YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Mason

lines on the record: 211
first: 2022-05-08
most recent: 2022-05-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And thinking about a lot of that cost is rocket fuel. A lot of it is the ride. I've been on calls where Axiom's like, hey, SpaceX, give us to make it a little cheaper. We can make it cheaper on our end. It's the cost. That is the rocket.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a long time just being in one spot, right? So, could you be doing some things where you're 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 fundraise on the podcast. 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.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, it'll 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. And there we, you know, you're looking at the ranges of 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? If you're up there, for example, for two years basically, almost two years.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is no official number, and it depends on the mission, of course. So if you ask them, well, often they'll say, well, how serious are you? They really want, they don't just want to give out random numbers to people.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamentally, it's no longer a question of years and years of training and selection, this impossible odds task of becoming an astronaut. It's frankly just a question of funds.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what's been extraordinary traditionally, yes, I think most of the space agencies have been very by definition bureaucratic because they're coming from the government, but they have been that way for a really good reason, is that safety, you know, in the early 60s, we know almost nothing about the body in space, except for some of the work that pilots had done at really high altitudes. 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 this physiological responses. We know what to expect. We can also treat some of it. But 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 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.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Podcast, you know, unless it's mixed martial arts, is a pretty safe activity, unless you're doing the octagon version of your podcast. 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 open heart surgery in space. You're just saying, what if I do a podcast?”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 could do the podcast from there. And I think.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you'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 Four mission just went up for three days in flight. 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're up in the space station. It's a shared atmosphere. So you have to follow all the ISS protocols. What's interesting about the Dragon capsule and the inspiration for 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? But I think that's what we'd probably see him do first because we're going to see a lot more tests of those in the next two, three years, but there already been demonstrated to be safe. And then you're not trying to.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go to a conference in China technically with NASA funds about, say, space medicine or engineering a new rocket. I could go with personal funds, but I can't use those funds.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 PI 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 every other grant I get from the NASA DOD, or sorry, let me go back to that. Every other grant I get from, say, the NIH or the NSF, even sometimes DOD, 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 that I can't do anything with anyone in China about this. What I view is 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.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 far ahead right now. They're probably going to be done first. But the extraordinary thing is unfortunately there's no collaboration between the U.S.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if he doesn't learn, he can't go to that part of the space station. So, interesting things like that. 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 capsule. But technically, he can't go.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Schroffner, you have to do 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 Schofner, for example, unless you complete this additional training all in Russian, he's not allowed to do that.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 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”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one of the things we can see part of what's driving inflammation is we can actually see macrophages of these other dendritic cells, 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 as 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 other GI problems, even, you know, even looking at 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 be good to say if you're going into space, here's exactly what you need for each bacteria in your body. Here's what you can take to get rid of nausea or other ways we could monitor. Keep the inflammation down.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's never been done before. We've never seen the structure of the skin and how it changes in response to microgravity and also the microbes that change. And so these beautiful images of even the structure of skin changing and the inflammation that we've seen for Scott Kelly, for example, we now have a molecule by molecule map of what happens to skin, which has never been done before.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know, I want to learn as much as we can about every time I go up anyone. So we're doing it with NASA astronauts, but it's been something this influx of new crews that are willing to do almost anything, right? So including, we did skin biopsies for the inspiration fork crew before and after spaceflight.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That'll be much nimbler, not as much of a giant Dr. Octagon kind of spacesuit, but really looks like just a nice spacesuit and they're going to go out into the vacuum of space. And so pushing all the engineering for these missions, which are privately funded. So it's people who just say, I want to go up in space and see if I can push the limits has been fabulous. But I think the most fabulous part is Jared in particular, but others, other commercial spaceflight drivers like John Schauffner, Peggy Witson for the Axiom missions are coming to us, the scientists, researchers saying, I don't just want to go up into space just to hang out. How much science can I get done when I'm up there? What can I do? What experiments can I do? Give me blood, tissue, urine, semen, tears. I'll give you any biofluid. And I email them back and say, listen, every one of your cells is worthy of study. So I have this really kind of creepy geneticist email response. I want all of your cells. But it's true because there's so much.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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 out in these new spacesuits that SpaceX is designing.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like a gold rush. A 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 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 for mission and now some of the Polaris missions which are happening. And Jared Isaacman has been a fabulous colleague collaborator pilot for the missions. Again, we're doing the same deep profiling and molecular characterization of these astronauts as we've done for Scott Kelly and other astronauts that are from NASA. And we're seeing so far, actually, there'll be a lot of this presented later this year. It seems like 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.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks. It's basically my favorite quote. Well, I'm writing a book, I'm going to put my favorite quotes. Might as well put them.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some point. I mean, it'll be pretty harsh, like what Shackleton did doing this exploration exploration eventarctica 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 their genes active, the pseudogene, they'd be okay. The early settlers will be, it'll be very different crew. But once it's people are comfortable there, I think they're going to, 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”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Says 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 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 the culture will definitely be different. There'll be different dialects, different foods. There'll be different values. 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 science fiction. And it's almost unavoidable because there's been, I mean, just think of all the religions that have happened on earth with very little, I think, I mean, there's just terrestrial drama, but suddenly you have a different planet. And then a deity that would span multiple planets. And I don't even know how you do that. But I think someone.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 here. And that's not even that far away, or even just people on Long Island versus New York City, and I'll be able to this big nasally accent, or even Wisconsin. I'm from Wisconsin. We have this big nasally tone. Welcome to Wisconsin and Minnesota”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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's supposed to do it. So we'll see 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, JAXA has the Japanese Space Agency, and there's the US. So now it went from just a two-person race to a whole field, a whole field of runners, if you will, on the track trying to get to Mars first. And I think, I mean, it's going to be like anything. If you start to have settlements and construction projects in place to visit on Mars, I think the true mark of place being actually settled is when you start to be able to pick. 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 this idea of innovating and competing will continue to drive, I think.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try and build with whatever you can, so that has to be perfected still. But then once you're in those buildings, those structures, you need to create all the biology that will feed the populace, feed them. 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.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think we'd have to make sure we do that so that it's not completely exploited. 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 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 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.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think of just all the colonization efforts, but I think most of it was done in a really dark area of humanity where average life expectancy was more than half less than it was today. It was life was brutish and short as many as Hobbes has famously said. It was a rough existence, right? So I think some of the ugliness of humanity in prior colonization times was a consequence of the time, or at least that's my hope. I think that now we would have it be much more, I think, inclusive, much more responsible, much more evil, frankly. Like we go there and you would need commercialization, you need efforts to do mining, for example, bring things back, but it have to be some degree where there are some areas that are viewed 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 feet of a lake are all for public property and everything that you can own property, but just not certain barriers.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Several big challenges to Mars, and even the first one is even just the word colonized. So I think there's even a social challenge. Like a lot of people, Danielle Wood actually studies, is at MIT, 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 just 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 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, a history, you could say has proved me wrong every single time. Like every time humans have gone somewhere, it's usually been a tale of exploitation, strife, and drama again. And often murder, genocide. It's actually a pretty dark history.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a score of one. Anything above, you know, some of the best exoplanets that are in the habitable zone where there's liquid water that could be there start to get above 0.8 or 0.9. But 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, 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 galactically and Venus is just too hot right now. So I think Venus would also be a great candidate, but it is much easier to survive in a place where it's very cold, but you can be sealed and survive, whereas going on, we probably just have no technology to survive anywhere except in the clouds of Venus. So it's just currently our best option, but it's not the best option for sure.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one of the closest options. It's not the best option though by far. I put in the book Measures of Earth Similarity Index. There's 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.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But so far we have no data. We have no video of it either way. We have no real knowledge other than it would be need a lot of Velcro, I think is my only real answer there.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Humans are very predictable in that regard. Again, going back to the Greek tragedies, I think there's probably someone did something close to at some point. And so I think 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 would be, I think when we start to get bigger structures that have a bit more privacy, I think there'll be a lot of it. And this is a big question of who goes up into space. It's now becoming more of regular in quotes people who have prosthetic limbs or cancer survivors like Haley Arseneau, who just went up on the Inspiration Four mission. So she's been a great researcher in helping with a lot of the science from that mission. We have been 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 after spaceflight. So we now know that other people can go into space. Those more and more regular Joe's and Janes go up, I think we'll see a lot more of it.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For Sexton 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... You know, we all wonder about that. I think.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bed bugs. There's a guy at the Americans Game of Natural History in New York. He loves bed bugs, Luke. 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 bed bugs. They're pretty gross. But in terms of the value of what you can get for protein, they're really good. They're a good candidate. I think you'd have to, if you could deep fry them. If you deep fry anything, you can pretty much eat it. So maybe you need a fryer up in space. But they're a candidate.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Not forget our humanity and this love of all the benefits and wonder of food and cooking and smells.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They 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”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting margaritas, although dogs can't 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-nosed primates called strepsarines. But we are dry-nose primates, and 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 pseudogene. It's just broken down. It's like having our genome, we have these functional genes like NICE BMW, a nice car that works well, but we also have this junkyard of cold 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, 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 it start slow.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In space, 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 I think it's rehydrated, which doesn't taste awful, but is not self-reliant. So I think those would have to be small bioreactors, that have to be a lot of work on fermentation, a lot of work on 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 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? Also, you know, I think that's one case where another adaptation could be to activate the vitamin C gene. 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.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the other advantage. Yeah, you can get to them because some of them are exposed. You can do a little bit of drilling and then see essentially this entire cavern.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so they are a bit like what they sound like they were large masses of lava at one point on the planet pushing really quickly through the environment and they created basically these small caverns which you could go in in theory and build a small habitat and 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 in 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 as a mission being planned right now.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's just in space, it'll be hard because you'll need basically some gravity at some point. I think you 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, 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 just in space part, that's hard. You'd need some gravity. You need some additional protection from the radiation.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's this extraordinary idea of like, wait, 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 can see it for more, I think, work-related purposes. Like if you're working in a dangerous mine or high radiation environment, you could basically start to prime it for work safety. We need to genetically protect you. Now, it would have to be shown that that genetic option is safe, reliable, you know, that it's better, at least as good, if not better, than other shielding methods. But I think we'll start to see that more in the next 10, 20 years. And eventually, as I described 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. Instead of having to take weeks and weeks for acclamation, 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.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 of this is for beta thalassemia. We all have hemoglobin in our blood that carries oxygen around and we are an adult. It's a different version. It's a different gene. You have one gene when you're a fetus called fetus fetal hemoglobin. When you're an adult, you have a different gene. But they both are making a protein that carries oxygen. After you're born, the fetah hemoglobin gene gets just turned off. It just goes away and you replace it with adult hemoglobin. But if you're a gene for hemoglobin is bad as an adult, 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 cure as for sickle cell and beta thalassemia in this past year.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we're taking the same passion to keep astronauts safe that's outside them and just putting it in their cells is what I propose. Now it's a bit radical today because we're just starting this in clinical trials to treat diseases on Earth. So it's not ready, I think, to do an astronaut. But in the book I proposed by about the year 2040, that's when we'd reach this next phase where I think, well, you 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.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know for copy, it's good to just have one big statement. But you want to do both, or a third option, I would want to do electromagnetic shielding. I would want to do a fourth option of maybe some other kind of physical defenses.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Activate 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 betathalassemia. You can reactivate a gene that was dormant as a way as a therapy.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we know that the radiation 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 one set of cells in my lab where you activate them before we irradiate them to actually prepare them for the dose of radiation. That is what's called epigenetic CRISPR therapies where you can actually, instead of adding or taking away a gene or modifying a cell, you just change kind of how it's packaged, like I was just describing with the DNA. The genes are still there. We're just changing how they get used. And so you can actually pre-empt.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 tried clinically. So this idea of just a little bit of stress on the body or what's called hormesis might prime you into active of cleansing things that were about to die.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source