Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / The Science of "The Spare Man"

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The Science of "The Spare Man" · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Kelly, y'all set for today's episode? Yeah, I got
0:11
Speaker 1: all my equipment set ready to go. What about a drink?
0:13
Speaker 1: Is that part of your podcasting gear these days? You know,
0:16
Speaker 1: you and I usually record early enough in the day
0:19
Speaker 1: that that I'm not usually drinking while podcasting. And also,
0:23
Speaker 1: you know, physics bends my brain enough without booze making
0:26
Speaker 1: it all harder. Maybe there's a cocktail out there that
0:29
Speaker 1: makes physics easier, maybe something with caffeine in it. I
0:32
Speaker 1: thought I saw an energy drink once called dark matter.
0:35
Speaker 1: I think that would work. No, No, I'm not drinking
0:37
Speaker 1: anything called dark matter because that sounds super scatological. But
0:41
Speaker 1: maybe that's the biologist in me. I think it was carbonated.
0:44
Speaker 1: Is that health? No, it makes it so much worse,
0:48
Speaker 1: so much worse, thumbs down. I'll stick with coffee, Just
0:52
Speaker 1: don't call it dark matter. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a
1:09
Speaker 1: particle physicist and a professor UC Irvine, and I usually
1:13
Speaker 1: do physics wild caffeinated. And I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I'm
1:16
Speaker 1: a parasitologist adjunct at Rice University. And I'm a big
1:20
Speaker 1: fan of coffee. And we're both parents, which means that
1:23
Speaker 1: we've spent many nights up later than we wanted to
1:26
Speaker 1: and rely it on coffee to get through the next day.
1:29
Speaker 1: So many, so many, and Welcome to the podcast Daniel
1:33
Speaker 1: and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio.
1:37
Speaker 1: My friend and usual co host Jorge can't be with
1:39
Speaker 1: us today, so we're delighted to have one of our
1:41
Speaker 1: regular guest hosts, Kelly. Thanks very much for joining us again. Thanks.
1:45
Speaker 1: I'm excited to be back, and I'm super excited to
1:47
Speaker 1: be back for this episode in particular. Usually on the podcast,
1:50
Speaker 1: we dive into the mysteries of the universe, thinking about
1:53
Speaker 1: where it came from, how it works, how it might
1:55
Speaker 1: all happen, what's going on inside black holes, and whether
1:59
Speaker 1: or not we could have travel faster than light. Because
2:02
Speaker 1: we view the universe like one giant detective novel, the
2:05
Speaker 1: universe has left clues for us, and we are trying
2:07
Speaker 1: to unravel the rules by which it works. We are
2:11
Speaker 1: like bloodhounds sniffing out the next clue to try to
2:14
Speaker 1: help us understand what's going on out there in the universe.
2:19
Speaker 1: That's that's what bloodhounds sounds like, right right. I guess
2:22
Speaker 1: they don't know much about dogs. You're the biologist, so
2:24
Speaker 1: I'm not going to fact check your bloodhout for you.
2:26
Speaker 1: It was spun on. It was fun. But we have
2:28
Speaker 1: a fun series of episodes in which we dig into
2:30
Speaker 1: the signs of fictional universes. We think that creativity and
2:35
Speaker 1: art is an important part of being a scientist, thinking
2:39
Speaker 1: about the way the universe might be, rather than the
2:41
Speaker 1: way the universe is. As we stand on the forefront
2:44
Speaker 1: of human ignorance, we don't know how the actual universe is,
2:48
Speaker 1: so we have to hold in our minds several possibilities.
2:50
Speaker 1: Maybe there are lots of particles out there for supersymmetry.
2:54
Speaker 1: Maybe the universe is infinite, maybe it's finite, maybe it's
2:57
Speaker 1: shaped like a donut. In order to explore all these ideas,
3:00
Speaker 1: we need someone to generate these ideas. And while theoretical
3:03
Speaker 1: physicists are quite adept at that, there's another group of
3:06
Speaker 1: folks who are also working on the front lines to
3:08
Speaker 1: expand our minds. And those, of course are science fiction authors.
3:13
Speaker 1: Unconstrained by the rules of reality. They are allowed to
3:15
Speaker 1: create whatever universe they want for their stories to take
3:18
Speaker 1: place in. But sometimes those universes and those ideas inspire
3:22
Speaker 1: real scientists to think in new directions. I love the
3:26
Speaker 1: interplay between these two communities, the sci fi authors and
3:29
Speaker 1: the like physicists space people like I cannot tell you
3:32
Speaker 1: how many times while I was researching space settlements, the
3:35
Speaker 1: Expanse was cited as like a you know, a serious reference, like, oh,
3:39
Speaker 1: you know, space settlements might be like this as seen
3:41
Speaker 1: in the Expanse. And it's like, oh, wow, you guys
3:44
Speaker 1: are really clued into what's happening in these sci fi novels.
3:47
Speaker 1: And anyway, clearly ideas are being generated by scientists while
3:50
Speaker 1: they're reading through these novels. Absolutely, and it goes both
3:53
Speaker 1: directions right. Science fiction authors take the science seriously of
3:56
Speaker 1: their universes. They want to make something plausible, something realistic,
4:00
Speaker 1: something that the reader feels like is a really universe
4:03
Speaker 1: out there that they could experience, And physicists like me
4:06
Speaker 1: who read a lot of science fiction do get inspired
4:09
Speaker 1: by the ideas out there. There are some books that
4:11
Speaker 1: are very heavy on the physics. Greg Egan's books, for example,
4:14
Speaker 1: are very creative in terms of the fundamental theories that
4:17
Speaker 1: underlie his universes. He wrote a book recently in which
4:20
Speaker 1: there are two time dimensions and he worked out all
4:23
Speaker 1: the physics of how it works and came up with
4:25
Speaker 1: all these incredible realizations about how such a weird universe
4:28
Speaker 1: would work and then wove it into this story with
4:31
Speaker 1: his characters. Really an incredible intellectual achievement. Yeah, I'll have
4:35
Speaker 1: to read that. That sounds like a lot of fun,
4:36
Speaker 1: and that the books that we're talking about today also
4:38
Speaker 1: did an amazing job of world building and helping you
4:41
Speaker 1: really imagine what it would be like to live in
4:43
Speaker 1: that world. It's a real skill, exactly. And so on
4:46
Speaker 1: today's episode, we're gonna be talking about the science fiction
4:54
Speaker 1: universe of the spare Man. So this is a really
4:57
Speaker 1: fun book by Mary Robinett called who has been a
5:00
Speaker 1: guest on our podcast before for her book The Calculating
5:04
Speaker 1: Stars as part of the Lady Astronauts series. So, Daniel,
5:07
Speaker 1: here's what I'm wondering. Drinks come up a lot in
5:09
Speaker 1: this book. Do you typically sip cocktails while you're reading
5:13
Speaker 1: science fiction? I do enjoy cocktails with friends usually, and
5:18
Speaker 1: sometimes in the evening after a bunch of cocktails, I
5:20
Speaker 1: will come home and read a bit of science fiction
5:22
Speaker 1: as I fall asleep. But I'll admit it just makes
5:25
Speaker 1: me fall asleep faster, so I end up reading like
5:27
Speaker 1: a quarter of a page while a little bit tipsy.
5:30
Speaker 1: Sometimes it makes it harder to stay awake, maybe if
5:33
Speaker 1: I was drinking earlier in the day, but that's got
5:35
Speaker 1: its own downsides depending on how early you start. How
5:38
Speaker 1: about you? Do you ever sip cocktails while listening to
5:41
Speaker 1: science talks? For example? I enjoy sipping cocktails when someone
5:44
Speaker 1: else does the hard work of telling me what cocktails
5:47
Speaker 1: I should be making. But to be honest, I would
5:49
Speaker 1: rather just get a glass of wine. But my buddy
5:52
Speaker 1: Scott Solomon and I used to interview scientists for this
5:55
Speaker 1: series called Dorks, and our acronym was discussing our research
5:59
Speaker 1: and knowledge. Socially, it's a tortured acronym, but we got
6:02
Speaker 1: there and we had people come on and like dork
6:05
Speaker 1: out about the stuff they do. And every week Scott
6:07
Speaker 1: Solomon would pick a mocktail and a cocktail for us
6:11
Speaker 1: to try out. That was sort of along with the theme,
6:13
Speaker 1: and that was really fun. But you know, I usually
6:16
Speaker 1: I am sort of lazy and I prefer to just
6:17
Speaker 1: pop open a bottle of wine when I'm reading sci
6:20
Speaker 1: fi on my own. But the cocktails were fun when
6:22
Speaker 1: Scott was picking up Well. I know that the Drunk
6:24
Speaker 1: History series is very popular. I wonder if a drunk
6:27
Speaker 1: Science series would do as well. If you find out
6:29
Speaker 1: like what the scientists really think after the third cocktail.
6:33
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, I really want I want to do
6:36
Speaker 1: be the person who does this series. That sounds like
6:38
Speaker 1: it would be so much fun. A couple of times
6:40
Speaker 1: I've watched Drunk History, I loved it. Well, today, we're
6:42
Speaker 1: not here to pitch drunk Science series to Netflix, though,
6:45
Speaker 1: if any Netflix exects are listening, shoot us an email.
6:48
Speaker 1: We're here to talk about a really fun book, The
6:51
Speaker 1: spare Man, which is an unusual kind of book because
6:54
Speaker 1: it's both a science fiction novel and it's a murder mystery.
6:58
Speaker 1: Keeps you on the edge of your seat. Usually murder
7:00
Speaker 1: mysteries take place here on Earth because they rely on
7:02
Speaker 1: the reader understanding the rules and being very familiar and
7:06
Speaker 1: comfortable with the universe that takes place in, so you
7:08
Speaker 1: can understand the context for the rules and the clues
7:11
Speaker 1: so that the reader has a chance at least of
7:13
Speaker 1: figuring it out. So it's quite a technical achievement to
7:16
Speaker 1: put together a murder mystery in space that also makes
7:19
Speaker 1: sense and keeps you entertained. Yeah, and one of the
7:22
Speaker 1: things that I loved about this book is that it's
7:24
Speaker 1: it's in the future, but it's in the sort of
7:26
Speaker 1: near future. So you know, we're hearing a lot more
7:28
Speaker 1: about space tourism happening, and so that's starting to be
7:31
Speaker 1: a thing that's on people's minds. And the couple in
7:34
Speaker 1: this story are in space for their honeymoon, and they're
7:38
Speaker 1: on this giant cruise ship which is able to simulate
7:42
Speaker 1: the gravity of three different places, so the Moon, Mars,
7:46
Speaker 1: and Earth, which is just an incredibly complicated cruise ship
7:51
Speaker 1: moving through space. But you know, I've been on some
7:53
Speaker 1: incredibly complicated cruise ships, and so maybe maybe this is
7:56
Speaker 1: the direction of things. What do you think are we
7:57
Speaker 1: going to have one of these in the near future.
8:00
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. I don't even like cruise ships on
8:03
Speaker 1: the water, so I'm definitely not signing up for a
8:05
Speaker 1: giant cruise to Mars with huge spinning pieces that could
8:09
Speaker 1: pull themselves apart. But you know, there are lots of
8:10
Speaker 1: people who are excited about space tourism. It definitely seems
8:13
Speaker 1: to be a thing of the near future, but it's
8:16
Speaker 1: sort of been a thing of the near future for
8:18
Speaker 1: a while. Do you think this is like really the
8:20
Speaker 1: taking off point that it's going to be commonplace, that
8:23
Speaker 1: we're in the generation that sees space tourism is rare,
8:26
Speaker 1: and our kids are gonna be like, yawn, whatever, another
8:29
Speaker 1: sub over to flight. You know, I don't really know.
8:32
Speaker 1: I'm sort of hesitate to ever make predictions because I'm
8:35
Speaker 1: risk averse, I guess, but I mean, certainly we've been
8:38
Speaker 1: talking about space tourism for a long time, and this
8:40
Speaker 1: has been a super exciting year for space tourism. You know,
8:43
Speaker 1: Virgin Galactic had what was it one or two flights,
8:47
Speaker 1: they definitely had one, and then Blue Origin had a
8:51
Speaker 1: couple of flights. William Shatner made it to space I
8:55
Speaker 1: r L. That was very exciting, and Wally Funk made
8:57
Speaker 1: it to space finally, that was super exciting. She was
8:59
Speaker 1: one of them, a Curry thirteen, so one of the
9:01
Speaker 1: thirteen women who passed the tests to be able to
9:05
Speaker 1: you know, do space flight, but ultimately didn't get their chance.
9:08
Speaker 1: So certainly the pace of it is picking up. There
9:11
Speaker 1: was space tourism before that. I think you could pay
9:13
Speaker 1: something like ten million dollars. Dennis Tito was on the
9:16
Speaker 1: International Space Station for a while, and so it's it's
9:19
Speaker 1: going from something that only the super crazy, mega rich
9:24
Speaker 1: could do to something that the mega rich could do.
9:26
Speaker 1: So you're like removing some of the descriptors that I
9:29
Speaker 1: don't I don't know that you and I would be
9:31
Speaker 1: able to afford space tourism for quite a long time.
9:33
Speaker 1: But but maybe I'm wrong. Who knows? Are you suggesting
9:36
Speaker 1: that there are people out there who are mega rich
9:37
Speaker 1: who are not super crazy. I don't know enough for
9:39
Speaker 1: rich people to say, all right, well, let's get back
9:43
Speaker 1: to the book. As you say, it's set in space
9:46
Speaker 1: in the near future, and the basic set of the
9:48
Speaker 1: book is that a couple are taking a trip to
9:51
Speaker 1: space for their honeymoon. So this is supposed to be pleasureful, right.
9:55
Speaker 1: They're on a fancy cruise ship. It's all luxurious, they're
9:58
Speaker 1: eating fancy food, and and then there's a murder. And
10:01
Speaker 1: one of the cool things about the murder is that
10:04
Speaker 1: it's not fancy technology. They're not like zapped with the
10:06
Speaker 1: laser or stuffed in a space trash compactor. They just
10:10
Speaker 1: use a knife. That's true for the first one, but
10:13
Speaker 1: that's all I'll say. Actually, technically the first one requires
10:17
Speaker 1: knowing something about complicated closed loop ecologies. But but yes, yes,
10:22
Speaker 1: the first murder you hear about is with an old
10:24
Speaker 1: fashioned knife. It's got a really cool sort of tone
10:26
Speaker 1: to it. I think it was inspired by the movie
10:28
Speaker 1: The Thin Man, and so it's got these sort of
10:31
Speaker 1: old fashioned e cocktails and they're sort of on an
10:33
Speaker 1: old fashioned cruise ship. But then the whole thing is
10:35
Speaker 1: in space, so it's a really sort of fun mash
10:38
Speaker 1: up of styles. I also think it's written in a
10:40
Speaker 1: really fun voice. Mary Robinette, the author, is definitely a
10:43
Speaker 1: funny person, and you can hear it in her prose. Yeah,
10:46
Speaker 1: I've really enjoyed it. She created a very fun environment
10:49
Speaker 1: to spend, you know, three four hundred pages in and
10:52
Speaker 1: not only did she do this really nice thing where
10:55
Speaker 1: you've got this cruise ship with different kinds of gravity,
10:58
Speaker 1: but she also included a bunch of other cool, sort
11:01
Speaker 1: of near ish future tech and I thought it was
11:04
Speaker 1: interesting to see sort of her predictions for what will
11:07
Speaker 1: come online and like the next fifty years and what won't.
11:09
Speaker 1: What did you think about the tech that she introduced?
11:12
Speaker 1: I thought it was really fun. She has, for example,
11:14
Speaker 1: heads up displays, this kind of thing where you can see,
11:16
Speaker 1: for example, messages from your partner that nobody else can see.
11:20
Speaker 1: They're not like on a phone in front of you.
11:22
Speaker 1: There's like appearing virtually in your vision. I thought that
11:25
Speaker 1: was really cool. It seems to me like a very
11:27
Speaker 1: natural progression of technology. And she also has other sort
11:30
Speaker 1: of biological tech like pain controlling devices, which seemed to
11:34
Speaker 1: me like a really important area of research. I hope
11:37
Speaker 1: people are reading about this and going like, oh, that's
11:38
Speaker 1: a good idea, we should make that real. Yeah. I
11:41
Speaker 1: do think people are working on that already, but yeah,
11:44
Speaker 1: I agree. I would love to see a lot more
11:45
Speaker 1: progress in that particular area. And I also like that
11:48
Speaker 1: she thought through for these devices, like the social implications
11:52
Speaker 1: and how they would really impact the people. And so
11:54
Speaker 1: one of the things that made me laugh was she
11:56
Speaker 1: was talking about the heads up display and how you
11:58
Speaker 1: could sort of search for information and by like moving
12:01
Speaker 1: your eye to different places, and she said something about
12:03
Speaker 1: how like you could tell that this person was probably
12:06
Speaker 1: searching for information because their eyes were sort of going
12:08
Speaker 1: all over the place and they looked kind of, you know,
12:10
Speaker 1: wild eyed. I've always thought like, oh yeah, if you
12:12
Speaker 1: had a heads up display, you probably would look like
12:15
Speaker 1: a little you have crazy eyes sometimes. And anyway, I
12:18
Speaker 1: thought it was interesting the way she had her you know,
12:20
Speaker 1: her people sort of engage with the technologies that they had,
12:24
Speaker 1: and she didn't go wild with the technological extrapolation. She
12:27
Speaker 1: has like a bunch of semi autonomous robots that come
12:30
Speaker 1: and help people do things. But this is not an
12:32
Speaker 1: AI dystopian novel where you know, the machines rise up
12:35
Speaker 1: and murder people on their cruise ships or anything like that.
12:38
Speaker 1: It's basically like a realistic extrapolation of where AI might be.
12:42
Speaker 1: You know, it's like Superuma rather than you know, your
12:45
Speaker 1: car has taken over the world. And it was a
12:47
Speaker 1: really nice mix of technology and then advancements in sort
12:51
Speaker 1: of the other solutions that we have for things. So
12:53
Speaker 1: for example, there's a service dog and not a service
12:55
Speaker 1: dog robot, but an actual service dog with all you know,
12:59
Speaker 1: the things that come along with dogs, like you can
13:01
Speaker 1: lose track of them or something like that, or you
13:02
Speaker 1: have to make sure you don't step on them, where
13:04
Speaker 1: it's like a robot might get out of the way.
13:05
Speaker 1: And so yeah, it was a really nice mix of
13:08
Speaker 1: evolutions of various technologies, and then also just sort of
13:12
Speaker 1: some of the things that we have today carried forward.
13:14
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of very far future science fiction,
13:18
Speaker 1: you know, space operas like Alistair Reynolds. But I also
13:21
Speaker 1: really enjoy this almost immediate near future science fiction because
13:24
Speaker 1: it feels so tactle, like you can really get there,
13:27
Speaker 1: and some of the practical issues are really understandable, you know,
13:30
Speaker 1: you can really resonate with them. For example, a lot
13:32
Speaker 1: of the questions and we'll dig into this in a minute,
13:34
Speaker 1: revolve around law, like what happens when you commit murder
13:38
Speaker 1: in space? Whose rules or what laws actually apply? All
13:41
Speaker 1: these really funny scenes where she's on the phone with
13:43
Speaker 1: her very angry lawyer trying to figure out like exactly
13:46
Speaker 1: what to do. I feel like the near term sci fi.
13:49
Speaker 1: I like the far term stuff, but the near term
13:51
Speaker 1: stuff is almost more personally motivating because you're like, oh,
13:54
Speaker 1: what would space law be like in fifty years, and
13:56
Speaker 1: you know, would it build off of cruise ship law?
13:58
Speaker 1: Would it build off of the law for how we
14:00
Speaker 1: run the International Space Station? And I feel like the
14:03
Speaker 1: more near term stuff gives you a little bit more
14:05
Speaker 1: of a sense of hope for how things could go,
14:08
Speaker 1: or gets you a little bit more tied up because
14:09
Speaker 1: you know, maybe some of the stuff will get figured
14:11
Speaker 1: out in your lifetime. And so you know, for me,
14:13
Speaker 1: that's one of the fun parts of more near term
14:15
Speaker 1: sci fi exactly. And so we're gonna dig into the
14:18
Speaker 1: science of this cruise ship and the law of her
14:20
Speaker 1: space law, and then in a bid will have an
14:22
Speaker 1: interview with the author. But first we're gonna take a
14:25
Speaker 1: quick break. All right, we're back and we are talking
14:40
Speaker 1: about The spare Man, a book by Mary Robinett Cole,
14:44
Speaker 1: which is just coming out. We encourage you all to
14:46
Speaker 1: check out a really fun murder mystery in space that
14:49
Speaker 1: involves a few really fascinating bits of science fiction and
14:53
Speaker 1: also some bits of maybe legal fiction. So first, let's
14:57
Speaker 1: talk about the setting of the book. This takes place
14:59
Speaker 1: on essentially, what's a massive cruise ship in space, Like
15:03
Speaker 1: imagine taking a cruise to Alaska or Antarctica, except now
15:08
Speaker 1: you're in space. You're eating fancy foods, and you're looking
15:10
Speaker 1: at the window and seeing very inhospitable climbs. So do
15:14
Speaker 1: you think that they'll build that gigantic cruise ship on
15:17
Speaker 1: Earth and boost it up to space. So you think
15:19
Speaker 1: they'll have to build it in space. It's gonna be
15:21
Speaker 1: a tricky problem. It's going to be a tricky problem.
15:24
Speaker 1: And this cruise ship specifically has lots of literally moving parts.
15:28
Speaker 1: She has several huge rotating rings that can provide centrifugal
15:32
Speaker 1: gravity when at Earth levels, one at Martian levels, so
15:36
Speaker 1: you have two rings spinning differently. It has to be
15:39
Speaker 1: really big for that to work. I don't see how
15:41
Speaker 1: you build that on Earth and launch it. In order
15:42
Speaker 1: for that to happen, I think you're gonna have to
15:44
Speaker 1: build it in space, which means essentially you need like
15:46
Speaker 1: a space construction industry, right, which means like you need
15:50
Speaker 1: asteroid mining and really a large industrial base in space.
15:54
Speaker 1: How far do you think we are away from that
15:56
Speaker 1: kind of thing. I think we're really far away. I
15:59
Speaker 1: know that there are many people who disagree with me there.
16:02
Speaker 1: But you know, your construction on Earth is difficult, and
16:04
Speaker 1: when you're constructing in space you also have the problems
16:07
Speaker 1: of like you know, when you're away from the Sun,
16:10
Speaker 1: it's hard to have a power source, and when it
16:11
Speaker 1: gets cold, sometimes it gets so cold that you hit
16:14
Speaker 1: I think it's the duct tile to brittle transition, where
16:17
Speaker 1: when you have some metals, they go from being like
16:19
Speaker 1: something that will sort of bend if you hit it
16:22
Speaker 1: to something that will like break and crumble. So I
16:25
Speaker 1: thought that one of the problems that the Titanic had
16:27
Speaker 1: is that it was really really cold when it hit
16:29
Speaker 1: the iceberg, and instead of just sort of like bending
16:32
Speaker 1: in a little bit, like you know, if a baseball
16:35
Speaker 1: hits your car, maybe you get like a little dent
16:36
Speaker 1: in and it transitioned to brittle, and so it just
16:39
Speaker 1: sort of like crumbled away in that spot. There's all
16:41
Speaker 1: sorts of difficult things when you're work in cold environments,
16:44
Speaker 1: and you know, if you're exposed so for example, the
16:46
Speaker 1: International Space Station is exposed to the sun, it gets
16:48
Speaker 1: really hot and then it gets in the dark and
16:50
Speaker 1: it's really cold. That causes a lot of expansions, and
16:53
Speaker 1: it's difficult on things like the lubricants that you're gonna use,
16:57
Speaker 1: and so you know, there's a lot of things that
16:58
Speaker 1: we have to figure out that we really don't have
17:01
Speaker 1: a lot of experience with. And you know, if you're
17:03
Speaker 1: talking about building this giant, complicated cruise ship, I would
17:06
Speaker 1: say We're a long way away from doing that using
17:09
Speaker 1: materials that are just in space, but it would be
17:11
Speaker 1: fun to see it happen. Isn't it very difficult to
17:14
Speaker 1: make these kind of predictions because often they are exponential.
17:16
Speaker 1: You know, they're driven by market forces. But once you
17:19
Speaker 1: create some new technology, it allows things to happen that
17:22
Speaker 1: people didn't envision. And that allows things to happen that
17:25
Speaker 1: people didn't envision. I imagine there's a very broad possible
17:27
Speaker 1: set of timelines where it could take a hundred years
17:30
Speaker 1: or ten years or fifty years, But isn't it possible
17:33
Speaker 1: that it could sort of happen in the next few
17:34
Speaker 1: decades if the right things fall into place in the
17:36
Speaker 1: right way. Ye, if the right investment happens. It's a
17:39
Speaker 1: little bit hard for me to imagine because it's going
17:42
Speaker 1: to be so incredibly expensive, and that seems like that
17:44
Speaker 1: will be a limiting factor for a while. But you know,
17:46
Speaker 1: you've got SpaceX driving down the cost of sending stuff
17:49
Speaker 1: into space. So maybe we can build construction equipment on
17:52
Speaker 1: Earth and send it up into space and then get
17:54
Speaker 1: experience with construction in space. So yeah, I mean totally.
17:57
Speaker 1: I think if if enough people decide to invest in this,
17:59
Speaker 1: and we get some technologies that really break open our
18:02
Speaker 1: ability to do construction in space, then you know, maybe
18:05
Speaker 1: this could happen in the next couple decades, and then
18:08
Speaker 1: maybe we could finally build that space based solar power
18:12
Speaker 1: system we've been hoping for. Yeah, check out our episode
18:14
Speaker 1: where we discuss whether or not that's a great idea. Surprise, surprise,
18:18
Speaker 1: Kelly was skeptical. You were skeptical too, if I remember correctly.
18:22
Speaker 1: You were maybe nicer about it, but but you were
18:25
Speaker 1: also skeptical. I was more hopeful. You know, I want
18:27
Speaker 1: to see that happen. I think it sounds cool, except
18:30
Speaker 1: for the bit where we're shooting laser beams to the
18:32
Speaker 1: surface of the Earth from space. Yeah, they could have
18:34
Speaker 1: some problems geo political and otherwise. So another really fascinating
18:38
Speaker 1: element of this cruise ship is the gravity. She works
18:41
Speaker 1: really hard to make sure that there's comfortable gravity for
18:44
Speaker 1: people on this cruise ship. I guess she imagines people
18:47
Speaker 1: don't want to sort of float their way through the
18:49
Speaker 1: trip to Mars. Why do you think that is? Don't
18:51
Speaker 1: people want to go to space to experience zero gravity?
18:54
Speaker 1: If you're in space for a long time, you can
18:56
Speaker 1: have some medical problems related to life in micro gravity.
18:59
Speaker 1: But I remembered what we were doing the interview that
19:03
Speaker 1: she had the trip only last in eleven days, So
19:05
Speaker 1: probably that's a short enough trip that you're not going
19:07
Speaker 1: to get some of the you know, like bone and
19:09
Speaker 1: muscle degradation problems to such a degree that you have
19:12
Speaker 1: to worry about it a lot. But when you're in
19:15
Speaker 1: micro gravity, your body sort of stretches out and your
19:17
Speaker 1: like vertebras start, you know, separating from each other. And
19:20
Speaker 1: apparently that's a very uncomfortable feeling that astronauts complain about. Yeah, yeah,
19:26
Speaker 1: super uncomfortable, and so having some gravity will help with
19:29
Speaker 1: that problem. And then there's also let's say sanitation issues
19:33
Speaker 1: which are improved by having a little bit of gravity.
19:35
Speaker 1: Are we talking about like spilling your cocktail? So spilling
19:38
Speaker 1: your cocktail is one, but I was mostly thinking about
19:40
Speaker 1: bathroom related issues. So, like you know, on the I
19:44
Speaker 1: S S, for example, there's the complicated two hose vacuum
19:48
Speaker 1: system to take care of one and two. And even
19:51
Speaker 1: with this vacuum system, they still get quote unquote escape
19:54
Speaker 1: ease from time to time. And so you know, in
19:57
Speaker 1: a world where everything sort of goes down own. Things
20:00
Speaker 1: are a little bit less complicated when it comes to like, yeah,
20:03
Speaker 1: to sanitation issues and losing track of your stuff, and
20:06
Speaker 1: so it's it's a bit more comfortable and a more
20:08
Speaker 1: manageable thing when you have a little bit of gravity.
20:10
Speaker 1: And this really is a solution, right if you have
20:13
Speaker 1: a huge rotating space station, it can provide the experience
20:17
Speaker 1: of gravity. You see lots of fictional portrayals of space
20:20
Speaker 1: travel because it really is a thing. For example, you've
20:22
Speaker 1: ever been on the amusement park ride where they spin
20:25
Speaker 1: you around really really fast and you get pinned to
20:27
Speaker 1: the wall and then they drop the floor out beneath you.
20:30
Speaker 1: You stay pinned to the wall. You do not drop
20:32
Speaker 1: and plummet to your death, because there is the experience
20:34
Speaker 1: of the centrifugal force pushing you against the outer edge.
20:38
Speaker 1: If the wheel is big enough, we're spinning fast enough,
20:40
Speaker 1: you could walk along that surface. So this is a
20:43
Speaker 1: real thing. The science there is real. It is, but
20:45
Speaker 1: it's also weird. And one of the things that I
20:47
Speaker 1: appreciated about the spare Man was that she incorporated how
20:50
Speaker 1: life in a rotating environment is weird. So you know,
20:53
Speaker 1: there's a story where they're throwing something to the dog
20:57
Speaker 1: and one of the two environments where they're using centrifical force.
21:02
Speaker 1: So you know, when you're rotating and spinning, if you
21:03
Speaker 1: throw something, it's going to curve a little bit, and
21:07
Speaker 1: getting used to that is probably going to take a
21:09
Speaker 1: little bit of practice. So do you want to explain
21:12
Speaker 1: Corioli's forces and how those work? Yeah, there's an important
21:15
Speaker 1: wrinkle there. If you are standing on the surface of
21:18
Speaker 1: the Earth, you only feel a force down right at
21:20
Speaker 1: the force from gravity. But if you're the inside of
21:23
Speaker 1: Merry Go Round or a huge spinning spaceship, you feel
21:26
Speaker 1: almost exactly the same force. You feel a fource down
21:29
Speaker 1: sort of outwards away from the center, which would press
21:32
Speaker 1: you up against the ring of the spaceship, giving you
21:34
Speaker 1: the experience of gravity. But the spinning also generates another force. Imagine,
21:39
Speaker 1: for example, you're on a Merry Go Round and you're
21:41
Speaker 1: throwing a ball to your friend. The ball is going
21:43
Speaker 1: to travel in a straight line. From the point of
21:45
Speaker 1: view of somebody on the ground who's not on the
21:46
Speaker 1: Merry Go Round, They'll see you throw the ball from
21:48
Speaker 1: one spot and you'll fly through the air in a
21:50
Speaker 1: straight line to somebody else. But because you're on the
21:54
Speaker 1: Merry Go Round and you're spinning, you're not going to
21:56
Speaker 1: see the ball moving a straight line from your perspective.
21:59
Speaker 1: It's going to like the ball curves because the Merrygoround
22:02
Speaker 1: is sort of spinning under the ball as it flies.
22:05
Speaker 1: So we call this the Coreola's effect. Essentially, it's a
22:07
Speaker 1: force sideways. So if you're on this space station and
22:10
Speaker 1: you do throw a ball to your dog, it's not
22:13
Speaker 1: going to go in what feels like a straight line
22:15
Speaker 1: to you. Again, that's just a product of this whole
22:18
Speaker 1: thing spinning, of this artificial gravity scenario. Yeah, so if
22:22
Speaker 1: you are playing baseball and it's Earth team versus the
22:25
Speaker 1: rotating space station team, the rotating space station team is
22:27
Speaker 1: going to have a massive home team advantage because they'll
22:30
Speaker 1: be used to the Coriola's effect and it's gonna totally
22:33
Speaker 1: throw the Earth based team of guessing. Mm I think
22:36
Speaker 1: that would be really fun in the fire future, the
22:38
Speaker 1: Intergalactic Baseball champions. It also made me think about another issue,
22:42
Speaker 1: which is that if the wheel is not really very big,
22:45
Speaker 1: then the centrifugal force you feel changes as a function
22:49
Speaker 1: of the distance from the center so there's like no
22:51
Speaker 1: force at the center and a larger force at the edge,
22:54
Speaker 1: and if you start walking towards the center, it goes
22:57
Speaker 1: down and down and down. So if you're just on
22:59
Speaker 1: the ring, it's fine, but imagine you're kind of tall
23:02
Speaker 1: or the ring is not very large, then the force
23:04
Speaker 1: of gravity you're feeling on your head is less than
23:07
Speaker 1: the force of gravity you're feeling on your feet. That
23:10
Speaker 1: must be a little bit disorienting. There's so many things
23:12
Speaker 1: about building these rotating space stations that to me or
23:15
Speaker 1: like counterintuitive and complicated. So you know, the big wheels
23:19
Speaker 1: are going to be crazy expensive, and the smaller wheels
23:23
Speaker 1: are going to have problems Like what you just said.
23:25
Speaker 1: You know, your feet are gonna feel a different gravity
23:28
Speaker 1: than your head. And also when you have these smaller wheels,
23:31
Speaker 1: you get what I think of as the washing machine effect.
23:34
Speaker 1: So if they're unbalanced, you're going to get like, you know,
23:37
Speaker 1: the cot chunk, chunk chunk thing that happens in your
23:40
Speaker 1: washing machine when you have too many towels on one
23:42
Speaker 1: side and nothing on the other. Is that what they
23:44
Speaker 1: refer to it in the scientific literature, the chunk effect? Yes, oh, probably, probably,
23:49
Speaker 1: but maybe not. So we we read these proposals when
23:52
Speaker 1: we were reading about rotating space stations where they were
23:54
Speaker 1: talking about maybe having a water system that would counter
23:58
Speaker 1: the movement of people. So if everybody was on one
24:01
Speaker 1: side for a pot luck, they'd have to move something
24:04
Speaker 1: like a bunch of water to the other side to
24:06
Speaker 1: counter balance that, so you don't end up with like
24:09
Speaker 1: something catastrophic happening, like a hole on the side that
24:12
Speaker 1: you've got a pot luck and everybody being ripped out
24:14
Speaker 1: into the void of space. But that would be bad.
24:16
Speaker 1: That would definitely be a bad way to end your
24:17
Speaker 1: pot luck. And why is this a bigger issue for
24:20
Speaker 1: the smaller wheel. Is it because people are just like
24:23
Speaker 1: a larger fraction of the mass of the wheel, or
24:25
Speaker 1: does it have to do with the sort of lever
24:27
Speaker 1: arm My understanding is that it has to do with
24:29
Speaker 1: the mass. When you get big enough, the pony humans
24:32
Speaker 1: moving around don't cause the same kind of problems. You know,
24:35
Speaker 1: like your washing machine doesn't have to be perfectly balanced,
24:38
Speaker 1: but it needs to be balanced enough. And when you
24:40
Speaker 1: get a big enough wheel, the humans moving around don't
24:42
Speaker 1: matter as much. But tell me about this this lever
24:44
Speaker 1: thing you think that might matter. Also, no, I think
24:46
Speaker 1: it probably is just a mass effect. You know, if
24:48
Speaker 1: you have like ants crawling around inside your washing machine,
24:51
Speaker 1: they don't set it off because, as you say, they're
24:53
Speaker 1: a tiny fraction of the mass. So essentially, you need
24:55
Speaker 1: this thing to be so massive that humans moving around
24:59
Speaker 1: is not going to signific equally imbalance it. And this
25:01
Speaker 1: thing has a lot of momentum right it's spinning, it's big,
25:04
Speaker 1: it's massive, and so if it gets imbalanced and like
25:07
Speaker 1: comes off of its axle, that would definitely be catastrophic.
25:10
Speaker 1: That happened in the latest season of For All Main Kind.
25:12
Speaker 1: I don't know if you're a fan of that show.
25:14
Speaker 1: Almost everybody in my life who knows about space has
25:17
Speaker 1: told me I have to watch that series, but everything
25:20
Speaker 1: in my life is waiting until my book is done
25:22
Speaker 1: on November one. Then I will enjoy that series, but
25:25
Speaker 1: until November one, there's no time for joy. Well, I'm
25:28
Speaker 1: hoping to get a right from that series on the
25:29
Speaker 1: podcast to talk about the signs of that. But essentially,
25:31
Speaker 1: you're telling us that these wheels either have to be
25:34
Speaker 1: really really big so they're stable, but then they're hugely expensive,
25:38
Speaker 1: or they have to be smaller to be cheaper, in
25:40
Speaker 1: which case you need very complicated technology to make sure
25:43
Speaker 1: they don't get imbalanced. That's my understanding. Yes, it's not
25:46
Speaker 1: an easy engineering problem either way. Right, and then if
25:48
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of guests on your cruise ship
25:50
Speaker 1: and they're all a little tipsy, you can't exactly make
25:53
Speaker 1: sure they're all like staying on opposite sides of the
25:55
Speaker 1: ring at the same time. When what a drag it
25:57
Speaker 1: would be to have to, like, you know, say, oh, hey,
26:00
Speaker 1: we've got a group of ten people and we're all friends,
26:02
Speaker 1: but we can't be in the same place at the
26:03
Speaker 1: same time. So you know, we can only party with
26:06
Speaker 1: like in groups of five, and we have to be
26:08
Speaker 1: spread out in anyway. Humans are never gonna be able
26:11
Speaker 1: to follow worlds like that. Well, I like that in
26:13
Speaker 1: this book she really did take a lot of those
26:14
Speaker 1: issues seriously and thought about what it would be like
26:17
Speaker 1: to be on the ship. She also, for example, really
26:20
Speaker 1: worked hard to make sure that realistic time lags were
26:24
Speaker 1: a feature in the experience of these cruise shippers, you know,
26:28
Speaker 1: when they wanted to talk to their lawyer, for example.
26:30
Speaker 1: As they get further and further from Earth, it gets
26:32
Speaker 1: much more expensive, and also the time lag increases, so
26:35
Speaker 1: they have these weird conversations where they have to wait
26:37
Speaker 1: three minutes to hear a response and then six minutes, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah,
26:42
Speaker 1: she was really careful with detail in that. It really
26:45
Speaker 1: impressed me the way she had the science so clearly
26:47
Speaker 1: figured out, and she weaved it really nicely into the
26:50
Speaker 1: way the story was told. It was awesome. That was
26:52
Speaker 1: really impressive. And because it's a space murder, there are
26:55
Speaker 1: a lot of really interesting legal issues, like what laws
26:58
Speaker 1: actually govern in your behavior you're in space, who's in
27:01
Speaker 1: charge as the captain of the ship basically a dictator
27:04
Speaker 1: until they get to their destination? And you know, can
27:07
Speaker 1: you do murder in space? Is it legal? Is it illegal?
27:10
Speaker 1: I know that you've done a whunch you're reading about that.
27:12
Speaker 1: What is the basic situation? Can you murder in space? Well,
27:15
Speaker 1: I mean you can technically murder anywhere. Don't take that
27:18
Speaker 1: as permission. People. That was technically so right, So you
27:21
Speaker 1: shouldn't be murdering anyone anywhere. But in space we still
27:25
Speaker 1: need to work out some of the rules. So the
27:28
Speaker 1: Outer Space Treaty does stipulate that countries are responsible for
27:33
Speaker 1: like the actions of their citizens in space, so there
27:37
Speaker 1: is some responsibility sort of assigned in that case. But
27:40
Speaker 1: these things can get complicated. There's this example of the
27:43
Speaker 1: case in the Arctic that was thought of as an
27:46
Speaker 1: exciting case for sort of figuring this stuff out, where
27:48
Speaker 1: they were on an ice flow in the Arctic. So
27:51
Speaker 1: this moves, it can like move between the territorial waters
27:54
Speaker 1: of multiple countries. And an American citizen accidentally murdered I
27:59
Speaker 1: think it is his boss after a fight about some
28:03
Speaker 1: raisin wine which was stolen by a third member of
28:07
Speaker 1: the crew who was generally considered to be an all
28:09
Speaker 1: around kind of jerk face. And the guy who shot
28:12
Speaker 1: his boss it was, according to him, an accident. His
28:15
Speaker 1: rifle went off. It wasn't supposed to go off. But
28:17
Speaker 1: everybody involved was American, so it was pretty clear that
28:20
Speaker 1: jurisdiction should go to America. But these things can get
28:23
Speaker 1: more complicated. So there have been some issues on the
28:25
Speaker 1: International Space Station and the way those are handled is
28:29
Speaker 1: according to this nine inter Governmental Agreement or i g
28:34
Speaker 1: A that essentially said, okay, so we're gonna call the
28:38
Speaker 1: modules a sort of quasi sovereign territory. So Japan's keybo
28:42
Speaker 1: module is effectively like visiting a chunk of Japan, whereas
28:46
Speaker 1: the individuals remain under the law of their home nations.
28:50
Speaker 1: So this would be like an American going to visit, like,
28:53
Speaker 1: you know, an Australian base in Antarctica. So there was
28:56
Speaker 1: recently this problem on the International Space Station where there
28:59
Speaker 1: was a whole in one of the soyez is. So
29:01
Speaker 1: this is a spacecraft that, for example, can bring astronauts
29:05
Speaker 1: and cosmonauts from Russia up to the I S S
29:08
Speaker 1: and someone had drilled a hole in it. It was
29:11
Speaker 1: discovered because the station was very slowly depressurizing, and so
29:14
Speaker 1: they were like, oh, what's going on. And the two
29:17
Speaker 1: competing theories are that in Russia somebody who was building
29:21
Speaker 1: the Soyez accidentally made a mistake and drilled a hole
29:25
Speaker 1: and instead of admitting all my bad, I put a
29:27
Speaker 1: hole in the soyas they hastily patched it up and
29:31
Speaker 1: the patch didn't give way until it was in the
29:33
Speaker 1: vacuum of space for a while, So that would be
29:36
Speaker 1: Russia's fault. But Russia claims that one of the astronauts
29:40
Speaker 1: on the U S side had a mental break after
29:42
Speaker 1: getting some bad medical news from one of the medical
29:44
Speaker 1: experiments in space and that that astronaut kind of went
29:48
Speaker 1: off the deep end and wanted to go home early,
29:50
Speaker 1: so they drilled a hole in the soyas to try
29:53
Speaker 1: to freak everyone out and get everybody to go home early.
29:55
Speaker 1: What drilled a hole in the space station they were
29:58
Speaker 1: currently living in. Yeah, right, that seems ridiculous, And so
30:03
Speaker 1: the US is like, no, clearly that's not what happened,
30:06
Speaker 1: and Russia was like, okay, well, let us do a
30:08
Speaker 1: lie detector test. In the US was like one, no,
30:12
Speaker 1: because you're being ridiculous. Two of those don't even work,
30:15
Speaker 1: Like why would we let you do that? And so anyway,
30:17
Speaker 1: there's just been this back and forth where Russia is like, well,
30:20
Speaker 1: it's weird that the camera that was supposed to be
30:22
Speaker 1: watching the soya is at that time wasn't working. What's
30:24
Speaker 1: going on there? And so both sides it's like heating up.
30:27
Speaker 1: And the deal is at the end of the day
30:29
Speaker 1: that the rules governing the I S S say something
30:33
Speaker 1: to the effect of, like, you know, Russia can say
30:36
Speaker 1: to the US, we want to prosecute the astronaut under
30:40
Speaker 1: Russian law because we think they put everybody at risk
30:43
Speaker 1: and damaged the equipment. When that happens, the United States
30:47
Speaker 1: gets to say, all right, well, we have ninety days
30:50
Speaker 1: and we're going to try to show you that we're
30:52
Speaker 1: going to prosecute the offender ourselves and deal with this appropriately.
30:56
Speaker 1: And if nothing happens in ninety days, then Russia is
30:58
Speaker 1: supposed to be allowed to go full word with their investigation.
31:01
Speaker 1: But you know what actually happens in practice is that
31:04
Speaker 1: the US is not willing to just give up their astronaut,
31:07
Speaker 1: and so geopolitics is getting in the way. Like I
31:10
Speaker 1: think in any of these cases where there's any ambiguity
31:12
Speaker 1: at all, it's not going to work out the way
31:14
Speaker 1: it's supposed to because no one's going to give up
31:16
Speaker 1: their citizen to another country, what alone Russia. But aside
31:20
Speaker 1: from the fascinating digression here into true crime space murderer
31:25
Speaker 1: that might have actually happened on the I S S.
31:27
Speaker 1: That's fascinating. Are you saying that the situation is that
31:30
Speaker 1: the I S S is multiple countries. As you move
31:33
Speaker 1: from one module to another, you're like under the laws
31:35
Speaker 1: of Japan or under the laws of Russia. So if
31:37
Speaker 1: you kill somebody on the space station, it matters in
31:40
Speaker 1: which part of the space station you did it. Yes,
31:42
Speaker 1: to some extent it matters. And sorry about the digression.
31:45
Speaker 1: I think it's a fascinating story. But so you know,
31:49
Speaker 1: if if you had an American who killed another American
31:52
Speaker 1: in the Japanese module, probably the U S would deal
31:55
Speaker 1: with that. But yes, there is some sort of territory
31:57
Speaker 1: that Mundy's waters even more and makes things even more complicated.
32:00
Speaker 1: I guess the point is we don't have this all
32:02
Speaker 1: worked out yet. There's not nice, clear rules to follow.
32:05
Speaker 1: So in the story Mary Robin, it sort of created
32:08
Speaker 1: a system to deal with it, and I it's interesting
32:10
Speaker 1: talking to her about how she settled on what system
32:13
Speaker 1: to use. Yeah, and a bad space lawyers get really
32:15
Speaker 1: excited when somebody gets murdered in a new way in
32:18
Speaker 1: a new place that's never happened before, because like it's
32:20
Speaker 1: sets some new precedent for how to these things. There's
32:24
Speaker 1: a little bit of glee in their voice. Perhaps all right,
32:26
Speaker 1: that cover is a little bit the signs and legal
32:28
Speaker 1: issues that are raised in the fun book The spare Man.
32:31
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a break and when we come back,
32:32
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk to the author herself. And hear about
32:35
Speaker 1: her writing process. All right, we're back and we're talking
32:50
Speaker 1: about the novel The spare Man by Mary Robinett Coble,
32:54
Speaker 1: and here's our fun interview with her. Well, then, it's
32:57
Speaker 1: my great pleasure to welcome back to the podcast, asked
33:00
Speaker 1: Mary Robinette Cole. She's been a guest before for her
33:03
Speaker 1: excellent book Calculating Stars, which one Hugo and Nebula awards.
33:07
Speaker 1: That's a pretty big deal. And for those of you
33:09
Speaker 1: who don't remember, she has a really fun background. Before
33:12
Speaker 1: she started writing, she worked as a puppeteer and also
33:15
Speaker 1: worked for Jim Henson and Sesame Street. Mary Robinette, thank
33:19
Speaker 1: you very much for coming back to the podcast. Thank
33:21
Speaker 1: you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. Well,
33:24
Speaker 1: last time you were here, we asked you our standard
33:26
Speaker 1: set of questions for an author who has come to
33:28
Speaker 1: the podcast the first time. But since you're coming back,
33:31
Speaker 1: I have another question for you. I see that you
33:33
Speaker 1: have served as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy
33:37
Speaker 1: Writers of America, and I was wondering if that gives you,
33:40
Speaker 1: like any broad powers you get to like settle disputes
33:43
Speaker 1: over deep questions like whether Hans shot first. Or are
33:46
Speaker 1: you in charge of foreign policy letting you declare war
33:48
Speaker 1: against other guilds or Disney? Maybe? Yes, yes, In fact,
33:52
Speaker 1: I've gone into battle on the Disney front lines. That's been,
33:55
Speaker 1: you know, proud service that I've done there. It also
33:58
Speaker 1: gives me the ability to herds and to shoot laser
34:01
Speaker 1: beams from my eyes. I did have to give up
34:04
Speaker 1: the laser beam power upon leaving office though. That was
34:06
Speaker 1: a skill I miss. I missed that. That's got to
34:08
Speaker 1: be disappointing, no doubt about it. You know, it does
34:10
Speaker 1: make reading easier. It was very hard to read while
34:13
Speaker 1: in office. So one thing that makes me feel better
34:15
Speaker 1: what I'm feeling low is a good drink. And every
34:19
Speaker 1: chapter in the book starts with the drink recipe, and
34:21
Speaker 1: the characters definitely enjoyed our cocktails. Does that tell you
34:25
Speaker 1: tell us something about your experience of lockdown? Um? Yes,
34:34
Speaker 1: it does. So. It's funny because my husband is a winemaker,
34:39
Speaker 1: so you would think that our go to beverage would
34:41
Speaker 1: be wine. But when we were living in Iceland, the
34:44
Speaker 1: cost for a bottle of you know, Scotch, it was
34:47
Speaker 1: about the same or not much more than the cost
34:51
Speaker 1: for a bottle of wine, but it lasted a lot longer.
34:53
Speaker 1: So our cocktail games started there. But during lockdown we
34:56
Speaker 1: really really up to our cocktail game. And is that
34:59
Speaker 1: why our word drinks incorporated into the book? How did
35:02
Speaker 1: you pick the drinks that ended up in the book.
35:04
Speaker 1: So the book is basically the Thin Man in Space
35:07
Speaker 1: and in the Thin Man movies, like when we start off,
35:10
Speaker 1: Nick Charles is like drunk from the very beginning. I
35:13
Speaker 1: did not want my characters to be drunk the entire time,
35:15
Speaker 1: but it's a film that came out right after prohibition
35:18
Speaker 1: was lifted, so cocktails are just constant and everywhere. I
35:21
Speaker 1: wanted to have some of that vibe, but I also
35:24
Speaker 1: wanted to incorporate some that were non alcoholic. So there's
35:28
Speaker 1: a mix of cocktails that are classic cocktails like Corps
35:31
Speaker 1: Survivor Number two, Death in the Afternoon, the Obituary, and
35:35
Speaker 1: then there are also ones where I made up the
35:37
Speaker 1: cocktail because I needed something that was thematically linked to
35:40
Speaker 1: the chapter, and all of the non alcoholic ones had
35:43
Speaker 1: things like Shirley Temple. So Frisky Business is one of mine.
35:47
Speaker 1: Orbital Decay also one of mine. So playing around and
35:51
Speaker 1: trying to come up with something that was tasty and
35:53
Speaker 1: also had an a thematically appropriate name. How long does
35:56
Speaker 1: it take to come up with a cocktail that sounds
35:58
Speaker 1: like a fun experience? You know, it's really difficult having
36:01
Speaker 1: to do that kind of research, so painful. Once you
36:03
Speaker 1: understand the theory, it's actually pretty easy. There are a
36:06
Speaker 1: number of cocktails that you can just swap out one
36:09
Speaker 1: ingredient and and you have a totally different ones. So
36:12
Speaker 1: the Negroni is a great example of this. It's equal
36:15
Speaker 1: parts Compari, vermouth, and gin. But if you swap out
36:19
Speaker 1: gin for bourbon, you come up with something that, let's
36:21
Speaker 1: call a boulevardier. If you swap out the Compari for
36:24
Speaker 1: something else, then you get a you know, a different flavor,
36:26
Speaker 1: a different profile. So a lot of what I'm doing
36:29
Speaker 1: there are ingredients swaps or proportion flips. So I can't
36:34
Speaker 1: remember which one it is, but one of them is
36:36
Speaker 1: basically a Manhattan but with the proportions inverted. So usually
36:40
Speaker 1: I would take a standard recipe, I would do a swap.
36:44
Speaker 1: Sometimes there was something that I was going for, particularly
36:47
Speaker 1: like the orbital decay. I wanted something that was akin
36:50
Speaker 1: to an aviation, but that was spaceflight. So my first
36:53
Speaker 1: attempt on that was to take an aviation and do
36:56
Speaker 1: a bourbon swap for the gin, and that results in
37:00
Speaker 1: a cocktail that is an incredibly foul colors, just gross,
37:05
Speaker 1: so that when I had to play with a fair
37:07
Speaker 1: bit that drifted really far away from the aviation. It
37:11
Speaker 1: sounds like you suffered for your art. I did. I did.
37:14
Speaker 1: It was really hard. It was really you know, people
37:17
Speaker 1: don't understand creativity, and you know, the research that's involved
37:22
Speaker 1: so hard, so hard. So I'm really curious about your
37:26
Speaker 1: writing process for the science of this book. In your
37:28
Speaker 1: other books, you did really extensive research on the various
37:31
Speaker 1: scientific scenarios. What was that process like for this book.
37:34
Speaker 1: So there are three kind of areas of science that
37:39
Speaker 1: are happening in this One is the deep brain pain suppressor,
37:42
Speaker 1: and the other is the centrifugal gravity of the ship,
37:46
Speaker 1: and then the third is the time lag. So the
37:49
Speaker 1: deep brain pain suppressor, which I regretted every time I
37:53
Speaker 1: had to say it in the audio book, is based
37:56
Speaker 1: on my mom's My mom has Parkinson's and she has DBS,
38:00
Speaker 1: which is a deep brain stimulator, So a lot of
38:03
Speaker 1: it is based on that and what they had to
38:05
Speaker 1: do with that, and then it's kind of extrapolated towards
38:08
Speaker 1: what things could be possible in the future. The problem
38:11
Speaker 1: with doing pain suppression via deep brain in the real
38:15
Speaker 1: world is that pain is incredibly specific person to person,
38:21
Speaker 1: and doing clinical trials on pain, having two people that
38:25
Speaker 1: have chronic pain for the same reasons, it's rare. You
38:28
Speaker 1: don't want to do that to someone. So that is
38:31
Speaker 1: lagging significantly behind, but they are aware that it's a
38:34
Speaker 1: thing that can be done. And then just last month
38:38
Speaker 1: or the month before, someone announced a thing that where
38:42
Speaker 1: they basically wrap a cooling sheath around the angry nerve
38:46
Speaker 1: for lack of a better way to say it, and like,
38:48
Speaker 1: I'm very very layman's terms here, but that can cool
38:51
Speaker 1: it down. And so we're actually on the verge of
38:54
Speaker 1: that no longer being science fiction. Yeah, the next ten
38:58
Speaker 1: to twenty years, I expect that that that's technology that
39:01
Speaker 1: will exist. The centrifugal force and the time lag. I
39:04
Speaker 1: partnered with rocket engineer Max Fagan, and I told him
39:08
Speaker 1: what I wanted the ship to do, which was to
39:10
Speaker 1: have Mooner gravity, Earth gravity, and Martian gravity. Um that
39:15
Speaker 1: depending on where you were coming from on this this
39:17
Speaker 1: cruise ship that you could stay in your home gravity
39:19
Speaker 1: or be in your destination gravity, and so he helped
39:22
Speaker 1: me come up with this wackadoo thing that would work.
39:25
Speaker 1: The only people who would build it would be a
39:27
Speaker 1: luxury cruise liner because it is completely bonkers. It travels
39:31
Speaker 1: under constant thrust, which gives you Learner gravity, and then
39:35
Speaker 1: is spinning with two rings that are progressively larger to
39:38
Speaker 1: give you Martian and Earth gravity. As I said, completely bonkers,
39:43
Speaker 1: but it meant that whichever level they were in, I
39:46
Speaker 1: had to think about, Okay, is the Correolis effect happening here,
39:49
Speaker 1: and how's that going to affect things. I fudged a
39:52
Speaker 1: little bit on some site lines because the levels would
39:57
Speaker 1: have to be I think was like fifty yards apart,
40:00
Speaker 1: and I'm like, yeah, you can totally see things from
40:02
Speaker 1: one level to the next, you know, And the answer
40:04
Speaker 1: is not really not really, wouldn't be able to. And
40:07
Speaker 1: then the time lag again because it's constant thrust, the
40:11
Speaker 1: round trip time lag for communications changed, like the amount
40:15
Speaker 1: of time in the morning and the evening was several
40:18
Speaker 1: minutes difference. Because it's a I think it's an eleven
40:21
Speaker 1: day voyage that I've got them on. So Max made
40:23
Speaker 1: the spreadsheet for me, and I had a calendar, and
40:27
Speaker 1: so anytime an event happened where they needed to make
40:29
Speaker 1: a call back to Earth, I had to figure out
40:32
Speaker 1: what day it was on the voyage, what time it
40:34
Speaker 1: was on the voyage, consult with the spreadsheet, and then
40:37
Speaker 1: put that in for the time lag, and then make
40:40
Speaker 1: sure that I had enough dialogue in betwo, you know,
40:44
Speaker 1: like enough action happening locally to account for how long
40:48
Speaker 1: it was going to be for them to get the
40:50
Speaker 1: response back. And there was one point where I moved
40:52
Speaker 1: a scene and then had to like rewrite everything in
40:56
Speaker 1: it because the time lag no longer worked well. I
40:59
Speaker 1: really appreciate your dedication to being consistent about the science,
41:02
Speaker 1: but I wonder why you seem to have chosen to
41:04
Speaker 1: keep the signs of your universe basically right on the
41:08
Speaker 1: science of our universe means in some cases that things
41:11
Speaker 1: are quite tricky to engineer the story. Why didn't you
41:13
Speaker 1: decide to like put it in a slightly different universe where,
41:16
Speaker 1: you know, maybe FDL communication was possible. Some of it
41:18
Speaker 1: was that I actually wanted the complication of the time lag.
41:21
Speaker 1: The other is that my experience from writing fantasy where
41:24
Speaker 1: I am making up the rules is that it's not easier,
41:26
Speaker 1: you know. With this I can go to Max and
41:28
Speaker 1: I can say, hey, I need a spreadsheet, and he
41:29
Speaker 1: can give me a spreadsheet, and then I have the
41:31
Speaker 1: spreadsheet and I have to consult. But that's fine. When
41:33
Speaker 1: I'm doing my own universe, I have to make up
41:35
Speaker 1: all of the rules and there is no book that
41:38
Speaker 1: I can go to, so I become my own reference library,
41:40
Speaker 1: and I have to keep track of whether or not
41:42
Speaker 1: I have done a thing and what the ramifications of
41:45
Speaker 1: it are. And what I find is that it is
41:48
Speaker 1: equally as hard. It's just that the difficult point is
41:51
Speaker 1: placed in a different part of the process. And people
41:54
Speaker 1: will still tell me that I'm wrong about things for
41:55
Speaker 1: stuff that I made up. Yeah, of course I will.
41:59
Speaker 1: How do you try all that stuff? Do you have
42:00
Speaker 1: like a checklist? And after writing every scene you go
42:03
Speaker 1: back and say, Okay, have I thought about the Coriolis effect?
42:05
Speaker 1: Have I thought about the time leg or is it
42:07
Speaker 1: just like in your brain so much? Yeah? How do
42:09
Speaker 1: you do that? So usually, like the first two thirds
42:13
Speaker 1: of the book, it's just in my brain because I'm
42:15
Speaker 1: writing it fast enough of the pace that I haven't
42:17
Speaker 1: forgotten what I've been working on. But this book was
42:19
Speaker 1: actually complicated enough that I made a triloboard when I
42:23
Speaker 1: was doing their visions on it, so that to remind
42:27
Speaker 1: myself to check each chapter. It's like, okay, check your
42:30
Speaker 1: time lag, check Coriolis. Check what's setting Tesla's DBPs is
42:35
Speaker 1: on right now? Does she have it on or off?
42:37
Speaker 1: So yeah, I did actually put up a triloboard for
42:40
Speaker 1: myself for each chapter. A challenge I find for science
42:43
Speaker 1: fiction murder mysteries that for a mystery to work, the
42:46
Speaker 1: reader has to know the rules of the world, so
42:48
Speaker 1: they know how to interpret the clues they have like
42:49
Speaker 1: a fair chance at figuring out the mystery. But in
42:52
Speaker 1: a science fiction book, often the rules are just made up.
42:54
Speaker 1: And here you've invented several advanced technologies and so the
42:57
Speaker 1: reader is learning them as they go. How do you
43:00
Speaker 1: handle filling the reader in on the rules of your universe,
43:04
Speaker 1: the technologies and how they change life, while also like
43:06
Speaker 1: leaving them enough bread crumbs to follow. Is that a
43:08
Speaker 1: really difficult thing to balance? It could be like all
43:11
Speaker 1: of the things that are existing in the world are
43:14
Speaker 1: The hard part is that all of the things are
43:16
Speaker 1: things that are completely natural for the characters. Explaining it
43:19
Speaker 1: to the reader, the bread crumb question is interesting because
43:22
Speaker 1: when I'm teaching this, what I say is you treat
43:24
Speaker 1: it like a cheese sandwich. So, if your character is
43:27
Speaker 1: just like a cheese sandwiches and everyday thing, and it's
43:30
Speaker 1: not a plot point, it's just they're eating a cheese sandwich,
43:32
Speaker 1: you just say she had a cheese sandwich and you
43:34
Speaker 1: move on. If you are needing to you know, if
43:37
Speaker 1: your your character is a chef, then your reaction how
43:40
Speaker 1: that cheese sandwich is treated is very different. They're going
43:43
Speaker 1: to really think about the bread as they're slicing it,
43:45
Speaker 1: and maybe they're going to make the bread themselves from scratch.
43:48
Speaker 1: But if your character is an alien, they've never encountered
43:51
Speaker 1: a cheese sandwich before. What you're gonna say is, you
43:54
Speaker 1: know that the temptation that a lot of writers have
43:56
Speaker 1: is like, okay, what's a cheese sandwich? Okay, cheese sandwich
43:59
Speaker 1: is made out of cheese and bread, and the aliens like, okay,
44:02
Speaker 1: well what's what's bread? And you're like, okay, so bread.
44:06
Speaker 1: Bread is made from wheat and it's ground and what
44:08
Speaker 1: the alien actually needs to know is a cheese sandwich
44:11
Speaker 1: is something that you hold in your hands and you eat.
44:13
Speaker 1: And the temptation is to put in all of this
44:16
Speaker 1: extraneous detail that you don't need. So what I do
44:19
Speaker 1: is I give the character the reader. The reader is
44:22
Speaker 1: the alien in this case. I give the reader just
44:25
Speaker 1: the information that they need in order to move through
44:27
Speaker 1: to the next part. So cheese sandwich is the thing
44:30
Speaker 1: you hold in your hand and your eat, and I
44:32
Speaker 1: try to give it to them before the cheese sandwich
44:34
Speaker 1: is in front of them, so that when it arrives
44:36
Speaker 1: there like, ah, I know what to do with this thing.
44:39
Speaker 1: But octa devices, yes, the octopode and the octopot yes.
44:43
Speaker 1: So that's the other piece. So that those were doing
44:46
Speaker 1: two things, lifting wise three things actually, so part of
44:50
Speaker 1: what's going on there is the other the other thing.
44:54
Speaker 1: When I say, you let them know about it before
44:55
Speaker 1: it arrives, so that they know what to do with it.
44:57
Speaker 1: To keep people in a murder mystery from knowing for
45:00
Speaker 1: sure and certain that that something is a clue, you
45:03
Speaker 1: need to use it in a way that is not
45:06
Speaker 1: the way it is used as the clue. And then
45:07
Speaker 1: also to make something feel real and part of the world.
45:13
Speaker 1: For world building, you want to use it more than
45:17
Speaker 1: one way. So, for instance, with that cheese sandwich, if
45:19
Speaker 1: I use that cheese sandwich once and never again, it's
45:22
Speaker 1: like whatever. But if if cheese sandwiches appear multiple places,
45:26
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, cheese sandwiches are really important to this society.
45:29
Speaker 1: It's like we walk past a cheese sandwich kiosk, you
45:32
Speaker 1: know that she pulled out the microplane that she normally
45:34
Speaker 1: used on her cheese sandwich, but she could use it
45:36
Speaker 1: to slice this apple. That kind of thing helps the
45:38
Speaker 1: reader feel like this is an embedded part of the world.
45:41
Speaker 1: So with the octopoton octopot part of what I was
45:44
Speaker 1: doing was letting the reader know how those machines worked.
45:47
Speaker 1: The other pieces that I was letting them know is
45:50
Speaker 1: that autonomous robots are just part of the world. I
45:52
Speaker 1: was also letting them know that I was doing some
45:54
Speaker 1: competence porn, which is Tesla is really smart and she
45:57
Speaker 1: knows her stuff. And the third thing that I was
45:59
Speaker 1: doing is them know that this is not obvious to
46:02
Speaker 1: everyone else, that this is a non obvious and somewhat
46:06
Speaker 1: complicated things. So there's a narrow range of people that
46:08
Speaker 1: are going to have the same knowledge that my main
46:11
Speaker 1: character does. So there's there's a number of different load
46:15
Speaker 1: bearing things that those two devices are doing, which is
46:18
Speaker 1: part of why you do get more information about it.
46:20
Speaker 1: That is a really detailed answer. And the first time
46:23
Speaker 1: I wrote fiction, I was like, oh my gosh, this
46:24
Speaker 1: is so much harder than I had expected it to be.
46:28
Speaker 1: And now I see that there's you know, there's like
46:31
Speaker 1: all this theory and anyway, it's it's complicated. So now
46:34
Speaker 1: I'm going to transition to a law question. So your
46:36
Speaker 1: main character is like always on call with her a
46:39
Speaker 1: very angry lawyer who has very colorful language. And so
46:43
Speaker 1: I'm wondering what kind of research you did for the
46:46
Speaker 1: law related parts of the book. So I think that
46:48
Speaker 1: I read that you've like organized workshops on a cruise ship,
46:52
Speaker 1: which made me wonder if you've researched cruise ship law
46:55
Speaker 1: or did you research space law? How did you end
46:58
Speaker 1: up like settling on the jurisdiction is I had a
47:01
Speaker 1: space lawyer as a consultant. So my space lawyer was
47:04
Speaker 1: Gabriel Sweeney. He does uh space law for the US government,
47:08
Speaker 1: which is an amazing It's like basically his whole job
47:12
Speaker 1: is thinking about space law. It's amazing. So the space
47:17
Speaker 1: law is made up, we made some decisions and he
47:21
Speaker 1: let me know where it was like just didn't make
47:23
Speaker 1: sense as an evolution. It turns out that space law
47:26
Speaker 1: in the real world is terrifyingly vague. You know, all
47:29
Speaker 1: the satellites that gets in up, the international space law
47:32
Speaker 1: is such that if anything goes wrong, the government that
47:36
Speaker 1: they launched from is the one that's on the hook
47:39
Speaker 1: for the money. Like, so all of the private space,
47:43
Speaker 1: all of the commercial space flight stuff, the US government
47:47
Speaker 1: is the one that actually has to pay other countries
47:50
Speaker 1: if it like comes down and causes damage whatever you think.
47:53
Speaker 1: And it is not maritime law. It's a totally different
47:56
Speaker 1: set of law. Well, what I want to know is,
47:57
Speaker 1: would you or would you not recommend doing a urder
48:00
Speaker 1: in space? I mean purely hypothetically, purely hypothetically, with the
48:04
Speaker 1: way things are currently, that's a great place to murder
48:07
Speaker 1: someone because there is no one who has jurisdiction over
48:10
Speaker 1: you if you were killing someone who is not from
48:12
Speaker 1: your country. The closest thing that we have to comparable
48:16
Speaker 1: murder thing is a murder on an iceberg. A research
48:20
Speaker 1: station on an iceberg because it was in no one's jurisdiction.
48:24
Speaker 1: So on the topic of space tourism and the laws involved,
48:27
Speaker 1: is a lot of discussion these days about the ethics
48:30
Speaker 1: of the upcoming space tourism industry and the potential for
48:33
Speaker 1: a colonization of the Moon and Mars, and whether we
48:36
Speaker 1: should allow corporations to treat space as a resource or
48:39
Speaker 1: if you should be treated as a public good and regulated.
48:42
Speaker 1: I know that you've constructed here in your book just
48:43
Speaker 1: as a setting fit for the murder, But do you
48:45
Speaker 1: think it's a good idea in our universe to build
48:48
Speaker 1: cruise shift to Mars if it were possible. I think
48:51
Speaker 1: that everybody should be able to go into space. The
48:54
Speaker 1: question of resources, I think that the model that we
48:57
Speaker 1: currently have for going to new place is very bad
49:04
Speaker 1: and leads to a lot of harm. I would love
49:06
Speaker 1: to see us come up with different models, and I
49:08
Speaker 1: would love to see us come up with different models
49:09
Speaker 1: before we get there. That is not what's happening. What
49:12
Speaker 1: is happening because in order to do that, every country
49:16
Speaker 1: would have to kind of enact that law simultaneously, because
49:19
Speaker 1: otherwise the countries that don't have those laws enacted, their corporations,
49:24
Speaker 1: their private citizens have an advantage. And so right now
49:27
Speaker 1: everybody is basically doing a free for all and it's
49:30
Speaker 1: gonna stay that way until something goes horribly tragically wrong.
49:34
Speaker 1: And what that means is that, um, everybody who's like
49:38
Speaker 1: do first permission, later forgiveness over permission, all of those
49:42
Speaker 1: places will have established to holds. So do I think
49:46
Speaker 1: it's a good idea? No? And yes, simultaneously, like two
49:52
Speaker 1: things can be true if it was well regulated. Yes, absolutely,
49:57
Speaker 1: you learned so much about where you are from by
49:59
Speaker 1: going some place else. But the way that things are moving,
50:02
Speaker 1: we're not on a good trajectory right now. So does
50:05
Speaker 1: the research you've done for this book make you more
50:07
Speaker 1: or less likely to invest in some space tourism company
50:11
Speaker 1: to buy shares, you know, Blue Origin or whatever. You
50:14
Speaker 1: ask that question as if I have money to invest
50:18
Speaker 1: in anything. I am a writer. We're speaking hypothetically asking
50:24
Speaker 1: for actual investment advice. Speaking hypothetically, there's a couple of
50:28
Speaker 1: really interesting companies, one of which I can't remember the
50:30
Speaker 1: name of it right now, but they basically do crowd
50:33
Speaker 1: funding for space. It's like a Kickstarter kind of thing.
50:35
Speaker 1: There's a I think you can buy in for a
50:38
Speaker 1: hundred dollars I think is your minimum, but you can
50:40
Speaker 1: support some really interesting space research as a private citizen
50:45
Speaker 1: for a very low And if I were going to
50:46
Speaker 1: do it, that's probably the direction I would go because
50:49
Speaker 1: this smaller places seem to be doing things generally speaking,
50:55
Speaker 1: because they're curious about the science of it. But otherwise, yeah,
50:58
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're talking about investments, it's a longer
51:02
Speaker 1: investment than I think most people think. But the trajectory
51:05
Speaker 1: that we're on is the same trajectory that we were
51:06
Speaker 1: on when air flight first happened, which is heading towards
51:10
Speaker 1: commercial stuff. And what I think people should be looking
51:13
Speaker 1: for stuff that's doing suborbital flights, because those are the
51:17
Speaker 1: ones where I think people are going to see a
51:19
Speaker 1: return on investment and are likely to become a thing.
51:24
Speaker 1: Um Again, you know, we always say twenty years to Mars,
51:27
Speaker 1: but I think the suborbital flights, looking at where we
51:30
Speaker 1: are right now, that actually seems like that's coming. So,
51:33
Speaker 1: speaking of space tourism, would you hop on the ln
51:37
Speaker 1: grin and take the cruise ship to Mars? Yes, I
51:41
Speaker 1: think of Mars is like a colder irradiated airless version
51:45
Speaker 1: of Antarctica. But but that's that sounds like a good destination.
51:49
Speaker 1: Well so if a ship like the Lynde Grin exists,
51:52
Speaker 1: then that means that there's stuff at the other end.
51:55
Speaker 1: So it's not just going to desolate wasteland. It's going
51:59
Speaker 1: to resort in desolate wasteland. But yeah, I would absolutely
52:02
Speaker 1: go ownership like the Lyndgren, which in eleven days the
52:05
Speaker 1: longest transit. Would I go now under the circumstances that
52:08
Speaker 1: we have. No, I'd go to the Moon under the
52:11
Speaker 1: circumstances we have. But I'm like, I have a cat.
52:14
Speaker 1: I want to be with my cat. What about the
52:17
Speaker 1: husband You've mentioned a couple of times he doesn't travel,
52:20
Speaker 1: so again, you know, but he might go with me
52:22
Speaker 1: to the Moon. He might actually go with me to
52:24
Speaker 1: Mars because it is a desolate desperately wants to go
52:27
Speaker 1: to Antarctica. See Kelly, some people do want to go
52:30
Speaker 1: to Antarctica. Yeah, I guess I'm definitely not one of them.
52:33
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of people here in the physics department
52:35
Speaker 1: who love going to Antarctica to set up their experiments.
52:37
Speaker 1: Mary Robin, and I want to ask you about your
52:39
Speaker 1: sort of vision for the future of humanity. When you
52:42
Speaker 1: were last on the podcast, it was early on in
52:44
Speaker 1: the pandemic and you were talking about your book The
52:46
Speaker 1: Calculating Stars, in which humanity comes together to use science
52:50
Speaker 1: to solve a crisis. So now two years later, how's
52:52
Speaker 1: your idealism surviving contact with reality? Do you still think
52:56
Speaker 1: humans will come together in the face of an urgent
52:58
Speaker 1: crisis or even like a boiling one like climate change,
53:01
Speaker 1: or should we interpret your pivot to murdering space as
53:04
Speaker 1: a sign of a joke? Great question, and that's all
53:09
Speaker 1: the time we have. It actually has survived because what
53:13
Speaker 1: we saw supports my central thesis, which is that humans
53:18
Speaker 1: do pull together, and that so much of it depends
53:21
Speaker 1: on who is in in the leadership, in the tone
53:24
Speaker 1: that they said. So when you look at some place
53:25
Speaker 1: like New Zealand, when you look at the early days
53:28
Speaker 1: of the pandemic, where everyone's like, yeah, okay, yeah, no,
53:30
Speaker 1: we're gonna do this lockdown thing, when we thought it
53:32
Speaker 1: was only going to be a couple of weeks, you know,
53:34
Speaker 1: people did pull together New Zealand. The leader that they
53:37
Speaker 1: had and the way they weathered that was it perfect. No,
53:40
Speaker 1: But yeah. I think when you look a globally at
53:43
Speaker 1: the way different governments reacted, you can see that we
53:49
Speaker 1: have this capacity, and you can also see how easily
53:54
Speaker 1: we are shaped by someone modeling what to do. It's,
53:58
Speaker 1: you know, it is the bystander effect, a large that
54:00
Speaker 1: no one knows what to do in this circumstance, and
54:02
Speaker 1: so you look for someone in a position of power
54:05
Speaker 1: and authority to tell you how you're supposed to behave
54:07
Speaker 1: And if you're getting conflicting information, then you're gonna wind
54:13
Speaker 1: up with conflict, literal conflict. But if you have people
54:18
Speaker 1: who are study and give you consistent information and are
54:21
Speaker 1: clear and transparent and trust you and you can trust them,
54:26
Speaker 1: then you have a totally different experience. So my optimism remains,
54:31
Speaker 1: but in that we have the capacity, my actual feeling
54:34
Speaker 1: on how things happened did lead to a murder mystery
54:38
Speaker 1: context dependent optimism, yes, yes, So why did you decide
54:43
Speaker 1: to name your main character Tesla? To be honest, for
54:46
Speaker 1: a second, I found myself wishing I hadn't named my
54:49
Speaker 1: daughter Aida, had gone with Tesla instead, because now I
54:51
Speaker 1: think it's a great woman's name. Why did you decide
54:54
Speaker 1: to go with Tesla? So this is definitely not in
54:57
Speaker 1: the book. My headcanon for Tesla is that her dad
55:06
Speaker 1: is or was, say, an armored superhero maybe that happened
55:10
Speaker 1: to have a thing that flew and could shoot things
55:13
Speaker 1: out of his hands. It's definitely not a copyrighted character.
55:16
Speaker 1: So that's my headcanon for her. And you know, obviously,
55:19
Speaker 1: because there is all sorts of reasons, I wanted a
55:23
Speaker 1: name that said, this is somebody who values science. The
55:26
Speaker 1: name that I kind of wish I had gone with
55:28
Speaker 1: in the after the fact is Delta, which is a
55:32
Speaker 1: name that Kelly Gaspari named her daughter Um And I'm like, oh,
55:36
Speaker 1: that's such a good name for someone who's into aerospace,
55:38
Speaker 1: because Tesla, unfortunately is tied up in a lot of
55:41
Speaker 1: people's brains with Elon Musk. But you know, it's such
55:44
Speaker 1: a such a out of the box thinking kind of name.
55:47
Speaker 1: Delta is a great name for middle initials V. Also, yes,
55:50
Speaker 1: I think Delta's middle name does have a V. That's incredible. Well,
55:55
Speaker 1: thanks very much for coming on the podcast and telling
55:58
Speaker 1: us about your latest book, The spare May, and we
56:00
Speaker 1: encourage all of our listeners to check it out. In
56:02
Speaker 1: the meantime, I'm sure you're involved in lots of other projects.
56:05
Speaker 1: What else do you have on the horizon that all
56:07
Speaker 1: of your fans can look out for. Well, I am.
56:10
Speaker 1: I'm writing the next Lady Astronaut book, but that doesn't
56:12
Speaker 1: come out until right now. That's the Martian contingency. So
56:16
Speaker 1: my life is full of very complicated calendars. But the
56:20
Speaker 1: thing that I'm spending a lot of time doing and
56:22
Speaker 1: enjoying these days is teaching on Patreon. So if any
56:26
Speaker 1: of your listeners or writers and want to learn some
56:28
Speaker 1: narrative theory and stuff, that's the thing that I would say,
56:31
Speaker 1: come hang out with me there. All right, Well, thanks
56:33
Speaker 1: very much, everybody, go check that out, and thanks again
56:36
Speaker 1: Mary Robinette for joining us today. Thank you so much. So, Kelly,
56:39
Speaker 1: did she answer your space law questions adequately? Yeah? She did.
56:42
Speaker 1: I I really enjoyed hearing her talk about you know,
56:45
Speaker 1: who's responsible, and I think she did a great job.
56:47
Speaker 1: I think it's amazing that when you write a murder
56:49
Speaker 1: mystery in space you have to not only construct the
56:51
Speaker 1: murder mystery, but think about the science of it and
56:54
Speaker 1: the legal issues of it, Like what a big project.
56:57
Speaker 1: Kudos to Mary Robinette, She's so good. At that and
57:00
Speaker 1: like all the different layers. It's so fun talking to
57:03
Speaker 1: fiction authors and hearing about the different layers that they
57:05
Speaker 1: have to consider when they decide they're going to introduce
57:07
Speaker 1: something and how it has to be like multi purpose
57:09
Speaker 1: for the story. It's incredibly hard. Is one question I
57:12
Speaker 1: forgot to ask her, though, What's that? Can't she use
57:14
Speaker 1: her laser vision to turn her cheese sandwich into a
57:17
Speaker 1: grilled cheese sandwich? You know, I think that was probably
57:22
Speaker 1: the most important question, and you really dropped the ball. Yeah, well,
57:24
Speaker 1: we'll have to have her back when she comes out
57:26
Speaker 1: with the sequel. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We encourage
57:29
Speaker 1: you to go check out The spare Man by Mary
57:31
Speaker 1: Robin and Cole whatever good books are as sold. Thanks
57:34
Speaker 1: Kelly for joining us. Thanks for having me. It was fun.
57:37
Speaker 1: Tune in next time everyone. Thanks for listening, and remember
57:47
Speaker 1: that Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe is a production
57:50
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio or more podcast from my Heart Radio,
57:54
Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
57:57
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.