Kind: captions
Language: en
would that make you sad to die in mars
looking back at the planet you were born
on no i think it would be actually
in some ways it may be the best way to
die knowing that you're in the first
wave of people
expanding the reach into the stars
it'd be an honor
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
this is the lex friedman podcast 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 one of the most
human specific traits and features
that we have it's actually maybe
one of the few things that we only we
have and no one 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 dedicate it because i think we might
not be the last sentients 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
it is true
when you wrote it
it it was really powerful to realize for
me
that we do contemplate our extinction
and that that is a creative force
so the at the individual level
contemplating your own death is a
creative force yes like i have a
deadline yes but the
contemplating the extinction of the
whole species i suppose that stretches
through human history
that's many of the sort of
uh 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 uh fiction
almost 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 well
several hundred years and especially in
the past few decades where we can see
you know a sense of responsibility and 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 one just not
that well
well yeah that's right so we're like a
bunch of ants
uh
extinction aware sentience ants
that are busy trying to terraform this
planet to make it uh habitable so we can
flourish
and then
you say that it's our duty
to
expand beyond earth
to expand to other planets
to uh to find a a good
backup off-site backup solution
why the word duty it's an interesting
word duty is something that usually
puts people to sleep i'll say that's how
duty you know it's duty is a bit like
death people don't often like to really
think what you wake up in the morning
what is what was my duty today
most people there are some people who
think about 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 to flourish and
to be safe so we do have this 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 with
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 our
own frailty which of course is often
talked about and climate change and
people think about pandemics
but other species that we sometimes
cause extinction but
very soon will be even
species like the woolly mammoth
colossals or recent startups that's
doing that on their advisory report and
it's it might happen in three or four
years so it's the 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
just been working on uh backup and
restoring uh databases quite a bit
recently
and uh you can do quite a lot of damage
when you restore them properly
when we bring back the madness it might
be uh you have to be careful bringing
that back yes like 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 yes pushing us forward yeah
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
that little flame whatever that is dies
that will be a real shame for the
universe
what is that what is special about human
beings what is special about the human
condition that we want to preserve
that's
why do we matter there are some people
who think we don't there are some people
say well humans take take it or leave it
they think they're misanthropes so the
book is on the one sense a call to
misanthropes to hopefully shake them out
of their slumber
but there's some people the words and
throw me just people that uh dislike
humanity there they're just again
they're all just they're called nihilist
donnie that's a shout out for big
lebowski they're like nothing matters
and why does any they can 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 and you know nuclear
weapons testing on unsuspecting citizens
of remote islands definitely things
we've done bad but
the poetry the music the uh engineering
feats the you know getting to the moon
and eventually already rovers on mars
these extraordinary feats that humans
have already accomplished
interested really a sense of beauty i
think is something that is
uh you know you can't
ask
ants or cockroaches about their favorite
paintings or maybe if you could
uh it would be very different from ours
but in either case there's a unique
perspective
that we carry and i think so that that's
something even just the old 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
those traits so it's a question of
degree not of type of trait that defines
you know 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 and maybe it
is that awareness the frailty of life
that allows us to be
so urgently creative
create beauty
create innovation 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 and ants are less
efficient at that they also create
beautiful things
but less uh 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 like these like uh
hierarchical systems where you greater
and 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 yeah which ants have been
building the same structures for
millions and millions of years with no
real change and so that is the key
differentiator yet yeah that's right
we've got an experiment going right now
and maybe it'll uh change but
well yeah we will bring up some extreme
uh organisms
another thing you're
uh interested in
okay one 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
like that's also an engineering problem
yes you know you kind of uh
the i mean
you
seriously look at the next 500 years
and that's such a beautiful thing
you know seriously we'll talk about like
the uncertainty involved with that and
all the different trajectories but
to to seriously look at that and then to
seriously look at like
what happens when the sun runs out
what happens when the
uh
the universe comes to an end like 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
maybe we can prevent it actually right
the come up with the best known
understanding current of how things end
the you know we have 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 um
that's really inspiring that's really
powerful i never really thought about i
thought that you know eventually all
things end
and that was the kind of
melancholic notion behind all of it you
know none of this matters
in a way just
uh to me that's also inspiring
and to enjoy the moment
to really live in the moment you know
that 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 going to solve it
so what do you think about that the the
long scale beyond 500 years
is do humans have a chance
absolutely i think we have the the best
chance of any species and actually the
best chance that humanity's ever had so
i think a lot of people fear that we
could that we can or will kill ourselves
actually my
favorite question i asked to ask at the
end of every interview for every
potential graduate student medical
student faculty whoever i'm interviewing
for whatever reason yes 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
or some people say billions some people
say as long as the universe lasts but to
the person who once said as a medical
student applicant who said i think we've
only got 100 juice left and i was like
really for all of humanity everything
will be gone in 100 years and he said
yes and i said well
well
sweet jesus man why go to med school why
would he why not go sell bananas on the
beach and then he said i really want to
make the last you know 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 i think
we've never been better situated to
actually last for the long term we have
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
uh tony orb has a great book about this
called the precipice where
the precipice for humanity is at one
point we made technologies that we
weren't sure whether or not they would
destroy the earth or the entire universe
so the math was incomplete and there was
too much air 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 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 depth
that just becomes that's a 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 expanding
everything it's 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 quite literally the shape of
the universe to prevent it
i think we would i think we would want
to survive 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 and you could argue maybe
should survive because and are able to
engineer systems that example survive
yeah yeah and always have yeah
so what is this though the tsar bomb
yeah the hydrogen
yeah there's there's
nothing more terrifying and somehow
inspiring than watching the mushroom
cloud of a nuclear explosion
it's like humans are capable of this
they're capable of leveraging the power
of nature
to completely obliterate
everything and and to create propulsion
i mean most the voyager spacecraft are
nuclear powered because it's still in
many ways the most efficient way to get
a tiny amount of physical material and
make power out of it you know so they're
still slowly drifting they're past the
heliosphere they're out in now into
interstellar space and they're nuclear
powered so it's like any tool or
technology it's a it's a tool or a
weapon depending on how you hold it are
we alone in the universe chris mason
what do you think so
the presumption that you've just
mentioned is let's just focus on our
thing yeah for now for now well i think
we
as far as we know with no other sentient
life on the universe that we've found
yet
and and i think there's probably
bacterial 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
psychrophiles that in extreme cold
there's you know basically organisms can
survive in really almost any possible
environment you 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
you know how many
where is everyone is that what enrico
fermi said is the
why haven't we heard from anyone there
are these other life forms i actually
think the question is wrong
to phrase it that way because
the unit the earth has only been here
for 4.5 billion years
and we and you know life maybe only for
a few billion of those years complex
life only for several hundred years 100
million years of life we've actually had
you know in humans only the past few
million years since our last common
ancestor so it's not that much time
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 the universe
right so the current estimates 13.8
billion years of just the whole universe
but it spent the first five or six 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 one of the
very few or one of the early life forms
but the universe itself hasn't had that
much time to make life in the integra
and a galactic and universal time frame
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 we i just think we're the first
ones at the party of life but more
people are coming
one of the early attendees to the party
yeah or maybe the for as far as we know
the first but maybe we'll get into the
local pocket of the universe
um because the parties then expand and
you it overflows
and then there's a mosh pit and then you
know you bump into the other galaxy uh i
think it's i think the question should
be
we know when else is everyone getting
here instead of where is everyone i
think i think we've just started on the
genesis of life in the universe yeah so
not not worry have they or not more
about when and who
and how do we set up the party right and
then how do we help them i think it's an
interesting other moral question is do
we you know the a lot of star trek
episodes you 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 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 interview interfere i think
that would actually be wrong to say well
we can save this this life here and we
decide not to we decide
after
millions and billions of years past and
we know the sign will engulf that planet
like what will happen with our planet
and we don't interfere that's you know
watching a train hit someone on the
tracks and not moving the train so
i
mean
in terms of the effort of humans
becoming 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 beyond
years
and just
versus
option number two really just focusing
on setting up the party on our own
engineering
our on our own um
the genome the biology of humanity the
ai
collaborating with humans just all the
engineering challenges and opportunities
that we're um
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
uh you know reaching out to other aliens
we've been doing reach out to aliens
since the first radio waves been
broadcast so we're doing some of it but
to do them really made it sound like
your lab is mostly focused on biology
but you also reach out occasionally
occasionally when they visit they have
they bring their whiskey you know we
have a drink but the
uh
i think we we can do we've been
broadcasting into space for you know at
this point almost a century getting
close to
and you know so but it's not been
structured so i think it's very cheap
and easy to send out structured messages
um like what carl sagan wrote about in
contact doing prime numbers and sending
those out to indicate intelligence
uh 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 one of
the biggest critiques people often say
of space research and even space flight
in general is 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 and get rid of structural inequality
while getting to the moon and mars in
this decade so i think i think we can do
both
yeah and they kind of help each other
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 but
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 uh
hyper saline lakes and rivers
for decades and then eventually became a
massive therapeutic which is like a
curing of diseases in this past year and
there's stuff that you discover
as part of the research that you didn't
anticipate they have nothing to do with
the actual research like uh oceanography
uh is
one of the interesting things about that
whole field
is that it's a huge amount of data and
neuroscience too actually so you could
discover computer science things like
machine learning things or even data
storage manipulation distributed compute
things by having to forcing yourself to
get something done about on the
oceanography side that's how you invent
the internet
and and 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
the somehow the that line between
fear and beauty
because we're aliens are like perfectly
merged basically
because this we don't know i mean for
you
let's start talking about primitive
alien life are you excited by it
or are you terrified
i want to make a lotion out of it i
think it'd be great if it's alien life
assuming it's safe but i'm very excited
it doesn't have to be you just said a
half sentence presuming it's safe that's
the fundamental question
so if you could yes presuming it's safe
so i think you know we have this uh
we're this beginning of some planetary
protection is happening now is we're
going to send we're bringing rocks back
from mars in 2033 if all goes according
to plan
but there's always a danger what if you
bring this back what if it's alive what
if it will kill all of humanity or
michael creighton wrote a book the
andromeda strain about this very idea
and we could but it hopefully won't and
the only way you can you know 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 and 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 a different branch of life
and could be very dangerous or it could
be very inert i mean most of life on
earth on earth is
not really dangerous or harmful let me
go back down 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
yourselves and destroying your cells
like a virus like like like covid xrcv2
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 the bacteria on
the
table on your skin
in the subway are pretty inert they're
just
you know 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 they're phages
almost all the vast majority of viruses
are phages there's this this battle in
the biology that is really dorky is that
bacteria think that they're the most you
know people 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
that but then people who study phages
they say well there's 10 times more
phages than the 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
uh what do you think about viruses all
right 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 by 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 it's just
autonomously
aggregating and replicating of
information uh
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
you know 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
um
like you said at which point
our ai systems allowed to say we're life
we we are allowed
humans must allow them
and the viruses didn't ask for
permission to express themselves to
humans they just kind of they just kind
of did yeah we didn't have to allow them
are they overall though exciting or
terrifying to you as somebody who has
studied viruses well whenever given two
options there's always two more you
could do both or neither so here i'll
say they're both uh terrifying and
exciting i think to me
more exciting than terrifying i think if
i had to make that sandwich and how many
layers are you know meat versus cheese
there's a lot more cheese of excitement
and meat isn't it
well i love both so it's a hell of a
delicious sandwich
you quote president dwight d eisenhower
in your book
quote plans are useless but planning is
essential and you provide a thought
experiment called entropy goggles
can you describe this thought experiment
happily i i do this
almost every day somewhere when i'm
sitting in a given room i will
uh well a quick comment about that quote
actually for all the nasa planning
meetings for the twin study and other
missions that was often the quote that
goes put up on the wall before we'd sit
down for the day to plan the mission it
was that quote which is useless
which i thought was hilarious for a
official nasa meeting but it was because
you need to have a plan but you have to
know that plan might change and so i
think uh that's just a quick the context
for that quite craig kundra who's a
leader at nasa's headquarters now i
would always put that first slide up and
i'm like hmm this meeting is either
going to go really well or really bad i
don't know what's about to happen but
but it's a inspiring quote because it's
very true in any case the entropy
goggles is a thought experiment i detail
in in my book which is
if you just sit in a room any room
wherever you are and and imagine what it
will look like in 10 years 100 years 500
years or even thousands of years it is a
wonderfully
terrifying and exciting exercise against
definitely both because he realized the
transience of everything that you think
of what might survive almost everything
that you're looking at will probably not
be there in hundreds of years uh it will
be you know it fairly degraded or it
might be changed altered completely
different moved
it is
just it's that
trait though of humans to just sit there
and project into the future it's easily
you know really seamlessly with whatever
you're doing and previously
is is powerful because it shows the you
know what can change and what should
change in some cases but also that
you know left to you know its own
devices the universe would entropy would
come take over and really things would
decay things would be destroyed but the
only thing really preventing i think
some of the entropy is is
humans these sort of sentient creatures
that are aware of extinction like
ourselves
is really one of the only forces in the
universe that's counteracting the second
law of thermodynamics this entropy
that's always increasing
technically we're actually still
increasing it because we emit heat and
we never have perfect capture of all of
energy but were the only things really
actively and consciously uh you know
resisting it really you could say life
in general does this like ants do this
when they build their big homes they're
rearranging the universe to make a nice
place for themselves and they're you
know counteracting entropy but we could
actually do it in a way that would be at
a large scale and for long term
so the entropy goggles is just a way to
realize
how transient everything is and just
imagine
everything that will decay or change in
the room around you so anyone listening
if they're listening on a train or
they're driving in their car whether
someone is listening right now
looking around everything can and will
change and so you that but then at first
it's terrifying to see that oh my gosh
everything will decay and go away
but then
i think it's actually liberating i think
wait i can affect this chain i can
prevent it or i can affect it or i can
improve the change that may occur
all by itself say naturally um and so i
think it is but is it that awareness
again of like you know the frailty of
life the ever uh insistence an increase
in entropy
that you can address though and actually
i say the same thing to first-year
medical students i teach them genetics i
say i point early in the course i say
here's all these charts of how the human
body decays over time it just and i call
it the inexorable march towards
molecular oblivion which the students
often find they kind of laugh at ah
because on all the charts they're 22
years old but
older people do not laugh as much of the
thought of molecular oblivion but we're
all marching towards it to a large
degree so this is both
a great thought experiment for the
environment around you so just looking
at all the objects around you
that they will
dissipate it will disappear with time
but then it's also
the thing you mentioned which is how can
i affect
any of the world
like uh you're one little creature
and
it's like uh your life is kind of
you get dropped into this ocean and you
make a little splash
and how do i make it so the splash lasts
for
uh a little bit longer because it
ultimately
will uh i mean i suppose the wave will
continue indefinitely but it'd be such a
small impact it's almost undetectable
and so how do i have that impact at all
on so many levels i get to experience
this
as a human like um
i recently had had my
cold storage uh hacked
to where it was locked essentially it
wasn't hacked it was locked and so you
get to lose all your data so for example
if you lose all your data if you lose
all your online presence your social
media your emails
if you
like think of all the things you could
lose in a fire there's been a lot of
fires in the united states if you lose
your home yeah
it makes you realize wait a minute
this is exactly a nice simulation
of what will happen anyway yeah
eventually uh and that eventually comes
pretty quickly and so you it allows you
to focus on you know how can i actually
affect
so what matters what lasts
um and what brings me joy i suppose that
the ultimate answer is nothing lasts you
have to focus on the things in the
moment that bring you joy and that have
a positive impact on those around you
that focusing on something that's long
lasting is perhaps
i don't know it's it's complicated right
because like
well it used to be foolhardy to say i
want to think legacy is often what
people think of as they approach the end
of their life what is my legacy what
have i done even younger in life but
it used to be really foolhardy to say i
could affect something that would learn
people would build the building
architecture i put my name on this
building and there i have some sense of
immortality
but that's a it's a fleeting dream it's
not you can't uh we're reaching
mortality uh and if you could it would
be resource
you know taxing on everyone else if
you really were
but i think it's it's okay i mean the
books for the next 500 years but i
presume i'll be dead for the vast
majority of that time and i i but that
is that is actually the liberating state
of mortality is you know
that you don't have forever so it means
what can you do that is the most
impactful but you can build things that
you said i want to pass this on to the
next generation again the most obvious
thing we do with this is if people have
kids but
they don't think of this as a as an
intergenerational responsibility to
think of it as well i was at the bar one
night and i met this hot girl and then
things happen or sometimes it's more
planned than that but the
the
there's no overarching sense of weight i
could have something that three or four
generations from now well that someone
will receive this gift that was planned
for them long before they were born or
gestating
and i think we have that capacity and
that that can be a version of legacy but
it's even okay if if no one knows
exactly who started it but that the
benefit was was wrought by people
you know again hundreds or even
thousands of years after you start got
it started so i think this
is again something that is um
only really people that are economically
secure can even begin to do this or you
can say you know think of maslow's
hierarchy of needs where you need to
satisfy your physical needs all your
structural needs and have shelter
and so you know i'm sitting from a
position of great privilege to be able
to pontificate about what i hope i could
do for things for people that come 200
years from now but nonetheless more and
more people can do that humanity's never
been in a better state quantifiably to
be able to start to think about these
intergenerational responsibilities
yeah this is a interesting balance
because like it seems that
if you let the ego flare up a little bit
that's good for productivity yeah like
saying i can somehow achieve immortality
if what i do is going to be pretty good
but then
that's actually being kind of
dishonest with yourself because it won't
in the long arc of history won't matter
right in terms of your own ego but it
will have
a small piece to play in a larger puzzle
and help people yeah
people many generations from now
and that they said there are all these
people who were looking after me before
i was ever born i think um
it's because it's a bit of just uh even
just know what if when you go to a
campsite there's a camping rule that you
always leave the campsite better than
you found it so
if if the fire pit was somewhat damaged
and you got there you fix it if there
was no wood you leave a few bits of logs
for the next person who comes and this
ethos is something that uh just picked
up from camping and so i think if we did
that as people the world would be a
better place and the world coming ahead
would also be
that said with these entropy glasses
how can you uh see through the fog 500
years is a long time first of all why
500 years
most people this is so refreshing
because most colleagues and friends i
talk to are
don't have the guts
to think even like 10 years out
they start doing wishy-washy kind of
statements about well you don't know but
it's so refreshing to say all right i
know there's so many trajectories that
this world can take but i'm going to
pick a few
and and think through them and think
what it's the well it's the quote right
plans are useless but planning is
essential
so what why 500 years so 500 was a
little bit of what i felt like i could
see clearly through the entropy goggles
i i feel like i can't i can't just the
contradiction in terms
right i can see
i mean for example you said chris what's
going to happen in a million years well
i'll start to describe
you know what happens to the
the moon will be farther away because it
moves several inches away every year and
so then eventually you can't have a full
lunar eclipse after a while i think
about structures of the continental
change and things will move i could
describe some things but it starts to
become so
vague it's just not a useful exercise i
think if it's too far out if it's too
soon that's not that much different from
what people just do with the news and
say i think that's what the economy
might look like over the next year or
two years economists are notoriously not
held accountable when they have really
bad predictions you can make really
awful predictions no one seems to care
you can just make another one next week
so too short is i think not
necessarily as helpful but
500 i actually when i was first working
on the book and thinking about type i
thought well do i do a thousand or two i
kept thinking about the main idea was if
i were to pick this up 500 years from
now what would it look like i changed
the number if i pick up a thousand years
from now
or a hundred
and i kept trying to think of
what are some time frames where really
large-scale changes have happened and so
in some sense you could argue that
humans been mostly the same for about
three or four thousand years and the
best example is this you looked at some
of the homer's poems or the greek
tragedies uh and oedipus for example
like humans are really almost identic
we're still petty and people you know
have affairs and people do things they
shouldn't and people it's it's just
saying that all those things like it's
bad
that's just me like you read that it's
astounding and in some sense soothing
that the greek tragedies of 2 300 years
ago
are very relatable to what happens in
like in every high school right so like
you know people that's why you read them
in high school like oh that's really a
clear part of the human condition so in
that sense some things are really
permanent but i want to think of a few
reasons i chose 500 is that it's a time
frame where i could foresee
clear development of some biotechnology
that will get us to a new place
including missions to mars that are
planned that will be there and that we'd
start to have settlements there on the
moon and mars
and i could see also that by that time i
think we would have enough knowledge of
biology and technology and space
medicine to start to prepare for an
interstellar mission to actually send
people on a craft that would have what's
called a generation ship
people live and die on the same
spacecraft on the way towards a
destination
but i think we need that much time to
actually perfect the technology and to
learn enough about physiology to be able
to make it for that distance
and
the book is kind of focused on the human
story
this is a specific slice of the possible
futures yes
there could be sort of ai systems there
could be other technologies that kind of
build up the world so much of the world
might be lived in virtual reality
so you're not touching any of that
you're sticking to biology we're not
you're you're touching a little bit but
focused on what
the cells that make up the human body
how do they change how do we design
technologies to repair them and how do
we uh protect them and
as they travel out into the cosmos
absolutely and it's something that is
part of the duty if your duty is to keep
life safe you have to consider all means
to do so
and and engineering life to save itself
is definitely on that list
and you know i think we can
imagine in that time frame 500 years
that we would you know there
there will be ai that's continually
advancing and i actually say that i'm
matter agnostic towards cognition so if
your matter is carbon atoms and cells
and tissues and you have cognition bravo
good for you if you're if you're silicon
based and you're in chips and you're an
ai that's all virtual but we reached a
state of you know well beyond the
touring test and really clearly
intelligent
congratulations to you too so i feel
like this sense of duty is is
applicable regardless of what the state
of matter your cognition is based in so
i would imagine that ai platforms that
are really intelligent might also get a
sense of this duty or i hope they would
i wrote the book for them too they can
carry that flame of whatever makes
humans special so
but why
nevertheless is so much of your focus
on this human meat vehicle do you think
is it
it's essential it doesn't have to be me
no it definitely does not it could be
i'm hoping that the ai platforms that
we've built or that would become that
would start to build themselves
would also carry the sense of duty
because at that point they would be life
and so whichever means
that life
whatever form life takes it should have
this duty i think
will it have the lessons of genetics
genomics
dna and rna and proteins and the squishy
stuff that makes us
uh human are those lessons a temporary
thing that will discard or will those
lessons be carried forward i mean like
if the machines completely take over
let's say and it's all uh not
necessarily completely take over but
either completely take over or merge
with humans in some interesting way
where we as opposed to figuring out how
to repair cells and protect cells
we start having some cyborg cells
we could i think we will they'll
definitely be a blending and blending's
already happened there's prosthetic
limbs there's cybernetic limbs
there's you know uh neural link
you know progress being made to blend
biology and cybernetics and machines for
sure
but i think the
you know in the long term
you know we'll see that they
are are fairly
the biology be useful because it's it's
a it's a it's a manufacturing system all
of life is a way to create
copies of things or to replicate
information including storage of
information actually hard drives are
probably one of the worst ways for
long-term storage
dna might end up being the best way to
have you know millennia or you know even
longest scale storage where you want
something that has redundancy that's
built in
and it can store and can be put at
really cool temperatures and survive in
cosmic rays or so i think it
dna might be the best hard drive of the
future potentially
this is really interesting okay what is
dna
what is rna
and what are genes yes we should because
most i presume the audience knows it but
some might just be first-time listeners
kind of there's a person right now who's
like in in brazil smoking a joint
sitting on the beach
and just wants to learn about dna so
please please
dna the dxe ribonucleic acid is the
recipe for life it is what carries the
instructions
in almost all of your cells you have a
copy of your genome it's actually the
reason i became a geneticist is because
the day i learned that as an embryo we
started just a single cell but all the
instructions there to make every single
type of cell in your body
i was and still am endlessly fascinated
by that that is extraordinary that is to
me the most beautiful thing in the
entire universe that is
a completely from one single embryo
everything is there to make the entire
body which aspect of that is most
beautiful so is it
that there's this information within dna
that's stored efficiently
and it also stores information on how to
build not just what to build
yeah and so from all of that is what's
what's the sexiest what's the most
beautiful aspect is it the entire
machinery or is it just the information
is there
it's the fact that the machinery is the
information like that they basically it
becomes its own manufacturer
is is what is extraordinary imagine if
you if you took a one two by four and
you threw it on the ground and you said
i'll be back in a day and then a whole
house was made when you came back i mean
we would all lose our minds a lot of
people would poop their pants people
would have to wear adult diapers it
would be a big scene yes if that
happened um and then we're not we're
actually getting close to that people
having autonomous house building it's
not quite there yet but there are people
trying to make
uh robots that will build entire houses
but you need much more than the block of
wood right right that's that's the
extraordinary thing is just one one
piece of wood there and say i'll just
leave it there for a few days and i'll
come back that's basically what embryos
do okay it takes nine months a little
bit longer but still
that is nothing short of magic right so
i think
that's what i
love about you know the fact that dna
carries that information now the
information
is static so to actually read that
information and to actually put into
motion is where rna comes in so this
ribonucleic acid so it just has one
other oxygen added to it
versus dna but it is the transcribed
version it's like if you look at a book
and you say you can have it in your
hands but then you start to read it
aloud it becomes the active form of the
recipe for life is the rna and those
rnas also then get
translated to become proteins that
become active forms like enzymes you
think of like your hair or think of
other ways you digest food there's all
these you know active proteins going
around that are copying your dna making
rna making sure your dna is safe there's
all these built-in systems to keep your
cells in check and working and these are
often in protein form
and so genes are the really these
constructs basically what are the
instruction sets like how many versions
of instructions do you have in your
genome so the genome is the collection
of all the dna of a person for humans
about three billion letters of genetic
code so just three billion acs g's and
t's these nucleotides that are the
recipe for life and that's it that is
the entire instruction set to go from
that one embryo up to a full human which
is pretty efficient if you say it's
that's actually not that that much
information and in that three billion
letters are snippets of the genes which
are independently regulated
autonomous instruction sets if you will
these really active forms of of the
instructions from your dna to say make a
protein make this rna or turn off some
other part of a cell all those
instructions are there in our dna and
there's about 60 000 of these genes that
are in our genome so how do those all
lead up to you
having a personality
good memory and bad memory some of the
functional characteristics that we at
the human level are able to interpret
the
the the way your face look the way you
smile
you're good at running or jumping
whether you're good at math and all
those kinds of things there's the
age-old debate of nature versus nurture
so like most things if given two options
you can of course have both so almost
every trait
that we know of in humanity has mixtures
of nurture and nature some of them are
purely nurture so there's most people
probably familiar with twin studies but
twin cities are one of the best ways to
gauge how much is something nurture
versus nature how much of it is really
ingrained and has probably less ability
to change versus how much can you really
train so
height for example is one of the most uh
obvious inheritable traits but it
doesn't have one gene it probably has at
least 50 or 60 genes that contribute to
height so it's not like a gene for
height
some people think of like the gene for
cystic fibrosis now that's in that case
that's true there is one gene that if
you have mutations you get cystic
fibrosis as a disease but for other
other traits they're much more
complicated they can have dozens or even
hundreds of genes that influence your
risk and what appears but from twin
studies you take monozygotic twins twins
that are identical and you can clearly
tell they look they have the same facial
structure similar intonation similar
even likes and you compare them to
dizygotic twins or when you have
fraternal twins you can have a male and
female for example in the same uterus
and those are you know dizygotic twins
are two zygotes so in that case they're
they share 50 of their dna but they
shared the same womb and that and then
what you can look at is they you know
what's the difference between identical
twins versus uh fraternal twins and
calculate that difference for any trait
and that gives you an estimate of the
heritability or what's called h squared
so that's what we've been doing for
almost every trait in humanity for the
past you know 100 years i've been trying
to measure this and religion is one
that's a negative control so if you
separate people and see what religion
they become there's no gene for religion