"we think that self-assembly this modular reconfigurable algorithm for constructing space structures in orbit is going to give us this promise of space architecture that's actually worth living in you ..."

"one day become intergalactic civilization i have a hope yeah the following is a conversation with ariel ekblah director of mit space exploration initiative she's especially interested in autonomously ..."

"my parents are both ex-air force so my dad's an a-10 fighter pilot and my mom trained and had qualified to be a fighter pilot but it was early enough that women were not allowed in combat at that time..."

"always said he was absolutely convinced because he was a child of the apollo years that he would get to go in his lifetime really thought it was gonna happen and so it was a challenge and you know sad..."

"trilogy this is a amazing story of harry selden this you know foundation that he forms at different ends of the well according to the story uh difference the universe and has this interesting focus on..."

"it's kind of a fascinating figure in that way so do you do you also think about uh him beyond just his work in science fiction but his role in coming up with wild crazy ideas that actually become real..."

"orbit or on a surface of a celestial body that are bigger than the biggest rocket payload fairing that we currently have available and that what led me to self-assembly and other models of in-space co..."

"um i mean as an ex-military family we used to talk about all of this we would say that luck favors the prepared and so growing up you know we had a plan actually a family plan for what we would do in ..."

"exactly it's a forcing function like survival you don't get this right you die so uh and that you can bring back to earth and it will improve um right like figuring out food in space will make you fig..."

"okay so you mentioned to go back to swarm yeah so that was interesting to you first of all in your own work but also i i believe you said something that was inspiring from neil stephenson as well so w..."

"uh envision system to be fully distributed and just like an ant colony if one of them is damaged or you know whatever uh loses control and all those kinds of things that that doesn't affect the perfor..."

"changing conditions so uh maybe can you talk about your phd work about this this work about tesserae what is it in general also any any cool stuff because this is super cool yeah yeah absolutely so te..."

"know if they're in a toxic relationship and they need to get out right right if they need if they need to separate exactly yeah all right this is like so amazing and for people who are just listening ..."

"is going to give us this promise of space architecture that's actually worth living in living in oh i thought you also meant from like outside artistic perspective when you see the whole thing it's ju..."

"stacks and builds itself and creates a bridge or something in the future what do you envision the thing would look like like when you imagine a thing far into the future where there's um so we're not ..."

"could you define a module that's a node a small node that someone can live in and you self-assemble a lot of those together they're called uh plesiohedrons like uh space filling solids and you dock a ..."

"are cubes and i think hexagons i have to remind myself exactly what the faces are but overall a truncated octahedron can be bonded to other truncated octahedrons and just like a cube it fills all the ..."

"i know those space people they're kind of wild up there let's see how that dynamic evolved yeah exactly there's that culture culture forms and i would love to see what kind of culture once you once yo..."

"system is you can disassemble it you can completely reconfigure it as if your mission changes or the number of people in space that you want to host if you have a space conference happening like south..."

"promise of reconfigurable space architecture might allow us to explore i've been hanging out with grimes recently i just feel like she belongs up in space this is like designed for for artists essenti..."

"tolerances come together so they figured that out on themselves and the local robotics problem but by the way was danielle rose pebbles what's the pebbles project the pebbles project are little cubes ..."

"looking at a tiled doughnut and i'm not hungry so this is the is this is this from your thesis or no uh this is probably i mean this is in my thesis this looks like it was one of my earlier papers thi..."

"essentially it does what you'd want a plane never to do it pitches really steeply upwards at 45 degrees that's a picture you yeah yeah that's test rate that's super early in my phd some of just the pa..."

"experience they kind of that you explicitly tried to really form this into a membrane and then you could do the replay cognitively freeze it yeah save right uh when we have neural link we can replay t..."

"duration space missions deep duration space missions okay let's talk about this um i'm just gonna ask a bunch of dumb questions so approximately how long does it take to travel to mars asking for a fr..."

"duration uh as well what are the hardest aspects of this of living in space for many days for let's say 100 days 200 days maybe there's a threshold when it gets really tough what are what are some stu..."

"growing your own food no okay this is this is essential for the space party is the yes the space beer yes it's the fermented product yes okay cool in terms of water what's a good source of drinkable w..."

"propellant without always having to ship it up from earth so how much water is there on mars that's a great question i do not know we don't know water at the caps i suspect nasa from all of the satell..."

"biology search for life in the universe okay yeah does that scare you or excite you it excites me profoundly there's other alien civilizations potentially very different than our our own i think there..."

"which properties life should have right uh whether it can should be able to reproduce and all those kinds of things or pass information genetic type of information we don't know and it's like it's tha..."

"knowledge yeah i mean i personally believe that it's teeming with life and you're right i think that's a really useful productive engineering scientific question of what kind of great filter yeah can ..."

"complicated quickly okay anyway um back to the dumb questions because you you answered this um there's an interview we answer a bunch of cool little questions from um from young students and so on abo..."

"this musical instrument that you referenced was a design of an object that could only be performed in microgravity oh cool so it doesn't sound the same way when it's um it's a percussive instrument wh..."

"astronauts get adjusted to the stuff how long does it take to adjust to the physics of this world this other world so even after one or two parabolic flights you can gain a certain facility with movin..."

"what do you think about like decades do you think about decades or is this like an entire i think about centuries especially for myspace but yeah for decades i think as soon as we get past the three-y..."

"to think about next generation space architecture but also starfleet academy if you know that reference from star trek uh yes so let me ask a silly sounding ridiculous sounding but probably extremely ..."

"development yeah so there's some studies on mice in microgravity it's interesting like i think the mice like one of them the mice weren't able to walk or like their understanding of physics i guess is..."

"like mcmurdo right so we have these models of really extreme environments on earth in antarctica for example where humans have been able to go and make a sustainable settlement mcmurdo style life on m..."

"current political climate is such that you can't get the trillion dollar investment to build to start from scratch and build the sci-fi megastructure but if you can build it in fits and starts in litt..."

"see this in series like the expanse with the belters and these you know different societies that uh if we were to succeed in having human societies grow up in different pockets it's not necessarily go..."

"space and it's worth trying to tie nations together with more collaboration to avoid that happening the international space station is a great example i think it's something like 18 countries are part..."

"uh to escape these sort of geopolitical conflicts i mean there's something there's so much camaraderie to the whole thing and um even in this little period of human history we're living uh through it ..."

"but also uh colonizing mars yeah it's it's something to look forward to something that uh that uh and not make it a domain of war but a a domain of human collaboration and human compassion i think yea..."

"and human compassion i think yeah you're the founder and director of the mit space exploration initiative it includes a ton of projects so i just wanted to their focus i guess on life in space from as..."

"we are working on swarm robots uh we have just announced actually mit's return to the moon so my organization is leading this mission for mit going back to the surface of the moon as early as the end ..."

"we're testing out it's a tech demonstration mission not a true not a true swarm yeah there they are those are the astro ants wow and they this was a distributed system and they in in theory you could ..."

"uniting there's a great quote from bill anders from the apollo 8 mission to the moon which is he it's the earthrise photo that was taken where you see the earth coming up over the horizon of the moon ..."

"human beings when when uh ai system learns to play chess better than humans you start to let go of this idea that humans are special because of intelligence it's it's something else um maybe the flame..."

"mission and i feel like ai's when other humans will need to make these decisions and it also feels like ai systems will need to help make those decisions i don't know um i guess my question is about g..."

"horizon to think about i think it should be on the horizon it's always good to think about these things early because we make a lot of technical design decisions at this phase working with swarm robot..."

"well the hri component is really interesting to me um especially when the eye includes like almost friendship because like people don't realize this i think that we you know we humans long for connect..."

"have a powerful role in the mental health and just the stability of a crews to have some other robot friends come along what do you by the way the book you mentioned is into the anthra cosmos a whole ..."

"and happy or feeling fulfilled what about other humans relationship with other humans do those get those get weird when you get past a certain number of humans i'm not an expert in this area but an an..."

"down some married couples i think a lot of marriages broke up a lot of marriages got closer together um so it's like and then the the single people some of them went off the cliff and some of them dis..."

"young scientist do you think in your lifetime you will go out into orbit you will go out beyond into deep space and potentially step you i i don't know if you can call yourself a civilian i don't know..."

"to mars what's the bar for like health do you do you think that bar will keep getting lower and lower in terms of how healthy how athletic like how yes or the psychological profile all those kinds of ..."

"different kinds of people culturally what's the difference between uh spacex or commercial type of efforts nasa and mit and academia academia yeah so the first part of your question i am thrilled by a..."

"that's amazing it definitely doesn't have to be a consortium of universities anymore depends on what you want to fly if you want to fly james webb a huge telescope that's decades in the making sure yo..."

"projects that pop to mind from the space exploration initiative or maybe stuff from the book the that you can mention something super cool i mean everything we've been talking about is cool but just s..."

"like that so it's kind of like a i mean you can't call it a leg but whatever it's a additional appendage appendage so how would you what are ideas for controlling something like that yeah so right now..."

"necessary right we have other ways to grow in orbit hydroponics liquid medium trying to keep the liquid around the plant roots is hard because there's no gravity to pull it down in a particular direct..."

"and involved again kind of like in the apollo era where it was a big deal for everybody well a lot of that is also one of the big impressive things that elon does i think uh extremely well is the soci..."

"do want mit to do that more for students to show off their stuff and not be uh pressured to do this kind of generic official presentation but show their become a youtuber also like show off your raw r..."

"in space i should say i couldn't agree more and i actually think that this is why we need a real life starfleet academy right now it was the place where the space cadets got to go to learn about how t..."

"exploration push back on one thing we don't need space lawyers i'm just kidding okay it's a joke we do we do okay we do the lawyers are great i love them yeah okay uh let me ask a big ridiculous quest..."

"really understand it that is something that just um just really captivates me and i would love to even though i'm now much more on the applied space exploration side i really try to keep up with what'..."

"what did you pick up from the variety of that physics mathematics philosophy what i loved about having this chance to do a liberal arts education was trying to understand the human condition and i thi..."

"that kind of led me from the physics domain to thinking about engineering and practical questions for life in space in physics was there a dream are you also captivated by this search for the theory o..."

"better understanding of engineering and day-to-day services from that it might not be an immediately obvious thing when we discovered the higgs the higgs boson i was there at cern that day it was uh j..."

"impressive weapons yeah let me ask a weird question in terms of you disagreeing with others what important idea do you believe is true that many others uh don't agree with you on maybe uh it's a tough..."

"and it just kind of envelops uh the space around us and it's like neighborhoods yeah yeah it's like rural and there's like giant structures and there's small pirates structures and that kind of stuff ..."

"yeah that's fascinating what's also fascinating is the interaction between nations regard like who owns that do you would you would you say in those floating cities do you envision independent governm..."

"what advice would you give to a young person today thinking about what they want to do with their life career so somebody in high school somebody in college maybe somebody that looks up to the stars a..."

"you're an incredibly accomplished scientist young scientist but you know and you hopped around from you know physics to aerospace so going from the the biggest theoretical ideas to the to the biggest ..."

"cross-disciplinary interdisciplinary whatever you want to call it but where do artists come in do you work with artists we do we have an arts curator on the space exploration initiative side she helps..."

"yeah that's awesome so when you look out there it's the flame of human consciousness there does seem to be something quite special about us humans first of all what do you what do you think it is what..."

"yeah um and our life here together is there a why or do we just kind of like let our curiosity carry us away oh interesting is there a single kind of driving purpose why or can it just be curiosity-ba..."