YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Mason

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

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  1. “But I think we've never been better situated to actually last for the long term. Even though we've also never been at the greater risk of being able to destroy ourselves ever since really the first nuclear test. When they, Tony Orb has a great book about this called The Precipice, where the precipice for humanity is at one point we made technologies that we weren't sure whether or not they would destroy the earth or the entire universe. So the math was incomplete and there was too much air, but they tested the bomb anyway. But it's an extraordinary place as a species to think we now have something in our hands that may destroy the Earth and possibly a chain reaction that destroys the whole universe. Let's try it anyway as a stage that we're at as a species. But with that power comes an ability to get to other planets to survive long term. And when you think about the heat death, that just becomes, that's an ad infinitum question. If you keep thinking, well, who survived? We go to the next sun, and then you go to the next sun. Eventually the question will be, well, if you just keep doing that forever, at some point, 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

  2. “Humans have a chance Absolutely. I think we have the best chance of any species and actually the best chance that he humanity's ever had. So I think a lot of people fear that we can or will kill ourselves. Actually, my favorite question I ask at the end of every interview for every potential graduate student, medical student, faculty, whoever I'm interviewing for whatever reason, the last question is, well, how long do you think that humans or our evolutionary derivatives will last? And the answers are shockingly wide-ranging. Some people say, I think we've only got 100 years left. Or some people say billions. Some people say as long as the universe lasts. But to the person who once said it was a medical student, applicant who said, I think we've only got 100 years left. And I was like, really, for all of humanity, everything will be gone in 100 years. And he said, yes. And I said, well, sweet Jesus, man, why go to med school? Why not go sell bananas on the beach? And then he said, I really want to make the last few hundred years count really matter. And I said, oh, well, that's actually kind of sort of hopeful in a really dark way.”

    2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “To communicate those ideas and you share those ideas, and all of a sudden you have the rockets gone out into space, which ants have been building the same structures for millions and millions of years with no real change. And so that is the key differentiator. Yeah, that's right. We've got an experiment going right now, and maybe it'll change.”

    2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Other species have some degree of those traits. So it's a question of degree, not of type of trait that defines humans a little bit. But I think for the extinction awareness, that is a uniquely human trait. That is, to our knowledge, no other species or entity or AI or sentience that carries that awareness of the frailty of life, of our own life, but all life.”

    2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Nothing matters. And why does anything? And they just apply it more particularly to humans, but there are. Endless reasons, I think, to cherish and celebrate what humans have done at the same time, many things we've done awfully and genocide and nuclear weapons testing on unsuspecting citizens in the remote islands. There are definitely things we've done bad. But the poetry, the music, the engineering feats, the getting to the moon and eventually rovers on Mars, these extraordinary feats that humans have already accomplished. interested really a sense of beauty, I think, is something that is You know, you can't ask ants or cockroaches about their favorite paintings or maybe if you could it would be very different from ours but in either case there's a unique perspective that we carry and I think so that's something even just the old age old question in biology and geneticist so this comes up a lot of what makes humans unique and so is it bipedalism is it our intelligence is it tool making is it language all those things I just listed”

    2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Are some people who think we don't? There are some people who say, well, humans take it or leave it. They think they're misanthropes. So the book is on the one sense a call to misanthropes to hopefully shake them out of their slumber, but that some people...”

    2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Even to the tooth and nail with the way you'd protect your family, the way you'd fight for a country, for example, to feel the same way towards the rarity and preciousness of life and feel that sense of duty towards particularly extinction-aware life, which is just us so far, this ability that we have this awareness of not only our own frailty, which of course is often talked about, and climate change and people think about pandemics, but other species that we sometimes cause extinction, but very soon will be even de-extinctifying species like the woolly mammoth, Colossal is a recent startup that's doing that on their advisory board, and it might happen in three or four years. So it's interesting point in history where we can actually think about preventing death at a species-wide level and even resurrecting things that we have killed or that have gone away, which brings its own series of questions of just as when you delete something from an ecosystem, adding something can be completely catastrophic. And so there are no real guidelines yet on how to do that, but the technology now.”

    2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Is something that usually puts people to sleep. I'll say. They say, oh, duty, duty is a bit like death. People don't often like to really think, wake up in the morning, think, what is my duty today? Most people. There are some people that think about every day, people in active military service wake up. It's a very concrete sense of duty to country. Sometimes you can think about it, though, in terms of family. You feel a duty towards your spouse, your kids, your parents. You feel a real duty to them because you want them to flourish and to be safe. So we do have the sense of duty, but I'm very much like death. You don't think about it actively usually. It's something that just becomes embedded in your day-to-day existence. But I think about duty because this is people think about duties for themselves, but there has never been a real overarching duty that we all feel as a species for each other and for generations that haven't yet been born. And I think I want people to have a sense of the same love and compassion and fight.”

    2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “If you do it at a species wide level, it's something that is actually an exemplary human specific trait that you're exhibiting. You think about something that is the loss of not just your life or your family or everyone you see, but everyone like you. And that is, I dedicate it because I think we might not be the last sentience to have this awareness. I'm actually hoping we'll just be the first. But as far as we know, we're the only, and I think this is the part of the moral thrust for the book is that we're the only ones that have this awareness that gives us a duty that only we can exercise so far.”

    2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Think this is actually one of the most human specific traits and features that we have. It's actually maybe one of the few things that only we have and no one else has. So it sounds scary, sounds like what people often don't like to think about their death except now and again or at funerals or to recognize their mortality.”

    2022-05-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source