You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hu.
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.
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?
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 mining, domesticating horses and allowed ourselves to travel quickly.
Or when the first train was invented, you know, late 1700s, early 1800s.
And then the airplane and the car.
All of those things changed not only how we could move around, but then where we could go to.
And spaceflight has been around now for 60 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.
And 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?
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 um, and i think the evolution uh makes complete sense where initially it was just barely possible and we, we took an enormous risk to try and 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 uh, just trying to push the 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 13 and all those near misses, to the shuttle program, which we regularize it a lot.
But it's still we had two tragic, completely fatal accidents during shuttle.
And 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 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 it under that the centenary or something.
Someone who has, I don't know, one 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.
Wow.
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.
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 they, I mean, it was crazy.
There were no regulations.
Instrument flying didn't exist yet.
Where do you get fuel?
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.
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 space flight right now.
I, I helped 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 uh, 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.
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 global tensions and geopolitical tensions, and space is always in a lot of ways, reflected the politics of the time.
And so I wonder if, 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?
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, you know, 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 effects.
Consequences like almost the whole world could see aurora because of the big disruption of the magnetic field.
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 integrate it 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.
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 I think to sort of piggyback on what you're saying.
Do you see this?
I guess this sort of blurring 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 Kat 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?
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, GHG 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 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, multi-billion dollar industry that there's lots of different areas in it that you can choose to support by investing in certain companies.
I'd love to build on that a little bit.
You know when you think about the technology and you know what's advancing in all spaces.
But in space you know we have 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'm a semi-autonomous rover myself.
Yeah.
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?
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 uh, you know 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're really 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.
But the real problem change will be when we have a hundred percent reusable rocket.
So you don't throw away any of your um construction and and in 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 uh, 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 11th test flight, they had remarkable success.
Both pieces safely made it back.
They're pushing the edges of the uh economical savings in 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.
Well, 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 space-faring species.
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?
Well, civilizations rise and fall uh, all the time, as some of them last a long time.
You know the roman empire.
Uh, if you look at china, they've been an anomaly in human history.
Although they've had, you know, 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.
Uh, 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 you know, Egypt had that zenith of civilization and then, 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 um, 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, our bad chimpanzee natures and to actually um, make the most of 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, 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 1,000 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, 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 changed 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.
But 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 common everyday society.
It makes me an eternal optimist because our species has been here forever. 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.
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, um and how, in a lot of ways, space exploration has served as somewhat of like a human, uh project that transcends, you know borders, uh transcends any, any sort of thing that might divide us um, do you think that there's an opportunity for it to still bring people together um, in that same way in this moment as in the past?
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 30 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 90s 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 90s.
I think when that happens, you want more good examples, things that people can look up to.
So, while all that stuff has been going on, 15 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 cooperating, 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.
Russians launch on the American Dragon and Falcon rockets.
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, and we need examples like that because we're always going to be messing the other stuff up.
There's so many questions uh, from the members about um, just how how you think about the world, um and humanity after spending some some time out there.
Um, And Johanna Z is curious from your perspective when you think about life and sort of meaning and purpose and you touched on this a few minutes ago but what do you see as the meaning of life?
Is the question.
Yeah, 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 I have a seven-month-old granddaughter.
Her answer to the meaning of life would be different than my 10 year old granddaughter, or my 40 year old daughter, or or my wife and I at different stages of your life.
There are different goals and purposes.
I think my generic answer though is, um, Have dreams.
Have things that are important to you.
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?
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 10, 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, you know, 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 now? with all the little decisions that you make.
Because that's the only thing you control is your little decisions.
What am I gonna do next?
That's the only thing you actually control.
What am I gonna do next?
Everything else, you can't change what you did.
The future is just a menu to choose from.
What am I gonna 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 OK briefly, but it's going to be fundamentally disappointing.
And, and maybe the final piece of that Whitney is, is don't allow and this is chris's philosophy on on life, well lived, but don't allow those big dreams of your life to define success or failure.
Um, try and 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 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.
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.
I love that.
Well, I'd love to move to some of your writing, and your work, specifically 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 the similar way that you've also been able to do that through space flight.
So what inspired you to start writing stories about space exploration?
Well, I've always loved reading.
I love being able to probe deeply into the thoughts of a person that I've never met.
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 it's 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, you know, bestsellers.
But I
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 creatively and engagingly as I can.
I'm a musician.
I've written and performed songs about it.
I've done a BBC series, a National Geographic series.
I did a master class.
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 limit 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.
Well, there's a lot of interest in the comments around your writing.
And we have a question from Fensiri 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?
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 pretended 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 30 languages.
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 10 or 12 maybe, where you're becoming aware of the world but you still hardly know anything beyond the little details, community that you've grown up in and what are some of the big ideas.
But i'm i'm just in the writing process right now.
I've decided what is the most effective way to do that.
Do i write it in the 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 an, you know uh, le petit prince by saint antoine or 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 10 year old granddaughter.
She lives in china But every day, with a 12-hour time difference, we read Anne of Green Gables together.
Because at 10 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 is, 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.
When you look at what's happening right now with space exploration, what makes you feel really hopeful and what gives you pause?
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.
Right.
What gives me great optimism is the incredible relentless, unstoppable human ability to imagine and create new things.
We are almost the only species, if not the only one, that can imagine things that don't exist yet.
And and we we 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 83 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 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 and keep, and keep it going.
And we have rises and falls, but we're, we're still here.
And and and.
So when people say oh, we're ruining the world, and it's never been as hard to be an adult as it or a human 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.
That's just the last hundred years.
So...
So I'm quite excited 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 were 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 and 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 mean like we learned how to harness electricity, how to move electrons around.
Um, we have a probe going to one of the moons of jupiter.
Now that is has more water.
That moon of jupiter has more water than earth and it has a heat source at the middle because of gravitational pulse.
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.
We have, you know, a couple of questions.
We're wrapping up here uh, one that i want to ask you.
That's come from two different people.
Um, 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?
Um, 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 is some wisdom that you can bring that to help us 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 percent 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 recognize that imperfection is the norm um, and we need to be working on the big problems the, the ones that are most um life-threatening, or 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 automatically, 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 we're, 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 going to 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 page where we can do better.
And i'm not going to say we can't go to the moon until we get earth perfect.
What i'm doing instead is saying we're inevitably, because of human nature, going to be setting up settlement on the moon.
So let's use every influence possible and every lesson that i can have learned possible to try and do it as well as we can at this particular time in history, and to me that's that's the most important stuff I'm doing in my life influencing other minds, pushing the edges of technology and trying to give us the greatest chance of doing the right thing in the days to come.
Well Chris, you've given us so much to think about here, about your own experiences, a new lens through which to look at our planet and the universe honestly.
And so this has been wonderful.
I know that I speak for all the members in saying that this has been such an enlightening conversation.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Whitney, thank you for taking the time and being so deft and skilled at juggling all the questions and prodding me to continue to talk so long.
It's been a joy talking to you.
And I hope everybody enjoys the ideas, maybe the books, all the various things.
You get one life.
I lost both my parents in the last four months and that what I took away was they lived good, long lives.
And you need to live and love every day.
It's amazing what can happen.
I love that.
Thank you.
Thank you, Chris.
Thank you.
That was Chris Hadfield in conversation with Whitney Pennington-Rogers for a TED membership event in 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Christopher Fasey-Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
