PassW0rd – 14 October 2020 (Space)

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you hear, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate. Hello, I’m Peter Warren. I’ve traveled past stars and planets to the Horsehead Nebula. On an unforgettable journey through the universe. Actually, I was standing on a narrow metal shelf in a warehouse in London’s Islington, watching it on a virtual reality wall display called the Digital Universe and developed by the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium. I have never forgotten how it felt. So I understand the urge that many people have to go to outer space. Space, just for the sheer wonder of it all. In this edition of Password on Resonance FM, I’ll be exploring the latest space missions and what they mean for humankind. Women naturally are a bit smaller than men, and from that perspective, from an engineering perspective, that makes them a good candidate for a crew member. When we start talking about going to Mars The exposure to the radiation environment is also critical there. And there’s slight differences between men and women and how they accommodate long duration to deep space radiation. So there are differences between men and women in how they adapt and work in space, but it’s nothing compared to the differences in the environments between Earth and the Moon and Mars and in between. We’re living in cultures that seem to be becoming more and more xenophobic. Others are being turned away and made to feel unwelcome. That’s not a great thing if we’re going to go out into wider space and possibly encounter other beings. Space is used for military purposes and always has been from day one. Let’s begin at the beginning with a bomb. The V-2 rocket was developed by Wernher von Braun as part of Adolf Hitler’s last-ditch revenge against the Allies during World War II. It was devastating. The rocket went up into space and landed with a deadly impact at least 3,000 times. There was no defense, and they killed and injured at least 9,000 people. V-2 launch testing, humanity’s first steps into space. London landmarks including Smithfield Market and the New Cross Woolworths stores were among the targets. Between 12,000 and 20,000 further people lost their lives in the manufacture of the V-2s by forced labour in Nazi concentration camps. The birth of modern spaceflight is a dark one. According to the UK government’s Fedden Mission report on the V-2 production facility, They were disgusted by what they found. They thought the factory the epitome of megalomaniac production and robot efficiency and layout. Everything was ruthlessly executed with utter disregard for humanitarian considerations. The record of V-2 facility Nordhausen is a most unenviable one. 250 of the slave workers perished every day. Due to overwork and malnutrition. Even Wernher von Braun, the missile designer, objected to the missiles used for bombing. He was thrown into jail for refusing to cooperate, as Rolf Heckel explains. Heckel is the founder of the Space Education Institute. His connection to V-2 rockets goes way back. My grandfather was one of the small airfield observers in the in the weather tower who has to watch that no bombers came to bomb this. And he was young, 30 years old, and he said to me as I was 10 years old, he said, Ralf, rockets are a fine thing, but only when you have freedom. Because after the Second World War, Wernher von Braun and 119 of his team went to the USA, and the Russian scientists, they came with the Red Army and went into the old factories Peenemünde and Nordhausen and also discovered the pieces. They created a technical piece and the politic used or misused that. Like you can create a car from Mercedes-Benz and use as a platform for guns or use it as rescue car for medical. Sure, the production of the V2 was a black point in history. The opposite side is that everyone who lives on that world, he use something from spaceflight. It starts with your telephone, it goes forward with your car and the navigation system or with the television and so on. So you use that. So it has a point of the history and everyone who used it has to know what is the history of that. And Wernher von Braun in Peenemünde controlled research, rocket research area. He had the chance that some military people played him the game that he was able to make his dissertation. But in the moment, so his colleagues told me, that as The ministry said, okay, now the rocket is flying. It was on the 2nd or 3rd of October 1942, 80 kilometers high. Now the rocket is flying, now we have to make TNT on it. But Wernher von Braun and his team don’t want to make TNT on it to destroy that because it was their baby. They want to put instruments in it, cameras, and to measure the atmosphere and something like that. Like that. And as he said this, he was sitting in jail for 4 weeks. Now, the possibilities that the V2 inadvertently launched for humanity to explore the solar system are once again veering off course because of the potential of conflict as vested interests drool over space’s infinite riches. According to international lawyers and august organizations like the United Nations, Space belongs to all of humanity, but it’s a view that political leaders and military commanders may sideline as the exploitation of space becomes a reality. During the September 2020 Air Force Association Air, Space, and Cyber Conference, the Chief of Space Operations, General John Raymond, said the United States doesn’t want to engage in warfare that begins or ends in space. But must be prepared for such a conflict. “We want to deter that from happening. However, if deterrence fails, a war that begins or extends into space will be fought over great distances at tremendous speeds,” Raymond said. Something the US Space Force has been working on since it was established as a separate branch of the military in December 2019. Dr. Bledin-Bowen is a lecturer in international relations at Leicester University and the author of War in Space. Well, space is used for military purposes and always has been from day one. So ever since Sputnik went up into space, it was more about its demonstration as the Soviet Union’s ability to launch nuclear weapons towards the United States rather than putting a radio beacon up in orbit. Similarly, the United States was able then to put spy satellites onto its long-range rockets and ICBMs to spy on the Soviet Union. And what you get from the 1980s is an increased reliance on satellites for military systems to start targeting each other, especially long-range strike capabilities. So what you have today is that continued maturation of those technologies that first really came about in the 1980s in terms of tactically relevant space-based intelligence and surveillance and reconnaissance systems. In terms of waging modern warfare, it’s not a done deal if you don’t have space support. It very much depends on the situation at hand, so, and the actual war that you’re talking about. So, for example, the United States still had a very tough time, putting it politely, in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite having an unchallenged dominance of outer space. It still couldn’t beat the Iraqi insurgency indefinitely. It still could not defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. We’re still dealing with those problems now, resistance still ongoing, because they managed to find ways to adapt to the way the Americans fight their wars and deploy their military forces and conduct long-range strikes or drone strikes. There are always countermeasures to the weapon systems you want to employ. And we’re seeing that a lot now in the Nagorno-Karabakh clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan, where you know, you can have all the drones you want and all the satellites, but if you have good air defense systems, you can start swatting them out of the sky if you want, if you have the right sort of systems. You can also start denying your visibility to the enemy as well. Al Qaeda in the invasion of Afghanistan, 2001, got very creative in hiding their forces from American space-based sensors and made life increasingly more difficult for long-range precision weapons. For the United States. It’s a different case, however, if you’re looking at, say, China versus America over Taiwan, perhaps, where there’s a greater dependency on satellite support systems for waging maritime and air warfare against a better-equipped adversary that also has its own space systems. But there are still always options and adaptations that you can have towards enemy space systems, and also mitigations if you also lose your own satellite support systems as well. Who actually owns space? What governs what people are after in space? Well, nobody owns space. So there’s no territory that’s owned by any state, and it’s not the right of any state or authority to portion out any territory in space. So when it comes to governing outer space, the only things that’s written down on paper really is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and then 3 other sub-treaties that are building on various principles in the Outer Space Treaty. The Moon Treaty or the Moon Agreement, which was put forward in 1979, hasn’t really been ratified and even signed by most countries in the world. And that was a treaty that was unpopular because it tried to resolve the problem of how to equitably distribute the potential resources of the Moon when only very few states have the capability to do so. And that is a debate we’re seeing now with all the hype and hot air now about lunar resources or asteroids. But we have the United States, Luxembourg, and possibly China who have written domestic laws which will allow companies to go to the moon or the asteroid and take the minerals or regolith and then sell it in those states. So they don’t claim the territory, but they can sell what they find. So this is mining of the Moon, mining of asteroids. That’s what we’re beginning to talk about now. Well, that’s what some people are beginning to talk about, which I think is very premature because nobody knows what the real bounties of the Moon are, if there are any to be had, and it’s still massively expensive to get there. So it’s one of the few areas where the legal discussions are far in advance of the actual problem actually needing to be resolved. So in that sense, it’s good. I mean, they are talking about helium-3 on the moon, aren’t they? I mean, they’ve been talking about that for a generation already. So I mean, there’s nothing significantly changed that makes it more accessible now. And the helium-3 bubble burst a while ago. So now it’s about utilizing the lunar regolith to make rocket fuel for rovers and other space probes that might launch from the moon. So you only need to send them to the moon and then refuel them at the Moon, which is far cheaper than giving them more fuel if they want to go to Jupiter or Saturn or Neptune or the outer planets, for example. What is regolith? The soil, the surface matter. And we can make fuel out of that? Well, that’s some scientific sort of proposals anyway. It’s not been proven, but if you can distill hydrogen and oxygen from what you find on the lunar surface, then you can theoretically make rocket fuel out of synthesizing, sort of mixing the compounds. But that’s— this is very much scientific exploration. This is not stuff that’s relevant for the global political economy or military power. It’s very much science and exploration, their sideshows, their prestige. It’s not actually altering, you know, the balance of power on Earth because it’s still so expensive to do anything in space, and we still don’t know enough about what the moon is actually made of to know whether there’s anything worth actually mining on a large economic scale there. Well, it’s cheese, isn’t it? Yeah, I don’t think Wallace ever figured out what sort of cheese it tasted like in the end. Of course, you know as well as I do that the Moon isn’t made of cheese. It’s a rock. The Chinese Chang’e 4 rover went to explore the possibility of mining the Moon last year, and Chang’e 5 is scheduled to lift off next month. Data from the 2019 lunar rover samples has been made available to all humanity, and that’s one of the reasons why Chang’e 4 was just awarded the annual prize by the International Astronautical Federation, currently holding its conference in cyberspace. The possibility of finding a wealth of minerals on the moon and in the asteroids is not enough, though, to reinvigorate the 50-year-old US space program during the countdown to a presidential election, with a trade war against China in full swing. A bigger goal is in sight: Mars. Coincidentally, the red planet is closer to the Earth this week than at any time during the past 17 years. Yet, can the United States just blast off into space, fueled and provisioned by commercial supply rockets like Elon Musk’s SpaceX? Isn’t there a law against it, or at least some kind of cosmic air traffic control system? Here’s Professor Stephen Freeland at the University of Western Sydney in Australia. He is also the co-chair of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which discusses the exploration, exploitation, and utilization of space resources. There are 5 treaties, but they, they have quite a few fundamental principles. Around the fact that space can’t be colonised, the fact that there’s an overall notion of peacefulness, peaceful uses of space. There are limitations on certain types of weapons. There’s a liability regime if things go wrong and there’s collisions. There’s a responsibility regime so that the UK is responsible for all of its citizens’ actions in space and what they do in space. You know, fundamental principles that work really well, and around cooperation and taking account of others’ interests and all of that. So those treaties— and so that was the 1967, we know it as the Outer Space Treaty, it’s got a longer name, and that’s a fundamental framework principle treaty, like the Geneva Conventions are for warfare, like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is for the law of the sea. This is the fundamental one with the fundamental principles The subsequent 4 treaties essentially add some flesh to that. The last of those treaties was in ’79. We know that as the Moon Agreement, and that was a treaty about mining the moon. So the discussions that are sexy now were also on the agenda then, and that really highlighted this notion of how do we get the benefits, because only a few people could actually do that. And in that treaty, through weight of numbers of voting with all these newly independent countries, it says, you know, if we set up a regime to exploit these resources, we have to do it safely, sustainably, and benefits somehow have to be shared on an equitable basis amongst everybody. And those discussions were going on, because it’s all politics, at exactly the same time that the same discussions were going on with the same diplomats about mining the deep seabed in the Law of the Sea. So the Moon Treaty is 1979 and the Law of the Sea Treaty is 1982. And even though they’re 3 years different, they’re essentially simultaneous and the negotiations for them were simultaneous and the same people were going from meeting to meeting. And so the same issues come up in the Law of the Sea. And the Law of the Sea also says, sure, if you’re going to mine the deep seabed, We’re going to do it safely, sustainably, and you’ve got to share the benefits. And so exactly the same thing happened in both treaties. The big boys and girls said, okay, well, we’re not going to sign up because we don’t believe— we’re spending all the money, effort, R&D, etc. Why should we share the benefits? Even though the underlying notion is about cooperation, but geopolitics, it was all about geopolitics and ideological differences. So in terms of those countries that haven’t signed up, then I understand it’s the big players that haven’t signed up. So the UK, the US, the Russia. Correct, correct. To the Moon Agreement. In fact, there’s only— there, that the US, Russia, China, and there’s only 18 countries that have signed the Moon Agreement, right, ratified it, including my country, Australia. So I’m very proud of my country. So the Moon Agreement And the United States has already said this. They don’t regard that as part of any basis for discussion in the discussions that I’ll be moderating. And there’s lots of other preliminary discussions going on. But there are lessons to be learned from some of the things there. So we don’t have any more treaties since ’79 because that treaty brought these— brought this raw difference, right? But we have lots of Since then, you know, technology is racing ahead. So we have lots of other types of instruments that are not traditional law binding, but they’re codes of conduct, they’re guidelines, they’re UN principles about a whole range of different things that— and law, especially when it comes to space, it’s all about regulating behavior and leading to behavioral norms which are responsible to allow us to move sustainably forward. Well, earlier we heard Dr. Bledyn-Bowen saying that flying to the moon is a sideshow, a distraction from the true weaponized nature of spaceflight. At the American space agency NASA’s mission control, lunar architect Pat Troutman doesn’t see it that way. He’s focused on scientific exploration and excited about preparations for the new Artemis mission to put humans on the moon again. 54 years after that first giant leap for mankind. Their first challenge when they step foot on the South Pole of the Moon is not going to be the gravity. It’s going to be the lighting conditions, because when you’re on the South Pole of the Moon, it’s very much like the South Pole of the Earth. The sun is always at the horizon. It sort of goes around 360 degrees as you progress through the month. So it’s like driving into the sun in the evening all the time. So there’s high contrast shadows everywhere. So bright lights, darkness, bright lights, darkness. And so they’re going to see for the first time and really experience what that’s like. Sure, we can simulate that on Earth and everything, but when they get to that moon for the first time in 1/6 gravity in that strange lighting environment with both the sun and the Earth on the horizon. It’s going to be a, a new experience that no one in humanity has ever had before. So it’s about learning to get there, learning how to walk around there, and they’re only going to stay there for like 6 and a half days and then they’ll go back. But you have to think of the 2024 mission as a test mission. So what sort of man and woman will be chosen for this initial mission? What, what are their attributes going to be? Well, it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. You have to be able to be calm under pressure. You have to be able to adapt to contingencies. You have to be extremely intelligent and motivated and passionate. So I guarantee you every crew member, man, woman, that goes down there will have those attributes. It’s— they are explorers. There is an element of risk there. These people are whoever they may be, will be the best representation of humanity. I know a lot of astronauts and they’re just incredible people. They’re gifted and they are so hardworking and so dedicated to the cause of expanding humanity’s sphere beyond that of Earth. Now you say it doesn’t matter if they’re men or women, but surely male and female bodies will react differently to the conditions on the moon. Or don’t they? Well, over a span of 6 days, I’m not really sure that’s the case. I’m an engineer, not a doctor, so I can’t really go too far there. But what I can tell you, that’s a generic quality of a crew member, is that it’s not large, hulking strength. We don’t need that. We have machines do that. We need people who can endure and who can minimize the consumption of resources. So actually, for an astronaut, smaller is better. They consume less food. They require smaller capsules. They consume less energy to generate less heat. They drink less water. All that is mass. And what I’d rather do, instead of taking someone who’s larger, I’d rather take someone who’s smaller And with that mass difference, put extra fuel in the tanks just in case we need a little more margin in the system. Women naturally are a bit smaller than men. And from that perspective, from an engineering perspective, that makes them a good candidate for a crew member. When we start talking about going to Mars and longer duration missions, the exposure to the radiation environment is also critical there. And there’s slight differences between men and women and how they accommodate long duration to deep space radiation based upon the limited exposure we have had on the International Space Station. So there are differences between men and women in how they adapt and work in space, but it’s nothing compared to the differences in the environments between Earth and the Moon and Mars and in between. So long as they’re calm under pressure, and they’re adaptive and innovative and passionate, it doesn’t matter. What will be the benefits for humankind from these missions to the Moon and Mars? Well, there’s the near-term ones. There’s, of course, the economic stimulation. There’s the pushing the technology. Living and operating in an extreme environment has parallels on Earth, whether it be a contaminated nuclear power plant or in a firestorm or a bad weather event or in a war zone or something. There are parallels between operating in extreme environments on the moon, Mars, and here on Earth. The technologies we push to allow us to get to the moon, to operate on the moon, to recycle air, to filter air, to decrease contamination, they’re all applicable at Earth. But that’s not, that is a guaranteed return on investment. So that’s a nice thing. That, that’s a side benefit from my perspective. The real benefit is that we as humanity, we live in one place, and I think 2020 has shown that a single event can have a major impact on humanity, whether that is civilization, technology. If in the future we have, let’s say, a worse type pandemic, having a second sphere humanity, whether that be on the moon or Mars or series, who knows, allows us to help reset the civilization back on Earth. We’re never— they’re never going to find a place better than Earth to live. No matter how much we mess it up, it’s still going to be a great place for humanity. Pat Troutman at the United States space agency NASA. He sounds very positive, yet there’s no denying that space travel is dangerous and often deadly. 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts have lost their lives since the start of what was known in the 1950s as the Space Race. When the space shuttle Challenger blasted off in 1986, no one could imagine how the flight would end. In her memoir, as yet unpublished, American author El Friedel describes what happened. Local students file outside. People on the bleachers raise binoculars. Nesbitt in Houston reads data to the public, tunes out the color TV on his left. Between the booster rockets, the white orbiter rests on the side of the orange external tank like a fly on a wall. Orange columns of fire stutter and hold. A puff of dark smoke shoots and disappears from the lower joint of the right booster. The bleachers are miles away. No one is within 1,000 feet of the shuttle except the crew inside, and the smoke is invisible except to the high-def engineering cameras and later scientists parsing frame by frame who know what they’re looking for. The liftoff blast travels through palmetto scrub and lagoon. Turkey vultures fly upwards, gnats on white steam. The crowd braces for the grocery cart rattle of the bleachers. The blast hits chest first, flapping windbreakers and scarves and jacket pins. Oranges bob across the Cape. The shuttle rises on a white contrail over the ocean. It rises in binoculars and sunglasses and rearview mirrors throughout the Cape and west to Titusville, north to Daytona, south to Vero Beach. It rises in the double glow of screens and their linoleum reflections in classrooms from Florida to Alaska. A small point of light burns, flickering, at the lower right joint. A flash cloud immerses the shuttle, orange-tinted white like the sun. The bleachers cheer. People in uniforms stare. “RTLS!” one yells. “RTLS!” “Where in hell is the bird?” screams another. “Where’s the bird?” “Velocity 2,900 feet per second,” says Nesbitt. “Altitude 9 nautical miles. Range distance 7 nautical miles.” Hands point to the TV. The numbers on his screens turn to the letter S. The cloud has horns now, the booster rockets rising. Bits of debris tumble higher. Some of the out-of-towners are still clapping. One man in the bleachers gives a thumbs up. The woman behind him has her hand on her chest. The boosters loop and curve like bottle rockets, turning circles so tight no donut hole appears, little white knots in their contrails. People begin to clasp hands over their mouths, begin to cry and scream. Zoomed-in cameras trawl the sky, waiting for pieces of the shuttle to jump into the lens. There. The wings are spiraling down. The tail falls with engines still burning. The delayed roar of the shuttle travels back towards the Cape like light from a dead star, unravels into rumbles. But the contrail hangs. People spread Venetian blinds with forefinger and thumb. Look at it, still there, like a loop of lower intestine. They turn on break room TVs, pull over on the highway, gather in parking lots around car radios. Debris rains into the ocean. The contrail hangs for hours. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. You can follow me on Twitter @petewarren, and after this, On the radio you can hear DJ Ritu with A World in London. London, remember, was on the receiving end of the early V-2 rockets, the first to go into space with their deadly payloads. When their designer, Wernher von Braun, was taken to the United States after the Allies defeated Hitler in World War II, he was stationed at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. It’s no coincidence that Huntsville has been the location for the annual Moonbuggy Challenge for 24 years now. The challenge involves building a lunar rover and driving it very fast across a series of obstacles, stopping on the way to set up a solar panel to power an electronic gadget, collect soil samples, collect water samples, conduct a scientific experiment, plant a flag, and take professional quality photos of all these activities. Racing against the clock, the young teams from all over Earth compete. Password’s Jane Wyatt met one of the German teams, which already has a Mexican member and is open to 2 new team members from amongst Resonance FM listeners. I’m Cosma Heckel, I’m 13 years old, and I drive since I am 7. Years old, and yeah, I think I can drive the Moon Rover very well because I have some experience. So when you take part in the competition, when you’re old enough, do you think you will win? So I don’t think that I win because I think now I’m not in the right— I’m not ready for this because I have not enough muscles because You have also to complete the course fast before the time is up. I think that I can take this with my partner, but I don’t think that I will— that we will be the first one. Yeah, that we win. Okay, Valeria? Yes. Okay, my name is Valeria Vázquez. I am a Mexican engineer. I am here because I started a participating in this competition in Mexico, from Mexico. I was with my team of engineers in Mexico and well, now I am helping here in Team Germany. And what kinds of things specifically are you helping the team with? Right now I am doing the CAD design. CAD design is computer-aided design. It means we can sketch and draw complex parts in the computer and then assembly, assembly them and create, yeah, like, uh, complex parts. This is the method to design, for example, a car, a shuttle, or anything, uh, you want to, to design, you can do it in CAD design. And then how is it produced? Oh, it depends on the material, on your design, on the technical specifications. So maybe you need a very strong part, so you need maybe steel, then you choose the manufacturing process. Maybe you need a very flexible part, and then you use maybe plastic, and then you choose the manufacturing process. So it depends on mostly functionality of that piece, then you choose the material, then you choose the manufacturing process. So Tobias, tell me about yourself and and your aspirations. Hello, my name is Tobias Kage. I’m 13 years old. I come from Germany. I’m my first time here at the Institute. It’s a lot of fun to drive with a rover or design with Valeria something in the program. Yeah, I’m learning. It’s a lot of fun, I think. So scientific experiments as well as actually building the moon buggy. Okay, so some of the challenges I have to meet are this kind of solar deployment of a panel. So we have to build an electronic device that is oriented by the sunlight. And also we have to take soil samples, as if we were on Mars or the Moon, maybe we would need to take some samples of the ground. Also liquid samples. Maybe another task is to put your flag on the ground. Also, you can take pictures, pictures of the trail, actual photos, actual experiments on an exoplanetary surface. If you would like to join Tobias, Valeria, and Cosma to train as a Moonbuggy engineer or racing driver for the 2021 challenge, message me on Twitter @petewarren and I’ll put you in touch with the team coach Ralph Heckel. While his international teams from Germany, Mexico, Russia and India are training for the Moonbuggy contest, Chinese schoolchildren are already one step ahead. In the reddish sandy wastes of the Gobi Desert, a strange-looking structure has been built to simulate what it would be like to live on the planet Mars. Slovenian photographer Majers Tončić traveled from his home in Shanghai for the grand opening and was one of the first humans to set eyes on it. To my surprise, I mean, there was positive and negative thing. Positive was definitely that the entire thing looks really fascinating and really out of this world, driving into the desert, passing the camels And then you come to see this big base in the middle of nowhere, in this completely Martian-like landscape. Negative thing is that it has basically no scientific value. It’s more really a simulation how it could look once. So it’s the main purpose, it’s more for educational purposes. To bring the whole idea of Mars and space exploration closer to the people that they don’t know much about it, and they can see it firsthand how, let’s say, the living quarters are going to look like, the recycling process of the wastewater and so on, and like the medical facilities. So it’s basically, yeah, to go there and see how ones might look and, you know, inspire the people to get more interested into the whole topic. So in that sense, would you say it’s more of a tourist attraction than a laboratory? Yes, for sure, it’s a tourist attraction, or let’s say education facility, where, you know, they can arrange school trips for kids and they showed them and walked them around the premises. They also have this electric vehicle rover that goes around, so it’s, let’s say, a well-prepared presentation of where Chinese exploration is going, heading. But I guess the government wouldn’t go to all that trouble and expense of creating such a facility if they were not serious about going to Mars? Realistically, I think first they have to conquer the moon before thinking of going to Mars. So I think United States with Elon Musk, they are way ahead of, you know, putting a human on Mars. But yeah, China is catching up pretty fast. Also in the space sector like in any other, and they are, yes, super serious and they want to be, you know, in step with the other nations when it comes to that, which also shows by, you know, landing the first rover on the dark side of the moon and this year sending a Mars rover to Mars along the United States and United Arab Emirates. So yeah, they are really serious and surprisingly there’s also already more than 100 private companies that they are dealing with space, mostly satellites or small rockets that they can put these satellites in the orbit in China. So yeah, they’re definitely catching up with space exploration. It’s fascinating to wonder as China and the other great powers gear up to penetrate further into the universe Is there already life out there? One person who is convinced of it is Dr. Bill Miller, a former NASA scientist now with the commercial company Deep Space. But it’s not what you might think. The singular reality is that we’ve become what’s called an agent of panspermia. Let me explain, because it sounds like a complicated term. But it’s not really. One of the many theories of the origin of life on Earth is that it’s come from outer space. I think many people are familiar with that. And of course we don’t know. It is possible that the planet was seeded by pre-existing life that is coming in from outer space, and then the planet, the theory is, was a fertile location for life. So life may be abundant out there, and it starts from either multiple places around the universe or perhaps even just one central location and disseminates outward. And one of the reasons that this is a very prominent theory is because of the mystery of why we can’t find any life. Scientists for decades and decades have believed that life is prominent throughout the universe simply because on a statistical basis. The hundreds of trillions of stars and the even many more exoplanets mean life should be everywhere, and yet life is nowhere to be found. Panspermia is the thought that life has come from outside. Now we are doing it. How did it happen? Well, it began from the very first moment we started to put spacecraft and propel it up into space. Here’s why. NASA was serious about the possibility of sending germs out into space. They didn’t think it was a good idea right from the very beginning. The engineers were aware that this was a problem. And so they developed what were considered highly vaunted clean rooms. These clean rooms, they felt, were utterly sterile. So they would go around with their little swabs and they would culture on these plates and look for microbes. And then they would report back to their supervisors, the spacecraft is clear, no problem. Well, here’s what’s happened, Peter. In the ensuing decades, we now have genomic techniques that are identifying forms of microbial life that were completely invisible. So how inaccurate were this old culture technique? Wildly inaccurate. Not just a little bit. In fact, we probably were not culturing 10% of the total microbes that were in and on those spacecraft. We weren’t being negligent at that time. We simply didn’t know better. We didn’t have the technology to know better. When I was in medical school, I was taught that the insides of our body, except for our guts, were sterile. My pancreas, my spleen, my brain, these are all sterile compartments. Well, now we know that’s not true. That’s not because of cultures. That’s because of these new enhanced genomic techniques. So inadvertently, we have been propelling microbes out into space. We send microbes into space without knowing. We send microbes into space that are incredibly hardy without realizing. Now it’s different, Peter. Here’s why. Now we’re doing it on purpose. We have private industry, and I’m not against private industry in the slightest. It’s just that the rules can be different. Tesla said right off the bat they don’t care whether or not it was sterile. They didn’t even try. It didn’t matter to them. But here’s the issue. This particular craft has got a loop and they say, “Oh, it won’t crash into a planet for at least 1.2 million years.” Well, so what? All that time, little tiny bits of comets, space dust, micrometeorites are impacting that craft. Eventually, over a long period of time, that craft will be pulverized into a Hulk. All of that has microbes on it and every time something hits it, some of those hardy little devils are going to be going off wherever they go. In the 1970s, we sent out Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. That now it’s actually exiting the heliosphere. The heliosphere is the region of space which is under the sun’s influence. That’s not the end of the solar system. That goes out way farther, the Oort Belt and That’s another 10,000 years of travel. Even though the Voyager crafts are traveling at a million miles a day. We are in the process of sending life outside the solar system. We have become agents of panspermia. So if you want to catalog in all human history, what is the single most significant activity of man? Don’t give me speeches and don’t talk to me about wars. This is it. This is our human moment. No one’s talking about it. If Miller is right, it’s microbes, not Martians, who will populate the extraterrestrial sphere. His view chimes in with one of the staunchest opponents of human spaceflight, the veteran explorer Robin Hanbury-Tennyson OBE. He claims the rush to put humans on other planets is an act of desperation. And he told Password’s Jane Wyatt, it’s all a massive waste of resources. There is a much greater infinity of infinitely greater interest than there is in outer space, and yet we spend untold billions sending rockets off into space, which is very sterile and really, for me, very uninteresting. I can see the romantic attraction of going to Mars and things, but really there’s very little out there of interest. Whereas just as telescopes have been getting stronger over the last few decades, so microscopes are getting much stronger, and we are beginning to realize just how incredible an infinity of life there is on this planet as you go further into it. I mean, there are more microbes, more life on your body and mine than there are people on the planet. And so I regard space research as a rather desperate, nihilistic view of life, that it’s people who have given up on this planet and are desperately searching for a way out. I don’t want to give up on this planet. I want to understand how it works and make it work. So if the sort of money that was spent on space research were being spent on medicine and agriculture and understanding the microbial life on this planet, which is incredibly interesting and diverse, then I think we’d be in a much better place than we are. What about all the new technology that’s been developed in space and applied on Earth? Well, yeah, they always say that. Non-stick pans. Well, exactly, non-stick pans, Teflon. Where would you be without your sat nav in the car? But that’s not— smart irrigation now using satellites to show farmers where they need to irrigate their land and where they, they will be wasting water otherwise. I mean, you can’t deny that there have been some scientific breakthroughs through the space program. I’m not against satellites. Satellites are on the edge of our atmosphere and are telling us a lot about the planet and are very interesting, and we couldn’t manage with all our technology without satellites. I’m talking about further space research, going to the moon and beyond, and, and Mars, which is where the serious money is being spent. And satellites, of course, are necessary, but the outer space research— they always bring up Teflon and non-stick frying pans. I mean, if that’s all it can bring up when the amazing amount of discoveries that are being made about our own planet and our own bodies and the microbial life here on Earth Everybody’s beginning to realize the way the mycorrhizal threads underground join forests together, that trees are actually speaking to each other. And this is incredibly interesting and important scientifically, far more important than this mad search for things in outer space. Yes, satellites, I give you. I don’t want to stop that, but I don’t regard that really as outer space. I know in your explorations and travels and research you’ve looked into how civilizations emerge and flourish and then become extinct, like the Maya for instance. What would you say is our current trajectory in terms of our civilization? Well, during the research for this book I got interested in why civilizations become extinct. Extinct. And there’s a good deal of evidence that civilizations last for up to 500 years, and then usually they’re conquered or they expire or something goes wrong. And I began to look into what it is that goes wrong. And quite clearly, it seems to me that they began to, as they got bigger and more powerful after about 300 or 400 years, they began to use up their natural resources. They cut down their rainforests, They were worried the climate started changing. They tried all sorts of things to stop that happening by sacrificing people like the Maya did and praying for rain and so on. And in almost every case, it seems to me what happened was that they used up all their resources and then moved on to somewhere else. Well, that’s a fairly familiar story today. We just haven’t got anywhere to move unless you want to go into outer space. Which, as I say, is a mad idea. So we have to understand how not to destroy our resource base, and that’s really quite easy if you start examining and researching the microbial life. For instance, one of the things we can do is to produce cultured meat. We should eat much less meat. Meat is produced in the most obscene way in factory farms and feedlots. And most of the land that’s cleared for rainforests in the Amazon, which I’ve been traveling in for over 60 years and has halved in my lifetime, most of the land that’s been cleared from rainforests, uh, mistakenly in the idea that you could put cattle on there, is now growing soybean. What’s the soy for? Feeding cattle in big feedlots in America and elsewhere where you have to put increasing amounts of hormones and pesticides and so on. And so on to make it all hang together. It’s a ridiculous way of doing it. Now, if you were able to produce synthetic meat, which we’ve been using techniques for making cheese and wine and microbial activity for making silage, as a farmer I can say that, for years. If we were able to, as the Finns are now doing, make synthetic meat, cultured meat, which is indistinguishable from the real thing, especially when it’s in something like a hamburger, really indistinguishable, tastes just as good, and actually doesn’t do you harm, doesn’t let you get obese, and so on. Then you could start letting the rainforests regrow over the area where soybean is no longer needed. And if you could write a synthetic palm oil, which is in everything we do and is destroying the rainforests of Southeast Asia, how wonderful would that be? The rainforests could recover and the world would be a much healthier place. You’re talking about the rainforest, and I’m sure you must probably be aware that today is the International Day of Indigenous Peoples, formerly known as Columbus Day. And do you see any parallels between what Christopher Columbus achieved and the current space program? What a dreadful idea. I mean, Columbus’s discovery, so-called, of the Americas, where there were many very civilized great civilizations already in existence with wonderfully cultured people who were in many ways advanced, in advance of the Old World. It was an absolute catastrophe, one of the greatest catastrophes that ever happened on this planet, because the diseases of the Old World, which he and his people, the conquistadors, brought with them, the local people had no resistance to, and tens of millions of people died from those diseases. Far more than died from the horrible atrocities that the conquistadors perpetrated upon them as well. So it was a catastrophe, and if there were people in outer space, God forbid that we should bring our— the worst parts of our civilization to them, just as Columbus did to the indigenous people of South America. And those who are still there, the tribal people, who I’ve been privileged to travel among over 100 different tribes, and seen their way of life, they have to a large extent got it right in ways that we’ve got it wrong. They live sustainably in their environment. They don’t exploit their environment. They don’t over-exploit it. They don’t cut the trees down. If you look from satellite, your satellites, onto the remaining Amazon rainforest, you will notice that there are many straight lines of the remaining green areas in the Amazon. Those are areas which To give them credit, the previous Brazilian governments have allocated something like 10% of Brazil’s land mass to indigenous people. Those are the main areas where the forests still continue. And if the tribal people weren’t there, they would have been cut down for some ridiculous reason, thinking they’d turn them into cattle farms, and we would have even less wilderness left in the world. Well, you made some very strong points there, Robin, and I wonder if just finally you could sum up, as if you were talking now to a NASA astronaut preparing to board a craft going to Mars, what would your message be to that person? Well, I would admire their courage because it is dangerous, and the— and it’s a very long and lonely flight. And I’ve watched films about— recent films about people going to Mars and doing exciting things like that. But I would be sorry for them. I’d say you’re in for a pretty horrible time. And although you will be adulated as a hero for going, making this extraordinary journey, it’s not what I call serious exploration because there’s really nothing very important to find out there. You may find some minerals, you might even possibly find a very primitive form of life, but you’ll do very little that will be of benefit for this planet, which desperately needs the resources that are being spent on your journey into outer space, needs to be spent on research onto this wonderful, unique, tiny planet of ours. We’ve just celebrated Columbus Day, rebranded the Day of Indigenous Peoples, And there are parallels to draw with the early explorers of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors. But perhaps we should think of this generation as merchants rather than pioneers. It was the East India Company, not a national government, that first claimed new territories and all the wealth of raw materials and human slaves they could provide. If Earth is becoming exhausted, it’s commerce and not science that will drive the move to new planets. Ironically, the slogan “There is no Planet B” has been adopted by the European Space Agency since they emphasize that their weather satellites and altimeters are vital to track the progress of climate change and the rising sea levels on Earth. You can buy the slogan printed on a hoodie from their website. And if you really want to embrace the non-military use of space, there’s a free gift open to everyone taking part in this week’s online International Astronautical Federation conference, where arms manufacturers from Thales and Northrop Grumman with scientists from NASA and Chang’e rub cyber shoulders with Asgardians, those people who plan to start a new Commonwealth on a satellite. The free gift on offer is called the Cosmic Welcome Mat, designed by space archaeologist Dr. Alice Gorman of Flinders University in Adelaide, Western Australia. You can download and print it yourself, and Dr. Gorman believes it’s an important symbol. So the Cosmic Welcome Mat is a design that has been created to make all beings in the universe feel welcome—human, animal, alien, whatever they happen to be. It doesn’t discriminate against anyone. So to make a design that would convey that message of welcome, the mat has at its center a red blob, and the blob is to convey that idea of anyone and everything, because we’re very accustomed to sentient beings having a very particular shape. So the blob seems like the opposite of that. The mat has a black frame, so that represents the blackness of outer space through which the cosmic visitors will travel in order to come to Earth during the International Astronautical Congress, which is taking place right now. And then the red blob is shown against a background of an ultraviolet blobby shape into which it’s attempting to fit. So that represents the idea that on arrival, the cosmic visitor will adapt itself to local surroundings and feel at home. So we’ve obviously had to make a lot of assumptions about the nature of our cosmic visitors. But what Jonathan Keats, who is my collaborator on the Cosmic Welcome Mat, and I feel is that we have to make a start of making everyone in the universe feel welcome. And this will appeal to a certain subset of visitors with particular senses and particular ways of approaching the world, but that’s okay. So is it just a bit of fun to amuse the people on the online conference, or do you seriously believe that space needs a more welcoming culture? Well, it is a bit of fun. We look on this as quite a playful work, but we also hope to inspire some profound thought around this. At the present time, we’re living in cultures that seem to be becoming more and more xenophobic. Others are being turned away and made to feel unwelcome. So we’re generating on Earth an approach to tolerance and inclusion that’s degrading and decaying. And so that’s, that’s not a great thing if we’re going to go out into wider space and possibly encounter other beings. So while we look on this as a little bit of fun, the idea that there could be a cosmic visitor in your own home because you have displayed this particular design, We’re also using it as, as a way to critique very terrestrial and nation and state-centred ideas of who counts and who doesn’t count. So we’re trying to spread a message of tolerance, I guess. That’s all from this edition of Password with me, Peter Warren. You can follow the new developments on Twitter @petewarren And I’ll be back next month with an exploration of technology in society. Password was written by Jane Wyatt and produced by Blue Buffery, with a reading from her memoir by Elle Friedle and original music by David Ashwanden. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. This program has been brought to you by Resonance FM. 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