Speaker 1: Hey, brain Stuff Listeners. As a bonus for you today,
Speaker 1: I want to share with you a preview from my
Speaker 1: compatriot Josh Clark. You may know him from a little
Speaker 1: show called Stuff you Should Know. He's got a new
Speaker 1: podcast series out on existential risks, threats that could bring
Speaker 1: humanity to a sudden and untimely end in the near future.
Speaker 1: So here's a preview featuring a clip about our potential
Speaker 1: to spread from Earth. I'm Stuff you Should Know, as
Speaker 1: Josh Clark. I'm launching a teen part podcast series about
Speaker 1: all the ways humanity might accidentally wipe ourselves right out
Speaker 1: of existence. It covers everything from whether we're alone in
Speaker 1: the universe to the evolution of life on Earth, from
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence to what goes on inside a particle collider.
Speaker 1: It is an immensely interesting deep dive into the world
Speaker 1: of existential risks, and I hope that you enjoy listening
Speaker 1: to it as much as I have, making I want
Speaker 1: to share a preview of the series with you. This
Speaker 1: clip comes from episode four and it features economist Robin Hansen,
Speaker 1: creator of the Great Filter hypothesis, which is something we
Speaker 1: may have to contend with in the near future when
Speaker 1: we settled down, our cities developed. Agriculture can support more
Speaker 1: people than hunting and gathering, and the more people there are,
Speaker 1: the more brilliant ideas there are two, So our civilization
Speaker 1: began to advance by leaps and bounds in the last
Speaker 1: nine or ten thousand years. Ideas spread more quickly among
Speaker 1: those people who lived together in those new cities, so
Speaker 1: innovations were able to develop over the span of a
Speaker 1: handful of years rather than millennia. Almost everything we have
Speaker 1: in the world today can be traced back to our
Speaker 1: collective decision to settle down and raise crops. It was,
Speaker 1: to say the least, a sweeping change for us humans.
Speaker 1: With our next great leap spreading out into space, we
Speaker 1: are effectively doing the opposite of when we settled down
Speaker 1: into cities. Rather than contracting, we will be expanding. From
Speaker 1: that huge coming together, we will spread out. Over time,
Speaker 1: humans will begin to colonize other planets, and generations of
Speaker 1: little human babies will be borne on planets other than Earth.
Speaker 1: They will be shaped by forces and experiences that no
Speaker 1: earthbound human will have ever encountered, and they will learn
Speaker 1: to adapt to their home planet just like we did.
Speaker 1: We are quite capable of becoming all the things that
Speaker 1: it's possible to become. Life that starts from us and
Speaker 1: radiates out can not only spread to different places, that
Speaker 1: can create different styles and techniques and cultures and approaches.
Speaker 1: All of the life that you see on Earth started
Speaker 1: out from a much smaller amount of variation, but with
Speaker 1: time it could explore lots of different niches and ways
Speaker 1: of living. And that's probably what would happen to us too.
Speaker 1: If we're the only life around it, we can survive,
Speaker 1: we will radiate, We will become diverse and different and
Speaker 1: fill thousan million billion different niches of different ways of being.
Speaker 1: Over time, perhaps their physical connection to humans on Earth
Speaker 1: will become distant enough that new species of humans will form,
Speaker 1: and the universe will be home to more than one
Speaker 1: species of human again, just as it was fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: We will become the aliens we seek, and later on
Speaker 1: they might be surprised to learn that they came from
Speaker 1: something that was simple and not as very It's odd
Speaker 1: to think of, but humans are in an evolutionary bottleneck
Speaker 1: of our own. Right now. There's only one species of us,
Speaker 1: and with the exception of maybe half a dozen astronauts
Speaker 1: on the International Space Station. At any given time, we
Speaker 1: are all stranded on this island Earth. Those astronauts aboard
Speaker 1: the I s S showed just the faintous beginnings of
Speaker 1: our future. If we become a space faring species, all
Speaker 1: of humanities eggs will no longer be in just the
Speaker 1: one basket of Earth. Should some catastrophe befall those of
Speaker 1: us here on Earth, there will be other humans living
Speaker 1: elsewhere to carry on. We will begin to trickle from
Speaker 1: our bottleneck and spread throughout the universe, and when we do,
Speaker 1: we will have made it through the great filter. Colonizing
Speaker 1: beyond Earth is something we should begin working on as
Speaker 1: soon as we can, because Earth is vulnerable to a
Speaker 1: wide variety of catastrophes that are pretty hostile to life,
Speaker 1: things like exploding stars, the death of our son, even
Speaker 1: Earth's own systems going haywire. Please join me for the
Speaker 1: End of the World with Josh Clark. Listen and subscribe
Speaker 1: at Apple Podcasts or on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: or listen wherever you get your podcasts.