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.
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.
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