From the Vault: Star Wars Alien Necropsy, Part 1

we did. Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm it's been It seems like a lot has happened since we did these episodes, but I remember them being a lot of fun, and this is gonna be the perfect time to to re explore them. There's a lot going on in the Star Wars uh universe out there, and we have another episode of Weird How Cinema coming up where we're gonna look at a Star Wars knockoff film, so that's always exciting. Oh boy, Lord Veda requires all of these necropsy is to be completed by the end of the day. The

surgical Droids says these are substantial specimens. We might require more time two episodes. Even Lord Vader is not a fan of two parts. He says the anatomy of the alien specimens are quite involved, and if we're to perform a complete analysis, will need more time. Okay, fine, but the results better be extremely infotaining. Welcome to st Have to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is

Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And you know, the last couple of years, Rob, you really leaned into the holidays. But most of those holidays were towards the end of the year, the wintertime holidays, the hibernation holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, of course Halloween. But we do that all the time. And I think I get the sense that you are so strongly leaning into the holidays that it has continued

into the month of May. Yeah, I guess, I'm I'm bringing that spirit uh into May, especially for today's holiday, uh May the Fourth, as in May the Fourth be with you, which is of course the one day each year that everyone gets to go crazy for Star Wars in addition to plan, addition to all the other days. I guess. But um, but yeah, I I you know, I don't know that even though I think my son and I had gotten super into Star Wars this at this point. Last year, I think we kind of forgot

about May the four being a thing. Like May the fourth was never a thing when I was a Star Wars fan as a kid that I know of, so it kind of blew right past me. Um. But but this time I I kind of realized that the last minute, Oh my goodness, May fourth is next week. It's it's Star Wars Day. It's just uh, just open season. We should do some Star Wars content. You know. I would have guessed, even as obsessed with Star Wars as you were last year, and I guess continuing into this year, uh,

that that May the fourth wouldn't be your bag. I would I would expect that May the fourth would kind of irritate you, would be one of those cute little things that gets under your skin. Am I wrong? Um? No? No, I mean I think I don't have any problem with it. I mean, especially since there's like new stuff coming out. I'm like, Okay, if that's if this sets the deadline for for the bad Batch animated series to come out and makes them you know, put it out, then I'm

glad that we have it. Otherwise stuff would just keep getting delayed right right, Okay, yes, just wedge on into our calendars. Yeah, maybe they'll come up with another Star Wars holiday this year. Well, some say that there's we have May the fourth and it Made the Fourth be with you and then write. Some say there's Revenge of

the Fifth, which is tomorrow. But I don't know, Um, I don't know how how crazy they Maybe there's something for the sixth as well, but I think I think it's gonna be appropriate that it will continue after today, because we originally planned for this to be one episode, but then as we were working on the notes, we were like, oh, wait a minute, We've got like, you know, fifty thou pages of content or whatever it is we've got now, So so this will definitely be at least

Tuesday and Thursday of this week. It is a it is a week long Made the Fourth, Yes, yes, as well, it should be. So. Obviously we've talked about Star Wars a bit here on the show in the past, whether it be a discussion of you know, the question, could Jupiter be blown up by the Death Star? Uh, and I think the answer was probably not. We've also talked about the Mighty Sarlac, and we also did a Weird House Cinema episode on e Walks the Battle for Indoor.

But in this episode we're gonna take the old my monster science approach to the some of the the aliens from the Star Wars universe, you know, using some sort of some bit of fantastic biology and then using that as a way to discuss real world terrestrial biology and finding where things line up where they don't, etcetera. Now standard disclaimer here we are Star Wars fans, but we are not Star Wars experts. We're probably not going to perfectly reflect cannon or legend uh with regards to the

Star Wars universe with accuracy. Here. We haven't read every scientific meditation on Star Wars, and we don't know the extended universe perfectly. But we'll do the best we can here, and we'll have some fun with the topic. But we fully invite you to get mad about it. Well, there's no reason to get mad about it. This is all too too fun. But yes, certainly, um, feel free to write in if if you have any actually he's uh to share with us regarding the creatures we're talking about

here today. Well, put, all right, Well, let's start with your first selection Joe, what did you choose from the the vast and exotic Star Wars universe? Okay, Well, to set the stage the film is The Empire Strikes Back. It's that mid movie section, the chase where han Leia, Chewy and C three p O are on the run from the Imperial fleet in the Millennium Falcon. This is after they have evacuated the hath base and there are a group of star destroyers that are chasing the Millennium

Falcon and they chase it into an asteroid field. This was one of my favorite parts when I was a kid.

I still love it today. There's a kind of it almost becomes like a James Bond car chase or like Smokey and the Bandit where you know, they're like the scene where the cars are zipping around, you know, through obstacles and around traffic, but it's in space and instead of other cars and a bunch of barrels and just street you know, uh, tomato carts in the way and stuff, it is asteroids and of course this is extremely dangerous

there space rocks crashing all around and uh. The Falcon eventually manages to evade its Imperial pursuers and it hides in a cave on a large asteroid. Yeah, this is this is a great sequence in a just a great Star Wars film. It's one of those like out of the frying pan into the fire moments where actually it's like into a third frying pan or front five because everyone's gotten out of hot. You've had that tremendous battle

seat once with all of its ins and outs. Then you have the asteroid field, and then what happens next is uh, it comes from an entirely different direction. Well, that's one of the great things about the story structure of the Empire Strikes Back is that you know you're cutting between the different characters and the things they're doing. But when you're with han Leia, Chewy and c three

p Oh, it's just one frying pan to another. Every time they get to a new place, they think that they're finally safe now, but then they realize that the floor is teflon and things start heating up, and it's just on to the next crisis. But in this cave we get some creature encounters. So first the Millennium falcon is swarmed by a flock of nasty winged creatures with ring shaped sucker mouths and there they look sort of

like sulfurous leech bats. These are called minox Han, and Chewy seem to be familiar with them like that they once they see them, Hans says, uh my Knox, Yeah, yeah, like he talks about them like they're very common nuisance animals for space travelers. He says that they're chewing on the power cables, like, yeah, that's what they always do.

And so our heroes they leave the ship, they go outside, go down the ramp and start walking around outside with these little oxygen masks on while they're trying to blast the mineox off. But then they encounter and it's another realizing you're actually in another frying pan moment when it is revealed that the cave that they're hiding in is

no cave at all. It is a giant carnivorous worm of some kind and they have essentially parked down its gullet, And of course there's a great escape sequence where they have to rock it out between its closing jaws just in time. Is the teeth are coming together. Yeah, and it's a fabulous looking creature to this big alien whalish worm monster. Yeah. One of the best. This giant worm creature on the asteroid is not named in the movie.

I mean they say what the minox are. It's like, it's like, it's almost as if in Star Wars it's like saying, oh, rats, we've got rats here, We've got my knox, but they never say what this thing is. I looked it up and some plenty of the Elder of the Galaxy has given its species of designation. It is called an exo gorth or alternately a space slug. And Rob, I've got some pictures attached here for you to look at. Of course, we've seen the movie, so we know what it looks like. It's is this giant Uh?

Have have to be honest and say, somewhat phallic looking worm comes up out of the hole. It's got the big jaws clamping after the ship, so it seems to be actively wanting to eat the space ship. Uh. And then I found another image that I think is from one of the Marvel Star Wars comics, and it's a panel. I really don't know the context of how this happens, but there's a panel in a comic somewhere where a

star destroyer flies into a giant Exo Gorth's mouth. That doesn't look like it's going to end well for for anybody involved there. That's something that the extra it looks like that's that's too big of a mouthful. Yeah. Now, there's something very interesting about both of these alien species, the min Ox and the Exo gorths uh. And it's something that I've actually thought about for a long time.

I remember having this thought, maybe not when I very first saw Star Wars when I was a kid, but at some point it occurred to me that these are the only aliens I can think of in the Star Wars movies that are not found on a planet, but in outer space itself, on the barren terrain of an asteroid with no atmosphere, living in the vacuum. These are vacuum dwellers. Yeah, and I think it was that way for a long time. Eventually, they also introduced a creature

called a Purgle that came around. I think it was introduced in Star Wars Rebels, one of the animated series, and I have a feeling it's going to show up in some live action stuff in the near future. But they're like a deep space whale like organism with its kind of a squid, like a combination betwe in, a space squid and a space whale. And they're capable of entering hyperspace even but they're kind of they have a lot in common with the design of the Exo Go.

They're kind of like the Noble Exo Gorth. The picture you attached looks mad. He's got like the downturned eyebrow. He looks like he's he's looking for a fight. Well, they they explore this kind of like whale like nature where if you're if you're not treating them right, if you're abusing them, then yeah, they can be quite dangerous, but if you try to understand them, then you realize that they have this very passive and beautiful nature. Oh,

I can see that. So it's like the you know, somebody says about the dog, like, oh, he doesn't like strangers, but when you warm up to him, you know, he's a he's a real cuttlebug. Yeah. So, anyway, for this entry of our Aliens Star Wars Alien Neck Cropsy, I wanted to to think about the idea of vacuum dwellers as a as a proposal as a concept. Now Star Wars obviously it is not hard science fiction. You know, it's not trying to create a scientifically grounded experience. It's

a fantasy. And that's fine. I mean, you've got no problem at all with with soft science fiction and space fantasy. I love that stuff. Uh, And there are plenty of elements in this sequence that are really nothing like what we'd expect to find in reality. So I wanted to mention a couple of other examples of that before we get back to the idea of a vacuum dwelling organism

and consider the plausibility of that. One example of how this doesn't really resemble reality in any recognizable way is the idea of how dense the asteroid belt in the Empire Strikes Back is how it's just crammed with rocks that are moving really close to each other and slamming together all the time, And how this compares to the one example of a real asteroid belt that we know about. And this is a standard feature of sci fi movies.

It's not just Empire Strikes Back. I mean, I think a lot of times there are space battles in an asteroid belt that is just a mind field. This densely packed obstacle course of of giant boulders that are going to smash into your ship and kill you, and the ships have to frantically dodge around through the slamming rocks

while they dog fight. Yeah, it's a great sequence, but it is just um maddening, just how how tired everything is, and and it just seems like a complete nightmare that anyone would I mean, it seems like it should be a Butcher Cassidy and the Sundance Kid kind of moment, right, Like why would the Thai fighters even chase them in there? Like how because how could you expect to survive unless you were like a fourth sensitive pilot of some sort, you know, or like the greatest pilot of all time,

like like a Han Solo. Yeah, they'd be crazy to follow us, wouldn't they. And I know when I was a kid, I pictured the asteroid belt of our solar system being like this, probably because of especially Empire, but more generally movies like this that it's just you know, it's just tight with rocks. But now we know that is not the case. I was trying to find what is the actual density of the asteroid belting terms of asteroids of an appreciable size. I found an explainer about

this from Scientific American that's older. It's from nine so our our our knowledge might be a little bit updated since then. But this, I feel it gives you a good idea to asks several experts about this, this question of the density of the asteroid belt. First of all, there was an interesting story in it that's relayed by Tom Garrels of the University of Arizona, who said that quote.

Some scientists were seriously concerned about the possible high density of objects in the asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, when the first robotic spacecraft were scheduled to be sent through it. The first crossing of the asteroid belt took place in the early nineteen seventies when the Pioneer ten and Pioneer eleven spacecraft journey to Jupiter and beyond. The danger lies not in the

risk of hitting a large object. In fact, such a risk is minuscule because there is a tremendous amount of space between Mars and Jupiter, and because the objects there are very small in relation. Even though there are perhaps a million asteroids larger than one kilometer in diameter, the chance of a spacecraft and not getting through the asteroid

belt is nearly negligible. And then there was an updated thought that came in after that from David Morrison of NASA AMES who said, quote, there were more than a hundred thousand asteroids larger than one kilometer in diameter, but these objects are distributed within the huge volume of the asteroid belt. Their average spacing is several million kilometers. Collisions are thus extremely rare. An average one kilometer asteroid suffers one collision every few billion years, or maybe one or

two collisions over the lifetime of the Solar System. The spacing is also so large that seen from one asteroid, even the nearest one kilometer asteroid would likely be too faint to be visible without a telescope. Uh So, yeah, extreme distances between these objects now because there aren't a lot of objects. There are, but the you know, space is gigantic, so the space between them is also gigantic. If you were to fly into an asteroid belt, it's

actually unlikely you would even notice it. You probably wouldn't see any asteroids while you were flying through it. Though, I did think about something that could make another interesting I'm sure some movie has done this but it could make a different kind of threat of traveling through an

asteroid belt interesting. I think the more likely risk while flying through an asteroid belt is not that you would be smashed between giant space rocks while you're trying to dodge through them, but the chance that you would hit an invisibly tiny micro asteroid at high speed, and it would be like a bomb because of the kinetic energy of the impact because it's going so fast and you're going so fast. Though I guess, of course, it would depend on how fast you were going and what angle

you hit it at relative to its own trajectory. I mean, a head on collision with a with a tiny asteroid

could be catastrophic. But there's another thing in the sequence that doesn't make sense if you try to bring hard sci fi rules to it, which is the part where they're in the cave and the minox show up in that great moment where I think Leiah is looking out the window and then suddenly the big sucker comes down and he got which I was talking to Rachel about this earlier this morning, and she says, when she saw that part in the theater, when the Star Wars remasters

or remake not remakes, the whatever you call him. The remasters came out in the nineties or the earlier. I guess it was the nineties. Yeah, that she just like screamed in the theater, just like Bloody Murder screamed. Yeah, it's startling and gross totally. It's like, it still gets me when I watched the movie. It's very suddenly that noise it makes. It's like when the head pops out of the boat and Jaws, you know, and when Richard Dreyfuss is like down in the water looking at it.

It gets you every time. But anyway, so there's yeah, the minox come out, and so Han and Chewy and Leah walk outside of the Millennium Falcon in their regular oaths wearing little oxygen masks. So this is another one of those space fantasy things, because this would not work on a real asteroid. The vacuum would kill you pretty quickly, even if you had a little oxygen mask. So I found a good explainer on this. This was also a

Scientific American article. This was written by Anna Goslin in two thousand eight, and and of course one thing we should be clear about is that a vacuum in as the term is generally used is defined as a region of space with extremely low gas pressure. Uh. It's sort of a conventional definition because even in outer space, there's not nothing in space. You're still going to have a few random hydrogen atoms floating around and stuff, but it's

pressure so low that it's negligible. So once you walk out of the Millennium falcon, once you are exposed to the low pressure environment of a vacuum of space, several things are going to happen pretty quickly. One is that because of the lower pressure, gas is tend to expand, and this includes the gases that are trapped in your body, trapped in your lungs. So if you're holding your breath or inhaling, this expanding gas is going to cause trauma

in the lungs, tearing up gas exchange tissues. Also, the low pressure will cause water to boil at a lower temperature, and in the case of a vacuum, this means water boils at a temperature lower than your body temperature, which translates to swelling in the body, rapid evaporation of water vapor from the easiest escape roots in your body, and primarily this will be things like the holes in your face, like your mouth, nose, and eyes, and this rapid boiling

off of water will of course cause very low temperatures around these holes in your face. I think about the way that you know, the rapid evaporation of water cools your body through sweat, except take that to the extreme, like literally your tongue might freeze. And if records of what has happened to animals that are opposed to a vacuum or any indication, you also might simultaneously defecate, urinate, and projectile vomit. Wow, So even event horizon scaled back

a little bit on what this would be like. Yes. Now, on the other hand, sometimes movies make it look like if you were exposed to a vacuum, you would explode, and that doesn't seem to be true. It actually does seem like you could survive being in a vacuum for maybe a few minutes. I mean, it would depend on

a number of factors, but you could. Most people could probably survive being exposed to a vacuum for some amount of times, like a few minutes, less than five minutes maybe, but it would require somebody else who is not exposed to a vacuum helping you because we have seen this in in sci fi. I think that's basically what happens an event horizon. And I think the and yeah, the

expanse has has has explored this as well. Yeah, because like one of the reasons you would need somebody to help you is that you would you would very rapidly lose anciousness. The low pressure would also cause bubbles to form in your blood vessels, which would interfere with oxygen circulation.

And I think the estimate is that this leads to rapid unconsciousness, probably in something like ten to fifteen seconds after you're exposed to the vacuum, and then so you lose consciousness, you probably collapse and it would go on to kill you within a few minutes if you're not repressurized. This article by Anna Goslin shares a story of a human who actually survived vacuum exposure. Uh So, I just

want to read this part quote. In nineteen sixty five, a technician inside a vacuum chamber at Johnson Space Center in Houston accidentally depressurized his space suit by disrupting a hose. After twelve to fifteen seconds, he lost consciousness. He regained it at twenty seven seconds after his suit was repressurized

to about half that of sea level. The man reported that his last memory before blacking out was of the moisture on his tongue beginning to boil, as well as a loss of taste sensation that lingered for four days following the incident. So all that to say, Han Chewy and Leiah, these are experienced space travelers. They would know better than to try to walk out into the vacuum of space without a pressure suit. Now, I want to

be fair. I have seen some righteous nerds on the Internet arguing that, well, maybe because we we now we know from what happens later in the movie that actually they were not in a cave on an asteroid, they were in the exo Gorth's gullet, and maybe the exo Gorth's gullet creates its own pressurized atmosphere. And okay, let's say I grant that, Uh maybe, But I thought the whole point was that they thought they were in a cave on an asteroid, not in the belly of a

giant worm. So it doesn't seem like they would go outside without a pressure suit. Yeah, I mean, I guess if maybe They're like the ship's readings were like, hey, you don't actually need a suit to go outside in this this weird cave, and they're like, Okay, that's fine. Cool. It really wasn't thinking about it that hard, Like they weren't asking, well, why would that be? Why would a cave that it's supposedly open to the to the void

have these unique conditions? Um? But I guess if I was gonna play Devil's advocate and try and like sort of stitch everything together, I could and then maybe, yes, maybe this giant space slug. Uh. It's it's gastric environment closely mimics a terrestrial world and just you know, the atmosphere is a little off. Um, I don't know, maybe or maybe that's maybe that's so one of the ways that it gets its its food, right, it just waits

for spaceships to land inside its belly and uh. And since spaceships are hard to digest, it needs to have an inviting environment that lures the precious meat beings out of the spaceship. Right. Yeah, it gets gets gets them out there. I mean, it does have fog rolling around, so it almost looks like you're out on the moor once you leave the spaceship. I wonder also how fog rolling around would work in a vacuum. It doesn't seem

very vacuum like. It's almost as if they weren't really thinking of it and in pure physical terms as a vacuum, which would make a lot of sense. Again, because this is space fantasy. I just wanted to say also, I I found a picture on the Internet of the model of the the Giant Exit Worths teeth while it was being created, along with the I l M model maker Lauren Peterson inside the mouth looking at it, and he just looks just exploding with joy while gazing at the

teeth he has created. He kind of he also in this picture he's got long hair and a big beard. He almost looks like a human e walk. Yeah. I love looking at these old photos of these like these these seventies guys working on these models for this, uh, for for these films. It's pretty great. But yeah, it's pure joy on this NaN's face. Than I wanted to come back to the question that I brought up earlier

about the vac hume dwellers. When we imagine finding alien life forms not in space fantasy, but in reality, of course, we always imagine finding them on a planet, a planet with an atmosphere. But I was wondering, is it biochemically and evolutionarily conceivable that there could be such thing as an alien dwelling directly within the void, within the you know, the howling emptiness of space. Could there be creatures of the vacuum? And so I was looking around trying to

find some good sources on this. I didn't come across any like direct scientific papers, though, if any listeners know of any that I couldn't find and want to send in my way, please do. The best thing I came across was actually an interesting BBC article from sixteen by the science writer Philip Ball, one of my my favorite science writers who wrote probably the best book I've ever read on quantum physics, which is called Beyond Weird. I recommended it, uh really, I think a couple of years

ago during a summer reading episode. But in this article, Ball starts off by pointing to a study published in the journal Science by Cornelia Minair at all. Mine Air is a professor at the University of Nice in France, and it's a study called ribos and Related Sugars from ultra violet irradiation of interstellar ice analogs and so to read from the summary from from the journal Science on this quote, astrobiologists have long speculated on the origin of

prebiotic molecules such as amino acids and sugars. Mine art at All demonstrated that numerous prebiotic molecules can be formed in an interstellar analog sample containing a mixture of simple ices of water, methanol, and ammonia. They irradiated the sample with ultra violet light under conditions similar to those expected during the formation of the Solar system. This yielded a wide variety of sugars, including ribos, a major constituent of

ribo nucleic acid or RNA. And of course, as we've discussed on the show before, RNA is one of the important, uh you know, long organic molecules that is considered a possible precursor of the original formation of life on Earth, the first cell, and of course RNA is used is used in life forms today, it's in the cells in

your body. And this is not the only study of this kind showing that some molecules important to the formation of a biological sphere, such as sugars and amino acids can be formed in space, maybe even just on little tiny grains of ice floating around in space by themselves, not on a planet at all. They can be formed in these types of scenarios by radiation acting on precursor compounds.

So another example would be that UM researchers for decades have have found evidence of amino acids in meteorites that apparently these amino acids were formed in deep space, and the Rosetta mission, which intercepted a comet was a common six seven p in space. In the Rosetta orbiter detected the presence of the amino acid glycine, along with methylamine and ethylamine from a spectrometry reading of the of the comet.

So it's possible that important molecules and molecules that are necessary for the early stages of chemical evolution before the formation of the first cell we're not formed on Earth but in space and then somehow delivered to Earth, maybe on the backs of icy comets that smashed into the Earth's surface when the planet was young. And of course this is all hypothetical. We still don't know for sure

how the first life on Earth came to be. We actually talked about one very interesting model of this on a recent episode, the one we did about the Nile Inundation, where we discussed the idea that the first cells might have been created by the presence of prebiotic molecules like lipids and nucleic acids in areas on the surface of the Earth that are repeated least subjected to wet dry cycles. And if you want the details on on the reasoning behind that, you can go back and listen to that episode.

What was it called, I believe the title we went with was the Nile Inundation God's Water in Life, because there's a little bit of mythology in there, but also just a lot about the the the annuals flooding of the Nile and how it factors into the environment and

the history of the region. Right, so we don't know how for sure how it happened, but the process of chemical evolution leading from those organic molecules to the formation of the first cell, meaning a cell capable of replication and metabolism, that's generally assumed to have happened somewhere on Earth or in a or on another planet like Mars maybe and then seated to Earth through some kind of collision and travel of rocks through space, and that could

be in hydrothermal vents or in puddles or what have you. But it's usually assumed to have happened on Earth. But Philip Ball rights quote, there is a more intriguing possibility life itself might not have kne did a warm and comfortable planet bathed in sunlight to get going. If the raw ingredients were already out there in interplanetary limbo, might life have started there too? Interesting question? And of course

there's another question, which is a follow up. If it were possible for life to form in space rather than on a planet, would it also be possible to for that life to evolve into complex forms out there in space? Um? Now, there are some reasons that this does seem unlikely on

its face. So a bunch of Philip Ball's article ends up focusing on ways that alien life forms could have the benefits of a home planet while existing in interstellar space, and the primary idea he explores here is life on rogue planets, meaning planets that are ejected from their solar systems and float through the interstellar void alone or maybe with some moons into and you. You might think that without a home star, these worlds would be guaranteed to

be barren. But internal heating from residual formation heat and radioactive elements in the core, and possible title interactions with the moons that are along for the ride, this could possibly be enough to sustain a biosphere, perhaps in an iced over ocean. But this isn't really what we're talking about, right We're we're we're looking for something that could live in space itself or on the surface of an asteroid exposed to the vacuum, where there's no atmosphere, no ocean,

just the raw hell of the infinite. Now and exploring this part of the article, Ball notes something that I had read about before, but I had forgotten about until I was reading this, which is that um the astronomer Fred Hoyle, who did a lot of important work in in twentieth century astronomy, but now is probably best remembered in the popular consciousness for coining the term Big Bang, which he meant as an insult, like a ridicule of the theory, because he was a supporter of the steady

state theory of the universe, which is now known to be wrong, like the the we know that the universe is thirteen point eight billion years old, and and we called the process of expansion leading to the universe we know today the Big Bang. After this, after this negative appellation from Hoyle. But anyway, Hoyle actually wrote a science fiction novel that was published in nineteen fifty nine called The Black Cloud, and supposedly it's quite good, though I've

never read it. But the premise is that there is a giant cloud of intelligent gas that floats around through outer space, and when it encounters Earth, it sort of doesn't know what to make of life that inhabits a planet, and it becomes a threat to us. But Hoyle did not have a plausible theory for how a such a sentient space gas would would come to evolved. I think

it's just a mystery in the book. But Ball looks at this question of what the chemical basis of space based life could be and concludes that despite the difficulties of the environment, it seems like urban molecules are still probably the best bet for creating biology. The most common alternative put forward to carbon based biology is silicon and I will know that when I looked up the the exo gorth on Wikipedia. Wikipedia tells me that the exo

go is a silicon based life form. And also I think that in addition to eating humans and spaceships and stuff, it eats rocks, you know, eats the minerals of asteroids. So I think it's the case it's supposed to have like a mineral and energy diet that perhaps occasionally supplements. But you know, another thing I was thinking about is that, Okay,

two things. I guess on one level, it could be eat biting at a spaceship just because it's there, or out of defense, it doesn't really want to eat it, you know, in the same way that you'll have animals in the wild that will attempt to take a bite out of something, you know, defensively even if it's not part of their diet. But also the curious mouth. Yeah so.

But but here's another thing. If the inside of the the of the creature here is essentially an ecosystem, um, is it possible that it it is like grabbing things in order to sort of not feed itself, but to supply and feed the ecosystem within it, and then it somehow gets so much sort of residual nutrition from that ecosystem like it kind of has. It's almost like a hive maintaining a um like like a domestic crop within itself, except its domestic crop is just like this swampy world.

Oh my god. So when it eats a millennium falcon, that's like it's poop yogurt, like the probiotics stuff. It's trying to supply its interior minox and like the mossy organisms that line its gullet and produce all that fog we see with some nice power cables to chew on and and I guess presumably humans to feast on whenever they die. Yeah, maybe it feeds on swamp fog. And but it needs a you know, a ripe swamp environment there, and occasionally, yeah, needs some needs some new stuff to

add to the to the genetic pool. You're so good at world building. This is this is great a future Star Wars. I hope you're taking notes. But anyway, So back to Philip Ball's article. So he he echoes the sentiments of many experts I've read who have deep familiarity with chemistry, who generally say that carbon is just so much better at building complex molecules than silicon Uh, silicon really does not seem like a very good candidate for

creating life. Again, maybe our imagination is being limited in some way, but but it really looks like carbon is the good stuff. If if we're fine, if we're gonna find life elsewhere in the universe. A lot of astrobiologists seem to think that carbon is just the way it's going to be. For example, Ball quotes an astrobiologist named Charles Cockle of the University of Edinburgh who thinks that, yeah,

alien life could be very different. Maybe there's a lot that is hard for us to imagine, but that whatever it is, it's going to be carbon based, and it's going to require water, and that this will be a universal norm no matter what planet or part of space you're on. Uh. And he does he does admit quote I have a quite conservative view, which science generally proves

is misguided. But he he holds the view nonetheless. So when looking for carbon molecules to form the precursors to life, we already know that a substantial number of them can be and are readily formed in the vacuum and in deep space. As we mentioned already, both sugars and amino acids. We have evidence that both of these things can be formed outside the environment of a planet, maybe on the surface of a comet or just an ice grain floating

around in a dust cloud in space. And of course, you know, amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, these sugars like ribos or important ingredients in forming nucleic acids. So uh so, like this is the stuff you would need. And typically these things are formed through simple chemical and

photochemical processes. So Ball mentions a typical chemical reaction called Strekker synthesis that could be responsible for the formation of amino acids in space, but also that these things can be formed by exposure of precursor chemicals to radiation, typically ultra violet light. Now this part I thought was interesting. Ball rights quote. It looks at first as though these reactions should not take place in deepest space without a

source of heat or light to drive them. Molecules encountering one another in frigid, dark conditions do not have enough energy to get a chemical reaction started. It's as if they run into a barrier that is too high for them to jump over. However, in the nineteen seventies, the Soviet chemist vitality. Golden Sky showed otherwise, some chemicals could react even when chilled to just four degrees above absolute zero,

which is about as cold as space gets. They just needed a bit of help from high energy radiation such as gamma rays or electron beams like the cosmic rays that whizz through all of space. And so maybe there is some hope for for deep space stimulation of the chemical reactions that lead to life given these types of

inputs like like gamma rays or cosmic rays. Given these inputs which are possible in outer space, Goldanski found evidence that some long chain molecules could form, such as formaldehyde chains that are several hundred molecules long. But there's a there's a catch. There's the downside. While space can form these precursor molecules, the molecules encounter another problem, which is continued exposure to the same radiation sources that formed them

in the first place. Ball sides this this guy Charles Cockle again saying that they are just as likely to smash molecules as they are to form them. Potential biomolecules, progenitors of proteins and RNA say, would be broken apart

faster than they were being produced. And to come back to the Nile episode, this reminds me of what we talked about in that episode with theories about the formation of life on Earth and the role of water, because again, water would play this stimulating and destruct deive role in

the in the early chemical evolution of life. Water is a key ingredient in Earth based models of chemical evolution, but it also easily destroys the delicate organic molecules it creates, and that's one of the reasons that it's been hypothesized that there are these wet dry cycles that uh that

would have allowed the first cells to come together. So ultimately that the experts that Ball consults here seem to think it's pretty unlikely that we would see in these really cold environments in deep space, like on the surfaces of ice creams. Even though these precursor molecules to life can be formed, it seems unlikely that these environments would form enough complex molecules and have them survive long enough to kick off chemical evolution and really really bring together

space based life. But I want to get into another option in just a second here that could explain where something like this organism comes from. But before that, I was just wondering also, like, Okay, why the complex morphology of the exo goth Uh? You know? Complex? More so, it's got like a body with different parts like the animals we see on Earth. It's got a mouth with teeth, and it's got something that looked like little eyes talks, and it's got a head and a tail, and it's

it's very differentiated. Uh. Complex morphology arises on Earth, I think as a reaction to complex environments. Right, Like if you look at all the body parts on an animal, these are parts that have arisen in response to different qualities and challenges of the environment in which the animal evolved. Animals need to I mean not all animals, I guess there are sessile animals, but most animals that move they've had these different parts because they need to move around

and do different types of things. They have different types of predators and prey, etcetera. The asteroid in the Empire Strikes Back does not seem to me to be a complex environment, Like so if anything was living there in reality, I feel like I could more easily imagine a sort of map of bacteria just harvesting radiation and on the surface of the asteroid rather than rather than like a complex,

differentiated large animal. But that that makes me think, well, what if these organisms didn't first evolve in space, but this is this is sort of a transplant operation. Yeah, this would seem to make more sense, right, Yeah, the idea that it's it's worm shaped because this worm shape that it has once served it well in a non asteroid environment exactly. So. I think all of our listeners now probably know about the animal I'm about to bring up,

but but it's worth revisiting the details. The mighty tarte grade, also known as the water bear, a truly all inspiring organism. Yeah, they're they're absolutely incredible. Tartar grades are animals. They're not bacteria or fungus. They are animals like us. They're even bilateral animals. They have bilateral symmetry like we do. So they're not like sponges, but they are extremely tiny. Tartar

grades are ubiquitous within Earth's byo sphere. You'll find them on the highest mountain peaks, in marine caves, in moss in Antarctica. They're basically everywhere, and as far as I can find evidence of they are the only known animal that has been documented to survive prolonged exposure to the raw vacuum of space, and they do it apparently by taking specific steps to avoid some of the nastiness that we talked about earlier when we were talking about humans

being exposed to a vacuum. Now, of course, one of their main defense mechanisms has got to be just that they're they're so cute, Like they imagined that one day they would be discovered by humans, and if they were not so cute, we would not take so kindly to to uh, to finding out that this is really their planet and we're just on it um. But they're they're

so adorable, you you you kind of don't get earth jealous. Yeah, the what was the German description that the declina vassa baron the the tiny water bears, yeah, or the little moss piglets some people, Uh yeah, they look like across. I think I've seen somewhere described as a cross between a caterpillar and a teddy bear. That's pretty accurate. I

keep seeing them pop up in animated shows recently. Really, Yeah, I just was watching a show with the fam and there was a race of creatures in another world that were clearly based on water bears, And then there was another cartoon we were watching where they were like futuristic mutated water bears that live in the water, and if they get in the water, you drink the water, then they get in your brain and start controlling you stuff

like that. Clearly they strike a chord. Yeah, I mean, there's something about the way they look and the way that we've already started describing them that, um it lends itself well to further imagination. Yeah. So about their hardiness and ability to survive, to survive a vacuum. I was reading a New York Times article about water bears by Cornelia Dean, and this article discusses the targe grades ability

to survive unbelievably harsh environmental conditions. So, if a tartar grade encounters extreme drought or sudden changes in temperature or water salinity, or other types of environmental threats, the tartar grade can enter a kind of hibernation state where it's metabolism throttles down to zero point zero one percent of its standard rate, so that's one ten thousand of its

regular metabolism. During this process, almost all of the water content is avoided out of the tartar grade's body, and the tartar grade curls up into this dehydrated shell state called a ton spelled t u n so. Cornelia Dean writes, quote tons can be subjected to atmospheric pressure six hundred times the surface of Earth and they will bounce right back. They can be chilled to more than three hundred degrees fahrenheit below zero for more than a year, no problem.

The European Space Agency once sent tons into space two third it's survived simultaneous exposure to solar radiation and the vacuum of space. This is not something that can be said of any other animal that I know about. I

think this is the only one we're aware of. And it really seems like this dehydration is one of the main keys to survival in the state because with all the water evacuated, you won't get these rapid boiling and freezing effects of water content that can occur in space that led to some of the really gross outcomes we were talking about earlier. In fact, the evacuation of the water content, counterintuitively apparently even affects the Tarte grades ability

to survive exposure to extreme radiation. You wouldn't think those things were correlated. But Dean writes, quote, when cosmic radiation hits water in a cell, it produces a highly reactive form of oxygen that damages cell d n A. The ton doesn't have this problem. Tons have been reconstituted after more than a century and brought back to life as tarte grades looking not a day older. So no frozen tongue for the tartar grade and no radiation damage either.

So if you're if you're looking for a candidate for something that could possibly take hold of life in the void, I'm not saying a tart grade could like take up life on an asteroid. It seems like eventually it would just like its window for life would close. But using our imaginations here, this might be trending in the right direction. And I want to take it a step further because did you know that there are probably tartar grades on

the Moon, not native to the Moon. I want to be very clear they're from Earth, but they're on the Moon now, possibly still alive, and in this this ton state, just awaiting the possibility to get splashed with water again. Right. So I was reading about this in an article on vox by Brian Resnick called Tartar Grades. The toughest animals

on Earth have crash landed on the Moon. Uh. This was from twenty nineteen, and it covers the fact that I think this is actually drawing from an article that was originally in Wired in twenty nineteen that had some interviews with the people involved. But the short version is that in April twenty nineteen, there was a lunar lander called a Baracheet, which was scheduled to become the first

privately funded spacecraft ever to land on the Moon. It was originally a competitor for the Google Lunar Xprize, but that window had passed, but the mission was still scheduled and it was controlled by a group called Israel Aerospace Industries that was based out of Yahoo Did, Israel. And after landing on the surface, it was planned to take some readings of the Moon's magnetism. But unfortunately, there was

a mission failure. There was a critical computer error I think during its descent or before, and the probe ended up crash landing on the Moon. And so you would think, okay, well the craft was destroyed, end of story. But there was something on the craft. There was something much of interest.

Aboard there was a small installation created by a group called the arch Mission Foundation, and speaking to Daniel Oberhouse of Wired, the group claims that they believed their cargo may have survived the crash, and their cargo it included several things. I mean, the idea was they were trying to send up to the Moon a record of Earth

civilization that could last for billions of years. So maybe like if humanity goes extinct and aliens ever get to the Moon, they could find some records of Earth from this little from this little installation on this lunar lander. And so part of it was a library of information that was etched onto a nickel metal disc that had like a bunch of English Wikipedia pages and some some classic books. But it also had samples of human tissue

like human blood, and it had Tarte grades. Oh man, I hope they screenshotted essentially screenshot at Wikipedia at a time when there were no like trolley entries at a incorrect information because there's a cut off period there and now it's it's up there on the moon, that's right. Yeah. I wonder how many uh citation needed tags the aliens

are going to run into. But to read from Resinus article here quote, many of those Tarte grades are coded in a protective resin, much like how Amber preserves long dead mosquitoes that were once trapped in tree sap. According to Wired, a co creator of the library believes the disc survived the crash. In the best case scenario, Barascheet ejected the Archmission Foundation's Lunar Library during impact and it

lies in one piece somewhere near the crash site. Wired reports, so water bears on the Moon at least potentially may

maybe still viable. So I would say this is still not super plausible if you're if you're gonna be really strict about it, But to play our hand as far as we can, I'm going to say that I think the Exo Gorth was originally some type of extremely hardy water bear type creature that crash landed via spaceship on an asteroid and a heavily populated stretch of space and somehow adapted to the new environment over millions of years of evil lution. I'm still not quite sure how it

survives without an atmosphere. That doesn't seem very possible, because while the Tarte grade can for a while. It's only able to survive that through entering this cryptobiotic state the ton uh. So it's it's harder to imagine an organism do in its life and doing full metabolism while simultaneously

being exposed to the vacuum um. Maybe if the exo gorth and the mynock have some kind of biology that allows them to live without water content, because it seems like one of the main problems with being exposed to the vacuum and trying to live is that the organisms we're thinking of are sort of heterogeneous mixtures of different states of matter. They've got some gas contents, some liquid content, and some solid content, and that that just doesn't all

hold together super well when exposed to a vacuum. The low pressure messes with your liquid and your gas contents. Plus, I mean, I can't honestly say that it seems like the exo Gorth in the movie is all is purged water because I think, as we mentioned, it's got fog and it's in its belly, so yeah, it's very swampy in there. Yeah, it's not a dry heat um, you know,

and it almost as a saunotype environment. It would be interesting to see if there was like a treatment of this where where one of these Exo gorths is actually like a vacation destination where you you know, you go to just sweat it out. But as far as I know that that does not currently exist. Another awesome idea that man, they should hire you to write one of these upcoming movies. I wouldn't go that far um at

any rate. The exo go certainly one of the cooler alien monster type species that that we discover in the Star Wars movies. And a great reveal as well. I always love that scene where you finally see the whole thing, like just you know, leaping out of that hole in the asteroid trying to grab the millennium falcon. I love how it bends over as it bites. Yeah, and I guess another thing that's wonderful about it is that it's

not certainly not a cheap creation like it has. They put a lot of skill and a lot of love into creating it. But it also kind of looks like an oven mit, you know, So it it has this it's it's basic um body shape is uh is a big hand puppet, you know, But but they make it into something that is. Uh you know that it goes beyond hand puppets, So I don't know, but it's still kind of simultaneously hits both those uh uh those frequencies

For me, I love it. Give me more monsters like that puppets models, uh, instead of the computer animation please. All right, well, I think we have time for at least one more uh consideration here in the episode. So for my selection for today, basically I went to my son and I said, hey, Joe and I are doing these episodes on features from the Star Wars world. What should we cover? And without any deliberation, he said toe grouts.

He's been obsessed with toe groot is over the past year, often discussing their key anatomical features, their leak wu and their mon trails. Uh, just wondering aloud, what do they feel like? What do you know? What is there? How flexible are they? What? Um? How do they move as the as individual toe groutes get older and so forth? And so very popular discussion area. So I owe it to him to consider them here. Now are these the creatures?

These are humanoid creatures right, so they're they're like sentient humanoid, not like some space monster and they have a kind of they have a biological feature that kind of looks like a long hat or head dress. Yea, they have Yeah, they have these uh, these appendages on their head that do look like a head dress and certainly strike that that chord when you're looking at them and they are um. Yeah.

So basically, yeah, that you have two different sets. So you have the mon trails and these are two large cone like horns on the top of their head, sometimes said to be hollow. And then you have the leaku. These are three fleshy appendages also called head tails that protrude downward, two on either side beneath the montrels and

one behind the head. Uh. These are sometimes compared to the head appendages of the Twilights, which I believe you're familiar with these from Return of the Jedi, Yes, from Jab of the Huts, little lackey guy. Yeah. But while the leaku of the Twilights, uh, you know, are are supposed to contribute to communication, like they have like subtle movements that they make with them, the leaku of the toe Gruta seem mostly motionless, though with varying degrees of rigidity.

They might have to do with age or environmental conditions or in many cases like what you know, what what degree flexibility is inherent in the makeup, special effects or in the computer animations being used. You know, this is funny because I was sort of considering picking The Twilight actually because I was thinking about, oh, the weird like head tails, those things, until I saw you had picked this. So I feel like we got our head tail basis covered.

You're going to be the Liku and Montrale's expert here. I feel like there's a little more to talk about with with the Tgrudas because you have you have these two different features going on. Yeah, so, um, in case you don't know, you're not you don't know offhand who I'm talking about with the Dogrutas, I should point out the two most notable to Grutas in the Star Wars galaxy, both of whom were Jedi. So there's Jedi masters Shocked Ti Uh, hero general of the Clone Wars, and Uh.

She fought in pivotal battles on Genosis, Camino, and Corrassant and served as the Jedi representative on the world of Camino. And she was killed at the close of the Clone Wars by Darth Vader. But the even more famous uh to grout of character is Jedi Commander as Katano, hero of the Clone Wars, later a Rebel operative. Uh. She was the padawan of Anakin Skywalker and she was voiced by Ashley Exstein on the Clone Wars and later played

in live action by Rossario Dawson. I would say she's not only the most beloved Star Wars character of the modern era, but probably at this point one of the most beloved Star Wars characters of all time. Like, she's she's up there? Wait, why do I not know this character? What does she? What does she? What properties is she from? So she pops up in the Clone Wars animated series. Um, the long the long run, not the initial one. Um, you know that that was very short form. This is

the uh, the later one. Uh the computer animated version. Oh, I mean I like, I like all the the Clone Wars animated but but yeah, this one was was particularly good. Uh. Enjoyed going through all that with my son over the past years. But yeah, she's an introduced in a series early on as as Anakin's padawan, and you follow her

throughout this whole series. She kind of grows up and then as you know, as a as an adult, she's a character in the Rebels series, and she finally popped up as a live action character in the second season of The Mandalorian, and she's gonna have her own spin off series, etcetera. She's in all the stuff I haven't seen, right, right, but you know, it's just a really well fleshed out character. Um, you know, just a strong female character, and uh in an alien character with a lot of depth to them.

You know, so often in the Star Wars universe where we're just focusing on the human characters amid the aliens, and here we have one of the aliens. Yeah, I mean, you gotta love Han Solo, Princess Lea and all them, but we've got enough humans. I'm gonna have some real creatures as heroes. Yeah. So coming back to their biology, Yeah, for the most part, they're they're very very human though, but they do have these mon trials and the Leekup.

So what are they doing? What what are they for? Well, as far as the Leeku go, again, they seem to play a role in communication, uh in other species, but not so in the toegrew or they don't seem to to move around or anything. Now, they do seem to grow throughout their life, and there does seem to be some degree of sexual dimorphism in that they're longer in females than in males. Um. So obviously they could have evolved to aid in mate selection to communicate fitness to

potential mates. Uh. They are quite colorful and I cut catching after all. Uh. And you know, we see this in the wattles of various bird species, for instance, and I think I think leeku are quite comparable to wattles in other species like goats. However, wattles or castles as there sometimes known, are generally thought to have no purpose. I was reading about this in a book book by Sue Weaver titled The Goat is Just All about goats and how they work. Chapter about the parts that have

no purpose. Yeah, pretty much. It seems it seems as if or tassels have no purpose. So it's possible that you have this feature in this alien humanoid species that ultimately has no purpose. But maybe, but you know, is a part of of of their anatomy and is you know, factored into their own ideas of beauty and representation. Now, as for the montrals, we have a far more specific

purpose in the star Wars lore. Uh. They allow an individual to sense the movement of objects around them through echolocation and um in consens up to eighty two feet or roughly twenty five ms. Now. Echolocation is of course the location of objects by reflected sound, used in a number of terrestrial birds and mammals, either used in the hunting of prey or in the navigation of their environments

such as trees and caves. Um Now, I was looking around at some possible parallels, and I think a good comparison for the to gruta might actually be the shrew, which uses echolocation quote for habitat assessment at close range a in too, why do shrew's twitter communication or simple echo based orientation by siemens at all published in the

Royal Society Biology Letters from two thousand and nine. So again, this would be a situation where the shrew or perhaps that took gruta, is not using its echolocation like say like a bat, you know, to hunt in a you know, a nighttime environment. They would be using it more as a way to assist in their understanding of their immediate environment. Now, okay,

so we were with these possible echolocation horns. Again we're talking about the montrels on the took rudas, but this actually come brings us back to the leak of those uh those those tales that are hanging down um, because sometimes waddles are used by organisms such as the umbrella bird to aid in the production of sounds. So perhaps that's what's going on with the took root as well.

I don't think we ever see or hear at the grouta doing this, but I was wondering if possibly, like that's the reason for this combination of headgear, like the leakup would have been used at least originally to create sounds that would aid in echolocation that was then picked up by the montrels. Oh like you also see I think in some marine mammals, like some of the equipment on the front of their head is not just used for receiving the sounds, but for producing the sounds. Yeah.

So so again there's nothing. I don't think there's anything in the shows too to support this idea. Maybe it's somebody's written about it, uh and gone to this this area. I'm not sure, but I was thinking, well, okay, on one hand, maybe it's simply out of our range of hearing as a supposedly you know, human viewer of this

space drama. Um Or it could have to do with the fact that the two to grooted that we spend the most time with our our our fourth sensitive and their Jedi trained uh so perhaps most of the time they have little use for these um more archaic sense features.

But then again, for sensitivity, would you know it would open up a new sense realm for an individual, But I don't mean, I don't know if that would mean you would just completely abandon another sense realm, you know, even if it was decreased or or partially um you know, atrophied, uh, you know, due to evolution. Well, you know, I think about in the very first Star Wars movie, how a large part of what the forces shown to do is to aid in the guidance of actions without the use

of senses. So when when Luke is training with Obi Wan Kenobi while they're on the way to the Death Star, they put the blast shield down on the helmet so that he can't see the remote while he's training with it. He's supposed to be able to tell what's there without using his primary sense of his eyes the same way. Um, you know, he turns off his targeting computer when he's

aiming the proton torpedoes into the death Star. He somehow is is abandoning or surrendering is either natural or technologically aided senses in in almost as a kind of supplication to the power of the force. Right, It's like the you put the blast shield down or you turn off the targeting you to as a sign of faith, is showing that you you truly forsake these senses and you trust the force totally. Well, there you go, there's there's

precedent for it after all. So anyway, it's a fun exercise I think too, you know, to look at something like that on a on a fictional alien species that you know it's clearly there, mostly because it looks cool, but try to imagine what what could it have done? What what could its purpose actually be? And again, some of it is baked into the cannon already, the idea that there is some of these worst sense features of

some sort. But yeah, it's it's fun to than try and break it down further and imagine exactly what they were doing and what it would be like, uh, to have uh, those those montreles and leku um, you know, without getting into my my son's additional concerns over what do they feel like? How flexible? I'm sorry, this is unacceptable. We need an answer, Rob, What do they feel like? Oh? Well, I mean I guess you could say, what does the wattle of a bird or or the tassels of a goat?

What do they feel like? I guess they would be kind of flashy and awesome. Um. Yeah, the horns would be kind of rigid. Uh yeah, And I guess it would depend on, you know, how how old they are and how you know, if they do they lotion? Do they lotion their their their leku enough to keep them you know, uh, you know from getting too dried out. I don't know. It's like the self care manuals for the Tokruta. It's like, hey, you know, remember to oil your oil your leaku do well? The Jedi tended. They

seem to take pretty good care of themselves. How often you see like a truly scruffy Jedi, That's true. One thing I always noticed, Obi Wan Kenobi's beard is so well trimmed and sculpted. Yeah, I think you just have that extra you have that extra time on your hands, you know. Uh, you know, even as even as an old Jedi, he took the time. Yoda was pretty scruffy, um, especially towards the end, but he was ancient, so yeah, he's earned it. Okay, should we call part one there?

Because we've got plenty more alien necropsies from the Star Wars universe to to come back and explore next time. That's right, we have. There's a more fun specimens to discuss and to die sect. Uh So in the meantime, we'd love to hear from everyone or what are your thoughts on on giant Star Wars space worms and fleshy

appendages to alien species? Uh, you know, let us know of anything we missed, any details, uh that we're not aware of from from Cannon or extended universe that might uh you know, further fill in some of the holes here.

And uh yeah, in the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, such as the past episodes where we talked about the Death Star blowing things up or or or certainly the Mighty Star Lack, you can find them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We just asked the rate review and subscribe huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.

If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this step, SOOD or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.