box that is spiritual, but not religious.
That is, they're looking for that element in life, that connection to something greater, that those benefits that spirituality brings, but they're trying to find a new way of doing it. And often in midlife, there is an uptick for people.
Often when people turn in around 50, 55, if you actually, if you look at people taking up meditation, the people who are doing it most rapidly are people in that age bracket. I think it's because you're at that stage in life where you're not at the end, but you can see the end and it feels a little more real and you're getting a little older and you're trying to reevaluate.
And some people do convert at that time. So I think there is a spiritual hunger for people.
It's trying to find the thing that fits your needs. We're talking about the benefits, the rewards of having religion in your life.
And we're talking with Dave Desteno. He's author of a book called How God Works, the science behind the benefits of religion.
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That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E dot com slash something. So Dave, despite all these benefits that people experience, the number of people who would say they're members of an organized religion, that number keeps going down.
That is true. Again, but most of them aren't leaving to become atheists.
Most of them are leaving because they disagree or they feel that that institution is not speaking to them.

But again, this is why you're seeing, you know, increases in people taking up other types of faith. Buddhism is on the rise.
People are going to things like Burning Man and having spiritual experiences. People are looking for new ways to get that when they feel that the traditional faiths aren't speaking to them or, you know, have institutional failings like child abuse or gender discrimination.
But it would seem odd to me, you know, that people would switch faiths. You know, I don't want to be a Catholic anymore, so I'm going to become Jewish.
I can't imagine that happens a whole lot. And, you know, and Burning Man is once a year.
So, I mean, it doesn't seem like that really fills the void. No, it doesn't.
And I think that's why people are hungry and are looking for something different. And I think the religion, if you look at the sociological trends, the religious landscape is kind of in flux right now, because you're right, if you're raised Catholic, it's hard to become Jewish and vice versa, or whatever it might be.
But it doesn't mean people don't want to fulfill that part of their life. You know, I'm here saying things like grieving rituals, things like meditation and contemplation increase people's well-being.
They certainly do. And so people leave these religions, they're looking to fill those.
They're looking to find connection to something, to other people, to something greater than themselves. how that's going to shake out in society right now we don't know but what we do know is people

are doing more and more things alone, and loneliness is up. And one of the ways that religion really affects people's health and well-being is by providing a sense of community and by ritualizing.
You know, if you join a club, it's like, well, maybe I'll go this week, maybe I won't go next week. But if you're practicing a faith, there are all of these elements built in that regularly bring you together.
And when you're there, have you engage in activities that psychologically make you feel more bonded. How that's going to shake out over the next decade or so with people leaving traditional faiths, I think we don't know.
So one of the very first things you said at the beginning of our discussion is people who practice religious rituals live longer, are healthier. Is it because of that or is it something to do with when you practice these rituals, you somehow take better care of yourself or you eat better? I mean, is it a two-step process or is it just the religious rituals that are like magic?

We don't know the answer to that.

What we do know is that there are some kind of longitudinal data.

And by that, what I mean is you follow people as they age.

That solves the causality problem, that is.

If people become more religious, they then have better outcomes.

So we know the directionality there. It's not just like the people who are religious are also people who take better care of themselves.
Religion can cause them to take better care of themselves, etc. But the mechanisms by which it's going to do that are going to be many, right? It reduces stress.
Reducing stress gives you better health. People who are more dedicated to religion often abuse substances less have less depression that will make you feel better they they have they have more community they're less lonely loneliness is as bad for your health as is smoking in terms of the years it takes off your life if it's chronic so i think there's going to be a lot of mechanisms by which it works even though the benefits are are pretty good as you've described mean, longer life, better health, all kinds of great things come from being part of a religion.
But I think people think they can't join the club because they don't have this deep religious belief in God or whatever it is that keeps them outside, that makes them feel as if they're not welcome because they don't buy the premise, I guess. Yeah.
And I think there are a lot of people who aren't sure what they believe yet partake for the very reason that you're saying. I know many of them.
In fact, I know some strident atheists who go to church every Sunday because singing those hymns and being with other people and attending those events brings them a feeling of solace. But I think there's also this kind of backlash, you know, kind of especially in more urban educated society of, oh, religion is silly.
It's for people who don't know any better. And so, you know, I know there are a lot of people who feel like if I don't completely buy into religion, I'm either smarter or if I go, I'm kind of being fake.
And I think the question people have to realize with religion is even people who practice, there are times they doubt their faith as well. And I don't think it's an all or nothing thing.
I don't think you're all in or you're all out. But if you are all out, as you said, you are going to be missing some of the benefits there.
Yeah, that's really interesting that there is this idea that because things that are in the Bible couldn't have happened. And I'm too smart for this.
So I dismiss the whole thing. Yeah.
And the thing I say is, look, I'm a scientist. Have I seen any data that would make me believe in God? No.
But does that mean I definitely know God's not there? Again, even Richard Dawkins, most famous atheist around, will say he can't be sure. And so I think let's not have arguments about something that we can't answer, right? And let's Let's partake in the benefits that come in a way that speaks to us.
Let's have a little intellectual humility. This is the problem with many people on both sides.
There are scientists who are so sure that they know that all religion is nonsense and there is no God, that they look down on people who think the other.

And there are some fundamentalists in religion who are so sure that the word of the Bible or the Quran or the Torah, whatever the text is, is all there is and science is wrong. And I think on both sides, that level of self-confidence is really more hubris because we don't know.
And if we put that question aside, then we can actually, I think, hopefully work together to try and figure out how to make life better for all of us and be open to other people's perspectives and trying things. The benefits you talk about of long life and better health, has anyone ever compared the religions to see if one delivers more benefit than the other? There haven't been really scientific comparisons.
What I can say, and there tends to be a lot of convergences. That is, people, if you look at different types of practices and rituals at different life stages, there's a lot they share.
But there also are some that deal with certain challenges better than others. Like, I think Judaism deals with grief, the rituals rituals of Shiva better than, say, Christianity does.
So I think they're all good. There hasn't been an empirical examination of is one better than the other.
But I think in certain cases here and there, different religions do have better approaches that we can quantify scientifically. And that work is just starting.
But really, it does seem that it's more about the person than the religion, that it's your view of it rather than necessarily... Yeah, it's your view of it.
And it's how those practices that you engage in affect you. And because more of them are shared, if you take away the words of the prayers or the specific beliefs, if you put those to the side, there's a lot of overlap in the practices.

And I think that's why it doesn't really matter so much which faith it is. There are people I know who will say that they're very religious, but they don't necessarily belong to a church, that they have faith, that they believe in God, that they have religion in them, but they don't practice a specific religion.
Is having faith enough to get these benefits, or is it the practice of the rituals that gives you the benefits? Yes, there's the faith, but there's also the doing of religion. And outside of Christianity, a lot of religions really are more defined by the doing, what you do daily in terms of your practices and rituals more than your beliefs.
And I think that's where a lot of the scientific focus should go. What does the doing of those practices do for people? Well, this has been a really interesting conversation because I think people think about this, but they don't talk much about it, and they kind of wonder what other people think and what the truth is.
So thanks for shedding some light on that. David DeSteno has been my guest.
He's the author of a book called How God Works, The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion. He also has an excellent podcast that has the same title, How God Works.
And there's a link to the book and to the podcast in the show notes. Thank you, David.
Thanks for having me on, Mike. It's been a pleasure.
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Terms and conditions apply. I'm Anne Foster, host of the feminist women's history comedy podcast, Vulgar History.
And every week I share the saga of a woman from history whose story you probably didn't already know and you will never forget after you hear it. Sometimes we reexexamine well-known people like Cleopatra or Pocahontas, sharing the truth behind their legends.
Sometimes we look at the scandalous women you'll never find in a history textbook. If you can hear my cat purring, she is often on the podcast as well.
Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get your podcasts. I bet you have thought, at least a little bit, about what it would be like to go into space, the final frontier, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
It all sounds very exciting. But what is the reality of going into space and living away from Earth? What would that really be like? Well, people have done it.
They're doing it now on the space station. And it turns out that being in space can be a little weird.
Even little things like eating. For example, you can't shake salt onto your food in space because if you did, the salt would just float around in the air.
To understand the reality of being in space and what it does to someone, I'd like you to listen to my next guest, who has actually been to space, twice, to the space station. And the stories he is about to tell you are, as they say, out of this world.
Dave Williams is an astronaut, an aquanaut, a pilot, ER doctor, scientist, and the former director of space and life sciences at NASA's Johnson Space Center. He's author of the book, Why Am I Taller? What Happens to an Astronaut's Body in Space? Hey Dave, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Well, thanks very much for having me. I'm absolutely thrilled to be talking about what it's like exploring space.
So let me ask you first, just in general, is being in space difficult? Is it effortful? Is it hard? Or do you adapt? Does it just become normal after a while or not? You adapt. Having said that, though, everything is different when you're living in space.

You know, we grow up on the planet Earth. We grow up in a gravitational environment.
So living without gravity, you have to relearn how to brush your teeth, comb your hair and have a shower and simply eat a meal. And is that the biggest thing is the lack of gravity? And that's and that cascades into creating other problems.
With today's spaceflight, that's definitely the case. Living and working on the space station, we've had humans in space on the space station for the last 22 years, but they're working in this microgravity environment without gravity.
Going back to the moon, we're going to be living and working one-sixth gravity. And ultimately, when we go to Mars, it'll be about 40% of the Earth's gravity.

So managing these different levels of gravity is something that we have to get used to.

Since we have enough data, you say people have been going to space for, you know, well, since the 60s.

But do we have enough data to know that if you go to space, certain things happen to you or everybody's individual or it depends how much time or what?

Thank you. Do we have enough data to know that if you go to space, certain things happen to you or everybody's individual or it depends how much time or what?

We're still learning, but there's no question. We have a lot of data now and we've acquired so much data on the space station.

We think we understand the issues with long duration missions like sending a human to Mars, which would take six months.

And is that likely?

And are we going to go to Mars or is somebody going to go to Mars anytime soon? I wouldn't say it's anytime soon. The current plan is, of course, going back to the moon.
We have the Artemis 1 spacecraft orbiting the moon right now. And Artemis 2 will carry humans to orbit the moon.
And then ultimately, we're going to land humans on the surface of the moon, set up a lunar habitat and understand how to develop new technologies to enable us to live there for long periods of time and those missions will get us ready to go to Mars probably sometime in the next 20 to 30 years. So talk a little bit about your trips to space and when it was and what it was like.
Well the first time was in 1998. I like to say the first space flight I was on was in the last millennium.
And that was a mission dedicated to understanding how the body, the brain, the nervous system adapted to being in space. My second space flight was in 2007.
I went from being a neuroscientist in space to being a construction worker, helping build the space station.

I went outside, did three spacewalks to help build the space station. An amazing experience.
And what about mentally, psychologically? Does being in space, does that experience kind of mess with your mind? Yeah, it's an unbelievable experience. It really, it changes you forever.
I remember riding on the end of the Canadarm on my second spacewalk, looking back at the Earth, this four and a half billion year old planet upon which the entire history of the human species has taken place. And it's cast against the black, infinite void of space, this beautiful blue oasis of our planet.
And you realize when you orbit the Earth every 90 minutes that, in fact, we live on a pretty small planet. You might even call it the global village.
And there's no borders separating countries you can see from space. It's quite clear we're all in this together.
And you can see changes taking place on the planet far below. So it really is quite a transformational experience.
And while you are there, is your day similar to an Earth day in the sense of you sleep at, well, how do you even know what night is? But you sleep at some predetermined nighttime and you get up and have breakfast and then you work for a while and have lunch. I mean, is it that kind of day or totally different? Well, pretty much so.
You know, despite the fact you see a sunrise and a sunset every 45 minutes, we have a designated eight-hour sleep period. And it's really important to actually get to bed and sleep for that eight hours.
We have what's called PSA, pre-sleep activities and post-sleep activities, you know, to enable you to brush your teeth and make a meal if having breakfast and things. And the rest of your day, though, is really quite busy.
You've got research experiments scheduled, maintenance activities for the space station that are scheduled. Sometimes you have to go outside and do a spacewalk.
And going outside is not quite as simple as just throwing on a spacesuit and going out the airlock to be able to do the work that you have outside. There's a whole protocol to get ready for spacewalks.
And what does all this do when you're up there for months or weeks, however long you're up there and you come back? What is it that has been determined that this is what happened to your body? Your body either sped up its aging or you, as your book implies, the title that you got taller what are the things that happen to the body literally every system of the body is affected by being in space and the it depends on the actual organ system so yeah i got taller in space on earth i'm 6 1 in space i was 6 2 and 3 quarters because, your spine essentially elongates. It stretches out a little bit and the normal curve you have in your back on Earth disappears when you're in space.
But your muscles become weaker simply because you're not lifting heavy objects. You're just simply floating around in space.
Your bones become deconditioned. They lose bone density.
Again, for the same reason, you're not lifting heavy weights. You're not walking against the resistance of gravity.
So every organ system has changes that take place. But the remarkable thing is when you come back to Earth, it all changes back.
So many of the similarities of weakness and bone loss sound like we're aging in space, but it's reversible aging, which returns to normal when we get back to Earth. Do you, when you're up there with other people, do you get private time or where you're not connected to somebody that somebody isn't watching you or monitoring you? Do you get to be alone or are you always with hooked up with other people?'re definitely busy and there's always other people around but it is possible to get private time and i think that's really important to re-energize when you're in space the same thing on earth you know in the pandemic a lot of us were living with other people in isolation for a period of time which is very much what it's like living on board the space station.
And you have to find time for yourself. So what I would do is go to the cupola and look out the windows and the cupola at the earth going by and just simply put on some earplugs and listen to music while you're doing this.
And imagine I was able to listen to Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World, while I'm orbiting the planet, looking at it from afar on the space station.

And even today, if I listen to that song, I'm instantly on board the space station. How long does it take to get there? Well, it's only an eight and a half minute ride to space.
And it's pretty much the same no matter what rocket you're riding. But in terms of actually getting to the space station, it does take time once you get into orbit to then go to a higher orbital altitude and then rendezvous and dock with the space station.
So when I went there on the space shuttle, we would rendezvous and dock on the third flight day because our second flight day we spent inspecting the tile on the orbiter. It is possible without using the shuttle and doing the tile inspection to rendezvous and dock on the second day and then you can also certainly do a rendezvous and docking within one day so a lot of it depends on the mission that you're flying on and when you're up there what do you eat the food in space is very much like camping food and it's a really really interesting phenomenon because, of course, food is really important for all of us.
And it's not just the nutritional aspect of food. Food can, if you're eating the same stuff all the time, it becomes a little bit boring.
So people like to have a wide variety of different foods to eat. When you're in space, food tastes a little bit different than it does on Earth.
It's almost as though you have a cold until you adapt to being in space. So people like really spicy sauces on their food.
How do you put salt on your food in space without gravity? You can't shake it out of a salt shaker. So we actually have salt water and you spray it on your food.
So eating in space is quite a different experience. Well, I never thought of that.
Yeah, you can't sprinkle salt and pepper because it would just float around, right? Yeah, there's no question. So the pepper, we mix it with oil and you can squirt that on.
Wasabi is really popular because, you know, it's a paste and you can just put it on your food and it makes it spicy, clears out the nasal passages. So any hot sauces like that people really enjoy.
In fact, shrimp cocktail in the shuttle program was one of the most popular meals because of the spicy horseradish sauce. So if your muscles atrophy because there's no resistance to anything, you're not lifting anything heavy, it seems that that puts a clock on how long you could be up there because wouldn't you just kind of wither away if you didn't get back to Earth and start being pulled by gravity? You know, it's an interesting question.
You would think that it's a linear decrease. So if you stay up there long enough, your bones are going to dissolve and your muscles are going to be really weak.
You'll turn into a blob of jelly. And in fact, that's not what happens.
It turns out that there is a fairly rapid decay that takes place over a year if you're living in space, but it hits a plateau level. And if we think about that, if you're in bed for a long period of time, we have patients in hospitals that are in bed for a year or more with various illnesses.
We have people who live in wheelchairs following a tragic accident where they get a spinal cord injury. And we know in those individuals that the muscles in their lower extremities don't disappear, the bones don't dissolve, that it plateaus after a period of time.
We also understand that if you stay in space and microgravity for a year, remember, it's only going to take six months for us to get to Mars and then six months to come back. So we certainly will be able to survive those long duration missions going to another planet in our solar system.
But doesn't that put a limit on living in space? I mean, understanding it plateaus, but you're still hardly 100%. You are hardly.
That's very true. There is a limit.
There's no question. We need to think about what are the solutions to enable us to stay in space longer and go farther.
So going farther, new propulsion systems, but staying longer. Remember 2001, a space odyssey, they had a rotating space station.
So they created artificial gravity in space by rotating their space station. And of course, if you're able to do that, that changes the whole paradigm of living in space.
You're going to prevent a lot of these changes that we're seeing today on board the space station from taking place. So I understand you're real busy when you're on the space station.
You got a lot of things to do, but the two or three days that it takes to get there, what do you do? Do you just sit there and look out the window or are you actually flying the thing or is a computer flying it mostly or explain that process? Yeah, so a lot depends on the type of vehicle that you're on. For the most part, yes, the computers are flying the spacecraft.
Usually the final phase of rendezvous and docking is done by the pilots or the commanders of the spacecraft. It really depends on whatever spacecraft you're on.
We can automate that. There's no question for cargo resupply of the space station.
It's an automated rendezvous and docking. But you're busy.
Surprisingly, it sounds like there's not a lot to do. You're just traveling to the space station, but you're always busy monitoring spacecraft systems, maintaining the spacecraft.
In the case of rendezvous and docking, getting ready for that critical phase of flight because you don't want to collide with the vehicle that you're rendezvousing and docking with. That would be really bad.
What other challenges have come up that maybe you weren't anticipated that are making people think, well, we've got to solve this problem?

Are there any others that really kind of get in the way of long term space travel?

There's a whole host of issues we're still working on.

Radiation exposure is one of them.

Trying to figure out new types of shielding to enable us to protect the astronauts inside the vehicle faster propulsion systems to go from one point to another and decrease radiation exposure simply by getting there faster so that's another category that we have to look at developing new technologies but then there's the simply living in living with each other, the behavioral issues of working in close proximity with other individuals, the loneliness that you can get in space, and working in this high-performing environment where you always have to be on top of your game. So we're studying all the different aspects of this, and arguably one of the greatest lessons for me of living and working on the space station was this attention to wellness which helped me out during the pandemic because in many cases in the beginning of the pandemic when i was isolated at home it felt like living on the space station really well why why so why so well because you're you're living in a small confined environment i mean depends how big your apartment is or your house is, but you're living inside.
You're not really able to go out. You're spending time with whoever it is you're living with, which sometimes, you know, even our loved ones we can get upset with and get on each other's nerves.
So we have to figure out how to maintain our wellness in that environment. So wellness is all about our physical fitness and sleep and diet

and rest and exercise. It's about our emotional spirit re-energizing by playing music or doing

whatever we enjoy doing, whether it's reading literature, playing music. And then of course,

interacting with other individuals and building that positive relationship between each other.

So there's many different aspects to wellness that are critical. Even after now we're emerging

Thank you. interacting with other individuals and building that positive relationship between each other.
So there's many different aspects to wellness that are critical. Even after now we're emerging from this pandemic, building wellness into our day-to-day lives is something that's very helpful.
What's the physical layout of the space station, the living part or the part you're in? I mean, how big is it? Where's the, where are the bedrooms? Where's the bathroom? You know, that, with that kind of thing. Overall, it's roughly the size of a football field, but there's different modules that you are able to live in and work in.
And some of the modules are essentially laboratories. Other modules have sleep stations in them.
Of course, we have an airlock and then we've got an area called the cupola where it's all windows and you can look at the earth around you. The funny part though is when we think about houses and apartments on earth, we think about square feet.
Well, square feet in space doesn't really matter at all. It's cubic feet because you've got this whole volume that you can live in.
And, you know, if you're on the floor, I can hang out on the ceiling and, you know, what metaphorically is the ceiling. And I'm looking down at you and I'm perfectly happy using this additional surface.
So we really are able to use all the different environments in the space station itself. There is no ceiling.
There is no floor. There are no walls.
We just simply use whatever surface we're on. And how do you move about? Fingertip forces.
You know, it's funny when you see a first time flyer in space and to a degree, they're like the bull in the China shop. You know, they push off a little too hard and they go flying across one of the modules and then bounce off the wall and you kind of, eh, don't push so hard.
And then after you've been there for a while, you realize it literally is just a fingertip force that you push off very gently or push off with your toes very gently. And you can glide kind of cruising from one part of the module to another.
It's a really amazingly graceful thing to be able to do. I would miss that, I would think, when you got back home.
You do. In fact, there's what we call zero G flashbacks.
So even with me talking to you today, I'm sitting in a chair, but I can imagine what it would be like to just simply close my eyes like I'm on board the space station and float out of my chair and be floating around the middle of my room here. The trick, of course, in space is when you're working in a fairly large module, always make sure that you can get back to a surface because you can't just flop around like a fish.
You know, you've got to have a handrail to grab onto to be able to push and be able to move forward. What happens if you don't? What happens if you're floating in the middle of the room and you can't reach anything? What would eventually happen to you? Well, you know, a couple things.
You can flop around and see if that's going to work for you. And I can tell you from experience, it's not really going to work for you.
You can just sit there floating and hope that the airflow from the fans will kind of slowly move you over towards the surface. Or you can say, hey, can somebody come in and give me a hand here? And then somebody will float over and smile at you.
Well, there you are. And give you a little nudge.
But most astronauts, when we're living in space for long periods of time, we know to push off and get to another surface. It's not really an issue.
The only time that it might happen is if you simply close your eyes for a nap and you fall asleep. And then you're kind of curled up in this little ball just randomly floating around.
So when you go to bed and you do you go get into a bed and is it like the blankets that keep you in it? We have a sleeping bag. You don't call it that in space because it doesn't sound very astronaut like.
So we call it the sleep restraint system. But basically, it's a sleeping bag and you can attach it to any surface the wall the ceiling the floor whatever you want and most people use their sleeping bags or their sleep restraint system to fall asleep in you climb into the sleeping bag you zip it up and then your hands will float up in front of you when you fall asleep because it's not like earth where you're lying in a bed and gravity's holding you into the bed it turns turns out when you sleep without gravity, your arms are kind of hovering in front of your face.
And I'll never forget on my first space flight having a dream that somebody was reaching out to grab my neck. And I woke up startled thinking, oh my goodness, what's happening? And I saw these hands right in front of me.
I go, oh no. And then I realized it's my own hands.
Well, I think it would be really cool to experience that, to experience zero gravity, which I probably won't get to.

But I certainly enjoy hearing it from you, someone who's been to space a couple of times.

I've been talking to astronaut Dave Williams. He is a scientist, an ER doctor, and he is author of a book called Why Am I Taller?

What Happens to an Astronaut's Body in Space? And there's a link to that book in the show notes. This has been fun, Dave.
Thank you. Okay, excellent.
Thanks. I'm sure you've heard of the phrase, perhaps even used the phrase, that's a whole nother story.
It's pretty common. Some people consider the word nother as bad grammar, while others consider it just the natural evolution of language.
You probably won't find the word nother in a standard dictionary, but it is in the urban dictionary. It's defined as an accidental word that comes out when your tongue is unsure if it wants to say other or another.
But the Merriam-Webster dictionary has a whole nother definition. It says the definition of nother is alteration from misdivision of another and other.
And that is something you should know. We publish episodes three times a week here and really appreciate the fact that you take the time to listen and hope you'll spread the word about this podcast to your friends.
I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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