#283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space

Chris Mason is a professor of genomics, physiology, and biophysics at Cornell, doing research on the long-term effects of space on the human body. He is the author of The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off – Grammarly: https://grammarly.com/lex to get 20% off premium – Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex – Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex EPISODE LINKS: Chris’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/mason_lab Chris’s Website: http://masonlab.net/ Chris’s Company: https://onegevity.com/ The Next 500 Years (book): https://amzn.to/3k9ab4S Reasons and Persons (book): https://amzn.to/3Lrm6a5 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (0:00) – Introduction (7:43) – Human extinction awareness (16:29) – Heat death of the universe (22:05) – Alone in the universe (25:41) – Aliens (33:50) – Entropy goggles (48:04) – Genetics (56:14) – Scott Kelly (1:02:12) – Adapting to space (1:12:13) – Sex in space (1:14:46) – Colonizing planets (1:21:25) – Culture on Mars (1:25:51) – Commercial space flights (1:33:09) – Podcast in space (1:40:43) – Axiom Space (1:42:59) – Designing space experiments (1:49:49) – Robots in space (1:52:30) – Space exploration (1:56:28) – War in space (2:00:05) – Launch toward the Second Sun (2:06:14) – Chlorohumans (2:11:50) – Extreme microbiome project (2:18:17) – Space travel breakthroughs (2:30:15) – Clones (2:36:08) – AI age prediction (2:41:38) – Advice for young people (2:47:56) – Dark times (2:52:19) – Mortality (2:56:37) – Visiting ISS and deep space (2:57:46) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  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. And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.

• 0:43Lex Fridman?

  We've got BetterHelp for mental health, Grammarly for writing, Magic Spoon for cereal, Blinkist for books, and Aesleep for her naps. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. BetterHelp helps you figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. I recently had a conversation with Carl Deisseroth, brilliant psychiatrist. He, at least in part, reinvigorated my curiosity,

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  maybe passion about psychiatry, about talk therapy, about exploring the human mind through conversation, especially when that human mind has fallen off the beaten path. One of the most moving things to me is when folks happen to run into me in the street, they'll sometimes say that, you know, me talking about love and just in general having optimism about the future gave them strength. But I also hear about the struggle, and I see the pain even just a few seconds of interaction. I don't know. It makes me feel like we're together in this thing, you know? So if you're struggling, just know we're in this together.

• 2:10Lex Fridman?

  I'm with you, brother and sister. Anyway, BetterHelp is easy, private, affordable, and available worldwide. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex. That's betterhelp.com/lex.

• 2:24Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Grammarly, a writing assistant tool that checks spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability. Grammarly Premium, the version you pay for, offers a bunch of extra features. My favorite is the clarity check, which helps detect rambling, overcomplicated chaos that many of us descend into in conversation, in writing, and otherwise. Again, let me bring up Carl Deisseroth, who references James Joyce quite a bit in his book, Projections. This is like a long ad read for Carl, who's awesome. He references James Joyce, the author of Ulysses, considered one of the great novels of the 20th century, and Finnegan's Wake, which is complete rambling chaos, which is the kind of thing that might be good

• 3:10Lex Fridman?

  for an epic novel that explores schizophrenia, but it might not be good for emails and tweets and all that kind of stuff. If you want to not do that kind of thing, Grammarly will help you, and it's available on any platform, major sites and apps like Gmail and Twitter and so on. It doesn't just do spell check. It helps you get your point across effectively, and you can do that with Grammarly Premium. You can get 20% off Grammarly Premium by signing up at grammarly.com/lex. That's 20% off at grammarly.com/lex.

• 3:45Lex Fridman?

  This episode is brought to you by Magic Spoon, low-carb keto-friendly cereal. It has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 40 grams of protein, only four net grams of carbs, and 140 calories in each serving. I think I'm having way too much fun doing these ad reads. And they're like much less about whatever the product is, much more about me just talking. It's like personal therapy by myself, but also with my friends. Back to Magic Spoon. You can build your own box and get a variety pack with available flavors cocoa, fruity, frosted, peanut butter, blueberry, and cinnamon. But I return time and time and time again to cocoa.

• 4:29Lex Fridman?

  The flavor of champions. It reminds me of childhood. It reminds me of happiness. But it just reminds me of that joy of morning cereal without the deeply unhealthy excessive amounts of sugar. Anyway, Magic Spoon have a 100% happiness guarantee. Now we're back to happiness. If you don't like it, they refund it. Go to magic spoon.com/lex, use code Lex at checkout to save five bucks off your order. That's magic spoon.com/lex and use code Lex. This show is brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses

• 5:10Lex Fridman?

  them down to just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. I can recommend a ton of books, Sapiens, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Beginning of Infinity by David Dourich, Snowden Book, and so on. They don't have the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I don't believe. I have to check again. But they have a lot of the most important, most impactful nonfiction books ever written. If you don't have the time to read all of them, which nobody does, you should definitely use Blinkist to catch up on the ones that are not at the top of your stack to read. I use it both to summarize books I'll never read, but also to summarize books I've already read to remind myself to the key insights.

• 5:53Lex Fridman?

  You can go to blinkist.com/lex to start your free seven day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist premium membership. That's blinkist.com/lex, spelled B L I N K I S T, blinkist.com/lex. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and its Pod Pro mattress. It controls temperature with an app, it's packed with sensors, it can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. There are very few things in life, my friends, that are as pleasant as a good power nap. Sometimes I'll even drink a coffee beforehand, which I don't know how that works. Andrew Huberman probably knows how that works, but it works. I'll drink a coffee and I'll just pass out.

• 6:37Lex Fridman?

  Now, sometimes I pass out on the floor and that also works. But if I want to really enjoy the power nap, it's not just about function. It's about happiness. And if I want to enjoy happiness, there's nothing better than a cool bed with a warm blanket for 20 minutes, 25 minutes, 30 minutes, and then I wake up 100% refreshed. I do that because I'm in an 8Sleep Pod Pro cover that you can add to your mattress. I add it to my mattress. You can go to 8sleep.com/lex to check out the aforementioned Pod Pro cover and save $200 at checkout. 8Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the UK. That's 8sleep.com/lex.

• 7:21Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Chris Mason.

• 7:43Lex Fridman?

  You wrote a book called The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, and you dedicated it to, quote, "to all humans and any extinction-aware sentience." How fundamental is awareness of death and extinction to the human condition?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  I think this is actually one of the most human-specific traits and features that we have. It's actually maybe one of the few things that 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 dedicated it because I think we might not be the last sentients 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.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  That gives us a duty that only we can exercise so far.

• 8:48Lex Fridman?

  So we definitely contemplate our own mortality at the individual level.

• 8:54Lex Fridman?

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

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:12Lex Fridman?

  Like I have a deadline.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes.

• 9:14Lex Fridman?

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

• 9:32Speaker 01

  And revelation and in 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 fiction almost, 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 several hundred years and especially in the past few decades where we can see, you know, a sense of responsibility at a planetary scale. So when we think about, like I 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.

• 10:04Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, that's right. So we're like a bunch of ants, extinction-aware sentient ants that are busy trying to terraform this planet to make it habitable so we can flourish. And then you say that it's our duty to expand beyond Earth, to expand to other planets, to find a good backup, off-site backup solution. Why the word duty? It's an interesting word.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Duty is something that usually puts people to sleep, I'll say. Duty is a bit like death. People don't often like to really think, wake up in the morning and think, 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 real duty to them because you want them to flourish and to be safe. So we do have this sense of duty, but you don't, 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

• 11:24Speaker 01

  that we all feel as a species 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 protect your family, the way you'd fight for a 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 have this awareness of not only 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 then very soon will be even de-extinctifying species like the woolly mammoth.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Colossals, a recent startup that's doing that on their advisory board and it's, it might happen in three or four years. So it's the interesting point in history where we can actually think about preventing death at a species level and even resurrecting things that we have killed or that have gone away, which 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 guidelines yet on how to do that, but the technology now exists, which is pretty extraordinary.

• 12:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I've just been working on backup and restoring databases quite a bit recently. And you can do quite a lot of damage when you restore improperly. When we bring back the mammoths, it might be, you have to be careful bringing that back.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:48Lex Fridman?

  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, but also the most morally grounded people.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:59Lex Fridman?

  Pushing us forward.

• 13:03Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 13:15Lex Fridman?

  That little flame, whatever that is, dies. That will be a real shame for the universe. What is that? What is special about human beings? What is special about the human condition that we want to preserve? That's... Why do we matter?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  There are some people who think we don't. There are some people say, well, humans, take it, take it or leave it. They think they're misanthropes. So the book is, on the one sense, a call to misanthropes to hopefully shake them out of their slumber. But there's some people-

• 13:45Lex Fridman?

  What does the word misanthrope mean?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Oh, just people that dislike humanity. They're, they're just, again, they're all just-

• 13:50Lex Fridman?

  They're called nihilists, Donnie. That's a shout out for Big Lebowski fans.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  They're like, nothing matters. And why does any, and they just apply it more particularly to humans. But there are endless reasons, I think, to cherish and celebrate what humans have done. As at the same time, many things we've done awfully and genocide and, and, you know, nuclear weapons testing on unsuspecting citizens in remote islands. There's definitely things we've done bad. But the poetry, the music, the engineering feats, the, you know, getting to the moon and eventually already rovers on Mars, these extraordinary feats that humans have already accomplished. Interesting, really, a sense of beauty, I think, is something that is, you know, you can't ask ants or cockroaches about their favorite paintings.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Or maybe if you could, it would be very different from ours. But in either case, there's a unique perspective that we carry. And I think, so that's something, even just the old, it's an age old question in biology. I'm a geneticist, so this comes up a lot of what makes humans unique. And so is it bipedalism? Is it our intelligence? Is it tool making? Is it language? All those things I just listed, other species have some degree of those traits. So it's a question of degree, not of type of trait that defines, you know, humans a little bit. But I think for the extinction awareness, that is a uniquely human trait. That is, to our knowledge, no other species or entity or AI or sentience that carries that awareness of the frailty of life, of our own life, but all life.

• 15:19Lex Fridman?

  And maybe it is that awareness of the frailty of life that allows us to be so urgently creative, create beauty, create innovation. It just seems like if you just measure, humans are able to create some sort of subjectively beautiful things. And I see science that way. I see engineering that way. And ants are less efficient at that. They also create beautiful things, but less aggressively, less innovation, less building, like standing on the shoulders of giants, building on top of each other over and over and over, where you're getting like these like hierarchical systems, where you create an greater levels of abstraction, then

• 16:01Lex Fridman?

  you use ideas to communicate those ideas and you share those ideas and all of a sudden you have the rockets going out into space.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yep. Which ants have been building the same structures for millions and millions of years with no real change. And so that is the key differentiator.

• 16:14Lex Fridman?

  Yet.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. We've got an experiment going right now and maybe it'll change.

• 16:19Lex Fridman?

  But, well, yeah, we will bring up some extreme organisms. Another thing you're interested in. Okay. 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 is something worth fighting against. Like, that's also an engineering problem.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:52Lex Fridman?

  You know, you kind of, I mean, you seriously look at the next 500 years. And that's such a beautiful thing. You know, seriously, we'll talk about like the uncertainty involved with that and all the different trajectories, but to seriously look at that and then to seriously look at like, what happens when the sun runs out?

• 17:16Lex Fridman?

  What happens when the the universe comes to an end? Like, we have an opportunity and a kind of duty, like you said, to fight against that. And that was so inspiring to me to think, wait, maybe we'll actually, that's a worthy thing to think about.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Maybe we can prevent it, actually.

• 17:38Lex Fridman?

  Right. The come up with the best known understanding current of how things end. That, you know, we had, we kind of 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. How that could be avoided, how that could be channeled and misdirected and you can pivot it somehow.

• 18:10Lex Fridman?

  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, to me, that's also inspiring to enjoy the moment, to really live in the moment. You know, that because that is truly where beauty exists is in the moment. 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 going to solve it.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:45Lex Fridman?

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

• 18:53Speaker 01

  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 ask at the end of every interview for every potential graduate student, medical student, faculty, whoever I'm interviewing, for whatever reason.

• 19:12Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  The last question is, well, how long do you think that humans or our evolutionary derivatives will last? And the answers are shockingly wide ranging. Some people say, I think we've only got 100 years left. Or some people say billions, some people say as long as the universe lasts. But to the person who once said, as a medical student applicant, who said, I think we've only got 100 years left. And I was like, really, for all of humanity, everything will be gone in 100 years. And he said, yes. And I said, well, Sweet Jesus, man, why go to med school? Why not go sell bananas on the beach? And then he said, I really want to make the last, you know, few hundred years count really matter. And I said, oh, well, that's actually kind of sort of hopeful in a really dark way. But I, I think we've never been better situated to actually last for the long term. We have, even though we've also never been at the greater risk of being able to destroy

• 19:57Speaker 01

  ourselves ever since really the first nuclear test when they, Tony Orb has a great book about this called The Precipice, where the precipice for humanity is at one point we made technologies that we weren't sure whether or not they would destroy the earth or the entire universe. The math was incomplete and there was too much air, but they tested the bomb anyway. But it's an extraordinary place as a species to think, we now have something in our hands that may destroy the earth and possibly exchange reaction that destroys the whole universe. Let's try it anyway as a, as a stage that we're at as a species. But with that power comes an ability to get to other planets to survive long term. And when you think about the heat death, that just becomes, that's a, an ad infinitum question. If you keep thinking, well, we survive, we go to the next sun and then you go to the next sun. Eventually the question will be, well, if you just keep doing that forever, at some

• 20:42Speaker 01

  point, the universe either continues to expand or could collapse back in itself. And the heat death is more likely at this point where it just keeps expanding and expanding. Everything gets too far away. But even in that case, I think if we had a fundamental knowledge of physics and space time that you could try and restructure it quite literally the shape of the universe to prevent it, I think we would. I think we would want to survive. I think, you know, unless we had done the math and we think that there's a greater chance that the next universe would form and make more life, maybe we would. But even then, I think humans have always wanted to survive and, and you could argue maybe should survive because.

• 21:14Lex Fridman?

  And are able to engineer systems that help us survive.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And always have, yeah.

• 21:19Lex Fridman?

  So what is this, though? The Zar Bomb? Yeah, the hydrogen. Yeah, there's, there's nothing more terrifying and somehow inspiring than watching the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 21:34Lex Fridman?

  It's like humans are capable of this. They're capable of leveraging the power of nature.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  To completely obliterate.

• 21:42Lex Fridman?

  Destroy everything.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  And to create propulsion. I mean, most of the Voyager spacecraft are nuclear powered, because it's still in many ways the most efficient way to get a tiny amount of feasible material and make power out of it. You know, so they're still slowly drifting their path to heliosphere, they're out now into interstellar space, and they're nuclear powered. So it's like any tool or technology. It's a it's a tool or a weapon, depending on how you hold it.

• 22:05Lex Fridman?

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

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, for now. Well, I think we, as far as we know, there's no sentient life out in the universe that we've found yet. And I think there's probably bacteria life out there, just because we 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 psychophiles that in extreme cold, there's you know, basically organisms that can survive in really almost any possible environment you can that can adapt and find a way to live. But as far as we know, we're the only sentient ones. And I think this is the famous the Drake equation, or you know, how many, 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 phrase it that way, because the unit, the Earth has

• 22:59Speaker 01

  only been here for 4.5 billion years. And we, and you know, life may be only for a few billion of those years, complex life only for several hundred years, 100 million years of life we've actually had, you know, and humans only 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 universe, right? So the current estimates 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 stars to then make the atoms that would come from supernovae. 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

• 23:42Speaker 01

  time to make life 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 wherever is everyone is the wrong question. I think the question is, I think we are 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 more people are coming.

• 24:11Lex Fridman?

  One of the early attendees to the party.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe the first, as far as we know, the first, but maybe we'll find someone.

• 24:17Lex Fridman?

  Local pocket of the universe.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:21Lex Fridman?

  Cause the parties then expand and it overflows.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, right. And then there's a mosh pit and then, you know, you bump into the other galaxy. I, I think it's, I think the question should be, we 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.

• 24:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so not, not worry, have they or not, more about when and who? And how do we set up the party?

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Right, and then how do we help them? I think there's an interesting other moral question is do we, you know, the, a lot of Star Trek episodes, 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 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 interfere? I think that would actually be wrong to say, well, we can save this, this life here and we decide not to.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  We decide after 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.

• 25:41Lex Fridman?

  In terms of the effort of humans becoming multiplanetary species.

• 25:48Lex Fridman?

  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 beyond years and just versus option number two, really just focusing on setting up the party on our own engineering, our on our own, the genome, the biology of humanity, the AI collaborating with humans, just that all the engineering challenges and opportunities that we're we're exploring.

• 26:23Speaker 01

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

• 26:38Lex Fridman?

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

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Occasionally, when they visit, they have they bring their whiskey and we have a drink. But the I think 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 like what Carl Sagan wrote about in Contact, doing prime numbers and sending those out to indicate intelligence. 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 even spaceflight in general is it's too expensive. Shouldn't we solve poverty? Shouldn't we cure diseases? And the answer is always, as it always has been, is that you can walk and chew gum at the same time.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  You can pass the Civil Rights Act and go to the moon in the same decade. You can improve and get rid of structural inequality while getting to the moon and Mars in this decade. So I think, I think we can do both.

• 27:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, they kind of help each other. There's sometimes criticism of like ridiculous science, like studying penguins or something, or studying the patterns of birds or fish and so on.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Some congressman stands up and says, this is a waste of taxpayer dollars. And then but someone says, but we, 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, hypersaline lakes and rivers for decades. And then eventually became a massive therapeutic, which is like the curing of diseases in this past year.

• 28:15Lex Fridman?

  And there's stuff that you discover as part of the research that you didn't anticipate. They have nothing to do with the actual research, like oceanography is one of the interesting things about that whole field is that it's a huge amount of data, neuroscience too, actually. 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. That's how you invent the internet and and all those kinds of things. So to me, aliens, looking for aliens out there in the universe

• 28:59Lex Fridman?

  is a motivator that just inspires, inspires everybody, young people, old people, scientists, artists, engineers, entrepreneurs, everybody. Somehow, the that line between fear and beauty. Because we're

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Aliens are like perfectly merged, basically. It's this

• 29:22Lex Fridman?

  Because it's, we don't know. I mean, for you, let's start talking about primitive alien life. Are you excited by it? Or are you terrified?

• 29:31Speaker 01

  I want to make a lotion out of it. I think it'd be great if it's alien life, assuming it's safe. But I'm very excited. It doesn't have to be

• 29:36Lex Fridman?

  You just said a half sentence, assuming it's safe. That's the fundamental question.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  So if you could, yes, presuming it's safe. So I think, you know, we have this, this beginning of some planetary protection is happening now is we're going to send, we're bringing rocks back from Mars in 2033, if all goes according to plan. But there's always a danger. What if you bring this back? What if it's alive? What if it will kill all of humanity? Or Michael Creighton wrote a book, The Andromeda Strain, about this very idea. And we could, but it hopefully won't. And the only way you can really gauge that is the same way we do with any infectious agent here on Earth, right? If it's a new pathogen, a new organism, you do it slowly, carefully. You often do it with levels of containment. So, you know, and it's gonna be, probably have to be where some pioneers go and would be, for example, on Mars, there might be other organisms there that only get activated

• 30:26Speaker 01

  once there's an ambient temperature and more humidity. And then suddenly, the first settlers on Mars are encountering a strange new fungus or something that's not even like a fungus, because it might be a different clade of life, different branch of life. And could be very dangerous, or it could be very inert. I mean, most of life on Earth is not really dangerous or harmful. Let me go back on this. Most of life on Earth is neither harmful nor beneficial to you. It's just they're making its own way in the universe, just trying to survive. It's when, you know, it's inside of you and replicating your cells and destroying your cells like a virus like COVID, XRCV2, that it becomes a big problem, of course. But it's, you know, just doesn't really have agency. It's just trying to get by. And so, for example, most of the bacteria on the table, on your skin, in the subway

• 31:11Speaker 01

  are pretty inert. They're just, you know, people hanging around for the ride.

• 31:15Lex Fridman?

  And actually, just because we're talking so much trash about viruses, most viruses are, don't bother humans.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're phages. Almost all the vast majority of viruses are phages. There's this, the battle in the biology that is really dorky is that bacteria think that they're the most, you know, people study bacteria, think the bacteria are the most important because there's trillions and trillions of them. They run a lot of our own biology in our body. But then people who study phages, they say, well, there's 10 times more phages than the bacteria, which can attack the bacteria and destroy them as well. So, phage people think that they run the world, but we need them both.

• 31:50Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about viruses? So, because you said alien organisms, wouldn't we encounter something like bacteria, something like viruses, as the first alien life form? Are they, first of all, are viruses alive or not?

• 32:05Speaker 01

  So the book definition, if you pick up a biology textbook, they'd say technically no, because they don't have the ability to self replicate independently. But I would think if you restructure how you view what life is, as just autonomously aggregating and replicating of information, for example, AI at some point, what if there's an AI platform that we could consider alive? Like, at what point would you allow it to say it's alive? And I think we have the same definitional challenge there is that if it can continually propagate instructions for its own existence, then it is a version of living. I think, you know, viruses don't get that category because they can't do it on their own, but they are a version of life, I'd say, but probably not alive.

• 32:50Lex Fridman?

  Well, they are expressing themselves and doing so on occasion quite powerfully in human civilization. So like you said, at which point are AI systems allowed to say?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  We're life. We are.

• 33:07Lex Fridman?

  Allowed. Humans must allow them. And viruses didn't ask for permission to express themselves to humans. They just kind of, they just kind of did.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:18Lex Fridman?

  We didn't have to allow them.

• 33:22Lex Fridman?

  Are they overall, though, exciting or terrifying to you as somebody who has studied viruses?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Whenever given two options, there's always two more. You could do both or neither. So here, I'll say they're both terrifying and exciting, I think, to me. More exciting than terrifying, I think. If I had to make that sandwich, and how many layers are, you know, meat versus cheese, there's a lot more cheese of excitement.

• 33:43Lex Fridman?

  And meat, meat isn't.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Meat is the fear.

• 33:45Lex Fridman?

  Is the fear.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  In this metaphor.

• 33:46Lex Fridman?

  Sandwich. Well, I love both. So it's a hell of a delicious sandwich. 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. Can you describe this thought experiment?

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Happily, I do this almost every day somewhere when I'm sitting in a given room. I will, a 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 goes put up on the wall before we'd sit down for the day to plan the mission. It was that quote, which I

• 34:23Lex Fridman?

  Plans are useless.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  But planning, which I thought was hilarious for official NASA meeting, but it was because you need to have a plan, but you have to know that plan might change. And so I think that's just a quick context for that quote. Craig Kundra, who's a leader at NASA headquarters now, would always put that first slide up and are like, hmm, this meeting, either going to go really well or really bad. I don't know what's about to happen, but it's an inspiring quote because it's very true. Any case, the entropy goggles is a thought experiment I detail in my book, which is, if you just sit in a room, any room, wherever you are, and imagine what it will look like in 10 years, 100 years, 500 years, or even thousands of years, it is a wonderfully terrifying

• 35:07Speaker 01

  and exciting exercise against definitely both, because he realized the transience of everything, that you think of what might survive. Almost everything that you're looking at will probably not be there in hundreds of years. It will be, you know, very least degraded, or it might be changed, altered, completely different, moved. It is just, and it's that trait, though, of humans, to just sit there and project into the future easily, you know, really seamlessly with whatever you're doing previously, is powerful because it shows the, you know, what can change and what should change in some cases, but also that, 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 with like humans,

• 35:49Speaker 01

  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, is entropy that's always increasing. Technically, we're actually still increasing it because we emit heat and we never have perfect capture of all of energy, but we're the only things really actively and consciously 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 to make a nice place for themselves and they're 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 everything that will decay or change in the room around you. So, anyone listening, if they're listening on a train or they're

• 36:34Speaker 01

  driving in their car, or whoever, someone is listening right now, looking around, everything can and will change. And so you, but 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. I think, wait, I can affect this, I can prevent it, or I can affect it, or I can improve the change that may occur all by itself, say naturally. And so I think it is, but is it that awareness, again, of like the frailty of life, the ever insistence in increasing 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 time. And just, and I call

• 37:16Speaker 01

  it the inexorable march towards molecular oblivion, which the students often find, they kind of laugh at, oh, because on all the charts, they're 22 years old, but older people do not laugh as much at the thought of molecular oblivion, but we're all marching towards it to a large degree.

• 37:32Lex Fridman?

  So, this is both a great thought experiment for the environment around you. So, just looking at all the objects around you, that they will dissipate, they will disappear with time. But then it's also the thing you mentioned, which is how can I affect any of the world? Like, you're one little creature. And it's like, 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 a little bit longer? Because it ultimately will, I suppose the wave will continue indefinitely, but it'd be such a small impact that it's almost

• 38:16Lex Fridman?

  indetectable. And so how do I have that impact at all? On so many levels, I get to experience this. As a human, like I recently had my cold storage hacked 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. There's been a lot of fires in the United States. If you lose your home.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:54Lex Fridman?

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

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:01Lex Fridman?

  Eventually, and that eventually goes pretty quickly. And so it allows you to focus on, you know, how can I actually affect? So what matters? What lasts? And what brings me joy? I suppose that the ultimate answer is nothing lasts. 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 complicated, right? Cause like.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Well, it used to be foolhardy to say, I want to think like legacy is often what people think of as they approach the end of their life. What is my legacy? What have I done? Even younger in life, but it used to be really foolhardy to say, I could affect something that would. People would build the building, architects would say, I have my name on this building in there. I'll have some sense of immortality. But that's a, it's a fleeting dream. It's not, you can't, we're reaching mortality. And if you could, it would be resource, you know, taxing on everyone else. If you really, if you really were, but I think it's, it's okay. I mean, the books of the next 500 years, but I presume I'll be dead for the vast majority of that time. And 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?

• 40:18Speaker 01

  But you can build things that you said, 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 they don't think of this as a, as an intergenerational responsibility to think of as, well, I was at the bar one night and met this hot girl and then things happen. Sometimes it's more planned than that, but the, the, there's no overarching sense of wait, I could have something that three or four generations from now, well, that someone will receive this gift that was planned for them long before they were born or gestating. And I think we have that capacity and that that can be a version of legacy. But it's even okay if if no one knows exactly who started it, but that the benefit was was wrought by people, you know, again, hundreds or even thousands of years after you got it started.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  So I think this is again, something that is only really people that are economically secure can even begin to do this, where you can say, you know, think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where you need to satisfy your physical needs, all your structural needs and have shelter. And so, you know, I'm sitting from a position of great privilege to be able to pontificate about what I hope I could do for things for people that come 200 years from now. But nonetheless, more and more people can do that. Humanity has never been in a better state quantifiably to be able to start to think about these intergenerational responsibilities.

• 41:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, this is an interesting balance because like it seems that if you let the ego flare up a little bit, that's good for productivity, like saying I can somehow achieve immortality if what I do is going to be pretty good. But then that's actually being kind of dishonest with yourself because it won't, in the long arc of history, won't matter in terms of your own ego, but it will have a small piece to play in a larger puzzle.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  And help you, you know.

• 42:03Lex Fridman?

  People many generations from now.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  And that they said, there are all these people who were looking after me before I was ever born. I think it's because it's a bit of just even just know if when you go to a campsite, there's a camping rule that you always leave the campsite better than you found it. So if the fire pit was somewhat damaged and you got there, you fix it. If there was no wood, you leave a few bits of logs for the next person who comes. And this ethos is something that we just picked up from camping. And so I think if we did that as people, the world would be a better place and the world coming ahead would also be.

• 42:37Lex Fridman?

  That said, with these entropy glasses, how can you see through the fog? 500 years is a long time. First of all, why 500 years? Most people, this is so refreshing because most colleagues and friends I talk to are, don't have the guts to think even like 10 years out. They start doing wishy washy kind of statements about, well, you don't know. But it's so refreshing to say, all right, I know there's so many trajectories that this world can take, but I'm going to pick a few and, and think through them and think what it's the, well, it's the quote, right? Plans are useless, but planning is essential. So what, why 500 years?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  So 500 was a little bit of what I felt like I could see clearly through the entropy goggles. I feel like I can't, I can't.

• 43:26Lex Fridman?

  It's a contradiction in terms.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. I can see, I mean, for example, if you said, Chris, what's going to happen in a million years? Well, I'll start to describe, you know, what happens to the, you know, the, the moon will be farther away because it moves several inches away every year. And so then eventually you can't have a full lunar eclipse after a while. I think about structures of continental change and things will move. I could like describe some things, but it starts to become so vague. It's just not a useful exercise. I think if it's too far out, if it's too soon, that's not that much different from what people just do with the news and say, I think this is what the economy might look like over the next year or two years. Economists are notoriously not held accountable when they have really bad predictions. You can make really awful predictions and no one seems to care. You can just make another one next week.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  So too short is, I think, not necessarily as helpful, but 500, I actually, when I was first working on the book and thinking about type, I thought, well, do I do a thousand or 2000? I kept thinking about, the main idea was if I were to pick this up 500 years from now, what would it look like? And I changed that number. If I pick up a thousand years from now or 100. And I kept trying to think of what are some timeframes where really large scale changes have happened. And so in some sense, you could argue that humans have been mostly the same for about three or 4,000 years. And the best example is this, you looked at some of the Homer's poems or the Greek tragedies and Oedipus, for example, like humans are really almost ident- like, we're still petty and people, you know, have affairs and people do things they shouldn't and people, it's

• 44:56Lex Fridman?

  You're saying all those things like it's bad.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  It's just me, you read, it's astounding and in some sense soothing that the Greek tragedies of 2,300 years ago are very relatable to what happens in like in every high school, right? So like, you know, people, that's why you read them in high school, like, oh, it's really a clear part of the human condition. So on that sense, some things are really permanent. But I wanted to think of a few reasons I chose 500 is that it's a timeframe where I could foresee clear development of some biotechnology that will get us to a new place, including missions to Mars that are planned that will be there and that we'd start to have settlements there on the moon and Mars. And I could see also that by that time, I think we would have enough knowledge of biology and technology and space medicine

• 45:39Speaker 01

  to start to prepare for an interstellar mission, to actually send people on a craft that would have what's called a generation ship. People live and die on the same spacecraft on the way towards a destination. But I think we need that much time to actually perfect the technology and to learn enough about physiology to be able to make it for that distance.

• 45:57Lex Fridman?

  And the book is kind of focused on the human story. So a specific slice of the possible futures.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:06Lex Fridman?

  There could be sort of AI systems, it could be other technologies that kind of build up the world. So much of the world might be lived in virtual reality. So you're not touching any of that, you're sticking to biology, or not, you're, you're touching a little bit, but focused on what the cells that make up the human body, how do they change? How do we design technologies to repair them? And how do we protect them? And As they travel out into the cosmos.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And it's something that is part of the duty. If your duty is to keep life safe, you have to consider all means to do so. And engineering life to save itself is definitely on that list. And I think we can imagine in that timeframe, 500 years, that we would, you know, there will be AI that is continually advancing. And I actually say that I am matter agnostic towards cognition. So if your matter is carbon atoms and cells and tissues and you have cognition, bravo, good for you. If you're silicon based and you're in chips and you're in AI, that's all virtual. But we reach a state of, you know, well beyond the Turing test and really clearly intelligent, congratulations to you too. So I feel like

• 47:17Speaker 01

  this sense of duty is applicable regardless of what the state of matter your cognition is based in. So I would imagine that AI platforms that are really intelligent might also get a sense of this duty. Or I hope that would. I wrote the book for them too.

• 47:31Lex Fridman?

  That can carry that flame of whatever makes humans special. So, but why nevertheless is so much of your focus on this human meat vehicle? Do you think is it essential?

• 47:45Speaker 01

  It doesn't have to be meat. No, it definitely does not. It could be, I'm hoping that the AI platforms that we've built or that would become, that would start to build themselves, would also carry the sense of duty. Because at that point, they would be life. And so whichever means that life, whatever form life takes, it should have this duty, I think.

• 48:05Lex Fridman?

  Will it have the lessons of genetics, genomics, DNA and RNA and proteins and the squishy stuff that makes us human? Are those lessons a temporary thing that we'll discard? Or will those lessons be carried forward?

• 48:23Speaker 01

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

• 48:26Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 48:40Speaker 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, Neuralink, you know, progress being made to blend biology and cybernetics and machines for sure. But I think the, in the long term, you know, we'll see that they.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Are fairly, the biology be useful because 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, the 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 scale storage where you want something that has redundancy that's built in and it can store and can be put at really cold temperatures and survive even cosmic rays. So I think it, DNA might be the best hard drive of the future potentially.

• 49:31Lex Fridman?

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

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Yes, we should, because most, I presume the audience knows it, but some might just be first time listeners coming.

• 49:42Lex Fridman?

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

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Who's like?

• 49:45Lex Fridman?

  In, in Brazil, smoking a joint, sitting on the beach and just wants to learn about DNA. So please, Chris, can you explain it to them?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  DNA, the D-xyribonucleic 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 because the day I learned that as an embryo, we start as just a single cell, but all the instructions that are 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 is a complete, from one single embryo, everything is there to make the entire body.

• 50:26Lex Fridman?

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

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:39Lex Fridman?

  And so from all of that, is, 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?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  It's effective, the machinery is the information like that they basically it becomes its own manufacturer is is what is extraordinary. Imagine if you if you took 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. 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. Yes. If that happened. And that we're not we're actually getting close to that, that people having autonomous house building. It's not quite there yet, but there are people trying to make robots that will build entire houses. But you need much more than the block of wood. Right, right. That's that's the extraordinary thing is it just for one, one piece of wood then say, I'll just leave it there for a few days and I'll come back. That's basically what embryos do. Okay, it takes nine months, a little bit longer, but still, that is nothing

• 51:31Speaker 01

  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 ribonucleic acid, so it just has one other oxygen added to it versus DNA, but it's the transcribed version. It's like if you look at a book and you say you can have 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 as RNA is also then get translated to become proteins that become active forms like enzymes. You think of like your hair or think of other ways you digest food. There's all these, you know, active proteins going around that are copying your DNA, making RNA, making sure

• 52:15Speaker 01

  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, about three billion letters of genetic code. So just three billion A, 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 autonomous

• 52:57Speaker 01

  instruction sets, if you will, these really active forms 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. So how do those all lead up to you?

• 53:17Lex Fridman?

  Having a personality, good memory and bad memory. Some of the functional characteristics that we at the human level are able to interpret. The, the, the way your face looked, the way you smile.

• 53:32Lex Fridman?

  You're good at running or jumping, whether you're good at math and all those kinds of things.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  There's an age old debate of nature versus nurture. So like most things, if given two options, you can of course have both. So almost every trait that we know of in humanity has mixtures of nurture and nature. Some of them are purely nurture. So there's, most people probably familiar with twin studies, but twin studies are one of the best ways to gauge. How much is something nurture versus nature? How much of it is really ingrained and has probably less ability to change versus how much can you really train? So height, for example, is one of the most obvious inheritable traits, but it doesn't have one gene. It probably has at least 50 or 60 genes that contribute to height. So there's not like a gene for height. Some people think of like the gene for cystic fibrosis. Now that's, in that case, that's true. There is one gene that if you have mutations, you get cystic fibrosis as a disease.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  But for other, other traits, they're much more complicated. They can have dozens or even hundreds of genes that influence your risk and what appears. But from twin studies, you take monozygotic twins, twins that are identical. And you can clearly tell they look, they have the same facial structure, similar intonations, similar even likes. And you compare them to dizygotic twins. Or when you have fraternal twins, you can have a male and female, for example, in the same uterus. And those are, you know, dizygotic twins are two zygotes. So in that case, they're, they share 50% of their DNA, but they shared the same womb. And that, and then what you can look at is they, you know, what's the difference between identical twins versus fraternal twins? And to calculate that difference for any trait. And that gives you an estimate of the heritability or what's called H squared. So that's what we've been doing for almost every trait in humanity for the past, you know, 100 years.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  I've been trying to measure this and religion is one that's a negative control. So if you separate people and see what religion they become, there's no gene for religion or what religion you choose. So that often is their correlation there is zero because it should be, it's a nurture trait. What religion you end up taking is not encoded in your DNA.

• 55:23Lex Fridman?

  Religion, meaning Islam, Judaism, Christianity, but there could be aspects of religions that-

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Good question. There is religiosity as a trait that's been studied in twins, and that has a heritable component to some degree. So, and things like boredom susceptibility is a trait. One of my favorite papers just looked at, how likely is it that people get bored? And they looked at identical twins and fraternal twins, and there's a heritability of about 30%. So it's not, it's mostly not heritable. It's like mostly environmental, but that means to some degree, whether or not you're bored, you can say, wow, it's a little bit of my genes. You could, a little bit, not a lot, but you know, most traits of some degree, and they're probably overlapping with other traits. Like your boredom susceptibility versus risk-seeking behavior are interrelated. So how likely are you to say, I want to go, you know, cliff jumping, or I want to go, I want to do freebasing, or I want to, I don't know, do something else. It's risky behavior.

• 56:14Lex Fridman?

  So, speaking of twin studies, Scott Kelly spent 340 consecutive days out in space. You analyzed his molecular data, DNA, RNA, proteins, small molecules. What did you learn about the effect of space on the human body from Scott?

• 56:32Speaker 01

  We learned that space is, is rough on the human body, but that the human body is amazingly and monstrously responsive to adapt to that, that challenge. 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, of 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 a puffy face. What's called the astronaut 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.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  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. 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 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. He notoriously had, you know, broke out in a rash all over his body and really even the weight of clothing on his skin was too heavy. It created all this irritation because his body had not felt the weight of just

• 57:59Speaker 01

  a simple t-shirt. It wasn't really, had zero weight, of course, right? So it went up in space. So that led to all this inflammation, all these changes. He had to, you know, he was much more comfortable just to walk around nude. In that case, it was for medical reasons. Some people do this, you know, recreationally. He was doing it for medical purposes. I do it for medical reasons as well. All the time. I mean, people say. I have a prescription. Doctor told me. So he was allergic to Earth, you could say, which is fascinating to think about, actually. How quick did his body adapt there? So there it was about three to four days. He got back to normal, at least in terms of the inflammation. But what's extraordinary is that we measured a lot of other molecules, genes, 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

• 58:44Speaker 01

  in response to spaceflight 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 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, 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 can 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, even six months later. How do, how do you, wait, how do you explain that? 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

• 59:29Speaker 01

  sometimes turning a gene on or off is that simple. Sometimes you just flip it on because the gene is already ready to go. Other cases, though, you have to reprogram even the structure of how your DNA is packaged. It's called an epigenetic rearrangement. In that case, we could see in it that a lot of these genes had been, 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 is almost a. It lag time, kind of like jet lag for the body, but jet lag for your cells to repair all the DNA.

• 1:00:04Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  There are several surprises. One is just that he, that the repair, as I just mentioned, that the repair took so long. I thought maybe 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 caps and the ends of your chromosomes, which keep all your DNA packaged. And you could have 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 length is just an overall sign of aging, getting shorter. His telomeres got longer in space. And this is really surprising because we thought the opposite would happen. So he, that was 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

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  his body, maybe the cells that were about to die is one of our main theories on what's happening.

• 1:00:59Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Right, right. It's notoriously one of the lowest powered studies in human history, yes, but, but, what you, 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, almost every few weeks, had a full workup, including in space. So that was the way we tried to make up for it. But, 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.

• 1:01:35Lex Fridman?

  Does that indicate anything about lifespan, all those kinds of things, or no? You can't make any of those kinds of jumps?

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Not yet. I want to make that jump yet, but it does indicate that there is a version of cleansing, if you will, that's happening in space, a mixture of, we see this actually clinically at our hospital, you can do a low dose of radiation with some targeted therapies to kind of activate your immune cells, is even, even tried clinically. So this idea of just a little bit of stress on the body, or what's called hormesis, may prime you into active of cleansing, things that were about to die.

• 1:02:07Lex Fridman?

  And that includes stress caused by space?

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, apparently.

• 1:02:12Lex Fridman?

  So how do we?

• 1:02:15Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  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 astronauts 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, and 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 have a one set of cells in my lab where you but you activate them before we irradiate them to actually prepare them for the dose of radiation. And now that is what's called epigenetic CRISPR therapies, where you can actually instead

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  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, that the DNA, the genes are still there, we're just changing how they get used. And so you can actually preemptively activate a DNA repair genes, and we've done this for cells. We haven't done this yet for astronauts, but we've done it for cells. And a similar idea to this is being used to treat sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia. You actually, you can reactivate a gene that was dormant as a way as a therapy.

• 1:03:42Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  I want to, I want to get good at.

• 1:03:50Lex Fridman?

  Okay, sorry to interrupt. I think every time I ask this question, you have taught me that there's always a third option. Say both.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  I will say both. I know, you know, for for copy, it's good to just have one big statement, but you want to do both, do good, or a third option. I would want to, you know, do electromagnetic shielding. I would want to do a fourth option of, you know, maybe some other kind of physical defenses.

• 1:04:13Lex Fridman?

  So outside of the human body?

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  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. And now it's a bit radical today because, 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.

• 1:04:41Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  A lot of really exciting developments where if you really want to activate genes like I was just describing or a repair, a specific disease gene, you can actually CRISPR it out, modify it. This has been already published and well documented. But as I was alluding to, more and more we'll see people that you just want to temporarily change your genes' functions and change their activity. So the best example, 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 hemoglobin. When you're adult, you have a different gene, but they're both are making a protein that carries oxygen. When you, after you're born, the fetal hemoglobin gene gets just turned off, just goes away and you replace it with adult hemoglobin.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  But if your gene for hemoglobin is bad as an adult, that's one of the therapies, 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, 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, I think, work-related purposes. Like if you're working in a dangerous mine or in a radio, a high radiation environment, you could, 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, you know,

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  that's better, that at least as good or 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 want to 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.

• 1:06:43Lex Fridman?

  So this is stuff to do on Earth?

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  If it's just in space, it'll be hard because 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 1G. If you're on Mars, it's actually, you know, even though the gravity is 38% of Earth's, you're 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 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.

• 1:07:29Lex Fridman?

  Can you linger on the lava tubes on Mars? What are the lava tubes on Mars?

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they are a bit like what they sound like. There were large masses of lava at one point on the planet pushing really quickly through the environment. And they created 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 a blowing up a balloon 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 like, as it sounds, kind of 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.

• 1:08:15Lex Fridman?

  So they're accessible without a significant amount of drilling?

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

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

• 1:08:24Lex Fridman?

  Text you a little bit from the radiation.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

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

• 1:08:30Lex Fridman?

  What about source of food? What's a good, so that's part of biology, how you power this whole thing. What about sorts of food across decades?

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  In space, we'd have to, plants have been grown in flight and you can get some nutrients, but right now it is very reliant on all the up mass being sent up, all the freeze dried food that then gets rehydrated, which doesn't taste awful, but is not, is not self reliant. So I think those would have to be small bioreactors, it'd have to be a lot of work on fermentation, a lot of work on, you know, potentially prototrophic organisms, the organisms that can make all of the 20 amino acids that you would need to eat. I describe a little bit in the book, what if we did a prototrophic human, where you could have, like right now, we need to, we need to get some of our amino acids because we can't make them all, which I think is kind of sad. So what if we could make all of our own amino acids or all of our own vitamins?

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Also, you know, I think that's one case where another adaptation could be to activate the vitamin C gene. Like right now, you'd have to have limes or some other source of vitamin C in space. But we actually carry the gene inside of our genome to make vitamin C. Look at dogs and cats, for example, they have these kind of wet noses. You don't see them going out and getting margaritas, although dogs can drink beer and get drunk, they don't need vitamin C, they have no risk of scurvy because they can make the vitamin C all by themselves. So can other wet nose primates called strepsinies, but we are dry nose primates and we, we lost this ability sometimes 10 or 20 million years ago. We no longer make our own vitamin C, but the gene for it is called gulo, is still in our DNA. It's what's called a pseudogen, it's just broken down.

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  Like it's, it's like having a, like in our genome, we have these functional genes like a nice BMW, a nice car that works well, but we also have this like wrecking, this like junkyard of old cars, old genes, old functions in our DNA that we could bring back. And so vitamin C is one of them that would be very easy to do. So then you could activate the gene, repair it basically, repair it so we can make our own vitamin C. Now, we'd have to do it again carefully because what if we lost vitamin C? The production of vitamin C as a species, what if it was a good reason that we lost it? Maybe it was helping in some other way that we can't see now. But you'd start slowly, do it in cells, then do it potentially in animal models and other primates, and then try it in humans. But that's something else I'd like to see. So we wouldn't have to make as much food in orbit. You could actually start to make as much of your own food in your own cells.

• 1:10:47Lex Fridman?

  So the input to the system in terms of energy could be much more restricted. Doesn't have the diversity we currently need as humans.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  But I don't want to be a robot. Humans love, as I do, texture. I realize that made me sound like I wasn't human, but humans love food and flavors and textures and smells. All that is actually attenuated in flight. So you'd want to not forget our humanity and so this love of all the benefits and wonder of food and cooking and smells.

• 1:11:16Lex Fridman?

  Well, speak for yourself because for me, I eat the same thing every single day and I find beauty in everything and some beauty is more easily accessible outside of Earth. And food is not one of those things, I think. What about insects? That people bring that up, basically food that has sex with itself and multiplies. So cockroaches and so on, they're a source of a lot of protein and a lot of the amino acids.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  And bedbugs. There's a guy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He loves bedbugs, Lou Sorkin, and he has a monthly meeting where he talks about which insects would be the best for eating. And one month he gave a whole talk about bedbugs that they're pretty gross, but in terms of the value of what you can get for protein, they're really good. So they're a good candidate. I think you'd have, if you could deep fry them, if you deep fry anything, you can pretty much eat it. So maybe you'd need a fryer up in space, but they're a candidate.

• 1:12:13Lex Fridman?

  All right. What technical question? What are the major challenges of sex in space? Asking for a friend for reproduction purposes. So like when we're looking about survival of the human species across generations.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Lex Fridman?

  Do we need gravity essentially?

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  For sex in space, 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 fly. So it's possible for other invertebrates to show they can make babies in space. But for humans, NASA's official stance on this is that there has never been sex in space officially. I think.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  You know, we all wonder about that. I think humans are very predictable in that regard. Again, going back to the Greek tragedies, I think that 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, in vitro fertilization for humans. But sex itself in space, 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 has to be, you know, this, this is a big question of who goes up into space. It's now becoming more of, you know, regular, in quotes, people who have prosthetic limbs or are cancer survivors like Haley Arseneau, who just went up on the Inspiration 4 mission. So she's been a great researcher and helping with a lot of the science from that mission. We

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  have, doing the same analysis on them as we've been doing for the twin study and for other astronauts that 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. And as more and more of regular Joes and Janes go up, I think we'll see a lot more of it. But so far, we'd have no data. We have no video of it either way. We have no real knowledge other than it would be, it would need a lot of Velcro, I think is my only real answer there.

• 1:14:01Lex Fridman?

  Well, I, I'm as a fan of Velcro and duct tape. I think that's gonna be, those two are essential for anything, any kind of engineering out and anywhere, honestly, in all kinds of harsh conditions. But 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 engineering things. But there's still a human element 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.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

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

• 1:14:42Lex Fridman?

  Or a reality show.

• 1:14:46Lex Fridman?

  So what about the colonization of other planets? If you look at Mars, when you...

• 1:14:54Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  It's one of the closest options. It's not the best option, though, by far. We put in the book Measures of Earth Similarity Index, or something called ESI, is how close is the gravity, the temperature, the solar incidence 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 an ESI of about 0.7. And Earth is one, so the best you can get is one. Earth is just like Earth. It gets a score of one. Anything above, you know, some of the best exoplanets are in the habitable zone, where there's liquid water that could be there, start to get above 0.8 or 0.9. But they're, most planets are very low. They're 0.1, 0.2. They're either way too big and we have crushing gravity, or way too small,

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  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 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 in, 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.

• 1:16:16Lex Fridman?

  So over time, the ESI changes across millennia?

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  It does.

• 1:16:20Lex Fridman?

  So Venus is going to get cooler and cooler. Okay. But what are the big challenges to you in colonizing Mars, from a biology perspective, from a human perspective, from an engineering perspective?

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  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, Daniel Wood actually studies this at MIT, is We shouldn't even use the word colonized, but then we probably shouldn't use the word settle either because there's settlements that have some other baggage to that word as well. And then maybe we should use the word explore. But at some point, you didn't 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. I think 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, you could say, has proved

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  me wrong every single time. Like, every time humans have gone somewhere, it's usually been a tale of exploitation, strife, and drama again, and then, and often murder, genocide. Like, it's actually a pretty dark history, if you think of just all the colonization efforts. But I think most of it was done in a really dark area of humanity, where there was, average life expectancy was more than half less than it was today. It was, life was brutish and short, as many, as Hobbes famously said. So it was, it was a rough existence, right? So I think some of the ugliness of humanity in prior colonization times was, was a consequence of the time. And at least that's my hope. I think that

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  now, we would have it be much more, I think, inclusive, much more responsible, much more, much less, you know, evil, frankly. Like, we go there, and you would need commercialization, you need efforts to do mining, for example, bring things back, but it'd have to be some degree where there are some areas that are viewed as, as commons, or that are untouchable, like places that are parks. We do this today, even if there's a lake, for example, the first, you know, several hundred feet of a lake are all for public property and everything, that 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 want to be underground, with engineering and modifying even human cells to make sure you survive. The soil does have a lot of perchlorates, which is a problem for growing them, but there's

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  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 NASA posted about a year ago. And there's water everywhere. Not lots of it everywhere, but 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 self generating reactors, machines that could make food, start to even make beer, if you go long enough down the path. But the technical challenges are definitely, the engineering and the manufacturing are going to 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 buildings, those structures,

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  you need to create all the biology that will feed the populace, feed them. So, which we don't have the technology for yet. We have bits of it, but I think that's going to be the biggest challenge is making Mars really truly independent. But that'll probably take, as I say in the book, several hundred years before I think we'd get there.

• 1:19:39Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting because we're also exploring ways to motivate society to take on this challenge. It's the JFK thing and then the Cold War that inspired the race, the 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.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  But yet compete at the same time.

• 1:20:07Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  Competition.

• 1:20:10Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  I think, well, and they are, they've announced they want to have boots on the red planet by 2033, which is two to four years earlier than when NASA is supposed to do it. 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, JAX has the Japanese Space Agency, and there's the US. So now it went from just a two-person race to, you know, a whole field that the, you know, the whole field of runners, if you will, on the track trying to get to Mars first. And I think, I mean, it's gonna be like anything. If you start to have settlements and construction projects and places to visit on Mars, I think that the true mark of some place being actually settled is when you start to be able to pick.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  You're like, well, I want to go to this destination, not this one, because they have better Martian cocktails here, but this one's not as good. So then this idea of innovating and competing will continue to drive, I think, humans as it always has.

• 1:21:25Lex Fridman?

  You write this 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 toward the dusty sky." I love that you've thought through the geometry of this. "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.

• 1:22:11Lex Fridman?

  That's another interesting question. How will culture be different on Mars in the early days and beyond?

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. It'll be, as we've seen. With all of human history, I think even just when people migrate and they move, even the dialects change, even just going to the south in the United States. Oh, y'all come on down. And that's not even that far away, or even just people on Long Island versus New York City. And people with a big nasally accent, oh, yeah. And the people will just get, or even Wisconsin, I'm from Wisconsin region, people with this big nasally tone. Welcome to Wisconsin and Minnesota.

• 1:22:46Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54Lex Fridman?

  They have to be for the engineering challenges. Well, actually, I don't know. It could be the, this has to do with your 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 going to be both? Because my experience of scientists, they're, you know, they like the comfort of their, the lab.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:17Lex Fridman?

  They don't, well, no, there's some, I keep contradicting myself nonstop. There's some badass scientists that traveled to like Antarctica and all that kind of stuff, so.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  It's an 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 we can, we can get them, we can train them out of that. We can get them to engage other humans, not all of them, but hopefully most of them. So I think, you know, I think the culture will definitely be different. There'll be different dialects, different foods, there'll be different values. They're very likely will be a different religion. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a lot about this in his books, the new Martian religion that was created. So I think this idea has been discussed in the, in science fiction. It is almost unavoidable because there's been, I mean, just, just think of all the religions

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  that have happened on Earth with, with, you know, very little, I think, I mean, there's just terrestrial drama, but suddenly you have a different planet and you need 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 make up something.

• 1:24:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's, uh, look for ways to draw meaning. So religion for a lot of people, myths, common ideas are a source of meaning. And when you're on another planet.

• 1:24:38Lex Fridman?

  Boy, does the sense of what is meaningful change because 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 because you're clearly not on Earth currently and you're doing fine and you made it.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  At some point, I mean, it'll be pretty harsh like like what Shackleton did doing this exploration 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 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 they'll draw more meaning because more planets should be more meaning. I feel like it's like more hands is a better massage. I don't know if that's the best analogy here, but.

• 1:25:35Lex Fridman?

  I think Aristotle said that. Yeah.

• 1:25:39Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  Thanks. It's basically my favorite quotes. I'm like, well, I'm writing a book. I'm gonna put my favorite quotes.

• 1:25:49Lex Fridman?

  Might as well put them all down. What are your thoughts about the efforts of Elon Musk and SpaceX and pushing this commercial spaceflight and I mean, other companies, Axiom Space as well? What are your thoughts on on their efforts?

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  It's like a gold rush. 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 also, there's a lot of 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, planning the Inspiration 4 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, again, we're doing the same deep profiling and molecular characterization of these astronauts as we've done for Scott Kelly and other astronauts there from NASA. And we're. So far, actually, there'll be a lot of this presented later this year.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  It seems like it's pretty safe. Again, there's dangers. We can see real stress on the body, very obvious changes. Some of the same changes that Scott Kelly experienced. But for the most part, they returned back to normal, even for a short three day mission. I remember chatting with Jared and we were presenting the data to them actually just a few weeks ago, kind of a briefing to the crew. And because they went to 590 kilometers, they went basically several hundred kilometers higher than the space station or the Hubble normally rests. More radiation, 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, it actually 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 going to go even farther. And then also open the hatch and go on these new spacesuits that SpaceX are designing.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

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

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  You know, and I always email them back and say, listen, every one of your cells is worthy of study. I said, send me, you know, so I have this really kind of creepy geneticist email response of like, I want all of your cells, you know, but, but it's true because there's so much we don't know. I want to learn as much as we can about every, every time they go up anyone. So we're doing it, you know, with NASA astronauts, but it's been some of this influx of new crews. That are willing to do almost anything, right? So including, we did skin biopsies for the Inspiration four crew before and after spaceflight. 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 there's beautiful images of even the structure of skin changing and the inflammation that we've seen in like for Scott Kelly, for example.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  We now have a molecule by molecule map of what happens to skin, which has never been done before. So there.

• 1:29:03Lex Fridman?

  What are interesting surprises there?

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  So one of the 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 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 changes in vision, some people had, you know, other GI problems, or 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 were able to see, and start to get a little bit predictive about our medicine. Right now, we're just diagnosing, but it'd

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  be good to say, ah, 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 can monitor you to keep, keep the inflammation down.

• 1:29:58Lex Fridman?

  What does it take to prepare for one of these missions? Because 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?

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  They have to do a lot of the same training that most astronauts do. So a lot of it's in Hawthorne at SpaceX headquarters, which if you can ever get a chance to do a tour, it's 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, the majority of the training. If you want to go to the space station, as the Axiom missions are, including John Shoffner, you have to do a training 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.

• 1:30:52Lex Fridman?

  All in Russian?

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  They have to learn enough Russian to be, you know, just functional.

• 1:30:55Lex Fridman?

  Wow. So it's not just technical, you also have to...

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  Enough, enough Russian.

• 1:30:59Lex Fridman?

  Enough, enough Russian.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  And so it's a, 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. But technically, he can't go. So, you know.

• 1:31:13Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

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

• 1:31:40Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  It's a good question. So maybe, for example, when we get different NASA grants, you apply for a grant, you get to the lab, it goes, you know, it goes through Cornell, the grants office. I have to sign as a scientist, as the P I. 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 NASA D O D. Or sorry, do you let me go back to that. Every other grant I get from, say, the N I. H. Or the N S. F., even sometimes D O. D. You don't have to promise that you won't talk to anybody in China about it. But for NASA alone, it's congressionally mandated. You have to promise and sign all those papers. I can't do anything with anyone in China about this.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  And what I view as sad about that is I want to 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 can't go. I could go with personal funds, but I can't use those funds.

• 1:32:41Lex Fridman?

  Like you should be able to go to a conference and in a friendly way, talk shit to the other scientists. Like we're doing like, like the way scientists do really well, which is like they compliment, but it's a backhanded compliment. Like, like you're doing a really good job here. And then you kind of imply that you're doing a much better job. That's the core of competition. You get jealous and then everybody's trying to approve. But you're ultimately talking, you're ultimately collaborating closely, you're competing closely as opposed to in your own silos.

• 1:33:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me ask, in terms of preparing for spaceflight. You know, I tweeted about this and I joked about it and I talked to Elon quite a lot these days. What I tweeted was, I'd like to do a podcast in space one day. And it was a silly thing because 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? There's no, just even seeing what Axiom is doing, what Inspiration Four is doing. It's like regular civilians could just start going up.

• 1:33:52Lex Fridman?

  Well, so let me ask you this question. When do you think, we saw Jeff Bezos go on to orbit. When do you think Elon goes up to space? So his thinking about this is it's partially responsible until it's safe because he has such a direct engineering roles in the running of multiple companies. So at which point do you think, what's your prediction for the year that Elon will go up?

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  I think he'd probably go up by 2026, I would say, because the number of missions planned, there'll be several missions per year through multiple space agencies and companies that are really making low earth orbit very routine. And by go up, I think it might also, for example, the Inspiration 4 mission just went up for three days in flight, you know, and it was enough time to get up there, do some experiments, enjoy the view, and then he came back. The Axiom missions are a bit more complicated. There's docking you up in the space station to shared atmosphere. So you have to follow all the ISS protocols. What's, what's interesting about the Dragon capsule and the Inspiration 4 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. It's not that big, right?

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

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

• 1:35:25Lex Fridman?

  2026, I wonder how the audio works. See, also, can you comment on 2026? I'll start getting ready. I'll, I'll start pushing him on this. I'm quite, quite serious. It's a fascinating kind of

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  Axiom 2 still has room. You could go on that mission if you want.

• 1:35:39Lex Fridman?

  So I'll ask you about Axiom. What, how strict are these? So this, this seems surreal that civilians are traveling up. 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 because you get to, you know, you don't want to complain too much. But how much, you know, there's sometimes bureaucracy with NSF and the OD and the funding and all those kinds of things that kind of prevent you from Being as free as you might sometimes like to do all kinds of wild experiments and crazy experiments. Now, the benefit of that is that you don't do any wild and crazy experiments that hurt people.

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:36:24Lex Fridman?

  And so it's very important to put safety first, but it's like a dance. A little too much restrictions of bureaucracy can hamper the flourishing of science. A little too little of that can get some crazy scientists to start doing unethical experiments. Okay. That said, NASA and just spaceflight in general is sort of famously very, very risk averse. So what's your sense currently about like even like doing a podcast, right?

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  Podcast, you know, unless it's a, you know, I think with mixed martial arts is a pretty safe activity unless you're doing a, the octagon version of your podcast. Should, I mean, just getting there and back is the only real risky part, which is still risky. But I think you're not asking to do, you know, open heart surgery in space. You're just saying, what if I do a podcast? And I think.

• 1:37:17Lex Fridman?

  Well, fun. You're trying to ask to have fun.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:20Lex Fridman?

  And I feel like fun sounds dangerous, any kind of fun.

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  Uh, that's what's been extraordinary is that traditionally, yes, I think most of the space agencies have been very, by definition bureaucratic because they're coming from the government and, but they've been, been that way for a really good reason is that safety, you know, in the early sixties, we know almost nothing about the body in space, except for, you know, some of the work that pilots had done at really high altitude. So we really didn't know what at all to expect. So it's good that there were decades of resolute focus on just safety. But now we know it's pretty safe. We know the physiological responses. We know what to expect. We can also treat some of it. We'll hopefully, hopefully soon we'll treat a lot more of it. But if you just want to go up there, it's actually now it's just a question of cost. Like imagine, I think the way you can view a lot of the

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  commercial spaceflight companies is that if you have the funds, you can basically plan the mission. All the training they'll do is to help you get prepared for how you run some of the instrumentation, how you can fly the rocket to a limited degree and how to use some of the equipment. But fundamentally, it's no longer a question of, you know, years and years of training and selection, this impossible odds task of becoming astronaut. It's frankly, just a question of funds.

• 1:38:29Lex Fridman?

  Expensive plane ride. So how much, you mentioned Axiom. Well, is it known how much the, it costs? For the plane ride?

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  There is no official number and it depends on the mission, of course. So if you ask them, often they'll say, well, how serious are you? They really want, they don't just want to give out random numbers to people. But the numbers, because for example, we proposed one mission. We want a new twin study where someone goes up and stays up there for 500 to 550 days. Basically, be up there for the longest time ever to simulate the time it would take to get to Mars and back for the shortest possible duration, about 550 days. Because if you went there and immediately turned around, you could maybe make that mission. Otherwise, it's a three-year mission. The, and there we, you know, it's, you're looking at the ranges of, you know, it's 50 to 100 million dollars in that ballpark range. But the reason it's so variable is it depends. What are you doing up there?

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  If you're up there, for example, for two, two years, basically, almost, you know, almost two years. That's a long time just being in one spot, right? So could you be doing some things where you're, you can, your time is valuable. So you can do experiments and people pay for those and that defrays the cost. Or you could build something or you could do podcasts and maybe, you know, fundraise on the podcast. And so as long as you, the reason the cost is variable is because it depends. Well, do you have all the money? And you say, I want to go and just sit in space for two years and do nothing. Well, then you have to pay for all that time that you're up there if you want to do things.

• 1:39:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I see the, the official X1 mission was 55 million for a trip to the ISS.

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  It could be worse.

• 1:40:01Lex Fridman?

  Wait, Sergey just posted a $35,000 price tag per night, per person on the ISS. Is that real? I don't know.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  That sounds about right. That's why.

• 1:40:10Lex Fridman?

  That's like a real hotel stay. So to stay, oh, so interesting. And then I'm sure there's costs with the docking and all those kinds of things. That's from the perspective of Axiom, the private company or SpaceX or whoever is, whoever is paying the cost and.

• 1:40:28Lex Fridman?

  In the short term and in the long term.

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  Yep. And then thinking about a lot of that cost is rocket fuel. A lot of it is the ride. So I've been on calls where Axiom's like, hey SpaceX, give us to make it a little cheaper. We can make it cheaper in our end. It's the cost. That is the rocket.

• 1:40:43Lex Fridman?

  So SpaceX is giving Axiom a ride.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:40:45Lex Fridman?

  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 is the Axiom One mission that just went up?

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, so the Axiom Space is a private spaceflight company that's building 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. Eventually it'll be expanded and then by 2028, the plan is it'll be completely detached 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 want to 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 want to do it, you can do it. It's like, it's, you can have a lab up there. If you want to do experiments, you can do experiments. You figure out the cost.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  If you want to have beer up there, you can make your own brewery or beer. And so this is the first beer made in space. For some reason you want to 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.

• 1:41:53Lex Fridman?

  Okay, cool. So what is the Axiom One mission that just went up? Can you tell me what happened?

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  Axiom One is the first private, the first commercial crew to go to the space station. So Inspiration Four was the first commercial private crew to just go into space. They went into space and actually did an orbital mission for just about three days. But Axiom One is the first, you know, again, 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 work with staff, actually just take some pictures. But it's a mission, actually doing a lot of experiments, doing almost eighty different experiments. So it's a lot of, 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 that's all privately funded and then go to the space station.

• 1:42:37Lex Fridman?

  It's four people.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

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

• 1:42:59Lex Fridman?

  So they're doing the experiments too?

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:02Lex Fridman?

  What does it take to design an experiment and to run a, design an experiment here on Earth that runs up there? And then also to actually do the running of the experiment? What are the constraints? What are the opportunities? All that kind of stuff?

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  There are, 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? Because things always float away in space. There's notoriously panels in the space station where you don't want to 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.

• 1:43:36Lex Fridman?

  The little things.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  It just, 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. And the big question is, if this thing, whatever you want to 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 answer, 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 that glove box. And so, but you can propose almost anything. 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.

• 1:44:17Lex Fridman?

  And that includes the, not just the materials, but the, the equipment you used to analyze the materials.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the ones we worked on, actually with Kate Rubens, was putting the first DNA sequencer in space called the Biomolecule Sequencer Mission, also with Aaron Burton and Sarah Castor Wallace. But there, the interesting thing is, we had to prepare this tiny little sequencer. It sequences DNA, you can do it really quickly, within really minutes. And what's extraordinary is you have to do, if you want to 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 it? Do pieces, little pieces of glass break everywhere? If so, that's a problem. So you have to redesign it and do fire testing. How does it burn? How does your device 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 want to fly one thing into space, you need to make four of them and destroy at least three of them to know how they die, how they destroy.

• 1:45:05Lex Fridman?

  Destructive.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  Destructive.

• 1:45:07Lex Fridman?

  Fire.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  Fire and then vibration testing.

• 1:45:10Lex Fridman?

  It's kind of like. 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?

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  Vibration, like just large shakers. So that's, uh, there's actually mostly to simulate launch. They have a lot of machinery at NASA and at SpaceX to do, just make sure what, does this thing completely fall apart? If it has a high vibrational, essentially force attached to it. So it's just a, kind of like a big shaker.

• 1:45:36Speaker 01

  Fire testing is just to simulate what would happen if there was a normal fire. That's something that gets up to, you know, the fire temperatures, several hundred degrees Celsius. And.

• 1:45:44Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  No, it's more like.

• 1:45:48Lex Fridman?

  Heat or is it actual flames?

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  It's flames and heat, but it's, it's not like a kiln or anything like that. It's not, you don't want to know how does it burn in the kiln. It's more, is it flammable is the first big question. Like, does it just start on fire? If it gets a little bit of flame on it, does it just light up like a Christmas tree?

• 1:46:00Lex Fridman?

  Is there a YouTube video of this?

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  Oh, I, you know.

• 1:46:02Lex Fridman?

  You guys, did you film any of this?

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  Not, not, um, Aaron Burton might still have some of the videos. We're in the middle of doing some testing for the new sequencer called the Mark 1C. So I will make videos of, of that.

• 1:46:14Lex Fridman?

  I would, I would love to, uh, see that for, if anything, for my private collection. This is very exciting.

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  And the destructive testing is just often, it can be something as simple as, as a hammer. It's really how does it shatter? You want to question is, are there glass components and so?

• 1:46:26Lex Fridman?

  So it's like office space.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  It's like.

• 1:46:28Lex Fridman?

  That scene with the fax machine.

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  That's right. With blow, you know, to the damn it feels good to be a gangster soundtrack. Yeah, that's a great scene.

• 1:46:37Lex Fridman?

  That's so, that's so exciting. That kind of, that's the best of engineering is like that kind of testing. What else about designing experiments? Like what kind of stuff do you want to get in there? You said 80 different experiments. So we're staying in the realm of biology and genetics?

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  Yep, for now, but we, we also want to do, you know, some of the experiments that have been discussed in the lab have been, and some are being planned as well. But I think the most controversial one that's come up in our, in our planning, it gets back to sex in space is, you know, can human embryos? Divide and actually begin to develop in space. But then if we do that experiment, that means you're taking viable human embryos. Watching them develop in space, then you could freeze them and bring them down and characterize them to see. But to answer that question, because we actually don't know, can a human embryo actually develop well in zero gravity? We just don't know. But to find that out, that means we'd have to literally sacrifice embryos probably. So and which itself has, of course, a lot of complications, ethical considerations. Some people just wouldn't, it's a nonstarter for lots of people. So.

• 1:47:37Lex Fridman?

  But we do know that the sperm survives.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  Sperm survives.

• 1:47:39Lex Fridman?

  As you earlier said.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:47:41Lex Fridman?

  And nobody cares about sperm, apparently.

• 1:47:43Speaker 01

  Sperm. We're doing several studies on autism risk for fathers and sperm. And now it's really easy to get sperm, I'll just tell you. It's a people say you're helping us.

• 1:47:51Lex Fridman?

  What I hear.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:47:52Lex Fridman?

  I read that somewhere on Wikipedia.

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  Asking for a friend.

• 1:47:56Lex Fridman?

  Okay, cool. Are you involved in Axiom one, Axiom two experiments? Like what, what does, is your lab directly or indirectly involved in terms of experiment design? What are you excited about different experiments that are happening out there?

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  Some of them, we're doing a lot of the direct training for the crews, really saying, how do you? How do you do a modern genetics experiment? The Axiom one, for Inspiration four and Axiom one, we're also collaborating with TRISH, which is the translational research arm for NASA. That's in Houston. And there it's a lot of sharing of samples and data for all these missions. Basically, for all the commercial spaceflight missions, there'll be a repository where you can look at the data from the astronauts. You can look at some of the genetic information, some of the molecular changes. So that's being built up with TRISH, which has been fabulous collaboration between Cornell and TRISH. But the other thing we're doing is for Axiom two is training them. How do you, for example, if you want to look at a virus, you can take a swab of something, extract it, sequence it. And say, do I have Omicron or do I have a different virus?

• 1:48:52Speaker 01

  And we're doing some of the exact same work in flight, but we're having the astronauts do the extraction, the sequencing and the analysis of all the molecules. And so one of the common occurrences is herpes is reactivated often in spaceflight, oral herpes. So you can see that viral reactivation is one of the biggest kind of mysteries in spaceflight where the immune system seems to be responding a lot as active, the body's really perturbed, but viruses start shedding again. And it's really, it just happens clinically. And we see this for like, for example, hepatitis C or hepatitis B, you can get infected with it and it can stay in your body for decades and still kind of be hiding in the body. And in this case, we see it in spaceflight, herpes comes back. So we want to figure out, is it there first of all? And then when is it happening? And characterize it better, but have the astronauts do it themselves rather than collecting

• 1:49:36Speaker 01

  it and bring it back to Earth and figuring out later, we could see in real time how it's happening. And then also look at their blood. We'll see what, what is changing in their blood in real time with these, these new sequencers. So I'm excited about the genomics in space, if you will.

• 1:49:49Lex Fridman?

  So clearly, as somebody that loves robots, how many robots are up there in space that help with the experiments? Like what, how much technology is there? Would you say, is it, is it really a manual activity? Or is there a lot of robots helping out?

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  Good questions. So far, it's almost all manual, just because the robots have to all undergo the destructive fire and vibrational testing. So if you have a million

• 1:50:13Lex Fridman?

  This is so exciting.

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  So if you can get

• 1:50:15Lex Fridman?

  That thing is a lot less than a million.

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  So we can destroy it.

• 1:50:18Lex Fridman?

  Definitely gonna test it out for the, in, I guess, in which order? No, you have to do separate for each one.

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, each one.

• 1:50:26Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

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

• 1:51:01Lex Fridman?

  Or you have to come up with a good reason.

• 1:51:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, for NASA, you have to go good. But I think for private spaceflight, you could have, the reason is, I'm curious. And that could just be, and like, I've got a private funder, or I've got your own money.

• 1:51:12Lex Fridman?

  And then you pay per kilogram, essentially.

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  And I mean, there are some things you can't say, I want to send a nuclear bomb up there. I'm curious. I don't think that would fly, but you

• 1:51:21Lex Fridman?

  And there's probably rules in terms of free floating robots, right? They probably have to be attached. They have to, like, it's an orchestra that plays together, all the experiments that are up there. There's probably It's not silos, it's not separate, 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?

• 1:51:41Speaker 01

  A lot of electronics, so a lot of it's tablets, there's laptops up there, there are, you know, the whole space station is, is, is running and humming on electronics. Actually, one of the biggest complaints astronauts have is, is sleeping up there is hard, not only because 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 that are keeping the, the station alive. The CO2 scrubbers, all the instrumentation, it's, it's loud. So I think it is a very well-powered lab, basically, in, in flight, but it, but it, 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,

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  when you talk to the other industry partners, they want to make it, you know, space more fun and engaging and open to new ideas.

• 1:52:30Lex Fridman?

  So that's looking at the fun stuff going on in the next few years. But if we zoom out once again, 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? You know what, let's, let's step back a little and 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?

• 1:53:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the end of 500 years, I'm hoping we make the big launch towards another solar system, 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 discovery didn't start to happen until 89 and really the early 90s for the real validated ones. So, you know, I'm hoping over the next 500 years, we go from thousands of possible habitable planets to hundreds of thousands or millions, especially with some of the recent telescope's launch, we'll find them. But before we get there, I have a whole section, I really describe about the magic of Titan, because it has all this methane, which is a great hydrocarbon

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  you can use to make fuel. You can use it, it's cold, it's all bejesus on Titan, but if you can.

• 1:53:47Lex Fridman?

  Ice.

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:53:48Lex Fridman?

  So what's Titan made up of? What is Titan? Everybody loves Titan.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  It is, it's a favorite, it's this kind of eerie, green-hued moon that's around Saturn that is, 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 actually be so cold, it's like a lake of methane. You could go swimming in it potentially. There might be some degree of rocks or maybe mountains there, but they might also be made of like frozen methane. So no one's ever, 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 bit of an outpost. It might not be a luxurious retreat, because it's really cold.

• 1:54:38Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  Maybe. Well, actually, with all that carbon and all those hydrocarbons, it is very possible that some microbial life could be there and hanging out, waiting for us to dip our toes into the methane 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, that close to Jupiter, though, it has, because it's such a giant planet, it emits back out a lot of radiation, and it's collecting from other parts of the universe, and it juts back out. So if you get too close to Jupiter, it actually almost certainly not be able to survive, depending on which part of it, but.

• 1:55:26Speaker 01

  That's one risk about Jupiter. But it'd be cool to see the giant red spot up close, maybe have some spots there.

• 1:55:32Lex Fridman?

  Mars is top one. Then you get to pick Titan or Io, so ice, firing ice.

• 1:55:38Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 1:55:39Lex Fridman?

  The Robert Frost poem comes to mind. And then Europa is that?

• 1:55:43Speaker 01

  Europa would be cool too, and Insula, which is a big ocean. It might be there like an alien ocean that's under the, it might be even water ice that's there. And even liquid water potentially there 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. It'd be interesting. You could have maybe 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.

• 1:56:08Lex Fridman?

  Why do you like asteroids?

• 1:56:09Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:56:10Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:56:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, vacation spots, basically. Yes, I'd say that, well, so 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, you know, all the resources from it. So this legally is very possible because even though 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. You could.

• 1:56:43Lex Fridman?

  What's the Space Act?

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  Space Act was 1967, was the first 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 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 additional act in the 90s, the lunar, the lunar, actually I'm blanking on the name of it, but the, there hasn't been any significant legislation that has been universally accepted since the Space Act.

• 1:57:20Lex Fridman?

  So but the primary focus.

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  Was on the militarization.

• 1:57:24Lex Fridman?

  The militarization.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

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

• 1:57:29Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:58:18Lex Fridman?

  Of course you see there's going to be some contentious battles, even wars over those resources. Hopefully at a very small scale, it's more like conflict or like human tension, but.

• 1:58:33Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy. It's like war makes for human flourishing, like after the war somehow. Sometimes there's just this explosion of conflict and afterwards for a long while there's a flourishing and again, conflict and flourishing and hopefully over a stretch of millennia, the rate of conflict and the destructiveness of conflict decreases.

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  It has, at least in the past hundred years, the number of wars, number of military actions, casualties have all decreased. I don't know if it's going to stay that way for humanity going, I think. You know, the trajectory is there. I think the war mongering 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. And you've spoken a lot about it. And it's, you know,

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  but it's, you know, there, there sometimes will be small military actions. But I think the, you know, and even there, it says, you know, a large military action across most of the country, but not all of it, actually. Right? So it's, I think 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. But hopefully, less of that as well.

• 1:59:52Lex Fridman?

  And yet, the destructiveness of our weapons increases. So it's a, it's a complicated race in both directions. We've become more peaceful and more destructive at the same time. It's fascinating. How do we get outside the solar system? You, you write an epic line, I believe it's the title of one of the sections, launch toward the second sun.

• 2:00:19Lex Fridman?

  That journey of saying, we're going to somehow the solar system feels like home.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:24Lex Fridman?

  Earth is home, but the solar system is home. It's our sun. The sun is a source of, of life.

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:32Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:39Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  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 described 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, 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

• 2:01:29Speaker 01

  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 so with that as a backdrop, you could have people hibernate and talk about like maybe need to hibernate 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 and then people can all just sleep in pods. Great. You know, so I'm, 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 will have more in 500 years, but basically 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 age, you said, we're, yes, you can

• 2:02:14Speaker 01

  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 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 societies 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.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  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, and we, 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 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.

• 2:03:20Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:03:29Lex Fridman?

  It's always, everybody lives in a prison.

• 2:03:32Speaker 01

  It was, it's a limited planetary experience. We'll say it's like that, like it. Prison sounds so dark, but.

• 2:03:38Lex Fridman?

  Just, yeah, just like prison is a, is a, is a limited geographic and culinary experience.

• 2:03:46Speaker 01

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

• 2:03:57Lex Fridman?

  And yeah, I mean, 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 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 the threshold of people like, um. I, I lived for a long time in a studio and then I upgraded gloriously to a one bedroom apartment. And the power to be able to like, close the door.

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  It was magnificent, right?

• 2:04:41Lex Fridman?

  It's just like, wow, you can speak volumes. It's like, you can escape. That feels like freedom. That's the definition of freedom. Having a door where you could close it. And now you're alone with your thoughts and then you can open it and you enter and now there's other humans as freedom. So the, the threshold of what freedom, the experience of freedom is like, is, is really fascinating. And like you said, there could be technologies in terms of hibernation.

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  VR had, um, ultra reality, virtual reality, like, cause you know, 30 years ago, they sounded awful. I think, I think you'd be stuck in a spacecraft. But now you could bring the totality of all of humans, history, culture, every, every music, every bit of music song, every movie, every book can all be in one tablet, basically. Right? So, and also you'd still get up, updates from Netflix. If you're on the way towards another star, you could still get downloads and so. But eventually maybe the crew would start to make their own shows. It'd be like, well, I don't want the earth shows. I want to talk about, I'm going to make a drama on this spacecraft. But I think it would have to be big enough. So it feels like at least the size of a building. I think people's intuitions about quarantining have really become very, uh, immediate because we've all had to experience it to some degree in the past two years. And we've survived, but definitely we've learned that you need a really good internet

• 2:05:55Speaker 01

  connection. You need, you know, some ability to go somewhere sometimes. And, you know, that might just be as simple as people leading the spacecraft to go to something that's another thing connected to it, or just go out into the vacuum of space for an afternoon to experience it. So people need regression. People need games. People need toys. People love to play.

• 2:06:15Lex Fridman?

  What are chloro-humans?

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  Chloro-humans is a description of how you can embed chloroplast 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 three, 400 years from now, if we could work on the ways that animals and plants work together, you could embed chloroplast in human skin. And then if you're hungry, you go outside and you lay out your skin, and then you absorb sunlight, and then you go back in when you get full. If you only wanted to lay outside for just say one hour to get, get your days fully, you know, your days fully value of energy, you'd need about two tennis courts worth of skin that you could lay out, and maybe your friends would play on it or something. But if they play on it, then their shadows

• 2:07:01Speaker 01

  would block your sun. So maybe you leave your skin out there and you could roll up your skin, 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 light capture and efficiency of the chloroplast. 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.

• 2:07:21Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:07:32Speaker 01

  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 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, says of a half a tennis court, so you could make-

• 2:07:44Lex Fridman?

  Could be like wings?

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  Could be like wings, 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 still have to eat, but not as much. And I described 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. But it's, you know, that's something I'm hoping would happen in three to 400 years, but it would be hard because you're taking a plant organelle and putting it into animal cell, which sounds weird, but we have mitochondria inside of us, which basically where our cells capture the bacteria and now it walks around with us all the time. So there's precedent for it in evolution.

• 2:08:32Lex Fridman?

  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. What about evolving humans or evolving organisms that live on humans? Sort of the thing you mentioned, which you've already learned is that humans are pretty adaptable. Now, what does that mean? You also somewhere I 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.

• 2:09:16Lex Fridman?

  So can we leverage the natural process of evolution of the slaughter, the selection, the mutation and the adaptation that is all in, sorry to throw slaughter into there. It's just acknowledging that a lot of organisms have to die in evolution. Can we use that for long term space travel or colonization, occupation? Is there a good word for this? Of planets?

• 2:09:45Speaker 01

  Like to terraform the planet?

• 2:09:47Lex Fridman?

  Terraform the planet. No, to adjust the human body to the planet.

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  Oh, there's not really a term for that yet. I guess to

• 2:09:54Lex Fridman?

  Adapt to the new vacation spot.

• 2:09:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I called it just directed evolution in the book is that you, you, you guide the evolution towards what you want. In this case, sometimes you can engineer yourselves to make exactly what you want. But other times you put people on planets and, and see how they change. Actually, later in the book, I imagine if you have humans on multiple planets, you could have this virtuous cycle where as people adapt and evolve here, you'd sequence their DNA and see how they change and then send the information back to the other planet and then study them with more resources. So you'd be able to then have a continual exchange of what's evolving in which way on different planets. And then each planet would learn from the changes that they see at the other planet.

• 2:10:35Lex Fridman?

  Does the evolution happen at the scale of human or do we need the individual like, or is it more efficient to do like bacteria?

• 2:10:43Speaker 01

  Bacteria cheaper and faster and easier, but we but we also have a lot of bacteria in us, on us and all around us. And even the bacteria in the space station are continually evolving. So.

• 2:10:52Lex Fridman?

  Did you study that, by the way, like non-human cells, like what the microbiomes?

• 2:10:58Speaker 01

  Yep. So we've seen it for the astronauts. We can actually see their their immune system respond to the microbiome of the space station. So as soon as you get into that aluminum tube, there's a whole ecosystem that's already up there. And we can actually see, we saw this with Scott Kelly, we've seen this with other astronauts, you can see the T cells in their body, they actually are responding to little peptides, a little the molecules of the bacteria, they're the immune system is looking for a specific bacteria. And then once it sees new ones, it remembers it. And you can see the body looking for the microbes that are only on the space station that you don't see on Earth. And then when Scott came back, he actually had more of those microbes embedded in his skin and in his mouth and stool that weren't there before. So he like picked up new hitchhikers in the space station and brought some of them back down with him.

• 2:11:39Lex Fridman?

  So there's like long term ecosystems.

• 2:11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, 20 years, they've been there for 20 years. Yeah, so it's.

• 2:11:45Lex Fridman?

  There's some like Chuck Norris type of bacteria up there, I'm sure. You you're part of the Extreme Microbiome Project. What does that involve? What kind of fun

• 2:11:59Lex Fridman?

  fun organisms have you learned about? Have you gotten to explore?

• 2:12:03Speaker 01

  We have a it's a really fun project, XMP, the Extreme Microbiome, which is as it sounds like. We look for really odd places, like heavy radiation environments, high salt, higher, low temperature, you know, strange area at 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 a candy pink lake in Australia called Lake Hillier, which we just published a paper on this where.

• 2:12:30Lex Fridman?

  Why is it pink?

• 2:12:31Speaker 01

  So it's actually Danilia salina is 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 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 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 being said it grows in thirty percent salt and if you go below ten fifteen percent salt it doesn't even grow it actually kills it.

• 2:13:00Lex Fridman?

  Oh wow.

• 2:13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, there it is like here.

• 2:13:02Lex Fridman?

  Is it toxic to humans or no?

• 2:13:04Speaker 01

  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 because it's so salty. Uh so yeah, so but it won't kill it'll it.

• 2:13:18Lex Fridman?

  Listen, you have to suffer for art.

• 2:13:19Speaker 01

  And that's right.

• 2:13:20Lex Fridman?

  Great art requires suffering.

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  I mean, so it is a beautiful lake. Uh 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. 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 because he loves flying over it and it was like a little bit less pink because it had a bunch of rain in the past 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's a beautiful pink lake and so.

• 2:13:48Lex Fridman?

  That is gorgeous.

• 2:13:50Speaker 01

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

• 2:13:53Lex Fridman?

  Hard to get to?

• 2:13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no road. 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.

• 2:14:05Lex Fridman?

  If anyone knows how to get there, let me know. I want to go there. Okay, cool. What are some other extreme organisms that you study?

• 2:14:12Speaker 01

  Other ones, uh there's some organisms we studied in the space station called Ascinidibacter piti i, which is a uh often found in human skin, but we found hundreds of strains in the space station that we brought down and and curated and and then sequenced. Uh and this is with uh Katsuri 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 Ascinidibacter. 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've found some of those that have just they're they're evolving in as life is always evolving and we can see it also in the space station.

• 2:14:54Lex Fridman?

  Entirely new species born in the space station.

• 2:14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's completely different. So we we found one species actually um. That we named after a donor to Cornell, someone who's donated funds to research. So we named a different species of fungus after him, Naginissia tolchinskya, because he's Igor Tolchinsky. So as a thank you for him donating to Cornell, we said, we've named this fungus that we found on the space station for you.

• 2:15:18Lex Fridman?

  Was he grateful or did he stop funding all the research?

• 2:15:23Speaker 01

  He was very grateful. And then, and I told him, I said, if you have like an ex-girlfriend, we could try and name like a, you know, a genital fungus after her or something if you want. And he said, he said, maybe.

• 2:15:35Lex Fridman?

  He stopped answering emails after that. Okay. What about like in extreme conditions?

• 2:15:42Lex Fridman?

  In ice, in heat, is that something of interest to you and the things that survive where most things can't?

• 2:15:50Speaker 01

  Yes, of keen interest. I think that will be the roadmap for some of the potential adaptations, what we could think of for human cells or certainly for our human, the microbiome, like just all the microorganisms in and on and around us. So we've seen, you know, even there's this one crater, it's called the Lake of Fire. It's in Turkmenistan where it's been on fire because of oil that had been set on fire decades ago, and it's still burning. So we collected some samples from there and those were some pseudomonas potidae, some species we found there that can.

• 2:16:21Lex Fridman?

  So there's stuff alive there.

• 2:16:22Speaker 01

  That seems to be surviving there by this large pit of fire. Oh yeah, there is the desert. It's been just on fire for decades, apparently.

• 2:16:30Lex Fridman?

  What the?

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  So this is another place that.

• 2:16:33Lex Fridman?

  It's just a lake of fire.

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's that they said.

• 2:16:36Lex Fridman?

  Soviet scientists had set up a drilling rig here for extraction of natural gas. Of course, it would be in this part of the world that you would get something like this. But the rig collapsed and methane gas is being released from the crater.

• 2:16:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So for those just listening, we're looking at a, at a lake full of fire and there's something alive there. Allegedly.

• 2:17:00Speaker 01

  And pseudomenus are known to be some of the most tough organisms. They actually can clean toxic waste from, you know, in years of superfund sites where there's so much waste that's been deposited, you'll find them there as well. Actually, there's one place in the Guanis Canal, there's something, it's called, in New York City, in Brooklyn, and it is a complete toxic waste dump. That was where a lot of waste in the 1700s was dumped. And so the gateway to hell is what it's called, but the

• 2:17:25Lex Fridman?

  That's the nickname for the lake.

• 2:17:30Speaker 01

  So the Guanis Canal is also a place that has been fun to sequence and see pseudomenos species that can survive there, basically pulling toxins from the environment. So it's as if you create this toxic landscape and then evolution comes in and says, fine, I'll make things that can survive here. And when you look at the biochemistry of those species, what they've created is their own salvation, basically. The selection has made them survivors. And suddenly you can use that to remediate other polluted sites, for example. So

• 2:17:58Lex Fridman?

  That explains Twitter perfectly. The toxicity created adaptation for the psychological microbiome that is social media. Okay, beautiful. But you just actually jump back to the interstellar travel. 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? Is it biology? Is it computer science? So information or DNA, like some

• 2:18:42Lex Fridman?

  kind of informational type of thing? Is it biological, like physiological, making the body resilient, live longer, and resilient to the harsh conditions of space? Or is it the actual vehicle of transport, which would be applied physics?

• 2:19:02Speaker 01

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

• 2:19:04Lex Fridman?

  This question, never.

• 2:19:07Speaker 01

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

• 2:19:38Lex Fridman?

  Technical term.

• 2:19:40Speaker 01

  Air.

• 2:19:41Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:20:07Speaker 01

  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, think a broader duty? You could, I mean, he was-

• 2:20:19Lex Fridman?

  What's the broader duty exactly?

• 2:20:20Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 2:20:21Lex Fridman?

  Maintaining the, the well-being of astronauts?

• 2:20:25Speaker 01

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

• 2:20:30Lex Fridman?

  Not completely. It's a trade-off.

• 2:20:32Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:20:33Lex Fridman?

  So, like, a doctor has to make decisions like this, too. You're restricted on the resources. You have to make life and death decisions.

• 2:20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:42Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:20:49Speaker 01

  Maybe a de-ontogenic vision of what was the best duty for, for the genetics, you could say.

• 2:20:55Lex Fridman?

  What's de-ontogenic mean?

• 2:20:57Speaker 01

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

• 2:21:02Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:21:03Speaker 01

  What are you supposed to do with it? Which is kind of the, the value of life. But if Hal was a silicon-based version of genetics, which is just his own maintenance of himself and self-survival, you could argue he's doing the right thing for himself. But I think a human in that circumstance might have tried to find a way to, even if the astronauts don't agree with the mission, to figure out some way to get them on a different spacecraft to, to go away or something, versus just say, well- You're in the way of the mission. I'll just you have to die is I think, but accommodation can always be made to your point with doctors. Like sometimes you'd like to save three people, but you can only save two.

• 2:21:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:37Speaker 01

  And you have to at some point pick. But I think that's it's a false dichotomy. I think Hal didn't wasn't programmed to and didn't try to find a third solution.

• 2:21:46Lex Fridman?

  Perhaps this like Stuart Russell proposes this idea that AI systems should have self doubt. They should be always uncertain in their final decision and that would help Hal sort of get out of the local, the local optimum of the this is the mission. Like always be a little bit like, hmm, not sure if this is the right thing. And then you're forced to kind of contend with other humans, with other entities. And what is the right decision? So like the worst stuff, the worst thing about decisions from that perspective is if you're extremely confident and you're stubborn and immovable.

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  Right. And then, but it's programming doubt is that sounds complicated. That sounds like.

• 2:22:30Lex Fridman?

  Go wrong.

• 2:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:32Lex Fridman?

  So many ways.

• 2:22:33Speaker 01

  You can go wrong either way. If you're too confident, you won't see the other options. If you have too much doubt, you won't move. You'll be paralyzed by the options. So you need some middle ground, which I think is what most people experience every day is we all love the concept of being a steadfast, resolute leader, making big decisions quickly and without question. But at the same time, we know people can be blinded to things they're missing if they're if they're too headstrong. So.

• 2:22:58Lex Fridman?

  So how would you improve Hal in 9000?

• 2:23:00Speaker 01

  I think I would include other because Hal is one program, much like we do for humans, you get feedback from other humans before you make a decision that affects all of them. So I think Hal could have gotten feedback from other AI systems that said, well, is this are there other options here and done it probably very quickly. Are you giving, you know, embed a programming system where the AI has a primary function, but at times of uncertainty queries a series of other programmed AIs to ask for consensus almost, almost like a democracy of the AI. But since it's all programmed, you could bring it all together and say, there's a primary, but it only activates the parliament, if you will, for a decision when needed. Now, I don't know how you program dramatically different AIs all in one system that are different enough, but yeah, conceptually it's possible. Of course, that can lead to, you know, logjam and government and parliament

• 2:23:45Speaker 01

  doesn't do anything or Congress doesn't do anything. And so there's trade offs, but it's one idea.

• 2:23:52Lex Fridman?

  I, you know, I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. That I'm really, I find really compelling the idea. I'd love to set that up in my own life at some point is um. So you're stuck there on a spaceship. Yeah. With an AI system. And it's just the two of you and you have to figure it out. I love that. Challenge. I love that um. Almost a really. Deep human conflict. Of through conversation have to arrive at something you. You really try to understand what survival is a stake. You have to try to understand the other being. Now you think it's just a robot. We keep saying like it's just programmed to that. But you know what? When you talk to another human.

• 2:24:36Lex Fridman?

  It's just a bag of meat. And then, and then you disagree and you're like, you know, everybody. Starts using terms like how dumb can you be? How ignorant can you be? Yeah. Come on, this is the right way. What are you talking about? This is your, what you're talking about is insane. And when the stakes go up, when it's life and death. You have to convince another person. First, you have to understand another person. In this case, you have to understand. The other, the machine. Without knowing how it was programmed because. As a programmer, even, I mean, this is very much true for the, for these leg of robots. I really make sure that everything is that's programmed.

• 2:25:16Lex Fridman?

  Is sufficiently large and has a sufficient degree of uncertainty. Where I'm constantly surprised. I don't know how it works. I kind of know how it works, but I'm surprised constantly. And there, there's a human. Component of trying to figure each other out. And if it's high stakes. Life and death. Through conversation. I mean, to me, that's actually what makes a great companion out in space. It's like. You're both in charge of each other's life. And you both don't quite know. How each other works. And also, you don't treat each other as a servant. So I don't know how Hal was treated that way a little bit.

• 2:26:01Lex Fridman?

  Where you're like, yeah, like a servant as opposed to a friend, a companion, teammate, you know. Cause I think the worst part about treating an AI system or another human being as a servant is what it does to you.

• 2:26:18Speaker 01

  If you treat them as a means to an end rather than end in of itself, then you've debased them.

• 2:26:23Lex Fridman?

  And like lessen the humanity in yourself.

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the same time.

• 2:26:27Lex Fridman?

  Which is, which is, I mean, that's why they talked about kids have to be polite to Alexa. Because they find if they're, you know, if people are, if kids are rude to AI systems, they actually that.

• 2:26:40Speaker 01

  It's a bad sign, right?

• 2:26:41Lex Fridman?

  It's a bad sign and it develops the wrong thing in terms of how they treat other human beings. So that's AI. So what about physics? Can we do in terms of, can we travel close to the speed of light? Can we travel faster than the speed of light?

• 2:26:56Speaker 01

  I would love to fold space. We know wormholes are technically possible, but we have no way to do it. I'd love to see advancement wormhole technology. Anti-matter drives, antimatter is notoriously missing for most of the universe, so.

• 2:27:10Lex Fridman?

  What is antimatter drive?

• 2:27:12Speaker 01

  Anti-matter would be we just purify bits of antimatter. Basically, that was the opposite of matter. So if you can have an anti-electron, you can convert to the electron, you could have even the complete atoms that would be anti atoms. And when you put them together, there would be pure energy released in theory. And that could drive the most powerful possible engine for space travel. But we, you know, the only place you can make antimatter is in large particle accelerators and only very briefly. So that is hard, but if that could work, that would be extraordinary. Fusion drives would be great. Just getting nuclear fusion well controlled. And that would actually give you a pretty good propulsion. So I think that's the most likely thing we'll see is fusion drives. Fusion technology is getting better and better every year. Or it's that old saying, fusion is always 10 years away. Every year it's always 10 years away, but

• 2:27:57Speaker 01

  it's getting better. And I think.

• 2:27:58Lex Fridman?

  That saying is something that is a century old or less than a century old. Over multiple centuries, that saying might.

• 2:28:07Lex Fridman?

  Might actually become the future might actually become a reality for propulsion.

• 2:28:12Speaker 01

  So that would be, I think, very likely to see in the next few centuries. And then, and then biology was the other part, or anything else physics. I mean, physics, you could imagine ways that have electromagnetic shielding. So it could be, you could deflect all the cosmic rays that are coming at your spacecraft with a large, almost like force fields, quite frankly.

• 2:28:29Speaker 01

  That would take some development to do, but that would be good to see.

• 2:28:32Lex Fridman?

  And uploading human memories and consciousness into digital form.

• 2:28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, this kind of blends the machine and physics with the biology developments. And I think, you know, there's a lot of great work being done on longevity. I have a, one of my companies itself works on longevity. It's called one longevity. And so I'm working on myself on ways to improve how we monitor health and wellness now and live longer, live better. Many people are doing this, is what the whole purpose of medicine is to a large degree. But I don't think we'll live, in the book, I propose we might get, uh, do, lived 150 years. I think that's reasonable. But say humans are going to live to be two, three, four, 500 years or some people, I meet people like this every week. Cause I think I'm not going to die, to which I always say, I hope you're right. But I think you should plan that you're not going to be right. But I want people, also, as we mentioned earlier, like being immortal would really fundamentally change the social contract

• 2:29:24Speaker 01

  and how you plan and how you allocate resources, not necessarily bad, but it would just be different. But I also just think we don't know yet of any way to undo the ravages to the human body that occur over time. We can repair some of it, replace some of it, but you know, it's okay to assume that you're going to die. And I can just assume, know you're going to die, because then you have a bit of liberty about what you can do quickly and do next. The, uh, but, but I think we will get better. I think we could see people live potentially to 150 with some of the tools and methods and living longer.

• 2:29:57Lex Fridman?

  But upload, you know, living might.

• 2:30:00Speaker 01

  Living a brain, like in the Kurtzwell singularity, where we all have this rapture like moment. And we go up and upload into the cloud and live forever. I don't know if it would still be the same as what we consider the view of self in this flesh form. If we could really get a complete representation of a person's entire personality up into digital form. I mean, that would be immortality, basically.

• 2:30:23Lex Fridman?

  Or a loose representation. I'd go to the thought experiment of, I like thinking about clones.

• 2:30:33Lex Fridman?

  Like. Like twins, twins are clones, basically. Basically, but.

• 2:30:38Lex Fridman?

  Um, the ability to generate, I mean, you're stuck with those clones. The twins is a fixed number of clones, so that's a genetic clone. I mean, a philosophical clone where you can keep generating them. Versions. And then I, the reason I really like that construction, thinking about that, like for me personally is it nicely encapsulates how I feel about being human, because why do I matter? If I'm, how would I, if I do another copy of me? How would I defend? Uh, why I matter as a human being? And I don't think I can, because that clone is just fine. Not even a perfect, like a reasonable clone.

• 2:31:23Lex Fridman?

  Like, most people I know, um, that love me and who I love, they'll be just fine with the clone.

• 2:31:31Lex Fridman?

  They'd be like, and some, they'd be surprised, like, oh, you're like, your, your move kind of weird, but like overall. But otherwise, I'll take it. And if that's possible to do that kind of copying. And, and no, I don't want to say perfect clone, because I think perfect clone is very difficult engineering wise. I mean, like a pretty crappy copy. Would still be okay for. Just like wears suits a lot, has a weird way of talking. I mean, I think there's a lot of elements there, like, uh, you know, in the, in the digital space, especially with the metaverse. You can clone, I think, you know, in the next few decades, you'll be able to clone people's behavioral patterns pretty well.

• 2:32:13Lex Fridman?

  And visual, uh, is at least in the, in the virtual reality, in the digital representation, if you are. And then you have this really contender, it's like, why do I matter? Is maybe what matters isn't the individual person, but what matters are the ideas that that person plays with. So it doesn't matter if there's a thousand clones, what matters is that I'm currently thinking about X. So some kind of problem that I'm trying to solve and those ideas and I'm sharing those ideas. Maybe ideas of the organisms and not the, the meat vehicles of the organism. Maybe that's a cultural shift where we won't necessarily treat any one body as fundamentally.

• 2:32:55Lex Fridman?

  Unique or important, but the sort of the ideas that those bodies play with. I mean, that sounds crazy.

• 2:33:02Speaker 01

  No, it's abstract, but very relevant. Derek Parfeet wrote this great book called Reasons in Persons about how you really define an individual is not just your own thoughts and your own self-reflection, but we're almost, he argues, more defined by how other people see you. See, like, if you walked out into the world and say suddenly nobody knew who you were, recognized you, you'd be in some regards deceased, right? If no one, if everyone just suddenly had massive amnesia and you just didn't know who you are and never remember, no memory of anything you'd ever done together, you'd be very alone. You'd be basically, you know, starting from scratch, like as if you'd just been born, basically. So, and also he writes, thought experiments, like what if half of your neurons get replaced with half of someone else, or a quarter, or 60%? At what point do you stop being you and become the other person? And the argument he makes is it's more than just what percentage of your neurons are

• 2:33:48Speaker 01

  swapped out. It's also the relationships you have with so many people that partly define you. No, not completely, but they're a key component of how you view yourself, how they view you, what you are in the world. And, you know, and he actually goes so far to say that they're probably, you know, more important than even what's in your head. Like if you swap out, you know, all of your thoughts, but when you walk out into the world, everyone still treats you and talks to you the same way as this memory of what you are, that is still like an entity that's defined you, even if all of your, you know, there's even movies like Trading Spaces about this with Eddie Murphy, or like ideas of people who can swap bodies. The reason those are comedies is because they're fish out of water comedies and, but, but they go to the point of what defines you is not just you, but also your view.

• 2:34:26Lex Fridman?

  Well, you as an entity exists in the memories of other, of other beings. And so that, yeah, the, the entities as they exist in their form in those memories perhaps are more important to who you are than what's in your head. And that clones then.

• 2:34:46Lex Fridman?

  Are, um, how do they, do they lessen? Not really. They just distribute. They just scale the eunus that can be experienced by other humans.

• 2:34:56Speaker 01

  Like if I could be doing five podcasts right now at the same time, then theory, but I'd have to have some way to transmit the memory of each one I did, which would be hard, but not impossible if it's all digital. You could aggregate and accrete more and more of the memories into one entity.

• 2:35:10Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I see. But I thought at the, at the moment of cloning, it's like cloning a Git repository. Then you're no longer as branched. You share, you share the version V one of Chris that a lot of people have experienced, like your high school friends, college friends, colleagues and so on. But now you moved on to your music career and that one of your clones did. And then that, that's fundamentally new experiences that you, you still, your colleagues can still experience the memories of the old Chris. But the new one is totally, you're going to have new communities experiencing, connecting to those. And then you can just propagate. And the ones that are, don't get a lot of likes on social media, we can, we can like quietly dispose of.

• 2:35:55Lex Fridman?

  What, what maximizes the clones of Chris that can get a lot of likes on Facebook. Okay.

• 2:36:03Lex Fridman?

  On, on, just returning briefly to moment, uh, the topic of AI. Are you working on AI stuff too?

• 2:36:13Speaker 01

  A lot of machine learning tools for genomics.

• 2:36:15Lex Fridman?

  For genomics, because I, I was seeing this interspersed because you're such a biology. I mean, I suppose computational biology person. But what about the, are you working on age of prediction?

• 2:36:29Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, yeah. Like, so I, you, you've heard about the book, I guess. Yeah.

• 2:36:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What?

• 2:36:33Speaker 01

  That's actually written with the philanthropist I mentioned, who we named the fungus after the space station. So that's coming out, uh, next year, actually.

• 2:36:40Lex Fridman?

  What's the effort there? What's, what's your interest in, uh, sort of the more narrow AI tools of prediction and machine learning, all that kind of stuff?

• 2:36:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think called the age of prediction. So the next book that's coming is all the ways where machine learning tools predictive. Algorithms have fundamentally changed our life. So some of them are obvious to me where, for example, when we sequence cancer patients' DNA and we have predictions of exactly which drug will work with it, that's actually a very simple algorithm. But other ones involve predicting, say, the age of blood that's left at the scene of a crime, which uses computational tools to look at each piece of DNA and what it might reveal for its epigenetic state, and then predicting essentially how old you are at any given moment. And that also gets to longevity because sometimes you can see if you're getting, if you're aging faster or slower than you should be. So some tools are in medicine or even forensics. But my favorite part, a lot of the book is where does

• 2:37:33Speaker 01

  this show up in economics as well as in medicine? So predictive tools, I mean, I think the most notorious when people thought about during the 2012 election and 2016 election especially, we were seeing these really big differences of how Facebook was monitoring feeds. And so prediction is not just better medicine or in finance and economics. People think about stock traders, people doing predictive algorithms. But how you, what you view in your feed, how you, what your vote is and what you saw. Facebook did experiments. They called it social contagion experiments to see, can we restructure what people see and then how they respond, actually kind of be really predictive and manipulative, frankly, with what happens. And then can that change how they vote? And the answer seemed to be yes, for a good amount of the populace in 2016

• 2:38:17Speaker 01

  in the US. So I think we're seeing more and more of these algorithms show up all over the place. And so the book is about where they appear, where they're good. For example, in medicine, they're phenomenal. They have fundamentally changed how we treat cancer patients. But where they're risky, like if someone's trying to steal your vote or manipulate your thoughts potentially negatively. So in medicine, you're hopeful about prediction? Yeah, most of the AI in medicine, the machine learning tools for image recognition, for example, for pathology samples, where normally you think of, oh, someone takes a bit of a bit of tissue and then puts it onto a slide. Normally, there's pathologists that have been training for years to look at a chunk of your tissue and say, okay, is this cancer? What kind of cancer? What treatment should I do? But there's an old joke about pathologists that you can give 10 slides to 10 different

• 2:39:00Speaker 01

  pathologists and get 11 different diagnoses, which is as awful as it sounds, because you're having someone squint at a stained microscope slide. But instead, if you use a lot of the AI tools, where you can actually segment the image, high-resolution characterization with multiple probes, it's what AI was built to do. You have a large training data set, and then you have test samples afterward. You can do far better than almost every pathologist on the planet and get a much more accurate diagnostic. So that's for breast cancer, for prostate cancer, for leukemia. We've seen the diagnostic tools explode with AI power.

• 2:39:31Lex Fridman?

  Is it currently mostly empowering doctors? Or can it replace doctors?

• 2:39:36Speaker 01

  Watson, when notoriously was made by IBM to try and replace doctors.

• 2:39:40Lex Fridman?

  I love IBM so much.

• 2:39:42Speaker 01

  I was in the room when we got a tour of Watson for the first time with the dean of our medical school. And these programmers came out and they said, listen, here's this example of a patient, and watch Watson diagnose the patient and recommend the right treatment. And then at one point in the conversation, remember, this is a room of, I'm a PhD, it's like a geneticist, and programmers, some MDs, leaders of the medical school. The dean is there, and he says, you could imagine some data could replace doctors in a roomful of doctors, right? So it was a really poor choice of words, because everyone's like, no, you want to help the doctors. But I think the view from the programmers is often a bit naive, that they could fundamentally replace doctors. Now, in some cases, they can, for the pathology description I just mentioned. I think the AI tools already do a better job, and we've only really been doing this for about five years, right?

• 2:40:27Speaker 01

  So you imagine another five years of optimization and data, they're going to take over, right? And they should, because staring and squinting at screens for hours on day is not the best use of human ingenuity. So I think, in some cases, they'll take over. Other cases, they'll augment, they'll help.

• 2:40:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that human ingenuity, actually, especially for AI people, sometimes difficult to characterize. They have this debate all the time about autonomous driving. It's a lot more difficult than people realize.

• 2:40:52Speaker 01

  You're an expert on, or you focused a lot on that for your research, right?

• 2:40:55Lex Fridman?

  I'm an expert in nothing. Except in not being an expert, I think. Or asking stupid questions where the answer is both. Okay.

• 2:41:10Lex Fridman?

  But there is some ingenuity that's hard to kind of encapsulate that is human for a doctor, the decision making. It's the how nine thousand.

• 2:41:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:18Lex Fridman?

  You can have a perfect system that has able to know the optimal answer, but there's some human element that's missing. And sometimes the suboptimal answer in the long term is the right one. It's the self doubt that is essential for human progress. It's weird. I'm not, not sure what that is. If I can, let me ask you to be the wise old sage and give advice to young people today.

• 2:41:45Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:41:46Lex Fridman?

  In high school, in college, about how to have a career they can be proud of, or maybe a life they can be proud of on this planet or, or others.

• 2:41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think for the Padawans out there and young, younglings looking up at the stars, you have to know that this day that you're alive is quantifiably the best day that's ever happened. And that tomorrow will be even better than this day in terms of the capacity for discovery, the amount of data that exists. Again, it's not my opinion. That's just an empirical fact of the state of genetics, research, knowledge, accretion of humanities, acumen for many disciplines. So with that ability to do so many things, it can be sometimes just terrifying. Well, what do I pick? If I could do everything and this is the most possibility ever in human history, how do you pick one thing to do? And that's just the thing, what do you find yourself daydreaming about?

• 2:42:42Speaker 01

  What's the thing that you, what keeps you up at night? And if you don't have anything that keeps you up at night, sometimes you go find something that keeps you up at night. Cause that, that is kind of this, sometimes I feel like if I'm, I get woken up by the someone on the inside of my skull who's knocking, trying to get out. It's kind of that almost haunting feeling of I need to wake up. There's things that have to be done. There are questions I, I don't know the answer to. And there's a lot of times it's simple as how do we engineer cells to survive more radiation? But what I, I read a paper and then it came back to me a week later as hell. Well, we could use some of these tools or these genes or these methods. Really, you know, being pleasantly haunted by something is a wonderful place to be and, and find that thing that, that bothers you because there'll be good days and there'll be bad days. But you want to have, even on the worst possible days, working on the thing that you love the most.

• 2:43:27Speaker 01

  And, and then all the usual, you know, normal phrases apply. Like then you, you never work a day in your life if you have a job you love, the usual phrases. But, but it's true and it, and it's actually really hard to find. I think a lot of times. You'll have to do work for random jobs that maybe you don't like for five or even 10 years, right? Or you might have to go to school for 10 to 15 to 20 years to finally get to the right spot where you have the knowledge, the experience, and even frankly, just reputation that people trust you. You've done enough good work. And only then can you really do the thing you love most. But so you have to be a little bit patient, be a little bit patient and impatient at the same time. You have to do both.

• 2:44:02Lex Fridman?

  And the interesting thing is, when you're trying to find that, that thing that, that excites you, you have to, especially in this modern world, I think, silence the distractions. Cause um, once you find that thing, you hear it, that little voice in your head, there's still Instagram and TikTok and video games and other exciting sort of dopamine rushes that can like pull you away and make it seem like they're the same thing, but they're not really. There's some little flame there that, um, that's longer lasting. And I, I think you have to silence

• 2:44:43Lex Fridman?

  everything else to let that sort of flame become a fire. Um, so it's, it's interesting because so much of the internet is designed to, uh, convert that natural predisposition that humans have to get excited about stuff, convert that into like attention and money and ads and so on. But like, we have to be conscious of that. I think a lot of that is full of fun and is awesome. I think TikTok and Instagram, that's full of fun.

• 2:45:13Speaker 01

  Amazing, yeah. And creativity leads to people making amazing videos or even doing people, my daughter loves TikTok and, you know, people who do makeup art on TikTok of things that are mind blowing. You think they, they made that video just to put it on TikTok and practice their art and share it with the world. It's fabulous. But, but then if my daughter watches TikTok for like three hours straight, I'm like, what are you doing exactly? And she's like, well, you know, so, so it's hard. Cause but I mean, when I was a kid, I remember I played Nintendo. I sometimes would play for like 10 hours a day, even in grad school, I'd sometimes play like Counter-Strike or Half-Life. Like 12 hours straight. And I'm like, what was I did? So I, at one point, I built a new computer. I just didn't install some of the games I had on for. I was like, I'm just gonna not install them because otherwise I'll play them for too long.

• 2:45:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I would love to.

• 2:45:56Lex Fridman?

  I get props from the team. I would love to lay out all the things I've ever done in my life to myself. Cause I think I would be less judgmental of others and less understanding, more patient. Because the amount of hours I spent playing like Diablo and like video, like is insane.

• 2:46:17Speaker 01

  I'm sure it adds up to like weeks, maybe months of my life that was just, you know. But I feel like I was probably, I tell myself at least I was problem solving.

• 2:46:25Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:46:25Speaker 01

  It could say hand eye coordination, or that's an old, I don't know if that really is even remotely true. But some of the games like Final Fantasy things are things we actually had to solve problems and think. And they were some degree of strategy, but.

• 2:46:35Lex Fridman?

  They were actually just expanding the diversity of human character that makes up you. It's like, you can't just focus on, not you can't, but perhaps it's more beneficial to focus, to not focus on a singular thing for many, many years at a time. That could be one of the downsides of a PhD, if you're not careful, is that you become too singularly focused, not just on the problem, but on a particular community. And you don't do wild stuff. You don't do interdisciplinary stuff. You don't go out painting or getting drunk or dancing, whatever the variety, whatever injects variety to the, to the years of difficult reading, research paper after research paper,

• 2:47:20Lex Fridman?

  that whole process. You have to be very careful to add variety into it. And maybe that involves playing a little bit of Counter Strike or Diablo, whatever floats your boat.

• 2:47:30Speaker 01

  Or dancing. Well, New York City is a great place for this. There's, there's sunrise rooftop dancing, a party that does this and.

• 2:47:36Lex Fridman?

  That's a thing?

• 2:47:36Speaker 01

  It's a thing. So you go there, ask some people from my lab that go, I've only been once, but like at sunrise, and you see the sun rise over the city and there's huge house music and you play and you dance like crazy. And then you go to work, you know, you go to lab, you go to wherever you go. But you can, it's good to squeeze in some weird, crazy sunrise rooftop dancing or things like that when you can.

• 2:47:56Lex Fridman?

  If we can, if we may, to uh, to some difficult, dark places.

• 2:48:01Speaker 01

  I'll bring a flashlight.

• 2:48:04Lex Fridman?

  Maybe something, um, find something that can warm your soul or inspires others. Is there dark periods, dark times in your life that you had to overcome?

• 2:48:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, like many people, uh, had friends I've lost, had a friend when I was younger who committed suicide. And that was actually, um, I remember being so struck of, I couldn't understand it. I didn't, uh, understand mental illness at the time. I was very young. I was only, I think, 11 at the time. And I really was confused more than anything else about how, how could someone take their life. And actually, yeah, once I got over sort of the, the grief of it all, I really, it cemented in my head that I would, you know, never commit suicide. I could tell this to my wife, it's like, you know, it's like, if it looks like I hung myself, go find my killer. Cause I would never do it.

• 2:48:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:50Speaker 01

  It's gotta be staged and, you know, but at the same time, I've begun to appreciate there are times where the suffering is so great and diseases can be so awful that, um, sometimes, you know, euthanasia, it is a, as an actual exit, but I, uh, just have friends I've lost along the way or, or, um,

• 2:49:07Speaker 01

  but, but that's not too different. Everyone has people they've lost along the way, but I actually, um, was never, never too dark of a childhood or of a dark place. I mean, the, the hardest things have been really weird relationship breakups where I felt like, you know, love, falling in love and then losing that person, just breaking up, not like they died, but where you felt like, you know, you just could barely move and like you literally felt like your heart was moved in your body to a different location. And, uh, that sort of scraping sense of existence of, but, but also at the same time, that's been where I've in some ways been the most alive, where I lost the, what I thought at the time was the love of my life. And, but then, uh, was able to actually, I think carve a deeper trench into my heart,

• 2:49:52Speaker 01

  which then could be filled more with joy, I would, I would say is what, uh, Pablo Neruda wrote about this and Khalil Gibran, is that the deepest, deepest sorrows, I think later have translated into my life as to places that can be filled with greater amounts of joy.

• 2:50:05Lex Fridman?

  I love thinking of sorrows as a digging of a ditch that can then be filled with more good stuff.

• 2:50:12Speaker 01

  Eventually. Not at the time, but for a while it's just a giant, empty cavern full of like blood and tears and pain, but then it comes later.

• 2:50:20Lex Fridman?

  There is an element to life where this too shall pass.

• 2:50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:24Lex Fridman?

  So any moment of sorrow or joy, it's gonna be over and like,

• 2:50:33Lex Fridman?

  treasure it no matter what. I mean, I do definitely think about losing love. That's like a celebration of love in.

• 2:50:42Speaker 01

  And even like any like any living, I think is better. That's why I just adamantly, I don't think I'd ever really commit suicide because anything I take is better than than nothing. Like so the worst kiss scenario, so there's no heaven, there's no hell. That's just it. Like if you just die and that's really just it, then anything that you have in living is by definition infinitely better than the zero. Because it's at least it's something. And so I appreciate sad. I mean, enjoy sadness, which sounds like an oxymoron, but I sometimes even long for a good sadness, like a, you know, like a rainy day and I'm staring out a window squinting and like drinking some underpriced whiskey and then, you know, and, and just moping and like, what are you doing? Like, I'm just moping today. And I just, but I want at least one day where I do that or something.

• 2:51:24Lex Fridman?

  I actually had a conversation offline with Rick Rubin. He's a music producer about this and he's, he told me, um, he has a way of speaking that's old like sage like, and he says, be careful that you, um, spend some time appreciating that sadness, but don't become addicted.

• 2:51:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:51:48Lex Fridman?

  That, that there's a line you can cross and then you actually push away the joy.

• 2:51:55Speaker 01

  Because you feel like the sad, because the sadness can be all encompassing and therefore even more real than what might seem like fleeting happiness.

• 2:52:02Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:52:02Speaker 01

  And so, yeah.

• 2:52:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, right. You can sadness, if, if you let it can be a thing that stays with you longer and stickier, but you, um, but just witnessing suicide made you appreciate.

• 2:52:17Speaker 01

  Life more, yeah. And just an appreciation of death is actually an appreciation of life at the same time.

• 2:52:23Lex Fridman?

  Are you afraid of your death?

• 2:52:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:52:26Lex Fridman?

  You think about it?

• 2:52:28Speaker 01

  I think it's, it's like being afraid of the sunrise. It's, it's, it doesn't make sense.

• 2:52:34Lex Fridman?

  So you're, you're a part of this like fabric that is humanity and then you're just. Think generationally.

• 2:52:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I want to do as much as I can. I'll, I feel like I would die. I feel like I've lived a full life already. I actually believe that since age seventeen onward, I feel like even then, I mean, then the bar was low. I feel like, well, I'd had at least sex once. I had had good friends.

• 2:52:57Lex Fridman?

  What else is there?

• 2:52:59Speaker 01

  Right at that age. But then I had also really read a lot of philosophy, had traveled a bit, felt like I'd started to at least see the world and had lived somewhat of a life. But that, from then on, I felt like, that I wouldn't feel like I was cheated if I had died from that day forward, that I had gotten at least enough of life to feel like that I wouldn't, I would be not okay with dying, but that I feel like I, I knew I was gonna die. I wasn't afraid I was going to die. And it actually was very liberating. And it's only gotten better since then. And so I think, you know, some of that might, may or may not have been drug-related euphoria, but nonetheless, the joy stuck. And I think it was, it's just gotten more true ever since is that

• 2:53:38Speaker 01

  the, the default state is one of very rich appreciation because it's, it's so fleeting. And so, any, I know I would die, I knew I would die happy, I guess, even at age seventeen. But now my, my metrics have changed a little bit. It's not, I've had sex more than one time now. So that's really big.

• 2:53:55Lex Fridman?

  Congratulations. This is very exciting news.

• 2:53:57Speaker 01

  At least four times. But

• 2:54:00Lex Fridman?

  Multiples.

• 2:54:01Speaker 01

  And, and professionally accomplished things, like I could actually do some of the genetic dreams I had when I was sixteen or seventeen. I'm now actually making them in my lab. I actually like to say, my, my scientific goals and statements have really been the same since I've been seventeen. It's just now everyone takes me seriously because I'm a professor and actually I've done

• 2:54:19Lex Fridman?

  And you're mentoring people, you're educating

• 2:54:21Speaker 01

  To the next generation, yeah.

• 2:54:22Lex Fridman?

  Also, patients.

• 2:54:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and helping patients live longer and seeing the hope in their eyes when they went from a, even my own grandfather went from a two-month diagnosis of, of living from metastatic cancer to living for more than two years, eventually succumb to it, but knowing can use the tools of predictive medicine to save people. Yeah. And so now, you know, looking ahead. I'd feel like it's, I would die very happy if I saw boots on the red planet and people there. And the other advice to the younglings, I'd say is, the first time I proposed the twin study to NASA, they said, no, several times, no, we don't, we're not have a plan for a mission like that. It's not going to happen. So don't, you know, just persevere as the old.

• 2:55:03Lex Fridman?

  You were, I didn't know, I knew you were part of leading the NASA twin study, but you were also part of the failure to do so early.

• 2:55:11Speaker 01

  Early, so the first, actually, because when you start a lab in academia, they say, here's a pile of money.

• 2:55:15Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:55:15Speaker 01

  Write grants and bring in more money and train people and start a lab. But, so I actually wrote NASA and said, I don't, I'm not requesting any funds. I have funds, they just gave me a bunch of money. I would like to, though, do a deep genetic profile of astronauts before and after spaceflight. And do it ideally if we have some twins or do genetics and epigenetics and microbiome. But John Charles, who's the director of the Human Research Programs, said, no, we don't have, we don't even have those samples bank that you would want to, for the, that are old samples. And we don't have any plans for missions like that right now. So we can't do it. And that was the first time I, you know, it's like, it's like saying to someone at, listen, I'll, I'll buy a house for you. I just have this, I'll buy, and they're like, no, no thanks. Because it felt like I was offering a really unique research opportunity. But then that, you know, failure of saying that we're not ready yet, it's not time.

• 2:55:58Speaker 01

  But then, once they had this solicitation, then he reached out and said, oh, actually, I think we've got something along the lines of what you were thinking a few years ago. So sometimes when some things get rejected, or someone says no, say, okay, maybe it's just too early. But don't, don't give up, I think it's a, you know, so to me, when someone says, no, not right now, I'll be like, okay, I'll just, I'll come back in a year. No, just means no for now. And so if I think it's, sometimes no means you have a crappy idea. That is true. Again, I do have crappy ideas and so does everybody. But if I really believe in it, I just say, okay, I'll, I'll be back.

• 2:56:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, this too shall pass, the no.

• 2:56:38Lex Fridman?

  Do you hope to go out to ISS, out to deep space one day?

• 2:56:44Speaker 01

  I would love to go. I want to be a little bit older so that if I die, it's not as traumatic for my daughter and family. But yeah, I feel like if I'm a little bit older, definitely. I would even potentially do a one-way trip to Mars if it's later in life.

• 2:56:57Lex Fridman?

  So would you like to, do you think you will step foot on Mars?

• 2:57:03Speaker 01

  I would love to, and I think I might. I think the.

• 2:57:08Speaker 01

  It may be that one way trip if they, because I think they'll need settlers who would want to go and stay there and build and be there for the long term, knowing it's high risk, knowing it's.

• 2:57:16Lex Fridman?

  And your resume fits, so you'll have a lot of cool stuff to do there.

• 2:57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:21Lex Fridman?

  At least on the surface, you'll be able to sell yourself well. Um, resilience, experience, motivation.

• 2:57:31Lex Fridman?

  Would that make you sad to die on Mars?

• 2:57:33Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:57:34Lex Fridman?

  Looking back at the planet you were born on?

• 2:57:36Speaker 01

  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 their reach into the stars. It'd be an honor.

• 2:57:47Lex Fridman?

  Why do you think we're here? What's the meaning of life?

• 2:57:50Speaker 01

  To serve as the guardians of life itself. That is a, the, the duty for our species is, is to recognize and really manifest this unique responsibility that we have and only we have so far. So I, I think, yeah, to me, the, the meaning of life is for life to, in its simplest form is to be able to survive, but to, to, to leverage the frailty of life into its ability to protect itself. And quite literally, the guardians of the galaxy is basically what we are. We're regarding, we're guarding ourselves and also life. I mean, life is just so precious. As far as we know, it is completely rare in the universe. And I do think a lot, well, what if it, what if this is the only universe that's ever come in and it won't come back again?

• 2:58:32Speaker 01

  And like, this is it. And if that's true, we have to serve as shepherds.

• 2:58:37Lex Fridman?

  Leverage the frailty of life to protect it. And this is all life. So we get the opportunity, we humans get the opportunity to be smart enough, to be clever enough, to be motivated enough to actually protect the other life that's on this.

• 2:58:51Speaker 01

  Including AI, including life that's to come, that might be very different from what we imagine today.

• 2:58:55Lex Fridman?

  And that would make you sad if we were replaced by the kinder, uh, the kinder, smarter AI?

• 2:59:00Speaker 01

  No, I think about that in the book a bit of that. I think I, I would be okay with it if they carry some echo of that duty and they bring that with them. Uh, it would be real, I'd be sad if they're like, to hell with everyone, we're going to destroy everything we come across and become like nanobots that make everything gray goo. That seems, but that would still be a version of life, just not one that is, as I think is pretty, but technically it'd be alive. So like, you know, philosophically, could I object? It's borderline.

• 2:59:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but romantically, no.

• 2:59:31Speaker 01

  Romantically.

• 2:59:32Lex Fridman?

  They need to carry the duty.

• 2:59:34Speaker 01

  There's some, yes, yes, there's a bit of a romance to the philosophy that's in there.

• 2:59:38Lex Fridman?

  And you also end the book with a universe that creates new universes.

• 2:59:48Lex Fridman?

  So if this isn't the only universe, do you think that's in our future? That we might launch?

• 2:59:54Speaker 01

  New universe.

• 2:59:55Lex Fridman?

  New offspring universes.

• 2:59:56Speaker 01

  It's very possible. I mean, multiverse is a controversial field because it's very much hypothetical. But with this universe has been created, the one we're in now. And so it's happened before, it certainly could happen again. Some of them might be happening in parallel. I, I think, you know, if you look at billions of years, trillions of years in the future of technological development, certainly possible, we could start to have little baby universes, grow them like cabbage. Get them out, saute them, make them have flavor.

• 3:00:24Lex Fridman?

  Ah, yeah, create something delicious. Well, it sounds difficult, but it's our human duty to try. As you said, Chris, this is an incredible conversation. You're an incredible person, a scientist, explorer. I can't wait to see what you do in this world. And I hope to be there with you on Mars. I would like to also breathe my last breath on that sexy red planet. That's our neighbor.

• 3:00:52Speaker 01

  Podcast from Mars, at least space, I think space should be coming.

• 3:00:55Lex Fridman?

  Space is pretty good, space is pretty good. But Mars next. Chris, thanks so much for talking today.

• 3:01:00Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. It's really an honor and a pleasure to be here. Thanks.

• 3:01:04Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Chris Mason. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Stanislav Lem and Solaris. Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.