Dr. Harold White - Advancing Human Exploration Beyond Our Solar System - Limitless Space Institute

Transcript

[Music] welcome to another episode of progress potential and possibilities discussions with fascinating people designing a better tomorrow for all of us i'm your host ira pastor welcome everybody again to another episode of our show bringing you another really fascinating guest today who is helping to create a better tomorrow for all of us um as a little background to today's show as many people are aware there have been a variety of folks out there in recent years people with names like elon musk and jeff bezos and richard branson that have been doing really cool things with rocket ships and rocket planes and so forth aiming to get uh us up into low earth orbits and back to the moon and eventually one day to mars uh but our guest today is a really amazing thought leader who is working on research which ultimately aims to get us much much farther uh at speeds uh many organ you know orders of magnitude beyond uh where current technologies can take us uh we have the honor of being joined by uh dr harold sunny white director of advanced research and development at the limitless space institute located in houston texas uh dr white has over 25 years of experience working in the aerospace industry with boeing lockheed martin as well as nasa and his current role at the space institute he leads all r d work and established priorities for investigation and expenditures uh for their research programs dr white grants and other resources to support their r d efforts uh markets uh the limitless space institute the major benefactors to increase their resources and the related r d efforts and ultimately arranges and conducts events uh ensuring that appropriately related well-known individuals involved with programs uh dr white holds his phd in physics from rice university uh masters of mechanical engineering from wichita state university bachelors mechanical engineering university south alabama and dr white has been recognized many times over uh the span of his career for uh not just an excellent work ethic exceptional technical skills visibility as a project manager and dedicated ultimately to the pursuit of human spaceflight uh he was awarded the nasa medal for excellence in achievement by the administrator for his role in getting the thermal protection system robotic inspection tools built delivered and certified to support the sts-114 space shuttle mission it was awarded the silver snoopy award by the crew office for his actions and discovery and disposition of critical damage the robotic arm prior to sts-121 and received uh the nasa space flight awareness honor reaward sts-122 mission one of the highest and most prestigious awards available to employees of nasa he was also awarded the nasa exceptional engineer achievement medal for his role in exploring and incorporating advanced power and propulsion concepts into human spaceflight architectures uh a lot of really interesting things we're going to be talking about but uh sunny white thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today hey ira yeah thanks for asking me to be on your show it's always a treat to get a chance to talk with folks about some of the stuff that we're we're trying to pursue and champion here at the limitless space institute so you know thank you for being a communicator that tries to help uh engage with more people on some of these interesting topics so you know i think you you cover a broad array of things right so i imagine you find yourself having to be an expert on lots of different stuff depending upon whether it's a monday or a wednesday or a friday and who you're talking to right i i try my best and you know one of the things i always look for uh on the show and not just the yeah the cutting edge but really the bleeding edge of the people like yourself that are willing to take these risks uh in 2022 for things that you know i don't know if they're going to happen in 2052 or 2082 or when things are going to be happening but people that are really willing to take these risks today and say this is the research that we have to do and obviously you know you're right at the top of that list so i'm so glad sonny that then to have you here um before we get into everything you're doing uh in the company and and and all the research um take a little time if you would just to talk about yourself i mean i read up you know the bio and obviously all the awards and cool stuff you're doing where did you where did you grow up uh you know what you know what was your childhood like were you always interested in space and and the frontiers uh star trek fans star wars fan take us to the beginning yeah what what's the uh what's the people aspect of them right you know my dad was in the military so i've lived all over the u.s but i spent a large portion of my my young life uh in and around washington dc uh grew up in loudoun county virginia if you will um and spent a lot of time uh going to the national air and space smithsonian in dc right there on the mall this is before i think dude bar hazy was actually there this is back in the mid to late 80s so i got plenty of opportunity to go to this beautiful museum that had all these amazing examples and illustrations of people accomplishing amazing things and overcoming all kinds of obstacles and you know it's it's uh it's it's not interesting just the standpoint you know you're looking at the x-15 or you're looking at the lunar module uh landed on the surface of the moon or some of the capsules that went to space it's when you read into the people that were involved with these things in terms of working together and some of the things they had to do and that really to me it was that aspect as well that really helped me connect uh in terms of the a love and appreciation for kind of pushing the boundaries of knowledge in this in this specific way in this specific area so i i think that that set a bit for me very early on that i was always going to have a healthy interest in in in things that fly and try and defy gravity and go to other planets uh and certainly you know at tv shows and movies those all influenced me just like they did anybody else and i i personally remember growing up uh not at least not when they were first aired but in syndication the star trek tv show uh i remember growing up with that and i think the next generation was towards uh early part of my college college days so i think those always colored my thoughts in terms of what might be possible and give a little bit of a hopeful vision for what a future could be at some point in time so you know i always had a healthy love for technology and engineering even independent of that i was much to my parents chagrin always disassembling stuff uh not always successful at reassembling it but you know that's part of i guess the discovery process of trying to explore things in your world around you so i think i've always known i was going to be an engineer but also had a very healthy interest in science and so you know when you were going through the educational experience i started off in engineering and then later on switched over to physics so i have a master's in mechanical engineering and phd in physics right so i have a love for both engineering and physics and so to me science is also extremely interesting in understanding how how does how does the star how does our star work how does our how is our solar system formed uh general relativity plasma physics all those things are just fascinating so yeah i i think that's uh it's kind of a quick synopsis of what makes me tick right absolutely no absolutely absolutely and and you know as we were we were chatting um offline a bit and and you know doing doing reading into limited space institute you know i saw a lot of parallels you know as you know i come out of the pharmaceutical industry and a lot of uh what we've worked on in the past uh whether they're you know small molecule drugs or protein therapeutics or whatever they got a long time before they ever get to the market and they start with an idea and they may work and they may not um but you got to work on them and i saw you know a lot of similar parallels even worse telling what you're doing um talk just a little bit before we get into sort of the science of warp bubbles and and and some of the the really futuristic concepts just walk us through a little bit about the history of the limitless space institute when it was set up uh who initially sort of funded it uh and you know i was looking at your first year of issue board you got people like pete worden from the breakthrough prize he got uh anusa ansari xprize clint crozier used to be in space force uh a really a nice who's who of um of space stack uh involved with your group uh talk to you what what that was like also setting all that up and how you brought all these great minds together yeah that's a great question lara yeah thank you for that um so look at the space institute is a 501c3 we're a non-profit uh we were kind of uh you know gaveled that by the irs in 2020 i joined limitless space institute in 2019 uh the very tail end of 2019. uh brian bk kelly had contacted me while i was still at nasa and asked me uh he wanted to chat with me about some uh opportunities that he that he had and so came over and we talked about at the time the seedling formation of limitless space institute and brian bk kelly is our president um he you know he worked for nassau for a very very long time he was the head of the flight operations directorate so uh he picked the astronauts and the crews that went to space a very uh amazing human being accomplished an enormous amount of uh incredible things with his long and storied career at nasa um and uh our benefactor is uh cam gafferian uh he is a co-founder of a number of other for profit commercial companies you might have heard of some of those uh axiom spaces is one that's working on a commercial space station intuitive machines is working on the commercial uh cargo lunar lander uh x energy is a nuclear reactor company uh and he has a number of other things that he's interested in uh he's very much a kind of a renaissance guy very interested in trying to uh champion the technologies and ideas that help make for you know a better world for us for today and tomorrow and so forth um so it was after a lot of thought and prayer it seemed like a really great opportunity to uh lean into something that i've always been passionate about since we were talking about my interest in space i'm very very interested in parent propulsion a lot of my career at nasa has been um has revolved very very closely around that particular topic and so the limitless space institute in the process of kind of thinking about who and what limitless space institute is you know our mission statement i think really distills it down to a coffee cup worthy type of statement our mission is to inspire and educate the next generation to travel beyond our solar system and to support and develop support the research development of enabling technologies right and so that is a that is a very uh challenging mission um in terms of uh aspirin educate the next generation of trial will be on our solar system i mean think about that for a second uh when we think about space exploration today right we are working to put human beings back on the surface of the moon in the next few years um we have a rover that's sitting on the surface of mars with a little um a drone that's keeping it to company and those are amazing accomplishments and that's typically what might come to people's minds when they think about space exploration but if you talk about sending a human being to the outer solar system or further uh if you wanted to send a human beings to say saturn in 200 days the amount of energy that's necessary to make something like that possible is an order of magnitude more energy than it takes to get a payload from the surface of the earth to lower door so all that to say chemical propulsion is is not gonna it's not gonna close that kind of objective we have to we have to try something different we have to do something so if chemical propulsion can't do it then what do we do right what's what's a potential solution so a very uh distillation of a fairly complicated topic into just a few major brush strokes uh is the following uh if you want to think about how we might try and tackle that starting from what we know and then working to what we don't know within the context of what we know in terms of engineering and physics we could use nuclear electric propulsion where we would have a nuclear reactor that's fissioning uranium providing power to some form of electric propulsion that's ionizing the gas and this type of an architecture can send human beings to every destination in the solar system uh and so that's uh it's you know well explored in literature well understood and that's something we could do today if we decided to and that would give us the solar system if you will but that won't necessarily do a good job on interstellar that still might take a thousand years to do something like that uh for interstellar in maybe a hundred year type of time frame or several decades at a minimum we would turn to fusion propulsion so kind of moving a little bit into the unknown on the engineering side still we still understand the physics fusion propulsion uh could potentially allow us to send a large payload to another star system uh in say a hundred years um but what if we wanted to uh do an interstellar mission in a fraction of a human lifetime that's kind of where we have to look to the frontiers of physics as well right so we've got general relativity and quantum mechanics kind of uh articulate what we know of the world from the microscopic to the microscope but those two theories are not compatible so we know that we have yet to develop some kind of a generalized understanding and so the process of exploring those frontiers uh maybe we can find new ways of doing things um you know we know the idea of the space work that's mathematically possible what do we build to make it uh manifest and real so in the process of working on the frontiers of physics maybe you know better understand what that that might need to look like right so those are some so that kind of frames our view of the trade space there's lots of different things one to talk about but it's just a good way to highlight some of the major things to think about and so limitless space institute how do we kind of map that that mission and vision into into action if you will we are a doing organization uh we do research internally through eagle works we're currently funded by darpa defense science office on some interesting things we'll talk about here in a minute we also fund research externally we stood up a program in the summer of 2020 called interstellar initiative grants we asked for proposals from all over the globe and we picked uh nine uh groups from different universities all over to fund things ranging from beamed energy propulsion relativistic solar sails we did four teams that are working on fusion propulsion we did two that are working on space drives uh and one that was uh one that's working on traversable wormholes uh in addition to that we um we commissioned a summer class this past summer that we uh we did in partnership with the initiative for interstellar studies a week-long class on interstellar engineering physics topics and so forth we'll probably teach it again in 2022 we'll also be standing up some programs um this uh this next year in 2022 limitless space institute fellowships we'll also do scholarships uh something we'll call lab boosters where you might be able to fund some small things down at the high school level as well so definitely a doing organization trying to i guess you know put rubber to the road in lots of different areas and continue to foster advocation for uh this domain and feed the community because there's a there's a hungry community out there that wants to think about and work in this domain and so we're trying to do our part to help move the move the ball down the field so and as you said you know we're surrounded by a bunch of uh very bright and amazing people both internally at lsi and then our advisory board and some of the amazing people that we have there uh and we've got some good working partnerships with with organizations including breakthrough initiatives uh we have uh formal engagements with over 20 different uh entities we put on contract if you will just in our brief two years worth of uh existence and we we have several more in work and we'll continue to try and make a difference so excellent excellent and you know you mentioned um [Music] amongst your your funders or your partners is darpa and i've done episodes in the past with darpa folks from there and you know one of the um interesting things i remember actually i had um dr jeff ling uh on the show last year uh he was the former head of the um the darpa's biologic technology office and you know he he was sort of laying things out at the time in our discussion he was like you know you might go to uh a venture capitalist and they'll spend all this time doing due diligence and looking at a bunch of stuff that doesn't mean anything uh before they put money into you and and and darpa's model the way he's come to say the first thing we ask is this cool and if it is cool we will find out how to get it funded and put really good minds on it albeit for five years and then they gotta go with something else but is it cool and i gotta tell you what you're doing is cool and you know but you know at all ends of the spectrum um and me being a biologic guy i i i say that talk a little bit about i mean obviously you know i'm saying about your darpa relationship but the the need for some of these new models uh darpa-like models models that mimic what darpa does in our exploration of the unknown in these cutting-edge areas because you know a lot of traditional investors just don't touch the stuff um talk a little bit about how you see specifically in in space tech or i don't know about classifying strategies as space tech or beyond space tech but the importance of some of these unique funding uh innovation models for what you're trying to do right yeah no thank you for the narrative there right a lot of for-profit entities are gonna focus any type of um research and development that they that they conduct internally using internal resources on something that has a very low risk in terms of trying to result in a product that they can then maybe move forward with and of course the risk posture is also the i guess dependent upon how much revenue something could potentially generate so risk posture in you know medicine pharmaceuticals for example your area there's lots of stuff that that gets done that doesn't necessarily pan out a handful of things that pan out they could they can bring in a lot of revenue if you will so risk posture in one industry might be different from another and so aerospace tends to be uh very calculated on on risk and so resources that get put into kind of that seed corn kind of research if you will sprinkling the initial seeds and trying to water it and see if you can get it to grow up uh the the for-profit entities tend to be very reserved on what they can do and what they're willing to do and and i understand that right that's just a i guess a function of of the industry but municipal organizations have a little bit more flexibility right and so even you know nasa has uh something called the called niacc that they use to fund very low trl stuff but even that kind of has a threshold that it's very mindful of as well number one number two niacc is also a very broad category they fund anything from all different disciplines right we we we're very focused on the the power propulsion regime but the interesting thing about darpa right you know darpa has um through the to the defense science office uh they can fund basic research right we go all the way down to hey we just want you guys to think about this that or the other and how that might uh maybe shift over into the category of applied and help us avoid surprise if you will and so that allows them to be very aggressive and i've always had a healthy respect for the darpa model right they they move very quickly right they if if something seems like it might be interesting they're willing to take the risks uh put in some resources into it go through a due due diligence and uh and then look at it at some after some period of time and say hey we like that we like that we didn't like that so then they can they can accomplish a lot with minimal amount of resources and they have a they also have i think a good model with the management uh process that they use in terms of dark pins rolling in and off uh in and out every uh like five years or something like that so that keeps the organization vibrant and fresh and moving so um you know the stuff that we're trying to champion uh at lsi definitely falls into the category of low trl uh at a minimum in some cases we're very much on the frontiers of science right trying to figure out um uh what's beyond the two standard models of the microscopic in the microscopic world right i mean that is basic research right so and it requires people thinking about those those types of things to be able to make progress so excellent thanks um sonny last week uh you know a lot of activity in uh the press about you know mentioning things uh warp bubbles and actually accidental discovery warp bubbles and so forth once again um nothing confidential here but uh talk a little bit about you know what you're discovering what you've discovered what you haven't discovered yet i know you you haven't you haven't found warp speed yet scotty i need webspeed or we'll be dead but talk a little bit about what this particular news was all about and uh right no that's uh yeah in terms of the work we're currently doing for darpa defense science office is um uh we are working on a kind of a again that um frontiers of physics type of mindset filling in the gap between general relativity and quantum mechanics if you will we're exploring a model we call our dynamic vacuum model we had we've done some previous work with darpa when i was at nasa uh to develop and explore the model both in the lab and theoretically in that case we were studying how it pertains to modeling uh individual atoms and so part of what we're doing now with with darpa dso is we're taking those physics models and we're applying them to some microscopic nanoscopic structures uh that we're we're learning how to make at the same time we're working on physics models uh where we can try and predict how we think the the quantum vacuum uh might respond to the presence of these these microscopic and nano scale structures uh now the specific applications that we're trying to explore may have some implications for uh small but sorry modest but persistent amounts of power there may be the ability to generate a propulsive force so maybe you don't have an application as a some kind of a space drive or a thruster there may be some implications for communications and sensor systems um so now switching gears a little bit in the process of kind of exploring how uh the quantum machine responds to these structures that's where the the term accidental discovery kind of comes to mind we were exploring some custom casimir cavities that we were building that i'm going to use some hand puppets maybe hopefully this will communicate well over soon we were we were exploring some custom casimir cavities where we have two plates that are you know very close to one another and then we have three three pillars that are in between those those plates and we were studying how the quantum vacuum responds around where the pillar is in between the two plates and in the process of looking at like a two dimensional section cut of this negative vacuum energy density distribution it was uh these two uh lenticular types of regions that had extremely uh large magnitude negative vacuum energy density and so based on work i've done previously in the idea of the space war i was looking at those those distributions and saying that it kind of kind of looks like what we might need for the idea of space work i wonder if we were to try and be more purposeful about how we structure the topology could we could we get this really close and so we uh we went through the process of modeling a a one micrometer diameter sphere uh surrounded by a four micrometer diameter cylinder in the process of doing that we were able to show that this uh this very tiny structure will manifest a toroidal ring of negative vacuum energy density that uh basically matches the requirements for the okubir warp metric so the cubia work metric is a metric that's kind of uh comes out of the the formalism of general relativity and it's a way to kind of capture the idea of being able to go to another star system in say months as it comes to decades uh and so when you when you look at what that that that specific model requires it requires is toward a ring of negative vacuum energy density around the central portion of the spacecraft and so uh when we compare those topologies to one another it was a match right and so what uh what we published in our paper that was a little bit impressed in epjc uh we said that we have discovered a nanoscale structure that we can propose to the community that one can make and if we make it it's going to cause the quantum vacuum to respond in such a way that it will generate this this ring of negative vacuum energy density such that it will uh manifest a nano scale wart bubble not a not an analog right though that's right i use that i use that parlance reel and analog for the following reason uh there's you know people do work with things like analogs for black holes if you will acoustical black holes where you study stuff in the lab uh that has characteristics that kind of look like the mathematics we see with black holes but with sound waves instead and so it's not really a black hole it's just an analog right so sure so that's right that's why i think the specific choice of the word uh real in the literature to make sure we're we're not confusing the physics community with what we're saying so sure absolutely and it sounds completely fascinating to me most of it's over my head and i apologize for that but i i i i take my once again i'm taking my hat off to all of you for for focusing on this type of research in 2022 as we enter 22. um take us if you would um you know one of the the things i always like to go into uh on shows especially in some of these domains which are sort of a little outside of my experience in life sciences is alternative uses and any case and you know i i did this show uh a few months ago with uh dr david stout at booz allen who runs their directed energy program and why was it doing directed energy well laser beams are just cool and i'm a star trek fan and like phasers and all sorts of stuff like that but you know it's a question you know what can you do with these things ultimately before we make a spaceship that shoots laser beams uh you know can we use these laser beams to drill the deeper than we've ever drilled before or do certain things with the industrial menu processing uh can we make little laser beam guns you don't shoot bullets whatever yes he doesn't want questions yeah who doesn't want that stuff anyway uh take us just a little walk for those that are unfamiliar what potentially could toroidal rings of negative vacuum energy density do before you get the warp drive going uh potentially in the coming years or decades here well yeah so um what is is is there some kind of a road map or a progression or a crawl walk run type of thought process for for some of these concepts and ideas right and uh so in terms of the stuff that we were looking at uh and we talked about in the ebjc paper one of the things that we've been thinking about is there's optical implications for this right there will be optical properties of those systems um could you potentially study the impact that those types of structures might have on light um you could view them as like a like a broadband uh meta material uh oftentimes meta materials are kind of constrained to you know specific frequency bands if you will whereas this might be a little bit more broadband meta material um maybe it could have an impact on gases that one might flow through it and you could change the source absorption spectrum or something uh i don't know and even going back to um some of the stuff i talked about for the custom cashmere cabinets this is the the physics is all connected if you will um some of the stuff we're looking at in the custom casimir cavities uh you know to me communications might be a really interesting uh application long before it ever has some of the space stuff that we would like to think about um in some of the work that we did for the the darpa work that was funded back when i was at nasa you know we we studied how the atomic structure of atoms these are potentially manifestations of acoustic resonances in quantum vacuum uh longitudinal wave if you i don't mean to say it's something you hear it's just it's a longitudinal wave resonance around the atom uh and so that suggests that the quantum vacuum can manifest and sustain longitudinal waves that's a different form of radiation and so uh uh what would that do if you had a transmitter or receiver that could transmit or receive these longitudinal waves well that might be a new a new form of communication that you can equip cell phones with for example and maybe you'd have a a cell phone that uh when you get into an elevator and the door closes you don't lose a signal right the longitudinal waves would uh would not be uh bothered by the fact that there's this uh metal enclosure around or you know what if you were uh in a car in the la area or something so these little hills and valleys when you go down into a valley maybe ordinarily you might have some issues with cell phone coverage but with a system that used longitudinal waves to transmit back and forth it could go through large uh large swaths of dense material and the signals would not be attenuated so there could be some communication implications long before the space stuff that we think about um longitudinal waves is a sensory system right it'll be able to see things that we we currently currently cannot see with electromagnetic radiation whether it's rf x-rays uh anything that falls in that category longitudinal waves will see things that uh transverse electromagnetic waves will not be able to see so who knows what that might do for us in terms of can we see things in the human body in a different way uh that might be useful to us and for any any myriad of purposes primarily probably related to health um you know maybe there could be lots of things where that would be brought to bear uh and help us long before we would really get it to a point that we might use it in space so there might be a lot of neat um waypoints along the way in the process of trying to mature and explore the idea uh and some and in a lot of in a lot of cases those those waypoints would they'll benefit us in the hearing now right um so i guess going back to the you know the accidental discovery even right when we were just doing the work for darpa dso and we've accidentally discovered this connection with the idea of the space anyway excellent excellent yeah i i really enjoy uh hearing about the alternative the short term possibilities but then yeah i mean joking offline with you that that elevator phone that's what that's worth trillions of dollars i think right away so that's people will put that to to use right away right exactly exactly um but that being said um you know so you have you know your phd in physics um obviously you know we need uh you're a young guy i'm a young guy time's moving on we need this uh but you're setting things up for for all generations to come after you because this is uh there's there's things that work today there's things that are going to be working 20 years from now based on this type of research um talk about the next generation uh a little bit and what you know if if tomorrow you know it a 50 trillion dollars materialized in in limited space institute's bank account you need to do any all the research you want what are you looking for in terms of the next generation of physicists and engineers and so forth to come along what will your team look like that works on sort of the the translation of these projects uh in in the next decade or two uh inspire that next generation of folks that you want to get into stem that are thinking of getting into investment banking instead right now or law right right right right right right right um you know i think it's it's important for us to work together in the here and now right uh there's there's you know there's value in being a member of the team uh and where you have multiple perspectives you tend to be more capable than an individual might be so there's there's value in working together in the in here and now but i think it's also important excuse me to remember we have to be able to work together you know across generations uh if you will i think there's a lot of importance in that and i'll come back to that you were talking about specific numbers of size and scale but there's there's a point i want to highlight here in terms of the value proposition moving forward in terms of us doing things together i think we need to learn we need to remember it's really important to do things together over time if you think about some of the things we've accomplished in the past with that type of a mindset you know think about the i i so in this past summer i taught some uh classes at the international space university in strasbourg northern france uh and uh during some of the off days got a chance to go into uh strasbourg and then tour in strasbourg cathedral and so the strasbourg cathedral uh they started building that thing in like 1100 a.d and they did not finish that uh until the 1700s so all that to say i mean the the people that built the basement i mean they they never saw the rest of the cathedral get built they knew they had to do their part building the foundation so that the next generation could come along and they could build the walls and the next generation could come along and maybe we could build the gussets and so forth until 700 years goes by and it's uh this beautiful thing is there in strasbourg uh and so i think in a day and age where we get a little irritated when we text somebody and they don't text us back in five minutes uh we need to learn there's a lot of value in that type of mindset and philosophy uh and so you know i think one of the things i really hope to see is you know inspiring to educate the next generation that's this continuing thing that we continue to try and work together both in the here and now and across generations to accomplish these things and i i have no idea when and if these types of things would become possible but i know what i need to be doing now because you know that ira that's one of the questions the most common questions i get is hey when are we when are we going to have warp drive i don't know but i know what i need to be doing right now there's a specific work that we can be doing in the lab right now so uh you know it's to me it's like if if this stuff really stirs your soul and gets you excited uh it's it's a it's a multi-disciplinary problem there's lots of aspects and areas of exploration it's kind of a all hands on deck thing too this is a this is a monumental problem and a monumental uh challenge uh and the cool thing is in the process of trying to reduce some of these grand visions to to reality i mean we're going to end up with power systems uh that we probably couldn't even imagine today that will obviously improve the quality of life here on the planet we'll learn how to be more effective at um you know not generating waste right trying to do a better job of taking care of the environment and you know one of the things i always like to think about is the whole concept of scarcity we have an entire solar system full of stuff resources and so forth and uh having a solar system-wide community and culture uh i mean that would that would potentially change the the very definition of scarcity for us as a species as well right so i think it's um it's one of those things that uh in the process of trying to chase these uh amazing hopes and dreams and aspirations i mean they could really make life better for us uh here on earth right i mean i i think that's so there's no question that uh that would be an outcome of the pursuit of these types of things so all hands on that come join us we need help right so absolutely absolutely and if i had the skills i'd come join you continuing along that line with the 50 trillion dollars you have in the bank um if if if the warp speed was to miraculously materialize in in 2026 or whenever uh with the money that we give you um where where where does dr uh harold sunny wait what do you want if i could send you anywhere in in the cosmos today uh to check things out and you'll be safe and everything with the uh with all the the the right bells and whistles associated with this unique spacecraft but uh where where do you want to explore in the cosmos just the rings of saturn andromeda where do you want to go um the oort cloud right right right yeah i mean i think there's a lot of uh there's a lot of interesting stuff that's coming out of exoplanets right think about uh all the stuff that we've been able to discover uh the whole bunch of stars in proximity to our star have all kinds of planets around them a number of those um are located in in regions that we would we would kind of consider uh habitable if you will i think there's like an actual quotient that they use to identify those but um uh there's a number of planets that are around stars and even i think proxima centaur proxima sorry b uh is an exoplanet that's potentially in a habitable zone around uh proxima centauri um i think there's some speculation that alpha one i don't know if south of san a or alpha indeed has an exoplanet that's potentially a habitable zone i i would speculate they'll probably eventually find uh lots of these stars all have the planets in the the habitable zones so there's probably no shortage of interesting places to to go see if we have the capability to go there in person if you will um you know in in terms of i think you maybe asked us an earlier question where would i like to see resources put in terms of uh different different areas for research now you know i'll go back to the kind of that the three swim lane view that i gave you on ways to try and enable the ability to send human beings to the outer solar system and beyond if you look at our portfolio now it kind of matches that as well we're we're putting resources in uh nuclear electric propulsion we have a university partnership with uh texas a m we're funding them to to to do a a very detailed paper design on a micro nuclear reactor that generates a one megawatt electric of power um we're funding a number of researchers that are working in that that fusion uh propulsion range and then we have a a number of folks that are also working in that i call it the breakthrough uh category the frontiers of physics so i in my mind i think i think in terms of to bringing resources to bear if we had even more resources we would continue to do the same thing we're doing today uh we put a bit as a if you think of it like as a portfolio if you are putting resources in each of those uh categories if you will it's kind of a balanced portfolio maybe a little bit more towards the fusion and breakthrough because there's there are already municipal government organizations that are bringing money to bear for the nuclear reactor domain but the diffusion and breakthrough are the area where there's probably the greatest need and so that's where if we had increased revenue uh from multiple sources let's say it's like a public-private partnership for example uh may we have some opportunity in the future we can partner together and uh do try and champion some work in this area and that then it would be something where we would try and continue to to augment the resources that we're putting into those specific research categories got it well i have to say i i hope that uh you know your your research budget becomes limitless because the stuff you're working on is just so impressive and the fact that you know not only you work on it but you know you put together the team to bring these ideas to bear i think it's you know we need more and more of this in today's world um on all fronts whether they be space tech biotech uh environmental tech what have you so i mean i i take my hat off to you for everything that you're you're trying to achieve there um any final messages for the audience anything that i didn't touch on sunday that you wanted to mention please give you the floor on the way out um yeah and i think in terms of anything that uh that's in the press i think they've done they've tried to do a pretty good job of pointing to some of our our published papers uh number one so uh and we we try anything that we publish we tried to do is uh open source to make sure people can get directly to uh the information themselves and explore it and think about it um i do wanna maybe highlight one more thing it's part of our interstellar initiative grants the work we're doing there um we um we conducted those uh research grants where we recorded the kickoff meeting the midterm meeting and the final meeting through a uh like a zoom webinar uh and we we so we broadcast that so everybody could watch it uh that uh whether they watch it through the zoom webinar or through our youtube channel and then we we put the recording proceedings onto our youtube channel so if anyone wants to go look at the things that we funded under interstellar initiative grants go to you can google limitless space youtube that'll take you to our youtube channel and you can find all those proceedings the recordings are bookmarked uh with chapters for the different investigators and their presentations and so you know even though it might be like an eight-hour long video you can still just look at whichever segment you want uh as you need to so lots of good material already out there we're going to continue to grow it over the coming years and so be looking for the interstellar initiative grants the second biennial cycle we'll be putting something out probably the main time frame awesome awesome and we will put links to to all of that uh in the bio to the show when it when it goes live so um really great um for uh for everybody that's gonna be listening to this particular episode uh across the podcast networks or watching on the youtube channel uh you've been listening to dr harold sunny white director advanced research and development limitless space institute down in houston texas uh sunny i i want to thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to come educate us on these topics um thanks for everything that you're doing there and continue to do and as we say on this show thanks for helping to make tomorrow a better place um really fascinating uh program and i wish you the best with it okay i thank you ira i appreciate it godspeed godspeed you