Adam Frank
speaker
594 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Frank’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So it's not a, you know, trying to establish a base on Mars is going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self-sufficient for a couple of, you know, a century at least. So it's not like a backup plan now. You know, we have to solve the problem of climate change. We have to deal with that.
There's still enough nuclear weapons to really do, you know, horrific things to the planet for human beings. So I don't think it's like a backup plan in that way. But I do think, like I said, it's the prize. It's, you know, if we get through this, then we get the entire solar system to sort of play around in and experiment with and do really cool things with.
Yeah. I think my only dilemma with that is that I just think that a self-sufficient base is so far away that, like, say, you start doing that, and then there is a full-scale nuclear exchange.
That base is, you know, it's not going to last because it's just, you know, the self-sufficiency requires a kind of economy, like literally a material economy that we are so far from with Mars, that we are centuries from. Like I said, you know,
Three centuries, which is not that long, two to three centuries, you know, look at 1820, nobody had traveled faster than 60 miles an hour unless they were falling off a cliff, right? And now we routinely travel at 500 miles an hour, but it is sort of centuries long.
So that's why I think, I think we'd be better off trying to solve these problems than, you know, I just think the odds that we're going to be able to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars before that threat comes to head is small. So we'd have to deal with the threat.
Yeah, yeah. Because it's really what about, you know, thinking about complex systems, right? A space habitat, you know, would have to be as robust as an ecosystem, as the kind of thing, you know, you go out and you see a pond with all the different webs of interactions. You know, that's why I always think that, you know, if this process of going out into space, right?
is actually will help us with climate change and with thinking about making a long-term sustainable version of human civilization. Because you really have to think about these webs, the complexity of these webs, and recognize the biosphere has been doing this forever. The biosphere knows how to do this, right?
And so, A, how do we support, how do we build a vibrant, powerful technosphere that also doesn't mess with the biospheres, mess with the biospheres capacity to support our technosphere? So, you know, by doing this, by trying to build space habitats, in some sense, you're thinking about building a small scale version of this. So I think the two problems are going to kind of feed back on each other.
10 miles below the earth's surface. And there are things where there's no sunlight. There's, you know, the conditions are so extreme and there's lots of microbes having a great time living off the radioactivity, you know, in the rocks, but you know, they had lots of time to evolve to those conditions.
So I'm not sure if you dumped a bunch of bacteria, you know, so somebody like somebody must've done these experiments, like, you know, how fast, uh,
could microbial evolution occur in under harsh conditions that you maybe get somebody who figures out okay i can deal with this i think the moon's too much because it's so sterile but you know mars i don't know maybe i don't know we'd have to that but it's an interesting idea i wonder if somebody has done those yeah you think somebody would like let's take a bunch of microbes the harsh the take the harshest possible condition of all different kinds temperature all this kind of stuff right
pressure, salinity, and then just dump a bunch of things that are not used to it, and then just see, does everybody just die? That's it.
Is there enough, right? Are there other options? Is the condition rich enough? Rich enough, yeah. There's an alternative view, though, which is there's this great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called Aurora. So there's been a million century ship stories, like where Earth sends out a generation ship or century ship, and it goes to another planet, and they land, and they colonize.
And on this one, they get all the way there, and they think the planet's going to be habitable. And it turns out that it's not habitable for Earth life. There's bacteria or prions, actually, that just kill people in the simplest way. And the important thing about this book was the idea that life is actually very tied to its planet. It may not be so easy.
I just thought it was a really interesting idea. I'm not necessarily supporting it, but that actually life reflects the planetary conditions. Not the planetary conditions, the planet itself, the whole lineage, the whole history of the biosphere. And it may not be so easy to just sort of be like, oh, just drop it over here and it'll, you know.
Because the bacteria, even though they're individual examples of life, And I kind of believe this, the true unit of life, it's not DNA, it's not a cell, it's the biosphere. It's the whole community. Yeah.
Because everybody, everything on life is, you know, has the same lineage. We all come from Luca, you know, the last universal common ancestor. And what you see is often in science fiction, people will do things like, oh, well, it's okay. Because like that bio, that metabolism, that biochemistry is so different from ours that we can coexist because they don't even know each other, you know, right?
That the, you know, and then the other version is you get there, you land and instantly, you know, the nose bleeds and you're dead.
Yeah, it sort of feels like a very alien kind of thing.
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