In this special Everyday Mars episode commemorating Mars Love Month, returning guest Dr. Simon Dubé joins Joe 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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A huge thank you as well to Simon for joining me again and sharing his time and perspective, to Nick Thorburn for the stellar theme music, to Ceci Giglio for the incredible graphics, to Jero Squartini for the amazing animations, to RDan, Leila, Inka, and Carl for adminning the Facebook group, and to my family for supporting this project—even when space history gets unexpectedly sweet.

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