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Man, welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Noory with you, Peter Ward with us, Peter. If this is the sixth mass extinction, is there a time cycle to these things?
Yeah, that was a great question, George. When I was a grad student, there were two great tale intelligists, a guy named David Raup and Jackson Kowski, and they did a bunch of statistical work and suggested that every twenty six million years there was another mass extinction. Route was pretty convinced that what was happening is that we are being impacted by meteors or comments, if you will, or asteroids coming out of the big body of objects surrounding
New York. That he thought that our planet was just going through this cloud and that this twenty six billion year cyclicity was related to that, And subsequent work suggested
that that's not really the case. I mean, back then, the geological time scale wasn't as well defined, and there's a number of ways and statistics that you can produce false positives really through what we've set a cycle, But clearly we are having periods of time when really bad things happen that we are subjecting to impact from space. There will be more big asteroids, giddiness. We've got so many challenges right now, with so many humans and so
much problem in climate and crops. The last thing we need now is some objects in space strangely enough to jeorgan. One of the things that really scared theatrobiologists that was a member of back in the day around two thousand is that even a body about fifty meters in diameter. That doesn't sound very big, but it's got to be that big for a meteor to pass all the way
through the atmosphere and hit the ground. If it's smaller than that, it creates what's called an air burst, and an air burst exactly mimics a nuclear explosion going off with aloitude. So the big problem was, we know something like this happened in nineteen oh six in Tunguska in Russia, there was an air burst the knock down thousands of square acres of trees. Had that happened over a major city, Let's say we had an air burst over New York City or in London.
Everybody's dead.
Well, this just that, But how do you know it wasn't a nuclear attack. And the biggest problem is that if this happens and all of a sudden, the military thinks we've been attack. New York has been bombed by the Russians, quick start shooting. How do you get hold of the military and say, wait a minute, that was a meteor, not an atomic explosion. What are you going to talk to you? Who's got the phone number? I mean,
it's just one of these really scary what ifs. But these things, these options from space, they're out there.
Do you think there have been some mass extinction events on other planets throughout this universe?
Well, have great question. I would assume that if we had an earth like planet that had the same parallel evolution leading to more complex life animal equivalence, that there's going to be the same sort of dangers that outer space can give you. Some of my friends at SETI search for extraterrestial intelligence. Oh what, Seth was a good buddy and he calls me an evil twin Skippy. I can pay heed the evil twin Skippy, But we've debated
for years. We're close friends. It's very good. But SETI wants us to believe that there are lots of planets with lots of civilizations, and yet the most common stars out there are small dwarfs. Any planet circling a dwarf star to because enough to have water is what we call tidally locked with our moon face always facing the sun. Bubble of that is that small suns burn in burbot radiation. You would have a transient solar event that would wipe
out any life that was there. Mass extinction. So yeah, I think this has an inherent part of the whole system. Life is dangerous, planets are more dangerous. Stars are the most dangerous of all them.
Peter.
After the mass extinction, what causes the rebound?
Well, opportunity does? I always hate to bring this up, but it's just it's so heartbreaking to me. George. What's happened to Leahina on Malays My favorite towns I love Behinah and as a young man I went there. It's just every decade or so I go to Mahina and the arc dowries and the beach and the bubble gums, so all the great stuff there, plus the whole local Hawaiian culture that's gone, and so you're at you know
what happens next? Well, what does happen next? And I saw that the governor of Hawaii said it's going to take several billion dollars to restore that part of even that part of Mali.
Have they said yet how that fire started.
I've been trying to find that out, and it's either lightning or probably or probably somebody just threw a cigarette tossed it out of a window. I mean, that's what happens in Washington State. But as I looked into this today, George, because again the heartbreak is just you know, my heart goes out to those people, I started looking at why there was so much fuel around. I lived in Australia
in twenty fourteen. Adelaide Australia, and the Australians are very cognitive and terrified of fire because the forests or eucalyptus, and eucalyptus is a beautiful tree. You can smell it all over California. You're a la you lucky dog. You go out, there's the eucalyptus trees all around you. But that very smell comes to the oils. It's extremely flammable. Ucatus twigs and bark. They burn like crazy. When the Australians have fires. They are so dangerous and so fatal.
And what I gathered just from the reading today is that non native grasses grass that did not exist in Hawaii until various humans came with all the products we drew, these non native grasses have taken over all around and Malley and that they burn faster. Second, lad they've been having to draw it. And thirdly, a typhoon several hundred miles just to the south produced enough wind. You get the spark, you've got the fuel, and you have the wind,
and then you get catastrophes. So it is just from a human, from a nature, from just a cultural point of view, this is just tragedy. Mass extensions are the same biotic tragedies. And afterwards people dig out. Afterwards, the survivors set about rebuilding. What will be rebuilding behind it will not look anything like the town that was now on the planet Earth rebounds after mass extinction, totally different kinds.
Of animals, and sadly they're finding more and more dat out there.
I just don't you want to think about it. You know that the fire in Paradise, California. I have friends all through this one. I feel there is Chico Creek and last in wilderness and paradise itself. I thought that sound very well, and they were caught in the cars and just again, when you get fired and fast moving flames, it's it's a recipe for tragedy.
Yeah.
Absolutely. Do you think Mars once had life and then what happened there?
I think Mars may have. I think my Krobiy life is very easy to once it starts, and I think it's probably if you have the chemicals around, not that difficult for life to assemble itself from non life. Or we got life here on Earth and an asteroid hits our planet, throws the rock in space and lands on Mars, or I started on Mars and was set off on Earth. Either way, that planet's too small, it doesn't have the
mask to hold an atmosphere. It's lost its atmosphere. If there had been life on Mars, it would have been probably four point two to four billion years ago, and then probably by three point five everything that was even
close to complexity is gone. However, I think the first person you want to send the Mars or at least on the same team, is going to be a paleontologist with a good drill rig and you also want to have a microbiologist drill cores, send them down one hundred meters, get down benep the surface and try to see if there's any microbes up in the soil. So we're all hoping. I mean, I don't want to be the only place of life at the cosmos. I don't think we are,
but the very what type of life will be? But it's the big history.
What about our moons? You believe moons are critical for life?
Yeah, it's interesting we have the gigantic moon and how important it's been. We think. The book I wrote in two thousand with Don Brownlee called Rare Earth was actually a very interesting exercise for me. I've been mostly italiantologist stuff till that time, and it forced me to get out on a comfort zone. So I only bring it up because Don and I have been asked to write a sequel to it after he's twenty years later and we're laboring through it. But what do we know now?
And then you brought up self Shostak. I would love for Stef to write the introduction of this book. If he's listening or thing deafense or if you know him. I mean, that would be a fabulous thing for us. Stef is a wonderful writer, but I have from someone from us SETTI hike a crack at this rare earth hypothetsys the best of all worlds. I still think that we're going to find lots of life and the cosmos, but that it will never be much more than very
simple life, except in the rarest circumstances. So that's through the book. We are going through catalog the one hundred closest planets to Earth out there by looking at all the permission that we have the excellent planets, I guess right, well, yeah,
the exo planets. So we're going to see these hundred closest extra planets are great on the probability of whether or not we think there could be animal equivalents, and right after bad, I'll be amazed if even one of those planets is are like it's it's hard to find a good planet.
We're rare, We're lucky, but who knows it. Maybe I'll tie to spirituality, you never know.
Well, I'm just I do not believe that life is unique to this planet. How could it be. I mean, the cosmos is so gigantic, there's so many planets, so many stars. That would be quite a strange phenomenon that life started on this planet and nowhere else. Panspermia, right, panspermia definitely, that's such a great term. Yep, panspermia. We're throwing rocks from place to place. And as you know, there's two kinds. Interstellar could life go from one star
system to another? And that one seems hard, but interplanetary absolutely. We know this great experiments. People have taken hanks of lava and actually they put them on the front of one of the soil used capsules that re entered. They had a big hunk of lava. It had bacteria in the middle. It re enters, gets really hot, they break the rock open. Bacteria are fine adroid to blast life from place to place. But it's going to be very simple life.
Our extinction events controllable.
That's a sixty four dollars question. I mean, if you look at the conservation movement, I would say that the major goal of conservation on the planet today is to reduce extinctionion can we do it at all? I mean, big rare things are really hard to keep because there's
so few of them. It's so easy to dock them off one of the great tragedies to me is where I live, we've had resident killer whales resident of Orca, and there were eighty to one hundred of them when I was a young man, and now there are only half that. And a big problem about is that SeaWorld came and harvested is the term they used, took about
forty five of them out. I just noticed that, well, Leda, the very last living that was taken in nineteen seventies out of ten Cove in Washington State, is being brought back to Washington State to be released.
What's the life spanable whale like that? Oh?
They laughed, Well, I think it's forty fifties the year. This is a very old whale. She was taken as a calf, so she would be very near the end of her life spent.
That's a long time, though, My god, forty fifty sixty years for yeah, But look, man, I don't like that.
Look look at you and me. You know, if it's forty fifty or sixty, I would be all dead me too. I'm personally thinking I'm going to shoot in for the timeety hundreds. That's as good to be.
I'd be doing a talk show up in heaven at least I hope would be up there.
Hey, you're already doing a talk show in heaven. We're on Earth. It is heaven on Earth. You're already you already achieved that.
What other scientists, Peter Sayer, palaeontologists say about the possibility of extinction events?
Do they do?
They agree with you?
Well, they certainly see it. Of the rock record is full of them. I mean, just the really big ones have all the book box of geolastical record. We have these three great years to tell Zola and Mesozoic and sent Isolic and even in eighteen to two, in eighteen three four, these early naturalists, we're able to recognize these great, big strokes. They're huge disappearances. We can see it for the fossils themselves. So it's been a long knowing two
hundred years. We know we've had these big things. The big question now is how extensive is what has happened on the planet today, How extensive will it be?
How far will do and how long do they last?
Yeah? Absolutely, and that we don't know.
What.
Let's talk about the rebound again. In this particular case, we didn't have humans during the last extinction. How quickly. Could we rebound?
Yeah, great question. It's funny to say that, I mean concident of might be on your show today. It's interesting for a number of reasons. I just received a letter, as I do an email this morning from an author. She wants to do a children's book, and she said, you're doctor Ward. I want to do a children's book about what life will be one million years from now. Can you posit what the future evolution of Earth life
will be in one million years. I actually did a book with my great friend, the artist Alexis Rockman in the nineties, and we called it future Evolution, and we tried to ask that question if humans continue. And my own sent of the George is that we humans are about as close to extinction proof as an animal can be. A curse the caveat of nuclear weapons, we can certainly wipe ourselves out. I have the hope that we're wiser
than that. But even a million years, you know, most species can be produced in perhaps tens of thousands of years, but in a million years you could have a lot of different types of life. So in our book we asked where are the habitats, what are the big places that life would have to adapt to. And I think you'll agree. Two of the biggest habitats on the planet
now are cities and secondly farm lands. And then there's what seven eight billion people on this earth are soon to be on this earth, and we need ever more acreage for farms. Well, that becomes a gigantic ecological habitat. Secondly, cities getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so the question we asked, if these are two of the big habitats, and if we know that nature produces new species, what will be the successful species and cities? But we already
see this. I'm living outside Seattle. I'm on a small lake, but we've got you just to put my head out on and hear the coyotes. U in La you could just get near the foothills. There plenty at coyotes, cougars, coyotes. But the big successful things are like pigeons and crows and lots and lots of cockroaches and snakes because there's so many rats and so many mice that live in
the crevices and cities. And think about garbage dumps. How much resources are there for animals in the garbage dump and not just that I've been to the Philippines, some of the gigantic garbage dumps outside Manilla, where large numbers of humans absolutely exist on the edges and in these garbage dumps because there's so much food and there's so many resources to be home.
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