What would happen if a country claimed Mars as their own? Will we have the expanse scenario? What's a realistic timeline for lunar exploration? And in Q&A+, can we use those inflatable modules on the moon? All this and more in this question show. It's time for the question show. Your questions, my answers, as always, wherever you are, cross my channel. If a question pops in your brain, just write it down. I'll gather them up and I will answer them here. All right, let's get into the questions. Neil von Holtham. What happens if a country claims Mars as their own? So almost every nation on Earth has signed something called the Outer Space Treaty. And this is a guideline, a worldwide guideline for how the nations on planet Earth are expected to behave in space. And there's a lot of rules in it, mostly about how you're not allowed to put nuclear weapons in space. That is the big no-no. That is If you look at the Outer Space Treaty, the thing they're really concerned about is orbital weapons. And for good reason, because if you launch a rocket that has nuclear warheads on it, and you can have that go above another country that perhaps you have a beef with, then you can drop missiles on that country in just a minute or two. And so there's no warning. You can just sneak attack some other country and destroy them before they have a chance to respond. And instead, we have the perfectly sane, very rational, you have to have your nuclear weapons on submarines that can't be found or in silos in the middle of the Midwest or launched on airplanes. And that will give people, you know, 20 minutes of warning before the apocalypse. And they can decide which of the horrible, horrible possibilities they want to consider. So, you know, we are very civilized. But the Outer Space Treaty also has a bunch of other provisions in it. And they talk a lot about how you cannot, no nation may claim any place in space. So you cannot own the moon, you cannot own Mars, you cannot own Alpha Centauri, you are not allowed to own any of that. So that is the framework of the Outer Space Treaty. And all the nations that have the ability to go to space have signed this treaty. That said, there's this sort of term in law, possession is nine-tenths of the law, right? That if a nation was to try to violate the Outer Space Treaty and actually set up shop on the moon and say, we own the moon, then they're going to have problems down on Earth. because if it's China, United States, Canada, right, whatever, you still have this global economy, these interactions, these trade flows that are going back and forth, laws, regulations, and there's a lot of pressure that various nations can put on you to get you back in line with the Outer Space Treaty. They can do embargoes. They can kick you out of the global financial system, they can remove investments, they can switch currencies. There's a lot of economic damage that the rest of the world united can do to any country that is trying to violate the outer space treaty. Same thing with Mars. If the United States says we're going to own Mars, then the rest of the world can say, no, you don't. As long as you keep saying that you own Mars, then we're going to punish you here on Earth. This is where you keep all your stuff. Where it comes to the sort of possession is nine-tenths of the law is that if you can actually go to Mars, let's say some country goes to Mars and actually sets up a city and says, no, no, don't worry, we're not trying to own Mars. And then they say, okay, actually, you know, Mars is really profitable. We now own Mars. Mars is part of Japan. then and the world goes well we're going to hammer japan economically and japan goes yeah i don't care whatever do what you want because mars is more profitable and that people will have to actually decide whether they want to go to mars and stop them from uh owning mars and that is very difficult and so when we think about sort of the plans of people like elon musk right he wants to go and build a city on Mars. And if he went to Mars, built a city, the city was self-sufficient and that they decided to cut off all ties with earth and declare their own sovereign country of Mars, their own planet. It would all be on whether or not people were willing to send warships and Marines from earth to Mars to solve this problem. And it is very expensive. Now, there's no reason to do this because there's no profit to be made on Mars. And so wouldn expect anybody would ever actually do such a thing So it is a violation of the outer space treaty But then you know we see international treaties get violated all the time And so and there are no consequences for violating international treaties. So the really, the the reason that nobody is going to try to claim Mars is because there is no value in it. There's nothing to be gained from saying that you own Mars apart from the bragging rights and a lot of pissed off neighbors on Earth. Mike D. Isn't this the expanse? Yeah. I mean, you can imagine this future where somebody finally figures out an economic reason for Mars that, that isn't just a giant pit in space that you have to pour money into forever because that is what Mars is today. And so any nation that tries to go to Mars and try to set up shop and build a city is just going to be dumping money. It is the equivalent of buying a boat. Anyone who's ever bought a boat, the way it's described is it's just a hole in the ocean that you pour money into. Well, if you want to own Mars, it's just going to be a hole in space that you're going to be pouring money into. You're going to be sending replacement parts and propellant and food and new colonists. And then you're going to be bringing home nothing. There's nothing on Mars that we don't have here on Earth. But you can imagine some far, far future, hundreds of years from now, where the gross domestic product of the entire solar system has grown to the point that some base on Mars has figured out how to be economically sustainable, fully self-contained, and capable of cutting ties with Earth. And this is what happened in The Expanse. The Martians were trying to terraform Mars. The asteroid belt, the belters, were declaring their own sovereignty. Earth was dying, essentially, because of climate change and was an overpopulation and was just becoming a very bad planet. The reality, of course, is that Earth is so much better than, you know, the worst possible Earth is better than the best possible Mars. That you could go to Antarctica in the middle of winter, and it would be a more hospitable place than Mars near the equator on a nice, warm, sunny day. It's going to be really tricky. It's can take a lot of technology for us to not make these places just instantly kill us, right? Whether it's an asteroid, whether it's Mars, whether it's the cloud tops of Venus, the Terminator on Mercury, the moon, any of that, all of space is just incredibly hostile and beyond our technology for the foreseeable future. And so we'll only be the places we can go to explore. But there will come a day when our technology is trivialized living anywhere in the solar system. And then perhaps people will have those conversations. It's time to shout out our new patrons at the $5 level and above. Greg Marta, John Koons, Eric Herzl, Daniel Cummings, Gail Chandler, Dunk Cameron, Mike Heath, Christian Lane, Kerry Kliber, and Daryl John Salisbury, Space Oddities. Join our community at patreon.com slash universe today. Gig boss man. After 53 years, how far along would we be on the moon? A moon base 40 years ago, private moon cruises, etc. What say you? I think we are exactly where we are supposed to be on the technology curve of exploring the cosmos of of settling the solar system. Yes, human beings first set foot on the moon in 1969, which is 56, 57 years ago. Crazy, right? That a nation pulled together all of the technology, the engineering, and sent humans to the moon and back safely, and did it six times, and then stopped doing it for 53 years. That is sad. But it was incredibly expensive. If you go back and you look at the amount that the United States was spending on NASA during the height of the Apollo era, it is many times more what they're spending on space exploration today, like the budget of NASA, I think it was, it was $350 billion in inflation adjusted money for them to do the Apollo program. And it was $500 billion or so for the Gemini, for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. So for that, like 10 years, 15 years that they were doing all of those those missions, it was a lot of money. And especially for a nation that didn't have as much money at the time. So nobody has the stomach for that. And there were other priorities, they went move to the space shuttle, and they moved to Artemis. And here we are now, where the technology is starting to make things cheaper, where we've got reusable rocketry, we've got incredible computers new material science a much better understanding of keeping humans alive in space for long periods of time But we had to go through the space shuttle era the space station era and the reusable rocket era And now we in the let maybe go back to the moon And so it would have had to have been a fundamentally different world at the time. And if you've watched for all mankind, they tackle this question exactly, which is that, you know, what if the Soviets got to the moon first, how that would create a true space race, and then the Soviets and the Americans would be battling back and forth, and who knows what would happen. I don't know if that's true. I just don't think any nation has the stomach to spend that kind of money forever, just to keep spending that amount of money without some reason. As soon as there's some other issue that they need to spend their money on, wars, pandemics, new technology, housing crashes, bailing out billionaires, artificial intelligence, who knows, then the priorities shift and change, and there's no interest in that. And so NASA's funding has remained roughly the same, roughly in the kind of 20 to $25 billion mark for decades now. And that is a fraction of what it was back in the Apollo era. And so I have to kind of imagine, like, I have to put myself into this place, which is that every politician is space pilled. They just, they love space. It is like, it's the Kerbal space program. And you've got this incredible, exciting enthusiasm for space exploration. People have decided that they no longer want to fight wars anymore. And they just want to invest in really cool space research, trade, getting along with each other, solving the world's climate problems and energy problems, and developing the technology to go to space. in that world, in that dream world, then you would see something that would look very familiar to us today, I think, that we would have a permanently established base on the moon. We probably would have seen the first human explorers go to Mars by this point. We would probably see some human missions that have gone to asteroids, but it wouldn't be the expanse. It would be there's a station on the moon, kind of like there's a station down in Antarctica. there's a few tentative steps on Mars. The first humans have gone to Mars at this point, and tentative exploration into the asteroid belt. But, you know, it will have been delivering and demonstrating all of this technology that will trickle down through the rest of our society. And again, you know, you've got to kind of go watch for all mankind. Like, they did a really great job of just considering what would happen if to society, if enthusiasm for space exploration continued apace to what it was in the 1960s. And, and that would be really cool, especially when you consider the hundreds of billions of dollars that people spend on war, the trillions of dollars that people spend on war. It's crazy. And imagine if that money was spent on space exploration, or just, you know, better medicine technology, who knows? The key thing is, is that we would not have unlocked the economic engine for space. And that's the key. You know, the thing that you need is for space to pay for itself. And in fact, to drive revenue. Once you get that, then the whole endeavor, then it's a flywheel that spins up. And we probably would not have found that flywheel yet. So it would have continued to be this expense. And every year, governments would be like, why are we spending so much money on space exploration? We should be spending this money on Earth. We have so many problems on Earth. Why are we sending people to space, right? That is the conversation that you have when there isn't an economic incentive to do this. You don't see that as like, why are we spending so much money digging oil from the ground when we could be spending that money fixing problems here on Earth, right? People are just like, because we make money, that's why we do it. We don't have a because we make money yet for space exploration. And we may never. It could be hundreds of years before we figure out an economic reason to explore space. Daniel Whitehouse, do you think those blow-up modules would work on the moon? Yeah. So this is an idea that has been tested in space. There's a module that's attached to the International Space Station. that was developed by Bigelow Aerospace back when they weren't bankrupt, which was this inflatable, it's called Beam. It is an inflatable module that's attached to the International Space Station. And Bigelow had been developing versions of this that could be much, much bigger, where you would have, say, the volume of the International Space Station that could be inflated, but it would just be one launch. Lucky Martin has also been working on versions of this where you essentially send up the central core part of the station that fits maybe within a nine meter fairing of say starship and all of the electronics and the computers and the air flow systems and the bathrooms and cargo and all that is inside this sort of central cylinder. And then the outer part of the inhabitant can inflate and you end up with this torus. And this has been an idea that's worked as well. And so people have considered if you could build these inflatable structures on the moon that you could build, say, a hemisphere on the moon that you would inflate. And theoretically, this would work just fine. In fact, there was this potential idea for for rescue on the moon that was proposed back in the 1960s, that if astronauts were stranded on the moon, that they maybe should take some kind of inflatable tent for the moon. And that if they run into any problems, they can inflate the tent on the moon, they could survive for a couple of weeks so that a rescue could be mounted to bring them back home to earth. So yeah, no, the inflatable modules theoretically should work well. And I would be super surprised if the first permanent station on the moon isn't made out of inflatable habitats. It's a great idea. All right, those are all the questions that we had this episode. Thank you, everyone who asked your questions in the YouTube comments. Everybody who joined me for the live show. We're going to be off for a couple of weeks. I'm on the road. So we'll be doing some overtime. So the next couple of weeks, so no live shows until the roundup the 27th, 28th. That's when I get back. I'm going to talk about the new UFO release. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Glanklotz and Zelda more galactic defender who support us at the master of the universe level and all our patrons all your support means universe to us so I've had a whole bunch of people reaching out and asking me what I think about the new big release of information about UAPs uh you unidentified anomalous phenomena um on the department of war website and I haven't looked through them. So I don't have an opinion yet. And I probably won't look through them. I'm going to let other people. We did a story on it on Universe Today. Alan Boyle, who typically covers this information. This is his beat. He's been covering it. And then Mick West, who I consider to be sort of one of the best identifiers of unidentified flying objects, has looked through and sort of picked out what he considers to be the most interesting and mysterious. There's this one where it goes through a wind farm, one where it's in the desert, and it's pretty sure he's identified what it is that they are, but I'm not going to spoil it. I'm going to put a link down in the show notes. But like just in general, I have been reporting on space and astronomy news for 27 years now, and I have seen different flavors and versions of the disclosure is right around the corner. we're about to find out, finally, we're going to get the information. And nothing is ever delivered to the scientist that is actually actionable, something that scientists can look at, and figure out what it is that they're looking at, be able to do any follow on analysis, take samples of material, examine the DNA, perform alien autopsies, none of that it is all, here's a blurry picture at the very limits of what this camera can see. There's no more information that's available, and there's no way to get any more additional information. And so it has to remain unidentified. And once you have said that something is unidentified, you can't then in the same sentence, identify it and say that it's UFOs. And so, you know, like, I can't wait, I cannot wait for someone to bring forth really fascinating, interesting evidence that will set the scientific community abuzz, as they're able to really sink their labs into the material, try and discover new composites that have never been seen before, see forms of life that just could not have evolved on Earth, or be able to actually get up close to some kind of alien spacecraft that has traveled to us from another star system. And until that happens, we have to all remain collectively in a holding pattern, waiting for better evidence to come along. But until that happens, there's really no news to report apart from some people saw some stuff. And that's just like not enough for us to go on. All right, we'll see next time.
