Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: I want you to picture something for a second. Think
Speaker 2: about the sheer kinetic reality of a major asteroid impact.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's almost impossible to truly visualize, right, because we're
Speaker 3: talking about a mass of rock and iron, maybe one
Speaker 3: hundred meters across, hitting the upper atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.
Speaker 3: We're talking twenty to thirty kilometers per second exactly.
Speaker 2: And at those velocities, the atmosphere doesn't just part for
Speaker 2: the rock. It compresses so violently that the air itself
Speaker 2: turns into this superheated.
Speaker 3: Plasma, which is terrifying, honestly it is.
Speaker 2: And when that mass finally strikes the continental crust, the
Speaker 2: physics just completely defy our normal terrestrial frames of reference.
Speaker 3: The pressure is so high it exceeds the structural integrity
Speaker 3: of any known mineral on.
Speaker 2: Earth, right, solid bedrock doesn't just crack or fracture. It
Speaker 2: behaves like a fluid. It melts, a.
Speaker 3: Huge portion of it literally vaporizes into a localized atmospheric
Speaker 3: plume right.
Speaker 2: On impact, and then you have this massive shockwave that
Speaker 2: spreads outward, just instantly leveling all the topography.
Speaker 3: While underneath a superheated melt sheet is forged in literal milliseconds.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate sterilization event, right, I mean, the thermal
Speaker 2: radiation alone should eradicate any complex organic chemistry for miles
Speaker 2: and miles.
Speaker 3: That has always been the standard assumption.
Speaker 2: Our whole traditional understanding of astrobiology kind of frames these
Speaker 2: impacts as hard reset buttons, ye, like they are the
Speaker 2: great terminators of life.
Speaker 3: But what if that interpretation is just fundamentally backward.
Speaker 2: Well exactly, what if the intense thermal energy and the
Speaker 2: extreme pressure of an asteroid impact don't just leave a
Speaker 2: sterile geological scar.
Speaker 3: What if they actually synthesize the exact thermodynamic and chemical
Speaker 3: conditions needed to incubate.
Speaker 2: Life in a world that is otherwise completely hostile to it.
Speaker 3: The paradigm in the scientific community is definitely shifting in
Speaker 3: that direction right now.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this because it's a massive shift.
Speaker 3: For decades, we've categorized impact traders strictly through this lens
Speaker 3: of catastrophic destruction.
Speaker 2: Mainly because the visible macro level effects are just so
Speaker 2: incredibly severe, right.
Speaker 3: But when you shift the scale and you examine the
Speaker 3: post impact environment geologically over tens of thousands of years,
Speaker 3: the narrative totally inverts.
Speaker 2: The extreme violence is actually what generates the long term
Speaker 2: energy gradient you need to drive complex biogeochemical cycles.
Speaker 3: Exactly, destruction and creation become two ends of the exact
Speaker 3: same thermodynamic process.
Speaker 2: So today we are exploring a really groundbreaking discovery from
Speaker 2: South Korea that links these violent impacts to the very
Speaker 2: oxygen we breathe.
Speaker 3: And this earthly revelation is frankly acting like a treasure
Speaker 3: map for finding life on Mars too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's wild. The research comes from a team at
Speaker 2: the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources led by
Speaker 2: doctor Jsu Limb.
Speaker 3: They've given us a completely new framework for understanding the
Speaker 3: aftermath of cosmic impacts.
Speaker 2: Let's ground this geographically first, because the location is super important.
Speaker 2: We're talking about the Hapcheon impact crater.
Speaker 3: Which is located in the Jokshan Chogi.
Speaker 2: Basin, right, And this basin is a really distinct bowl
Speaker 2: shaped depression on the Korean Peninsula.
Speaker 3: And what's fascinating is that it's the only confirmed impact
Speaker 3: crater on the entire peninsula, which.
Speaker 2: Is crazy when you think about it. It's a massive
Speaker 2: seven kilometer wide.
Speaker 3: Structure, but it was only definitively confirmed as an impact
Speaker 3: crater back in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: How does a seven kilometer crater stay hidden until twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one.
Speaker 3: Well, it's a testament to how dynamic Earth's surface really is.
Speaker 2: Unlike the Moon, right, where creators just sit there, perfectly
Speaker 2: preserved in a vacuum forever.
Speaker 3: Exactly. Earth has a very active hydrological cycle. We have
Speaker 3: tectonic movement, heavy biological weathering, and the.
Speaker 2: Korean Peninsula gets a lot of rainfall. Plus it has
Speaker 2: incredibly dense vegetation.
Speaker 3: Which is basically the perfect camouflage for geological anomalies.
Speaker 2: So for decades, scientists just cataloged this basin as a
Speaker 2: structurally unusual valley.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it took extensive subsurface drilling to figure it out.
Speaker 3: They had to look for microscopic.
Speaker 2: Evidence the shocked courts right.
Speaker 3: Precisely, shocked courtz only forms under the extreme instantaneous pressures
Speaker 3: of a bullied impact.
Speaker 2: So finding that finally proved its extraterrestrial origin.
Speaker 3: But that twenty twenty one conformation just laid the groundwork.
Speaker 3: The real bombshell is the twenty twenty six update, right.
Speaker 2: Doctor Limb's team focused on the northwestern sector of the crater,
Speaker 2: a spot they called Site str.
Speaker 3: And what they found there just completely recontextualize the whole basin.
Speaker 2: They discovered ancient microbial structures called stromatolites.
Speaker 3: Just sitting right there in the crater.
Speaker 2: Let me stop you there, because common sense is screaming
Speaker 2: at me right now, I.
Speaker 3: Know exactly what we're gonna ask.
Speaker 2: If an asteroid vaporizes rock and creates this massive, superheated,
Speaker 2: sterile crater, how do delicate microbial structures just appear there?
Speaker 3: It seems like a total paradox, right.
Speaker 2: How does a zone of absolute multi megaton annihilation become
Speaker 2: a biological nursery.
Speaker 3: It's a great question, And if you look at the
Speaker 3: immediate seconds or days or even years after the impact,
Speaker 3: you're totally right.
Speaker 2: It's just a floor of molten glass and shocked.
Speaker 3: Rock utterly sterile. But the biological incubation doesn't happen concurrently
Speaker 3: with the impact.
Speaker 2: Ah. Okay, so there's a timeline here.
Speaker 3: Exactly, we have to introduce the concept of a post
Speaker 3: impact hydrothermal lacustrine environment hydrothermal lakes.
Speaker 2: Let's trace the thermodynamics of that.
Speaker 3: So, the kinetic energy of the impact melts the bedrock,
Speaker 3: creating this subtrane layer of superheated rock, the melt sheet.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: And because this melt sheet is buried under hundreds of
Speaker 3: feet of fractured rock and insulating brescia, it cools down
Speaker 3: incredibly slowly.
Speaker 2: It basically acts like a giant subterranean furnace.
Speaker 3: A thermal blanket.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: And then over centuries the climate stabilizes.
Speaker 2: Rainwater and groundwater start to fill the crater basin.
Speaker 3: Right. And as that water percolates down through the highly
Speaker 3: fractured walk, it hits the residual heat of the melt sheet, it.
Speaker 2: Gets superheated and rises back to the surface through convection.
Speaker 3: Exactly, This creates a closed loop hydrothermal system.
Speaker 2: Wow. So it's not just a warm bottle.
Speaker 3: No. As the water circulates through all that pulverized bedrock,
Speaker 3: the heat dramatically accelerates the dissolution of minerals.
Speaker 2: The crater leg becomes a highly concentrated chemical reservoir.
Speaker 3: Enriched with iron, silica, all these essential trace elements.
Speaker 2: So the initial violence is actually necessary. It shatters the bedrock,
Speaker 2: which increases the surface area for the water to interact.
Speaker 3: With, and the sustained heat turns the whole basin into
Speaker 3: a highly efficient chemical solvent.
Speaker 2: Literally a self sustaining hydrothermal bioreactor.
Speaker 3: That's the precise dynamic. And within this stable, warm, nutrient
Speaker 3: rich spa, essentially life.
Speaker 2: Thrives, specifically the cyanobacteria that build those trumatallites at cite.
Speaker 2: Str let's actually.
Speaker 3: Talk about what strumatallites are, because they're fascinating.
Speaker 2: Oh, definitely. I like to avoid heavy jargon, so I
Speaker 2: always think of them as ancient layered department buildings.
Speaker 3: That's actually a fantastic analogy built.
Speaker 2: By microscopic tenets the cyanobacteria, right.
Speaker 3: And these cyanobacteria are photosynthetic, They eat sunlight and exhale oxygen.
Speaker 2: And they have a fossil record that dates back what
Speaker 2: three point five billion.
Speaker 3: Years roughly, Yes, that They are some of the oldest
Speaker 3: known life forms on the planet.
Speaker 2: So how do they actually build these structures.
Speaker 3: Well, as a colony of cyanobacteria grows, they precipitate calcium
Speaker 3: carbonate as a byproduct of their metabolism, and.
Speaker 2: As they do that, they trap ambient sediment from the water.
Speaker 3: Exactly so they precipitate minerals in trap sediment. Building. These
Speaker 3: structures up layer by micro scopic layer over very long periods.
Speaker 2: Which means they aren't just fossilized microbes. They're basically biogeochemical chronometers.
Speaker 3: They are literal history books made of rock because every
Speaker 3: layer traps the chemical signature of the lake at the
Speaker 3: exact moment that specific layer formed, like biological tree rings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I kind of picture them like a layer jawbreaker.
Speaker 3: Candy and the Kigam team didn't just look at the
Speaker 3: outside of the jawbreaker. They sliced it open and analyzed
Speaker 3: the layers.
Speaker 2: They performed really granular geochemical analyses across the cross sections
Speaker 2: of these ten to twenty centimeter structures.
Speaker 3: And we have to note the temporal markers here because
Speaker 3: the Hapchin Crater is relatively young geologically, right.
Speaker 2: It's from the late Pleistocene epic about fifty thousand years.
Speaker 3: Ago, which is perfect for this kind of study because.
Speaker 2: Fifty thousand years is well within the range for radiocarbon.
Speaker 3: Dating, specifically carbon fourteen analysis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, carbon fourteen has a half life of around five
Speaker 2: seven hundred and thirty years.
Speaker 3: Right exactly, So it's useless for dating billion year old
Speaker 3: dinosaur bones, but it's incredible for higher resolution absolute dating
Speaker 3: of the late Pleistocene.
Speaker 2: So they anchored the timeline using fourteen C and then
Speaker 2: map the isotopic variations across the jawbreaker layers, tracking.
Speaker 3: The changing conditions of the lake from the inner core
Speaker 3: of the stromatolite all the way out to its surface.
Speaker 2: And the data from that isotopic gradient is basically the
Speaker 2: smoking gun for this whole hydro thermal theory.
Speaker 3: The signature is definitive. They looked at the ratios of
Speaker 3: stable isotopes like oxygen eighteen to oxygen sixteen within those
Speaker 3: carbonate layers, and.
Speaker 2: They found a massive thermal gradient.
Speaker 3: The inner layers, the oldest parts that formed first had
Speaker 3: ratios corresponding to significantly elevated water.
Speaker 2: Temperatures, proving that they formed in a highly active hydrothermal environment.
Speaker 3: And then as you measure outward toward the younger layers
Speaker 3: of the jawbreaker.
Speaker 2: The ratios shift to show progressively cooler water.
Speaker 3: Yes, what's fascinating here is this proves the structures began
Speaker 3: growing during the hottest, earliest phase of the newly formed lake,
Speaker 3: and they just.
Speaker 2: Kept rowing as that subterranean melt sheet slowly ran out
Speaker 2: of use over thousands.
Speaker 3: Of years, until the hydrothermal spa eventually cooled down into
Speaker 3: a standard ambient temperature lake.
Speaker 2: They captured the entire thermodynamic life cycle of the IMPACT's aftermath.
Speaker 2: That is incredible.
Speaker 3: But wait, it gets better.
Speaker 2: I'll laid on me.
Speaker 3: The analysis showed that these microbial colonies were actually incorporating
Speaker 3: extraterrestrial material into their structures.
Speaker 2: Wait, really, remnants in the asteroid itself.
Speaker 3: Yes, they mixed material from the impactor with the violently
Speaker 3: altered local bedrock.
Speaker 2: So they were literally metabolizing and building their homes out
Speaker 2: of the fractured weapon that tried to destroy their environment.
Speaker 3: It's the ultimate display of biological resourcefulness.
Speaker 2: The asteroid delivered the heat, but its pulverized remains also
Speaker 2: provided the exact trace minerals they needed to accelerate their.
Speaker 3: Growth things like phosphorus and specific iron isotopes.
Speaker 2: Okay, this force is a massive logical leap for me.
Speaker 3: I think I know where you're gong with this.
Speaker 2: If a local asteroid impact in South Korea fifty thousand
Speaker 2: years ago can create a perfect self sustaining incubator for cyanobacteria.
Speaker 3: We have to scale this up to the entire planet
Speaker 3: billions of years ago.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we have to talk about the Rkean eon roughly
Speaker 2: two point four billion years.
Speaker 3: Ago to lead up to the Great Oxidation Event or
Speaker 3: the GOE.
Speaker 2: Because if we connect this to the bigger picture, Earth
Speaker 2: back then was completely alien.
Speaker 3: It was fundamentally hostile to complex life.
Speaker 2: The atmosphere had zero free oxygen. It was this toxic
Speaker 2: soup of methane, ammonia and carbon.
Speaker 3: Dioxide, and the global oceans were largely anoxic and highly
Speaker 3: enriched and dissolved iron.
Speaker 2: So if a primitive cyanobacteria colony tried to evolve and
Speaker 2: photosynthesize out in the open ocean, it was basically doomed.
Speaker 3: It faced an incredibly uphill.
Speaker 2: Battle because any free oxygen they produced would instantly bond
Speaker 2: with the ambient dissolved.
Speaker 3: Iron right, Yes, it would scavenge the oxygen and precipitate
Speaker 3: out as iron oxide.
Speaker 2: Plus there was no ozone layer.
Speaker 3: Yet, so the surface of the ocean was being continuously
Speaker 3: bombarded by lethal levels of ultraviolet radiation.
Speaker 2: The open ocean was a chemical sink and a radiation
Speaker 2: death trap.
Speaker 3: So the long standing mystery has always been how did
Speaker 3: cyanobacteria ever establish a large enough population to overcome all that?
Speaker 2: How did they eventually off gas enough oxygen to permanently
Speaker 2: alter the atmosphere.
Speaker 3: This is exactly where doctor Limb's team points to the
Speaker 3: concept of the oxygen oasis.
Speaker 2: And the Hapschian Crater provides the physical blueprint for it.
Speaker 3: Think about the Archean eon, the Earth was experiencing a
Speaker 3: vastly higher rate of asteroid bombardment.
Speaker 2: Back then, the crust was just being repeatedly shattered by
Speaker 2: space rocks.
Speaker 3: And instead of seeing that as a series of extinction events,
Speaker 3: this hydrothermal model suggests something totally different.
Speaker 2: Every single impact was basically excavating a biologically optimized safe haven.
Speaker 3: A crater lake offers massive advantages over the open ocean
Speaker 3: on Earli Earth well.
Speaker 2: First, off, the rim of the crater physically isolates the
Speaker 2: lake from the global ocean.
Speaker 3: Right, it acts as a bare against those turbulent iron
Speaker 3: rich currents, stopping the immediate scavenging of the new oxygen.
Speaker 2: And second, that hydrothermal circulation provides a constant upwelling of nutrients.
Speaker 3: Right, completely independent of the nutrient starved surface waters of
Speaker 3: the global ocean.
Speaker 2: And third, the physical depth of a crater lake gives
Speaker 2: you a thick collar of.
Speaker 3: Water which attenuates and blocks that lethal UV radiation from
Speaker 3: the sun.
Speaker 2: Allowing the cyanobacteria to safely photosynthesize in the furtic zone.
Speaker 3: So within these isolated, thermally regulated impact basins, the cyanobacteria
Speaker 3: population could just absolutely boom.
Speaker 2: Because it's localized. The oxygen they make eventually outpaces the
Speaker 2: chemical sinks in the crater and.
Speaker 3: The lake becomes completely saturated with free oxygen.
Speaker 2: So are we saying that before the entire atmosphere became breathable,
Speaker 2: life was essentially sheltering in these scattered asteroid made safe havens.
Speaker 3: That is exactly what the data suggests.
Speaker 2: Were these craters literally the localized engines that tip the
Speaker 2: scale for the whole planet.
Speaker 3: Yes, Once the local water column in a crater reached saturation,
Speaker 3: all that excess oxygen had nowhere to go but up.
Speaker 2: It would bubble up an off gas into the sky.
Speaker 3: So the planetary scale transition of the Great Oxidation Event
Speaker 3: probably didn't happen uniformly across the ocean.
Speaker 2: It was driven by a decentralized network of millions of
Speaker 2: these hydrothermal crater.
Speaker 3: Lakes, all of them steadily pumping oxygen into the toxic
Speaker 3: Artian sky.
Speaker 2: Wow, the cosmic bombardment was literally terraforming the planet.
Speaker 3: It provided the isolated, high energy sanctuaries that life required
Speaker 3: to achieve critical mass.
Speaker 2: The very mechanism we assume suppressed early life was actually
Speaker 2: its greatest catalyst.
Speaker 3: It beautifully resolves a major thermodynamic paradox in evolutionary biology.
Speaker 2: Because major biological transitions require immense amounts of energy.
Speaker 3: Right and highly specific stable chemical gradients.
Speaker 2: Which a post impact environment provides perfectly. A massive spike
Speaker 2: of kinetic energy converted into a sl low release thermal gradient.
Speaker 3: Driving a localized chemical cycle for thousands and thousands of years.
Speaker 2: Okay, here's where it gets really interesting.
Speaker 3: Let's take it off world.
Speaker 2: Exactly if this mechanism drove early life on Earth. We
Speaker 2: can't just limit this to our own biosphere.
Speaker 3: No, this terrestrial analog instantly becomes the ultimate diagnostic tool
Speaker 3: for astrobiology.
Speaker 2: Especially when we look at the planetary history of Mars.
Speaker 3: When you look at the Noatian period of Mars, which
Speaker 3: is roughly the same time as Earth's are Key and Eon,
Speaker 3: the similarities are striking.
Speaker 2: Mars had a thicker atmosphere back then, it had abundant
Speaker 2: surface water.
Speaker 3: And it was getting hammered by the exact same heavy
Speaker 3: bombardment of asteroids that Earth was.
Speaker 2: Its surface is still completely scarred with those ancient basins.
Speaker 3: But unlike Earth, where plate tectonics and biological erosion have
Speaker 3: wiped our early crater history clean, Mars essentially frozen place.
Speaker 2: So the ancient paleo lakes of Mars are just sitting there,
Speaker 2: structurally intact.
Speaker 3: Which raises an important question. If impact craters on Earth
Speaker 3: were the inky for microbial.
Speaker 2: Life, then the dormant craters on Mars aren't just geological depressions.
Speaker 3: They are the fossilized remains of potential alien nurseries.
Speaker 2: And the Hapchien crater research totally alters how we investigate them.
Speaker 3: Because until now, looking for life on Mars has been
Speaker 3: like searching for a microscopic needle in a planetary haystack.
Speaker 2: We know water was there, so we send rovers to
Speaker 2: ancient lake bits like the Jeesuro Crater.
Speaker 3: But just knowing a basin ones held water isn't enough.
Speaker 2: We need to know what specifically to look for, and
Speaker 2: the hapchen stromatolites provide a literal treasure map.
Speaker 3: They give us the precise isotopic fingerprint of impact driven
Speaker 3: hydrothermal biology.
Speaker 2: It's like a calibration tool for our rovers exactly.
Speaker 3: Think about NASA's Perseverance rover driving around the Jezro crater
Speaker 3: right now.
Speaker 2: Jezero is an ancient impact basin that hosted a palaeolake.
Speaker 3: Yes, and Perseverance has highly advanced spectroscopy instruments.
Speaker 2: Like PixL, which maps the elemental composition of rocks at
Speaker 2: a sub millimeter.
Speaker 3: Scale, and sholock, which scans for organic compounds and specific minerals.
Speaker 2: But all that data requires a reference point.
Speaker 3: Right if Perseverance finds a carbonate layer in the Jezro basin,
Speaker 3: the hap gene study tells scientists the exact isotopic ratios
Speaker 3: of carbon and oxygen to look for.
Speaker 2: To determine if it formed in a hot cooling hydrothermal gradient.
Speaker 3: Furthermore, the South Korean data tells them to look for
Speaker 3: extraterrestrial trace minerals bound within the.
Speaker 2: Rock, like those specific isotopes of strontium or the shocks
Speaker 2: toartz we talked about earlier, mixed right into the carbonate matrix.
Speaker 3: We aren't just blindly looking for vague signs of past
Speaker 3: water anymore.
Speaker 2: We know exactly what chemical fingerprints to look for when
Speaker 2: the rover scrapes the dirt.
Speaker 3: We have the exact terrestrial reference spectrum for what a
Speaker 3: microbial oasis looks like.
Speaker 2: We've basically transitioned from blind exploration to highly targeted forensic geology.
Speaker 3: It's a beautiful illustration of uniformitarianism in geology, but on
Speaker 3: an interplanetary scale.
Speaker 2: Meaning the physics that govern a crater in South Korea
Speaker 2: are the same ones that operated on ancient Mars.
Speaker 3: The fundamental laws of thermodynamics in geochemistry don't change just
Speaker 3: because you're on another planet.
Speaker 2: By rigorously studying this earthly discovery, we unlock the code
Speaker 2: to hunt for astrobiology across the Solar System.
Speaker 3: It's incredibly powerful let's bring.
Speaker 2: All these threads together, because the sheer scope of this
Speaker 2: is staggering.
Speaker 3: It really is a massive shift in perspective.
Speaker 2: We start with a catastrophic event, a meteorite strike that
Speaker 2: melts the crust and sterilizes the landscape.
Speaker 3: But beneath the destruction, a massive reservoir of heat is
Speaker 3: trapped in the melt sheet.
Speaker 2: As water returns, that trapped heat drives a long term,
Speaker 2: highly active.
Speaker 3: Mineral bath, turning a crater into a nutrient rich, protected bioreactor.
Speaker 2: Where microscopic cyanobacteria can thrive. Utilizing the minerals from the
Speaker 2: very asteroid that made the crater, They.
Speaker 3: Build their stromatolite structures, locking the thermal history of the
Speaker 3: lake into stone.
Speaker 2: And on early Earth, millions of these isolated oases pumped
Speaker 2: out oxygen until they literally changed the atmosphere of our planet.
Speaker 3: The violence of the cosmos provided the scaffolding for aerobic
Speaker 3: life to dominate.
Speaker 2: And now the chemical clues left behind in South Korea
Speaker 2: are guiding our rovers on Mars, telling them exactly where
Speaker 2: to look for alien biology.
Speaker 3: It completely reframes our relationship with destructive cosmic phenomena.
Speaker 2: It does it shows that complex biological systems require immense energy,
Speaker 2: and early on that energy is delivered through catastrophic impacts.
Speaker 3: Destruction is an anomaly. It's a prerequisite step in chemical evolution.
Speaker 2: The next time you take a deep breath of oxygen,
Speaker 2: I want you to remember this.
Speaker 3: You owe a tiny fraction of that life giving gas
Speaker 3: to the cosmic violence of ancient asteroid impacts.
Speaker 2: The biological comfort we enjoy today is the downstream consequence
Speaker 2: of a terrifying era of planetary bombardment.
Speaker 3: We are literally breathing the biological dividends of falling stars.
Speaker 2: Which prompts a really provocative final thought for you to ponder.
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm curious where you're taking this.
Speaker 2: Well, if life on Earth utilize the chaotic destruction of
Speaker 2: asteroid impacts to build oxygen oases and terraform the.
Speaker 3: Planet, what other catastrophic events in the universe are doing
Speaker 3: the same thing Exactly?
Speaker 2: What other seemingly destructive cosmic phenomena like the intense radiation
Speaker 2: of a nearby supernova or the tidal friction of massive
Speaker 2: gas giants tearing a moon apart, are happening right now
Speaker 2: secretly planting the seeds for entirely new forms of life.