"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 ..."

"what was the uh what was the favorite sci-fi authors when you're growing up probably a sick asimov foundation trilogy this is a amazing story of harry selden this you know foundation that he forms at ..."

"body that are bigger than the biggest rocket payload fairing that we currently have available and that what led me to self-assembly and other models of in-space construction okay every every time you ..."

"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..."

"stephenson seven eaves actually were these arklets which were decentralized spacecraft that could form and dock little temporary space stations with each other and then separate and go off on their wa..."

"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 ..."

"living in living in oh i thought you also meant from like outside artistic perspective when you see the whole thing it's just with the aesthetics of it absolutely you know when you like go like in int..."

"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 even thinking about like uh small space..."

"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 ..."

"that's where the nautilus comes in is could we design an organically inspired shape for space station can i just say how awesome it is to hear you say we space people i know you meant people that are ..."

"when you say the plesiohedrons these kinds of shapes are they multi-functional like is the idea you'd be able to uh uh humans cannot occupy them safely in some of them and some others have some other ..."

"i've been hanging out with grimes recently i just feel like she belongs up in space this is like designed for for artists essentially like imagine i mean this is what south by keeps introducing me to ..."

"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..."

"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 friend asking for a friend..."

"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..."

"that's not an issue on earth at all at all okay so we'll talk about each of those in a bit more detail but let me continue on the chain of dumb questions what about food what's a good food source for ..."

"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..."

"so humbling i mean i tend to believe that there could be something like alien life here on earth and we're just too human biology obsessed to even recognize it the shadow biosphere i remember you and ..."

"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 just be destroying all that life or..."

"to where you kind of fit well but i think you know if uh the songs or poetry or books taught me anything if you like each other a little too much um i mean the problems arise because then there's alwa..."

"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 ..."

"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 off or something like that yeah the ment..."

"earth i think small outposts absolutely like mcmurdo right so we have these models of really extreme environments on earth in antarctica for example where humans have been able to go and make a sustai..."

"very simple existence more like pioneer life out west in the story of the u.s for example and i think that the future of larger scale gatherings of humans in orbit or so in space is actually going to ..."

"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..."

"no humans in it for months at a time because they think it's going to be seasonal they think we might not be constantly staffing it so this would be a really great test of i don't know that anybody's ..."

"mean hell 9000 we you know the movie maybe doesn't portray it that way but i'm sure there's a relationship there between the astronauts and and the robot yeah especially when you have greater and grea..."

"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 ..."

"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 anecdote that i'll share my under..."

"and then the the single people some of them went off the cliff and some of them discovered their new happiness and meaning and so on it's a beautiful little experiment a painful one yeah is there a th..."

"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..."

"there's a fantastic group called astra access that is already helping disabled space fliers do zero-g flights and potentially get access to the iss and some of the things that we think of as disabilit..."

"that in a few years i will rent lab space in orbit i will rent a module from the axiom space station or the orbital reef uh which is the blue origin space station or nana racks is thinking about uh st..."

"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..."

"environment would you control something 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 controlli..."

"what i loved about this project was they said sure we have ways that the plants could grow on their own but the astronauts might want to care for it in the same way that we have little plants that com..."

"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'..."

"i loved about having this chance to do a liberal arts education was trying to understand the human condition and i think more designers for space exploration should be thinking about that because ther..."

"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..."

"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 question y..."

"scale increasing the scale of basically humans in space are they just like in um they're in orbit and then they get a little farther and farther out like do you see this kind of uh floating cities jus..."

"indiscriminately as an amoeba in low-earth orbit beyond that though i think we'll grow in pockets where there are resources so we won't just expand around the gravity well of earth we'll do some devel..."

"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..."