Imagine the place where you can escape for a day, get immersed in a world of rooms, inspiration, and expertise, where you can lay luxury, accommodation, and kids can fees from ninety five sets. Tickets are free to everyone and include all the attractions you've just imagined a day out at the kia Ikia the Wonderful every Day.
Oh hey, it's that guy in your video editing class who choose so much gum you're actually worried about him. Ali Ward back with another episode of Ologies. So this episode, I'm just I'm gonna say this up top, just getting out of the way.
It's out of this world.
Okay, I said it, It's out of this world. Now we're going to start by talking about the passions that lead to a career in extraterrestrial alien searches as well as laid down some foundations on mission in our Solar system, and then we'll get to what could live where. But before we get to a live things on distant space bodies, let's thank some earthlinks. So thank you to all the people who make the podcast possible on Patreon dot com, slash Ologies, all my buddies there, to all the folks
sporting ologies swag from ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you to all the folks who are rating and making sure you're subscribed and leaving reviews for me to peruse like a semi creep, such as, for example, one left by anonymous epidemiologists to speak, who said more years of grad school than I like to admit tends to hamper my ability to talk about my research without being boring, condescending, inaccurate,
or worse all three. I love this podcast because it helps me figure out how to talk about my own work in a way that is true but hopefully relatable. I'm going to say I think a lot of folks listening probably related to that. So boom, there you go. Okay, astrobiology, let's get to it. Once called exobiology, but let's consult the grip, shall we. So astro comes from the word for star, and biology has its roots in the verb to live. So what is out there living on those
ding dang stars? What's on the planets? That's the big question? Is anything alive out there? What are the odds?
Is it big?
Is it small? Is it cooler than us? So to get some answers, will consult a professional. So over the course of eleven months and twenty seven gentle desperate emails for me. This ologist kindly obliged, and the resulting interview is I was literally about to say stellar. I'm not going to I swear that was an accident, but it was a stellar interview.
He's such a great dude.
So he has been a researcher at the SETI Institute, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence that was founded by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. He's a National geographic explorer who has stretched the Arctic and down to the depths of the Sea. You may have seen him in James Cameron Aliens of the Deep and is currently the Deputy Chief Scientist for Solar System Exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in Pasadena, California. And side note, the opinions he expresses therein are his own and not those of JPL or NASA, because when you're in charge of looking for space aliens from NASA, you got to toss out some disclaimers. He stopped by last week after work and we settled in for an evening talk about icy moons and space drills,
ty extraterrestrials sci fi movies, extremophile tartar grades, subsurface oceans, squirrels, ghosts. Okay, I brought up the ghost I'm sorry, various voyages made by NASA spacecraft and essentially what is lurking in the great darkness of the universe and doesn't want to kill us? So make some space in your brain for the brilliant and wonderful astrobiologist, doctor Kevin Peter Hand. Okay, that's what I thought, But just in case it was hond, I've never said it aloud.
I thought i'd ask.
Now, you are an astrobiologist, correct, when you toss that out at parties?
Do people know what that means?
No, because I don't toss it out at parties.
That's one way to avoid that. What exactly does it mean?
It's a it's a very good question, many different ways to answer it, but simply put, astrobiology is the study of the living universe. And yeah, that's that's it, in a nutshell.
The study of the living universe. So this is excluding rocks air.
Well, keep going and welcome back to some of that.
Rocks light cars.
So what's important about it being the study of the living universe is that Oftentimes when people think about astrobiology, they say, you know, okay, this is the search for life beyond Earth, And that's correct, that's certainly part of astrobiology. But what's also very central to astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, and future of life on Earth. Where did we come from, where are we going? How
did life originate? And so when you think about the living universe, of course, right now all we know of is life on Earth. We have yet to find even a little speck of life beyond Earth. But based on what we know from life on Earth, and based on what we know about the other major sciences physics, chemistry, geology, we can make the prediction that, if the conditions are right, life should potentially arise beyond Earth.
So to be an interplanetary alien hunter it helps to have a background that's a bit interdisciplinary. So Kevin doctor Hand got his bachelors from Dartmouth and physics with a minor in astronomy and studied some psychology in there as well, then went on to get a master's at Stanford in mechanical engineering with a focus on robots. He continued on at Stanford there for a PhD and his dissertation was titled on the Physics and Chemistry of the ice shell
and subsurface Ocean of Europa. It used Galileo spacecraft magnetometer data. More on that later. Now. The abstract for Kevin's dissertation uses the term holophilic organisms, and yes, I look that shit up, and halophilic means I love me some salt in science talk. So next time you single handedly finish off the onion dip at a party, don't be shamed to say I'm a halophile. Just own it, salty bitches.
How did you start to get into this field?
Were you more of an astro nerd or a biology nerd, or like an alien nerd?
What was your history? Sorry for the cough, but yeah, I don't know. I'm a bit of an intellectual platypus in that so I studied physics and astronomy and psychology and undergrad and part of the rationale for the psychology was, well, let's say we do get a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence, how do we with our five senses are senses that evolved under the conditions that planet Earth has presented us with.
But from a just captivation standpoint, my curiosity and my obsession with this question started at a young age and just looking up at the at the night sky, did.
You see e T? Did you see aliens?
Like there's no lack of aliens in pop culture? Yes, what's your what's your flavor? What's your flavor of alien entertainment?
Well that's that's a broad question. Well, so to your question of of E T. As a as a young child, I grew up in a small town in Vermont, and so the night sky of Vermont captivated my imagination early on. You it's hard to grow up under a clear night sky and not wonder what could be out there. And so that coupled with Carl Sagan's Cosmos, both the TV series and his books, uh and some great science teachers early on, those were all big influenced.
The cosmos is were rich beyond measure.
The total number of stars and you know, Verse is larger.
Than all the grains of sand, than all the beaches of the planet Earth. And then yeah, ET Close Encounters of the Third kind. And not only did I watch ET, but I also was ET for Halloween. Nice.
How many years in a row?
Still going still? Yeah, I haven't stopped all yet. As a kid, my mom soda and et outfit for me, and I just lived in that thing.
That's the best I can just imagine. They're like Kevin, it's February.
Shut up, not taking it off.
So when looking for alien life real quick, let's get some stats out of the way. Now, the Big Bang happened approximately thirteen point eight billion years ago. For more on that, you can see the two parter with cosmologist doctor Katie Mack. And Earth has been around for four point five billion years, and there's evidence that life began on our planet at least three point seven billion years ago, maybe even over four billion years ago. So now we
are one. It's a bitsy tan ten ten pale blue dot in the cosmos, but we know there are a lot of grains of sand out there, so how many could have life. This is where you just grab an envelope and flip it over because it's time for the Drake equation. So Frank Drake. He's a round faced man of eighty eight who looks like he could play a
grandpa in an oatmeal commercial. He's one of the founders of SETI, and in their very first meeting in nineteen sixty one, he busted out the Drake equation, posing that the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible is based on ready whole bunch of math.
Here we go the rate of star formation, the fraction of those stars that even have planets, and the number of planets per star in a habitable zone, and then the fraction that actually do the develop life, the fraction of those planets that have in intelligent life or civilization, and then the fraction of those civilizations that make technology. They can communicate their own existence to the universe times a length of time they're beaming there, hey, into the cosmos.
So this Drake equation can come up with different outcomes that vary widely depending on your estimations for all those factors, but overwhelmingly, at the very most, our chances of being alone are thirty percent, just thirty percent, based on some calculations. It came out last summer by some Oxford astrobiologists, which included someone on the team named Ander Sandberg, not to be confused with Brooklyn nine nine's Andy Sandberg.
Welcome to the Space of Olympics a year thirty twenty two.
Anyway, that back of the envelope deduction is called a Fermi problem. This was named after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who's known for those equations like how many piano tuners are there in Chicago? First you gott figure out how many people are in Chicago, how many people have pianos, how many people need tuners, blah blah blah blah blah. Also, Fermi famously uttered what is now known as Fermi's paradox when discussing astrobiology over a summer luncheon in nineteen fifty.
Discussing the seeming absence of aliens, he asked, informally, oh, where is everybody?
Where?
Is everybody? Where?
Is everybody?
Where's everybody?
Where? Is everybody? Everybody?
Where?
Is everybody?
Fermi's paradox has become one of the smartest stupid questions ever asked. Now, speaking of those questions, back to Kevin. When Kevin was an undergrad, he interned at the NASA Ames Research Center, and he went to see his hero, Frank Drake give a talk.
I love this story and I was obsessed with this stuff since I was a little kid. Got to see Frank Drake give a talk and afterward with a lot of trepidation, Doctor Drake, I just had a little question for you, and it's probably crazy, et cetera. And I said, so, if we think about life on Earth, what do you think is going to be the next tool using communicating uh organism. That means that's not a crazy question, it's
it's it's obviously going to be squirrels and raccoons. Mind blown, uh, And you can you explained to his rationale which is quite sound, which is that those creatures are coexisting with us right now and they are problem solving.
My god, he's going to delight my dad, who has now constructed four squirrel houses on the property. It's like I am welcoming the next species.
And I like Frank's logic. And that was that was a fond memory that I have of my first interaction with a living, breathing scientist, and to some extent having my uh, crazy obsession validated by his like, oh, great question. Raccoons and squirrels the best.
Oh my god.
So ask some more people stupid questions because they're great questions. Also, hide your wallet from raccoons. Don't tell any of your secrets to squirrels. Dad now in his work Kevin has traveled to all sorts of biomes, but he says that if you have the travel bug, you don't have to do astrobiology specifically to have field work adventures kind of any Earth science will get you out about. Also side note, there's a real need for folks who want to study geobiology,
which is the study of microbes that eat rocks. Anyway, he loves to bop around for science.
I grew up doing a lot of skiing, climbing, mountaineering, various things, and I've got to get out and see planet Earth. And it's exploring Planet Earth is part of what grounds me, centers me, connects me back with the night sky and helps reignite that that curiosity and that
that passion for exploration and discovery. Uh. And so I feel very fortunate that I've been able to have some research programs where I've gone to Antarctica, made dives in submersibles to the bottom of to some hydrothermal vents and orosi and gone up to uh the Arctic and explored icy environments up there. Yeah. So it's uh, it's been amazing going to those places.
Now, what is a day in the life of an astrobiologist, like, like, what does your work look like?
Yeah, well, well that's there's many different layers to that. My is so, I'm a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and part of the job of scientists at JPL is not only to do their own research and to publish papers, publisher parish, et cetera, et cetera, write proposals and get in that that hamster wheel of of of research. But we also are very engaged with the formulation and implementation of missions. Missions to all sorts of different places, small objects,
big objects, nearby objects, far away objects. And for me, what that means is a focus on worlds in our solar system that could harbor life.
Sorry, I'm just a mouth therament over here.
I focus most of my time, both from a research standpoint and a mission standpoint, on Jupiter's moon Europa and to a slightly lesser extent, Saturn's moon Enceladus.
Why are we looking at moons so much rather than the planets?
Yeah, so this has been one of the big game changers in astrobiology. I think people probably appreciate that an amazing revolution has happened in our understanding of of planets. Existing beyond our own Solar system. This goes back to the early nineteen nineties when the first exoplanets were discovered. Fast forward to to today, and we've got both ground based telescopic observations and spacecraft observations, Kepler being the most
recent example that have discovered thousands of exoplanets. So I think people are for the most part pretty familiar with the exoplanet revolution in the prospect for potentially habitable worlds.
Okay, quick aside, in case you're like, remind me what Kepler was all about again. Okay, So this is a space telescope that NASA launched in two thousand and nine, and it flew around to determine the percentage of Earth like planets out there. It weighed about twenty three hundred pounds, and I did a bunch of comparisons size wise, it was about as big as a hum vy. It scooted around, taken dope ass photos, observing five hundred and thirty five
hundred and six stars. It discovered two thousand, six hundred and sixty two exoplanets, and after nine years, way beyond its expected lifetime, Kepler ran out of fuel last fall in twenty eighteen, it was deactivated with a good night command sent for a mission control. It's now just kicking it in space millions of miles away orbiting the Sun, but its data helped astrobiologists conclude that there may be eleven billion Earth like planets orbiting Sun like stars in
the Milky Way galaxy. Eleven billion planets in the Milky Way Galaxy a lot like Earth whoa Also it was named after Johann Kepler, who in the sixteen hundreds was a contemporary of Tiko Brahe, the Danish astronomer who not only had a beer guzzling drunk pet moose that lived in his castle, but also had a metal nose after a sword fighting incident, and who later died after his bladder exploded because he was too polite to go potty at a fancy dinner party. For more on that, see
Selenology Moon episode. But anyway, Kepler changed the game in helping discover so many planets that could harbor life.
The other big game changer, in my opinion, has been what I like to call sort of a new Goldilocks.
I think I see where this is going.
So in the early days of astronomy and planetary science and astrobiology. Back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, when planetary scientists, astronomers, exobiologists thought about what it takes for a world to be habitable, that framework was largely based on our Earth biases. Wherever we look and find liquid water on Earth, we generally find life. Therefore, you need liquid water for life, and in order for a planet to harbor liquid water, you've got to have liquid water
on the surface in contact with a nice atmosphere. And for a planet to be able to sustain those kind of conditions, you have to be at just the right distance from your parent star so that you're not too hot or not too cold. If you're too close to your parent star, like Venuses, then you're too hot and you probably boiled off any ocean that you once had. If you're too far away like Mars, and maybe some of the water froze out or you lost much of
your water to space. But if you're at the Earth Sun distance, then you're in that sort of Goldilocks sweet spot.
And it was neither too hot nor too cold.
It was just right, and you can have liquid water on the surface of your planet, and potentially it's off to the races from a biology stamp, that Goldilock scenario has kind of been the paradigm what we've learned in the past few decades, and this was largely informed by the Voyager spacecraft and then the Galley of spacecraft and then the Cassini's spacecraft that went into the Outer Solar System.
Quick aside, let's do a rapid rundown of these spacecrafts for your next pub trivia victory. Okay, ready, So Voyager one and two are a set of twin spacecrafts launched in nineteen seventy seven. They explored all of the giant planets of our Outer Solar System. We're talking Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune forty eight of their moons, plus a bunch of planetary rings, some magnetic fields. So as of November fifth, twenty eighteen, both are now exploring interstellar space. This is
between eleven and thirteen billion miles away. So NASA JPL's website has a constantly updated ticker of their location, which is kind of like Find My Friends, but for forty year old, very famous and respected spacecraft. Now. Galileo was launched in nineteen eighty nine. It got to Jupiter nineteen ninety five and it orbited the Jovian aka Jupiterium system. It did eleven flybys of Jupiter's moon Europa during this outer space stint. It went from nineteen eighty nine to
two thousand and three. Now Cassini was launched in nineteen ninety seven. This was all about Saturn, and it entered Saturn's orbit in two thousand and four. It did two flybys of Venus, saw a cool asteroid, checked out Jupiter, and it also deployed a lander on Titan, which is one of Saturn's moons, in two thousand and five, and then we crashed and burned it on purpose in September twenty seventeen. Okay, so moons Europa is one of Jupiter's, Titan is one of Saturn's. Now, if you already knew
that awesome, Here's something you might not know. In Scotland, it's illegal to walk a pig on a leash.
Is that these moons of the outer Solar System are presenting us with a new Goldilock scenario. It's a Goldilock scenario where the energy to maintain and sustain liquid water comes not from the energy of your parent star, but rather from the energy of tie. It's the tug and pull that these moons experience as they go around their gas giants or their ice giants, and so the Jovian system. The moons of Jupiter are a great example of this. There are four large moons Io, your rope Aganamine a chlysto.
Io does not have an ocean. Io doesn't really have any water, Io orbits Jupiter, and Io is tugged to such a great degree that it is the most volcanically active body in our solar system, more volcanically active than the Earth. The volcanoes are erupting on Io right now. It's just a beautiful, beautiful gem of a world. And it really does kind of look like a gemstone when you look at these pictures.
It's a lava party happening so far away it is.
It is.
Break out the popcorn and just watch. So in this new Goldilocks paradigm, Io it's kind of like Venus. It's got too much tidal energy. It's too closer. It's you know, Venus is too close to warm. Io has got too much tidal activity. Let's go to the further furthest out of the large moons Calisto. Now Calisto, we think it does have an ocean trapped beneath a very thick ice shell, But Calisto has very little tidal energy dissipation going on in it. So in that scenario, Callisto is kind of
like Mars. It's it's maybe doesn't have quite enough energy to really make it an ocean that we could explore and think could sustain life today. But in the middle we've got Europa and Ganymede, and Europa in particular, we think occupies this new Goldilocks sweet spot where it's got just the right amount of tidal energy dissipation. So it's to sustain a global salty liquid water that's one hundred kilometers or sixty miles in depth. Oh my god, yeah, that's the right response.
How deep are are oceans?
So it's about ten times as deep as our ocean.
Oh, the smokes the octopods we must have.
So in the Marianto Trench we're about seven miles deep, eleven kilometers down. Europe was ocean ten times as deep.
So our oceans are seven or so miles deep. But where did the water come from? Kevin says, they're two sources water from the rocks from which Earth itself formed. And then there's what they call water that's exotic in its delivery. So coming from comets are asteroids. This is like Postmates, but a dirty ball of frozen space ocean ding goong, I'll get it.
And so yeah, water elsewhere in the Solar System was delivered to the Earth. And when it comes to finding water elsewhere, we now that know that it exists not just on Earth but also on our moon and these various asteroids, comets, the moons of the outer Solar System, in the permafrost of Mars.
Oh my god.
Yeah, there's a lot of water out there. And I should be clear when I say water, I'm not differentiating for the most part. I'm referring to water in ice form. Right when we get to Europa in the ocean world's there, we are then talking about water in the liquid phase.
Slichy, sloshy water is what a lot of scientists cologists in case you need to use that in a meeting. So there's plenty of water on Jupiter's moon Europa, both in ice and in liquid form, and is deep. Now, could extraterrestrials be lurking in those deep dark waters.
The Europe is small, It's about the size of our moon. It's Europe is about one seventh of the Earth's gravity. So when you do the math the pressure within Europa's ocean, it's comparable to it's a bit more, but it's comparable to the pressure found within the deepest trenches of our ocean.
Oh and so when we think about, well, you know, could life survive within europos ocean, we can actually do the experiment and look at places on planet Earth where the conditions are comparable and say, oh wow, life found a way in that environment that has parameters similar to Europa's ocean, or in solidus is ocean, and so on and so forth.
Life will find a way if you want so eloquently put it.
And we can make the sort of biological plausibility connection.
So Kevin says that they analyze magnetometer data to figure out what's creating the gravity fields on those worlds, and then with a lot of whiteboard number crunching, came to the conclusion that Europa is encrusted in ice with liquid salty water below it. But how thick is that magic shell of ice? So most of his colleagues would say, like twenty kilometers thick, but he's in the minority. He thinks it's quite a bit thinner, perhaps less than ten kilometers thick. So when do we get to bore into
it like an icy coconut? While NASA is planning to launch the orbiting space.
Probe that's called the Europa Clipper.
In about twenty twenty two, and that's going to take a bunch of sassy photos and determine some chemical composition. It'll set the stage for a chilly, icy Europa landing by twenty thirty. What do we call this lander? Well, Kevin kicked around the nickname Europa Landing Probe for Surface Astrobiology or ELSA.
Co never bothered me anyway.
How will they bust through this ice? This isn't a crem breulet. At JPL, they're prototyping these robotic arms and drills and saws and sampling systems, and some of the oceanic diving technology that they're tinkering with has a win wind bonus because it's making waves in our own undersea exploration for this whole planet we call Earth.
And now Europa.
Is that where we're really looking in terms of searching for something alive?
Is that really where all eyes are?
Kind of on Europa, well, I love to highlight three prime ocean world candidates, Europa and Solidus and Titan Titan. When we talk about Titan briefly first and we can come back to it. Titan is just an amazing world with its atmosphere and liquid methane ethane lakes carving out its icy surface, and there's liquid water ocean beneath its ice crust. And from the standpoint of astrobiology, Titan is my favorite place to go and look for weird life. And what I mean by weird life is life unlike
life as we know it. Life as we know it is based on liquid water as the solvents the substance in which the chemical reactions of life take place, and those chemical reactions and the building blocks are of course based on carbon. We are a carbon and water based life form. On Titan, life would potentially also be carbon based, but the solvent might be liquid methane and ethane in those lakes that we see on Titan. Could life? Could
the business of life get done? Could life originate? Is there a weird life form that could arise in those lakes and seas. I don't know, but I'd sure love to get there and explore. And then Titan could, of course, within its liquid water ocean beneath its its icy shell, harbor water and carbon based life similar to what we know and love here on Earth.
How flammable.
Can you start titaned on fire? This short answer is no, because in order to light something on fire, what do you need? Yes, And so Titan's atmosphere as basically no oxygen, and so that actually is one of the limiting factors for me when I think about the feasibility of life on Titan.
Okay, so back to general habitability. Kevin says liquid water is one of the keystones. So what else is on our intergalactic shopping list?
The other keystones for life are that you need the building blocks, the stuff that life is made of, the bricks and mortar. For us, that's carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, a smattering of some fifty four elements from the periodic table. Then the third kind of lesser appreciated keystone is life needs energy. It needs a power source. It needs something that can sustain the growth and reproduction and the maintenance of life. Technically, we call that the redox gradients that
life harnesses. You bring together a reductant compound that likes to give up electrons with an oxygen that likes to accept electrons. And for us, we Homo sapiens, that redox reaction is eat some carbohydrates, eat some food, and breathe in oxygen, and then we do a slow burn in our stomachs and biology in us we're glorified campfire man, so we're doing a slow burn with our redox chemistry inside our bodies.
So next time you're eating fistfuls of cookie dough, just holler, I'm redoxing. Microbes, however, can vary quite a bit and have all kinds of metabolic pathways. So by studying how they do it at the bottom of trenches and then the Arctic and next to volcanoes, we can try to determine how those little bibis on other planets and moons might go about their business of eating and farting and pooping and mating as it were.
Now on some.
Moons that may be easier to envision than on others, Kevin explains.
And I think for Enceladus and Europa there probably is some redox chemistry, a reductant oxygen coupling that microbes could harness potentially quite easily on Titan. The chemical story there for redox pairing is a little more complicated than what we gotta go. We got to explore, We got to get out there and just see because biology doesn't care what our hypotheses are. It's just gonna if it can take hold, it will.
And do you think in terms of alien life? Well, number one, let me ask this, is it correct to call alien life alien life? Extraterrestrials? I mean, aren't we aliens? As soon as we go to Europa?
So why? How are they the aliens?
Like?
How what's the proper terminology?
Yes, frame of reference is important in all of these endeavors. So yeah, uh yeah, if you're an intelligent octopus on Europa and and our uh spacecraft lands there, then to them, we of course are the aliens.
Right is it weird that we're aliens to someone else?
Right? Now?
I love it. Let's just hope we play that Close Encounters music bomb.
And so do you think that when we find life?
Well, but let's let's dive into that a little bit more. But go ahead and say, when do.
You think we will find teeny tiny critters or do you think we'll find crazy translucent mammoths?
What do you think we might find?
Yeah, so a lot to kind of unpacking there.
But.
First let's change that when, if that's important, because both outcomes are incredibly profound. I certainly am excited about the prospect of discovering life elsewhere, and that's in part because, at a more kind of philosophical and human level, and taking off my real sort of science brain, biology is beautiful. I love life forms and seeing how life works, and so I'm excited by the prospect of biology being out there in different ecosystems, different planets, and so I do
hope it is a when. But there again, the universe doesn't care what we want, and so it could be that life and the origin of life is a singularity. It's only occurred here on Earth, and we are the first and only instance of it. And so if we do go out and explore and we don't find life elsewhere, that also is pretty profound because that means that life is rare and and it also puts an even bigger onus on us to take care of the only life
we know. We of course have to do that even if we do discover life elsewhere.
But isn't it kind of like if you're looking for your cell phone and you're like, well, I checked my purse, it's not there.
My cell phone doesn't exist.
And meanwhile, your cell phone could be anywhere, like if we go, if we go check places, like, there's an infinite number of places we.
Would have to check on prove it, like you'll almost never prove a null result, right, But then.
So let's let's come back to the other part of your question. Were we to find it, would it be small, would it be large? Microbial? More complex? And this helps me sort of triangulate on one of the aspects of the exploration of ocean worlds like Europa, Enceladus, and Titan that I think is particularly important, and that is that I'm really motivated by the prospect of finding what we call extant life as opposed to extinct life, in other words, life that is alive today, life that we could see
and study and understand how it works. And the reason for that is because I'm in large part interested in the question of is the origin of life easier hard? Is there a second origin of life in our own backyard here in the Solar system. And the reason for that is because if we discover life in our own backyard, if we discover a second origin of life, one that was not seeded by life on Earth, then that means
that the origin of life is probably easy. Life arises wherever the conditions are right, and we potentially live in a biological universe. So looking out at all those exoplanets and everything and say, okay, there's a decent chance that since we found two instances to independent instances of life in our own solar system, the origin of life probably proceeds in many different places.
So we're looking for life in our backyard, i e. Our own solar system, because if it arose on its own, it would prove that life might be easy. The universe might be filled with critters, and if it's still alive or extant as opposed to fossilized, we could find out if the building blocks and genetic code involving DNA and RNA. The whole business of ATP is, as Kevin says, not the only game in town. Is there another system besides
DNA and RNA. This is like asking are there other restaurants in your neighborhood, and are they doing good business?
Are they busy?
Also? Are they pizza places? Or is this something totally different like a Sahi balls? Now would Kevin care about, say a shuttered and abandoned restaurant like, for example, extinct life on Mars.
I love Mars. I do some work on Mars.
I'm sensing there's going to be a however, or a butt coming up like you're this sounds like you're breaking up with Mars right now.
Mars, I love you.
But Mars is absolutely fantastic, and there could be extant life on Mars in the in the subsurface of Mars, and I hope we explore Mars in that context. But right now, our Mars exploration program is primarily focused on the past habitability of Mars. And that's for very good reason.
You look at at the geological and geochemical history of Mars and we see that three and a half billion years ago, it had flowing water, rivers, lakes, perhaps even fast oceans that would have been potentially very earth like and great places for life as we know it to have existed and thrived. Now today, as for example, the Mars curiosity rovers is making its way up Mount sharp In on Mars in Gale Crater. Tomorrow it could turn
a corner and see stromatolites. Stromatolites are or textures in rocks that can often be traced back to microbial mats, microbes that have worked in a consortia and perhaps lived three and a half billion years ago and left behind their sort of microbial fossil. That would be astonishing, That would be a game changer, like we'd be jumping up and down. I'd be super excited about that. But there are some limitations. We can't drill into a stromatolite on Mars and search for DNA. We can't do that on
planet Earth. DNA, the large biomolecules of life, do not last long in the rock record, So then we'd find ourselves at a crossroads. Are these stromatolites from a rock on Mars evidence of an independent origin of life on Mars billions of years ago, or are they evidence of life on Earth that was transported to Mars hitchhiked on some ejecta from an asteroid impact which then seated life on Mars, or vice versa. It was life on Earth seated by this ancient strmatolite. Life form on Mars and
then came here. So Earth and Mars have got a long standing relationship of trading material.
Let's say turn a corner they find a dancing Martian and it's like.
Surprise, I was waiting to get here. Where have you been? It's just like it's got maybe a camelback full of water. It's good. Do you think the government would tell us how soon before? Like a lay person who know.
Now you're you're trying to get the real secrets out of the alley.
Listen, I'm asking the questions. I know that you have, I know you're wondering this, but like, how soon would that come out? Because that would be something that would rock every society on Earth to find out that they're aliens.
Right, people would freak.
Out if there was a little marching Martian. Yes, that would would freak everybody out. Yeah, absolutely, But let's be clear, there's his historical president precedent for exact actly this. The al eight four double one meteorite, the Mars meteorite, the Allen Hills meteorite that was landed in Antarctica and was studied and could be determined to have come from Mars back in the late nineties, and this actually helped catalyze
and initiate much of the current field of astronology. Back in the late nineties, there was a big press release and publications about a set of evidence from studies of that asteroid, of that meteorite that pointed to pass life on Mars.
Oly Smokes.
Bill Clinton got up and said, Hey, look at this. How amazing is this.
This discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that signed ever uncovered.
Great job, NASA, and it was incredibly exciting for NASA in the community. Now, granted, that was a meteorite that landed on Earth. It wasn't a little Martian waving to curiosity, but even that Martian meteorite created a tremendous amount of excitement. Fast forward to today, and just to make sure that I put a cap on the Mars meteorite story, most scientists who study that meteaite think that probably what was seen in that meteorite was contamination from organics on Earth
and potentially microbes on Earth. Yeah, back to your question, if we did find if a spacecraft visiting another world, such as a spacecraft on Mars or a spacecraft going to your Ropo or a spacecraft going to enceladuscer Titan, if it did find obvious evidence, if biology on those worlds was very generous and made itself readily apparent, that would just be phenomenal. I hope that everybody would be thrilled and excited. And I often get asked, well, then
you know, what good is that? Why should we be spending money on this area other thing? It's like, yeah, that discovery. It's not going to change the way you make your coffee in the morning, it's not going to shorten your commute, but it really would mark the beginning of a new understanding, a new revolution in how we think about biology, The science of biology and the stuff
that is us. The phenomenon of life are very phenomenon and to put that in context, and it's also very exciting in terms of the time in which we live. Galileo couldn't send a spacecraft to Mars to search for evidence of life on Mars, or to Europa or in Solidus or Titan or a in these other places. For the first time in the history of humanity, we have the tools and technology to do this last great experiment, to see whether or not biology and the phenomenon of
life works beyond Earth. So let's get it done. You know, I'd love to get out there.
So when you think of the aliens, like just slow your roll, start small, Maybe think of like a little goofy, little bleep bloor microbes instead of you know what we all think about when we talk about extraterrestrials. Why do they always make it? Why do you think we have such iconic imagery of these gray aliens with big heads? Where do you think these kind of stories are coming from? Because when we expect to see aliens, why do you think we expect to see these particular visions?
Yeah, it's I don't have a good succinct answer to that. I think it really, at the heart of it reveals some of our own anthropocentric bias. I'm a tremendous fan of what Arrival did and thinking about life forms that would evolve in much different environments. But I think the whole phenomenon of aliens, UFOs, et cetera, that kind of stuff. It is interesting historically, if you look at William James, the varieties of religious experience quick aside.
So doctor William James was a Victorian era psychologist who believed in ghosts and telepathy, but who thought that religious experiences can come in all shapes and sizes. From what I gather now, this dead psychology doctor William James is not to be confused with the alive UFO ologist ufologist doctor William J. Burns, who's the editor of UFO Magazine and believes that like an influencer wielding face tune, NASA
airbrushes extraterrestrials out of photos all the time. Anyway, theories have been simmering for centuries.
And the different kinds of experience people had centuries ago that they ascribed to divine intervention, et cetera, et cetera. I think some of those same psychological phenomenon also informed the experiences that people have when they think that they've experienced something with alien life forms, abductions and all those things. I'm by no means a specialist in that, but there again, my interest in psychology has sent me down those roads many times.
So how many people in the US believe in aliens? While a twenty seventeen poll showed that nearly half did, but a slim sixteen percent had reported seeing a UFO now among the believers Kesha Nick Jonas, that lady from The Nanny, Casey Musgraves, Russell Crowe, Kendall Jenner, and Demi Lovado, who, if nothing else, has admirable conviction.
I believe that there could possibly be mermaids, which is actually an alien species that lives in parts of the Indian Ocean which we have never explored before as human.
Beings also top cruise.
But uh okay, so now, Kevin remember was a researcher at SETI listening for signals. Now I found one very sketchy article claiming that a bunch of astronauts have reported that the skies above us are just a traffic jam of flying saucers and there's an alien space station on the Moon. But even supposing all of that is true, how would we communicate? What do we do charades when it comes to trying to say, signals from other planets,
other civilizations? How do we know that we will have the right intendant to pick it up like we don't?
And so it's a great question, and my friends and colleagues at the same institute obsess over that kind of question. Even within the frequency space of our radio search, there's still so much to explore, and Frank Drake and Jill Tarter and Seth and Dan Warteimer and others have focused in throughout the years on particular wavelengths where the cosmos itself is quiet and it would sort of make for a good broadcast and transmission in the radio part of
the spectrum. But then another colleague of mine, Andrew Howard who's now at cal Tech, and his advisor at Harvard, Paul Horowitz, they were some big innovators on optical SETI if you think about an advanced civilization, well, if you think about the center of the Milky Way galaxy, I hope the center of the Milky Way galaxy is like, well, okay, let's put this in context. We are in the boondocks
of the Milky Way. We're eight and a half killiparsex outs and suffice to say, that's a long ways out from the galactic bulge.
That's right, that's right. The densely packed cluster of stars at the center of a spiral galaxy is called a galactic bulge. Someone please go as one for Halloween. It's March. It's not too late to get started on a luminous, starry cod piece and some twinkling spirally arms.
I hope that the center of the galaxy is teeming with life, and we've got advanced civilizations and they're they're darting back and forth, and they're there's a galactic internet, the sort of you know, modern version of what Carl Sagan used to like to call the Encyclopedia Galactica. We I hope that is happening right now in the center of our galaxy. Those civilizations would probably communicate with with with laser beams, with optical beams directed UH star to star,
planet to planet, uh spacecraft to spacecraft, et cetera. It's just more efficient to send transmissions that way. And so one of the ways that uh SETI researchers are now looking for signals from advanced civilizations is looking for those nanosecond pulses in the sort of visible part of the light spectrum, which so far nothing, but there's still so much to search.
There could be aliens sending laser grams right now, like party, party.
On my moon tonight exactly.
Okay, I'm ann pose a theory.
You can use this in a paper if you want to, it's fine, just credit me. But what if dark matter, dark energy is just full of ghost of aliens.
Yeah, that's that's beyond my pay grade.
We don't know exactly what it is or what it's to what's allows you with ghosts and aliens?
Right?
Yes, And to that I say, we are the four percents. Ok Right, Everything that we see, we know in love is four percent of the known universe. And actually I think it's it's more. It's closer to one percent when you actually consider the particles with which we interact. Yeah, but that's if.
You're going to use it in a TED talk. It's fine.
Just put a slide. This is thank you, Okay. Are you ready for some Patreon questions?
Sure?
Okay, But before we get to listener questions from Patreon, a quick word from our sponsors, who have allowed me to raise the pay of the folks who help me make ologies, also let me donate to a cause of the ologists choosing. This week, Doctor Kevin Peter Hand chose to support the work of Traveling Telescope and this is a cause started by Susan Marrabona and her husband Chu and colleagues to share astronomy with school kids and the
general public in Kenya. They say that they regularly visit both government and private schools, exposed students to a variety of astronomy tools and concepts. Giving the students practical hands on experience with astronomy is important if we are to inspire young people to be the scientists of tomorrow. So that is Traveling Telescope and there will be a link in the show notes if you want to know more
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All right, your questions, okay, patroon questions, We got a gozillion I I can okay. It kind of a lightning round shoot from the hip. I categorize them as best I could. Okay, So, Jasmine Wells, Vincent Maddie Worker and Mike Marlowe all kind of want to know, as a firm believer of other forms of life, what's the most probable.
Planet for alien life to exist on?
Like one of the most likely places.
Mars is fantastic. Mars is still a wonderful place to look for evidence of past life and potentially life that's alive today. We'll just have to dig a lot deeper. So I put Mars, Europa, Enceladus, and Titan. And when it comes to the search for extant life, I really prioritize Europa and Thencelladus for extant life similar to life as we know it. And then if we go one layer deeper, I prioritize Europa over Enceladus for a couple of different reasons. Europa, we have good reason to predict,
has had an ocean for the history of the Solar system. Yeah, so it's an ocean that's been around for a while. Enceladus, there's still some question marks. The reason Saturn has rings is because some sort of collision, some sort of impact event happened in the neighborhood of the moons of Saturn in the past tens to hundreds of millions of years ago.
Okay, so remember Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. Kevin says that Saturn had had some drama in the last tens of billions of years, so didn't sell it.
This form from that is, it's ocean relatively young.
We don't know will those rings glomb together to form moons eventually, Well.
A bunch of it will go into Saturn, and a bunch of it will will sort of drift in the other direction further out, and stuff will continue to glom onto the existing moons. And so yeah, it's going to continue to be a bit of a pinball game out there in the Saturnian system.
So many people had the same question, and I'm going to say all of their names right now. Elizabeth Gable, one we Renee Coley, Mad's Clement, Moses Bibbi, Devin Robertson, Dion Dabolo, Anthony still Own, also Landy Bauer, Nathan Algrim, Theodore Vissian, Sani Seth, Sarah Clark, Jack, Gavin Jordan, where Me, Lauren Paul, Erica Kaine, and Tony Rosso all asked what well is there already non carbon based life on Earth? What is the possibility of extraterrestrial non carbon based life?
Could it be silicon based? Is that possible? What would that look like?
It's a great question, one that I definitely ponder, one that I don't necessarily have a good answer to, because what we know of life so far is that life needs a good balance between larger information molecules that can you know, the store the software for us that's DNA obviously, and so you need those molecules to be made of elements that can bond together and are stable. But you don't want those molecules to be too stable, because you got to tear them apart and translate them and figure
out what they're saying. And then the you know, the RNA and the worker bees of life as we know it have to go off and build the proteins and make the business of life. So from a feasibility of life, using other things like silicon, et cetera. Every time I go down this road, it's like, gosh, darn a. Carbon is just such a good element for not just bonding with itself and bonding with other elements and forming long molecules.
It's also really good, albeit at temperatures and pressures that are found here on Earth and frankly many of the other planets. It's also really good at forming molecules that occupy that nice sweet spot of you can be large and stable, but not so stable that you can't be broken apart and replicated and or metabolized and stuff. And all you got to do is look at the rocks on Earth. The rocks on Earth are made of strings of silicon, right, the silicates, the silicon linked to four
oxygen atoms and then various metals bounded in there. You know, if silicon based life could have evolved on Earth, it had plenty of opportunity. So water and carbon based life. Yeah, it's it's a pretty darn good solution to that. Use the word solution appropriately.
Well, rock solid pun there.
But I would love nothing more than to go to a world like Titan or see some big mothership in the sky that comes down with silicon based life and the and keep in mind, of course, that silicon based life could be the future of life as we know it. When we think about our mushy bags of water and carbon, silicon based life that we then create an advance could obviously have a much greater staying power galactically than the
carbon and water based life. So that's like maybe, well, it's a great question, and I love to think about it. But every time I go down the rabbit hole of chemical feasibility, carbon pops it's head up.
Yeah you think you can be Carbon's like, yeah, I got this exactly.
That's exciting to see that that your audience is interested in that question.
Other people had questions about the oceans, trying to settle a debate Oceana Reese as are deep sea creatures aliens? I think they are? And also are we looking at the deep sea to provide any clues of what could exist on other planets?
Yeah, great questions. Answer. The first one is as alien as they are, and I've gotten to see some of them up close, and as astonishing and beautiful and bizarre as they are, they are very well connected into our tree of life. They are based on DNA and RNA and the ATP paradigm with proteins, et cetera. So yeah, they are not different from life as we know it.
So are we looking in our own oceans to see whether or not or search for life elsewhere it can be informed by life that works in these deep ocean environments. The answer is absolutely, And it's something that I'm very passionate about and I've been fortunate to be able to take part in some of that exploration and science. The depths of our trenches or the Mariana Trench, the New Britain Trench, the Japan Trench, all these places that are in what we call the hate Old depths deeper than
six kilometers down in our own ocean. Those environments are incredibly poorly explored. There's so much great work yet to be done. And from an astrobiology standpoint, they offer a great bridge for learning about the environmental conditions that could affect the habitability of these distant worlds. It's entirely plausible that we could go to a world like Europo or Enceladus and discover that it has the right liquid water,
chemical conditions, et cetera. It is quote unquote habitable but not inhabited, and that could be because the origin of life is a bottleneck. The origin of life could be quite hard. So going to these deep ocean environments, going to places on Earth that serve as analogs for the conditions that we might find elsewhere is part of NASA's astrobiology program.
All right, I'm going to keep blazing through these ready, Sophia Garbo's great question. Do you think they have been here and left? What are the chances have aliens been here and bounced?
I don't know if they came and went. They haven't left so much as a paper clip. And as a scientist, I need hard evidence, so as much as I have read anecdotes and I want to believe to use the X files. Uh yeah, it's at the end of the day. Give me an alien paper clip or sash. A stack says, bring back a fork from from the mothership?
What is it? It's a dingle?
Wait that brings me to someone. Two people had the same question. Sophie goes to know and Heather Shaver wanted to know, are you more of a Molderer Scully? Are you in the molder fan cult?
Interesting? So the uh uh yeah, I'm the hybridized love child of two of them. Let's okay, both.
Of their DNA's combined a new carbon based water bag. Not as you justin Griggs and Casey Wright. First time questioned askers wanted to know what's the coolest gadget we currently have and if you were given unlimited funds, like what kind of imaging or radio equipment would you use?
Well, that's a that's a really interesting question. And layered into that question is that when we think about the search for life elsewhere and actually doing those experiments, and this is what I spend much of my days doing. I'm I'm the pre project scientist for the Europa Lander mission concept. This is a mission that is far from Greenlitz. Our team of scientists and engineers has been working on this for many years. NASA currently has a mission going
to Jupiter to study Europa. That's the Europa Clipper mission, and it's a mission that will fly by Europa and do remote sensing look as it makes those flybys, to take images, do spectroscopy, do ice penetrating radar studies. It's an absolutely amazing mission and the data is going to be incredible. And I'm a co investigator on that mission, and hopefully someday following on that mission, we can put a landed vehicle on the surface to dig up some
material and look directly for signs of life. Use a microscope to look for morphologic indicators little cells if they exist. Use things like mass spectrometry or infrared or roman spectrometry to look for organics and other things. And so to your listener's question, in the biotech world, here on Earth, we've made tons of progress in sequencing DNA and twenty
three and meters and all this stuff. But when I think about a payload for exploring a world like Europa, we can't use DNA based analytical systems because then we might miss life. Even if it's carbon and water based, it may well not be DNA based. It would be really interesting if it was, because that would set the stage for some evolutionary debates and convergence versus contingency and DNA arising independently.
More than once, I think what this means is would DNA appearing in extraterrestrial organisms be total chance or developed because the circumstances kind of steered evolution toward that efficient coding formation. Again, who the hell knows people, literally, no one at least not on this point. It maybe Kesha knows, but.
We certainly don't want our instrumentation and our measurements to require that life form to be based on DNA.
Right, It's like taking a VCR somewhere las.
Hell are you going to do with that?
Exactly? And that's important to appreciate with a lot of the biotech that feeding into those that instrumentation are primers that are that latch onto DNA in different ways, And so yeah, it's like a VCR.
You got a thumb drive and in an eight track.
Hell are you gonna do? Exactly a lot.
Of people, including Lauren Murray, Sarah Clark, Timothy Diyke's, Joe O'Bannon, Jane Joy, Jenny Hoover, Jeffrey Katz all kind of wanted to know, in Jeffrey Kat's words, do you think intelligent aliens would look somewhat like us? Like as we evolve, somethings seemed efficient, like bilateral symmetry for extremities to use to manipulate tools. Are they going to look like us?
So, instead of answering the question will alien life look like us? I like to do the experiment of what if we re ran the life on Earth again, would we end up with Homo sapiens? And you can look at different convergent and contingent events and evolutionary history. Obviously, one that's great to examine is the impact event that extinguished the dinosaurs. What if that didn't happen, would the dinosaurs have evolved into intelligent, communicating creatures with useful thumbs
and all that. And Star Trek's is examined those kinds of scenarios, and I think there's a case to be made that early on in the evolution of intelligence, if you do not figure out how to use tools and how to build shelters, and how to propagate information beyond the single generational time scale, in other words, the printing press and the internet and all these things, if you don't develop that relatively quickly, you will become extinct just by the nature of the fact that the cosmos is
full of hazards and eventually a large impact event will wipe you out. Caboo, no thing to fast forward to us. And now clearly we are at an inflection point. Yes, we're messing up the home planet. Yeah, climate change is going gangbusters. And planet Earth is saying, hey, we're going to shut down this subsystem. So our life support system is being challenged by our own existence. Coupled with that, we could still have an impact from outer space that
wipes us out. And so, in my opinion, the clock is ticking on us to get some real intelligence and learn how to be a longer lived species. So if we re ran the clock, would you end up with bilotal symmetry? I think yes. Would you end up with eyes? I think yes. You can look at the evolution of eyes, and it's occurred some fifty or more times in different organisms on Earth. Obviously, photosensing makes a lot of sense. The senses that we have smell and taste are variations
on chemical sensors, and that's very useful. I get intrigued by some of the sensory modalities that are not as ubiquitous, sensing the polarization of light as bees do, sensing magnetic fields, echolocation as obviously bats and dolphins and other creatures do. Is there a world in which those sensory modalities become more prevalent in the primary biological paradigm of a planet.
Perhaps, who knows what an ultrasound antenna would look like.
Well, and that in part goes to arrival, right, and the way in which those creatures communicated through sound and the circular timeless ink blots.
Okay, from ink blots to the great filter. So several listeners, including Dion Dabolo, Tyler Q, Donald McCloud, Christopher Barley, and Katie Boyd asked about the great filter, which is the notion that the reason we've got radio silence from extraterrestrials is that our kind of advanced civilizations are either a one off just us, or they die out before they're
capable of communicating with one another. Kevin says that if we make it through our own population growth and carelessness with the planet and aren't just randomly boned by a space rock, there is the prospect of finding another civilization if a signal is out there. But he says, on the flip side, I'm.
Sure many of your listeners have probably read The Three Body Problem and that trilogy, which is a fantastic trilogy, and the second book called The Dark Forest, which really gets into the question of do you actually want to reach out and make contact? Yeah? Is that a safe thing to do? And I think that's a very important question to ponder and from a transmission standpoint, do you really want to transmit? I don't think I have a clear answer right now. I've got thoughts on both yes
and no for transmitting. But short of that, we can certainly do a heck of a lot more in listening, and that is something that I advocate for and hope we do more of.
So it's like reaching out and texting your ext versus just lurking on their Twitter late at night. A few people asked Christopher Barley, Layel Defkova and first time question asker Rebecca Lee Richardson, Does Fermi paradox make you sad?
The Fermi paradox make me sad? Like where are they and why haven't we found them yet? Yes, in some ways it does, and to the extent that it makes your your listener said, I sympathize. But people like Jill Tarter and the folks up at the Seti Institute serve as great inspiration and when we talk to them about this stuff, I was like, well, we just we really
have not listened enough. We haven't looked in We know where to look, we just have not yet had time or the computing power to to really search the haystack for the needle. So we're going to keep keep searching.
Keep working. You're employed forever, yes, okay. One last question from listeners.
Great question asked by Joe Porfito as well as Chris Bauman, Danny King, Jenny Cove Sick. In your opinion, did the chartar grade come from outer space? What's the deal with tartar grades? Should we send them to Mars? Let's talk tarties tartar grades.
Those little water bears. They are curious little creatures, and they are again DNA based, RNA based. We can fit them into the tree of life on Earth. Okay, very well, so they make sense. Okay, that said, they sure are curious little creatures, aren't they?
A tartar grade?
By the way, is this teeny tiny micro animal. It looks kind of like if a futon cushion had eight stumpy little legs and then a vacuum for a face. And they're five hundred and thirty million years old at least. They've been everywhere from the Antarctic to the deep sea to volcanoes. They can survive like a decade without any water and crazy temperatures in space radiation. If you soak a piece of moss in water and then you look under like a low power microscope, you might be able
to spot one. But yeah, Kevin says, sorry, y'all, they're earth lengths.
Okay, last two questions.
I always ask, what is something that is the shittiest part of your job, the thing that you dislike the most about what you do, or about alien life, or maybe some flim flam that you'd like to debunk some myths.
That irk you. What is what gets your goat.
When it comes to astrobiology so annoying?
Honestly, the thing that comes to mind, of course as a scientist, the ubiquitous answers. We hate writing proposals, begging for money, getting rejected like yeah, yeah, yeah. That's just part of the life cycle of a scientist across the board. That's not specific to After a while, dude, I guess the sad part is for all of the exciting stuff that we discussed here today, why I wish we could
just get going with it. It is through the generosity and dedication and excitement of the taxpayer who make NASA and all this stuff possible. So if you want to see us move faster. Just keep on being interested in the stuff and express it to your various folks who helped make the high level decisions that are well beyond my.
Pig grid about NASA.
So we got to do on the search for life in astrobiology.
What about your favorite thing about astrobiology or your job the best you know.
I've got a lot of great colleagues and we love brainstorming about forcing each other to think out of the box. I have a position at Woodshole Oceanographic Institution, an amazing institution that is a pioneer in the field of ocean exploration. And I go there and I visit colleagues like Chris Jerman and Julie Hooper and others, and we just have a blast forcing each other to think out of the box about how to explore a planet Earth and understand life on Earth and how to apply that to worlds
and wonders beyond Earth. So that kind of intellectual popping the popcorn is a lot of fun. And at JPL I get to do that with engineers. I'm just a silly scientist with crazy ideas. I can't do anything without the engineers who figure out how to actually implement the
ideas of myself and my fellow colleagues. They're the ones who are actually getting these missions done and making sure that when they fly by or orbit or land on a distant world, we get those bits back that can revolutionize our understanding of how the universe works.
If someone wanted to be an astrobiologist, what would you tell them?
Where do they start? Yeah, it's a great question. In the field of astrobiology today, there's biologists, chemist, geologists, geochemists, oceanographers. My own background physics and astronomy and geological environmental sciences. I also did a master's in robotics. It takes all kinds to get this sort of Let me use a
few buzzwords interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary trendsdisciplinary kind of research done. And so what I tell students and folks interested within the framework of sciences that feed into astrobiology, follow your passion biology, geology, physics, astronomy, et cetera, et cetera, chemistry, and enjoy that fundamental research and then extend and bridge it into astrobiology.
Smart It's just the sound of so many people changing their majors right now.
Thank you for studying aliens.
Thanks for having me a year to talk about aliens.
So, whether it's about aliens or squirrels, the theme here asks smart people stupid questions, because what a shame not to know your surroundings. Now you can become a doctor Kevin Peter Hand fan by following him at Alien Oceans on Twitter on Instagram, He's Kevin Underscore Peter Underscore Hand And once again, the charities we talked about were Traveling
Telescope and the Manchester Rescue Squad. Link to the show notes in case you're curious about them, alongside all the sponsors of the show and any codes that you might need. You can find those links up at aliword dot com to find ologies. You can follow along on Twitter at ologies also at ologies on Instagram. I'm ali Word with one L on both and yeah that's alien no n Now, if you're in the LA area, I'm moderating talks at
the Natural History Museum for their first Friday series. So that's the first Friday.
Of April of May of June.
You just come in. I'm doing some talks with ologists SAH and I'm just kind of doing a live Q and A with them, so come say hi. More on that is at NHM dot org. I also have my own science show on the CW called did I Mentioned Invention? And I'm a correspondent on Innovation Nation on CBS every Saturday. If you're a Netflix havever, you can check out Brainchild, wherein I am in a beehive explaining science every episode. Also, Happy birthday to my wonderful sister Janelle. I'm very, very
proud to share Earthling DNDA with you. For Ologies T shirts with the Ologies logo and mugs and toads and pins and hats, go to ologiesmerch dot com. You can tag your Instagram photos Ologies Merch so I can post them on Mondays. Thank you Shannon Felds and Bonnie Dutch for managing that. Thank you Aaron Talbert and Handah Lippo for admitting the Facebook group. Thank you to interns Harry
Kim and CAYLEB Patten. To assistant editor Jarrett Sleeper of mind Jam Media and the new combat podcast Fight Stuff in case you're into boxing and MMA, and of course the Mulley. To my scolder Stephen Ray Morris of the per Cast and c Jurassic Right, And to Nick Thorburn who wrote and perform the theme music. Now, if you stick around to the end, you know, I tell you
a secret this week. When I was younger, my sister and I used to love eating spaghettios with meatballs, and we had this tactic where we would eat the spaghettios and then save all the meatballs on a smaller, separate plate, and then at the very end you would just get an entire mouth full of meatballs.
But it now sounds so gross, but it.
Was just heaven as a child. So that's it.
That's all I got.
I have a good week everyone forby pacodermatology, hobiology or do zoology, Lithology and technology, meteorology and matterhology, nathology, seriology, selenology.
Yeah, I'm all that choosy.
I'm sorry,