Should We Settle in Space? - Tim Peake, Kelly Weinersmith and Alan Davies

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BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

You're about to listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Episodes will be released on Wednesdays, wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, the full series is available right now.

First on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

And I'm Robin Inks, and we are in the Infinite Monkey Cage, which has just been teleported here to Harwell.

Teleported.

Well, actually, it was a four and a half hour journey in the vegetable on a train which had no functioning toilet, and I was stood next to a man who smelt of Dairy Lea.

It is true, actually, that one of the benefits of teleportation is that you don't need a toilet.

Don't you?

No.

Why?

Because it's instant.

Right.

But the downside is...

Hang on, why is that instant?

What if I teleport you need a wee?

No, teleportation is instant.

So you can go through a wee before you get in the teleporter.

Right.

What if I forgot?

Shortly afterwards, you'll arrive at the location.

Yeah.

So it's fine.

The downside is you cease to exist at the point of origin.

So in your case, you'd have been vaporised at Manchester Piccadilly.

I like vaporised at Manchester Piccadilly.

It sounds halfway between Gary Newman and Morrissey, I think, that one.

Oh, vaporised at Piccadilly Station.

On a Tuesday, I'll never see Stockport.

Back in the time of the Smiths, when we were young, we all thought that by the year 2000, we'd be living on the moon.

This is true.

If any of you are old enough to remember Space 1999, most wonderful TV show, but like everything in the 1970s, it was basically a public information film that would go, don't live on the moon.

If you live on the moon in nylon flares, you'll find you'll set fire to a nuclear dump and then live a melancholy existence with a woman who occasionally becomes an eagle.

Don't wear nylon on the moon.

But now, as we approach the third decade of the 21st century, finally, it seems like science fiction futures of our youth may become a a reality.

Within the next decade, there will be commercial space stations.

Astronauts will return to the moon, and maybe we'll take our first steps towards Mars and beyond.

Joining us to discuss the opportunity and risks as our civilization takes its first steps into the cosmic ocean and decides whether the water is inviting,

we are joined by an astronaut, a Martian architect, and a man who is very probably quite interested in space.

And they are.

Hello, I'm British astronaut Tim Peake.

And the most ridiculous thing that I've heard about Mars is there is a rock which looks like it's got a face on it.

And some people believe that this face has been carved into the rock by an ancient civilization that used to live on Mars, which is, of course, complete nonsense because it wasn't carved, it was 3D printed.

I'm Kelly Wiener Smith.

I'm co-author of A City on Mars and co-host of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

And I was reading about whether or not women could have babies on Mars, and there was this idea that maybe our bones and our muscles won't be strong enough when labor kicks in if we've been living at 40% Earth gravity.

The solution is to sleep in a centrifuge, to give yourself artificial gravity.

And I don't know how many moms out there couldn't sleep or got sick during their pregnancy, but I'm sure we all would like to be sleeping in centrifuges.

Hello, I'm Alan Davis.

I'm a comedian coming to a town near you soon, I hope.

The Don't make it sound like a threat.

Yes, leave.

The most ridiculous thing I've heard about Mars is it has a sister planet called Fun Size.

It's very, very small and no one knows where it is.

And this is our panel.

Now, Tim, to set the scene, a very simple first question, which is why space?

How long have we got, Brian?

Why space?

Three things.

Science, inspiration, exploration.

So in terms of science, because we can learn so many new things.

We've changed the parameter.

We've gone from 1G to 0G.

And when we start exploring other planets, we'll have different levels of G on those planets.

So we learn new things.

We can do new things like growing disease-causing protein crystals or making metal alloys that we can't make on Earth or printing human organs because there's no crushing force of gravity.

So these kind of scientific processes could really improve life for everybody on Earth.

Then there's inspiration, the Apollo effect that the United States benefited from back in the 50s, 60s, 70s as they were going through that program.

And then there's the true sort of exploration, our innate desire as a human species to find out what's over that next horizon and to go and explore a different planet or a different moon.

Because, Kelly, it is a a question that is often asked, which is why are we thinking about space, developing space, going into space, when we face the challenges we face here on Earth?

Yeah, I do feel like people like to pit space against like poverty.

And why are we going to space if there's all these problems we still have to solve here on Earth?

I guess to be honest, I'm a bit of a cynic.

I see no reason to think that if we stop doing space, we'll solve poverty.

I think we could solve poverty if we wanted.

And space does give us a lot.

You know, I use Starlink.

I live out in the middle of nowhere in Rural Virginia.

Starlink is the only way my kids could get internet access to go to school during the pandemic.

And so I think there's plenty of economic and like awesome and inspirational reasons to go.

And I don't think we need to think of it as pitting ourselves against other things when there's so much to learn out there.

Everybody uses a great deal of space technology every day.

Yeah.

Without necessarily noticing it's become a central part of our lives.

Yeah, when you use a credit card, you're communicating with satellites.

When you move around a city, your GPS, your phone is connecting to satellites.

I saw a stat that we use, we connect with satellites something like 20 to 30 times every single day.

So much of our economy is linked to satellites, and so we're intimately tied to space already.

So, Alan, what we've discovered there is if we use a map and we've got cash, we don't need space.

So,

what's your general, your first, because I think it is, as Kelly was saying, sometimes you do think, you know, well, why are we spending this money going in that direction when we're doing so little down here but ultimately are there not enough humans who have enough empathy to want to change the world anyway wherever the money goes well the best argument i've heard for leaving earth is that it won't always be here but i think if earth disappears so does mars right so we've got to go a lot further and that then i read that when voyager left the solar system the next galaxy it was going to reach was 40 000 years away and i thought oh no we're stuck we may as well just go here the next let's so it's it's really far.

So we need to invent sleeping, long-term sleeping, cryo chambers, you know, that sort of thing.

And

that's probably the first priority.

For the moment, it's quite hard to get up the M1, never mind.

Were you someone who kind of would have, as a kid, thought, oh, it's going to be amazing.

We're going to live in space.

Like beforehand, when we started this show, I was just talking about how Brian Blessed, when he came on, he really was angry that we hadn't been to Mars because when he was growing up, he saw these pictures and he was reading, you know, astounding tales and they were saying we're gonna be on Mars by you know the 1960s or the 1970s.

Well I think all of our ideas of space were spoiled by Star Trek because it looked like everywhere you went you could just get out and walk about and everyone would talk to you and then I read that novel The Martian and it turns out that Mars is awful.

I mean awful.

It's freezing cold.

You can't see anything.

There are dust storms.

There's nothing to eat.

You've got to plant potatoes in your own poo and you've got to take your own potatoes in the first place.

It'll take you five five years to get there, you can't get back.

So it seems like a terrible idea to me.

I'll just say, you've always got to take your own potatoes, haven't you?

You can't,

even on Earth, you can't just.

There's not even a corner shop.

There's always a corner shop.

I've never seen you take your own potatoes, Brian.

You've always got a little man running behind you with a sack.

Someone does it.

Tim, if we start in Earth orbit, could you characterise what we have currently done in Earth orbit and and how it's used here on Earth?

Yes, so in Earth orbit, which isn't that far away, space we officially classify as 100 kilometers at the Kármán line.

Beyond that, you're into space.

And in orbit, we have a number of communication satellites, obviously.

We've mentioned all the kind of ways in which space touches your daily life.

But in terms of building a space station, actually humans kind of settling in space, if you like, we have had a number of space stations.

The Mir space station was very successful as an early space station, and that paved the way for the International Space Station, which has been permanently occupied since the year 2000 and has been doing remarkable research.

And now that the ISS is creaking and leaking a little bit, it's coming to the end of its life, we're looking at a number of commercial space stations to take over from that.

And I should also mention, of course, the Chinese space station has been in orbit for the past few years as well.

And although there's a lot up there, what is it?

What's the number, 30-odd thousand plus currently?

We've got about 11,500 satellites currently, but we will be about 30,000 satellites by the end of this decade.

So it's growing exponentially.

When I joined the space agency back in 2009, there were just 900 satellites.

So

it's quite a large increase in a short space of time.

So does it feel crowded up there?

No, because space is a big place, isn't it?

We've been saying how far it is that Voyager will travel to the next star system.

And when you think about geostationary orbit, that's the orbit where if you place a satellite in geostationary, it'll stay over the same spot on Earth.

So it rotates once every 24 hours along with the planet.

So between here and geostationary, it's 36,000 kilometers.

So that's a large volume there.

But what is driving that increase in the number of satellites?

Technology and cost.

Miniaturization has meant we can build interesting satellites that are smaller and lighter and cheaper.

And reusing parts of the spacecraft, so SpaceX, I mean, they brought down the cost of access to space by a vast sum.

I mean from $57,000 a kilogram to low Earth orbit on the shuttle to $1,500 on the Falcon Heavy today.

So that's why we now have the greater access to space.

Alan, we're here in Harwell under the most incredible piece of art, which is basically a representation, 3D representation of the moon by Luke Jeram.

What I'd like to know from you is, have you ever done a gig in a room this dark with the giant giant moon inside it?

Because I really am beginning to get quite freaked out by the entire thing.

Actually, what is the weirdest gig that you've the weirdest room you've ever done a gig in?

I don't know.

I had a terrible gig in a nightclub in Basildon.

If we said, right, that your next gig is on the International Space Station, would you go?

Yes.

I'd like the idea of being there, of visiting.

You know, I'm very like Katy Perry in that regard.

It's one of many similarities between Katie and I.

Because many people that I speak to, because I would love to go into space.

Many people aren't.

SpaceX is quite roomy.

I think you'd be fine, Brian.

Yeah, I'd be alright in the dragon.

But would you have any nerves?

I want to go up there.

It would be a silly way to die, wouldn't it?

I mean, because completely pointless.

I've got nothing to offer up there.

Why would you want to?

I mean, I think the first people who wanted to go were just curious, weren't they?

I remember reading about Apollo astronauts wondering if they were going to see God or not, you know, and what would the Earth look like, and how would they feel and how would it affect them?

And there was only so many accurate guesses that could be made initially.

I mean, really, it's very primitive in the 50s and 60s when they were making these plans.

I know, for example, I've done some scuba diving.

And when they first invented scuba tanks and sent divers down, they used US Navy divers and sent them further and further to see exactly when they got the bends.

And made people quite ill, but developed quite sophisticated charts as a consequence.

And it felt a little bit like those early people strapped to the tips of rockets were similar things.

They were kind of, you were a test pilot, Tim, right?

There must be a time when they're putting you in, going, it'll be fine, Tim.

Don't worry.

But the Soyuz.

The Soyuz is basically a 1960s bit of kit, isn't it?

It is.

It is.

I think, you know, thanks to some of those early cosmonauts who paved the way to make that vehicle as good as it is.

They haven't changed much.

You know, if it ain't broke, then don't fix it.

We were flying a spacecraft that really had just had some glass cockpits in their bit of software, but ultimately, most of the hardware was all the same.

I love that.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

If it is broke, fix it really quickly, or you'll be sucked into the vacuum of space.

That's a good way of living your life.

Also, I like your when you said that bit about being strapped at the tip of the rocket, for a moment I was imagining that you thought they were on the outside, not the inside.

Would you take the opportunity?

Can't we go in that room?

It depends on how long I'd be up there.

So, you know, when you first get up there, you often feel queasy, and I'm guessing I am the kind of person who would feel queasy.

So if I could stay up for a couple weeks and get over that queasy bit, yeah, I'd go up and do some experiments or something.

I don't want to go to Mars, but I'll go to the ISS.

So how long did you spend in space, Tim?

Six months.

So how much do we know now about what happens to the human body?

We know quite a lot now.

We subsequently had quite a few astronauts and cosmonauts spending a year in Space Plus.

So we've learned a lot about the human body.

how it changes and how to stop some of those changes from happening by good exercise and good nutrition.

So when it comes to traveling further afield, space agencies are pretty confident that a Mars mission isn't going to raise too many problems that we don't already know how to deal with.

I suppose one question before we move outwards is what role humans need to play in that economy, in that ecosystem.

I suppose you could argue that we can have all those functions, the Earth observation and the communication satellites and even fixing satellites and so on, refueling them without a human presence there.

I think that's a really reasonable thing to say.

And as we're starting to think of things that we thought were science fiction, and actually, because of the costs coming down, they're actually within our grasp within the next kind of 10 to 15 years.

I'm thinking large-scale solar farms, for example, one to two kilometers in scale, beaming down solar energy using microwaves.

Now, you can think about manufacturing that kind of thing using robotics in space.

And so, human construction of these installations isn't necessary.

So, I think the interesting thing is that low Earth orbit now becomes more of a tourist destination potentially.

It's really hard to follow up after an astronaut.

Yeah, I agree with all of that.

I think there's a lot of things that the robots could be doing in space.

And I don't think we need humans in space to do a lot of things.

But I'm seeing space tourism expand rapidly.

And I think we're going to keep seeing that.

And I think we will see, you know, rotating space stations where we've got science experiments going on.

And I think we'll send people there because it's awesome.

And I feel like that's the motivation for a lot of people.

They get into this because space is awesome and they want to go and they'll find a way to get there.

So when you say space tourism expanding, what do we mean by space tourism?

Because at the moment it seems to be you just go high quickly, look out of the window and then you come back.

And if you're William Shatner, you go, oh, it's not gone down very well with me at all.

I feel all sad.

Which is, you know, you spend a lot of money on that.

I mean, we've all had holidays like that, but that one's even shorter than normal, isn't it?

Yeah, so the suborbital launches, there is a bit of a debate about whether or not that should count as going to space.

I don't think that's a particularly interesting debate.

They have a really nice view and they really enjoy it.

They're getting what they want out of it.

But I think there's more tourists who are also paying to go up to the International Space Station or orbit the Earth, and they have way more money than I will ever have.

But they might be facilitating over time the drop in the cost of going to space.

So maybe, you know, right now the super extra ultra-rich can go, but maybe it'll be the super rich that are going in a decade.

And I don't know, maybe that's good that we're expanding the people who can get out.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed-from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.

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How difficult is it to make the next step?

I mean, for the radio listeners and the podcast listeners, we're sat below a giant moon, which is quite spectacular hanging from the roof of this room.

So, I suppose the natural next step is the moon.

How much more difficult is that?

Well, we've done it once already, to anybody who doubts that.

I promise you, we have done it once already.

And so, to do it again, it's not insurmountable.

In terms of technology, of course, we have the technology.

What we now have is political will from a number of different countries who've all signed up to the Artemis program to actually invest and go and do this in a sustainable way with a view of having a research facility at the south pole of the moon that hopefully at some point will be permanently occupied.

So that's the difference between this Artemis program and the Apollo program.

And why, Kelly?

What is the rationale?

How would you make the case for the moon?

I mean, there's loads of interesting scientific questions.

You know, we think the moon used to be a chunk of earth that got knocked off.

And so by studying the moon, we can learn more about the earth.

But there's a lot of experiments that we could be doing.

So if if we go to the South Pole, for example, we could be trying to extract some of the water ice that's in the craters there.

But what we want to do when we're there could be really complicated.

The moon is a very difficult environment.

It's a hard vacuum.

So, if you go outside, you're in a lot of trouble.

But there's all these little things about the moon that are different and complicated.

Like the regolith on the surface is very sharp.

And so, there's some concerns that if it gets back in the habitat and you breathe it in, it could scar your lungs and give you problems like that.

And if we decide that we want to, for example, learn how to grow plants on the moon because we want to prepare for going to Mars, the moon has some carbon, but it's very carbon-poor.

And we're carbon-based life forms that eat carbon-based life forms.

And I think the most concentrated sources of carbon on the moon are probably the bags of feces and vomit left behind by the Apollo astronauts.

And I think those are NASA heritage items.

They don't want you to plant potatoes in them.

So it's going to be a harsh environment to work on, but there's lots of cool questions we can ask while we're out there.

And how do you feel, Ellen?

Do you feel happier about the idea we're going to send you to to the moon now, that you don't have to plant your potatoes in other people's feces and sick?

Or do you feel let down?

You're not allowed to plant your potatoes in other people's feces.

Who's going to tell?

I'll take a grow bag.

Is that the worst idea of it?

You mentioned the South Pole.

Why is it the South Pole that's the target?

Well, Kelly, you mentioned there water ice.

Where you've got water, it makes habitation easier.

You can split that hydrogen and oxygen for your atmosphere.

You can have water to drink.

You can make rocket fuel for your future missions, for example.

And also minerals.

We have had some rovers now exploring that region, and we're looking for what kind of rare earth metals, for example, what minerals could be useful, helium-3 as a potential future source of energy for fusion, for example.

So these are the kind of things that we want to find out about the South Pole.

I feel like I want to keep asking you.

So we've got the low Earth orbit, and I share your view that I would love to go, even on one of the suborbital flights, I'd love to see the Earth from space.

What about the Moon though?

Because this becomes a whole different commitment, perhaps a different level of risk and so on.

So if I said to you, right, the first moon base is there at the South Pole, do a gig at the South Pole of the Moon.

They'll need entertainment.

I suppose they could probably get all the sports channels.

I mean, the satellites are right outside the door.

I mean, I just think everything about,

I'm sitting looking at Tim here and I'm thinking, Tim did this.

He went in the rocket.

What a ride.

You know, know isn't it a relaxing isn't it relaxing just like taking off from heathrow or is it a bit more it's a bit it's a bit more exciting

it's relaxing once you get there actually it's the ride back home that's that's the worst that's where the spacecraft kind of blows itself into three bits and it gets a little bit warm outside the g-forces are higher and stronger and then the parachute's open and that's quite uncomfortable for half a minute or so so coming back to earth is still you know it's a bit of a roller coaster I've got to say, one of the best, because I was at my son's school and there was a special day.

I think it was

a Saturday you came back.

I can't remember, but it was anyway.

There was an open day and it was a lovely, sunny day.

And one of the things that most impressed me was how Chris Hadfield filled the airtime when what you're really saying is still coming back at the moment, roughly the same thing, still coming back.

He's going to be coming back for a while.

And he just managed to fill it with so many little details.

It was like watching the home shopping channel, but NASA-based.

So it seems you both share the view that it's likely that we'll be back on the moon with a presumably a permanent settlement.

Where would you estimate we would be?

10 years, 20 years?

I think it's really hard to estimate, so I'm wiggling out of that question a little bit.

So I think it has to do a lot with political will.

So for example, if getting back to the moon kicks off a really strong space race part two between the U.S.

and China, I can imagine us making sure we get there really fast and staying on a timeline.

I imagine we could be there pretty soon if we decided we really wanted to.

If you look at what's happening in the short term, Artemis II is scheduled to launch next year.

Four crew training on that, on the Orion spacecraft, on SLS rocket, to test out the orbits and the Orion.

And then at the moment, 2027 is Artemis III, which is boots back on the surface of the moon again.

Still, these are exploratory missions.

So Artemis II is an Apollo 8 style orbiting.

It's an Apollo 8 style in a different orbit, obviously, not equatorial, looking at a polar orbit.

But Artemis III is the moment when you know generations are going to be watching those images coming back from the surface of the moon in full colour, high definition.

It's going to be quite incredible.

And that will be a significant moment, I think, for so many of us who didn't get to watch that the first time around.

And then after that, the pace of the missions, I think, will depend, as Kelly says, on political will, on the Artemis program, on technology to an extent.

What will the Chinese be doing?

And what will commercial companies be doing?

If funding and political will starts to fall down, will somebody like Elon Musk just say, well, I didn't build Starship for the moon anyway.

I built Starship for Mars and I'm going to go there with or without NASA.

So that's what's going to be really interesting to see how that sort of shapes out over the next 10, 15 years.

You said the word settlement, which to me implies you're having families there and that you're having children who live there and go on to have children.

A base.

Oh, a base.

Okay, yeah.

I feel like settlements is way farther off.

We have learned a lot in our 50 years of having space stations orbiting the Earth, but we haven't really learned what we need to know to live on the moon or Mars.

So we're protected largely by the magnetosphere on the International Space Station.

So we don't have a great handle on how space radiation impacts cancer, and that kind of radiation is different than the kind of radiation we encounter here on Earth.

And we know that having no gravity and being in free fall is bad for things like bones and muscles and vision, but the moon has one-sixth of that gravity.

And maybe that makes most of those problems go away, away, especially if you're exercising and you have the right diet and you're taking some of the countermeasures that we know about from our time on the International Space Station.

But I think feeling confident enough to have babies in space would require a lot more data, and we haven't even had rodents go through the whole process of reproduction in space.

So I think we've got a lot of work to do before you actually.

I'm still waiting, really help me, for rodents to build rockets.

Yeah.

Turns out pandas make rockets, and it's only gravity that's been slowing them down in terms of having sex because they're not keen are they?

But imagine if we find out if you send pandas to the moon, you go, there's about a population, about 2,000 of them now, they won't stop doing it.

Wow, that'd be great.

Very cute.

I was sort of assuming, I suppose, that you're on the space station, we've got a lot of data about the way that the human body functions in low Earth orbit, long duration.

But the moon is a radically different environment, not only gravitationally, but in terms of radiation as well.

So does that imply that we really have to redo this whole program of research again with humans spending long months and even years on the moon?

Yes, to a degree.

We don't know what a low-gravity environment is like for the human body.

How much is helpful?

Is one sixth enough with a bit of exercise to really make it so much easier to live and work without those sort of negative effects of microgravity as we experience on the International Space Station.

Most of the proposals that I've seen for life on the moon or Mars involve burying ourselves under a couple meters of that horrible regolith that I was talking about as a radiation shield.

And when it comes to babies, we have had some rodents in space having sex.

We've had geckos and all kinds of animals up there.

But I think in general, we're sort of squeamish about questions related to this.

So there hasn't been a very strong, consistent program to try to get a good handle on reproduction in space.

So yes, I think when we get to the moon, there's a lot of stuff we'd need to start from the beginning.

Did we send them up to have sex?

Or did we just catch them at it?

When we opened the cage?

I mean it would be fun to be running that lab on the moon.

Alan, are there other experiments now that we're talking about these animal sex experiments?

What are you thinking in terms of the experiments you'd like to?

Well I just feel like you're going to need a really, really big, probably centrifugal.

I read a science fiction novel like this when it had a centrifugal

spaceship so it created its own gravity and that it was enormous and you can replicate the Earth's atmosphere inside it and then off you go in that cylinder for years.

And the people that initially, for the first 50 years, they die, get jettisoned, or eaten, or turned into fertilizer, and the next generation take the ship on.

And that's the only way you can get really far is by humans reproducing in a cylinder over thousands of years.

I guess that's not in the planning at the moment.

I suppose at the moment

it's some sort of clipped together flooring, laminate, probably.

Basic furnishings, I imagine.

Basic furnishings.

It's in a rudimentary environment.

Not unlike being a student in halls.

And what about psychologically as well?

Because we've been talking about the radiation section, but obviously we know it's an incredibly long journey to Mars.

You know, for you, how are long journeys generally?

You know, are you someone who you think, you know, I can handle that?

Well, you need to be like the guy in close encounters who goes with them at the end.

Like he's burnt all his bridges on Earth, hasn't he?

And his family's saying, yeah, go.

And if your family's saying, yeah, go, dad.

But at the moment, there are quite a lot of ties here on Earth.

So are you implying that essentially to be a successful astronaut, you have to be tremendously unpopular?

Well, to be the point of that.

That's what our selection criteria is all about.

This does bring us naturally, Kelly, to the next step.

Your book, City on Mars.

So Earth orbit, the Moon, relatively close to the Earth, you know, a few days' journey, and so on.

Mars, a completely different idea, but the one that is probably in everybody's consciousness at the moment, partly because of SpaceX and they're designing these spacecrafts.

So, could you describe how big a difference it is going to Mars from going, let's say, to the Moon?

Oh my gosh, such a big difference.

Yeah, so Musk is saying he's going to have a million people on the surface of Mars in the next 30 years.

To get there, it's a six-month journey with current propulsion techniques, and you can't just leave at any time.

So, Earth and Mars are traveling around the Sun, but they're not traveling together.

So you have to wait until they're sort of in the right positions where if you leave the Earth, you're going to shorten the distance it takes to get to Mars.

And that window only opens up every two years.

So it's six months to get there, then you're stuck there for over a year, and it's about six months to get back.

It's so far away that the minimum communication delay is three minutes, and there's a maximum of about 20 to 22 minutes.

So if you have a problem on Mars, you can't call and get live advice back home.

So you're much more on your own than you would be on the moon where communication is near live.

There's a little bit of a delay, but you can ignore it.

Mars is a really harsh environment.

It has 1% of the atmosphere we have here on Earth, which means you still need a spacesuit to walk around on the surface, and that's not really enough to protect you from radiation.

So again, you're probably going to be living underground.

There's some proposals for living in lava tubes or caves, which sounds like kind of epic, but I think I'd get depressed pretty quickly.

And then you also have to worry about that regolith and breathing it in.

But on Mars, it has this added difficulty where there's also perchlorates in there.

So these are endocrine disrupting chemicals that mess with the hormones your thyroid makes.

And your thyroid is making hormones that controls your temperature, your heart rate, and brain development in fetuses.

And we know that if you grow plants in dirt that has perchlorates, the plants will take that dirt up.

And so you could be eating it if you're trying to garden in it, for example.

There's ways to get it out, but just about everything that you would do on Mars would be a real pain in the rear end.

And I've talked to plenty of people who don't care.

They tell me that I can't stop them.

They're going there anyway.

I was never trying to stop them.

I don't know why they think I have any power there.

But they'll tell you, I would be happy to die on the surface of Mars, and I hope we get good data.

But it's a very harsh environment.

What do you think it is, Alan, about this desire to explore?

When I think in many ways, and I know we've talked about it before in the show, when we think about how much remains unexplored on this planet alone.

You know, that desire of going, I have to get to Mars.

Well, it's got a romantic image, hasn't it?

It's the red planet.

We've all seen it in the sky.

There's loads of films about it.

Martians have been here, apparently.

It's been on the radio.

So, but the practicalities are obviously, they're seemingly not insurmountable.

Then you see, I saw one little short film about how they would create, using hopefully the water that's on the planet, create an atmosphere on Mars.

And then they did an animation of Mars turning green as humans turned it into a habitable environment with the application of science.

It's very convincing.

Well, I'd say Mars sucks, but it sucks way less than just about anywhere else in space.

Like it's got water, it's got a lot of the building blocks you need for life.

It has a 24-ish-hour day-night cycle, so very much like what we have here.

And at the equator at the right time of year, it's almost room temperature.

So it's kind of Earth-like in a lot of ways, but it'll still be difficult.

I agree with that completely.

If we don't go there, we'll never go anywhere.

Yeah.

It's the only planet we can go, conceivably.

And there are plenty of places on Earth we can't go.

We live on small little bits of our own planet.

So the idea that you'd go to Mars and you could only live in a strip around the equator, that's okay.

Tim, the only plan at the moment is SpaceX's plan with Starship.

There are many different opinions on the timeline.

But from your perspective, what what would be a realistic timeline do you feel for the first landing on Mars?

Well NASA have uh looking at kind of late twenty thirties as is what they've publicly advertised as that kind of mission time frame that could be brought forward, driven by commercial companies who want to get there faster and do things more quickly.

But I wouldn't expect to see a mission to Mars this decade, but by the end of the 2030s, we really could see humans on the surface of Mars, even if just for a very short mission there and back.

So, would you be disappointed if we weren't there by the end of the 2030s?

I wouldn't be necessarily disappointed,

depending on what we're doing on the moon, moon, because I think that's quite exciting.

And if we've got the research laboratory, then Mars can wait.

You know, we'll get there in good time.

And is it inevitable, do you think, that once we've been there, then this idea of a city,

how do you see that unfolding?

I don't know that it's inevitable.

I think there's a good chance we get there and then we don't stay.

And I think one of the problems is that we don't have a really good economic case for a settlement on Mars.

Mars doesn't really have anything that would be worth worth going all the way out there to collect and then bring back to Earth.

And the proposals that I've seen involved things like, well, we can do a reality TV show, and that will fund the settlement.

But, you know, for the Apollo missions, everyone tuned in to Apollo 11.

By Apollo 12, people were paying less attention, and Apollo 13 had really low ratings until the oxygen canister burst.

And then people were tuning in again.

And so I don't know that people would want to watch a reality TV show on Mars unless you had really interesting characters.

And so, yeah, I don't know what the financial case is to sustain a a settlement.

I mean, it's hard to see, and we've still got a lot to learn.

I think there's a scientific case for Mars, definitely.

And I think those first missions, yes, and a small research module on Mars, I can see that happening.

And then it will be a case of, okay, is there a commercial case that follows on?

Or is there political will?

Is it going to be scientifically driven that will continue to have these missions sustained on Mars?

So, Alan, I should carry on this theme of asking you.

So, you said yes to a suborbital flight, yes to an orbital flight, yes to the space station, yes to the moon,

one-way trip to Mars.

Well, it would take a pretty serious pandemic on Earth to get me to the launch path.

You did say that, don't ask them.

But

do you understand it though?

Semi-sort of serious question.

I suppose it's often described as the settlers who went out and crossed oceans in our past without knowing where the destination was.

Are you that kind of person?

Because there are people who are that kind of person.

Obviously, there were in our history that got on a boat.

Forget the war.

What pushed a lot of people to go was terrible poverty where they were living.

It would be a desperate situation on Earth for a larger number of people to want to upsticks and move to an inhospitable planet, although they could make a very nice brochure about it.

Very convincing.

Humans are very susceptible to promotion and PR.

Look at the roomy room and the view of the, you know, don't mention the temperature or the chemicals or anything else.

But it's kind of depends how life is here.

Although I don't think it's an either-or, let's go and explore space and the planets and the moon and neglect our own planet.

We do need to think at the same time about how we can apply perhaps what we learn to improving our treatment of the planet.

Yeah, one thing that really struck me while I was researching this book is how great the Earth is.

And it's hard for me to imagine anything we could do to the Earth that would make it as bad as Mars.

Like, Mars is really rough.

And, you know, when you were, when, you know, people were escaping religious persecution and going to the United States, they were in New Jersey, which like a lot of people don't love, but New Jersey had like deer that you can eat and flowing water that you can drink.

And you don't step outside and immediately like die because the nitrogen boils out of your blood.

So Earth has like a lot of things going for it.

And I think it's hard for me to imagine escaping Earth and going to Mars.

I can imagine long-term planning where you set up a settlement on Mars.

That could be a plan B if, like, hundreds and thousands of years from now, something happens to Earth.

But I think for the foreseeable future, if something bad happens to Earth, the people living on Mars are toast as well, because they're going to need resupply from this amazing planet we have here.

There's a lot of questions we didn't get to because I couldn't read them because of the dark.

So, Alan, what do you think are some of the challenges of operating machinery on Mars?

I think,

that all the machinery is going to be operated by robots, right?

I think, you know, I mean, we're sending drones to deliver pizzas now, aren't we?

I think that's surely the plan.

And also, I mean, what about Alan?

Do you feel that the space law we've got now is good enough,

or do you think we need to change it?

Do you think it'd be a bit like the Wild West?

We're going to have to send a sheriff up there.

I do want to just pick that up because we focused on the technological difficulties.

How would you imagine the management or

these outposts of civilization?

How, in our wildest dreams, how do those things develop?

Yeah, so we're still trying to figure some of that stuff out.

So the 1967 Outer Space Treaty says that you can't claim sovereignty over anything in space.

So, you know, Elon Musk says in his Starlink Terms of Service that he's going to start a nation on Mars and that they're not going to have to answer to Earth-based law.

But according to international law, the people who go to space are still the responsibility of some nation.

And so if Musk does start a settlement, the way it's managed should be consistent with U.S.

law.

And so if you had a Chinese settlement, that would probably be consistent with Chinese law.

But it's going to be really hard to police what people are doing out there.

And because of that communication delay we were talking about, you need people who can make decisions right at that moment.

And I don't think we've had enough discussions right now to figure out what will punishment look like on Mars, because that's going to be a difficult problem.

That's what everybody says when I talk about punishment.

They're like, like, oh, you kick them out the airlock.

But, you know, presumably you'd like to have some other options for minor infractions.

But, you know, we need to figure out the system for that.

And we don't really know yet.

And so I think there's a lot of work that still needs to get done.

But it's fascinating.

Like, imagine being the people

figuring out the rules to govern the first settlements in space.

Like, what a cool time to be working in international law.

Yeah, remember

it's quite interesting on the space station.

If you commit a crime in the Japanese segment, you can be tried under Japanese law, float into the US segment and commit the same crime.

You can be tried under US law.

So it depends on which module you're in that has jurisdiction.

You think that they're going to steal someone's biscuits?

What's

the best place to do it?

But it does.

It opens up so many questions about all these legal frameworks that have been built up over so many years here on Earth, and Mars is a fresh planet.

At what point will the Mars colony break away and become independent?

And also, thank you, Kelly, because one of the complaints we often get from Radio 4 listeners is people who are really into S SM and feel that we don't inspire them enough.

And I think your just what will punishment look like on Mars is going to lead some really great role play this weekend for a few people in the Droit Witch area.

I'm glad I could help with that.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, those are my people.

What do you think punishment would look like on Mars?

I think people would be required to write 100 lines.

No one talks to you.

You get sent to Coventry.

There have been a bunch of...

So communes are a model for life in space that you hear a lot of the space settlement community talk about.

And in those communities, shunning is actually a main way that they get people to behave.

So they don't have prisons.

Maybe shunning will be how we punish people in space.

Or eating the raw potato, freshly picked out.

I'd hope to finish this in some kind of inspirational and educational way.

We seem to have finished this.

We always dub a bit later on where you go to explore space.

The wonder of touching starlight.

You know, we always have that thing at the end.

No, I know, but that's why I deliberately did the impression with you being factually inaccurate.

Apparently, it's affecting your sales.

But we asked the audience a question.

This is even better than the script, right?

Because the light is blue.

The pens you've used are blue.

The likelihood of us being able to read them out.

So here we go.

What did we ask them, Brian?

We asked, what would you take to occupy your time on a journey to Mars?

There's one here from someone called Kat who says, a truckload of Brzeco and a a karaoke machine.

I'm assuming the geeks will bring sensible stuff.

Cat, that is your answer to everything.

Noise canceled earphones in case there's a baby on board.

Brian Cox, so he can lull me to sleep with his treacle voice for the long journey, and so I can have sweet D-reams.

What you got there?

Chris Fuller says they take an IKEA self-assembly shelf system.

Very practical.

This is a better one, like teach yourself rocket maintenance.

Do you remember that?

I remember,

I think it's in Norman Mailer's book about the Apollo programme when they were asking Buzz Aldrin in particular, your last few minutes on the moon, if the engine had failed, how would you spend your last few moments?

And he said, fixing the engine.

Well, thank you very much to our fantastic panel, Tim Peak, Kelly Wooney Smith, and Alan Davis.

Next week, we will be asking how you can create the perfect athlete.

You're asking for a friend, right?

Yeah.

Do you think Robin would make a good astronaut?

I think he'd be a brilliant astronaut, yeah.

As long as you could kinda just go to your crew quarter, you know, where you go away from every perhaps five minutes every hour and just have a break.

No one could shun Robbie and he'd wake us up with a Brian Blessed voice every morning.

oh that would be great wouldn't it come on let's go look at earth see what they're doing down there every

month the fools i'll crush them every morning for eight months the same joke

good night

in the infinite monkey cage

again hi greg hi greg hi greg i'm greg furtz and my bbc radio 4 show Sliced Bread is back to investigate more of your suggested wonder products and find out if the latest fads really deliver on their bold claims.

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