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The John Batchelor Show

ANTHROPOCENE MAN: 3/4: The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds by Christopher E. Mason

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2024

⏱️ 13 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

ANTHROPOCENE MAN: 3/4: The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds by Christopher E. Mason

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

0:14.4

interesting things there are to know about the world of sports. It's for you

0:18.2

whether you like sports or not. Did you know that legendary cricketer Gary Sobers scored his final century while drunk?

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.

0:40.6

This is CBS I in the world.

0:42.0

I'm John Bachelor. Impact is the book. This is the world, I'm John Bachelor.

0:43.0

Impact is the book.

0:44.0

This is meteorites that fall to Earth

0:47.0

and what we've learned about our solar system,

0:49.0

about life, about water,

0:51.0

about our understanding of where we come from. Impact is the book how rocks from

0:56.6

space led to life culture and Donkey Kong. Greg Bratica, a cosmochemist is here and

1:01.8

Greg you teach me there are three kinds of meteorites that fall to earth, our classifications. What are they? And you study one particular kind of meteorite I believe the CAIs what is that first

1:17.1

the three kinds thank you okay well a lot I guess I'll have to slightly correct

1:21.6

you there's a lot more than three kinds kinds. I think there's three main kinds of

1:25.0

of chondrites. So I'll just kind of break it up into that. There are chondrites which are really primitive samples and then they're a

1:33.0

chondrites which have melted.

1:34.7

There are three types of chondrites.

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