This is CBS Eye on the World with John Bacheler. Here's John Bacheler.

This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Bacheler. I welcome Christopher Mason, geneticist,

computational biologist, and he is often a principal investigator and co-investigator

for NASA. But right now he's a professor at Wild Cornel Medicine and he's going to guide

us to the next 500 years. That is the title of his new book, Subtitle Engineering Life to

Reach New Worlds. Dr. Mason, Christopher, congratulations and good evening to you. I want

you immediately to take us to the 23rd century. The generationships that you propose. What

is a generation ship and what are the challenges for the human beings and their colleagues

onboard that ship as it heads for a new son? Good evening to you. Good evening and thank

you so much for having me. It's pleasure to be here. The generation ship is really a

culmination of both technological and design and aerospace engineering that will let us

get to a point where we can have a whole spacecraft that's since that is launched towards

another star that we've identified that has a habitable planet that eventually that

people will get there and begin to explore and have humans exist around the light of

the second sun. And to do this, I describe in the book what this is is a generation ship

being multiple generations live and die on the same spacecraft which raises some pretty

large ethical questions but also address that in the book is actually it's a moral duty

that we have as a species to enable humans to survive beyond this sun to serve really

as guardians and shepherds of life. But to do that eventually we're going to have to

go towards another star. You make very clear that an inspiration for this was when you

were gifted a copy of Isaac Asmoff's foundation. Foundation series is a vast number of volumes.

What in the foundation still inspires your doctor? Well one of the most extraordinary things

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