The Substance of Human Experience

Why in-person space travel and oceanic exploration cannot compare to a hot bowl of pasta

Sponge Bob and Patrick can finally visit Sandy Cheeks

So let’s just get this out out of the way first. No human will ever live on Mars. Or the moon. Or anywhere else in the solar system. If you don’t believe me, go research those places and then get back to me. I’ll wait <taps fingers on desk>.

Believe me yet? No? Let’s do a thought experiment… wait… [in best Dana Carvey Biden impersonation voice] No joke. Here’s the deal. Let me be clear. By the way… there’s no such thing as a thought “experiment”, at least in the sense that we use the term.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Okay, let’s disregard the sloppy idioms, and forge ahead with a thought non-experiment anyway. Let’s imagine you could live on the moon, and were sufficiently insane to want to live there. You survive the trip on a partially-reusable monster rocket, you have a pressurized housing bubble that will last forever, you can manufacture air, water and food, dispose of waste, deal with the radiation, keep yourself busy and entertained, repel the aliens with space lasers, and avoid the occasional stray meteorite (they don’t burn up in the atmosphere because there is no atmosphere, for practical purposes). Etc., etc. Oh sure, you can leap fifteen feet off the surface, or drive a golf ball into temporary low orbit. All that seems pretty surreal and cool for about fifteen minutes. But do try to not get appendicitis; lunar surgical resources are quite limited, as are golf balls, for that matter — not to mention beer carts with flirty attendants on the ninth hole. As luck would have it, moon dust burial plots are very cheap; this is good because you will need one fairly soon after arriving — as soon as just about anything goes wrong.

All of those practical things aside, what does living on the moon mean? Can you really experience the moon?

As with all things semantic, it depends on your definitions; we will need to dive into that loaded word “experience”. But, spoiler alert, by my reckoning, no, you can’t experience the moon. You will never step out of your hermetically sealed bubble without a space suit, and feel the moon dust between your toes, or stub your toe on a moon rock, while breathing the vacuum of space. Never, ever. Now there’s a bubble burster — you were flung a quarter million miles, like a stone in a slingshot, to be thiiiis close to moon dust and moon rocks. But it’s a tease. You can never touch them in their natural state. Oh, sure, you could bring them back to your hi-tech Tupperware enclosure and look at them there. But, at that point, you could have retrieved them with a much less expensive robotic system and shipped them back to earth — where you would have better scientific instruments. And where, when you’re done for the day, you could go home, open a window, and experience a pleasant ocean breeze with a glass of 2016 Laurel Glen Cabernet and a fine rib-eye from Rancho Largo ranch.

Alas, the best you can hope to do on the moon is live adjacent to the moon, with you and the moon sort of co-existing in a tense, uncomfortable relationship that never feels right and doesn’t end well. You will never experience the moon. Sure, your relationship with the moon will be marginally more intimate than viewing a virtual reality video feed from a robot on the moon surface. The stars will be incredible and ever-present. Looking at earth would be interesting for a few days, if you happen to be facing earth. But, at some level, it will always be a virtual experience, an experience that a sufficiently sophisticated simulation could replicate. At some point your affair with the seductions of the moon will end, and earth will seem like a very attractive option for a more permanent relationship.

Similarly, you will never walk on the ocean floor, or swim next to the Titanic. As with your moon bubble, you can risk your life in a pressure vessel, finding yourself nominally adjacent to the Titanic for a few hours (though preferably not in one made of carbon fiber). But the experience will be no different — and far more dangerous — than a well-crafted attraction at Disney World. Humans can never experience the ocean floor at that depth.

Physical proximity might be an ego or adrenalin or bucket list booster, but it is not genuine experience. When an astronaut does a space walk, s/he does not experience space in a more authentic way than while enclosed within the ship. S/he is simply enclosed in a smaller, more form-fitting, specialized “ship” that we call a space suit. Or, to put it in pop culture terms, when Sponge Bob would visit Sandy Cheeks, he had to wear a fishbowl on his head, else he and Patrick would end up like this:

Air is not good, Patrick! Air is not good!

Other planetary bodies will never be a refuge for humans. If we don’t like what is happening here on earth, we need to fix what is wrong. Leaving is not, and will never be, an option. Sorry Elon, you’re just wrong about this one.

The less sexy argument for in-person exploration of uninhabitable places is that suitably-trained humans are more capable than machines. But this too implodes quickly under the pressures of reality (much like certain deep-sea submersibles). But let’s consider it anyway. For the sake of argument, we will assume the humans are alive and functioning — after all, we can all agree that an operational robot is way more capable than a dead human. But you can’t have it both ways. You cannot pray at the altar of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity fantasy, living in fear of AI controlling the world, while arguing that only humans can properly explore Mars. If the machines are becoming that good (and, while they’re not “singularity good”, they’re getting pretty darn impressive), why spend the money required to keep humans breathing in hostile places, if machines will do the job just fine?

I understand why we sent people to the moon over fifty years ago, and I’m glad we did that. We learned a lot. But one of those lessons learned was “This is freakin’ expensive and dangerous, and there are better ways to use limited space exploration budgets.” The Apollo program ended, despite its wild success.

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And so we’re left with that “experience” thing. The real reason that people dream of walking on other planets is that humans love to explore and do cool things. It is in our nature, even if it’s a vicarious, safer activity for many. That’s why many people, particularly those who have no respect for their knees and hips, go skiing in the winter. We can argue the cost/benefit of that. But what we can’t really argue is its status as an authentic experience. The cold air on your face. The sound of the ski edges grinding through crystalline snowpack. Your heavy breath condensing in front of your eyes. The mechanized reality and perturbations of the lift (full disclosure: I’ve never been on one). It’s all real. It is all a type of immediate physicality that exists within the sensor range of our bodies. Even I, the ultimate downhill skiing cynic, can imagine the experience and the exhilaration.

Think of your body as as old school FM radio. They can typically pick up signals broadcast at frequencies between about 88 and 108 megahertz. The space around you is filled with radiation above and below those frequencies, but the radio is designed for a small slice of that. The radio is blissfully unaware of the rest; it is engineered to operate within — i.e., experience and interpret — a specific frequency range. Similarly, your body and mind are tuned for specific parts of planet earth.

All of that is an introduction to my larger point.

The truth is, we seem to be tuned to an illusion of sorts. We are not only not tuned to experience macro reality (the expanse of empty space), we are also fish out of the waters of micro reality (the world of super tiny things). Size matters, apparently. We live in a Goldilocks Zone in many ways, and not just at planetary scale.

But the issue is not simply scale. The broader universe that we inhabit is a supremely weird place. And almost all of it is unsuitable for human experience, let alone permanent residence. Humans have no way of imagining the gravity of Jupiter, let alone that of a black hole — environments that dwarf the water pressure that instantly killed my college classmate, Tock Rush, and his associates, a couple years ago next to the Titanic.

Conversely, everything around us — along with us — is made of stuff that acts really weird within its own, super tiny Goldilocks Zone of operation. We can explore and research what these places might be like, and try to explain their behavior using machines crafted in our own zones. And that is a fine use of human time and exertion, even though the machines themselves have shelf lives, just as we do. But we will never experience those places. We will never inhabit them. Investing resources to do that is a waste of time and money. It is the stuff of what used to be called comic books.

The astute reader of a certain age will retort, “Yeah, and Dick Tracy’s wristwatch seemed farfeteched too!” True enough. But Dick Tracy’s wristwatch was a machine. It was a machine that required technology that didn’t quite exist when the Chester Gould dreamed up his character. But it was a machine, a machine at human scale, using technology that communications researchers at the time could at least imagine, based on known physics. It didn’t require humans to develop new senses or intergalactic skills. It was something that Apple engineers could reasonably cook up fifty years later, in labs run by human hands, using materials that exist in our Goldilocks Zone.

Elon Musk could invent the most incredible human habitation pod imaginable, and figure out a way to transport it to Mars reliably. But why? Most people do not understand that all space travel is not much different than the slingshot trip to the moon — you don’t fly to Mars in the same way that an airplane actively navigates to some designated destination. You have to fling yourself into space on a trajectory, and try to time things so you “fall” where Mars will be in a number of months. Think of launching a clay pigeon and then shooting at it. Mars is your clay pigeon. A very, very fast clay pigeon.

Notably, there is very little room for error, as the energy required to make major course corrections is far more than human machines can supply or physically withstand, due to the physics of interplanetary travel (the required speeds, the G forces, the substantial momentum inherited from the planet one leaves, the gravity of the sun, etc., are all well out of scope relative to the earthly human experience). So, no course changes for you! If you’re lucky, nothing goes wrong, and you make it to your destination — but you only get one shot at entering a survivable orbit. You don’t just casually say “Standard orbit, Mr. Crusher” to the hormonal teenager inexplicably at the helm of the trillion dollar machine. This is a one shot, life or death proposition. And even if you live, you still have additional life or death challenges ahead.

If all goes well, you get to live in a tiny pod on a lifeless planet. Cool! Oh sure, life will be ever so slightly better on Mars than on the moon. At least there’s an atmosphere. I mean, you can’t breath it, but you do get a daytime sky of some sort. The landscape will be marginally more interesting, assuming that “endless sedimentary, post-nuclear wastelands in Nevada” are your preferred vibe. But you will face most of the same challenges that the moon tosses your way, except that the Martian atmosphere presents additional fatal risks to go with those heartwarming, vaguely earthy skies. You don’t want to be outside in a bad Martian dust storm — you think the Sahara is bad?. Your comfy pod better be anchored really well.

As with your trip to the moon, you won’t be able to experience Mars, other than for about two minutes before you lose consciousness and die. The honeymoon period might last a little longer than on the moon, as the familiarity factor runs deeper. But the inevitable disappointment will also run much deeper, after the days of walking around in a clunky space suit and not being able to take a decent shower or eat fresh food or be with family and friends begin to merge into an amorphous, internal cry for help. And your psyche is crushed by the knowledge that the trip home will be many months, assuming your ship is still launchable and intact.

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It seems we have a battle among modern tech titans, a battle to win our hearts to odd and false forms of transhuman experience. Elon Musk wants to woo us to the moon and to Mars and beyond — worlds that we can never experience directly — and merge our brains with technology. Mark Zuckerberg wants to woo us into a virtual, experiential space — again, grafting our bodies and minds to a crude facsimile of the world around us. Tim Cook wants to control our perception of our own world, augmenting the complexity and beauty of our natural world with digital graffiti. None of these visions has any chance of succeeding. To the extent that any do succeed financially, the humans who pay for the privilege will be paying to devalue their lives, not enhance them.

True human experience is direct and intimate. Yes, it is limited to a range of possibility on a single planet, with human and planet mutually and exquisitely tuned to make beautiful music together. Is that so bad? Give me a bowl of pasta with fresh basil and olive oil, with a nice, buttery chardonnay and some warm bread, with some friends and great music. Nothing on the moon or Mars, or in Mark Zuckerberg’s cheesy metaverse, or enhanced by Tim Cook’s goofy headset, can ever compare to these things. We are built for earth. Why can’t we just enjoy the place we were designed to inhabit? I say leave the other places to the machines — they’re nice places for machines to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. And that’s good. Because we can’t. Regardless of what Elon tells you.

Thanks for reading.

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For more reflections about gardening and the broader life lessons it bestows on us, feel free to check out my online book, Life Lessons of a Backyard Gardener, which I am publishing here, one chapter at a time.