The Right Stuff with Astronaut Scott Kelly and Dr. Chris Mason

What does it take to be an astronaut? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gary O’Reilly, and Chuck Nice break down the physical effects of being in space and the results of the astronaut twins study with guests astronaut Scott Kelly and biophysicist Chris Mason.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition, the right stuff. Yeah, yeah, I said it, the right stuff. That's what we're gonna explore today. And I got with me, of course, my co-host Chuck Nice, Jack. Hey Neil, what's happening? Stand-up comedian. And I got Gary O'Reilly. Hey Neil, nice to be here again. Okay, I have to tell in more than one of these episodes that we've got a cool Wiki, there's a Wiki page on you out there that I just stumbled on and you're looking good, I just wanna say. All right, must be breathing in. Is that what it takes? It is, yeah.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, today's topic, the right stuff. You generally heard that applied to astronauts and in fact, we have a real live, authentic astronaut on this show. Because we want to explore what commonalities there might be for training to go into space and how that might impact the future of training for athletics. Just basically understanding what the human body is capable of. And who is that astronaut? But the one and only Scott Kelly. Scott, he's an old friend. Scott, welcome, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Neil.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you don't know who Scott Kelly is, he's one of a twin and the one twin went into space, this twin, and the other twin stayed on Earth. And the other one went, and the other one went to market.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Also known as the US Senate.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good, very good. So you're retired, now retired astronaut, engineer, naval aviator, I got the whole list here. You commanded the International Space Station and you recorded a full year in space and that was consecutive, right? Not just in bits and pieces. And you, you wrote a book, A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery. I like that. And let me name tag your brother, his name is Mark, Mark Kelly, and a current US Senator from Arizona.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  John McCain's state, Arizona.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  John McCain's old seat, actually.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His actual seat. His actual seat.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  He's actually sitting at John McCain's desk.

• 2:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dang. Pretty wild. Did he drink in the beer that he had in the fridge?

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Scott, how did you prepare on Earth to go into space?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Well, there's a lot of preparation. I think more you're focused on the physical part of it, since this is, you know, how does this relate to sports? You know, we just keep active, keep healthy. The astronaut office has a workout facility with really good trainers to instruct us. They also teach us how to use all the exercise equipment, which, the equipment that we're going to use in space, which is pretty important, because it's somewhat complicated and takes some good technique to use.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  But, you know, mostly for spaceflight, what we're, you know, our pre-flight preparation with regard, you know, physical activity is more just about staying healthy and being able to do the job, you know, which means being in space for a long time and the stressors that puts on your body, and also to do spacewalks, which is a pretty challenging thing to do.

• 3:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So can you compare what we all saw in the movie, The Right Stuff, with whatever you might have gone through? Because the original Mercury Seven, it looked like, no, I don't want to go through that.

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, with the centrifuge and the survival and this, and, and, so how, how soft are you compared with the original Seven?

• 4:00Speaker 01

  I'm not sure. You know, I'm a little older than they were when they, they started, not older than they are now, of course, because that was very much before my time. But, you know, regarding the book, The Right Stuff, the movie, you mentioned the movie, I think I maybe, maybe saw it once, it's really the right, the book was much more significant part of my life, or really was what's inspired me to become a better student and to go on and fly in the Navy and then later at NASA. So, yeah, the type of stuff you saw in the movie and that's related well in the book, a lot of that stuff is the astronaut selection part, you know, some of the uncomfortableness of it. And, yeah, we have to go through that. You know, the different, you know, exams you have to go through from, you know...

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Just a very thorough like, you know, eye examination to make sure your vision's good, which in some ways is a little bit uncomfortable, believe it or not, all the way, you know, through your gastrointestinal system, you know, cardiovascularly, all that stuff. They test us for claustrophobia.

• 5:02Chuck Nice?

  And how do they do that?

• 5:05Speaker 01

  They put you in a rubber bag, you know, you kind of crawl up into a ball, this like thick rubber bag with a very hairy, heavy zipper. They put electrodes on you and push you into a closet and don't tell you how long you're gonna be there. So if you have claustrophobia.

• 5:23Chuck Nice?

  I want to scream right now.

• 5:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just listening to that.

• 5:26Chuck Nice?

  Just listening to that, I feel like, I feel like calling for help for some reason right now.

• 5:31Gary O'Reilly?

  And they told you that was a test? That just sounds like, that just sounds like a bunch of bullies playing a prank on you.

• 5:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's after they gave you the wedgies. That would actually happen there, Scott.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Well, you wouldn't want to have claustrophobia and get into a space suit and figure it out when you're doing a spacewalk.

• 5:51Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I was gonna say, you know, when you're in low Earth orbit, it might be a little late to figure that out. Hey, guys, guys, can we, somebody get me down?

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know several astronauts were, were previous athletes, like Buzz Aldrin. I knew he was a track and field athlete, even did the, the pole vault, I think it was. So did you do any sports when you were in college?

• 6:17Speaker 01

  I was a pole vaulter in, in high school, not a very good one. I was the captain of my swim team. I'm a decent swimmer, but I shouldn't have been the captain. It's just our team was so bad.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Scott, you, you won the pole vault contest because you ended up in space. So you sailed over every height.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Everyone on the team, including my brother, who was also a pole vaulter. And the reason I sailed over him is because I went on one of those Hubble missions, which is much higher than he ever went.

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it's a higher orbit than the space station. That's right. That's right. But 100 miles or so, I think.

• 6:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Ah, sibling rivalry.

• 6:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Scott, I'm interested because going into space for a year, and we know, and I'll hold my hand up, astronauts are elite athletes. You've got amazing cognitive skills, high IQ and strength and conditioning that is as good as anything you find on an NFL field or anywhere else for that matter.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Except for curling.

• 7:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, well, they're just, Chuck, you've gone to the top of Mount Olympus there. Really? But we're going to be speaking to Dr. Mason a little bit later on in this podcast. So, you know, stick around for that, please, all our listeners. He said to us that you said when you were in space, it felt like your bones were melting. And to back that up, the blood work and the urine samples proved that you were draining calcium. Now, we're all told about athletes who can feel and intuitively know their own body. How did you come to that conclusion?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  I never said that.

• 7:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, busted.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  That my bones were melting. And I doubt very much that Dr. Mason said that either.

• 8:03Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Certainly, we lose a lot of bone mass in space, you know, 1% a month if you didn't do anything to prevent it. But we do, fortunately, we do a lot of exercise, resistive exercise specifically helps with that. And I did lose some bone mass. And, you know, that does show up in your urine samples. Our bodies are really smart. You know, we evolved in gravity and once you get to space, your physiology recognizes there's no more gravity, no more need for a skeleton to support it. So it starts getting rid of that stuff.

• 8:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're on route to just becoming a pile of ectoplasm up there?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Like Gumby. You're like Gumby, maybe.

• 8:45Gary O'Reilly?

  So.

• 8:48Gary O'Reilly?

  So while all of this is going on in your body and your bodies, is there a point like when people we speak to who go to on vegan diet say it takes a couple of weeks and then they kind of feel the whole thing working for them. Is it the same situation for a human body in space where you go over this bump in the road and after that you feel comfortable with things?

• 9:10Speaker 01

  You know, there's all different levels of adaptation. You know, on a short term flight, on a space shuttle, the process really goes, exists for, you know, it's like a few days where you might no longer be nauseous and you kind of feel, you still don't feel great, but you feel good enough to do your job and then you come home. On a long duration flight, I found the milestones to be more like, you know, one at about a month in space and then where you can now kind of, you know, move around very efficiently, you can think pretty clearly, you know, your head isn't as swollen as it is when you first get up there because, you

• 9:51Speaker 01

  know, our cardiovascular system, again, evolved to push blood against gravity and without that your head gets swollen. But I would say over the course of me being there for an entire year, I always felt better in every way, but I never felt like I was on Earth. You know, I always felt that my head was a little swollen, my sinuses were a little congested because of that. I always had, you know, like, most of the time a low grade headache because of the carbon dioxide, but, you know, I think maybe there is a, maybe there is a point out there, some kind of inflection point where if you stay in space long enough, you, you know, you do feel like you're on Earth, perhaps.

• 10:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rather, you feel like you're someplace else and then when you go to Earth, Earth becomes completely weird, right? If you just completely physiologically adapt to where you are, then Earth becomes the outlier.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, gravity can give you a pretty good beat down upon return.

• 10:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. So speaking of the change and adaptation, so I read that

• 10:57Chuck Nice?

  When you returned upon inspection, when they got under the hood to see what was going on with your DNA, that 7% of your DNA actually saw some change. Now, I guess subsequently hasn't returned to its regular state, or what happened with that, that 7%? And what exactly was the change? Did we find out exactly what the change was?

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Chuck, we know that it didn't make them regrow hair. That was a change that did not happen. Ooh.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Which is great. You know why? Because this is like the perfect hair for space. I hope to go back someday. But actually, you know, what changed for me was my DNA, but also RNA and proteins. So what changed was 7% of my gene expression.

• 11:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  And gene expression is whether these things, if you think of them as a switch, they're turned on and off, or on or off. And that expression controls, you know, our physiology, how our bodies react to things, how they behave. This would be a better question for Chris Mason, but in my case, 7% of that changed over the course of the year. Now granted, you know, all of us are probably changing a little bit all the time, but I think this was more interesting because how it changed compared to my brother. With him on Earth, 7% of mine changed relative to him, I think, more so over the course

• 12:32Speaker 01

  of that year. And then what is the implication, what are the implications of that for future space travelers and also myself for my health going forward? And, you know, hopefully I'll never find out.

• 12:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Didn't they say that your chromosomes actually got longer? And here I am, so advanced in my medical training, but that actually made you younger?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  So what you're referring to is my telomeres, these like end caps on our chromosomes. And as we age, you know, cells divide, those get shorter and more frayed. So your telomeres are really an indication of your physical age. And the hypothesis was me being in space, all this radiation, the microgravity environment, the stress, you know, all these different factors would work together against my chromosomes to shorten them as compared to my brother.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  And surprisingly, we found out that they actually improved. Now, initially, we thought, well, maybe that's due to the exercise. We do a ton of exercise on board. Maybe the diet, which is, you know, different than a terrestrial diet. It's more controlled by dietists. Maybe that was helpful. So that's what they actually thought at first. But then, I don't know, it was six months or a year after I got back from space. We learned that the Japanese had this experiment on telomeres on the space station at the same time I was there, on these small worms. And their telomeres got better. And I never once saw those guys working out on the treadmill or the bicycle or anything. So there's clearly more to this than meets the eye.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Scott. How many dangling variables were between you and Mark? So, for example, did they make Mark eat the same food you did? Did he exercise at the same times you did? So that you have localized the effect of being in space as the only difference between the two of you? Or was he partying and drinking and?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  So.

• 14:28Gary O'Reilly?

  We're going with the latter, aren't we?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  As a scientist, Neil, I think everyone realizes that, including yourself, clearly that, you know, the way you would normally do a scientific experiment is to control a lot of these external factors and variables and focus on, you know, like the one thing you're trying to investigate. So all things, you know, are basically equal. We actually talked about maybe my brother following the same diet, maybe following the same exercise protocol. But, you know, he had his own life. He traveled. He had to do work in different parts of the country. It really wasn't practical. So, you know, it's an experiment that involves some interesting information. It's more of a, you know, a longitudinal kind of experiment, you know, comparing me

• 15:17Speaker 01

  to my brother over a long period of time and other astronauts and not something where you're looking at a very specific, controlled, very large sample group as, you know, what you're comparing this me as the, you know, scientific subject to.

• 15:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because if you did, if you were to do that perfectly, you would lock him into a vessel the size of your space station module for a year as well. I mean, so that there'd be, the only difference is your zero G above Earth's atmosphere.

• 15:47Gary O'Reilly?

  That'd be the plastic fact.

• 15:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that, Gary?

• 15:51Gary O'Reilly?

  That would be the plastic bag scenario that Scott went through for claustrophobia. Lock him in the cupboard for a year. Okay, the one thing we get asked all the time, and Neil is brilliant with these sort of answers, is what if we did this sport on this planet? Right, and I think we're talking to one of the few people who has come as close to anybody as doing sport off-world. Even if it's exercise or two straws and a bead of water. So it's, what did you think you could achieve in terms of sport whilst you were in space for a year?

• 16:29Speaker 01

  You know, I think you would have to design a sport specifically for microgravity. It would be hard to translate, you know, sports that are conducted under gravity to microgravity and have them work the same way. Certainly, you know, we try things in space for fun. I had a football up there and one time, it took me a few months, but I was able to throw it from the front of the space station, node two, all the way into the service module of the Russian segment, which is probably, I don't know, like, maybe several hundred feet away. And there was about that much space to get it through. Took me months. But as far as, I don't know, maybe you could have wrestling.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  That would be pretty interesting.

• 17:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Neil, you're in.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Wrestling in space. I don't know how you would pin somebody, though.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I think you're right. You have to sort of start from scratch and say, what are some zero-G athletic feats that we would? Because, you know, faster, higher, stronger, whatever is the Olympic motto. They'd have to even adjust that, adjust it, because strength, I don't know, takes on a different meaning in space. Because any force will send something into motion. And so, okay, so maybe that's a book I think you should write.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll tell you what, though. I think the thing that would be competitive.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Would be how you're able to very precisely maneuver your body around in zero gravity. Because, you know, over the course, the longer you're there, the better you get at it. And that's really a skill to learn. So there could be certain things like, you know, um, just being able to, you know, do like a flip in, in the middle of the module and see who can do it the longest without actually hitting anything. That would be, you could time that and that would be a good competition.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without accidentally hitting the, the red eject button.

• 18:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Space gymnastics.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space gymnastics, because everything they do on the, the floor exercises and things, you just do in space and you don't even have to touch back down. That, I like that.

• 18:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and how about synchronized swimming? If they had some swimming pool that was just a big blob of water.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you sort of enter the blob of water and then you can have cameras from all directions. That'd be interesting too.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  You'd probably drown.

• 19:00Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Be a short competition.

• 19:02Gary O'Reilly?

  We, we've spoken a lot about the physical version of you. How about the mental version of you? Because I'm told that you took a gorilla suit into space. Is that another, is that another, you did, I'm being told a whole load of this.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Now, my brother sent me a gorilla suit, but I did not take it. I actually said, why are you sending me a gorilla suit? And he said, well, there's never been a gorilla suit in space, so I'm sending you one and you have no control over it.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They gotta take a blurry photo of you and then it would be like Bigfoot is in space, you know?

• 19:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Wouldn't that be cool? I'm, these stories are getting lost in translation. It's strange.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who are you, are you talking to the National Enquirer, Gary?

• 19:46Gary O'Reilly?

  I, I cannot divulge my sources. You know the rules on this, Chuck.

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So guys, we gotta, we gotta take this break. But Scott Kelly's book is A Year in Space: A Lifetime of Discovery. Definitely check it out. And when we come back, we're going to introduce Christopher Mason. He's the medical doctor who conducted the experiments on Scott while he was in space for a year. And it's his test that gives us this glimpse into the effect of human spaceflight on human genetics. So stay with us.

• 20:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition. Building the right stuff. We just came out of a segment with one of the Kelly Twins, who's been in space for a year. And we found out that a lot of medical experiments were conducted, trying to find out how his body compared with his twin, Mark, who he left here on Earth. And we've got right now, the doctor who analyzed him, Dr. Christopher Mason. Chris, welcome to StarTalk.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 21:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, let me get your, your, your title straight here. Associate Professor and Director, the World Quant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction. Did I get that right?

• 21:30Speaker 04

  That's right. It's all there. Yep.

• 21:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and you, and you specialize in physiology and biophysics, one of my favorite fields. If I were not an astrophysicist, I'd be a biophysicist. So I'm totally with you on that. And what is the, the file family of Brain and Mind Institute? What is that?

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Basically, looking at cognitive traits in general for when you do large scale studies, including like with astronauts, but then also looking for genes that are responsible for how the brain develops or responds to stress. So looking at diseases that run in families. Yeah.

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Very interesting. And also the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at the Wild Cornell, at Wild Cornell Hospital?

• 22:07Speaker 04

  Medicine.

• 22:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Medicine. Okay. Excellent. You're the right guy for this.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  I'm just a curious geneticist.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have to let people know. That you came 15 minutes late to this interview because you were like talking to the CDC and there's no excuse. Who raised you? All right. Where are your manners here?

• 22:28Speaker 04

  Just a few mutated viruses floating around the population.

• 22:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A few mutated COVID viruses, that's not an excuse. All right. So, your, the words associated with your profession, I got one here, ep transcription, meg, metagenome, transcriptome, epigenome. What is, what is all that?

• 22:52Chuck Nice?

  By a aqua Doolub, alpha, disco, psycho, beta.

• 22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was an old timer joke right there Chuck. Oh man.

• 23:01Chuck Nice?

  Just gotta love some Parliament fucking Delic.

• 23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Parliament fucking Delic. So Chris, what is, what is all that?

• 23:06Speaker 04

  Happy to clarify. So it is every layer of biology being studied sort of in its totality. So you think about, you probably, everyone probably remembers DNA and RNA and protein, kind of this idea of the central dogma of molecular biology, what happens in your cells? And how do you go from, you know, one cell when you're an embryo? Everyone here started as one cell, or at least you should have. If you didn't, please tell me later. We should do some experiments on you, but you should have been one cell when you started and all the instructions are there to become all the other cells in your body, which is one of the most beautiful things in genetics. And, but to make that happen, you need to control the DNA, the RNA, the protein at every stage of development, and also when you go to space, for example. So the omes, the genome is the DNA, the transcriptome is the RNA, the proteome is the proteins, and all the omes in between are the totality

• 23:51Speaker 04

  of studying how those molecules interact in the body.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but the epigenome is, is something that happens later, correct? It's not, what's something that's sort of you're born with? What's going on there?

• 24:01Speaker 04

  The, epi is Greek for on top of. So you still have your genome, you know, it's only a four letter alphabet that comprises the entire genetic code for all of life actually this. But then on top of that, or epigenome, right on top of that, are small chemical tweaks that change how and when and where something gets used. And so if you can package DNA and like make it so it's inaccessible and turn things off, or you can slightly sprinkle kind of like snow, these epigenetic marks that turn them on and turn them off.

• 24:26Chuck Nice?

  So these epigenetic marks, there, is it true, or do you know?

• 24:34Chuck Nice?

  Or has enough been done to study if indeed trauma over a period of time leads to a change in genetics down the line. So for instance, let's just say I'm a survivor of, um, you know, uh, homelessness, right? When I'm a little kid and I go through this terrible trauma. Uh, and then I give birth to somebody, or better yet, my mom is goes homeless while she's carrying me. All right. So take those two scenarios. One, my mom is homeless, suffers that trauma.

• 25:17Chuck Nice?

  And then two, I am homeless, suffering the trauma. So one, I'm fathering a child. One, I'm giving birth to a child. Will it have indeed an effect?

• 25:27Speaker 04

  An epigenetic, a transgenerational.

• 25:29Chuck Nice?

  A transgenerational effect.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  So this is a big question. Uh, it's hotly debated in the field of genetics and epigenetics. We know in mice, the answer is definitely yes. And in worms, the answer is definitely yes. We can see evidence of multi-generational impacts where the genetic code is the same. It's what's called an isogenic line. It's like a mouse line that is, they're all the same genetic background. There's no change in the genetics. It's only the epigenetics and you can, you can see it. You can see those small chemical tweaks in mice where essentially if you've been lean, you might have a better chance of being lean as a mouse later in generations or obese as well. You can switch it up. And in, and in C. elegans, there's even a case where work by Odette or Chavi said worms that are, have an antiviral response can pass on for up to three generations, but then it slowly fades away. So

• 26:15Speaker 04

  we know it's possible biologically, but in humans, it's hotly debated. The best example is that in World War II, a lot of the mothers that were, uh, that were famished because of a lot of restrictions, because they didn't have enough food. There were a lot of downstream health, uh, affect negative because of that. And so there's, there's epidemiological evidence, but it's hard to do the same experiment in humans that you do with, with mice. You can't force humans to have children who you want to. Uh, I mean, you can kind of do it with an app these days, but it's, it's, um, you can't do it in a controlled fashion.

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just, and just.

• 26:45Chuck Nice?

  The old, the old Tinder control group.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  You can kind of, you can get closer, but you still.

• 26:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, so one thing you just blew past, and I just want to make sure we like pause and reflect on that amazing fact that in the world of experimental, you know, physiology. There are catalogs where you can order up any number of identical mice.

• 27:08Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That someone else had experimented on in some other country at another time that found some effect. So you can get that strain of mice and it's identical DNA to that other mouse so that now you can look for the soul.

• 27:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, whoa. Wait a minute. Are you saying that they they keep that that line that?

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. That's why I just blew by it like everybody knows this.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  It's no big deal.

• 27:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so is the ideal experimental lab animal is it? Yeah. So did I get it right? Did I get that right, Chris?

• 27:42Speaker 04

  That's spot on. And you can get ones with specific mutations, one that, you know, age faster, like progeria, or ones that have a higher propensity for diabetes, or obesity, or cancer. You can make almost any kind of mouse you want these days.

• 27:53Chuck Nice?

  So now, how do you guys do this? You have like a little mouse brothel that's? Chuck, what are you? What are you guys? Damn, Chuck? That's a bunch of mouse pimps? What is happening? What is happening?

• 28:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuck, behave. What it does is makes Scott Kelly going to space with his genetically identical twin brother on Earth even more fantastic.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why Dr. Mason was the ideal person to study this stuff.

• 28:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so we don't have whole colonies of identical Mark Kellys, but we had two, all right, brought to you by their mothers, their mother. So what were you looking for specifically? Did you know what questions you wanted to answer before it all began? Or you're just gonna do sort of do a scatter, a scatter experiment and see whatever shows up?

• 28:47Speaker 04

  We had some hypotheses going in, but for the most part, we weren't sure, and NASA wasn't sure, and nobody was sure. What would be the facet of biology that would change the most? Is it the DNA? Is it the RNA? Is it the protein? Is it the microbiome, like the microorganisms in your body? You know, there's eye and retinal damage that's been studied before. So but we had no idea. So I think the best thing to do when you don't know where to look is to look everywhere you possibly can. So in this case, we put basically took the whole kitchen sink of molecular biology and biophysics and examined everything we could about everything that was going in their body and out of their body and some parts on their body as well, like the microbiome. And so this, uh, so we sequenced their genome, the genome of what was in their stool.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  So we got, um, some space poop and also some space skin samples to see what bacteria were changing and viruses, because there's often herpes gets reactivated in a lot of astronauts and about forty percent of them, uh, herpes gets, you know, the immune system's a bit suppressed and so herpes

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reactivated. That means they had it already.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And

• 29:46Chuck Nice?

  Wait a minute. Are we talking space herpes here?

• 29:50Speaker 04

  We're

• 29:51Chuck Nice?

  Are we actually talking space herpes?

• 29:54Speaker 04

  I know it's early in the day, but we're already there.

• 29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This interview just began, dude.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, okay, but wait a minute, just you, again, you just blew by something. I just gotta like pause you for a moment. So you not only concern yourself with the health and well-being of Scott Kelly, you also concerned yourself with the health and well-being of the bacterial stowaways that are in his gut and are on his skin.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And sends a lot of it too. Exactly. I mean, basically because biology is driven by human cells and microbial cells, to be a good geneticist, you have to look at all kingdoms of life for every patient.

• 30:32Chuck Nice?

  So now, oh man, that makes for, okay, first of all, how do you handle all this data? I mean, seriously, just, just this one person in space, the tranche of data that comes back to you has got to be overwhelming. It's got to be huge, a tidal wave of, of just bits and bytes. So, and, and then you start talking about the microbial, uh, uh, uh, aspect of this. You're looking at a whole nother universe inside of a human being that you're, that you're, that you're quantifying, measuring at the same time? How, how do, how do you even do that?

• 31:06Speaker 04

  It, well, lots of sequencers. So, I mean, a lot of it's petabytes of data. It is, uh, I mean, we have a biol, a laboratory, most laboratories these days, mine included, it's, it's biology, it's genetics, but about sixty-five, seventy percent of it is a dry lab. So it's all computational, uh, just people who just do programming, just do informatics. The other third of it is more the wet lab. And so the lab becomes kind of half-wet, half-dry, like a humidor, uh, or like an armpit. It depends on what day it feels like it is, but, um, a little bit of half-wet, half-dry. So it has to be

• 31:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't even need to hear that about it.

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry. One other thing, I just gotta make sure we're on the same page. All right. You just went right through petabyte. So that's the next metric group of a thousand that follows gigabyte. So we have

• 31:47Speaker 04

  Terabytes.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gigabyte, terabyte, and then petabyte. So thank you. So this is way more data than even you ever be storing on your computer.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Chris, how are you reacting to data in real time? Or is it a case of we'll deal with that when you get back? Can I mean, I mean, I'm getting my facts so wrong on this show. It's actually, I'm going to break records, I'm sure. Is there a mini sequencer on the International Space Station? Or have I dreamt that?

• 32:18Speaker 04

  There is, there is. So a lot of the, when we sequence all the molecules, the DNA and the RNA, and you can even track these proteins with the sequencers too. Normally these really big machines, these giant machines made by like Illumina or PacBio are some of the bigger companies in the space, and their machines are big. But there's smaller ones made by a company called Oxford Nanopore out of the UK that makes it just literally the size of something, you'd say half the size of your phone, or you know, even the size of your phone. They are, and you can do sequencing in space. We demonstrated this with Kate Rubens, who's up in the space station right now. And I was just emailing with her yesterday. She has the small, she did it for the first time in 2016, and now it is a standard flight hardware. You can sequence anything you want right up in space right away.

• 32:56Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God, that's so Gattaca, dude. That is so Gattaca.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  It's happening in real time. So you could kiss someone, quickly swab her mouth, and then sequence it and see, do I want to date this person anymore? It's like 23 and Me and Tinder coming together. It's finally happening.

• 33:13Chuck Nice?

  That's cool.

• 33:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gattaca was a movie reference for those who are younger than 40.

• 33:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, and by the way, if you haven't seen Gattaca, get a life.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  It's a good movie.

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an important film.

• 33:25Chuck Nice?

  It's a good, it's a great film.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, the letters in the title of the movie are your amino acid letters.

• 33:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. So now, so can I just ask about this microbial? Because I'm just, when you think about the human gut and the fact that most of us, I mean, most of our insides is not us. Right? If you think about it, most of our insides is not us. So did you find anything that might either enhance our ability for long-term space travel or detract from our ability for long-term space travel?

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I was, I was thinking of Gary's question. What were you monitoring in real time? Like, if you knew Scott Kelly was like dying from something, do you say, oh, we're not going to tell him we need the data?

• 34:15Speaker 04

  So just take this, don't ask why. Just, just take this.

• 34:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't ask why.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  We can see, because a lot of the biochemistry of the microbes contributes to our own biology and sort of vitamin levels, for example, vitamin B3 and B6, a lot of this made by the microbes in your gut. So you can see, is the composition changing in a way that's negative? But also, some of the microbes make something called arachidonic acid, which has some radio protective capabilities as well. So there's some ongoing questions of, could you protect astronauts or at least give them good nutrition, but maybe give them even a little bit of radio protection, both inside and out? It is ongoing research at NASA and in our lab.

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you say radio protection, you mean radiation from space?

• 34:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Well, galactic cosmic rays will still kind of blow right through you. But if you think about lower radiation or sort of secondary radiation, it might help you with that.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just clarifying that.

• 35:04Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Hey, so let me ask you this, Neil. How do you deal with, like, you know, the barrage of radiation that you will experience once you are, you know, there's no magnetic field, there's no, what do you, what do you do?

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The urge to try to find a biological solution to this, I think, will end up futile relative to what engineers can design. And so it doesn't take much thickness of water, for example, to completely shield you from most of what's damaging from the sun. So you can imagine enveloping the spacecraft.

• 35:36Chuck Nice?

  It's just a membrane, right?

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, some kind of fluid membrane. And that could be some of the recycled water that you use. So I'm not worried about that. Everyone's, oh, what about the radiation? We got clever engineers. That's the least of my worries.

• 35:48Chuck Nice?

  Okay. And that makes sense.

• 35:50Gary O'Reilly?

  So Chris, what was the most? Interesting set of results you got, maybe the most disturbing with the same breath. But and the lessons we've actually picked up from Scott's year in space. And where are you hiding the Andromeda string?

• 36:07Speaker 04

  It's in the freezer. It's, I mean, oh, wait, no, I mean, it's.

• 36:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another movie. You've got to be over 50 to know that movie.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  So, so I think it's really surprising to see actually how plastic the body was. Many, many things changed that were stress responses in flight. But and even when he landed, he really, his whole body broke out into a rash. And his ankles swelled up to the size of basketballs, but it went back to normal. So a lot of the body did return to normal. But he did, we did see increased damage to his DNA. So we know he did get radiated. So it's something to keep an eye on. Telomeres got a little bit longer. We could see which was surprising. And one other thing that's really surprising is we could see his immune system. We could see which bacteria it was actually engaging with. Because we've also sequenced the walls of the space station. So we can see the bacteria that his body's engaging with and the immune cells. You can actually see the T cells in his body becoming more active towards those specific microbes. That was kind of a really interesting result, too.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it means you could not upfront disentangle the effects of zero G versus a slightly lower pressurized environment versus the rate of exposure that he's getting. All of those are happening together because when I think of microbes, do they really care how much gravity there is? Like, they live in a whole other world where sort of, you know, other forces dominate what role gravity would play. So it sounds like most of what you're finding has nothing to do with zero G.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, we think it's a lot of it's the stress on the body. Sometimes you get local hypoxia just because they're small clouds of CO2. Because air doesn't move the same way in space as it does here on Earth. Essentially, the clouds can stay a little bit in front of your face. You can see some of that in the blood work even. And so we think you see that, you see the, you know, essentially the radiation, the stress of the flight.

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're not going to carry a fan with you wherever you go.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  There's a lot of fans in the space station to make sure the air moves.

• 37:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, circulation. Wow. So Scott's in space for a year. That's not the record, is it?

• 37:56Speaker 04

  No, the Russians have us beat, like with many things.

• 37:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, well, that's, that's why it's called a space race.

• 38:02Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's because they punished somebody to put them up there.

• 38:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, what happened was Russia's beat, Russia's just beat us in everything in space. First, first satellite, first non-human animal, first human, first woman, first black person. They had everything and then we landed on the moon, we say, we win.

• 38:20Gary O'Reilly?

  So, having said that, we will need to do experiments, as you did with Scott, for even longer periods of time. Not in terms of the length of time possibly, because what is it, nine months to get to Mars? The projection.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  Six to seven months, yeah.

• 38:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, what sort of test can you conduct? What sort of time can a human exist in space at this particular point in our technological evolution?

• 38:47Speaker 04

  Well, there are missions planned now for doing 18 months and there's going to be a barrage of six and 12 month additional missions to follow up on the twin study. So by the time we send people to Mars, you know, if you ask NASA, it's 2035. If you ask Elon Musk, it's, you know, 2026 or something, so.

• 39:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you ask me, it's never.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  No, you don't think we're gonna go? You think never?

• 39:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a whole other thing. I'm not, don't, don't get me started. Actually, you wrote a whole book on thinking about humans and the future, the next 500 years. Why don't we take a break and we'll come back and just explore where that book goes and why and what you found and what your insights are as a medical profession. We'll be right back on StarTalk.

• 39:37Chuck Nice?

  Hey, it's time to acknowledge our Patreon patrons, Jamie Ferns, Evan Steggall and Peyton Hawke. Thank you so much, guys. Without you, we couldn't make this trek across the cosmos. And for anybody else who would like their very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

• 40:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. We led off with Scott Kelly, one of the twins who went into space and got studied by our current guest. We've got Dr. Mason here, who's an expert on the human genome and the human physiology and biophysics. And he's the right guy in the right place doing the right thing. So again, thanks for being on our show. So let me ask you, is there anything we learned that we can apply to the rest of us, even if we're not going into space, from what you studied with Mark Kelly's physiology?

• 40:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, because we, you know, we studied, we-

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me be specific. Do you think we can know about pandemics or any, you know, I gotta sort of throw that in the mix, viruses?

• 40:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, their physiology or any response to stress, for example. So what's amazing is we, about a year ago, you know, we started getting a lot of samples from the hospital, New York Presbyterian, the COVID-19 patients coming in, we started sequencing them, applying some of the exact same molecular technologies that we did to the Kelly Twins and other astronauts. And we could actually see, for example, some things that looked just like, that looked like the stress of landing back from space, like interleukin-6 is basically a cytokine and inflammatory signaling molecule that really spiked up when he landed. So when he landed back on Earth, it looked like his body basically was saying, oh crap, you know, I'm breaking on rashes, I'm in a lot of pain. And it was because you could see these cytokines, these pro and anti-inflammatory signals and molecules battling each other.

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, this is not because he had landing anxiety, it's because the body was beginning to feel gravity once again?

• 41:47Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. And so getting back to 1G, the body releases all these signals that are kind of an alarm bell to say, okay, we need to begin to use our muscles, rebuild our bones. Even though they work out on the space station and try to prevent as much of that as possible, it still is different. When you come back to a full 1G on your whole body, the whole time, it hurts a little bit. And we could see some of those same signatures show up in COVID patients. So what's interesting is, we published a paper last year saying, what's the list of possible medications that you could use when you land on gravity after you haven't been in gravity? A lot of them overlap with what are now being used for therapies for COVID-19, which, you know, we couldn't have predicted a year ago, but now we can see it. And then even the sequencer we use, little tiny sequencer we've used in space, that gives you sequence data, you know, within minutes, we now sequence coronaviruses on that same machine.

• 42:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you know, this is, this sounds like some badass stuff. And we introduced you as associate professor. Why aren't you a full professor?

• 42:40Speaker 04

  Oh, I, uh, thanks for the lead. I just got promoted, uh, just, so it's just, just now full professor.

• 42:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause if, if while Cornell didn't promote you, we would, okay?

• 42:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are now knighted, full professor. And keep this going. Uh, for those who are unfamiliar with academia, full professor is really simply, you have a higher salary. But everything, all the other expectations are the same of you to keep, stay badass. Uh, in this, cause you've already had tenure. So that wasn't the threshold here.

• 43:11Chuck Nice?

  So when you're looking at Scott and you're looking at his physiology, uh, is there something that we can take away from that for like, uh, our daily exercise routines and things like that? Like I read somewhere that running, for instance, helps increase bone density. Like the pounding actually does something to tell your brain to strengthen your bones. Is there anything that we can take like that from your studies?

• 43:38Speaker 04

  From, from these we've seen, uh, when they run in space, there's actually, you know, they have to wear bungee cords to keep themselves down. But that, that, that, that hammering on your knees and it tells your bones to really, uh, you know, maintain this, this homeostasis. And there's also something called hormesis, which means when you kind of push yourself a little bit, if you ever lift weights a little bit and you push yourself hard, you're kind of sore that next day. But it's a good sore. And so we've seen some of that. You need to actually push yourself a little bit, a little bit more if you can. Not every time you work out, uh, and break a record every time, but it helps to do so now and again. And it's cause it helps stimulate the body that way. So, you know, pushing yourself a little bit is one simple thing they do actually with some of the exercise regimens in space. And also, and they're, uh, monitoring the body. You can actually see, we could, you know,

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Scott, you know, when he talked about in his book, that if he didn't work out every day, he could almost feel like his bones were dissolving, which is awful to think about. But then as amazing as in the urine data, we could see the calcium coming out of his body. So he wasn't imagining it. It was actually happening. And if you don't have that, you know, consistent activation of your body's rebuilding, you know, you'll, you'll atrophy. Your bones will slowly go away.

• 44:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chris, I have to just correct something you said. You said that the bungee cords keep them down, but in space there is no down. I just want, I just gotta keep you honest here. It's just because you got full professor. That's what I mean.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  There's no down in space.

• 44:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it keeps you pulled towards the running machine, wherever that running machine is.

• 45:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so Scott's got a book out.

• 45:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Gary O'Reilly?

  A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery, but your book, Professor, The Next 500 Years. Um, hmm, interesting.

• 45:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, can we say that with some drama, please? The next 500 years. Give me some emotion in that, my gosh.

• 45:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, a spectacular read coming to you very shortly is The Next 500 Years.

• 45:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 45:28Gary O'Reilly?

  By Professor Mason.

• 45:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what are you gonna ask him?

• 45:32Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so if we go back 500 years, the, the discoverer Ferdinand Magellan discovers Guam. Now, that's ancient. That's like sailing ships and weird. In 100 years, 500 years' time, are we gonna be looking back at your work now, which is so exciting, and think, hmm, that's ancient, that's boring.

• 45:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look how quaint.

• 45:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, look at what they all do. Ah, look at that, that's my second great homework. That's right.

• 45:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly. So, I mean, how are people gonna view this? And where is 500 years? What can we do? How can we? There's a lot, there's a million questions to unravel.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And why do you think you know what have happened in 500 years?

• 46:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  I have, it's a, it's a treatise of hope, I guess, if you will. I put it together as what I think humanity can do and also should do, and that we have a duty to do. So when you think of duty, most people immediately get sleepy. You think of a duty to what? To like feed my cats, a duty to maybe your spouse, maybe to your country. Maybe it's patriotic, but you'll hopefully have a duty to your kids. But even that is not guaranteed, right? Some people just completely forego that duty. But there is one duty that we have as humans that as soon as you understand it is actually something you can control and that you can have influence on the universe, is just being aware of extinction. We're the only species that we know of that is aware of extinction. So then we have a duty to prevent it, not only our own, but also any other species and life form that we come across.

• 46:52Speaker 04

  So we have kind of a duty to the universe that is actualized at the moment you realize that you understand what extinction is.

• 46:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, do you have a duty to a species that would go extinct without us? Because the tree of life is, there's no end of extinction on it. It has nothing to do with us. And the fact that the dinosaurs went extinct pried open an ecological niche that allowed us to rise up. So who are you to pass judgment on what life form should or should not go extinct if we have nothing to do with that extinction?

• 47:22Speaker 04

  It's even independent of whether we caused it or not. It's just that life, so I start from the premise that that life and actually self-aware life, that is life that is aware of extinction, is unique in the universe and any other life that doesn't have it, doesn't have this duty. So even extinct life, even if we didn't cause it, you can bring it back, but you have to do it carefully. Because what if you bring it back, if you bring back dinosaurs, they probably would rampage through a lot of us.

• 47:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He does.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  So that's not necessarily advised. So, you know, I think we just started on an island, a small island, so what could go wrong, right?

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jurassic Park, yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  So what could go wrong? No, but it, but it conceptually is, there are species we clearly caused their extinction. And I think we have a moral duty to try and even bring them back, especially there's, with genetic technologies, we can do so. Some of those same technologies now allow us to make immunotherapies where you can engineer your T cells to go after cancer cells very exquisitely. So this idea of genome engineering and cellular engineering is already deployed in clinical trials around the world. And some of that same technology lets us be sort of the safeguardians and shepherds of life and maybe even bring it back. But that is, we're in no hurry to do that. That would be very slow.

• 48:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd like, that's a very, I'd like that. So you're not some sci-fi guy thinking what new contraption we're going to have or what new spaceship. You're thinking of our duty to ourselves, to our civilization and to the planet and our ecosystem. I think that's a noble cause. So in 500 years, if all goes as you want, what, what does it all look like?

• 48:44Speaker 04

  So hopefully we would end up to Mars eventually, which is the first step on a stairwell towards preservation. Because like every moral question becomes immediately clear when you put it out to a billion years. That's when the sun gets big enough to start to heat the earth and it's really going to be really hard to live here. If you go five billion years, the sun's probably going to be at the surface of the, of the earth. Like they're going to be touching and kissing. So no matter what we do, if we achieve perfect pieces of species and perfect technological bliss, if we're still physically here, you know, really even in a billion years, then that's it for us. And so I think we're worth preserving. And that means eventually we have to start going. So we have to start to go to the moon, to Mars. I think by 400 years from now, we might be able to get to have some people in Titan. And at the end of the book, at 500 years, I say, we might have enough knowledge and understanding of physiology to be able to send people on what's called a generation ship, where people

• 49:29Speaker 04

  live and die for multiple generations on their way towards a new star. So in the book-

• 49:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But are you, you're including in this genetic modifications to us-

• 49:36Speaker 04

  If needed.

• 49:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -in the service of this longevity and this insight?

• 49:40Speaker 04

  Because I think we might need to. The other option, if you send humans to a planet that they've not evolved on, it's like just say, "Good luck, and hopefully you survive." But if you have biochemical and genetic capacity to protect people, and we don't use it, that would be actually be more unethical. So we could actually protect you from, assuming it works and it's safe, of course, which we have to prove.

• 49:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So ethics is a big part of this book. So what about the ethics of sending a group of fertile people into space, who then give birth to a next generation, a generational ship, and that generation-

• 50:07Speaker 04

  Is stuck.

• 50:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -is born only ever knowing that their job is to have another generation so that some generation down the line gets to land at, gets the prize. And so, isn't that a form of-

• 50:21Speaker 04

  Prison.

• 50:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Prison or slavery?

• 50:23Chuck Nice?

  Ah, you know what? I'm gonna call that a form of early civilization here on Earth.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 50:29Chuck Nice?

  Because honestly, that's all Earth, earlier civilizations on Earth was.

• 50:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all it ever was, huh?

• 50:34Chuck Nice?

  That's all it ever was. It's, here we are, on this rock spinning around-

• 50:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm gonna have some babies in this new place.

• 50:38Chuck Nice?

  And the whole thing is, have some babies. We're stuck here. We gotta have more babies so that we can stay here. And now here we are, where we are. You know, eight billion of us.

• 50:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn.

• 50:46Gary O'Reilly?

  But human evolution has been migration, whether it's been north, south, east, west, mainly east, west, because of temperate zones and all the rest of it. So the, once we've kind of got to a point on this planet, the migration to another seems to be just another development of our-

• 51:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Humans being human.

• 51:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. And I mean, at the moment, we've got Russia and China joining forces to go and build some sort of bases on the moon or around the moon. I mean, are we looking at this, Chris, as, because of, think of this problem Scott experienced coming back after a year in space physically. Would we use things like moon bases, call them that, as stepping stones back into 1G? Rather than just come straight back to Earth?

• 51:28Speaker 04

  Absolutely, it'd probably be easier. I mean, that's 1/6 gravity there and, you know, Mars is, you know, 38% gravity, so hopefully these will give you a little stepping stone, so it wouldn't be as bad. But then, you know, eventually, you know, think about people who just live, you know, think about what happened, the Australians, when they were left England, they got a different accent, they get a different culture, you get, you know, on a different planet, you'll get different physiology as well. So we would expect them to become different.

• 51:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus the deer in Australia have pouches.

• 51:57Speaker 04

  So I'm hopeful, you know, I think, well, the great thing about the book, I guess at the end is that we've discovered all the new genes that we didn't know existed even 20 years ago, and we've discovered all these planets, exoplanets, that we didn't even know 25 years ago. So I call them twin engines of discovery, because now we know what genes we can use to understand them and keep us safe potentially, and we know which planets we could eventually go to. So I hope 500 years from now, we would pick the best one or several and then send people there, and maybe we'd get some interesting, you know, sitcoms that get broadcast from this other new planet, potentially.

• 52:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think it's brilliant to have this addition to the futurist's portfolio, because it's usually some technologist, it's some fantasy writer, it's somebody imagining a future, and you're coming at it physiologically. I think that's a brilliant construct for a book. And we'll look for it on the bestseller list if it's not already there.

• 52:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 52:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that's totally what we should all be thinking about. Rather than just the next two years or the next four years for an election, is anyone thinking about the next century?

• 52:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. So let me ask you this, how do you feel, this is not related to anything that we're talking about, I'm just interested in your opinion on the project to take 500 fertilized eggs and put them on the moon at the same way we did with seeds in wherever we put the seeds, what was it?

• 53:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To store them on the moon.

• 53:21Chuck Nice?

  To store them on the moon, so that, basically like a seed vault, but for humankind.

• 53:27Speaker 04

  Um, it would be, they'd have to be really well maintained up there. I guess, you know, tardigrades fell on the moon when the Israeli spacecraft crashed on there a year and a half ago. So, and I think those have all been probably irradiated and not useful. But I think if they're buried deep and came

• 53:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're irradiated and now they're large.

• 53:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're floating You didn't see the right movies, Chris. When you get radiated, you become big.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  And green, sometimes green.

• 53:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And green, thank you, bulk. Yeah, yeah.

• 53:54Speaker 04

  So there, so, I mean, I think it's, I think preserving, you know, we can actually embed a lot of the genomes now in a digital code, right? So this is being done on something called the Genome Ark Project, sequencing as many genomes on the earth as possible as kind of a reservoir of human and biological diversity of everything we know on earth. And so I think you can put it in digital form. That might be simple.

• 54:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting, good point, because Chuck, I can write a book on engines and store the book. I don't have to store the engine.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 54:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you can read the book, the information about the engine, and then rebuild the engine. So that's, so we gotta, we gotta land this plane at some point.

• 54:30Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 54:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't. So Chris, let me, let me take us out with this final question to you.

• 54:35Speaker 04

  Sure, sure.

• 54:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What have you genetically engineered in your basement? We won't tell anyone. What do you have? You can whisper it. Okay, we won't tell anybody.

• 54:47Speaker 04

  Just a couple of things.

• 54:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a couple of things.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  Just a couple of things. We've got a butterfly that tastes like barbecue sauce.

• 54:59Speaker 04

  We do have one thing in the lab that's true, though. We took genes from tardigrades that can resist radiation and put them into human cells. And now they have 80% more resistance to radiation. So that is something we have done with tardigrades. And now you can actually, you know, take some of these immune function genes and also put them in cells. So we're, we're working

• 55:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it means you can go repair Chernobyl.

• 55:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, potentially. I mean, I think any gene we see from any species on this planet or others can be essentially a part of the genetic toolbox of surviving long term.

• 55:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because nature already gave it to you. You're just rearranging them. Yeah. Right, right. Very cool. But safely and carefully and in one space and not releasing to the world. Yes, yes. To be fair. Well, Chris, good luck with the book. It's a fascinating topic and I think is an underserved topic. And you're the clearly the right person to put that out there. So thanks for being on StarTalk. We would totally want to have you back on again. Because if for no other reason, we'll find some reason to bring you back on. Because you do fascinating work. Congratulations on your promotion to professor. Thank you, sir. And so that means you're old and gray, I think. Yes. And there's a pipe, you have to smoke. It's coming in, it's coming in.

• 56:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. At tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic, Gary tweeting at My3LeftFeet, is that it? Correct, yes. Yeah, Chris, are you, do you have social media presence? Yeah, just Mason underscore lab, Mason Lab, yep. Mason Lab, all right, on Twitter, I guess that is. Yes, yes, sir. Yeah, all right. Well, we'll keep an eye on you. All right, everyone, this has been StarTalk Sports Edition, The Right Stuff. And as always, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, bidding you to keep looking up.