Ariel Ekblaw is the director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Ariel's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ariel_ekblaw
MIT Space Exploration Initiative: https://media.mit.edu/groups/space-exploration
Books and resources mentioned:
Into the Anthropocosmos (book): https://amzn.to/3CUIchM
Seveneves (book): https://amzn.to/36ipd4O
Endurance (book): https://amzn.to/3CYdKDJ

PODCAST INFO:
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:56 - Space exploration
10:02 - Swarm robotics and self-assembling space habitats
27:44 - Microgravity
32:01 - Deep duration space missions
37:11 - Extraterrestrial life
43:33 - Music and sports in space
50:12 - Colonizing space
57:33 - War in space
1:02:06 - Robots in space
1:16:48 - Commercial space exploration
1:20:25 - Future of space exploration
1:28:11 - Beauty of the universe
1:33:07 - Space cities
1:38:49 - Advice for young people
1:42:09 - Consciousness
1:43:54 - Meaning of life

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We think that self-assembly, this modular reconfigurable algorithm for constructing space structures in orbit is gonna give us this promise of space architecture that's actually worth living in.

You see, do believe we might 1 day become intergalactic civilization?

The following is a conversation with Ariel Egbla, director of MIT Space Exploration Initiative.

She's especially interested in autonomously self-assembling space architectures, basically giant space structures that can sustain human life and that assemble themselves out in space and then orbit Earth, Moon, Mars, and other planets.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Ariel Agblaw.

in love with space exploration and space in general?

So my dad's an A-10 fighter pilot, and my mom trained and had qualified to be a fighter pilot, but it was early enough that women were not allowed in combat at that time.

And so I grew up with these 2 pilots, and although they themselves did not become astronauts, there's a really rich legacy of Air Force pilots becoming astronauts, and this loomed large in my childhood.

What does it mean to be courageous, to be an explorer, to be at the vanguard of something hard and challenging?

And to couple with that, my dad was a huge fan of science fiction.

And so I, as a kid, read Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, all these different classics of science fiction that he had introduced me to, and that just started a love affair with space exploration and really thinking about civilization scale space exploration.

So did they themselves dream about going to the stars as opposed to flying here in Earth's atmosphere, just looking up?

Yeah, my dad always said he was absolutely convinced because he was a child of the Apollo years that he would get to go in his lifetime.

And so it was a challenge and sad for many people when to their view on the outside, space exploration slowed down for a period of time.

I think we leapt so far ahead with Apollo, more than the rest of society was ready for.

And now we're coming back to this moment for space exploration where we actually have an economy and we have the other accoutrement that society needs to be able to make space exploration more real.

And my dad's thrilled because finally, not nearly, I hope not anywhere near the end of his life, but as he's an older man, he now can see still within his lifetime, people really getting a chance to build a sustainable lunar settlement on the moon or maybe even go to Mars.

So settlement, civilizations and other planets, that's the cool thing to dream about in the future.

What was the favorite sci-fi authors when you were growing up?

This is an amazing story of Harry Seldon, this foundation that he forms at different ends of the, well, according to the story, different ends of the universe, and has this interesting focus on society.

So it's not just space exploration for the sake of space exploration or novel technology, which is a lot of what I work on day-to-day at MIT, but how do you structure a society across those vast expanses of distance and time?

Now though, my favorite is Neil Stevenson and 7 Eves.

It's a book that inspired my own PhD research and some ongoing work that we're doing with NASA now for the future of swarm robotics for spacecraft.

We were saying offline about Neil Stephenson, because I just recently had a conversation with him.

And I said that, you know, not until I was doing the research for him that I realized he also had a role to play in Blue Origin.

So it's like sci-fi actually having a role to play in the design, engineering, just the implementation of ideas that kind of percolate out from the sci-fi world and actually become reality.

It's kind of a fascinating figure in that way.

So Do you also think about him beyond just his work in science fiction, but his role in coming up with wild, crazy ideas that actually become reality?

Yes, I think it's a great example of this cycle between authors and scientists and engineers, that we can be inspired in 1 generation by what authors dream up.

We build it, we make it a reality, and then that inspires another generation of really wild and crazy thought for science fiction.

I think Neil Stephenson does a beautiful job of being what we'd call a hard science fiction author.

So it's really grounded in a lot of science, which makes it very compelling for me as a scientist and engineer to read and then be challenged to make that vision a reality.

The other community, you know, that Neil's involved with and some of my other mentors are involved with that we are thinking about more and more in the work that we do at MIT is the Long Now Foundation and this focus on what does society need to take in terms of steps at this juncture, this particular inflection point in human history, to make sure that we're setting ourselves up for a long and prosperous horizon, for humanity's horizons.

There's a lot of examples of what the Long Now Foundation does and thinks about.

But when I think about this in my own work, it's what does it take to scale humanity's presence in orbit?

We are seeing some additional investment in commercial space habitats, so it'll no longer be just NASA running the International Space Station.

But to really democratize access to space, to have like Bezos wants to have millions of people living and working in space, you need architecture that's bigger and grander and can actually scale.

That means you need to be thinking about how can you construct things for long time horizons that are really sustainable in orbit or on a surface of a celestial body that are bigger than the biggest rocket payload fairing that we currently have available.

And that's what led me to self-assembly and other models of in-space construction.

Okay, every time you speak, I get like a million tangent ideas.

So 1 sort of on the dark side, let me ask.

Do you think about the threats to human civilization that kind of motivate the scaling of the expansion of humans in space and on other planets?

Nuclear war, pandemics, super intelligent, artificial intelligence systems, more not existential crises, but ones that have potentially significant detrimental effects on society, like climate change,

And then there's of course the fun ass story coming out from the darkness and hitting all earth.

Anyway, is there something that you think about that threatens us in this century?

I mean, as an ex-military family, we used to talk about all of this.

We would say that luck favors the prepared.

And so growing up, we had a plan, actually, a family plan for what we would do in a pandemic.

Didn't think we were gonna have to put that plan into place and here we are.

We do, certainly, you know, among my own family and my friends and then our work at MIT, we do think about existential threats and risks to humanity and what role does space exploration and getting humans off world have to play in a resilient future for humanity.

But what I actually find more compelling recently is instead of thinking about a need to ever abandon Earth through a path of space exploration or space voyaging, is to see how we can use space technology to keep Earth livable.

The obvious direct ways of doing this would be, you know, satellite technology that's helping us learn more about climate change or emitters or CO2.

But there's also a future for geoengineering that might be space-based.

A lot of questions that would have to be answered around that.

But these are examples of pivoting our focus away from maybe the Hollywood vision of, oh, an asteroid's gonna come, we're all gonna have to escape Earth, to let's use our considerable technology prowess and use space technology to save Earth and be very much focused on how we can have a worthwhile life for Earth's citizens.

Even as some of us want to go out and further venturing.

Right, just the desire to explore the mysterious, yes.

But also it does seem that by placing us in harsh conditions, the harsh conditions of space, the harsh conditions of planets, and the biology, the chemistry, the engineering, the robotics, the materials, all of that, that's just a nice way to come up with cool new things.

So, and that you can bring back to Earth and it will improve, like figuring out food in space will make you figure out what, how to eat, you know, live healthier lives here on Earth.

I mean, some of the technologies that we're directly looking at right now for space habitats, it's hard to keep humans alive in this really fragile little pocket against the vacuum and all of the dangers that the space environment presents.

Some of the technologies we are going to have to figure out is energy efficient, you know, cooling and air conditioning, air filtration, scrubbing CO2 from the air, being able to have habitats that are themselves resilient to extremes of space weather and radiation.

And some of these are direct translational opportunities for areas torn by natural disasters.

You know, people in California a decade ago would never have had to think about having an airtight house.

But now with wildfires, maybe you do want something close to an airtight house.

There's a lot of technologies from the space habitation world that we are hoping we can actually bring back down to benefit life on Earth as well, in these extreme environment contexts.

Okay, so you mentioned to go back to swarm.

So that was interesting to you, first of all in your own work, but also I believe you said something that was inspiring from Neil Stephenson as well.

So when you say swarm, are you thinking about architectures or are you thinking about artificial intelligence like robotics or are those kind of intermixed?

I think the future that we're seeing is that they're going to be intermixed, which is really exciting.

So the future of space habitats are 1 of intelligent structures, maybe not all the way to how, and the 2001 Space Odyssey reference that scares people about the habitat having a mind of its own.

But certainly we're building systems now where the habitat has sensing technology that allows it to communicate its basic functions, you know, maintaining life support for the astronauts, but could also communicate in symbiosis with these swarm robots that would be on the outside of the spacecraft, whether it's in a microgravity orbiting environment or on the surface.

And these little robots, they crawl just a la Neil Stephenson and Seveneves.

They crawl along the outside of the spacecraft looking for micrometeorite punctures or gas leaks or other faults and defects.

And right now we're just working on the diagnosis.

So can the swarm with its collective intelligence act in symbiosis with the spacecraft and detect things?

But in the future we'd also love for these little micro robots to repair in situ and really be like ants living in a tree altogether connected to the spacecraft.

Do you envision the system to be fully distributed and just like an ant colony for 1 of them is damaged or whatever, loses control and all those kinds of things that doesn't affect the performance of the complete system or doesn't need to be centralized.

This is more like almost a technical question.

Right, from the ground up, it's so scary to go fully distributed.

But it's also exceptionally powerful, right?

A robust, resilient to the harsh conditions of space.

What do you, if you look into the next 10, 20, 100 years, starting from scratch, do you think we should be doing architecture-wise distributed systems?

For 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 right 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.

There's Another idea out of Neil Stephenson's 7 Eves actually were 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.

So the self-assembly component of that too, so this is your PhD work and beyond.

You explored autonomously self-assembling space architecture for future space tourists' habitats and space stations in orbit around Earth, Moon, and Mars.

There's few things I personally find sexier than self-assembling space, autonomously self-assembling space architecture.

In general, it doesn't even need to be space.

The idea of self-assembling architectures is really interesting, like building a bridge or something like that, through self-assembling materials.

It feels like an incredibly efficient way to do it because optimization is built in.

So you can build the most optimal structures given dynamic, uncertain changing conditions.

So maybe can you talk about your PhD work, about this work, about tesserae, what is it in general?

Any cool stuff, because this is super cool.

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.

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 1, go to tile 2.

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 the 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 whether they're forming the structure that they're supposed to form or not.

They know if they're in a toxic relationship and they need to get out.

Right, right, if they need to separate, exactly, yeah.

And for people who are just listening to this, yeah, there's, I mean, how large are these tiles?

So the size that we use in the lab, they can really be any size because we can scale them down to do testing in microgravity.

So we sent tiles that were about 3 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.

The larger scale that we would love to build in the future would actually be tiles that are big enough to form a buckyball, 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 1 of the goals of 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 stunning piece of architecture on Earth.

And so we think that self-assembly, this modular reconfigurable algorithm for constructing space structures in orbit is gonna give us this promise of space architecture that's actually worth living in.

Living in, oh, I thought you also meant from like outside artistic perspective,

You know, when you like go like into Vegas, whenever you go into a city and it like over the hill appears in front of you.

And I mean, there's something majestic about seeing like, wow, humans created that.

It gives you like hope about like, if these a bunch of ants were able to figure out how to build skyscrapers that light up.

And in general, the design of these tiles and the way you envision it are pretty scalable.

Yes, and they're inspired by exactly what you mentioned a moment ago, which is we have these patterns of self-assembly on earth

there's a lot of fantastic MIT research that we're building this concept on.

So like Daniela Rus at CSAIL 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.

What do you envision the thing would look like?

Like when you imagine a thing far into the future where there's, so we're not even thinking about like small space, well let's not call them small, but are currently sized space stations, but like something gigantic.

Is this something with symmetry, or is this something we can't even come up with yet?

Is there beautiful structures that you imagine in your mind?

I've got 3 candidates that I would love to build.

If we're talking about monumental space architecture, 1 is, what does a space cathedral look like?

It can be a secular cathedral, 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.

And each direction you look at, all the cardinal directions, are spires going off in a really large and long way.

Number 2 would be something more organic that's not just geometric.

So here, 1 of the ideas that we're working on at MIT in my lab is to say, could you, instead of the tesserae 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-assemble a lot of those together?

They're called plesiohedrons, like space-filling solids.

And you dock a bunch of them together, and you can create a really organic structure out of that.

So this is the same way that muscles accrete to appear.

You can have these nodes that dock together and 1 shape that I would love to form out of this is something like a nautilus, a seashell, that beautiful Fibonacci spiral sequence that you get in that shape, which I think would be a stunning and fabulous aggregated space station.

So you can stack cubes together, and if you had an infinite number of cubes, you'd fill all that space.

Another plesiohedron is a truncated octahedron, and that's actually 1 of the candidate structures that we think would be great for space stations.

Ah, 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 2 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.

It's could we design an organically inspired shape for a space station.

Can I just say how awesome it is to hear you say, we space people?

I know you meant people that are doing research on space exploration, space technology, but it also made me think of a future.

There's Earth people, and there's those space people.

But like, it's like New Yorkers and like Texans or something like that.

Yeah, of course you live for a time in New York and then you go up to Boston, but for a time you're the space people.

All I know those space people, they're kind of wild up there.

There's that culture, culture forms, and I would love to see what kind of culture, once you have sort of more and more civilians, I mean, there's a human, I mean, I love psychology and sociology, and I'll maybe ask you about that too, which is like the dynamic between humans.

You have to kind of start considering that, and You start spending more and more time up in space and start sending civilians, start sending bigger and bigger groups of people.

And then of course, the beautiful and the ugly emerges from the human nature that we haven't been able to escape up to this point.

But when you say the plesiohedrons, these kinds of shapes, are they multifunctional?

Like is the idea you'd be able to, humans can occupy them safely in some of them and some others have some other purposes.

1 could be sleeping quarters, 1 could be a greenhouse or an agricultural unit, 1 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 1 of the promises of both Tesserae, 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.

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.

I was thinking space party, but space conference is good too.

Then maybe all of a sudden you want to change out what were window tiles yesterday, cupola tiles, and make them into a birthing port so that you can welcome 5 new spaceships to come and join you in space.

That's what this promise of reconfigurable space architecture might allow us to explore.

I've been hanging out with Grimes recently.

I just feel like she belongs up in space.

This is like design for artists, essentially.

I imagine, I mean, this is what South by keeps introducing me to is there's like, the weird and the beautiful people and like the artists and it feels like there's a lot of opportunities for art and design.

100% It's like space is a combination of arts, design and great engineering with with a it's a safety critical with like the highest of stakes.

And is this, is there, first of all, you talking about tiling, so Neil Stephens is obsessed about tiling.

I don't know if it's related to any of this, but he seems to be obsessed with like, how do you tile a space?

And it's, I mean, it's a beautiful idea for architecture that you can self-assemble these different shapes And you can have probably some centralized guidance of the kind of thing you want to build, but they also kind of figure stuff out themselves in terms of the low level details, in terms of the figuring out when everything fits just right.

For the OCD people, like, shh, what's that subreddit?

Everything, they have like videos of everything's just pleasant, when everything just fits perfectly.

Very pleasing, All the tolerances come together.

So they figure that out on themselves and the local robotics problem.

But by the way, was the Neoverse Pebbles, was the Pebbles Project?

the Pebbles 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.

And that's gonna, So I'm supposed to talk to Danielle, so I'll probably spend an hour just discussing the sounds and the pebbles.

So that's, because you mentioned 2, I think.

My third 1 is the Ringworld, just because every science fiction book ever that's worth anything has a ring world in it.

So really big Taurus that could encircle a planet or encircle another 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.

By the way, for the viewers, we're looking at figure 11.

This is a hexagonal tiling of a torus generated in Mathematica referencing code and approach from 2 citations.

So we're looking at a tiled donut and I'm now hungry.

So this is the, is this from your thesis or no?

This is probably, I mean this is in my thesis, this looks like it was 1 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 1 example with hexagons, to be able to say, could we take this same test array approach of self-assembling tiles and create other geometries?

So you mentioned microgravity and I saw, I believe that, there's a picture of you floating in microgravity.

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Ariel Ekblaw: Space Colonization and Self-Assembling Space Megastructures | Lex Fridman Podcast #271