Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - How to Find Aliens | Jaime Green (#327)

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

Watch the full video on youtube here: https://youtu.be/EY8b5g31j44 Welcome author Jaime Green! We discuss her moving and delightful book about the possibility and actuality of alien life. The discussion covers a range of topics, from the role of waste of space to the significance of life on Earth. The episode also delves into other scientific questions, such as the definition of a planet, the simulation of the Drake equation, and the morality of abortion from a religious perspective. The episode concludes with a discussion on the potential impact of discovering alien life on society. Jaime Green is a science writer, essayist, editor, and teacher, and she is series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia, and her writing has appeared in Slate, Popular Science, The New York Times Book Review, American Theatre, Catapult, Astrobites, and elsewhere. Jaime Green is interested in the fundamental nature of life and how it arises. She is working to abstract from Earth's chemistry to gain a broader understanding of what distinguishes living matter from inanimate matter. Jaime recognizes that defining life is a difficult task and that traditional definitions may not be useful in understanding the complexity of living systems. Her work is focused on unraveling many of the mysteries surrounding the origins of life, and she is regarded as a leading author in this field. https://www.jaimegreen.net/ Related Episodes: Life’s Edge with Carl Zimmer: https://youtu.be/s8B4eHcsWKQ Lee Cronin assembly theory: https://youtu.be/aC8yIU7gE5w Sarah Rugheimer extrasolar planets with a particular focus on atmospheric biosignatures :https://youtu.be/w5DxU-lPYK4 Sara Seager: Life in the Galaxy search for exoplanets the smallest lights in the univ.: https://youtu.be/88FMsX745rs Paul Davies the Goldilocks enigma what is life: https://youtu.be/KgK0RW5GeoA Sara Walker is deputy director of the pioneering Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science:https://youtu.be/0Iklfzmqz88 Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are researchers who are working on this is how life in general arises in general, trying to abstract from Earth's chemistry and look at what life fundamentally is. What is the distinction between when matter is ruled by the laws of physics and when something else kicks in? One of the big challenges to that is that we don't have a theoretical understanding of what life is. I talk in the book and people often ask me about like, we don't have a definition for life. And it's true, we don't. But that's not because we haven't found it yet. It's because life isn't the sort of thing for which definitions are useful. Welcome, dear listeners, to this new book edition of Into the Impossible with author Jamie Green discussing her book,

The possibility of life, science, imagination, and our quest for kinship in the cosmos. If you're a regular listener, you know that your host, Professor Keating, has done many episodes addressing the big questions of life. What is it? How did it start? Are we alone in the universe? Although Brian maintains that life is unique to Earth, in recent years, the discovery of exoplanets and the field of astrobiology has exploded. This discussion covers the possibility of alien life, the origin and nature of life and the significance of life on earth. The episode delves into religious and moral questions Jamie grapples with. What would happen to society if life was proven to exist beyond earth?

If you love pondering the big questions like The Origin of Life, please keep into the impossible in your feeds by subscribing and following. Help us evolve by paying it forward with a shared and curious friends. To see the video version of this interview, jump over to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, that's DR. Brian Keating, and subscribe there too. There you can find many more episodes on the topics of astrobiology, exoplanets, and the origins of life with Carl Zimmer, Sarah Seeger, Sarah Walker, Sarah Rookheimer, Lee Cronin, Paul Davies, and more. Let us know what you think of the show in the form of a review like this one on Apple Podcasts from KG&BK.

Brian's podcast and YouTube channel are great fun for the layman to be introduced to fascinating insights, exhilarating theories, and mind-expanding ideas. Brian has a knack for metaphor to help explain. And now, ponder the possibility of life with Jamie Green on Into the Impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome everybody to what promises to be a very lively and lifelike discussion of the possibility and the actuality of life with none other than friend of the friend of the show, Jamie Green. How are you, Jamie? Hi, I'm good.

Thanks for having me. Joining us from the spiciest state of all, the nutmeg state. Not far from where I had my own origin of life event long, long ago. But you are a good friend and colleague or at least a partial connection to my friend, Shelly Wright, an esteemed professor here. One of my highest, greatest accomplishments was that I was on the search committee leading it to hire Shelly. and it's just such a delight to have her. And I wouldn't know about you without her

because she tweeted out this wonderful book by her friend, Jamie Green. And I was on Twitter. And then I tried to find you on Twitter just to tweet at you to remind you about this. And I can't find you anymore. What happened? Did their Twitter bird die?

Are you still on Twitter? I am. Okay. That's alarming. My name is very easy to misspell. Well, isn't the rule that Jamie as a man is with an I-E and for a female it's AI artificial intelligence? No, it's not because a lot of female J-M-E-E also spell it J-A-M-I-E.

Like in that form, it's sort of short for James, but it's also like the, I don't know. It's, you know, my parents wanted it to be spelled interestingly and they succeeded. Yeah, it's got AI and it's got me in it. And it's got a J. So that's French, too. So it's got everything. It's got I am me and I am also French for artificial intelligence. Jay, it's great to meet you digitally.

We've been talking for weeks and weeks now about this possibility of getting you on the show and you said yes. So, Jimmy, we pulled out all the stops. We normally have a nice pink hue in the background here at the Into the Impossible Studios. But now you'll notice there's a greenish hue. That's just for you. Ah. Settle. him. And speaking of visual delights, the cover of this wonderful book is beautiful. It's artistic

and it's mesmerizing. And as we discuss, the first thing I always talk about when I have an author grace me with her presence on my podcast is to judge her book by its cover. So I'm asking you to now take out the copy that you have. I have it in audio and printed form and describe the title, the origin story of the title, the cover art, and the subtitle of this wonderful new book. So the possibility of life, I had known that this would be the title. I had the idea to write a book like this, or a book about this topic, for over a decade. And that was always the title that I had in mind. That was the title of the essay series that I wrote in like 2017 or so that led to this book.

Because it just, it captures everything about it for me. You know, it's that, it is a phrase that's familiar. You know, oh, the possibility of life on other worlds, the possibility of life, et cetera, et cetera. But I like not putting the of on other worlds on it, you know, and it's just all the possibilities. And that's also what it means to me, that it's not just, oh, what's the possibility of life on Mars? It's what are all of the possibilities of life itself. So that had always been with me. The subtitle was, as often happens in publishing, something that was ironed out through a lot of brainstorming between me, my agent, my editor.

They really didn't want aliens or extraterrestrials to be like named in the subtitle. I think when I was first writing the book and when I wrote the book. the book proposal, the subtitle was something like how we imagine aliens. And my publisher wanted it to be a lot broader. And so I sent them a bunch of possibilities, and they went for this one, science, imagination, and our quest for kinship in the cosmos. In the UK, it has a slightly different subtitle. They put a U in there somewhere.

They put an extraneous U. Although they say Cosmos, fantastic. How do they say, like, Cosmos? I don't know. They pronounce Cosmos in a way that I wouldn't expect, but it's just searching for kinship in the cosmos is the UK subtitle. Okay. Yeah, the UK, so the book came out in the UK and the Commonwealth

the same week it did in the U.S., but it has the different subtitle and a totally different cover, which even like further abstracts the alienness. Like all of this looks like, it reminds me of the Burgess Shale. Like it looks like ancient, you know, flora and fauna. But they're all fantastical, you know, combinations of real things. I feel like the UK cover really echoes the cover for Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life, which is a book that I adore that my UK publisher was using as a comp title.

And I was like, I hadn't read it at that point. And I was like, okay, this is a book about fungi. Like I get that it was a big seller and you want to compare my book. And then I read it. And I was like, oh, no, this is actually, even though it's about fungi, a very similar approach of just looking at the scientific question through the science and also through what it means to us as people. So I was like, yeah, I am happy for the cover in the UK to sort of echo or evoke associations with that book. But in the U.S., it's this lovely sort of illustrated cover. And I very early on in the process, because I am a bossy overachiever, created a mood board for covers for my publisher before they had even asked.

Because I wanted to make sure that it didn't look just like an astronomy book, that when you looked at the shelf, and I knew it would be on the science shelf. But I wanted it to be clear that it is about science but is also about culture, about meaning. I wanted it to feel a little more literary sort of that like if someone loves reading essays, that they'll know that this is a book for them. So I made this mood board with a lot of art and some covers that I liked. I knew that I didn't want it to be like black and navy blue, you know, which is what so many. Most books. Right.

Like this book behind me that she can't see that's my first book. Right. Because it's really, it's conveying specifically what it is. And this, I have a lot of science and a lot about space, but it's not an astronomy book. No. And so actually this image on the cover is by an artist who I follow on Instagram. And I put some of her work in the mood board. And my publisher decided they really liked her work.

and said go to her site and pick three to five images that I feel like would be a good background. And this was one of them. Or is this the second one? There was a lot of back and forth because the first cover that they put together with her work was beautiful and looked like an astronomy book. I was like, this is a beautiful cover, but it's not the right cover for my book. And so it took a lot of work to get the right feeling, to find the right font. that were like serious enough but not too serious. I really cared about the mood.

But I love this cover so much. You know, the fact that it's a view of a planet and stars, but it has a very illustrated feeling and has the... It's whimsical, but it's also evocative. Exactly. And, you know, has pinks and oranges and in addition to the requisite dark purple and the star field. So, yeah, I love it very much.

Well, I appreciate you setting the record for describing and judging the book by its cover. Because normally when I have somebody on, they say, oh, my publisher chose it and they told me what title it was. But yeah, it sounds like you like me are a little bit of a control freak when it comes to books, especially your first book like your first kid. You tend to over control on. But you'll loosen up if you do have more children. I found. So behind you, you don't have to pull it out, is a book by past guest, I should say, husband and father of past guest Sasha Sagan and Druryan.

And that's Cosmos. And Cosmos makes a not insignificant role in this book. And I want to read a quote that I'd never heard before I read your lovely book. And it was, it is the following here. It says, Carl said in 1973, this is incredible. He was talking about an encyclopedia for constructing or discovering life. He quoted Thomas Carlyle. And he says, a somewhat crusty old fellow upon thinking about the stars said, a sad spectacle, if they be inhabited. What's scope for misery and folly?

If they are not inhabited, what a waste of space. And of course, that plays a big role in the movie Contact featuring probably the caricature of past guest and friend of the show, Jill Tartar, as you talk about in the book. But Sagan says, I suspect we'll be talking about this. Is it possible that in a universe teeming with stars and planets, there is not a multitude of other inhabited worlds? And if there is a multitude of inhabited worlds, Carl said, then what is the nature of their inhabitants? And what are the possible aspects of our contact with them? I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm a skeptic. I don't believe, I believe with very high levels of confidence that not only is there no technological life elsewhere in the universe,

but there may not be any other life in the universe besides that which came from Earth via a process you discussed called panspermia. We'll get into that. Where do you fall? Are you, did you come away from this book? Did you enter this book with a preconceived notion that you're going to fulfill the Ellie Arrowway-like dreams, your favorite, your favorite name and all of literary history? Did you come away with a hope?

You know, you prove it, or did you come away somehow discouraged? How did you start off to chart your own non-biological, but your evolution, ideological evolution throughout the writing of this book? It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month.

Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. explore GoogleFi wireless plans today plus taxes and government fees googleify wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage i think um you know the so much of the premise of the book and the the whole introduction is about like most books on this topic are about skepticism versus optimism about likely unlikely unlikely common rare unique you know what are the odds And I really set for myself the goal of not talking about odds in the book, that part of what the title means to me is that I want to look at what are the possibilities. If there is life, what might it be like? If there is life, how could we understand it? How could it help us understand life on earth? What would we learn from it? So I do think that in making that decision, it's sort of like inhabiting a role that you're acting.

I really came to take up that mindset where it's like a real agnosticism where it's like, I don't know. And I do think that when people, including Carl Sagan himself, say, how could there be so many stars, so many planets and no other life? my answer is like, well, there absolutely could be. You know, this happened with a JWST deepfield image. People would post that and say, look at all this. How could we be alone? I'm like, well, very easily, let me tell you how. Yes.

And especially when people mean, how could we be the only conscious animals, how could we be the only technological civilization, quite possibly? That's one where the more I learned, especially in terms of learning about the origin of life and the origin of complex life, it does seem like my feeling is we don't really know because we only have one example. And so we have no idea if, you know, this is the common way for planets to go or what. But the one thing that I think we can extrapolate from is that life seems to have. have emerged on Earth just about as soon as conditions allowed. And that, to me, makes it feel like you only have to roll the dice a few times before you get life. But then, going from roughly bacterial life to cells with complex interstructures,

which were able to evolve multicellularity, structural complexity, you know, plants, animals, people, all of that, it was about two billion years. And that's a lot of rolling the dice. And I feel like the origin of eukaryotic cells feels lucky. There are very smart people who argue in the other direction. You know, I am not a evolutionary biologist. I don't have a PhD in anything. But, you know, it just, it's so hard to say because so much.

of the optimism is inspired by desire. Yeah, it's a faith-based statement. Yeah, it's, I don't think of it as a faith-based statement because I don't think it's based on no information, but it is inspired by what we want to be true, which I guess is a way that you could look at faith. Yeah, there's belief versus evidence. Like I would say, I don't believe in gravity. I have evidence for gravity.

Right. And getting back to the point of the waste of space that you talk about. In the book, I point out, you know, I've been to Antarctica twice, and Antarctica's one-seventh of the continents of the whole planet Earth. There is life there. There's about, you know, a couple billion seagull-like creatures that are like on seagulls on steroids called skuas. There's a couple of billion penguins. But those are only at the coast. At the South Pole, there's nothing. There's just people. And those are brought by large military cargo planes. So if you just said, I'm going to take a flat prior distribution. I'm going to say that equal probability of being on equal land

mass where there is a continent in Antarctica, you'd be horribly wrong. The biomass is insignificant compared to the continental mass. It's bigger than the United States almost. So, you know, for those reasons, I don't think that a possibility, you know, to use the loaded word in your title, which I, which I love, but that doesn't connote probability. And they're very different things, right? Yeah. And I think, you know, once you get into if the universe is infinite, like, yes, that when it's infinite, then you have a million, infinite me, right? So then you definitely have other, but talking about just sort of practically. Our galaxy, yeah. Right. Because also, if we're hoping for a detection or communication, it's almost entirely constrained to the galaxy. There has been work,

Jason Wright did some searching for signs of possible, like basically like mega civilizations in other galaxies. So there would be ways to detect that. But for the most part, we're talking about just within our galaxy. I also think that there's something about when we look at all that space and we say, well, surely there must be life if there's that much space. Otherwise, what a waste of space. That rests on this assumption that life is the purpose of the universe.

Which is a very... It's a theoretical statement. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I wrote a piece when those first JWST images came out about that impulse to see all that vastness and say, surely there must be something else. And I spoke to an anthropologist, Lisa Messeri at Yale, who studies, you know, how we engage with space and science and technology. And she said something fantastic, which was... look at these galaxies, they have their own relationships, like gravitational relationships between

each other. They don't need us to be meaningful, to have stuff going on. You know, we are not necessarily the point. There's other stuff happening. And I found that just really, a really, like, moving way of looking at it because we look for meaning in the universe. And one of the ways we do that is by looking for life elsewhere in the cosmos, but I think also noticing and observing and recognizing the absence of life or the things that are other than life is also really important. Why do you say that? I'm not disagreeing, but I think there's this notion I've talked to a lot of atheists on this podcast and listen to many, you know, people like Sam Harris or even this person wrote this book called 4,000 Weeks, Blanky on his name, he's a philosopher, maybe.

Oliver Bergman, that's his name. And he talks about what's called cosmic insignificance therapy. The fact that we're so small compared to, you know, let alone the galaxy of the universe, but we're small compared to the planet Jupiter. But what does that matter? I mean, a tiny little virus, 1,000th the diameter of the human hair, shut down the entire planet for the better part of three years. So size is irrelevant. If you're talking about like lifetime, you know, we live 75 years, okay, so the Galapagos tortoise that lives 160 years,

is that more significant than us? I find with atheists, they're kind of, they're kind of consumed. They say, oh, I see this Hubble deep field or web deep field, as you're discussing, and I'm just filled with awe and it just gives me meaning. And I'm, where do you get your meaning from as an atheist necessary? And I don't know your, and that's not the point of this question. But how do you react to those statements that that somehow gives, you know, gives, obviates the teleological purpose that you just mentioned by saying, oh, well, it's so vast and we're so insignificant. I don't find that very convincing. For me, it's not about insignificance. And I find my meaning on earth, engaging with, you know, and that was also part of the process that I went through writing this

book was really coming to appreciate life on earth so much more, which is another part of my like, I don't care. You know, it's wonderful to think about and it's fascinating to think about, but I don't need the answers from off world. Excuse me. But I find contemplating that vastness, I find it beautiful rather than meaningful, where it doesn't change how I live my life. It's sort of like it's the sublime a little bit, which I know is related to a sense of, insignificance. I think it's an appreciation, not of just aesthetic beauty, but of the diversity of existence. That life on earth, there's so much going on. There's so much life. We have so much

occupying ourselves every day, our daily concerns, political concerns, science, relationships, like more than any one person can handle. And then there's so much more beyond that. So I think it's a diversity thing where Lisa Messeri, this anthropologist was specifically talking about one of the early JWST images, which is of Stefan's Quintet, which is five galaxies, four of which are gravitationally interacting, the fifth of which is just like in our view,

but is not actually part of what's going on. And she talked about how we have an image that shows us that these galaxies have some sort of relationship physically. They are in motion. They are affecting each other, changing each other. And recognizing that alienness of physics, of astronomy, it's sort of like it takes me out of myself for a second to realize that there is something so big and so different happening there. It's sort of the same thing like, you know, thinking about a different, you know, a bat, for example, or an octopus or some earth creature that because of their environment and their different senses has an incomprehensibly different experience of the world. Trying to imagine that is also a very meaningful act for me. And it's a similar thing of like trying to connect with things that actually can't.

be connected with. That's right. Yeah, I agree for sure. And I think, you know, there's this notion that as the more we know, we're sort of endowed with these abilities to basically make ourselves inured to the awe and majesty. And, you know, I would say scientists are kind of like on a daily basis. We see the equivalent of a Grand Canyon or, you know, like you said, the Stefan's Quintent. And you're looking at things that are billions, you know, hundreds of millions of light years away.

we're talking about speculation in my field and the cosmic microrate background and the inflationary epoch when the universe might have come into existence a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. And oh yeah, we just, that's literally what I get paid to do. So a lot of times an ordinary normal person who's not a scientist, you know, they see the Grand Canyon. This is awesome. Literally it fills you with awe. Scientists, geologist, sees it and, oh, that's uplift. That's a schist formation and so forth. But getting back to to the book. It has a thematic kind of development where you start from, you know, more primitive ideas and you move into more very advanced ideas leading up to technology

and so forth. I wonder, what would it take you? You detailed, and I love this because I often bring this up with my friends. I say, what would happen the day after life, alien life is discovered? I'll suspend my disbelief. I'll say, and I'll ask Sean Carroll or something. I'll say, what would happen? And they'll answer, oh, it would be life transforming. I say, no, it wouldn't, nothing would happen. The next day, two days later, nothing would happen. I'd say the next day something. Yeah, it would be like, but, and there's proof of it because you detail seven different

events claim discoveries of extraterrestrial life or intelligence in the last 50 years of the Drake equation alone. One of those is in the movie contact. It's actually not CGI, right? Bill Clinton is standing on the white house, this discovery. If it goes down, it will be the greatest discovery. This rock speaks to us. And that was a real meteorite, right?

which, by the way, if you have a .edu email address, you can get a real meteorite from Briankeeting.com. I have a media email address. Then go for it. I will send you on it. So it's all my students that I want to encourage to pay advantage to these awesome authors like it to have a lot. So until maybe 2017 or something,

that was still sort of hotly contested, is it this, or in scientific circles. In other words, for two decades, people lived with the notion that the public had in their mind that alien life had been discovered. And yet it hadn't. And nothing changed. So how do you feel about these? From the wow signal to things like the phosphine life that past guest Sarah Seeger discussed on my podcast not long ago, which goes into the – I would say it appears on page A1, the New York Times, above the fold.

and then when the retraction comes, if it ever comes, it's on page C-17 of the Saturday paper that nobody reads. So what do we do about this, the hype cycle of alien life? It's a real challenge because like it's how science works. There is like the phosphine paper that all, you know, unless someone is being extremely irresponsible, they're saying, we found an interesting signal or artifact and we think that we, our team, has done the best that we can to eliminate other, to, you know, cross off the list, all the other known sources for phosphine or ways that a rock

might look like this or sources for this signal. But, you know, further work is required. There has not, you know, the phosphine paper didn't say, we found life on Venus. But it's exciting and there isn't that much room for nuance in headlines. So I don't really know. I do, you know, it is sort of a problem, not even a problem. It's just like it's how journalism works. It's what people want to talk about. So I don't know.

I don't have a solution for that. And yeah, I mean, I remember there was a leak of like, just a couple months after the phosphine story broke, I think it was the Guardian leaked that the breakthrough team at Berkeley had found a signal that was clearly technological and they hadn't yet figured out what was up with it. And that made big news. And everyone on that team,

I assume was pretty frustrated because they were like, we weren't ready to talk about this. And that made lots of headlines. And then I only found out that they had figured out the earthly origin of that technological signal because someone tweeted from the conference presentation that the researcher gave saying, oh yeah, we figured out it was, you know, whatever it was on Earth. Like that made no headlines whatsoever. And that's very tricky.

But as for what would happen, I think it also really depends on what the find is. Is it a microbe on Mars? Is it a fossilized microbe on Mars or, you know, something kick. around to the clouds of Venus versus a signal of clear technological origin or other proof of a technological civilization. Absolutely. Yeah. Hugely different meaning.

And I think no matter what, though, there are going to be people who don't care for whom it doesn't affect their lives. They're going to be people who care and are frustrated that there isn't more information or anything to do about it. I think it's extremely unlikely that even if we do find technological evidence that we're going to be able to enter into any sort of conversation.

You know, oh, who are you? What do you do? What are you like? Do you have any ideas for climate change? You know, the sort of stuff that Carl Sagan dreamed of, it would just have to be so perfectly lined up, perfectly timed, so close in space, so similar in cognition and language,

that I think if we find a signal and can't have a conversation, I think a lot of people are going to be let down because that's what both science and science fiction have sort of primed them to hope for. Yeah. And actually, I think the timing of the 1996, you know, Bill Clinton, L.E. Iroa, you know, cement mashup. That was also time when Dan Golden at NASA was trying to gin up more. funding and attention for astrobiology and have been cut and so forth. So that was kind of propitious for them, perhaps. But I think long term, these things do damage, ultimately to the researchers who promote it. And I've talked to Sarah Seeger. She's a very good friend. I've had her over. And she's, you know, and I think she's, she's very cautious and capable. But it's almost

like an irresistible force, especially for young people when they find out, you know, there's an implication of what they're doing and it kind of transcends. I always say, you know, there's an old joke about professors that we have such heated battles because the stakes are so low. There's some truth to that, and if you've ever attended a faculty meeting, but the bottom line is a lot of what we do is significant, but it's not, it may not be meaningful in that it gives an imbued sense of meaning or purpose to scientists, many of whom who, you know, will say that they're, you know, agnostic or so forth. And I'm not, I never claim you have to be religious or practice anything to have this sense of wonder or awe. I will ask you at the end some existential questions of the meaning

of life. And Andrewian, who's an atheist as well, you know, she, she answered the question of, you know, what do you think is the most important piece of advice to your former self? And she said, you know, to walk, walk humbly, act justly. And that was it. And that's a quote from the biblical book of Mika. and I said, Anne, you left off the last phrase, which is walk, you know, walk humbly with your God. And she was like, yeah, that's right. I'm going to leave it on. But obviously she has tons and tons of meaning. And she figures prominently in here.

I see this book is sort of half, you know, like cultural anthropology. And as you say, by learning about aliens, we're learning about ourselves. Do you think that is enough sort of, in a sense, like is enough to catapult it from being culturally important, but not necessarily. as maybe scientifically well respected. As you know, Carl Sagan never got inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, which he's definitely deserved. He was a phenomenal scientist. And you outline many of the scientific advancements and achievements. Do you think that there is still this, you know, prosthetic farhead problem of aliens that Adam Frank has spoken about? He's also in the book. Do you think that it can be made completely legitimate, like, say, high energy particle physics,

if you are dealing with, you know, tentacles and crashes in Roswell and stuff like that. Well, I mean, I think it can, but I think that the legitimate science wouldn't deal with the tentacles and crashes in Roswell. But there is a lot of cultural baggage. I've also heard it called the giggle factor, you know, looking for little green men. Or women. Yes, little green people, little green creatures. It's so tricky. I mean, there are quotes I have in the book that use men to stand in for humans.

And I'm like, well, that's just, that's what they were saying historically. And the phrase, as we know it, is little green men. But the image of little green men is very gender neutral, which is the thing that I'm sure someone other than me has written about. But I'm just like, I'm not interested in the UFO stuff. There are other books on that. I do think that it has a little bit of the giggle factor. I think there's also the question of what the scientific rigor is. This was a question I had going into it in terms of SETI, which is like,

What's the hypothesis? Is it just a search? Because, you know, one of the many various freelance jobs that I have is I work with graduate students applying for National Science Foundation graduate fellowships. And I work with them on their research proposals. And I've through that come to learn that for that for that grant, the NSF does not like to fund open-ended questions. I'm going to go count how many fish are in this lake. I'm going to characterize this. whatever, they really want to see a hypothesis. And that's just something that's gotten in my head as a way of showing, I mean, this doesn't apply to the setty researchers, but like a way of critically engaging with the research. I think it's also an act of creativity and imagination to say, here's my hypothesis, here's how I'm designing the experiment. But I made the mistake of saying to a seti researcher, like a senior researcher, not a graduate student or anything, like, well, but this work isn't like hypothesis driven. You're just seeing if there's something out there.

And he was like, no, no, no, no. This is rigorous hypothesis driven. We hypothesize that within this space on the sky, within this frequency space, that we will see this sort of signal. And we go and test that hypothesis. And so it's sort of like, you know, you have the entire 360 degree physical space of the sky or the galaxy around us. and you have all of the various frequencies that you could be listening at and the various times.

But it's just like what is the difference between that and a sort of open-ended search? I don't totally know. And I think that might be part of the challenge in terms of, like, is the hypothesis just someone is out there? but it is a very important scientific question and it's one worth asking because I don't think that we should assume that no one is out there. We should look, you know, like we have the ability to look. We have barely scratched the surface. And if there is someone out there transmitting at us, like let's, I think it would be very foolish to not check. Right. Yeah, that question is the hawking question that you bring.

up, which is whether we should advertise the dinner menu for the residents of 51 Pegasus B. I have a lot of questions for my audience. I always list of questions. You can answer them. Rather, you can ask me them on YouTube and the comments section at Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube or on Twitter or Instagram where I sometimes post stuff and will link to Jamie's lovely feeds there. Now that I know that they are not dead, they are in fact not possibly alive.

are definitely alive. So one question comes from someone named Little Man, and he asks on Twitter, is it reasonable to consider a biogenesis as a science? I know it's an aggressive question, and assumptions are being challenged. But the assumptions that people start with, who study this, which don't seem to be falsifiable, nor is there any experimentation showing non-life to life transition. What am I missing? So what do you say to little man over here on Twitter?

Yeah. Is it legitimate? I think it is. I mean, I think the study of the origin of life is a fascinating field to me. And I touch on it in the book and I'm like very interested in continuing to learn and write about it. There is an unanswerable question, which researchers in the field agree is not what they are pursuing and not something that will ever be answered, which is the historical question of how life began on Earth. We don't have a time machine.

We're not going to know it. I mean, in terms of all the sci-fi that I... Speak for yourself. Speak for yourself. All right. If you're working on it, that's cool. But there's even, there's an episode of Star Trek the next generation where Q brings Picard back to the moment.

He's like, right there in that pool. And I'm like, oh, I wish we could do that. So no one is really thinking that they're going to say, this is how it happened. There are some researchers who are working on being able to say this is how it plausibly could have happened. And we don't even have the answer to that. Then there are researchers who are working on this is how life in general arises in general, trying to abstract from Earth's chemistry and look at what life fundamentally is. What is the distinction between when matter is ruled by the laws of physics and when something else. kicks in. One of the big challenges to that is that we don't have a theoretical understanding of what

life is. I talk in the book and people often ask me about like, we don't have a definition for life. And it's true, we don't. But that's not because we haven't found it yet. It's because life isn't the sort of thing for which definitions are useful. And this is drawing on the work of philosopher of science, Carol Cleland, physicist Sarah Walker. I don't want to make it seem like I figured this out myself. Sarah's been a guest and Sarah's been on the show and so is Lee Kronin and they're both mentioned in that. Exactly. Yeah. And so Cleland points out that definitions are useful for understanding what words mean.

But they don't tell us fundamentally what like how the universe works. So I don't need to know what L-I-F-E means. Just like saying gravity is the force that holds me to the earth doesn't tell me anything about how the universe works. It doesn't help me understand anything scientifically. So a definition for life isn't going to actually help. And that's why the definition project, there's always something is included that you, like, oh, my definition accidentally includes fire or excludes mules, because definitions are not useful here.

But we don't have a theory of life. And it's questionable whether we can work towards one with only one example. Sarah and Lee are working on developing a theory of life that off the idea that what's fundamental about life is complexity and the ability to store information sort of to have a memory that persists through time. But Cleland says that you just can't do it from one example. You have to get too abstract. You're not actually drawing from specific evidence. And so we have to go about the search for life and the study of the origin of life. differently by sort of not trying to be too constrained by definitions, but being sort of open-minded,

looking for anomalies, things that are sort of maybe lifelike, and then we dig in deeper there. So it is a tricky field in that we don't have a clear framework yet. And we're sort of trying to find that framework and find evidence to build that framework from and find evidence to support the framework that we don't totally have yet. So that might be the sort of sort of murkiness that was it Little Man on Twitter was talking about that we're sort of trying to design the house and build the house and measure the house all at the same time. Yeah. And so the book is reminiscent of, you know, other topics that we've talked about, other authors we've had on recently, Carl Zimmer, who wrote a book called Life's Edge, and I'll

ask you a question that I asked him and maybe made him squirm a little bit, but we'll see if you'll answer it later on. You're free not to. But we talk with our Ehrushenbaum about his book, The Zoologist Guide to the Galaxy. And there are all sorts of hopes that there could be other signatures of life that perhaps are remotely sensible that we could actually detect from Earth. And I'm going to ask a question. This is from George Anderson over on YouTube this time. And he's asking about the fossil in fossil fuels, which plays a role in things like Adam Frank, who passed guest on the show, Light of the Stars author,

claims global warming could be perceived on another planet as evidence of technological life. But I'm going to gloss over that. I usually say, you know, to get to have this conversation on Riverside.fm, not sponsored, hashtag, not sponsored yet, that, you know, we're communicating over telecommunications, you know, wireless, wired, you know, over trillions of transistors. None of that would be possible without whale oil, you know,

and the death of many trillions and trillions of metric tons of fossil life. And so George Anderson's kind of asking a similar question. I mean, how plausible is that to happen on another planet? That's one question, but he's asking a different question. He's saying, here on Earth, when living things decomposed, they leave carbon in layers. The carbon has rock layers that slide on top of each other during tectonic events, which helps constantly renew our mantle. Are there any other traces of life on other planets that could,

be used as a biomarker, if not a techno marker, but a biomarker, say, plate tectonics on an exoplanet. Is that something we could hope to divine in our lifetimes? I don't know if there's hope for detecting plate tectonics anywhere outside the solar system. There's, I mean, we're beginning to be able to detect what is in the atmospheres of exoplanets. There's work that indicates that we could detect the rotation periods and the sort of layout of continents just by being in terms of sort of like light and dark blotches, which is also part of how you see the spin because you see the stuff moving. But I haven't heard anything about being able to detect plate tectonics on another planet. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. That it's not an idea, but it would...

What were you going to say? Oh, no, go ahead. Yeah. No, I was just going to say, can you say about your feelings on Adam Franks, Professor Franks, speculation about global warming tracers? Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG, Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot.

Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. And host and style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube dice, and crushed ice. Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, U.S. only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See store online for details. I'm not familiar with that. I'm familiar with his work about sort of conceptually using the idea of,

of an Anthropocene as a way to sort of think ourselves through this moment. You know, his book, Light of the Stars, I hope that's what it's called. Yeah. Yeah, makes the argument that like we need to see ourselves within this cosmic community of other civilizations that have hit this bottleneck, this sort of threshold, where our resource use starts making the planet harder for us to live in. And, you know, he models all these different ways that these hypothetical other civilizations, which he argues, like, we should not think of them as hypothetical because he is not a skeptic pessimist like you. That not every – and then, you know, when a civilization realizes the error of their ways and changes their ways, which I wouldn't say we are even at yet, some of them are able to make it through.

Like that's our big, big inspiration. But yeah, I mean, I've also heard about looking for technosignatures like an abundance of elemental silicon on the surface of a planet. I think that's a Jason Wright idea that on an Earth-like planet that would immediately combine with oxygen. You would get a lot of rocks. But if you have a lot of elemental silicon detectable, that could be solar panels. That's how you would get that on Earth. Right. So these ideas of looking for elemental abundances or presences that.

on Earth only exist because of technology. But the problem with all of these, whether it's biosignatures or techno signatures, is they're never going to give us a definitive detection. They're always going to be suggestions or signatures because we don't know that some exoplanet, for whatever reason, doesn't have its own way of keeping a lot of this surprising element in a surprising abundance in the atmosphere on the surface, which just goes back to the problem with the public's expectations for what sort of definitive answers we're going to get. It's related to the abiogenesis thing. We're never going to know historically how it happened on Earth.

We're going to know here's how it could have happened. It's interesting you say that because Carl Zimmer in his book, Life's Edge, which we'll get to in just a second, just only tangentially. It's about this show is about your book. But he really makes it out that it's insipid. You know, we have, we're about to get it. I happen to have that too. We're about to, yeah, he's your neighbor over there. Yeah, in Connecticut. He's in New Haven.

So the nutmeg state produces a lot of spicy authors, right? Okay. Anyway, the claim is that, you know, he visits all these people. He does experiments on platy pie and I don't know if that's the plural or whatever. But anyway, he does all these things in experiments. He makes his own DNA from this and that. And he makes, okay, we're about to discover it. And there are scientists that are really coming up with a definite.

But I like that you're not being wishy-wash. You're taking a stand that this is. And I'm not saying you're right or he's right or you're wrong and he's wrong. But that, you know, there's a lot of like, there are a lot of wishy-wash. Well, we'll know when we see it. You know, it's like pornography, I suppose. But, you know, how can we make progress in a field where there is no definition of what is the thing under study? And he tweeted out, the reason I got him on my podcast, because he tweeted out,

Imagine if astronomers couldn't agree what a planet was. That's where we're at. And I said, I cannot. I got news for you, buddy. Not only is Pluto, you know, kind of still beloved by many of my colleagues and myself, but there's no one definition. Anyway, so I think it's important to take a stand like you're doing and make these claims. I think it's also important to do the research and to support, you know, these kind of investigations.

But as usual, it's the public has always left. in this ambiguous state of, well, scientists made life in a laboratory here in La Jolla and at Craig Vettner's laboratory. No, they didn't. They started with a living cell and they extracted some gulgi bodies and whatever they do over there. And they made it into something. Or, you know, that the meteorites that we talked about or the six, six other signatures that you talk about in this book. And so it's a very precarious thing. But I think scientists have to be careful because if we're not, the public will lose interest, to lose support, and will be out of a job. So anyway, I'm not expecting you to necessarily reply to that. We have more questions from the audience. Do you want to follow up or?

No, I mean, I think it's, yeah, let's take another question. Okay, given that, this is from my friend, Bernie Taylor, who's a cultural anthropologist, kind of independent, given that the Drake equation is based on a statistical analysis of life in our solar system, can the same experience be numerically simulated or projected into the cosmos unless there are exactly the same astronomical conditions. I don't understand the first part of that. Because that, saying that it's based on, you know, what we know on Earth, the Drake equation isn't based on that.

I would say potential answers to the Drake equation. When people try to fill in the variables for the Drake equation, they sometimes try to extrapolate from Earth. But the Drake equation itself, I mean, it wasn't even meant to be solved originally. It was created as an agenda setting exercise at one of the very first setting meetings. I picture Frank Drake like setting up the chairs in a circle in the room and he was like, oh, what should we talk about today? And he wrote, I don't know if the people, if, you know, Carl Sagan and whoever else were in their chairs yet or not, but he

used it to set the agenda where if they wanted to work on trying to, to detect signals from other civilizations, they needed a reasonable assumption. They needed to think that it was reasonable that there might be other civilizations. And so then you say, okay, what determines whether there are other civilizations? It's these factors. And then that means those are the factors that are necessary to investigate in order to establish the worthwhileness of SETI as a field. And so some of those variables at the time were known, like the approximate rate of star formation,

some of them were not known at the time, but are better constrained now. Like how many stars have planets, how many planets are Earth-like, although you'll get anything from like 2% to 40% for Earth-like, depending on whom you ask. And then there's stuff that we absolutely don't know the answer and probably never can know the answer. Like what fraction of planets that have life go on to have intelligent life? Like, you would have to do a survey. It was just not, it's not plausible unless we're talking extremely far future. So I don't think that the Drake equation rests on any assumptions other than what Frank Drake identified as the most important sort of milestones. And there are plenty of steps between,

you know, life arising and intelligence arising. And different people have made different arguments about, oh, this is an important factor. This is a make or break factor. But I don't think that the – Linda Billings calls it the Drake heuristic, which I think is helpful because it reminds us that we're not trying to solve it. There isn't one answer. It's a way of framing discussions. That's right. Yes.

Just another hat tip to our brilliant friend's show. who won the Drake Award the year prior to Frank Drake's passing last year. So I wanted to ask you a controversial question. You're free not to answer it. This is your show. But I asked it in one form or another with Carl Zimmer too. So I figure why not give it a try? So I am Jewish.

I'm a practicing Jew. And in my religion, there is a clear mandate that allows a woman or a person to choose whether or not to abort a fetus at a certain age of development. It's not unlimited. It's not the entirety of their pregnancy, as some laws would have it. But I wonder, I've often asked this, you know, and it's possible to do so and to be stronger about that case. In other words, when is it actually killing or taking the life of another human being and when does it not count? Forgetting about the actual timescale that's delineated in the Talmud and how they came to it or whatnot. I might surmise.

that you might be pro-choice. Correct me if I'm wrong. So if you're pro-choice. Okay, fine. So this is what I ask Carl. Because as well, his book starts off with a quote from Ben Shapiro. He's actually a guest and friend of the show. But he has said things like life starts a conception.

And Carl just radically disagrees with that, but kind of dismisses it because Ben's just a podcaster in his opinion. Anyway, I would like to ask you to do the following thought experiment. We discover unambiguous evidence that there's a fetus. And it's on 51 Pegasus, 51B. and it's just sitting there, it's doing its thing. With that, you know, and so it's life. It's not only life, it's almost like human life. Would that cause you to revisit your pro-choice position?

I know, like, I've had people on my show, and we talked about veganism, and they actually came to veganism from studying the problem, you know, what animals can feel and so forth. They reconsidered their eating meat. You know, I haven't. I only eat meat. But anyway, the point being, did, the, Does investigating life and its improbability, does that impact things on a daily basis in terms of choice versus not choice? No, not at all. Because I don't know what that fetus on another planet is doing, but I imagine it's not inside the body of a pregnant person who is being potentially forced to carry it, birth it, raise it.

You know, my stance on abortion is more about the pregnant person and about bodily autonomy and about being able to choose whether or not you are pregnant or have a child. I have been pregnant. I have had a child. I would not wish that on anyone who does not want to do it. even for someone who wants to do it, it is, it completely overthrows your life. And adoption is not an alternative to pregnancy. Adoption is an alternative to parenting, right? So still being pregnant is, it's a bodily autonomy question. And just like you can't force me to give someone a kidney in order to keep them alive, that has nothing to do with their status as a person.

You can't force someone to be pregnant. It's also not just a biological question. It's incredibly wrapped up with social power structures and who is being given access to abortion and safe abortion. That's why I put the fetus on 50. Right, right, right. Like when we talk about... Well, maybe I should rephrase the question.

Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, no, no, go ahead. No, I was going to say, maybe I could rephrase it. Does that make, would it make you revisit the question of what is life or when life begins, for example? No, because it's not like a fetus is part of life because bodies are alive, just like my hand is proof of life. But if I cut off my hand, it wouldn't be alive. But I don't want to bring it down to viability either because I don't think, I think that that's, it's just trying to move the goalposts. And it's still thinking in the terms of the argument that anti-abortion and anti-choice people are setting,

where they're saying life begins at conception. And pro-choice people say, no, no, no, it begins at like 28 weeks. It begins at viability. It's not about when life begins because life is a process. Life is a system. Life is a state of being. This is, it's not, abortion for me isn't a question about life. it's a question about bodily autonomy and power.

Okay. Okay, good. Yeah, so hopefully we'll look at the constitution of Planet 51B. Right. And we'll see what we can do. Since we're talking about abortion, can I just mention a book? You mentioned so many brilliant people you've talked to. I just, once again, did not expect to talk about abortion, but happened to have it on my desk.

I know. I do have a large stack of books on my desk. But this book, You Are Someone You Love by Hannah Matthews. The subtitle is Reflections from an Abortion Dula. It's a beautifully written, very thoughtful book that also is just about all of the systems of care that are involved in abortion and giving people the tools and opportunities to choose what life they live. Because I think it's also more, it's not just about choosing whether or not to become a parent or whether to be pregnant. It's really about this sort of like, self-determination. It's just a really fantastic book.

And I, as someone who have always thought of myself as pro-choice, came to understand abortion and its place in our lives even more deeply from that. So I just wanted to mention that since you brought it up. All right. We're going to wrap up with a non-controversial question. Trans rights. Trans rights, Jamie. No, gun rights, Jamie.

Oh, not a thing. Guns don't have rights. Just kidding. Just kidding. So we always close with a quote from Sir Arthur C. Clark, who is the namesake of the center that I am associate director. of here at UC San Diego called the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. And it's a quote that is the following. It is the only way of determining the limits of the possible is to venture

beyond them into the impossible. I like to use that as a springboard to ask my beloved guest, such as you, what advice would you give to yourself as a 20-year-old? I don't know your age, but maybe you're not 20 anymore. Go back to when you're 20. We have a lot of young people that listen to this show, young men and women, give them some advice to help them have the courage to do as you have done and go into the impossible. Advice to your former self, please. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind, you told me what Andrian said in her beautiful partial quote from the Bible. Mine is probably much more specific to what I needed to hear at age 20. but I'm going to have to just go with my answer.

It feels so trite, but my answer is stop dieting. Because I mean, I think that that's very, I wish it's something that I could have come too much earlier. But I also think it does connect, I can connect it to bigger ideas, which is the ways that we waste time on fighting ourselves and trying to make ourselves other than we are. rather than embrace ourselves and get to know ourselves and strengthen ourselves and our relationships to ourselves. You know, when you say venturing into the impossible like you have, like I have, I don't know what exactly that is, but I do know that I wish I had wasted less energy and less time reading nutrition labels.

Who knows what that might have freed up my creativity. for. But I think it's the, that's the specific version of it for me, but the bigger thing it resonates with is not trying to constrain yourself into a path or a shape that is not the one that your essence is leading you onto. Well, Jamie, I have good news for you. If you'll subscribe to my newsletter, pay my seminar fee of 99 bucks a week, I will give you the dietary tips that allowed me to drop five pounds from my chin to my stomach. So Jamie Green, phenomenal author. No, I think you've done an incredible job with this book. It's really delightful. It's moving, especially when you talk about your son.

I found that very moving and your father and so forth. And just echoing the meaning that you get from tackling the biggest issues that human beings uniquely, as far as we know, I'll plant a steak. Adam can say whatever he wants. Anyone can say what Jason Wright. There's no evidence for life anywhere else, but right here. So let's take care of it. Let's imbue each moment with meaning. And this book will help you do that.

The Possibility of Life, Jamie Green, a renowned author, reviewed glowingly by past guest a long time ago, Annalie Newitz in The Washington Post as one of the top science books of you. Thank you so much for having me. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening. Keep in touch, inspired and informed by signing up for Professor Keating's Monday magic email at Briankeeting.com slash list. And if you have a dot-EDU domain, we'll send you an artifact older than the earth, forged in the fire of an exploding star, in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment.

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