Interview with Valerie Olson
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Video transcript: "Lack, lacking energy, lacking resources is the baseline situation that has to be addressed in any kind of aerospace situation, any kind of aerospace building project or imagining interplanetary flight or this arrival of people elsewhere. One of the principles that organizes it is efficiency and a capacity to deal with and use the smallest amount of resources possible in the most efficient way.
So what we have to ask ourselves, in terms of history, is why those technologies were considered the most advanced and the most symbolically advanced way to interact with an environment - to recycle, to conserve, to deal with lack of resources, to efficiently use energy in the most effective way - why that didn't translate on Earth, to a rapid sort-of restructuring of energy systems on Earth. And that's a very interesting paradox in the history of aerospace.
I think they provide examples, they provide very, very effective and evidence-based examples of the need to conserve and the need to think systemically about contamination, energy, water, food to sort-of build models of systems that are not separate that are connected together - the human body and spacecraft are one systemic unit.
We're having a 50 year anniversary of the moon landing in the U.S. this year, in which the technologies used to achieve that are still not largely available, and have still not transformed the energy systems in the U.S., and that's an interesting paradox to look at."
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