Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julia
Speaker 1: Lee Douglas. Julie, welcome back from vacation. Where did you go?
Speaker 1: I went to Via Keys. It's a small island right
Speaker 1: outside of Puerto Rico. I went to go see bioluminescent Bay. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: with a microplankton that blows. Unfortunately, and they don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm not quite sure what's going on there. They were
Speaker 1: not surfacing, so they don't know if it's a changing
Speaker 1: climate or if they were disturbed somehow. But um, kind
Speaker 1: of a bummer. But I hope that they get that
Speaker 1: back because it's an amazing thing. I think it's only
Speaker 1: one of two places in the world that has that
Speaker 1: level of bioluminescence. Cool. I mean you get to see
Speaker 1: other stuff obviously, Yeah, lots of wild horses, um, all
Speaker 1: sorts of really cool things. Well, welcome back, thank you,
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the podcast, and welcome back listeners to
Speaker 1: outer Space. We've been talking about wanting to hit some
Speaker 1: more space content because I mean that's part of the
Speaker 1: DNA of the show and we haven't been there recently,
Speaker 1: So here we go into space into some big cosmic questions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we've talked about this before, this idea of the
Speaker 1: goldilocks principle and how Earth is just the perfect place, right,
Speaker 1: it's not too hot, not too cold. Um, but what
Speaker 1: else is going out there in the universe? And we're
Speaker 1: going to try to get at this idea of you know,
Speaker 1: the universe is not this dead, you know, void of space.
Speaker 1: It's actually a living universe. Yeah. You you always end
Speaker 1: up coming back around to that, that whole scenario. Right.
Speaker 1: You look out into into space as as much as
Speaker 1: we can as an individual understand space. You see all
Speaker 1: that darkness and uh. And as the saying goes, there's
Speaker 1: the idea that there's life out there, and there's the
Speaker 1: idea that there's nothing out there. And both of those
Speaker 1: ideas are completely mind blowing to think that there is
Speaker 1: life thinking or just kerdel ng and and and you know,
Speaker 1: reproducing itself somewhere, or there's just nothing it's just a
Speaker 1: dead universe. And both of those have a tremendous effect
Speaker 1: on you if you stop to really chew them over. Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially if you add the time element to it because
Speaker 1: one hand, you could look at you know, some people
Speaker 1: look at space and the universe and they think of
Speaker 1: it in futuristic terms. One day we will conquer it.
Speaker 1: One day we will know more about it. Other people
Speaker 1: look at it as a relic. As if you're peering
Speaker 1: into deep space, you are peering into deep time, and
Speaker 1: you can reverse engineer time and try to figure out
Speaker 1: something about how we came into being exactly now, we
Speaker 1: of course have a humans have an evolving, continuingly evolving
Speaker 1: understanding of the cosmos. Uh. You go back not even
Speaker 1: too long ago, in our very brief period of time
Speaker 1: and as a species in this cosmos, and it is
Speaker 1: just a very like the briefest little tip of the needle.
Speaker 1: Um and uh, and you have our understanding based on
Speaker 1: basically ancient Babylonia and cosmology, you know, and you have
Speaker 1: just just very rough ideas about what we are and
Speaker 1: where we are. You our cosmos was limited by what
Speaker 1: we could see with the naked eye, and we, inevitably,
Speaker 1: being self centered as we are, put ourselves at the center.
Speaker 1: So there's the idea that the Earth was the center
Speaker 1: of the observable universe, which again was not even that large. Yeah, um.
Speaker 1: And a lot of this boils down to the Copernican principle, right,
Speaker 1: we're talking about the mid undreds when astronomer Nicolas Copernicus said, hey,
Speaker 1: the Earth is not the center of our solar system,
Speaker 1: which really was disturbing too many people because that was
Speaker 1: putting out the question of well, what if we're not
Speaker 1: the center of it, and God is not the center
Speaker 1: of it, then who is the center of it? Who's
Speaker 1: driving this ship? And he introduced the idea of the sun.
Speaker 1: He was a heliocentric, the idea that the Sun is
Speaker 1: the center of things and we are just revolving around it.
Speaker 1: Now again, based on his limited under understanding, an observation
Speaker 1: that made perfect sense, and that was a huge step
Speaker 1: in the right direction, because the Earth is revolving around
Speaker 1: the Sun. Yeah. And we've been building on that idea
Speaker 1: ever since and really sort of expanding out from that
Speaker 1: and trying to figure out, Okay, so if you know
Speaker 1: the Earth is not at the center of it, and
Speaker 1: you know we're revolving around the Sun, and let's move
Speaker 1: beyond that, let's move beyond our galaxy. Um. And so
Speaker 1: we're still trying to move toward that. But you had
Speaker 1: said something I thought was really interesting. You said that
Speaker 1: are really our history and our idea of this in
Speaker 1: terms of deep time is just occupying a space on
Speaker 1: the tip of a pin, right, And I wanted to
Speaker 1: mention if you guys haven't already seen this um in Cosmoses,
Speaker 1: I know exactly where you going. Yes, uh, which is
Speaker 1: hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. He gives a wonderful explanation
Speaker 1: of this idea of of really how much time we
Speaker 1: humans are occupying in deep time, and he takes the
Speaker 1: entire three thirteen point eight BILLI in the Age of
Speaker 1: the Universe, and it condenses it down into one year.
Speaker 1: This is not going to give justice to it, this explanation,
Speaker 1: So that's why I urge everybody to to check out.
Speaker 1: I think it's in the first episode. I think towards
Speaker 1: the latter part of the first episode. Yeah, this graphic
Speaker 1: of this calendar this one year. The first second of
Speaker 1: January one is the Big Bang. In the last second
Speaker 1: of December thirty one is the present day. And he
Speaker 1: walks you through this and according to this calendar, all
Speaker 1: life on Earth only appears within the final week of
Speaker 1: that year, and humans appear only in the last hour
Speaker 1: of the last day, and all of our recorded history,
Speaker 1: from the founding of every religion to the fighting of
Speaker 1: every war, takes place in the last four seconds of
Speaker 1: December thirty one. Yeah, it's crazy, like just to think
Speaker 1: that even if life on Earth exists only one million
Speaker 1: more years, say in a million years, something catastrophic happens,
Speaker 1: then life on Earth was still just this tiny little
Speaker 1: blip in in this in this grand time timescape. Now
Speaker 1: for something, well, that might make you feel sort of
Speaker 1: divorced from um, from life, but for others, you can
Speaker 1: look at this deep time and realize that this fabric
Speaker 1: of um of matter that's helped to create us has
Speaker 1: always been well, and I have not has always been there,
Speaker 1: but it's been there for a really, really really long
Speaker 1: time before and after us, and we all are intertwined
Speaker 1: by that. So again, you mentioned that that calendar year,
Speaker 1: that our entire cosmic history as a calendar year, that
Speaker 1: calendar year is representing, roughly, based on our current estimates,
Speaker 1: thirteen point eight billion years of history. That's thirteen point
Speaker 1: eight billion years from the beginning of the universe as
Speaker 1: we understanding it to the present day. Yeah, and how
Speaker 1: do we know this, How can we calculate this? Well,
Speaker 1: First of all, the universe cannot be younger than the
Speaker 1: objects contained within it. So you start to look at
Speaker 1: the objects. For instance, you look at stars and you
Speaker 1: begin to measure their mass and their brightness and figure
Speaker 1: out the lifespan of the start. So you have more
Speaker 1: massive stars burning faster than their lower mass siblings. And
Speaker 1: by the way, the more massive, the more brilliant they are,
Speaker 1: and the easier they are spot So a star ten
Speaker 1: times as massive assemble burn through its fuel supply in
Speaker 1: twenty million years, while a star with half the Sun's
Speaker 1: mass will last more than twenty billion years. And that
Speaker 1: gives us a clue, especially when you look at something
Speaker 1: like globular clusters, which have these similar characteristics, and you
Speaker 1: know that the oldest one of these globular clusters have
Speaker 1: stars with ages between eleven and eighteen billion years. All right,
Speaker 1: So that's that's one set of evidence. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like trying to figure out what times some guys robbed
Speaker 1: a bank. You asked one one witness and I think
Speaker 1: they went in around five pm. And you ask another
Speaker 1: and they say, I think they went around on five pin.
Speaker 1: And then you sort of compare the notes. Well, one uh,
Speaker 1: one witness here is saying, I think it was it
Speaker 1: has to be about an eleven and team billion years
Speaker 1: based on the the age of these globular customers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that there's one clue that kind of gets us in
Speaker 1: striking distance. Um, and we'll talk a little bit more
Speaker 1: about why people have you know, the general consensus of
Speaker 1: their team point eight billion years in a second. But
Speaker 1: we have to kind of go even further back into
Speaker 1: the path before we can do that, and we've got
Speaker 1: to talk about this fog at the beginning of time.
Speaker 1: And in order to do that, you got to talk
Speaker 1: about the Big Bang. Yes, Now, big Bang, of course
Speaker 1: is is the big theory about how the universe came
Speaker 1: to be and what the basically what the universe is
Speaker 1: really very straightforward a manner. Uh. Then the main opposition
Speaker 1: to this was historically the steady state theory, and that's
Speaker 1: the idea of the universe has always existed and therefore
Speaker 1: it's always existed in the same density and then will
Speaker 1: make more sense in a minute. But we're talking about
Speaker 1: the Big Bang here, so there is no before the
Speaker 1: Big Bang. That's important to note. There is no outside
Speaker 1: the Big Bang, the Big Bang, to to go back
Speaker 1: to the beginning of of of history, to go back
Speaker 1: to the beginning of that that calendar year that we
Speaker 1: talked about, to come to a moment when all matters
Speaker 1: of singularity, and since all matters of singularity, all times
Speaker 1: of singularity, the single point, yes, a single point of time,
Speaker 1: a single point of of matter. It's it's it's almost
Speaker 1: almost impossible to comprehend. It's such a foreign and even
Speaker 1: though it's very small, it's such an immense idea that
Speaker 1: time and space, everything is down to this, the smallest
Speaker 1: point possible. And it's just kind of like my brain
Speaker 1: almost breaks trying because I want to place my understanding
Speaker 1: of it in a in a system of time, because
Speaker 1: I exist in time and it's the only way I
Speaker 1: can understand things. And this is something that that is
Speaker 1: wrapped in time and and and it's part of its compression,
Speaker 1: and it was outside of time at one point, right
Speaker 1: And when you're talking about that pin point, you're talking
Speaker 1: about this tiny pin point of energy. Um. This description
Speaker 1: is from Nola Taylor Red writing for space dot Com,
Speaker 1: and she says, when the universe was just ten thirty
Speaker 1: four of a second, or so old that that is,
Speaker 1: by the way, a hundreds of a billions of a
Speaker 1: trillionth of a trillionth of a second, and age it
Speaker 1: experienced a huge burst of expansion known as inflation, in
Speaker 1: which space itself expanded faster than the speed of light.
Speaker 1: And during this period the universe doubled in size at
Speaker 1: least ninety times, going from okay, that that pinpoint, that
Speaker 1: sub atomic size pinpoint to a golf ball size uh
Speaker 1: ball of energy almost instantaneously. And she says that after inflation,
Speaker 1: the growth of the universe continued, but it is slower rate.
Speaker 1: And then as space expanded, the universe cooled and matter formed,
Speaker 1: and one second after the Big Bang, the universe was
Speaker 1: filled with neutrons, protons, electrons and anti electrons, photons and neutrinos.
Speaker 1: And this is really this is where it gets very interesting.
Speaker 1: She talked about how during the first three minutes of
Speaker 1: the universe, light elements were born during a process noon
Speaker 1: as Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and for three hundred eighty thousand
Speaker 1: years or so, the universe was essentially too hot for
Speaker 1: this light to shine. So you have that heat of
Speaker 1: creation smashing atoms together with enough force to break them
Speaker 1: up into this dense plasma soup of protons and neutrons
Speaker 1: and electrons, and that's scattered like fog. That's the fog
Speaker 1: of the beginning of time. That's pretty crazy. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: no real response to that. So here we are, roughly
Speaker 1: three seventy eight thousand years after the Big Bang. Like
Speaker 1: you said, everything has been this this hot mess for ages.
Speaker 1: That's a good way today. And uh, and there's and
Speaker 1: there's not much that can really happen there. It's just
Speaker 1: everything is kind of I mean, I hate to use
Speaker 1: the word chaos, but it's kind of a chaotic state.
Speaker 1: But then the universe cools to about five thousand degrees
Speaker 1: fahrenheit or kelvin. And this is a crucial because this
Speaker 1: is cool enough for electrons and protons to combine into
Speaker 1: hydrogen atoms, and it also releases photons, making up the
Speaker 1: radiation that we come to know as the cosmic microwave background. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that recombination era sets lusa's first flashes of light that
Speaker 1: were created during the Big Bank. So now they are
Speaker 1: detectable in the form of cosmic wave background radiation. Why
Speaker 1: is this important, Well, it's important for so many reasons.
Speaker 1: But one is that it helps to support the big
Speaker 1: bank theory, the fact that this is detectable right the
Speaker 1: second witness exactly Um. The other thing is that it
Speaker 1: allows us to again get a bigger um take on
Speaker 1: what was happening in the universe. That gives us a
Speaker 1: chance to reverse engineer the timeline. And it's been measured
Speaker 1: with NASA's Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe and the European Space
Speaker 1: Agencies plank spacecraft, and so they've looked at this radiation
Speaker 1: leftover from the Big Bang and they can look at
Speaker 1: the density, the composition, and the expansion rate of the
Speaker 1: verse as a result. And in two twelve W M. A. P.
Speaker 1: They said, Hm, we think that, you know, looking at
Speaker 1: the different data here, that the universe is probably about
Speaker 1: thirteen points seven seven two billion years old. Then you
Speaker 1: have the plank Um spacecraft that says we're looking at
Speaker 1: thirteen point eight two billion years and that's where you
Speaker 1: come into this idea of all, right, the consensus is
Speaker 1: thirteen point eight billion years old the universe is. And
Speaker 1: again it's on one hand, we were looking at the
Speaker 1: age of the items in the universe and here we're
Speaker 1: looking at the rate of expansion and how big it
Speaker 1: is and what the cosmic microwave background is telling us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so okay, this is all important. Why because it
Speaker 1: gives us a little bit more data to work with
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about this in a second. Because you
Speaker 1: start to look at the universe in a different way.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just this you know, static thing that's always
Speaker 1: been existing. There were dynamic changes and as a result,
Speaker 1: it kind of up ends this idea of the Goldilocks theory,
Speaker 1: this idea that you have to have the absolute perfect
Speaker 1: conditions for life to occur. Because if you look again
Speaker 1: at our solar system, you look at Earth, that's the
Speaker 1: bed that Goldilocks is going to bed down in, right,
Speaker 1: because you've got sustainable water sources that are pretty you know,
Speaker 1: solid in terms of staying regular um, particularly when you
Speaker 1: look at the distance the Sun is from the Earth. Right.
Speaker 1: But if you look at something like Mercury, which is
Speaker 1: closest super hot, that's not gonna work. But if you
Speaker 1: look at Neptune super cold, or just if you're feeling nostalgic,
Speaker 1: if you look at Pluto super cold. Um, that's what
Speaker 1: we normally have thought about. We've thought, Okay, Earth is
Speaker 1: really special because life has happened here against what seems
Speaker 1: like all odds. But when we get back from this break,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about this idea that life could
Speaker 1: be more playful than we think, and perhaps even before
Speaker 1: Earth was even formed. All right, we're back, and you
Speaker 1: know it's it's important to to stress again that that
Speaker 1: we used to live in in a time where we
Speaker 1: have this geocentric fallacy where we thought that the Earth
Speaker 1: was the center of things. But when you get into
Speaker 1: this Goldilocks scenario, you you get close to falling into
Speaker 1: another type of geocentric fallacy because you get your again
Speaker 1: stressing the idea that Earth is special, that the life
Speaker 1: on Earth is special, and by virtue of that, humans
Speaker 1: are special as the as the primary evolved intelligent speechies,
Speaker 1: and therefore I am special, right, and we are all
Speaker 1: special to a degree. But if you look into deep space,
Speaker 1: if you look into deep time, then you start to
Speaker 1: look at this thing called the habitable epic, and we're
Speaker 1: talking about is for millions of years after the Big Bang,
Speaker 1: the universe was in a kind of interim state between
Speaker 1: lumpy gas and the cool galaxy. Suddenly studied darkness that
Speaker 1: we see today when we look up at the night sky. Uh,
Speaker 1: there were no galaxies at the time, only large stars,
Speaker 1: probably embedded in dark matter. So along come someone named
Speaker 1: Abraham Lobe, and he is an astrophysicist at Harvard University,
Speaker 1: and he says, hey, we can do simulations of these
Speaker 1: early years, and what people find is that there were
Speaker 1: tens hundreds of times more massive stars than the Sun,
Speaker 1: and these giant stars floating alone could have had rocky
Speaker 1: worlds like Earth in orbit around them. And this is
Speaker 1: where the idea of a habital epoch occurred, after the
Speaker 1: Big Bang, but before life on Earth. So what does
Speaker 1: Lobe do. He puts together a couple of calculations here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the craziest one here is that, Okay, today, the
Speaker 1: temperature of that relic radiation we're talking about that that
Speaker 1: that CNB, that cosmic microwave background is just about two
Speaker 1: point seven calvin calvin. But at an age about the
Speaker 1: fifteen million years ago that we're talking about here, it
Speaker 1: would have kept the entire universe at three hundred degrees kelvin.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about heating emerging from that that cosmic
Speaker 1: microwave background. Yeah, and again, this is just a blip
Speaker 1: in the eye of time. It's fifteen million years after
Speaker 1: the Big Bang. But any existing planets at that time
Speaker 1: would have been in that habitable habitable zone, as you say,
Speaker 1: Goldilocks hair would have had numerous beds to get into
Speaker 1: because the universe was still bathed in that warm gas
Speaker 1: from the cosmic microwave background, but it had cooled down,
Speaker 1: so you would have liquid on these planets or you know,
Speaker 1: no matter where they were in relation to a star. Yes,
Speaker 1: which is huge because liquid water is the one of
Speaker 1: the building blocks of life. Exactly. One of the things
Speaker 1: we look for when we look out and sit and
Speaker 1: think is this is this exoplanet capable of theoretically supporting life. Yep,
Speaker 1: there would be energy to kick start life forms. You
Speaker 1: have your liquid water which was slashed around the surface
Speaker 1: of planets with atmosphere. Now, as Load points out, this
Speaker 1: would be a very weird time for life to evolve
Speaker 1: anywhere because many of the building blocks of life on Earth,
Speaker 1: like carbon and metals, uh, they only exist because we
Speaker 1: have these massive cellar explosions, we have the supernovast that
Speaker 1: so you know, we're all star stuff. And there was
Speaker 1: a lot of star stuff to go around. Because this
Speaker 1: is early in the universe, they haven't been many stars
Speaker 1: to die and uh and and this would have been
Speaker 1: an age where most of the elements on the periodic
Speaker 1: table didn't even exist yet, so you had fewer building
Speaker 1: blocks to build things. But it's kind of like if
Speaker 1: if you're really into Legos and then you find the
Speaker 1: building blocks, be they Legos or some other brand that
Speaker 1: like your father or an older sibling had to think,
Speaker 1: how did they build anything? They didn't have those little
Speaker 1: wheelie dus or the little rotating things, and I only
Speaker 1: had the colored blocks. It seems like you would be
Speaker 1: you would be very limited in what you could construct.
Speaker 1: Uh and and Yes, that's one of the crazy things
Speaker 1: about this is trying to imagine what would what what
Speaker 1: would life on one of these worlds have been like that,
Speaker 1: you know, would it what kind of form would it
Speaker 1: have taken? Yeah, it's kind of funny because Lope says,
Speaker 1: if you think about it right now, you look up
Speaker 1: into the night sky and you see all these galaxies
Speaker 1: and you see all those stars shining um and that's
Speaker 1: that's sort of you know, our people out there. But
Speaker 1: this would have been an isolated a lonely kind of
Speaker 1: life with as you say, just a couple of lego parts, um,
Speaker 1: would it have borne out intelligent life? Probably not um.
Speaker 1: Alexander villen Kin as a cosmologist at Touch University in Medford, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: and he says that a few million years in this
Speaker 1: habitable epic is too short of time to produce intelligent
Speaker 1: life because if you think about humans and how long
Speaker 1: it took for us and all the building blocks before
Speaker 1: us to create, um, the sort of complex intelligence that
Speaker 1: we have as four point five billion years of history
Speaker 1: on Earth and uh, that's about three point five billion
Speaker 1: years of those in which life has been wriggling around
Speaker 1: our planet. But Lobe says, Hey, when I'm talking about
Speaker 1: life taking ape here, I'm not talking about intelligent life.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about simple life forms like allergy. Yeah. Now
Speaker 1: another thing to keep in mind too, One another thing
Speaker 1: that works in the advantage of this, uh, this theoretical
Speaker 1: early life would be that that same the same isolation
Speaker 1: that they that they had would also protect them from
Speaker 1: cosmic radiation, asteroid bombardments, and other things that could conceivably
Speaker 1: snuff out life before it even you know, got going
Speaker 1: to any degree that mattered. That's true. Um, even though
Speaker 1: it have been isolated and lonely. You're right, some of
Speaker 1: those elements that might have impacted them greatly them or
Speaker 1: whatever life, what a reform that might have taken on
Speaker 1: some of those early planets wouldn't have been completely wiped
Speaker 1: out by an asteroid. Now, some of you may be
Speaker 1: wondering at this point, Okay, well what you know? That's
Speaker 1: that's interesting to think that there was this this early
Speaker 1: epic in which in which very primitive life could have
Speaker 1: evolved and then and then perished. But how does that
Speaker 1: affect the current scenario. It's like saying, oh, well, you know,
Speaker 1: once long ago this happened, but but how does that
Speaker 1: affect the present? Well? Ultimately, uh, what Loabs really pushing
Speaker 1: about this idea is that it makes us have to
Speaker 1: rethink what life could be like out there now, and
Speaker 1: it changes the equation to a certain degree about life
Speaker 1: in the universe as a whole, not just in in
Speaker 1: ancient times, in an early epoch, but even in our
Speaker 1: current epoch. That's right. That recast the idea of the
Speaker 1: universe as a living universe, not a dead universe. Um,
Speaker 1: it doesn't make Earth feel so lonely in the sense
Speaker 1: that perhaps it's the only planet that has ever experienced
Speaker 1: some sort of life form on it. Also, it brings
Speaker 1: into the question this idea of if we know this,
Speaker 1: just this fraction of information about the universe's history, what
Speaker 1: else is out there to support the idea that um
Speaker 1: somewhere and you know, buildings and billions and billions of
Speaker 1: light years away that we can't even measure. Is there
Speaker 1: another planet that could sustain life currently? Is it in
Speaker 1: the near future, has it been in the past, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's And we're gonna we're gonna resist the temptation to
Speaker 1: google go too far into the deep end on this one.
Speaker 1: But but that you really have to then think about
Speaker 1: all the various forms life can take without even getting
Speaker 1: into the the idea of intelligent life, because then you
Speaker 1: have to you have to stop and think, well, what
Speaker 1: is what is what is it we call intelligent life?
Speaker 1: Is it? This? Is it self consciousness? And so how
Speaker 1: many different types of conscious consciousness exist for for some
Speaker 1: sort of organic being. How many different versions of time
Speaker 1: perception exists from an organic being? I mean, we we
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time on this show, uh dismantling
Speaker 1: human perception. Uh, and and you and as you just
Speaker 1: mantle it and you you can imagine, just like a car,
Speaker 1: if you take all the pieces apart, and if you
Speaker 1: try to put them back together in varying ways, like
Speaker 1: think of all the different ways you could reassemble some
Speaker 1: version of intelligent life on another world. And those are
Speaker 1: just the ones we can possibly conceive of. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's a couple of ways to go at
Speaker 1: this if we really wanted to fall down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: And one is just from a chemical chemical perspect that
Speaker 1: we could say, well, you know, we're carbon biased. We
Speaker 1: think that only life forms can can start with carbon,
Speaker 1: But could there be another configuration that we're not aware of?
Speaker 1: Probably not, but that's one argument. Another is that some
Speaker 1: people will say, um, you know, there's this anthropic principle,
Speaker 1: this idea that life here exists on Earth only because
Speaker 1: it's observable to us. Therefore, life does not exist outside
Speaker 1: of the Earth because it cannot be observed or you know,
Speaker 1: there maybe or not life forms that can observe their
Speaker 1: selves or themselves rather. But that one's really sticky territory
Speaker 1: to get into as well, because again you're you're talking
Speaker 1: about ideas of consciousness and what is consciousness? And then
Speaker 1: what degree is any kind of intelligent life going to
Speaker 1: destroy itself? To what extent is any form of intelligent
Speaker 1: life going to eradicate other forms of life and its vicinity?
Speaker 1: And then we sort of fall back into that whole
Speaker 1: uh Goldilocks affair where we're again basing our understanding on
Speaker 1: what intelligent life can be based on the only model
Speaker 1: we have, and we have to depend on the only
Speaker 1: model we have. But but then we can't help that
Speaker 1: but have our expectations colored by that. No, but you
Speaker 1: know what makes me feel for it's warm and cuddling
Speaker 1: cosmic microwave background. That too, I'd like to think of
Speaker 1: it just cooking me passively kidding. Uh. The Voyager one,
Speaker 1: because it's out there, that probe that was launched in
Speaker 1: seventy seven and seven along with Voyager two. We know
Speaker 1: last year that it left our Solar System and it's
Speaker 1: in interstellar space still giving us data. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of getting weak right now. It is the
Speaker 1: the human sharpie on the bathroom of the universe, that
Speaker 1: is in which we have written humans was here. I
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, that's because it has the gold album
Speaker 1: on it right exactly, which contains about of different sort
Speaker 1: of audio ephemera of life on earth. So you have
Speaker 1: like a baby crying the sound of a kiss. You
Speaker 1: also have images on there just in case someone intercepts
Speaker 1: it about billion years from now. All right, well that note,
Speaker 1: let's call the robot over here for just one quick
Speaker 1: listener mail. All right, This one comes to us from
Speaker 1: Brandon Brandon Rights, and it says, Hi, Robert and Julie.
Speaker 1: My name is Brandon, and I'm a huge stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind fan, keep up the great work. I
Speaker 1: just listened to your brain hacking podcasts on habits. Something
Speaker 1: you said in the podcast struck me, and so I
Speaker 1: decided to write this email. You mentioned something about taking
Speaker 1: a vacation as being a good way to break bad habits.
Speaker 1: This is very true for me. I'm terrible with biting
Speaker 1: my nails, and I'm constantly trying to stop. At the
Speaker 1: end of last year, I traveled to Europe with my
Speaker 1: sister for two weeks. When I got home, I realized
Speaker 1: I had not bitten a single nail once. I was
Speaker 1: completely stunned. I had not even thought about the entire
Speaker 1: time about it. The entire time I was overseats. Simply
Speaker 1: being in a new environment and doing new things was
Speaker 1: enough to help break my old habit without much effort
Speaker 1: on my part. To day after I got home, though,
Speaker 1: I immediately noticed it was once again a struggle to
Speaker 1: not by my nails, and I had to really try
Speaker 1: hard to stop myself from doing it subconsciously. Just some
Speaker 1: interesting tidbits I experience, and I thought I would share
Speaker 1: love from South Africa. Brandon, all right, Yeah, I noticed
Speaker 1: that team when I was on vacation, that I wasn't
Speaker 1: checking my phone every two seconds, because you know, you've
Speaker 1: got that compulsion. And I finally kind of broke free
Speaker 1: of that. And the funny thing about this, my husband
Speaker 1: is always making fun of my virgin mobile phone because
Speaker 1: he has an shiny iPhone. But it worked brilliantly in
Speaker 1: via case, and I think that's because Sir Richard Branson
Speaker 1: has Neckro Island nearby, and I gotta think that the
Speaker 1: network there is pretty strong. What's it called Necro Island?
Speaker 1: Now you were getting all like Necro what Branson? There?
Speaker 1: No no Necker. I think about his necking because it's Branson.
Speaker 1: For some reason, I think of him as always necking.
Speaker 1: He's always happy looking, so he looks, you know, just
Speaker 1: tanned and like he's living the good life with a
Speaker 1: robot wireless network in the islands. All right, well there
Speaker 1: you go. UM, hey, you wanna check in with us?
Speaker 1: You want to share your thoughts about the habitable epic?
Speaker 1: How does that change your understanding of the cosmos? Your
Speaker 1: thoughts on the cosmos? UH? In regards to reality or
Speaker 1: even science fiction? What do you think extress real life
Speaker 1: might consist of? All these questions are valid, We'd love
Speaker 1: to hear from you. UH. There are number ways to
Speaker 1: get in touch with us. UH. The best is just
Speaker 1: simply to go to stuff to Bow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That is the way to get a a strong dosage
Speaker 1: of stuff to bow your Mind. That way, there's no
Speaker 1: there's no algorithms getting the way of what you see there.
Speaker 1: You know, you're not having to depend on likes and shares.
Speaker 1: That's just all of our stuff all the time. Are
Speaker 1: our podcast episodes, are videos, are blogs, as well as
Speaker 1: UH links out to various UH social media accounts that
Speaker 1: we have such as our Facebook, our Twitter or Tumbler
Speaker 1: or Google Plus, our YouTube account which is mine stuff
Speaker 1: show and Yes, if you want to get in touch
Speaker 1: with the old fashioned way, tell them how they can
Speaker 1: do it. I will in a second, but first you
Speaker 1: guys gotta check out Roberts show, his Monster Show, which
Speaker 1: is on our YouTube channel, mind Stuff Show. It's awesome,
Speaker 1: so give it a look. See In the meantime. You
Speaker 1: can send us an email at blow the Mind at
Speaker 1: Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics. Because it houstof works dot com