Something You Should Know - The Psychology of Crowds & Where Did Life Come From?

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

Most of us have heard that the speed at which you drive can impact your gas mileage but by how much? My guess is you probably believe it isn’t a lot. This episode begins by explaining how much slowing down will save you on gas – and it is more than you think. And if you have a bike rack on your car – you really have to hear this. https://abc7.com/archive/9151803/ There is something about a crowd. When you go to a concert or sporting event, you feel a kinship with the crowd. And the crowd has an energy to it that is hard to describe. Crowds also have a dark side. A crowd can turn into a mob and a mob can become violent. How does that happen? Is there such a thing as a mob mentality that makes people do things they would otherwise never do? Here to look at the science of crowds is Dan Hancox. He has thoroughly researched the topic and wrote a book about it titled Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World (https://amzn.to/40axzVW). Life comes from other life. New plants come from existing plants, you came from your parents – all life comes from existing life. If that is so, then where did the first life forms come from? Also, while life is abundant here on earth, we have yet to discover life anywhere else in the universe that we can see. Why not? Here to tackle these questions is Mario Livio. He is an astrophysicist who worked with the Hubble Space Telescope and is the author if seven books, - his latest (which he co-authored with Jack Szostak), is titled Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest for Cosmic Life (https://amzn.to/4dSpSGY). If you are a Venmo user, you’ve surely noticed that you can see when other people use the service. You can see who they pay and how much they pay – and Consumer Reports doesn’t like this a bit. Listen as I reveal what Consumer Reports says is the potential problem of everyone seeing your transactions and I will tell you how to make your details private. https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-make-your-venmo-information-private-a6507250342/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED:  Get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING  Support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast.  Indeed.com/SOMETHING.  Terms and conditions apply. SHOPIFY:  Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business – no matter what stage you’re in! MINT MOBILE: Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at https://MintMobile.com/something! $45 upfront payment required (equivalent to $15/mo.).  New customers on first 3 month plan only. Additional taxes, fees, & restrictions apply. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's hockey season, and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get a nice rank on Uber Eats. But iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice? Yes, we deliver those. Goaltenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are groceries, and we deliver those too.

Along with your favorite restaurant food, alcohol, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. Today on Something You Should Know, the math behind how driving slower can save you real dollars.

Then the psychology of crowds. Much of what we think is true is not. Essentially everything that we've been we think is true is not. Essentially everything we've been told about crowd behavior is wrong and when you hear phrases like mob mentality is based on late 19th century crowd theorists who didn't actually do any serious empirical work studying how crowds behave at all. Also something you need to know if you're a Venmo user. And the origins of life. We know life comes from other life, but how did it all begin?

From nothing? It's not from nothing. I mean, the universe as a whole may have started from nothing. Life started from chemistry. So when we talk about origin of life is how does chemistry evolve into biology. All this today on Something You Should Know. We have talked on this podcast about how losing weight on your own, it's just really hard, which is why a lot of people, I bet you know some people who are trying these new weight

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Compounded products are not FDA approved or verified for safety effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. Restrictions apply. Something you should know. Fascinating Intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, you know I get those pictures that pop up on Facebook of from some group that sends out pictures of the good old days, days gone by and there was a picture of somebody standing in front of a gas station and the gas was like forty nine cents a gallon.

Well it's not forty nine cents a gallon anymore, is it? So by now, you've probably heard all the tips and tricks to improve gas mileage, and one of them is to slow down. And Consumer Reports did the math on some of this, and slowing down has a bigger impact than I think you probably would imagine. If you drive, and of course, it depends on the type of car you drive. But if you drive, say, 65 miles an hour, you're getting about eight miles less per gallon

than if you drove at 55. At 75 miles an hour, you're losing about 14 miles per gallon. So that's about 250 miles you've lost on an 18 gallon tank of gas. And this is surprising, I think, to most people that if you have a bike rack on your car, you really need to take it off when you're not using it. The rack alone, without a bicycle, the rack alone eats up about five miles a gallon. And if you add two bikes, you're losing up to 15 miles per gallon because it messes up the aerodynamics and that is something you should know. As you have no doubt noticed people act

differently in crowds versus when they're alone or in a one-on-one situation. Being in a crowd changes you. And I'm sure you've heard the term crowd mentality or mob mentality. There's no doubt that people change or at least some people change and do things when they're part of a crowd that they would never do alone. People at a concert or a sporting event, people at a party or a celebration, or people in a mob. The crowd changes them. So what is it about crowds and why is this important for all of us to understand? That's what Dan Hancocks is here to talk about. Dan has researched this topic thoroughly and he's authored a book called Multitudes, How Crowds Made the Modern World. Hi Dan, welcome. Hey Mike, great to be here.

Thanks for having me. So everyone has had this experience. When you're with a group of people, like in a theater, you're watching a funny movie and collectively you laugh at something that if you were watching that movie at home, you would never laugh at. You at a sporting event will stand up and cheer along with the crowd when the team scores a goal or hits a home run or whatever.

You would never do that if you were sitting in your living room watching it on TV. The crowd has an energy, the crowd has a force, a power. And what is that? It's amazing, isn't it? It's something that crowd psychologists call social identification, which is a jargony phrase, but what it describes is exactly that kinship with our fellow travelers. We feel affirmed, we feel validated in our beliefs or in, even if that's our belief in what we something that we think is funny

that makes it so different during the pandemic lockdown, the COVID pandemic lockdown when we were denied these opportunities. And I don't know about you, Mike, but we, you know, I watched some online comedy performances from my favorite comedians and I watched football games that were taking place in stadiums with no crowd there in the building. And it was like a ghost spectacle. It was just not even close to being the same as usual. Yeah, I remember here at some baseball games watching them on TV during COVID that they put like fake cardboard people in the seats just to make it look like

there were people there. Because to watch a baseball game or a foot, or really any sporting event that normally has crowds and to watch it in an empty arena or stadium, there's boy, there is really something missing. It's so unsettling, isn't it? I mean, it was exactly that gap that really captivated me. And it made me want to understand what it

was that we were missing. It is that kinship, it's that solidarity. It's laughing louder because the person next to you is laughing and you're enjoying that fact. Yet, we are also sometimes in crowds and we really don't connect. If you're in a crowded subway or you're with a crowd, but you really wish you weren't. So there's a crowd that doesn't do much for you.

Yeah. So I think that this is a really key distinction that crowd psychologists make between what they would call a physical crowd and a psychological crowd. Sometimes these two things overlap and sometimes they don't. So if you're in, say, Penn Station in New York and overwhelmed and bewildered and maybe a little bit lost and everybody's stressed and pushing past you in an agitated fashion, you and everybody else there

are not part of a psychological crowd. You are a physical crowd because you're in the same place, but you're not bonded together by some shared belief or shared value. It's the big sports game or the big concert for your favorite band. That's when you have that social identification with your fellow travelers. That's when you get the crowd joy rather than just the slightly overwhelming feeling that there's a lot of strangers here and that you are perhaps feeling claustrophobic or bewildered, but certainly not enjoying yourself, not having a good time. I remember hearing someone talk about how when you think about it, when you go to a concert, it's a pain in the neck.

You've got to park and then you're going to have to get your car out later when everybody leaves at the same time. It's a hassle. It isn't fun in the sense, and the music never sounds as good as it did on the record. In terms of enjoying the music, being at home would have been probably better. But there is something about going to that concert

with fellow fans of whoever you're going to go see that drives people you're going to go see, that drives people in droves to go see them. There's a very strong argument that that's an evolutionary imperative that's driving us to that to that concert that drives us towards any crowd of like-minded souls. I draw on the books of Barbara Ehrenreich, who's a huge journalistic hero of mine. She wrote a great book called Dancing in the Streets in 2007, which made the argument that early human societies, when you initially had groups of cave dwellers in family groups,

they left those caves for the first time and started bonding together in the first micro-civilizations, groups of 20 to 30 people larger than the family group, because they were better able to survive predators like saber-toothed tigers by being in larger groups. Well, how did they bond together? Well, language was part of that. The evolution of language was part of that. The evolution of language was part of that. But she argues that actually partying together, banging one rock against another rock, dancing around the fire, was the way that early humans bonded. So when we feel the drive to overcome those hassles and go to the rock concert, go to the sports arena where obviously our view is not

going to be nearly as good as if we were watching it on TV at home. That's another example of that, right? We do that because there is something innately human and innately necessary that we desire in being among groups of people that we share a bond with. So this is all very interesting. And I imagine everyone listening has experienced that crowd effect of being part of a crowd.

But other than being interesting, what do we do with this? Why is this important? What's the big so what here? The driving argument that I've come to through years and years of reporting on crowd behavior, both crowd policing and how people behave in protests and carnivals and festivals, but also riots. I reported on the 2011 riots in England that were the biggest in our history. So I've

seen the dark side as well. And what I've learned from all of this is that essentially everything that we've been told about crowd behavior for the last 100 odd years is wrong. And it has a political agenda to it. So when you hear phrases like mob mentality or the madness of crowds, or the idea that violence and bad behavior in crowds is contagious, you know, think of the angry mob in The Simpsons with their pitchforks, their flaming torches and so on. That characterization is based on late 19th century crowd theorists who didn't actually do any work, any serious empirical work studying

how crowds behave at all. What they were doing was responding to people who are processing in the streets of the great cities of Europe, cities like Paris, with fear. The people who wrote these initial works of crowd theory and told us all that crowds are deranged, animalistic, that we are in some sort of primitive state when we join a crowd. And that's why we give into the, quote, madness of crowds. They were doing so because they were scared of the people that were pushing for democracy

in the late 19th century. Mass protests by working class people and by women indeed as well who were excluded from the vote. It was very much an agenda to delegitimize crowds and to say that these people are insane if they're demanding democracy and universal suffrage. Unfortunately, those ideas continue to serve people in power. I would argue it's why we continue to hear crowds demonized as mobs to this day. Crowds often do things that I disapprove of as well, but it does us no good to pretend that those people in crowds who are throwing bricks through windows are mad. They're not.

They have a clear reason for doing it, and we need to interrogate what that reason is. If the conventional wisdom about crowd mentality and crowd behavior is wrong, what's right? What is crowd behavior? What is crowd mentality? It's a great question. So the work being done in universities now

by the leading academic crowd psychologists, of which I am not one, you know, I'm a journalist, but I've spoken to a lot of these people, says that actually crowd behavior is a lot more dynamic. It's a lot more varied and it's a lot more diverse than this idea that there is one homogenous mindset among among a crowd. homogenous mindset among a crowd. So take protests or indeed the riots in London in 2011. There were people doing criminal things during those riots. They were smashing windows and they were looting. There were also people within the crowd trying to persuade the more violent ones not to trash shops or loot shops or smash up cars. So there's what crowd psychologists call self-policing. Now they may not win that argument, but the idea that all crowd behavior is homogeneous

is provably untrue. There is always going to be competing instincts within any crowd. Another example I like to point to is in the mosh pit in a rock show. That looks like very unappealing behavior to a lot of people. You know, young people usually throwing themselves around, hurtling themselves into each other in the name of dancing. As soon as someone falls to the floor in that environment,

everyone stops and picks that person up. It's the first thing you learn if you're into rock or punk or rap music. So I would say that crowd behavior is dynamic, it's diverse, it's varied. And there are frequently conversations going on within the crowd about how that crowd behavior should evolve and what the next step should be. We're talking about crowds and how people's behavior changes in a crowd. My guest is Dan Hancocks.

He is author of a book called Multitudes, How Crowds Made the Modern World. It's hockey season and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get a nice rank on Uber Eats. But iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice? Yes, we deliver those. Goaltenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes.

Because those are groceries, and we deliver those too. Along with your favorite restaurant food, alcohol, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.

I am so dreading groceries this week. Why? You can skip it. Oh, what? Just like that? Just like that. How about dinner with my third cousin? Skip it. Prince Fluffy's favorite treats? Skippable.

Midnight snacks? Skip. My neighbor's nightly saxophone practices? Er, nope. You're on your own there. Could've skipped it. should have skipped it. Skip to the good part and get groceries, meals, and more delivered right to your door on skip. So Dan, in a crowd, doesn't somebody

kind of have to lead the crowd? Doesn't somebody have to be the first one to throw the brick through the window if it's a riot or something? Somebody has to go first, and then it does seem, and I think you said that this idea that it's contagious is wrong, but it doesn't look wrong. It looks exactly right. Somebody throws a brick through the window,

and then all of a sudden there's 20 bricks in the window. Yeah, so the key distinction in terms of the idea of crowd contagion is that in original crowd theory, the argument would be that anybody joining that crowd of rioters would immediately become susceptible to all of its worst behaviors and be a victim of that contagion. So Gustave Le Bon, the founder of crowd theory in the 19th century, this French eccentric aristocrat, argued that even the most civilized man upon joining a crowd becomes a barbarian. They become devoid of all of their usual rationality and sense. What crowd psychologists today are finding is that if you are someone who is predisposed

to throwing a brick through a window and you join a crowd of rioters and you see the guy next to you throw a brick, then you are disinhibited by having joined that crowd of rioters in order to do the thing you wanted to do. That's not the same as me or you, civilized gentlemen who would not never throw a brick through a window, joining a crowd, we would maintain our sense of propriety and order and our sense of what is right and wrong. So it's the distinction between contagion and becoming disinhibited enough to do what you would do, what you would like to do.

One of the situations that I think stumps a lot of people, when a sports team wins the championship, there's a celebration in the town, in the city, where that, and it very often turns into trouble. Cars get burned, overturned, windows get, and I never understood that because this is supposed to be a celebration, kind of a city spirit thing. And it turns ugly. And I don't know why.

Yeah, it's such an interesting example. I think I'd really like to get more stuck into that particular type of crowd behavior. I feel like it's particularly common in the United States and Canada from what I've seen. We have trouble at football matches in Europe. I mean, Britain was famous for that historically. That's changed dramatically in the last 30 years, I would add. And actually, we have very, very, very few arrests in ever in British football matches these days. The idea of a celebratory moment becoming one of violence, is intriguing. I don't have any easy answers for you, I'm afraid, Mike.

It's something about the catharsis of that victory. I mean, it's also going to be about alcohol, let's be honest. That's certainly part of it, that drunken behavior leads more directly to reckless behavior. There's no doubt about that. I think there's something about the raised levels of adrenaline, the raised levels of alcohol consumption, and then perhaps and frustrations from other parts of people's lives being unleashed in what ought to be a celebratory crowd moment and becomes a riot. I mean, the difficult truth that's connected to this,

actually, Mike, is that people get joy out of riots. It's an unpalatable truth. But that is something that successive pieces of serious crowd psychological work have uncovered, that people find joy in a riot. The deep-seated psychological motives for that is something that's much harder to unpack. But it must speak to some sort of need to vent frustrations

as illegitimate as we may see the violent venting of those frustrations. Isn't that interesting? Because you would think if you're celebrating a team victory that you would get joy from that, not you would get joy from let, not you would get joy from, let's cause a lot of trouble and break a lot of things. But I think you're right.

I mean, you see it all the time. Very often when the camera shows those people rioting, there's big smiles on their face. Absolutely, huge smiles. I think of the Woodstock 99 documentary, which I was over in the UK when Woodstock 99 happened, but I was very much into a lot of the music that was being played as a teenager in London.

And for people who haven't seen it, the Woodstock 99 festival descended into absolute carnage and chaos and people breaking stuff and setting fire to these giant trucks that exploded. The reasons for that are many and varied. It was mostly that the organizers of that festival denied the festival goers water and shade and food and they were driven slowly a bit crazy. But there's a moment towards the end of the documentary where this guy who's now in his

mid-forties and experienced that cataclysmically bad and badly run festival. And at the end of this three-hour documentary, which you're watching with your jaw wide open, this guy says, you know what? It was still the best time I ever had. He was remembering, you know, the thrills and albeit kind of chaos of his youth. But hasn't anybody, you know, the next morning gone to the jail and asked the people who got arrested,

what was that about? I mean, and get an answer? Like, well, you know, I just got carried away. I mean, what's the excuse for why we did what we did? It's often boredom gets cited quite a lot, a need for just to see something happen, even if that thing is, you know, in London, a double-decker bus going up in flames. In riots, people cite things like inequality. There are often political motives that come out that they feel that they haven't got a stake in society and so why not burn it all down?

And occasionally people would just say that they happen to be passing by and it was sort of almost opportunistic that there was no great thought process that went into it. Now, it's not the same as it being mindless. You know, those people still have control over their senses. And when we describe bad behavior in crowds as mindless, we're kind of letting those people off the hook, I believe. But there's a real range of answers to that question. I think they're all completely fascinating. What motivates someone to take part in a riot?

Do you think, or is there any evidence that when we see that happen at a celebration that turns bad, that people, some of the people came there for that purpose or was it spontaneous, let's burn the bus or is it, hey, there's a thing downtown, let's go cause some trouble? I think what we find is it's going to be a mixture. So there'll be, you know, there'll be people who for whom this was always part of the plan that they were kind of geared up for it. You know, when we had these far right sort of fascist riots, they were quite small in scale, but they were nonetheless terrifying in Britain

earlier this summer. Some of those people had experience of being part of far-right street movements. They had previous criminal convictions for violence and for fighting with the police or indeed like racist attacks. I feel like there's a small minority for whom this is their set of normal behaviors and they're always going to be first in the pool as it were. And then you'll get the more casual people for whom maybe they need to be in that sport and they need to be a bit drunk and they maybe need to have had a bad week and that's enough

along with that identification with their fellow sports team fans in order to motivate them to to do the bad thing, to do the thing that carries risk for them and to transgress the social norms which say you don't throw a brick through a window, you don't set fire to the double-decker bus. Well I think all of us have heard of that term crowd psychology or mob mentality and kind of have an inkling of what it's about but it's really good to get a deeper understanding of what it is, what it means and some of the myths about it. I've been speaking with Dan Hancocks and the name of his book is Multitudes how crowds made the modern world and there's

a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Great Dan, good to have you on. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. I really enjoyed it. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings

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who just wants to retire and explore the world's flea markets. So take a moment and think about what you're building for. We've got the financial tools to help make it happen. Wealthsimple, built for possibilities. Visit Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit Wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. Here's a question you may have thought about as have many others. How did life originate? Right? Because we all know life comes from other life. You came from your mother and father, new plants come from other plants, life cannot just spontaneously exist. And so if that's true, how did the first life come to exist? How did life of any kind first originate? Of course, religions

offer an answer, but what about science? And here's another question. If you look around the Earth, you see life is plentiful. We have all types of animal life, plant life, we have huge life forms, and life so small you can't see it with the naked eye. Life is everywhere on our planet. So why is it not everywhere anywhere else? or at least as far as we can see? People theorize that the universe is so vast that there must be life elsewhere, but if there is, we haven't found it yet. It seems beyond Earth, life is rare. Why? Here to take a scientific look at these questions is Mario Livio. He's an astrophysicist

who has worked with the Hubble Space Telescope. He is the author of seven books. His latest, which he co-authored with Professor Jack Szostak, is titled, Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life. Hi Mario, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for cosmic life. Hi Mario, welcome to something you should know. Thank you for having me. So let's start with that first question. Where did the first life come from? Because how could life just originate from nothing?

So it's not from nothing. I mean, the universe as a whole may have started from nothing. Life started from chemistry, namely on the early earth there were all kinds of chemical compounds and there were certain conditions. So when we talk about origin of life is how does chemistry evolve into biology? And the answer to that question is? After the last few decades of research, we already know some of the things. For example, RNA, which is very, very important,

it's one of the building blocks of life, we know how to make two of the bases of RNA, we know how the phosphates and the sugars are done. And out of the four bases that make RNA, we know how two could have been made from chemistry on the early earth. Similarly, if you look at proteins, the building blocks of proteins are amino acids.

There are 20 such amino acids. What researchers have managed to do is to show that from the same type of chemistry that makes the building blocks of RNA, you can make 12 at least of the 20 building blocks of proteins. So basically, we know how to make some of the building blocks of life or how Earth could have made some of the building blocks of life from chemistry. We still don't know for all of those.

And when did we think that might have happened? You know, the earliest life forms that we find on Earth are about 3.5 to 3.7 billion years old. So life on Earth probably started around that time, possibly a little bit earlier, maybe as early as 4 billion years ago. The Earth itself is about 4.6 billion years old. So, you know, relatively speaking, quite early on in the life of the Earth, life on Earth already appeared. So given that life outside of Earth seems to be very rare, we can't find it. And given that the conditions for life on Earth are so particular, it has to be just so in order for life to exist,

it makes people think perhaps this was the work of a god, of some force that created life, because it just seems so impossible for it to have just happened on its own by accident. it to have just happened on its own by accident? Indeed. We still don't know to tell for with absolute certainty whether or not, uh, the emergence of life is inevitable given the right, you know, chemicals and the right conditions, or is it some sort of a fluke chemical accident that is extraordinarily rare and happened here, but maybe has not happened elsewhere?

From here to jump to the conclusion that somebody must have done that, that requires a different type of thinking. And of course, religious people might think this way, that requires a different type of thinking. And, you know, of course, religious people, you know, might think this way. But what scientists are trying to do is to see whether or not just, you know, given that the chemistry

was there, that life could have happened by itself. And I think it comes as a surprise, at least to some people, that we have not discovered life beyond Earth. I think people believe we have. Yes, there have been a few claims in the past that life has been discovered, in particular on Mars, for example. There were the Viking experiments. Those were landers that landed on Mars. And there was an experiment there which originally was thought to show that there is some life form in the Martian soil. But today almost nobody believes that. Then there was a meteorite that arrived to Earth from Mars, at which there was a claim that maybe some fossils of life

are found inside it. Again, those are thought now not to represent life. So we didn't find life on Mars. There is also a claim about something that may have been created by life on Mars. There is also a claim about something that may have been created by life on Venus that is also still very nonconclusive. And biosignatures in planets around other stars, none so far has been convincing

that there is life on those planets. So you often hear the argument that because the universe is so big, because there are so many stars, so many planets, there has to be life somewhere else. It's just statistically impossible to imagine that's not true. Yes, you're right. Many people say that. What do you say? However, I will say that it is still statistically possible to imagine That there is no life, but you know, look I would like to think that there is life elsewhere You point out correctly that there are many planets a bit like Earth in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, perhaps

maybe even as many as a billion such planets. There are many, many galaxies in the observable universe. They number probably in the trillions. So you could say, well, with trillions of galaxies and a billion planets in each one of them a bit like Earth, surely there must be life somewhere. And the answer is there might be, but surely is not the correct answer

because we don't know yet what is the probability for life to emerge even if the conditions are right. And, you know, if you say there are a billion planets like Earth in the Milky Way, we don't know yet whether the probability of life emerging is smaller or larger than one in a billion. So we cannot tell, you know, that surely life must have emerged somewhere. Although I must say, I would like to think that perhaps life did start elsewhere, because I'm a great believer in what has become known

as the Copernican principle, which basically says that we are nothing special. Starting with Copernicus, you know, he showed that in the solar system, we're not at the center and so on. And many others have shown, continuously shown that neither earth nor life on earth are something particularly special.

So it's a bit arrogant to think that we are the only ones out there, but we cannot say with certainty that we're not. When you say that there's nothing special about us or about Earth, then why can't you find life anywhere else? That in fact, the fact that there is so much life on Earth and every other planet that we can find is barren makes us pretty exceptional. Well you know there are very few planets relatively speaking so far that we have actually been able to study. You see in order to tell whether there is any life form on another planet, in particular an extrasolar planet, we need to be able to determine the composition of the

atmosphere on such a planet. Well, we are just about starting to be able to do that using the James Webb Space Telescope. So we cannot say that, oh, how come we have not found life? We still did not have the right scientific equipment to be able to find life. We're just getting there now. If in another, I'd say, 10 to 20 years,

there is a planned telescope called Habitable Worlds Telescope, which will probably be launched around 2040. That telescope will perhaps be able to characterize the composition of atmospheres of a few dozen extrasolar planets. If we don't find any life then, then we will at least be able to say something statistical, namely to say, aha, even if the conditions are right, you know, the chances of life emerging are smaller than say 1% or so. At the

moment we are unable to say such things. So for life to exist on this planet there are certain conditions that have to be met, right? We need light and air and water. Life can't exist without those things. Is the assumption that those conditions must be somewhere else for life to exist or could there be life on another planet somewhere that doesn't have those conditions? It has entirely different conditions. Yeah, so you're right about some of those things.

For example, we do think that liquid water is an absolute must because you need a solvent where all the chemistry has to start to take place. Now, experiments are done as we speak on the possibility of other types of solvents, but it does turn out, at least so far, that no other solvent is as good as water. So we think that liquid water on the surface, on a rocky surface of another planet, is an absolute must. Now, could life itself be completely different? For example, the life we know is all carbon-based.

Could there be life that's not based on carbon? So again, experiments have been done, in particular, for example, silicon, which is the closest to carbon in terms of its chemical properties. Well, it turns out, yeah, it's closest, but it really does not allow for the same wealth of chemical reactions that carbon allows. So while I would say that we don't know with certainty that you cannot have silicon-based life, I would say the chances for that are rather small. And similarly other properties of life on Earth are being tested whether other things can happen, like

the membranes of cells and so on, different type of membranes, or maybe not even membranes at all. So all of this is being researched, but at the moment we have not found a really good way to make complexity in general and life in particular other than you know needing water, carbon and a few other things. So is the general scientific belief that life is I guess an accident that was just certain conditions were met and now we have life? Well, I pointed out that, first of all, it's not a matter of belief.

It is all needs to be confirmed by experiments and searches. If we will find after extensive searches, which will only happen, like I said, about two decades or more from now, we will not find life even on extrasolar planets that appear to have all the right conditions for life to have emerged, then we will have to say that I wouldn't say maybe an accident, but certainly that it is rare and maybe even an accident in the sense that the conditions you need are so specific that they are very rarely satisfied. So we talked about it in the beginning, but I'm not sure I completely understand the answer.

Has biology been created from chemistry in the lab on this planet? Well, not in the lab. On the planet, we think that biology emerged from chemistry on the early Earth. In the lab, researchers have managed to create some of the building blocks of, important building blocks so far, namely parts of RNA, some of the building blocks of proteins, membranes that can grow and divide.

So many, many of the characteristics of life have been produced in the lab, but not all of them so far. But the researchers who work on that do think that within another decade or so, they will be able to produce in the lab all the building blocks of life and in particular, that they will be able to produce something that is a living cell. Isn't that a little scary?

Not to me, I must say. Look, this is not Frankenstein, you know, they're not creating some sort of a monster. We're talking about creating something that resembles a living cell, one living cell. Well, that's how we all started, even Frankenstein. Yeah, that is correct. So at some point, you know, people will have to develop ethical rules and so on of what you can do and what you cannot do. But at this point, it is really the most basic building block of life.

I understand that we haven't discovered life anywhere else. Not yet. But is there a sense that we will, not just a hope, but based on what we know, it seems likely that if we keep looking long enough, far enough? You know, there is definitely a chance that that will happen. And like I said, if it doesn't happen, we will at least be able to indeed put some real statistical

numbers on how rare life probably is, which is interesting in itself. Of course, it's more interesting if we actually find life. Mind you, there is one type of life that we haven't mentioned here, which some people think that maybe that's what's happening, which is that AI is starting to develop, artificial intelligence.

So at some point, maybe it's machines that become the really intelligent civilizations and maybe biological intelligence is only a relatively brief phase in the evolution of complexity. If that is the case, then maybe even all intelligent life in our galaxy, if it exists, is actually dominated by some sort of machines and not by wet brains like ours. Well, I don't like that at all. Whether we like it or not,

if that is where things are going, we may not have any control of that. It's so interesting because I remember seeing, when I was very young, saw that map that showed you where the Earth is in the Milky Way galaxy. And we look so insignificant. You kind of think, well, we're like the center of the universe, or at least the sun is or something. And when you see the big picture and we're in that little corner of the galaxy that nobody would even look at twice.

In the galactic suburbs, basically. Correct. Yeah. That it's very humbling. It's like, who are we? But on the other hand, we can't find anybody else like us. So So maybe we are exceptional. It's really it makes your head hurt. It is fascinating It is fun to talk about and it certainly makes you think I've been speaking with Mario Livio

He is an astrophysicist who has worked with the Hubble Space Telescope And he is co-author of a book called Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you for coming on today, Mario. Thank you very much for having me. I saw that Consumer Reports is very concerned and alerting people that if you use Venmo, seems like a lot of people use Venmo, the default privacy setting allows the outside world to look through your contact list, your friends, your payment history, who you pay, how much you pay, intimate information that can be exploited by scammers, stalkers,

divorcing spouses, and just anybody who wants to snoop. I imagine there's some reason they do that, but in any event, you should know that you can change that setting and make your transactions private. It takes a little work, and in the show notes, I have linked to an article that takes you step by step through the process to make your Venmo transactions private. And that is something you should know. You know, a lot of people who listen to podcasts also write reviews.

That's why we have, I think, over 5,000 reviews just on Apple. But we always like to get more because they do help and it would only take you a moment to write a quick review of this podcast, hopefully attach five stars to it, and tell the world. I'm Mike Herbrothers, thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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