Scott Solomon

It's called the Mars Desert Research Station and a remote facility in a place in the desert that really kind of looks like Mars.

And so I went out there and visited a crew that had just begun a simulation.

And it was fascinating to see kind of, you know, what they're doing and how the ways that they try to kind of make it feel realistic and the kind of things that they try to learn.

And there's a whole bunch of these.

Well, that's really the thing that I'm most interested in.

So my background, I mean, I'm an evolutionary biologist.

Right.

And so the thing that got me most interested in this topic of like, how will people be affected by being in space is the question of would making a long term settlement on Mars or anywhere else lead to evolutionary change?

From my perspective, I think it's inevitable.

I think basically if you are creating a situation where people are not just going and coming back, but they're going to live there.

In other words, they're moving there.

That's where their lives are.

And most importantly, they're having families there.

They're raising children there.

Once you start talking about a multiple generation, generational presence on another world,

we should expect evolutionary change.

That's how evolution works, right?

Yeah, that's right.

The island of Flores, which is today part of Indonesia.

creatures had been diminutized down to this tiny little level because they were all on this little island is that bullshit or am i right well that is one of the ways that we think about it and and you're you've got a lot of the story correct there so you're absolutely right that basically what people have found are the skeletal remains inside of a cave on this island of flores