克里斯·梅森：太空旅行、殖民與在太空的長期生存

Lex Fridman Podcast #283 – Chris Mason: Space Travel, Colonization, and Long-Term Survival in Space Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. The following is a conversation with Chris Mason, professor of genomics, physiology, and bio physics at Cornell. He and colleagues do some of their research out in space, experiments on space missions that seek to discern the molecular basis of changes in the human body during long term human space travel. On this topic, he also wrote an epic book titled "The Next Five Hundred Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds" that boldly looks at what it takes to colonize space far beyond our planet and even journey out. Towards livable worlds beyond our solar system, and now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got BetterHelp for mental health, Grammarly for writing, Magic Spoon for cereal, Blinkist for books, and A Sleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp spelled HELP help. BetterHelp helps you figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. I recently had a conversation with Carl Diceroth, brilliant psychiatrist. He at least in part reinvigorated my curiosity, maybe passion about psychiatry. About talk therapy, about exploring the human mind through conversation, especially when that human mind has fallen off the beaten path. One of the most moving things to me is when folks happen to run into me in the street. They'll sometimes say that you know me talking about love and just in general having optimism about the future gave them strength. But I also hear about the struggle and I see the pain, even just few seconds of interaction. I don't know, it makes me feel like we're together in this thing, you know. So if if you are struggling, just know we're in this together. I am with you, brother and sister. Anyway, BetterHelp is easy, private, affordable, and available worldwide. Check them out at betterhelp dot com slash lex. That's betterhelp dot com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by Grammarly, a writing assistant tool that checks spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability. Grammarly Premium, the version you pay for, offers a bunch of extra features. My favorite is the clarity check, which helps detect rambling, overcomplicated chaos that many of us descend into in conversation, in writing, and otherwise. 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It has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 40 grams of protein, only four net grams of carbs, and 140 calories in each serving. I think I am having way too much fun doing these ad reads. And they're like much less about whatever the product is, much more about me just talking. It's like personal therapy by myself, but also with my friends. Back to Magic Spoon. You can build your own box and get a variety pack with available flavors: cocoa, fruity, frosted, peanut butter, blueberry, and cinnamon. But I return time and time and time again to cocoa. The flavor of champions. It reminds me of childhood. It reminds me of happiness. But it just reminds me of that joy of morning cereal without the deeply unhealthy excessive amounts of sugar. Anyway, Magic Spoon have a 100% happiness guarantee. Now we're back to happiness. If you don't like it, they refund it. Go to magic spoon dot com slash lex. Use code lex to check out to save five bucks off your order. That's magic spoon dot com slash lex and use code lex. This show is brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down to just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. I can recommend a ton of books: Sapiens, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, Snowden book and so on. They don't have The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I don't believe. I have to check again, but they have a lot of the most important, most impactful nonfiction books ever written. If you don't have the time to read all of them, which nobody does, you should definitely use Blinkist to catch up on the ones that are not at the top of your stack to read. I use it both to summarize books I'll never read, but also to summarize books I've already read to remind myself to the key insights. You can go to blinkist dot com slash lex to start your free seven day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist Premium membership. That's blinkist dot com slash lex spelled B L I N K I S D. Blinkist dot com slash lex. This episode is brought to you by A Sleep and its Pod Pro mattress. It controls temperature with an app. It's packed with sensors and can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. There are very few things in life, my friends, that are as pleasant as a good power nap. Sometimes I'll even drink a coffee beforehand, which I don't know how that works. Andrew Huberman probably knows how that works, but it works. I'll drink a coffee and I'll just pass out. Now sometimes I pass out on the floor, and that also works. But if I want to really enjoy the power nap, so it's not just about function, it's about happiness. And if I want to enjoy happiness, there is nothing better than a cool bed with a warm blanket for 20 minutes, 25 minutes, 30 minutes, and then I wake up 100% refreshed. I do that because I am in a A Sleep Pod Pro cover that you can add to your mattress. I added to my mattress. You can go to a sleep dot com slash lex to check out the aforementioned Pod Pro cover and save 200 at checkout. A Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the UK. That's a sleep dot com slash lex. This is the lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Chris Mason. You wrote a book called "The Next Five Hundred Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds," and you dedicated to quote to all humans in any extinction aware sentient. How fundamental is awareness of death and extinction to the human condition? I 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 we 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, but if you do it at a species wide level, it's something that is actually an exemplary human specific trait that you are 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 dedicated it because I think we might not be the last sentients to have this awareness. I am 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 are the only ones that have this awareness that gives us a duty that only we can exercise so far. So we definitely contemplate our own mortality at the individual level. It is true when you wrote it, it was really powerful to realize for me that we do contemplate our extinction and that that is a creative force. So at the individual level, contemplating your own death is a creative force. Yes, like I have a deadline. Yes, but contemplating the extinction of the whole species, I suppose that stretches through human history. That's many of the sort of subtext of religious ideas is that like if we screw this up, it's going to be over. 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. You know a sense of responsibility at a planetary scale. So when we think about like 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. Well, yeah, that's right. So we're like a bunch of ants, extinction aware sentients, ants that are busy trying to terraform this planet to make it habitable so we can flourish and then. You say that it's our duty to expand beyond Earth, to expand to other planets, to to find a a good backup, off site backup solution. Why the word duty? It's an interesting word. Duty is something that usually puts people to sleep. I'll say they say duty, you know, duty is a bit like death. People don't often like to really think. What wake up in the morning? Think what is 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 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 to flourish and to be safe. So we we do have the sense of duty, but you don't you know 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 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 you know fighting 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 has 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, colosses a recent startup that's doing that. I am on their advisor board and it's 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 exists, which is pretty extraordinary. Yeah, I've just been working on backup and restoring databases quite a bit recently, and you can do quite a lot of damage when you restore improperly. When we bring back the mammals, it might be you have to be careful bringing that back. Yes, like the best of science, the best of engineering is both dangerous and exciting, and that's why you have to have the best people, but also the most morally grounded people. Yes, pushing us forward. But on the point of duty, there is a kind of sense that there is something special to humanity, to human beings that we want to preserve, and if that. That little flame, whatever that is, dies. That will be a real shame for the universe. What is that? What is special about human beings? What is special about the human condition that we want to preserve? That's why do we matter? There are some people who think we don't. There are some people say, "Well, humans take it, 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 some people, what does the word misanthrope mean? Oh, just people that dislike humanity. There, they're just again they're well just they're called nihilists, Donny. That's a shout out for Biglebofki fans. They're like nothing matters, and why does any like 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 and you know 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 you know getting to the moon and eventually already 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 Mars. But in either case, there is a unique perspective that that we carry, and I think so that that's something even just the old the age old question in biology and a geneticist. 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. Other species have some degree of those those traits, so it's a question of degree not of type of trait that defines. You know 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 sentients that carries that awareness of the frailty of life of our own life but all life. Maybe it is that awareness of the frailty of life that allows us to be so urgently creative, create beauty, create innovation. It just seems like if you just measure humans are able to create some. Sort of subjectively beautiful things, and I see science that way. I see engineering that way, and ants are less efficient at that. They also create beautiful things, but less aggressively, less innovation, less building like standing on the shoulders of giants building on top of each other over and over and over where you are getting like these like hierarchical systems. We create on greater levels of abstraction. Then you use ideas to communicate those ideas and you share those ideas and all of a sudden you have the rockets going 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. Yet, yeah, that's right. We've got an experiment going right now, and maybe they'll change, but. Well, yeah, we will bring up some extreme organisms. Another thing you are interested in. Okay, one interesting thing that comes up much later in your book is something I also haven't thought of and it's quite inspiring, which is the heat death of the universe. Is something worth fighting against? Like that's also an engineering problem. Yes, you know you kind of the I mean, you seriously look at the next 500 years. And that's such a beautiful thing, you know. Seriously, we'll talk about like the uncertainty involved with that and all the different trajectories, but to seriously look at that and then to seriously look at like. What happens when the sun runs out? What happens when the the universe comes to an end? Like we have an opportunity and a kind of duty, like you said, to fight against that, and that was so inspiring to me to think, wait. Maybe we'll actually that's a worthy thing to think about. Maybe we can prevent it actually. Right, the come up with the best known understanding current of how things end. That you know we we kind of are building an intuition and data and models of the way the universe is the way started the way it's going to end. So our best model of the end, let's start thinking about how that could be prevented, how that could be avoided, how that could be. Channelled and misdirected, and you can pivot it somehow. That's really inspiring. That's really powerful. I never really thought about. I thought that you know eventually all things end, and that was a kind of melancholic notion behind all of it. You know none of this matters in a way just to me that's also inspiring and to enjoy the moment to really live in the moment. You know that because that is truly where beauty exists in the moment. But there is a long lasting aspect of beauty that is part of the engineering ethic, which is like tell me what the problem is and we're going to solve it. So what do you think about that? The the long scale beyond 500 years is do humans have a chance? Absolutely, I think we have the the best chance of any species, and actually the best chance that humanity's ever had. So I think a lot of people fear that we could 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 am interviewing for, whatever reason, yes, 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 billion. 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, I was like really for all of humanity everything will be gone in 100 years, and he said yes, and I said well. Well, sweet Jesus, man, why go to med school? What do you why not go sell bananas on the beach? And then he said, "I really want to make the last you know few hundred years count really matter." And I said, "Oh well, that's actually kind of sort of hopeful in a really dark way, but I think we've never been better situated to actually last for the long term. We have, even though we've also never been at the greater risk of being able to destroy ourselves ever since really the first nuclear test where they. " Tony Orb is 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 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 add in for item question if you keep thinking well we survive 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 either continues to expand or could collapse back on itself and the heat death, is more likely at this point where it just keeps expanding and expanding everything gets too far away but even in that case I think if we had a fundamental knowledge of physics and space time that you could try and restructure quite literally the shape of the universe to prevent it, I think we would I think we would want to survive I think you know unless we had done the math and we think that there's a greater chance that the next universe would form and make more life maybe we would but even then, I think humans have always wanted to survive and and you could argue maybe should survive because and are able to engineer systems that help us survive yeah yeah and always have yeah, so what is this the the zar bomb yeah the hydrogen, yeah there's there's nothing more terrifying and somehow inspiring than watching the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, it's like humans are capable of this they're capable of leveraging the power of nature, to completely obliterate everything and and to create propulsion though I mean most the Voyager spacecraft are nuclear powered because it's still in many ways the most efficient way to get a tiny amount of fissible material and make power out of it you know so they're still slowly drifting their path the heliosphere they're out now into interstellar space and they're nuclear powered so it's like any tool or technology it's a it's a tool or a weapon depending on how you hold it, are we alone in the universe Chris Mason, what do you think so the presumption that you've just mentioned is let's just focus on our thing, for now for now well I think we as far as we know we know there's sentient life out in the universe that we've found yet, and and I think there's probably bacteria life out there just because we found it everywhere we've looked on Earth it is, and there's you know halophilic organisms that can survive in extreme salts there are caryophiles that in extreme cold there's you know basically organisms can survive in really almost any possible environment you can they can adapt and find a way to live, but as far as we know we're the only sentient ones and I think this is the famous the Drake equation or you know how many where is everyone is the what Enrico Fermi said is the why haven't we heard from anyone if there are these other life forms I actually think the question is wrong to phrase it that way because the unit the Earth has only been here for four point five billion years, and we and you know life maybe only for a few billion of those years complex life only for several hundred years hundred million years of life we've actually had you know and humans only in the past few million years since our last common ancestor so it's not that much time, but if you think even further back the universe hasn't had that much time itself to cool and create atoms and have them spread around the the universe right so the current estimates thirteen point eight billion years of just the whole universe but it spent the first five or six of those billion years really just like cooling and making enough of the stars to then make the atoms that would come from supernovas so I actually think we might be the first or one of the very few or one of the early life forms but the universe itself hasn't had that much time to make life in the in a galactic and universal time frame, you needed billions of years for the elements to be created and then distributed and we're only really in the I think the last few billion years where I think even life could have been made so I think the question of wherever is everyone is the wrong question I think the question is, I think we are the first ones at the party let's set up the liquor let's set up the food we I just think we're the first ones at the party of life but more people are coming, one of the early attendees to the party, yeah maybe the as far as we know the first but maybe in the local pocket of the universe, because the party is then expand and it overflows and that's right and then there's a mosh pit and then you know you bump into the other galaxy I think it's I think the question should be, we know when else is everyone getting here instead of where is everyone I think I think we've just started on the genesis of life in the universe, yeah so not not worry have they or not more about when and who and how do we set up the party right and then how do we help them I think it's an interesting other moral question is do we you know the a lot of Star Trek episodes you the prime directive is you do not interfere with another planet if you could pass by a planet, I think it's time to also revisit that because what if what if you go by a planet and we think that with as far as we can tell with enough certainty that they would never be able to leave their planet and then the sun eventually would engulf that planet wherever that planet might be in some solar system, but if we had a way to help them their culture their science their technology everything about a different species to survive, would we not interfere interfere I think that would actually be wrong to say well we can save this this life here and we decide not to we decide after millions and billions of years past and we know the sun will engulf that planet like what will happen with our planet and we don't interfere that's you know watching a train hit someone on the tracks and not moving the train so, in terms of the effort of humans becoming multibillionary species, in terms of priorities, how much would you allocate to trying to make contact with aliens, and getting their help, and if we look at the next five hundred beyond years, and just versus option number two really just focusing on setting up the party on our own engineering our on our own, the genome the biology of humanity the AI collaborating with humans just that all the engineering challenges and opportunities that we're, we're exploring, I'm focused in my lab of course a lot on the engineering of genomes the monitoring of astronauts during long missions, you know reaching out to other alien we've been doing reach out to aliens since the first radio waves been broadcast so we're doing some of it but to do a real made it sound like your lab is mostly focused on biology but you also reach out occasionally aliens occasionally when they visit they have they bring their whiskey and we have a drink but the, I think we we can do we've been broadcasting into space for you know at this point almost a century getting close to and you know so but it's not been structured so I think it's very cheap and easy to send out structured messages like what Carl Sagan wrote about in contact doing prime numbers and sending those out to indicate intelligence, so there's things we can do that I think are very cheap and very easy so we should we should do some of that we can walk and chew gum at the same time this is one of the biggest critiques people often say of space research and and even space flight in general it's too expensive shouldn't we solve poverty shouldn't we cure diseases and the answer is always as it always has been is that you can walk and chew gum at the same time you can pass the civil rights act and go to the moon in the same decade you can improve and and get rid of structural inequality while getting to the moon and Mars in this decade so I think I think we can do both, yeah they kind of help each other there's sometimes criticism of like ridiculous science like studying penguins or something or studying the patterns of birds or fish and so on some congressman stands up and says this is a waste of taxpayer dollars and then but someone says but we for example CRISPR was pure research for twenty five years now it's a household word and and students are editing genomes in high school but it was just pure research on weird bacteria living actually in salt hypersaline lakes and rivers, for decades and then eventually became a massive therapeutic which is like the curing of diseases in this past year, and there's stuff that you discover as part of the research that you didn't anticipate they have nothing to do with the actual research like oceanography, is one of the interesting things about that whole field is that it's a huge amount of data neuroscience too actually so you could discover computer science things like machine learning things or even data storage manipulation distributed compute things by having forcing yourself to get something done about on the oceanography side that's how you invent the internet and and and all those kinds of things so to me, aliens looking for aliens out there in the universe, is a motivator that just inspires inspires everybody young people old people scientists artists, engineers entrepreneurs everybody, somehow the that line between fear and beauty, because we're aliens are like perfectly merged basically because we don't know I mean for you let's start talking about primitive alien life are you excited by it or you terrified, I want to make a lotion out of it I think it'd be great if it's alien life assuming it's safe but I'm very excited it doesn't have to be you just said a half sentence presuming it's safe that's the fundamental question of trying to get it so if you could yes presuming it's safe so I think you know we have this this beginning of some planetary protection is happening now is we're going to send we're bringing rocks back from Mars in twenty thirty three if all goes according to plan, but there's always a danger of what if you bring this back what if it's alive what if it will kill all of humanity or Michael Creton wrote a book The Andromeda Strain about this very idea, and we could but it hopefully won't and the only way you can you know really gauge that it's the same way we do with any infectious agent here on Earth right if it's a new pathogen a new organism you do it slowly carefully you often do it with levels of containment so you know and it's going to be probably have to be where some pioneers go and would be for example on Mars there might be other organisms there that only get activated once there's an ambient temperature and more humidity then suddenly the first settlers on Mars are encountering a strange new fungus or something that's not even like a fungus because it might be a different clade of life different branch of life, and could be very dangerous or it could be very inert I mean most of life on Earth on Earth is not really dangerous or harmful let me go back on this, most of life on Earth is neither harmful nor beneficial to you it's just they're making its own way in the universe just trying to survive it's when you know it's inside of you and replicating yourselves and destroying yourselves like a virus like like like COVID XRCV two that it becomes a big problem of course but it's you know just doesn't really have agency it's just trying to get by and so for example most of bacteria on the table on your skin in the subway are pretty inert they're just you know people hanging around for the ride, and actually just because we're talking so much trash about viruses most viruses are, don't bother humans they're phages almost all the vast majority of viruses are phages there's this this the battle in the biology that is really dorky is that bacteria think that they're the most you know people study bacteria think the bacteria the most important because there's trillions and trillions of them they run a lot of our own biology in our body but then people who study phages they say well there's ten times more phages than bacteria which can attack the bacteria and destroy them as well so, phage people think that they run the world but we need them both, what do you think about viruses or so because you you said alien organisms wouldn't we encounter something like bacteria something like viruses as the first alien life form are they first of all are viruses alive or not, so by the book definition if you pick up a biology textbook they'd say technically no because they don't have the ability to self replicate independently, but I would think if you restructure how you view what life is in terms of autonomously, aggregating and replicating of information, for example AI at some point what if there's an AI platform that we could consider alive like at what point would you allow it to say it's alive and I think we have the same definitional challenge there is that if it can, continually propagate instructions for its own existence, then it is a version of living I think you know viruses don't get that category because, they can't do it on their own but they are a version of life I'd say but probably not alive, well they are expressing themselves and doing so on occasion quite powerfully in human civilization so, like you said at which point, our AI systems allowed to say we're life we we are allowed, humans must allow them and viruses didn't ask for permission to express themselves to humans they just kind of they just kind of did we didn't have to allow them, are they overall though exciting or terrifying to you as somebody who has studied viruses, whenever given two options there's always two more you could do both or neither so here I'll say they're both terrifying and exciting I think to me more exciting than terrifying I think if I had to make that sandwich and how many layers are you know meat versus cheese there's a lot more cheese of excitement, and meat meat is the fear is the fear in this metaphor sandwich, well I love both so it's a hell of a delicious sandwich you quote President Dwight D Eisenhower in your book quote plans are useless but planning is essential, and you provide a thought experiment called entropy goggles, can you describe this thought experiment, happily I I do this, almost every day somewhere when I'm sitting in a given room I will, well a quick comment about that quote actually for all the NASA planning meetings for the twin study and other missions that was often the quote that goes put up on the wall before we sit down for the day to plan the mission, it was that quote which I plans are useless but planning essential which I thought was hilarious for an official NASA meeting, but it was because you need to have a plan but you have to know that plan might change and so I think that's just a quick context for that quote that Craig Kundrow who's a leader at NASA is headquarters now I would always put that first slide up and I'm like hmm this meeting either going to go really well or really bad I don't know what's about to happen but but it's a inspiring quote because it's very true, in any case the entropy goggles is a thought experiment I detail in in my book which is, if you just sit in a room any room wherever you are and and imagine what it will look like in ten years a hundred years five hundred years or even thousands of years it is a wonderfully terrifying and exciting exercise again it's definitely both because you realize the transience of everything that you think of what what might survive almost everything that you're looking at will probably not be there in hundreds of years, it will be you know at very least degraded or it might be changed altered completely different moved, it is just and it's that trait though of humans to just sit there and project into the future, easily you know really seamlessly with whatever you were doing and previously, is is powerful because it shows the you know what can change and what should change in some cases but also that, you know left to you know its own devices the universe would entropy would come take over and really things would decay things would be destroyed but the only thing really preventing I think some of the entropy is is really humans these sort of sentient creatures that are aware of extinction like ourselves, is really one of the only forces in the universe that's counteracting the second law of thermodynamics that's entropy that's always increasing, technically we're actually still increasing it because we emit heat and we never have perfect capture of all of energy but we're the only things really actively and consciously, you know resisting it really you could say life in general does this like ants do this when they build their big homes they're rearranging the universe to make a nice place for themselves and they're you know counteracting entropy but we could actually do it in a way that would be at a large scale and for long term, so but the entropy goggles is just a way to realize how transient everything is and just imagine everything that will decay or change in the room around you so if anyone listening if they're listening on a train or they're driving in their car wherever someone is listening right now, looking around everything can and will change and so you that but then at first it's terrifying to see that oh my gosh everything will decay and go away, but then I think it's actually liberating I think wait I can affect this I can prevent it or I can affect it or I can improve the change that may occur all all by itself say naturally, and so I think it is but is that awareness again of like kind of the frailty of life the ever insistence in increase in entropy, that you can address though and actually I say the same thing to first year medical students I teach them genetics I say I point early in the course I say here's all these charts of how the human body decays over over time it just and I call it the inexorable march towards molecular oblivion which the students often find that kind of laugh at ah because I know the charts they're twenty two years old but older people do not laugh as much at the thought of molecular oblivion but we're all marching towards it to large degree, so this is both a great thought experiment for the environment around you so just looking at all the objects around you, that they will, dissipate they will disappear with time, but then it's also the thing you mentioned which is how can I affect any of the world like you're one little creature, and it's like your life is kind of, you get dropped into this ocean and you make a little splash and how do I make it so the splash lasts for, a little bit longer because it ultimately will I suppose the wave will continue indefinitely but it'll be such a small impact that it's almost indetectable and so how do I have that impact at all, on so many levels I get to experience this, as as a human like, I recently had had my cold storage hacked, to where it was locked essentially it wasn't hacked it was locked and so you get to lose all your data so for example if you lose all your data if you lose all your online presence your social media your emails, if you like think of all the things you could lose in a fire there's been a lot of fires in the United States if you lose your home, and it makes you realize wait a minute, this is exactly a nice simulation of what will