Chris Mason is a professor of genomics, physiology, and biophysics at Cornell, doing research on the long-term effects of space on the human body. He is the author of The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Chris's Twitter: https://twitter.com/mason_lab
Chris's Website: http://masonlab.net/
Chris's Company: https://onegevity.com/
The Next 500 Years (book): https://amzn.to/3k9ab4S
Reasons and Persons (book): https://amzn.to/3Lrm6a5

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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
01:04 - Human extinction awareness
09:49 - Heat death of the universe
15:25 - Alone in the universe
19:01 - Aliens
27:11 - Entropy goggles
41:25 - Genetics
49:34 - Scott Kelly
55:32 - Adapting to space
1:05:34 - Sex in space
1:08:06 - Colonizing planets
1:14:45 - Culture on Mars
1:19:11 - Commercial space flights
1:26:29 - Podcast in space
1:34:03 - Axiom Space
1:36:20 - Designing space experiments
1:43:09 - Robots in space
1:45:50 - Space exploration
1:49:48 - War in space
1:53:25 - Launch toward the Second Sun
1:59:35 - Chlorohumans
2:05:10 - Extreme microbiome project
2:11:37 - Space travel breakthroughs
2:23:36 - Clones
2:29:28 - AI age prediction
2:34:59 - Advice for young people
2:41:16 - Dark times
2:45:39 - Mortality
2:49:57 - Visiting ISS and deep space
2:51:07 - Meaning of life

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Would that make you sad to die on Mars, looking back at the planet you were born on?

No, I think it would be actually, in some ways, maybe the best way to die, knowing that you're in the first wave of people expanding the reach into the stars.

The following is a conversation with Chris Mason, professor of genomics, physiology, and biophysics at Cornell.

He and colleagues do some of their research out in space, experiments on space missions that seek to discern the molecular basis of changes in the human body during long-term human space travel.

On this topic, he also wrote an epic book titled The Next 500 Years, Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, that boldly looks at what it takes to colonize space far beyond our planet, and even journey out towards livable worlds beyond our solar system.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Chris Mason.

You wrote a book called The Next 500 Years Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, and you dedicated to, quote, to all humans and any extinction-aware sentience.

How fundamental is awareness of death and extinction to the human condition?

I think this is actually 1 of the most human-specific traits and features that we have.

It's actually maybe 1 of the few things that only we have and no 1 else has.

So it sounds scary, sounds like what people often don't like to think about their death except now and again, or at funerals, or to recognize their mortality.

But if you do it at a species-wide level, it's something that is actually an exemplary human-specific trait that you're exhibiting.

You think about something that is the loss of not just your life or your family or everyone you see, but everyone like you.

And that is, I dedicated it because I think we might not be the last sentience to have this awareness.

I'm actually hoping we'll just be the first, but as far as we know, we're the only, and I think this is the, part of the moral thrust for the book is that we're the only ones that have this awareness.

That gives us a duty that only we can exercise so far.

So we definitely contemplate our own mortality at the individual level.

When you wrote it, it was really powerful to realize for me that we do contemplate our extinction, and that is a creative force.

So at the individual level, contemplating your own death is a creative force.

But contemplating the extinction of the whole species, I suppose that stretches through human history.

That's many of the sort of subtext of religious ideas is that like, if we screw this up, it's gonna be over.

Forever, and Revelation, and every religious text has some view of either the birth or the death of the world as they know it, but it was very abstract.

It was fiction, almost, or in some cases, complete fiction of what you hope or think might happen, but it's become much more quantified and much more real I think in the past several hundred years, and especially in the past few decades where we can see a sense of responsibility at a planetary scale.

So when we think about, like say, terraforming Mars, that would just be the second planet we've engineered at a planetary scale.

We're already doing it for this 1, just not that well.

So we're like a bunch of ants, extinction-aware sentience ants that are busy trying to terraform this planet to make it habitable so it can flourish.

And then you say that it's our duty to expand beyond Earth, to expand to other planets, to find a good backup, offsite backup solution.

Duty is something that usually puts people to sleep, I'll say this, so duty, duty is a bit like death.

People don't often like to really think, wake up in the morning and think, what is my duty today?

Most people, there are some people that think about it every day.

People in active military service wake up, it's a very concrete sense of duty to country.

Sometimes you can think about it though in terms of family, you feel a duty towards your spouse, your kids, your parents, you feel a real duty to them because you want them to flourish and to be safe.

So we do have the sense of duty, but you don't, you know, very much like death, you don't think about it actively.

Usually it's something that just becomes embedded in your day-to-day existence.

But I think about duty because this is, people think about duties for themselves, but there has never been a real overarching duty that we all feel as a species for each other and for generations that haven't yet been born.

And I think I want people to have a sense of the same love and compassion and, you know, fighting even to the tooth and nail, whether the way you protect your family, the way you'd fight for a country, for example, to feel the same way towards the rarity and preciousness of life and feel that sense of duty towards, particularly extinction-aware life, which is just us so far, this ability that we have this awareness of not only our own frailty, which of course is often talked about, and climate change and people thinking about pandemics, but other species that we sometimes have caused extinction, but very soon will be even de-extinctifying species like the woolly mammoth, Colossal is a recent startup that's doing that on their advisory board, and it might happen in 3 or 4 years.

So it's an interesting point in history where we can actually think about preventing death at a species-wide level and even resurrecting things that we have killed or that have gone away, which brings its own series of questions of, just as when you delete something from an ecosystem, adding something can be completely catastrophic.

And so there are no real guidelines yet on how to do that.

But the technology now exists, which is pretty extraordinary.

Yeah, I've just been working on backup and restoring databases quite a bit recently.

And you can do quite a lot of damage when you restore improperly.

When we bring back the mammoths, it might be, you have to be careful bringing that back.

The best of science, the best of engineering, is both dangerous and exciting, and That's why you have to have the best people, but also the most morally grounded people pushing us forward.

But on the point of duty, there's a kind of sense that there's something special to humanity, to human beings that we want to preserve and if that little flame, whatever that is, dies, that will be a real shame for the universe.

What is special about the human condition that we want to preserve?

There are some people who think we don't.

There are some people who say, well, humans, take it or leave it.

So the book is, on the 1 sense, a call to misanthropes to hopefully shake them out of their slumber.

But some people- What does the word misanthrope mean?

They're just, again, they're all just- They're called nihilists, Donnie.

They're like, nothing matters, and why does any, and they just apply it more particularly to humans, but there are endless reasons, I think, to cherish and celebrate what humans have done.

At the same time, many things we've done awfully, and genocide, and nuclear weapons testing on unsuspecting citizens in the remote islands.

There's definitely things we've done bad, but the poetry, the music, the engineering feats, the getting to the moon and eventually already rovers on Mars, these extraordinary feats that humans have already accomplished, and just a sense of beauty, I think, is something that is, you know, you can't ask ants or cockroaches about their favorite paintings, or maybe if you could, it would be very different from ours.

But in either case, there's a unique perspective that we carry.

And I think, so that's something, even just the age old question, in biology, I'm a geneticist, so this comes up a lot of what makes humans unique.

And so, is it bipedalism, is it our intelligence, is it tool making, is it language?

All those things I just listed, other species have some degree of those traits.

So it's a question of degree, not of type, of trait that defines humans a little bit.

But I think for the extinction awareness, that is a uniquely human trait.

That is, to our knowledge, no other species or entity or AI or sentience that carries that awareness of the frailty of life, of our own life, but all life.

Maybe it is that awareness of the frailty of life that allows us to be so urgently creative, create beauty,

It just seems like if you just measure, humans are able to create some sort of subjectively beautiful things.

And I see science that way, I see engineering that way.

But less aggressively, less innovation, less building, like standing on the shoulders of giants, building on top of each other over and over and over, where you're getting these hierarchical systems where you create on greater levels of abstraction, then you use ideas to communicate those ideas and you share those ideas and all of a sudden you have the rockets going on into space.

Which ants have been building the same structures for millions and millions of years with no real change.

an experiment going right now and maybe it'll change, but.

Well, yeah, we will bring up some extreme organisms.

Okay, 1 interesting thing that comes up much later in your book is something I also haven't thought of and it's quite inspiring, which is the heat death in the universe is something worth fighting against.

You know, you kind of, I mean, you seriously look at the next 500 years, and that's such a beautiful thing.

You know, seriously, we'll talk about the uncertainty involved with that and all the different trajectories, but to seriously look at that, and then to seriously look at what happens when the sun runs out, what happens when the universe comes to an end.

We have an opportunity and a kind of duty, like you said, to fight against that.

And that was so inspiring to me to think, wait, maybe we'll actually, that's a worthy thing to think about.

Right, the come up with the best known understanding, current, of how things end.

You know, we kind of are building an intuition and data and models of the way the universe is, the way it started, the way it's going to end.

So our best model of the end, let's start thinking about how that could be prevented, how that could be avoided, how that could be channeled and misdirected and you can pivot it somehow.

That's really inspiring, that's really powerful.

And that was the kind of melancholic notion behind all of it.

Just to me that's also inspiring to enjoy the moment, to really live in the moment, because that is truly where beauty exists, is in the moment.

But there is a long-lasting aspect to beauty that is part of the engineering ethic, which is like, tell me what the problem is and we're gonna solve it.

So what do you think about that, the long scale, beyond 500 years?

Absolutely, I think we have the best chance of any species, and actually the best chance that humanity's ever had.

Actually, my favorite question I ask at the end of every interview for every potential graduate student, medical student, faculty, whoever I'm interviewing, for whatever reason, the last question is, well, how long do you think that humans or our evolutionary derivatives will last?

And the answers are shockingly wide ranging.

Some people say, I think we've only got 100 years left.

Some people say as long as the universe lasts.

But to the person who once said, it was a medical student, applicant, who said, I think we've only got 100 years left.

And I was like, really, for all of humanity, everything will be gone in 100 years?

And I said, well, sweet Jesus, man, why go to med school?

And then he said, I really wanna make the last few hundred years count really matter, and I said, oh, well, that's actually kind of, sort of hopeful in a really dark way, but I think we've never been better situated to actually last for the long term.

Even though We've also never been at the greater risk of being able to destroy ourselves ever since really the first nuclear test when they, Tony Orbe has a great book about this called The Precipice where, the precipice for humanity is at 1 point we made technologies that we weren't sure whether or not they would destroy the Earth or the entire universe.

The math was incomplete and there was too much error, but they tested the bomb anyway.

But it's an extraordinary place as a species to think, we now have something in our hands that may destroy the Earth and possibly a chain reaction that destroys the whole universe.

Let's try it anyway as a stage that we're at as a species.

But with that power comes an ability to get to other planets, to survive long term.

And when you think about the heat death, that just becomes, that's an ad infinitum question.

If you keep thinking, well, we survive, we go to the next sun, and then you go to the next sun, eventually the question will be, well, if you just keep doing that forever, at some point, the universe either continues to expand or it could collapse back in itself, and the heat death is more likely at this point where it just keeps expanding and expanding, everything gets too far away.

But even in that case, I think if we had a fundamental knowledge of physics and space-time that you could try and restructure it quite literally to the shape of the universe to prevent it.

I think, you know, unless we had done the math and we think that there's a greater chance that the next universe would form and make more life, maybe we would, but even then, I think humans have always wanted to survive and you could argue maybe should survive because.

And are able to engineer systems that help us survive.

So what is this though, the Tsar Bomb, yeah, the hydrogen.

Yeah, There's nothing more terrifying and somehow inspiring than watching the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

They're capable of leveraging the power of nature.

I mean, most of the Voyager spacecraft are nuclear powered because it's still in many ways the most efficient way to get a tiny amount of fissile material and make power out of it.

So they're still slowly drifting, they're past the heliosphere, they're now into interstellar space and they're nuclear powered.

It's a tool or a weapon depending on how you hold it.

Are we alone in the universe, Chris Mason?

So the presumption that you've just mentioned is let's just focus on our thing.

Well, I think we, as far as we know, there's no other sentient life out in the universe that we've found yet.

And I think there's probably bacteria life out there, just because we found it everywhere we've looked on Earth.

It is, and there's, you know, halophilic organisms that can survive in extreme salts.

There are cyclophiles that in extreme cold.

There's, you know, basically organisms that can survive in really almost any possible environment that can adapt and find a way to live.

But as far as we know, we're the only sentient ones.

And I think this is the famous, the Drake equation, or how many, where is everyone, is what Enrico Fermi said, is why haven't we heard from anyone if there are these other life forms?

I actually think the question is wrong to phrase it that way because the Earth has only been here for 4.5 billion years and life may be only for a few billion of those years, complex life only for several hundred years, hundred million years of life we've actually had, and humans only the past few million years since our last common ancestor.

But if you think even further back, the universe hasn't had that much time itself to cool and create atoms and have them spread around the universe, right?

So the current estimate's 13.8 billion years of just the whole universe, but it spent the first 5 or 6 of those billion years really just like cooling and making enough of the stars to then make the atoms that would come from supernovas.

So I actually think we might be the first or sit 1 of the very few or 1 of the early life forms, but the universe itself hasn't had that much time to make life in a galactic and universal timeframe.

You needed billions of years for the elements to be created and then distributed.

And we're only really in the, I think the last few billion years where I think even life could have been made.

So I think the question of wherever is everyone is the wrong question.

I think the question is, I think we are the first ones at the party, let's set up the liquor, let's set up the food.

I just think we're the first ones at the party of life, but more people are coming.

Yeah, maybe the first, as far as we know, the first, but maybe we'll find some.

Because the parties then expand and it overflows.

that's right, and then there's a mosh pit and then you bump into the other galaxy.

else is everyone getting here instead of where is everyone?

I think we've just started on the genesis of life in the universe.

Yeah, so not where you have they or not, more about when and who and how do we set up the party.

I think it's an interesting other moral question is do we, you know, a lot of Star Trek episodes, the prime directive is you do not interfere with another planet if you could pass by a planet.

I think it's time to also revisit that because what if you go by a planet and we think that with, as far as we can tell with enough certainty that they would never be able to leave their planet and then the sun eventually would engulf that planet, wherever that planet might be in some solar system, but if we had a way to help them, their culture, their science, their technology, everything about a different species to survive, would we not interfere?

I think that would actually be wrong to say, well, we can save this life here, and we decide not to.

We decide after millions and billions of years pass and we know the sun will engulf that planet.

That's watching a train hit someone on the tracks and not moving the train.

In terms of the effort of humans becoming a multi-planetary species, in terms of priorities, how much would you allocate to trying to make contact with aliens and getting their help?

And if we look at the next 500 and beyond years, and just versus option number 2, really just focusing on setting up the party on our own engineering, on our own, the genome, the biology of humanity, the AI collaborating with humans, just all the engineering challenges and opportunities that we're exploring.

I'm focused in my lab, of course, a lot on the engineering of genomes, the monitoring of astronauts during long missions.

We've been doing reach out to aliens since the first radio wave's been broadcast, so we're doing some of it, but to do a real.

You made it sound like your lab is mostly focused on biology, but you also reach out occasionally to aliens.

I should be, occasionally, when they visit, they bring their whiskey and we have a drink.

But I think we can do, we've been broadcasting into space for, you know, at this point, almost a century, getting close to, and, you know, but it's not been structured.

So I think it's very cheap and easy to send out structured messages, like what Carl Sagan wrote about in Contact, doing prime numbers and sending those out to indicate intelligence.

So there's things we can do that I think are very cheap and very easy, so we should do some of that.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

This is 1 of the biggest critiques people often say of space research and even space flight in general, is it's too expensive, shouldn't we solve poverty, shouldn't we cure diseases?

And the answer is always, as it always has been, is that you can walk and chew gum at the same time, you can pass the Civil Rights Act and go to the moon in the same decade, you can improve and get rid of structural inequality while getting to the moon and Mars in this decade.

There's sometimes criticism of like ridiculous science, like studying penguins or something, or studying the patterns of birds or fish and so on.

Some congressman stands up and says, this is a waste of taxpayer dollars, and then someone says, oh, but we, And for example, CRISPR was pure research for 25 years.

Now it's a household word and students are editing genomes in high school.

But it was just pure research on weird bacteria living actually in salt, hyper saline lakes and rivers for decades and then eventually became a massive therapeutic, which is like the curing of diseases in this past year.

And there's stuff that you discover as part of the research that you didn't anticipate that have nothing to do with the actual research.

Like oceanography is 1 of the interesting things about that whole field is that it's a huge amount of data, neuroscience too, actually.

So you could discover computer science things, like machine learning things, or even data storage manipulation, distributed compute things, by forcing yourself to get something done on the oceanography side.

That's how you invent the internet and all those kinds of things.

So to me, aliens, looking for aliens out there in the universe is a motivator that just inspires, inspires everybody.

Young people, old people, scientists, artists, engineers, entrepreneurs, everybody.

Somehow that line between fear and beauty.

Aliens are like perfectly merged basically.

I mean for you, Let's start talking about primitive alien life.

Are you excited by it or are you terrified?

I think it'd be great if it's alien life, assuming it's safe, but I'm very excited.

You just said a half sentence, presuming it's safe.

That's the fundamental question I'm trying to

So I think, we have this, this beginning of some planetary protection is happening now is we're gonna send, we're bringing rocks back from Mars in 2033 if all goes according to plan.

Or Michael Crichton wrote a book, The Andromeda Strain, about this very idea.

And the only way you can really gauge that is the same way we do with any infectious agent here on Earth, right?

If it's a new pathogen, a new organism, you do it slowly, carefully.

You often do it with levels of containment.

So, you know, and it's gonna be, probably have to be where some pioneers go and would be, for example, on Mars.

There might be other organisms there that only get activated once there's an ambient temperature and more humidity, then suddenly the first settlers on Mars are encountering a strange new fungus or something that's not even like a fungus because it might be a different clade of life, different branch of life.

And could be very dangerous or it could be very inert.

I mean, most of life on Earth is not really dangerous or harmful, let me go back on this.

Most of life on Earth is not really dangerous or harmful, let me go back, I'll get on this.

Most of life on Earth is neither harmful nor beneficial to you, it's just, they're making its own way in the universe, just trying to survive.

It's when, you know, it's inside of you and replicating your cells and destroying your cells like a virus, like COVID, dexrcv2, that it becomes a big problem, of course, but it's, you know, just doesn't really have agency, it's just trying to get by.

And so, for example, most of the bacteria on the table, on your skin, in the subway are pretty inert.

They're just people hanging around for the ride.

And actually, just because we're talking so much trash about viruses, most viruses are, don't bother humans.

There's this battle in biology that is really dorky is that bacteria think that they're the most, people who study bacteria think the bacteria are the most important, because there's trillions and trillions of them.

They run a lot of our own biology in our body, but then people who study phages, They say, well, there's 10 times more phages than there are bacteria, which can attack the bacteria and destroy them as well.

So phage people think that they run the world, but we need them both.

So, because you said alien organisms, wouldn't we encounter something like bacteria, something like viruses as the first alien life form?

Are they, first of all, are viruses alive or not?

So the book definition, if you pick up a biology textbook, they'd say technically no, because they don't have the ability to self-replicate independently.

But I would think if you restructure how you view what life is, as far as autonomously aggregating and replicating of information, For example, AI at some point, what if there's an AI platform that we could consider alive?

Like at what point would you allow it to say it's alive?

And I think we have the same definitional challenge there, is that if it can continually propagate instructions for its own existence, then it is a version of living.

I think viruses don't get that category because they can't do it on their own, but they are a version of life, I'd say, but probably not alive.

Well, they are expressing themselves and doing so on occasion quite powerfully in human civilization.

So like you said, at which point are AI systems allowed to say?

And viruses didn't ask for permission to express themselves to humans.

Are they overall though exciting or terrifying to you as somebody who has studied viruses?

Well, whenever given 2 options, there's always 2 more.

So here I'll say they're both terrifying and exciting, I think to me.

If I had to make that sandwich, and how many layers are meat versus cheese, There's a lot more cheese of excitement.

And meat is the fear, apparently, in this metaphor.

Well, I love both, so it's a hell of a delicious sandwich.

Eisenhower in your book, quote, plans are useless, but planning is essential.

And you provide a thought experiment called Entropy Goggles.

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Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space | Lex Fridman Podcast #283