The Right Stuff 41:08

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Hello, I'm Lily Miller. Today, we are going back into the past with a freaking awesome rerun that'll take us all into the future. Hope you enjoy. Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Rewind.

Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. And today we're going to start. All right, here we go. With reporter Andrew Leland. I'm just going to hold my mic like I'm doing a karaoke. Where are you on planet Earth? Where are you doing karaoke from? I'm in Long Beach, California. All right, so now I'm just going to wander around talking to people, gathering it all. At a place called the FBO.

which is like a tiny private airport, just one building sitting on a giant tarmac. And so I walk into the building through these sliding glass doors and it's this big bright room with a fish tank in it and these fancy chairs and it's full. Hi guys. Hi.

of people. There is a film crew. There's some family members. And the whole place is just sort of a buzz. Because today is, after months of preparation, flight day.

It's this training flight for potential astronauts to experience near-zero gravity. And so scattered about the room are these people wearing these jumpsuits, these flight suits. How you feeling? Good. Got your ticket? Got my boarding pass. Got your flight suit. You're ready to rock. Yeah, I'm rock and roll. Some of them look nervous. Some of them...

are at a little table. And these people are the people who everybody's here to see. They're known as the ambassadors. So you're one of the ambassadors. I should say that I was also wearing a flight suit. No. That's why I'm confused. Okay. I'm not. Okay. But you could be.

I could be, because technically I'm disabled. Okay, take it away, Steve. I am still arranging the deck. Don't worry, I'm not fixing it. And that's a Braille deck. We're really excited. This is the blind crew. Because what this flight day is, is essentially an experiment. We're going to head for the plane. Okay, let's do it. This first step to see what would happen if disabled people were to go to space. You ready to rock? Oh, you got it. Thanks, man. You think you're blind?

And so these ambassadors are all people with disabilities. There are blind people, deaf people, people who use wheelchairs, people who have prosthetics, who are here to be a part of this experiment. And I was there to simply report on it.

Basically, I was there to go on this flight as a journalist. Oh, my goodness. Oh, it's amazing. But it's, you know, there is, I'm coming at it from an angle that I'm interested personally. So Andrew is a writer that we've long admired here at the show. And it was a few months ago that he told us about this effort to get disabled people into space that was just in its kind of early experimental phase.

And he really wanted to go. He really wanted to be a part of it and observe it because what they were really up to seemed to be wrapped up in things he thinks about a lot. Stuff I think about all the time, which is namely, what does disability mean? And how does the world look at disability? And how does that view need to change?

Well, outer space is not the obvious place I would go to for that to answer that question, I think. I'm with you. Maybe just explain what were the steps that brought you to Long Beach to get on this flight thing you're on?

So I'm legally blind and I'm getting blinder at a very slow rate. And I've been writing and thinking about disability and in particular blindness a lot more intensively in the last couple of years as I've kind of hit a new level of vision. And it's put me in touch with...

the world of blindness. And I've been hearing about... One, two, three, here's the mic check. And if I get excited, I might talk like that. A woman named Sherry Wells Jensen for a while. I won't be doing much singing, I don't think. And it happened that Sherry is one of the key architects of this whole getting disabled people into space thing. This could really change a lot of things. And so it's humbling and exciting and overwhelming to be part of it. And also terrifying. Well, before we go deeper into...

all of that. There's a lot about you that I don't even know in terms of your background and how you got to this point. So can we go back there first and then work our way back? Yeah, sure. So where are you from, Sherry? I'm from Temperance, Michigan. And where's that? So if you hold your hand up like people do when they're from Michigan, Temperance is right down by your wrist on the thumb side. It's a pretty small town, rural. I think

And Sherry was born blind. But I was a tree-climbing, forest-running child. I wanted to do everything. But she said most of her childhood felt like people... Telling me, slow down, be careful. Stay safely on the ground. Let me literally control where your hands go. And please go sit down and let me take care of you. It was suffocating. Oh, it was a lot. But she said that she always had this place of refuge. Outside, in the dark, at night. In her backyard. In the quiet, by myself.

And I remember just having that sense of no eyes are on me now. This is just me and the world. And I can move through it gracefully and quietly and intentionally. And I felt powerful and I felt sleek. And I felt like I had this, I had the night on my own terms.

And she said that even though she couldn't see the stars, she had that feeling. That sense of awe. And she said it was in part those nights in her backyard that made her want to become an astronomer. Yes.

When she would say this to people, they were like, oh yeah, yes. I could read the room and I knew what was going to work and what was going to be a problem. So she graduates high school, goes to college. Discovered linguistics. She became a linguist. And then, so there's only one more sharp curve to go around to get where we are. Skip ahead about 14 years and I got just an email out of nowhere that says, we know we're doing the CISC.

SETI International, SETI, the SETI Institute, that's what they call themselves. Which is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence people. We know we're doing a seminar on cognition across the cosmos. Would you like to come out here? And I'd gotten a hold of Sherry because she had developed a class in astro-linguistics, which is...

Basically the study of... What would a truly alien language be like? How you're going to communicate with aliens. And after I picked myself up off the floor, I tried really hard to write a professional sounding, oh yes, I believe I can fit that into my schedule and I'll be happy to return it.

All the while, I was screaming my head off. So she just starts reading anything she can find. Everything I can get my hands on about extraterrestrial life and something keeps getting repeated. And the thing that keeps getting repeated is that any intelligent life capable of developing sufficient technology to build a radio telescope will have some analog of human visual perception.

And I kept reading that and I kept thinking, really? Are you really freaking trying to tell me that you could not have a civilization of blind people who could discover science and build a telescope? Is that really what you're saying? Because if that is what you're saying, we are going to have words. So I wrote...

It's a really cool paper about how a blind race of aliens could go through all the steps of growing up and not being eaten by tigers and gathering food and discovering science and building a telescope. And so I presented this paper at a conference and we had this lively debate about some of the details. And I thought, I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm showing them and they're getting it. And I could see how...

talking about blind aliens can make it better for blind people on earth and making it better for all disabled people on earth. And I was so happy. And then we get to the end of the paper and I felt like they were with me and they believed that I could build a telescope. And then I turned around

They were about two steps down off of the little stage I was on to get back to the seating area. And one of the people who had just agreed with me that blind aliens could smelt metal and build a telescope leaps up out of his seat, comes running forward and says to me, let me help you down those two steps. And I felt like, oh, it's not going to be that easy. I think that was a turning point for her where she started to think,

Maybe theory isn't enough. He did not believe I could get down those two steps. And instead, she needed to think about people, disabled people, blind people in space, and what a blind astronaut would look like.

And how that would work. Because you can't just do that without profoundly changing how disabled people are perceived on Earth. And so in 2018, she sits down and writes this article for Scientific American called "The Case for Disabled Astronauts."

And the thing I like about it is it's not this sort of bid for inclusion. It's not just about disabled people going off and being inspirational. It's not, we're going to give candy canes to disabled kids on Christmas to make them feel better. She's sort of making the case that like actually disabled people would make for better astronauts and they should actually be given this like preference when you're picking your next flight. Why? Yeah. Why? Why?

Well, I mean, Sherry likes to say that space is trying to kill you at all times. We're not evolved to go to space. Everything that we trust and depend on on Earth is just gone in space. It's just not there. I mean, space is...

if you think about it, it's this weird disabling environment. Right. And so her point is that people with disabilities have already, they're already kind of better prepared. Because the built environment on Earth is not built for you. It's built, by and large, for non-disabled people. So as you move about in your day, you know you're going to have to work around things. Things are not going to be accessible to you. Something's going to go wrong. You're going to have to figure it out. That skill set is essential for...

the unpredictable things that can happen to you in space.

You never know what the heck is going to happen, right? Caution warning panels lit up like a Christmas tree. Fire warning lights, smoke warning lights, low voltage lights. So one example is back in 1997 on the Mir space station. There was a fire. Low torch-like intensity, sparks flying off the end of it. And even though it was a pretty small fire, smoke starts billowing. Cabins filling with it. Can't see the five fingers in front of your face, headed for a respirator, fuzzy peripheral vision, needing oxygen. Now...

Astronauts aboard did get the fire out. They did a great job using the skill sets that they had. But it did take them 14 minutes to extinguish the fire. Wouldn't it be handy if you had one of your astronauts really good at moving around in the dark and have a person who the dark doesn't bother? Or another example, I don't think people realize that on a space station...

It's extremely loud. So this is ambient sound of the International Space Station. Oh, wow. It's quite loud. Yeah, that's pretty loud. So there have even been reports of astronauts having hearing damage after spending a long time in space. But if ASL is your first or one of your fluent languages... Noise doesn't matter. You can still communicate. Or imagine... The medium ORU bag is tethered. You're out on a spacewalk and the radio just dies.

Well, might not be a problem. If you could sign. You know, and a lot of the time that the astronauts spend now with physical activity, you know, you think about an astronaut's job as being very physical. A lot of the very physical activity is the two and a half hours a day they spend doing training. Without...

constant load on your body. Your muscles will start dissolving. Your bones will start getting reabsorbed back into your body. Doing physical workouts so they can retain the muscle tone and bone density that they came up with. Luckily, we have the capability to run here on the space station, too.

So every day they have to ride on stationary bicycles and strap into this special space treadmill. Well, you don't have to run on the treadmill if your legs already aren't functioning. That's time they could spend doing anything else, like research. And, um...

So we are at the very beginning of space travel, of this whole enterprise of humans moving ourselves off the planet. But because we're at the very beginning of this and more and more companies and governments are gaining the possibility of putting people in orbit themselves, the question is, how are we going to do that? If we're really going to be a civilization that moves more and more people into space, which we could do,

Right? I don't see any reason we couldn't do that. Then we have a glorious opportunity right now, right now, because we're at the inflection point right now to decide what kind of people are going to be welcome there and what kind of world are we going to build off planet. And so does that world include only people

the subset, the very small subset of human beings that happen to meet the present restrictions on physical ability to get into space? Or do we want to rethink that and open up the potential recruits for our astronaut class? There's like a common sense argument that I run up against, which is that like, yes, like obviously women are just as capable of being astronauts as men, but

Because we know biologically, scientifically, in every way that women and men are equal in those ways. But then like when you try to say the same thing about disability, it's like, well, hang on a second. Like disabled means not able, right? Like literally the person can't do the same things, you know? So how do you like get past that seemingly like very common sense thing?

And that's not an argument about space. That's an argument about employment. That's an argument about parenting. That's the argument that people have when they allow blind parents to have their children removed. Like, you can't possibly parent you're blind. You can't possibly parent this child you're disabled. And...

I'm just done tolerating that sort of stuff, right? Because that comes down to basic disrespect for other human beings and allowing your own fear and your own head space to contaminate the way you treat other human beings. But it's also an argument about space. I think when people like imagine space

what it takes to pilot a space shuttle, they're imagining all the same things that you need to parent a child or, you know, do all the things that you just listed. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I get it walking across campus. How do you know where you're going? What do you think you're doing here? Is there a special program for you? Can I help you get somewhere? Right? Not hello, nice day, but all the other things, right? And so, so space, it might be a specially dramatic case, but it's the same case.

But the first step is not, hey, I know, let's send six disabled people to the International Space Station. That's not the smart first move, right? The smart first move is to take a zero-G flight. And then we're going to be on the path towards something, towards making big change. What are we, what are we, what's going on in the plane right now? When we come back, we're going to Long Beach, California. Radio Lab will be back in a moment.

Lulu. Lattes. Radiolab. Back with burgeoning space astronaut, reporter Andrew Leland. So you, okay, but so how do we go from Sherry, like having this kind of amazing idea that seems born of her childhood and born of some real frustration and other things into this article? Great think piece, loving it, clicking, great.

To what the heck is happening up down in Long Beach. Yeah. So Sherry put out that piece in the middle of 2018. Was it my name, my own business one about 10 months ago, I guess it is by now. She gets a call from George T. Whitesides. Dun, dun, dun. Who the heck is?

He's the former chief of staff of NASA under Obama. And also on the line was Anna Volker. The founder of SciAccess, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accessibility of the STEM fields to disabled people.

adults and children. They told Sherry, we read your article. We've also been thinking about this stuff for a long time. And we're interested in staffing a parabolic flight full of disabled people of all sorts. Do you want to be a part of it? Yes, absolutely.

So what happens then? How does it all come together? What do you mean, after the screaming? Why are you screaming? Like, explain to me. It's just that sense of somebody really believes, really believes, and is really gonna, is really committed to this thing. So on October 14th, I went to Long Beach to see how this was all gonna play out. But also...

I had a seat on the plane. Something about my body shape and the way this fits me, it feels much more like sanitation worker than astronaut to me. So I get my flight suit on. I go gather with everybody. Hello. Welcome to Los Angeles slash Long Beach. Woo!

And after the welcome, I start meeting everybody. There are NASA people. I'm a planetary scientist. Scientists. I meet George. Hey, George, I'm Andrew Leland. T. Whitesides. Does George C. Whitesides have long, white sideburns? No, ma'am, he does not. How are you feeling this morning? I'm feeling great. He's like clean-cut Princeton guy. So exciting to have everybody together. And then I meet the crew.

Welcome. The ambassadors. Are you Victoria? I wanted to introduce myself. I'm Angelina. There were 12 total. Two of them were deaf. Tell me about what's going through your mind. Right now, I can just say I'm very excited. Six have mobility disabilities, which means they use a wheelchair or a prosthetic. And four of them were blind.

Andrew! How's it going? Good, it's nice to meet you in person. I know, finally. One of whom was, of course, Sherry. How are you, my friend? I'm good. Oh, sorry, I just bumped into you. I'm freaked out, I'm overwhelmed. Are you? I touched a thing that's going to space. And so the plan for today is that all of us are going to get on this plane and do what's called a parabolic flight. Right. And can you just explain what that is, actually? So really simply, you're on a plane, the plane starts to ascend,

And it's somewhat violently up, like the nose is pointing 45 degrees into the sky. And then at like 32,000 feet, the pilot cuts the thrust of the engines and starts to level the plane back out. And it's in that moment, because of physics, gravity starts to get canceled out. And what you get is this little window of like 20 to 30 seconds where you feel weightless.

where you feel like you're just floating in space. Kind of. Incredible, really. Well, I'm wondering what exactly is the question you all are trying to answer with this flight? The question... I think the question is, what is zero-g like for disabled people, and what do we need to do to make it

What problems are we going to find? So we're sort of out there looking for problems. So if you guys want to pick your sounds, then I can program them. So for blind people floating in zero gravity, do we in fact need some kind of device that will help you always know where the nominal floor is? I don't know.

Because on these flights, the most important thing is, can you float up and then find your way back down to where you started from without hurting anybody? So before the flight, the blind crew was testing out these different ringtones. Ha ha ha!

That might help them orient themselves. Because Sherry's like, we don't know what happens when you're blind in zero-G. Do you just panic and roll into a little ball and cry? Like there's all these things they don't know. How much of an inconvenience are legs that you can't control in zero-gravity? How do you alert a deaf person that they need to get back to their seat? You can't stomp on the floor and use the vibrations to help get attention. So what's ideal? Is it like a light? A little stock ticker thing?

In some ways, the fundamental question is just what happens to you when you're disabled? In zero gravity. I mean, we don't know that until we do the investigation.

And so... Look at that plane. Sunday morning, 10.30 a.m., we all board this plane. Hey. Oh, sorry. It's a normal plane, except once you get inside, it's like you've entered a tube of toothpaste or something. Huh. Why is that? Well, in the main cabin, there's no seats, and it's just lined with these, like, bright white gym mats. But in the back, there were a few rows of seats, and so I went, ugh.

and sat down there with everybody. Well, this feels like a commercial airliner, right? I strapped myself in so I don't run for it. I know, we got middle seat. And apparently there's an area in the very far back of the plane called the Pain Cave, where if you start to feel real bad, you can go there. Feel bad like... Well, the plane is known as the Vomit Comet. Oh, right. Because of the...

Duh. But anyway... Dear pastel, what the fuck were you thinking? Doors close, and pretty quick... The plane is moving! We take off. Here we go! And we fly out over the Pacific Ocean, north of San Francisco. You okay? Yeah, all right. I'm just chilling. And they start bringing people out into the main area with the padding. Have a great time. I'm so excited.

Everybody kind of takes their positions. Blind crews checking on their sound system. I see one guy lying on a mat who uses a wheelchair. He's got a strap around his legs. Everybody's getting ready. And then the plane starts climbing.

I can feel it, oh my goodness. Time to lay down. We get up to 20,000 feet, 25,000, 30,000, and then at 32,000 feet, we enter zero gravity. And suddenly, people are just floating everywhere, bouncing off the walls. Oh, that's awesome!

And there are just all these bodies moving around in space. And it's pretty chaotic and disorienting. But it's like you get a peek into this other world and then it's like... And in like 20 seconds, gravity's back. It's extremely disorienting. I forgot which way the floor was, but I found it.

If I was totally blind, I'm trying to imagine how I would be doing this. So the plan is we're going to do 15 parabolas. And as we keep going, I'm trying to get around and talk to people and observe things. And I'm in a snow globe that...

The toddler is shaking every minute. I don't think a single person is doing an experiment on this plane. Just the getting through each parabola is an experiment. And then I find out later that the blind crew, the sound devices that they brought aren't working because it's too loud on the plane for them to hear. And every time I feel like I'm trying to get a handle on something, somebody starts yelling, "Feet down! Feet down!"

But eventually, I do make my way up to the blind group. How you doing? And they're like, Dude! This is incredible. Sherry, how are you? Awesome. Everything's going good? So good. And do you have trouble, like, bumping into anybody or, like, finding the floor or anything? No. Oh, shit. Is it starting again? I'm going to lie down. And as we all float up again, I start to realize that people are figuring it out.

Like, they're all doing the thing. They're floating up off the floor and safely floating back down. And it's happening over and over again. Eric is doing, like, breakdancing disco moves. Monica is doing some... Lie back down, lie back down. And while we were up there, we also did these parabolas that simulated gravity on the moon. I can do all the yoga on the moon.

And gravity on Mars. I like Mars! Mars is good! And at a certain point... I've been kind of an emotional reaction to that. I just felt overwhelmed. No one's in the pain cave. No one's getting sick. Like, they're able to do this. Here comes another one. Mona seems extremely happy. And Sherry looks honestly like a Buddha. Oh, there's little bubbles of water.

There's water floating all through the cabin in little beautiful orbs. My legs are reaching the ceiling. I see Cece. Her mouth is open wide. And we're coming down. We're done. So we make it back down to Earth. We deplane. We have some snacks. There's lots of hugs.

And that's pretty much it.

So, okay, they land and like scientifically, what did the flight show us? Like, what did it prove? They found that between 70 and 90 percent of the times that an ambassador left their yoga mat or their station, they were able to return to it. Huh. And that's like, how does that check against their expectations? I think they were very happy with that. And was there...

Was it truly just like, can disabled people hack it in a space flight? Or was anyone looking specifically at, could they make better astronauts than non-disabled people? Honestly, I don't think that they were testing against non-disabled astronauts on this flight. I mean, it was a really tiny mission compared to being in actual space, you know, like to being an astronaut. But I will say that

When I was on the plane, I did feel like there were some moments when that huge distance between what it takes to be an astronaut, to go on a mission to Mars, and what was happening on this plane, that huge distance felt like it started to collapse a little bit. Like, there was one moment with Mary Cooper, who's a Stanford undergrad who has a prosthetic leg.

One of her goals was to like remove her prosthetic leg and reattach it in microgravity, you know, and so she did that test, which is fine. But then she also like took it off, held it in her hand and spun it so that it was like spinning on its axis and kind of rotating, you know, doing this very graceful microgravity balletic turn in space.

And as her leg was just floating there between us, I just looked at her and I was like, you are totally an astronaut right now. We can do this. Disabled people can be astronauts. It's clear to me. Sherry Wells Jensen again. And so I felt powerful and confident and joyful. But we didn't flick a switch and change the world. I can tell that by the next two times I went through airports, right?

You know what I mean about my airport situation, right? Yeah. Wait, what's the airport situation? So after the flight, Sherry left Long Beach and flew up to Berkeley to visit some friends. And as she was getting off the plane and like walking up the jetway, these guys came up behind her and started directing her. Like three guys behind me in the jetway going a little bit left, a little bit right. That's like they were trying to, they had, I should have turned around and said, if y'all want a remote control car, go buy one. Yeah.

I would just like to walk down the freaking jetway in peace. Could you stop? Yeah. Could you stop? Could you please just, Jesus, could you please stop? Stop, stop, stop. She's thinking like, I just did this thing that, you know, is this brand new, never been done before historical thing. And these guys still can't conceive of me as being able to like walk in a hamster tube. And so in some ways, what we've done is,

is widen the gap between what's possible and what's expected. Wait, you widened it or you narrowed it? I think we widened it because we pushed what's possible out of step. Like we went on this parabolic flight and it was like, oh, look at that. These disabled people can do that. But the expectations didn't change, right? Right.

That gap between what I understand we can do and how we are still treated and what the expectations on Earth still are is a horrible, yawning gap. And it's bigger than I thought it was because the positive end has been moved up, right? So I know that I can be an astronaut. And yet when I walk through an airport, people treat me like a drunken golden retriever. It reminds me of the way you described...

where like you push against the wall and you sort of go flying in the other direction. It's almost like this project in some ways, like you gave this wall a big shove and instead of the wall moving, like you kind of went tumbling. Yeah.

I think that makes really good sense. It was emotionally quite distressing, quite disorienting to me to return after this amazing flight and to realize the world remains unchanged. And I have to say, I had my own sort of complicated, upside-down experience of watching these possibilities get pushed out further.

I am floating up from the ground. Like, around the end of the first set of parabolas, there was this moment where Eric and Sawyer, who were in the mobility group, sort of floated into standing positions. All right, so apparently...

In lunar gravity, I can stand. So that's cool. And I started crying. I'm having kind of an emotional reaction to that. And I really didn't want to be crying. I can't imagine doing this with people who can walk. And I felt really bad that I was crying. Why would you feel bad about that? It seemed to come out of the sense of liberation that, like, you know, the wheelchair user, wheelchair, like, that, like, their disability had been erased and that's a thing to celebrate.

Because that goes against everything that I'm trying to understand and sort of situate myself towards, right? Like, I feel like as I become more blind, it's really complicated for me because, like, what I'm going through right now is a loss. And I'm experiencing it as a loss. Like, it's a literal loss, but there's all this emotional loss connected to it, too. But at the same time, like, I am recognizing...

elements of blindness that are interesting. And like, it's tricky. Like part of me wants to like go with the Sherry route of being like, and maybe even it's making me better, you know, and I'm not there yet, but at the very least, I don't want to see disability as a negative trait that should be erased. Yeah.

Let me ask you in terms of the flight. So after Sherry told me about her complicated reaction to the flight, I started crying. I told her about mine. And then afterwards, I was sort of ashamed. Like, why was I crying? And was I like, you know, do you think that that my reaction was problematic in that way? No, no, no, no. That's different. Those people were genuinely feeling joy.

they weren't being manipulated. They didn't walk away feeling like shit and you were happy. They were genuinely joyful about a new experience with their own bodies, which belonged to them. And I try to be super fair about this. I think if there were a zero-G parabola and I went through it and I could see for a minute, if I could see light and color like I did when I was a tiny, tiny child, I would have been

I would have been somewhere else. I would have been elated. I would have been joyful. That's a new, that experience is not a bad experience. I think that the harm comes when we use that joyful experience as a weapon against your ordinary experience. What do you mean? What does that mean? It means that

That would not make my life as a blind human being less valuable, or it wouldn't mean that I was now going to struggle all my life to return to the zero-G state so I could see again. Like, I don't want to use that experience of being different as explosives against my ordinary experience, which is not seeing. It would be such a relief to have that experience without having to have people feel sorry for you later that it went away.

Let me ask you one more question about you, though, about this gap that you've talked about. If the flight is actually making the gap bigger, then why are you planning future flights? Oh, it doesn't because the gap has always been there. Right. It's not like I discovered it. Right. It just I just had a I just had a particularly vicious experience of the gap.

And that doesn't mean, I mean, because these flights make it better, right? In the end, these flights are going to make it better. I'm not a patient person, but I'm willing to take the long view when I have to. That we are making things better by doing the work of gathering the data that we need that will eventually make things more accessible, that will eventually change lives, that will eventually destroy the gap. Reporter Andrew Leland.

Andrew just came out with a new book. It is called The Country of the Blind, a memoir at the end of sight. And in a lot of ways, it's really similar to this episode. In it, he goes on all these different adventures with other folks who are blind, artists, and

This episode was reported by Andrew Leland and produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez, Matt Kielty, and Pat Walters. Jeremy Bloom contributed music and sound design. Production sound recording by Dan McCoy.

Thank you to so many people. Here we go. All the Mission Astro Access ambassadors, including and especially Sherry Wells-Jensen, Dana Bowles, Apurva Varia, Eric Ingram, Mary Cooper, Mona Minkara, Sina Burram, Zubian Wuta, Sisi Mazik, Victoria Modesta, Eric Scheer, and Sawyer Rosenstein.

Plus, additional thanks to George Whitesides, Anna Volker, Ann Kapusta, Jamie Molaro, J.D. Polk, Katie Coleman, Shannon Finnegan, Sharon Von C., April Jackson, Ebony Gaitan, and Annie Diekman. I'm Lula Miller. I'm Latif Nasser, composed of the wrong stuff. This is Radiolab. Thank you for listening.

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasr are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

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Hi, I'm Luis Vera and I'm calling from Mexico City. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

There's a lot going on right now. Mounting economic inequality, threats to democracy, environmental disaster, the sour stench of chaos in the air. I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's On the Media. Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here and maybe how to head them off at the pass? That's On the Media's specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts.