All right, let's get a quick clap to sink. Ready, and... One, two, three, clap. I think the wienersmith's bloated. Yeah, pretty good. We can do it again. Yeah, we do a few mulligans. It's quite all right. Ready. One, two, three, clap. Beautiful. Rock and roll. We can do a few for fun later.

Man, you're an exciting bunch.

All right.

That's the energy. Hello and welcome to Let's Learn Everything, the show where we learn anything and everything, interesting.

My name's Tom, and today we have two very special guests, a pair of science communicators and general funny nerds on the internet, who have written Scientific Americans' number one nonfiction book for 2023.

Ooh.

My name's Caroline, and I'm going to be asking our guests, is speculating about the future useful for day-to-day life?

My name's Ella, and I'm going to be asking our guests, what could possibly go wrong with communes in space? And we're Kelly and Zach Wienersmith.

Wiener-Smith simultaneously saying it. We'll fix it in post, we'll fix it in post.

It's fine, yeah.

And we're asking about closed-loop ecologies.

That's our topic.

Closed-loop ecologies.

I don't know what this term means, so I'm going to learn a lot.

Yeah.

I'm going to venture our guess it's going to be about specifically closed- loop ecologies in Mars, or how that could apply to Mars or space.

Or how it would apply to Mars since we haven't done it yet.

Yes.

Oh, have we not?

I say that, of course, because Zach and Kelly are authors of the book, A City on Mars, colon, can we settle space, should we settle space,

and have we really thought this through?

Kellyan-Zach, I don't know if you want to introduce yourselves anymore.

...