Space Dreams: Reality Check | Kelly and Zach Weinersmith | 568

Today, I want to look at how thought leadership challenges our deeply held assumptions. And to do that, I'm going to ask a simple question: when will we have cities on Mars? Science fiction has used cities on Mars as set dressing and plot points for over a century. Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Babylon 5, The Expanse, For All Mankind. My guests today are Kelly and Zach Wienersmith, and together they actually stopped to ask and research deeply this question: How might we actually put a city on Mars? The TL;DR answer is it's not nearly as easy as we might think. Kellee is an adjunct assistant professor in biology at Rice University. Zack writes books and draws comics, including the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. And together, they are the co-authors of the well-researched and yet delightfully funny book, A City on Mars. Kellee and Zack took a multidisciplinary research approach, and this led them not only into questions of biology, spaceflight, resources, celestial geography, but even space law and its terrestrial equivalents. In this episode, we'll talk about their research process, how they had to overcome their own assumptions, and then how they made complex ideas approachable and even entertaining for mainstream audience. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Kelly and Zach.

Thanks for having us.

So I want to dive in with a question about the premise of your book to begin with, right? And how it popped my bubble a little bit and may pop other people's bubbles. I mean, I think back to all of the science fiction I watched as a kid. And every show had people traveling to the moon, whether it was Space: 1999 or it was Star Trek. And it was just assumed we will go places and that would be easy and there would be colonies and things. Now, your book is telling me that's not so easy in, you know, pretty strong detail. My first question is, along the lines of what does it take to overturn conventional thinking and get people to stop and listen to you?

I could start on that. Maybe Kelly has a better conclusion, but as you're talking about the science fiction stuff and the stuff you mentioned in particular, I was thinking about how there's this great quote we didn't get to end up using by Patricia Limerick, who was a Western historian, and she said something to the effect of once you pick a metaphor for how you understand something, both like controls and constrains your view. I think in the case of like Star Trek, Star Trek was originally pitched as Wagon Train in space, right? It was deeply cued on a sort of American notion of what the West was like, which was, I would say, broadly incorrect, both in the sense of what the actual American West was like, but also in the sense of whether it would even be applicable to space if it were like the myth. And so I think part of why, you know, we have this incorrect premise in the first place is because we are conflating a mythology, especially we as Americans, although Europeans often have some other exploration mythology that they go to. We're conflating it with the truth, right? So in this myth of the West, and in the way the West actually was, you know, there were things worth getting, there were resources, there were people to trade with. In Europe, sometimes you'll hear people talk about like, well, what about like the 1600s through like the 1800s, like the Age of Exploration for us? And what I always want to say is If there was the equivalent of the Kingdom of China and India on Mars, we would already have a huge armada of ships to go trade with them. And so I guess the point is, you know, you have to figure out if you're going to overturn a premise, it'd be nice to understand where it comes from. In the case of space, I think a lot of those beliefs sit somewhere at the apex of self-mythology for our country and the actual technological developments that occurred, especially in the late '50s through the '60s.

I think also building on that, we're also constrained by sort of the technology and the capacity of the time. So I was thinking of Georges Méliès and the Trip to the Moon, where they load the passengers in the cannon and just shoot them out the cannon, and then all of a sudden the moon has this big, you know, capsule embedded in it, right? Because they didn't have the visualization of the rocket ship, right? And so in some ways, our ability to envision— I mean, we've all seen spaceships and designs of battle stars and whatever, things that don't exist. And reality doesn't really look like that yet.

So cost for a long time has stood in the way. So the reason we were able to go to the moon is because that was part of a space race, and our government was willing to dump just huge quantities of money into it that we have not been willing to do again. Since there was a geopolitical will and that resulted in the money. Space— between now and when SpaceX— sorry, between the Apollo program and when SpaceX came along, it remained incredibly expensive to send stuff to space. And the Space Shuttle was supposed to reduce those costs by being a reusable way to send mass to space. But then it turned out that refurbishing the Space Shuttle in between uses was incredibly expensive, even more expensive than if you just threw everything away.

Right, the cost per pound or kilogram actually went up with the shuttle. Yeah.

Yes, right. Yeah, it wasn't supposed to do that, but it did. And so SpaceX has been sort of changing the game by dropping the cost of launching stuff to space and by making these reusable rockets that really do save money. So you can get mass up to low Earth orbit. But in our opinion, there's a big difference between being able to field satellites, which are very profitable, and being able to start a settlement, which requires that you can create habitats that keep humans happy and alive, and that we think we're not quite ready for yet.

And I want to get deeper into the thesis, but you talk about sort of the ladder and the scale of accomplishing things. I think we have this myth of the moon landings, and even watching what NASA has done on Mars, where they basically send a giant bouncy ball, it rolls a little bit, unfolds, and off it goes with the rover, or they send a helicopter, right? But if we look at more recent private attempts, it's hard to even land a spacecraft vertically on the moon without tipping over, right? There's a lot of hard engineering just to get something on the surface.

Something we didn't get into the book, but I think it's probably relevant, is there's this famous story. I think it was John Huboldt, who was a young engineer at NASA, who was the one who really pushed for what's called lunar orbit rendezvous, which is what, what everyone knows is what they did on Apollo 11. Like, you send this little spaceship to the moon, it lands on the moon and then jumps back up, like a piece of it jumps back up and docks. So the earlier and earlier proposal, which was pushed by von Braun, which I think if you went back to the '50s people would have thought was more likely, was to build out a kind of infrastructure which would have involved first building a giant, like an 80-person space station that would have utility, especially back in the '50s before modern microelectronics, you know, for, for surveillance and, and he thought weapon systems. We could debate that, but— and then only once you'd mastered that would you have sent ships to the moon, which would have had like something like a dozen scientists or more, sort of proper scientific way to do things. And so what's interesting is, is among a certain type of nerd, like an engineer, the, the story of pushing for lunar orbit rendezvous was a sort of heroic story, because it's the only way it was possible to get it done by 1969, was, was this version of a moon landing where you start with a skyscraper-sized rocket, a single giant rocket, and slowly pieces of it go away until you like land on the moon in a canoe. And what I always think of is though, like, it, it is, it is true that that was probably the only way to do it by 1969, but it, it, it set up what John Logsdon, who's, uh, one of the top historians of space, he called it a dead-end technology which produced a, a 40-year identity crisis for NASA. Because as you say, it was, it wasn't like with computers where each thing leads to the next step. We like threw a huge amount of money had a way to do the moon that really couldn't be repeated, not cheaply anyway. And so there, there, there wasn't that ratchet you see with other technologies. Like with something like phones, they get better every year because we're all willing to like pay 5% more. There is no such ratchet for going to the moon. There is for satellites, as Kelly said, you know, like, like if you, if you slightly improve the efficiency on size of a satellite, you know, you can cram more into a fairing and you make more money. But there's not something like that for the moon. And I think people think there is, or, or even in some cases think that it is so hard that they make up things that are worth doing on the moon that probably aren't.

So we've explored the premise a little bit. I want to go deeper, but first I have to ask this question. So Kelly, you are trained as a biologist and teach. Zach, you write webcomics and novels. My question is, how did the two of you become the obvious people to write this book?

Uh, you know, so, so first of all, I'll note that like for pop sci books, it's, it's very common for authors to jump into a topic they don't know anything about and just explore it for a couple years and, and go for it. But, you know, this topic in particular had so many different fields of research that we tried to combine into one book that it's not clear that there's any expert who would've been the obvious person to write this book, cuz it required knowledge of, you know, space science, physiology, space law, uh, other aspects of international law also. And so I think the, the obvious person to write the book are the people who have enough time to sit for 4 years and read textbooks every day. And so we, we had, we literally have 37 shelves on our bookshelves that are just books that Zach and I took turns reading and writing notes on and then going on walks to describe to the other one what we just learned about. And it was just, you know, it's just whoever's willing to do all of that work is the one who can write this book.

Well, and this is one of the things I want to sort of underline. There's a type of thought leadership which is going deep on a subject and adding to the conversation in that area. And then there's also a form of thought leadership which is synthesis and syncretic, where you look at the problem from a number of perspectives and say, okay, what do we really need to be talking about that isn't being talked about here? And I'm sure a lot of engineers haven't really thought about space law, for example, and, you know, the Treaty of the— and the Law of the Sea and all of those things where, like you said, there's no person that you could put out the job application for with the bullet points and everybody go check, check, check. Yeah, I did that too. Yeah, right. Yeah. So what interested you to this topic? How did you get here? Because you've answered the question of, well, there was no ideal.

But why you? Why did we get interested? Well, it was half by accident. So we had originally planned to write a very different book. It was still on space settlement, but it was kind of like the thesis was along the lines of, you know, space settlement is coming fairly soon and there's maybe not enough thought about what you might call human factors, which is both like the medical physiology stuff, but also psychology, economics, sociology. So we thought we were going to write a text about a kind of how-to now that we are doing this thing. And because we're lucky, we're in a position to ask our editor to give us multiple years to do research on a single book. We were able to get to the point where about 2 years in, we, you know, the thesis was very different and in concert with our editor who was very, very nice about it, agreed it was time to reorient the book toward a thesis that was more about the problems and less about, you know, the idea that this was an imminent possibility. And so— that in addition to that, we already wanted to cover lots of topics. Once we were going against the zeitgeist, at least among a lot of space people, then we really felt like we had to do an amazing amount of homework. So, you know, one thing that I think differentiates us, not from everybody, but from a lot of people who write in this area, is we will want to talk about like parallels between seabed law and space law. We didn't just reach out to experts, although we did eventually. We first read what the law was before reaching out. And that's, by the way, a whole interesting thing, which is when do you reach out? Right? Because there's a danger in reaching out too soon because then you just become the sort of apprentice.

And right. And you're almost doing transcription rather than coming with the sharp question.

Exactly. Which is dangerous because it's one, it's like maybe a waste of both your time. But two, you know, there's a danger that you are just going to pick up the zeitgeist and the zeitgeist often contains errors. And also you don't have the wisdom to know who you're talking to. Everyone inside a field of study knows who the good people are, or at least has opinions on it. So if you just find like the first person who is apparently prominent by like citation count or something, you're putting yourself in real danger of saying something silly. But then on the other hand, and Kelly and I kind of, I think we argue about this or we have a difference of opinion, which is I think Kelly would like to read like someone's entire corpus before contacting them. I'd like to read a few papers first, but there's probably a sweet spot between us. Probably.

Well, and I almost see the creation of almost the grad school approach of start with the lit review and build the annotated bibliography and say, okay, let's figure out what the significant pieces are and what the conversation to date is in that field. And then you also jumped back and you said, well, there's these things that were published in the early 20th century that haven't had a lot of traction. So you really did a deep environmental scan. From my take. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And it was part of why we wanted to write this book is because we did find all this stuff interesting. We wrote a book called Soonish together that had a little bit on space law. And I remember thinking, space law, oh, I wish I could just dig into textbooks. It blows my mind that this exists. And so we spent half a year digging into textbooks. And it was fun.

I've seen science fiction shows. I've seen shows that cover attorneys and that. But I haven't seen Space Lawyers, the television show. I think there's a pitch there somewhere. Mm-hmm. But you mentioned something, Zack, and I wanna turn to the two of you and say you had an initial response from people. It's like, oh cool, you're doing this book, right? And yeah, we'll be happy to do an interview thinking that the two of you were gonna be like, and here's how we charge boldly into the future, right? And at some point the positions switched for the two of you on research. And in the book, you use the term space bastards. Talk about that transformation, and if you would, define and explain who coined space bastards.

Oh, that's a good question. Uh, well, let me say, I, I was talking to a person who, who works in a related parallel field of research, and he said that they had— he had a small group, they called themselves the space humanists., based on the same concept. And I thought, that's a much better, uh, thing to call oneself. But, uh, but, but, but that said, the reason we, we started saying Space Bastards and it, you know, we joke about it, but it was actually quite anxious for both of us, which is, you know, when you start out, you're going to do the rah-rah version of it. There's a big support community who's like, yeah, you know, like support our in-group, right? We're the space people. We're team space. We love this stuff. You're going to write a book we love. And they helped us and they became our friends. And then later we kind of moved in a more— I don't want to say necessarily an anti-direction, but more like realistic, which is perhaps a kind of like dream-killing direction. And what was interesting is some people were totally cool with that and continued to help us and would actually be exactly what you want, which would be like constructively argue with you. Whereas some people became very angry and that was tough. This was not supposed to be a controversial book. It was supposed to be a fun book. And so I think what we discovered about ourselves was that we just are not controversial people. I have like, I have friends who do public speaking. They love arguing. I do not. I don't think Kelly does either. It was just that the only alternative was to lie. And so we would like, or say another way, we would rather be sad and anxious than wrong. So, so that's why we ended up going in this direction, but it was, it was not fun. We, we, we joke about it and we say space bastards, but honestly, we were just both like waking up at 2 AM sweating about like fighting with people.

Yeah, well, it takes a certain amount of discipline or even courage to be able to go, oh, this is going to go against the zeitgeist. Whether you use the framework of The Emperor's New Clothes, or, you know, you go back to Galileo and purportedly— but it's still— he says to the Inquisition afterwards, after he's confessed, yeah, but the planets still move, right?

It also takes a really good editor to call you out and be like, you guys— her name, Virginia Smith Younts. She's amazing. At some point, she was like, guys, you are writing a book that's like, yay, space settlement, but every fact you have in your book is like, this isn't going to happen. She's like, you have to update. What is your actual thesis now? And we're like, ah, you're right.

But that's interesting too, to your point, because it was like, the way I remember it is we had all this interesting stuff, and it kept not sort of congealing into a book. And then once there was a thesis that was like the actual thesis we wanted, it was like, and not that it was like easy, but everything sort of clicked. Like it was clear where to put everything. It was clear what could be cut and what had to stay. It was clear what could be made very short and what needed to be expanded. So it was almost like magic. I remember having this feeling like we kept doing stuff and it kept not resolving into a book. And then it was like that week where we sort of switched over, everything was just obvious. It was, it was, it was kind of magical.

So was it cathartic in that sort of sense of the, oh yeah, that's the book we really are writing? Or what was that process? Was there a challenge in letting go of the old hypothesis? I think by then we were pretty far gone.

Oh, Kelly, you want to say something?

Yeah, I mean, so for me it was, I was really nervous about writing the like anti-space settlement book. That's not the book I wanted to write, but there did become a point where I just had to accept that that is the book that we were writing. And anti is overselling it, just, you know, the critical of. The near-term possibility of space settlements. And then once I accepted that that's the book we were writing, I slept a little bit better and started steeling myself for the arguments. So it was cathartic. Yeah.

Well, and I want to underline the importance of having someone who can do sort of the conceptual sparring with you because when you're deep in the weeds, it's very difficult because you're trying to stitch the pieces together. And having an editor who can come back and say, I don't think you're writing the book you think you're writing.

Yes. Yeah, well, with something like this, we're like, so like, in space research, there's a lot of really smart people, like definitely smarter than we are, like super turbo Einstein types, right? And so to come into this field and tell them that they are wrong, that's hard to do. That's very uncomfortable and it makes you very scared. And so one of the things that ended up being helpful is actually talking to the people who got very mad at us and reviewing their arguments and being like, no, like there's this weird thing where it was like sometimes people would say stuff that was so obviously wrong, it was actually sort of encouraging because it was like, oh, okay, people can be smarter than us, but just believe crazy stuff. And so it did, like what matters is who's got command of the facts. And so there's a certain point at which we, I think we both felt kind of freed by those interactions.

And I wanna turn to you, Kelly, as the scientist, right? I'll come to the webcomic and humor element in a bit, Zach. But there is a strong empirical backbone throughout this book, right? And so coming at that from that approach where you have an— not only a teaching interest, but a desire to pursue truth, right? And to see things more clearly. How does that inform this work? And how does your academic training sort of lean into this?

Well, so first I'll note that Zac has 1/3 of a physics degree. So he also— he also has a— I did not know that. Two-fifths. Two-fifths. Yeah, so he also has a scientific mind. And so the way we split up the work often was that Zac would read the review papers and the textbooks, and then I would dig into the original papers that were reviewed in the reviews so that I could see, like, What kind of scientific or what kind of experimental design did they use? What was their sample size? And so, you know, the stuff that I learned in grad school about how to design a good experiment, the stats classes about what kind of sample size you need before you trust the results.

All the juicy methods sections that most people sort of glaze over.

Right.

But that's where the important stuff is.

Oh, it totally is.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if that's bad, you can't trust anything else. And so, so, you know, Zack, like, Zack, what are, what are the figures that you joke about that you, you get us like, 80% of the way.

The joke, so well, the way I remembered it, so like on our last book, it was just kind of divide and conquer. Like one person would read and kind of do the write-up. And I think, you know, we were both kind of doing everything. And on this book, it was just so much work. We had to divide labor. And I remember it like it was a single conversation. And I can't remember which of us proposed it first, but it was essentially like we agreed that we would sort of stage how the chapters got written, which was that we would both read, but with the recognition that our joke was I read very fast with 80% comprehension and Kelly reads very slowly with 100% comprehension. And so meaning that's where we both kind of read everything. So it's a little bit muddier than that, but essentially I was the one who was reading 800 future casting books and Kelly was the one reading the NASA radiation dossier. And then we would kind of pile that into a giant notepad. We have thousands of pages of Google Docs. And, and Kelly would convert that, synthesize that into what we did call the dossier, which is like the— if this was for an academic, this is the 30-page nightmare treatment with citations. And, and then I would convert that down into a proposal for a chapter.

So, so Zach also thinks very scientifically. So it was like having— it felt to me like having two professors doing the reading together. But we just sort of divided who was focusing on what at the end.

Thank you for that clarification. That was a piece I didn't know. So the other thing I think I heard there is you were looking for basically for any claim you were making, what are our citations? And then did you actually send back out to folks that you had spoken with to do sort of the fact check as well, if I remember correctly, to say, hey, are we aligned or misrepresenting here?

We did. Yeah, yeah. And so we sent a bunch of our chapters out to experts afterwards to just be like, does this make sense? So we had a chapter on whether or not you can make nations in space. So we sent it out to constitutional scholars. And so we did get a lot of input, especially if we were pushing back against people. Like, we wrote to Asgardia, who hopes to be the first space nation. And we tried to make sure we weren't misrepresenting them because we think it's a far-off idea that's maybe not likely to work. And so we wanted to confirm that we were giving the nicest version of their pitch. They never wrote us back, but we always made an effort.

Fair. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts, and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So let's move a little bit forward into details on some of the book, because one of the things that I found really interesting was once you moved from, okay, here's some of the obvious stuff. The biology. How are we going to handle, you know, reproduction? How are we going to handle defecation and all that stuff? How do you poop in a bag, right? Yep, yep. You wind up getting into questions of, well, what models do we have on Earth already, whether they're from a legal perspective or a rights perspective, that are anything like this? You went looking for analogous frameworks. So I want to dig in there a little bit into how found patterns that could be extrapolated outwards in that regard?

Well, so we touch on a lot of different topics, and for each topic we tried to find the relevant analog situation. Uh, so for law, we felt like Antarctica and the deep seabed were similar because they're both places that are absolutely miserable, but technology has pretty recently opened up our ability to extract resources from them. So And there are also areas that are supposed to be common heritage, so they're supposed to be owned by just about everybody, or global commons. For psychology, you want to look for isolated and confined environments. So particularly initially on Mars, you're going to have a lot of people in a tight space. So we studied things like submarines, life in research stations in Antarctica, polar exploration. And essentially what we learned from those places that we've already extracted most of what we need to know from those environments. And NASA already knows a lot of that stuff and has it already rolled into their mission plans. So yeah. And then additionally, you know, we've had ro— we've had space stations orbiting Earth for about 50 years now. So since the '70s, the, you know, the Soviet Union got the first space station up there. There have been people in space almost continuously since then. Over something like 650 people have visited them. And we've collected some data. Those data were not meant to prepare us for settlements, which involve having babies in space. They were just meant to help us understand what it's like orbiting Earth. But, you know, there are lots of places where you can go to collect data and draw some conclusions.

Let me just add to that a little thing, which is, is in terms of like trying to, to find the relationship. So like one thing that was really important to us was that stuff about like if you want to talk about space law, to the extent it's ever talked about among people interested in this stuff, it's as a kind of isolated thing you can analyze. Which is we came to think a really bad way to do things because it turns out, you know, space law is deeply tied to how we regulated Antarctica and how we regulated the seabed. And then they're also considered like what happens in one of those zones sets precedent for another potentially. So like skipping that entire background that this is how we regulated things in the 20th century really misses the picture. And it was, as Kelly was saying, it's very similar. One of the nice things is Antarctica and the sea are also reasonably good analogs for human psychology in space. You'll often see an article— we've seen several of these recently— saying, you know, humans in confined spaces just sort of crack. And you would want to check that against something, you would, you would think. And it turns out we have reasonably good data from Antarctica going back to 1948 and nuclear submarines going back to, I think, like the late '50s. And people don't crack. I mean, they do occasionally, but that's true on the mainland. There's not some sort of enhanced rate of psychosis. I mean, and that's a little complicated by the fact that it's a selected group and it's a self-selected group. But, but the results are pretty boring. So it's really valuable to go beyond like guesses about the specific situation you're looking at for like related zones that might help answer the question. It makes, it makes for a much deeper understanding.

One thing that really surprised us while we were doing the research is that often people will, will recognize that there is an environment that could have some relevant insights for what they're doing, but they won't dig into the literature. Yeah. Like we, we, we— Say more, please. Yeah, yeah. So we— I would go to conferences and people would say, oh, space— the first communities in space are going to be company towns. And you'd be like, oh, well, what were company towns like? And what could we learn from company towns that existed on Earth so that we can avoid— we've all heard stories about how company towns go bad, go wrong sometimes. How can we avoid that? And then people would say, oh, well, we're going to want to be communal in space because you're not going to be able to afford to have a kitchen for everybody. So you're going to have to share kitchen space. You're probably going to have to share your garden. And so you'd be like, okay, well, what, you know, my sense is that communes fail a lot. And of course I'm thinking of like the '60s era communes. Right, right. What do we know about communes and which ones tend to stick around? And they'd be like, I don't know, it's going to be like a commune. We're going to share stuff.

And you're like, ah, read the literature.

So what can 1,000 years plus of monastic tradition teach us about, you know, living together? Seems like there are communities that have done this that could be studied.

Yeah, well, especially to like— so we actually wrote a paper on communes. It was originally part of the book. There wasn't room for it, but we did write one on company towns. And it's like, you know, it's not just that you could say, let's look at communities where people live together. At this point, a number of setups are very well studied in a quantitative way by economists and sociologists. So meaning, you know, our sort of razor for what got to stay in the book was if by learning it you would change something about your design for your mission or society. Right. So if something is super interesting, but you wouldn't actually change anything, it's not relevant. So some people will say, you know, you look at this or that group from like the 12th century. And usually all you could do is think, well, I could get a cool lecture out of this, but I don't know if I would actually tell like Elon Musk to change his proposal. But with something like communes or company towns, once you've stated this is the plan, we're going to run a company town, there's a huge body of literature. They're extremely well studied by economists who are interested in like labor relations. Um, and so, so meaning they're like knobs you can turn. And, and, and so like why you wouldn't go into that body of literature, uh, like, so, so there's a really strong tendency for what people do is that when they go into the literature, they find someone who is a space nerd who also thinks about company towns rather than going into someone whose beat is just company towns and saying, what if I gave you these parameters that are true in space? And it was such a more interesting, like separate from it being good practice, it's just way more interesting to take what you know about space and apply it to actual literature.

Well, and you mentioned something that I love, where pieces that didn't make the book wound up as publication papers, right? Yeah. And adding to a conversation in a different way. And so there's a meta-thread here of, as you go through, you're identifying what overturns conventional thinking and changes planning, what adds to knowledge, and then who needs to hear this conversation. Does it go into the popular science book, does it get circulated back to a more academic community? There's sort of multiple levels of conversation concurrently happening and dialogue.

Yeah, and I don't know that we're getting to the right people. I don't know if Musk and Bezos are reading our book, for example. There's only so much you can do. But I know some of the people who work at their companies have read the book. So maybe you change culture that way. I don't know.

Well, and from a culture change perspective, I mean, there are different models out there, right? Because when you're trying to overturn the established order of what every— everyone knows, the sun goes around the Earth, for example, there's some pushback, some resistance, and it takes a while and a lot of data and a lot of voices to amplify. And so not just one voice can sort of say, hey, this is now the truth, and everybody jumps in.

Yeah, I was going to say, one thing we really tried to do, because we know we're arguing against some people's sacred beliefs here, is— and I don't know if everybody agrees we achieved this, but we tried very hard, one, to not say anything in like a mean way. We like— I don't think in this book we ever call anyone an idiot. Well, maybe one or two legal theories we called stupid, but even then, like, we really laid out— and we actually, even then, we explicitly said they're not stupid. They're, they're making art, you know. And so we did try to be very, you know, gentle and conversational, uh, and, and not sort of call out people. We also tried very hard to not, like, inject any politics. So when we try, like, to the extent possible, like, when we talk about company towns, obviously that's a very fraught issue in many directions. We tried as hard as we could to just stick to, well, what, what do we know data-wise about, like, when these things go well or poorly, uh, and, and, or even, like, when saying, like, here's our view of, like, how you might set up a bureaucracy to manage, like, lunar claims. Like, we're, you know, we're trying to say, you just, just lay out the case. There's no kind of, like, and if you don't agree with us, it's because you're one of those crazy so-and-so's. Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's important because, like, in space, for a lot of people, this is very sacred, like, the beliefs we're talking about. And so, like, you know, for example, when we say Kennedy was acting politically, not for, for science, which is very well documented, we provided like a lengthy transcript chunk. I don't think we were like gloaty about it. It was just like, you know, we're trying to explain to you what seems to have actually been the case.

If you go through the book, people from the left will be mad at us on some chapters, people from the right in other chapters. I think every chapter we wrote, we were thinking we had like some friends in mind where they were like, what enemy are we making of our friends in this chapter?

A little bit of an equal opportunity offensive, I guess, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I want to turn from data to humor, and let me start with you, Kelly, on that. How academic papers, and certainly the methods section, sections are known for their jokes and humor. So where do you see the role of humor in making the complex simpler and accessible? And then I want to get into with Zach how.

So I, I have to admit that I have submitted scientific papers and had reviewers write back that I, that it sounds too simple. I'm not using the jargon. I've always had a preference for just like, just say the thing with as little jargon as possible.

Rather than gatekeeping. Yeah. Right.

And you know, and this is, this especially started to be like a thing to me after writing Soonish, because we had to read papers from so many different fields. That, and it was so hard to understand some of them. And then you'd read the next paper and it would be simple. And you're like, oh, this can be explained clearly if you leave all the jargon out. And so I've always preferred simple explanations when you can get away with it. I always, I enjoy a good joke. And especially if you're going to be doing 5 chapters on international law. And our editor was like, oh, you know, you guys originally pitched 1 chapter, but you, you think, you think people want 5 chapters on international law?

You're gifting us with 5. Thank you.

So we promised to try to make it as funny as we could. Uh, and so I think that's a good transition to Zack.

So, you know, hopefully it doesn't read this way, but actually most of the jokes were added toward the end. Uh, and by that I mean like in the last few months, really. Uh, well, I mean, at least for a given chapter, it was always like the last step. I mean, if we thought of something funny, we'd put it in, but it was, it was more of a polish step. And the, the kind of, you know, the spine of the book is just what we think the bare minimum set of information is to give a complete picture. I know it's like the book is like fairly thick, but you know, we had a lot of stuff. The book is like about 30% shorter than the draft we wanted to do initially, which our editor saved us from, I would say. Saved the reader from. Yeah, so, you know, our theory is essentially like, you know, when you're doing pop science, if you want to hold on to your audience, you can either make it so low level they can just turn the pages. Or you can kind of try to, you know, lard it up a little, throw in some stories and jokes to get them through the important stuff. Because it is, you know, to have a really complete picture, you do need to talk about things like what is geology like on Mars, which maybe isn't for everyone the most engaging. And then in the same book, if it's this book, you have to talk about like, you know, what is the history of law in outer space, which is not always a page-turner. Let me tell you, those textbooks were some of the endurance challenges of this research project. And I could totally believe that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just, you know, they're meant to be dry and repetitive, to be clear, but Jesus. And, and so, you know, as an example, I remember I happened to be reading— I didn't end up finishing it because it wasn't super relevant, but there's a book called Operation Deep Freeze, which is about Operation Deep Freeze, which was when the US permanently inhabited Antarctica, I think starting in 1948.. And I happened to come across this story about Nazis landing on Antarctica in, I think, 1943 and literally heil-ing a penguin. And I was, it was like, not relevant to space, obviously, but I was like, I, this is an amazing, how can people not know about this? And we, we managed to track down like a paper from the '60s that was like a narrative account by a guy who was there. And what was amazing though is I remember thinking like, this is gonna buy us a lot of Antarctic law. Because like learning about the ins and outs of Antarctic law is not the most engaging. But if instead of saying things were a bit tense prior to the creation of the Antarctic Treaty System, you could say, let me tell you, Nazis were trying to claim chunks of Antarctica. And here's a funny story about that. Now the audience is interested. And so now you can work in all the depth you want, or at least a lot of it, uh, because you've kind of bought the attention span. And so it's like, I feel like you keep lifting people along and by the end they've learned more. And hopefully you're still amused.

I think it's worth noting that any writing style is going to leave behind some readers. So if you write a humor book, you're not going to reach the humorless. Right. The Nazi Penguins, I did see somebody write a review about, and they include stupid stuff like some Nazi heil'd a penguin once. Who cares? And I'm like, well, no, no, no, we thought it was really funny.

How can you not care about that?

Yeah, so I mean, I guess every writing style has its fans. But when you make jokes, you risk— losing the people who don't like your sense of humor, but we hope it worked for a lot of people for us.

So we've sort of abridged this discussion on audience by referring to it as pop science, but who did you see as your audience? Because sort of the level of sophistication you write, the "explain it to me like I'm in 5th grade" versus you're assuming an audience has, you know, an education and has done some reading outside. Who did you have in your mind in terms of audience for this?

For me, the audience I eventually had in mind was, I guess, people like me 5 years ago, people who didn't really know much about space but were sort of interested and would hear Elon Musk saying, we're going to have a million people on Mars in the next 2 to 3 decades. And I remember hearing Musk saying stuff like that and saying, well, then why aren't we— if it's that easy, why aren't we there yet? Something's not making sense here. And so the people who are sort of interested but want to actually know where we are And then I guess stretch goal, we'd love to convince the people who are already in the community and are trying to make space settlements a reality. We'd like to make sure that they've got all the different pieces in their head and they can see the big picture. And maybe we can all work together on solving these tough integrative problems.

Yeah, I think there's a thing with pop science, with books I think of as bad pop science, they often don't assume they have a curious audience. And so they're doing a little too much song and dance. Do you know what I mean? Uh, like, I, I, I really think if you're already someone who's picked up a book that's on, you know, something like space settlements, you, you should assume they're someone who's willing to go with you a little ways and, and that you don't have to, like, you know, make it seem like they ought to be interested even though science is boring, right? Like, I, I think at least for us, like, the pop science books we love, we're trying to write the kind of book we like, which is, oh my God, I've never thought about any of this, and here's everything about it. Which is obviously not for everyone. Maybe the typical book consumer would much— I mean, going by sales, they'd much rather have the Britney Spears memoir. But the people who pick this book up are curious people. They're a different sort of feel. So you should write for them.

So let's talk about the book as a whole and the impact you wanted to make. So A City on Mars here, whether we're looking a year out or maybe 3 or 5 years, Kelly, what impact would you like to see? And how will you know this book has achieved?

So to be honest, I feel really great already because we've had a lot of people send us emails saying, we're in the community. We've felt like this sort of more nuanced view needed to be put out there, but nobody was really doing it. And so we appreciate that you've done it. And in fact, you got me to think about a couple angles I hadn't thought about before. That was exciting. And then we've also— Zack pretty regularly searches Reddit and looks for space stuff. And pretty often underneath a claim that's a bit extraordinary about space settlements, somebody will say, oh, you should read A City on Mars. It's actually not that simple. And so to be honest, I feel like we did what we were setting out to do. We've got people thinking a little bit more critically about this question and hopefully without completely squashing enthusiasm for the idea of space settlements one day. And I think we've got some discussions going. So I guess I'm going to go ahead and pat myself on the back and say— Mission accomplished. I think we did what we wanted to do.

Roll up the banner. It's done.

Exactly. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's basically how I feel. I also think like, I mean, there's stuff you could say like, it'd be neat if tomorrow some important person was like, you know what? We have been saying the wrong thing. We'd better start saying something else. But I don't know, it's almost like, you know, that sort of thing would be nice, but I don't know, part of getting to write pop science is just like, it's a fun lifestyle. And also, you know, I don't know if there was a lot of people who thought the sky was green and it was blue, someone ought to write the book saying it's blue. And, you know, whatever gets achieved after that, you know, the book ought to have been written. So like Kelly said, I think we're becoming like, hopefully something like the book of reference for pushing back on this stuff. And that to me is, is like 100% of what you could ask for. Everything else would be just the nifty bonus. Yeah.

And with that, there's a bit of a mic drop with this book because this is not the field that you are going to continue. The next books are not going to be subsequent, if I understand correctly, on this. You're moving on to next topics on that. So you have to be willing to join the conversation, engage in it, and then put it aside to move to the next question.

Yeah, it's like a mic drop and then a cowardly run in the other direction. People will ask me like, well, what about space are you going to tackle next? And I'm like, nothing. You guys don't like me anymore. I'm out of here.

Yeah, but I feel like part of that is like, this was a 4-year book. This is about as comprehensive of a book as we could do. I don't know what we would like if we wanted to do it like If our publisher was like, we'll give you a giant pile of gold if you do another space book, I mean, probably we would say yes. I was going to say we wouldn't say yes, but we would say yes. And, but, but I have no idea what we'd write about. I mean, we, I can imagine all sorts of technical papers we could work on, but this was like, this really did cover everything. Like, like I can even imagine a second edition that's expanded, but like, but like a totally another topic. I didn't know what it would even be about.

So as we begin to wrap up, I want to ask a final question here. And I'll ask it to both of you. I'll start with Zach. So what advice would you give your younger self? You've been practicing thought leadership accidentally or purposefully, but knowing what you know now, what would you say to your younger self to either think or know or be aware of?

Oh, wow. That is a really hard one. I don't know. I am I'm always skeptical of like, even if it's me to myself, like older people advising younger people on how to navigate because like, as a cartoonist, like, so I have a cool job. I get to draw cartoons for a living. I often get asked by, you know, younger people like essentially some form of how do I get your job? And I always try to opt out because like, I mean, I can say things about the craft of doing comics or I can say things with books. I can talk about the craft of doing books. I do think that's very important. But the part where you climb the ladder was very different when I started. And that was only really 20 years ago. And I've become more out of touch every year. I don't know. I know this is a cop-out, but I do think it's like the only piece of advice that I consider standard for this sort of question is that you ought to meet your peers and know what the market is like. And hopefully think for yourself and work on getting good at what you're doing. But that's all hallmark card advice. I don't know that I'd want to say anything more particular.

So to your point, in terms of the world of publishing, what it was in 2000 versus what it is today, vastly different. Totally. But I would argue as well, there are still many different modalities that we're just starting to begin down on how you get an idea out and the ability to adapt to those modalities. And like you said, my journey might not be your journey. You've got a different set of tools in a different time. And I think that's entirely fair. Kellen, what advice would you give your younger self, or what goes through your mind?

You know, I think that, uh, as I've gotten older, part of my writing process involves reading a lot more. And the more that I read, the easier it is to write, and the more confident I am going into arguments. And so I think if I could talk to my younger self, I would say, every time you're staring at that page and you just can't get words on the page, you probably need to read more. So just sit down. There's probably something you don't understand because once it's all in your head, it comes out much easier. So just read more. I think that's the only advice I could give younger me that I would feel comfortable will stand the test of time.

Well, and I think it has for centuries. If you want to advance the conversation, you got to know what's going on. You've got to get a Pulse board. Before we go, would either of you like to tell the story of astronaut names?

I don't think I've ever been asked about that. It's— gosh, do you want to do it or should I?

How about I'll do the Russian one and then— or sorry, I'll do the first one, the Georgian one. OK, so I became a bit of a Soviet space program fangirl. And I learned a little bit of Russian. I was reading a bunch of books about the history of the Soviet space program, and I became sort of fascinated with how the Soviet program was willing to lie about everything. Like, there's no fact so trivial that they wouldn't lie about it. And I think my favorite example of that was they had this program called— oh no, what was it called? Interkosmos. Interkosmos. Thank you. Where they were sending people from different countries up to their space stations. And one of them was a guy from, I think it was Georgia, and his last name was Kakalov. And that sounds— the first part of his name sounds like a Russian word for poop, like a funny word for poop, even like, you know, doo-doo, or like what you'd call it to a baby or something. And so they changed his name to Ivanov, or Ivanov, even though, you know, that's not his last name. They were like, nope, we've got to lie about your last name. Like, needless to say, the Wiener Smiths would not be flying. And so they— They changed his name because they didn't want to take any chances. And then Zach, what was— there was one for what, a Mongolian cosmonaut? Yeah, we were really proud.

So the Kakalov story is— I don't want to say well known, but it's in a number of books. We only found one book referring to this other thing. There's no way I'm going to try to pronounce the name. But I think it was under Interkosmos, they had a Mongolian astronaut. And one of the backups had a syllable in his name that was something like hui. Which I guess in Russian means something quite, uh, X-rated. And so, uh, they made him change it, uh, which was kind of funny. So we— this is just a really short little like palate cleanser we put in the book, but we felt bad because like, you know, this is obviously quite juvenile. So we were trying to find like an American astronaut who had an equally stupid name, and we just couldn't. There were some goofy ones, but nothing quite on the level of of Kakalov. And, um, so the best we got was someone pointed out to us— I think there was a Dutch astronaut named Wubbo Uckels.

Wubbo J. Uckels.

I'm sorry, J. It's just like a Dr. Seuss name. Wubbo J. Uckels. Uh, so which, you know, everybody knows Dutch isn't real, it's a made-up language. And, uh, um, I'm sorry, I'm offending someone now. But, uh, no, so yeah, so, you know, okay, so the context for this So people think the book is the least bit serious, is we do sort of bookend sections about things that matter with stupid stories that fit nowhere in the book, but we could not bear to let go of, like, uh, Georgi Kakalov.

So Zach and Kelly Wintersmith, I want to thank you for joining us and talking about the journey towards writing A City on Mars, as well as the process of thought leadership. Thank you very much. This has been a blast of a conversation.

Thanks so much for having us. Yes, it was a ton of fun.

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