Notes for ThisWeekInStartup Ep.610: Chris Impey’s “Beyond: Our Future in Space” & the entrepreneurial opps awaiting us there

In this episode, Jason’s guest is Chris Impey, astronomy professor hailing from Arizona and author of “Beyond: Our Future in Space”

You can find the whole episode on YouTube here and you can follow Jason in “This Week In Startup” by subscribing to the podcast on Itunes here https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/this-week-in-startups- video/id314461026?mt=2 and on Twitter @TWistartups

Let’s bring it on now.

• There will be huge opportunities in space for businesses in the coming years: mining asteroids, low-earth orbit satellites to create high-speed internet and more. The space program today has the same potential that the internet had in ‘95
• “You don’t have to watch science fiction anymore, you can watch STARTUPS”
• In 2016, TWiS will focus more on the space industry and the business opportunities it will bring: the cost of launching stuff will go down thanks to Space X, more stuff will be put up there, more opportunities
• The book is a combination of historically researched facts and fiction — yet plausible — on the development of men’s colonizing the space through imagination and insights presenting a future that might happen without breaking any law of physics
• The author is a bit sad that people don’t really care about space programs anymore: America hasn’t put an austronaut on orbit for 5 years now
• “Is another hour on our battery life better than seeing a man’s first step on Mars?”
• We’ve become narcissist in our desire for technology and we’d rather see an advance in the tech in our packet than seeing something meaningful happen in the history of humanity
• Men has lost sight for these great goals/humanity achievement as species

Why did we never go back to Moon?

• Everything has improved incredibly yet the physics are still the same
• Hard and expensive to put men on the moon while keeping them safe
• it was born out of a pissing contest between superpowers: in ‘78 Nasa budget was 5 times the federal budget and 10 times today’s budget (unsustainable — cut down nowadays to half percent of the federal budget)

The 7R or the Explorer’s gene

• There is a variant of a gene we all have peculiar to a minority of the population
• Evidence presents that when the 7R gene was present, people were more prone to take huge risks for hunter-gatherers populations to travel away from their comfort zone for thousands of mile
• Today people with that gene more likely to have ADHD, taking risks, doing skydiving, extreme sports — risk taking in the modern culture
• They are the ones pushing the envelope in society, the pioneers
• Can’t be too many otherwise the furthering of the specie could be put in danger (evolution required that food supply and society was tended by risk-adverse people)

Audible book of the Week from @Jason

Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft by Brooks London (Amazon link)

Going to another star: a no-return mission

• People will be put on ice, hibernated for a long time:
• no point in coming back home, there will be nobody left you knew — the nearest star, assuming it has an earth-like planet to colonize is hundred thousands if not million times further away than mars
• We’d propolusion tech and suspension animation methods we don’t have (journey will take a couple of centuries)
• minimum amount of people need to send in a balance gene pool that would not give inbred population on a new world — it has been studied, 100–120 people
• we could send frozen hembriones tended by robots — would that be moral? A kid grows up and become a man knowing he was sent there and he’s alone with no parents…
• If you wanted to live forever and don’t believe in cryonics and you are a rich, megalomaniac individual you could send thousands of hembriones with your genes, your sons and daughters and colonize the whole universe
• Maybe it’s already happened and we are the result of that

Are we alone in the universe?

• Enrico Fermi’s paradox: he couldn’t be the most advanced species and that there would be more advanced colonizations, yet wondered where they were since we can’t see or communicate with them
• They could be extremely rare, the universe is large, they may have not yet found us
• They don’t exist, or not developed enough
• They don’t care about us, they are so advanced or evolved in a Buddhist-like society that don’t care about contacting other species (thus, they have no space programs and the means to do it)
• It’s so anthropocentric to believe they would want to interact with us or to eat us, kill us, enslave us
• Jason’s favourite : they are already here, waiting to come out without disrupting human society, waiting for us to be able to handle the shock
• Variant of that: zoo hyphotesis. They are watching us among many other civilizations. As soon as any of us is able to leave their planet, they will eradicate our civilization (we are about to be slaughtered then)

How will the space program look like in 10 years

• 10 years ago we didn’t have SpaceX and what they achieved wasn’t expected to be achieved in such a short time (re-usable rockets were thought to be impossible to build)
• there will be the demostration of a viable business model for space. Nowadays the likes of Brunson (sub-orbital space travels) or Bigelow Aerospace with space hotels are looking for a viable space model, they have the money to play with ideas starting from the high-end segments of the market
• When ROIs will be validated, it will snowball, lots of money on the side waiting to be invested in the next frontier

Potential new businesses models of space

• Turism
• Putting satellites up
• Mining asteroids (if it’s economically viable, given the cost of extraction, can’t predict the internal composition of asteroids by looking at them)
• Astronomers don’t expect a new magic element (they have same the same ones in far far away galaxies)
• What excites people is finding lots of minerals like platinum that on earth are rare, expensive to extract, strategic to many industries, that, if extracted could make breaking even and a profit a likely reality

Sex in space

• Nasa denies it ever happened
• there are rumors it has happened though in a dark corner of the Space Station (impossible to conferm but Crhis would bet it’s happened)

Conception in space

• We don’t know yet if possible
• 20–25 years before that’s going to happen
• Medical wisdom, given studies on sex cells in a buffer enviroment where gravity wasn’t a predominant factor says yes, it should be ok
• Worst problem: radiation. When hembrion is growing, subjected to cosmic radiation.

The problem of cosmic radiation

• Shielding from is not enough, radiatio is tricky
• People going to Mars will get a lifetime amount of the radiation they would get on Earth in six to eight months.
• If you are a colonist and plan to stay, most of the work will be fighting and protecting yourself from radiation
• They’ll need to turn the soil in slump blocks and shield their bubble domes

The Martian by Andy Weir

• Chris liked both the move and the book
• preferred the book because it covers an exhausting list of problems he had to face, all the calculations needed to solve them (too many for a movie)

Prediction about space programs in 2050–2060

• Hard to predict
• Could you have been able to predict a 3 million dollar industry build on the internet in 1995?
• 20 years later 2 billion people and growing participating in it
• We could have thousands (maybe hundres of thousands) of corporations participating in it

Space outlaws

• There are no rules or laws in space
• Nobody owns nothing: Nasa would have liked to declare the moon landing sites national parks but can’t
• Whoever gets there first can exploit any celestial body and do whatever they want with them, it’s a free universe
• Elon Musk landing on Mars could claim it as his property
• There is no legal basis to deny him tjat and there is no cases in law saying he can’t claim it
• Even if he wasn’t allowed to, nobody could enforce the law on Mars

China

• It’s going gangbusters with their space program
• Doubling his space budget every 5–6 years that can buy lots of progress compared to Nasa stagnant budget
• Average age of their workers: 27; average age of Nasa’s workers:57
• Lots of fresh energies, they want to build their own space station, going to the moon, Mars. Gangbusters

Robotics

• What’s the case for sending humans when we could send robots or drones and keep humans safe?
• Scientists would never send humans: robots are cheap, work great, have a long operating lifespan and it’s 100x more expensive to send humans
• Only reason: because we want to. Inner desire of men to go beyond and being a multi-planetary specie

Space Colonies

• We are 20 years away from establishing the first colony in space, according to Nasa plans
• 40 years away possibility from establishing a small self-sustaining colony
• We have the technology, it’s easy: you can get water out of Mars soil easily, you can get oxygen out of water, you can turn oxygen into rocket fuel, you can turn the soil into your hardening shelter against radiations
• The idea is to ship as little as possible, bring as little as possible and live off the land and that’s possible

Xfactor that once figured out would make space development much faster

• Space elevators (would cost 10 billions while the space Station cost ten times that): could fabricate stuff in a zero gravity environment, cheaper, easier, don’t have to deal with the G-force and would become a staging point for the solar system
• Suspended animation/hybernation: experiments were made on animals being hibernated for a couple of days with 50% survival rate
• Studies done to research how to treat people entering coma or going through near death experiences, new ways to revive people
• It’s $80k if you want to have your head frozen, $160k for the whole body

Space Elevators and the physics

• The space elevator of Chris’ hyphotesis is on the moon
• Too hard to do on earth at the moment with current materials cause the gravity is 6 times higher
• It would be like an indian rope trick, starting a cable out at the geostationary point
• If you could drop a heavy and self supporting cable down to the earth or the moon surface it wouldn’t go there because it’s being sustained by centrifugal force of the spinning earth to that point that’s straight, like a satellite would stay there
• Gravity keeps it in place and it would be tethered to earth to stabilize it (the hard challenge is to stabilize it)
• There would be cars going up and down carrying stuff using solar energy. If you build the thing, that’s free. If the cost of a Saturn 5 is made for 95% of the fuel, you’ve just bypassed the whole cost.
• The hotel coud be the end of the line, it could be like a big London eye, straight up and straight down.
• It would be a vulnerable thing, given its hefty 10 bln dollars price tag. You’d have to protect it.
• Engineers say that building one on the moon could be technically feasible now; on earth, not yet because our best nanotube composite fibers are not strong enough, they don’t have enough tensile strength
• In a decade or so, it may be possible with stronger, lighter materials
• The economic return for a consortium of investors on a 10 billion dollars on the moon would liberate a new big industry in the solar system, including the mining of asteroids and other things

Science fiction movies that get it right or come close to describe how the future could look like

• The Martian
• Gravity
• Blade Runner: humans would not need to go up there cause they would use replicants as their sensory extensions + virtual reality with a live that would make it feel like you are in space

Elon Musk biggest future success

• Jason thinks that Elon Musk biggest success will be the low orbit satellite network providing the whole planet high-speed, low-latency internet
• Nobody seems to be really paying attention to that

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