I have one big question that I think everybody would like the answer to, which is, to what extent do you think there's life outside Earth, or not on Earth? And when people hear this, they think aliens, but, you know, like an insect-like creature, single or small multi-cell organism on another planet, that itself would be a spectacular find.

And I'm kind of an outlier, so just everyone should, you know, look to the actual experts in this field. But I have some rigorous, you know, kind of logical arguments that I believe the probability of life, I would never say it's zero, but I think it's very low. And I think I can substantiate that.

And the best part is I can't be falsified right now. There's zero evidence that there's life anywhere else in the universe, period, full stop, end of sentence. There's no evidence, conclusive evidence. Lots of drones over in New Jersey right now, not no evidence of life anywhere else. I knew we'd get into drones.

So the argument that it would somehow, first of all, transform our understanding of human place is inarguable to me. I believe that's true, although in this movie Contact, it's a really wonderful movie. It's not cheesy science fiction. It was the first to, like, use a wormhole and all sorts of cool stuff as contrivances.

But in that movie, there's a scene where President Bill Clinton is talking about the discovery that this fictitious character made. But he's actually talking about a meteorite that was discovered in Antarctica. And they just clipped that. And the meteorite was believed to have microbial life, and that meteorite's origin was inarguably from Mars.

OK? So the reasoning was, this is 1997, that there was a meteorite found in Antarctica where it's easy to find meteorites. Is it in the movie or in real life? It's in real life. In 1997, a scientist announced the discovery of a meteorite from Antarctica. It's called Allen Land-Hills meteorite.

And it had what they claimed were evidence of microbial life and even respiration byproducts of these microbial life forms, OK? It was such a big deal that within minutes, you know, Bill Clinton had a press conference on the White House lawn where he goes, "This rock speaks to us from across the generations and, if confirmed, will undoubtedly, you know, revolutionize our understanding of the universe around us." OK?

Now, the movie clips that clip to make it seem like Ellie, the fictitious character, were like, you know, SETI, extraterrestrial technology, not a microbe. But in the public's mind, that actual scientific discovery was never falsified. It was certainly never confirmed. No one's ever come back to say that was correct and that we did find microbial evidence, microbial life on Mars.

Now, how did that meteorite get there? Well, some asteroids hit the moon. That's why it has craters on it. It hits the Earth. That's why we have Meteor Crater, Arizona, Winslow, Arizona, Yucatan, Chicxulub, where the dinosaurs' doom was sealed by the giant impactor 66 million years ago. Those impacts occur on every planet, every moon in our solar system.

So some asteroid hit the surface of Mars probably millions of years ago, ejected material, low gravity on Mars, low atmosphere. And that material has been orbiting around and eventually made its way and hit the Earth. OK? So matter from Mars landed on the Earth. Does that make sense? That's how I gave you-- I have a lunar meteorite that I'm giving to you, again, as a token of my appreciation for all you do.

That came the same way. Something hit the moon, blasted off some lunar-- it's called breccia, it's the crust of the moon-- eventually made its way, landed in Northwest Africa. And I bought a slice of it from a-- I got a dealer, you know, I got a meteorite dealer. And I got that for you, OK?

So what's the lesson? Material gets exchanged from planet to planet. Now I ask the following question. If that happened on Mars to the Earth, the moon to the Earth, so too has material from the Earth been ejected since life emerged 3.7 billion years ago. There's literally millions of tons of Earth that's floating around in space.

Some of that will have landed on Mars. So someday we'll get there, we'll find some piece of it. Now could some of it have a tardigrade on it? Could some of it have a protozoan on it? Obviously it could. And yet-- Maybe some interesting microbes. Yeah, it could. Maybe some ancient microbes that are no longer-- That's right.

--extant. So one theory of the formation of life on Earth, you asked me about that earlier, the origin of life on Earth is a huge mystery. How did life get here? One proposition was made by Fred Hoyle and other people. It sounds dirty, but it's not. It's called panspermia.

It just means that genetic material has been transferred from another astronomical object landed here on Earth. So the converse reaction occurs as well. But the fact is we don't observe it even on Mars. So if I told you, you know, we've discovered a planet and there's another planet right next to it and it has almost the same conditions.

It's in the so-called Goldilocks zone where the temperature is just right to have liquid water which Mars can have on it at certain times of the year in certain places on Mars. It had flowing water on it. We know for sure Mars had flowing water on it. We know for sure that material from the Earth got there when Earth had life on it.

So the absence of life on Mars is a data point. It's not probative or provative, it's positive rather, that life couldn't exist on Mars. We haven't searched all of Mars. But it at least shows that there's an impediment to it. So people are fond of saying, as I told you earlier, there's about 10 to the 24th planets probably in our observable universe.

Going back to the Big Bang, going out to the farthest reaches of the universe. But even if you just take the Milky Way galaxy, there's probably, you know, literally hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy alone. And when you look at that, people like to say, as Carl Sagan did, if there's no life, it's an awful waste of space, right?

Why is there so much space and there's no life? It seems incomprehensible. But nature, you know, I love when atheist scientists will say, like, you propose God exists and that's the God of the gaps to explain things that you don't understand. But when science advances, we'll have an explanation for why, you know, thunder occurs.

It's not because of Thor, right? We get rid of gods as we learn more and so the gap shrinks smaller and smaller. But they'll say the same argument about life in the universe. They'll say, well, there's got to be life because there's so much room there. But as I told you, I've been to Antarctica twice.

The only life forms I saw there, okay, were people. I saw a few penguins in the distance and a couple of dead sea lions. There's no trees. There's no flora at all in the entire continent. It's incredibly barren. And yet, Andrew, it makes up 8% of the land mass of the earth.

And you would think, well, it's just proportional to the amount of area, i.e. the number of stars. There should be 8% of the life on earth. There should be a billion people there or whatever, you know, 600 million people. No, there's nothing there except for scientists that go there.

So the odds of life, you know, you can't construct probability from possibility. And many, many other arguments that I could give you, the improbability of life, how hard it is to create life. And, you know, if you just sprinkled, imagine you had a koala cannon, okay, people at PETA are going to get mad.

They're just going to go to Mars and spray it with koala. It's obviously not going to like start life, right? Well, I think PETA would probably be okay with you populating with an area with koalas. A cannon to take out koalas, they would probably protest. That's right. They would not like that.

So, yeah. So, you know, possibility is not probability. The number of hurdles to create a single cell is enormous. We have yet to reproduce, you know, to make a functional cell in the laboratory. Not that that's a requirement to prove that life could exist elsewhere. I'm just saying it's very hard.

Our history of life, we have an N of one. It's very difficult to speculate on. And if we're alone, if life is abundant, as Fermi asked many, many, many years ago, if life is abundant and the galaxy is old, where are they? Where are the aliens? There should have been plenty of time, not only for them to evolve and be superior to us in many ways and travel the distances of our galaxy, not even of the cosmos, our galaxy.

Where are they? Where are they? I mean, we've been doing this for 80 years because we've been broadcasting radio waves for the last 85 years. Do you know this theory about the gut microbiota? You know, our guts, our skin, our eyes, our nose, but certainly our entire digestive tract, the whole way down from our lips, out the other end, are populated with these little microbiota that influence everything from fatty acid production, neurotransmitter production, et cetera.

It's more than human cells. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's powerful for modulating all sorts of biological processes. And every time we interact, shake hands, if people kiss, if you interact with dirt, if you interact with a pet, the microbiome changes. It's an inner reflection of all your outer behaviors.

Internet, yeah. Yeah. And then we're learning a lot about it. There's this one theory that I like that kind of turns life as you and I know it on its head, which is that humans and other species are just vehicles for the microbiome. And so you would take something like, oh, the desire to populate Mars or to land on the moon as just the microbiota, taking advantage of this weird old world primate species that we call homo sapiens that loves to develop technology, almost destroy itself, but then continues to evolve social media, et cetera, warn each other about declining birth rates.

And then just to basically the microbiota have a, what, you know, a sort of quote-unquote consciousness, not a brain, but a consciousness of their own, which is like all species to make more of itself and to go further and further out and populate. It's hard to punch holes in the logic of this model, but it certainly diminishes our conscious experience.

We could go on forever about this trail. I'll just kind of put a kind of a cliffhanger out there. It'd be wonderful sometime to sit down with you and discuss the possibility of rather than thinking about life elsewhere in the galaxy, given what we know about physics and engineering, astronomy, et cetera, would it be possible to build a planet at the appropriate distance from the sun that we could spawn life by bringing things there as opposed to trying to take it, you know, figure out how to do it at a distance that it might not be amenable to life.

- Right. - You know, maybe creating a garden planet. Maybe we don't put humans there right away, but trying to create a garden that could thrive at some appropriate distance from the sun and seeing what nutrients could be grown there. You know, you could have robots man this planet, but you'd have to somehow aggregate stuff in space to build this planet or launch this planet up that it would collect things.

I mean, that to me feels like a fun experiment. - It is, yeah. - And a lot less risky than going up to other planets. - Yeah, I was blessed as my first guest on the "Into the Impossible" podcast to have Freeman Dyson. You mentioned your dad, your dad mentioned him, one of the greatest intellects of the last hundred years, great physicist.

And he had these ideas for these Dyson spheres, which would be, you know, energy harvesting. So the first, you know, ingredient that you need to construct the Huberman planet habitable zone is to have energy, is harvest as much energy as possible from a star. So he basically conjectured a megastructure, an alien megastructure that could be observable by astronomers could detect these objects and some claim that we have, but those have always been refuted.

And it would be basically surrounding a star, capturing every photon worth of energy that came out of it, and then converting that to mechanical energy. And then, yes, and then once you have infinite energy, you can actually do fusion. You can make up whatever molecules you want. You could make up, you know, print 3D printing at the quark level on up, basically.

And so that was his, you know, conjecture how super advanced aliens would behave. But again, we have no evidence for it, but it's fun. It's certainly fun to have the science fiction, you know, kind of, you know, a lot of interesting science, you know, originates from ideas and creativity that originates from science fiction.

So yeah, it'd be a lot of fun.