Are we alone in the universe? That's the question Astrobiologist Dr. Graham Lau spends every day trying to answer. In this in-depth interview, we talk finding life on other planets, Shadow Biospheres here on Earth and what happens if we find intelligent life - or it finds us. Then, because we all have that only sketchy cousin, we countdown the Top 5 Annoying Family Members.
Interview with Astrobiologist Dr. Graham Lau
Speakers
Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host
Dr. Graham Lau: Astrobiologist / Cosmobiologist
Nick VinZant 0:14 Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant coming up in this episode, we're talking astrobiology and annoying relatives.
Dr. Graham Lau 0:24 Astrobiology is our quest to understand life. And that's all of life. So life here on Earth, the potential for life elsewhere, how life started here, how it's evolved here, whether or not we could find it elsewhere. The idea of this shadow biosphere, so a lot of our methods, in chemistry in biology are very much based on life as we know it. And so the question is, you know, could we be missing out? So much so that there could even be living things on earth that aren't life as we know it? And I love these ideas like you know, what else could there be? Could there be mineral life forms, could an entire planet be considered a living being, we're now thinking that there's at least something like 1.6 planets for every star. And so now we're looking at several hundreds of billions, maybe even a trillion planets in our galaxy alone, which means other galaxies might be also a very rich in planets. And if that's the case, then it really starts to feel like it would be a huge waste of space. If we're the only show in town.
Nick VinZant 1:25 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it, it really helps us out. So I'm sure that all of us at some point in our lives have looked up at the night sky and wondered what else is out there? Is there any other life out there? And if there is, is it going to be like us? Or is it different in ways that we could never even imagine? Our first guest is one of the people leading that search for extraterrestrial life. And in that search, there's some really big questions about how life on Earth started. What exactly is life? Where could we find it in the solar system and even beyond? And then what happens? If we do find it? This is astrobiologists. Dr. Graham. Wow. So, astrobiology that's essentially looking for life on other planets, right.
Dr. Graham Lau 2:24 Youknow, I get that a lot. But it's more than that. Really. astrobiology I guess from a NASA they kind of have like, their standard way of explaining astrobiology is trying to understand the origins, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe. But when I think about astrobiology, what really hits me first is that astrobiology is our quest to understand life. And that's it. I mean, all of life. So life here on Earth, the potential for life elsewhere, how life started here, how it's evolved here, whether or not we could find it elsewhere. And it's a really important thing. You know, it's one of those deeper questions we've had with us. And, you know, before we started writing down our questions, you know, we wanted to know, like, you know, why are we here? What is this place? What is around us? Are we thinking? Are we alone? Is there more than what we see?
Nick VinZant 3:16 So do we know how life on Earth started?
Dr. Graham Lau 3:20 We definitely don't. And it is because there's a great field out there and the origin of life research, where people are working really hard to try to figure out how life might have started here on Earth. There's a question, you know, what was like brought here from elsewhere, like maybe from Mars or Venus maybe, and then crashed here and then start evolving? Or did like start here? And so people are doing experiments and modeling and trying to figure out whether or not life started here? If so, where and how, and when? Those are huge questions.
Nick VinZant 3:52
Do we have any kind of an answer like what's the best theory so far?
Dr. Graham Lau 3:57
That's a great question. We have some ideas right now. For instance, David Beamer and Bruce damer recently released a paper on their hot spring hypothesis for the origin of life, where they posit that life had to have dry land on Earth, specifically around hot springs, and hot spring environments with a lot of wedding and then drying cycles going back and forth, to allow for the chemicals of life. These biological molecules that form all of life as we know it for those molecules who have formed, they hypothesize that you need this dry, hot spring environment where they're wetting and drying going on back and forth. However, there are others who think that maybe life started on the bottom of the ocean around hydrothermal vents. Ever since the 1970s. We've been exploring these these events on the ocean floor where we're superheated seawater moving through the crust is bringing out a whole bunch of metals and other elements in a high tunnel. torture regime and making these big chimneys that we call black smokers. And so something maybe life could have started there, which also gives us good reason to then wonder if we could find life in some of the icy worlds of our solar system like Europa or Enceladus. But the true answer is we really don't know yet. You know, we have some ideas of what the you know, the early early days for life could have looked like, what kind of things might have happened along the way for creating the first cells and for for starting the process of having a genetic code that can evolve through time that that can replicate and make more molecules and can evolve through time, through billions of years to make us.
Nick VinZant 5:40
So I mean, if it essentially came from somewhere else, life would basically just hitch a ride on an asteroid. Or a meteor or whatever the correct word would be?
Dr. Graham Lau 5:51
Yeah, exactly. So there's this idea of panspermia, which has actually been with us for a very long time. The term to my knowledge was first coined by annex sagaris In ancient Greece, and the idea has been molded through time with us as well, but the idea of panspermia is that and then the word literally means seeds everywhere. And the idea is that maybe life could be seated on Earth from somewhere else and vice versa. In that case, so you know, we have these, you know, asteroid bombardment, that you know, when large things strike the earth or the moon or other worlds. Sometimes during that process, the rocks on that world can actually be launched into space due to the impact. And we've done lots of modeling to show that life as we know, it could survive inside of one of those rocks being launched off the planet, and then transported through space, and even through the process of crashing onto another planet. And so it is quite possible, but currently, we don't have any evidence that it's ever actually happened. But it is a really intriguing idea for us to study. Of course, you know, if panspermia did happen, we Still have the problem of the origin of life, it still had to start somewhere and somehow, but there are some out there who are wondering, maybe maybe life could have started in a more favorable environment on Mars, for instance. Or maybe in the early solar system, maybe Venus was a really cool place to be for living things. And maybe life came here, Mars, Venus. When people start talking about panspermia from outside of the solar system, it's still quite possible, but you start losing the probability because of the distances between stars, for things, things that have traveled through space through time.
Nick VinZant 7:33
When we are talking about the origin of life and going back millions of years or however long ago, were other planets in the solor system more habitable than Earth.
Dr. Graham Lau 7:45
Yes, that's one of the reasons I love Venus so much. It's such a beautiful world. It's Earth twin, really, as far as its size and its composition is concerned. Earth is far more dense, but Venus is still a very intriguing world. And early in the early in the solar system, Venus was very likely far more earth like than it is now. It would have been right in that beautiful area around a star called the Goldilocks zone where liquid water could survive on the surface. And there's some people out there who've done modeling to suggest there could have been oceans on Venus long ago. But Venus these past billion years or 500 million years or so has undergone not only a runaway greenhouse effect that has created this very thick atmosphere, the pressure of the surface of Venus is about 92 times more than the pressure we have here at sea level on Earth. So it's very thick. And because of the runaway greenhouse effect, sunlight gets absorbed and stuck inside just like you know, the greenhouse that we have going on right now, you know, climate here on Earth, and the warming of our planet. That warming happened on Venus, you know, in an amazing way to the surface of Venus is very close to 900 degrees Fahrenheit on average, which is pretty darn warm. And nothing that we know as far as life is concerned can currently survive on the surface of Venus. However, you know long ago maybe something did live there maybe maybe Venus had a biosphere long ago,
Nick VinZant 9:17
when you guys kind of classify things like what are what is considered life?
Dr. Graham Lau 9:23
It's kind of intriguing, right?We actually do not know what life is. Exactly. And so you'll hear people talk about this, they're gonna like, what is life is a huge question. And it's kind of important question for us to, to do astrobiology and to search not just for life as we know it somewhere else. But for us to even try to contemplate you know, life as we don't know like life is different than life here on earth. We kind of have to have a good working idea what life is. Now there have been several hundred, you know, suggestions for what a definition of life could be. Sometimes you might hear what's called the NASA definition of life. And that is that life is a self contained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution. And it's a pretty good definition. But it misses out in a lot of ways. For instance, you know, if we create artificial intelligence, or if humans ourselves become a post biological being, and integrate ourselves into our computers, and our machines are refill alive, at that point, is that life? And that's a huge question. There could be forms of life out there that kind of really break through some of these definitions we've had. And you know, currently, a lot of us are learning a lot more about viruses right now. For instance, the virus has always been, you know, kind of on this fringe of trying to understand life. I remember as a kid, you know, we were told viruses are not alive. That's what the textbook said. And now, you know, I'm not actually sure myself I kind of think of viruses as as some part of life that they are some kind of Living biological machine. And so you know, it's intriguing. There's a lot of questions about what life really is. And if you really want to go off the deep end, then, you know, trying to figure out what life is It's hard enough but then trying to figure out what intelligence is, or even worse, what consciousness is. Those become some really huge questions.
Nick VinZant 11:19
I feel like you get a lot of headaches, do you get a lot of headaches? Just thinking about all this stuff?
Dr. Graham Lau 11:24
You know? I don't know. Like, it's actually it's kind of fun, right? Like, you can sit down and just for hours, just mall through the potential for, for what is life? What could be out there? You know, I grew up watching so much science fiction, and reading science fiction stories and playing science fiction video games. And I love these ideas like, you know, what else could there be? Could there be mineral life forms? Could an entire planet be considered a living being? Could there be living things that can survive in space and not only survive, but actually thrive in the environment of space? And there are so many questions about what's called
Nick VinZant 12:00
Howdy How do you study a place where you can go?
Dr. Graham Lau 12:04
Absolutely, yeah. So, you know, astrobiologists we all we all come to the field from, you know, different backgrounds. Some astrobiologists are studying oceanography and trying to better understand those hydrothermal vents. Some astrobiologists focus almost solely in the realm of microbiology, and they try to understand the evolution of various, you know, ways that that microbes have lived on earth and how they function through time and how their their enzyme to function through time. Some astrobiologists are doing a lot of planetary science, and they're trying to figure out where on the surfaces or the interiors of other worlds could we find life. Me Myself, I came from a geochemistry background. So originally, I started off studying biology and chemistry. I then spent some time studying astrophysics before finally jumping into my PhD in geology, where I really focused in geochemistry and mineralogy. And so for me, I was looking I'm not just to work on the paper right now, from some research back in 2014 already, where we went up to the Arctic to a place called Ellesmere Island. It's one of the farthest north land and NASA's on the planet to a place a valley called Borg fjord past where in this valley, there's a glacier. And on top of the glacier water coming up from the surface below, is coming out and depositing the large mass of yellow material on the ice. And that yellow material is sulfur. And so we've been studying the kinds of organisms that thrive in this sulfur material on top of the glacier, what they can teach us about software and its role in biology. What the mineralogy and geochemistry can tell us about not just that site and other polar environments, but also what we might find if we go out you know, to a world say, like Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, which has an icy surface, and a lot of sulfur on its icy surface. So, you know, can we use some of the tools we developed and the techniques and the knowledge we developed from this site here on earth and the Arctic and apply that to looking for life on Jupiter's moon Europa was a lot of us astrobiologists that are doing that kind of work. We're trying to understand what are the signs of life or bio signatures? What What, what diagnostic evidence is given to us from living processes that we can find?
Nick VinZant 14:34
What are some of the basic like building blocks, that a place needs to even have that is there some basic things that you have to have this you have to have that in order for life to start?
Dr. Graham Lau 14:45
You know, in the long history of us trying to define and characterize life? There are some of those key things we've come up with you know that that life has to have energy life has to have a metabolism. Life has to grow. It has to evolved, and from these kinds of things, and so had a very base, kind of understanding that that's kind of when we start looking for, for instance, with the Viking landers on Mars back in the 1970s. We sent them there they were the first and so far the only missions to Mars that were specifically looking for life. And on board, they had four biological tests. But in general, three of those biological tests were very much based on life as we know it, assuming that that life on Mars would be some kind of organism like we know here and would produce the same kinds of chemicals, if it was metabolizing material that we gave it. And unfortunately, we you know, we didn't have a positive confirmation. We do have a potentially questionable a result from one of the experiments that has never been confirmed. And so we'd be saying that we you know, we did not detect life because of that. And actually the next Mars rover from NASA project severence will be the next spacecraft on Mars, the next rover on Mars to actually look for signs of life after the Viking landers but when we start looking for these signs, you know what we're looking for, there's a lot of things we can look at, if we got really lucky, and we found something walking in front of our camera, you know, or like the little like, multi leg or if we were in the red with oceans with fins keep swimming by us. That'd be pretty cool, right? That's, that's a no brainer. You know, we we could look at that and say, hey, that's life. But you know, if we only have chemistry to look at say we're looking for signs of past life in a rock on Mars, then we might look at look at some of the chemical signatures that remain from living processes. When life is you know, metabolizing it can leave behind some signatures of those metabolisms. For instance, it can it can cause a differentiation in the isotopes that are present in a rock sample for us to study. We also can look for things like the left handedness and right handedness of molecules So it turns out in chemistry, just like you have your left hand, your right hand, and they're mirror images of each other. But if you lay them one on top of the other, your thumbs don't line up. So just like we have left hand and right hand that are mirror images, but aren't the exact same. There are molecule, many of them that are mirror images, and yet aren't the theme. And life as we know, it actually has a preference for the left handed or the right handed. For our amino acids. It's one way for our sugars, it's another way. And so we actually wonder, you know, could other life out there, if it is out there also have that selection for left handedness or right handedness in certain molecule? And so we can look for that. And there's actually a whole realm of these bio signatures, things that we're trying to trying to understand. Are they definitive signs of life? And if so, you know, can we find them on another world?
Nick VinZant 17:53
How do we, I mean, is there a chance though, that we're just testing in the wrong way, so to speak?
Dr. Graham Lau 17:59
Absolutely. A really cool paper came out some years back by Carol Cleveland and Chris Koba, where they hypothesize that there could be a shadow biosphere here on Earth, the idea of this shadow biosphere. So a lot of our methods, in chemistry in biology are very much based on life as we know it. And so the question is, you know, could we be missing out? So much so that there could even be living things on Earth, that aren't life as we know it? And so we actually don't see them because they're in this shadow biosphere that we're not observing. And it's a really good question, you know, and the truth is, we just don't know it's one reason why scientifically we want to be as agnostic as possible when it comes to you know, looking for these potential bio signatures. So that we you know, we are we are doing our due diligence, to try to look for any potential sign of life even if even if it's like as we don't know it.
Nick VinZant 18:56
To kind of maybe understand this I guess in like the dumb guy way. This rock is actually a living thing. And we just didn't realize it.
Dr. Graham Lau 19:05
But there are other things in nature that we haven't quite explained yet. So one of the best examples actually does come from Iraq. One of the examples they used in this original paper is desert varnish. So if anyone's ever gone out into, you know, a desert area like the American Southwest, or, you know, other desert regions around the planet, you might have noticed, you know, that some of the rocks have this dark coating on the outside. And indeed, many many ancient peoples indigenous peoples around around the globe, found those rocks and wood actually etch petroglyphs into the into that that that outer dark material, they realized they could just they could just chip that dark material away on the outside of these rocks. And we find a lot of ancient petroglyphs inside of this this rock varnish. But that rock varnish or desert varnish, as it's called, we still don't know entirely is that being caused by a biological phenomenon, organism are causing it, or if it's being caused by an inorganic process of chemistry alone. And so it's possible and this was partly a part of that original shadow biosphere idea was that maybe desert varnish is part of some unknown living process that we just don't know how to look at yet.
Nick VinZant 20:16
I mean, there seems to be and look, I think that any, anybody who's listened to this and any episodes where we talk to scientists, there's always a lot of kind of unknowns. But is this stuff that we can ever find out?
Dr. Graham Lau 20:27
It's a great question, right? I mean, it's like our physics right now. I mean, there's so much that we don't know about things like black holes, and what happens inside of them. We use our knowledge of science, science as a tool to help us better understand our place in the cosmos. But it will, you know, it will always have limitations based on our own abilities. And our science now is way different than science was 100 years ago. And likewise, 100 years from now, science may be very different as well, and we'll hopefully have better tools for better understanding the universe. Now very recently, we started using gravitational waves to look at other phenomena in the universe. And so when it comes to astrobiology and understanding, you know, if there could be some living things out there that we just don't know how to look for yet. Maybe you know, in the not too distant future, there'll be some new instrument that we develop, that allows us to see part of that shadow biosphere
Nick VinZant 21:22
right now, where is the main focus on where life could be in our solar system
Dr. Graham Lau 21:26
in our solar system, like, like I said, I love Venus. But Venus is no longer a great candidate, at least on the surface. However, there's a place about 51 kilometers above the surface of Venus, where some people are wondering, it actually has a temperature and pressure regime there that's about the same as the surface of Earth at the ocean. And so maybe there could be something living in the clouds of Venus, but you don't care as much, because right now Mars is super sexy. A lot of people are thinking about Mars as potentially once having Had life, we now know that Mars was very wet in the distant past, and then likely lost most of its atmosphere and oceans over time. But maybe maybe we'll find signs of past life or maybe even extant life or things that are alive right now on Mars. And so we're doing a lot of work there. Also, though, the icy worlds of our solar system are, you know, really these intriguing hotspots right now for us to try to figure out, you know, if life can originate inside of an ocean, you know, around the hydrothermal vent or at the bottom of an icy shell. You know, could there be living biospheres in spite of worlds, like Europa and Enceladus? And so can can we find signs of that life through either plumes of water coming out of these worlds, or by you know, sending a lander down to the surface and trying to look at some of the ice and those places are just so intriguing. I honestly I really love Europa. We have a mission coming up soon called Europa Clipper. It will go in orbit around Europa and help us study the surface a lot more. There is a Europa lander design right now, it's not actually a fully, you know, the mission hasn't been, you know, fully guaranteed yet, but it's a really cool idea. A lot of folks have worked on to try to bring a Europa lander together. There's a lot of potential in our solar system. But then, you know, people listening might know that we now know of a confirmed confirmed over 4000 exoplanets, worlds around other stars. Now, when I was a kid, I was born, we didn't have confirmation of any exoplanets. It wasn't until the 1990s, the early 1990s that we started making the first detections and now, now over 4000, it makes me think, in the next decade, or two or three, how many 10s of thousands of exoplanets we have to look at. And as we get better and better telescope technology, with the next generation of space telescopes, we might start being able to really look into the atmospheres of these worlds, and really, look Chemistry. And it might be that for the first detections of life come from that.
Nick VinZant 24:04 I
mean, for a lay person, it basically seems like it's a certainty somewhere else, right? Like, it's just a matter of finding it.
Dr. Graham Lau 24:11
Yeah, and I'm sure you've heard that phrase before, you know that if we are the only thing, you know, it sure is a waste of space. And that comes from just doing the math when you start looking at the numbers. And when people start, we're using that phrase, when you heard that phrase in the movie contact, for instance, or heard Carl Sagan or other popularizers of science mention that phrase. That was at a time we didn't have any known exoplanets. They were just talking about stars. They were talking about the hundred billions, maybe 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and the maybe hundred billion galaxies in the known universe. Those numbers alone start suggesting a lot when you look now, with these planet confirmations we've made already, we're now thinking that there's at least something like 1.6 planets for every star. And so now we're looking at several hundreds of billions, maybe even a trillion planets. In our galaxy alone, which means other galaxies might be also very rich in planets. And if that's the case, then it really starts to feel like it would be a huge waste of space. If we're the only show in town.
Nick VinZant 25:12
This is the thing that I always wonder about, because I mean, the numbers are so huge when we start talking about them. Is there any chance that I'll be really dramatic here? Like somebody just forgot to carry the one somewhere? And then reality? It's, it's just the solar system. And we accidentally messed up the math and there isn't all of this else. Because it's just seems to me to be so like mind bogglingly huge.
Dr. Graham Lau 25:38
Yeah, that's an interesting question. It kind of kind of takes my mind into a science fiction place, actually. And so imagine if you would you know that if you were born on a planet, with an atmosphere so thick that you couldn't see the sky and so that you never saw the stars. What would you think about yourself? in hand, as an astrobiologist, he was recently on my show asked me astrobiologists for NASA astrobiology. He has a recent book out called alien oceans, where he also suggested this thought experiment using Europa. So if you were an organism born into an ocean environment under a thick, icy crust, where you never saw the stars, what and you became intelligent, like, what would you think about yourself? What would your stories what would your science be? You know, for us, most of our scientific endeavor came from trying to better understand how our lives work here on Earth, and how the stars move in the skies above. You know, the earliest humans, you know, they were very in tune with the heavens above, they watched the movements of the stars. They watch these weird things that look like stars, but mooted in strange patterns that we now call planets. And they, they wanted to know like, what's going on up there? And so you know, our science now all the things that led us to now with our smartphones and in our telecommunications Technology and our Tesla that can go self driving down the highway and all these things that we're doing now with artificial intelligence. All of that comes from those early days when we just wanted to better understand, you know, how to better grow our crops, how to better prepare for the seasons, what's happening in the skies above us. And so, you know, if you were born into a world without the stars, I mean, imagine what that would be like, what would your science be, then? You know, would you ever would you ever want to leave your world? Would you ever want to launch a rocket? Would you have any reason to and I don't know the answer to that. And the interesting thing is, even if you forgot to carry a one, when it comes to the vastness of the cosmos out there, even if you miss the number two, you really wouldn't be that far off. The numbers become so staggeringly large.
Nick VinZant 27:50
What do you think happens when we find it?
Dr. Graham Lau 27:53
Yeah, you know what, for one thing, I will have a job forever.Every astrobiologist will be automatically employed. If we find alien life, you know, there have been different ideas. And a lot of people in science fiction and film have suggested that, you know, if we find alien life, that people will go, you know, lose their minds, and they'll be they'll be riots in the streets and, you know, then there's been a huge issue and then, like, religions won't know what to do with themselves, you know, people who are religious will know to do it themselves and things like that. And I think that's not right. I think that there might be some people who would handle it in a poor manner. But I think in general, I think all of us if we found alien life, I think it'd be a good moment for us to reflect together about you know, the fact that one we are no longer unique in the universe, that there is other life. But that, you know, we give us a chance to finally start saying, Hey, you know, we are part of this biosphere. This is our life. We now have another example to go study and learn more comparative biology. At that level would teach us so much about what life really is.
Nick VinZant 29:05
Are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions? Sure. What is the Fermi Paradox?
Dr. Graham Lau 29:14
the Fermi paradox, as it's called, it comes from an Italian American, a physicist named Enrico Fermi, who was working on some of the early work with you know, nuclear energy and trying to better understand physics. Fermi was out to lunch with some other scientists and, and they were discussing, you know, what we were just discussing, they were discussing the vastness of the cosmos. And Fermi brought up the issue, that if there is the alien life out there, if we can just assume, just counted as RIT that there is alien life out there and it's everywhere, all these other planets in our, in our galaxy, if there is alien life out there, and it is possible to travel faster than light and where are the aliens and Then the question then becomes, you know, because the stars are so far apart, but if we've ever learned to travel at the speed of light or faster, they would change the rate in which we can get these other stars. And if that was possible, why aren't there aliens here right now? Why aren't they visiting us? And so in this in this issue, you know, maybe there, maybe there aren't beings that can travel faster than light, maybe travel is very slow for everyone. And it does take 10s of thousands or millions of years. But let's assume that even if, even if it took, you know, a million years or more to travel between stars, fill in the history of our of our galaxy of our solar system. There's Philbin billions of years. And so even then, some beings should have been able to make it here by now. But then we have other issues. And maybe we are one of the first maybe there are other biospheres out there right now. But maybe we're one of the first ones to actually gain a level of intelligence to start asking in our selves why we're here. Another issue could be the kinds of stars that are out there. So when a star forms, it forms from these large clouds of gas, dust. And a lot of the material in there, you might have heard that a lot of our our elements of our bodies come from the nuclear engines inside of stars. That famous phrase that we are starstuff. And this comes through a process called nucleosynthesis. And it's how elements are made inside of stars. But in the very early universe in the early history of the galaxy, the earliest stars would have been almost all hydrogen all helium, there wouldn't have been enough time to make a lot of heavier elements. But as those early stars start fusing, they start making heavier elements, they explode, they push other elements out into the universe. Then other stars come around, they take in some of that material, and then they start making heavier elements. It might be that in the very, you know, the first few bits years of the history of the universe, the history of our galaxy, that there just wasn't enough heavy element material inside of planets for life to arise. Maybe life requires some of this enrichment of heavier elements. And so maybe we needed stars, like our son to make living things. And if that's the case, maybe younger stars right now are even more enriched in some of these heavy elements. And maybe they're even faster to have life, you know, originate and evolve and do some cool things. You know, we just don't know. You know, but the other the idea of Fermi's paradox of why aren't they here yet? It's an interesting one to throw your head at. And I'll throw out another potential solution. And it's what's one that you'll see pop up a lot in, in various sci fi and stuff like that. And this one is kind of that that's the cosmic Zoo idea, like a menagerie where maybe there are aliens out there everywhere, and they're all watching us. They know We're here they've been watching us evolve through time. And maybe they just think that we're not ready yet to meet them. And that'd be kind of weird too. I mean, but not unlike what we do in zoos where we you know, we put animals in the in the cages or behind glass so that we can observe them you know, maybe the Earth right now. It's just an off limits area area for aliens to watch us.
Nick VinZant 33:22
What would be stranger if we meet alien life and it's nothing like we've seen in the movies, or we meet alien life and they look exactly like us.
Dr. Graham Lau 33:33
Oh, I love that. That was a Gene Roddenberry around the time of Star Trek next generation was trying to explain you know, like, Why are all Why are all the characters humanoid? I mean, we see that a lot in science fiction. You know, a lot of the characters look very humanoid like us. And you know, a lot of that comes from storytelling, because when it comes down to it, a lot of our alien science fiction isn't really about the aliens. It's about telling human stories through the alien. In reality, you know, a lot of scientists, we really don't have a lot of reason to think that other things would look like us, at least not large multicellular organism, you know, at the salt at the smaller scale, maybe there's lots of things that look like other bacteria that we have here. Maybe cells are very common for life, you know that that seems like it could be likely that maybe the cell is a common unit for life, across the universe. And so maybe that will look similar. And maybe we'll have some things happen. Similarly, maybe organelle, for instance, will happen inside of some cells. So maybe things that have things like chloroplasts or things like our mitochondria, similar organ organelles inside of cells might have occurred. But when it comes to all the many steps that made these larger scale things like you see like our fungi and hummingbirds and humans and horses and all of this stuff, you know, that's, it was a lot of steps to get to where we are now to make this happened. And so we don't have as much of a reason to think that if we met aliens, they would look exactly like us. Especially if you look through like the history of, you know, animals on earth, if you look over the past 500 million years, for most of that period of time, the large scale organisms did not look like you know, us on an eighth and monkeys, they look a lot more like dinosaurs. And so you know, maybe maybe if large scale things do look more like more more like life on Earth, then maybe dinosaur like life is far more likely than human like life. But it does raise a good question. Maybe there are convergent, you know, scenarios in evolution that do drive similar features to occur. So for instance, having appendages makes a lot of sense. appendages allow you to find other ways to move, to get food to fight off predators to be a predator. And then, you know, like our hands have the digits on the end of them that allow us to actually interact with our environment in very special ways. And that can be a very interesting thing to have happen. convergently in evolution when it comes down to like the age looking structure of our bodies in our two arms, two legs, you know, the whole the whole structure of us. I don't think it's as likely. But I think it'd be pretty groovy if we actually met other human like organisms.
Nick VinZant 36:16
Best place right now. Like if you were a betting man, where would you bet we're gonna find it first.
Dr. Graham Lau 36:24
If I had to throw down money, and I'm gonna get some flack for this, from my my astrobiologists, friends because everyone has their favorite place. If I had to throw down money, I would say it's gonna come from exoplanets outside of the solar system, I think outside of our solar system, you know, even though I love Mars, I think we definitely should go there. I want to see humans go to Mars, to settle and to explore and to learn more about that world as well as ourselves. Like I said, I love Venus. I really love the icy moons Europa, Enceladus, Triton, Titan, but honestly with the the S Evolution of our telescope technology. As we're discovering more and more about exoplanets, our models are getting better. I think, you know, it's very likely even in our lifetimes that we're going to find potential signs of a biosphere on an exoplanet.
Nick VinZant 37:15
I hope it's gonna be I mean, I know it's not an exoplanet, but I hope somehow it's Pluto. Just as a way to get back for everybody for knocking it off of the planet status.
Dr. Graham Lau 37:24
Yeah, I mean, Pluto is an interesting little thing, right? Like, you know, even before the quote unquote demotion, in 2006, when Pluto was renamed to a dwarf planet status, even then we knew something weird was going on. On the surface of Pluto, we had Hubble Space Telescope images showing us that the surface wasn't all one persistent kind of color, which told us that there was some weird chemistry going on. So with New Horizons flying by in 2015, and just these remarkable images that came back with all the data that came back of that weird modeled ice surface With so much variation, it was just stunning. And so, you know, some people talk about the potential for an ocean inside of Pluto. I don't know if that's likely I don't think it is personally. But maybe in the distant past long ago, who knows? But it'd be pretty cool if that works. Newtonian is out there.
Nick VinZant 38:18
Best Movie about aliens?
Dr. Graham Lau 38:21
And,well, I do love science fiction that tries to get it right. I really enjoyed Europa Report. I love on science fiction channels to try to figure outyou know, what would alien life really be like?However, to me, the two films because they both hold so much importance for me. One is the film The thing based on the short story Who goes there? And that one's important because it makes us question you know, what if there is really bizarrely different alien life that can actually consume and replicating life as we know it, and then the One is the movie alien, Ridley Scott's alien, such an incredible film. And honestly that the biology presented in that film this idea of the these eggs that hatch these face huggers that then implant the host fee inside the host face this growing creature that data becomes you know more of who pops out. I really love alien. I love the whole Alien franchise. I've been a huge fan since I was a kid. So I think aliens the Nick VinZant 39:28 coolest. What do you think about like people who do the Alien Encounters thing and say like I saw an alien. I was like, What do you when you hear that stuff? What do you kind of think?
Dr. Graham Lau 39:39
First off, I never want to question someone's belief or their experience. If someone feels that they really experience something if they really believe it. I don't want to call it a question that belief or experience, but you know when it comes to science and how science works and why scientists are powerful, is that you know, science is look At evidence, looking at the data that are out there, and then formulating your opinions about what you actually saw what you observed what you experienced. But the important thing in the sciences is that it has to be something like what your conclusion for it to be really be accepted, has to be the exact same conclusions something else someone else would make, based on those theme information. And so, you know, I personally like the nighttime sky with the idea of UFOs I've seen things in the nighttime sky before that I can't personally explain. And even though I know that scientifically, we can explain about 90 or 95% something like that of all the all the claimed observations of UFOs there's still some small number that we just don't understand. However, jumping from you know, I don't know what that is, the whole way to well, it must be aliens is a pretty big jump. Because there's a lot of other things that could be first, that we should actually maybe research and try to figure out No. And there are people who are really certain there are aliens here right now. And one of the biggest questions I always have for them. If that's the case, if aliens can travel through these vast cosmic distances between stars, no, they have the technology to make those transits to hide their spaceships from us so well, to even be down here and walking amongst us. If that were the case, then why are they so bad at doing it? What Why do we see them every now and then if they were that good, we wouldn't ever see them.
Nick VinZant 41:34
That's pretty much all the questions I got what's coming up next for you, man. What research are you working on that kind of stuff.
Dr. Graham Lau 41:41
So many cool things. So I am working on a paper right now on some structures and geological structures at my field site in the Arctic, that are relevant to Mars. So these structures are very rich in iron and sulfur. They're their structures we called Gosselin's and they might be really important for our future after bye illogical studies on Mars. I'm currently doing a lot of science communication work do marble space. So I do a lot in trying to find cooler ways to share science with the public. I have my show it's asked an astrobiologist. We're funded through NASA astrobiology and we have a new astrobiologist on talking with me every month about their research about astrobiology, we know in the field and also talking about how to get into astrobiology as a career. And then also, from our I have a large number of research associates, interns, who are working with me in both science communication, as well as a project for the Center for light detection out of NASA Ames, where we're developing a knowledge base of bio signatures for astrobiologists to come together as a community and say, you know, what are the signs of life that we're looking for out there.
Nick VinZant 42:53
I want to thank Dr. Lau so much for joining us if you want to connect with him. We have a link to him on our social media accounts. We're Profoundly Pointless on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And we've also included his information on the RSS feed that's on this podcast. He's got a really cool show too, if you're really interested in learning more about astrobiology and how to become an astrobiologist, we've also included a link to his show on the RSS feed that's along with this podcast. There's just I think that's just a huge question for us, right. It's something that everybody at some point in their lives has think thought about. Are we alone?