Artificial Companions on Mars with Dr. Simon Dubé

In this special Mars Love Month episode, returning guest Dr. Simon Dubé joins me to explore one of the most surprising frontiers of space settlement: artificial companions. If Mars is going to be home — not just a research outpost — we’ll need more than life-support systems and radiation shielding. We’ll need emotional infrastructure.

Simon is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of love, sexuality, psychology, and emerging technology. Listeners may remember him from our conversation last year on Sex and Love on Mars. This time, we take things further, asking what role AI-driven companions, robotic intimacy, and emotionally responsive systems might play in long-duration missions.

We discuss whether artificial partners are substitutes or supplements, how isolation changes human bonding, what happens to attachment in confined habitats, the ethics of emotional AI, and why the goal on Mars may not be to pass the Turing Test — but to pass the loneliness test.

If we’re serious about building a civilization on Mars, we have to design for the heart as much as the body.

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