Ariel Ekblaw on the Future of Space Exploration

ARIEL:
There’s something really foundationally beautiful about humanity doing what we do best and exploring. And space is going to help us expand our horizons in a way that, you know, nothing else is, until we learn about teleportation or beaming ourselves through wormholes. So, we need this technology to be able to go out and do what is so profoundly human, which is to explore, look into the final frontier.

REID:
Hi, I’m Reid Hoffman.

ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.

REID:
We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way.

ARIA:
We’re speaking with visionaries in every field, from climate science to criminal justice, and from entertainment to education.

REID:
These conversations also feature another kind of guest: GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode will have a companion story, which we’ve generated with GPT-4 to spark discussion. You can find these stories down in the show notes.

ARIA:
In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it’ll take to get there.

REID:
This is Possible.

ARIA:
I’m so excited to be talking today about space exploration, but not for the reason that you might think. Like, I was not a sci-fi person. I have only seen one episode of Star Trek, Reid, you know that because you made me watch it! And it was good, it was good, I liked it. But I’m actually not someone who has sort of spent my childhood or my twenties thinking about the cosmos and what’s beyond the earth. And what I love about Ariel Ekblaw, who is the person we’re interviewing today, is that she is so visionary and she thinks about what’s beyond, but she also brings it home, and I love hearing her talk about how all of this incredible science can benefit both space exploration but also what we’re doing here on planet Earth. And so, I think it’s super accessible to those who are, you know, super well-versed about sci-fi and space exploration and also those who perhaps, like me, are not as well-versed in it.

REID:
Yeah, her care about space is not a desire to get away from the Earth, it’s a desire to elevate humanity. And her level of articulateness is off the charts. And I hope we get into science fiction with Ariel, like, she articulates the humanity of science fiction, the question about why this is part of our aspirational future. And, you know, it is, I think, broadly the case, but of course Ariel is also very attuned to what are the things that we do for this planet.

ARIA:
Ariel Ekblaw is the founder and director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, a team of over 50 students, faculty, and staff building and flying advanced technology for space exploration. She’s currently leading MIT’s return to the moon. Ariel is also the founding CEO of Aurelia Institute, a hybrid space architecture research institute and venture incubation studio.

Here’s our conversation with Ariel Ekblaw.

Ariel, I am so excited for this interview. I think it would be an understatement to say I am a fangirl of what you are doing and how you are able to talk about it. In one of the interviews you talked about how your parents were ex Air Force and that there’s a history of Air Force folks becoming astronauts. And so, I sort of assumed that that was the sort of nugget of what got you involved in space exploration, but I would love to hear from you, like, what’s the backstory? How did you get into this interesting and unique field?

ARIEL:
Thanks for asking. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here with you guys, so thanks for having me.

The story of how I got into space is maybe two or threefold. First is absolutely that Air Force pilot story. My mom is one of the first ever female pilots in the United States Air Force. So it’s a really amazing glass ceiling breaking story, very inspirational. And my dad was an A-10 fighter pilot, and while they themselves didn’t go on to be astronauts, it really loomed large in my childhood because a lot of pilots do become astronauts. And then even back further, we have ancestors that were explorers, that were geologists, and we have an Ekblaw Glacier and an Ekblaw Mountain in Antarctica, so Arctic and Antarctica. And the joke is that I need to be able to, you know, keep this family thread up on Mars or somewhere else in the future. And then the other aspect of it was in undergrad I was studying particle physics, and I had a chance to do a zero-gravity flight and experience this really sublime type of weightlessness, and it was absolutely what hooked me into the space industry and making that part of my career.

ARIA:
That is awesome. I love it.

REID:
Next time I’ll have to see if I can fly over it or something, when I’m down there.

Now, let’s shift to the origin of your nonprofit Aurelia, which, you know, I’m proud to support and be an advisor on. I think around the time this airs, it’ll be just over a year since Aurelia’s public launch. Can you reflect on the past year? What were some of the greatest achievements and surprises, and what did you learn?

ARIEL:
Yes, absolutely. So you are – we’re very close to the public launch. We launched on Star Wars Day, which just happened: May the Fourth be with you! We are uber nerds just like that, we had to do it.

Within the last year, what we’ve been building at Aurelia is part of this mission of designing a life worth living in space as humanity becomes a spacefaring species. What Aurelia means, it’s an old English word that means “chrysalis,” and that’s part of our logo. The idea being that we – humanity – are at the cusp of our next metamorphosis into a spacefaring species. And so we’ve been working on, in the last year, everything from space habitats – advanced tech R&D to build habitats that are far bigger than our biggest rocket – to payload fairing, so self-assembling, origami unfolding, artificial gravity spinning. Really the next generation of tech beyond what you see with the International Space Station or Axiom or Blue Origin’s very cool Orbital Reef, these days.

And because it’s a nonprofit, really equally important to us for this advanced technology mission is the Starfleet Academy piece of it. We love science fiction inspired by Star Trek, and the idea is to do outreach and education and workforce development to show more people, a really broad swath of humanity, that they can participate in space exploration directly, but also in this industry, that we can welcome more people into it. So we charter a full zero-gravity flight every year. We bring 25 different outreach partners, often communities that we’re trying to focus on who were traditionally excluded from aerospace or maybe never had a chance to engage, and we’re now trying to bring them into the fold. So we do this hybrid of really advanced tech R&D spinning out of my lab at MIT and the education outreach and policy work.

REID:
Before we get to the other questions, since I’ve already forced Aria to watch one Star Trek episode, [laugh] what would be the Star Trek episode that you would provoke her to watch?

ARIEL:
Ooh, okay, so it has to be TNG, absolutely must be The Next Generation with Picard. Oh, is it “[The Measure of a Man?]” I think where they decide-

ARIA:
[laugh] That’s the one he made me watch!

ARIEL:
Like, it’s a must, especially in the age of AI and deciding about AGI and sentience and data’s role as a human or not as a human. Yeah. “[The Measure of a Man.]” Yeah, that’s probably one of my favorites. There are some other fantastic ones as you get later in the series. The early ones are a little campy. You go back and you’re like, “oooh…”

ARIA:
All right, I’ll do some binge watching this weekend, start with season two or three, and I will report back. [laugh]

ARIEL:
And then you can be one of our space cadets. I mean, we’re recruiting, so, here we go. [laugh]

ARIA:
I would love it. I would love it.

REID:
Thinking a little bit about the history of space exploration R&D – you know, obviously people go, “wow, that’s really cool,” it’s kind of a dream of the stars, go to the stars, space race, geopolitics. You know, it also makes a difference for our lives here, our lives on Earth. What are some of the most interesting developments in the field that you think will have significant impacts for the future? Our future life here?

ARIEL:
This is something that’s really near and dear to my heart because I’m not one of those space people that thinks of space as a plan B or an “abandonment of Earth” plan. I’m really quite an Earth-first person in addition to my love of space. And so I usually think about the answer to your question in three buckets. The first is super tactical ways that space is going to help earth, the second is strategic, and then the third is maybe visionary.

So on the tactical side, you have this wonderful legacy that a lot of people have heard about, and maybe they’re bored of it by now, that NASA says, “Microwaves, Kevlar, Lasik eye surgery, transistors, all of these things are very meaningful technology spin-outs that were enabled because we had to design for the rigors of the space environment.” Sometimes that push to force humanity to do something really hard yields incredible innovation that comes back down. And to make that bucket a little bit more near-term for people, it’s not just 50 years ago that we got a bunch of those technologies. Right now at Aurelia, we’re looking at a minimum viable product for space habitats. They have to have energy efficient air conditioning, they have to do direct air carbon scrubbing, they have to be able to do really effective air filtration. What do we desperately need in the California building housing market, maybe for the first time ever? We need airtight homes because of the wildfires. So there’s, again, this really amazing potential wealth of direct technology spinoffs from space to benefit life on Earth.

The second category is strategic. So, if you think about the way that we know about greenhouse gas emissions, for example, and how significant this is going to be for the future of climate change on our planet – where did we learn that? We learned that by looking at Venus and sending probes to Venus and studying our near neighbor planet in the near neighborhood of our solar system. And then quite similarly, slightly different tack, on Apollo 8, that mission where they were ostensibly going to fly by the moon, it was before the landing, Bill Anders has this beautiful quote that they flew all the way to the moon and what they really discovered was the Earth. They took that iconic photograph, the Earthrise photograph, and then later they took the Blue Marble – beautiful, iconic image of the Earth – on a separate Apollo mission. And those images helped spark the environmental movement. They were put on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog, and the Merry Pranksters, and Stewart Brand, and it was thanks to that momentum that we started to appreciate the fragility of our planet and how much space exploration helps us appreciate taking care of Earth So I think that’s the second thing, it’s strategic. Really going out into space helps us learn more about our planetary science and helps really expand, as an old friend of Reid’s and mine would say, expands our circles of awareness as a species coming back.

And then the third is visionary, and this is where maybe it’s split between the Earth people and the space people, but the visionary element is, for the earth-based / focused, space could help us make Earth a garden planet. This is not my idea, this has been, you know, Gerry O’Neill talked about this, Jeff Bezos talks about this. Where we would use space to off-world the industry, the mining, the polluting activities, and let Earth be preserved for this beautiful biosphere, this beautiful, fragile ecosystem that we have, and take the big, heavy, industrial stuff out into low Earth orbit or the asteroid belt. And then the other vision, for the space people, is there’s something really foundationally beautiful about humanity doing what we do best and exploring, and space is going to help us expand our horizons in a way that, you know, nothing else is until we learn about teleportation or beaming ourselves through wormholes. So, we need this technology to be able to go out and do what is so profoundly human, which is to explore, look into the final frontier, as Star Trek would say.
ARIA:
What you said really actually lends well to my next question. A lot of people, when they’re thinking about the visionary, they’re thinking about colonizing Mars and going to live on other planets and how can we go create civilizations elsewhere. But I heard that your hot take is that we will actually be more likely to have floating cities than colonizing other planets. So, what’s your reasoning behind that? Give us your argument.

ARIEL:
So Mars, in particular, is a little bit fraught. I think we have this orthodoxy, a lot of humans feel this way, I do too, we like to stand on things, we like to land and set foot and have a physical surface to explore, and so we assume that we want to have settlements on celestial bodies. But the problem with Mars, one, is that there’s perchlorates in the soil. So we’re never really going to be able to farm Mars. We’re going to have to do a completely closed loop, you know, almost like urban style agriculture to be able to make that a viable thing. That’s a technology hurdle, we can overcome it.

The bigger thing that we don’t know if we can overcome is it’s 1/3 gravity on Mars, one third Earth G. And we’re not sure if a mom can bring a baby to term in 1/3 G. So there’s still an open question as to whether a settlement on Mars can be self-sustaining or would just be a constant replacement situation, more like an outpost like McMurdo in Antarctica. And so rather than going from one gravity well back down into another, slightly less deep but still, you know, serious gravity well, we can live in orbit and spin space stations at variable rates to get us everything we need. We can spin them – if they’re big enough, it depends on the physics of it and the centripetal forces – but we can spin them at a rate that gives us earth-based gravity, which you see in 2001: A Space Odyssey where they’re walking around the ring. And that’s really important for our physiology. We can spin it at 1/3 G, at 1/6 G for the moon, and learn about those environments. And then we can also just have it be a microgravity section of the habitat where we’re able to do all of this really stunning science and research and filming for Hollywood and whatever else it is that we want to do. There’s so much more flexibility, I think, in living in orbit.

REID:
With the Space Exploration initiative, I think you have over 40 initiative projects there on life in space. Can you highlight a few of them that would delight and amaze?

ARIEL:
Yes. So the mission of the Space Exploration Initiative at MIT, this is where we spun Aurelia out of, it’s this lab that I’ve run for six years. The idea was to do two things, democratize access to space, and build the artifacts of our sci-fi space future. So we work on really technical, rigorous things that you’d expect MIT to work on, but we also work on playful, beautiful, delightful things that would actually make it a life worth living in space, and so this would be things like musical instruments that only play when they’re in microgravity.

So instead of always importing these elements of Earth culture up into space, we actually think about space as a blank canvas, or nearly blank canvas, to invent new cultural artifacts. We work on space fermentation. NASA really loves to dehydrate things – it takes some of the nutrition away from the food, but it was a necessary step at the time – but now we’re thinking about how to bring probiotics and umami and the health of the gut microbiome back into these space foods with space beer, with sourdough, with kimchi, with miso. So two examples of the different 40+ projects that we have in the portfolio.

REID:
Do you think the next time we send out a voyager, we should send it with some space beer?

ARIEL:
Yeah, here’s our recipe. No, that’s what we’ll etch onto the Golden Voyager record is our recipe for space beer. [laugh]

ARIA:
One thing that I think is so interesting about the field of space exploration is it’s like a perfect example of sort of tri-sector collaboration. It’s like you have NASA that set the stage for these private companies to explore space. You’re the director of the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, so that’s where academia comes in. And then, I think quite recently, you have raised a space-related fund. So, can you tell us about that investment thesis and what are you seeking to do there?

ARIEL:
Yeah, so we’re working on these different aspects to essentially scale humanity’s presence in space, and to do that we are very much tri-sector. So we work within academia for the research. We work within, you know, government and corporate. And then on the VC side, what we’re trying to do is, to maybe borrow a word from Reid, what does it take to blitzscale a space economy? We need different pieces of the ecosystem, and so that’s really what I work on across these different hats at MIT and Aurelia, is I need all of the different pieces of the ecosystem. So we work on the advanced tech so that there’s physically big, grand infrastructure in space, self-assembling space, habitats that can physically house and welcome more people in space. We work on the economy and investing in companies that are going to, you know, “rising tide lift all boats” for the economy of services, both to serve a space audience, but, maybe even more important, the types of products that would be made in space that would serve Earth. So things that we could manufacture in microgravity, like new proteins or drugs or really pure crystals for semiconductors, and actually have that come back down for an earth-based market. And then the final piece is policy, thinking with our government counterparts: what are the right ways to be stewards of the space commons? The space commons has a risk of becoming, basically, a tragedy of the commons, and we’ve already seen problems like space debris arise within the last few decades. So we work with these other partners to essentially try to do thought leadership around: how are our actions, as a potential habitat operator or designer, and then also how are the kind of global community’s actions in space leading to an optimistic possible future? As opposed to something that would be more fraught, tied down into tragedies of the commons. So, we’re really working across those different ecosystems to try to blitzscale, getting humanity out, expanding humanity’s horizons in space.

ARIA:
And can you say a bit more, I think you do a lot of work with self-assembling systems and so, say, I don’t know what that is! Can you go a little deeper into, like, what does that mean for a system or a product to be self-assembling?

ARIEL:
Yeah, exactly. So this was my PhD at the MIT Media Lab and the notion was: learn from biology, these beautiful examples of self assembly in nature where proteins fold or ants come together to form a bridge in this swarm, this collaborating swarm. And then take these principles of stochastic self-assembly – how things come together on their own – and use that to build really big, science fiction-worthy infrastructure.

And the way that we do that is with this system called TESSERAE. It was inspired by ancient Roman mosaics and these tiny little glass tiles where you make a lot of them, you put a lot of them down, and the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. So this tessellated system of tiles – in my case, pentagon and hexagon tiles – they have powerful magnets on their edges. You release the tiles in a microgravity environment and the magnets draw them in autonomously to dock. And so all the tiles click, click, click, click, click into place. There are so many different things we can do, we can make other shapes, we can make satellites, we’re looking into applying this to really big telescopes. So for James Webb, instead of having to fold it up and have 78 single points of failure to unfold it, maybe we just self assemble it in the future. And so we’re really hoping that this is an extensible paradigm, an in-space construction, mechanism, that can be used for all kinds of different achievements that humanity is going to need as we become spacefaring.

REID:
Do you still – I mean, I know that you’ve done displays of TESSERAE in various places like TED and MIT – do you, is there any place where it’s standing? Is there any place where people can go see it or is it kind of in the pop-up space exhibit from Ariel’s PhD thesis and work?

ARIEL:
Yeah, so it’s on display at the Media Lab and it’s on display at our Aurelia offices, which are in Central Square in Cambridge. And we were just invited by the Seattle Museum of Flight to exhibit the TESSERAE space architecture concept and the flight tiles that actually went to space. They flew to space twice, once for my PhD, once the year after, or two years after. So they’ll be part of the Museum of Flight’s big showcase around space stations next year.

ARIA:
So this brings us to our first GPT-4 story.

AI STORY:
In 2053, the Patel family had grown accustomed to living in their self-sustaining, resilient home in the middle of the Nevada desert. The Patels had moved into their new home after the devastating 2030 earthquake that had destroyed much of the infrastructure in the region. The government realized that traditional building methods were no longer viable in the face of increasing natural disasters. So it partnered with private spacefaring corporations and nonprofit organizations to fund research into self-assembling architecture. One of the key features of the Patel’s new home was the use of airtight airlocks to keep out pollutants. The Patel’s home was equipped with other state-of-the-art technology, including a water filtration system that used a combination of solar power and desalinization to provide them with clean water. They also had a rooftop garden that grew a variety of fruits and vegetables thanks to the use of vertical farming techniques. The home was also designed to be energy efficient with solar panels in a battery storage system that allowed them to live off the grid. The Patels were not limited to just living on Earth. Thanks to the advancements in space travel, they were able to visit their extended family who lived in a floating city in space.

ARIA:
Was this story science fiction? What do you think was actually, like, “oh, actually that could be something we make happen in the future.” Would love to hear your response.

ARIEL:
I felt like I was reading alternative science fact, like, a news story report, which was really, yeah, which was really compelling to know that that came out of ChatGPT. I’ve played around with it a bit myself, but I’ve never asked it to be that creative with the grounding of some of the tech that we’re already putting out there.

I love that it picked up on the fact, which we are trying to do with TESSERAE, which is not only is it a self-assembling system for space, but with some additional help with pulleys and ladders on Earth, it’s essentially a snap-based system that could be architecture for extreme environments, for areas torn by natural disasters. I do think one of the elements I would love to tweak in the story is it was very much they’re living in it, and maybe it’s empowering them to live in an environment that they couldn’t have otherwise, whether there’s all these challenges raised by climate change. One of the things that, if that vision where they’re also able to transit to space so easily and visit their family there, if that has come to reality, I think we’ll have had – and this is a bit of a controversial opinion – but we’ll have had opportunities to address, not fully, but to maybe mitigate climate change based on technologies like geoengineering or space-based geoengineering. So that would also be, I think, in the mix, at this future time period with the Patels. But overall, yep, I think I was reading alternative science fact. It was very compelling.

REID:
So, obviously, as you and I have talked about, not on recording a podcast, but generally, we’ve got this whole kind of “the year of AI acceleration.” Different form of elevation. What impact has that had in thinking about space exploration or the intersection with the technologies you’ve been working on? Share some of the thoughts about the current kind of speed and acceleration of A,I and how it makes you think about going to space, space tech, things we can learn from space, things we can do in space, all of that.

ARIEL:
So this is actually one of the areas where the fund is the most interested to invest: founders who are really creatively bringing AI services into the space sector, and ChatGPT, and AI agents. One of the challenges that space has faced in the last few decades is that to get something up to space, it needed to be flight-qualified or already flight heritage. And so that produced a risk profile that the International Space Station, for example – an incredible feat of engineering – but actually quite far behind a lot of office buildings on Earth, now, in terms of the responsivity or the IOT or the integration of modern tech. And so what we’re trying to do at Aurelia with this future of AI agents is build these really leading edge, cusp of what’s possible technologies into our models with the space habitat to begin with, so we’re not retrofitting it on later.

Of course, that raises questions about: how? Everybody in the space industry has a little bit of an immune system response to AI and space. But we’re already learning, I think, or we will be exploring how to be responsible cohabitants here with AI in our lives. And so a lot of those learnings will inform how we live with a synergy between AI and humans in a space environment. And there’s so much that AI could do to empower a responsive space habitat, you know, where your bio signals are maybe a closed loop ecosystem and the habitat is living in symbiosis with you. Of course, you’re able to talk to it and engage with it, like, essentially with a sentient-like being, in the way that we do in Star Trek, we talk to the computer. And now that is here, I think, maybe several decades before people thought it was really going to be. I listened to Sam Altman do a podcast about his chatbots last year and he was trying to explain to people why the chatbot was so cool. I think everybody was like, “ugh, chatbots, they’re so annoying.” [laugh] But now the level of sophistication is such that you actually imagine it being a fully embedded enabler in your life, and maybe life in space. So I think it’s a really attractive area to explore this crossover between AI and space tech.

ARIA:
We already touched on this a little, but obviously NASA has such a history in the space race, you have these great private-public partnerships. Can you talk a little bit more on, like, how have these sectors historically collaborated and has that changed recently? Is it the same as it’s been in previous decades? Or, how would you like it to change?

ARIEL:
It changed dramatically in the last 10 years and even in the 5 five years, and that is that change in how NASA was funding and beginning to really support commercial ecosystems like SpaceX. Spacex was able to succeed early because they got some really big NASA contracts. That model produced me! I didn’t have to wait in a NASA grant pipeline for 5 or 10 years to get to build the space initiative and do one mission to space. I was fundraising independently through a network of amazing supporters, like Reid and others, and then was able to buy my own ticket to space, buy my own zero-gravity flight for my whole team and for the lab. And that was really enabled by NASA basically saying, “we’re not going to keep control of all of it anymore, we’re going to seed different things that can happen,” like commercial crew with SpaceX, which, of course, Lori Garver and Dava Newman and Charlie Bolden, some of my mentors, had a big part in enabling, along with Elon and Gwynne.

And we’re seeing NASA do it again for the moon, which I think is a really fantastic approach, where instead of NASA saying, “we’re going to take everyone to the moon,” they are buying a ride like everybody else. They basically said, “this is what we want, this is the service we want available, we’re going to call it Commercial Lunar Payload Services and we’re going to give some grants to commercial entities to get us and everybody else there.” And that’s starting to seed what I’d say is maybe a little proto-cislunar economy that we now get to participate in. So, yeah, between like the last 10 to 5 years, it has just been a sea change in how we actually get to participate in space.

ARIA:
So, you’ve talked in the past about reimagining life in space. You talked about the musical instruments that will only play in space. It’s sort of like a space-first culture. How would culture fundamentally change if we became a spacefaring society more than we already are?

ARIEL:
One of the things we’ll start to see is people will commute to space for work. I think we’ll have a resurgence of appreciation for trades and blue collar work. Right now people in the space industry think, “oh, you have to have a PhD in aerospace engineering to contribute,” but we need a lot of space plumbing, we need a lot of space welding, we need a lot of people taking care of the infrastructure in the space environment. And some of it will be robotic, but some of it will, for a while at least, require human help. And so I think that’s a kind of an evolution of an interesting cultural element that we’ll return to.

And then the third one is time. Our sense of time will begin to be challenged the further out into the solar system we go. So, best case scenario on Mars, when Mars and the Earth are closest together with their orbital dynamics, is going to be a 40 minute round trip for information. And so all of a sudden, you won’t have the live, super-connected, maybe overstimulated digital lives that we have on Earth. I think we’ll go back to writing letters, we’ll have a more asynchronous-style communication between the outskirts of humanity’s civilization and the hub. And that is a really profound thing for us, to return back to this period or to return back to this paradigm where time, just because of the limitations of the speed of light, has more of a controlling role in our lives again, as opposed to us having bested it with modern technology.

REID:
Well, it’s a very Einsteinian perspective. In terms of, you know, light cones and time and all the rest. Although, I’m not sure letters – even though we do, of course, I’m sure you have a number of space pens – I’m not sure letters will be the full thing.

Speaking of space pens, if you were going to wave a magic wand to change, solve anything, advance space exploration, quickest, meaningful, greatest accelerant – what would you change?

ARIEL:
Can I pick two?

REID:
Yeah, of course.

ARIEL:
Okay, one would be we need a really, really good answer to radiation protection and we just don’t have it. Water walls for spacecraft have been proposed, maybe drugs that help treat the human body to make you more resilient to radiation. These things would be really important to do better and, again, to come back down to benefit life on Earth for cancer treatment or chemo, maybe, in a really profound way. But we’re going to need an answer to that before we start spending too much time outside the Van Allen Belts.

The second would be nuclear propulsion, or even just any type of propulsion that can get us significantly somewhere faster than chemical rockets that we have now. And there’s been, you know, concerns about the risk of nuclear propulsion because what happens if it blows up on the launchpad and creates an issue with the local environment where it launched from? But we’ve been doing nuclear submarines properly for decades and we need to actually be provocative and willing to take that past now into the future for a different type of travel within the near neighborhood of our solar system, at least.

REID:
Well, I think that leads us to our second story by GPT-4, which suggests a dozen inventions that humanity has developed and honed decades from now. They’re designed for space but we discover they’re useful for us too here on earth.

AI STORY:
Here is a list of inventions that will be designed for space and adapted for use on Earth: quantum entanglement communication, spacetime propulsion, molecular assemblers, artificial general intelligence, zero-gravity 3D printing, terraforming technology, cryogenic preservation, artificial photosynthesis, nanorobotics, quantum gravity sensors, artificial gravity generator, universal translation technology.

REID:
What were your reflections on this list? What would you change? What seemed promising? What seemed improbable?

ARIEL:
I think a few things that we’re missing – and maybe just because of the way that we prompt the AI, of course, is going to be how it reflects back to us – would be on the biological side. Maybe the molecular assemblers solve all of this, but I think there’s so much compelling work in personalized medicine, gene therapy, changing the human body with cryptobiosis. Maybe we make ourselves more resilient to space because we engineer ourselves like tardigrades to be resilient to radiation and the vacuum and desiccation and temperature swings and things like that.

I loved its lean towards fundamental physics because those really are the types of technologies that would be civilization scale enabling and changing. If we had artificial gravity that wasn’t physically spinning something to get artificial gravity but was actually harnessing, like, a Higgs Boson field or something to play with gravity and play with mass. Or spacetime, finally being able to get past that fundamental limit of the speed of light if we can warp spacetime. And it reminded me of something my dad did for me when I was like five or six. He sat my brother and I down, and he was really into science fiction, which is a big source of my inspiration, and he drew two dots on the different sides of an inflated balloon and then let the air out, and he was like, “kids, this is what I want you to work on.” [laugh] He always said he wanted us to work on a warp drive that would connect those dots, basically compress spacetime. And so I think it’s, right now, totally science fiction. We don’t have the physics to be able to do that. But if we were able to jump ahead to a really possible future like that… I thought it was fascinating that GPT hit on that as an example.

ARIA:
So, for a lot of people there’s still an elitism associated with space, whether that’s like all of the headlines of wealthy folks who are funding private space exploration. But you also talk a lot about democratization of space. Can you go a little deeper in how we can democratize access to space?

ARIEL:
Yes, so there are a couple different categories that we think of and we’re working in democratizing access to space. One is the different types of fields and study and trying to explain to people now in the public that you don’t have to be really into math or science to get to participate, to bring the rich tapestry of what makes life worth living on Earth into space. We need artists and biologists and architects and ethicists. And a lot of the work that I lead at MIT and at Aurelia is with these interdisciplinary teams, trying to be role models to bring more interdisciplinary teams into existence for space.

I think the second category is empowering communities who have been, you know, either traditionally excluded or didn’t know that it was possible. So we work really closely with a few different fellowship organizations. For example: Patti Grace Smith, supporting black excellence for young students in aerospace; or Brooke Owens, supporting women to get into aerospace in undergrad; or Zed Factor Fellowship, which does a little bit of a broader look at underrepresented minorities overall. And, like so many of these different challenges for diversity, equity and inclusion, it means going into the pipeline, getting really creative early and supporting people early in their educational journey to view this as accessible. And so a lot of democratizing access to space is really improving people’s understanding of accessibility to be part of this community. You know, we do as much as we can on the educational side, but there’s also nothing like getting on a zero-G flight and experiencing it, and that was what got me hooked when I was an undergrad, and so that’s part of why we do these programs with Aurelia, is we bring people on this experience to give them a gateway into this life.

And then I think the final comment that I’ll have on this front is I was sad to see that the media covered Jeff Bezos and Branson in the way that they did because they made it seem as if they were villains for spending their money to go to space. But the great irony of it is both of those gentlemen are building companies whose missions are to democratize access to space. They’re dropping the costs of suborbital space experiences. They don’t want to only sell to a really, really tiny market of really, really wealthy people, they want to sell to the whole world and they want the inflection point that we had after World War II when commercial aviation took off and has empowered so much for human society – they want to empower that wave of accessible space flight to humanity. I think we need a little bit of a shift in the media of the awareness of the role that benefactors are playing to make this a democratized future.

ARIA:
When you talk about sort of the other disciplines that are necessary – I was so struck from reading your bio, you obviously have a degree in math, a degree in physics, but also a degree in philosophy, which actually made me think about you and Reid. You have such similar backgrounds, sort of bringing philosophy in. So could you talk for a minute how you think a liberal arts degree, sort of that more broad view as opposed to just straight math and science, has informed your view?

ARIEL:
Yes. I think it is absolutely mission critical, because it’s worth thinking about big picture questions for humanity, and that’s what philosophy does, as opposed to just being trapped in the iterative cycles of tech for the sake of tech, or tech because it’s cool. I certainly feel really significantly impacted by my liberal arts education, and I think it’s also a great reminder of the different dimensions of human life that we’re going to have to contend with if we do space right, which is not just the technology but the geopolitics and working with Russia and China. Meaning: why is it that so many people want to go to space, or people who don’t want to go to space don’t understand why we spend money on space. You have to be able to appeal and communicate and inspire people, and I think that is where liberal arts really comes in and philosophy really comes in, to be able to have a complementary vision to the tech forward, you know, techno utopian vision.

REID:
How would you imagine we should think about the habitat differently for, you know, humans in space? Whether it’s transiting living – obviously, you know, ultimately, space stations, or so forth – and then given, once you have the physical habitat, society and governance? Sketch something a little bit, you know, be science fiction-y even though you are always very science fact-y.

ARIEL:
So, inside habitat first and then societal scale.

REID:
Yeah.

ARIEL:
Inside the habitat, this is what we’re working on with Aurelia, is to say, “let’s push back against the kind of sterile, very white, very silvery-chrome vision of life in space. Let’s make it maximalist, not minimalist. Let’s make it celebrate biophilia, instead of very sterile where we’re worried about all the bio that we bring up. Bring up a lot of bio and have humans live with this environment that’s better for their mental health.” Actually producing a sustainable, you know, civilization or society and space, because we know we have to coexist with other organisms to support human life. Do this in a way that describes maybe a vision of life in space that has more cultural heritage to it.

I learned this from Thomas Heatherwick, he gave an amazing TED talk a few years back where he said humans, when we go to cities on earth, we don’t really tend to gravitate, if we’re tourists, to the skyscrapers, to the downtown areas that are all glass and steel. Where do we go? We go to the old town where there’s so much cultural heritage and ornament and decoration. And so Aurelia is trying to bring that back into life and space and say, yes, it’s very futuristic and we’re working with really advanced technology, but it doesn’t have to feel sterile. It can feel really richly envisioned, really creative, not just isolating. I think a lot of people look at space and life in space and think, “oh, that’s not for me, it’s very isolating, it’s very intense.” It’s actually that space can be profoundly exciting. You can build things in space, monuments like Newton’s Cenotaph, these huge structures, these huge types of architecture that would just give you goosebumps when you get to float inside them. A space cathedral, a space microgravity concert hall. That’s the type of things that we’re building and designing at Aurelia to begin to make it a life worth living in space.

And on the societal front, I think this is something that doesn’t get talked about as much because we love, especially in the US, we love our model, and I do really love our capitalist, democratic model. But space settlements are going to propose an opportunity to tweak and improve upon and maybe look at new types of political science ideas to found human societies that are not earth-based. Eventually maybe there will be tensions between those societies and the mother planet, the humming beacon. And we’re already looking at the future of the moon and saying, do we need to import everything by nation state? It’s probably going to be that way because we’re following laws of maritime and those precedents. But maybe if the moon is going to be an amalgam of earth-based precedent and new political science ideas, new political theory, new ethics, then Mars could be really new, because they’re so far distant, they’re going to have to be very independent, maybe they find their own governing model. And so I think that there’s going to be a really great opportunity for philosophers and political scientists to have these proving grounds to, you know, policy prototype new ideas for how we structure relationships between humans and societies and governments.

REID:
Do you think there’ll be a space constitution?

ARIEL:
Yes, I think there will be a space constitution! Maybe because I’m from a constitution country where it’s very important and that’s how we think about it, but this is actually one of the policy things that Aurelia is starting to dip our toes into is, what would a space constitution look like?

REID:
What do you think are the greatest misconceptions the public has about space exploration? And what could happen if we actually got people to kind of see the truth of it?

ARIEL:
I think there are two. One is that space is not just for the elites. I think there was a wonderful mentality in the Apollo era where people would look up at the stars and think, “hey, in my lifetime, I’m going to get to go.” And the challenge with Apollo is we achieved it so early, we almost jumped ahead of the rest of humanity’s readiness to actually, you know, from an economic standpoint or technology standpoint, to scale. But we’re at that point now, we actually have an economy and all of this additional supporting infrastructure, so I think people should be given the chance to bring that hope back for their life, for their chance to actually experience it within their lifetime.

I think the second thing is that people assume it’s hard, intense, scary, isolating. And we have so much sci-fi that focuses on a dystopian future or surviving in space. We are actually at the cusp of a time where we’re going to be thriving in space, where we’ll use space technologies to benefit life on Earth, and you’ll be commuting to space because you’ll want to relax your back, you know? From really mundane things to really cool things. When you’re in a geriatric situation and you need to take some load off your spine, you’ll go up to space for the afternoon to be able to get a little bit of comfort back. You could do your yoga in a clear floating pod, looking out completely immersed in a galaxy. That’s the scale of experiences that are awaiting you. And we’re finally at this cusp where we’re able to really achieve that and make that future near term.

ARIA:
So the Apollo missions made people look up to the cosmos and dream of being there. Do you have the same dream? Do you think you will one day visit the moon, Mars, a floating space habitat?

ARIEL:
Yes, I think I will have a chance to go to the moon in my lifetime. Absolutely to LEO. There’s so many opportunities to be able to get to lower earth orbit and be an astronaut, be a civilian commercial astronaut. Moon, most likely.

Mars, it might be a tough choice. It might be like, “this is going to be my life for 5 or 10 years.” Am I willing to go as an early adopter? I think if I’m willing to go as an early adopter, yes, there will be that opportunity for probably the first human missions in the 2030s. And NASA, we’re not going to do a one-way mission, that Mars One stuff is ridiculous, so it’ll be a chance where we’re building it so you can also come home. But yes, I think I’m just on the cusp of the Mars generation.

REID:
And here we are now with our rapid fire questions.

Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

ARIEL:
This is an oldie but goodie, but there’s a Willie Nelson song, “Blue Skies.” I love listening to that song and I think it’s a little bit melancholy and a little bit hopeful, and this notion of blue skies are waiting. I’ve gone through, you know, some hardship in my own life in the last four to five years. And so coming out on the other side of that, humanity is coming out on the other side of the pandemic, we have this really beautiful blue sky vision for space. Something about Willie Nelson’s “Blue Skies” really speaks to me these days.

ARIA:
I love that.

Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?

ARIEL:
I am so captivated by personalized medicine. I don’t mean just in the data sense. I do think there’s a huge opportunity, still, to leverage our data. And this is actually something I worked on early in grad school, before I went back to space, I worked on blockchain for medical records – a complicated topic we can get into at another time. But that’s the data side. What really gets me excited for personalized medicine is gene therapy. We don’t have to have orphan diseases anymore where there’s not enough sick people, it doesn’t get attention. And how that is something that you can do midlife, also, if you have a disease, and be cured maybe with tools like CRISPR. I just find it absolutely fascinating, that biology side of personalized medicine.

REID:
Yeah, I agree with you on many, many things on personalized medicine.

What’s one technology that may seem, you know, kind of oblique from space but is going to be super important for transforming space exploration, space investigation, development. What’s a technology that you’re excited about for its ability to transform space?

ARIEL:
Maybe one kind of mundane one and one really exciting one. The exciting one would be something around new physics, like what GPT spat out for us today. If we could understand the crunch of spacetime better, I think that would take us from just really local explorations to much more profound exploration of the universe, like, Star Trek-level. So, it’s hard to not say that, as a space person. That would be probably the single most empowering technology if that came to fruition, with maybe the alternative of life in space – if we find microbial life in space or aliens elsewhere, those two would be coupled.

The second one I think of is social media and actually trying to make sure that we get it right. Neal Stephenson writes about it in a way that is disastrous, and social media, because we haven’t solved the problems on Earth, it essentially becomes this virus that endangers space missions just like it endangers democracy on Earth. So I do think that there’s some level of – and social media is kind of the metaphor for a group of technologies that would need to come about to make sure that we are able to still function effectively in groups without polarization, and that we don’t get so slowed down by polarization that we fail to invest together as a unified species in all of these species-saving technologies that we need. Some technology that helps us kind of get over that balkanization or polarization of social media, I think, would be critical for everything, not just for space, but really critical for humanity’s future period.

ARIA:
And can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if, like, everything breaks humanity’s way in the next, say ,15 years? And then what is our first step to set off in that direction?

ARIEL:
If everything breaks our way in the next 15 years, we will have a thriving space city in orbit around the earth. So, thousands, maybe even low millions of people if everything broke the right way, hundreds of thousands of people in orbit. And the first step there is to build the infrastructure that actually can house more than seven people in orbit. That’s what we’ve got now, seven people in orbit with the International Space Station, and Tiangong maybe a little bit more. But that next step is building the infrastructure to scale humanity’s presence in orbit.

REID:
So Ariel, always amazing, delightful, insightful. The optimism that she not just has for, obviously space, but for humanity, and even like precision medicine and all the rest. And of course, you know, I couldn’t resist trying to convert you to a little bit more Star Trek throughout the episode because, just, it was like it was a fruit lying on the ground in front of me. [laugh] But just amazing.

ARIA:
You know what? I think I can get into it. I loved Ender’s Game as a kid, my husband’s reading some Neal Stephenson right now, so I think I’m going to get back to some sci-fi roots. But I do really love how sci-fi becomes a reality. You know, she talked about how she was reading through the list of inventions that GPT-4 was positing that could be in the future and she said, like, “these aren’t science fiction, these are science fact.” It’s like so many of these things start out as just a glimmer in our eye and then they become reality. And I love that connection between sci-fi and reality and science and we can’t even predict what’s going to happen in 10 or 20 years because of the pace of innovation.

REID:
Yeah, and also thinking about the various, kind of, pieces of systems, like, how do you both learn from all things we have but also reinvent. What I kind of love about her, she’s thinking everything from nanotech and biology to society and society governance. It’s part of the long view with the foundation as an answer, and kind of saying, “hey, this is the journey we’re on, let’s hasten our steps.”

ARIA:
But I feel like everything she’s doing is sort of the ultimate argument for collaboration. Sometimes it’s like, “well you have humanities people over here and the tech people over here and never the two shall meet.” Or, “over here you have people doing private sector, and here nonprofit sector.” And I was just really interested to hear about what she said about NASA because I think a lot of the narrative is, “oh, well, NASA used to be on top and now they’re behind.” But to hear her talk about how this change has been really wonderful because we’ve let commercial and private spacefaring actually turbocharge the industry, so NASA can rent space, so Ariel, as an MIT worker, can rent space, and so that for her thesis, she was able to send stuff into space. I think it’s pretty phenomenal. So I love worlds colliding and everything she’s doing, which is then creating this much better product in the end.

REID:
Yeah, and with her drive and energy, I think I share her certainty that she will be in space. Probably on the moon, if not, as it were, mentally planning it already.

ARIA:
I mean, I cannot wait to be watching that launch and cheering her on from afar. Because, to your point, if anyone’s going to make it happen, it’s her.

REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network, hosted by me, Reid Hoffman, and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sara Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

ARIA:
Special thanks to Ted Huetter, Geoff Nunn, Sean Mobley, Janine Liberty, Sands Fish, Nicole L’huillier, Thomas Sanchez Lengeling, MIT Space Exploration Initiative, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Ben Relles, and the team at Jump Creative for video production on this episode.