Christoper Mason

Dr. Christopher E. Mason the co-founder of Onegevity Health, co-founder of Biotia, and is a geneticist and computational biologist who has been a Principal Investigator and Co-investigator of many NASA missions and projects. He is a 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. Mason is the author of The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds.

3 words to describe Nature?

Beautiful. Responsive. Engineered

3 things Nature taught you?

Humility

Adaptation

Mutation

3 most treasured Nature spots?

Fernando de Noronha 

Sanders Park 

Lake Hillier

When you look at the OCEAN, it makes you feel...?

Open

When you see a FOREST, it makes you feel...?

Enraptured

When you see a VOLCANO, it makes you feel...?

Constructive 

When you see a SUNRISE or SUNSET, it makes you feel...?

Ease

When you hear THUNDER, it makes you feel...?

Volition

When you hear the WIND HOWLING, it makes you feel...?

Excited

Are you an OCEAN, MOUNTAIN, FOREST, or DESERT person?

Forest

On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is Nature to your well-being?

9

Share with us a childhood nature memory?

Standing in a Panama rainforest away from all other people, and hearing the breath of the forest itself as I could feel and sense it moving and living.


Theo Jansen

Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist known for his kinetic sculptures. In 1990, he began building large mechanisms out of PVC that are able to move on their own and, collectively, are entitled, Strandbeest. His animated works are intended to be a fusion of art and engineering. He has said that "The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds." A 2016 episode of The Simpsons, "The Nightmare After Krustmas", featured the Strandbeest and Jansen. He provided the voice for his cartoon character. The Strandbeest have been shown all over the world including at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Science Museum Kaohsiung in Taiwan, at Art Basel in Miami, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow, the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, the Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Peru, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Saporro Art Museum in Japan, the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany, the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan. You can watch his TED talk here.

3 words to describe Nature? 

Sea. Sand. Dunes

3 things Nature taught you? 

Modesty

Awareness

Beauty 

3 most treasured Nature spots? 

Sea

Beach 

Dunes

When you look at the ocean, it makes you feel…?

Being born again. A deep contact with our existence. I am amazed that we exist. I am amazed that I myself exist. That I landed in the body of an ape. I am an ape. And I look through this ape's eyes to the world.

When you see a forest, it makes you feel…?

Like I can breath

When you see a volcano, it makes you feel…?

I don’t feel anything

When you see a sunrise or sunset, it makes you feel…?

I always turn my head away from the sun. I want to look at the landscape which is lighted by the sun with that orange light. I never understand why people spoil their eyes looking at the sunset.

When you hear thunder, it makes you feel…?

Excited

When you hear the wind howling, it makes you feel…?

Warm in my bed. Reading a book with the curtains closed. Lovely!

Are you an Ocean, Mountain, Forest, or Desert person? 

Of course, I am an ocean person!

On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is Nature to your well-being? 

10

Share with us a childhood nature memory? 

When I was a small boy I remember I was throwing a wooden shoe in the sea. And every time it was being brought back by the waves. At one moment it didn’t come back because it was behind the waves. Then I went into the sea with my clothes on. It was in the winter season. My body felt the cold water. And I felt very excited. This contact with the sea. 


Joel Sercel

Dr. Joel Sercel is the CTO and CEO of Trans Astronautica Corporation. TransAstra is a NewSpace company dedicated to accelerating the process of human exploration and industrialization of cislunar space and near Earth asteroids. Funded by a combination of private sector investment plus NASA grants and contracts, TransAstra is building the technology to provide in-space transportation and related services with a fleet of reusable space tugs supplied by propellant derived from asteroid and lunar resources.

Dr. Sercel has over 30 years of NASA, industrial, other government agency, and academic experience and education all of which is directly related to space technology development and innovation. Sercel’s professional experience includes a 14 year career at JPL; 12 years teaching, researching, and advising graduate students at Caltech in the area of space systems engineering; two years as a senior government official serving as the Chief Systems engineer of a $22B Air Force communications satellite network (TSAT) leading a team of 122 systems engineers and several years as a private technology and management consultant

Joel conceived and initiated the NSTAR project (the first deep space solar electric propulsion system) and served as the first Principal Technologist of the NSTAR project. He presently has patents pending in the area of space resources technology and is known as the inventor of Optical Mining™, a practical method for extracting the ingredients in rocket propellant from asteroids. 

Dr. Sercel is a five time NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Fellowship awardee. 

3 words to describe Nature?

Nature. Includes. Everything 

3 things Nature taught you?

While we will never understand everything about nature, we have learned enough to know that nature follows laws that are understandable to the mind of Man.

When you discover a truth about the universe, it unlocks other truths and they all fit together.

When scientists think they have a mature theory that they understand, they are in for a big surprise.

3 most treasured Nature spots?

A kelp forest in the Channel islands

Looking across the Sierras at night at a thunderstorm on the next mountain

The night sky in the Arizona desert on a clear day

When you look at the ocean, it makes you feel…?

Peace

When you see a forest, it makes you feel…?

Connected

When you see a volcano, it makes you feel…?

Wonder

When you see a sunrise or sunset, it makes you feel…?

The flow of time

When you hear thunder, it makes you feel…?

Lucky

When you hear the wind howling, it makes you feel…?

Small

Are you an Ocean, Mountain, Forest, or Desert person?

One part each, no preference. Love them all

On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is Nature to your well-being?

As I am part of nature, that would be a 10

Share with us a childhood nature memory?

The Milky Way galaxy spread across the night sky and the realization of the immensity of it all and the potential for an infinite future for humanity and our progeny coupled with a sense of awe that we exist.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLijoedlE2A