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
or what religion you choose so that
often is their correlation there is zero
because it should be it's a nurture
trait of what religion you end up taking
is not encoded in your dna
religion meaning
islam judaism christianity but there
could be aspects of religions there is a
good good question there is religiosity
as a trait yes there's been study
influences and that has a heritable
component to some degree
so and things like boredom
susceptibility is a trait one of my
favorite papers just looked at how
likely is it that people get bored and
the
identical twins and fraternal twins and
there's a heritability about 30 so it's
not it's mostly not heritable it's like
mostly environmental but that means to
some degree whether or not you're bored
you can say well it's a little bit of my
genes you could a little bit not a lot
but you know most of some degree and
they're probably overlapping with other
traits yeah boredom susceptibility
versus risk seeking behavior are
interrelated so how likely are you to
say i want to go you know cliff jumping
or i want to go i'm going to do
freebasing or i want to
i don't know do some else it's risky
behavior
so speaking of twin studies scott kelly
spent
340 consecutive days out in space you
analyzed as molecular data dna rna
proteins small molecules what did you
learn about the effect of space on the
human body
from scott
we learned that spaces is rough on the
human body but
that the human body is um
amazingly and
monstrously responsive to adapt to that
that challenge it can rise to the
occasion so we could see there scott had
as almost all astronauts do a bit of
puffiness and spikes in his bloodstream
of these are called cytokines or these
inflammation markers or the body is
clearly
saying to itself holy crap i'm in space
and leaders of fluid move to the upper
torso and they get puffy face what's
called the in the astronaut uh face that
is very common but it goes away after a
few days
and some astronauts maintain high levels
of stress for their whole mission as
measured by cortisol or some of these
other inflammation markers
whereas scott actually had a little
spike but then he was cool as a cucumber
for most of the mission but he had spent
at that time that was the longest ever
mission for a u.s astronaut a few
cosmonauts have gone a little bit longer
but there had never been a deep
molecular analysis of what happens the
body after about a year in space so it
was the first study of this kind
and what we found is when he got back
you know we saw all the same markers of
stress on the body and changes spiked up
to levels we've never seen for any other
astronaut before so it seemed like
going to space for a year wasn't so hard
as much as returning to gravity after a
year it was much harder on the body
he notoriously had you know broken a
rash all over his body
and really even the weight of clothing
on his skin was too heavy it created all
this irritation because his body had not
felt the weight of just a simple t-shirt
it was it wasn't really had zero weight
of course right so and up in space
so that led to all this inflammation all
these changes he had to you know
it was much more comfortable just to
walk around nude in that case it was for
a medical reason some people do this you
know recreationally he was doing it for
medical purposes i do it for medical i
mean as well
all the time i mean people say a
prescription since the doctor told me
so he was allergic to earth yeah very
fascinating to think about actually how
quick did his body adapt there so there
was about three to four days he got back
to normal at least in terms of the
inflammation but what's extraordinary is
that
we've measured a lot of other molecules
genes
structural changes tissue look at his
eyeballs look at his vasculature it took
him even six months after the mission a
lot of the genes that had become
activated in response to space flight
were still active so things like we
could see his body repairing dna he was
being irradiated by cosmic rays and by
the radiation it's the equivalent of
giving like three or four chest x-rays
every day just in space and we could see
his body working hard at the molecular
level to repair itself and even in his
urine we could see bits of what's called
eight-oxley guanosine there's a form of
damaged dna that you could see coming
out
and we see it for other astronauts as
well so it's very common you can see
damaged dna the response of the body to
repair the dna but even though he'd been
back on earth for six months that was
still happening uh even six months later
wait how do you explain that so some of
this has to do with when you have a gene
get activated you might think oh it's
like a light switch i'll look at my wall
just flip a light on or off and
sometimes turning a gene on or off is
that simple sometimes you just flip it
on because the gene is already ready to
go
other cases though you have to reprogram
even the structure of how your dna is
packaged yeah which is called an
epigenetic rearrangement in that case we
could see in is that a lot of these
genes had been in these his cells had
changed the structure of how dna was
packaged and it remained open even
months after the mission now after about
a year it was actually almost all back
to normal 99 of all the genes were back
to where they were in pre-flight levels
so it means that you know eventually
you'll adapt but there there's almost a
a lag time kind of like jet lag for the
body but jet lag for your cells to
repair all the dna what was the most
surprising
the thing that you found in that study
there are several surprises one is just
that he
that the rep as i just mentioned that
the repair took so long i thought maybe
a week or a few days he'll be back to
normal but to see this molecular echo in
his cells of his time in space still
occurring was interesting this telomeres
was one was really surprising the the
caps and the ends of your chromosomes
which keep all your dna packaged and you
get half your chromosomes from your
mother and half from your father and
then you go on and make all your cells
normally these shrink as you get older
and telomeres
length is just an overall sign of aging
getting shorter his telomeres got longer
in space
and so this is really surprising because
we thought the opposite would happen so
he that was genetically once surprised
and also some of the mutations we found
in his blood he had less mutations as if
his body was almost being like a low
dose of radiation was sort of cleansing
his body of maybe the cells that were
about to die is one of our main theories
on what's happening and of course you
can't really you have theories but you
can't
because
the number of subjects in the study is
small right it's the it's notoriously
one of the lowest powered studies in
human history yes but but but what you
will you lack in subjects you can make
up for in the number of sampling times
so we did basically 260 samples
collected over the course of three years
so we really almost every few weeks had
a full workup uh including in space so
that was the way we tried to make up for
it but but we've tried another model
organisms in mice we've seen this we've
looked now at 59 other astronauts and in
every astronaut that we've looked at
their telomeres get longer in space
does that indicate anything about
lifespan all those kinds of things or no
you can't make any of those kinds of
jobs yes i won't make that jump yet but
it does indicate that there is a version
of
cleansing if you will that's happening
in space a mixture of we see this
actually clinically at our hospital you
can do a low dose of radiation with some
targeted therapies to kind of activate
your immune cells is even even tried
clinically so this idea of just a little
bit of stress on the body or what's
called hormesis might prime you into
active of cleansing things that were
about to die and that includes stress uh
caused by space yes yeah apparently so
how do we
adapt the human body to stress of this
kind
for periods of multiple years
what what lessons do you draw from that
study and other experiments in space
that
gives you an indication of how we can
survive for multiple years
i think we know that the radiation is is
one of the biggest risk factors and this
has been well described by nasa and many
other astronauts and researchers and so
there we don't have to just
measure the radiation or just look at
dna being damaged we can actually
actively repair it this happens
naturally in all of our cells there's a
little enzymes little protein
really many machines that go around and
scan dna for nicks and breaks and repair
it
we could improve them we could add more
of them or you can even
activate them before you go into space
so we have a one set of cells in my lab
where you but you activate them before
we irradiate them to actually prepare
them for the dose of radiation
and now that is what's called epigenetic
crispr therapies where you can actually
instead of adding or taking away a gene
or modifying a cell you just change kind
of how it's packaged like i was just
describing the dna
the genes are still there we're just
changing how they get used and so you
can actually preemptively activate dna
repair genes and we've done this for
cells we haven't done this yet for
astronauts but we've done it for cells
and a similar idea to this is being used
to treat sickle cell disease and beta
thalassemias you actually you can
reactivate a gene that was dormant in
his way as a therapy so should we make
human genes resilient to harsh
conditions or should we get good at
repairing them
i want to i want to get good at right
okay start to interrupt
i think every time i ask this question
they have taught me
that there's always a third option
both i will say both
i know uh you know for for copy it's
good to just have one big statement but
uh but you want to do both a good or a
third option i would want to you know do
electromagnetic shielding i would want
to do a fourth option of you know maybe
some other uh kind of physical defenses
outside of the human body yeah so
we're taking the same passion to keep
astronauts safe that's outside them and
just putting it in their cells is what i
propose now it's a bit radical today
because
uh you know we're just starting this in
clinical trials to treat you know
diseases on earth so it's not ready i
think to do an astronauts but in the
book i proposed by about the year 2040
that's when we'd reach this next phase
where i think we'll have known enough
about the clinical response we'll have
the technology ironed out
that's about when it's time i think to
try it
so
what are the some interesting early
milestones
so you said uh
2040 what do we have to look forward to
in the next 10 20 years according to
your book according to your thoughts a
lot of really exciting developments
where
if you
really want to activate genes like i was
just describing or or repair a specific
disease gene you can actually crispr it
out modify it this has been already
published and well documented but as
alluding to
more and more we'll see people that you
just want to temporarily change your
genes functions and change their
activity
so the best example this is for beta
thalassemia we all have hemoglobin in
our blood that carries oxygen around and
we are an adult it's a different version
it's a different gene you have one gene
when you're a fetus called fetus fetal
hemoglobin when you're adult you have a
different gene but they both are making
a protein that carries oxygen when you
after you're born the fetal hemoglobin
gene gets just turned off just it goes
away and you replace it with adult
hemoglobin but if your gene for
hemoglobin is bad as an adult
that's one of the therapies well let's
turn back on the gene that you had when
you were a fetus and it's actually
already led to cures for sickle cell and
beta thalassaemia in this past year
so it's this extraordinary idea of like
well you already have some of the
genetic solutions in your body why don't
we just reactivate them and see if you
can live and indeed you can so i think
we'll see more of that that's for severe
disease but eventually you could see it
for more
uh i think work-related purposes like if
you're working in a dangerous mind or a
radio a high radiation environment you
could you could basically start to prime
it for you know work safety basically we
need to genetically protect you now it
would have to be shown that that genetic
option is safe reliable uh you know that
it's better that at least as good or if
not better than other shielding methods
but i think we'll start to see that more
in the next 10 20 years and eventually
as i describe in the book you could get
to recreational genetics you could say
well i want to turn some genes on just
for this weekend because i'm going to a
high altitude so i'd like to prepare for
that and so instead of having to take
weeks and weeks for acclimation
you could just do some quick epigenetic
therapies and have a good time in the
mountains and then come back and turn
them back off so this is stuff to do on
earth yeah across thousands of humans
and then you start getting good data
about what the effects in the human body
are
how do we make humans survive across the
entire lifetime for well let's say
several decades in space
if it's just in space it'll be hard
because you'll you'll need basically
some gravity at some point i think you'd
need orbital platforms that give you at
least some partial gravity if not 1g
if you're on mars it's actually
you know even though the gravity is 38
of earth's just having that gravity
would be enough and if you could get
under the surface into some of the lava
tubes where you have some protection
above you from the radiation i think
that would be you probably could survive
quite well there so i think it's the
just in space part that's hard you need
some gravity you need some additional
protection from the radiation can you uh
linger on the lava tubes on mars what
are the lava tubes
yes so they are a bit like what they
sound like there were large masses of
lava at one point on the planet pushing
really quickly through the environment
and they created these these basically
these small caverns which you could go
in theory and build a small habitat and
then puff it up kind of like blowing up
a balloon
and have a protective habitat basically
it's a little bit underground so one of
the next helicopter missions being
planned at the jet propulsion lab is to
see if you can get a helicopter to go
into the lava tube and which is just
like as it sounds kind of like take out
a big worm that has burrowed into the
landscape and leave out the hollow
column that's left and that's what your
tubes look like so one of the future
helicopters might even go explore one of
them is a mission being planned right
now so they're accessible without a
significant amount of drilling yeah
that's the other advantage yeah you can
get to them uh because some of them are
exposed you can do a little bit of
drilling and then see essentially this
entire thing texts you a little bit from
the radiation right because you have
some soil above you basically which
would be a regalith which would be nice
what about source of food
uh what's a good so that's part of
biology how you power this whole thing
what about source of food across decades
in space we'd have space plants have
been grown in flight and you can get
some nutrients but right now it is very
reliant on
all the up mass being sent up all the
you know freeze-dried fruit that thing
gets rehydrated which doesn't taste
awful but is is not uh
is not self-reliant right so i think
those would have to be small bioreactors
that have to be a lot of it work on
fermentation a lot of work on you know
potentially prototrophic organisms the
organisms that can make all of the 20
amino acids that you would need to eat i
described a little bit in the book what
if we did a prototrophic human where you
could have like right now we need to we
need to get some of our amino acids
because we can't make them all which i
think is kind of sad
so what if we could make all of our own
amino acids or all of our own vitamins i
also you know i think that's one case
where another adaptation could be to
activate the vitamin c gene
like right right now you'd have to have
limes or some other source of vitamin c
in space
but we actually carry the gene inside of
our genome to make vitamin c look at
dogs and cats for example they have
these kind of wet noses
you don't see them going out and getting
margaritas
dogs can drink beer and get drunk
they don't need vitamin c they have no
risk of scurvy because they can make the
vitamin c all by themselves so can other
wet-nosed primates called strep-serines
but we are dry nose primates and we we
lost this ability sometimes 10 or 20
million years ago we no longer make our
own vitamin c but the gene for it is
called gullo is still in our dna it's
what's called a pseudogene it's just
broken down
it's like having a like in our genome we
have these functional genes like nice
bmw a nice car that works well but we
also have this like wrecking this like
junkyard of cold cars old genes old
functions in our dna that we could bring
back and so vitamin c is one of them
that would be very easy to do so then
you could activate the gene repair it
basically repair it so we can make our
own vitamin c
now we'd have to do it again carefully
because what if what if we lost vitamin
c the production of vitamin c as a
species what if it was a good reason
that we lost it maybe it was helping in
some other way that we can't see now but
you'd start slowly do it in cells then
do it you know potentially in animal
models and prime other primates and then
try it in humans but that's something
else i'd like to see so we wouldn't have
to make as much food in orbit you could
actually start to make as much of your
own food in your own cells so the input
to the system in terms of energy could
be much more restricted it doesn't have
to have the diversity we currently need
as humans but i don't want to be a robot
humans love i i as i do texture i admit
i realized that made me sound like i
wasn't human but humans uh love food and
flavors and textures and smells all that
all of that is actually attenuated in
flight so it's you'd want to
not forget our humanity and so this this
you know love of of all the benefits and
wonder of food and cooking and smells
well speak for yourself because for me i
eat the same thing every single day and
i um
i find beauty in everything and some
beauty is more easily accessible outside
of earth and food is not one of those
things i think what about insects
people bring that up basically food that
has sex with itself and multiplies
so cockroaches and so on they're a
source of a lot of
um
protein and a lot of the amino acids and
bed bugs there's a guy at the american
museum in natural history in new york he
loves bed bugs lou sorkin
and he has a monthly meeting where he
talks about how which insects would be
the best for eating and one one month he
gave a whole talk about bed bugs that
they're pretty gross but in terms of the
value of what you can get for protein
they're really good so
they're they're a good candidate i think
you'd have if you could deep fry them if
you deep fry anything you can pretty
much eat it so maybe you need a fryer up
in space but now they're a candidate
all right what uh technical question
what are the major challenges of sex in
space asking for a friend for
reproduction purposes
so like uh when we're looking about
survival the human species across
generations yeah do we need gravity
essentially for sex and space we we know
that gestation can happen in space where
the babies can develop at least in mice
we know that it's possible for worms to
replicate and fly so it's possible
to for other invertebrates to show they
can make babies in space but for humans
nasa's official stance on this is that
there has never been sex in space yeah
officially
i i think
you know if we all
wonder about that
i think humans are very predictable in
that regard again going back to the
greek tragedies i think that there's
probably someone did something close to
it at some point and so i think we we
know that sperm can be sent into space
and brought back and be used for
fertilization for uh in vitro
fertilization for humans but sex itself
in space uh you know would be i think
when we start to get bigger structures
that have a bit more privacy
i think they'll i think there'll be a
lot of it and it has to be you know this
this is a big question of who goes up
into space
it's now becoming more of you know
regular in quotes people who have
prosthetic limbs or cancer survivors
like haley arsenau who just went up on
the inspiration for mission so she's
been a great uh researcher in helping
with a lot of the science from that
mission we have doing the same analysis
on them as we've been doing for the twin
study and for other astronauts we're
doing basically all the same molecular
profile before during an after space
flight so there we now know that you
know other people can go into space
those more and more regular joes and
jane's go up
i think we'll see a lot more of it but
so far we'd have no data
we have no video of it either way we
have no real knowledge other than it
would be it would need a lot of velcro i
think is my only real answer there well
i i'm as a fan of velcro and duct tape i
think that's going to be
yes those two are essential for anything
any kind of engineering out in
anywhere honestly in all kinds of harsh
conditions
but um
that is i mean
on the topic of sex in general just
social interaction with humans
it's fascinating the the current
missions are very focused on science and
very technical engineering things but
there's still a human element absolutely
that seeps in and the more we travel out
the space the more the humans
the natural human drama
the love the hate that merges it's all
going to be right there it's a greek
tragedy just in space basically i think
it's going to be a reality show
so
what about the colonization of other
planets if you look at mars when you
first of all do you think it's a worthy
effort looking at this particular one
planet to put humans on mars
and to start thinking about colonizing
mars
it's one of the closest options it's not
the best option though by far we we uh i
put in the book measures of earth
similarity index or something called
esis how close is the gravity the
temperature the solar incidence on the
surface
how close is it to earth is a
calculation many astronomers make when
they look for exoplanets and mars is
pretty far away from
an esi of about 0.7 and earth is one so
the best you can get is one earth is
just like earth
it gets a score of one anything above
you know some of the best exoplanets
that are in the habitable zone where
there's liquid water that could be there
start to get above 0.8 or 0.9 but
they're
most planets are very low they're 0.1.2
they're either way too big and we have
crushing gravity or way too small too
close to a sun
but
mars is even though it's not that great
on the esi scale it is still very
relatively close you know galactically
and and venus is just too hot right now
so i think venus would also be a great
candidate but it is
it's much easier to survive in a place
where it's very cold but you can be
sealed and survive whereas going on we
probably just have no technology to
survive anywhere except in the clouds of
venus so
it's just currently our best option but
it's not the best option for sure so
over time the esi changes across
millennia and it does so the venus is
going to get cooler and cooler
um okay
but what are the big challenges to you
in colonizing mars from a biology
perspective from a human perspective
from an engineering perspective
there's several big challenges to mars
and even the first one is even just the
word colonized so i think we there's
even a social challenge like a lot of
people
danielle wood actually studies this at
mit
is
sh we shouldn't even use the word
colonized but then we probably shouldn't
use the word settle either because
there's settlements that have some other
baggage to that word as well and then
maybe we just use the word explore but
at some point you didn't say we're going
there to survive there and so
colonization still is the word most
people use but i try to say go explore
and build or settle but i think the
first challenge is social i think
getting people to think that this will
not be like the colonization efforts of
the past the hope is that this will be a
very different version of humanity
exploring that's my hope
history has you could say has proved me
wrong every single time like every time
humans have gone somewhere it's usually
been a tale of exploitation strife
and and drama again and then and and
often murder genocide like it's actually
a pretty dark history if you think of
just all the colonization efforts but i
think
most of it was done in a really dark
area of humanity where their average
life expectancy was more than half less
than it was today it was uh life was uh
british and short as many of as hobbs
famously said so
it was
it was a rough existence right so i
think some of the the the ugliness of
humanity in prior colonization times was
was a consequence at the time and at
least that's my hope i think that now
we would have it be much more i think uh
inclusive much more responsible much
more
much less you know evil frankly like
we'd go there
and you would need commercialization you
need efforts to do mining for example
bring things back but it'd have to be
some degree where there are some areas
that are viewed as as as commons or that
are untouchable like places that are
parks we do this today even if there's a
lake for example the first you know
several hundred feet of a lake are all
for public property and everything you
can own property but just not certain
barriers so i think we'd have to make
sure we do that so that it's not
completely exploited but the so that's
on the social the human side the
technological we've talked a little bit
about where you'd have to live you want
to be underground with engineering and
modifying even human cells to make sure
you survive
uh the soil does have a lot of
perchlorates which is a problem for
growing them but there's ways to extract
them there's a fair amount of water
there's actually a beautiful image of
all the known water on mars that nasa
posted about a year ago and there's
water everywhere not not lots of it
everywhere but you almost everywhere you
look there's at least a little bit of
water just a few feet under the surface
and by the caps there's a lot so i think
we could get some water and we could
also do you know self-generating
reactors machines that could make food
start to even make beer
if you go long enough down the path but
the technical challenges are definitely
the
engineering and the manufacturing are
going to be hard because you have to
build the buildings basically out of the
soil that's there so you have to really
go there and try and build with whatever
you can so that has to be perfected
still but then once you're in those
those buildings those structures you
need to create all the biology that will
feed the the populous feed them so
which we don't have the technology for
yet we have bits of it but i think
that's going to be the biggest challenge
is
making mars really truly independent but
that'll probably take as i say in the
book several hundred years before i
think we'd get there
it's interesting because we're also
exploring
ways to motivate
society to take on this challenge
it's the jfk thing
and then the cold war that inspired
the race to space
and i think as a human species we're
actually trying to figure out different
ideas for how to motivate everybody to
work on the same project together
but yet competed at the same time well
that's one idea and that's worked well
competition competition that's not
necessarily the only idea but it's one
that worked well so far so maybe the
only way to truly build the colony
in uh on mars
or a successful sort of human
civilization on mars
is to get like china to get
like uh competitive about it i think
well and they are they've announced they
want to have boots on the red planet by
2033 which is two to four years earlier
than when nasa's supposed to do it so
we'll see if they if they get there
first but i think it's a space race 2.0
but it's not just the us and russia this
time it's china it's india it's the uae
it's europe esa
jax has the japanese space agency and
there's the u.s so now
it went from just a two-person race to
you know a whole field at the you know
the
whole field of
runners if you will on the track trying
to get to mars first and i think
i mean i think this can be like anything
if you start to have settlements and
construction projects in places to visit
on mars
i think that the true mark of of some
place being actually settled is when
you you start to be able to pick you're
like well i want to go to this
destination not this one because they
have better martian cocktails here but
then this one's not as good so then
this idea of innovating
competing will continue to drive i think
humans as it always has you write this
um
fascinating thing which is quote people
living on mars will have developed
entirely new cultures dialects products
and even new religions or variations of
current religions for example a martian
muslim
will need to pray upward toward the
dusty sky i love that you've thought
through the geometry of this
for example a martian muslim will need
to pray upward toward the dusty sky
since earth and therefore mecca will
sometimes be overhead
or when mecca is below the martian's
feet the prayer direction to allah will
stay downward toward the 38 gravity
floor
perhaps a second mecca will be built on
the new planet
end quote
that's another interesting question
how will culture be different on mars in
the early days and beyond yeah it'll be
as we've seen
with all of human history i think even
just when people migrate and they move
even the dialects change if you're just
going to the south in the united states
yeah oh y'all come on down out here you
know just and that's not even that far
away or even just people on long island
versus new york city and i'll be there's
a big nasally accent you know yeah and
uh the people will just get or even
wisconsin i'm from wisconsin i'll be
able to speak nasally town welcome to
wisconsin and minnesota
i wonder who defines that culture
because
it's very likely that the early humans
on mars will be very technically savvy
yeah they have to be engineering
challenges well actually i don't know it
could be the this has to do with your
extreme microbiome it's like is it going
to be
the extreme survivalists or is it going
to be
the engineers and scientists or is it
going to be both
because my experience the scientists
they're you know they like the comfort
of their
the lab yes they don't well no there's
some i keep contradicting myself
non-stop there's some badass scientists
that travel to like antarctica and all
that kind of stuff so it's an
evolutionary selection for humans who
can stare at a screen for eight hours at
a time or pipette for 12 hours at a time
and not talk to anybody so it's not
surprising when our scientists are a
little bit awkward in social situations
but we can we can get we can train them
out of that we can get them to engage
other humans uh not all of them but uh
hopefully most of them
so i think you know i think the culture
will definitely be different there'll be
different dialects different foods
there'll be different
values so very likely would be a
different religion kim stanley robinson
wrote a lot about this in his books
the new martian religion that was
created so i think this idea has been
discussed in the in science fiction
and it is almost unavoidable because
there's been i mean just just think of
all the religions that have happened on
earth um
with
with you know very little
i think uh
dr dr i mean there's just terrestrial
drama but suddenly you have a different
planet and you then need a deity that
would span multiple planets and i don't
even know how you do that but i think
someone will think of a way
and make up something
yeah that's uh
look for ways to draw meaning
so religion for a lot of people myths
common ideas are a source of meaning and
when you're on another planet
boy
does the sense
of what is meaningful change
because you're
it's humbling
the harshness of the conditions is
humbling
the the
very practical fact that earth from
which you came is not so special because
you're clearly not on earth currently
and you're doing fine
and you made it at some point i mean
it'll be pretty harsh like like what
shackleton did doing this explore
exploration of antarctica and going it
was very dangerous mission barely made
it people died actually he didn't
believe in scurvy at the time so he
didn't take enough vitamin c and some of
his people died from not having vitamin
c so if we had had their genes active
the pseudo gene they'd be okay but
there i think the early starter lawyers
will be it'll be very different crew but
once it's comfort once people are
comfortable there i think they're gonna
i hope they'll draw more meaning because
more planets should be more meaning i
feel like it's like uh
more hands is a better massage i don't
know if that's the best analogy here but
i think aristotle said that yeah
i should mention that your book has
incredible quotes it's great writing but
also just incredible quotes at the
beginning of chapters they're really
thanks it's basically my favorite quotes
i'm like well i'm writing a book i'm
going to put my favorite quotes
as well
put them all down what are your thoughts
about um
the efforts of elon musk and spacex and
pushing this commercial
space flight and i mean other companies
axiom space as well uh what are your
thoughts on
um on their efforts it's like a gold
rush uh it's a space race 2.0 there's a
lot of terms for it the new space race i
think it's fabulous i think it is
it's moving at a pace that is
unprecedented and also has a lot of
investment from the commercial and
private sector pushing it forward so
elon most notoriously doing a lot of it
just himself with spacex so we've worked
really closely with the spacex ops teams
and medical team uh planning the
inspiration for mission and now some of
the polaris missions which are happening
and jared isaacman
has been a fabulous colleague
collaborator pilot for the missions you
know we're doing again we're doing the
same deep profiling and molecular
characterization of these astronauts as
we've done for scott kelly and other
astronauts they're from nasa
and we're seeing so far actually
there'll be a lot of this presented
later this year
it seems like
it's pretty safe again there's dangers
we can see real stress on the body very
obvious changes some of the same changes
that scott kelly experienced but for the
most part they returned back to normal
even for a short three-day mission i
remember chatting with with jared and we
were presenting the data to them
actually just a few weeks ago kind of a
briefing to the crew
and because they went to 590 kilometers
they went basically several hundred
kilometers higher than the space station
or the hubble you normally wrestle more
radiation the farther you get from earth
there's more radiation he was worried
you know did we get cooked it was kind
of his question for me in the briefing
it actually looks like you can go back
into the microwave you didn't get fully
cooked you can go a little bit farther
so for the polaris mission they're going
to go even farther
uh and then also
open the hatch and go on these new
spacesuits that spacex is designing
that'll be much nimbler not as much of a
giant you know
dr octagon kind of uh spacesuit but
really
like looks like just a nice spacesuit
they're gonna go out into the vacuum of
space
and so you know pushing all the
engineering uh for these missions which
are privately funded so it's it's people
who just say i want to go up in space
and see if i can push the limits has
been fabulous but i think the most
fabulous part is is jared in particular
but others other commercials space
flight drivers like john schaffner peggy
whitson for the axiom missions are
coming to us the scientists researchers
saying i don't just want to go up into
space just to hang out how much science
can i get done when i'm up there what
can i do what experiments can i do give
me you know blood tissue urine
semen tears i'll give you any biofluid
uh you know and i always i email them
back and say listen every one of your
cells
is worthy of study i said send me you
know so i have this really kind of
creepy geneticist email responsible like
i want all of your cells you know but
but it's true because there's so much we
don't know
i want to learn as much as we can about
every every time i go up anyone so we're
doing it you know with nasa astronauts
but it's been suddenly this influx of
new crews that are willing to do almost
anything right so including we did skin
biopsies for the inspiration for crew
before and after space flight and that's
never been done before we've never seen
the structure of the skin and how it
changes in response to microgravity and
also the microbes that change and so
these beautiful images of even the
structure of skin changing and the
inflammation that we've seen in like for
scott kelly for example we now have a
molecule by molecule map of what happens
to skin
which has never been done before so
there what are interesting surprises
there so one of the things we can see
the part what's driving inflammation is
we can actually see macrophages there's
other dendritic cells pieces like cells
that are part of the immune system kind
of creeping along towards the surface of
the skin which is now we know it's
actually physically driving the immune
system is these cells going and creating
this inflammation which is what leads to
some of the rashes but we didn't see as
much in them as we saw for example some
of the signatures of scott kelly so
we can see within the crew who's getting
more of a rash or not or who didn't
experience any rash
and some people had
changes in vision some people had you
know other uh gi problems uh even you
know even looking at what happens to the
gut and looking at the microbiome they
got other people didn't so we able to
see and start to get a little bit
predictive about our medicine right now
we're just diagnosing but it'd be good
to say uh if you're going into space
here's exactly what you need for each
bacteria in your body here's what you
can really take to get rid of nausea or
other ways we can monitor you to keep
keep the inflammation down
what does it take to prepare for one of
these missions because you mentioned
some of the folks are not necessarily
lifelong astronauts you're talking about
more and more regular civilians what's
what does it take physiologically and
psychologically to prepare for these
they have to do a lot of the same
training that most astronauts do so a
lot of the time hawthorne at spacex
headquarters which if you can ever get a
chance to do a tour it's fabulous it's
really you can see all these giant
rockets being built and then we're
drawing blood over there right next to
them so it's a really cool place but the
the training they have to go through a
lot of the ops a lot of the programming
just in case most of the systems are
automated on the dragon and other
spacecraft but
just in case so they have to go through
all the majority of the training
if you want to go to the space station
as the axiom missions are including john
schuffner you have to do training for
some of the russian modules
and if you don't do that training then
you're not allowed to go to that russian
part of the space station apparently so
right now john schaffner for example
unless he completes this additional
training all in russian he's not allowed
all in russia i still learn enough
russian to be you know just wow so it's
not just technical he also has
enough enough russian enough enough
russian and uh so it's a and if he
doesn't learn he can't go to that part
of the space station so interesting
things like that are but you'll be you
know it's not that far you're like oh i
can see it right there i can't float
over to that that capsule
uh but technically he can't go so you
know is there uh a chinese components to
this the international space station is
there collaboration there sadly not
they're building uh their own space
station uh i'm glad they're building a
space station actually eventually
there'll be probably four space stations
in orbit by 2028 some from the orbital
reef some from lockheed martin of course
axiom is far ahead right now they're
probably going to be done first
but the
the extraordinary thing is
uh the there's
unfortunately there's no collaboration
between the you see that as a negative
that's not the positive kind of
competition it's it's a good question so
maybe
as for example when we get different
nasa grants you apply for a grant you
get to the lab it goes you know to go
through cornell the grants office i have
to sign as a scientist as the pi on the
mission say i promise i will move no
funds or resources or any staff to
anyone in china or work with anyone in
china with these dollars that you're
giving to the lab for this mission and
so every other grant i get from the nasa
dod or sorry do you let me go back to
that okay
every other grant i get from say the nih
or the nsf even symptoms dod you don't
have to promise that you won't talk to
anybody in china about it but for nasa
alone it's congressionally mandated you
have to promise and sign all this
paperwork so i can't do anything with
anyone in china about this
and what i view is sad about that is i
want to at least be able to chat with
them about it and know what they're up
to but we can't you know even
go to a conference in china technically
with nasa funds about say space medicine
or engineering a new rocket i i can't go
i could go with personal funds but i
can't use those funds like you should be
able to go to a conference and in a
friendly way talk yeah yeah just
yeah we're doing like like the way
scientists do really well which is like
they complement but it's a backhanded
compliment like uh like you're doing a
really good job here and then you kind
of imply that you're doing much better
job that's the core of competition you
get jealous and then everybody's trying
to improve but that you're ultimately
talking you're ultimately collaborating
closely you're competing closely as
opposed to in your own silos
well let me ask uh
in terms of preparing um
for
space flight
you know i i tweeted about this and i
joked about it and i i talked to you
along quite a lot these days
what i tweeted was
i'd like to do a podcast in space one
day
and uh it was a silly thing
uh because i was thinking for some
reason in my mind i was thinking 10 20
years from now
and then i realized like wait why not
like now
yeah there's no
just even seeing what uh axiom is doing
what inspiration four is doing it's like
regular civilians could just start going
up
well so let me ask you this question
when do you think we saw jeff bezos go
on to orbit what do you think elon goes
up to space
so
his thinking about this is it's
partially responsible until it's safe
because he has such a
direct engineering roles in the running
of multiple companies
so at which point do you think what's
your prediction for the year that elon
will go up
i think you probably go up by 2026
i would say
because the number of missions planned
there'll be pr several missions per year
through multiple space agencies and
companies that are really
making low-earth orbit very routine
and by go up i think it might also for
example the inspiration for mission just
went up for three days in flight you
know it was enough time to get up there
do some experiments enjoy the view and
then you came back the axiom emissions
are a bit more complicated there's
docking up in the space station it's a
shared atmosphere so you have to follow
all the iss protocols what's what's
interesting about the dragon capsule and
the inspiration for and some of these
what are called free flyer missions you
can just launch into space you basically
have your own little mini space station
for a few days it's not that big right
but i think that's what we'd probably
see him do first because they're fair
you know we're going to see a lot more
tests of those in the next three to
three years
but they're
already been demonstrated to be safe and
then you're not trying to go for 10 to
20 days or months or years at a time
it's just up in space for a few days but
you're in proper space it's an orbital
flight it's not just a subway flight
you're um you could do the podcast from
there and i think 2026 i wonder how the
audio works
see also can you comment on 2026 i'll
i'll start getting ready
i'll start pushing him on this i'm quite
quite serious it's a fascinating kind of
axiom two still has room you could go on
that mission if you want consistency so
i'll ask you about axiom um
what
how strict are these
so
this this seems surreal that civilians
are traveling up so
how many how much bureaucracies there's
still in your experience for the
scientific i mean i know it's a
difficult question to ask a scientist
because you get to
you know you don't want to complain too
much
but how much you know there's sometimes
bureaucracy with nsf and the od and the
funding and all those kinds of things
um that kind of prevent you from
being as free as you might sometimes
like to to do all kinds of wild
experiments and crazy experiments now
the benefit
of that is that you don't do any wild
and crazy experiments that hurt people
right right and so it's very important
to put safety first but it's like a
dance a little too much restrictions the
bureaucracy
can hamper the flourishing of science a
little too little of that
can get some crazy scientists to start
doing unethical experiments okay that
said nasa and just space flight in
general is
sort of
famously very
uh very uh risk-averse
so what's your sense currently about
like
even like doing a podcast
right podcast you know unless it's a you
know i think with uh
mixed martial arts is a pretty safe
activity unless you're doing uh the
octagon version of your podcast i mean
just getting there and back is the only
real risky part which is still risky
right but i think you're not asking me
to do you know open heart surgery in
space you're just saying what if i do a
podcast and i think well fun you're
trying to ask to have fun yes and i feel
like fun sounds dangerous any kind of
fun ah that's what's been extraordinary
is that traditionally yes i think
most the space agencies have been very
by definition bureaucratic because
they're coming from the government
and but they've been been that way for a
really good reason is that safety
you know in the early 60s we know almost
nothing about the body in space
except for you know some of the work
that pilots had done at really high
altitudes so we really didn't know what
at all to expect so it's good that there
were decades of resolute focus on just
safety but now we know it's pretty safe
we know this physiological response is
we know what to expect we can also treat
some of it but hopefully hopefully soon
we'll treat a lot more of it
but
if you just want to go up there it's
actually now it's just a question of
cost like imagine
i think the way you can view a lot of
the commercial space flight companies is
that if you have the funds you can
basically plan the mission all the
training they'll do is to help you get
prepared for how you run some of the
instrumentation how you can fly the
rocket to the limited degree and how to
use some of the equipment but
fundamentally it's no longer a question
of
years and years of training and
selection this impossible odds task of
becoming an astronaut
it's frankly just a question of funds
expensive plane rides so how much how
much you mention axiom well is it known
how much the it costs
for the plane ride there is no official
number and it depends on the mission of
course so the if you ask them well often
they'll say well how serious are you
they really want they don't just want to
give out random numbers to people right
uh but the numbers
because for example we propose one
mission
we want a new twin study where someone
goes up and stays up there for 500 to
550 days to basically be up there for
the longest time ever to simulate the
time it would take to get to mars and
back for the shortest possible duration
about 550 days
because if you went there and
immediately turned around you could
maybe make that mission otherwise it's a
three-year mission
the
and there we go you know it's you're
looking at the ranges of you know it's
50 to 100 million dollars in that
ballpark range but the reason it's so
variable is it depends what are you
doing up there if you're up there for
example for two two years basically
almost almost two years
that's a long time just being in one
spot right so could you be doing some
things where you're yeah it's you can
your time is valuable so you can do
experiments and people pay for those and
that defrays the cost or you could build
something or you could do podcasts and
maybe you know fundraise on the podcast
and so as long as you the reason the
cost is variable is because it depends
well do you have all the money and you
say i want to go and just sit in space
for two years and do nothing well then
you have to pay for all that time that
you're up there if you want to do things
and yeah i see the the official x1
mission was 55 million for a trip to the
iss
it could be worse
wait i uh sergey just posted a 35 000
price tag per night per person on the
iss is that real
i don't know that sounds about right
that's why that's like a real hotel so
to stay
oh so interesting um and then i'm sure
there's costs with the docking and all
those kinds of things that's from the
perspective of axiom the private company
or spacex or whoever is
whoever is paying the cost and uh
in the short term in the in the long
term yeah
and then think about a lot of that cost
is rocket fuel a lot of it is the ride
so it's i've been on calls where axioms
like hey spacex give us make it a little
cheaper we can make it cheaper and it
there's the cost that that is the rocket
as well so spacex is giving axiom a ride
right right in this case what is axiom
space can you speak to this
this particular private company what's
their mission what's their goal and what
what is the axiom one mission that just
went up yeah it's uh
so the axiom space is a private
space flight company that's building the
the first
private space station to actually i've
seen the videos and footage and hardware
being put together so they're in the
process of
constructing it the hope is that by 2024
one of the first modules will be up and
connected to the iss and eventually be
expanded and then by 2028 the plan is
it'll be completely uh detached and free
floating and it will be maybe even a
little bit sooner depending on how fast
it goes but they're building the world's
first private space station so if you
want to have a wedding up there
you just have to multiply the number of
guests times the number of nights and
you could have a wedding up there it'd
be very expensive but if you want to do
it you can do it it's like it's it's you
can have a lab up there if you want to
do experiments you can do experiments
you figure out the cost you want to have
a beer up there you can make your own
breeder and beer and so this is the
first beer made in space for some reason
you want to do it you can pay for it so
it's opened up this space where if you
can find the funds for it you propose it
you can probably just do it okay cool uh
so what is the axiom one mission that
just went up can you tell me what
happened axiom one is the first private
uh
the first commercial crew to go to the
space station so inspiration four was
the first
commercial private crew to just go into
space they went in space and actually an
orbital mission for just about three
days
but axiom 1 is the first you know again
on the spacex rockets but launched up
docked to the space station and they're
up there for about 10 days to do
experiments to work with staff actually
just take some pictures
but it's a mission
actually doing a lot of experiments
doing almost 80 different experiments so
it's live it's very science-heavy which
i love as a scientist
but it's the ability to show that you
can fundraise and launch up a crew
that's all privately funded and then go
to the space station it's four people
and four people and the axiom two will
also likely be four people the two that
have been announced are john schaffner
and peggy whitson peggy woodson's uh
already prior nasa astronaut has been at
many times the many experiments she
knows the space station like our own
house
and uh we recently did a training with
peggy and john in my lab at cornell to
get ready for some other genomics
experiments that we'll do on that
mission so they're doing the experiments
too
what does it take to design an
experiment and to run a design
experiment here on earth that runs up
there and then also to actually do the
the running of the experiment what are
the constraints what are the
opportunities all that kind of stuff
there are the biggest is is what is it
what do you need for reagents or
materials the liquids that you might use
for any experiment what if it floats
away what if it gets in someone's eye
because things always float away in
space there's notoriously panels in the
space station where you don't want to
look behind because it's got a little
fungus or food has gotten stuck there
and sometimes found months and months or
years later so things things float
around so the little things
just and and so if you have anything you
need to do your experiment that's a
liquid or a solid whatever that is it
has to go through toxicity testing
and the big question is if this thing
whatever you want to use gets in
someone's eye will they lose their
vision or be really injured and if the
answer is yes it doesn't mean the answer
you can't use it just means if the
answers yes you have to then go through
multiple levels of containment there's a
glove box on the space station where you
can actually do experiments that have
triple layers of containment so you can
still use some harsh reagents but you
have to do them in the glove box
and so but you can propose almost
anything the biggest challenge is the
weight if it's a heavy it's ten thousand
dollars per kilogram to get something up
into space
so if you have a big heavy object that
there's some costs you have to consider
and that includes the not just the
materials but the the equipment used to
analyze the materials
one of the ones we worked on actually
with kate rubins was putting the first
dna sequencer in space called the
biomolecular sequencer mission also with
aaron burton and sarah castro wallace
but there the interesting thing is we
had to prepare this tiny little
sequencer it sequences dna you can do it
really quickly within really minutes
and
what's extraordinary is what you have to
do if you want to get a piece of
machinery up there you have to do
destructive testing so you have to
destroy it and see what happens how does
it destroy do pieces little pieces of
glass break everywhere if so that's a
problem so you have to redesign it and
do fire testing how does it burn how
does your device
explode in a fire or doesn't it you have
to test that and then you do vibration
testing so you have to basically if you
want to fly one thing into space you
need to make four of them and destroy at
least three of them to know how they do
how they destroy destructive destructive
fire fire and then vibration testing um
it's kind of like asking for a friend
how how do you from a scientific
perspective do destructive testing
and how do you do fire testing and how
do you do vibration testing vibrations
like well just large shakers so that's
uh this is mostly to simulate launch
they have a lot of machinery at nasa and
it's spacex to do just to make sure what
does this completely fall apart if it
has a high vibrational
essentially force attached to it so it's
just looking like a big shaker
fire testing is just to simulate what
would happen if there was a normal fire
that something that gets up to you know
the fire temperatures several hundred
degrees celsius
and does spin fire or are we talking
like you put in a toaster no it's more
like heat or is it over flames it's
flames then heat but it's it's not like
a kiln or anything like that it's not
you don't want to know how does it burn
in the kiln it's more is it flammable
it's the first big question like does it
just start on fire if it gets a little
bit of flame on it does it just light up
like a christmas there's a youtube video
of this oh you know what you guys did
you film any of this not um aaron burton
might still have some of the videos uh
we're in the middle of doing some
testing for the new sequencer called the
mark 1c so i will make videos of that i
would i would love to uh see that for if
anything for my private collection and
this is very exciting and the
destructive testing is just often it can
be something as simple as as a hammer
it's really how does it chatter you want
to question his other glass components
and stuff so it's like office space it
looks like that scene
with the facts
damn it feels good to be a gangster
soundtrack yeah that's a great scene
that's so that's so exciting that kind
of that's the best of engineering is
like that kind of testing
what else
about designing experiments like what
kind of stuff do you want to get in
there you said 80 different experiments
so we're staying in the realm of biology
and
genetics yeah for now but we but we also
want to do you know some of the
experiments have been discussed in the
lab have been and some are being planned
as well but i think the most
controversial one that's come up in our
in our planning
it gets back to sex in space is you know
can human embryos
divide and actually begin to develop in
space but then if we do that experiment
that means you're taking viable human
embryos
watching them develop in space then you
can freeze them and bring them down and
characterize them to see
but to answer that question because we
actually don't know can a human embryo
actually develop well in zero gravity we
just don't know
but to find that out that means we have
to literally sacrifice embryos probably
so and which itself has of course
uh you know a lot of complications
ethical considerations some people just
wouldn't it's a non-starter for lots of
people
so but we do know that this sperm
survives
as earlier said yes and nobody cares
about sperm
we're doing several studies on uh autism
risk for fathers and sperm and you know
it's really easy to get sperm i'll just
tell you it's uh people say you're
helping us what i hear that's right so i
read that somewhere
asking for a friend
um okay cool
are you involved in axiom one axiom two
experiments like what what does your lab
directly or indirectly involve with in
terms of experiment design what are you
excited about
different experiments that are happening
out there some of them were doing a lot
of the direct training for the crews
it's really saying how do you
how do you do a modern genetics
experiment so for the axiom one for
inspiration four and axiom one we're
also collaborating with trish which is
the translational research arm for nasa
that's in houston and there it's a lot
of sharing of samples and data for all
these missions for basically for all the
commercial spaceflight missions there'll
be a repository where you can look at
the data from the astronauts so you can
look at some of the genetic information
some of the molecular changes so that's
being built up with trish which has been
fabulous collaboration between cornell
and trish but the other thing we're
doing is for axiom two is training them
how do you for example if you want to
look at a virus you can take a swab of
something extract it sequence it and say
do i have omicron or do i have a
different virus and we're using the
exact same work in flight but we're
having the astronauts do
the extraction the sequencing and the
analysis of all the molecules and so one
of the common occurrences herpes is
reactivated often in spaceflight oral
herpes so you can see that viral
reactivation is one of the biggest kind
of mysteries in space flight where the
immune system seems to be responding a
lot it's active the body's really
perturbed but viruses start shedding
again and it's really this happens
clinically again we see this for like
for example hepatitis c or hepatitis b
you can get infected with it and it can
stain your body for decades and still
kind of be hiding in the body and in
this case we see it in space flight
herpes comes back so we want to figure
out is it there first of all and then
when is it happening and characterize it
better but have the astronauts do it
themselves rather than collecting it and
bringing it back to earth and figuring
out later we could see in real time how
it's happening and then also look at
their blood we'll see what what is
changing in their blood in real time
with these these new sequencers so i'm
excited about the genomics in space if
you will so clearly somebody who loves
robots um how many robots are up there
in space that help with the experiments
like what how much technology is there
would you say is it is it really a
manual
activity or is there a lot of robots
helping out good questions so far it's
almost all manual because the robots
have to all undergo the destructive fire
and vibrational testing how so if you
have a million dollars so exciting yeah
so if you can get that thing is a lot
less than a million so we can definitely
test it out for the uh in i guess in
which order no you have to do separate
for each one yeah
vibration fire
uh no
note to self do fire testing for the
legged robots and the destructive
testing that would be fascinating i
wonder if uh
any of the folks i'm working with did
that kind of testing on the materials
like what breaks first
with the robots that's the question and
also the big question so what's
interesting about this for axiom and for
these
commercial spaceflight areas if you can
fund it you could fly it right so if you
have to say like i want to fly these
series of robots up because i think they
could help build something or they could
help measure or repair the spacecraft oh
you have to come up with a good reason
yeah well for nasa you have to go group
but i think for private space flight you
could have the reason is i'm curious and
that could just be exactly like
i've got a private funder i've got your
own money and then you pay uh per
kilogram yeah essentially and i mean
there are some things you can't say i
want to send a nuclear bomb up there i'm
curious i don't think that would fly but
there's probably rules in terms of
free-floating robots right they probably
have to be attached they have to like
it's an orchestra that plays together
all the experiments that are up there
there's probably
it's not silos it's not separate a
separate kind of things but you're
saying it's all mostly manual how much
electronics is there in terms of data
collection in terms of all that kind of
stuff a lot of electronics so a lot of
its tablets there's laptops up there
there are you know the whole the space
station is is
running and humming on electronics
actually it's one of the biggest
complaints astronauts have is
is sleeping up there is hard not only
because you're in zero gravity but
there's a consistent loud hum of the
space station there's so many things
active and humming and and moving
uh that are keeping this the station
alive the co2 scrubbers all the
instrumentation
it's loud so i think it is a very well
powered
uh lab basically in in flight but it but
it uh and one of the future space
stations i think will be very different
because they're being built more for
pleasure than business or you know a
little bit of both but they're built for
we want people to you know at least when
you talk to axiom when you talk to the
other industry partners they want to
make it you know space more fun and
engaging and open to new ideas so that's
looking
at the fun stuff going on in the next
few years but if we zoom out once again
how and when do we get outside of the
solar system you mentioned this
before or maybe you can mention the
other hops we might take you know what
let's
let's step back a little
and
where are some of the fun places we
might visit first in a semi-permanent
way inside the solar system that you
think are worth visiting yeah at the end
of 500 years i'm hoping we make the big
launch towards another solar system
really driven by the fact that we now
actually have exoplanets that we know we
might be able to get to and survive on
whereas 20 years ago we really had
almost none certainly none that we knew
were habitable
and exoplanets even just just discovered
didn't start to happen until 89 and
really the early 90s for the real
validated ones so you know
i'm hoping over the next 500 years we go
from thousands of possible habitable
plants to hundreds of thousands or
millions that you know especially with
some of the recent telescopes launch
we'll find them but but before we get
there
i have a a whole section i really
describe about the magic of titan
because it has all this methane which is
a great hydrocarbon you can use to make
fuel you can use it it's cold as all
bejesus on titan but if you get ice it's
uh yeah it's it's what so what's a titan
made up of what is titan oh everybody
loves titan yeah it is it's a favorite
uh it's this kind of eerie uh green hued
moon um that's around saturn that is
uh
into our knowledge you know this large
it has like you know
it's so cold it has these methane lakes
where the methane normally is a gas but
there would actually be so cold it's
like a lake of methane you could go
swimming in it potentially
there might be some degree of rocks or
maybe mountains there but they might
also be made of like frozen methane so
no one's ever no person's obviously been
there but it is you have enough
satellite imagery and some data that you
could actually potentially survive on
titan so i think that'd be one place
where i'm hoping that we would at least
have
a bit of an outpost it might not be a
luxurious retreat because it's really
cold is there a life on titan you think
underneath the surface somewhere maybe
well actually with all that carbon and
all those hydrocarbons it is very
possible that some microbial life could
be there and hanging out waiting for us
to to dip our toes into the methane and
find it
but we don't know yet but i think that's
one place i'd like to see an outpost i
would like to see other outposts near
jupiter but jupiter has extremely high
radiation actually so even places like
io which are volcanically active and
quite amazing
we probably couldn't survive that long
that close to jupiter though it has
because it brings such a giant planet
uh it emits back out a lot of radiation
that it's collecting from other parts of
the universe and it juts back out so if
you get too close to jupiter it'd
actually almost certainly not be able to
survive depending on which part of it
but
that's one risk about jupiter um but
it'd be cool to see the giant red spot
uh up close maybe have some spots there
a mars stop one
then you get to pick titan or io so ice
firing ice the robert frost poem comes
to mind yeah and then europa is that you
would be called to an enceladus which is
a big ocean it might be there like an
alien ocean that's under the uh it might
be even water ice that's there and why
even liquid water potentially there
under the surface so that'd be a great
candidate the asteroids of ceres would
be good or arrows or big enough you get
a little bit of gravity
that they'd be interesting you could you
know have maybe a habitable place there
and they just might be big enough that
you could get there survive and even
have a tiny bit of gravity but not much
why do you like asteroids no are you
just this we're just listing vacations
yeah vacation spots yes i'd say well so
they probably have a lot of rare earth
minerals that you could use for
manufacturing which is why
part of the space economy that's being
built up now is people really wanted to
go and hollow out the asteroids and
bring back all the
um you know all the resources from it so
this uh legally is very possible because
even though um the the space space act
prevents people from militarizing space
or owning all of it
if you get the resources out of an
asteroid but you don't actually say you
own it that's still that's perfectly
legal
so you could what's the space act uh
it's basically 1967 was the first
a large-scale agreement between major
international parties particularly the
u.s and russia but also many others to
say that space should be a place for
humanities to not militarize it to not
weaponize it to not militarize it also
establish some of the basic sharing
principles between countries who are
going into space
and there was a plan to make an
additional act in the 90s
the the lunar the lunar
actually i'm blank on the name of what
but the uh there hasn't been any
significant legislation that has been
universally accepted since the space act
so but the primary focus
was on the militarization the
militarization which was in theory not
allowed which will which so far has
stayed true but but there's no um is
there any legal framework for who owns
space and space
uh
like different geographical regions of
space both out in space and on
asteroids and planets and moons
the currently you can't own
you're not supposed to be able to own i
mean people have tried to sell bits of
the moon for example or sell names of
stars which is pretty harmless but
you're not supposed to be able to own
any part of the moon or an asteroid for
that matter but you're allowed to mine
the resources from it so in theory you
could go catch an asteroid hollow out
the whole thing like you eat an orange
and leave the shell
and say okay i'm done i never owned it
but i just extracted everything inside
of it and now i'm done with it and and
then
of course you see there's going to be
some contentious battles
even wars over those resources
hopefully at a very small scale it's
more like conflict or like human tension
but
oh boy
it's like war makes for human
flourishing like after the war somehow
sometimes there's just this
explosion
of conflict
and afterwards for a long while there's
a flourishing and again conflict and
flourishing and hopefully over a stretch
of
uh millennia the rate of conflict and
the destructiveness of conflict
decreases it has at least in the past
hundred years the number of wars number
of military actions casualties have all
decreased i don't know if it's gonna
stay that way for humanity
going i think
you know the trajectory is there i think
the the war mongering is less tolerated
by the international community the you
know it's more scrutinized it still
happens like you know right now is an
ongoing war between russia and ukraine
and you've spoken a lot about it and
it's you know uh
but it it's
you know there there are sometimes will
be small military actions but i think
the the
you know and even there there's a you
know uh large military action across
most of the country but not all of it
actually right so it's i think we see
less over time of large-scale
multi-country invasions like like we've
seen in the past i think maybe that
won't happen ever again but you might
see
country to country battles happening
which has always happened i think um but
hopefully less of that as well
and
yet the destructiveness of our weapons
increases so it's a
it's it's a complicated race in both
directions we become more peaceful and
more destructive at the same time it's
fascinating
how do we get outside the solar system
you uh
you write
an epic
line
i believe it's the title of one of the
sections launched toward the second sun
that journey
of saying we're going to somehow the
solar system feels like home yeah the
earth is home but the solar system is
home it's our sun the sun is a source of
of uh life yeah
and going towards the second son leaving
this home behind
that's that's one hell of a journey yeah
so
what does that journey look like when
when does it happen and what's required
to make it happen
to get to that state we have to actually
have you know i describe a number of
options either we have to all have
people survive and multiple generations
live and die on the same spacecraft
towards another another star
propulsion technology you need to have
that in place i assume we don't have
dramatic improvements i describe ways
that could happen like anti-matter
drives or things that could make it
possible to go faster
but since it's a book of non-fiction i
just make no big leaps other than what
we know of today that's possible and if
that's the case you'd need probably 20
generations to live and die on one
spacecraft to make it towards what is
our known closest habitable exoplanet
now that sounds
you know so you need to have the life
support self-reliance
self-sustainability all in that one it'd
be a large spacecraft you'd have to grow
your own food probably still have some
areas with gravity
it would be complicated but i think
after 500 years we could actually have
the technology and the means and the
understanding of biology to enable that
and and so with that as a backdrop you
could have people hibernate and talk
about like maybe you need to hibernate
instead of just people living their
normal life but i think we don't the
hibernation technology doesn't work that
well yet i don't know if it might pan
out and maybe in 200 years it gets
really good then people can all just
sleep in pods
great you know so i'm i i think this is
the the minimum viable product with
everything that we have today and
nothing else right so if that's the case
which of course i'm sure of more than
500 years but based on what we know
today you have people live and die on
the spacecraft and that sounds almost
like a prison sentence you say
if you were born into a spacecraft and
and when you got old enough they just
said we're yes you can tell we're on a
spacecraft we you will live your whole
life on this let's say something the
size of a building
and this is everyone you'll ever know
and then you'll die and then your
children will also carry on the mission
would those people feel
proud and excited to say we are the the
vanguard and hope of humanity we're
going towards a new son
and maybe they'd love it or would they
after 10 generations maybe they would
rebel and say to hell with this i'm
tired of being in this prison this is a
bad idea
we're turning around or we're going
somewhere else or a mutiny happens and
they kill each other right so
we would have to really make sure that
the mental health the structure the
societies built so they could sustain
that mission that's a crazy mission but
it's not that much different from
spaceship earth right here we are stuck
on one planet we don't have planetary
liberty we can't go to another planet
right now we can't even really go to
another moon that easily
so we
and we i love earth there's lots of
wonderful things here but it's still
just this one planet and we're stuck on
it so everyone that you know and love
and live with here will be dead someday
and that's all you'll ever know too so i
think it's a difference of scale not a
difference of type in terms of an
experience it's still a spaceship
traveling out in space earth is still a
spaceship traveling out of space
so
it is a kind of prison
it's always
everybody lives in a prison well let's
say it's a limited planetary experience
we'll say it's like that like
yeah prison's not so dark but but
just yeah just like prison is a
there's a limited geographic
and culinary experience
but i don't want it to be viewed that
way i want to think wait this is what an
extraordinary gift and we wouldn't
probably just launch one generation ship
we'd probably launch 10 or 20 of them to
different the best candidates
and hopefully get there
and yeah i mean
the the fact is limitations and
constraints make
life fascinating because the human mind
somehow struggles against those
constraints and that's how beauty is
created so
there is kind of a threshold you know
being stuck in one room
is different than being stuck in a
building
uh and being stuck in a in a city being
stuck in like i wonder what the
threshold of people
like um
yeah i i lived for a long time in a
studio and then i upgraded gloriously to
a one-bedroom apartment
and the power to be able to like
close the door
was magnificent right it's just like
wow you can speak
volumes it's like you can escape that
feels like freedom that's the definition
of freedom having a door
where you could close it
and now you're alone with your thoughts
and then you can
open it and you enter and now there's
other
humans as freedom so the the threshold
of what freedom the experience of
freedom is like is is really fascinating
and like you said there could be
technologies in terms of hibernation
vr you know ultra reality virtual
reality like
because you know 30 years ago they
sounded awful i think they think you'd
be stuck in a spacecraft but now you can
bring the totality of all of humans
history culture every every music every
bit of music song every movie every book
can all be on one tablet basically right
so
and also you'd still get up updates from
netflix if you're on the way towards
another star you can still get downloads
and so but eventually maybe the crew
would start to make their own shows i'd
be like well i don't want the earth
shows i want to talk about i'm going to
make a drama on this spacecraft
but i think it would have to be big
enough so it feels like at least the
size of the building i think people's
intuitions about quarantining have
really become very uh immediate because
we've all had to experience it to some
degree in the past two years
and we've survived but definitely we've
learned
that you need a really good internet
connection you need you know some
ability to go somewhere sometimes
and you know that might just be as
simple as people leaving the spacecraft
to go to something that's another thing
connected to it or just go out into the
vacuum of space for an afternoon to
experience it um so people need
recreation people need games people need
toys people
love to play
what are chloro humans
chloro humans is a description of how
you can embed chloroplasts into human
skin or these the thing that makes
plants green so they can absorb light
from the sun
and then get all their energy that way
and of course
humans don't do this but i described in
the book in the far future maybe three
four hundred years from now if we could
work on the ways that animals and plants
work together you could embed
chloroplasts in human skin and then if
you're hungry you go outside and you lay
out your skin and then you absorb
sunlight and then you go back in when
you get full
if you only wanted to lay outside
for just say one hour to get get your
days fully you know your day's fully
value of energy you'd need about two
tennis courts worth of skin that you
could lay out
and maybe your friends would plant or
something but if they plant it then
their shadows would block your sun so
maybe leave your skin out there and you
could roll up your skin go back inside
after about one hour and that's how much
skin you would need to have exposed
with some reasonable assumptions about
the light capture and efficiency of the
chloroplast
so it's just kind of a fun concept in
the book of green humans going around
absorbing light from the sun
something i've dreamed about since i was
a kid is there
engineering ways of like
having that much skin and being able to
laying it out efficiently like is there
it sounds absurd but
you could roll it up it would be or you
could just lay outside longer i want to
think if you just need to have one hour
and how much game would you need but if
you just went out there for
four hours you need something that's
smaller but you know think of you know
says of a half of a tennis court so you
could make it like wings could be like
and you lay them out there and but but
also if you that's if you need all your
energy only from your skin so if you
just get a little bit of it your energy
of course you could just walk around
with your skin as is and you still have
to eat but not as much and i described
that because we'd need other ways to
think about
making your own energy if you're on a
really long mission that's far from
stars you could turn on a lamp that
would give you some of that you know
essentially exact wavelength of light
you need for your
chloroplast and your skin
but it's you know that's something i'm
hoping would happen in three to four
hundred years but it would be
hard because you're taking a plant
organelle and putting it into animal
cell which sounds weird but we have
mitochondria inside of us which
basically where our cells capture the
bacteria and now it walks around with us
all the time so there's precedent for an
evolution
how much by the way speaking of which
does evolution help us here so
we talked a lot about engineering you
know building
you know genetically modifying humans
to make it more resilient or having
mechanisms for repairing parts of humans
um what about evolving humans or
evolving organisms that live on humans
sort of the thing you mentioned
which you've already learned is that
humans are pretty adaptable now what
does that mean you also
um
somewhere wrote that you know there's
trillions of cells that make up the
human body
and you know those are all organisms and
they're also very adaptable
so can we leverage the natural process
of evolution
of the slaughter the selection the
mutation and the adaptation that is all
in uh sorry to throw slaughter into
there it's just just acknowledging that
a lot of organisms have to die
in evolution uh
can we use that
for long term
space travel or
colonization
[Music]
occupation there's is there a good word
for this of uh pl of planets like it's a
to terraform the planet
you know to adjust the human body to the
planet oh oh oh there's not really a
term for that yet i guess to
like adapt to uh what the new vacation
spot yeah i called it just the directed
evolution in the book is that you you
you guide the evolution towards what you
want in this case sometimes you can
engineer your cells to make exactly what
you want but other times you put people
on planets and and see how they change
actually later in the book i imagine if
you have humans on multiple planets you
could have this virtuous cycle whereas
people adapt and evolve here you'd
sequence their dna and see how they
change and then send the information
back to the other planet and then study
them with more resources so you'd be
able to then
have a continual exchange of what's
evolving in which way and different
planets and then each planet would learn
from the changes that they see at the
other
planet does the evolution happen at the
scale of human or do we need the
individual like or is it more efficient
to do like bacteria
bacteria cheaper and faster and easier
but we but we also have a lot of
bacteria in us on us and all around us
and even the bacteria on the space
station are continually evolving so do
you study that by the way like non-human
cells like what the microbiomes yep the
so we've seen it for the astronauts we
can actually see
their
their immune system respond to the
microbiome of the space station so as
soon as you get into that aluminum tube
there's a whole ecosystem that's already
up there and we can actually see we saw
this with scott kelly we've seen these
other astronauts you can see the t cells
in their body they actually are
responding to little peptides a little
the the molecules of the bacteria
they're the immune system is looking for
specific bacteria and then once it's
these new ones it remembers it and you
can see the body looking for the
microbes that are only on the space
station that you don't see on earth and
then when scott came back he actually
had more of those microbes embedded in
his skin and in his mouth and stool that
weren't there before so he like picked
up new hitchhikers in the space station
and brought some of them back down with
them so there's like long-term
ecosystems yeah
20 years they've been up for 20 years
yes
there's some like chuck norris
bacteria up there i'm sure
uh you um you're part of the extreme
microbiome project
what does that involve and what kind of
fun
fun organisms
have you all learned about have you
gotten to explore we have a really fun
project xmp the extreme microbiome which
is as it sounds like we look for really
odd places like
heavy radiation environments high salt
high or low temperature you know strange
area the space station for example lots
of radiation and microgravity places
where organisms can evolve for
interesting adaptations and some of them
have been organisms we've seen like a
candy pink lake in australia called lake
hillier which would just publish a paper
on this word why is it pink uh so it's
actually uh denalia salinas and these
one of these organisms there's a mixture
of bacteria and some algae that are
there that make it bright pink so they
actually make carotenoids these like
really sort of orangey and kind of pink
molecules when you look at them in the
light so if you know if you get enough
of the bacteria it becomes pink so and
it's not just pink it's like a bubblegum
pink the lake and so we uh that's just
an odd it's a halophile being said it
grows in 30 salt and if you go below 10
15 percent salt it doesn't even grow it
actually kills it
well yeah there it is liqueur is it
toxic to humans or no it so when you
walk in the pink lake actually it's so
hypertonic meaning it's so salty you can
feel it lysing and killing your cells on
your foot so it actually hurts the
walking because it's so salty
uh so yeah so but it won't kill it'll
listen you have to suffer for art and
that's great art requires something i
mean so it is a beautiful lake uh you
have to get permits to go sample there
but we actually just got an email last
week there's pilots who fly over this in
australia because they love the color
yeah so he emailed us one of the pilots
and he said hey guys i saw you publish
his paper
it's not as pink as it used to be
because he loves flying over it it was
like a little bit less pink because i
had a bunch of rain in the past few
weeks so it was just a little bit
diluted so we reassured him it'll get
more pink as they grow again
uh but basically yeah it's a beautiful
pink lake and so that is gorgeous
it's almost like that it's like a dr
seuss book or something it does it's
like it doesn't even look hard to get to
yeah it's there's no road if you have to
basically fly uh land nearby and then
paddle in but uh so it's not next to
anything
so it's hard to get to but once you get
there um it's beautiful if anyone knows
how to get there let me know i want to
go there okay cool what are some other
extreme organisms
that you study other ones uh there's
some organisms we studied in the space
station called acinitobacter pitii which
is a
often found in human skin but we found
hundreds of strains in the space jason
that we've brought down and curated and
then sequenced uh and this is with uh
katsuri venkatsuran who's at jet
propulsion laboratory working with him
and they have evolved so they're now
they no longer look like any earth-based
ascinitobacter they don't look like
they've now basically a new species so
actually we uh
there's there's a different species of
bacteria and fungi that have now mutated
so much on the space station they're
literally a new species and so we've
found some of those that have just
they're they're evolving in splash life
is always evolving and we can see it
also in the space it's an entirely new
species born in the space yeah that's
completely different so we we find one
species actually
that we named after a donor to cornell
someone who's donated funds to her
research so he named a different species
of fungus after him uh naganeshia
tolchinsky
because he's igor tolchinsky so as a
thank you for him donating to cornell we
said we've named this fungus
that we found on the space station for
you was he uh grateful or did he stop
funding all research
very grateful and then and i told him i
said if you have like an ex-girlfriend
we could try and name like a uh you know
a genital fungus after her or something
if you want and he said yeah he said
maybe but
he stopped answering him
okay what about like in extreme
conditions um
in ice in heat is that something of
interest to you and the things that
survive
where most things can't yes
of keen interest i think that will be
the road map for some of the potential
adaptations what we could think of for
human cells or certainly for
our human the microbiome like just all
the micro organisms in and on and around
us
so we've seen you know even there's this
one crater it's called um the the lake
of fire it's in turkmenistan where it's
been on fire because of oil that had
been set on fire decades ago and it's
still burning so we collected some
samples from there and those were some
pseudomonas potatoes some species we
found there that can so there's stuff
alive there that seems to be surviving
there
by this large uh pit of fire oh yeah
there is the desert it's been just on
fire for decades apparently
so this is another place though it's
just the lake of fire yeah yeah and it's
uh they said soviet scientists had set
up a drilling rig here for extraction of
natural gas
of course it would be in this part of
the world that you would get something
like this but the rig collapsed and
methane gas is being released from the
crater
yeah so for those just listening we're
looking at a
at a lake
full of fire and there's something alive
there
allegedly and pseudometeos are known to
be some of the most tough organs they
actually can clean toxic waste
from you know many years of superfund
sites where there's so much waste that's
been deposited you'll find them there as
well actually there's one place in the
gowanus canal we have something it's
called in new york city in brooklyn
and it is a complete toxic waste dump
that was where a lot of waste in the
1700s was dumped and so the gateway to
hell um is what it's called but the the
the nickname
[Laughter]
so the the gowanus canal is also a place
that has been fun to sequence and see so
the pseudomonas species that can survive
basically pulling toxins from the
environment so
it is if you create this toxic landscape
and then evolution comes in and says
fine i'll make things that can survive
here and when you look at the
biochemistry of those species what
they've created is their own salvation
basically the selection has made them
survivors and suddenly you can use that
to remediate other polluted sites for
example so that explains twitter
perfectly the toxicity created
adaptation
for the for the uh psychological
microbiome that is uh social media okay
uh
beautiful but you um just actually jump
back to the
interstellar travel
assuming the technology of today
yes
what are some wild
innovations that might happen in the
space of physics or biology by the way
where do you think is the most exciting
breakthroughs for interstellar travel
that will happen in the next 500 years
is it physics is it biology
is it computer science so information or
dna like some kind of
informational type of thing is it
biological like physiological making the
body resilient
um live longer
and resilient to the harsh conditions of
space or is it the actual vehicle of
transport which would be applied physics
as you can probably guess i'll say all
the above the
question
but but to break those down though i
think the ai i hope in the book later
that we would have really good machine
companions that the ai i really hope the
ais that we build like realistically we
are the programmers are making them i
would feel the colossal failure if we
didn't make ai that was embedded with a
sense of duty and caretaking
and friendship and even even creativity
like we have the opportunity we're i've
coded algorithms myself like
we're building them so it would it's
incumbent upon us to actually make them
uh not you know i think frankly
so just be
uh technical
actually on that point uh just to linger
on the ai front
can you still man the case that hal 9000
from space odyssey
was doing the right thing
so you know so for people who haven't
seen 2001 space odyssey held 9000 is
very kind of
um focused on the mission cares a lot
about the mission and uh kind of
wants to hurt the astronauts that try to
get in the way of the mission
i think he was doing who's program to do
which was just to follow the mission
but didn't have a sense of
you know think a broader
duty you could i mean
what's the broader duty exactly uh
maintaining the the well-being of
astronauts yeah or giving them another
option i think you viewed them as like
completely
expendable rather than say not
completely
it's a trade-off well
so like a doctor has to make decisions
like this too you're restricted on the
resources you have to make life and
death decisions yeah so
maybe hal 9000 had a long-term vision of
what is good for the civilization back
at home maybe a a deontogenic vision of
what was the best duty uh for for the
genetics you could say
it's de-antigenic it's a word i made up
in the book it's like what is your
genetic duties
when you think of my your dna right what
are you supposed to do with it which is
kind of the value of life but if hal was
a silicon-based version of genetics
which is just his own
maintenance of himself and self-survival
you could argue he's doing the right
thing for himself but i think a human in
that circumstance might have tried to
find a way to
uh even if the astronauts don't agree
with the mission to figure out something
to get them on a different spacecraft to
go away or something versus just say
well
you're in the way of the mission i'll
just you have to die is i think
but accommodation candidates you've made
to your point with doctors like
sometimes you'd like to save three
people but you can only save two yeah
and you have to at some point pick but i
think uh in that sense it's a false
dichotomy i think hal
didn't wasn't program two and didn't try
to find a third solution
perhaps the sex student russell proposes
this idea that
ai systems should have self-doubt they
should be always uncertain in their
final decision and that would help hal
sort of get out of the local
local optimum of this this is the
mission like always be a little bit like
i'm not sure if it's the right thing and
then you're forced to kind of contend
with other humans with other entities
and what is the right decision
um so like the the worst stuff the worst
thing about decisions from that
perspective
is uh if you're extremely confident and
you're stubborn and immovable
right and then but as programming doubt
is that sounds complicated that sounds
like go wrong yes
you can go wrong either way if you're
too confident you won't see the other
options if you have too much doubt you
won't move you'll be paralyzed by the
options so you need some middle ground
which i think is what most people
experience every day is we all love the
concept of being a steadfast
resolute leader making big decisions
quickly and without question
but at the same time we know people can
be blinded to things they're missing if
they're if they're two headstrong so
so how would you improve hell 9000
i think i i would
include other because hal is one program
much like we do for humans you get
feedback from other humans before you
make a decision that affects all of them
so i think hal could have gotten
feedback from other ai systems that said
well is this are there other options
here and done it probably very quickly
are you even you know embed a
programming system where the ai has a
primary function but at times of
uncertainty queries a series of other
programmed ai's to ask for a consensus
almost i'm like a democracy of the ai
but since it's all programmed you can
bring it all together and say there's a
primary but it only activates the
parliament if you will for a decision
when needed
i don't know how you program
dramatically different ais all in one
system that are different enough but
yeah conceptually it's possible of
course that can lead to you know log jam
and government parliament doesn't do
anything or congress doesn't do anything
yeah so there's trade-offs but
it's one idea
i i you know i'm sorry dave i'm afraid i
can't do that that
i'm really i find really compelling the
idea
i'd love to set that up in my own life
at some point is um
so you're stuck there on a spaceship
yeah with an ai system
it's just the two of you and you have to
figure it out
i love that
challenge
i love that um
almost a really
deep human conflict
of through conversation have to arrive
at something you you really try to
understand what survival is at stake you
have to try to understand the other
being now you think it's just a robot we
keep saying like it's just programmed
but you know what when you talk to
another human it's just a bag of meat
you know it's and then and then you
disagree and you're like you know
everybody starts using terms like how
dumb can you be how ignorant can you be
yeah come on this is the right way what
are you talking about this is you're
what you're talking about is insane and
when the stakes go up when when it's
life and death you have to convince
another person first you have to
understand another person in this
case you have to understand the machine
the other the machine without knowing
how it was programmed because
yeah as a programmer
even i mean this is very much true for
the for these lego robots i really make
sure that everything is that's
programmed
uh
is sufficiently large and has a
sufficient degree of uncertainty
where i'm constantly surprised i don't
know how it works i kind of know how it
works but i'm surprised constantly and
there there's a human
component of trying to figure each other
out and if it's high stakes
life and death through conversation i
mean to me that's actually what makes a
great companion out in space it's like
you're both in charge of each other's
life
and you both don't quite know
how each other works
and also
you don't
treat each other as a servant
so
i don't know if how
hal was treated that way a little bit
where
you're like uh yeah like a servant as
opposed to a friend a companion
a teammate
you know um
because i think the the worst part about
treating an ai system or or another
human being as a servant is what it does
to you if you treat them as a means to
an end rather than end in of itself then
you've debased them and and like lessen
the humanity in yourself yeah at the
same time which is which is i mean
that's why they talked about kids have
to be polite to alexa
um because they find if they're you know
if people are if kids are rude to ai
systems they actually that
it's a bad sign right it's it's a bad
sign and it develops the wrong thing in
terms of how they treat other uh human
beings so that's ai
so what about physics
can we do in terms of can we travel
close to the speed of light can we
travel faster than the speed of light we
can i i would love to fold space we know
wormholes are technically possible
but uh we have no way to do it i'd love
to see advanced in wormhole technology
antimatter drives antimatter is
notoriously uh missing for most of the
universe so what is antimatter drive
antimatter would be where you used
purified bits of antimatter basically it
was the opposite of matter so if you can
have an anti-electron
to the electron you could have even a
complete atoms that would be anti-atoms
and when you put them together they
would be pure energy released in theory
and that could drive the most powerful
possible engine for space travel
but uh we you know that's the only place
you can make antimatter is in large
particle accelerators and only very
briefly so that is hard but if that
could work that would be extraordinary
fusion drives would be great just
getting nuclear fusion well controlled
and that would actually give you a
pretty good propulsion so i think that's
the most likely thing we'll see is
fusion drives fusion technology is
getting better and better every year or
it's that old saying fusion is always 10
years away every year it's always 10
years away but it's getting better and i
think and saying is something that is a
century old or less than a century old
over
multiple centuries that saying might
might actually because the the fusion
might actually become a reality for
propulsion so that would be i think very
likely to see in the next few centuries
and then and then biology was the other
part or anything else physics i mean
physics you can imagine ways that have
electromagnetic shielding so it could be
you could deflect all the cosmic rays
that are coming at your spacecraft with
a large almost like force field quite
frankly
uh that would take some development to
do but that would be good to see
and uploading
human
memories and consciousness into digital
form yeah this kind of blends the
machine in physics with the biology
developments and i think
you know there's a lot of great work
being done in longevity
i have one of my companies itself works
on longevity it's called longevity and
so i i'm working on myself on ways to
improve how we monitor health and
wellness now and live longer live better
many people are doing this is what the
whole purpose of medicine is to a large
degree
but i don't think we'll live in the book
i propose we might get out to a lived
150 years i think that's reasonable but
say humans are going to have to be two
three four five hundred years or some
people i meet people like this every
week because i think i'm not going to
die to which i always say i hope you're
right but i think you should plan that
you're not going to be right but i want
people also as we mentioned earlier
being immortal would really
fundamentally change the social contract
and how you plan and how you allocate
resources not necessarily bad but it
would just be different
but i also just think we don't know yet
of any way to
undo the ravages to the human body that
occur over time we can repair some of it
replace some of it but
you know it's okay to assume that you're
going to die and i just assume no you're
going to die because then you have a bit
of liberty about what you can do quickly
and do next
the uh but but i think we will get
better i think we could see people live
potentially to 150 with some of the
tools and methods and living longer
but upload you know
living my in a living brain like in the
kurzweil singularity where we all have
this rapture-like moment and we go up
and upload into the cloud and live
forever um
i don't know if it would still be the
same as what we consider the view of
self in this flesh form
if we could really get a complete
representation of a person's entire
personality up into
digital form i mean that would be
immortality basically or a loose
representation i'd go through the
thought experiment of
i like
thinking about clones
uh
like twins twins are clones basically
basically but
um the ability to generate i mean you're
stuck with the those cl like the twins
is a fixed number of clones so that's a
genetic clone i mean a philosophical
clone where you can keep generating them
versions and then i the reason
i really like that construction
thinking about that like for me
personally is
it
nicely encapsulates how i feel about
being human because why do i matter if
i'm
how would i if i do another copy of me
how would i defend
uh why i matter as a human being and i
don't think i can because that clone if
it's just fine
not even a perfect like a reasonable
clone like most people i know
um that love me and who i love they'll
be just fine with the corner
they'd be like and some they'll be
surprised like oh you're like
your move kind of weird but like overall
but otherwise i'll take it yeah and if
that's possible to do that kind of
copying
and no i don't want to say perfect one
because i think perfect cologne is very
difficult engineering wise i mean like a
pretty crappy copy would still be okay
just like wears
suits a lot
has a weird way of talking i mean i
think there's a lot of elements there
like uh you know in the digital space
especially with the metaverse
you can clone
i think you know in the next few decades
you'll be able to clone
people's behavioral patterns uh pretty
well
and visual uh
at least in the
in the virtual reality in the digital
representation if you are and then you
have to really contenders like why do i
matter is maybe what matters isn't the
individual person but what matters are
the ideas that that person plays with
um so it doesn't matter if there's a
thousand clones what matters is that i'm
currently thinking about
x or some kind of problem that i'm
trying to solve and those ideas and i'm
sharing those ideas maybe ideas of the
organisms and not the
the meat vehicles of the organism maybe
that's a cultural shift where we won't
necessarily treat any one body as
fundamentally
uh
unique or important but the sort of
the ideas that those bodies play with i
mean that sounds crazy no it's abstract
abstract but very well and derek parfitt
wrote this great book called reasons and
persons about
how you really define an individual is
not just your own thoughts and your own
self reflection but
we're almost he argues more defined by
how other people have seen you see like
if you walked out into the world and say
suddenly nobody knew who you were
recognized you you would be in some
regards
deceased right if no one if everyone
just suddenly had massive amnesia and
you just didn't know who you are and
never remember no memory of anything
you'd ever done together
you'd be very alone you'd be basically
you know starting from scratch because
you've just been born basically so and
also you write thought experiments like
what if half of your neurons get
replaced with half of someone else or a
quarter or 60 at what point do you stop
being you and become that other person
and the argument he makes is it's more
than just what percentage of your
neurons are swapped out it's also the
relationships you have with so many
people that partly define you no not
completely but they're a key component
of how you view yourself how they view
what you are in the world and you know
he actually goes so far to say
that they're probably you know more
important than even what's in your head
like if you swap out you know all of
your thoughts but when you walk out into
the world everyone still treats you and
talks you the same way as this memory of
what you are that is like an entity
that's defined you even if all of your
you know there's even movies like
trading spaces about this with eddie
murphy or like these are people who can
swap bodies
uh the reason those are comedy is
because they're fish out of water
comedies and but but they go to the
point of what defines you as not just
you but also your viewed well you as an
entity exist in the memories of other of
other beings and so
that yeah the the
the entities
as they exist in their form in those
memories perhaps are more important
to who you are than what's in your head
and that clones then
are um
how do they do they lessen
not really they just distribute they
just scale the eunice that can be
experienced by other humans like if i
could be doing five podcasts right now
at the same time then theory but i'd
have to have some way to transmit the
memory of which one i did
which would be hard but not impossible
if it's all digital you could aggregate
and accrete more and more of the
memories into one entity oh i see but i
thought at the at the moment of cloning
it's like cloning a git repository then
you're no longer is branched you share
you share the version view one of chris
that a lot of people have experienced
like
your high school friends college friends
colleagues and so on but now you moved
on to your music career and one of your
clones did
and then that
that's fundamentally new experiences
that you you still
um your colleagues can still experience
the memories of the old christmas but
the new one
is totally you're going to have new
communities experiencing connecting to
those and then you can just propagate
and the ones that are don't get a lot of
likes on social media we can we can
like quietly dispose of
when it maximizes the clones of chris
that can uh get a lot of likes on
facebook okay
uh on uh just returning briefly to
moment uh the topic of ai
are you working on
ai stuff too
a lot of machine learning tools for
genomics yeah but
because i i was seeing this interspersed
because you're such a biology uh
i mean i suppose computational biology
person
uh but what about the
are you working on age of
uh yes yeah like so i you've heard about
the book i guess yeah yeah what that's
actually written with the philanthropist
i mentioned who we named the fungus
after the space station so that's coming
out uh next year actually yeah what's
the effort there what's what's your
interest in uh sort of the more narrow
ai tools of prediction and machine
learning all that kind of stuff yeah i
think called the age of prediction so
the next book that's coming is all the
ways where machine learning tools
predictive algorithms have fundamentally
changed our life so some of them are
obvious to me where for example when we
sequence cancer patients dna and we have
predictions of exactly which drug will
work with it that's actually a very
simple algorithm but other ones involve
predicting say the age of blood that's
left at the scene of a crime which uses
computational tools to look at each
piece of dna and what it might reveal
for its epigenetic state and then
predicting essentially how old you are
at any given moment and that also gets
to longevity because sometimes you can
see if you're getting if you're aging
faster or slower than you should be so
some tools are in medicine or even
forensics but my favorite part a lot of
the book is where does this show up in
economics as well as in medicine so
predictive tools i mean i think the most
notorious when people thought it was
during the 2012 election and 2016
election especially
we were seeing these really big
differences of how facebook was
monitoring feeds and so prediction is
not just better medicine or in finance
and economics people think about stock
traders and people doing predictive
algorithms
but
how you what you view in your feed how
you what your vote is and and what you
saw facebook did experiments they called
it social contagion experiments to see
can we restructure what people
see and then how they respond actually
kind of uh be really predictive and
manipulative frankly with what happens
and then can that change how they vote
and the answers seem to be yes for a
good amount of the populous in 2016 in
the u.s so
i think we're seeing more and more of
these algorithms show up all over the
place and so the book is about where
they appear where they're good for
example in medicine they're phenomenal
they have fundamentally changed how we
treat cancer patients but where they're
risky like if someone's trying to steal
your vote
or manipulate your thoughts potentially
negatively
so in medicine you're hopeful about
prediction yeah most of the ai and
medicine the machine learning tools for
image recognition for example for
pathology samples where normally i think
if someone takes a bit of a bit of
tissue and then puts it onto a slide
normally there's pathologists that have
been training for years to look at a
chunk of your tissue and say okay is
this cancer what kind of cancer what
treatment should i do but there's an old
joke about pathologists that you can
give 10 slides to 10 different
pathologists and get 11 different
diagnoses which is as awful as it sounds
because you're having someone squint at
a stained microscope slide but instead
if you use a lot of the ai tools where
you can actually segment the image high
resolution characterization with
multiple probes
it's what ai was built to do you have a
large training data set and then you
have test samples afterward you can you
can do far better than almost every
pathologist on the planet
and get a much more accurate diagnostic
so that's for breast cancer for prostate
cancer for leukemia we've seen the
diagnostic tools explode with ai power
is it currently mostly empowering
doctors or
can it replace doctors watson when
notoriously was made by ibm to try and
replace doctors i actually love ibm so i
was in the room when we got a tour of
watson for the first time with the dean
of our medical school
and uh these programmers came out and
they said listen here's this example of
a patient and watch watson diagnose the
patient and recommend the right
treatment and then at one point in the
conversation remember this is the room
of uh i'm a phd is like a geneticist
some programmers some mds
leaders of the of the medical school the
dean is there and he says you could
imagine someday this could replace
doctors in a room full of doctors right
so it was a really poor choice of words
because everyone's like no you want to
help the doctors but but i think the
view from the programmers is often a bit
naive that they could fundamentally
replace doctors now in some cases they
can for the pathology description as i
just mentioned
i think the ai tools already do a better
job and we've only really been doing
this for about five years right so you
imagine another five years of
optimization and data
they're gonna take over right so and
they should because staring and
squinting at screens for hours on day is
not the best use of human ingenuity so i
think
some cases they'll take over other cases
they'll augment they'll help
yeah that human ingenuity
actually especially for ai people
sometimes difficult to characterize they
have this debate all the time about
autonomous driving
they're
it's a lot more difficult than people
realize you're an expert or you focus a
lot on that for your research right now
i'm an expert in nothing
except
in not being an expert i think
um or asking stupid questions with the
answers both
okay
um
but if there is some ingenuity that's
hard to kind of
encapsulate that is human for doctor the
decision making it's the hal 9000 thing
you can have a perfect system that
has able to know the optimal answer but
there's some human element that's
missing and sometimes the sub-optimal
answer in the long term
is the right one
it's the self-doubt that is essential
for human progress that's weird i'm not
not sure what that is
if i can let me ask you to be the wise
old sage and give advice to young people
today sure
in high school
in college
about how to have a career
they can be proud of or maybe a life
they can be proud of on this planet or
or others yeah i think for the padawans
out there and young younglings looking
up at the stars
you have to know that
this day that you're alive is
quantifiably the best day that's ever
happened
and that tomorrow will be even better
than this day in terms of the capacity
for discovery the amount of data that
exists
again it's not my opinion that's just an
empirical fact of the state of genetics
research knowledge accretion of
humanities
acumen for many disciplines
so with that ability to do so many
things it can be sometimes
just terrifying well what do i pick if i
could do everything and this is the most
possibility ever in human history how do
you pick one thing to do and that's just
the thing what do you find yourself
daydreaming about what's the thing that
you uh
what keeps you up at night if you don't
have anything that keeps you up at night
sometimes you go find something that
keeps you up at night because that is
kind of this sometimes i feel like if i
get woken up by the someone on the
inside of my skull who's knocking trying
to get out it's kind of that almost
haunting feeling of i need to wake up
there's things that have to be done
there are questions i i don't know the
answer to and there's a lot of times as
simple as how do we engineer cells to
survive more radiation but what i have i
read a paper and then it came back to me
a week later as hell wait we could use
some of these tools or these genes or
these methods
really you know being pleasantly haunted
by something
is a wonderful place to be and and find
that thing that that bothers you because
there'll be good days and there'll be
bad days but you want to have even on
the worst possible days working on the
thing that you love the most
and then all the usual you know normal
phrases apply like then you never work a
day in your life if you have a job you
love the usual phrases but yes but it's
true and it and it's actually
really hard to find i think a lot of
times
you'll have to do work for random jobs
that maybe you don't like for five or
even ten years right or you may have to
go to school for 10 to 15 to 20 years to
finally get to the right spot where you
have the knowledge the experience and
even frankly just reputation that people
trust you you've done enough good work
and only then can you really do the
thing you love most but so you have to
be a little bit patient maybe a little
bit patient and impatient at the same
time you have to do both and the
interesting thing is
when you're trying to find that that
thing
that um
that excites you
you have to especially in this modern
world i think
silence the distractions yeah because um
once you find that thing you hear
that little voice in your head
there's still
instagram and tick tock and video games
and
other exciting sort of dopamine rushes
that can like pull you away yeah and
make it seem like they're the same thing
but they're not really
there's some little flame there that
um that's longer lasting and i i think
you have to silence everything else to
let that sort of flame become a fire
um so
it's interesting because
so
much of the internet is designed to uh
convert that natural
predisposition that humans have to get
excited about stuff convert that into
like attention and money and ads and so
on yeah it's everywhere but like we have
to be conscious of that i think a lot of
that is full of fun and it's awesome i
think tech talk and instagram that's
full of fun amazing yeah and creativity
leads to people making
amazing videos or even doing people my
daughter loves tik tok and you know
people who do makeup art on tick tock of
things that are mind-blowing you think
they they made that video just to put it
on tiktok and practice their art and
share it with the world it's fabulous
but but then if my daughter watches
tick-tock for like three hours straight
i'm like what are you doing exactly and
she's like well you know so so
it's hard because but i mean when i was
a kid i mean i played nintendo i
sometimes would play for like 10 hours a
day even in grad school i'd sometimes
play like counter-strike or half-life
like 12 hours straight now like what was
i did so after when at one point i built
a new computer i just didn't install
some of the games i had before i was
like i'm just gonna not install them
because otherwise i'll play them for too
long yeah i would love to
get props from the team uh
i would love to
uh lay out all the things i've ever done
in my life to myself
because i think i would be less
judgmental of others
and less understanding more patient
because the amount of hours i spent
playing like diablo and like video like
is insane
i'm sure it adds up to like weeks maybe
months of my life that it was just you
know but i feel like i was probably i
tell myself at least i was problem
solving right i could say hand-eye
coordination or that's an old i don't
know if that really is even remotely
true but uh some of the games like final
fantasy things or things we actually had
to solve problems and think and they
were some degree of strategy but they
were actually just expanding
the diversity of human character that
makes up you it's like
you can't just focus on none that you
can't but perhaps it's more beneficial
to focus
to not focus on a singular thing
for many many years at a time that could
be one of the downsides of p if a phd if
you're not careful
is that you become too singularly
focused not just on the problem but on a
particular community and you don't do
wild stuff you don't do
interdisciplinary stuff you don't go out
painting
or getting drunk or dancing whatever the
variety whatever injects variety
to the to the years of difficult
reading research paper after research
paper that whole process
um you have to be very careful to add
variety into it and maybe that involves
playing a little bit of
counter-strike or diablo whatever floats
your boat
we're dancing well new york city is a
great place but there's there's sunrise
rooftop dancing they've got a party that
does this and that's the thing it's a
thing so you go there uh some people
from my lab that go i've only been once
but like at sunrise and you see the sun
rise over the city and there's huge
house music and you play and you dance
like crazy and then you go to work you
know you go to lab you go to wherever
you go but you can it's good to squeeze
in some weird crazy sun sunrise rooftop
dancing or things like that when you can
if we can if we may
to uh to some difficult dark places
uh i'll bring a flashlight
maybe something um
find something that can warm your soul
or
inspires others is there dark periods
dark times in your life
that you had to overcome
yeah like many people uh had friends
i've lost that friend when i was younger
committed suicide and that was actually
um
i remember being so struck of i couldn't
understand it i didn't uh i understood
mental illness at the time i was very
young i was only like 11 at the time
and i really was confused more than
anything else about how how could
someone take their life and i actually
once i got over sort of the the grief of
it all i really it cemented in my head
that i would you know never commit
suicide i could tell this to my wife
it's like you know if like if it looks
like i hung myself go find my killer
because i would never do it yeah it's
got to be staged and you know but at the
same time i've begun to appreciate there
are times where the suffering is so
great and diseases can be so awful that
uh sometimes you know euthanasia it is a
as an actual exit but i uh just have
friends i've lost along the way or or um
but but that's not too different
everyone has people they've lost along
the way but actually
um
was never never too dark of a childhood
or a dark place i mean the hardest
things have been really weird
relationship breakups where i felt like
you know
love falling in love and then losing
that person just breaking up not like
they died but
where you felt like you know you just
could barely move like you literally
felt like your heart was moved in your
body to a different location
and uh that sort of scraping sense of
existence but but also at the same time
that's been where i've in some ways been
the most alive where i lost the what i
thought at the time was the love of my
life
and but then uh was able to actually i
think
carve a deeper trench into my heart
which then could be filled more with joy
i would i would say is what uh pablo
neruda wrote about this and khalil
gibran is that
the deepest deepest sorrows i think
later have translated into my life as to
places that can be filled with greater
amounts of joy i love thinking of
sorrows as a digging of a ditch that can
then be filled
with more good stuff
eventually
not at the time but for a while just a
giant empty cavern full of like blood
and tears and pain but then yeah it
comes later
uh there is an element to life where
this too shall pass yeah so any moment
of sorrow or joy
it's gonna be over and like
uh
treasure it
no matter what i mean i do definitely
think of about losing love that's like a
celebration of love in in
in even any any living i think is better
that's why i just adamantly i don't
think i'd ever really commit suicide
because anything i take is better than
than nothing like i said the worst case
scenario said there's no heaven there's
no hell
it's just it like if you just die and
that's really just it then anything that
you have in living is by definition
infinitely better than the zero because
it's at least it's something and so i
appreciate said i have to enjoy sadness
which sounds like an oxymoron but i
sometimes even long for a good sadness
like a like a rainy day and i'm staring
out a window squinting and like drinking
some
underpriced whiskey and then you know
and and just moping and like what are
you doing like i'm just moping today and
i just but i want at least one day where
i did that or something
i actually had a conversation offline
with uh rick rubin he's a music producer
about this
he's he told me
um
he has a way of speaking that's all like
sage-like
and he says
be careful
that you um
spend some time appreciating
that sadness but don't become addicted
that that there's a line you can cross
and then you actually push away
the joy because you feel like the
because the sadness can be all
encompassing and therefore even more
real than what might seem like fleeting
happiness uh yes so yeah
yeah right you can uh sadness if if you
let it can be a thing that stays with
you longer and stickier yeah but you um
but just witnessing suicide made you
appreciate
life more yeah i mean just an
appreciation to death is actually an
appreciation of life at the same time
are you uh afraid of your death no do
you think about it
i i think it's it's like being afraid of
the sunrise it's it's
it doesn't make sense
so you're you're part of this
like fabric that is humanity
and then you just
think generationally yeah i think i want
to do as much as i can like i'll i feel
like i would die
i feel like i've lived in full life
already i actually believe that since
age 17 onward i feel like even then i
mean then the bar was low i feel like
well i had at least sex once
i had had good friends what else is
right at that age but then i had also uh
really read a lot of philosophy had
traveled a bit felt like i'd started at
least see the world and had lived a
somewhat of a life but that
from then on i felt like
uh that i wouldn't feel like i was
cheated if i had died from that day
forward that i had gotten at least
enough of life to feel like the that i
wouldn't i would be not okay with dying
but that i feel like i i knew i was
going to die i wasn't afraid i was going
to die and it actually was very
liberating and it's only gotten better
since then so i think you know some of
that might it may or may not have been
drug related euphoria but nonetheless
the the joy stuck and i think it was
it's just gotten more true ever since is
that the
the default state is one of very rich
appreciation because there's uh
it's so
fleeting and so
any i know i would i knew i would die
happy i guess even at age 17 but now my
my metrics have changed a little bit
it's not i've had sex more than one time
now so that's really big congratulations
this is very exciting at least four
times but empathy multiples
um and
professionally accomplished things like
i could actually do some of the genetic
dreams i had when i was 16 or 17 i'm not
actually making them in my lab i
actually like to say my my scientific
goals and statements have really been
the same since i've been 17. it's just
now everyone takes me seriously because
i'm a professor and actually i've done
that you're mentoring people you're the
next generation yeah also
patients yeah and helping patients live
longer and seeing the hope in their eyes
when they went from even my own
grandfather went from a two-month
diagnostic diagnosis of living from
metastatic cancer to living for more
than two years eventually succumbed to
it but knowing can use the tools of
predictive medicine to save people
um yeah and so now you know looking out
ahead
uh i feel like it's i would die very
happy if i saw boots on the red planet
and and people there and now the other
advice to the younglings i'd say is the
first time i proposed the twin study to
nasa they said no uh several times said
no we don't we're not a plan for a
mission like that it's not going to
happen so
uh don't you know be just perseverance
that will in the east you were i didn't
know i i knew you were part of leading
the nasa twin study but you were also
part of the failure to do so earlier so
the first actually because when you
start a lab in academia they say here's
a pile of money yes write grants and
bring in more money and train people and
start a lab but so i actually wrote nasa
and said i don't i'm not requesting any
funds i have funds they just gave me a
bunch of money i would like to though do
a deep genetic profile of astronauts
before and after space flight and do it
ideally if we have some twins or do
genetics and epigenetics and microbiome
but john charles is the director of the
human research programs that we don't
have we don't even have those samples
bank that you would want to for the that
are old samples and we don't have any
plans for missions like that right now
so
uh we can't do it and that was the first
time i you know it's like it's like
saying to someone that listen i'll i'll
buy a house for you i just have this
mile by and like uh no no thanks because
i felt like i was offering a really
unique research opportunity but then
that you know failure of saying that
we're not ready yet it's not time but
then once they have the solicitation
then he reached out and said oh actually
i think we've got something along the
lines of what you were thinking a few
years ago so sometimes when some things
get rejected or someone says no say okay
maybe it's just too early but don't
don't give up i think and say
um you know so to me when someone says
no not right now i'd be like okay i'll
just i'll come back in a year no just
means no for now then so
if
i think sometimes no means you have a
crappy idea that is true they can i do
have crappy ideas and so does everybody
but
if i really believe in it i just say
okay i'll be back
yeah
this too shall pass the no
um
do you hope to go out to iss out to deep
space one day
i would love to go i want to be a little
bit older so that if i die it's not as
traumatic for my daughter
and family but um yeah i feel like if
i'm a little bit older
i definitely i would even potentially do
a one-way trip to mars if it's later in
life
so
would you like to
do you think you will step foot on mars
i would love to and i think i might i
think the
it may be that one-way trip if they
because i think they'll need settlers
who would want to go and stay there and
build and be there for the long term
knowing it's high risk knowing it's and
your resume fits so you'll have a lot of
cool stuff to do there yeah at least on
the surface you'll be able to
sell yourself well
um resilience experience
motivation
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 maybe the best way to die
knowing that you're on the first wave of
people
expanding the reaching of the stars
it'd be an honor
why do you think we're here what's the
meaning of life
to serve as the guardians of life itself
that is a
the the duty for our species is is to
recognize and really manifest this
unique responsibility that we have and
only we have so far
so i think
yeah to me the
the meaning of life is for life to it in
its simplest form is to be able to
survive but to
leverage the frailty of life into its
ability to protect itself and
quite literally the guardians of the
galaxy is basically what we are
regarding light regarding ourselves and
also life
i mean life is just so precious as far
as we know it is completely rare in the
universe
and i do think a lot well what if it
what if this is the only universe that's
ever come in and it won't come back
again
and like this is it
and if that's true we have to serve as
shepherds
leverage the frailty of life
to protect it and this is all life so we
get the opportunity we humans get the
opportunity to be smart enough to be
clever enough to be motivated enough to
actually protect the other life that's
on this including ai including life
that's to come that might be very
different from what we imagined today
and that would make you sad if we were
replaced by the kind and uh the kind or
smarter ai no i think about that in the
book a bit of that i think i i would be
okay with it if they carry some echo of
that duty and they bring that with them
uh it would be real i'd be sad if they
like to hell with everyone we're gonna
destroy everything we come across and
become like nanobots that make
everything gray goo
that seems but that would still be a
version of life just not one
that is as i think is pretty but
technically it'd be alive so like you
know philosophically could i object uh
it's borderline
yeah but romantically no romantic
there's they need to carry the duty
there's some yes yeah there's a bit of a
romance to the philosophy it's in there
and you also
uh end the book with a universe that
creates new
universes
uh
so if this isn't the only universe do
you think that's in our future
that we might launch
new universe new offspring universes
it's very possible i mean multiverse is
a controversial field because it's very
much hypothetical but
with this universe has been created the
one we're in now and so it's happened
before it certainly could happen again
some of them might be happening in
parallel i i think you know if you look
out billions of years trillions of years
in the future of technological
development
certainly possible we could start to
have little baby universes
grow them like cabbage yeah get them out
saute them make them have flavor
uh yeah create something delicious well
it sounds difficult but it's our human
duty to try
as you said chris this is an incredible
conversation you're an incredible person
a scientist
explorer i can't wait to see what you do
in this world and i
um
hope to be there with you on mars i
would like to also
um breathe my last breath on that
sexy red planet
that's our neighbor podcast for mars at
least space i think space should be
coming base is pretty good space is
pretty good
but mars next
chris thanks so much for talking today
thanks for having me it's really an
honor and a pleasure to be here thanks
thanks for listening to this
conversation with chris mason to support
this podcast please check out our
sponsors in the description
and now let me leave you some words from
stanislav lem and solaris
man has gone out to explore other worlds
and other civilizations without having
explored his own labyrinth of dark
passages and secret chambers and without
finding what lies behind doorways that
he himself has sealed
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you