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

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

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Chris Mason. You wrote a book called "The Next 500 Years, Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds," and you dedicated to, quote, "To all humans and any extinction-aware sentience." How fundamental is awareness of death and extinction to the human condition?

- I think this is actually one of the most human-specific traits and features that we have. It's actually maybe one of the few things that only we have and no one else has. So it sounds scary. Sounds like what people often don't like to think about their death, except now and again, or at funerals, or to recognize their mortality.

But if you do it at a species-wide level, it's something that is actually an exemplary, human-specific trait that you're exhibiting. You think about something that is the loss of not just your life or your family or everyone you see, but everyone like you. And that is, I dedicated it because I think we might not be the last sentience to have this awareness.

I'm actually hoping we'll just be the first. But as far as we know, we're the only. And I think this is the, part of the moral thrust for the book is that we're the only ones that have this awareness. That gives us a duty that only we can exercise so far.

- So we definitely contemplate our own mortality at the individual level. It is true. When you wrote it, it was really powerful to realize for me that we do contemplate our extinction. And that is a creative force. So at the individual level, contemplating your own death is a creative force.

Like I have a deadline. But contemplating the extinction of the whole species, I suppose that stretches through human history. That's many of the sort of subtext of religious ideas is that like, if we screw this up, it's gonna be over. And Revelation and every religious text has some view of either the birth or the death of the world as they know it.

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

So when we think about, like say, terraforming Mars, that would just be the second planet we've engineered at a planetary scale. We're already doing it for this one, just not that well. - Well, yeah, that's right. So we're like a bunch of ants, extinction-aware sentience ants that are busy trying to terraform this planet to make it habitable so it can flourish.

And then you say that it's our duty to expand beyond Earth, to expand to other planets. To find a good backup, off-site backup solution. Why the word duty? It's an interesting word. - Duty is something that usually puts people to sleep, I'll say this. So duty, duty is a bit like death.

People don't often like to really think, wake up in the morning and think, what is my duty today? Most people, there are some people that think about it every day. People in active military service wake up, it's a very concrete sense of duty to country. Sometimes you can think about it though in terms of family.

You feel a duty towards your spouse, your kids, your parents. You feel a real duty to them because you want them to flourish and to be safe. So we do have this sense of duty, but you don't, very much like death, you don't think about it actively. Usually, it's something that just becomes embedded in your day-to-day existence.

But I think about duty because this is, people think about duties for themselves, but there has never been a real overarching duty that we all feel as a species for each other and for generations that haven't yet been born. And I think I want people to have a sense of the same love and compassion and fighting even to the tooth and nail, whether the way you protect your family, the way you'd fight for a country, for example, to feel the same way towards the rarity and preciousness of life and feel that sense of duty towards, particularly extinction-aware life, which is just us so far.

This ability that we have this awareness of not only our own frailty, which of course is often talked about, and climate change and people think about pandemics, but other species that we sometimes cause extinction, but very soon will be even de-extinctifying species like the woolly mammoth, colossals, a recent startup that's doing that, I'm on their advisory board, and it might happen in three or four years.

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

And so there are no real guidelines yet on how to do that, but the technology now exists, which is pretty extraordinary. - Yeah, I've just been working on backup and restoring databases quite a bit recently, and you can do quite a lot of damage when you restore improperly. When we bring back the mammoths, it might be, you have to be careful bringing that back.

The best of science, the best of engineering, is both dangerous and exciting, and that's why you have to have the best people, but also the most morally grounded people pushing us forward. But on the point of duty, there's a kind of sense that there's something special to humanity, to human beings that we want to preserve.

And if that little flame, whatever that is, dies, that will be a real shame for the universe. What is that? What is special about human beings? What is special about the human condition that we want to preserve? Why do we matter? - There are some people who think we don't.

There are some people who say, "Well, humans, take it or leave it. "They think they're misanthropes." So the book is, in the one sense, a call to misanthropes to hopefully shake them out of their slumber. But there's some people-- - What does the word misanthrope mean? - Just people that dislike humanity.

They're just, again, they're all just-- - They're called nihilists, Donny. That's a shout out for Bigelow fans. (both laughing) - Nothing matters. And why does any, and they just apply it more particularly to humans. But there are endless reasons, I think, to cherish and celebrate what humans have done.

At the same time, many things we've done awfully, and genocide, and nuclear weapons testing on unsuspecting citizens of remote islands. There are definitely things we've done bad. But the poetry, the music, the engineering feats, the getting to the moon and eventually, and already rovers on Mars, these extraordinary feats that humans have already accomplished, interest to really a sense of beauty, I think is something that is, you can't ask ants or cockroaches about their favorite paintings.

Or maybe if you could, it would be very different from ours. But in either case, there's a unique perspective that we carry. And I think, so that's something, even just the age old question in biology, I'm a geneticist, so this comes up a lot of what makes humans unique?

And so, is it bipedalism? Is it our intelligence? Is it tool making? Is it language? All those things I just listed, other species have some degree of those traits. So it's a question of degree, not of type of trait that defines humans a little bit. But I think for the extinction awareness, that is a uniquely human trait.

That is, to our knowledge, no other species, or entity, or AI, or sentience that carries that awareness of the frailty of life, of our own life, but all life. - Maybe it is that awareness of the frailty of life that allows us to be so urgently creative. Create beauty, create innovation.

It just seems like if you just measure, humans are able to create some sort of subjectively beautiful things. And I see science that way. I see engineering that way. And ants are less efficient at that. They also create beautiful things. But less aggressively, less innovation, less building, like standing on the shoulders of giants, building on top of each other over and over and over, where you're getting these hierarchical systems, where you create on greater levels of abstraction.

Then you use ideas to communicate those ideas, and you share those ideas, and all of a sudden you have the rockets going on into space. - Which ants have been building the same structures for millions and millions of years with no real change. And so that is the key differentiator.

- Yet. - Yet. - That's right. We've got an experiment going right now, and maybe it'll change. - Well, yeah, we will bring up some extreme organisms. Another thing you're 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 of the universe.

Is something worth fighting against? (laughing) - Yes. - That's also an engineering problem. - Yes. - You kind of, I mean, you seriously look at the next 500 years, and that's such a beautiful thing. Seriously, we'll talk about the uncertainty involved with that, and all the different trajectories, but to seriously look at that, and then to seriously look at what happens when the sun runs out, what happens when the universe comes to an end.

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

You know, we kind of are building an intuition, and data, and models of the way the universe is, the way it started, the way it's going to end. So our best model of the end, let's start thinking about how that could be prevented, how that could be avoided, how that could be channeled, and misdirected, and you can pivot it somehow.

That's really inspiring, that's really powerful. I never really thought about it. Eventually, all things end. And that was the kind of melancholic notion behind all of it. None of this matters, in a way. To me, that's also inspiring to enjoy the moment, to really live in the moment, 'cause that is truly where beauty exists, is in the moment.

But there is a long-lasting aspect to beauty that is part of the engineering ethic, which is like, tell me what the problem is, and we're gonna solve it. - Solve it, yeah. - So what do you think about that, the long scale, beyond 500 years? Do humans have a chance?

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

And the answers are shockingly wide-ranging. Some people say, I think we've only got 100 years left, or some people say billions, some people say as long as the universe lasts. But 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? Why not go sell bananas on the beach? And then he said, I really wanna make the last few 100 years count really matter.

And I said, oh, well, that's actually kind of, sort of hopeful in a really dark way. But I think we've never been better situated to actually last for the long term. Even though we've also never been at the greater risk of being able to destroy ourselves, ever since really the first nuclear test, when they, Tony Orbe has a great book about this called "The Precipice," where the precipice for humanity is at 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 error, but they tested the bomb anyway. But it's an extraordinary place as a species to think, we now have something in our hands that may destroy the Earth and possibly a chain reaction that destroys the whole universe. Let's try it anyway, as a stage that we're at as a species.

- But with that power comes an ability to get to other planets to survive long term. And when you think about the heat death, that just becomes, that's an ad infinitum question. If you keep thinking, well, we survive, we go to the next sun, and then you go to the next sun, eventually the question will be, well, if you just keep doing that forever, at some point the universe either continues to expand or it could collapse back in itself.

And the heat death is more likely at this point where it just keeps expanding and expanding, everything gets too far away. But even in that case, I think if we had a fundamental knowledge of physics and space-time that you could try and restructure it quite literally the shape of the universe to prevent it, I think we would, I think we would wanna survive.

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

- Yeah, yeah, and always have, yeah. - So what is this though, the Tsar Bomb, yeah, the hydrogen. Yeah, there's nothing more terrifying and somehow inspiring than watching the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. It's like humans are capable of this. They're capable of leveraging the power of nature.

- To completely obliterate-- - Destroy everything. - And to create propulsion. I mean, most of the Voyager spacecraft are nuclear-powered because it's still in many ways the most efficient way to get a tiny amount of fissile material and make power out of it. So they're still slowly drifting, they're past the heliosphere, they're now into interstellar space and they're nuclear-powered.

So it's like any tool or technology. It's a tool or a weapon depending on how you hold it. - Are we alone in the universe, Chris Mason? What do you think? So the presumption that you've just mentioned is let's just focus on our thing. - Yeah, for now. Well, I think we, as far as we know, there's no other sentient life out in the universe that we've found yet.

And I think there's probably bacterial life out there just because we found it everywhere we've looked on Earth. It is, and there's, you know, halophilic organisms that can survive in extreme salts. There are cyclophiles that in extreme cold. There's basically organisms that can survive in really almost any possible environment that can adapt and find a way to live.

But as far as we know, we're the only sentient ones. And I think this is the famous, the Drake equation, or how many, where is everyone, is what Enrico Fermi said, is why haven't we heard from anyone if there are these other life forms? I actually think the question is wrong to phrase it that way because the Earth has only been here for 4.5 billion years.

And life may be only for a few billion of those years. Complex life only for several hundred years, hundred million years of life we've actually had. And humans, only in the past few million years since our last common ancestor. So it's not that much time. But even further back, the universe hasn't had that much time itself to cool and create atoms and have them spread around the universe.

So the current estimate's 13.8 billion years of just the whole universe. But it's been 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 still 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 a galactic and universal timeframe. You needed billions of years for the elements to be created and then distributed. And we're only really in the, I think the last few billion years where I think even life could have been made.

So I think the question of where is everyone is the wrong question. I think the question is, I think we are the first ones at the party. Let's set up the liquor, let's set up the food. I just think we're the first ones at the party of life, but more people are coming.

- One of the early attendees to the party. - Yeah, maybe the first, as far as we know, the first. But maybe we'll find some-- - In the local pocket of the universe. - Yeah. - 'Cause the parties then expand and it overflows. - Yeah, that's right. And then there's a mosh pit and then you bump into the other galaxy.

I think the question should be, when else is everyone getting here instead of where is everyone? I think we've just started on the genesis of life in the universe. - Yeah, so not where you have they or not more about when and who and how do we set up the party.

- Right, and then how do we help them? I think it's an interesting other moral question is do we, a lot of Star Trek episodes, the prime directive is you do not interfere with another planet if you could pass by a planet. I think it's time to also revisit that because what if you go by a planet and we think that with, as far as we can tell, with enough certainty that they would never be able to leave their planet and then the sun eventually would engulf that planet, wherever that planet might be in some solar system.

But if we had a way to help them, their culture, their science, their technology, everything about a different species to survive, would we not interfere? I think that would actually be wrong to say, well, we can save this life here and we decide not to. We decide after millions and billions of years pass and we know the sun will engulf that planet.

Like what will happen with our planet? We don't interfere. That's watching a train hit someone on the tracks and not moving the train. - In terms of the effort of humans becoming a multi-planetary species, in terms of priorities, how much would you allocate to trying to make contact with aliens and getting their help?

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

- I'm focused in my lab, of course, a lot on the engineering of genomes, the monitoring of astronauts during long missions. Reaching out to other aliens, we've been doing reach out to aliens since the first radio wave's been broadcast, so we're doing some of it, but to do a real-- - You made it sound like your lab is mostly focused on biology, but you also reach out occasionally to aliens.

- Sure, sure, occasionally. When they visit, they bring their whiskey and we have a drink. But I think we can do, we've been broadcasting into space for, at this point, almost a century, getting close to, but it's not been structured. So I think it's very cheap and easy to send out structured messages, like what Carl Sagan wrote about in "Contact," doing prime numbers and sending those out to indicate intelligence.

So there's things we can do that I think are very cheap and very easy, so we should do some of that. We can walk in, chew gum at the same time. This is one of the biggest critiques people often say of space research, and even space flight in general, is it's too expensive, shouldn't we solve poverty, shouldn't we cure diseases?

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

So I think we can do both. - Yeah, and they kinda help each other. There's sometimes criticism of ridiculous science, like studying penguins or something, or studying the patterns of birds or fish and so on. - Some congressman stands up and says, "This is a waste of taxpayer dollars," and then someone says, "Oh, but we..." And for example, CRISPR was pure research for 25 years.

Now it's a household word, and students are editing genomes in high school. But it was just pure research on weird bacteria living actually in salt, hypersaline lakes and rivers for decades, 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 that have nothing to do with the actual research, like oceanography 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 forcing yourself to get something done on the oceanography side. That's how you invent the internet and all those kinds of things. So to me, aliens, looking for aliens out there in the universe is a motivator that just inspires, inspires everybody, young people, old people, scientists, artists, engineers, entrepreneurs, everybody.

Somehow that line between fear and beauty. 'Cause we're-- - Aliens are like perfectly merged, basically. - 'Cause 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 wanna make a lotion out of it. I think it'd be great if it's alien life, assuming it's safe, but I'm very excited.

It doesn't have to be a lotion. - You just said a half sentence, assuming it's safe. That's the fundamental question I'm trying to get at. - If you could, yeah, presuming it's safe. So I think, you know, we have this, this beginning of some planetary protection is happening now, is we're gonna send, we're bringing rocks back from Mars in 2033, if all goes according to plan.

But there's always a danger. What if you bring this back? What if it's alive? What if it will kill all of humanity? Or Michael Crichton wrote a book, "The Andromeda Strain," about this very idea. And it could, but it hopefully won't. And the only way you can really gauge that is the same way we do with any infectious agent here on Earth, right?

It's a new pathogen, a new organism. You do it slowly, carefully. You often do it with levels of containment. So, you know, and it's gonna be, probably have to be where some pioneers go and would be, for example, on Mars. There might be other organisms there that only get activated once there's an ambient temperature and more humidity, and then suddenly, the first settlers on Mars are encountering a strange new fungus or something that's not even like a fungus, 'cause it might be a different clade of life, different branch of life.

And it could be very dangerous, or it could be very inert. I mean, most of life on Earth is not really dangerous or harmful. Let me go back, I'll get on this. Most of life on Earth is neither harmful nor beneficial to you. It's just, they're making its own way in the universe, just trying to survive.

It's when, you know, it's inside of you and replicating in yourselves and destroying yourselves like a virus, like COVID, DexRCV2, that it becomes a big problem, of course. But it's, you know, just doesn't really have agency. It's just trying to get by. And so, for example, most of the bacteria on the table on your skin in the subway are pretty inert.

They're just, you know, people hanging around for the ride. - And actually, just 'cause we're talking so much trash about viruses, most viruses are, don't bother humans. - Yeah, they're phages. Almost all, the vast majority of viruses are phages. There's this battle in biology that is really dorky, is that bacteria think that they're the most, you know, people who study bacteria think the bacteria are the most important, 'cause there's trillions and trillions of them.

They run a lot of our own biology in our body. But then people who study phages, they say, well, there's 10 times more phages than the bacteria, which can attack the bacteria and destroy them as well. So phage people think that they run the world. But we need 'em both.

- What do you think about viruses? So, 'cause you said alien organisms. Wouldn't we encounter something like bacteria, something like viruses, as the first alien life form? Are they, first of all, are viruses alive or not? - So, the book definition, if you pick up a biology textbook, they'd say, technically, no, because they don't have the ability to self-replicate independently.

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

And I think we have the same definitional challenge there, is that if it can continually propagate instructions for its own existence, then it is a version of living. I think viruses don't get that category because they can't do it on their own. But they are a version of life, I'd say, but probably not alive.

- Well, they are expressing themselves and doing so, on occasion, quite powerfully in human civilization. So, like you said, at which point are AI systems allowed to say? - We're life, we are-- - Allowed. Humans must allow them. And viruses didn't ask for permission to express themselves to humans, they just kinda did.

We didn't have to allow them. Are they, overall, though, exciting or terrifying to you, as somebody who has studied viruses? - Well, whenever given two options, there's always two more. You can do both or neither. So, here, I'll say they're both 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 meat versus cheese.

There's a lot more cheese of excitement. - And meat is the fear, apparently, in this metaphor, apparently. - In this 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 do this almost every day, somewhere, when I'm sitting in a given room. I will, well, a quick comment about that quote, actually, for all the NASA planning meetings for the twin study and other missions, that was often the quote that goes put up on the wall before we sit down for the day to plan the mission.

It was that quote, which I-- - Plans are useless. - But planning is essential, which I thought was hilarious for an 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 quote.

Craig Kundro, who's a leader at NASA's headquarters now, would always put that first slide up, and I'm like, hmm, this meeting's either gonna go really well or really bad. I don't know what's about to happen. But it's an inspiring quote because it's very true. In any case, the Entropy Goggles is a thought experiment I detail in my book, which is if you just sit in a room, any room, wherever you are, 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, again, it's definitely both, because you realize the transience of everything.

You think of what might survive. Almost everything that you're looking at will probably not be there in hundreds of years. It will be at the very least degraded, or it might be changed, altered, completely different, moved. That trait, though, of humans, to just sit there and project into the future, easily, really seamlessly with whatever you're doing previously, is powerful because it shows what can change and what should change in some cases, but also that left to 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 humans, these sort of sentient creatures that are aware of extinction like ourselves. It's really one of the only forces in the universe that's counteracting the second law of thermodynamics, this entropy that's always increasing. Technically, we're actually still increasing it because we emit heat and we never have perfect capture of all of energy, but we're the only things really actively and consciously resisting it.

Really, you could say life in general does this. Like ants do this when they build their big homes. They're rearranging the universe to make a nice place for themselves and they're 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 driving in their car or someone is listening right now, looking around, everything can and will change.

But at first, it's terrifying to see that, oh my gosh, everything will decay and go away. But then I think it's actually liberating. I think, wait, I can affect this, I can prevent it or I can affect it or I can improve the change that may occur all by itself, say naturally.

And so I think it is, but it is that awareness, again, of the frailty of life, the ever insistence in increasing entropy that you can address though. Actually, I say the same thing to first year medical students, I teach them genetics. I say, I point early in the course, I say, here's all these charts of how the human body decays over time.

And I call it the inexorable march towards molecular oblivion, which the students often find, they kind of laugh at, oh, because on all the charts, they're 22 years old, but older people do not laugh as much of the thought of molecular oblivion. But we're all marching towards it to a large degree.

- So this is both a great thought experiment for the environment around you, so just looking at all the objects around you, that they will dissipate, they will disappear with time. But then it's also the thing you mentioned, which is how can I affect any of the world? Like, you're one little creature, and it's like, 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 a little bit longer? 'Cause it ultimately will, I suppose the wave will continue indefinitely, but it'd be such a small impact, it's almost indetectable. And so how do I have that impact at all? On so many levels, I get to experience this as a human.

Like, I recently had my cold storage hacked to where it was locked, essentially. It wasn't hacked, it was locked. And so you get to lose all your data. So for example, if you lose all your data, if you lose all your online presence, your social media, your emails, if you, like, think of all the things you could lose in a fire.

There's been a lot of fires in the United States if you lose your home. And it makes you realize, wait a minute, this is exactly a nice simulation of what will happen anyway, eventually. And that eventually comes pretty quickly. And so it allows you to focus on, you know, how can I actually affect, so what matters?

What lasts? 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 long-lasting is perhaps, I don't know, it's complicated, right?

'Cause like-- - Well, it used to be foolhardy to say, I wanna think, like, legacy is often what people think of as they approach the end of their life. What is my legacy, what have I done? Maybe even younger in life. But it used to be really foolhardy to say, I could affect something that would, people would build the building, architect would say, I'm gonna put my name on this building, and there I'll have some sense of immortality.

But that's a fleeting dream. It's not, you can't reach immortality. And if you could, it would be resource, you know, taxing on everyone else, if you really were. But I think 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.

But that is actually the liberating state of mortality, is you know that you don't have forever. So it means what can you do that is the most impactful. But you can build things that you say, I want to pass this on to the next generation. Again, the most obvious thing we do with this is if people have kids.

But they don't think of this as a intergenerational responsibility. They think of it as, well, I was at the bar one night, and met this hot girl, and then things happened. Sometimes it's more planned than that. But the, there's no overarching sense of, wait, I could have something that three or four generations from now, well, that someone will receive this gift that was planned for them long before they were born or gestating.

And I think we have that capacity. And that can be a version of legacy. But it's even okay if no one knows exactly who started it, but that the benefit was wrought by people, you know, again, hundreds or even thousands of years after you got it started. So I think this is, again, it's something that is, only really people that are economically secure can even begin to do this, where you can say, you know, think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where you need to satisfy your physical needs, all your structural needs, and have shelter.

And so, you know, I'm sitting from a position of great privilege to be able to pontificate about what I hope I could do for things for people that come 200 years from now. But nonetheless, more and more people can do that. Humanity's never been in a better state, quantifiably, to be able to start to think about these intergenerational responsibilities.

- Yeah, this is an interesting balance, 'cause like, it seems that if you let the ego flare up, a little bit, that's good for productivity. 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, 'cause it won't, in the long arc of history, it won't matter, in terms of your own ego, but it will have a small piece to play in a larger puzzle.

- And help people, you know. - And help people many generations from now. - And that they said, there are all these people who were looking after me before I was ever born. I think, 'cause it's a bit of just, when you go to a campsite, there's a camping rule that you always leave the campsite better than you found it.

So 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 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.

- That said, with these entropy glasses, how can you see through the fog? 500 years is a long time. First of all, why 500 years? Most people, this is so refreshing, 'cause most colleagues and friends I talk to 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 think through them and think what, well, it's the quote, right? Plans are useless, but planning is essential.

So 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 see-- - Just a contradiction in terms, yeah. - Right, right, right, I can see. I mean, for example, if you said, Chris, what's gonna happen in a million years?

Well, I'll start to describe what happens to, the moon will be farther away 'cause 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 continental change and things will move. I could describe some things, but it starts to become so vague.

It's just not a useful exercise. I think if it's too far out, if it's too soon, that's not that much different from what people just do with the news and say, I think 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 necessarily as helpful. But 500, I actually, when I was first working on the book and thinking about time, I thought, well, do I do a thousand or two?

I kept thinking about, the main idea was, if I were to pick this up 500 years from now, what would it look like? I changed the number. If I pick up a thousand years from now or a hundred. And I kept trying to think of, what are some timeframes where really large scale changes have happened?

And so, in some sense, you could argue that humans have been mostly the same for about three or 4,000 years. And the best example is this. You looked at some of the Homer's poems or the Greek tragedies in Oedipus, for example. Humans are really almost identical. We're still petty and people have affairs and people do things they shouldn't.

People, it's a-- - You're saying all those things like it's bad. - I know, it's just me. You read that it's astounding and in some sense soothing that the Greek tragedies of 2,300 years ago are very relatable to what happens in every high school. So, that's why you read them in high school.

Like, oh, that's really a clear part of the human condition. So, on that sense, some things are really permanent. But I want to think of a few reasons I chose 500 is that it's a timeframe 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 would start to have settlements there on the moon and Mars.

And I could see also that by that time, I think we would have enough knowledge of biology and technology and space medicine to start to prepare for an interstellar mission, to actually send people on a craft that would have what's called a generation ship. People live and die on the same spacecraft on the way towards a destination.

But I think we need that much time to actually perfect the technology and to learn enough about physiology to be able to make it for that distance. - And the book is kind of focused on the human story. 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. Well, not, 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 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 engineering life to save itself is definitely on that list.

And I think we can imagine in that timeframe, 500 years, that we would, there will be AI that's continually advancing. 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 silicon based and you're in chips and you're in AI, that's all virtual, but we reach a state of well beyond the Turing test and really clearly intelligent, congratulations to you too.

So, I feel like this sense of duty 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 that would, I wrote the book on them too.

- That 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 it's essential? - It doesn't have to be meat, no, it definitely does not. It could be, I'm hoping that the AI platforms that we've built or that would become, that would start to build themselves would also carry the sense of duty.

'Cause at that point they would be life. And so, whichever means that life, whatever form life takes, it should have this duty I think. - Will it have the lessons of genetics, genomics, DNA and RNA and proteins and the squishy stuff that makes us human, are those lessons a temporary thing that will discard or will those lessons be carried forward?

- You mean like if the machines completely take over, let's say, and it's all-- - 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.

- 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 neural link, progress being made to blend biology and cybernetics and machines for sure. But I think in the long term, we'll see that they are fairly, the biology would be useful because 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 millennia or 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 DNA might be the best hard drive of the future potentially. - This is really interesting. Okay, what is DNA? What is RNA? And what are genes? - Yes, we should, 'cause most, I presume the audience knows it, but some might just be first-time listeners. - There's a person right now-- - Who's late.

- In Brazil smoking a joint, sitting on the beach, and just wants to learn about DNA. So please, can you explain it to them? - DNA, the deoxyribonucleic 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 'cause the day I learned that as an embryo, we start with just a single cell, but all the instructions that are 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, from one single embryo, everything is there to make the entire body. - Which aspect of that is most beautiful? So is it that there is 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, 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. It becomes its own manufacturer is what is extraordinary. Imagine if you took a one two by four and you threw it on the ground, and you said I'll be back in a day, and then a whole house was made when you came back.

I mean, we would all lose our minds. A lot of people would poop their pants. People would have to wear adult diapers. It would be a big scene if that happened. And we're actually getting close to that, to people having autonomous house building. It's not quite there yet, but there are people trying to make robots that will build entire houses for you.

- But you need much more than the block of wood. - Right, right, that's the extraordinary thing, is just one piece of wood there, and say I'll just leave it there for a few days, and I'll come back. That's basically what embryos do. Okay, it takes nine months, a little bit longer, but still, that is nothing short of magic, right?

So I think that's what I love about the fact that DNA carries that information. Now, the information is static, so to actually read that information, and to actually put it into motion, is where RNA comes in. So this ribonucleic acid, so it just has one other oxygen added to it, versus DNA, but it's the transcribed version.

It's like if you look at a book, and you have it in your hands, but then you start to read it aloud, it becomes the active form of the recipe for life, is the RNA. And those RNAs also then get translated to become proteins, to become active forms like enzymes.

You think of like your hair, or think of other ways you digest food. There's all these active proteins going around that are copying your DNA, making RNA, making sure your DNA is safe. All these built-in systems to keep your cells in check and working, and these are often in protein form.

And so genes are 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. Three billion A's, C'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, to say that's actually not that much information. And in that three billion letters are snippets of the genes, which are independently regulated, autonomous instruction sets, if you will, these really active forms of 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 way your face look, the way you smile, you're good at running or jumping, whether you're good at math and all those kinds of things.

- There's an 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 most people are 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. Some people think of like the gene for cystic fibrosis. Now 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 traits, they're much more complicated. They can have dozens or even hundreds of genes that influence your risk and what appears. But from twin studies, you take monozygotic twins, twins that are identical, and you can clearly tell.

They look, they have the same facial structure, similar intonation, similar even likes. And you compare them to dizygotic twins, or when you have fraternal twins, you can have a male and female, for example, in the same uterus. And those are dizygotic twins or two zygotes. So in that case, they share 50% of their DNA, but they share the same womb.

And then what you can look at is, what's the difference between identical twins versus fraternal twins? And calculate that difference for any trait. And that gives you an estimate of the heritability, or what's called H squared. So that's what we've been doing for almost every trait in humanity for the past 100 years, we'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 often, 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-- - Good question, there is religiosity as a trait that 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 of about 30%. So it's mostly not heritable, it's mostly environmental, but that means to some degree, whether or not you're bored, you can say, well, it's a little bit of my genes. You could, a little bit, not a lot, but most traits have some degree, 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 wanna go cliff jumping, or I wanna go, I wanna do freebasing, or I wanna do some else that's risky behavior. - So speaking of twin studies, 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 rough on the human body, but that the human body is amazingly and monstrously responsive to adapt to that challenge.

It can rise to the occasion. So we can see there, Scott had, as almost all astronauts do, a bit of puffiness and spikes in his bloodstream of these, what are called cytokines, or these inflammation markers of the body, is clearly saying to itself, holy crap, I'm in space. And liters of fluid move to the upper torso, and they get a puffy face, what's called the, an 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, as measured by cortisol or some of these other inflammation markers. Whereas Scott actually had a little spike, but then he was cool as a cucumber for most of the mission. But he had spent, at that time, that was the longest ever mission for a US astronaut.

A few cosmonauts have gone a little bit longer, but there'd 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, we saw all the same markers 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. He notoriously had, broke out in a rash all over his body, and really, even the weight of clothing on his skin was too heavy, it created all this irritation 'cause his body had not felt the weight of just a simple T-shirt.

It wasn't really, it had zero weight, of course, right? So it went up in space. So that led to all this inflammation, all these changes. He had to, you know, he was much more comfortable just to walk around nude. In that case, it was for medical reasons. Some people do this recreationally.

He was doing it for medical purposes. - I do it for medical reasons as well. - All the time. - I mean, people say-- - I have a prescription, the doctor told me. - So he was allergic to Earth, you can say. - Yeah, exactly. - Which is fascinating to think about, actually.

How quick did his body adapt there? - So there, it was about three to four days he got back to normal, at least in terms of the inflammation. But what's extraordinary is that we measured a lot of other molecules, genes, structural changes, tissue, looked at his eyeballs, looked at his vasculature.

It took him, even six months after the mission, a lot of the genes that had become activated in response to space flight were still active. So things like, we could see his body repairing DNA. It was being irradiated by cosmic rays and by the radiation. It's the equivalent of giving 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 8-oxyguanosine, a form of damaged DNA that you could see coming out. And we see it for other astronauts as well. So it's very common.

You can see damaged DNA, the response of the body to repair the DNA. But even though he'd been back on Earth for six months, that was still happening, even six months later. - 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'll look at my wall, just flip a light on or off. And sometimes turning a gene on or off is that simple. Sometimes you just flip it on because the gene is already ready to go. Other cases, though, you have to reprogram even the structure of how your DNA is packaged.

It's called an epigenetic rearrangement. In that case, we could see 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 know, eventually you'll adapt, but there's almost a lag time, kind of like jet lag for the body, but jet lag for your cells to repair all the DNA. - What was the most surprising thing that you found in that study?

- There were 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.

His telomeres was one that was really surprising. 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, and telomeres, length is just an overall sign of aging, getting shorter.

His telomeres got longer in space. And so this was really surprising 'cause we thought the opposite would happen. So he, that was genetically one surprise, 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, 'cause the number of subjects in the study is small. - Right, right, it's notoriously one of the lowest-powered studies in human history, yes. But what you lack in subjects, you can make up for in the number of sampling times.

So we did basically 260 samples collected over the course of three years. So we really, almost every few weeks, had a full workup, including in space. So that was the way we tried to make up for it. 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? - Not yet. I won't make that jump yet, but it does indicate that there is a version of cleansing, if you will, that's happening in space.

A mixture of, we see this actually clinically at our hospital. You can do a low dose of radiation with some targeted therapies to kind of activate your immune cells. It's even tried clinically. So this idea of just a little bit of stress on the body, or what's called hormesis, may prime you into active of cleansing, things that were about to die.

- And that includes stress 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 lessons do you draw from that study and other experiments in space that give you an indication of how we can survive for multiple years?

- I think we know that the radiation is one of the biggest risk factors, and this has been well described by NASA and many other astronauts and researchers. And so there, we don't have to just measure the radiation or just look at DNA being damaged. We can actually actively repair it.

This happens naturally in all of our cells. There's little enzymes, little protein, and 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.

We have one set of cells in my lab where you activate them before we irradiate them and actually prepare them for the dose of radiation. And now that is what's called epigenetic CRISPR therapies, where you can actually, instead of adding or taking away a gene or modifying a cell, you just change kind of how it's packaged.

Like I was just describing that the DNA, the genes are still there. We're just changing how they get used. And so you can actually preemptively activate the DNA repair genes, and we've done this for cells. We haven't done this yet for astronauts, but we've done it for cells. And a similar idea to this is being used to treat sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia.

You can reactivate a gene that was dormant in a way as a therapy. - So should we make human genes resilient to harsh conditions, or should we get good at repairing them? - I wanna get good at-- - Okay, sorry to interrupt. I think every time I ask this question, you have taught me that there's always a third option.

Say both. - I will say both. I know for copy, it's good to just have one big statement, but you wanna do both, or a third option. I would want to do electromagnetic shielding. I would wanna do a fourth option of maybe some other kind of physical defenses. - So outside of the human body.

- Yeah, so we're taking the same passion to keep astronauts safe that's outside of them, and just putting it in their cells is what I propose. Now, it's a bit radical today, because we're just starting this in clinical trials to treat 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, well, we'd 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 some interesting early milestones?

So you said 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 repair a specific disease gene, you can actually CRISPR it out and modify it.

This has been already published, and well-documented. But as I was 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 of this is for beta thalassemia. 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 fetal hemoglobin. When you're an adult, you have a different gene. But they both are making a protein that carries oxygen. When you're after you're born, the fetal 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, then 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 sickle cell and beta thalassemia in this past year.

So it's this extraordinary idea of like, "Well, you already have some of the genetic solutions "in your body. "Why don't we just reactivate them, "and see if you can live?" And indeed you can. So I think we'll see more of that. That's for severe disease, but eventually you could see it for more, I think, work-related purposes.

Like if you're working in a dangerous mine, or in a high-radiation environment, you could basically start to prime it for work safety. Basically, we need to genetically protect you. Now, it would have to be shown that that genetic option is safe, reliable, that it's better, at least as good, or if not better, than other shielding methods.

But I think we'll start to see that more in the next 10, 20 years. And eventually, as I describe in the book, you could get to recreational genetics. You could say, "Well, I wanna turn some genes on "just for this weekend, "because I'm going to a high altitude, "so I'd like to prepare for that." And so instead of having to take weeks and weeks for acclimation, you could just do some quick epigenetic therapies, and have a good time in the mountains, and then come back and turn 'em back on.

- So this is stuff to do on Earth, across thousands of humans, and then you start getting good data about what the effects on 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, 'cause 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's 38% of Earth's, just having that gravity would be enough. And if you could get under the surface, into some of the lava tubes, where you have some protection above you from the radiation, I think that would be, you probably could survive quite well there.

So I think it's the, just in space parts, that's hard. You'd need some gravity. You need some additional protection from the radiation. - Can you linger on the lava tubes on Mars? What are the lava tubes on Mars? - Yeah, so they are, but look what they sound like.

They were large masses of lava at one point on the planet, pushing really quickly through the environment. And they created these, basically, these small caverns, which you could go in, in theory, and build a small habitat and then puff it up, kind of like blowing up a balloon, and have a protective habitat.

Basically, it's a little bit underground. So one of the next helicopter missions being planned at the Jet Propulsion Lab is to see if you can get a helicopter to go into the lava tube, and which is just, like as it sounds, kind of like take out a big worm that has burrowed into the landscape and leave out the hollow column that's left, and that's what your tubes look like.

So one of the future helicopters might even go explore one of them, there's a mission being planned right now. - So they're accessible without a significant amount of drilling? - Yeah, that's the other advantage. Yeah, you can get to them, 'cause some of them are exposed. You could do a little bit of drilling and then see, essentially, this entire cavern.

- And that protects you a little bit from the radiation. - Right, 'cause you have some soil above you, basically, which would be, or regolith, which would be nice. - What about source of food? What's a good, so that's part of biology, how you power this whole thing. What about source of food across decades?

- In space, we'd have to-- - In space. - Plants have been grown in flight, and you can get some nutrients, but right now it is very reliant on all the upmass being sent up, all the freeze-dried food that then gets rehydrated, which doesn't taste awful, but is not self-reliant.

So I think those would have to be small bioreactors. It'd have to be a lot of work on fermentation, a lot of work on, essentially, prototrophic 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 prototrophic human, where you could have, like right now, we need to get some of our amino acids, 'cause we can't make them all, which I think is kind of sad.

So what if we could make all of our own amino acids or all of our own vitamins? I also, I think that's one case where another adaptation could be to activate the vitamin C gene. Like 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, although dogs can drink beer and get drunk. They don't need vitamin C. They have no risk of scurvy, because they can make the vitamin C all by themselves.

So can other wet-nosed primates, called strepsirines, but we are dry-nosed primates, and we lost this ability sometimes 10 or 20 million years ago. We no longer make our own vitamin C, but the gene for it, it's called Gulo, is still in our DNA. It's what's called a pseudogene. It's just broken down.

It's like having a, like in our genome, we have these functional genes, like a 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, 'cause 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 potentially in animal models, in 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 wanna be a robot.

Humans love, as I do, texture. I realize that made me sound like I wasn't human, but humans love food and flavors and textures and smells. All that is actually attenuated in flight. So you'd wanna not forget our humanity and this love of all the benefits and wonder of food and cooking and smells.

- Well, speak for yourself, 'cause for me, I eat the same thing every single day and 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? The 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 protein and a lot of the amino acids. - And bedbugs. There's a guy at the American Academy of Natural History in New York, he loves bedbugs, Lou Sorkin. And he has a monthly meeting where he talks about which insects would be the best for eating.

And one month he gave a whole talk about bedbugs, 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 a good candidate. I think if you could deep fry 'em, if you deep fry anything, you can pretty much eat it.

Some of you need a fryer up in space, but they're a candidate. - All right, what, technical question, what are the major challenges of sex in space? Asking for a friend for reproduction purposes. So like when we're looking about survival of the human species across generations. Do we need gravity, essentially?

- For sex in space, 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 for other invertebrates to show they can make babies in space. But for humans, NASA's official stance on this is that there has never been sex in space, officially.

I think, you know, if we all wonder about that, I think humans are very predictable in that regard. Again, going back to the Greek tragedies, I think that probably someone did something close to it at some point. And so I think we know that sperm can be sent into space and brought back and be used for fertilization, for in vitro fertilization for humans.

But sex itself in space would be, I think when we start to get bigger structures that have a bit more privacy, I think there'll be a lot of it. And it has to be, you know, this is a big question of who goes up into space. It's now becoming more of regular, in quotes, people who have prosthetic limbs, or cancer survivors like Haley Arsenault who just went up on the Inspiration4 mission.

So she's been a great researcher in helping with a lot of the science from that mission. We are doing the same analysis on them as we've been doing for the twin study and for other astronauts. We're doing basically all the same molecular profile before, during, and after space flight.

So there, we now know that other people can go into space. As those more and more regular Joes and Janes go up, I think we'll see a lot more of it. But so far we have no data, we have no video of it either. 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'm a fan of Velcro and duct tape. I think that's gonna be-- - I think that, yeah. - Those two are essential for anything, any kind of engineering out in anywhere, honestly, in all kinds of harsh conditions. But that is, I mean, on the topic of sex in general, just social interaction with humans is fascinating.

The current missions are very focused on science and very technical engineering 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 gonna be right there. - It's a Greek tragedy just in space, basically.

I think it's gonna be-- - Or a reality show. (Dave laughs) 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 put in the book measures of Earth Similarity Index, or something called ESIs. How close is the gravity, the temperature, the solar incidence on the surface? How close is it to Earth is a calculation many astronomers make when they look for exoplanets.

And Mars is pretty far away from an ESI of about 0.7. I mean, Earth is one, so the best you can get is one. Earth is just like Earth. It gets a score of one. Anything above, you know, some of the best exoplanets that are in the habitable zone, or there's liquid water that could be there, start to get above 0.8 or 0.9.

But most planets are very low. They're 0.1, 0.2. 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 Venus is just too hot right now.

So I think Venus would also be a great candidate. But 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, yeah. - So Venus is gonna get cooler and cooler. Okay, but what are the big challenges to you in colonizing Mars, from a biology perspective, from a human perspective, from an engineering perspective? - There's several big challenges to Mars.

And even the first one is even just the word colonize. So I think there's even a social challenge. Like a lot of people, 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, 'cause there's settlements that have some other baggage to that word as well.

And then maybe we should use the word explore, but at some point you can say, we're going there to survive there. And so colonization still is the word most people use, but I try to say go explore and build or settle. But I think the first challenge is social.

I think getting people to think that this will not be like the colonization efforts of the past. The hope is that this will be a very different version of humanity exploring. That's my hope. History, 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 drama again, and then, and often murder, genocide.

Like it's actually a pretty dark history, if you think of just all the colonization efforts. But I think most of it was done in a really dark area of humanity, where the average life expectancy was more than half less than it was today. It was, life was brutish and short, as many of, as Hobbes famously said.

So it was a rough existence, right? So I think some of the ugliness of humanity in prior colonization times was a consequence of the time. And at least that's my hope. I think that now we would have it be much more, I think, inclusive, much more responsible, much more, much less evil, frankly.

Like we'd go there and you would need commercialization. You need efforts to do mining, for example, bring things back, but it'd have to be some degree of there are some areas that are viewed as commons or that are untouchable, like places that are parks. We do this today, even if there's a lake, for example, the first, you know, several hundred feet of a lake are all for public property and everything.

Like you can own property, but just not certain areas. So I think we'd have to make sure we do that so that it's not completely exploited. But the, so that's on the social, the human side. The technological, we've talked a little bit about where you'd have to live. You'd want to be underground with engineering and modifying even human cells to make sure you survive.

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 lots of it everywhere, but 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 self-generating reactors, machines that could make food, start to even make beer if you go long enough down the path. But the technical challenges are definitely, the engineering and the manufacturing are gonna 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 buildings, those structures, you need to create all the biology that will feed the populace, feed them. So, which we don't have the technology for yet.

We have bits of it, but I think that's gonna 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 'cause we're also exploring ways to motivate society to take on this challenge.

It's the JFK thing and then the Cold War that inspired the race to space. And I think as a human species, we're actually trying to figure out different ideas for how to motivate everybody to work on the same project together. - But yet compete at the same time. - Well, that's one idea and that's worked well.

- Competition. - Competition. It's not necessarily the only idea, but it's the one that worked well so far. So maybe the only way to truly build a colony on Mars or a successful sort of human civilization on Mars is to get China to get competitive about it. - And they are.

They've announced they wanna have boots on the Red Planet by 2033, which is two to four years earlier than when NASA's supposed to do it. So we'll see if they 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, it's the USA, JAXA is the Japanese Space Agency, and there's the US. So now it went from just a two-person race to a whole field, 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 that the true mark of a place being actually settled is when you start to be able to pick. You're like, well, I wanna go to this destination, not this one, because they have better Martian cocktails here, but this one's not as good.

So this idea of innovating and competing will continue to drive, I think, humans as it always has. - You write this fascinating thing, which is, quote, "People living on Mars will have developed "entirely new cultures, dialects, products, "and even new religions or variations of current religions. "For example, a Martian Muslim will need to pray upward "toward the dusty sky." I love that you've thought through the geometry of this.

"For example, a Martian Muslim will need to pray upward "toward the dusty sky since Earth, "and therefore Mecca, will sometimes be overhead. "Or when Mecca's below the Martians' feet, "the prayer direction to Allah will stay downward "toward the 38% gravity floor. "Perhaps a second Mecca will be built on the new planet." End quote.

That's another interesting question. How will culture be different on Mars in the early days and beyond? - Yeah, it'll be, as we've seen with all of human history, I think even just when people migrate and they move, even the dialects change. Even just going to the South in the United States, there's the, "Oh, y'all, come on down." And that's not even that far away.

Or even just people on Long Island versus New York City, and it'll be with a big nasally accent, and oh yeah, and the people will just get, or even Wisconsin, I'm from Wisconsin, which there'll be this big nasally tone, "Welcome to Wisconsin and Minnesota." - I wonder who defines that culture, because it's very likely that the early humans on Mars will be very technically savvy.

They have to be for 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 gonna be both? Because my experience of scientists, they like the comfort of the lab.

- Yes, yeah. - They don't. Well, no, there's some, I keep contradicting myself nonstop. There's some bad-ass scientists that travel to Antarctica and all that kind of stuff, so. - It's an evolutionary selection for humans who can stare at a screen for eight hours at a time, or pipette for 12 hours at a time, and not talk to anybody.

So it's not surprising when our scientists are a little bit awkward in social situations. But we can train them out of that. We can get them to engage other humans, not all of them, but hopefully most of them. So I think the culture will definitely be different. There'll be different dialects, different foods.

There'll be different values. There very likely will be a different religion. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a lot about this in his books, the new Martian religion that was created. So I think this idea has been discussed in science fiction. It's almost unavoidable, because there's been, I mean, just think of all the religions that have happened on Earth, with very little, I think, I mean, there's just terrestrial drama, but suddenly you have a different planet, and you then need a deity that would span multiple planets, and I don't even know how you do that.

But I think someone will think of a way and make up something. - Yeah, that's look for ways to draw meaning. So religion, for a lot of people, myths, common ideas are a source of meaning. And when you're on another planet, boy, does the sense of what is meaningful change.

'Cause it's humbling. The harshness of the conditions is humbling. The very practical fact that Earth, from which you came, is not so special, 'cause 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 what Shackleton did doing this exploration of Antarctica and going, it was a 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 pseudogene, they'd be okay. But there, I think, the early settlers, it'll be a very different crew.

But once it's comfort, once people are comfortable there, I think they're gonna, I hope they'll draw more meaning. 'Cause more planets should be more meaning. I feel like it's like more hands is a better massage. I don't know if that's the best analogy here, but-- - I think Aristotle said that, yeah.

(laughing) I should mention that your book has incredible quotes. It's great writing, but also just incredible quotes at the beginning of chapters that are really-- - Thanks, it's basically my favorite quotes. I'm like, well, I'm writing a book, I'm gonna put my favorite quotes in there. - Might as well put 'em all down.

What are your thoughts about the efforts of Elon Musk and SpaceX in pushing this commercial spaceflight, and I mean, other companies, Axiom Space as well? What are your thoughts on their efforts? - It's like a gold rush. Space Race 2.0, there's a lot of terms for it, the new Space Race, I think it's fabulous.

I think it's moving at a pace that is unprecedented, and also there's 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 Inspiration4 mission, and now some of the Polaris missions which are happening.

And Jared Isaacman has been a fabulous colleague, collaborator, pilot for the missions. 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 are 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 chatting with Jared, and we were presenting the data to them actually just a few weeks ago, kind of a briefing to the crew, and 'cause they went to 590 kilometers, they went basically several hundred kilometers higher than the space station or the Hubble.

You normally rest more radiation, the farther you get from Earth, there's more radiation. He was worried, you know, did we get cooked? It was kind of his question for me in the briefing. I said, well, actually, it 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 gonna go even farther. And then also, open the hatch and go on these new spacesuits that SpaceX are designing that'll be much nimbler, not as much of a giant, you know, Dr. Octagon kind of a spacesuit, but really looks like just a nice spacesuit, and they're gonna go out into the vacuum of space.

And so, you know, pushing all the engineering for these missions, which are privately funded, so it's people who just say, I wanna go up in space and see if I can push the limits, has been fabulous, but I think the most fabulous part is Jared in particular, but others, other commercial spaceflight drivers like John Shoffner or Peggy Whitson for the Axiom missions are coming to us, the scientists, researchers, saying, I don't just wanna go up into space just to hang out.

How much science can I get done when I'm up there? What can I do, what experiments can I do? Give me, you know, blood, tissue, urine, semen, tears, I'll give you any biofluid, you know, and I always email them back and say, listen, every one of your cells is worthy of study.

I send, you know, so I have this really kind of creepy geneticist email response, like I want all of your cells, you know, but it's true, because there's so much we don't know, I wanna learn as much as we can about every time I go up, anyone. So we're doing it, you know, with NASA astronauts, but it's been some of this influx of new crews that are willing to do almost anything, right?

So including, we did skin biopsies for the Inspiration4 crew before and after spaceflight, and that's never been done before. We've never seen the structure of the skin and how it changes in response to microgravity, and also the microbes that change. And so we have these beautiful images of even the structure of skin changing, and the inflammation that we've seen, and 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.

- What are the interesting surprises there? - So one of the interesting things we can see, part of what's driving inflammation is we can actually see macrophages and there's other dendritic cells, pieces, like cells that are part of the immune system kind of creeping along towards the surface of the skin, which is, now we know it's actually physically driving the immune system, is these cells going and creating this inflammation, which is what leads to some of the rashes.

But we didn't see as much in them as we saw, for example, some of the signatures of Scott Kelly. So we can see within the crew who's getting more of a rash or not, or who didn't experience any rash. And some people had changes in vision, some people had other GI problems, even looking at sort of what happens to the gut and looking at the microbiome of the gut, other people didn't.

So we're able to see, and start to get a little bit predictive about their medicine. Right now we're just diagnosing, but it'd be good to say, 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 the inflammation down.

- What does it take to prepare for one of these missions? 'Cause you mentioned some of the folks are not necessarily lifelong astronauts. You're talking about more and more regular civilians. 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 in Hawthorne at SpaceX headquarters, which if you can ever get a chance to do a tour, it's fabulous. It's really, you can see all these giant rockets being built, and then we're drawing blood over there right next to them. So it's a really cool place.

But the 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 the majority of the training. If you wanna go to the space station, as the Axiom missions are, including John Shroffner, 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 Shroffner, for example, unless he completes this additional training, all in Russian, he's not allowed-- - All in Russian? - Otherwise he has to learn enough Russian to be just functional.

- Wow. So it's not just technical, he also has to-- - Enough, enough Russian. - Enough, enough Russian. And so, and if he doesn't learn, he can't go to that part of the space station. So interesting things like that. But you'll be, you know, it's not that far. You're like, oh, I can see it right there.

I can't float over to that capsule. But technically he can't go, so you know. - Is there a Chinese component to the International Space Station? Is there a collaboration there? - Sadly not, they're building their own space station. I'm glad they're building a space station. Actually, eventually there'll be probably four space stations in orbit by 2028.

Some from the orbital reef, some from Lockheed Martin. Of course, Axiom is far ahead right now. They're probably gonna be done first. But the extraordinary thing is, unfortunately there's no collaboration between the-- - You see that as a negative, that's not the positive kind of competition. - It's a good question.

So maybe, for example, when we get different NASA grants, you apply for a grant, you get to the lab, it goes 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, let me go back to that. 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 'cause I can't do anything with anyone in China about this. And what I view as sad about that is I wanna at least be able to chat with them about it and know what they're up to, but we can't even go to a conference in China, technically with NASA funds, about, say, space medicine or engineering a new rocket.

I can go with personal funds, but I can't use those funds. - Like, you should be able to go to a conference in a friendly way, talk shit to the other scientists. Like, the way scientists do really well, which is like they compliment, but it's a backhanded compliment, like, you're doing a 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 everybody's trying to improve, but then you're ultimately talking, you're ultimately collaborating closely, you're competing closely as opposed to in your own silos. Well, let me ask, in terms of preparing for space flight, I tweeted about this and I joked about it, and I talk to Elon quite a lot these days.

What I tweeted was, I'd like to do a podcast in space one day. And it was a silly thing, 'cause 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 now? There's no, just even seeing what Axiom is doing, what Inspiration4 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 his thinking about this is it's partially responsible until it's safe, because he has such a direct engineering roles in the running of multiple companies.

So at which point do you think, what's your prediction for the year that Elon will go up? - I think he'd probably go up by 2026, 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.

And by go up, I think it might also, for example, the Inspiration4 mission just went up for three days in flight, and there was enough time to get up there, do some experiments, enjoy the view, and then he came back. The Axiom missions are a bit more complicated, there's docking up in the space station, it's a shared atmosphere, so you have to follow all the ISS protocols.

What's interesting about the Dragon capsule and the Inspiration4 and some of these what are called free-flyer missions, you can just launch into space, you basically have your own little mini space station for a few days, it's not that big, right? But I think that's what we'd probably see him do first, because we're gonna see a lot more tests of those in the next two, three years, but they're already been demonstrated to be safe, and then you're not trying to go for 10 to 20 days or months or years at a time.

You're 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 could do a podcast from there, I think. - 2026, I wonder how the audio works. See, also, can you comment on 2026? I'll start getting ready.

I'll start pushing him on this, I'm quite serious, it's a fascinating kind of-- - Axiom 2 still has room, you could go on that mission if you wanted to. - So I'll ask you about Axiom. How strict are these? So this seems surreal, that civilians are traveling up. So 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, 'cause you get to, you don't wanna complain too much, but how much, there's sometimes bureaucracy with NSF and DOD and the funding and all those kinds of things that kind of prevent you from being as free as you might sometimes like 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. And so it's very important to put safety first, but it's like a dance, a little too much restrictions of bureaucracy can hamper the flourishing of science, a little too little of that can get some crazy scientists to start doing unethical experiments.

Okay, that said, NASA and just space flight in general is sort of famously very risk-averse. So what's your sense currently about like, even like doing a podcast, right? - Podcast, unless it's, I think with mixed martial arts is a pretty safe activity, unless you're doing the octagon version of your podcast.

I mean, just getting there and back is the only real risky part, which is still risky. But I think, you're not asking to do 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.

And I feel like fun sounds dangerous, any kind of fun. - 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, but they've been that way for a really good reason, is that safety, in the early '60s, we knew almost nothing about the body in space, except for some of the work that pilots had done at really high altitudes.

So we really didn't know what at all to expect. So it's good that there were decades of resolute focus on just safety, but now we know it's pretty safe. We know the physiological responses, we know what to expect. We can also treat some of it. We'll hopefully soon will treat a lot more of it.

But if you just wanna 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 spaceflight 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 a limited degree, and how to use some of the equipment.

But fundamentally, it's no longer a question of years and years of training and selection, this impossible odds task of becoming an astronaut. It's frankly just a question of funds. - Expensive plane ride. So how much, you mentioned Axiom, is it known how much it costs for the plane ride?

- There is no official number, and it depends on the mission, of course. So if you ask them, often they'll say, "Well, how serious are you?" They don't just wanna give out random numbers to people. But the numbers, 'cause for example, we proposed one mission, we want a new twin study where someone goes up and stays up there for 500, 550 days.

But you're basically gonna 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. 'Cause if you went there and immediately turned around, you could maybe make that mission. Otherwise, it's a three-year mission.

And there, you're looking at the ranges of, 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 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 your time is valuable, so you can do experiments, and people pay for those, and that defrays the cost. Or you could build something, or you could do podcasts, and maybe fundraise on the podcast. 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 wanna go and just sit in space for two years and do nothing. Well, then you have to pay for all that time that you're up there, if you wanna do things. - Yeah, I see the official AX-1 mission was 55 million for a trip to the ISS.

- It's not that bad. It could be worse. - Wait, Sergey just posted a $35,000 price tag per night, per person on the ISS. Is that real? I don't know. - That's what, right, that's why-- - That's like a real hotel stay. So to stay, oh, so interesting. 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 paying the cost in the short term and in the long term. - Yeah, and the thing about a lot of that cost is rocket fuel, a lot of it is the ride. So I've been on calls where Axiom's like, hey, SpaceX, give us, make it a little cheaper.

We can make it cheaper on our end. It's the cost, that is the rocket. - So SpaceX is giving Axiom a ride in this case. What is Axiom Space? Can you speak to this particular private company? What's their mission, what's their goal? And what is the Axiom-1 mission that just went up?

- Yeah, so the Axiom Space is a private spaceflight company that's building the first private space station. They actually have 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.

Eventually it'll be expanded, and then by 2028, the plan is it'll be completely detached and free-floating. And it will be, maybe even a little bit sooner, depending on how fast it goes, but they're building the world's first private space station. So if you wanna 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 wanna do it, you can do it. It's like, you can have a lab up there. If you wanna do experiments, you can do experiments. You just figure out the cost. If you wanna have a 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 wanna 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. 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 Inspiration4 was the first commercial private crew to just go into space. They went into space and actually did an orbital mission for just about three days. But Axiom-1 is the first, again, on the SpaceX rockets, but launched up, docked to the space station, and they're up there for about 10 days to do experiments, to work with staff, actually just take some pictures.

But it's a mission, actually doing a lot of experiments. They're doing almost 80 different experiments. So it's a lot of, it's very science-heavy, which I love as a scientist. But it's the ability to show that you can fundraise and launch up a crew that's all privately funded and then go to the space station.

- Yeah, 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 Shoffner and Peggy Whitson. Peggy Whitson's a already prior NASA astronaut, has been at many times, done many experiments. She knows the space station like her own house.

And we recently did a training with Peggy and John in my lab at Cornell to get ready for some other genomics experiments that we'll do on that mission. - So they're doing the experiments, too. What does it take to design an experiment and to run a design experiment here on Earth that runs up there?

And then also to actually do the running of the experiment? What are the constraints? What are the opportunities? All that kind of stuff. - The biggest concern 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? 'Cause things always float away in space. There's notoriously panels in the space station where you don't wanna look behind because it's got a little fungus or food has gotten stuck there and sometimes found months and months or years later. So things float around.

- The little things, wow. - And so if you have anything you need to do your experiment that's a liquid or a solid, whatever that is, it has to go through toxicity testing. And the big question is if this thing, whatever you wanna 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 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 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, there's some costs you have to consider. - And that includes not just the materials, but the equipment used to analyze the materials.

- One of the ones we worked on actually with Kate Rubins was putting the first DNA sequencer in space called the Biomolecule Sequencer Mission. Also with Aaron Burton and Sarah Caster Wallace. But there, the interesting thing is we had to prepare this tiny little sequencer. It sequences DNA. You can do it really quickly, within really minutes.

And what's extraordinary is what you have to do, if you wanna 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 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 wanna fly one thing into space, you need to make four of them and destroy at least three of them to know how they destroy.

- Destructive, fire, and vibration testing. I was just asking for a friend, 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, actually it's mostly to simulate launch.

They have a lot of machinery at NASA and at SpaceX to do just, make sure, does the 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's something that gets up to, fire temperature is several hundred degrees Celsius. And-- - Open fire, or are we talking like you put in a toaster? - No, it's more like-- - Is it heat, or is it actual flames? - It's flames and heat. But it's not like a kiln or anything like that.

You don't wanna know how does it burn in a kiln. 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 Christmas tree? - Is there a YouTube video of this?

- You know, I've checked-- - Did you film any of this? - Not, not, no. Aaron Burton might still have some of the videos. We're in the middle of doing some testing for the new sequencer called the Mark 1C. So I will make videos of that. - I would love to see that, if anything, for my private collection.

This is very exciting. - And the destructive testing is just, often it can be something as simple as a hammer. It's really how does it shatter? You wanna question is, are there glass components? So it's like office space. - That's right. - That scene with the fax machine. - That's right, that's right.

We blow it, yeah, into the damn it feels good to be a gangster soundtrack. Yeah, that's a great scene. - That's so, that's so exciting. That kind of, that's the best of engineering is like that kind of testing. What else about designing experiments? Like what kind of stuff do you wanna get in there?

You said 80 different experiments. So we're staying in the realm of biology and genetics. - Yeah, for now. But we also wanna do, some of the experiments that 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 planning, it gets back to sex in space.

Is can human embryos divide and actually begin to develop in space? But then if we do that experiment, that means you're taking viable human embryos, watching them develop in space. Then you could freeze them and bring them down and characterize them to see, but to answer that question. 'Cause 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. Which itself has, of course, a lot of complications, ethical considerations. Some people just wouldn't. It's a non-starter for lots of people. - But we do know that the sperm survive in space, as you earlier said.

- Yes. - And nobody cares about sperm apparently. - We're doing several studies on autism risk for fathers and sperm. And it's really easy to get sperm, I'll just tell you. People say, you're helping us. - That's what I hear. - That's right. - I read that somewhere on Wikipedia.

- Asking for a friend. - Okay, cool. Are you involved in Axiom 1, Axiom 2 experiments? Is your lab directly or indirectly involved 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.

So they're saying, how do you do a modern genetics experiment? So for the Axiom 1, for 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.

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 Axiom 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 Omicron? Or do I have a different virus? And we're gonna do some of the exact same work in flight, but we're having the astronauts do the extraction, the sequencing, and the analysis of all the molecules.

And so one common occurrence is herpes is reactivated often in spaceflight, oral herpes. So you can see that viral reactivation is one of the biggest kind of mysteries in spaceflight, where the immune system seems to be responding a lot. It's active, the body's really perturbed, but viruses start shedding again.

And it's really, and 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, and then when is it happening and characterize it better, but have the astronauts do it themselves rather than collecting it and bringing it back to Earth and figuring out later. We could see in real time how it's happening.

And then also look at their blood. We'll see what is changing in their blood in real time with these new sequencers. So I'm excited about the genomics in space, if you will. - So clearly, somebody that loves robots, how many robots are up there in space that help with the experiments?

Like, how much technology is there, would you say? Is it really a manual activity, or is there a lot of robots helping out? - Good question. So far, it's almost all manual, just 'cause the robots have to all undergo the destructive fire and vibrational testing. So if you have a million-- - This is so exciting.

- So if you can get-- - That thing is a lot less than a million. So we could destroy it. - We're definitely gonna test it out for the, I guess in which order? And they have to do separate for each one. - Yeah, each one, yeah. - They have to do vibration, fire.

Note to self, do fire testing for the legged robots and the destructive testing. That would be fascinating. I wonder if any of the folks I'm working with did that kind of testing on the materials. Like, what breaks first with the robots? - That's a very key question. And also, the big question, so what's interesting about this, for Axiom and for these commercial spaceflight areas, if you can fund it, you could fly it, right?

So if you had to say, "I wanna fly these series of robots up "because I think they could help build something "or they could help measure or repair the spacecraft." - Or you have to come up with a good reason. - Well, for NASA, you have to have a good reason, but I think for private spaceflight, you could have, "The reason is I'm curious." And that could just be it.

- Exactly, curiosity. - And I've got a private fund, or I've got your own money. - And then you pay per kilogram, essentially. And I mean, there are some things. You can't say, "I wanna send a nuclear bomb up there "because I'm curious." I don't think that would fly.

- And there's probably rules in terms of free-floating robots, right? They probably have to be attached. 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, they're 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. The whole space station is running and humming on electronics. Actually, one of the biggest complaints astronauts have is sleeping up there is hard, not only 'cause 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 moving that are keeping the station alive. The CO2 scrubbers, all the instrumentation, it's loud. So I think it is a very well-powered lab, basically, in flight. But the future space stations, I think, will be very different because they're being built more for pleasure than business, or a little bit of both.

But they're built for, we want people to, at least when you talk to Axiom, when you talk to the other industry partners, they wanna make 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 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 discovered and started to happen until '89 and really early '90s for the real validated ones. So I'm hoping over the next 500 years, we go from thousands of possible habitable planets to hundreds of thousands or millions, especially with some of the recent telescopes launched, we'll find them.

But before we get there, I have a whole section I really describe about the magic of Titan because it has all this methane, which is a great hydrocarbon you can use to make fuel. You can use it, it's cold as all bejesus on Titan. But if you can-- - Ice.

- It's, yeah, it's-- - So what's Titan made up of? What is Titan? Everybody loves Titan. - Yeah, it is, it's a favorite, it's this kind of eerie green-hued moon that's around Saturn that is, 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 it actually would be so cold, it's like a lake of methane.

You could go swimming in it, potentially. There might be some degree of rocks or maybe mountains there, but they might also be made of like frozen methane. So no one's ever, no person's obviously been there, but it is, you know, I have enough satellite imagery and some data that you could actually potentially survive on Titan.

So I think that'd be one place where I'm hoping that we would at least have a bit of an outpost. It might not be a luxurious retreat 'cause it's really cold. - Is there a life on Titan, you think, underneath the surface somewhere? - Maybe, well, actually, with all that carbon and all those hydrocarbons, it is very possible that some microbial life could be there and hanging out waiting for us to dip our toes into the methane and find it.

But we don't know yet, but I think that's one place I'd like to see an outpost. I would like to see other outposts near Jupiter, but Jupiter has extremely high radiation, actually, so even places like Io, which are volcanically active and quite amazing, we probably couldn't survive that long or that close to Jupiter, though, it has because it's such a giant planet.

It emits back out a lot of radiation that it's collecting from other parts of the universe and it juts back out. So if you get too close to Jupiter, you'd actually almost certainly not be able to survive, depending on which part of it, but that's one risk about Jupiter.

But it'd be cool to see the giant red spot up close, maybe have some spots there. Mars is top one, then you get to pick Titan or Io, so ice, firing ice, the Robert Frost poem comes to mind. And then Europa is that-- - Europa would be cool, too, and Enceladus, which is a big ocean that might be there, like an alien ocean that's under the, it 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 Ceres would be good, or Eros, or big enough you get a little bit of gravity. That'd be interesting, you could have it 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, we're just listing vacations spots. - Yeah, vacations 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 wanna go and hollow out the asteroids and bring back all the, you know, all the resources from it.

So this legally is very possible, 'cause even though the 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?

- Space Act, it was 1967, was the first 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 militarize it, to not weaponize it, to not militarize it, also establish some of the basic sharing principles between countries who are going into space.

And there was a plan to make an additional act in the '90s, the Lunar, actually I'm blanking on the name of it, but 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. - Was on the militarization.

- Which was, in theory, not allowed, which so far has stayed true, but there's no, is there any legal framework for who owns space and space, like different geographical regions of space, both out in space and on asteroids and planets and moons? - 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." - Of course, you see there's going to be some contentious battles, even wars, over those resources.

Hopefully, at a very small scale, it's more like conflict or human tension, but... Oh boy, it's like war makes for human flourishing, 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 millennia, the rate of conflict, and the destructiveness of conflict decreases.

- It has, at least in the past 100 years, the number of wars, number of military actions, casualties, have all decreased. I don't know if it's gonna stay that way for humanity. I think the trajectory's there. I think the warmongering is less tolerated by the international community. It's more scrutinized.

It still happens. Right now, there's an ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. You've spoken a lot about it. There sometimes will be small military actions, but I think, and even there, there's a large military action across most of the country, but not all of it, actually. I think we see less over time of large-scale multi-country invasions, like we've seen in the past.

I think maybe that won't happen ever again, but you might see country-to-country battles happening, which has always happened, I think, but hopefully, less of that as well. - And yet, the destructiveness of our weapons increases, so it's a complicated race in both directions. We become more peaceful and more destructive at the same time.

That's fascinating. How do we get outside the solar system? 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. Earth is home, but the solar system is home.

It's our sun. The sun is a source of life. And going towards the second sun, leaving this home behind, that's one hell of a journey. So what does that journey look like? When is it to happen, and what's required to make it happen? - To get to that state, we have to actually have, describe a number of options.

We have to all have people survive in multiple generations, live and die on the same spacecraft towards 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 nonfiction, I just make no big leaps other than what we know of today that's possible. And if that's the case, you'd need probably 20 generations to live and die on one spacecraft to make it towards what is our known closest habitable exoplanet. Now that sounds, you 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 so with that as a backdrop, you could have people hibernate, I talk about, like maybe you need to hibernate instead of just people living their normal life, but I think the hibernation technology doesn't work that well yet.

And I don't know if it might pan out and maybe in 200 years, it gets really good and then people can all just sleep in pods, great. So I think this is the minimum viable product with everything that we have today and nothing else. So if that's the case, which of course, I'm sure more in 500 years, but basically 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 when you got old enough age, you said, yes, you can tell we're on a spacecraft, 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 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 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 of the society is built so they could sustain that mission.

That's a crazy mission. But it's not that much different from spaceship Earth. 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 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 in 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. Prison sounds so dark, but-- - Just, yeah, just like prison 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 ship. We'd probably launch 10 or 20 of them, the different, the best candidates, and hopefully get there. - And yeah, I mean, the fact is limitations and constraints make life fascinating because the human mind somehow struggles against those constraints and that's how beauty is created.

So there is kind of a threshold, you know, being stuck in one room is different than being stuck in a building and being stuck in a city, being stuck in, like, I wonder what the threshold of people, like, 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. - It was magnificent, right? It's just like, wow, you can speak volumes. It's like, you can escape, that feels like freedom. That's the definition of freedom, having a door where you could close it and now you're alone with your thoughts and then you can open it and you enter and now there's other humans as freedom.

So the threshold of what freedom, the experience of freedom is like is really fascinating. And like you said, there could be technologies in terms of hibernation, VR, ultra reality, virtual reality. 'Cause, you know, 30 years ago, it sounded awful, I think, you'd be stuck in a spacecraft, but now you could bring the totality of all of human history, culture, every music, every bit of music, song, every movie, every book, can all be in one tablet, basically, right?

So, and also you'd still get updates from Netflix if you're on the way towards another star. You could still get downloads and so, but eventually maybe the crew would start to make their own shows. And they'd be like, well, I don't want the Earth shows. I wanna talk about, I'm gonna 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 immediate because we've all had to experience it to some degree in the past two years. And we've survived, but definitely we've learned that you need a really good internet connection. You need some ability to go somewhere sometimes. And 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.

So people need recreation, people need games, people need toys, people love to play. - What are chlorohumans? - Chlorohumans is a description of how you can embed chloroplasts into human skin or the thing that makes plants green so they can absorb light from the sun and then get all their energy that way.

And of course, humans don't do this, but I describe in the book in the far future, maybe 300, 400 years from now, if we could work on the ways that animals and plants work together, you could embed chloroplasts in human skin. And then if you're hungry, you go outside and you lay out your skin and then you absorb sunlight and then you go back in when you get full.

If you only wanted to lay outside for just say one hour to get 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 or something. But if they plan it, then their shadows would block your sun.

So maybe you leave your skin out there and you could roll up your skin, go back inside after about one hour and that's how much skin you would need to have exposed with some reasonable assumptions about the light capture and efficiency of the chloroplast. So it was 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. Or you could just lay outside longer. I wanted to think if you just had one hour and how much skin would you need.

But if you just went out there for four hours, you need something that's smaller, but you know, thick, so it's as of a half a tennis court. So you could make a-- - Could be like wings, gigantic wings. - And you lay them out there. But also, 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'd 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 essentially exact wavelength of light you need for your chloroplasts in your skin. But that's something I'm hoping would happen in three to 400 years, but it would be hard because you're taking a plant organelle and putting it in an animal cell, which sounds weird, but we have mitochondria inside of us, which basically where our cells capture the bacteria and now it walks around with us all the time.

So there's precedent for it in evolution. - How much, by the way, speaking of which, does evolution help us here? So we talked a lot about engineering, building genetically modifying humans to make them more resilient or having mechanisms for repairing parts of humans. 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, somewhere wrote that there's trillions of cells that make up the human body. And those are all organisms, and they're also very adaptable. So can we leverage the natural process of evolution, of the slaughter, the selection, the mutation, and the adaptation that is all, sorry to throw slaughter into there, it's just acknowledging that a lot of organisms have to die in evolution.

Can we use that for long-term space travel or colonization, occupation? Is there a good word for this? Of planets. - Like to terraform the planet? - Terraform the planet. No, to adjust the human body to the planet. - Oh, there's not really a term for that yet, I guess, to-- - Adapt to the new vacation spot.

- Yeah, I called it just directed evolution in the book, is that you guide the evolution towards what you want. In this case, sometimes you can engineer your cells to make exactly what you want, but other times you put people on planets and see how they change. Actually, later in the book, I imagine if you have humans on multiple planets, you could have this virtuous cycle, or 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, or is it more efficient to do bacteria?

- Bacteria are cheaper and faster and easier, but we also have a lot of bacteria in us, on us, and all around us. Even the bacteria in the space station are continually evolving. - Did you study that, by the way? Like non-human cells, like the microbiomes. - Yep, so we've seen it for the astronauts.

We can actually see 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 T-cells in their body, they actually are responding to little peptides, the molecules of the bacteria.

The immune system is looking for a 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 in the space station. - 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.

- You're part of the Extreme Microbiome Project. What does that involve, and what kind of fun organisms have you learned about, have you gotten to explore? - We have a really fun project, XMP, the Extreme Microbiome, which is as it sounds like. We look for really odd places, like heavy radiation environments, high salt, high or low temperature, you know, strange area, the space station, for example, lots of radiation and microgravity.

Places where organisms can evolve for interesting adaptations, and some of them have been organisms we've seen like a candy pink lake in Australia called Lake Hillier, which we just published a paper on this. - Why is it pink? - So it's actually Denalia salina, is one of these organisms.

There's a mixture of bacteria and some algae that are there that make it bright pink. So they actually make carotenoids, these like really sort of orangey and kind of pink molecules when you look at them in the light. So if you get enough of the bacteria, it becomes pink.

So, and it's not just pink, it's like bubblegum pink, the lake. And so we, that's just an odd, it's a halophile, means that it grows in 30% salt. And if you go below 10, 15% salt, it doesn't even grow. It actually kills it. - Oh, oh. - Yeah, there it is, Lake Hillier.

- Is it toxic to humans or no? - So when you walk in the pink lake, actually, it's so hypertonic, meaning it's so salty, you can feel it lysing and killing your cells on your foot. So it actually hurts to walk in 'cause it's so salty. So yeah, but it won't kill, it'll-- - Listen, you have to suffer for art.

- That's right. - Great art requires suffering. - I mean, so it is a beautiful lake. 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," 'cause he loves flying over it, and it was like a little bit less pink 'cause it had a bunch of rain in the past few weeks. So it was just a little bit diluted. So we reassured him it'll get more pink as they grow again.

But basically, yeah, it's a beautiful pink lake. - That is gorgeous. - It's almost like a Dr. Seuss book or something. It doesn't even look real. - Is it hard to get to? - Yeah, there's no road. You have to basically fly, land nearby it, and then paddle in, so it's not next to anything.

So it's hard to get to, but once you get there, it's beautiful. - If anyone knows how to get there, let me know. I wanna go there. Okay, cool, what are some other extreme organisms that you study? - Other ones, there's some organisms we've studied in the space station called Acinetobacter pitii, which is often found in human skin, but we've found hundreds of strains in the space station that we've brought down and curated and then sequenced.

And this is with Katsuri Venkateswaran, who's at Jet Propulsion Laboratory working with him. And they have evolved, so they no longer look like any Earth-based Acinetobacter. They don't look like, they're now basically a new species. So actually, there's a different species of bacteria and fungi that have now mutated so much in the space station, they're literally a new species.

And so we've found some of those that have, just they're evolving, as life is always evolving, and we can see it also in the space station. - So an entirely new species born in the space station. - Yeah, that's completely different. So we found one species, actually, that we named after a donor to Cornell, someone who's donated funds to research.

So we named a different species of fungus after him, Naganishia tolchinskia, 'cause he's Igor Tolchinsky. So as a thank you for him donating to Cornell, we said we've named this fungus that we found on the space station for you. - Was he grateful, or did he stop funding all the research?

(laughing) - He was very grateful, and then, and I told him, I said, if you have an ex-girlfriend, we could try and name a genital fungus after her or something, if you want. And he said, yeah, he said maybe. (laughing) - He stopped answering emails after that. Okay, what about in extreme conditions, in ice, in heat, is that something of interest to you, in the things that survive where most things can't?

- Yes, of keen interest. I think that will be the roadmap for some of the potential adaptations we could think of for human cells, or certainly for the microbiome, like just all the microorganisms in and on and around us. So we've seen, even there's this one crater, it's called the Lake of Fire, it's in Turkmenistan, where it's been on fire because of oil that had been set on fire decades ago, and it's still burning.

So we collected some samples from there, and those were some Pseudomonas potida, some species we found there that can-- - So there's stuff alive there. - That seems to be surviving there by this large pit of fire. Oh yeah, there it is, the desert. It's been just on fire for decades, apparently.

- What the? (laughing) - So this is another place that-- - It's just a lake of fire. - Yeah, yeah, and it's-- - 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 lake full of fire, and there's something alive there, allegedly. - And Pseudomonas are known to be some of the most tough organisms. They actually can clean toxic waste from, you know, in years of superfund sites where there's so much waste that's been deposited, you'll find them there as well.

Actually, there's one place in the Gowanus Canal, there's something, it's called, in New York City in Brooklyn, and it is a complete toxic waste dump. That was where a lot of waste in the 1700s was dumped, and so the gateway to hell is what it's called. But the-- (laughing) - That's the nickname for the lake.

(laughing) - So the Gowanus Canal is also a place that has been fun to sequence and see Pseudomonas 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, oh, fine, I'll make things that can survive here.

And when you look at the biochemistry of those species, what they've created is their own salvation, basically. The selection has made them survivors, and suddenly you can use that to remediate other polluted sites, for example. - That explains Twitter perfectly. The toxicity created adaptation for the psychological microbiome that is social media.

Okay, beautiful, but you just actually jump back to the interstellar travel. Assuming the technology of today, yes, what are some wild innovations that might happen in the space of physics or biology? By the way, where do you think is the most exciting breakthroughs for interstellar travel that will happen in the next 500 years?

Is it physics, is it biology, is it computer science? So information or DNA, like some kind of informational type of thing? Is it biological, like physiological, making the body resilient, live longer, and resilient to the harsh conditions of space? Or is it the actual vehicle of transport, which would be applied physics?

- As you can probably guess, I'll say all of the above. (Dave laughs) - It's a question, never. - But to break those down, though, I think the AI, I hope in the book later that we would have really good machine companions, that the AI, I really hope the AIs that we build, like realistically, we are the programmers who make 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 creativity.

Like we have the opportunity. I've coded algorithms myself. We're building them, so it's incumbent upon us to actually make them not assholes, I think, frankly. So it'd just be-- - It's a technical term. - Air. (laughs) - Actually, on that point, just to linger on the AI front, can you steelman the case that HAL 9000 from "Space Odyssey" was doing the right thing?

So for people who haven't seen "2001 Space Odyssey," HAL 9000 is very kind of focused on the mission, cares a lot about the mission, and 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 know, a broader duty.

I mean, he was-- - What's the broader duty exactly? Maintaining the well-being of astronauts? - Yeah, or giving them another option. I think he viewed them as completely expendable, rather than say-- - Not completely, it's a trade-off. - Oh. - 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 deontogenic vision of what was the best duty for the genetics, you could say. - What's deontogenic mean?

- It's a word I made up in the book. It's like, what is your genetic duty? It's like, when you think of your DNA, what are you supposed to do with it, which is kind of the value of life. But if HAL was a silicon-based version of genetics, which is just his own maintenance of himself and self-survival, you could argue he was doing the right thing for himself.

But I think a human in that circumstance might have tried to find a way to, even if the astronauts don't agree with the mission, to figure out some way to get them on a different spacecraft to go away or something, versus just say, well, you're in the way of the mission, you have to die, is I think, but a combination can always be made, to your point with doctors.

Sometimes you'd like to save three people, but you can only save two, and you have to at some point pick. But I think that since it's a false dichotomy, I think HAL wasn't programmed to and didn't try to find a third solution. - Perhaps, just like Stuart 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 the local optimum of this is the mission. Always be a little bit like, hmm, 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.

So the worst thing about decisions from that perspective is if you're extremely confident and you're stubborn and immovable. - Right. - But programming doubt, that sounds complicated. That sounds like-- - Go wrong. - Yeah. - So many ways. - You can go wrong either way. If you're too confident, you won't see the other options.

If you have too much doubt, you won't move. You'll be paralyzed by the options. So you need some middle ground, which I think is what most people experience every day. 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 too headstrong.

- So how would you improve HAL 9000? - I think I would include other, 'cause HAL is one program, much like we do for humans. You get feedback from other humans before you make a decision that affects all of them. So I think HAL could have gotten feedback from other AI systems that said, "Well, are there other options here?" And done it probably very quickly.

Or you can even 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, more 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 it 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 different enough, but conceptually it's possible. Of course, that can lead to log jam and government and parliament doesn't do anything or Congress doesn't do anything. So there's trade-offs, but it's one idea. - I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

That I find really compelling the idea. I'd love to set that up in my own life at some point. So you're stuck there on a spaceship with an AI system and it's just the two of you and you have to figure it out. I love that challenge. I love that almost a really deep human conflict of through conversation have to arrive at something.

You really try to understand what survival is a stake. You have to try to understand the other being. Now, you think it's just a robot. We keep saying it's just programmed. But you know what? When you talk to another human-- - It's just a bag of meat. - And then you disagree and you're like, 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 what you're talking about is insane. And when the stakes go up, when it's life and death, you have to convince another person. First, you have to understand another person. In this case, you have to understand the machine without knowing how it was programmed because as a programmer, even, I mean, this is very much true for these Lego robots.

I really make sure that everything that's programmed 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 is 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 was treated that way a little bit where you're like a servant as opposed to a friend, a companion, a teammate. 'Cause I think the worst part about treating an AI system 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 lessened the humanity in yourself. - Yeah, at the same time. - Which is, I mean, that's why they talked about kids have to be polite to Alexa 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 a bad sign and it develops the wrong thing in terms of how they treat other 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?

- I would love to fold space. We know wormholes are technically possible, but we have no way to do it. I'd love to see advanced wormhole technology, antimatter drives, antimatter is notoriously missing for most of the universe, so-- - What is antimatter drive? - Antimatter would be where you just purify bits of antimatter, basically, that is the opposite of matter.

So if you can have an anti-electron, you can convert to the electron, you could have even the complete atoms, it would be anti-atoms. And when you put them together, there would be pure energy released in theory. And that could drive the most powerful possible engine for space travel. But 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 multiple centuries, that saying might-- - Yeah. - Might actually become, 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 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 fields, quite frankly.

That would take some development to do, but that would be good to see. - And uploading human memories and consciousness into digital form. - Yeah, this kind of blends the machine and physics with the biology developments. I think, you know, there's a lot of great work being done on longevity.

I have a, one of my companies itself works on longevity. It's called Longevity. And so I'm working on it myself, on ways to improve how we monitor health and wellness now, and live longer, live better. Many people are doing this, 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 gonna live to be two, three, four, 500 years, or some people, I meet people like this every week, 'cause I think I'm not going to die.

To which I always say, I hope you're right. But I think you should plan that you're not going to be right. But I want people, also as we mentioned earlier, being immortal would really fundamentally change the social contract and how you plan, and how you allocate resources. Not necessarily bad, but it would just be different.

But I also just think we don't know yet of any way to undo the ravages to the human body that occur over time. We can repair some of it, replace some of it, but it's okay to assume that you're gonna die. And I don't just assume, know you're gonna die, 'cause then you have a bit of liberty about what you can do quickly and do next.

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, living might become-- - Living in a brain, like in the Kurtzpill singularity, where we all have this rapture-like moment, and we go up and upload into the cloud and live forever.

I don't know if it would still be the same as what we consider the view of self in this flesh form. If we could really get a complete representation of a person's entire personality up into digital form, I mean, that would be immortality, basically. - Or a loose representation.

I'd go through the thought experiment of, I like thinking about clones. - Twins, twins are clones, basically. - I don't have twins. - The ability to generate, I mean, you're stuck with those clones. 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 the reason I really like that construction, thinking about that, for me personally, is it nicely encapsulates how I feel about being human, because why do I matter? How would I, if I do another copy of me, how would I defend why I matter as a human being?

And I don't think I can, 'cause that clone is just fine. It's not even a perfect, like a reasonable clone. Like most people I know that love me and who I love, they'll be just fine with the clone. (laughing) They'd be like, and they'll be surprised, like, oh, you're like, your move kind of weird, but overall, but otherwise, I'll take it.

And if that's possible to do that kind of copying, and no, I don't want to say perfect clone, 'cause I think perfect clone is very difficult engineering-wise. I mean like a pretty crappy copy. - Would still be okay for most of them. - Just like wears suits a lot, has a weird way of talking.

I mean, I think there's a lot of elements there, like in the digital space, especially with the metaverse. - Yeah. - You can clone, I think, in the next few decades, you'll be able to clone people's behavioral patterns pretty well, and visual, at least in the virtual reality, in the digital representation, if you are.

And then you have to really contend with, like, why do I matter? Maybe what matters isn't the individual person, but what matters are the ideas that that person plays with. So it doesn't matter if there's 1,000 clones, what matters is that I'm currently thinking about X, so 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 meat vehicles of the organism.

Maybe that's a cultural shift where we won't necessarily treat any one body as fundamentally unique or important, but the sort of, the ideas that those bodies play with. I mean, that sounds crazy. - No, it's abstract, but very relevant. Derek Parfitt wrote this great book called "Reasons and Persons" about how you really define an individual as not just your own thoughts and your own self-reflection, but where almost, he argues, more defined by how other people see you.

See, like, if you walked out into the world and, say, suddenly nobody knew who you were or recognized you you'd be, in some regards, deceased, right? If everyone just suddenly had massive amnesia and 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 starting from scratch, like as if you'd just been born, basically. So, and he also 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. No, not completely, but they're a key component of how you view yourself, how they view what you are in the world.

And he actually goes so far to say that they're probably more important than even what's in your head. Like if you swap out all of your thoughts, but when you walk out into the world, everyone still treats you and talks to you the same way as this memory of what you are, that is still like an entity that's defined you, even if all of your, you know, there's even movies like "Trading Spaces" about this with Eddie Murphy, or like the ideas of people who can swap bodies.

The reason those are comedies is 'cause they're fish-out-of-water comedies, 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 beings, and so that, yeah, 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, how do they do, they lessen? Not really, they just distribute, they just scale the you-ness 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 moment of cloning, it's like cloning a Git repository, then you're no longer as branched. You share the version, view one of Chris, that a lot of people have experienced, like your high school friends, college friends, colleagues, and so on, but now you moved on to your music career, and one of your clones did.

And then that's fundamentally new experiences that you still, your colleagues can still experience the memories of the old Chris, 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 don't get a lot of likes on social media, we can quietly dispose of.

- We want to maximize the clones of Chris that can get a lot of likes on Facebook. Okay, just returning briefly to the topic of AI, are you working on AI stuff too? - A lot of machine learning tools for genomics. - For genomics, 'cause I was seeing this interspersed, 'cause you're such a biology, I mean, I suppose computational biology person, but what about the, are you working on Age of Prediction?

- Yes, yeah, so you've heard about the book, I guess, 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 next year, actually, yeah. - What's the effort there? What's your interest in sort of the more narrow AI tools of prediction and machine learning, all that kind of stuff?

- I think, called the Age of Prediction, so the next book that's coming, is all the ways where machine learning tools, predictive algorithms have fundamentally changed our lives. So some of them are obvious to me, where, for example, when we sequence cancer patient's DNA, and we have predictions of exactly which drug will work with it, that's actually a very simple algorithm.

But other ones involve predicting, say, the age of blood that's left at the scene of a crime, which uses computational tools to look at each piece of DNA and what it might reveal for its epigenetic state, and then predicting, essentially, how old you are at any given moment. And it also gets to longevity, 'cause sometimes you can see 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 of was during the 2012 election, and 2016 election especially, we were seeing these really big differences of how Facebook was monitoring feeds.

And so prediction is not just better medicine or in finance and economics. People think about stock traders, people doing predictive algorithms. But what you view in your feed, how you what your vote is 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 be really predictive and manipulative, frankly, with what happens, and then can that change how they vote?

And the answer seemed 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're good, for example, in medicine, they're phenomenal. They have fundamentally changed how we treat cancer patients.

But where they're risky, like if someone's trying to steal your vote or manipulate your thoughts potentially negatively. - So in medicine, you're hopeful about prediction. - Yeah, most of the AI in medicine, the machine learning tools for image recognition, for example, for pathology samples, where normally you think, oh, someone takes a big 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 do far better than almost every pathologist on the planet and get a much more accurate diagnostic.

So that's for breast cancer, for prostate cancer, for leukemia, we've seen the diagnostic tools explode with AI power. - Is it currently mostly empowering doctors or can it replace doctors? - Watson notoriously was made by IBM to try and replace doctors. - 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 recommend the right treatment." And then at one point in the conversation, remember this is a room of, I'm a PhD, so I could geneticist, some programmers, some MDs, leaders 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, 'cause everyone's like, "No, you want to help the doctors." 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 just mentioned, I think the AI tools already do a better job. And we've only really been doing this for about five years. So you imagine another five years of optimization and data, they're gonna take over, right? And they should, because staring and squinting at screens for hours on day is not the best use of human ingenuity.

So I think in some cases they'll take over. Other cases, they'll augment, they'll help. - Yeah, that human ingenuity, actually, especially for AI people, is sometimes difficult to characterize. I have this debate all the time about autonomous driving. It's a lot more difficult than people realize. - You're an expert on it, or you focus a lot on that for your research, right?

- I'm an expert in nothing. (laughing) Except in not being an expert, I think. (laughing) Or asking stupid questions where the answer is both. Okay. (laughing) But there is some ingenuity that's hard to kind of encapsulate that is human. For a doctor, the decision-maker, it's the HAL 9000. You can have a perfect system that is 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 the right one. It's the self-doubt that is essential for human progress. That's weird. I'm 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 others. - Yeah, I think for the Padawans out there and younglings looking up at the stars, you have to know that this day that you're alive is quantifiably the best day that's ever happened, and that tomorrow will be even better than this day in terms of the capacity for discovery, the amount of data that exists.

Again, it's not my opinion. That's just an empirical fact of the state of genetics research, knowledge, accretion of humanities, acumen for many disciplines. So with that ability to do so many things, it can be sometimes just terrifying. Well, what do I pick? If I could do everything, 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 keeps you up at night? And if you don't have anything that keeps you up at night sometimes, you go find something that keeps you up at night. 'Cause that is kind of this, sometimes I feel like I get woken up by someone on the inside of my skull who's knocking, trying to get out.

It's kind of that almost haunting feeling of, I need to wake up, there's things that have to be done. There are questions I don't know the answer to. And there's a lot of times it's as simple as, how do we engineer cells to survive more radiation? But I read a paper and then it came back to me a week later as how we could use some of these tools, or these genes, or these methods.

Really being pleasantly haunted by something is a wonderful place to be and find that thing that bothers you. Because there'll be good days and there'll be bad days, but you wanna have, even on the worst possible days, working on the thing that you love the most. And then all the usual normal phrases apply.

Like then you never work a day in your life if you have a job you love, the usual phrases. But it's true 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.

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, and people trust you, you've done enough good work. And only then can you really do the thing you love most.

So you have to be a little bit patient, you have to 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 thing that excites you, you have to, especially in this modern world, I think silence the distractions.

'Cause once you find that thing, you hear that little voice in your head, there's still Instagram and TikTok 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's longer lasting.

And I think you have to silence everything else to let that sort of flame become a fire. So it's interesting 'cause so much of the internet is designed to convert that natural predisposition that humans have to get excited about stuff, convert that into attention and money and ads and so on.

But we have to be conscious of that. I think a lot of that is full of fun and is awesome. I think TikTok and Instagram is full of fun. - Amazing, yeah. And creativity leads to people making amazing videos or even doing people, my daughter loves TikTok, and people who do makeup art on TikTok of things that are mind-blowing.

You think they made that video just to put it on TikTok and practice their art and share it with the world, it's fabulous. But then if my daughter watches TikTok for like three hours straight, I'm like, "What are you doing exactly?" And she's like, "Well, you know." So it's hard.

But I remember when I was a kid, I remember I played Nintendo and sometimes I'd play for like 10 hours a day. Even in grad school, I'd sometimes play Counter-Strike or Half-Life, like 12 hours straight. And I'm like, "What was I?" So 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 gonna not install them "because otherwise I'll play them for too long." - Yeah, I would love to, (laughs) I'm getting props from the team. I would love to lay out all the things I've ever done in my life to myself 'cause I think I would be less judgmental of others and less understanding, more patient because the amount of hours I spent playing Diablo and video, it's insane.

- I'm sure it adds up to weeks, maybe months of my life that it was just, you know. But I feel like I was probably, I tell myself at least, I was problem-solving. It's a hand-eye coordination, or that's an old, I don't know if that really is even remotely true, but some of the games, like Final Fantasy things, are things where you actually had to solve problems and think, and they were some degree of strategy.

- They were actually just expanding the diversity of human character that makes up you. It's like, you can't just focus on, not that you can't, but perhaps it's more beneficial to focus, to not focus on a singular thing for many, many years at a time. That could be one of the downsides of a PhD if you're not careful, is that you become too singular and you focus not just on the problem, but on a particular community.

And you don't do wild stuff. You don't do interdisciplinary stuff. You don't go out painting or getting drunk or dancing. Whatever the variety, whatever injects variety to the years of difficult reading, research paper after research paper, that whole process, 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. - Or dancing, New York City's a great place for this. There's Sunrise Rooftop Dancing, a party that does this. - That's a thing? - It's a thing, so you go there. I have some people from my lab that go.

I've only been once, but at Sunrise, and you see the sun rise over the city and there's huge house music, and you play and you dance like crazy, and then you go to work. You 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 some difficult, dark places. - I'll bring a flashlight. (laughing) - Maybe something, find something that can warm your soul or inspires others. Is there dark periods, dark times in your life that you had to overcome? - Yeah, like many people, I had friends I've lost.

I had a friend when I was younger who committed suicide. And that was actually, I remember being so struck of, I couldn't understand it. I didn't understand mental illness at the time. I was very young, I was only, I think, 11 at the time. And I really was confused more than anything else about how could someone take their life.

And I actually, once I got over the grief of it all, I really, it cemented in my head that I would never commit suicide. I could tell this to my wife, if it looks like I hung myself, go find my killer, 'cause I would never do it. It's gotta be staged.

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 sometimes, euthanasia is an actual exit. But I just have friends I've lost along the way. But that's not too different. Everyone has people they've lost along the way.

But I actually was never too dark of a childhood or of a dark place. I mean, the hardest things have been really weird relationship breakups where I felt like love, falling in love, and then losing that person, just breaking up, not like they died, but where you felt like you just could barely move.

And you literally felt like your heart was moved in your body to a different location. And that sort of scraping sense of existence. But also at the same time, that's been where I've, in some ways, been the most alive, where I lost what I thought at the time was the love of my life.

But then was able to actually, I think, carve a deeper trench into my heart, which then could be filled more with joy, I would say, is what Pablo Neruda wrote about this. And Khalil Gibran is that the deepest, deepest sorrows, I think, later have translated into my life as to places that can be filled with greater amounts of joy.

- I love thinking of sorrows as a digging of a ditch that can then be filled with more good stuff. - Eventually. Not at the time, but for a while, it's just a giant empty cavern full of blood and tears and pain. But then, yeah, it comes later, I'd say.

- There is an element to life where this too shall pass. So any moment of sorrow or joy, it's gonna be over. And treasure it, no matter what. I mean, I do definitely think about losing love. That's like a celebration of love. - And even any living, I think, is better.

That's why I just adamantly don't think I'd ever really commit suicide, is 'cause anything I take is better than nothing. Except the worst case scenario, so there's no heaven, there's no hell. That's just it. 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, 'cause at least it's something.

And so I appreciate sad, I enjoy sadness, which sounds like an oxymoron, but I sometimes even long for a good sadness, like a rainy day and I'm staring out a window, squinting and drinking some underpriced whiskey, and then just moping. And like, "What are you doing?" I'm just moping today, but I want at least one day where I do that or something.

- I actually had a conversation offline with Rick Rubin, he's a music producer, about this. And he told me, he has a way of speaking that's all sage-like, and he says, "Be careful that you spend some time appreciating "that sadness, but don't become addicted to it." - Yeah, yeah.

- That there's a line you can cross, and then you actually push away the joy. - Because you feel like, because the sadness can be all-encompassing, and therefore even more real than what might seem like fleeting happiness. - Yes. - And so, yeah. (laughing) - Yeah, right, you can, sadness, if you let it, can be a thing that stays with you longer and stickier.

But you, but just witnessing suicide made you appreciate life more, yeah. And just an appreciation of death is actually an appreciation of life at the same time. - Are you afraid of your death? - No. - When you think about it? - I think it's like being afraid of the sunrise, it doesn't make sense.

- So you're a part of this fabric that is humanity, and then you just think generationally. - Yeah, I think I wanna do as much as I can. I feel like I would die, 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. I feel like I had at least sex once. I had good friends. - What else is there? - Good friends, right, at that age. But then I had also 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, that I wouldn't feel like I was cheated if I had died from that day forward, that I had gotten at least enough of life to feel like that I would be not okay with dying, but that I feel like I knew I was gonna die, I wasn't afraid I was gonna die, and it actually was very liberating.

And it's only gotten better since then. So I think some of that may or may not have been drug-related euphoria, but nonetheless, the joy stuck. And I think it's just gotten more true ever since, is that the default state is one of very rich appreciation because it's so fleeting.

And so I knew I would die happy, I guess, even at age 17, but now my metrics have changed a little bit. I've had sex more than one time now, so that's really big. - Congratulations, this is very exciting news. - At least four times. But the-- - Multiples.

- Right, right, and professionally accomplished things. Like I 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 scientific goals and statements have really been the same since I've been 17.

It's just now everyone takes me seriously because I'm a professor and actually I've done-- - And you're mentoring people, you're an educator. - To the next generation, yeah. - Also patients. - Yeah, and helping patients live longer and seeing the hope in their eyes when they went from, even my own grandfather, went from a two-month diagnosis of living from metastatic cancer to living for more than two years.

Eventually succumbed to it, but knowing, can use the tools of predictive medicine to save people. And so now, looking out ahead, I feel like it's, I would die very happy if I saw boots on the red planet 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, several times, said no, we don't have a plan for a mission like that, it's not gonna happen.

So don't, just persevere as the oldest-- - But you were, I didn't know, 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, 'cause when you start a lab in academia, they say, here's a pile of money, write grants and bring in more money and train people and start a lab.

But, so I actually wrote NASA and said, I don't, I'm not requesting any funds. I have funds, they just gave me a bunch of money. I would like to, though, do a deep genetic profile of astronauts before and after space flight and do it ideally if we have some twins or do genetics and epigenetics and microbiome.

But John Charles, who's the director of the Human Research Program, said, no, we don't have, we don't even have those samples, Bank, that you would want, that are old samples, and we don't have any plans for missions like that right now, so we can't do it. And that was the first time I, you know, it's like saying to someone, listen, I'll buy a house for you.

I just have this, I'll buy, and they're like, oh, no, no thanks. 'Cause it felt like I was offering a really unique research opportunity. But then that failure of saying that, well, 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 something along the lines of what you were thinking a few years ago.

So sometimes when some things get rejected, or someone says no, say, okay, maybe it's just too early, but don't give up, I think, and say, you know, so to me, when someone says no, not right now, I'll be like, okay, I'll just, I'll come back in a year. No just means no for now, and so, if I think it's, sometimes no means you have a crappy idea.

That is true, I do have crappy ideas, and so does everybody, but if I really believe in it, I just say, okay, I'll be back. - Yeah, this too shall pass, the no. (laughing) Do you hope to go out to ISS, out to deep space one day? - I would love to go.

I wanna be a little bit older so that if I die, it's not as traumatic for my daughter and family, but yeah, I feel like if I'm a little bit older, I definitely, I would even potentially do a one-way trip to Mars if it's later in life. - So would you like to, do you think you will step foot on Mars?

- I would love to, and I think I might. I think, it may be that one-way trip, 'cause I think they'll need settlers who would wanna go and stay there, and build and be there for the long term, knowing it's high risk, knowing it's-- - And your resume fits, so you'll have a lot of cool stuff to do there.

- Yeah, I can help 'em. - At least on the surface, you'll be able to sell yourself well. 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, it may be the best way to die, knowing that you're in the first wave of people expanding the reach into the stars.

It'd be an honor. - Why do you think we're here? What's the meaning of life? - To serve as the guardians of life itself. That is the duty for our species, is to recognize and really manifest this unique responsibility that we have, and only we have so far. So I think, yeah, to me, the meaning of life is for life to, in its simplest form, is to be able to survive, but to leverage the frailty of life into its ability to protect itself.

And quite literally, the guardians of the galaxy is basically what we are. We're guarding 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 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 its 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 were replaced by the kinder, smarter AI? - Nope, I think about that in the book a bit. I think I would be okay with it if they carry some echo of that duty and they bring that with them.

It would be sad if they're like, to hell with everyone, we're gonna destroy everything we come across and become like nanobots that make everything gray goo. That seems, but that would still be a version of life, just not one that is, I think, is pretty, but technically it'd be alive.

So philosophically, could I object? It's borderline. - Yeah, but romantically, no. - Romantic, there's-- - They need to carry the duty. - There's some, yes, yes, there's a bit of a romance to the philosophy that's in there. - And you also end the book with a universe that creates new universes.

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 'cause 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 think if you look at billions of years, trillions of years in the future of technological development, it's certainly possible we could start to have little baby universes, grow them like cabbage, get them out, saute them, make them have flavor. - Yeah, create something delicious.

Well, it sounds difficult, but it's our human duty to try. As you said, Chris, this is an incredible conversation. You're an incredible person, a scientist, explorer. I can't wait to see what you do in this world. And I hope to be there with you on Mars. I would like to also 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 to me. - 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 Stanislav Lem and Solaris. Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)