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The Current Transcript for April 4, 2023

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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MALE SPEAKER: Indeed, 50 years after the end of the Apollo missions, we are going back to the moon. Back to the moon. Think about that for a moment. The moon.

[crowd cheering]

MATT GALLOWAY: Jeremy Hansen wasn't yet born when astronauts first set foot on the moon in 1969. Next year, though, if all goes to plan, he will get a close up view of the lunar surface as part of the Artemis 2 mission, the furthest any Canadian has travelled in space. In an hour, Canada's next astronaut, Jeremy Hansen, is here to talk about a childhood dream come to life. Also this morning, you're only as old as you feel, we like to tell ourselves. It turns out there is some scientific basis to that.

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RICHARD EIBACH: We sort of form our sense of our self-concept, our identity when we're young. And we have to kind of update that as we age and there's a bit of a lag in that updating process.

MG: New research is telling us more about the difference between the age we are and what is known as our subjective age. In an hour, feeling older when you're young, younger when you're old, and how we might rethink myths about ageing. We begin, though, on the Canada-U.S. border with smugglers ferrying people across dangerous waters. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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AKWESASNE DEATHS

Guests: Marjorie Skidders, Francois Crepeau

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VALENE GRAY: It’s not the first time in our community where we've lost people to the river, but not as so many. And the children. Like that's the hardest part because I have children. It's been very heavy, very emotional. Customers coming in and they’re sad.

MG: That's Valene Gray. She owns a cafe in the Mohawk Territory of Akwesasne. The bodies of eight people were pulled from the St. Lawrence River there last week. Among them, two children under the age of three. The Akwesasne Territory straddles provincial and international borders and includes regions of Quebec, Ontario and New York State. And earlier this year, the Akwesasne Mohawk police warned of an increase in human smuggling and how that is putting community safety at risk. Marjorie Skidders lives in Akwesasne and is editor of the Indian Time newspaper. Marjorie, good morning.

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: Good morning.

MG: What went through your mind when you heard about this tragedy?

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: It was shocking. It hit close to home. I know the waters. I know the area here well. I've lived here all my life. It's tragic to imagine two children dying as they did. A lot of us can't comprehend. We live on the water here. Everyone has a boat here, practically. You know, we can't imagine why people would set out in weather like that, why they would be in if they were in that small vehicle the police have. There's just so many questions. Yes, there's been an increase of illegal aliens crossing and it's a safety concern for everyone.

MG: Let me ask you about that because in January, as I mentioned, Mohawk police alerted the public to a rise in human smuggling in the area. You, through the paper, have interviewed members of law enforcement authorities that are involved in border patrols and in enforcing the rule of law. What have they told you about what's going on?

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: Well, there’s an increase of like approximately 48 arrests or where they have held people since January. And they noted that that is like incredibly high from previous years.

MG: 48 people. These are people who would be involved in helping to move people across the border?

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: No. These are people who have been crossing.

MG: Okay. People who are trying to get across the border.

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: Correct.

MG: Right.

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: Mm hmm.

MG: For people who don't know the area, what is it about Akwesasne that would make it appealing for people who are trying to cross that border from Canada into the United States or the other way?

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: Well, it's beautiful here. We have three rivers. The St. Lawrence, the Racket River and the St. Regis River. And Akwesasne is intersected by Canada, U.S., New York State, Ontario, Quebec. We have like so many borders coming through here. Yes, if you had a boat and you had connections, you could cross from one area to another.

MG: How easy would that be?

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: Again, if you had connections, I think it would be easy. I don't know how easy that would be, really.

MG: Yeah. I just wonder in terms of like distance, how far is it to cross?

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: Oh, I'm looking at the St. Lawrence River now and probably about 15, 20 minutes. I mean, this is a larger part of the river.

MG: But that's not a long crossing if the weather's okay.

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: If the weather is okay. You know, this area, as beautiful as it is, has been our home and people are taking advantage of it, I mean, to the point of now, we're an international spot known for smuggling when we should be an international spot for our crafts, for our language, for songs, for a variety of different kinds of things.

MG: We know that, and I want to ask you about what this has done to the community in a moment, but we know that the authorities are still searching for a man named Casey Oakes. He was the owner of a boat that was found at the scene near those bodies.

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: Yes. He's been missing for five days now. Today is the fifth day and the police have been very good in trying to update us. And still, at this time yesterday, they released another press release and they're still stating they cannot connect the male that's related to the investigation. However, these are my words now, however, they have found clothing that have belonged to Casey Oakes in the area that they are searching. They're searching for Casey in the same area that they searched for those bodies that they recovered.

MG: The grand chief of Akwesasne, Abram Benedict, was on CBC Radio's As It Happens last night. And he talked about what you were speaking about, the smuggling that's been going on not just involving people who are trying to cross the border, but also drugs and weapons and who he holds responsible for all of this. Have a listen to what the grand chief said.

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ABRAM BENEDICT: It's organized crime that's exploiting our community and the geographical location of our community and the vulnerability of our people to use Akwesasne as an area where they can traffic people, guns or drugs. And it's not acceptable. So there is an element of police enforcement there. But also, you know, it's about prosperity for the community as well.

MG: What do you make of that? He says that organized crime has exploited this within the community.

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: He's absolutely right. This is a vulnerable area. For as much as it is beautiful, it's vulnerable. People see it as the easy way to cross. And to transport, to attempt to transport eight people across, there has to be more than one person involved. There's a person probably on the Canadian side and there's a person probably on an American side. And there's probably a person in neither country, but in a foreign country organizing this.

MG: He also talked about prosperity. And in the Globe and Mail, Alex Burns who is a community member, and he told the CBC this as well. He said people don't have money in the community. And so a thousand dollars is like a million dollars to them. Does that lead, do you think, to people who might be willing to get involved in this because as the grand chief said, prosperity is an issue within the community?

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: I think prosperity is an issue, but it's not as there are so many poor people in Akwesasne. Akwesasne is a well-developed community of Mohawks. We have businesses, we have organizations, we have programs, we are well developed here. There are people who, you know, through whatever circumstances, need money. There are people willing to take this risk to cross and smuggle. But to say overall Akwesasne has people that need money, it's well developed here.

MG: What do you want to see done?

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: So I think they're taking advantage of a few.

MG: Well, in that situation where, as you say, people are being taken advantage of and the community is kind of wearing this in some ways, what do you want to see the response to this story be?

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: Well, the St. Regis Mohawk tribal police and the Akwesasne Mohawk Police service are small police forces here trying to tackle an international issue. And Hogansburg Akwesasne volunteer fire department should be hailed as heroes for going out there every day searching for Casey Oakes. Sometimes they were searching for him 24 hours a day. They have now limited it to daylight hours. These are volunteer men from Akwesasne. They are not paid to do that and they see it as their duty as searching for one of them. And I know personally, when we knew that there was a baby and a toddler missing, that they were not going to stop until they found them. And they did find them.

MG: Do you worry about more stories like this in future?

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: I'm sure it will probably happen. I hope not on this scale. I hope for all the attention that has been brought here, possibly, maybe I'm just being naïve, that they will look elsewhere. I think with the global circumstances, smuggling illegal aliens will not stop. But possibly, maybe they will search elsewhere to do it. This is our home. This is our community and we’re proud of living here.

MG: I'm really glad to talk to you about this, Marjorie. Thank you for taking time to speak with us.

MARJORIE SKIDDERS: You're welcome.

MG: Marjorie Skidders lives in Akwesasne. She's the editor of the Indian Time newspaper. These are not the first people who have died trying to cross the Canada-U.S. border. And it's not the first time that human smuggling has been suspected. Last January, as you might remember, four people were found frozen to death in a field on the Manitoba side of the Canada-U.S. border. Francois Crepeau is a professor at McGill University's Faculty of Law, served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants from 2011 through 2017. Good morning to you.

FRANCOIS CREPEAU: Good morning.

MG: As we heard, the police in that community of Akwesasne have been warning about concerns that they had around human smuggling. What do we know about how prevalent this is, people being smuggled across the Canada-U.S. border?

FRANCOIS CREPEAU: It's very difficult to have exact stats because this is not an official activity. So we don't have stats. We know it exists. And we know that the more you prohibit crossing borders, especially for people who have protection issues like refugees or for low wage migrants looking for jobs, the more you prohibit that, the more smuggling exists. Smuggling is entirely policy induced. If you have a free flow through the borders, there's no smuggling. Within the European Union, there is zero smuggling until, for example, France put border controls at the border with Italy three years ago because they thought that too many Tunisians were coming through the border and then smuggling through the Alps started again. So it's entirely policy induced. Until we realize that there is a need for people to come, some people need to come because they want a future for their kids. They want a job. They need protection. And in our countries, in countries like Canada, the U.S., European Union, but also Malaysia, South Africa, there are employers who are ready to employ them and exploit them because of lack of status or because of very poor status. And that means that there is a need on one side and a need on the other side. What happens when you put a prohibition in between, you create and you subsidize underground markets like the smuggling market. But this happened in the past. See the prohibition era. People wanted to drink, people produced alcohol and Canada became richer because of that. The war on drugs, 40 years of prohibition, and we're now dismantling the war on drugs because we've realized it doesn't work. It doesn’t change.

MG: How lucrative do you think this is, the cross-border smuggling for people who carry this out? And we should mention, I mean, we saw the Indian family that's at the centre of this story. The family of four had been in Canada on a tourist visa. It's unknown why they were heading to the United States. But there was that story again of the family in Manitoba from the same region in India that died trying to cross into the United States in the belief that smuggling was at the centre of that story as well. How lucrative is it for people who are ferrying families like this across the border?

FRANCOIS CREPEAU: It's billions of dollars across the world. If you see all the border crossings that happen with smugglers, it's billions of dollars. It's one of the most lucrative underground markets. And it's entirely policy induced. States cannot believe that they will stop that, just that they haven't stopped the war on drugs. I mean, they haven't stopped drug smuggling. You have to tackle that from another angle. Trying to stop crime doesn't work. Criminals are always savvier, faster, more technically advanced than police forces. So you can try to, you can reduce the numbers. And certainly the fact that for example, in the Mediterranean, you have 3000 people dying every year, it probably has an inhibiting effect on people who try to. But still, you have hundreds of thousands crossing every year. It's not by prohibiting people and going after the smugglers that you're going to win. Just like prohibition was not about going after the people who were the criminal gangs. It was by creating, you know, the LCBO and the SAQ and making the profits that of government. So governments have to provide papers to cross borders. That will change the market.

MG: The Prime Minister spoke about this incident in Akwesasne and what it says from his perspective about Canada's immigration and refugee system. Take a listen to what Justin Trudeau said about this.

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JUSTIN TRUDEAU: We will continue to do more and more to welcome in people from around the world, but we're going to make sure that it's done in the right ways appropriately so people aren't putting themselves at risk by trying to cross borders illegally, where they're not, you know, giving money to criminals to help them come to a different country.

MG: How is it that Canada could have a regulated and fair immigration system that does not promote human smuggling?

FRANCOIS CREPEAU: Well, we had one before the end of the 70s. There was very little smuggling to Canada, migrant smuggling to Canada before the end of the 70s, just like there was very little human migrant smuggling to Europe or within the U.S. People could come and go through borders and look for a job. For example, you know, millions of Mexicans entered the U.S. and left and came back and left. Millions of Turks, millions of North Africans entered Europe, went back home, came back, went back home, came back. It was easy to cross borders, find jobs. You lost your job, you went back home. The cousin called from Chicago, you went to Chicago to pick up another job. It was easy. Smuggling was reduced to a minimum. It still existed. I mean, pockets of it existed, but it was reduced. And Canada could have a leadership role in trying to entice partner countries, especially the U.S., to facilitate mobility through borders, especially for low wage migrants. Now, there is an issue with that is that it's been 40 years, at least 40 years that our employers… We have hundreds of thousands in Canada and millions of employers in the U.S. who have been addicted to exploiting migrant labour since the beginning of the 80s. It's difficult to change that and it's difficult to make those industries non-de-localizable low wage industries like agriculture, construction, care, hospitality, profitable. You know, from one day to the next, you will have to transition those industries and that will cost money. You'll have to subsidize them in order for them to become normal labour markets and not exploitative labour markets.

MG: If you go back to the border though, and we only have a minute and a half or so left, John Manley, the former deputy prime minister, was on this program last week and he said that compassion needs to be at the heart of an immigration policy, but also that fundamental to a nation's sovereignty is the ability to control your borders. Do you not need to be able to control who comes in and comes out of your country?

FRANCOIS CREPEAU: The U.S., Europe, Canada controlled their borders in the 50s, 60s and 70s. And there are people we don't want to see except that the vast majority of people, we want to see them. We want to see them as tourists. We want to see them as workers. I mean, our employers have been calling for increased migrant numbers. You know, Europe is not a lawless place and it has freedom of movement across borders, within its external borders.

MG: And that's what you believe we need here in North America, similar to the European Union, a sense of freedom of movement.

FRANCOIS CREPEAU: I think with NAFTA, we had an opportunity to do it and we missed it. I think we need to have progressively, this cannot be done overnight. It has to be done through long term strategic planning and international cooperation over 10, 20 years. But we need to have that objective in mind which states are not having at the moment that facilitating mobility, and actually, states have committed to that. They signed the Global Compact on Migration in 2018, which says precisely that facilitating mobility through borders is the objective.

MG: Francois Crepeau, we'll leave it there. Good to talk to you. Thank you very much.

FRANCOIS CREPEAU: Thank you.

MG: Francois Crepeau, professor at McGill University's Faculty of Law, and served as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants from 2011 through 2017. Your CBC News is up next. And then, you are only as old as you feel. Sounds like a cliché. Actually some truth to it. We'll talk in six minutes about age, your subjective age, and why the two don't always align. And then in half an hour.

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NEIL ARMSTRONG: It’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

MG: You'll meet the Canadian who is going to be heading to the moon. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. We're back in six minutes. Stay with us.

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SUBJECTIVE AGE

Guests: Steven Mock, Richard Eibach

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, after 50 years, Nasser will return to the moon, this time with a canuck on board. In half an hour, the Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will be here. But first, age is just a number.

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MALE SPEAKER: Someone is only as old, I'd say, as they feel. Like my parents are in their early 60s. And if you asked me when I was younger if I thought 60 was old, I would have thought yes. But now that I'm approaching 30, old to me, I guess, like I don't know if I like that word, but I'd say it is like 80. Like that's when you're starting to get old, but it's not a bad thing either. It's like you’re experienced. That's a better way of saying it.

MG: Age they say is relative. And the other adage, of course, you know, you're only as old as you feel.

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FEMALE SPEAKER: I'm 71. I feel 50. And I think the reason is because I'm a very happy person and I enjoy life. Good DNA, happy parents. My parents were both super positive. One is still alive. My mom's 95. And yeah, I've got a good positive disposition. Yeah.

MALE SPEAKER: I am 73. Oh I feel like 42. You know, my wife and I, we have just one son and he is in his forties. But I feel I'm just as equal in terms of reactions, in terms of running and that kind of thing. You are what you eat and I truly believe that. I don't eat junk foods. I never do. And yeah, be optimistic, be positive and enjoy life.

MG: And that's the goal, being in your seventies and feeling decades younger. Sometimes, though, people also feel older than their age. It's called your subjective age. Researchers are exploring what it can mean for quality of life. Steven Mock is an adult developmental psychologist and associate professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo. Richard Eibach is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at that same University of Waterloo. Good morning to you both.

BOTH GUESTS: Good morning.

MG: Richard, what is subjective age? I mean, we know what age is. Age is a number, right? But obviously, how we interpret that number and the way that we apply that number to our lives is individual and different. What is subjective age?

RICHARD EIBACH: So subjective age is the age that you feel inside or the age that you identify with. And as your interviews suggested, sometimes that can be different than a person's chronological age.

MG: Do we know why it is, and I'll ask you both this, but why it is that some people would feel, as we heard there, younger than their actual age in years?

RICHARD EIBACH: Yeah. And there's a lot of variability in this, as you saw in those interviews. And I think one of the reasons that people feel younger than their actual age or chronological age is that we sort of form our sense of our self-concept, our identity when we're young. And we have to kind of update that as we age and there's a bit of a lag in that updating process. So it tends to be anchored in a kind of young adult reference point and we don't update it linearly with each year as we age. So there's a bit of a lag or falling short there.

MG: Steven, what's your take on this? I mean, why age is a subjective thing. I mean, there's a song, age ain't nothin but a number. I mean, and we look at that number, but we also apply the number differently to our own lives. Why is that the case?

STEVEN MOCK: Yeah. I would agree with everything that Richard just said, but also add that feeling younger than your chronological age is really something that kind of kicks in more in your 40s. And one of the reasons it stays that way for a while is there's a lot of stability in our lives in mid-life. So mid-life some people define as roughly 35 to 65. So our health is relatively stable, our roles are relatively stable. And as Richard kind of suggested, we maybe anchored are feeling about who we are in this, you know, sort of younger adult stage and then time passes. We still feel the same way, but we are chronologically older. And then also subjective age being reliably younger is something that does tend to happen 40 plus. When you're younger, what it means to feel older is sometimes different. So sometimes it's a marker of maturity when you're a younger adult. And then when you're an older adult, feeling younger is sort of, you know, this failure or this lack of updating to your actual chronological age based on the fact that there is all this stability in your life experience for the most part.

MG: You could imagine, Steven, people who are listening saying, tell me something I don't know, that I play around with those numbers all the time. Anecdotally, we would have these conversations. But as I said, you've been studying this. How did you go about studying subjective age beyond just asking people how old they feel?

STEVEN MOCK: Yeah. Well, there's a couple different ways. One was exactly like you just said. It was asking people, you know, how old do you feel? And then basically subtracting that from their chronological age. So that's what we did with what's called secondary data. So data set where the data were already collected in the U.S. But the other way we did it is we actually made people feel older or rather closer to their chronological age by giving them a reading task that was hard to read. And we either explained it to them and said, you know, sorry, we had a mess up with the printer or, you know, it's not you, it's us, or we didn't explain it at all. And these were all people who were in mid-life. And in the hard to read situation where we let them come to their own conclusions about why it was hard to read, they actually felt an older subjective age. So we have experimentally induced feeling older. So that kind of shows you that subjective age is somewhat malleable and it's dependent on the situation that you're in from day to day.

MG: So you give people something to read that I mean, it feels as though they would need glasses to actually be able to read properly.

STEVEN MOCK: Exactly.

MG: Richard, this is what's called the senior moment in the research. Is that right?

RICHARD EIBACH: Yeah, that's right. And, you know, that itself is a bit of an adjustment.

MG: Sure is.

RICHARD EIBACH: Yeah. It's one of those familiar terms in everyday life and it's a familiar experience in everyday life. Like we have these kind of salient moments that make us aware of ways in which our bodies or our social lives are getting a bit older. And that can, as Steve was just saying, that can inch up our sense of subjective age closer to our chronological age.

MG: So what do we know about what's going on there? If I get something and you've just passed it to me and you don't say anything, but I realize that I can't really read it, what's happening in my mind that lets me believe that I'm having, again, he says in quotation marks, the senior moment?

RICHARD EIBACH: Yeah, that's a great question. In fact, some of our subjects would spontaneously say things like, oh gosh, I need bifocals, or I'm really getting old. So they would actually verbalize those interpretations. And I think yeah, what's going on there is you're interpreting it as a symptom of the ageing of your body. And we had another study where we tried to induce this sense of getting older somewhat differently. We based it on generation gap experiences. So when I'm teaching, sometimes, there might be this lingo or cultural references that my students are using that I'm unfamiliar with and I sort of feel like, oh gosh, I'm getting older because I'm out of touch. And so we capitalized on another experiment where we gave people emoticons. This was back when emoticons were relatively new. And we asked these middle-aged adults to try and interpret what these different characters meant. And they had a hard time. They struggled with it. And again, they interpret that as meaning that they were getting older or getting out of touch with youth culture.

MG: Steven, what's wrong with that? What's at risk? We all, I think, as we get older, feel like we're getting older. And it's not just, oh, my back hurts or my knees feel wonky after a run, but that you feel perhaps a little bit out of touch with maybe things that are going on. What's wrong with that?

STEVEN MOCK: Yeah, so nothing in particular. So this is sort of the heart of a lot of what we've looked at is it's not necessarily that feeling older is a bad thing. It has to do with what your attitudes are about ageing. So this is sort of where the intersection of subjective age, so the age you feel coincides with how you feel about what it means to be an older adult. And we've also manipulated that and also looked at people's ageing attitudes. So basically, these are the internalized stereotypes or attitudes about what it means to be older. And you can imagine there are some cultures and societies that value their elders, and then there are others that do not. And sort of famously, you know, Western or North American cultures are a bit more ageist than maybe Eastern cultures or more collectivist societies or places where elders are valued for their wisdom and their knowledge and their contribution to society. So that's really the intersection that we found is it's not necessarily a bad thing in terms of your physical health and your psychological well-being to feel older. It's when it's coupled with negative ageing attitudes, that's when it has the negative consequences.

MG: Tell me more about that. If you live in a society where the wisdom of elders is not respected, where you are, you know, put away, parked off somewhere out of the family connection and you feel isolated and in that moment you feel older. What are the negative complications of that?

STEVEN MOCK: Yeah, exactly. So if those negative ageing attitudes are salient or brought to the fore, plus if you have one of those quote unquote senior moment episodes that we've used in some of our own experimental work, that's going to make you feel, you know, your self-worth is going to be diminished, your life satisfaction is going to go down, and also we found your negative feelings are increased as well. So and this is with both experimental and longitudinal research that the causal links are fairly strong. And there's other work by Becca Levy at the School of Public Health at Yale that shows that negative ageing attitudes have a really important impact on physical health, mental health and mortality.

MG: Is that shown, I mean, again, that it's not something that you kind of just interpret, but there are actually physical impacts to your health?

STEVEN MOCK: Absolutely. Yeah. There is physiological impact of negative ageing attitudes. And that's essentially what we're finding is it's the intersection of the age. You know, as you feel older, if you also have these negative ageing attitudes, it pulls your mood down and it decreases your sense of life satisfaction.

MG: What about the other way around, Richard? We heard earlier the person saying that they're 71, but they feel decades younger. What are the benefits that would be associated with older people feeling younger than the number on the clock?

RICHARD EIBACH: Yeah. So some of those benefits are because of the fact that if we're in a society that interprets being older as being a more negative thing, then feeling younger does help you to feel better about your life, feel more confident about yourself, feel more connected to your society, feel more useful. So feeling younger can be a way to maintain a sense of well-being when you're in a cultural context that devalues older people and older experience. And so you could think of the tendency of people to maintain a younger subjective age in older adulthood as a kind of resistance against ageism. It's an individualized resistance, but it's a way of sort of saying, well, if old age means that in this culture, then I don't feel that way. I don't identify with that. And so it's an individual act of resistance to sort of say the age you might perceive me as is not the age I identify with or the age I feel. But of course, it's a very limited kind of resistance. It's not challenging those ageist stereotypes. In fact, it's in a way kind of reinforcing them by saying, I'm not one of those old people who is, you know, decrepit. Potentially, a more powerful kind of resistance would be to challenge the stereotype itself and sort of say being older doesn't necessarily mean just decline. It means gains too like being wiser and being useful in other ways.

MG: I want to come back to that in a moment and what we might do collectively to address that ageism. But it's not just older people who are thinking about that subjective age and how old they feel. We asked some young adults how old they feel. Take a listen to this.

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MALE SPEAKER: I am 27 years old and I definitely feel more like 24, 25. Not a huge difference, but I'm thinking it’s because of COVID. I feel like I lost a couple of years and I just feel so young and youthful. It's like if someone asks me, my brain's like, oh yeah, I'm like early twenties or something. Now I'm approaching late twenties and it kind of baffles me.

FEMALE SPEAKER: I'm 31 and I feel like I'm 24 because I feel like I have the same enthusiasm as when I was younger, when I wanted to like party or get out. And I think like the essence is never lost. And our essence like forms when you are younger. And you just get more experiences, but you still feel the same.

ANOTHER MALE SPEAKER: I am turning 27 in a couple of months, but sometimes I feel I am more than 30 or maybe even 35, depending on how busy my day was. Being an international student here makes you do everything by yourself, makes you tired by the end of the day. That kind of makes me feel old at times. I do feel younger sometimes when I am with young people as well. When I achieve something that I want to do that particular day, it makes me feel good about myself. It makes me feel younger and I feel more energetic. When I feel older, I feel more tired. I feel like not doing anything that day. And when I feel younger, I feel like going out, meeting friends.

MG: There's a couple of interesting things in there, Richard. One is that idea of the essence of youth. The 31-year-old who feels 24 has that essence of feeling young and believes that she's going to keep that as she gets older. Is there an essence of youth that we can hang onto?

RICHARD EIBACH: Yeah. I think that that experience makes a lot of sense because there is research that suggests we kind of consolidate our sense of identity sometime in our early 20s. So that's kind of like, you know, our sense of self is very much formulated at that time. And that turns out to be a reference point throughout our life span. And so there's even this thing called a reminiscence bump that it's easier to retrieve memories from that period of our lives in our 20s than memories from later stages of our life. And so we kind of do tend to look at that kind of youthful self as being in some ways are pure a sense of self. But of course, there's a lot of variability around this too. And some people do identify with an older age. Maybe when they enter into certain kinds of important relationships and social roles, their sense of identity might formulate around those. So none of this is like a hard and fast rule, but there's average tendencies for identity to be kind of anchored in those young adult stages.

MG: What about the pandemic? Somebody said that in some ways, they lost a few years. I think all of us can relate to that. But what did that do in terms of how we feel about our age, do you think, Richard?

RICHARD EIBACH: So with a former student of ours, Chris Locke, we did some research on that very topic. And as Steve was saying, in young adulthood, feeling older has these beneficial associations. So Chris found that when you feel older in young adulthood, it's associated with character based maturity. So wisdom and responsibility. So it has these good connotations. And so young adults, in the COVID period, many of them felt like they were blocked from moving forward on some of those adult goals.

MG: Like cheated out of whatever those opportunities were.

RICHARD EIBACH: That's right. Yeah. And so many of them felt like they were losing opportunities to mature. And that sort of made them feel like they weren't maturing. But Chris found that young adults in the COVID period who found ways to interpret that in ways that wasn't just looking to focus on the block goals, but focussed on ways that they were engaged in this shared effort to protect our health and a collective effort to protect the society, they actually interpreted COVID as a maturing experience for themselves. And so they were able to maintain that sense of progress towards maturity. So it all depends on how you're interpreting those experiences. You can still find ways to find benefits and gains in maturity even when you might be in an unusual situation like COVID was.

MG: Steven, we talk a lot about the ageing population and the challenges that that ageing population is going to present to our society. Why does research like this matter in this context now, do you think?

STEVEN MOCK: Yeah, I think it matters a lot. And maybe it's a slight deviation from your question, but I think one of the things that's amazing about or, you know, fascinating about the notion of subjective age is, you know, as you hinted at earlier, it's something we all feel. And we have a lot of intuitive, you know, perceptions about what it means and what it means to feel young at heart. But I really think that it revolves not only the subjective age piece, but also the ageing attitudes piece. They really kind of work together. And I think that, you know, as society ages, you know, we're going to have to come to terms with are we going to have this large growing generation of adults that we see as, you know, in decline or making, you know, living full lives and making contributions to society? And I think that frankly, we're going to experience that firsthand. But I also think that it's important for us to be aware as we move forward and as we age as a society, you know, the kinds of messages that we're sharing about what it means to be an older adult. And even everyday speech and occurrences and experiences that we have, you know, like just being mindful that when you're talking with older adults or as an older adult or about older adults, that older adults are in many ways, you know, just living life like anyone else does. And it doesn't necessarily have to mean, you know, a period of decline or anything in particular, like in any way that we would think differently than an adult at any other stage of life, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

MG: Richard, that gets at the heart of what we were talking about earlier, challenging some of those conventions around ageism. What do we need to do to think differently about ageing and to Steve’s point, the language that we use, the ideas that we have around what it means to get older?

RICHARD EIBACH: I think one of the main things we need to do is recognize that there are opportunities to still grow even into late old age. So I think a lot of times, one of the most detrimental ageist stereotypes is that there's kind of this arresting of development, like kind of you don't have any more opportunity to grow. And that's not true.

MG: You can't do something new. There's nothing else that's good that's fresh in front of you.

RICHARD EIBACH: That's right. And so if you kind of move into older adulthood looking for those opportunities for growth, that can have a rejuvenating effect, sort of make you feel like you still have things to learn and opportunities to grow. Now, I think what's important there is to not just maintain a sense of youthfulness, but to challenge the idea that growth is only about youthfulness, that growth can be something that we can experience at any stage of the life span.

MG: Has doing this research made you think differently about your age, Richard?

RICHARD EIBACH: Yeah, that's a great question.

MG: And I have no idea how old you are, and I don't know how you feel, but I mean, where do you fall on the spectrum?

RICHARD EIBACH: So I'm turning 48 this year. And I think I would sort of say I feel somewhat in my mid-40s or something like that, somewhere in my 40s. And I think one of the things that this research has taught me, though, is to sort of challenge that feeling in myself too and sort of say, well, wait a minute, why do I need to articulate a sense of still feeling like myself by sort of saying I'm younger than my chronological age? But as I was saying before, I think that reinforces an ageist stereotype that if you're getting older, you're losing something about yourself. So I try to avoid slipping into that tendency to connect with my younger self as a way to sort of say I still feel that I'm the same person.

MG: Steven, do you see yourself being reflected in some of the work that you're doing?

STEVEN MOCK: Yeah. You know, as somebody that studies adult development and ageing, it's hard not to think about yourself, right? And actually I find that with a lot of professors in general. You know, as they age, they become much more interested in studying adult development and ageing. You know, studying it, putting it under a microscope, so to speak, it does make you think about how these processes play out in yourself. And in terms of my own subjective age, I'd probably say I feel younger than Richard says, just because I feel health wise like a lot of stability since my mid-30s. And in a way though, I've been finding like academics as well often feel like a sense of, I don't know, imposter syndrome or, you know, challenges to their confidence. And I do find as I age, I am actually feeling a little bit more confident and also just kind of a little more at ease with knowing what I know and not knowing what I don't know. Whereas when I was younger, I maybe felt a little bit more insecure. And maybe it's partially just a process of, you know, I would like to think this is a positive aspect of ageing. It's just becoming a little bit more confident and also just, you know, giving other people space to share their views and perspectives and not think that it's necessarily a comparative thing like, oh, I know more or less or, you know, I'm insecure. So I think the security that comes with age is hopefully a benefit that I'm gaining from this.

MG: Now everybody is going to be thinking how old they really feel and interrogating whether that's actually true or not based on their own actions, but their own experience as well. This is really, really interesting. I'm really glad to talk to you both about it. Thank you very much.

BOTH GUESTS: Thanks for having us.

MG: Steven Mock is an associate professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo. Richard Eibach is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology also at the University of Waterloo. How old do you feel? How do you go about telling yourself that age is just a number? And what do you do to retain the essence of youthfulness? You can email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca. Are you fine with the age you are and that number or the things that you do to try to feel older or younger? Let us know. Coming up after your regional update.

SOUNDCLIP

MALE SPEAKER: The largest, most powerful rocket in the world is going to propel them onward and upward into the heavens and they fly to the moon.

MG: To the moon indeed. The Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will be on that historic flight. He's here in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current on CBC Radio and the CBC Listen app. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

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MOON EXPLORATION

Guests: Jeremy Hansen, Gordon Osinski

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

MALE SPEAKER: He is a master of science in physics and F-18 pilot and a Canadian astronaut. Your mission specialist, Jeremy Hansen.

[crowd cheering]

MG: He's headed to the moon. Jeremy Hansen named yesterday as one of four astronauts on the crew of Artemis 2. Its mission is the first human spaceflight to orbit the moon in more than 50 years. Mission specialist Jeremy Hansen joins me now from the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas. Jeremy, good morning.

JEREMY HANSEN: Good morning, Matt. Thanks for having me.

MG: Congratulations.

JEREMY HANSEN: Yeah, thanks. Big day for me yesterday, but I hope Canadians also feel the pride I felt. I thought it was just really tremendous to see that our American partners highlighting Canada on the stage yesterday for all the value and contributions that we bring to this program. I was really proud of what our country has accomplished.

MG: You’ve done this country very proud. When did it sink in for you that this was happening?

JEREMY HANSEN: I don't think it has yet. I think it's still sinking in. It's coming in waves and stages. I'm looking at the moon a little bit differently these days. But, you know, I found out officially just over two weeks ago and, you know, I've shared that with my family. Super excited, a little bit humbled by the opportunity. So like I was saying, just really proud.

MG: You have kids. What was it like to tell your kids that you're going to the moon?

JEREMY HANSEN: Yeah, it was pretty special for me. Definitely over the years, my kids are 18, 16 and 15 right now and over the years, you know, I think they've gotten a little tired of my enthusiasm about space sometimes. And in this case, they were really excited and really authentically excited and that was super meaningful for me.

MG: Do you have, I don't know, on your watch or something, some sort of countdown clock that will count you down to November of 2024 when you're off?

JEREMY HANSEN: No, no, I really don't. And I think, you know, partly because we know this is a test mission and we expect that, you know, things could change. They won't necessarily. We might make our timeline, but that's not the most important thing. It's important to have a timeline goal and something we’re pushing towards. And we will definitely give it our best shot. But if it gets delayed from there, you know, that's not what's important. What’s important is we do it right, we do it successfully. And this is just one steppingstone in a campaign of missions. If we’re not successful in this mission, then the next one doesn't go to the lunar surface. And, you know, our goal is to prepare to buy down the risk for the mission to the lunar surface.

MG: What do you do between now and then, whenever then is?

JEREMY HANSEN: Yeah. So, you know, we’re trained. But when you're flying a vehicle for the first time, the training, a lot of it is really developing the vehicle testing and evaluating the vehicle. So there's a huge team of people we’ll be integrating into that team now to add the human element. So how are the humans that are controlling the vehicle? What are the different test profiles we're going to execute while we're on it and then coming back? And so we'll just be working with those people on a day to day basis, getting ready for the mission.

MG: You said earlier that since you found out, you kind of look at the moon differently in a way. I mean, what does that mean for you?

JEREMY HANSEN: Well, I mean, I've always had, you know, great respect for the moon. It’s always been part of my night sky. I've always thought it was beautiful. I've always wanted to truly as long as I can remember, I have wanted to go there. I don't know why, but I just am drawn towards it. But now when I look at it, I just kind of think about it as how far it is. Like I look at the size of it and I think about, wow, like how far away that is actually going to be. And I was in the living room last week and looking out the window when the capsule in the simulator was on the other side of the moon and looking back at the earth. And I was like, whoa, earth is really small. The moon is really big and things are just starting to come into focus for me.

MG: I mean, there's that amazing Earthrise photo that was taken during Apollo eight where you see the whole of the planet. And people have read into that for years and it's given people a sense as to who we are and who we aren't in this kind of tiny little speck in the vast universe. You're going to be able to see that. What do you think that's going to be like?

JEREMY HANSEN: Yeah. I think it's going to be very impactful. I mean, I know it's going to be impactful. It's going to resonate with my soul, if you will. And it's going to highlight the importance of bringing that into focus for all of us. I think any of us can look at the world today and say, well, we could be doing better. We just all know we could be doing better as a global species. And I think that's an important aspect of this mission, is, you know, we have a lot of technical things and learning to do over this mission. But another huge part of this mission is, you know, taking the time as humans, all of us, to kind of reflect on our existence here on this planet and the importance of us working together to solve some pretty challenging global problems. And, you know, as I'm raising three young kids, you know, our youth are always concerned about these things, and they are going to have to learn to work together as a global community to solve some of these issues. And I think these space missions are really visible and excellent examples of that.

MG: That's really interesting because, as you said, there's technical things that will be learned from this mission and missions to come. And we're going to talk about the lunar rover in just a moment. But that's a philosophical kind of answer to what you think we might learn from you being involved in this.

JEREMY HANSEN: Yeah. I think it really is the most important part because it's never one mission that changes the world. It's our real mindset. You know, if you just like step back and like just look at this micro example of a space mission where Canada has been invited to partner with the United States to go back to the moon, I mean, that's actually pretty incredible. But the reason is that we truly can do more together. It's not easier to work together sometimes. It's actually adds complexity. But once you figure out that part, once you get the team humming, you actually can do way more. And that's really what's important about anything we do is figuring out the methodology to do something bigger and better next time. And everything we accomplish on this mission will only be eclipsed in the very near future, and then humanity will keep marching on.

MG: Are you ready for the attention that's coming your way? Yesterday, after the announcement, memes circulating of, you know, he's just like Buzz Lightyear. Look at him. Take a look. I mean, kids are going to look at you and they're going to know your name and they're going to look up at you and look up to you and say, I want to be just like Jeremy Hansen. Are you ready for this?

JEREMY HANSEN: I don't know. Honestly, I don't know. I think I've had a taste of it, you know, just being an astronaut. You know, I've already had that experience of, you know, one day you're not an astronaut, the next day you're selected as an astronaut and people do look at you differently. From my perspective, it's just very evident. I mean, nothing has changed about me. I'm still the same person and I'm just a human like everybody else. And hopefully, you know, I will be able to convey that to these young Canadians who are looking up to me that there is nothing different or special about me. What happened to me was I set some goals. And the most important part was I shared them with other people. And it was these other people who truly mentored me, lifted me up, got me over my challenges. And when I fell down, you know, helped me move through them. And those are the people who equipped me to move forward and accomplish the things that I wanted to do in life. And they can do that same thing. Simple steps. Set goals, share them with others, and be willing to do some things that are a little bit scary.

MG: And then you wake up in the morning and you still pinch yourself that this is actually going to happen.

JEREMY HANSEN: Yeah, it's a little bit hard to believe. I think it'll continue to sink in for a little while.

MG: It's a great story and it's just really, really beginning. As one would expect from somebody who is headed to the moon, you're a busy guy. So I appreciate you taking some time to talk to us this morning. Jeremy, Thank you very much.

JEREMY HANSEN: No, it's my pleasure. And again, congratulations to all Canadians. I really hope people understand that they have enabled this through many, many, many contributions over decades and decades. And I hope they're proud of it.

MG: Jeremy, take good care. And thanks again.

JEREMY HANSEN: All right. You too. Bye bye.

MG: Jeremy Hansen is a member of the crew for Artemis 2. It's the mission to orbit the moon, scheduled to launch in November of 2024. And as he mentioned, this is just the beginning of a series of missions that will take humanity eventually back to the moon. Gordon Osinski is a professor at Western University's Department of Earth Sciences, Scientific lead for Canada's Lunar Rover Project. He's been working with NASA on teaching geology to astronauts. Gordon, good morning to you.

GORDON OSINSKI: Good morning. Thanks for having me on the show.

MG: What went through your mind when you heard the news that Jeremy had been named to this mission?

GORDON OSINSKI: Excitement, relief. You know, it was just wonderful to see Jeremy's smiling face when he walked up on the stage. It was truly a great moment.

MG: What do you make of him? I mean, you know him a little bit. And just in hearing him there, there's a real sense of humility. But also, he sees kind of a bigger goal in what he is involved in. Tell me a little bit about how you read him.

GORDON OSINSKI: Absolutely. And, you know, maybe he's still listening. But I mean, I think the interview you just had with him kind of just sums Jeremy up. Very humble, you know, with humility. You know, he is someone that can communicate, I think, with Canadians, that Canadians can relate to. You know, here in London, I think there's a lot of excitement now. He was born here. He was raised on a farm, you know, north of here, in tiny little settlement of Ailsa Craig. And, you know, hopefully there are a lot of Canadians who just maybe listened to Jeremy or will meet him maybe in a classroom in the coming years, and they'll be like, you know what? Yeah, yeah, maybe I will set some goals like he just said and share them with others, take a few risks, and maybe I could become an astronaut too.

MG: How does what he is going to be involved in fit into the broader picture and the broader goal of moon exploration?

GORDON OSINSKI: I mean, I think he hit the nail on the head. This is really a very critical mission. You know, the Artemis program, as it is named, is about getting humans back to the lunar surface and then on to Mars too, you know, which is the exciting long term goal. This is only mission two. We have essentially three missions to get to the lunar surface. So just last November, some listeners might remember the Artemis 1 mission where for the first time, we launched this Orion spacecraft with no people. And, you know, I think it's a pretty big ambitious jump where we're now going to put humans in this for Jeremy’s mission. They're going to test it out, make sure it works. And just in this test phase, they're not going to land on the moon, but they're going to fly by the moon and actually go further than any human has ever gone before from our planet. So that in itself is, you know, a monument that will be in the Guinness Book of Records. And then if everything goes well on that flight, Artemis 3, you know, the very next mission is where we'll see humans hopefully land on the surface of the moon. So it's a series of ambitious missions. And you could argue that perhaps Jeremy’s mission ultimately is the most critical step in getting us back to the surface of the moon.

MG: You've been involved in training astronauts to do geology on the moon. Tell me a little bit about that.

GORDON OSINSKI: Yeah, it's definitely something. You know, if you'd asked me a couple of decades ago when I was a student or early career professor that I'd be doing that, I wouldn't have believed you. It was, you know, a great set of circumstances that my path crossed. The Canadian Space Agency first actually was interested in providing some geology training to Jeremy and Davison Jacque, who they both graduated together, became astronauts in 2011. And so I started taking them both actually up on expeditions to the Canadian Arctic. And so there was multiple kind of rationales for this. Obviously, basic training in geology. You know, neither of them have a geology background. And at that time, you know, we were potentially thinking of they would be flying on the International Space Station where, you know, just being able to interpret what they're flying over would become important. But, you know, even the discussions back then were focussed on the moon and getting humans back into deep space. So my specialty in geology is looking at meteorite impact craters. What happens when asteroids and comets strike the earth? And we know by just looking up at the moon on a clear night that this impact cratering is the dominant geological process on the moon. So the astronauts will be going through these heavily crater terrains. And so the sites we were visiting with Jeremy and David were meteorite impact craters in the far Canadian north. And then the last aspect was the very fact that we were working up in the Canadian Arctic. You know, we were in small teams, very remote environments, difficult to get anywhere if we have any trouble. And, you know, definitely not as high stress, not as remote as space on the moon, but, you know, provides a good experience and good training for these astronauts too.

MG: And having done all of that, you think he's perfectly suited for this mission that he's going to be taking on?

GORDON OSINSKI: 100%. Absolutely.

MG: I introduced you as a professor, but also you're a scientific lead for the Lunar Rover project. What is that?

GORDON OSINSKI: Yes. So, you know, it really is truly an exciting time. I don't remember a time in my entire career or even back when I was a student where there was so much happening in Canada for space. And just in last week's federal budget, there was yet another commitment for, you know, designing a bigger robot to go along with the astronauts on Artemis. But also back in November, at the same time that Artemis 1 was launching, we received word that Canada insists this company based here in southern Ontario had won the contract to build Canada's first ever Rover mission. So we're sending a small rover about 30 kilograms to the moon. And I was honoured to be named as principal investigator for that. And so this is the Canadian Lunar Mission or Canadian Lunar Rover mission. You know, hopefully we'll have a competition and we’ll come up with a cool name, maybe. You know, not curiosity or perseverance. Those are taken. But this is Canada's first ever mission we're leading to another planetary body. So that is also, you know, a big deal for us here in Canada.

MG: Talk about where specifically this will be going, because it's going to the South Pole of the moon, right?

GORDON OSINSKI: Absolutely. And that's also where Artemis is going too. So this is a region of the moon that the Apollo missions didn't go to. If you kind of look up a map online of where the Apollo missions went, they chose the relatively safe environment around. Essentially, if you look, they're all at the equator of the moon and on the side of the moon facing us. So where we're going with both robots and humans in the next few years is the South Pole region. And there's two kind of big reasons for that. The first is that that's somewhere that from satellites in orbit around the moon, we think we've detected volatiles in a particular frozen water ice. You know, we need to get down on the ground to really, you know, confirm the hypotheses and the data we have from orbit to, you know, really test to see if that is there. If there is water ice there, it's interesting, you know, tons of scientific questions that the likes of me ask, but it also opens the door to using that as a resource for, you know, astronauts to drink, the oxygen to breathe. And you can extract the hydrogen for rocket fuel. And that makes things or would make things a lot more sustainable. You know, one of the most costliest things about human spaceflight is things like having to transport water along for the crew to drink because it's very heavy. If we can reduce the mass that we have to launch from the surface of the earth by using resources in situ kind of living off the land, it will really reduce the costs of spaceflight, make it more sustainable. Second thing is a really interesting area of the moon. We think it's part of the oldest crust of the moon that witnessed a giant impact event maybe four and a half billion years ago. And we really want to bring back samples from this so-called South Pole Aitken basin too. And, you know, to me as a geologist, just to emphasize that one of the most exciting things about having humans go back to the moon is the samples. There are lots of samples that they will bring back to us and we'll be able to study in laboratories here on earth.

MG: I read you say that we are still studying the samples that were brought back from the moon decades ago. We're still learning things from those samples.

GORDON OSINSKI: We sure are. I just put in another proposal last fall and got word a couple of weeks ago that I'll get another series of Apollo samples in my lab here at Western because you're quite right. There’s so much we're still learning. And so we've answered some of the questions that we had during Apollo. But for example, this finding of water ice was something that was only really made in the last decade or two. We had absolutely no thinking that there would be any water on the moon. We thought it was, you know, a very dead, dry, barren rock in space. But we've since learned that that's not the case. And so that's kind of turned our understanding of the moon upside down. And so we've got, you know, more rationale to go back and also go back to the samples that Apollo collected to see if there's things in there that we missed 50 years ago.

MG: What's the big question that you want answered?

GORDON OSINSKI: Oh, that's a tough one. I mean, I do think the priority for our Canadian lunar Rover mission and for Artemis in part is this question of water ice. You know, we think it's down there on the surface of the moon, but we don't know how much, what form it's in. You know, there’s big skating rink sheets of ice, more like we get in the Canadian Arctic where it's a lot of, you know, fine particles locked up in the ground. And depending on what that is, you know, it's very different in terms of the implications for using it.

MG: There is a whole new generation of people who are involved with this. I mean, Jeremy Hansen wasn't born when the last people walked on the moon, when people went to the moon. And I don't know what it's like for him to be part of a new bit of history. He kind of gave a bit of an example there. But for you, what is it like to be part of this new generation?

GORDON OSINSKI: Actually, I think Jeremy and I were born within a month of each other. So we’re from the same post-Apollo generation. And, you know, if you look at the demographics, most Canadians were not around to witness Apollo, the first astronauts land on the moon. And so we have grown up, you know, knowing that Apollo happened or seeing astronauts on the International Space Station before that, the space shuttle. But I think it's going to be really incredible to share this journey and this time around hopefully see it in high definition colour video, unlike grainy black and white imagery, but to see humans, you know, explore the surface of another planetary object. And as Jeremy mentioned, you know, I really hope this inspires this current and the next generation. You know, so many people I've met who worked and or who witnessed the Apollo landings talk about how that inspired them not to go into space, although many of them did go into the space program, but just to pursue that scientific, you know, go into science, engineering, technology and math, which we’re really in need of in this country. We need people to go into those so-called STEM disciplines. And if Artemis is the next Apollo moment that inspires a lot of our kids and youth to do that then I think that will be fantastic.

MG: I was going to say just finally, what is in it for this country? One of the things, and Jeremy talked about this as well, the sense of collaboration that we are part of this, the United States chose Canada to be part of this. What's in it for Canada to be involved in a mission like this?

GORDON OSINSKI: I mean, I think just the announcement yesterday is incredibly prestigious. You know, it speaks to the trust that has developed between our two countries. You know, I think both within and outside the space program, Artemis is much bigger than just these two countries. You know, we have the other partners in the space station like Europe and Japan. We’ve got over 20 other countries now who have signed a set of accords called the Artemis Accords to work together. And so, as Jeremy says, you know, I think this is hopefully going to be a demonstration of how we can do something beautiful, something inspirational if we actually work together. And hopefully that will inspire us to, you know, come together and tackle some of the big problems we face here on Earth too.

MG: What a neat thing to be part of. Gordon, it's great to talk to you. Thank you very much. Gordon Osinski is a professor at Western University's Department of Earth Sciences and he's scientific lead for Canada's Lunar Rover project. That is The Current for this Tuesday. Q is up next on CBC Radio One. If you missed anything on the program, of course you can get caught up through the CBC Listen app. You'll find that wherever you find your apps. It's free. Anything that is audio produced by your public broadcaster can be heard through that app. We're going to leave you this morning with a little bit of music, moon music. I'm not entirely sure that that's appropriate, but it's certainly music to think about the cosmos as Canadians get set to head there and Jeremy Hanson heading out perhaps in a year and a bit’s time to orbit the moon. This is Moby and his song We Are All Made of Stars, performed alongside the Budapest Art Orchestra. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll see you tomorrow.

[Song: "We Are All Made of Stars" by Moby and the Budapest Art Orchestra]

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Tuesday April 4, 2023 Episode Transcript

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