John Donvan
Should the US decouple from China supporters say yes, it is a strategic necessity to counter Beijing’s military ambitions, defend democratic allies and protect the United States economically. They argue relying on China for everything from rare earth minerals to critical medical supplies leaves America dangerously exposed, but critics warn, decoupling could backfire, destabilizing global markets, leaving America not safer, but more isolated. Is this a smart pivot or a risky rupture? Tonight we find out in this debate produced in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations. This is open to debate. I’m John Donvan. We’re in the New York headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations, our partner in this ongoing series of debates around global events. This time taking a look at something of a paradox that involves China. Here’s the paradox. On the one hand, China is now undoubtedly the strongest rival to the United States, economically, militarily, politically.

John Donvan
But on the other hand, the US is profoundly dependent on China. China is our biggest trading partner, a source of so many manufactured goods that Americans rely on as well as a critical market for the things that we do still produce. We are hitched to China through an amazingly complex web of overlapping supply lines. China is our biggest lender. Even our major public universities depend on hundreds of thousands of tuition paying Chinese students who often perform super well. So China’s the competition and yet the US seems wedded to China. Can that state of affairs change? Is that even a good idea and what would that look like? What would the risks be in something like that? That’s what we’re here to debate with this question. At the center of the arguments to come, should the US decouple from China, let’s welcome our debaters to the stage. First up, answering yes to that question. I want to welcome Derek Scissors and Isaac Stone Fish and on the other side arguing the answer to that question should be known. Please welcome Susan Shirk and Ben Steil. So let’s move to our opening round. Our opening round is comprised of formal statements made by each of the four debaters. In turn, they each get two and a half minutes and I want to start with Isaac Stone fish. Isaac is CEO and founder of strategy risks, which quantifies corporate exposure to China for companies and helps reduce China risk. He’s also author of America’s Second, a book about Beijing’s influence on the United States. Isaac, it is so good to have you with us here in New York. Thanks for joining us.

Isaac Stone Fish
Thank you for having me.

John Donvan
And the floor is yours. You are answering yes to the question. Should the US decouple from China, please tell us why.

Isaac Stone Fish
Who in the audience thinks that World War II was the last global war? For those listening at home, we have one. Okay, one out of about 80 people who here thinks that the United States and China are going to fight in the same side, are going to be allies in World War iii. No one who wants China to win World War iii. No one decoupling for those reasons is a necessity. We’ll get into the details later. The other reason why we must decouple is the risks of engagement. Now far outweigh the benefits. I myself was an exemplar of engagement. I lived in China for six, seven years. I studied there, I worked there. I did the language programs. I engaged with the United Front and the Communist Party and the Ministry of State Security through various arms and firmaments inside the Communist Party. Now under Xi Jinping, especially a late and bold and Xi Jinping, all of those risks have gone up and those risks get born much more on Chinese Americans and citizens of China than they do for the folks in the audience.

Isaac Stone Fish
But understanding that the way that we’ve engaged as students, as businesses, the idea of potential win-win that’s all way out the door. Even five, 10 years ago, the people in the US government would joke that win-win means China wins twice. It’s worse now I’ll end and I like leaving some time and leaving stage early. There’s a Chinese proverb, ngbi, which means a praying mantis waving its arms in front of the chariot to hold that image in your head. Picture this little creature delighted by its seeming power and then getting crushed by fate. If this is the direction that the world is going in, then regardless of how we debate these issues, how we structure our engagements, it’s not something we can overcome. If there will be a war, the war will happen despite any of our ENT treaties or our nonprofits or our business dealings or our lobbying and if that’s the reality that we’re getting into, we have to be prepared. Thank you.

John Donvan
Next up, I want to welcome Ben Steil. Ben is a senior fellow and director of international economics here at the Councilman Foreign Relations. He is also lead writer on their geographics blog and creator of several web-based interactives tracking global economic trends. Ben, also for you, you didn’t have to go very far to travel, but it’s great to have you on the stage with us tonight. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. John, you are answering no to the question should the US decouple from China, Chris, your chance to tell us why?

Benn Steil
Ladies and gentlemen, we on this side of the states strongly believe that decoupling is a manmade disaster of epic proportions. Brexit on steroids as it were, it will undermine the US economy, undermine US leadership and undermine US national security. Because of the decoupling program on which we are now entering over the coming months and beyond prices in the United States, interest rates are going to be materially higher than they should be and investment in employment is going to be lower and looking out longer term decoupling is going to undermine the special status of the US dollar internationally a status that President Trump has pledged to defend some numbers to illustrate what the folly that we’re heading into right now. If you go back to President Trump’s first term, he bailed out American farmers hit by retaliatory tariffs from China to the tune of $61 billion. That 61 billion represented 92% of the total tariffs which we collected from imports from China and 100% of those tariffs were paid by American firms.

Benn Steil
So we did not benefit at all from this. Another number that you should always bear in mind, nearly half of the imports that we take in from China are intermediate goods which are absolutely vital to US competitiveness internationally and therefore also vital to maintaining the primacy and readiness of the US military. Now for years now, the prospect of a global decoupling from China that is the United States and its allies combining to isolate China economically has acted as an extremely effective deterrent limiting China’s aggressive behavior in the Asia Pacific. Now that the United States is treating its allies ass adversaries and is firing all its economic ammunition unilaterally, we are making it more likely that we will have conflict with China and the region because China is likely to calculate that the incremental costs of military conflict with the United States today are materially lower than what it will be in the future. For all these reasons, ladies and gentlemen, we on this side of this stage opposed decoupling. Thank you.

John Donvan
Thank you Ben. Next up to give his opening statement in answering yes to the question, should the US decouple from China, I want to welcome Derek Scissors. Derek is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and chief economist of the China Beige book, as well as the author of the China Global Investment Tracker. Derek, thank you for making the trip up from DC to join us. It’s great to have you here and you are answering yes to the question, should the US decouple from China?

Derek Scissors
Probably the most important thing I’m going to do right now is say Ben is misleading you. President Trump does not want to decouple from China. He has never won to decouple from China. He wants to make a deal with China. In particular, he wants the US to export more to China and therefore in a sense depend more on China. So just to get that straight, we are not on the Trump side here at all. If anything, they’re on the Trump side, but we’ll probably argue over that. I want to describe two economies quickly. One is economy C, one is economy D, and this is the background from my points throughout the debate economy. C reported G, DP growth of 2.9%. D was 4.5% household net worth and economy C grew 8%, D grew 11%. Okay, D seems better, but they both seem like they’re doing pretty well.

Derek Scissors
Let’s take a step down. The ratio of wealth of the top 1% to the bottom 50% and economy C is 5.5 to one. It’s kind of stunning. In D, it’s 3.6 to one, not great either, but better than C, labor force participation in C is 62.5%. In D, it’s 67.2% manufacturing employment in C, this is giving it away for bend 12.9 million in D, it’s 17.2 million. Patent applications in C are flat patent applications in D rose 12%. The budget deficit in C is 6.3% of GDPD runs a surplus of 0.7% of GDP economy. C is the US in 2023. Economy D for decoupled is the US in 1998. 1998 was the last year before we started to feel the effects of China’s WTO entry because in 1999 we let China in the WT O and production began moving. Before we started to feel the effects of China’s debit TO entry, we were a much stronger healthier economy.

Derek Scissors
Now I realize that technological change has improved matters for people in the last 25 years and China’s a part of that, although I’ll argue that it’s a harmful part of it as well, but I would argue that as a society we were better off 25 years ago and if we can’t go back in time 25 years, we can at least try to identify what caused the weaknesses in our economy which have had profound social and political weaknesses. One of those major causes not the only one, one of those major causes is tying ourselves to closely to China. When we were less tied to China and it was possible it was only 25 years ago, we had more manufacturing employment, we had less wealth inequality. We were not spending ourselves into oblivion. That was a better America.

John Donvan
Thank you Derek. And now I want to welcome Susan Shirk. Susan is a research professor at the uc, San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy as well as director emeritus of its 21st century China Center. She’s also the author of Overreach How China Derailed. Its Peaceful Rise. Susan, thank you for joining us.

Susan Shirk
It’s great to be here.

John Donvan
Susan. You’re answering no to the question should we decouple from China? Here’s your chance, please tell us why.

Susan Shirk
Great, so I think we all probably agree that China has been overreaching and that China has become more of an economic and security threat, but the answer to that challenge is not to decouple from China and decoupling is a losing strategy. One reason that we believe that is because China is much better prepared for decoupling than the United States is Xi Jinping has been fireproofing the Chinese economy ever since he came into power in 2012 in order to reduce its vulnerability to what he believes is a long-term effort by the United States to contain China’s economic development. So it has reduced its dependence on exports overall and particularly to the United States. Today only 14% of Chinese exports come to the United States compared to 16% for AAN and 48% to Belt and road countries. It has rerouted its exports through other countries like Vietnam and Mexico. Instead of sending them directly to develop markets like the United States.

Susan Shirk
China has also been motivated by US steps toward decoupling. To go back to self-reliance, especially in the technological domain, made massive investments to become a tech superpower. It has been able to create supply chains for high tech manufacturing and tech innovation all within China and as we’ve seen in recent weeks, they also prepared a really impressive and comprehensive retaliatory toolkit that they could use in response to a trade war from the United States targeted on US firms key sectors like agriculture, energy and most important and export licensing system for these critical minerals which gives China a stranglehold on the American economy. They are irreplaceable and China dominates not just in the mining but in the refining of these minerals and the making of Chinese magnets, which we’ve all learned a lot about in recent weeks.

John Donvan
Susan, I’m sorry, your time is up.

Susan Shirk
Okay,

John Donvan
Thank

Susan Shirk
You. Thank you very much.

John Donvan
Thank you very much. Okay, we’re going to move on to a discussion round now, although I want to say when you were doing country C and DI was asking myself where are A and B until I figured out you were doing coupling couple decouple cd so it made sense. So we’re going to move on to discussion about what we heard in the opening arguments, but I just want to tell you what I’m hearing on the side arguing that the US should decouple from China, from Isaac Stone fish and Derek scissors. I’m hearing fundamentally a sense that there is a presumption of war or a probability of war or a plausibility of war and if that were to happen that the US would need to be already decoupled, but that at present to the degree that there have been attempts to avoid decoupling and in fact engagement over the last 25 years, that the risks of that have outweighed the benefits that the win-win that was presumed when China was introduced to the world trade organization never really happened.

John Donvan
They also say that the US has already been hurt fundamentally by the relationship that developed economically over the last 25 years. Their opponents on the other side, Ben Steel and Susan Shirk are saying that decoupling is already happening, that we’re seeing it in real time, that to go further would create a manmade disaster. They’re saying that we’re seeing the evidence of that, that the likely outcome would be an undermining of the status of the US as the financial power. While they acknowledge that China has overreached, they’re arguing the answer is more diplomacy because their point being that China is going to be the better in the better position actually to come through a decoupling that we were already seeing that prompted by moves that they’ve made in response to the US even talking about decoupling and that they’re saying the evidence is on their side in that case. So I want to take to you, Ben, your opponent’s argument about there being a presumption of war and certainly we would not want to be dependent on, I think the point being very obviously we wouldn’t want to be dependent on Chinese supply lines if we were to go to war at China, but that fundamental presumption that I’m not sure if you’re saying it’s inevitable, Isaac, but you’re saying things are moving in that direction lot likeer than we think. Okay, I’ll take that to Ben please.

Benn Steil
In the short run, there is simply no way for us to decouple fast enough such that we would be in a better position militarily vis-a-vis China than if we stuck with the status quo. Right now we are fundamentally dependent on China as is the rest of the world for intermediate goods which are vital to our military and not just to our private sector. As I argued in my introduction, the way the Trump administration is implementing decoupling makes war more likely first of all because we have completely alienated, quite deliberately our allies who are not going to join us in confronting China. Secondly, we’ve shot all our economic bullets. We have nothing left to throw at China. Third of all China looking at this strategic calculus is going to say, look, if we’re going to confront the United States in this region perhaps over Taiwan, now is the best time to do it. They have no allies, they have nothing left to throw at us economically. We’re better off confronting the United States now than waiting for a future administration.

Isaac Stone Fish
Do you want to go first? So I appreciate both of your arguments because they seem to be arguing for decoupling. The idea of China as a threat and more specifically the communist party is a threat. The idea that China is much more prepared for decoupling and the idea that Trump’s behaviors driving us closer to war does require more decoupling quicker. I agree. If wars were just fought on military armaments alone, that decoupling would be worse than if we stayed coupled and fought. But there’s so many other aspects of war, psychological warfare, political warfare. There’s cyber war in this particular one. This is going to be a war fought by conventional means and by many other means as well. And so the idea of TikTok major other US data infrastructures so exposed to China and China, not having that same exposure to the United States does put us in a much weaker place. One more point on deterrent. We have to understand that the more we push, the more it’s a deterrent. I thought the news around Speaker Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan was backwards. I thought that was the opposite of provocative. I think the more the US shows its support for Taiwan and other countries in the region, the more it reduces temperature as opposed to what Beijing says, this idea that they’re so thin skinned that they have to react. Susan,

Susan Shirk
I think a lot of this comes down to America’s allies and partners and if China acts aggressively actually attacks or blockades Taiwan or attacks Japan or something else, then we are going to want to be able to act very promptly to punish China to push back and we’ll need to do it with our allies and friends. They’re not going to move to do that now, so we should really hold our powder and keep that ability in the case of an actual crisis.

John Donvan
Derek, something else Susan said in her opening is that the US, even by talking decoupling, threatening to decouple letting China know that we might want to do this is prompting China to decouple on its own terms already and that they’re going to be better at that than the us. What do you make of that argument?

Derek Scissors
Good. I’m glad they’re decoupling on their own terms already, so I don’t really have a problem with it. It isn’t true. Of course, what the Chinese say in their Xi Jinping came over with this some years ago and it’s been repeated since, and it’s a good line from him, which is we want to be less dependent on the world. We want the world to be more dependent on China, so it is a one-way dependence that’s not decoupling, that’s taking the high ground and saying, okay, well we’re going to be less dependent on you, but you still need us connected to that. It feels like the other side is kind of pursuing the politics of fear here, which is to say, oh, well we can’t do it, but we’re not arguing that we’re arguing whether we should do it. You can do it better and you can do it worse, and it’s reasonable to say that there are unavoidable costs.

Derek Scissors
There are unavoidable costs, but the argument isn’t like, oh, this is going to be really hard. America should just give up. What’s the alternative? Then we get into a worse and worse situation. That’s absolutely the Chinese goal. The Chinese goal is to put us in a worse and worse situation and the side opposed to decoupling is taking that mantle up. And I have one more really quick point because Ben is doing this again, we are not on Trump’s side. Trump alienating our allies is not part of our argument and it should not be used against us strike and should we decouple strike? Can you strike

John Donvan
That from the record that that’s not

Benn Steil
Part of their argument? It’s beautiful. Humpty Dumpty quality to Derek’s arguments, decoupling is whatever I choose it to be whenever I decide to speak. It’s not 145% tariffs as Trump would have it. It is perhaps de-risking with a MAGA hat. I challenged Derek to tell us what decoupling actually is. What policies would you recommend?

Derek Scissors
You ready for that? Oh, I am absolutely ready. All right, Ben. I was literally born ready for this. Ben says, we’ve used all our economic ammunition so I can answer that question and respond to that point. At the same time, we should be taking Chinese firms which has benefited from IP theft and I don’t use the really big numbers for IP theft, but there have been over time hundreds of billions of dollars worth of IP theft from US. Firms hurt US workers. Chinese firms have benefit from them. We should be declaring them illegal actors, no tariffs. They have benefited from a crime and we have documentation. I have documentation on about 60 of these firms. I assume the US government can do better, although perhaps not this current US government, we should be not supporting our rival, our enemy, however you want to return them with US portfolio investment, so US portfolio investment in the first Trump term sent all sorts of records.

Derek Scissors
Three of the four years it went up $800 billion while Trump was president so that we could deny them capital, we could punish ’em for their IP theft. There are very strong decoupling steps we haven’t started with and I agree one of the things we should be doing is working with our allies who are willing to work with us. That is part of a good decoupling strategy, so I agree with them to that extent. What I don’t like is the idea that well, Trump did something wrong so we can’t decouple or it’s too hard, so we can’t decouple. That’s not the way American policy should work.

John Donvan
I just want to say Isaac, you haven’t had a lot of an opportunity to talk yet, so the next big round is going to go to you, but I just want to let the other side respond first.

Susan Shirk
Well, I think interdependence actually makes us more secure. It gives us the leverage we’ll need in a crisis if we give that up. Now, if we shoot our wad, we won’t have it when we really need it. Can you

John Donvan
Drill down on that a little bit more what you mean

Susan Shirk
By that? Well, yeah. I mean if China and the United States both need one another, there’s a lot of cross investment. There’s a lot of flows of human capital and talent going back and forth as well as trade, and if we really need to whack China across the board because they have acted really aggressively, then their dependence on us is going to be very important and their dependence on all our other friends and allies, but we won’t get our friends and allies to join with us now and not just because of the way Trump has mistreated them, but because they really benefit from commercial exchange with China and any kind of decoupling is actually going to harm them more than the United States.

John Donvan
I just want to take that then to Isaac, where I think Susan is saying that the dependence is actually a weapon in US hands. What’s your response to that?

Isaac Stone Fish
The US is far more dependent on China than China is in the United States. And can you say

John Donvan
Why?

Isaac Stone Fish
So you could look at student numbers, for example. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students in America, a thousand students in the us. We can look at US courts, US courts are far more free and fair to global companies, US companies than Chinese courts are. We can look at competition in China, the treatment of Chinese businesses. Chinese businesses get very preferential treatments across various different sectors. I think the other broad point about this that we miss about decoupling is if you put the question to people in China, let’s imagine you could have free polling in China, the most innovative, the most creative, the bravest people in China don’t want the communist party to be ruling China, and they also don’t want the communist party to be ruling the world. And so it’s just baffling to think about this idea of yes, the Trump administration over the last several weeks and months has alienated America’s allies and partners, but those are not broken relationships. Those are relationships that can be rebuilt and will be rebuilt, and the idea that because of the temporary alienation, these countries are going to take China’s side in a global conflict with some pernicious exceptions, Russia, North Korea, Pakistan is very surprising

John Donvan
To me. But I think what I heard Susan saying is that China needs us more than we need China and that that’s a stick that we can hold over their heads.

Isaac Stone Fish
No, no, no, no, no. That hasn’t been true for 15, 20 years. Don’t understand so well

Susan Shirk
Who needs most? Who most is actually a rather difficult question because you can look at just the total numbers of trade and things like that, or you can look at the kind of choke points, the key products or the key services or the talent that really matters to one side and the other.

Isaac Stone Fish
Xi Jinping is not ruling in a Turkey like Mao was Mao who said that you can nuke everything east of Shian and let hundreds of millions of people die and we’ll be okay. But Xi Jinping has shown a great willingness to put a lot more pain on his citizens than American leaders had. And so in some objective reality, yeah, it’s debatable in the reality that we live in today with the US and China. Beijing is far more willing to exert those costs on its own people than the United States is.

Susan Shirk
But if you look at the political situation that these two strong man leaders are in, I would argue that Trump needs to try to make a deal and to avoid decoupling a lot more than China does.

Isaac Stone Fish
And so you agree with Trump

Susan Shirk
On that? No, no. I think that right now China has a lot of cards it can play and it is damaging the United States as it plays those cards.

John Donvan
Ben, I want to go back to something in your opening argument and then I want to ask Derek to respond to it. Just to go a little bit further in your opening, you said that decoupling has already and would continue to hurt Americans. Elaborate a little bit on that for about 30 seconds and I want to hear Derek’s response

Benn Steil
Again. Intermediate goods are about 50% of what we import from China,

John Donvan
So those are things that are partially made.

Benn Steil
Exactly. They’re fundamental to the products that American firms are delivering, not just to the United States, but globally. We’ve seen examples around the world of countries that have decoupled. Brazil has brilliantly decoupled from the rest of the world. You can build, and in fact, apple does build iPhones entirely in Brazil, exactly what President Trump wants to do and an iPhone in Brazil costs more than twice what an iPhone in the United States costs. Now imagine that we’re going to introduce that sort of shock therapy to our economy, not just for iPhones, but everything we buy. We will be in no position to confront China at any point in the future because we will be far less strong economically.

John Donvan
And yet, Derek, in your opening, you made the case that 25 years ago before engagement with China, over trade really began the US economy was healthier than it is now.

Derek Scissors
It was much healthier. I am sorry I went through all those numbers, but that’s the basis for this argument. We have to have China. Well, we didn’t have China. It wasn’t that long ago. We had a much healthier economy. We had a much healthier society. I won’t get into details, but some of the people driving our political process now are people I really strongly disagree with who are empowered by the costs of the dislocation that China has posed on us. So that’s a philosophical point, but I think an accurate one and an important one, a concrete point is Ben keeps trying to bleed us into should the USB protectionist or can list, but that’s not the question. The question isn’t should the US isolate itself from the world? The question is, should the US isolate itself from China now? Can you hang on one second? Sure. 15 seconds. Is that your argument?

Benn Steil
IPhones are made almost entirely in China. Okay, back to you.

Derek Scissors
Well, I mean very good point. iPhone is not the sum of America’s existence.

Benn Steil
No, I give an example Derek, and you decide you don’t like it. You’re going to throw out another one where maybe there’s some manufacturer going on in India.

Derek Scissors
No, I’m not going devolve the debate into a debate over iPhones. I’m going to argue that we were okay before iPhones got really cheap because they were made in China. There are costs, as you said, there are costs. There are more costs as we can see in the weakening of the foundations of the American economy over the last 25 years in staying in the position that we’re in. You guys are both arguing the politics of we can’t, when we weren’t, we weren’t coupled with China. We didn’t need them. We didn’t need them to be prosperous, and now you’re arguing about, oh, we can’t change this or we’re doomed,

Susan Shirk
John, we probably just, no. What we’re arguing is that this is a losing strategy for the United States. That’s what we’re arguing.

Benn Steil
Derek’s essentially saying that if we had blocked China’s WTO entry, they would still be some sort of adorable little Maoist peasant economy and wouldn’t be bothering us. That is absolutely ridiculous. The rest of the world was going to trade with China because it was to their benefit and we would have

Derek Scissors
To, so the increase in Chinese foreign exchange reserves for the first 25 years from starting in 1998 is entirely explained by their goods trade surplus with the United States. It’s the exact same amount of money. So yes, China would’ve traded more with other countries. The most lucrative market in the world is ours. The lion’s share the benefits was ours. They negotiated with us first because they knew everyone else would follow.

Isaac Stone Fish
What do you think about airport security? What do you mean?

Derek Scissors
I’m all

Benn Steil
In favor of it.

Isaac Stone Fish
Okay, there you go. So get ready to decouple, get ready for national security incentives and guardrails and requirements transforming your life. Do you want to take off your shoes when you go to the airport or do you want to talk about this before nine 11?

Benn Steil
I have absolutely no idea what debate you think you’re at.

Isaac Stone Fish
Perfect. I’ll break it down for you. So nine 11, September 11th, 2001, the aftermath of that caused a massive increase in national security restrictions in the United States for a much, much smaller enemy. What do you think is going to happen if we don’t prepare now to something that we can see coming and work on reducing our exposure? Do you think that if when China attacks Taiwan or when the US and China go to war because iPhones are cheaper? You can jump in. It’s okay. I can see your face. The audience listening can’t see your face, so if you want to jump in, please feel free.

Benn Steil
Otherwise keep going. No, I’m inviting Susan.

Susan Shirk
Yeah, well I think that

John Donvan
That

Susan Shirk
Very gracious by the there. No, there are a lot of positive features of interdependence that we haven’t spoken about at all, and we might want to consider those.

Isaac Stone Fish
There’s a lot of really wonderful people who work for the ministry of security, not just people. I mean, I’ve met a lot of them. I’m sure you have too, Susan. I think we’re living in some sort of economic, this is like econ 1 0 1. We’re missing the political, the military, the social and the cultural reality of this. If the question is, is decoupling bad economically? And that’s purely the question, sure, a lot of costs, fewer benefits. If the question is, should we, must we, can we? Yes, yes, yes.

Susan Shirk
China has more than 150. It’s the largest trading partner of more than 150 other countries in the world. So China is highly integrated in the global economy as Ben says. I mean even if the United States had not helped support China to join the WTO, a lot of other countries would want to be trading with China.

John Donvan
Wait, Susan, we’re going to come to questions in just a minute, but I just want to get to one other point. Susan, you mentioned you’re opening a preference for diplomacy, diplomacy with China directly. Is that what you’re talking about? And what would that look like?

Susan Shirk
Well, yeah, I know we’ve sort of forgotten what it looks like. Diplomacy with China is where you identify what you’re actually trying to achieve as, for example, we would ask President Trump, what do you really want to achieve when you make a deal with China or you decouple from China? What are you trying to achieve? Then you starting at lower levels, you actually bargain with one another and talk about how you can make one another better off and actually sometimes it works.

John Donvan
I just want to get a quick response from the other side before we go to questions.

Derek Scissors
I just want to say, I say this as praise. Susan is my elder in this field, but I am old enough to remember Jman and Hu Tao and Xi Jinping is not those two. There is a political reality to who you’re dealing with when you choose diplomacy, and Xi Jinping is not someone who’s thinking, how can I make the Americans more comfortable in this diplomatic process

Isaac Stone Fish
And put diplomatically, neither is President Trump. This is a massive break to the way that we’ve done diplomacy in the past.

Susan Shirk
Oh, I totally agree with that.

Isaac Stone Fish
And we have to live in that reality.

Speaker 6
Alright, I’d like to go to questions from the audience on the far aisle, Jeff Hogan from Wells Fargo. I’m going to pick up on something that Derek said, which is you’ve been talking about the should, not the how and you you’re talking about the why but not the how or when. So can we go into more depth about what does decoupling actually, I mean it’s wonderful to say we’re going to make iPhones in America. It doesn’t happen overnight, and if you do that for the entirety of the Chinese trade, how do you move it outside of China? How do you replace it? What’s the impact on the US economy from doing that

John Donvan
And how long does it

Speaker 6
Take and how long does it take? Let’s

John Donvan
Get really practical. The side argument

Derek Scissors
I get the next hour, right?

Speaker 6
Right.

Derek Scissors
Okay. So when Congress actually worked, which has been a while now, the discussion in Congress was, and Susan, I don’t want to put words in her mouth at all, but she’s referenced one of the areas was what sectors do we need to separate ourselves from the Chinese from not 44 rare earth’s semiconductors because the Chinese are in the semiconductor supply chain. Now we have an emphasis on shipbuilding for military reasons. That’s going to be hard. Some of them will take three years, some of them will take 10. So I’m not looking for a full decoupling, I don’t really care about toys, I don’t care about textiles, but I’m looking for a crucial decoupling. The things that really matter to us economically and matter to us in terms of our national security and the tools are you phase the Chinese entirely out of the supply chain. You just say if you want to sell in the United States, you cannot have China in the supply chain and you do that over multiple years and I could go into more detail, but other people should talk.

John Donvan
So multiple years is the answer to the how long it would take. But Isaac, it depends

Isaac Stone Fish
On the sector. We rank companies in their China exposure. Wells Fargo has one of the lowest China exposures of any major companies in the United States, and so that’s your answer. Many major US financial institutions and other corporates have joint ventures with the communist party. They have close ties to other arms of the, they have heavy importer export reliance on China. Plenty of companies don’t follow the examples of the companies that don’t.

Benn Steil
I love Derek’s response because he should really be on this side of the table. He doesn’t support decoupling at all. He supports, but he’s tougher than those Biden guys. Right. Okay. I need to respond. You’ll

John Donvan
Get to you in a second, but wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That’s diversification. For people who are listening who don’t know these terms of our difference between decoupling and de-risking, please

Benn Steil
Right to decouple the two economies, you do something really simple like impose 145% tariffs, so nobody wants to trade with anybody anymore that is decoupling. No, it’s not. Wait, I’m not finished, but it’s not finished. There are other ways to do it too. You could do it with import barriers and export barriers, but 145% tariffs work just fine. De-risking is identifying specific sectors and specific products where you put up specific import barriers or export barriers. It is exactly what the Biden administration tried to do. Both this side of the table on that side of the table could easily propose ways to do it better, but it’s not deco

Derek Scissors
Or he’s trying to take decoupling and make it a caricature. First of all, 145% tariffs don’t do squat because we have not provided resources to customs and border patrol. The Chinese will just transship over the hundred 45% tariffs. There is no decoupling going on the ground that will last more than a few months. So that is a way to associate our argument again with Trump, which it’s not associated with. I didn’t want to take up a lot of time, so I stopped and said, Hey, there are strategic sectors. Stop capital flow into China. If there are rival not even an enemy, why are we giving them our money? Criminalize their firms, which we have never done. The US talks about IP protection all the time. We have never retaliated properly against the Chinese beneficiary of IP theft. So those are the big things. It’s not tariffs I wouldn’t use primarily use tariffs. It is attacking Chinese capital and technology, which is where we’re really in a competition with them and it is much more, although supply chains matter, than picking out a few sectors.

John Donvan
The

Derek Scissors
Sector argument is for practicality because I don’t want to say we can snap our fingers and take away 40 sectors in a year.

John Donvan
I’m going to go onto can’t do that. By the way, that was a great question In a model for a great question, if you saw what just happened as a result down on the aisle,

Speaker 6
Thank you for a great debate. Bti, Ani, you haven’t mentioned human rights at all as a reason for decoupling and a couple of years ago this was very important, so would love to hear if it’s relevant to you and what you think about it.

John Donvan
Who would like to take that first?

Susan Shirk
I’ll take it. It is really striking how little people talk about human rights these days and it’s really kind of tragic. Although based on my own experience in government, it is very tough for any foreign power to really influence human rights practices inside China and we have not had much success and we’ve tried all sorts of different

John Donvan
Things. Does that make the decoupling question irrelevant to the human rights question?

Susan Shirk
Well, I think China’s human rights abuses create an attitude toward China in the United States and other countries, which we really object to China’s human rights practices, but decoupling is not going to do much to help.

Isaac Stone Fish
There’s been so much great question. There’s been so much corporate facilitation of Chinese human rights abuses by both Chinese corporations and American corporations, and we haven’t mentioned this yet. Probably the best example of successful decoupling is the Uyghur Force Labor Prevention Act, bipartisan bill, which forces us companies to reduce their exposure to Xinjiang the region in northwest China where upwards of a million or more Muslims and others have been imprisoned in concentration camps. And the fact that we’ve so given up on the idea that we can exert influence in China on human rights, I think is a tragic one. I think also the gutting of RFA and VOA, one of the many, many reasons why.

John Donvan
Can you remind people what?

Isaac Stone Fish
So our great friend Elon Musk, in his infinite wisdom decided that gutting the US public broadcasters voice America and radio free Asia, which are some of the best sources of human rights abuses, but also the situation on the ground in China and Tibet and Xinjiang was the right government cutting strategy. And so the idea that we should both engage with Beijing but not push back on their human rights abuses seems to have it reversed. So the way to do decoupling is to call out Beijing to push US companies to reduce and US nonprofits to reduce their facilitation of human rights abuses in China. Very quick final story too. US nonprofits to be in China have to have party sponsors and party relationships. And so what this means is that some very prominent nonprofits have worked directly with the Communist party and continue to work with the Ministry of State Security, which not only endangers the global mission of what they’re doing, but puts their Chinese staff in great danger and these are things that must be stopped.

John Donvan
Sir, did you still want to ask a question?

Speaker 8
James Mitz? I’ll ask this question. In my capacity as an advisor to the South China Morning post, which I like to think is dedicated to fact-based journalism, so I listened to your true gentleman’s opening discussion. First one you said was you compared c and d economies, but I’ve yet to hear the correlation why the codependence led to the demise of America.

John Donvan
Alright, that’s a great question.

Derek Scissors
Well, I mean I realize I went over those facts too quickly, but it’s their fault for only giving me two and a half minutes. We’ve seen people do it, so I mean I’m kidding. The mechanism is clear. The first shock is clear. We’ve been talking about it for years, which is we transferred production from partly from the United States, partly from offshore countries in East Asia to China. So we had not that all the manufacturing decline was due to China, but a large chunk of it was due to China, didn’t occur after nafta. It didn’t occur suddenly due to automation. It occurred right after we signed an agreement where financial institutions may be represented in this room, said we need to open up China so we can invest more in China. We built more plants in China. Chinese exports soared US manufacturing jobs dropped the US labor, labor force participation thus drops.

Derek Scissors
The financial side of this at the government level is more complicated and I don’t want to take up too much time, but for the people in the audience who are aware of this, there is a relationship, I know Ben is, there’s a relationship here between the America consumes too much and China saves too much. And as the Chinese become larger and larger and their savings are encouraged by selling to the United States and storing savings out of that, that codependency increases imbalances in the world economy. The Chinese economy was not unbalanced. Investment versus consumption in 2002 became unbalanced in part because of its relation to the United States. The United States economy has also become unbalanced, which is directly led to part of our budget deficit. Bush runs up the deficit because we’re losing manufacturing jobs. He wants to win In 2004, the Republicans resort to tax cuts all the time. The Democrats not as proative as Republicans, but increased spending, again, always offsetting social harms that intensify with China’s WTO entry.

John Donvan
Thank you. Derek, are you good with my moving on to another question? Yeah. Okay. Thank you

Speaker 9
Sir. This is for the decoupling side. It seems that there are two very different arguments going on. One is entirely driven by fear of a war and the other is concern about the economy. So which is it? Is it a concern that we do not have the capacity or the willingness to deter China militarily or that the economic effects irrespective of what China does, militarily are so detrimental that we need to decouple?

John Donvan
That’s a really good dissection of what’s been happening in the conversation. Why don’t we take that?

Isaac Stone Fish
So the two arguments are interrelated but they’re not actually aligned. So the military argument is the US needs to reduce its China exposure, it needs to do a level of managed decoupling or perhaps fold decoupling in order to protect itself and for national security reasons. And I agree with the points that everyone’s been making, that while you do that you should be moving closer to your allies rather than further away there entirely. The economic argument for decoupling is about fairness and externalities. Fairness, I’ll let Derek talk about, that’s part of what he’s been saying about his point about the nineties. The externalities is what happens when you are supporting Chinese competitors via your long decades of engagement in China. What is the price that we are all paying for a dominant communist party globally? What is the price we are paying for pollution from Chinese entities that are supported by US trade? How do we think through that? How do we structure through it? And then I think decoupling also can be done on an individual or on a corporate level. Again, so many examples of US and Chinese universities where you have 20 people from the communist party on one side and 20 people not from a government on the other side trying to have a conversation that is very party led and very party dominated.

Derek Scissors
So I’m very scared of a war with China. I don’t think it’s likely, but I’m scared of it and I agree we should be preparing for it and I don’t think we are. But the econ argument doesn’t rely on a war with China. It just relies on China being a predator, China being a malevolent entity. It’s a cult of personality dictatorship. So I’m just going to very quickly, the comparison that Ben made to Brexit. Brexit is Britain separating from the eu. That is not the US separating from China. If you see China as equivalent to the eu, first I’m never going to convince you, but also I think you’re out of your mind. So we need the separation doesn’t require a war. A war is scary, but it requires us understanding that China is in the current government ruled by the communist party is a malevolent entity. That’s the kind of country you don’t want harming you other side to respond.

Benn Steil
Obviously Derek knows this. When I gave the example of Brexit, I was referring to the economic effects of the decoupling and I’m simply arguing that the economic effects of the United States decoupling from China are multiples of the economic effects of Britain decoupling from the European Union.

John Donvan
Alright, speaking of the economic impact, one thing we haven’t discussed is the fact that China holds an awful lot of US debt. How does that play into that? Does that give them leverage? Does that give us leverage?

Susan Shirk
Well, for years people have worried that that kind of dependence of the United States on China holding a lot of our debt. One day they could just pull the plug, pull out all their money and the America would collapse. And as in the last few weeks we’ve seen small changes in the dollar and in American reserves there’s no evidence. I don’t think that we know that it’s coming from China. It means that everybody watching what a chaos there is in the United States right now is feeling very worried about whether or not those reserves are really as secure as they originally believed. But it does ultimately it’s a kind of dependence that we need. I mean we’re not going to get rid of that and that’s one of the reasons actually, Derek, that I think your proposals for cutting off capital floats to China is really a very draconian move of the sort that we normally only see during peace time, I mean during wartime. So I think it’s a form of decoupling which is likely to lead to increased hostility and the risk of actual war.

Derek Scissors
So just let me point out that Susan just said that my proposal to stop US capital supporting China is draconian, which I think is reasonable. Whereas Bento said, I’m not really proposing decoupling, so I wish the other side would get their story straight. I will say that on us bond dependence on China, the peak of Chinese bond holdings in the United States was we don’t get monthly figures that are accurate, but somewhere between June, 2014 and June, 2015, and unfortunately the real problem, we’ve borrowed a lot of money since then not from China. So the reason the dollar is vulnerable China is because of our stupid policies, but it’s not the case that we are, get back to your question, that we’re vulnerable to the Chinese, we’re vulnerable to our own foolishness.

Benn Steil
There are some relatively simple policy tools that we could implement right now that would cut our current account deficit with China and do minimal damage. For example, few people are aware of the fact that under the IRS tax code, a Chinese state entity investing in the United States in a portfolio investment buying an asset like a treasury bond or an IBM bond pays 0% tax none. When you buy an IBM bond, you’ll pay about 37%. That gives China an enormous incentive to accumulate US assets. That increase in our capital account surplus with China is then mirrored by an increase in the current account deficit. In other words, China has to sell us more in order to acquire the dollars to buy US tax subsidized debt. So I calculate for example, that if we simply eliminated this anomaly in the US tax code and imposed this standard 30% withholding on all Chinese portfolio investment in the United States, we would reduce the current

Susan Shirk
Account only Chinese. You think

Benn Steil
Only Chinese call up. I have to call her up on time, reduce the current account deficit for 16%.

John Donvan
Thank you for your questions. We have to move on to our closing round and in our closing round the debaters take the floor one more time and tell us one more time why they’re making the case for yes or no on our central question, which is should the US decouple from China and here to make his closing statement as a yes Answer to that question one more time. Isaac, the floor is yours.

Isaac Stone Fish
Thank you. I’m going to do the why and also why we talked about military, we talked about safety and externalities, we talked about the Chinese Communist Party and the fact that, and no one here and frankly probably vanishing few people in China want to live in a world dominated by the Chinese Communist Party. Also, something we’ve never talked about is that decoupling is popular and for so long, part of the reason we’ve gotten into it, yeah, I see that face in the back, not in this room. We are not representative of America here. Thank you very much. We are the self-appointed elite and we feel very differently about decoupling that the rest of Americans do. Should we listen to the voice of the people? Sure. It’s a debate that we’re having right now, but they feel very, very strongly on the subject. How do you decouple, use de-risking to decouple?

Isaac Stone Fish
The idea is not let’s eliminate every Chinese company from America. Let’s kick out all the Chinese students. That sounds barbaric and horrific and I hope that the US and China don’t get so bad that we have to get to a place like that. Rather it’s you’re a corporation. Look at the joint ventures you have with the Chinese Communist Party. Figure out which ones are likely to get sanctioned. Figure out which ways your joint ventures with Chinese state entities are supporting the People’s Liberation Army or supporting the ministry of state security, your university, your petrified about the Trump administration coming in and cutting your funding, cut your connections to various pernicious party entities before the Trump administration finds those and uses them as an excuse to reduce your federal funding. These are ways to do it. This is not only a national conversation, this is happening state legislators, universities, companies, but it’s something that we should all be part of and we should all be discussing. Thank you

John Donvan
Susan Turk, you’re up next. You’re closing statement as you answer no to the question. Should the US decouple from China?

Susan Shirk
So I want to use my last chance to say something about talent and human capital, which really hasn’t come up enough in our discussion. The United States has a very powerful asymmetric advantage over China and in its global technological leadership, which is its ability to attract talented people from around the world, including China to its world-class universities and r and d enterprises. Decoupling would squander this advantage. So choking off the flow of talent to the United States would represent a major national security risk. Chinese China has a lot of the top AI talent and we need to attract that talent. People in China, as Isaac knows right now, there are a lot of young people lying flat. There’s unemployment, they’re demoralized. This is the time to actually recruit more Chinese to America because when you look at the talent, the people who come here and get PhDs in American universities, most of them remain in the United States. They go on to become permanent residents, citizens, the same rates as people from other countries. So it’s really important that we not decouple, we maintain the flow of talented people from around the world, especially China to the United States. And that means let’s not get into a race to the bottom with China out of nationalism, extreme fear of security threats. Let’s become a better version of ourselves instead of acting like China.

John Donvan
Thank you Derek. You are up. You’ve been arguing yes to the question. Should the US a couple from China and here is your closing.

Derek Scissors
So I want to make an economic point really briefly. We have 90 seconds and then I want to close the moral point, which is totally unfair, but they told me to come up with something new in the last 90 seconds. The economic point is there are a whole range of US separation actions from China involving manufacturing production, involving capital, involving technology that would make our economy healthier, would make our society healthier. I can’t go through them all, so I’m just going to ask you, you think about what would make our economy and society healthier, you’re going to find out there’s less Chinese involvement and that’s because China is a predatory economic actor under a cult of personality. Dictator. I don’t know how anyone can think any different. Xi Jinping is never going to retire until he is dead and he is not looking out for the wellbeing of ordinary Americans.

Derek Scissors
Now I’m going to make the moral point. People think Trump is tough on China. In 2020 while he was president, about 380,000 Americans died of a disease that was caused by Chinese irresponsibility. I don’t know, I don’t want to say China. They didn’t do it on purpose. I don’t even want to say how irresponsible they were. They’ve lied about it since aggressively, they use the situation to their advantage in economics and health and politics. They’ve blamed us. In 2020, the stock of US investment in Chinese securities under President Trump rose $300 billion. And if you think rightly that we shouldn’t reward a pandemic originating in China with hundreds of billions of dollars of more money, you’re already halfway to my side. That’s the most extreme example. But it’s the idea of the whole our side of debate. You don’t reward their behavior with economic engagement with the United States. Thank you.

John Donvan
Thank you. Derek and Ben Steel. You get the last word? You are answering. No to the question. Should the US decouple from China? Your closing please.

John Donvan
This is open to debate. I’m John Donvan. Hi everybody. A declaration by the American president made early in his second term quote. We are going to conquer the vast frontiers of science and we are going to lead humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars. Donald Trump addressing Congress on March 4th, 2025. Putting people on Mars is of course a longstanding dream or pipe dream depending on your viewpoint. Nasa America’s space agency has seemed committed in some way to making that happen, but not with the same energy and focus that put men on the moon in 1969, only eight years after NASA set out to do that. Not that the agency is not interested in Mars. There are two Mars rovers up there right now that NASA sent exploring the planet. NASA orbiters are circling, but those are robots. They are not people. And NASA’s more immediate effort involving people has been getting back to the moon, both for its own sake and then eventually as a stepping stone to Mars.

John Donvan
But at the same time, other players are joining the game who do seem in more of a hurry to put people on the Martian surface. There’s China, of course, and India, Elon Musk’s, SpaceX, and of course we know how much he’s got the ear of the president whose recent declaration to Congress suggests that he too wants to hurry things up for America. So should we we be organizing our efforts and energies around putting women and men on Mars or is there a case to do the exact opposite, which would be to walk away from the whole idea of humans on the red planet as we come up on the 62nd anniversary of the discovery of water on Mars? That’s the issue we’re going to debate framed around this question. Should the US prioritize settling Mars? Let’s meet our debaters. Answering yes to that question. I want to welcome Eric Berger. Eric is a journalist and a meteorologist who is the senior space editor at ours Technica, as well as the author of two books, liftoff and Reentry, which both detail the rise in continued story of SpaceX. Eric, welcome to the program. It’s great to have you.

Eric Berger
Well, it’s great to be here. Thanks very much.

John Donvan
And answering no to the question, which again, should the US prioritize settling Mars? I want to welcome Sharon Derone. Sharon is a freelance science writer with a focus on space. Her work has been featured in the Atlantic and in Wired and the Washington Post and National Geographic and a lot of others. Her work has also been anthologized in best American Science and Nature writing in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Sharon, welcome to the program. It’s great to have you on open to debate.

Shannon
Thanks so much for having me.

John Donvan
Alright, let’s get to our opening statements. This is a chance where each of you has the floor to yourself exclusively for a few minutes to explain why you’re answering yes or no to our question. Eric, you are up first. Again, the question, should the US prioritize settling Mars? Your answer is yes. Please tell us why.

Eric Berger
My answer is yes. So I live in Houston, Texas just a few miles from Space Center. The city’s pro basketball team is named the Rockets, so we love space down here. And speaking of the rockets, they won their first NBA championship 30 years ago. They played the New York Knicks. Now you’re probably thinking, how is this germane? Well, here’s how the NBA finals take place during the summer and it gets hot and humid here. One of the sports writers covering the series from New York Post apparently did not enjoy his mid-summer visit to Space City. Now I can empathize, but he described Juin as a steamy bug infested, nondescript prairie town. The headline over his column was a single word hellhole. Now I have to tell you, I’ve lived in Houston for 30 years. I met my wife and raised a family here. We like it. It’s really all about perspective.

Eric Berger
I bring this up because my colleague, who is a wonderful writer and journalist is called Mars a hellhole many times over. And you know what? I totally concede the point. So it’s like the debate over seriously. Mars on his best day is far less hospitable than Antarctica on its worst day. That does not mean we should not go. Mars is a hellhole compared to Hawaii, even to Houston and Midsummer, but it is the best nearest option for humans to try to live off this planet. Sure, there’s no breathable air and prolonged exposure to radiation on the surface is problematic, but you should try living on the Moon Europa. Now that’s really a hellhole. What this debate comes down to is whether you think humans should live on earth forever or whether we should expand outward and into the unknown. It isn’t our nature to explore, to multiply and to satiate our curiosity about what is beyond an X Hill.

Eric Berger
Some people argue against humans going to Mars and other world saying we will harm them. What right do we have, especially after what we’ve done on earth to trample other worlds under our boots? Well, I have my concerns about what humans are doing on earth, deep concerns, but I also like to live in a house. I like eat three meals a day and I certainly like air conditioning in the summer in Houston. Humans modify their environments. It’s what we do. Unlike some critics of our species, I just don’t see us as a vermin bringing war and pestilence to new and pristine worlds. For all of our faults, I think humans are mostly good. So why should we go to Mars and settle there? Well, I don’t think it should be defined a backup for planet earth. Astronomers have identified and characterized thousands of exoplanets during the last two decades, but this is still the best world we know of and we should do everything to keep it that way.

Eric Berger
The real reason to go to Mars I believe, is because humans should be a space-faring species. It really is the next step forward. And the good news is that flying to and living in new and challenging environments will spur humans to come up with new solutions to old problems. Think about the major challenges of surviving on Mars. There’s a shortage of arable land, like there’s none. There’s a lack of power and it’s really just a hostile environment. General, yes, I can see all of this. Mars is a hellhole right now, so one can only imagine the advancements in biotechnology, robotics, solar and nuclear energy, geoengineering and much more that we dreamed up to solve these problems. And these ideas will all have immeasurable benefits back here on earth. And think about this. So much of the 20th and 21st centuries have been marked by human degradation of this world, deforestation, climate change, landfills, nuclear waste.

Eric Berger
How much of a redemptive stories for a species would it be if we could take on another world, a dry and desolate place like Mars and renew conditions for life there? That is what is possible in the future by taking the first steps towards space settlement today. It boils down to this, if we are never ever going to leave earth to explore and settle beyond this rock, then what does that mean for our species? It’s so limiting. Humans don’t like to live in a box, however large and green our current planet is. So I choose to expand humanity rather than chaining us to a single world. Thank you and I look forward to our discussion today.

John Donvan
Thank you very much, Eric. So Shannon, you disagree. You believe the US should not prioritize settling Mars. You have this chance now to make your case.

Shannon
Thank you. I want to start with a quote from Ursula Lewin. It’s a rare gift to know where you need to be before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be. I am arguing no today and forever that we should focus on settling humans on Mars for a few different reasons. I’m going to focus on four. The first is that it is illegal and unethical. There is this thing called the Outer Space Treaty, which was formed in 1967 where many nations essentially agreed to the peaceful use of outer space. This was during the Cold War. While it is wildly outdated, the ethics behind it still stand. The two most important parts of that treaty for today’s debate are one that no nation can stake a claim on any planetary body, whether that’s an asteroid or a planet. The second is regarding planetary protection, that no nation should interfere with the integrity of any planetary body if there perhaps was once life or could be life currently.

Shannon
So any expansion or human settlement on Mars would automatically violate both of those. The second reason, and I think Eric pointed this out in his opening, is the idea of settlement and colonization. I personally find it appalling that after hundreds of years of bearing witness to the consequences of colonization, that it is still a part of a conversation that we should still think about doing that off world. That we have not thoroughly learned our lesson to what happens to people and to our society when we are pro colonization. The third, as Eric mentioned, is that Mars is a hellhole. It is not hospitable to humans. There’s no air, there’s no water. The radiation is out of control. The soil is toxic, it’s full of perchlorates. The pressure is so low that if you’ve got a small puncture in your spacesuit, you’re going to start to asphyxiate.

Shannon
And while you asphyxiate, your blood will boil, evaporate and freeze at the same time. And the fourth is that I am a huge proponent of space exploration. Anything I’ve ever written has been space exploration. I think there is a huge difference between actual true exploration in the name of science and seeking claim for a place where we think that we should go. I think that as Eric I’m sure knows, and everybody knows this, that the amount of money it would take to build any kind of infrastructure on Mars, whether that’s for three humans or for a whole settlement of people is trillions and trillions of dollars. And it is absurd to me that we would even entertain the idea of investing that many resources into a world that is so deadly when we have a perfectly wonderful planet here that desperately needs our help. We need help living here.

Shannon
I think that we absolutely must keep exploring Mars. I think we absolutely must keep exploring the universe and the solar system. It is one of the most incredible things humans can do, but I really struggle with this narrative about settlement that we should be an interplanetary species. Why? That’s what I want to know. That’s what I struggle with. Why do we need to, why is robotic exploration not enough? Why do we feel so pushed against these limits? I think that we are attached to this idea of interplanetary immortality and it is in a large form rejection of the limits as human beings, that we die, that we have limits here on earth. Maybe we’re stuck here, but I think that the narrative and the story that we’re constantly hearing that we should become interplanetary with humans is actually a really dangerous one.

John Donvan
Thank you very much Shannon and thank you Eric. I want to summarize what I think that I’ve heard each of you say, but first I’m just curious about things that have inspired you to be interested in this topic in the first place. I know for myself it was watching the moon landing as a child. And I remember specifically that night going out to my backyard and looking up at the moon and thinking things would never be the same again because I was looking at a place in the sky where there are actually people. And it’s a fascinating thought that stays with me to this day. Eric, I’m wondering for, was it something like that? Was it reading science fiction? Where did your interest come from?

Eric Berger
I had really two formative moments I think that propelled me to study astronomy in college. Very useful degree by the way. First of these was when I was a kid. We had an assignment, this probably was third or fourth grade, so it was around 1980 or early 1980s. And we wrote to NASA via post just asking them for more information about what they were doing. And I got back these wonderful eight by 11 glossy photos, some taken by the voyagers of both Jupiter and the outer planets. And it just was, first of all, it was so cool that nasa, this agency which only a decade earlier, had sent people to the moon, would write back to me and then sent these images as evocative images about what was out there. That was really inspiring. And then the other thing was I grew up in rural Michigan and a couple of times a year there would be these spectacular meteor showers. And I just remember in the dead of winter sort of getting bundled up and going out and laying in my backyard and looking up at the stars and seeing these incredible meteor showers of things falling back to earth. And just that was such a powerful moment to see that it sort of ignited with me a long lifelong interest in looking up the stars and seeing and wondering what was out there and thinking what would it be like to go there? And so I’ve just had a fascination with space for my entire life since then.

John Donvan
What about you, Shannon? Anything like that for you?

Shannon
Different story but similar. I’ve always been interested in space. I think it started when I was around seven or eight when I saw Saturn through a telescope and really hit me that that’s an entirely separate world from this one. And I would stay up late at night trying to zoom out and zoom out from earth and LA and trying to figure out, God, this universe is so big. And it just blew my mind. And then when I was 13, like many people have this story, I saw the movie contact and it changed my life. I wanted to be Ellie Airway. I still do. I would go in that ship if given the chance right now, even if it meant never coming back. It makes me feel such a sense of awe and connection. And I think for me it’s really moving that I’m a part of this really beautiful universe and that somehow we came to be in it. I think it’s incredible.

John Donvan
Okay, so what we all have in common, three space nerds and there are more of us out there than I think people understand and I think we’re going to probably convert a few people today with this debate. And although we just found common ground on being space nerds, this is a debate and we’ll be right back to continue the debate after this break. I’m John Donvan. This is open to debate. Had you go back to there. It’s that’s what I’m looking for. Okay. Welcome back to Open to Debate. I’m John Don Van and we’re taking on this question. Should the US prioritize settling Mars? Our debaters are Eric Berger, senior space editor at ours, Technica and Sharon Tarone, freelance science writer. And in our opening statements, to summarize very briefly, I heard, Eric, you make the point fundamentally that the human race was born to expand, that we are curious that it’s always been our history, that it’s almost a moral imperative to continue to explore and to go farther than we’ve already gone before.

John Donvan
That there’s always a frontier before us. And that in fact, in pursuing this particular frontier, there is a great deal to be learned if we ultimately would succeed in reaching the goal of settling on Mars. How much would we have learned, how much new technology, how much progress would’ve been made in areas of science and just understanding and perhaps even philosophy as we understand more and more how our horizons can expand. You do concede that Mars, however at the moment is a hell hole. Shannon Jerone, you argue that Mars is a hell hole and that’s one of your reasons for making the case that we should not be putting humans into this effort. You do believe very much in exploration, but you’re saying primarily through technology, not by putting people up there that going to Mars would be both illegal and unethical. You also make the point that colonization, we have a history of learning the downside of colonization, particularly if there’s a place where there might have been life in the past or may still be life that’s undetermined at this point on Mars, but there are reasons to believe that perhaps there was life there in the past and that that’s fundamentally why you feel that now and forever.

John Donvan
You say we should not be putting people on Mars or actually anywhere. I think beyond our immediate neighborhood, I am not sure will perhaps talk about how you feel about the moon, but I think those are the main dividing lines I’ve heard and I want to take since you structured your argument. So particularly Shannon, I want to use that a little bit of a structure to take it back to Eric. Excuse me, Eric. So you’ve heard Shannon say that it’s unethical and not to mention illegal under existing treaties, international treaties to settle Mars. I think we could go back and forth on the illegality issue and maybe not get very far on where we feel about that. But on the unethical part of it, there’s more to dig into there. And I just want to ask you, do you recognize the case that she’s making, not to agree with her, but do you recognize what’s at stake in what Shannon’s talking about and what’s your response to it?

Eric Berger
Well first of all, lemme just say on the legal side, I’m not a space lawyer, but certainly I’ve read the outer space treaty, which was created back in 1967, I believe, and it does preclude nations, existing nations. The United States cannot go to Mars and declare that this is part of the United States just as we can’t go to the moon and do that. But you could create new nations on Mars. So if you took a private mission to Mars and set up a settlement there, that’s perfectly legal. And in regard to the other part, the other issue that she raised, Joan, NASA has been working to identify regions of Mars where there is likely not accident life, if there is life anywhere on the planet and that these would be goods places for humans to go if they were to explore there, ask for her argument about the ethical part of this. And I think, I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but I just would probably like to get a better sense from her of what sort of the real objection to having humans on Mars is. Is it concern about destroying a pristine ecosystem? Is it concern about the possibility that there are microbes below the surface that we would be changing their ecosystem? So I’d love to respond to that, but I just would want to get a little better sense of her objections from an ethical standpoint.

Shannon
Yeah. Oh, sorry. I can jump in if you want, but

John Donvan
You should have jumped in without me prompting you. I apologize. So just go for

Shannon
It being too polite. My ethical objections are several fold what you mentioned, Eric, that yes, it takes a lot of effort for us to find out whether there was one’s life or is currently life. It’s tremendously laborous with our little rovers, but for me, I really struggle with what obviously interfering with the pristine wilderness, an environment that we have agreed to protect the same way we protect our wilderness here on earth. For me, I also struggle with this feeling of entitlement and I think that it is worth pointing out for me, the ethical part is this. It is so deep seated in our culture to be colonialists, to really feel this entitlement that well, we should send a private space company like SpaceX and set up a settlement on Mars. When I personally feel like that would end in disaster on many different reasons they would, people would die. But then you’re introducing a whole host of other ethical issues. Like if you go with this private space flight, someone controls your air, someone controls your access to water, someone controls your access to food, then you’re really in trouble. Now you’re looking at forced labor and a whole host of ethical problems. I think we really have to pause and think about where that sense of should comes from.

Eric Berger
I hear you. I would sort of counter the fact that you clearly have objections to human history, but the whole of human history is sort of the outward expansion of humans with all of our messy problems out of Africa into Europe and doing damage to ecosystems. And there was the whole neanderthal battle and then obviously the problems with colonization of the Americas. That is all part of human history and I’d like to think that maybe we’ve learned a little bit from that, but the reality is that there are not sentt life forms on Mars. There’s probably not even microbes below the surface. We don’t know that for sure. Certainly the rovers are looking for them.

Shannon
Can I interrupt and actually just share that quote, that famous quote from Carl Sagan where he says, if we do in fact find microbes on Mars, then Mars belongs to the microbes.

Eric Berger
Well that’s fine and I have a great respect for Carl. Sagan had the pleasure and honor to meet him at one point, but I think reasonable people could disagree about that. Did Antarctica belong to the microbes before people went there? I mean, I think we have a fundamental disagreement here and I don’t think we’re going to change each other’s minds, but I don’t think that we should not visit other worlds as people because there’s the possibility of microbial life there.

Shannon
Can I ask you one question, Eric, about this? We started out as microorganisms, we’ve evolved over billions of years from microorganisms. If there was another species that felt it was entitled to come and trample all over earth and destroy any potential of us evolving into the beings that we are, do you think that that’s right?

Eric Berger
I’m not sure that that’s right or not. I’d prefer to have a robust space program to deal with that eventuality if it came to it. The fact of the matter is that again, there probably is not life on Mars, and so we’re going to lock ourselves into this planet and never go anywhere because of the possibility that life could exist. Like I said, NASA has thought pretty deeply and seriously about this problem is identifying zones where they believe it would be safe for humans to land and not disrupt any ecosystem that might be existing on Mars. So I’m not sure we’re going to agree on this and I guess that’s good since this is a debate. But again, if we take that attitude then we’re never going to go anywhere in space. And I just think that that ultimately is incredibly limiting for the human experience.

John Donvan
I think, sorry, go ahead Shannon. Then I have a question for you on

Shannon
The ethics. Okay. The voyagers have left the Helio pause To say we’re not going anywhere in space is false. I think that what you’re pointing out, Eric, is this, we really struggle as humans, which I get to see ourselves to see our robotic explorers as surrogates of ourselves. We really relate to seeing human beings doing things that we wish we could do. It’s just like mirror neurons 1 0 1. But to say that we haven’t been anywhere is insulting to NASA’s history and to us as humans, we have been all over the place. There’s so many places for us to go but limit human exploration as the definition of going somewhere then I think that’s not the best way to frame it.

John Donvan
Let me jump in for a moment and ask another question that has an ethical consideration and that is, as I understand it, earth is not permanent, that the sun is going to burn out and life will die here. It’s a long way off, I think maybe a billion and a half years from now, but there would be a time when the human race, if we don’t for any other reason, perish will perish because the system is ticking against us. Is there any sort of ethical imperative to try to save ourselves? And I know Eric, you aren’t necessarily making the lifeboat arrangement argument, but is there an ethical imperative to try to save ourselves or did I hear you say in your opening, Shannon, that sometimes we just death is part of life and death of the human race. I think you were implying it’s just something we have to accept.

Shannon
Yeah, I think that actually if you talk to a psychologist about our obsession with becoming interplanetary, that there really is ultimately this denial of death and that this resistance to our limits as being humans. And I think that that’s a totally natural thing to struggle with. But no matter how far out you look, there are endings. Things end. And I think that that is ultimately what makes life meaningful and beautiful as human beings that have managed to live on this planet. And I think resisting against that fights back at our very nature of humanity and forces us to look elsewhere for distractions instead of thinking about what actually really matters here. Again, exploration is imperative, but trying to fight this, trying to fight death is not going to happen, especially going to a place that really is going to kill you faster than anywhere on earth.

John Donvan
Lemme let Eric jump in and see what his response is to that.

Eric Berger
Let me say a couple of things. First of all, I would pretty strongly disagree that it’s not in human nature to struggle against death. I mean the whole idea of natural selection and evolution and the origin of species is the struggle for survival that’s pretty hardwired into all life on earth, including human beings. And I think it explains some of our behaviors, but ask the question you asked John about should it be an ethical consideration that we should try to ensure the survival of the human species? I think that’s what you were getting at. It is interesting. If you look at surveys that are done about the things that NASA should be doing, right, public surveys about what the space agency ought to be spending its money on very last on them is settling the moon or Mars, right? That is not a public priority, absolutely. But what is consistently one of two top priorities is one is science. People want to study the planet and understand it. The other is protect us from asteroids. And I think that that is a proxy for making sure that earth is habitable and humans survive. And so I think in that sense that if we’re going to have a space program, part of its mission out to be ensure human survival.

Shannon
I have to share, this is the thing NASA calls Mars a punching bag for asteroids. There is one that lands on Mars roughly every single day that creates a crater of about 26 feet across in diameter. That’s a large sailboat. There’s no atmosphere to slow down meteorites or asteroids. It gets pummeled all the time. If you want to avoid getting hit by an asteroid, that is the worst place in the solar system, worse than here.

John Donvan
Alright. I want to bring it a little bit down to earth now with a different consideration. And as I mentioned in the opening, there are competitors working to get to Mars and very potentially before the United States does. If this becomes an American mission, ultimately China is very seriously focused on getting up there pretty soon. There’s a whole issue right now where the samples that the rovers are taking, there’s no way to get that stuff back to earth and that that’s a long-term project, which might take another decade for NASA to figure out a way to get samples that are being taken on the planet back to earth. China is already positioning itself to do that a lot earlier. I want to ask you to discuss, and this was not something either of you brought up in your opening, but just the space race aspect of this, which as we recall from the 1960s, the space race with the Soviet Union motivated so much of what NASA did. Would you address that first, Eric, whether for you that’s a case for as our opening statement, as our question that we’re debating embodies that we should prioritize Mars settlement now.

Eric Berger
So first of all, the space race can certainly concede right now between the United States and China’s primarily over the moon, right? It’s the Artemis program versus the international lunar research station that China has. So Mars is kind of in the background of that competition, but I think quite clearly China has very serious space ambitions and they have the very first spacecraft that they sent to Mars, not only landed on the moon, landed on Mars, but deployed a rover. And no nation had ever done anything like that in terms of Mars exploration. So they clearly have a credible program and they do have long-term ambitions to, as you said, not just return samples, which they very well could do before NASA does, but also put astronauts on the moon. I mean, excuse me, on the moon and then on Mars. And so to the extent that we have values in the United States today, I think we’d want to project those values, not just the moon, but to Mars and to be in the game, you have to be there. And so yeah, I think the space race is definitely part of it. I don’t think we’re actively engaged right now in a space race with China to get humans on Mars, but certainly that will be an increasing issue in coming decades. I have to believe.

Shannon
I think it’s interesting that you use the word game. I think that a lot of, I think the administration and a lot of people think about this as a game as a zero sum game and instead of, I understand that there’s a geopolitics involved, but ultimately it would cost us so much money to focus on any kind of Mars program. And Eric, as you know better than anybody, the plans change with every administration. There’s such a lack of consistency. I think he and I can actually agree on this, there’s such a lack of consistency between presidential administrations that one administration, it’s Mars and the next, it’s the moon and the next, it’s like actually let’s not do either of those things. And it really keeps NASA from being able to have a steady flow of money towards some specific program. I think that if we’re going to go to Mars for science reasons with human scientists, that’s a different story.

John Donvan
Eric, do you have a follow up to that?

Eric Berger
I would want to push back a little bit. We’ve talked a lot about the cost of going to Mars and I absolutely agree that if we’re going to use through traditional procurement and methods that NASA has, if you look in their directive and sort of look at their mission plans, it’s like six to eight to 10 launches of their biggest version of the space launch system rocket. And so this is like a human mission. A single human mission would cost Sharon’s Wright hundreds of billions of dollars. That has been the whole thrust of the push toward reusable rockets. And I realized that Elon Musk is a pretty toxic person in terms of his behaviors to a lot of people. And they don’t like what he’s doing with the US government. They don’t like the things he says and the way he behaves. I completely understand that and sympathetic toward that.

Eric Berger
But the reality is that over the last 20 years we have seen a revolution in reusable space flight and we are potentially on the cusp of having reusable, large reusable rockets that can put lots of payload into orbit. And so I think the interesting thing, and I think the reason why this debate is valuable to have right now is that yes, starships are blowing up, but at some point they’re going to stop blowing up and they’re going to start flying into orbit pretty frequently. If we can use the Falcon Nine Rocket as a guide, it’s going to fly 150 times this year. They’re launching them basically every other day. And so we are actually for the first time able to discuss not just as theoretical but as real the potential to send large payloads to Mars. I mean the biggest rovers we’ve sent to Mars, the biggest payloads are about one ton and the potential for a vehicle like Starship.

Eric Berger
And to be clear, there’s nothing else in the market today or even under development by anyone anywhere that’s like this is the potential to send a hundred tons at a time to the surface of Mars. Now SpaceX is a long way to go to make that a reality, but that’s a vision and they’ve made credible steps toward that. And so you are talking about for the first time having the ability to send lots of stuff and humans would need lots of stuff on Mars and to do it for a reasonable cost because Starship launches are not going to cost 2 billion. They’re going to cost on the order of tens of millions of dollars most likely. So I would push back that this is a trillion dollar program and I would also kind of push back and say that it’s probably not going to entirely be funded by governments. There will be commercial participation investment. And so it’s not something that’s going to break the bank of the US government because it’s going to be done differently or it’s not going to be done at all. The US government will never send a human mission to Mars. I don’t think

John Donvan
We’re coming up to a break, and I just wanted to check in with you on Shannon. No. One thing that occurs to me because in terms of prioritizing, Mars would suggest deprioritizing something else, especially for nasa, which has been mentioned. The Artemis project is focused on getting back to the moon. Where are you on the moon exploration part of this? And is your argument that we should stick to earth an argument that we should not have gone to the moon in 1969?

Shannon
No, I think it’s amazing. I think the Apollo program was absolutely incredible. And yes, it was done for geopolitical competition with Russia, but it was an absolutely inspiring, incredible and scientific endeavor. I don’t think that going to the moon in the past was a bad decision at all. I personally see there’s scientific value in studying the ice and the craters of the moon, and there’s lots of different scientific missions. But in terms of having a human presence on the moon, I personally think the Artemis program is kind of a waste. I mean, maybe that’s a controversial thing to say, but we’ve been there and I realize that there’s technological reasons why building the infrastructure to go back to the moon helps us leapfrog into going back to Mars or going to Mars with humans in general. But I don’t

John Donvan
See the purpose of it. You would deprioritize Artemis regardless completely. I want to ask you the same question in terms of prioritizing, something has to be deprioritized. Eric, would you deprioritize the Artemis program to get back to the moon in order for somebody else potentially to go to Mars since Artemis seems to be a kind of Mars launching pad idea?

Eric Berger
No, I would not deprioritize Artemis. I think the idea behind it is good. It’s been an excellent vehicle to build international collaboration and cooperation. Dozens of nations have signed the Artemis Accords that sort of want to follow the strictures put up by the outer space treaty and sharing data and openness and transparency and things like that. I think that’s all quite good. There are elements of it that are superfluous, like there’s a proposal to build a lunar space station that’s very expensive and doesn’t really add to the surface program. I believe we should move really fully into commercial launch programs, but there are ways to do our Artemis more affordably

Shannon
Commercial launch programs on the moon

Eric Berger
To the moon.

John Donvan
Sorry. No, you go ahead Shannon.

Shannon
Oh, I’m just wondering how do you see that going with private space companies having the ability, I realize they need a launch licenses to launch off of Earth, but how do you see that going in terms of abiding by the international agreements that we have with not contaminating other worlds or misusing them? Because unfortunately, as we can see in the world we’re in right now, that doesn’t go well somewhere.

Eric Berger
I mean, the first thing thing Apollo 11 crew did when they landed on the moon was jettison their trash. I know. So it’s like exploration is not perfect. And so I think it’s an open question. I think you’re going to have to have, and NASA will be involved in sort of setting the ground rules of what happens and trying to abide by norms and so forth. But I mean, humans are flawed and their companies are going to go and make money and try to do what they want. And so I think again, the fundamental question is do we want to extend the sphere of human activity, good, bad, ugly to other worlds, or do we want to keep it confined here on earth?

John Donvan
That is the question we’re debating. And it’s a perfect way to wrap this segment because we have to take a break and when we come back, we’re going to bring in some other voices to the conversation. I’m John Donvan, this is open to debate and we’ll be right back. Welcome back to Open To Debate. We’re taking on the question, should the US prioritize settling Mars? I’m John Donvan, and our debaters are Eric Berger, senior space editor for ours, Technica and Shannon Dione, freelance science writer. And what we’d like to do at this point in the program is bring in some other voices, individuals who are subject matter experts in this topic because they write about it or they’ve lived it in one way or the other. And the first person I want to welcome in is David Aoto. David is co-host of the Space Minds podcast and author of Open Space from Earth to Eternity. David, welcome to Open to Debate, and I want to say welcome back. You used to be one of the producers on our staff and now you’re focusing on space and you have two podcasts going in addition to the book coming out. Congratulations on all of that, but please come in and tell us what your question is for our debaters today.

John Donvan
I’m not hearing you, David. I don’t know if you have a mute or not.

Speaker 1
Oh, okay.

John Donvan
Now you’re up.

Speaker 1
Alright, thanks for having me John. So I have a question for Eric and Kirk Topher, Sharon, Eric, the first English colony, the New World was effectively a public-private partnership between the English crown and private entity, but what came of it was sort of a rough place, right? There was just indentured servitude and settlers were employees and sort of lots of abuses, lots of bonded debt. And so I guess my question is, is there a danger then with the sort of corporate driven future that we’re looking at toward the Red Planet, a sort of similar sensibility, or are those just growing pains in all of this? And Sharon, the question I have for you,

John Donvan
David, would you hold off and let Eric answer that one so that we remember your second question? Thanks.

Eric Berger
Thanks, David. I’ve been enjoying your podcast at Space News. I mean, look, the history of human colonization on earth and especially with Jamestown that you referenced are some pretty ugly, pretty ugly developments. I’m not sure there’s any way to sugar coat it. And so yes, that’s absolutely a real concern when people say, do you want Elon Musk deciding how you’re going to live on Mars? Do you want him setting the price of air on the surface of Mars? I mean, I hear those concerns. I understand those concerns, and I think that we ought to learn from history. And I think the people going into these explorations, it’s not going to be me. I’m 51, I feel like I’m probably too old to go to Mars. I’d love to visit a moon on the hotel on the moon one day. But I think the people going into are going to have to be eyes wide open.

Eric Berger
There’s going to have to be pretty clear terms for what happens. I think what we’ll also see pretty quickly and what bears out in human history is that the group of people that goes off and establishes a settlement on Mars is going to create their own rules. They’re going to be far beyond sort of the dictums or what rules or order initiated from Earth. They’re going to be on their own and they’re going to make their own rules and they probably will set those rules according to survival. And so will it become Lord of the Flies? Will it become something like Jamestown or will it be better? It’s definitely a risk, and I acknowledge that and I think the people going that will be brave and will be taking on those risks.

John Donvan
Shannon, you get to comment on that question. Yeah.

Shannon
Are those the options? Jamestown and Lord of the Flies better.

Eric Berger
Better. Those are the worst case options. Of course we can do better, but I’m just acknowledging the fact that yes, this is a valid concern and I think it is something we ought to be thinking about beforehand and so that there are strictures in place to address it.

John Donvan
David, your question for Shannon. I’m sorry,

Shannon
Shannon. I was going to say, I think that we’re sort of circling around an interesting topic nested in this, which is who gets to go, who goes? Who’s a part of the settlement? Who is making those laws when you’re there? Are we abiding by an international treaty? Are we using American laws? I mean, there’s so much to talk about when it comes to this, but I think that maybe leaning towards it being something that we can do and it will go well is hubris.

John Donvan
David, your question for Shannon?

Speaker 1
Sure, sure. Well, Shannon, you’ve talked about the risks of going to Mars, the sort of the variable hell hellhole that at least it currently is, but less about the risks of not going. And so I guess my question centers on do we risk the loss of some of these downstream technologies that we got from the Apollo program being like MRIs, computing and microelectronics and all of this that came at a time when the incentive was really just a geopolitical motivation and a national prestige issue. And so there’s that. And of course, maybe more importantly, this question of the galvanizing effects of doing great big things that you can filter and sort of see anecdotally through the population in terms of STEM involvement and the like.

Shannon
So I think that I have a fundamental problem with that question in the sense that why does doing great big things have to always involve humans doing things off of the planet? I mean, we do great. NASA does great big things all the time. Other space agencies do great big things all the time. We develop technology on earth without sending humans to other worlds that are life-changing and amazing. I don’t think that the metric by which to measure doing great big things involves moving a select group of human beings to a really deadly planet. And your question about do we sacrifice the potential technological developments by not creating a Mars program, I want to make this clear. I think that we should send NASA scientists and astronauts to Mars to do science. I don’t think they should stay there. I don’t think NASA would ever let them stay there because they would likely die. I think we should do that. I’m talking about a long-term presence. I think that it is honestly delusional that we would consider that an actual viable option when we’ve got a really cool planet or there’s air. I’m breathing it right now. It’s great.

John Donvan
Alright, we have to move on. David, thank you very much for your question. And now I want to bring in Andrea Fel. Andrea is the Houston Chronicles space reporter where she covers NASA and the commercial space sector. Andrea, thanks for joining us. And I know you’ve been listening, so we’re looking forward to hearing your question.

Speaker 5
Yeah, thanks for having me. One thing that stands out to me is space is one of these areas where countries tend to collaborate more or less despite geopolitical tensions on earth. Is there a way this collaborative spirit could be used to overcome some of these ethical issues that we’ve discussed surrounding sending humans turn another world?

John Donvan
Erica, I’d like you to take that first.

Eric Berger
Hi, Andrea. In my most optimistic moments, you could see a Mars mission being a point where humans came together. We saw in the Martian China helped out, but you could sort of see

John Donvan
Just to remind people, that was a movie,

Eric Berger
A novel. A novel and a movie. But yeah.

John Donvan
Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t read the novel

Eric Berger
Novel’s. Excellent.

John Donvan
Who wrote the novel? Just so we can give credit

Eric Berger
Andy, Andy Weir. So you could see NASA and China and Russia, kind of all the great space programs, India coming together, sort of all contributing to a human Mars to Mars mission. Just kind this culmination of humanity and sort of giving us a project to work together when we’re so much at odds here on earth. Unfortunately, having covered the space program for a couple of decades now, I’m pretty cynical and I have a hard time seeing that happen. Even with the Artemis program today, I think we’re seeing some fundamental tensions play out now between the United States and Europe because the actions of the Trump administration. So I think even sort of that partnership may get a little frayed. So I had love to see that happen. It’s just from a geopolitical reality standpoint, it’s difficult for me to see it coming to fruition.

Shannon
I’m sorry, but I agree with Eric. I think that there’s an interesting part in this, which is that we think of any kind of space activity as being really separate from earth when the consequences of any of that activity happens on earth, if there is any conflict in space, it’s playing out in war here. So I do think that there’s a lot of challenges. I mean, when it comes to robotics space missions, there’s so much international collaboration and there’s lots of reasons why that works well. But as earth as our culture becomes more tumultuous and divided, it makes that collaboration much more difficult. It’s not impossible, but I think in this moment would be really difficult.

John Donvan
Andrea, thank you very much for your question. Andrea, I have a question for you. How do I pronounce your surname, your last name?

Speaker 5
Felder.

John Donvan
Okay. I mispronounced it. So I’m just going to record that now and everybody can watch me do this. And I want to bring in now Andrea Felder. Andrea is the Houston Chronicle space reporter where she covers NASA and the commercial space sector. Okay, thank you, Andrea. Thank you very, very much for joining us. And next up, I want to welcome Gina suny. Gina has covered space exploration for a, b, c news, my former home for two decades, including the evolution of the commercial space industry, as well as NASA’s missions to Mars and other planets. Gino, welcome to open to debate, and please come on in with your question.

Speaker 6
I think my question is this, that we’ve had five presidents back to back, literally say we will go to Mars and with humans and we have not politically, what needs to change to make this happen and is it worth it?

John Donvan
Eric,

Eric Berger
You want to go first? Yeah,

John Donvan
Yeah, sounds like it’s up your

Eric Berger
Alley. Hi Gina. Hi

John Donvan
Eric. You seem to know everybody that we’ve brought into the program so far. It is a small fraternity or

Eric Berger
I’ve closely with Gina and Andrea. So yes. So I would say nothing needs to change politically. I think Shannon hit very strongly on one of the main stumbling blocks of this already, and that’s cost, right?

Eric Berger
It has been enormously expensive to try to do it. And there’s a great book about the first Bush effort to do this called Mars Wars, which sort of goes into the political intrigue surrounding the development of the first, I think vision for going, sending humans to Mars. Politically, I don’t think anything needs to change, but what needs to happen is you need actually a transportation system that enables this by unlocking lower cost access to space. And that really has been the thrust of the commercial space industry over the last 20 or 25 years is building large rockets that can fly again and again and try to approach airplane like operations. And so if you do eventually get to a transportation system that could open up Mars, then it becomes more of a viable political option. And so again, that is the promise of Starship is that it could open that pathway to Mars, which really has been closed for all practical purposes here to four.

Shannon
I agree with Eric that the basic infrastructure launch infrastructure is required. We have to have an actual transportation mechanism. But to go back to ethics, there’s a reason why nasa, I mean yes, the rockets aside, but there’s a reason why NASA hasn’t been ready to send humans to Mars yet is because the radiation, the health effects. They ethically also for PR reasons, they ethically cannot and will never send any of their astronauts to Mars until they can ensure their safe return home. And when I mean their safe return home, I mean not coming back with three months left to live because they have such extreme cancer.

Speaker 6
So

Shannon
Until they have that shielding has to be added to the transportation vehicles. There has to be water and extra steel to protect from the radiation exposure in transit and also while on Mars. So until that is solved, it’s a no-go, which is why it’s not been pushed forward is one big reason why it’s not been pushed forward from them.

John Donvan
Thank you very much for your question, gene, and thanks for joining us on the point that was just made until Mars is made livable. Eric, what this program could benefit from is just a sort of image for the listener and the viewer to be able to imagine what would happen on Mars to make it livable, this notion of terraforming. Can you take 45 seconds to sum up what a livable would have to be done to a livable Mars, and what would be the approach taken to make that happen so that we can all picture what that’s supposed to look like?

Eric Berger
Well, I am not an engineer. I’m certainly not an expert in geoengineering, and I would expect that the solution to making Mars more livable is very complex, challenging, and probably beyond our current means of accomplishing. So I don’t have a great engineering answer for you. I just know that it probably is possible there are some innovative ideas and solutions out there to address this, but I would absolutely concede that it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

John Donvan
But lemme just follow up. One, is it your belief it could happen that it’s a solvable problem? And does that lead to your opening statements, inspiration for the notion that we would learn so much by being able to do that in the way that we learned so much in the sixties through the race to the moon? How convinced are you of that? And then I want to take it to you, Shannon.

Eric Berger
I think it’s fundamentally true that the big problems, the humans only really solve big problems when they’re facing them directly head on. And so once we get to Mars and take data and really understand the nature of what’s there and how bad it is, then we would find solutions. That is the whole point. That’s all humans have done. The main thing they’ve done is take their surroundings and make them more livable and adaptable as we’ve sort of struggled with natural selection and evolution to survive. That’s kind of what we’ve done.

Shannon
Well, I have some science for you. So to me, terraforming and the idea of it that is so unethical, but it is also for me, just the definition of hubris. But the reason,

John Donvan
By the way, while definition defining it as hubris, can you just define terraforming for people who don’t know that term?

Shannon
So terraforming is using geo-engineering techniques to create a livable for humans environment on the planet Mars. That is like you’ve heard Elon,

John Donvan
So get oxygen into the atmosphere and raise the temperature and do something on a big global scale to change the reality

Shannon
Of that process, trying to get some algae to bloom to then absorb some of the CO2 and release oxygen. But here’s the thing, Mars is a third the size of earth. It has cooled a lot faster than our planet. It’s magnetic field. Its core is dormant, it’s cooled off, it’s done, which means that there’s no magnetic field. That magnetic field not only serves a purpose to reflect cosmic rays and radiation, but it also holds in an atmosphere. So you could in some dream world, drop algae, melt the ice caps, take the oxygen out of the CO2 ice. But what we know and what we’ve learned from NASA emissions is that once that magnetic field disappeared, the solar wind blew away mars’s atmosphere. If you don’t have an atmosphere, you don’t have a magnetic field or an active core to hold onto that atmosphere, you are drawing words in the sand while the tide comes in. There’s no point.

Eric Berger
It’s a big C, it’s a big challenge. And yeah, the solar wind did strip the magnetic field the way billions of years ago when Mars was a livable world. We think that conditions would’ve been great for life there. And if there’s some way to take it back to that kind of condition, I think that would be great.

John Donvan
Okay, so we have a disagreement over techno optimism in this moment.

Shannon
Sorry, terraforming is just theoretical. It’s not actually, there’s no actual data behind that. It could actually happen. It’s just a conversation.

John Donvan
So let’s move on to our closing round and our closing round. You each have a chance to make one more case for your position of yes or no on whether the US should prioritize settling Mars. You go first in this closing round. Eric, the floor is yours.

Eric Berger
Well, Shannon, thanks for a great discussion today. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you about these things. One of my favorite works of science fiction is the foundation series. It was written by Isaac Asimov, and I have found him to be remarkably insightful about the future at the World’s Fair in 1964, he made a series of predictions about what the world would look like half a century later. And he really got a lot of things right, like automated kitchen devices, satellite communication, HDTVs, lab grown meat, solar power, and much, much more. And so I first read the Foundation series decades ago, about the same time I was looking up at those meteor showers and a depiction of one planet in the novel Foundation. Earth has stuck with me over the years and at my age, believe me, I’ve forgotten a lot. But in their search for earth, the protagonist visit a planet called, so there are about just 1200 people inhabitants on the entire world, each occupying each estate occupied by a single person.

Eric Berger
They each have hundreds of robots to carry out their household and other, these people never interacted. And they communicated via holograms and telekinesis and what an odd, lonely, depressing world. And I guess that’s why it stuck with me. It’s of course not anything like earth of today. But what about the future? In the developed world, birth rates have fallen well below the rate needed to maintain a steady population, and that’s fine. I would probably agree that we’ve got too many people on the planet, but sometime around 2080, our population is going to start to shrink. And there are lots of hints in the current data that the population could rapidly contract in the 21 hundreds. We’re also at the beginning of a revolution in AI and robotics, and people spend more time staring at their screens than they do talking to other people. We’re leading more insular lives, and I’m not saying earth will become solar, but it does offer an extreme example of what might happen to society that stops growing and expanding and becomes increasingly technology reliant and just turns inward on itself.

Eric Berger
So I say, let’s let the most intrepid of us go off to Mars and make it less of a hellhole. Let’s use it as Ford base to jump off to other places in the solar system, perhaps can meat or Titan or the clouds of Venus, and let us learn enough about living in difficult environments and long duration space flight that one day we might settle worlds around other stars. That’s the vision I have for humanity. It’s fundamentally opposed to Shannon, I believe, but I do think that it’s in our nature to go outward. So thanks very much.

John Donvan
Thank you very much. And now Shannon, you get the last word again, your answer to the question, should the US proprietary settling Mars is No. You’re closing on why you’re a no.

Shannon
Well, Eric, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you about this. This has been really fun. I want to read one more quote before I finish. This is from Carl. Young space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself because it is easier to go to Mars or the Moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being. I will forever argue no, that we should not be focusing settling humans on Mars. I understand by this point that Mars has become this bright red symbol of immortality. We think if we can just get there, if we can just find a way to live there, we can outrun death. But in reality, the only thing waiting for us on Mars is death. It is a place to die, not a place to live. My wish is that we would recalibrate our relationship to the cosmos and the way that we think about Mars and other planets and our place in this universe that we are a part of a shared environment and we are stewards of this environment the same way we’re stewards of Yosemite or Yellowstone or Antarctica.

Shannon
My wish is that we would think about that we are a part of this beautiful universe and that we can be a part of something without taking it, that we can be a part of something without destroying it. I know it’s less romantic. I know it’s less exciting, it’s less science fiction, it’s less adventurous. But we know how to fix the problem. We know that Mars is not actually the answer. The answer is here we have a planet with everything we could possibly need. There’s air, there’s water, there’s life, and there’s a future. So thank you.

John Donvan
Thank you, Shannon. And that is a wrap on this debate, and I really want to thank both of you, Eric Berger and Shannon Cerone, for being willing to meet over this topic, to come to the table and actually to have a very robust disagreement in such a civil and informative way. I think a lot of us learned a lot that we didn’t know before, and you’ve given us a lot to think about. So thanks both of you for taking part in this open to Debate program.

Shannon
Thank you so much for having me.

Eric Berger
Thank you.

John Donvan
And I also want to thank my fellow journalists for bringing their expert questions to the table. So thank you David and Andrea and Gina. And finally, a big thank you to you, our audience, for tuning into this episode of Open To Debate. As a nonprofit, we depend on people like you to support Open to Debate. And I also want to mention, of course, our regular supporters, which include, I’m sorry, my script has stopped. So I’m going to go to Paper and I want to thank, I’ll do it this way, as a nonprofit to combat extreme polarization through civil debate. Our work is made possible by listeners like you, by the Rosen Kranz Foundation and by supporters of Open to Debate. Our CEO is Clay O’Connor. Leah Math is our chief content officer. Elizabeth Stenberg is our Chief Advancement Officer. Michelle Deni is our director of marketing. This episode was produced by Alexis Pazi and Marlet Sandoval, editorial and research by Gabriela Mayer, Andrew Lipson and Max Fulton provided production support. The Open to Debate team also includes Anna Elisa Cochrane, Gabriel Elli, Rachel Kemp, Eric Gross, Linda Lee, Mary Regas, Tom Bunting, and Vlad Tonin, Damon Whitmore mixed. This episode, our theme music is by Alex Clement. And I’m John Donvan. We’ll see you next time on Open To Debate.