This revolutionary moment in space exploration - Chris Hadfield

You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. We're in the midst of an extraordinary space age, and yet very few people have actually been to space and can speak from a place of personal experience about what might be the future of humankind there. In this conversation, former astronaut Chris Hadfield, who's been dubbed a space exploring James Bond, sat down with TED curator Whitney Pennington Rogers to discuss his remarkable experiences on the International Space Station and how it turned into writing high-stakes fiction, including his latest book, Final Orbit. The two of them explore the boundaries between what is science fiction and what is truly possible, and help paint a picture of the great unknown of the cosmos into something we can all understand.

您正在收听的是《TED每日演讲》，我们每天为您带来激发好奇心的新观点。我是主持人Elise Hugh。我们正身处一个非凡的太空时代，然而真正去过太空、能从亲身经历出发畅谈人类未来的人却少之又少。在这次对话中，前宇航员克里斯·哈德菲尔德——被誉为“太空探险界的詹姆斯·邦德”——与TED策展人惠特尼·佩宁顿·罗杰斯坐在一起，探讨了他在国际空间站的非凡经历，以及这些经历如何转化为他创作高风险小说（包括他的新书《最终轨道》）的灵感。他们两人一同探索了科幻与真正可能之间的界限，并帮助将浩瀚未知的宇宙描绘成我们都能理解的样子。

It feels like this is just an exciting time to talk about space and everyone seems to be doing it. I think maybe we could just kick things off and start right there. From your perspective, what do you think is driving this new wave of excitement and investment in space exploration? What feels different to you about this moment?

感觉现在正是谈论太空的激动人心的时刻，每个人似乎都在谈论。我想或许我们可以直接从这里开始。从您的角度来看，您认为是什么推动了这新一轮的太空探索热潮和投资？这一刻让您感觉有何不同？

Access. There are amazing times in history, Whitney, where we collectively, as a species invent something new that opens up whole new opportunities for humanity. Think about when we first harnessed fire or when someone built the first raft to cross, I don't know, the Red Sea. Or when we started domesticating horses and allowed ourselves to travel quickly. Or when the first train was invented, you know, late seventeen hundreds, early eighteen hundreds, and then the airplane, the car, all of those things change not only how we could move around, but then where we could go to. And spaceflight has been around now for sixty years. But we're in a revolution right now of reusable spaceship design which is drastically dropping the cost, which then increases the access for everybody. And right now it's possible to just buy a ticket and go to space for the price of a luxury car. And luxury cars are expensive, but there are a lot of people buying luxury cars too. So it's just a kind of a revolutionary time in starting to leave earth in amongst all the scientific and explorative stuff going on. And I find it all really inspiring and exciting and also kind of delightful based on what I've done my whole life.

是进入的可能性。惠特尼，历史上有许多惊人的时刻，我们作为一个物种共同发明了新事物，为人类开辟了全新的机遇。想想我们最初驾驭火的时候，或者有人造出第一艘木筏去横渡——我不知道——红海的时候。或者当我们开始驯养马匹，得以快速旅行的时候。或者当第一列火车被发明出来的时候，你知道，十八世纪末、十九世纪初，然后是飞机、汽车，所有这些事物不仅改变了我们的出行方式，也改变了我们能去的地方。而太空飞行至今已有六十年了。但我们正处在一场可重复使用飞船设计的革命中，它正急剧地降低成本，从而增加了每个人的进入机会。现在，买一张去太空的票，价格只相当于一辆豪华车。豪华车固然昂贵，但购买豪华车的人也很多。所以，在所有这些科学和探索活动进行的同时，这正是一个开始离开地球的革命性时代。基于我一生所从事的事业，我发现这一切都非常鼓舞人心、令人*奋，也令人愉悦。

I mean, and you've lived through many eras of space exploration from, you know, think about like Cold War competition to international cooperation. And now where we are, where we're seeing this sort of surge in private enterprise. And how do you think the purpose of going to space has evolved through these phases? How have people thought about it differently?

我的意思是，您经历了太空探索的许多时代，从冷战竞争到国际合作。而现在我们看到了私营企业的这种激增。您认为在这些阶段中，前往太空的目的发生了怎样的演变？人们对其看法有何不同？

When I was born, and I'm by no means the oldest man in the world, no one had gone to space. Like when I was just learning to walk, that's when Yuri Gagarin and then a month later Al Shepard and then everybody that followed started going to space. So it's still incredibly new in the human experience. And I think the evolution makes complete sense where initially it was just barely possible and we took an enormous risk to try, just like we often do with a new capability like the first people to Antarctica, a large percentage of them died just trying to prove whether Shackleton managed to keep his whole crew alive, barely, but just trying to push really the envelope of human experience and that's where we were when I was growing up. And then we evolved from the Apollo program with Apollo Thirteen and all those near misses to the Shuttle program, which we regularized it a lot but it's still... we had two tragic, completely fatal accidents during Shuttle. But we've gotten better and better at it. We've learned so much from each of those problems in the past so that now the vehicle that regularly takes people to the space station and back, the SpaceX Dragon vehicle with a Dragon capsule on top, it's the safest rocket ever and that didn't happen accidentally. It is a natural progression and as soon as you make something safe enough and cheap enough then it stops being just the purview of a trillionaire like the Soviet Union or the United States and it gets down to the billionaire and then the millionaire and then I don't know what you call under that, the centenaire or something. Someone who has, I don't know, a hundred thousand dollars or seventy-five thousand dollars, it's still expensive but if you plot it on a curve it's easy to extrapolate where it's going and that naturally then opens up a lot more commercial opportunity for putting things in space for satellites to observe the world for commercial purposes, but also just for people, not just to risk their lives and explore, but to just see what it's like to go for a ride. And lots of people are doing that now.

我出生时——我绝不是世界上最年长的人——还没人去过太空。就在我蹒跚学步时，尤里·加加林，然后一个月后艾伦·谢泼德，以及后来的所有人开始进入太空。所以这在人类经验中仍然是非常新的事物。我认为这种演变完全合乎逻辑：起初仅仅是有可能，我们冒着巨大的风险去尝试，就像我们面对任何新能力时常做的那样，比如首批去南极的人，他们中有很大一部分人在试图证明沙克尔顿是否能（勉强）让全体船员活下来时牺牲了，但这正是在努力突破人类经验的极限，这就是我成长时所处的阶段。然后我们从阿波罗计划（包括阿波罗13号和那些千钧一发的时刻）发展到航天飞机计划，我们对其进行了很多规范化，但仍然……在航天飞机期间我们发生过两次悲惨的、完全致命的事故。但我们在这方面做得越来越好。我们从过去的每一个问题中都学到了很多，以至于现在定期运送人员往返空间站的飞船——顶部带有“龙”舱的SpaceX龙飞船——成了有史以来最安全的火箭，这并非偶然。这是一个自然的进程，一旦你将某样东西做得足够安全和廉价，它就不再仅仅是像苏联或美国这样的“万亿富翁”的专属领域，它会逐渐惠及亿万富翁、百万富翁，然后我不知道该怎么称呼之下的人，是“十万富翁”之类的吧。有的人，我不知道，有十万美元或七万五千美元，这仍然很贵，但如果你把它画在曲线上，很容易推断出它的趋势，这自然就为将物品送入太空、让卫星为商业目的观测世界开辟了更多的商业机会，同时也为普通人——不仅仅是为了冒生命危险去探索，而只是为了体验一下乘坐的感觉。现在很多人正在这样做。

Well, and it sounds like you think that we're probably going to see more of this or it will become even more accessible as time goes on.

那么，听起来您认为我们很可能会看到更多此类情况，或者随着时间的推移，它会变得更加触手可及。

Well, if you'd asked me the same question about airplanes in 1920, say after we'd had a big area of government development with the First World War and then the very first airlines started being formed, one of the first was KLM in Holland. And I mean, it was crazy. There were no regulations. Instrument flying didn't exist yet. Where do you get fuel? They don't. There's not any big infrastructure of runways. But people saw that, hey, this is important. This is going to open up the whole world to us and let's be on the cutting edge of it and let's move out. You can't stop people's creativity and imagination and entrepreneurship. And that's the phase we're just really nicely entering into in spaceflight right now. I help run a big international technology incubator called the Creative Destruction Lab, I run the space component of that. And so I regularly see hundreds of brilliant young people from all around the world building businesses, developing ideas so that they can take advantage of this moment in history to be some of the early developers of the technologies we're going to need.

嗯，如果您在1920年问我关于飞机的同样问题，比如说在一战后政府大力推动发展之后，第一批航空公司开始成立，其中最早的一家是荷兰的皇家航空。我的意思是，当时情况很疯狂。没有法规。仪表飞行还不存在。去哪里搞燃料？他们搞不到。没有任何大型的跑道基础设施。但人们看到了，嘿，这很重要。这将为我们打开整个世界，我们要站在前沿，我们要行动起来。你无法阻止人们的创造力、想象力和创业精神。而这正是我们现在在太空飞行中真正顺利进入的阶段。我帮助运营一个名为“创造性破坏实验室”的大型国际技术孵化器，我负责其中的太空板块。所以我经常看到来自世界各地的数百名才华横溢的年轻人创办企业、开发创意，以便他们能利用这一历史时刻，成为我们所需技术的早期开发者之一。

You know, I think another thing, a lot of folks when they're looking at the headlines not just related to space but just in general, there's a lot of things happening around, you know, global tensions and geopolitical political tensions and space is always in a lot of ways reflected the politics of the time. And so I wonder when you look at these headlines and see the things that are going on out there, what opportunities you might see for collaboration in orbit and potentially what risks do you think were presented in this moment when we think about the future of space exploration.

我想还有一件事，很多人在看头条新闻时，不仅限于太空领域，总的来说，世界上正在发生很多事情，比如全球紧张局势和地缘政治紧张局势，而太空在很多方面总是反映着当时的政治。所以我想知道，当您看到这些头条新闻和外面正在发生的事情时，您认为在轨道合作方面可能有哪些机会？以及，在我们思考太空探索的未来时，您认为此刻潜藏着哪些风险？

Yeah, all new inventions are dual use. You know, we don't really think about it much, but everything you ever come up with, any new idea, it can be used peacefully. It can be used antagonistically, you know, metallurgy with knives and forks or anything, fire or nuclear energy or gosh, everything. And we're just people. I got to know Jane Goodall, had multiple things we did together and she just sadly passed away recently. But I was with her back in March and we were talking. One of the things she discovered when she went into the jungles, quite optimistically about the innocence and the purity of animals, she discovered that chimpanzees murder each other and they wage war, tribes of chimpanzees, wage war on each other. They commit genocide. I mean, and that's the closest animal in the entire living things on earth that we're related to. We are very much that flawed being. But at the same time, we have developed society and societal rules and cultures that protect us from our worst nature. And we have police forces and military forces. And so all of that is going to be exported into space. Right now it's been maybe slightly more pure than it could have been because of the limited access to it. But you need to remember in 1962, both the United States and the Soviet Union detonated nuclear weapons in Earth orbit and had horrific consequences, like almost the whole world could see aurora because of the big disruption of the magnetic field and it wiped out a whole bunch of satellites and some of the ground stations in Hawaii caught fire because of all the tremendous amount of energy coming from the sky. So, you know, we're by no means perfect. What we need to do is look at this new technology, just like we have all the ones in the past and figure out how should we regulate it, how do we so that it actually serves a purpose for the human condition. And I focus on a lot of different things. But that is very much one of them. How can I be part of the group of people that is thinking long term, thinking big picture. I'm the chair of the Open Lunar Foundation looking at Lunar settlement policy and how not to just mirror the problems that exist on Earth right now. But if we wait for everything to be perfect, we'll never do anything, and we have to somehow do the amazing things while allowing for the imperfections of human behavior.

是的，所有新发明都具有双重用途。你知道，我们不怎么多想这件事，但你想到的任何东西，任何新想法，它都可以被和*利用，也可以被对抗性地使用，比如冶金术用于制造刀叉或任何东西，火、核能，天哪，一切。而我们只是人类。我认识了简·古道尔，我们曾一起做过几件事，她最近不幸去世了。但今年三月我和她在一起聊天。她当初进入丛林时对动物的天真和纯洁相当乐观，但她发现的事情之一就是黑猩猩会互相残杀，它们会发动战争，黑猩猩部落之间互相开战。它们实施种族灭绝。我的意思是，那是地球上所有生物中与我们亲缘关系最近的动物。我们很大程度上就是这种有缺陷的存在。但与此同时，我们发展了社会、社会规则和文化，保护我们免受自身最恶劣本性的伤害。我们拥有警察部队和军队。所以，所有这些都将被带入太空。目前，由于进入太空的机会有限，情况或许比原本可能的样子稍微纯净一些。但你需要记住，1962年，美国和苏联都曾在地球轨道上引爆核武器，造成了可怕的后果，比如由于磁场遭到巨大破坏，几乎全世界都能看到极光，它摧毁了一大堆卫星，夏威夷的一些地面站因为来自天空的巨大能量而起火。所以，你知道，我们绝非完美。我们需要做的是审视这项新技术，就像我们对待过去所有技术一样，找出我们应该如何监管它，如何让它真正为改善人类境况服务。我关注许多不同的事情，但这绝对是其中之一。我如何才能成为那群进行长期思考、拥有大局观的人中的一员。我是开放月球基金会的主席，研究月球定居政策，以及如何不简单照搬地球目前存在的问题。但如果我们等到一切都完美，我们将一事无成，我们必须设法在允许人类行为不完美的同时，去完成那些了不起的事情。

You will not be surprised to know that we're getting lots of interesting questions from the audience who are just so fascinated by your work and the things that you're saying right now. And you know, I think to sort of piggyback on what you're saying, do you see this, I guess the sort of learning line between space exploration and some of the challenges that we're facing here at home, whether that is geopolitics or climate change. For instance, we have a question from Cat H who asks how we might think about investing in space as climate activists, how can that be part of the way we look at space travel.

您不会感到意外，我们收到了观众提出的许多有趣问题，他们对您的工作和您此刻所说的内容非常着迷。您知道，我想接着您的话说，您是否看到这一点——我想说的是太空探索与我们在地球上面临的一些挑战（无论是地缘政治还是气候变化）之间的某种关联线。例如，我们有一个来自Cat H的问题，她问作为气候活动家，我们如何看待投资太空，这如何能成为我们看待太空旅行的一部分方式。

Right. Well, it's much like how can you be a climate activist and invest in some other industry? Of course, none of the space industries are based in space, all of the industry and investing happens here on Earth. And so if you look at a company, for example, like GHGSat, GHGSat stands for greenhouse gas and what they developed is a really clever little sensor that specifically looks for the gases like methane that contribute most to changes in the chemistry of our atmosphere and therefore the greenhouse effect that leads to global warming. And GHGSat is a very successful company and they're leading the world. And what they do is they orbit the world and constantly 24/7 look for unknown sources of big methane leaks and then inform the person that owns the pipeline or the plant or whatever. There's a company like Planet that has hundreds of satellites up that are imaging the world down to very fine resolution every day and they do a lot of what you would have to call altruistic work to try and let everybody see the actual health of our planet and what's going on. And so it's a big enough industry, multi-billion dollar industry that there's lots of different areas in it that you can choose to support by investing in certain companies.

对。嗯，这很像你如何能作为一名气候活动家去投资其他行业？当然，没有哪个太空产业是建立在太空的，所有的产业和投资都发生在地球上。所以，如果你看一家公司，比如GHGSat，GHGSat代表温室气体，他们开发的是一种非常精巧的小型传感器，专门寻找像甲烷这样对我们大气化学变化贡献最大、从而导致全球变暖的温室效应的气体。GHGSat是一家非常成功的公司，他们处于世界领先地位。他们所做的是环绕地球运行，持续地、全天候地寻找未知的大型甲烷泄漏源，然后通知拥有管道或工厂等设施的相关人员。还有一家叫Planet的公司，拥有数百颗卫星，每天以非常高的分辨率对地球成像，他们做了很多你不得不称之为利他的工作，试图让每个人都能看到我们星球的真实健康状况和正在发生的事情。所以这是一个足够大的产业，一个价值数十亿美元的产业，其中有许多不同的领域，你可以通过投资某些公司来选择支持。

I'd love to build on that a little bit. You know, when you think about the technology and what's advancing in all spaces but in space, you know we have what reusable rockets now and AI being used to assist spacecraft and you know, even autonomous rovers and that sort of thing. And you of course are way more versed in this than I am. I mean, I guess when you think about all this stuff, what are the innovations that you see that you think are most reshaping our path to eventually being able to spend significant amounts of time off of Earth?

我想在此基础上再深入一点。您知道，当您想到技术和各个领域的进步，尤其是在太空领域，我们现在有了可重复使用火箭，人工智能被用来辅助航天器，甚至还有自主漫游车之类的。您当然比我精通得多。我的意思是，当您思考所有这些事情时，您看到的哪些创新，您认为正在最大程度地重塑我们最终能够在地球之外度过大量时间的道路？

Yeah, one of the first ones you touched on, Whitney, which is reusable rockets. Right now we have partially reusable rockets, the first stage that gets you off the launch pad and above the air so that then you can go fast enough. You know, in order to stay in orbit you have to go five miles a second, eight kilometers a second. You can't do that down here in the air. There's just too much friction. But as soon as you get above the air, then you can go sideways and accelerate out to orbital speed. And so that first stage that does the heavy lifting gets you off the pad, gets you up where there's virtually no air and then it runs out of fuel and spits you off. Now those first stages as most people on this call know come back and land. So you don't throw away any of the metal and you really are just paying for fuel and that has radically dropped the cost of access to space. And not only is it SpaceX with their Dragon or their Falcon rocket that a lot of people know about, but Blue Origin has already launched once, but they're launching again within a few weeks, their big lifter that they named after one of the early astronauts, they call it New Glenn and they're trying to land that first stage out on a barge. And then a New Zealand company, a real strong up and comer called Rocket Lab, has a new partially reusable rocket called Neutron that they're intending to launch from the east coast of the US before the end of the year. So multiple Western companies competing with first stage reusable rockets and in China they're doing the same thing. The real change will be when we have 100% reusable rocket so you don't throw away any of your construction and sunk cost investment with each flight, you can just bring the pieces back like an airline or fill them up with fuel and use them again and then you become really financially viable. It doesn't take an enormous organization just to get to space. And that's coming quickly with SpaceX's new Starship. It's a monster of a rocket and a very complex thing to do. But if you watch their last flight, their eleventh test flight, they had remarkable success. Both pieces safely made it back. They're pushing the edges of the envelope to try and figure out where they can make all of their economical savings in complexity. But it won't be very long before you see a Starship launch either from Texas or Florida, the first stage come back and get grabbed and then the orbital stage, get up, do what it's doing in space and then come back and get grabbed, stack them up, fill them up with fuel and use them again. That's coming quite rapidly. That's going to drop the cost even more. And so to me, access is everything. As soon as we can make it safe and simple and as inexpensive as possible for things to get to space, that's when the Earth orbit and Earth-Moon economies will really take off.

是的，惠特尼，您首先提到的其中之一就是可重复使用火箭。目前我们拥有部分可重复使用的火箭，即第一级，它将你推离发射台，送到大气层之上，这样你才能达到足够快的速度。你知道，为了保持在轨道上，你需要达到每秒五英里（约每秒八公里）的速度。在下面的大气层里你做不到这一点，摩擦力太大了。但一旦你到了大气层之上，你就可以横向加速，达到轨道速度。所以，承担主要推进任务的第一级将你推离发射台，送到几乎没有空气的地方，然后燃料耗尽，将你分离出去。现在，正如大多数与会者所知，这些第一级会返回并着陆。这样你就不会扔掉任何金属部件，你实际上只是在为燃料付费，这从根本上降低了进入太空的成本。不仅有很多人知道的SpaceX及其龙飞船或猎鹰火箭，蓝色起源也已经发射过一次，他们将在几周内再次发射他们以一位早期宇航员命名的大型运载火箭——新格伦号，并尝试让第一级在驳船上着陆。还有一家新西兰公司，一个非常强劲的后起之秀叫火箭实验室，他们有一款新的部分可重复使用火箭叫中子号，打算在年底前从美国东海岸发射。所以多家西方公司都在第一级可重复使用火箭领域竞争，中国也在做同样的事情。真正的变革将发生在我们拥有100%可重复使用火箭的时候，这样每次飞行你都不会丢弃任何建造和沉没成本投资，你可以像航空公司一样把部件带回来，加注燃料，再次使用，这样在财务上才真正可行。进入太空不再需要一个庞大的组织。而随着SpaceX的新星舰，这一天正在快速到来。它是一个火箭巨兽，要做的事情非常复杂。但如果你看了他们上一次飞行，也就是第十一次试飞，他们取得了显著的成功。两部分都安全返回了。他们正在突破极限，试图弄清楚如何在复杂性中实现最大的经济节约。但要不了多久，你就会看到星舰从德克萨斯州或佛罗里达州发射，第一级返回并被回收，然后轨道级升空，在太空中完成任务后返回，也被回收，把它们堆叠起来，加注燃料，再次使用。这即将迅速到来。这将进一步降低成本。所以对我来说，进入太空的机会就是一切。一旦我们能让物品安全、简单、尽可能便宜地进入太空，地球轨道和地月经济才会真正起飞。

You've talked a little bit about some of the technological things that might need to happen in order to enable us to be a spacefaring species. Excuse me. I guess when you think about some of the other obstacles that we might face, whether that's political or ethical things, what do you see as some of the biggest things standing in our way from seeing this as a reality?

您谈到了一些可能需要发生的技术性事情，以使我们成为一个太空文明物种。抱歉。我想当您考虑我们可能面临的其他障碍时，无论是政治还是伦理方面的问题，您认为阻碍我们将此视为现实的最大因素有哪些？

Well, civilizations rise and fall all the time. Some of them last a long time, the Roman Empire. If you look at China, they've been an anomaly in human history, although they've had all of their ebbs and flows. They've been kind of a discrete geopolitical unit for thousands and thousands of years in that part of the world. And that adds a sense of urgency to what's going on, because you don't have to look very far back in history to whatever the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, or Egypt had that zenith of civilization and then collapsed, or all the ones that came before that. And so you're just sticking your head in the sand if you don't think that our current civilization is going to come apart at the seams and crumble for a while before something else emerges. So there's urgency to what's happening. We're at a moment right now where we're capable of doing magnificent things. You know, it's kind of staggering to think of the huge number of things that are happening simultaneously on Earth right now, right at the cutting edge stuff that was impossible just five years ago. And so a lot of what I do is to be part of the effort to help hold it all together to keep us from falling to our bad chimpanzee natures and to actually make the most of the civilization that we've been handed. But I also, one of the things, Whitney, that you really internalize orbiting the world is a sense of time. In a frenetic place in a city, you just, everything's just going, going, going and fast. And it's hard to even imagine the rest of the world. It sure is hard to imagine 100 years and it's virtually impossible to imagine a thousand years or 10,000 years. But on the quiet, grace-filled almost sanctity of a spaceship, you can see where the continents fit together just by looking out the window. And while I was on board the spaceship, we went from one side of the Sun to the other over six months and I got to watch the entire world change from summer to winter as the hemisphere swapped. I got to watch the whole world take a breath in what I realized was one of four and a half billion breaths of how our world refreshes itself. And that sense of time really soaked into me, and also the commonality of the human experience, because you see the same patterns reflected no matter where we have chosen to live. They all are similar. Whether you're over Connecticut or whether you're over Africa or whether you're over Australia, you can see, hey, it's just people doing the same thing down there and they all want a little joy and laughter and a good world for their children and their grandchildren. And so, to me, that tempers the kind of panicked urgency of a lot of news reporting and frantic feeling of desperation that seeps into a common everyday society. It makes me an eternal optimist because our species has been here for half a million years and we're still here despite our destructive nature and despite the rises and falls. And I just see it as a necessity, as the current crop of adults to not squander that and to try and do our best to recognize our history and make the most of our presence so we can hand our kids a decent future.

嗯，文明一直在兴衰。有些文明持续了很长时间，比如罗马帝国。看看中国，它在人类历史上是一个特例，尽管它经历了所有的起伏兴衰。在世界那个地区，它在某种程度上作为一个独*的地缘政治实体已经存在了数千年。这给正在发生的事情增添了一种紧迫感，因为你不必回顾太远的历史，无论是中世纪、黑暗时代，还是埃及文明的巅峰然后崩溃，或者在那之前的所有文明。所以，如果你不认为我们目前的文明将在接缝处破裂，并在新事物出现之前崩溃一段时间，那你就是在把头埋进沙子里。因此，正在发生的事情具有紧迫性。我们正处在一个能够做出伟大事情的时刻。你知道，想到此刻地球上同时正在发生的海量事情，那些在五年前还不可能的尖端事物，真是有点令人震惊。所以我所做的很多事情，就是参与其中，努力将一切维系在一起，防止我们堕入自身恶劣的“黑猩猩本性”，并真正充分利用我们传承下来的文明。但是，惠特尼，在环绕地球飞行时你真正内化的东西之一就是时间感。在城市里一个狂热的地方，你只觉得一切都在快速地发生、发生、发生。甚至很难想象世界其他地方。当然也很难想象一百年，几乎不可能想象一千年或一万年。但在宇宙飞船那宁静、充满恩典、近乎神圣的空间里，你只需望向窗外，就能看到各大洲是如何拼接在一起的。当我在飞船上的六个月里，我们从太阳的一侧运行到另一侧，我得以目睹随着半球转换，整个世界从夏季变为冬季。我得以看到整个世界的一次呼吸，我意识到这是我们的世界自我更新的四十五亿次呼吸之一。那种时间感深深浸透了我，还有人类经验的共通性，因为无论我们选择居住在哪里，你都能看到相同的模式。它们都很相似。无论你是在康涅狄格州上空，非洲上空，还是澳大利亚上空，你都能看到，嘿，下面的人们都在做着同样的事情，他们都想要一点快乐和欢笑，为他们的子孙后代创造一个美好的世界。所以，对我来说，这缓和了许多新闻报道带来的那种恐慌性紧迫感，以及渗透到日常社会中的那种疯狂的绝望感。它使我成为一个永恒的乐观主义者，因为尽管我们有破坏性，尽管有兴衰起伏，但我们的物种已经在这里存在了五十万年，并且仍然在这里。我只是将其视为一种必要，作为当代成年人，我们不能挥霍这一点，而要尽最大努力认识我们的历史，充分利用我们的存在，以便我们能给孩子们一个体面的未来。

It's an extraordinary perspective on life from being able to see it from that vantage point. And it seems like something that I imagine a lot of people could take and help them sort of navigate their day to day and ground them in what really matters. Well, you know, I mean I think that speaking to this point of like thinking about global division, which we talked about a little earlier, and how in a lot of ways space exploration has served as somewhat of like a human project that transcends borders, transcends any sort of thing that might divide us. Do you think that there's an opportunity for it to still bring people together in that same way in this moment as in the past?

能够从那个有利位置观察生活，这是一种非凡的视角。而且，我想象很多人可以从中汲取经验，帮助他们在日常生活中找到方向，让他们立足于真正重要的事情。嗯，您知道，我的意思是，谈到这一点，就像我们之前稍微谈到的全球分裂，以及太空探索如何在很多方面充当了一个超越国界、超越任何可能分裂我们的事物的、类似于人类共同项目的东西。您认为在这一刻，它是否仍有机会像过去那样以同样的方式将人们团结起来？

Yeah. And in fact, perhaps it's more important than ever. If you look at world history since the early 1990s, we've had a strange thirty-year bubble of peace with the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the wall in Berlin and all that. It's not our normal behavior. Our much more normal historical behavior is one of conflict and fear and jealousness over possessions and such that often flame the worst of human behaviors. But even since the early nineties we've had lots of bad things happen. The Gulf War and of course the huge human conflict and loss of life that's going on at the other end of the Mediterranean and in Ukraine right now. And when there is conflict and that sense of nationalism and the decrease of optimistic internationalism that began in the early nineties, I think. When that happens, you want more good examples, things that people can look up to. And while all that stuff has been going on, fifteen leading nations of the world have found a reason to cooperate peacefully 24 hours, seven days a week for that entire period on the International Space Station. And even right now with all of the posturing and saber-rattling that's going on, the United States and Russia and all the other partners of the International Space Station are working together every single day, doing scientific research, trying to understand the universe itself, observing our world and also sharing command of the International Space Station. Americans launch on the Russian Soyuz rocket like I did, Russian launch on the American Dragon and Falcon rocket. And that cooperation is so visible that anyone in the world can walk out at dawn or dusk, you just have to go to the NASA site and see when it's going over your house. But you can go out and watch. It's the third brightest thing in the sky after the sun and the moon, next brightest thing is the International Space Station and you can just watch it go over your head from horizon to horizon, an unmistakable little beacon of how we behave when we do things right. And we need examples like that because we're always going to be messing the other stuff up.

是的。事实上，或许现在比以往任何时候都更重要。如果你看看自1990年代初以来的世界历史，随着苏联解体、铁幕和柏林墙倒塌等等，我们经历了一个奇怪的三十年和*泡沫。这不是我们的正常行为。我们历史上更正常的行为是冲突、恐惧和对财产的嫉妒，这些常常会煽动起人类最恶劣的行为。但即使从九十年代初以来，我们也发生了很多坏事。海湾战争，当然还有目前正在地中海另一端和乌克兰发生的巨大的人类冲突和生命损失。我认为，当冲突发生，那种民族主义情绪和始于九十年代初的乐观国际主义的消退出现时，你会需要更多好的榜样，人们可以仰望的事物。在所有那些事情发生的同时，世界上十五个主要国家在整个时期内找到了一个理由，在国际空间站上每周七天、每天二十四小时进行和*合作。即使在现在，在所有那些姿态和武力威胁进行的同时，美国、俄罗斯和国际空间站的所有其他合作伙伴每天都在共同努力，进行科学研究，试图理解宇宙本身，观测我们的世界，并且共同指挥国际空间站。美国人乘坐俄罗斯的联盟号火箭发射，就像我当年那样；俄罗斯人乘坐美国的龙飞船和猎鹰火箭发射。这种合作是如此明显，以至于世界上任何人都可以在黎明或黄昏走出去——你只需要去NASA网站查查它何时经过你家上空——然后你就能出去观看。它是天空中继太阳和月亮之后第三亮的东西，下一个最亮的就是国际空间站，你可以看着它从地*线的一端飞到另一端，一个明确无误的小灯塔，展示了我们做正确事情时的行为方式。我们需要这样的榜样，因为我们总是会把其他事情搞砸。

There's so many questions from the members about just how you think about the world and humanity after spending some time out there. And Johanna Z is curious, you know, from your perspective when you think about life and sort of meaning and purpose and you touched on this a few minutes ago, but you know, what do you see as the meaning of life is the question.

成员们提出了许多问题，关于您在外太空度过一段时间后，如何看待世界和人类。Johanna Z很好奇，从您的角度来看，当您思考生活以及意义和目的时——您几分钟前提到过一些——但您知道，问题是：您如何看待生命的意义？

It's a big question. It's a very personal question because life means different things to different people and I think it also means, you know, I have a seven-month-old granddaughter. Her answer to the meaning of life would be different than my ten-year-old granddaughter or my forty-year-old daughter or my wife and I at different stages of your life. There are different goals and purposes. I think my generic answer though is: have dreams, have things that are important to you that they don't have to matter to anybody else, but maybe a little internal thought experiment: if my life goes perfectly from here forward, what will happen? Like, and if you don't have an answer to that question, then the odds of your dreams coming true are greatly diminished. But if you've gone through the little self thought experiment, what is it that I actually dream of? I remember when I was ten, but now I'm a busy adult and I don't dream of anything anymore. I think that's a self-destructive way to live. What is it that you're dreaming of? And I don't mean the transient, uncontrollable stuff like win the lottery or whatever. I mean things that you can actually shape through your own choices and then once you've decided these are the actual things that are important to me in life that I really want to have in my life, that make me feel joyful and fulfilled and proud. And then once you have that list, then what are you doing this afternoon or this evening or this weekend in order to change who you are so that you are moving yourself and your life very slightly towards those dreams? And how are you doing that with all the little decisions that you make? Because that's the only thing you control is your little decisions. What am I going to do next? That's the only thing you actually control. What am I going to do next? Everything else, you can't change what you did. The future is just a menu to choose from. What am I going to do next? But if you don't have those personal overarching definitions of perfection, then I don't know how you choose what you're going to do next. Are you just stimulating your nerve endings? That's going to be maybe okay briefly, but it's going to be a fundamentally disappointing... And maybe the final piece of that, Whitney, is don't allow, and this is Chris's philosophy on lifestyle lived, but don't allow those big dreams of your life to define success or failure. Try and lower your margin of victory, your bar of victory, so that you can get over it multiple times a day because nobody else really cares or understands what you're doing. They may try, but that's really up to you. And so don't say well six years from now I'm going to enjoy myself. Instead try and find all the little joyful and beautiful and personal things that are happening in amongst your daily work that you can take pride in, that you can smile at, that you can revel in a little bit, that you can quietly celebrate to yourself as you're herding this big intractable herd of sheep that is your life towards some upper pasture that you're dreaming about. So yeah, have those goals. Make strong daily, hourly, moment by moment decisions to move yourself that way and celebrate yourself as often as you can. To me that is a life well lived.

这是个很大的问题。这是一个非常个人化的问题，因为生活对不同的人意味着不同的事情，而且我认为它还意味着……你知道，我有一个七个月大的孙女。她对生命意义的回答，会与我十岁的孙女、我四十岁的女儿，或者处于人生不同阶段的我和我妻子不同。有不同的目标和目的。但我通用的答案是：要有梦想，要有对你重要的事情，它们不必对别人重要，但或许可以做一个小小的内心思考实验：如果我的生活从这里开始完美地发展下去，会发生什么？如果你对这个问题没有答案，那么你梦想成真的几率就会大大降低。但如果你完成了这个小小的自我思考实验：我真正梦想的是什么？我记得我十岁的时候，但现在我是个忙碌的成年人，我不再梦想任何事了。我认为那是一种自我毁灭的生活方式。你在梦想什么？我指的不是那些短暂的、无法控制的东西，比如中彩票之类的。我指的是你可以通过自己的选择去塑造的事情，然后一旦你决定了这些就是生活中对我真正重要、我真正想拥有的、让我感到快乐、满足和自豪的实际事情。一旦你有了这个清单，那么你今天下午、今晚或这个周末要做什么，来改变你自己，让你自己和你的生活非常缓慢地朝着那些梦想前进？你如何通过你做的所有小决定来实现这一点？因为这是你唯一能控制的东西，就是你的小决定。我接下来要做什么？这是你唯一真正能控制的。我接下来要做什么？其他一切，你无法改变你做过的事。未来只是一个可供选择的菜单。我接下来要做什么？但如果你没有那些个人化的、总体的完美定义，那么我不知道你如何选择下一步要做什么。你只是在刺激你的神经末梢吗？这也许短期内没问题，但从根本上说，这会令人失望……也许最后的建议，惠特尼，是不要允许——这是克里斯关于生活方式的哲学——不要允许你生活中的那些大梦想来定义成功或失败。试着降低你对胜利的预期，降低你胜利的门槛，这样你一天之内可以多次达成它，因为没有人真正在意或理解你在做什么。他们可能会尝试，但这真的取决于你。所以不要说，好吧，六年之后我会享受生活。相反，试着在日常工作中找到所有那些小小的、快乐的、美丽的、个人的事情，你可以为之自豪，可以为之微笑，可以稍微沉醉其中，可以悄悄地为自己庆祝，同时你正将你这群庞大而难以驾驭的“羊群”（也就是你的生活）赶向你梦想中的某个上坡牧场。所以，是的，要有那些目标。每天、每小时、每时每刻都做出坚定的决定，让自己朝着那个方向前进，并尽可能经常地庆祝自己。对我来说，这就是美好的一生。

Well, I'd love to move to some of your writing. And you know, your work as a writer takes readers to space, but this time sort of through historical fiction. And I imagine that fiction presents this opportunity for you to spark curiosity and wonder about the universe in a similar way that you've also been able to do that through spaceflight. So what inspired you to start writing stories about space exploration?

嗯，我想谈谈您的写作。您知道，您作为作家的作品将读者带入太空，但这次是通过历史小说。我想小说为您提供了这个机会，以一种类似于您通过太空飞行所做的方式，来激发对宇宙的好奇心和惊叹。那么，是什么启发您开始创作关于太空探索的故事呢？

Well, I've always loved reading. I love being able to probe deeply into the thoughts of a person that I've never met. You know, it's like a form of shared telepathy. Someone has taken the time to as eloquently as they can to lay their thoughts and emotions down into script so that then I can pick them up whenever is convenient for me and try and tap into that other human being. And I love the power and the insight that I get from reading. I also love to be entertained. I like reading not just like I'm reading Justinian's Flea now, which is a fascinating history of the end of the Roman Empire and one of the big plagues that came through Europe, which is factual. But I'm really looking forward to the new Reacher, you know, Lee Child book because they're so much fun to read. I love being totally engrossed in a thought like that or someone else's book. And so when I set out to write I initially wrote three nonfiction books and they've all done great. They're all bestsellers. But I thought it would be a really fun challenge to try and share the wild difference of spaceflight experience and the life of an astronaut because it's still one of the very rarest of all professions. How to share those ideas as richly and fulsomely and engagingly as I can. You know, I'm a musician, I've written and performed songs about it, I've done a BBC series, National Geographic series, I did a MasterClass, I teach at university. I've done all those things, but writing fiction suddenly you can get into just everybody's spontaneous gut reaction and you can look at the same event from multiple different characters within your story. So then you can really bring it to life for the reader. And I took it as a big challenge, just like learning to be an F-18 pilot or learning to command a spaceship. What is the goal? How do you learn from the experts of how to do this thing and then how do you develop your own skill set so that maybe you can do it to the limits of your own ability? And I'm really proud to say my newest book, Final Orbit, which is the third in my thriller fiction series, it's the number one national bestseller right now, number one of all the books. It's like that sounds crazy, but that's the truth. So it's great that other people are looking forward to the adventure and to the ideas as much as I look forward to writing them.

嗯，我一直热爱阅读。我喜欢能够深入探究一个我从未谋面之人的思想。你知道，这就像一种共享的心灵感应。有人花时间尽可能雄辩地将他们的思想和情感倾注于文字，这样我就可以在方便的时候拾起它们，尝试与那个人建立联系。我喜欢从阅读中获得的力量和洞察力。我也喜欢被娱乐。我喜欢阅读，不仅限于我正在读的《查士丁尼的跳蚤》，这是一本关于罗马帝国灭亡和一场席卷欧洲的大瘟疫的精彩史实著作。但我真的很期待新的杰克·里奇系列，你知道，李·查德的书，因为它们读起来非常有趣。我喜欢完全沉浸在这样的想法或别人的书中。所以当我开始写作时，我最初写了三本非虚构书籍，它们都取得了巨大成功，都是畅销书。但我想尝试分享太空飞行体验和宇航员生活的巨大差异会是一个非常有趣的挑战，因为这仍然是所有职业中最罕见的之一。如何尽可能丰富、充实地分享这些想法并引人入胜。你知道，我是一个音乐家，我为此创作并表演过歌曲，我做过BBC系列节目、国家地理系列节目，我做过大师课，我在大学任教。所有这些事情我都做过，但写小说时，你突然可以触及每个人自发的本能反应，你可以从故事中多个不同角色的视角来看待同一事件。这样你就能真正为读者将其写活。我把它当作一个巨大的挑战，就像学习成为一名F-18飞行员或学习指挥一艘宇宙飞船一样。目标是什么？你如何向做这件事的专家学习，然后如何发展你自己的技能，以便你或许能在自己的能力极限内做到？我很自豪地说，我的新书《最终轨道》——这是我的惊悚小说系列的第三部——现在是全国畅销书第一名，所有书籍中的第一名。这听起来可能很疯狂，但这是事实。所以，其他人像我期待写作它们一样，期待着这次冒险和这些想法，这太好了。

Well, there's a lot of interest in the comments around your writing. And we have a question from Fer A who says if you rewrote an Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth today, is there anything you would change, any new stories you would add?

嗯，评论中对您的写作有很多兴趣。我们有一个来自Fer A的问题，他说如果您今天重写《宇航员的地球生活指南》，您会做出任何改变吗？会添加任何新故事吗？

I think the next book I'm going to write will be a young adult version based on the purposes of An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. I mean, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth is how to lead a better life. I pretend that it was a biography, but if you read it then you'll realize it is exactly what the title says, an astronaut's guide to life on earth. And it's been used by so many surprises. It's been in almost thirty languages. And Sam Houston State used it to formulate the fundamental curriculum for first-year students, compulsory reading. And some of the southern ministers made it the central theme of a whole series of lectures that they gave. But I'm trying to take the purposes of An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth and make it accessible to people who are at a really pivotal stage of life, which is around ten or twelve, baby, where you're becoming aware of the world but you still hardly know anything beyond the little community that you've grown up in and what are some of the big ideas. But I'm just in the writing process right now. I'm deciding what is the most effective way to do that. Do I write it in the style that I did Astronaut's Guide or do I make it like an illustrated young person's version of that or do I challenge myself with the task of trying to write it as an adventure or as, you know, a lucid primer by, like, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry or whatever, an engrossing story that appeals to a human being at that age of development but that also has within it all of the ideas that might help them make better choices in their life. And just a quick aside, I have a ten-year-old granddaughter, she lives in China but every day with a twelve-hour time difference we read Anne of Green Gables together because at ten years old that's such a beautiful book of ideas and behaviors. And so I make time when she's just getting up for school, she gets up early to read with her grandpa, or if my schedule is busy, she'll do it after she's done her homework at night. But how to write useful ideas in the language of a young adolescent? And so to answer the question specifically, yeah, I'm rethinking the ideas that are in An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, to try and frame them as clearly and as usefully as I can for the people that I hope will read it.

我想我接下来要写的书，将会是基于《宇航员的地球生活指南》的宗旨，为青少年改编的版本。我的意思是，《宇航员的地球生活指南》是关于如何过上更好的生活。我假装它是一部传记，但如果你读了，你就会发现它正如标题所说，是一本宇航员的地球生活指南。它的用途带来了很多惊喜。它已被翻译成近三十种语言。萨姆休斯顿州立大学用它来制定一年级学生的基础课程，作为必读书目。一些南部的牧师将它作为他们一系列讲座的核心主题。但我正试图将《宇航员的地球生活指南》的宗旨，传达给那些正处于人生关键阶段的人们，也就是大约十岁或十二岁，孩子，在这个阶段你开始意识到这个世界，但除了你成长的小社区和一些大概念之外，你几乎还一无所知。但我现在还处在写作过程中。我正在决定最有效的方式是什么。是采用我写《宇航员指南》的风格，还是把它做成一个有插图的青少年版本，或者挑战自己，尝试把它写成一个冒险故事，或者像圣埃克苏佩里写的那种清晰易懂的入门书，总之是一个能吸引那个发展阶段的人、引人入胜的故事，同时其中又包含所有可能帮助他们做出更好人生选择的理念。顺便提一下，我有一个十岁的孙女，她住在中国，但每天我们克服十二小时的时差，一起阅读《绿山墙的安妮》，因为在十岁的时候，那本关于思想和行为的书是如此美好。所以我安排时间，在她刚起床准备上学时——她早起和爷爷一起读书——或者如果我的日程很忙，她就在晚上做完功课后读。但是，如何用青少年能理解的语言写出有用的理念？所以具体回答这个问题：是的，我正在重新思考《宇航员的地球生活指南》中的理念，试图尽可能清晰、实用地为那些我希望阅读它的人来阐述它们。

When you look at what's happening right now with space exploration, what makes you feel really hopeful and what gives you pause?

当您观察当前太空探索的现状时，什么让您感到充满希望，什么又让您感到担忧？

Both. I mean everything makes me feel hopeful and gives me pause and that's how life goes, right? And it's hard to keep things together at a personal level, at a family level, at a business level and at a species level. What gives me great optimism is the incredible, relentless, unstoppable human ability to imagine and create new things. You know, we are almost the only species, if not the only one, that could imagine things that don't exist yet. And that's our big lever that's what has given us the great advantage in the animal kingdom, right, is we can picture things that haven't happened yet and take action and build things and do things, anticipating something that's coming and not just reacting to how we feel right now. And you know, leading this big international technology incubator or looking at some of the creativity that's going on around the world, and when you said 8 billion people loose with the activity of their minds, it's just wild, the stuff we can come up with. And so that gives me great optimism. The history of our species gives me great optimism as well, despite the daily ability to snuff ourselves out, to stop all civilization, to do ourselves irreparable harm. We are still here after many hundreds of thousands of years despite our destructive nature. We find a way to muddle through and keep it going and we have rises and falls but we're still here. And so when people say, oh, we're ruining the world and it's never been as hard to be an adult as it is right now and all of that, it's hard, but it's always been hard. You're just demonstrating your ignorance of history when you say stuff like that. I don't think your great grandparents would have said they weren't worried about existentialism, you know, the First World War, Second World War, the gosh, nuclear weapons being invented, the McCarthyism, Vietnam War. And that's just the last hundred years. So I'm quite exc*ted about our ability to invent and create and do things that overall end up being better for the human condition. And we're big enough now in population that we're slowly gaining a better awareness of that impact globally. And what we're going to do about that, you know, if there are only a thousand of us, we wouldn't have to worry. But there's enough of us now that we just need to consider that in how we generate energy and what we do with our garbage and stuff like that. But we're also discovering just so much cool stuff right now. We're discovering all of the small particles, the subatomic particles, things smaller than an atom. And who knows, we may soon discover how to harness gravity. I mean, like we learned how to harness electricity, how to move electrons around. We have a probe going to one of the moons of Jupiter now that has more water. That moon of Jupiter has more water than Earth and it has a heat source at the middle because of gravitational pulls. Maybe there's life there. We're drilling on Mars looking for fossils. We have our James Webb and other telescopes actually analyzing the atmosphere of planets orbiting other stars to try and find out if we're alone in the universe or not. And yeah, there's all the troubles that we go through, but at the same time there's daily magnificence and I know which part I'm more interested in.

两者皆有。我的意思是，一切都让我感到充满希望，也让我停顿思考，生活就是这样，对吧？而且很难在个人层面、家庭层面、商业层面和物种层面把所有事情都维系好。让我非常乐观的是人类那不可思议、不屈不挠、无法阻挡的想象和创造新事物的能力。你知道，我们几乎是唯一（如果不是唯一的话）能够想象尚不存在之物的物种。这是我们的大杠杆，也是我们在动物王国中取得巨大优势的原因，对吧？我们可以描绘尚未发生的事情，并采取行动，建造东西，做事情，预见即将到来的事物，而不仅仅是对我们当前的感受做出反应。你知道，领导这个大型国际技术孵化器，或者观察世界上正在进行的一些创造性活动，当你提到八十亿人自由地运用他们的心智活动时，我们能想出的东西真是太疯狂了。这给了我极大的乐观。我们物种的历史也给了我极大的乐观，尽管我们每天都有能力毁灭自己，停止所有文明，给自己造成不可挽回的伤害。尽管我们有破坏性，但在数十万年之后，我们仍然在这里。我们找到了蹒跚前行、持续发展的方法，我们有兴衰起伏，但我们仍然在这里。所以当人们说，哦，我们正在毁掉世界，现在做成年人从来没有这么难，等等。生活是艰难，但它一直都很艰难。当你说那样的话时，你只是在展示你对历史的无知。我不认为你的曾祖父母会说他们不担心存在主义，你知道，第一次世界大战、第二次世界大战、天哪、核武器的发明、麦卡锡主义、越南战争。而这仅仅是过去一百年。所以，我对我们发明、创造和做那些最终能改善人类境况的事情的能力感到非常*奋。我们现在的人口规模已经足够大，以至于我们正在逐渐对全球影响有更好的认识。我们将对此采取行动。你知道，如果我们只有一千人，我们就不必担心。但现在我们的人数足够多，我们只需要在如何产生能源、如何处理垃圾等方面考虑这一点。但同时，我们现在也发现了许多非常酷的东西。我们正在发现所有的小粒子，亚原子粒子，比原子还小的东西。谁知道呢，我们可能很快就会发现如何驾驭引力。我的意思是，就像我们学会了如何驾驭电力，如何移动电子。我们现在有一个探测器正前往木星的一颗卫星，那里有更多的水。木星的那颗卫星拥有的水比地球还多，而且由于引力作用，它的中心有热源。也许那里有生命。我们正在火星上钻孔寻找化石。我们有詹姆斯·韦伯和其他望远镜，实际上正在分析绕其他恒星运行的行星的大气层，试图找出我们在宇宙中是否孤独。是的，我们经历了所有麻烦，但与此同时，每天都有壮丽的事情发生，而我更感兴趣的是哪一部分。

So we have a couple of questions we're wrapping up here, one that I want to ask you that's come from two different people. So Richard S puts forward, you know, if we as a species can't take better care of what's right in front of us on the planet, why should we be entrusted to manage a less inviting environment? And then which feels like a part two to this, Karina M says how can we cultivate the same level of focus and teamwork here on Earth that astronauts need to survive in space? And I wonder if there's some wisdom that you can bring that to help us.

我们有几个问题要收尾了，其中一个是我想问您的，它来自两个不同的人。Richard S提出：如果我们作为一个物种都不能更好地照顾地球上我们眼前的东西，为什么我们应该被委以管理一个更不适宜的环境的重任？然后感觉像是这个问题的第二部分，Karina M问：我们如何在地球上培养宇航员在太空中生存所需的同等水*的专注力和团队合作？我想知道您是否能带来一些智慧帮助我们。

Move to any wisdom. I had got tapped out long ago, but I'll do my best for Richard and Karina. If we wait until things are perfect, then we will never get anything done. And if we say, well, I've got to get my house 100% in order before I ever do anything else, well then you'll never do anything else because your house will never be 100% in order. We have to accept that imperfection is the norm and we need to be working on the big problems, the ones that are most life-threatening or the ones that are important for quality of life or continuance of existence or whatever. We got to work on those, but if we wait until we get those completely nailed down and perfect, then we will wither and die as a species because we have to be doing the other things as well. Watching my grandchildren is fascinating. What I've realized is evolution gave us the ability to walk way before it gave us the ability to talk and communicate. The necessity to go explore, to touch things, to experience things, to lick everything, to just find out about it. That is so important for human development and human nature that that's how we evolved. And it's only later that someone can explain to you what's happening. And that's going to continue and manifesting itself through all of life and the necessity to go over the next hill and to explore and to try and understand. And the reason I'm the chair of the board of the Open Lunar Foundation is, hey, we're sending people to the Moon in February and that's the precursor to setting up the first permanent settlements on the Moon. How are we gonna do it? Let's not just transplant our current stupid geopolitical mess and just stick it on the Moon. Maybe this is a turning of a pag