Instant Genius - How we can engineer humans for life beyond Earth

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

Like it or not, Earth won’t be our home forever. Whether it’s climate collapse, nuclear war, or the slow death of the Sun, life on this planet is on borrowed time. So, what happens next? If we’re serious about avoiding extinction, we’ll need to look not just beyond Earth – but far beyond our Solar System. Our guest today believes we not only can do that, but that we must. Christopher Mason is a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine and author of The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds. In the book, he argues that as the only species aware of life’s inevitable end, we have a moral duty to preserve it – not just our own, but all life on Earth. To do that, we’ll need to radically rethink what it means to be human. Because as things stand, our bodies are far too fragile to survive the journey. Chris lays out an ambitious 500-year plan to reengineer human biology, making us more resilient to space travel and alien environments — and he maps out how we might go about seeding life across the stars. So, is humanity ready to become an interstellar species? And where on Earth – or off it – do we begin? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist Focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth,

so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit nameadio.com to learn more. And welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Tom Howarth, Trends editor at BBC Science Focus. Like it or not, Earth won't be our home forever. Whether it's climate collapse, nuclear war, or the slow, inevitable death of the sun, life on this planet is on borrowed time.

So what happens next? If we're serious about avoiding extinction, we'll need to look not just beyond Earth, but far beyond our own solar system. Our guest today believes we not only can do that, but that we must. Christopher Mason is a professor of physiology and biophysics at Wild Cornel Medicine and author of the next 500 years, engineering life to reach new worlds. In the book, he argues that as the only species aware of life's inevitable end, we have a moral duty to preserve it, not just our own, but all life on earth.

To do that, we'll need to radically rethink what it means to be human, because we'll be Because as things stand, our bodies are far too fragile to survive the journey into outer space and to live there sustainably. Chris lays out an ambitious 500-year plan to re-engineer human biology, making us more resilient to space travel and alien environments. And he maps out how he might go about seeding life across the stars. So, is humanity ready to become an interstellar species? And where on Earth, or off it, do we begin?

So Chris, welcome to Instant Genius. Thank you for coming on today. Thank you for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here. So one of the key themes and the ideas in your book that you discuss is the fact that we as humanity have a moral duty to preserve life and not just preserve it, but also in doing so, spread it right across the universe and the cosmos. Could you explain why you think it is that we have that duty? Yes, happy to. And I think this is, you know, I think people have a personal sense of duty towards either a country,

towards a marriage, towards a project, towards some goal in their life. And I've often thought about what's something that is a goal that we all share, that is really the whole species. And the more I thought about that, you know, as a kid and as a young adult was the realization that life is very precious in the universe and that there's extinction, that species can go away. and that we as humans are the only ones that know this. As far as we know, there could be aliens somewhere that also know about this, but to our knowledge in the universe, it's just us.

We're the only ones that have this awareness of extinction and the fact that life is rare and frail and can go away. And assuming life has value, which I do, and most people do, that it has some value that should be preserved, that if that's true, then we should think about ways to preserve it. And if we're the only ones that know it can go away, that gives us a very unique responsibility, in duty towards it, I call it a deontogenic or genetic duty.

Like, if we have DNA and genetic code, what is the duty of that, what's the purpose of that code, the duty of that code, particularly when it becomes sentient in our case, for example. So I view this as an activation event as soon as you're aware of extinction, that you on some level are responsible for either, you know, for preventing it. In the case of smallpox, we accelerated it because we thought this was an existential threat to humanity. So it can cut both ways, but in general, you'd want to preserve. of life once you are aware that it can go away is sort of my argument in the book.

And just exploring that idea sort of more, did you maybe explain why that's different to perhaps some animal that isn't aware of themselves and the possibility of extinction? Yes, and other animals could become aware someday. Like most of the, to our knowledge, again, no one, no other animal has this awareness. There are many animals that are varied that have consciousness, likely, that have some levels of awareness, that even, you know, have a sense of, even intergenerational plans, like birds build nests for their next generation and animals pass on traits over many generations. But there is, you know, no other creature that has a sense of a 10 or 20 generation time frame

or a billion year time frame. I was like, any ethical question, I think, becomes very clear, crystal clear, when looked at through the lens of a billion years and say, okay, how big of a problem is this? if it's something that will help us someday survive long term, it is something that's probably worth considering or even doing. But if things will fluctuate in the near term, short term, and eventually the earth gets engulfed by the sun or the oceans boil off,

I find that there'd be a very clarifying time frame. I'm like, okay, well, this, you know, it's both clarifying and terrifying. Like, on the one hand, like, well, then, you know, you can have the slings and arrows of daily misfortune can, you know, roll off your shoulders to be easier, but then you think, well, it might be terrifying because it, because nothing has meaning if everything goes away.

You know, it can cut both ways there. But what I really mean is that, you know, there's no other creatures that can even have this conversation. Again, to our knowledge, some people always say, well, how do you know there's not aliens? Of course, I don't know. There might be, but if there, it would be great to chat with them or AI could have this conversation someday maybe.

But again, to our knowledge, this is a duty that is, I think, created as soon as you have a multi-generation or even billion-year view of life in the universe. And once you have that, you have to think about, that life does come and go and 99.9% of all species that have ever lived have all gone extinct. And, you know, some of this is is natural, if you will, that there is a wax and wane of species. But for the first time in the history of life, we don't have to just sit idly by. And certainly we've not been sitting idly by for the past few thousand years. We've caused extinction and caused, you know, massive habitat change.

So I think this is just this, you know, you're anything embodied by this conversation. We're the only species that can have this. And so because this is a unique human traits, it, I think, imparts upon us a unique human duty and responsibility. But not just for us. Someday, again, if AI becomes sentient and starts chatting with us about it, they may be better stewards of complexity in life and intelligence in the universe than we are. And as long as they're nice to us, I think that'd be fine. And it's that long-term view that's the key here, isn't it? Because it's, I think that a lot of people sort of have problems with this idea of looking to,

of space and the stars and they see the billions of dollars being invested in, you know, space exploration and putting satellites up. And they say, we've got enough problems here on Earth at ground level that we need to be fixing. But you take that much more long term. Could you sort of expand on why it is that that means that we need to invest in space exploration today, even if we have problems of climate change? Yes. And this is a critique that's been talked about in the space program since even the 60s is, you know, we're spending billions of dollars, even at some point trillions of dollars, if you add that up, was spent. And there are problems that are on Earth. But, but to me, you know, I guess I have three specific responses as to why I do this. And the first one is

that it is a false dichotomy to say we have to do one or the other. We definitely can do both. We can pass, for example, in the United States, civil rights legislation was passed, you know, confronting social problems and problems of poverty was addressed in the 60s while we landed people on the moon. So there's, you know, even during times of severe racial strife and societal challenges and poverty, we can address those problems while doing extraordinary advances in spaceflight. The second reason I would give is that I think there is a very intangible but essential aspect of hope that the younger generation should be able to look to the skies and imagine that the future will be brighter than the present. And if they can believe that, I think it gives them a great

motivation to work harder, to dream bigger, to build new cures for diseases and to build new rockets. I think, again, you can then do both things when you see the look at the night sky and imagine going there, thinking about skateboarding on the moon, some of these beautiful images, I think, that did talk about with my daughter. And then the third reason, I think, of why it's important is that as evidenced by the fact that there is extinction, life is precious and rare. And if we just sit here, like, let's say we have perfect world peace and perfect research

allocation and we're all fine on earth that is fabulous but it is you know by the very cosmological fact of what happens to suns it is an impermanent home that we have and if you take a long view we have to at some point create technology they'll help us survive on other planets and eventually have a solar systems but again it's over the course of hundreds of millions of years but it is an inevitable cosmological fact that we cannot stay here forever so that's where it gets interesting some people was like, well, we'll all be dead in 10,000 years or a million years, and who cares. But I think that's false. I mean, that could be true, but it doesn't have to be true.

It's the first time, again, in the history of life in the universe, and certainly for our species, we have this awareness of the normal trajectory of life and planets and stars, and we can actually do something about it. So I think it is, you know, that's my response to, you know, what else we do. And we do work on a lot of those other diseases, other problems. So, for example, technology that you work on for space is a forcing function to make something smaller, lighter, more efficient, make it so you can do diagnostics in the field better or improve imaging techniques in the hospital. So a lot of the benefits of space technology help us here on

Earth as well. So obviously your book does start by talking about the reasons why we should preserve life and go to space. But actually what it's a lot about is how we actually do that, how we sort of engineer life to do that. And I suppose that the starting point of that is understanding the effects that space travel has on our bodies. You were obviously deeply involved in the NASA Twins study. Could you explain for our listeners what exactly that is and some of the fascinating things that we managed to sort of learn about the impacts of space travel by studying a set of twins,

one who stayed on Earth and one who went to space? Yeah, so really it was in a really unique opportunity, I was one of the principal investigators along with several other teams that looked at what happens to the human body when you're in space for a full year, which had been done a little bit by the Russians. They'd had a few cosmonauts who'd gone up just past a year in space, but we had never applied a lot of the armamentarium of modern medicine and molecular biology to spaceflight to understand at a molecular genetic and cellular level

what's happening inside the body and really delineate these changes at a high-resolution level to then understand them for countermeasures and planning for future missions. And so we, yeah, I spend a good part of the book, and a lot of the work in our lab is looking at missions from NASA and SpaceX and Blue Origin and other both government and commercial agencies to build this, you know, basically molecular atlas of what happens to the body. Most of it is really purely discovery. Like we see things change that we didn't expect. For example, telomeres got longer, which are these, the way your chromosomes and DNA gets packaged and maintained in your body and in your cells. Normally it shrinks as you age, but in space it got longer, which was surprising some work we did. with Susan Bailey to discover that and invalidate it in multiple other missions.

So that was a kind of a surprise. In some sense, you got genetically younger in space, but also a lot of the signatures of immune activation and the basically immune cell perturbation indicate that the body feels like it's fighting an infection, but it is still fully functional as far as we can tell. Like you can still make antibodies, you can still respond to a vaccine, respond to microbes. We've tested all those facets of biology. And so we see all these changes, but we're still learning very, very much. much what's normal change, what's adaptive, what might be maladaptive. So a lot of these questions

we're basically have an open protocol for anyone who goes to space. We're studying a lot of them or most of them who are going up to space with some of the commercial crews and with NASA. So it's very exciting time to build out these kind of maps. So when it comes to going up to space for an extended period of time, you know, not just on the space station, but beyond long-term space travel, what are some of the changes to our bodies that we need to be aware of, both things that affect us short term, so perhaps when you get back to Earth, it's a short term effect, and also some of the more concerning long-term effects. Yeah, so short term, we've noticed that, you know, there's a lot of inflammation changes. There are many real, you know, clear disruptions due to what happens in the body, like in the stress on the immune system.

We see what are called cytokines, these inflammatory markers that come up. which are often what you see when you have, again, have an infectionary, you have an injury. And a lot of astronauts get skin rashes. They get discomfort, especially the day that they land. But that is not as surprising because you're getting used to gravity or using your muscles again. That in some sense is expected. And it goes away within a matter of a few days. So, you know, that's actually a good thing to see that your body's responding to using its muscles and bones again.

But long term, there is bone loss, muscle loss. We do see increased radiation. We don't see big evidence of large-scale mutations in the DNA, but we do see changes and we think potentially long-term presence of mutations, and we're still studying that for the current crews. And also gene expression changes. We see how your body's regulating its genes, its genetic code. 93% of it seems to recover or 95%, but some of it is perturbed a little bit longer.

And we're not sure why. So the way we're testing this is looking in marathon running. versus astronauts versus climbers of mountains and trying to build a better catalog of what is normal variation and normal spaceflight response versus something that might be indicative of a worrisome medical change. So radiation you mentioned there, that's obviously quite a big concern. And with astronauts on the ISS, they're actually still within our magnetosphere, right? So they're not actually exposed to that much, well, they're exposed to more radiation than we are down on Earth, but not as much as someone who perhaps might be going to Mars or beyond.

And what risks does perhaps being exposed to radiation in that way pose to an astronaut or, you know, a future member of the public? You might be going to set up a colony on Mars. Yes. And there's a lot of people talking about it. My favorite is there was the Mars One campaign, people who wanted to go on a one-way trip to Mars. And so many people signed up. And a lot of people critiqued and said, well, and some guy posted, so my wife is excited for me to go, but she's going to stay back on Earth. And someone said, if your spouse wants you to go on a one-way trip to Mars, you should really reconsider.

of your marriage. Anyway, there's a lot of people who have various plans. But there are actually now, you know, legit plans from SpaceX to try and have flyby missions and then also potentially to have a Mars landing, even in a matter of five or six years, maybe less, maybe more. But there's a lot of enthusiasm. And we also have a nonprofit called Bioastra that's planning Mars and Venus missions. And so there's a lot of groups working on concepts for ways we could get there now that we have these heavy-lift rockets that could enable us to actually reach these planets, assuming that the refueling works in space. But to your question of radiation, it will be much more stark when you get to the moon

and you get to Mars. You're outside of the magnetosphere. Quite literally, the protective force field of our planet is gone. But what people would do is that have to go underground, they'd probably bury shelters under the regolith, under the soil, either the moon or Mars. But we can also monitor for dosymmetry changes or radiation changes. we can look in the blood, we can look at genetic changes, we can look for response of the body to the radiation and monitor the crew on the moon or Mars. And so we can do what's called sequencing method where you take DNA and we look for every detected mutation and see if it's changing, see if it's having any problems, see if there's anything that's worrisome for a genetic risk for cancer or disease.

But so far, you know, there's been rarely, you know, some astronauts have gotten cancer, actually including both Mark and Scott Kelly, eventually get prostate cancer, but they had it before the year-long mission, and so it's probably not related. So, you know, we have to really always put into the context, anyone who's aging in space relative to just what happens on Earth, which of course we all age and accumulate mutations here as well. So it's still ongoing, but, you know, the vast majority of people have had that comfort of the low Earth orbit, which is very safe, relatively safe. Peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

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What you discuss in your book is kind of looking at the ways that we We can't not just let's send people to space, but how can we bioengineer them to be more adapted to long-term space travel to a different planet? When do you think we might see genetically engineered astronauts going up into space and what sort of things might we be looking to tweak when we want to edit sort of the genetics of people going to space? Yeah, happy to go into some details because there are many things you could change genetically. you know, that or even many things that have changed genetically about humans over the past several million years since the last common divergence from, you know, chimps and Bonobos.

So it's kind of a provocative part of the book. I think, you know, what else could we change, modify, or even borrow from other creatures? So there's many, many things we could change. And so I think I have a, the whole several chapters about it, but I'll go through some of my favorite highlights. And some of them are, well, actually, I'll start first with the concept. First, a lot of people think, oh my gosh, we shouldn't modify humans.

That sounds crazy. It sounds, is it effort? what should we do? But I think the concepts of genetic engineering for humans has gone from completely abstract 10 years ago to an FDA-approved therapy in the United States for sickle cell disease where you actually modify the cells of the adult to turn back on fetal hemoglobin, which is a way to treat sickle cell disease. So this is a curative therapy that is genetic editing of humans that's happening today. So again, the concept of this is an abstract notion maybe was the case 10 years ago or even when I first started writing the book, but is no longer at all

abstract through these CRISPR methods. And so if that's the case, there's two big areas where you could make changes. One is you make genetic changes, modify the DNA. And so for that, I'd say that includes things like, you know, changing what hemoglobin you use, which is already FTE-approved therapy if you would need to. Turning back on genes that are still inside of us along those lines, like the gene to make vitamin C is still inside of us. It's just been degraded. We should turn it back on your dog. If you have a dog or cat, they don't need to have limes or mohitos to get their vitamin C, but they make it naturally and they're mammals, right? So this is, it's interesting that this ability to make your own vitamin C is a simple vitamin has been gained and lost several times

through evolution. And the gene that is still inside of us. So you can just slightly modify it or make other amino acids or add in genes from organisms like tardigrade's, they get more radio protection. And so that's one area, genetic modifications. And then the second big area is epigenetic modification. So instead of changing your DNA or adding or deleting or modifying it, you just change what gets turned on or turned off, like a light switch. And so this is something we have working in cells in the lab where you can flip on radio protection genes or turn them back off. And so if you know you're going to a high radiation environment, you could tweak your genes activity before you go there. So this is, again, something that's been published in the literature now for several years, but, you know, 10 years ago was completely fanciful and almost science fiction, but is now really established.

So these two areas are places where I'd like to make it so you can survive in space longer, withstand the radiation and need less resources broadly. I'm sure the idea of not having to eat any citrus fruits will be pleasing to some people, but less pleasing to others. Well, you still could. It's just you wouldn't need it, right? It would be optional versus now you'll literally get scurvy if you don't get enough, you know, limes. And what's also interesting is the shackleton expedition's in Antarctica in the early 1900s, that was still debated. People weren't sure if you really needed limes or what was preventing scurvy. You know, now it's very clear. Some of the members that expedition did get scurvy, for example. So, yeah. You mentioned tardigrates there or water bears, as some people might know them by. Could you maybe explain a little more about why they're such fascinating creatures to study in this context and sort of what we can learn and apply to our own aspirations in the stars?

Yes, they're an example of an extremophile, which is a kind of creature that can survive either high radiation, temperature, salinity, other pressure. you know, extreme is of course relative to humans. So for them, it's not extreme. It's just where they've evolved. But it is a place where they can survive even, for example, the vacuum of space, tardigrades are these small little eukaryotes that are

in soil all over the world. They're almost everywhere you look. But they can go even into the vacuum of space and come back and survive that desiccation and radiation and vacuum and get rehydrated. Now, they don't all survive. It's not like their favorite environment. But the fact that they can is extraordinary and illustrative of a genetic

capacity for one organism to survive in a place that is inspiring. So we have taken inspiration from those creatures and made chimeric human tardigrade cells that have some of the genes from tardigrades, that's particularly a gene called D-sup and a few others and then make it so the human cells can have resistance to radiation. So we're big fans of the cute water bears. I think the other thing in the book that I found really surprising was about, or something I never knew was about elephants and how they have far more cells than us, but are much less susceptible to cancers. Could you maybe explain a little bit about what that is about and why that

could be useful? Yeah, I'm happy to. So they have actually 20 copies of a gene called P53. They're not all fully functional, but they have more copies of it, which actually, we just published a paper on this with colossal biosciences as a preprint that is, you know, just even to modify those cells was harder because this gene actually prevents DNA damage and double strand breaks from existing or being protected against. So if you have many copies of the gene, it's hard. to genetically edit cells because they'll resist it. So this is, you know, one facet that makes making it harder to clone a woolly mammoth, for example, but not impossible. But this gene, P53, is often called the guardian of the genome because it goes around and prevents or protects

against damage to the DNA. So it's something that elephants have a lot more copies of me, 20 copies instead of the two copies that we have, for example. So really, an extraordinary creatures. Yeah, I mean, extraordinary in many ways, but that was something new that I learned and loved, And it's definitely a fact that I'm going to take to a few dinner parties and such. So we've kind of picked some bits from your book so far, but the book is about the next 500 years and sort of how, you know, the spans half a millennium. Could you try and walk us through sort of what some of the key phases are to go from where we are today to becoming an interstellar species? I'm not expecting you to be able to walk through the entire book in all its depth, but a whistle stop tour. Yeah, the book spans five centuries, and some people even say, like, well, why 500 years?

And I always like to say, because that seems like a reasonable amount of time to me. I think, you know, 50 years is relatively short. That's within someone's own lifetime. They could plan for retirement or then what they do when they're older. That's reason, you know, it's short. And 5,000 is pretty long in the sense that where we were 5,000 years ago versus today is dramatically different. So I think it's hard to, you know, well, it's famously difficult to predict the future. And so I like to say this isn't a book about prediction.

I'm not a futurist. I often decline that label. I just think it's a rational linear projection and a regression of current data into what's likely coming and what we know we will need to do, basically. So it's more about the view of a billion year time frame of what we need to do. And then what should we do in the next 500 years to make it so we can begin to go towards other planets and survive. So the first phase just completed actually. So it's 10 phases 500 years. The first phase was actually the first 10 years of the book that I started in.

2010, which was mostly about pure discovery of biology. The second phase was much more about beginning to early stages of genetic engineering and early trials. And when I first wrote it, some of the wrote that plan, CRISPR had just barely been utilized yet in human cells. And now it's much easier to do some of the early gene editing. So I thought by phase three, which would be more in the 2060s, we would do a lot more complex editing and swap out whole, even chromosomes potentially, and start to get more creative. And at the time, thought that'd be hard, but maybe it won't be that hard. And also we begin to do at that point, I call multi-generational clinical trials where we see, okay, we're going to start making really dramatic changes in the genetic code. And you could argue we've

somewhat already done that for cells for these patients with sickle cell, although it's just their adult cells. It shouldn't be passed on. But I think we should monitor any time we do large-scale manipulation of humans or environments over many generations. And a great example in the United States is called the Framingham Heart Study. We followed multiple generations of families. And that's how we learned about a lot of heart disease risk factors. And so I think longitudinal studies would start in phase three. Phase four would be a lot more exploration of the inner planets and ways to start to have a lot more probes and beginning settlements of Mars.

Then phase five, we'd start to actually get testing of basically protected genomes on Mars and throughout the inner solar system, probably not as much mercury, but some work on Venus. Mercury is just a little bit too hot, too cold. I'd say phase six then actually gets towards getting out to the outer planets where we'd start to look at what's in Enceladus and other potentially ocean worlds and learn from extreme falls on Earth to get and potentially survive on those worlds. And phase seven starts to get out, even out towards the outer planets, like looking more Saturn, Neptune.

The vision is that by then we're having a pretty consistent movement between most of the areas of our solar system. And in phase A is where we've actually perfected the way to look for other stars and star systems. You probably just heard the news recently, potentially dimethyl sulfides existing in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. And so I have a whole section about by phase 7, Nate, we'll have probably, today we have several thousand exoplanets that are known. By then, this is, you know, say, 3,000, 250, 300 years from now, we would probably have millions of exoplanets from which we could choose to understand their atmosphere and think about work we potentially send life.

And then phase nine is about building what would then be the generation ship where we would actually start to send out whole crews that would try and go to find these other solar systems. And then basically the end of 500 years is when we start to launch them out into other solar systems. is the hope and the vision of what's in the book. Obviously, there's considerations about ourselves and how we might engineer our genes and such. Also, there's this sort of engineering problem of physically getting to other places. Do you think that those two things are aligned pace-wise at the moment,

or do you worry that one is going, you know, that we might be going to Mars too quickly and not actually keeping up in terms of how do we keep people safe and then also thrive? Good question. So right now the hardware is moving faster than the wetware, I'd say, is that the human bodies are relatively frail compared to what they're going to encounter out slitting on the surface of Mars, for example. There's actually a great YouTube video. It's called How You Would Die on Every Planet in our Solar System. I just talked about the pressure, the temperature, the changes, and it just tries to estimate how fast you would die on the surface. It's a really kind of, I think it's an interesting video. Maybe funny is the wrong word, but certainly

intriguing. The images are funny. But we would need to really be careful with how we can protect the human body and also deploy robots and other tools. It could be just because we're not built for that. Most of the environments outside of Earth, of course. But there's also a lot of new space seeds being designed, new habitat structures, new robots that can help us or even go first. It does sort of the pioneering wave of a version of sentience and then we'd follow up. And, you know, let's see. Eventually humans might even evolve differently on these plans. and become a different species over a long enough period. But that's a ways down the road.

But right now the hardware is a bit faster than life support and the wetware. So you also kind of imagine scenarios where we don't just make it past to the next star, you know, but we also make it kind of to the end of the universe itself. Could you give us a glimpse into what that kind of cosmic engineering might be that is required to push us beyond what might be a big crunch or a, big slow expansion and death of the universe. Yes. So that was kind of the last chapter of the book was, it was frankly,

it was a little bit depressing to write because I was writing for a few, you know, a good couple weeks about the end of the universe in all the ways it could, every atom and molecule in the universe could perish. So, you know, and I thought at the end, that's called the kind of the ultimate ethical question is like,

let's say we've survived that long. We've survived at that point hundreds of trillions of years. And the universe depends on mostly on dark matter and dark energy, but at some point, it'll either keep expanding and accelerate into expansion. That's the current model. Or it might come back in and collapse on itself. And in either situation, we'd be confronted with at that point, probably we'd have the technological acumen to maybe restructure the space time itself, maybe, maybe modify the universe to carve out an issue where we'd still survive, or do we somehow prevent ourselves from being crushed in the big crunch? I don't know how we do that, of course, but wormholes or other features maybe.

But the question then becomes, but should we, right? So say the universe has this natural waxen way in forming and reforming, and maybe it's happened hundreds of times already, should we prevent the heat death of the universe or their big collapse or just let it do what it has done before and hope that life will rise again and just let ourselves perish. And if the duty to survive is a good argument, which I think it is, we would have to actually try and prevent the universe from collapsing in itself or find a way to find an escape for life to survive. And so that is something that I think would be the, it would be a manifestation of the duty that's appropriate is that we'd have to try and wormhole or

make a carve out and survive, which makes us, it makes it sound a bit like deities if we're doing things like that, but that would be what we'd have to do to actually survive, I think. But I think, and the question of should we or shouldn't we? I think the answer is yes, that we should. It's what we have always done. And there's no guarantee that life would arise in the next universe. What if this, what if there's been a thousand universes before this and there'll be thousands after, but this is the only one it's ever formed and maybe the only one it ever would form, which I think would be sad and why I'd like to prevent that. Gosh, quite a depressing place to leave it, but also very exciting.

I mean, incredible to kind of, it baffles the mind to think about us at that kind of level of technological advancement. We've covered loads here and there's loads of sort of fascinating ideas in your book. if someone was to take away a key message, you know, from all of this incredibly in-depth and interesting information, what do you think that that should be? I think it would be this sense of duty towards life that I think a lot of people feel natively, the sense of like you see a beautiful flower, you see a dog limping on the street or you want to help it, you see just a person fall down, you reach out your hand and you help

someone. That instinct is present in most people and I think almost everyone, really, and it's a It's just taking that same instinct, but viewing it not just about one day, but having that compassion and duty towards life be for the past and for the future and the present. And that basically this is a duty that you can manifest just by thinking far ahead. And I like that some people have thought, well, I didn't even know that I could make a plan for 50 years, 100 years, 500 years. But I would also say that, you know, think about the duty towards life and realize that also

it's your birthright as a human being to have decades, centuries. long plans, to have intergenerational plans, and then make a dream that's commensurate with your innate capacity as a human being to dream big and dream far. I guess I'd say it would be my two things. The duty and compassion towards life and then the manifestation of big long-term dreams. Thanks for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus. If you'd like to watch our presenters and guests speaking in person, then you can also check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now.

Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines, or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. And if you'd like to hear more about the ideas that Chris was discussing today, don't forget to check out his book. The next 500 years. Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds. Available in all good bookstores. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio,

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