Humanity's Space Odyssey: Ethical Futures and Biological Insights

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?

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