Is There Life Beyond Earth? | Dr. Brian Keating & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | I have one big question that I think everybody would like the answer to, which is, to what

00:00:09.960 | extent do you think there's life outside Earth, or not on Earth?

00:00:17.240 | And when people hear this, they think aliens, but, you know, like an insect-like creature,

00:00:23.080 | single or small multi-cell organism on another planet, that itself would be a spectacular

00:00:28.320 | find.

00:00:29.320 | And I'm kind of an outlier, so just everyone should, you know, look to the actual experts

00:00:33.680 | in this field.

00:00:34.680 | But I have some rigorous, you know, kind of logical arguments that I believe the probability

00:00:39.520 | of life, I would never say it's zero, but I think it's very low.

00:00:42.560 | And I think I can substantiate that.

00:00:44.680 | And the best part is I can't be falsified right now.

00:00:47.000 | There's zero evidence that there's life anywhere else in the universe, period, full stop, end

00:00:51.320 | of sentence.

00:00:52.320 | There's no evidence, conclusive evidence.

00:00:53.520 | Lots of drones over in New Jersey right now, not no evidence of life anywhere else.

00:00:57.360 | I knew we'd get into drones.

00:01:00.160 | So the argument that it would somehow, first of all, transform our understanding of human

00:01:06.320 | place is inarguable to me.

00:01:08.180 | I believe that's true, although in this movie Contact, it's a really wonderful movie.

00:01:14.080 | It's not cheesy science fiction.

00:01:15.080 | It was the first to, like, use a wormhole and all sorts of cool stuff as contrivances.

00:01:18.960 | But in that movie, there's a scene where President Bill Clinton is talking about the discovery

00:01:24.880 | that this fictitious character made.

00:01:27.160 | But he's actually talking about a meteorite that was discovered in Antarctica.

00:01:31.480 | And they just clipped that.

00:01:32.880 | And the meteorite was believed to have microbial life, and that meteorite's origin was inarguably

00:01:39.000 | from Mars.

00:01:40.000 | OK?

00:01:41.000 | So the reasoning was, this is 1997, that there was a meteorite found in Antarctica where

00:01:46.040 | it's easy to find meteorites.

00:01:47.040 | Is it in the movie or in real life?

00:01:48.360 | It's in real life.

00:01:49.360 | In 1997, a scientist announced the discovery of a meteorite from Antarctica.

00:01:52.880 | It's called Allen Land-Hills meteorite.

00:01:55.320 | And it had what they claimed were evidence of microbial life and even respiration byproducts

00:02:00.880 | of these microbial life forms, OK?

00:02:03.040 | It was such a big deal that within minutes, you know, Bill Clinton had a press conference

00:02:07.000 | on the White House lawn where he goes, "This rock speaks to us from across the generations

00:02:11.920 | and, if confirmed, will undoubtedly, you know, revolutionize our understanding of the universe

00:02:17.000 | around us."

00:02:18.000 | OK?

00:02:19.000 | Now, the movie clips that clip to make it seem like Ellie, the fictitious character,

00:02:21.840 | were like, you know, SETI, extraterrestrial technology, not a microbe.

00:02:27.560 | But in the public's mind, that actual scientific discovery was never falsified.

00:02:33.600 | It was certainly never confirmed.

00:02:35.920 | No one's ever come back to say that was correct and that we did find microbial evidence, microbial

00:02:40.440 | life on Mars.

00:02:41.440 | Now, how did that meteorite get there?

00:02:43.440 | Well, some asteroids hit the moon.

00:02:47.200 | That's why it has craters on it.

00:02:48.560 | It hits the Earth.

00:02:49.960 | That's why we have Meteor Crater, Arizona, Winslow, Arizona, Yucatan, Chicxulub, where

00:02:54.760 | the dinosaurs' doom was sealed by the giant impactor 66 million years ago.

00:03:00.040 | Those impacts occur on every planet, every moon in our solar system.

00:03:04.400 | So some asteroid hit the surface of Mars probably millions of years ago, ejected material, low

00:03:10.720 | gravity on Mars, low atmosphere.

00:03:13.200 | And that material has been orbiting around and eventually made its way and hit the Earth.

00:03:17.280 | OK?

00:03:18.280 | So matter from Mars landed on the Earth.

00:03:20.400 | Does that make sense?

00:03:21.680 | That's how I gave you-- I have a lunar meteorite that I'm giving to you, again, as a token

00:03:26.480 | of my appreciation for all you do.

00:03:28.400 | That came the same way.

00:03:29.520 | Something hit the moon, blasted off some lunar-- it's called breccia, it's the crust of the

00:03:33.080 | moon-- eventually made its way, landed in Northwest Africa.

00:03:36.280 | And I bought a slice of it from a-- I got a dealer, you know, I got a meteorite dealer.

00:03:40.720 | And I got that for you, OK?

00:03:42.800 | So what's the lesson?

00:03:44.440 | Material gets exchanged from planet to planet.

00:03:46.920 | Now I ask the following question.

00:03:48.920 | If that happened on Mars to the Earth, the moon to the Earth, so too has material from

00:03:54.160 | the Earth been ejected since life emerged 3.7 billion years ago.

00:04:00.400 | There's literally millions of tons of Earth that's floating around in space.

00:04:04.680 | Some of that will have landed on Mars.

00:04:06.180 | So someday we'll get there, we'll find some piece of it.

00:04:08.800 | Now could some of it have a tardigrade on it?

00:04:11.180 | Could some of it have a protozoan on it?

00:04:13.760 | Obviously it could.

00:04:14.760 | And yet--

00:04:15.760 | Maybe some interesting microbes.

00:04:17.160 | Yeah, it could.

00:04:18.400 | Maybe some ancient microbes that are no longer--

00:04:20.480 | That's right.

00:04:21.480 | --extant.

00:04:22.480 | So one theory of the formation of life on Earth, you asked me about that earlier, the

00:04:25.060 | origin of life on Earth is a huge mystery.

00:04:26.760 | How did life get here?

00:04:28.040 | One proposition was made by Fred Hoyle and other people.

00:04:30.880 | It sounds dirty, but it's not.

00:04:32.360 | It's called panspermia.

00:04:33.360 | It just means that genetic material has been transferred from another astronomical object

00:04:38.920 | landed here on Earth.

00:04:40.100 | So the converse reaction occurs as well.

00:04:43.800 | But the fact is we don't observe it even on Mars.

00:04:46.480 | So if I told you, you know, we've discovered a planet and there's another planet right

00:04:50.200 | next to it and it has almost the same conditions.

00:04:52.640 | It's in the so-called Goldilocks zone where the temperature is just right to have liquid

00:04:55.760 | water which Mars can have on it at certain times of the year in certain places on Mars.

00:04:59.400 | It had flowing water on it.

00:05:00.600 | We know for sure Mars had flowing water on it.

00:05:02.780 | We know for sure that material from the Earth got there when Earth had life on it.

00:05:06.680 | So the absence of life on Mars is a data point.

00:05:09.520 | It's not probative or provative, it's positive rather, that life couldn't exist on Mars.

00:05:14.560 | We haven't searched all of Mars.

00:05:16.320 | But it at least shows that there's an impediment to it.

00:05:18.760 | So people are fond of saying, as I told you earlier, there's about 10 to the 24th planets

00:05:24.120 | probably in our observable universe.

00:05:26.440 | Going back to the Big Bang, going out to the farthest reaches of the universe.

00:05:29.680 | But even if you just take the Milky Way galaxy, there's probably, you know, literally hundreds

00:05:35.040 | of billions of planets in our galaxy alone.

00:05:38.240 | And when you look at that, people like to say, as Carl Sagan did, if there's no life,

00:05:43.000 | it's an awful waste of space, right?

00:05:44.940 | Why is there so much space and there's no life?

00:05:46.880 | It seems incomprehensible.

00:05:48.160 | But nature, you know, I love when atheist scientists will say, like, you propose God

00:05:52.920 | exists and that's the God of the gaps to explain things that you don't understand.

00:05:56.360 | But when science advances, we'll have an explanation for why, you know, thunder occurs.

00:05:59.960 | It's not because of Thor, right?

00:06:01.880 | We get rid of gods as we learn more and so the gap shrinks smaller and smaller.

00:06:06.160 | But they'll say the same argument about life in the universe.

00:06:08.320 | They'll say, well, there's got to be life because there's so much room there.

00:06:10.880 | But as I told you, I've been to Antarctica twice.

00:06:13.080 | The only life forms I saw there, okay, were people.

00:06:16.720 | I saw a few penguins in the distance and a couple of dead sea lions.

00:06:21.240 | There's no trees.

00:06:22.240 | There's no flora at all in the entire continent.

00:06:24.600 | It's incredibly barren.

00:06:26.280 | And yet, Andrew, it makes up 8% of the land mass of the earth.

00:06:32.360 | And you would think, well, it's just proportional to the amount of area, i.e. the number of

00:06:35.720 | stars.

00:06:36.720 | There should be 8% of the life on earth.

00:06:38.000 | There should be a billion people there or whatever, you know, 600 million people.

00:06:41.480 | No, there's nothing there except for scientists that go there.

00:06:44.360 | So the odds of life, you know, you can't construct probability from possibility.

00:06:51.480 | And many, many other arguments that I could give you, the improbability of life, how hard

00:06:55.960 | it is to create life.

00:06:56.960 | And, you know, if you just sprinkled, imagine you had a koala cannon, okay, people at PETA

00:07:01.320 | are going to get mad.

00:07:02.320 | They're just going to go to Mars and spray it with koala.

00:07:04.800 | It's obviously not going to like start life, right?

00:07:05.800 | Well, I think PETA would probably be okay with you populating with an area with koalas.

00:07:11.120 | A cannon to take out koalas, they would probably protest.

00:07:14.440 | That's right.

00:07:15.440 | They would not like that.

00:07:16.440 | So, yeah.

00:07:17.440 | So, you know, possibility is not probability.

00:07:20.080 | The number of hurdles to create a single cell is enormous.

00:07:24.560 | We have yet to reproduce, you know, to make a functional cell in the laboratory.

00:07:28.040 | Not that that's a requirement to prove that life could exist elsewhere.

00:07:30.800 | I'm just saying it's very hard.

00:07:32.680 | Our history of life, we have an N of one.

00:07:34.840 | It's very difficult to speculate on.

00:07:37.200 | And if we're alone, if life is abundant, as Fermi asked many, many, many years ago, if

00:07:43.240 | life is abundant and the galaxy is old, where are they?

00:07:47.320 | Where are the aliens?

00:07:48.320 | There should have been plenty of time, not only for them to evolve and be superior to

00:07:52.040 | us in many ways and travel the distances of our galaxy, not even of the cosmos, our galaxy.

00:07:57.080 | Where are they?

00:07:58.080 | Where are they?

00:07:59.080 | I mean, we've been doing this for 80 years because we've been broadcasting radio waves

00:08:01.400 | for the last 85 years.

00:08:03.080 | Do you know this theory about the gut microbiota?

00:08:05.640 | You know, our guts, our skin, our eyes, our nose, but certainly our entire digestive tract,

00:08:12.560 | the whole way down from our lips, out the other end, are populated with these little

00:08:17.680 | microbiota that influence everything from fatty acid production, neurotransmitter production,

00:08:21.600 | et cetera.

00:08:22.600 | It's more than human cells.

00:08:23.600 | Yeah.

00:08:24.600 | Oh, yeah.

00:08:25.600 | And it's powerful for modulating all sorts of biological processes.

00:08:28.600 | And every time we interact, shake hands, if people kiss, if you interact with dirt, if

00:08:33.600 | you interact with a pet, the microbiome changes.

00:08:37.200 | It's an inner reflection of all your outer behaviors.

00:08:41.120 | Internet, yeah.

00:08:42.120 | Yeah.

00:08:43.120 | And then we're learning a lot about it.

00:08:44.120 | There's this one theory that I like that kind of turns life as you and I know it on its

00:08:49.160 | head, which is that humans and other species are just vehicles for the microbiome.

00:08:55.780 | And so you would take something like, oh, the desire to populate Mars or to land on

00:09:03.340 | the moon as just the microbiota, taking advantage of this weird old world primate species that

00:09:08.820 | we call homo sapiens that loves to develop technology, almost destroy itself, but then

00:09:13.800 | continues to evolve social media, et cetera, warn each other about declining birth rates.

00:09:20.440 | And then just to basically the microbiota have a, what, you know, a sort of quote-unquote

00:09:25.580 | consciousness, not a brain, but a consciousness of their own, which is like all species to

00:09:29.980 | make more of itself and to go further and further out and populate.

00:09:33.400 | It's hard to punch holes in the logic of this model, but it certainly diminishes our conscious

00:09:39.820 | experience.

00:09:41.000 | We could go on forever about this trail.

00:09:43.740 | I'll just kind of put a kind of a cliffhanger out there.

00:09:46.440 | It'd be wonderful sometime to sit down with you and discuss the possibility of rather

00:09:50.580 | than thinking about life elsewhere in the galaxy, given what we know about physics and

00:09:57.780 | engineering, astronomy, et cetera, would it be possible to build a planet at the appropriate

00:10:03.180 | distance from the sun that we could spawn life by bringing things there as opposed to

00:10:07.260 | trying to take it, you know, figure out how to do it at a distance that it might not be

00:10:11.340 | amenable to life.

00:10:12.340 | - Right.

00:10:13.340 | - You know, maybe creating a garden planet.

00:10:16.060 | Maybe we don't put humans there right away, but trying to create a garden that could thrive

00:10:20.240 | at some appropriate distance from the sun and seeing what nutrients could be grown there.

00:10:26.820 | You know, you could have robots man this planet, but you'd have to somehow aggregate stuff

00:10:32.000 | in space to build this planet or launch this planet up that it would collect things.

00:10:36.180 | I mean, that to me feels like a fun experiment.

00:10:37.980 | - It is, yeah.

00:10:38.980 | - And a lot less risky than going up to other planets.

00:10:41.780 | - Yeah, I was blessed as my first guest on the "Into the Impossible" podcast to have

00:10:46.100 | Freeman Dyson.

00:10:47.100 | You mentioned your dad, your dad mentioned him, one of the greatest intellects of the

00:10:51.180 | last hundred years, great physicist.

00:10:52.460 | And he had these ideas for these Dyson spheres, which would be, you know, energy harvesting.

00:10:56.940 | So the first, you know, ingredient that you need to construct the Huberman planet habitable

00:11:03.180 | zone is to have energy, is harvest as much energy as possible from a star.

00:11:08.300 | So he basically conjectured a megastructure, an alien megastructure that could be observable

00:11:14.480 | by astronomers could detect these objects and some claim that we have, but those have

00:11:20.100 | always been refuted.

00:11:21.260 | And it would be basically surrounding a star, capturing every photon worth of energy that

00:11:25.380 | came out of it, and then converting that to mechanical energy.

00:11:28.300 | And then, yes, and then once you have infinite energy, you can actually do fusion.

00:11:31.780 | You can make up whatever molecules you want.

00:11:33.700 | You could make up, you know, print 3D printing at the quark level on up, basically.

00:11:38.380 | And so that was his, you know, conjecture how super advanced aliens would behave.

00:11:43.340 | But again, we have no evidence for it, but it's fun.

00:11:45.900 | It's certainly fun to have the science fiction, you know, kind of, you know, a lot of interesting

00:11:49.900 | science, you know, originates from ideas and creativity that originates from science fiction.

00:11:54.580 | So yeah, it'd be a lot of fun.

00:11:55.580 | [Music]

Is There Life Beyond Earth? | Dr. Brian Keating & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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