Searching for Alien Life Starts Here

two topics I just said have to do with each other? Well, in this case, we're talking about kind of a model that's been made that could possibly predict where we would most likely find aliens. But that's we're getting ahead of ourselves. Yeah, because because alien life had to come from somewhere, our life had to come from somewhere. Studying one can potentially lead to figuring stuff out about the other, Right, And it's possible that both the alien life and our life

came from the same place. Wait a minute, I saw Prometheus. Yeah, I did not think about the Prometheus tie in when I agreed to do this topic. Joe has feelings about Prometheus, don't we all have feelings. I don't. I never watched Okay, I it makes me feel things about Wiley Coyote mostly there. Yeah, okay, there is a there is a bald, godlike muscled figure in it that I suppose you might be able to relate to somewhat. Jonathan being the bald, muscular dude that

I am, I'm mostly made off. Actually, I was emphasizing the godlike part. Okay, all right, I'll take it. But no, this is this is a thing that happens in the movie Prometheus. You see these bald, pale, weird dough is flying throughout the galaxy seeding life on other planets. So he sets down on what looks like some part of Iceland and appears to PLoP some weird DNA goop into

the water and boom life on Earth. Yeah, and we're gonna get to a theory that is essentially really I should say, a hypothesis that is essentially that well, a little bit less purposeful, I would say. Yeah, So to to kind of just do a quick run through of some of the stuff we mentioned before with alien life, just so that we uh, you know, have a foundation here. One of the things we have often referenced on this show is the Drake equation, which is a probabilistic formula

created by Dr Frank Drake. Sure, and this equation is it is an equation, but when you think of an equation, you often think of something that has lots of known values in it, Right, you can you can manipulate to your will potentially. This is more of a thought experiment expressed in the form of a mathematical equation with lots of variables. Yeah, it's it's meant to be a way to kind of estimate how many uh, technologically advanced alien

civilizations would be out there. But in order to actually get a number on that, we would have to have a lot more information than what the the what we currently have. Yeah, but you arrive at it by multiplying a bunch of different probabilities. And of course, as you know, when multiplying probabilities, if any of these probabilities are in fact zero, then your product in the end is going to be zero, right, And if there are fractions, your

product in the end is going to be tiny. Yeah, it's gonna get smaller and smaller as you multiply these small fractions together. Yeah. So here are some of the things are actually here are all the things that go into the Drake equation. First, you take the rate of formation of stars capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. That's your first number, which already is a little complicated

because we're basing this on a sample size of one. Right, because based upon our assumptions, we could say, all right, let's just look at the stars that are son like, But it may be that there are other types of stars that also are able to support life. It's just life that's very different from the kind that we have on our planet. Yeah, sure, what if there is life

on planets orbiting red giants, life on planets orbiting neutron stars. Right, there's also the possibility of life on rogue planets which don't orbit a star at all, or on commets or yeah, so such, I guess orbit stars. Never mind, but still it's not a planet commets, sure, I guess. Well, I mean, whatever they're doing, whether or not they're orbiting a star,

they're orbiting the galactic center here. Yeah, So then you take that number and you multiply that by the fraction of those stars that have planetary systems, because some stars do not. I want to come back to this variable in a minute. Ye, then multiply that by the number of planets per solar system that have an environment suitable

for life. For this, multiply that by the action of suitable plants on which life is present, Multiply that by the fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life can evolve, and then multiply that by the length of time such civilizations released detectable signals into space. You know, one of the funny parts about this thought experiment is that back when it was first articulated, I think more

of these probability variables were just big question marks. Sure, no idea at all, But a couple of the things you mentioned are actually figures where we are starting to gain some relevant knowledge, where we we could actually look at this and say, here's a good guess for what this number would be. For example, the fraction of stars that have planetary systems. Oh, yeah, we're learning more about

extra planets every day. Yeah, I mean, that's something we can actually put a pretty reasonable estimate on now, and and back at the time we didn't know, although, of course they there are other parts of that variable that we would have to add to you know, we we have some information about some of the planets about whether or not there are any kind of uh, you know, markers for potential biological life, but for the most part, we don't know for a lot of those exoplanets yet. Yeah. Yeah,

and we've certainly never received a signal. It's like, hey, guys, text me back, right, you're Toad's not in the group message,

what's wrong with you? Guys? But I do think it's interesting that here's one where here's one figure where we used to not know, and now we we have a pretty good idea, And there are other ones where we're about to get a much better idea, Like we're about to be able to use telescopic techniques to learn more about the environments of extra planets, so like whether they have an atmosphere that we think would be conducive to life. I mean, who knows what's really conducive to life, but right, yeah,

conducive to our type of life. Yeah. So this this means that we are slowly filling in those blanks, but we haven't. We're still far away from being able to use this equation in any real meaningful way. Now, of course, there's another way. We could try and see if they're technological civilizations out there, which is listen to see if they're broadcasting anything. Yeah, yeah, tune into those text messages. Yeah.

In this case, we're talking largely about SET the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which scans the sky for any radio transmissions and then goes through all the data that comes back, tries to find anything that's meaningful that looks like it's a purposeful broadcast as opposed to random noise. Uh. And that's you know, a good approach to We figure that that's more likely to to result in us discovering life than just say, direct observation or having some aliens stumble

upon us. Those two are not terribly likely. Of course, as you probably know, CT has not really turned up anything so far, unless you want to count some possibly anomalous weird signals like the Wow signal. If some most of the stuff that people think are are probably uh, you know, pulsar related or other naturally related phenomena. And space is huge. I don't know if you've read Hitchicker's Guy to Galaxy like like like really big exactly, you thought it was a long way down to the chemists,

But that's peanuts compared to space. Uh yeah, space is enormous. So focusing on any section of space is like it's like you're in a massive arena. You have been blindfolded and spun around a huge number of times, and your goal is to throw a dart at a tiny target that's someplace around you and maybe you'll hit it. Like that's and even that is being pretty optimistic compared to just pointing telescopes out space to try and listen for stuff.

But we might be able to narrow down that search a bit if we're able to make some predictions about where life would most likely arise. And of course this brings us to what we were alluding to at the beginning of the episode, which is the pan spermia hypothesis. Yeah. Now, one thing I want to clear up at the beginning here, because I think I've encountered a lot of confusion about this, at least when I read people leaven comments about it

online and stuff. A lot of people think that pan spermia is a hypothesis about the origins of life, which is not. Now, it's about distribution of life. Yeah, so the origins of life is a is a big question in science and you know, in physics and chemistry and organic chemistry, we we don't know exactly how life comes about from the molecules that exist in the universe, and that that's a big question that a lot of really smart people are working on and it's a big interest

of mine. But pan spermia is the idea of not how life comes about, but how life got here. Yeah, exactly, it's it's more about, uh, not just how life got here, but how could life potentially get to other places in the galaxy. Exactly right, So, so pan spermia is a Greek word. It means seeds everywhere, and uh, the hypothesis posits that seeds of life are scattered throughout the universe

and can be propagated through space. And this is not that knew of an idea it might sound, you know, yeah, this was not like Golden Age of science fiction kind of idea right around for a minute. Yeah, it's been around. Actually, if you want to go way back, the actual origins of the word pant spermia date back to the ancient times. But to really get into a point where it became part of the conversation in scientific circles, you need to

look at the mid eighteenth century. Bnoir de Mallier wrote in seventeen forty three that he thought that Earth was seated by life essentially kind of germs falling from space into the oceans, rather than through a biogenesis. And that kind of leads us to the question what is a biogenesis? Right, Well, that idea includes a biogenesis somewhere. I mean, life still has to begin somewhere, begin replicating and then spread. Well, a biogenesis could be part of that. For for the

scientifically minded, it certainly is part of that. He thought, yeah, okay, so also, yeah, I guess it's worth acknowledging. Some people would also attribute this to some kind of supernatural cause it's not really the type of stuff that we're to talk about. We're looking at the scientific side. Uh. And a biogenesis is a theory that was really popular. I mean, like Aristotle talked about how completely obvious it was, that

it was true for a very long time. And it's the idea that life can be generated from non living things. For example, the idea that wasn't disproven until like the mid sixteen hundreds. I think that maggots come from dead stuff, right, like something dies and then maggots spontaneously, right, right, Not that eggs get laid in dead stuff and then the maggots grow from them, but that they just spontaneously show up.

Some of these ideas are so funny. One of them was I remember reading about this guy named Jean Baptiste van Helmont, who was the seventeenth century physician, who said that if you got a sweaty shirt and you put it in a box of grain and then covered it up and left it, I think he said, leave it for a few weeks or something, and then come back, it will have sprouted mice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, mice come from hey, bees come from flowers. Oh it's so good. Like how else could you explain mice in a box

of grain that you left there for several weeks? And while while these these ideas are obviously comical to us, the concept of a biogenesis itself is not necessarily that ridiculous, in that it's really looking more at could life have arisen from some combination of organic but non living materials under certain conditions? Sure sure that that chemistry is responsible

for life. The big differences that spontaneous generation had to do with complex organisms spontaneously arising out of non living material, whereas typically if you talk to uh, you know, a molecular biochemist who's working on the problem of a biogenesis. Today, they're trying to figure out how how DNA was assemboled out of you know, chemical soups and conditions in you know,

the Earth, like three point eight billion years ago. And I have a thing to say about that way at the end of the episode, but for now, let's get back to the the pant spermia hypothesis. So we've got this idea that there are some sort of of seeds

of life out there in the galaxy. How they came about is not addressed in this hypothesis, as Joe had mentioned earlier, but they might be carried by an asteroid or a comet or a meteorite, or even exist as part of interstellar dust pushed around by the solar wind microbe delivery. Now, clearly these would be what we would call extreme O files, right because they'd have to survive the ride. And we've talked on this show so many times about how the ride through space is not a

nice ride. You got the vacuum going, you've got radiation going, you've got extreme temperatures going. You've got lots of different types of pressure changes going as these these items move into the atmosphere of a planet. Yeah. So obviously organisms like us are not going to be surviving this ride. But there are organisms we know of on planet Earth that survived bizarrely harsh conditions. Yeah. Yeah, there's various bacteria

I think that can survive inside volcanoes. There's those water bears. Those are great. Yeah. Yeah, the water bears. I love them, Tarte grades. They're so cute. I just want to pinch their little microscopic cheeks. I can't wait till the horror movie where they get blown up to human size and then they just vacuum our liquids out. Pretty sure that watch that today? So yeah, there are examples of extremophiles here on Earth that can live in conditions that we

would find completely inhospitable. Although to flip that, they would find the conditions we live in to be completely inhospitable. So um, there there's some pretty interesting examples of that. And pant Spermia suggests that these organisms would arrive at a planet uh. In other words, there'd be a collision, you'd have an asteroid or a comet or a meteorite collide with a planet, and anything surviving on that could

potentially spread to that planet. And there are three major variations of this hypothesis, right, because this obviously it asks some questions of us. We say, okay, so life is maybe frozen in a comet somewhere headed towards Earth for millions of years, it finally smashes into Earth starts spreading here. How to get on the comet? Yeah, And pant spermia doesn't answer those questions necess serreily, although there are some some variations of the hypothesis that that's at least suggested.

You don't get to the point zero origin, but you can get to all right, Well, in this way, something could be ejected from a planet and therefore make its way to some other place. Yeah, yeah, that I'm just asking one step back, so like did it come from another star in the galaxy, or did it come from another planet in the Solar System? Or did it come

from somebody with some ideas? Right, So with that first version, you've got a litho pan spermia, that's interstellar panspermia that suggests that a planet that supports life somewhere is in like a star system. There's some sort of major collision that happens, and bits o planet break off and get ejected into space, and those bits o planet happened to have life forms on them. Obviously it would have to be in some kind of bacterial format or something similar

to that. It could not, you know, ed like Ed would not make the trip, probably not, not unless he brought a really good space suit. Yeah. Yeah, we're we're imagining here kind of a uh at the end of the never ending story situation, the little grain No no no, no, I'm imagining when it doesn't have a scene where like the planets all smashed up into pieces and their bits flying apart. Yeah, and then well eventually there's only one little grain of sand left and you have to make

wishes to make it grow. Yeah, and then you get a luck dragon. So uh, you get these massive, massive collisions where stuff gets ejected into space. That stuff ends up finding its way to other solar systems. So this is a huge amount of distance these things would have to travel, right, you have to be some hardy organisms. Yeah, you'd have to be probably in essentially suspended animation the equivalent to that for millions of years to make a

trip for one solar system to another. But it is one of the three versions of pant spermia we tend to talk about. Then there's ballistic pan spermia. This is interplanetary pant spermia. This would happen within the within the confines of a single solar system. Right. So, if you've ever heard the hypothesis that originally life on Earth came from Mars, that would be an example of this, right.

So imagine that you have Mars and there's some sort of massive bombardment of Mars, which which it results with tons of stuff being ejected from Mars and heading towards Earth, eventually colliding with Earth. That would be this version. So, uh, those are your your two basic Uh, stuff just happens naturally. But then you've got the third kind, right, directed pants spermia, and that is in fact the Prometheus model. Yes, yeah,

pretty much. It definitely includes that the person spreading the life must be naked and huge and muscily, that's part of the hypothesis science clearly in the small print, because I did not see that when I was looking this over. Yah. Directed pant spermia is essentially the idea that some intelligent life form is purposefully spreading life by by shooting out whatever bodies, you know, like like rocks or whatever they

may be. Could even be rockets filled with bacteria, uh to go to distant places and uh and potentially to propagate life that way. Now I'm wondering if this includes life that's spread by accident, because I mean that that would have to sort of be another option if it weren't part of directed pants bermia, you know what I mean. It's sort of like if if one of our probes a long time the future ran into another planet and it has bacteria in it, and that winds up spawning

an entire civilization. That's exactly what I mean. Yeah, it's

I mean, it reminds me a little bit. This isn't the same thing, really, but it reminds me a little bit of when we were first getting some reports that that one of the rovers had detected the presence of methane on Mars, and people got excited, and then the scientists were saying, listen, we have to make sure that this wasn't a contamination, that it wasn't brought and of course it was, yes, And that's that's one of those things where you know, we already have instances of the

stuff we've sent to other bodies carrying things with it that were not necessarily intentional. I want to go on a little digression real quick and say, if you read any headline anywhere on the Internet saying that we have found life on Mars and you haven't already noticed people freaking out about this, it's probably not true. They're probably just trying to con you into a click. I clicked on something to see an N's website the other day that was like life on Mars, and I was like,

how come I haven't heard about this? And you know what it was? It was rocks. It was some rocks that looked like lizards and squirrels, and one of them just looked like a pyramid. And I'm like, there's there's no living pyramid that just looks like a thing that you recognize. There's pyramid Head. There is. He is. He's a living thing, but if you run into him, you are not likely to be living for much. Actually he might be undead. Technically, Yeah, have they found undead thing?

What a wonderful end to the curiosity rovers pyramid Head just puts that one big blade through it, hear the scraping sound, and that's the last transmission. You don't know who pyramid Head is. I suggest you Google search it anyway. Sorry, Back back to the matter at hand, right, So, so specifically looking at Earth, is it possible that life here on the planet did not arise through a biogenesis here on Earth, but instead was the result of a seed

of life landing on Earth. Well, one argument for this hypothesis, one of the things that people argue to support it, is that life on Earth appears to have developed sometime around three point eight three billion years ago. That's interesting. I've never heard it dated with that much precision before. I've always heard like around three point five or four billion years. Yeah, I'm I'm guessing that this itself is an estimation. Well, obviously it's an estimation. It's like no

one was around there to start doing tick marks. Well, no, I mean, I guess I'm just curious where that number comes from, because I've never heard one that precise. Yeah, it was in the source I was reading. It was they were specifically calling it out that specific, But I

honestly find that a little um convenient too. But at any rate, around that same time, period around between three point eight and four billion years ago, Earth went through a period of bombardment where meteorites were hitting the planet fairly regularly, and so this timing seems to somewhat support that argument, the idea that perhaps some of these media rights contained elements of life on them, whether they were the bacteria or the missing secret sauce, that was going

to allow life to happen here on Earth, and that as a result, that's why we have life here on Earth. However, there's nothing conclusive, like there's no smoking gun here. It could just as easily be that it's an a biogenesis approach here on Earth and that this was something that

also happened around that same time. Well, I mean, another way, you could look at the coincidence of the origins of life and the bombardment period, as you could say that the bombardment created conditions or in introduced materials that made the a biogenesis process happen. Right, So in other words, it wasn't that there were life forms on the meteorites themselves, It's just that that was one more ingredient into life.

Like I feel like I've read, don't don't wholly to this because I could be mistaken, but I think I've read that some people hypothesized that this is where a lot of Earth's water came from, Like during this bombardment period, there were a lot of icy objects that slammed into the Earth and brought water to the surface. I've heard the same thing. And another argument in support of the Earth's life comes from Space Seeds, which I believe is

a fantastic Star Trek episode that introduces Khan. Space Seed is the Con episode. Uh. Chekhov, by the way, not in that episode, So I don't know how Cohn recognizes him in Wrath of Con But that's beside the point anyway. Is it really beside the point? It's really the point. I wanted to make this whole episode about that, but I was trying to kind of hide it by Chekhov does a lot of like Facebook snooping around Kirk in

his friend But how would Khan know about Chekhov? Is that because he says I never could have faced Mr from faceoff? Okay, yeah, that's probably right. I'll tell you you've got an unfriend con that's rule number one. So another Instagram feeds private Another argument in support of that hypothesis that Earth in fact was seeded by outer space bacteria. Is that that bacteria can be dormant for a really really long time and then yeah, and they can they

can then be viable. Right, It's not just that they stick around. They stick around and then they could come back. So, for example, there have been cases where we have retrieved bacteria from sources that had been trapped for as many as two hundred and fifty million years and the bacteria were still viable. So stuff like finding bacteria in the gut of bees that had been embedded in amber for millions of years and the bacteria, once extracted, regained viability.

So there are examples of critic Yeah, it's amazing that this can even happen. That's creepy. It is a little creepy. Yeah there, yeah, I guess for science. But cool, like these bacteria don't remember dinosaurs because there weren't dinosaurs yet

they slept right through dinosaurs. Yeah. Well, the the interesting thing to me is that this does mean that there is at least some some feasibility for the pant spermia hypothesis, because we've seen instances where bacteria can survive very long periods. Uh and then come back from being dormant, whether or not significantly longer than two fifty million years, I don't know.

And even even an interplanetary um pant spermia hypothesis suggests that it could be millions of years from the point when something is ejected into space to the point where it collides with another planet. That's that's just interplanetary. When you take in solar systems into account, star systems into account, that's an enormous, enormous amount of time. Yeah, So I

think paint spermia is a really interesting hypothesis. It's one of those that for a long time at least, I think it's probably just going to remain an interesting hypothesis because we don't have strong enough ways of confirming or disconfirming it. You can only just sort of look for evidence that's consistent or inconsistent with it. Sure, but that doesn't mean that people are not running mathematics on it, right.

In fact, we've got some astrophysicists out of Harvard who wanted to try and start building a predictive model based

upon the pant spermia hypothesis. So they're not testing the hypothesis, right, That's not what their their research is all about their Their research starts from the premise that assuming this hypothesis is true, then we should be able to start predicting where life would uh kind of where the point of origin would be from any given explosion of life that moves outward, um, and then we would have a better idea of where to look if we're searching for evidence

of that life. Uh So, basically they are creating a model that think of it like a Google Maps type thing of Milky Way galaxy, except instead of showing you where the traffic is, it's showing you circles of where life would likely be found. Due to uh, some evidence that there was this pant spermia permutation to the spreading of life. So based on this, they suggest, well, life would probably spread out in kind of just a full

expanding globe around whatever body was was impacted. Yeah, so you you just say, all right, well, the planet that originated the life, wherever that life maybe uh go an equal distant out in every direction, and that's where the seeds of life would be spread. And so um it was that that to me is already an interesting idea. So they're suggesting that's not something that would be purely directional where there'd be an impact, and straight on the

other side be where the life goes out. And that's it. Um, they're saying, no, think of it like almost like an explosion. In fact, they they likened it to the way an epidemic spreads and talked about how the galaxy could be infected with life a cancer. Um. So, if we work from this hypothesis and we assume that the Earth is let's say, on the edge of one of these bubbles. Um, we don't necessarily think that, because we have no evidence yet to to think one way or the other. But

let's assume that we are, then we'll play along. Yeah, then what what would need to happen next is we would actually still need to look somewhere and find some evidence of if not life, not not direct evidence of life, at least some some bio markers that could indicate the

presence of life. And according to this model, the best thing to do at that point would be to really focus your attention in that general direction and kind ignore everything on the other side, because if Earth is on the edge of one of these bubbles, everything behind us would be lifeless. Everything ahead of us in from that perspective would be potentially yeah, full of life. Um. Now, that of course assumes that we're on the edge of

a bubble and not in the middle. If we're in the middle, then technically everywhere we look should still have lots of potential for life. But it is an interesting idea. It does obviously have some drawbacks. For example, we still have to find evidence of some form of life somewhere in order for us to even have an idea of

where to look. But from that point we could start to model where the life would most likely be found, and then we could concentrate our efforts in those directions, thinking that perhaps it's possible that we could discover um intelligent life that way, because we we have a you know,

a specific direction to focus on. The other thing to keep in mind is that, over the course of millions of years, star systems move in relation to one another, and if this event happened many many, many hundreds of millions of years ago, then it makes it more difficult to figure out where that central spot would be because the the star systems have continued to move apart or

you know, in relation to one another over that time. Yeah, I mean, you can think about it the way that uh that the Earth is not always a constant distance from Venus or Mars. Likewise, the solar system is not always a constant distance from other solar systems. Yeah, everything

in space is moving around. Yeah. I imagine it as Let's say that you've got a bowl of water, and you have like a little drop of food coloring that can float on the surface of that water, and you drop it, and at first it's a nice little circle that starts to spread, but eventually it starts to break up and move around in relation, so that things that used to be right next to each other now might

be across the bowl of water from one another. So so we need to create a model for the way that the universe and in our little localized region of it, has been spreading, like a very detailed model. In order to really get to the bottom of this and to understand that, we would need to at least have an estimation of how long ago the life spread out in the first place. Now here on Earth, we're talking possibly, you know, around around four billion years ago or so.

That's a lot of time. How long did it take to get here? Yeah, exactly, So it gets it gets hard for X exactly. Yeah. So in other words, this is a really interesting thought experiment, and I'm sure that it will end up being useful and in the long run. It's just one of those where I still think that there are some variables that we can't fill in yet.

Even even if we were to discover a planet distant planet that appears to have these markers for biological activity, it would be very difficult for us to estimate when

that would have happened in the galactic time scale. It would be really nice if our giant, bald alien neighbors would just send us a message and be like, hey, uh we did we did this about this long ago in Earth years, in which case we're like, well, the whole reason we were looking into it was to talk to you, So I guess now we can just stop anyway. Plus you can just tell us where you put it. We have a lot of questions out. First of all,

have you shot that store? Like? There's a lot of clothing stores that we can hook you up with here on Earth, you know, if you if you feel like it, you know, no, no shame, no shaming. I'm just imagining

a really interesting moment in the future of humanity. When let's say we do encounter microbial life somewhere out there, you know, whether it's on Mars or it's on a comet or something like that, and we bring it back and we say, okay, it's time to let's assume it's DNA based the moment when we test that, to see do we share jeans with this thing? Because it seems like that would be the test. I mean, I'm not an astrobiologist. I don't really know, but my guests would

be the test for pan spermia. The real test would be you find an alien life form and then you test it the same way we look for ancestral similarity in in life forms on Earth. You say, okay, do you match these points of loci on a on a you know, gene panel, And if you do, wow, I

mean that's interesting. I'd imagine you could also probably be able to look at its genome and our genome and determine, based on assumptions about the mutation rate, about how long ago we split apart, right, I suppose, I mean it's roughly. Those kind of estimates are pretty shaky on a on a global time scale, but but but absolutely, yeah, we could at least look to see if if there are enough common elements to make an educated guess at it. It's we're talking so much in the hypothetical here. It's

here that's very interesting. So, yeah, the super interesting idea for this this work. But again, it really depends on this pan spermia hypothesis being being being the way that

life travels or distributes throughout the galaxy and the universe. Yeah, and I wanted to go back to the concept of a biogenesis for a minute and talk about one of the alternate theories about how bodies impacting Earth could have led to life on Earth coming about so um without just bringing it here, without just bringing it without like bringing a water bug. And you know our common ancestor, the water bugpagating all life on Earth. All right, let's

hear it, water water bear. What am I even talking about? Well, I'll stick with water bug actually at this point. So so, research from multiple team has found building blocks of life as we know it amino acids in comets, and in one experiment at the University of Hawaii and Manoah, chemists simulated a comet like environment like like ten degrees Calvin above zero uh and this ball of ice that included carbon dioxide and ammonia and methane and ethane and propane

and stuff like that. And when they zapped this ball with with simulated cosmic rays the high energy electrons, the chemicals reacted and formed dipeptides, which are paired amino acids, which are definitely essential to life. So it's possible that that this this UH concoction, that this this series of events that are you know, amazing that they all happened within enough time for this to be a to to work,

could be the building blocks for life. The only thing we have to do now is wait billions of years to find out if it works. Oh well, And and you know, the next question after at was do these dipeptides actually exist in other places? Because if they only exist on Earth, then that would be a good indication that this experiment from Hawaii was totally off base. But research out of UC Berkeley and NASA have sampled UH stuff from Mars and from comets and both found amino acids.

They found dipeptides on Mars, which indicates that this kind of material is indeed floating around the Solar System. And then uh I guess The next question is whether or not an impact with Earth would would help or hamper the situation, because that much energy is is a really

big it's a big bota boom, you know. Um so, so, a team out of the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology and also out of a Nagoya University ran an experiment that simulated the shock of a comet containing amino acids impacting the Earth, and they they got tripe peptides out of it, which is an even longer amino acid chain and is therefore even more impressive interesting. So you know, who knows tripeptides are certainly not water

bugs or water bears neither one. Yeah. This this kind of goes back to some of that that idea of if you have organic but non living material, could that give rise to actual living or organisms and uh and this these sort of experiments are really important to add to our understanding about whether or not that's possible. And uh yeah, I mean I love the fact that we have multiple lines of inquiry out there looking at different

different possibilities. And it may very well be that the the real answer is something that we haven't even thought of yet. Oh sure, it could absolutely be be a combination of any of these systems. And uh, the looking into to the dual chemical and energy jack system that could have brought life here about is so fascinating to me. Yeah, no, it really is interesting. So uh, you know, we've also

often said this on the show as well. Sometimes it may seem like a particular uh experiment, or a particular discipline or whatever might seem like a long shot, but the important thing to remembers that we're learning important stuff about ourselves in the process, not just whether or not alien life is out there, but how how life had originated and then evolved over time here on Earth. These

sort of questions are really awesome. I mean, it's great to learn more about it, and you never know what else you will be able to learn down the line. It can be stuff that ends up changing the course of humanity in the future. So really interesting. I'm glad we've got a chance to tackle this. I'm going back and forth about whether or not I need to see Prometheus now. I don't know. I've commend watching it. It's not good necessarily. Well, there's a sequel coming out. I

guess I feel the same way. I mean, if if you love if you love Alien. It's worth seeing, but it's it's don't expect it to be good. Well, you know, Prometheus two is Ridley Scott's next feature. That's the next one. You know that the Martian is done. I'm fine with that as long as he doesn't go back to doing sword and sandal movies. Yeah, I hear that. It's all sorts and sandal aliens. It's just it's just one alien writing on the back of a Xeno morph. But that's

that sounds great. Actually, that sounds like that. I like that a lot better than than Gladiator. Yeah, that'd be another movie that we'd have to, um, we'd have to to dissect here on the show. So, guys, if you have any suggestions for future topics we can tackle here on Forward Thinking. Maybe there is a science fiction movie that you want us to look at and discuss the

scientific merits or lack thereof. Let us know the email addresses f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Twitter, Google Plus or Facebook. At Twitter and Google Plus, we are FW thinking. Search FW Thinking and Facebook will pop right up. You can leave us a message and we'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, just is forward sinking dot com brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places