This is an I-Hard podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Elon Musk recently announced that SpaceX is shifting its focus away from a self-sustaining

city on Mars and will instead build a self-growing city on the moon.

Musk explains that building on the moon makes sense because you can launch a rocket to leave for the moon every 10 days,

and it only takes two days to get there. But for Mars, because you have to wait for the planets to align nicely,

you can only leave for a trip

every 26 months, and it takes six months to get there. So, he argues, you can go to the moon

more often and more quickly. So it makes more sense to start there. But orbital mechanics

hasn't, like, recently changed.

These facts that Musk is stating have been true for the history of SpaceX, and of course for much longer than that.

So why the change in heart now?

And fickle human hearts aside, how feasible are these plans?

We'll chat about how difficult it will be to create a self-growing or self-sustaining city on the moon or Mars, and we'll chat about Musk's plans to build

AI satellites on the moon and launch them into deep space using a mass driver. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe.

Hi, I'm Daniel.

I'm a particle physicist, and I want humanity to occupy the stars, but I want to stay here on Earth.

Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith.

I study parasites and space, and I'm also cool with humanity occupying the stars, as long as we do it like ethically and carefully.

But I am also staying down here on Earth with the goats and the moths and my

kids and my husband. All right. Well, if neither of us are going to Mars or the moon or the belt,

then my question for you today, Kelly, is what is the most dangerous or uncomfortable place you'd be

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