Here's an idea.
Maybe the only way to pay for ambitious space travel
is if it doubles as entertainment.
All that talk about Mars and the teletransportation paradox
in our Three Short Ideas episode from a couple weeks
ago got me thinking and reading more about Mars, Mr.
friendly, red, potential home away from home.
And in my internet space travels,
I realized that I completely missed Mars One's announcement
that they had decided on the finalists for their doomed,
I mean, soon to be mission.
Doomed!
If you missed the dish, here's the gist.
Dutch money haver Bas Lansdorp announced two years ago
that his not for profit Mars One would
send a small group of people to that planet
in order to establish a permanent human presence.
Those people would be selected based upon an open application
process, meaning like, open, open.
Anyone can apply.
You want to go to Mars?
Come on down.
You're the man, Bob.
On February 16, 2015, Mars One announced the Mars 100,
100 finalists that will be further whittled down
into only a few groups of four.
Right now, the plan is that one of those teams of four
will be sent to Mars in 2024 to live for as long
as they can live.
No coming back, one-way ticket.
Now, if at this point, you are shaking your head
in absolute disbelief and/or incredulity,
you are in super good company.
Everyone who is anyone in the space game
has said that Mars One is doomed.
Chris Hadfield, Wired, former astronauts,
space professionals, astrophysicists, they all
say it is utter foolishness.
Here, watch.
Hey Gabe, Mars One, utter foolishness, right?
Utter foolishness sounds about right.
The trip alone might turn their bones to glass.
See?
Gabe knows what he's talking about.
He has a PhD in physics, but more importantly, a YouTube
show, which is great.
You should watch it.
He knows what he's talking about.
Experts say that Mars One is going to cost 10 times as much,
take 10 times longer, be 100 times more dangerous,
and require significantly more planning than is currently
arranged.
Basically, if we ever meet Evghenia on Mars,
it's not going to be as soon as 2024 and probably not
because of Mars One.
But snark aside, let's real talk.
Mars One is exciting.
Mars has long, long been a symbol
of hope, a second chance, another planet
to ruin after we're done mucking up this-- oh, sorry.
I forgot, snark aside.
People are talking about Mars One, So many people applied.
For countless lay people, Mars One
is the most visible and exciting attempt
at the colonization of space.
Why is it so visible?
Because it's entertaining.
I mean, yes, it is fascinating and like I said before, it does
provide that sense of hope.
But I mean come on, we all know that if something
is fascinating and/or inspiring, that doesn't automatically
mean that people are going to care about it.
And entertainment actually is a part of Bas Landorp's plan.
One of the original funding sources of Mars One
and arguably its biggest PR feature
is that it would double as a reality TV show.
People training to go to Mars, people going to Mars, people
being on Mars probably kicking the Martian bucket all on TV.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And as much as I want to give Tina Fey oh, brother
faces to infinity and beyond, part of me
thinks that maybe that's a great idea.
I mean, it's a terrible idea but it might work anyway.
Who are the big players in space exploration?
NASA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency,
SpaceX, each of them differing degrees of underfunded
and in need of resources.
If you're going to bring home all of the bacon
it seems like the three best ways
are one, entrepreneurship and investment,
which is where Bas and Elon got their start.
Two, real estate investment and I
think it's fair to say that it's not exactly a seller's
market on Mars right now.
And three, entertainment, doubly so if it involves superheroes.
Diane, remind me to call Bas and pitch
Avengers on Mars, the first MCU entry
to be shot in actual space.
In talking with the New York Times a couple years ago,
Lansdorp put it thusly, "we are talking
about creating a massive media spectacle, much bigger
than the moon landings or the Olympics
with potential for revenue coming from TV rights
and sponsorships."
Except, just a few months ago, the production company
that Mars One was in talks with, Endemol, the people
who are probably best known for making the UK reality TV series
Big Brother, dropped the project because they couldn't
quote "come to an agreement on the details," which I think
is code for ha, ha, ha, no.
Lansdorp says that that is not going to stop him though,
and that entertainment will still
be a major component of the funding, a documentary style
project produced by an as yet unnamed entity.
Beyond making me wonder what they would have been making
with Endemol if not a documentary style project,
this also reinforces for me the connection
that Lansdorp sees between the future of space exploration
and entertainment.
From the very beginning, he said he had no idea
how to develop the gear only that he
was interested in figuring out the business model for space
exploration.
Did he find it?
A massive contingent of sci-fi stories might say, yeah.
Hunger Games, Battle Royale, Running Man, Stay Tuned,
even the Truman Show, to a certain degree,
all draw some connection between the state of a society, profit,
and the publicly broadcast trials
and tribulations of specific people for entertainment.
And those are just movies.
There are plenty of other stories,
novels, and games premised on showing actual people
in the way of actual harm because it's actually
very profitable.
What they also tend to have in common is some dastardly
force drunk on power or hell bent
on control or subjugation operating
on some maniacal idea of what does and does not
count as order or at the very least, someone acting
like the emperor at the gladiator
games, a final say, a presider of some kind.
I don't think that there's any of that at play with Mars One,
but it's hard to argue with its danger factor,
the pure spectacle of it.
The trip is explicitly one-way.
The central tension here is not will they make it.
It is in what way will they end up not having made it.
Their total success is still a weird and grim one.
Some MIT students ran the numbers
and assuming that they do make it to Mars,
they say that the first crew member would die on day 68.
And sure, the moon landing was absolutely a spectacle
but I would argue that it wasn't designed as one
and I think that makes a big difference.
If we're thinking from step number one that this mission
has to succeed both as a scientific endeavour
and a profitable piece of entertainment,
how do we navigate that relationship successfully?
I don't know.
My gut says, woo, that seems tough.
So, in place of specific recommendations,
let me just say this.
For me, and for lots of us, I think,
our ideal of space travel was established
by Star Trek, of all places.
And this idea that humanity is able to traverse
great interstellar distances to find new life and locations
and provide guidance because we have
moved beyond some measure of self-interest.
Insofar as space travel represents the possibility
of a global community which has moved beyond boring old power
structures, will Mars One be reliant on them?
If so, maybe that makes it no different from any other not
fictional space program.
But still, the relationship with entertainment
leaves me feeling a bit dizzy.
What do you guys think?
Is entertainment a good funding source
for the future of ambitious space
travel and do you see that as causing any problems?
Let us know in the comments.
And if you were to subscribe I would be over the moon
but not on my way to Mars because we all
know how that's going to turn out, not
well for anybody, apparently.
Last week we talked about the Sims, Judith Butler,
and gender performance.
Let's see what you had to say.
We're going to do comments a little bit
differently this week.
I'm not going to respond to particular comments,
only a couple things that sort of came up
a lot, themes that developed.
But before we do that, I just want
to say thank you to everybody who
was in the comment section for last week's video
trying to have a reasoned and respectful conversation.
You know, like I go to meetings at Google and YouTube
and they ask, you know, like how do we
get every comment section on every video to be like yours?
I have to tell them that I, I literally don't know.
Like, it's not something that I can tell them
because it's just it has to do with how great Idea Channel
viewers are.
So I just want to say thank you to everybody
who was trying to have as good a conversation in the comment
section last week as they could.
It means so much.
The first of two really big points
that I want to talk about is the one about my proclamation
that boys who aren't interested in fire trucks or video games
and so on are not seen as referencing another gender
because there were a lot of people in the comments
who had the opposite experience.
That in not being interested in those things,
they were called all manner of names
like sissy, girly, et cetera, et cetera.
And this was a thing that we had a bit of a conversation
about before shooting the episode.
The people involved in that conversation
all had really different experiences
and my personal experience, as someone
who was called no shortage of terrible names growing up,
was that the people using those insults
didn't see me necessarily as referencing another gender
in my actions but rather saw femininity as an insult
to hurl at a young boy.
That it wasn't that I was being girly
but that girliness was an insult, which I realize
is maybe kind of like splitting hairs.
But, of course, that doesn't mean
that other people have had exactly that experience
and so there was definitely room for more nuance
when we made that point.
So thank you to everybody who wrote
a comment about that idea, letting
us know your experiences.
The second of two really big points
that I want to talk about is this idea
that Butler's theories don't leave a lot of room
for biological difference when it
comes to the gender spectrum, specifically
this idea of brain sex.
From what I understand, a lot of the science
is still in development and not meant
to replace the cultural idea of gender
but rather contribute to it.
But it seems that there is a difference
in the brains of people who experience gender dysphoria,
that it is either the cause of gender dysphoria,
a result of gender dysphoria.
But either way, there seems to be
some measurable, verifiable difference
in the brains of those people.
This is good for two reasons.
The first being that if someone feels as though they
are different but are ultimately unsure,
this provides some sort of proof or validation.
And the second being that it kind of erases the idea
that gender dysphoria is a choice
and that if there are people saying, oh,
you're just choosing to be this way,
there is a kind of verifiable proof
that, that is not a choice.
It is part of who they are.
However, there seem to be also competing ideas
that the medicalization of gender
could come with its own set of very, very complicated baggage.
Like, let's say someone feels gender dysphoric
and is actually ready to transition
but they need monetary support in the form of insurance
to accomplish that transition.
But they don't have the necessary neurological markers
to prove that they are, in fact, really gender dysphoric.
Will their insurance now not cover their transition or not
to the degree that they would before?
This is, it's all really, really complicated
and there are many, many sides to each of these aspects
and there are things that we had no idea
about, due in no small part, to the fact
that we don't have this embodied experience.
So I just want to restate, and re-, re- restate,
thank you so much to everybody who let us know about these
things, who hung out in the comments of last week's video
and tried to have respectful, reasoned conversations,
and sort of let us know about their experience.
It means so, so much.
So yeah, thanks and we'll see you next week.