The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #414 - Cmdr. Chris Hadfield

00:00:05.000 His name is Chris Hatfield.

00:00:07.000 The book is An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth.

00:00:12.000 Hear that?

00:00:12.000 That's me.

00:00:13.000 I never forget.

00:00:14.000 I never remember, rather.

00:00:16.000 Turn my laptop off.

00:00:17.000 You were in space for 166 days.

00:00:20.000 Amazing, huh?

00:00:21.000 That's insane.

00:00:22.000 When I sit on my dock and watch the space station go over, it's really hard to rationalize.

00:00:29.000 Because I know I was up there and I can remember all the details, but to try and link in...

00:00:33.000 Life on Earth with seeing that spotlight go across the horizon, it's still, I haven't got sorted out of my head how to connect it.

00:00:40.000 Is that the longest a person's ever been up there?

00:00:42.000 No, there was a Russian guy named Valery Polyakov who stayed up 14 months straight, 400 and whatever that is, days, long time.

00:00:49.000 Wow!

00:00:49.000 No, I'm nowhere near the record.

00:00:52.000 That's still 166 days is an incredible amount of time to be detached from gravity and floating around in space.

00:01:00.000 What is the effect on your body?

00:01:03.000 Big effects short term.

00:01:05.000 Huge.

00:01:05.000 Your body doesn't have to lift the blood up to your head when you're weightless, right?

00:01:09.000 So your whole cardiovascular system changes.

00:01:11.000 All the nice little mechanisms that squeeze the balloon that is your body to get the blood up to your head, they stop working.

00:01:18.000 Your heart gets smaller.

00:01:19.000 You start losing your skeleton.

00:01:22.000 Your balance system completely shuts down.

00:01:25.000 I mean, it has no stimulus from gravity anymore, so you become totally visually based.

00:01:30.000 So when you come home, it's brutal building all those things back up again.

00:01:35.000 And most of them, you feel...

00:01:37.000 I mean, you lose the calluses on the bottom of your feet.

00:01:39.000 It's kind of disgusting because your feet are like a snake up there, but the bottom of your feet are shedding because you never use the bottom of your feet.

00:01:45.000 And you build up calluses on the top because you're always tucking your feet underneath things.

00:01:50.000 So when you come back, you even have to grow the calluses back at the bottom of your feet.

00:01:54.000 And the thing that takes the longest is your skeleton body.

00:01:57.000 I lost about 8% of the bone across my hips, but it's grown back.

00:02:01.000 And within about a year of landing, I'll hopefully be back to normal.

00:02:05.000 One year.

00:02:06.000 It takes one year for your body to fully recover.

00:02:08.000 It took about four months before I could run normally again, where my body would get the blood out of my feet and pump it properly back up to my head.

00:02:16.000 About four months, which is almost as long as I was up on this trip.

00:02:19.000 But yeah, the bone takes the longest.

00:02:21.000 But it's automatic, which is interesting.

00:02:24.000 My body got osteoporosis, and it's reversing osteoporosis using some internal stimulus that we don't even understand.

00:02:32.000 So it makes a pretty good medical study for everybody.

00:02:36.000 I would imagine so.

00:02:37.000 Now, how long do you have to be in space before your body loses so much mass of skeleton?

00:02:43.000 The first time you take a leak in space, your urine is full of calcium and minerals.

00:02:47.000 We do urine samples all the time.

00:02:49.000 And your body, we don't even know why.

00:02:51.000 We don't know what sensors in the body Recognize that you're weightless or why we would even have those sensors.

00:02:57.000 But your body starts to shed your skeleton right away.

00:03:01.000 And we can almost beat it now through heavy exercise.

00:03:04.000 We have a bunch of equipment on board, resistive exercise and treadmill and bicycle and stuff.

00:03:11.000 And with that, we can almost beat it.

00:03:13.000 But across my hips and my upper femur, we haven't been able to load that area upright.

00:03:18.000 You always lift symmetrically.

00:03:20.000 And on a treadmill, you always run nice and symmetrically.

00:03:22.000 So you don't get all the The banging transverse loads that you need to make your body keep the bones dense there.

00:03:27.000 So how much of it can you preserve by using exercise?

00:03:30.000 The rest of my body was fine.

00:03:31.000 In fact, I increased muscle mass.

00:03:33.000 I decreased fat a little bit.

00:03:34.000 My bones were at the same density.

00:03:36.000 The only place we haven't solved yet is just the hip cradle. 0.98

00:03:40.000 And I think with another iteration or two of our exercise equipment, we'll get that solved.

00:03:44.000 And then we can go to Mars.

00:03:47.000 Wow, so now how long are you when you're doing like exercise to try to build up?

00:03:52.000 What percentage of your day is doing that?

00:03:54.000 Two hours a day, every day.

00:03:55.000 We do one hour of cardiovascular and one hour of resistive every single day, seven days a week for the whole half a year that you're up there.

00:04:02.000 And we've determined that's the best trade-off between getting useful work done, you know, because it's a big multinational laboratory, and keeping your body healthy.

00:04:10.000 So we commit about two hours a day.

00:04:13.000 When they first started going up there, did they not do anything?

00:04:16.000 No, we've tried a bunch of different things.

00:04:17.000 The Russians even tried a suit they call a penguin suit.

00:04:21.000 Which is like a set of coveralls, tight-fitting coveralls that's full of elastics, so that every time you bend your elbow or twist your body or something, you're fighting the resistance of the suit, because they thought then you could sort of get it for free.

00:04:34.000 But you need to demand it.

00:04:37.000 You need to actually heavily force your body to exercise.

00:04:40.000 And if you do that, then you can stay in shape.

00:04:42.000 But we started out with a resistive exercise device, and then it was the improved iRED.

00:04:48.000 And now we're on ARED, which is the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device, as we've learned, you know, how to make it better so that we can return to Earth healthy.

00:04:57.000 Or, you know, when we go to the Moon, more importantly, when we go to Mars, because it takes about half a year to get there.

00:05:01.000 Well, this is one of the problems we need to solve.

00:05:04.000 The Mars is really that next level trip, right?

00:05:06.000 Because there's no coming back.

00:05:08.000 It's like several levels above where we are now.

00:05:11.000 Station is in orbit, right?

00:05:13.000 It's around us, the space station.

00:05:15.000 It's been up there 13 years now with people on board.

00:05:18.000 But it's like...

00:05:20.000 Sailing up and down the coast with insight of land.

00:05:23.000 You know, we haven't headed across the body of water, even to go to the moon, as far as habitation goes.

00:05:29.000 So, right now we're just sailing up and down the coast of the world, figuring out how to beat osteoporosis, how did the radiation, the psychology of it, what to make the hull out of, how do you make a toilet that works, a closed environmental system.

00:05:41.000 Got to invent all those things.

00:05:43.000 Then, I think, we'll go to the moon, because it's the next, it's only three days away.

00:05:48.000 And then we can do How to use resources that are there.

00:05:50.000 How do you generate power?

00:05:52.000 How do you navigate?

00:05:52.000 How do you do all that?

00:05:54.000 And then once we get that sorted out, then I think we'll go further, but it's still a lot of years away.

00:06:00.000 What are the big hazards?

00:06:01.000 The big hazards are radiation from space, micrometeors, and what else?

00:06:07.000 Psychological.

00:06:08.000 How do you keep people sane?

00:06:11.000 It's not so bad in the space station because we're close to the world.

00:06:13.000 There's only like a two-second delay talking on the radio.

00:06:17.000 So you can have a normal conversation, just a little pause.

00:06:20.000 But as soon as you start going to Mars, within a couple weeks, you will never have another conversation with Earth, a normal one.

00:06:26.000 Again, everything's got so much lag that you'll just have, like, recorded video messages back and forth.

00:06:32.000 And so the psych impact of that is going to be high.

00:06:34.000 And the Earth will shrink to just another star within a couple weeks, you know.

00:06:38.000 And that, those people...

00:06:41.000 We'll become Martians in their mind. 0.73

00:06:43.000 You know, they will no longer be from Earth.

00:06:45.000 They will see themselves as separate.

00:06:48.000 When I was on the space station the second time, one of the other crew members, her name's Sue Helms, she and I were talking.

00:06:54.000 We'd known each other since test pilot school.

00:06:56.000 And in passing, a throwaway thing she didn't even think she was saying.

00:06:59.000 She said, hey, you know, Earth said that we're supposed to do this next.

00:07:02.000 And in my mind, I heard Earth said.

00:07:05.000 I heard those words come out of her mouth and it was like she has, in her mind, completely split off from the other seven billion people.

00:07:14.000 There's her crew and Earth is one singular identifiable entity on the other side.

00:07:19.000 And that was a real bell ringer to me of what it's going to be like to go to Mars.

00:07:23.000 Those people are going to be a completely discreet unit of People, and they'll be Martians. 0.94

00:07:30.000 They won't be Earthlings pretty quick in their heads.

00:07:32.000 And how do you deal with that?

00:07:33.000 How do we plan for that?

00:07:35.000 And it's still a long ways in the future, but it's one of the many things we need to sort out before we...

00:07:39.000 Because as you say, once you get the engines going fast enough that you're headed for Mars, you can't just turn around.

00:07:45.000 There's no coming back.

00:07:46.000 That's it.

00:07:47.000 Well, I mean, Apollo 13, right?

00:07:49.000 They lost an engine on the way to the Moon.

00:07:51.000 They coasted all the way to the Moon, and they just used...

00:07:54.000 Like a ball on the end of a string, they just went around the Moon with the gravity of the Moon to sling them back at Earth again.

00:07:59.000 So if something failed on the way to Mars, you could do the same thing, but it would take a year.

00:08:04.000 So, you know, no problem can normally last a year to get resolved.

00:08:08.000 So pretty much, yeah, you've got to have all the problems solved before you head that way.

00:08:12.000 And what about, like, sustainable resources, like as far as, like, food and things like that?

00:08:16.000 Do they have to terraform when they get to Mars and start growing things?

00:08:21.000 Well, we don't know.

00:08:22.000 We're trying to figure all that out.

00:08:24.000 A really interesting discovery about three weeks ago, Curiosity, that big rover that, That is driving around on Mars right now has some pretty good equipment on it and it discovered just in the last few weeks that in every cubic foot of dirt on Mars there's a quart of water.

00:08:42.000 So there's oceans of water.

00:08:45.000 I mean the topsoil is full of water on Mars.

00:08:49.000 So that's really promising for when we get there because water is hydrogen and oxygen.

00:08:54.000 Oxygen to breathe, hydrogen and oxygen makes fuel, hydrogen and oxygen makes water.

00:08:58.000 That's a huge resource.

00:09:00.000 The moon, there's water there, but it's really rare.

00:09:03.000 So that's a big discovery for us eventually being able to go there.

00:09:09.000 But, you know, we need a power source.

00:09:11.000 The sun's a long ways away and it's dusty on Mars.

00:09:13.000 You can't just, you can't have a solar-powered bulldozer.

00:09:17.000 You know, you need a power source.

00:09:19.000 And we need, how do you navigate?

00:09:20.000 And there's just a, how do you build a perfect closed-loop environmental system so that you don't We have constant losses.

00:09:28.000 Because the space station, we only, I think it's about 92% of our water we reclaim, but we constantly need that little trickle from Earth of new water because it's not perfect.

00:09:38.000 There's a lot of stuff we don't even know what we don't know yet.

00:09:42.000 And that's, I think, why we'll sort a lot of that out on the Moon before we launch to Mars.

00:09:47.000 To me, watching the footage of the rover and the images that it sent back was almost surreal.

00:09:53.000 It didn't seem real.

00:09:55.000 It was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that they sent a robot to another planet, and it's roaming around taking pictures and sending them back, and we're looking at them.

00:10:04.000 Yeah, it's phenomenal.

00:10:05.000 It's incredible!

00:10:06.000 Yeah, that we could do that.

00:10:07.000 And the way that came...

00:10:09.000 You know, Mars has...

00:10:10.000 It's just the wrong atmosphere.

00:10:13.000 It's not thick enough to use a parachute in, but it's not thin enough that you can ignore it and just slow down and land with a rocket.

00:10:20.000 You know, it's not good for landing.

00:10:23.000 The Earth's atmosphere is nice and thick.

00:10:24.000 You can come down under a parachute.

00:10:26.000 And the Moon has none.

00:10:27.000 So you can just, like the Apollo guys, you can just land on your rocket plume.

00:10:31.000 Mars, you're kind of stuck in the middle.

00:10:33.000 So you need a complex landing system.

00:10:35.000 And Curiosity, the way they came up with the solution to that, was just phenomenal.

00:10:40.000 Aero break through the atmosphere and then that sequence of miracles and the retro rockets and the extendable bridle and everything.

00:10:46.000 It's amazing that that worked.

00:10:48.000 And huge kudos to the JPL guys and everybody who came up with it.

00:10:51.000 And the stuff it's teaching us about how planets work and what is the past and the future for that planet Mars and therefore...

00:11:01.000 It gives us a lot better understanding of what's normal and what we can expect on Earth.

00:11:06.000 Yeah, huge kudos to those people indeed.

00:11:08.000 I mean, they did an amazing, amazing thing.

00:11:10.000 And just one of those, in my opinion, one of those paradigm-shifting moments where when, you know, we're back here on Earth and we're watching those images, you're like, wow, they can do this now.

00:11:20.000 Yeah, I'm an astronaut.

00:11:22.000 I'm an astronaut, and, you know, I've been in space twice, and I gathered my family around to watch that thing happen because it's so...

00:11:28.000 It is right on the edge of what we can just barely do.

00:11:31.000 It's such a brave thing to do and such a capable probe, a capable extension of us all to put down on the surface and it's teaching us about Mars.

00:11:40.000 Did you ever pay any attention to the face on Mars or any of that craziness before?

00:11:45.000 That's all fun.

00:11:47.000 There's faces all over.

00:11:48.000 I mean, just lay on your back and look at the clouds.

00:11:50.000 There's faces everywhere, right?

00:11:52.000 Sure.

00:11:52.000 We naturally look for faces.

00:11:54.000 Especially in weird shadowy images like those images were.

00:11:57.000 I mean, they were some really unique things.

00:11:59.000 There's a rock near my house that's a square rock.

00:12:01.000 And when I have a friend who believes in a lot of conspiracy theories and he believes in the face on Mars and a lot of different stuff, and I said, I'm going to show you something, man.

00:12:09.000 Come over here.

00:12:10.000 I go, look at that rock.

00:12:10.000 Do you think anybody made that rock?

00:12:12.000 I go, that rock is just made.

00:12:13.000 That's just a rock amongst a pile of rocks.

00:12:15.000 It's big and it's kind of square.

00:12:17.000 Not perfectly square, but if you looked at a blurry picture of it that was taken from space, you would swear, this is the building block for a pyramid.

00:12:24.000 This is clearly made by an intelligent species.

00:12:27.000 Yeah, the same one that built the pyramids.

00:12:28.000 Yeah, I know.

00:12:30.000 It's always easier to believe something than it is to understand it.

00:12:34.000 Yeah, the fascinating thing about the face on Mars is not that it looks like a face on Mars.

00:12:40.000 It's the idea that Mars at one point in time actually could have sustained some form of life, and in fact, definitely did.

00:12:48.000 It had an atmosphere that was livable at one point in time.

00:12:51.000 Really, there could have been some kind of life.

00:12:54.000 Maybe it was just like microbes or plants.

00:12:55.000 It might still.

00:12:56.000 I mean, it is the biggest volcano in the solar system, so it has heat.

00:13:00.000 And it has all this water that we've just found now for sure.

00:13:05.000 And heat and water on Earth always means life.

00:13:08.000 I mean, just look under your sink.

00:13:09.000 And so on Mars, maybe there's a fossil record of it.

00:13:13.000 Maybe there's even something still, primitive stuff, living somewhere in the rock.

00:13:17.000 We don't know.

00:13:17.000 But we haven't found any yet.

00:13:19.000 But if we can find it on Mars, and we know there's life on Earth, then there's life everywhere.

00:13:23.000 And that would be a pretty important thing to figure out.

00:13:26.000 Or the possibility that life actually started on Mars and some sort of an impact from an asteroid, panspermia, sent it hurling towards Earth?

00:13:34.000 Yeah, but I'm not sure that's a logical conclusion.

00:13:38.000 You know, if life can start somewhere, then it can start in two places, right?

00:13:42.000 And so it doesn't have to miraculously be panspermiad from one planet to another.

00:13:46.000 If it formed on Mars and there's life on Earth, then it's a more logical conclusion to think that it just formed in two places, I think.

00:13:54.000 When you sit in that space station and you're floating above Earth, much as you were saying that your colleagues started referring to Earth as a separate individual entity and you guys were separate from Earth, did you look out when you're looking at the vastness of Everything.

00:14:12.000 I mean, it's just everything.

00:14:14.000 And did it feel like Earth was in a neighborhood more?

00:14:19.000 You know what I mean?

00:14:20.000 That we weren't isolated. 0.97

00:14:22.000 It's so silly. 0.66

00:14:23.000 The thing is so big.

00:14:24.000 Did you feel more connected to the rest of the universe in any sort of a way?

00:14:28.000 Joe, when you're in the side of the spaceship, And you look at the world.

00:14:33.000 You're looking at it through the windows.

00:14:35.000 And I came back.

00:14:36.000 It was so funny.

00:14:37.000 I came back from my first space flight.

00:14:39.000 I was sitting in the living room with my wife, Helena.

00:14:40.000 And we were watching Star Trek.

00:14:42.000 And they show that scene with Sulu and whoever up front.

00:14:45.000 And they were in the standard orbit, Mr. Sulu.

00:14:47.000 And there's the curve of the Earth underneath.

00:14:49.000 And I remember going, that's it.

00:14:51.000 That's exactly what it looks like.

00:14:52.000 They got that right.

00:14:53.000 They guessed right in 1968 or whatever it was.

00:14:55.000 Because when you're inside the spaceship, it looks like that.

00:15:00.000 The difference is when you go outside.

00:15:02.000 And then it's like the difference between sitting in your living room looking outside and hanging on a cliff or hanging on a half-dome or somewhere where it's an entirely different perspective, even though it may look at the same thing.

00:15:15.000 Being outside is so immersive.

00:15:20.000 The world is no longer nicely underneath you like Sulu, but it is this huge hanging, spinning mass next to you, and the universe is what's around you, and you are You are part of it.

00:15:34.000 You're suspended in it.

00:15:35.000 We aren't used to having the universe under our feet or all around us and feeling that you're in it, not just sort of below it, looking up at it.

00:15:44.000 And that is really different.

00:15:46.000 And that's when you really see that the world is just in the neighborhood and that it is a ball with the moon being a ball and the sun's over there.

00:15:55.000 And if we go out there, that's Mars.

00:15:57.000 You really get that feeling when you're out on a spacewalk.

00:15:59.000 I've heard several astronauts talk about that feeling and that moment when they are outside of a spacecraft looking at the universe itself and saying that it changed them forever.

00:16:13.000 It gave me a profound respect.

00:16:18.000 And also, I don't even know, I mean, nobody knows the answer, right?

00:16:23.000 Big Bang and all the rest of it and all the All the belief systems around the world and how everybody deals with all that.

00:16:30.000 And I sure don't know the answer to that.

00:16:31.000 But when you look at the world, it's really hard to convince yourself that it's random, just looking at it.

00:16:37.000 It's like, how can that possibly be?

00:16:40.000 But then again, if you look a little further out, there's, you know, how could Mars be random?

00:16:44.000 And how could all the other planets, how could Saturn, the way it looks, be just a random event?

00:16:50.000 And the unlimited number of stars that are out there.

00:16:53.000 And the planets we're seeing around other stars directly.

00:16:56.000 I don't know how to resolve it in my mind.

00:16:58.000 I didn't find the meaning of it all by being on a spacewalk.

00:17:03.000 If anything, it just deepened my dumbfoundedness at the immensity of it and our tiny little part of it.

00:17:12.000 I've often thought that questions, pondering questions like the randomness of the universe or just the reality that we know about subatomic particles and the idea of the universe being this fractal thing and impossible and never-ending, I think it's almost like walking up to a mountain and going,

00:17:30.000 yeah, I could see how that could be picked up.

00:17:33.000 But you can't really pick it up yourself, so you're just like, man, I guess it could be random.

00:17:37.000 I don't know.

00:17:38.000 I mean, I don't understand. 0.93

00:17:40.000 I don't even know what the fuck random means. 0.72

00:17:42.000 The idea of random seems... 0.95

00:17:43.000 The universe itself seems to be this incredibly complex thing that has...

00:17:50.000 Not just laws, but very clear directions that things move into.

00:17:54.000 It constantly is complexifying from the Big Bang till now and the idea of black holes eating matter and creating a singularity and that.

00:18:04.000 Possibly these new astrophysicists and string theorists guys are saying that they think that inside every black hole may in fact be a completely different universe.

00:18:16.000 You know, on the top of the space station, we have an experiment put there by a Nobel Prize winning physicist named Sam Ting.

00:18:25.000 And it's from CERN, from the big particle accelerator that's under Switzerland and France.

00:18:29.000 It's their baby.

00:18:31.000 And it's up there.

00:18:32.000 It's a huge magnet.

00:18:33.000 And what it's doing is collecting subatomic particles of the universe.

00:18:37.000 And it's got layer after layer of detector, so it can try and figure out what they all are as they come ripping through.

00:18:44.000 And it's collected trillions and trillions of them.

00:18:46.000 It's been up there for the last couple of years.

00:18:48.000 And the reason is, we don't know what the universe is made of.

00:18:51.000 We can only account for 5% of the universe with the known particles that we have.

00:18:57.000 We don't know what 95% of the universe is even made of.

00:19:01.000 And so we call it dark energy and dark matter.

00:19:04.000 And we're trying to indirectly prove that those exist based on the proportions of the subatomic particles we're collecting up at the top of the space station.

00:19:12.000 And it's a decadal-long project.

00:19:14.000 And they released the first layer of the results back in the spring.

00:19:18.000 And it's starting to look like maybe some of the theories are correct.

00:19:21.000 But we talk as if we're conclusively brilliant and we understand everything.

00:19:27.000 I mean, we're still calling things dark matter and dark energy.

00:19:30.000 We have no idea, and we're just trying to figure it out.

00:19:32.000 That's another word for magic.

00:19:34.000 It is indeed.

00:19:35.000 It's another word for I don't know.

00:19:37.000 Well, we are most certainly the smartest and the most informed human beings that have ever existed as far as we know.

00:19:44.000 The two of us?

00:19:45.000 No, no.

00:19:46.000 Human, denying me 100%. 1.00

00:19:48.000 I'm an idiot. 1.00

00:19:49.000 But... 1.00

00:19:50.000 As far as humans that have ever lived, we're the most informed, the most technologically capable.

00:19:55.000 But much like when we look back at the Renaissance era, or look back at Galileo being imprisoned because he dared question the idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, We're going to make fun of us. 0.96

00:20:07.000 Someday, they're going to make fun of us like these dummies. 0.79

00:20:10.000 They didn't know what Clark Gluon Plasma was.

00:20:12.000 They had to use a particle accelerator to prove that the Higgs boson existed.

00:20:16.000 Yeah, I agree.

00:20:17.000 We're going to look at the space shuttle and go, what were they thinking?

00:20:20.000 That station wagon.

00:20:21.000 That big thing. 0.98

00:20:22.000 It's just so ridiculous. 0.96

00:20:24.000 Like a DC-3 now, you know.

00:20:25.000 That's one thing I really wanted to bring up with you.

00:20:28.000 You had to take one of those up there.

00:20:32.000 You had to take some sort of a spaceship up there.

00:20:35.000 What is the feeling like?

00:20:37.000 Did you have to get in a Russian one?

00:20:39.000 My first two flights were on shuttles.

00:20:41.000 I flew Atlantis and then Endeavour.

00:20:42.000 And then my third flight, I was left seat, so sort of like the pilot of the Soyuz.

00:20:46.000 So I flown them all.

00:20:47.000 Wow.

00:20:48.000 Wow.

00:20:48.000 So you flew when the space shuttle was in operation and you flew the Russian version of the space shuttle.

00:20:55.000 What's the difference?

00:20:57.000 The shuttle is so much more capable.

00:21:00.000 It is the most capable flying machine humans have ever built.

00:21:04.000 Unbelievable.

00:21:05.000 And three-quarters of everybody who's ever flown in space flew on the shuttle.

00:21:08.000 It was the first great lifter.

00:21:10.000 Its purpose was...

00:21:13.000 We're good to go.

00:21:38.000 Was so that we could carry this huge telescope.

00:21:40.000 And they weren't automated back then, so we needed a crew to be able to operate the telescope.

00:21:44.000 That's why the payload bay was the size that it was, and why the shuttle could lift the amount that it could lift.

00:21:50.000 It was to meet all those requirements.

00:21:52.000 That all immediately stopped being the reason for the space shuttle to exist, but the design was already set.

00:21:59.000 What that gave us, though, was a vehicle that could carry, gosh, 40,000 or 50,000 pounds up in a payload bay that's the size of a city bus and then bring it back and land it gently on a runway and carry a crew up to seven.

00:22:12.000 So it's like a space station all on its own.

00:22:15.000 An amazingly capable vehicle.

00:22:18.000 Amazingly complex, too.

00:22:20.000 And when things are amazingly complex, they're really expensive and hard to operate safely.

00:22:24.000 And we lost two crews, you know, as a result of the complexity of it.

00:22:28.000 The Soyuz is designed to take three people and a tiny bit of gear up to the space station, dock, stay there for half a year or longer as their lifeboat, and then at the end of time get back in and come back home again.

00:22:43.000 That's the Soyuz's purpose.

00:22:45.000 And it does that really well.

00:22:47.000 But it's tiny and very purpose-built.

00:22:49.000 The two of them are magnificent vehicles, but built for way different purposes, and both very carefully evolved to do what they do exquisitely well.

00:23:01.000 And I'm lucky to have flown them both.

00:23:03.000 That sounds so incredible.

00:23:05.000 What does the G-force feel like when you're taken off from the launch pad?

00:23:10.000 You go straight up, of course.

00:23:12.000 You have to get above the air.

00:23:14.000 If you want to stay in orbit, you've got to go five miles a second.

00:23:19.000 If you're going a little slower, it's sort of like throwing something sideways.

00:23:24.000 Gravity pulls it down.

00:23:25.000 But if you can throw it sideways at five miles a second, then gravity will still pull it down.

00:23:31.000 But the Earth curves away underneath it if it's going fast enough.

00:23:34.000 You know, it like goes over the horizon before it falls.

00:23:37.000 So that's how we stay in orbit, is we go five miles a second.

00:23:41.000 But you can't go five miles a second in the air.

00:23:43.000 The friction's just too high.

00:23:44.000 So the rocket ships take you straight up to get you above the air.

00:23:48.000 And that takes about two minutes going straight up.

00:23:51.000 And in 45 seconds, you're through the speed of sound, straight up and accelerating.

00:23:56.000 And in 70 seconds, you're through the altitude and speed of the Concorde, accelerating straight up.

00:24:01.000 And after two minutes, you're about 160,000 feet and six times the speed of sound, but you're above almost all the air.

00:24:07.000 And then your first stage falls off.

00:24:09.000 So inside, it's this incredibly powerful push in your back, like a dragster, but like one that's gone off the road.

00:24:19.000 The vibration of pushing through the air.

00:24:22.000 It's like a tuning fork kind of vibration.

00:24:25.000 This enormous, powerful, jaws-of-a-dog kind of ride, straight up.

00:24:31.000 But then, after two minutes, the stage that got you above the air is all out of fuel.

00:24:38.000 Explodes off because you don't want to carry all that dead weight with you anymore and then you use the remaining engines for the next six minutes or six and a half to accelerate out horizontal basically to five miles a second and and so for the last six minutes it's like a long liquid drive heavy steady pushing like someone with their fist in your back pushing you faster and faster and faster a smoother ride because you're above the air and after just under nine minutes like 8.45 or so You're

00:25:08.000 exactly the right place, the right direction, and the right speed.

00:25:12.000 The engines shut off, and you're in space, and you're weightless.

00:25:15.000 Wow!

00:25:16.000 So it's nine minutes?

00:25:17.000 Yep.

00:25:18.000 It's 8.42 on the shuttle and just under 9, like 8.55 for the Soyuz.

00:25:23.000 What's the maximum g-force you experience during that push?

00:25:26.000 The shuttle's about 3g, and in fact, when you hit 3g, the throttle start coming back because it was only built for about 3.5g, so three times your normal weight.

00:25:34.000 So if you weigh 200 pounds, you weigh 600 pounds in there.

00:25:36.000 The Soyuz is about 4 or 4.5g.

00:25:39.000 So if you're a 200-pounder, you're up around 800-900 pounds.

00:25:43.000 I got to ride with the Blue Angels, one of those F-A-18s once.

00:25:47.000 Yeah, I was an F-A-18 pilot for a lot of years.

00:25:50.000 Oh, those are incredible.

00:25:51.000 That's a great airplane.

00:25:52.000 You got to fly those?

00:25:53.000 Yeah.

00:25:54.000 What's the most G's you pulled in one of those things?

00:25:57.000 If you take an F-A-18 and you grab the stick and you snap it into your lap, You aren't actually connected to anything except a computer.

00:26:05.000 It's little sensors.

00:26:06.000 It's fly-by-wire.

00:26:07.000 So it says, wow, he wants to turn right now.

00:26:10.000 And so then it moves all the control surfaces of the airplane, but it doesn't want to break the wings off.

00:26:15.000 So it will limit you.

00:26:17.000 The airplane limits the amount of G that it can pull.

00:26:20.000 And it'll give you about 8G. About 8G. That's all it'll give you.

00:26:25.000 Because otherwise you could structurally damage the airplane.

00:26:28.000 So there was a paddle you could actually, if you were going to hit the ground...

00:26:32.000 You could hit this paddle that would override the G-control system and snap it into your lap and just give you whatever the aerodynamics would give you.

00:26:38.000 And we've had people pull 12G. But the Soyuz, if you come into the atmosphere the wrong way, can pull 20 or 22G on the way home, which is just wicked.

00:26:49.000 And that happened once in the Russian experience.

00:26:52.000 Can you survive that?

00:26:53.000 You're lying down.

00:26:55.000 When you're in an F-18, like when you flew with the Blue Angels, you're sitting upright.

00:26:58.000 So when you pull back, It pushes the blood down to your feet.

00:27:04.000 So the real limitation is how much of that can you stand before you can't stay awake, before you black out.

00:27:10.000 In a Soyuz, we're actually laying on our back.

00:27:13.000 So the blood doesn't drain out of your head.

00:27:15.000 It just gets kind of pushed to the back of your body.

00:27:17.000 So therefore you can survive it.

00:27:19.000 It won't black you out.

00:27:20.000 It doesn't damage you.

00:27:22.000 It's sort of like a prolonged car crash.

00:27:26.000 You know, people pull 20G in a car crash, but it's instantaneous.

00:27:29.000 If you fall into the atmosphere the wrong way in a Soyuz, then as you hit the thick atmosphere, it's almost like crashing into something super high G-peak for maybe 30 seconds, and then you come through that G-peak and slow down.

00:27:42.000 And it's survivable, but I wouldn't want to ride it.

00:27:45.000 Wow!

00:27:46.000 That feeling must be just incredible.

00:27:49.000 What are the thoughts that are going through your mind when you're going that fast, shooting up into space?

00:27:54.000 It was funny.

00:27:57.000 I'm focusing on...

00:27:59.000 Because there's a million things that can fail.

00:28:02.000 And one of the mantras of astronauts is, there is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse.

00:28:08.000 So we think about that all the time.

00:28:10.000 And so we really are careful on the way up.

00:28:13.000 And so a big part of you is involved with that.

00:28:15.000 But another part of you is just It's just loving the ride so much.

00:28:20.000 And I found after a while that my cheeks were hurting.

00:28:23.000 And I was like, why is my face hurt? 0.97

00:28:25.000 And I realized because this smile, this big stupid smile was on my face so much that my cheeks were cramping up because it was so much of a thrill to go. 0.99

00:28:34.000 That's amazing. 0.99

00:28:35.000 Yeah, it was like having those two people on your shoulders, one that's being all serious and one that's yelling bad advice to you.

00:28:40.000 The one that's having a good time is just going forward.

00:28:43.000 Whee! 1.00

00:28:43.000 The whole time just loving the ride. 1.00

00:28:45.000 It is so much fun.

00:28:46.000 Well, I guess that's a good time to do that, right?

00:28:48.000 Because you're completely helpless.

00:28:50.000 Just enjoy it.

00:28:51.000 Actually, you're not helpless at all.

00:28:52.000 Yeah, there's all sorts of stuff that you're responsible for on the way up and the way down.

00:28:57.000 Even in the suyas, when you're lying down? 0.97

00:28:59.000 Oh, in the suyas.

00:29:00.000 What do you do?

00:29:00.000 We've got the full control panel, and there's stuff you have to do.

00:29:03.000 Oh, you have to do as it's happening.

00:29:04.000 Oh, yeah.

00:29:05.000 What do you do while you're flying up there and smiling?

00:29:07.000 Well, if everything works perfectly, we're just watching.

00:29:10.000 And same in the shuttle.

00:29:11.000 We have very...

00:29:11.000 You know, hopefully, don't have to do anything.

00:29:13.000 But sometimes things don't go right.

00:29:15.000 And then you've got a bunch of things you can do, you know, various shutdowns and aborts.

00:29:19.000 And people probably don't know, but the shuttle, as it launched up the east coast of the U.S., we kept abort landing runways all the way up the coast.

00:29:28.000 You could land at Cherry Point, or you could land in New York, or you could land in Newfoundland, or all those places.

00:29:32.000 And so as you're ticking up the coast, you're constantly going, okay, if we have a failure now, we're going to abort this way, we're going to turn around, we're going to land in Bermuda, we're going to land here, we're going to land in...

00:29:41.000 And, you know, practice those like crazy.

00:29:44.000 And then you get to a certain point, and then you would land in North Africa or South France or in Spain.

00:29:49.000 And all those windows, all those tick points, all those thresholds you have to get through, that's what we're hyper-aware of.

00:29:55.000 We're not along for the ride.

00:29:57.000 Wow.

00:29:58.000 So while this is all going on, you have this big giant smile and you still are calculating.

00:30:03.000 Oh, yeah.

00:30:03.000 You still are going, okay, if it screws up now, I go here.

00:30:06.000 Oh, yeah.

00:30:07.000 I'm running my thumb down a long list of all the various wickets that you're jumping through.

00:30:11.000 Yeah, you pay attention.

00:30:13.000 How much of the trip is automated?

00:30:16.000 How much of it is manual?

00:30:19.000 We'd like it to be as automated as possible because that means things are predictable and things didn't break.

00:30:26.000 And for the vast majority of shuttle flights and Soyuz flights, it's automated.

00:30:31.000 But sometimes it's not on the way uphill.

00:30:35.000 And we've had engines fail or engines start to fail.

00:30:37.000 Had to shut engines down and go to backup or at least a reserve configuration of the engines.

00:30:44.000 Mid-launch?

00:30:46.000 Yeah.

00:30:46.000 During launch that happened on Apollo as well.

00:30:49.000 On the way back to Earth, We've had serious problems with the Soyuz where you have to take over and try and fly manually or come in ballistically which means it loses its ability to steer on the way home and you just start spinning the vehicle and then it just comes in like a pure meteorite.

00:31:06.000 You pull about 8 or 9 G on a ballistic entry and that's pretty tough after six months of weightlessness to suddenly if you're a 200 pounder now you weigh 1600 or 1700 pounds and that's pretty hard on the body.

00:31:20.000 Wow!

00:31:21.000 It's incredible.

00:31:22.000 The feeling that you must have had when you actually stepped onto ground again.

00:31:28.000 What was that like?

00:31:30.000 It's awful.

00:31:31.000 It's awful.

00:31:32.000 You're so nauseous and dizzy.

00:31:35.000 And the reason is, of course, your vision is telling you one thing.

00:31:41.000 Telling you where the horizon is, where up is.

00:31:44.000 But your inner ear, which normally, when your eyes are closed, keeps you from falling over.

00:31:49.000 You know, you can close your eyes and not fall over.

00:31:51.000 That has forgotten completely what to do with gravity because you've been weightless for, whatever, five or six months.

00:31:58.000 So now you have this sudden great violent disagreement between what your eyes are saying and what your inner ear is saying.

00:32:04.000 It's like if you spin 50 times and then stop spinning and you stagger around.

00:32:08.000 So your body says, whoa, there is something seriously wrong.

00:32:12.000 Why is his vision so wildly different than his inner ear?

00:32:16.000 And for the last million years, one of the probable causes was you ate something poisonous.

00:32:22.000 You ate some sort of neurotoxin or something that is messing up your internal systems.

00:32:27.000 And it might kill you.

00:32:29.000 So the first thing your body makes you want to do is throw up.

00:32:32.000 Because it's trying to get rid of whatever it was you just ate.

00:32:34.000 And then the next thing your body makes you want to do is go lay down and go to sleep.

00:32:37.000 So you stop metabolizing it, right?

00:32:39.000 It's trying to keep you alive.

00:32:41.000 So when you first get back from space, your body's just screaming at you.

00:32:45.000 To throw up and go lie down.

00:32:48.000 But, you know, you got all this stuff to do and people are there to meet you and you're trying to just ignore those symptoms and pay attention to what, you know, what's going on.

00:32:58.000 Is there happiness along with that?

00:33:00.000 I mean, is there a feeling of being home?

00:33:02.000 Oh, yeah.

00:33:03.000 Yeah.

00:33:04.000 All three of my flights.

00:33:05.000 And if the flight went well, and we work hard enough that they almost always do, there's a great sense of satisfaction because it's like the final step in an extremely complicated process where you have done everything right or enough things right that you can have that for the rest of your life.

00:33:25.000 So there's a tremendous feeling of joy and pride and accomplishment when you get back to Earth.

00:33:33.000 I have always been fascinated by space, and if you look up, you can see the lights here are covered with stars.

00:33:38.000 I saw that.

00:33:38.000 I like your lights.

00:33:39.000 They're good.

00:33:41.000 But what drives me nuts is how little we actually get to see of the stars because of light pollution.

00:33:49.000 I was at the Big Island, and I went to the Keck Observatory, and there's a station where the telescope is, and then below that, at like 9,000 feet, there's this visitor station.

00:34:01.000 Have you been?

00:34:02.000 I've been near there.

00:34:03.000 I've been up on the top of a couple of the mountains there to have a look at the sky.

00:34:06.000 It's incredible.

00:34:08.000 When we were driving up there, I was worried that it was too cloudy.

00:34:12.000 I was like, oh, this is going to be terrible.

00:34:14.000 We wanted to go and see the stars, and we picked a cloudy night, but we drove through the clouds.

00:34:19.000 And then when you get above there and you realize that the entire Big Island, they have special diffused lighting to make sure that they don't emit light pollution, the view is life-changing.

00:34:30.000 Must be like one one millionth of what you experience on the space station.

00:34:36.000 But for me, it was a real life-changing moment.

00:34:38.000 I'll never forget it.

00:34:39.000 And I think about it all the time.

00:34:41.000 Whenever I look at the stars, I always think about that night in Hawaii.

00:34:45.000 That's what it looks like.

00:34:46.000 But even crazier, there's an image of it up there.

00:34:49.000 Yeah.

00:34:50.000 But even crazier when you're actually experiencing it, you can see the Milky Way.

00:34:55.000 And I remember thinking, God, we have to figure out a way to stop light pollution.

00:34:59.000 Because I think just that, just being able to look up and see that, would change people's perceptions.

00:35:05.000 And would probably make people way more enthusiastic about space.

00:35:10.000 People, you know, of course the vast majority of people live in cities and the places that have the worst light pollution of the cities.

00:35:15.000 I had a similar experience to yours when I was an F-18 pilot.

00:35:18.000 I would get it up to High altitude, you know, going on across country, especially in the north, put on the autopilot and shut off every light in the cockpit and let my eyes adjust.

00:35:28.000 And you're already up at 40,000, 45,000 feet.

00:35:30.000 And so there's almost no atmosphere above you.

00:35:33.000 And you can see the texture of space.

00:35:35.000 You can see the, I mean, the Milky Way.

00:35:37.000 You can see why it's called the Milky Way.

00:35:39.000 I mean, it's a white, a gray-white part of the sky, you know.

00:35:44.000 And you don't need a telescope to see it.

00:35:45.000 You can see it with your eyes.

00:35:47.000 You don't need some special time-lapse photography.

00:35:49.000 So it's both humbling and really inspiring, I think, to see.

00:35:58.000 It puts everything into perspective.

00:36:00.000 But, I don't know, even if you try and work on light pollution, people are indoor creatures in cities and they have street lights and they drive around in cars.

00:36:08.000 I don't know how you get people to notice the universe around them.

00:36:13.000 I think it would help if they could just see it.

00:36:17.000 It'd be a good start.

00:36:18.000 If you look up in Los Angeles, God, what do you see?

00:36:20.000 You see like a star.

00:36:21.000 I lived in Houston, yeah, for a long time.

00:36:23.000 And yeah, look at that.

00:36:24.000 I can see 18 stars tonight.

00:36:25.000 It's a real clear night.

00:36:27.000 Maybe, barely.

00:36:27.000 But when you're up there in the observatory, and I'm sure when you were at 40,000 feet in the jet, it must have been amazing.

00:36:34.000 Yeah, it's amazing.

00:36:36.000 It's not that much further away.

00:36:38.000 I mean, the big island mountain is not all that high, but you just need sometimes one small step and you can see a whole new thing.

00:36:45.000 Yeah, I had some similar but not quite as intense viewings in the mountains above Boulder, Colorado.

00:36:52.000 So like at 8,500 feet up there, it was beautiful too.

00:36:55.000 But I think that we forget that we're really in space. 0.99

00:36:59.000 As stupid as that sounds, people really do forget. 0.97

00:37:02.000 So I was going around the world. 0.99

00:37:04.000 And my son, who ran the social media for the flight to a large degree, sent me a note saying, hey dad, Mount Etna is erupting, you know, in southern Italy.

00:37:11.000 Have a look at Mount Etna.

00:37:12.000 So I'm a good dad, took a picture of Mount Etna.

00:37:15.000 But seeing the superheated lava and the smoke and the steam coming out of the earth was a really, especially when you're looking at the world as a ball, It was a really clear reminder of the fact that most of the planet is superheated lava and magma and where it's so hot that the rock is liquid and plastic,

00:37:37.000 right?

00:37:37.000 And we just live on this little chilled crust, like the top of a porridge pot, you know?

00:37:44.000 And we just live on this little thin bit at the top that is crust.

00:37:47.000 And when you tip it the other way around and look up, half of the atmosphere is in the first three miles.

00:37:54.000 Three miles.

00:37:54.000 You know, think about it.

00:37:55.000 People go for a three-mile run, you know, and really the whole habitable atmosphere is three miles, above 15,000 feet.

00:38:02.000 It's hard to even live.

00:38:03.000 And yet we live on this little bit of cooled crust and this little sliver of air, and we think it's guaranteed.

00:38:11.000 We think we're invincible, right?

00:38:13.000 And we think the whole universe is here to serve us.

00:38:16.000 And we're like...

00:38:18.000 We're like bacteria in a corner.

00:38:20.000 Just found a little niche that will support our life.

00:38:23.000 So much so that we're willing to...

00:38:25.000 Almost our entire system, as far as energy, is based on burning things.

00:38:30.000 Yeah.

00:38:30.000 It's based on releasing fumes.

00:38:33.000 If you talk about 100 years from now looking back and going, what were we thinking?

00:38:36.000 I mean, golly.

00:38:37.000 I mean, you can see why.

00:38:39.000 A five-gallon pail of gasoline is an amazingly enabling thing.

00:38:43.000 You can stick it in your car and drive hundreds of miles, and you can carry it in your hand, and it's fairly stable.

00:38:49.000 It's a very seductive fuel.

00:38:52.000 But at the same time, it has such consequences.

00:38:55.000 And when we figure out the next...

00:38:58.000 When we look back, hopefully, in a couple hundred years, we will go, what were we thinking?

00:39:04.000 That was crazy.

00:39:06.000 It's really hard for people to change, too.

00:39:08.000 Once we have a pattern that we follow, it's very difficult.

00:39:13.000 Especially if we found a way to make it work for ourselves.

00:39:16.000 In spite of all the pollution, we still rock it that way.

00:39:20.000 In spite of all the stuff that we throw into the ocean, it's still kind of happening, basically on a daily basis.

00:39:26.000 Well, you can't Yeah, once you built the structure, it's real hard to change, of course.

00:39:31.000 And you can't just suddenly starve millions of people or kill millions of people just because you decide to change energy sources.

00:39:35.000 It has to be gradual, and we will be weaned off fossil fuels, but they've got to get a lot more scarce before we're going to bother, just because of its human nature.

00:39:43.000 Well, the ultimate use of fossil fuels is a rocket.

00:39:47.000 I mean, that's the ultimate display of it, shooting into space with a giant plume of fire behind you.

00:39:53.000 Yeah, it's a brute force way.

00:39:55.000 I mean, we're burning dinosaurs to get to space.

00:39:58.000 But so far, it's the only way we've figured out how.

00:40:00.000 So far, it's the only way.

00:40:02.000 Now, when you think about what's possible for the future, when they start talking about all these different propulsion methods that will someday be available, what if any of them appear viable?

00:40:14.000 Yeah, you're asking me to predict physics inventions of the future, which, gosh, I wish I could do that.

00:40:21.000 I'd do it tomorrow.

00:40:24.000 I don't know.

00:40:25.000 To me, the obvious answer is every single molecule that exists, every complex molecule and atom was put together in a blast furnace of a place with almost unlimited heat and pressure, which is the center of a sun.

00:40:41.000 And it stored that energy in every single atom and molecule that exists.

00:40:46.000 And we have yet to find a good way to get that energy back out.

00:40:50.000 But there is more energy in a pencil.

00:40:52.000 You know, if you could truly get the energy that's inside all of the molecules that are in there, there's so much energy stored there.

00:41:00.000 You know, we have like wood that's stored sunlight, right?

00:41:03.000 And by burning it, we can release that stored solar power.

00:41:06.000 Even nuclear.

00:41:07.000 But we haven't found a clean way to release the energy that gives us nuclear power.

00:41:14.000 We can do it, but we're still, you know, we're kind of cavemen about it, and we haven't got a clean way.

00:41:19.000 So I'm certain that at some point we will figure out how to, whether it'll be cold fusion or just fusion itself.

00:41:27.000 But if you read what they're doing in the various laboratories around the world, Even the experts think, well, we're probably 50 years away from being able to contain fusion so that it becomes a net positive power source.

00:41:39.000 But when the experts are saying it's 50 years until we can do it, who knows?

00:41:43.000 There was a recent article in one of the science magazines that the volume of nuclear waste could be reduced by 90%.

00:41:53.000 They've shown that they can mix plutonium-contaminated waste with blast furnace slag and turn it into glass.

00:42:01.000 And it reduces its volume by 85% to 95% and effectively locks in the radioactive plutonium, creating a stable end product.

00:42:11.000 I've always felt like...

00:42:13.000 I mean, the nuclear waste thing is a huge issue, obviously.

00:42:17.000 I mean, they've done a lot of weird things like dig holes in the ground and buried in there in Nevada and, you know, and what's going on now in Fukushima is very disturbing.

00:42:24.000 They're trying to figure out how to contain it.

00:42:26.000 Sure.

00:42:26.000 Coming up with all these different ways, but it's a fascinating thing about human innovation.

00:42:30.000 If their backs are up against the wall, those crazy monkeys figure out a way to fix things.

00:42:35.000 Yeah, and it's just our nature.

00:42:37.000 Necessity is the main mother and we need to, sometimes we don't think we have the necessity Yeah, nuclear waste is a big problem, but you know, fossil fuel waste is a huge problem as well, and neither of them are perfect.

00:42:48.000 Even solar energy has waste, you know, because you have to build all the solar panels and you have to collect all the rare earth metals.

00:42:55.000 None of it's for free.

00:42:56.000 We have to find as best a trade-off as we can and still be able to try and sustain as good a standard of living for as many people around the planet as possible.

00:43:08.000 We feed more people now than we ever have, right?

00:43:11.000 But how do we do it in the future?

00:43:14.000 How do we get better at it?

00:43:15.000 I'm not sure.

00:43:16.000 There's so many variables, obviously, but I'm always very excited when I see something like this that is like, my faith in the crazy humans has been restored.

00:43:27.000 These nuts have figured out a way to fix an issue or at least reduce an issue significantly by as much as 90-plus percent.

00:43:36.000 The fossil fuel thing to me is a weird one because obviously I enjoy it.

00:43:43.000 We use it.

00:43:44.000 It's so important for almost everything we do.

00:43:45.000 But obviously this is going to create a problem someday.

00:43:48.000 And there's no better example for me than automobile pollution or pollution that you get from jet airplanes on a daily basis.

00:43:59.000 There's a big impact in the environment every time the space shuttle gets launched, isn't it?

00:44:03.000 Well, compared to...

00:44:05.000 Everything else, well, and of course, space shuttle's retired, but we only flew the space shuttle 135 times.

00:44:11.000 I mean, you couldn't even measure, compared to everything else, the pollution that it injected.

00:44:15.000 But if it had gotten to the point where it was like air travel.

00:44:18.000 Yeah, well, you wouldn't want, you know, thousands of those launching every day, you know, but that wasn't a possibility and wasn't what it was going to do.

00:44:25.000 But compared to just...

00:44:27.000 How we burn coal to generate electricity and how we use cars to transport ourselves around.

00:44:35.000 There are 42,000 people a year killed just in car crashes.

00:44:41.000 That is a societal norm in the United States.

00:44:44.000 We expect that.

00:44:45.000 We say that's okay. 0.96

00:44:46.000 It's all right to kill 42,000 people so we have the freedom to drive our cars around wherever we want. 0.67

00:44:50.000 Kind of an interesting... 0.77

00:44:52.000 Level of accepted disaster.

00:44:55.000 You know, we just say that's okay.

00:44:56.000 And that's not some global warming problem that may manifest itself on our children.

00:45:00.000 That's a guaranteed thing this year.

00:45:03.000 And that's just an interesting thing to hold up the mirror and look at yourself and say, hmm, okay, that's what we decide is all right.

00:45:11.000 There's also a matter of a very statistically significant number of years of your life that you lose by living in a smog-filled environment.

00:45:20.000 That's a fact.

00:45:21.000 Sure.

00:45:21.000 And we don't think about that because you can survive and be healthy in New York City.

00:45:25.000 You can go jogging down the streets of Manhattan and drink spring water and think everything's all groovy.

00:45:30.000 But the reality is, if you're living in a city and you're breathing in those fumes on a daily basis, it will reduce your life, period.

00:45:38.000 I agree with you, but none of us are lasting forever.

00:45:43.000 And people live where they want to live for all the reasons.

00:45:45.000 And only one of the variables is how many years you're going to live there.

00:45:48.000 Right.

00:45:49.000 Would you rather live in the middle of nowhere where the air is clean, but there's no people to talk to?

00:45:53.000 And the theater's really bad, right?

00:45:55.000 The theater's always bad, let's be honest.

00:45:58.000 What's the best theater?

00:45:59.000 Even nearly as good as the best movie?

00:46:02.000 It's not even close. 0.54

00:46:04.000 It's antiquated, goofy art form.

00:46:09.000 Okay, here I have to ask you about these guys.

00:46:11.000 Yep.

00:46:13.000 Aliens?

00:46:14.000 Uh-huh.

00:46:14.000 That little alien guy right there?

00:46:16.000 Yeah, I see him.

00:46:16.000 When you're up there, when you're in space, I mean, do you ponder the possibility?

00:46:23.000 And is that something that you ever wondered yourself?

00:46:26.000 Are there intelligent life forms out there?

00:46:28.000 And if so, do you think that they watch us?

00:46:30.000 Do you think they're aware of us?

00:46:33.000 You mentioned earlier that with Galileo inventing the telescope, he was, you know, tortured for pointing out that we weren't the center of the universe.

00:46:45.000 And with every invention that's come since then, we've been able to prove more and more conclusively just how far from the center of the universe we are and also how huge the universe is and billions of years old and more vast.

00:46:57.000 The numbers are so big, they're incomprehensible, both in numbers of stars and number of galaxies.

00:47:04.000 And within the last few years, using the great-great-grandchildren of Of Galileo's telescope, we are seeing planets, directly seeing planets around the nearby stars.

00:47:14.000 And we've seen thousands of them.

00:47:16.000 So we've basically shown that every single star has planets.

00:47:21.000 And so there's an unlimited number of planets out there.

00:47:25.000 And so to think that with an unlimited number of chances that we are the only life in the universe, to me, is just a natural extension of thinking that We're the center of the universe.

00:47:35.000 It's an arrogance-egotism thing based on belief instead of fact.

00:47:39.000 But it's also, I think, arrogant and egotistical to think that we're so fascinating and we're so revelationary and so special that somehow...

00:47:50.000 Weird, big, black-eyed monsters with no hair on their bodies are sneaking around staring at us because we are so special.

00:47:59.000 To me, that's just...

00:48:00.000 I mean, it's fun science fiction, and it makes for great entertainment, but it's not real.

00:48:07.000 Well, I've heard that the archetype of the doctor, the alien with the large black eyes and the strange big head, that what it may very well come from is the actual birth experience for children.

00:48:21.000 The first time the eyes are outside of the womb, they don't have clear vision, and they see the bright light of the operating room, which is the first time they've ever been exposed to something like that, and it's an incredibly traumatic experience.

00:48:32.000 They recognize the eyes, which are enormous in front of the head, This face with a white mask on it, featureless.

00:48:40.000 Interesting.

00:48:41.000 And that this is most likely what the archetype of the experience, these medical experiments that supposedly go on with these aliens, that that's the origin of it.

00:48:52.000 Could be.

00:48:53.000 Well, we have this very arrogant idea that children don't remember things.

00:48:57.000 Yeah.

00:48:58.000 It's been my point about circumcision. 0.52

00:49:01.000 I don't think circumcision is a good idea. 0.98

00:49:03.000 I think it's ridiculous. 0.98

00:49:04.000 I think it's antiquated. 0.99

00:49:05.000 It's genital torture. 1.00

00:49:07.000 And I think the justification is, one of them is that the baby doesn't remember it.

00:49:11.000 And I'm always like, how do you know the baby doesn't remember it?

00:49:13.000 Just because they don't have a point of reference or context, it's very possible they remember it.

00:49:17.000 Well, the scientific answer to the alien abduction experience and these cold, hard medical examinations, emotionless medical examinations, may very well just be the birthing process.

00:49:29.000 Or circumcision.

00:49:30.000 The trauma of it.

00:49:30.000 Or circumcision.

00:49:31.000 Both.

00:49:32.000 And then the incredible feeling of helplessness that they have is basically their body doesn't move yet and that these intense memories are burned deep, deep, deep into our consciousness.

00:49:43.000 I think it also just comes from a fear of being alone and a fear of being immortal.

00:49:48.000 And if we can somehow convince ourselves that neither of those two things are true, then it's a great comfort to folks.

00:49:56.000 And to think that there's other life out there and it's holding us as super special and it's been here before and it's going to be back, it's a nice seductive thought process to go down.

00:50:07.000 But there is...

00:50:10.000 I mean, we have left Earth.

00:50:12.000 13 years ago this month, we permanently started living on the space station with the International Space Station program.

00:50:18.000 And the Soviets had been there for decades before on their space stations.

00:50:21.000 We have sent probes to every planet in the solar system.

00:50:24.000 We've got one going up to Pluto right now, and we're rovers on a couple different, three different planets and moons of the solar system.

00:50:32.000 If aliens did show up, I don't think their behavior would be the one that is in the common science fiction media.

00:50:39.000 You know, it just doesn't make sense.

00:50:41.000 So I am convinced there's life in the universe.

00:50:45.000 You know, just on the statistics of it, it just makes sense.

00:50:47.000 It's just egotism to think that we're that special.

00:50:51.000 But I think it's also just egotism to think that we're so special that we're the object of great secretive fascination by higher beings.

00:50:58.000 Well, I think you're very humble, and so you look at us and say that it wouldn't be that interesting.

00:51:02.000 But I say to you, imagine if we found out that there was a planet just outside of our solar system where there were some people that were there, they were just like human beings, but they were like human beings from like the 1300s.

00:51:15.000 They just hadn't figured anything out yet. 0.64

00:51:16.000 We would be like, holy shit, they have guns, they figured out the wheel, their light and their city's on fire. 1.00

00:51:22.000 They're crazy. 1.00

00:51:23.000 They just haven't figured out mass communication yet, and most of them can't read.

00:51:26.000 I think we would be absolutely- That sounds a lot like us right now, actually.

00:51:29.000 It is a lot like us right now.

00:51:30.000 We really haven't changed that much.

00:51:32.000 But I mean, if we found some people just from a thousand years ago, a thousand years in our past, we would be absolutely, incredibly fascinated.

00:51:39.000 I think if we found some being somewhere that had harnessed the power of fire, if we went back 40,000 years ago, I think we'd find it incredibly fascinating.

00:51:47.000 So the stuff that we can do, I don't buy it.

00:51:51.000 I think if I was an alien, I would be so fascinated by these freaks, these pink monkeys with bang sticks and the internet and religions and all the freak show stuff that we have down here on Earth. 0.99

00:52:02.000 I think we would be the most wonderful freak show of all time.

00:52:06.000 I've often said that if there is intelligent life in the Earth or outside of Earth, I think that Earth is probably the Tijuana of outer space.

00:52:15.000 Which explains why all visitations come in the middle of the night.

00:52:18.000 They're hammered and they want to see a show.

00:52:21.000 They want to go see the freak show.

00:52:23.000 I think if I was an intelligent being, I do not buy the idea what would be so special about human beings.

00:52:29.000 Where do we start?

00:52:31.000 There's a lot special about this crazy species above all other species on this planet.

00:52:37.000 There's seven billion of them, okay? 0.99

00:52:39.000 They're like rats on a sinking ship. 0.74

00:52:40.000 They inhabit every little spot in the ocean.

00:52:42.000 Find a little floating thing poking out of the ocean where some plants are growing on it, boom, there's a whole sea of people living there.

00:52:50.000 You know, go to Hawaii, this little tiny spot.

00:52:52.000 It's a million people in Oahu.

00:52:54.000 We're crazy.

00:52:55.000 I think I would look.

00:52:57.000 I think I would...

00:52:57.000 We gotta go there.

00:52:58.000 We gotta go to Earth. 0.99

00:53:00.000 I think we would be probably one of the most fascinating things to observe because we're so incredibly advanced and yet so contradictive, so hypocritical, so ridiculous, so easily led, so easily tricked and fooled. 0.97

00:53:13.000 We have access to instant information, but yet we choose to believe some of the most ridiculous things of all time. 0.87

00:53:19.000 Yeah.

00:53:20.000 I agree with you, though, that I find the evidence of us being contacted by aliens incredibly uncompelling.

00:53:27.000 And the people that I talked to, I did a sci-fi show called Joe Rogan Questions Everything, where I met with a lot of these UFO guys, and I felt like I was talking to religious fanatics.

00:53:38.000 It's just like talking to a religious fanatic.

00:53:40.000 It's just they feel like they're too clever for the Quran. 1.00

00:53:43.000 So they fall for the Blue Book.

00:53:46.000 Project Blue Book is their lord.

00:53:48.000 So two weeks ago, a satire paper in Canada published a thing about what I did in a movie theater watching the movie Gravity.

00:53:55.000 And they said I heckled it.

00:53:56.000 I heard about that.

00:53:58.000 Yeah, and I farted to protest the movie and did all this stuff and got thrown out of the theater.

00:54:03.000 That's really rude.

00:54:03.000 I thought it was very funny, right?

00:54:05.000 I read this article.

00:54:06.000 Thousands of people believed it and sent notes and sent it to their friends.

00:54:11.000 And, hey, look, hey, look, hey, look, this must be the truth because I believe it.

00:54:15.000 And that thinking is so easily prevalent and dominates a lot of populist conclusion making when in fact it's not based on fact at all.

00:54:25.000 Because people want to believe stuff, but they don't want to spend any time actually doing the thinking or the research about it.

00:54:31.000 And so, you know, that's pervasive right across all cultures, including what people think about, you know, alien abduction.

00:54:39.000 Yeah, there's also a real problem with the access to information right now.

00:54:44.000 It's so beautiful.

00:54:44.000 Anybody can get information at any time, but it's not vetted.

00:54:47.000 And there's also a lot of what they call satire sites, which are just not satire.

00:54:53.000 They just lie.

00:54:53.000 I mean, there's this one national news something or another website that people keep constantly tweeting me stories from.

00:55:00.000 And they just make up stories.

00:55:02.000 There was one that I retweeted before I read where it came from, that Texas decided to use sexual predators for medical experiments.

00:55:12.000 But it's just a lie.

00:55:14.000 It's like if you read The Onion, within five minutes or five seconds, you realize, okay, they're doing comedy.

00:55:20.000 This is funny.

00:55:21.000 This is humorous.

00:55:22.000 They're not being humorous.

00:55:23.000 They're just lying, and they're calling it satire.

00:55:26.000 When you see that attributed to you, like farting in a movie theater, that's rude! 1.00

00:55:30.000 And I've read it, and I had it sent to me, like, this guy's an asshole. 1.00

00:55:34.000 Like, he farted in the movie. 1.00

00:55:37.000 It made me laugh.

00:55:38.000 But the reaction to it made me laugh as well.

00:55:40.000 It's just like, come on, people, please.

00:55:42.000 We are actually separate from the one-celled organisms.

00:55:47.000 We have brains and reason and experience and logic and use it.

00:55:50.000 We're clearly still developing.

00:55:53.000 Clearly, right?

00:55:54.000 I mean, there's folks like you that have experienced technology and innovation at its very height.

00:56:02.000 The highest highs.

00:56:04.000 You've actually gone above the actual atmosphere of our Earth.

00:56:09.000 And you've experienced the amount of technological sophistication it takes to pull something like that off.

00:56:15.000 But then there's other folks that are barely, they're chimps with a language. 1.00

00:56:19.000 And they exist amongst us. 1.00

00:56:20.000 Because of this complex society, it makes it really easy for dumb people to just get by and breed and make more dumb people. 1.00

00:56:28.000 It's so easy. 0.99

00:56:31.000 So you've got to have that, right?

00:56:32.000 Is this the yin and the yang of life?

00:56:35.000 You know, I think the real key to it is what does everybody want to get out of it?

00:56:41.000 What do you want to get out of your life?

00:56:43.000 And what do you find is your own compulsion?

00:56:46.000 What is it that gives you the satisfaction at the end of the day?

00:56:49.000 And it may be...

00:56:51.000 That stuff you've read on the internet, or maybe the television show that you watch, or maybe the sports team that you idolize, or it may be some new invention somewhere, or some area, your huge belief into some particular subset of what we know or what we don't know.

00:57:03.000 And to me, that's all great.

00:57:05.000 Everybody should be doing that, as long as they're pushing themselves to something that they're interested in, they're trying to get the best out of the things that they're naturally inclined towards and make the most of it.

00:57:16.000 It's just been what I've been doing.

00:57:18.000 I'm just interested in this particular part of spaceflight.

00:57:22.000 And case or us, fine by me.

00:57:25.000 Live and let live.

00:57:27.000 But don't spend all of those efforts in taking your particular set of interests and your beliefs that have given you this area and try and force them on other people.

00:57:38.000 Make them good for you.

00:57:39.000 Offer them up for other people to believe if they like.

00:57:42.000 But don't try and convince everybody else in the world that they're UFOs just because this is what you believe.

00:57:48.000 Why would that become your...

00:57:52.000 You know, your mantra.

00:57:53.000 Why would it be so important?

00:57:54.000 I think it's just like people that want people to convert to Islam.

00:57:57.000 They just have this idea in their head that this is the truth and they have to pursue it.

00:58:01.000 It's just like a religion.

00:58:02.000 I think the religion of belief, you know, the intensity of ideology.

00:58:09.000 I know people that want you to be on AT&T because that's their network.

00:58:13.000 You know, like, man, what are you doing with Verizon?

00:58:15.000 You should go AT&T. There's a weird clan thing that human beings have.

00:58:20.000 BlackBerry versus iPad.

00:58:21.000 And the people that believe in aliens, they all stick together.

00:58:24.000 They go and they have conferences and it becomes a part of their culture.

00:58:27.000 That's fun.

00:58:28.000 And there's this thing that happens, this confirmation bias, where they don't want to look at anything outside of something that confirms their idea.

00:58:36.000 They don't want to look at it objectively.

00:58:38.000 I think having a belief system is important.

00:58:41.000 Did you see anything up there?

00:58:42.000 Anything weird?

00:58:43.000 Nothing?

00:58:44.000 No lights?

00:58:44.000 The world is really weird to look at.

00:58:46.000 And fascinating to look at.

00:58:48.000 And the storms around the planet and the...

00:58:51.000 I mean, I was out on a spacewalk going through the southern lights, you know, with the...

00:58:57.000 Aurora, in this case, Aurora Australis, coming up underneath my feet for a thousand miles.

00:59:01.000 And that is a weird thing to see.

00:59:04.000 It's beautiful.

00:59:05.000 It's fascinating.

00:59:06.000 It doesn't look real.

00:59:07.000 Is it green?

00:59:08.000 Mostly what you see in pictures is green because that's what the cameras see.

00:59:12.000 But in reality, it's got red and orange and yellow coming out the top of it that your eyes can pick up.

00:59:17.000 And it's...

00:59:18.000 You can't believe it's real.

00:59:22.000 Like, how could this possibly be Earth?

00:59:24.000 How can this be going on all the time?

00:59:26.000 It's...

00:59:26.000 It is phenomenal to see, especially when you can see for several thousand miles and it's under your feet.

00:59:34.000 It's amazing to see.

00:59:35.000 So yeah, we see amazing stuff all the time. 0.95

00:59:38.000 Yeah, that's way cooler than some dork in a flying saucer. 0.88

00:59:41.000 He doesn't even have the manners to come and say hi. 0.99

00:59:45.000 He's got to circle around and abduct you and erase your memory.

00:59:48.000 To me, the world is fascinating and unknown and interesting enough with having to invent little green men visiting. 1.00

00:59:54.000 It really is.

00:59:55.000 And the awareness of how fascinating it truly is is greatly enhanced by people like you.

01:00:02.000 So I want to thank you very much.

01:00:04.000 Thank you very much for doing this.

01:00:05.000 Thank you very much for being you.

01:00:07.000 Thank you very much for writing this book, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth.

01:00:12.000 What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything.

01:00:18.000 Colonel Chris Hatfield. 1.00

01:00:20.000 You, sir, are a bad motherfucker. 1.00

01:00:21.000 It was a really nice topic. 1.00

01:00:22.000 Thank you very much.

01:00:22.000 This was a very enjoyable and fascinating conversation.

01:00:25.000 I really, really appreciate it.

01:00:26.000 So folks, go out and buy this book.

01:00:28.000 Is it available everywhere?

01:00:29.000 Can they get it on Amazon?

01:00:30.000 It's available.

01:00:30.000 It's a New York Times bestseller.

01:00:32.000 It's on Amazon.

01:00:33.000 Go to chrishadfield.ca.

01:00:34.000 We'll show you everywhere you can buy it.

01:00:36.000 Go.

01:00:37.000 Buy it, folks.

01:00:37.000 Support it.

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01:01:03.000 Bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 11, 2013

Joe Rogan Experience #414 - Cmdr. Chris Hadfield

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