Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - If Darwin Had A Spaceship | Arik Kershenbaum: The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy (#222)

Episode Date: April 4, 2022

What would a modern-day 'Voyage of the Beagle ' be like? Cambridge zoologist Arik Kershenbaum evokes Charles Darwin's travels in a trip not confined to the earth's confines. Come along with us on a journey of discovery through the entire galaxy where we encounter aliens and their planets with supersonic creatures, a moon where aliens have a language composed of smells, and aliens who scream with fear, act honestly and have technology. The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy answers these questions using the latest science to tell the story of how life really works, on Earth and in space. This is a wildly fun and scientifically sound exploration of what alien life must be like, using universal laws that govern life on Earth and in space. But short of aliens landing in New York City, how do we know what they are like? Using his own expert understanding of life on Earth and Darwin's theory of evolution - which applies throughout the universe - Cambridge zoologist Dr. Arik Kershenbaum explains what alien life must be like: how these creatures will move, socialize, and communicate. For example, by observing fish whose electrical pulses indicate social status, we can see that other planets might allow for communication by electricity. As there was evolutionary pressure to wriggle along a seafloor, Earthling animals tend to have left/right symmetry; on planets where creatures evolved in midair or in soupy tar, they might be lacking any symmetry at all. Please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php  Topics discussed: Why natural selection is both a universal and predictable process, the existence and results of which are likely to be present on alien planets. What are Animals and What are Aliens? Examines the definition of animals, from the historical definitions derived from observation (e.g. Aristotle), to modern phylogenetic relationships. The book argues that a purely phylogenetic definition of what is an animal cannot be sufficient for classifying alien life. Movement – Scuttling and Gliding Across Space How the constraints of physics and mechanics combined with evolutionary laws to produce the movement strategies we see on Earth, and why many of these strategies (e.g. legs) are likely to exist on other planets too. Get The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy https://amzn.to/3K2JHgx Follow Arik https://twitter.com/arikkershenbaum Please Visit our Sponsors: LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE Athletic Greens, makers of AG1 which I take every day. Get an exclusive offer when you visit https://athleticgreens.com/impossible AG1 is made from the highest quality ingredients, in accordance with the strictest standards and obsessively improved based on the latest science. All 33 Chairs. My All33 Chair is the ideal chair for all of us ‘knowledge workers’ suffering through unending Zoom calls. Sitting still is bad for you. All33 chairs are my choice because they allow your pelvis to move the way it does while you walk — so all 33 vertebrae align into perfect posture. The result? Better breathing, better blood flow, and relief from pain. It’s crazy what you can do when you set your body to it. To get $100 off your order, visit https://all33.com/impossible Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagine if Charles Darwin had had access to a spaceship to travel around our galaxy and collect samples. What would such an intergalactic beagle accomplish? That's what Eric Kirshenbaum's fascinating new book, The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, reveals. One of the most brilliant zoologists of our time takes us on a journey through our galaxy and what it means to be conscious, to be a life for, and the prospects for what that will be. will teach us about life on Earth. He's a delightful individual and you're going to love this book. It's the book that Darwin wished he could have written. Way back in the early 1800s when he first set sail aboard the HMS Beagle. Come along with a modern day Darwin as we explore the galaxy

and all the wonderful creatures that may await us. Come along. Let's go into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. be held. It is a great pleasure to have on Professor Art Kirshenbaum of Cambridge University all the way across the pond and here we have some simulated British weather because it's actually not 72 degrees and sunny in San Diego today. It's pouring and about 55 degrees. So winter is finally here in early March. How are you, Eric? It's great. Yeah, we're doing great here. Maybe winter's not even close to being over actually what can you do it's a great treat to have you on the podcast you're a fan favorite i wanted to have you on for years and now on the occasion of the paperback book uh launch of

the zoologist guide to the galaxy i thought it was an opportune time to chat with you and i think this book dovetails nicely with some themes that are percolating in the in the in the metaverse in the in the in the universe of ideas and the zeitgeist however you want to call it about alien life and what it might be like and what it might teach us about life on earth. But before we do that, we always like to do the thing you're never supposed to do as a reader. But what else can you do? You don't have any, you talk a lot in the book about game theory. Well, how do you apprise whether you should read this book or watch a cat video?

And so I want to ask you, and we're going to play my favorite game, and it's called Judging Books by Their Covers. What is the Genesis, if you will, to use a very loaded phrase with good reason, as you'll see. What is Genesis of the title, of the subtitle, and the cover art of your wonderful new book? Yeah, well, it is interesting because it's an unusual book. You don't see a lot of books that combine questions like Life in the Universe with Life on Earth. So it wasn't a particularly easy cell. So a lot of publishers were reluctant to go anywhere near scientific examination of extraterrestrial life.

And really, I actually, when I first conceived the book, I really wanted to write a book more about life on Earth. And maybe with a little bit of aliens here and there, just to give a nice comparison. And most publishers were like, you know what, ditch the aliens. Write a book about animals, ditch the aliens. And then I'm very lucky that the publisher I ended up with, they said, well, we like the idea, but can you beef up the aliens a bit and have more aliens in there? So that is really why it got the emphasis, the emphasis that it did. But it's a blend of those two questions. And that's where the subtitle fits in really nicely, because this is a book about the laws governing alien, the nature of alien life.

but it's a book about the laws governing life, and therefore it's a book about us. It's a book about life on earth. It's a book about the diversity of life on earth, where it came from, and where we came from, and what our nature is. So it really is that blend between the two, and I think that worked out nicely.

I like that. I was very reminiscent, you know, not to, you know, damn it with high praise, but it reminded me of, you know, what I know, about Darwin's voyage of the beagle. It was very reminiscent of this, you know, kind of journey, obviously, of sort of this

hero's journey that Darwin took. But you take more of an intellectual rather than, you know, you're not actually journeying, you know, spoiler alert to other parts of the galaxy yet. But speaking of beagles, it looks like you're joined by some life forms in the background. I don't believe they're beagles, but tell us about your collaborators there. Well, if you're referring to my dog Darwin, he's lying on the floor there and groaning a little bit. He's 15 years old, so he's entitled to groan and he's entitled to sleep as well. Yes, most teenage boys will take you up on that offer. So in that spirit, you know, this magical kind of journey that you take us along, and I'm not accompanied by any living force, but I did bring a galaxy. You can see it in the back over there. There's a, the Whirlpool Galaxy M-51, which is a coalescing galaxy.

And I wanted to kind of really start with a quote that you mentioned in the book from the namesake of the organization that I'm pleased to be a co-director of, which is the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination here at UC San Diego. And you quote Sir Arthur, and you say, nowhere in space, will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants or any of the animals that share our world, whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scales.

What about that quote really resonates with you? Is it the kind of disabuse of this notion that we're going to meet entities with just bigger foreheads than us and big eyes and gray skin? What about that quote resonates with you? Well, it resonates with me for its errors as well as for its insight. And, you know, if you look at the history of humans thinking about life on other planets, we've gone through all these phases. We've gone through phases of being convinced that other worlds have human-like creatures on them,

and through to a great deal of skepticism. And really, until the discovery of exoplanets 20 years, ago, skepticism dominated the idea of what we might know about life on other planets. And in that, in that period, in that period between certainty that there were angels on other worlds and a discovery that there might actually be life on, that we can discover on other planets, a lot of, a lot of poor ideas came into consideration of, of alien life. And the one that I like the best because I think it's a fantastic book in every respect other than its consideration of biology was Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud.

It's one of my favorite science fiction books. And it's really a tremendous read. But it really typifies this idea that whatever's out there has got to be so completely different, so completely alien that we can't know anything about it. And that's just not true. I mean, that arises out of a lack of understanding of what life is and where life comes from. And the case that I make, and I hope I make it convincingly, is that there are rules, there are constraints, there are laws, there are things that mean that while we may not see

trees like trees on earth, but trees of some sort, there will probably be. So I think that quote by Arthur C. Clarke is nice because it simultaneously gives the idea that, don't let's think, that we're going to have aliens, humans with large foreheads. But at the other time, it just goes too far. We've got to pull back a bit and understand that life is governed by rules. Do you think that along those lines, that because there's sort of this fixation that either aliens will be just like us, in some sense, you know, have five kind of vast appendages or whatever, or, you know, will have some sort of symmetry properties or will be macroscopic,

you know, on the kind of midway point between the plank scale and the size of the universe in some sense. Do you think that, you know, with me it resonates with this quote from the right stuff, the book, Thomas Wolfe, about the astronaut program. And there was a quote in there, you know, that they said, we can't get money unless they're astronauts on these, you know. I mean, obviously humans could do anything that John Glenn did, you know, go up in a rocket and come back down and dogs did that. but their quote was, no buck, no buck Rogers, no bucks. Or maybe it was the other way around. But the point being that you had a sort of appeal of pandering somewhat to the human interest aspect of things.

And I think, especially with this resurgence of interest in alien craft coming here, I mean, what could be more like we are than some alien flying disks that, yeah, maybe they use different propulsion that we don't understand. But they're using crafts about the size of our airplanes and the inhabitants must be about the same size. Do you think that that's fundamentally an anthropomorphic or anthropocentric vantage point, in contradiction to the alien insects of Clark, that there's a whole other camp that says, no, they must be like us. And kind of in order to appeal to our desire and maybe funding and so forth. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars.

Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April. 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. UN must be 21 to enter. Well, there's, I think there are many things that are driving public perception of what alien life might be like. And look, right on the beginning, we've got to put it on the table, any alien life that we discover in the next 50 years is going to be microbial or the equivalent. We're not genuinely, I don't think that I will ever get the chance to study alien

animals in the way that I study animals on Earth. So I think that's a really a long way off. But in terms of the public perception of what aliens are like, you know, it's been driven a lot by our fear of humans. If you think about the flying saucers and the alien invasions and this is all Cold War stuff. This is all appealing to a public narrative that has little to do with life on other planets. And so it's best just to discard that, I think. I mean, it's one of the reasons that I don't subscribe to the whole UFO idea is apart from any sort of rational and scientific reasons. I just feel that it seems to be a throwback to the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. And it's unconvincing to me.

I'm much more interested in the fundamental scientific rules that might actually give us some idea about what alien life forms might be like. You talk about the microbial probability just now. It made me think of something that I've got on the record about and maybe a little bit controversial. But I claim, you know, tomorrow we wake up, and let's do a good on an experiment, we wake up. And, you know, some of my colleagues here, I've got a colleague, you know, Professor Shelley Wright. She does optical setty. She does, but let's just say, you know, one of her colleagues and or her or whatever, they discover, you know, some byproduct of microbial life. Or maybe this, you know, this meteorite that landed in Antarctica, or where I've spent two winters or two summers, I guess it was my summer, their summer, my winter. You know, they fly. Oh, it actually is a microbial respiratory biproenter, okay? I claim that excitement will last for a week, but almost no more. And I'm wondering, like, what do you think would be the reaction? Because I think we have already seen what happened.

I mean, the meteorite that fell in the Allen Landhills has never conclusively been falsified to not contain alien remnants. It was announced by President Bill Clinton on the White House front lawn in 1997, I believe, 96, and it's never been refuted. So we already kind of have the answer to this Godalkin experiment, but what do you think? Do you think that it would fundamentally change our perspective of our place as a species, in the galaxy, and in the universe?

I totally agree with you. I think it wouldn't. I don't think that the discovery of microbial alien life will hold the public imagination for very long, but it doesn't need to. It doesn't need to, you know. It needs to, it is a scientific discovery and not a PR discovery. The goal is not to create a media circus. The goal is to find out what's going on, what's going on in the universe.

And in the long term, of course, it will be hugely, it will be hugely important. Look, we're dealing at the moment with huge existential threats to humanity. We need to deal with our climate threat. Discovering microbes in another solar system, it's not going to change that and it's not going to make. us come together and say, well, oh, we have to save life on this planet because there's life on other planets or something like that. But it's a fundamental shift in our science. It's a fundamental shift in our understanding of science. I'm not a historian, but I would be very surprised if when Copernicus declared that the Earth goes around the sun, that people were running around in the

street, screaming and, you know, waving their arms about. I think it's unlikely. But it's still, it's still generated a shift in the way that science has done and the way that we understand our observations. Absolutely. Yeah, that is true. And you make this beautiful statement, you know, that we are the first generation that cannot, in human history, that cannot say that there, you know, that Earth is unique among the types of planets that Earth is, the Earth-like planet.

There's not just one Earth-like planet. And similarly, it made me think back to, yeah, I mean, back when Giordano, Bruno, you know, was burned at the stake for claiming that stars were other sons. He couldn't claim that. You know, he couldn't get away with that. But we're living in a completely new paradigm because of the discoveries of things like Kepler and others. And I want to push back with respect, not on you, but on kind of this feeling in the community of which you are one of the foremost kind of expositors, which is that, you know, life is abundant in the universe and that if it's not, it's kind of a waste of space. And I hear this a lot

from my religious friends who will say, you know, if there is no God, then, you know, life is ultimately unjust and the universe is unjust because why do the good get punished and the wicked thrive? And, you know, the basic question of theology. I think there's a theodic component to alien, you know, they have to exist because there's so much space. And again, you know, just hearkening from my experience in Antarctica, I saw like six penguins, you know, the whole time I've been there, I spent two months there almost, six penguins in my whole life, and I couldn't get close enough to one to bring it home from one of my kids. But I would probably be shot on site. But, you know, it's a capacious continent. You know, it's one seventh of all the continents on Earth. And yet there's

almost no, you know, animal life there besides, you know, some, some sco-birds and a couple of sea lions. But on the continent itself, almost nothing. It's completely devoid of life. Even microbial life is hard to find. But a lot of the people in the extraterrestrial life community claim that discoveries like Kepler, those by Kepler satellite, those by researchers on extremophiles, another famous kind of event was about seven years ago, the discovery of this arsenic life. You'll recall that in Mono Lake here in California, beautiful place. and that turned out to be unverifiable.

And yet it was a press release. It was an accepted paper in science and so forth. So a lot of the research that I hear, and I get criticism from my colleagues, why are you, SETI Institute people, why are you spending money researching extremophiles and researching, you know, sociological language, as you talk about in the book a lot? Is that not putting, you know, the cart far, far ahead of the alien horse? or, I mean, we have no evidence, I think, and you say this in the book, and it's not really a

criticism of the book, but there's no evidence for life elsewhere. So, like, talking about second order things like their culture and society, what do you say to somebody who criticizes that as being so far in advance of what, you know, what is justified by the evidence? Well, that the appeal of thinking about aliens stimulates important discussions about life. if we want to know, if we're asking, so you ask quite rightly the question, why should all the space be filled? Well, why should this space be filled comes down to some very clear scientific questions that we can ask? How likely is a biogenesis? How likely is life to arise from non-life? If it's very likely to arise, then the answer to your question is yes, the space will be filled.

if it's very unlikely to arise, then perhaps not. But these are questions that can be addressed scientifically. So if we didn't think about alien life, we might not be asking those questions at all. Now, when it comes to the kinds of questions that I ask, which may seem even further into the future about societies, about language, and what kind of language would aliens have, you're quite right, that these are not testable hypotheses.

but they're the opportunity to ask important questions about the constraints on biological life, and they then have implications for us on Earth, hence the subtitle of the book, right? What it tells about ourselves. Sometimes you cannot think about yourself without thinking about where your place is in the greater scheme of things. So as I said, I do not believe I will ever get to watch alienation. animals and you know unless unless we're really lucky i mean what i'm praying for is that is that

that some alien civilization somewhere has this david attenborough uh sort of equivalent and they're beaming their nature documentaries to us that's possibility but no i don't i don't seriously hold out hope for seeing alien animals but by thinking about what they would be like if they do exist tells us a great deal about animal life on earth and how that arise arose and and and where it's going yeah so So along those themes, you know, again, this book is phenomenal in that it is evocative of this great, you know, magnificent work by Darwin and the Beagle and other works. And speaking of Beagle, your dog, Darwin seems pretty content over there. What is it about zologists?

You guys, you know, I'm an astronomer, so I'm on the A side of the alphabet, you're Z z zoologist. What is it about that profession? I mean, you've studied everything from coral to wolves. What made you pivot to aliens? Why that very dynamic pivot? Yeah, well, my field is animal communication. So that's what I research. And one of the things that I do is looking at where information is in animal calls.

So broadly speaking, you could ask what do they mean, but we need to drill down and define that a little bit more rigorously. So let's talk very generally what kind of. information exists in an animal call it when a bird sings, what information is it putting into its song? When a wolf howls, how much information is there? Are they just saying who they are or that they are there? Or is there more information about like it's time to go hunting or something like that? So that's my field. And that's quite an algorithmic endeavor because we need to look at statistical properties of these calls and correlations between different elements of the call and so on. So I actually organized a investigative workshop a number of years ago on this topic, on the topic of information in animal vocalizations.

And one of the applicants to take part was a man who you might know, Lawrence Doyle at the SETI Institute. And he works at SETI Institute. And his big thing is that if we're ever going to, if we ever receive communication from alien technological civilized. and we want to decode that. Our best bet for getting a handle on how we might decode that is to try and decode the communication of animals. So he said, can I come to your conference? And he did. We had a great time.

And we started talking. We started talking about questions that are important questions for zoologists and independently important questions for SETI researchers. Like, for instance, here's a sound. Is it a language? how do we know? We often say birds, animals, they don't have a language.

Only humans have a language. How do we know that? Is there some sort of test we can do to see whether bird song or dolphin whistles are a language? And it's a difficult question. It's not clear that there is such a test, but if there were such a test,

it would be a useful one for SETI scientists to have as well when they start receiving signals from outer space. So it kind of grew out of that, that analogy of, is there information in this signal, whether it's a dolphin or whether it's an alien? And you make a very convincing case regarding language that language must benefit first and foremost the sender of the signal. And yet you seem to be very much at the cornerstone of what's called Medi, not Meta, although Mark Zuckerberg wants to sponsor your research or mine, we're welcome him with open arms. But what is Medi? Why is that, you know, I mean, again, this is a zooologist in one of the world's most eminent zoologist, you know, profession, you know, practiced by folks like Richard Dawkins and other. And you're talking about messaging extraterrestrial intelligences. So talk to talk to our audience about this. And don't be afraid to be, you know, super geeky. We have the most erudite tech, a savvy audience in the known universe. So talk about Medi. What is it? And how could that possibly benefit us, Eric, when there's at least some percent chance, as your fellow countrymen and university colleague, Stephen Hawking, said,

even if it's like a 0.1% chance that they could be malevolent, could end our civilization, and only benefit the few boffins like you and me. So tell us, Eric, what is METI? Why does it interest a zoologist? And what about the risks? So METI, as a concept, is the idea that we should be sending messages to, extraterrestrial civilization. So we're searching, seti, we're searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. But of course, if everyone is searching and no one is sending, then no one's

going to hear anything. We could all be standing around and just not knowing that the universe is full of very shy civilizations. So there is a, there's an argument to be made that maybe we should be sending signals. This is, by the way, an intellectual argument. So no one's actually, these days no one is actually building transmitters to send things. But there is a valid question, should we be sending messages? And as you say, there are people who say, no, this is too big a risk. We should keep our heads down and not let the aliens know that we're around because they might come and eat us. So I think it's very worthwhile to debunk that idea. And there's a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, I think it's bad idea.

I think it's not a sound argument. It's not a sound argument primarily because we've been broadcasting radio signals into space for 100 years now. And anyone who has anything like the technology to come and eat us already knows that we're here. So I think it's spacious from the beginning in that respect. But also, I think it's unreasonable and backward-looking. to think that aliens are going to come and eat us. Again, it brings us back to that period between the 1920s and the 1980s when it was the Cold War that was the concern. We were worried about being invaded. Now, as a physicist, you know that any technology that's capable of transporting

life forms from one star system to another must be so advanced, so far ahead of us. Not only will they already know that we're here, but if they have the kind of energy resources to travel between the stars, they don't need to eat a few humans, okay? I mean, they really, it just seems like a projection of our own earthbound imperialism that we are afraid of being invaded. So I think it's, I think on both of those counts, I think it's a weak argument that we shouldn't be sending messages. But the reason that I think it's an important argument to have is because we need to change the way that we think about what life in the universe must be like. If we continue to think that it's all about invading aliens who are coming to destroy us, then that that will tarnish our scientific effort. It will tarnish our attempts to understand what alien life might be like. and I think it's important to put things on a more solid footing.

They're not coming to eat us. Prudent to your comment that we've been sending out information for 75 years or whatever. Did you ever hear the joke about these archaeologists in the Middle East and they discover different things? And I'll tell it just in case my audience hasn't heard it. I'm a purveyor of relentless purveyor of dad jokes, but it isn't quite a dad joke. But anyway, three archaeologists are sharing their expletive.

One from Jordan comes up. He pulls out this big piece of copper like in a cable. And he goes, look, this proves Jordanian scientist invented, you know, underground wireless conduction of communication on Mars code. This is evident, clear evidence of this thousands of years ago in Amman Jordan. Then an Egyptian archaeologist, she gets up and says, no, no, no. We found this funnel. And it dates back, you know, a thousand years earlier. And it's, evidence that we invented in Egypt, you know, communication using antennas, because it's kind of like an antenna. And then the Israeli archaeologist gets up and says, we found this. And they're like, what did you find? He says, it's nothing. Yes, exactly. We invented wireless communication. So it's kind of a joke. But, yeah, I mean, we have been sending out information, but it's kind of a monopolar distribution, very low, you know, targeting, you know, messaging specific star systems. And we have sent out messages, the Pioneer disk, you know, which had the recordings of the brainwaves of past guest, And Druryan on the podcast. She's been on the podcast before. She recorded her brainwaves, sent it on to the universe.

Yeah, the likelihood of that being found is pretty low, too. but, you know, this notion of pure benefit, is it true? And I've always wondered about this, you know, in terms of like things that are done frivolously, besides the, you know, rock musicians that seem to be pretty adept at, you know, mate selection or whatever you may say, I want to keep it G-rated here. But, you know, what is the purpose of music? I mean, it is sort of, you know, expending a lot of energy, a lot of effort as a form of communication. It's very low bandwidth, you know if you have to listen to a whole song to find out how this guy, his girlfriend dumped them and he got a new pickup truck,

whatever, what is the purpose, current perspective on the evolutionary purpose of music? Well, music is, seems to be not restricted to humans. We know that. I've got a student at the moment, Vicky Fam, who's doing her studies on rhythmic behavior in chimpanzees and how that might relate to the evolution. of music in humans, whether we gain a direct benefit from generating complex rhythms. So there is, you know, there are analogs of music in animals and birds being the obvious example.

But you always have to remember that when we take a concept like music or art, or even social concepts like, for instance, empathy and fairness. A lot of people talk often about how there are many animals, many primates, who have a sense of fairness. You know, these are behaviors that evolved to provide a benefit for those organisms. And clearly, Birdsong, you know, provides a benefit. fit for the male bird and it's impressing the female bird or the male the male challenger. But they only really become music when placed in the context of human society. So there's something happened. Something happened when, you know, half million years ago or

100,000 years ago, something happened where human society was able to take all of these, all of these different behaviors and turn them into cultural phenomena, which is something slightly different from what's happening in the animals. So while there are clear parallels, and clearly our music is based and has its origins in adaptive behaviours that are very beneficial for other animals, it does seem to be, it turns into something different when it comes into human society. But that is a complex question. I can answer that one.

I don't know the answer to that one. 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 start at $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today.

Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. And it kind of, you know, reminded me, you know, a section of the book, which comes later, but it's about competition and warfare and all sorts of things. And I want to cover that. But it made me think of, you know, what is the, throughout this book, the main, you know, kind of progenitor, you know, protagonist is, you know, evolution via natural selection. But I'm wondering if we can go even deeper, you know, than natural selection. because a lot of places start off with natural selection, once you turn it on, you know, the game is afoot, right? But I want to go deeper.

And actually, well, before, if you'll permit me, another joke. So you've heard the question, you know, which came first, the chicken or the egg, right? So one of my kids told me, you know, she had an idea. You could find out which comes first, the chicken or the egg. You just order a chicken on Amazon and an egg, and you see which comes for that. Okay, you can use that. Feel free to use that. But I want to ask you this question, as one of the world's most eminent zoologists and thinkers about these topics.

It's not clear to me that natural selection is really the starting point. It seems like throughout this book, the resonant message to me is that competition, you know, whether it be for resources or mates and maybe, you know, you could think kind of blindly in the animal kingdom that, you know, mates are a form of resource. which comes first. I mean, is it the recognition, you know, obviously at the macro scale in societies, there's fights for resources we're witnessing one right now in Ukraine, right? But tell me, is there a notion that something, you know, is a proto-evolutionary requirement, that there be competition? I mean, you can imagine, like, certain civilized, you know, structures,

maybe only artificial intelligence that wouldn't be competitive. So is there something more primal, more primitive than natural selection, or am I totally off base? Not totally off base, and it's an absolutely crucial point. So natural selection requires three things. So there are three necessary conditions for natural selection to occur. There needs to be some sort of heritable information, so passed on from one organism to another. there needs to be variation in the characteristics of those individuals, and there needs to be what we call differential fitness. Some need to do better than others, which in the most part comes down to competition.

You can imagine ways where it may not be competitive, but essentially that is competition. Now, these three requirements of system, any system, for natural selection to occur are not just necessary requirements. They're also sufficient requirements, which means that any system that does happen to have those three properties will undergo natural selection, whether it's artificial, whether it's artificial intelligence, whether it's internet memes, whether it's religion, whatever it is, if it's got those three properties, then it will undergo natural selection. So the competition is inherently a part of natural selection. It's not that one came first or the other came after. It's that if there are organisms which could reproduce more effectively than other organisms, then you see natural selection, then you see natural selection taking place. But the other point about this, when you talk about chickens and eggs and what came first

and how did it all start and things like that is that, you know, even the most simple life is unbelievably complex. The most simple life that we know of is far, far more complex than anything that we could build. And we presume that the first entities that underwent natural selection were not alive, but they were chemicals. So there was a phase, most likely,

when chemical molecules themselves were undergoing natural selection. And that was really where life began, even though it's not alive in any sense that we would think of it today. But it needed that differential fitness. It needed some molecules to reproduce more reliably and more effectively than other molecules, and only then could natural selection take over and begin to lead to the diversity of life we have now. No, that's a lovely way to look at it. And what's, again, I'm sorry to keep, you know, just praising you and beating you over the head with this.

But you are one of the rare authors that do something that I love to do on this channel, which is to debate with love and basically to steal man your opponent's ideas and not shy away and just beat them over the head with straw man and so forth. So one of the things I came away almost convinced to become a Lamarckian arc. I'm sorry to tell you that. But you're so convincing about the kind of aesthetic appeal of Lamarck's perspective. in contrast to Darwin. First, for my listeners that need to buy the book, need to listen to the book, can you explain a little bit

about this contrast between these two competing approaches, why Darwin won, and what still appeals to you and now to me, because you made me a convert, sad to say, about Lamarckianism. So evolution by natural selection is horribly inefficient. It's incredibly inefficient, right? It's all down to which of the babies get eaten and which ones don't get eaten. And you end up having to have a lot of babies and a lot of them get eaten.

And evolution by natural selection seems to be a fairly effective way of optimizing various characteristics, but it's by no means efficient. And that raises the question. perhaps there's a more efficient method, a more efficient algorithm that could out-compete natural selection and perhaps would then actually take over as a mechanism of increasing complexity in the living world. And the one that people talk about is this idea, which you can sort of broadly talk about, it's Lamarckian, but the idea that experience during your lifetime can be transmitted to your offspring.

So if I, as a mother antelope, recognize that a lion is coming to get me and I run away and I escape from the lion, it would be much more efficient for my babies to know that when they were born. Classic way that natural selection works is my babies are born. I don't know about lions or not about lions and half of them get eaten. But surely it's much better if they would know from the fact that I escaped from a lion, that they should run away from lions as well. And that idea that the experiences you go through in your lifetime can be passed on to your offspring should, in theory, perhaps, lead to faster

evolution. But it doesn't seem to occur in the natural world. We don't see it. Now, is that because we only have one example of life and perhaps there are planets out there and some of them have Darwinian evolution and some of them have Lamarckian evolution? Or is there a a reason why on earth we don't see this kind of, this kind of phenomenon. And we don't know. We don't know the answer to that. We can do a lot of mathematical simulations, which we do. And they kind of give us a clue that it may be that Lamarckian evolution is somewhat capricious. And it may be a little bit less stable because if you're always changing, you know, Your offspring are always taking the latest fad, the latest fashion, then they may in the long run be at a disadvantage.

And we don't know the answer, but it ties in really nicely to the one place where we know that Lamarckian evolution does occur, and that's in human culture. So we can pass our life experiences on to our offspring. We do it every day. We do it by reading them bedtime stories and sending them to school. So there's a good example of lifetime experiences being passed on to offspring and look at the pace of progress of human society. It's been phenomenal. It's been exceptional.

Of course, it may also end in the extinction of mankind. And I think that is a really nice illustration of how, just because something may be more efficient, doesn't actually make it necessarily more effective. and that could be, in fact, a disadvantage of Lamarckianism. Or it could be too efficient by half or something and therefore lead to this notion of this great filter. I wonder, are you familiar with that concept, the great filter? And what's your perspective, first again, for my audience,

I might not be familiar. What is the great filter? And then what might the implications be if we are past it, through it, in the middle of it? Yeah. Well, this harks back to the question of why haven't we heard. anything from any aliens. Surely, if there are alien civilizations out there and they really are as advanced as they

might be, then they'd be everywhere. You know, you'd see the spaceships flying through the sky all the time, and they'd be visiting us all the time openly, not just in the backwaters of some farmland somewhere. But we don't see that. So the question is, why not? And there are many possible answers. there are many explanations have been proposed. One is that yes, there's life all over the universe,

yes, there's complex life all over the universe, but as soon as complex life becomes technologically advanced, it destroys itself. And although we don't have any examples except for one, it's certainly looking pretty much that way. I mean, we're not doing a good job of ensuring the future of humanity. And if that is the case, that technological advancement just comes so quickly that a civilization is not ready for it and not prepared to deal with the problems, and then they may

just drive themselves extinct. Is that likely? I would say it's one of the better explanations for why we don't see many alien civilizations. I think it certainly is... Is the answer to the Fermi paradox. Yeah. Yeah. So it's Quite compelling. However, there is also the argument that if you do manage to get through this great filter. So if we were somehow to stop our climate change and to stop war and to solve all the problems of humanity, then essentially you become unlimited in your lifespan. A civilization like that could exist for billions of years.

So it doesn't really solve the Fermi paradox in that sense, because surely there'd be one or two that managed to get through the great filter, and then where are they? But, yeah, this is an intellectual question without a great deal of data on which to base it, I'm afraid. And as an outsider, for the field of astrophysics, we're going to pivot to next. And I'm sorry, I wasn't showing my galaxy before. Can you see the galaxy now? Okay, that's the Whirlpool galaxy.

I'm too clever again by half because I have two cameras, and I probably only need half of one camera. the Drake equation. It kind of lays out an astronomical terms, a framework by which one could predict a number of intelligent species that could inhabit the galaxy. And some have even extended it further. My large problem with it is that it's something that my students do all the time, which is that they quote a number, you know, Newton's gravitational constant, you know, and it'll get the number right, the mean value correct, but they won't do any error analysis. So it's like me saying, your dog, you know, Darwin weighs less than 10,000 kilograms. Okay, it's accurate. It's not precise. So the problem I have is that there's very little attention paid to the estimation of errors. And we did hear from my friend Christopher Consolice, who's a professor in the UK, a very powerful professor, because he actually is the editor for App Jay. It's just the main journal or was in my, anyway, he's a friend.

But, you know, he did a prediction and he came up with this number of, you know, There are 36 civilizations in the universe and the galaxy, and everyone's like, why couldn't you add six more? So it could be 42. But the point being, you know, he had assigned some likelihood to that. And it was a well done presentation, controversial too. But as an outsider, how do you look at that? Is there a zoologist, Drake equation?

We can make the Kirshenbaum equation. Name it after you, maybe. Here's your opportunity. Well, I agree with you. I agree with you entirely about the Drake equation. But to be fair, people do attempt to address those. So a colleague of mine, for instance, uses probability distributions instead of values. Rather than saying there are this many planets, habitable planets in the galaxy,

there's a distribution with a mean and a certain variance. So you can do that. But really, I don't think the Drake equation was ever intended to give a number. It was only ever an illustration. of how there are these multiple, multiple constraints on, on the evolution of life. Is there an equivalent? Is there a zoological equivalent? I think that the other, to answer that, I'd say the other problem with the Drake equation is that it has a single output, a number of, number of civilizations.

whereas if we're looking at extraterrestrial life, there's going to be diversity of extra, whatever happens is going to be diversity of extraterrestrial life. I mean, assuming there's any, there's not none, there will be a diversity. So much more interesting than how many inhabited planets there are is what's the diversity of different types of life in the galaxy or in the universe. So if there were a zoological Drake equation, it wouldn't have a single output, how many. It would tell you more about how many different kinds of niches might be exploited, you know. Are there really is all life pretty much the same?

Or is it so diverse in the kinds of habitats that it inhabits, that it must be very different? A lot of people have speculated without really very good basis that DNA may be a universal, a universal molecule of heritable information. Is that true? Are there hundreds of different kinds of molecules of heritable information? That's really the sort of thing I think that I would be more interested in rather than just counting. Very good. So I want to pivot to astronomical topics. So there's a fair number of my audience members who are astronomically inclined. Some of my best friends are astronomers. So I'm going to first ask a question.

You brought up Sir Fred Hoyle, who's really a hero to many of us in the field of astronomy. Controversial figure, as you know. And I actually had on, you might be interested to know, Giant Narlocar, who was his Ph.D. student at Cambridge many years ago. but, you know, Sir Fred, sadly, is no longer with us, but Jayaan very much is in Kunah, India, and I talked to him and his wonderful wife, who's a mathematician, and we talked a lot about, you know, these theories that don't really ever go out of favor. And one of them is the steady state theory that he was an exponent of and still is, despite all the evidence, you know, supporting at least some version of an event,

creation or initiation event when the universe was much different than it is now. And they keep adding on, you know, sort of epicycles in some ways. But there's many reasons and there are many alternatives to the singularity-based-driven narrative of the Big Bang by eminent, you know, cosmologists such as past guest Sir Roger Penrose on the show. And I want to ask you, one of Fred Hoyle's, you know, signature lines, he was a master of the of the Mojouste, of the Bonneau. And one of his ideas was this idea of panspermia, which is one of these things that sounds, sounds X-rated, but it's really, not. And I want to ask you first to define panspermia what it really means. And correct me if I'm wrong that he was either the coiner of that term or at least an exponent of it. And then I want to pivot from that to why I think it provides some, you know, an Abasian confidence interval

perspective, evidence against the existence of life in the universe other than Earth. But let's start with that. Pennspermia. Did Hoyle create that? What does it mean? And what is its relevance in and the current context. Well, at the moment, it's an interesting topic that people do take seriously, not in exactly the way that Fred Hoyle formulated it, which was quite outlandish, I would say. But the idea that in some way life is transferred between celestial bodies, I think there's very little doubt about that, you know. simulations

that the papers that the simulations that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs ejected so much material from Earth that some of it will have landed on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn already and if microbes could have survived

that 60 million year journey then we may get there and find there's earth life on on these planets it's very reasonable and in that sense in terms of life spreading between celestial bodies in a single solar system, I think it's a plausible hypothesis.

Of course, it doesn't answer any questions about the origin of life. It doesn't answer any questions about how life arose. It's just kicking the can down the road a little bit. More problematic, of course, is a question of directed pansepermia, which is the intentional seeding of planets with life, which presupposes a technological civilization that is capable of sending biological material between solar systems. Although I do play about with that idea in the book a little bit because there are some interesting, some very interesting questions that it raises. But I think if that were the case, then we're talking about a post-filter civilization.

So where are they? Why aren't they here? So, yeah, I'm pertinent to that. I've gone to Chixilab. I've taken my submersible vessel down some 20 kilometers. No, I haven't done that. But here's a chunk of a fragment. I actually have a chunk of the planet Mars, which I got delivered via the United Postal Service here in America. But you can buy them.

You can buy fragments, you know, a gram or two, which is more. more than I have, but then you're touching like a piece of another planet. And it's known to have the same chemical composition, the crustal analysis, my geology friends tell me it's identical. So again, to push back, like if I told you that there is this process of interchange of material, and we exchange material with, as you said, you know, definitely some material is ejected into space from Chixelub and from the, you know, the TK event and the end of the Cretaceous during Jurassic period. But why wouldn't that be perceived as an evidence against the ubiquity of life in that we, you know, it's had way more than 65 million years. I mean, this has been happening.

The early bombardment, heavy barbarmament was, you know, maybe a billion years after the formation of our solar system. Or so I forget. And it was, you know, it was happening for, therefore, four, five billion years. billionaires, four billionaires. And so why wouldn't there be, you know, tremendous colonies of, and it was co-timed with the stromatolite, you know, existence and that we've seen, and bacteria and the oxygenation events. So why not say that the fact that you haven't seen life on other planets or Enceladus or Titan or, you know, admittedly, not that we have to go and dig it up, but we haven't seen any byproducts of it. So we don't have to go there. And that's

like the key feature behind what JWST is going to do. It's not going to fly. glide approximate as in Tori B, it's going to look at its atmosphere. So would you view that as a strike in the Bayesian confidence interval sense, or would you say it just rules out panspermia as a viable opportunity? Either option, I think, is interesting, right? Yeah, but I don't think it's either of them. I think it's something else. I think that, in fact, that if you look at the evidence that we've got, we can't make that, we can't make that judgment because Mars and Venus probably at some point in their in their past were hospitable to earth-like life. And for all we know, there may well have been stromatolites and other Earth originating

organisms on those planets. But we know now that neither of those planets are hospitable to the kind of life that evolved on Earth. In terms of Enceladus and Europa, we haven't actually looked, you know, we haven't really looked properly. Their emissions planned and we do need to. and in that case we may well find. We may well find. You know, there will be systems, Trappist, for instance, probably has more than one Earth-like planet in it.

And in a case like that, you could ask questions about, okay, is life being transferred between the two of them? But it's not really fair to ask that about our solar system when the other bodies in the solar system are pretty miserable places to be. So another topic, you know, pertinent to my astronomical audience is that the composition of these creatures, you know,

some say, and you talk about, you know, the laryngeal nerve of the giraffe versus the fish, and you talk about calcium in the teeth of all these, you know, predators on Earth, those fundamentally trace their composition to a type 2 supernova that detonated in the corner of our galaxy that we call home. You know, but another planet, you know, trappist system. It may not have been formed identically. I mean, we know it's density. It's higher than water and less than lead. You know, rough things about it, but we don't know how much calcium, you know, is in.

So if I told you that there's no, you know, calcium is a fluke of, you know, of our solar system, you know, would that change your prior? Like, is there any astrophysical connection to a biological function that would then be necessary for a social function, which you claim is crucial to enevales? evolutionary advantage and heritability of the tools that would make aliens persist and travel and so forth. Is there any astrophysical link? Like, you need calcium, and if you don't have calcium, it's over, you can't have a tongue. I don't know. I'm kind of making it up, but you wouldn't have prey predator interactions without teeth in the same way we have on Earth. There ain't astrophysical implications that we can draw purely from astronomy on society behavior of an alien species? I think there are some. I think that there are certainly some conclusions.

that we can draw. I don't think that, firstly, I don't think that the calcium teeth, predator prey argument works because predators and prey will exist and they'll eat each other however they manage to, right? You know, they'll gum each other or something like that. But, and, you know, there were predators long before they were teeth on earth. So that's, that's not a problem. I think when it comes to more fundamental biochemical processes, then we have to go back and ask the question is how unique, how essential is our biochemistry. We're fairly confident that a carbon-based chemistry is probably what's necessary for life. Just because we don't know any other chemical, we don't know any other way of arranging chemistry

so that it can produce a kind of variety of reactions that we see with organic chemistry. Beyond that, you know, people talk a lot about water in the Goldilocks zone. And, you know, people often forget, non-astronomers forget, what is really, really, really common in the universe. It's not something rare and weird and unique to Earth. The most common element, hydrogen and, you know, fifth most common element, oxygen. So, but when it comes to other elements, you know, I mean, I think that all rocky planets are going to be the product of supernova.

it's the only way that you're going to get, you know, iron and heavy elements like that. So you could be right. There may be no calcium in Trappist. And again, this is one of the interesting things that we're going to find out from examining the atmospheric chemistry of a lot of these planets. But everyone I've spoken to all the sort of the planetary geophysicists and things like that, you know, we're talking about the same rules, same laws of physics. and I think things are going to be, I think things are going to be pretty similar, which does not, of course, rule out the possibility of a very different chemistry. So, for instance, you know, on Earth, there are, well, nitrogen is extremely important in carbon chemistry. Must it be nitrogen that's important in the chemistry of life on other planets?

I don't know. People are looking at other possible chemical pathways, but, but, um, But, yeah, again, amino acids, although they sound really cool and really indicative of life, but they're really common, right? You know, there are amino acids everywhere. They're not difficult things to make. So it seems reasonable that life might be based on them. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grill.

seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day, get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, pricing invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See homedepot.com slash price match for details. Yeah, our chemistry department here is named Uri Hall after the famous Harold Uri, who with his student Stanley Miller did the famous Miller-Uri experiment, which to my knowledge hasn't really been really functionally improved upon.

I mean, it's known not to represent the earlier as chemistry, and the reducing atmosphere versus oxidizing atmosphere. But moving beyond that, speaking of, you know, this book is particularly delightful for, you know, kind of the things you throw in there, and we're talking about our Kirshenbaum's wonderful, the zoologist's guide to the galaxy. And every now and then, you'll just,

did he just mention the Brady Bunch? But I assume you're familiar with the Simpsons cartoon, and there's a famous episode where, you know, like Grandpa Simpson tells Homer Simpson, And if you ever go back in time, never step on anything. And Homer starts daydreaming and he goes back and he steps on a bug. You die now, bug. You go squish. And then all of history has changed.

But maybe taking a more serious role in it. I always say, you know, it took whales to have Wi-Fi. In other words, like solar panels aren't built with solar panels. You know, the first operating system was written without an operating system. You know, the first computer was designed without a computer. It's the nature of these initial systems that make them so powerful. but also so random and unique. You know, we had this, you know,

kind of abundance of carbon life form that made petroleum and coal and all sorts of things possible. And then those were then used to power the next generation and the next generation after that, ion drives and whatever else my colleagues will come up warp drive. So to what extent is the actual path history,

you know, as Feynman might say or say, like the actual path that we took is that how flexible is it or how resilient is it? If we didn't have whales, we wouldn't have had, you know, we would have had to use something else to have light and oil and so forth, you know, 200 years ago. So how crucial is, or how resilient is the perturbations about the tech path that we took to get to where we are and beyond? And that's a key question. That's a crucial, a crucial question. The insight that that evolutionary biology can give to that is not to answer the question directly, which we can't do because we can't recreate the conditions on early Earth

and run the experiment again and see what happens. Clearly, at the very least, there were, at the very least, there were astronomical phenomena that may or may not have happened. You know, the meteorite may not have hit Earth. And so things would turn out differently. but the insight that we can get from evolutionary biology is to look at ecosystem complexity. And what we can see is that for the first two billion years of life on Earth, life on Earth is only like three and a half billion years old. For the first two and a half billion years, it was slime. It was all slime. It was a very, very simple ecosystems.

And then you got some simple multicellular organisms. You know, three and a half billion years of life. And what we recognize as animals and stuff like that, it's only been around for the last half billion. So it took a long time for life to get started. But when it did, and starting about 540 million years ago, ecosystems began to become complex. So the relationships between organisms started to get complex, complex food webs, predators, prey, groups, you know, parasites and so on. And what we've seen in the last 540 million years has been a dramatic increase in the complexity of the ecosystem. Particularly a major event was the evolution of flowering plants and then you get insects that are pollinating the flowers and just life explodes.

Life keeps exploding into more and more and more diversity. And it seems to be that complexity of the ecosystem that was the basis for our ancestors, to develop a language and societies and eventually technology. So, no, it doesn't have to be exactly the same, but it's probably inevitable that ecosystem complexity will increase. And if it's inevitable, ecosystem complexity will increase, then probably sooner or later, yes, technological civilization would arise. So one of the tools I used to illustrate the lacunae in the Drake equation, as I imagine

and saying, well, what if you want to predict the number of people at the world famous San Diego Zoo here in beautiful San Diego, which is normally not downpour and drizzling, but normally resplendent in sunlight. So I encourage people to visit. But I say if you want to predict how many people are there, you can make a kind of a Drake equation. And I did it once when I was at the SETI Institute in front of Frank Drake, you know, kind of hostile territory. And I came up with a number. But I did without error analysis. And the error, the error, bars then come out to be plus or minus something like two times the number I estimate. You could have negative 8,000 people or whatever. And I was just at the San Diego Zoo recently, and I took my daughter there, and we saw this Kapji, you know, which is like this on the African

Savannah. They have these giant rocks. And then, you know, all these different types of animals, pretty wild diversity of animals come there. And they gather around and they're not really sure what it is. I mean, you probably are. I'm not sure it is. But, do you think there's sort of a cosmic copji, you know, where if life does exist, that we'll get together and kind of hang out and talk about what we've learned, or do you feel more, you know, less sanguine, shall we say, about the prospects for, you know, such a thing to exist? I've got to be optimistic that, again, coming back to the Great Filter, any civilization that can get through the Great Filter, what are they here for, right? What do they want to do?

Okay, we got through the great filter. We fixed climate change, renewable energy, and there are no more wars and there's no more poverty. And now what do we do? Well, in the Star Trek universe, of course, we go out and explore and we explore in peace and so on. Because what else would you do? It's that, essentially, or in another science fiction trope, upload your consciousness to a computer and live in this sort of artificial paradise, which I actually think is extremely unlikely to be something that would happen, if only because the people who would have to build this computer

into which you upload your consciousness are scientists. And scientists is never going to be satisfied with the simulation because it tells them absolutely nothing about the real world. So scientists are still going to want to go out there and explore. And if we can get any civilization that can get past this great filter, So yes, I think it would be a tremendous drive to create a United Federation of Planets. So you talk a bit in the book about the differences in what was called by Carl Sagan, kind of the universal language of math, and you kind of differ with Carl about that, and that's great.

And I'll leave it to the readers to read it. But there's one notion that, you know, I was kind of interested to get your thoughts about, which is that what if the aliens had access to higher dimensions? You know, we believe we're superior to any kind of flatland creature, you know, exist in lower dimensions. But if there are truly higher dimensions than they're large, or they could be accessed as past guest on the show like Jim Gates

and Michi Okaku and others have suggested, you know, is the lack of evidence, for such creatures here, I mean, assuming we could notice them, and you've got to go through a nice example of how you might notice an alien and a higher dimension coming here. But the fact that we don't see such thing, could that be used in a Bayesian sense again to kind of falsify the existence of both, you know, well, I'll just say not of both higher dimensions and higher dimensional aliens, I'll just say higher aliens that have access to mathematical structures that we don't have access to. Well, I don't, I'm a zoologist. I don't, I can't tell you what's the

probability that there are accessible higher dimensions. I don't know, but I do know that our laws of physics, as we understand them, seem to be fairly complete. We don't have, we don't understand them to the end, of course, but they do seem to be very consistent. So, so from a Bayesian perspective, there seems to be little prior reason to think that these higher dimensions might exist. Of course, you may have theoretical reasons to think that, and I can't argue that one. I can't argue that one with you. But one thing that I think is a real lesson from thinking about the mechanisms by which alien life could evolve is that, you know, I do not doubt that there will be some really weird

stuff out there. I do not doubt that there will be somewhere in the galaxy life forms that completely contradict what I say in my book. I don't doubt that at all. but I think they'll be really rare because the obvious is common, the easy is common, and no matter how strange and wonderful and weird aliens might be like, they'll be the rare ones. And life that evolves in the ordinary way, in the easy way,

in the way that we understand and we understand that natural selection is a powerful force, you know, that's going to be widespread. Very good. Okay, Eric, well, we've reached the now the point in the conversation where I'd like to ask you audience questions if you're willing to take some of them. So first question is a comment from John Hawley, and he says, I read this book. It was really cool and insightful. There we go. Thanks for that, John.

The first question comes from Gabe Cruz. It's a little bit long, but we can kind of digest it. He says, differences between human and other large mammal brains are large. due to divergent evolution of brain structure from a relatively recent common ancestor. This means we share common brain hardware informed by common sensory function. We use our sensory capability to gather information from the same world. It appears to me that mammalian software cognition differs more in degree more in kind, although obvious differences are still observed in methods.

I would be fascinated to hear a discussion about the impending inter-mammalian, mammalian translation of electrical molecular brain activity. How would humans react if other species are translated? Basically, if we could read the, you know, Dr. Doolittle out, you know, your dog, Darwin over there, would you do it? What would be the implications? What would be the first question you would ask? So it's true.

Mammalian brains share a relatively recent, well, not that recent, but certainly, certainly there are a lot of mammals out there with brains that share a relatively recent common ancestor. Brains are ubiquitous. All animals have brains because all animals need to translate the sensory information into, mostly into decisions and into motor movements. But brains are really, really, really expensive organs. They use an awful lot of energy.

They're easily damaged. And so no animal has a brain more complex than it needs. and that means that all of these mammal brains, which may look very similar to us in terms of hardware, but their software is there to perform the tasks they need to perform, not to perform the tasks we need to perform. So if you think about dogs or dolphins or anything else, they've got a brain that they need, and it performs the tasks that they need. And specifically, one of the tasks it doesn't perform, so we believe, until we prove otherwise, is language. So we as very complex social primates need language.

It's absolutely essential in our evolutionary past when we lived in large groups of competing hominins, that we had this way of communicating, way of passing information, way of understanding each other. And animals that don't live in those groups don't need that. So even if it's built upon the same hardware, they don't have the software, it's just not necessary. So it's unreasonable to think that you could invent a machine that would read a dog's brain and make it something that we could understand. This is the famous Wittgenstein quote, right? If a lion could talk, we wouldn't understand it. not because of any of any limitations, but only because that experience that they have isn't

translatable to a human experience. So, yes, there are similarities. Of course they are. We are built. We've got the same four legs. We've got the four limbs. We've got the same bilateral symmetry as our ancestors did, but the software is different. Yeah, on that topic.

I told David Chalmers. I'm working on a pseudonymously written book called What Is It Like to be Thomas Nagel by A period Bat? Staying with the Brain philosophy question, a very kind of meandering question by listener, viewer MS. And it has to do with maybe chiral asymmetry, but also in the fundamental split between the halves of the brain. and this commenter says it's unknown why we have two halves of the brain. Of course, most why questions aren't really answerable in the domain of physics without some teleological purpose. But what about the asymmetry? Is there an asymmetry in the properties function role of the hemispheres of other mammals or other animals even?

I think it's, I think, although it's not my field, but I only. I'll stick my neck out and say, I think it's fairly clear why we have two hemispheres of the brain, the same reason that we have two eyes, and we're bilaterally symmetrical. And this is a fundamental property of almost all animals on Earth, and I believe on other planets, too. It's just our ancestors, and we're now going back a very, very long way. So we're going right back into before we have any fossils a billion years ago. our ancestors were bilaterally symmetrical because it just provided such a tremendous movement advantage.

And once you have that physical structure, then remember evolution builds on what you've got. It doesn't invent things new. So everything that we've built on top of that since then has inherited that structure and been constrained by that structure. So I'm not surprised that the brain has two hemispheres. Are there any interesting, sort of spontaneous breaking of symmetry that we see in biology in the same ways we see, for instance, in chirality of certain molecules? There is, you know, there are events, there are evolutionary events that could have gone one way or the other and happened to go one way, right? And then you're stuck with that. mostly we illustrate that with really maladaptive things like for instance the laryngeal nerve

that in the giraffe it has to go all the way down the neck and all the way back up again just because it's inherited what it was stuck with but but i think none of them really not of them really shape the the future of evolution in the same way that that biochemical chirality doesn't or the balance between matter and antimatter doesn't right you know there's no difference but we we might be made of antimatter living you know in an antimatter universe it's just the name there's more of one kind than there is of the other so that that spontaneous breaking of symmetry oftentimes doesn't actually have have visible effects there's an old joke just getting back to the giraffe you know giraffe seems to be you know

this this magical creature i mean uh you wouldn't really explain expect such an animal to exist. And then, you know, it's like people that say, well, what are, like Sean Carroll, like, what are all the purposes of all these galaxies in the Hubble Deep field? You know, why should it be that way? And if I were God, I wouldn't make it. And, you know, one of my rabbi friends says, you know, what I would be doing right now if I were God? The same thing God's doing right now. You think I know better than God? You know, I think, like, to say that, oh, well, you know, another giraffe on an exoplanet might not have its laryngeal nerve make a four meter journey.

I think it's a little bit, you know, kind of like discounting the effectiveness of the, of the engineering solution that whatever God or nature engineered, but I don't want to get too far down that particular rabbit hole. I do want to ask, just out of cure, are you a vegetarian? What fraction of zoologists are vegetarians? I am, and it's quite high. It's not ubiquitous, but it's pretty high. and yeah, that shouldn't surprise you.

And what fraction of zoologists are theologically inclined or theistically inclined, shall I say? I think that zoologists and I imagine other scientists as well, but speaking to the people I know, tend not to be combative about subjects like this. Except for one in particular, whose name is probably. Okay, and there are always exceptions. But on the other hand, there are a number of theistic, of quite prominent theists.

So the obvious, Simon Conway Morris, of course, very famous. Robert Asher is another member of our department who also is. So it's not an uncommon, it's not an uncommon position to hold, but, but, you know, we have the, we have the advantage that we are, we are confident with our, with our understanding. of how life could have evolved. So as long as a religious or a theistic zoologist understands that, and they do, because otherwise they wouldn't be a zoologist, then there's really no threat.

No one's sort of threatening anyone else. I suppose if you were a geologist and someone can say, well, you know, I believe the world was created in six days. You might say, but that undermines everything that I believe. But as long as a theistic zoologist who understands evolution, then there's no real threat. Very good. Okay, back to just two more audience questions, and then we'll close out.

So the question, this is kind of tongue in cheek, maybe, perhaps, or maybe some other body part in cheek, but a commenter by the name of LV-Gamer Cats, C-A-T-S, which I chose, almost chose for one. of my kids' names. But he or she asks, is the 21 second law of urinating, is that universal? In other words, how might it differ if mammals evolved in a planet with half the gravity of Earth or twice the gravity of Earth, sort of these bodily functions? And maybe just globally speaking, no pun intended, but what would be the implications, are there physical limitations to the existence

of intelligent, you know, sentient organisms. In other words, gravity's a thousand times, you know, you're in a proto-black hole, is that going to happen? So you'll have to forgive me that I'm not familiar with the 22nd one, 21-second rule of urination. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay.

Hilton for the stay. Yeah, but there are, and there will be, of course. And as I talk about in the first part of my book, you know, physics does constrain. If you live on a planet with a very thin atmosphere, you're not going to communicate with sound. You know, if you live on a planet with opaque atmosphere, you're not going to communicate with light. There are some things that are clearly dictated by the laws of physics. Gravity is one that science fiction authors tend to enjoy playing about with.

But, you know, it's, and no doubt, there is, you know, there's an issue here and there's an issue about flight. and how you might fly and what might be buoyant and what might not be boy. There's all kinds of interesting questions you could explore, but they're purely speculative until we know the details of a planet. But one thing that's important to remember, though, is that if you take these physical conditions to the extreme,

the problem is no longer biological, it becomes chemical. So if you were to live on the surface of a white dwarf, something like that, Star is a famous science fiction story about life on the surface of a neutron star. Then the question is, what chemical reactions could take place? Would molecules be stable under those conditions? And so I think physics is very low level, and I think the effects are primarily going to be felt at the low level.

Very good. Okay. Last question I'm not going to even bother you with because it's so right up the alley of this book, could aliens have a hive mind slash societal structure similar to ants and how could this lead to the evolution of hominity species, which is, this is a core quite, I hate it when authors are asked, as I once was on many a podcast, you know, can you explain the core thesis of your book in so many words so that the audience doesn't have to buy? No, buy the book, buy this book, listen to it, read it as I've done, David Buckingham, good friend of the show. Now, please do

that. So you'll get your answer when you do buy or listen to the book. And if you'll indulge me for another five more minutes, I have some existential questions to ask you along the themes of Sir Arthur C. Clark. Are you willing to go into the impossible with me for a few minutes? That's it. All right. These are the so-called thrilling three questions, which help to reveal scientists and deep thinkers such as yourself and the human terms that they are by putting kind of an ethical and moral dimension to their otherwise incredibly brilliant scholastic. and engaging and entertaining as this book is. I laughed. I didn't cry, but I laughed, and I really enjoyed this book. As I said, I became away a Lamarckian, so you'll be, you'll be forever-hounded, perhaps if you care about such things. But the first of these thrilling three final existential questions involves your ultimate demise at the biblical age of 120 years old, the age that Moses left

this planet. And it's meant to be a type of what's called an ethical will, or in Hebrew, we call it a Zaba'a. And this is something that represents your, essentially your moral, your ethical teachings, learnings, your wisdom, not just your knowledge, which is copiously displayed in papers and books. But what wisdom would you bequeath to your hereditary heirs, biological and ideological alike? Well, I think that, so I have five kids, and I hope that they're familiar with this, that the difference that we make in the world,

in general, is not bombastic. I don't believe in making a big difference. I don't think there's some people will make a big difference. But for most of us, to aim to make a big difference in the world is not the way to go. We should be making small differences. And it's those small acts that are our true posterity. I work with a lot of students, a lot of research students, and I'm not changing anyone's life, right? I'm not making them richer or anything like that.

But if I can help them touch their lives in some small way and help them along the way to what they want to do, that in itself is the only true accumulation of anything of any worth in this world. I think that's what we should all be aiming for. That's a beautiful way to put it. And the next question involves the future as well. but now we're going to go a billion years into the future. And you might recall from the movie 2001, a space odyssey, there are these hominids in Africa somewhere, and they come upon this massive monolith,

and they hit it with a bone, and they try to do all sorts of things to it and bashing it with skulls. But it makes its appearance throughout the film in many different capacities. We're not sure. Is it a time capsule? Is it a warning?

We're not really sure. But I want to phrase it in the form of a time capsule. If you had access to a billion-year-lasting time capsule, and you could put any the most important learning or discovery in your field, not necessarily by you, but you get bonus points, I assume, if you do, by your own discovery or your students, tell me, what would you put on such a time capsule to encapsulate, literally, for future generations,

to kind of brag and have a little bit of swagger about what we as humans did as of 20, 2022. I think there's only, there can only be one answer, surely. There can surely only be one answer. And that is evolution by natural selection. And that's not because I think it's a particularly important piece of information for the life, intelligent life in a billion years to have. But I think it's a, it's the discovery, it was a very recent discovery. it's only 150 years old, but it's the discovery that that bound us to the natural world, to say that we are related to every other living thing on this planet.

That is not just a scientific observation, that is also a moral observation. It's something that we haven't discovered soon enough. Perhaps if we had discovered it a thousand years earlier, then maybe history would have turned out differently. But if we're looking to a billion years into the future after the human civilization has disappeared, then I would hope that message would get to a fledgling civilization in time to maintain and to respect that connection between them and all of the life on Earth. Very nice. And, Eric, the last one, the last and final question now, instead of going to the future, we're going to go into your past. and along the way we're going to encounter the origin story of not species but of the name of this podcast. And that is a quote from Sir Arthur C. Clark, which in his third law, states that the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible.

And so that's the name of this podcast. And I want to ask you and turn this into a sort of advice to your former self. as a 20-year-old, as a 30-year-old, if you could go back in time, teleport your self in some holographic form, perhaps. What advice would you give to your 20- or 30-year-old self to give him the courage to go as you have done into the impossible? Well, I've had a fairly unconventional career, and I've done a few different things, I've been a rocket scientist and as well as a zoologist. And the advice I would give to myself is the same advice I give to my children and to my students, which is, don't be afraid to do what you want to do.

Don't be afraid to change if you want to change. Don't be afraid to explore lots of different things because actually the real interest, the real interest in life and speaking as a scientist, the real interest in science, but in general, the greatest stuff comes from diversity. it's only through diversity that you can really see everything see everything that's going on and that's true in every in every aspect of life so so yes by all means do do something different do change to try different things that is that that that's that's what we we want to do delightful lark uh kurschenbaum i want to thank you i look forward to the kerschenbaum equation and hopefully many other interactions um and i really enjoy this

truly a delight and an honor and privilege to talk to you. And I wish you a great success and everything you do. And hopefully we'll get to meet in person, perhaps, and I'll visit when I go across the pond again someday. That'll be fantastic. That's great. I've had a great time. Thank you. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode with our recursion, Baum of Cambridge University, where there are great many scientists and great influences on the scientific method for the last several hundred years. And Eric falls into that tradition very nicely. The Dawkins tradition of their rival at Oxford and of course good old Charles Darwin. And I think it's really delightful that we

get to talk to such luminary, such intellects and that I'm getting so much love and support from those of you who are out there in the listening out there in the rest of the galaxy. And I want to just share with you some of the reviews that I get that really touch my heart. This is one I got recently from a person whose name is underscore science underscore on Apple Podcasts. And the title is bringing the listener into the impossible five stars each time. I get so excited. Each time I get the notification for a new podcast with Dr. Keating. He does a phenomenal job of virtually bringing the listener into the conversation as a space junkie,

to the impossible sits easily alone at the top of my all-time favorites. Thanks so much, Dr. Keating. Well, thank you so much, Science underscore Science. This really warms my heart when I get reviews like that. And I really will hope to keep on entertaining you in this ride throughout the galaxy that I'm trying to do. I remind you, I have also a YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, and I have an email sign-up lease that you can get my Monday magic messages twice a month.

I send out a memory and appearance, something that I have a email. It's genius, some beautiful image or idea, and of course I share the conversations that you can find in video format. I also do on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, you can find explainer videos about things like the origin of magnetic fields, the way that light can come together to produce matter, pure energy, producing pure matter. It's really fascinating if I don't say so myself, but really it's to really hook you into this world of science to answer the questions that you have so you can be a better

informed citizen. After all, you guys pay my taxes. No, actually, sorry. I wish you paid by taxes. Your taxes pay my salary because anyone who takes any scientific support is supported by the public. And I view it as my moral obligation to pay it back to you. So check out my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating. Sign up for my email list.

It's easy to subscribe to, easy to leave. And leave me a review if you can at Apple Podcast. Spotify now allows you to leave a certain number of stars. I hope it will also be an asterism, no smaller than five stars. and I tremendously appreciate all the love and support that you guys have, and I hope I am sharing it back, returning it to you. So for now, Dr. Brian Keating off. Thank you so much for going into The Impossible.

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