Photo: NASA
mensanthropist [ men-san-thruh-pist ] noun
a person, who actively participates in fulfilling one of Mensa’s objectives by fostering and utilizing intelligence for the benefit of humanity
For this episode I got a chance to interview Chris Hadfield, known as „the most famous astronaut since Neil Armstrong“, the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station and holder of numerous awards and achievements not only in the field of space flight and space exploration. Chris has become well known by the general public for recording a cover version of David Bowie’s „Space Oddity“ on board the ISS, which has over 50 million views on YouTube alone at the time I am writing this. I am glad I can bring you a few Chris‘ answers to the questions I asked him specifically for Mensans……
Chris, you mentioned in one of your videos, answering those internet questions, that as a teenager you passed the IQ test and qualified to join Mensa. For how long did you stay a member of Mensa and why not longer?
Well, I think, like a lot of young people, I wanted to take a measure of myself. There’s a lot of social pressures as an adolescent and a young person, and you’re curious as to how you compare to everyone else. I’d always done well in school, and I thought I know how tall, how fast I can run, and how much weight I can lift, but I never really had an external measure of what my mental capacity was. So I did the various tests and was bright enough to be able to pass and join Mensa.
Then I thought it would be an interesting way to to meet similar people, who had a certain level of intellect, and it wasn’t just in my teens, it was in my early 20s as well. So while I was in college and then while I was a young pilot with the Air Force. I even went to several Mensa meetings and found the conversation with other folks that were part of the organization interesting. But like a lot of things, you get interested in other stuff and it just doesn’t become the focus of your life.
There have been many things that I’ve been part of that now I’m not part of anymore. And Mensa clubs were just one of those. I think I really did it mostly to try and learn about myself and try and see how I fit in with other people.
„No matter what you’re born with, it’s what you do with it that matters.“
– Chris Hadfield
Do you think that people who don’t qualify for Mensa may still be able to qualify for being an astronaut or is the high intellect one of the must to haves for being an astronaut?
A lot of people think it’s physical or purely experience, but the hardest part of being an astronaut is the mental task. It is an immensely complex and demanding mental task. I trained as an astronaut every day for twenty one years. You have to learn things and then find a way to remember them, retain them, and retrieve them when you need them.
And you have to be able to learn really complex things on a wide variety of subjects rapidly and retain them. For my third spaceflight, first I had to learn to speak Russian, then I had to learn to fly a Russian spaceship. I didn’t even begin studying Russian until I was in my 30s.
So, just like having the right sized and healthy body, having the right level of mental capability is important as an astronaut. I’m not sure that the threshold that allows you to join Mensa is some magic line to become an astronaut. But I think it definitely helps to be an astronaut if you have lots of mental capacity, mental horsepower. And if anything, I think Mensa measures mental horsepower. So it sure does improve your odds.
What does your intellect mean to you personally?
I’ve always wished I were smarter and could remember things more easily. No matter how smart you are, you’re probably only going to be smart in one particular area of life. There have been very few truly across the board brilliant human beings in human history. All of the very smart people that I’ve met are not perfect people. They have shortcomings somewhere else.
Even if you look at some of the brightest, most successful people on Earth right now, if you look at Elon Musk, who’s obviously brilliant, he’s not a perfect human being either. I think he publicly announced he has Asperger’s. That gives him tremendous mental capacity and therefore a great ability to accomplish things. But he’s by no means a uniformly complete and perfect human being.
„Having a strong and able body is a really important facet of an interesting and successful life, but having a strong and able mind is the same thing.“
– Chris Hadfield
What does my intellect mean to me? I just counted as a lucky gift that that I learn easily, that I can remember things easily and that I have a good capacity to understand and retain a lot of different topics. And I find it makes life more interesting. There’s such an enormous depth of opportunity to learn and of complex ideas out there that I still don’t know very much about.
Challenging myself physically is important. I try and exercise every day and keep my body fit because having a strong and able body is a really important facet of an interesting and successful life, but having a strong and able mind is the same thing. And you can improve your intellectual capability.
You’ve obviously got the fundamental wiring that you are born with, which tends to set your basic intelligence quotient. But you can learn to play violin. You weren’t born knowing how to play violin and no matter what your IQ is, you’re not a violin player until you actually put a tremendous amount of work into it. And there have been lots of studies done that there are physiological changes to the brain that occur when you become an accomplished violinist.
The brain is somewhat plastic. So I don’t just work at trying to keep my body healthy, I also try to keep my brain active and engaged and healthy. I do Sudoku. I do crosswords with my wife. I’ve recently started doing Wordle because it’s just fun. I do it online with my children. I’m always studying and learning and teaching and trying to push my own mental capacities.
That’s what my intellect means to me. It’s just a key to open a whole bunch of doors. And I try to make that key open as many doors as possible.
What is the next big thing you would like to learn?
One of my children married a lady from China and so my granddaughter speaks both English and Chinese. So I’m beginning to study Chinese, and it’s a very foreign language for me. I speak Russian reasonably well. Может быть, вы тоже говорите по-русски, я не знаю. And I speak French reasonably well. There’s more languages than I could ever learn, but to have a personal tie makes it interesting.
I’m also constantly learning new songs, which is great. I have fronted several bands, so I’m always on the lookout for new songs to learn and then to understand and play those well.
And obviously I’m learning to write fiction. That’s a whole new skill set. And I’ve had tremendous success with The Apollo Murders, its a number one bestseller in multiple countries. Euromedia is doing a Czech translation and they should have it available in May 2023. I don’t know what they’re going to call it in Czech.
I’m always challenging myself to try and do something that sounds interesting and then see if I can gain all of the physical and mental skills to do it well.
What is The Apollo Murders book like? Is it closer to Doyle and Christie’s style, mysterious until the very end, or is it more an alternative history like the For All Mankind series from Apple?
It’s alternative history action thriller fiction set in 1973. It’s probably closest maybe to Robert Ludlum or Frederick Forsyth books, such as Day of the Jackal, or maybe Tom Clancy’s Hunt For Red October.
About 90% of this book really happened and more than half of the characters in the book are real people. It’s 100% plausible sequence of events, but you’ll also learn a tremendous amount of firsthand spaceflight. I think anybody of an inquisitive mental nature is going to enjoy The Apollo Murders.
What do you think is the smartest and stupidest thing humanity has done in recent history?
There’s almost eight billion of us, so we’re pushing the boundaries of both those things at the personal level every single day. Collectively, there have been huge leaps forward in improving the quality of life for people all around the world.
If you just look to 1822 through 2022, fifty percent of everyone died as a child in 1820 and now infant mortality is almost down to nothing. It’s odd now in any of the advanced nations of the world for a child to die. So that’s been an enormous application of intellect to accomplish something.
Also in 1820, 90 percent of the world lived in abject poverty, and now it’s down to 10 percent. So in a very short time, through the application of intelligence, we have radically improved the quality of human life and individual human opportunity. I see that as the great triumph and result of intelligence.
What’s the stupidest thing or the least intelligent thing we’ve done? I think global war. If you look at the conflicts of the 1930s or even of the early teens of just over a hundred years ago. To think that our best way to resolve mutual conflict is to kill 70 million fellow humans, as if that was the only solution that we could come up with to try and resolve our own disagreements. I mean, I can’t think of a more idiotic behavior than multiple mass murder as a way to try and solve disagreements. It’s not unexpected. It’s part of our behavior. Chimpanzees do the same thing. But that doesn’t excuse us doing it as ostensibly the most intelligent beings on Earth.
I think those are great examples. During your astronaut career, did you have a chance to execute your own ideas or were you just working on someone else’s projects?
I served 21 years as an astronaut. I helped invent spaceflight. I worked on it every single day. I helped create displays, I constantly changed the procedures. I worked on multiple different vehicles. I worked with researchers on hundreds of different types of experiments. We created spaceflight as part of a huge team of people. So there are thousands of examples where my contribution changed what has happened, and it’s part of the legacy of spaceflight. That’s why it’s interesting and challenging and fun. We’re not automatons. We’re creative people as part of the whole process. That’s why it’s interesting and why I did it for over 20 years.
Can you name a single most beneficial outcome of it?
The Hubble telescope is purely the result of human intellect. It has told us how old the universe is and it’s shown us planets around other stars. We now know that Earth is not unique in the universe. It’s the greatest telescope we’ve ever built, and astronauts and human space flight was an enormous part of that.
In 1999-2000 we also mapped the entire world in 12 days using a three dimensional radar where you could actually map things down, not just location, but elevation. We mapped the entire world in under two weeks in the 90s that had never been done before, and it now becomes an enormously useful tool to everybody on Earth.
And there’s countless examples like that.
„The greatest limitation we ever have are the boundaries that we put on ourselves.“
– Chris Hadfield
When your child dream finally came true as you became an astronaut, how difficult was it for you to come up with new dreams and goals for your life?
I never had just one dream. That would be odd. I still have loads of places I haven’t been and things I haven’t accomplished and stuff I’m extremely curious about that I don’t know anything about. Like how do you write a book? How do you write a song? How do you teach at university? How do you run a business? How do you make a startup, turning an idea into a successful business? How do you run a board of a major public company? How do you sing in harmony? How does the human body work? How can you improve healthy longevity in a human being? And how can we make the quality of life as good as possible for as many people as possible in a sustainable way? There’s an enormous bottomless well of mysteries and problems to solve out there, and I’m fascinated by all of them. And I flew a spaceship.
The greatest limitation we ever have are the boundaries that we put on ourselves or the things that we’ve given up on. To me, it’s best to stay curious and inspired and have all sorts of goals in your life and then constantly be working to change who you are individually to be able to get closer and closer to accomplishing those goals. That’s the very essence of life.
If you could send a short text message to yourself in the past, what would the message be?
I have always been focused and optimistic in my life, even when I’ve run into what seemed to be insurmountable obstacles. When Challenger came apart in January of 1986, I thought that was my space dream disappearing. But nothing is ever as good or as bad as it first seems. And I think it’s important to realize that life is long.
So if I could send myself a note, I think it would be to be deliberate in choosing who I have in my life. Because the people around you are very important in the success or failure that you have in your life. People that believe in you. People that challenge you. People that teach you.
There’s a song that I know that has a lovely line in it that says „I lost some friends that needed losing“. And that’s kind of a contrary idea to a lot of people. But I think if I could send a note back to myself at all stages of life, it would be to recognize that success is very seldom an individual act. It’s the fruit of a lot of other people’s influence. So constantly be aware of who you have in your life with you and look for people that inspire, enable, and challenge you. I think that would be the most useful message to remind myself of at all stages of my life.
Any last word for Mensans?
If you are able to join Mensa, then you have a black and white measure of your own mental capacity and you’ve been born with a gift that is now up to you to decide how to unwrap. Just having mental capacity is no guarantee of anything, it’s like if you’re the strongest person in the world or the tallest or the fastest runner. The real question now is what are you going to do with it? How are you going to apply it and use it and nurture it and learn?
Just raw ability is not the same thing as proven capacity. Imagine if Usain Bolt had never run in his life, even though he’s the fastest human being than ever. What if he had just never actually run? Even though his body was tremendously capable, he had to work his whole life to get to the level where he could be the fastest man in the world.
It’s sort of the same for members of Mensa, born with a great capacity for mental accomplishment. The real challenge now is how you’re going to train and learn and study and practice and make mistakes and get faster and get better so that you can really use your raw capacity to the limits of its capability to accomplish things that you believe in. To me, no matter what you’re born with, it’s what you do with it that matters.
If you’re lucky enough to be a member of Mensa, then you have a proven raw capacity to do something. So get out there and do magnificent things with it! Because not only will it be better for the world, but it will be infinitely better for yourself.
Thanks a lot, Chris, I appreciate being able to talk to you.
It was my pleasure.
