“Right now all of our eggs are in one basket,” explains meta-geneticist Christopher E. Mason. “And the basket is called Earth.”

Our home plate and solar system are not tenable long-term locations for humanity’s HQ. The first step to moving beyond this place is to learn how to colonize extraplanetary bodies, specifically Mars. If in the next 500 years we’ve developed a species-wide strategy for living off-planet, we’ll greatly improve the chances of maintaining humanity beyond the limits of Earth’s capacity to keep us happy.

But Dr. Mason also grapples with another testy subject: There have to be limits to how far we can go, right? At some point the universe is bound to collapse in on itself. No matter how spacefaring we are, humanity will be in deep trouble at that point. That’s why the Mason Lab’s extra-long term goal is to figure out whether there’s some sort of preventative option for humanity to prolong the universe, assuming we manage to keep ourselves alive long enough to use it.



