The Rest Is Science - What We Said To Aliens

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

What happens when humanity dares to shout a cosmic “hello”? Could it help alien civilisations decode human mathematics, our DNA, the blueprints of who we are? And why did we blast the 3-trillion-watt message into the stars in the first place…only to never try anything like it again? This is the story of the Arecibo message. Welcome to The Rest Is Science: Field Notes. Every Thursday, Hannah and Michael rummage through their personal troves of scientific treasure and source discoveries that explain our understanding the universe, oddities that scramble our brains, objects that hint at forces we’ll never see...and a few things that are essentially just plain cool. Expect deep dives into the science behind each pick, the spark that grabbed their attentions, and the sheer delight they get from sharing it all with you.They’ll also be tackling your questions, so email The Rest Is Science at [e-mail]. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience ⁠Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠clicking here.⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam ThorntonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Imee MarriottProducer: Becki HillsSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterHead Of Digital: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Imagine this. Inside all of us, billions of cells follow millions of instructions written in microscopic code. And when a new cell grows, it copies those instructions, but the smallest error can lead cancer to develop. Right. And this is the reason why there isn't a single cure for cancer, because, you know, there are more than 200 different types. Each of them have got different distinct characteristics, you know, different challenges, different mysteries. And that means that trying to cure cancer isn't like following a single path. It's like trying to map out an entire

forest. That's right. And Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research. I mean, their work spans more than 20 countries with over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses pushing knowledge forward to save and improve lives worldwide. You know, over the 50 years, the work that this charity has done has helped to double cancer survival in the UK. And you have to think about that is more parents at the dinner table, right? That is more friends at their birthday parties. That is more people who are living longer, better lives. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest of science. Amazon presents Laura versus fruit flies.

Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen. These little freaks, multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say yo chill but Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray countertop wipes and fly traps hey fruit flies your baby boom ends here save the everyday with Amazon this episode is brought to you by Defender with the towing capacity of 3500 kilograms and a waiting depth of 900 millimeters the Defender 110 pushes what's possible. Learn more at landrover.ca. Welcome to the rest is science. This is field notes, sort of expedition diary as it were, where Michael and I, we're going to trade on discoveries, on curiosities, on riddles or questions maybe that have tickled our minds. That's right. That's

exactly right. I'm glad to be here, Hannah. So what are we going to explore today? Well, okay, I think given that both of us essentially in our respective houses are effectively living in small museums of dedicated to science. Small shrines, shall we say, dedicated to science. I thought we could start with the stuff that is very obviously in the background. And I noticed that you've got the Arescebo message up on your wall. Can we talk about that? Yeah, we certainly can. So you might be at home. This is my office. I'm going to move my desk so we can observe these two big posters. These are representations of the Erecebo message, which were made. Like I had these made for an episode of Mindfield. I think the best way to explain them is that they are messages that we humans

sent to outer space for aliens to potentially find and read back in 1974. They were sent from the Puerto Rican Erescebo telescope, which is no longer in existence. And the messages are still not even close to where we shot them at. Even though they're traveling at light speed, they were shot at the M13 cluster of stars 25,000 light years away. So it's going to take basically 25,000 more years for them to reach that cluster. But if there's any intelligent life out there listening for radio waves, they'll get not this nice color picture, they'll get something more like this black and white one,

which is actually, if you look closely, a series of ones and zeros. So it's binary. It's a pulse and then no pulse. It's, you know, pulse, pulse, it's just on and off. And there's exactly 1,679 pulses. Now, as a mathematician, what's special about that number? That is, I mean, just off the top of my head and not because I know about the RSAV their message before, of course. I know that that is two prime numbers multiplied together. Oh my gosh.

This is the idea of Carl Sagan, right? Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. Yeah, Drake and Sagan worked on this as well as, let me tell you the names of everyone involved. Richard Isaacman, Linda May and James C.J. Walker, along with Carl Sagan. And they said, hey, guys, we could send a message with this telescope. We could just shoot some radio waves out somewhere. And, you know, what should it say? What should a message from Earth be?

And that's what they came up with. So why did they pick something that was two prime numbers multiplied together? I mean, they're very clever sausages, these two. These two people, you would think there's something good going on. Well, it might be too clever by half, as they say. That's why I had these posters made. We gave the message, not as a post. but as a series of on and offs, as a bunch of bits, to a whole bunch of groups of mathematicians, college students.

And we just told them, crack the code, figure out what this is. Actually, I think we told them, this message has been received by a telescope operated by SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life. Is it a message and what does it say? And none of them were able to figure it out. This was for an episode of Mindfield, the psychology show I did. But being the product of two prime numbers means that 1,679 is pretty special. We also call it semi-prime, if you're the product of two prime numbers. And when you notice that, you go, man, you know, the only number that goes into 1,679 are 23 and 73.

Is that true? Yeah. Is that if you're the product of two prime numbers, you only have two. two factors. Yeah, it's absolutely true. Okay, so you might think, well, let me arrange these pulses into a grid that's 23 by 73. So if you do that with 23 columns and 73 rows, a picture emerges, a visual picture of squiggles and lines. One of them, right there, shown here more easy to see in red, looks like a little stick figure drawing of a person, a very pixelated human body. If you, however, arrange these

pulses as 73 columns and 23 rows, it makes no sense at all. And you would just throw it away. Oh, really? I know. So you have to be, you have to not only recognize the semi-prime nature of 1679, you also have to arrange it properly. But once you do that, it looks really non-random. It looks like it has some meaning to it. Okay. Now, It does have meaning, and the meaning is almost comical the way they tried to use just 1679 pulses to say a lot about us. The white stuff at the top here is the same as what you see here in the binary representation. It's ones and zeros. And if you use the ones, if you imagine the ones or the information and the zeros or the background,

you can color code it like this black one here, which is a black poster with a bunch of, of colored squares on it that have been color coded to differentiate all the information. I'm kind of describing this to people who are just listening. At the top, you've got what looks like a bunch of white confetti, and that's actually the numbers 1 to 10 in binary. But there's like not enough room up here. So they had to do two columns for all the numbers over seven. And so to make it clear that the two-columed sections,

are their own number. The bottom row is like a bullet point. So that's why one is two dots. It's actually a bullet point meaning, okay, here's one number, one. And then they've got another bullet point. Here's two. And then two is a blank spot and then a one. A zero and then a one. So, okay, we're doing this like binary counting thing. So hang on. So because I didn't know this about the binary bit at the top. I just, I just like those numbers. Okay, fine. I never looked into it that deeply. But okay, so thus far, even if you are lucky enough to be from the same planet as this message was sent, even if you have the same counting system, the same concept of prime numbers as these students did, even if you know what binary numbers are, you still also

then have to decode this weird extra pattern that they put in where they punctuated each one of the numbers. That's right. You also need to understand the concept of a bullet point system. Now, personally, I think that if we got a message like this, we would all work on it together. Like, everyone would come up with so many different ideas. I feel like we might figure it out, or at least someone would, whether we all believe them or not, I don't know. But yeah, it's almost hilarious how hard it is to decode. This purple shape, okay, which follows next, which also, by the way, not only do you have to have the same number system and you have to be able to detect radio waves of this frequency and you have to. have to find that it's semi-prime. You also need to read top to bottom and left to right,

except the binary numbers are actually written bottom to top above their bullet point. Now, the purple represents the elements that life on Earth is made out of. So it's got the numbers 16, 7, 8, and 15, all kind of crunched together. And those are the atomic numbers of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus. Okay? So we don't tell you that these are atomic numbers or that these are elements or anything. It's just that you're supposed to think, what's important about 16, 7, 8, and 15? Well, if you have chemistry on your alien planet, you might say, well, that's, maybe they're

made out of that stuff. I don't know. The green stuff are the nucleotides that are in our bodies, representing. again by numbers representing the atomic numbers of the elements in each nucleotide, then here the blue squiggle is the shape of DNA. Sure. Sure it is. Kind of.

It's the double helix. And the white line in the middle of them, it's not a line. It's a cluster of, it's two columns of white squares with some black spaces in between them. That's the binary representation of the number 4.3 billion. which is how many base pairs the human body has? No. Oh, no.

It's how many we thought the human body had in 1974. It turns out it's more like $3.2 billion. So it's also got misinformation about the human body. Wow. There is something very cool about this, though. If we keep going down, you see, here's a picture of what humans look like so that the aliens can go, wow, that's what their bodies are. They've got like four appendages and a little ball at the top of a torso. And then over here, there's a big cluster of white squares, and that is a way to represent in binary the population of the Earth in 1974.

How many of these little creatures there are? And funny enough, in 1974, the number of people we believe to exist was almost exactly the same as the number of base pairs we thought were in the human body. 4.3 billion. Which are both now wrong. Yeah. So they're wrong. One was wrong all the time. One was only temporarily right.

There are many more than 4.3 billion people now. The blue line is just a stack of squares interrupted by a horizontal line of white squares. The blue squares represent that we're talking about the height of the person and the binary number here is the height of a typical person. Okay. When you say person, though, are we talking man? I mean, this was 1970s. That physical height is five feet nine inches is what's being represented, which is the height of, drum roll, an average man. Average American man, no less.

It could be an average human man. I don't know in 1974 what the average global male height was. But, you know, I guess aliens will know what we told them. Now, you can't see the rest of the image because there's a big chest in the way. But underneath there's some yellow. I'm going to move it up. And the yellow represents our sun and all the planets in the solar system. And the third one is raised up a little bit higher because that's the one we live on.

It has a special position. I'll pick it up and bring it closer so you can see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, from left to right, you've got the sun and each of the planets. presumably the number of dots represents how big the planet is roughly. That's right, Hannah. So the gas giants are represented by more than one square. I can't actually hold this high enough without hitting my ceiling.

But we're almost done because then, oh my gosh. Well, hold on a second, though, because hang on, you've got Pluto on there. There's a blob on the right, which is also now incorrect. Pluto no longer considered a planet. Yeah, so imagine if the aliens not only read in the same way that we did, understood the bullet point system, used binary, understood semi-primes, they also have to have the same astronomical definition of a planet that we have. Because imagine if they saw these yellow dots.

Right. And they were like, well, maybe those are planets, and they found our solar system, and they looked at Pluto and said, yeah, but Pluto hasn't cleared its orbit. So clearly we're looking in the wrong solar system. we need one that has nine planets, not eight. And then finally at the bottom, there's a picture of the, it's supposed to be a picture of the Erecebo telescope, the device that sent this message.

The M-shaped represents the fact that it's a concave structure. Then the numbers at the very bottom, I don't even know what they're supposed to represent. Let me see if I can figure that out. Can I tell you my two favorite things about the Erecebo message based on what you've shown us? So the thing is, right, Frank Drake, Carl Sake, Carl Sagan, like these big dogs of space and communication with, you know, the sciences and so on, these like really, really, really cool, amazing people in history. And I love the idea that they're like,

right, we're going to send this message out to aliens and it's going to include this representation of like hydrogen and carbon and like DNA and a flattened double helix and a representation of all the people on Earth. And then, you know, they probably said that in a meeting somewhere. and then this is what they came up with. And it's like, I mean, even as someone who understands all of those things, the great beauty of all of those scientific kind of, you know, entities of like humanity and the planet,

you know, the 1970s pixelated graphics are just not really doing it for me. It's sort of, it's this great wonder and awe and then this absolutely completely rubbish image, like A for effort, F for execution. My other favorite thing about the air-receiver message, though, is that it just kind of rounds everything off, I think. As you mentioned, they were aiming this message.

You can't broadcast it to the entirety of the universe because they would just take way too much energy. So they very deliberately aimed it at this like little cluster of stars on kind of a corner of the Milky Way. And as you said, it's like 20-odd thousand light years away. And so unfortunately, by the time that this message reaches that spot, whatever, 21,000, 25,000 light years time, those stars will have moved.

So we are essentially broadcasting this nonsense message that is impossible to decode. Even when you decode it properly, it's just a pile of pixelated junk to nothing. Oh, no, wait, you know? I'd never thought about that.

So it's like shooting a moving target. You need to shoot ahead of it. Right, which they didn't do. Well, in 25,000 years, how far will that cluster have moved? Surely at least some fringe stars will still be in range. Maybe, maybe. I think in general, though, neat idea, terrible execution.

Michael, that's what I'm giving. I think you're right in how you graded it. It gets an A for effort and it gets an F for execution, but I think this is all about effort. This is not for aliens. This is for us. It's an exercise in how do we describe ourselves at the most basic level to a completely different intelligent life form.

And we can think this is poorly done, but that encourages us to try to do better. Oh my gosh, it's going to crush me. I'm going to put this back away. For completeness, I want to say that the squares at the very bottom represent the dimensions of the Erecebo telescope. Okay, I'm going to put this back on the wall before it hurts somebody.

There we go. From top to bottom, incomprehensible binary numbers. You've got incomprehensible atomic numbers. You've got nucleotides. Maybe that one, that one's sort of all right. You've got a flattened double helix. You've got incorrect information about the number of molecules and human body. Incorrect population data.

Incorrect solar system information and a telescope that doesn't exist. Hey! You're welcome, aliens. What about the reverse, though? I mean, because we have turned on telescopes to try and hear whether they're there were any messages coming back. And as of yet, we haven't found anything. No, we haven't. I played my part for a long time. I lent my computer's processing power to SETI, using SETI at home, where they process all the radio and probably other light form information they receive from their telescopes to try to find patterns,

messages sent like these, not from us, but from potentially extraterrestrials. And I remember distinctly living in New York. York and going, I want to use my computer's downtime for a purpose. And the two things I could do were SETI at home or mine Bitcoin. And I chose listening for aliens. And I found none. How long ago was this that you made this choice between SETI? This would have been in like 2008, 2009. Oh, so there were still a lot of bitcoins out there to be mine. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. You could have been a squillionaire. And I think there are still a lot of aliens out there to be found, but they're harder to find than the Bitcoins were 12 years ago or more. Which actually was a bit of a surprise.

I mean, there was some people who thought that once we turned on, SETI, once we started listening, there would be a cacophony of sounds. There would be, you know, countless other life forms out there who had sent out messages like the ERACB message just waiting for us to tune in and hear. And there was nothing. Radio silence. Yeah, we seem to be very alone. and that raises the question of why?

Like, if life is so likely to occur in a universe as large as ours, why do we have no evidence of any intelligent life but ourselves? In fact, no evidence of life of any kind except Earth life. And do you have your favorite answer to that question? I can run through some of the classic ones that aren't my favorite. One is that there's some kind of. kind of great filter. But basically, in our universe, when life becomes intelligent enough, it inevitably destroys itself. I mean, this whole question is called the Fermi paradox, right?

So Fermi, who was actually a big part of the Manhattan Project in building the nuclear bomb. But he was like, there seems like so much opportunity for life to exist. And yet there's no observational evidence of it at all. How is it possible that those two things can coexist? And then Drake came up with this equation to try and quantify how many potential life forms there were. He kind of breaks it down piece by piece by piece by piece. But he has this final term in it, which is about the length of time that an intelligent civilization can last for before effectively taking itself out. I don't know whether I buy that one.

But it certainly feels like it a bit these days, isn't it? Well, yeah, it seems like maybe once you've got nuclear weapons. which he was very concerned about, of course. Of course. It's only a matter of time before a species eradicates itself. And so, sure, intelligent life has formed all over the universe. It's just that they don't last very long to, like, overlap and meet each other because there's something they do wrong.

They mishandle nuclear weapons or weapons of similar strength. They mishandle something about space exploration, about trying to harvest energy from their sun. Who knows? It could be that the universe is teeming with intelligent life, but it's more like we live in a zoo. They're all watching us, but they don't make themselves known. They enjoy watching to see how we get on on our own. Or maybe they have a prime directive.

You know, don't interact. Don't say hello until they reach a certain level of technological sophistication. But then there's the other option, which is that actually maybe We were just all really far away from each other, you know? You know, like as demonstrated by the Erescebo message, we tried to send a message out to aliens and we've managed to point it to what is effectively, you know, a model village in another country.

It's like shining a torch rather than like broadcasting a message. And it's incredibly difficult to build technology that will successfully be received by other life forms. But, you know, ultimately, I think once it comes down to it, you are talking about something is incredibly, incredibly unlikely, the chance of life itself, and you're sort of multiplying it by something that is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly large, right?

The number of opportunities for life in the universe. And so who knows? You could be anywhere between, you know, life nowhere, life everywhere, or like a small handful. I think, like, in my heart, right, I think I would be very shocked if we were really alone. The universe is old enough. There's enough stars. There's enough planets around those stars at the right distance.

to have liquid water, and there's been enough time for life that started there to become intelligent. Given all of that, though, why is the sky so silent? Why is no one talking to us? Are they avoiding us? Are we gross? Does intelligent life inevitably destroy itself once it gets nuclear weapons or weapons of a suitable strength?

Do they mismanage their growth to other star systems? and did they mismanage the way they get energy from, say, their own stars? Do you know what? I think there's a new theory. Having looked at the Erosievo message again, I think I've got a new theory, which is that they're out there. They saw that message coming for us,

and they were like, these guys are just absolutely bonkers. Let's stay the hell away. I think I strongly suspect that might be what was going. Yeah. We're sending out like basically horror movies to outer space. I think, honestly, for me, for the last few years, I've just felt like more and more convinced that we are alone, that the universe is not old enough for intelligent, sentient, conscious life to be plentiful.

I think that in a billion years, I think that when the universe is just full of little blue dwarf stars that have long lives, there'll be a better chance for life to grow. But I think that we are the ancients. I think we are the first or among the very first intelligent conscious creatures in the universe. Well, okay, we might be alone in the universe, but here on earth we are very much not alone because we have got some questions from our listeners, a little mailbag bit, which is going to come up in a moment after the break. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it

begins. After years of work, cancer research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops. So, it's a lot of the disease's early on. It's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible.

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Well, welcome back from the break. have you refueled and readers go because we thought we would try something with FieldNotes. We thought that we would have sort of like a mailbag,

you know, like an old school radio show mailbag where you can send us in things. They can be objects, they can be ideas, they can be questions, and we can, you know, spend a little bit of time examining them.

So this week we've got a couple of questions that have come in that we're going to use for the purposes of our mailbag. The first one comes in from Tony who asks, can an expert tell the difference between a natural diamond

and a lab member? made diamond and do they have different commercial value? You want to take that one? Well, gosh, I haven't prepared, but I would think that they could tell because a lab diamond would be, or could be a lot more clean. Like a natural diamond is going to have more clarity issues. I mean, I know a little bit. So I have this ring, which I stole from my auntie, but it's a really beautiful diamond

ring. And I know it to be real because every. Every time that I get my nails manicured, you put your hand under a UV light and the ring, there are certain stones in it which basically fluoresce blue. And that is because inside that stone when it was formed, you know, however many, probably millions of years ago, right? There was nitrogen in the air and abundance of nitrogen. and a little nitrogen atom was included within the sort of the crystal structure of the diamond. And I think that that's right, you know, is that like when you grow diamonds in a lab, you've got this perfectly clean, excellent environment that there's like total purity.

But when diamonds exist in reality, right, when they're sort of formed in reality, they are effectively a record of the atmospheric conditions under which they formed. And so you have all of these little inclusions, you have these little inclusions, you have these little fault lines, etc. So lab-grown diamonds are basically way more perfect and therefore, I think, boring. Yeah, right, right, right. They're just carbon atoms in a diamond structure.

You could put nitrogen in lab-grown diamonds, though. That's actually what happened when we made the diamond hourglass, which I have right over here. Oh, yeah. This is the hourglass we made that contains 200 carrots of diamond. They're lab-grown diamonds. Sorry, 200 carrots. 200 carrots.

A carrot is, I think, a fifth of a gram of diamond. Here we go. There it is. So this hourglass contains lab-grown diamonds, and they're kind of a green color. They're very sparkly. What is it like? Dust?

Yeah, they're very small. But see, the sparkling is really, really overwhelming. If you bring this out into the sunlight, it is very cool. Oh. And that green color comes from nitrogen that gets trapped in them while they're made. And it costs quite a bit more to get that nitrogen removed so they become clear diamonds. And we didn't do that for the subscription box. But we are going to go ahead and make a version with crystal clear diamonds.

But this runs for a minute. And it's, yeah. A minute of diamond dust. A minute of diamond dust. And this whole thing costs like 10 bucks to make. I have, I mean, I have quite strong opinions on diamonds. I think diamonds as jewelry, right? Especially like whopping great big diamond rings.

I'm not into it. But maybe that's one for another episode. Shall I give you another question? Okay. James R. asks, which scientific discovery of the last 25 years will have the most positive impact on humanity going forwards?

Got a candidate? Yeah. I mean, my answer is pretty quick. I think it's going to be fusion. I think fusion that is, you know, portable. and long-lasting is going to be almost like a BC AD transition for our species. Energy will just no longer be a concern. People like you and I will tell our grandchildren, like we used to have to plug things in

and we used to have to like buy new batteries and fill our cars up with fuel and pay bills. And there were limits to what we could do when it came to big, large-scale projects like space exploration or, you know, running computers. they got too hot. We had to build wind farms and it was expensive and now it's like there's no limit. There's also, I mean, if we did manage to crack fusion, a lot of the big existential questions

that we've really been troubling ourselves with for the last few decades, I mean, essentially they disappeared overnight, right? Like desalination becomes really, really possible. Stripping salt out of water is something that we can do. It's just really energy expensive. Then there's no shortage of clean water across the entire Earth. Also, taking carbon out of the atmosphere,

like suddenly become something that we can do really, really easily. Fusion has no byproduct that, you know, it's like the opposite of nuclear fission, the nuclear power stations that we have at the moment, where the waste is like extremely toxic for many, many thousands of years after we've finished with it. Plus, you are essentially sitting on,

effectively a fragile atomic bomb that you have to control very carefully. Fusion is the opposite. You leave Fusion B and it fizzles out into nothing. It's like extremely safe, has no dangerous byproducts, and could effectively give us unlimited free energy. Yeah. That one would be good. Yeah, effectively.

Right. And it would be philosophically so profound that every thing on earth is powered by the sun ultimately. The sun warms up the air and causes the wind. It causes the currents in the ocean. It's how the plants grow. It's how we, you know, then eat the plants and get energy. But if we had fusion here on Earth, we would have brought the sun to us. We would have graduated from needing a star to not needing one.

And I think that's a big stage in the evolution of intelligent life. And it's also like the ultimate sort of like message of optimism because we know that it works. we know that it works because this is how energy is like generated by the sun. We are effectively fusion creatures as we already, exactly as you described. I'm going to go something slightly smaller. You know what? You win with fusion. If we get there, great, but we're not there yet.

So at the moment, it's just still a pipe dream, Michael. I'm going to go for something we've already got. I'm going to go for CRISPR. There was there was this research into bacteria, right? Like into how the immune systems of bacteria work. And they were studying these kind of like repeating DNA. sequences and they and they realized that what this particular bacteria was able to do was like effectively chop out little bits of DNA and then make replacements in it. This is sort of like blue sky

research. But then this group of this other group of scientists were like, oh, that is, there's something really interesting in that that you can basically edit DNA. You can go in and you can snip a bit out and change it for what you want it to be. And so they effectively created this new technology called CRISPR, which stands for clustered regularly into space, short palindromic repeats. And it has allowed them to, to, I mean, quite literally, edit genes. And like, up until now, this thing has been phenomenally impactful in our understanding of medicine, but also our ability to fight new diseases, essentially. there is one example of sickle cell anemia which this incredibly serious genetic condition

in which your hemoglobin are not shaped normally they're shaped like like sort of like a half moon right like a like a sickle cell essentially and it can be really really damaging it's it's particularly prevalent in certain populations and it's life limiting it's a really really serious illness. But with the advent of CRISPR, we have been able to essentially create a one-shot treatment where you can go in, and I mean, there's other stuff on top of this, maybe we'll do an episode about this at some point or another, but you can go in and you can edit the genes of a person who was born with sick or cell anemia in order that they never have to suffer from the repercussions of that disease again. It's really pretty amazing, I think.

No, it's huge. And by editing DNA, we are creating ourselves. With fusion, we become the son, but with CRISPR we become the mother. There are two really huge things that I think are related in a deep way. Was that Oppenheimer thing? I'd become God. Yeah, I have become death. That's it.

Destroyer of worlds. He was a bit dramatic. He was a bit dramatic. I've lately I've heard a lot of people say he kind of like knew that that quote would like, oops, blame me for it. Guess I'm kind of cool though, right? I love this meme because it shows the big dramatic, lapidary quote from Oppenheimer, oh, I am become death. And then, you know, you've got Truman over there being like, dude, I'm the one who dropped the bomb, not you. And then you've got von Neumann being like, what are you saying?

I think you're trying to confess a sin because really you want credit for it. And I'll be honest with you. Von Neumann out of all of them was by some distance the smartest. That's why he's on the far right end of this spectrum. Can we do an episode of Von Neumann one point? Because oh my God, that man, he is. Holy moly. We'll leave you there then with some grand quotes from Oppenheimer.

And us, Michael and Hannah, just taking him down. And as always, if you want to reach out, you can email us at the The rest is science at goalhanger.com. And if you want to hear more from us, go to the rest is.com forward slash science to sign up for our newsletter. Until next time, see you later.