![]() ![]() Things like rivers being massively irradiated could also be explained quite easily. The only real places that are just massive radioactive clouds are places like The Glow on the West-coast, and The Glowing Sea on the East. Not like the Pre-war government cared much about environmental protection.Īnd even places like DC aren't 100% irradiated, they're just toxic and scorched to high hell. Most areas are irradiated because of that, not because of the inital nukes' radiation.Įvery single nuclear plant would have a meltdown, and there was already tons of radioactive waste laying around due to improper disposal. To buy a copy of The Next 500 Years – Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, go to /next-500-years.Nuclear based energy-production was a much bigger thing in Fallout than it is in our current world from what we are shown, with mini-reactors and the like found basically everywhere from in the basements of companies to more mundane places like cars. His deepest hope isn’t to see his plans realised, more that we continue to make, test and remake them, for the sake of all life. He explores the major risks of genetic tinkering, entertains the pertinent counterarguments, knows where 19th-century eugenics led and understands the value of biological and neurological diversity. While a proud child of his engineering culture, Mason is no dupe and no Frankenstein. This Mason puts a new layer of flesh on what have, so far, been some ardent but very sketchy dreams. Significantly, many famous NASA astronauts, including John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin, were Freemasons. Visionaries from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky have all expounded on the tenets that underpin Mason’s account: the apocalypse is imminent, but, by increasing human knowledge, we may recover the paradise we enjoyed before the flood. Uneven as it is, Mason’s book is a genuine, timely and engaging addition to a 1000-year-old Western tradition, grounded in religious expectations and a quest for transcendence and salvation. And will readers of a book like this really need reminding of Frank Drake’s equation regarding the likelihood of extraterrestrial civilisations? The role of spectroscopy in the detection of exoplanets is certainly relevant, but in a work of this gargantuan breadth, I wonder if it needed rehearsing. More informed readers may start to lose interest in the later chapters. Outside his specialism, Mason has some fun (a photosynthesising human would need skin flaps the size of two tennis courts – so now you know) then flounders slightly, reaching for familiar narratives to hold his sprawling vision together. He even describes how tools like CRISPR and its successors may enable us to address the risks of space flight (exposure to cosmic radiation is considered the most serious) and protect the health of settlers on the moon, on Mars and even on Saturn’s moon Titan. Mason explains how the study informed our understanding of the human biome, and how a programme once narrowly focused on human genetics now extends to bacteria and viruses. In 2015, he became the principal investigator on NASA’s Twins Study, an analysis of the health of identical twins Scott and Mark Kelly during a 340-day period when Scott was in space and Mark was on Earth. ![]() Spreading humanity to the stars would hedge our bets nicely, only we currently lack the tools to survive the trip, never mind the stay. Our ultimate goal, he says, should be to settle new solar systems. Mason’s 500-year plan for our future involves re-engineering human and other genomes so that we can tolerate the extreme environments of other worlds. He isn’t the first to think this way, but his book arrives at a fascinating moment in the history of technology, when we may, after all, be able to avert previously unavoidable catastrophes. ![]()
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