Genetic Engineering, Space Colonization & The 500-Year Plan to Save Humanity

Dustin Grinnell (00:00:00 --> 00:00:17)
I'm Destin Cornell, and this is Curiously. All life on Earth has about 4 billion years left. That's the time before the Sun expands, heats the planet to unimaginable temperatures, engulfs it, and then explodes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:00:17 --> 00:00:19)
We need to leave this rock.

Dustin Grinnell (00:00:20 --> 00:02:07)
Dr. Dr. Christopher E. Mason has a plan. In his book, "The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds," he lays out an ambitious roadmap for humanity's survival, arguing that we not only can, but must re-engineer ourselves to thrive in space and safeguard life beyond Earth. From using CRISPR technology to re-engineer our genes to colonizing exoplanets, his book explores the science, ethics, and awe-inspiring impossibilities of humanity's next great chapter. Dr. Mason is a geneticist, a computational biologist and a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine who has been a principal investigator and co-investigator of 11 NASA missions and projects. In Dr. Mason's vision of year 2151, here's what our world could look like.

We'll edit our genes safely and easily, selecting for desirable traits and erasing diseases that have haunted humanity for millennia. We'll travel routinely between space stations orbiting the Moon, Mars, and beyond, and we may even create artificial wombs, so-called exowombs, to make reproduction possible on distant worlds. And before you dismiss this as mere science fiction, think about the strides we've already made as a species, from landing on the moon to splitting the atom. Considering Dr. Mason's ambitious ideas for our future requires imagination. It reminds me of a scene from the movie Contact, where Jodie Foster's character, an astronomer seeking funding for a telescope project, is turned down by an executive.

Jodie Foster (00:02:09 --> 00:02:38)
This is a unique time in our history, in the history of any civilization. It's the moment of the acquisition of technology. That's the moment where contact becomes possible. The Very Large Array in New Mexico is the key to our chances for success. With its 27 linked radio telescopes, we can search more accurately than at any other conventional facility. Now, we've already gotten the preliminary approval to buy the telescope time from the government. Now all we really need is the money.

Movie Voice (00:02:39 --> 00:02:52)
A nice presentation, Doctor. But while our Foundation arm does have a mandate to support experimental programs, we must confess that your proposal seems less like science and more like science fiction.

Dustin Grinnell (00:02:53 --> 00:03:09)
What I love about this scene is that she doesn't give up. She's been in too many rooms with too many people like this before. So she makes a passionate plea. Urging this man to expand his vision of what's possible by reminding him of what we're capable of and have already accomplished.

Jodie Foster (00:03:10 --> 00:03:20)
Science fiction. You're right. It's crazy. In fact, it's even worse than that.

Movie Voice (00:03:21 --> 00:03:21)
Nuts.

Jodie Foster (00:03:24 --> 00:04:02)
You want to hear something really nutty? I heard of a couple of guys that want to build something called an airplane. You know, you get people to go in it and fly around like birds. It's ridiculous, right? Or what about breaking the sound barrier?

Or rockets to the moon, or atomic energy, or a mission to Mars. Science fiction, right? Look, all I'm asking is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision, you know, to step back for one minute and look at the big picture, to take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history of history.

Dustin Grinnell (00:04:02 --> 00:04:03)
I just—

Jodie Foster (00:04:04 --> 00:04:15)
I spent the last 13 months coming into rooms like this and talking to people like you. And the truth is, you're my last chance. So I'm sorry I wasted your time.

Dustin Grinnell (00:04:15 --> 00:04:20)
But it's still a no until the executive gets a phone call.

Movie Voice (00:04:20 --> 00:04:32)
Doctor? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

Dustin Grinnell (00:04:32 --> 00:04:48)
Watching on a security feed is the company's founder, a highly accomplished engineer and entrepreneur whose career has been defined by bold action and innovative thinking. He recognizes the genius in her work, sees its potential, and greenlights the project.

Movie Voice (00:04:48 --> 00:04:49)
You have your money.

Dustin Grinnell (00:04:50 --> 00:04:55)
Before she leaves, she looks up to the camera and thanks the man who saw and believed in her vision.

Jodie Foster (00:04:56 --> 00:04:58)
Thank you. Thank you.

Dustin Grinnell (00:04:58 --> 00:05:05)
Now let's dive into my conversation with Christopher Mason, as we explore his bold vision for the future.

Dustin Grinnell (00:05:06 --> 00:05:08)
Christopher Mason, welcome to Curiously.

Christopher E. Mason (00:05:09 --> 00:05:10)
A pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dustin Grinnell (00:05:11 --> 00:05:34)
Today we're going to talk about your 2022 book, The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds. And I really enjoyed the read. It very concretely gamed out how our species, life in general, might be able to relocate and get off planet Earth if we need to. And you made it abundantly clear that we will need to. Eventually.

Christopher E. Mason (00:05:35 --> 00:05:47)
Yeah, it's not, it's not an if, it's got to be a when. Mostly just because of cosmological constants and the fact the sun will at some point engulf the Earth, which I think about almost every morning, not in a panic way, but just in a factual way. And it's very motivating, I'd say.

Dustin Grinnell (00:05:48 --> 00:05:53)
Yeah. Does that get you motivated knowing it's the mortality of our home in a way?

Christopher E. Mason (00:05:53 --> 00:07:11)
And really any species on this planet. Part of the argument of the book is, which maybe we'll get into a little bit, is that we're the only species with an awareness of extinction. I think that that awareness itself becomes a self-motivating duty is that because you know that, you are beholden to act upon that. Obviously, you can do it selfishly. You can have your own body survive.

We can then think about having our species survive, but the duty I argue for is really across all life, and even potentially someday AI. I talk about in the book, like, if AI really becomes sentient and a superintelligence, maybe they would be good stewards of life and complexity. At that point, it would effectively be life as well. So I think, um, I like to say that I am matter agnostic towards intelligence. So if it's carbon, if it's silicon, if it's some other entity, that's fine.

But the need and duty towards shepherding life and that complexity applies to all of those substrates. So, um, yeah, so that's, uh, some of the philosophical parts of the book. But then it gets into the the fun genomics technical parts of how do you build new creatures from scratch? How do you modify radiation resistance? How do you survive on other planets?

Dustin Grinnell (00:07:11 --> 00:07:52)
Yeah, yeah. And I think as far as the questions I have laid out, we'll touch on all that. And I particularly want to talk about kind of like the moral duty you think, you know, humanity has to our own species, but life in general, to, you know, help us continue on in the event of some catastrophe or inevitable extinction event or something. But I think it might be useful if you could kind of briefly tell listeners about your background real quick as a geneticist, as a computational biologist, and then also the scientific work you've done as an investigator for NASA missions and projects.

Christopher E. Mason (00:07:53 --> 00:09:52)
Yeah, my background. So I started as a single-celled embryo a long time ago in Racine, Wisconsin. I have since divided many times and picked up some microbes along the way, had some epigenetic changes. So, you know, been originally from Wisconsin, did my undergraduate degree in genetics at Madison, a PhD in genetics at Yale, did a clinical genetics postdoc at Yale, the medical school, also a fellowship in genomics, ethics, and law at Yale Law School. And so a lot of time, you know, Midwest, East Coast, and then I've been in New York City since 2009 and a laboratory here at Weill Cornell Medicine, you know, at the medical school for Cornell.

Where we focus on 3 main areas, and that's clinical genetics, which is cancer dynamics and evolution, infectious disease, and space medicine. So broad interdisciplinary clinical genetics profiles. The second area is in computational methods, and this includes AI tools, machine learning, various base calling and computational new methods basically to integrate, process, or merge kinds of datasets. And generate them. And the third area is synthetic biology.

So this, I think, is what is today the smallest part of the lab, but over the course of the next several decades will be by far the largest part of a lot of our work because we'll have mapped enough genetic code, we'll have understood enough genetic code and characterized it that we can then begin the process of tweezing, tweaking, modifying, slightly adjusting or merging components of creatures. We've done this with tardigrade genes and human genes. We've done this with different microbial species. You can— you reach an era, I think, relatively soon where you could synthesize entire genomes from scratch and then try and predict what you'll get at the end. And, you know, this applies to everything from better microbes that can make you products or absorb toxins to cyanobacteria that could absorb carbon to, you know, more interesting things recently like bringing back the dire wolf through de-extinction process, which when I was writing the book was very hypothetical.

Dustin Grinnell (00:09:52 --> 00:09:54)
Wow. How's it doing?

Christopher E. Mason (00:09:54 --> 00:10:01)
Great so far. There's actually 3 of them born and they're in an undisclosed location, but they're healthy and they seem happy and they're doing great, actually.

Dustin Grinnell (00:10:02 --> 00:10:50)
Okay. Very interesting. Like a big theme in your book, it's in the subtitle, Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, is using engineering. To change our own biology, maybe engineering to change our own planet. And I think one place I want to start with is things you learned from one of your studies that you talked about at the beginning of the book, where you, you studied Scott Kelly, the astronaut, and he spent a year on the International Space Station, and you compared the physiological changes that happened to his body with his twin brother. It's called NASA's Twins Study. And I wanted to see if I can get you to kind of summarize what you found and why it mattered.

Christopher E. Mason (00:10:51 --> 00:13:00)
But this gave us a unique opportunity to look at a really long mission, which is one of the longest— well, at the time it was the longest contiguous mission for an American and one of the longest orbits ever. And also we had an identical twin. So a very unique series of circumstances and compared them at a genetic level, molecular level, a cellular level. So look at many layers and modalities of biology to discern, you know, what happens to the body in space for that long. So many things change.

We saw, you know, thousands of genes would turn on and turn off and be up or downregulated. We saw a lot of activity in the immune system, we saw changes in the blood profiles, we had the telomeres actually got longer, which these are regions of your chromosomes that store your DNA. Normally, as you age, telomeres get shorter, but ironically, they got longer in space. This was a really surprising result. We worked with Susan Bailey on that particular project where we confirmed it with different methods.

One's called qPCR, one is nanopore sequencing. We also did other versions of sequencing. So, we confirmed it was real and then really thought, well, that's interesting. And, we've seen it now, actually in almost every astronaut crew we've looked at, is that their telomeres seem to get longer in space. And, we now know mechanistically what's driving that.

It turns out it's a bit of the response to radiation and the microgravity. And, we can see that there's a non-coding RNA, it's called TERRA, basically a guiding function that helps the telomeres get longer. We can see that activated in the blood. For the astronauts. So mostly it seemed to be the radiation response, but we can see that as a really surprising result.

Dustin Grinnell (00:13:00 --> 00:13:24)
So if we go into space, go to Mars, go to a different solar system, it's pretty treacherous territory for humans. There's a lot of insults, radiation, and the like. Is there anything you learned from Scott Kelly's body, from your twin study, that informs like what we'll need to do in order to survive in tough conditions?

Christopher E. Mason (00:13:24 --> 00:13:26)
Yeah, we looked at a lot of them.

Dustin Grinnell (00:13:26 --> 00:13:26)
So we've—

Christopher E. Mason (00:13:26 --> 00:14:31)
So I think the first phase of, okay, what's changing, what's adapting, we know what is perturbed by being in space. And we're just though at the very beginning of knowing, okay, well, should we target that with a drug? Should we turn that gene off if it's going on? And, and we don't know enough yet to, I think, to turn down something that's being turned up in space because we don't know the difference really that much between maladaptive and adaptive for spaceflight because we just don't have enough data. So we have basically, I'd say, the first draft of the map of the body to know what changes, but we don't yet know which parts we should, you know, modify or change in terms of what we should target.

But at least we know what's changing. And so we'll keep looking over each mission. We've done some work now with SpaceX and other commercial providers and look, you know, again and again at each mission and see what is consistently changing. And then what seems to be something we could start to have a countermeasure, it's called some intervention, basically to stop any of the negative effects, basically. Okay.

Dustin Grinnell (00:14:31 --> 00:14:46)
One of the things I want to ask is how the book idea came to you. It's a 500-year plan. And I understand, did it begin with a Wikipedia post you wrote in 2011? Is that how it started and how did it evolve from there?

Christopher E. Mason (00:14:46 --> 00:16:40)
It was— so I started first, we had a— I just begun the lab at Cornell. We had a team that's called the iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition. So we had a team trying to get as many radiation-resistant organisms together, get their genome sequenced, get the genes that confer the radiation resistance and put them into one big organism. So it was a wildly ambitious summer project with a team of undergrads with very few resources. And a handful of people.

So, but, you know, our ambitions were big, but we also, you know, we're talking about structures, the technical data, the philosophy behind it. And at one point in one of the meetings, we said, you know, why are we doing this? Why are we looking at radiation resistance and what's the long-term use of this data? So I wrote a little blog post for the project that just said, okay, the purpose of this is to understand where life can exist. And if we find all the genes that confer radiation resistance, maybe that could help us survive in space long-term.

If we can do that, we could look at other ways to modify eukaryotic cells or human cells and help us survive in faraway planets and then someday get to other solar systems and like look at the end of the universe. So it was just a blog post of ideas, but then it was in 10 parts and then an editor at MIT Press saw it, Bob Prior, and he said, "Oh, Chris, you know, this looks kind of like an outline for a book. Have you ever considered writing a book?" And I said, "Yes, but I don't have a lot of extra time." And when would I write? Meet and we had coffee and just chatted about making it into a book. And so, you know, normally for a book proposal, you shop it around.

I was very fortunate. He found me and said, "Hey, I think you should just write a book about this and we'll help, you know, give you an advance and get going." I was like, "All right, great." So I'd been thinking about it for years, of course. So it was very easy. It was actually a pleasure to write because it's a collection of most of the things I think we can do and should do technologically, philosophically, and, you know, genetically even. And then so wrote that, you know, actually just before the pandemic, it got the full first draft done.

Dustin Grinnell (00:16:40 --> 00:17:05)
And then, well, one of your core ideas, like I mentioned, is that to save life, we need to like engineer it basically. And for hundreds of thousands of years, evolution has been self-directed. But you argue that now we must take control, like reshape our biology and environment to survive space travel in new worlds. I was wondering if you can kind of expand on that idea.

Christopher E. Mason (00:17:05 --> 00:18:21)
Yeah, it's not a necessity because there's a chance that, for example, Mars has some gravity, a little bit of atmosphere, less than 1%, but something. And you could maybe go in a lava tube, like, which is where, you know, lava flow creates these big caverns, and you could go underground and maybe be protected from the radiation and maybe be okay. You still need, you know, air, you need food, you need to survive. But, but the radiation risk I talk a lot about in the book we may be pleasantly surprised that the human body is resilient enough to survive it. But I describe other modifications you need to, say, to live on Titan or Jupiter, other places where, you know, there's no way we'd remotely survive unless we had significant changes either to our body or systems that keep us alive or both. And so I propose it as, you know, something that you'd be ethically bound to do these kinds of modifications if the alternative is death. But if we know that a human body can survive and maybe it's more adaptive than we even imagine, great, then it's easier, frankly. But I have a feeling from what we've seen, a human body is fairly fragile, will need some of these modifications just to survive. And so that's where I propose that this is something that's required to do, otherwise you won't make it at all. So that's the proposal, basically.

Dustin Grinnell (00:18:22 --> 00:18:39)
Yeah. Especially when it comes to space, we're just incredibly fragile. And I was kind of wondering if you could describe, broadly speaking, what are the major conditions we're most unsuited for when we're leaving Earth or living elsewhere? Like, what do we have to worry about?

Christopher E. Mason (00:18:39 --> 00:19:24)
Yeah, the radiation we discussed a little bit already, and that's a big one. But there's other, other features. The dust from the moon, dust on Mars are really big concerns for NASA and other space agencies. 'Cause we know it's probably gonna be rough on the body. We don't know how bad, but just the particulate matter, the grain granularity of it. There's, you know, also just fluid shifts, the nutrition. There's a psychosocial dynamic. What's gonna happen when you're in a very, you know, marooned basically far away, you know, from Earth. It's one thing if you're on the moon, you can get back pretty quickly, but on Mars, you know, you're months away from being able to get help or to get back. So you're really truly alone., in a way that no humans have ever been before. So there is a psychosocial dynamic and cognitive feature that we'll have to, you know, keep an eye on for sure.

Dustin Grinnell (00:19:24 --> 00:20:02)
Yeah. And you learned a lot from like Scott Kelly's body and his reaction to space conditions, zero gravity, but you also learn from other organisms that have figured out a way to survive in extreme environments. And you already mentioned one of them, which is the tardigrades, the the water bear creature that can— that's like almost indestructible. It can live in the vacuum of space, and somehow it's figured out how to do that. And I understand you have learned things about its genetics, its physiology, that may inform our ability to withstand extreme environments as well.

Christopher E. Mason (00:20:02 --> 00:21:06)
Yep. Yeah, they have, uh, you know, we've been looking at them in a range of contexts that they— we can take a gene from tardigrades, one that was identified in 2016 called DSUP, or damage suppressor protein. And you can take that gene, optimize it, and put it into a human cell. So take a tardigrade gene, human genome, and it confers about 80% of the radiation resistance that we've seen in tardigrades. So it gives you a really easy way to take an evolutionary tool or lesson from one creature and transplant it into a human cell. So, you know, that's one example. We're also taking proteins from Deinococcus radiodurans, which is a another extremophile that survived radiation and doing transplants of some of their proteins into human cells. So we're, it's very early stages. We're not doing clinical trials on people or anything like that yet, but we're showing that it's technologically possible that the human cells can tolerate these effectively alien proteins or, you know, very divergent species, take those proteins from those species and put them in human cells and they actually function and they work and they give you the result you want, the phenotype of radiation resistance.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:06 --> 00:21:21)
So, Wow. Not to get too in the weeds, but like mechanistically, how does transferring like a tardigrade's genes that confers resistance to radiation, how does that give a human cell radiation resistance?

Christopher E. Mason (00:21:21 --> 00:21:53)
So what we've seen is actually the protein itself is actually going to places of DNA and it seems to be protecting some of these sensitive regions. So it's actually serving, we think, a bit of a physical shield, but also helping to activate DNA repair a little bit as well. So it's both a, we think, structural, like physical, and also potentially biochemical or regulatory that it's activating some of these DNA repair pathways, or at least helping to make them stronger, it looks like. So, yes, a very, very fascinating kind of hybrid entity in this regard.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:53 --> 00:22:06)
And like you said, it's not happening in humans. So we are quite far away from putting these tardigrade genes in human cells and then having like a human being more resistant to radiation?

Christopher E. Mason (00:22:06 --> 00:22:44)
Yeah, we are, you know, we're probably at least a decade away from that, I'd say. But also, we would need to make sure there's a need to do it. Real clear, you know, unmet medical need that necessitates this kind of intervention. And we'd have to do it slowly, carefully. You know, we'd have to make sure that we are not doing, you know, something that's creating a lot of problems in the genome or secondary effects. So it's like most clinical trials, we would do it very slowly, methodically, start with something akin to a Phase 1 clinical trial, then do Phase 2, then Phase 3. So we would go slowly through applications into human subjects.

Dustin Grinnell (00:22:44 --> 00:23:03)
And so you imagine years from now, maybe astronauts will be in a in space and before they go on their mission, they'll maybe have like a certain amount of genetic tinkering happening in order to confer resistance to these extreme conditions.

Christopher E. Mason (00:23:03 --> 00:23:33)
Yeah, we would see— you can even imagine a couple of directions. You could say, what's your genetic profile? Are you high risk or low risk? And maybe you're already pretty low risk, so you're probably fine. But if you're high risk, could you take pharmacological agents? Could you do— you don't have to even do genome modifications. You can do epigenome reprogramming. So you turn on genes temporarily. You could imagine doing that. And also just building in a molecular profile of the, of the risk profile for the individual before they go is something that we could do, but it's way down the road, but it's something we could definitely, you know, have set up for them.

Dustin Grinnell (00:23:33 --> 00:23:39)
Okay. Elephants. What have we learned from elephants and their cancer resistance?

Christopher E. Mason (00:23:39 --> 00:25:22)
And so, but one interesting fact about them is they don't get a lot of— they get very rarely do they get cancer. And so when the idea is that it seems to be they have all these extra copies of p53, 20 extra copies, so compared to humans that have 2 copies. And so it's indicated that maybe there is something to their feature of having these other proteins that are often called the guardian of the genome is the term for p53. It's going around and scavenging and making sure that if you have damage, it helps bring proteins to help repair it. It maintains a monitoring across the genome.

So it's very powerful in terms of its ability to keep you safe, basically at a genetic level. And so we, you know, we could see that— actually, one thing we did actually recently with elephants for the iPSCs to make woolly mammoths, we showed that you need to, you know, they're not all active, but you do have to make sure that they're dosage regulated correctly, or otherwise it's hard to do reprogramming. Because if you think about CRISPR, you often break DNA to then do modified DNA. But if your DNA is— if your cell is really good at repairing broken DNA, it makes it harder to modify that DNA. So you have to actually do a bit of attenuation for what p53 normally does, just so you can do genome editing for like the woolly mammoth, for example.

Dustin Grinnell (00:25:22 --> 00:25:33)
Does anybody, uh, has there ever been a criticism on some of this work of genome modification, of like playing God? Have you ever gotten that, uh, reaction, and what would you say to it?

Christopher E. Mason (00:25:33 --> 00:27:10)
Who are you to do it? What, you know, that's something that sounds a bit like making life or recoding life or playing God. And in that regard, I, I think there's two specific responses. One is that this is a molecular level of playing God that we're already doing at a macroscopic level and have been doing for centuries. So, there's not that much.

It's only a difference, I think, of specificity and scope. It's not a difference of kind. It's a different degree. If anything, it's a more accurate version of what we've been doing for a long time. We can get down to the single base and single molecule resolution of a change versus a pretty uncertain hybrid mixture or a breeding experiment.

We're actually doing things very specific., and can finally, you have a counterbalance to have something, if you're doing breeding and you're getting something that's too low in genetic diversity, you can monitor and ensure that that doesn't happen. So these new methods and tools let you do what we've already been doing, but do it better, in the sense that, so one argument I would say is that we're not really doing anything that different from what we've already done, but even if there, someone could say, well, I don't think we should play God in any context, so I don't think it should be done at all. To which I say, possibly, but if we're still here in a billion years and the oceans start to boil and genome engineering is the only way we can survive and get off the planet, then it becomes much more not only palatable but essential. And so I think it is one of the likely necessary tools for us to survive elsewhere and certainly worth considering. Again, maybe we're wrong.

Dustin Grinnell (00:27:10 --> 00:27:25)
Do you ever hear criticism like, uh, we have enough problems here on Earth? Like, why should we be spending resources on other planets and, you know, these grand visions that are hundreds of years out?

Christopher E. Mason (00:27:25 --> 00:28:42)
We have poverty, there's diseases, there's cancers, there's You know, and even there, I have often a very— 3 specific responses. One is that you can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can cure diseases on Earth and address poverty and go to space. That was shown in the '60s when we passed civil rights legislation, but then also got a person on the moon. So we know it's possible to do really good in society and structure and fight things like poverty and racism and, you know, go farther than humans ever gone before.

The second reason is hope. I think it's very hopeful to have, you know, the younger generation Imagine their future is brighter than their present. And I think spaceflight is a very inspiring future-forward look that brings everyone together and is extraordinary. And the third is the duty I mentioned at the beginning. Like, if we don't do this, we run the risk of everyone, you know, frankly, dying on Earth and all of life.

And as far as we know, life in the universe is only on this planet. Now, maybe we're wrong. Maybe it's elsewhere. But so far, it's just us. And so no, by definition, no one else even knows there's life or has a capacity to protect it.

Dustin Grinnell (00:28:42 --> 00:28:56)
This may sound like a kind of a dark thought, but one of the things I wanted to think about in counterpointing like such a grand vision is this idea of saving humanity and whether we're maybe like worth saving.

Christopher E. Mason (00:28:56 --> 00:28:57)
That's a good question.

Dustin Grinnell (00:28:58 --> 00:29:52)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And You know, you say it's our moral duty to prevent human extinction, and I think I would agree with that. I'm not opposed to that. But there are philosophers— this guy David Benatar, he's an antinatalist, but he kind of argues the opposite, that life is too painful and humanity shouldn't be preserved. It reminds me of a scene in the TV show True Detective where Matthew McConaughey's character was actually inspired by Benatar's philosophy of antinatalism. He's basically just saying he thinks that humanity was this kind of failed experiment because self-awareness came online and created a bunch of us who just have these individual selves. And he thinks we should just deny our programming and, you know, go extinct, essentially. But you're arguing the opposite. It's our moral duty to prevent human extinction. And I was wondering if you could kind of sell me on humanity.

Christopher E. Mason (00:29:52 --> 00:33:36)
Yeah, sure, and I'm happy to do so. I think the— so it's a fascinating, uh, argument. There's also the other book right behind me is Derek Parfit wrote a book called Reasons and Persons, which is a really great philosophy book that has similar ideas and questions, which is— this came from the '80s where he imagined an experiment which he called the repugnant conclusion, which is imagine you have, you know, hundreds of billions or trillions of people and you try to quantify happiness much like was done with John Stuart Mill, but you say they're all happy, but they're barely alive, and they're technically better than dead but suffering a lot. And if your goal for the universe was to maximize happiness, you would say that this is still good, effectively. But, but you look at what the structure of the universe is, and it's this widespread suffering everywhere that is, you know, you might say on the, on the numbers, yes, they should live, and it's, quote, ethical.

But if they're all barely surviving and barely have the smallest possible capacity for happiness, only like 1 day a year or barely at all, that yes, that's better than zero, but it's a repugnant conclusion to reach. So there's an argument there and there's also, as you mentioned, other philosophers who've looked at this. So I think the challenge there is it's analogous to when people say if we're 10 feet away and you keep cutting the distance in half and you keep going in half and half and half, eventually you reach infinity. And then we would never be able to reach each other. If you keep doing this progression towards infinity, which sounds cool for like if you're at a bar and you've got nothing else to talk about, but then the reality is someone can just like slap you in the face, right?

So like we know it's possible to touch each other and to move across a room and to exist in the universe. And so I think some of the arguments I think are too abstract to be useful, frankly. I'd say that that's one critique, but that doesn't address the meat of their question. I think that's more of a technical critique of a philosophical argument. To get at the heart of the matter though, you know, it's an important question.

Like, are humans doing good in the universe? Are we the best iteration of life that could or should exist to be here? Like, is— would the universe be better off if we just went away, either because something better might come along or that you just— nothing would be better is also— those are both variations of that same question and a conclusion. But I think it is a Descartes kind of response where I think therefore I am or cogito ergo sum. Just being able to ask that question is itself a way to show value that for that value to have question, you have to exist in the first place.

And so we don't know what value would look like in the absence of existence because no one would exist. So I would argue that actually the ability to exist and ask that question is better than nonexistence because that question only has value because someone can ask it, right? So if everything and everyone was dead, then by definition there'd be no values, right? So I think having some ability to have value, even a value system, even if your value today is that we are not good, that doesn't mean it will be forever though. But like, you can't have any value if everyone's dead.

Dustin Grinnell (00:33:36 --> 00:33:36)
almost any metric and it's gotten—

Christopher E. Mason (00:33:36 --> 00:34:10)
well, no, it's gotten a little bit— it hasn't always gotten good in the past few years. It's starting to dip back down again on some of these metrics, but at least relative to, say, 3,000 years ago, it's wildly better than it ever used to be. So that indicates that it's possible to change, that even if you could say, "Well, I've done the math and I still think it's not— like, yeah, it's better than 3,000 years ago, but I still think humans are an awful existence." I would point to just the empiricism of the past that we can and do get better. And I think we could reach a point that is better, that is, you know, a grander existence that is happier, or whichever metric they'd want to use that's better.

Dustin Grinnell (00:34:10 --> 00:34:43)
I really like that idea. It just will stick with me, the idea that we will most likely improve and, and maybe be helped by our technology. My last episode, I was talking with an astronomer, Dan Koh, and he's hopeful that AI might be able to help us solve issues that are too complicated for us, like solving famines or genocide or, you know, or large-scale complex things that we just can't— we don't have the computational power and we can't even do with institutions.

Christopher E. Mason (00:34:43 --> 00:36:05)
Like, maybe that'll help us get better. It could. I mean, I even ascribed AI as being a candidate for what could be called life in the universe, and they might even be better than us at many things, and I think that's fine. I'm also not afraid of AI, you know, coming and killing us all because I think it's wonderful for a movie script. But a good analogy, I think, is when we look at, say, you know, cockroaches that are annoying.

If they're in your house and they're in your way, you might kill them, but you don't think, oh, the thing is annoying me, I will go and kill all cockroaches in the world because it's energetically expensive. It's unnecessary and just doesn't make that much sense if you're just trying to, you know, have good management of resources. Because they're not a threat, right? So if we're— if something is really a superintelligence and can beat us and be better than us at everything, by definition we're not a threat at that point. So why would it care?

So I'm not too worried about a superintelligence, but I agree AI could help in general. It could be a buddy. I don't think it'll be too threatening. And yet it's time is the big question. I think you— if you think that, you know, humans innately have no capacity to ever be of value to the universe,, you know, then you're just a misinterpret— almost a nihilist at that point.

So then it's hard to get a nihilist to see value in anything. So, which makes it a bit self-defeating. So I think you've got to give us a chance. And you could argue, I don't want to give humans a chance, I think we're doomed. We could have that discussion.

Dustin Grinnell (00:36:05 --> 00:36:49)
we've seemed to have gotten better, and maybe we'll keep getting better, I would argue. If we want to reach some of the exoplanets that we've identified, habitable ones with conditions that might be good enough for our species, we'll have to overcome enormous challenges which you outlined in the book and you've talked about here already too— radiation, dust— but also we'll need propulsion technology, there'll be cosmic debris, the psychological stress of confined living. So many sci-fi movies just showing colonies tearing themselves apart because everyone's stressed and fighting for resources and You just pick your political economic conflict. We'll have to figure those things out.

Christopher E. Mason (00:36:49 --> 00:37:16)
But there's also— and like The Expanse. The Expanse is a great, you know, technology, and we've, you know, we're all over the solar system and amazing tools, but still petty and backstabbing and mean and jealous and vicious and, you know, awful to each other. So yeah, that series and those books were really kind of depressing to read because you have this hope that, oh, we'll be amazing and great creatures once we've reached this inter- planetary exploration phase, but maybe not.

Dustin Grinnell (00:37:16 --> 00:37:55)
It might just be still mean to each other. It's possible. It will probably bring our problems with us, and we'll still have envy, greed, lust, seven deadly sins. Yeah, yeah, they'll come with us. Uh, maybe we'll get better, but we'll see. Um, actually, I'm just remembering a movie. I can't remember the title, but everybody, all the, uh, the people on the, uh, spaceship took a took a drug of some kind to kind of dull their emotions. And that, that's like a pharmacological intervention to get people to kind of— maybe if you don't feel, maybe if you dull one's mood, that could help us not be in conflict with each other.

Christopher E. Mason (00:37:55 --> 00:38:32)
Yep, yep, yep. It could be a way to, yeah, just make it so people are a bit more palatable. Or there's even some discussion in my more recent book, I talk about, you know, what if you get genetic engineering gone crazy and you're like, we're going to make it so you have the perfect genome for the job and decrease violence tendencies. Or you could get a lot of dystopian futures of genome engineering, which I don't think will happen. But, you know, it gets like the movie Gallica potentially. So there's also ways you could imagine taking away people's rights because you're too focused on the genetics of it, which is not perfect, of course, as a science right now. So it's hard to be that predictive and prescriptive towards what people with their genome is relative to what they're going to do.

Dustin Grinnell (00:38:32 --> 00:39:00)
How do you think one of the barriers to space travel I wanted to get your take on is dealing with just the long-term space travel, like the distances we'll have to cover and we'll have to probably hibernate, we'll have to go into some sort of sleep. You know, it's so many movies from Alien to Interstellar, all with very cool depictions, takes on how that could happen. How do you think realistically, scientifically, we could pull that off?

Christopher E. Mason (00:39:00 --> 00:39:57)
Well, we know, I guess we, I have some hopes because a little bit about in the book and I actually just came from the Applied Physiology Lab that's in Pittsburgh yesterday where Kate Freisinger and Efsheen Baheshti and others are working on ways to mimic hibernation that we see in bears. 'Cause bears are extraordinary. They have, they really, you know, really decrease insulin levels. Their blood becomes as thick as barbecue sauce. And they, they don't go to the bathroom either. They don't go to the bathroom. And it's extraordinary. It's like, yeah, we know in a mammalian system it's possible to do this for, at least months on end and to have this exquisite level of regulation, it's not impossible. So that there means that there's a possible path forward. Now, we don't know how to do it yet, of course, but there's a lot of groups looking at this and even a few companies looking at ways to try and simulate this. Because you could also imagine if you could induce hibernation, that could help you if you have a trauma victim, so you could pause sort of the damage of the body before on the way to a hospital.

Dustin Grinnell (00:39:57 --> 00:40:08)
There's other medical applications I think that are relevant and very interesting to the same question. Yeah. So if we could figure out how bears do it, yeah, we might be able to do it in us as well.

Christopher E. Mason (00:40:08 --> 00:40:10)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But hopefully we don't have to be that hairy.

Dustin Grinnell (00:40:10 --> 00:40:48)
I don't know, maybe we'd be that hairy. Maybe it might be just kind of something we'll have to accept, you know, just excess hair in order to be able to not go to the bathroom for 9 months. So if we We say we survive space travel, we get to a new system, and we reach another planet. Its conditions are different than Earth's. How realistic is it that the idea of engineering the planet itself to make it more habitable, like, how could be change of a planet in terms of UV, in terms of the resources we'll need? You've talked a little bit about that in the book.

Christopher E. Mason (00:40:48 --> 00:42:09)
It's actually changing the new home Yep. To match what we need, which would be, you know, in that sense, you'd need a whole terraforming plan, which is a many generational plan. You'd need basically, you know, centuries, if not millennia to accomplish a feat of real terraforming, but not impossible. The example you can quickly point to, and I do in the book a bit, is you look at the ozone hole in the ozone layer, we recognize as a global community a problem that we wanted to address. We did so and got rid of chlorofluorocarbons, fixed it, did it, you know, already successfully completed one geoengineering project on Earth in a matter of a few decades, which actually are even less, which is, which is pretty impressive.

So we know it's possible. The challenge is, can you get as widespread agreement? You know, CO2 levels are trying to regulate now, and that's very difficult. But as long as there's a view and a sense of duty again towards a multigenerational stewardship of a planet, It's definitely possible, but it's also, you know, the closest thing we have for an analogy would be in medieval Europe where people would, it would take 15 or 20 generations of people working on a cathedral to build it. I know that was an intergenerational plan, but they could, you know, see it every day and work on it and have the sense of pride and local response.

Dustin Grinnell (00:42:09 --> 00:42:41)
It reminded me of a question I had later. Uh, it's interesting, a multi-generational project, um, and, you know, building a cathedral. How is it that you keep individual generations motivated to work on a project that will finish after they pass? Because if you're working on a 500-year plan or longer, you'll have people working on something that will basically benefit generations, many, many generations down the line.

Christopher E. Mason (00:42:41 --> 00:44:47)
I think it requires a real shift of perspective for everyone, really, ideally, where you look at what can you do for people you'll never meet and how do you get them to care. Yeah, the closest iteration I've seen of that in modern day is Boy Scouts. And when you go camping, there's an old adage that you always leave the campsite better than you found it. And so the simplest thing is if there are 5 sticks of wood by the fire pit, when you use the fire and you leave the next day, make it so that there are 6 there so that you leave it at least as good, if not better, than how you found a campsite. You know, if it's a little— if there was garbage, you get rid of the garbage, you know, small things like that.

But even though it can sometimes be for very small degrees of change, it means there's continual improvement at a spot that benefits people you never meet. It means that, you know, there's always progress., and there, there is no gratification other than just the knowledge that someday that would be you. And so I think with just enough self-reflection, you'll think, oh, that I exist in the world with certain benefits because someone else did something for me that I, I'll never meet them and never be able to thank them. And wouldn't it be nice to pay it forward? But they, how do we generate that instinct to pay it forward?

It's hard because for cathedrals, it was for a deity. It was like they were doing it for good works. They were hoping they'd get into heaven. They had a clear motivation. Some of them just did it because they like beautiful things.

Some of them did it as a job. You know, they were building things for a variety of reasons that were either short or very long term. But we won't have that in the case of probably terraforming. You would do it just for the sake of good of humanity. But we would not likely see that readily.

Dustin Grinnell (00:44:47 --> 00:45:01)
Yeah, I wonder if the vision if the vision becomes more concrete, like we identify a habitable planet and it becomes like a planetary— like a goal. Yeah. And we— that would sort of bring us together, almost like the moon missions.

Christopher E. Mason (00:45:01 --> 00:46:06)
Uh, yeah, that's a great point. And that's a— I think very much, yes. So because like the moon, obviously it's visible, you can see it in the night sky, you can say, let's go there. And if we had enough in the media, we've zoomed in, say, with the new telescope, and we can see this looks like it's a habitable planet, we want to go there, we can see exactly where it is, we know what we want to do. I think that could be an example where people, they feel like they can see something and they know there's a goal. And yet, let's say it's a 5,000-year goal. Now, we've never had one, but we could have one. So, I think part of it was you have to give people credit that were in the 1600s, average life expectancy was in the mid-20s. So, maybe you live to be 30, but it's hard to imagine something taking centuries when you barely live to be 2 decades. It would be, um, I think that's helped a bit, that just people have a sense of, I can have a, I can have a career that's 50 years, or I can have 3 careers that are each 20 years, or I can have this— people's view of time has gotten, I think, longer, uh, or more appreciative of longer time frames, and that's helped.

Dustin Grinnell (00:46:06 --> 00:46:40)
I'm always curious how scientists are inspired by science fiction and, you know, which books or movies help shape their imagination. I always like to ask a scientist, you know, what they read or watched as they were growing up and what made a big impression on them. And feel free to answer however you'd like, but I did see that, I think in the acknowledgments, you said your aunt and uncle gave you Isaac Asimov's Foundation series on your 15th birthday. So what influence did that book and maybe other sci-fi in general have on you being a scientist?

Christopher E. Mason (00:46:40 --> 00:46:49)
That was a big one, just in the sense of several ways. There's a bit of a humanism that was in there, and I'd never heard the word humanist. Asimov was a humanist.

Dustin Grinnell (00:46:49 --> 00:46:51)
I didn't even know what that was.

Christopher E. Mason (00:46:51 --> 00:48:30)
Just someone who believes in the value of humans and that being just a humanist is often focused on peace and preserving humanity and appreciating humanity. Just being a humanist as a thing you could be. I didn't even know that was a thing that you can see the value of humans. I, you know, that humans make poetry and art and music and science and appreciate and have, you know, good, you know, have joys and sadness and have, you know, this rich diversity and tapestry of emotions and ambitions and dreams and inventions and all these things that come from being human is something you appreciate and you want to preserve, which I didn't know was a thing you could be. But Asimov was very much a humanist and wrote about this and talked a lot about it.

And then also there's the science in the books that he, you know, imagined with such ease, this idea of an intergalactic empire and people having many, many planets feed one planet, the capital in the book, or people traveling across the galaxy. And it seems so effortless in the book that I was taken with that vision of what could the future be for humanity and wanted to help make that possible. And the senses of duty And genetics came later, but I think that, that sense of the awe of the galaxy, the ease of travel, the, the beauty of what's ahead was really captivating. And so that was one good book. Kim Stanley Robinson's books were a really good book.

Dustin Grinnell (00:48:30 --> 00:49:38)
And I think many people have done that for thousands of years. We met at the Boston Space Week, I think it was, at the space career fair, and you were at the MIT Press table, and that's how we met, and I got your book. And one of the things I was very interested in that week was hearing scientists and astronomers and, and the like talk about life elsewhere. And, you know, thinking about the Drake equation and how, like, mathematically life must exist. And I wanted to ask you what you think about the possibility for life elsewhere, and also, like, what form you think it may be in. Could be, like, microbial or I think it might be fun to like speculate as well. Like maybe it's something, maybe it's a life form we can't even imagine because the conditions in which it arose are so different from Mars. So I'm wondering, do you think life exists elsewhere?

Christopher E. Mason (00:49:39 --> 00:51:59)
The conditions for life, as far as we know it, seem to be relatively common. Almost every star probably has at least several planets. There seems to be a lot of those planets that are, you know, inhabitable zones, but at least of the ones we've discovered so far, maybe 10%, 5%, you know, a good number. And if there's billions and billions of stars, or if there's trillions, and each one of them has planets and it's some, you know, good percent inhabitable zone, so you could update the Drake equation to indicate that I think there's probably microbial life somewhere in the universe. Not that we know of, but just on the odds, it seems like raw materials are there in enough places in the universe.

Stars have been around long enough to make life, you know. And so I think microbial life, very likely. But if you look on our own planet, there was microbial life several billion years ago, but it took billions of years to reach a stage of complexity that lets us have this conversation.. And so you might be many planets where life just got going 1 billion years ago, right? And it's still in the early stages of building complexity.

So I would say, you know, to our knowledge, complex life is in only one planet in the whole universe. It's here so far. And microbial life, I think, probably, but we don't know, of course. But I just think it's also early in the universe. It's only been here 13.8 billion years, 13.7.

And, you know, a lot of stars took a few billion years to get formed. There was a time period there weren't enough heavy elements. So we've only had probably a good 9 or 10 billion years of a, you know, of a runway to start to build life. And so we have another, you know, several hundreds of billions or trillions ahead of us. Right.

So I think we've got a lot more time now. Somewhere at some point we will run out of stars, though. Actually, one weirdly depressing fact, or just depressing fact to me at least, is the majority of stars that ever will form in the universe have probably already formed. So we're probably past the 50% mark of all the stars that ever will exist in the, in the future of the universe, history and future, at least of this universe. So that means we don't have, you know, hundreds of billions of years to keep making new stars.

Dustin Grinnell (00:51:59 --> 00:52:02)
So unless we figure out a way to maybe engineer Exactly.

Christopher E. Mason (00:52:03 --> 00:52:07)
The birth of stars. Yeah, different kinds of nucleobases, different structures of matter.

Dustin Grinnell (00:52:07 --> 00:52:42)
Exactly. Yeah, that would then really open it up so that life is starting to make life itself. Speaking of that, I was curious, you know, you're obviously a very strong believer in engineering solutions. I'm wondering, is there an engineering challenge you think might be unsolvable? And one that comes to mind is potentially like reversing aging or stopping death altogether. So radical life extension comes to mind. You know, if we're thinking about being able to hibernate and resist radiation, I wonder what can we do on life extension?

Christopher E. Mason (00:52:42 --> 00:53:34)
We still are hitting a wall. And so I think to get past that point, you can think about, you know, reprogramming chromatin and epigenetics in cells, you know, maybe some more aggressive cellular therapies. But I— but we haven't tried a lot of them yet. But I think they may be needed to get to the stage where people want to live to be, say, 200 years. I'm personally fine for my 500-year plan.

I'll be dead for the vast majority of that plan. That was always the plan. So it's It's okay to, you know, know you're going to die, not fear you're going to die. And if I happen to be wrong in 30 years, they find some amazing way to keep me alive. Great.

Dustin Grinnell (00:53:34 --> 00:53:58)
But I'm going to plan with what is the very likely results from what we know so far. In your lifetime, in that approximately 80 years or so that we have, where do you hope humanity will be? And then if you want, looking 100 or even 500 years out, if all goes to plan, what does the human future look like to you?

Christopher E. Mason (00:53:58 --> 00:55:57)
Billions of people do not have, you know, enough to eat or enough food. So We have the luxury of having the ability to have this conversation and hypotheticals and dream of a future because we don't have to worry where our next meal is going to come from. So I think solving some of those short-term problems is still top of the list. But eventually we'd have people really have a sense of ownership and duty between generations and to each other and to help each other, which we don't have yet embedded in many cultures or really certainly not globally. So I think it's— I'd love to see that and I'd love to see more of the trials of these kinds of modifications in human systems where we're doing a lot of CRISPR therapies now for treating diseases, which is extraordinary, but perfecting that technology, making it so genome modification and genome synthesis is safe, effective, and routine is a world that we're getting a glimpse into, but I would love to see it become ubiquitous.

And we don't think anything now about using electricity, which is an awesome force of the universe. We use it everywhere all the time and don't think twice about it. So at some point, could genomics and genetic modifications and optimization become as ubiquitous? So you've got, you know, your cyanobacteria processing your waste in your house, making your food. You're protected from radiation.

If you get too much damage, you do a quick burst of an epigenetic modification. You can imagine futures like that. That would be, you know, I think wondrous and safe, and people would live longer, healthier lives and have plenty to eat. So, um, you know, I'm a technologist and a biologist, so of course I like biotechnology as one source of salvation, if you will. But it could come from robotics, AI, other tools.

Dustin Grinnell (00:55:57 --> 00:56:04)
So yeah, that's the future I'd love to see. Well, uh, we'll leave it at that. You know, it was a pleasure meeting you at Space Week.

Christopher E. Mason (00:56:04 --> 00:56:20)
Really, thanks so much for coming on and talking about your book, and I hope we stay in touch. Yeah, definitely. It was really great to meet you there, and thanks for this podcast. You got a lot of great material out there online, so very happy and honored to contribute to it. And I look forward to staying in touch. And if you're ever in New York City, uh, let me know.

Dustin Grinnell (00:56:20 --> 00:56:23)
I can swing on by the lab.

Dustin Grinnell (00:56:23 --> 00:56:24)
Will do.

Dustin Grinnell (00:56:24 --> 00:56:24)
Thank you.

Dustin Grinnell (00:56:24 --> 00:56:25)
Thanks.

Dustin Grinnell (00:56:25 --> 00:56:48)
Thanks for listening to this episode of Curiously. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Christopher E. Mason. If this episode challenged you or helped expand your perspective or satisfy your curiosity about the world, Please consider sharing it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. If you want to support Curiously, please consider leaving a review. They encourage people to listen and help attract great guests.

Dustin Grinnell (00:56:48 --> 00:56:51)
Thanks again for listening and stay tuned for more conversations with people I meet along the way.