Speaker 1: I want you to close your eyes for a second, seriously,
if you can, if you aren't driving a car or
you know, operating heavy machinery, just shut them.
Speaker 2: Always a good disclaimer.
Speaker 1: Right, so your eyes are closed, I want you to
visualize a window, but not the window in your office,
not your living room. You are standing in front of
a heavily reinforced, quadruple paned bay window.
Speaker 2: And the glass is probably freezing cold to the touch.
Speaker 1: Exactly freezing cold. And outside that window is just this profound,
infinite blackness. There are no stars yet, just a total void.
But right in the very center of that frame there
is a small, pale blue dot earth and it's glowing.
It looks incredibly fragile against all that dark, and as
you watch it, it just gets smaller and smaller, until
eventually it just blinks out. It completely vanishes into the dark.
Speaker 2: That is a wow. That is a terrifying thing to visualize.
Speaker 1: Right you turn around, you look at the heavy metal
of the airlock door behind you, and the realization hits you.
You are not going back.
Speaker 2: You're not for decades. That was just, you know, the
the opening chapter of a sci fi novel. It was fantasy,
but what we are looking at today is the very real,
very rapidly approaching timeline where that exact view becomes a
literal memory for actual human.
Speaker 1: Beings, which is just staggering. Yea, we are talking about
the reality of leaving Earth forever. Welcome to thrilling Threads.
I'm your guide on this journey into the absolute unknown.
Speaker 2: And I'm here to help untangle the massive, frankly intimidating
stack of data, the physics, the biology that makes a
journey like that even remotely possible.
Speaker 1: And today we are pulling on a thread that leads
directly to the Red Planet. We've been going through a
really fascinating stack of research and analysis recently provided by
the channel astrom, which also pulls in some incredible, really
ground level insights from Veritasium.
Speaker 2: It's a gold mine of a deep dive into the.
Speaker 1: Material, it really is. And I have to say right
up front, the mission today isn't just to talk about rockets.
I feel like rockets are the easy part, aren't they.
Speaker 2: Oh? Absolutely, relatively speaking, yes, we get so focused on
the launch right, the fire, the smoke, the countdown. It's cinematic, it's.
Speaker 1: The big show. Yeah, But the real challenge. The actual
nightmare scenario begins the literal second those engines cut off
and you're just drifting.
Speaker 2: We are unspooling the harsh reality of colonizing Mars, not
the glossy NASA Brisher version. We're gonna look at the
dust that actively wants to choke your machinery. We're looking
at the psychology of never ever seeing.
Speaker 1: A tree again or breathing outside air.
Speaker 2: Right. We're looking at the food that might actually poison
you if you aren't careful. And the robot dogs. Yes,
we have robot dogs on the agenda today that are
probably going to be your best friends out there.
Speaker 1: It requires a total shift in perspective. We're moving from
this idea of visiting a world like the Apollo missions
to living on a dead world, and that adjective is
crucial here.
Speaker 2: Mars is dead, and according to the sources we're pulling
from today, NASA is projecting booths on the ground by
the late twenty thirties.
Speaker 1: Which is sharkingly soon.
Speaker 2: It's tomorrow in aerospace years.
Speaker 1: It really is. And some of the scientists cited in
the Astrum analysis are pushing the timeline for permanent, actual
colonies to around twenty fifty twenty fifty. That means the
people listening to this right now, you listening to this
on your commute or at the gym, you could be
the ones standing in that bay window.
Speaker 2: It's not for your great grandchildren, it's for us.
Speaker 1: It's for us. But here is the twist, and this
is what really hooked me when we were doing the
reading for this. Mars is actively trying to kill you.
It has a fatal flaw regarding human survival that we
frankly just haven't fully solved yet.
Speaker 2: Well it's not just one flaw, really, it's a whole
cascade of flaws. Mars is like a puzzle where every
single piece is made of radiation, or freezing temperatures or
toxic dust.
Speaker 1: So let's start where any journey starts, the commute. You
pack your bags, you say you're tearful goodbyes to your family.
You strap into the ship. How long are we actually
stuck in the car, so to speak.
Speaker 2: Well, assuming the orbital mechanics are lined up perfectly.
Speaker 1: Which doesn't happen often right right, Earth.
Speaker 2: And Mars only a line optimally about every twenty six months.
But if you hit that window, you're looking at a
criz of about seven to nine months for a standard trajectory,
but under the most optimal high energy launch conditions, like
if we really push the propulsion tech we're developing, we
might get that transit time down to about three months.
Speaker 1: Three months, Okay, I mean that doesn't sound entirely terrible.
I've had college semesters that dragged on longer than that.
It's basically a long stint on a submarine or a
cruise ship. Yes, just a lot of download movies and
freeze right ice cream.
Speaker 2: It sounds totally manageable until you realize where you are
physically located during those three months. You are leaving the
safety of Earth's magnetic bubble.
Speaker 1: Right, the magnetosphere. I remember this from high school science.
It shields us.
Speaker 2: Exactly here on the surface and even up on the
iss to a large extent, we are shielded. Earth's magnetic
core generates this massive field that basically deflects the worst
of the Sun's anger. It bounces off, yeah, deflexs it
around the planet. But once you head out into the
deep black, what we call the interplanetary medium, you are
completely exposed, exposed.
Speaker 1: To what exactly like, what is actually hitting the shift.
Speaker 2: Two main things. First, you have solar wind, which is
a constant stream of charged particles coming off the Sun.
And then you have the big one, cosmic rays galactic
cosmic rays or GCRs.
Speaker 1: The invisible enemy.
Speaker 2: Precisely. These are high energy atomic fragments. We're talking protons,
helium nuclei, and they are moving at nearly the speed
of light. They don't just bounce off your ship's hull.
They tear right through the metal, and they tear right
through human tissue.
Speaker 1: Wow, and this isn't just you know, get a bad
sunburn levels of radiation, is it not?
Speaker 2: At all? Prolonged exposure during transit can cause astronauts to
develop cancer over the long term, obviously, but the research
points is something even more disturbing, something much more immediate.
What's that symptoms of Alzheimer's disease appearing before they even
land on Mars.
Speaker 1: Wait, seriously, so you could arrive on Mars, you're suiting up,
ready to step out and start this brave new world,
and your cognitive functions are already deteriorating.
Speaker 2: That is a very real risk highlighted in the data.
The research shows that when your brain is bombarded by
these high energy particles for months. It physically damages the
neural networks. It creates severe inflammation that mimics neurodegenerative diseases.
You might literally forget how to operate the landing sequence.
Speaker 1: That is okay, that's a hard deal breaker right there.
We obviously need a shield. So what are the engineers proposing.
I assume we can't just line the entire spaceship with lead.
Lead is insanely heavy.
Speaker 2: Lead is way too heavy to launch. Every single kilogram
costs an astronomical amount of fuel. But here is the
fascinating physics twist that Veritasian gets into. Lead isn't actually
the best shield for cosmic rays anyway, It isn't.
Speaker 1: I thought lead stopped everything Like Superman can't see through it.
They put a lead blanket on you at the dentist.
Speaker 2: For X rays, yes, lead is fantastic, But for galactic
cosmic rays, no. When a high speed cosmic ray hits
a heavy, dense atom like lead, it can actually shatter
the nucleus of the lead atom. Oh wow, yeah, and
that creates a spray of secondary radiation. It's exactly like
shooting a high caliber bullet at a brick wall.
Speaker 1: The wall breaks apart and you.
Speaker 2: Get hit by the shrapnel. On the other side, the
secondary radiation from the shattered lead can actually be worse
from the astronauts than the initial cosmic ray would have been.
Speaker 1: So what works better than lead? What doesn't shatter?
Speaker 2: Hydrogen?
Speaker 1: Hydrogen? Like the gas we're going to fill the walls.
Speaker 2: Of gas well, materials that are very rich in hydrogen.
Hydrogen atoms are tiny, they are the simplest atoms, so
they're great at absorbing that kinetic energy from the cosmic
ray without shattering and creating that secondary spray of shrapnel.
So the main concept the engineers are working on right
now is called the water wall a.
Speaker 1: Water wall, So wait, are we living inside a giant
fish bowl?
Speaker 2: In a practical sense kinda, The most elegant engineering solution
is to design the crew quarters, the place where you sleep,
where you eat, where you spend the vast majority of
your time, right in the very center of the ship.
And then you surround that central cabin with the ship's
water tanks.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, because water is h two zero two
carts hydrogen.
Speaker 2: It's packed with it, exactly. You absolutely have to bring
tons of water anyway for drinking for hygiene, for the
life support systems. So you just use it as your armor.
You sleep and work inside a shelter made of your
own drinking supply. It absorbs the cosmic rays beautifully.
Speaker 1: That is such a clever use of mass. You take
something you already need to survive and you turn it
into a shield.
Speaker 2: It's essential spacecraft design, double duty for every ounce. Now,
there is a sci fi dream out there of using
magnetic field generators to create an active invisible shield around.
Speaker 1: The ship, basically mimicking Earth's magnetic field exactly.
Speaker 2: But right now, the technology required to do that is
way too big and requires entirely too much power. So
for the near future, you're hiding behind a wall of water.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's say we survived the commute. We drank
from the walls. We didn't get Alzheimer's thanks to the
water tanks. We look out that window and we see
the red planet growing larger. We enter the atmosphere, we
touch down. My first instinct looking at the high res
photos from the rovers is that it feels weirdly familiar.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It just looks like Arizona or parts of the Mahabi Desert.
Speaker 2: It's what planetary scientists call the Uncanny Valley of planets.
It looks just enough like Earth environments to trick your
monkey brain into feeling safe, but it's wrong in all
the critical lefal ways.
Speaker 1: Let's look at the stats on that. The day length,
for example, that seems pretty close to home.
Speaker 2: It is remarkably close. A single day on Mars, which
they call us All is twenty four hours, thirty nine
minutes and thirty five seconds.
Speaker 1: Which is shockingly close. It's almost exactly our day.
Speaker 2: It's almost perfect for human circadian rhythms. NASA actually ran
tests and found that people adapt to Martian time very quickly.
You wouldn't really suffer from permanent jet lag. You'd basically
just stay up an extra forty minutes every night, which.
Speaker 1: Let's be honest, I do that anywayscrolling on my phone
in bed. Right, we're already training for Mars, so the
day feels normal. What about the seasons? I know Mars
has an axis tilt.
Speaker 2: Also very similar. Earth is tilted at twenty three point
five degrees. Mars is tilted at twenty five degrees. This
means Mars actually has distinct seasons.
Speaker 1: It has a.
Speaker 2: Winter and a summer. The sun rises in the east
and sets in the west.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you land, you step out, and it's a
nice Martian summer day. What's the weather actually like? Could
I go out for a walk?
Speaker 2: This is exactly where the trap springs in the equatorial summer.
Right at noon, the temperature can actually get up to
twenty or even thirty five degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: Wait, thirty five celsius. That's like ninety five degrees fahrenheit.
That's a hot summer day in Texas. I could wear
shorts on Mars.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you didn't eat a full pressure suit
to keep your blood from literally boiling in the vacuum. Yes,
the temperature is balmy, but here is the massive catch.
The atmosphere is incredibly thin. It's less than one percent
of Earth's atmospheric volume.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's practically a vacuum pretty much.
Speaker 2: And because it's so thin, it cannot hold heat at all.
It's not like Earth, where the thick air acts like
a blanket and stays warm long after the sun goes down.
Speaker 1: So what happens when a cloud passes over, or when
the sun sets.
Speaker 2: Or honestly, just when you take a step into the
shade of a rock. The temperature just plummets instantly. As
soon as the sun dips below the horizon, the ambient
temperature drops to minus forty three degrees celsius. Good grief,
and right before dawn, the coldest part of the night,
it's minus eighty celsius.
Speaker 1: That is a massive violent swing. You'd be sweating at
noon and freeze solid in the afternoon.
Speaker 2: It gets weirder. The Astroum source describes this really bizarre
head versus feet phenomenon.
Speaker 1: Oh I love this detail in the deep dived material.
This really helps visualize how truly alien the physics of
that atmosphere are. Break this down for us.
Speaker 2: So, because the air is so whisper thin, it doesn't
circulate heat well at all. The heat you feel during
the day primarily comes from the dark ground, absorbing direct
sun light and radiating it back up just a few inches. Okay,
So if you are standing on the marsh in equator
right at high noon, your feet, which are touching that
warm soil, might be feeling a very pleasant twenty three
degrees celsius about seventy three fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: Okay, comfortable feet, warm toes in.
Speaker 2: Your boots, but your head, which is say two meters
up in the air. The thin air up there hasn't
been worn by the ground radiation at all. Your head
could literally be in zero degree celsius freezing air.
Speaker 1: So your feet are vacationing in Miami and your head
is in a blizzard in Canada.
Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, you are straddling two completely different climate zones
just by standing up straight.
Speaker 1: That is wild. That really drives home how hostile this
environment is. Despite the visuals, it looks like a desert
on Earth, but the physics are completely inverted. And speaking
of alien landscapes, let's talk about the poles, because when
I think of Mars, my mind just goes straight to
endless red dust. But it actually has bright white polar caps.
Speaker 2: It does, and they are physically fascinating. The caps are
prime merely made of water ice, just like here on Earth,
but they are covered by these huge, heavy slabs of
frozen carbon dioxide dry ice.
Speaker 1: And the source mentioned these incredible shapes up there, the
spiral patterns.
Speaker 2: Yes, they are highly visible from orbit. Beautiful massive swirling
white spirals cut deeply into the ice. It's caused by
the Coriolis effect.
Speaker 1: The speed of the planet exactly.
Speaker 2: The rotation of Mars twists the extremely cold winds as
they move off the pole toward the equator. It carves
the ice over millennia. It looks almost like a spiral
galaxy printed directly onto the ice cap.
Speaker 1: Nature really is an artist, even on a dead world.
But this dry ice, it doesn't melt in the summer
right because the pressure is too low.
Speaker 2: Right. Mars is way too cold overall, and the atmospheric
pressure is far too low for liquid CO two to exist.
So when the harsh winter turns to spring in summer,
the dry ice does something called sublimation. Sublimates it transitions
directly from a solid block of ice to a gas.
It completely skips the liquid fit, no puddles, just poof
straight to gas.
Speaker 1: Like dropping dry ice in a punch bowl at a
Halloween party or a smoke.
Speaker 2: Machine in a concert exactly, but imagine a planetary scale
smoke machine millions of tons of dry ice. This massive
rapid release of gas creates localized high speed winds, and
this bizarre physics quark leads us directly to the phenomenon
known as the white spiders.
Speaker 1: White spiders, I have to say that sounds like the
title of a sci fi horror movie.
Speaker 2: It looks exactly like one two if you see the
orbital photos. In the spring, the sunlight hits the ice cap,
but the ice is somewhat translucent. The light penetrates down
through the heavy slab of dry ice and hits the
dark Martian soil underneath.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the dirt gets worn.
Speaker 2: The dirt worms up, which means the CO two ice
resting directly on that dirt starts to turn to gas
from the bottom up.
Speaker 1: Oh, so the gas is trapped underneath the heavy ice.
Speaker 2: Last exactly, it's completely sealed in. The pressure builds and
builds under the ice until finally crack, the ice physically ruptures.
High pressure CO two gas shoots out of the craw
like a geyser.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And as it blasts out, it carries that dark, fine
Martian dust from the bottom up with it. It sprays
this dark red and black dust all over the pristine
white ice in these sprawling, creepy spider shaped patterns.
Speaker 1: So the ground is literally exploding from the inside.
Speaker 2: Out constantly all spring long. And all this erupting gas
creates massive wind currents, and the wind well the wind
brings the dust.
Speaker 1: The fatal flaw. Let's talk about the dust, because here
on Earth, dust is just you know, it's an annoyance.
It's something I have to wipe off my bookshelf every
couple weeks. Yeah, But on Mars, reading through this research,
the dust sounds like an apex predator.
Speaker 2: It absolutely is. Dust is the central dominating engine of
all Martian weather. On Earth, our entire weather system is
driven by water, right rain, ocean evaporation, clouds. On Mars,
the weather is exclusively driven by dust.
Speaker 1: So how does so much dust get up into the
air in the first place. Is it just incredibly windy
all the time?
Speaker 2: It's actually a lot more complex than just wind blowing
over dirt. First, you have dust devils. Mars experiences thousands
of them every single year. They spiral up, sweeping across
the plains, and they can reach eight point five kilometers
into the sky.
Speaker 1: Holl In eight point five kilometers, that's roughly the height
of Mount Everest. A tornado of dust as tall as Everest. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, they aren't violent like Earth tornadoes. There are these thin, wisty,
towering structures of dust just meandering across a desert. Because
the gravity on Mars is so much lower, it's only
about thirty eight percent of Earth's gravity. These columns can
grow absolutely massive without collapsing.
Speaker 1: That would be a terrifying thing to see out your window.
Speaker 2: And they pump tons of fine dust into the upper
atmosphere constantly. But the main mechanism, the really insidious one
that lifts the bulk of the dust is a process
called saltation.
Speaker 1: Saltation. The Veritasium source used a really great analogy for this,
the packing peanuts.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is crucial to understanding why the dust is
such an unsolvable nightmare. Imagine the really really fine dust
covering Mars. You'd think it blows away easily in a
breeze because it's so incredibly.
Speaker 1: Light, right, like blowing flower off a kitchen counter.
Speaker 2: Right, But because those particles are so microscopic and the
Martian atmosphere is so unbelievably dry, they become highly electrostatic.
They hold a static charge, they clump together tightly, they
physically stick to the bedrock and to each other. Okay,
it's exactly like trying to blow away a pile of
static charge styrofoam packing peanuts. Have you ever tried to
sweep those up.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's impossible. They just cling to the broom, they
jump onto your hands, they stick to the floor exactly.
Speaker 2: The wind alone can't move that fine dust directly, it's
too sticky. But the wind can move the slightly larger,
heavier grains of sand. The sand is too heavy to
hold that static charge, So the wind picks up a
grain of sand, carries it a short distance in the
low gravity, and then drops it back down. Smash.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, it looks like a kindy hammer.
Speaker 2: Exactly like a hammer. The sand grain crashes down into
the static clumps of fine dust. The physical impact of
that heavier sand grain violently breaks the static bond holding
the clump together, and it kicks the fine microscopic dust
high into the air.
Speaker 1: And because the gravity is so low, it just stays
up there.
Speaker 2: It hangs around in the upper atmosphere for weeks, sometimes months.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we have all this extremely fine dust floating around.
Why exactly is this the big fatal flaw? It sounds
incredibly annoying, like having a permanently dirty windshield, But why
is it deadly to a colony?
Speaker 2: Because of the thermodynamic feedback loop, This is the really
scary part of Martian weather. Dust floating high in the
atmosphere absorbs incoming sunlight. It acts like a giant floating radiator.
It actively warms up the thin air immediately around it, and.
Speaker 1: Basic physics, warm air.
Speaker 2: Rises, warm air rises. As that pocket of warm air
goes up, it creates a localized low pressure zone underneath it.
On the surface, that low pressure physically sucks in more
cold air from the surrounding areas to.
Speaker 1: Replace it, which creates more wind.
Speaker 2: Which creates it's more wind. More wind drives more sand, grains,
more saltation. More saltation kicks up even more fine dust,
which then absorbs even more solar heat, which creates even
more winds.
Speaker 1: So the runaway engine. It feeds itself.
Speaker 2: It absolutely feeds itself, and roughly every three Martian years,
which is about five and a half Earth years, this
localized feedback loop goes completely global. It doesn't just cover
a city or a single crater region. The storm grows
and connects with other storms until it swallows the entire planet.
Speaker 1: The whole world goes dark.
Speaker 2: Total absolute blackout. To put it in perspective on Earth,
when we have a really bad wildfire, season, you know
when the sky turns that apocalyptic orange color and it's
hard to breathe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've all seen those photos from California or Australia.
Speaker 2: During those events, the aerosol optical depth or AOD, which
is how we measure atmospheric opacity, is maybe a four
or a five. In these Martian global dust storms, the
AOD regularly hits nine, ten or even eleven.
Speaker 1: Good lord. So if I'm a colonist city in my
habitat and I look at my reinforced bay window at noon,
I don't see the sun. I don't see the horizon
or the rover parked outside. I just see a solid
wall of dark, swirling red brown.
Speaker 2: You see nothing, Yep. It is effectively pitch black for
how long weeks sometimes months at a time, the sun
has just gone from the sky. And this is exactly
where the fatal flaw hits our technology, right where it hurts.
Because if you are an early colony and you are
relying heavily on solar panels for your power grid, you're dead.
You are in catastrophic trouble, which brings us to a
really sad section of the research, the robot graveyard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this part of the deep dive material was rough.
We actually have real world case studies of our robots
fighting these exact global storms and losing.
Speaker 2: We do. They are the pioneers that found the edge
of what's possible.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about opportunity. OPPI, the little rover that could.
I think practically everyone on Earth got somewhat emotionally attached
to that specific robot.
Speaker 2: It's really hard not to anthropomorphize it. OPI was originally
designed for a ninety day mission. Ninety days. It lasted
fifteen years. Credible engineering, unbelievable, but it lived entirely by
the Sun. It had solar wings, and eventually the Sun
was permanently taken away.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and seven, Oppy got hit by a
massive global storm. Right it survived that one.
Speaker 2: Yes, it did, and the data from that storm is wild.
To give you a sense of the scale. On a healthy,
clear sunny day on Mars, Oppy solar panels easily generated
about seven hundred watt hours of energy.
Speaker 1: Okay, seven hundred, that's our baseline.
Speaker 2: During the absolute peak of that two thousand and seven
global storm, the sky got so dark that the daily
generation dropped to one hundred and twenty eight watt hours.
Speaker 1: That is a massive, terrifying drop, almost down to a
sixth of normal power. What's the deathline for a rover
like that? How much power did it absolutely need just
to keep the lights on and stay alive?
Speaker 2: The absolute danger zone, the red line is anything under
one hundred and fifty one.
Speaker 1: So it was starving. It was actively dying.
Speaker 2: It was starving to death. And you have to understand
the problem isn't just that the rover stops driving around
taking pictures. The rover has vital systems called survival.
Speaker 1: Heaters because it gets to minus eighty at night.
Speaker 2: Exactly, Mars drops down to minus seventy five or minus
ninety degrees celsius in the dark. If the battery completely drains,
the survival heaters shut down. If the heaters die, the
delicate internal electronics freeze solid. The metal solder joints physically snap,
the computer chips crack from the thermal contraction. The rover
literally freezes to death from the inside out.
Speaker 1: Wow, So how on earth did APPI survive that two
thousand and seven storm. If it was consistently pulling under
the survival.
Speaker 2: Limit, it went into an induced coma. The NASA engineers
back at JPL shut down absolutely everything. No driving, no
robotic arm movement, no science instruments, and critically no communication
with Earth. It just slept in the dark and hoarded
every single precious wat of energy exclusively for those internal
heaters and a work.
Speaker 1: The storm cleared, the sun came out, and it woke
back up.
Speaker 2: It was a miracle of thermal management. But then twenty
eighteen happened, the big one. The twenty eighteen storm was
an absolute monster. The aerosol optical depth was so incredibly
high the sky was effectively pitch black at high noon.
Oppi's automated systems threw it into hibernation mode immediately, but
the storm just kept raging. It lasted way too long.
The ultrafine static dust completely coated the solar panels, the
batteries slowly drained to zero. The survival heaters eventually failed, and.
Speaker 1: When the sky's finally cleared months later.
Speaker 2: NASA sent the wake up signal. They sent it over
and over again. They beamed over a thousand commands to
that spot on Mars, just hoping to hear a pingback.
Speaker 1: And just silence, absolute silence, and it never woke up.
That actually makes me weirdly emotional. I know it's just
a box of wires and aluminum, but it feels like
reading about an old school explorer dying of exposure in
a blizzard.
Speaker 2: It is exactly that. It's a tragedy of exploration, but
more importantly for us, it's a glaring warning sign. If
human beings go there and we set up a habitat
relying on acres of solar panels for our life support,
our oxygen scrubbers are heat, and a global storm hits
for three continuous months, you.
Speaker 1: Just run out of power, the scrubbers stopped pulling CO
two out of your air, the habitat loses heat, You
freeze in the dark.
Speaker 2: Exactly. This is why the sources strongly argue that banking
on solar power on Mars is a highly dangerous, potentially
fatal gamble. You absolutely cannot rely on it as a
critical baseline. You have to have nuclear power.
Speaker 1: We'll definitely dig into the nuclear solutions in a bit
because that's fascinating, But before we get there, let's look
at the other major robot death mentioned to the Deep Dive,
because it highlights a totally different problem with the Martian
terrain itself.
Speaker 2: Spirit right, Spirit was Appi's twin, and Spirit didn't die
from the darkness of a storm. Spirit died because it.
Speaker 1: Fell into a trap, a trap like a sinkhole sort of.
Speaker 2: Spirit got irrevocably stuck. And this completely exposes the major
limitation of what engineers call the wheel paradigm.
Speaker 1: The wheel paradigm meaning we just assume everything should have wheels.
Speaker 2: Right. We use wheels on all our rovers because they
are mechanically simple and very efficient on flat, hard surfaces,
but wheels struggle massively in soft, unpredictable soil. Spirit was
driving through an area they named Troy, and from the cameras,
the surface looked like completely normal, hard packed Martian dirt,
but it was no lurking right under a very thin,
deceptive crust, there was a deep deposit of a mineral
called jerosite gerosite. It's an iron sulfate mineral, and physically
it's incredibly slippery and powdery. The Astrum source specifically called
it a sand trap. Spirit drove right onto it. Its
heavy wheels broke right through that thin top crust and
they just started spinning. It completely lost traction. It was
like trying to drive a golf cart into a deep
pit of loose talcum powder.
Speaker 1: Oh no, And the more it spawned, the jeeper dug.
Speaker 2: Itself in right exactly, it bottomed out.
Speaker 1: But wait, why was being stuck fatal? Couldn't it just
accept its fate, sit there and become a stationary science platform,
a weather station.
Speaker 2: It tried to do exactly that. It did stationary science
for a while. But remember the axial tilt. Remember the seasons.
Speaker 1: Winter was coming, Winter was fast approaching.
Speaker 2: As winter sets in the sun drops much lower on
the horizon. To survive the winter on solar power, a
rover has to physically drive onto a north facing slope
and tilt its body, tilt its solar panels directly toward
that low winter sun to catch enough rays.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, I never thought about that. It couldn't physically
angle its space to the sun because its wheels were buried.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it was stuck flat on its belly. As the
winter progressed, the sun got lower and lower in the sky,
the angle of the light became too shallow. The power
generation plummeted, and eventually it hit a low power fault.
Without power for the heaters, spirit froze to death in
the sand trap in twenty ten.
Speaker 1: That is brutal. So wheels are a massive liability. If
you hits off sand, you're dead. If you can't move
to angle your panel, you freeze ye. This brings us
perfectly to the next generation of explorers. If we're gonna survive,
we are actively trying to escape the wheel.
Speaker 2: We have to. If the terrain itself is the primary enemy,
you need to completely change how you move across it.
You need to stop rolling and start walking or even
better flying.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the flying first. The helicopter Ingenuity. I
absolutely love this little machine. It looked like a hobby
drone you'd buy at them all, but it's actively swing
in an atmosphere that is, as we establish, basically a vacuum.
Speaker 2: The engineering behind Ingenuity is just mind bending. To generate
enough lift to fly in a one percent atmosphere, you
need incredibly lightweight materials. It uses these oversized, super rigid
carbon fiber blades and they have to spin unbelievably fast,
way faster than an Earth helicopter.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just a tiny proof of concept hop right.
The actual operational stats are incredibly impressive.
Speaker 2: Very impressive. It ended up doing seventy two distinct flight
It covered a total distance of seventeen kilometers across the surface.
It undeniably proved that aerial scouting on Mars is not
just possible, it's practical, which is.
Speaker 1: Huge because if you have a drone scouting ahead of
your rover, you can easily spot and just fly right
over the hidden jersyites sandtraps that killed.
Speaker 2: To Spirit exactly. You map the safe routes from the.
Speaker 1: Air, But obviously you can't haul cargo or build a
colony habitat with a tiny, fragile drone. You need heavy
lifters on the ground that don't get horribly stuck in
the sand.
Speaker 2: Enter the robodogs, yes, dogs. This is a really exciting
collaboration happening right now between Boston Dynamics and JPL, the
Jet Propulsional Laboratory.
Speaker 1: I think we've all seen the viral videos of Spot right,
the yellow robot dog doing parkour, dancing to music, opening
doors and labs here on Earth. But we're actually putting
Spot on Mars.
Speaker 2: We are. The initiative is called Project Braille, and the
functional advantage of legs over wheels in this kind of
terrain is just massive. Think about speed. A heavy wheeled rover,
like Curiosity or Perseverance, has to move incredibly cautiously. They
top out at about zero point two kilometers.
Speaker 1: Per hour glacial right.
Speaker 2: They have to carefully analyze every single pebble before rolling
over it. Spot, on the other hand, can hustle at
five point eight kilometers per hour.
Speaker 1: That's a brisk human walk, that's jogging pace.
Speaker 2: It's fast and terrain wise. It can step right over
large rocks that would stop a rover cold. It can
easily climb steep unstable gravel slopes and critically specifically addressing
the spirit rover scenario, if Spot loses its footing, if
it falls down a slope or slips in soft dust,
you can just scan back up it self rights automatically.
A heavy wheeled rover flips onto its back like a turtle.
It's a multi billion dollar piece of junk. It's dead.
A robot dog just rolls over, plants its feet and
stands up.
Speaker 1: That resilience is incredible, and there's a heavy artificial intelligence
component here too, right because as we discussed earlier, you
absolutely cannot fly or drive the things with a joystick
from Houston.
Speaker 2: No, the light lag makes remote control impossible. This is
a huge factor in the mission design, depending on where
the planets are in their orbits. The communication signal lag
between Earth and Mars is anywhere from three to twenty
two minutes one way, right.
Speaker 1: Because radio waves are limited by the speed of light exactly.
Speaker 2: So if Spot is trotting along and suddenly comes right
up to the edge of a deep crater cliff, by
the time the cameras transmit that image to Earth and
you scream and hit the brake button, and that signal
travels all the way back to Mars, Spot.
Speaker 1: Has already been falling down the cliff for twenty minutes exactly.
Speaker 2: They have to be able to see the cliff and
stop themselves instantly.
Speaker 1: They have to think, so they use AI.
Speaker 2: They are outfitting them with a specialized AI called Nebula,
and the proposed mission profile for this is straight out
of science fiction. They want to send a coordinated pack
of these robot dogs deep into uncharted Martian caves.
Speaker 1: The lava tube.
Speaker 2: The lava tubes these massive ancient underground tunnels. The pack
swarms into pitch dark. They die, namically communicate with each
other to form a network. They map the intricate tunnels
using light ar and they use their AI to decide
entirely on their own which rocks and mineral formations are
scientifically interesting enough to sample.
Speaker 1: That is, I mean, that is both absolutely terrifying and
deeply amazing. A pack of autonomous thinking robot dogs hunting
for science in a pitch black lava tube on another planet.
Speaker 2: It's the bleeding edge of the future of exploration robots
that don't just blindly follow a pre program script, but
actively investigate their environment.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's fast forward. The robots have scattered the caves,
the area is secure. The human crew arrives. We set
up the water wall habitat. We're safe from the radiation.
Now I'm hungry. It's been a long trip. We need
to eat. And I've seen the Matt Damon movie The Martian.
I know exactly how we solve this. We plant potatoes
and the Martian dirt using well, using our own human waste.
Right easy.
Speaker 2: It makes for a really great dramatic story, but the
actual ole biochemistry of Martian farming is much much more complicated.
The good news upfront is that Martian soil, which scientists
call regolith, actually does contain usable nutrients.
Speaker 1: Oh it does.
Speaker 2: Yes, we've verified this. Scientists have run actual experiments here
on Earth using chemically perfectly simulated Martian regolith and they
successfully grew tomatoes, spinach, and rye.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we can have a nice fresh salad on Mars.
That sounds great, But there's.
Speaker 2: A massive catch. Two catches. Actually. First, there is absolutely
zero organic matter in that soil. It is completely sterile,
crushed volcanic rock. There are no earthworms to erate it,
no natural microbes or fungi to break things down. It's
dead dirt. But the really truly big problem is the
poison poison. The dirt is poisonous, highly poisonous. It is
saturated with a chemical compound called calcium.
Speaker 1: Perchlorate johnsum perchlorate. That sounds like an industrial cleaner.
Speaker 2: I shouldn't drink You definitely shouldn't, and you shouldn't eat
it either. The regolith is absolutely full of it. It's
a toxic salt. Biologically, if a human ingests it, it
severely interferes with the thyroid gland.
Speaker 1: Wait, so if I plant a potato directly in that
untreated Martian dirt.
Speaker 2: The potato plant's root system eagerly absorbs that perchlorate right
along with the water and nutrients. The chemical gets stored
in the potato itself. You eat the potato, you eat
a heavy dose of poison over a short period of time.
It completely shuts down your thyroid function, wreaks havoc on
your metabolism, and can easily be fatal.
Speaker 1: So the very ground we are walking on is actively
trying to kill us from the inside out. Is there
a realistic fix for this or do we have to
literally bring thousands of tons of potting soil from Earth
on starships?
Speaker 2: Bringing heavy dirt is financially and logistically impossible. Fortunately, chemistry
gives us a relatively simple solution. Perchlorates are highly water soluble.
You can literally just wash the dirt.
Speaker 1: Like, run it through a colander, just rinse it.
Speaker 2: You put it in a processing vat and rinse it
thoroughly with liquid water. The toxic salt dissolves out of
the dirt and into the water. You drain the water
and you're left with clean save regolith ready for seeds.
Speaker 1: Okay, that sounds mechanically simple, but then you're left with
thousands of gallons of horribly poisoned water. And water is
your most precious resource.
Speaker 2: True, you can't just dump the water, but there is
an even better, almost miraculous biological fix being developed. We
have discovered specific strains of bacteria here on Earth that
literally eat perchlorates.
Speaker 1: They eat the toxic poison as food.
Speaker 2: They consume the perchlorate compounds for energy, and get this,
the metabolic byproduct the excrete is pure oxygen.
Speaker 1: Are you kidding me? That's an unbelievable two for one deal.
They clean the poisonous soil and generate breathable air at
the exact same time, exactly.
Speaker 2: It's perfect biological engineering. So safe farming is definitely possible,
but it requires a massive, heavy industrial processing setup before
you can safely plant a single seed.
Speaker 1: Right, You're not just throwing seeds in the yard, not
at all.
Speaker 2: And regarding the whole fertilizer issue from the movie, yes,
hum waste absolutely works as a nutrient base, but you
have to heavily treat it in a bioreactor to kill
the human pathogens first. You really really don't want to
accidentally start a rampant cholera outbreak in a sealed colony
on Mars.
Speaker 1: That would be a very dark end to the mission now.
The Astrum Deep Dive mentioned a really interesting point about
the psychology of food in these extreme environments, because food
isn't just raw caloric input, is it, No, not for humans.
Speaker 2: Think about the sensory reality of the environment you are
living in. You are trapped in a world made entirely
of aggressively red dust, gray metal bulkheads, and humming artificial
lights for years. The sensory deprivation and monotony is going
to be incredibly intense.
Speaker 1: Everything is totally sterile and dead.
Speaker 2: Precisely so, imagine, after months of eating gray foil packet
nutrient paste, you finally get to bite into a fresh
hydroponically grown tomato or a blueberry. Just the physical sensation
of it exactly, the sudden pop of the skin, the crunch,
the complex texture, the intense smell, well, the vibrant non
red color. It obviously provides essential physical antioxidant's sure, but
the profound psychological morale boost of eating something genuinely alive
and fresh is almost unquantifiable.
Speaker 1: A single blueberry could literally save an astronaut's sanity.
Speaker 2: It really could. It physically and emotionally connects you back
to Earth in a very visceral grounding way.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we have safe food, now we need a
house to eat it in. We talked briefly about hiding
in lava tubes, but if we aren't living like cavemen,
how do we actually build structures on this with us?
As we said, we can't ship heavy bags of Portland
cement from a home depot in orbit.
Speaker 2: No, even with massive next generation rockets like Starship dropping
the launch prices, the cost per kilogram to get anything
out of Earth's gravity well is huge. Shipping heavy building
materials like concrete or steel beams is completely insane. We
have to master something called.
Speaker 1: Isru isru in city resource utilization, right.
Speaker 2: Which is just very fancy aerospace jargon for living off
the land.
Speaker 1: It is the ultimate extreme camping trick exactly.
Speaker 2: So the premier plan right now revolves around autonomous three
D printing of habitats. Fleet of heavy duty autonomous construction robots,
maybe much bigger, heavily modified cousins of those Boston Dynamics
dogs we talked about, would arrive on Mars years before
the first human crew even launches.
Speaker 1: So the house is ready when you get there. How
do they print it?
Speaker 2: They autonomously excavate tons of local regolith, run it through
processors to sift it, mix it with water ice they
mind from the permafrost, or a special polymer binder they
brought with them, and they slowly extrude it. They essentially
three D print thick concrete like layers to build the
walls of the habitat.
Speaker 1: So the house is quite literally built out of Mars itself.
Speaker 2: Yes, but remember the intense cosmic and solar radiation. The
printed walls alone, unless they are incredibly thick, might not
be enough to safely shield the crew over a multi
year stay.
Speaker 1: So what's the shield more water walls?
Speaker 2: Actually a simpler brute force approach. The plan is to
use bulldozers to simply pile massive amounts of loose dirt
raw regolith directly on top of the three D printed habitat.
Speaker 1: Just bury the houses under a huge pile of dirt.
Speaker 2: Just bury them. We're tyking several meters of pack dirt
over the roof. That mass of soil will physically block
the radiation just as effectively as the entire atmosphere does
here on Earth.
Speaker 1: So visually, the first Martian colony is basically going to
look like a high tech village of hobbit.
Speaker 2: Holes, precisely a series of interconnected mounds, snug incredibly thermally
insulated against those minus ninety degree nights, and perfectly radiation shielded.
Speaker 1: Okay, I love the hot to hole aesthetic, but let's
talk about the most immediate need inside that hole breathing.
We need continuous oxygen, and we obviously can't bring enough
pressurized scuba tanks to last to lifetime.
Speaker 2: No, the mass penalty would be absurved. But we have
some brilliant technological options. There is a module called MOE.
It's a phenomenally successful experiment that is actually already sitting
right now on the surface of Mars physically attached to
the Perseverance rover.
Speaker 1: How does m OCX actually work.
Speaker 2: It's essentially a mechanical tree. It sucks in the ambient
Martian atmosphere, which remember, is ninety six percent unbreathable carbon dioxide,
and it runs that gas through a highly advanced solid
oxide electrolysis process.
Speaker 1: Electrolysis that takes a lot of.
Speaker 2: Energy, right it does. It basically heats the CO two
up to incredibly high temperatures and electrochemically violently strips the
oxygen atoms right off the carbon molecules. It breaths in
toxic CO two, and it actively exhales pure breathable oxygen gas.
Speaker 1: That is just incredible and it works perfectly.
Speaker 2: You just take that toaster sized prototype box on the rover,
you scale it up to the size of a small
industrial fastory room, and you have unlimited breathable air for
a colony.
Speaker 1: Wow. And what about water. We can't constantly be mining
and melting ice if we're near the equator.
Speaker 2: For water, we rely on extreme closed loop recycling. We
look to the International Space Station for this. On the
ISS right now, the environmental systems recycle over ninety percent
of all water on board. They recycle everything, everything, urine, workout, sweat,
the ambient humidity from breathing. It all gets captured, aggressively filtered,
chemically treated, and turned back into completely pure drinking water.
Speaker 1: What's the astronaut joke. Yesterday's coffee is tomorrow's coffee.
Speaker 2: That's the exact mantra. It sounds gross to us down here,
but the filtered water is technically purer than what comes
out of most earth taps.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we have air, we have water, we have
a dirt root.
Speaker 2: Let's go back to the power issue. You mentioned earlier
that solar power is the fatal flaw because of the
global dust storms. We can't have the lights and the
EMACOS system shut down when the storm hits.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not. You need a robust, totally weather independent hybrid system.
Solar arrays are great for cheap, easy energy when the
sun is actually out, but you absolutely must have a
nuclear baseline running underneath it. NASA is heavily investing in
a program called the Kill A Power Project. Kill A
Power That sounds delightfully intense.
Speaker 2: It's a brilliant piece of engineering. It's a very small,
incredibly compact nuclear fission reactor. The actual reactor core is
roughly the size of a household trash can. But that
tiny core provides continuous, totally reliable, uninterrupted electrical power for
ten years.
Speaker 1: Straight, regardless of the weather exactly.
Speaker 2: It doesn't care if the sun is out or if
there's a Category eleven dust storm raging for six months.
You desperately need that zero fail reliability for the habitat,
heaters and the air scrubbers.
Speaker 1: Okay, so logically, we have all the hard tech we
have the nuclear trash cans, the AI dogs, the perchlorate
eating bacteria farms, the three D printed hobbit holes. The
physics are largely solvable, but now we really have to
talk about the soft, highly unpredictable, squishy part of the mission,
the human, the humans, because this is the one variable
you absolutely cannot engineer away on a drafting board. The
crushing psychology of that level of isolation, it.
Speaker 2: Is unprecedented in human history.
Speaker 1: People always jump to make comparisons, right, they say, oh,
it's just like researchers wintering over an Antarctica or sailors
on a nuclear submarine for six months. Is it like that.
Speaker 2: It's superficially similar, but fundamentally different. In a research base
in Antarctica or deep underwater on a submarine, things get
incredibly tough. Yes, But you always know, deep down in
your subconscious that if you fall and badly shatter your leg,
or if someone has a severe psychod mental breakdown, a
vehicle can eventually come get you.
Speaker 1: A helicopter can fly in, or the sub can surface.
Speaker 2: Right. It might be heavily delayed by a storm, it
might take a week, but physical evacuation is structurally possible.
On Mars. You are there. There is absolutely zero rescue.
If something goes catastrophically wrong. You are fifty million miles
from the nearest hospital.
Speaker 1: That is heavy and the astrom source specifically highlighted a
psychological trigger called the Earth gazing phenomenon.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is fascinating and terrifying. Up on the International
Space Station right now, astronauts frequently spend hours in the
Kippola window just staring down at Earth. It's physically massive
in their view, it's bright blue, it's highly dynamic. They
can see swirling weather patterns. They can literally see the
glowing lights of their home cities at night.
Speaker 1: It still feels like home, it feels physically close.
Speaker 2: But on Mars. On Mars, Earth isn't a landscape. It's
just a star. It's just a slightly brighter, pale blue
dot in the evening sky. You can stand on the
dusty surface, hold up your arm and completely cover your
entire home planet, everyone you have ever loved, every single
human being who has ever lived in all of history.
You can cover all of it with the tip of
your thumb, just.
Speaker 1: Blotting it out completely. That level of absolute permanent detachment
from the human race. I honestly don't know if the
human brain is biologically wired to process that without breaking.
Speaker 2: We haven't been able to truly test it. We've done
isolation experiments in the desert, but the participants always know
they can just walk out the door. That profound psychological
break is a massive looming risk for the early colonies.
And then you add in the inevitable social friction.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, You are physically trapped in very small, claustrophobic spaces
with the exact same five or ten people every single day,
while facing constant lethal external danger. It is the ultimate
psychological pressure cooker.
Speaker 1: You need a crew of actual saints not to end
up at each other's throats. And beyond the mind, what
about the physical body. The Deep Dive mentioned the famous
Kelly twins study.
Speaker 2: Right, NASA sent astronauts Scott Kelly to spend almost a
full year on the Iss and zero gravity, while his
identical twin brother Mark Kelly stayed firmly down on Earth
as a control subject. When Scott came back, the physical
and genetic comparison was startling.
Speaker 1: Because space is just generally terrible for the human body.
Speaker 2: Microgravity is absolutely brutal. The lack of constant resistance leads
to rapid, severe muscle atrophy and bone density loss. You
have to work out violently for hours a day just
to walk when you.
Speaker 1: Get back, and Mars gravity is only thirty eight percent
of ours. So that's a constant problem exactly.
Speaker 2: But it's not just muscles without strong gravity pulling your
bodily fluids down towards your legs. Massive fluid shifts occur.
The fluid puls up in the head and upper.
Speaker 1: Torso, which causes what headaches.
Speaker 2: Headaches, sure, but more alarmingly, it puts immense physical pressure
on the back of the eyeballs. It severely flattens the
shape of the eye, causing permanent vision degradation. In many astronauts, you.
Speaker 1: Literally lose your eyesight because of the lack of gravity.
Speaker 2: And then we get to the really deep stuff. The
DNA changes, right.
Speaker 1: The study found his actual genes changed, yes, the.
Speaker 2: Length of his telomeres, the protective caps on the ends
of DNA strands physically changed. His active gene expression fundamentally
altered in response to the stress of the space environment,
which clearly shows that the human body actively tries to
evolve and adapt to fit the extreme environment it's.
Speaker 1: In, which naturally leads to an absolutely massive, almost uncomfortable
ethical question that the source material raised the concept of
deliberate genetic modification for astronauts.
Speaker 2: This is where we cross firmly from engineering into heavy
sci fi territory. But it's being seriously debated by bioethicists
right now. Should we preemptively edit the DNA of astronauts
before they go to.
Speaker 1: Make them better suited for Mars?
Speaker 2: Think about the logic. If we definitively know that galactic
cosmic radiation relentlessly destroys human DNA and causes cancer, should
we use crisper to heavily edit the astronauts to have
hyper advanced DNA repair mechanisms like splice them with tartar
grades exactly like tartar grades, or certain highly radiation resistant
bacteria like Dinococcus radiodurans. If the weak Martian gravity destroys
normal human bone density, should we artificially edit their genome
to produce impossibly dense, hyper strong bone structures.
Speaker 1: But man, that opens a terrifying Pandora's box of ethics.
Speaker 2: It absolutely does. The philosophical question becomes, are we sending
human beings to colonize Mars, or are we intentionally engineering
a brand new, divergent speed of Martians. If you fundamentally
change the core biology of a human to perfectly fit
an alien world, are they still technically human?
Speaker 1: That is such a heavy foundational question. It really makes
you wonder if we have to fundamentally re engineer our
own basic genetic code just to simply survive the environment.
Maybe the universe is trying to tell us we aren't
meant to be there in the first place.
Speaker 2: It's a very valid perspective. And yet, despite the perchlorate
poison in the soil, despite the massive Alzheimer's radiation risk
during transit, the freezing minus ninety nights, and the brutal, isolating,
one way ticket nature of those early missions, Literally thousands
of highly qualified people eagerly volunteer every time NASA opens
an application.
Speaker 1: Why do they do it? What is that specific drive?
Is that the ultimate fatal flaw of the human spirit
that we just can't sit still?
Speaker 2: Honestly, I don't think it's a flaw at all. I
think it's our defining feature as a species. It's the raw,
unquenchable drive to explore the burning need to see exactly
what it over the next hill, even if that specific
hill happens to be completely devoid of oxygen and located
fifty million miles away.
Speaker 1: It's the exact same crazy, irrational drive that made our
ancestors push off from a perfectly safe beach and cross massive,
violent oceans in tiny wooden ships. They didn't know what
was out there either, exactly.
Speaker 2: It's the stark difference between looking at the sky and
feeling like a safe, comfortable prisoner on a beautiful blue
rock and wanting to be a pioneer in the dark.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Wow, So let's wrap this deep dive up. We've
unspooled the whole threat. Today, living on Mars is physically possible.
The timeline is accelerating. We're looking at the twenty thirties
to the twenty fifties for real colonization. The crucial survival
tech is actively being built and tested right now in labs,
the spot dogs, the MXI oxygen factories, the three D
printed robotic construction crews.
Speaker 2: But the inherent risks remain absolutely catastrophic right.
Speaker 1: The relentless dust is just waiting to permanently kill your
power grid. The bitter cold is constantly waiting to crack
your batteries. The cosmic radiation is waiting to degrade your
brain before you even arrive.
Speaker 2: It is arguably the ultimate engineering and survival challenge in
human history. It requires perfectly solving energy production, complex biology,
and fragile human psychology all at the exact same time,
with zero margin for error.
Speaker 1: And honestly researching all of this it brings up a profound,
overwhelming new appreciation for Earth. Astra mentioned at the end
of their video that they're intentionally focusing more on Earth
based content lately, and after going through this, it makes
total sense.
Speaker 2: It does. When you spend hours looking at exactly how
relentlessly hard Mars is trying to instantly kill you, you
suddenly realize how incredibly hard Earth is effortlessly working to
keep you alive.
Speaker 1: The atmosphere of the magnetic field, the water cycle. Earth
is essentially the only five star luxury resort in the
entire Solar System. Every single other planet is just a
spectacularly creative death track.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 1: So here's the final provocative uestion for you, the person
listening right now. We've spent this time talking about the
toxic thyroid destroying salts, the terrifying global darkness of the
dust storms, the mind bending isolation of seeing Earth as
just a tiny dot. If a seat suddenly opened up tomorrow,
literally tomorrow morning, on a starship heading permanently for the
Red planet.
Speaker 2: A completely one way ticket, no return trip, no return, you.
Speaker 1: Are officially one of the primary founders of a brand
new branch of human civilization. Your name goes down in
history forever, but you will never ever feel a cool
ocean breeze on your face again. You will never smell
a pine forest after a rainstorm.
Speaker 2: You will get to see the sun rise over the
rim of Olympus Monds.
Speaker 1: You will see an entirely new world. So would you
take the seat? Are you the restless pioneer who eagerly
accepts that massive, terrifying risk for the sake of exploration,
or are you the grounded guardian who chooses to stay
behind to enjoy and aggressively protect the pale blue dot.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate defining go or stay decision.
Speaker 1: Really think about it and seriously let us know. Leave
a comment down below, send us a message on socials.
We genuinely want to know where you stand. On this because,
statically speaking, looking at the timelines and the human drive,
some of the people listening to this right now are
actually going to go.
Speaker 2: They are, and we'll definitely be watching from down here.
Speaker 1: That is it for this thread. Thank you for taking
this journey with us, Stay curious and keep looking up