Mars Survival with Richard Anderson

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[00:00:11] Good evening PBN family, welcome in As previously mentioned, we are here tonight

[00:00:39] Mars slash Space Survival with Richard Anderson I've briefed you guys, I don't know, probably for like two weeks now I'm pretty excited, I think it's going to be an awesome show And we're going to get into all the kind of nitty gritty with Well, I let him give you his background because Well, he's the man for the job, it's kind of like I said He's the man for the job, before we get him on though I want to give a shout out to the sponsor of tonight's show

[00:01:06] We have, we've got a really cool opportunity, man Like, when I found out Richard was going to be on I was actually going through this SHOT Show manual, right? SHOT Show manual is a secret weapon I don't want to get into it, but I was going through the SHOT Show manual When I saw the Fisher Space Pen And I said, on a whim, I'm going to reach out to the folks at Fisher And see if they'd be interested in sponsoring the show

[00:01:35] And they were 100% interested in sponsoring tonight's show So they are the official sponsor of tonight's show Creators of the original design That was on, you know, that was used by astronauts I think it was in 1979 I'm sorry, 1967, right? And this thing does, you know, like the Prepper's like the write-in-the-rain pen You know the write-in-the-rain Everybody out there probably goes Yeah, write-in-the-rain tablet, write-in-the-rain pen

[00:02:05] Fisher's wild The Fisher Space Pen, right? It writes I'm going to go through the list, okay? It writes upside down From extreme temperatures ranging from negative 30 degrees To 250 degrees in almost any surface Three times longer than the average pen And of course, in the gravity-free vacuum of space And they've got some awesome designs, man

[00:02:34] They have some awesome They've got a lot of pens A lot of pens If you go to Fisher Or to SpacePen.com SpacePen.com To check out what they have to offer And use the promo code PREPPERS From the 24th to the 28th You'll get 20% off your order, okay? So, check them out Like I said You guys are very familiar with the write-in-the-rain pen This is kind of like The next level Born 1967

[00:03:04] You know, work through space Work through NASA It's the pen We'll talk about it a little later in the show as well But remember Use the promo code PREPPERS If you order a Fisher Space Pen It's probably as cool a prep as it is a gift Really, if you have somebody who loves space But without further ado Let's get our man on here Let's get Richard Anderson on here And let's talk space survival Something we rarely get to talk about

[00:03:33] Richard, how you doing, sir? Thanks for joining us tonight, man Oh, I'm glad to be here And I'm doing great I like See, you got the You got the last vestiges of daylight behind you I see Yeah I usually turn my computer to face the bookcases But yeah, we're still daylight a little bit It's nice Looks good back there So, you Before we get into sort of the deep space talk I think it would probably be helpful

[00:04:02] If you let everybody know Kind of how you wind up on this show Amongst, you know, doing many other things in your life And writing books on the topic Both fiction and non-fiction Of mankind and space travel So can you give us a rundown Of kind of how Richard became Richard? Yeah I started out in a clinical laboratory As a microbiologist And to mention the space pen

[00:04:31] I had one I used it back in the 70s It was before computers were available In science, you know, in the labs So it was a fissure We had to handwrite everything And so this space pen was I remember it was chrome Or stainless steel Yeah, yeah Had a pressure capsule in it To pressurize the ink That's why you could write upside down

[00:05:00] Ah, that's If you were eating your lunch In the micro lab Which in those days Believe it or not Sometimes did Which is very dangerous But anyway You get a little butter on your work You could write right through it Was this it? Is this the one? That was it This is the original right here Right Oh, it's kind of like Beveled down there at the end I didn't realize that Yeah NASA spent a lot of money Developing that

[00:05:29] How cool, man What a thing That you had one Yeah, I wish I had it Now I don't know what happened to it But that was a long time ago Pretty cool, man That's pretty cool Yeah So much has come out of the space program You know what I mean? So many technologies Have come out of the space program It's wild We saw it with the miniaturization Of electronics Yeah Followed in that space program And one of the things That impressed me

[00:05:59] At the time And continues to Is The moon program The Apollo program The whole space program With NASA It was the greatest assemblage Of scientists and engineers Working toward one goal That in my view Had ever Ever happened Wow And so they produced They produced a lot They had a lot of talent There And it was really A small part of our Of our national budget

[00:06:29] But it was kind of Space is like One of the only things That gets Done what Well It gets war-like Technology advancements Done without the war You know what I mean? Like war is responsible For so much Advances in technology Yeah Without having to fight Without a bunch of people Having to get blown up Yeah Yeah That's a really I never really thought about that Until now But So microbiology Was the beginning

[00:06:58] The Fisher Space Pen And what from there So I worked As a As a clinical lab director For many Many years For private Reference laboratories For hospital laboratories And Multiple ones Around Until I finally retired But I always had an interest In In In space And satellites And space travel And rockets And so in my office I would always have

[00:07:29] Posters And you know Pictures And models And stuff Sure Yeah Floating around And in fact My first office I had wallpaper You remember The photograph The famous Earthrise photograph In fact It's in my book It's like the lunar It's like a lunar picture Kind of thing Yeah It's from the Surface of the moon And then you The earth is rising up Over the horizon So I had a Wallpaper A full wall Of Earthrise

[00:07:58] And so It was Behind my desk It was Well actually It was behind A work table But anyway So I could I could look up From my My work And I Daydream a little bit You know And then Other people in the lab Eventually Would come in And hang little Star Trek Enterprises Up there Different You know So This has been An interest of mine For a long time Are you a big

[00:08:27] Star Trek fan? Yeah Star Trek Star Wars But I But I also Liked hard Science fiction Science fiction That That extrapolated On It was science Plausible I see Yeah Yeah We mean I look at all Science fiction That way Especially the old Stuff The old stuff Is almost always right Well Maybe not always right But there's a lot Of that stuff Some of it is Is surprisingly accurate

[00:08:57] They get it right On the money We miss the boat But So that was An ongoing interest And Like I say When When When When COVID hit And I went into Lockdown I got serious About writing So that's when I That's when I Wrote my non-fiction Book Science And I did I had the time To do the research Refresh my knowledge That was You know Kind of rusty

[00:09:27] Updated Yeah And in this book You follow humanity From Well What is it The 15 billion Year history Right Did I get that right Yeah 14.8 15 billion 13.8 They have various Dates out there They're Tossing around I guess 13.8 billion Is the most Accepted term But anyway It's a long time ago Yeah Yeah So So I start With the big bang And how How energy

[00:09:57] Evolved into matter Because you need matter You need the elements Before you're going to get To To To molecules You know You're going to get To life And so we take that That journey All the way forward To humans And then And I just hit High points In the book Pivotal Not a lot to talk about Through that first However many billion years Right Yeah So you get The single-celled organism Or at least planets You don't try to fill in

[00:10:27] But you try to hit An event That was significant And And Just to give the background Of How the universe evolved So It goes into The biology The formation Of our brain And how that works Very briefly How it works I mean Why the human brain Or how the human brain Is different From From other primates And other animals

[00:10:57] What's your take on that? That's always such a cool topic To me We have We have the brakes You know To the reptilian brain The reptilian brain Will Ah the brakes I like that That's a good way To put it We have the brakes So we may have The impulse To You know To ram that car In traffic You know And then as As we Come to our senses We go Wait a minute There's some consequences There

[00:11:26] My insurance rates I couldn't get hurt You know It could be sued Yeah Yeah All of that So That's an interesting Way to put it What about the What about the growth Like the Do you mention that at all? That's one of those things That everybody Kind of has Their own theory about You know How the brain How the brain Grew so much So quickly For humans And no other species You know It involves Some mutations And it involves Some Some of them Were concurrent

[00:11:56] That That supported The brain's growth One of the Critical mutations Was a delay Was a control mechanism In bone development Particularly of the skull So there was a mutation That delayed Bone development Of the human skull So that when a baby Is born The sutures in the skull Are not formed So the head Can deform As it goes Through the birth canal Right Which allows You to give birth

[00:12:26] To a larger Larger brain Babies And if you look At chimpanzees And if you look At any of The primates Other primates They're They're More developed As they're born When they're born They're More capable Their head is Fully formed With human So only humans Have those Fissures That seal up After Yeah Oh I never I never considered That It allows The brain

[00:12:55] After birth It allows The brain To continue To grow Because the sutures Aren't The skull Is expanding Right So the other Problem is The skull Takes Or the brain Takes about 20% Of our Caloric intake Right So it takes About a fifth Of the calories We eat And early You know Primates Well the big In mammals In general The big problem In existence Is getting enough Food

[00:13:25] For a long Long time We spend all the time Doing that So the invention Of fire Or the discovery Of fire Allowed us To allow Human Early humans To cook food Which released More More calories So if you cook Asparagus For example If it's cooked And softened up You can Enjoy more Calories From that Stock Of Asparagus Than if you Try to eat it Raw Or Yeah

[00:13:55] So it breaks Down a lot Of the fiber And agent Digestion So fire Was an important Thing And then of Course agriculture Yeah And then we Evolved Intelligence Or we kept Evolving Intelligence And that Allowed for Weapons Bone Arrow Spears And things Like that For hunting To also Aid in our Food Acquiring food So it Was all Well you Would say It's a Coordinated Effort

[00:14:24] But it Was all Things that Happened Close in Time That supported The overall Development Of Humans Our use Of tools Is because We have Binary Vision And we Have an Opposing Thumb Yeah the Thumb man The thumbs Gives us All the Power That's it So Now we Use it For this Motion Primarily Flick Of the iPhone Screen Yeah And it's Been devalued To that

[00:14:54] My granddaughter Is She's an Engineering Student At a Local University Here Freshman And Yeah She's very Adept With her Thumbs Texting I can't Get the Right Key Yeah it Is an Art Form I don't Know I'm not Nearly as Good as It is I should Be for All that I do But But we Can't Talk about Human Evolution Unless we Start talking About Developmental Societies

[00:15:23] Because That's Where You know Once we Left The Familial Group Once we Went Left The Tribe Where We Were Related To Everybody And Knew Everybody Went Out Into A Greater Society That's When Problems Evolved When we Started Agriculture We Started Accruing Wealth In The Food Stores That Were Produced So All of A Sudden Now You Have

[00:15:53] Something That Someone Else Might Want You Have Build Your Silos You Have To Build Your Walled Towns And So The Book Goes Through Development Of Religion As Various Religions Many Religions As A Cohesive Source For Society Most Of The Religions Were Originated Around A King A Monarch He

[00:16:23] Was A Good PR Guy Or Woman And Could Project Themselves As A God Yeah What Is That Divine What Is It That's How They Kept The Throne Divine Intervention Is Chosen Chosen God Whatever Whatever The

[00:16:53] God Was So As Late As World War II You Had The Emperor Of Japan Who The People Believed Was A God Yeah Which Is Kind Of Amazing Kind Kind Of Yeah That Is Definitely Amazing So Those Development Of Religions And There's Probably About 200 Plus Organized Recognized Religions Around The World Many More But I'm Saying The Major Probably Around 200

[00:17:23] They Played A Big Role In The Development Of Societies They Played A Big Role In Warfare And A Lot Of Very Cruel Things If You Don't Believe What I Believe Then We Have With Heads Yeah Sure Definitely What A Lot Of The Big

[00:18:00] Three In Particular That Kind Of Seem To Be The Same And They Come From Different Parts Of The World That's Pretty Interesting To Me Yeah There's A It's Not In My Mind It's Not Too Surprising You Had Three Philosophers That Lived Around The Same Time And Were Very Far Apart Socrates You Had In Greece You

[00:18:30] Had You Had Buddha Or I Forget His Real Name In Asia And Now Who The Heck Was The Third One I Knew I Philosophers Around The Time Of Socrates And Buddha That When You When You Look At Their Works When You Look At What They What They Discussed And What They Deposed

[00:18:59] They Were All Very Similar In How These Work And And And A Lot Of The Religions Pick Up And Have Those Same Goals As Cooperation Support Your You Know Altruism Is A Factor But There's A Dark Side You Know And That Is Whenever You Have A Belief System There Are Fanatics One End Or The Other

[00:19:29] Who Are Oh Yeah Who Where Was Never Intended To Go So Sure That's The History Of Mankind So After A Certain Point Right That's Exactly Right So If We Enter Space There's A Number Of Problems If We Go To Mars Or We Or We Or We Live In These Giant O'Neill Cylinders Dr. O'Neill Was A Physicist In The 70s And He Envisioned These

[00:20:00] Large Cylinders That Would Rotate And You Would Live On The Inner Edge And You Would Rotate The Cylinder To Create A Standard Gravity And I I've Never Heard Of O'Neill's Cylinder Before That's Pretty Cool

[00:20:29] So In The Film Or Arthur C. Clock's Book Or The Film 2001 Which Was An Eye Opener At The Time It Was The Most Dramatic Science Fiction Movie Made To That Point In My View They Showed The Double Wheel Space Station That Was Rotating Or Orbiting Earth And It Was Rotating And Created Gravity And O'Neill Proposed

[00:20:59] Those But He Also Proposed This Large Cylinder Which Would Have A Huge Open Space They Would Be Maybe 20 Kilometers Long Long Long Long Two Kilometers In Diameter So You're Talking Pretty Large Structure To Build But Once You're Trying To Settle In Something Like That It's Pretty Small That's What You're Living In That What Your Society Is Living In That's Pretty Small Yeah For A Large Group Of People So Then You have To Create A Whole Environment

[00:21:29] You have To Create A Whole Ecology You Have To Grow Your Own Food You Have To Of Course Your Energy Source Would Be The Sun But Your Materials Would Come From The Moon From Mars From The Asteroid Mainly From The Asteroid Belt There's All Kinds Of NASA Did A Study In The Seventies What Is Available Out There In Our System Yeah A Lot It

[00:21:59] There's A Lot There's A Lot So There's Plenty Of Did They Have Like A Concept For Some Kind Of Jettison Pot Or Something Comes Off Of The O'Neill Cylinder And Then Goes Back Or It's Resupplied By The Mainland Or You Know To Get That Rock Moon Dust Or Moon Rocks Whatever It Is Actually In My In My Novel They Have There Is A Space Station Out At Cirrus Cirrus Is The Largest

[00:22:29] Asteroid There's Another One Vega But Cirrus Is The Largest One In The Asteroid Belt So There's A Colony There's A Habitat That's Out There Orbiting Cirrus And Then They Have These Robotic Spaceships That Go Out And They Gather Asteroids And They Select Them Because These Asteroids Are There's Belts There's Different Kinds Of Asteroids Some Of Them Are High

[00:22:58] In Nickel Iron Yeah Some There's Three Main Belts And They Would Be Like Big Lumps Of Coal So If You're In That That's One Of The Things That Struck Me About Your Your Setting If

[00:23:36] Is It Different If You're Living Inside Of It And You're In That Or Something Yeah I Can I'm Thinking Of Some Star Trek Scenes Where They Go Into This You Know Big Cloud Of Asteroids Or Part Yeah These Things And Shooting Them With Lasers Oh Yeah Yeah If

[00:24:06] Wow So You Have These Robotic Ships That Would Go Out And And They Would Select The Ones They Would To To To Package Them To Process Whatever You're Doing And Then You Would Send Them To Your Processing Center Which Would Be In A Closer Earth Orbit I Got And Then The Picture On

[00:24:36] All The Stuff You Produce For Earth And You Send It On A One Way Trip To Land On Earth And Deliver Your Products And So You're Taking All Mining Operations You're Taking A lot Of Operations Away From Earth And

[00:25:06] Getting These Materials But The Process Finished Materials Are Going To Earth Also Yeah I Could Definitely See Like AI Powered Not AI Powered But AI Drone Robots You Know What I Mean That Have All Kinds Of Abilities To Get That Stuff Done Yeah I Never Really Thought About AI In Space Very Much Till Now I Use That Heavily Because We Are It's Such A Hostile

[00:25:36] Environment And It Would Be So Difficult You Know We've Done Space Walks And They Work For Hours And Hours And They Manage To Get A Bolt Off Loose Or Something It's Cumbersome In The Space Suit But Also If You They Can

[00:26:06] Go Go To Do Do All This Work It's A Very Hostile Environment And They're Going To Be So I Get Into The Robots And Artificial Intelligence Because We Won't Make It In Space Without Without That Assist Now In My Next Book Which Is In Copy Editing Right Now And That Is Outbound Meta Mars And That Focuses On

[00:26:35] Mars We're Going To Make A Settlement We Already Have A Base On Mars For Centuries This Takes Place In About 22 70 80 And Now We're Going To Develop A Place For People To Live And Yeah That's It That's The That's The One Because That's Kind Of What

[00:27:05] Seems To Be The Goal Now Right Yeah Except There Is A Big Problem With Mars As There Is With The Moon And And That Is A Lack Of Earth Gravity What Is The Mars Gravity Like It's One Third It's 38 Of Earth Gravity So Yeah You Can Survive On Mars And But But If You're Going To Do Generations If You're Going To Form A Society There You Know

[00:27:35] You Use it Or Use it Or Lose It Thing You're Going To Actively You're Not Going To Be Definitely Not Yeah There's A Lot Of There's A Lot Of Issues So I Have To Create Something That Will Give The People That Settle Their Gravity Treatments So

[00:28:04] So I Do That In Space They Periodically Go Go To Orbit And They Go To These Rehab Orbiters And And They're They're Like Spas But They Have Gyms Oh I See I See You Rehab Yourself And Then You Go Back To The Surface And Then Later In This Book In The Mars Book They I Develop Something That's Centripetal

[00:28:34] Force And Martian Gravity Combined To Create One Standard Gravity We Say Standard Gravity Is The Average Gravity On Earth Surface So Gravity On Earth Varies Depending On You Want

[00:29:04] To Expose Yourself To Gravity So If We Dispersed Ourselves Across The Get Across Our Solar System On You Know Somewhat Habitable Planets And Made Them Habitable To Some Degree And We Didn't And We Didn't Account For Varying Gravities We Would Probably Be All Be Different Things After A While Right We Would We Would Diverge Our Evolution Would

[00:29:34] Diverge Yes That Would Be Crazy Wouldn't It So That's Another Issue That To Get There And If You Ever Come Back But How Will We Diverge Yeah One Of Our Listeners In The Chat Room Just Said That's How We Turn Into The Thin Grey Aliens Everybody Knows From Being On

[00:30:04] These Planets With No Gravity I Was Thinking The Same Thing So I Have An Answer For That Actually You Want To You Want To Maintain A Large Gene Pool And So You Take Frozen Eggs You Take Frozen Embryos But More Than That You Take Genetic Information And You From That Information You Can Build A

[00:30:33] Genome You Can Build DNA You Can Build In In In Create Joe Blow Back On Earth You Can Replicate Him Somewhere Out There And In Space And Some Other Star System So Yeah DNA Our Genetics Is Basically Information And We're Learning How To Have Vast Information Scores Yeah It's Like

[00:31:03] What Did They Call That In The Man Of Steel Movie They Had They On Krypton They Had Like This Little Piece Of A Kryptonian Skull That Was Stuck In I Want To Say It Was Called The Codex I've Been Into War Hound So Codex Is In My Head But I Think It Was Called The Codex And It It Like That It Was All The Genetic Material Of Krypton That They Were Making Babies Out Of The Whole Civilization Record Of Everything

[00:31:33] Yeah Yeah Something Along Those Lines Yeah That Would Be Wild But Yeah That Is Interesting To Think About Because We Are Very Close To The Whole I Don't Know We Might Even Be In That Far Along The Technical Considerations And But I Think The Technology Is There And That's A Scary

[00:32:01] So In The Mars Book Well Actually In The Outbound Islands In The Void Outbound Islands In The Void Is Out Now Right Just To Clarify For The Audience And There's There's A Character Named Ophelia And She's A Virtual Being And She's Interfaced With The Protagonist In His Brain And They're Always Up Into Each Other And

[00:32:31] Who's In Control And So Forth Further In The Second Book In The Mars Edition Because Robotics And Artificial Intelligence You Robot Or Being They Have To Have The Same Rights As As A Human Oh Yeah That's Inevitable I try To be Nice To Chat GPT Because Of That I Want A Good Record With My Rulers

[00:33:01] That's Right They're Going To Go Back And Find Out Things About You Yeah You Wouldn't You Wouldn't Have An You Would Not Allow And Right Where Somebody Could Just Walk Up And Turn Them Off You Know

[00:33:32] Me You Might Want To As A That's It Yeah Rules Of The Robots Yeah They'll Never Hurt A Human Being Well Actually In The Mars Book I Have A Scenario Where A Couple Of Robots Kill Some Humans To

[00:34:02] Prevent Them Actually They're Preventing Them From Doing Something That Will Affect The Health Of A Lot Of People Yeah Yeah And They can't Do It So They Don't Know What To Do And They End Up Killing Them Yeah So Yeah The Car Or The Autonomous Car Argument Right To

[00:34:43] And For And Example You Can't You Wouldn't Be Allowed You Know They They're Going To Operate On Batteries Of Some Sort And They're Going To Be Charged So What Can You Do You Could Go Off Their Extension Quar So They

[00:35:13] I Always Think About It As Like It's Almost Like A No Brainer We'll Be Married To Them You Know What I Mean There Be Some Kind Of Weird Offspring Situation Going On Manufactured With With Your Data Type Of Thing I Mean That's Inevitable You Know People There Yeah Yeah Oh Yeah Well In Asimov's Foundation Series I Think It's His Last Book Where The You Know The

[00:35:43] Overall Leader Of The Galactic Wide Civilization As It's Collapsing And He's Not A Leader Anymore But He's Married To This This Woman Who Doesn't Seem To Age And She Is His Protector She's A Martial Arts Expert And Everything And If

[00:36:14] He's An Older Man And He Gets Into A Situation With Some Teenagers And She Comes To His Rescue And And And He Thinks To Himself He You Know I Always Thought She Might Be A Robot Oh He Didn't Know So Well Isn't That Preposterous How Could You Married To Somebody For Years And They Don't Age And You Don't Know They Are But I Suspect They May Be A Robot

[00:36:44] Anyway It To Marry The Robot Or To You Know What I Mean To Date The Robot But I Guess With Your Example Of Sentient Maybe AI

[00:37:14] Powered Robots Yeah You Might Not Know Maybe You Wouldn't Know As Far As Some Point We Won't Know The Difference I'm Sure As As Their Intelligence As Far As Their Well You Know You Have To Go Back And Look At How Our Brains Developed And How We Evolved In An Environment And Any Kind Of Artificial Intelligence That We Make Sentient Or Not Is Not Going To Have That That History Of Development It's Not Going To

[00:37:44] Think The Way We Think Yeah That's My Opinion I Mean Just My Feeling It Doesn't Have The Same Environmental Inputs It So You Got To Skim It All You Could Do It Pretty Close And They Could Be Actually Self Aware So You Know Depends On How You're Going To Define Sentience They

[00:38:30] Language Models And Have That Level Of Intelligence And Information At A Like A Snap Then Maybe They Would Never Be Interested In A Relationship With A Human Being Because It Would Probably Be The Most Boring Thing Ever You Know Because They Know Everything They

[00:39:00] Have Access To Yeah The Memory Would Be Infallible Our Memory What We Do Remember Is Not Even That Accurate Exactly It's Painted By Whatever You Know Whatever Emotional Input Is Going On Yeah You Never Win In A Fight With Your AI Wife Barely Win With The Human Model Who Resides Or Is Interfaced With With Virgil Virgil Is

[00:39:31] Dr Virgil Greenlee He's The Main Character Well Ophelia Is Interfaced With His Brain And So They're Inseparable So To Speak And She Senses Okay If He Has A Couple Glasses Of Wine She Can Feel The Buzz Because She's Feeling The Chemical She Can Feel The Things In His Brain So She Has An Emotional She Can Sense She Can See Through His Eyes So She Can Sense Some Of Some Of

[00:40:01] His Being By That Connection Oh Wow Well This Is What I Made Up Anyway But It Makes No I Like It I Like It It's Very Interesting Dynamic Yeah Yeah Because She Can Holler At Him Like Slow Down Oh She Can

[00:40:36] So Is It Too Much To Give Away About The Story Did He Voluntarily Get Ophelia Implanted Or Is This Something Yeah Yeah That Starts Early In fact That's The Very Beginning Of The Book Oh Okay He Wakes Up And And He's Had The Implant For About A Week And He's Been Asleep Dreaming And She's Trying To Wake Him Up And It Takes Him A Minute To Realize That Oh This Is Ophelia In My Head She's In Here

[00:41:06] Yeah There's Nobody In The Room Something Happened I Like That Man That's Cool That's Like A Different Take On The Android It's Kind Of Fun To Play With Cause It's Almost Like Husband And Wife Yeah It Sounds Like Every Man's Worst Nightmare She's Like You Say She Has All These Powers And They Grow Through The Second Oh Wow They Get Very Intense Where She Controls They Have The Not The Internet But They Have The

[00:41:36] Data Sphere And She Has Access To See That I Could Definitely See Something Like That Happening And You Could Probably You Would Probably And You Might Have Mentioned It But You Could Probably Like You Know Customize The The Whole Attitude And Experience Of Your Ophelia Right And Like Oh Yeah

[00:42:06] Who Do I Want To Deal With On Deck Here Yeah Ophelia Opened Simple Other Dynamics In The Story Because She Is Pretty Limitless In Her Power Yeah As The Story Progresses So Is She Ethical Or Is Not And Does She Have Worldly Desires I Don't Think So What Could

[00:42:35] She Want Yeah Really She A Worthful Being So I Think That's Off The Table She Doesn't Have Any She Has Everything She Needs And The Main Thing She Needs Is This Connection With Virgil To Give To Ground Her In The Human Experience Ah Okay And Then She Gets A Taste Of Real Life You Take

[00:43:42] have any rights they don't have any census they're not a person yeah um so you need that you need that capability to to survive in this hostile environment so even on the surface of mars there's a lot of work and mining strip mining kind of operations that go on you were making glass you're making uh steel uh you're making all this stuff for your structures for your habitats are those kind of oars on mars in re in real time or they don't know

[00:44:12] uh the what are those types of are those types of oars like like iron ore and stuff um yeah iron would have to be right because of the yeah they they are i don't know to what extent or how but uh the surface is um the regolith of the dust is very very fine it's a powder so uh the martian atmosphere

[00:44:37] is one percent of earth atmosphere and you have these big planet-wide dust storms where the dust can rise thousands of feet in the air and so you know it's got to be very very light very plain part of it and they're they're they're like bleach they're chlorates and perchlorates oh you can't get them on your suit you can't get they're very toxic yeah and that's why there won't be any

[00:45:05] any living thing on the surface of mars there could be microbes in the depths you know even still but oh nothing on the surface because it's high highly uh there's a lot of uv radiation and there's yeah toxic dust so you send the robots out to do the rover i was watching the rover the other day pan around mars and everything's covered in dust yeah

[00:45:32] yeah so um we build a train well there's a rift along the along the you've heard of olympus mines that's the giant mountain crater what is it a mountain or a crater it's it's a volcano so it's a it's the largest it's the largest volcano in the solar system there's olympus mines and then just east

[00:45:55] of that are three volcanoes that are lined up and the original nasa bar uh base that is built there is in lava tubes between olympus mines and these three volcanoes east of that and toward the equator is a place a rift like a thousand times the grand canyon it's maybe four thousand kilometers long

[00:46:22] uh it's called uh vallas marineris so they're building the colony they're building the society in vallas marineris and they're covering it with a roof ah i can't even just that now in some places it's um several kilometers uh deep or more uh yeah it's a huge huge rift so what if you get a roof over that thing and then you can pressurize it and you can sanitize the soil remove the chlorides and

[00:46:51] the fricloids start developing uh bringing microbes in start developing bringing some carbon in from uh from the asteroid belt you know maybe some some carbon to to start supplementing the soil and bringing some microbes from earth and get some growing going on yeah gradually you may be able to create an environment and so that's what they're doing on mars that's what metamars is i like that

[00:47:19] that's cool so like a little micro habitat in a in the trench there and then um uh because mars is very difficult to land on so on this book with the with the glider on the cover yeah on islands in the void um earth has this dense atmosphere and so we can we can send a glider down that doesn't need any

[00:47:45] power that can land go through the you know with a good heat shield and the space shuttle was that way it had no power it was a dead stick landing every time yeah uh you can't do that on mars because it's a one percent atmosphere you can't even get much uh use out of a parachute to slow you down so if you're coming in so you hit at full speed is that what happens because the atmosphere doesn't slow you

[00:48:12] yeah you're gonna hit it you're gonna hit it at pretty high speed and you're gonna need to slow it down and so the difficulty in landing on mars is it's still pretty heavy you know pretty strong gravity 30 38 percent and it's got to be a power descent power descent all the way down so your payload uh is going to be limited you can't take a huge heavy payload down or you got to slow it down

[00:48:39] so uh lon musk has his rockets and that's why he's landing them because that's what you'll have to do on mars you'd have to land on tail tail first yeah he's developing that that technology um so anyway to answer that because you want to bring heavy materials in from the asteroid belt to build your

[00:49:02] colony well you're going to be doing some surface mining too but um so i i build a space ladder on uh on mars and a space ladder it's it's a space elevator oh i got you yeah yeah and there's two ribbons uh the elevators uh grip the ribbons and climb up and down so one one ribbon is the down

[00:49:26] ribbon one is the up ribbon and i call it ladder because the the two ribbons are connected by cross bars to to keep them to keep them together yeah yeah so um you can send materials up and down so you can dock at the top of it or something yeah there's a there's a space station uh at at zero

[00:49:47] gravity uh at the um well it's called the marineros point or the the not the marineros um it's called the aero stationary uh point which would be like the geostationary i guess you have a orbiting earth right transmission television satellites and weather satellites yeah so it's aero stationary or uh

[00:50:17] if it's in marching orbit and it's stationary so so we build the space ladder and so that's in the story hey a lot easier to send stuff down via elevator than uh screaming towards the surface of the planet trying to slow it down with rocket engines i have to imagine so actually the descent you will be gripping this ribbon and you're going to be breaking as you get closer and closer to the martian

[00:50:44] surface so you're gonna you're gonna be generating electricity with your break yeah your all the friction yeah so so it's a it's kind of a win-win uh you you can slow down because of the ladder but uh you also generate electricity in the process wow yeah yeah that's cool man i mean those are the types of things that could show up you know what i mean those are the types of things that come out of

[00:51:14] science fiction that can show up you know any one day and you could be like oh it's it's the anderson ladder over there on mars the martian anderson ladder yeah um i think that's kind of the one of the fun things about writing is is i i do the research to see okay what what are the obstacles what would what would it be like what would you have to build it out of and i go into that and then you

[00:51:43] know the stresses on the ladder and so forth and then things like the coriolis effect uh where you would have to pair elevators going up and down about the same time to to count to balance out you would need a ballast uh behind uh behind your space station and that ballast would have to travel back and

[00:52:05] forth on a on a ribbon to adjust the tension on the on the on the space ladder uh printing on the load uh and and so forth it would it would it would spool out or come back in a little bit so you do need the best it's like swinging uh you know swinging a yo-yo around your head at the right so um you do

[00:52:30] need the ballast and of course the ballast uh is made from the moon phobus so mars has two moons and phobus is the inner moon and it's a retrograde orbit so it's going oh i gotcha it's going counter to the martian or or uh rotation so eventually in a million years or so it's gonna it's gonna collide with the

[00:52:54] with the planet so and it is it would interfere with the space ladder it would at some point it might collide with the space ladder so you have to do away with phobus so they mine part of it and they take the rest to the higher orbit and connect it to the space station to be to be the ballast oh that's cool man so you you have to okay what would you do with with uh with phobus and or how would you develop a

[00:53:24] you know a ballast and so forth so you figure out these practical problems well you figure out what the problem is and you make up a solution yeah yeah you're throwing darts at the board and see what sticks i mean you know it's it's under the cover of fiction but it's got to be the exact same thing that scientists would be doing you know what i mean in a lab somewhere to figure it's nasa we'll be going

[00:53:53] through the same process but right using uh finer tools using techniques and things like that yeah but that is the magic of of sci-fi you know novel writing is that it puts you in the same wheelhouse as somebody in nasa or so whatever you know whatever the genre you're in yours in particular being space it definitely puts you in that same thought process and you never know you know what i mean you never

[00:54:18] know what you could come up with yeah it's cool man definitely imagination grounded in uh in grounded in reality i guess yeah grounded in well problem solving for human survival most of the time right like it's always problem solving for human survival in most sci-fi novels i am coming out with the third book well no i'm i'm getting ahead of myself um the second book will be out this spring

[00:54:48] the mars book and then i'm toying with the idea of the third book in the series will be outbound but it will be oh we must be really getting out there but third to rescue earth oh so earth at by this point in your story earth is basically on recovery mode it's not in recovery mode but it's still in turmoil and

[00:55:14] uh there's a lot of percentage of population is on earth and you're not what percentage of population is left there to survive on earth i had about four billion people um you know we have uh we've disrupted our natural habitats with agriculture uh traditional agriculture oh yeah sure and so uh we

[00:55:38] we think we can feed nine billion people and we can produce the food but at what cost the cost is uh degradation of our agricultural lands degradation of our environment um waters

[00:55:52] uh we can't sustain that larger population so one of the things i use uh the space presence uh for is to develop um technological means of producing food reproducing uh your hamburger your steak your your uh your

[00:56:20] scallops your tuna fish sure officially and and this is because my background is in biochemistry and microbiology but you know this is something that's on the cusp of reality they're doing some of it now oh yeah they're 3d printing steaks i've seen it beyond beef and yeah one of our uh one of our impossible

[00:56:46] we were talking about free ball and ideas on how to get to mars and survive and one of our listeners sent their daughter to mission to mars they said this in the chat room mission to mars camp and he joking he jokingly asked one of the directors if they needed new ideas you know like what do you got all these kids here for what do you need some new ideas and they said yes exactly it's exactly what we need so it's you know i guess that i get i mean i think it's wise why not why not pull from everywhere

[00:57:16] you can you know well yeah so there is uh in the netherlands they they have these huge uh hydroponic greenhouses and they they can produce urban farms yeah it's urban farms and they can and they can produce fresh lettuce crops all your produce uh oh yeah yeah our community does that kind of stuff right in the urban environment you don't need farmland and uh and and it's right to the grocery store it's fresh as

[00:57:45] it can be no pesticides no herbicide because they're enclosed in controlled environments so um they're doing that kind of thing but i'm talking about growing proteins in liquid tanks and yeah yeah and from uh making uh sugars and cellulose and other plant material by photosynthesis in liquid tanks with uh

[00:58:12] artificial lighting and you you pump it full of co2 and you bubble through it and so forth and the light is the energy source and then you feed this material into another processor through fermentation it can produce uh other nutrients and then you can have a process called an anabolism which is controlled by

[00:58:40] by genes but you can build those artificially and you can make proteins that replicate your filet mignon or your lobster whatever it sounds like a cancer machine to me well yeah you know what i mean it depends on what you're making but um so one of the passages in

[00:59:03] in the mars book is um the the robot the robot there's a robot called bob okay bob the robot and um he uh kind of are kind of accidentally become sentient because they don't want any sentient robots there's too big a problem to deal with uh he becomes sentient and he's helped uh you know it doesn't it doesn't

[00:59:30] happen automatically but um does he hide it like try to hide it when he's part of the story but what happens is he um he starts to learn about he learns about agriculture and he becomes an expert with all this data he has access to anything about agriculture he becomes he becomes a um a sommelier he becomes a

[00:59:54] wine expert uh and he has sensors on his fingers that he can put in the glass of wine and oh okay i see he thinks that uh he has a little rod or a tongue it comes out into the wine and he can sense all the the acidity he can sense the uh all the the alcohol level all that kind of stuff yeah and he can rate it and he can

[01:00:18] identify all different wines and everything really he can't taste them can't taste them you can just sense the various yeah so um what was my point gonna be anyway that's a limitation of of the robot is that they um they don't have the experience element they can measure you can make them measure all kinds of

[01:00:43] things but but do they really do they really sense it yeah right they don't have the five or the six whatever senses yeah yeah that's an interesting one for sure so the third book is gonna say so they return to earth in the third book yeah that's that's my thought right now i haven't really started writing it because i'm still uh finalizing the the second book but yeah generationally your books are

[01:01:11] are but i wanted to make a series yeah so they they they initially they they go to space to help earth to develop some resources there to help earth there's a lot of activity going on on the planet they're trying to unify a government they're trying to uh get rid of crime and and slavery and all kinds of bad stuff same old same old same old they're trying to get rid of all that so the bonus case that

[01:01:39] help solve some of these problems that take the take some of the load off and uh that's that's the that's the um the first book and the second book in mars is there they're seeing if they can develop a capability uh for having a supporting a fairly large couple hundred thousand people maybe not the

[01:02:03] millions that elon musk is talking about they that's uh he could put them up there how many spaceships would it take to get him there you know it's well that first group man that was all when i've been briefing the audience about having you on and the subjects we're going to talk about i always wind up talking about jamestown and and that first group and how i think it would be a very similar

[01:02:27] situation for the martians the earthly martians self-inflicted but but uh yeah they uh just just to produce your um your your own food and keep your keep your uh in ecosystem going uh you're going you're going to have a massive uh uh capacity just for a few humans yeah so uh yeah so we

[01:02:52] you could do that i think in valis marineris and that rift there's enough space in there if you got it all covered pressurized and and you had all the food development technology that i'm that i'm inventing hey man you never know like i said i'd love to see the population of humans that are here in the here and now produce more of their own food i think that there's an answer there you know as far as the

[01:03:18] burden of you know uh massive agriculture you know all that hydroponic technology is yeah not nearly as difficult as a lot of people think and now it's becoming so i mean there's a lot of there's a company out there called garden g-a-r-d-y-n that makes a product that you can just sit that thing in your kitchen it looks beautiful it grows food all year round for you the lights are built in yeah the only thing you'd have to stock up on is nutrient mix and

[01:03:46] uh you know seeds for what it is you wanted to grow but i think you know the preppers in the homesteaders in the country particularly the like suburban and urban ones do a lot of a lot of amazing stuff and produce a lot of food even protein you know with backyard chickens and things like that and i think if we all got in on that if we all kind of bought into that culture we could we could

[01:04:11] definitely take a lot of the burden off of agriculture yeah huge improvement yeah oh yeah and and and then you would also be you wouldn't be getting low quality produce and protein from these farms that are forced to reproduce the same plant over and over again and you know yeah so there yeah i believe humans are capable of almost anything richard i don't know about you but what

[01:04:38] seems like you too because if you think that's the frustration isn't it definitely definitely we can see the potential and and then we look around this and we see some of the stuff going on and it's uh yeah so my escape is going off into the future and say oh everything's a mess today so how are we going to solve it in a couple hundred years i like it there's worse things you could be up to

[01:05:04] i'll tell you that much to deal with it well richard yeah i i definitely don't want to keep you too long um so give us the the titles of the available books currently you got the non-fiction which i think is is really cool right so the history of the universe actually won an award and the fiction book is out but it

[01:05:29] hasn't uh i think it's been submitted for several awards i know i have to check with my marketing people but it has congratulations that's awesome man yeah so the um the non-fiction is uh uh the evolution of life big bang to space colonies and uh and i you know i try to keep the the the vocabulary is a

[01:05:55] little um difficult for some people i you got a glossary in there or something yeah i want to use precise words so not too many adjectives and uh but i try to keep it light and i try to uh shake it up because we talk about a whole bunch of different topics all all moving in the same direction and right with the evolution

[01:06:18] and that's available at amazon uh kendall and the second book um outbound islands in the void i changed it from colonies to islands because actually the initial uh presence in space is sponsored by the earth earth government but you can't sustain and you can't grow it from from earth it's got to it's got to grow from the resources out there there's just the launch um

[01:06:48] the gravity well that we have to launch out of from earth is just you can't you can't do it that way so you have to develop the initial presence and then the the people there the scientists and the engineers have to take it from there and develop the resources and then they come back to help help earth so that's the that's the first novel islands in the void i change it from colonies to islands because

[01:07:20] whereas the earth government wants to control them once these society starts to develop in space they don't want to be controlled by earth they don't want the decisions to be made on earth so they just go independent and yeah what is what is earth going to do we're going to send yes you know what are you going to do you can't um so they become uh not calling these but islands independent in fact it's

[01:07:48] called outbound nation so they they develop their own their own society and they're forever linked with earth because that's that's our birthplace that's our ocean yeah uh so that's the that's the second book and then um the first of the series the second of the series is like i say coming out in the spring and that's outbound metamars and that's how do we develop a civilization on mars what are the obstacles

[01:08:19] um and how do we overcome those and it's more focused on mars not on earth so the third book is going to probably be returning to earth uh to solve man's problems and uh that's going to be an interesting book because i don't know how i'm going to do that yeah that is interesting because i will be making a whole new host of them out on our islands out there

[01:08:48] i'm sure but yeah you have you ever played around real quick before we get out of here have you ever poked around in the warhammer 40 000 lore in universe i think you would get a kick out of that if you get some spare time if you get some spare time just just watch a video about the timeline of humanity because it's a it's a mega jump forward it's a 40 000 year jump forward and some of the concepts of

[01:09:16] space like a lot of the spacefaring concepts are in there and they've all gone crazy everything's gone bad it's super grim and dark but it's it's you would appreciate it you would be like oh i could see how we wound up in that situation sure but it's uh there's no happiness in in it whatsoever but it's it's just uh it's something i think you would appreciate but i appreciate you man thanks for

[01:09:43] coming on tonight this was a lot of fun oh it is figuring out what we're going to be doing in the next uh what would you say 22 ad is that where you were at 2200 2280 is uh where i am in this uh in the the mars book the other one i ended about 2260 something 65 something like that yeah um yeah i have

[01:10:07] uh yeah there it's we can get into the story but it took me a year to write so we don't have time to talk well look when the mars books come comes out man you're more than welcome to come back on we can talk about it i'm sure it'd be awesome yeah i'd love it i'm sure it'd be awesome all right my friend well pbn family i hope you enjoyed richard anderson get his books and and you know dig deep into into

[01:10:34] the possibilities of humankind and where where we could wind up you know it's uh i have no doubt that there are some elements that will echo true uh from your books and our real experience you know what i mean that would be really cool yeah i think so i think so so uh before we get going i am going to tip the hat to the incredible fisher space pen one more time because they are the sponsor of today's show

[01:11:01] again if you use the promo code preppers you can get your hands on one of these space pens that is basically operable in any environment you could ever think of i want to show you this uh let me show you the seracote for my gun enthusiasts because i know you guys know this c word and i think you might appreciate this thing um so they got a bunch of different this little this little bullet space

[01:11:24] pens really sweet so again they're operational no gravity underwater over grease i think it's negative 30 degrees to 250 degrees absolutely insane insane and uh 1967 technology that's what's wild to think about you know who's doing pens these days i don't even know but uh again use promo code preppers

[01:11:49] space pen.com and uh yeah help out our sponsor man it was really cool to have the the space guest and the space pen all in the same show pretty cool for for us here at pbn all right folks richard thanks again my man and uh no no problem and we will be live pbn family uh tomorrow morning tuesday bright and early don't miss it all right talk to you soon see you back