The Astronaut Protocol - EMF 2026

[applause] Thank you. I take it you can hear me. That's good. Good morning. In a few moments, I'm going to tell you a story that I hope opens up your curiosity for some of the things that we often don't notice when we're looking at and admiring space science. I want to tell you these stories because I think that we need to be thinking differently, thinking more long term and thinking more constructively about what's ahead for us and our loved ones. I'd like you to be thinking about how this imply applies to you as well as the people around you and then talk about it more because we certainly don't talk about it enough. I want to go back to 2001 when the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield was on attempting his first spacew walk. This spacew walk is described along with others as being kind of the dream that astronauts have. And once they spend more time on the space station, they often call it their holiday or vacation from the intricate and demanding life of space station. Chris had put an incredible amount of effort into his preparations just like any astronaut would. He worked on or on sorry he worked on the ground and in a pool learning the intricate steps he would have to take in order to make the repairs and installations on the Canada Arm 1 which was a essential piece of equipment for building the space station. He was partnered with Scott Perisinski. They were going to go together to make these repairs. He was supported by the crew in the space station as well as the ground crew on Earth. This is such an intricate and important time. If you like space, you probably know that space is trying to kill you. It's an area and space that we cannot survive in. So, it requires a space suit that at the time required three hours to get in and prepare. This space suit was designed for up to eight hours of space walk or period in space plus a couple of extra capsules of oxygen just in case they needed it. And Chris worked to make sure that this was perfect. He made a joke about he was so particular about it, he double shined his helmet. He gets into the spaceacuit and often as described it's like a square peg and a round hole. The space suit is not designed to go through the portal and take some time to get out, but he's supported by his space crew to do so. He gets out in space in under about an hour of working through these pro this assignment that he has, things start to change. He said he went from admiring the amazing sense of space, bigness, and humility to being really concerned about what was going on inside his spaceacuit. for him. He was looking for sorry he suddenly realized he was looking for or looking around and spotting little droplets of water wandering inside his helmet and he was aware that this was not supposed to be happening. These micro droplets started to flood in more and more and then because there's no gravity started floating into each other attaching and becoming larger droplets. The larger droplets started to float more slowly and one of them attached to his left eye. Now you can imagine that what would happen here is that he would blink like we would instinctively but that didn't move the water or the fluid. He tried to shake it off, but without gravity, it didn't move. He even went to do the automatic thing that you and I would do, is try to rub his eye, but his space suit came up and clunked against his helmet, only to find that he did not have that option either. As he was blinking, closing his eye, trying to reopen it, closing his eye, and trying to reopen it, he realized that his vision was diminishing. It was becoming cloudier and cloudier until suddenly he couldn't see through that eye and it snapped shut. It's okay, he said. That's probably why I have two eyes. He started to work through the problem, reported it to his space partner, his crew, started talking about what was what was going on and if he could remedy the situation. They also were talking about what would happen if things got worse. How would they get him back into the space station? Meanwhile, these droplets are not stopping. They're continuing to float inside his helmet, becoming bigger and bigger. And of course, latching to his right eye. He does the same activities, tries to f break it free, and nothing goes. It's clamps shut. He opens his eye and realizes he is completely blind. Okay, he said that was definitely unexpected. we didn't train for this. He reports this to his space partner. He reports it to space crew and then he has to say, "Houston, I have a problem." He relays to his capsule commander, Elena Choa, what's going on and how things are. He's safe, but he's got a problem and he's not exactly sure what the remedy is. That's okay, Chris. We've got you. She relays the situation to the engineering teams, the biomedical teams, the space true crew team to try and figure out how to solve this problem. Meanwhile, they're working on the ground. She's translating to Chris asking good questions about what's going on. Meanwhile, the space crew is in the space station trying to figure out how they're going to get him back, get him out of his suit, and figure out what the issue is. Meanwhile, Chris is standing still trying to figure out what's going on. He's thinking about his options. He's thinking about how he does not want to finish that. He does not want to stop this. He wants to complete the work because he's representing Canada. This means a lot to him. The purpose of this mission is hugely important. Elaine continues to talk to him in a calm, emotionally even voice. She is the emotional side of his brain right now. She's making sure that he doesn't move into fight or flight and start to panic. that he remains in problem solving mode because the goal here is working the problem. While everything is going back and forth, Chris is continuing to think about what's going on. And he's realizing, wait a minute, I've done this so many times, I could do it with my eyes shut. And so he decides and relays to his team that he's going to continue with the work. He's going to continue to do the repairs and the installation, and he thinks he can complete the mission. They stand by his decision. He finishes the assignment. He's assisted back to the space station by Scott. They remove his space suit inside and they work to solve the problem. These are the kinds of stories that I tell families when I work with them when they're diagnosed with dementia or navigating it. Families who are caring individuals who are navigating the symptoms that they're experiencing. I want them to hear that it's important not to do things alone. I want them to think about how they take holidays, how they plan, how they have a plan B, how they have teams they can turn to, who are those teams, and to call them out because holidays getting out of our norm are risky. Things happen. You might have had things happen here in this trip today, this week. For people with dementia though, when things happen, things are highly risky. They can land people in hospital. They can spoil ever taking a holiday again. And that's not what we should be doing. We should be building in systems so that when we're challenged by chronic persistent conditions, we do these things successfully. We don't do them alone. But there this requires us to think about how we work the problem. This is a fundamental part of how the space agencies think through things. This particular phrase, work the problem, was coined by Jean Fran CR, the flight director of the Apollo 13 mission. He needed to get that crew back and he couldn't afford for people to say, "There's no perfect solution. We don't know how we're going to do this." He needed to work systematically through all of the issues to keep his crew calm on the ground, keep the crew in space calm so that he could successfully get them home. And this has carried on for decades in the culture of the space agencies in space science. They are not going to wait for the perfect solution to travel or live in space. What we are actively doing though is working towards small incremental improvements to keep us there for longer so we can learn more, collect more data, be informed about what's possible in the future. This is a really important thing to do when lives are on the line. You can't afford to seek a perfect solution and not have a plan for the interim. You can't write it off as if it's just not worth the effort, right? And that certainly doesn't help the ethos, the culture, and the belief we have around astronauts being heroes, space science being fantastic, traveling to outside of or off of Earth a dream. This is a fundamental part of why astronauts and the space agency need to make sure that they keep the image of traveling to space positive, strength-based, and worth investing in. But remember, it doesn't take big solutions to make this happen. And a lot of the things that are going on in space are things that are happening in aging. As we age from after the age of 30, when we navigate how people do things in space, we can learn how to do it better on Earth. This is an opportunity for us to think about what is ahead that we haven't been told about because we don't have enough role models and how can we turn or change the chapters that we've seen that haven't gone well. We also have more and more evidence about how to do this well. There was recently a global report released on how to reduce our risk factors for dementia. There are now 14 solid risk factors that we can reduce that will improve our ability to avoid it altogether. The challenge is that we often think it's genetic. We often think that it's a one it just takes a cure or a treatment. But the challenge with cures and treatments is they are at least a decade away. And meanwhile, we need to be navigating what's going on now. We need to be working the problems and NASA and other space agencies do this really well. So one of the factors around risk, one of the risk factors for dementia is social isolation, something that we've all been affected by in the during the pandemic. Social isolation is the second highest risk factor for dementia. It's also a risk factor for astronauts. In fact, over the period of time astronauts have kept journals, they've recorded feeling isolated. And it became such an issue that the ground crews started to think, how are we going to solve this? Because we can't have people going to space and navigating de depression. That is not going to work. So they started thinking about what they could do in really restricted environments like the space station where it's filled with equipment and people and not a lot of space. But it doesn't need to be high-tech. Okay. So, what do they do? They want to bring people together who are share who are on shifts. They're often sleeping in different time zones and they're not exactly their workloads are so heavy they don't have time to talk, but they do have time to eat. So, what did they do? They bolted down a table and in the picture on the left brought astronauts together from all over the world. so that they could eat together, share stories and connect and their journals entries started to change. They were not experiencing the isolation and they were not experiencing the levels of depression. Small easy solution. They probably will work to improve this, right? It's not really a great environment for 12 astronauts to gather around this small table. And as their eating improves, they'll need to start thinking about what that means in the future. But this works. Now the other another risk factor the third in the list is physical activity. When we don't take physical activity into our older years, we experiencing the same things that astronauts do. Astronauts experience [sighs] muscle loss and bone density loss. In gravity, there's nothing to push against. And so the bone starts to remmineralize into the body and the muscles start to waste. You might know this if you're a fan of astronauts, but you might not. When they land, they cannot walk. We don't know this because the image of an astronaut walking isn't really great for space. But what you can tell is that they actually end up being lifted out of the space capsule, wrapped in blankets for their medical checks, and then put in a lounge chair. A lounge chair, aka a wheelchair. They're wheeled off into rehab and have been for decades where they rehabilitate their bodies and their brains because they experience cognitive impairment, too. but they're actively working to make sure that they get back into the body that they were in before they took off for space. We also know that physical activity is a fundamental for space because of this wastage. But they have had to spend decades developing new and improved exercises to understand how to stay in space longer. There's been five or six reiterations of how to make this work because exercise without gravity is virtually impossible. Now they're cinched in, weighed down, and they do two to two and a half hours of exercise a day, six days a week, just to maintain the strength and bone density they left Earth with. They're not even improving. But they know when they get on land, they can build that back up. We don't talk about rebuilding, rehab, experiencing abilities to recover. We often assume that this is a kind of permanent state that we're living in as we get older and that there's nothing that can be done. But we can actually learn a lot from what astronauts are doing today. There are a ton of parallel challenges that people face in space and we will space as we a as we and we will experience as we age. The challenge is that on earth we don't use the same positive language. For astronauts it's really important to keep positive to keep that working the problem idea to keep solution focused. So, their wording is continent's management systems when it comes to taking care of how they poop and pee. They've gone so far in language that they have renamed the nappies they wear for launches, return to Earth, and spacew walks to mags, maximum absorbency garments. Right? That's fancy. We don't often hear the difference in the language, but it's there and we should be adopting it because then we can start to improve the situations here. We need to be thinking that the bone density changes, the muscle adaptations that astronauts are experiencing are the same as the bone density loss, the muscle wastage that we talk about in age. We need to be thinking about how the isolation that the astronauts are focused on and fa and working to solve are the same things that we need to solve here for ourselves and our families and the people who matter to us. It also means that we think differently about different disrupted sleep wake cycles like astronauts experience instead of thinking about delirium and wandering and worst case scenarios that we might associate with dementia or frailty. When it comes to high stake decision-making, astronauts turn to their teams. They don't assume that they just need to be managed for the risk that they're managing and play small. This is my pitch for thinking differently about it because I know when families take these things into consideration and put these things into place, they live better. their dementia symptoms drop, their frailty improves, their experience of living with dementia better for longer is present in our communities. They should be lessons that we take on board for how to prevent it, how to support and and care for our loved ones, how to think differently about it rather than to just focus on decline, deterioration, and loss. That just doesn't take us anywhere. This world report that I show talked to you about was presented or created by the Lancet Commission. They did a global report on the impact of dementia on the world. They looked at population studies. They looked at longevity studies. And they highlighted these 14 really important activities that we can intervene on to reduce our risk of dementia. And when I say dementia, I mean Alzheimer's disease, too, because Alzheimer's is a dementia. There's over 100 types of dementia. I work with a dozen of them in the community. We need to be thinking differently about our cognitive health. How to build resilience, how to do it better, how to prevent it, and how to be ready for cures and treatments when they do arrive. The fascinating part about this report is that when they compiled all the numbers, they said if we could reduce all these risk factors, all 14 of them around the world, we would reduce dementia diagnosis by 45%. We should be thinking about this. This should give us goosebumps. This is an opportunity to change something that is affecting the world over where we're hinged on waiting for a cure or treatment when there are things that we can do today and it doesn't matter how old we are. It may be that only a few or half of these apply to us. But it's important to think about what they are. And what's really great about this particular report is that they talk about it as a lifespan issue starting from early years and how we're educated, how we take that education through life and continue to learn all the way through our years. How we look at how our social engagement, our physical activity, whether or not we can correct for hearing loss and vision loss. By the way, hearing loss is the number one risk factor for depre for dementia if it's not corrected. It's a fundamental. And if you think about it, these are all integrated and interconnected. If we can't hear well, we can't be socially engaged, which puts us at risk of depression. Another risk factor, which affects our heart health, which is another risk factor, which can create more isolation, which creates more risk of not doing physical activity, of gaining weight, obesity, another risk factor. This report is available to you. It's an opportunity to change how we think. Taking inspiration from astronauts means that we have better language and a better mindset and a better problem solving technique than we have today. I encourage you to think differently about these. And if you're inspired by space science like I am, this is your opening. But it takes a moment to we have to think differently. So I'll leave you with this story. This also is affected by our human ego. We're proud. We're proud of what we do. We're proud of who we are. And astronauts are no different. Astronauts come from highly competitive type A personalities who have had to fight to be at the very very top percentage of everything from flight school to a competing for astronaut spaces to maintaining them. But they also have to participate in research and sometimes they get to they need to get knocked down a little bit. So a few years back they were considering how do we manage continents in space? This is a huge effort. It's run by the human waste division and the first director was called Dr. Flush. Right? Because humor matters. So a team of engineers devised this plan for taking urine, capturing it, and then returning it to space to be measured so that they could anticipate needs for the future. They called in a team of astronauts. They explained the situation. What they had devised was a condom-like device that was attached to a pipe using working as a catheter to draw urine into a container that could be returned to space safely. The astron they told the astronauts they needed to test it on Earth. But they had devised three sizes for them, asked them to choose one, return home, test it, come back and give them information about how well it was, how successful it was, and what needed to be improved. Sounds like a good thing to do. Comfort of their own homes. The challenge was no one took the size small. So they came back, reported that this was a huge failure. There was urine leakage all over the place. This wasn't going to work in space. You can't have droplets floating around in space damaging million dollars of equipment. They can't be floating around harmful to astronauts wandering around. They had to fix this. All right, constructive feedback. Went back, looked at the situation, realized that actually this might not be their problem. Thought about it differently. Took it back to the astronauts, renaming the sizes. You don't have to say much, right? You don't have to confront the problem. You just have to give them some insight about how they're looking at things. success in their research because they thought differently because they were working with humans who are a diverse, not perfect, but they needed a solution. So, they worked the problem. I encourage you to work the problem. Laugh about it. It's funny. Aging is funny. The work I do is hilarious. But it's also incredibly important for us to think about what's ahead because we're living longer but not necessarily better because we're not having the schools and tools and skills to live with live with it. So here's some short pieces to take with you. Remember you'll know problems are data not defeats. You need support systems. You need to build capacity and capability into your systems. Seek updates. Don't assume that what you knew yesterday is all we need to know. Work the problems. Remember that language shapes opportunity and that preparation enhances resilience. If you'd like to see the report, you can Google for the words below. And I thank you very much for your attention. [applause] Thanks. >> [applause]