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

“It's notoriously one of the lowest powered studies in human history, yes, but what you lack in subjects you can make up for in the number of sampling time. So we did basically 260 samples collected over the course of three years. So we really, almost every few weeks had a full workup, including in space. So that was the way we tried to make up for it. But we've tried in other model organisms. In mice, we've seen this. We've looked now in 59 other astronauts. And in every astronaut that we've looked at, their telomeres get longer in space.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Normally, the shrink as you get older and telomere's length is just an overall sign of aging getting shorter. His telomeres got longer in space. And so this is really surprising because we thought the opposite would happen. So that was genetically one surprise. And also some of the mutations we found in his blood, he had less mutations in blood, as if his body was almost being like a low dose of radiation was sort of cleansing his body of maybe the cells that were about to die. It's one of our main theories on what's happening.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are several surprises. One is just that the repair, as I just mentioned, that the repair took so long. I thought maybe a week or a few days he'll be back to normal. But to see this molecular echo in his cells of his time and space still occurring was interesting. This telomeres was one that was really surprising. The caps on the ends of your chromosomes, which keep all your DNA packaged, and you get half your chromosomes.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Call it an epigenetic rearrangement. In that case, we could see in that a lot of these genes had been, his cells had changed the structure of how DNA was packaged. And it remained open even months after the mission. Now, after about a year, it was actually almost all back to normal. 99% of all the genes were back to where they were in pre-flight levels. So it means that eventually you'll adapt, but there is almost a lag time, kind of like jet lag for the body, but jet lag for your cells to repair all the DNA.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, some of this has to do with when you have a gene get activated. You might think, oh, it's like a light switch. I'll look at my wall, just flip a light on or off, and sometimes turning a gene on or off is that simple. Sometimes you just flip it on because the gene is already ready to go. Other cases, though, you have to reprogram even the structure of how your DNA is packaged.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there it was about three to four days he got back to normal, at least in terms of the inflammation. But what's extraordinary is that we measured a lot of other molecules, genes, structural changes, tissue, looked at his eyeballs, looked at his vasculature. It took him even six months after the mission, a lot of the genes that had become activated in response to spaceflight were still active. So things like we could see his body preparing DNA. He was being irradiated by cosmic rays and by the radiation. It's the equivalent of giving like three or four chest X-rays every day just in space. And we could see his body working hard at the molecular level to repair itself. And even in his urine, we could see bits of what's called eight oxoguanazine as a form of damaged DNA that you could see coming out. And we see it for other astronauts as well. So it's very common. You can see damaged DNA, the response of the body to repair the DNA. But even though he'd been back on Earth for six months, that was still happening, even six months later.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of what happens to the body after about a year in space. So it was the first study of this kind. And what we found is when he got back, we saw all the same markers of stress on the body and changes spiked up to levels we've never seen for any other astronaut before. So it seemed like going to space for a year wasn't so hard as much as returning to gravity after a year. It was much harder on the body. He notoriously had, you know, broke out into rash all over his body. Really, even the weight of clothing on his skin was too heavy. It created all this irritation because his body had not felt the weight of just a simple t-shirt. It wasn't really had zero weight, of course, right? So up in space. So that led to all this inflammation, all these changes. He had to, you know, it was much more comfortable just to walk around nude. In that case, it was for a medical reason. Some people do this, you know, recreationally. He was doing it for medical purposes.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We learn that spaces is rough on the human body, but that the human body is amazingly and monstrously responsive to adapt to that challenge. It can rise to the occasion. So we could see Scott had, as almost all astronauts do, a bit of puffiness and spikes in his bloodstream of these, what are called cytokines, or these inflammation markers where the body is clearly saying to itself, holy crap, I'm in space. And leaders of fluid move to the upper torso and they get puffy face, what's called the astronaut face that is very common, but it goes away after a few days. And some astronauts maintain high levels of stress for their whole mission, as measured by cortisol or some of these other inflammation markers. Whereas Scott actually had a little spike, but then he was cool as a cucumber for most of the mission. But he had spent at that time that was the longest ever mission for a U.S. astronaut. A few cosmonauts have gone a little bit longer, but there'd never been a deep molecular analysis.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Versus risk seeking behavior are interrelated. So, how likely are you to say, I want to go Cliff jumping or I want to go, I want to do free basing, or I want to, I don't know, do some analysis risky behavior.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. There is religiosity as a trait that has been studied in Twins, and that has a heritable component to some degree. So, if things like boredom susceptibility is a trait one of my favorite papers just looked at, how likely is it that people get bored and they look at identical twins and fraternal twins? And there's a heritability about 30. So it's mostly not heritable. It's like mostly environmental. But that means to some degree, whether or not you're bored, you can say, well, it's a little bit of my genes. A little bit, not a lot.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can clearly tell they look to have the same facial structure, similar intonation, similar even likes, and you compare them to diazygotic twins or when you have fraternal twins, you can have a male and female, for example, in the same uterus. And those are dizzy twins or two zygotes. So in that case, they share 50% of their DNA, but they share the same womb. And then what you can look at is what's the difference between identical twins versus fraternal twins and calculate that difference for any trait. And that gives you an estimate of the heritability or what's called h squared. So that's what we've been doing for almost every trait in humanity for the past 100 years. I've been trying to measure this. And religion is one that's a negative control. So if you separate people and see what religion they become, there's no gene for religion or what religion you choose. So it often is their correlation there is zero because it should be. It's a nurture trait what religion you end up taking is not encoded in your DNA.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an age old debate of nature versus nurturer. So, like most things, if given two options, you can, of course, have both. So almost every trait that we know of in humanity has mixtures of nurture and nature. Some of them are purely nurture. So most people probably familiar with twin studies, but twin studies are one of the best ways to gauge how much is something nurture versus nature, how much of it is really ingrained and has probably less ability to change versus how much can you really train. Height, for example, is one of the most obvious inheritable traits, but it doesn't have one gene. It probably has at least 50 or 60 genes that contribute to height. So it's not like a gene for height. Some people think of like the gene for cystic fibrosis. Now in that case, that's true. There is one gene that if you have mutations, you get cystic fibrosis as a disease. But for other traits, they're much more complicated. They can have dozens or even hundreds of genes that influence your risk and what appears. But from twin studies, you take monocygotic twins, twins that are identical.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so genes are really these constructs, basically what are the instruction sets, like how many versions of instructions do you have in your genome? So the genome is the collection of all the DNA of a person. For humans, about 3 billion letters of genetic code. So just 3 billion A, Cs, Gs, and T's, these nucleotides that are the recipe for life, and that's it. That is the entire instruction set to go from that one embryo up to a full human, which is pretty efficient, if you say. That's actually not that much information. And in that 3 billion letters are snippets of the genes, which are independently regulated, autonomous instruction sets, if you will, these really active forms of the instructions from your DNA to say make a protein, make this RNA or turn off some other part of a cell. All those instructions are there in our DNA, and there's about 60,000 of these genes that are in our genome.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. That's the extraordinary thing. One piece of wood there and say, I'll just leave it there for a few days and I'll come back. That's basically what embryos do. Okay, it takes nine months, a little bit longer, but still that is nothing short of magic, right? So I think that's what I love about the fact that DNA carries that information now. The information is static. So to actually read that information and to actually put it into motion is where RNA comes in. So this ribonucleic acid, so it just has one other oxygen added to it versus DNA, but it is the transcribed version. It's like if you look at a book and you say you can have it in your hands, but then you start to read it aloud, it becomes the active form of the recipe for life as the RNA. And then the RNAs also then get translated to become proteins, that become active forms like enzymes. You think of like your hair or think of other ways you digest food. There's all these active proteins going around that are copying your DNA, making RNA, making sure your DNA is safe. All these built-in systems to keep your cells in check and working. And these are often in protein form.”
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 the fact that the machinery is the information, like that it becomes its own manufacturer is what is extraordinary. Imagine if you took a one-two by four and you threw it on the ground and you said, I'll be back in a day and then a whole house was made when you came back. We would all lose our minds. A lot of people would poop their pants. People would have to wear adult diapers. It would be a big scene That happened. We're actually getting close to that people having autonomous house building. It's not quite there yet, but there are people trying to make robots that will build entire houses.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In almost all of your cells, you have a copy of your genome. It's actually the reason I became a geneticist, is because the day I learned that as an embryo, we started just a single cell. But all the instructions are there to make every single type of cell in your body. I was and still am endlessly fascinated by that. That is extraordinary. That is to me the most beautiful thing in the entire universe. That is a completely from one single embryo, everything is there to make the entire body.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are fairly the biology be useful because it's a manufacturing system. All of life is a way to create copies of things or to replicate information, including storage of information. Actually, hard drives are probably one of the worst ways for long-term storage. DNA might end up being the best way to have millennia or even longer scale storage where you want something that has redundancy that's built in and they can store and can be put at really cold temperatures and survive even cosmic rays. So I think it DNA might be the best hard drive of the future potentially.”
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 we will. There'll definitely be a blending, and blending's already happened. There's prosthetic limbs, there's cybernetic limbs, there's neural link, progress being made to blend biology and cybernetics and machines for sure. But I think in the long term, we'll see that they...”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think it's essential? It doesn't have to be me. No, it definitely does not. It could be, I'm hoping that the AI platforms that we've built or that would start to build themselves would also carry the sense of duty. Because at that point, they would be life. And so whichever means that life, whatever form life takes, it should have this duty, I think”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And it's something that is part of the duty. If your duty is to keep life safe, you have to consider all means to do so. And engineering life to save itself is definitely on that list. I think we can imagine in that time frame, 500 years, that we would, you know, there will be AI that continually advancing. And I actually say that I'm matter agnostic towards cognition. So if your matter is carbon atoms and cells and tissues and you have cognition, bravo, good for you. If you're silicon-based and you're in chips and you're in AI, that's all virtual, but we reach a state of well beyond the turing test and really clearly intelligent. Congratulations to you too. So I feel like this sense of duty is applicable regardless of what the state of matter your cognition is based in. So I would imagine that AI platforms that are really intelligent might also get a sense of the study, or I hope they would. I wrote the book for them too.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I could see also that by that time I think we would have enough knowledge of biology and technology and space medicine to start to prepare for an interstellar mission, to actually send people on a craft that would have what's called a generation ship. People live and die on the same spacecraft on the way towards a destination. But I think we need that much time to actually perfect the technology and to learn enough about physiology to be able to make it for that distance.”
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 astounding in some sense soothing that the Greek tragedies of 2300 years ago Very relatable to what happens in every high school, right? So, like, you know, that's why you read them in high school, like, oh, that's really. A clear part of the human condition. So, on that sense, some things are really permanent. But I want to think of a few reasons I chose 500 is that it's a time frame where I could foresee clear development of some biotechnology that will get us to a new place, including missions to Mars that are planned, that will be there and that we'd start to have”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Idea was if I were to pick this up 500 years from now, what would it look like? I changed the number. If I pick it up 1,000 years from now or a hundred. And I kept trying to think of what are some timeframes where really large scale changes have happened. And so in some sense, you could argue that humans spend mostly the same for about three or four thousand years. And the best examples is this. You looked at some of the Homer's poems or the Greek tragedies and Oedipus, for example. humans are really almost identical. We're still petty and people, you know, have affairs and people do things they shouldn't and people, it's the same.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, for example, if you said, Chris, what's going to happen in a million years? Well, I'll start to describe what happens to the moon will be farther away because it moves several inches away every year. And so then eventually you can't have a full lunar eclipse after a while. I think about structures of the continental change and things will move. I could describe some things, but it starts to become so vague, it's just not a useful exercise, I think. If it's too far out, if it's too soon, that's that much different from what people just do with the news and say, I think this is what the economy might look like over the next year or two years. Economists are notoriously not held accountable when they have really bad predictions. You can make really awful predictions and no one seems to care. You can just make another one next week. So too short is, I think, not necessarily as helpful. But 500, actually, when I was first working on the book and thinking about, I thought, well, do I do 1,000 or 2,000? I kept thinking about, it may not.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“500 was a little bit of what I felt like I could see clearly through the entropy goggles. I feel like I can't contradict.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they said there were all these people who were looking after me before I was ever born. I think it's because it's a bit of just when you go to a campsite, there's a camping rule that you always leave the campsite better than you found it. So if the fire pit was somewhat damaged and you got there, you fix it. If there was no wood, you leave a few bits of logs for the next person who comes. And this ethos is something that just picked up from camping. And so I think if we did that as people, the world would be a better place and the world coming ahead would also be.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it's something that is only really people that are economically secure can even begin to do this, or you can say, you know, think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs where you need to satisfy your physical needs, all your structural needs, and have shelter. And so I'm sitting from a position of great privilege to be able to pontificate about what I hope I could do for things for people that come 200 years from now. But nonetheless, more and more people can do that. Humanity's never been in a better state. quantifiably to be able to start to think about these intergenerational responsibilities.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes it's more planned than that, but there's no overarching sense of weight. I could have something that three or four generations from now that someone will receive this gift that was planned for them long before they were born or gestating. And I think we have that capacity. And that can be a version of legacy. But it's even okay if no one knows exactly who started it, but that the benefit was wrought by people, again, hundreds or even thousands of years after you got it started. So I think this.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It used to be foolhardy to say I want to think legacy is often what people think of as they approach the end of their life. What is my legacy? What have I done, even younger in life? It used to be really foolhardy to say I could affect something that would build the building, architects would say my name on this building in there, I'll have some sense of immortality. But it's a fleeting dream. We're reaching mortality. And if you could, it would be resource taxing on everyone else if you really were. But I think it's okay. I mean, the books of the next 500 years, but I presume I'll be dead for the vast majority of that time. But that is actually the liberating state of mortality. You know that you don't have forever. So it means what can you do that is the most impactful? But you can build things that you say, I want to pass this on to the next generation. Again, the most obvious thing we do with this is just people have kids, but they don't think of this as an intergenerational responsibility. Think of as, well, I was at the bar one night and met this hot girl and then things happened.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over time. And I call it the inexorable march towards molecular oblivion, which the students often find they kind of laugh at, ah, because on all the charts they're 22 years old, but older people do not laugh as much at the thought of molecular oblivion, but we're all marching towards it to a large degree.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we could actually do it in a way that would be at a large scale and for long term. But the entropy goggles is just a way to realize how transient everything is and just imagine everything that will decay or change in the room around you. So anyone listening, if they're listening on a train or driving in their car or wherever someone is listening right now, looking around, everything can and will change. And so at first it's terrifying to see that, oh my gosh, everything will decay and go away. But then I think it's actually libering. I think, wait, I can affect this. I can prevent it or I can affect it or I can improve the change that may occur all by itself, say naturally. And so I think it is, but is it that awareness, again, of the frailty of life, the ever insistence and increase in entropy that you can address though? And actually, I say the same thing to first year medical students. I teach them genetics. I say, I point early in the course, I say, here's all these charts of how the human body”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trait though of humans to just sit there and project into the future easily really seamlessly with whatever you're doing previously is powerful because it shows what can change and what should change in some cases, but also that its own devices, the universe would attribute would come take over and really things would decay, things would be destroyed. But the only thing really preventing, I think, some of the entropy is really humans, these sort of sentient creatures that are aware of extinction like ourselves is really one of the only forces in the universe that's counteracting the second law of thermodynamics, this entropy that's always increasing. Technically, we're actually still increasing it because we emit heat and we never have perfect capture of all energy. But we're the only things really actively and consciously resisting it. Really, you could say life in general does this. Like ants do this when they build their big homes. They're rearranging the universe to make a nice place for themselves and they're counteracting entropy.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was because you need to have a plan, but you have to know that plan might change. And so I think that's just a quick context for that quote. Craig Kundro, who is a leader at NASA, is headquarters now. I would always put that first slide up and are like, hmm, this meeting is either going to go really well or really bad. I don't know what's about to happen. But it's an inspiring quote because it's very true. In any case, the entropy goggles is a thought experiment I detail in my book, which is If you just sit in a room, any room, wherever you are, and imagine what it will look like in 10 years, 100 years, 500 years, or even thousands of years, it is a wonderfully terrifying and exciting exercise against definitely both because he realized the transience of everything, that what you think of what might survive. Almost everything that you're looking at will probably not be there in hundreds of years. It will be at least degraded or it might be changed, altered, completely different, moved.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happily, I do this almost every day somewhere when I'm sitting in a given room. I will, a quick comment about that quote, actually, for all the NASA planning meetings for the twin study and other missions that was often the quote that goes put up on the wall before we'd sit down for the day to plan the mission. It was that quote, which I went up to. Which I thought was hilarious for an official NASA meeting.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whenever given two options, there's always two more. I could do both or neither. So here I'll say they're both terrifying and exciting, I think, to me. More exciting than terrifying, I think, if I had to make that sandwich and how many layers are meat versus cheese, there's a lot more cheese of excitement.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The book definition, if you go pick up a biology textbook, they'd say technically no because they don't have the ability to self-replicate independently. But I would think if you restructure how you view what life is instead of just autonomously aggregating and replicating of information, for example, AI at some point, what if there's an AI platform that we could consider alive? At what point would you allow it to say it's alive? And I think we have the same definitional challenge there, is that if it can continually propagate instructions for its own existence, then it is a version of living. I think viruses don't get that category because they can't do it on their own, but they are a version of life, I'd say, but probably not alive.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're phagos. Almost all the vast majority of viruses are phages. This is the battle in the biology that is really dorky, is that bacteria think that they're the most, you know, people study bacteria think the bacteria are the most important because there's trillions and trillions of them. They run a lot of our own biology in our body. But then people who study phages, they say, well, there's 10 times more phages than their bacteria, which can attack the bacteria and destroy them as well. So phage people think that they run the world, but we need them both.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And could be very dangerous, or it could be very inert. I mean, most of life on Earth is not really dangerous or harmful. Let me go back on this. Most of life on Earth is neither harmful nor beneficial to you. It's just they are making its own way in the universe, just trying to survive. It's when it's inside of you and replicating yourselves and destroying yourselves like a virus like COVID, XRCV2, that it becomes a big problem, of course. But it just doesn't really have agency. It's just trying to get by. And so, for example, most of the bacteria on the table on your skin in the subway are pretty inert. They're just, you know, people hanging around for the ride.”
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 we have this beginning of some planetary protection that's happening now. We're going to send, we're bringing rocks back from Mars in 2033 if all goes according to plan. But there's always a danger. What if you bring this back? What if it's alive? What if it will kill all of humanity? Or Michael Creighton wrote a book, The Andromeda Strain about this very idea. And we could, but hopefully it won't. And the only way you can really gauge that is the same way we do with any infectious agent here on Earth, right? If it's a new pathogen, a new organism, you do it slowly, carefully. You often do it with levels of containment. So, you know, and it's going to be probably have to be where some pioneers go and would be, for example, on Mars, there might be other organisms there that only get activated once there's an ambient temperature and more humidity, then suddenly the first settlers on Mars.”
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 a lotion out of it. I think it'd be great if it's alien life, assuming it's safe, but I'm very excited. It doesn't have to be a lot of fun.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so on. Some congressman stands up and says, This is a waste of taxpayer dollars and then put someone says, for example, CRISPR was pure research for 25 years. Now it's a household word and students are editing genomes in high school. But it was just pure research on weird bacteria living actually in hypersaline lakes and rivers for decades and then eventually became a massive therapeutic, which has led to curing of diseases 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
“Occasionally when they visit they bring their whiskey and we have a drink I think we can do, we've been broadcasting into space for at this point almost a century, getting close to. But it's not been structured. So I think it's very cheap and easy to send out structured messages like what Carl Sagan wrote about in contact doing prime numbers and sending those out to indicate intelligence. So there's things we can do that I think are very cheap and very easy. So we should do some of that. We can walk in chew gum at the same time. This is one of the biggest critiques people often say of space research and even spaceflight in general. It's too expensive. Shouldn't we solve poverty? Shouldn't we cure diseases? And the answer is always, as it always has been, is that you can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can pass the Civil Rights Act and go to the moon in the same decade. You can improve and get rid of structural inequality while getting to the moon and Mars in this decade. So I think we can do both.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm focused in my lab, of course, a lot on the engineering of genomes, the monitoring of astronauts during long missions. Reaching out to other aliens, we've been doing reach out to aliens since the first radio waves have been broadcast, so we're doing some of it. But to do a real”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, how do we I think it's an interesting other moral question, a lot of Star Trek episodes, the prime directive is you do not interfere with another planet if you pass by a planet. I think it's time to also revisit that because what if you go by a planet and we think that as far as we can tell with enough certainty that they would never be able to leave their planet and then the Sun eventually would engulf that planet wherever that planet might be in some solar system. But if we had a way to help them, their culture, their science, their technology, everything about a different species to survive, would we not intervene? I think that would actually be wrong to say, well, we can save this life here and we decide not to. We decide after millions and billions of years pass and we know the sun will engulf that planet. Like what will happen with our planet? We don't interfere. That's watching a train hit someone on the tracks and not moving the train. So”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there's a Mosh Pit, and then you bump into the other galaxy. I think it's the question should be when else is everyone getting here instead of where is everyone? I think we've just started on the genesis of life in the universe”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is everyone the wrong question? I think the question is I think we are the first ones at the party. Let's set up the liquor, let's set up the food. I just think we're the first ones at the party of life, but more people are coming.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And life may be only for a few billion of those a year, is complex life only for several hundred years, 100 million years of life we've actually had, and humans only the past few million years since our last common ancestor. So it's not that much time. But if you think even further back, the universe hasn't had that much time itself to cool and create atoms and have them spread around the universe, right? So current estimates, 13.8 billion years of just the whole universe, but it spent the first five or six of those billion years really just like cooling and making enough of the stars to then make the atoms that would come from supernova. So I actually think we might be the first, or one of the very few or one of the early life forms, but the universe itself hasn't had that much time to make life in a galactic and universal timeframe. You needed billions of years for the elements to be created and then distributed. And we're only really in the, I think the last few billion years where I think even life could have been made. So I think the question of wherever”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think as far as we know, there's no other sentient life in the universe that we've found yet. And I think there's probably bacteria life out there just because we found it everywhere we've looked on Earth. It is, and there's halophilic organisms that can survive in extreme salts. There are sacrophiles that in extreme cold. There's basically organisms that can survive in really almost any possible environment that can adapt and find a way to live. But as far as we know, we're the only sentient ones. And I think it's the famous, the Drake equation, or how many, where is everyone is what Enrico Fermi said? Why haven't we heard from anyone if there are all these other life forms? I actually think the question is wrong to phrase it that way because the Earth has only been here for”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to create propulsion. I mean, most of the Voyager spacecraft are nuclear powered because it's still in many ways the most efficient way to get a tiny amount of fissible material and make power out of it. So they're still slowly drifting they're past the heliosphere. They're out now into interstellar space and they're nuclear powered. So it's like any tool or technology. It's a tool or a weapon depending on how you hold it.”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either continues to expand or it could collapse back into itself, and that heat death is more likely at this point where it just keeps expanding, expanding, everything that's too far away. But even in that case, I think if we had a fundamental knowledge of physics and spacetime that you could try and restructure quite literally the shape of the universe to prevent it, I think we would. I think we would want to survive. I think unless we had done the math and we think that there's a greater chance that the next universe would form and make more life, maybe we would. But even then, I think humans have always wanted to survive. And you could argue maybe should survive because in our able”
2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source