Inevitably, life on Earth will come to an end, whether by climate disaster, cataclysmic war, or the death of the sun in a few billion years. What do we do about it?
Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/t2caS7MX7tk
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In this talk, Christopher E Mason argues we have a moral duty to explore other planets and solar systems. He envisages the same capacity for ingenuity that has enabled us to build rockets and land on other planets can be applied to redesigning biology so that we can sustainably inhabit those planets. And he will lay out a 500-year plan for undertaking the massively ambitious project of reengineering human genetics for life on other worlds.
Christopher E. Mason is a geneticist and computational biologist who has been a Principal Investigator and Co-investigator of several NASA missions and Planetary Protection projects. He is Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, with affiliate appointments at the Meyer Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School, and the Consortium for Space Genetics at Harvard Medical School. His book The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach Other Worlds will be published in April 2021 by MIT Press.
This talk was recorded on 20th April 2021
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