Grizzly Bears from Outer Space

older sculder exactly. You are Sculder, and you have just been caught by security guards while raiding the file cabinets of a secret evidence room chock full of alien conspiracy documentation, and before you can get a good look at all these autopsy reports and heavily redacted witness Affidavid. You've pulled the security guards who caught you. They lead you down the hall, this long dark hall, to the office of a bald man with a goatee and a green Paisley

bow tie, obviously a major player in the shadow government. Yes, that's what the bow tie signifies. So Paisley bow Tie stares you down, and he says, Okay, hot shot, you think you know a lot about aliens. Well, I've got a test for you, and if you pass the test, I'll let you in on the whole conspiracy and you can know everything. But if you fail, you're going to spend the rest of your career at a weather station

in the Arctic Circle. Okay, so the stakes are pretty high here, right, So he pushes a short stack of staple documents across the desk towards you and gestures for you to peruse them at your leisure. And here's what he says. One of these five accounts is true. The other four are lies. Pick the right one and you pass.

So you flip through the documents. They tell this first person account of a young woman who was abducted by aliens while hiking on the Appalachian Trail, And in all five accounts, the abductee is lifted off the ground in this beam of strobing violet light and sucked into the interior of an alien spacecraft, where she meets a group of aliens. They take a blood sample, They check our blood pressure, maybe do a cheek swab cotton swab on

the inside of the mouth, very on the level. Everything is very professional, yes, uh, and then the next morning she wakes up in the forest with vague memories. Now, the only difference in the five accounts is how the aliens are described physically. So, in one account they're tall, about seven to eight feet tall, beautiful humanoids with smooth

skin and pure white eyes. In another one, they are short, stout humanoids about three to four feet tall, covered in thick black body hair from head to toe, with curling tusks extending for the lower jaw. Okay, so so far we have elves and we have dwarves to choose from. Gotcha? Yeah, pretty much? Okay. Then you've got eight legged, crab like animals with a brittle exoskeleton, two pairs of grasping claws, one larger pair and one smaller pair of claws, and

compound eyes. The whole creature is approximately the size of a cargo van. Giant crab. Gotcha. Then you've got small blobs about one meter cubed of thick beige putty that seemed to move as though guided by intelligence, and they interact with onboard machinery and communicate psychically with the abductee.

Each one moves about on the spacecraft on four long stilts on the underside of the putty, and occasionally they excrete small puddles of sludge resembling muddy snow onto the floor of the cabin, and these puddles are promptly removed by room by like robots that emerge from the vents whenever needed. And then in the fifth account there are predators. They just straight out predators from the dreadlocks, the wrist blades, the mask predators. Okay, so which one is the true account?

M Now this is an interesting quandary to deal with because on one level, like just knowing what I know and what I actually believe about encounters with aliens, and in any kind of paranormal experience, I would I would say, I would want to pick the thing that could that that that matches up with our expectations more in our

popular minds that concerning aliens. So in that regard, I would tend to either go with predators or or perhaps the the eleven creatures, because they're kind of matches there the grays right. Okay, so you're saying you're more likely to see these show up in fiction, So so that this seems like if one were to have a paranormal experience, if one were to have an hallucinatory experience, um, your mind would would be more likely to pick from those

two buckets of alien content. However, wait, hold on, so wait are you assuming the abduct team made this whole thing up? Yeah? That my My first response to this would be, all right, this, this individual has had a paranormal experience that feels very real to them, but is ultimately uh, but is ultimately not supernatural. It's ultimately is all about their mind uh making sense of some sort

of um, you know, abnormal experience. But so she actually just kind of like got dizzy from walking too much one day, passed out and dream you know, she's or she's been awake for an extended period of time. However, if i'm if, I'm going to get outside of that mindset and get in the mindset if someone's actually act actively assuming as same one actually happened, assume one of

these is actually legit. I would probably go with the blobs, because the blob idea, as as you laid it out here, feels weird enough, unique enough, inhuman enough, and departed enough from our more mainstream ideas of what alien life who consists of so I would think that one sounds out there enough to actually be out there. You know, I wondered myself because I was trying to decide after I wrote these which one is more plausible. And I also

felt like the blobs. But maybe that's just because I used the deceiver's tactic of adding interesting details like the stilts and the and the sledge pooping on the floor that seemed to make things more believable. If you add weird little details, yeah, you you embellished it enough to where I I got a sense that there was actually some sort of, h you know, a culture going on here. If you were to subtract to those details, I wonder

if I might not drift towards the crab. You know, I I love predators, but I might have to go for the crab because the crab has two things going for it. It's both weird enough and different enough from humans to be sort of conceivable as as outside the realm of normal standard abductee imagination. But it's also familiar enough that I can see biology creating that. I'm not quite sure that the chemicals available in the universe would create sentient blobs. Maybe that would, but I'm not sure.

I know that the chemicals in the universe can create things like crabs, yes, And I guess my reluctance to go with the crab is that it's essentially a giant crab, that it's essentially just something very terrestrial that it's just been u spaced out a little bit, you know. But there's one feature of the giant crab that might actually be a selling point, depending on how much credence you give to a recent paper that came out that's sort of like the inspiration for this episode, which is that

the crab is the size of a cargo van. Uh. And this is a paper we're gonna get to in a little bit, but it actually did some statistical calculations to try to determine one particular aspect of what alien bodies are going to look like in that aspect's size, because obviously there are countless additional questions regarding the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, but this particular study that we'll look at deals exclusively with just the size

of the organism. Yeah, and well in the numbers you would expect and what their planets look like. But the one takeaway about the alien bodies themselves is the size. But I thought that was an interesting thing to address because actually, in fiction we've seen a vast sort of range of imagination in how large aliens can be expected to be. Obviously, the most common are your human sized aliens,

because they are there are human actors playing them. That's right, I mean, that's always the concern, right if you're and and it is understandable if you're dealing with you want to get a really cool sci fi idea out there, and you want to discuss it, and you want to shoot it in a way that actually, uh comes under budgets. Under budget, It's far easier to just put somebody in a guerrilla suit than put a microwave on their head and call it an alien robot. Yeah, the what was

his name? I think I have it in my Roman Roman Extension x J two. Yeah, folks at home, if you haven't seen Robot Monster, it's a classic. It's pretty fun. I mean I like to think of it as um, you know, kind of like a biospace suit worn by some other organism that just happens to look like a gorilla costume with a like a TV set on its head.

Oh that's interesting, but yeah, we have countless examples, like Star Wars and Star Treker are particularly just loaded with humanoid roughly human size alien species, the track being the most scandalous in its way because it's because we you know, it's just like a ripple on the forehead makes this species and this entire you know, this entire strain of evolution different from this one, or sometimes just give them

different clothes. That's enough. And then, of course there is, in my opinion, the greatest and most scientifically plausible vision of alien life ever created, which is Cone Heads. Yes you are now are you yourst referring only to the original Saturday in Life skits or the Oh no, I'm including the films. Yeah, the film includes lots of relevant details. Yeah, we we learned about their mating practices and so well. I don't know. Those might have been the sketches too,

I haven't seen all of them. I remember they had a great stop motion creature in the film. It actually, yeah they did. I think it was claymation. It was this Ray Harry Housing kind of thing. I don't know who actually created it, but it was pretty awesome. There's a monster towards the end. I can forgive just about any film if it has a cool stop motion creature

in it, I am right there with you. You ever made it to the end of Howard the God, I was just thinking about Howard the Duck, like that's literally the only thing that I remember about it is that at the end um the dude of the mustache turns into this awesome, like weird technically creature and and it's it's glorious the dark overlord of the universe. Yeah. But then of course we've also got aliens that have been imagined to run rather to the small side, which I

think is kind of interesting. Often if you hear the actual abductee stories, so you go back to that scenario we had at the beginning, I think most likely you're going to hear that people were abducted by the gray aliens, right, which you're typically pretty small, right, Yeah, generally got two to four feet tall, and you're in varying accounts. Yeah, this is this is sort of the alien mythos that has sees the popular consciousness, and so they're these short, smooth,

gray things with large black eyes, big heads. Yeah. So it's since it's the idea that's in the popular consciousness. People have these paranormal experiences and they tend to draw from that that bucket of content, if you will. Um outside of the grays though, the average ewalk stands about three ft tall a little over depending on the you know they ran. You have your your wickets, but then you also have those bigger, sort of chunkier monkeys. You know.

I do wonder exactly how small and actually intelligent organism could run. Indeed, I mean in our science fick and you see, uh, such creatures as the virus, the flood from Doctor Who, or the thing from John Carpenter's two Masterpiece, where every cell of the shape shifting organism is itself an individual organism with its own survival instake. And that's how they end up discovering who has been replaced by the thing sticking the hot wire and the blood and

seeing if the blood tries to escape. Yeah, yeah, they take a blood sample from each one, and if your blood tries to defend itself, that's not a good sign. Yeah, And that's uh, that's if not a space faring species, at least a species intelligent enough to steal the space faring technology from another species. Yeah, so it could perhaps co opt the intelligence of a host species, if even

if it's not particularly intelligent or conscious itself. But certainly when we look at terrestrial models, and we'll be coming back to this again and again, um, it's it's hard to find any examples of a particularly small all life where you can say, oh, well, there you go, that that could be a space faring species on its own. Yeah. But of course this paper we're about to talk about in a minute doesn't say that aliens run small. It's ays that they run large. And we've got no shortage

of large aliens. You could run all the way up to probably some Kaiju monsters, right, Oh yeah, yeah, the let's see. Uh I was looking around and there are a lot of Kaiju monsters to consider, Um, how many of them are actually aliens though? Yeah, because yeah, a

number of them have more terrestrial origins. I found one, in particular, a hundred and thirty foot tall millenniums from god Zilla two thousand UM millennium which came out and uh I, it seems like various other Tohoe properties in kaiju, and certainly when you get into um like power rangers and whatnot, right. I mean, they're always battling some sort of giant creature. And but doesn't that take a magic

wand to make the monster grow? Well? Yes, but if you look at them, magic wand is some form of technology. I don't know, it gets kind of complicate. But but even then you have other examples of really huge alien life and sci fi. Um. You know, Old Cathulu stood hundreds of meters tall, and he, of course was an

extraterrestrial creature. What about the native inhabitants of Arakushea, the sandworms, Uh, they are They at least had been measured up to four d fiftys long, but there were speculations that in the polar regions of Iraqis they might reach seven hundred or even a thousand meters. So that's uh, upwards of three thousand, hundred and eighty feet long. That's pretty big.

I'm not sure why, but intuitively I find it more plausible that a giant land dwelling animal would be worm like and sort of horizontal, rather than like a upright two legged kaiju monster. Yeah, I think that. Yeah. The larger to get when you start looking at the limits of morphology, um, Like the human model is just gonna fall upon part if you just try and wave the magic wand at it right. And then then of course you've got your aliens that are just basically huge humans, right,

the engineers of Prometheus, they're about seven ft tall. Um, there are the oh did you ever see Fantastic Planet? Actually haven't? Oh yeah, nineteen three wonderful animated film, and you have these these enormous blue humanoid drugs uh stand about three nine ft tall, and they keep little human homes as pets. So they are these little naked humanoids that they they kind of dress up in like weird kind of cute, kind of sexy doll costumes and just

keep them as pets. It's a creepy, fabulous film. But but they had another extra large critter there. Um, there's a tin foot tall species and E. N. M. Banks culture series uh known as the Darians. And they're also a three legged uh species, which is interesting. I think that's interesting because fun fact, did you know that there's no such thing as a three legged animal anywhere on Earth? Um, not a single side of the dogs you see, but right, well,

and naturally occurring three legged animals. So there are some things that sort of actual like a tripod by using back legs and balance with a tail or something. So yeah, some things like a kangaroo or something might sort of use a tail sort of like a leg, But there's no such thing as a three legged animal. That's kind of a strange fact about the way life emerges on Earth.

If you go millions of years back, you see certain particular body plans emerge, and one of those body plans is the four legged body plan that informs all reptiles and mammals. But you didn't have an ancestral three legged body plan to grow into animals that survived today. Yeah, the the sort of stand the standard models become set in stone evolutionarily, and uh and and yeah. So if you go back far enough, I feel I feel like there there is an example or two of like three

eyes and very small creature. Really, I think one in particular. Um, yeah, animals with odd numbers of features. That's weird, Yeah, but it is rare. Generally you see the typical two legged, four legged, two eyes. Yeah. Alright, so we've hinted that this paper we're gonna talk about says aliens are going

to be rather large. What's the deal with this actual paper. Well, in March, the cosmologist Fergus Simpson of the University of Barcelona published this paper pre published on archive called the Nature of Inhabited Planets and their Inhabitants, which is a great name for a scientific paper. And so what was his reasoning? How did he come up with the idea that aliens are going to be on balance rather big? Well for starters, he uh largely employs Bayesian statistics, which

is a model based on Bay's theorem. So the way of calculating probability of things, like if anyone out there is familiar with what a Nate Silver, right, Yeah, who's who's made a name from self predicting things like presidential elections, Like he used his Bayesian logic and in crunching the numbers on the statistical possibilities of varying outcomes, and that's scarily good at predicting the future. Yeah, yeah, And it's this is the same model that that Simpson employees here.

So as we as we mentioned, his work concerns the statistical probabilities of inhabited planets, how many aliens would be on those planets, and then the size of those uh, those aliens, what would be the sort of standard model and uh and in determining the number of individuals UM that would most likely live in a given civilization, he

came up with fifty million or fewer individuals. While any given alien in our universe would likely be from a high population world in the same way that most people on Earth are going to be just statistically Chinese, Indian, or American, um, very few worlds would host either a small number or or a large number of individuals. Right.

So the idea is that if you randomly select a human from anywhere Earth, it's more likely they'll live in China or the United States, one of the most populated countries. But if you randomly select the population of a country, you're more likely to select a country that's near the Median somewhere in the middle. That's you know, like Canada

or some you know, not particularly huge, not particularly small. Yeah, it's kind of like imagine all the nations of the Earth, and each nation is its own planet, some large, some small, and then the larger ones have higher populations. Yeah, okay. So he also argues that a planet supporting extrastraustrial life is likely to be smaller than Earth closer to the size of Mars. Yeah, and he assumes that about fifty percent of Earth's diameter is there, you know, in the

lower limits. Smaller than that, and it becomes difficult for the gravity of the planet to hold onto the atmosphere in water, right, So you see, Mars is pretty much at the limit it's about of Earth. And Mars actually already has that problem because Mars has almost no atmosphere. Asphere is like one percent of the thickness of Earth's, so that's another factor to take into account. He also says that each individual alien would be more likely to live on a big planet, as those worlds can clearly

support more individuals. Kind of again, it sounds like an overstatement of the obvious, but it's an important one to get out there. So his basic prediction when you boil all this down again to figuring out trying to figure out how many worlds are gonna be um inhabited, and then how many uh individuals are gonna live in those worlds, and he says that most of these creatures are going to be big. Nearly seven hundred pounds three ms, the

size of a terrestrial bear. Um the exact number that he ends up spouting in the piece is six pounds or three ms um. So we're talking half the creatures in the universe are going to weigh more than the bear. Half are gonna weigh less, but the bear sized extraterrestrial

is going to be the standard model. It's if if outsiders from another universe peered into ours, according to this paper, they would say, hey, this is that uni verse where bear sized creatures with well bear sized creatures do live, you know. Yeah, And then that's the thing. It is something that matches up with why, yeah, why isn't the

bear the dominant species on Earth already? Well, perhaps it is, and we're just kind of being selfish, but well, uh, you know, there are a number of you know, you get into arguments and just discussions about why humans evolved to the point where we have all of this, you know, this great intelligence and then on top of that intelligence, technologies and culture, right, and a lot of it comes down to our need to use our brains to uh, to score our next meal, to use our our our

intellect because we don't have clause. We don't have we don't have if we had bear strength, we'd be dumb because we wouldn't need to be smart. Yeah. I think the thing is that the bear is just The bear doesn't need to be super intelligent, because the bear can do things like like hibernate through the winter. The bear can care things part with its clause, it can it can stand up for itself against pretty much anything on Earth except for the technology assisted human. Yeah. So I

thought this paper was interesting. I gotta admit I read it twice and I still don't fully understand the statistical

argument that's being made. I've read some commentary on the paper where some experts consultant said that they agree with the math of what he's doing, saying that the statistical calculation is is pretty much sound, but he might be not taking into account lots of factors that could change things dramatically, such as just physical conditions that give rise to life on planets, things like gravity, or some of just the basic facts we observe about how certain life

forms make their living in different environments on Earth. And this leads into one of the criticisms we read from the seat researchers Seth show Stack. Yeah, and particularly he was I was thinking about the likelihood of of of large creatures actually, uh, you evolving too, where they would have advanced intellects and also technology. He pointed out that larger creatures are likely to reside in the water, where

the advent of technology just might not happen. Um, because you're a large creature, you're gonna you know, all this mass. The buoyance of water helps you to stabilize it, right, And think of a blue whale. You wouldn't have a blue whale on on land. Right. And then if you are a very large animal, lika blue whale, like an elephant. Whatever, Um, are you going to need to advance like humans develop these technologies? Develop this an advanced intelect to win food?

Probably not because you're big, You're content, You're you're station in life is achieved. You're you're a You're you're this blue whale just grazing through the ocean. You're an elephant pushing over anything you need to eat and just consuming it. You don't need technology if you're a filter feeder. Right, So you have to ask yourself this and this organism that we're trying to imagine, why does it need to start externalizing its abilities and and dipping into tool use

and dipping into more complicated systems. Yeah, and of course that could lead to the broader question of how are we characterizing intelligence, Like is intelligence necessarily technological intelligence for

some purposes? That is what we're talking about, because sometimes when people talk about encountering alien species, they're talking about the kind that would send radio signals where you could detect, or the kind that would visit Earth in spacecraft, in which case you're not going to be dealing with aliens that might be intelligent in some kind of strange social way,

but that don't build machines. Yeah, we kind of get into this this anthropomorphic bias here, and almost kind of a Captain Kurt kind of bias where it's like, it's only alien life if it's like us, um, can I kiss it? I? Can I kiss it? Can I seduce it? Right? Because you know, an alien visitor Earth might would look at something like a dolphin or even something arguably like an octopus and say, well, this is a highly intelligent creature. Do they do these either of these species? Do they

build things? Do they have a language? Do they have culture as humans think of it? Well? No, uh, I mean for starters there in the water, which, to show sticks point unlikely that technology is going to emerge. It's hard to build an integrated circuit underwater, right, and uh, yeah,

intelligence doesn't necessarily mean the advent of technology. Well, I think we should take what we've looked at so far and see if we can draw some broader conclusions about what alien life is actually more likely to look like. Is there anything we can actually say on this subject or is it all just speculation? Is there anything we can base our assumptions on? You know, I'm currently reading Ian M. Banks culture novel Accession, which has a fabulous

extraterrestrial creature and it called the the Affront. An extraterrestrial species called the Affront and their space faring. They're kind of like a a gas world um cephalopod creature, but they're also really sadistic and awful in their own way. So they the culture in this novel, which is like a far future post singularity um humanoid culture for the most part. Uh, they spent a lot of time like trying to figure out the Affront like they want to.

They want to push the Affront, encourage them to be less awful and uh and and get along better with their neighbors instead of just constantly enslaving or wiping out other species, and so they have to ask themselves, well,

you know, why are the affront warlike? And they look to their evolution in uh, you know it advanced hunting practices where they work together as a group to to to hunt their prey, and they say, well, if they hadn't done that, if that hadn't been a part of their evolutionary is since, then perhaps they'd be more peaceful. But then on the other end of the that argument is if they hadn't had that that hunting nature and that warlike aspect of themselves, they might not have evolved

to this level. And either So now one thing I'm orious about you said, you said that they're sadistic. Did you actually mean that they're sadistic as in terms of taking pleasure in the pain of others or is it just that they're kind of like numb to our concerns and desires. Oh no, No, they're they're awful like they're

they're they have this big hunting spirit. They'll have these dinners where they'll they'll all be eating a particular type of animal and then they'll be a fighting pit in the middle of the table where that same type of animal is alive. Fighting each other and they're betting on it. And then they also have a little miniature harpoons that they throw across the table at other dinner guests to try and snag some of their food and drag it

over to their play. Okay, so they're kind of like predators. Yeah, yeah, they're they're kind of like a more humorous predator because there they strike me. They have kind of like an Oliver read quality to them, like they're they're kind of like big drunken louts that also developed uh, space faring technology and occasionally sing yes, yeah, yeah, I can I

can definitely imagine in building out. Well, yeah, I think that brings up an interesting point, which is that, of course our evolution informs what type of creature we are, and we can probably safely assume that that's going to be true no matter where you go in the universe, Like you can go to other planets, you can probably even go to other galaxies, and while lots of local conditions might be different, there are a couple of things

you can depend on when looking at alien life. One of them is that the physics of the universe are going to be the same, So all the same basic physical laws, and the presence of the same basic chemicals might be in different quantities, but still the palate, the color palate is the same. Yeah. And then the other thing is evolution. We can probably safely assume that whatever life forms are out there, they come about and gain

complexity through the process of evolution. By one would have to assume by something like mutation, something that encourages change with replication, and then something like nat real selection some form of evolution at least until they reached the point where they have advanced technology and then are either creating their own life or creating mechanical life that then recreates

organic life. Sure. And then of course there's the argument, which I probably support, that we're much more likely to encounter alien technology than we are to encounter aliens themselves. Like when we meet aliens, we're not going to meet them, We're going to meet their robots scouts. And that that lines up very much with with Banks's vision of the culture. Is that really you keep referencing these books. I've got to read them. They're they're pretty great. I I strongly

recommend them. Anytime anybody writes into us and says, hey, what's some good you know, thought provoking and fun sci fi banks. This stuff is great, except I'm currently like two percent into Dune for the first time. I've got to finish that first. Oh yes, well, that's a that's

a that's that's indeed a great book. Well, I think we should look at some of the principles of Earth life and ask the question of can we assume, based on the things we've already stated, that the physics going to be probably equivalent and life comes about through evolution. Can we assume that these principles are going to be present in the aliens we observe coming from other solar systems, other planets, and maybe even other galaxies in the far future.

And one of the things that I think is interesting is how many animals in nature exhibit some form of symmetry. Now, whether that's bilateral symmetry like us, if you folded us in half, we would be roughly equivalent. Then the other thing would be radial symmetry, and that's something like an

apple pie. Basically it extends out along the radius. And you can think about a jellyfish like it's symmetrical looking from the top down, like if you saw it a person in half, you could counted the rings if you will. If you will, there would be radial symmetry. Yeah, and symmetry is approximate. Of course, the sides rarely match each other exactly, but they roughly match each other. And it's, in my opinion, pretty easy to see why evolution might

tend towards symmetry because it's easier. I mean, it's easier to make half of a person and then just copy that half than it is to come up with different halves of body plans for the same individual. Yeah. I mean, one thing you have to always keep in mind with

evolution is that evolution is essentially lazy. Evolution is it's the path of least resistem exactly, Like even just thinking about the brain, Like one of the analogies I love is the idea that the human brain is like a a double scoop ice cream cone, so that we didn't when it's our brains evolved like just another scoop was added on top of the existing scoop. It wasn't like

a complete overhaul of the system. Yeah. Yeah, And you can see that in the brain actually, the different levels the brain stem, the cerebellum, cerebrum kind of like extending up towards Godhood. I guess, you know, to where eventually we get we get the angel brains that have the ethereal particles floating above the skull, or just the cone head brain. The cone head brain would be a wonderful example.

So observing this principle on Earth very naturally leads us to assume that, Okay, if we see other aliens out there, they might be totally weird. They might have claws, they might be like crabs, they might be slimy lizard like organisms. They might have you know, weird you know, twenty ft long legs and huge pyramid heads. Who knows what they're going to look like. But almost all visions include basic bilateral symmetry. If you fold the alien in half, the

sides match. But is that a safe assumption. There are animals on Earth that actually don't display external symmetry. They're they're asymmetrical on the outside. And one of the examples would be sponges. You've seen pictures of sponges. I mean, sponges are animals, yet they don't necessarily match when you fold them in half. They can have weird little nodules coming out on the side. So that, you know, they look more like a plant of some kind. Indeed, so if we were if we were trying to imagine a

sponge based alien species, they might not have symmetry. Yeah. Then again, sponges don't possess intelligence, and I guess we don't know if it's possible for something like a sponge to possess intelligence. We're back to the question of, well, well, the only creatures on Earth that have anything like intelligence are basically symmetrical. You can fold them in half. Uh, And so should we assume the same is true for

the rest of the universe. Yeah, this is where we get into that interesting discussion of On one hand, life on Earth is our only model we can We only have terrestrial life when it comes to trying to extrapolate what life elsewhere in the universe would consist of. So

we we have to base it on this model. And we see symmetry here and we have to imagine it that way elsewhere we see uh, we see the importance of water and the evolution of life here, we have to assume that elsewhere, and and that's really the best

course of action. On the other hand, Uh, there's this little thing called the Copernican principle, which states that there's nothing special or privileged about Earth or hu manity, which is sort of the um you know, sort of the Fox News fair and balanced approach to cosmology, like in trying to when thinking about the universe, try not to have too big of a head about the importance of

Earth and the human species. Right. Of course, the Copernican principle originally comes from like astronomy and cosmology, the idea that, hey, you don't necessarily have to start with the assumption that the Earth is the center of the universe. But it has been extended to a much more general principle beyond just saying we don't start with the assumption Earth is the center of the universe. Two, we don't start with the assumption that whatever our position is as an observer

is privileged. Yeah, it's we don't necessarily assume that we're looking from a unique vantage point. Yeah. It seems to me that the safe course of action, I think this is the one that most cosmologist tint to to lean towards, is use the Earth model of what life is like when thinking about other worlds, but then also have the

Copernic and principle. In the back mind, it's kind of like if you interact with people in your daily life, treat other people like you would like to be treated, but then adjust accordingly as new information becomes available, bearing in mind that everybody is not going to have the same case and preferences as you yourself. Yeah yeah. Another way of looking at this would be calling it something

like the mediocrity principle. This has been invoked in speculating about alien life before, and it's a sort of statistical argument. The idea is, if you're drawing a random sample from a pool of objects, and you don't have information to the contrary, the safest assumption is that the sample you select is typical or average, and in this case, the sample would be Earth. So that's our one sample. We've randomly, not by choice, but by necessity, randomly selected Earth from

the pool of possible inhabitable planets. Is one ping pong ball in the powerball and yeah, and so we've selected this and it's Earth. Now we're looking at it. What can we assume about its relationship to all the other balls in the in the powerball thing? Well, the safest

assumption is that it's pretty normal it's average. And of course this becomes uh, this becomes kind of heartbreaking I guess at times for a top modelist as we continue to get new information about various excep planets and and how few of those ex planets are really earthlike in nature. But there's another interesting way of applying the sort of averageness principle or the typicalness principle towards the universe, and some people have gone a lot farther with it, saying

that basically Star Trek got it right. Yeah, that essentially the the universe is likely filled with other humanoid species if it's filled with animals, because if it has anything at all, then they're likely going to be humanoids. They're gonna be I mean, it kind of gets into the whole territory that Stephen Hawking uh dipped into talking about, Well, if there are other alien species out there, they're probably awful like us, right. Yeah. That that's the pessimistic way

of pointing it. But there could be the colder, more anatomical way of looking at it, which would mainly come back to this one guy whose name I kept seeing when this theory came up. It's the Cambridge paleontologists Simon Conway Morris, and he has argued that aliens are likely to be a whole lot like us, so that intelligent aliens are gonna be a whole lot like humans, and that aliens in general are going to be a whole

lot like animals on Earth. And so in a two thousand five edition of the Journal Astronomy and Geophysics, Conway Morris begins with this interesting question. He starts by looking at this three hundred and twenty million year old fossil from you know, carboniferous strata in Montana, and it's some kind of weird water dwelling animal that made its living in a giant lagoon millions of years ago. And he describes it as quote vaguely fish like, but neither fish

nor like any other group of known animals. And so it's the strange thing that we just have nothing like it on Earth today. And he actually imagines a scenario. So three million years ago, this disgruntled alien bureaucrat is visiting Earth and he's angry. He's kicking around on a beach in ancient Montana, and in frustration, he releases some of his alien pets into Earth's ecosystems. Against all regulations, the alien pet fish die, become fossilized, and millions of

years later human paleontologists dig up these weird fossils. This raises some interesting questions. One of them is, if there's intelligent life all over the galaxy, how come there's no evidence that it has ever visited or colonized Earth in the past. How come we don't have obvious fossils of dead aliens in the fossil record. And then two, if we were to encounter aliens in the fossil record, how

would we recognize them? M Well, I mean, one obvious point that comes up is that it's it's fairly difficult for a creature to enter the fossil record, particularly a small number of of of visitors happened to drop by, right, they could be their fossils could be out there right now, and we might find them. We might never find them. We might build a mall on top of their location. Yeah, they might have died in some arid climate that's not

conducive to fossilization. They didn't necessarily position they're dead right on, Like, what are those the muddy banks that are Yeah, yeah, that's place the number of fossils have to be met for for fossilization to take place, and you're far It kind of gets down to the mediocrity principle, right, Yeah, you're you're far more likely to find fossils of particular types of creatures, particular populations of creatures that live in the right environment, or apex predator fossils are fewer and

farther between. Sure, we have lots more fossils of like sort of bottom dwelling ocean animals. I mean we have tons of those, because of course there were tons of so Conway Morris's point is sort of that we might not be able to tell if some aliens had landed on Earth and become fossilized, because he argues that alien life is going to be striking lee similar to Earth life. One of the arguments he makes is that all life is likely to be carbon based, like like life on Earth.

He says it's basically a quote strong hunch among molecular biologists that any life in the universe is gonna have a chemical basis that's really similar to terrestrial life to life on Earth. One of the things he points out is that he says the fundamental operations such as primary metabolic cycles, possibly photosyn synthesis, and maybe d N A and the replication of DNA just really don't have any

chemical alternatives that we can come up with. You you can't mimic processes like this without a system that's pretty much the same as what we already have. Uh. And then he he sort of goes on deposit that there are general rules to evolution. He says that they're independent of the quirks of your local ecosystem and the accidents that would arise through you know, just random trial and error throughout history. He points out convergent evolution. What do

you know about converge and evolution? Oh, this, of course is uh, for instance, the model to say, all right, you have birds that can fly, you have bats that can fly. Yeah, these both of these, Uh, these lineages evolved flight separately. Yeah, they didn't get it from a common flying ancestry. And so yeah, that's the ideas that organisms arrive at these very similar biological solutions through completely

different routes or from different starting points. Uh. Two people start on opposite sides of the globe, somehow they end up in the same place. One great example of this. In addition to wings would be eyes, So not all eyes evolved from the same line. A squid has a camera IE, and you have a camera I, But you and squid did not both evolve from a common ancestor with the primeval camera I. The humans and the squid do evolve from a common ancestor, but they've got their

eyes in different ways. We know. The cephalopod was a great It's a great point because it reminds me of some information I've read before on arguments for octopy consciousness, which is actually a reason I don't I do not eat octopi anymore, just because if you if you look at the octopus and you try to judge its consciousness based on human models, it doesn't pass the test, the test that we have that even the test that we can give you know, a primate or even a dolphin

are not going to apply to the octopus. But if you if you look at the octopus brain, which has uh, you know, evolved separately from these other models of what we think of is highly intelligent animals, uh, it itself has a very advanced brain and could arguably could be conscious. Yeah, I've had the same thought. If you ever watch octopuses is like play with toys. This is the thing they do.

It's very strange and it's somewhat unsettling. You see a weird kind of intelligence in them that you don't quite recognize. It's like hard to empathize with it, almost because it's so alien to human intelligence. Yet it's so different from what we think of as like fish, you know, this ocean dwelling kind of dull creature. Yeah, they play, they explore, they they utilized tools in some cases we're going to of course, you ask yourself when they steal things from divers,

steel things from divers. But but then you also have to ask, could a creature like the octopus ever evolved to the point where it would develop technology, where it developed some sort of culture in the way that we think about it? And it is that even a fair question, because it again comes down to us taking this very anthromomorphic sense of the universe and applying it to a creature that that emerged rather differently differently than we did. Yeah,

totally so, Conway Morris. He basically has two main arguments for thinking that convergence, like convergent evolution, is a universal of evolution, it's not just that we're witnessing convergence between different species on Earth made of terrestrial biological building blocks, but that we should expect to see convergence no matter what planet you're looking at. Right. But it's basically the argument is the basic shape of the evolution of life. Yeah, and so he says, one thing in this in favor

of this is the pervasiveness of convergence. It's all over the natural world. You know, tons and tons of examples of it. It's at every level of resolution. So if you zoom way into the tiny little gears and parts that make bodies work, you can see it there. And he points out the enzyme carbonic anhydrace. He says that accelerates the hydration of carbon dioxide by more than a million times, and he this is a quote. He says on Earth it plays a key role in processes as

desparate as photosynthesis, respiration, and by mineralization. And then of course you see convergence at the larger level with things like cameras and wings. And then of course he also says that it's the degree of similarity in complex, highly integrated systems. So it's not just small individual components but large systems that have different things working together still seem

to converge on pretty similar working models. An example of this might be, for example, the brains of primates and corvids. You ever noticed that, Huh? It's kind of weird that human brains and crow brains can both come up with tool using technologies that seem to arise by pretty similar patterns of evolution and adaptation, yet their brain structures are

radically different. I mean, one's bird and one's a primate. Indeed, I think that's the pretty convincing argument, espect as long as I try to disregard any star trek now in there and rippled foreheads. But yeah, if you imagine any any war, you have this, uh, this this complex system

of evolution taking place, varied models of life emerging. There's going to be some model of life that it doesn't have these extra bells and whistles anatomically to deal with acquiring food, protecting itself, carrying out its basic genetic mission of species that has to depend more on ingenuity, um and tool use, and it's probably probably going to look something like us. It's going to be vaguely humanoid in

form at least. Yeah, that's another sort of final position he arrives at that it's not just that our bodies are gonna look similar to alien bodies, but that he believes intelligence is pretty much a an inevitable consequence of life in the universe, that all things evolved towards some kind of human like intelligence. And in fact, there's the I mean, the further argument is that any complicated system moves towards intelligence, right, the emergence of intelligence? Right, Well,

what what do you mean by that? Like? What other than life? What do you mean? Um, I've heard this argument in terms of of of artificial systems, but that even even systems, And this is where he gets, you know, kind of out there outside of biological life, that that the universe itself is a complicated is a complex system, and an intelligence must emerge from that system. Okay, so that if you have like a wave action acting on a bunch of different rocks, creating vortexes of current at

the shoreline, eventually that start God exactly, I like that. Yeah, I'm partially convinced. I'm not quite sure what I think about Conway Morris. He's obviously a smart and well respected scientist, but I think a lot of people disagree with him quite strongly on this argument. He makes one more thing

I wanted to end on I thought was interesting. Earlier we mentioned the Ceti researchers Seth show Stack, and in two thousand eleven he gave an interview to Popular Science where he said some things about alien body plant that actually some of them I found pretty interesting. One of them was referring back to this thing about size that

inspired this episode. He was talking about the maximum size of aliens, and he was sort of arguing against these gigantic world size aliens or even probably maybe even against the sandworm due definitely planet from Marvel would be right out. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, Because he says, if you keep making an animal larger, its strength increases as a square of its size, but its weight increases as a cube of its size. So as you keep scaling up, weight becomes too much for

even a strong animal. And according to him, this is unlikely to be a problem specific to Earth. This is a problem in physics and engineering that you would encounter on any planet. Yeah, and it's one of the reasons why you start, if you start throwing a lot of science at King Kong. It falls apart. I mean literally, the monkey falls apart, right, it is not strong enough to lift its bones. Furthermore, I don't know if do you think the buildings that climbs would be strong enough

to support it? You know, I've never seen anyone crunch that data. You know that we tend to focus more on the structural engineering project. Yeah, are there what? What buildings out there are essentially rampage proof? Another one, this is a direct quote. Heads are a good deal. Yeah, he's a show stack. He thinks that heads are a common feature that you'd find on alien land animals. And I think his argument is really interesting. It would sort of be the cup holder of the animal body plan,

you know, like it's a car. You can't sell a car without a cup holder. You can't have an you can't have an alien without a head. Yeah, I mean this is basically the sensory array of any organism. And uh yeah, I've actually looked into this before. Um in uh doing various monster monster the weak monster science stuff for the for the website. You know, you'll see like a two headed monster in fit in fiction, or you'll see a no headed mind stern fiction, and you ask yourself,

was this possible. Is there anything in the natural world that conforms uh to this model and uh and generally that there isn't you get into like two headache organisms? Why would it have two heads? And that seems counterproductive? Yeah, the best you could really get into is you don't want to debate about what your body is gonna do, right, Like, the best you can get into is, essentially you could have an organism with some of its sensory material on

one stalk and other sensory material on another stalk. But other than that, there's just no evolutionary reason for two heads or for a species to be conjoined by its very nature. Well, show Stack makes a good argument actually against even the sensory stalks because he he says that basically is a head. We're talking about a consolidated housing unit for the primary sense organs, which in our case would be things like eyes and ears, though that wouldn't

have to be sensing. The visible spectrum on any planet would be whatever organs this alien uses to take an in formation about its environment. And why why would the primary sense organs need to be on the head. Well, it might seem kind of arbitrary at first, but I like his reasoning, He says that heads put the input devices right next to the central processing unit for rapid response, and he categorizes this in terms of response time, like it's important to your survival that you be able to

respond immediately to what you see. But I actually thought of another thing about this. It seems like less likely that you can have your vision impaired by damaging the pathways of information exchange. So if you imagine the dude from Pan's Labyrinth, what's that guy called has the eyes in his hands? Oh, I don't know, it's like that the paleman or something like that, and that might be it. So he's so this monster has got eyes in his palms and he's walking around looking around with his hands.

On one hand, that seems kind of cool, like you can peek around a corner with your hand. But on the other hand, you could probably blind this guy by injuring his arms. That's not something you'd want. Yeah, Also, like how does he cut up peppers for dinner? You know? I mean there's just a number of problems that stem from that. Yeah. Yeah, So you wouldn't want this long, exposed, kind of vulnerable path of information exchange from your primary

sense organs to the thing that needs to receive them. Yeah, plus the transfer of of those neural signals from from touch from pain uh four different uh accent pathways. When you say stub your toe, uh, it takes time for that for that signal to reach the brain. Now, it's a very small amount of time. Um, and it varies depending on the type of sense data. But but there

there is a delay. And in the evolutionary scheme of things, Um, you know, the body is going to again, it's gonna be lazy, it's gonna go with the path of least resistance. So it's easier just to to cut down that that delay time as much as possible. Yeah. I think he makes that point pretty convincingly. The the other thing he says, I think this is into thing too. Despite the fact that he's very pro head, he characterizes the number of limbs we have is pretty much happenstance of evolution, Like

that's just a fluke. We have four limbs because we evolved from four lobed fish, but we could have had any other number of limbs. Though somehow, I don't know, four limbs seems economically primed to me, Like if you have an animal with less than four limbs. It seems like you couldn't evolve an intelligent animal with two limbs, because they wouldn't have tool manipulating uh you know, like

grabby grabby things whatever those be. Well, it instantly makes me think though about giraffes and elephants, um, because of course the elephant has a highly tactile trunk, uh, and then the giraffe has a pretense prehensile a tongue. So I could I could imagine alien species who say, I only have two legs and they walk on them, but then when it comes to using their computers or what have you, they rely on their trunk, they rely on

their their their draft like tongue. In fact, in one of the culture books in Banks has an elephant type creature that has two trunks I remember correctly, and those are its primary manipulation uh limbs. Man. That's fascinating. Yeah, it just highlights actually how poor our imagination is, because I was thinking, yeah, yeah, you need hands, but you could I don't know, you could have a tail, and then you could have a tail that over time grew a fork in it and it had prehensile forks, and

then you could basically have tentacles on land. Let's not count out ear lobes. You know, we take them for granted, But there could be a species out there on a artist in alien world and those are its primary you know, tactile instruments. I have a question, do you think it's really all that advantageous to have like four arms? Like, would would Goro have a real advantage as an organism outside of the sacred rights of Mortal Kombat? Yeah? Why would Goro? What? What was he? A showcan? Is that

his species? I don't recall? Um? Yeah, why why is this model evolved? Um? Well mhmm, yeah, he certainly has an advantage against humanoids, and maybe he had if I if I remember correctly, his his species sort of ancestral enemy is essentially a centaur right of a big Oh is that right? Yeah? The one in the third Mortal Kombat film Motaro. Okay, so if they're fighting there was

a third film? No, no, well, Motaro might be in the films too, But in the third game of Taro's like a coo role of being like the sub boss. So I was about to leave work and go watch the third Mortal Kombat film. I think he shows up in it, you would probably not be surprised. But so maybe there is an evolutionary advantage to having a second

pair of arms if you're having to grapple with uh. Yeah, another species that has six limbs, six limb creatures, maybe that's ultimately the model of life uh on the go homeworld. You know, I have to come down with one sad prediction of my own, which is that if we encounter alien species, I don't think they will biologically emit rays. This is a thing that's often imagined, right, I can see them having laser guns, but I don't think from their bodies they will emit rays. It just seems like

the energy requirements are implausible. Yeah, that's probably a safe bet. You're probably not going to be vaporized by their their heat vision, right, you see them, So Kryptonians are out. And plus if a creature has like a natural heat vision ability, again, they why are they Why are they developing the kind of advanced intellect that would enable them to travel. They're just setting there blasting whatever they want to eat, and if anything messes with they blast the predators.

So no problem and no reason to venture out into the void. Well, I always enjoy talking about aliens, but this has been particularly fun. Robert, Yeah, yeah, I mean it's, uh, it's one of those things that, like, oftentimes I find myself just sort of thinking at night, and I tend to more and more and more pessimistic about the idea of intelligent life in a sci fi sense existing out there.

But I'll often think, well, there's probably somewhere, just so far away, there's an ocean that I can scarcely imagine, and there's some sort of like slug like creature just doing it's very basic thing, and it's it's incapable of knowing me, incapable of imagining me. But it's out there somewhere. Well, not to open a whole other can of sandworms, but there are I mean, their their whole environments we haven't

even really discussed in this. I mean we're talking about sort of like surface dwelling creatures that might be in the water, or they might be walking around on some kind of hard, rocky surface of a planet. There's also the idea that's pretty common is that well, what if gas planet it could be inhabited but basically floating or flying aerostatic types of creatures that that move up and down in the thick, dense, fluid like atmosphere of gas

and a gas planet. Essentially Jovian jellyfish. Yeah. I can see something like that too, though with those I also don't know, if you know, would technology evolve, would would something like that create tools if they don't have hard, rocky materials to make tools out of. Yeah, what would their technology consists of? Perhaps it would be entirely organic or yeah. It just it just blows the mind to try and think about it. But that's why we keep coming back around to it. One. We we keep envisioning

all these different fantastic aliens. You know, essentially giant and small aliens are not any different than the giants and dwarves that inhabit our mythologies and folklores. But as we look into the future with them, we take we take more and more of our scientific quandaries and apply them to the creation. Yeah, all right, So there you have it. UH, Space Faring Bears considerations UH on the size of aliens and the populations of of aliens elsewhere in the universe.

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