Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space | Lex Fridman Podcast #283

1. 0:00 – 1:04

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      Would that make you sad to die on Mars, looking back at the planet y- you were born on?

   2. CMChris Mason0:05

      No, I think it would be actually in some ways maybe the best way to die, knowing that you're in the first wave of people expanding the reach into the stars. It'd be an honor.

   3. LFLex Fridman0:17

      The following is a conversation with Chris Mason, professor of genomics, physiology, and biophysics at Cornell. He and colleagues do some of their research out in space, experiments on space missions that seek to discern the molecular basis of changes in the human body during long-term human space travel. On this topic, he also wrote an epic book titled The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, that boldly looks at what it takes to colonize space far beyond our planet, and even journey out towards livable worlds beyond our solar system. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Chris Mason.

2. 1:04 – 9:49

   Human extinction awareness

   1. LFLex Fridman1:04

      You wrote a book called The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, and you dedicate it to, quote, "To all humans and any extinction-aware sentience."

   2. CMChris Mason1:15

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:16

      How fundamental is awareness of death and extinction to the human condition?

   4. CMChris Mason1:20

      I think this is actually one of the most human-specific traits and features, uh, that we have. It's like maybe one of the few things that we- only we have and no one else has. So it sounds scary, sounds like what people often don't like to think about their death except now and again or at funerals, or to recognize their mortality. But if you do it at a species-wide level, it's something that is actually an exemplary human-specific trait that you're exhibiting. You think about something that is the loss of not just your life or your family or everyone you see, but everyone like you, and that is... I dedicate it because I think we might not be the last sentience to have this awareness. I'm actually hoping we'll just be the first, but as far as we know, we're the only, and I think this is the part of the moral thrust for the book is that we're the only ones that have this awareness. That gives us a duty that only we can exercise so far.

   5. LFLex Fridman2:09

      So we definitely contemplate our own mortality at, at the individual level. [sighs] It is true. When you wrote it, it, it, it was really powerful to realize for me that we do contemplate our extinction, and that that is a creative force.

   6. CMChris Mason2:27

      Mm-hmm.

   7. LFLex Fridman2:27

      So the, at the individual level, contemplating your own death is a creative force.

   8. CMChris Mason2:32

      Yes.

   9. LFLex Fridman2:32

      Like, I have a deadline.

   10. CMChris Mason2:33

       Yeah. [laughs] Yes.

   11. LFLex Fridman2:34

       But the contemplating the extinction of the whole species, I suppose that stretches through human history. That's many of the sort of, uh, subtext of religious ideas is that, like, if we screw this up, it's gonna be over. [laughs]

   12. CMChris Mason2:53

       Forever, and Revelation and, and every religious text has some view of either the birth or the death of the world as they know it. But it was very abstract. It was, uh, fiction almost, or in some cases complete fiction of what you hope or think might happen. But it's become much more quantified and much more real I think in the past, well, several hundred years, and especially in the past few decades, where we can see, y- you know, a sense of responsibility on a planetary scale. So when we think about, like, say, terraforming Mars, that would just be the second planet we've engineered at a planetary scale. We're already doing it for this one, just not that well.

   13. LFLex Fridman3:24

       [laughs] Well, yeah. That's right. So we're like a, a bunch of ants, um, ex- [laughs] extinction-aware sentience ants-

   14. CMChris Mason3:35

       [laughs]

   15. LFLex Fridman3:36

       ... that are busy trying to terraform this planet to make it, uh, habitable so we can flourish.

   16. CMChris Mason3:43

       Mm-hmm.

   17. LFLex Fridman3:43

       And then you say that it's our duty to expand beyond Earth, to expand to other planets, to, uh, to find a, a, a good backup, offsite backup solution. Why the word duty? It's an interesting word.

   18. CMChris Mason4:02

       Duty is something that usually, um, puts people to sleep, I'll say. They say, "Oh, duty." You know, as duty is li- like bit like death. People don't often like to really think, "What" ... Wake up in the morning and think, "What is, what is my duty today?" Most people. There are some people that think about it every day. People in active military service wake up, it's a very concrete sense of duty to country. Sometimes you can think about it, though, in terms of family. You feel a duty towards your spouse, your kids, your parents. You feel a, a real duty to them because you want them to, s- to flourish and to be safe. So we, we do have this sense of duty, but you don't, you know, very much like death, you don't think about it actively usually. It's something that just becomes embedded in your day-to-day existence. But I think about duty because this is a... People think about duties for themselves, but there has never been a real overarching duty that we all feel as, as a species, uh, for each other and for generations that haven't yet been born. And I think I want people to have a sense of the same love and compassion and, you know, fighting even to the tooth and nail with the way you'd protect your family, the way you'd fight for country, for example. To feel the same way towards the rarity and preciousness of life and feel that sense of duty towards particularly extinction aware life, which is just us so far. This ability that we c- have this awareness of not only our own, our own frailty, which of course is often talked about and climate change and people think about pandemics, but other species that we've sometimes caused extinction, but un- very soon will be even de-extinctifying species like the woolly mammoth. Uh, Colossal is a recent, uh, startup that's doing that on, on their advisory board, and it's, it might happen in three or four years. So it, it interesting point in history where we can actually think about pr- preventing death at a species-wide level and even resurrecting things that we have killed or that have gone away, which h- brings its own series of questions of just as when you delete something from an ecosystem, adding something can be completely catastrophic. And so there are no real, uh, guidelines yet on how to do that, but the, the technology now exists, which is pretty extraordinary.

   19. LFLex Fridman5:53

       Yeah, I've just been working on, uh, backup and restoring, uh, databases quite a bit recently. And, uh, you can do quite a lot of damage when you s- restore improperly.

   20. CMChris Mason6:03

       Yeah. Yeah. It's-

   21. LFLex Fridman6:04

       When we, when, when we bring back the mammoths, it, it might be, uh- You have to be careful bringing that back.

   22. CMChris Mason6:09

       Yes.

   23. LFLex Fridman6:09

       Like, the best of science, the best of engineering, is both dangerous and exciting, and that's why you have to have the best people-

   24. CMChris Mason6:17

       Mm

   25. LFLex Fridman6:17

       ... but also the most morally grounded people-

   26. CMChris Mason6:19

       Yes

   27. LFLex Fridman6:20

       ... pushing us forward.

   28. CMChris Mason6:21

       Yeah.

   29. LFLex Fridman6:21

       Uh, but on the point of duty, there's a kind of sense that there's something special to humanity, to human beings, that we want to preserve, and if that, that little flame, whatever that is, dies-

   30. CMChris Mason6:39

       Mm
3. 9:49 – 15:25

   Heat death of the universe

   1. LFLex Fridman9:50

      One interesting thing that comes up much later in your book is something I also haven't thought of, and it's quite inspiring, which is the heat death in the universe-

   2. CMChris Mason10:04

      Mm

   3. LFLex Fridman10:04

      ... is something worth fighting against.

   4. CMChris Mason10:08

      [laughs] Yes.

   5. LFLex Fridman10:09

      Like, that's also an engineering problem.

   6. CMChris Mason10:12

      Yes.

   7. LFLex Fridman10:12

      You know, you kinda, uh, th- the, I mean, you seriously look at the next 500 years, and this is such a beautiful thing. You, you know, seriously, we'll talk about, like, the uncertainty involved with that-

   8. CMChris Mason10:26

      Of course

   9. LFLex Fridman10:26

      ... and all the different trajectories, but to, to, to seriously look at that, and then to seriously look at, like, what happens when the sun runs out?

   10. CMChris Mason10:35

       Mm-hmm.

   11. LFLex Fridman10:36

       What happens when the, uh, the universe comes to an end?

   12. CMChris Mason10:41

       Mm-hmm.

   13. LFLex Fridman10:41

       Like, we have an opportunity and a kind of duty, like you said-

   14. CMChris Mason10:46

       Mm

   15. LFLex Fridman10:46

       ... to fight against that. And f- that was so inspiring to me to think, "Wait, maybe we'll actually..." That's a worthy thing to think about. Like-

   16. CMChris Mason10:56

       Maybe we can prevent it, actually. Yeah.

   17. LFLex Fridman10:58

       Right. The come up with the best-known understanding current of how things end. The, you know, we ha- we kind of, uh, are building an intuition and data and models of the way the universe is, the way it started, the way it's going to end. So our best model of the end, let's start thinking about how that could be prevented.

   18. CMChris Mason11:21

       Mm-hmm.

   19. LFLex Fridman11:21

       How that could be avoided, how that could be channeled and misdirected, and you can, uh, pivot it somehow.

   20. CMChris Mason11:29

       Yeah.

   21. LFLex Fridman11:30

       Um, that's really inspiring. That's really powerful. I never really thought about it. I thought that, you know, eventually all things end, and that was the kind of melancholic notion behind all of it. You know, none of this matters in a way. Just, uh, to me, that's also inspiring, uh, to enjoy the moment-

   22. CMChris Mason11:50

       Mm

   23. LFLex Fridman11:50

       ... to really live in the moment, you know? That, 'cause that is truly where beauty exists, is in the moment.

   24. CMChris Mason11:55

       Mm.

   25. LFLex Fridman11:55

       But there is a long-lasting aspect to beauty that is part of the engineering ethic, which is like, "Tell me what the problem is, and we're gonna solve it."

   26. CMChris Mason12:04

       Solve it, yeah.

   27. LFLex Fridman12:06

       So what, what do you think about that, the, the long scale, beyond 500 years? Is, do humans have a chance?

   28. CMChris Mason12:13

       Th- absolutely. I think we have the, the best chance of any species, and actually the best chance that humanity's ever had. So I think a lot of people fear that we could, that we can or will kill ourselves. Actually, my favorite question I, I ask at the end of every interview for every potential graduate student, medical student-

   29. LFLex Fridman12:30

       [laughs]

   30. CMChris Mason12:30

       ... faculty, whoever I'm interviewing for whatever reason-
4. 15:25 – 19:01

   Alone in the universe

   1. LFLex Fridman15:26

      Are we alone in the universe, Chris Mason? What do you think? So y- the presumption that you've just mentioned is let's just focus on our thing.

   2. CMChris Mason15:35

      Yeah. For now. For n-

   3. LFLex Fridman15:36

      [laughs]

   4. CMChris Mason15:36

      Well, I, I think we... As far as we know, there's no other sentient life out in the universe that we've found yet. And, and I, I think there's probably bacterial life out there, uh, just because we've found it everywhere we've looked on Earth. It is... And there's, you know, halophilic organisms that can survive in extreme salts. There are, uh, psychrophiles that in extreme cold. There's, you know, basically organisms that can survive in really almost any possible environment, you can, they can adapt and find a way to live. But as far as we know, we're the only sentient ones, and I think th- this is the famous, the Drake equation or, you know, how many s- or where is everyone is the, what Enrico Fermi said, is the, why haven't we heard from anyone if there are these other life forms? I actually think the question is wrong to s- phrase it that way, because the uni- the Earth has only been here for 4.5 billion years, and we, and, you know, s- life maybe only for a few billion of those years, complex life only for several hundred years, hundred million years of life we've actually had, you know, and, and humans only in the past few million years since our last common ancestor. So it's not that much time. But if you think even further back, the universe hasn't had that much time itself to cool and create atoms and have them spread around the u- the, the universe, right? So the current estimate's 13.8 billion years of just the whole universe, but it spent the first five or six of those billion years really just, like, cooling and making enough of the, uh, you know, stars to then make the atoms that would come from supernova. So I actually think we might be the first, or sit one of the very few, or one of the early life forms, but the universe itself hasn't had that much time to make life in a, in a gal- in a galactic and universal timeframe. You needed billions of years for the elements to be created and then distributed, and we're only really in the, I think the last few billion years where I think even life could have been made. So I think the question of where ev- ev- is everyone is the wrong question. I think the question is, I think we're the first ones at the party. Let's set up the liquor. Let's set up the food. We, I just think we're the first ones at the party of life, but, but more people are coming.

   5. LFLex Fridman17:32

      One of the early attendees to the party.

   6. CMChris Mason17:35

      Yeah. Or m- maybe the f- as far as we know, the first, but maybe we'll find someone-

   7. LFLex Fridman17:37

      In the local pocket of the, the universe.

   8. CMChris Mason17:40

      Yeah.

   9. LFLex Fridman17:41

      Um, 'cause the parties then expand, and you, it overflows and like-

   10. CMChris Mason17:44

       Yeah. Right, right. [laughs] I think, and then there's a mosh pit, and then, you know, you bump into the other galaxy. Uh, I, I think it's, I think the question should be, uh, you know, when else is everyone getting here? Instead of where is everyone. I think, I think we've just started on the genesis of life in the universe.

   11. LFLex Fridman17:59

       Yeah, so not, not where have they or not, more about when and who-

   12. CMChris Mason18:04

       It's coming

   13. LFLex Fridman18:04

       ... and how do we set up the party-

   14. CMChris Mason18:06

       Right

   15. LFLex Fridman18:06

       ... for them.

   16. CMChris Mason18:06

       And then how do we help them? I think it's an interesting other moral question is, do we, you know, the, a lot of Star Trek episodes, you, uh, the prime directive is you do not interfere with another planet if you could pass by a planet. I think it's time to also revisit that because what if, what if you go by a planet and we think that with, as far as we can tell with enough certainty, that they would never be able to leave their planet, and th- then the sun eventually would engulf that planet, wherever that planet might be in some solar system. But if we had a way to help them, their culture, their science, their technology, everything about a different species to survive, would we not intervere, interfere? I think that would actually be wrong to say, "Well, we can save this, this life here," and we decide not to. We decide af- after mil- bill- millions and billions of years pass, and we know the sun will engulf that planet, like what will happen with our planet, and we don't interfere, that's, you know, watching a train hit someone on the tracks and not moving the train. So I,

5. 19:01 – 27:11

   Aliens

   1. CMChris Mason19:01

      you know.

   2. LFLex Fridman19:02

      In terms of the effort of bec- humans becoming a multiplanetary species, in terms of priorities, how much would you allocate to trying to make contact with aliens and getting their help, and if we look at the next 500 and beyond years?

   3. CMChris Mason19:21

      Mm-hmm.

   4. LFLex Fridman19:22

      And just fo- uh, versus option number two, really just focusing on setting up the party on our own engineering, our, on our own, um, the, the genome, the biology of humanity, the AI-

   5. CMChris Mason19:36

      Mm-hmm

   6. LFLex Fridman19:37

      ... collaborating with humans, just the, all the engineering challenges and opportunities that we're, um, we're exploring.

   7. CMChris Mason19:44

      I'm, I'm focused in my lab, of course, a lot on the engineering of genomes, the, uh, monitoring of astronauts during s- long missions. I, you know, reaching out to other alien-- We've been doing the reach out to aliens since the first radio waves have been broadcast, so we're doing some of it. But to do a real-

   8. LFLex Fridman19:59

      You made it sound like your lab is mostly focused on biology, but you also reach out occasionally to aliens. [laughs]

   9. CMChris Mason20:04

      Oh, sure, sure. Occasionally, when they visit, they ha- they bring their whiskey, and I-

   10. LFLex Fridman20:08

       Yeah

   11. CMChris Mason20:08

       ... we have a drink. But the, uh, I think we, we can do-- We've been broadcasting into space for, you know, at this point almost a century, getting close to. And, you know, so but it's not been structured. So I think it's very cheap and easy to send out structured messages, um, like what Carl Sagan wrote about in Contact, doing prime numbers and sending those out to indicate intelligence. Uh, so there's things we can do that I think are very cheap and very easy, so we should, we should do some of that. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. This is one of the biggest critiques people often say of space research and, and even space flight in general is it's too expensive. Shouldn't we solve poverty? Shouldn't we, uh, cure diseases? And the answer is always, as it always has been, is that you can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can, you know, pass the Civil Rights Act and go to the moon in the same decade. You can improve, um, and, and get rid of structural inequality while getting to, uh, the Moon and Mars, uh, in this decade. So I think, I think we can do both.

   12. LFLex Fridman21:00

       Yeah, and they kinda help each other. There's sometimes criticism of, like, ridiculous science-

   13. CMChris Mason21:05

       Mm-hmm

   14. LFLex Fridman21:05

       ... like studying penguins or something, or s-

   15. CMChris Mason21:07

       Yeah

   16. LFLex Fridman21:07

       ... studying the patterns of birds or fish and so on.

   17. CMChris Mason21:10

       Some congressman stands up and says, "This is a waste of taxpayer dollars." And then, but someone says, "Oh, but we..." And for example, CRISPR was pure research for 25 years. Now it's a household word, and, and students are editing genomes in high school. But it was just pure research on weird bacteria living actually in salt, uh, h- hypersaline, uh, lakes and rivers, uh, for decades, and, and then eventually became a massive therapeutic, which has led to curing of diseases in this past year.

   18. LFLex Fridman21:36

       And there's stuff that you discover as part of the research that you didn't anticipate-

   19. CMChris Mason21:40

       Yeah

   20. LFLex Fridman21:41

       ... that have nothing to do with the actual research. Like, uh, oceanography, uh, is one of the interesting things about that whole field is that it's a huge amount of data, and neuroscience too, actually.

   21. CMChris Mason21:53

       Yeah.

   22. LFLex Fridman21:53

       So you could discover computer science things, like machine learning things, or even data storage manipulation, distributed compute things, by having to, forcing yourself to get something done about on the oceanography side.

   23. CMChris Mason22:07

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   24. LFLex Fridman22:07

       That's how you invent the internet-

   25. CMChris Mason22:10

       Yeah

   26. LFLex Fridman22:11

       ... and, a- and, uh, and all those kinds of things. So to me, aliens, looking for aliens out there in the universe is a motivator that just inspires. Inspires everybody, young people, old people, scientists, artists, um, engineers, entrepreneurs, everybody.

   27. CMChris Mason22:32

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   28. LFLex Fridman22:33

       The, somehow the, that line between fear and beauty [laughs] 'cause we're-

   29. CMChris Mason22:40

       Aliens are, like, perfectly merged, basically.

   30. LFLex Fridman22:42

       Yeah
6. 27:11 – 41:25

   Entropy goggles

   1. LFLex Fridman27:12

      You quote President Dwight D. Eisenhower in your book. Quote, "Plans are useless, but planning is essential." And you provide a thought experiment called entropy goggles.

   2. CMChris Mason27:24

      Mm.

   3. LFLex Fridman27:24

      Can you describe this thought experiment?

   4. CMChris Mason27:26

      Happily. I, I do this almost every day somewhere. When I'm sitting in a given room, I will, uh... Well, a quick, quick comment about that quote, actually. For all the NASA planning meetings for the twin study and other missions, that was often the quote that gets put up on the wall before we'd sit down for the day to plan the mission. It was that quote, which I always thought was-

   5. LFLex Fridman27:44

      Plans are useless [laughs] .

   6. CMChris Mason27:45

      But planning is essential, which I thought was hilarious for a official NASA meeting.

   7. LFLex Fridman27:49

      Yeah.

   8. CMChris Mason27:49

      But it was because you need to have a plan, but you have to know that plan might change. And so I think, uh, that's just a quick context for that quote. Craig Kundrot, who's a, a leader at NASA, is, uh, headquarters now, would always put that first slide up, and I'm like, "Hmm, this meeting's either gonna go really well or really bad. I don't know what's about to happen." But, but it's a inspiring quote because it's very true. Any case, the entropy goggles is a thought experiment I detail in, in my book, which is if you just sit in a room, any room, wherever you are, and, and imagine what it will look like in ten years, a hundred years, five hundred years, or even thousands of years, it is a wonderfully terrifying and exciting exercise. Again, it's definitely both. Because you realize the transience of everything, that you think of what, what might survive. Almost everything that you're looking at will probably not be there in hundreds of years. Uh, it'll be, you know, at the very least degraded, or it might be changed, altered, completely different, moved. It is just... And it's th- that trait, though, of humans to just sit there and project into the future s- easily, you know, really seamlessly with whatever you were doing, uh, previously, is, is powerful because it shows the f- you know, what can change and, and what should change in some cases, but also that, y- you know, left to, you know, its own devices, the universe would, entropy would come take over and really things would decay, things would be destroyed. But the only thing really preventing, I think, some of the entropy is, is really humans. These sort of sentient creatures that are aware of extinction like ourselves is really one of the only forces in the universe that's counteracting the second law of thermodynamics. It's entropy that's always increasing. Technically, we're actually still increasing it because we emit heat, and we never have perfect capture of all energy. But we're the only things really actively and consciously, uh, you know, resisting it. Really, you could say life in general does this. Like, ants do this when they build their big homes. They're rearranging the universe, uh, to make a nice place for themselves, and they're, uh, you know, counteracting entropy. But we could actually do it in a way that would be at a large scale and for long term. So, but the entropy goggles is just a way to realize how transient everything is and just imagine h- everything that will decay or change in the room around you. So if anyone listening, if they're listening on a train or they're driving in their car, wherever someone is listening right now, uh, looking around, everything can and will change, and so you... The, the, but, uh, then at first it's terrifying to see that, oh my gosh, everything will decay and go away. But then I think it's actually liberating to think, "Wait, I, I can affect this cha- I, I can prevent it, or I can affect it, or I can improve the change that may occur all, all by itself, say, naturally." Uh, and so I think it is... But it is that awareness, again, of like, you know, the frailty of life, the ever, uh, insistence in increase in entropy that you can address, though. And actually, I say the same thing to first-year medical students. I teach them genetics. I say, I point early in the course, I say, "Here's all these charts of how the human body decays over, over time." It just... And I call it, uh, the inexorable march towards molecular oblivion. Which the students, uh, often find they kind of laugh at, ah, because on all the charts they're 22 years old. But, uh, older people do not laugh as much at the c- the thought of molecular oblivion. But we're all marching towards it to a large degree.

   9. LFLex Fridman30:52

      So this is both a great thought experiment for the environment around you, so just looking at all the objects around you.

   10. CMChris Mason31:00

       Mm.

   11. LFLex Fridman31:01

       That they will dissipate, they'll disappear with time. But then it's also the thing you mentioned, which is how can I affect any of the world? Like, uh, you're one little creature.

   12. CMChris Mason31:14

       Yeah.

   13. LFLex Fridman31:15

       And i- it's like, uh, your life is kind of you get dropped into this ocean and you make a little splash. And how do I make it so the splash lasts for, uh, a little bit longer?

   14. CMChris Mason31:28

       Yeah.

   15. LFLex Fridman31:29

       'Cause it ul- ultimately will, uh, I m- I, I suppose the wave will continue indefinitely, but it'd be such a small impact that it's almost undetectable. And so how do I have that impact at all? And I, I f- on so many levels, I get to experience this as a, as a human. Like, um, I recently had, had my cold storage, uh, hacked.

   16. CMChris Mason31:54

       Oh.

   17. LFLex Fridman31:54

       Uh, to where it was locked, essentially. It wasn't hacked, it was locked. And so you get to lose all your data. So for example, if you lose all your data, if you lose all your online presence, your social media, your emails, if you ... Like think of all the things you could lose in a fire.

   18. CMChris Mason32:10

       Mm.

   19. LFLex Fridman32:10

       There's been a lot of fires in the United States. If you lose your home.

   20. CMChris Mason32:13

       Yeah.

   21. LFLex Fridman32:14

       And it makes you realize, wait a minute, this is exactly a nice simulation of what will happen anyway.

   22. CMChris Mason32:21

       Mm-hmm, yeah.

   23. LFLex Fridman32:21

       [laughs] Eventually. Uh, and that eventually comes pretty quickly. And so you, it allows you to focus on, you know, how can I actually affect, uh, so what matters? What lasts? Um, and what brings me joy? I suppose that-

   24. CMChris Mason32:36

       Mm-hmm

   25. LFLex Fridman32:36

       ... the ultimate answer is nothing lasts.

   26. CMChris Mason32:38

       Yeah.

   27. LFLex Fridman32:38

       So you have to focus on the things in the moment that bring you joy and that have a positive impact on those around you. That focusing on something that's long-lasting is perhaps, I don't know. It's, it's, it's complicated, right? 'Cause like-

   28. CMChris Mason32:55

       Well, it used to be foolhardy to say, "I wanna th-" Like legacy is often what people think of as they approach the end of their life. What is my legacy? What have I done?

   29. LFLex Fridman33:02

       Yeah.

   30. CMChris Mason33:02

       Even younger in life. But it used to be really foolhardy to say, "I could affect something that would l- " Or people would b- build a building. Architects would say, "I, I put my, my name on this building, and there I'll have some sense of immortality." But that's a, it's a fleeting dream. It's not, you can't, uh, r- reach immortality. Uh, and if you could, it would be resource, you know, taxing on everyone else if you r- if you really were. But I think it's, it's okay. I mean, the, the, the book's for the next 500 years, but I presume I'll be dead for the vast majority of that time. And I, I, but that is, that is actually the liberating state of mortality, is you know that you don't have forever. So it means what can you do that is the most impactful? But you can build things that you say, "I want to pass this on to the next generation." Again, the most obvious thing we do with this is just people have kids. But, uh, y- they don't think of this as a, as a intergenerational responsibility. They think of it as, "Well, I was at the bar one night and I met this hot girl,"
7. 41:25 – 49:34

   Genetics

   1. LFLex Fridman41:25

      Will it have the lessons of genetics, genomics, DNA and RNA and proteins and the squishy stuff-

   2. CMChris Mason41:33

      Stuff

   3. LFLex Fridman41:33

      ... that makes us h- uh, human, are those lessons a temporary thing that we'll discard, or will those lessons be carried forward?

   4. CMChris Mason41:43

      You mean, like, if the machines completely take over, let's say, and it's all, uh-

   5. LFLex Fridman41:47

      Not necessarily completely take over, but either completely take over or merge with humans in some interesting way, where we, as opposed to figuring out how to repair cells and protect cells, we start having some cyborg cells.

   6. CMChris Mason42:01

      We could ... I think we will. There'll definitely be a blending, and blending's already happened. There's prosthetic limbs. There's cybernetic limbs. There's, you know, uh, Neuralink, uh, te- you know, progress being made to blend biology and cybernetics and machines, for sure. But I think the, you know, in the long term, you know, we'll see that they are, are fairly ... You know, the biology will be useful because it, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a manufacturing system. All of life is a way to create copies of things or to replicate information, including storage of information. Actually, hard drives are probably one of the worst ways for long-term storage. DNA might end up being the best way to have, you know, millennia or, you know, even longer es- scale storage, where you want something that has redundancy that's built in, uh, and it can store and can be put at really cold temperatures and survive even cosmic rays.

   7. LFLex Fridman42:47

      Sure.

   8. CMChris Mason42:47

      So I think it, DNA might be the best, uh, hard drive of the future potentially.

   9. LFLex Fridman42:52

      This is really interesting. Okay, what is DNA? What is RNA? And what are genes?

   10. CMChris Mason42:58

       Yes, we should g- uh, 'cause most, I presume the audience knows it, but some might just be first-time listeners coming in, so-

   11. LFLex Fridman43:03

       There's, there's a person right now-

   12. CMChris Mason43:04

       Who's like [laughs]

   13. LFLex Fridman43:05

       ... in, in Brazil smoking a joint, sitting on the beach, and just wants to learn about DNA. So please, Chris-

   14. CMChris Mason43:12

       Yes

   15. LFLex Fridman43:12

       ... please, can you explain it to them?

   16. CMChris Mason43:14

       Uh, DNA, the deoxyribonucleic acid, is the recipe for life. It is what carries the instructions. In almost all of your cells you have a copy of your genome. It's actually the reason I became a geneticist, is 'cause the day I learned that as an embryo we start as just a single cell, but all the instructions are there to make every single type of cell in your body, I was and still am endlessly fascinated by that. That is extraordinary. That is, to me, the most beautiful thing in the entire universe. That it is a completely... From one single embryo, everything is there to make the entire body.

   17. LFLex Fridman43:46

       Which aspect of that is most beautiful? So is it that th- there is this information within DNA that's stored efficiently, and it also s- stores information on how to build, not just what to build?

   18. CMChris Mason43:59

       Yeah.

   19. LFLex Fridman44:00

       And so from all of that, is, w- what's, what's the sexiest, what's the most beautiful aspect? Is it the entire machinery, or is it just the information is there?

   20. CMChris Mason44:10

       It's the fact that the machinery is the information. Like, that the, the, basically it becomes its own manufacturer is, is what is extraordinary. Imagine if you, if you took a, a one two-by-four and you threw it on the ground and you said, "I'll be back in a day," and then a whole house was made when you came back.

   21. LFLex Fridman44:25

       Yeah.

   22. CMChris Mason44:25

       I mean, we would all lose our minds. A lot of people would poop their pants. People would have to wear adult diapers. It would be a big scene-

   23. LFLex Fridman44:30

       Yes

   24. CMChris Mason44:30

       ... if that happened. Um, and then we're not- we're actually getting close to that, of that people having autonomous house building. It's not quite there yet, but there are people trying to make, uh, robots that will build entire houses for you.

   25. LFLex Fridman44:39

       But you need much more than the block of wood.

   26. CMChris Mason44:41

       Right. Right. That's, that's the extraordinary thing, is that just to put one, one piece of wood there and say, "I'll just leave it there for a few days and I'll come back."

   27. LFLex Fridman44:47

       Yeah.

   28. CMChris Mason44:47

       That's basically what embryos do. Okay, it takes nine months, a little bit longer, but still that is nothing short of magic, right? So I think that's what I love about, you know, the fact that DNA carries that information. Now, the information is static, so to actually read that information and to actually put into motion is where RNA comes in, so this, uh, ribonucleic acid. So it just has one other oxygen added to it versus DNA, but it is the transcribed version. It's like if you look at a book and you s- you can have it in your hands, but then you start to read it aloud. It becomes the active form of the recipe for life, is the RNA, and then those RNAs also then, uh, get, uh, translated to become proteins. They become active forms, like enzymes. You think of, like, your hair, or think of, uh, other ways. You digest food. There's all these, you know, a- active proteins going around that are copying your DNA, making RNA, making sure your DNA is safe. There's all these built-in systems to keep your cells in check and working, and these are often in protein form. And so genes are the really, these constructs, basically what are the instruction sets. Like, how many versions of instructions do you have in your genome? So the genome is the collection of all the DNA of a person. For humans, it's about three billion letters of genetic code, so just three billion As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, these nucleotides that are the recipe for life, and that's it. That is the entire instruction set to go from that one embryo up to a full human. Which is pretty efficient, to say. It's, that's actually not that, that much information. And in that three billion letters are snippets of the genes which are independently regulated, uh, uh, autonomous instruction sets, if you will, these really active forms of, of the, of the instructions from your DNA to say, "Make a protein. Make this RNA," or turn off some other part of a cell. All those instructions are there in our DNA, and there's about 60,000 of these genes that are in our genome.

   29. LFLex Fridman46:34

       So how do those all lead up to you having a personality-

   30. CMChris Mason46:39

       Mm
8. 49:34 – 55:32

   Scott Kelly

   1. LFLex Fridman49:35

      So speaking of twin studies, uh, Scott Kelly spent 340 consecutive days out in space. You analyzed his molecular data, DNA, RNA, proteins, small molecules.

   2. CMChris Mason49:47

      Mm.

   3. LFLex Fridman49:47

      What did you learn about the effect of space on the human body from Scott?

   4. CMChris Mason49:53

      We learned that space is, is rough on the human body, but that the human body is am- am- amazingly and monstrously responsive to adapt to that, that challenge. It, it can rise to the occasion. So we could see there, Scott had, as almost all astronauts do, a bit of puffiness and spikes in his bloodstream of these what are called cytokines, or these inflammation markers, where the body is clearly saying to itself, "Holy crap, I'm in space." And liters of fluid move to the upper torso, and they get puffy face, what's called the, you know, the astronaut, uh, face that is very common. But it goes away after a few days. And some astronauts maintain high levels of stress for their whole mission, as measured by cortisol or some of these other inflammation markers, whereas Scott actually had a little spike, but then he was cool as a cucumber for most of the mission. But he had spent, at that time, that was the longest ever mission for a US astronaut. Uh, a few cosmonauts have gone a little bit longer. But there'd never been a deep molecular analysis of what happens to the body after about a year in space, so it was the first study of this kind. And what we found is when he got back, you know, we saw all the same markers of, of, uh, stress on the body and changes spiked up to levels we'd never seen for any other astronaut before. So it seemed like going to space for a year wasn't so hard as much as returning to gravity after a year. It was much harder on the body. Uh, he notoriously had, you know, broke out in a rash all over his body, and really, uh, even the weight of clothing on his skin was too heavy. It created all this irritation 'cause his body had not felt the weight of just a, a simple T-shirt. It w- it wasn't really... It had zero weight, of course, right? So went up in space. So that led to all this inflammation, all these changes. He had to, you know, uh, it was much more comfortable just to walk around nude. In that case, it was for a medical reason.

   5. LFLex Fridman51:31

      Yeah.

   6. CMChris Mason51:31

      Some people do this, you know, recreationally.

   7. LFLex Fridman51:33

      Yeah.

   8. CMChris Mason51:33

      He was doing it for medical purposes.

   9. LFLex Fridman51:34

      I do it for medical reasons as well.

   10. CMChris Mason51:36

       [laughs] That's right.

   11. LFLex Fridman51:37

       All the time.

   12. CMChris Mason51:37

       I mean, people say, uh, w- [laughs]

   13. LFLex Fridman51:38

       I have a prescription.

   14. CMChris Mason51:40

       That's it.

   15. LFLex Fridman51:40

       Doctor told me.

   16. CMChris Mason51:41

       So.

   17. LFLex Fridman51:41

       So he was allergic to Earth, you could say.

   18. CMChris Mason51:43

       Yeah, basically.

   19. LFLex Fridman51:43

       Which is fascinating to think about, actually. How quick did his body adapt there?

   20. CMChris Mason51:47

       So there it was about three to four days, he got back to normal, at least in terms of the inflammation. But what's ex- extraordinary is that we measured a lot of other molecules, genes, uh, structural changes, tissue, looked at his eyeballs, looked at his vasculature. It took him, even six months after the mission, a lot of the genes that had become activated in response to space flight were still active. So things like, we could see his body repairing DNA. He was being irradiated by cosmic rays and by the radiation. It's the equivalent of giving a, like, three or four chest X-rays every day, just in space. And we could see his body working hard at the molecular level to repair itself. And even in his urine, we could see bits of what's called 8-oxoguanosine. It was a, a form of damaged DNA that you could see coming out, and we see it for other astronauts as well, so it's very common. You could see damaged DNA, the response of the body to repair the DNA. But even though he'd been back on Earth for six months, that was still happening, uh, even six months later.

   21. LFLex Fridman52:39

       How does, how do you... Wait, how do you explain that?

   22. CMChris Mason52:42

       So some of this has to do with when you have a gene get activated, you might think, "Oh, it's like a light switch. I'll look at my wall, just flip a light on or off." And sometimes turning a gene on or off is that simple. Sometimes you just flip it on because the gene is already ready to go.

   23. LFLex Fridman52:54

       Mm-hmm.

   24. CMChris Mason52:55

       Other cases, though, you have to reprogram even the structure of how your DNA is packaged.

   25. LFLex Fridman52:59

       Yeah.

   26. CMChris Mason53:00

       Which is called an epigenetic rearrangement. In that case, we could see in his that a lot of these genes had been s- in his, his cells had changed the structure of how DNA was packaged, and it remained open even months after the mission. Now, after about a year, it was actually almost all back to normal. 99% of all the genes were back to where they were in pre-flight levels. So it means that, you know, eventually you'll adapt, but there, there is almost a, a lag time, kinda like jet lag for the body, but jet lag for your cells to repair all the DNA.

   27. LFLex Fridman53:25

       What was the most surprising, the thing that you found in that study?

   28. CMChris Mason53:29

       There were several surprises. One is just that he, that the repair, like, as I just mentioned, that the repair took so long. I thought maybe, oh, a week or a few days he'll be back to normal. But to see this molecular echo in his cells of his time in space still occurring was interesting. His telomeres was one that was really surprising. The, the caps on the ends of your chromosomes, which keep all your DNA packaged, and you get half your chromosomes from your mother and half from your father, and then you go on and make all your cells. Normally, these shrink as you get older, and telomeres just, just length is just an, a overall sign of aging, getting shorter. His telomeres got longer in space, and so this was really surprising 'cause we thought the opposite would happen. So he, that was, like, genetically one surprise, and also some of the mutations we found in his blood. He had less mutations in blood, as if his body was almost being, like a low dose of radiation was sort of cleansing his body of maybe the cells that were about to die is one of our main theories on what's happening.

   29. LFLex Fridman54:20

       And of course, you can't really, you have theories, but you can't, 'cause you [laughs] the number of subjects in the study is small.

   30. CMChris Mason54:27

       Right, right. It's the, it's notoriously one of the lowest powered studies in human history, yes. But, but, but what you lo- what you lack in subjects, you can make up for in the number of sampling time. So we did basically 260 samples collected over the course of three years, so we really, uh, almost every few weeks had a full workup, uh, including in space. So that was the way we tried to make up for it. But it, we, but we've tried in other model organisms. In mice we've seen this. We've looked now in 59 other astronauts, and in every astronaut that we've looked at, their telomeres get longer in space.
9. 55:32 – 1:05:34

   Adapting to space

   1. LFLex Fridman55:32

      So how do we adapt the human body to stress of this kind for periods of multiple years? What, what lessons do you draw from that study and other experiments in space that give you an indication of how we can survive for multiple years?

   2. CMChris Mason55:52

      I think we know that the radiation is, is one of the biggest risk factors, and this has been well-described by NASA and many other as- astronauts and, and researchers. And so there, we don't have to just measure the radiation or just look at DNA being damaged. We can actually actively repair it. This happens naturally in all of our cells. There's little enzymes, little protein, um, and m- really many machines that go around and scan DNA for nicks and breaks and repair it. We could improve them. We could add more of them. Or you can even activate them before you go into space. We, we have, uh, one set of cells in my lab where you, you activate them before we irradiate them to actually prepare them for the dose of radiation. And now that is what's called epigenetic, uh, CRISPR therapies, where you can actually, instead of adding or taking away a gene or modifying a cell, you just change kind of how it's packaged. Like I was just describing with the DNA, the genes are still there. We're just changing how they get used. And so you can actually preemptively activate the DNA repair genes, and we've done this for cells. We haven't done this yet for astronauts, but we've done it, uh, for cells. And a s- a similar idea to this is being used to treat, uh, sickle cell disease and beta thalassemias. You act- you can reactivate a gene that was dormant a- as a way, as a therapy.

   3. LFLex Fridman57:02

      So should we make human genes resilient to harsh conditions or should we get good at repairing them?

   4. CMChris Mason57:09

      I wanna, I wanna get good at re-

   5. LFLex Fridman57:11

      Okay. Sorry to interrupt. I think every time I ask this question-

   6. CMChris Mason57:14

      I say both [laughs]

   7. LFLex Fridman57:14

      ... you have taught me that there's always a third option. Say both.

   8. CMChris Mason57:18

      I will say both. [laughs] I know, uh, you know, for, for copy it's good to just have one big statement, but, uh, but you wanna do both. You could... Or, or a third option, I would want to, you know, do electromagnetic shielding. I would wanna do a fourth option of, you know, maybe some other, uh, kind of physical defenses that-

   9. LFLex Fridman57:34

      So outside of the human body?

   10. CMChris Mason57:35

       Yeah. So we're taking the same passion to keep astronauts safe that's outside them and just putting it in their cells is what I propose. Now, it's a bit radical today because, uh, you know, we're just starting this in clinical trials to treat, you know, diseases on Earth. So it's not ready, I think, to do in astronauts, but in the book I propose by about the year 2040, that's when we'd reach this next phase where I think we'll have known enough about the clinical response. We'll have the technology ironed out. That's about when it's time, I think, to try it.

   11. LFLex Fridman58:01

       So what are the some interesting early milestones? So you said, uh, 2040. What do we have to look forward to in the next 10, 20 years according to your book, according to your thoughts?

   12. CMChris Mason58:13

       A lot of really exciting developments where if you really want to activate genes, like I was just describing, or, or repair a specific disease gene, you can actually CRISPR it out and modify it. This has been already, uh, published and well-documented. But, uh, as I'm alluding to, more and more we'll see people that you just wanna temporarily change your genes functions and change their activity. So the best example of this is for beta thalassemia. We all have hemoglobin in our blood that carries oxygen around, and when you're an adult it's a different version. It's a different gene. You have one gene when you're a fetus called fetal, fetal hemoglobin. When you're adult, you have a different gene. But they both are making a protein that carries oxygen. When you- After you're born, the fetal hemoglobin gene gets just turned off. Just, it goes away and you replace it with adult hemoglobin. But if your gene for hemoglobin is bad as an adult, the, one of the therapies is, well, let's turn back on the gene that you had when you were a fetus, and it's actually already led to cures for sickle cell and beta thalassemia in this past year. So it's this extraordinary idea of like, well, well, you already have some of the genetic solutions in your body. Why don't we just reactivate them and see if you can live? And indeed you can. So I think we'll see more of that. That's for severe disease, but eventually you could see it for more, uh, I think work-related purposes, like if you're working in a, in a dangerous mine or in a radio- uh, high radiation environment. You could a- you could basically start to prime it for, you know, work safety basically. We need to genetically protect you. Now, it would have to be shown that that genetic option is safe, reliable, um, you know, that it's better, that, at least as good if not better than other shielding methods. But I think we'll start to see that more in the next 10, 20 years. And eventually, as I describe in the book, you could get to recreational genetics. You could say, "Well, I wanna turn some genes on just for this weekend because I'm going to a high altitude, so I'd like to prepare for that." And so instead of having to take weeks and weeks for acclimation, you could just do some quick epigenetic therapies and have a good time in the mountains and then come back and turn them back off.

   13. LFLex Fridman1:00:03

       So this is stuff to do on Earth-

   14. CMChris Mason1:00:05

       Yeah

   15. LFLex Fridman1:00:05

       ... across thousands of humans, and then you start getting good data about what the effects on the human body are. How do we make humans survive across an entire lifetime for, well, let's say several decades in space?

   16. CMChris Mason1:00:19

       If it's just in space it'll be hard 'cause you'll, you'll need basically some gravity at some point. I think you'd need orbital platforms that give you at least some partial gravity, if not one G. If you're on Mars, it's actually, you know, even though the gravity is 38% of Earth's, just having that gravity would be enough, and if you could get under the surface into some of the lava tubes where you have some protection above you, uh, from the radiation, I think that would be... You probably could survive quite well there. So I think it's the just in space part that's hard. You'd need some gravity. You need some additional protection from the radiation.

   17. LFLex Fridman1:00:50

       Can you, uh, linger on the lava tubes on Mars?

   18. CMChris Mason1:00:53

       Yeah.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:00:53

       What are the lava tubes on Mars?

   20. CMChris Mason1:00:54

       Uh, yeah. So they are a bit like what they sound like. They were large masses of lava at one point on the planet pushing really quickly through the environment, and they created these, these, these basically these small caverns which you could go in, in theory, and build a small habitat and then puff it up kind of like, uh, blowing up a balloon-

   21. LFLex Fridman1:01:12

       Mm-hmm

   22. CMChris Mason1:01:12

       ... and, and have a protective habitat. Basically it's a little bit underground. So one of the next helicopter missions being planned at the Jet Propulsion Lab is to see if you can get a helicopter to go into the lava tube. And which is just a, like as it sounds, kinda like take out a big worm that has burrowed into the landscape and leave out the hollow column that's left, and that's what your tubes look like. So, one of the future helicopters might even go explore one of them. There's a mission being planned right now.

   23. LFLex Fridman1:01:35

       So they're accessible without significant amount of drilling?

   24. CMChris Mason1:01:38

       Yeah, that's the other advantage. Yeah, you can get to them, uh, 'cause some of them are exposed. So you could do a little bit of drilling and then see essentially this entire cavern.

   25. LFLex Fridman1:01:44

       And that protects you a little bit from the radiation.

   26. CMChris Mason1:01:46

       Right, 'cause you have some soil above you basically, which would be, or regolith, which would be nice.

   27. LFLex Fridman1:01:50

       What about source of food? Uh, what's a good... So that's part of biology, how you power this whole thing.

   28. CMChris Mason1:01:58

       Yeah.

   29. LFLex Fridman1:01:58

       What about source of food across decades?

   30. CMChris Mason1:02:01

       In space, we'd have to-
10. 1:05:34 – 1:08:06

    Sex in space

    1. LFLex Fridman1:05:34

       All right. What, a technical question: What are the ma- major challenges of sex in space? Asking for a friend-

    2. CMChris Mason1:05:39

       [laughs]

    3. LFLex Fridman1:05:40

       ... for reproduction purposes. So like, uh, when we're looking about survival of the human species across generations-

    4. CMChris Mason1:05:48

       Yeah

    5. LFLex Fridman1:05:50

       ... do we need gravity essentially?

    6. CMChris Mason1:05:52

       For sex in space, we, we know that gestation can happen in space, where the babies can develop, at least in mice. We know that it's possible for worms to replicate and flies, so it's possible to, for other invertebrates to show they can make babies in space. But for humans, NASA's official st- stance on this is that there has never been sex in space-

    7. LFLex Fridman1:06:09

       Yeah

    8. CMChris Mason1:06:09

       ... officially. I, I think-

    9. LFLex Fridman1:06:11

       [laughs]

    10. CMChris Mason1:06:13

        You know, we all wonder about that-

    11. LFLex Fridman1:06:16

        Yeah

    12. CMChris Mason1:06:16

        ... sta- I, I think humans are very predictable in that regard. You know, going back to the Greek tragedies, I think there, there's probably someone did something close to it at some point. And so I think we, we know that sperm can be sent into space and brought back and be used for fertilization for, uh, in vitro fertilization for humans. But sex itself in space, uh, you know, would be, I think when we start to get bigger structures that have a bit more privacy, I think there'll, I think there'll be a lot of it, and there'd have to be, you know... This, this is a big question of who goes up into space. It's now becoming more of, you know, re- "regular," in quotes, people who have prosthetic limbs or are cancer survivors like Hayley Arceneaux, who just went up on the Inspiration4 mission. So she's been a great, uh, researcher in helping with a lot of the science from that mission. We have, doing the same analysis on them as we've been doing for the twin study and for other astronauts. So we're doing basically all the same molecular profile before, during, and after spaceflight. So there, we now know that, you know, other people can go into space. As those more and more regular Joes and Janes go up, I think we'll see a lot more of it. But so far we have no data. We have no video of it either way. We have no real knowledge other than it would be, it would n- need a lot of Velcro, I think is my only real answer there.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:07:21

        [laughs] Well, I, I'm a, as a fan of Velcro and duct tape-

    14. CMChris Mason1:07:24

        [laughs]

    15. LFLex Fridman1:07:25

        ... I think that's gonna be-

    16. CMChris Mason1:07:26

        I think that, yeah, so- [laughs]

    17. LFLex Fridman1:07:26

        Those two are essential for anything, any kind of engineering out in anywhere, honestly, in all kinds of harsh conditions. But, um, that is, I mean- On the topic of sex in general, just social interaction with humans is fascinating. I mean, the, the current missions are very focused on science and very technical, engineer-y things.

    18. CMChris Mason1:07:48

        Yeah, yeah.

    19. LFLex Fridman1:07:48

        But there's still a human element-

    20. CMChris Mason1:07:49

        Absolutely

    21. LFLex Fridman1:07:50

        ... that seeps in, and the more we travel out to space, the more the humans, the natural human drama, the love, the hate that emerges, it's all gonna be right there.

    22. CMChris Mason1:08:00

        It's a Greek tragedy just in space, basically. I think it's gonna be-

    23. LFLex Fridman1:08:03

        Or a reality show.

    24. CMChris Mason1:08:04

        [laughs] Right.

11. 1:08:06 – 1:14:45

    Colonizing planets

    1. LFLex Fridman1:08:06

       [laughs] So what about the colonization of other planets? If you look at Mars, when you... First of all, do you think it's a worthy effort looking at this particular one planet to put humans on Mars and to start thinking about colonizing Mars?

    2. CMChris Mason1:08:26

       It's one of the closest options. It's not the best option though by far. We, we, uh, I put in the book measures of Earth Similarity Index, or something called ESI, is how close is the gravity, the temperature, the solar incidents on the surface, how close is it to Earth is a calculation many astronomers make when they look for exoplanets. And Mars is pretty far away from, uh, a- an ESI of about .7. I mean, Earth is 1, so the best you can get is 1. Earth is just like Earth, it gets a score of 1. Anything above, you know, some of the best exoplanets that are in the habitable zone, where there's liquid water that could be there, start to get above .8 or .9, but they're... Most planets are very low. They're .1, .2. They're either way too big and would have crushing gravity, or way too small, too close to a sun. But Mars is, even though it's not that great on the ESI scale, it is still very relatively close, you know, galactically. And, and Venus is just too hot right now. So I think Venus would also be a great candidate. But it is, it's much easier to survive in a place where it's very cold but you can be sealed and survive, whereas going on... We probably just have no technology to survive anywhere except in the clouds of Venus. So it's just currently our best option, but it's not the best option for sure.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:09:36

       So over time, the E- ESI changes across millennia.

    4. CMChris Mason1:09:40

       It does. Yeah.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:09:40

       So the, Venus is gonna get c- cooler and cooler. Um, okay. But what are the big challenges to you in, uh, colonizing Mars from a biology perspective, from a human perspective, from an engineering perspective?

    6. CMChris Mason1:09:54

       There's several big challenges to Mars, and even the first one is even just the word colonize. So I think we- there's even a social challenge. Like, a lot of people, um, Danielle Wood actually studies this at MIT, is, sh- we shouldn't even use the word colonize. But then we probably shouldn't use the word settle either, 'cause there's settlements that have some other baggage to that word as well. And then maybe we just use the word explore, but at some point you need to say, "We're going there to survive there." And so colonization still is the word most people use, but I try to say go explore and build or settle. But I think the first challenge is, is social and getting people to think that this will not be like the colonization efforts of the past. The hope is that this will be a very different version of humanity exploring. That's my hope. History has, w- you could say, has proved me wrong every single time. Like, every time humans have gone somewhere, it's usually been a tale of exploitation, strife, and, and drama again, and then, and, and often murder, genocide. Like, it's actually a pretty dark history if you think of, of just all the colonization efforts. But I think most of it was done in a really dark area of humanity, where there w- average life expectancy was more than half less than it was today. It was, uh, life was, uh, brutish and short, as many of- as Hobbes has famously said. So it was, it was a rough existence, right? So I think some of the, the, the ugliness of humanity in prior colonization times was, was a consequence of the time, or at least that's my hope. I think that now we would have it be much more, I think, uh, inclusive, much more responsible, much more, m- much less, you know, evil, frankly. Like, we'd go there and, a- and you would need commercialization. You need efforts to do mining, for example, bring things back. But it'd have to be some degree of there are some areas that are viewed as, as, as commons or that are untouchable, like places that are parks. We do this today. Even if there's a, a lake, for example, the first, you know, several hundred feet of a lake are all for public property, and everything. You can own property, but just not certain areas. So I think we'd have to make sure we do that so that it's not completely exploited. But the, so that's on the social, the human side. The technological, we've talked a little bit about where you'd have to live. You'd wanna be underground with engineering and modifying even human cells to make sure you survive. Uh, the soil does have a lot of perchlorate, which is a problem for growing them, but there's ways to extract them. There's a fair amount of water. There's actually this beautiful image of all the known water on Mars that, uh, NASA posted about a year ago, and there's water everywhere. Not, not, not lots of it everywhere, but you, almost everywhere you look, there's at least a little bit of water just a few feet under the surface, and by the caps there's a lot. So I think we could get some water, and we could also do, you know, self-generating, um, reactors, machines that could make food, start to even make beer, uh, if you go long enough down the, the path. But the technical challenges are definitely the m- m- engineering and the manufacturing are, are gonna be hard because you have to build the buildings basically out of the soil that's there. So you have to really go there and try and build with whatever you can. So that has to be perfected still. But then once you're in those, those buildings, those structures, you need to create all the biology that will feed the, the populace, feed them, so, which we don't have the technology for yet. We have bits of it, but I think that's gonna be the biggest challenge is making Mars really truly independent. But that'll probably take, well, as I say in the book, several hundred years before I think we'd get there.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:13:00

       It's interesting 'cause we're also exploring ways to motivate society to take on this challenge. It's the JFK thing-

    8. CMChris Mason1:13:10

       Yeah

    9. LFLex Fridman1:13:10

       ... and, and then the Cold War that inspired the race to space. And I think as a human species, we're actually trying to figure out different ideas for how to motivate everybody to work on the same project together.

    10. CMChris Mason1:13:25

        [laughs] But yet compete at the same time.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:13:28

        Well, that's one idea, and that's worked well.

    12. CMChris Mason1:13:30

        Competition.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:13:30

        Competition.

    14. CMChris Mason1:13:31

        Yeah.

    15. LFLex Fridman1:13:31

        That's not necessarily the only idea, but it's the one that worked well so far. So maybe the only way to truly build a colony in, uh, on Mars or a successful sort of human civilization on Mars is to get, like, China to get- Like, uh, competitive about it

    16. CMChris Mason1:13:49

        I think, well, and they are. They- they've announced they wanna have boots on the red planet by 2033, which is two to four years earlier than when NASA's supposed to do it

    17. LFLex Fridman1:13:56

        Right

    18. CMChris Mason1:13:57

        So we'll see if they, if they get there first. But I think it's a space race 2.0, but it's not just the US and Russia this time. It's China, it's India, it's the UAE, it's Europe, ESA. Uh, JAXA is the Japanese space agency, and there's the US. So now it, it went from a, just a two-person race to, you know, a whole field. Uh, the, you know, the, a whole field of, uh, runners, if you will, on the track trying to get to Mars first. And I think ... I mean, th- things can be like anything. If, if you start to have settlements and con- construction projects and places to visit on Mars, I think the, the true mark of, of someplace being actually settled is when you s- you start to be able to pick. You're like, "Well, I wanna go to this destination, not this one, because they have better Martian cocktails here-

    19. LFLex Fridman1:14:37

        Yes

    20. CMChris Mason1:14:37

        ... but, uh, this one's not as good." So then the, the, this idea of innovating and com- competing will continue to drive, I think, humans as

12. 1:14:45 – 1:19:11

    Culture on Mars

    1. CMChris Mason1:14:45

       it always has.

    2. LFLex Fridman1:14:45

       You write this, um, fascinating thing, which is, quote, "People living on Mars will have developed entirely new cultures, dialects, products, and even new religions or variations of current religions. For example, a Martian Muslim will need to pray upward [laughs] toward the dusty sky." I love that you've thought through the geometry of this. Uh, "For example, a Martian Muslim will need to pray upward toward the dusty sky since Earth, and therefore Mecca, will sometimes be overhead, or when Mecca is below the Martian's feet, the prayer direction to Allah will stay downward toward the 38% gravity floor. Perhaps a second Mecca will be built on the new planet." End quote. Uh, that's another interesting question. Uh, how will culture be different on Mars in the early days and beyond?

    3. CMChris Mason1:15:38

       Yeah. It'll be, as we've seen with all of human history, I think even just when people migrate and they move, even their, the dialects change. Even just going to the South in the United States-

    4. LFLex Fridman1:15:49

       Yeah

    5. CMChris Mason1:15:49

       ... there's the, "Oh, y'all, come on down out here."

    6. LFLex Fridman1:15:51

       Yeah. I hear that

    7. CMChris Mason1:15:51

       You know, and just... And that's not even that far away. Or, or even just people on Long Island versus New York City, and there'll be a big nasally accent. Oh, yeah, and, uh, the people will just get... Or even W- Wisconsin. I'm from Wisconsin originally. There'll be this big nasally tone. Welcome to Wisconsin and Minnesota.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:16:06

       I wonder who defines that culture because it's very likely that the early humans on Mars will be very technically savvy.

    9. CMChris Mason1:16:14

       Yeah.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:16:15

        They have to be-

    11. CMChris Mason1:16:15

        Yeah

    12. LFLex Fridman1:16:15

        ... for the engineering challenges. Well, actually, I don't know. It could be the, this has to do with your [laughs] extreme microbiome, is like, is it going to be the extreme survivalists, or is it going to be the engineers and scientists, or is it gonna be both?

    13. CMChris Mason1:16:31

        I-

    14. LFLex Fridman1:16:31

        Because my experience with scientists, they're, you know, they like the comfort of their, the lab.

    15. CMChris Mason1:16:37

        Yes. Yeah

    16. LFLex Fridman1:16:37

        They don't... Well, no, there's some... I, I keep contradicting myself non-stop.

    17. CMChris Mason1:16:41

        [laughs]

    18. LFLex Fridman1:16:41

        There's some badass scientists that travel to, like, Antarctica and all that-

    19. CMChris Mason1:16:44

        Yeah

    20. LFLex Fridman1:16:44

        ... kind of stuff, so.

    21. CMChris Mason1:16:45

        It's a evolutionary selection for humans who can stare at a screen for eight hours at a time, or pipette for 12 hours at a time and not talk to anybody. So it's not surprising when our scientists are a little bit awkward in social situations. But they, we can, we can get them, we can train them out of that. We can get them to engage other humans. Uh, not all of them, but, uh, hopefully most of them. Uh, so I think, you know, I think the culture will definitely be different. There'll be different dialects, different foods. There'll be different, uh, values. There'll, uh, very likely will be a different religion. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a lot about this in his books. Uh, there's a new Martian religion that was created. So I think this idea has been discussed in the, in science fiction. And it is almost unavoidable because th- there's been... I mean, just, just think of all the religions that have happened on Earth, um, w- with, with, you know, very little, I think, uh, dra- dra- I mean, there's just terrestrial drama. But suddenly you have a different planet, and y- you then need a, a deity that would span multiple planets, and I don't even know how you do that. But I think someone will think of a way and, and make up something.

    22. LFLex Fridman1:17:44

        Yeah. That's, uh, look for ways to draw meaning.

    23. CMChris Mason1:17:48

        Mm.

    24. LFLex Fridman1:17:49

        Uh, so religion for a lot of people, myths, common ideas are a source of meaning. And when you're on another planet, boy, does the sense of what is meaningful change. 'Cause you're, it's humbling. The harshness of the conditions is humbling. The, the very practical fact that Earth from which you came is not so special 'cause you're clearly not on Earth currently, and you're doing fine-

    25. CMChris Mason1:18:18

        Yeah. You made it

    26. LFLex Fridman1:18:18

        ... and you made it.

    27. CMChris Mason1:18:19

        At some point, I mean, it'll be pretty harsh, like, like what Shackleton did doing this exploratration, exploration of Antarctica and going. Was very dangerous mission. Barely made it. People died. Actually, he didn't believe in scurvy at the time, so he didn't take enough vitamin C, and some of his people died from not having vitamin C. So if we had had their genes active, the pseudogene, they'd be okay. But there, I think the, the early settlers will be, it'll be very different crew. But once it's comfort- once people are comfortable there, I think they're gonna ... I hope that they'll draw more meaning, 'cause more planets should be more meaning. I feel like it's like, uh, more hands is a better massage. I don't know if that's the best analogy here, but-

    28. LFLex Fridman1:18:55

        I think Aristotle said that. Yeah.

    29. CMChris Mason1:18:57

        [laughs]

    30. LFLex Fridman1:18:59

        [laughs] I should mention that your book has incredible quotes. It's great writing, but also just incredible quotes at the beginning of chapters that really-
13. 1:19:11 – 1:26:29

    Commercial space flights

    1. LFLex Fridman1:19:11

       'em-

    2. CMChris Mason1:19:11

       That's right

    3. LFLex Fridman1:19:11

       ... uh, put 'em all down. What are your thoughts about, um, the efforts of Elon Musk and SpaceX in pushing this commercial space flight and, I mean, other companies, Axiom Space as well? Uh, what are your thoughts on, um, on their efforts?

    4. CMChris Mason1:19:26

       It's like a gold rush. Uh, it's, uh, the, the space race 2.0. There's a lot of terms for it, the new space race. I think it's fabulous. I think it is, it's moving at a pace that is unprecedented, and, and also there's a lot of, there's investment from the commercial and private sector pushing it forward. So Elon most notoriously doing a lot of it just himself with SpaceX. So we've worked really closely with the SpaceX ops teams and medical team, uh, planning the Inspiration4 mission, and now some of the Polaris missions which are happening. And Jared Isaacman has been a fabulous colleague, collaborator, pilot for the missions. You know, we're doing, again, we're doing the same deep profiling and molecular characterization of these astronauts as we've done for, uh, you know, Scott Kelly and other astronauts that are from NASA. And we're seeing so far, actually there'll be a lot of this presented later this year, it seems like, uh, it's pretty safe. Again, there's dangers. We can see real stress on the body, very obvious changes, some of the same, uh, changes that Scott Kelly experienced. But for the most part, they return back to normal, even for a short three-day mission. Uh, I remember I was chatting with, with Jared ne- and we were presenting the data to them actually just a few weeks ago, kind of a, a briefing to the crew, and 'cause they went to 590 kilometers, they went basically several hundred kilometers higher than the space station or the Hubble normally rests. So more radiation. You know, the farther you get from Earth, there's more radiation. He was worried, you know, "Did we get cooked?" It was kind of his question for me in the briefing. I said, "Well, actually it looks like you can go back into the microwave. You didn't get fully cooked. You can go a little bit farther." So for the Polaris mission, they're gonna go even farther, uh, and then also, uh, open the hatch and go out in these new spacesuits that SpaceX are designing.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:20:53

       Mm-hmm.

    6. CMChris Mason1:20:54

       That'll be much nimbler, not as much of a giant, you know, um, Dr. Octagon kind of, uh, spacesuit, but really, um, th- like, looks like just a nice spacesuit, and they're gonna go out into the vacuum of space. And so, you know, pushing all the engineering, uh, for these missions, which are privately funded. So it's, it's people who just say, "I wanna go up in space and see if I can push the limits," has been fabulous. But I think the most fabulous part is, is Jared in particular, but o- others, other commercial s- space flight drivers like John Shoffner, Peggy Whitson for the Axiom missions, are coming to us, the scientists, researchers saying, "I don't just wanna go up into space just to hang out. How much science can I get done when I'm up there? What can I do? What experiments can I do? Give me, you know, blood, tissue, urine, uh, semen, tears. G- I'll give you any biofluid."

    7. LFLex Fridman1:21:36

       [laughs]

    8. CMChris Mason1:21:37

       Uh, you know, and I, I always, I email them back and say, "Listen, every one of your cells is worthy of study. S- send me..." You know, so I, I have this really kind of creepy geneticist email response-

    9. LFLex Fridman1:21:46

       Yeah. [laughs]

    10. CMChris Mason1:21:46

        ... of like, "I want all of your cells," you know? But, but it's true because there's so much-

    11. LFLex Fridman1:21:49

        Yeah

    12. CMChris Mason1:21:49

        ... we don't know, I wanna learn as much as we can about every, every time they go up, a- anyone. So we're doing it, you know, with NASA astronauts, but it's been suddenly this influx of new crews that are willing to do almost anything, right? So including, we did skin biopsies for the Inspiration4 crew before and after space flight, and that's never been done before. We've never seen the structure of the skin and how it changes in response to microgravity and also the microbes that change. And so these beautiful images of, uh, even the structure of skin changing and the inflammation that we've seen in, like for Scott Kelly, for example, we now have a molecule by molecule map of what happens to skin, which has never been done before. So they're-

    13. LFLex Fridman1:22:23

        What are interesting surprises there?

    14. CMChris Mason1:22:25

        So w- one of the interesting things we can see, the part of what's driving inflammation is we can actually see macrophages and there's other dendritic cells, pieces, like cells that are part of the immune system kind of creeping along towards the surface of the skin, which is now we know it's actually physically driving the immune system, is these cells going and creating this inflammation, which is what leads to some of the rashes. But we didn't see as much in them as we saw, for example, some of the signatures of Scott Kelly. So, uh, we can see within the crew who's getting more of a rash or not, or who didn't experience any rash. And some people had, uh, changes in vision. Some people had, you know, other, uh, GI problems, uh, even, you know, even looking at sort of what happens to the gut and looking at the microbiome of the gut. Other people didn't. So we are able to see, and start to get a little bit predictive about our medicine, right? Now we're just diagnosing, but it'd be good to say, "Uh, if you're going into space, here's exactly what you need for each bacteria in your body. Here's what you could maybe take to get rid of nausea or other ways we could monitor you to keep, keep the inflammation down."

    15. LFLex Fridman1:23:19

        What does it take to prepare for one of these missions? 'Cause you mentioned some of the folks are not necessarily lifelong astronauts. You're talking about more and more regular civilians. What's, what does it take physiologically and psychologically to prepare for these?

    16. CMChris Mason1:23:31

        They have to do a lot of the same training that most astronauts do. So a lot of it's done in Hawthorne at SpaceX headquarters, which if you can ever get a chance to do a tour, is fabulous. It's really, you can see all these giant rockets being built, and then we're drawing blood over there right next to them. So it's a really cool place. But the, the training, they have to go through a lot of the ops, a lot of the programming just in case. Most of the systems are automated on the Dragon and other spacecraft, but just in case. So they have to go through all, alm- the majority of the training. If you wanna go to the space station, as the Axiom missions are, uh, including John Shoffner, you have to do training in, for some of the Russian modules. And if you don't do that training, then you're not allowed to go to the Russian part of the space station, apparently. So right now, John Shoffner, for example, unless he completes this additional training all in Russian, he's not allowed-

    17. LFLex Fridman1:24:12

        All in Russian?

    18. CMChris Mason1:24:13

        In other words, to learn enough Russian to be, you know, just functional.

    19. LFLex Fridman1:24:16

        Wow.

    20. CMChris Mason1:24:16

        So-

    21. LFLex Fridman1:24:16

        It's not just technical, you also have to-

    22. CMChris Mason1:24:18

        Learn enough, enough Russian.

    23. LFLex Fridman1:24:19

        Enough, enough Russian.

    24. CMChris Mason1:24:20

        And, uh, so, so, and if he doesn't learn, he can't go to that part of the space station. So interesting things like that are, but you'll be, you know... It's not that far. You're like, "Oh, I can see it right there. I can't float over to that, that capsule." Uh, but technically he can't go. So, you know.

    25. LFLex Fridman1:24:33

        Is there, um, a Chinese component to the, the International Space Station? Is there collaboration there?

    26. CMChris Mason1:24:39

        Sadly not. They're building, uh, their own space station. Uh, I'm glad they're building a space station. Actually, eventually there'll be probably four space stations in orbit by 2028. Uh, some from the Orbital Reef, some from Lockheed Martin. Of course, Axiom is, is a- well, far ahead right now. They're probably gonna be done first. But the, the extraordinary thing is, uh, th- there's, unfortunately, there's no collaboration between the-

    27. LFLex Fridman1:25:01

        You see that as a negative. That's not the positive kind of competition.

    28. CMChris Mason1:25:04

        Well, it's, it's g- good question. So may- maybe [sighs] ... For example, when we get different NASA grants, you, you apply for a grant, you get it to the lab, it goes, you know, it goes through Cornell at the grants office. I have to sign as a scientist, as the PI on the, on the mission, say, "I promise I will move no funds or resources or any staff to anyone in China or work with anyone in China with these dollars that you're giving to the lab for this mission." And so, like, every other grant I get from the, uh, NASA, DoD, or sorry, DO- let me go back to that. Every other grant I get from, say, the NIH or the NSFs, even sometimes DoD, you don't have to promise that you won't talk to anybody in China about it. But the, for NASA alone, it's congressionally mandated. You have to promise and sign all this paperwork to say I can't do anything with anyone in China about this. And what, what I view as sad about that is I wanna at least be able to chat with them about it and know what they're up to. But we can't, you know, even go to a conference in China technically with NASA funds about, say, space medicine or engineering a new rocket. I, I, I can't go. I could go with personal funds, but I can't use those funds.

    29. LFLex Fridman1:26:01

        Like, you should be able to go to a conference and in a friendly way talk shit to the other scientists.

    30. CMChris Mason1:26:05

        Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
14. 1:26:29 – 1:34:03

    Podcast in space

    1. LFLex Fridman1:26:29

       Well, let me ask, um- In terms of preparing, um, for space flight, you know, I, I tweeted about this and I joked about it, and I, I talk to Elon quite a lot these days. What I tweeted was, "I'd like to do a podcast in space one day."

    2. CMChris Mason1:26:50

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:26:52

       And, uh, it was a silly thing, uh, 'cause I was thinking, for some reason in my mind I was thinking 10, 20 years from now. And then I realized like, "Wait. Why not, like, now?" [laughs]

    4. CMChris Mason1:27:03

       Yeah.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:27:03

       There's no... Just even seeing what, uh, Axiom is doing, what Inspiration4 is doing-

    6. CMChris Mason1:27:08

       Sure

    7. LFLex Fridman1:27:08

       ... it's like regular civilians-

    8. CMChris Mason1:27:10

       Could just go

    9. LFLex Fridman1:27:10

       ... could start going up. Well, so let me ask you this question.

    10. CMChris Mason1:27:14

        Mm-hmm.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:27:14

        When do you think... We saw Jeff Bezos go out into orbit. When do you think Elon goes off to space? So hi- his thinking about this is it's partially responsible until it's safe because he has such a, uh, direct engineering roles in the running of-

    12. CMChris Mason1:27:32

        Of the-

    13. LFLex Fridman1:27:32

        ... multiple companies.

    14. CMChris Mason1:27:33

        Yeah.

    15. LFLex Fridman1:27:34

        So at which point do you think, what's your prediction for the year that Elon will go up?

    16. CMChris Mason1:27:40

        I think he'd probably go up by 2026, I would say. Uh, uh, because the number of missions planned, there- there'll be pr- several missions per year through multiple space agencies and companies that are really making low Earth orbit very routine. And, and by go up, I think it might also... For example, the Inspiration4 mission just went up for three days in flight. You, you know, and it was enough time to get up there, do some experiments, enjoy the view, and then he came back. Uh, the Axiom missions are a bit more complicated. There's docking, you're up in the space station. It's a shared atmosphere, so you have to follow all the ISS protocols. What's, what's interesting about the Dragon capsule and the Inspiration4 and some of these what are called free flyer missions, you can just launch into space. You basically have your own little mini space station for a few days.

    17. LFLex Fridman1:28:23

        Mm.

    18. CMChris Mason1:28:23

        It's not that big, right? But I think that's what we'd probably see him do first because they're fair- They're, you know, we're gonna see a lot more tests of those in the next three, two to three years. But they're al- already been demonstrated to be safe, and then you're not trying to go for 10 to 20 days or, or months or years at a time. You're just up in space for a few days, but you're in proper space. It's an orbital flight. It's not just a sub-orbital flight. You're, um, you could do a podcast from there, and I think-

    19. LFLex Fridman1:28:46

        2026. I wonder how the audio works. See, also, can you comment on 2026? I'll, I'll start getting ready.

    20. CMChris Mason1:28:52

        [laughs]

    21. LFLex Fridman1:28:53

        [laughs] I'll, I'll start pushing him on this. I'm quite, quite serious. It's a fascinating kind of-

    22. CMChris Mason1:28:57

        Axiom-2 still has room. You could go on that mission if you want. It's, it's-

    23. LFLex Fridman1:29:00

        So I'll ask you about Axiom. Um, what, how strict are these? So this, [laughs] this seems surreal that civilians are traveling up.

    24. CMChris Mason1:29:10

        [laughs]

    25. LFLex Fridman1:29:12

        So how many, how much bureaucracy is there still in your experience for the scientific... I mean, I know it's a difficult question to ask a scientist.

    26. CMChris Mason1:29:18

        Mm-hmm.

    27. LFLex Fridman1:29:19

        'Cause you get to, you know, you don't wanna complain too much.

    28. CMChris Mason1:29:22

        [laughs] Right.

    29. LFLex Fridman1:29:23

        But-

    30. CMChris Mason1:29:23

        Yeah. Yeah
15. 1:34:03 – 1:36:20

    Axiom Space

    1. CMChris Mason1:34:03

       That's the-

    2. LFLex Fridman1:34:03

       So SpaceX is giving Axiom a ride.

    3. CMChris Mason1:34:05

       Right. Right

    4. LFLex Fridman1:34:06

       In this case. What is Axiom Space? Can you speak to this, this particular private company? What's their mission? What's their goal? And what, what is the Axiom 1 mission that just went up?

    5. CMChris Mason1:34:15

       Yeah. It's, uh, uh, so the Axiom Space is a private s- spaceflight company that's building the f- the first private space station. They actually have seen the videos and footage and hardware being put together, so they're in the process of constructing it. The hope is that by 2024, one of the first modules will be up and connected to the ISS, and eventually it'll be expanded, and then by 2028, the plan is it'll be completely, uh, detached and, and free-floating. And it will be maybe even a little bit sooner, depending on how fast it goes, but they're building the world's first private space station. So if you wanna have a wedding up there, you just have to multiply the number of guests times the number of nights, and you could have a wedding up there. It'd be very expensive, but if you wanna do it-

    6. LFLex Fridman1:34:55

       Wow

    7. CMChris Mason1:34:55

       ... you can do it. It's like, it's, it's, you can have a lab up there. If you wanna do experiments, you can do experiments. You have to figure out the cost. If you wanna have a beer up there, you can make your own, brew your own beer. And so this is the first beer made in space. For some reason you wanna do it, you can pay for it. So it's opened up this space where if you can find the funds for it, you propose it. You can probably just do it.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:35:14

       Okay. Cool. Uh, so what is the Axiom 1 mission that just went up? Can you tell me what happened?

    9. CMChris Mason1:35:19

       Axiom 1 is the first private, uh, com- the first commercial crew to go to the space station. So Inspiration4 was the first, uh, commercial private crew to just go into space. They went into space and actually did an orbital mission, uh, for just about three days. But Axiom 1 is the first, you know, again, on, on the SpaceX Rockets, but launched up, docked to the space station, and they're up there for about 10 days to do experiments, to wo- you know, work with staff, actually just take some pictures. But it's a mission, uh, they're actually doing a lot of experiments. They're doing almost 80 different experiments, so it's a lot. It's very science-heavy, which I love as a scientist. But it's the ability to show that you can fundraise and launch up a crew, uh, that's all privately funded and then go to the space station.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:35:58

        Yeah, it's four people.

    11. CMChris Mason1:35:59

        Yeah, four people. And the Axiom 2 will also likely be four people. The two that have been announced are John Shoffner and Peggy Whitson. Peggy Whitson's a already prior NASA astronaut, who's been up many times, done many experiments. She knows the space station like her own house. And, uh, we recently did a training with Peggy and John in my lab at Cornell to get ready for some other g- genomics experiments that we'll do on that mission.

16. 1:36:20 – 1:43:09

    Designing space experiments

    1. CMChris Mason1:36:20

       So-

    2. LFLex Fridman1:36:20

       So they're doing the experiments too.

    3. CMChris Mason1:36:21

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:36:22

       What, what does it take to design an experiment and to run a, d- design an experiment here on Earth that runs up there, and then also to actually do the, the running of the experiment? What are the constraints?

    5. CMChris Mason1:36:33

       Mm.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:36:33

       What are the opportunities? All that kind of stuff.

    7. CMChris Mason1:36:36

       There are, uh, the biggest constraint is, is what is, what do you need for reagents or materials, the liquids that you might use for any experiment? What if it floats away? What if it gets in someone's eye? 'Cause things always float away in space. There's notoriously panels in the space station where you don't wanna look behind because it's got a little fungus, or food has gotten stuck there and sometimes found months and months or years later. So things, things float around, so-

    8. LFLex Fridman1:36:57

       The little things. Wow

    9. CMChris Mason1:36:58

       ... it, it just... And, and so if you have anything you need to do your experiment that's a liquid or a solid, whatever that is has to go through toxicity testing.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:37:04

        Yeah.

    11. CMChris Mason1:37:04

        To m- and the big question is if this thing, whatever you wanna use, gets in someone's eye, will they lose their vision or be really injured? And if the answer is yes, it doesn't mean the ans- you can't use it. It just means if the answer is yes, you have to then go through multiple levels of containment. There's a glove box on the space station where you can actually do experiments that have triple layers of containment. So you can still use some harsh reagents, but you have to do them in, in that glove box. And so, but you can propose almost anything. The, the biggest challenge is the weight. If it's a heavy, it's $10,000 per kilogram to get something up into space. So if you have a big, heavy object, that, there's some costs you have to consider.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:37:38

        And that includes the, not just the materials, but the, the, the equipment-

    13. CMChris Mason1:37:41

        The materials

    14. LFLex Fridman1:37:41

        ... used to analyze the materials.

    15. CMChris Mason1:37:42

        Yeah. Yeah. One of the ones we worked on actually with Kate Rubins was putting the first DNA sequencer in space called the Biomolecular Sequencer Mission. Also with, uh, Erin Burton and Sarah Castro-Wallace. But there, the, the interesting thing is we had to prepare this tiny little sequencer. It sequences DNA. It can do it really quickly, within really minutes.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:37:59

        Mm.

    17. CMChris Mason1:38:00

        And what's extraordinary is w- you have to do, if you wanna get a piece of machinery up there, you have to do destructive testing, so you have to destroy it and see what happens. How does it destroy? What, do pieces, little pieces of glass break everywhere? If so, that's a problem, so you have to-

    18. LFLex Fridman1:38:11

        Yeah

    19. CMChris Mason1:38:12

        ... redesign it. And do fire testing. How does it burn? H- how does your device, uh, explode in a fire, or doesn't it? You have to test that, and then you do vibration testing. So you have to basically, if you wanna fly one thing into space, you need to make four of them and destroy at least three of them to know how they di- how they destroy.

    20. LFLex Fridman1:38:26

        The destructive-

    21. CMChris Mason1:38:27

        Destructive test-

    22. LFLex Fridman1:38:28

        ... fire

    23. CMChris Mason1:38:28

        ... fire, and then vibration testing.

    24. LFLex Fridman1:38:30

        And vibration.

    25. CMChris Mason1:38:30

        Um, it's kinda like-

    26. LFLex Fridman1:38:31

        Just asking for a friend, how, how do you, from a scientific perspective, do destructive testing? And how do you do fire testing and how do you do vibration testing?

    27. CMChris Mason1:38:40

        Vibration, like, well, just large shakers. So that's, uh, th- actually it's mostly to simulate launch. They have a lot of machinery at NASA and at SpaceX to do just, you know, make sure what- does, does the thing completely fall apart if it has a high vibrational, I mean, essentially force attached to it? So it's just, uh, kinda like a big shaker. Fire testing is just to simulate what would happen if there was a normal fire, that something that gets up to, you know, the fire temperature is several hundred degrees Celsius, and does-

    28. LFLex Fridman1:39:05

        Open fire or are we talking like you put it in a toaster?

    29. CMChris Mason1:39:08

        No, it's more like-

    30. LFLex Fridman1:39:08

        Is it heat or is it actual flames?
17. 1:43:09 – 1:45:50

    Robots in space

    1. LFLex Fridman1:43:09

       So clearly somebody that loves robots, um, how many robots are up there in space that help with the experiments? Like, what, how much technology is there w- would you say? Is it, is it really a manual activity or is there a lot of robots helping out?

    2. CMChris Mason1:43:25

       Good question. So, so far it's almost all manual, just 'cause the robots have to all undergo the destructive fire and vibrational testing.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:43:32

       How-

    4. CMChris Mason1:43:32

       So if you have a million-dollar robot-

    5. LFLex Fridman1:43:33

       This is so exciting.

    6. CMChris Mason1:43:34

       Yeah, so if you can get-

    7. LFLex Fridman1:43:36

       That thing is a lot less than a million.

    8. CMChris Mason1:43:37

       [laughs] So we can destroy it.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:43:39

       We're definitely gonna te- test it out for the, uh... In, I guess in which order? No, you have to do separate for each one.

    10. CMChris Mason1:43:45

        Yeah, each one.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:43:46

        You have to do-

    12. CMChris Mason1:43:46

        Yeah, yes

    13. LFLex Fridman1:43:46

        ... vibration, fire. Uh, note, note to self, do fire testing for the legged robots and the destructive testing. That would be fascinating. I wonder if, uh, any of the folks I'm working with did that kind of testing on the materials. Like, what breaks first with the robots?

    14. CMChris Mason1:44:07

        And also the, the big question... So what's interesting about this, for Axiom and for these less, these commercial spaceflight areas, if you can fund it, you could fly it, right? So if you had to say, like, "I wanna fly these series of, uh, of robots up because I think they could help build something or they could help measure or repair the spacecraft."

    15. LFLex Fridman1:44:22

        Oh, you have to come up with a good reason.

    16. CMChris Mason1:44:23

        Yeah. Well, well, well for NASA you have to have a good, but I think for private spaceflight you could have, "The reason is I'm curious," and that could just be it.

    17. LFLex Fridman1:44:29

        Exactly. Curiosity.

    18. CMChris Mason1:44:29

        And like, and, uh, I've got a private funder or I've got your own money.

    19. LFLex Fridman1:44:32

        And then you pay, uh, per kilogram-

    20. CMChris Mason1:44:35

        Yeah

    21. LFLex Fridman1:44:35

        ... essentially.

    22. CMChris Mason1:44:36

        And, and I mean, there are some things. You can't say, "I wanna send a, a nuclear bomb up there 'cause I'm curious." [laughs] I don't think that would fly. But you-

    23. LFLex Fridman1:44:42

        And there's probably rules in terms of free-floating robots, right? They probably have to be attached, they have to... Like, it- it's an orchestra that plays together, all the experiments that are up there.

    24. CMChris Mason1:44:51

        Yes.

    25. LFLex Fridman1:44:51

        There's probably-

    26. CMChris Mason1:44:52

        Exactly

    27. LFLex Fridman1:44:52

        ... it's not silos, it's not separate th- uh, separate kind of things. But you're saying it's all mostly manual. How much electronics is there in terms of data collection, in terms of all that kind of stuff?

    28. CMChris Mason1:45:01

        A lot of electronics. So a lot of it's tablets, there's laptops up there. There are, you know, the whole, the space station is, is, is running and humming on electronics. Actually, it's one of the biggest complaints astronauts have is, is sleeping up there is hard. Not only 'cause you're in zero gravity, but there's a consistent loud hum of the space station. There's so many things active and humming and, and moving, uh, that are keeping the s- the station. A lot of the CO2 scrubbers, all, all the instrumentation. It's l- it's loud. So I think it is a very well-powered, uh, lab basically i- in flight. But it, but it, uh, it won't... Uh, the future space stations I think will be very different because they're being built more for pleasure than business or, you know, a little bit of both. But they're built for, we want people to, you know, at least when you talk to Axiom, when you talk to the other, uh, industry partners, they wanna make it, you know, space more fun and en- engaging and

18. 1:45:50 – 1:49:48

    Space exploration

    1. CMChris Mason1:45:50

       open to new ideas.

    2. LFLex Fridman1:45:50

       So that's looking at the fun stuff going on in the next few years. But if we zoom out once again-

    3. CMChris Mason1:45:58

       Mm-hmm

    4. LFLex Fridman1:45:58

       ... how and when do we get outside of the solar system? You mentioned this before. Or maybe you can mention the other hops we might take.

    5. CMChris Mason1:46:08

       Mm-hmm.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:46:08

       You know what? Let's, let's step back a little and s- where are some of the fun places we might visit first in a semi-permanent way inside the solar system that you think are worth visiting?

    7. CMChris Mason1:46:20

       Yeah, at the end of 500 years I'm hoping we s- make the big launch towards another solar system. Uh, really driven by the fact that we now actually have exoplanets that we know we might be able to get to and survive on, whereas 20 years ago we really had almost none, certainly none that we knew were habitable. And exoplanets even just, just discovered didn't start to happen until '89, and really the early '90s for the real validated ones. So, uh, you know, I'm, I'm hoping over the next 500 years we go from thousands of possible habitable planets to hundreds of thousands or millions that, uh, you know, especially with some of the recent telescopes launch we'll find them. But, but before we get there, I have a, a whole section I really describe about the magic of Titan because it has all this methane, which is a great hydrocarbon you can use to make fuel. You can use it, it's cold as all bejesus on Titan, but if you can-

    8. LFLex Fridman1:47:07

       Ice

    9. CMChris Mason1:47:07

       ... it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's-

    10. LFLex Fridman1:47:09

        What, so what's Titan made up of? What is Titan?

    11. CMChris Mason1:47:12

        Oh.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:47:12

        Everybody loves Titan.

    13. CMChris Mason1:47:13

        Yeah, Ti- Ti- it is, it's a favorite, uh, I mean, it's this kind of eerie, uh, green-hued mu- moon, um, that's around Saturn that is, uh, to our knowledge, you know, this large, it has like, you know, it's so cold it has these methane lakes where the methane normally is a gas, but there it'd actually be so cold it's like a lake of methane. You could go swimming in it potentially. There might be some degree of, uh, rocks or m- maybe mountains there, but they might also be made of, like, frozen methane. So we, no one's ever sh- uh, no, no person's obviously been there, but it is, you know, have enough satellite imagery and some data that you could actually potentially survive on Titan. So I think that'd be one place where I'm hoping that we would at least have a s- uh, a bit of an outpost. It might not be a luxurious retreat 'cause it's really cold.

    14. LFLex Fridman1:47:59

        Is there life on Titan, you think, un- underneath the surface somewhere?

    15. CMChris Mason1:48:03

        Maybe. Well, actually, considering with all that carbon and all those hydrocarbons, it, it is very possible that some microbial life could be there and, and hanging out waiting for us to, to, to dip our toes into the methane and, and find it. But we don't know yet, but I think that's one place I'd like to see an outpost. I would like to see other outposts near Jupiter, but Jupiter has extremely high radiation actually. So even places like Io, which are volcanically active and quite amazing, we probably couldn't survive that long or that close to Jupiter though it has, because it bring, it's such a giant planet, uh, it, it emits back out a lot of radiation that it's collecting from out, out other parts of the universe and it juts back out. So if you get too close to Jupiter, you'd actually almost certainly not be able to survive. Uh, depending on w- which part of it, but that's one risk about Jupiter. Um, but it'd be cool to see the giant red spot, uh, up close maybe. We have some spots there.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:48:53

        Yeah, Mars is top one, then you get to pick Titan or Io. So ice, fire and ice-

    17. CMChris Mason1:48:59

        Fire and ice

    18. LFLex Fridman1:48:59

        ... the, the Robert Frost poem comes to mind.

    19. CMChris Mason1:49:01

        Yeah.

    20. LFLex Fridman1:49:02

        And then Europa, is that-

    21. CMChris Mason1:49:03

        Europa would be cool too, and Enceladus, which is a big, uh, ocean that might be there, like a alien ocean that's under the, uh, that might be even water ice that's there and wa- even liquid water potentially there-

    22. LFLex Fridman1:49:12

        Mm-hmm

    23. CMChris Mason1:49:12

        ... under the surface. So that'd be a great candidate. The asteroids of Ceres would be good, or Eros are big enough you get a little bit of gravity. That, it'd be interesting and you could, you know, have a, maybe a, a habitable place there, and they just might be big enough that you could get there, survive, and even have a tiny bit of gravity, but not much.

    24. LFLex Fridman1:49:28

        Why do you like asteroids?

    25. CMChris Mason1:49:30

        Well-

    26. LFLex Fridman1:49:31

        Are you just, this, we're just listing vacation spots?

    27. CMChris Mason1:49:33

        Of, of place- Yeah, vacation spots basically, yes, I'd say. Well, also they probably have a lot of rare earth minerals that you could use for manufacturing, which is why part of the space economy that's being built up now is people really wanting to go and hollow out the asteroids and bring back all the, um, you know, all the resources from it. So

19. 1:49:48 – 1:53:25

    War in space

    1. CMChris Mason1:49:48

       this, uh, legally is very possible 'cause even though, um, the, the Space- Space Act prevents people from militarizing space or owning all of it, if you get the resources out of an asteroid but you don't actually say you own it, that's still, that's perfectly legal. So you could-

    2. LFLex Fridman1:50:04

       What's the Space Act?

    3. CMChris Mason1:50:05

       Uh, Space Act was 1967, was the first- A large-scale agreement between major international parties, particularly the US and Russia, but also many others, to say that space should be a place for humanities to not ha- militarize it, to not weaponize it, to not militarize it. Also establish some of the basic sharing principles between countries who are going into space. And there was a plan to make an, uh, an additional act in the '90s, um, the, the lunar, the lunar... Actually, I'm blanking on the name of it, but the, uh, there hasn't been any significant legislation that has been universally accepted since the Space Act.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:50:40

       So, but the primary focus-

    5. CMChris Mason1:50:43

       Was on the militarization

    6. LFLex Fridman1:50:44

       ... on the militarization.

    7. CMChris Mason1:50:45

       Which was, in theory, not allowed, which will, which so far has stayed true, but-

    8. LFLex Fridman1:50:50

       But there's no, um... Is there any legal framework for who owns space and space? Uh, like different geographical regions of space, both out in space and on asteroids and planets and moons.

    9. CMChris Mason1:51:07

       The, currently you can't own, you're not supposed to be able to own. I mean, people have tried to sell bits of the moon, for example, or sell names of stars, which is pretty harmless. But you're not supposed to be able to own any part of the moon, or an asteroid for that matter. But you're allowed to mine the resources from it. So in theory, you could go catch an asteroid, hollow out the whole thing like you eat an orange, and leave the shell and say, "Okay, I'm done. I never owned it, but I just extracted everything inside of it, and now I'm done with it." And, and then the affordability of-

    10. LFLex Fridman1:51:38

        And of course, you see there's going to be some contentious battles, even wars, over those resources.

    11. CMChris Mason1:51:44

        Yeah.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:51:45

        Um, hopefully at a very small scale, it's more like conflict or, like, human tension, but-

    13. CMChris Mason1:51:53

        It will-

    14. LFLex Fridman1:51:54

        Oh, boy.

    15. CMChris Mason1:51:54

        [laughs]

    16. LFLex Fridman1:51:55

        It's like war makes for human flourishing, like after the war somehow.

    17. CMChris Mason1:52:00

        It is.

    18. LFLex Fridman1:52:01

        Sometimes there's just this-

    19. CMChris Mason1:52:02

        Struggle. You need a struggle

    20. LFLex Fridman1:52:03

        ... explosion of conflict and afterwards for a long while, there's a flourishing. And again, conflict and flourishing, and hopefully over a stretch of, uh, millennia, the rate of conflict and the destructiveness of conflict de- decreases.

    21. CMChris Mason1:52:20

        It ha- it has, at least in the past 100 years, the number of wars, number of military actions, casualties have, have all decreased. I don't know if it's gonna stay that way for humanity going... I, I think, you know, the trajectory is there. I think the, the warmongering is, is less tolerated by the international community. The, you know, it's more scrutinized. It still happens. Like, you know, right now there's an ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. I know you've spoken a lot about it, and it's, you know, uh, but it, it's, you know, there, there sometimes will be small military actions, but I think the, the, you know... And even there there's an, you know, a large military action across most of the country, but not all of it, actually, right? So it's, I, I think you- we see less over time of large scale multi-country invasions like, like we've seen in the past. I think maybe that won't happen ever again. But you might see country-to-country battles happening, which has always happened, I think. Um, but hopefully less of that as well.

    22. LFLex Fridman1:53:13

        And yet the destructiveness of our weapons increases, so it's a-

    23. CMChris Mason1:53:18

        Mm.

    24. LFLex Fridman1:53:18

        It's a, it's a complicated race in both directions. We become more peaceful and more destructive at the same time. It's fascinating.

20. 1:53:25 – 1:59:35

    Launch toward the Second Sun

    1. LFLex Fridman1:53:25

       How do we get outside the solar system? You, uh, you write an epic line, I believe it's the title of one of the sections, Launch Toward the Second Sun.

    2. CMChris Mason1:53:37

       Mm.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:53:39

       That journey of saying, "We're going to..." Somehow the solar system feels like home.

    4. CMChris Mason1:53:44

       Yeah. Yeah.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:53:45

       Earth is home, but the solar system is home. It's our sun.

    6. CMChris Mason1:53:48

       Mm.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:53:48

       The sun is a source of, of, uh, life.

    8. CMChris Mason1:53:51

       Of life, yeah.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:53:52

       And going towards the second sun, leaving this home behind, that's, that's one hell of a journey.

    10. CMChris Mason1:53:59

        Yeah.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:53:59

        So what does that journey look like? When, when does it happen, and what's required to make it happen?

    12. CMChris Mason1:54:06

        To get to that state, we have to actually have, you know... I describe a number of options. Either we have to all have people survive, and multiple generations live and die on the same spacecraft towards another, another star. Propulsion technology, you need to have that in place. I assume we don't have dramatic improvements. I describe ways it could happen, like antimatter drives or things that could make it possible to go faster. But since it's a book of nonfiction, I just make no big leaps, uh, other than what we know of today that's possible. And if that's the case, you'd need probably 20 generations to live and die on one spacecraft to make it towards what is our known closest habitable exoplanet. Now, that sounds... You know, so you need to have the life support, self-reliance, self-sustainability all in that one. It'd be a large spacecraft. You'd have to grow your own food, probably still have some areas with gravity. It would be complicated, but I think after 500 years, we could actually have the technology and the means and the understanding of biology to enable that. And, and so with, with that as a backdrop, you could have people hibernate. I talk about, like, maybe you need hibernation instead of just people living their normal life. But I think we don't-- the hibernation technology doesn't work that well yet, and I don't know if... It might pan out and maybe in 200 years it gets really good, then people can all just sleep in pods. Great. Uh, you know, so I'm, I, I, I think this is the, the minimum viable product with everything that we have today and nothing else, right? So if that's the case, which of course I'm sure we'll have more in 500 years, but based on what we know today, you have people live and die on the spacecraft, and that sounds almost like a prison sentence. You say, "If you were born into a spacecraft, and, and when you got old enough, they just said, 'We're-- Yes, you can tell we're on a spacecraft. We-- You will live your whole life on this,' let's say something the size of a building, 'and this is everyone you'll ever know, and then you'll die, and then your children will also carry on the mission.'" Would those people feel proud and excited to say, "We are the, the, the vanguard and hope of humanity. We're going towards a new sun"? And maybe they'd love it. Or would they, after 10 generations, maybe they would rebel and say, "To hell with this. I'm tired of being in this prison. This is a bad idea. We're, we're turning around," or, "We're going somewhere else." Or a mutiny happens, and they kill each other, right? So we would have to really make sure that the mental health, the structure of the society is built so they could sustain that mission. That's a crazy mission. But it's not that much different from spaceship Earth, right? Here we are stuck on one planet. We don't have planetary liberty. We can't go to another planet right now. We can't even really go to another moon that easily. So we, uh... And, and we, uh, I love Earth. There's lots of wonderful things here, but it's still just this one planet, and we're stuck on it. So everyone that you l- know and love and live with here will be dead someday, and that's all you'll ever know too. So I think it's a difference of scale, not a difference of type in terms of an experience.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:56:40

        Yeah, it's still a spaceship traveling out in space. Earth is still a spaceship traveling out in space. So it is a kind of prison. It's always everybody lives in a prison.

    14. CMChris Mason1:56:52

        It- Well, let's say it's a limited planetary experience. We'll say it's like that. Like a-

    15. LFLex Fridman1:56:56

        Limited, yeah

    16. CMChris Mason1:56:56

        ... [laughs] prison sounds so dark, but, but-

    17. LFLex Fridman1:56:58

        [laughs] Just, yeah, just like prison is a-

    18. CMChris Mason1:57:01

        [laughs]

    19. LFLex Fridman1:57:02

        ... is a, is a limited geographic-

    20. CMChris Mason1:57:03

        [laughs]

    21. LFLex Fridman1:57:04

        ... and culinary experience.

    22. CMChris Mason1:57:06

        But I don't want it to be viewed that way. I want to think, "Wait, this is what an extraordinary gift." And, and we wouldn't probably just launch one generation ship. We'd la- probably launch 10 or 20 of them to different, the best candidates, and hopefully get there.

    23. LFLex Fridman1:57:17

        And yeah, I mean, the, the, the fact is limitations and constraints make life fascinating because the, the human mind somehow struggles against those constraints, and that's how beauty is created. So, um, there is kind of a threshold. You know, being stuck in one room is different than being stuck in a building, uh, and being stuck in a, in a city, being stuck in... Like, I wonder what-

    24. CMChris Mason1:57:44

        Different level

    25. LFLex Fridman1:57:44

        ... the threshold of people. Like, um-

    26. CMChris Mason1:57:48

        Yeah

    27. LFLex Fridman1:57:48

        ... I, I lived for a long time in a studio, and then I upgraded gloriously to a one-bedroom apartment.

    28. CMChris Mason1:57:54

        [laughs]

    29. LFLex Fridman1:57:55

        And the power to be able to, like, close the door.

    30. CMChris Mason1:57:59

        [laughs] It sort of was magnificent, right? Like [laughs]
21. 1:59:35 – 2:05:10

    Chlorohumans

    1. LFLex Fridman1:59:35

       What are chlorohumans?

    2. CMChris Mason1:59:38

       Chlorohumans is a description of how you can embed chloroplasts into human skin or these, the thing that makes plants green, so they can absorb light from the sun and then get all their energy that way. And of course, humans don't do this, but I describe in the book in the far future, maybe 30 to 400 years from now, if we could work on the ways that p- animals and plants work together, you could embed chloroplasts in human skin. And then if you're hungry, you go outside, and you lay out your skin. And then you absorb sunlight, and you go back in when you get full. If you only wanted to lay outside for just say one hour to get, get your day's fully, you know, your day's fully value of energy, you'd need about two tennis courts worth of skin that you could lay out, and maybe your friends would plant it or something. But if they plant it, then their shadows would block your sun. So maybe you'd leave your si- skin out there, and you could roll up your skin and go back inside after about one hour, and that's how much skin you would need to have exposed with some reasonable assumptions about the l- light capture and efficiency of the chloroplast.

    3. LFLex Fridman2:00:34

       Mm-hmm.

    4. CMChris Mason2:00:35

       So it's just kind of a fun concept in the book of green humans going around absorbing light from the sun, something I've dreamed about since I was a kid.

    5. LFLex Fridman2:00:42

       Is there engineering ways of, like, having that much skin and being able to laying it out efficiently? Like, is there [laughs] it sounds absurd, but-

    6. CMChris Mason2:00:53

       You could roll it up. It would be... I mean, or you could just lay outside longer. I wanted to think if you just need, had one hour and h- how, how much skin would you need? But if you just went out there for four hours, you need something that's smaller, but, you know, think of, you know, s- size of a half a tennis court. So you could make-

    7. LFLex Fridman2:01:05

       Could be like wings

    8. CMChris Mason2:01:06

       Could be like wings.

    9. LFLex Fridman2:01:06

       Gigantic wings.

    10. CMChris Mason2:01:07

        And you lay them out there and... But, but also if you... That's if you needed all your energy only from your skin. So if you just get a little bit of it, your energy, of course you could just walk around with your skin as is, and you'd still have to eat, but not as much. And I describe that because we'd need other ways to think about making your own energy if you're on a really long mission that's far from stars. You could turn on a lamp that would give you some of that, you know, essentially exact wavelength of light you need for your chloroplast in your skin. Uh, but it's, you know, that's something I, I'm hoping would happen in 300 to 400 years. But it would be hard because you're taking a plant organelle and putting it in an animal cell, which sounds weird, but we have mitochondria inside of us, which basically where our cells captured a bacteria, and now it walks around with us all the time. So there's precedent for it in evolution.

    11. LFLex Fridman2:01:52

        How much, by the way, speaking of which, does evolution help us here? So we talked a lot about engineering, you know, building, you know, genetically modifying humans to make them more resilient or having mechanisms for repairing parts of humans. Um, what about evolving humans or, uh, evolving organisms that live on humans?

    12. CMChris Mason2:02:17

        Hmm.

    13. LFLex Fridman2:02:18

        Sort of the thing you mentioned Which you've already learned is that humans are pretty adaptable. Now, what does that mean? You also, um, somewhere wrote that, you know, there's trillions of cells that make up the human body. And, you know, those are all organisms, and they're also very adaptable.

    14. CMChris Mason2:02:36

        Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    15. LFLex Fridman2:02:36

        So can we leverage the natural process of evolution, of the slaughter, the selection, the mutation, and the-

    16. CMChris Mason2:02:43

        That's

    17. LFLex Fridman2:02:43

        ... adaptation that is all in... Uh, sorry to throw slaughter into there.

    18. CMChris Mason2:02:47

        [laughs] That's true.

    19. LFLex Fridman2:02:48

        Just, just acknowledging that a lot of organisms have to die-

    20. CMChris Mason2:02:50

        [laughs]

    21. LFLex Fridman2:02:51

        ... in evolution. Um-

    22. CMChris Mason2:02:52

        The

    23. LFLex Fridman2:02:53

        ... can we use that for long-term space travel or, uh, colonization, occ- occupation? There's... Is there a good word for this? Of, uh, pl- of planets.

    24. CMChris Mason2:03:05

        Like, to, to, to terraform the planet or like to-

    25. LFLex Fridman2:03:07

        Terraform the planet

    26. CMChris Mason2:03:08

        ... fix a-

    27. LFLex Fridman2:03:09

        No, to adjust the human-

    28. CMChris Mason2:03:10

        Okay

    29. LFLex Fridman2:03:10

        ... body to the planet.

    30. CMChris Mason2:03:11

        Oh, to... Oh, I g- There's not really a term for that yet. I guess to, like-
22. 2:05:10 – 2:11:37

    Extreme microbiome project

    1. LFLex Fridman2:05:10

       you, um, you're part of the Extreme Microbiome Project.

    2. CMChris Mason2:05:14

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    3. LFLex Fridman2:05:15

       What does that involve and what, what kind of fun, um, fun organisms have you, uh, learned about, have you gotten to explore?

    4. CMChris Mason2:05:23

       We have a r- It's a really fun project. XMP, the Extreme Microbiome, which is as it sounds like. We look for really odd places, like heavy, heavy radiation environments, high salt, high or low temperature, you know, strange are- The space station, for example. Lots of radiation and microgravity. Places where organisms can evolve for interesting adaptations, and some of them have been organisms we've seen, like at a, a candy pink lake in Australia called Lake Hillier-

    5. LFLex Fridman2:05:48

       Mm-hmm

    6. CMChris Mason2:05:48

       ... which we just published a paper on this where-

    7. LFLex Fridman2:05:50

       Why is it pink?

    8. CMChris Mason2:05:51

       Uh, so it's actually, uh, Dunaliella salinas are these, one of these organisms. There's a mixture of bacteria and some algae that are there that make it bright pink. So they actually make carotenoids, these, like, very sort of, uh, orangey and kind of pink molecules when you look at them in the light. So if, you know, if you get enough of the bacteria, it becomes pink. So it's, and it's not just pink. It's, like, bubblegum pink, the lake. And so we, uh... That, that's just an odd... It's a halophile, means that it grows in 30% salt.

    9. LFLex Fridman2:06:16

       Mm-hmm.

    10. CMChris Mason2:06:17

        And if you go below 10, 15% salt, it doesn't even grow. It actually kills it. Where the-

    11. LFLex Fridman2:06:21

        Oh, wow.

    12. CMChris Mason2:06:22

        Yeah. There it is, Lake Hillier.

    13. LFLex Fridman2:06:23

        Is it toxic to humans or no?

    14. CMChris Mason2:06:25

        It, so when you walk in the pink lake, actually it's so hypertonic, meaning it's so salty, you can feel it lysing and killing your cells on your foot. So it actually hurts to walk in 'cause it's so salty. Uh, so yeah. So but it won't kill. It'll, it, it-

    15. LFLex Fridman2:06:38

        Listen, you have to suffer for art.

    16. CMChris Mason2:06:40

        [laughs] That's right.

    17. LFLex Fridman2:06:40

        Great art requires suffering.

    18. CMChris Mason2:06:42

        Great... I mean, so it is a beautiful lake. Uh, we, you have to get permits to go sample there, but we actually just got an email last week. There's pilots who fly over this in Australia because they love the color.

    19. LFLex Fridman2:06:51

        Yeah.

    20. CMChris Mason2:06:51

        So he emailed us, one of the pilots, and he said, "Hey, guys, I saw you publish this paper. It's not as pink as it used to be." 'Cause he loves flying over it and it was, like, a little bit less pink 'cause they had a bunch of rain in the past-

    21. LFLex Fridman2:07:00

        Yeah

    22. CMChris Mason2:07:00

        ... few weeks. So it was just a little bit diluted. So we, we reassured him it'll get more pink as they grow again. Uh, but basically, yeah, it, it's a beautiful pink lake. And so-

    23. LFLex Fridman2:07:09

        That is gorgeous.

    24. CMChris Mason2:07:10

        It's almost like a, it's like a Dr. Seuss book or something. It do- It's like it doesn't even look real.

    25. LFLex Fridman2:07:13

        Is it hard to get to?

    26. CMChris Mason2:07:14

        Yeah, it's, there's no road. You have, you have to basically fly, uh, land nearby it, and then paddle in. But, uh, so it's not next to anything. So it's hard to get to. But once you get there, um, it's beautiful.

    27. LFLex Fridman2:07:25

        If anyone knows how to get there, let me know. I wanna go there.

    28. CMChris Mason2:07:28

        [laughs]

    29. LFLex Fridman2:07:28

        Okay, cool. What are some other extreme organisms that you study?

    30. CMChris Mason2:07:33

        Other ones, uh, there's some organisms we've studied in the space station called Acinetobacter pitii, which is a, uh, often found in human skin. But we've found hundreds of strains in the space station that we've brought down and, and curated and, and then sequenced. Uh, and this is with, uh, Kasthuri Venkateswaran, who's at Jet Propulsion Laboratory working with him. And they have evolved, so they're now, they no longer look like any Earth-based Acinetobacter. They don't look like... They've now basically a new species. So actually we, uh, there's a, there's a different species of bacteria and fungi that have now mutated so much in the space station they're literally a new species. And so we have found some of those that have just, they're, they're evolving in sp- As life is always evolving and we can see it also in the space station.
23. 2:11:37 – 2:23:36

    Space travel breakthroughs

    1. LFLex Fridman2:11:38

       Assuming the technology of today, yes. What are some wild innovations that might happen in the space of physics or biology? By the way, where do you think is the most exciting breakthroughs for interstellar travel that will happen in the next 500 years? Is it physics?

    2. CMChris Mason2:11:56

       Mm.

    3. LFLex Fridman2:11:56

       Is it biology? Is it computer science? So information or DNA.

    4. CMChris Mason2:12:02

       Mm.

    5. LFLex Fridman2:12:02

       Like, some kind of, um, informational type of thing? Is it biological, like physiological, making the body resilient? Um, live longer-

    6. CMChris Mason2:12:12

       Mm, mm

    7. LFLex Fridman2:12:13

       ... um, and resilient to the harsh conditions of space? Or is it the actual vehicle of, uh, transport, which would be applied physics?

    8. CMChris Mason2:12:23

       As you can probably guess, I'll say all of the above. [laughs]

    9. LFLex Fridman2:12:25

       Good question. Never-

    10. CMChris Mason2:12:27

        But, but to, to break those down, though, I think the AI, I hope in the book later that we would have really good m- machine companions, that the AI, I really hope the AIs that we build, like realistically, we are the programmers who are making them. I would feel it a colossal failure if we didn't make AI that was embedded with a sense of duty and caretaking and friendship and even, even creativity. Like, we have the opportunity. We're... I've coded, uh, algorithms myself. Like, I, we're building them, so it, it would, it's incumbent upon us to actually make them, uh, not assholes, you know, I think, frankly. So just be, uh-

    11. LFLex Fridman2:12:59

        Technical term

    12. CMChris Mason2:13:00

        ... [laughs]

    13. LFLex Fridman2:13:01

        Actually, on that point, uh, just to linger on the AI front, can you steel man the case that HAL 9000 from Space Odyssey was doing the right thing? So, you know, C- so for people who haven't seen 2001 Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is, uh, very kind of, um, focused on the mission, cares a lot about the mission, and, uh, kind of s- wants to hurt the astronauts that try to get in the way of the mission.

    14. CMChris Mason2:13:29

        I think he was doing what he was programmed to do, which was just to follow the mission, but didn't have a sense of, you know, I think a broader duty. You could, I mean, he, he was-

    15. LFLex Fridman2:13:39

        What's the broader duty, exactly?

    16. CMChris Mason2:13:41

        Uh, that-

    17. LFLex Fridman2:13:42

        Maintaining the, the well-being of astronauts?

    18. CMChris Mason2:13:45

        Yeah, or, or giving them another option. I think he viewed them as, like, completely dis- expen- expendable, rather than say-

    19. LFLex Fridman2:13:51

        Not completely

    20. CMChris Mason2:13:52

        ... or-

    21. LFLex Fridman2:13:52

        It's a trade-off.

    22. CMChris Mason2:13:53

        Well, he-

    23. LFLex Fridman2:13:54

        So, so, like, a doctor has to make decisions like this, too.

    24. CMChris Mason2:13:57

        All the time, yeah.

    25. LFLex Fridman2:13:58

        You, you're restricted on the resources. You have to make life and death decisions.

    26. CMChris Mason2:14:02

        Yeah.

    27. LFLex Fridman2:14:03

        So maybe HAL 9000 had a long-term vision of what is good for the civilization back at home.

    28. CMChris Mason2:14:09

        Maybe a, a, a deontogenic vision of what was the best duty, uh, for, for the genetics, you could say. May-

    29. LFLex Fridman2:14:16

        What's deontogenic mean?

    30. CMChris Mason2:14:17

        It's a word I made up in the book. It's like, what is your genetic duty as a, the, when you think of my, your DNA?

Episode duration: 2:55:04