Hey, brain Stuff Listeners. As a bonus for you today, I want to share with you a preview from my compatriot Josh Clark. You may know him from a little show called Stuff you Should Know. He's got a new podcast series out on existential risks, threats that could bring humanity to a sudden and untimely end in the near future. So here's a preview featuring a clip about our potential to spread from Earth. I'm Stuff you Should Know, as
Josh Clark. I'm launching a teen part podcast series about all the ways humanity might accidentally wipe ourselves right out of existence. It covers everything from whether we're alone in the universe to the evolution of life on Earth, from artificial intelligence to what goes on inside a particle collider. It is an immensely interesting deep dive into the world of existential risks, and I hope that you enjoy listening to it as much as I have, making I want
to share a preview of the series with you. This clip comes from episode four and it features economist Robin Hansen, creator of the Great Filter hypothesis, which is something we may have to contend with in the near future when we settled down, our cities developed. Agriculture can support more people than hunting and gathering, and the more people there are, the more brilliant ideas there are two, So our civilization began to advance by leaps and bounds in the last
nine or ten thousand years. Ideas spread more quickly among those people who lived together in those new cities, so innovations were able to develop over the span of a handful of years rather than millennia. Almost everything we have in the world today can be traced back to our collective decision to settle down and raise crops. It was, to say the least, a sweeping change for us humans.
With our next great leap spreading out into space, we are effectively doing the opposite of when we settled down into cities. Rather than contracting, we will be expanding. From that huge coming together, we will spread out. Over time, humans will begin to colonize other planets, and generations of little human babies will be borne on planets other than Earth.
They will be shaped by forces and experiences that no earthbound human will have ever encountered, and they will learn to adapt to their home planet just like we did. We are quite capable of becoming all the things that it's possible to become. Life that starts from us and radiates out can not only spread to different places, that can create different styles and techniques and cultures and approaches.
All of the life that you see on Earth started out from a much smaller amount of variation, but with time it could explore lots of different niches and ways of living. And that's probably what would happen to us too. If we're the only life around it, we can survive, we will radiate, We will become diverse and different and fill thousan million billion different niches of different ways of being.
Over time, perhaps their physical connection to humans on Earth will become distant enough that new species of humans will form, and the universe will be home to more than one species of human again, just as it was fifty years ago. We will become the aliens we seek, and later on they might be surprised to learn that they came from something that was simple and not as very It's odd to think of, but humans are in an evolutionary bottleneck
of our own. Right now. There's only one species of us, and with the exception of maybe half a dozen astronauts on the International Space Station. At any given time, we are all stranded on this island Earth. Those astronauts aboard the I s S showed just the faintous beginnings of our future. If we become a space faring species, all of humanities eggs will no longer be in just the one basket of Earth. Should some catastrophe befall those of us here on Earth, there will be other humans living
elsewhere to carry on. We will begin to trickle from our bottleneck and spread throughout the universe, and when we do, we will have made it through the great filter. Colonizing beyond Earth is something we should begin working on as soon as we can, because Earth is vulnerable to a wide variety of catastrophes that are pretty hostile to life, things like exploding stars, the death of our son, even Earth's own systems going haywire. Please join me for the
End of the World with Josh Clark. Listen and subscribe at Apple Podcasts or on the I Heart Radio app, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.