FAR, FAR AWAY: 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
🗓️ 8 July 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Next-500-Years-Engineering-Worlds/dp/0262044404
An argument that we have a moral duty to explore other planets and solar systems—because human life on Earth has an expiration date.
Inevitably, life on Earth will come to an end, whether by climate disaster, cataclysmic war, or the death of the sun in a few billion years. To avoid extinction, we will 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. As the only species aware that life on Earth has an expiration date, we have a responsibility to act as the shepherd of life-forms—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 on other worlds.
As they are today, our frail human bodies could never survive travel to another habitable planet. Mason describes the toll that long-term space travel took on the astronaut Scott Kelly, who returned from a year on the International Space Station with changes to his blood, bones, and genes. Mason proposes a ten-phase, 500-year program that would engineer the genome so that humans can tolerate the extreme environments of outer space—with the ultimate goal of achieving human settlement of new solar systems. He lays out a roadmap of which solar systems to visit first, and merges biotechnology, philosophy, and genetics to offer an unparalleled vision of the universe to come.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a |
| 0:05.0 | CVS I in the world. I'm John Batsu with Dr. Christopher Mason, a geneticist |
| 0:10.0 | computational biologist. He's a professor at the Waukornel Medicine School, however the |
| 0:15.1 | author of the next 500 years. In the 23rd century we have engineered life. There's |
| 0:28.4 | Homo sapiens and his or her allies, friends, companions, including AI. We're on a generational ship and we're headed to another son. There are challenges, we're not |
| 0:35.0 | going to engineer this, where I'm going to talk about some aspects of Chris's |
| 0:39.2 | presentation that are exciting. Chris, on board this generational ship are exo-woms. |
| 0:45.0 | Why and what does that do for creating the possibility of life throughout the galaxy? |
| 0:52.0 | This technology that underlies exo womb, there was kind of artificial uterus has really exploded in the past a couple decades where now you can grow almost to term at these some goats that have been done as well as some mice from from |
| 1:07.6 | Embry Genesis almost all the way to adulthood or to birth I should say you know the entire process of development, the Embry Genesis, becoming a fetus |
| 1:15.8 | and then making your way into the world to live on your own. And this ex- |
| 1:19.5 | this kind of ex-oome technology could in theory give you the greatest possible cellular |
| 1:24.1 | liberty we talked about for that all your cells should you know you should |
| 1:27.0 | be able to have physical liberty with your body and your cellular liberty with your |
| 1:30.6 | cells and this lets you say well if I would like to have a system that can grow the human embryos |
| 1:35.6 | you could even have a robot watching over them while they grow and they get to the new planet and then |
| 1:40.1 | you get human caretakers because it's hard to get humans to go and survive all the way to the other planet. |
| 1:45.1 | You have to put them asleep or have a generation ship or multiple people live in multiple generations live and die. |
| 1:50.4 | Or you have all the embryos frozen and have a robot do this and there was recently a show called Raised by Wolves that put this into a video format. |
| 1:57.4 | So this idea has been in science fiction for a while but we actually now have the technology that can enable it almost completely. |
| 2:03.6 | I like the idea of using that chloro-human because that either bypasses or solves the food source. You need sunlight and the chlorophyll that is part of chlorohumans, |
| 2:18.8 | although I don't fancy looking like an amoeba spread all over Boston Harbor but I understand we've got a |
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