Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Man, welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Noory with you,
Speaker 2: Peter Ward with us, Peter. If this is the sixth
Speaker 2: mass extinction, is there a time cycle to these things?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was a great question, George. When I was
Speaker 3: a grad student, there were two great tale intelligists, a
Speaker 3: guy named David Raup and Jackson Kowski, and they did
Speaker 3: a bunch of statistical work and suggested that every twenty
Speaker 3: six million years there was another mass extinction. Route was
Speaker 3: pretty convinced that what was happening is that we are
Speaker 3: being impacted by meteors or comments, if you will, or
Speaker 3: asteroids coming out of the big body of objects surrounding
Speaker 3: New York. That he thought that our planet was just
Speaker 3: going through this cloud and that this twenty six billion
Speaker 3: year cyclicity was related to that, And subsequent work suggested
Speaker 3: that that's not really the case. I mean, back then,
Speaker 3: the geological time scale wasn't as well defined, and there's
Speaker 3: a number of ways and statistics that you can produce
Speaker 3: false positives really through what we've set a cycle, But
Speaker 3: clearly we are having periods of time when really bad
Speaker 3: things happen that we are subjecting to impact from space.
Speaker 3: There will be more big asteroids, giddiness. We've got so
Speaker 3: many challenges right now, with so many humans and so
Speaker 3: much problem in climate and crops. The last thing we
Speaker 3: need now is some objects in space strangely enough to jeorgan.
Speaker 3: One of the things that really scared theatrobiologists that was
Speaker 3: a member of back in the day around two thousand
Speaker 3: is that even a body about fifty meters in diameter.
Speaker 3: That doesn't sound very big, but it's got to be
Speaker 3: that big for a meteor to pass all the way
Speaker 3: through the atmosphere and hit the ground. If it's smaller
Speaker 3: than that, it creates what's called an air burst, and
Speaker 3: an air burst exactly mimics a nuclear explosion going off
Speaker 3: with aloitude. So the big problem was, we know something
Speaker 3: like this happened in nineteen oh six in Tunguska in Russia,
Speaker 3: there was an air burst the knock down thousands of
Speaker 3: square acres of trees. Had that happened over a major city,
Speaker 3: Let's say we had an air burst over New York
Speaker 3: City or in London.
Speaker 2: Everybody's dead.
Speaker 3: Well, this just that, But how do you know it
Speaker 3: wasn't a nuclear attack. And the biggest problem is that
Speaker 3: if this happens and all of a sudden, the military
Speaker 3: thinks we've been attack. New York has been bombed by
Speaker 3: the Russians, quick start shooting. How do you get hold
Speaker 3: of the military and say, wait a minute, that was
Speaker 3: a meteor, not an atomic explosion. What are you going
Speaker 3: to talk to you? Who's got the phone number? I mean,
Speaker 3: it's just one of these really scary what ifs. But
Speaker 3: these things, these options from space, they're out there.
Speaker 2: Do you think there have been some mass extinction events
Speaker 2: on other planets throughout this universe?
Speaker 3: Well, have great question. I would assume that if we
Speaker 3: had an earth like planet that had the same parallel
Speaker 3: evolution leading to more complex life animal equivalence, that there's
Speaker 3: going to be the same sort of dangers that outer
Speaker 3: space can give you. Some of my friends at SETI
Speaker 3: search for extraterrestial intelligence. Oh what, Seth was a good
Speaker 3: buddy and he calls me an evil twin Skippy. I
Speaker 3: can pay heed the evil twin Skippy, But we've debated
Speaker 3: for years. We're close friends. It's very good. But SETI
Speaker 3: wants us to believe that there are lots of planets
Speaker 3: with lots of civilizations, and yet the most common stars
Speaker 3: out there are small dwarfs. Any planet circling a dwarf
Speaker 3: star to because enough to have water is what we
Speaker 3: call tidally locked with our moon face always facing the sun.
Speaker 3: Bubble of that is that small suns burn in burbot radiation.
Speaker 3: You would have a transient solar event that would wipe
Speaker 3: out any life that was there. Mass extinction. So yeah,
Speaker 3: I think this has an inherent part of the whole system.
Speaker 3: Life is dangerous, planets are more dangerous. Stars are the
Speaker 3: most dangerous of all them.
Speaker 1: Peter.
Speaker 2: After the mass extinction, what causes the rebound?
Speaker 3: Well, opportunity does? I always hate to bring this up,
Speaker 3: but it's just it's so heartbreaking to me. George. What's
Speaker 3: happened to Leahina on Malays My favorite towns I love
Speaker 3: Behinah and as a young man I went there. It's
Speaker 3: just every decade or so I go to Mahina and
Speaker 3: the arc dowries and the beach and the bubble gums,
Speaker 3: so all the great stuff there, plus the whole local
Speaker 3: Hawaiian culture that's gone, and so you're at you know
Speaker 3: what happens next? Well, what does happen next? And I
Speaker 3: saw that the governor of Hawaii said it's going to
Speaker 3: take several billion dollars to restore that part of even
Speaker 3: that part of Mali.
Speaker 2: Have they said yet how that fire started.
Speaker 3: I've been trying to find that out, and it's either
Speaker 3: lightning or probably or probably somebody just threw a cigarette
Speaker 3: tossed it out of a window. I mean, that's what
Speaker 3: happens in Washington State. But as I looked into this today, George,
Speaker 3: because again the heartbreak is just you know, my heart
Speaker 3: goes out to those people, I started looking at why
Speaker 3: there was so much fuel around. I lived in Australia
Speaker 3: in twenty fourteen. Adelaide Australia, and the Australians are very
Speaker 3: cognitive and terrified of fire because the forests or eucalyptus,
Speaker 3: and eucalyptus is a beautiful tree. You can smell it
Speaker 3: all over California. You're a la you lucky dog. You
Speaker 3: go out, there's the eucalyptus trees all around you. But
Speaker 3: that very smell comes to the oils. It's extremely flammable.
Speaker 3: Ucatus twigs and bark. They burn like crazy. When the
Speaker 3: Australians have fires. They are so dangerous and so fatal.
Speaker 3: And what I gathered just from the reading today is
Speaker 3: that non native grasses grass that did not exist in
Speaker 3: Hawaii until various humans came with all the products we drew,
Speaker 3: these non native grasses have taken over all around and
Speaker 3: Malley and that they burn faster. Second, lad they've been
Speaker 3: having to draw it. And thirdly, a typhoon several hundred
Speaker 3: miles just to the south produced enough wind. You get
Speaker 3: the spark, you've got the fuel, and you have the wind,
Speaker 3: and then you get catastrophes. So it is just from
Speaker 3: a human, from a nature, from just a cultural point
Speaker 3: of view, this is just tragedy. Mass extensions are the
Speaker 3: same biotic tragedies. And afterwards people dig out. Afterwards, the
Speaker 3: survivors set about rebuilding. What will be rebuilding behind it
Speaker 3: will not look anything like the town that was now
Speaker 3: on the planet Earth rebounds after mass extinction, totally different kinds.
Speaker 2: Of animals, and sadly they're finding more and more dat
Speaker 2: out there.
Speaker 3: I just don't you want to think about it. You
Speaker 3: know that the fire in Paradise, California. I have friends
Speaker 3: all through this one. I feel there is Chico Creek
Speaker 3: and last in wilderness and paradise itself. I thought that
Speaker 3: sound very well, and they were caught in the cars
Speaker 3: and just again, when you get fired and fast moving flames,
Speaker 3: it's it's a recipe for tragedy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Do you think Mars once had life and then
Speaker 2: what happened there?
Speaker 3: I think Mars may have. I think my Krobiy life
Speaker 3: is very easy to once it starts, and I think
Speaker 3: it's probably if you have the chemicals around, not that
Speaker 3: difficult for life to assemble itself from non life. Or
Speaker 3: we got life here on Earth and an asteroid hits
Speaker 3: our planet, throws the rock in space and lands on Mars,
Speaker 3: or I started on Mars and was set off on Earth.
Speaker 3: Either way, that planet's too small, it doesn't have the
Speaker 3: mask to hold an atmosphere. It's lost its atmosphere. If
Speaker 3: there had been life on Mars, it would have been
Speaker 3: probably four point two to four billion years ago, and
Speaker 3: then probably by three point five everything that was even
Speaker 3: close to complexity is gone. However, I think the first
Speaker 3: person you want to send the Mars or at least
Speaker 3: on the same team, is going to be a paleontologist
Speaker 3: with a good drill rig and you also want to
Speaker 3: have a microbiologist drill cores, send them down one hundred meters,
Speaker 3: get down benep the surface and try to see if
Speaker 3: there's any microbes up in the soil. So we're all hoping.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't want to be the only place
Speaker 3: of life at the cosmos. I don't think we are,
Speaker 3: but the very what type of life will be? But
Speaker 3: it's the big history.
Speaker 2: What about our moons? You believe moons are critical for life?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting we have the gigantic moon and how
Speaker 3: important it's been. We think. The book I wrote in
Speaker 3: two thousand with Don Brownlee called Rare Earth was actually
Speaker 3: a very interesting exercise for me. I've been mostly italiantologist
Speaker 3: stuff till that time, and it forced me to get
Speaker 3: out on a comfort zone. So I only bring it
Speaker 3: up because Don and I have been asked to write
Speaker 3: a sequel to it after he's twenty years later and
Speaker 3: we're laboring through it. But what do we know now?
Speaker 3: And then you brought up self Shostak. I would love
Speaker 3: for Stef to write the introduction of this book. If
Speaker 3: he's listening or thing deafense or if you know him.
Speaker 3: I mean, that would be a fabulous thing for us.
Speaker 3: Stef is a wonderful writer, but I have from someone
Speaker 3: from us SETTI hike a crack at this rare earth
Speaker 3: hypothetsys the best of all worlds. I still think that
Speaker 3: we're going to find lots of life and the cosmos,
Speaker 3: but that it will never be much more than very
Speaker 3: simple life, except in the rarest circumstances. So that's through
Speaker 3: the book. We are going through catalog the one hundred
Speaker 3: closest planets to Earth out there by looking at all
Speaker 3: the permission that we have the excellent planets, I guess right, well, yeah,
Speaker 3: the exo planets. So we're going to see these hundred
Speaker 3: closest extra planets are great on the probability of whether
Speaker 3: or not we think there could be animal equivalents, and
Speaker 3: right after bad, I'll be amazed if even one of
Speaker 3: those planets is are like it's it's hard to find
Speaker 3: a good planet.
Speaker 2: We're rare, We're lucky, but who knows it. Maybe I'll
Speaker 2: tie to spirituality, you never know.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm just I do not believe that life is
Speaker 3: unique to this planet. How could it be. I mean,
Speaker 3: the cosmos is so gigantic, there's so many planets, so
Speaker 3: many stars. That would be quite a strange phenomenon that
Speaker 3: life started on this planet and nowhere else. Panspermia, right,
Speaker 3: panspermia definitely, that's such a great term. Yep, panspermia. We're
Speaker 3: throwing rocks from place to place. And as you know,
Speaker 3: there's two kinds. Interstellar could life go from one star
Speaker 3: system to another? And that one seems hard, but interplanetary absolutely.
Speaker 3: We know this great experiments. People have taken hanks of
Speaker 3: lava and actually they put them on the front of
Speaker 3: one of the soil used capsules that re entered. They
Speaker 3: had a big hunk of lava. It had bacteria in
Speaker 3: the middle. It re enters, gets really hot, they break
Speaker 3: the rock open. Bacteria are fine adroid to blast life
Speaker 3: from place to place. But it's going to be very
Speaker 3: simple life.
Speaker 2: Our extinction events controllable.
Speaker 3: That's a sixty four dollars question. I mean, if you
Speaker 3: look at the conservation movement, I would say that the
Speaker 3: major goal of conservation on the planet today is to
Speaker 3: reduce extinctionion can we do it at all? I mean,
Speaker 3: big rare things are really hard to keep because there's
Speaker 3: so few of them. It's so easy to dock them
Speaker 3: off one of the great tragedies to me is where
Speaker 3: I live, we've had resident killer whales resident of Orca,
Speaker 3: and there were eighty to one hundred of them when
Speaker 3: I was a young man, and now there are only
Speaker 3: half that. And a big problem about is that SeaWorld
Speaker 3: came and harvested is the term they used, took about
Speaker 3: forty five of them out. I just noticed that, well, Leda,
Speaker 3: the very last living that was taken in nineteen seventies
Speaker 3: out of ten Cove in Washington State, is being brought
Speaker 3: back to Washington State to be released.
Speaker 2: What's the life spanable whale like that? Oh?
Speaker 3: They laughed, Well, I think it's forty fifties the year.
Speaker 3: This is a very old whale. She was taken as
Speaker 3: a calf, so she would be very near the end
Speaker 3: of her life spent.
Speaker 2: That's a long time, though, My god, forty fifty sixty
Speaker 2: years for yeah, But look, man, I don't like that.
Speaker 3: Look look at you and me. You know, if it's
Speaker 3: forty fifty or sixty, I would be all dead me too.
Speaker 3: I'm personally thinking I'm going to shoot in for the
Speaker 3: timeety hundreds. That's as good to be.
Speaker 2: I'd be doing a talk show up in heaven at
Speaker 2: least I hope would be up there.
Speaker 3: Hey, you're already doing a talk show in heaven. We're
Speaker 3: on Earth. It is heaven on Earth. You're already you
Speaker 3: already achieved that.
Speaker 2: What other scientists, Peter Sayer, palaeontologists say about the possibility
Speaker 2: of extinction events?
Speaker 1: Do they do?
Speaker 2: They agree with you?
Speaker 3: Well, they certainly see it. Of the rock record is
Speaker 3: full of them. I mean, just the really big ones
Speaker 3: have all the book box of geolastical record. We have
Speaker 3: these three great years to tell Zola and Mesozoic and
Speaker 3: sent Isolic and even in eighteen to two, in eighteen
Speaker 3: three four, these early naturalists, we're able to recognize these great,
Speaker 3: big strokes. They're huge disappearances. We can see it for
Speaker 3: the fossils themselves. So it's been a long knowing two
Speaker 3: hundred years. We know we've had these big things. The
Speaker 3: big question now is how extensive is what has happened
Speaker 3: on the planet today, How extensive will it be?
Speaker 2: How far will do and how long do they last?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Absolutely, and that we don't know.
Speaker 1: What.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about the rebound again. In this particular case,
Speaker 2: we didn't have humans during the last extinction. How quickly.
Speaker 2: Could we rebound?
Speaker 3: Yeah, great question. It's funny to say that, I mean
Speaker 3: concident of might be on your show today. It's interesting
Speaker 3: for a number of reasons. I just received a letter,
Speaker 3: as I do an email this morning from an author.
Speaker 3: She wants to do a children's book, and she said,
Speaker 3: you're doctor Ward. I want to do a children's book
Speaker 3: about what life will be one million years from now.
Speaker 3: Can you posit what the future evolution of Earth life
Speaker 3: will be in one million years. I actually did a
Speaker 3: book with my great friend, the artist Alexis Rockman in
Speaker 3: the nineties, and we called it future Evolution, and we
Speaker 3: tried to ask that question if humans continue. And my
Speaker 3: own sent of the George is that we humans are
Speaker 3: about as close to extinction proof as an animal can be.
Speaker 3: A curse the caveat of nuclear weapons, we can certainly
Speaker 3: wipe ourselves out. I have the hope that we're wiser
Speaker 3: than that. But even a million years, you know, most
Speaker 3: species can be produced in perhaps tens of thousands of years,
Speaker 3: but in a million years you could have a lot
Speaker 3: of different types of life. So in our book we
Speaker 3: asked where are the habitats, what are the big places
Speaker 3: that life would have to adapt to. And I think
Speaker 3: you'll agree. Two of the biggest habitats on the planet
Speaker 3: now are cities and secondly farm lands. And then there's
Speaker 3: what seven eight billion people on this earth are soon
Speaker 3: to be on this earth, and we need ever more
Speaker 3: acreage for farms. Well, that becomes a gigantic ecological habitat. Secondly,
Speaker 3: cities getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so the
Speaker 3: question we asked, if these are two of the big habitats,
Speaker 3: and if we know that nature produces new species, what
Speaker 3: will be the successful species and cities? But we already
Speaker 3: see this. I'm living outside Seattle. I'm on a small lake,
Speaker 3: but we've got you just to put my head out
Speaker 3: on and hear the coyotes. U in La you could
Speaker 3: just get near the foothills. There plenty at coyotes, cougars, coyotes.
Speaker 3: But the big successful things are like pigeons and crows
Speaker 3: and lots and lots of cockroaches and snakes because there's
Speaker 3: so many rats and so many mice that live in
Speaker 3: the crevices and cities. And think about garbage dumps. How
Speaker 3: much resources are there for animals in the garbage dump
Speaker 3: and not just that I've been to the Philippines, some
Speaker 3: of the gigantic garbage dumps outside Manilla, where large numbers
Speaker 3: of humans absolutely exist on the edges and in these
Speaker 3: garbage dumps because there's so much food and there's so
Speaker 3: many resources to be home.
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