What Is Special About Humanity?

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There are endless reasons, I think, to cherish and celebrate what humans have done. There's a kind of sense that there's something special to humanity, to human beings that we want to preserve. When we bring back the madness, it might be you have to be careful bringing that back. And so there are no real guidelines yet on how to do that.

Chris Mason is a professor of genomics, physiology, and biophysics at Cornell, doing research on the long-term effects of space on the human body. He is the author of The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(0:00) – Introduction
(7:43) – Human extinction awareness
(16:29) – Heat death of the universe
(22:05) – Alone in the universe
(25:41) – Aliens
(33:50) – Entropy goggles
(48:04) – Genetics
(56:14) – Scott Kelly
(1:02:12) – Adapting to space
(1:12:13) – Sex in space
(1:14:46) – Colonizing planets
(1:21:25) – Culture on Mars
(1:25:51) – Commercial space flights
(1:33:09) – Podcast in space
(1:40:43) – Axiom Space
(1:42:59) – Designing space experiments
(1:49:49) – Robots in space
(1:52:30) – Space exploration
(1:56:28) – War in space
(2:00:05) – Launch toward the Second Sun
(2:06:14) – Chlorohumans
(2:11:50) – Extreme microbiome project
(2:18:17) – Space travel breakthroughs
(2:30:15) – Clones
(2:36:08) – AI age prediction
(2:41:38) – Advice for young people
(2:47:56) – Dark times
(2:52:19) – Mortality
(2:56:37) – Visiting ISS and deep space
(2:57:46) – Meaning of life