Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. So Robert, Yes,
Speaker 1: I want you to do a little experiment with me.
Speaker 1: All right, let's do it. Put yourself in the shoes
Speaker 1: of a paranormal phenomenon investigator. Okay, okay, somebody with some judgments,
Speaker 1: some authority. You're not necessarily a skeptic or true believer,
Speaker 1: maybe somewhere between Molder and Scully and you old scolding
Speaker 1: older sculder exactly. You are Sculder, and you have just
Speaker 1: been caught by security guards while raiding the file cabinets
Speaker 1: of a secret evidence room chock full of alien conspiracy documentation,
Speaker 1: and before you can get a good look at all
Speaker 1: these autopsy reports and heavily redacted witness Affidavid. You've pulled
Speaker 1: the security guards who caught you. They lead you down
Speaker 1: the hall, this long dark hall, to the office of
Speaker 1: a bald man with a goatee and a green Paisley
Speaker 1: bow tie, obviously a major player in the shadow government. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's what the bow tie signifies. So Paisley bow Tie
Speaker 1: stares you down, and he says, Okay, hot shot, you
Speaker 1: think you know a lot about aliens. Well, I've got
Speaker 1: a test for you, and if you pass the test,
Speaker 1: I'll let you in on the whole conspiracy and you
Speaker 1: can know everything. But if you fail, you're going to
Speaker 1: spend the rest of your career at a weather station
Speaker 1: in the Arctic Circle. Okay, so the stakes are pretty
Speaker 1: high here, right, So he pushes a short stack of
Speaker 1: staple documents across the desk towards you and gestures for
Speaker 1: you to peruse them at your leisure. And here's what
Speaker 1: he says. One of these five accounts is true. The
Speaker 1: other four are lies. Pick the right one and you pass.
Speaker 1: So you flip through the documents. They tell this first
Speaker 1: person account of a young woman who was abducted by
Speaker 1: aliens while hiking on the Appalachian Trail, And in all
Speaker 1: five accounts, the abductee is lifted off the ground in
Speaker 1: this beam of strobing violet light and sucked into the
Speaker 1: interior of an alien spacecraft, where she meets a group
Speaker 1: of aliens. They take a blood sample, They check our
Speaker 1: blood pressure, maybe do a cheek swab cotton swab on
Speaker 1: the inside of the mouth, very on the level. Everything
Speaker 1: is very professional, yes, uh, and then the next morning
Speaker 1: she wakes up in the forest with vague memories. Now,
Speaker 1: the only difference in the five accounts is how the
Speaker 1: aliens are described physically. So, in one account they're tall,
Speaker 1: about seven to eight feet tall, beautiful humanoids with smooth
Speaker 1: skin and pure white eyes. In another one, they are short,
Speaker 1: stout humanoids about three to four feet tall, covered in
Speaker 1: thick black body hair from head to toe, with curling
Speaker 1: tusks extending for the lower jaw. Okay, so so far
Speaker 1: we have elves and we have dwarves to choose from. Gotcha? Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much? Okay. Then you've got eight legged, crab like
Speaker 1: animals with a brittle exoskeleton, two pairs of grasping claws,
Speaker 1: one larger pair and one smaller pair of claws, and
Speaker 1: compound eyes. The whole creature is approximately the size of
Speaker 1: a cargo van. Giant crab. Gotcha. Then you've got small
Speaker 1: blobs about one meter cubed of thick beige putty that
Speaker 1: seemed to move as though guided by intelligence, and they
Speaker 1: interact with onboard machinery and communicate psychically with the abductee.
Speaker 1: Each one moves about on the spacecraft on four long
Speaker 1: stilts on the underside of the putty, and occasionally they
Speaker 1: excrete small puddles of sludge resembling muddy snow onto the
Speaker 1: floor of the cabin, and these puddles are promptly removed
Speaker 1: by room by like robots that emerge from the vents
Speaker 1: whenever needed. And then in the fifth account there are predators.
Speaker 1: They just straight out predators from the dreadlocks, the wrist blades,
Speaker 1: the mask predators. Okay, so which one is the true account?
Speaker 1: M Now this is an interesting quandary to deal with
Speaker 1: because on one level, like just knowing what I know
Speaker 1: and what I actually believe about encounters with aliens, and
Speaker 1: in any kind of paranormal experience, I would I would say,
Speaker 1: I would want to pick the thing that could that
Speaker 1: that that matches up with our expectations more in our
Speaker 1: popular minds that concerning aliens. So in that regard, I
Speaker 1: would tend to either go with predators or or perhaps
Speaker 1: the the eleven creatures, because they're kind of matches there
Speaker 1: the grays right. Okay, so you're saying you're more likely
Speaker 1: to see these show up in fiction, So so that
Speaker 1: this seems like if one were to have a paranormal experience,
Speaker 1: if one were to have an hallucinatory experience, um, your
Speaker 1: mind would would be more likely to pick from those
Speaker 1: two buckets of alien content. However, wait, hold on, so
Speaker 1: wait are you assuming the abduct team made this whole
Speaker 1: thing up? Yeah? That my My first response to this
Speaker 1: would be, all right, this, this individual has had a
Speaker 1: paranormal experience that feels very real to them, but is
Speaker 1: ultimately uh, but is ultimately not supernatural. It's ultimately is
Speaker 1: all about their mind uh making sense of some sort
Speaker 1: of um, you know, abnormal experience. But so she actually
Speaker 1: just kind of like got dizzy from walking too much
Speaker 1: one day, passed out and dream you know, she's or
Speaker 1: she's been awake for an extended period of time. However,
Speaker 1: if i'm if, I'm going to get outside of that
Speaker 1: mindset and get in the mindset if someone's actually act
Speaker 1: actively assuming as same one actually happened, assume one of
Speaker 1: these is actually legit. I would probably go with the blobs,
Speaker 1: because the blob idea, as as you laid it out here,
Speaker 1: feels weird enough, unique enough, inhuman enough, and departed enough
Speaker 1: from our more mainstream ideas of what alien life who
Speaker 1: consists of so I would think that one sounds out
Speaker 1: there enough to actually be out there. You know, I
Speaker 1: wondered myself because I was trying to decide after I
Speaker 1: wrote these which one is more plausible. And I also
Speaker 1: felt like the blobs. But maybe that's just because I
Speaker 1: used the deceiver's tactic of adding interesting details like the
Speaker 1: stilts and the and the sledge pooping on the floor
Speaker 1: that seemed to make things more believable. If you add
Speaker 1: weird little details, yeah, you you embellished it enough to
Speaker 1: where I I got a sense that there was actually
Speaker 1: some sort of, h you know, a culture going on here.
Speaker 1: If you were to subtract to those details, I wonder
Speaker 1: if I might not drift towards the crab. You know,
Speaker 1: I I love predators, but I might have to go
Speaker 1: for the crab because the crab has two things going
Speaker 1: for it. It's both weird enough and different enough from
Speaker 1: humans to be sort of conceivable as as outside the
Speaker 1: realm of normal standard abductee imagination. But it's also familiar
Speaker 1: enough that I can see biology creating that. I'm not
Speaker 1: quite sure that the chemicals available in the universe would
Speaker 1: create sentient blobs. Maybe that would, but I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I know that the chemicals in the universe can create
Speaker 1: things like crabs, yes, And I guess my reluctance to
Speaker 1: go with the crab is that it's essentially a giant crab,
Speaker 1: that it's essentially just something very terrestrial that it's just
Speaker 1: been u spaced out a little bit, you know. But
Speaker 1: there's one feature of the giant crab that might actually
Speaker 1: be a selling point, depending on how much credence you
Speaker 1: give to a recent paper that came out that's sort
Speaker 1: of like the inspiration for this episode, which is that
Speaker 1: the crab is the size of a cargo van. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is a paper we're gonna get to in
Speaker 1: a little bit, but it actually did some statistical calculations
Speaker 1: to try to determine one particular aspect of what alien
Speaker 1: bodies are going to look like in that aspect's size,
Speaker 1: because obviously there are countless additional questions regarding the possibility
Speaker 1: of life elsewhere in the universe, but this particular study
Speaker 1: that we'll look at deals exclusively with just the size
Speaker 1: of the organism. Yeah, and well in the numbers you
Speaker 1: would expect and what their planets look like. But the
Speaker 1: one takeaway about the alien bodies themselves is the size.
Speaker 1: But I thought that was an interesting thing to address
Speaker 1: because actually, in fiction we've seen a vast sort of
Speaker 1: range of imagination in how large aliens can be expected
Speaker 1: to be. Obviously, the most common are your human sized aliens,
Speaker 1: because they are there are human actors playing them. That's right,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's always the concern, right if you're and
Speaker 1: and it is understandable if you're dealing with you want
Speaker 1: to get a really cool sci fi idea out there,
Speaker 1: and you want to discuss it, and you want to
Speaker 1: shoot it in a way that actually, uh comes under budgets.
Speaker 1: Under budget, It's far easier to just put somebody in
Speaker 1: a guerrilla suit than put a microwave on their head
Speaker 1: and call it an alien robot. Yeah, the what was
Speaker 1: his name? I think I have it in my Roman
Speaker 1: Roman Extension x J two. Yeah, folks at home, if
Speaker 1: you haven't seen Robot Monster, it's a classic. It's pretty fun.
Speaker 1: I mean I like to think of it as um,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of like a biospace suit worn by
Speaker 1: some other organism that just happens to look like a
Speaker 1: gorilla costume with a like a TV set on its head.
Speaker 1: Oh that's interesting, but yeah, we have countless examples, like
Speaker 1: Star Wars and Star Treker are particularly just loaded with
Speaker 1: humanoid roughly human size alien species, the track being the
Speaker 1: most scandalous in its way because it's because we you know,
Speaker 1: it's just like a ripple on the forehead makes this
Speaker 1: species and this entire you know, this entire strain of
Speaker 1: evolution different from this one, or sometimes just give them
Speaker 1: different clothes. That's enough. And then, of course there is,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, the greatest and most scientifically plausible vision
Speaker 1: of alien life ever created, which is Cone Heads. Yes
Speaker 1: you are now are you yourst referring only to the
Speaker 1: original Saturday in Life skits or the Oh no, I'm
Speaker 1: including the films. Yeah, the film includes lots of relevant details. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we we learned about their mating practices and so well.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Those might have been the sketches too,
Speaker 1: I haven't seen all of them. I remember they had
Speaker 1: a great stop motion creature in the film. It actually,
Speaker 1: yeah they did. I think it was claymation. It was
Speaker 1: this Ray Harry Housing kind of thing. I don't know
Speaker 1: who actually created it, but it was pretty awesome. There's
Speaker 1: a monster towards the end. I can forgive just about
Speaker 1: any film if it has a cool stop motion creature
Speaker 1: in it, I am right there with you. You ever
Speaker 1: made it to the end of Howard the God, I
Speaker 1: was just thinking about Howard the Duck, like that's literally
Speaker 1: the only thing that I remember about it is that
Speaker 1: at the end um the dude of the mustache turns
Speaker 1: into this awesome, like weird technically creature and and it's
Speaker 1: it's glorious the dark overlord of the universe. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: then of course we've also got aliens that have been
Speaker 1: imagined to run rather to the small side, which I
Speaker 1: think is kind of interesting. Often if you hear the
Speaker 1: actual abductee stories, so you go back to that scenario
Speaker 1: we had at the beginning, I think most likely you're
Speaker 1: going to hear that people were abducted by the gray aliens, right,
Speaker 1: which you're typically pretty small, right, Yeah, generally got two
Speaker 1: to four feet tall, and you're in varying accounts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is sort of the alien mythos that
Speaker 1: has sees the popular consciousness, and so they're these short, smooth,
Speaker 1: gray things with large black eyes, big heads. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: it's since it's the idea that's in the popular consciousness.
Speaker 1: People have these paranormal experiences and they tend to draw
Speaker 1: from that that bucket of content, if you will. Um
Speaker 1: outside of the grays though, the average ewalk stands about
Speaker 1: three ft tall a little over depending on the you
Speaker 1: know they ran. You have your your wickets, but then
Speaker 1: you also have those bigger, sort of chunkier monkeys. You know.
Speaker 1: I do wonder exactly how small and actually intelligent organism
Speaker 1: could run. Indeed, I mean in our science fick and
Speaker 1: you see, uh, such creatures as the virus, the flood
Speaker 1: from Doctor Who, or the thing from John Carpenter's two Masterpiece,
Speaker 1: where every cell of the shape shifting organism is itself
Speaker 1: an individual organism with its own survival instake. And that's
Speaker 1: how they end up discovering who has been replaced by
Speaker 1: the thing sticking the hot wire and the blood and
Speaker 1: seeing if the blood tries to escape. Yeah, yeah, they
Speaker 1: take a blood sample from each one, and if your
Speaker 1: blood tries to defend itself, that's not a good sign. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's uh, that's if not a space faring species,
Speaker 1: at least a species intelligent enough to steal the space
Speaker 1: faring technology from another species. Yeah, so it could perhaps
Speaker 1: co opt the intelligence of a host species, if even
Speaker 1: if it's not particularly intelligent or conscious itself. But certainly
Speaker 1: when we look at terrestrial models, and we'll be coming
Speaker 1: back to this again and again, um, it's it's hard
Speaker 1: to find any examples of a particularly small all life
Speaker 1: where you can say, oh, well, there you go, that
Speaker 1: that could be a space faring species on its own. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But of course this paper we're about to talk about
Speaker 1: in a minute doesn't say that aliens run small. It's
Speaker 1: ays that they run large. And we've got no shortage
Speaker 1: of large aliens. You could run all the way up
Speaker 1: to probably some Kaiju monsters, right, Oh yeah, yeah, the
Speaker 1: let's see. Uh I was looking around and there are
Speaker 1: a lot of Kaiju monsters to consider, Um, how many
Speaker 1: of them are actually aliens though? Yeah, because yeah, a
Speaker 1: number of them have more terrestrial origins. I found one,
Speaker 1: in particular, a hundred and thirty foot tall millenniums from
Speaker 1: god Zilla two thousand UM millennium which came out and
Speaker 1: uh I, it seems like various other Tohoe properties in kaiju,
Speaker 1: and certainly when you get into um like power rangers
Speaker 1: and whatnot, right. I mean, they're always battling some sort
Speaker 1: of giant creature. And but doesn't that take a magic
Speaker 1: wand to make the monster grow? Well? Yes, but if
Speaker 1: you look at them, magic wand is some form of technology.
Speaker 1: I don't know, it gets kind of complicate. But but
Speaker 1: even then you have other examples of really huge alien
Speaker 1: life and sci fi. Um. You know, Old Cathulu stood
Speaker 1: hundreds of meters tall, and he, of course was an
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial creature. What about the native inhabitants of Arakushea, the sandworms, Uh,
Speaker 1: they are They at least had been measured up to
Speaker 1: four d fiftys long, but there were speculations that in
Speaker 1: the polar regions of Iraqis they might reach seven hundred
Speaker 1: or even a thousand meters. So that's uh, upwards of
Speaker 1: three thousand, hundred and eighty feet long. That's pretty big.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure why, but intuitively I find it more
Speaker 1: plausible that a giant land dwelling animal would be worm
Speaker 1: like and sort of horizontal, rather than like a upright
Speaker 1: two legged kaiju monster. Yeah, I think that. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: larger to get when you start looking at the limits
Speaker 1: of morphology, um, Like the human model is just gonna
Speaker 1: fall upon part if you just try and wave the
Speaker 1: magic wand at it right. And then then of course
Speaker 1: you've got your aliens that are just basically huge humans, right,
Speaker 1: the engineers of Prometheus, they're about seven ft tall. Um,
Speaker 1: there are the oh did you ever see Fantastic Planet?
Speaker 1: Actually haven't? Oh yeah, nineteen three wonderful animated film, and
Speaker 1: you have these these enormous blue humanoid drugs uh stand
Speaker 1: about three nine ft tall, and they keep little human
Speaker 1: homes as pets. So they are these little naked humanoids
Speaker 1: that they they kind of dress up in like weird
Speaker 1: kind of cute, kind of sexy doll costumes and just
Speaker 1: keep them as pets. It's a creepy, fabulous film. But
Speaker 1: but they had another extra large critter there. Um, there's
Speaker 1: a tin foot tall species and E. N. M. Banks
Speaker 1: culture series uh known as the Darians. And they're also
Speaker 1: a three legged uh species, which is interesting. I think
Speaker 1: that's interesting because fun fact, did you know that there's
Speaker 1: no such thing as a three legged animal anywhere on Earth? Um,
Speaker 1: not a single side of the dogs you see, but right, well,
Speaker 1: and naturally occurring three legged animals. So there are some
Speaker 1: things that sort of actual like a tripod by using
Speaker 1: back legs and balance with a tail or something. So yeah,
Speaker 1: some things like a kangaroo or something might sort of
Speaker 1: use a tail sort of like a leg, But there's
Speaker 1: no such thing as a three legged animal. That's kind
Speaker 1: of a strange fact about the way life emerges on Earth.
Speaker 1: If you go millions of years back, you see certain
Speaker 1: particular body plans emerge, and one of those body plans
Speaker 1: is the four legged body plan that informs all reptiles
Speaker 1: and mammals. But you didn't have an ancestral three legged
Speaker 1: body plan to grow into animals that survived today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the sort of stand the standard models become set
Speaker 1: in stone evolutionarily, and uh and and yeah. So if
Speaker 1: you go back far enough, I feel I feel like
Speaker 1: there there is an example or two of like three
Speaker 1: eyes and very small creature. Really, I think one in particular. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: animals with odd numbers of features. That's weird, Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it is rare. Generally you see the typical two legged,
Speaker 1: four legged, two eyes. Yeah. Alright, so we've hinted that
Speaker 1: this paper we're gonna talk about says aliens are going
Speaker 1: to be rather large. What's the deal with this actual paper. Well,
Speaker 1: in March, the cosmologist Fergus Simpson of the University of
Speaker 1: Barcelona published this paper pre published on archive called the
Speaker 1: Nature of Inhabited Planets and their Inhabitants, which is a
Speaker 1: great name for a scientific paper. And so what was
Speaker 1: his reasoning? How did he come up with the idea
Speaker 1: that aliens are going to be on balance rather big?
Speaker 1: Well for starters, he uh largely employs Bayesian statistics, which
Speaker 1: is a model based on Bay's theorem. So the way
Speaker 1: of calculating probability of things, like if anyone out there
Speaker 1: is familiar with what a Nate Silver, right, Yeah, who's
Speaker 1: who's made a name from self predicting things like presidential elections,
Speaker 1: Like he used his Bayesian logic and in crunching the
Speaker 1: numbers on the statistical possibilities of varying outcomes, and that's
Speaker 1: scarily good at predicting the future. Yeah, yeah, And it's
Speaker 1: this is the same model that that Simpson employees here.
Speaker 1: So as we as we mentioned, his work concerns the
Speaker 1: statistical probabilities of inhabited planets, how many aliens would be
Speaker 1: on those planets, and then the size of those uh,
Speaker 1: those aliens, what would be the sort of standard model
Speaker 1: and uh and in determining the number of individuals UM
Speaker 1: that would most likely live in a given civilization, he
Speaker 1: came up with fifty million or fewer individuals. While any
Speaker 1: given alien in our universe would likely be from a
Speaker 1: high population world in the same way that most people
Speaker 1: on Earth are going to be just statistically Chinese, Indian,
Speaker 1: or American, um, very few worlds would host either a
Speaker 1: small number or or a large number of individuals. Right.
Speaker 1: So the idea is that if you randomly select a
Speaker 1: human from anywhere Earth, it's more likely they'll live in
Speaker 1: China or the United States, one of the most populated countries.
Speaker 1: But if you randomly select the population of a country,
Speaker 1: you're more likely to select a country that's near the
Speaker 1: Median somewhere in the middle. That's you know, like Canada
Speaker 1: or some you know, not particularly huge, not particularly small. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like imagine all the nations of the Earth,
Speaker 1: and each nation is its own planet, some large, some small,
Speaker 1: and then the larger ones have higher populations. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: So he also argues that a planet supporting extrastraustrial life
Speaker 1: is likely to be smaller than Earth closer to the
Speaker 1: size of Mars. Yeah, and he assumes that about fifty
Speaker 1: percent of Earth's diameter is there, you know, in the
Speaker 1: lower limits. Smaller than that, and it becomes difficult for
Speaker 1: the gravity of the planet to hold onto the atmosphere
Speaker 1: in water, right, So you see, Mars is pretty much
Speaker 1: at the limit it's about of Earth. And Mars actually
Speaker 1: already has that problem because Mars has almost no atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Asphere is like one percent of the thickness of Earth's,
Speaker 1: so that's another factor to take into account. He also
Speaker 1: says that each individual alien would be more likely to
Speaker 1: live on a big planet, as those worlds can clearly
Speaker 1: support more individuals. Kind of again, it sounds like an
Speaker 1: overstatement of the obvious, but it's an important one to
Speaker 1: get out there. So his basic prediction when you boil
Speaker 1: all this down again to figuring out trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how many worlds are gonna be um inhabited, and
Speaker 1: then how many uh individuals are gonna live in those worlds,
Speaker 1: and he says that most of these creatures are going
Speaker 1: to be big. Nearly seven hundred pounds three ms, the
Speaker 1: size of a terrestrial bear. Um the exact number that
Speaker 1: he ends up spouting in the piece is six pounds
Speaker 1: or three ms um. So we're talking half the creatures
Speaker 1: in the universe are going to weigh more than the bear.
Speaker 1: Half are gonna weigh less, but the bear sized extraterrestrial
Speaker 1: is going to be the standard model. It's if if
Speaker 1: outsiders from another universe peered into ours, according to this paper,
Speaker 1: they would say, hey, this is that uni verse where
Speaker 1: bear sized creatures with well bear sized creatures do live,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, And then that's the thing. It is
Speaker 1: something that matches up with why, yeah, why isn't the
Speaker 1: bear the dominant species on Earth already? Well, perhaps it is,
Speaker 1: and we're just kind of being selfish, but well, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there are a number of you know, you
Speaker 1: get into arguments and just discussions about why humans evolved
Speaker 1: to the point where we have all of this, you know,
Speaker 1: this great intelligence and then on top of that intelligence,
Speaker 1: technologies and culture, right, and a lot of it comes
Speaker 1: down to our need to use our brains to uh,
Speaker 1: to score our next meal, to use our our our
Speaker 1: intellect because we don't have clause. We don't have we
Speaker 1: don't have if we had bear strength, we'd be dumb
Speaker 1: because we wouldn't need to be smart. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: the thing is that the bear is just The bear
Speaker 1: doesn't need to be super intelligent, because the bear can
Speaker 1: do things like like hibernate through the winter. The bear
Speaker 1: can care things part with its clause, it can it
Speaker 1: can stand up for itself against pretty much anything on
Speaker 1: Earth except for the technology assisted human. Yeah. So I
Speaker 1: thought this paper was interesting. I gotta admit I read
Speaker 1: it twice and I still don't fully understand the statistical
Speaker 1: argument that's being made. I've read some commentary on the
Speaker 1: paper where some experts consultant said that they agree with
Speaker 1: the math of what he's doing, saying that the statistical
Speaker 1: calculation is is pretty much sound, but he might be
Speaker 1: not taking into account lots of factors that could change
Speaker 1: things dramatically, such as just physical conditions that give rise
Speaker 1: to life on planets, things like gravity, or some of
Speaker 1: just the basic facts we observe about how certain life
Speaker 1: forms make their living in different environments on Earth. And
Speaker 1: this leads into one of the criticisms we read from
Speaker 1: the seat researchers Seth show Stack. Yeah, and particularly he
Speaker 1: was I was thinking about the likelihood of of of
Speaker 1: large creatures actually, uh, you evolving too, where they would
Speaker 1: have advanced intellects and also technology. He pointed out that
Speaker 1: larger creatures are likely to reside in the water, where
Speaker 1: the advent of technology just might not happen. Um, because
Speaker 1: you're a large creature, you're gonna you know, all this mass.
Speaker 1: The buoyance of water helps you to stabilize it, right,
Speaker 1: And think of a blue whale. You wouldn't have a
Speaker 1: blue whale on on land. Right. And then if you
Speaker 1: are a very large animal, lika blue whale, like an elephant. Whatever, Um,
Speaker 1: are you going to need to advance like humans develop
Speaker 1: these technologies? Develop this an advanced intelect to win food?
Speaker 1: Probably not because you're big, You're content, You're you're station
Speaker 1: in life is achieved. You're you're a You're you're this
Speaker 1: blue whale just grazing through the ocean. You're an elephant
Speaker 1: pushing over anything you need to eat and just consuming it.
Speaker 1: You don't need technology if you're a filter feeder. Right,
Speaker 1: So you have to ask yourself this and this organism
Speaker 1: that we're trying to imagine, why does it need to
Speaker 1: start externalizing its abilities and and dipping into tool use
Speaker 1: and dipping into more complicated systems. Yeah, and of course
Speaker 1: that could lead to the broader question of how are
Speaker 1: we characterizing intelligence, Like is intelligence necessarily technological intelligence for
Speaker 1: some purposes? That is what we're talking about, because sometimes
Speaker 1: when people talk about encountering alien species, they're talking about
Speaker 1: the kind that would send radio signals where you could detect,
Speaker 1: or the kind that would visit Earth in spacecraft, in
Speaker 1: which case you're not going to be dealing with aliens
Speaker 1: that might be intelligent in some kind of strange social way,
Speaker 1: but that don't build machines. Yeah, we kind of get
Speaker 1: into this this anthropomorphic bias here, and almost kind of
Speaker 1: a Captain Kurt kind of bias where it's like, it's
Speaker 1: only alien life if it's like us, um, can I
Speaker 1: kiss it? I? Can I kiss it? Can I seduce it? Right?
Speaker 1: Because you know, an alien visitor Earth might would look
Speaker 1: at something like a dolphin or even something arguably like
Speaker 1: an octopus and say, well, this is a highly intelligent creature.
Speaker 1: Do they do these either of these species? Do they
Speaker 1: build things? Do they have a language? Do they have
Speaker 1: culture as humans think of it? Well? No, uh, I
Speaker 1: mean for starters there in the water, which, to show
Speaker 1: sticks point unlikely that technology is going to emerge. It's
Speaker 1: hard to build an integrated circuit underwater, right, and uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: intelligence doesn't necessarily mean the advent of technology. Well, I
Speaker 1: think we should take what we've looked at so far
Speaker 1: and see if we can draw some broader conclusions about
Speaker 1: what alien life is actually more likely to look like.
Speaker 1: Is there anything we can actually say on this subject
Speaker 1: or is it all just speculation? Is there anything we
Speaker 1: can base our assumptions on? You know, I'm currently reading
Speaker 1: Ian M. Banks culture novel Accession, which has a fabulous
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial creature and it called the the Affront. An extraterrestrial
Speaker 1: species called the Affront and their space faring. They're kind
Speaker 1: of like a a gas world um cephalopod creature, but
Speaker 1: they're also really sadistic and awful in their own way.
Speaker 1: So they the culture in this novel, which is like
Speaker 1: a far future post singularity um humanoid culture for the
Speaker 1: most part. Uh, they spent a lot of time like
Speaker 1: trying to figure out the Affront like they want to.
Speaker 1: They want to push the Affront, encourage them to be
Speaker 1: less awful and uh and and get along better with
Speaker 1: their neighbors instead of just constantly enslaving or wiping out
Speaker 1: other species, and so they have to ask themselves, well,
Speaker 1: you know, why are the affront warlike? And they look
Speaker 1: to their evolution in uh, you know it advanced hunting
Speaker 1: practices where they work together as a group to to
Speaker 1: to hunt their prey, and they say, well, if they
Speaker 1: hadn't done that, if that hadn't been a part of
Speaker 1: their evolutionary is since, then perhaps they'd be more peaceful.
Speaker 1: But then on the other end of the that argument
Speaker 1: is if they hadn't had that that hunting nature and
Speaker 1: that warlike aspect of themselves, they might not have evolved
Speaker 1: to this level. And either So now one thing I'm
Speaker 1: orious about you said, you said that they're sadistic. Did
Speaker 1: you actually mean that they're sadistic as in terms of
Speaker 1: taking pleasure in the pain of others or is it
Speaker 1: just that they're kind of like numb to our concerns
Speaker 1: and desires. Oh no, No, they're they're awful like they're
Speaker 1: they're they have this big hunting spirit. They'll have these
Speaker 1: dinners where they'll they'll all be eating a particular type
Speaker 1: of animal and then they'll be a fighting pit in
Speaker 1: the middle of the table where that same type of
Speaker 1: animal is alive. Fighting each other and they're betting on it.
Speaker 1: And then they also have a little miniature harpoons that
Speaker 1: they throw across the table at other dinner guests to
Speaker 1: try and snag some of their food and drag it
Speaker 1: over to their play. Okay, so they're kind of like predators. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're kind of like a more humorous predator because
Speaker 1: there they strike me. They have kind of like an
Speaker 1: Oliver read quality to them, like they're they're kind of
Speaker 1: like big drunken louts that also developed uh, space faring
Speaker 1: technology and occasionally sing yes, yeah, yeah, I can I
Speaker 1: can definitely imagine in building out. Well, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that brings up an interesting point, which is that, of
Speaker 1: course our evolution informs what type of creature we are,
Speaker 1: and we can probably safely assume that that's going to
Speaker 1: be true no matter where you go in the universe,
Speaker 1: Like you can go to other planets, you can probably
Speaker 1: even go to other galaxies, and while lots of local
Speaker 1: conditions might be different, there are a couple of things
Speaker 1: you can depend on when looking at alien life. One
Speaker 1: of them is that the physics of the universe are
Speaker 1: going to be the same, So all the same basic
Speaker 1: physical laws, and the presence of the same basic chemicals
Speaker 1: might be in different quantities, but still the palate, the
Speaker 1: color palate is the same. Yeah. And then the other
Speaker 1: thing is evolution. We can probably safely assume that whatever
Speaker 1: life forms are out there, they come about and gain
Speaker 1: complexity through the process of evolution. By one would have
Speaker 1: to assume by something like mutation, something that encourages change
Speaker 1: with replication, and then something like nat real selection some
Speaker 1: form of evolution at least until they reached the point
Speaker 1: where they have advanced technology and then are either creating
Speaker 1: their own life or creating mechanical life that then recreates
Speaker 1: organic life. Sure. And then of course there's the argument,
Speaker 1: which I probably support, that we're much more likely to
Speaker 1: encounter alien technology than we are to encounter aliens themselves.
Speaker 1: Like when we meet aliens, we're not going to meet them,
Speaker 1: We're going to meet their robots scouts. And that that
Speaker 1: lines up very much with with Banks's vision of the culture.
Speaker 1: Is that really you keep referencing these books. I've got
Speaker 1: to read them. They're they're pretty great. I I strongly
Speaker 1: recommend them. Anytime anybody writes into us and says, hey,
Speaker 1: what's some good you know, thought provoking and fun sci
Speaker 1: fi banks. This stuff is great, except I'm currently like
Speaker 1: two percent into Dune for the first time. I've got
Speaker 1: to finish that first. Oh yes, well, that's a that's
Speaker 1: a that's that's indeed a great book. Well, I think
Speaker 1: we should look at some of the principles of Earth
Speaker 1: life and ask the question of can we assume, based
Speaker 1: on the things we've already stated, that the physics going
Speaker 1: to be probably equivalent and life comes about through evolution.
Speaker 1: Can we assume that these principles are going to be
Speaker 1: present in the aliens we observe coming from other solar systems,
Speaker 1: other planets, and maybe even other galaxies in the far future.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that I think is interesting
Speaker 1: is how many animals in nature exhibit some form of symmetry. Now,
Speaker 1: whether that's bilateral symmetry like us, if you folded us
Speaker 1: in half, we would be roughly equivalent. Then the other
Speaker 1: thing would be radial symmetry, and that's something like an
Speaker 1: apple pie. Basically it extends out along the radius. And
Speaker 1: you can think about a jellyfish like it's symmetrical looking
Speaker 1: from the top down, like if you saw it a
Speaker 1: person in half, you could counted the rings if you will.
Speaker 1: If you will, there would be radial symmetry. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: symmetry is approximate. Of course, the sides rarely match each
Speaker 1: other exactly, but they roughly match each other. And it's,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, pretty easy to see why evolution might
Speaker 1: tend towards symmetry because it's easier. I mean, it's easier
Speaker 1: to make half of a person and then just copy
Speaker 1: that half than it is to come up with different
Speaker 1: halves of body plans for the same individual. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: one thing you have to always keep in mind with
Speaker 1: evolution is that evolution is essentially lazy. Evolution is it's
Speaker 1: the path of least resistem exactly, Like even just thinking
Speaker 1: about the brain, Like one of the analogies I love
Speaker 1: is the idea that the human brain is like a
Speaker 1: a double scoop ice cream cone, so that we didn't
Speaker 1: when it's our brains evolved like just another scoop was
Speaker 1: added on top of the existing scoop. It wasn't like
Speaker 1: a complete overhaul of the system. Yeah. Yeah, And you
Speaker 1: can see that in the brain actually, the different levels
Speaker 1: the brain stem, the cerebellum, cerebrum kind of like extending
Speaker 1: up towards Godhood. I guess, you know, to where eventually
Speaker 1: we get we get the angel brains that have the
Speaker 1: ethereal particles floating above the skull, or just the cone
Speaker 1: head brain. The cone head brain would be a wonderful example.
Speaker 1: So observing this principle on Earth very naturally leads us
Speaker 1: to assume that, Okay, if we see other aliens out there,
Speaker 1: they might be totally weird. They might have claws, they
Speaker 1: might be like crabs, they might be slimy lizard like organisms.
Speaker 1: They might have you know, weird you know, twenty ft
Speaker 1: long legs and huge pyramid heads. Who knows what they're
Speaker 1: going to look like. But almost all visions include basic
Speaker 1: bilateral symmetry. If you fold the alien in half, the
Speaker 1: sides match. But is that a safe assumption. There are
Speaker 1: animals on Earth that actually don't display external symmetry. They're
Speaker 1: they're asymmetrical on the outside. And one of the examples
Speaker 1: would be sponges. You've seen pictures of sponges. I mean,
Speaker 1: sponges are animals, yet they don't necessarily match when you
Speaker 1: fold them in half. They can have weird little nodules
Speaker 1: coming out on the side. So that, you know, they
Speaker 1: look more like a plant of some kind. Indeed, so
Speaker 1: if we were if we were trying to imagine a
Speaker 1: sponge based alien species, they might not have symmetry. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then again, sponges don't possess intelligence, and I guess we
Speaker 1: don't know if it's possible for something like a sponge
Speaker 1: to possess intelligence. We're back to the question of, well, well,
Speaker 1: the only creatures on Earth that have anything like intelligence
Speaker 1: are basically symmetrical. You can fold them in half. Uh,
Speaker 1: And so should we assume the same is true for
Speaker 1: the rest of the universe. Yeah, this is where we
Speaker 1: get into that interesting discussion of On one hand, life
Speaker 1: on Earth is our only model we can We only
Speaker 1: have terrestrial life when it comes to trying to extrapolate
Speaker 1: what life elsewhere in the universe would consist of. So
Speaker 1: we we have to base it on this model. And
Speaker 1: we see symmetry here and we have to imagine it
Speaker 1: that way elsewhere we see uh, we see the importance
Speaker 1: of water and the evolution of life here, we have
Speaker 1: to assume that elsewhere, and and that's really the best
Speaker 1: course of action. On the other hand, Uh, there's this
Speaker 1: little thing called the Copernican principle, which states that there's
Speaker 1: nothing special or privileged about Earth or hu manity, which
Speaker 1: is sort of the um you know, sort of the
Speaker 1: Fox News fair and balanced approach to cosmology, like in
Speaker 1: trying to when thinking about the universe, try not to
Speaker 1: have too big of a head about the importance of
Speaker 1: Earth and the human species. Right. Of course, the Copernican
Speaker 1: principle originally comes from like astronomy and cosmology, the idea that, hey,
Speaker 1: you don't necessarily have to start with the assumption that
Speaker 1: the Earth is the center of the universe. But it
Speaker 1: has been extended to a much more general principle beyond
Speaker 1: just saying we don't start with the assumption Earth is
Speaker 1: the center of the universe. Two, we don't start with
Speaker 1: the assumption that whatever our position is as an observer
Speaker 1: is privileged. Yeah, it's we don't necessarily assume that we're
Speaker 1: looking from a unique vantage point. Yeah. It seems to
Speaker 1: me that the safe course of action, I think this
Speaker 1: is the one that most cosmologist tint to to lean towards,
Speaker 1: is use the Earth model of what life is like
Speaker 1: when thinking about other worlds, but then also have the
Speaker 1: Copernic and principle. In the back mind, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like if you interact with people in your daily life,
Speaker 1: treat other people like you would like to be treated,
Speaker 1: but then adjust accordingly as new information becomes available, bearing
Speaker 1: in mind that everybody is not going to have the
Speaker 1: same case and preferences as you yourself. Yeah yeah. Another
Speaker 1: way of looking at this would be calling it something
Speaker 1: like the mediocrity principle. This has been invoked in speculating
Speaker 1: about alien life before, and it's a sort of statistical argument.
Speaker 1: The idea is, if you're drawing a random sample from
Speaker 1: a pool of objects, and you don't have information to
Speaker 1: the contrary, the safest assumption is that the sample you
Speaker 1: select is typical or average, and in this case, the
Speaker 1: sample would be Earth. So that's our one sample. We've randomly,
Speaker 1: not by choice, but by necessity, randomly selected Earth from
Speaker 1: the pool of possible inhabitable planets. Is one ping pong
Speaker 1: ball in the powerball and yeah, and so we've selected
Speaker 1: this and it's Earth. Now we're looking at it. What
Speaker 1: can we assume about its relationship to all the other
Speaker 1: balls in the in the powerball thing? Well, the safest
Speaker 1: assumption is that it's pretty normal it's average. And of
Speaker 1: course this becomes uh, this becomes kind of heartbreaking I
Speaker 1: guess at times for a top modelist as we continue
Speaker 1: to get new information about various excep planets and and
Speaker 1: how few of those ex planets are really earthlike in nature.
Speaker 1: But there's another interesting way of applying the sort of
Speaker 1: averageness principle or the typicalness principle towards the universe, and
Speaker 1: some people have gone a lot farther with it, saying
Speaker 1: that basically Star Trek got it right. Yeah, that essentially
Speaker 1: the the universe is likely filled with other humanoid species
Speaker 1: if it's filled with animals, because if it has anything
Speaker 1: at all, then they're likely going to be humanoids. They're
Speaker 1: gonna be I mean, it kind of gets into the
Speaker 1: whole territory that Stephen Hawking uh dipped into talking about, Well,
Speaker 1: if there are other alien species out there, they're probably
Speaker 1: awful like us, right. Yeah. That that's the pessimistic way
Speaker 1: of pointing it. But there could be the colder, more
Speaker 1: anatomical way of looking at it, which would mainly come
Speaker 1: back to this one guy whose name I kept seeing
Speaker 1: when this theory came up. It's the Cambridge paleontologists Simon
Speaker 1: Conway Morris, and he has argued that aliens are likely
Speaker 1: to be a whole lot like us, so that intelligent
Speaker 1: aliens are gonna be a whole lot like humans, and
Speaker 1: that aliens in general are going to be a whole
Speaker 1: lot like animals on Earth. And so in a two
Speaker 1: thousand five edition of the Journal Astronomy and Geophysics, Conway
Speaker 1: Morris begins with this interesting question. He starts by looking
Speaker 1: at this three hundred and twenty million year old fossil
Speaker 1: from you know, carboniferous strata in Montana, and it's some
Speaker 1: kind of weird water dwelling animal that made its living
Speaker 1: in a giant lagoon millions of years ago. And he
Speaker 1: describes it as quote vaguely fish like, but neither fish
Speaker 1: nor like any other group of known animals. And so
Speaker 1: it's the strange thing that we just have nothing like
Speaker 1: it on Earth today. And he actually imagines a scenario.
Speaker 1: So three million years ago, this disgruntled alien bureaucrat is
Speaker 1: visiting Earth and he's angry. He's kicking around on a
Speaker 1: beach in ancient Montana, and in frustration, he releases some
Speaker 1: of his alien pets into Earth's ecosystems. Against all regulations,
Speaker 1: the alien pet fish die, become fossilized, and millions of
Speaker 1: years later human paleontologists dig up these weird fossils. This
Speaker 1: raises some interesting questions. One of them is, if there's
Speaker 1: intelligent life all over the galaxy, how come there's no
Speaker 1: evidence that it has ever visited or colonized Earth in
Speaker 1: the past. How come we don't have obvious fossils of
Speaker 1: dead aliens in the fossil record. And then two, if
Speaker 1: we were to encounter aliens in the fossil record, how
Speaker 1: would we recognize them? M Well, I mean, one obvious
Speaker 1: point that comes up is that it's it's fairly difficult
Speaker 1: for a creature to enter the fossil record, particularly a
Speaker 1: small number of of of visitors happened to drop by, right,
Speaker 1: they could be their fossils could be out there right now,
Speaker 1: and we might find them. We might never find them.
Speaker 1: We might build a mall on top of their location. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they might have died in some arid climate that's not
Speaker 1: conducive to fossilization. They didn't necessarily position they're dead right on, Like,
Speaker 1: what are those the muddy banks that are Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's place the number of fossils have to be met
Speaker 1: for for fossilization to take place, and you're far It
Speaker 1: kind of gets down to the mediocrity principle, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're you're far more likely to find fossils of particular
Speaker 1: types of creatures, particular populations of creatures that live in
Speaker 1: the right environment, or apex predator fossils are fewer and
Speaker 1: farther between. Sure, we have lots more fossils of like
Speaker 1: sort of bottom dwelling ocean animals. I mean we have
Speaker 1: tons of those, because of course there were tons of
Speaker 1: so Conway Morris's point is sort of that we might
Speaker 1: not be able to tell if some aliens had landed
Speaker 1: on Earth and become fossilized, because he argues that alien
Speaker 1: life is going to be striking lee similar to Earth life.
Speaker 1: One of the arguments he makes is that all life
Speaker 1: is likely to be carbon based, like like life on Earth.
Speaker 1: He says it's basically a quote strong hunch among molecular
Speaker 1: biologists that any life in the universe is gonna have
Speaker 1: a chemical basis that's really similar to terrestrial life to
Speaker 1: life on Earth. One of the things he points out
Speaker 1: is that he says the fundamental operations such as primary
Speaker 1: metabolic cycles, possibly photosyn synthesis, and maybe d N A
Speaker 1: and the replication of DNA just really don't have any
Speaker 1: chemical alternatives that we can come up with. You you
Speaker 1: can't mimic processes like this without a system that's pretty
Speaker 1: much the same as what we already have. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then he he sort of goes on deposit that there
Speaker 1: are general rules to evolution. He says that they're independent
Speaker 1: of the quirks of your local ecosystem and the accidents
Speaker 1: that would arise through you know, just random trial and
Speaker 1: error throughout history. He points out convergent evolution. What do
Speaker 1: you know about converge and evolution? Oh, this, of course
Speaker 1: is uh, for instance, the model to say, all right,
Speaker 1: you have birds that can fly, you have bats that
Speaker 1: can fly. Yeah, these both of these, Uh, these lineages
Speaker 1: evolved flight separately. Yeah, they didn't get it from a
Speaker 1: common flying ancestry. And so yeah, that's the ideas that
Speaker 1: organisms arrive at these very similar biological solutions through completely
Speaker 1: different routes or from different starting points. Uh. Two people
Speaker 1: start on opposite sides of the globe, somehow they end
Speaker 1: up in the same place. One great example of this.
Speaker 1: In addition to wings would be eyes, So not all
Speaker 1: eyes evolved from the same line. A squid has a
Speaker 1: camera IE, and you have a camera I, But you
Speaker 1: and squid did not both evolve from a common ancestor
Speaker 1: with the primeval camera I. The humans and the squid
Speaker 1: do evolve from a common ancestor, but they've got their
Speaker 1: eyes in different ways. We know. The cephalopod was a
Speaker 1: great It's a great point because it reminds me of
Speaker 1: some information I've read before on arguments for octopy consciousness,
Speaker 1: which is actually a reason I don't I do not
Speaker 1: eat octopi anymore, just because if you if you look
Speaker 1: at the octopus and you try to judge its consciousness
Speaker 1: based on human models, it doesn't pass the test, the
Speaker 1: test that we have that even the test that we
Speaker 1: can give you know, a primate or even a dolphin
Speaker 1: are not going to apply to the octopus. But if
Speaker 1: you if you look at the octopus brain, which has uh,
Speaker 1: you know, evolved separately from these other models of what
Speaker 1: we think of is highly intelligent animals, uh, it itself
Speaker 1: has a very advanced brain and could arguably could be conscious. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've had the same thought. If you ever watch octopuses
Speaker 1: is like play with toys. This is the thing they do.
Speaker 1: It's very strange and it's somewhat unsettling. You see a
Speaker 1: weird kind of intelligence in them that you don't quite recognize.
Speaker 1: It's like hard to empathize with it, almost because it's
Speaker 1: so alien to human intelligence. Yet it's so different from
Speaker 1: what we think of as like fish, you know, this
Speaker 1: ocean dwelling kind of dull creature. Yeah, they play, they explore,
Speaker 1: they they utilized tools in some cases we're going to
Speaker 1: of course, you ask yourself when they steal things from divers,
Speaker 1: steel things from divers. But but then you also have
Speaker 1: to ask, could a creature like the octopus ever evolved
Speaker 1: to the point where it would develop technology, where it
Speaker 1: developed some sort of culture in the way that we
Speaker 1: think about it? And it is that even a fair question,
Speaker 1: because it again comes down to us taking this very
Speaker 1: anthromomorphic sense of the universe and applying it to a
Speaker 1: creature that that emerged rather differently differently than we did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: totally so, Conway Morris. He basically has two main arguments
Speaker 1: for thinking that convergence, like convergent evolution, is a universal
Speaker 1: of evolution, it's not just that we're witnessing convergence between
Speaker 1: different species on Earth made of terrestrial biological building blocks,
Speaker 1: but that we should expect to see convergence no matter
Speaker 1: what planet you're looking at. Right. But it's basically the
Speaker 1: argument is the basic shape of the evolution of life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so he says, one thing in this in favor
Speaker 1: of this is the pervasiveness of convergence. It's all over
Speaker 1: the natural world. You know, tons and tons of examples
Speaker 1: of it. It's at every level of resolution. So if
Speaker 1: you zoom way into the tiny little gears and parts
Speaker 1: that make bodies work, you can see it there. And
Speaker 1: he points out the enzyme carbonic anhydrace. He says that
Speaker 1: accelerates the hydration of carbon dioxide by more than a
Speaker 1: million times, and he this is a quote. He says
Speaker 1: on Earth it plays a key role in processes as
Speaker 1: desparate as photosynthesis, respiration, and by mineralization. And then of
Speaker 1: course you see convergence at the larger level with things
Speaker 1: like cameras and wings. And then of course he also
Speaker 1: says that it's the degree of similarity in complex, highly
Speaker 1: integrated systems. So it's not just small individual components but
Speaker 1: large systems that have different things working together still seem
Speaker 1: to converge on pretty similar working models. An example of
Speaker 1: this might be, for example, the brains of primates and corvids.
Speaker 1: You ever noticed that, Huh? It's kind of weird that
Speaker 1: human brains and crow brains can both come up with
Speaker 1: tool using technologies that seem to arise by pretty similar
Speaker 1: patterns of evolution and adaptation, yet their brain structures are
Speaker 1: radically different. I mean, one's bird and one's a primate. Indeed,
Speaker 1: I think that's the pretty convincing argument, espect as long
Speaker 1: as I try to disregard any star trek now in
Speaker 1: there and rippled foreheads. But yeah, if you imagine any
Speaker 1: any war, you have this, uh, this this complex system
Speaker 1: of evolution taking place, varied models of life emerging. There's
Speaker 1: going to be some model of life that it doesn't
Speaker 1: have these extra bells and whistles anatomically to deal with
Speaker 1: acquiring food, protecting itself, carrying out its basic genetic mission
Speaker 1: of species that has to depend more on ingenuity, um
Speaker 1: and tool use, and it's probably probably going to look
Speaker 1: something like us. It's going to be vaguely humanoid in
Speaker 1: form at least. Yeah, that's another sort of final position
Speaker 1: he arrives at that it's not just that our bodies
Speaker 1: are gonna look similar to alien bodies, but that he
Speaker 1: believes intelligence is pretty much a an inevitable consequence of
Speaker 1: life in the universe, that all things evolved towards some
Speaker 1: kind of human like intelligence. And in fact, there's the
Speaker 1: I mean, the further argument is that any complicated system
Speaker 1: moves towards intelligence, right, the emergence of intelligence? Right, Well,
Speaker 1: what what do you mean by that? Like? What other
Speaker 1: than life? What do you mean? Um, I've heard this
Speaker 1: argument in terms of of of artificial systems, but that
Speaker 1: even even systems, And this is where he gets, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of out there outside of biological life, that that
Speaker 1: the universe itself is a complicated is a complex system,
Speaker 1: and an intelligence must emerge from that system. Okay, so
Speaker 1: that if you have like a wave action acting on
Speaker 1: a bunch of different rocks, creating vortexes of current at
Speaker 1: the shoreline, eventually that start God exactly, I like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm partially convinced. I'm not quite sure what I think
Speaker 1: about Conway Morris. He's obviously a smart and well respected scientist,
Speaker 1: but I think a lot of people disagree with him
Speaker 1: quite strongly on this argument. He makes one more thing
Speaker 1: I wanted to end on I thought was interesting. Earlier
Speaker 1: we mentioned the Ceti researchers Seth show Stack, and in
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven he gave an interview to Popular Science
Speaker 1: where he said some things about alien body plant that
Speaker 1: actually some of them I found pretty interesting. One of
Speaker 1: them was referring back to this thing about size that
Speaker 1: inspired this episode. He was talking about the maximum size
Speaker 1: of aliens, and he was sort of arguing against these
Speaker 1: gigantic world size aliens or even probably maybe even against
Speaker 1: the sandworm due definitely planet from Marvel would be right out. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: Because he says, if you keep making an animal larger,
Speaker 1: its strength increases as a square of its size, but
Speaker 1: its weight increases as a cube of its size. So
Speaker 1: as you keep scaling up, weight becomes too much for
Speaker 1: even a strong animal. And according to him, this is
Speaker 1: unlikely to be a problem specific to Earth. This is
Speaker 1: a problem in physics and engineering that you would encounter
Speaker 1: on any planet. Yeah, and it's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why you start, if you start throwing a lot of
Speaker 1: science at King Kong. It falls apart. I mean literally,
Speaker 1: the monkey falls apart, right, it is not strong enough
Speaker 1: to lift its bones. Furthermore, I don't know if do
Speaker 1: you think the buildings that climbs would be strong enough
Speaker 1: to support it? You know, I've never seen anyone crunch
Speaker 1: that data. You know that we tend to focus more
Speaker 1: on the structural engineering project. Yeah, are there what? What
Speaker 1: buildings out there are essentially rampage proof? Another one, this
Speaker 1: is a direct quote. Heads are a good deal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a show stack. He thinks that heads are a
Speaker 1: common feature that you'd find on alien land animals. And
Speaker 1: I think his argument is really interesting. It would sort
Speaker 1: of be the cup holder of the animal body plan,
Speaker 1: you know, like it's a car. You can't sell a
Speaker 1: car without a cup holder. You can't have an you
Speaker 1: can't have an alien without a head. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: this is basically the sensory array of any organism. And
Speaker 1: uh yeah, I've actually looked into this before. Um in
Speaker 1: uh doing various monster monster the weak monster science stuff
Speaker 1: for the for the website. You know, you'll see like
Speaker 1: a two headed monster in fit in fiction, or you'll
Speaker 1: see a no headed mind stern fiction, and you ask yourself,
Speaker 1: was this possible. Is there anything in the natural world
Speaker 1: that conforms uh to this model and uh and generally
Speaker 1: that there isn't you get into like two headache organisms?
Speaker 1: Why would it have two heads? And that seems counterproductive? Yeah,
Speaker 1: the best you could really get into is you don't
Speaker 1: want to debate about what your body is gonna do, right, Like,
Speaker 1: the best you can get into is, essentially you could
Speaker 1: have an organism with some of its sensory material on
Speaker 1: one stalk and other sensory material on another stalk. But
Speaker 1: other than that, there's just no evolutionary reason for two
Speaker 1: heads or for a species to be conjoined by its
Speaker 1: very nature. Well, show Stack makes a good argument actually
Speaker 1: against even the sensory stalks because he he says that
Speaker 1: basically is a head. We're talking about a consolidated housing
Speaker 1: unit for the primary sense organs, which in our case
Speaker 1: would be things like eyes and ears, though that wouldn't
Speaker 1: have to be sensing. The visible spectrum on any planet
Speaker 1: would be whatever organs this alien uses to take an
Speaker 1: in formation about its environment. And why why would the
Speaker 1: primary sense organs need to be on the head. Well,
Speaker 1: it might seem kind of arbitrary at first, but I
Speaker 1: like his reasoning, He says that heads put the input
Speaker 1: devices right next to the central processing unit for rapid response,
Speaker 1: and he categorizes this in terms of response time, like
Speaker 1: it's important to your survival that you be able to
Speaker 1: respond immediately to what you see. But I actually thought
Speaker 1: of another thing about this. It seems like less likely
Speaker 1: that you can have your vision impaired by damaging the
Speaker 1: pathways of information exchange. So if you imagine the dude
Speaker 1: from Pan's Labyrinth, what's that guy called has the eyes
Speaker 1: in his hands? Oh, I don't know, it's like that
Speaker 1: the paleman or something like that, and that might be it.
Speaker 1: So he's so this monster has got eyes in his
Speaker 1: palms and he's walking around looking around with his hands.
Speaker 1: On one hand, that seems kind of cool, like you
Speaker 1: can peek around a corner with your hand. But on
Speaker 1: the other hand, you could probably blind this guy by
Speaker 1: injuring his arms. That's not something you'd want. Yeah, Also,
Speaker 1: like how does he cut up peppers for dinner? You know?
Speaker 1: I mean there's just a number of problems that stem
Speaker 1: from that. Yeah. Yeah, So you wouldn't want this long, exposed,
Speaker 1: kind of vulnerable path of information exchange from your primary
Speaker 1: sense organs to the thing that needs to receive them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: plus the transfer of of those neural signals from from
Speaker 1: touch from pain uh four different uh accent pathways. When
Speaker 1: you say stub your toe, uh, it takes time for
Speaker 1: that for that signal to reach the brain. Now, it's
Speaker 1: a very small amount of time. Um, and it varies
Speaker 1: depending on the type of sense data. But but there
Speaker 1: there is a delay. And in the evolutionary scheme of things, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, the body is going to again, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be lazy, it's gonna go with the path of least resistance.
Speaker 1: So it's easier just to to cut down that that
Speaker 1: delay time as much as possible. Yeah. I think he
Speaker 1: makes that point pretty convincingly. The the other thing he says,
Speaker 1: I think this is into thing too. Despite the fact
Speaker 1: that he's very pro head, he characterizes the number of
Speaker 1: limbs we have is pretty much happenstance of evolution, Like
Speaker 1: that's just a fluke. We have four limbs because we
Speaker 1: evolved from four lobed fish, but we could have had
Speaker 1: any other number of limbs. Though somehow, I don't know,
Speaker 1: four limbs seems economically primed to me, Like if you
Speaker 1: have an animal with less than four limbs. It seems
Speaker 1: like you couldn't evolve an intelligent animal with two limbs,
Speaker 1: because they wouldn't have tool manipulating uh you know, like
Speaker 1: grabby grabby things whatever those be. Well, it instantly makes
Speaker 1: me think though about giraffes and elephants, um, because of
Speaker 1: course the elephant has a highly tactile trunk, uh, and
Speaker 1: then the giraffe has a pretense prehensile a tongue. So
Speaker 1: I could I could imagine alien species who say, I
Speaker 1: only have two legs and they walk on them, but
Speaker 1: then when it comes to using their computers or what
Speaker 1: have you, they rely on their trunk, they rely on
Speaker 1: their their their draft like tongue. In fact, in one
Speaker 1: of the culture books in Banks has an elephant type
Speaker 1: creature that has two trunks I remember correctly, and those
Speaker 1: are its primary manipulation uh limbs. Man. That's fascinating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just highlights actually how poor our imagination is, because
Speaker 1: I was thinking, yeah, yeah, you need hands, but you
Speaker 1: could I don't know, you could have a tail, and
Speaker 1: then you could have a tail that over time grew
Speaker 1: a fork in it and it had prehensile forks, and
Speaker 1: then you could basically have tentacles on land. Let's not
Speaker 1: count out ear lobes. You know, we take them for granted,
Speaker 1: But there could be a species out there on a
Speaker 1: artist in alien world and those are its primary you know,
Speaker 1: tactile instruments. I have a question, do you think it's
Speaker 1: really all that advantageous to have like four arms? Like,
Speaker 1: would would Goro have a real advantage as an organism
Speaker 1: outside of the sacred rights of Mortal Kombat? Yeah? Why
Speaker 1: would Goro? What? What was he? A showcan? Is that
Speaker 1: his species? I don't recall? Um? Yeah, why why is
Speaker 1: this model evolved? Um? Well mhmm, yeah, he certainly has
Speaker 1: an advantage against humanoids, and maybe he had if I
Speaker 1: if I remember correctly, his his species sort of ancestral
Speaker 1: enemy is essentially a centaur right of a big Oh
Speaker 1: is that right? Yeah? The one in the third Mortal
Speaker 1: Kombat film Motaro. Okay, so if they're fighting there was
Speaker 1: a third film? No, no, well, Motaro might be in
Speaker 1: the films too, But in the third game of Taro's
Speaker 1: like a coo role of being like the sub boss.
Speaker 1: So I was about to leave work and go watch
Speaker 1: the third Mortal Kombat film. I think he shows up
Speaker 1: in it, you would probably not be surprised. But so
Speaker 1: maybe there is an evolutionary advantage to having a second
Speaker 1: pair of arms if you're having to grapple with uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: another species that has six limbs, six limb creatures, maybe
Speaker 1: that's ultimately the model of life uh on the go homeworld.
Speaker 1: You know, I have to come down with one sad
Speaker 1: prediction of my own, which is that if we encounter
Speaker 1: alien species, I don't think they will biologically emit rays.
Speaker 1: This is a thing that's often imagined, right, I can
Speaker 1: see them having laser guns, but I don't think from
Speaker 1: their bodies they will emit rays. It just seems like
Speaker 1: the energy requirements are implausible. Yeah, that's probably a safe bet.
Speaker 1: You're probably not going to be vaporized by their their
Speaker 1: heat vision, right, you see them, So Kryptonians are out.
Speaker 1: And plus if a creature has like a natural heat
Speaker 1: vision ability, again, they why are they Why are they
Speaker 1: developing the kind of advanced intellect that would enable them
Speaker 1: to travel. They're just setting there blasting whatever they want
Speaker 1: to eat, and if anything messes with they blast the predators.
Speaker 1: So no problem and no reason to venture out into
Speaker 1: the void. Well, I always enjoy talking about aliens, but
Speaker 1: this has been particularly fun. Robert, Yeah, yeah, I mean it's, uh,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that, like, oftentimes I find
Speaker 1: myself just sort of thinking at night, and I tend
Speaker 1: to more and more and more pessimistic about the idea
Speaker 1: of intelligent life in a sci fi sense existing out there.
Speaker 1: But I'll often think, well, there's probably somewhere, just so
Speaker 1: far away, there's an ocean that I can scarcely imagine,
Speaker 1: and there's some sort of like slug like creature just
Speaker 1: doing it's very basic thing, and it's it's incapable of
Speaker 1: knowing me, incapable of imagining me. But it's out there somewhere. Well,
Speaker 1: not to open a whole other can of sandworms, but
Speaker 1: there are I mean, their their whole environments we haven't
Speaker 1: even really discussed in this. I mean we're talking about
Speaker 1: sort of like surface dwelling creatures that might be in
Speaker 1: the water, or they might be walking around on some
Speaker 1: kind of hard, rocky surface of a planet. There's also
Speaker 1: the idea that's pretty common is that well, what if
Speaker 1: gas planet it could be inhabited but basically floating or
Speaker 1: flying aerostatic types of creatures that that move up and
Speaker 1: down in the thick, dense, fluid like atmosphere of gas
Speaker 1: and a gas planet. Essentially Jovian jellyfish. Yeah. I can
Speaker 1: see something like that too, though with those I also
Speaker 1: don't know, if you know, would technology evolve, would would
Speaker 1: something like that create tools if they don't have hard,
Speaker 1: rocky materials to make tools out of. Yeah, what would
Speaker 1: their technology consists of? Perhaps it would be entirely organic
Speaker 1: or yeah. It just it just blows the mind to
Speaker 1: try and think about it. But that's why we keep
Speaker 1: coming back around to it. One. We we keep envisioning
Speaker 1: all these different fantastic aliens. You know, essentially giant and
Speaker 1: small aliens are not any different than the giants and
Speaker 1: dwarves that inhabit our mythologies and folklores. But as we
Speaker 1: look into the future with them, we take we take
Speaker 1: more and more of our scientific quandaries and apply them
Speaker 1: to the creation. Yeah, all right, So there you have it. UH,
Speaker 1: Space Faring Bears considerations UH on the size of aliens
Speaker 1: and the populations of of aliens elsewhere in the universe.
Speaker 1: As always, if you want more information on this episode,
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Speaker 1: Mind dot com. That's the mothership and that's where you
Speaker 1: will find all of it. In the Landing Patriot. This
Speaker 1: episode will include some links out to the materials we
Speaker 1: discussed here, and if you've ever been abducted by an alien,
Speaker 1: seen an alien, or just have any relevant thoughts about
Speaker 1: what aliens might look like, how big their bodies are,
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