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June 15, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:36
Edition 209 - Dr Robert Zubrin

This time the President of the Mars Society - Dr Robert Zubrin - on colonising the RedPlanet...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for the very good response that's still coming in to Dr. Carmen Bolter, the last edition about ancient Egypt.
And Carmen is hoping to be able to get an expedition to that new site together.
If she does, we'll tell you more about it.
And I'm sure she'll come back on here.
But a great guest who you appreciated very much indeed.
I will be doing some shout-outs on this edition and some of your comments about Richard C. Hoagland, the recent show.
Controversial that definitely was.
But first, two quick things.
Number one, my voice will be appearing in a documentary about Seth Szostak, the man behind SETI.
You might remember recently I interviewed him, and when he was there, a TV crew from America's Smithsonian Channel was recording the whole thing.
And a little tiny snippet of the interview will be featured in a documentary airing on the Smithsonian Channel, which I think is also on in Europe as well as America, a little later this year, round about November.
So listen out for that.
You know, it's one of those things, blink and you miss me, but I'm definitely going to be there.
So I'm very excited about that.
Another thing is something that happened recently on my birthday.
I came home from work.
It was still morning time.
And I was sitting here thinking about what am I going to do about money?
Look at my career.
What am I going to do about that?
And just generally feeling very reflective about everything.
As you often feel that way on your birthday, don't you?
Then the doorbell goes, and it's a postman.
One I haven't seen before.
He's a relief postman in this area.
He doesn't normally do this route, this round.
And he said, are you Howard Hughes?
And I said, yes.
And he took his earpiece out of his ear, and he was listening to one of these shows.
And he told me that he discovered the unexplained, did James the postman six months ago and listens to two or three shows a day as he's doing his rounds.
Now, I thought first of all, this was a setup.
But apparently it was absolutely genuine.
And he was so shocked, and so was I, he had to put his post bag down just to kind of recover.
So a very strange and truly unexplained thing, which I'm still trying to find some kind of rational explanation to and still can't.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work as ever getting the show out to you, keeping the website moving.
Shout out's going to do those in this edition.
Got a list of them here.
Sorry if I couldn't get to your email, but I do see all of them and I'm trying to personally reply to as many as possible these days.
Okay, let's do these.
Paul in Sydney found Richard C. Hoagland, who was very controversial on a recent edition, entertaining, quotes.
Daniel in Glasgow, good to hear from you.
Paul in Newcastle, Australia, said that Richard C. Hoagland makes grand claims with no substance.
David Flynn says that the photos on Richard's website look just like rocks and nothing else.
Okay, well, it's a matter of interpretation, I suppose.
Gurudat in Mumbai, I've noted all of your points and nice to hear from you.
Mark in Switzerland thought that Richard Hoagland was rude.
Well, look, I think he's direct because he's got so much to say.
But some of you felt that he was rude.
Okay.
Ken in Australia, nice to hear from you.
Bent in Stavanger, Norway, would like to hear more about the topics Richard C. Hoagland talks about.
So he liked the show.
Charles in Shropshire, UK, sends me some tales of aports.
Fascinating stuff, Charles.
Would like to know more.
Danny, some good thoughts about my online representation.
Thanks, Danny, for taking the time and trouble to write.
Joe in Lake Hills, Texas, thought that Richard C. Hoagland was feisty, but brings his points across well.
Steve in Canada, nice to hear from you.
Ray Hardy thinks that he wasted an hour of his life listening to Richard C. Hoagland.
Wasn't worth it, he thinks.
Rakesh Dodia, good to hear from you.
Mike in Mansfield, Texas, loved Dr. Carmen Bolter.
Glad to hear that.
Like I say, response to that show is still coming in.
And Rob Jeffs, good to hear from you.
Podcaster, fellow podcaster, Paul Reeder in Minneapolis, nice to hear from you.
Michael in Tampa Bay, nice to hear from you.
Kate Wolf May, good to hear from you again.
John Stinson, thanks for your email.
Ben Cravey, a great email from Western Australia.
Nice to hear from you, Ben.
Noted everything you said.
And Caitlin in Boston.
Nice to hear from you.
On this edition, we're going to talk with a guest who you suggested.
His name is Robert Zubrin.
And we're going to be talking about life on Mars and the preparations and explorations that need to be done before we can even consider going there and being there.
Robert Zubrin is the president of the Mars Society.
They have some pretty important members and do some pretty important stuff.
Robert Zubrin is the founder and president of the society, as well as a member of the organization's director's board, also president of Pioneer Astronautics, an aerospace R ⁇ D company in Colorado, formerly a staff engineer at Lockheed Martin in Denver.
He has a master's degree in aeronautics and astronautics and a PhD in nuclear engineering.
So this man is about as well qualified in these fields and a renowned expert on Mars, just about as well qualified as you can get.
On the steering committee, many important people too, perhaps the most important of all, Dr. Buzz Aldrin, who of course was one of the first to walk on the moon in 1969.
And the purpose of the Mars Society is to further the exploration and settlement of the red planet.
So fascinating subject.
And right up our street here, thank you very much.
You know who you are for suggesting Dr. Robert Zubrin for this edition of The Unexplained.
So let's get to Colorado, think six hours behind the UK time-wise, and say, Dr. Robert Zubrin, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Thanks for inviting me.
One of my listeners suggested you, and I have to say, and this is my dereliction, I hadn't heard of your organization before I actually read the website.
And then I began to wonder why on earth I hadn't, because the work that you're doing seems to me to be extremely important, and not only important, but also very much at the moment at this place in time that we're at in the history of the world, very much of the moment.
Well, we think so.
You know, if you ask any American what happened in the year 1492, he would say Columbus did his voyage.
But of course, in the year 1492, other things happened as well.
England and France signed a peace treaty in 1492.
The Borgias took over the papacy in 1492.
Lorenzo de' Medici died in 1492.
To people of that time, if there had been newspapers, those would have gotten the headlines.
And yet we don't really remember those things very much.
Only historians or history buffs do.
So I think that similarly, you know, 500 years from now, what are people going to remember in our time?
Are they going to care very much about who came on top in Syria?
I don't think so.
But what we did to make their civilization, which will be an interstellar civilization spanning thousands of solar systems possible, that is what they will think is significant.
This time will be remembered because this is when we first set sail for other worlds.
I think a lot of people, certainly the ones who are listening to me speaking these words now, will wonder why governments don't pay more attention to interplanetary matters than they do.
Well, of course, it's always the affairs of the moment that dominate people's attention and the affairs of the powerful and their strivings for momentary dominance.
And that is why, you know, they don't.
In the United States, we have a substantial space exploration program, not as much as I would like, but the most expansive one of any country in the world.
And that is because of the frontierism of Americans.
Americans have this longing for the frontier, which for Americans is defined as the line beyond which things have yet to be determined.
The place where no one's gone, where the rules haven't been written yet, where people have not found what there is to be found and built what there is to be built.
The word frontier is actually a French word, but in France, the word frontier means like the border with Germany, which is something that no American would think of as a frontier.
But this is what we insist that there must be.
There must be another place to go.
And it is, I believe, why Americans support the space program.
European Space Agency has a program, but it's one-fifth the size of NASA, despite the fact that Europe has an economy about equal in size to the United States.
And it's much more oriented towards things like commercial satellites and so forth, which, you know, their importance is obvious.
The unobvious is what we've yet to discover to be useful.
Now, it's interesting, isn't it, that we have this interest and the Americans have this interest, and yet America got to the moon.
And on your own steering committee, you have Buzz Aldrin, for goodness sake.
But America got to the moon and then decided not to return and not to go anyplace else with people.
That surprised an awful lot of people and still surprises people, doesn't it?
Well, sure.
It represents a massive failure of leadership of the American political class and a massive lack of imagination.
It's as if Columbus had come back from the New World and Ferdinand and Isabella said, well, so what?
Who cares?
You know, go sell your ships.
We're not interested in doing any more of this.
That's pretty much what it was.
But I find that the American people are as shocked and disgusted with this decision as I am.
I mean, whenever I give a talk to a public audience, the main question I get is, why aren't we doing this?
This is the sort of thing this country ought to be doing.
They have not accepted this notion that apparently has been accepted by a substantial portion of our elites that, you know, we've now entered the age of limits.
And if you want to find out how great America was, you can go to the museums at our capital.
You know, we don't want to be a country whose great deeds are recorded in museums.
We want to be a country whose great deeds are recorded in newspapers.
Well, it's a curious thing, isn't it?
Because one of the reasons that was given to us, certainly over here, for America not continuing to go to the moon and discontinuing in 1972, I think it was.
One of the reasons was the phenomenal, monumental cost of it all at a time when fuel was getting more expensive because of the Middle East oil crunch and all the rest of it.
And yet if you apply that same model to technology, computing, for example, a computer in 1972 would do a tiny fraction of what a computer today would cost at many, many multiples, ridiculous multiples of the price.
So the cost of exploring space, had they continued, had the America continued, presumably would have fallen.
So that argument that we've been fed all of these years doesn't appear to hold water, does it?
No, it doesn't.
And furthermore, I mean, you know, in 1967, the United States elites in the Johnson administration pushed for the signing of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which banned all claims in national sovereignty in space.
And the explicit reason given was that this would avoid competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in space, thus reserving our energies for more what they considered worthy activities, such as pursuing the war in Vietnam.
Where, as, I mean, really, if you want to have competition with an adversarial power, what better place to do it than in space?
And furthermore, as far as that competition is concerned, you know, it's an interesting story.
I was actually in Leningrad in July 1969 when we landed on the moon.
Really?
And all the Russians I knew, you know, would come up to me and, you know, sort of punch me on the shoulder, Maladiets, you know, that a boy.
They were impressed.
It's like being impressed by an Olympic athlete of another country.
You know, you're showing excellence in a sport that both sides were considered significant.
Well, we used to call it the space race, didn't we?
It was literally seen by both sides as a race.
Right.
But also, I mean, you know, Kennedy's objective when he started Apollo was to astound the world with what free societies can do.
And he did it.
So in terms of the Cold War competition, I think Apollo did much more to help the West than our adventure in Vietnam at that time.
Really.
But also, it did something more significant than the Cold War competition.
It potentially opened up a new chapter in human history, which is what Armstrong meant when he said giant leap for mankind.
I mean, really, is the significance of Apollo that helped us beat the Soviet Union?
Soviet Union no longer exists.
500 years from now, most people will never have heard of it.
But I think they'll have heard of the moon landing.
So why are you interested in exploring Mars and possibly colonizing Mars rather than continuing and finishing the work that we started on the moon?
Well, the moon wasn't the destination.
It was the direction.
And ultimately, you can even say that of Mars.
The direction is up and out.
But why Mars as opposed to the moon?
Because it's a much better place for human settlement.
Mars compares to the moon for the future age of exploration as North America compared to Greenland in the previous European age of maritime exploration.
Europeans reached Greenland first.
It was closer.
But it was not a place that could sustain the development of a new branch of human civilization.
Similarly, Mars is a world.
The moon's a rock.
I mean, Mars has got copious supplies of water.
The moon, their presence in parts per million quantities, except for in a few locations near the poles that are permanently shadowed, so they're ultra-cold.
On Mars, there are continent-sized regions that are 60% water by weight in the soil and even water ice.
Mars has got carbon.
The atmosphere is carbon dioxide.
Carbon is the key element of life, carbon and water.
The moon has no carbon.
The moon has no nitrogen, the third element of life.
Mars does.
It's the minority constituent of the atmosphere.
Mars has a 24-hour day, which is suitable for growing plants, whereas the moon, it's two weeks of light, two weeks of dark, which is not what you want.
Mars has had a complex geological history with volcanism and water action, which is necessary for the formation of mineral ores to concentrate geochemically rare elements into minerals that are usable.
The moon hasn't had this history, and so it's all basically trash rock.
So for many points of view, I mean, Mars is a place where a new branch of human civilization can be developed.
It has geothermal power resources.
It has wind.
You know, its atmosphere, as thin as it is, is thick enough to mask out the lethal effects of solar flares, which means you could put greenhouses on the surface and be lit by sunlight and grow plants, whereas on the moon, they would be killed by solar flares.
So Mars is a place we can settle.
The moon's a place we can visit.
And what do you make of the efforts to recruit teams of young people that are ongoing now for a possible mission to Mars?
Is that a good sign?
The Mars One effort by this Dutch entrepreneur, Vaas Lansdorf.
Well, their plan is technically feasible.
The main question about it is the fact that they don't have the resources that are remotely in the range of what is required to do this.
And I mean, look, the one-way mission, I mean, in their defense, I will say the one-way mission is not a suicide mission as people have represented it to want to disparage them.
The one-way mission is a settlement mission, and we're all on a one-way trip to somewhere.
Okay.
But if you're going to do it, if you're not going to bring those people back, you got to keep on reinforcing them and resupplying them and build them up.
It's got to be the normative of peach approach.
It's not a raid.
It's an invasion.
And you send people, then you send more people, more equipment, more supplies, more people, more equipment, more supplies, and you take the planet.
And so even if Mars One found an ultra-rich sponsor who might advance them the money for the first mission, say, which one-way mission would be much cheaper than a round-trip mission, that is true.
You know, $5 billion if Bill Gates fell in love with this and decided, hey, I'll sport you some money.
That's chump change for him, isn't it?
That would not be enough.
What they need is to put together a worldwide logistical organization, a worldwide support organization that will not only fund the first mission, but keep funding the colony.
Now, if you look at human history at some of the most daring and noteworthy colonization efforts, for instance, the pilgrims going to Massachusetts in the 1620, the Mormons going to Utah in the 1840s, the Jews going to Palestine in the early and mid-20th century.
In all cases, the people who went were supported by large home front organizations that raised the money to finance the actual colonists and to keep supporting them.
So in a sense, what Mars One needs is not a reality TV show.
It needs a Theodore Herzl what it needs.
And if you were to go to Washington, I presume you have anyway, to lobby the powers that be, and the senators there would say to you, hey, boy, what do you think the great benefit of all of this would be if we spend these billions of dollars and build a whole program around it?
What would you say?
What would be the one selling sentence that you would give?
And then there's A fourth point that I would make.
Okay.
You know, we should make, first of all, for NASA to be productive at all, it needs a goal.
It needs a clear goal, a clear objective, and it's wandering adrift right now.
And even though it's currently getting about 85% in real dollars, it's Apollo-level funding, it's not accomplishing remotely enough because it doesn't have a clear direction.
So if you want to have a productive space agency, if you want to justify the dollars we're spending on NASA, you need to give it a clear goal.
And ideally, the right goal, and that should be humans to Mars, because Mars is where the science is.
It's where we could find out if life is a general phenomenon in the universe, because Mars was warm and wet in its early history.
And so if the theory that life evolves in such environments is from chemistry is correct, life should have appeared there, even if it subsequently went extinct when the conditions on the surface deteriorated.
And if that's true, it means life's everywhere in the universe because there are planets everywhere.
Secondly, Mars is the challenge that can motivate millions of young people to want to go into science and engineering.
And this is where economic growth and national defense strength and advances in healthcare comes from our intellectual capital.
And third, it's the future, okay, because it is the planet that can be settled.
And, you know, the people that start settling space are the people who are going to put their stamp on the future.
I'm speaking to you in English right now because the English settled North America, even though my ancestors were not from the British Isles at all, I do not have an ounce of Anglo-Saxon blood in me, but my cultural heritage right now is Shakespeare and Swift and all of that and Anglo-Saxon concepts of liberty and Magna Carta and you name it.
And if the British had not gone forth, I mean, Britain and what it represents would be as significant in the world today as Croatia, because that's about how significant it was in the year 1400.
So you're saying that in pure political terms, in order to remain significant, you have to do this.
Sure.
And then finally, there is this matter of the present, you know, which gets me back to Apollo, okay?
If they can't understand anything else, they should understand this, that America, the West, the countries based on individual liberty, this concept that the limited government and the governments exist to protect liberty is being challenged right now, strongly.
It's being challenged by Putin.
It's being challenged by the Chinese.
It's being challenged by the Islamists.
They're all looking at us and saying, yeah, you guys had your stuff once upon a time, but you've become weak and decadent.
We are the way of the future.
Despotism is the way of the future.
You guys, you know, liberty leads to license, leads to decadence.
You're through.
Okay.
And we have to show the doubters in between.
We have to show, for instance, people in Indonesia, where I just visited, that, no, liberty is the way of the future.
We need once again to astound the world with the feats that free societies can do.
And what better way to astound the world than to send humans to Mars?
There may be some, and it isn't a notion that I would subscribe to, who would say that's old-fashioned jingoism.
No, it's not old-fashioned jingoism.
It's recognizing what you've got and understanding this gift that you have and understanding that you have to, you have an obligation to the future to defend it, just as the people before us defended it in the great conflicts of the 20th century and even before that.
You know, I mean, this is a marvelous thing, this gift of liberty that we have, that we do not have to live in fear that a government can take from us anything it wants to take, our property, our lives, that it can abuse us in any way it wants.
This is an original concept, the concept of limited government.
Here we are.
We're in the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta this year.
We should treasure this heritage, and we have to know that we have an obligation to fight for it, and preferably to fight for it in ways that aren't violence, that don't kill anyone, that simply make the argument.
Make the argument.
Let's show those people in Russia once again, okay, who now have a better chance of grasping the opportunity.
Because look, you know, here we have SpaceX that has been started in the United States and is making great strides in developing new space technologies on a private entrepreneurial basis.
Why isn't there a SpaceX in Russia?
They have tremendous engineering talent and they have large pools of capital.
Why hasn't a SpaceX been formed?
Well, the reason is, is if somebody actually went to the work of creating a SpaceX, it'd probably be seized from them by the clique in the Kremlin.
So no one will make what someone else can take.
The reason why the free societies are rich is because free societies protect people's ability to create wealth.
And so we need to show this.
We need to show to people that this is the way for the future.
So there's a good libertarian.
We can win the hearts and minds of the world by showing them the creative power of freedom.
Now, that is a fascinating argument, Robert.
And thank you for acquainting me with it because I haven't heard it before.
There is actually a libertarian imperative to do this, because if you can show people that there is a bigger picture than your minor squabbles down here, then in so many ways, in so many dimensions, you've won.
That's right.
And also to show that if you want to be part of that big picture, join the world of the free.
And is this a way of looking at things that is getting any traction in Washington?
Well, some, some, but, you know, I mean, the current administration in Washington has very much accepted the idea that America has entered the age limits and not just in space.
They're in retreat around the world.
But we have an election coming up in a little more than a year, and we're going to roll the dice and we're going to see what people choose.
But I think that a rejection of retreat is going to be a strong message in the coming election.
And the you lobbying people who are going to be involved in this contest, I'm just wondering if perhaps you've approached Hillary, for example.
Well, we've approached people around Hillary, and we've approached people around some of the more significant Republican candidates.
And we're going to try to inject this theme into it.
This is the rejection of retreat.
This is, once again, a statement of who we are.
And by the way, that's another thing.
You know, we went to the moon and yeah, it was a significant expense.
But here's what's interesting about it.
It was a significant expense, although less than many other Cold War expenses by far.
But still, okay, it was there.
But the America of the 1960s had a quarter of the GDP of America of today and 60% of the population.
And they did it.
For us to say that we can't take on the challenge of Mars is saying we've become much less than the kind of people we used to be.
But where is the political will to do it, though?
I mean, Kennedy, the little bit of film that is often replayed, you know, we want to be able to take a man to the moon and bring him back within whatever time scale it was.
Politicians don't say that kind of stuff now, do they?
No, they don't.
Although Marco Rubio, in a speech he gave about a week ago, started talking about the new frontier.
I mean, he was literally channeling Kennedy.
Now, of course, that's a whole, that's a political thing, and he's trying to, you know, convey the concept of himself as representing youth and vigor.
Okay, vigor was a word that Kennedy used to like to use as well as new frontier.
But, you know, Kennedy said a new ocean has opened and freemen must sail it.
And that was inspiring.
And I think that the American people are waiting to hear someone sound the trumpet.
So you're trying to rediscover the kind of America that I remember when I was a kid.
You know, everything that was exciting, everything that was thrusting and forward-looking seemed to be coming out of the U.S. That's a broad overstatement, perhaps to some people, because we were doing a lot of stuff over here in the U.K. But, you know, the real exciting stuff was being done when I was a child in America.
And that kind of spirit seems to have died.
Well, it's died among the political class.
It hasn't died among the people.
I mean, America's 4% of the world's population were responsible for 50% of the inventions.
So you still have people trying new things, launching new businesses.
I mean, it's extremely entrepreneurial, but not just entrepreneurial in the sense of starting businesses, but businesses that embody new technologies that haven't yet proven that they have a market for themselves or anything of the sort.
No, the American people still have their spirit of adventure.
The problem is this bureaucracy.
bureaucracy always embodies the spirit of timidity of management rather than leadership and and um you know so But I think we still have the stuff and I think we have to but in order to not let that ebb away, we have to demonstrate it.
We have to reaffirm it.
We have to reaffirm that we are a nation of pioneers.
What do you make of the Mars agenda that says we're busily trashing this planet here and we need somewhere fresh, new and developable to get out to when all of this collapses around our ears?
Well, I actually do not share that kind of pessimism about the Earth.
I mean, I think that this is a much nicer planet to live in than it has ever been at any time in the past.
When I was a kid, you know, my parents told me to finish my breakfast because they were children hungry in Europe.
Yeah, really.
And you could tell the difference between Europeans and Americans just by looking at their teeth.
Well, that may still be true.
Well, not certainly.
And, you know, here, once again, I was just in Indonesia.
And as poor as the people there are, they're making one-tenth of what Americans make today.
They're making about what Americans make a century ago when America was at that time still the richest country in the world, relatively speaking, but much poorer than today.
But these people, these Indonesians, zipping around on their scooters and talking on their cell phones, 100 years ago, their grandparents were coolies calling water around on their backs.
So I think what you're saying is that this could become a focus for mankind.
And at the moment, it seems to me, and I know I've said it before on this show, and maybe I've become boring saying it, but it would perhaps take our eyes away from the multiply repeated reality television formats that you see in every market, so-called around the world, the dancing shows, the baking shows, the singing shows, the My Talented Pet shows.
Perhaps this will be something to look forward to.
Well, there's that, but there's always been junk culture, always.
But stupid stuff sells.
But perhaps it's a way from getting us away from the cultural pessimism.
Because this belief that the world has limited resources is a very dangerous belief.
It is a belief that sets people against each other as they fight for the share of the finite pie.
I mean, look, Hitler, Germany needs living space, so we have to seize it from others by exterminating Eastern Europe.
Well, Germany never needed living space.
Germany today has much smaller space than it had in the Third Reich, and it had a bigger population, and they lived much better because technology is creativity is where wealth comes from, not from land, and nothing comes from land.
The food doesn't even come from land.
Food comes from farmers, okay?
And better, it comes from farmers backed up by industry and science who have vastly multiplied the yields of any particular acre of land.
There are no such thing as natural resources.
They're only natural raw materials.
It's human creativity that turns raw materials into resources.
Which takes us back to the beginning of this conversation where you said there are so many potentials on Mars.
There are so many things that you could develop into the building blocks of life.
That's right.
All we have to do is get out there and apply the expertise.
Right.
We have to apply our creativity.
You know, humans are not really native to the earth.
We're native to Kenya.
Okay.
No human being in the true state of nature could survive a single winter night in Colorado, where I live, which is considered today to be a very pleasant place to live.
And it was through developing our technology that we became able to leave our native tropical habitat and go and colonize Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas, and even the Arctic.
We became a global species of hundreds of nations and languages and cultural traditions, which various ones have made all sorts of contributions to technology and literature and the history of human heroic deeds.
And, you know, it is by using our technology that we'll be capable of leaving this current limit of our existence, one planet becoming a spacefaring species with numerous other planets open to us.
But I would say that right now, the challenge of Mars to us today is less than the challenge of Ice Age Europe must have been to early tropical man.
So it must be enormously frustrating to you to know that it's, I'm not saying it's that easy, but it's that doable and we're not doing it.
Well, it is frustrating, although you have to recognize that, you know, I mean, for me, certainly this was frustrating.
You know, I was 17 when we landed on the moon.
And if anybody had told me then that I'd be 63 and we wouldn't be on the moon or Mars, you know, that we'd be confined to Earth and low Earth orbit, I would have thought that they were nuts.
But I think this is a temporary retreat.
I think there's a fundamental human spirit that drives us to go where we haven't gone before, to see what we haven't seen before, to do what we haven't done before.
You know, I think this is the fundamental drive that brought us out of Kenya to become a global species and to accomplish all the things that we've accomplished.
And so I think we will go to Mars.
We'd be less than human if we didn't.
If the next president decided to push a button that said, we're going to go for this, this is going to be a realistic and realizable aim, how long do you think it would take?
I think we could be on Mars within 10 years.
The program starts, certainly.
So within our lifetimes.
Absolutely.
I mean, look, from a technical point of view, we're much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later.
You know, if the next president were to get up early in his or her first term and say, I'm committing the nation to go to Mars, we could be on Mars before the end of their second term.
Before we talk about the practicalities of that and the practicalities of people surviving there, which is a fascinating thing in itself, and I want to give a fair amount of this conversation to that.
What do you make of people who've said, and more of them saying recently, that there are signs that they can see, I'm not necessarily sure that I've been able to see them, that there have been past civilizations or a past civilization on Mars.
Do you think there's any mileage in that?
No, I don't.
There are rock formations on Mars that look like human faces or other interesting things, but similarly, there are some on Earth.
In fact, right down here in Colorado Springs, there is a mountain called John F. Kennedy Mountain, because if you look at it, it looks like John F. Kennedy in profile.
I mean, the resemblance is striking, yet it's simply a natural rock formation.
So these people who see regular geometry in the photographs that we're getting back from Mars, the high-res ones that we're now able to get, they're just seeing something that their brain is constructing and isn't really there.
Well, the rock formations are there, but given the number of photographs that we have of Mars, it would be surprising that you wouldn't find formations there.
I bet you if you got some kind of fractal thing that would generate random rock formations on an image, you could create images.
You would be able, if you searched it thoroughly enough, you'd find images that represented all sorts of interesting things.
You know, I mean, near Los Alamos, where I worked, there's a rock formation that looks like a camel.
I mean, it really does, but it's not a sculpture of a camel.
It's just a natural rock formation.
And just to deal with this.
But listen, but there are gigantic discoveries waiting to be made on Mars.
In particular, this discovery.
I mean, it's absolutely possible that life did develop on Mars.
Mars was warm and wet for a billion years of its early history.
And if the theory is correct that life evolves from chemistry in aqueous environments, wherever you have the various minerals and sufficient time and sunlight, then it should have happened on Mars.
And if we can find it, and it may still exist underground in the groundwater, because there is groundwater on Mars, we'd be able to come up, we'd sample it, we'd be able to look if life as it evolved on Mars is the same as life on Earth or fundamentally different.
We'd be able to find out if life as we know it on Earth is what life is or if we're just one particular example drawn from a vast tapestry of possibilities.
We'd be able to find out something fundamental about the universe.
We now know planets are everywhere from the Kepler Space Telescope.
If life evolves wherever it has a decent planet, it means life is everywhere.
And since the whole history of life on Earth is one of development from simpler forms to more complex forms, manifesting greater capacities for activity and intelligence and ever more rapid evolution, if life's everywhere, it means intelligence and civilization is everywhere.
It means we're living in a living, intelligent universe.
And this is something that thinking men and women have wondered about for thousands of years.
Are we alone?
What are we?
What is the universe all about?
And we can find this out by going to Mars.
And statistically, do you believe that there is a high probability of finding evidence of past life or even evidence of current life?
But perhaps not as we know it, as they say.
I think there's a good chance, but I think we need to send human explorers to do it.
You know, the Mars Society that I represent, we built a practice Mars station in Utah.
We've been operating it since 2002.
And on one of our early sorties in the area, we discovered some dinosaur fossils.
And since then, that has been followed up by professional paleontologists, and they dug the area out.
And it has now produced one of the largest findings of dinosaur fossils in history.
And that never would have been found by robotic rovers.
But it was found by humans in spacesuits simulating Mars missions on Earth.
So that is a metaphor for what we could do were we to go there.
That's right.
Exactly.
Right.
And what about the process of recruiting people to do this?
Because this isn't just a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway, is it?
This is a big deal.
Well, yeah.
Well, are you talking about the Mars one?
Are you talking about any broader terms?
I mean, with reference to them, but in general, because if America was to embark upon this, you'd have to recruit people.
They would have to have a very special gradation of the right stuff.
How would you go about getting those people?
Although you'd probably be better off recruiting people that grew up on farms than people who were professional test pilots.
That is, you want to have people who know how to make do, can improvise, can grow plants, but can also fix a generator without the manual.
So these would be the pioneers then, literally, the modern generation of pioneers.
That's right.
And I think we have those people.
I think that Mars One, you know, the Mars One went through this whole process of they got thousands of volunteers and they downselected to 1,000 and more recently 100.
And I've met some of these people.
And while I wouldn't say that all of them have the right stuff, some of them definitely do.
And I think in that final hundred, there's probably 20 that are appropriate, that would be fully competitive for choosing for the NASA Astronaut Corp, but moreover, have a variety of skills that's necessary for Frontier.
But the problem then, therefore, with Mars One is not the people that it's found.
It's the fact that they have no money.
And that has got to be the insurmountable, isn't it?
Because the orders of money are really only the sorts of things that governments could come up with.
Well, governments, or I mean, the money could be mobilized privately if, for instance, the government offered a prize for it, something like that.
But yeah, I mean, look, $5 billion is not a lot of money to the U.S. government, but it's a huge amount of money to you and me or Mars One.
And I believe, by the way, that human Mars mission, well, if you did it my way, Mars directed, if it was done by NASA, the program could probably be done for $20 or $30 billion.
A one-way mission like Boss Lonsdorf wants to do could probably be done for $5 billion.
But he doesn't have it.
On the other hand, it's pretty easy.
I mean, the Mars One's engineering design needs a bit of work, but fine.
If you had a little bit of money, you could hire the right engineers and work it all out.
The fact that he can't do it really, though, but that it can be done poses the question to NASA, why aren't you doing it?
You're getting $18 billion a year.
If it takes $5 billion to do this, for 5% of your money spent over five years, you could do this.
Why aren't you doing this?
Why are you just drifting around?
Why are you just sending people up and down and up and down to Earth orbit?
And as you implied at the beginning of this conversation, that's a failure of management, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
So really, Mars One has done a service in posing the question, yeah, this is feasible if someone had 5 billion.
Well, we don't, but you do.
So why don't you do it, seeing as your charter is to open space to mankind?
Would you like a higher profile than you have now?
Because you speak with such passion and enthusiasm.
And I would love to see you up in Washington holding some kind of rally to push these people to get off their butts and do it.
Well, sure, I would enjoy having greater influence.
And I don't know if a rally is the right thing, but a greater media presence would help reach millions of people and help them influence their legislators and perhaps influence legislators directly if they encountered, you know, my ideas.
You know, but yes, the reason why we created the Mars Society was to spread these ideas.
And your members and your steering committee, though, are incredibly accomplished, including yourself, of course.
I mean, look at your list of qualifications and your background.
You're all incredibly accomplished people.
If you can't do this and make this happen, it's a poor lookout for the rest of us, isn't it?
Well, I don't know.
You know, we just have to keep trying, have to keep trying.
And, you know, we've had some influence.
I mean, in some surprising directions.
I mean, because look, there's nothing more influential than ideas.
Why is Elon Musk doing what he's doing?
Okay.
He's mobilized billions of dollars to create low-cost to space rocketry.
One significant reason is he read my book, The Case for Mars.
So, you know, the men of action, the men with resources at their disposal, decide to do with their capabilities what the ideas that they believe in convince them to do.
Have you spoken to Richard Branson about this?
What?
Have you spoken to Richard Branson about this?
No, I've never spoken to Richard Bronson.
I certainly have spoken to Elon Musk.
Because it just strikes me that Richard Bronson, I don't know whether he'd have the kind of dough to even begin to get involved in this, but he does see above the parapet.
Yeah.
Well, of course, he has financed this Virgin Galactic, which is a space tourism thing.
I'm skeptical of that activity because I think the number of people who want to spend $200,000 a shot for a 10-minute joyride is limited.
And the technology they're developing has only marginal relationship to that which is needed to go to orbit, let alone Mars.
But it does show that he does have imagination.
That is true.
So the way that you would foresee this is not That Dutch expedition's way of foreseeing this.
You see there being a mission where people can go to Mars and spend a year or two there and come back.
Is that feasible?
Well, that's feasible, yes.
I mean, certainly, if I was making policy for the U.S. government with respect to space, I would steer NASA in exactly that direction, and I believe we could accomplish it.
And I believe, though, after a number of round-trip missions that you have done some on-the-ground exploration and you know where's the best place to put a settlement, then by all means, start sending people for much longer duration stays.
If you stay twice as long, you accomplish twice as much for the same money.
If you spend five times as long, you accomplish five times as much.
And as you stretch this out, sooner or later, some people are going to become lifers.
I mean, if they start spending two, three rotations there, each rotation is two years, you know, they'll form relationships with each other.
They'll have children on Mars and we'll have schools on Mars.
I mean, people born and raised on Mars are not going to want to go back to Earth.
I mean, with this lousy gravity we have here and all that.
I mean, who would want to come to Earth where you weigh three times?
That's another thing.
If you were born on Mars, then your physiology would adapt to the prevailing conditions on Mars.
Would you be able to come back here, to come here?
Not back here, because you were never here in the first place, but you would be human.
Could you come back?
Well, I think probably with an exercise program, if you really prepared yourself, you could, because genetically, you would be the same as a human from Earth.
So, but you'd have to work out a lot and work out with weights and others.
You'd have to prepare yourself for the shock of Earth gravity, but you could do it.
But, you know, I live in Colorado and I used to live in rural Colorado, a place where much less human contact than certainly you have in London.
And every time I went to Britain and rode the tube, I'd catch cold because, you know, you go to London and there's millions of people and they're coming through there from all over Europe and Asia and North America, for that matter.
I'm trying to avoid it in the winter.
I tend to take that, you know, that alcohol hand gel with me whenever I go on the underground here because you never know what you're going to catch.
Living in rural Colorado, I had experienced much less contact with these everyday diseases and would inevitably catch cold within a couple of days.
So those people on Mars Colony would be sitting ducks for anything that we had in the way of bugs going around at the time they came back here or came to Earth.
Well, there would be that, but that would be a minor, I mean, but look, my ancestors once lived in the old world.
They didn't have those particular vulnerabilities that I have.
I think, I mean, the Martians genetically would be the same as their ancestors from Earth, but yeah, they'd have certain vulnerabilities and some would be those minor ones that we just discussed, and others would be things like not being accustomed to Earth gravity, which would probably be a significant discouragement to want to come back.
And isn't it fascinating, Robert, to speculate on how we would evolve as a species on Mars?
In other words, if two young people born on Mars met, fell in love, decided to get married, do whatever they do, and have children, how would we develop there?
How would we start to depart from the human beings that we are on Earth?
Well, I think initially the main departure would be cultural.
And I mean, look, the best example I think we have is America, which of course has European roots, in particular English roots.
And we have many things in common.
We speak something like the same language, for example.
And you can go to outdoor productions of Shakespeare right here in Colorado in the summer, and there'll be a mass audience there.
But we have different attitudes on a lot of things than Europeans.
We are much more pragmatic and much less respectful of tradition.
This is always and much more optimistic, I would say.
I think that's right.
A lot of Americans that I know, they want to know about ways they can do things.
A lot of British people I know, which bugs me, not everybody, but a lot of people I know, are constantly looking at reasons why we can't do things.
Well, there's that.
And the contrast with a continental Europe is even more obvious.
But really, you know, this belief that there's always a better way to do things.
And so you don't do things just because they've been done a particular way in the past.
This comes, I believe, from the frontier, where you've gone to a place where the rules have been written yet, where ruling institutions hold is weak.
So you have both and where there are new challenges.
And so you're both being, you're free to innovate and you're forced to innovate and you innovate.
And I think that this is a characteristic attitude towards things.
And so, I mean, let's take an example looking forward.
Right now, there's all these people running around wanting to stop genetically modified foods, okay?
Take an example.
And they're raising all kinds of hypotheticals about the potential dangers of genetically modified foods, despite the fact that all life on Earth is genetically modified.
I mean, if you understand the theory of evolution, you know that all life is genetically modified and has been repeatedly.
But in a natural kind of way, not in a laboratory.
Well, humans have modified plants.
I mean, everything you eat, except for fish caught in the wild, has been genetically modified by humans through artificial techniques.
And there's nothing about natural foods that make them automatically safe.
In fact, tomatoes were lethal until human beings bred the toxins out of them.
I know that, really?
yeah, sure.
200 years ago, you could make a living in the United States by eating a tomato on a dare in front of a crowd and passing the hat around.
Now, but let me just get to the point I was trying to make.
On Mars, okay, agricultural land is going to be very limited.
We're going to be doing greenhouse agriculture.
Okay, so you won't have acres and acres and acres to grow things.
You're going to make every square meter of cropland count.
So if somebody comes along with an innovation that would double the crop yield of a particular crop, you're not going to say, oh, that sounds nice, but let's put it through 10 years of testing before we certify it.
You're going to say, let's put this to use right now.
Okay.
And because you need it so much and you will simply be intolerant of bureaucratic obstacles to implementation.
But this also has significance for human potential.
For instance, what you always have on a frontier is a labor shortage.
And so you won't want to have people blocking people from engaging in professions that they're actually qualified to do.
You know, today, a woman school teacher is a stereotype, but I don't know exactly the history in England, but in the United States, women did not become school teachers until the American Civil War, which created a home front shortage of the men who were teachers.
But if you had woman who could, well, first it occurred on the frontier.
If you had a woman who could read and write and knew arithmetic, you put her to work teaching because you needed someone to do it and a man wasn't available.
Then during the frontier, during the Civil War, with the labor shortage created by that, that custom propagated eastward and ultimately, and today it's the stereotype that, for instance, elementary school teachers are generally women and majority of other teachers are women.
So women had that potential, but they couldn't get into that profession until the labor shortage, necessity, opened up that trade to them, much as during World War II, many professions were open to women that had not been before.
So we have to go to Mars.
And again, you hinted at this early in our conversation, not just because it would be a nice thing to do and because it's there, as the people who conquered Everest said, you know, because it is there, Sir Edmund Hillary, but we have to do this if we are to instill or reinstill dynamism within ourselves and get away from this lethargy that we seem to have got into in every field of our lives.
In order to give a good kick up, as we say in the UK, kick up the bum to science and culture and everything, politics included.
We've got to do this.
To reaffirm who we are.
We have to do this.
Reaffirm who we are as creative pioneers.
And, you know, look, every civilization spends a chunk of its surplus wealth on creating things that celebrate its most important values.
You know, the Egyptians built their pyramids, the Athenians built the Acropolis, the medieval Europeans built cathedrals.
You know, we built the Hubble Space Telescope, which, you know, is one very good affirmation of what we consider importance, the search for truth.
And I think establishing humanity on Mars would truly be a monument to what we believe human beings are capable of.
I watched a fascinating documentary last night about a British couple and their children who decided to give life up here and move out to a tiny, tiny, tiny remote Pacific island, the kind of place that takes three days to get to at least a combination of many planes and boats to get there.
And they started by building a little wooden hut through skills that they'd taught themselves by learning them on the internet before they went and reading them in books.
Started by building a hut and little by little, bit by bit, they built a large home on a rocky outcrop, a water system, a generator, and everything that you need to have what we would consider to be a comfortable and reasonably sophisticated life.
But they started with a little wooden hut that they now use for sheltering from typhoons.
Would it be similar when we go to Mars?
Well, to some extent, yes.
Now, of course, that couple that you named, they could probably build a water wheel to turn the generator, but they probably had to get the magnets and the wires and so forth from industrial civilization and import it.
And I think similarly on Mars, there'll be some high-tech items that you have to import from Earth for quite a while before you have the ability to make them, but certainly be able to grow food on Mars.
We'll probably be able to establish and dig in underground vaults and create pressurized living space there.
We'll be able ultimately to make domes, to expand our living space on the surface, acquire water, create geothermal power systems, all sorts of things.
It'll be a process over time as we minimize the key components that will continue to be needed from Earth.
And one of the most important things we have to do, which I hadn't even thought of until I spoke, there are many things I hadn't thought of until I spoke to you today, Robert.
We have to establish a supply line.
There have to be freighters that are going back and forth.
Well, we certainly have to have freighters that are going out.
I mean, especially if you're doing colonization, the most important thing is to send stuff and people one way.
And probably the cheapest way for People to travel out to Mars would be to ride the freight.
But in terms of going back, in terms of having products to sell on Earth, I think probably the most credible would be intellectual productions.
If what you have on Mars is an inventor's colony, they'll be making inventions that could be licensable on Earth, and we can transmit those inventions back to Earth by radio and won't need to be moving large mass at high expense across interplanetary space.
Fascinating.
I sound like Mr. Spock, I know, but it is truly fascinating.
And you've made me think about this in ways I'd never thought about it before.
Now, look, you told me that you were kind enough to tell me that you are 63 now, and you sound like a very young 63.
Are you sad that perhaps you won't be able to go?
Well, you know, for a while I was, but of course I've become reconciled to that reality.
But if I can do some significant things that help make it happen, that's good enough for me.
And what would you like to achieve in this year of 2015?
Well, really, a couple things.
One is to get humans to Mars on the policy agenda of the people that are contesting for power in the United States right now.
How likely do you think that is?
Well, I think we've got chances there.
I really do.
Because of what advantage is it to these politicians to tell the public, sorry, if I'm president, America will no longer accomplish great things in space.
Politics, though, is a road to disappointment, isn't it?
So politicians will often back a cause when they're trying to get elected.
Then they get elected and they forget all about that.
Right.
But you know, you can never predict things.
None of this is inevitable.
It wasn't inevitable that Kennedy would make the decision he made.
If Nixon had been elected, it probably wouldn't have happened.
And they were within a hair of each other in the 1960 election.
In 1996, when the Mars rock was discovered that had evidence of life on Mars in it, it caused a great deal of excitement.
And one of Bill Clinton's advisors wanted him to announce a Humans to Mars program.
And he would have done it at the Democratic Convention in 1996, except for the fact that this particular advisor, Dick Morris, was upended by a scandal unrelated to this almost immediately before the convention.
And other advisors who were not into this idea took his place.
You know, you can never tell what's going to happen.
You know, Arthur Clark tells an interesting story, and it goes like this.
In 1970, Apollo astronauts visited the crater Aristarchus, which was the site for an Arthur Clark novel called Earthflight, about an intrigue on the moon.
And the astronauts were aware of this novel, and they went to the crater, and one of them made a grand statement.
Here we are at the crater Aristarchus, the site of Arthur Clarke's great novel, Earthflight.
He would be so proud that we're here.
If only he were alive today, he'd be so proud that we finally made it here.
Now, of course, Arthur Clark was alive in 1970.
And so he comedically said, yes, well, I indeed I was very proud that they had finally made it there.
But, you know, I wrote that novel in 1940 while I was manning a radar station in England during the Blitz.
And if anybody had told me then that 30 years later, people would be visiting the place I was writing about in my, you know, nighttime slow hours, I would have thought it was the wildest poppycock imaginable.
So just think about that.
It's 30 years from the Blitz to the moon landing.
Okay.
So if we conceive it, we can achieve it.
That's right.
Do you believe in aliens?
Well, I certainly think that there are probably other intelligent species elsewhere in the galaxy and the universe.
I do not believe that unidentified flying objects are manifestations of them, but I believe they're out there.
Yes.
I see no reason why they wouldn't be.
And Mars, you believe, will be a staging post eventually for exploration further.
Yes, that's right.
We go to Mars, we become a space-faring species, and we will, on that basis, develop our space technologies much further.
You know, Columbus crossed the Atlantic in ships that even 50 years later, no one would have attempted the Atlantic in.
Because there weren't transatlantic capable ships in Columbus's time because there was no transatlantic traffic.
But because he discovered the Americas for Europeans, Europeans became a trans-oceanic civilization, and they went from Columbus' crude Mediterranean-style ships to three-mastered caravels and later Clipper ships and steamships and ocean liners and Boeing 747s.
And so we'll go to Mars in ships that by the standards of a generation later will seem extremely crude.
But that next generation of ships will make voyages to the outer solar system marginally possible.
And the colonization of the outer solar system will lead to the development of space technology that makes interstellar travel possible.
As I sit here in a very warm room in London this afternoon, I'm grateful for two things.
I'm grateful to the person who last week suggested that I speak to you and introduced me to your organization.
And I'm grateful to you for responding to an email from somebody you didn't know and saying, yes, I will do that.
So thank you very much.
You've made me think, and I would like to talk to you again one day, if that's possible.
I'd be delighted.
Robert, thank you.
And please take care.
If people want to know about the Mars Society, where do they go online?
To marssociety.org.
And we're going to have our international convention in Washington, D.C. in August or August 13th through 16th.
There's information about that there.
Just one very quick question before you go.
Does Buzz Aldrin himself get involved in things like that?
He sometimes comes to speak.
I don't think he's coming this year, but he's spoken at a number of our conferences.
And I should be asking him this question.
I spoke to Edgar Mitchell a couple of years ago.
I'd love to speak to him, but he's obviously enthused by the whole idea of going to Mars.
Well, certainly, Buzz wants us to go to Mars.
Buzz understands that his mission to the moon, ultimately its significance, will be determined by whether we follow it up, whether we really make that a great leap for mankind, the opening chapter in a new book of human history, or whether it's a one-off stunt.
I believe we can make it the first chapter of the next book of human history.
And I know that Buzz wants to make sure that happens too.
It's a nice thought.
Dr. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Thanks for inviting me.
And you can find more information about the Mars Society by following the link that I will put on my website, www.theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much for all of your support.
Keep those guest suggestions coming.
If you can make a donation to the show, that would be nice too.
All of those things you can do by going to the website, theunexplained.tv, which was designed and curated by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Thank you very, very much for being there and for supporting me.
And until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
Please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
Take care.
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