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

Would that make you sad to die on Mars looking back at the planet you were born on? No, I think it would be actually in some ways maybe the best way to die knowing that you're in the first wave of people expanding the reach into the stars. It'd be an honor. The following is a conversation with Chris Mason, professor of genomics, physiology, and biohysics 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 Freedman 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. Mhm. How fundamental is awareness of death and extinction to the human condition? I think this is actually one of the most humanpecific 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 specieswide 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 dedicated 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. [gasps] It is true when you wrote it. It it it was really powerful to realize for me that we do contemplate our extinction and that that is a creative force. Mhm. So the at the individual level contemplating your own death is a creative force. Yes. Like I have a deadline. Yeah. Yes. But the contemplating the extinction of the whole species I suppose that stretches through human history. That's many of the sort of [sighs] uh subtext of religious ideas is that like if we screw this up, it's going to be over. for and revelation and 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 several hundred years and especially in the past few decades where we can see you know the sense of responsibility on 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. [laughter] Well, yeah, that's right. So we're like a bunch of ants um extinction aare 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 a good backup offsite backup solution. Why the word duty? It's an interesting word. Duty is something that usually puts people to sleep. I'll say this. So duty, you know, it's duty is bit like death. People don't often like to really think what wake up in the morning think what is what was my duty today? Most people, there are some people that think about it every day. People in active military service wake up, it's a very concrete sense of duty to country. [snorts] 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 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 a people think about duties for themselves, but there has never been a real overarching duty that we all feel as 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. the way you'd protect your family, the way you'd fight for a country, for example, to feel the same way towards the rarity and preciousness of life and feel that sense of duty towards particularly extinction aware life, which is just us so far. This ability that we have this awareness of not only our own our own frailty, which of course is often talked about and climate change and people think about pandemics, but other species that we sometimes have caused extinction, but very soon will be even deextinctifying species like the woolly mammoth. Colossal is a recent startup that's doing that on their advisory board and it's it might happen in three or four years. So it's 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 uh guidelines yet on how to do that but the 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 improperly. When we bring back the madmas, it might be uh you have to be careful bringing that back. It's 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. 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 it. Take it or leave it." They they think they're misenthropes. So, the book is on the one sense a call to misenthropes to hopefully shake them out of their slumber. But that some people What does the word miss mean? Oh, just people that uh dislike humanity. They're they're just again, well, just they're called nihilists, Donnie. That's a shout out for Bigglebos fans. They're like nothing matters. And why does any and they just apply it more particularly to humans. But there are endless reasons I think to cherish and celebrate what humans have done. At the same time, many things we've done awfully and genocide and and you know nuclear weapons testing on unsuspecting citizens of remote islands. There 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 [snorts] have already accomplished. interested really a sense of beauty I think is something that is uh you know you can't ask uh ants or cockroaches about their favorite paintings or or maybe if you could it would be very different from ours but in either case there's a unique perspective that 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 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 of the frailty of life that allows us to be so urgently creative create beauty create innovation 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. Yeah. Uh 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 gone out into space. Yep. [snorts] Which ants have been building the same structures for millions and millions of years with no real change. And so that that is the the key differentiator yet. Yet that's [laughter] right. We've got [clears throat] an experiment going right now and maybe it'll change. But well, yeah, we 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. [laughter] 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, 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 to seriously look at that and then to seriously look at like what happens when the sun runs out, [clears throat] 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 that 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 uh 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 to enjoy the moment to really live in the moment. You know that cuz that is truly where beauty exists is in the moment. But there is a longlasting 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 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 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 a hundred years left or some people say billions. Some people say as long as the universe lasts. But to the person who once said, it was a medical student applicant who said, I think we've only got 100 years left. And I was like, really? For all of humanity, everything will be gone in 100 years. And he said, yes. And I said, well, sweet Jesus, man, why go to med school? What? 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 he 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 death, that just becomes that's a an add 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 could collapse back in itself. And that heat death is more likely at this point where it just keeps expanding expanding. Everything gets too far away. But even in that case, I think if we had a fundamental knowledge of physics and spacetime 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 help us survive. Yeah. Yeah. And always have. Yeah. So, what is this though? The the Zarb bomb. Yeah, the hydrogen. Yeah. There's There's nothing more terrifying and somehow inspiring than watching the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. Mhm. Mhm. It's like humans are capable of this. They're capable of leveraging the power of nature to completely obliterate destroy everything and and to create propulsion. I mean, most of the Voyager spacecraft are nuclearpowered because it's still in many ways the most efficient way to get a tiny amount of fissible 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 nuclearpowered. 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? [snorts] What do you think? So the presumption that you've just mentioned is let's just focus on our thing for for well I I think we as far as we know there's no other sentient life out in the universe that we found yet and and I 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 haloilic organisms that can survive in extreme salts. There are cyrofiles that in extreme cold. There's, you know, basically organisms that can survive in really almost any possible environment. You can they 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 the what Enrio Fermy said is the why haven't we heard from anyone if there are these other life forms. I actually think the question is wrong to phrase it that way because the unit the earth has only been here for 4.5 billion years [snorts] 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 and humans only in 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 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 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 in a in 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 but more people are coming. One of the early attendees to the party. Yeah. Maybe the f as far as we know the first. But maybe we'll find in the local pocket of the the universe. Yeah. Um cuz the parties then expand and you it overflows. Right. I think and then there's a mosh pit and then you know you bump into the other galaxy. Uh I I think it's I think the question should be you 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 and then how do we help them? Um 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 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 interfere 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 bill millions and billions of years pass and we know the sun 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 Yeah. In terms of the effort of be humans becoming a multiplarious 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 uh versus option number two, really just focusing on setting up the party on our own engineering, our on our own um the the genome, the biology of humanity, the AI, [clears throat] collaborating with humans, just the all the engineering challenges and opportunities that we're um we're exploring. I'm I'm focused in my lab of course a lot on the engineering of genomes, the uh monitoring of astronauts during long missions. I you know reaching out to other alien we've been doing reach out to aliens since the first radio waves have been broadcast. So, we're doing some of it, but to do them real. You made it sound like your lab is mostly focused on biology, but you also reach out occasionally to aliens. Occasionally when they visit, they have they bring their whiskey and I we have a drink. But the [snorts] 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 Sean 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 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 and even space flight in general is it's too expensive. Shouldn't we solve poverty? Shouldn't we cure diseases? And the answer is always as it always has been is that you can walk and chew gum at the same time. you can pass the Civil Rights Act and go to the moon in the same decade. You can improve and and get rid of structural inequality while getting to uh 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 for example crisper was pure research for 25 years now it's a household word and and students are editing genomes in high school but it was just pure research on weird bacteria living actually in salt uh hypers saline uh lakes and rivers for decades and and then eventually became a massive therapeutic which has led to 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 um is one of the interesting things about that whole field is that it's a huge amount of data neuroscience too actually so you could discover computer science things like machine learning things or even data storage manipulation distributed compute things by 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, artist, um engineers, entrepreneurs, everybody. this somehow the that line between fear and beauty [laughter] cuz we're aliens are like perfectly merged basically. It's this cuz it's 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. Uh it doesn't have to be. You just said a half sentence presuming it's safe. That's [laughter] the fundamental question I'm trying to get at. So if you could Yes. presuming it's safe. So I think you know we have this uh this is the beginning of some planetary protection is happening now is we're going to send we bring rocks back from Mars in 2033 if all goes according to plan. But there's always a danger of what if you bring this back and what if it's alive? What if it will kill all of humanity? Or Michael Kraton wrote a book the Andromeda strand about this very idea. And it 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 going to 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 and then suddenly the first settlers on Mars are encountering a strange new fungus or something that's not even like a fungus because it might be a different cate of life 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 on this. Most of life on Earth is neither harmful nor beneficial to you. It's just there making its own way in the universe just trying to survive. It's when you know it's inside of you and replicating your cells and destroying your cells like a virus like 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 mo for example, most of the bacteria on 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 cuz we're talking so much trash about viruses, most viruses are don't bother humans. And they're fages. Almost all the vast majority of viruses are phages. There's this this the battle in the biology that is really dorky is that bacteria think that they're the most, you know, people 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. But then people who study phages, they say, "Well, there's 10 times more fages than the bacteria, which can attack the bacteria and destroy them as well." So [snorts] fage people think that they run the world. Uh but we need them both. Uh what do you think about viruses? All so cuz you 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 go 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 instead of autonomously uh 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 and I think we have the same definitional challenge there is that if it can continually propagate uh instructions for its own existence then it is a version of living. I think you know viruses don't get that uh 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. though. Um, like you said, at which point are 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. We didn't have to allow them. [sighs and gasps] Are they overall though exciting or terrifying to you as somebody who has studied viruses? Oh, 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 meat is meat is the fear in this metaphor. The sandwich. 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 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 I are useless but planning central 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 that's just a quick context for that. Craig Kundro who's a leader at NASA is headquarters now would always put that first slide up and I'm like hm this meeting 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. was against definitely both because he realized the transients of everything that you think of what what might survive almost everything that you're looking at will probably not be there in hundreds of years. Uh it will be it'll be very degraded or might be changed altered completely different moved. It is just and it's that trait though of humans to just sit there and project into the future easily you know really seamlessly with whatever you're doing 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 really like humans these sort of sensient 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. [snorts] Technically, we're actually still increasing it because we emit heat and we never have perfect capture of all energy, but we're 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 uh 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, but 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, wherever someone is listening right now, looking around, everything can and will change. And so, you 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 to think wait I I can affect this ch I I can prevent it or I can affect it or I can improve the change that may occur all all by itself say naturally u and so I think it is but is it that awareness again of kind of 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 over time it And I call it uh the inexorable march towards molecular oblivion which the students uh often find they kind of laugh at ah because on all the charts they're 22 years old but uh older people do not laugh as much of the the thought of molecular oblivion but we're all [snorts] 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 cuz it ultimately will uh I mean I suppose the wave will continue indefinitely but it'll be such a small impact it's almost indetectable and so how do I have that impact at all I on so many levels I get to experience this as as a human like um I recently hack had my cold storage uh hacked uh 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. And he 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 so 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 longlasting is perhaps I don't know it's it's it's complicated right cuz 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 people would build a building. Architects would say I put my my name on this building and there I'll have some sense of immortality but that's a it's a fleeting dream. It's not you can't reach immortality. Uh, and if you could, it would be resource, you know, taxing on everyone else if you if you really were. But I think it's it's okay. I mean, the book's 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 a 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 say I want to pass this on to the next generation. Again, the most obvious thing we do with this is just people have kids. But uh they don't think of this as a as an intergenerational responsibility. They think of as well I was at the bar one night and I met this hot girl and then things happen. Sometimes it's more planned than that. But the the there's no overarching sense of wait I could have something that three or four generations from now will that someone will receive this gift that was planned for them long before they were born or just dating. And I think we have that capacity and that 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 where you can say, you know, think of Maslo'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 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 interesting balance cuz like it seems that if you let the ego flare up a little bit, that's good for productivity. M 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 cuz it won't in 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 you yeah people many generations from now and that they said there were all these people who were looking after me before I was ever born. And 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 we 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. [gasps] [sighs] 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 cuz 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 feel like I can't I can't just a contradiction in terms. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. can see I mean for if you said Chris what's going to happen in a million years well I'll start to describe you know what happens to the you know 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 continents will 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 this is 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 and no one seems to care. You can just make another one next week. So too short is I think not uh necessarily as helpful. But 500 I actually when I was first working on the book and thinking about 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 or that I changed the number? or if I pick it up a thousand years from now or 100 and I kept trying to think of what are some time frames where really large scale changes have happened and so on and some sense you could argue that humans been mostly the same for about 3 or 4 thousand years and the best examples this you looked at some of the Homer's poems or the Greek tragedies uh and Edipus for example like humans are really almost ident like we're still petty and people you know have affairs and people do things they shouldn't and people it's it's saying all those things like it's bad. I know. It's just you 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 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 a clear part of the human condition. So in that sense some things are are really permanent. But I wanted to think of a 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 uh for that distance. And the book is kind of focused on the human story. So 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 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 it'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 uh if you're silicon based and you're in chips and you're an AI that's all virtual, but we reach 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 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 [snorts] 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 we'll 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 there'll definitely be a blending and blending's already happened there's prosthetic limbs there's cybernetic limbs there's you know neural link you know progress being made to blend biology and cybernetics and machines for 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 longer scale storage where you want something that has redundancy that's built in and it can store and can be put at really cold temperatures and survive even cosmic rays. So, I think it DNA might be the best uh 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 firsttime listeners coming. There's there's a person right now who's in in Brazil smoking a joint sitting on the beach and just wants to learn about DNA. So please Chris please you explain it to them. DNA the DXC ribboucleic 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 start in 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 that they basically it becomes its own manufacturer is is what is extraordinary. Imagine if you if you took a a one 2x4 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 9 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 ribboucleic acid. So it just has one other oxygen added to it versus DNA. But 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 then those RNA is 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. This all these built-in systems to keep your cells in check and working. [snorts] 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, it's about three billion letters of genetic code. So just three billion AC's, 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 actually not that that much information. And in that 3 billion letters are snippets of the genes, which are independently regulated autonomous instruction sets, if you will. these really active forms of of the 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, um you're good at running or jumping, whether you're good at math and all those kinds of things. There's a 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 studies 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 obvious inheritable traits, but it doesn't have one gene. It probably has at least 50 or 60 genes that contribute to height. So there's not like a gene for height. Uh 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 dzygotic 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, dzygotic twins or two zygot. So [snorts] in that case they're they share 50% of their DNA but they share the same womb and that and then what you can look at is they you know what's the difference between identical twins versus fraternal twins and and calculate that difference for any trait and that gives you an estimate of the heritability or what's called H squ. 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 the correlation there is zero because it should be it's a nurture trait. What religion you end up taking is not encoded in your DNA. Religion meaning Islam, Judaism, Christianity, but there could be aspects of religions that there a good good question. There is religiosity as a trait has been studied in twins 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 they looked at 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 you could a little [laughter] bit not a lot but you know most have some degree of and they're probably overlapping with other traits like your 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 want to do freebasing or I want to I don't know, do something else that's risky behavior. So, speaking of twin studies, uh Scott Kelly spent 340 consecutive days out in space. You analyzed his 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 space is is rough on the human body, but that the human body is 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 what are called cytoines or these inflammation markers where the body is clearly saying to itself, "Holy crap, I'm in space." and lers of fluid move to the upper torso and they get a puffy face what's called the the astronaut 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 is 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 US astronaut uh a few cosminauts have gone a little bit longer but there had never been a deep molecular analysis of what happens to 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 of stress on the body and changes spiked up to levels we'd 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. Uh he notoriously had, you know, broke out in a rash all over his body and really even the weight of clothing on his skin was too heavy. He created all this irritation cuz his body had not felt the weight of just a a simple t-shirt. It was it wasn't really had zero weight of course, right? So went 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 medical reasons. Some people do this, you know, recreationally. He was doing it for medical purposes. I do it for medical reason. That's right. All the time. I mean, people say prescription doctor told me. So he was allergic to earth. This is fascinating to think about actually how quickly did his body adapt there. So there it was about 3 to 4 days he got back to normal at least in terms of the inflammation. But what's extraordinary is that we measured a lot of other molecules, genes, structural changes, tissue, looked at his eyeballs, looked at his vascule. It took him even 6 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 a 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 oxalog guanazine is 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 6 months, that was still happening even 6 months later. How does how do you 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 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. Just call an epigenetic rearrangement. In that case, we could see is that a lot of these genes had been 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 eventually you'll adapt, but there there's almost a a lag time kind of like jet lag for the body, but jet leg for your cells to repair all the DNA. What was the most surprising thing that you found in that study? There are several surprises. One is just that he that the repair 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 telomeirs was one was really surprising. The the caps on 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. Telmir is just length is just 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 unsuppressed and also some of the mutations we found in his blood. He had less mutations in blood 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 cuz the number of subjects in the study is small. Right. Right. It's the it's notoriously one of the lowest powered studies in human history. Yes. But but but what you what you lack in subjects you can make up for in the number of sampling times. So we did you know basically 260 samples collected over the course of 3 years. So we really almost every few weeks had a full work up uh including in space. So that was the way we tried to make up for it but but we've tried in other model organisms in mice we've seen this. We've looked now in 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 jumps. Yeah, 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. 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 being even tried clinically. So the this idea of just a little bit of stress on the body or what's called hormmesis might prime you into active of cle 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 give [snorts] 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 been well described by NASA and many other astronauts and 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 little enzymes, little protein u 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 you activate them before we irdiate them to actually prepare them for the dose of radiation. And now that is what's called epigenetic crisper 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 with the DNA the genes are still there we're just changing how they get used and so you can actually preemptively activate a 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 a similar idea to this is being used to treat cell disease and betaththalmia is you act you can reactivate a gene that was dormant as a 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 Okay, sorry to interrupt. I think every time I ask this question, you have taught me [laughter] that there's always a third option. Say 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, you could 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 that 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 in astronauts but in the book I propose 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 crisper it out modify it. This has been already published and well documented but uh 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 betathalcemia. We all have hemoglobin in our blood that carries oxygen around and when you're an adult it's a different version. It's a different gene. You have one gene when you're a fetus called fet 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 fetto hemoglobin gene gets just turned off just goes away and you replace it with adult hemoglobin but if your gene for hemoglobin is bad as an adult that one of the therapies is 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 cickle cell and betathalcemia in this past year so it's this extraordinary idea of like well 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 workrelated purposes like if you're working in a in a dangerous mine or in a radio 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 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 described 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 acclamation, you could just do some quick epigenetic therapies and have a good time in the mountains, 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 an entire lifetime for 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 uh 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 on Mars? 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 these basically these small caverns which you could go in in theory and build a small habitat and and puff it up kind of like a blowing up a balloon and 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 significant amount of drilling. Yeah, that's the other advantage. Yeah, you can get to them cuz some of them are exposed. You can do a little bit of drilling and then see essentially this entire cavern protects you a little bit from the radiation cuz you have some soil above you basically which would be or 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 have 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 then 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 work on fermentation a lot of work on you know potentially prototic organisms the organisms that can make all of the 20 amino acids that you would need to eat. I describe a little bit in the book, what if we did a protottrophic 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 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. Uh although dogs can drink beer and get drunk, they don't need vitamin C. They they have no risk of scurvy because they can make the vitamin C all by themselves. So can other wet-nosed primates called strepsinis, but we are dry-nosed 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 gulo is still in our DNA. It's what's called a pseudo gene. It's just broken down. Like it's 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 old 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 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 in prim 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 as I do texture. I I realized that made me sound like I wasn't human, but but humans uh love food and and flavors and textures and smells, all all that all that is actually attenuated in flight. So, it's you'd want to not forget our humanity and sort of this this, you know, love of of all the benefits and wonder of food and cooking and smells. Well, speak for yourself cuz for me, I 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? Uh that 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 of Natural History in New York. He loves bed bugs. L S Orcin 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 they're a candidate all right what uh technical question what are the major challenges of sex in space asking for a and for reproduction purposes. So like uh when we're looking about survival of the human species across generations, yeah, do we need gravity essentially for sex in 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. for humans. NASA's official stance on this is that there has never been sex in space officially. I I think [laughter] 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 there 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 invitro 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 there have 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 and quotes people who have prosthetic limbs or cancer survivors like Haley Arseno who just went up on the inspiration for mission so she's been a great researcher and 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 that we're doing all the same molecular profile before, during, and after space flight. So there we now know that, you know, other people can go into space. So more and more regular Joe's and Janes 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 [laughter] tape. I think that's maybe 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 interactions with humans is fascinating. I mean the the current missions are very focused on science and very technical engineery things but there's still a human element that seeps in. And the more we travel out to space, the more the humans, the natural human drama, the love, the hate that emerges, it's all going to be right there. It's a Greek tragedy just in space, basically. I think it's going to be or a reality show. So, what about the colonization of other planets? If we 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. There's something called ESI is how close is the gravity, the temperature, the solar incidents 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 uh an ESI of about 7. 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 are in the habitable zone where there's liquid water that could be there. Start to get above 08 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. It does. So the Venus is going to get cooler and cooler. Um, okay. But what are the big challenges to you in uh 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 coloniz. So I think we there's even a social challenge like a lot of people um Daniel Wood actually studies this at MIT is we shouldn't even use the word colonize, 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 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 often murder, genocide. Like it's actually a pretty dark history if you think of of just all the colonization efforts. But I think most of it was done in a really dark area of humanity where there average life expectancy was more than half less than it was today. It was uh life was brutish and short as many of as Hobbs has 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 go there and and you would need commercialization you need efforts to do mining for example bring things back but it 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 a lake for example the first you know several hundred feet of a lake are all for public property and everything that you can own property but just not certain barriers so I think we 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'd 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 this beautiful image of all the known water on Mars that NASA posted about a year ago. And there's water everywhere. Not 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 selfgenerating um 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 populace, 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 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. That's not necessarily the only idea, but it's one that worked well so far. So, maybe the only way to truly build a colony in uh on Mars or a successful sort of human civilization on Mars is to get like China to get like 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 2 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, uh Jax has the Japanese space agency, and there's the US. So, now it it went from a just a twoperson race to, you know, a whole field at the, you know, the a whole field of runners, if you will, on the track trying to get to Mars first. And I think I mean this can be like anything. If you start to have settlements and construction projects and places to visit on Mars, I think the the true mark of of a 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 the this idea of innovating and competing will continue to drive, I think, humans as it always has. We 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. Uh 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. Um that's another interesting question. Uh, 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 their dialects change, even just going to the south in the United States, there's, 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 people with this big nasely accent, oh yeah, and people will just get or even Wisconsin. I'm from Wisconsin. People have this big nasly tone. Welcome to Wisconsin and then Minnesota. I wonder [snorts] 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 for the engineering challenges. Well, actually, I don't know. It could be the this has to do with your extreme microbiome is 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 of 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 a evolutionary selection for humans who can stare at a screen for 8 hours at a time or pipet 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, [snorts] we can we can get them we can train them out of that. we can get them to engage other humans. Uh not all of them but hopefully most of them. [snorts] Uh 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. They very likely will be a different religion. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a lot about this in his books. There's a new Martian religion that was created. So I think this idea has been discussed in in science fiction and 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 dramal 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 and make up something. Yeah, that's uh look for ways to draw meaning. Uh [clears throat] 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 cuz 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 cuz 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 explor exploration of Antarctica and going 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 the early settlers will be it'll be very different crew but once it's comfort once people are comfortable there I think they're going to I hope they'll draw more meaning because more planets should be more meaning I feel It's like u more hands is a better massage. I don't know if that's the best analogy here, but I think Aristotle said that. Yeah. [laughter] I should mention that your book has incredible quotes. It's great writing, but also just incredible quotes at the beginning of chapters that really Thanks. It's basically my favorite quotes. Like, well, I'm writing a book, I'm going to put my favorite quotes. Might as well put them 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. The 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 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 that 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 return back to normal even for a short three-day mission. I remember was chatting with with Jared and we're presenting the data to them actually just a few weeks ago kind of a briefing to the crew and because they went to 590 km they went basically several hundred kilometers higher than the space station or the Hubble you normally rest so more radiation you know the farther you get from earth there's more radiation he was worried you know did we get cooked was kind of his question for me in the briefing I said 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 in these new space suits that SpaceX is designing that'll be much nimler, not as much of a giant, you know, Dr. Octagon kind of uh space suit, but really um that like looks like just a nice space suit and they're going to 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 commercial spaceflight drivers like John Schauffner, Peggy Witson 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, uh semen, tears. I'll give you any bofluid." Uh, you know, and I I always I email them back and say, "Listen, every one of your cells is worthy of study." send send me, you know, so I I have this really kind of creepy geneticist email response of 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 they 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 4 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 [snorts] so this 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 interesting is we can see the part of what's driving inflammation is we can actually see macrofasages. 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, uh, 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, uh, changes in vision. Some people had, you know, other, uh, GI problems even, you know, even looking at sort of what happens to the gut and looking at the microbiome of the gut. 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 could maybe take to get rid of nausea or other ways we could 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 it's on Hawthorne at SpaceX headquarters, which if you can ever get a chance to do a tour is 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, uh, and including John Schoffner, 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 the Russian part of the space station apparently. So right now John Schoffner for example unless he completes this additional training all in Russian he's not allowed all in Russian otherwise to learn enough Russian to be you know just wow it's not just technical he also has to enough enough Russian and uh so so 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 like oh I can see it right there I can't float over to that that capsule uh but [snorts] technically he can't go so you know is there um a Chinese component 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 Loheed Martin. Of course, Axiom is is far ahead right now. They're probably going to be done first. But the the extraordinary thing is uh 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 good question. So may maybe for example when we get different NASA grants you apply for a grant you get it to the lab it goes you know 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 let me go back to that [snorts] every other grant I get from say the NIH or the NSF even Sometimes 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 those paperwork. 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 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 to the other scientist like we're doing like like the way scientists do really well which is like they compliment but it's a backhanded compliment like uh like you're doing really good job here and then you kind of imply that you're doing a much better job. That's the core of competition. You get jealous and then you 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 Elon quite a lot these days. What I tweeted was I'd like to do a podcast in space one day. Mhm. Mhm. And uh it was a silly thing cuz 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 there's no just even seeing what uh Axim is doing, what Inspiration 4 is doing. It's like regular civilians could start going up. So let me ask you this question. When do you think we saw Jeff Bezos go out into orbit? When do you think Elon goes up to space? So he his thinking about this is it's partially responsible until it's safe because he has such a uh 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'd probably go up by 20 26 I would say because the number of missions planned there'll be several missions per year through multiple space agencies and companies that are really making low earth orbit very routine by go up I think it might also for example the inspiration 4 mission just went up for 3 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 axi missions are a bit more complicated there's docking you're 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 4 and some of these what are called freef 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 3 2 3 years, but they're already been demonstrated to be safe. And then you're not trying to go for 10 or 20 days or 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 suborbital 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. [laughter] I'll I'll start pushing him on this. I'm quite quite serious. It's a fascinating kind of Axiom 2 still has room. You could go on that mission if you want to. So, I'll ask you about Axiom. Um what how strict are these? So this this seems surreal that civilians are traveling up. So [clears throat] how many how much bureaucracy is there 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, right? But how much, you know, there's sometimes bureaucracy with NSF and DoD 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? And so it's very important to put safety first, but it's like a dance. A little too much restrictions and bureaucracy can hamper the flourishing of science. A little too little of that can get some uh crazy scientists to start doing unethical experiments. Okay, that said, NASA and just spaceflight in general is sort of famously very uh very uh risk averse. Yeah. So, what's your sense currently about like even like doing a podcast, right? Podcast, you know, unless it's, you know, I think with mixed martial arts is a pretty safe activity, unless you're doing a the octagon version of your podcast should 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 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. H that's what's been extraordinary is that traditionally yes. I think most of the space agencies have been very by definition bureaucratic because they're coming from the government and but they've 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 [snorts] now we know it's pretty safe. We know there's physiological responses. 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 limited degree and how to use some of the equipment. But fundamentally, it's no longer a question of, you know, years and years of training and selection. This impossible odds task of becoming astronaut. It's frankly just a question of funds. Expensive plane ride. So, how much how much you mentioned Axiom? 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 they 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 of 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 but 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. Uh cuz 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, you know, it's you're looking at the ranges of, you know, it's 50 to $100 million 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 two years, that's a long time to just be in one spot, right? So, could you be doing some things where you're it's you can your time is valuable. So you can do experiments and people pay for those and that that defays the cost or you could build something or you could do podcasts and maybe you know fund raise on the podcast and so there's what 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 2 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. Uh it's not that bad. 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. No, 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. uh in the short term and the in the long term. Yeah. And you think about a lot of that cost is rocket fuel. A lot of is the ride. So it's I've been on calls where Axium's like, "Hey SpaceX, give us make it a little cheaper. We can make it cheaper on our end." But it's the cost that that is the rocket as the 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 Axium one mission that just went up? Yeah, it's a so the Axiom Space is a private space flight company that's building the the first private space station. They 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 will be expanded and then by 2028, the plan is it'll be completely uh detached and 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 beer up there, you can make your own brew your own 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 1 mission that just went up? Can you tell me what happened? Axiom 1 is the first private the first commercial crew to go to the space station. So, Inspiration 4 was the first uh commercial private crew to just go into space. They went into space and actually did an orbital mission uh for just about 3 days. But XM1 is the first, you know, again on 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 take some pictures. But it's a mission actually doing a lot of experiments. They're doing almost 80 different experiments. So it's a lot of it's very scienceheavy, which I love as a scientist, but it's the ability to show that you can fund raise and launch up a crew uh that's all privately funded and then go to the space station. It's four people. Yeah, four people. And the Axiom 2 will also likely be four people. The two that have been announced are John Schoffner and Peggy Witson. Peggy Witson's a already prior NASA astronaut who's been at many times, done 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 So they're doing the experiments too. Mhm. what what does it take to design an experiment and to run an 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 constraint is is what is 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? Cuz 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 a 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 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. It just means if the answer's 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 in that glove box. And so but you can propose almost anything. The biggest challenge is the weight. If it's a heavy, it's $10,000 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 the equipment used to analyze the materials. Yeah. One of the ones we worked on actually with Kate Rubin was putting the first DNA sequencer in space called the biomolelecular sequencer mission. Also with Aaron Burton and Sarah Caster Wallace. But there the 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 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 how they destroy destructive destructive fire and then vibration testing. Um it's kind of like just 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? vibration like just large shakers. So that's uh this actually is mostly to simulate launch. They have a lot of machinery at NASA and at SpaceX to do just make sure what does this thing completely fall apart if it has a high vibrational essentially force attached to it. So it's just kind of like a big shaker. Fire testing is just to simulate what would happen if there was a normal fire that something gets up to, you know, the fire temperatures several hundred degrees C and open fire or are we talking like you put in a toaster? No, it's more like heat or is it flames? It's flames and heat, but it's it's not like a kil or anything like that. It's not You don't want to know how does it burn in a kil. It's more is it flammable is 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 crystal? YouTube video of this. Oh, I you know, you guys, did you film any of this? Not 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 1 C. So, I will make videos of of that test. I would I would love to uh see that for if anything for my private collection. This is very exciting. And the destructor testing is just often it can be something as simple as as a hammer. It's really how does it shatter? You want to question is are there glass components and so so it's like office space that scene with with the fax machine. That's right. That's right. Yeah. To the damn It feels good to be a gangster soundtrack. Yeah. That's a great scene. That's so that's so exciting 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 we're staying in the realm of biology and and genetics. Yeah. For now, [snorts] but we we also want to do you know some of the experiments have been discussed in the lab have been and some that 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 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 could freeze them and bring them down and characterize them to see. But to answer that question, cuz 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'd 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 the sperm survives as you earlier said. Yes. And nobody cares about sperm apparently. Sperm we're doing several studies on autism risk for fathers and sperm and you know it's really easy to get sperm. I'll just tell you it's people say you're helping us here. That's right. I read that somewhere on Wikipedia asking for a friend. Um okay cool. Are you involved in Axium 1, Axium 2 experiments? like what what does is your lab directly or indirectly involved with in terms of experiment design? What are you excited about different experiments that are happening out there? Some of them we're 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? for the Axiom 1 for the inspiration 4 and Axiom 1 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 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 Axium 2 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 omocron or do I have a different virus?" And we're going to do some of the exact same work in flight, but we're having the astronauts do the extraction, the sequencing, and the analysis of of all the molecules. And so, one of a common occurrence is herpes is reactivated often in space flight, 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. is 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 stay in your body for decades and still kind of be hiding in the body. And in this case, we see it in spaceflight. Herpes comes back. So we want to figure out is it there first of all, 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 that 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 question. So 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 exciting Yeah. So if you can get that thing is a lot less than a million. [laughter] So we can definitely going to test it out for the uh in I guess in which order. No, you have to do separate for each one. You have to do vibration fire. Uh, note 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? Question and also the big question. So what's interesting about this for Axium and for these the commercial space flight 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 uh 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, but I think for private space flight, you could have the reason is I'm curious and that could just be like and I've got a private fund or I've got your own money and then you pay uh per kilogram 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 you and 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 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 it's tablets. There's laptops up there. There are, you know, the whole space station is is running and humming on electronics. 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, [snorts] it's it's loud. So, I think it is a very wellowered lab basically in flight. But it but it uh it want 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 Axium 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 discovery didn't start to happen until ' 89 and really early 90s for the real validated ones. So, you know, I'm I'm hoping over the next 500 years we go from thousands of possible habitable planets to hundreds of thousands or millions that, you know, especially with some of the recent telescopes launched we'll find them. 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 be Jesus on Titan. But if you can it's what? So what's Titan made up of? What is Titan? Oh, everybody loves Titan. Yeah, it is it's a favorite. It's this kind of eerie uh green hued moon moon um that's around Saturn that is uh to our knowledge, you know, this large it has like you know so cold it has these methane lakes where the methane normally is a gas but there actually be so cold it's like a lake of methane. You could go swimming in it potentially. There might be some degree of uh rocks or maybe mountains there but they might also be made of like frozen methane. So we no one's ever no person's obviously been there, but it is, you know, 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 uh a bit of an outpost. It might not be a luxurious retreat cuz 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 it is very possible that some microbial life could be there and and hang out waiting for us to to to dip our toes into the methane and 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 outpost 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 bring it's such a giant planet 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. Mars is top one. Then you get to pick Titan or Io. So ice, fire, and ice. The Robird Frost poem comes to mind. And then Europa is that Europe would be cool, too. And Insulatus, which is a big ocean. It might be there like a alien ocean that's under the might be even water ice that's there. Even liquid water potentially there under the surface. So that'd be a great candidate. The asteroids of Sirius would be good or Aeros or big enough you get a little bit of gravity that it' be interesting. You could, you have a 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? Well, are you just this, we're just listing vacation spots? Place? Yeah, vacation spots basically. 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 was 1967 was the first u large scale agreement between major international parties particularly the US and Russia but also many others to say that space should be a place for humanities to not have 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 an additional act in the '90s um the the lunar the lunar actually I'm blanking on the name of it but the 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 on 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 in 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. Yeah. Um 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 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 going to stay that way for humanity going I think [sighs] you know the trajectory is there. I think the the wararm mongering is is less tolerated by the international community. The you know it's more scrutinized. It still happens like you know right now there's 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 sometimes will be small military actions but I think the the you know and even there's an you know uh large military action across most of the country but not all of it actually right so it's I I think you 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 countryto 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, launch toward the second sun. That journey of saying we're going to somehow the solar system feels like home. Yeah. Earth is home but the solar system is home. It's our son. The sun is a source of of uh life. Yeah. And going towards the second sun leaving this home behind that's that's one hell of a journey. Yeah. So what does that journey look like? When when is 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 it could happen like antimatter 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 uh 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 with that as a backdrop, you could have people hibernate. talk about like maybe you need to hibernation 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 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 we have more in 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 age, you 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 the vanguard and hope of humanity. We're going towards a new sun 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 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 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. Yeah, 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 prison sounds so dark, but but just Yeah, just like prison is a is a [laughter] is 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 trip. We 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 the human mind somehow struggles against those constraints and that's how beauty is created. So um 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 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 This room was magnificent, right? It's just like, wow, you can speak so volumes. It's like you [clears throat] 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 alter reality virtual reality like cuz you know 30 years ago they sounded awful I think you'd be stuck in a spacecraft but now you could 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 could still downloads and so but eventually maybe the crew would start to make their own shows 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 a 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 2 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 chloroans? Chloroans is a description of how you can embed chloroplast 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 [snorts] don't do this, but I describe in the book in the far future, maybe 3 400 years from now, if we could work on the ways that animals and plants work together, you could embed chloroplast 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 plan it or something. But if they plan it, then their shadows would block your sun. So maybe you leave your sun skin out there and you could roll up your skin, go back inside after about 1 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. Mhm. 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 I or you could just lay outside longer. I want to think if you just need had 1 hour and how much game would you need? But if you just went out there for 4 hours, you need something that's smaller but you know thick of you know says of a half of a tennis court. So you could make could be like wings and you lay them out there and but but also if you that's if you needed 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 describe 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 in your skin. U but it's, you know, that's something I'm hoping would happen in 3 to 400 years, but it would be hard because you're taking a plant organal and putting it into an animal cell, which sounds weird, but we have mitochondria inside of us, which basically where our cells capture a bacteria and now it walks around with us all the time. So there's precedent for it in 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 them 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 are also very adaptable. Mhm. Mhm. 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 just just acknowledging that a lot of organisms have to die in evolution. [clears throat] Um can we use that for longterm space travel or uh colonization occupation? There's is there a good word for this? of uh of planets like to to to terraform the planet or No, to adjust the human body to the planet. Oh. Oh, there's not really a term for that yet. I guess to adapt to uh the new vacation spot. Yeah. I called it just uh directed evolution in the book is that you you you you guide the evolution towards what you want. In this case, sometimes you can engineer yourselves 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 where as 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 on 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 nonhuman cells like what the microbiomes? Yep. Uh, so we've seen that 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 this with other astronauts. You can see the tea cells in their body. They actually are responding to little peptides, the little the molecules of the bacteria there. They're the immune system is looking for specific bacteria. And then once it sees 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 him. So there's like long-term ecosystems up 20 years. They've been up there for 20 years. Yes. There's some like Chuck Norris type of bacteria up there, I'm sure. Uh you um you're part of the extreme microbiome project. Mhm. [clears throat] What does that involve and what kind of fun um fun organisms have you learned about? Have you gotten to explore? We have a it's a really fun project XMPP the extreme microbiome which is as it sounds like we look for really odd places like he 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 a candy pink lake in Australia called Lake Hillier which we just published a paper on this where why is it pink uh so it's actually Denelia selenas are 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 caratenoids. These like very 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 bacterium it becomes pink. So and it's not just pink it's like bubblegum pink the lake. And so we uh that that's just an odd it's a halo file meaning it grows in 30% salt and if you go below 10 15% salt it doesn't even grow. It actually kills it. Where's that? Oh wow. Yeah. There it is. Lillier. 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 licing and killing your cells on your foot. So it actually hurts to walk in because it's so salty. Uh so yeah. So but it won't kill it'll it listen you have to suffer for art. That's right. Great art requires suffering. 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. So he emailed us, one of the pilots, and he said, "Hey guys, I saw you publish this paper. It's not as pink as it used to be." And it was like a little bit less pink in the past few weeks. So it was just a little bit diluted. So we 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 it's like a Dr. Seuss book or something. It's like doesn't even hard to get to. Yeah, there's no road. You have you have to basically fly uh land nearby it 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've studied in the space station called asabacttor piti, which is a often found in human skin, but we've found hundreds of strains in the space that we've brought down and curated and then sequenced. uh and this is with uh Katsuri Venetan who's at Jet Propulsion Laboratory working with him and they have evolved so they're now they no longer look like any earthbased they don't look like they've now basically a new species. So actually we uh there's a 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 SP as life is always evolving and we can see it also in the space station an entirely new species born on the space station. Yeah, that's completely different. So we we found one species actually um that we named after a donor to to Cornell, someone who's donated funds to research. So, we named a different species of fungus after him, Nagania Tlchinski, cuz he's eager Tolchinsky. So, as a thank you for him donating to Cornell, we said, "We've named this fungus uh that we found on the space station for you." Was he uh grateful or did he stop funding all research? [laughter] Was very grateful. And then, and I told him, I said, "If you have like an ex-girlfriend, we could try and name like a you know, a genital fungus after her or something if you want." And he said he said, "Maybe." But [laughter] back to me. He stopped answering emails after that. 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 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 the just all the microorganisms 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 Turk Menistan where it's been on fire because of of oil that been set on fire decades ago and it's still burning. So we collected some samples from there and those were some sudamonus patito, 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 it is. The desert has been just on fire for decades apparently. So this is another place that it's just a lake of fire. Yeah. Yeah. And it's they set 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 uh full of fire and there's something alive there allegedly. And pseudomedas are known to be some of the most tough organisms. They actually can clean toxic waste from, you know, in years of super fun sites where there's so much waste that's been deposited. You'll find them there as well. Actually, there's a one place in the Guanas Canal. We have something it's called in New York City in Brooklyn and it [snorts] is a complete toxic waste dump that was where a lot of waste in the 1700s was dumped. And so the gu the gateway to hell um is what it's called. But the the the [laughter] that's the nickname for the lake. So the boy so the the Ganas Canal is also a place that has been fun to sequence and and see sud sudimenos species that can survive there. Basically pulling toxins from the environment. So it's as 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 but 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 social media. Okay. Um, beautiful. But you, um, just actually jump back to the interstellar travel. Mhm. Mhm. Assuming the technology of today. Yes. [sighs] 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 umformational type of thing? Is it biological like physiological making the body resilient um live longer um and resilient to the harsh conditions of space or is it the actual vehicle of uh transport which would be applied physics as you can probably guess I'll say all the above question [laughter] never but but to 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 a 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 I 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 term actually on that point uh just to linger on the AI front can you steel man the case that Hell 9000 from Space Odyssey was doing the right thing. So, you know, so for people who haven't seen 2001 Space Odyssey, Hell 9000 is uh 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 what he was programmed to do which was just to follow the mission but didn't have a sense of you think a broader duty you could I mean you 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. So maybe HAL 9000 had a long-term vision of what is good for the civilization back at home. Maybe a deonttogenic vision of what was the best duty uh for for the genetics. You could say what's deonttoenic? It's a word I made up in the book is like what is your genetic duty? It's like that when you think of my your DNA, right? What are you supposed to do with it? Which is kind of the the value of life. If Hal was siliconbased version of genetics, which is just his own maintenance of himself and self-s 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 somebody 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 uh but accommodation can always be made to your point with doctors. Like some 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 that's it's a false dichotomy. I think how didn't wasn't programmed to and didn't try to find a a third solution. Perhaps this like Steuart 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 the local optimum of the this is the mission like always be a little bit like hm not sure if this is the right thing and then you're forced to kind of contend with other humans with other entities on 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 programming doubt is that sounds complicated. That sounds like go wrong so many. It's like it 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 too headstrong. So So how would you improve HAL 9000? I think I I would include other cuz HAL is one program much like we do for humans. You you get feedback from other humans before you make a decision that affects all of them. So I think how could have gotten feedback from other AI systems that said well is this are there other options here and done it probably very quickly. Or you can 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 AIs to ask for a consensus almost like a democracy of the AI but since it's all programmed you could bring it all together and say there's a primary but only activates the parliament if you will for a decision when needed. Now I don't know how you program dramatically different AIs all in one system that are 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. 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 try to understand the other being. Now you think it's just a robot. We keep saying like it's just programmed to but you know what? When you talk to another human, it's just a bag of meat, you know, 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? 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 g case case you have to understand the other the machine without knowing how it was programmed because as a programmer even I mean this is very much true for the for for these Lego robots. I really make sure that everything is that's programmed um 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 Hal Hal was treated that way a little bit where you're like um yeah, like a servant as opposed to a friend, a companion, uh teammate, you know? Um cuz 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 advance in wormhole technology. Antimatter drives. Antimatter is notoriously uh missing for most of the universe. So we What is antimatter drive? Antimatter would be where you purify 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 complete atoms, it would be anti-atom. 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 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 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 that saying is something that is a century old or less than a century old over a uh multiple centuries that saying might might actually become 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 could 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 [sighs] human memories and consciousness into digital form. Yeah, this kind of blends the machine and physics with the biology developments. I think you know, there's a lot of great work being done in longevity. Um I have a one of my companies itself works on longevity. It's called longevity. And so I I'm working myself on ways to improve how we monitor health and wellness now and live longer, live better. Uh 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 live to 150 years. I think that's reasonable. But say humans are going to live to be two, three, four, 500 years. Or some people I meet people like this every week who say 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, that 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 it's okay to assume that you're going to die. And I assume know 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 living brain like in the the Curtsville 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' 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 clone like the 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 Um, how would I if I do another copy of me? Mhm. How would I defend uh why I matter as a human being? And I don't think I can cuz that clone it's just fine. It's a 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 [laughter] they'd be like and some they'll be surprised like oh you're like you're [laughter] 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 and know I don't want to say perfect loan because I think perfect loan is very difficult engineering wise. I mean like a pretty crappy copy would still be okay for 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 in the digital space especially with the metaverse. Yeah. um 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 is at least in the in the virtual reality in the digital representation of who you are and then you have to really contend with 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 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 um unique or important, but the sort of the ideas that those bodies play with. I mean that sounds crazy. No, it's it's abstract but very relevant. Derek Parie wrote this great book called reasons and persons about how you really define an individual is not just your own thoughts and your own selfreflection but we're almost he argues more defined by how other people have se like if you walked out into the world and say suddenly nobody knew who you were recognized you'd be in some regards deceased really if no one if everyone just suddenly had massive amnesia and you just did no one knew who you are and never remembered no memory of anything you'd ever done together you'd be very alone you'd be basically you know starting from scratch like as if you've just been born basically. So, and also he writes 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. Now, not completely, but they're a key component of how you view yourself, how others view what you are in the world. And you know, he actually goes so far to say that they're 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 to you the same way. Is this memory of what you are, that is like an entity that's defined you even if all of your, you know, there's there's even movies like uh Trading Spaces about this with Eddie Murphy or like the ideas of people who can swap bodies. 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 is not just you, but also how you're 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 uness that can be experienced by other humans. Like if I could be doing five podcasts right now at the same time, then in theory, but I'd have to have some way to transmit the memory of each 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 as 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 that 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 Grisp, 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. We want to maximize is the clones of Chris that can uh get a lot of likes on Facebook. Okay. Uh on 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. Genomics because I I I was seeing this interspersed because you're such a biology uh I suppose computational biology person. Uh but what about the are you working on age of prediction? 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 I think it's 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 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 uh 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's it 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 one people thought about was uh during the 2012 election and 2016 election especially, uh we were seeing these really big differences of how Facebook was monitoring feeds. And so prediction is not just better medicine or and 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 answer seems to be yes for a good amount of the populace in 2016 in the US. So I think we're seeing more and more 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 uh or 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 you think, oh, 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 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 notoriously was made by IBM to try and replace doctors. I actually I love IBM so much. I was in the room when we got a tour of Watson for the first time with the dean of our medical school and these programmers came out and they said listen here's this example of a patient and watch Watson diagnose the patient and and recommend the right treatment and then at one point in the conversation remember this is a room of uh I'm a PhD 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 cuz everyone's like no you want to help the doctors but 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 I I just mentioned I think the AI tools already do a better job and we've only really been doing this for about 5 years right so you imagine another 5 years of optimization and data they're going to take over right so and they should because staring and squinting at screens for hours on a day is not the best use of human ingenuity so I think uh 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 I have this debate all the time about autonomous driving there. It's a lot more difficult than people realize. You're an expert or you focus a lot on that for your research, right? The I'm an expert in nothing [laughter] except in not being an expert, I think. [laughter] Um or asking stupid questions where the answer is both. Okay. [laughter] Um but there is some ingenuity that's hard to kind of encapsulate that is human if we're a doctor. the decision-m 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 suboptimal answer in the long term is [snorts] 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 one 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. Uh again, it's not my opinion. That's just an empirical fact of the state of genetics research knowledge accretion of humanity's 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 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? And if you don't have anything that keeps you up at night, sometimes go find something that keeps you up at night cuz that that is kind of this sometimes I feel like if I'm I get woken up by the someone on the inside of my skull who's knocking trying to get out. is 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 a lot of times as simple as how do we engineer cells to survive more radiation? But what I I read a paper and then it came back to me a week later as oh 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 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 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 10 years, right? Or you might 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, be 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. cuz um once you find that thing and you hear it, that little voice in your head, there's still Instagram and Tik Tok and video games and other exciting sort of dopamine rushes that can like pull you away 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 longerlasting. And I I think you have to silence everything else to let that sort of flame become a fire. Um, so it's 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. Ads everywhere. But like we have to be conscious of that. I think a lot of that is full of fun and is awesome. I think Tik Tok and Instagram that's full of fun. Amazing. Yeah. And creativity like leads to people making amazing videos or even doing people my daughter loves Tik Tok and you know people who do makeup art on Tik Tok of things that are mind-blowing. You think like they they made that video just to put on Tik Tok and practice their art and share it with the world. It's fabulous. But but then if my daughter watches Tik Tok 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 cuz but I mean when I was a kid I remember 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 HalfLife, like 12 hours straight. Like, what was I? So, when at one point I built a new computer, I just didn't install some of the games I had them for. I was like, I'm just going to not install them because otherwise I'll play them for too long. Yeah. I I would love to [laughter] getting props from the team. Uh, I would love to, uh, lay out all the things I've ever done in my life to myself cuz 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 was just, you know, but I feel like I was problem I 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 like Final Fantasy things were things you 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 not 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 of 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 variets variety to 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 [laughter] or [snorts] dancing. Well, New York City is a great place for this. There's there's sunrise, rooftop dancing. We got a party that does this. And that's a thing. It's a thing. So, you go there, uh, I have 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 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're going, but you can, it's good to squeeze in some weird crazy sunrise, rooftop dancing or things like that when you can. if we can if we may to uh to some difficult dark places. I'll bring a flashlight. [laughter] Maybe something um find something that can warm your soul or inspires others. Is there a dark periods, dark times in your life that you had to overcome? Yeah, like many people uh had friends I've lost. said friend when I was younger who committed suicide and that was actually um I remember being so struck of I couldn't understand it. I didn't uh understand mental illness at the time. I was very young. I was only think 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 tell this to my wife is that you know like if it looks like I hung myself go find my killer because I wouldn't ever do it. 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 u sometimes you know euthanasia it is a as an actual exit. But I 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 I actually um was never never too dark of a childhood or of a dark place. I mean, the 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 and 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 Nuda wrote about this and Khalil Gabbron 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 it's just a giant empty cavern full of like blood and tears and pain. But then yeah, it comes later I'd say. Uh there is an element to life where this two shall pass. Yeah. So any moment um of sorrow or joy, it's it's going to be over and like uh treasure it no matter what. I mean I do definitely think about losing love. That's like a celebration of love in in and even any living I think is better. That's why just adamantly I don't think I'd ever really commit suicide is because anything I take is better than than nothing. Like so the worst case scenario say there's no heaven, there's no hell, that'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 sad. I even enjoy sadness which sounds like an oxymoron but I sometimes even long for a good sadness like a you know 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 do that or something. [snorts] Uh I actually had a conversation offline with uh Rick Rubin. he's a music producer about this and he he told me um he has a way of speaking that's all like sagelike and he says be careful that you um spend some time appreciating that sadness but don't become addicted to it 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. 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, but you um but just witnessing suicide made you appreciate life more. Yeah. Just an appreciation of death is actually an appreciation of life at the same time. Are you uh afraid of your death? No, you think about it. But I think it's it's like being a afraid of the sunrise. It's it's doesn't make sense. So you're you're part of this like fabric that is humanity. Then you just think generationally. Yeah. I think I want to do as much as I can. Like I'll I feel I would die. I I feel like I've lived a full life already. I actually believe that since age 17 onward. I feel like even then I mean then the bar was low. Oh, I feel like well I had had at least sex once. I had had good friends. What else is there [laughter] right at that age? But then I had also uh really read a lot of philosophy, had traveled a bit, felt like I had started to 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 at from that day forward. That I had gotten at least enough of life to feel like that 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 uh you know some of that might may or may not have been drugreated 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 it's so fleeting and so any I know I would die 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 but the multiples um and and professionally accomplished things like actually do some of the genetic dreams I had when I was 16 or 17. I'm now 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 have done and you're mentoring people. to the next generation. Yeah. Also patients. Yeah. And helping patients live longer and seeing the hope in their eyes when they went from a even my own grandfather went from a two-month diagnos diagnosis of of living from metastatic cancer to living for more than 2 years eventually succumb to it. But knowing can use the tools of predictive medicine to save people. Um, you and and so now, you know, looking out ahead, uh, I'd feel like it's I would die very happy if I saw boots on the red planet and and people there. And 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 don't have a plan for a mission like that. It's not going to happen." And so uh don't you know be just persevere as old in the old 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 early early so the first actually cuz 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. Uh but John Charles who's the director of the human re research program said no 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 it was the first time I you know it's like it's like saying to someone at listen I'll buy a house for you I just have this I'll buy and they're like uh no no thanks cuz 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 had the solicitation then he reached out and said oh actually I think we've got 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 to me when someone says no not right now I'll be like okay just I'll come back in a year no just means no for now and so if [laughter] if I think it's sometimes no means you have a crappy idea that is true and I do have crappy ideas and so does everybody but if I really believe in it I just say okay I'll 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 [clears throat] 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 uh it may be that one-way trip if they cuz 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 will have a lot of cool stuff to do there. Yeah. At least on the surface, you'll be able to to sell yourself well, right? Um, resilience, experience, motivation. Would that make you sad to die on Mars? No. Looking back at the planet you were born on? No. I think it would be actually in some ways maybe the best way to die knowing that you're in the first wave of people expanding to reach into 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 uh 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 I think yeah to me the the meaning of life is for life to in its simplest form is to be able to survive but to 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 life, 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 imagine today. And that would make you sad if we're replaced by the kinder uh the kinder smarter AI. Nope. I think about that in the book a bit 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're like to hell with everyone. We're going to 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 is I think is pretty. But technically it'd be alive. So I you know philosophically could I object? Uh it's borderline. Yeah. But romantically no. Romantic. They need to carry the duty. There's some Yes. Yes. There's a bit of a romance to the philosophy 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 you know get them out sauté them make them have flavor uh yeah create something delicious while 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 from Mars. At least space. I think space should be coming. Space 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 with some words from Stannislav 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.