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Paul Jarley: It’s Space Week at UCF and I’m like a kid in a candy store. So many questions. For one, everyone’s talking about going to Mars, but why? What problem are we solving? What does Mars offer that other planets or the moons don’t? And if the answer is survival or curiosity, does that really require an economy, people trading air, power and data in some kind of cosmic barter system? Or is Mars just a science project? Let’s be real. Most moms or dads did their kids science projects. Nobody ever monetized anything from any of them.
This show is all about separating hype from fundamental change. I’m Paul Jarley, Dean of the College of Business here at UCF. I’ve got lots of questions. To get answers, I’m talking to people with interesting insights into the future of business. Have you ever wondered, Is This Really a Thing? On to our show.
In the past few years, the College has been undergoing a transformation. We’ve been asked to build a Business School that’s a key asset to Florida’s leading engineering and technology university. That’s meant bringing in people who are a little different from our typical pragmatic, data-driven faculty. The ones who teach students to manage people and PNLs. A few of these new faces can fairly be called dreamers. One of them is Zaheer Ali. He, along with Greg Autry is leading our space commercialization efforts, including our space MBA. It’s not a nickname, it’s a space MBA. As we were setting up for Space Week, Z claimed that a Martian economy would really be a thing. Well, he said something like that. I gave him a skeptical look, he countered with a panel of experts.
Listen in.
Zaheer Ali: Well, thank you Dean Jarley. I like to say that, you know, in our business, we turn sci-fi into sci-reality. And one of the people who helps make sci-fi and is now helping make science reality is Danica Vallone of the Making Space Agency. Her path to space is very interesting coming from Hollywood of things like costumes and sets of such high fidelity and accuracy that the space industry said we need some of that. In my time at NASA, one of the things we did was we always built very high fidelity simulators and simulation systems to prepare people and equipment for the challenges of the space environment. So welcome Danica.
Danica Vallone: Thank you very much.
Zaheer Ali: We also have Dr. Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute, of the SETI Institute, one of the leading planetary scientists in the US and indeed the world Co-Chair of the National Space Society Space Settlement Summit and International Space Development Conference. Welcome, sir.
Paul Jarley: So I’m going to start this conversation by asking the same question I ask anybody who pitches me an idea, what problem does this solve? If you’re going to Mars and establishing an economy, what problem does that solve?
Danica Vallone: Mars expert over here should probably have first crack.
Pascal Lee: This is an interesting way to frame the question. I’m not interested in space exploration to solve a problem. I’m interested in drawn to space exploration and Mars exploration in particular because as a scientist, I’m interested in this quest for life. We often say we’re looking for life on Mars. What we fail to specify is that we’re looking for the first example of an alien form of life. And we’re not talking about little green men or some intelligent form of life. We know that Mars hasn’t had that in its history, but we’re looking for another example of life. A different biology from ours. All life on earth is connected and going to Mars would solve possibly that problem, which is how alone are we? Is there some other form of life even within our own solar system? That would solve the problem in the sense of giving us a fuller perspective of what we mean here on Earth.
What are we as a phenomenon in the universe? Are we something really exceptional? Are we common? So that’s the scientific quest that I think would be solved by going to Mars. But in a broader sense, going to Mars to me is also opening a frontier. It’s creating new possibilities. It’s allowing our dream to not just be focused on one planet, but sort of be placed our dreams to be placed in a broader context of a universe where we can do things, where we can thrive. And so maybe the problem we’re trying to solve here is to not be confined to the Earth in our thinking, but to be beyond Earth.
Danica Vallone: I love Pascal with every fiber of my being, but I think that going to Mars is a step in the path to solving the penultimate problem, which is the eventual demise of our species. On a long enough time signature, even if we manage to not blow ourselves up or create some giant nuclear winter or implode the Earth, eventually it will no longer be livable here on our planet. So if we don’t, and we’re talking about millions of years of time signature, eventually figure out how to exist off world and terraform and make other habitable places in the solar system and galaxy and universe as a whole, we will inevitably go extinct. So this is the biggest, fastest, juiciest of all of the problems to solve, and Mars is our second-closest neighbor that is viable.
Paul Jarley: Z, you threw out the economy. It’s on you buddy.
Zaheer Ali: So I’m going to go hardcore here. Capitalism, as we know it is based on continuous growth, right? And you see interesting behavior in the last decade. There was a really good article about competing for talent and things, but the real gem in that article was the statement that, look, we don’t have easy growth markets anymore, right? You’re down to tier five in China, the African disposable income has not increased and India is serving itself to a great extent. So if we’re going to constantly drive the system we currently have, we need to grow populations and we need to grow economies. So I think going to the moon, going to Mars and developing economies off world fundamentally solves the problem of continuing to drive the system we have, should we change the system? That’s a different type of discussion entirely. And secondly, the Earth as far as we know it, in our solar system and certainly within reachable timelines is completely unique.
Are there other planets out there that are Goldilocks-type planets where there’s water and the right temperature and all these other things for our type of life to exist? Yes, we found them. Missions like Kepler and TESS and others have identified some of those. But, they’re not reachable. We do not have the physics understanding to achieve that. So in the meantime, what do we do? How do we protect Earth? Well, I would rather that we completely strip-mine the moon. I would rather that we completely pull asteroids down onto Mars, even if it crashes in the surface, it causes different types of damage. It’s a dead rock. But the only place there’s life that we know it is here and creating these economies off world to serve Earth is in my opinion, one of the ultimate forms of Earth environmentalism as well.
Paul Jarley: Okay, I’m going to focus on Mars here, because that’s how you served it up. We’ll get to this more a little bit. Yes, Mars is a rock. I don’t see that Mars has anything going for it. The moon has some things going for it. It’s close, it has some water, right? There’s some other things there. Mars doesn’t seem to have anything. You are telling me that it would be easier to grow and produce an economy on Mars than it is in Africa. I would ask you to rethink that proposition.
Zaheer Ali: That’s fair. I just think we should do both.
Pascal Lee: I both agree with Zaheer and disagree in some ways. But I think the disagree may be on the timescale over which we would like to see these things happen. Mars is a God-forsaken place right now.
Paul Jarley: It’s hell, let’s be honest,
Pascal Lee: Venus is hell, Mars worse, a little better.
Zaheer Ali: The atmosphere will melt you on Venus.
Pascal Lee: Mars is a little bit better. It’s a place to me that we can explore. Now whether or not we should establish colonies and large settlements of humans, I personally don’t see that. That’s not what drives my vision of the future of humanity and space including on Mars. But there are several things that are really changing here in the landscape. First of all, when we say why spend money in space, why can’t we have more of an economy in space? The answer is that money is not spent in space. Even when we go to space, money is spent here on Earth, the economy is here on Earth. It’s benefiting humans every day on Earth with the things that we’re doing already in space. And to me for quite a while still until, and if we ever have a larger population that’s permanently present on some other world, what we really see the economy that’s based on Mars. But for a long time, even when humans are going to explore Mars and even when we establish a first base there and a resort that tourism might actually want to use and send people to, the economy will still be on the Earth. The money will be made on Earth, the investments will be made on Earth. And, you know, it’s farther down the road that I see that we would really transition into what one might call a sort of a Mars-based economy. But I hope that the day for that will come. It’s just a matter of is this really the immediate future that we’re talking about? And for quite a while still the economy is going to be Earth-centered even when we go to the moon, let alone Mars.
Paul Jarley: Well, the economy requires a few things. The first thing is scarcity. Mars has plenty of scarcity. That won’t really be a problem.
Danica Vallone: Scarcity in abundance.
Paul Jarley: Right? Exactly. Then it needs specialization of labor because scarcity and specialization of labor leads to trade and trade is at the heart of an economy. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that currency has to trade. I mean you could see on Mars or on another planet, oxygen credits might serve as a barter system for trade. But I do think also there’s sort of a stage in the middle. So if you think about on our little world how colonization happened, you would think about things like the Hudson Bay Trading Company, which was given a monopoly for a certain period of time, largely for resource extraction. And here I think we’re talking about a resource extraction scenario, at least in the short term. What I worry about with Mars is there ain’t no resource to extract. I don’t know what it would be.
Pascal Lee: Well, water actually would be a very important resource and we know is abundantly present there. First of all, it can be used as a fluid that we use for hydration solution in general, but also for as rocket fuel, you can break up H2O into hydrogen and oxygen and that’s rocket fuel. So in the context of Mars, actually, this notion of using water from Mars, I don’t know how that translates into an economy, but as a resource certainly that we should tap into that buys you a lot.
Paul Jarley: Something to make a settlement sustainable that would –
Pascal Lee: Buy you a lot to be able to –
Paul Jarley: Yeah, that would buy you a lot.
Pascal Lee: To extract water and have a gas station on Mars.
Paul Jarley: Yeah.
Pascal Lee: Now it’s actually less clear on the moon ironically, because right now we have a lunar program that’s completely obsessed by extracting water ice from the lunar South Pole. If you look at the actual scientific data about this, there is water ice at the South Pole, and even people say there’s the equivalent of 200,000-plus Olympic size swimming pools worth of water at the South Pole, but it’s really scattered over a very vast region. And even in places where you have the highest concentration of water ice, according to the one map that we have for now of the hydrogen in the lunar South Pole, it would take the plowing of 26 football field size of a patch of ground on the moon down to a depth of one meter for you to extract enough water to fill one Starship. Forget about the environmental damage you do to the moon.
There’s no economy there in my view because it’s not just excavating the stuff. You have to confine the water, pipe it, store it, preserve it because it vaporizes, it vents, and then eventually you’d have to fill in your rocket. So you have to take the water to where the rocket is because where the ice is is actually not really easy to land or operate. The bottom line is to me, there’s a pipe dream here with extracting water from the moon economically. And yet we are all focused on getting to the South Pole of the moon right now, which I think is actually a strategic mistake to send people there. The biggest source of water on the South Pole of the moon is the Earth.
Paul Jarley: Can we import it?
Pascal Lee: Yes, we can transport water from the Earth. Any single landing of a starship on the moon can bring in 125 metric tons of water. I think for a long while, the water on the moon should be counted as coming from the earth as opposed to extracted on site. It might take a generation or two here of really prospecting at the South Pole, and if we ever get lucky enough to find a spot where we can really extract water in large amounts and in a way that’s economically viable, we would do that. I’m completely on board the dream and desire of growing an economy in space from local resources, but the bar is very high to make it economically viable for quite a while.
Danica Vallone: There is one factor that we haven’t discussed yet, which is the variability in gravity that exists, whether we are in LEO (Low Earth Orbit), MEO (Medium Earth Orbit), GEO (Geostationary Earth Orbit), on the Moon, or Mars. And Mars has its own very unique gravity signature and we do not yet know what kind of manufacturing can be done in very specific gravitational balance levels. Specifically when it comes to organelles or biology or being able to 3D print organs and things like that. Again, when it comes to reproduction capabilities. Essentially all we know when it comes to our bodies and gravity is one G good, zero g bad. And that’s the extent of our knowledge base. So to have a planet-sized laboratory to be able to explore what is possible inside of those bounds is potentially incredibly advantageous.
Zaheer Ali: One other thing that I would add is it’s about real estate at some level.
Paul Jarley: Well now we’re talking property rights.
Zaheer Ali: And that’s being established. That’s why we have a panel on governance at the Space Settlement Summit because we have to figure that out. But –
Paul Jarley: I seriously doubt there’s going to be sovereignty on the moon or Mars.
Zaheer Ali: It might be like the Alaskan wilderness.
Paul Jarley: Or Antarctica, right?
Zaheer Ali: Antarctica is different because the world’s nations got together mostly and said we’re not going to extract resources. That is exactly the opposite of what we want to do in space. We want people to go extract resources because that fuels investment. If there’s an ROI at the end of this, when my ship comes in or in this case when my spaceship –
Paul Jarley: You and I are going to be dead then, Z.
Zaheer Ali: Yeah, but we do have to set this up. I mean that is one thing that is important to realize in the space conversation is we are in this for the species and between (Carl) Sagan and (Frank) Drake, they laid out the probability that our great great grandkids exist. And it is not a hundred percent. And that is a reality that some of us look at and say the way we can make sure that gets closer to a hundred percent is –
Paul Jarley: This is why you need a space MBA. But keep going.
Zaheer Ali: You know, Phil Metzger, who is a professor here, I’ve been telling him to publish this work, but he’s been tinkering with this model and I think you’ve seen it Pascal, right?
Pascal Lee: Phil is a great researcher, yeah.
Zaheer Ali: But he needs to publish the damn thing, so then the rest of us can start playing with it too and optimize it and 20-year-olds can figure it out, which is probably what’s going to happen.
Pascal Lee: And he does publish good stuff.
Zaheer Ali: Yeah, but this particular model on how much mass and population it takes to actually make exactly what you said, that economy –
Paul Jarley: A minimally viable economy in this case.
Zaheer Ali: Right? It’s not a hundred, it’s not a thousand, it’s not 10,000. It’s tens of thousands of people, but it is not all of them on Mars. It is a spectrum from orbit all the way to Mars and back. And the thing is, when you look at distances, particularly you talk to people like Joel Sercel of TransAstra and others, when we think about what is it really going to take for us to advance to other levels of civilization? That and also where does some of these economies kick in? And to access the asteroid belt at some level, we don’t know how to mine an asteroid, but we do know how to mine in gravity. So if we have to pull stuff down to Mars and then process it there, it could become the giant processing plant for the next level, the type two human civilization.
Paul Jarley: Well, that may bring up some ethical issues that we don’t have time for today. But I’m trying to apply a pretty fundamental economics principle here. I’m not trying to pooh-pooh the idea that there’s going to be an economy that has some basis in space. We need to think in terms of comparative advantage. And I don’t see Mars having one. It ain’t close, it doesn’t have any materials that I think we need. I’m thinking there are probably other prospects even in the solar system that would be better for establishing a civilization than Mars would be?
Pascal Lee: First of all, like I said, establishing a civilization on Mars is not at all something that drives my interest and actions and area of space.
Paul Jarley: And we can stipulate, it’s hard.
Pascal Lee: To me, first of all, Mars right now is still a very attractive and some sense romantic landscape, but the reality of this place is really harsh. It’s completely deadly. If you walk out onto Mars without a pressurized spacesuit, you’re dead within seconds from low pressure and other things will kill you eventually as well. But the key thing here is there really is a potential for there to be life on Mars. Not at the surface, we don’t think anymore, but deeper down, or at least in the subsurface, possibly in caves. And there are many caves, there’s over a thousand caves and pits that have been identified on Mars in this day. And when you’re in a cave on Mars, the harshness of the environment is completely different. Now it’s completely moderated into something that many forms of life on Earth could survive in, even at the low pressure of Mars. So really one of the potential major discoveries we could find on Mars, if you find a form of alien bug or life, is essentially insights into an entirely new realm of biology. And we have to understand what biology means today. It’s an entire industry. It’s an entire economy on Earth, understanding life, how it works, how it doesn’t work, how it could be modified, how it could be adapted. All of these things would be revolutionized by another example of life that we could find. So there’s that huge potential I think that really is looming on Mars, but we don’t know that it’s there. That’s a fact.
The other thing is what’s the worth of a National Park? It is just there preserved, it’s beautiful, it has potential, it’s very attractive. People still go to National Parks. Are we necessarily thinking that one day we’ll have to destroy Yellowstone and turn it into a thermal plant or an electrical plant? No. The answer is there are some things out there that we should try to achieve, go explore and possibly settle a little bit because they are just incredible things for us to think about and dream about. So, I think that once again, if you’re in the business of really making money fast, space is only in a very limited way the place where you want to be. But if on the other hand you are really a long-term thinker and you are interested, you believe in humanity’s greater future down the road, and you sort of are an investor in that sense of into our distant future, then the action, as Zaheer says, needs to be taken. Now we are the people who have the responsibility of taking the first steps to making this happen down the road.
Paul Jarley: So we did find some things right on the sea bed near volcanic vents, which showed us forms of life that we did not know existed before. If I may digress for a minute though, our own human experience would tell us that if life exists, it exists everywhere on that planet. It’s not hard to find. It screams at us in various forms.
Pascal Lee: Let me moderate that. I’ve done 25 years of field work in the Arctic. There is life in the Arctic, but a lot less. It doesn’t scream at you anymore. You go to the Arctic, you’re walking on this desert plane. You have to look for life to find it. It’s not harking back at you. And so, I do think that a place like Mars could have life, globally, but in places that are still niche like underground. And there’s the speculation that somehow if it had life at all, it would have somehow colonized the whole planet and modified it. That’s not necessarily the case. On Earth, even on Earth, in extreme environments, you see that life recedes into nooks and crannies where it can survive, but it doesn’t necessarily have enough oomph at that point to change the planet.
Paul Jarley: So, you used the word romance. So talk a little bit about that, about the power of space exploration and storytelling and romance. People make a lot of money off of that.
Danica Vallone: Yes we do. Yes we do, my friend. People need things that are greater than themselves to believe in and to strive for. That’s a unifying human trait. And to do hard things means that we’re solving for all sorts of other problems along the way. So if Mars is the symbolic end goal, the amount of technology and innovation that’s required to get us there will produce an enormous amount of viable, economically viable offshoots that we can make use of. The more resource constrained the environment, the more difficult our solutions are, but we will get there. And as our Earth becomes less inhabitable, as we treat it increasingly poorly, this will become very, very relevant for us to be able to have access to. But the reach itself is noble and if it exists as little more than a symbol that still has intrinsic value to the species.
Paul Jarley: So if you had a few trillion dollars to invest tomorrow, where would you put it? Z?
Zaheer Ali: A couple trillion, that’s a big number.
Paul Jarley: We’re going to think big here, right? Well, it’s not going to be a small task.
Zaheer Ali: Right. If I had to invest it in a short time span or within a few years, it’s going to be a little nuts, but I’m just going to say it.
Danica Vallone: I’m ready.
Zaheer Ali: The material capability of there for a lunar space elevator, it would eliminate the need for keypad zones and directly enable interaction from the lunar surface to orbit and could be a direct last-mile system to kickstart the lunar economy.
Paul Jarley: You got to tell me more about what a lunar elevator looks like so I understand.
Zaheer Ali: It’s a space elevator like this Arthur C. Clark thing where you’ve got weight on one end –
Paul Jarley: And it’s connected to the Earth?
Zaheer Ali: and connected to the body. The material properties are not sufficient.
Paul Jarley: The material science guys need to do some work. Is that what you’re telling me?
Zaheer Ali: Well, I mean even to get to the lunar one capable, they’ve done a lot of work. That’s 25 years of work.
Paul Jarley: Or ladies, by the way.
Danica Vallone: Thank you.
Zaheer Ali: That’s an impressive development. And the reason I say if I had the money now I would invest in the moon is because I believe this is a ladder. And I don’t think we can leapfrog rungs here. It needs to be done methodically. It needs to be done strategically with consistent effort. The moon enables us to develop all the systems at some level and optimize them to go to the harder environment, which is Mars. And there’s a lot there because the radiation environmental Mars is also worse fundamentally than on the moon. And there’s all types of other challenges. So that’s where I would put the money. I would make lunar happen as soon as possible and I believe that would kickstart this and we would have a sustaining cislunar economy because of the comparative advantages to the moon, you know, crater resources, gravity, helium. I actually don’t think that’s going to be a thing. There’s just no market. I mean the tokamak, the type of fusion that would’ve used Helium three is not the one that is going on grid by 2035. And I know this because I’ve been in the Commonwealth Fusion data room.
Pascal Lee: It’s a maybe later thing.
Zaheer Ali: That’s a whole other podcast, nuclear power. So that’s what I would do first, but I would specifically do it in a method that is not focused on, okay, moon and then stop. But Moon as a rung on the way to Mars.
Paul Jarley: Do you agree with that?
Pascal Lee: Yes. At this point, I think going back to the moon is imperative. I was sort of criticizing Artemis and the plan to send humans to the South Pole earlier, but I’d like to see what the alternative is or what it should be, which is to set up a base on the moon off pole, not too far from it, but in a place where, I mean my favorite spot is Clavius Crater, which happens to be where “2001: A Space Odyssey” had its base, for reference. But at the time they didn’t realize how great a place this is.
Paul Jarley: Hal is echoing in my head right now.
Pascal Lee: It’s turning out to be a fantastic place to set up a base and for reasons that Arthur C. Clark or Stanley Kubrick could not have known, but the reasons they had, which is a big wide open place, are still good. But it turns out that it has caves nearby, it has a direct drivable route to the South Pole, it’s much more pleasant to be based out of, much safer as well, easier to access from Earth, etcetera. But setting up a base is really the imperative. Right now, we are in this contrived, self-inflicted race against China to be first to put humans back on the moon when in fact, I don’t think that’s the real race. That race we won 60 years ago, and we don’t have to re-litigate that. On the other hand, where there is a race, is a race to stay on the moon for permanent presence. And so the Artis program in my view, should be redirected as soon as possible to establishing permanent presence at the surface of the moon. Not in the polar regions, but at Clavius or somewhere similar.
Paul Jarley: But that’s a military imperative as much as it is anything else.
Pascal Lee: Well, it’s strategic.
Paul Jarley: Let’s be honest about it.
Pascal Lee: Strategic, but it also opens the way to our future exploration of the moon for science. It’s a better place for a number of reasons. I don’t know if we’ll get to the AI part, but this –
Paul Jarley: Throw it out there.
Pascal Lee: Well, this particular summit that Zaheer Ali here and Dr. Greg Autry organized at UCF with the National Space Society, I think is really a visionary opportunity because, think about Mars settlement as sort of a farther out frontier here that we’d like to someday achieve and get humans to occupy. But there’s also been talk of the role of artificial intelligence. And humanity, while we continue to explore and push our limits in space, humanity’s really on the verge of this huge revolution here, which is the one that’s associated with the emergence of AI and AI-equipped androids. So it’s not just AI that’s making progress, it’s robotics as well. And very soon, just because we are Dr. Frankenstein’s, all of us, we are wanting to see humanoid robots. You can create robots that don’t look like humans at all and have AI, but somehow there’s this global effort to create humanoid robots that are eventually going to be equipped with artificial general intelligence, meaning intelligence that matches that of our human brains and eventually –
Danica Vallone: Supersedes.
Pascal Lee: artificial super intelligence, which exceeds the human brain. But anyway, once you have a robotic machine that’s essentially like ourselves, that we can relate to completely differently from how we relate to a robot rover on Mars, instead, this is a robot that we essentially can talk to as if they were part of our family. Now all of a sudden you are opening an entirely different realm of possibilities for humanity if you extend that definition to include these AI robots to explore space. So as much as I don’t see, ever, a point where we should be thinking of a million biological human beings on Mars, because I don’t think a place could support it, I could actually see a million Android robots on Mars reproducing themselves, extracting local resources, but turning Mars into this incredible playground.
Paul Jarley: You know how that science fiction movie ends though? Mars revolts.
Danica Vallone: Or they claim it for themselves and we negotiate a treaty.
Paul Jarley: The Martians are never happy.
Pascal Lee: I’m banking on the fact that we’ll be good parents in raising these AI for sure, for sure.
Danica Vallone: And we need better stories.
Paul Jarley: Can you sell that movie?
Danica Vallone: Oh, absolutely. I think we have sold that movie.
Paul Jarley: Probably!
Pascal Lee: The point is, if now you have representatives or human selves who are much more resilient, I mean think of sending Android robots to Mars. You don’t need to feed them on the way there. They don’t need water anymore. They just need power, and there’s plenty of that on Mars. They don’t even need a spacesuit to go out on spacewalks. The ones who will occupy Mars on our behalf and be part of ourselves essentially in this process. And so we’ve even talked about interstellar travel and what that can do to us. So you’re correct. There’s no place in sight right now for us to head out to beyond our solar system. But if you have Android robots, then they’re immortal. I don’t actually think that we will ever terraform Mars. I think we’ll have the ability to reach nearby stars that are already habitable and then if we’re just cared for as humans in the form of DNA all the way there, then we could be replicated there.
Paul Jarley: What should students learn about potential missions to Mars or space exploration or?
Zaheer Ali: One thing that we didn’t actually say, but it’s been implicit in all of our discussion, is that you have to get a business case to close. And one of the things the space economy teaches you perhaps better than any other economy is how hard that is and how tightly you have to pull that thread through and connect it. So many things we take for granted about the way we can build a business in all other aspects of our economy. We have ready markets, people understand the products, it’s easy to communicate all these things. Here? You have to get every aspect of your business. So that’s how I’d answer what I think students should take away.
Danica Vallone: It’s a bit like playing your favorite video game on the hardest setting possible. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. So if you’re going to pitch an idea and try to make it work in the space economy, you are set for whatever other endeavors you want to tackle thereafter.
Pascal Lee: I agree completely with both what Zaheer just said and Danica. President Kennedy I think said, I’m going to paraphrase poorly, but he said, we want to do this and the other things not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard. You gain something from doing something that is hard. The benefit is not necessarily out there, it’s here, down here and how you do it and how you get it done. In some sense, even if we couldn’t identify or pinpoint any specific benefit right now, and there has to be a component of everything we do that sort of takes into account this bigger picture out there that’s there. We are just in this tight spot in history where it’s going to take quite a bit of investment to make all this eventually pan out.
Danica Vallone: But this is the most glorious of all pursuits because this is legacy. What greater path to legacy than this?
Paul Jarley: So is the Martian economy going to be a thing or not it when Zaheer?
Zaheer Ali: Yes, a hundred years.
Danica Vallone: Yes. For humans, 200 years. Robots before.
Pascal Lee: Yeah, space economies will be on Earth for the next 50 years until things get going on the moon and then 100 years or so or more for Mars.
Paul Jarley: Well, thank you all.
If you view Mars through an economist’s lens, it’s the least-efficient frontier imaginable. High-fixed costs, negative externalities, no obvious path to comparative advantage. There are way better options than Mars. The moon for one. The only plausible reason to go are psychological and civilizational. Curiosity, maybe the continuity of the species, and the need to prove that humans can live elsewhere. Every generation invents a frontier to prove we’re all still moving forward. Once it was oceans, then continents, then the sky. Now it’s a red dot in the dark. Mars isn’t a business plan, it’s a mirror. It reflects our fear that Earth might be finished, our hope that we can start again, and our stubborn belief that we’re still builders. We don’t chase Mars for its resources. We chase it for its symbolism. A clean slate, a test, a thrill. Maybe we just want to prove that we can bend the universe to our will, even if our will is just for a thrill. Many a Greek tragedy reminds us hubris is a bad investment.
So what’s your take? Check us out online and share your thoughts at business.ucf.edu/podcast. Special thanks to my new producer, Brent Meske, and the whole team at the Office of Outreach and Engagement here at the UCF College of Business. And thank you for listening. Until next time, charge on.