Name: Joe Rogan Experience #414 - Cmdr. Chris Hadfield
Uploaded: 2013-11-11T22:31:09.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #414 - Cmdr. Chris Hadfield' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2013-11-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #414 - Cmdr. Chris Hadfield' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2013-11-11. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #414 - Cmdr. Chris Hadfield

his name is chris hatfield the book is an astronaut's guide to life on earth
hear that
that's me i never forget i never remember rather turn my laptop off you uh you
were in space for
166 days amazing huh that's insane it's it's when i uh sit on my dock and watch
the space station go
over uh it's really hard to rationalize because i know i was up there and i can
remember all the
details but to try and link in life on earth with uh with seeing that spotlight
go across the horizon
it's it's still i haven't got sorted out of my head how to connect it is that
the longest a person's
ever been up there no we there was a russian guy named valeri polyakov stayed
up 14 months straight
400 and whatever that is days long time wow yeah no i'm nowhere near the record
that's in still 166
days is an incredible amount of time to be detached from gravity and floating
around in space
what what is the effect on your body uh a big effect short term huge your body
doesn't have to lift the
blood up to your head when you're weightless right so your whole cardiovascular
system changes all the
nice little mechanisms that squeeze the balloon that is your body to get the
blood up to your head
they stop working your heart gets smaller uh you start losing your skeleton um
your balance system
completely shuts down i mean it has no stimulus from gravity anymore so you
become totally visually
based so when you come home it's brutal building all those things back up again
um and most of them
you feel i mean you lose the calluses on the bottom of your feet it's kind of
disgusting because
your feet are like a snake up there but the bottom of your feet are shedding
because you never use the
bottom of your feet and you build up calluses on the top because you're always
tucking your feet
underneath things so when you come back you even have to grow the calluses back
in the bottom of your
feet and the thing that takes the longest is your skeleton um i lost about
eight percent of the bone across
my hips and but it's grown back and uh within about a year of landing i'll uh
hopefully be back to normal one year it takes one year for your body to fully
recover
took about four months before i could run normally again where my body would
get the blood out of my
feet and pump it properly back up to my head about four months which is almost
as long as i was up on
this trip but uh yeah the bone takes the longest but it's uh it's automatic
which is interesting my
body got osteoporosis and it's reversing osteoporosis using some internal
stimulus that we don't even
understand so it makes a pretty good medical study for everybody yeah i would
imagine so now how long
is how long do you have to be in space before your body loses so much mass of
skeleton and the first
time you take a leak in space your urine is full of calcium and minerals we do
you know urine samples
all the time and your body we don't even know why we don't know what sensors in
the body recognize that
you're weightless or why we would even have those sensors but uh your body
starts to shed your skeleton
right away and we've we can almost beat it now through uh heavy exercise we
have a bunch of
equipment on board resistive exercise and treadmill and bicycle and stuff and
with that we can almost
beat it but we across my hips and my upper femur we haven't been able to load
that area up right you
always lift symmetrically and on treadmill you always run nice and symmetrically
so you don't get all the
the banging transverse loads that you need to make your body keep the bones
dense there so how much of
it can you preserve by using exercise uh the rest of my body was fine in fact i
increased muscle mass
i decreased fat a little bit my bones were at the same density the only place
we haven't solved yet
is is just the hip cradle and i think with another iteration or two of our
exercise equipment we'll get
that solved and then then we can go to mars wow so now how long are you when
when you're doing like
exercise to try to to build up what what percentage are your days two hours a
day every day we do one
hour of cardiovascular one hour of resistive every single day seven days a week
for the whole half a
year that you're up there that we've determined that's the best trade-off
between getting useful
work done you know because it's a big multinational laboratory and um keeping
your body healthy so we
we commit about two hours a day did they when they first started going up there
did they not do anything
no we've tried a bunch of different things the russians even tried a suit they
call a penguin suit
which is like a set of coveralls tight-fitting coveralls that's full of elastics
so that every
time you bend your elbow or or move your twist your body or something you're
fighting the resistance of
the suit because they thought then you could sort of get it for free but but
you need to demand it you
need to actually heavily force your body to exercise and if you do that and
then you can stay in shape
but we've you know we started out with resistive exercise device and then it
was the improved i read
and now we're on a red which is the advanced resistive exercise device as we've
learned you know how to
make it better so that we uh we can return to earth healthy or you know when we
go to the moon but more
importantly when we go to mars it takes about half a year to get there well
where this is one of the
problems we need to solve the mars is really that next level trip right because
there's no coming back
it's it's like several levels above where we are now station is in orbit right
it's around us the
space station it's been up there 13 years now with people on board um but it's
like uh sailing up and
down the coast with insight of land you know we haven't headed across the body
of water even to go to
the moon as far as habitation goes so right now we're just sailing up and down
the coast of the world
figuring out how to beat osteoporosis how the radiation the psychology of it
the what to make
the hull out of how do you make a toilet that works a closed environmental
system got to invent
all those things then i think we'll go to the moon because it's the next it's
only three days away
and then we can do how to use resources that are there how do you generate
power how do you navigate
how do you do all that and then once we've got that sorted out then i think we'll
go further but
it's still you know a lot of years away what what are the big hazards the big
hazards of radiation
from space micrometeors yep and what else uh psychological how do you keep
people sane and
it's not so bad in the space station because we're close to the world there's
only like a two second
delay talking on the radio so you can have a normal conversation just a little
pause but as soon as you
start going to mars within a couple weeks you will never have another
conversation with earth a normal
one again everything's got so much lag that you'll just have like recorded
video messages back and
forth and so the psych impact of that is going to be high and the earth will
shrink to just another star
within a couple weeks you know and that those people will become martians in
their mind you know
they will no longer be from earth they will see themselves as separate when i
was on the space
station the second time one of the other crew members her name's sue helms uh
she and i were
talking we'd known each other since test pilot school and in passing a throwaway
thing she didn't even
think she was saying she said hey you know earth said that we're supposed to do
this next
and in my mind i heard earth said i heard those words come out of her mouth and
it was like she has
in her mind completely uh split off from the other seven billion people there's
her crew and earth is
one singular identifiable entity on the other side and that was a real bell
ringer to me of what it's
going to be like to go to mars those people are going to be a completely
discrete unit of people and
they'll be martians they won't be earthlings pretty quick at their heads and
how do you deal with that
how do we plan for that and it's still a long ways in the future but it's one
of the many things we
need to sort out before we because as you say once you get the engines going
fast enough that you're
you're headed for mars you can't just turn around there's no coming back that's
it uh well i mean the
apollo 13 right they lost an engine on the way to the moon they coasted all the
way to the moon
and they just used like like a ball on the end of a string they just went
around the moon with
the gravity of the moon to sling them back at earth again so if something
failed on the way to mars you
could do the same thing but it would take a year so you know no problem can
normally last a year to
get resolved so pretty much yeah you got to have all the problems solved before
you head that way and
what about like sustainable resources like as far as like food and things like
that do they have to
when they have to terraform when they get to mars and start growing things we
don't know we're trying to
figure all that out um a really interesting discovery about uh three weeks ago
curiosity that big rover
that that is driving around on mars right now has some pretty good uh equipment
on it and it discovered
uh just in the last few weeks that in every cubic foot of dirt on mars there's
a a quart of water
so there's oceans of water i mean the topsoil is full of water on mars so that's
really promising for
when we get there um because water is hydrogen and oxygen oxygen to breathe
hydrogen and oxygen makes
fuel hydrogen and oxygen makes water so that's a huge resource the moon there
there's water there but
it's really rare so that's a big discovery uh for us eventually being able to
go there but you know we
need a power source the sun's a long ways away and it's dusty on mars you can't
just you can't have
a solar powered bulldozer you know you need a power source and we need how do
you navigate and um there's
how do you build a perfect closed loop environmental system so that you don't
have a constant losses and
because the space station we only i think it's about 92 percent of our water we
reclaim but we constantly
need that little trickle from earth of new water because it's not perfect there's
there's a whole
and there's a lot of stuff we don't even don't even know what we don't know yet
and that's i think why
we'll we'll sort a lot of that out on the moon before we launch to mars to me
watching the footage of
the rover and the images that it sent back was almost surreal it didn't seem
real it's it's it was
hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that they sent a robot to another
planet it's roaming
around taking pictures and sending them back and we're looking at them yeah it's
phenomenal it's
incredible yeah that we could do that and and the way that came you know mars
has has just the wrong
atmosphere um it's not thick enough to use a parachute in but it's not thin
enough that you
can ignore it and just and just slow down and land with a rocket you know it's
it's it's not good for
landing uh the earth's atmosphere is nice and thick you can come down under a
parachute and the moon has
none so you can just like the apollo guys you can just land on your rocket plume
mars you're kind
of stuck in the middle so you need a complex landing system and curiosity the
way they came up with
the solution to that was just phenomenal the big arrow break through the
atmosphere and then that
sequence of miracles and the retro rockets and the extendable bridle and
everything it
is amazing that that worked and a huge kudos to the jpl guys and everybody who
came up with it that
and the stuff it's teaching us about how planets work and and what is what is
the past and the future
for that planet mars and therefore gives us a lot better understanding of what's
normal and what what
what we can expect on earth yeah a huge kudos to those people indeed i mean
they did an amazi