Oh hey, it's that guy in your video editing class who choose so much gum, you're actually worried about him. Alie Ward, back with another episode of Ologies. So this episode, I'm just, I'm gonna say this up top, just get out of the way. It's out of this world. Okay, I said it, it's out of this world. Now we're gonna start by talking about the passions that lead to a career in extraterrestrial alien searches.
As well as lay down some foundations on missions 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 earthlings. So thank you to all the people who make the podcast possible on patreon.com slash allergies, all my buddies there.
To all the folks sporting allergies swag from oligiesmerch.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 epidemiologist as we 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 Greek show. 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-dong stars? What's on the planets?
That's the big question. Is anything alive out there? What are the odds? Is it big? Small is it cool within us? So to get some answers will consult a professional. So over the course of 11 months and 27 gentle, desperate emails from me, thisologist kindly obliged and the resulting interview is I was about 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's aliens of the deep. And is currently the deputy chief scientist for solar system exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
On site 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, tiny extraterrestrials, sci-fi movies, extremophile, tardigrades, subsurface oceans, squirrels, ghosts. Okay, I brought out 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, Dr. Kevin Peter Hand. Okay, that's what I thought, but just in case it was honed, and 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?
I know, because I don't toss it out at parties. Okay, that's one way to avoid that. What exactly doesn't mean? 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 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, air, light, cars, mineral.
So what's important about it being the study of the living universe is that oftentimes when people think about astrobiology, they say, 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 rise beyond earth.
So to be an interplanetary alien hunter, it helps to have a background that's a bit interdisciplinary. So Kevin, Dr. Hand, got his bachelors from Dartmouth in 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 Sub-Surface Ocean of Europa, it used Galileo spacecraft magnetometer data. More on that later. Now the abstract for Kevin's dissertation uses the term, Hello, Phyllic Organisms, and yes, I look that shit up, and Hello, Phyllic 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 ashamed.
Just say I'm a Hallophile, just own it, salty bitches. But how did you start to get into this field where you more of an astronard or a biology nerd or like an alien nerd? What was your history? Sorry, I think it's sort of cough, but yeah, I don't know. I'm a bit of an intellectual platypus in that. 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 is 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 night sky. Did you see ET? Did you see aliens? There's no lack of aliens in pop culture. What's your flavor? What's your flavor of alien entertainment? Well, that's a broad question.
Well, so to your question of ET, as a young child, I grew up in a small town in Vermont and so the night sky, I've come captivated my imagination early on. It's hard to grow up under a clear night sky and not wonder what could be out there. So that coupled with Carl Sagan's Cosmos, both a TV series and his books and some great science teachers early on, those were all big influence. The Cosmos is rich beyond measure.
The total number of stars in the universe is larger than all the grains of sand and all the beaches of the planet Earth. And then ET, close encounters of the third kind. Not only did I watch ET, but I also was ET for Halloween. Nice. How many years in a row? Still going. I haven't stopped all year. That's a good decision. No, but as a kid, my mom saw an ET outfit for me and I just lived in nothing. That's the best. I can just imagine they were like, Kevin, it's February. I'm like, shut up mom.
I'm 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 13.8 billion years ago. For more on that, you can see the two-parter with cosmologist Dr. Katie Mac. And Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years and there's evidence that life began on our planet at least 3.7 billion years ago, maybe even over 4 billion years ago. So now we are one. It's a bitsy. Do you mean 10, 10, 8? Pale blue dot in the cosmos.
But we know there are a lot of grains of sound 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 88 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 1961, 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 intelligent life or civilization, and then the fraction of those civilizations that make technology that can communicate their own existence to the universe, times the length of time they're beaming their hay 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 30% of the population per cent. Just 30%. Based on some calculations, it came out last summer by some Oxford astrobiologist, which included someone on the team named Anders Sandberg, not to be confused with Brooklyn 9-9's Andy Sandberg. Welcome to the space Olympics, the year 32.
Anyway, that back of the envelope deduction is called a Fermi problem. This was named after the Italian physicist and Rico Fermi, who's known for those equations like how many piano tuners are there in Chicago? First, you gotta figure out how many people in Chicago, how many people have pianos, how many people need tuners, blah, blah, blah, blah. Also Fermi famously uttered what is now known as Fermi's paradox when discussing astrobiology over a summer luncheon in 1950.
Discussing the seeming absence of aliens, he asked informally, what was everybody? Where is everybody? Where is everybody? Where is everybody? Where is everybody? Where is everybody? Where is 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. I got to see Frank Drake give a talk and afterward with a lot of trepidation, I was a bit of a doctor Drake. I just had a little question for you. It's probably crazy, et cetera. And I said, yeah, so if we think about life on Earth, what do you think is going to be the next tool using communicating organism? Look at that news. That's not a crazy question. It's obviously going to be squirrels and raccoons.
And he explained his rationale, which is quite sound, which is that those creatures are co-existing with us right now. And they are problem solving. Oh my God. He's going to delight my dad who has now constructed four squirrel houses on the property. And it's like, I am welcoming the next machine. 100%, and I like Frank's logic. And that was a fond memory that I have of my first interaction with a living breathing scientist.
And to some extent, having my crazy obsession validated by his like, no, great question. Records and squirrels. The best. Oh my God. So, ask smart 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 fieldwork adventures.
Kind of any Earth science will get you out and 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 bob around for science. I grew up doing a lot of skiing, climbing, nut nearing various things, and I've got to get out and see planet Earth. And exploring planet Earth is part of what grounds me, centers me, connects me back with the night sky.
And it helps reignite that curiosity and that passion for exploration and discovery. 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 some mercenables to the bottom of, to some hydrothermal vents in our ocean, gone up to the Arctic and explored icy environments up there. Yeah, so it's been amazing going to those places. Now, what is a day in a life of an astrobiologist like? What does your work look like?
Yeah, well, there's many different layers to that. My, 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, publish a parish, etc., etc., write proposals and get in that hamster wheel 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. So I just have a mouth there and then over here. Good helmet. 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 in solidus. 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 planets existing beyond our own solar system. This goes back to the early 1990s when the first exoplanets were discovered fast forward 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 2009 and it flew around to determine the percentage of Earth-like planets out there. It weighed about 2300 pounds and I did a bunch of comparisons size-wise. It was about as big as a humvee.
It scooted around, taken dope-ass photos, observing 530,506 stars it discovered 2662 exoplanets and after nine years, way beyond its expected lifetime, Kepler ran out of fuel. Next fall, in 2018, 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 11 billion Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
11 billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy, a lot like Earth. Also, it was named after Johann Kepler, who in the 1600s 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 the Salonology Moon episode.
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 a new Goldilocks. I'm in the early days of astronomy and planetary science and astrobiology back in the 60s, 70s and 80s 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. In order for a planet to harbor liquid water, you've got to have liquid water on the surface in contact with a nice, thick atmosphere. For a planet to be able to sustain those kind of conditions, you have to be at just the right distance from your parent's star so that you're not too hot or too cold.
If you're too close to your parent's star, like Venus is, 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's undistinguished 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 standpoint. That Goldilocks 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 Galileo spacecraft and then the Cassini 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, you ready?
So Voyager 1 and 2 are a set of twin spacecrafts launched in 1977. 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 5, 2018, both are now exploring interstellar space. This is between 11 and 13 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 40-year-old, very famous and respected spacecraft. Now, Galileo was launched in 1989. It got to Jupiter 1995 and it orbited the Jovian aka Jupiterian system. It did 11 flybys of Jupiter's moon Europa during this outer space stint. It went from 1989 to 2003. Now Cassini was launched in 1987. This was all about Saturn. And it entered Saturn's orbit in 2004.
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 2005. And then we crashed and burned it on purpose in September 2017. 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 Goldilocks scenario? It's a Goldilocks 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 TOT. 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 Europa, Ganymina, and Chlister.
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. Oh my god. Volcanoes are erupting on Io right now. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, it's just a beautiful, beautiful gem of a world. Then 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. Bring break on Io. So in this new Goldilocks paradigm, Io is kind of like Venus. It's got too much tidal energy. It's too closer. Venus is too close to warm. Io has got too much tidal activity. Let's go to the further out and further this out of the large moons. Chlister. Now Chlister, we think, does have an ocean trapped beneath a very thick ice shell. But Chlister has very little tidal energy dissipation going on in it.
So in that scenario, Chlisto is kind of like Mars. 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. Chlisto is to sustain a global salty liquid water ocean. That's 100 kilometers or 60 miles in depth.
Oh my God. Yeah, that's the right response. How deep are our oceans? So it's about 10 times as deep as our ocean. Oh, the smokes, the octopods, same as tab. So in the Mariana Transfer, about 7 miles deep, 11 kilometers down. Europa's ocean, 10 times as deep. So our oceans are 7 or so miles deep. But where did the water come from? Kevin says there are 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 or asteroids, this is like postmates, but a dirty ball of frozen space ocean. Ding dong, 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 it 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 and the ocean worlds there, we, or then talking about water in the liquid phase. Slishy sloshy water is what a lot of scientists call it just 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, in his deep. Now could extraterrestrials be lurking in those deep dark waters?
Europa's small. It's about the size of our moon. Europa's about 1 seventh of the Earth's gravity. So when you do the map, the pressure within Europa's ocean is comparable to, it's a bit more, but it's comparable to the pressure found within the deepest trenches of our ocean.
And so when we think about, well, you know, could life survive within Europa's ocean, we can actually do the experiment and look at places on planet Earth where the conditions are comparable and say, oh wow, life, life found away in that environment that has parameters similar to Europa's ocean or in solidest as ocean and so on and so forth. Life will find a way as you want to 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 field 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 20 kilometers thick, but he's in the minority. He thinks it's quite a bit thinner, perhaps less than 10 kilometers thick.
So when do we get to bore into it like an icy coconut? Well NASA is planning to launch the orbiting space probe. It's called the Europa Clipper in about 2022 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 2030. What do we call this lander? Well Kevin kicked around the nickname Europa landing probe for surface astrobiology or Elsa. How will they bust through this ice?
This isn't a crembrule 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-win bonus because it's making waves in our own undersea exploration for this old 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 Salad is in Titan. Titan, when we talk about Titan briefly first and we can come back to it. Titan is just an amazing world with this atmosphere and liquid methane, ethane lakes carving out its icy surface and there's a 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 in 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. Oh my god. 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 icy shell, harbor, water and carbon based life similar to what we know and love here on Earth. Now flammable is a thing. Like if you're making methane and ethane. Can you start Titan on fire? Sure answer is no because in order to light something on fire, what do you need?
Oxygen. Yes. And so Titan's atmosphere has basically no oxygen. Okay. 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 54 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, a compound that likes to give up electrons with an oxidant. That likes to accept electrons.
And for us, we, we, the 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. And we're glorified campfire. 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 in the Arctic and next to volcanoes, we can try to determine how those little bit is 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, untighten the chemical story there for redox pairing is a little more complicated than what we got to go. We got to explore. We got to get out there and just see because biology doesn't care what our hypothesis are. It's just going to, if it can take hold it well. 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, what's the proper terminology? Yes, frame of reference is important in all of these endeavors. Yeah, if you're an intelligent octopus on Europa and our spacecraft lands there, then to them, we of course are the aliens. Is it weird that we're aliens to someone else right now? I love it. Let's just hope we play that close encounter as music.
Boom, boom. And so do you think that when we find life? Well, let's dive into that a little bit. 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 I'm a lot to kind of unpack in there. No. But first, let's change that when to if. And 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 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 and different ecosystems, different planets. And so I do hope it is a win. 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 it also puts an even bigger, only sound 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, you're like, your cell phone could be anywhere. Like if we go check places, there's an infinite number of places we would have to check. 100% proof of it, like you'll almost never prove a no-versal. But then, so 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 and cell.
It's a titan that I think is particularly important. 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 or hard? Is there a second origin of life in our own backyard here in the solar system?
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, two 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, he's shuttered an 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 blood coming up. This sounds like you're breaking up with Mars right now. Mars, I love you. But... Mars is absolutely fantastic. There could be extant life on Mars 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 the geologic and geochemical history of Mars, and we see that three and a half billion years ago, it had flowing water, rivers, lakes, and perhaps even vast oceans that would have been potentially very Earth-like, and great places for life as we know it to have existed and thrived. But...
Now, today, as for example, the Mars Curiosity rover is making its way to Mars, and way up Mount Sharpen on Mars in Gal crater, tomorrow it could turn a corner and see stromatolites. Stromatolites are 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. 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. Then we'd find ourselves at the crossroads. Are these stromatolites from a rock on Mars?
Are they 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 unseated life on Mars, or vice versa, it was life on Earth, ceded by this ancient stromatolite life form on Mars, and then came here. Earth and Mars have got a longstanding relationship of trading material. Let's say, turn a corner. They find a dancing Martian. It's like, surprise.
I was waiting for you to get here. Where have you been? It's just like, it's got maybe a camel back full of water. It's good. Do you think the government would tell us how soon would be before a lay person like no? No, you're trying to get the real secrets out of me, Ali. Listen, I'm asking the questions I know that you have. I know you're wondering this. But how soon would that come out? That would be something that would rock every society on Earth to find out that they're aliens, right?
People would freak out. I, if it was a little marching Martian, yes, that would freak everybody out. Yeah. Absolutely. But let's be clear. There's historical president precedent for exactly this. The AL-8401 meter right, the Mars meter right, the Allen Hills meter right, that was landed in Antarctica and was studied and could be determined to have come from Mars back in the late 90s. This actually helped catalyze and initiate much of the current field of astrobiology.
Back in the late 90s, there was a big press release in publications about a set of evidence from studies of that asteroid that, of that meteorite, that pointed to past life on Mars. Oh, he 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 science has ever uncovered. Great job, NASA. And it was incredibly exciting for NASA and 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 meteorite think that probably what was seen in that meteorite was contamination from organics on Earth and potentially microbes on Earth. Yeah, yeah. 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 robot or spacecraft going to Enselda sometime, 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, what then? What good is that? Why should we be spending money on this 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 short in 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, our 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 T. Europa or Insolidus or Titan or any of 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. I'd love to get out there. So when you think of aliens, just slow your all. Start small.
Maybe think of a little goofy little bleep-blur microbes instead of what we all think about when we talk about extraterrestrials. Why do you always make it? Why do you think we have such iconic imagery of these gray aliens with big heads? Why do you think these kind of stories are coming from? When we expect to see aliens, why do you think we expect to see these particular visions? Yeah. 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, etc., that kind of stuff, it is interesting historically if you look at William James, the varieties of religious experience. So Dr. 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 psychologist, Dr. William James, is not to be confused with the alive UFO ologist, UFOologist, Dr. William J. Burns, who is the editor of UFO magazine and believes that like an influencer wielding facetune, 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, etc., etc. The same psychological phenomenon also informed the experiences that people have when they think that they have experienced something with alien life forms, abductions and all those things. I'm by no means a specialist in that, but again, my interest in psychology has sent me down those roads many times. So how many people in the US believe in aliens?
Well a 2017 poll showed that nearly half did, but a slim 16% 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 Lovato, 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 Tom Cruise, but duh.
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 jammer 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 read signals from other planets, other civilizations, how do we know that we will have the right antenna to pick it up? We don't. And so it's a great question, and my friends and colleagues at the SETI Institute obsess over that kind of question. Even within the frequency space of our radio search, there's still so much to it.
We'll explore. And Frank Drake and Jill Tartar and Seth and Dan Wartimer 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 Caltech and his advisor at Harvard, Paul Horowitz, they were some big innovators on optical setty.
If you think about an advanced civilization, 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 kiloparsecs out. 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 teaming with life. And we've got advanced civilizations in there. They're darting back and forth. And there's a galactic internet, the sort of modern version of what Carl Sagan used to like to call the Encyclopedia Galactica. I hope that is happening right now in the center of our galaxy.
Those civilizations would probably communicate with laser beams with optical beams directed star to star planet to planet spacecraft to spacecraft, et cetera. It's just more efficient to send transmissions that way. And so one of the ways that sety 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. It's being like party, party on my moon tonight. Exactly. Okay. I'm going to 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 ghosts and aliens? Yeah. That's that's beyond my pay grade. We don't know exactly what it is or what it's do. It's lousy with ghosts and aliens. Right. Yes. And to that I say we are the 4%. Okay. Right.
Everything that we see we know and love is 4% of the known universe. And actually I think it's it's more it's closer to 1% when you actually consider the particles with which we interact. Woof. Yeah, but that's if you if you're going to use it in a TED talk, it's fine. Just put a slide. This is thinking. 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 helped me make allergies. Also let me donate to a cause of theologist choosing. This week Dr. Kevin Peterhand chose to support the work of traveling telescope. This is a cause started by Susan Maribona and her husband, Chiu 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, expose 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 about them. Now an additional donation this week was made to Vermont's Manchester rescue squad in memory of Peterhand.
Kevin's father, who passed away last summer and the Manchester rescue squad provides 24 hour, 365 paramedic level emergency care via paid staff and volunteers. They also do CPR and first aid classes. So on behalf of all theologites, our heart goes out to the hands. Okay. Now some messages from our new sponsors. All right. Your questions. Okay. Patreon questions. We got a gozillion. I'll do what I can. Okay. It's kind of a lightning round. Okay. Shoot from the hip.
I categorize them as best I could. Okay. So Jasmine Wells, Vincent, Maddie Worker and Mike Marlow 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 what are the most likely places? You wrote a Titan. Where's this 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.
Okay. And when it comes to the search for Extant Life, I really prioritize Europa and Enceladus for Extant Life, similar to life as we not. And 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 did Enceladus form from that? Is it ocean relatively young? We don't know. Well, those rings glombed together to form moons eventually?
Well, a bunch of it will go into Saturn and a bunch of it 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 Gabel, one we, Renee Kohley, Mads Clement, Moses Bibby, Devon Robertson, Dion Dabbelow, Anthony Stull, Oh, and also Lanny Bauer, Nathan Algrim, Theodore Vissian, Ceneer Aseth, Sarah Clark, Jack Gavin, Jordan Wehrmee, Lauren Paul, Erica Kane, and Tony Roso all asked, what, well, is there already non-carbon base life on earth? What is the possibility of extraterrestrial non-carbon base 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, store the software for us. That's a DNA, obviously. And so you need those molecules to be made of elements that can bond together in our 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 has 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 it, 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 silica, the silicon link to four oxygen atoms and then various metals bounded in there. If silicon-based life could have evolved on Earth, it had plenty of opportunity.
So water and carbon-based life. It's a pretty darn good solution. It's used the word solution, probably. It was 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. Keep in mind, of course, that silicon-based life could be the future of life as we know it.
And then we can think about our mushy bags of water and carbon silicon-based life that we then create in advance could obviously have a much greater staying power galactically than the carbon water-based life. So that's like a 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 its head up. Yeah, you think you can be made? Carbants like, yeah, I got this back. Exactly.
That's exciting to see that your audience is interested in that question. Other people had questions about the oceans. Trying to settle a debate, Oshana Rees asks, 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.
The answer to 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 our search for life elsewhere 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 in science. The depths of our trenches, or the marijuana trench, the new Britain trench, the Japan trench, all these places that are in what we call the HALDEPPS, 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 Europa 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? So a few garbos, 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 paperclip. And as a scientist, I need hard evidence.
So as much as I have red anecdotes and want to believe to use the X-Files at the end of the day, give me an alien paperclip or his Sashostak says, bring back a fork from the mothership. What is it? It's a dingo. Wait, that brings me to someone, two people had this same question. Sophie goes to know, and Heather Shaver wanted to know, are you more of a molder or scully? Are you in the molder fan cult? I'm interested in something. I'm a hybridized love child of two of them.
Both of their DNAs combine to know a carbon-based water bag. Notice, you. Justin Griggs and Casey Wright, first-hand question asked her, wanted to know what's the coolest gadget we currently have? And if you were given unlimited funds, what kind of imaging or radio equipment would you use? Well, 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 the pre-project scientist for the Europa Land or Mission concept. This is a mission that is far from Greenlets. 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. And 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 ramen spectrometry to look for organics and other things. And so two-year listeners question, in the biotech world here on Earth, we've made tons of progress in sequencing DNA and 23 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.
But 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, 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 of circumstances kind of steered evolution toward that efficient coding formation again? Who the hell knows people?
Literally no one. At least not on this planet. 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. Because they got laser disks. Great, great. How are you going to do that? Exactly. It's important to appreciate with a lot of the biotech that feeding into those, that instrumentation are primers that are, that latch on to DNA in different ways. And so yeah, it's like a VCR.
You got a thumb drive and an eight track. How are you going to do? Exactly. A lot of people, including Lauren Murray, Sarah Clark, Timothy Dykes, Joe O'Bannon, Jane Joy, Jenny Hoover, Jeffrey Katz, all kind of wanted to know. In Jeffrey Katz words, do you think intelligent aliens would look somewhat like us? As we evolve, some things seem deficient 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 reran the life on Earth again? Would we end up with homo sapiens? And you can look at different convergent and contingent events in evolutionary history. Obviously one that's a 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 certainly is examines those kinds of scenarios. 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 thank you. Fast forward to us. And now, clearly, we are at an inflection point. Yes. We're messing up the home planet. 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 rerun the clock, would you end up with bilateral 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 50 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?
And that 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 Dabbalo, 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 in the second book called The Dark Forest, which really gets into the question of, do you actually want to reach out and make contact? 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 exed versus just lurking on their Twitter late at night. A few people asked Christopher Barley, Lail, Def Kovah and first-time question asker, Rebecca Lee Richardson, does Fermi paradox make you sad? The Fermi paradox makes me sad. Where are they?
And why haven't we found them yet? In some ways it does. To the extent that it makes your listener sad, I sympathize. But people like Jill Tarder and LaFoux up at the Sadi Institute serve as great inspiration. And when we talk to them about this stuff, I was like, well, we just really have not listened enough. And we know where to look. We just had time or the computing power to really search the haystack for the needle. So we're going to keep searching. Keep working. Keep working.
You're employed forever. Yeah. Do you find that life? Okay. One last question from listeners. Great question asked by Joe Perfito as well as Chris Bauman, Danny King, Jenny Kovacik. In your opinion, did the Tardegrade come from outer space? What's the deal with Tardegrades? Should we send them to Mars? Let's talk Tardegrades. Tardegrades are 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 very well.
So they make sense. Okay. That said, they sure are curious little creatures, aren't they? A Tardegrade, 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 530 million years old, at least. We've been everywhere from the Antarctic to the deep sea to volcanoes. They can survive like a decade without any water and crazy temperatures and 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, all there are things. 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 flimflam that you'd like to debunk, some myths that urqu you, what gets your goat when it comes to astrobiology? So annoying.
Um, honestly, the thing that comes to mind, of course, as a scientist, the ubiquitous answer is we hate riding 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 astrobiology. I guess the sad part is, um, for all of the exciting stuff that we discussed here today, um, why I wish we could just get going with it.
It is, uh, through the generosity and dedication and excitement of the taxpayer who make NASA and all of 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, uh, folks who help make the high level decisions that are well beyond my, uh, pig read tweet about NASA. So we got to do the search for life and astrobiology. Uh, what about your favorite thing about astrobiology or your job, the best?
Uh, you know, I've got a lot of great colleagues and we love brainstorming about, uh, forcing each other to think out of the box. I have a position at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and amazing institution that is a pioneer in the field of ocean exploration.
And I go there and I visit colleagues like Chris German and Julie Hoover and others and we just have a blast forcing each other to think out of the box about how to explore planet earth and understand life on earth and how to apply that to worlds and wonders beyond earth. And that kind of, uh, intellectual popping the popcorn is a lot of fun. And a JPL, I get to do that with engineers. Uh, 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, of myself and my, 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's, uh, 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, chemists, geologists, geochemists, oceanographers, uh, my own background physics and, and astronomy and, and, uh, geological environmental sciences. I also did a master's in robotics. Um, it takes all kinds to get this sort of, um, let me use a few buzzwords, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary kind of research done.
And so what I tell students and folks interested is, uh, within the framework of sciences that feed into astrobiology, follow your passion, biology, geology, physics, astronomy, et cetera, et cetera, um, chemistry. And enjoy that fundamental research and then extend and bridge it into astrobiology. That's smart. It's just a sound of so many people changing their majors right now. Thank you for studying aliens. Thanks for having me here to talk about aliens.
So whether it's about aliens or squirrels, the theme here asks smart people stupid questions because what is shame not to know your surroundings? Now you can become a Dr. Kevin Peter Han 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, both are linked to the show notes in case you're curious about them, um, alongside all the sponsors of the show and any codes that you might need, you can find those links up at alleyword.com to find allergies. You can follow along on Twitter at allergies, also at allergy on Instagram. I'm alley 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 a first Friday of April of May of June. You just come in, I'm doing some talks with all of just Sarah, I'm just kind of doing a live Q&A with them. So come say hi. More on that is at nhm.org. I also have my own science show on the CW called that I mentioned invention and I'm a correspondent on innovation nation on CBS every Saturday.
If you're a Netflix have her, you can check out brainchild. We're in I am in a beehive explaining science every episode. I'm also happy birthday to my wonderful sister, Janelle. I'm very, very proud to share Earthling D a day with you for allergies t-shirts with the allergies logo and mugs and totes and pins and hats. Go to allergiesmurch.com. You can tag your Instagram photos, allergies merch so I can post them on Mondays. Thank you Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch for managing that.
Thank you Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lipo for admitting the Facebook group. Thank you to interns Harry Kim and Kayla Patton to assistant editor, Jared Sleeper of Mind Jam Media and the new combat podcast fight stuff in case you're into boxing and MMA. And of course the mully to my sculptor, Steven Ray Morris of the per cast and C Jurassic Right and to Nick Thorburn who wrote and performed 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 spaghetti-os with meatballs and we had this tactic where we would eat the spaghetti-os 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. I'm thinking about it now sounds so gross but it was just heaven as a child so that's it. That's all I got. Have a good week everyone. Bye bye. Gothic And won't let you remember Sorry.