Chatter #272 - Michael Robinson: A Theory You've Never Heard Of, Arctic Exploration & the Space Race

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Welcome to another episode of Chatter. Today I'm here with Dr. Michael Robinson from the University of Hartford. Michael welcome to the program. Thanks Josh. Thank you so much. No problem. Then you are the author. from the book the lost white tribe and host of a rather wonderful podcast, whose name just at this very second completely escapes me, it's time to eat the dogs, time to eat the dogs, that's all. So, yes, I've been listening. to the podcast enjoying some of your reflections on

exploration

and world history, um, but I'm curious to know where you are fascinated by the idea of ​​

exploration

and those historical wanderers, um, well, I studied biology in college and was really interested in science, I worked in a lab for a couple of years and I thought I was really interested in the science part of it, but doing science, sitting at the lab table and dissecting animals and trying to find a grant I didn't really like. appealed so much, so I went back to school and got a graduate degree in the history of science because that's where all the discoveries come from, the stories of discoveries, and that's what I discovered I was really interested in.

The question was how do people use science? creativity to come up with new things and that gradually took me. I thought I was going to work on the DNA of 20th century scientific biology, but my advisor was really interested in 19th century biology and that's what it's all about. people like darwin go on journeys collecting specimens trying to figure it out, so i really got involved in exploration from the scientific side and my first book was about

arctic

exploration in the 19th century, early 20th century, the attempt to reach the north pole and I really got kind of hooked from there because exploration has so many different aspects and so many different realms that, uh, it's just the gift that keeps on giving.

I

never

get tired of it, what attracted you to

arctic

exploration like it did me. I was very curious about that because if someone thinks about the different lands and worlds that have been explored around the planet, the Arctic is not the one that maybe you would assume people would jump to first in terms of interest or you just know a story that people would find maybe just on the surface, at least as fascinating as if you know discover the caribbean or america or you know india or you know parts of africa like these all seem like the glamorous quote in quotes like if you know parts of the exploration like what drew you to the arctic instead is good for me and, you know, in graduate school, when I look at different things, I got very interested in exploration and science and one of the strange things about this was that I was at the University of Wisconsin and I would go to the state historical society because they had a fantastic collection of exploration books and I would just wander around the shelves looking at all these books on exploration and if you went In addition to the piles on Arctic exploration that were packed away, there were hundreds and hundreds of books written by explorers or by biographers of Shackleton, Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen, you know, name after name after name of these famous polar explorers, and yet nobody in my field was writing about Nobody who was interested in the history of the Science was interested in it because I think a lot of these expeditions were really not interested in doing science per se, but rather in planting flags or attempting what today we might call soft power. showing off your nation's prestige by doing something really cool like going to the moon or winning the Olympic hockey game that kind of thing, so I found that was really a niche.

I wonder if there is a bigger story here. if arctic exploration is something that we can look at and take seriously from an academic point of view and that's what that first project was about and then when I dug into it, I found out, oh my gosh, people took it incredibly seriously. in the 19th century and Actually, it was the sexy way of exploration. There were more people talking about the Arctic in the early 20th century than practically anywhere else. Yeah, I guess that makes sense given that at the time it was probably like one of the quote-unquote last undiscovered lands where the or one of the undiscovered continents maybe other than Antarctica, but again you're in a similar world. similar there, so what do you think was what drove these early days? explorers because if you showed up in 1850 in northern Canada you wouldn't be, you'd probably look and say wow, that's beautiful, but you wouldn't, or most people at least wouldn't think, hmmm, let's see how far we are in this arid wasteland. can say that, you know, they're trying to kill us everywhere because of the polar bears or, you know, the freezing temperatures and what do you think made them do that?

Well, first of all, I would say it was a pretty extreme environment for a lot of the Europeans and North Americans who were watching it, but for all the Inuit cultures in the far north that was their home and they were perfectly comfortable living in places where a lot of people like you and I would consider it extreme, but the reason this became a place of fascination for Europeans and North Americans was actually because of the British in the period after the discovery or, should I say, the arrival of Columbus to the Americas at the end of the 15th century.

Well, a lot of people think that's some kind of great opportunity, but a lot of Europeans saw the American continent as a giant obstacle. They didn't want to go to America, they wanted to get to Asia. Asia was where there was silk, spices, tea and opium. On the American continent, it remained to be seen how a benefit would be derived from this. So for Britain and many northern European countries the question was how to move. the American continent to get to the good things to get to this, the spice trade or to get to India, so the search for the Northwest Passage, a passage that would go through North America to reach Asia, became very , very popular since that time.

From Henry VIII onwards and in the early centuries, mainly the British tried to do this without success, but in the 19th century, after the defeat of Napoleon, the British admiralty found itself with all these additional ships and had no French adversary against who to fight It was gone and then Second Secretary of the British Admiralty John Barrow said why don't we use these ships for exploration why don't we finally figure out how to get through the northwest passage and at that point I think it wasn't even possible. Commercially it was already so viable, but It was a brilliant project, a project that could show British power to the world, so starting in the early 19th century, these expeditions set out for the Canadian Arctic to try to find the Northwest Passage and in 1845, after decades. of trying unsuccessfully with this john franklin, sir john franklin, who was an admiral in the british navy at the time he set out with two ships in 1845 for the arctic and disappeared, no one ever

heard

from him again, so there are a lot The number of rescue expeditions increases and even the Americans enlist, so the US Navy sends an expedition to try to find John Franklin.

They don't find it, but they do find evidence of a winter camp and that really starts to draw the American public to the Arctic as a place. uh where they can compete with other countries where they can show off their prowess and their technology and their heroism, that's how Americans really get caught up in that and then at the end of the 19th century when it becomes clear that Franklin is dead and you know that the mystery is more or less solved. People are starting to find other goals in the Arctic, like trying to reach the North Pole first.

So, many people who went on these expeditions maybe not many, but there would be one. school of thought today that would see them as colonizers and, um, people who would maybe be villains and then there's another school of thought in a more maybe not as traditional way, but the more I don't know what the word is. What I'm looking for here is, but the old way of looking at these people was as pioneers and explorers and as people that you meet trying to find the next frontier, how do you see these explorers? Yeah, that's a very good question, I mean, I came.

In this field, looking at Western explorers, I was looking at Arctic explorers in particular and what I was really interested in was not just what happens in the Arctic, but why these expeditions are important to people back home. Why do people care so much? and that's a very western story that's actually a story about white explorers and American popular audiences and that kind of thing and when I got into the exploration thing I found exactly what you're talking about, which is that there are many ways. , that traditional story of white explorers traveling looking for interesting things that they report back home is actually a fairly incomplete view of what happens on expeditions because in almost all cases, in the 19th century and in the 20th century, these Expeditions were not just white people walking these were expeditions that were made possible by indigenous people, a perfect example of that Robert Peary who is often credited with being the first person to reach the North Pole.

You know he had 49 Inuit men, men, women and children on his boat who served as his sled drivers his hunters he had women on board the boat who were seamstresses he had Inuit men driving his dog sleds it was practically an impossible task without these people indigenous people similarly we can see uh hillary and tenzig norgay and their expedition to everest in 53 they had 350 porters helping them on their way 150 seriously yeah on two separate tracks I mean from where they started and then of course , there were smaller and smaller groups as they climbed to base camp, but I Know That's True again and again Henry Morton Stanley tried to find David Livingston in the heart of Africa.

He had over 200 Zanzibar and Nyamwayze porters with him and these were not alone. I must say that they are not just porters. These people are guides. They're map makers, they're people who really understand the geography of the places they're in, that they go to much better than any of the Western explorers they're with, but because they're locals, they don't really understand. credit as scouts, they're just seen as helpers, so actually I think you know this is a bit of a confusing answer to your question, but getting back to this, I think there's room for both, they're both absolutely important.

Understanding exploration when you get to the 20th century, almost all expeditions, with the exception perhaps of

space

exploration, are hybrid expeditions. These are expeditions that are built from the work, effort and planning of Westerners and local people. Yes, well, unfortunately there isn't. There are no natives in

space

to ask, we don't know that yet, so somehow you mentioned Morgan Stanley and it seems like this is yes, so this is someone who appeared in your book, the lost white tribe, um and yeah, so i. I'd like to go into it a little bit more, but before we start, maybe it'd be helpful if you offered a little summary of what that book is about and the hermetic hypothesis, sure, so the lost white tribe, my second book really comes out of This strange thing I found in my first book, which was that I was doing all this research on explorers who went to different places in the world, but particularly the polar regions, and there was a Canadian anthropologist explorer named Wilmer Stephenson Steffensen went to the Arctic. in 1910 this was just after robert peary returned from the arctic saying he had reached the north pole and i think stephenson was a little deflated by that because that seemed to be the big goal in the arctic but he trained as an anthropologist and thought that instead to discover a geographyunknown, I'm going to discover unknown peoples, so he walked to the high Arctic and found a group of people or rather he met a group of people.

I didn't find them, but I did meet these people who today are called Copper Inuit. They live on Banks Island in the Arctic archipelago, but he noticed that many of them had reddish hair and light complexions and returned to the United States. He says that he had found a group of what he called blonde Eskimos and I thought this is the strangest story in the world. I didn't know what to do with it at the time, but I put it in a file, no, not really. I didn't know what to do with it and it seemed like everyone wanted to somehow explain how these people ended up being blonde, if they were actually mixed

race

people. mixed that they had some kind of intermarriage between Inuit and let's say British explorers that happened years ago, nobody.

I really knew this and then I started collecting this. I started finding other accounts of people that explorers and researchers found people who looked white in places where they wouldn't be expected in central Africa, in the Himalayas, in Panama, in Tibet, and so the book The Lost White Tribe is actually a book that tries to explain what is happening here, that at the end of the 19th century people start to find white people all over the world or supposedly white people and the reason why Stanley is so important is because Henry Morton Stanley actually He becomes famous for finding David Livingston, this British missionary on Lake Tanganyika in East Africa, but years later he returns to Africa in search of the source of the Nile and in the process of doing so he encounters a group of people who he says look at white people. , they look like he says, Greeks and white shirts and he starts collecting information about them, finds this mountain that they're supposed to live on, reports it to the New York Herald and this becomes a big story. and um, so using Stanley's kind of report on finding this white tribe in Africa, the book basically builds up from there and says you know there, actually, it was a whole scientific

theory

about why you would find people supposedly white people in places you wouldn't find Wait for them and these anthropological theories that it's not like some kind of ancient white

race

that populates the world were incredibly popular.

You could see it in linguistics, you see it in population biology, anthropology, archeology and it really framed the way that people viewed discoveries like. the ruins of great zimbabwe or the pyramids or the mounds of the mound builders in north america and today there is no evidence that any of these stories of an ancient white migration are true, but they were still powerful ideas because they influenced the people and shaped the path. They thought about the world and more than that, they shaped the way indigenous people thought about the world. There were groups that still exist to this day in Africa, groups of people who believe they essentially have origin stories from white or proto-white groups from outside. from Africa, so anyway it's a big, complicated story, but basically it's a story about racial ideas over time, yeah, this gets to what we were talking about right before we started recording that your book is, ya You know, mass, uh, it's an exploration book disguised or I'm sorry, it's a human psychology book disguised as an exploration book, yes, because I find it fascinating that people can start to see features of things that are lost and this is something I know you've mentioned a lot before and I asked this when we tried to do the podcast the other day, so yeah, I think it's a good question, so how was it?

I know you went through Morgan Stanley. As different drafts of seeing it through his journal drafts and stories and seeing this as a myth of this lost white tribe in Africa emerge, it felt like he was creating fiction or it felt like he was just trying to find some kind of truth. somewhere that made them feel better maybe yeah, that's a great question because you know Stanley is um, I mean, first of all, Stanley is vilified by a lot of people and, you know, for very good reasons, I mean, He went to Africa. on several different expeditions and although he considered Africans to be very important people to him, he had personal relationships with them, he brought some African assistants to live with him in London, at the same time his expeditions led to an incredible amount of bloodshed and he was also a very insecure person who was perfectly happy to exaggerate, embellish or even lie when given the chance, I mean, he was kind of a tabloid editor in many ways, prime minister, that being said, um, I In fact, I think Stanley's interest in these people that he calls white people was actually sincere and I think it came from a lot of different things, I mean, and this wasn't unique to Stanley.

Western explorers will go to Africa assuming that the Africans are right. This massive population of diverse peoples was more or less the same and we now know that the genetic diversity of Africans is greater than that of any other population in the world and that you can go 200 miles into Africa and find different languages, different physiognomic traits, different heights and I think this is clear, what's happening to a lot of explorers is that they're moving from village to village and they see these quite different traits, um uh, physical traits in people and then they're, they're, they're like rebuilding it. because, in fact, a lot of these reports about so-called white tribes have nothing to do with skin color, they have nothing to do with whiteness, they have to do with these other traits, so, for example, when guys as jonathan john hanning speaks a british explorer goes into certain areas he sees groups of people who are the batutzi and um the bahutu of rwanda and um he notices physical differences in these groups high cheekbones different shapes of different cultural habits long, aquatic noses these become interpreted as racially correct because of things that connect to what he knows and I think in Stanley's case, Stanley was also a very lonely man and he was in Africa for three years and I think to some extent he was eager to see people who looked like him.

He has passages in his book where he says this African reminds me of Thomas Jefferson. This African reminds me of a guy I know back home and it's an assumption on my part that that's why he saw these groups of people that way, but I know he was eager to find people he could connect with. in Africa and I think race became one of those powerful forms. Do you think it's possible that maybe some of the characteristics of some of these people were just like reminding them? of of I like different people because I mean sometimes I find that so I'll meet someone from a completely different country but like you like you're like this guy that I know like you that like you know maybe in the the way he behave or the way they use their hands or the way they like to move their head when they talk or you know, sometimes I'm like me or for example, a friend of mine and his girlfriend are characteristically like that from Northern Ireland once of Spain and then are some of the things they like to say and do and the way they do it.

I wonder how these identical things have developed independently. It's like humans are yes, fascinating. I totally agree, I was watching this tic tac video of this guy who has this tic tac cooking and his voice reminds me a lot of a person who I know he has no relationship with, but he's very close and I think and In fact , I think you know that this is how human beings understand the world. It's very, very rare that we go to a place where we don't understand people or we don't understand what we're seeing and we just go, uh, that's a complete mystery to me, I have no idea how to make sense of that, I What we normally do is come in and say, oh, that sound that sounds just like the Backstreet Boys.

I remember 20 years ago, you know, we found ways to connect. the unknown of the things we know and I think that's absolutely true in terms of how we see new people too, so what led to the debunking of the hermetic hypothesis, other than your book, obviously, was like genetics or like genetic testing or just more exploration and finding out that these tribes didn't exist or what it was that finally brought it down as an accepted

theory

, so there were some things that brought it down from a kind of scientific standpoint, for example. One of the pieces of evidence for the Hemetic hypothesis is the idea that there had been an ancient white race that had invaded Africa and that they were the original settlers.

By the way, this was a very popular idea in places like Rhodesia or South Africa, which, uh, in some way wanted to prioritize white land ownership over African property, but one of the great tests of that the whole lost white tribe theory was the discovery of Great Zimbabwe and for decades there were archaeologists going to Great Zimbabwe. beautiful ruin in the current country of Zimbabwe uh and saying that this could not have been built by Africans there is evidence that it was built by Mediterranean people or by European people and then in the 1920s uh uh gertrude canton thomas uh an archaeologist is going to great Zimbabwe, at the behest of the British Academy of Sciences, does six months of research, carefully examines all the materials and says, "Look, this is traditional African architecture, we see all kinds of architecture, like this Shona architecture, which is of African origin.

African, and her people rebuke her. her about it, they rule it out um, but there were things like there was evidence from linguistics that said look at this, there is no evidence that this happens, there is evidence from population biology and also, in some cases, I will give you an example in panama richard marsh in the 1920s says he found a group of white indians, the kuna indians of the isthmus of panama and he brings these people a group of these people back to washington and he's talking about how they got there, maybe they married the conquistadors all these theories, well, now we know that, in fact, it was a form of albinism, right, that essentially it was a genetic trait towards white facial features, so you can go through the list and find a lot of them that That said, I think what really brings this down is World War II.

I think when there's all kinds of racial thinking that happens before World War II, where we say oh, it's very important to know if you're white, black, Asian or Latino, not only that there are people who make all kinds of distinctions between nationalities, right? Are you the German type or are you the Irish type? True, they were essentially different white races within the thinking, I think after World War II, when you saw. the absolutely horrific atrocities of the third reich and how racial thinking and Japan, as well as how racial thinking had so devastated the world, social scientists in the 1940s and 1950s absolutely said, we're not going to talk about racial essentialism and that was fed well with What was happening in biology?

Where? If you talk to population biologists today, regardless of politics. If you simply talk to population biologists and tell them what qualities make this group a race, what they will tell you is that race is a useless concept. When it comes to science, there's such a smorgasbord of people that you want to call African or Asian or Latino, and if you look at it on a genetic level, it doesn't really even make sense, so I think it's actually almost more for reasons. social than for scientific reasons in the '40s and '50s, when people started saying enough of this whole idea of ​​the hermetic hypothesis, like some of the things that I've

heard

you point out like some of the other pieces of the puzzle. it's like they're trying to fit into place being like an architectural language, um, some of the stories and myths and legends that people told.

I don't want to spend too much time on this, but how much credibility do you give the idea that it was? popularized by people like Graham Hancock that there was some kind of older civilization, like it didn't have to be a white civilization, there was just some kind of older civilization that maybe fueled these stories and, you know, as a word, the source of these myths, I mean, today I get emails like every day almost from this ted talk with people giving their theories about where these type of highly civilized ancient people came from and how they spread around the world and you can see evidence here and it seems like if the evidence here is like people compared pyramids to ziggurats and Aztec temples and said, well, the structures look the same, therefore there must be a cultural connection, therefore there must have been a civilization underneath that and there's actually a theory. there's a theory about that in anthropology it's called cultural def uh diffusion and in the 19th century people did this all the time this word represents looks a lot like that word this piece of Aztec jewelry looks like this African piece of Aztec jewelry, so So there are connections and I think what a lot of people would say today inday is that, honestly, you can do that with almost anything, you can look at any two cultures and, if you choose carefully, you will find things that look similar to each other, but to make claims that there are connections between them and that those connections They go back in time, you just need a lot more evidence than that, as far as really sophisticated ancient civilizations, I mean, we know there were really sophisticated ancient civilizations.

I mean, since at least from the beginning of writing we can see um incredibly sophisticated societies in Mesopotamia and Egypt and in Great Zimbabwe and Africa, you can see and in China all over the place as to those that exist prehistorically before writing. I have no idea, I mean, I can't really, you know, talk about it, yeah, well, I mean there's a big debate about how, what is it called Quebec, the place they found in Turkey that's fourteen thousand years old um yeah, it's like um and they've only discovered like five percent of it um but the reason they're freaking out is because it was deliberately buried, so they can know its age, so at least I think it's 11,800 years old.

Don't quote me exactly on that, but something around that, and they say the ongoing debate is whether he was a hunter. -gatherers who built this thing because there's something huge like megalithic, um stone work and um, it's perfectly aligned with true north, um, I think, or at least some of the buildings, so the debate is whether the hunters- gatherers were smarter than we thought. Or was there some civilization that built this and like me I don't know where I am exactly, but it's really interesting? Well, I put my money on hunter gatherers because they are smarter than we think. because I think, what's his name?

Hariri, the guy who wrote the book Sapiens has a good article on this, which is like you know we live in a time today where you don't have to load so much on your brain. Really what you need to carry in your brain is the knowledge to know where to access the information you need. You know that you can find practically everything you are looking for on YouTube or know where you want. And so, in a way, the argument he presents. and I'm sure what you're actually getting that argument from other people is that the amount of information you would need to know as a hunter-gatherer 10,000 years ago would have been incredible: you would need to know how to take rocks to make tools, you would know how to start fires, you would need To know the seasonal migration of animals, you would need to know how to make your own clothes, literally the skill set for a hunter-gatherer would be far ahead of anything we have. do now, while we are very specialized, we can do small amounts of things and basically outsource the rest to our friends or what we find online, yes, yes, it's very useful, it's funny, you mention Yuval Noah Harari, he's the first person. whose book I read and then it made me think about these ancient explorers because, before, he had

never

observed the development of the industrial revolution and the kind of economic prosperity that was not ancient Europe but Europe in the Middle Ages.

They went through where they could have the surplus to send these explorers and that was almost at least in that time period, as far as we know, like a pretty unique thing in human history to just send people and be like Go find things like and I had never considered it to be like that because it's quite, it was a very important part of why Europe came to dominate the world for a couple of hundred years because they said oh and then they found all these things and then they brought them back obviously themselves and We thought haha, that's mine and that's mine and we'll have some of that and oh, I like that, I'll have some of that um in a slightly less than fair way. but the source of all of this was that scientists were trying to discover and codify the planet, basically, which I think was much more noble than at least the motivations that had been portrayed, which is to say, the results, you know, don't.

It doesn't change based on you know what you think about their initial motivations, but it was nice to see that they weren't just talking okay, guys, here's the plan: We're going to loot this place and kill some people. Here, uh, let's steal some ancient artifacts. Here is a much nicer way to see the world. Although I would say that people in the 18th century were smart about these things and had been dealing with you since that time. of Christopher Columbus and the exploitation of the Americas and the empire of the slave trade in the Atlantic already had quite a bad reputation and not only among the indigenous peoples, but in Europe there were all kinds of people who said, as if you knew him, this is this is bru. you know, the brutal treatment and exploitation of other people and I think in the 18th century you start to see scientific expeditions, these are like James Cook, of course, who goes to the Pacific and he is what he is doing, he is actually there working to study astronomy, right?

We're looking for the transit of Venus, just the crossing of Venus across the surface of the sun, which will give you some evidence about how big the solar system is. Well, he's out there too, you know, collecting information about Tahiti and natural resources. true for lewis and clark it was true for bougainville it was true for malaspina almost and it was actually true for the british for the um even the arctic expeditions that didn't seem so practical there was a geopolitical reason for a lot of this stuff that makes the british seem powerful In the same way as the United States and the Soviet Union, we are really trying to outdo each other in prestige points right back to the moonshots of the 1960s, so I think you're right, science was a great part of it, but I also think that science gave countries a lot of cover to do what they wanted to do in Africa and the South Pacific and say, hey, we're doing this for science, it's science, so it was a bit.

It was almost like an early version of the space race, then the way you framed it, it's like a bicycle, oh yeah, it's about bravery and showing what we're capable of and that kind of stuff, yeah, I like it. I mean In the case of the space race, I absolutely believe that the space race was not really the first time this happened. You saw the United States competing with Britain in the Arctic and you see the Norwegians and the British competing in the Antarctic and you know, it's different. countries competing in central Africa and then you have, yes, then you have the creation of colonies, but in the case of the space race, I think the only thing that made it very important to the United States and the Soviet Union was that they really had They had very limited ways to compete with each other.

You know they were both terrible enemies, but any kind of direct conflict would have led to a thermonuclear war. So how do you fight a war that can't be fought well? How do you fight? How do you fight a cold war? Well, a cold war is fought through proxy wars. You can go to Korea, Vietnam or Chile, or you can fight them in the Olympics. You can make sure you know that you can get points that way. fight them in space with these kind of spectacular symbolic expeditions sputnik yuri gagar and you know neil armstrong yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned the olympic games there because that's definitely still going on.

Yes, I think what was the Icarus documentary that was revealed only by the lengths. which the Russians will go to and which shows how important it still is geopolitically um or at least um superficially geopolitically which is yeah, really and I mean, today what's also really interesting is that these symbolic meanings for exploration like um, the ones we were talking about in the 18th century and then the space race are still there with other countries that also want to show prestige through exploration look at the Chinese space program right now the Chinese have a 50 year plan to colonize the moon create natural resources that would allow them to go to other places where in fact I had a guest a few months ago on my podcast talking about Chinese plants for lunar exploration, it is incredible and they have clearly drunk the kool-aid of what the exploration, it's not about economics. it's about nationalism, it's about soft power, yeah, I mean, I would suggest there's probably a bit of economics in it because I can't remember what the figure is, but the moon is basically like there's lots and lots of h3 on the moon and I had a friend of mine, Houston Wade, who has the most listened to podcast of all time on this show.

He was telling me about yeah, if you could successfully mine the Moon like a truck full of this H3 stuff would. like in the world for hundreds of years um so whoever gets there and figures out how to do it will become the richest nation on the planet so this is my question for you Josh do you think this is really what drives to the people? Go to the moon or Mars like I'm going to be rich I'm going to go I'm going to make a lot of money from this I mean, I would say I think that's in Elon Musk's heart right now, you know? money that's going to be made on Mars, so I would say, and you can, you can tell me I'm wrong on this, but I would say that pioneers like people who say we have to do it like Elon Musk, so people who said we have to go to the Arctic, we have to do it like them, the people who become like the figureheads or the women or are not motivated by money, the people who are going to finance this and have to open their checkbooks, will be motivated for the money, that's what I would say and I would say that the Chinese are motivated quite significantly by potential profits, although that may differ since it is a country and as we have talked about soft power. and maybe that's more of an influence on a nation's decision to do it than it is on an individual's desire to push for an exploration maybe in the way that maybe and maybe that's just the way we see it from a retrospective perspective.

We, you know, we thought that Columbus was the guy who brings the team together, you know, in Ocean's Eleven, like him, he's the guy like us, he's getting them all together and going well, this is the guy we need to do sales and this. he's the guy we need to do this and we see it as his expedition, while it was probably france that financed columbus, columbus was spain, so maybe we're looking at him as columbus, but actually that was spain and maybe Maybe that's why I see it differently because I see it as a triumph of an individual compared to the triumph of a nation.

I mean, I think for years and years there was talk of colonization. of mars in particular mars to some extent the moon I mean these are the people who are talking about this these are the true believers you know in a sense they know what they want humans want on mars and now they are going to reverse engineer the reasons why that we should get there, so it's like, well, you know we're going to do this and we're going to find h3 on the moon and that's going to be something amazing or you know, just building rockets.

This will lead to incredible side effects. Look what we found with Apollo. We kind of know tang and you know velcro and all these things you know, but I kind of think they're reverse engineered reasons, um, for what's really going on. which is kind of ma, I mean it really is kind of manifest destiny for space, we think it's cool to go places and it's part of our heritage and we're going to do it and all the reasons why you could throw up against it , like you know how much radiation you'll get getting to Mars and then trying to protect yourself on Mars.

Mars does not have a Van Allen belt, there is no type of magnetic protection shield like there is on Mars. the earth to prevent people from being completely irradiated by cosmic radiation, I mean, not to mention the fact of just surviving or the fact that, like if you are putting all kinds of things on Mars, you will never be able to get out of there Mars will never be a place where you can study as a Martian because after a while you'll just be human and I think people just dismiss that stuff, I'll say, although with Elon Musk he's a true believer.

There's no doubt about that, but they've found a way to make it profitable, I mean what Spacex is doing with reusable rockets and they've absolutely found an economically viable niche, particularly for space communications like that, they're definitely making money off of that, That's definitely what it sounds like. like you don't think we should explore space, I mean, I mean, I love space exploration, I mean, I was probably with you, I was looking at James Webb's pictures, uh, last week when they came out and you know, it just shook completely my world I am totally and totally fascinated in it and I tell you this if there are astronauts who are going to do interesting things on the moon or if they finally get the space launch system, the monstrous giant NASA rocket to send Artemis to the moon or the Chinese reach the moon I will be, you know, I will record all those things, I will be watching them as attentively as everyoneetc, but should we spend national dollars to spend, you know, putting humans in places that they don't need to be, I mean, it's very expensive, josh, I mean, we're talking about trillions of dollars to send to the people to places where robots can actually do the job pretty well, I mean you know you have the rovers going, they've been for 15 years, I mean the thing about sending humans to places is you have to send them there with an atmosphere, you know, you have to put atmospheres around humans and then you have to feed them and then you have to bring them back home.

I mean, I know there are projects that say you don't need to bring them home, but most people want to come home, it's incredibly expensive to make profits that aren't really viable, I don't think so, so you don't do it. I think it's because I don't know how to explore, what if there was a 17th century version of this podcast in some tavern in England? um and they say no, no, we don't need to go to America, it's too expensive, you know, we just don't. It's worth it, what can the United States bring us that we don't have here?

It's Britain, we've got everything, you know? Well, the world would have been different, but the Native Americans would have been perfectly excited about that since they had already populated the Americas when it comes to thinking, you know what happens if we you know what happens if we don't, I mean one One of the things you hear a lot with Mars is, hey, do you know that humanity has put all its eggs in one basket, which is the Earth basket? You know we're hit by a meteor. You know, Putin drops the thermonuclear bombs. Covid gets worse next time in annihilation. of the species, therefore, we need to inhabit another planet.

This is the argument you hear most often, but if you think about it from a practical point of view, it is as if you were going to invest billions of dollars to create a colony in one place. that may or may not be viable in the long term rather than using those trillions of dollars to, say, try to address the domestic problem of global warming or world peace or whatever, I just don't think there are too many kinds of arguments that have makes sense from a logical point of view about sending people into space. Hey, I'll be watching.

I think it's a great thing. I'm completely fascinated by it. I just don't want you to know about our nations spending our tax money instead of spending it on well, you guys don't have to worry about it as much on your side of the pond, but healthcare would be great, you know if we could put a little more money on health? Really all of our healthcare spending goes directly to the administration. I think you are in the same boat. To be honest, yes, but yes, I agree it would be nice. More spending on healthcare would be wonderful.

A less sick population. It's probably great, so that's costing us less money, this is what I don't understand, why wouldn't you want to pay for people to be healthier? Oh yeah, make people healthier and it'll cost you less, so I think this Exploration space race will probably go ahead anyway, so maybe you could give us some things you think we could learn about what's going to happen. in the space race by looking at ancient exploration of some other parts of the world, say the United States or the Arctic since that is one of your areas of expertise, what can we learn about what we are going to see?

Well, what's really interesting is that a lot of people use in the United States in particular a lot of expeditions, I should say expeditions that have astronauts on them, uh, in space, a lot of those references to earlier expeditionary eras, particularly in the United States United, Lewis and Clark is right because, first of all, Lewis and Clark was one of those expeditions that didn't go out and kill a lot of people. people who were actually trying to win, you know, they got along quite well with the Native Americans that they met and it was also something that promoted science, so I think you see it used routinely in, you know, George Bush for Por For example, when he started the uh right after the loss of one of the space shuttles, he said uh, you know we have to do this, it's written in our spirit, you know, like Lewis and Clark, so I think we're going to keep using it. .

Those metaphors, I think the pioneer metaphor as you mentioned is powerful, certainly in the United States it is incredibly powerful and will be used in space, so I think they're not going to change much about those metaphors. I think the danger of metaphors is that when you really look at the new environment, they are not like the old environment, so in reality the space is not like the West, the space is more like the Arctic, it is not easy to find sources. of food, it's very cold, you go out unprotected, you die, so I think those things, those metaphors will still be used in terms of where it's going in the future.

I mean, I feel like the Chinese probably did it. Of course, it depends on political stability, but one of the problems with the American space program is that NASA will develop a series of strategic plans. Congress will decide what it wants to do. Sometimes you will see presidential initiatives. go to the moon in 10 years like john kennedy said in the early 60s, but really the only reason that happened was because the threat of the cold war was there during the 60s and therefore the Funding was maintained after kennedy, through johnson, and even nixon, but most of the time it doesn't work that way someone will present a president will present this great space initiative the next administration will dismiss it or congress will change hands and the program will be terminated. will cut, so in the United States it is very difficult to create these two-decade-long plans that are needed for a large, let's say, human exploration of space, the Chinese don't have to worry about, the Chinese don't have to worry about the popularity of the programs, they do not have to worry. about changing administrations and they really have their eye on the long term, they can put money in incrementally year after year after year and develop their projects towards some goals, so I really think that in China, possibly, also in India, you will see Then will likely begin to surpass the United States and NASA in the next decade in certain areas of human exploration, so no credence is given to the ideas that perhaps China will have a difficult time surpassing the United States or the West technologically because they steal a lot of things and ip and that once they get over us they will have difficulties, it will be like a game of thrones you know, he did it wonderfully when he had the books to draw and then once they got over that it was all over.

It collapsed, well, I mean this has been something that I think people in the West, particularly in the United States, tell themselves to make them feel like you know how to sleep better at night, the Chinese are, this is just derivative. , but I mean, if you look right now. In 5G networks and telecommunications, I mean, yes, there is intellectual property theft? Yes, there is, but I think you can't say just because that's happening that there is incredible innovation in China. I think it's an absolutely perfect example of this, the Chinese. I've created a lunar lander to go to the Moon, take a sample of rock, return it to Earth, the kind of innovations you need to do a project like that are incredible, so I guess I really don't think the Chinese don't. they are.

They're going to be successful because their stuff is so derivative, I think they're absolutely as innovative as the West in certain areas, and I think as long as the policy is right, as long as the policy is stable, and as long as Xi Jinping maintains his commitment to space. I think he really cares about space, but as long as it's there and as long as the system is stable, I think the Chinese could do very well. I'll be watching. I'll be watching. Some of the moon stuff, um, with great fascination, mainly because the h3 thing I told you about is that it blew my mind when I found out that I thought hanging on the moon is like a huge golden ball, if you can imagine it.

I figure out how to get it um and then my mind just goes to the Rick and Morty episode where they mine Pluto to nothing because it's full of plutonium, but anyway, um, Michael, I've taken up a lot of your time, so I really want to. to thank you, it's been a really fun conversation, so would you like to share some of your stuff? Oh well, if people are interested in exploring, my podcast Time to Eat the Dogs comes out every week or two and I try to get a guest on there who's going to talk about some aspect of this last thing, actually what's going to drop Next week it's an exoplanet astronomer talking about how James Webb will really revolutionize the search for planets and other planets. systems and then I have someone talking about magellan after that and then talking about French polar exploration the next week um yeah and then the two, the two books called the coldest crucible and the lost white tribe are the two books that I've written Yes I'm interested in that topic, yes, I feel like the exoplanet thing is like we're looking, we're just looking at a beach and we're looking for grains of sand because they're all there, we just can't see them.

I think that's what I really want to know, well, I mean before, back in the 1960s and 1970s, the search for extraterrestrial life was done when people watched the radio, essentially put up radio telescopes and listened for signals, but actually when You are doing it. that you are looking for intelligent life that is so intelligent and powerful that they will emit something powerful enough for us to hear it, but now with exoplanets you don't have to look for intelligent life. look at planetary atmospheres and say if there are any biological signatures, there are things you can do, we don't know how you would do them without life, for example, in our atmosphere, oxygen is a product of life, our atmosphere, you know, 4 ago billion years ago is not full of oxygen, now it is thanks to living beings, methane is another biological signature molecule.

Now we have the network capability and other telescopes have the capability to look at over 10,000 planets and look for biosignatures, so what I'm really excited about is the idea that maybe in the next decade people will find biosignatures in other planets that cannot be explained simply as chemical reactions, it will be an amazing time. I think it's fascinating. I'll have to be careful. That sounds really interesting, okay, so I'll put links to your books and your podcast and some of the things we talked about in the description below, so yeah, thanks everyone, thanks Michael, thanks Josh, thanks for reaching out the end. of the podcast if you want to leave us a comment that would be great, like, share, subscribe and if you're listening on Apple, leave us a comment until next time, thanks for listening.