 And without further ado, a biohacker since 2019, JJ Hastings co-founded 2009, oh damn, I'm really bad. A biohacker since 2009. I won't forget it now. JJ Hastings co-founded London Biohack Space and Bioquisitive and has the first garage to be PC1 certified in Australia. An alumna of NYU, Harvard and Oxford, with advanced degrees in biology and bioinformatics, she is an analog astronaut and field researcher for NASA and JPL. Without further ado, JJ Hastings. Thank you. I know I've got the tough like after lunch spot so I appreciate your enthusiasm and I'll try and keep the energy up for it as well for my own sake. But good night. I'm playing all the way over from Melbourne, Australia. I know I've got an American accent, Native American authentically American, but have since been a transplant down to Melbourne since 2016. So first I'd like to start with something that I have learned to become quite precious of, especially since moving to Australia, which is an acknowledgement of country. So recognizing the traditional owners of this particular land that we're sitting on and the deep history and connection that they have and particularly the people, the Paiute people here of Southern Nevada who have connections throughout the Western Rockies. So a little bit about myself. I've been at so many different times how to describe who I am, what I do and frankly all I can really come down to is that I'm an extremophile. I do so many different things that really it's like trying to have someone pull out the Swiss Army knife. So really what I try and do is categorize it by what I do, which is biohacking since 2009. I'm a tissue engineer by training a scientific tissue engineer. I have affiliations and a proper tissue engineering lab. I am a bioinformatician. I studied bioinformatics at Harvard back in 2010. So old fucking school bioinformatician. I have also now an analog astronaut. So I'm going to talk to you today about my experience going into this sort of space training environment as a biohacker in the lessons I've learned because I think it's important for all of us as we enter into an era of commercialized and civilian space exploration to really think very carefully about the sort of visions that we have for space exploration going forward. So as was mentioned, I have the very first PC1 certified home lab in Australia. This is my garage. Yay, more people coming in. So what PC1 means is in Australia we have a different sort of understanding and value system around GMOs. We're not as concerned per se with human tissue versus insect tissue versus bacteria. What we are concerned with is containment of any genetically modified organisms as in intentionally modified. So we are focused on biosafety and biosecurity of containing GMOs and fully testing them for up to 10 years before environmentally releasing them at all, if ever. So what I have obtained for my home garage lab is PC1 or entry level containment certification so that I can work with GMOs at home, which is very, very rare. But it's also meant that I have a very close relationship with many of the leadership within the regulatory body, the OGTR in Australia. So what do I do? Well, since 2009 I do a lot of different crazy things using my own body as a source material and the sort of subject of my studies. Frequently drawing blood from my own body because I find it actually much more ethically comfortable to use my own body as subject rather than other people's bodies. I also have been experimenting with different implants probably for about three years now, though definitely not as advanced as some of the other people in this room. I do appreciate very much the work of grinders. What do I do with this blood? Well, I'm also a trained artist. One of the things that wasn't mentioned in my bio is that I am a trained artist from St. Martin's in London. I have used my blood to create other materials such as glass and glazes. And on the far left-hand side is a photographic print that I created using albumin from my blood. So I isolated this from albumin and then added silver nitrate, exposed that and developed it as a photograph and that is a photograph of a heart. So I routinely draw substantial amounts of my own blood to intermix and utilize in this artwork, but I also have a desire to understand how machines and our bodies are becoming much more closely intimate. Not just data, but actually physically more intimate. In this case, this is an artwork that I created where it's a plant that is connected to the cloud. As I share my stories with the components that are embedded within the plant, it goes up to the cloud and RNN, a recurrent neural net, then reads my stories and recapitulates them into its own stories and then can share their own stories with others. So it's a way of creating material archive, my blood nurturing the plant, the plant protecting my stories and the machine creating its own stories based on that ecosystem. Another machine that I've developed this year and has been on tour around the world in different galleries is a project called the Demiurge. I had my whole genome sequence in 2016, not just the VCF files that you might get from 23andMe, but by whole genome sequence started on a hard drive, 186 gigabytes of data and programmed what I'll call a machine. I won't quite call it an AI because it's not quite the same flavor of what you might consider the study of AI, but certainly creative machines. This particular algorithm that I've coded and given the capacity to look through my genome identify any potentially harmful mutations, so it's taken all publicly available data from GWAS studies, genome-wide association studies. Studies my genome and tells me what it thinks based on those risk profiles it's been exposed to, what I should fix and then generates gRNA sequences to provide to CRISPR that I can then inject back into my body and modify my genome to correct those errors. Now let's return to the topic of space. Oddly enough, I was always a geek, right? Who isn't a geek for space, right? Raise your hand. Geek for space? Yeah. I'm assuming if you're in this room, you're in some way a geek for space, right? I was the girl that put her Barbies into rocket ships. I was the girl that memorized the Mercury Gemini and Apollo missions rather than whoever was in Tiger Beat. So I've just been a space nerd my whole life, but I never ever thought I would ever have an actual chance to contribute personally towards space exploration. So it was a huge shock to me to be, to find myself in the past few years growing into a capacity of actually working within the space industry context. And I'll start with my field research in North West Victoria, which is now going to be expanding out into a vast inner basin in interior Australia of doing metagenomic studies in partnership with NASA, JPL and Gene Lab, as well as my partners at Cornell. Well, where I'm studying these hypersaline lakes that are really far isolated lakes within interior Australia, but what I love is that I get to build amazing tools, including Priscilla, my queen of the desert, who will be coming out to the desert with me to take samples and help do environmental monitoring of these hypersaline lakes out in the middle of Australia. And last year, oddly enough, I was invited to go on what's called an analog space mission. Kind of curious because I really had no real understanding of it before I got into it. Has anyone heard of analog space missions? Anyone? Well, you guys probably don't count because you know me, but anyone who doesn't know me, has anyone heard of what an analog space mission is? Anyone want to hazard a guess of what an analog space mission might do? Yeah, yeah, exactly like biosphere. Yeah, a contained space. What sort of stuff do you think we do in that? Yeah, exactly. Try not to go crazy. Yeah, so we have different analogs that are essentially meant to be scenarios and we do either low fidelity or high fidelity, high-fi, low-fi missions where we attempt to simulate as best as we can the conditions and aims that we might have off Earth. Well, last July, I was asked to be a mission specialist, bioengineer for this mission, Lunaris. In a habitat in Poland, this is my crew, my lovely crew, spent two weeks together in full containment. When I say full containment, I mean no outside air, no outside light, no outside communications. We were throttled six minutes because we were meant to be on the moon. Water rationing, light conditioning as in no UV light except for a single UV light source that we would use for 20 minutes a day and severe water restrictions. So hygiene was particularly an issue. This is the base and I want to kind of highlight it because it's an interesting space in its own right with an interesting history. This is set in Pioa, Poland. It's called Lunaris Station and it was intentionally built to simulate the physical conditions of a lunar base constructed in 2017 on a former military base in Pioa, Poland. Now, mind you, this is an old Soviet era base. They essentially decommissioned the entire base and then left it open. Imagine if you were a hacker, you could have essentially requested one of these hangers, old bomber hangers, and give it into your own space. Our neighbors and other hangers were doing car mods. Some were doing really sophisticated sound systems. Another was doing parachute jumping or other aeronautical training out on the runway. They now had a racetrack. It was an interesting environment, but one of these hangers was set aside to become this lunar analog station, a research station that was custom built specifically for training astronauts and conducting research sponsored by different agencies like ESA that would help inform future missions. So in this particular base, when we were in this mission, it's since been augmented, but when we were in it, we had a kitchen, we had a garden biolab, and the garden biolab was essentially my domain. I was responsible for the care of the hydroponic garden and running all the experiments out of the biolab. We had a hygiene module, which is our toilet and shower. We had the analytical lab where we ran basic biometric studies, followed the crew health, storage areas, pre self-explanatory, you've got to have everything that you need for two weeks, communication control room, really important for keeping a prized of mission tasks, sleeping quarters, which were a lot like kind of the module hotels that you would have in Japan, sleeping in your own little module that you could close the curtain on. But then here's the airlock. Now the airlock takes you out into the hangar, and the hangar is fully enclosed, so there's no natural light, completely dark, fully enclosed, and quite a sort of oppressive feel to it, very stale air as you go out. But in order to be a full SIM, you must go through the airlock. You must go into the airlock for decompression, recompression stages, and you must be in full EVA suit, extra vehicular activity suit, so your exosuit that you normally take out onto the crater, and they had built a crater within the hangar that we could test out rovers, we carry out EVA activity out on that crater. Just a few little photos of inside of the station. So we've got the atrium in the middle that kind of is the common space. I used to love sleeping out there underneath the atrium at night rather than my little bed module. We had different contained tools for doing volatile chemistry. The kitchen was rather interesting because right above the dining room table was our sole UV light source. So as we're having lunch, we would have our single dose of UV radiation for the day. Now I was responsible for doing biological experiments on the mission as bioengineer. I would do microgravity simulation, especially with Cs. I was interested in studying how they might grow under microgravity. Did metagenomic studies, so following how microbial population shifts within the crew as well as the habitat itself throughout the duration of two weeks and six crew members. I was particularly interested, this was my own research. I'm interested in how to produce within a contained environment completely off earth a regenerative source of hydrogel material that can be multimodal. So providing many different functions or serving many different functions within the space environment. So this is something I'm going to cover in the hydrogel workshop. I believe that's taking place 30 minutes after this talk, but we'll talk a little bit more about the hydrogels that I've been studying because they're all plant-based and all regenerative, and they are all multimodal. I was actually really impressed with how resilient and how eager the plants were to grow. I was able to get growth within two days, the first sprouts in two days. That really amazed me just how eager life seemed to thrive even in this seemingly harsh environment. But then I want to turn to more of what I discovered during this mission, and I'll just say quickly, while I can't disclose the full details now, I will be commanding my own mission. An all-female crew of six on a Mars analog, that's going to be hopefully rather a high profile coming up in January of next year. So if you want more details, please come talk to me afterwards, and also please stay tuned. But I want to share some lessons that I learned from this space environment. One is that the future is no longer meant, the space environment is no longer meant for PhDs and former fighter pilots. Those days are gone, really. The legacy astronauts and cosmonauts are not the best candidates for living off Earth. Think miners, sailors, and hackers. And no more running tasks for mission control, because you've got a 20-minute delay if you're on Mars, six minutes if you're on the moon. So you've got to be completely autonomous, and it's a psychological rather than a physical game. So really endurance and grit that are the qualities that you're looking for in a candidate over strengths or expertise, which we would have seen in the missions that have led up to the current day. Finally, no more sterile tin cans planted in the ground. Those are also gone. No more tin cans. No more docks and tin cans. That's the lesson I'm teaching today. We need to take as much of Earth with us as possible. So no more just humans and tin cans, but multi-species contained spaces. But we also need to leave everything that we've ever expected out of life on Earth behind as well. We need to become extraterrestrial in every way. And we don't need to change our environment around us. We don't need to geo-engineer Mars. We need to change ourselves. Engineering has to come from the inside, not from the outside. So I'm going to ask some questions to you. And if you want, you can raise your hand, but I don't want anyone to feel called out by these. Do you spend most of your time indoors under fluorescent light with recycler? Do you sleep at odd hours? Can you work for 36 to 48 hours without sleep? Do you eat or drink pretty much the same thing every day? Do you work remotely or spend most of your time with only a few people ever? Ever. Do you wash your clothes only once per week? Do you take a shower every one to two weeks and only use baby wipes in between? Do you enjoy working with other curious beings who likewise geek out over all things spacey? Then it probably sounds like you belong in space. Basically what I'm trying to argue is if you're comfortable in the hack space environment, you absolutely have a place in space. It's a psychological game. We're going to have to learn how to be a bit more communal, but our current visions of space exploration have to completely change if it's going to be a long game. So I want to thank you all from my Martian landscape down under and help you come visit me and explore the Aussie out back and enjoy Mars on Earth. And now I will take questions and say more questions than anything else. You mentioned microgravity experiments on the plants. How are you doing that within the confined space? Well that's that and I'll actually back up to it because I want you to see this. This is actually DIY hacked. It's just a bit of value frame really. Got it. Okay cool. Yeah, this guy here if I can play the video again. It's just a there we go. Just a few servo motors. It's really the algorithm. That's the most sophisticated part of this, which is also open source. So you can build your own microgravity simulator. Sitting in the back. Can you explain a little bit about what hydro gel is? Hydro gels. Okay. Anyone want to hazard a guess just by the the etymology hydro gel? Basically it's anything it's a cellulosic material that's usually absorbent up to 90% water. So hyper absorbent materials that form some sort of matrix, some sort of hemicellulosic matrix within that that water suspension. So how the hydrophilic like to absorb a lot of water forms some sort of matrix that's stable so it doesn't dissolve. And we'll kind of cover the basics of forming hydrogels and the chemistry of it. But essentially you're forming some sort of cross link between these different monomer so monomer to polymer and then between the polymeric chains forming some sort of connection between them to create that stable matrix. Now stable is it I'll say then quotes because they can be degradable within the body. So stable for maybe two weeks. What could hydrogels be used for? What's that? What could hydrogels be used for? What can they oh my gosh yeah so it's another thing I've got a slide for in the workshop. But essentially a hydrogels can be used for everything. So when I say multimodal, I mean I'm aiming for in this environment to be used for food for medicine direct either sort of administering medicine but also like long release but also direct interventional so tissue regenerating tissue as well. Gosh what else can use it for so many different things you can use it as an adhesive yeah use it as a hyperabsorbent material so putting it as a liner into different diapers and other hygiene products yeah also great for creating textiles yeah. So I've been working with DIY electrospinners and trying to scale that so you can create using this cellulosic material creating textiles out of that using DIY electrospinners. Hi JJ. What kind of technology needs to be created or discovered to enable biology off-planet? Yeah yeah look I'm a huge fan of synthetic biology but I think it's really got to get even more efficient and I think humans need to stop consuming as much energy full stop. I think we need to work on our own metabolism a bit so that we're not consuming as much energy as organisms so that's why I'm kind of advocating like we have to be engineered significantly before we can be even close to adaptable long for longevity off earth. We're fine in like ISS for six months a few years but we're still within launch capabilities in ISS even moon like Mars is a difference got pulled together so yeah technologies really we have to do human engineering. Can you comment on kind of being with all of those people for two weeks psychologically what that was like and then after you left did were there any sort of psychological ramifications or observations? Oh my gosh yeah look the interesting part of that is really crew selection and I think there's been so many so many interesting studies in these analog environments particularly I'll I'd say anyone who's interested in going into space long term should definitely look at different psychological studies of crew that have done overwinters in Antarctica so Concordia Station there was a great study of three crew three different crew that had overwintered and this sort of psychological coping mechanism that they experienced in the six months overwintering in pretty much the same conditions that we had you know complete containment recycled air no outside communications really just you know that crew of six to eight over six months it's pretty intense we were on a two-week mission you know so that had its own challenges because we had to do a lot in two weeks so really it was more of a negotiating that space intensely over the two weeks between six crew members but with these long durational missions it's a psychological game as in learning how to tolerate one another with no return there's there's no going back if you're going off earth to Mars you're stuck with them till death's you part so definitely look into definitely look into psychological studies from overwinters in Antarctica for a sort of hint into the the psychological game that we'll have to have there are a number of interesting incidents of crews needing to kind of split the space to prevent assault of people coupling I think Alex and I were talking about this the other day of of crew couplings you know what happens when you have crew members that pair up creates a little social awkwardness yeah I mean the other question the the Mars one crew have been asked to be completely abstinent can you be absent living off earth and just being fine with that yeah interesting sort of behavioral and cultural changes that we will have to address once we move off earth once I left we're all still very close we're actually good friends there's something about that two week mission that I think just kind of it's trial by fire and you learn how to cement your your relationship by kind of enduring something together so very different kind of mission experience than a longitudinal mission yeah so yeah we found it kind of brought us together there were definitely tensions right but all because of that sort of intensity of the mission over a long period of time you've had enough time to kind of cycle through certain issues in many different forms yeah what were the roles and responsibilities of the other crew members yeah so our last Lunaris mission was a bit more close to the more traditional formalized roles so I was mission specialist bioengineer we had crew medic there's usually some sort of crew medic someone who's kind of designated to be the one that's keeping an eye on the health and no betting end is like the go-to in case of emergency commander and vice commander are kind of monitoring all the tasks they're making sure that the whole mission they've got the big eye on mission some sort of communication officer that's responsible for liaising with mishcom making sure that everything say okay back home um let's see there's so many different kind of roles but I think what I'm trying to do on this next mission that I'm I'm commanding is subverting that away kind of flattening would you want to live six months off earth on Mars with no real say in in what you're doing on there I can understand if you're coming from a a national program where you have very specific goals um or even a full research program or if you're going from a corporation so it's becoming a company town I think that's very likely to be the very first sort of base that we see on the moon is a company mission mining or some other specific um aim um yeah yeah so the rules that we're going to see going forward are going to shift a bit um and probably become a bit more corporatized uh so you spoke a little bit about the uh sort of the mindset uh of the human and how the technology needs to adapt in order to become this sort of extraterrestrial like you were talking about what in the in a perfect world would that type of human look like uh or what would that society kind of look like you know what's funny I've heard this we've had some interesting discussions kind of within different people that are involved in these you know Mars formulations um we were kind of joking about what the sort of perfect astronaut might be in different scenarios if it's zero gravity then probably shorter statured women probably lesbians who are just fine living in a cohort of women and not not needing to navigate other psychosexual problems um yeah as for Mars moon that's probably going to be more determined by gravity um the other thing I'll say about this is that when you're living in this contained environment it's a lot like living in a TARDIS you have complete disorientation I could have been living in some other universe in another dimension you have no orientation absolutely no orientation and on the moon you're remember you're a satellite of a satellite so your temporal experience on the moon is going to be quite staggeringly different your circadian rhythm will have to be completely different Mars is slightly closer um to our 24 hour soul um but still uh sun daylight is much weaker um you will never see natural UV light again you will always be in some sort of contained vehicle either an EVA suit or your contained space so no more sun on the skin no more outside natural wind on the skin um no more smelling anything from the outdoors everything is going to be mediated um off earth so perhaps I'll close by saying I think that gives us a bit more perspective on just how special this particular planet is and how well-adapted our senses are to it so thank you