ANTHROPOCENE MAN: 4/4: 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
⏱️ 10 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. |
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| 0:38.8 | This is CBS I and the world. |
| 0:41.8 | I'm John Bachelor with the author Greg Branaka who is a cosmocivist, his day job. |
| 0:47.0 | He's an author, Impact, how rocks from space led to life, culture and Donkey Kong. |
| 0:52.0 | We see on the world's world life because we've |
| 0:55.3 | established that there's a way of saying what happened before the moon and after |
| 0:59.4 | the moon. Right now, Greg, I need a definition. What is a complex organic molecule? |
| 1:05.0 | Well, a complex organic molecule is a molecule that contains carbon, usually some hydrogen bonded to it. |
| 1:14.0 | And then when it becomes complex, I guess it gets a little bit quicker |
| 1:17.5 | than just carbon and hydrogen. |
| 1:19.6 | So the definition is quite fuzzy about what complex means but it just |
| 1:24.3 | means something that's got a little bit more to it than just carbon and hydrogen I |
| 1:28.4 | guess and the reason we're looking at them is have the word organic is highly suggestive however we don't |
| 1:36.3 | have the at this point we don't have the formula that we need to put together organic molecules, amino acids, and meteorites. |
| 1:48.2 | But it would appear that you have the elements for it. |
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