Thank you all so much for joining us today. My name is Tori Bosh, and I'm the editor of Future Tense, which is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University. And our goal is to explore emerging technologies and sciences and their implications for public policy and society. This exploration takes two forms. We have events like this, and then daily commentary on technology and science news on Slate. And you can find us on Slate at www.slate. And before I introduce the event today, I'd like to invite our first panelists to take a seat up here and get mic'd up. So we're here today, of course, to discuss the giant leap, the race to Mars and back. Mars has haunted human beings for a long time. It's so close and yet so far. Now it looks increasingly possible that humans could step foot on Mars within the next couple of decades. But before that can happen, there are enormous challenges. We'll need the science and technology to carry the modern day explorers safely to their destination and hopefully back. We'll need to cut through bureaucratic red tape. We'll need the money and more. Today we'll discuss all of these issues. I'd also like to thank our underwriters, Lockheed Martin, for making this event possible. Just a quick housekeeping note. This event is being live streamed on the New America website. So when you ask a question during the Q&A portion, please wait for the microphone so that people here and online can hear you. We also ask that you introduce yourself and make your question a question if possible. Our first panel will be A Day in Deep Space, Technology, Research, and the Human Condition. It gives me great pleasure to introduce the panel's moderator, Phil Plait, who you may know from his Bad Astronomy blog on Slate. He's also the author of Death from the Skies, exclamation point. Phil has a PhD in astronomy from the University of Virginia and worked on the Hubble Space Telescope as a NASA contractor at the Goddard Space Flight Center before beginning his blogging career. Welcome. And thanks, everybody, for coming. It's interesting to be back in Washington. I grew up in this area. I grew up in northern Virginia. Went to Lake Braddock. Yeah, great. Everybody here is from Wilson, I guess. All right, that's fine. And so it's nice to be back, especially when the weather's cooperating and the flowers are blooming everywhere. It's lovely here right now. And it's a pleasure to be here. I'd like to thank the sponsors as well and, of course, Slate for, well, for paying me, but also just to be here and to moderate this. I'm very excited about this. A big enthusiast for space exploration, I'm very excited that after all these years, we may actually be going to Mars. This is something that is now being taken seriously again, even though it may have been started in decades and decades ago. Once Apollo came and kind of went, those dreams sort of were put on hold, but now we're back in a situation, I think, where we can take this sort of thing seriously. And we're building rockets big enough to do this. We're going to have them very soon. A lot of people are crying doom and gloom about the space program. I am not one of them. I think we're doing just fine. I wish we were doing better, but things could be a lot worse. So the future is actually looking, I think, fairly bright for going back to the moon and going on to places beyond. And that is what we're here to talk about today. We talk a lot about the architecture. We talk a lot about what happens when we get there. But it's not that often that we spend a lot of time talking about what's it going to be like on the way? You know, when you're on a road trip, you're always thinking, oh, we're going to go to Disneyland, but it's like, yeah, but it's a 27-hour drive. You've got a lot to do. You're not going to be playing license plate and go the whole time. So we have to figure out what's going to happen on the way. And that's what our panelists are going to talk about today. They are lettered enough that I'm going to read from my notes because otherwise I would never get this right. To my immediate right is Tara Rutley, who was, associate or is, associate international space station program scientist. Everybody here has like way better job titles than I do. I'm blogger. What are you going to do? And I love this too, lead hardware engineer for the ISS health maintenance system and for the human research facility. I was. The human research facility sounds nefarious. It's fantastic. It was, but nothing horrible, I would assume, no? Okay. No, we're the government. I saw Planet of the Apes. I know what human research facilities look like. And also an aquanaut with the NASA extreme environment missions operations six or Nemo. And we're going to want to hear about that because I know that's going to play in immediately into what we're going to be talking about today. Great. Next to her is Josh Hopkins, a space exploration architect with Lockheed Martin. Works on possible configurations for spacecraft and that includes crude. And I say crude, not CRUDE, like, you know, made of balsa wood. Crude with a crew on them, which is now the preferred term instead of manned for obvious reasons. And I wish we could come up with a better term for that because I don't like crude because it sounds better. At humanned, you need some sort of... Human spacecraft. Astronaut spacecraft. Ooh. Astronaut. Because there could be an astronaut as well. Astronaut. Yeah. So you work on possible configurations for those types of spacecraft going to Moon, Mars, and beyond. And like me, an asteroid and orbital mechanics enthusiast. So that's cool. We'll have lots of Delta V talk later. That'll be awesome for the audience, I'm sure. And on his right, we have Kate Green, who is a science technology journalist who's written for such venues as Wired, Discover, New Yorker, and U.S. News and World Report, as well as many others. I'd heard of all of them, so that's cool. Congratulations. And I love this, too. Your crew writer for the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. It's a NASA-sponsored mission, four months in a geodesic dome on Mauna Loa at 8,000 feet. Or as we call that in Boulder, Colorado, sea level. But 8,000 feet, that's pretty good. Is that the longest anyone has spent in Hawaii without going to the beach? Might be, it might be. And I saw pictures of that, and that, I mean, it's supposed to be a Mars analog. Yeah, it absolutely looks like. And it's amazing. Yeah, red rocks, desert, dry. So if we could have found three better people to talk about what it's like to go to Mars, I don't see how. So, we wanna talk about what it's like to be on a spacecraft going to Mars. And to do that, I think we first have to sort of define what the spacecraft is gonna be, because there are different architectures for getting to Mars.  And Josh, you're sort of the expert here. First, even before we get to that, I just wanna spend a minute. What do we need to do between now and launching a rocket or a series of rockets that will take astronauts to Mars? Well, I think that figuring out how to get to Mars is a long list of challenging new technologies and capabilities. And I tend to group them into two categories. There's things that are sort of unique to operating on Mars itself. So landing, getting down through the Mars atmosphere, you know, supersonic parachutes and all those sorts of things. Figuring out how we're gonna deal with planetary protection, which is preventing Earth microbes from colonizing Mars or Mars microbes from colonizing Earth. Figuring out how you provide power on the Martian surface at night and so forth. So those are the things that are specific to Mars. But then there's a category of things that are sort of general purpose skills you need to operate in deep space, no matter where you wanna go if it's a long distance away. So that's things like figuring out how the human body handles microgravity and how do we protect against that. Figuring out what we're gonna do about deep space radiation. Figuring out things like how do you keep the crew happy and healthy and productive when they're locked in a tin can for a long period of time. People keep looking at me. We'll get to that, we'll get to that. Four months, four months. We'll get to that, right. You know, propulsion, communications from great distances and so on. So I think the thing that's important about that category of stuff is that those are useful skills for other missions as well, going to the moon or going to asteroids. So those are probably the things we'll learn to do first. And a lot of that is happening on the International Space Station right now. So, you know, questions like how big a habitat do we need for the astronauts over that period of time and how much exercise time do they need to spend during the day? So everybody knows that the astronauts have to exercise to keep their muscles and bones healthy. But a consequence of that is that they eat more and they turn more oxygen into carbon dioxide and they sweat more. And so that actually is a major driver for the life support system. One of the things I didn't actually know until quite recently talking to a former Apollo astronaut is that you couldn't exercise on an Apollo spacecraft because the life support system couldn't keep up. So. Once there's no room. Yeah, that too. So figuring out how we design those spacecraft is one of the things that we're gonna be focusing on in the next 10 or 20 years at the moon and an asteroid. It's funny you would bring this up or answer that question this way because one of the things I was trying to think of when I was preparing for this, the hard part about a moderator is coming up with either enough questions or not too many questions. And as I was thinking about this, as you're going to Mars, how you get there is going to define a lot of what we're gonna be talking about. Just what's the spacecraft going to be like? So to even discuss this on a panel, are the crew gonna be weightless for four to six months or nine months, however long it takes to get there? Or is there going to be something that we're going to use to simulate artificial gravity, not like inertial plates or anything like in Star Trek, but spinning the spacecraft to mimic gravity? I wonder if we should take those two ideas separately? We haven't actually discussed this. Should we take that separately or just talk about them together? Talk about them together, I think that'd be... Well, you're the expert. Yes, so from my perspective, in my work with the space station, I firmly believe that whatever the next, whatever the vehicle is to get us to Mars, I feel pretty strongly that it's likely not going to be rotational. I feel like there's going to be microgravity involved. And so that's why we do so much work on the space station right now and understanding the human body changes in microgravity because we have to figure out what systems change and how you mitigate that so that you're healthy when you get to Mars. And we're all beings of the 1G environment. I mean, that's what we're built for. So the second you take that away, we've become new and changed and the body is really efficient at getting rid of what it doesn't use, things like your muscles and bones if you're not standing up against gravity anymore, things like your blood volume, your plasma volume goes down because you don't need all that fluid anymore and your heart's not pumping as hard because you don't have the gravity to pump again. So your heart starts to atrophy. So you have all these changes even in the immune system, the immune system becomes suppressed. So with all that being said and know that the engineering challenge would be too great technically and I think monetarily, financially and also vestibularly for a rotating vehicle. I think that's too many challenges. We're facing the fact that it'll be microgravity based and so we've got to get all these things figured out now with this laboratory that we have in the Earth orbit. Right, and we have two astronauts on board right now. We're gonna spend a year specifically. There have been astronauts who have spent a year in space before, I think four in total. But this is where this is specifically designed to look into long-term effects. And so just to give everybody a sense of perspective, a Mars mission is probably about a six to nine month trip to Mars and something like 18 months at Mars and then another trip back. So you're talking about a two and a half year mission and typically a space shuttle mission was about two weeks. A typical space station mission has been about six months. So we need to prove that we can safely operate for much longer than we have in the past and these one year missions are kind of a first step in that direction. Well, given all of the problems you just listed which is a terrifying litany of how your body can go wrong, it's like, I know how my body can go wrong in 1G. You say we're sort of adapted to 1G and it's like, that's cool, you're young. Let me tell you about my L5S1. With all of those, does it still make sense to keep them weightless or at least in microgravity on the way to Mars when they're gonna have to land under roughly a third of a gravity and work on that? When we know it's difficult for them to come back to Earth even after six months. Yes, and so I think to answer that question we can look to the first big advancement we've gotten through space station is an understanding bone loss. We've made some significant advancements in mitigating bone loss. I mean ever since I was a kid, we knew you lose bone in space but now we've got the right countermeasures in place that we have found that we've been able to maintain bone mineral density. Now we don't know about the inside of the structure of that bone, it still may be weak but I think it's a really good example of how we are doing things right now in ways that we can mitigate, potentially go into Mars in microgravity because I think the other side of that vehicle spinning is such a huge financial and engineering feat and probably as an engineer, the more you introduce that's new and non-tested in history before, it's kind of like you don't know what you don't know so you may be facing other challenges that we've not faced before with such a complex vehicle. At least the human body, we've got years and decades behind us of understanding what happens in space and we feel like we're on a burned down path with risk in terms of mitigating those changes in the humans. What are the, what have you done to make sure bone loss is minimized? Those things include resistive high impact, resistive exercise, so things like weight lifting and obviously it's a little different in space, the machines they use. There's treadmill, so the heel impact on the bone. You need load on the bone, that's what you need. We've also figured out a good nutritional mix for the astronauts so they gotta eat all their calories and take, I think it's 800, so it's twice, I think the daily dose of vitamin D that you would take on Earth. So they, all those things and we're finding out that these things seem to be working. So diet and exercise. Right, exercise. Yeah, right. The advice for astronauts is the same as for the rest. Same for you. You can make millions of dollars selling diet books that have all kinds of crazy things and they all kind of wind up, the ones that work, burn more calories than you take in. So you were asking about artificial gravity and somebody said something interesting in a recent study of artificial gravity that it, you have to think of artificial gravity as a little bit like artificial turf and artificial sweeteners, that it's almost like the natural stuff but it's not quite the same thing and there's some subtle differences like you were getting to that cause challenges both in the biology and in the engineering. So one example is if you've all seen the movie 2001 where they've got the rotating centrifuge in their spaceship and one of the astronauts goes jogging around the spaceship. Well, the apparent effect of gravity is a result of your angular speed around the rotation. If you start moving in that direction, you're changing your speed. So for example, if you jog with the motion of the spacecraft, you would get twice as heavy and if you jog the other direction, you could become weightless. So the astronauts have to figure out how to function that way and the engineers have to figure out how to make the spacecraft really big and rotate really slowly so that those effects disappear. That's great for sci-fi writers out there. I can see people taking notes. I won't give anything away but a friend of mine who writes science fiction actually has a story similar to that and he asked me what would be the effects of moving and I said basically what you just said. So I'm glad you said that because I feel better that I wasn't wrong in giving my friend advice. Yeah, and there are also effects, there are also just daily effects. Like I always think about what it would be like to pour tea and have the stream seem to move away from you or just miss the cut because- Things don't drop in a straight line in a rotating spacecraft.   So I won't be in a rotating habitat on my way to Mars anytime soon, which is fine with me actually. Okay, so they're gonna be weightless, that's good. Now we've established that. It's a six to nine month trip. Is this gonna be a one-shot deal? Are we launching multiple ships that they're going to have to rendezvous with fuel and water and air depots on the way? Or is it, are we basically loading them up with a backpack full of supplies and saying hope you get there? What do you think? So it's a lot bigger than a backpack. I think one good exercise for this is if you've ever packed the car for a family vacation, imagine packing everything you'd need for, say, a family of four for a two and a half year camping trip and just thinking of the food and there's no water there, so take the water and the toilet paper and, you know. Like a trailer for your gasoline. Right, so it very quickly becomes a really large amount of stuff. So you're not likely to be able to launch that all in one shot, even with the biggest rockets we can build. So it'll be a conglomeration of several loads of stuff and then the question is, do you aggregate all of those things in Earth orbit and send them all off to Mars together? Or do you send some of the things to Mars first so that they're waiting there when you get there? One advantage of that is that you don't have to launch everything fairly close to it at the same time. You can launch some things a few years ahead of time. The disadvantage is how confident are you that it'll still be there and functioning when the astronauts get there? So then you start thinking about things like, well, let's not pack anything that they have to have to come home and send that first. We'll send all that stuff with them, but then does that mean that you have too much stuff? So it turns into a pretty complicated packing problem, but it'll almost certainly be several launches and at least some things going out to Mars ahead of time. Right, so that strikes me that your crew is going to have to be fairly confident in what they're doing and certainly able to handle any sort of contingency that comes up. And that is, I think, probably one of the most hand-fisted segues I've ever made. And in the next section, which would be, okay, so now we've decided the hardware. It's not going to spin. We're gonna be throwing stuff out there. They're gonna be taking a lot of stuff with them, multiple launches. We have to pick a crew. How, I've seen a lot of designs and the crew always seems to settle around four people. Does that sound about right? Four to six? Yeah. So if you go back to, say, Werner von Braun's studies, I think he had, I don't know, 75 people or something, but when you start figuring out how to do that, it gets really hard. And so the engineers wanna turn it into like two people, two astronauts, and then the crew and the scientists say, that doesn't, you know, you can't do that. That's not enough. And then you start figuring out, well, what's the minimum? Is it three? Is it four? Is it six? I think six was established, didn't have it. Costello go to Mars. So I think that's probably... That's a good baseline. That's the way to go, as opposed to... Whereas the three Stooges, of course, clearly believe the three is the right number, so... Did they go to Mars? I don't remember. But, well, that brings Kate into the conversation now. Not for the three Stooges, not having Costello angle necessarily, but for crew selection. You have four or six people that you're about to send on a trip to Mars. It's gonna take two and a half years. This is not Apollo anymore. This is a whole other game. How do you do this? How do you even begin to think about crewing a vehicle like this? That's a good question. I don't know if I have the answer to that, but I do know... I do know that our high seas crew had six members, and we were selected out of 700 people worldwide for these astronaut-like characteristics, which are education, some background in science or engineering, attitude, can-do attitude, and experience, sort of being willing to go out into the world and try things, or go out into other worlds and try things. So, like I said, we had six people on crew, three men, three women. And actually, in the audience right now is one of my crew members, the chief scientist, Jaheda Sarah Sastra. She wants to raise her hand and wave. So, one-third of the high seas crew is here today. And we were brought together in a sort of a pilot... So, high seas was about a food study. So, we were exploring different food systems, and we were brought together for a sort of cooking lesson before the main mission. How do you cook with freeze-dried foods? How would you cook on Mars? This was the question. And so, there were nine finalists for this mission, and we all came together at Cornell University, and we learned how to cook with freeze-dried cheese and crystallized eggs and that sort of thing. And that's when we got a chance to get to know each other and see is this gonna work or not. And we actually all got along pretty well. And even after the mission, we all get along pretty well. So, it's a testament to the selection process of the PIs of the high seas mission. They were really looking for a crew that was fairly diverse. Only half of us were native English speakers. So, our crew commander was from Belgium, and we had a Canadian and a guy who was born in Russia and moved to the U.S. when he was 11, and Jahida grew up in Puerto Rico. And I'm from Kansas, so. I'm warm. I'm warm. Right, so. We were a pretty diverse crew, all with science backgrounds, but some of us were, like in my case, more creative professionals, so I'm a writer. And our crew commander was actually an artist. And so, we had geologists and engineers and pilots and scientists. It was just a real great mix of people. Kind of, it's a way of looking at building a tiny community and sending this off to another planet. Who do you want in the mix? And diversity is a really good thing in that regard. And I think it's important that you brought up the whole international angle, because it's likely that this would be an international mission. And so, you have, in addition to, kind of at the planning phase, that means you've gotta be satisfying the goals and objectives of lots of different countries and people and agencies. And then at the individual level, you have these challenges of different cultural expectations about how people work together, language barriers. I find even that people who speak English fluently, but from a different country, there are certain words that mean different things, right? So, you think you're communicating really well and you discover that there's a miscommunication going on. Right, I mean, in some ways, a diverse crew can be more challenging at certain points, but like in our case, I recognize that we're constantly relearning each other's habits and language quirks and preferences and that can feel like there's a little bit of friction, but it also keeps you on your toes. And if you're in a group of people that are just incredibly similar, you don't know what you don't know. But if you have perspectives that are from kind of all over the place, then yeah, then the problem solving, your potential to solve serious problems, which can seriously happen with these systems and on a two and a half year mission. I mean, your potential to solve problems just increases significantly. And I write case writing and also a publication that came out last year about gender, sex and gender in space and the fact that the diversity, a good part of the diversity comes from a mixed gender crew too. So there's practical reasons that Kate wrote about ascending women into space.  And so, you know, they may be cheaper, they're lighter, they're smaller, right? But also, the behavior perspectives and different ways of thinking between male versus female, I think brings a lot of strength. So the workshops that were held last year and the publication that came out from NASA indicated that there should be more female flyers and there should be a mixed crew. And that difference in perspectives is really important. And sometimes the diversity and the sort of what it is that defines the diversity is not obvious. I was fortunate enough to work for an astronaut a number of years ago who had been in the astronaut class that was selected in the late 70s, which was the first one when essentially the all white male pilots were being joined by women, minorities, international participants and so forth. And his comment was that there certainly were some issues that had to get figured out, but really the biggest difference was that that was also the first time that scientists were joining the astronaut corps. And the biggest difference in the group was not male versus female, it was military pilots versus scientists. And wanted to make a decisive decision right now versus study the problem as long as you possibly can. And really the gender issue wasn't that big a deal. And the introversion and extraversion, that's another issue. Flexibility as sort of a rigid mindset. There are all sorts of ways that people are diverse. And I mean that sort of thing just gets sussed out as you are going through the selection process. Well, one more question about that then, because I read your article about sending an all female crew, which I thought was really interesting. In Apollo, for example, those spacecraft were so small that the astronauts had to be a certain height. And even with the shuttle, they weren't supposed to be too tall, except for Mike Massimino, who's like 18 feet tall. Stunning how tall that guy is, I wasn't expecting that. But the idea of an all women crew sort of seems to go the other way as far as diversity goes. Would you then, would you recommend if you're trying to balance sort of logistics and everything else, would it make more sense to have maybe more women to reduce consumption and all of that, but still have enough men for diversity? That's an interesting question. Or four and two, maybe something like that. So just to give you some background, I wrote a piece for Slate that proposed sending an all female crew to Mars. It's got some attention because it's not your typical Mars crew. But when you look at the numbers, women, small women in particular actually require half the calories or less than larger men. And historically men have been sort of the de facto astronaut. But when you require fewer calories then you can send half the food. And on a two and a half year mission, half the food is a significant weight savings. And when you save weight, when you save weight, you can save fuel and costs. So a number of people agreed with me. I found this out while I was on the high seas mission. I was looking at the body media data. It's all anonymous, but I could see that the women on our crew were consuming. I mean, we would rarely break 1500 calories of expenditure a day, whereas some of the guys were, I mean, 3400 calories day in and day out.  So that was the basis for this article. Now, an all female mission, that's kind of out there. But what I liked about it was it turned our idea of what Amar's mission could be kind of upside down. And I'm not sure what the answer is to having more women than men. I think it's interesting to consider it when you're thinking of a craft design because you have to, if you decide to go with a smaller astronaut, that has a ripple effect all the way down the line. And so is that really the choice that you want to make from the very beginning? It's a question that should be asked. So I think one of the big differences between the old days and today and the future is that when you look back to Mercury and Gemini, those were, for example, the Mercury seven astronauts. There weren't very many of them. And you could pretty easily apply a criteria that says you can't be more than five foot nine and five foot 10, whatever it was, and still get plenty of qualified candidates. With the space shuttle program, there was a deliberate effort to broaden that because there were going to be hundreds of people flying and they didn't want to exclude people. And so on the space shuttle and on the space station, the design requirements basically say you have to be able to design the spacecraft for a fifth percentile, i.e., very short woman, or a 95th percentile man who looks like a football player basically. So not only does that mean you have to design things to be very big, but it also means that things like the seats or the reach to the switches has to also be designed for someone with very short limbs. So it's not just the, it's not just the too big, it's also the too small dimension. For something like a Mars mission where there probably will be a much smaller number of people going, I think it would make sense to narrow that range, not necessarily an all female crew, but a sort of reapplying the five foot nine, whatever criteria or a metabolic criteria and say you can't be eating 3,500 calories a day if you want to go to Mars. And there's some interesting physiological differences between men and women in space too that's documented, but the end result is, you know, the recommendation is to fly more women now. So send more women to space. Out of over 500 flyers, only 57 of them have been women in the history of the US space program. So we don't have a lot of data that's statistically significant as much on women as we do on men. So that's more things that we need to study and understand. What's the trend? Is it, I mean, clearly in the beginning, there were no women, now there are more. So is that, is that going in the right direction? Yeah, and in fact, the last year's astronaut selection class, there were eight new astronauts selected and four were female and four were male. Cool, yeah. All right. But there's another difference that's interesting too in this whole selection issue, which is that the data suggests, and I'm not sure how conclusive it is, that women are more susceptible to damage from radiation in deep space than men are. And so then there's this question of what does fair and equal mean? Because the way that rule is being applied essentially means female astronauts may not be able to spend as many days on the space station as male astronauts would, at least over the course of a career. So is that unfair? Is that applying sort of a more fundamental constraint equally? I mean, it's an interesting topic for discussion and particularly in deep space missions that's going to be a challenge. There's also issues of age. Older people tend to be less susceptible to radiation, cancer induced by radiation than younger people. So a Mars mission may have an older crew than we are perhaps used to thinking of, particularly from the right stuff days. Wow, I hadn't thought about that. I mean, I know there are physiological differences, of course, but some of them are clearly going to be weighted more heavily than others. I think mass requirements are probably going to play a big role in this. And if women eat less, that's probably going to be more highly rated than something like radiation resistance. I'm just guessing, because in that case, you want to make your spacecraft as radiation resistant as possible, but still lightweight. So it would be interesting to see a list of sort of prioritized. How do we make the crew optimized? And of course, there probably isn't a single most optimal crew. There's going to be a wide range. But here we are. It's 2040. We've chosen our crew. It's, let's say, it's six people. However, we've done that. And we're on our way to Mars. 2040. I thought it was 2030. Well, we've done this before. I don't want this to be the first one. This is Apollo 16, when the public doesn't care about it so much anymore. It's a little more routine. I love Lucy's on. We've got stuff to do. But just so my point is that perhaps, again, for a conversation like this, you have to think about the architecture. Is there an existing base on Mars? Is this the first crew to go? And when I was trying to think about questions, I thought, well, if it's the first crew to go, that's going to introduce a tremendous number of other questions, although maybe they're of interest. But let's assume that because this is a day in the life of going to Mars, which suggests a routine sort of an idea, let's say it's been done before. Now we have our crew of six. They're weightless. They're on their way to Mars.  What do they do with it? Science. Really? Yeah. Well, not astronomy, I assume. So less interesting science. But science, so what kind of science are they doing? So you say they're on the way to Mars or they're there already? They're on the way to Mars. They're on their way, yeah. You could do microgravity science. Any kind of investigations that you could take that would be a sample type that you don't need to necessarily return or return right away? The small things. You could do fluids demonstrations or study behavior of fluids. And microbial behavior is a big one, especially when we're talking about planetary protection. You can study those guys. Any of the small stuff that gets you some fundamental discoveries along the way, I think, and radiation, too. Radiation is one of the big things that we will still be learning about in part because it takes a lot of, you're mentioning, statistical sample size. You want a lot of astronauts to experience that. And the radiation environment in deep space is different from what almost all of our data is based on so far, which is low Earth orbit, the International Space Station, which, although it's outside the Earth's atmosphere mostly, it's still inside the Earth's magnetic field. So the radiation environment is only sort of roughly half as bad at the space station as it is in deep space. And the kinds of radiation you're exposed to are a little bit different. So we'll still be learning about what the effects of radiation on the human body are in deep space, even on the third or fourth Mars mission. And then I had some discussions with Kate just before coming up here. In addition to the work, there's the full life that she could tell you more about here. But ideally, you want the crew to feel, and reading through the journals, the experimental journals, you want the crew to feel like they're focused on a mission, something, not just hanging around all day and waiting, right? They got to feel like they have a purpose. And so Kate, if you want to expand on your experience, I think. Right. Well, I mean, as you mentioned, the ISS crew is highly scheduled. And so they have to hew to this very rigid schedule and every minute is accounted for. And we had something similar on high seas, but we were able to kind of determine our own schedule. So we had this level of autonomy that our PIs believed is going to be true of a Mars mission because you're far enough away from Earth. I mean, no human has ever been that far away from Earth. And not only are you disconnected culturally from your home planet, but communication back and forth, there's going to be a delay, a maximum of 20, 22 minute delay. And so you can't be checking in with mission control all the time. So we'd call that mission support. And the crew itself has to be quite autonomous. So creating your own schedule and feeling like you have some sort of control over that, I think is really important, especially for eight months, going someplace. But as you were saying, having a purpose. So of course, you're going to get to Mars. And that's the ultimate goal. But in the meantime, you have to have a sense of what you're doing isn't just busy work. I think that's actually quite crucial. So you might have some role in creating your own projects. You might have some role in figuring out the rotation of those projects. Our crew scientist did a great job bringing with her a list of microbial studies that she was going to do. Every two weeks, she changed it up. She had a different study that she was working on, so she wouldn't get bored. And I think that that's a really good way of looking at things. Is boredom going to be a problem? It could be. So it's a big question for astronauts and the people who study astronauts do astronauts get bored. And if you ask astronauts and the people who study astronauts, they will say no. Because no astronaut wants to admit to being bored in space. It's a privilege to go. And you might not go again if you said that it was a boring experience. But I think a lot of it depends on how we define boredom. This relates to a piece that I wrote for Aeon last year about my own experience with boredom. I didn't think I was bored. We had plenty of discussions about it as a crew and no, of course we weren't bored. We had so much to do. We were constantly busy. We were working out. We were making meals. We were eating the meals, having conversation. We were working on our research projects that we brought along. And I brought two projects. I was a writer and I was doing a sleep study. We were filling out surveys. We were donating data to NASA to help get future astronauts to Mars. There is great purpose here, and we had a ton to do. But over time, I realized that there was a monotony that settled in with me. And it was a pretty serious kind of boredom. I didn't think that I was a person who got bored. I really like finding new things and being interested in things. And I can do that all the time. But what I didn't realize is that that actually might be an indicator of being easily bored. And so I think that we have to really think about how we define boredom and how we get at that question, is this person prone to boredom? And if so, what are some countermeasures to that? Because I don't think that that should preclude people from going. But I think it should be considered that astronauts don't want to admit that they're bored, and they might actually be bored with the routine. And we should try to figure out a way to liven it up for them. One of the other things that will be different is that on the space station of the Space Shuttle, when astronauts have a few spare moments of free time, the thing they almost always want to do is look out the window. And it's just spectacular looking at Earth and you see things, you recognize, and things are constantly changing, and the light is different, and the weather is different. It never gets old. Well, if you are on a spacecraft halfway between Earth and Mars, you're tens of millions of miles away from anything. There is nothing to see out the window. And so figuring out what is it that the astronauts are going to do when they have five minutes of me time, that's going to be a little bit different than we've seen before. The void probably isn't the best idea. For psychological help. Your iPhone and all that. Well, it sounds like the ideal candidate then is a short female amateur astronomer who would then be happy to put her nose up against the window and just look at the Orion Nebula by naked eye for months at a time. So to wrap this up, just a final question. Does this, the routine day, I guess we've talked about that a little bit, but does that change as they're approaching their destination? And then after they've spent x number of months on Mars and have to come home, does that psychological situation change? Right. So I mean, when you're coming home, it's a completely different goal now. Getting to Mars is one thing, but coming home is another. So we've all taken that road trip where we're coming back and there's just sort of deflated emotional sensation. The air in the car is different for a few reasons. But yeah, you have to really change your focus. So I think questions of motivation and value in the work are going to be really important. And I don't think the answer is obvious to how you can keep people motivated and keep people excited. Yeah, I don't know. So there's a lot of things we've mentioned that we don't really know the answers to. And I think one of the things that's important to recognize is we can study them on Earth, and we can do simulated missions. And we learn a lot from that. But the way we're really going to know the answers to these questions is by going and doing it. So some of the first missions probably won't go all the way to Mars, won't be a two and a half year mission, but doing something like going to lunar orbit for six months or going to an asteroid that might be a 12 month round trip mission. That's where we're gonna start learning. What is it really like to go so far away you can't even see the Earth anymore and so far away that you can't talk to mission control and get help in a prompt amount of time? I guess that brings us back to how we started, which was what steps do we have to take before we go? And I guess they're very similar to what we're going to experience when we get there and coming back. So there you go. Going to Mars means doing a hell of a lot more than just going to Mars, which I'm all for because in the meantime, that means exploring other places that I'm personally very interested in, like the Moon and near Earth asteroids. And I'd love to see that happen. So I've always said I think we should go to the Moon first and keep in mind Mars as we're doing it. It seems like I have to broaden my perspective a little more and say there's a lot more we have to do. I actually support an idea of going to Mars and it sounds like by going to Mars we're going to do everything that everybody wants to do anyway. So it strikes me as being a pretty good idea. So that's all the formal questions I have. We can throw this to the audience now to see what you all want to know about going to Mars. We've covered everything, nobody has any questions. Oh, okay, excellent. Hi, thanks very much. My name's Edward Hoyt with Nexent. One thing that I don't think has been given enough attention or maybe it's a non-issue is the whole question of the habitat and how that relates to life support and also the possibility once on Mars of growing food as opposed to eating MREs and stuff that you packed in a can. And I mean, is that something that is being discussed? Is that really a secondary issue for further research or experimentation or what is the state of thinking about that given some of the experiments that have been done here on Earth to create an enclosed biosphere? Those are actually, that's a really good question. Those are actually primary issues that we're focused on with space station. How do you keep plants alive from seed to seed in a crop that has nutrition and the appropriate microbial balance? And sometimes fluids behave so differently in space that we drown our own plants. And we still haven't gotten a full crop of edible produce to keeping crew alive and that's ongoing science that's happening on space station. Even the ECLIS system, there are some parts of the system that are tried and true on station. We've proven them out and we feel really, really good about. Others are still, they're not performing the way you expect. And so space station is the proving ground for those types of experiments. I think you can do them better there than even anywhere on Earth and that's what we're gonna need to keep doing until we can get to this next phase. Go from Earth dependent to the proving grounds where then you go out beyond. There has been a fair amount of work on growing food in zero gravity. I'm not sure there's been very much, there's been a little bit on growing food on the Moon and Mars, but probably less. There's two maybe non-obvious things that they've learned about that. One is that the first trick is to pick food, to choose foods that are easy to process. So for example, there was some work done on growing wheat in enclosed life support systems and then somebody figured out that okay, great, you've got wheat, how do you turn that into something you'd actually eat? Now you need to be able to mill it and bake it and it turns into a whole, whereas something like potatoes are much simpler. You grow a potato, you dig it out of the ground, you scrub it off and you can eat it, which is probably why in the book The Martian, which we were talking about earlier, there's potatoes. The other thing is that, so when you start trying to figure out how food and plants interact with the rest of the life support system, if you try to treat that as a life support problem and meeting a certain part of the calorie requirement and are you relying on the plants to produce the oxygen, it all gets very, very complicated and you might decide that it's not worth the trouble, but there's a whole lot of psychological value for the astronauts in having something fresh and green to eat and also in having something that they grow. So even if all you're growing is a little window box full of lettuce or something, you're not gonna feed the astronauts on that and keep them alive for a thousand days that way, but they are gonna get some nutritional value, they're going to enjoy their meals a whole lot more. I can access that. Yeah, and they'll appreciate the experience of actually being involved in food production and seeing something come out of the work that they're putting into it. Because of the constraints of our food study, we weren't allowed to grow a lot of food, we did have crop of sprouts and that was really something special.  You're used to the same sort of chunky broccoli all the time and so to have something crisp that releases this cool water all of a sudden it really is quite different than normal dehydrated beef but you also asked about habitat design and we lived in a large geodesic dome about the size of a two bedroom apartment. We each had our own state rooms but there was really something interesting about the architecture of it because we had a feeling even though it was an enclosed space that it was spacious because we could look up and we saw all the space and there's some thought that inflatable habitats might be a good way to go because their mass can be minimal but then the volume once they're inflated can be quite large and in particular then you might ask well what about radiation shielding? How does that work? But there's also some thought into looking at the lava tubes that are on Mars and the moon and maybe using those as natural radiation shields so these caves and putting an inflatable habitat within the cave. So that's one answer to your question. And next year a station is gonna have an inflatable habitat attached to the outside so we're testing those kind of technologies. Last year we grew lettuce, the crew couldn't eat it, they had to send it back to the scientist for evaluation. Well they were supposed to not eat it. I'm sure 100% of that got sent back to Earth, right? So I heard a story about the Russian space program on the Mir space station that the botanical scientists sent up these onion plants to do plant growth experiments and the cosmonauts didn't quite realize they, well didn't know they weren't supposed to eat them and so the scientists called up and said how's that experiment going and they're like, it's going great. It's going great now. It's delicious, yeah. Like the wildest of space stations in the country. All right, hello, my name's Andrew Burns. I'm a fifth grade science teacher from Atlanta. Cool. Yay, thank you. What I'm wondering about and I think that I might be representative of a lot of the general population and that my perspective is colored by science fiction horror films. Have the high seas program or anything else like that begun to develop maybe a list of personality traits or tendencies that specifically should be excluded from a mission like this? Well, NASA already has that. I mean, there are things, there are red flags that you like out. Yeah. The whole psychological profiling is pretty rigorous right now. You don't want, you want people who are pretty even keeled. So we were selected for our lack of drama. You don't necessarily want people who would be good on a reality show. So that's one way of looking at it. I'm Jerry Telles. I'm a retired NASA navigator. And I'm just wondering, has NASA and other space agencies resolved itself to something of the order of a six-month transit time to Mars or are there technologies, R&D, going on for hypervelocity travel, to get it down to a few weeks instead of a few months? So there are technologies being researched. I would, I guess I'd summarize it by saying it's a really hard problem. And there are some, there are some things that are physically plausible. So nuclear thermal propulsion is one option that's been talked about a lot. The word nuclear in there causes some challenges. But one of the things that makes it difficult is even supposedly you develop the technology that gives you the really fast propulsion system to get there. If you're going to Mars really fast or coming back from Mars really fast, that also means you have to slow down a lot. And so, yeah. So the technology, it's sort of a doubly hard problem in that the faster you are able to go, the more you need a fast propulsion system to be able to slow down. And the greater the risks are if something goes wrong. So for example, we're looking a lot at when we come back to Earth from Mars, how fast can we be going without destroying the heat shield when we hit the atmosphere? And it turns out, for example, that we don't have any way to test on the ground, the environments that you see when you come back that fast. So you start extrapolating with the math. And in theory, we get the math correct, but we'd certainly like to test it. So that's one of the reasons why we're doing some of the test flights we're doing is we're learning things from those test flights that we can't simulate in a wind tunnel or an arc jet test facility on the ground. So I guess the answer is yes. There are testing things. And that would change, of course, the entire inflection of everything we've been discussing. If you can get to Mars in a week as opposed to, or I guess I've heard 90 days is a decent estimate using advanced technology propulsion. But that's a long time from now. And certainly the way things are going right now, it looks like we'll be going to Mars using conventional chemical rockets first. Actually, quite possibly using solar electric propulsion, which is essentially using the solar panels like on regular satellites to electrically charge propellant and spew it out the back, which is a very fuel efficient way to travel, but it doesn't produce a lot of thrust. So it doesn't necessarily get you there faster, but it reduces the mass of your spacecraft a lot. And that's being thought about for the first missions? Yes, and one of the reasons it's being thought about is that it's actually being done for a lot of missions now. And so one of the reasons why we haven't developed warp drive or ultra-spiffy advanced propulsion technologies that are great for Mars is if Mars is the only application where you really need that, then NASA has to do all the technology development. And a fairly small part of the space program has to cover all of that. But there's other propulsion technologies like electric propulsion that are used on other space applications. So for example, if you have satellite television, there's a pretty good chance that the satellite that's beaming that signal to you has an electric propulsion system on board. And that means that we in industry want to invest in better solar panels, better power processing units, better thrusters, because we have all kinds of other uses for it. So that technology is advancing faster than some of the really far out there stuff. Well, then let me close on this thought then, as you're saying that. Right now, we have a spacecraft called Don, which is orbiting or is about to enter. It's sort of orbiting the asteroid series. It's lowering its orbit right now. That is a fully ion propulsion drive where it basically throws atoms individually out the back at very high speed. It's very low thrust, but very high efficiency. We've been using this type of drive for quite a long time for station keeping, for satellites, just to move them around. As a main propulsion, we've been using it for a while as well. It's a very nice technology. It allows you to do a lot of stuff that you can't do with chemical rockets. The thing I love the most about it of everything that I've heard is that way back when in the 1960s in Star Trek, there was an alien that they are trying to chase. And Spock says they're using an ion drive. And he says, there are 100 years ahead of us in technology. Yeah. And that takes place 200 years from now. And Spock is saying, there are 100 years ahead of them. In fact, we have that now, that technology. Going to Mars may seem like science fiction, but what was science fiction 50 years ago is happening today. The future is now. And the time to be thinking about this is now.  So I'd like to thank our panelists, our Rutley, Josh Hopkins, Kate Green for sharing your brains with us about this. And I hope that this becomes a reality pretty damn quick. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


Hello and welcome to the session. My name is Mansi and I'm going to help you with the following question. The question says ABC is a triangle in which altitudes B, E and C, F to sides AC and AB are equal. C figure 7.32. Show that first triangle A, B, E is congruent to triangle AC, F and second AB is equal to AC, that is ABC is an isosceles triangle. Let us start with the solution to this question. The first thing we have to prove is triangle A, B, E is congruent to triangle AC, F. So let us consider the triangles A, B, E and triangle AC, F. That is this triangle and this triangle. The first thing that we notice here that angle A is common in both the triangles. So first we can say that angle A is equal to angle A because this is the common angle. Second thing we can say here angle B, E, A is equal to angle C, F, A. That means this angle is equal to this angle because C, F and B, E are the perpendicular. They are each 90 degree equal to C, F, that is given. congruent parts of congruent triangles. Therefore, we have proved the second part also. I hope you understood the question and enjoyed the session. Have a good day.


Now, both will be greater or not better for each of you. Yeah. Don't we just step into the stage on the feet? On the entire stage? I'll do it for you. I'll do it for you. All right. I'll do it for the second person. Oh. That is easy. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now let's get musically present with each other by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you'll find in your order of service. We're going to sing it through twice. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society, except to me it's not just another Sunday. It's my birthday. Please hold your applause. We have a tight schedule today. I've decided to spend the morning of my birthday right here at First Unitarian Society because as we all know, this is a place where independent thinkers can gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social and spiritual and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud 67-year-old member of this congregation, and I'd like to extend a special welcome to any guests, visitors, and newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I know you'll find that this is a special place, and if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we'll be conducting a guided tour after the service today. Just meet over here by the windows after the service, and we'll take good care of you. And after the tour, you can join us in our fellowship hour where you get a chance to wish me a happy birthday. This would be a perfect time to silence those electronic devices that you just will not need during the service, and while you're taking care of that, I'll remind you that if you're accompanied today by a youngster, and you think that your young companion would rather experience the service from a more private space, we offer a couple options for you, starting with our child haven here in the back corner of the auditorium, and some comfortable seating just outside the doorway in the commons from which you and your young companion can see and hear the service. And as many of you know, the reason we are able to hear and see the service today is that it's brought to us by a wonderful team of volunteers whose names I will read to you right now so that you can thank them later. Helping with the job of greeting everybody upstairs, we thank Claire Box and Mary Elizabeth Kunkel. Our lay ministers today, Robin Perron and Pam McMullen. Our ushers, Michael Losey, Liza Monroe and Dick Goldberg, and our coffee and hospitality are being prepared for us right now in the kitchen by Nancy Kaseff. Our tour guide a little later is John Powell, and the orchids that you see behind me were generously donated by Carlos and Melinda Moser in celebration of their 35th anniversary. So thank you to all of those volunteers. Just a couple of announcements before we proceed with the service. One is that the Sanctuary Press Conference is going to be held this Thursday, 11 a.m., at the Madison Christian Community on Old Salk Road. I think the address is 7118 Old Salk Road. If we're able to attend, please do so because our own Reverend Kelly Crocker is one of the featured speakers, and she would certainly enjoy seeing some familiar faces in the audience. Again, that's this Thursday, 11 a.m., at the Madison Christian Community on Old Salk Road. And one more event-related announcement. Tuesday, July 11, FUS will be hosting a presentation on mass imprisonment in America. This presentation will be made by Sam Mahara, who was a prisoner at the Hart Mountain Relocation Center from 1942 to 1945. Sam's presentation will talk about his own experience as an imprisoned Japanese American at Hart Mountain during World War II, why only Japanese Americans were imprisoned, typical daily conditions in those camps around the country, and today's prison camps for Central American refugees in this country. We'll have the potential implications for the registration of Muslim Americans. Again, FUS is proud to host this session here Tuesday, July 11, 6 p.m. until 8 p.m. right here. That's the end of the announcements. I invite you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I know it will touch your heart, stir your spirits, and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. Happy birthday to me. We open our service with one of the connections that are made slowly. Sometimes they grow underground. You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet. And so penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet. Light persistently as the creeper that overruns the garden. Nought in the dark, use the sun to make sugar. Weave real connections. Create real nodes. Build real houses. Live a life you can endure and make love that is loving. Keep tangling, interweaving, taking more in, a thicket and a bramble wilderness to the outside, and to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs. Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen. Reach out. Keep reaching out. Keep bringing in. This is how we're going to live for a long time, but not always. For every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes. And if you will join me in the words of affirmation that are printed in this morning's program. As we light this chalice, may its flame illuminate the inspiration waiting to be discovered in our hearts. May its light remind us of the hope that is restored by the efforts of our minds. May its warmth renew the dreams brewing in our spirits. May this flame be a symbol of all that we aspire to and might become. And now I would invite you to turn to your neighbor on this Fourth of July weekend and extend to them a warm greeting. There is a change in our program for the nine o'clock hour, thanks to an oversight on our part, our being me and Kelly Crocker, we neglected to note that there was a family waiting to dedicate a youngster at the nine o'clock hour. And so we happily this morning will be dedicating Xavier and in a few moments will be asking their families to come forward. And so on this lovely July morning, on a weekend when we do celebrate the birth of our nation, we would pause to acknowledge the presence among us of a child who is just beginning, well he's a little bit further along than that in his life's journey. In this season of sunny days and fragrant nights, we join Xavier's parents in welcoming him into our lives and into this, our spiritual home. Today we offer this family our friendship and support in the opportunities and the challenges that lie before them. We trust that the commitment to and love for each other is strong in this family and therefore it is our hope that this youngster will be blessed with a secure home with dependable caregivers that he may enjoy the freedom to develop his own personality and to shape his own unique destiny. Again, universalism holds that every person comes into this world fresh and unsullied and possessing inherent worth and dignity. And so this morning we would acknowledge that this child, Xavier, is a bona fide human being with his own special gifts, with needs and feelings that matter every bit as much as any of ours. Although he has yet to fully unfold, Xavier is already an active, vital participant in his family's home life, a full partner in the work and play of living a true heir to all of our dreams and our values. Dedication does not make this child a full fledged member of First Unitarian Society for that is a choice Xavier himself must make when he achieves the age of reason. But this ritual does affirm his place in our hearts and it affords him the special kind of emotional security and spiritual opportunity that the Unitarian Universalist congregations such as this one can provide. And so we are glad that moved by a sense of the blessings of parenthood and trust in this community, Jacob and Krista have chosen to express their own values and their progressive religious faith through this special celebration. And yet ultimately it is all of us, not just parents, but friends and relatives who are responsible for the teaching and the nurture of our children. And by presenting him to you, these parents acknowledge that Xavier is more than a purely private treasure, that he is a young soul in whom we all have a stake and for whom we all wish the best. So on this day of great promise, we not only dedicate this lovely and gifted youngster before us, but we dedicate ourselves to him and to his interests and to his welfare. And now we would invite the parents and Xavier to come forward. And as they do so, if you will look to the insert in your program, the Congregational Pledge, and you have two tasks before you, one is to substitute Xavier's name for the two that are listed. And the other thing is to change the plural pronouns to the singular. You think we can do that? All right. And so please join me. For the gift of childhood, whose innocence, laughter, and curiosity bring hope, joy, and new understanding into our lives, we lift thankful hearts. We welcome Xavier into this spiritual community and extend to his parents our love and support in the joys and challenges of caregiving. As this child grows, we will share with him our insights, values, and our dreams that he may enjoy the rich benefits of our religious heritage. And now there are several people among us who bear a special close relationship to Xavier, and I would like to acknowledge Johnna Flash, or Flash, if you would please stand. And then there are a number of grandparents and cousins and assorted relatives who are also here, and if you would please stand. And so I would ask all of you, my friends, do you take upon yourselves the privilege and the responsibility to nurture, defend, and to support the freedom and growing spirit of this child? Will you recognize his worth as a person and encourage him to speak truthfully and from the heart? Will you share with him the best that is in you, the insights, the values, and dreams that give your own lives meaning? And finally, will you help this youngster to understand not only his own rights, but also the rights of others? And if so, please say we will. More enthusiasm. Thank you. Please be seated. And now to the parents who have brought their child before us, Jacob Christa. It is your privilege and your obligation to provide an environment both of security and of challenge for your child to grow up in.  Will you respect as well as protect your son and bestow your love as a free and unmerited gift? And will you also this day reaffirm your commitment to care for and to support one another as partners in life and in parody? And if so, please say we will. In the act of dedication, we use the symbolism of water as a sign of our common heritage. There is no suggestion here of the washing away of inherited sin. This child, we believe, came into the world with all the limitations natural to our human species, but we believe that he did arrive here innocent. And so water in this context stands for vitality. It is the elixir of life, the foundation of all being. And for purposes of today's ceremony, a portion of this water has been saved from our annual water communion service that's held in late August when members bring water here from their travels across the country and throughout the globe. And so its use here reminds us of our common bond with all-embracing and ever-sustaining nature. Name this child, Xavier Leali. He dedicates you in the name of truth, the promise of love, and in the fellowship of this society. May you be granted clarity of thought, integrity of speech, and a compassionate heart. And as a token of Xavier's dedication, we give to him a rosebud. It's stuck. There you go. Fragrant symbol of beauty, promise, and love. This rose has no thorns, so it was not pricking him. And that symbolizes the better world that we would give to our children if it is in our power. Now we know that the world is not altogether as lovely as this rosebud, but we do hope that Xavier will learn to recognize the beauty and goodness that does exist, that he will grow in wisdom and compassion and add his own beauty to the world. Xavier as this rose unfolds in natural beauty, so may your life unfold. And now we would conclude our service of dedication, first of all by presenting Xavier and his parents with a special comfort item made by our shawl ministry. And maybe you can wrap up when you're watching TV and feel a little bit of the comfort of this community with your blanket. Yeah. Congratulations. And so now we'd invite you to rise in body and spirit as we sing together our hymn of dedication, number 77. So we continue with a passage from the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament, chapter 40. Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint. He does not grow weary. His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might, he increases strength. Even youth shall faint and be weary. Young men shall fall exhausted. But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. And they shall mount up with the wings of eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint. And the second reading from the contemporary book by Helen McDonald, H.S. for Hawk, published in 2014. And by the way, the name of the hawk in this reading is Mabel. McDonald writes, my old friend Martin Jones had raised both his hands in a gesture half of supplication and half of exasperation.  Don't do it. It'll drive you mad. I was thinking about what he said as I drove home. Clutch into fourth gear, roundabout, shift down, fierce acceleration, slight resentment. I didn't want to think about all the things the men had told me.  Leave goss hawks to the goss hawk boys. Get a bird that's more sensible. Now I knew training a hawk would be hard. Goss hawks are notoriously difficult to train, to man in falconry parlance. You can man a Merlin in a few days. I once flew a Harris hawk three after only four days. But goss hawks, they're nervous, highly strong birds. It takes a long time to convince them that you are not the enemy. Nervousness, of course, is not quite the right word for a goss hawk. It's simply that they have these jacked up nervous systems, in which the nerve pathways from the eyes and the ears to the motor neurons that control their muscles have only these minor links with the associated neurons in the brain. Goss hawks are nervous because they live 10 times faster than we do. And they react to stimuli, literally without thinking. Of all hawks, the 17th century falconer Richard Blum said, she, the goss hawk, is doubtless, the most shy and coy, both toward men and dogs, requiring more of a courtship, the courtship of a mistress than the authority of a master being apt to remember any unkind or rough usage. But being gently handled, they will become very tractable and very kind to their keeper. Well, MacDonald thought to herself, kindness it will be and kindness we shall hope for. A professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania was released, provocatively entitled Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance. This book quickly rose on the non-fiction bestseller charts. Angela Duckworth's thesis was simple, and she marshaled impressive examples to support that thesis. Highly successful people, she claimed, manifest two traits that are missing in those of lesser accomplishment. First, they are very, very clear about what they want, and they are fiercely committed to its achievement. Second, they are willing to work long and hard to reach their identified goal. Taken together, these two traits constitute what Duckworth calls grit. Now, this was hardly a groundbreaking discovery. Five years earlier, another bestseller, Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, made similar claims. Here, Gladwell invoked the 10,000-hour rule, a rule that was first proposed by two Carnegie Mellon academics, Herman Simon and William Chase, way back in the early 1970s. And in their sampling of accomplished chess players, Simon and Chase found that in order to reach the grandmaster level as a chess player, you had to be so preoccupied with the game that you would be willing to invest upwards of 50,000 hours contemplating the various configurations of the pieces on the board. 10,000 hours, they concluded, was the bare minimum needed to achieve mastery in the field of chess. The very best chess players had grit. Simon and Chase didn't give it that catchy and marketable name, however, that had to wait. Subsequent studies of experts in other fields tend to support those findings. Classically trained musicians, for instance, must spend countless hours honing and perfecting their skills. And investigators found that violin students at the prestigious Music Academy of West Berlin, all of them were unusually exceptionally talented. That's how they got into the school in the first place. But what separated the merely good from the truly great was their work ethic, their persistence in practicing. Now, Malcolm Gladwell allows that success isn't always a function of relentless work and determination, grit, in other words, an ability to jump high or to run fast. That's pretty much innate. That's a genetic gift. And while practicing as a runner or a jumper is important because the athlete's form does matter, the amount of time required to achieve excellence in these disciplines isn't nearly as great as in technical sports like baseball or golf. Gladwell writes, in complex or cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. You've got to have grit. And this is certainly what Helen McDonald discovered when she took on the challenge of training the notoriously skittish goss hawk. Although she had worked with other species in the past, although she had sought counsel from old hands in the sport of falconry, McDonald was still unprepared for the weeks and the months it would take to gain Mabel's trust and to establish a working partnership with this impressive raptor. And moreover, as maddening as Mabel's behavior was at times, as physically and mentally taxing as it was to put her through her paces, McDonald knew that she always had to stay absolutely calm, keep her reactivity at bay, because any sign of upset, any sign of frustration on her part would reverse any progress that they had made and perhaps sever completely the bond between the two of them. This was hardly the same as housebreaking a puppy, but McDonald persisted. And over time, in fits and in starts, human and hawk established a rapport and an understanding of their respective roles. Patience accords with the way things are, the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu once said, forcing a project to completion, forcing it to completion, you will ruin what is almost right. Persistence, perseverance, the patient study application of effort is often necessary for success, necessary but not sufficient, because Helen McDonald had other advantages that made it possible for her to undertake this project in the first place. She was a college teacher, and thus she was able to devote herself almost exclusively to Mabel's training between college terms, and she was also financially able to afford what could be a very expensive hobby. And this is one of the concerns that some reviewers had with Angela Duckworth's thesis, that she oversells this concept of grit, while downplaying factors that can also play a significant role in a person's success. Moreover, she seems to suggest that grit is an attribute that's within everybody's reach, that if a person doesn't have grit, it's just because they don't have the right attitude. Grittiness can be acquired, it can be inculcated, and if we appreciate its importance, we will, like a tiger mom, instill it in our children and strengthen it in ourselves. It's all just a matter of choice. It's all just a matter of willpower, Duckworth suggests. Unfortunately, as David Denvey recently observed, children are not born onto a level playing field. Now, it does make eminent sense to develop strategies for helping children become more patient, more persevering, more committed to their chosen discipline, and yet, we should be very careful about making value judgments about any given child, because some kids, as Denvey notes, suffer severe injury long before they reach school age. If they are born into poverty with absent, neglectful, or abusive parents, such youngsters will be exposed to high levels of toxic stress, Denvey says, and this in turn can cause irreversible damage to the prefrontal cortex, the seat of the individual's executive functions. And when these are compromised, neurologists tell us, a child's capacity for resilience and for perseverance can also be impacted. And much of that damage will already have been done before the child reaches nursery school age. What's called for in cases like this is more support for struggling, overstressed families, a more nuanced approach to children's behavioral deficits and recognition of the limits of any particular developmental approach. Indeed, too much emphasis on grit may induce sharper feelings of inadequacy in a child. Mike Egan is an accomplished musician, a former member of the U.S. Marine Band. He comes on strong, but the point he makes is well taken.  Even if we were lucky enough to have been spared early childhood trauma, we may need more than grit to reach our goals. Now, David Denby, who writes for the prestigious New Yorker magazine, he committed himself to a career in journalism very early on. He has worked very hard, long, and risen in his professional ranks, but he also admits that he had advantages that many other people lack. My parents carried me for a number of years, he says, as I fumbled along with my journalism career. Now, his parents were not responsible for his success, but Denby does allow that their belief in him and their support of him made it possible for him to persist. Over the years, I've run across many self-help books that claim to have discovered that singular key to leading a successful and flourishing life. But what most of them ignore is the fact that we all exist within a social milieu that can push us forward or it can hold us back. David Denby and Helen McDonald were committed, persevering people, but they both had these support systems that they could rely upon. Others may not be that fortunate, and grit alone will only carry them so far. The reality Malcolm Gladwell observes is this. The amount of practice necessary for exceptional performance is so extensive that people who end up at the top always need help. They invariably have access to lucky breaks or privileges or conditions that make all those years of practice possible. But social and economic factors aside, perseverance, this ability to stay on task over an extended period of time, that's still just one piece of the grit equation because there is also that second issue called motivation. Why are some people highly motivated and others not? Well, sometimes an untreated emotional or physical malady will keep us stuck, unmotivated. But the problem oftentimes is uncertainty. A lack of clarity about where we want to go and why we want to go there. And so we need to find our passion in order to be motivated. And once we do, it will feel natural and even joyful to persevere in the service of that passion. Now for some, this passion, this sense of calling or of mission in life comes on very early. By the age of eight or 10, a boy or girl will feel the muse stirring within or they will find great pleasure in solving mathematical puzzles. The noted entomologist, E. O. Wilson, he was an indifferent student at his South Alabama public school. As a youngster, he didn't want to be in the classroom. He wanted to spend as much time as he possibly could out in nature where he captured and he studied snakes and spiders and all kinds of other small creatures that inhabited the pine barrens in South Alabama. His passion was already clearly in evidence out in the field and he fashioned that passion into a celebrated career at Harvard University. Now his intelligence, E. O. Wilson's IQ was above average, he says, but he hardly qualified as a genius based on his IQ. But he did have grit. He had a passion for environmental studies and an indefatigable work ethic. And as a teacher, Wilson has stressed with his students, many of whom lack a clear vision for themselves, he stresses the importance of having both a good work ethic and a passion. Put passion ahead of training, he says. Feel out in any way you can what you most want to do in science or in some science related profession. Obey that passion as long as it lasts but then sample other subjects, be ready to switch if a greater love becomes apparent. As in other choices in life, he says, there is too much at stake here. Decision, hard work based on enduring passion will never fail you. E. O. Wilson's perspective as a natural scientist complements, I believe, the words that I shared earlier from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. If we wait on the Lord, Isaiah assures us. If we trust in and rely on the Lord, we will discover unexpected strength and stamina. We shall run and not be weary. We shall walk and not faint. Now God and the individual's relationship to him or her, that is what concerns the prophet in this passage. But I believe that we could substitute the word passion for God and the passage would make equal sense. Whether or not we enjoy a personal relationship with the divine, there are those passions, a sense of calling that people possess that stir them to purposeful and persistent action. Senator Elizabeth Warren has been passionate, passionate about increasing the accountability of our financial system. John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, was passionate about clean government and fair elections. Daniel Berrigan was passionate about nuclear disarmament and world peace. These are not sacred causes in the strict sense, but those who embraced them with passion were able to run and not faint, to walk and to not grow weary. Or as John Gardner himself once put it, reform is not for the short-winded. Unfortunately, discerning one's passion isn't always easy. And sometimes it will actually be preceded by a lengthy gestation period. E. O. Wilson suggests that passion is necessary for perseverance, that we will not be sufficiently motivated to work hard until we feel called to the task. Switch gears, he advises, before making too great an investment in any given field. Likewise, David Denby says that we need to be careful where we invest our life energy and not commit ourselves to endeavors about which we still feel ambivalent. I don't believe in banging my head against the wall, but my own experience convinces me that a passion can be acquired very slowly, very incrementally, as well as serendipitously. Because you see, when I decided long ago to begin studying for the Unitarian Universalist Ministry that was 45 years ago, I had no idea whether that choice was going to pan out. As an undergraduate, I had developed an avid interest in spirituality. But growing up, our family only attended religious services sporadically, mostly in a small, lay-led Unitarian fellowship. And all I knew at the age of 21 was that I wanted to continue investigating religion and spirituality and figure out how to make a living in the process. I couldn't imagine doing that anywhere else, but in the free, open atmosphere of a Unitarian Universalist faith community. But that was not a career decision that my secularist parents approved up or were willing to support. I was pretty much on my own. I should say Trina and my wife and I were pretty much on our own. Moreover, with so little previous exposure, I was pretty much clueless about the professional ministry. What a clergy people do. I really wasn't sure. So did I feel a passion about this perspective calling? Nah. I was curious, but I was not convicted. And even after three years of graduate study in Berkeley, California, I was still uncertain. And after three more years serving a small congregation in Northwest Iowa, that did very little to further allay my doubts. And so I dropped out of the ministry, went back to school, earned a PhD, dabbled in college teaching, for which I also felt very little passion.  And I decided, what the heck, let's give ministry another chance. The second chapter was in its own way. Every bit is challenging, and at times every bit as disillusioning as the first. But despite my ambivalence, I worked hard, I persisted, and I made progress. Gradually I gained more confidence. And after eight years in the parish ministry, I finally was able to say to myself, Michael, you know what? You can do this stuff. And I had found my passion. Now I look back three decades into the distance, and it's clear that I needed grit to accomplish my goals in the ministry. The hard part for me wasn't grit. It wasn't the lack of perseverance, the steady application of effort. That's always been a part of my makeup. It's what helped me succeed as a distance runner in my younger days, able to put in 60 and 70 mile weeks to brave winter blizzards and oppressive summer heat to train for an important race. This discipline requires that you take the long view. Boston Marathon winter Ambi Berfoot once observed, it takes weeks and months to get into shape. Give yourselves time. Don't make hasty or unnecessary mistakes. Remember, he said, life is a marathon, it is not a sprint. I learned that life is a marathon, not a sprint. The same lesson applies to the parish ministry. Treat it like you would along a distance race. Give yourself time. But could or would I have stuck with this demanding profession on the basis of grit alone? I doubted. And perhaps the biggest difference, the second time around for me, was the network of collegial relationships that I developed and the insights I acquired from describing my struggles to other seasoned clergy. I needed that wisdom. I needed that encouragement from others, the elders in my craft that I could turn to for honest feedback. And I did need a supportive life partner who could make me aware of my rough edges and help lubricate our relationships with parishioners. Thank you, dear. There's something else I learned. Something that is important if you're going to go the distance and what it reflects, what it means to have real passion. And that is that the work has to be its own reward because what counts in the end isn't success as it's ordinarily understood. What's important is that sense of fulfillment. And in the ministry, how is that acquired? It is acquired by weaving real connections through your persistent effort and your faithful service, as Marge Piercy suggested in our opening reading. True, I have enjoyed success as a professional, but that is not what has kept me in the game for over 40 years. It's the entanglement, the recognition that ministry isn't what I do. It's what all of us do together. And that's what sustains the passion. And that's why I have persisted. Blessed be I not meant. And so now it is time for the giving and the receiving of our offering and our contributions this morning will be used to support the wonderful music program and the other programmatic elements of our congregation. Please be generous. Just outside the middle doors here and we do invite individuals if they would like to share with the congregation a joy or sorrow that has visited their life recently to enter those in the book and we share them at this time. There were no entries today. So other than happy birthday, Steve and a happy birthday in advance to my father who turns 95 tomorrow. There are no other joys to share. So we will proceed directly to our closing hymn, number 351. Close with these words from Rainer Maria Rilke. Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. And the point is to love everything, to live the questions now and perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers. Please be seated for the post.


Welcome to Fulton Industrial Boulevard, the armpit of Atlanta, Georgia. Home with a pimp's, hoes, players, prostitutes, rappers, strip clubs. And don't forget about the dope boy, Shouter. And the fat asses, bro. And the Roach Motel. I know I had near Coke 45 around here somewhere.  I know one of the Roaches ain't take my goddamn moat liquor. Hey, what's up, people? My name's Ray The Roach, and I'm what you might call a rebel. I live inside the walls of this dirty motel with my two best friends. My always hungry and always horny homie Rico. Hey, what's up, guys?  What? You know, her doggy door. And my cousin Rosco the troublemaker. Hell no, I ain't goin' in there. Rosco, are you hurt? No, I'm good, sis. But I can't move. Why not? Cause I'm on my back. You know Roaches can't get up a day on their backs? Oh yeah, you're right. And this is my beautiful ride-a-die girlfriend, Lala. I'm coming with you. No way. It's too dangerous. Exactly.  You need me to watch it back. Nah, we can handle it. Is there something on my shirt? Or something stings? And my back feels wet. Nah, shawty, you good? You're right. The life of a Roach is a struggle. We risk our lives every day, just so we can survive. Goddamn show-offs.  Now the outside world is a huge and crazy place. And the Motel Onestand has no problem smashing us on site. We even gotta watch out for our own kind. Shit, we even got a neighborhood superstar. Welcome to the Roach Motel.


I am John Bacham. I'm the director of marketing for Henry Shine Dental. We are the world's largest supplier of goods and services to office-based practitioners in the medical, vet, and dental space. We have an impressive amount of products that we offer our customers and the challenge has always been when a customer asks us for a specific product or information on a technology. We had to get back to them with the appropriate literature they're requesting. Using FileMaker Go for iPad, we built a solution where we house every piece of literature. Our reps can preview those pieces of literature right in front of a customer. They can order printed copies or download PDFs and distribute them to our customers in a matter of seconds. The literature databases really helped us in getting the right information to our customers faster more efficiently to help them make the right decisions. At any given time we could have any of our 800 plus representatives accessing the literature and promotions that are available through the solution. At Henry Shine Dental, we believe in improving the lives of those we touch. For dental professionals, we do that by focusing on practice care so they can focus on patient care. So equipping our sales team with the most efficient state-of-the-art tools such as our sales literature solution powered by FileMaker Go for iPad greatly assists us in achieving that goal. The real aha moment for us in identifying FileMaker's platform as an exciting solution is that we can develop high quality database solutions, marketing solutions, communication tools in less time and for less money. I'm not a programmer, I've never been a programmer and nobody on my team was a programmer. And the fact that this solution is so user-friendly that people that don't have a background in programming can quickly understand its abilities and manage and train others on how to use it. We have a little bit of time to do a lot of things. What I most appreciate about FileMaker is that I can develop high quality solutions for less cost and less time. The FileMaker platform has really allowed us to take to the next level.


What's the problem I've read every Christian dating book out there, and I still haven't found my proverbs 31 wife You do know that if you want to get in a relationship you actually need to talk to girls, right? wait


You know the one question I keep you keep you keep mentioning this thing where it's like sales like you have an emphasis for sales You're teaching your daughter sales. Where did this come from in your lifetime? Have you always been in sales has your parents always instilled this in you? Can you give me a window into why you value sales so much? I totally agree by the way, but i'm just curious He grew up like he's two years old and he's like, where's the sales place? I need to go study My parents were not Did not install anything on me, okay I was um the first time I went selling I was in Costa Rica. I lived in many different countries I have a weird accent. I know But I lived in Costa Rica and my neighbor had given me like a sack of oranges How old was I at the time seven so I tell my I had a nanny and I said I need you to get me glasses and a jar And I need a box and I started looking for a box and she didn't know what it was doing So I took my stuff and go on the street. I remember we had a house We I drove I walked on in the dirt path all the way to the top of the street And I had cat oranges and I started oh and I needed something to make juice So I sold orange juice to cars and cars would stop and it says how much is this and I said there's two colonists That's two that's the the monetary Point there and I sold on my oranges and people say oh, this is really good I should make my my children do this. I said, yes, that's good. Uh, that's four colonists, please You don't want competition. I don't know. Anyway, so um, that's the first time I remember selling in something Who installed this on me? It just lately came Then later on it's part of his beingness.  So if you are a good salesperson You get to achieve the things that you might want in life. So selling Very important. I love it. I absolutely I couldn't agree more I think this is the one tenant I have in my life. Let's give people some tips. So for me Whenever I've run sales teams or I even do sales myself I record myself. I want to see how awkward I am.  You're like, ah, how do I break that? What are you what are some tenants that you could share with some people as it relates to sales that you found to be Truly a differentiator for you practice. What what give us a window? Okay, um, there's many different types of sales. Okay, but the most The sale that we deal in short time is different to other sales, but there's many different types of sales Your sales are a one-on-one. You have sales to groups of people, but the most important thing on a sale Never be afraid never and this is really important Never be afraid of what will happen Because a lot of people don't even start a sale or start saying the thing because they're afraid of what response they're gonna get I call that analysis paralysis Okay, you analyze until you are paralyzed So the most important thing is it doesn't matter what you're selling or what you want or what you don't want It doesn't matter Just take it out Right that the best way of putting it is like You're in a horse, right? And you're riding a horse.  What's the worst thing that can happen? You don't get the sale You're so right. I feel like I've uh, I've rewired my brain. So like that fear component, right? So it's like action and then fear is natural because we're all humans and then it's like your result I've just killed the fear part of my brain like doesn't exist anymore. It will always be there I believe it people that like me me talking about it. I have that fear too I remember that I wouldn't sell what was it? I think it was Walmart or someone I wouldn't I was afraid of sending an email with prices because I was afraid that they would say no right and I was afraid that they would say no to me and That thing will happen. So by no sending the email I didn't get a no. So it was okay But it wasn't okay. That wasn't okay. If they said no, it's fine It's one of the thousands of no I'm gonna get in my road to success because the road of success is leader If you look behind you by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of no's All you need is one. Yes Hey, everyone. Thanks for checking out that clip If you enjoyed it, be sure to hit the like button down below And if you're interested in hearing the full episode, it's out right now on our youtube channel We've had a lot of great guests come on this show before and we've got a lot of great guests coming up in the future So hit subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode and one final note We're always looking for new ideas and new companies to feature on the show So if you know of someone or know of a company write us a comment down below letting us know who they are and what they do We'd be happy to have them on the show Till then I'll just be here waiting for your comments. So, uh See you later


My name is Edwin Barasa. I am the Interim Executive Director of the Kenbury Welcome Trust Research Program and in addition to that I lead the health economics work within the program. So the Kenbury Welcome Trust Research Program is a partnership between three partners. This is Oxford, the University of Oxford, the Welcome Trust in the UK and the Kenya Medical Research Institute, which is a state corporation in Kenya with a mandate to carry out health research. We are physically located in East Africa with offices in Nairobi and Kilifi in Kenya and in Bali in Uganda. Our mission is to carry out high quality research in human health that is also purposeful and relevant and to develop research capacity within the African continent. So the Kenbury Welcome Trust Research Program focuses on key five thematic areas of research. This is vaccines, pathogen, biology, population health, clinical research and health systems and policy research. The way we approach our research work is to use a truly multidisciplinary approach and we also invested in engagement at both the policy level and the community level to ensure that the research that we do is relevant and responsive to the needs of the community and the needs of policy makers. There are several examples of pieces of work that we've done that have been quite impactful in contributing to the development of global health. Examples that I can think about at the moment include the work that we did during the COVID-19 pandemic that informed the Kenyan government's response to the pandemic and also supported other countries to do the same. Our research has also contributed to research on the two new malaria vaccines which are going to be quite important tools in the containment of malaria in our part of the world. We've also done work that has informed the development and updating of clinical guidelines that are used to manage sick children in hospitals. Our vision for the future is to continue to conduct relevant research that is responsive to emerging global health priorities. We are going to continue to do the work that we do because it remains relevant but we are also going to get into areas that are emerging such as climate change and health.