PAUL:
Welcome to Brainwaves, a podcast about big ideas produced at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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This week we're talking about space: when will we ramp up missions to objects beyond Earth again, how far will they go, how will our bodies handle the harsh realities of
deep space, and how are we going to interact with other life out there if and when we find it?
To kick us off Jack Byrnes, he recently addressed the National Space Council, arguing that people should go back to the moon sooner rather than later. He's the director of the NASA funded network for exploration and space sciences and he's also a professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at CU-boulder. Professor burns welcome to Brainwaves
JACK:
Well thank you good to be here.
PAUL:
How soon do you think we could return people to the moon?
JACK:
I think we can meet that five year deadline that the vice-president set, when we talked at the national space council meeting a few weeks ago.
PAUL:
Why go back to the moon, we've been there why return people to the moon now?
JACK:
You know that's a that's a great question, NASA itself has been in kind of a malaise for well over a decade. We've done a lot of PowerPoint journey says I like to to say, PowerPoint journeys that
have gone nowhere, it's time for NASA to establish itself again as a space exploration, a spacefaring agency to lead not only the nation but the world in space exploration. We have today the technologies we have the interest from industry and we have international partnerships that all make going to the moon with a new agenda for science and exploration possible.
PAUL:
What would that agenda look like?
JACK:
Well it would look among other things, is mining resources on the moon, we've discovered over the last decade that there's water at the poles. In the case of water it's like the gold or the oil of space. Rather than bringing that from the earth, mining it from the moon we can turn that water break it up into hydrogen and oxygen turned into rocket fuel uses a course to grow plants oxygen to breathe, it's an enormously valuable resource and there are well over a dozen companies already that have been spawned to look at mining water from the moon. That's one of the reasons the other is scientific exploration to understand from the, particularly from the far side of the Moon, the origin of the earth by studying the bombardment history of the Moon and also to explore the low-frequency radio emissions coming from the very early universe.
PAUL:
How would this phase of lunar exploration be different from the Apollo era?
JACK:
We take advantage of 50 years of advanced technology, in particular it's the combination of humans and robots exploring together. I often hear well it's cheaper if we just use robots but we also know from talking to my lunar geologists friends that there's no substitute for the human mind, but what's powerful is the combination of the two so envisioning in the future that astronauts task Rovers as robotic explorers to do what we call teleoperation, that saves time, effort and also develops this new synergy taking advantage of the latest developments and artificial intelligence for example.
PAUL:
What do you imagine life would be like on the moon 20 years from now?
JACK:
Well hopefully 20 years from now we have a lively set of public-private partnerships and academic partnerships that is, it's maybe somewhat like the Antarctic station in which there is a whole series of scientists who in Antarctic winter over and this time with the moon, they spend a year or more doing geological research or setting up radio telescopes, that there are mining operations on the moon that involve partnerships with private companies as well as the international arena and if there's regular transportation back and forth to the moon it makes the moon affordable even for tourism.
PAUL:
So you see some some form of tourism on the moon within the next 20 years?
JACK:
Oh yes absolutely just like we are beginning to see for example with Virgin Galactic that they're going to be bringing the first space tourists regularly into just the edge of space, in a few years we'll be seeing people going more regularly into Earth orbit and then finally you can imagine joining scientists and astronauts on the moon.
PAUL:
Would you be first in line?
JACK:
Maybe so maybe so that would be a lot of fun.
PAUL:
Do you think we'll ever figure out interstellar travel, and if so what would that look like?
JACK:
Oh that's a tough one, I talk to my students about this all the time and although interstellar travel is very alluring because we've identified thousands, two, three, four thousand planets around other stars that are not too far away the distances are just enormous. So even traveling at 20% or 30% of the speed of light would take a long time to get to the nearest star systems, and even more importantly is the energy that's required is enormous it's a substantial fraction of the entire power generation of the United States per year.
PAUL:
So how long do you think it might take to move beyond the moon perhaps to asteroids or Mars?
JACK:
Yeah I think we're looking at probably the 30-year timetable. I think by the middle of the century we can be on Mars we can be on asteroids and again it's combination of companies and the international partnerships that will make us a global spacefaring civilization.
PAUL:
Professor Jack Byrnes thank you very much for joining us today on Brainwaves.
JACK:
You're welcome.
[Music]
PAUL:
Let's pretend you're about to land on Mars. You and a team are just about to enter the atmosphere after months of being in space, so you really need to be on top of your game. But we also know that your bones and muscles get weaker when there's no gravity. What do you do
how can we ensure that our future Mars astronauts are ready to go from day one, on an alien world? Brainwaves Dan Strain has a look at the people trying to figure out that one.
LOUIS:
My name is Louis Stodieck.
DAN:
Louis Stodieck might work in Boulder, Colorado, but he's always looking beyond that, way
Beyond.
LOUIS:
I am the director of Bioserve Space Technologies.
DAN:
That's a research center in CU Boulder’s College of Engineering. Over three plus decades bioserve has developed hundreds of biological experiments, and then shot them…
[Rocket Launching]
...into space. Stodieck helped to send some of the tiniest astronauts ever I'll be on Earth's atmosphere those include mice, spiders even a microscopic yeast cells.
LOUIS:
In our early years we did that on the space shuttle and now we do it on space station, so we take experiments at the space station on a regular basis.
DAN:
That space environment static says, not a forgiving place for the human body and that's ultimately what they're looking at with these experiments.
LOUIS:
One of the things that happens to astronauts, people that fly in space, is if they don't exercise and I mean exercise vigorously they will lose significant amounts of muscle and bone and they lose it very very rapidly.
DAN: That's just the beginning, astronauts also face high levels of radiation, their eyesight can deteriorate and so can their cardiac function and these problems will only become more concerning as humans travel farther into space, think about the first people who land on Mars.
LOUIS:
There is no quick return to medical help so they have to be completely self-sufficient, their crewmates will have to treat any injuries that occur or they'll have to treat their own.
DAN:
Which is where scientists at Bioserve come in they're working to develop treatments to some of the most common medical conditions that astronauts face, so that future space fares can be or self-sufficient.
[NOISE]
DAN:
Louis Zea is showing me some of that work now.
ZEA:
This is SABPL, stands for space automated bio product lab.
DAN:
Zea is a researcher at Bioserve, he's pointing to machine looks a bit like a high-tech toaster oven.
ZEA:
And then they just pull it open like you would an oven door and inside is where all the science lives.
DAN:
That science in this case means colonies of bacteria. Zea cultures them in SABPL to study how these organisms grow in space and how they form giant globs called biofilms.
ZEA:
And we have three of these tables on the International Space Station at this moment.
DAN:
He says bacteria in space don't behave like bacteria on earth.
Research Z is involved with shows microbes are more resistant to antibiotics in the absence of gravity. That poses a threat to astronauts health.
It's also not great for space equipment, Zia points to the case of a Russian cosmonaut who removed a console panel on the MIR space station.
ZEA: When he pulled the panel out he noticed that on the back there was a lot of biofilm forming, some of it was eating basically part of the plastic covers of wires.
DAN:
Gross... and also dangerous. That's why Zea and his colleagues are trying to come up with ways to combat biofilms in space. Studies show for example the biofilms don't grow well on some types of surfaces.
ZEA:
We need to make sure that the stuff, the materials that we use on future spacecraft are going to be made in a way that they can be resilient they can resist these biofilm formations.
DAN:
And Zea says such advancements might also help people on a completely different orbit through space, right here on earth. For brainwaves I'm Daniel Strain.
[NOISE]
PAUL:
And then there's the question of how we'll handle other life if and when we find it out there. Brainwaves executive producer Andrew Sorenson talked with Seth Shostak at CU-Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs recently. Shostak is the senior astronomer for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, better known as SETI and he's thought about that question of dealing with other life out there quite a bit.
ANDREW:
Let's for a second pretend that you know we figured out how to travel interstellar without any you know negative impacts on the human body, how do you think we would have to think about engaging with alien life? You know microbial or intelligent life when we get to someplace that's habitable.
SETH:
Well plenty of movies have been made about our engagement with extraterrestrial intelligence, the aliens usually come to earth and they start by flattening Los Angeles and I got to say is somebody lives in Northern California, if the aliens want to flatten
Los Angeles really I don't care that much but, but does that be intelligent life they're coming here and we always engage with them in a sort of an aggressive way. But the facts are that if you actually went out into space, the chances that you would find anybody are probably pretty low but if you did the chance that they are within centuries of your level of technical development are incredibly small, so they're either going to be very very far behind you, so you know they're they're plants I mean you know they're lizards or whatever, right or they're very much more advanced you know maybe 100 million years more advanced and to say well how are you
going to engage with those is like asking you know if you could bring back the trilobites--
how would they engage with humans? I don't know, they would probably end up on the dinner plate I mean I don't know but I don't think that that's a very realistic worry.
ANDREW:
What about that um the sort of colonial problem. You you end up with a exchange of microbes and things that you know could kill us, or other species do we need to think about that ethically? SETH:
Well I don't know if you, the first thing to think about it is if is if it's really a danger which I doubt because you know the microbes that attack you right the viruses all the bacteria and so forth that cause you to get sick that you know the pathogenic ones, they've all shared four billion years of evolution here on earth with you right, I mean not that Homosapiens is for ten years but we represent it you know we're in that long line of evolution and that means that they're very finely attuned to your biochemistry and your biology so they know how to make you sick. Right whereas the alien microbes probably wouldn't make you sicker they don't know anything about you there's that, but there is also this ethics Ida I don't worry terribly much about that but there is this ethical problem, for example if you give a very specific example suppose we go to Mars and we drill down you know 100 feet and it turns out well they're microbes living there they're Martians right and you know maybe over most of the planet if you dug a hole 100 feet or a thousand feet deep you would find microbes Martian microbes, would you say okay we're not going to colonize this planet we're not going to put settlements on Mars because Mars has inhabitants already it has the Martians now their microbial but they are Martians and would you say nope hands off or would you say you know okay we'll put a few of them in the museum but we're not going to stop our own development? And I don't think that the answer to that is so so obvious.
ANDREW:
Where would you land on that?
SETH:
I'm not sure, I think that I would say let's wolof can I use that verb, you know parts of Mars and say this is Nature Preserve you're not going to build any settlements here. But to deny the entire planet to human development seems to me to be the wrong decision, simply on the basis of what harm are you doing to humanity if you do that? So yeah, I know it's a problem that hasn't arisen so far put it that way.
[MUSIC]
ANDREW:
Thanks again to Jack Burns, the folks over at Bioserve and Seth Shostack for being on this episode of Brainwaves.
Join us next week when we look into the complicated issues dictating the future of Water in the West.
I'm your host this week Paul Beique, Dirk Martin and I produced this episode, Dirk also edited this show, Andrew Sorensen is our executive producer, Andres Pelton created our introduction. Thanks for listening.