Do we have a moral duty to colonize other planets and other solar systems?

Inevitably, life on Earth will come to an end, whether by climate disaster, or cataclysmic war, or when the sun runs out of fuel in a few billion years. To avoid extinction, we will have to find a new home, even a new solar system. In this provocative and fascinating book, Christopher Mason argues that we have a moral duty to do so. Because we are the only species aware that life on earth has an expiration date, we have the responsibility to act as the shepherd of lifeforms--not only for our species but for all species on which we depend. Mason argues that the same capacities of ingenuity and creation that have enabled us to build rockets to land on other planets can be applied to redesigning biology so that we can sustainably inhabit those planets. And he lays out a 500-year plan for undertaking the massively ambitious project of reengineering human genetics for life in other worlds.
Our bodies as they are now could never survive on another planet. Mason describes the toll that long-term space travel took on astronaut Scott Kelly, who returned from a year in the International Space Station with changes to his blood, his bones, and his genes. Mason proposes a nine-phase program that would engineer the genome so that humans could tolerate the extreme environments of outer space--with the ultimate goal of achieving human settlement of new solar systems.

Christopher E. Mason