Modern Wisdom - #357 - Christopher Mason - A 500-Year Plan To Reach Other Worlds

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

Christopher Mason is a Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, founding Directors of the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction and an author. Eventually, the sun is going to engulf the earth. This means that if we want human and animal life to not be snuffed out within a billion years, we need to reach other worlds and Christopher has put together a 500-years roadmap for how we could do it. Expect to learn why space flight is so harsh on the human body, how genetic manipulation could assist us with survival, whether locking generations of humans on a spaceship is ethical, if zero gravity birth is possible, whether anyone has had sex in space yet, why we should bathe in yoghurt and much more... Sponsors: Get 40% discount on everything from boohooMAN at https://bit.ly/manwisdom (use code MW40) Reclaim your fitness and book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at http://bit.ly/rxwisdom Extra Stuff: Buy The Next 500 Years - https://amzn.to/3lwzkrY  Check out Christopher's lab - https://masonlab.net/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello you! Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Christopher Mason, he's a professor at Wild Cornel Medicine, founding director of the World Quant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction and an author. Eventually, the sun is going to engulf the earth. This means that if we want human and animal life to not be snuffed out within a billion years, we need to reach other worlds. And Christopher has put together a 500 year road map for how we could do it. Today, expect to learn why spaceflight is so harsh on the human body, how genetic manipulation could assist us with survival, whether locking generations of humans on a spaceship is ethical,

if zero gravity birth is possible, whether anyone has had sex in space yet, why we should bathe in yoghurt and much more. Honestly, I don't think I'm ever going to get bored of dreaming about the potential futures for humanity, where we could end up and how we might get there and different strategies for getting across the galaxy. And even more mental than that is the fact that Christopher has somehow managed to get an entire lab of people to actually be on board with this. So not only are they crazy theories, but somehow they're happening

in the real world, which yeah, I mean, the future is here. We just haven't got the flying cars yet. Another reason to be very positive about the future is that the Modern Wisdom Reading List is now live, and you've got a hundred amazing books, including fiction, nonfiction and real-life stories that you can sink your teeth into for the rest of however long it takes you to read them all. Head to chriswillx.com slash books. Download a copy, it is completely free. Thousands of people have already got theirs and the feedback's been great. Wasting people's life, not wasting their lives, just making them spend it on something that isn't Netflix and love island. Go and get a copy today, chriswlex.com slash books.

But now it's time for the wise and wonderful chris vermason. Chris Vermason, Puck at the Show. Play here to be here, thanks for having me. Do you know how I knew that me and you were going to get unjust fine? It's when I found out that you're also a fan of Neil Stevenson's Seven Eaves. Yes, the five books review probably you read, I imagine, yes. Yes, which was if your audience hasn't read it is really a phenomenal book, but is also terrifying in a lot of ways. But I think it is related to some of the things that I just wrote in my book, yet in terms of thinking about what happens at the cusp of survival for our species

and what do we do and how do we survive. So yeah, it's a great book. I'm sure it will be a movie at some point you would have to be. It's basically written as if it's already. So good. The first line, the moon explodes. Yeah, the first line of the book, the moon explodes. So anyway, how do you get started thinking

about creating a roadmap for us to leave Earth? It comes from really a place of hope. I actually think the, I'm a humanist. I like people. There's a lot of things that people do bad, but there's a lot that we do that's great in terms of poetry and music and science and the ability for humans to create things that will exist long past their own lifetime. And so I mean, the most obvious example is people have kids all the time, but even hidden historically when people have built cathedrals that we knew would take generations to build and also even just having science projects that can sometimes be multi-generational climate changes a good example. You know, we're not doing it that well yet and we could do it wrong there too, but there are many places where humanity has a lot that I think that is extraordinary and I think it's worth preserving as long as possible.

So I've always thought that. And as of it came as scientists, I thought, well, if we're really going to exist as humans for a long, long time, we have to think about what is that time and then how do we do it? And the time frame I think about a lot is the end of the earth because once you read about that, it's going to happen. It's something I never forgot. So I think, well, if we only have a finite time in this solar system, well, what are we doing to eventually get ready to, at some point, we have to go?

It's not if we go, it's when we go. And so I wanted to think about what can we do technically, ethically, and really sociologically to do to make that happen. The timeline has actually been moved up a little bit sooner as well, right? Originally, most people think that we've got about four billion years until the sun's going to expand and engulf the earth, but in less than one billion years it'll be getting pretty hot, a lot of oceans will evaporate and life's going to be very, very difficult. So the timeline has been

hurryed along to say the least. Yeah, absolutely. So this is, and I actually I really said when I was writing the book at the end, I thought, well, I'm writing kind of like what happens in the far, far future for a humanity or what could happen, what I hope happens. And I always have that number in my head like what we have, you know, four and a half billion years is a long time. And a billion years is still a pretty long time too. But it was the equivalent of imagining that you might live to be a hundred years old and someone telling you one day, no, you're only going to be to 20.

That's, you're going to have about a fifth of the lifespan you thought you would have, because by then, as you just said, the oceans will begin to boil, the luminescence of the sun gets so much more that it gets probably too hot to leave her. It could maybe live underground, but it's gonna be tough. So I got really sad.

I came downstairs and told my wife, I was like, oh, she's like, what's wrong? And I said, well, I just thought we had more time. And she said, you know, a billion years is still a long time. And I said, yeah, it is, but And I said, well, I just thought we had more time. And she said, you know, a billion years still a long time. And I said, yeah, it is, but it's certainly a lot less than I thought we had. So I was a bit sad finishing the book and thinking about it.

But it underscores the fact that that's the maximum time, right? It is seems we don't have an asteroid hit as some other global calamity, you know, some plague. For example, we just had a plague. So something else could happen and really decimate humanity before then. And I find that said because as I state, I think we have an ethical obligation to preserve that on the R species, but all life that we can see because we're the only ones that knows it can become extinct. And so this is a unique responsibility,

because we're the only ones that is aware of it. Just dig into that a little bit more for me, please, because you talk about ecosystems and there's these typical sort of three groups of animals and then you kind of class us as this fourth species sort of a guardian of the earth galaxy type thing. Yes, it is kind of like a guardian of the galaxy so I recognize that is a great of comic book that's been around for decades and now movies and it is but it's interesting in the original comic books. I've actually never read them, but I've seen some of the movies, but now since read some of them after my books come out and after seeing some of the movies, it's similar concept. They're guarding truth and justice and the nature of the universe and life, but some of the concepts are the same where we need in some sense protectors

of life in the universe and quite literally guardians of the galaxy. So I actually really wrestled with what would be the best term when I was writing it as well are we shepherds, are we sharpas, are we guardians, are we protectors, what's the best word and guardians the best thing I could come up with because it describes what our role is to really service protectors of life itself and the complexity of life, which again, as far as we know is unique in the entire universe so far. And so I think, you know, those three things, people normally think of our producers, consumers,

and decomposers, like in the environment to see this something eating you or you're eating it, or it's decomposing you basically. And throughout all of history, that's what we kind of do all ecosystems as, but I think for us, we can see the ecosystem. We understand its fragility and we can actually protect it, which no other entity can do that's been previously described. So I think we are distinct. And I would hope that even if AI takes over some day, they would also have sentience

and might view the value, see the value of complexity of thought or life, or in any matter, whether it's carbon-based or otherwise. So I talk about that a little bit too then. I'm agnostic towards matters complexity. If it's carbon-based, silicon-based, hopefully they all have the same sense of guardianship. It's interesting because the hubris that can be quickly attributed to thinking

that we're supposed to be in charge of this little corner of the universe, is quite an easy easy accusation to make who do we think that we are the planet was fine before we got here, the planet will be fine after we leave. Well, no, it won't. There's a lot of existential risks for us to get past. And even if we make it past all of them, there is this huge full stop coming at the end of the sentence and that's going to be the sun. It's really interesting to think about whether or not. I just like the fact that we are the only corner of the universe that appears to have illuminated it with consciousness and we are not cargo aboard Spaceship Earth were crew and we can actually direct it's and everything else that's on

it right we can save the rest of the cargo and I think from that naturally you run forward with this is a compulsive duty this provides us with a level of responsibility that we need to bear seriously. Yeah, because we're the only ones that can and to your point some people say, you know, I think we're just going to screw it up as a most common response. Like it is this sort of. It's better than the fucking tigers do. Give me a break. Come on. Or better than, you know, the sun is not going to be a good shepherd. It'll engulf

the whole planet. Right. So it is, that's the thing that, to me, it derives from a simple, it's a cosmological fact like it's not my opinion that we need to eventually leave this planet. Like until we can survive in a fusion state with the sun as entities, unless that happens, we have to leave. So it's not a might we should we can we we and everything else on here is gone. And so I think, and there's even some people who push back on the morons and say, well, maybe it should just be extinguished, maybe all life should be extinguished anyway. And they're not even taken by the this, because it presupposes an inherent value of life, right?

Which some people still could reject and say, well, life is, there's matter over here, and there's matter over there, is life really that special? And I still, in which I think is somewhat axiomatic, that I shouldn't have to, you know, make that obvious to someone, it seems pretty straightforward. But even there, when I've debated this, with some philosophy professors and other people just on the street sometimes, to convince them, I say that there is an ability to serve as the self-awareness

and serve as these caretakers that no other matter can do. Like, I think it actually, the reason I think it's hopeful is because it pushes away this indifferent state of most of the matter in the universe. And it's something that does have a concern, which I think has value at the very least for survival. It's just self-interest, but it's projecting our ability on other species. It does involve hubris, but the hubris doesn't obviate its necessity, I think. Well, we locally reverse entropy, right, in our current state.

We actually make a little bit of order from chaos. And that's really cool. Like even if you were to take a really fundamental view and say there's nothing particularly special about life, you would say, well, we tend to take care of more unique environments because we understand that there is something inherently special about that by its very nature. There is more that isn't that than that that is. So therefore you look

across the entire galaxy as far as we've seen, and as of yet, we have to presume that we are the only section of the universe that has a green planet that's got life that's able to be intelligent and so on and so forth. So yeah, I mean, it can be as axiomatic as you want and try and take it back to first principles. But like, regardless of your value for human life, this corner of the universe simply seems to be more unique than others. And therefore, why wouldn't you protect it? Right.

Right. It's among literally the most unique thing in the universe is what we are and what we're standing on. And so that at least is interesting. And I think worth protecting and interior. And I mentioned this also a bit, but you could argue gravity somewhat reduces entropy by bringing things together. And as most people probably know,

the second law of thermodynamics, entropy will just always probably increase unless the universe ends in a big collapse there again from gravity. So that's what eventually bring the entropy back all together. But short of gravity, the only other thing that organizes matter in a negative entropy fashion is life itself, right?

So it is extraordinary. And we're out, and we're doing it in ourselves. You don't have to ask ourselves to put together peptides to make proteins to synthesize DNA to sort of have this. Just along to the ride, man. Yeah, I'm just doing all the microbes in this in the honest, you know, they're doing all their jobs. It is extraordinary.

And we're just at the tip of the iceberg of what we've learned about the complexity of life, about chemistry, its adaptability, our ability to even engineer life or even just understand the basic genetics of life. It's just really getting started in the past couple of decades. So part of the enthusiasm of the book is, we really, really the launch has just started.

The engines of discovery have just been on for a couple of decades and have already found extraordinary things. So it was exciting to write. What's Deon Tagenic Ethics? So I tried to frame this in the book as a principle, because I really want to make it a moral argument, is why should we do this and we just covered some of this, of course. But I think I've been really taken by this ever since I took a philosophy class in college.

There's historically been two views of ethics. And one is basically the Emanuel Kant's categorical imperative, which is imagine if something that you did became a rule for everybody, how would the world look? And then you imagine the world and think, would this be good or bad? Most common example is if you still a candy bar when you're a kid, your mom will say, well, you shouldn't steal a candy bar. I think if everyone stole a

candy bar, then there'd be no candy bars. And you think, oh, okay, I get it. So even a kid can understand that. But this is also sometimes contradicted or battled with utilitarian ethics, which is the greatest good for the greatest number. We try to calculate what is one action do in the consequences of it as well as what other people are doing and try and get to a place of the greatest good for greatest number overall. There's a lot of challenges with both of those ethical frameworks is how do you measure what some actions might do if only some of the population does it or what have the greatest good for greatest number, how do you quantify the good

or the bad and it depends on where you are and who you are, of course. And even there's what's the consequence of your reaction, not the intent. And so there's a lot of ethical challenges, but that is the backdrop. I kept thinking, well, what's something that's before all of that? I think the most essential duty, and one thing I like about Contas, he talks a lot about what is our duty to other humans. I think we actually have a duty that even is antecedent towards our duty to each other, which is a duty just to do it the existence itself. You can't have an ethical debate if you're not alive to have it. So I think the duty preceded as to just for existence,

as I'd like to say, existence precedes the essence of anything you want to do. So our genetic duty, our duty to propagate ourselves, as well as to ensure a livelihood of the things on which we depend, is the minimal duty just to survive. So it's a genetic duty part one that you our duty to propagate ourselves as well as to ensure a livelihood of the things on which we depend is the minimal duty just to survive. So it's a genetic duty part one. The other part of it though is once you realize that and yourself aware of the species as we are, you then have a duty towards I think serve as their protectors

because once you've become a works to extinction, you can then actuate it or you can prevent it. And so I think this is the other part of the genetic duty is to preserve the complexity of life and life itself. And so I frame that out as duties that are even before any other duty because everything else depends on them. So I call it deontogenic or the genetic duty, basically,

and the ethical framework around there. I'm proposing entirely a new ethical framework because why not? I don't know. I mean, you're also trying to get us to another star system within half a millennia. So just why not rewrite rewrite everything else about ethics as well at the same time. All right. So what's the end goal?

Take me 500 years into the future. What are you hoping that we're able to do? So if all goes well and is described, you know, in fun and and it's and little parts of the book are playful where I talk about green humans that have chloroplasts in their skin and could be big, huge plants which is fun to write about and that calculations that would necessitate the changes to sell. So at the end of all that, I'm hoping that we have, what's interesting in the book, I don't presume any advances in necessarily propulsion or genetics beyond what we know today, with things that actually work today that we've deployed in clinical trials

that exist in astronaut studies that we're doing as we speak. So just small extensions of what we're doing are small tweaks and then project reasonably 500 years out. I believe that we would have enough knowledge of the risk to the body and ways to mitigate them and even to repair cells or to even genetically protect the cells. We'll come back to that.

That you could survive the trip out three-inner-stellar space to another planet. And actually, we will have enough exoplanets discovered that we would be able to know where to go. And so at the end of 500 years, I hope that we will have done testing and then begin to send people out on what are called generation ships,

which actually is a 100-year-old idea. What if multiple generations live and die on the same ship on their way to a new star? But a hundred years ago, even 20 years ago, it was pure science fiction, because we knew we had no good sub-strait of genetics to understand, or we only had to handful of exoplanets discovered all them impossible

for life as we know it today. But today, we already have several hundred planets that are likely habitable, exoplanets, meaning they're outside of our solar system. We have a pretty in-depth knowledge of human genetics and microbial genetics and ways to modify cells to keep them alive, to resist radiation, to maybe get new tweaks and even new abilities.

And I describe a lot of them in the book. And so it means after 500 years, I think we would have really, and we're basically on phase two of the 500 or plan. The first 10 years just finished. And I wrote about kind of This is a template about when I started my lab and we just finished phase one which which one quite well I'd say the first 10 years of it going quite swimmingly

I'll be dead for the vast majority of that 500 year plan. I probably die around somewhere between age 80 to 110 maybe somewhere in there. I'm guessing if all goes well, you know but but then at that point we'll be able to head towards a new star and and hopefully then become not just the interplanetary, but interstellar in our state. Who's the architect that built that cathedral in Barcelona that's still being built now? Um, you know, I don't know which one. It's huge, it's this huge beautiful cathedral anyway. It's this really famous artist whose name escapes me.

I went to go and see it and do the tour, which shows how bad my memory is. And he's done the same thing that you've done. He created this ridiculously long elaborate plan and then a hundred years after his death, everyone's still having to adhere to it and they're all still a way to do in the work. And he's long gone. He's chilling.

Even the first, the least for the land where the Guinness brewery was, the first least that was signed by I like it. I said I like it because by Guinness the first brewer was for 9,000 years. He said I want a 9,000 year lease and they gave it to him. They said okay, sure. You know the beer is still being brewed there. So it would have only been 150 years or so. I'm gonna say like 8,8,850 years still to go. Yes. Yes. A lot of Guinness. A lot50 years still to go. Yes. Right.

A lot again. A lot again. Well done, Granddad. All right. So what, how much does space wreck the human body? It's unpleasant, especially in the first few days, and where they ask for an ask what's often called puffy face, where they look a lot. Basically, because your body is built to push fluid, you know, essentially up, because

you're used to having gravity trying to push it down. So it has to keep circulation going suddenly. You don't have that downward force. So it generally about two liters of fluid goes from your legs and lower torso to your upper body, which makes you kind of puffy. And, you know, essentially eventually the lymphatic system in the body adapts in it. You get mostly back to normal, but there is, you know, just lymphatic and sort of fluid shifts changes as soon as you get up in the space. It's not just you're interjecting there, man. Like, isn't that crazy the fact that no human in all of history ever went to space, ever existed in zero gravity, and yet our body is able

to adapt itself. Like, it takes a bit of time and you look like a basketball for a little while or whatever, but right, right, right. That's so fucking cool. It's amazing. And I think we, and the adaptability and plasticity of the body is extraordinary. And so that writ large, it's rough on the body, but the body recovers. We saw this with Scott Kelly with other astronauts. We published a study on 59 astronauts just a few months ago. And you know, everyone has a different reaction to it. We can see some people have huge spikes of cortisol

as soon as they get into space. And you can see the body kind of freaking out, saying holy crap, I'm in space, hence that motion of, I'm used to gravity, the history of my entire species is used to gravity. And I don't have any right now. So what the heck? But the body adapts.

And then we can see some people have the spike in cortisol and then it comes right back down. Actually Scott Kelly was cool as a cucumber after the first couple days. But some people have the spike in cortisol and then it comes right back down and actually Scott Kelly was cool as a cucumber after the first couple days, but other astronauts have the spike and it stays pretty high. So they actually are still kind of adapting and you know, Scott is a veteran. The astronaut Kelly has been up there four or five times now. And he, you know, so some of this, I think he's gotten used to it, but it is extraordinary that the body can get into a situation it's never seen before and adapt quite well. A great example of this though is even our adaptive immune system. Like we can see a pathogen that our body by definition is new and has never seen before.

And essentially interact with it, engage it, digest it, create T cells and antibodies that will recognize it, and then be ready for when they see it again. So it's really this beautiful component of human biology and many other species that have adaptive immune systems to be so responsive to the environment. And we did it because we had to because there's because the microbes reproduce faster than we do and they're mutating faster because they have crappier polymerases that copy their DNA or RNA. So we kind of had to make it that way.

But in case, so what the question of what happens to the body, you have a lot of the fluid shifts and the body adapts to that. There is increased radiation, there's of course, you're in a more isolated space, you're in place with less people, so there's changes in your microbial environment. There are just hazards cognitively, you're in a very stressful environment, again, far from friends and family. And it's tough on the body, but the two biggest things we were about are the change in gravity fields and then also the radiation. So, and it's tough on the body, but the two biggest things we were about are the change in gravity fields and then also the radiation. So, and it's important to say,

it's not that there's really technically zero gravity because there's still plenty of gravity. You're just at the place where you're falling with this base station at the same rate. So it feels like zero gravity, but you still have gravity, you're just falling. So technically, it's called change in gravity fields, you could say, as I was experienced.

So those are the two big things that drive a lot of the changes. And so what happens is your microbe change and your gut, we see a lot of spikes in the genes that activate for the immune system, especially as soon as you get up there, the body... They just think that you're under attack. Basically, all this molecular signatures appear is if the body is on higher alert, thinks it's maybe attack, an infection, it's not clear, but a lot of the same signatures for those medical events spike up when you get into space.

And even more so when you get back to Earth and they've a lot of these same what are called cytokines, which are these molecular kind of signals that cells send to each other about what's happening and should they launch a response. And immune response, for example, these are heavily activated in flight and then also when you get back to Earth.

So that is a consistent feature we've seen for all the astronauts. It is kind of immune sort of signature and stress. And even, you know, because of that stress, it's not necessarily good or bad, it really depends on the astronaut because your immune system being on-hiler could be good because then you actually could adapt and be aware for any central pathogen. The bad thing though is if your immune some starts to attack itself essentially, this is what autoimmune diseases can do and really wreak wreak havoc on the body. We don't see that for outscrats, but just to make the point that just having activation of everything is not necessarily a good thing, but it's not necessarily bad either. We've seen for a lot of the

things that change in flight, they almost all went back to normal within a few months being back on earth in terms of the genes, the microbes, these cytokines, these things that changed. They all were pretty relatively quickly back to normal in a matter of either days or weeks. In some cases, a few months. But the other thing that you should, for example, tell them you've got longer in space. These are all, these still basically book ends at the end of your chromosomes that keep your DNA packaged and safe. They actually got longer in space, which at first with that was maybe just something weird

about astronaut Kelly, but now we've seen it in every astronaut we've looked at. It was work with Susan Bailey. So far it's 12 out of 12 for the astronauts that we've looked at. The telomeres get longer in space. We think it's two things that are driving this is that there is a little bit of consistent low dose radiation at their experiencing, which we've seen if you do this for other organisms like malaria, plasmodium, philciprim, their telomeres also get longer

if you do low dose radiation, which they are with. They don't live, no, they did not, because eventually it went away, but after the radiation was stopped, it went back. So it's two things, it's a bit of a response to the cells to turn on telomeres to elongate the actual telomeres. And also, we think it's killing out the lotus radiation is going to kill out and remove some of the cells

that were close to dying anyway, so that your average telomere length goes longer, because you're getting rid of the cells that were about to have the shorter telomeres anyway. So it's those two things together. But then it goes back to normal, once you get back from space, then, you know, then it goes quickly right back normal. That's an interesting one. That's like a radiation homesis effect thing that you've got going on there almost that you're stripping away, the unused ones. All right, what's

the longest anyone's ever spent in space in a single go? In a single go, there was a cosmonaut who did it. I believe it was 540 days. Is the record? I have to double check that. But I believe it was a cosmonaut. So the record holder, so Scott Kelle went up for 340 days. There was the longest is about a year and a half. I was around 540 days if I recall, was a cosmonaut.

And so that is the human record so far. But there are plans of foot to try and break that record in the next four or five years of all as well. Roll the clock forward for me. What you've identified so far in the challenges that those astronauts have faced and cosmonauts, I don't want to be Anglo-centric. And Tyklop, do there's some Chinese astronauts now? Yeah, exactly. The people that go into space have had to face, that's limited to a year and a half.

Let's double that, or say three years to sort of ten years. Is there something that you can predict that's going to be a challenge for people to face in space there that doesn't manifest within a year and a half? This is a great question. Something that's like endlessly debated at NASA meetings, aerospace meetings, medicine meetings. aerospace meetings, medicine meetings, is because, you know, the short answer is I think, I think we'll have seen already most of the significant changes that occur in flight or to the body from this year and year and a half long missions. Truth be told, we don't know. There might be something that only gets really bad when you've been in zero G or, you know, loss of gravity for two years or three years and it's just a

some unique feature. I can't think of what that would be but it's hard to speculate on something we've never observed before. So it is a extrapolation and it's imperfect but I think we've seen most of what the body does in space flight and what we'll likely see again for longer missions but we just think we'll see more we do see damage DNA for example coming out in urine so you can see fragments of the DNA coming out. You can see calcium. You can see the loss of bone density in, it's coming out of the body. I'm also if it's, you know, being, you know, just, just, extruded away, extruded like this, you can see the loss. So it's really striking to see that loss just coming out of the body. So I think we'll just see more of those.

I don't think we'll suddenly see dramatically new differences in the urine that we're getting and the molecules in the urine. I hope, but we'll find out soon enough. Presumably further and further away from the sun as well, less magnetic protection, less magnetic protection from the earth, from radiation, from solar flares, from other bits and pieces like that. Big bursts of radiation as you get further away from our solar system, that's part of the course. Yeah, it would be a bigger problem. So the Van Allen belt there, we're living in this wonderful protective magnetosphere. And once you get outside of that, you're much more at risk.

And so there's a lot of space weather satellites and researchers that are constantly tracking sunspots and solar activity. Hopefully we could warn some of the astronauts before it were to hit them because we have enough time before it would get there But you know, you know, but even there they go into a slightly more protected chamber of a spacecraft It's not going to be like under living under 20 feet of rock or something, right? So it's going to be Limited protection, but we're hoping you know, there are ways to do electromagnetic protection and some things to talk about in the book Our genetic protection tools where you can activate genes temporarily, for example DNA repair genes and then turn them back off. And so again,

this is not yet being tried in humans, it's mostly just in cell lines and in animal models, but we know that technically it's possible and so it would have to be really rigorously demonstrating clinical trials for safety and efficacy, but at least we know conceptually it's possible to do such a defense. Your suggestion is to kind of add in either genetic modifications or epigenetic modifications to be switched on and switched off, kind of in the same way as at the moment, people that go to space have protective suits. So you need a particular augmentation to you as a human in order to survive a non-tapical environment. And your suggestion from genetics is just to provide the same, but internally as opposed

to externally. Why do you think this is a very touchy subject for people? Is it just naturalistic fallacy? Is it something sacred about the current human nature? Both are active threads of thought where people say you should never adjust the natural world because if it's natural, it's perfect. Although as we've already described earlier, if it's natural and it's only staying here, it will not be perfect, it'll be gone. Smallpox isn't too good either. Yeah, no one has problems saying let's's eradicate severe patterns, like no one's saying, save the COVID, right?

That's not happening. There are certain times where we decide and rightly that there is a deontogenic framework that's being violated by another organism, right? In this case, if some organism is inhibiting the ability of another organism to live at all, or especially to serve as guardians or shepherds of other life forms, then that is bad in that ethical framework. It is something that you should remove. You're actually doing the right thing by getting rid of an existential threat to you. Now you have to balance that one because sometimes a threat to one organism is helping for

another so there are places where it's much more complicated. There may even be some places where smallpox is helpful to some things somewhere, but not that we know of. But you have to make the value judgment. And I know that the de-entrogenic framework, it's a no-brainer. It's really easy to say that we is ethically bad. And so the natural, some of the pushback on it is, how could we make sure it's safe, how could we make sure that this is efficacious, but we do this all the time with clinical

trials for CAR T cells or various American oxygen, which, but we do this all the time with clinical trials for CAR T cells or various American and Asian receptor therapies, where we modify T cells, infuse them into patients, we do this at the hospital I'm at now, as well as other many others I'm working with. This is just part of clinical trials. You do it slowly, you do it carefully,

you make sure before you roll out any therapy that it has really met good clinical guidelines and that the benefits outweigh any of the possible risks. And so we're not there yet at all for some of these therapies I describe in the book, but we're pretty close on other ones. We're massively modifying and crisper editing cells and then putting them back into patients to cure disease.

And in some cases extraordinarily well. So I think- What's the most successful case of that that you think's happened so far? One of the, so outside of the immunotherapies where you've modified T cells or natural killer cells that then grown up and re-infused back in some of them CRISPR or otherwise modified with other receptor changes those are really extraordinary to talk about those for a while in the book but then some of the other

therapies these epigenic therapies where you can even turn back on a gene inside you that had been turned off previously. So one of the best examples of this is treating for sickle cell disease, and might even be useful for beta-thelosemia, is basically, if hemoglobin is faulty, your adult hemoglobin has a problem. So the concept for the therapies, which are being in the clinic now, is, well, okay, when you're a fetus, when you're much younger, you did have fetal hemoglobin, which is a different kind of molecule that carries oxygen, actually much better, really than adult hemoglobin.

But it gets turned off right after you're born, and it just stays off. So for the rest of your life, you have this other version of a gene that makes hemoglobin that's just sitting there kind of quietly. And what you do, yeah, and then what you do is actually,

you can get rid of the enhancer that's controlling it, keep it off, and then you turn it back on. It's actually been in the clinical trials, looks like it's extraordinary successful because you get a good version of the gene back activated. So I think this idea, say if you did that for certain genes for DNA repair that might be useful for space flight, you know, again, it's just a different gene target. It's just in a different environment.

But here we'd say because we think the risk is so great that this benefit would overcome that. So that's one of my favorite examples. And it's really, it depends on things, again, 20 years ago it would be science fiction. We didn't even know all the genes in the genome where they were, what they were. We kind of had a first draft, not really.

The tools, the technologies to do this editing. Also, we're very nascent. And now you can crisper things at, when we have high school students doing crisper, it's, you can almost CRISPR in your kitchen if you want to. You actually can. There's home kids you can if you want to. So it's crazy. It's an amazing time. Are you working with Dr. David Sinclair on this? A bit actually. On some of the, we've chatted a bit on some of the longevity. Basically, Salzie's looking at it, so looking at the effiging changes to what happens for some of the treatments he's thinking. Yeah. So we've

actually been back to back at like three conferences recently. We're we end up just being in the agenda. And usually I'll speak first and say, here's what we need to do for the next 500 years. And then he'll say, and here's how I hope we'll live. You'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A fun pairing actually. A conference has recently. It's been fun for a great. He's a good mate. He's the work that he's doing to Fantastic. He's so cool to see that. So yeah, the thing that I've got in my head around people that may have a challenge to do with gene editing is a combination of ignorance about the fact that we're already doing it. An anchoring

bias against what we have right now and not understanding what could be that fixing something that's wrong, i.e. a change of the state as quote isn't the same as improving something that we wrong, i.e. a change of the status quo isn't the same as improving something that we don't have, but that just comes down to how do you judge welfare. And then it's just scope neglect. It's just not understanding what the outcome could be if we don't get this right.

And this is something from reading Toby Ords, the precipice that really sort of force fed me and understanding if you fully see yourself as a steward of humanity and as someone that's supposed to leave the world in a better place than when you found it, you can't just be thinking globally, you need to think pan-generationaly. So it's not just about everybody on the planet right now, it's everybody on the planet forever. And everybody that could then come from the planet thereafter as well. So yeah, I think when you when you fully internalize that any argument

that isn't we need to do everything that we can to gobble up as much galactic real estate as is possible and to make ourselves right for that kind of by whatever means we can. And it's interesting that the sort of deontogenic argument, you need to have something more concrete to hold onto because you get into questions of what are we saving. How far can we change ourselves whilst still being ourselves? Is a question that you inevitably end up encountering? And I suppose that sort of human values, the fundamentals of what we are to be human,

the genetic son and so forth, kind of that's the ground, the foundation upon which everything else grows out. It is, but also it can change. I would say, the idea that there's a perfect state that humanity is now, it is fallacious, and it's just not true. Humans are in a state where we are now, whatever this is, but it always changes and it will continue to change.

Evolution is not static. So, we're all evolving as we speak. The best example recently is that now we can drink milk as adults, but 20,000 years ago we probably couldn't anyone could or barely could. So the selection for a pretty interesting adaptive trade for adults based on diet is really recent and interesting. Even just, you know, how people, different hair, eye and skin color, as a reflection of a few hundred thousand years of migration around the planet, has already led to really dramatic changes. So we're continuing to evolve.

And I think that even if we evolve to a place where there's literally a different species, like say someone, there's people on Mars for 20,000 years and said, at some point, they can no longer reproduce with people on Earth, That may happen, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, they're just more people. And also, I describe in the book a concept of planetary liberty or even that cellular liberty is that you're no longer subject to the whims of the genetic deal that you got as an embryo. You can fix things that are broken or even modify things that you want to improve. Very much as a right as what your genetic rights are as an Individual as that you should have full autonomy and control over your DNA, which doesn't really exist in most

Legislatures are in sort of any laws anywhere, but we have versions of this we have reproductive rights We have rights about privacy. We think about this a lot in you know in current laws But nothing about the right to do something with your own cells or your own DNA, but I think that very much is your right. And this includes the ability to live on more than one planet. So if you do your genome editing accurately and correctly and broadly,

you'll increase your planetary liberty. I would actually think it would be sad if you had to engineer humans so much that you send them to Mars and like, okay, good, congrats. You can live on Mars now. We've made it so you're perfectly suited for it, but you can never come back to Earth. I would find that to be a technological failure. We should, if possible, expand the number of places on which you can live, including planets. That's an expansion of liberty. Liberty gives you a choice to do anything you'd want.

And so if we do it right, you could expand the planetary liberty essay or cellular liberty of which planet you can live on. Why should we take a bath in yogurt? Ah, so I am finding to be very soothing. I describe that there's some little nuggets in the book that come up here and there like taking a bath in yogurt. I have coded myself in yogurt sometimes be obviously a recreational thing. I do it. When I'm hungry and I want to sit in a bath It sometimes be over the old. Is it a recreational thing? I do. When I'm hungry and I want to sit in a bathtub full of something, I've been a bathtub full of yogurt is great.

You can dip a spoon in and then just eat it. A bathtub full of barbecue sauce is even better. I highly recommend it. Or maybe I could think of other sauces maybe in the UK. You could think of, you know. Not hot sauce though. I imagine that's probably a good bottle of oil. It's tough on the Newcastle member, and I don't remember that. I don't don't don't don't recommend that yet.

So you talk about humans that could have green skin and about this, other different ways that we could try and modify our DNA so that we can survive in space. What I think is a more interesting question than that, or at least for me, are the ethics around what it means to travel for a long time, to live and to die all within a metal can that's floating. From a deontogenic ethics framework, it is 100% ethical because it is what enables us to survive long-term along those goals. So it's easy for me to say yes,

and that assumes though that that's what the goal of the generation ship is. There's a chance that maybe the ship would fail and you get to the new planet and it turns out not to be as good as you think and then everyone perishes. That would be really unfortunate, but it still represents an ethical decision

to have made that choice on that mission with the information you had at the time. So I think, but it raises questions of consent. And by definition, the children and grandchildren in that mission get zero consent over 20 generations. But, you know, but here too, we, there's two things I'd say to that is, you know, when people say, well, how can you do this?

One is I'd say it's ethical, but the two other responses I'd add to that are, is people do this all the time. Parents move across the world to find a new place when they're when children are babies. The babies didn't get the consent to move safe from Tennessee to Alaska and live up in a cold tundra. The parents at some point just have to decide that's part of what parents do. And you know, the other thing is we're already kind of on a big generation ship now. Like you can't go to another planet right now. We're just on Earth. It's a really big generation ship. That's wonderful and nice and there's lots of features. But this is a big ship that you can't leave that you're on right now.

It's just called Earth. So it's not really that different in terms of type of trip that we're taking. It's just a difference of the size of Ed's thing. Yeah, I agree. It isn't a different of kind. It's a difference of degree.'t a different of kind, it's a different sort of degree. But the difference of degree from an individual's level is it's a very, very large price to pay. Yeah, for sure. You know, you didn't ask to be here. You didn't ask to be put on this ship. You know, we need some serious advances in entertainment technology in order to be able to make a ship as fun as Earth is. It's likely there's going to be some suffering. In the, on the grand scale, when we think about how human civilization

is going to work, even if you sort of add a utilitarian sort of stint to this and you think, oh well, maybe this particular generation ship with let's say 20,000 people probably not, but let's say 20,000 people suffer on this generation ship in order to facilitate a trillion people on a new planet. You go, well, like that's a fair point, but still uncomfortable for 20,000 people for whatever 400 years.

But you will maybe hope that they, like if you do the math on the, on the, instead of trajectory and the mechanics of space play, it would be about, you know, 20 to 400 years or so, hopefully. But those people on the ship felt like they were, the chosen ones, if you will, the ones that really were the vanguard of humanity and were enabling an entirely new epoch. And maybe they would be excited by it.

And I think you're right also I described in there. Again, 20 years ago, 20, 30 years ago, it'd be really hard to imagine having the totality of all human culture on video, like Netflix, for example, or these waves, where you can watch almost any video that's ever made or listening any song that any human has ever created and have that index in with you. And you'd also still get updates, because you can still send, of course, radio waves and the generation ship and get the latest episode of whatever comedy might be coming out or something. So you could still get updates while you're traveling farther from Earth, but you could be pretty well entertained with VR, you know, AR

services. If the transhumanists get their way, you're going to be able to be in here to unforeseen states of bliss, constantly, from the moment that you're born until the moment that you die. And if all that you need to be is this sort of vessel, to continue human civilization, or, or if David St. Clair gets his way, you only need one generation. Maybe two, maybe two and that's not so bad, right? That would be fabulous. Yeah, he was just posted a picture earlier today, he sent me a message, he's with some turtles, so he's a turtle as well. He's unhollowed. Three hundred years old. And he's, you know, so there's precedent that life can live pretty long.

I just, humans have not quite done it beyond 122 yet. So I, so I make, you know, in the book, it's very conservative. I make no assumptions that we will live to be twice as long or that we'll have, you know, fusion reactor propulsion technology, which would of course make it short. There's a lot of things that would make it easier, faster, shorter, better, but I just take what we have, what we know today, and then run with it. So it's very conservative in that regard, I'd say. How are we going to get somewhere in 400 years?

What's the propulsion technology that you put into your models that exists? Most of it's on either existing liquid propulsion systems, at least to get us to orbit and off running. There's a solar sail technology that over time could pick up a fair amount of speed. And there are some you could have met, I described some of the star side and if you're the break, the ability to have lasers basically shoot at a target and propel you, but that doesn't quite work yet, but it's cool idea. So I describe all the options

that are currently, but it probably be liquid propulsion plus some solar sales would get us, you know, once you get up to speed, because those are speeds again that exist today that we know we've had probes like the Parker solar probe can actually get to a speed that would get us to the closest star in about four to five hundred years soon. Has anyone had sex in space yet? You know this? Officially no. Unofficially.

Do you reckon they have? It, I think it's, if he, Scott Kelly told you any rumors from up on the ISS He has a very has officially there has not been Either confirmed or deny any rumors of any kind, but they do have private You know, you got to you got to really practice your moves, but there's no order practice put in space, you know, so officially. Space, no one can hear you, sex. But I mean, obviously, the, what happens when you've got an embryo growing into a fetus

into a baby and a birth in space? What are the challenges? I mean, is radiation a bigger concern for children in you to rob. That would be one of the key concerns we know that mice have been born in space pregnant mice have been sent up and then pops have been born and human embryogenesis has proceeded out for days so we know you can get to the early stages and get towards a gas relation and early parts of developing the embryo look like they will work. But we've never had a whole beginning to end embryogenesis towards birth of any creature yet in space. Well, there's been some drosophilized, you take that back. So we know, for example,

they have been able to be born in vertebrate. So, but for a complex mammal, all of it from beginning to end, we think it should work based on the data that's so far, but we don't know, yeah, like especially when you get outside the Van Allen belts and you go for a true interstellar trip, the radiation is going to be a big concern. But that being said, if we have all the tools of microbiology at our fingertips and we could, you know, resist the radiation, tweak it, modify the cells as needed on the way. It might be one way to prevent some of the damage or to repair it if it's detected. What about social and mental issues in space? Let's say that we're not doing the transhumanism,

like just strap yourself into an IV of MDMA for 80 years and give birth. David Pierce is going to be upset, but it doesn't really matter. Um, what about social issues? And anyone that's read seven eaves, it's fucked man. Like, you know, the president ends up with a stake between her tongue and she can't speak and everyone starts end up being cannibals and eating each other's legs, soft cannibalism, they call it.

Soft cannibalism, that section of the book freaked me out, totally because it freaked me out totally. But it freaked me out because it seemed not too far from what might actually happen. If you put people in these little capsules and say, you're stuck up there. And you might be able to get somewhere in a few hundred years, and we're not sure.

And the moon exploded, and the earth is being been barred, and you can't even live on it. So we don't know. The description of the book of the social breakdown, and just the cognitive Law and loss of being teller do any kind of reality It could very it was haunting because it seemed pretty pretty Probably like you like well, I could really see this happening and also it was a bit of a critique on the social media world in which we live today

Is that you can have people end up getting so caught up in concepts that they lead them to do really insane. They really eat their own legs. Even your own legs because someone said it was a good idea and said, okay, maybe it is a good idea. And like, I'm going to another one. I'm going to another one. I'm going to another one.

We're even like the pizza gate scandal. The guy who heard that there was a sex ring that was on a DC pizza restaurant went there with an assault rifle just because he read about it. And so I'm going to go and start to threaten people with a gun. And you're like, what's wrong with you? Like how do you at some point, you know, but people, you can't underestimate the ability for people to get, you know, to get lost, to get confused, to get angry, get frustrated, despondent, and it's more pronounced in space for sure.

So I think that is one of the, it's one listed as one of the key hazards by NASA of long-term space flight. It's just this cognitive challenge and isolation. Matthias Bosner studies this a lot at Penn. And we know it's a for sure a challenge that entertainment is one way to address it. MDMA, I'm not sure what, we'll need, I talk a bit in the book about games,

games are as old as humans are. So maybe we can think about like new games that people can play with each other in flight, some sort of space football, I'm not sure what it will be, but it's one of the biggest challenges. And we'd have to either entertain people, keep them distracted, or some I'll keep them saying, one of my favorite examples of this is there's these old underground cities in Turkey. A lot of it was even before the Ottoman Empire where when there would be essentially wars

back and forth across the, you know, so these steps of Turkey, people would go underground and they'd, you have these huge underground cities so they could hide from the army that was attacking. They'd have two, three, five thousand people sometimes living underground. But what I did this tour a couple of years ago in Turkey,

one out of every about 10 rooms was actually a distillery to make wine. And the reason was because they had to figure out some way, just to basically sedate the population so they wouldn't go insane, because they're all living in caves for like two years. And I thought that was just, you know, for a couple of years, but, you know, so one solution is just keep everyone drunk the whole time. We've tried that as humanity before, and it seemed to work in that context.

Talk me through the Mars expedition that hopefully, probably within what the next maybe 20 years, we're going to have boots on Mars. But by 20, 20, 35, 20, 33 maybe. So it's soon pretty soon. Do you think that we are further ahead technologically or further ahead genetically in terms of our preparation for this? Like if the technology was available right now, could we go genetically? And if the. Like if the technology was available right now,

could we go genetically and if the genetics was available right now, could we go technologically? I think technology is ahead right now in terms of, we can definitely get there. And the landing would be hard. There's, of course, a really rough track record for anything that's been sent to Mars a lot of the time of crash or not made it.

It is far away, but the JPL, the group at NASA, that designs a lot of the rockets and rovers has done an extraordinary job. So I think we can get there, land there, and even survive there. But the genetic, deploying genetic technologies for protection or a novel therapeutics or pharmaceutical agents are also really being tested because we just have so limited data. There's only about 585 people that have ever been to space, including these new suborbital flights. So it's really not that many people.

And most of them, we don't have molecular data on. Right? That was why it was so exciting to write, I called them the first genetic astronauts because we actually know what happened to them genetically, molecularly, cellularly when they went to space. But before these recent missions, we just didn't know. So I think we're pretty far behind, but we'll catch up pretty fast. If Vogue was occurring to plan, there'll be a private space station at 2024 by Axiom,

where we can do a really long-term missions and do entirely new science. If Vogue goes well by the late 2030s, a station around Mars called Mars Base Camp by Lockheed Martin. So there might even be a ways to actually have more power. That's in orbit rather than on the surface. On the surface in orbit. And it's planned. So it's projected. We'll see if it happens, but that is planned right now. And I think in the next 10, 20 years,

we'll see a lot more expansion that's not just coming from Russia and the US in a cold war fighting each other sense, but from private industry, many country, India, Israel, the UAE as an orbiter of Chinese are really expanding quickly. So I think we have this space race 2.0, which has a lot more players and a lot more tools and the genetics will be part of that. Ethically or politically or socially or technologically, is there anything that you're still concerned about? Are there any sort of real big questions that you haven't got answers to yet with regards

to our potential to colonize the galaxy? I think it's just a question of will and of coordination. I think we have a lot of the tools that exist already. Some of it is even just framing it. Like even the term colonizing the galaxy, there's such a loaded word to colonize, and even settlement as a loaded word. So he's almost like, explore the galaxy to serve as guardians or to expand life. But effectively, it's colonization, but we want to have all the good of colonization,

which is just the exploring part, but remove all the parts that were exploitative, that were disruptive, that were disruptive and destructive, that decimated entire ecosystems, you know, brought pathogens, did the opposite of the ontogenic ethics, right? That basically just destroyed everything in its path. And so, what I'm excited about is I think we've learned as a species, right? We have a greater awareness and consciousness of how we deploy technologies and tools, not just on Earth,

but also how we, when we go into space. So I'm an optimist because I think there's evidence for it. We've learned from it, infant mortality is lower than ever. Literacy is higher than ever. By most quantitative measures, humanity is really learning and doing better. Of course, we're heating the planet, we have other things we're doing that we're trying to get a handle on with mixed success, but I think we're even bringing species back from extinction potentially. So we're even correcting injustices that we

do. We just sequence the genome of some of the clones last couple of weeks and confirming that they're just as okay and genetically diverse to some of the other ones. And what's amazing is a lot of times with cloning, you worry about lack of genetic diversity, but you can expand the diversity of the clones. They actually, you know, we have a smaller population size, but increased genetic diversity with the tools of genetic engineering. So it's extraordinary as we can begin to even resolve and rectify some of the genetic injustices of our species past. You have to do it carefully though, because if you bring a woolly mammoth back, you know, it might have problems. We'll probably do it on an island, you know.

Could it not have been cooler than a ferret? Yeah. Like, first off. Come on. Like, put it in ferret. Oh, we had it. We had it. So we had it. Don't we have it? It's a ferret with socks on.

Like, I don't care. It's really cute, you know, the cuteness back, it was really hot. For the Reviving Restore Project with Ben Novak and all the team, it's a great group, it's conservation brought to the molecular and genetic level. So I think that same ethos is what's described a lot in the anthogenic principles is that what is our duty, what is our goal and what's a duty for our species. Everyone, the duties that you normally have in life, you could you could abrogate or give up on like to a marriage to a country, to a family, but this is something that I think is actualized upon awareness that it's a inherent duty for our species.

Do you think that we are spending too much or too little attention on capturing galactic real estate? We were doing it slow, so I think one of the big challenges is the SpaceX prohibits people from owning any land outside of Earth, including the moon, but it doesn't prohibit mining it. So you could actually create these hollow asteroids where you've mined everything out, and you didn't ever own it, but you extracted everything out of it, and that would still not violate the outer space treaty, I should say. And so what's interesting is I think the real estate so far is prohibited, but the extraction

and complete exploitation so far fine. So I think there's actually every year that a Harvard law, a Harvard space law meeting, where we just talk about issues in space law, which is a small group of lawyers, but nonetheless. Are you familiar with Mara Cortona? Do you know who that is? She's the director of the Astro Politics Institute. Oh no, no. She looks at the politics of space. She's been on the show and like, dude, I am fascinated by that. By what does it mean to own an area of space? What does it mean to, yeah, that's, that's amazing. But I mean more than that, I mean in terms of the attention that's being paid to finding ourselves new places to live

by going out into space. It's an easy critique to say there's lots of injustices here on Earth. We can chew gum and walk at the same time. Like it's more than possible for us to do multiple things. But if you had a God's eye view and you were able to move some of the resources around, do you think that there should be more of an impetus for us to apply pressure to this. To get even to find more exoplanet to me, is it to find to do research for proportion,

to do research on genetics, should we be paying more attention or are we paying the appropriate percentage proportion of attention? I think we should pay more. Again, I'm biased because I'm a geneticist and a space enthusiast and I just wrote a book about this. So of course, I think it should be more,

but I think in proportion to what we've done before, the GDP of the United States, for example, used to be almost 5% of the country's assets were being spent on space exploration, space technology, propulsion, and now it's about one tenth of that, right? We know that we can do both things, for example, at the same time like we passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act in the 60s while we were getting ready to go to the moon in the United States.

And so we can make social progress, make economic progress while exploring the universe. So I think we definitely can walk into you at the same time, we should invest more in it. Because really, the rainfall of side effects from the technology you develop for space help medicine, the local health transportation, help a lot of industries. Because in space, you're forced to think in very small spaces with very limited energy.

It forces inefficiencies that helps everything else you do at a terrestrial scale. So I think why not? There's been a lot of analyses of the economic of NASA and how much money's been spent. And it's usually the estimate that it leads to about one and a half to maybe a twofold for every dollar you spend. You get that dollar back either. In a new business, a job that's created, a technology that's licensed, some economic output that is writ large good.

I think there's probably some things that are more inefficient than others for any project and maybe some are more productive than others, but writ large, more investment would probably do a lot of downstream benefits without question. I'm sure you'll be familiar with Nick Bostrom's thesis that he says every second that we spend not capturing the stars, we're losing forever a part of our bubble, right? We have this expansion and it means that over time we get less and less that we can have that. And as Sandberg also working out of the Future of Humanities Institute, his new book, which it isn't going to come out to next year, is about how we would landscape solar systems and different galaxies by moving physically moving stars and planets around. So we're getting towards sort of the real limits of what's possible at least in theory,

as well as our theories are at the limits of what's possible. And then you take that to the nth degree, you go all the way to the very, very, very final moments of the universe and make a justification for why changing the fundamental substrate that we are built on would be a good idea. Just let's finish with that. Yep. And it was the depressing part of the book again, reading at the very end of the universe, because it begs the question, it's okay, you move to a new star, like, well, congratulations, but then the same thing's going to happen to that star. You go to the next one, the next one, the next one, the next one, onward, do another galaxy. Inevitably, you say, well, either the universe is going to collapse, but kind of itself, there'll be a big rip, or there'll be a heat death,

an entropy of the universe. In some way, the universe at some point will end or change in a way that we probably wouldn't necessarily live through. But I make the argument that if we know, for example, it's going to continually move in on itself and a big crunch where all the matter are recolesses and maybe makes a new big bang,

what if the next big bang, the next version of the universe, lifestyles an emerge or if it doesn't emerge in the next 500 or a thousand iterations of the universe? What if this is it? What if this uniqueness of life is really not just unique in this universe, but in all universes that ever could be or will be. And so I make the case that if the de-entrogenic question, the answer is clear. You would prevent the death of the universe or in any version of it to preserve life. So if we had the tools and the technology to actually fundamentally restructure space time, I think we should do so because there's no guarantee that anything else will

observe as a shepherd for the universe. I think if we could have a universe that has an ability to make and preserve universes, that would be something I think a universe would want. I kind of answered it for more precise the universes, but if I was a universe, that's what I would like. I'm saying, yeah. Yeah, that's a real big picture thinking. Christopher Mason, ladies and gentlemen, the next 500 years engineering life to reach new worlds will be linked in the show notes below.

Where else should people go? Any other stuff that you wanna plug? There's a, we have a Twitter handle at Mason underscore labs. The Mason lab is the lab at Cornell also You know the this bother books are ever or ever were books are sold you can get it Obviously on like Amazon and Barnes and Noble and other websites MIT press and then also I'd say you know a lot of the work is on NASA's websites for the exoplanets are fun to dig around in and also on Instagram

Christopher daddy that, some of that includes family, random photos, but yeah, my Twitter feed is the most common science feed I'd say. I love it. Chase Chris. Thanks so much, pleasure. Thank you. Yn yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw you