Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures | Lex Fridman Podcast #271

Ariel Ekblaw 0:00 We think that self-assembly, this modular reconfigurable algorithm for constructing space structures in orbit is gonna give us this promise of space architecture that's actually worth living in.

Lex Fridman 0:12 You see, you do believe we might one day become intergalactic civilization?

Ariel Ekblaw 0:18 I have hope, yeah.

Lex Fridman 0:21 The following is a conversation with Ariel Ekblaw, Director of MIT Space Exploration Initiative. She's especially interested in autonomously self-assembling space architectures, basically giant space structures that can sustain human life, and that assemble themselves out in space and then orbit Earth, Moon, Mars, and other planets. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now dear friends, here's Ariel Ekblaw.

Lex Fridman 0:56 When did you first fall in love with space exploration and space in general?

Ariel Ekblaw 1:01 My parents are both ex-Air Force. So my dad's an A-10 fighter pilot and my mom trained and had qualified to be a fighter pilot but it was early enough that women were not allowed in combat at that time. And so I grew up with these two pilots, and although they themselves did not become astronauts, there's a really rich legacy of Air Force pilots becoming astronauts, and this loomed large in my childhood. What does it mean to be courageous, to be an explorer, to be at the vanguard of something, uh, hard and challenging? And to couple with that, my dad was a huge fan of science fiction...

Lex Fridman 1:35 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:35 ... and so I as a kid read Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, um, all these different classics of science fiction that he had introduced me too. And that just started a love affair with space exploration and really thinking about civilization-scale space exploration.

Lex Fridman 1:52 So did they themselves dream about going to the stars as opposed to flying here in Earth's atmosphere, just looking up?

Ariel Ekblaw 2:02 Yeah. My dad always said he was absolutely convinced 'cause he was a child of the Apollo years that he would get to go in his lifetime.

Lex Fridman 2:08 Mm.

Ariel Ekblaw 2:08 Really thought it was gonna happen. And so it was a challenge and, you know, sad for many people when, um, to their view on the outside, space exploration slowed down for a period of time. In reality, we were just catching up. I think we leapt so far ahead with Apollo, uh, more than the rest of society was ready for, and now we're coming back to this moment for space exploration where we actually have an economy and we have the other accoutrement that society needs to be able to make space exploration more real. And my dad's thrilled because finally, you know, not nearly... I hope not anywhere near the end of his life, but as he's an older man, he now can see still within his lifetime people really getting a chance to build a sustainable lunar settlement on the Moon or maybe even go to Mars.

Lex Fridman 2:49 So settlements, civilizations on other planets, that's the, that's the cool thing to dream about in the future.

Ariel Ekblaw 2:55 Yes.

Lex Fridman 2:56 What was the, uh, what was the favorite sci-fi au- authors when you were growing up?

Ariel Ekblaw 3:00 Probably Isaac Asimov Foundation Trilogy. This is a w- amazing story of Hari Seldon, this, you know, foundation that he forms at different ends of the... well, according to the story, uh, difference the universe... and has this interesting focus on society. So it's not just space exploration for the sake of space exploration or novel technology, which is a lot of what I work on day-to-day at MIT, but how do you structure a society, um, across those vast expanses of distance and time, and so I'd say absolutely a favorite. Now, though, my favorite, uh, is Neal Stephenson and Seveneves. It's a book that inspired my own PhD research and some ongoing work that we're doing with NASA now for the future of swarm robotics for spacecraft.

Lex Fridman 3:46 We were saying offline about, uh, Neal Stephenson and that... 'cause I just recently had a conversation with him.

Ariel Ekblaw 3:51 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 3:51 And I said that, you know, not until I was doing the research for him that I realized he also had a, a role to play in Blue Origin. So it's like sci-fi actually having a role to play in the design, engineering, just the implementation of ideas that come kind of, um, percolate out from the sci-fi world and actually become reality. It's kind of... it's a fascinating figure in that way. Do you, do you also think about, uh, him beyond just his work in science fiction, but his role in coming up with wild, crazy ideas that actually become reality?

Ariel Ekblaw 4:24 Yes. I think it's a great example of this cycle between authors and scientists and engineers, that we can be inspired in one generation by what authors dream up. We build it, we make it a reality, and then that inspires another generation of really wild and crazy thought for science fiction. Think Neal Stephenson does a beautiful job of being what we'd call a hard science fiction author. So it's really grounded in a lot of science, which makes it very compelling for me as a scientist and engineer to read and then be challenged to make that vision a reality. The other community, you know, that Neil is involved with and some of my other mentors are involved with that we are thinking about more and more in the work that we do at MIT is The Long Now Foundation and this focus on what does society need to take in terms of steps at this juncture, this particular inflection point in human history, to make sure that we're setting ourselves up for a long and prosperous horizon, for humanity's horizons. There's a lot of examples of what The Long Now Foundation does and thinks about, but when I think about this in my own work, it's what does it take to scale humanity's presence in orbit? We are seeing some additional investment in commercial space habitats, um, so it'll no longer be just NASA running the International Space Station, but to really democratize access to space, to have... Um, like Bezos wants to have millions of people living and working in space. You need architecture that's bigger and grander and can actually scale, and that means you need to be thinking about how can you construct things for longtime horizons that are really sustainable in orbit or on a surface of a celestial body that are bigger than the biggest rocket payload fairing that we currently have available, and that what led me to self-assembly and other models of in-space construction.

Lex Fridman 6:08 Okay. Every, every time you speak, I get like a million tangent ideas. But let me-

Ariel Ekblaw 6:12 You can cut me off. Keep going. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 6:13 No, no, no, no, no, no. Please, keep talking. This is amazing.

Ariel Ekblaw 6:16 Keep going.

Lex Fridman 6:16 I just... There's, uh, there's like a million of i- um, ideas. So, one sort of on the dark side, let me ask.

Ariel Ekblaw 6:21 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 6:21 Do you think about the threats to human civilization that kind of motivate the scaling of the expansion of humans in space and on other planets? What are you worried about? Nuclear war?

Ariel Ekblaw 6:34 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 6:34 Pandemics? Uh, super-intelligent, artificial intelligence systems? You know, more not, uh, existential crises, but ones that have significant, potentially significant detrimental effects on society, like climate change.

Ariel Ekblaw 6:49 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 6:50 Those kinds of things. And then there's, of course, the fun asteroid coming out from the darkness-

Ariel Ekblaw 6:54 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 6:54 ... and hitting all of Earth. There's been a few movies on that. Anyway, is there something that you think about, um, that threatens us in this century?

Ariel Ekblaw 7:02 Mm-hmm. I mean, as an ex-military family, we used to talk about all of this. We would say that luck favors the prepared. And so growing up, you know, we had a plan, actually, a family plan for what we would do in a pandemic. Didn't think we were going to have to put that plan into place-

Lex Fridman 7:16 (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 7:16 ... and here we are. We do, certainly, you know, among my own family and my friends, and then our work at MIT, we do think about existential threats and risks to humanity, and what role does space exploration and getting humans off world have to play in a resilient future for humanity? But what I actually find more compelling, recently, is instead of thinking about a need to ever abandon Earth, uh, through a path of space exploration or space foraging, is to see how we can use space technology to keep Earth livable. The obvious direct ways of doing this would be, you know, satellite technology that's helping us learn more about climate change, or, um, emitters or CO2, but there's also a future for geoengineering that might be space-based. A lot of questions that would have to be answered around that. But these are examples of pivoting our focus away from maybe the Hollywood vision of, "Oh, an asteroid's gonna come, we're all going to have to escape Earth," to, "Let's use our considerable technology prowess, and use space technology to save Earth, and be very much focused on how we can have a worthwhile life for Earth's citizens-

Lex Fridman 8:20 Yeah, just-

Ariel Ekblaw 8:20 ... even if some of us go, want to go out and further venturing."

Lex Fridman 8:24 Right, just the... Yeah, yeah. The desire to explore-

Ariel Ekblaw 8:26 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 8:26 ... the mysterious, yes. But al- also, it does seem that by placing us in harsh conditions, the harsh conditions of space, the harsh conditions of planets, and the biology, the chemistry, the engineering, the robotics, the, uh, materials, all of that, that's just a nice way to come up with cool new things. Like-

Ariel Ekblaw 8:44 Great forcing function, yeah.

Lex Fridman 8:45 Yeah, it's a force... Exactly.

Ariel Ekblaw 8:46 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 8:46 It's a forcing function, like s- survival. (laughs) If you don't get this right, you die.

Ariel Ekblaw 8:51 Right.

Lex Fridman 8:51 So, uh, and that you can bring back to Earth, and it will improve, um-

Ariel Ekblaw 8:55 Right.

Lex Fridman 8:56 ... like figuring out food in space will make you figure out what... How to eat, you know, live healthier lives here on Earth.

Ariel Ekblaw 9:04 So true. I mean, some of the technologies that we're directly looking at right now, um, for space habitats, it's hard to keep humans alive in this really fragile little pocket against the vacuum, and all of the dangers that the space environment presents. Some of the technologies we are going to have to figure out is energy efficient, you know, cooling and air conditioning. Uh, air filtration, scrubbing CO2 from the air. Being able to have habitats that are themselves resilient to extremes of space weather and radiation. And some of these are direct translational opportunities for areas torn by natural disasters. You know, people in California a decade ago would never have had to think about having an airtight house, but now with wildfires, maybe you do want something close to an airtight house. How do you manage that? There's a lot of technologies from the space habitation world that we are hoping we can actually bring back down to benefit life on Earth as well, in these extreme environment contexts.

Lex Fridman 10:01 Okay, so

Lex Fridman 10:02 you mentioned, to go back to swarm-

Ariel Ekblaw 10:05 Mmm, yeah.

Lex Fridman 10:06 ... so that was interesting to you, first of all, in your own work, but also, I, I believe you said something that was inspiring from Neal Stephenson-

Ariel Ekblaw 10:14 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 10:14 ... as well. So when you say s- uh, swarm, are, are you thinking about, um, architectures? Or are you thinking about artificial intelligence like robotics? Or are those kind of intermixed?

Ariel Ekblaw 10:28 I think the future that we're seeing is that they're going to be intermixed, which is really exciting. So, the future of space habitats are one of intelligent structures, maybe not all the way to HAL, and the, you know, 2001 Space Odyssey reference that scares people about the habitat having a mind of its own. But certainly, we're building systems now where the habitat has sensing technology that allows it to communicate its basic functions. You know, maintaining life support for the astronauts, but could also communicate in symbiosis with these swarm robots that would be on the outside of the spacecraft, uh, whether it's in a microgravity orbiting environment or on the surface. And these little robots, they crawl just a la Neal Stephenson in Seveneves, they crawl along the outside of the spacecraft looking for micro meteorite punctures or gas leaks, or other faults and, uh, defects. And right now, we're just working on the diagnosis. So, can the swarm with its collective intelligence act in symbiosis with the spacecraft and detect things? But in the future, we'd also love for these little micro robots to repair in situ, and really be like ants living in a tree altogether connected to the spacecraft.

Lex Fridman 11:39 Do you envision, uh, the system to be fully distributed, and just like an ant colony if one of them, uh, is damaged or, you know, whatever, uh, loses control and all those kinds of things, that, that that doesn't affect the performance of any... Of the complete system? Or does it need to be centralized? This is more like almost like a technical question. Do you think we could-

Ariel Ekblaw 12:01 Good architecture question.

Lex Fridman 12:03 Right. E- from the ground up, it's so scary to go fully distributed.

Ariel Ekblaw 12:08 Yes. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 12:10 (laughs) But it's also exceptionally powerful, right? Robust, resilient-

Ariel Ekblaw 12:14 Right.

Lex Fridman 12:14 ... to the harsh conditions of space. Where do you...Um, if you look into the next 10, 20, 100 years, um, starting from scratch, do you think we should be doing, architecture-wise, distributive systems?

Ariel Ekblaw 12:28 For space, yes, because it gives you this redundancy and safety profile that's really critical. So whether it's small swarm robots where it doesn't matter if you lose a few of them, to habitats that instead of having a central monolithic habitat, you might actually be able to have a decentralized node of a space station, uh, so that you can, kind of right out of Star Wars, you can shut a blast door if there's a fire or if there's a conflict in a certain area, and you can move the humans and the crew into another decentralized node of the spacecraft. There's another idea out of Neal Stephenson, Seveneves, actually, were these arclets, uh, which were decentralized spacecraft that could form and dock little temporary space stations with each other and then separate and go off on their way and, and have a decentralized approach to living in space.

Lex Fridman 13:16 So the self-assembly component of that too, so this is your PhD work and beyond, you explored autonomously self-assembling space architecture for future space tourists' habitats and space stations in orbit around Earth, Moon, and Mars. There, there's few things I personally find, uh, sexier than self-assembling (laughs) space arc- autonomously self-assembling (laughs) space architecture. In general, it doesn't even need to be space. The idea of, like, self-assembling architectures is really interesting, like building a bridge or something like that...

Ariel Ekblaw 13:49 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 13:49 ... through self-assembling materials. It feels like a incredibly efficient way to do it, because optimization is built in. So you can build, like, the most optimal structures given dynamic uncertain changing conditions.

Ariel Ekblaw 14:08 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 14:09 So, uh, maybe can you talk about your PhD work, about this, this work about TESSERAI? What is it in general? All the-

Ariel Ekblaw 14:17 Sure.

Lex Fridman 14:17 A- any, any cool stuff 'cause this is super cool.

Ariel Ekblaw 14:19 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 14:19 So... (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 14:19 Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So TESSERAI is my PhD research. It's this idea that we could take tiles that construct a large structure-

Lex Fridman 14:29 Is this what that is?

Ariel Ekblaw 14:29 ... like a buckyball. Yeah. This is exactly what we're looking at here...

Lex Fridman 14:31 Okay.

Ariel Ekblaw 14:31 ... which is the tiles that are packed flat in a rocket. They're released to float in microgravity. Magnets, pretty powerful electropermanent magnets, on their edges draw them together for autonomous docking. So there's no human in the loop here, and there's no central agent coordinating, saying, "Tile one-"

Lex Fridman 14:49 Oh.

Ariel Ekblaw 14:49 ... "go to tile two." It's completely decentralized system. They find each other on their own.

Lex Fridman 14:54 (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 14:54 What we don't show in this video is-

Lex Fridman 14:56 So cool.

Ariel Ekblaw 14:56 ... what happens if there's an error, right? So what happens if they bond incorrectly? The tiles have sensing, so proximity sensing, magnetometer, other sensors that allow them to detect a good bond versus a bad bond and pulse off and self-correct, which anybody who works in this, you know, the field of self-assembly will tell you that error detection and correction, just like, uh, error detection in a DNA sequence or protein folding-

Lex Fridman 15:20 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 15:20 ... is really important part of the system for that robustness. And so we've done a lot of work to engineer that ability for the tiles to be self-determining. They know whether they're forming the structure that they're supposed to form or not.

Lex Fridman 15:32 They know if they're in a toxic relationship-

Ariel Ekblaw 15:34 (laughs) Yes.

Lex Fridman 15:34 ... and they need to get out. (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 15:35 Right. Right. If they need to, if they need to separate, exactly, yeah.

Lex Fridman 15:38 All right. This is, like, so amazing. And for people who are just listening to this, yeah, there's lo- I mean, how large are these tiles?

Ariel Ekblaw 15:45 So the size that we use in the lab, they can really be any size-

Lex Fridman 15:49 Right.

Ariel Ekblaw 15:49 ... 'cause we can scale them down to do testing in microgravity. So we sent tiles that were about three inches wide to the International Space Station a couple years ago to test the code, test the state machine, test the algorithm of self-assembly. But now, we're actually building our first-ever human-scale tiles. They're me human size, so little, you know, a little smaller than maybe your average human. Um, but they're, uh, 2.5 feet on edge length. The larger scale that we would love to build in the future would actually be tiles that are big enough to form a buckyball, big open spherical volume, spherical approximation volume, that'd be about 10 meters in diameter, so 30 feet, which is much bigger and grander in terms of open space than any current module on the ISS. And one of the goals with this project was to say, "What's the purpose of next generation space architecture?" Should it be something that really inspires and delights people? When you float into that space, can you get goosebumps in the way that you do when you walk into a really stunning piece of architecture on Earth? And so we think that self-assembly, this modular reconfigurable algorithm for constructing space structures in orbit, is going to give us this promise of space architecture that's actually worth living in.

Lex Fridman 17:03 Living in... Oh, oh, I thought you also meant from, like, outside artistic perspective.

Ariel Ekblaw 17:07 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 17:07 ... you see the whole thing is just...

Ariel Ekblaw 17:09 With the aesthetics of it, absolutely.

Lex Fridman 17:11 You know when you, like, go, like, in- into Vegas or s-

Ariel Ekblaw 17:14 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 17:14 ... whene- whenever you go into a city, and it, like, over the hill appears in front of you, and, I mean, there's something majestic about, uh, seeing like, "Wow, humans created that." It gives you, like, hope about, like-

Ariel Ekblaw 17:26 It does.

Lex Fridman 17:26 ... i- if these bunch of ants were able to figure out how to build sky- skyscrapers that light up... And in general, the design of these tiles and the way you envision it-

Ariel Ekblaw 17:35 Right.

Lex Fridman 17:35 ... are pretty scalable.

Ariel Ekblaw 17:36 Yes, and they're inspired by exactly what you mentioned a moment ago, which is we have these patterns of self-assembly on Earth.

Lex Fridman 17:42 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 17:43 And there's a lot of fantastic MIT research that we're building this concept on, so, like, Daniela Rus at CSAIL and PEBBLES taking the power of magnets to create units that are themselves interchangeable, this notion of programmable matter. And so we're interested in going really big with it to build big scale space structures with programmable tiles. But there's also a really fascinating, you know, end of that on the other side of the spectrum, which is, how small can you go with matter that's programmable and stacks and builds itself and creates a bridge or something in the future?

Lex Fridman 18:16 What do you envision the thing would look like? Like, when you imagine a thing f- far into the future where there's, um...So we're not even thinking about, like, uh, small space... Well, then, uh, let's not call them small-

Ariel Ekblaw 18:29 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 18:29 ... but, or currently sized space stations. But, like, something gigantic. What do you envision? Is this something with symmetry, or is this something we can't even come up with yet? Is, is, is-

Ariel Ekblaw 18:39 Great question.

Lex Fridman 18:39 ... is, is there a s- beautiful structures that you imagine in your mind?

Ariel Ekblaw 18:42 I've got three candidates that I would love to build.

Lex Fridman 18:45 (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 18:45 If we're talking about monumental space architecture, one is, what does a space cathedral look like? It can be a secular cathedral. Doesn't necessarily have to be about religion, but that notion of long sight lines inspiring stunning architecture when you go in. And you can imagine floating. Instead of, you know, being on the ground and only looking up, in space, you could be in a central node and each direction you look at, all the cardinal directions, are spires going off in a really large and long way. So that's concept number one. Number two would be something more organic that's not just geometric. So here, one of the ideas that we're working on at MIT in my lab is to say, "Could you..." Instead of the TESSERAE model, right, which is self-assembling a shell, could you define a module that's a node, a small node that someone can live in, and you self-assemble a lot of those together? They're called, uh, pleseohedrons, like, uh, space-filling solids, and you dock a bunch of them together and you can create a really organic structure out of that. So it's, uh, the same way that muscles accrete to appear, you can have these nodes that dock together, and one shape that I would love to form out of this is something like a nautilus, a seashell. That beautiful, you know, Fibonacci spiral sequence that you get, uh, in that shape, which I think would be a stunning and fabulous, um, aggregated space station.

Lex Fridman 20:10 You said so many cool words. Ple- pleseohedron.

Ariel Ekblaw 20:14 Yeah, a pleseohedron.

Lex Fridman 20:14 So that, that's a space-filling...

Ariel Ekblaw 20:18 Solid. The simplest thing to think about-

Lex Fridman 20:20 And, and a sphere?

Ariel Ekblaw 20:20 ... is, like, a cube.

Lex Fridman 20:21 Oh, cube.

Ariel Ekblaw 20:21 A cube, right? So you can stack cubes together, and if you had an infinite number of cubes, you'd fill all that space. There's no gaps in between the cubes. They stack and fill space. Uh, another pleseohedron is a truncated octahedron, and that's actually one of the candidate structures that we think would be great for space stations.

Lex Fridman 20:38 What's the truncated part?

Ariel Ekblaw 20:40 Ah, so it, you cut off a, an octahedron actually has, like, little pointy areas.

Lex Fridman 20:44 Right.

Ariel Ekblaw 20:44 You truncate certain sections of it and you get, um, surfaces that are on the structure that are cubes and I think hexagons. I'd have to remind myself exactly what the faces are. But overall, a truncated octahedron can be bonded to other truncated octahedrons, and just like a cube, it fills all the gaps as you built it out. So you can imagine two truncated octahedrons, they come together at an airlock, which is what we space people call doors in space-

Lex Fridman 21:12 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 21:12 ... and you dock them on all sides, and you've basically created this decentralized network of space nodes that make a big space station. And once you have enough of them and you're growing with enough big units, you can do it in any macro shape you want. That's where the nautilus comes in, is could we design an organically inspired shape for a space station?

Lex Fridman 21:34 Can I just say how awesome it is to hear you say "we space people"?

Ariel Ekblaw 21:38 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 21:38 I know you meant people that are doing research on space exploration, space technology, but it also made me think of a future. There's Earth people (laughs) -

Ariel Ekblaw 21:47 Hm.

Lex Fridman 21:48 ... and then there's, and there's those space people, and then there's the Mars people.

Ariel Ekblaw 21:51 I'd love to unite those two.

Lex Fridman 21:52 Yeah. No, no, for sure.

Ariel Ekblaw 21:53 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 21:53 For sure, but, like, it's like New Yorkers-

Ariel Ekblaw 21:56 Mm.

Lex Fridman 21:56 ... and, like, uh, Texans or something like that.

Ariel Ekblaw 21:59 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 22:00 Yeah, of course, you, you, you live for a time in New York, and then you go up to Boston, and, but for a time, you're the space people.

Ariel Ekblaw 22:07 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 22:07 "Oh, I know those space people."

Ariel Ekblaw 22:09 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 22:09 "They're, they're kind of wild up there."

Ariel Ekblaw 22:11 We'll see how that dynamic evolves.

Lex Fridman 22:12 Yeah, exactly. There's-

Ariel Ekblaw 22:13 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 22:13 ... that culture, culture forms, and I would, I would love to see what kind of culture f- once you, once you have sort of more and more civilians. I mean, there's a human... I mean, I love psychology and sociology, and m- and I'll maybe ask you about that too, which is, like, the dynamic between humans.

Ariel Ekblaw 22:29 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 22:29 You have to kind of start considering that.

Ariel Ekblaw 22:31 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 22:31 You need to start spending more and more time up in space, and, and start sending civilians, start sending bigger and bigger groups of people, and then, of course, the, the beautiful and the ugly emerges from the, uh, from the human nature that we haven't been able to escape up to this point. Uh, but when you say the pleseohedrons, these kinds of shapes, are they multifunctional? Like, can you... Uh, is the idea you'd be able to, uh, hu- uh, humans can opy- occupy s- them safely in some of them, and some others have some other purposes?

Ariel Ekblaw 23:04 Exactly. One could be sleeping quarters. One could be a greenhouse or an agricultural unit. One could be a storage depot.

Lex Fridman 23:13 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 23:13 Essentially, all of the different rooms or functions that you might need in a space station could be subdivided into these nodes and then stacked together. And one of the promises of both TESSERAE, my original PhD research, which is these shells, and then this follow on node concept, is that right now we build space stations, and once they're built, they're done. You can't really change them profoundly. But the benefit of a modular self-assembling system is you can disassemble it. You can completely reconfigure it. Uh, so if your mission changes or the number of people in space that you want to host, if you have a space conference happening, like South by Southwest-

Lex Fridman 23:48 I was thinking space party, but space conference-

Ariel Ekblaw 23:51 Space party. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 23:51 ... is good too.

Ariel Ekblaw 23:51 Sure. (laughs) Then, uh, maybe all of a sudden you want to change out what were window tiles yesterday, cupola tiles, and make them into a berthing port, so that you can welcome five new spaceships to come and join you in space. That's what this promise of reconfigurable space architecture might allow us to explore.

Lex Fridman 24:09 I've been hanging out with Grimes recently, and I just feel like she belongs up in space.

Ariel Ekblaw 24:12 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 24:13 This is like designed for p- for artists essentially. Like imagine... I mean, this is what South by int- keeps introducing me to, is there's like the weird and the beautiful people, and, like, the artists and-

Ariel Ekblaw 24:23 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 24:24 ... it feels like there's a lot of opportunities for art and design...

Ariel Ekblaw 24:28 ... 100%.

Lex Fridman 24:29 It's like, it's like space is a combination of arts, design, and, and great engineering.

Ariel Ekblaw 24:34 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 24:34 With, with a, a... (inhales deeply) It's, uh, safety critical with, like, the highest of stakes. So don't... you can't, you can't mess it up. And is this... is there... first of all, you talking about tiling, so Neal Stephenson is obsessed about tiling. I don't know if it's related to any of this, but he seems to be obsessed with, like, how do you tile a space? That's like a matheme-

Ariel Ekblaw 24:52 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 24:52 ... geometric notion.

Ariel Ekblaw 24:54 Tessellation, yeah.

Lex Fridman 24:54 Like, the tessellation. And it's... I mean, it's a beautiful idea for architecture that you can self-assemble these different shapes, and you can have probably some centralized guidance of the kind of thing you want to build. But they also kind of figure stuff out themselves in terms-

Ariel Ekblaw 25:12 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 25:12 ... of the low-level details, in terms of the figuring out when the... when if everything fits just right. Uh, for the OCD people, like... (makes whooshing sound)

Ariel Ekblaw 25:20 (laughs) Yeah.

Lex Fridman 25:20 Uh, what's that subreddit? Uh, pleasantly... it's, like, really fun. Everything... they have, like, videos of everything just pleasant... when everything just fits perfectly.

Ariel Ekblaw 25:29 Very pleasing.

Lex Fridman 25:30 Yeah, it's pleasing.

Ariel Ekblaw 25:30 All the tolerances (laughs) go together well, yeah.

Lex Fridman 25:32 (laughs) So they figure that out on themselves.

Ariel Ekblaw 25:34 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 25:34 And, and the local robotics problem.

Ariel Ekblaw 25:36 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 25:36 But by the way, was Danielle, were those pebbles? Was the Pebbles project?

Ariel Ekblaw 25:39 Yeah. The Pebbles project are little cubes that have EPMs in them, electropermanent magnets, and they can self-disassemble. So they'll turn off, and so you'll have this little structure that all of a sudden can, uh, flip the little, uh, pebbles over and, um, essentially just disaggregate.

Lex Fridman 25:54 They have to make some pleasing sounds, right?

Ariel Ekblaw 25:56 Yeah. (laughs) Make

Narrator 25:58 (imitates sound)

Lex Fridman 25:58 (imitates sound) And what's, uh... what... that's gonna... so I'm supposed to talk to Danielle, so the... I'll probably spend an hour just discussing the sounds and the pebbles.

Ariel Ekblaw 26:04 (laughs) Right.

Lex Fridman 26:05 Okay, uh, what were we talking about? So the... so that's... 'cause you mentioned two, I think.

Ariel Ekblaw 26:11 Right. My third one.

Lex Fridman 26:12 Yeah. What... is there a third one?

Ariel Ekblaw 26:13 My third one is a ring world, just because-

Lex Fridman 26:15 (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 26:15 ... every science fiction book ever that's worth anything has a ring world in it. And, uh, this-

Lex Fridman 26:20 Is it like a donut, or...

Ariel Ekblaw 26:21 A donut, yeah.

Lex Fridman 26:22 Okay.

Ariel Ekblaw 26:22 It's a really big torus that could encircle a planet, uh, or encircle another celestial body, maybe an, uh, asteroid or a small moon. And, um, the promise here is just the, the beauty of being able to have that geometry in orbit and all that surface area for solar panels and docking, and, um, essentially just all of what that enables to have a ring world at that scale in orbit

Narrator 26:48 That'd be fun.

Lex Fridman 26:48 Well, by the way, for the viewers, we're looking at figure 11. What paper is this from? This is, uh, "Hexagonal tiling of a torus generated in, in Mathematica, referencing code and approach from two citations." So we're looking at a tiled donut, and I'm now hungry.

Ariel Ekblaw 27:04 Exactly. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 27:04 So this is the... is this... is this from your thesis or no?

Ariel Ekblaw 27:06 Uh, this is probably... I mean, this is in my thesis. This looks like it was one of my earlier papers. This was an approach to say, "Great, we've come up with this tessellation approach for a Buckyball." And we picked the Buckyball because it is the most efficient surface area to volume shape. And what's expensive in space? The surface area, shipping up all that material. So we wanted something that would maximize the volume. But if we think about ring worlds and other shapes, we wanted to look at how do you tile a torus, and this is one example with hexagons, to be able to say, "Could we take this same tessellate approach of self-assembling tiles and create other geometries?"

Lex Fridman 27:42 This is so freaking cool. It's awesome.

Lex Fridman 27:44 So you mentioned, uh, microgravity, and, and I saw... I believe that, uh, there's a picture of you floating in microgravity.

Ariel Ekblaw 27:52 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 27:52 Uh, when, when did you get to experience that? What was that like?

Ariel Ekblaw 27:54 Ah, so I've flown nine times-

Lex Fridman 27:56 Wow.

Ariel Ekblaw 27:56 ... on the affectionately known as the Vomit Comet. It's the parabolic flight, and essentially it does what you'd want a plane never to do. It pitches really steeply upwards at 45 degrees.

Lex Fridman 28:07 Oh, there's a picture of you.

Ariel Ekblaw 28:07 Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman 28:08 (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 28:08 That's tessellate. That's super early in my PhD, some of just the passive tiles. Before we even put electronics in, we were just testing the magnet polarity and the... essentially, is it an energy-favorable structure to self-assemble on its own? So we tweaked a lot of things between

Narrator 28:23 (instrumental music)

Lex Fridman 28:24 Are we looking at a couple of them, or...

Ariel Ekblaw 28:26 Yeah, you're looking at a bunch of them there.

Lex Fridman 28:27 Oh, oh, oh, I see.

Ariel Ekblaw 28:27 There's almost, almost 32 of them.

Lex Fridman 28:29 Oh, I see, a lot more.

Ariel Ekblaw 28:29 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 28:29 Cool, and they're assembled in z-

Ariel Ekblaw 28:29 They're clumping, they're clumping, yeah.

Lex Fridman 28:31 Can you comment on what's the difference between microgravity and, and zero gravity?

Ariel Ekblaw 28:36 Yes. So there is-

Lex Fridman 28:38 Is that an important difference?

Ariel Ekblaw 28:38 It's an important difference. There is no zero gravity. There's no... nothing... there's... in the universe, there is no, no such thing as zero gravity. So Newton's law of gravity tells us that there's always gravity attraction between any two objects. So 0G is a shorthand that some of us fall into using, or is a little easier to communicate to the public. The accurate term is microgravity, where you are essentially floating, you're weightless, but generally in free fall. So on the parabolic flights, the Vomit Comet, you're in free fall at the end of the parabola. And in orbit around the earth-

Lex Fridman 29:11 Oh, that is cool.

Ariel Ekblaw 29:11 ... when you're floating, you're also in free fall.

Lex Fridman 29:14 What was it like?

Ariel Ekblaw 29:15 So that's micro G. Uh-

Lex Fridman 29:15 Uh, uh, so affectionately called Vomit Comet, I'm sure there's a reason why it's called affectionately so.

Ariel Ekblaw 29:20 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 29:20 So, what's it like? What's... uh, your first time to both philosophically-

Ariel Ekblaw 29:25 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 29:25 ... spiritually, and biologically. What's it like?

Ariel Ekblaw 29:28 It's profound. It is unlike anything else you will experience on Earth, because it is this true feeling of weightlessness with no drag. So the closest experience you can think of would be floating in a pool, but you move slowly when you float in a pool and your motion is restricted. When you're floating, it's just you and your body flying, like in a dream.

Lex Fridman 29:51 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 29:51 Um, it takes the littlest amount of energy, like a finger tap against the wall of the plane to shoot all the way across the fuselage.

Lex Fridman 29:58 Wow. And you can move at full speed.

Ariel Ekblaw 30:00 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 30:00 Like, your... you, you can even move your arms-

Ariel Ekblaw 30:02 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 30:03 ... so your muscles work-

Ariel Ekblaw 30:03 There's no... yeah.

Lex Fridman 30:04 There's no resistance like you would feel in a pool.

Ariel Ekblaw 30:06 There's no resistance. They actually tell you to make a memory when you're on the plane, because it's such a fleeting experience for your body that even a few days later, you've already forgotten exactly what it felt like. It's so foreign-

Lex Fridman 30:18 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 30:19 ... to the human experience.

Lex Fridman 30:20 They kind of suggest that you explicitly try to really form this into memory-

Ariel Ekblaw 30:24 Yes.

Lex Fridman 30:24 ... and then you could do the replay.

Ariel Ekblaw 30:25 Cognitively-

Lex Fridman 30:26 Is that for training or for just-

Ariel Ekblaw 30:27 ... freeze it. Yeah.

Lex Fridman 30:28 Cog- (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 30:28 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 30:29 Saved.

Ariel Ekblaw 30:30 Right.

Lex Fridman 30:31 Uh, when we have Neuralink, we can replay that, uh-

Ariel Ekblaw 30:33 There you go. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 30:33 ... the, the... replay that memory. So in terms of how much stress it has on your body-

Ariel Ekblaw 30:38 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 30:38 ... is it, uh, biologically stressful?

Ariel Ekblaw 30:41 You do feel a 2G pullout, right? So the cost of getting those, uh, micro G parabolas is you then have a 2G pullout, and that's hard. You have to train for it. Uh, if you move your neck too quickly in that 2G pullout, you can strain muscles. Um, but I wouldn't say that it's actually a, a profound, um, tough thing on the body. It's really just an incredibly novel experience, and when you're in orbit and you're not having to go through the ups and downs of the parabolic plane, there's a real grace and elegance, and you see the astronauts learn to operate in this completely new environment.

Lex Fridman 31:15 What are some interesting differences between the parabolic plane and when you're actually going up into orbit?

Ariel Ekblaw 31:19 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 31:20 Is, is it that with o- orbit you can look o- out and see-

Ariel Ekblaw 31:23 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 31:24 ... that blue little planet of ours?

Ariel Ekblaw 31:26 You can see the blue marble, the stunning overview effect, which is something I hope to see one day. Um, what's also really different is if you're in orbit for any significant period of time, there's gonna be a lot more physiological changes to your body than if you just did an afternoon flight on the Vomit Comet. Everything from your bones, your muscles, your eyeballs change shape. Uh, there's a lot of different things that happen for long duration space flight, and we still have to... As scientists, we still have to solve a lot of these interesting challenges to be able to keep humans thriving in microgravity or deep duration space missions.

Lex Fridman 32:01 Deep duration space missions.

Ariel Ekblaw 32:03 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 32:03 Okay, let's talk about this. Um, I was just gonna ask a bunch of dumb questions. So approximately how long does it take to travel to Mars?

Ariel Ekblaw 32:11 Mm.

Lex Fridman 32:11 Asking for a friend.

Ariel Ekblaw 32:12 (laughs) Asking for a friend, as we all do. Uh, about three years for a round trip.

Lex Fridman 32:17 Okay.

Ariel Ekblaw 32:17 And that's not that it actually takes that long.

Lex Fridman 32:18 Why, why the round trip? Is that-

Ariel Ekblaw 32:21 Well, you're just asking-

Lex Fridman 32:22 Oh, uh, the friend was asking about the one-way trip. (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 32:23 ... just for one way. Got it, got it, got it, got it.

Lex Fridman 32:24 One way. Uh, so okay, cool. So for just, like, literally flying to Mars and around, it takes three years. Interesting.

Ariel Ekblaw 32:30 There's some interstitial time there because you really can only go between Earth and Mars at certain points in their orbits where it's favorable to make that journey, and so part of that three years is you take the journey to Mars, a few months, six to nine months. You're there for a period of time until the orbits find a favorable alignment again, and then you come back another six to nine months.

Lex Fridman 32:52 So one-way travel, six to nine months. Then you hang out there on vacation, then come back six to nine-

Ariel Ekblaw 32:56 Forced vacation- (laughs)

Lex Fridman 32:57 Forced vacation.

Ariel Ekblaw 32:57 ... and you come back.

Lex Fridman 32:58 Well, me who loves working all the time, e- all vacation is forced vacation, but, uh, all right. Uh, so okay, so that gives us a sense o- of duration, and we could maybe also talk about longer and longer and longer duration-

Ariel Ekblaw 33:11 Right.

Lex Fridman 33:12 ... uh, as well. What are the hardest aspects of this, of living in space for-

Ariel Ekblaw 33:19 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 33:20 ... many days, for, let's say, 100 days, 200 days? Maybe there's a threshold when it gets really tough. What are, what are some stupid little things or big things that are very difficult for human beings to go through?

Ariel Ekblaw 33:32 There's one big thing and one little thing, and they're the s- two classic problems that we're trying to solve in the space industry. One is radiation. It's not as much of a problem for us right now on the International Space Station because we're still protected by part of Earth's magnetosphere, but as soon as you get farther out into space and you don't have that protection once you leave the Van Allen, uh, Belt area of the Earth and the, you know, cocoon around the Earth, we have really serious concerns about radiation and the effect on human health long term. That's the big one. The small one, and I say it's small because it seems mundane, but it actually is really big in its own way, is mental health and how to keep people happy and balanced. And you were alluding to some of the psychological challenges of having humans together on missions, and especially as we try to scale the number of humans in orbit or in space. So that's another big challenge, is how to keep people happy and balanced and cooperating.

Lex Fridman 34:24 That's not an issue on Earth at all.

Ariel Ekblaw 34:25 At all. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 34:27 (laughs) Okay, so we- we'll talk about each of those in the, in a bit more detail. But let me continue on the chain of dumb questions. What about food?

Ariel Ekblaw 34:35 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 34:35 What's a good food, source for food in space, uh, and what are some sort of standard go-to meals, menus?

Ariel Ekblaw 34:42 Right now, your go-to menu is gonna be mostly freeze-dried. Every so often, NASA will arrange for a fun stunt or fresh food to get up to station, so they did bake DoubleTree cookies with Hilton a couple years ago, as I recall, I think sometime before the pandemic. But there's work actually in our lab at MIT. Maggie Coblentz, one of my staff researchers, is looking at the future of fermentation. Everybody loves beer, right? Beer and wine and kimchi and miso, these foods that have just been h- you know, really important to human cultures for eons because we love the umami and the better flavor in them, but it turns out they also have a good shelf life if done properly, and they also have a additional health benefit for the microbiome, for probiotics and prebiotics. So we're trying to work with NASA and convince them to be more open-minded to fermented food-

Lex Fridman 35:30 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 35:31 ... for long duration deep space missions. That, we think, is one of the future elements in addition to in situ growing your own food.

Lex Fridman 35:38 All right, okay. This is, this is essential for the space party is the-

Ariel Ekblaw 35:41 Yes.

Lex Fridman 35:42 ... the space beer.

Ariel Ekblaw 35:43 Yes, is the fermented product, yes. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 35:45 (laughs) Okay, cool. In terms of water, what's a good source of drinkable water? Like, where do you get water? Do you have to always bring it on board with you?

Ariel Ekblaw 35:52 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 35:52 And is there com- compressed, efficient way of storing it?

Ariel Ekblaw 35:56 So to steal a line from Charlie Bolden, who's the former administrator of NASA, uh, "This morning's fresh water is yesterday's coffee." So if you think about what that means, (laughs) you drank the coffee yesterday.

Lex Fridman 36:08 Right, as it tr-

Ariel Ekblaw 36:09 You-

Lex Fridman 36:09 It goes fully through the body.

Ariel Ekblaw 36:10 Fully through the body-

Lex Fridman 36:11 Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw 36:11 ... as the recycling system, and then you drink what you peed out as, um, you know, clarified, uh, refined fresh water the next day. That is one source of water. Another source of water, uh, in the near neighborhood of our solar system would be on the moon, so water ice deposits. There's also water on Mars. This is one of the big things that's bringing people to want to develop infrastructure on the moon, is once you've gotten out of the gravity well of Earth, if you can find water on the moon and refine it, you can either make it into propellant or drinkable water for humans. And so that's really valuable as a potential gateway out into the rest of the solar system to be able to get propellant without always having to ship it up from Earth.

Lex Fridman 36:53 So, how much water is there on Mars?

Ariel Ekblaw 36:56 That's a great question. I do not know.

Lex Fridman 36:57 We don't know this yet, right?

Ariel Ekblaw 36:58 I know there's water at the caps. I suspect NASA, from all of the satellite, um, studies that they've done of Mars, have a decent idea of what the water deposits look like. But I don't know to what degree they have characterized

Ariel Ekblaw 37:11 those.

Lex Fridman 37:11 I really hope there's life or traces of previous life on Mars.

Ariel Ekblaw 37:16 This is a special spot in my heart because I got to work on Sherlock, which is the astrobiology experiment that's on Mars right now, searching for, what they would say in a very cautious way is, signs of past habitability. They want to be careful not to get people overly excited and say we're searching for signs of life. They're searching to see if there would have been organics on the surface of Mars, or water in certain areas that would have allowed for life to flourish. And I really love this prospect. I do think within our lifetimes, we'll get a better answer about finding life in our solar system, if it's there. If not on Mars, maybe Europa, one of the icy worlds.

Lex Fridman 37:56 So, you like the, you like a- astrobiology?

Ariel Ekblaw 37:59 I do.

Lex Fridman 37:59 So, this is part, part of the ... So, it's not just about human biology, it's also other extraterrestrial alien biology.

Ariel Ekblaw 38:06 Search for life in the universe.

Lex Fridman 38:08 Okay. (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 38:08 Yeah. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 38:09 Does that scare you or excite you?

Ariel Ekblaw 38:10 It excites me, profoundly excites me.

Lex Fridman 38:12 That there's other alien civilizations, potentially very different than o- our own?

Ariel Ekblaw 38:16 I think there's gotta be some humility there. And certainly from science fiction, we have plenty of reasons to fear that outcome as well. But I do think as a scientist, it would be profoundly exciting if we were to find life, especially in the near neighborhood of our solar system. Right now, we would expect it to be most likely microbial life, but we have a real serious challenge in astrobiology, which is it may not even be carbon-based life.

Lex Fridman 38:38 Right.

Ariel Ekblaw 38:38 And all of our detectors, we only know to look for DNA or RNA. How would you even build a detector to look for silicon-based life, or different molecules than what we know to be the fundamental molecules for life?

Lex Fridman 38:52 And you mentioned offline, Sarah Walker, I mean, she-

Ariel Ekblaw 38:54 Yes.

Lex Fridman 38:54 ... her, the, the question that she's obsessed with is even just defining life.

Ariel Ekblaw 38:58 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 38:58 What is life? To look outside, uh, the carbon base. I mean, to, to look outside of basically anything we can even imagine chemically, uh, to look outside of any kind of notions that we think of as biology. Yeah, it's, it's really weird. So, you, you now get into this land of, like, complexity of-

Ariel Ekblaw 39:15 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 39:15 ... measuring of, like, how many assembly steps it takes to build that thing.

Ariel Ekblaw 39:23 Right. (laughs) Right.

Lex Fridman 39:23 And maybe, maybe a dynamic movement or some maintenance of some kind of membrane structures Like, we don't even know, like, which properties life should have-

Ariel Ekblaw 39:34 Right.

Lex Fridman 39:34 ... uh, whether it can, should be able to reproduce and all those kinds of things, or pass information, gen- genetic type of information. We don't know. And it's like, it's, it's so humbling. I mean, I tend to believe that there could be something like alien life here on Earth, and we're just too human bi- biology-obsessed to even recognize it.

Ariel Ekblaw 39:56 The shadow biosphere, I remember you and Sarah were talking about. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 39:59 (inhales deeply) I mean, that-

Ariel Ekblaw 39:59 It's a crazy mission.

Lex Fridman 39:59 ... that's like, speaking of beer, I mean, that's something I want to make sure, in all of science, to shake ourselves out of, like, remind ourselves constantly how little we know.

Ariel Ekblaw 40:09 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 40:10 'Cause it might be right in front of our nose. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if, like, trees are, like, orders of magnitude more intelligent than humans. They're just operating at a much slower scale, and they're, like, talking shit about us the whole time.

Ariel Ekblaw 40:23 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 40:23 Like, about silly humans that take everything seriously, and we start all kinds of nuclear wars, and we quarrel, and we tweet about it, and then-

Ariel Ekblaw 40:31 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 40:31 But the trees are always there, just watching us silly humans as-

Ariel Ekblaw 40:35 Like the ents in Lord of the Rings. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 40:37 Exactly. (laughs) So, I mean, I don't know. I mean, ob- obviously I'm joking on that one, but there could be stuff like that. Uh, well, let me ask you the, the, the Drake equation, the big, uh, the question.

Ariel Ekblaw 40:48 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 40:48 How many, like, uh, obviously nobody knows, but what's your gut, what's your hope, as a scientist, as a human, how many alien civilizations are out there?

Ariel Ekblaw 40:57 Hmm. As a ex-physicist, I'm now much more on the aerospace engineering side for space architecture, but as an ex- ex-physicist, I hope it is, uh, prolific. I think the challenge is, if it's as prolific as we would hope, if there are many, many, many civilizations, then the question is, where are they? Why haven't we heard from them? Uh, and the Fermi paradox, is there some great filter that life only gets to some level of sophistication and then kills itself off through war or through famine or through different challenges that filter that, uh, society out of existence? And it would be an interesting question to try to understand if the universe was teeming with life, why haven't we found it or heard from it yet, to our knowledge?

Lex Fridman 41:42 Yeah. I, I personally believe that it's teeming with life. And you're right. I think that's a really useful productive engineering scientific question of what kind of great filter-

Ariel Ekblaw 41:51 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 41:51 ... can just be destroying (laughs) all of that life or preventing it from just constantly talking to, to us silly descendants of apes? That's a really nice question. Like, what are the ways civilizations could destroy themselves? And-

Ariel Ekblaw 42:09 There's too many, sadly.

Lex Fridman 42:10 Well, we, I don't think we've come up with most of them yet.

Ariel Ekblaw 42:13 (laughs) That's also probably true.

Lex Fridman 42:15 (laughs) That's the thing. It's, uh ... I mean, and, and, like, if you look at nuclear war, some of it is physics, but some of it is game theory. It's, um, it's human nature. It's how societies build themselves, how they interact, uh, how we create and resolve conflict. And it gets back to the human question on when you're doing long-term space travel, how do you maintain this dynamical system of, of flawed, uh, irrational humans such that it persists throughout time?

Ariel Ekblaw 42:48 Right.

Lex Fridman 42:48 So, not just maintaining a biological body, but get people from not murdering each other. Like, like each other sufficiently to where you kind of...... fit well.

Ariel Ekblaw 42:57 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 42:57 But I think, uh, you know, if, uh, uh, songs or poetry or books taught me anything, if you like each other a little too much, um, I mean, the problems arise 'cause then there's always a third person who also likes, and then there's the drama. It's like, w- I can't believe you did that, and then last night, whatever. So, and then there's beer-

Ariel Ekblaw 43:14 Gets complicated quickly. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 43:17 ... and then it gets complicated quickly. Okay, anyway, um, back to the dumb questions 'cause you, you, you answered this, um... There's an interview where you answer a bunch of cool little questions from, um, from y- young students and so on-

Ariel Ekblaw 43:27 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 43:27 ... about, like, space.

Ariel Ekblaw 43:28 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 43:29 Uh, one of them was, uh, playing music in space.

Ariel Ekblaw 43:32 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 43:32 Um,

Lex Fridman 43:33 and y- he mentioned something about what kind of instruments you could use to play music in space. Could you, could you mention about, uh, like, does Spotify work in space? And if I wanted to do a live performance, what, w- what kind of instruments would I need?

Ariel Ekblaw 43:47 Yeah. I mean, you referenced culture before, and I think this is one of the most exciting things that we have at our fingertips, which is to define a new culture for space exploration. We don't just have to import cultural artifacts from Earth, um, to make life worth living in space. And this musical instrument that you referenced was a design of an object that could only be performed in microgravity.

Lex Fridman 44:09 Oh, cool.

Ariel Ekblaw 44:10 So it doesn't sound the same way when it's, um, it's a percussive instrument, when it's rattled or moved in a gravity environment. It is unique.

Lex Fridman 44:17 Is, is there... Can we look it up?

Ariel Ekblaw 44:18 It's called the Telemetron. Yep.

Lex Fridman 44:19 (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 44:19 It's created by- (laughs) Yeah.

Lex Fridman 44:20 Of course it's called the Telemetron.

Ariel Ekblaw 44:21 Telemetron.

Lex Fridman 44:22 That is so awesome.

Ariel Ekblaw 44:23 Uh, created by Sans Fish and Nicole L'Huillier, two amazing, uh, graduate students and staff researchers on my team.

Lex Fridman 44:29 What does it look like?

Ariel Ekblaw 44:30 It, uh, it looks steampunk, actually. Yeah.

Lex Fridman 44:33 That's awesome.

Ariel Ekblaw 44:33 Yeah, it's a pretty cool design. It looks like it's a geometric solid that has these interesting artifacts on the inside, and it has a lot of sensors, actually, additionally on the inside, like IMUs, inertial measurement sensors, that allow it to detect when it's floating and when it's not floating and provides this really kind of ethereal, um... They later sonify it, so they use electronic music to turn it into a symphony or turn it into a piece. And yeah, this is the object, the Telemetron.

Lex Fridman 44:59 How does a human interact with it?

Ariel Ekblaw 45:01 Uh, by tossing it. So it's an interactive musical instrument. It actually requires another partner.

Lex Fridman 45:06 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 45:06 So the idea was that it's something like a dance, um, or just, like, something like a choreography in space.

Lex Fridman 45:12 Got it. And the, speaking of which, you also talked about sports-

Ariel Ekblaw 45:15 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 45:15 ... and, uh, like, ball sports, like playing soccer.

Ariel Ekblaw 45:18 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 45:18 So what... So y- you mentioned that... So your, your muscles can move at full speed, and then if you push off the wall lightly, you c- you fly across.

Ariel Ekblaw 45:27 You zoom.

Lex Fridman 45:28 Zoom, zoom across.

Ariel Ekblaw 45:28 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 45:29 So how does the physics of that work? Or can you still play soccer, for example, in space?

Ariel Ekblaw 45:34 You can, but one of the most, uh, intuitive things that we all learn as babies, right, is whenever you throw something, if I was gonna toss something to you, I'd toss it up 'cause I know that it has to compensate for the fact that that Keplerian arc is gonna draw it down, the, you know, equations of motion are gonna draw it down. I would, in space, I would just shoot something directly towards you.

Lex Fridman 45:54 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 45:54 So, like, straight line of sight. And so that would be very different for any type of ball sport is to retrain your human mind to have that as your intuitive arc of motion or lack of arc.

Lex Fridman 46:04 From your experience, from understanding how astronauts get adjusted to the stuff, how long does it take to adjust to the physics of this world-

Ariel Ekblaw 46:11 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 46:11 ... this other world?

Ariel Ekblaw 46:13 So even after one or two parabolic flights, you can gain a certain facility with moving in that environment. I think most astronauts would say maybe several days on station or a week on station, and their brain flips. It's amazing the plasticity (laughs) of the human brain and how quickly they are able to adapt. And so pretty quickly, they become creatures of this new environment.

Lex Fridman 46:36 Okay, so that's cool. It's, it's, it's creating a little bit of an experience. What about if you go for more than 100 days-

Ariel Ekblaw 46:42 Mm.

Lex Fridman 46:42 ... for one year, for two years, for three years?

Ariel Ekblaw 46:45 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 46:46 What challenges start to emerge in that case?

Ariel Ekblaw 46:49 So Scott Kelly wrote this amazing book after he spent a year in space, and he's a twin. It's absolutely fantastic-

Lex Fridman 46:54 (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 46:54 ... that NASA got to do a twin study.

Lex Fridman 46:56 Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw 46:57 It's perfect. Um, so he wrote a lot about his experience on the health side of what changed, things like, um, bone density, muscle atrophy, eyesight changing because the shape of your eyeball changes, which changes your lens, which changes how you see. If we're then thinking about the challenges between a year and three years, especially if we're doing that three-year trip to Mars for your friend, who you asked earlier-

Lex Fridman 47:20 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw 47:20 ... then you have to think about, um, nutrition. And so how are you keeping all of these different needs for your body alive? How are you protecting astronauts against radiation, either having some type of a shell on the spacecraft, which is expensive because it's heavy? You know, if it's something like lead, a really effective radiation shell, it's gonna be a lot of mass. Or is there a pill that could be taken to try to make you, um, less, uh, in danger of some of the radiat- uh, radiation effects? A lot of this has not yet been answered, but radiation is a really significant challenge for that three-year journey.

Lex Fridman 47:55 And what are the negative effects of radiation on the human body out in space?

Ariel Ekblaw 47:59 A higher likelihood to develop cancer at a younger age. Um, so you'd probably be able to get there and get back, but you'd find yourself, um, in the same way as if you were exposed to significant radiation on Earth, you'd find significant bad health effects as you age.

Lex Fridman 48:14 What do you think about, like, decades?

Ariel Ekblaw 48:17 Mm.

Lex Fridman 48:17 Do you think about decades, or is this-

Ariel Ekblaw 48:20 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 48:20 ... like, an entire human lifetime?

Ariel Ekblaw 48:21 I think about centuries- (laughs)

Lex Fridman 48:23 Centuries.

Ariel Ekblaw 48:23 ... (laughs) for my space arch- But yeah, for decades, I think as soon as we get past the three-year mark, we'll absolutely want, somewhere between three years and a decade, we'll want artificial gravity. And we know how to do that actually. The engineering questions still need to be tweaked for how we really implement it, but the science is there to know how we would spin habitats in orbit, generate that force. So even if the entire habitat's not spinning, you at least have a treadmill part of the space station that is spinning. And you can spend some fraction of your day in a near to 1 G environment and keep your body healthy.

Lex Fridman 48:56 Wait, literally from just spinning?

Ariel Ekblaw 48:58 From spinning, yes, centripetal force.

Lex Fridman 49:00 That's fascinating.

Ariel Ekblaw 49:00 So you generate this force. If you've ever been in those, um, carnival rides, the Gravitrons that spin you up around the side, that's the concept. And this is actually one of the reasons why we are spinning out a new company from my MIT lab.

Lex Fridman 49:13 Spinning out, ha.

Ariel Ekblaw 49:14 Spinning out, ha.

Lex Fridman 49:14 (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 49:14 That was accidental, but well, (laughs) well-noticed space pun. It's, it can possibly

Lex Fridman 49:18 (laughs) Dad jokes.

Ariel Ekblaw 49:19 ... fall your way.

Lex Fridman 49:19 All right.

Ariel Ekblaw 49:20 Um, but yeah, we're spinning out a new company to look at next generation space architecture, and how do we actually scale humanity's access to space? And one of the areas that we want to look at is artificial gravity.

Lex Fridman 49:34 Is there a name yet?

Ariel Ekblaw 49:35 Yep, there's a name. We are brand new. We are just exiting stealth mode, so your podcast listeners will literally be among some of the first to hear about it. It's called Aurelia Institute.

Lex Fridman 49:44 Beautiful.

Ariel Ekblaw 49:45 Aurelia is an Old English word for chrysalis, and the idea with this is that we, humanity, collectively are at this next stage of our metamorphosis, like a chrysalis, into a space-faring species. And so we felt that this was a good time, a necessary time, to think about next generation space architecture but also Starfleet Academy, if you know that reference from Star Trek.

Lex Fridman 50:09 (inhales) Uh,

Lex Fridman 50:12 yes. So let me ask a silly-sounding, ridiculous-sounding, but probably extremely important question.

Ariel Ekblaw 50:18 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 50:20 Sex in space, including intercourse, conception, procreation, birth, like, being a parent.

Ariel Ekblaw 50:27 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 50:27 Like raising the baby.

Ariel Ekblaw 50:29 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 50:29 So basically from birth, well, from the before the birth part, um, like the birds and the bees and stuff, and then the, uh, the whole thing. How complicated is that? I remember looking at the... (laughs) Thank you. Thank... (laughs) I remember looking at this exact Wikipedia page actually, and it's, uh, I remember being, uh, the, the Wikipedia page is Sex in Space, and fascinated how difficult of an engineering problem the whole thing is. Is that something you think about too, how to have generations of humans?

Ariel Ekblaw 50:59 Of humans.

Lex Fridman 50:59 Self, uh, self-replicating organism.

Ariel Ekblaw 51:03 Societies, yeah. They are.

Lex Fridman 51:03 Yeah, societies essentially.

Ariel Ekblaw 51:04 They are.

Lex Fridman 51:04 I mean, I guess with micro, like if you solve the gravity problem, you solve a lot of these problems, yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw 51:09 That's the hope, yeah, is like this central challenge of microgravity to human reproduction. But we do host a workshop every year at Beyond the Cradle, which is the space event that we run at MIT, and we always do one on pregnancy in space or motherhood or raising children in space 'cause there are huge questions. Um, there have been a few mammal studies that have looked at reproduction in space, but there are still really major questions about, how does it work? How does the fetus evolve in microgravity if you were pregnant in space? And I think the near term answer is just gonna be, we need to be able to give humans a 1G environment for that phase of our development.

Lex Fridman 51:45 Yeah, so there's some studies on mice in microgravity, and it's interesting. Like, I think the mice, like one of them, the mice weren't able to walk or, like, their, their understanding of physics, I guess, is off or something like that.

Ariel Ekblaw 51:56 So, yeah. The mental model when you're really young and you're kind of, um, getting your mental model of physics, we do think that that would change, um, kids' abilities to, if they were born in microgravity, their ability to have that intuition around an Earth-based 1G environment might be missing-

Lex Fridman 52:13 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 52:13 ... 'cause a lot of that is really crystallized in early development, early childhood development. So that makes sense that they would see that in mice, yeah.

Lex Fridman 52:20 So what about life when we, uh, choose to park our vehicles on another planet, on the moon-

Ariel Ekblaw 52:28 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 52:29 ... but let's go to Mars. First of all, does that excite you, humans going to Mars, like stepping foot on Mars, and when do you think it'll happen?

Ariel Ekblaw 52:38 It does excite me. I think visionaries like Elon are working to make that happen in terms of building the road to space. We are really excited about building out the human lived experience of space once you get there. So how are you gonna grow your food? What is your habitat gonna look like? I think it's profoundly exciting, but I do think that there's a little bit of a misunderstanding of Mars anywhere in the near future being anything like a replacement for Earth.

Lex Fridman 53:05 Mm.

Ariel Ekblaw 53:05 So it is good for humanity to have these other pockets of our civilization that can expand out beyond Earth, but, uh, Mars is not, in its current state, a good home for humanity. Too many perchlorates in the soil. You can't use that soil to grow crops. Atmosphere is too thin. Certainly can't breathe it, but it's also just really thin compared to our atmosphere. A lot of different challenges that would have to be fundamentally changed on that planet to make it a good home for a large human civilization.

Lex Fridman 53:33 How does a large civilization of humans get built on Mars, and w- what, what do you think, um, where do you think it gets, starts being difficult? So can you have a small base of like 10 people essentially, uh, kind of like the International Space Station kind of-

Ariel Ekblaw 53:48 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 53:48 ... situation? And then can you get it to 100, to 1,000, to a million? Are there some interesting challenges there that worry you, saying that Mars is just not a good backup at this time-

Ariel Ekblaw 53:59 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 54:00 ... for Earth?

Ariel Ekblaw 54:01 I think small outpost, absolutely, like McMurdo, right? So we have these models of really extreme environments on Earth, in Antarctica, for example, where humans have been able to go and make a, a sustainable settlement. McMurdo-style life on Mars, probably feasible in the 2030s. So we wanna send the first human missions to Mars, uh, maybe as early as the end of this decade, more likely early 2030s. Moving anywhere beyond that in terms of a place where h- like an entire human life would be lived, where it's not just you go for a three-month deployment and you come back, that is actually the big challenge line, is just saying is there enough, um, technological sophistication that can be brought that far out into space? If you imagine your electronics break, there's no RadioShack. (laughs) This dates me a little bit, but my mind jumps to RadioShack.

Lex Fridman 54:50 (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 54:50 But there's no, you know, there's no supply chains on Mars that can supply the level of technological sophistication for all the products that we rely on on day-to-day life. So you'd be going back to actually a very simple existence, more like pioneer life out West in the story of the US, uh, for example. And I think that the future of larger scale gatherings of humans in orbit, or sorry, in space, is actually gonna be in microgravity, floating-

Lex Fridman 55:18 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 55:18 ... space cities, not so much trying to, um, establish settlements on the surface.

Lex Fridman 55:25 So you think sort of a significant engineering investment in terms of our efforts and money should be on large...... um, spaceships that perhaps are doing this kind of, um, self-assembly, all these kinds of things, and doing an orbit.

Ariel Ekblaw 55:41 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 55:42 Maybe b- building a giant donut around the planet over time.

Ariel Ekblaw 55:45 Yeah, that is the goal, and I think the current political climate is such that you can't get the trillion-dollar investment to build, to start from scratch and build the sci-fi megastructure. But if you can build it in fits and starts, in little different pieces, which is another advantage of self-assembly, it's much more like how nature works, so it's biomimicry-inspired way for humanity to scale out in space.

Lex Fridman 56:09 You know, whether it's out in space or on Mars, the idea that sort of two people fall in love, they have sex, uh, a child is born, and then that couple has to teach that child that, like, we, (laughs) that they came from Earth. I, I just love the idea that somebody's born on Mars or out in space, and you have to be like, that th- this is not actually, like, the original home.

Ariel Ekblaw 56:36 Right.

Lex Fridman 56:36 Just them looking at e- at Earth and being like, "This is where we came from," I don't know, that's really inspiring to me. And the child being really confused and then wanting to go back to TikTok or whatever the, or whatever the, they do. (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 56:47 (laughs) Whatever they do in that era.

Lex Fridman 56:48 (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 56:49 I mean, there's great sci-fi, right, about, um, people being born on Mars, and because it's a lower gravity environment, they're taller, they're more gangly-

Lex Fridman 56:56 Mm. Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw 56:56 ... if they were actually able to develop there, and then they come back to Earth, and they're like second-class citizens 'cause they can't function here in the same way 'cause the gravity's too strong for them. You see this in series like The Expanse with the Belters and these, you know, different societies that, uh, if we were to succeed in having human societies grow up in different pockets, it's not necessarily going to be easy for them to always come back to Earth as their home.

Lex Fridman 57:20 Yeah, different cultures form, which is the positive way of phrasing it, but it's also this human history teaches us that we have, we like to form the other.

Ariel Ekblaw 57:29 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Lex Fridman 57:29 So there's this kind of conflict that naturally emerges. Um,

Lex Fridman 57:33 let me ask another sort of dark question. Uh, what do you think about, coming from a military family, uh, there's still, sadly, wars in the world. Uh, do you think-

Ariel Ekblaw 57:43 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 57:44 ... wars, uh, military conflicts will follow us into space? B- wars between nations. Like, fr- from my perspective currently, it just seems like space is a place for scientists and engineers to explore ideas.

Ariel Ekblaw 57:59 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 58:00 But the more and more progress you make, does it worry you that nations start to step in and form, you know, that's, that go out on full-out military conflict, whether it's in cyberspace, in space, or a actual hot war?

Ariel Ekblaw 58:18 I am really concerned about that, and I do think for decades, the scientific community in space has hung onto this notion from the 1967, uh, Outer Space Treaty, which is space is the province of all humankind, peaceful uses of outer space only. But I do think the rise in tensions and the geopolitical scene that we're seeing, um, I do, yeah, I do harbor a lot of concern about hot wars following humanity out into space, and it's worth trying to tie nations together with more collaboration to avoid that happening. The International Space Station is a great example. I think it's something like 18 countries are party to this treaty. It might be less, it might be more. Um, and then, of course, there's a smaller number of countries that actually send astronauts. But even, uh, at the fall of the Soviet Union and through some tense times with Russia, the ISS had been a place where the US and Russia were actually able to collaborate between Mir and ISS.

Lex Fridman 59:13 Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw 59:14 I think it'd be really important right now, in particular, to find other platforms where these hegemonic powers in the world and developing world nations can come and collaborate on the future of space and purposefully intertwine our success so that there's a danger to multiple parties if somebody's a bad actor.

Lex Fridman 59:33 So we're now talking as, uh, there's a war in Ukraine, and I haven't been sleeping much. I have family, um, friends, colleagues in both countries, and I'm just talking to a lot of people, many of whom are crying, refugees.

Ariel Ekblaw 59:47 Mm.

Lex Fridman 59:48 And I, you know, there's a basic human compassion and love for each other that I believe technology can help catalyze and accelerate. But there's also science. There's, there's something about rockets. There's something about, and I mean, like, space exploration, that inspires the world about the positive possibilities of the human species. So in terms of Ukraine and Russia and China and India and the United States and Europe and everywhere else, it seems like collaborating on s- giant space projects is one way to escape these wars, um, to escape these sort of geopolitical conflicts. I mean, there's something, there's so much camaraderie to the whole thing, and um, even in this little, um, period of human history we're living, uh, through, it seems like that's essential. Even with, through this pandemic, there is something so inspiring about those, like, SpaceX rockets going up, for example.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:00:52 Sure.

Lex Fridman 1:00:53 Uh, this reinvigoration of the space exploration efforts by the commercial sector, I don't know. That was ... I, I had some, as many of us have, sort of some dark times during the, uh, this pandemic, just like loneliness and sometimes emotion and anger and just f- and just hopelessness and politics. And then you look at those rockets going up, and it just gives you hope. So I, I think that's an understated sort of value of space exploration, is a thing that unites us and gives us hope, obviously also inspires young generations and young minds to also contribute in not necessarily in space exploration, but in all of science and literature and poetry. There's just something about when you look up to the stars...

Ariel Ekblaw 1:01:38 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:01:38 ... that makes you dream.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:01:39 Mm. Very true.

Lex Fridman 1:01:40 And, um, so that, that's a really...... good reason to sort of invest in this, whether it's building giant mega structure, which is so freaking cool, but also, uh, colonizing Mars. (sighs) Yeah. It's, it's something to look forward to, something that, uh, that, that, uh ... And not make it a, a domain of war, but a, a, a domain of human collaboration and human compassion, I think.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:02:06 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:02:06 Uh, you're the founder and director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. It includes a ton of projects.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:02:14 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:02:14 So, I just wanted to, um ... They're focused, I guess, on life in space from astrobiology, like we talked about, to habitats. Are there some other interesting projects, part of this initiative that you are, um ... that pop to mind that you find particularly cool?

Ariel Ekblaw 1:02:29 Absolutely. One is the future of in-space manufacturing. So, if we're gonna build large-scale space structures, yes, it's great to ship them up from Earth and self-assemble them, but what about extrusion in orbit? It's one of the best technologies, uh, to leverage in microgravity because you can extrude a particularly long beam that would sag in a normal gravity environment, but might be able to become the basis of a truss or a large-scale space structure. So, we're doing miniature tests of extrusion and are excited to fly this on the International Space Station in a few months. We are working on swarm robots. Uh, we have just announced actually MIT's return to the moon. So, my organization is leading this mission for MIT, going back to the surface of the moon as early as the end of this year, 2022.

Lex Fridman 1:03:15 Wow.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:03:15 Maybe early 2023. And trying to take data from our research payloads at this historic South Pole site-

Lex Fridman 1:03:24 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:03:24 ... where NASA's supposed to send the first humans back on the Artemis 3 mission. So, our hope is to directly support that human mission with our data.

Lex Fridman 1:03:32 How does that connect to the swarm, uh, aspects? Does it connect? Does-

Ariel Ekblaw 1:03:35 Yes. Yeah. So, we're actually gonna fly one of the little AstroAnts. That's the current plan.

Lex Fridman 1:03:39 Nice.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:03:39 One of the little swarm robots on the top of a rover. Um, that's part of the mission.

Lex Fridman 1:03:44 Ant riding a rover? (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 1:03:45 Yes. An ant ... Exactly. An ant riding a rover. That rover gets packed in a lander. That lander gets packed in a SpaceX rocket. So, it's a whole nesting dolls situation to get to, to get to the moon.

Lex Fridman 1:03:55 Mother of robot dragons.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:03:57 Yes. Yeah. (laughs) Exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:03:58 Okay. So, this one, uh, a swarm of one?

Ariel Ekblaw 1:04:01 Swarm of one. Exactly. We're testing out ... It's a tech demonstration mission, not a true, not a true swarm. Yeah. There they are. Those are the AstroAnts.

Lex Fridman 1:04:09 Wow. And they ... This was a distributed system, and they in, in theory, you could have a ton of these.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:04:14 Yes. These could also be centralized. So, they, they have wireless technology that could also talk to a central base station, and we'll be assessing kind of case by case whether it makes sense to operate them in a decentralized swarm or to command them in a centralized swarm.

Lex Fridman 1:04:29 Each robot is equipped with, uh, four magnetic wheels which enable the robot to attach to any magnetic surface, so you can operate basically in any environment. He tested the ... Uh, "We tested the mobility of all robots on different materials in a microgravity environment."

Ariel Ekblaw 1:04:44 On the Vomit Comet prior to going to the moon.

Lex Fridman 1:04:46 On the Vomit Comet.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:04:46 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:04:46 That must look so cool. So, they're basically moving along different s- like metallic surfaces.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:04:52 Yeah. Exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:04:54 Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:04:54 It's interesting when you, you know, just a minute ago talking about the reflection of how space can be so aspirational and so uniting. There's a great quote from Bill Anders from the Apollo 8 mission to the moon, which is he ... It's the Earthrise photo that was taken, where you see the Earth coming up over the horizon of the moon. And the quote is something along the lines of, "We came all the way to discover the moon, and what we really discovered was the Earth." This really powerful image looking back. And so we're also trying to think for our lunar mission. We realize we're a very privileged group at MIT to get the opportunity to do this. How could we bring humanity along with us? And so one of the things we're still testing out, I don't know if we're gonna be able to, to swing it, would be to do something like a Twitch Plays Pokemon-

Lex Fridman 1:05:35 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:05:35 ... but with a robot.

Lex Fridman 1:05:36 (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 1:05:37 So, let a lot of people on Earth actually control the robot or at least benefit from the data that we're gathering and try to release the data openly. Uh, so we're exploring a couple different ideas for how do we engage more people in this mission.

Lex Fridman 1:05:48 That would be surreal to be able to interact in some way with a thing that's out there-

Ariel Ekblaw 1:05:53 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:05:54 ... on another surface altogether.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:05:55 Direct connection. Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:05:56 Direct connection. Um, I think about artificial intelligence in that same way, which is like building robots puts a mirror to us humans.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:06:06 Certainly.

Lex Fridman 1:06:07 It makes us, like wonder about, like what is intelligence? What is consciousness? And what is actually valuable about human beings? When, when a AI system learns to play chess better than humans, you start to let go of this idea that humans are special because of intelligence.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:06:22 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:06:22 It's, it's something else. Um. So, maybe the flame of human consciousness, it's the capacity to, uh, to f- to feel deeply, to sort of, to both suffer and to love. All those things. And that, that ... Somehow AI, to me, sort of puts a mirror to that. You mentioned, uh, HAL 9000.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:06:41 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:06:41 You had to bring it up with, uh, with, with these swarm bots, uh, crawling on the surface of your, uh, cocoon in space.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:06:50 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:06:50 I mean ... All right. Let me, uh, steel man the, um, the HAL 9000 perspective here.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:06:56 Okay. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:06:58 (laughs) The poor guy w- just wanted to maintain the mission.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:07:01 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:07:02 And the astronauts were ... I mean, and I, I don't know if people often talk about that, but, you know, um, like doctors have to make difficult decisions, too. When there's limited resources, you actually do have to sacrifice human life often 'cause you have to make, uh, decisions.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:07:16 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:07:16 And I think HAL was probably making that kind of decision, uh, about what, what's more important, the lives of individual astronauts or-

Ariel Ekblaw 1:07:25 The mission.

Lex Fridman 1:07:25 ... the mission.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:07:26 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:07:26 And I, I feel like AIs or other humans n- will need to make these decisions, and it also feels like AI systems will need to help make those decisions. I don't know. Um, I guess my question is about greater and greater collective intelligence-

Ariel Ekblaw 1:07:44 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:07:45 ... by systems. Um-Do you worry about that? Uh, what is the right way to sort of solve this problem, keeping a human in the loop?

Ariel Ekblaw 1:07:56 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:07:56 Do you think about this kind of stuff? Or are they sufficiently dumb now, the robots, that that's not yet on the horizon to think about?

Ariel Ekblaw 1:08:03 I think it should be on the horizon. It's always good to think about these things early, because we make a lot of technical design decisions at this phase working with swarm robots, that it would be better to have thought about some of these questions early in the life cycle of a project. There is a real interest in NASA right now thinking about the future of human-robot interaction, HRI, and what is the right synergy in terms of level of control for the human versus level of dependence or control for the robot, and we're beginning to test out more of these scenarios. For example, the Gateway Space Station, which is meant to be in orbit around the moon as a staging base for the surface operations, is meant to be able to function autonomously with no humans in it for months at a time, 'cause they think it's going to be seasonal. They think we might not be constantly staffing it. So this will be a really great test of, I don't know that, uh, anybody is yet worried about HAL 9000 evolving, but certainly just the robustness of some of these AI systems that might be asked to autonomously maintain the station while the humans are away-

Lex Fridman 1:09:02 Mm-hmm.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:09:03 Um, or detection algorithms that are going to say, you know, if you had a human pilot, they might see debris in orbit and steer around it. There'll be a lot of autonomous navigation that has to happen. That'll be one of the early test beds where we'll start to get a little bit closer to that future.

Lex Fridman 1:09:16 Well, the HRI component is really interesting to me, um, especially when the I includes, like, almost friendship, because-

Ariel Ekblaw 1:09:25 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:09:25 ... like, people don't realize this, I think, that we, you know, we humans long for connection, and when you have even a basic interaction that's just, like, supposed to be just, like, serving you or something, you still project. It's still a, it's still a source of, um, meaning and connection.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:09:44 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:09:44 (laughs) And so you do have to think about that. I mean, HAL 9000, we, you know, the movie maybe doesn't portray it that way, but I'm sure there's a relationship there between the astronauts and the, and the robot.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:09:56 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:09:56 Especially when you have greater and greater level of intelligence, and maybe that addresses the, the happiness question too.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:10:03 Yeah. I think there's a, there's a great book by Kate Darling, who's one of my-

Lex Fridman 1:10:06 Oh, she's great.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:10:07 ... colleagues at MIT.

Lex Fridman 1:10:08 Yeah, she's amazing. We been, she's already been on this podcast, but we talk all the time, and we're s- we're supposed to talk, and we've been missing each other, and we're going to make it happen soon.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:10:18 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:10:18 Come, uh, come down to Texas, Kate.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:10:20 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:10:20 All right. Anyway, yeah, she's amazing, and she has this book. She has, her whole work is about this-

Ariel Ekblaw 1:10:25 Connection with robots, yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:10:26 This beautiful connection that we have with robots, but I think it's greater and greater importance when it's out in space.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:10:31 Space.

Lex Fridman 1:10:32 'Cause it could help alleviate some of the loneliness.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:10:34 Right. One of the projects in the book that I gave you, which is this catalog of the projects that we've worked on over the last five years, is this social robot that was developed at the Media Lab, and we, one of the first years in 2017 that we flew a zero-G flight, we took the social robot along and tried to do a little bit of a very scaled-down human study to look at these questions. Because you do imagine that we would form a bond, a real bond with the social robots that might be not just serving us on a mission, but really be our teammates on a future mission. And I do think that that could have a powerful role in the mental health and just the stability of a crew, is to have some other robot friends come along.

Lex Fridman 1:11:11 What do you... By the way, the book you mentioned is Into the Anthropocosmos: A Whole Space Catalog From the (laughs) Space Catalog.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:11:21 (laughs) Get that reference?

Lex Fridman 1:11:22 Yeah, so call out to Earth Catalog, a whole space catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. Um, what about the happiness? You said that that's one of the problems of when you're out in space. How do you keep humans happy? Again, asking for a friend.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:11:38 Yes. (laughs) I mean, one of the big challenges is you can't just open a window or walk out a door and blow off steam, right? You can't just go somewhere to clear your head, and in that sense, you need to build habitats that are homes that really care for the humans inside them and have, whether it's biophilia and a place where you can go and feel like you're in nature, or a VR headset, which for some people is a, a poor simulacrum, but is maybe better than nothing. Um, you need to be thinking about these technological interventions that are going to have to be part of your home and be part of your maybe day-to-day ritual to keep you steady and balanced and happy or feeling fulfilled.

Lex Fridman 1:12:22 Mm-hmm. What about other humans, relationship with other humans?

Ariel Ekblaw 1:12:25 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:12:25 Do those get, do those get weird when you get past a certain number of humans?

Ariel Ekblaw 1:12:30 I'm not an expert in this area, but an anecdote that I'll share. My, uh, understanding is that NASA has still not decided whether it's better to send married couples or single crew members in terms of, uh, you want some level of stability. You don't want to have, uh, the drama of romantic relationships, like you were, you know, alluding to before, but they can't decide because married couples also fight- (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:12:50 Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:12:50 ... and have a really tough dynamic. And so there's a lot of open questions still to answer about, what is the ideal psychological makeup of a crew? And we're starting to test some of these things with the civilian crews that are going up with Inspiration4, like last fall with SpaceX, and Ax-1 that's going to fly in a few days here in March. As we begin to lengthen the, the time of those civilian crews, I think we'll start to learn a little bit more about just average, everyday human-to-human dynamics, and not the astronauts that are themselves selected to be perfect human specimens, very good to work with, easy to get along with.

Lex Fridman 1:13:23 I wish you collected more data about this pandemic.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:13:26 Mm.

Lex Fridman 1:13:26 Because I feel like it's a good rough simulation of what it'd be out in space. A lot of people were locked down. Some married couples, I think a lot of marriages broke up. A lot of marriages got closer together. Um, so it's like-

Ariel Ekblaw 1:13:39 It depends.

Lex Fridman 1:13:39 And then the, the single people, some of them went off the cliff, and some of them-

Ariel Ekblaw 1:13:44 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:13:44 ... discovered their new happiness and meaning and so on. It's a, it's a beautiful little experiment, a painful one.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:13:49 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:13:50 Is there a thorough way to really test that? To... 'Cause it's such a costly experiment-

Ariel Ekblaw 1:13:56 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:13:58 ... send humans up there, but I guess you can always return back to Earth if it's not working out. (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 1:14:02 That's what we hope. (laughs) That's what we hope, you don't have, like, a, you know, Apollo 13 situation-

Lex Fridman 1:14:07 Yeah.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:14:07 ... that doesn't quite make it back. But yeah, the, this is also why Mars is such a challenge. The moon is only three days away. That's a lot quicker to recover from if there's a psychological problem with the crew or any type of maintenance problem, anything. Three years is such a challenge compared to these other domains that we've been getting more used to in terms of human space flight. So this is a question that we will need to have explored more before we start really sending crews to Mars.

Lex Fridman 1:14:33 So you're a young scientist. Do you think, in your lifetime...

Ariel Ekblaw 1:14:38 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:14:39 ... you will go out into orbit, you will go out beyond into deep space and potentially step... You, I, I don't know if you can call yourself a civilian.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:14:53 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:14:53 I, I don't know if that's what you count as, but you as a s- as a, a curious ant, uh, from MIT, uh, land, step on Mars?

Ariel Ekblaw 1:15:03 Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:15:05 So you... (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 1:15:06 That's a firm, that's a firm-

Lex Fridman 1:15:07 Are you coming back? (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 1:15:07 ... firm yes. Yeah, I'm coming back. I don't want that one-way mission. I want the two-way mission. Um, but yes. I mean, I think we're already talking about a pretty near-term opportunity where I could send graduate students to the International Space Station.

Lex Fridman 1:15:19 (laughs) Of course.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:15:19 Yeah. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:15:19 Okay.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:15:19 So no. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:15:21 (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 1:15:21 Not the, not a s- you know, not a sacrifice. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:15:24 Right.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:15:24 No, but send graduate students-

Lex Fridman 1:15:25 For the experience. (laughs)

Ariel Ekblaw 1:15:26 For the experience. (laughs) Send graduate students to the ISS to do their research.

Lex Fridman 1:15:29 Yes.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:15:29 I do think w- you and I both would have an opportunity to go to a lunar base of some sort within our lifetime, and there's a good chance, if we really wanted to, we might have to really advocate for it, you know, apply to an astronaut program, there will be some avenues for humans in our lifetime to go to Mars.

Lex Fridman 1:15:46 What's the bar for, like, health? Do you s- do you think that bar will keep getting lower and lower in terms of how-

Ariel Ekblaw 1:15:54 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:15:54 ... healthy, how athletic, like how...

Ariel Ekblaw 1:15:56 Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:15:56 ... or the psychological profile? All those kinds of things.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:15:59 Yeah. For one, we're gonna build more robust habitats that don't depend on astronauts being so impeccably well-trained, so we're gonna make it better for inclusion, um, and just opening access to space. But there's a fantastic group called AstroAccess that is already helping disabled space flyers do zero-g flights and potentially get access to the ISS. And some of the things we think of as disabilities on Earth are hyper abilities in space. You don't need really powerful legs in space. What you'd really benefit from having is a third arm, um, more ways to kind of move yourself around and grip and interact. So we are already seeing a much more open-minded approach to who gets to go to space, and AstroAccess is a wonderful organization doing some of that work.

Lex Fridman 1:16:43 I'm hoping introversion, uh, will also be a superpower in space.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:16:47 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:16:47 Okay.

Lex Fridman 1:16:48 Well, first, I'd love to get your opinion on commercial space flight, what SpaceX, what Blue Origin are doing.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:16:53 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:16:54 And also, another question on top of that is, uh, because you've worked with, with a lot of different kinds of people culturally, what's the difference between, uh, SpaceX or commercial type of efforts, NASA, and MIT?

Ariel Ekblaw 1:17:10 And academia? (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:17:11 Academia.

Ariel Ekblaw 1:17:12 Yeah, so to the first part of your question, I am thrilled by all of the commercial activity in space. It has really empowered our program. So instead of me waiting for five years to get a grant and get the money from the grant and only then can you send a project to space, I go out and I fundraise, a lot like a startup founder, and I directly buy access to space on the International Space Station through SpaceX or Nanoracks, same with Blue Origin and their suborbital craft, same with Axiom now. Axiom's, uh, making plans for their own commercial space station. It's not out of the realm of possibility that in a few years, I will rent lab space in orbit. I will rent a module from the Axiom Space Station or the Orbital Reef, uh, which is the Blue Origin space station, or Nanoracks is thinking about, uh, Starlab Oasis. There's probably some other companies that I'm not even aware of yet that are doing commercial space habitats, so I think that's fabulous, um, and really empowering for