Imaginary Worlds - To Seek Out New Life

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

For a long time, imagining what alien life could look like was mostly the job of science fiction creators. But in recent years, the field of astrobiology has gotten a boost from the discovery of faraway exoplanets with atmospheres which could support life. In trying to imagine what aliens could look like, scientists have found that science fiction is a good jumping off point. Astrobiologist Michael Wong hosts a science of Star Trek podcast called Strange New Worlds, and biologist Mohamed Noor wrote a book called Live Long and Evolve about what Star Trek can teach us about science. They discuss the influence Star Trek has on the way they question what the building blocks of life could be outside Earth, and what would happen if you rewound the clock of evolution. Plus, Jaime Green talks about her book The Possibility of Life, where she interviewed scientists about which science fiction is asking the right questions about astrobiology. Featuring readings by actor Luke Daniels. This week’s episode is sponsored by ShipStation and TodayTix Go to shipstation.com and use the code IMAGINARY to sign up for your FREE 60-day trial. Go to TodayTix.com/imaginary and use the promo code IMAGINARY to get $20 off your first Today Tix purchase. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does possible sound like for your business? It's having to spend to power your scale with no preset spending limit. Redefine possible with Business Platinum. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms and conditions apply. Visit amex.ca slash business platinum. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Every so often, I'll learn something about the history of life on earth that blows my mind. I was watching a nature documentary once,

and they said that the majority of species who have ever existed on this planet, we have no idea what they look like. Unless they left behind fossils or some other kind of imprint, they're lost to time. I kept trying to imagine what on earth, literally what on earth did these species look like?

There's also been a movement to reimagine extinct animals. In recent years, scientists have realized that dinosaurs were multicolored. They had feathers and pouches of fat. In fact, the real T-Rex might have looked less like the creature that we saw in Jurassic Park and more like the scariest chicken you've ever seen. And there's another field of scientists

who are trying to imagine species that they've never seen before with even less information. Michael Wong is an astrobiologist at Carnegie Science. I'm working on ways to detect life in the solar system, in particular working on ways to detect life whether or not it shares the exact same biochemical details as life on Earth does. And I'm also very interested in how to find life on distant exoplanets, so worlds that orbit other stars using telescopes.

Until recently, I thought imagining aliens was the job of science fiction writers or production designers. But the developments of technologically sophisticated telescopes in space have changed the field of astrobiology? Yeah, so astrobiology has really grown over the past few decades, and this is basically because science requires observations. We need data to understand, you know, whether or not we can

answer certain questions about the universe. And so you can sit in your armchair all you want and think about alien life, but until you actually have the kinds of technologies required to interrogate literal other worlds about whether or not there is life present there, you can't really do science. And so thankfully in the past couple of decades, a lot of scientific instruments and missions and telescopes have come online that allow us for the

very first time to do a scientific search for extraterrestrial life. Those scientific instruments analyze the atmosphere of distant exoplanets. Scientists can speculate what kind of life could exist in those environments. So there's data involved, but Mike still does some armchair daydreaming in his job. I really do think that the mindsets of an astrobiologist and a science fiction writer can be very similar at times. In science fiction, we're only constrained by our imaginations,

but when scientists push the boundaries of their imaginations, when do they realize they're coming up short? And how does science fiction help them with their thought experiments? Mohamed Noor is a professor of biology at Duke. He wrote a book called Live Long and Evolve. It's about how Star Trek incorporates scientific principles into their storylines. And he uses Star Trek in his classroom. The good news with Star Trek is there's just so much of it.

There's like over 900 episodes as you know. Essentially I can find something that's associated with any of those concepts in some episode for better or for worse. From an unscientific perspective of the people you've spoken with who are astrobiologists, how many of them are science fiction, Vince? Oh, I think all of them. But honestly that's not unusual. I mean, even if you just go,

my specialty is genetics and evolution, even if you go among my group, it's still very, it's still well over half. Jamie Greene is a science journalist. In her book, The Possibility of Life, she interviewed astrobiologists and other scientists about how sci-fi influences the way they think about extraterrestrials.

I asked her if the scientist she interviewed said it was hard to deprogram their minds and forget everything they saw in science fiction. You know, less that it's hard to deprogram the science fiction and more that it's hard to deprogram seeing life on Earth as the default. I actually think that the scientists I talked to appreciate science fiction that stretches the imagination farther.

HOFFMAN Muhammad agrees. BELLAMER When we define life, we think of it pretty easily. We think of ourselves, we think of seagulls, we think of trees, we think of mushrooms, we think of bacteria, all those sorts of things. But we're still thinking from that single origin, everything that we have is related. So the analogy I like to use is it's kind of like defining the word game, but all you've ever seen in your entire life is like settlers of Catan and versions thereof, like seafarers of Catan. All these are related, right? They all have one origin. If you go someplace else and you see somebody playing hacky sack, would you even recognize that as a game? I mean, you'd be like, what is that person doing? I have no idea what

that is. So I suspect when we find life, there'll be some big surprises of things that we just didn't even conceive of because we weren't thinking in that headspace. We hadn't put it in there. space. We hadn't put it in there. So I wanted to know more which science fiction is helping scientists stretch their imaginations. What sci-fi is asking the right questions? Star Trek came up a lot, which I was not surprised by. I know many people who went into STEM professions because they're inspired by Star Trek, including Michael Wong. He actually hosts a podcast about the science of Star Trek called Strange New Worlds. One of his favorite episodes from the original series is called The Devil in the Dark.

The episode features an alien called the Horta. It looks like a cluster of rocks and molten lava that can move along the surface. Although to be honest, to me it also looks like a giant meatball pizza wrapped around a boulder. But putting aside the special effects of 1960s television, Mike thought that the story was fascinating. In the cold open a person is attacked out of nowhere in

the classic monster of the week format. in the classic Monster of the Week format. A mining colony in the Federation is being terrorized by some unknown monster, which is able to evade detection for so long because instead of being carbon based, like all of life on Earth is, it is actually based on silicon. So it's really cool to see Star Trek playing around with these different possibilities, these different biochemistries, and really widen our minds for, hey, what should we expect life to look like in the universe? Maybe we shouldn't expect it to look exactly like us. But what if life exists based on another element? But what if life exists based on another element? For instance, silicon.

You're creating fantasies, Mr. Spock. Not necessarily, Bones. I've heard of the theoretical possibility of life based on silicon, but silicon-based life would be of an entirely different order. Then after Spock has the brilliant insight that they should be scanning for silicon-based life forms, they eventually do find the Horta. But it's still this monstrous creature until they discover that this rock monster was a mother just simply trying to protect her eggs, right?

That the miners were actually damaging her offspring. She had no objection to sharing this planet with you until you broke into her nursery and started destroying her eggs. And she fought back in the only way she knew how, as any mother would fight. But even that is kind of like a narrow scope of things. Oh, we will only empathize with it

after we discover that it has motherhood. And so can we bring that level of respect to things that we encounter out there that are so wildly different from us that they're even more different than the Horta is, and that maybe they don't share this concept or this idea of motherhood and parenting. In science fiction, aliens often fall into three categories, benign creatures, scary monsters, or people by any other name. There is a long history of monsters in sci-fi. The xenomorph in the alien movies is a predator out to kill us. Unlike the predator aliens who are out to kill us, but they're humanoid,

so killing is more of a cultural choice. My favorite quote about alien monsters comes from Doctor Who. A new companion has joined the Doctor, she goes to another planet for the first time, and she asks him, Why is everything out here evil? Hardly anything is evil. But most things are hungry. Hunger looks very like evil from the wrong end of the cutlery.

Or do you think that your bacon sandwich loves you back? Mike isn't worried about becoming a bacon sandwich for an alien race. He's more concerned about our behavior, especially if you look at the way we've treated non-human life on earth. You know, when we find life elsewhere, it's going to be so different from life on earth and we're not going to have had some kind of evolutionary like predilection or inclination toward that life. The way that, for instance, we find bunny rabbits very cute and cuddly,

but spiders repulsive, you know, and these are probably for evolutionary reasons, but because we didn't co-evolve with whatever life we'll end up discovering elsewhere, you know, we won't have that kind of natural inclination. So how do our scientific discoveries then inform our ethical practices and the values that we take into outer space? Those are big open questions too. Will we simply think of everything as horrifying or will we be able to appreciate it on its intrinsic value and merits. And that's something that I think is still a big question.

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print labels, and make customer service a breeze. Go to shipstation.com, use the code imaginary to sign up for your free 60 day trial. That's ShipStation.com code IMAGINARY. Most aliens on Star Trek do not look like the Horta. When I was a kid, back when Star Trek had a lot less cultural respect than it does now, I remember a lot of people would make fun of the show for trying to convince us that actors with pointy ears or bumpy foreheads could be taken seriously as aliens. Obviously, those

aliens evolved out of budgetary constraints, but the next generation invented a biological reason to explain why Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, and other species look similar to us. In an episode called The Chase, Captain Picard and his crew discover an alien computer code in the DNA of every humanoid species, including humans. So four billion years ago, someone scattered this genetic material into the primordial soup of at least 19 different planets across the galaxy. Again, here's Jamie Green.

And so they're on this quest to follow the clues to find the last couple bits of this code in other DNA. And it's called the chase because like they're doing it and some Romulans are doing it, and everyone's chasing each other around. And they eventually get the code together, put it in the tricorder, and the tricorder projects this image of a humanoid alien.

It seems to be played by a female actress, but not gender coded. She basically has a message saying, we are your ancient ancestors. When we developed technology, we started looking for others in the galaxy and we found that we were alone and we didn't want anyone else to have to be alone. So we seeded the galaxy and we put these little bits of code in your DNA so that you might find each other and collaborate and

receive this message from the ancients. You are a monument, not to our greatness, but to our existence. That was our wish that you too would know life. And would keep alive our memory. There is something of us in each of you. And so something of you in each other.

And then of course, afterwards, the Klingon is just like, but I'm not related to you. And the Romulans like, I hate you. The very notion that a Cardassian could have anything in common with a Klingon. It turns my stomach. This should be Earth shaking, galaxy shaking news to find out that the humanoid races of the galaxy share a common ancestor, that our evolution was seeded and directed and caused by this, like it should change everything.

And I think it's hilarious that it changes nothing. What's interesting about The Chase is that the episode touches on two different theories about the evolution of life in the galaxy. Mike Wong says the first theory is called directed panspermia. So let me just break that down. Those are kind of jargony words. So panspermia is the process through which life could hop from one world to another. The Star Trek universe depicts directed panspermia through the chase. But usually in astrobiology, we think about undirected panspermia, which is

sort of doing that transfer by accident, like an asteroid hitting a planet, knocking off some rock that happens to carry some microbes with it. And then that rock hurls towards another planet. Some of those microbes survive that transfer and then, you know, blossom into a new biosphere. So for certain origins of life theories, early Mars may have actually been a more hospitable place for trying to get life started. Well, maybe a long time ago, an asteroid hit Mars, knocked off a piece of Mars into orbit around the sun, and that piece of Mars carried early life to Earth. We are all Martians, and when we send our rovers back to Mars, we are simply returning to the planet where we're all from. The other theory that the episode taps into is convergent evolution.

Basically, if something is gonna move on a planet, there are only so many ways it can do it. It's gonna walk, swim, or fly, and it needs to move efficiently. So the idea that aliens would look similar to us or another species on Earth, isn't that far-fetched? And so a great example of convergent evolution here on Earth, for example, is the shapes of sharks and dolphins.

They have completely different evolutionary lineages, right? So the ancestors of dolphins were things that walked on land. Sharks never experienced that brief blip on land. They've always been in the ocean. But basically, they all have, both sharks and dolphins, have these very streamlined body forms with flippers and tails. And why is that? And it's probably because that is one of the optimal ways of having a shape if you wanted to swim really fast in the ocean.

Okay, this conversation sent me down a rabbit hole of looking at what aquatic mammals evolved from. Whales evolved from a creature that looked like a combination of a dog and an aardvark. It started avoiding predators by swimming in the water. It discovered it liked the taste of seafood. Yada yada yada, 50 million years later, it looks like a whale. That is just crazy to me. But the same thing happened with birds and bats. They were completely different mammals and dinosaurs that evolved to be a similar size with similar wings and I have confused birds for bats

if I see a bat far away in the sky. But Mohammed Noor doesn't buy this theory. Even if those ancient aliens seeded their DNA into the primordial soup of Earth, Vulcan, Kronos and other planets in Star Trek, and put a computer code in the DNA to make sure that they evolved into humanoids. There are so many random events and mutations that affect the evolution of life on a planet. Here on Earth, about two billion years ago,

we had this microscopic life form that ate another microscopic life form, and the smaller one Provided energy to the larger one and it reproduced inside it when the larger reproduced it also had more of those small ones inside it But that is what is potentially what provided enough energy for cells to actually become able to become multi cellular produced multicellular Organisms and things like that. Did that happen on Cronos and Cardassia Prime and Rhombus all at the same time? That's a that's very unlike it. Or much more recently, 65 million years ago, we had a big asteroid impact on Earth.

We had a lot of volcanic activity. That's what knocked back the dinosaurs and allowed mammals or mammalian forms to become much more abundant and much more diverse than they were at the time. There were mammals before then, but they were small and in terror. Did that happen at the same time?

And all those different, there's so many random chance events that had a dramatic impact on the shape of life on our planet. Mohammed was not a science advisor on The Next Generation so he couldn't argue his case, but he was one of the science advisors on Star Trek Discovery.

And he had the most input on a storyline from season four. The Federation is trying to contact a species that they call Ten-C. One of the producers in the show came to the group of scientific advisors, including Mohammed, and asked them to brainstorm the most alien aliens they've ever had on Star Trek. Visually, the Ten-C were created

with digital special effects. It looked like crustacean jellyfishfish the size of blue whales with huge branches floating in space and lights that emanate from their bodies. But the main storyline was the characters trying to figure out how to communicate with them. And this was urgent because the Ten-Sea were unintentionally destroying civilizations. The characters had to explain to them that they needed to stop or Earth would be next. Yeah, that was great because they invited us in very, very early for that, which I love

because it was a chance to actually work on it very much from the conception stage. So like the episodes with that aired in 2022, but we were actually discussing it in May 2020. So it was a long Before it came out. It was really early So we actually brainstormed a whole bunch of different sorts of things I can tell you some of the things that I suggested that didn't make it in They were kind of ridiculous in hindsight, but i'm just trying to think, you know blue sky But I mean what I pushed for it, uh in that context and this is something that did make it in there in the end

Was chemical communication because that's not something it did make it in there in the end, was chemical communication. Because that's something that's very competent in, say, the animal world here. But it almost never comes up in sci-fi. Like, why wouldn't there be chemical communication? This was something I suggested, and she jumped on it, and the other folks jumped with it. So I was very excited about that.

So what were some of the other blue sky ideas that you had? They were like, nah, it's like, that's kind of ridiculous. Well, one thing I suggested was contact chemicals. And what I suggested they might have is they have these gloves. And when you wear these gloves on their weird tentacles, it would then change the chemical signals into radio signals. Well, I like the idea with the gloves too. If you think about like, what would enable the use chemical communication? How would it make a walkie talkie? That's what I was trying to conceive of. That's what I was thinking, something that was chemical and it was a glove you put on

and you excrete your chemicals into and it translates it into these radio waves. So that's what I was aiming for. The walkie talkie tentacle gloves did not make it into the show. But as a fan, Mike Wong appreciated the ideas that Muhammad's team did develop because the question of how to communicate with the 10C reflects real questions that astrobiologists are wrestling with. The trickiest thing to convey in that entire message

was the concept of us. How do we convey who we are to the 10C? And they toss around different ideas. The number four, maybe. There are four of us. Or six. The atomic number of carbon, we are carbon-based. I fear that such numbers

could hold other significance for the Tentsea. It is easy for misunderstanding to occur between different cultures when one lacks context. What Captain Michael Burnham ends up deciding is to send the chemical nature, the mix of gases, in our atmosphere. The air. The air. They've created an artificial atmosphere based on the exact ratio of gases we need to breathe. 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide. They will recognize that as us.

That was so brilliant to me because it also reflects the way that we're looking for life on Exoplanets. Like I mentioned before, we're looking for these gases that indicate that there is a global biosphere on another world. And at the same time, the gases in our atmosphere reflects the coevolution with our biosphere over four billion years and literally is a beacon to whoever else is looking at our planet out there with their telescopes that life exists on Earth. And so to convey the message of who we are through our atmosphere was really insightful and I think reflects so much of how we go about trying to do astrobiology these days.

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rush tickets, savings, and a lot more. Go to todaytix.com slash imaginary and use the promo code imaginary to get $20 off your first TodayTix purchase. That's promo code imaginary at todaytixtix.com slash imaginary. Todaytix.com slash imaginary. Todayticks.com. Now, of course, a lot of other science fiction franchises have explored what life on other planets could look like. I asked Jamie Green about the movie Avatar.

When I saw it in 2009, this one short scene made a big impact on me. We see a creature on the planet Pandora that looks like a hairless blue monkey. It also looks like the humanoid aliens, which are called the Navi. I thought it was cool that James Cameron had thought so deeply about this world he created that he wanted to show us the evolutionary branch that the Navi came from. Jamie says, yeah, but it doesn't quite make sense. She says her thinking on this was inspired by a blog post she read by a paleontologist named Katie Sliwenski.

The blog post argued that the problem with this alien primate is that. It has six limbs, but the two upper ones have fused. So it has these sort of branching arms. And the reason this is necessary or was worked into the movie is that the Navi, the people on Avatar have four limbs, just like humans do, but all of the animals have six limbs, which is what ants and bugs have.

So it's just a way of making the world seem more alien. Ooh, six-limbed animals instead of four-limbed animals, but they still wanted to have four-limbed people, which would be very unlikely evolutionarily. Once a body plan gets established, evolution doesn't tend to change that. So on Avatar, there's not good evolutionary logic for six-limbed animals, four-limbed people.

And so we get Prolimurus, who we see for a split second, who once you realize all of this, looks like a creature whose top and middle limbs are in the process of fusing, as if to account for the difference in body plan. Now, Katie Slavinsky pointed out that a monkey who needs to grab lots of tree branches, it would not be evolutionarily advantageous for this creature to lose limbs, but it was almost definitely an attempt to build an evolutionary logic into this illogical world. But there is a sci-fi movie that got universal praise from the scientist that she interviewed

in her book. One of my standard interview questions with scientists was, do you have a favorite sci-fi alien? And by far the most common answer was the Heptapods in Arrival, which are one of the most alien-looking aliens that we've ever had on screen. Arrival was a 2016 film starring Amy Adams as a linguist who tries to communicate with aliens that have come to earth. People are afraid this is a hostile invasion but she suspects the aliens have a more benign agenda. Jamie says the design of the Heptapod aliens really impressed the scientists that she talked with.

They don't have arms and legs. They have seven limbs. They don't have bilateral symmetry like a right and a left. They have radial symmetry like a starfish. They don't have a right and a left, they have radial symmetry, like a starfish, they don't have a front and a back. And they also have a very alien experience of the world. Mike Wong is also a fan. They have a completely different language, a kind of circular language, which gives them an experience of time very different from our own. And this plays on the concept of linguistic relativity where people are said to experience the world differently based on the kinds of language that their thoughts are constructed in.

And that presents us with a huge challenge if we're ever going to hope to talk to alien life. Arrival is based on a short story called Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. Here's the actor Luke Daniels reading from the perspective of the main character. I could see the texture of its gray skin, the corduroy ridges arranged in whorls and loops. There was no smell at all from the looking glass, which somehow made the situation stranger. I pointed to myself and said slowly, Human. Then I pointed to Gary, Human. Then I pointed at each heptapod and said,

What are you? No reaction. I tried again, and then again. One of the Heptapods pointed to itself with one limb, the four terminal digits pressed together. That was lucky. In some cultures a person pointed with his chin. If the Heptapod hadn't used one of its limbs, I wouldn't have known what gesture to look for. I heard a brief fluttering sound and saw a puckered orifice at the top of its body vibrate. It was talking. Then it pointed to its companion and fluttered again. To write this short story, Ted Chiang spent

years researching linguistics. When Jamie interviewed him for her book, she asked if he put the same amount of thought into the Heptapods. And so I asked him if the aliens in the story are comprehensible to him, if he knows what's going on, if they have an interiority, if he knows why they do what they do. And right away he said no, that they have to remain mysterious to him and opaque to him in order to still be alien. I really admire his restraint because they're his invention. He could imagine a motivation for them. He could imagine his way into their minds, but he doesn't. I asked Jamie what are her favorite examples of stories that push the boundaries of how life could evolve differently.

She mentioned a novel that was technically not set on another planet. It was about parallel versions of Earth. The Amber Spyglass is the third book in Philip Pullman's series, His Dark Materials. A character named Mary travels to a parallel Earth where she meets a species called the Muleifa. One of the things that comes up a lot in evolutionary biology in thinking about what life might be like on other worlds, one way to think about it is in terms of niches, what niches are filled or empty. And if you look at life on earth, essentially every fillable niche is filled. Water, microbes in rocks, things that live in the trees, things that live under the trees, things that live underground, things that fly in the air. But one thing that often comes up, it's like, why hasn't

life evolved to be able to do this, is wheels. There are examples of animals that turn their body into a wheel and will roll as sort of an escape mechanism because it's very fast. But the reason, the two reasons, that wheels are not worth evolving, why they're not a good solution to the problems of life, is you need flat surfaces to roll on, otherwise it's not advantageous, and you need the wheel to be able to move freely around the axle. That would be two separate body parts.

How could you do that? And in the Amber Spyglass, Pullman gets around this in two ways. He's imagining an environment that has flat bands of cooled lava, I think, that essentially make roads. And the animals, the muleifa, have co-evolved with these giant trees that make these big seed pods.

And the seed pod is the wheel, and the muleifa like hook a claw into it, which is the axle. The muleifa spent much of their time, to begin with, in maintaining their wheels. By deftly lifting and twisting the claw, they could slip it out of the hole, and then they used their trunks to examine the wheel all over, cleaning the rim, checking for cracks. The claw was formidably strong, a spur of horn or bone at right angles to the leg, and slightly curved so that the highest part in the middle bore the weight as it rested on

the inside of the hole. And after she'd seen a number of the villagers sampling, testing, checking the state of their wheels and their claws, she began to wonder which would come first, wheel or claw, rider or tree. The Muleifa also have an unusual body shape. Where instead of being sort of shaped like a rectangle, you know, if you look at a horse from above, their front legs are the front corners of the rectangle, their rear legs are in the back of the rectangle. The Muleifa are diamond shaped, where they have one limb in the center in the front, one limb in the center in the back, and then two on the side that they push with

sort of like they're skateboarding and they hold the wheels in the front and rear legs. And it's amazing. But when they produced the live-action version for HBO, they decided to make the Muleifa look more like four-legged mammals on Earth. The effects supervisor said he didn't want the audience to be distracted by the quote unorthodox weird movement of the creatures as they were described in the book. He wanted them to be less alien, more relatable. Jamie thought that was a missed opportunity. That's why she really likes the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Flem.

In the book, a ship of cosmonauts is orbiting an oceanic planet, which appears to be sentient. In fact, the planet has psychic powers which can affect their minds. And that is pretty much all the humans know about it, but not for lack of trying. This academic discipline of solaristics

has sprung up around this discovery. I feel like that is a really realistic representation of what first contact could lead to. It's not gonna be, aha, now we know, we found them, we talked to them. It's going to be decades of debate and inquiry and investigation and theorizing, trying to make sense of something really alien.

I ran my fingertips over the green and brown almanac of solaristics. Someone fond of paradoxes and sufficiently stubborn could go on doubting that the ocean was a living being, but it was impossible to deny the existence of its mind. It had become quite clear that it was only too aware of our presence above it. That statement alone disconfirmed the entire expansive wing of solaristics that declared the ocean to be a world unto itself, a being unto itself, such that it supposedly knew nothing of the existence of

external phenomena or objects. Whether they liked it or not, human beings had to take cognizance of a neighbor that still lay in the path of their expansion and was harder to grasp than the whole of the rest of the universe. The idea of first contact may be exciting or frightening, but the truth is it is very unlikely to happen, at least not in the way that we've seen in science fiction. unlikely to happen, at least not in the way that we've seen in science fiction. Mohamed Noor says, if we find anything in our lifetimes, it's probably going to be very small, like microbial life in the oceans of one of Jupiter's moons. And that just doesn't show up in sci-fi. It's very, very, very rare that we see some sort of

microbial life. And that's often what they're thinking of, at least when they're thinking of just the most likely kind of life. And that's often what they're thinking of, at least when they're thinking of it, it's just the most likely kind of life. But that's kind of a boring answer, not a boring answer, but it's like, if that's the case, why is there even a whole field of astrobiology? Why is there so much discussion going on

about the variety of life that could exist out there? For me personally, and I think for most astrobiologists as well, I think finding that microbial life that's completely not related to our life would be not boring at all. It would be phenomenally interesting because what it says about just understanding life, because again, like when we think about life, we have one origin. Everything that we're working with comes from that single origin. If we were to find something with that different origin, then our ability to extrapolate what life in general means would

be dramatically increased. It would be like literally more than double, right? Jamie was also disappointed when she learned that these science fiction scenarios will probably just stay in the realm of science fiction, at least in our lifetimes. Then she made peace with it. It really is that in writing this book and needing to learn so much about life on earth in order to

be able to write about the possibilities of life on other worlds I just became very fascinated by life on earth and very appreciative of life on earth and all of the weirdness and diversity that we have here it's like I stopped needing aliens as much. that we have here, it's like I stopped needing aliens as much. Everything on Earth that is not human is alien to us. If we want to understand other creatures, we don't need to travel the galaxy. Before we make first contact, we have a lot more practicing to do at home. That is it for this week. Special thanks to Jamie Green, Michael Wong, and Mohamed Noor. And thanks to Luke Daniels who did the readings. I have links to all of their works in the show notes. And thank you to one of my listeners, Maria, who suggested this topic. My assistant

producer is Stephanie Billman. Another one of Jamie Green's favorite books about aliens is Octavia Butler's novel Dawn. You can hear a reading from that book in my 2022 episode Octavia Butler Revisited. You can learn more about Solaris in my 2017 episode Beyond the Iron Curtain. If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode from last year, How to Go to Infinity and Beyond, where I talked with engineers and scientists about what science fiction ships would make sense in real space travel. There are so many more examples of aliens that I didn't have room to include. Let me know on the show's Facebook or Instagram pages which ones you think are the most unique

in their designs. In case you missed our announcement, we are starting a new show called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show, only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. Next month we're kicking off the spooky season by talking with Brendan Grafius. His books explore the intersection of religion and horror. The best way to support Imaginary Worlds is to donate on Patreon.

At different levels, you get either free Imaginary World stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can also get access to our new show, Between Imaginary Worlds, which comes included with

the ad-free version of the show that you get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at ImaginaryWorldsPodcast.org. What is it about the supernatural that's captivated us for generations? Is it the mysterious allure of the unknown? The heart-pounding thrill of an unexplainable sighting? Or the creeping fear that a life-changing encounter could happen to you? Sightings is the new series that puts you at the center of the world's strangest unexplained events. From Roswell to Amityville to Loch Ness and beyond, each episode combines a never-before-heard story

of an infamous supernatural encounter with mind-bending investigations that will leave you questioning what's real and what's impossible. Enter the unexplained with Sightings, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.