Off-Nominal - 107 - He's Got a Butt

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

Jake and guest host Debarati Das are joined by Jaime Green, author of the new book The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and our Quest for Kinship in the CosmosTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 107 - He’s Got a Butt (with Debarati Das and Jaime Green)Follow JaimeJaime’s WebsiteThe Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the CosmosFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow DebaratiDebarati Das (@SpaceWicca) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS is go for main engine start. Go at throttle home eco. Welcome to space. Hello everybody. Welcome. Welcome to Off-Nominal. I got new music because everyone digging the music. I swapped it all out this morning. It is supposed to be something new and fresh. I realize it's funny because we have the same stuff going like every show and I went to look to see like, have we changed that recently? And it was like two years ago that we swapped it out. So I decided to have a special treat for everyone today.

for everyone today. Welcome to two people new to the show. Anthony's away this week. So I have Debrati Daz co-hosting again. Welcome, Debrati. Great to have you back. And then our guest of honor, Jamie Green. Welcome to the show, Jamie.

It's great to have you. Hello. Thanks for having me. Yeah. We're very excited to talk about your book. It's the possibility of life, which is, it was, so I got to tell you, it was like a super digestible and interesting and broad and scope kind of read like it was not what I expected it to be I went into it like totally

ready to go after like like a space space book because this is the you know this is the space show and then there was lots of space stuff in it but there was all this other stuff in it too and I was kind of like it took me in a new place that I didn't expect to go but I loved it so I'm really we still talk about it today um yeah well we'll do some drinks first that's always kind of the the top of the show here who wants to start anyone got anything interesting going on oh I'll start I have my very favorite it Mars and no it's not Mars sun and moon mug my best was hot but now it's an eclipse because my beverage has cooled down I'm drinking a milk along which is which kind of just like blows my mind is literally tea leaves that kind of smells like milk so yeah that's awesome that sounds really

good excellent yeah that sounds good I am I am drinking a very very large very large jar I started drinking water out of these it's probably like a like a 30 ounce jar when I had COVID last winter and I just I find it very satisfying and it's pink because it's I'm like weirdly into these little like hydration packets the brand I like is hydrant not sponsored but I mean I don't know if it's actually more hydrated But these are ones that, like, they don't have any artificial sweetener, which I don't like the taste of. So it just makes it, like, easier to chug, you know? Like, is it like making it, is it just that it's sweet and tasty?

Yes. But I like to tell myself that it's, like, extra hydrating. I don't know. Okay. I mean, you're drinking more because it's tasty. Yeah, it is extra hydrating. Yeah. So extra hydrating.

Yeah. I mean, you can't grow, the 30 ounce jar, there's not really any escape from being hydrated after that. That's a lot of water. That's true. That's extremely true. You could put vinegar in it and you'd probably still be hydrated. I know. I went full tropical today.

Ooh. Oh, man, that looks good. Yeah. You win the beverage prize. Oh, thanks. I'll see. So I've got just like some normal like rum and like grenadine and pineapple juice in here. But I also got, so I brought this back from Portugal.

I was just in Portugal. So this is like a cool banana liqueur. They make some sort of, I don't know. special kind of bananas there of some kind. And then I mixed in this. This is a local thing from where I am in Mexico here. This is a coconut liqueur from Casa Daristi in Chukatan. So I put that in there and I got like, you know, just all the different kind of tropical things going on here.

So I went for it. I would like to hydrate. Yeah, I would like to hydrate with that. Yeah, I don't know if a 30 ounce jar of that would be hydrated. But you'd feel great, though. Let's be honest. Yeah. It's working. So, Jamie, let's maybe just start with you a little bit.

Sure. What's your job? Where did you come from? And why did you choose to write a book about life and space of all things? Yeah. So I mean, I'm a freelance writer. I don't have a PhD. I have my master's in creative nonfiction. But I've always loved science. For a while in high school, I talked about going to college to be a theater and physics double major, largely because I thought that sounded cool, but also because I did love physics and science and, like, you know, learning about particle physics from Nova specials and things like that.

But I didn't do enough of my calculus homework senior year. I was like, oh, no, you really have to do all the homework. Right. But then I was like, never mind. So that was the end of studying math for me. But I'd always, always love this stuff. And then when I was in graduate school, we had to do a semester-long research project where we'd pick a topic to research and write from it. And I wanted to write about the Voyager Golden Record. And my professor said, go bigger, write about aliens. I was like, well, that's a lot bigger. But I did. And I talked to my... way into an undergrad astronomy class at the university on exoplanets and astrobiology, even though calculus was a prerec for that class, the professor very generously let me in,

because I had to take it past fail anyway. So I was like, I will brush up enough so that I can understand the calculus you're talking about, but then he wrote me problem sets for the calculus heavy section of things that were like word problems or short answer stuff, which I just really appreciated. But anyway, that was like the beginning, of it. And I loved learning about it and writing about it. And I was like, I want to write a book about this. I want to write a book about the search for life in the universe. And then I would do the thing that a lot of writers do when you have a book idea where you go to the bookstore and you visit the shelf that's like your book's future home. And I went to the astronomy shelf. And then

there were like already four books on this on the shelf. And they were all written by astronomers and astrophysicist and I was like, this is not the book I can write because it's already been written and by people with more expertise. So I sort of put it away for a while. And then a few years after I finished grad school, a friend was looking to commission essay series on culture topics. And I was like, what about aliens from a cultural point of view? And she said, yes. And it was while I was working on that and writing one of the essays, it was the one about like putting sci-fi and science in conversation and asking scientists who like study scientists and astrobiologists what they think of these various sci-fi representations

of aliens and I just like I just wanted to keep writing and keep writing and keep writing and that was when I realized that what was interesting and exciting to me was writing about this as a question not as a question of like how do we find this stuff where is it you know what are the odds but about looking at it as a question of imagination and like what are all the possibilities yeah yeah well yeah and your book does a good job of exploring that too and the sci-fi thread runs all the way through it which i found super interesting but because there was like a bunch of sci-fi mentioned it that i like knew very well and i was going oh yeah that's exactly what it's about and there's a bunch stuff i had no idea about it so

now i got to go and like now you this reading list book gave me a reading list so thank you for that you're well i mean it's like you know terrible homework it's like here's a china meaeville book you might not of red. I'm so sorry. Yeah, researching it was really fun because I'd be like, oh, I have to read a fantastic sci-fi novel now during work hours. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know that feeling I drink on YouTube for a living, so it's really good. You know, that's pretty, it's surprising to have you go from being afraid of the sky to a job like that. I don't know if you want to tell that story. Yeah, yeah. So like that's, you know,

that's how I opened the book. And it's true. Like when I was a little kid, I was scared of the night sky. It was like an extension of fear of the dark, you know, but it was just like the most dark, the biggest dark. And I'm still easily spooked, but through learning about astronomy and through connecting to the idea of space through sci-fi, like looking at the stars, you know, I'm realizing also part of it is like now knowing what I know about astronomy and exoplanets looking at the stars

it's not as alien anymore it's not mysterious like you look at any star and odds are there's a planet around it and like I know what planets are I live on a planet it's so much more familiar than when I look at the planets like I can recognize most of them I just sort of have a hunch like oh that's probably Saturn you can usually tell when it's Venus or Mars and so like that's sort of not you know it's funny, a lot of people, not a lot of people, but something I've heard from people who know me and know my writing and hear about the book is that they're going to read it even though they're scared of space. And I think that like that vastness still spooks a lot of people, even in adulthood, that it's like kind of scary to think about how small we are. But I think the book kind

of does the opposite and hopefully makes you feel like more connected with the cause. And like it's a little bit more familiar. Yeah, yeah, I can feel that for sure. It was, it's funny because sometimes I feel like you can go through that phase where like it starts. It's like very unknowable like the universe and then that's scary. And then you get to know it and it becomes less scary for that reason. But also now like, you know, I can look up and do the same thing. I'll look up at a point of light and it's like, oh, it's Mars.

And then I'm like, everything I know about Mars like rushes into my head. I'm like, that is a whole other place. like a literally another planet, a whole planet worth of stuff that you have to learn about. And then that can be very overwhelming too. Yeah. Like I remember, and I think I talk about this in the book too, the first time that I saw Saturn through a telescope where like I'd seen plenty of pictures of Saturn. No, that's not all about for someone.

Right. But then like you see the point of light in the sky and then you look through the telescope and you see it. And so you realize that it's not just a picture of something. It's that thing that you're looking at in the sky. sky and to even though it's a two-dimensional image like it just feels different it feels really like oh my god that's Saturn that's it's there it's real you know it like really hits you in a different way i think your feelings about science science is what most comes out in your book i think this was at

reading it as a scientist was struck me is what struck me the most as there's this one part where you say that life is just really hard to define and scientists just find it really hard to accept that life is literally just a vibe, you know? Like you know it when you see it, it's a vibe and you can't really define it and you write so much about your feelings about scientific discovery and how it is, you know, really peppered with the personalities of humans and our imaginations. And that's, I think that was the first time where it felt so relatable, you know, like because in science, we're just always kind of conditioned to remove the emotions of how we feel about the science, but have the motivation ready when we're writing proposals. But this was like, this was just like, ah, this is like

super cool. So yeah, I just wanted to really point it out. It's not just about science. It's about the humanity, the empathy, the complexity of human life itself. which like chef kiss. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so glad. And like, yeah, I hope that that's part. Not that like books about space by scientists aren't emotional, but like that's what I can bring to it.

Because I'm also like I'm an outsider. I don't do scientific research. I don't have to live through the sort of like monotony or struggle of that. We're like at some point it's just doing a lot of math. Like you're not sitting there feeling feelings about Saturn all. time. There's a lot of other stuff. It's like your job, you know. And so for me, even though writing about it is my job, I think having that distance of never having been like a lab scientist, um, lets it stay a little more magical for me, even though I talk to a lot of researchers,

you know, I learn a lot about their, about their research. But it was really fun, like, trying to make them be a little more speculative, you know, because something I talk about in the book is like once we get get past thinking about what microbes might be like like no one's writing papers about that there's like you know maybe like one or two like fun speculative papers but that's not the work of science um you don't get funding for that and so to say like okay but like what do you think but like what do you think like when you're not like what do you think and like really teasing that out i remember it's it's it's really easy to like when you're when you're in the science world and just like you know reading papers and talking about science and going to science

conference like it's easy to get lost in that I remember when the when the phosphine news hit at Venus and it was like big big deal and then at embargo had gotten broken and so we're all kind of watching it and I remember like one of my like uncles had texted me like I heard about this Venus thing like you know what do you think is going to happen you know what's the question and I was like still like in the zone I'm like well so there's this paper that came out and then they're going to really you could tell them. The other papers are going to come back and they're going to counter it. If you go to, you know, I'm sure it's going to be really lit at Absaicon. It's going to be awesome to go. And he was like, no, like, what do you think is going to happen though? And I was like, oh, he's not asking about that.

So, you know, there's like a different, there's a different perspective you can take on all this. And that's what I thought was really interesting about the book is it just, it kept, it brought me up out of the, I won't say a sewer, but you know, you're up out of the, out of the muck of the, of the, of the, of the, of the. the day-to-day kind of science stuff. Yeah. That was really good. It also adds a really important perspective that a lot of scientific definitions are based on what we already know and what our limitations are based on humans. And one thing that came up over and over again when you were going through all the depictions of alien life and what we define is life is based on what we know.

And we just kind of hit a wall. we want to do more work on it and you know when you're trying to be extremely kooky about like you know what something could look like like you mentioned silicone-based lives and if they breathe like imagine them breathing out sand because we breathe out carbon dioxide like who would fund that right science is based on what our imaginations are limited to and what is already funded what we already know so it's like a repetition over and over again of things we already know. So that was extremely refreshing to read.

Yeah. And it's like all these incremental steps. Like today the like JWST round two proposal funding came out. And like I was seeing on Twitter that no proposals about exo moons got funded. And it's like because that's like such a. Feels like such a far bridge. But it's like that's such a cool question too. I know that like there is only so much telescope time.

But yeah, like the weirder more out there, like you, it's really hard to get leaps funded. You have to do like this step and then this step, like all these little baby steps. And it is really constrained by what we know. I mean, that's that's like the fundamental problem is the n equals one problem. You know, it's like any guess, any extrapolation, any prediction is just based off Earth. And like, we don't know if we are average or we are weird or we are the only ones. Like, we just do not know. And no matter how much people will say, like, well, surely.

And it's like, no. Yeah. We're not well surely. Like. No. No. Yeah. I like the part.

There was a mention you were talking about language and stuff, you know, whether, like, how do we communicate with aliens if we ran into them? And I can't remember the book now. after refresh my memory, but where they had the aliens that had two mouths and that was part of the, like, that was embassy town by China Mievel. Yeah, yeah. So there was like a concurrency to their language. Like you had to talk to two things at the same time. That's and then there was only one stream. They didn't know what you were saying. And I was like, it's like such a brain bender to think about like. And those are the sort of weird leaps you have to try and, you know, be open to if you, if you want to, I don't know, do this as a job, I guess like we want to look for life.

But yeah, man, I don't know. I got stretched all over the place in this book. I don't know where I am anymore. Yeah, I feel like, I relate. Yeah, there's like, in the language section, I bring in a quote from Nome Chomsky, where he's basically saying that like if an alien language sort of, there's, we don't know if, let's say they're intelligent aliens and they use, they communicate. Maybe they even talk or they write or whatever. It's possible that learning an alien language will be just like learning,

another human language, like for me, learning Chinese or whatever. And it's just like, you learn it like a language, right? And that's what most sci-fi depictions of communicating with aliens are like. That's what arrival is like. That's what the sparrow is like. You know, you just like learn the language and you learn to speak it. Humans can learn to speak Klingon, right? But there's also the possibility that there will be something so fundamentally different in what their communication system is, that instead of learning it like a language, we would have to like untangle its secrets like learning physics. Like it'll be the work of like decades and decades of scholarship of like that it just wouldn't be a language to us. And I think that like those

sort of slow processes of understanding, it actually reminds me a lot of what you're saying about phosphine that like the general public thinks that when we find alien, it's going to be aha full stretch headline on the new york times alien life found right and instead it's nothing went wrong with the phosphine story some people thought they saw phosphine which like it's so hard for me as a lay person to even imagine what a like work of interpretation that is it's not like they were like boom phosphine it's like really interpreting the data it's like close reading you know um so they thought they saw phosphine and they were in the pastphine and they were in the paper very cautious about like we don't think we know how else this could be made,

which could mean life, but but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but. But then the correct scientific process is scrutiny and re-investigation and debating. And in this case, it was like, oh, the phosphine wasn't even really there, I think, right? Like, that's probably, it's kind of where I ended up with. Probably, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly. But like, if there was life in the clouds of Venus producing phosphine, like that would have played out exactly the same, except then, like, we would still be going. And it's the same thing for SETI signals, unless it's like a message is like, hello, Earthlings, what's up? You know, like in contact, it's going to be more like, oh, we think we got a signal. It seems technological. We have to spend a year proving that it,

figuring out that it didn't come from Earth, that it wasn't the microwave down the hall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I think there definitely was a case of a steady false alarm that was a microwave. Like, it would be like intermittent, and they realized it was when someone was heating up their dinner. They can pop them in the break room like you're not supposed to. Exactly, exactly. Like, I'm observing right now. Yeah, but it's just like we, we, sci-fi has primed us to think and we want it to be easy and aha.

just like, I found you, but that's just not how discoveries work. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. No, that's great. No, and you know, and I think about that fawking discovery. I watched the like the live stream they did like they did like a, you know, a press briefing thing that they yeah to break the embargo, you know, to end the embargo. And I remember being like really impressed with how they handled it because like all the

scientists were just like look like we are absolutely not saying and we just like we've run out of of things to try and figure out. So like we just wrote it all down in a paper and now we're giving it all to you to find the holes in it and we just like we can't get it. Like it was the most responsible way to handle something like that I thought. But it doesn't always go that way. And like even still, like the vibe on Twitter was oh my god there might be life on Venus. Yeah.

Because of course it is but then it's like people start getting disappointed and so many more people paid attention that day than paid attention to the handful of papers that trickled out sort of poking a hole. and saying like, probably not, probably not. Same thing with the breakthrough listening candidate signal, which was like just a couple months after the phosphine news, I think, which was another leak where before they were ready to say anything, I think the guardian or someone leaked that they had found a signal of technological origin.

And they were working, and it turned out to be from Earth, but it took like a year to find out. And there were no headlines when they announced that they figured out that it was from Earth. Like literally none. I found out about it because someone was like tweeting like a conference presentation. Like that was the news. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not as you know, it's not as sexy the other way around, right? Right. Right. Of course not. And it's not sexy to make the headline like scientists have have exhausted all of the plausible mechanisms for phosphine that they can think of, right? No one cares about exactly. Yeah. It's true though. It's so true.

we don't want the negative result right now but what happens one day when you know let's say right now we are kind of at the cusp of like okay maybe there was a signal of phosphine what if one day we do find like you know what yeah there is live and it's not terrestrial I really found your perspective in the book where you said that

I think humanity is going to lose their collective shits I mean, to put it very crassly, once we kind of do realize that, oh, we are, there is more than us now. And is, do you think like we'll all just have this existential crisis of, where do you, what do you think about that? Like, what if we did? And what, where, what do you think would happen if we did find something like headlines? Oh, we have found extraterrestrial life. Right. I mean, I think it really depends if it's like microbial life.

or a biosignature or a seti signal. You know, I think that proof of biological life versus proof of technology or intelligent life is gonna feel really different. But I don't know. I mean, it's funny, you know, like in contact, Carl Sagan imagines, which is like the most directed version of discovery, where it's like a message to earthlings with like, that we can decipher, it was instructions for building a mysterious machine,

he shows that as like triggering a lot of spiritual crises and revolutions and basically nuclear disarmament. Like it's everything that he and his generation of like the first SETI researchers hoped that that discovery would bring about on Earth, that it would be really meaningful because of course they wanted to be really meaningful. It's like their life's work. But then when I talked to current SETI researchers who are like a generation or two young, longer, a lot of, which is also like Sagan and Jill Tarter and those folks always would talk about finding a message, about being welcomed into the galactic community. Now SETI researchers are like much more agnostic. They're just looking for proof of technology. They do not expect a directed

message. They're just hoping to maybe eavesdrop or like, you know, find proof that someone once was there and built something that the universe doesn't build on its own. And they were were like, no, I don't think anyone's really going to care. I don't really see it changing. Not that no one's going to care, but that they don't see it changing anything really big on earth. And it's true. Like, I think it will matter to some people, but on a like cultural,

civilizational scale, people have a lot of stuff to worry about. And then like when people like, oh, this will show humanity that we're not also different and bring us together or inspire us to stop climate change or whatever, it's like, We already know those things. We already know that we're doing bad things. And we shouldn't wait for a big booming voice from the sky to tell us. But the other thing that I think is really interesting on that question is something I learned in my research and really had like put starkly was for most of modern history in the West, like since the Renaissance, I would say, which I realize is not. Yeah, I guess we call that early modern.

And so, yeah, we, more of that time than not has been spent just taking for granted that there's life on other worlds. It's only in the last like 100, 150 years that as we've learned more, we've realized that Venus is not hospitable, Mars is not hospitable, Mars is not inhabited. A hundred years ago, we thought there were canals on Mars. Yeah, because of a translation error, right, from the Italian for channels. It was not that long ago. Like that was like, yeah.

Right. Like you could go to the movie theater or you could say, yep, there's life on Mars. Like at the same time. You could drive in a car and driving in a car say like, yes, we take it for granted that there's life on Mars. And even until the Viking landers, some scientists reasonably thought that like they were just going to find like grass, microbes, whatever. It's like, yeah, Mars, chill. Great. We're going to find stuff.

And so it's. Someone mentioned that to me once that like you could reasonably think that you are going to find like macro scale life when Viking landed. But it was like an aside in a conversation. So it's not like, I don't know, a citation for it. So it's really in the last hundred years, most of the scientific discoveries and advances that we've made have made the universe seem less inhabited and less habitable except for exoplanets. That's really one where like 100 years ago, we did not know how we didn't have a clear model of planet formation. We didn't know if planet formation was a fluke. And especially the first half of the 20th century, that was the reigning point of view.

That planets were formed by like the near miss between two stars and the gravity would pull off some of the matter of the star and that would form planets. And so that's like not. now we know that planet formation is sort of like just a byproduct of star formation and that they're everywhere but it blew my it blows my mind to think about that the first exoplanets were discovered in the 90s that is also so recently and for a long time we had like 12 like there just wasn't that many right right and now and now it's but but now it's like I love telling people like you pointed a star any star in the sky odds are it has a planet yeah that That's cool. That's when you're like, well, shortly.

Not well sure. No, you've told that question very well as well. Yeah. Sorry. No, it's great. It's funny to think about that hypothetical of like, what do we do and when the Vulcans land and step off their spaceship in front of, you know, Zephram Cochran and do this. But I don't know.

I kind of think that when it does happen, if it does happen, it's going to be like just way more boring than that. Oh, yeah, because they're not going to be here. No, no, we're going to find it out there. It's going to be a signal. Yeah. And then like, it's going to take time to decipher. We're not going to be having a back and forth conversation. It's going to be like very slow pen pals.

And like, you're probably not going to be alive for the answer. No. If they catch it. Like, it's like trying to be, you know, I think I say in the book, it's like trying to be pen pals with Queen Elizabeth the first. But it's really like trying to be pen pals with Queen Elizabeth the first by throwing paper. airplanes at her and hoping she catches. Yeah. Like, like the, it just makes me nervous to think about because it's like, it's going to be

real hard and real slow and real confusing. Well, and like even if we find, you know, even something close to home, like, you know, Debraud, if you, you zap something with a laser down there and you find, you find something under a rock on Mars. And it's like there are, you know, like that process is such a, uh, a time consuming scientific process because the instruments are, you know, very narrow and focused. And the scope of what they do is like it does one thing and it looks for this one reading and then it gets that reading and that's what the instrument does. And so like you're going to see something that like maybe if you squint a little bit, it kind of looks like and then you have to go through that whole scientific product.

It's going to be, you know, it's going to require like two, three follow on missions to confirm that. It's going to take decades to actually. Right. Like even if you fast pack a Mars mission, it's just like and it's like, well, just send a person there and let them pick up the rock and look. But also like that's a whole thing. and then what lab are you sending with them? And also then, and this is, I'm like nervous about this. Like, if there's life on Mars, it's very possible that it's just like a couple

pockets here and there, right? It doesn't seem to be everywhere. So what if one Mars rover picks up a rock gets an interesting reading? 20 years later, another Mars rover picks up the rock next to it and can't find anything. And it's just like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of also, I mean, I think,

I think that's like not an issue really, but every Mars rover mission, the key question is finding life. And I think what you talked about when you were saying that, you know, we used to think that there's grass on Mars, but with the, with more understanding of it, now I realize what you mean by like we get lonelier and lonelier when we realize like, no, there is no grass, but then we also start, it's just rock, but we also start refining. where we might find life. Like now we know there was underground water activity in Gale Crater on Mars.

So it's like with understanding it a little bit more, we have so many places we still haven't looked at, which still might have that possibility. So I think that's... We've barely scratched the surface. So like that is exciting, but there are a lot of possibilities, both in terms of within the solar system,

trying to detect biosignatures from exoplanets, SETI, like all of this is just like barely scratch the surface. And so that's, you know, when people are like, oh, the Fermi paradox, where is everyone? It's like there could be a base on Venus that we don't know about. There could be probes in the out. It's not like we can see everything in the outer solar system, you know, like there. So like we know so little. But we also know so little about life on Earth. I don't know. It's there's, there's. It's exciting. That's true. It's exciting. And like, you know, it's the kind of thing that it doesn't exactly make me wish that I could like go back and be a scientist. Because I don't think that that's, but there's just so many exciting questions. But that makes it hard to think that we're necessarily on the verge of the big answer when we've got all these other little questions first.

It's going to be boring. I'm telling you. It's going to be so boring. A long series of papers that are indeclible to the common person. Yeah. Speaking of life on Earth, is that where you were going to say? Yes, that's exactly what I was going to say. I just wanted. Yeah.

This stupid thing, this. Is that Analamacaris? Yes. I like, I stopped in my tracks when I write this because I was just like, you, you know, you described this weird alien looking thing. Like, I have to go see that. Yeah. So the name.

Okay, so we, you know, this show is called off nominal. We call our listeners anomalies. And so like right away, this anomal lucaris, which is like, where it's supposed to be like weird shrimp or something, like op nominal shrimp is basically what it means. So I have to ask about this because you can tell a little story about it. And then we can go on a little further. But yeah, what the heck is this and why was it important to your story? So it's funny.

So this is a part of the book that I don't think anyone has asked me to talk about in interviews before. So I have to make sure I remember this. Okay. This is the thing from the Burgess Shale, right? Yes, yes. Okay. So the Burgess Shale is, oh, man, I have not gone back to this part of the book in a long time. Basically, it's a really good fossil record of soft-bodied creatures, right?

So it's like a, and it's a lot of little freaks where most of them like don't, or rather it's taken. researchers decades to figure out what's going on there because it's a lot of shmushed little soft guys and a lot of weird body plans that we don't see at like later in the fossil record. And so it's an important moment for thinking about whether evolution is convergent or random, right? So like you can find ancestors of like the body plans that we see on earth now, but you also see lots of little freaks who went extinct soon after. And it's like, there's no reason to think that the familiar body plans out-competed the weird ones. It really could just be like the weird one got eaten or a rock fell on a weird one.

I mean, I guess they were underwater, so a rock falling on you doesn't hurt that much. But anyway. Or are they only weird because we're the ones that won? Right, right, right, exactly. That there's no reason to think that they, were evolutionary, evolutionarily, that they were like out-competed, right? Like, could we all be like weird little multi-legged flying carpets like that guy? Um, it or, you know, and there are arguments for like if you have, well, that one is bilaterally symmetrical. So like being bilaterally symmetrical,

there's, that's very logical that if you're built by dividing cells, you know, one cell into two cells, you're going to have that symmetry of a left and a right where your sides match. Like even on a starfish, right? You can cut a line down the middle and fold it in half and it lines up. But everything else about insects having six legs, mammals or vertebrates having four limbs, like a lot of that is just like, that's who didn't get eaten last Tuesday. And that's who kept going. But this is really important for thinking about if there is something analogous to animal life on another planet, there is scientific, there are scientific arguments you could make that because of convergent evolution,

the same things that are successful in evolution on Earth would be successful there, just like, you know, humans and octopus evolved lensed eyes totally independently. So like, and bats and birds and plants have evolved the ability to make caffeine like four different times because that's useful. So would life on another planet stumble onto the same solutions? Are these the ideal solutions or is it just about like who got eaten and who didn't and who, you know, lived to be the grandfather to everything? Yeah. Well, and that's a that's a good theme for the whole kind of book really is like is, you know, is life a happy accident, you know, that just sort of it happened once and that was like a stroke of luck and then here we are or is it the natural

chemical end stage of like just the like you put you put a bunch of matter in a universe eventually it's just going to turn into you know garbage men and and pizza pit people like you know like it's just going to turn yeah but yeah no it was really which is like a really a really lovely way to think like when you're thinking about what is life even though you know entropy in the second I think law of thermodynamics, whichever one it is. Aside, like, the entire history of the universe is the universe figuring out how to, you know, like out of the Big Bang, we get particles and atoms and molecules and clouds of dust and stars and galaxies.

Like, the universe does, for some reason, create order. And what life does is, like, create little bubbles of more complexity and more order and more information and so you can see that like you can see your existence or like you writing a sentence or coming up with a new idea this creation of new order and novelty is like the entire legacy of the universe rather than seeing life as isolated on our planet or humanity as alone because we're intelligent and have no one else to talk to like we're just what the universe does um which i don't know that to be a nice way to think about it, even though that doesn't, that like still leaves open a lot of scientific questions about like what is life and what makes it do what it does, which we don't

have answers for. Yeah. Yeah, that's a big question. Yeah. Yeah. Because one of the chapters you do is on technology, which I found really important kind of chapter in this because, you know, we're now very much in the thick of this whole AI thing. And what, what is AI? Is it? Is it actually taking us on the path to some sort of singularity or is it really just like a fancy digital assistant that can help you schedule? Yeah. I don't know yet. I mean like I feel like I definitely I've been like trying to train myself to call chat

GPT and all these current things machine learning and not AI because there's no intelligence there. These are clever plagiarism algorithms. Right. Like they and you know like when chat GPT strings together a novel fendixen people like, oh no, it's sentient. But when Mid Journey makes a hand with 11 fingers, we're not like, ooh, it invented something novel,

like it doesn't know how to make hands. But yeah, it is like, we do feel like there's something happening. But what it feels like now is not the threat of this intelligence. It's much more like the threat of how capitalism is using it. Like the writer's strike right now is so much about making about making sure that writers don't get replaced by AI in the service of making mediocre crap that still makes money, right? Like it does just like the origin of life come back to this idea of novelty and creating new things, which like machine learning right now cannot do and humans can, but capitalism doesn't care. So like, you know, when we think about dystopian visions of the post-singularity,

future or we think about like, you know, I write about the matrix and sort of the backstory of the matrix in the book, which is covered in a couple of animated shorts in the animatrix. It's not that the machines were evil and wanted to take over. The machines in the matrix wanted to be respected and humans said no. And they only turned humans into batteries because humans used nuclear bombs to like cloud up the skies so that they couldn't get solar power anymore. And like what's going on now is not that like the machines are so smart. It's that machine learning is like allowing some of humanity's worst impulses to take over rather than valuing what's challenging.

It's like this the human like drive for ease and profit instead of. Yeah. Yeah. But like yeah. Yeah. They're not taking over. it's like capitalism's taking over. Yeah.

Yeah. No, it was interesting because it was like, even in the scope of technology, I mean, AI is the thing that stands out to us, you know, in today's world as what we would classify that as.

But even the book even goes through different kind of, you know, examples of different, you know, what technology might, technological life might look like. And, and again,

you bring in all the sci-fi stuff, which is also very, very interesting. So yeah, I found that very, very cool to to sort of explore that in broader detail than just, I don't know, tweets, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Nice thing about books. They're longer than tweets. They are longer than tweets significantly. Some might say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I, I'm curious to see your perspective on what you, what you pulled from this experience.

Like, you know, so you went into this knowing a little bit about these things, enough that you were like, I can write a book about it. And then you did all the research, wrote the book, the book's out. Now you're here talking to us. What's most different about you after this experience? What surprised you about your research? Where did you end up? Um, I mean, I don't know if it's because I've just sort of like gotten to the end of this

project, but I feel I sort of care less about whether or not there's actually life on other worlds. I feel less attached to that. And I write about this in the book that when I was work, when I was doing my research about, I have a chapter about planets. And that's like the section that I came into it knowing the most about for better or for worse. It made it like harder in some ways because I had taken that class at Columbia. And I was a writer for Astrobytes for a couple years. Astrobytes is a website that's staffed by graduate students. Other than me, it was graduate students in astronomy and astrophysics who write like summaries of new research papers aimed at an undergrad audience so that like an undergrad in physics or astronomy

can learn about new research. So I had like immersed myself in exoplanets and astrobiology for a couple years that way. So I was researching this chapter and I was talking to Abel Mendez who studies habitability and like maintains the habitable exoplanets catalog. And that's with habitability just as the right size and the right distance from the sun. Like would be rocky would have liquid water. Like that's it. Astronomy really backed itself into a corner with calling that habitability because a layperson is like, sweet, I'll pack my bags. I'll be right there. But he started. it out as an astrophysicist and then got into astrobiology. And I asked him, like, I asked every scientist that I interview in the book, you know, like, what do you think, what do you think

might be out there? What would it mean to you? And he was like, I don't care. I was like, you what? And he said, I don't really care. I was like, but why are you? What? And what he told me was that the more he learns about astrobiology, the more he learns about life on Earth, and the more he appreciates life on earth. And I was like, okay, buddy, cool. I'm going to keep writing my book. And then by the time I finished researching the book, I felt the exact same way where I was just like,

because I came into this knowing a decent bit about astrobiology and about SETI. But I learned a lot of new stuff about evolutionary biology, about the study of the origin of life, which I've always been really fascinated by, which I feel like sort of is connected to astrobiology. because they both require looking for life and thinking about what life is, which, you know, as we mentioned, we don't have a good understanding of. And just learning about like all the, it just feels magical. Like even the simplest cell is so complex.

And I read some work by a chemist named Nick Lane, who's a beautiful writer who studies the origin of life. And he has this amazing description of how a molecule of how ATP is created in your mitochondria. And he just like, you visualize it with these just like massive molecules, shuttling electrons around by quantum tunneling because it's that small. And all of this just to move a proton from like one side of a membrane to the other. You know, and that's how all life on earth, how all eukaryotic life on earth gets its energy. Sorry, sorry, bacteria. Don't come from me. And it's just this, like, magically huge, complex, beautiful systems that are happening in your cells all the time, thousands or millions of times a second.

And like, it's so, I just, like, really fell in love with that stuff. I think part of it is because that was new to me, whereas the astronomy stuff wasn't. But it just really made me appreciate, it's like a real Wizard of Odds moment where I just like really literally appreciate what's in my backyard. Like, I see a bird and I'm like, oh, my God, you're right on a fly. I sound like a stoner or a five-year-old. It's just like really can we appreciate all the different ways that life can be. And there are so many different ways that life can be right on Earth. So like, yes, I would give anything to know what life on another world is like, what the biology is like, what language, an intelligent alien might speak.

But there's a lot of cool stuff here, too. Yeah, yeah. Also, I know, which is another. Very recent shift in the consensus. It's exoplanets, birds are dinosaurs and plate tectonics are my three favorite, like, very recent discoveries. Like in Jurassic Park, at the end of Jurassic Park, when they're on the helicopter, leaving the island, the music is swelling. And you see birds flying out the window, right? And what that is saying is those birds are related to dinosaurs, which at the time was, like, very edgy.

to put that in a movie. And now everyone's fighting about why the dinosaurs don't have feathers in the sequels. And it's like that's a huge, a huge shift. I just think that that's awesome. So it's dinosaurs and exoplanets and plate tectonics just we didn't know so recently. There's so much still to learn. Also stuff that probably originated in something we take super granted for is like you talked about surface availability and transitional surfaces.

between water and air and water and land and ice and water. It's like transitional surface availability is life's love language or something. We need all of it. Like life needs a place to be. And so like when you're saying like why couldn't there be life in the clouds of Jupiter, there could. And like Carl Sagan in Cosmos has a beautiful imagining

of like what these sort of like floating creatures could be. But and they would like move up and down by convection and sort of migrate and whatever. But there's nowhere for it to be to start. Yeah. And life really needs a surface because whether it's like you get a lot of cool chemistry happening where two different phases meet or two different substances. But like you got to be somewhere to get started. You can't be being carried through all these different environments and different conditions when you're just starting out. So like there are, you know, one of the things I grapple with in the book is like when we're looking for life elsewhere, we're really looking for life as we know it on Earth.

And to what extent is that a bias? To what extent is that just starting, got to start somewhere? And to what extent is that actually meaningful? You know, like is water actually necessary? Is a rocky surface and an atmosphere actually necessary? We can I was going to say we can answer we can't answer any of those questions, but we can make better, you know, guesses on some than for others. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess we got to go to Europa then.

Yeah, lots of surfaces there. Let's go. I know, I love it. Or Titan has even more. Yeah, yeah. Titan's pretty rad. Surface lakes. I can fly.

Coming up. Coming up. Okay, we're getting near the end here. What didn't make it into the book? What research... That bit about Jurassic Park and Dinosaurs. No Jurassic Park, no dinosaurs, okay. No Jurassic Park, no dinosaurs.

That used to be the opening of the chapter about planets. And then I was like, this doesn't actually have anything to do with planets. Taking a star off the Amazon review, no dinosaurs, yeah. There is discussion of dinosaurs. Because in the chapter on evolution, I talk about this sort of thought experiment that a scientist did in like the 1980s saying if the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct and they had evolved into an intelligent creature anatomically what would need to change and he follows he's like well if this then that and it looks a lot like a lizard man he's got legs arms

hands head on top butt cheats because it's like well once you're walking you need strong muscles he's got a butt pretty sure this is a doctor new storyline It depends how good his butt is. So, yeah, there are dinosaurs in there. But so that little bit, like that idea about the birds and Jurassic Park got cut. I, there's a, oh, God, what was it called? There's a really cool fictional podcast. Oh, no.

Oh, it's called Tides that I listened to a bunch of and interviewed the creators where it's like a set on an exoplanet and has a lot of really cool science brought into it. Like really imagining out the implications of what this particular. I think it's a moon of a gas giant, but what it might be like and what the life might be like on it in these huge tidal zones. And I wasn't able to fit that in. I wanted to write about Neanderthals a little more. I mentioned them. And the fact that, you know, we did have another intelligent species on Earth at the same time as us for a while.

Two of them, if you count Denisovins, which you should. I don't know why you wouldn't. But like going into the sci-fi thing, like I grew up reading Gene All with the clan of the cave bear, which is the story set 40,000 years ago. It's a story of a homo sapiens girl who's orphaned and is raised by Neanderthals. And I didn't, I mention Neanderthals, but I don't get to go, I don't get into Clan of the Cave Bear, but I did write an essay for a slate where a question I get a lot is, who's your favorite alien? And I have so much trouble coming up with an answer. And I realized the reason is that my favorite aliens, my favorite fictional aliens are the Neanderthals and Clan of the Cave Bear.

Because they really are just like vividly imagined alien intelligence. And it really functions like a sci-fi book in a lot of ways. There's a ton of world building. It's about that sort of making contact interaction. So my love of Clan of the Cave Bear also did not make it into the book. All right. That's good. My mom loves those stories.

I just reread the first four of them again because I reread Clan of the Cave Bear to write this essay. And then I just had to keep going. so much fun to like reread the books that you were obsessed with as like a 12 or 14 year old because you click back into that kind of reading and it's just that like living inside a book. So tell your mom she has good pace. For me that book is it's called Raptor Red. It's a dinosaur book written by a paleontologist imagining, you know, a raptor dinosaur that has pretty much intelligence.

Like you go through, you know, all their their story. It could be a narrator. You got to. Yeah, yeah. So that's cool. It's kind of related now that I think about it. Yeah. I'm seeing the three lines.

Seeing the three lines. Yeah. So where do people get the book if they want to learn more about life in the universe? I mean, there it is. Everywhere. You can get it anywhere books are sold. Strongly encourage you to find your local independent bookstore. You can order, that's the UK cover and is the black one.

US cover is the purple one. You can order signed copies from my local independent book. store if you like and I'll even personalize it if you want. But yeah, anywhere it's sold. I recorded the audio book myself too. Nice. Which is yeah, so I had to learn how to pronounce all those things and then promptly forgot.

Whoops, put a lot of science in the book. Yeah. I even found like a classic scholar who like sent me a voice memo of the Greek and Latin words, which I just really appreciated. But yeah, it's everywhere, UK, US, Canada, I think probably Australia, New Zealand. I think that goes along with the UK. I don't know. We organize the world in weird, weird batches.

Yeah, yeah. Wherever the king is or has been, I think you can get the book. Yeah, we call that the Commonwealth back home. Right. But then are we all, yeah. But then it's like you can also get it in the U.S., even though we are very much not don't have that good relationship anymore.

But Canada gets the U.S. cover. We're weird. We're weird in Canada. We're like not quite Americans and not quite English. It's easy to just ship the books right up there. Yeah, and whatever we are, we're very sorry about it. Awesome.

This is great. DeV Roddy, anything going on in your world? You want to give us a little update? You're doing any getting good papers coming out? What's going on? Yeah, I just submitted one. And I think this book was really, like me reading this book was really well-timed because I study past water activity on Mars and I look at all these like transitional surface areas where life could be possible. So it was just like amazing to read this.

I did have a question, a very quick one. It's like you've interviewed so many scientists and you've met a lot of academics. If there was one thing as non-academic that you felt like, oh, why aren't scientists doing this or looking at it from this perspective or this is too cold and clinical? Is there something that you kind of came to you like, you know, I wish it was done this way? Have you ever experienced that in your journey? Oh, gosh. I don't think so. I was really lucky that I talked to a lot of really, mostly really awesome people.

There were a couple. Other people. Other people. Yeah, we have those. I know, I know. I don't think so. I mean, everyone was just so generous with their time and so thoughtful and, like, helped me find other people to talk to, which is just, you know, like, yeah, I'm just really

grateful for all of that like going back to when I was in grad school and emailed the head of the astrobiology program at columbia is Caleb sharp who's not at Columbia anymore was like can I take your class and he let me into the class even though I couldn't do calculus he wrote me problem sets he like has stayed in touch he's a source in the book like I couldn't have I would not have written this book if he hadn't let me into that class like that started so much of it for me And so I don't know. Other than people who are jerks sometimes and saying to them, don't be a jerk, they're not the ones who are listening. I just, you know, in terms of like my interactions with them from the like writer or journalist side, I have just been like really wowed by everyone's generosity and openness. So the one thing, I don't think this is what you're asking, but we need to stop thinking. about having a definition of life. That's useless. That's philosophically. Philosophers are just like

definitions are for language. They're not for scientific concepts. We just need to stop worrying about that and come at it from a theoretical side. But like don't listen to me. Listen to Carol Cleland. Like she says that. So yeah, I don't know. I'm just I'm really grateful to have been let in to so many doors and stories. in writing this book. Well, this has been tremendous. I want to thank you for coming on. I want to give a shout out to my wife who recommended you to me.

I had not heard of this book. Yes, she told me. You need to get Jamie on because she's great and her book is probably great. And it is. It was awesome. It was absolutely fantastic. She's definitely pick it up. I'm very grateful to that.

It is both a space book and not quite a space book and it's lots of things. It's a people book too. It's a human book. Yeah. We're all people. so we can relate. Yeah. Thank you so much.

It's been really fun to be here. Yeah, yeah. Okay, goodbye, everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye.