ANTHROPOCENE MAN: 2/4: The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds by Christopher E. Mason
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2024
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086SCVGS5/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
Inevitably, life on Earth will come to an end, whether by climate disaster, or by cataclysmic war, or when the sun runs out of fuel in a few billion years. To avoid extinction, will we have to find a new home planet, perhaps even a new solar system, to inhabit? In this provocative and fascinating book, Christopher Mason argues that we have a moral duty to do just that. Because we are the only species aware that life on Earth has an expiration date, we have a responsibility to act as the shepherd of lifeforms--not only for our species but for all species on which we depend and for those still to come (by accidental or designed evolution). Mason argues that the same capacity for ingenuity that has enabled us to build rockets and land on other planets can be applied to redesigning biology so that we can sustainably inhabit those planets. And he lays out a 500-year plan for undertaking the massively ambitious project of reengineering human genetics for life in other worlds.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everyone this is James Harkin and Anna Tashinsky two writers of the TV show |
| 0:05.2 | QI and two-fourths of the hit podcast no such thing as a fish. |
| 0:09.2 | We'd like to let you know that we've written a book it It is called everything to play for. The most |
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| 0:25.7 | Or that games of lacrosse used to involve 100,000 players. |
| 0:31.7 | Learn that and so much more by getting everything to play for, the QI Book of Sports, available |
| 0:36.2 | in all bookshops and online right now. This is a CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Greg Branaka, a |
| 0:48.0 | Cosmo chemist, a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore Labs and the author of Impact, a new book about |
| 0:55.2 | asteroids and things that fall to Earth, but reasoning backwards like a detective, no, as a detective, |
| 1:01.9 | Greg is going to take us to the asteroid belt and what the asteroid belt and other objects in our solar system called planets, not all of them are planets, but it's important to mention that the |
| 1:13.8 | building blocks of planets are everywhere. What they tell us about the formation of our |
| 1:18.6 | solar system. So far, Greg, my understanding is the planets have moved. |
| 1:23.5 | Why is the asteroid belt where it is after Mars? |
| 1:27.1 | What does it represent? |
| 1:29.6 | That's a great question, and you're right, the planets have moved over the course of history of |
| 1:33.7 | the solar system and particularly the large planets uh... jap Jupiter and |
| 1:37.8 | Saturn uh... they encompass a huge amount of mass in our solar system it's out not in part of the sun and |
| 1:44.8 | their kind of gravitational interactions with the sun are what caused things to kind of |
| 1:49.5 | move around because they're so large and they play such an important role. |
| 1:53.0 | And the reason the asteroid belt is where it is, |
| 1:56.0 | is because of this movement of the planets. |
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