YouSaid · the spoken record

Ariel Ekblaw

lines on the record: 112
first: 2022-03-23
most recent: 2022-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There's no supply chains on Mars that can supply the level of technological sophistication for all the products that we rely on on day-to-day life. So you'd be going back to actually a very simple existence, more like Pioneer Life out West in the story of the US, for example. And I think that the future of larger scale gatherings of humans in orbit, or sorry, in space, is actually going to be in microgravity, floating space cities, not so much trying to establish settlements on the surface.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think small outposts absolutely like McMurdo, right? So we have these models of really extreme environments on Earth and Antarctica, for example, where humans have been able to go and make a sustainable settlement. McMurdo style life on Mars probably feasible in the 2030s. So we want to send the first human missions to Mars and maybe as early as the end of this decade, more likely early 2030s. Moving anywhere beyond that in terms of a place where like an entire human life would be lived, where it's not just you go for a three-month deployment and you come back. That is actually the big challenge line. It's just saying, is there enough technological sophistication that can be brought that far out into space? If you imagine your electronics break, there's no radio shack. This dates me a little bit that my mind jumps to radio shack. But there's no”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does excite me. I think visionaries like Elon are working to make that happen in terms of building the road to space. We are really excited about building out the human-lived experience of space once you get there. So how are you going to grow your food? What is your habitat going to look like? I think it's profoundly exciting, but I do think that there's a little bit of a misunderstanding of Mars anywhere in the near future being anything like a replacement for Earth. So it is good for humanity to have these other pockets of our civilization that can expand out beyond Earth. But Mars is not in its current state a good home for humanity. Too many perchlorates in the soil. You can't use that soil to grow crops. Atmosphere is too thin. Certainly can't breathe it, but it's also just really thin compared to our atmosphere. A lot of different challenges that would have to be fundamentally changed on that planet to make it a good home for a large human civilization.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the mental model when you're really young and you're kind of getting your mental model of physics, we do think that that would change kids' abilities if they were born in microgravity, their ability to have that intuition around an earth-based 1G environment might be missing because a lot of that is really crystallized in early development, early childhood development. So that makes sense that they would see that in mice. Yeah.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the hope, yeah. It's like this central challenge of microgravity to human reproduction. But we do host a workshop every year at Beyond the Cradle, which is the space event that we run at MIT. And we always do one on pregnancy in space or motherhood or raising children in space because there are huge questions. There have been a few mammal studies that have looked at reproduction in space, but there are still really major questions about how does it work, how does the fetus evolve in microgravity if you were pregnant in space. And I think the near-term answer is just going to be we need to be able to give humans a 1G environment for that phase of our development.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, there's a name we are brand new. We are just exiting stealth mode. So your podcast listeners will literally be among some of the first to hear about it. It's called Aurelia Institute. Aurelia is an old English word for chrysalis. And the idea with this is that we humanity collectively are at this next stage of our metamorphosis, like a chrysalis into a space-faring species. And so we felt that this was a good time, a necessary time to think about next generation space architecture, but also Starfleet Academy, if you know that reference from Star Trek.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, we're spinning out a new company to look at next generation space architecture and how do we actually scale humanities access to space. And one of the areas that we want to look at is artificial gravity.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you generate this force. If you've ever been in those carnival rides, the gravitrons that spin you up around the side, that's the concept. And this is actually one of the reasons why we are spinning out a new company from IT laptop. That was accidental but well noted space pun.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think about centuries. For MySpace Archives, but yeah, for decades, I think as soon as we get past the three year mark, we'll absolutely want somewhere between three years and a decade. We'll want artificial gravity. And we know how to do that, actually. The engineering questions still need to be tweaked for how we'd really implement it, but the science is there to know how we would spin habitats in orbit, generate that force. So even if the entire habitat's not spinning, you at least have a treadmill part of the space station that is spinning, and you can spend some fraction of your day in a near to 1G environment and keep your body healthy.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Higher likelihood to develop cancer at a younger age. So you'd probably be able to get there and get back, but you'd find yourself in the same way if you were exposed to significant radiation on Earth, you'd find significant bad health effects as you age.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you have to think about nutrition. And so how are you keeping all of these different needs for your body alive? How are you protecting astronauts against radiation, either having some type of a shell on the spacecraft, which is expensive because it's heavy, you know, if it's something like lead, a really effective radiation shell, it's going to be a lot of mass? Or is there a pill that could be taken to try to make you less in danger of some of the radiation effects? A lot of this has not yet been answered, but radiation is a really significant challenge for that three-year journey.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Scott Kelly wrote this amazing book after he spent a year in space. And he's a twin. It's absolutely fantastic that NASA got to do a twin studies. Perfect. So he wrote a lot about his experience on the health side of what changed, things like Eyesight changing because the shape of your eyeball changes, which changes your lens, which changes how you see. If we're then thinking about the challenges between a year and three years, especially if we're doing that three-year trip to Mars for your friend you asked earlier.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, even after one or two parabolic flights, you can gain a certain facility with moving in that environment. I think most astronauts would say maybe several days on station or a week on station and their brain flips. It's amazing the plasticity of the human brain and how quickly they are able to adapt. And so pretty quickly they become creatures of this new environment.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can, but one of the most intuitive things that we all learn as babies, right, is whenever you throw something, if I was going to toss something to you, I'd toss it up because I know that it has to compensate for the fact that that Keplerian arc is going to draw down the equations of motion are going to draw it down. I would in space, I would just shoot something directly towards you. So like straight line of sight. And so that would be very different for any type of ball sport is to retrain your human mind to have that as your intuitive arc of motion or lack of arc.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By tossing it. So it's an interactive musical instrument. It actually requires another partner. The idea was that it's something like a dance or just like something like a choreography in space.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was a pretty cool design. It looks like it's a geometric solid that has these interesting artifacts on the inside. And it has a lot of sensors, actually, additionally on the inside, like IMU's inertial measurement sensors that allow it to detect when it's floating and when it's not floating and provides this really kind of ethereal, they later sonify it. So they use electronic music to turn it into a symphony or turn it into a piece. And yeah, this is the object, the telemetron.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is so awesome. Created by Sans Fish and Nicole Billier, two amazing graduate students and staff researchers on my team”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, you referenced culture before, and I think this is one of the most exciting things that we have at our fingertips, which is to define a new culture for space exploration. We don't just have to import cultural artifacts from Earth to make life worth living in space. And this musical instrument that you've referenced was a design of an object that could only be performed in microgravity So it doesn't sound the same way when it's a percussive instrument when it's rattled or moved in a gravity environment.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As an ex physicist, I'm now much more on the aerospace engineering side for space architecture, but as an ex physicist, I hope it is prolific. I think the challenge is if it's as prolific as we would hope, if there are many, many, many civilizations, then the question is, where are they? Why haven't we heard from them? And the Fermi paradox, is there some great filter that life only gets to some level of sophistication and then kills itself off? through war or through famine or through different challenges that filter that society out of existence. And it would be an interesting question to try to understand if the universe was teeming with life. Why haven't we found it or heard from it yet to our knowledge?”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's got to be some humility there, and certainly from science fiction, we have plenty of reasons to fear that outcome as well. But I do think as a scientist, it would be profoundly exciting if we were to find life, especially in the near neighborhood of our solar system. Right now we would expect it to be most likely microbial life, but we have a real serious challenge in astrobiology, which is it may not even be carbon-based life And all of our detectors, we only know to look for DNA or RNA. How would you even build a detector to look for silicon-based life or different molecules than what we know to be the fundamental molecules for life”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a special spot in my heart because I got to work on Sherlock, which is the astrobiology experiment that's on Mars right now searching for what they would say in a very cautious way is signs of past habitability. They want to be careful not to get people overly excited and say we're searching for signs of life. They're searching to see if there would have been organics on the surface of Mars or water in certain areas that would have allowed for life to flourish. And I really love this prospect. I do think within our lifetimes we'll get a better answer about finding life in our solar system if it's there. If not on Mars, maybe Europa, one of the icy worlds.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know this water at the caps. I suspect NASA from all of the satellite studies that they've done at Mars have a decent idea of what the water deposits look like, but I don't know to what degree they have characterized those.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through the body as the recycling system, and then you drink what you peed out. As clarified, refined freshwater the next day. That is one source of water. Another source of water in the near neighborhood of our solar system would be on the moon. So water ice deposits. There's also water on Mars. This is one of the big things that's bringing people to want to develop infrastructure on the moon is once you've gotten out of the gravity well of Earth, if you can find water on the moon and refine it, you can either make it into propellant or drinkable water for humans. And so that's really valuable as a potential gateway out into the rest of the solar system to be able to get propellant without always having to ship it up from Earth.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To steal a line from Charlie Bolden, who's the former administrator of NASA, this morning's freshwater is yesterday's coffee. So if you think about what that means, you drank the coffee yesterday.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, your go to menu is going to be mostly freeze dried. Every so often, NASA will arrange for a fun stunt or fresh food to get up to station. So they did bake double tree cookies with Hilton a couple years ago, as I recall, I think sometime before the pandemic. But there's work actually in our lab at MIT, Maggie Koblantz, one of my staff researchers, is looking at the future of fermentation. Everybody loves beer, right? Beer and wine and kimchi and mizo, these foods that have just been, you know. really important to human cultures for eons because we love the umami and the better flavor in them but it turns out they also have a good shelf life if done properly and they also have an additional health benefit for the microbiome for probiotics and prebiotics so we're trying to work with NASA and convince them to be more open-minded to fermented food for long duration deep space missions. That we think is one of the future elements in addition to in situ growing your own food.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One big thing and one little thing, and there are these two classic problems that we're trying to solve in the space industry. One is radiation. It's not as much of a problem for us right now on the International Space Station because we're still protected by part of Earth's magnetosphere. But as soon as you get farther out into space and you don't have that protection once you leave the Van Allen belt area of the Earth and the cocoon around the Earth, we have really serious concerns about radiation and the effect on human health long term. That's the big one. The small one, and I say it's small because it seems mundane, but it actually is really big in its own way, is mental health and how to keep people happy and balanced. And you were alluding to some of the psychological challenges of having humans together on missions and especially as we try to scale the number of humans in orbit or in space. So that's another big challenge is how to keep people happy and balanced and cooperating.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An interstitial time there because you really can only go between Earth and Mars at certain points in their orbits where it's favorable to make that journey. And so part of that three years is you take the journey to Mars a few months, six to nine months. You're there for a period of time until the orbits find a favorable alignment again. And then you come back another six to nine months.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can see the blue marble, the stunning overview effect, which is something I hope to see one day. What's also really different is if you're in orbit for any significant period of time, it's going to be a lot more physiological changes to your body than if you just did an afternoon flight on the vomit comet. Everything from your bones, your muscles, your eyeballs change shape. There's a lot of different things that happen for long-duration spaceflight, and we still have to, as scientists, we still have to solve a lot of these interesting challenges to be able to keep humans thriving in microgravity or deep duration space missions.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do feel a 2G pullout, right? So the cost of getting those microg parabolas is you then have a 2G pullout. And that's hard. You have to train for it if you move your neck too quickly on that 2G pullout. You can strain muscles. But I wouldn't say that it's actually a profound tough thing on the body. It's really just an incredibly novel experience. And when you're in orbit and you're not having to go through the ups and downs of the parabolic plane, there's a real grace and elegance. And you see the astronauts learn to operate in this completely new environment.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nerve resistance, they actually tell you to make a memory when you're on the plane because it's such a fleeting experience for your body that even a few days later you've already forgotten exactly what it felt like. It's so foreign to the human experience.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's profound. It is unlike anything else you will experience on Earth because it is this true feeling of weightlessness with no drag. So the closest experience you can think of would be floating in a pool, but you move slowly when you float in a pool and your motion is restricted. When you're floating, it's just you and your body flying like in a dream. It takes the littlest amount of energy, like a fingertap against the wall of the plane to shoot all the way across the fuselage.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So there is Important difference there is no zero gravity, there's no nothing, there's in the universe, there is no such thing as zero gravity. So Newton's law of gravity tells us that there's always gravity attraction between any two objects. So 0G is a shorthand that some of us fall into using or is a little easier to communicate to the public. The accurate term is microgravity, where you are essentially floating your weight list, but generally in free fall. So on the parabolic flights, the vomit comet, you're in free fall at the end of the parabola. And in orbit around the Earth, when you're floating, you're also in free fall.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that test ray, that's super early in my PhD. Some of just the passive tiles before we even put electronics in, we were just testing the magnet polarity and the essentially is it an energy favorable structure to self-assemble on its own. So we tweaked a lot of things between.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've flown nine times On the affectionately known as the vomit comet. It's the parabolic flight and essentially it does what you'd want to plane never to do. It pitches really steeply upwards at 45 degrees.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is probably, I mean, this is in my thesis. This looks like it was one of my earlier papers. This was an approach to say, great, we've come up with this tessellation approach for a buckyball. And we picked the buckyball because it is the most efficient surface area to volume shape and what's expensive in space, the surface area, shipping up all that material. So we wanted something that would maximize the volume. But if we think about ring worlds and other shapes, we wanted to look at how do you tile a torus, and this is one example with hexagons, to be able to say, could we take this same tesserae approach of self-assembling tiles and create other geometries?”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Donut, yeah, so a really big tourist that could encircle a planet or encircle a nether celestial body, maybe an asteroid or a small moon. And the promise here is just the beauty of being able to have that geometry in orbit and all that surface area for solar panels and docking and essentially just all of what that enables to have a ring world at that scale in orbit.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My third one is the ring world just because every science fiction book ever that's worth anything has a ring world in it.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Pebles project are little cubes that have EPMs in them, electropermanent magnets, and they can self-disassemble. So they'll turn off. And so you'll have this little structure that all of a sudden can flip the little pebbles over and essentially just disaggregate.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe all of a sudden you want to change out what we're window tiles yesterday, cupola tiles, and make them into a birthing port so that you can welcome five new spaceships to come and join you in space. That's what this promise of reconfigurable space architecture might allow us to explore.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. One could be sleeping quarters, one could be a greenhouse or an agricultural unit, one could be a storage depot. Essentially, all of the different rooms or functions that you might need in a space station could be subdivided into these nodes and then stacked together. And one of the promises of both Tesseray, my original PhD research, which is these shells, and then this follow-on node concept, is that Right now we build space stations and once they're built, they're done. You can't really change them profoundly. But the benefit of a modular self-assembling system is you can disassemble it. You can completely reconfigure it. So if your mission changes or the number of people in space that you want to host, if you have a space conference happening like South by Southwest.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you cut off an octahedron actually has little pointy areas. You truncate certain sections of it and you get surfaces that are on the structure that are cubes and I think hexagons. I have to remind myself exactly what the faces are. But overall, a truncated octahedron can be bonded to other truncated octahedrons. And just like a cube, it fills all the gaps as you build it out. So you can imagine two truncated octahedrons, they come together at an airlock, which is what we space people call doors in space, and you dock them on all sides, and you've basically created this decentralized network of space nodes that make a big space station. And once you have enough of them and you're growing with enough big units, you can do it in any macro shape you want. That's where the Nautilus comes in is could we design an organically inspired shape for space station?”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cube, right? So you can stack cubes together, and if you had an infinite number of cubes, you'd fill all that space. There's no gaps in between the cubes. They stack and fill space. Another pleasier hedron is a truncated octahedron. And that's actually one of the candidate structures that we think would be great for space stations.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of those together. They're called pleasiohedrons, like space filling solids. And you dock a bunch of them together and you can create a really organic structure out of that. So the same way that muscles accrete to appear. You can have these nodes that dock together. And one shape that I would love to form out of this is something like a nautilus, a seashell, that beautiful, you know, Fibonacci spiral sequence that you get in that shape, which I think would be a stunning and fabulous aggregated space station.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got three candidates that I would love to build. If we're talking about monumental space architecture, one is, what is a space cathedral look like? It can be a secular cathedral. It doesn't necessarily have to be about religion, but that notion of long sight lines, inspiring, stunning architecture when you go in. And you can imagine floating, instead of being on the ground and only looking up in space, you could be in a central node. each direction you look at, all the cardinal directions are spires going off in a really large and long way. So that's concept number one. Number two would be something more organic that's not just geometric. So here one of the ideas that we're working on in MIT in my lab is to say, could you, instead of the tesserray model, right, which is self-assembling a shell, could you define a module that's a node, a small node that someone can live in, and you self-assum”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and they're inspired by exactly what you mentioned a moment ago, which is we have these patterns of self assembly on Earth. And there's a lot of fantastic MIT research that we're building this concept on. So like Daniella Roose at CSAL and Pebbles taking the power of magnets to create units that are themselves interchangeable, this notion of programmable matter. And so we're interested in going really big with it to build big scale space structures with programmable tiles. But there's also a really fascinating end of that on the other side of the spectrum, which is how small can you go with matter that's programmable and stacks and builds itself and creates a bridge or something in the future?”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stunning piece of architecture on Earth. And so we think that self assembly, this modular, reconfigurable algorithm for constructing space structures in orbit is going to give us this promise of space architecture that's actually worth living in.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the size that we use in the lab can really be any size because we can scale them down to do testing and microgravity. Tiles that were about three inches wide to the International Space Station a couple years ago to test the code, test the state machine, test the algorithm of self-assembly. But now we're actually building our first ever human scale tiles, they're me human size, so a little smaller than maybe your average human. But they're 2.5 feet on edge length. The larger scale that we would love to build in the future would actually be tiles that are big enough to form a bucky ball, big open spherical volume, spherical approximation volume. That'd be about 10 meters in diameter, so 30 feet, which is much bigger and grander in terms of open space than any current module on the ISS. And one of the goals with this project was to say, what's the purpose of next generation space architecture? Should it be something that really inspires and delights people when you float into that space? Can you get goosebumps in the way that you do when you walk into a really”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're released to float in microgravity. Magnets, pretty powerful electropermanent magnets on their edges draw them together for autonomous docking. So there's no human in the loop here. And there's no central agent coordinating, saying tile one go to tile two. It's completely decentralized system. They find each other on their own. What we don't show in this video is what happens if there's an error, right? So what happens if they bond incorrectly? The tiles have sensing. So proximity sensing, magnetometer, other sensors that allow them to detect a good bond versus a bad bond and pulse off and self-correct, which anybody who works in this field of self-assembly will tell you that error detection and correction, just like error detection in a DNA sequence or protein folding, is really important part of the system for that robustness. And so we've done a lot of work to engineer that ability for the tiles to be self-determining. They know.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So test ray is my PhD research. It's this idea that we could take tiles that construct a large structure like a buckyball. Yeah, this is exactly what we're looking at here, which is the tiles that are packed flat in a rocket.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Space, yes, because it gives you this redundancy and safety profile that's really critical. So whether it's small swarm robots where it doesn't matter if you lose a few of them to habitats that instead of having a central monolithic habitat, you might actually be able to have a decentralized node of a space station so that you can kind of write out of Star Wars. You can shut a blast door if there's a fire or if there's a conflict in a certain area and you can move the humans and the crew into another decentralized node of the spacecraft is another idea out of Neil Stevenson 7 and Eves actually where these arclets which were decentralized spacecraft that could form and dock little temporary space stations with each other and then separate and go off on their way and have a decentralized approach to living in space.”
2022-03-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #271 – Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source