On Duster Cornell, and this is curiously all life on Earth has about 4 billion years left. That's the time before the sun expands, heats the planet to unimaginable temperatures, engulfs it, and then explodes. We need to leave this rock. But that, as you can imagine, will take some doing. Humans aren't exactly built for space travel, and new planets will offer environments not suited for our biology. Doctor Christopher E Mason has a plan.
In his book The Next 500 Years Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, he lays out an ambitious road map for humanity's survival, arguing that we not only can, but must re engineer ourselves to thrive in space and safeguard life beyond Earth. From using CRISPR technology to re engineer our genes to colonizing exoplanets, his book explores the science, ethics, and awe inspiring impossibilities of humanity's
next great chapter. Doctor Mason is a geneticist, A computational biologist, and a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine who has been a principal investigator and Co investigator of 11 NASA missions and projects. In Doctor Mason's vision of year 2151, here's what our world could look like. We'll edit our genes safely and easily, selecting for desirable traits and erasing diseases that have haunted humanity for millennia. We'll travel routinely between space stations orbiting the
Moon, Mars and beyond. And we may even create artificial wombs, so-called exo wombs, to make reproduction possible on distant worlds. And before you dismiss this as mere science fiction, think about the strides we've already made as a species, from landing on the moon to splitting the atom. Considering Doctor Mason's ambitious ideas for our future requires imagination.
It reminds me of a scene from the movie Contact where Jodie Foster's character and astronomer are seeking funding for a telescope project is turned down by an unimaginative executive. This is a unique time in our history, in the history of any civilization. It's the moment of the acquisition of technology. That's the moment where contact becomes possible. The Very Large Array in New Mexico is the key to our chances
for success. With its 27 linked radio telescopes, we can search more accurately than at any other conventional facility. Now, we've already gotten the preliminary approval to buy the telescope time from the government. Now all we really need is the money. A nice presentation, doctor, but while our foundation arm does a mandate to support experimental programs, we must confess that your proposal seems less like science and more like science fiction.
What I love about this scene is that she doesn't give up. She's been in too many rooms with too many people like this before, so she makes a passionate play urging this man to expand his vision of what's possible by reminding him of what we're capable of and have already accomplished. Science fiction. Oh, you're right. It's, it's crazy. In fact, it's even worse than that than nuts. You want to hear something
really nutty? I heard of a couple guys that want to build something called an airplane. You know, you get people to go in it and then fly around like birds. It's ridiculous, right? Or what about what about breaking the sound barrier? Or rockets to the moon? Or Atomic Energy or our mission to Mars? Science fiction, right?
Look, all I'm asking is, is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision, you know, to step back for one minute and look at the big picture, to take a chance on something that might end up being the most profound, profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for for the history of history. I'm sorry. I just, I just spent the last 13 months coming into rooms like this and talking to people like you. And the truth is you're my last chance. So I'm sorry I wasted your time.
But it's still a no until the executive gets a phone call. Doctor. Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir. Watching on a security feed is the company's founder, a highly accomplished engineer and entrepreneur whose career has been defined by bold action and innovative thinking. He recognizes the genius in her work, sees its potential and green lights the project. You have your money. Before she leaves, she looks up to the camera and thanks the man who saw and believed in her vision.
Thank you. Thank you. Now let's dive into my conversation with Christopher Mason as we explore his bold vision for. The future Christopher Mason, welcome to Curiously. A pleasure to be here, thanks for having me. Today we're going to talk about your 2022 book, The Next 500 Years, Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds. And I really enjoyed the read. It very concretely games out how our species life in general might be able to relocate and get off planet Earth if we need to.
And you made it abundantly clear that we will need to eventually. Yeah, it's not. It's not an if, it's good. It's got to be a win. Mostly just because of cosmological constants and the fact the sun will at some point engulf the earth, which I think about almost every morning. Not in a panic way, but just in a factual way. And it's very motivating, I'd say. Yeah. Does that get you motivated, knowing it's the mortality of our home in a way?
Yes, Yeah. Well, it's the only home we've ever known, and it's very precious and beautiful and wonderful and extraordinary. But if it's the only one we ever stay at, it'll be at the last home that we ever know as a species and really any species on on this planet. So we're part of the argument of the book is which, you know, maybe we'll get into a little bit, is that we're the only species with an awareness of extinction.
And I think that that awareness itself becomes a self motivating duties because you know that you are, you know, beholden to act upon that. And so obviously you can do it selfishly. You can have your own your own
body survive. We can then think about having our species survive, but the duty I argue for is really, you know, across all life and even potentially someday AI talk about in the book, like if AI really become sentient to the Super intelligence, maybe they would be good stewards of life and complexity. At that point, it would have effectively be life as well. So I think I like to say that I am matter agnostic towards intelligence. So if it's carbon, if it's silicon, if it's some other
entity, that's fine. But the need and and duty towards shepherding life and that's complexity applies to all of those substrates. So yeah, so that's some of the philosophical parts of the book, but then it gets into the the fun genomics technical parts of our how do you build new creatures from scratch? How do you modify radiation resistance? How do you survive on other planets? And then what have we learned from other astronauts basically so far?
Yeah, Yeah. And I think as far as the questions I have laid out, we'll touch on all of that. And I particularly want to talk about kind of like the moral duty you think, you know, humanity has to our own species, but life in general to, you know, help us continue on in the event of some catastrophe or inevitable extinction event or
something. But I think it might be useful if you could kind of briefly tell listeners about your background real quick as a geneticist, as a computational biologist, and then also the scientific work you've done as an investigator for national missions and projects. Yeah, my background, so I, you know, started as a single celled embryo a long time ago in Racine, WI. I have since divided many times and picked up some microbes along the way at some epigenetic changes.
So, you know, Ben, originally from Wisconsin, did my undergraduate degree in genetics at Madison, APHD in genetics at Yale, did a clinical genetics post doc at Yale, the medical school, also a fellowship in genomics, ethics and law at Yale Law School. And so a lot of time, you know, Midwest, East Coast and I've been in New York City since 2009 and laboratory here at Wild Cornell Medicine, you know, at the medical school for Cornell, where we focus on three main
areas and that's clinical genetics, which is cancer dynamics and evolution, infectious disease and space medicine. So broad interdisciplinary clinical genetics profiles. The second area is in computational methods and this includes AI tools and machine learning, various base calling and, and computational new methods basically to integrate processor or, or merge kinds of data sets and generate them. And the third area is synthetic
biology. So this I think is what is today the smallest part of the lab, but over the course of the next several decades will be by far the largest part of a lot of our work because we'll have mapped enough genetic code. We'll have understood enough genetic code and, and characterized it that we can then begin the process of tweezing, tweaking, modifying, slightly adjusting or merging components of, of creatures. We've done this with tardigrade
genes and human genes. We've done this with different microbial species. You can you reach an era, I think relatively soon where you could synthesize entire genomes from scratch and then try and predict what you'll get at the
end. And you know, this applies to everything from better microbes that can make you products or absorb toxins to cyanobacteria that could absorb carbon to, you know, more interesting things recently like bringing back the direwolf or de extinction process, which when I was writing the book was very hypothetical. But in the past year we have done, we've contributed to the project to get the first direwolf born actually or D extinct species born. Wow.
How's it doing? Great so far actually. There's actually three of them born and they're undisclosed location, but they're healthy and they seem happy and they're doing, doing great actually. OK, very interesting. Like a big theme in your book. It's in the subtitle Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds. It is using engineering to change our own biology, maybe engineering to change our own
planet. And I think one place I want to start with is things you learned from one of your studies that you talked about at the beginning of the book where you you studied Scott Kelly, the astronaut, and he spent a year on the International Space Station and you compared the physiological changes that happened to his body with his twin brother. It's called NASA's twin study. And I wanted to see if I can get you to kind of summarize what
you found and why it mattered. Yeah, we've found many things that change. So I think, you know, the goal was to look at what happens to the human body in a full, you know, it was 340 days, so almost a full year in space. And we looked at a lot of six month missions, few weeks in space, a few days in space. But this gave us a unique opportunity to look at a really long mission, which is one of
the longest. Well, at the time it was the longest contiguous mission for an American and one of the longest orbits ever. And also we had an identical twin, so very unique series of circumstances and compared them at a genetic level, molecular level, a cellular level. So look at many layers and modalities of biology to discern, you know, what happens to the body in space for that long. So many things change. We saw, you know, thousands of genes would turn on and turn off
and be up or down regulated. We saw a lot of activity in the immune system. We saw like changes in the blood profiles we had the telomeres actually got longer, which these are regions of your chromosomes, you know, that store your DNA normally as you age, telomeres get shorter, but ironically they got longer in space. So this wasn't a really surprising result. We worked with Susan Bailey on that particular project where we confirmed it with different
methods. One's called qPCR, 1 is nanopore sequencing. We also did other versions of sequencing. So we confirmed it was real and then really thought, well, that's interesting. And, and we've seen it now. I've seen almost every astronaut crew we've looked at the telomeres seem to get longer in space and we, we now know mechanistically what's driving
that. It turns out it's a bit of the response to radiation and the microgravity and, and we can see that there's a, a non coding RNA, it's called Terra, basically a guiding function that helps the telomeres get longer. We can see that activated in the blood for the astronauts. So, so mostly it seems to be the radiation response, but but we can see that as a really
surprising result. And then the other big take home is that, you know, we saw again thousands and thousands of changes at many layers of proteins and RNAs and DNA changes, but that they did revert back to normal within a few months. You know, more than 90% of everything had reverted back to what was a pre flight level. And so it seems to be the human body is extraordinarily resilient in terms of how it can adapt to these changes.
So if we go into space, go to Mars, go to a different solar system, it's pretty treacherous territory for humans. There's a lot of insults, radiation and the like. Is there anything you learned from Scott Kelly's body from your twin study that conforms like what we'll need to do in order to survive in tough conditions? Yeah, we looked at a lot of them.
So we all a lot of the changes we have published a follow up paper that looked at all the drugs that target some of these cytokine differences and you know we now know what to target. So I think the first phase of OK, what's changing, what's adapting, we know what is perturbed by being in space. And we're just though at the very beginning of knowing, OK, well, should we target that with a drug? Should we turn that gene off if it, if it's going on?
And, and we don't know enough yet to I think to turn down something that's being turned up in space because we don't know the difference really that much between maladaptive and adaptive for space life because we just don't have enough data. So we have basically, I'd say, the first draft of the map of the body to know what changes, but we don't yet know which parts we should, you know, modify or, or change in terms of what we should target. But at least we know what's
changing. And so we'll keep looking over each mission. We've done some work now with SpaceX and other commercial providers and look at, you know, again and again at each mission and see what is consistently changing and then what seems to be something we can start to have a countermeasure. It's called some intervention, basically to stop any of the negative effects basically. OK, one of the. Things I wanted to ask is how the book idea came to you. It's a 500 year plan and I
understand. Did it begin with a Wikipedia post you wrote in 2011? Is that how it started and how did it evolve from there? Yeah, it did. It was. So I started first. We had a just big on the lab at Cornell. We had a A-Team that's called the igem, the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition.
So we had a team trying to get as many radiation resistant organisms together, get their genome sequence, get the genes that confer the resistance and put them into one big Organism. So it was a wildly ambitious summer project with a team of undergrads with very few resources and a handful of people. So but our ambitions were big, but we also were talking about structures, the technical data, the philosophy behind it. And at 1.1 of the meetings we
said, why are we doing this? Why are we looking at radiation resistance and what's the long term use of this data? So I wrote a little blog post for the project. I just said, OK, the purpose of this is to understand where life can exist. And if we find all the genes that confer radiation resistance, maybe that could help us survive in space long term. And then if we can do that, we could look at other ways to modify eukaryotic cells or human cells and help us survive in
faraway planets. And then if someday get to other solar systems and like look at the end of the universe. So it was just a blog post of ideas, but then it was in 10 parts. And then an editor at MIT Press saw it, Bob Pryor. And he said, oh, Chris, you know, this looks kind of like an outline for a book. Have you ever considered writing a book? And I said, yes, but I don't have a lot of extra time and I wonder what I write. He said, well, let's meet.
And we had coffee and just chatted about making it into a book. And so, you know, normally for a book proposal, you, you shopping around. I was, I was very fortunate he found me and said, Hey, I think you should just write a book about this and, and we'll help, you know, give you an advance and get going. I was like, all right, great. So I've been thinking about it for years, of course. So it was very easy.
It was actually a pleasure to write because it's a collection of most of the things I think we can do and should do technologically, philosophically, and you know, genetically even. And then so wrote that, you know, actually just before the pandemic, it got the full first draft done and then. Well, one of your core ideas like I mentioned is that to save life we need to like engineer it basically. And for hundreds of thousands of years evolution has been self-directed.
But you argue that now we must take control, like reshape our biology and environment to survive space travel in new worlds. I was wondering if you can kind of expand on that idea. Yeah, it's not a necessity because there's a chance that, for example, Mars has some gravity, a little bit of atmosphere, less than 1%, but something. And you could maybe just go in a lava tube like which is where, you know, lava flow creates
these big caverns. And you can go underground and maybe be protected from the radiation and maybe be OK. You still need, you know, air, you need food, you need to
survive. But but the radiation risk I talk a lot about in the book, you know, we may be pleasantly surprised that the human body is resilient enough to, to survive it. But but I, I describe other modifications you need to say to live on Titan or Jupiter or other places where, you know, there's no way we'd remotely survive unless we had significant changes either to our body or, or systems that keep us alive or both.
And so I, I propose it is, is, you know, something that you'd be ethically bound to do these kinds of modifications if the alternative is death, you know, but if we know that a human body can survive and maybe it's more adaptive than we even imagine, great, then it's easier, frankly. So. But I have a feeling from what we've seen, a human body is fairly fragile. We'll need some of these modifications just to survive.
And so that's where I, I propose that this is something that's required to do, otherwise you won't make it at all. So that's, that's the proposal basically, Yeah, Yeah. And especially when it comes to space. Where? Just incredibly fragile. And I was kind of wondering if you could describe, broadly speaking, what are the major conditions we're most unsuited for when we're leaving Earth or living elsewhere? Like what do we have to worry about?
Yeah, the radiation we discussed a little bit already, and that's a big one. But there's other, other features. The dust from the moon, dust on Mars are really big concerns for NASA and other space agencies because we know it's probably going to be rough on the body. We don't know how bad, but they're just a particulate matter. The grain granularity of it. There is, you know, also just fluid shifts, the nutrition.
There's a psychosocial dynamic. What's going to happen when you're in a very, you know, marooned basically far away, you know, from Earth? It's one thing if you're on the moon, you can get back pretty quickly, but on Mars, you know, you're months away from being able to get help or to get back. So you're really truly alone in a way that no humans have ever been before. So there is a psychosocial dynamic and cognitive feature that we'll have to, you know,
keep an eye on for sure. Yeah, and you learned a lot from like, Scott Kelly's body and his reaction to space conditions 0 gravity, but you also learn from other organisms that have figured out a way to survive in extreme environments. And you already mentioned one of them, which is the tardigrades, the the water bear creature that can that's like almost indestructible. It can live in the vacuum of space. And somehow it's figured out how
to do that. And I understand you have learned things about it's genetics, it's Physiology that may inform our ability to withstand extreme environments as well. Yep, Yeah, they have. You know, we've been looking at them in a range of contexts that they, we can take a gene from tardigrades, one that was identified in 2016 called desupp or damage suppressor protein, and you can take that gene, optimize it and put it into a
human cell. So take a tardigrade gene, human genome, and it confers about 80% of the radiation resistance that we've seen in tardigrade. So it gives you a really easy way to take a evolutionary tool or lesson from one creature and transplant it into a human cell. So, you know, that's one example. We're also taking proteins from Dinococcus radiodurons, which is another extremophile that survived radiation and doing transplants of some of their
proteins into human cells. So we're it's very early stages. We're not doing clinical trials on people or anything like that yet, but we're showing that it's technologically possible that the human cells can tolerate these effectively alien proteins or very divergent species. Take those proteins from those species and put them in human cells and they actually function and they work and they give you the the result you want, the phenotype of radiation resistance, so.
Wow, not to get too in the weeds, but like mechanistically, how does transferring like a tardigrades genes that confers resistance to radiation, how does that give a human cell radiation resistance? So what we've seen is actually the the protein itself is actually going to places DNA and it seems to be protecting some of these sensitive. So it's actually serving we think a bit of a physical shield, but also helping to activate DNA repair a little bit
as well. So it's both a, we think structural like physical and also potentially, you know, biochemical or regulatory that it's activating some of these DNA repair pathways or at least helping to, you know, make them stronger, it looks like. So, yeah, so very, very fascinating, you know, kind of hybrid entity in this regard. And like you said, we're it's not happening in humans.
So we are quite far away from putting these tardigrade genes in human cells and and then having like a human being more resistant to radiation. Yeah. And we are, you know, we're probably at least a decade away from that, I'd say. But also we would need to make sure there's a need to do it real clear, you know, unmet medical need that is, that necessitates this kind of an intervention. And we'd have to do it slowly,
carefully. You know, we'd have to make sure that we are not doing, you know, something that's creating a lot of problems in the genome or secondary effects. So it's like most clinical trials where we do it very slowly, methodically, start with something akin to a phase one clinical trial, then do phase two, then phase 3. So we would go slowly through applications into human
subjects. And so you imagine years from now, maybe astronauts will be in a in space, and before they go on their mission, they'll maybe have like a certain amount of genetic tinkering happening in order to confer resistance to these extreme conditions. Yeah, we would see. You can even imagine a couple of directions. You could say what's your genetic profile? Are you high risk or low risk? And maybe you're already pretty low risk, so you're probably fine.
But if you're high risk, could you take pharmacological agents? Could you do, you don't have to even do genome modifications, you can do epigenome reprogramming. So you turn on genes temporarily. You can imagine doing that. And you know, also just building a molecular profile of the of the risk profile for the individual before they go is something that we could do. But it's the way down the road. But it's something we can definitely, you know, have set up for them.
OK, elephants. What if we learn from elephants and their cancer resistance? Yeah, they're, you know, they're pretty extraordinary creatures, also very social creatures. They when there's a friend, if you will, you know, they're very friendly. They have friends basically. And when a friend dies, they mourn. You know, they have these big social groups. They're very emotive. They're extraordinary creatures. And so, but one of the interesting fact about them is
they don't get a lot. They get very rarely do they get cancer and so when the idea is that it seems to be they have all these extra copies of P5320 extra copies. So compared to humans that have two copies and so it's indicated that maybe there is something to to their feature of having these other proteins that are often called the guardian of the
genome is the term for P53. It's going around and scavenging and making sure that if you have damage, it helps, you know, bring proteins to help prepare it. It maintains A monitoring across the genome. So it's very powerful in terms of its ability to keep you safe
basically at a genetic level. And so we, you know, we could see that actually one thing we did actually recently with elephants for the IPS CS to make wielding mammoths, we showed that you need to, you know, they're not, they're not all active, but you do have to make sure that they're dosage regulated correctly or otherwise it's hard to do reprogramming because if you think about CRISPR, you often break DNA to
then do modified DNA. But if your DNA is, if your cell is really good at repairing broken DNA, it makes it harder to modify that DNA. So you have to actually do a bit of attenuation for what P53 normally does just so you can do genome editing for like the woolly mammoth, for example. So, so we've learned a lot from about them and still learning a lot more, but they're very fascinating creatures for sure.
Does anybody is, is there ever been a criticism on some of this work of genome modification of like playing God? Have you ever gotten that reaction and and what would you say to it? Yeah, of course the people often say, you know, what gives you the right? Who are you to do it? What you know, that's something that sounds a bit like making life or recoding life or playing God. And in that regard, I, I think
there's two specific responses. 1 is that this is a, a molecular level of playing God that we're already doing at a macroscopic level and have been doing for centuries. So there's not that much. It's only a difference, I think of specificity and scope. It's not a difference of kind. It's a different, you know, degree. If anything, it's a more accurate version of what we've
been doing for a long time. We can get down to the single base and single molecule resolution of a change versus a pretty uncertain hybrid mixture or a breeding experiment. You know, we're actually doing things very specific and can finally you have a counterbalance to have something if you're doing breeding and you're getting something that's too low in genetic diversity, you can monitor and ensure that
that doesn't happen. So that these new methods and tools let you do what we've already been doing, but do it better in the sense that so it's so 11 argument, I would say is that we're not really doing anything that different from what we've already done. But even if they're someone would say, well, I don't think we should play God in any context. So I don't think it should be done at all. To which I say possibly.
But if we're still here in a billion years and the oceans start to boil and genome engineering is the only way we can survive and get off the planet, then it becomes much more not only palatable, but essential. And so I think it is one of the likely necessary tools for us to survive elsewhere and and certainly worth considering.
Again, we maybe we're wrong. Maybe we can evolve and somehow live in the vacuum of space or survive long flights, but I don't think that will happen anytime soon. Do you ever hear criticism like we have enough problems here on Earth, Like, why should we be spending resources on other planets and, you know, these grand visions that are hundreds of years out? Yeah, that's actually also, I think a pretty common critique if you would people say, well, you know, why? Why do this at all?
We poverty, there's diseases, there's cancers, there's, you know, and and even there I had to have often a very three specific responses to that. One is that you can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can cure diseases on Earth and address poverty and go to space. That was shown in the 60s when we passed civil rights legislation, but then also got a person on the moon.
So we know it's possible to do really good in society and structure and fight things like poverty and racism and and, you know, go farther than humans ever gone before. The second reason is, is hope. I think it's very hopeful to have, you know, the younger generation imagine their future is brighter than their present. And I think Space Flight is a very inspiring future forward look that brings everyone
together and is extraordinary. And then the third is, is the duty I mentioned at the beginning, like if we don't do this, we run the risk of everyone, you know, frankly, dying on Earth and all of life. And as far as we know, life in the universe is only on this planet. Now, maybe we're wrong, maybe it's elsewhere, but so far it's just us. And so no, by definition, no one else even knows there's life or has a capacity to protect it and preserve it. So I think those are the three
big reasons why. And someone says why do this at all? That I think not only can we, but that very much should we, and that we have to. This may sound like a kind of a dark thought, but one of the things I wanted to think about in counterpointing, like, such a grand vision is this idea of saving humanity and whether we're maybe, like, worth saving. That's a good question. Yeah. And you say it's our moral duty to prevent human extension. And I think I would agree with
that. I'm not opposed to that. But there are philosophers, This guy, David Benatar, he's a anti natalist, but he kind of argues the opposite, that life is too painful and humanity shouldn't be preserved. It reminds me of a scene in the TV show True Detective where Matthew Mcconaughey's character was actually inspired by Benatar's philosophy of anti natalism.
And he's basically just saying he thinks that humanity was this kind of failed experiment because self-awareness came online and created a bunch of us who just have these individual selves. And he thinks we should just deny our programming and, you know, go extinct, essentially. But you're arguing the opposite. It's our moral duty to prevent human extinction. And I was wondering if you'd kind of sell me on humanity. Why?
Why should we do it? Yeah, sure, that and I'm happy to do so. I think the it's a fascinating.
There's also a book right behind me is Derek Perfect wrote a book called Reasons in Persons, which is a really great philosophy book that is similar ideas and questions, which is just came from the 80s where he imagined an experiment, which he called the Republican conclusion, which is imagine you have, you know, hundreds of billions or trillions of people and you try to quantify happiness much like was done with John Stuart Mill.
But you say they're all happy, but they're barely alive and they're technically better than dead, but suffering a lot. And if your goal for the universe was to maximize happiness and you would say that this is still good effectively, but but you look at what the structure of the universe is and it's this widespread suffering everywhere that is, you know, you might say on the on the numbers, yes, they should live
and it's quote ethical. But if they're all barely surviving and barely, you know, have the smallest possible capacity for happiness, only like 1 day a year of barely at all that, yes, that's better than 0. But it's a Republican conclusion to, to reach. And so the argument there. And there's also, as you mentioned, other philosophers who've looked at this.
And so I think the, the challenge there is it, it is, it's analogous to, you know, when people say, you know, if we're 10 feet away and you keep cutting the distance in half and you keep going in half and half and half, eventually reached to Infinity. And then we would never be able
to reach each other. If you keep doing a, you know, it's just progression towards Infinity, which sounds cool for like if you're at a bar and you've got nothing else to talk about, but then the reality is someone can just like slap you in the face, right? So like, we know it's possible to touch each other and to move across a room and to exist in the universe. And so I think some of the arguments I think are too abstract to be useful.
Frankly, I'd say that that's one critique, but the, but that doesn't address the, the meat of their question. I think that's that's more of a technical critique of a philosophical argument to get the heart of the matter, though, you know, it's an important question like, are humans doing good in the universe? Are we the best iteration of life that could or should exist to be here?
Like is in would the universe be better off if we just went away, either because something better might come along or that you just nothing would be better? It's also those are both variations of that same question and a conclusion.
But I think it is a it's a Descartes kind of response where, you know, I think therefore I am or cogito or go soon, you know, just being able to ask that question, you know, is is itself a way to show value that they like for that value to have question, you have to exist in the 1st place. And so we don't know what value would look like in the absence of existence because no one would exist.
So I would argue that actually the ability to exist and ask that question is better than non existence because that question only has value because someone can ask it, right. So if everything and everyone was dead, then by definition there'd be no values, right? So I think having some ability to have value, even a value system, even if your value today is that we are not good, That doesn't mean it will be forever though. But like you can't have any
value if everyone's dead. So I think the critique of it would be in the substance would be that that may be true, that what if like you could make a number of metrics, any number of ways and say we've done all the math and it looks like humans are causing suffering or there's problems.
There's all these issues, but that presumes that it will always stay this way, which we know is not at all true based on just, you know, knowledge of history, of human history that, you know, slavery is mostly eradicated in the world, but used to be predominant in the world and poverty used to be awful. Infant mortality literacy was though there were all these issues where humanity quantifiably was much worse than it is today. And and it's no one can really argue any.
And I think, you know, just pick any, almost any metric and it's gotten, no, it's gotten a little bit, It hasn't always gotten good in the past few years. It's starting to dip back down again on some of these metrics. But at least relative to say, 3000 years ago, it's wildly better than than it ever used to be. And so that indicates that it's
possible to change that. Even if you could say, well, I've done the math and I still think it's not like, yeah, it's better than 3000 years ago, but I still think humans are an awful existence. I would point to just the empiricism of the past that we can and do get better, and I think we can reach a point that is better, that is, you know, a grander existence that is happier or whichever metric they'd want to use that's better.
I really like that idea. It's just will stick with me the idea that we will most likely improve and and maybe be helped by our technology. My last episode I was talking with an astronomer at Danco, and he's hopeful that AI might be able to help us solve issues that are too complicated for us, like solving famines or genocide or, you know, or large scale complex things that we just can't. We don't have the computational power, and we can't even do it
with institutions like. Maybe that'll help us get better. It could. I mean, I even ascribed AI as being candidate for what can be called life in the universe and they made me better than I'll said many things. And I think that's fine. I'm also not afraid of the AI, you know, coming and telling us all because I think it's wonderful for a movie script. But a good analogy, I think is when we look at say, you know,
cockroaches that are annoying. If they're in your house and you're in your way, you might kill them, but you don't think, oh, The thing is annoying me, I will go and kill all cockroaches in the world because it's energetically expensive. It's unnecessary and just doesn't make that much sense if you're just trying to you know, if good management of resources because they're not a threat, right.
So if we're if something is really a super intelligence, it can beat us and be better than us at everything. By definition, we're not a threat at that point. So why would it care? So so I'm not too worried about a super intelligence, but I agree AI could help in general. It could be a buddy it I don't think it'll be too threatening. And yeah, it's this time is the big question.
I think you, you, if you think that, you know, humans innately have no capacity to ever be of value to the universe, you know, then you're just a misinterpret, almost a nihilist at that point. So that it's hard to get a nihilist to see value in anything. So which makes it a bit self defeating. So I, I think you've got to give us a chance. And you could argue, I don't want to give humans a chance. I think we're doomed. We could have that discussion, but I, I think history shows
otherwise. And it's worth saying maybe we'll, we've seemed to have gotten better and maybe we'll keep getting better, right? I would argue. If we want to reach some of the exoplanets that we've identified habitable ones with conditions that might be good enough for our species. We'll have to. Overcome enormous challenges, which you outlined in the book and you've talked about here already, to radiation dust, but also we'll need propulsion technology.
They'll be cosmic debris. The psychological stress of confined living. So many sci-fi movies just showing colonies tearing themselves apart because everyone's stressed and fighting for resources and you just pick your political, economic conflict. We'll have to figure those things out.
But there's also. And like The Expanse, The Expanse is a great, you know, we're, it's amazing technology and we're we've, you know, we're all over the solar system and amazing tools, but still petty and backstabbing and mean and jealous and vicious and, you know, awful to each other.
So yeah, that series in those books we're really kind of depressing to read because you have this hope that Oh well, we'll be amazing and great creatures once we've reached this interplanetary exploration phase. But maybe not, might just be still mean to each other. It's possible. It will probably bring our problems with us and we'll we'll still have envy, greed, lust. Seven deadly sins, yeah. Yeah, they'll come with us. Maybe we'll get better, but we'll see.
Actually, I'm just remembering a movie. I can't remember the title, but everybody, all the, the people on the spaceship took a, took a drug of some kind to kind of dull their emotions. And that that's like a pharmacological intervention to get people to kind of maybe if you don't feel, maybe if you dull one's mood, that can help us not be in conflict with each other. Yep. Yep, Yep. It could be a way to yeah, just make it so people are a bit more
palatable. Or there's even some discussion in my more recent book I talk about, you know, what, if you get genetic engineering gone crazy and you're like, we're going to make it so you have the perfect genome for the job and, and decrease violence tendencies. Or, you know, because you get a lot of Ethiopian futures of genome engineering, which I don't think will happen, but you know, it gets like the movie Galica potentially.
So there's also ways you could imagine taking away people's rights because you're you're too focused on the genetics of it, which is not perfect, of course, as a science right now. So it's hard to be that predictive and prescriptive towards what people with their GM is relative to what they're going to do. How do you think?
One of the barriers to space travel I wanted to get your take on is dealing with like just a long term space travel, like the distances we'll have to cover and we'll have to probably hibernate. We'll have to go into some sort of sleep. You know, it's so many movies from Alien to Interstellar, all like very cool depictions, takes on how that could happen. How do you think realistically, scientifically, we could pull that off well?
We know, I guess we, I have some hopes because a little bit about in the book and I actually just came from the applied Physiology lab that's in, in Pittsburgh yesterday where Kate Frisinger and Efsheem Baheshti and others are working on ways to mimic hibernation that we see in bears because bears are extraordinary. They have, they're really, you know, really decrease insulin levels. Their blood becomes as thick as BBQ sauce. And they they don't go to the
bathroom either. And it's extraordinary, right? So they can we know in a mammalian system, it's possible to do this for, you know, at least months on end and to have this exquisite level of regulation. It's not impossible. So that, that, that there means that there's a possible path forward. Now, we don't know how to do it yet, of course, but there's, you know, a lot of groups looking at this and, and even the few companies looking at ways to try and, you know, assimilate this.
Because you could also imagine if you can induce hibernation, that could help you if you have a trauma victim. So you could pause sort of the damage of the body before on the way to a hospital. So there's other medical applications that are that are relevant and very interesting to the same question. Yeah. So if we could figure out how bears do it, yeah, we might be able to to do it in US as well. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But hopefully we don't have to be that hairy. I don't know.
Maybe we'd be that hairy. Maybe. It might be just kind of something we'll have to accept, you know, just excess hair in order to be able to, you know, not go to the bathroom for nine months. So if we would say we survive space travel, we get to a new system and we reach another planet, its conditions are different than Earths. How realistic is it that the idea of engineering the planet itself to make it more
habitable? Like how could be change of a planet in terms of UV, in terms of the resources we'll need? You've talked a little bit about that in the book. It's actually changing the new home. Yeah, that match what we need, which would be, you know, in that sense you'd need a, well, terraforming plan, which is a many generational plan. You'd need basically, you know, centuries, if not millennia to accomplish a feat of a real terraforming, but not impossible either.
The example you can quickly point to, and I do in the book of it, is you look at the ozone hole in the ozone layer. We recognize as a global community a problem that we wanted to address. We did so and got rid of chlorofluorocarbons, fixed it, did it, you know, already successfully completed one geoengineering project on Earth in a matter of a few decades, which actually even less, which was pretty impressive. So we know it's possible.
The challenge is can you get as widespread agreement, you know, CO2 levels we're trying to regulate now and that's very difficult. But as long as there's a view and a sense of duty again towards a multi generational stewardship of a planet, it's definitely possible.
But but it's also, you know, the closest thing we have for an analogy would be in medieval Europe where people would it would take 15 or 20 generations of people working on a cathedral to build it. I know that was an intergenerational plan, but they can, you know, see it every day and work on it and have the sense of pride and and local response. But engineering atmosphere would probably take much longer and probably be much less gratifying in the short term. It reminds me of a question I
had later. It's interesting on multi generational project and you know, building a cathedral. How is it that you keep individual generations motivated to work on a project that will finish after they pass? Because if you're working on a 500 year plan or longer, you'll have people working on something that will basically benefit generations, many, many generations down the line. I think it requires a real shift of perspective for everyone,
really. Ideally where you look at what can you do for people you'll never meet and how do you get them to care. Yeah, the closest iteration I've seen of that in modern day is Boy Scouts. And when you go camping, there's an old adage that you always leave the campsite better than you found it.
And so the simplest thing is if there were five sticks of wood, by the fire pit way, when you use the fire and you leave the next day, make it so that there's six there so that you leave it at least as good, if not better than how you found a campsite. You know, if it's a little, if there was garbage, you get rid of the garbage. You know, things, small things like that.
But even though it can sometimes be for very small degrees of change, it means there's continual improvement at a spot that benefits people you never meet. It means that you know the there's always progress and there, there is no gratification other than just the knowledge
that someday that would be you. And so I think with just enough self reflection, you'll think, oh, that I exist in the world with certain benefits because someone else did something for me that I I'll never meet them and never be able to thank them. And wouldn't it be nice to pay it forward? But they how do we generate that instinct to pay it forward? It's hard because the cathedrals, it was for a deity. It was like they were doing it for good works. They were hoping to get into heaven.
They had a clear motivation. Some of them just did it because they liked beautiful things. Some of them did it as a job. You know, they they were building things for a variety of reasons that were either short or very long term. But we won't have that in the case of probably a terraforming you, you would do it just for the sake of of good of humanity, but we would not likely see that readily.
So we'd have to really have a sea change of how do people view their place in the world and in in the world's they'll never meet. And so I talk a lot about duty towards species and duty towards life itself is my proposed method in the book of how do we get if everyone had the sense of duty towards life and towards the humans and towards all of life itself, I think that would help engender such activity.
But without either a deity or a sense of duty or, you know, sense that I think close gratification. Those are you want to have some, at least all one of those, if not all those on some level to get to get people to be motivated. Yeah, I wonder if the vision, if the vision becomes more concrete, like we identify a habitable planet and it becomes like a planetary. Like a goal. Yeah. And we that would sort of bring us together almost like the moon missions, yeah. That's a great point.
And that's, I think, very much, yeah. So because of the moon, obviously it's visible. You can see it in the night sky. You can see let's go there. And if we had enough in the media, we've zoomed in, say, with the new telescope, and we can see this looks like it's a habitable planet. We want to go there. We can see exactly where it is. We know what we want to do. I think that could be an example where people they, they feel like they can see something and they know there's a goal.
And yet, you know, let's say it's a 5000 year goal. Now we've never had one, but we could have one, right? So I think people, part of it was you have to give people credit, You know, that were in the 1600s, average life expectancy was in the in the mid 20s, right? So maybe you know, to be 30, but it's hard to imagine something taking centuries when you barely live to be two decades, you
know. So it, it, it would be, I think that's helped a bit that just people have a sense of I can have AI can have a career that's 50 years, or I can have three careers that are each 20 years, or I can have this people's view of, of time has gotten, I think longer or more appreciative of longer time frames and that's helped. I'm always curious how scientists are inspired by science fiction and you know, which books are movies help
shape their imagination. I always like to ask a scientist, you know, what they read or or watched it and as they were growing up and what made a big impression on them. And feel free to answer however you'd like. But I did see that I think in the acknowledgements you said your aunt and uncle gave you Isaac Asma's foundation series on your 15th birthday. So what influence did that book, and maybe other sci-fi in general, have on you being a scientist? That was a big one.
Just in the sense of several ways. There's a bit of a humanism that was in there. And I'd never heard the word humanist. Asthma of was a humanist. I didn't even know what that was. And what is it? Just someone who believes in the value of humans and that being just a humanist is, you know, often focused on peace and preserving humanity and appreciating humanity. Just being a humanist as as a thing you could be. I didn't even know that was a thing that you can see the value
of humans. So I, I, you know, that humans make poetry and art and music and science and appreciate and have, you know, good, you know, have, you know, joys and sadness and have, you know, this rich diversity and tapestry of emotions and ambitions and dreams and inventions and all these things that come from being human is something you appreciate and you want to preserve, which I didn't know was a thing you could be. But Asimov was very much a
humanist and wrote about this and talked a lot about it. And then also this, the science in the books that he, you know, imagined with such ease, the this idea of an intergalactic empire and people having many, many planets feed one planet, the capital in the book or people traveling across the Galaxy. And it seems so effortless in the book that I, I was taken with that, that vision of what could the future be for humanity and wanted to help make that
possible. And that the senses of duty and genetics came later. But that I think that that sense of the awe of the Galaxy, the ease of travel, the the beauty of what's ahead, what was really captivating. And so that was one good book. Kim Stanley Robinson's books were really good book Red Mars, Green bars Mars, Blue Mars and other books he's written. And I'd say, you know, so the Expanse series, Star Trek, of course, Star Wars, interesting
like sci-fi. So always enjoyable, of course, to, to when you look up at the night sky to imagine what if I could be up there? And I think many people have done that for thousands of years. We met at the Boston space. Week, I think it was. At the like space career fair and you were at the MIT press table and that's how we how we met.
And I got your book. And one of the things I was very interested in that week was hearing scientists and astronomers and, and the like, talk about life elsewhere. And, you know, thinking about the Drake equation and how like mathematically life must exist. And I wanted to ask you what you think about the possibility for life elsewhere and also like what form you think it may be in Could be like microbial or I think it might be fun to like speculate as well.
Like maybe it's something if it's a life form, we can't even imagine because the conditions of which it arose are so different from Mars. So I'm wondering, do you think life exists elsewhere, and if so, in what form? I think it, you know, we don't know, of course. So by empiricism the answer's no. But what do I believe and what do I hope or even think? The conditions for life, as far as we know it are, seem to be relatively common. Almost every star probably has
at least several planets. There seems to be a lot of those planets that are, you know, inhabitable zones, but at least of the ones we've discovered so far, maybe 1010 percent, 5%, you know, a good number. And if there's billions and billions of of stars, there's trillions and then each one of them has planets and it's some, you know, good percent of the
habitable zones. So you could update the direct equation to indicate that I think there's probably microbial life somewhere in the universe, not that we know of, but just on, on the odds it, it seems like raw materials are there in enough places in the universe. Stars have been around long enough to make life, you know, And so I think microbial life
very likely. But if you look on our own planet, there was microbial life several billion years ago, but it took you billions of years to reach a stage of complexity that lets us have this conversation. And so you might be many plans for life just got going 1 billion years ago, right? And it's still in the early stages of building complexity. So I would say, you know, to our knowledge complex life is an only one planet in the whole universe is here so far in
microbial life. I think probably, but we don't know, of course, but I, I, I just think it's also early in the universe. Yeah, it's only been here 13 point, you know, 8 billion years, 13.7. And you know, a lot of stars took a few billion years to get formed. There was a time period there weren't enough heavy elements. So we've only had probably a good so 9 or 10 billion years of, of a, of a, you know, a
runway to start to build life. And so we have another, you know, several hundreds of billions or trillions ahead of us, right? So I think we've got a lot more time now. Some of what some point we were in our stars, though actually one weirdly depressing fact or just depressing fact of me at least, is the majority of stars that ever will form in the universe have probably already
formed. So we're probably past the 50% mark of all the stars that ever will exist in the, in the future of the universe, history and future, at least of this universe. So that means we, we don't have, you know, hundreds of billions of years to keep making new stars. The universe is expanding. And that might mean we're, we only have another good 10 to 20 billion years where we really get good shots at making life.
You could argue so. Unless we figure out a way to maybe engineer exactly the birth of stars, yeah. Different kinds of nuclear bases, different structures of matter. Exactly. Yeah. That would then really open it up so that life is starting to make life itself. Speaking of that, I was curious, you know, you're obviously a very strong believer in engineering solutions. I'm wondering, is there an engineering challenge you think
might be unsolvable? And one that comes to mind is potentially like reversing aging or stopping death altogether. So radical life extension comes to mind. You know, if we're thinking about being able to hibernate and resist radiation, I wonder what can we do on life
extension. We can do so that's where I think some of these really aggressive genome and epigenome engineering tools could be deployed to get you people to live to be 100 to 30140150I even think it's likely they will for sure be needed to do to get there. Because you know, if you look at the maximum life age for humans, it's not moved really at all in decades. Even though the average has gone up, we're still are hitting a
wall. And so I think to get past that point, you can think about, you know, reprogram chromatin and epigenetics in cells, you know, maybe some more aggressive cellular therapies, but I, but we haven't tried a lot of them yet. But I, I think they maybe needed to get to the stage where people want to live to be say 200 years. I'm personally fine. And for my 500 year plan, I'll be dead for the vast majority of that plan. That was always the plan.
So it's, it's OK to, you know, know you're going to die, not fear you're going to die. And if I happen to be wrong in 30 years, they find some amazing way to keep me alive. Great. But I'm going to plan with what is the very likely results from what we know so far. In your lifetime, in that approximately 80 years or so that we have, where do you hope humanity will will be? And then if you want looking 100 or even 500 years out, if all goes to plan, what does the human future?
Look like to you? Yeah. I think I would love to reach a stage where when we talked about earlier that there is people have a sense of intergenerational duty and how do we really embed that into culture or society, into people's, you know, I think day-to-day operations. Now to get there, I think you have to solve a lot of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, for example, like food, water, shelter, a lot of sociological stability, which
many people do not have. Billions of people do not have, you know, enough to eat enough food. So we have the luxury of having the ability to have this conversation in hypotheticals and dream of a future because we don't have to worry where our next meal is going to come from.
So I think solving some of those short term problems is still on top of the list, but eventually we'd have people really have a sense of ownership and duty between generations and to each other and to help each other, which which we don't, you know, have yet embedded in many cultures or really certainly not
globally. So I think it's, I'd love to see that and I'd love to see, you know, more of the trials of these kinds of modifications in human systems where we're, we're doing a lot of CRISPR therapies now for treating diseases, which is extraordinary, but perfecting that technology, making it so genome modification and genome synthesis is, is safe, effective and routine is, is a world that we're getting a glimpse into, But I would love to see it become ubiquitous.
And, you know, we, we don't think anything now about using electricity, which is an awesome force of the universe. We use it everywhere all the time and, and don't think twice about it. So at some point, could genomics and genetic modifications and, and optimization become as ubiquitous? So you've got, you know, your cyanobacteria processing, your waste in your house, making your food, you're protected from radiation. If you get too much damage, you do a quick burst of an
epigenetic modification. And you can imagine futures like that. That would be, you know, I think wondrous and safe and people would live longer, healthier lives and, and have plenty to eat. So, you know, I'm a technologist and a biologist, of course, I like biotechnology as one source of salvation, if you will. But it could come from robotics, AI, other tools. There's definitely other technologies that could help us and even just social constructs that could help us.
So that's the future I'd love to see. Well, we'll leave it at that. You know, it was a pleasure meeting you at Space Week, really. Thanks so much for coming on and talking about your book, and I hope we stay in touch. Yeah. Definitely, It was really great to meet you there and thanks for this podcast. You got a lot of great material out there online. So very happy and honored to contribute to it. And I look forward to staying in touch. And if you're ever in New York
City, let me know. I can swing on by the lab. We'll do it. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of Curiously. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Christopher E Mason. If this episode challenged you or helped expand your perspective or satisfy your curiosity about the world, please consider sharing it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. If you want to support Curiously, please consider
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