Speaker 1: Hello, Hello, Welcome to Smart Talks with IBM, a podcast
Speaker 1: from Pushkin Industries, iHeart Radio and IBM. I'm Malcolm Glabbo.
Speaker 1: This season, we're talking to the new creators, the developers,
Speaker 1: data scientists, CTOs, and other visionaries who are creatively applying
Speaker 1: technology and business to drive change. Channeling their knowledge and expertise,
Speaker 1: they are developing more creative and effective solutions, no matter
Speaker 1: the industry. On the final episode of the season, our
Speaker 1: guest is NASA astronaut and retired Army Colonel Mark Bandahi.
Speaker 1: Mark holds the record for the longest single space flight
Speaker 1: undertaken by an American. He spent three hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: five days in orbit on the International Space Station, returning
Speaker 1: to Earth on March thirtieth, twenty twenty two. During his
Speaker 1: nearly year long stay in space, Mark conducted scientific experiments
Speaker 1: on behalf of NASA, including research where he himself was
Speaker 1: the test subject. By documenting the physiological changes he went through,
Speaker 1: Mark serves as an important source of data in understanding
Speaker 1: the impact of extended space flight on humans. I spoke
Speaker 1: with Mark about his experience as an astronaut and what
Speaker 1: he learned from living in space for a year. He
Speaker 1: told me about performing research only doable in space times
Speaker 1: he felt true fear, and how seeing Earth from orbit
Speaker 1: challenged his personal beliefs and led him to become an
Speaker 1: advocate for mental health and sustainability. Okay, let's get to
Speaker 1: the interview, So tell me a little bit. Did you
Speaker 1: always want to be an astronaut? What drew you to
Speaker 1: space in the first place. I was always curious about space,
Speaker 1: largely because just trying to get my head wrapped around
Speaker 1: how we fit into the very grandest scheme of things
Speaker 1: has always been interesting to me. But I always thought
Speaker 1: of becoming an astronaut like trying to become Spider Man,
Speaker 1: Like that's just not a realistic idea. It might sound cool,
Speaker 1: but that's like a superhero thing. So when I first
Speaker 1: joined the Army, my company commander, my boss, handed me
Speaker 1: a note because he knew I had a degree in
Speaker 1: a technical field. That was a message from the Army
Speaker 1: saying that NASA wanted military people with these qualifications to
Speaker 1: apply to the asternaut program. And I looked at the
Speaker 1: list and I had a bunch of them. That made
Speaker 1: me really excited. I thought, that's like, that's a possibility.
Speaker 1: And then when I went to grad school, had a
Speaker 1: lot of different things to possibly study, and I chose
Speaker 1: space physics, and just randomly, the Army said, hey, we're
Speaker 1: starting a new career field called space operations. I signed
Speaker 1: up and got accepted to go into space operations and
Speaker 1: I ended up getting loaned out to the astronon Office
Speaker 1: at NASA to work in the Mischi Control Center, which, honestly,
Speaker 1: I love that job so much that I could be
Speaker 1: doing that till I was sixty five and never having
Speaker 1: been an astat and felt like I was super blessed.
Speaker 1: It was amazing to live in history and just talking
Speaker 1: to the astronauts in space helping them solve problems while
Speaker 1: I'm listening to what the flight control team is doing.
Speaker 1: That's a fantastic job. I absolutely loved it. During the
Speaker 1: three year period that I expected to do that, they're
Speaker 1: hired another class and that was the first time I
Speaker 1: decided to apply, and largely because my wife said, Mark,
Speaker 1: come on, you gotta try, because I thought there's no
Speaker 1: way they would ever hire me, so I almost self
Speaker 1: selected myself out of that possibility. So really I feel
Speaker 1: very very fortunate. I could have very easily not pursued
Speaker 1: this I'm very happy it worked out, and I'm very
Speaker 1: happy I did pursue it. There's thousands of people that
Speaker 1: could do this job that never got the opportunity and
Speaker 1: may have done a better job than I did. I
Speaker 1: just somehow got the job. Yeah. Yeah, Now you had
Speaker 1: the record for longest time in space, right, it's the
Speaker 1: record for an American astronaut for the longest single flight.
Speaker 1: So Scott Kelly flew for three and forty days continuously,
Speaker 1: and I threw flew for three and fifty five days continuously.
Speaker 1: What is it about you that allows you to do that? Like?
Speaker 1: You know, if you I'm I'm going to say, if
Speaker 1: you put me through the exact same training you went through,
Speaker 1: there's no way I'm spending three hundred fifty five days
Speaker 1: I would I would lose my mind. I think what
Speaker 1: I'm going to do is compare myself between the first
Speaker 1: flight and the second flight. After I came back from
Speaker 1: the first flight, I had no desire to go back.
Speaker 1: The big change for me between the first and second
Speaker 1: flight is I paid a lot more attention to my
Speaker 1: mental health. I got in the habit of meditating every day,
Speaker 1: and I think that helped me not only recognize the
Speaker 1: value of trying to appreciate the present moment and try
Speaker 1: to be curious about the present moment. But it also
Speaker 1: made me more aware of what internal habit patterns I have,
Speaker 1: and it gave me the ability to kind of almost
Speaker 1: be an external observer of those, so that when I
Speaker 1: could recognize sometimes that hey, you're making up a very
Speaker 1: negative story and that's why you're grumpy right now, and
Speaker 1: that really helped me out with making a mental shift.
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit about what you're doing when
Speaker 1: you're up there. Why is it important to do various
Speaker 1: kinds of experiments and things in space? Yeah, great question.
Speaker 1: That's a really important question too. So it is a
Speaker 1: national laboratory, and it's unique because a lot of dominant
Speaker 1: forces on the ground are not dominant forces in space,
Speaker 1: So you get pretty interesting effects, like when you make
Speaker 1: a flame on the Earth, because of the pressure differentials
Speaker 1: and the fact that the hot combustion products are lighter,
Speaker 1: they will rise up and go away from the flame,
Speaker 1: and that will draw in the auction rich gases that
Speaker 1: keep the flame going. So in space, those combustion gases
Speaker 1: will just make a ball around the source of the fire.
Speaker 1: Turns out that flames in space burn more efficiently and
Speaker 1: at a lower temperature, So there's some potential to have
Speaker 1: a cleaner burning combustion engine. But that just gives us
Speaker 1: a more depth of understanding of how these things work.
Speaker 1: It just gives us another way to change some of
Speaker 1: the variables. Another thing that we can do on the
Speaker 1: space station is sedimentation. If you take a solution over
Speaker 1: time on the Earth with the heavier items, and that
Speaker 1: solution are going to settle to the bottom, well, in space,
Speaker 1: there's no preferred direction for those things to go in
Speaker 1: because everything isn't. This what I like to call a
Speaker 1: free fall that just keeps missing the Earth. So we're
Speaker 1: in a continuous state of freefall. Solutions stay very homogeneous.
Speaker 1: You can do experiments like there's even the way we
Speaker 1: try to simulate the human body with body samples and
Speaker 1: try to understand how things work. In the space station
Speaker 1: where those things float, it's a closer simulation to something
Speaker 1: being inside the human body. So there's I could go
Speaker 1: on and on. Clearly, there's a whole lot of different
Speaker 1: things that that allows us to do. And delicate structures,
Speaker 1: even protein structures that we could never make stay together
Speaker 1: on the ground together in space. Oh, that's interesting. So
Speaker 1: it just gives you a it's like another context for
Speaker 1: trying to advance scientific knowledge. It just you've you've changed
Speaker 1: all of kind of the defining variables of the experiment. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: that's it's a very significant thing. Absolutely. And then there's
Speaker 1: also that the idea of what we're doing in the
Speaker 1: space station, not just for science, but for human exploration.
Speaker 1: Because we're putting people in space for such a long
Speaker 1: period of time, we're getting a better understanding of how
Speaker 1: to keep people healthy. We can do technology experiments to
Speaker 1: try to figure out how to get things to work
Speaker 1: for these long er ation and space flights where we're
Speaker 1: going to put people much further away from the Earth
Speaker 1: than I was on my flight. Some of those experiments
Speaker 1: as we're associated with me being a subject of the experiments. Yes,
Speaker 1: give me an example of a kind of healthcare related
Speaker 1: line of research. Sure, I'm very open about the fact
Speaker 1: that I lost eight percent of my bone density. That's
Speaker 1: not typical for somebody at my age and my activity level,
Speaker 1: But as a function of being in space, I lost
Speaker 1: eight percent of my bone density because no more you know,
Speaker 1: you're not exercising with any resistance at all is that
Speaker 1: is that the reason almost true you spend all of
Speaker 1: your time except for when you're exercising, without really needing
Speaker 1: a skeleton to support you, because that's why we have
Speaker 1: a skeleton. When you're in a freefall all the time,
Speaker 1: there's nothing that you have to use to resist the
Speaker 1: ground or to keep you standing on the ground. So
Speaker 1: we have a resistive exercise device on the space station
Speaker 1: that actually it's very interesting. It uses vacuum cylinders as
Speaker 1: the source of the force. So when you expand the
Speaker 1: vacuum cylinder, unlike a spring, the vacuum cylinder the force
Speaker 1: will be constant regardless of how far you pull it,
Speaker 1: whereas with a spring, the more you expand the spring,
Speaker 1: the higher the force gets. So that allows us to
Speaker 1: have kind of what we want. But I like to
Speaker 1: tell school kids, if you imagine those vacuum cylinders being
Speaker 1: attached to one side of a seesaw pulling upwards and
Speaker 1: you on the other side of the seesaw pulling upwards,
Speaker 1: then you can change the mechanic claveyanage by moving where
Speaker 1: the pivot point is, where the folk firm is, and
Speaker 1: so we have the ability to turn a crank and
Speaker 1: it can adjust the force you feel anywhere from twenty
Speaker 1: pounds to six hundred pounds. But even so, I'm stunned
Speaker 1: though by in a space of a year, even given
Speaker 1: determined efforts on your part to counteract the effects of
Speaker 1: the physiological effects of being in a zero gravity atmosphere,
Speaker 1: even then, the effect on your body was profound. A lot.
Speaker 1: It's a lot. But I lost seven percent on the
Speaker 1: first flight, and I got it all back before the
Speaker 1: second flight, So I fully expect to get it all back.
Speaker 1: It does come back, and with a if somebody, ever,
Speaker 1: some archaeologists someday ever examined my bones, they would be
Speaker 1: able to tell that I had flung in space, because
Speaker 1: the way that matrix is built is somewhat different. But
Speaker 1: I fully expect all all the bone density to come back. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, this series we're doing is it's called The
Speaker 1: New Creators, and we're really focused on the role the
Speaker 1: creativity plays in kind of put the envelopes of knowledge.
Speaker 1: So I'm just I'm just curious about you up there
Speaker 1: in this strange environment doing what's sounding some pretty sophisticated experiments.
Speaker 1: Can you give me an example over the time when
Speaker 1: you felt your kind of your creativity was being tapped
Speaker 1: in a meaningful way in this experience. Yeah. Interesting, I
Speaker 1: would say. There is an experiment called celestial Immunity that
Speaker 1: involved us with small Petrie dishes that contained body samples.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it was a solution with some
Speaker 1: blood or or what, but I just know they were
Speaker 1: from various people, elderly and young people, and we would
Speaker 1: go through and use a pipette to inoculate them with
Speaker 1: various things, and then we would take these devices, put
Speaker 1: them in a black box to control the carbon dioxide
Speaker 1: and the temper, and put them in a place to
Speaker 1: let them kind of incubate for a while. In the
Speaker 1: process of doing it, I think my creativity came in
Speaker 1: as I was describing the challenges that I realized that
Speaker 1: the people who designed the experiment might not have realized
Speaker 1: we run into. And I was able to use what
Speaker 1: I've had my hands on to give them advice about
Speaker 1: ways we could change the experiment around. Because those petu
Speaker 1: dishes didn't have a lid, so they were just held
Speaker 1: in there by surface tension, and so the first time
Speaker 1: I did it, I put them very slowly into the box.
Speaker 1: I closed the box couldn't see what they were doing,
Speaker 1: and I had to very gently move them over to
Speaker 1: the place where they get incubate, and I had no
Speaker 1: idea if I was succeeding or failing. Yeah. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: I think there was a lot of conversation, a lot
Speaker 1: of observing, a lot of trying to draw on the
Speaker 1: unique experiences I'm exposed to to help out them. And
Speaker 1: it turned out I was an orbit long enough that
Speaker 1: the second iteration that came up, and they had, among
Speaker 1: other things, that had put a thinge sheet of flexible
Speaker 1: plastic on top. So instead of having to try to
Speaker 1: contain everything there, we just had to puncture it with
Speaker 1: a needle and add the add the inoculation that way instead,
Speaker 1: tell me a little bit bit more about that experiment.
Speaker 1: That's that celestial immunity investigation. By way, that's like the
Speaker 1: best name ever for a science Experimentum. I agree, it
Speaker 1: sounds like Jesus is involved in some ways. I agree,
Speaker 1: can do no wrong. But what was that experiment about
Speaker 1: trying to try to trying to investigate We're trying to
Speaker 1: understand how the human immune system reacts to different situations.
Speaker 1: So again, I think it's a great experiment to highlight
Speaker 1: because a better understanding of the human immune system will
Speaker 1: help out everybody. So on Earth, we might do an
Speaker 1: experiment where we have a variety of different cell samples
Speaker 1: that we're exposing to various pathogens and studying them and hear,
Speaker 1: what we're doing is repeating the experiment under a radically
Speaker 1: different set of conditions and in the hopes that changing
Speaker 1: the parameters of the experiment exposed some bit of knowledge
Speaker 1: or yes, And I don't know if that's been successful
Speaker 1: or not, but we do know. We do know that
Speaker 1: there are viruses that are more virulent in space for
Speaker 1: some reason. We don't understand why their biological things react differently.
Speaker 1: What was the most fun thing you did when you
Speaker 1: were up there? One of my crewmates, Caleb Baron, for
Speaker 1: some reason that two of us decided we're going to
Speaker 1: try to do some stunts together. So we literally would
Speaker 1: just have our feet hooked underneath some handrails and push
Speaker 1: off towards each other and then do something like get
Speaker 1: curl up, hit our hands down low. It causes to
Speaker 1: each spin simultaneously enops directions to a couple backflips, and
Speaker 1: then land. And it took a lot of attempts before
Speaker 1: we actually made it look like something was in sync.
Speaker 1: I've never once done a backflip in my life, but
Speaker 1: I've done four in a row before I hit my
Speaker 1: head on something on the space station. Yeah. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: grew hatch chili peppers. I recently got a certificate from
Speaker 1: New Mexico that said, congratulations, you're a atstronaut. So I'm
Speaker 1: proud to have that title them. We didn't cook with them.
Speaker 1: We of course, it was science, so we had to
Speaker 1: ship most of them back to the ground frozen carefully.
Speaker 1: But they were very nice about letting us have some
Speaker 1: of the chili peppers, and they warned us that the
Speaker 1: stress response to the space environment that these peppers have,
Speaker 1: they think would be that they're more potent. And I
Speaker 1: think they were more potent. They were shockingly spicy. Yessa
Speaker 1: could sell those chili peppers to some fancy restaurant and
Speaker 1: it could be you know, celestial you know, celestial pepper
Speaker 1: soup or something. You know, what a great name for
Speaker 1: a dish. I'm sure that celestial foods will be the
Speaker 1: culinary trend of the future. Pretty soon, we'll all be
Speaker 1: paying extra for specially vegetables grown in space Forget farm
Speaker 1: to table, try orbit to table. All kidding aside, there
Speaker 1: was one thing I made sure to ask Mark. I
Speaker 1: wanted to know more about the relationship between the astronauts
Speaker 1: and space and the NASA team on the ground. New
Speaker 1: technologies are reshaping the way astronauts communicate with their counterparts
Speaker 1: on Earth. IBM, for example, is testing edge computing solutions
Speaker 1: on board the space station to try and reduce the
Speaker 1: time it takes to analyze and send data. But what
Speaker 1: does this information flow mean for an astronaut's day to
Speaker 1: day life and what happens if there's an emergency? I
Speaker 1: asked Mark for more details. Tell me a little bit
Speaker 1: about the role that technology plays in and all of this.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're doing these experiments, You're actively learning in
Speaker 1: this new environment. What's happening with the data? How are
Speaker 1: you making sense of it? Processing it? Tell me about
Speaker 1: that angle on your work. The astronauts live in the
Speaker 1: space station. The ground control team is controlling the space station,
Speaker 1: so that data flow, the telemetry from the space station,
Speaker 1: and the commanding to the space station is happening just
Speaker 1: to actually get the thing to work, to get the
Speaker 1: lab to work, to make it if we want to
Speaker 1: change the temperature, we could We could go ahead and
Speaker 1: go deep into the software we got on board that
Speaker 1: we're trained to use in case we lose communications with
Speaker 1: the ground. But if we even want to change the temperature,
Speaker 1: we just call the ground control team and say, hey,
Speaker 1: one of our crew members feels a little cold. We
Speaker 1: all agreed we should raise the temperature by a degree
Speaker 1: or something. They would change it. So they're in charge.
Speaker 1: We live there, and we take care of everything that
Speaker 1: we possibly can. So data transfer is crucial to the
Speaker 1: way we operate the space station today. In your time
Speaker 1: up there, did you have any kind of moments of crisis?
Speaker 1: Did you ever lose communication with Houston? Two times we
Speaker 1: lost out of control. I think we got to the
Speaker 1: point where they told us to start executing the procedure
Speaker 1: and then we're able to call us off. They warned
Speaker 1: us that it's possible you could lose you know, maybe
Speaker 1: ten minutes from now, there's a risk of you losing
Speaker 1: communications for example. That's scary. What never felt scary to me,
Speaker 1: and I don't. I think the reason it didn't feel
Speaker 1: scary is because when we do that on the ground
Speaker 1: for training, when we do it in a simulation. The
Speaker 1: simulation is much harder because in space the ground was
Speaker 1: trying to help as much as possible. But on the
Speaker 1: ground they give you a scenario where you call the ground,
Speaker 1: you get no response. Everything is as bad as possible.
Speaker 1: So it was to me it felt just like a simulation,
Speaker 1: but where the trainers were willing to give us more
Speaker 1: help than they were willing to give us on the ground.
Speaker 1: So and the culture that I got trained in and
Speaker 1: that's worked for me really, really well, is one that says,
Speaker 1: slow way down. If you're on an emergency on the
Speaker 1: space station, unless it's an ammonia leak. In all other cases,
Speaker 1: slow way down because the worst thing you can do
Speaker 1: is go so fast that you make a mistake and
Speaker 1: cause problems. But otherwise a very safe system. When I
Speaker 1: was leading newer crew members, I tried to encourage them
Speaker 1: to have a culture where if they had any confusion,
Speaker 1: that they would feel comfortable stopping everybody to say, Hey,
Speaker 1: why are we going down this path that doesn't make
Speaker 1: sense to me, because that could be the one question
Speaker 1: that gets us to stay on the correct path. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you said you didn't get scared in that moment. Do
Speaker 1: you ever get scared, Mark, Oh yeah, I definitely get scared.
Speaker 1: I don't believe you. To give you an example, my
Speaker 1: experience of returning to Earth is everything's really interesting while
Speaker 1: you're going through the atmosphere and you're in a ball
Speaker 1: of flame and the heat shields melting away again, see
Speaker 1: things that are melting away going past the window. That's interesting.
Speaker 1: But then when there's nothing to pay attention to while
Speaker 1: you're falling towards the Earth, and this time you know
Speaker 1: you're in a trajectory that will result in you hitting
Speaker 1: the Earth with nothing to do except wait for the
Speaker 1: parachute to open for what I think was probably a
Speaker 1: couple of very long minutes, and nobody was having a conversation.
Speaker 1: We're just all quietly waiting to find out if we're
Speaker 1: going to live and we're gonna die. I didn't realize
Speaker 1: how afraid I was that it wasn't going to work
Speaker 1: until the parachute actually opened, and how giddily overjoyed I
Speaker 1: felt when when it actually opened, because I was just like,
Speaker 1: we're gonna live. So yeah, I was scared, And again
Speaker 1: I didn't realize it until after the fact. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's talk. You mentioned at the beginning your sort of
Speaker 1: interest in mental health. Let's talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 1: You know, you went through an experience which is exceedingly
Speaker 1: difficult and unusual and surely must have taught you a
Speaker 1: great deal about the kind of the challenges of maintaining
Speaker 1: one's mental health. Yeah, it was a good experience, but
Speaker 1: certainly those life skills doesn't matter if you're in space
Speaker 1: or not. I tend to get distracted easily, and so
Speaker 1: practicing trying to stay focused on one thing and paying
Speaker 1: attention and trying to maintain a sense of curiosity about
Speaker 1: something as simple as breathing is I think a really
Speaker 1: good practice to try to to expand your ability to
Speaker 1: stay focused and and actually even find joy and relaxation
Speaker 1: in it. It's it's very reassuring if you can get
Speaker 1: yourself to feel really relaxed no matter what's going on,
Speaker 1: that it's it's it's like you've got this island of
Speaker 1: comfort that you know is just internal to you. So
Speaker 1: I thought that was very powerful. It's not something that
Speaker 1: I had as a skill before my fifties at all,
Speaker 1: And I think meditation has certainly helped the awareness of
Speaker 1: the negative impact that the narratives that I would use
Speaker 1: to fill in the gaps, and information I had was
Speaker 1: really powerful for me. And I'll give you an example
Speaker 1: that's associated with space flight. We have a module on
Speaker 1: the space station that's called the PMM. It like the
Speaker 1: attic of the space station. If you have a task
Speaker 1: that takes forty that they've given you forty minutes, ado
Speaker 1: part of every activity is typically gathered the materials you
Speaker 1: need and a lot of time. That means you go
Speaker 1: into the PMM. And it's not unusual to see somebody's
Speaker 1: just ankles and feet sticking out between bags as they're
Speaker 1: digging with a flash head lamp on trying to get
Speaker 1: deep into the into the depths of these bags that
Speaker 1: are bungee corded in place. And it can be very
Speaker 1: chaotic when you have to get multiple items, and if
Speaker 1: you just loosely put it underneath the bungee cord and
Speaker 1: then bump the bungee cord, it can disappear very easily,
Speaker 1: so it can be very frustrating. So there was an
Speaker 1: instance I remember really well where I was. I had
Speaker 1: already spent twenty minutes trying to find stuff and still
Speaker 1: hadn't found the first thing, and I was getting mad,
Speaker 1: and I realized that the reason I was getting grumpy
Speaker 1: was the narrative I had was the ground's going to
Speaker 1: start thinking of Vanda High is one of the slow
Speaker 1: guys on the space station. He always takes longer to
Speaker 1: do other stuff. But then I realized that I didn't
Speaker 1: know that that was just some detail that I was adding.
Speaker 1: And then I thought to myself, wait a minute. For
Speaker 1: all I know, the ground feels bad that they didn't
Speaker 1: give me enough time to do this, So what do
Speaker 1: I really All I really knew as fact was that
Speaker 1: I was on the space station. My job was to
Speaker 1: find stuff space hardware in these bags that are all
Speaker 1: bungee corded and floating around, and honestly, that was kind
Speaker 1: of cool. And I had really if it took me
Speaker 1: longer than they expected, then that was just a fact.
Speaker 1: It took longer than I expected. They didn't have to
Speaker 1: be a positive or negative emotion associated that. It was
Speaker 1: just a fact. So instead of as many times before
Speaker 1: I've come out of there feeling angry at the world,
Speaker 1: at the situation, just beating myself about not being good
Speaker 1: enough for my job, I came out being like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, this is kind of cool. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: just such a huge shift, and I think over time
Speaker 1: you perform better too when you give yourself a break
Speaker 1: like that. So I think there's this aspect also about
Speaker 1: being more accepting of yourself, being more curious about it.
Speaker 1: There's just so many things that I think have helped
Speaker 1: make my life easier. And again, by no means am
Speaker 1: I perfect. This is a continuing process that I'm still
Speaker 1: working on and struggling with. But it helped you to
Speaker 1: keep your kind of perfectionistic and self judgmental side in check. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: is that the most significant change that you undergoing. No, Honestly,
Speaker 1: the most significant change for me was, well, the first
Speaker 1: big thing was when I first got to the space station.
Speaker 1: It was after a very long day and I had
Speaker 1: the next twenty four hours off to recover from that.
Speaker 1: I spent the first ninety minutes the first one time
Speaker 1: around the planet looking out the window in awe, and
Speaker 1: the first thing that struck me was how isolated the
Speaker 1: Earth looked. When you are looking at the Earth and
Speaker 1: in the sun and your eyes are adjusted to the sun,
Speaker 1: it makes the backdrop to the Earth space looking key black,
Speaker 1: like the definition of lack of light like it's liquid.
Speaker 1: So that was shocking to me. What do you say shocking?
Speaker 1: It was shocking because it I don't think it was
Speaker 1: like I had never seen something that black. It was
Speaker 1: just like, again, if you can imagine taking a ball
Speaker 1: and dropping it in a in a pool of black ink,
Speaker 1: That's that's what it looked like. And I knew it
Speaker 1: was I knew it was emptiness, but it was. It
Speaker 1: just there was an emotional impact in that, and I think,
Speaker 1: I think there's been people that I've been it's it
Speaker 1: can be hard to grapple with the sense of the
Speaker 1: Earth being isolated. Later on in the flight, as I
Speaker 1: was getting ready to come home again this is my
Speaker 1: first flight, I felt like I should be going back
Speaker 1: to the Earth with some unique perspective and some type
Speaker 1: of change to me, And I thought, am I blowing this? Am?
Speaker 1: I like, I don't know what that is. I had
Speaker 1: this incredible sense of smallness. And I say that because
Speaker 1: another thing that struck me looking at the Earth was
Speaker 1: when you look towards the horizon, the atmosphere looks like
Speaker 1: a varnish on a rock. It's like a puddle in
Speaker 1: a parking lot. It just looks super thin. So recognizing
Speaker 1: that first of all, and then recognizing that on that
Speaker 1: same horizon, none of the mountains show up. They're too small.
Speaker 1: So these things that we perceive as huge relative to
Speaker 1: the size of the Earth are unobservable lot on the horizon.
Speaker 1: But then when you think about the largest structure that
Speaker 1: humans have ever built, and how that compares to the
Speaker 1: largest mountains, and then how big we are compared to
Speaker 1: those structures, I just I felt like any sense of
Speaker 1: self importance I had was stripped away. So I was
Speaker 1: really struggling with is that what I'm going to come
Speaker 1: home with? This idea that there's this meaninglessness to it
Speaker 1: like that was really troubling to me, and also had
Speaker 1: a lot of time to think about my mortality because I,
Speaker 1: you know what, I might not survive this, So it's
Speaker 1: a for me at least. I don't tell that everybody
Speaker 1: has had this experience, but for me, it was a
Speaker 1: very thoughtful time. Yeah, I realized that you had. I
Speaker 1: was struggling with the scale of things when really part
Speaker 1: of my role is to be attentive to the scale.
Speaker 1: I choose if I'm studying a plant for my whole career,
Speaker 1: or maybe I'm sitting around the dinner table and being
Speaker 1: attentive to the scale right there, which is just my
Speaker 1: loved ones around the table, or maybe you're studying the
Speaker 1: structure universe, just being attentive to that scale, the scale
Speaker 1: you choose and we have the flexibility to pick it
Speaker 1: and they're all okay. But just kind of accepting that
Speaker 1: I thought was was a big leap for me. So,
Speaker 1: mental health advocacy is something that you've become quite interested in.
Speaker 1: The Sustainability has also been an idea. That is that
Speaker 1: something that also grew out of your those sort of
Speaker 1: observations when when you were in space that interesting sustainability. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do think that I did spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time on the space station thinking about, well, this is
Speaker 1: probably my last time in space. What am I gonna
Speaker 1: do after I work at NASA? What is my purpose here?
Speaker 1: And I love being outside. That's why I joined the
Speaker 1: Army as opposed to the Air Force. I just the
Speaker 1: idea of being outside and being comfortable in challenging in
Speaker 1: environments is something that's always been appealing to me. And
Speaker 1: I also feel like with devices that we all carry
Speaker 1: around that are engineered to distract us, I think it's
Speaker 1: very easy for us to stop being attentive to the
Speaker 1: environment that we actually live in. I do think we've
Speaker 1: got challenges ahead of us. The climate change is atmospheric change. Again,
Speaker 1: I've already mentioned my perception of the atmosphere is that
Speaker 1: very thin resource, and I really want to get that
Speaker 1: message across to people, because it's easy to think of
Speaker 1: the earth as so big that how could we possibly
Speaker 1: packed it? But really it's not the whole earth we're
Speaker 1: worried about. It is just this thin layer we live in.
Speaker 1: That idea, as well as concern that we're getting so
Speaker 1: sucked into screens that I would love to get involved
Speaker 1: in helping younger people appreciate that there's other alternatives, that
Speaker 1: there's an outdoor world that's super interesting, and I don't
Speaker 1: think a lot of young people are getting the opportunity
Speaker 1: to compare one way of living to the other like
Speaker 1: we have. Well, we grew up without those things. We
Speaker 1: know what it was like and how much fun it
Speaker 1: could be without having a cell phone in your pocket
Speaker 1: all the time, and a lot of people are growing
Speaker 1: up without that. So I'd love to get involved with
Speaker 1: getting people to experience that. Yeah, yeah, well wonderful. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Some of this has been really fascinating. Thank you, Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for taking the time to chat with me, Malcolm.
Speaker 1: It really really was a pleasure. I feel blessed I
Speaker 1: got to talk to you. It was really a wonderful
Speaker 1: opportunity for me as well. When Mark was looking at
Speaker 1: Earth from orbit and grappling with how insignificant we all seemed,
Speaker 1: he said he felt troubled by the possible meaninglessness of
Speaker 1: it all, But then he realized it's up to human
Speaker 1: beings to choose the scale we pay attention to. We
Speaker 1: decide what's worthy of our attention and what's meaningful. That
Speaker 1: might be something as expansive as studying the cosmos, or
Speaker 1: as immediate as having dinner with our loved ones, or
Speaker 1: as minute as the well being of a single hatch
Speaker 1: chilly pepper plant. This piece of wisdom from Mark is
Speaker 1: a great place for us to end this season. Pay
Speaker 1: attention to the scale you choose, because creativity begins when
Speaker 1: we give attention to something previously unnoticed, a minor detail overlooked,
Speaker 1: a bigger picture still unseen. As we strive to be
Speaker 1: new creators in our work and in our lives, let's
Speaker 1: remember that new insights can be found wherever we choose
Speaker 1: to look, as long as we're attentive enough to see it.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to Smart Talks with IBM. This is
Speaker 1: our season finale, but stay tuned for more smart Talks
Speaker 1: coming soon. Smart Talks with IBM is produced by Matt Romano,
Speaker 1: David jaw, Royston Breserve, and Edith Rousselo with Jacob Goldstein.
Speaker 1: We're edited by Sophie Crane. Our engineers are Jason Gambrel,
Speaker 1: Sarah Brigar, and Ben Holliday. Theme song by Gramoscope. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Carl Migliori, Andy Kelly, Kathy Callahan and the
Speaker 1: eight Bar and IBM teams, as well as the Pushkin
Speaker 1: marketing team. Smart Talks with IBM is a production of
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen
Speaker 1: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to podcasts. I'm Malcolm Glamo is a paid advertisement from IBM.