Speaker 1: Right now, like, at this exact, very moment, the complex
mathematical algorithms that astronomers originally designed to well to stare
into the terrifying, totally invisible abyss of a black hole,
those same algorithms are actually being used in a hospital,
probably down the street from you, to find a microscopic
tumor in a human lung.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I mean, it is one of the most
profound paradoxes of human civilization.
Speaker 1: That's totally insane. How did that even happen?
Speaker 2: Well, it happened because we were looking for aliens. We
hurl our most advanced technology into the cold, you know,
seemingly empty void of space, searching for something that is
entirely disconnected from our daily survival, right and in the
process we sort of accidentally invent the exact tools that
save our lives here on Earth.
Speaker 1: It blows my mind. But anyway, welcome to thrilling threads.
Today we are taking hold of a massively complex, intertwining
thread that connects the uh the microscopic chemistry of distant planets,
to the deepest, honestly most fragile parts of human psychology.
Speaker 2: Absolutely weirdd on some truly staggering insights from astrophysicists Sarah Seger.
Today we are.
Speaker 1: But I want to make something incredibly clear right from
the start for you listening, this edition of Thrilling Threads
is not It's not some whimsical conversation about little green
men or you know, blurry UFO sightings, right, No, tinfoil hats.
Today exactly we are talking about the impending, literal, world shattering,
philosophical earthquake that is going to strike humanity when we
finally find definitive proof of life beyond Earth.
Speaker 2: Because the hunt is no longer just theoretical, is it.
Speaker 1: No, not at all. The math, the chemistry, the sheer
scale of our observations right now, they're closing in on
a reality that will force us to completely dismantle everything
we believe about our place in the universe.
Speaker 2: And that really is the crux of Seger's work and
honestly the core of our discussion today. Yeah, the scientific
community is currently standing on the precipice of a paradigm
shift so severe that it well, it basically threatens the
very foundation of human exceptionalism.
Speaker 1: Wow, human exceptionalism, right.
Speaker 2: Because we're so accustomed to viewing the cosmos as this
magnificent but passive backdrop to the drama of human history,
like it's just.
Speaker 1: A painted sky for our specific play exactly.
Speaker 2: We think we're the main event, but the data we
are receiving from our telescopes and probes right now, it's
painting a very, very different picture.
Speaker 1: It's a picture of a crowded stage.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a crowded stage where humanity might honestly merely be
a background extra.
Speaker 1: Okay, So to really grasp the magnitude of this shock
wave that's heading for you, the listener, we have to
start by looking at the actual physical mechanics of the
search that's happening right now, like in our own cosmic backyard.
Speaker 2: Which is fascinating because we aren't just scanning the sky
for radio signals anywhere.
Speaker 1: Right the old SETI approach. We're actually looking for something
called a second genesis. And I want to pause here
because well, this term gets thrown around a lot in
popular science. Right here, coctuli, but we need to understand
the actual biological and chemical mechanics of what that means.
Why is a second genesis the Holy Grail?
Speaker 2: Well, to understand the second Genesis, we first have to
understand the sheer stubbornness of the first genesis.
Speaker 1: So one that created us.
Speaker 2: Exactly, every single living thing on Earth, from the bacteria
in your gut to the blue whale in the ocean
to the oak tree in your front yard, right, they
all share the exact same underlying biological architecture. We all use.
Speaker 1: DNA and RNA, we all use the same basic set
of amino acids to build proteins. We do, so it's
like we're all running on the exact same operating system precisely.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it. And in chemistry,
there is this fascinating concept called chirality.
Speaker 1: Chirality, Okay, what is that?
Speaker 2: It basically means handedness. Molecules can be structured in a
way that they are exact mirror images of each other,
kind of like your left and right hand. Okay, so
they have all the same components, but you can't perfectly
superimpose them on top of one.
Speaker 1: Another, like trying to put a left glove on a
right hand.
Speaker 2: Exactly now here on Earth, almost all biological amino acids
are left handed, and all biological sugars are right handed.
Speaker 1: Kay, really, is there a reason for that?
Speaker 2: Well? No, there's no fundamental law of physics that says
it has to be this way. It's just the random
chemical choice that our specific tree of life made, you know,
billions of years ago.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let me make sure I'm getting this. If
we send a rover up to Mars, right, Yeah, and
it scoops up a microbe in the dirt, and we
analyze that microbe and we find that it uses DNA
and it uses left handed amino acids, what does that
actually tell us?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, it would be an incredible discovery obviously,
but scientifically it would be highly ambiguous.
Speaker 1: Ambiguous. Finding life on Mars would be.
Speaker 2: Ambiguous scientifically speaking, yes, because planets actually exchange material.
Speaker 1: Oh, like meteorites.
Speaker 2: Right. Meteorites blast off the surface of Earth when we
get hit by massive asteroids, and some of those rocks
eventually land on Mars.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 2: So if we find a microbe on Mars with our
exact chemical signature, our left handed amino acids and DNA,
the most logical conservative explanation is that it's simply a hitchhiker.
Speaker 1: It's just Earth life that took a really rough trip
through the Solar System a few billion years ago.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It doesn't actually prove the universe's teeming with life.
It just proves that life can survive a very very
rough commute.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is where the operating system analogy really
clicks for me. What's your Finding a microbe on Mars
with our DNA is like, it's like finding an alien
computer buried in the sand, but when you boot it
up it runs Windows ninety five. Right, it just means
someone from Earth probably left it.
Speaker 2: There, exactly. But a second genesis is entirely different.
Speaker 1: Because it wouldn't be a Windows ninety five right.
Speaker 2: Finding a microbe that operates on a completely alien chemical structure,
say it uses right handed amino acids, or maybe it
uses a liquid solvent other.
Speaker 1: Than water, like what liquid methane?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, like liquid methane. If you find that, that
is the moment everything changes.
Speaker 1: Because there's no way it came from Earth exactly.
Speaker 2: That is the second genesis. If you find a completely
different chemical operating system, you have definitive proof that life
emerged independently a second time, entirely from scratch. It means
life wasn't just this miraculous one off fluke that required
the exact perfect impossible conditions of early Earth.
Speaker 1: It proves that biology is just a standard fundamental property
of the universe.
Speaker 2: Yes, just like gravity or thermodynamics. If you have the
right raw materials and a little bit of energy, the
universe naturally organizes itself into living things.
Speaker 1: Man. It's like, Okay, imagine you flick on the lights
in your kitchen at night, okay, and you see one
type of bug screwing by the fridge. You might think, oh,
bug got in. But if you look up and see
a completely different, genetically distinct type of bug crawling on
the ceiling.
Speaker 2: Right, you don't just have a couple of wandering.
Speaker 1: Insects exactly, you have a totally infested house.
Speaker 2: That's a disturbing but very accurate And the house we
are currently inspecting, our own solar system, is presenting us
with environments that are deeply, deeply provocative.
Speaker 1: Because we aren't just looking at the dry, dusty surface
of Mars anymore, are we.
Speaker 2: No, we're not. Though we have found complex organic molecules there,
and we strongly suspect there are liquid water reservoirs deep underground,
you know, protected from the radiation, right.
Speaker 1: But the search has expanded way beyond that to places
that frankly challenge our very definition.
Speaker 2: Of habitability, which brings us to Venus.
Speaker 1: Okay, Venus. Venus is by all human metrics. Venus is
an absolute healthscape. The surface pressure is like ninety times
that of Earth. It would crush a nuclear submarine like
a tin can easily. The temperature is high enough to
melt lead. It literally rains sulfuric acid. And yet scientists
are looking at Venus as a prime candidate for life.
How does that make any sense at all?
Speaker 2: Well, it makes sense when you stop looking at the
surface and you start looking at the atmosphere. Roughly fifty
kilometers above the surface of Venus, there's a sweet spot.
The pressure drops to match Earth's sea level pressure, and
the temperature cools down to a completely comfortable range like
Rouen temperature. Yeah, basically, and in that specific cloud layer
you have liquid droplets.
Speaker 1: Okay, but wait, aren't those droplets made of sulfuric acid?
Speaker 2: They are. They are droplets of sulfuric acid mixed with
a little water, which is incredibly hostile to life as
we know it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that sounds terrible.
Speaker 2: But remember the second genesis. Alien life doesn't need to
play by Earth's rules, and we have recently detected traces
of gases in those clouds, specifically phosphine phosphene right, and
on Earth, phosphine is strictly associated with biological processes.
Speaker 1: Wait, hold on, break that down for me. Why is
one specific gas a red flag for biology?
Speaker 2: Well, phosphine is a molecule made of one phosphorus atom
and three hydrogen atomska, and it is incredibly difficul to
make naturally on a rocky planet. Fast firuts and hydrogen
just don't really want to bond together unless they are
forced to under immense energy, like you know, in the
crushing depths of a gas giant like Jupiter.
Speaker 1: Oh so it shouldn't just be floating around on a
rocky planet like Venus.
Speaker 2: Exactly, unless it's forced by biological organisms that use energy
to create that chemical reaction.
Speaker 1: Okay, so where do we find it? On Earth?
Speaker 2: We manufacture it industrially, but it's also produced naturally by
anaerobic microbes bacteria that don't need oxygen like where, like
those found in swamps, or weirdly enough, the guts of penguins. Okay, yeah,
so finding phosphene on a rocky planet like Venus, where
it should rapidly break down in that acidic atmosphere. It
suggests something might be continuously producing it. Wow, it's not
definitive proof of life, but it is a massive, glowing
anomaly that absolutely demands an explanation.
Speaker 1: I got to say, it is almost scarier to me
if we find life floating in the toxic, acidic clouds
of v Venus then if we find ancient buried ruins
on Mars.
Speaker 2: Really, why is that?
Speaker 1: Because Mars is at least somewhat familiar. It's a rock
with some ice. It's like a really bad desert. But
if life can find a mechanism to emerge and actually
survive in the hyperacidic atmospheric layers of Venus, yeah, what
does that say about the sheer, terrifying resilience of biology.
Speaker 2: It says that life is not some fragile, delicate little
flower that needs a perfect garden to bloom exactly. It
suggests life is an aggressive, opportunistic infection of the cosmos.
Speaker 1: I love that phrase, an opportunistic infection.
Speaker 2: And we see the same aggressive potential when we look
away from the Sun out toward the gas giants.
Speaker 1: Right Jupiter and Saturn.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're surrounded by these icy moons Europa and selad
as Titan. For a really long time, we just assumed
these moons were dead frozen rocks because they're.
Speaker 1: So incredibly far from the warmth of the Sun. They're
way outside the traditional habitable zone where liquid water can
exist on a surface.
Speaker 2: Exactly. We completely failed to account for gravity.
Speaker 1: Gravity generates heat.
Speaker 2: It does in this context, these moons are locked in
a massive gravitational tug of war with their host planets
and the other surrounding boons. Okay, this constant pulling and
squeezing literally stretches the moons. It generates immense internal friction,
a process we call tidal heating.
Speaker 1: So it's like bending a paper clip back and forth
until it gets hot.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy. The friction melts the ice from
the inside out. We now know, beyond a shadow of
a doubt, that beneath the miles of frozen crust on
moons like Enceladus, there are vast global liquid water oceans.
Speaker 1: And we are just guessing about this right Like, we've
literally flown spacecraft through the water.
Speaker 2: We absolutely have. The Cassini spacecraft flew right through these
massive plumes of water vapor that Enceladus was shooting out
into space through cracks in its.
Speaker 1: Ice, just geysers of ocean water blasting into space.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Cassini actually analyzed that water. It essentially tasted it.
Speaker 1: And what did it find.
Speaker 2: It found salt, It found complex organic molecules, and crucially,
it found silica nanoparticles.
Speaker 1: Why is silica important because it.
Speaker 2: Strongly indicates the presence of hydrothermal vents at the bottom
of that dark alien.
Speaker 1: Ocean, hydrothermal vents, which is exactly where many biologists believe
life may have originated right here on Earth.
Speaker 2: Exactly deep in the pitch black ocean, completely independent of sunlight,
just feeding off the chemical energy of the planet itself.
Speaker 1: So if we put all these pieces together, the complex
organics on Mars, the atmospheric anomalies on Venus, the chemical
rich subsurface oceans of the outer moons.
Speaker 2: The scientific momentum is pointing in one overwhelming direction.
Speaker 1: The universe possesses all the ingredients, the energy, and the
diverse environments required for biology.
Speaker 2: Right and if a second genesis has occurred, the math
just scales up exponentially.
Speaker 1: Because there are billions of stars in our galaxy, each
with their own planet exactly.
Speaker 2: The conclusion is unavoidable. Somewhere out there, intelligent life like exists,
and humanity is hurtling toward a moment where we will
have to psychologically process that reality.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the psychological earthquake.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is where it gets really messy.
Speaker 1: For you, the listener. Consider how this fundamentally shifts your
personal cosmology. The universe goes from being a cold, dead,
sterile museum where Earth is the only exhibit, to a vibrant, chaotic,
deeply crowded jungle. You aren't standing alone in an empty room.
You are standing in a forest, and you realize the
trees are full of eyes.
Speaker 2: That is a haunting image.
Speaker 1: But as a real world story, it perfectly illustrates. Human
beings really really hate the idea that we aren't the
center of the universe.
Speaker 2: We despise it. Our entire cognitive framework is basically structured
around human exceptionalism. And this brings us to a deeply
revealing anecdote shared by Sarah Seeger a number of years ago.
She traveled to thunder Bay, Ontario.
Speaker 1: Okay, thunder Bay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she went there to serve as the keynote speaker
for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.
Speaker 1: Oh so a pretty prestigious event.
Speaker 2: Very it draws people who were deeply invested in the
science of the cosmos.
Speaker 1: But the real revelation didn't happen on the stage, did it.
Speaker 2: No, it didn't. It happened in a living room. While
she was in thunder Bay, Seger was billeted by a
woman she affectionately described as oh spunky widow.
Speaker 1: A spunky widow, I love that, right, And.
Speaker 2: This widow is a devout Catholic, heavily involved in her
local community, and she was very eager for Seger to
meet her circle of friends. Okay, now, prior to Seger arriving,
the widow had been trying to share some basic astronomy
with her friends. She was trying to explain the simple,
scientifically verified fact that there are other planets out there
in the universe orbiting other stars, exo planets, exactly exoplanets.
Speaker 1: I want to be really clear about this for the listener, though.
We aren't talking about the widow telling her friends about
little Green men or UFOs or alien civilizations right now.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. She was simply telling them that
other rocks.
Speaker 1: Exist just of gas and rock orbiting distant suns, a
completely uncontroversial, basic astronomical fact.
Speaker 2: And yet her friends flat out refuse to believe it.
Speaker 1: They just deny it.
Speaker 2: They actively deny the existence of other planets. They told
the widow it simply wasn't true. Wow. And when Seger
analyzes why they had this reaction, she hits on something profound.
The very concept of other planets presented a quote harsh
reality for their own system of thinking.
Speaker 1: I need to pause you there, because the psychology of
this is just fascinating. Why is a sterile rock floating
a thousand light years away a threat to a person
sitting in a living room in Ontario. It screams of
ultimate main character syndrome.
Speaker 2: It is the absolute ultimate manifestation of it. Because for centuries,
our theological, philosophical, and legal frameworks have been built on
a concept historically known as the Great chain of being.
Speaker 1: The Great chain of being.
Speaker 2: Yes, or at the very least, a deeply ingrained anthropocentrism,
the idea that Earth is the sole stage for the
grand cosmic drama.
Speaker 1: God or the universe created this specific place just for us.
Speaker 2: Exactly if you introduce the reality of billions of other planets,
you immediately dilute the uniqueness of the human narrative.
Speaker 1: It's like, Okay, imagine you're sitting in a dark theater
watching a movie that you've always been told as a
documentary about your life. Yukah, You're the star, but suddenly
the camera pans away and you realize you are just
an out of focus extra standing in the background of
a massive, sprawling epic that has absolutely nothing to do
with you.
Speaker 2: Ye.
Speaker 1: The cognitive dissonance of that is physically painful because if
there are other planets, well, what if there is other life?
Speaker 2: Right? The question's just cascade.
Speaker 1: What does that mean for human salvation? Are we the
only ones created in the divine image? Or is the
divine image something completely alien?
Speaker 2: It creates an immediate theological and philosophical crisis. So what happens.
The defense mechanism kicks in. Deny the rocks, exactly, deny
the rocks. If the exo planet don't exist, the crisis
goes away.
Speaker 1: That is wild. So Seger is an elite astrophysicist. She
literally studies the atmospheric compositions of these exact planets for
a living right, And she's sitting in a living room
with people who are actively aggressively denying that her entire
field of study even exists because it makes them uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: Quite the dinner party.
Speaker 1: How do you even handle that? Do you just start
drawing orbital mechanics on a napkin? Do you pull up
the Kepler telescope data and say, look at the light
transit dips you're wrong?
Speaker 2: Well, see, that is exactly what a lot of scientists
would do, and it is exactly why a lot of
science communication totally fail.
Speaker 1: Oh, because it puts people on the defensive.
Speaker 2: Exactly, if someone's worldview is threatened, attacking them with raw
data only makes them build their defensive walls higher.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: This is where Seger demonstrated profound empathy and pedagogical brilliance.
She didn't mock them, she didn't bury them in spectral
analysis grafts.
Speaker 1: So what did she do?
Speaker 2: The widow simply asked Seager to that her to explain
to her friends that astronomy is a legitimate field and
that she wasn't just making this up.
Speaker 1: So Seger met them exactly where they were.
Speaker 2: She did. She sat with them and gently legitimized the science.
She walked them through how we know what we know
without being condescending about it. Okay, she explained the methods,
and crucially, she also clearly stated the boundaries of our
current knowledge, meaning what she told them, Yes, we have
undeniable evidence of planets, but we do not have evidence
of earthlike planets or life yet.
Speaker 1: Ah. So she gave them the truth, but she didn't
force them to confront the ultimate existential dread all at.
Speaker 2: Once, exactly, and the result of that empathy was extraordinary.
What happened, well, The source material was that this intervention
had a massive impact. They ended up staying awake late
into the night, just talking. The friends later referred to
this deep, late night conversation as the awakening.
Speaker 1: The awakening. Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they accepted the reality of the planets, and they
began the incredibly difficult, uncomfortable work of regrouping their own
theological thinking to accommodate this larger universe.
Speaker 1: The awakening is a beautiful term for it. It implies
moving from a state of comfortable sleep into a startling
but you know, ultimately more authentic reality.
Speaker 2: It really does, but it also.
Speaker 1: Raises a terrifying question for anyone listening. Think about this.
A group of well adjusted adults experienced a miniature existential
crisis and had to completely restructure their worldview just over
the existence.
Speaker 2: Of empty rock empty sterile rocks.
Speaker 1: Yes, what is going to happen when we find the
real deal?
Speaker 2: That's the billion dollar question.
Speaker 1: If society panics over barren planets, the discovery of actual,
definitive biological life, let alone intelligent life, is going to
be a psychological earthquake that fractures our global institutions.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate test of human adaptability. If we
extrapolate that living room in Thunder Bay to the global stage,
we are looking at a scenario where major world religions,
governmental bodies, and philosophical schools will face an immediate crisis
of relevance. Oh absolutely, How do you preach human supremacy
in a universe where we might be the cosmic equivalent
of an ant hill next to a super highway?
Speaker 1: Right? And how do geopolitical conflicts over tiny strips of
land on Earth feel When we realize we are surrounded
by a biological.
Speaker 2: Galaxy, It shrinks everything down.
Speaker 1: I can just imagine the theological gymnastics. It won't just
be a press conference at NASA. It's going to be
a crisis of meaning for billions of people.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But you know, when we talk about this impending shockwave,
I think we are heavily influenced by movies.
Speaker 2: Oh, definitely, Hollywood has ruined our expectations.
Speaker 1: We have this image ingrained in our heads of how
first contact or the discovery of life is going to
go down. Like the President interrupts the Super Bowl, looks
into the camera and says, my fellow Americans, we are
not alone.
Speaker 2: Right, Cue the dramatic music.
Speaker 1: People panic in the streets. UFO cults emerge overnight, and
by Tuesday, human history is fundamentally severed into a before
and after.
Speaker 2: It is a super compelling narrative, but historically speaking, it
is completely inaccurate.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 2: Yeah. To understand how humanity will likely process the discovery
of alien life, we have to look backward at how
we have processed massive paradigm shifts in the past. Okay,
Segar draws a brilliant, highly instructive parallel to Nicholas Copernicus.
Speaker 1: The Copernican Revolution, the moment we realize the Earth wasn't
the center of the universe.
Speaker 2: Exactly prior to Copernicus, the dominant universally accepted model of
the cosmos was the Ptolemaic system. It was geocentric, erst
in the middle right, Earth sat entirely motionless at the
dead center of creation, and the Moon, the Sun, the planets,
and all the stars revolved around us in these perfect
crystalline spheres.
Speaker 1: It was the ultimate validation of that great chain of
being we just talked about. The physics perfectly matched the theology.
God put us in the center. So obviously everything revolves
around us.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just a religion belief either. It was
the established science of the day, backed by the immense
political and cultural power of the Catholic Church. So to
challenge it, to challenge it wasn't just to challenge a
math equation. It was to challenge the authority of the
Church and the divine order of humanity itself.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So when Copernicus formulated his heliocentric model, the radical mathematical
proof that the Earth is actually a planet hurtling through
space orbiting the.
Speaker 1: Sun, he knew exactly how dangerous that idea was.
Speaker 2: Oh, he was terrified. He was so terrified of the
backlash that he basically refused to polish his masterpiece to
Revolutionibus until he was literally on his deathbed in fifteen
forty three.
Speaker 1: He knew it was heresy. He knew it would shatter
the worldview of the spunky widows of the sixteenth century.
Speaker 2: He absolutely did. But here's the critical point Seeker makes
about this monumental shift in human understanding. What's that There
was no cinematic overnight revolution. Copernicus published the book, and
the world did not instantly change. There was no single
Tuesday where the peasants of Europe woke up, slapped their
foreheads and said, oh wow, the Earth goes around the sun.
How exciting. Our entire worldview is different now.
Speaker 1: So the Hollywood narrative is just a lie completely. We
love the Eureka moment in human culture, don't we. We
love the idea of the lone genius holding up a
piece of paper and suddenly the crowd gasps, the music swells,
and a new era of enlightenment begins.
Speaker 2: It's a great story, but the reality is agonizingly slow. Yeah,
it is a generational grind. When Copernicus published his work,
the reaction wasn't immediate acceptance. It was fierce entrenched resistance.
Speaker 1: EBA fought back hard.
Speaker 2: It took decades for the math to even be taken
seriously by other astronomers, and when it did start gaining traction,
the institutions doubled down. Decades later, Galileo built a telescope,
looked at Jupiter, saw moons orbiting it instead of Earth,
and championed the Copernican model.
Speaker 1: And what happened to him?
Speaker 2: He was arrested, right, Yeah, He was tried by the
Inquisition in sixteen thirty three, found vehemently suspect of heresy,
forced to publicly recant his findings, and spent the rest
of his life under house arrest.
Speaker 1: The institutions doubled down on their defense mechanisms. They literally
put the truth under house arrest.
Speaker 2: Exactly integrating a new reality that dismantles old power structures
requires immense societal friction. It took hundreds of years and
a mountain of definitive, unavoidable proof before the heliocentric model
fully permeated.
Speaker 1: The culture, and Seeger is arguing that finding definitive signs
of extraterrestrial life is going to follow the exact same
blueprint it really is. It is not going to be
a sudden flashpoint. It is going to be a slow, messy,
centuries long integration into our culture.
Speaker 2: We have to analyze the psychological resistance to new paradigms.
The physicist Max Planck famously coined what is now known
as Plank's principle.
Speaker 1: Oh I've heard of this, yeah.
Speaker 2: He essentially said that a new scientific truth does not
triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,
but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new
generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Speaker 1: Science advances one funeral at a time that is incredibly dark,
but it makes perfect sense. Generational die off is the
engine of paradigm shifts.
Speaker 2: Exactly when we find the chemical signature of life on
an exoplanet, there will be immediate modern heresy.
Speaker 1: Oh, there will be intense denial.
Speaker 2: You will see counter studies funded by organizations that refuse
to accept the findings. Pundits will argue on television that
the data is flawed, that the atmospheric models are wrong,
that the scientists are biased.
Speaker 1: So how does the definitive proof actually permeate our modern culture?
Speaker 2: Slowly, the older generation that refuses to let go of
Earth's unique biological supremacy will eventually pass away, and the
new generation will simply be taught the existence of alien
microbes as a basic, somewhat boring fact in their fifth
grade science textbooks.
Speaker 1: I want to frame this for you, the listener, because
you might actually live through the beginning of this slow
motion revolution. What about how you experience major historical shifts today?
Speaker 2: Good point.
Speaker 1: We are living through the adoption of artificial intelligence or
the undeniable realities of climate change. The data is there,
the reality is practically undeniable to anyone looking at the numbers.
But the cultural absorption is incredibly messy. It's heavily politicized,
it's full of bad faith arguments, and it takes decades
to fully adapt our behavior and laws.
Speaker 2: The discovery of extraterrestrial life will not feel like a
sci fi thriller. It will feel like a drawn out,
highly technical, incredibly bureaucratic debate.
Speaker 1: Imagine your actual day. You are sitting on the train
on a Tuesday morning, commuting to a job you don't
really love. You're drinking a lukewarm coffee, scrolling on your phone,
and suddenly you see a push notification from NASA. Definitive
bisignatures confirmed in the atmosphere of exoplanet K two eighteen
B statistical certainty of biological activity ninety nine point nine percent.
Speaker 2: The biggest news in history.
Speaker 1: It is, without hyperbole, the most significant discovery in the
history of human civilization. It answers the oldest philosophical question
we have ever asked.
Speaker 2: As a species, And what do you do?
Speaker 1: You read the headline, You stare at it for a minute,
and then your train arrives at your stop. You put
your phone in your pocket.
Speaker 2: Still have to go to work.
Speaker 1: You still have to go to work. You still have
to take your read By the first of the month,
you still have to sit in a meaningless marketing meeting
at ten am. The profound, crushing anti climax of monumental
scientific discovery.
Speaker 2: It is a striking juxtaposition that really highlights the duality
of the human condition. The universe expands infinitely in our minds,
our place in the cosmos is fundamentally rewritten, yet our
daily earthly obligations remain entirely rigid and unchanged. The grand
revelation simply becomes background noise to the mundane reality of
human survival. As Secer notes, it will just become another
part of our culture, digested over hundreds.
Speaker 1: Of years, which brings up a really cynical, entirely fair question.
Speaker 2: Okay, laying on me.
Speaker 1: If it takes three hundred years for society to accept
the truth without throwing scientists into metaphorical house arrest, and
if the search itself causes existential dread, cultural friction, and
theological crises, why are we doing this?
Speaker 2: That's the big question.
Speaker 1: Why do we spend billions of dollars and dedicate the
greatest minds of our generation to looking up at all?
Speaker 2: That is the eternal pragmatic question faced by every skeptic
of space exploration. When there is rampant poverty, systemic disease,
decaying infrastructure, and endless conflict on.
Speaker 1: Earth, how can we justify spending ten billion dollars on
the James Web space telescope?
Speaker 2: Exactly? Well, the search for life in the stars lead
to any practical, immediate discoveries that help us here.
Speaker 1: And what is Seeger's answer, Her.
Speaker 2: Brutally honest answer to that is it's all really to
be determined.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but if I go to an investment board
and say give me ten billion dollars and the return
on investment is to be determined. I'm getting life out
of the room. Oh absolutely, that sounds like the worst
pitch in history.
Speaker 2: It does sound deeply counterintuitive to our modern, hyper capitalist,
results driven mindset. We demand immediate quarterly returns on our investments.
But this is where we must passionately defend the necessity
of the random walk through science. We have to understand
the fundamental philosophical difference between applied science and pure science.
Speaker 1: Let's break that down. Applied science is goal oriented, right, yes.
Speaker 2: Applied science is looking at a specific known problem, like
trying to synthesize a specific enzyme to cure a specific
type of leukemia, okay, or trying to engineer a stronger
steel alloy to build a taller bridge, and working directly,
methodically toward that goal. You know what you want to achieve,
and you fund the specific path to get there.
Speaker 1: Makes sense and pure science.
Speaker 2: Pure science, however, is entirely different. Pure science is simply
pointing at something unknown and asking, what is that over there?
How does that work? Just curre It is human curiosity,
completely untethered from a specific profitable outcome.
Speaker 1: But history proves that pure science, this random walk of
just poking at the universe to see what happens actually
leads to incredibly great, completely unrelated world changing place oh constantly.
The source material gives us some mind blowing examples of this,
and I want to dig into the mechanics of these
because the connections are almost unbelievable. Let's start with medicine.
Speaker 2: Let's look at modern medical imaging. When you are a
loved one go to the hospital for an MRI a
magnetic resonance imaging scan to detect a torn ligament or
a tumor, you are relying on technology that was profoundly
shaped by the random walk of astronomy.
Speaker 1: Wait, how does looking at stars translate to looking at
a human kidney?
Speaker 2: It comes down to the mathematics of signal processing. Decades ago,
radio astronomers had a massive problem.
Speaker 1: Is it.
Speaker 2: They were building giant radio dish arrays to listen to
the incredibly faint radio waves emitted by dist galaxies, quasars,
and pulsars. Okay, but the universe is noisy, our atmosphere
is noisy, our electronics are noisy.
Speaker 1: So they're just getting static.
Speaker 2: A ton of static. The astronomers were taking in massive
amounts of visible data, and they needed a mathematical way
to filter out the useless background noise to isolate the tiny,
pure signal of the star they actually wanted to.
Speaker 1: Study and then convert that invisible data into a readable,
comprehensible image.
Speaker 2: Exactly. They needed to find a needle of data in
a massive haystack of cosmic static so they heavily utilized
and refined complex mathematical algorithms, specifically Fouryer transforms to reconstruct
images from limited noisy data sets.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's the astronomy side. How does that get
to the hospital?
Speaker 2: Fast forward to the medical field. Doctors wanted to use
magnetic fields and radio ways to see inside the human
body without cutting it open, right the MRI. But the
human body is mostly water and it's incredibly noisy on
a molecular level. The signals bouncing back from the hydrogen
atoms in your body are chaotic.
Speaker 1: It's it's the exact same problem, exactly.
Speaker 2: How do you filter out the noise of the surrounding
tissue to isolate the specific, tiny signal of a tumor.
Speaker 1: Use the exact same math the astronomers use to filter
out the cosmic noise to see the galaxy.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the algorithms designed to see a swirling galaxy millions
of light years away are practically identical to the algorithms
used to reconstruct a three D image of a tumor
inside a human lung.
Speaker 1: That is wild.
Speaker 2: The astronomers weren't trying to cure cancer. They were just
curious about radio waves in space, but their random walk
provided the specific mathematical key that unlocked modern radiology.
Speaker 1: That is an absolute miracle of unintended consequences.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: And Seeger points out another example that is perhaps the
most universally applicable to every single person listening right now,
GPS Global Positioning Systems.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I use GPS every single day. I use it to
navigate traffic. I use it to find a coffee shop
that is literally three blocks away. We all do our
entire modern logistics grid, planes, ships, uber it all relies
on GPS.
Speaker 2: But as Seeger rightly points out, do you think someone
in the nineteen fifties sat down in a boardroom and planned, Hey,
we need to invent a global network of satellites communicating
with pocket sized supercomputers so that people can instantly find
the fastest route to the grocery store.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not.
Speaker 2: No, GPS was born from pure science, from people simply
fooling around with rocketry and physics.
Speaker 1: They just wanted to see if they could launch a
piece of metal fast enough to not fall back down.
Speaker 2: It's exactly It started with Sputnik. When the Soviets launched Sputnik,
American scientists realized they could track it by listening to
the Doppler shift of its radio signals. Okay, if you
know your exact location on Earth, you can track the satellite.
Then the pure scientists flipped the equation, if.
Speaker 1: We know the exact location of the satellite, we can
track our location on Earth.
Speaker 2: Yes, But the physics of making that actually work is
insane because it involves Einstein.
Speaker 1: It deeply involves Einstein's theories of relativity.
Speaker 2: Wait, really, how to.
Speaker 1: Make GPS work. You need incredibly precise atomic clocks on
the satellites. But because the satellites are moving so fast
relative to the people on Earth, that's special relativity. Their
clocks actually tick slightly slower.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: Furthermore, because the satellites are further away from the mass
of the Earth, they experience less gravity. That's general relativity,
which makes their clocks tick slightly faster.
Speaker 2: So time is literally moving at a different speed for
the satellite than it is for your phone in your car.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's wild. And if the pure scientists, the theoretical
physicists who are just thinking about the weird nature of
space and time decades earlier, hadn't formulated those equations, the
GPS system would fail completely.
Speaker 2: The errors would just build up.
Speaker 1: The navigation error would accumulate by miles every single day.
GPS works because physicists were curious about the fabric of
space time, not because they wanted to improve tra flow.
Speaker 2: This perfectly illustrates what I call the Tinkerer's garage analogy.
Speaker 1: Oh I like that. Let's hear it.
Speaker 2: Imagine you have a garage and you only ever buy
the exact tool to fix the exact plumbing or electrical
problem you have today. Okay, you buy a wrench to
fix the sink, you buy a screwdriver to fix the outlet.
You will be a very competent homeowner. But you will
only ever fix what is already broken. Right, You will
never ever invent anything new. To invent the future, you
have to buy weird parts. You have to buy random
circuit boards, strange metals, and bizarre chemicals just to see
what they do when you combine them.
Speaker 1: You have to tinker without a purpose.
Speaker 2: That is the essence of pure science. Giant revolutionary leaps
forward for humanity are few and far between, and the
crucial takeaway is that they cannot be arrived at purposely.
Speaker 1: You can't just schedule a breakthrough exactly.
Speaker 2: You cannot mandate a paradigm shift by setting a corporate goal.
You have to stumble into it in the dark, through
this random walk oft discovery.
Speaker 1: So let me push you on this because it leads
to a fascinating conclusion. Sure, is the search for aliens
actually just a magnificent trojan horse?
Speaker 2: A trojan horse? How so do.
Speaker 1: We tell the public and the politicians, Hey, we are
looking for aliens. Give us funding because it's a grand
romantic quest. But secretly the scientific community knows that the
real value is simply funding the random walk. Is looking
for exoplanets just an excuse to force ourselves to invent
the technologies that will eventually cure our earthly diseases.
Speaker 2: Well, I wouldn't call it a deception, but rather a
profound necessary synergy. Human beings are storytelling creatures. We are
motivated by grand narratives. The quest to answer are we alone?
Is the ultimate narrative. It provides the inspirational fuel, the
political will, and the massive financial resources necessary to push
the absolute boundaries of physics, chemistry, engineering, and material science.
Speaker 1: Like the engineers who spent decades building the intricate, hexagonal
goldmere of the James Webb Space Telescope weren't trying to
invent new medical lasers or better eye surgery techniques.
Speaker 2: No, they were just trying to see the infrared dawn
of the universe.
Speaker 1: But the extreme, unprecedented precision required to polish those space
mirrors forces technological breakthroughs in optics and manufacturing that eventually
inevitably trickle down into everyday commercial and medical technology.
Speaker 2: So we hurl billions of dollars of metal at the
stars to satisfy our deepest philosophical and theological curiosity. Yeah,
and as a byproduct of that existential yearning, we get
the ability to find tumors faster or navigate our cars
without getting lost.
Speaker 1: Exactly every time you, the listener, pull up a map
on your phone, you are utilizing the direct, tangible byproduct
of humanity's urge to look up into the dark and
ask if anyone else is out there?
Speaker 2: It is a beautiful irony. The greatest, most vital discoveries
aren't always the ones we set out to find. Sometimes
the act of looking outward into the deepest voids of
space is exactly what gives us the tools we need
to fix the seemingly insurmountable problems right here at home.
Speaker 1: Sometimes looking for aliens is just the roundabout way we
find our way home. I love that.
Speaker 2: It's very poetic but also practically true.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's take a breath, step back and look at
the massive tapestry we've woven today on this edition of
Thrilling Threads.
Speaker 2: It's been a journey.
Speaker 1: We started by staring down the raw chemical reality of
a second genesis, the mathematical likelihood that biological life is
not a miracle but a fundamental property of the universe.
Hiding in the acidic clouds of Venus or the dark
hydrothermal vents of Enceladus, we did. We witness the intense,
almost tragic fragility of our own human ego through a
late night conversation in a living room in thunder Bay,
realizing how easily our deeply held belief systems are threatened
by the mere existence of rocks and space.
Speaker 2: Spunky widow.
Speaker 1: Yes, we learned through the historical echo of Compernicus and
Galileo that digesting the ultimate truth of our demotion from
the center of the universe won't be a sudden cinematic flash,
but a slow, messy, multi generational cultural grind, a bureaucratic slog.
And finally we realize that wandering aimlessly through the cosmos,
the pure, untethered curiosity of science is exactly how we
accidentally invent the technology that saves our lives.
Speaker 2: It is a scientific narrative that constantly loops back on itself.
It forces us to continually reevaluate not just the strange
chemistry of what is out there, but the psychology of
who we are down here.
Speaker 1: And that brings me to a final, highly provocative thought
for you to chew on today. Okay, we spend so
much time looking at the Fermi paradox, asking why we
haven't heard from anyone yet, Why is the universe so quiet?
We usually assume it's a technological barrier, right, like.
Speaker 2: They destroy themselves or can't travel that far.
Speaker 1: But maybe the universe isn't keeping its distance because our
telescopes aren't big enough. Maybe the universe is waiting for
us to be culturally, theologically and psychologically mature enough to
understand ourselves. If the mere scientific contormation of a single
one thinking microbe on Mars, or the realization of a
barren exo planet orbiting a distant sun is enough to
shake the very foundation of human philosophy and trigger an
existential crisis, perhaps the real fragile ecosystem isn't out there
in the harsh radiation of the stars. Perhaps the most
fragile ecosystem in the entire universe is the human ego
right here on Earth.
Speaker 2: That is a profoundly sobering thought. Until we can reconcile
our own cosmic insignificance without losing our sense of meaning, empathy,
and wonder, we simply may not be ready for the
awakening that awaits us.
Speaker 1: So we want to hear from you. We want to
bring you directly into this conversation because this is about
your worldview. Yes, please imagine you wake up tomorrow morning,
you check your phone and the newses everywhere. Scientists have
released Undeniable one hundred percent definitive, peer reviewed proof of
intelligent life in another star system.
Speaker 2: The debate is completely over.
Speaker 1: They are out there. How would that specific realization change
your personal belief system? Would it shatter your theological worldview
and cause a personal existential crisis, or would it be
the ultimate comforting awakening for you.
Speaker 2: We truly look forward to reading your perspectives and engaging
with your thoughts on this.
Speaker 1: Drop down into the comments and let us know exactly
where you stand. We want to read how you would
process the greatest paradigm shift in history. Thank you so
much for joining us for this incredibly deep addition of
thrilling threads. Remember to keep looking up, keep questioning the narrative,
and most importantly, keep pulling at the threads of the universe.